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Hil Malatino

Penn State University, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Faculty Member

Penn State University, The Rock Ethics Institute, Faculty Member

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I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a core faculty member of the Rock Ethics Institute.

My research and teaching occurs at the intersections and interstices of queer theory, trans and intersex studies, science and technology studies, feminist ethics, continental philosophy, and decolonial thought.

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Papers by Hil Malatino

Pedagogies of Becoming Trans Inclusivity and the Crafting of Being

Conventional approaches to trans inclusion in the women's, gender, and sexuality studies classroo... more Conventional approaches to trans inclusion in the women's, gender, and sexuality studies classroom often involve what Diana Courvant has called the " special guest " approach of bringing in trans, intersex, and gender-nonconforming folk to represent and authenticate trans experiences, perspectives, and political engagements. This essay argues for the inadequacy of this pedagogical strategy, focusing on its complicity with a neoliberal politics of inclusion that fails to move students to deal with their own deep complicities in upholding understandings of sex and gender that are fundamentally transphobic, as well as its failure prompt pragmatic understanding and address of the maldistribution of life chances for trans, intersex, and gender-nonconforming subjects. I offer several alternative strategies aimed at producing more deeply transformative types of trans inclusion in WGSS classrooms. These strategies focus on mapping connections between cis and trans experiences of gendered transformation in order to produce an alternative understanding of gender as process, craft, and becoming.

BIOHACKING GENDER

This essay explores how, for many minoritized peoples, cyborg ontology is experienced as dehumani... more This essay explores how, for many minoritized peoples, cyborg ontology is experienced as dehumanizing rather than posthumanizing. Rereading Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto through a decolonial, transfeminist lens, it explores the implications of Haraway’s assertion that cyborg subjectivity is the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” by examining the modern/colonial development and deployment of microprosthetic hormonal technologies – so often heralded as one of the technologies ushering in a queer, posthuman, post-gender future – as mechanisms of gendered and racialized subjective control operative at the level of the biomolecular.

The Waiting Room: Ontological Homelessness, Sexual Synecdoche, and Queer Becoming

Journal of Medical Humanities, 2013

An autobiographical reflection on the experience of being diagnosed as intersex, this essay consi... more An autobiographical reflection on the experience of being diagnosed as intersex, this essay considers the waiting room an apt metaphor for lives shaped by medical understandings of queer corporealities. Drawing upon the work of Gayle Salamon, Malatino develops the concept of sexual synecdoche as a useful analytic tool for considering the operations of medical pathologization in the realm of non-normative gender. She concludes with a discussion of queer becoming as an alternative ontology of gendered being that offers a resistant, coalitional way beyond contemporary, problematic institutionalized understandings of intersex subjectivities.

Queer Monsters: Foucault, 'Hermaphroditism,' and Disability Studies

Utopian Pragmatics: Bash Back! and the Temporality of Radical Queer Action

Situating Bio-Logic, Refiguring Sex: Intersexuality and Coloniality

Critical Intersex, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009

Medical histories, queer futures: Imaging and imagining abnormal corporealities

Once upon a time, queer bodies weren't pathologized. Once upon a time, queer genitals weren't sur... more Once upon a time, queer bodies weren't pathologized. Once upon a time, queer genitals weren't surgically corrected. Once upon a time, in lands both near and far off, queers weren't sent to physicians and therapists for being queer -that is, neither for purposes of erotic reform, gender assignment, nor in order to gain access to hormonal supplements and surgical technologies. Importantly, when measures to pathologize queerness arose in the 19th century, they did not respect the now-sedimented lines that distinguish queernesses pertaining to sexual practice from those of gender identification, corporeal modification, or bodily abnormality. These distinguishing lines -which today constitute the intelligibility of mainstream LGBT political projects -simply did not pertain. The current typological separation of lesbian and gay concerns from those of trans, intersex, and genderqueer folks aids in maintaining the hegemony of homonormative political endeavors. For those of us interested in forging coalitions that are attentive to the concerns of minoritized queer subjects, rethinking the pre-history of these queer typologies is a necessity. This paper is an effort at this rethinking, one particularly focused on the conceptual centrality of intersexuality to the development of contemporary intelligibilities of queerness.

What If It Doesn't Get Better? Suicide, Negative Affect, and the Outside of Homonormativity

Pedagogies of Becoming Trans Inclusivity and the Crafting of Being

Conventional approaches to trans inclusion in the women's, gender, and sexuality studies classroo... more Conventional approaches to trans inclusion in the women's, gender, and sexuality studies classroom often involve what Diana Courvant has called the " special guest " approach of bringing in trans, intersex, and gender-nonconforming folk to represent and authenticate trans experiences, perspectives, and political engagements. This essay argues for the inadequacy of this pedagogical strategy, focusing on its complicity with a neoliberal politics of inclusion that fails to move students to deal with their own deep complicities in upholding understandings of sex and gender that are fundamentally transphobic, as well as its failure prompt pragmatic understanding and address of the maldistribution of life chances for trans, intersex, and gender-nonconforming subjects. I offer several alternative strategies aimed at producing more deeply transformative types of trans inclusion in WGSS classrooms. These strategies focus on mapping connections between cis and trans experiences of gendered transformation in order to produce an alternative understanding of gender as process, craft, and becoming.

BIOHACKING GENDER

This essay explores how, for many minoritized peoples, cyborg ontology is experienced as dehumani... more This essay explores how, for many minoritized peoples, cyborg ontology is experienced as dehumanizing rather than posthumanizing. Rereading Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto through a decolonial, transfeminist lens, it explores the implications of Haraway’s assertion that cyborg subjectivity is the “illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism” by examining the modern/colonial development and deployment of microprosthetic hormonal technologies – so often heralded as one of the technologies ushering in a queer, posthuman, post-gender future – as mechanisms of gendered and racialized subjective control operative at the level of the biomolecular.

The Waiting Room: Ontological Homelessness, Sexual Synecdoche, and Queer Becoming

Journal of Medical Humanities, 2013

An autobiographical reflection on the experience of being diagnosed as intersex, this essay consi... more An autobiographical reflection on the experience of being diagnosed as intersex, this essay considers the waiting room an apt metaphor for lives shaped by medical understandings of queer corporealities. Drawing upon the work of Gayle Salamon, Malatino develops the concept of sexual synecdoche as a useful analytic tool for considering the operations of medical pathologization in the realm of non-normative gender. She concludes with a discussion of queer becoming as an alternative ontology of gendered being that offers a resistant, coalitional way beyond contemporary, problematic institutionalized understandings of intersex subjectivities.

Queer Monsters: Foucault, 'Hermaphroditism,' and Disability Studies

Utopian Pragmatics: Bash Back! and the Temporality of Radical Queer Action

Situating Bio-Logic, Refiguring Sex: Intersexuality and Coloniality

Critical Intersex, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009

Medical histories, queer futures: Imaging and imagining abnormal corporealities

Once upon a time, queer bodies weren't pathologized. Once upon a time, queer genitals weren't sur... more Once upon a time, queer bodies weren't pathologized. Once upon a time, queer genitals weren't surgically corrected. Once upon a time, in lands both near and far off, queers weren't sent to physicians and therapists for being queer -that is, neither for purposes of erotic reform, gender assignment, nor in order to gain access to hormonal supplements and surgical technologies. Importantly, when measures to pathologize queerness arose in the 19th century, they did not respect the now-sedimented lines that distinguish queernesses pertaining to sexual practice from those of gender identification, corporeal modification, or bodily abnormality. These distinguishing lines -which today constitute the intelligibility of mainstream LGBT political projects -simply did not pertain. The current typological separation of lesbian and gay concerns from those of trans, intersex, and genderqueer folks aids in maintaining the hegemony of homonormative political endeavors. For those of us interested in forging coalitions that are attentive to the concerns of minoritized queer subjects, rethinking the pre-history of these queer typologies is a necessity. This paper is an effort at this rethinking, one particularly focused on the conceptual centrality of intersexuality to the development of contemporary intelligibilities of queerness.

What If It Doesn't Get Better? Suicide, Negative Affect, and the Outside of Homonormativity