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Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

Amazon.com Price:  $18.99 (as of 19/04/2019 11:31 PST- Details)

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Description

The story of Christine Jorgensen, The usa’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment within the postwar era. Her celebrity, on the other hand, 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 within the construction and representation of transgender subjects. In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies more than one intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to offer-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 working out of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows more than one 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 conceivable.

Revealing instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living within the antebellum North that were mapped in relation to “cross dressing” and canonical black literary works that express black men’s get right of entry to to the “female within,” Black on Both Sides concludes with a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine, who used to be 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.

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