Contact Information
Biography Information
C. Riley Snorton is a doctoral candidate and Fontaine Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his BA in Women and Gender Studies from Columbia University in 2003. His academic and teaching interests include media anthropology, Africana studies, transgender and queer theory, cultural studies, performance studies, and popular culture. He is the director of a short documentary entitled "Men at Work: Transitioning on the Job," and 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. Snorton has also contributed to numerous edited volumes, including The Comedy of Dave Chappelle: Critical Essays; Homophiles; and Trans(gender) Migrations. His dissertation, "Trapped in the (Epistemological) Closet: Black Sexuality and Popular Imagination, examines the concept of the "down low" in news and popular culture.
Project Description
In the late 1990s, we witnessed the ascension of the term, down low, in news and popular culture. Initially a phrase used to describe any action, relationship, or thing which must remain discreet, by the early 2000s, the down low comes to signify a certain set of actors and sexual practices, which are simultaneously hidden from public view and subject to public debate. Trapped in the [Epistemological] Closet: Black Sexuality and the Popular Imagination examines the discursive emergence of the down low, a term typically used to describe Black men who have sex with men and women and do not identify as gay, bisexual or queer. In this study, the down low is first and foremost a site of signification—illuminating sets of relations among space, time, race, class, gender and sexuality produced by and within the logic of biopower and highlighting the racial and sexual dynamics of representation. The public nature of the down low—both as something that must be aired in public and therefore brought to various publics’ attention and as a rumor that most often surrounds public figures—is crucial to the project’s understanding of how the down low acts in chorus with dominant representations of black masculinity and sexuality. I suggest that the concept of the down low is indebted to a certain kind of public figuring of black sexuality aptly captured by the metaphor, “glass closet.” By glass closet, I refer to the simultaneity of hypervisibility and opacity that characterize representations of black sexuality in which the closet is both “obviously” transparent and a space for subterfuge.
As the title of my project suggests, scholarly work on representations of black sexuality may be trapped within the narrow confines of paradigms that seek to designate “good” and “bad” forms of representation and operate from identity models to understand race and sexuality. Working against both sets of assumptions, I juxtapose news and popular culture, historical and contemporary cultural nodes, British cultural studies and postmodernism to examine the down low as a mode of understanding the co-constituitive practices of racialization and sexualization in this representational moment.