C. Riley Snorton is a scholar of English, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Chicago whose work traces the historical entanglement of Blackness and transness — not as parallel oppressions but as co-constituted through the medical archive, legal regulation, and the logic of fungibility that characterizes chattel slavery.
Core ideas
- Blackness and transness: in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017), Snorton argues that the histories of Blackness and transness are not merely analogous but mutually constitutive. The fungibility of the enslaved body — its reduction to an interchangeable unit of labor and value — produced conditions under which gender was simultaneously imposed and denied, regulated and rendered irrelevant. Trans history cannot be told apart from Black history, and Black history cannot be told apart from the regulation and production of gendered embodiment.
- The medical archive: Snorton examines how medical institutions produced knowledge about gender variance through the bodies of Black and racialized people — using their bodies as sites for experimentation and classification while denying them the subjectivity that gender variance requires in the medical framework.
Notable works
- Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017)
- Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (2014)
Related
- Queer-of-color critique — the tradition his work extends
- Hortense Spillers — whose analysis of the flesh and the body in slavery informs Snorton’s work
- Dean Spade — fellow trans studies scholar
- Racial capitalism — the system that produces the entanglement of race and gender