Black on Both Sides

Black on Both Sides

9781517901738

A Racial History of Trans Identity

 

Winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Honor 2018

Winner of Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction 2018

Winner of the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies

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 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 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 gynaecology," 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," Black on Both Sides 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 liveable black and trans worlds.

Regular price£21.99
/
Tax included. Shipping calculated at checkout.

  • In stock, ready to ship
  • Inventory on the way

We deliver to addresses in the UK only.

Shipments are sent via Royal Mail and you will receive a tracking number as soon as your order is dispatched.

University of Minnesota Press

C. Riley Snorton is an American scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender and race, specifically Black transgender identities. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity.2017

Adult Non Fiction

Race and Religion and Gender

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Audiobooks

Interested in audiobooks too? The good news is you can buy them on The Feminist Bookshop audiobooks page!

https://libro.fm/thefeministbookshop

You may also like


Recently viewed