M. Shadee Malaklou is a critical race and gender and sexuality studies scholar with expertise in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Her scholarship interrogates social and political constructions of time to argue that gender and sexuality are produced as identity and type through the exclusion of black persons from human recognition and protections. Her provocative and promiscuous readings of Fanon contribute to the study of gender and sexuality, to black study, and to critical race and ethnic studies more generally; because her research finds that non-black persons of color are able to transcend ‘the bush’—which Hegel et al. describe as the location of the “black African,” a place where gender is undifferentiated and sexuality is unbridled and unchecked—through carefully curated sex and gender expressions that signpost movement through time, or racial modernity. In addition to writing for academic journals, Malaklou regularly publishes think pieces, most recently, in The Conversationalist, The Feminist Wire and CounterPunch; and periodically contributes to Always Already: A Critical Theory Podcast as the Frantz Fanon correspondent. Prior to joining Berea College as the Inaugural Director and founder of the bell hooks center and Chair of Women’s and Gender (and Sexuality) Studies, Malaklou served as Assistant Professor (2016-2019) and Acting Chair (2018-2019) of Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College, where she was also a Mellon Faculty Fellow for the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (2016-2018). Malaklou also currently serves as visiting faculty in the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University in Montreal. She received her PhD in Culture and Theory and graduate certificates in Critical Theory and Feminist Studies from the University of California, Irvine and her BA in Cultural Anthropology and Women’s Studies from Duke University.