Swamp Tales, Trans Ghosts, and Nonbinary (magical) Realism

Photo: Sarah Malone

This talk focuses on how nonbinary, as an analytic, becomes a portal for rethinking dominant conceptions of temporality, territory, and form within and across social difference. Beginning with literary and media depictions of the Green Swamp and Honey Island Swamp monsters — swamp tales that bring the 18th and 19th century into the contemporary moment — this talk highlights the monstrosity of fugitivity. The Green Swamp monster began as a so-called wild man who evaded police capture in the central Florida swamps in the 1970s. The Honey Island Swamp monster, “spotted” in 1963 in marshland surrounding New Orleans, has no apparent referent but goes by many names, including the Rogarou, the Jetiche, and in Cajun French, le Bete Noire, or the Black Beast. This talk concludes with a meditation on Juliana Curi’s 2022 documentary, Uyra: The Rising Forest, to pose questions about how abolition and decolonial praxes produce alternative frameworks for reading matters of gender and the environment among Black and Indigenous queer, trans and nonbinary artists and activists.

C. Riley Snorton is a cultural theorist who focuses on racial, sexual, and transgender histories and cultural productions. He is the author of 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), which won multiple awards including the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association and the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. He is the co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (Duke University Press), Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value (MIT Press/New Museum, 2020), and The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024).

Snorton will be a Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of English in Spring 2025. He will teach a graduate seminar engaging with trans studies, disability studies, histories of science, ecocriticism, posthumanism, queer and postcolonial theory, contending with how bodies and bodies of knowledge change over time.