2017 George Gerbner Lecture in Communication: C. Riley Snorton (Ph.D. '10)

"The Color of Sex: Race and the Visual Culture of American Gynecology"

The founding of American gynecology raises a number of questions, including how does race socially construct biology, and what are the relations between sex and chattel flesh? Following an exposition of J. Marion Sims's three and one-half years of experiments on enslaved test subjects, which produced a cure for vesicovaginal fistula, “The Color of Sex” takes up multiple trajectories of/in the flesh: in the series of woodcuts that accompanied Sims’s medical publications, in the description of Sims as the “father of modern gynecology” and of Anarcha as the field’s mother. These divergent paths provide a series of object lessons on flesh as a condition of possibility for the science and symbolics of modern sex. This paper also explores key figures and images in gynecology’s visual culture, focusing on a series of illustrations by Max Brödel and August Horn in Howard Kelly’s Medical Gynecology (1912) and Robert Thom’s J. Marion Sims: Gynecologic Surgeon (1961) to discuss sex and gender as the transoriented effects of flesh, rearranged in time and place and at the level of being. 

About C. Riley Snorton

C. Riley Snorton is an assistant professor in Africana studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and has received fellowships from Harvard University and Pomona College. Snorton's research and teaching expertise include cultural theory, queer and transgender theory, Africana studies, performance studies, and popular culture. He has published articles in the International Journal of Communication, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, and has contributed to several edited collections. Snorton's first book, Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), traces the emergence and circulation of the down low in news and popular culture. He has also been listed as one of "Ten Transgender People You Should Know" by BET.

About the George Gerbner Lecture in Communication

The annual George Gerbner Lecture in Communication was established in honor of Dr. Gerbner who retired as Dean of the Annenberg School at the end of the 1988 academic year. The annual lecture is typically given by an Annenberg School alumnus.