Black on both sides : a racial history of trans identity

Resource Information

The work Black on both sides : a racial history of trans identity represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in San Francisco Public Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

Black on both sides : a racial history of trans identity

Title remainder

a racial history of trans identity

Statement of responsibility

C. Riley Snorton

Creator

• Snorton, C. Riley

Author

• Snorton, C. Riley

Subject

• African American transgender people
• Racism -- United States
• Transgender people -- Identity
• Transgender people -- United States

Language

eng

Summary

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

Cataloging source

DLC

Dewey number

306.76/80973

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

LC call number

HQ77.95.U6

LC item number

S66 2017

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography