Oct 13: TRANS CAPABLE: Fungibility, Fugitivity, & the Fleshly Matter of Being


trans capableTrans Capable: Fungibility, Fugitivity, & the Fleshly Matter of Being

a lecture by C. Riley Snorton
October 13, Thursday
6 to 7:30 pm

C. Riley Snorton, Africana Studies, Cornell University
Flesh provides one route into the proverbial question of how matter matters, and Hortense Spillers’ notion of “female flesh ungendered” guides Snorton’s analysis of sex and gender as racial arrangements, wherein the fungibility of chattel persons produced a critical context for conceptualizing transness and generated understandings of sex and gender as subject to revision in the arenas of medicine and law. In this talk, Snorton traces how fungible flesh became a mode for fugitive action, as seen in the recurrence of “cross dressing” and cross gender performance in fugitive slave narratives, including in Ellen and William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Social & Cultural Analysis
20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor

This event is free & open to the public. For more information, please contact CSGS at csgs(at)nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.
Facebook event page here.
Co-sponsored by NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.



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