M. Shadee Malaklou received her PhD in Culture and Theory and graduate certificates in Critical Theory and Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of California, Irvine. Her research suggests that the exclusion of black people from human recognition is what produces gender and sexuality as human categories of difference. She is currently Chair and Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Berea College in Eastern Kentucky and the Founder and Inaugural Director of the bell hooks center. She is also visiting faculty in the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University in Montreal.