Hil Malatino, "Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
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What is the central premise of Hil Malatino’s book *Side Affects*?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello, and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Sarah Tyson, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Denver. I'm co-host of the channel, along with Carrie Figdor, Robert Slees, and Malcolm Keating. Together, we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books, drawing from a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Hill Malatino, assistant professor in the Department of Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies and a research associate in the Rock Ethics Institute. His new book, Side Affects on Being Trans and Feeling Bad, is just out from the University of Minnesota Press.
Fatigue, disorientation, numbness, envy, rage, burnout. What good could come from thinking about trans experience and these bad feelings? In Side Affects, Hill Malatino theorizes the centrality of bad feelings in a world of quotidian and spectacular anti-trans misrecognition, hostility, and violence. He does so not only to understand how bad feelings arise and how they can be hard to survive, but also what they can make possible when they are taken up through political practices of care. Centered on trans experience as it is represented through many cultural productions, Malatino highlights the pressure on trans folks to be made happy by transition. He takes the analysis further by arguing for the power of communal care to enable survival, not despite, but through these feelings.
Hill Malatino, welcome to New Books and Philosophy.
Thanks for having me.
Well, let's dive in. Tell us a bit about yourself and your background as a philosopher and how you came to write this book.
So I am... currently teaching in women's gender and sexuality studies and I'm affiliate faculty in philosophy. So I'm not sure if I'm officially a philosopher, although I do have a PhD in philosophy, but that PhD was in a relatively non-traditional program that actually no longer exists. So I'm a graduate of the philosophy interpretation and culture program at Binghamton University. And I did my dissertation under the advisorship of decolonial feminist theorist, Marie Lugones. And the PIC program, which unfortunately shares an acronym with the Prison Industrial Complex, which was a kind of a grim joke we all made during graduate school, right? It was like, that was a critical oversight when the program was founded.
And the program was actually founded in the mid 1980s at the sort of like height of the importation of post-structuralist thought into the US Academy. And as probably many listeners know, that wasn't necessarily greeted well by philosophy departments in the US. So the program that I'm a graduate of developed in a kind of tension with the more traditional canonical philosophy department at Binghamton. in the 1980s and lasted until the 20 teens. I graduated in 2010. I believe I finished my Ph.D. and I think the program was shut down about three years later to sort of mainstream the philosophy programming at the university. And we were told at the time to invest more money in the more traditional philosophy department in order to develop like a three, two combined bachelor's and MA that would give people training to be competitive for a law school that at the time, I think folks were hoping would begin at Binghamton University, which is a state university of New York.
That hasn't yet materialized, but my PhD program is gone. And I mentioned all of that at length, not to be gossipy, but to say that it was a kind of unique philosophy program and had strengths, not just in what we might call continental, even though, of course, that's problematic as if Europe is the only continent. Continental or post-structuralist philosophy, as well as queer theory, decolonial thought, feminist philosophy, those sorts of things. So that's where my training is. And then when I finished my PhD, I had a job teaching in a philosophy department at an HBCU for a short period of time.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the central premise of Hil Malatino’s book *Side Affects*?
0:01–10:47
2
How does Malatino’s personal and academic background shape his approach to trans theory?
10:47–42:11
3
Why does Malatino argue that “bad feelings” are politically productive for trans people?
42:11–1:00:49
4
How does the concept of fatigue connect to trans temporality and the interregnum?
1:00:49–1:01:02
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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