In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. 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.ĭrawing 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.

Their erasure from trans history masks the profound ways race has figured prominently in the construction and representation of transgender subjects. Her celebrity, however, has obscured other mid-century trans narratives-ones lived by African Americans such as Lucy Hicks Anderson and James McHarris. The story of Christine Jorgensen, America’s first prominent transsexual, famously narrated trans embodiment in the postwar era.

Winner of the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Winner of Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction 2018 Winner of an American Library Association Stonewall Honor 2018

Winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association 2018 Winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association 2018

C riley snorton black on both sides