Black on Both Sides

A Racial History of Trans Identity

2017
•
Author:

C. Riley Snorton

Black on Both Sides

AWARDS:

  • JOHN BOSWELL PRIZE FROM THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
  • WILLIAM SANDERS SCARBOROUGH PRIZE FROM THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION
  • LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR TRANSGENDER NONFICTION
  • AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION STONEWALL BOOK AWARD - ISRAEL FISHMAN NON-FICTION AWARD HONOR BOOK
  • SYLVIA RIVERA AWARD IN TRANSGENDER STUDIES FROM THE CENTER FOR LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES
  • HONORABLE MENTION: NICKLISS PRIZE IN U.S. WOMEN'S AND/OR GENDER HISTORY FROM THE ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS


Uncovering the overlapping histories of blackness and trans identity from the nineteenth century to the present day

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, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.

 

"In a beautifully written and brilliant intervention and extension—the first full length book to examine the historical and contemporary importance of race to the constitution of ‘trans gender’—C. Riley Snorton identifies and performs a black trans reading practice, from Anarcha to Transgender Days of Remembrance."
—Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

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 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,” 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 livable black and trans worlds.

Awards

John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association

William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association

American Library Association Stonewall Book Award — Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award Honor Book

Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction

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

Honorable Mention: Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History from the Organization of American Historians

Black on Both Sides

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).

Black on Both Sides

Black on Both Sides challenges the historical account of trans studies invention by excavating a black trans presence and persona long before modern articulations of such. C. Riley Snorton offers us a way to read the historical record in a fashion that requires the unthought to be the basis of the foundation for our claims of newness, demonstrating that there is no revision of what it means to be human without coming through blackness, past and present.

—

Rinaldo Walcott, author of Queer Returns: Essays on Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies

C. Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides is a welcome contribution to black studies with the potential to influence future directions in the burgeoning field of transgender studies. It is rigorous scholarship that manages to be imaginative and timely.

—

Kara Keeling, author of The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense

In a beautifully written and brilliant intervention and extension—the first full length book to examine the historical and contemporary importance of race to the constitution of ‘trans gender’—C. Riley Snorton identifies and performs a black trans reading practice, from Anarcha to Transgender Days of Remembrance.

—

Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

The research done here is stellar.

—

Washington Blade

This book is an outstanding contribution to conversations about black and trans studies; it will transform scholarly understandings of both fields and the intersections between them.

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CHOICE

Black on Both Sides reminds us that when we are careful about how we tell stories, we get new, nuanced stories that expose systems for what they are and that honor historically ignored populations.

—

Autostraddle

Black on Both Sides offers a new imagining of both black and trans history beginning in the early 19th century through the present.

—

Into News

Black on Both Sides

Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part I. Blacken
1. Anatomically Speaking: Ungendered Flesh and the Science of Sex
2. Trans Capable: Fungibility, Fugitivity, and the Matter of Being
Part II. Transit
3. Reading the Trans- in Transatlantic Literature: On the “Female” Within the Three Negro Classics
Part III. Blackout
4. A Nightmarish Silhouette: Racialization and the Long Exposure of Transition
5. DeVine's Cut: Public Memory and the Politics of Martydom
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index