Join us for a talk: The Life of Nonbinary. This talk moves beyond circumscribed identities to propose nonbinary as a way of living that loosens gender’s grip on personhood and sociality. Drawing from scenes—in classrooms, inside prisons, and in redwood forests—the talk argues that gender functions as a technology of classification that organizes care, desire, and governance, and that our task is not to expand its options but to render it unnecessary. Against recognition politics and state logics that demand legibility, the talk sketches nonbinary as unhooked from gender's logistics, open to kinships and joy. Nonbinary here names an insurgent orientation: not another box, but an otherwise.

Marquis Bey is a professor of Black studies and gender and sexuality studies, and affiliate faculty in critical theory, at Northwestern University. Their work concerns trans and nonbinary studies, black feminist theory, abolition, and critical theory. They are the author of numerous works, including Black Trans Feminism (Duke, 2022) and the forthcoming Nonbinary Life: An Autotheory (Bloomsbury, April 2026).