Abstract
Only having emerged as an academic area in the early 1990s, critical intersex studies too often remains invisible in scholarship on sex, gender, and sexuality. In their first book, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience, Malatino (2019) addresses this gap in the literature, extending a theoretically rigorous analysis of queer corporealities—“bodies that don’t cohere according to cis-centric, sexually dimorphic, ableist conceptions of somatic normalcy” (p. 165). The book consists of two primary projects: (a) providing a genealogical account of intersex biographies and (b) relating these histories to the contemporary experiences of individuals diagnosed with variations of sexual development.
For Queer Embodiment, questions of ontology are central to its historic, sociological, and psychological analyses. Beginning with the autobiography of Herculine Barbin (as presented by Michel Foucault), Malatino highlights significant moments in the history of intersexuality’s biomedicalization, including the work of John Money in the mid-20th century and the 2006 publication of the Consensus Statement on the Management of Intersex Disorders. The author interrogates these archives with critical attention to what types of existences are concealed or, in some cases, altogether made impossible. In this way, Malatino also attends to the psychological consequences of medicalization on intersex individuals and communities. Importantly, Malatino addresses the issue of racialized absence in these accounts, discussing invisibilization as a mechanism of violence enacted against intersex people of color. Malatino works against the frequent whitewashing of critical intersex studies through substantive engagement with scholarship from black, indigenous, and post-colonial studies.
Methodologically, Malatino weaves together a multitude of analytic frameworks with brilliance, producing what Nikki Sullivan has referred to as a “monstrous assemblage” in line with its epistemological aims (Malatino, 2019). Discussing forms of embodiment that exceed traditional categorization, Malatino refuses to write within the confines of disciplinarity, incorporating critical theory, autobiography, and archival analysis. Of significance, Malatino (2019) works at the crux of trans and intersex studies to consider “gender as a processual, intra-active becoming” (p. 5). In this way, they offer a unique epistemological intervention for both fields, which frequently only gesture toward one another despite their considerable overlapping investments.
This book is ideal for readers interested in critical analysis of sexing/gendering and embodiment. Queer Embodiment feels at once deeply personal and oriented toward broader systemic change. The brief, autobiographical vignettes that precede each chapter further ground Malatino’s theoretical investments within lived experience. In many ways, the author echoes bell hooks’ (1991) observation that within theory—both in its exploration and enactment—exists a space for healing. Malatino contends that the articulation of trauma serves to further its depathologization—a reinscribing of responsibility for physical and psychic pain on systemic violence as opposed to individual aberrance. Drawing from their experience as a trans and intersex theorist, the author issues a call to embrace monstrosity as a coalitional politic—one that has the ability to throw logics of categorization into disorder, working against the oppressive regimes that delimit queer embodiment. Engagement with this call has transformative potential for psychology, especially given the field’s historical and contemporary influence in the consolidation of certain biomedical understandings of sex/gender.
