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

On Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2017, C. Riley Snorton wrote an essay asking, "What [do] we mean when we 'say their names?'" In Black on Both Sides, he offers ways to think through an answer to this question, as the text is a "looking for" and a "looking after" the "theories and politics that emerge at the limits of current operations for making biopolitical and necropolitical sense of black and trans death." (xiv) Through a deft analysis of a vast and heterogeneous archive, Snorton interrupts dominant narratives of transness, blackness, and the co-constitutive genealogy of these categories by offering up grammar for black and trans life both historically and temporally. His deep and nuanced argument requires readers to examine how "category of transness is a racial narrative . . . [how] blackness finds its articulation within transness," as well as how both of these categories are "inextricably linked yet irreconcilable and irreducible projects." (8) While his engagement with disability studies is perfunctory, overall he demonstrates his ability to move deftly among scholarship from a range of disciplines in a way that asks the reader to rethink blackness, transness, and temporality.

Beginning with fungibility and fugitivity, he elucidates how both gender and sex are racial arrangements. Snorton brings "black" and "trans" into conversation by examining how both have been "constituted as fungible, thingified, and interchangeable." (6) He demonstrates how genealogies of blackness and transness are parallel and interrelated formulations in which "captive and divided flesh function[] as malleable matter for mediating and remaking sex and gender as matters of human categorization and personal definition." (11, 20) In this remaking, Snorton challenges notions of immutable gender so often rooted in white epistemologies, arguing that it is crucial to consider how "chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable and as an amendable form of being." (57) Within this framework, the ungendering of blackness is a site in which gender became subject to rearrangement, thus providing opportunities for fugitivity through performances of transness. Enslaved people utilized this ungendering as a "critical modality of political and cultural maneuvering" evidenced by "the frequency with which narrative of fugitivity included cross-gendered modes of escape." (56, 58) This refiguration and fugitive potential of gender provides a grammar for thinking through the racial history of trans identity in a U.S. context and how these genealogies inform our present moment.

Snorton's explication of black gender as "anagrammatical" within the frame of Black modernity challenges the reductive ways in which binary sex and gender are read back in time through the filter of whiteness, and in ways that dismiss black experiences of fungibility. He calls attention to how the "color line was produced and policed by black women's reproductive capacity," arguing that this reality "necessitates an encounter with the figure of the black maternal as a character and as the ground of nonbeing that engenders black manhood." (108)

Unlike most scholarship engaging trans history, Snorton moves quickly through and beyond Christine Jorgensen's story, focusing instead on media constructions of black transwomen that illustrated "the impossibility of a 'black Jorgensen,'" exposing how "anti-blackness [was] a critical paradigm for making sense of Jorgensen's figuration." (157) Snorton skillfully identifies the ways in which transwomen of color articulate their genders in ways that subvert linear logic, as achievable outside of medical and legal intervention. Ava Betty Brown's narrative, for example, "points to how knowledge systems unrecognized by colonial authority . . . suggest a different, and perhaps decolonial, understanding of the body she inhabited." (162) In this way, Snorton centers "other ways to be trans, in which gender becomes a terrain to make space for living." (175)

Snorton concludes by broadening our capacity to imagine and "construct more livable black and trans worlds." (14) Ultimately, he argues that this is what we must do when we "say their names." As such, he attends to Phillip DeVine's death and its framing in the Brandon Teena...