Queer Embodiment - (Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies) by Hil Malatino (Paperback)

About the Book

Merging critical theory, autobiography, and sexological archival research, Hil Malatino explores how and why intersexuality became an anomalous embodiment requiring correction and how contesting this pathologization can promote medical reform and human rights for intersex and trans people.

Book Synopsis

Merging critical theory, autobiography, and sexological archival research, Queer Embodiment provides insight into what it means to have a legible body in the West. Hil Malatino explores how intersexuality became an anomalous embodiment assumed to require correction and how contesting this pathologization can promote medical reform and human rights for intersex and trans people.

Malatino traces both institutional and interpersonal failures to dignify non-sexually dimorphic bodies and examines how the ontology of gender difference developed by modern sexologists conflicts with embodied experience. Malatino comprehensively shows how gender-normalizing practices begin at the clinic but are amplified thereafter through mechanisms of institutional exclusion and through Eurocentric culture's cis-centric and bio-normative notions of sexuality, reproductive capacity, romantic partnership, and kinship.

Combining personal accounts with archival evidence, Queer Embodiment presents intersexuality as the conceptual center of queerness, the figure through which nonnormative genders and desires are and have been historically understood. We must reconsider the medical, scientific, and philosophical discourse on intersexuality underlying contemporary understandings of sexed selfhood in order to understand gender anew as a process of becoming that exceeds restrictive binary logic.

Review Quotes

"Queer Embodiment joins a small shelf of important work in critical intersex studies. In beautifully written, lucidly argued, theoretically sharp, and emotionally evocative prose, Malatino articulates queer and trans theory with continental philosophy and a racially conscious decolonial perspective to produce a teratologically sublime work of scholarship on bodies that challenge our culture's belief in biologically based binary genders."--Susan Stryker, founding coeditor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly-- (9/21/2018 12:00:00 AM)

"Malatino's Queer Embodiment provides much fodder for thinking about sex and gender through the often overlooked positionality of intersex experience. In terms of its contributions to feminist and queer theory, Queer Embodiment offers fresh engagements with the philosophies of Grosz, Butler, Haraway, and Barad, while building on work in queer, trans, and intersex studies by Fausto-Sterling and Stryker among others. The text would make a notable contribution to courses (undergraduate and graduate) engaging queer and trans theory, feminist theory, bioethics, and/or the intertwined histories of sex, gender, and sexuality."--Eden Kinkaid, Feminist Formations

"Shrewd, eloquent, and compelling, Queer Embodiment is a thing of beauty, a monstrous assemblage of genres and methods that at once reorients contemporary scholarship on queer corporealities and mobilizes the possibility of new forms of coalitional praxis."--Nikki Sullivan, honorary associate professor, Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, in Sydney, New South Wales-- (9/21/2018 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Hil Malatino is an assistant professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University and core faculty in the Rock Ethics Institute.