Black on Both Sides

A Racial History of Trans Identity

By: C. Riley Snorton

Narrated by: C. Riley Snorton

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-19th 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.

©2017 the Regents of the University of Minnesota (P)2022 Tantor

Highly Informative, Challenging, and Interesting

Incredibly interesting read. I will say many parts felt more academically dense than I was prepared to fully comprehend but I believe I grasped the greater concepts introduced by the text.

Marginalized academic philosophy: pros and cons

If you’re a grad student or writing a doctoral thesis on matters relating to Blackness, Black bodies, gender, and US history, this may be a book you’ve been waiting for. As someone no longer in the academic world, I had to re-adjust to a way of thinking abstractly that I had the desire and ability to abandon years ago. This is written in a discursive style and specialized vocabulary that only those immersed in certain academic disciplines will want (and be able) to comprehend. While I’m no longer interested in books that use terms like ‘historicity’, I’m glad there are such voices in white, non-queer, male supremacist institutions. More power to C. Riley Snorton.