Black on Both Sides

A Racial History of Trans Identity

Bibliographic Data

ID7307987
AuthorsWhitney Strub (0000-0002-4943-6070, Rutgers University, Newark, Newark, New Jersey, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume105
Issue4
Pages981-982
Publication date2019-01-13
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of American History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-8723 • E-ISSN: 1945-2314
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/jahist/jaz018
OpenAlexW2917322871
LanguageEN
Citations received17

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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