Hil Malatino

Hil Malatino is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, a senior research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute, and affiliate faculty in the Department of Philosophy. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and a graduate certificate in Feminist Theory from Binghamton University. Prior to coming to Penn State, Dr. Malatino was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University and Assistant Director and Lecturer in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at East Tennessee State University.

Dr. Malatino's work draws 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 trans, intersex, and gender non-conforming lives. His most recent book, Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) is a critical phenomenology of fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rage amid the ongoing onslaught of casual and structural transphobia. His first book, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) examines the relationship between intersex embodiment, biomedical technologies, and the forms of subjectivity both enabled and constrained by the medicalization of gender non-conformance. His second book, Trans Care (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), offers 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.

His essays have appeared in Hypatia, TSQ, Signs, and many other journals and edited volumes.

Dr. Malatino's current research combines trans, mad, and disability studies to think through and about trans philanthropist Reed Erickson's archives and legacy.