Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity Contributor(s): Snorton, C. Riley (Author) |
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ISBN: 1517901731 ISBN-13: 9781517901738 Publisher: University of Minnesota Press OUR PRICE: $22.46 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: December 2017 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Social Science | Lgbt Studies - General - History | African American - Social Science | Ethnic Studies - African American Studies |
Dewey: 306.768 |
LCCN: 2017042186 |
Physical Information: 0.8" H x 5.5" W x 8.3" (0.75 lbs) 256 pages |
Themes: - Ethnic Orientation - African American - Topical - Black History - Chronological Period - 1851-1899 - Chronological Period - 21st Century - Chronological Period - 20th Century |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association 2018 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. |