Rock Ethics Institute

Biography

Hil Malatino is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and a research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and a graduate certificate in Feminist Theory from Binghamton University. Prior to coming to Penn State, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University and assistant director and lecturer in women’s studies at East Tennessee State University.  

His research and teaching draw upon trans and intersex studies, critical sexuality studies, transnational feminisms, disability studies, and medical ethics to theorize how experiences of violence, trauma, and resilience play out in intersex, trans, and gender non-conforming lives.  

Malatino’s first book, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) provides insight into what it means and has meant, to have a legible body in the West. In the book, 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. 

His new book, Trans Care (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), is a critical intervention in the ways that care labor and care ethics have heretofore 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. 

You can also find his work in TSQ, Rhizomes, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and Angelaki, as well as in multiple edited volumes.