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

C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity explores the conditions that gave way to the emergence of transness and blackness as both separate and intertwining categories. Black on Both Sides is not a traditional history, nor does it aim to be. Rather, “it is a set of political propositions, theories of history” (6). Snorton’s primary interest is in the ways in which race and gender emerged as invented categories. As an interdisciplinary study, Black on Both Sides engages with a wide range of fields, including black feminist thought, disability theory, literary criticism, media studies, and food studies in order to probe the question of how race and gender shape ways of black being. Snorton draws heavily from the work of black feminist theorist Hortense Spillers in order to frame his argument that since the antebellum era black people have and continue to experience gender as an unstable identity category. Spillers’s concept of “ungendering”—the idea that the dehumanizing conditions of slavery made the privileges of heteronormative gender identity inaccessible to black people—is critical to the cohesiveness of Snorton’s argument.

Black on Both Sides magnifies the black experience during the period before contemporary gender terms like “transgender” came into use in order to illustrate the long historical relationship between blackness and gender mutability. He creatively reads sources that have been widely analyzed and those that have been less explored, carefully attending to what they tell us about the relationship between fugitivity and fungibility. For example, in chapter 1 he tells the story of James Marion Sims, an American gynecologist credited with finding a cure for the vesicovaginal fistula in the mid-nineteenth century but who operated on enslaved black women without providing them anesthesia. Here, Snorton details how ideas about race and femininity created the conditions for these women’s bodies to become sites of medical experimentation.

One of the most exciting interventions that Black on Both Sides makes is the rereading of nineteenth-century American literary classics like Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In chapter 2 Snorton strongly drives home the question of what counts as black history and what role the conditions of slavery and capitalism played in what he refers to as the fungibility (or interchangeability) of transness and blackness. In this chapter he also provides an alternative historical reading of William and Ellen Craft’s escape narrative. Snorton frames the Crafts as an enslaved couple who strategically crossed racial and gender boundaries in order to gain freedom. In doing so, he challenges traditional histories of passing by attaching gender mutability to the way in which we understand strategies employed by black people in order to escape bondage.

At times, Black on Both Sides seems intended for a reader who is already familiar with a specific set of conversations in LGBTQ and black studies scholarship. This, however, does not detract from the book’s weighty interventions. Black on Both Sides is a rigorous historical and theoretical project that seeks to complicate how we understand blackness at an ontological level. What Snorton does exceptionally well is to offer readers the opportunity to consider the ways in which the narrowness of disciplinary boundaries within the academy have rendered queerness and transness as periphery subjects in black history. In this way the book functions as a call to think more expansively about trans studies and black studies.