Reviewed by: Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934 by Melissa Stein Liam Oliver Lair MEASURING MANHOOD: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830-1934. By Melissa Stein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2015. In this impressively researched book, Melissa Stein documents how scientists in the late 1800s and early 1900s naturalized racial hierarchy. As she explains: "this book is a story about how categories of human difference are created, maintained, and contested and the role of science in that process… not just categories of difference… they were, and often continue to be, categories of sociopolitical exclusion" (24). Ethnologists and sexologists in particular adapted ideas about race at the intersection of gender and sexuality to fit new social cultural and political circumstances, solidifying a mutually constitutive relationship racial science, politics, and culture. While the politics of these professionals differed, one constant theme among their work was the notion of "a natural racial hierarchy" grounded in white supremacy (269). Unlike other historical works concerning manhood in the late 19th century that focus on popular discourse and cultural texts, Stein's unique work begins with a consideration of how ethnology emerged as a field of study and the central role of men—and patrilineal descent—in questions regarding the origins of humankind. The confluence of ethnology and white masculinity served as a foundation for ethnological conclusions about race in justifications for slavery. Pro-slavery defenders grounded their logic in paternalistic rhetoric and utilized gendered arguments when it benefited their aim, often de-gendering Black folks or likening black men and women to children (77). What was so dangerous about these assertions is that many ethnologists raised their "innate prejudices to the level of scientific truth[s]," truths that shaped law, policy, and social opinion (124). These trends were exacerbated in the post-abolition era when concerns over two things: 1) citizenship—particularly for Black men, and 2) what racial scientists saw as the "threat" of miscegenation (93, 107). As Stein argues, "white supremacy depended on white men maintaining their dominion over white women" and whites believed that if Black men were to access political equality, they would also want social equality; that is, "equal access to white women" (159). General concerns about race, sexuality, gender, and the boundaries of whiteness converged in these moments, but Stein demonstrates the specificity and interconnectedness of these discourses. She focuses on the role of manhood, finding that in order to denigrate "a particular race or immigrant group" one only needed to "impugn[] manhood within the group" (165). Manhood, of course, was synonymous with reproductive heterosexuality, since the "fate of the nation depended on the superior race 'outbreeding' the inferior" (168). Thus, any white person who was not heterosexual was a "threat to the whole race and, in turn, American civilization" (168). Racial science and ethnology directly impacted other fields of medical research as well as attempts at legal and social control of those deemed "less evolved." The emergence of sexology is one key example, where concepts of "sexuality and sexual difference [were] shaped by the country's racial context" (178). This occurred, in part, because many ethnologists also conducted research as sexologists, using their 'expertise' gleaned from their work on race. Sexologists' defined inverts and homosexuals as not just reflective of deviance from the norm, but also reflective of a devolution or evolutionary regression. The results of these scientific inquiries alongside the emergence of eugenics as a specific iteration of scientific racism directly shaped not only the future of assessments on race and sexuality within the fields of medicine, but directly impacted the law and extra-legal violence. In her analysis of lynching, for example, Stein notes that "racial science and popular discourse on lynching shared language, imagery, and a highly charged set of assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and power in America" (219). The influence of eugenics facilitated the use of castration as an "increasingly central component in [End Page 123] the practice of lynching" but both "served the same ideological and practical functions; intimidation, containment, and social control" (239). Stein's research is particularly salient given our current political moment and the contemporary "resurgence of scientific interest in biology and...

New York City Trans Oral History Project. Community organizers (https://www.nyctransoralhistory.org/who-we-are) in partnership with the New York Public Library. https://www.nyctransoralhistory.org/...

Reviewed by: Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton Liam Oliver Lair BLACK ON BOTH SIDES: A Racial History of Trans Identity. By C. Riley Snorton. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2017. On Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2017, C. Riley Snorton wrote an essay asking, "What [do] we mean when we 'say their names?'" In Black on Both Sides, he offers ways to think through an answer to this question, as the text is a "looking for" and a "looking after" the "theories and politics that emerge at the limits of current operations for making biopolitical and necropolitical sense of black and trans death." (xiv) Through [End Page 115] a deft analysis of a vast and heterogeneous archive, Snorton interrupts dominant narratives of transness, blackness, and the co-constitutive genealogy of these categories by offering up grammar for black and trans life both historically and temporally. His deep and nuanced argument requires readers to examine how "category of transness is a racial narrative . . . [how] blackness finds its articulation within transness," as well as how both of these categories are "inextricably linked yet irreconcilable and irreducible projects." (8) While his engagement with disability studies is perfunctory, overall he demonstrates his ability to move deftly among scholarship from a range of disciplines in a way that asks the reader to rethink blackness, transness, and temporality. Beginning with fungibility and fugitivity, he elucidates how both gender and sex are racial arrangements. Snorton brings "black" and "trans" into conversation by examining how both have been "constituted as fungible, thingified, and interchangeable." (6) He demonstrates how genealogies of blackness and transness are parallel and interrelated formulations in which "captive and divided flesh function[] as malleable matter for mediating and remaking sex and gender as matters of human categorization and personal definition." (11, 20) In this remaking, Snorton challenges notions of immutable gender so often rooted in white epistemologies, arguing that it is crucial to consider how "chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable and as an amendable form of being." (57) Within this framework, the ungendering of blackness is a site in which gender became subject to rearrangement, thus providing opportunities for fugitivity through performances of transness. Enslaved people utilized this ungendering as a "critical modality of political and cultural maneuvering" evidenced by "the frequency with which narrative of fugitivity included cross-gendered modes of escape." (56, 58) This refiguration and fugitive potential of gender provides a grammar for thinking through the racial history of trans identity in a U.S. context and how these genealogies inform our present moment. Snorton's explication of black gender as "anagrammatical" within the frame of Black modernity challenges the reductive ways in which binary sex and gender are read back in time through the filter of whiteness, and in ways that dismiss black experiences of fungibility. He calls attention to how the "color line was produced and policed by black women's reproductive capacity," arguing that this reality "necessitates an encounter with the figure of the black maternal as a character and as the ground of nonbeing that engenders black manhood." (108) Unlike most scholarship engaging trans history, Snorton moves quickly through and beyond Christine Jorgensen's story, focusing instead on media constructions of black transwomen that illustrated "the impossibility of a 'black Jorgensen,'" exposing how "anti-blackness [was] a critical paradigm for making sense of Jorgensen's figuration." (157) Snorton skillfully identifies the ways in which transwomen of color articulate their genders in ways that subvert linear logic, as achievable outside of medical and legal intervention. Ava Betty Brown's narrative, for example, "points to how knowledge systems unrecognized by colonial authority . . . suggest a different, and perhaps decolonial, understanding of the body she inhabited." (162) In this way, Snorton centers "other ways to be trans, in which gender becomes a terrain to make space for living." (175) Snorton concludes by broadening our capacity to imagine and "construct more livable black and trans worlds." (14) Ultimately, he argues that this is what we must do when we "say their names." As such, he attends to Phillip DeVine's death and its framing in the Brandon Teena...

In this article we discuss how an oral history project emerged through our involvement in a collaborative, creative project at the University of Kansas called Four Rehearsals and a Performance (FRAP). FRAP utilized improvisation in dance and music, bringing together community members across ability to explore how knowledge and community are created. Our analysis explores themes of embodiment, community, and how participants experienced the space of FRAP. We first describe how FRAP became a project, and then we discuss how our oral history project emerged as part of FRAP. After providing specific examples of themes and experiences shared by our interviewees, we reflect on the successes and failures of creating a fully accessible performance space. We consider this oral history a "queer oral history" following Horacio Roque Ramirez and Nan Alamilla Boyd's introduction in Bodies of Evidence, as it is a project with an "overtly political function and a liberating quality." Both FRAP and our oral history project explored the politics of which bodies are valued and which bodies are seen as capable of creative production.

In a time when so many in the mainstream LGBT community are arguing that “it gets better,” Anne Balay offers Steel Closets, an honest and intimate window into the lives of hard-working, queer steel...

In her provocative study of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), historian Leigh Ann Wheeler provides an eye-opening look at the construction of sex as a civil liberty over the course of the ...