Dr. C. Riley Snorton is a Professor of English Langauge and Literature and Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at The University of Chicago. Earning his Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania with graduate certificates in Africana Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Dr. Snorton's work focuses on cultural theory, queer and transgender theory and history, Africana studies, performance studies, and popular culture. He is the author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017) and Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (2014).
Please join us for Dr. Snorton's lecture, "Fleshy Encounters: Black Feminisms and the Mutability of Gender" on Friday, February 22nd from 2:30pm to 4:00pm in 100 Ramseyer Hall. The event is free and open to the public.
Abstract: This talk traces how flesh figures one route into the proverbial question of how matter matters. Juxtaposing the archives of J. Marion Sims, lionized as the father of American gynecology, with the cross-gender maneuvers of fugitive actors in 19th century slave narratives, Snorton frames how transness became conceivable, as a kind of being in the world in which gender though biologized was not fixed but fungible, which is to say, revisable within blackness, as a condition of possibility. Flesh then becomes a crucial analytic for understanding “gender” as a racial arrangement related to shifting, complex and even contradictory understandings of ontology, ethnology and sovereignty in sexology and antebellum U.S. law.
Dr. Snorton will also be leading a graduate seminar in the morning from 10:00am to 11:30am in 386 University Hall. Please RSVP to Elysse Jones at jones.6187@osu.edu by February 19th to attend.
This event is co-sponsored by The Student Life Multicultural Center.
