Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

C. Riley Snorton's book "Black on Both Sides" explores the intersections of blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, highlighting the erasure of African American trans narratives. It argues that slavery and the production of racialized gender laid the foundation for understanding gender as mutable and reveals instances of personal sovereignty among blacks in the antebellum North.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 256 pages
\n Publication date: 05 December 2017
\n Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
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Winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association 2018
Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association 2018
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, 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. 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 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 l.

\n Weight: 344g\n
Dimension: 140 x 214 x 21 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9781517901738\n \n