Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton
Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton
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Black on Both Sides
A Racial History of Trans Identity

Author: C. Riley Snorton

Narrator: C. Riley Snorton

Unabridged: 8 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 02/22/2022

Synopsis

The story of Christine Jorgensen, America's first prominent transsexual, narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives. Their erasure from trans history masks the ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, 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 varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women to the negation of blackness.

Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of "cross dressing" and black literary works that express black men's access to the "female within," Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who was murdered alongside Brandon Teena in 1993. Reconstructing these trajectories furthers our capacities to conceive more livable black and trans worlds.

About C. Riley Snorton

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Alok on February 01, 2021

Trans history in the US tends to focus on white trans people like Christine Jorgenson, who was one of the first to publicly undergo gender confirmation surgery in the 1950s. While Jorgenson quickly rose to fame, many Black trans people – and especially Black trans women – were disappeared in her sha......more

Goodreads review by Thomas on February 15, 2024

This book presents interesting and important intersections between Blackness and transness. Several in-depth case studies that highlight the prominence of anti-Black racism in U.S. history as well as how race and gender are often intertwined, such as through misogynoir. I agree with other reviewers......more

Goodreads review by Ali on March 11, 2018

Organized around a series of events that provide occasions for bringing both signs—blackness and transness—into the same frame, Black on Both Sides is not a history per se so much as it is a set of political propositions, theories of history, and writerly experiments. If I had absorbed the above quot......more

Goodreads review by Bethany (Beautifully Bookish Bethany) on March 24, 2023

3.5 stars rounded up It's important to know that this is an academic text written with a very academic audience in mind. The language is often quite theoretical and difficult to parse for the average reader. And, while the subtitle is "A Racial History of Trans Identity" the actual content is less a......more

Goodreads review by Erik on November 11, 2019

The subtitle of this book, "Black on Both Sides," is misleading and not in a particularly positive way. Claiming to be a racial history, in the first few pages the author outright expresses he won't be doing historical work. Though the starting point for each of the chapters in the book is historica......more

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