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anpu325's review against another edition
5.0
A wonderful book about the ways that trans people care for one another. Theory intersects with thoughts on Fall Out Boy and the "Trans People are Sacred" billboard in Detroit. I will be turning over the thoughts Hil Malatino shared in this book for a long time and thinking about ways that I can care for my trans community.
skiploom's review against another edition
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
This short, university press book weaves a trans lens into anarchist and marxist-feminist lenses of care. While limited by its length, I’m looking forward to the conversations it stirs at my reading group :)
firagasauce's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
I don't mind flowery prose generally, but there were some passages that came off needlessly academic (and as a consequence, more impersonal/inaccessible than I believe the author intends), which stretched my tolerance. But I still found Malatino's discussion of archives and language compelling:
"I’ve come into contact with so much ephemera, so many traces of a number of minor lives—not famous or infamous historical personages, but everyday trans folk. Those who sent their self-portrait in to a transvestite newsletter, who were anonymized in medical case studies, who wrote heartbreaking letters to doctors seeking transition-related services. I’ve been consistently confronted with an ethical dilemma, which is also an ethical injunction: How to do justice to these lives? How to write about them—on behalf of them, with them, for them, in memoriam of them?
The language I use in an attempt to render them never seems to suffice. The problem might actually be one of language itself—diagnostic language, in particular, but not only. Roland Barthes wrote of what he called “the ‘fascism’ of language” (2002, 42). With this turn of phrase, he named what I find so
consistently and profoundly troubling when writing about (of, for, with) those subjects who appear, spectral, in the archives: the fact that the categories operative in language—masculine/feminine, or the informal, singular you and the formal, plural you, for instance—“are coercive laws” (42) that “permit communication . . . but in exchange (or on the other hand) impose a way of being, a subjecthood, a subjectivity on one: under the weight of syntax, one must be this very subject and not another” (41).
Working with fragments, attempting to render them legible, to place them within broader narratives of trans hirstories, places you squarely in the center of this quandary. In order to communicate about these lives, you engage in forms of speculation, projection, invention, and translation that inevitably fail
to render subjecthood faithfully. The piecemeal, the partial, the imperfect is all you have. Each claim you make is overdetermined and only ever possibly resonant with the vicissitudes of their lived experience. The terms you use to describe folks are inevitably, as Barthes attests, coercive, too forceful, assertive, and declarative to do justice to the complexity and nuance of experience. This intensifies with trans subjects, because we experience ourselves so often, and so acutely, as trapped and constrained by language.
I’m haunted by these archival specters, and by my sense of duty to them. Because, in some small way, by existing—however minimally or maximally, however “part-time” or “full-time” they were—they have made our existence possible. Because our lives are, in some opaque and difficult to capture way, entwined. Because I want to do justice to their struggles and joys. Because, in my own way, and with all of my own projections and fantasies intact, I have fallen in love with them. To love the dead is for them to remain with you, introjected, present. Haunting and love are very close, indeed."
I think meditations like this are worth it alone to read Trans Care, especially if you're interested in queer history & memory work.
"I’ve come into contact with so much ephemera, so many traces of a number of minor lives—not famous or infamous historical personages, but everyday trans folk. Those who sent their self-portrait in to a transvestite newsletter, who were anonymized in medical case studies, who wrote heartbreaking letters to doctors seeking transition-related services. I’ve been consistently confronted with an ethical dilemma, which is also an ethical injunction: How to do justice to these lives? How to write about them—on behalf of them, with them, for them, in memoriam of them?
The language I use in an attempt to render them never seems to suffice. The problem might actually be one of language itself—diagnostic language, in particular, but not only. Roland Barthes wrote of what he called “the ‘fascism’ of language” (2002, 42). With this turn of phrase, he named what I find so
consistently and profoundly troubling when writing about (of, for, with) those subjects who appear, spectral, in the archives: the fact that the categories operative in language—masculine/feminine, or the informal, singular you and the formal, plural you, for instance—“are coercive laws” (42) that “permit communication . . . but in exchange (or on the other hand) impose a way of being, a subjecthood, a subjectivity on one: under the weight of syntax, one must be this very subject and not another” (41).
Working with fragments, attempting to render them legible, to place them within broader narratives of trans hirstories, places you squarely in the center of this quandary. In order to communicate about these lives, you engage in forms of speculation, projection, invention, and translation that inevitably fail
to render subjecthood faithfully. The piecemeal, the partial, the imperfect is all you have. Each claim you make is overdetermined and only ever possibly resonant with the vicissitudes of their lived experience. The terms you use to describe folks are inevitably, as Barthes attests, coercive, too forceful, assertive, and declarative to do justice to the complexity and nuance of experience. This intensifies with trans subjects, because we experience ourselves so often, and so acutely, as trapped and constrained by language.
I’m haunted by these archival specters, and by my sense of duty to them. Because, in some small way, by existing—however minimally or maximally, however “part-time” or “full-time” they were—they have made our existence possible. Because our lives are, in some opaque and difficult to capture way, entwined. Because I want to do justice to their struggles and joys. Because, in my own way, and with all of my own projections and fantasies intact, I have fallen in love with them. To love the dead is for them to remain with you, introjected, present. Haunting and love are very close, indeed."
I think meditations like this are worth it alone to read Trans Care, especially if you're interested in queer history & memory work.
kp_writ's review against another edition
5.0
Love this format. The best of academic writing without all the shitty bits.
liamobrien's review against another edition
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
3.0
slugpony412's review against another edition
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
4.5
...it is precisely the recurrent, habitual, and mundane practice of showing up that makes us less and less willing to inhabit a world where we don't show up, and where whole systems fail to show up for us.
darbylacey's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.5