Hil Malatino, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience

Abstract

Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019 (ISBN 978-0-8032-9593-3) Reviewed by Shannon Dea, 2019 Shannon Dea is a Professor of Philosophy and of Gender and Social Justice at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She is the author of Beyond the Binary: Thinking about Sex and Gender (Broadview, 2016), of "Dispatches on Academic Freedom," a monthly online column in University Affairs, and of numerous articles and book chapters. Her current book project is Academic Freedom in a Non-Ideal World. Shannon lives and works on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples. Quote: The book's impressive pluralism supports rather than distracts from the book's core argument that attending to intersex experience helps us to conceive gender as creative instead of limiting, a conceptual shift that "recognizes the ability of monstrous reclamation to disrupt and denaturalize heterosexist, cissexist, Eurocentric hierarchy" In Queer Embodiment, Hilary Malatino argues that intersex corporeality points to an understanding of sex and gender that resists demarcations of "inside" and "outside." Appropriately enough, the book itself straddles scholarly areas and approaches. It is, most straightforwardly, a contribution to the emerging field of critical intersex studies. However, Malatino's approach also ranges with considerable authority across several cognate disciplines: gender studies, queer studies, philosophy, medical humanities, and political theory.