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emmaito's review against another edition
4.0
i recently posted how i thought the book a queer history of the united states was lacking & was glad to follow it with a more nuanced look at gender & race in Black on both sides: a racial history of trans identity, written by c. riley snorton. the back of this book states that; “Black on both sides 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, c. riley snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.”
this book isn’t a straightforward history, but rather a self-described meditation on a variety of archival materials, including mid-19th & 20th c. medical illustrations, pickup notices, fugitive-slave narratives, afromodernist literature, 20th c. journalistic accounts of Black people ‘exposed’ as living in/as different genders, true crime books, documentary film, and poetry. reading this takes the right headspace, a good chunk of time to really get through it, & definitely feels extremely “academic,” but im really blown away by how this is framed & snorton’s critical analysis. i learned so much from this & will absolutely be revisiting this book going forward.
this book isn’t a straightforward history, but rather a self-described meditation on a variety of archival materials, including mid-19th & 20th c. medical illustrations, pickup notices, fugitive-slave narratives, afromodernist literature, 20th c. journalistic accounts of Black people ‘exposed’ as living in/as different genders, true crime books, documentary film, and poetry. reading this takes the right headspace, a good chunk of time to really get through it, & definitely feels extremely “academic,” but im really blown away by how this is framed & snorton’s critical analysis. i learned so much from this & will absolutely be revisiting this book going forward.
cowboyjonah's review against another edition
DNF @ page 55, I'll come back to this eventually but the writing style is too academic for what I'm looking for right now
itsneilcochrane's review against another edition
1.0
I really wanted to like this book, but it’s written in such academic jargon that it practically needs to be translated, and also spends surprisingly little time talking about trans people at all, let alone black trans people.
littlebookterror's review against another edition
slow-paced
3.5
too often I watch a video that makes me think "oh that's such an interesting topic let me learn more about it" only to rediscover how not-smart and unequipped I am for this as soon as I encounter an academic text. (In this case, it wasn't a video but the point still stands.)
My starting point
I knew going into this that this a much more academic in nature than my usual nonfiction picks, so I was less concerned with understanding every little detail but getting the broader narrative regarding the interaction between Black and trans bodies which I did get. I do have some general knowledge now medical malpractices (Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine being the most recent example) have impacted trans/Black lives and general ideas about the US slavery period but there were definitely several points where I had Wikipedia open, getting a primer on minstrel shows or various historical figures.
Who's the author?
C. Riley Snorton is a transmasc nonbinary associate professor of Africana studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University and has earned a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture. This is his second publication with the University of Minnesota Press.
What did I learn?
Academic texts via audiobook are helpful as they keep me on track but also unhelpful because it's easy to just let the audio roll when a break and some contemplation are needed.
Anatomically Speaking is a horrifying look at how science has mistreated Black enslaved women and how that plays into the larger framework of gender and sex.
Trans Capable explored the voyeuristic aspects of passing and cross-dressing through a court case.
Transatlantic Literature is a textual analysis of three published works from the early 19th century - definitely up my alley but I have not read any of the three titles, which is always a bummer even if I don't have any interest in picking them up in the future.
A Nightmarish Silhouette is a discussion on how the media portrayal of trans people is handled at the time that Christine Jorgensen was famous.
Lastly, in DeVine's Cut shifts its focus from news outlets to the general legacy of murdered trans people in the example of Phillip DeVine and how erasure and narrative framing diminish his existence.
Additional Notes
I hope that I will remember enough of this work to come back to this at some point in my future reading to reference and maybe even look more into its sources.
I found this review by Erick to be a well-done recap to cement what I listened to and to which I am sure to come back to. I also found two videos which I found helpful, this virtual event with the author and a book discussion which was excellent.
And looking at other reviews on here/YT/instagram, outside of the content of the book, it does open an interesting discussion on a) accessibility in terms of the writing and b) its existence in the greater reading spaces on the internet. Many people, me included, have commented on the writing style and word choices which are, depending on nice you want to be, complex and academic or dense and incomprehensible. Now, to a a certain degree, once you are starting certain topics, you will feel more comfortable with understanding and using technical terms and this novel is was not written to be a primer for the average person stumbling upon this (I make this deduction by both the fact that this is published by a university press, has received accolades from similar academic-orientated organizations and has not been advertised to be accessible/a starting point on bookselling sites). But I have seen this book on multiple trans* lists, seen it recommended without any further details on the writing style and I think many people are going into this expecting something different from its (sub)title.
tl;dr there is a craving for these types of books and stories; the recent scandal around James Somerton's plagiarism video makes it clear that people are looking for queer analysis; but this book also kind of explains why many people interested in those topics never get into them: its a steep learning curve.
I want to leave two quotes that made things click for me. Both are from chapter 3:
My starting point
I knew going into this that this a much more academic in nature than my usual nonfiction picks, so I was less concerned with understanding every little detail but getting the broader narrative regarding the interaction between Black and trans bodies which I did get. I do have some general knowledge now medical malpractices (Envisioning African Intersex: Challenging Colonial and Racist Legacies in South African Medicine being the most recent example) have impacted trans/Black lives and general ideas about the US slavery period but there were definitely several points where I had Wikipedia open, getting a primer on minstrel shows or various historical figures.
Who's the author?
C. Riley Snorton is a transmasc nonbinary associate professor of Africana studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University and has earned a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture. This is his second publication with the University of Minnesota Press.
What did I learn?
Academic texts via audiobook are helpful as they keep me on track but also unhelpful because it's easy to just let the audio roll when a break and some contemplation are needed.
Anatomically Speaking is a horrifying look at how science has mistreated Black enslaved women and how that plays into the larger framework of gender and sex.
Trans Capable explored the voyeuristic aspects of passing and cross-dressing through a court case.
Transatlantic Literature is a textual analysis of three published works from the early 19th century - definitely up my alley but I have not read any of the three titles, which is always a bummer even if I don't have any interest in picking them up in the future.
A Nightmarish Silhouette is a discussion on how the media portrayal of trans people is handled at the time that Christine Jorgensen was famous.
Lastly, in DeVine's Cut shifts its focus from news outlets to the general legacy of murdered trans people in the example of Phillip DeVine and how erasure and narrative framing diminish his existence.
Additional Notes
I hope that I will remember enough of this work to come back to this at some point in my future reading to reference and maybe even look more into its sources.
I found this review by Erick to be a well-done recap to cement what I listened to and to which I am sure to come back to. I also found two videos which I found helpful, this virtual event with the author and a book discussion which was excellent.
And looking at other reviews on here/YT/instagram, outside of the content of the book, it does open an interesting discussion on a) accessibility in terms of the writing and b) its existence in the greater reading spaces on the internet. Many people, me included, have commented on the writing style and word choices which are, depending on nice you want to be, complex and academic or dense and incomprehensible. Now, to a a certain degree, once you are starting certain topics, you will feel more comfortable with understanding and using technical terms and this novel is was not written to be a primer for the average person stumbling upon this (I make this deduction by both the fact that this is published by a university press, has received accolades from similar academic-orientated organizations and has not been advertised to be accessible/a starting point on bookselling sites). But I have seen this book on multiple trans* lists, seen it recommended without any further details on the writing style and I think many people are going into this expecting something different from its (sub)title.
tl;dr there is a craving for these types of books and stories; the recent scandal around James Somerton's plagiarism video makes it clear that people are looking for queer analysis; but this book also kind of explains why many people interested in those topics never get into them: its a steep learning curve.
I want to leave two quotes that made things click for me. Both are from chapter 3:
"[...]it illustrates the ways in which the black mother has been rendered as the zone of nonbeing, in which her figuration becomes a portal to an articulation of a black (modernist) self.
[...] [The three novels] demonstrate the interface between the zone of nonbeing and Afromodernist modes of subjectification, an encounter profoundly marked by the complex figuration of the black mother, who maps blackness as an impossibly public experience, even as she also delimits the possibility of a black interiority."
"In this formulation, black people are all mammies compelled to produce white value through their intimate labor and, by their reproductive capacity, surplus value in the form of the production of additional laboring bodies."
It continues on that mammy-fication is "a symbol of the processes by which black gender becomes fungible in slavery’s political and visual economy of indifference to black gender difference".
nic55's review
2nd finished read for #TransRightsReadathon!
While I appreciated the project of this book, I feel like I only digested 50% of the content. And this is not the fault of the author! This is definitely written for an academic audience in mind, so it’s not necessarily meant to be accessible. The ideas were definitely enlightening: how gender has been/continues to be racialized, how this realization sheds light on gender’s variability/flexibility, how Black folks explored gender pre and post slavery…all of it was eye opening. Regardless, I was struggling to follow the ideas being explored because they were expressed in both dry and very academically dense language. It was still a valuable read (and honestly needs a reread in the future) but I wouldn’t recommend for those looking for a straightforward history of Black trans experiences in the US.
While I appreciated the project of this book, I feel like I only digested 50% of the content. And this is not the fault of the author! This is definitely written for an academic audience in mind, so it’s not necessarily meant to be accessible. The ideas were definitely enlightening: how gender has been/continues to be racialized, how this realization sheds light on gender’s variability/flexibility, how Black folks explored gender pre and post slavery…all of it was eye opening. Regardless, I was struggling to follow the ideas being explored because they were expressed in both dry and very academically dense language. It was still a valuable read (and honestly needs a reread in the future) but I wouldn’t recommend for those looking for a straightforward history of Black trans experiences in the US.