Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality) - Hardcover

Malatino, Hil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0803295936 ISBN 13: 9780803295933

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2019

Synopsis

Merging critical theory, autobiography, and sexological archival research, Queer Embodiment provides insight into what it means, and has meant, to have a legible body in the West. Hilary 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 persons.

Malatino traces both institutional and interpersonal failures to dignify non–sexually dimorphic bodies and examines the ways in which 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 then amplified over time at both intimate and systemic levels, through mechanisms of institutional exclusion and through contemporary Eurocentric cultures’ cis-centric and bio-normative understanding of sexuality, reproductive capacity, romantic partnership, and kinship.

Combining personal accounts with archival evidence, Malatino presents intersexuality as the conceptual shibboleth of queerness, the figure through which nonnormative genders and desires are, and have been historically, understood. The medical, scientific, and philosophical discourse on intersexuality underlying our contemporary understanding of sexed selfhood requires theoretical and ethical reconsideration in order to facilitate understanding gender anew as an intra-active and continually differentiating process of becoming that exceeds and undoes restrictive binary logic.

 

About this title

Review

“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 Author: Susan Stryke

“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 Author: Nikki Sullivan

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0803295936
• ISBN 13: 9780803295933
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 264