Hil Malatino

Professional Bio
Hil Malatino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and a graduate certificate in Feminist Theory from Binghamton University. Prior to coming to Penn State, Dr. Malatino was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University and Assistant Director and Lecturer in Women’s Studies at East Tennessee State University.
Dr. Malatino's research and teaching draws upon trans and intersex studies, critical sexuality studies, transnational feminisms, disability studies, and medical ethics to theorize how experiences of violence, trauma, and resilience play out in intersex, trans, and gender non-conforming lives. His first book, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) examines the relationship between intersex embodiment, biomedical technologies, and the forms of subjectivity both enabled and constrained by the medicalization of gender non-conformance. His second book, Trans Care (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), offers a critical intervention in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and critiquing the politics and distribution of care entrench normative and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. Dr. Malatino's current work places decolonial feminist thought, affect theory, and trans studies in dialogue to investigate the investment of popular and scholarly accounts of gender transition in neo-colonial understandings of gendered embodiment.
You can find his work in TSQ, Rhizomes, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and Angelaki, as well as in multiple edited volumes.
Publications
Trans Care
- Publication Date: Fall 2020
- Website: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/trans-care
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About the Book:
2021 Lambda Literary Award Finalist
Trans Care is a critical intervention in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and critiquing the politics and distribution of care entrench normative and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. A serious consideration of trans survival and flourishing requires a radical rethinking of how care operates.
Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence and Intersex Experience
- Publication Date: April 2019
- Website: https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9780803295933/
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About the Book:
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.