Black on Both Sides

A Racial History of Trans Identity

Datos Bibliográficos

ID7307987
AutoresWhitney Strub (0000-0002-4943-6070, Rutgers University, Newark, Newark, New Jersey, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen105
Número4
Páginas981-982
Fecha de publicación2019-01-13
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
EditorialOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaz018
OpenAlexW2917322871
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas17

Black on Both Sides traces the “condensation of transness into the category of transgender,” through race, and particularly blackness (p. 8). C. Riley Snorton ambitiously develops a capacious trans genealogy, which culminates in transgender but arrives there through the motion across categories contained in such derivatives as transitivity and transversality. Not a conventional history, the book is more a set of associative assemblages, a racial poetics of transness, a densely theoretical challenge to historical method. While not without flaws, Black on Both Sides pushes us to consider established and emerging categories in new and productive ways. Snorton's series of case studies begins with the gynecologist J. Marion Sims, whose unwilling enslaved patient-victims, Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and others, were “rendered as raw materials,” whose “captive flesh figures a critical genealogy for modern transness, as chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable and as an amendable form of being” (pp. 53, 57). Snorton, indebted to Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, and others, rehearses familiar analyses—including the fungibility of black bodies under slavery and the “ungendering of blackness”—while also reorienting trans history (p. 74

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