Skip to main content

close
Font size options
Increase or decrease the font size for this website by clicking on the 'A's.
Contrast options
Choose a color combination to give the most comfortable contrast.

BIG IDEA Book Group

Black on Both Sides by C. Riley Snorton

2023-08-22 17:30:00 2023-08-22 18:30:00 America/New_York BIG IDEA Book Group A discussion group dedicated to diverse voices, perspectives, and authors. We'll aim to construct a meaningful conversation about anti-racism and embrace the diversity of our community. Online Programs -

Tuesday, August 22
5:30pm - 6:30pm

Add to Calendar 2023-08-22 17:30:00 2023-08-22 18:30:00 America/New_York BIG IDEA Book Group A discussion group dedicated to diverse voices, perspectives, and authors. We'll aim to construct a meaningful conversation about anti-racism and embrace the diversity of our community. Online Programs -

A discussion group dedicated to diverse voices, perspectives, and authors. We'll aim to construct a meaningful conversation about anti-racism and embrace the diversity of our community.

Meetings take place via Zoom. Registered participants will be emailed meeting information prior to the event starting.

Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton

Print | Audiobook

The story of Christine Jorgensen, Americas first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives-ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. 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 dressingand canonical black literary works that express black mens access to the female within, he 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 Dont Cry out of narrative convenience.

AGE GROUP: | Adults (18+) |

EVENT TYPE: | Book Groups |

TAGS: | blacklivesmatterbookgroup | bigidea |

Online Programs


Hours
Mon, Sep 30 12:00AM to 11:30PM
Tue, Oct 01 12:00AM to 11:30PM
Wed, Oct 02 12:00AM to 11:30PM
Thu, Oct 03 12:00AM to 11:30PM
Fri, Oct 04 12:00AM to 11:30PM
Sat, Oct 05 12:00AM to 11:30PM
Sun, Oct 06 12:00AM to 11:30PM

About the branch

Online Programs from the Toledo Library