C. Riley Snorton 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.

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