Trans Care by Hil Malatino (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Trans Care by Hil Malatino
• Dan Paz

TRANS CARE. By Hil Malatino. Forerunner Series. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020; pp. 79.

Trans Care, written in the context of western, queer, trans and non-binary experience, is part of University of Minnesota Press’s Forerunners: Ideas First series. These books, short in length and sometimes long and wild in sentiment, are meant to provide a [End Page 597] more immediate and open-access space for scholars to speculate, analyze, and think out loud.

Rather than producing a guide or manual, Hil Malatino illustrates how daily negative affect impacts queer, trans, and non-binary lives. One of the topics that Malatino takes up is the harm of misgendering. Malatino critiques misgendering as a microaggression that is not simply offensive to an individual’s sensibilities but is instead ultimately an ontological refusal of the legitimacy of trans existence. In response to such attacks, Malatino uses photography as a metaphor to describe a culture of trans care that pushes beyond the frame of rote institutional mores to provide a temporally generative space for thinking about trans existence and imagining its possibilities. Malatino looks for relations between the lived experiences documented by photographs, the aesthetics and limits of the photograph, and the photograph’s audience, leveraging what French photography theorist Roland Barthes would call the overall cultural interplay between personal and collective responses to visual representations in the “studium.”

In this reading, the image depicts both the cultural and structural aspects of society, while shaping and interacting with our lives. In the first chapter, “Surviving Trans Antagonism,” Malatino describes the anticipation of his upcoming top-surgery to explore aftercare as a world of living and wellness; a vulnerability “that facilitates and supports emergence into a radically recalibrated experience of both body-mind and the world it encounters” (3). He uses contemporary photographic mise en scene, contextualizing a single frame of space in time, to decenter Eurocentric and normative concepts of family, picking apart “dominant imaginaries of how care labor does and should operate” (7). Malatino asks, “how are queer and trans folx living in the world, and how is the world living around us?”

Recently, my partner underwent gender affirming surgery, and it’s been difficult to reckon with the degree of queer kin interdependence required to make our lives work. They had a very alarming fainting spell the day after top surgery while on a host of medications. Stumbling to answer a series of dated and irrelevant questions on a 911 phone call to paramedics, I was both confused and infuriated: “Is she a female?” “What was the assigned gender at birth?” “Is there female genitalia?” How would the gender of my partner inform or disrupt the urgency of medical response? Fortunately, my partner survived the fainting spell, however, this experience crystallizes what Malatino calls a “gendered panopticon” (27): a method of constant, state-sanctioned surveillance where hetero-normative gender binaries are pervasively reproduced, often with fatal consequences. Keenly, Malatino’s use of transivity and photographic theory destabilizes the static image of this gendered panopticon. Surveillance looks for what it recognizes in its limited institutional vernacular.

In “Something Other Than Trancestors,” Malatino continues a mode of critical reflection in this memorable chapter on his archival research as both detachment and survivance. He mentions a photograph of Claude Cahun as a formative device in “[t]he standard feminist analysis which circulates around the gender transitivity of the image—is Cahun training to become, or unbecome, a woman?” (51) As a limited gender analysis, he redirects these dialectics into a larger, more expansive refusal, suggesting how all these conventions might perform misrecognitions that, when metabolized in aggregate, can impact transness, queerness, and non-binary subject formations, leaving lasting marks. Malatino describes the foreclosure of transcestors to singular identities as a western, colonizing gesture. Instead, he suggests that a trans aesthetic practice could open a space of possibility in the “links between transition, gender instability, and desire” (52). Such links offer variance in what Jordan Reznick—writing on photographs by Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore—refers to as “more comprehensive frameworks for making sense of trans subjectivity” (“Through the Guillotine Mirror: Claude Cahun...