Yet, Colebrooke maintains, “even things, which are not fungible, may be subjects of compensation being due under general obligation respectively as cattle, slaves, horses.” The legal treatment of slaves and animals as both “subjects of compensation” and “not fungible” indicates, at least in part, the anxiogenic time in which the Treatisewas produced. Fungible articles, which he delineated according to their characteristic quantifiability-“alike liquidate and exigible”-required legal definition in relation to matters of compensation. Colebrooke, having spent a considerable period of his life as a colonial bureaucrat and judge in India, returned to England to write about the particularities of British contract law he also wrote about Hinduism and Hindu philosophy before his death, in 1871. “Fungible,” according to its etymology, first appeared in the English language in Henry Colebrooke’s Treatise on Obligations and Contracts, Part 1, in 1818. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.”-Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” severing of the captive body from its motive will, its activedesire. marked a theft of the body-a willful and violent. Trans Capable Fungibility, Fugitivity, and the Matter of Being

Riley Snorton’s book, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. It is used with permission of the author and the University of Minnesota Press.

“The demarcation and annexation of territories and states evinced how slavery and settler colonialism structured official discourses of nation building and foreign policy.” The inhabitation of the un-gender-specific and “fungible” also mapped the affective grounds for imagining other qualities of life and being for those marked by and for captivity.

Riley snorton black on both sides