Frances Thompson's “System of Infamy”

This article analyzes the violence that Frances Thompson, a Black trans woman who lived in Memphis, Tennessee, endured during the period of Reconstruction. Thompson was assaulted and raped by members of a white-supremacist mob in 1866, and she was arrested in 1876 on “the charge of being a man and wearing women's clothing.” The article foregrounds the material elements of these violent events and connects them to larger themes of labor governance in the South after emancipation. Critical to this analysis is C. Riley Snorton's contention that fungibility was a transitive characteristic of Blackness and transness as they were historically constructed at this time. This article argues that white-supremacist authorities contested Thompson's gender fungibility to restrict the ways freedpeople were able to articulate radical forms of freedom. Finally, by engaging with modern, popular histories about Thompson, this article seeks to answer Jules Gill-Peterson's entreaty to employ trans-of-color analytic frames without casting trans women of color as breathlessly revolutionary.