Introduction

C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence.

DeVine’s Cut

Chapter 5 turns to the murders of Lisa Lambert, Brandon Teena, and Phillip DeVine on New Year’s Eve in Humboldt, Nebraska in 1993. While much of the scholarship in trans and media studies have focused on the implications of Brandon Teena’s death (and cinematic portrayals), this chapter narrates the Humboldt killings from the perspective of black and disabled DeVine.

A Nightmarish Silhouette

Chapter 4 situates the ascendance of Christine Jorgensen, dubbed America’s first transsexual celebrity, alongside myriad projects of U.S. imperial conquest and various forms of violent racist suppression at home. Focusing on the media narratives of Lucy Hicks Anderson, Georgia Black, Carlett Brown, James McHarris/Annie Lee Grant, and Ava Betty Brown that emerged in the black press, this chapter offers other ways to narrate trans embodiment in the postwar, early Cold War period.

Trans Capable

Chapter 2 discusses flesh’s collateral genealogy, suggesting that the recurrence of “cross dressing” and cross gender modes of escape in fugitive slave narratives engenders a way of seeing fungible flesh as a mode for fugitive action. This chapter looks at how fungibility and fugitivity occur within the narrative plots of Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861) and Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860).

Anatomically Speaking

Chapter 1 considers the founding of American gynecology and the archives of J. Marion Sims. Sims’s three and one-half years of experiments on female captives--Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy and several unnamed others--precipitates a view of sex as an effect of flesh and gender as a discourse indebted to racial slavery’s political and visual economy.

Reading the “Trans-” in Transatlantic Literature

Chapter 3 takes up the trans/gender implications of The Three Negro Classics, which is a compilation of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, and James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.