Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

Cover of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)
Speaker: 
Professor C. Riley Snorton (Africana Studies, Cornell University)
Event Date: 
March 26, 2018
Event Time: 
4:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: 
Lane Hall 2239
Event Accessibility : 
Ramp and elevator access at the E. Washington Street entrance (by the loading dock). There are accessible restrooms on the south end of Lane Hall, on each floor of the building. A gender neutral restroom is located on the first floor. Questions? Please contact: irwg@umich.ed
Event Tags: 
lgqri
Cover of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)

Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials—early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films—in this talk, 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 instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of “cross dressing.”  

This event is co-sponsored by the Lesbian, Gay, Queer Research Initiative (LGQRI), Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and Department of Afroamerican and African Studies.