Black on Both Sides : : a Racial History of Trans Identity

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Black Studies 306.76 Sn	4-week checkout	Due 05-24-2024

Introduction -- Part I. Blacken. Anatomically speaking : ungendered flesh and the science of sex -- Trans capable : fungibility, fugitivity, and the matter of being -- Part II. Transit. Reading the "trans-" in transatlantic literature : on the "female" within Three Negro classics -- Part III. Blackout. A nightmarish silhouette : racialization and the long exposure of transition -- DeVine's cut : public memory and the politics of martyrdom.
The story of Christine Jorgensen, Americas 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. C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections 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-Snorton 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, Snorton 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 mens access to the female within, he 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.

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Graduate school level, at least submitted by Xris on May 24, 2020, 2:22am I learned a lot about the beginnings of gynecological practices from this book, i.e. using slave women to experiment on. :( The middle section of the book discussed some classic books that I haven't read, so it was very dry for me. The last section was better, in that it told stories about transpeople, getting away from the academics of the middle section. Glad for the information I got from it, but feel like I'd get more out of it if I was more of an academic. Seemed a bit like someone's thesis or doctoral work.