Please join us for a lecture by C. Riley Snorton, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Cornell University.

Lecture Abstract:
Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials—early sexological texts, fugitive slave narratives, Afro-modernist literature, sensationalist journalism, Hollywood films—in this talk, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology,” to instances of personal sovereignty among blacks living in the antebellum North that were mapped in terms of “cross dressing.”