Kaz :)’s Reviews > Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity > Status Update

The pages after this are the Notes (sources) and the Index, I’m just not marking it as complete until I’m done formulating my thoughts on it.

Chapter 4’s the best one just because it talks about actual Black trans people and not the theoretical transness of all Black people by the way of being denied traditional (white) gender. Like I get it, I see it, I am acknowledging the fact and theory of it, but let’s talk about something real now.

“Black men are feminized by being born from a black women as laboring bodies” but also “Black sons can only become men when they untangle themselves from the burden of their mother” (the burden being. The Blackness). Idk it just rubs me the wrong way that this section didn’t go into the masculinization of black women while it went on about how black mothers are holding their sons back from manhood. :/

It would be more instructive [..] to read this instance of mammy-fication as the articulation of certain gendered dimensions of blackness in which the black "mother-like" is neither a black "woman" nor a black "man" but rather an emblem of a masochistic relation and a symbol of the processes by which black gender becomes fungible in slavery’s political and visual economy of indifference to black gender difference.

Oh goodie we’re talking about the black mammy now, are we still gonna be using Booker T Washington, W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson as our framework?

“Just as […] were made to stand in for a black body politic, they also demonstrated how masculinism sometimes functioned as a mask for gender fungibility. Put differently, in the production of blackness as monolithic and of black people as interchangeable, gender difference continued to be lost.” (pg 119)

This argument would be better if the three referenced authors in this section so far weren’t all men.

Semi-serious question, do I have to read the 60 pages of acknowledgments and notes (les sources) at the back?

Technically read yesterday.