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Exploring Racialized Gender Dynamics through Hil Malatino's Trans Care

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ff.2022.0040

2151-7371

Andrea J. Pitts,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

Exploring Racialized Gender Dynamics through Hil Malatino's Trans Care Andrea J. Pitts (bio) Hil Malatino's newest book, Trans Care, moves across what the author describes as "the everyday rhythms of the trans mundane" (Malatino 2021, 5). This invocation of quotidian moments, scenes, and webs of care drew me deep into my own affective resonances within the networks of support that have sustained me over the years. For this, I am truly grateful, as this book opens up space to explore both the cringe-worthy and caressing terms of praxis, labor, and "hirstories" that shape survival for so many trans folks (47). The book subtly shifts across trans antagonisms, the "multivalent and necessary care hustles" within anti-trans worlds, the ethos and care of a "t4t praxis of love" (building from the author's previous work), and the complexities of trans care within and against the medical industrial complex. Within such constellations of trans care, as Malatino carefully explores, when viewed abstractly or from afar, appear as familiar shapes and tropes (e.g. "community," "self care," "transcestors"). However, when considered from relations of proximity, an analysis of trans care reveals an immensely complex set of relations among bodies and forces. Such a book is necessary for working through and across the depths, webs, and worlds of care that sustain and nourish trans people through the day-to-day, and that create opportunities for multiplicitous spaces of trans futurity. With this, I am drawn to Malatino's interest in, in his words, "the intricately interconnected spaces and places where trans and queer care labor occurs: the street, the club, the bar, the clinic, the community center, the classroom, the nonprofit, and sometimes, yes, the home"—but as he notes the home can "often [be] a site of rejection, shunning, abuse, and discomfort" (42). The list that Malatino provides here, the scenes and sites for trans and queer labor, deeply resonate with me, and bring me to a few questions that I hope might offer a space for discussion within Malatino's tremendous work. Specifically, spaces of care such as the bar, the club, and the street harken to a few moments in the book that made me laugh and allowed me to revisit [End Page 141] some memories of my youth. For example, in the section titled "Fall Out Boy is Trans Culture," I couldn't help but grin and feel very seen by the author's commentary on his own self-described distance from Fall Out Boy fandom and emo music. He writes of how hard it is to empathize with "baby trans masc" affective investments in the genre's "gamely and selfish" workings through of an often masculine protagonist's "minor emotional devastations" that "center his sexuality," and are "eminently braggadocious and narcissistic" (17). Malatino follows this description of emo masculinity with this line: "No matter how insufferable this kind of guy is in reality, I would have killed for a fraction of his swaggering self-confidence as a kid" (17). That kind of pull toward the gender dynamics found within a genre of music, that I too must admit, I was, as Malatino writes, "too old, too feminist, and too much of a political punk . . . to be interested in" brought me to reflect not only on emo music's place in trans culture, but also to reflect on the punk scenes that shaped my own understandings of survival and joy (15). I grew up in Florida, in the Tampa Bay area, which, while the traditional homelands of the Tocobaga peoples whose ceremonial mounds and remnants of coastal life are still present there, was also part of the Spanish conquests of the Caribbean throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Florida, as many folks know, was the site of bitter fighting among British, French, and Spanish colonizers throughout the eighteenth century, as well as a site of major Indigenous rebellions throughout the nineteenth century, including a number of armed conflicts led by Native peoples and fugitive Black slaves forming the "cimarrones" or Seminoles who banded together against the US Army. By the late nineteenth century, however, the US Army had driven many such Afro-Indigenous groups inland to the...