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.