Trans definition: “a movement with no clear origin or point of arrival” (p.2)

Preface:

  • Naming Tamara Dominguez and Blake Brockington, both Black Trans folk who have passed, former of murder and later of suicide.
  • Naming these two Black trans bodies sets the frame for understanding that these bodies are not supposed to exist and cannot be free within a country built on colonial rule and slavery.

Introduction:

Objective: To examine the transitive connections between blackness and transness.

Method: Bringing together the blackness and transness in the same frame using a range of sources such as afromodernist literature, medical illustrations, and fugitive slave narratives.

Argument: Blackness is intertwined with transness and the separation of these two is a racial narrative. 

Part 1: Blacken

Emphasis on ungendered flesh

  1. Anatomically Speaking: Ungendered Flesh and the Science of Sex

Objective: show the ways that flesh became unattached from humanity and gender in the context of medical experiments on enslaved Black women. Also, to recognize the racist history of gynecology.

Method: Examining the medical experiments of Dr. Simms on enslaved Black female bodies, paying close attention to the three named patients: Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy.

Argument: Black enslaved bodies were ungendered and reduced to flesh all under the guise of medicine.

  • Trans Capable: Fungibility, Fugitivity, and the Matter of Being 

Objective: Explore the connection between the fungibility and fugitivity of Black enslaved bodies.

Method: Using the stories of Mary-Anne Waters, Ellen and William Craft slave narratives using the lens of fungibility.

Argument: The de-gendering of Black flesh opened the space for gender fluidity and a form of ‘trans’ in the context of escaping from enslavement. 

Part II. Transit 

  • Reading the “Trans-“ in Transatlantic Literature: On the “Female” within the Three Negro Classics

Objective: Understand the construction of the black maternal figure and its relation to black manhood and the fungibility of black flesh. As well as create an understanding of the production of Black literature. 

Method: examines three afromodernist slave autobiographies – that were all eventually published in one collection called Three Negro Classics, while playing close attention to the maternal figurations within these novels. 

Argument: black maternal figures reproduce the border between flesh, blackness, and gender in a society structured by anti-blackness.

Part III. Blackout

  • A Nightmare Silhouette: Racialization and the Long Exposure of Transition

Objective: Understand the racial hierarchy of light to dark bodies and the ways that Black bodies are forced into meaning as the opposition of white bodies.

Method: Examining the representation of Christine Jorgenson, a white trans woman, alongside the representation of black trans figures, Hicks Anderson, Black, the Browns, and McHarris/Grant.

Argument:  Narratives of black trans folks act as a countermythologies and provide other ways to conceptualize being trans 

  • DeVine’s Cut: Public Memory and the Politics of Martyrdom

Objective: create time and space for Black life that has ended prematurely without dedicating these lives to martyrdom.

Method:  examining the life of Phillip DeVine through the concepts of biomythography and still life. 

1.     Still life demonstrates how black and trans life continue to accumulate meaning after their death, 

       2.     Biomythography is used here as a way to tell the life story of Phillip DeVine without placing his body into prewritten colonial categories of what that story should be.

Argument:  Phillip DeVine had a life, all black people have a life no matter how much that life is deemed out of time or tied to death, and the sharing of these life stories disrupts the narrative that the inevitable fate and value of their body is as a martyr. 

Overall thoughts and themes of Black on Both Sides:

  • Fungibility linked to de-gendering of enslaved Black bodies. 
  • Examining of enslaved narratives, looking directly into their lives to understand their gender presentations. 
  • How are bodies created as free? When is a body free?
  • Relation between sex, gender, and flesh. Can any exist independently?
  • Putting bodies into categories of meaning