Hil Malatino

How the "bad feelings" of trans experience inform trans survival and flourishing Some days--or weeks, or months, or even years--being trans feels bad. Yet as Hil Malatino points out, there is little space for trans people to think through, let alone speak of, these bad feelings. Negative emotions are suspect because they unsettle narratives of acceptance or reinforce virulently phobic framings of trans as inauthentic and threatening. In Side Affects, Malatino opens a new conversation about trans experience that acknowledges the reality of feeling fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rage amid the ongoing onslaught of casual and structural transphobia in order to map the intricate emotional terrain of trans survival. Trans structures of feeling are frequently coded as negative on both sides of transition. Before transition, narratives are framed in terms of childhood trauma and being in the "wrong body." Posttransition, trans individuals--especially trans people of color--are subject to unrelenting transantagonism. Yet trans individuals are discouraged from displaying or admitting to despondency or despair. By moving these unloved feelings to the center of trans experience, Side Affects proposes an affective trans commons that exists outside political debates about inclusion. Acknowledging such powerful and elided feelings as anger and exhaustion, Malatino contends, is critical to motivating justice-oriented advocacy and organizing--and recalibrating new possibilities for survival and well-being.

On Being Trans and Feeling Bad

Side Affects

A radical and necessary rethinking of trans care What does it mean for trans people to show up for one another, to care deeply for one another? How have failures of care shaped trans lives? What care practices have trans subjects and communities cultivated in the wake of widespread transphobia and systemic forms of trans exclusion? 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. Forerunners is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Trans Care

Cameron Awkward-Rich

Originating in Craigslist personals to indicate a trans person seeking another trans person, the term "t4t" has come to describe not only circuits of desire and attraction but also practices of trans solidarity and mutual aid. Contributors to this issue investigate the multiple meanings associated with t4t, considering both its potential and its shortcomings. They explore forms of Black trans kinship, consider the possibilities and limits of trans crowdfunding, theorize transmasculine pornography as a site of identity formation, and critique t4t spaces that allow for abuse or exploitation. Because t4t names a type of separatism, it carries risks such as identity policing, the prioritization of one aspect of identity over others, and difficulty engaging in strategic coalition. And yet, in a world that remains hostile to trans forms of life, t4t also circulates as a promising practice of love, repair, and healing. Contributors. Cassius Adair, Aren Aizura, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Chris Barcelos, Cynthia Citlallín Delgado Huitrón, Lauren Fournier, Vox Jo Hsu, Christopher Joseph Lee, Amira Lundy-Harris, Hil Malatino, Amy Marvin, Isaac Preiss, Amir Rabiyah, Nicholas Reich

The T4t Issue

Merging critical theory, autobiography, and sexological archival research, Hil 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 people.

Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience

Queer Embodiment

"This manuscript productively joins affect theory and trans studies to examine how narratives around gender transition actually reinforce racial and gender hegemonies. Malatino notes that trans structures of feeling are ofted coded as negative, on both sides of the transition... When a trans person wants to transition, discourses around negativity, such as childhood trauma and the "wrong body". Post-transition, the lives of trans people, especially trans people of color, are seen as victims of a violent society. Malatino's manuscript works slowly through the negative affect that so often shapes trans lives to consider its productive dimensions, where negativity is key to enabling trans survival and flourishing"--

Hil Malatino

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