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\nBlack on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. R iley Snorton
\n\nThe story of Christine Jorgensen\, Amer icas first prominent transsexual\, famously narrated trans embodiment in t he postwar era. Her celebrity\, however\, has obscured other mid-century t rans narratives-ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderso n and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation o f transgender subjects. C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to presen t-day anti-black \;and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing&nb sp\;on \;a deep and varied archive of materials-early sexological text s\, fugitive slave narratives\, Afro-modernist literature\, sensationalist journalism\, Hollywood films-Snorton attends to how slavery and the produ ction of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding o f gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and t ransness\, Snorton follows multiple trajectories\, from the medical experi ments conducted \;on \;enslaved \;black \;women by J. Mari on Sims\, the father of American gynecology\,to the negation of blackness that makes transnormativity possible. Revealing instances of personal sove reignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in te rms of cross dressingand canonical \;black \;literary works that e xpress \;black \;mens access to the female within\, he concludes w ith a reading of the fate of Phillip DeVine\, who was murdered alongside B randon Teena in 1993\, a fact omitted from the film Boys Dont Cry out of n arrative convenience.
\nhttps://toledo.libnet.info/event/8213981 URL;VALUE=URI:https://toledo.libnet.info/event/8213981 ATTACH:https://static.libnet.info/images/events/toledo/Black_on_Both_Sides .jpg END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR