Hil Malatino

Decolonial Thinking delves into the intricate web of colonial practices, terms, and ideas that have woven themselves into people's lives. It seeks to understand how the tendrils of coloniality have insidiously attached themselves to the very fabric of self-understanding. From the mundane to the profound, this exploration sheds light on our relationship with all that constitutes life. Editors Mar a Lugones and Patrick M. Crowley have meticulously curated 11 unique articles by interdisciplinary theorists. These thought-provoking pieces compellingly address questions surrounding colonial legacies. Organized into five sections, the book navigates themes ranging from sexualities and multiple worlds to differential topographies. It also examines the transition from women-of-color politics to decoloniality, exploring resistance, coalition building, and pluriversality. As decolonial theory gains global recognition, it has emerged as a critical lens through which we view capitalism, racism, gender discrimination, violence, and Eurocentrism. Decolonial Thinking boldly rejects oppressive rationalities, prompting fresh strategies for shared meanings. These strategies diverge radically from dominant disciplinary and academic categories of knowledge, inviting us to reimagine our understanding of the world.

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.

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.

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

Merging critical theory, autobiography, and sexological archival research, Queer Embodiment provides insight into what it means to have a legible body in the West. Hil Malatino explores how intersexuality became an anomalous embodiment assumed to require correction and how contesting this pathologization can promote medical reform and human rights for intersex and trans people. Malatino traces both institutional and interpersonal failures to dignify non–sexually dimorphic bodies and examines how 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 amplified thereafter through mechanisms of institutional exclusion and through Eurocentric culture’s cis-centric and bio-normative notions of sexuality, reproductive capacity, romantic partnership, and kinship. Combining personal accounts with archival evidence, Queer Embodiment presents intersexuality as the conceptual center of queerness, the figure through which nonnormative genders and desires are and have been historically understood. We must reconsider the medical, scientific, and philosophical discourse on intersexuality underlying contemporary understandings of sexed selfhood in order to understand gender anew as a process of becoming that exceeds restrictive binary logic.