Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity

Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials–early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films–in Black on Both Sides Dr. Snorton, Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. Winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association, the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and an honorable mention from the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award Committee, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) is milestone work and we are honored to be featuring Snorton in our annual Charlotte Cushman Society lecture.

Created in 2018, the Charlotte Cushman Society is a group of donors dedicated to recovering and sharing LGBT history and will support on-going initiatives and exploration.