The Arrival of Black Trans Mattering

C. Riley Snorton's beautifully written book provides a critical foundation for Black trans studies by exploring how the intersections between Blackness and transness produce the epistemological and ontological foundation for understanding gender as a mutable category. Through his preface and acknowledgments, Snorton marks this book as a political project that centers the lives and voices of Black trans people.

Providing a clear and necessary lexical roadmap to the book's key terms, Snorton establishes "trans" and "Blackness" as sites of movement, departure, and "conditions of possibility" (2), thereby uprooting hegemonic notions of these terms as biologically fixed. He then introduces two challenging terms that structure the majority of the book: transitivity and transversality. To do so, Snorton draws on Claire Colebrook's idea of transitivity that posits "trans-" as a primordial operation, something that comes before language and works to create social categories that produce "the Human." Snorton bridges transitivity and Blackness as "conditions of possibility for the modern world" (5), illuminating how Blackness is "thingified" by chattel slavery. His deployment of transversality comes from Félix Guattari as a way to map "trans-" across time and space by "articulat[ing] submerged forms of relationalities that need not be visible to have effects" (10). These terms illustrate that ontological understandings of "trans-" and Blackness help render gender — as category and analytic — mutable and fluid, and demonstrate how, despite the title, the book functions not as a history but as a nonlinear chronology.

The book is divided into three sections: the two opening and two closing chapters are "companion chapters," that work within similar time frames and archives. The first, and perhaps most impactful, chapter focuses on the experiments that Dr. J. Marion Sims conducted on enslaved Black women in the mid-nineteenth century. Snorton argues that Black women's bodies were seen and treated not as bodies but as "captive and divided flesh" (20), as Hortense Spillers has theorized. Snorton argues that enslaved Black women's bodies, in Sims's medical work and subsequent visual representations of gynecological procedures, made possible the creation of categories of sex and gender as divisible from personal forms of identification. Centering the narratives of William Craft and Harriet Jacobs, the second chapter demonstrates how the fugitivity and fungibility of captive Black flesh becomes a precursor to understanding gender as a category subject to rearrangement. Though his reading of Ellen Craft's cross-gender and cross-racial performance is compelling, Snorton's analysis of Jacobs's Incidents is the highlight of the chapter; it provides an exceptional reading of "blackness-as-fungible" (71) that supports the book's central claims.

In the third chapter, Snorton posits that the "Three Negro Classics" — a compilation of narratives by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, and James Weldon Johnson — co-construct Black modernity, in such a way that we grasp how the color line is a continuation of plantation logics that posit Black mothers as vestibules that produce objects, as "zone[s] of nonbeing" (106). He holds in tension the notion that Black women's bodies are historical vestibules that (re)produced the color line, and that they function as patriarchal representations in Afromodernist texts. Thinking through Frantz Fanon, Hortense Spillers, and the Moynihan report, Snorton illustrates how ungendered flesh continues to mark Black sociality, both through Black mothers and Black men. Though Snorton expertly intervenes in how African American literary studies handles these texts, his analyses are not as persuasive as his readings in the second chapter and may have benefited from more archival or visual analysis.

The last two chapters show how dominant discourses that center white trans people not only eclipse Black experiences of violence and suffering but also seemingly require them. The fourth chapter launches with a discussion of Christine Jorgensen, one of the first famous transsexuals in the US, and how her fame has "represent[ed] a form of freedom, [while] it also signified upon the various kinds of unfreedom that marked and continue to animate black...