C. Riley Snorton

Last updated
C. Riley Snorton at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva, March 2024. C. Riley Snorton mars 2024 in Geneva 01.jpg
C. Riley Snorton at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva, March 2024.

C. Riley Snorton is an American scholar, author, and activist whose work focuses on historical perspectives of gender and race, specifically Black transgender identities. His publications include Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017). [1] [2] Snorton is currently Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. In 2014 BET listed him as one of their "18 Transgender People You Should Know". [3]

Contents

Biography

C. Riley Snorton is a transgender scholar and author. Snorton was born in the Bronx and raised in Wedgefield, SC, Sumter, SC and attended high school in Atlanta, GA. He has 3 older siblings and one younger sibling. Snorton earned an A.B. in Women and Gender Studies at Columbia University (2003), an M.A. in Communication at the University of Pennsylvania (2008), and he also earned his Ph.D. in Communication and Culture, with graduate certificates in Africana Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010. He is a recipient of a predoctoral fellowship at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University (2009), a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Pomona College (2010), and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2015). [4] He is currently Professor of English Language and Literature and is jointly appointed in the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a book project with the tentative title Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning where he will examine racial practices in relation to swamps and is coediting the forthcoming The Flesh of the Matter: A Hortense Spillers Reader.

Publications

Books

Journal articles and Book chapters

Awards and distinctions

Footnotes

  1. Snorton, C. Riley (2014). Nobody is Supposed to Know: Sexuality on the Down Low. University of Minnesota Press. p. 210. ISBN   9781452940908.
  2. Snorton, C. Riley (2017). Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. University of Minnesota Press. p. 256. ISBN   9781452955858.
  3. "18 Transgender People You Should Know". BET.com. Retrieved 2018-03-10.
  4. "ASE Faculty Profile > Department of American Studies and Ethnicity > USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences". dornsife.usc.edu. Archived from the original on 2018-04-17. Retrieved 2018-04-12.
  5. "Saturation". MIT Press. Retrieved 2023-03-02.
  6. Snorton, C. Riley (2014). Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN   978-0816677979.
  7. Snorton, C. Riley; Haritaworn, Jim (2013). Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife (2nd ed.). New York: Transgender Studies Reader. pp. 66–76.
  8. Snorton, C. Riley (2014). "On the Question of "Who's Out in Hip Hop"". Souls. 16 (4): 283–302. doi:10.1080/10999949.2014.968974. S2CID   144010425.
  9. "C. Riley Snorton is the 2023 F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality" . Retrieved November 5, 2023.

Related Research Articles

Heteronormativity is the concept that heterosexuality is the preferred or normal sexual orientation. It assumes the gender binary and that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between people of opposite sex.

Down-low is a slang term that typically refers to a sexual subculture of men who usually identify as heterosexual but actively seek sexual encounters and relations with other men, and practice gay cruising. They generally avoid disclosing their same-sex sexual activities, even if they have female sexual partner(s), they are married to a woman, or they are single. The term is also used to refer to a related sexual identity. Down-low has been viewed as "a type of impression management that some of the informants use to present themselves in a manner that is consistent with perceived norms about masculine attribute, attitudes, and behavior". Although the term has its origins in African-American slang, it has since expanded to all races.-

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transgender Day of Remembrance</span> Day to memorialize transphobia victims

The Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR), also known as the International Transgender Day of Remembrance, has been observed annually from its inception on November 20 to memorialize those who have been murdered as a result of transphobia. The day was founded to draw attention to the continued violence directed toward transgender people.

Boi is slang within butch and femme and gay male communities for several sexual or gender identities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transgender sexuality</span> Sexuality of transgender people

Sexuality in transgender individuals encompasses all the issues of sexuality of other groups, including establishing a sexual identity, learning to deal with one's sexual needs, and finding a partner, but may be complicated by issues of gender dysphoria, side effects of surgery, physiological and emotional effects of hormone replacement therapy, psychological aspects of expressing sexuality after medical transition, or social aspects of expressing their gender.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">France Winddance Twine</span> Native American ethnographer

France Winddance Twine is a Black and Native American sociologist, ethnographer, visual artist, and documentary filmmaker. Twine has conducted field research in Brazil, the UK, and the United States on race, racism, and anti-racism. She has published 11 books and more than 100 articles, review essays, and books on these topics.

<i>Trumpet</i> (novel) 1998 book by Jackie Kay

Trumpet is the debut novel from Scottish writer and poet Jackie Kay, published in 1998. It chronicles the life and death of fictional jazz artist Joss Moody through the recollections of his family, friends and those who came in contact with him at his death. Kay stated in an interview that her novel was inspired by the life of Billy Tipton, an American jazz musician who lived secretly as a transgender man in the mid-twentieth century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transgender</span> Gender identity other than sex assigned at birth

A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. Some transgender people who desire medical assistance to transition from one sex to another identify as transsexual. Transgender is also an umbrella term; in addition to including people whose gender identity is the opposite of their assigned sex, it may also include people who are non-binary or genderqueer. Other definitions of transgender also include people who belong to a third gender, or else conceptualize transgender people as a third gender. The term may also include cross-dressers or drag kings and drag queens in some contexts. The term transgender does not have a universally accepted definition, including among researchers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paisley Currah</span> Political scientist and author

Paisley Currah is political scientist and author, known for his work on the transgender rights movement. His book, Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity examines the politics of sex classification in the United States. He is a professor of political science and women's and gender studies at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was born in Ontario, Canada, received a B.A. from Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario and an M.A and Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University. He lives in Brooklyn.

Discrimination against non-binary people, people who do not identify exclusively as male or female, may occur in social, legal, or medical contexts.

Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.

<i>Transgender History</i> (book) 2008 book by Susan Stryker

Transgender History is a non-fiction book by professor Susan Stryker that provides a concise history of transgender people in the United States from the middle of the 19th century to the 2000s. The book was published in 2008 by Seal Press, with a revised edition released in 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">African-American LGBT community</span> African-American population within the LGBT community

The African-American LGBT community, otherwise referred to as the Black American LGBT community, is part of the overall LGBT culture and overall African-American culture. The initialism LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.

Accounts of transgender people have been identified going back to ancient times in cultures worldwide. The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities.

Necropolitics is a sociopolitical theory of the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. The deployment of necropolitics creates what Achille Mbembe calls deathworlds, or "new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead." Mbembe, author of On the Postcolony, was the first scholar to explore the term in depth in his 2003 article, and later, his 2019 book of the same name. Mbembe identifies racism as a prime driver of necropolitics, stating that racialized people's lives are systemically cheapened and habituated to loss.

Homonormativity is the adoption of heteronormative ideals and constructs onto LGBT culture and identity. It is predicated on the assumption that the norms and values of heterosexuality should be replicated and performed among homosexual people. Those who assert this theory claim homonormativity selectively privileges cisgendered homosexuality as worthy of social acceptance.

Transmedicalism is the idea that being transgender is primarily a medical issue related to the incongruence between an individual's assigned sex at birth and their gender identity, characterized by gender dysphoria. There are divides and debates within the transmedicalist community on the exact definition of who is or is not transgender. Many transmedicalists believe individuals who identify as transgender without experiencing gender dysphoria or desiring to undergo a medical transition through methods such as hormone replacement therapy or sex reassignment surgery are not genuinely transgender. They may also exclude those who identify themselves as non-binary from the trans label.

<i>Female Husbands: A Trans History</i> 2020 book by Jen Manion

Female Husbands: A Trans History is a history book by Jen Manion, a professor of History and Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College, published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. The book won the Best Book prize from the British Association of Victorian Studies and was a finalist for the Lawrence W. Levine Award.

Histories of the Transgender Child is a 2018 transgender studies book by the transgender author and academic Jules Gill-Peterson. The book is an exploration of transgender childhood in the United States throughout the twentieth century. It received the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction and the 2018 Children's Literature Association Book Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transgender genocide</span> Characterization of discrimination against trans people

Transgender genocide or trans genocide is a term used by some scholars and activists to describe an elevated level of systematic discrimination and violence against transgender people.