Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
by C. Riley Snorton
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Description
The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives - ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In this book, the author identifies multiple intersections show more between Blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-Black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials - early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films - the author attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of Blackness and transness, this book follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved Black women by J. Marion Sims, the 'father of American gynecology, ' to the negation of Blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among Blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of 'cross dressing' and canonical Black literary works that express Black men's access to the "female within," this book concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993, a fact omitted from the film Boys Don't Cry out of narrative convenience. Reconstructing these theoretical and historical trajectories furthers our imaginative capacities to conceive more livable Black and trans worlds. -- Provided by publisher show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Just an incredible book; Snorton carefully hammers home his points again and again, drawing together transness and blackness through fungibility, movement, and transversality. It's a book that is so beautifully couched in the works of women of color feminism, queer of color and trans of color critique, and it's something I'm going to be chewing on for a really long time as I think about ways to teach and also write trans history broadly. Just a magnificent book, truly.
Though this book includes many interesting stories and sources (I found the included images particulrly remarkable), its analysis rarely hits the mark for me. Maybe I just don't have the right academic background, but I frequently found it, oddly, both overwritten and frustratingly vague.
Included in a blog post and resource list at https://booksbeyondbinaries.blog/2019/06/10/non-fiction-about-gender-and-trans-e...
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Black Authors
384 works; 32 members
Trans Lit
36 works; 1 member
Author Information
4 Works 510 Members
C. Riley Snorton is associate professor of Africana studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University and visiting associate professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minnesota, 2014).
Awards and Honors
Awards
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
- Original publication date
- 2017
- People/Characters
- Mary Jones; Mary Ann Waters
- Original language
- English
Classifications
- Genres
- Sexuality and Gender Studies, History, Nonfiction, LGBTQ+, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 306.76 — Society, government, & culture Social sciences, sociology & anthropology Social Behavior - Dating, Marriage, Divorce Sexual relations Sexual orientation, transgender identity, intersexuality
- LCC
- HQ77.95 .U6 .S66 — Social sciences The family. Marriage, Women and Sexuality The Family. Marriage. Women Sexual life Transexualism
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 432
- Popularity
- 71,451
- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (3.61)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 6
- ASINs
- 1
