Blackness and Transness on Riley Snorton's Black on Both Sides

Black on Both Sides: A Response
Student's Name
Institution/Affiliation
Course
Professor
Date.
Black on Both Sides: A Response
In Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, C. Riley Snorton examines the circumstances that led to the development of transness and blackness as distinct and entwined identities. Black on Both Sides is not and does not attempt to be a conventional history. Instead, "it is a body of political assumptions, historical conceptions." The origins of race and gender as constructed categories are particularly interesting to Snorton. To explore the subject of how race and gender affect ways of being black, Black on Both Sides draws on a wide range of disciplines, including black feminist theory, disability theory, literary criticism, media studies, and culinary studies.
To explain his claim that black people had and still experience gender as an unstable identity category, Snorton largely leans on the work of black feminist thinker Hortense Spillers. The coherence of Snorton's thesis depends on Spillers' concept of "ungendering," which holds that black people were denied the benefits of heteronormative gender identification due to the degrading effects of slavery (2017). It is crucial to comprehend the background and intricacy of the word "transgender" before delving further into the discussion of Snorton's work. Similar to any word that categorizes a group of individuals, it is important to consider when the phrase should be used, who falls into this category, and how to locate the term using historical analytical methods. The terminology's modernism continues to be one of the challenges to comprehension. One of the major disputes in transgender history will result from this.
Furthermore, it's important to recognize that the phrase has westernized medical implications, which some community members may disagree with. Understanding Snorton's motivation for authoring the monograph is crucial to comprehending how key language sustains an oppressive system of power that disproportionately affects minorities. Last but not lea...