Hil Malatino, Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Philosophy, and Research Associate with the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University, presented a lecture titled "Theorizing Queer Embodiment: On Medical Violence and Intersex Experience" at Notre Dame on March 4, 2020.
Abstract: This talk examines the phenomenon of “queer embodiment”-- experiences of the body that don’t cohere according to cis-centric, sexually dimorphic, repronormative conceptions of somatic normalcy. Focusing in particular on intersex subjects, Malatino examines their encounters with biomedical technologies and medico-scientific understandings of gender pathology, and explores the ways in which the ontology of gender difference developed by the architects of modern sexology is consistently in tension with the embodied experience of intersex, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming subjects.