Queer Embodiment : Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience

Malatino, Hil

ISBN 10: 149622907X / ISBN 13: 9781496229076

Published by University of Nebraska Press, 2021

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 43109775-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Queer Embodiment : Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 149622907X
• ISBN 13: 9781496229076
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

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.
 

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.