NEW IN PAPERBACK AMERICAN STUDIES / WOMEN, GENDER & SEXUALITY
Queer Embodiment
LITERARY CRITICISM / GENDER STUDIES / LGBTQ STUDIES / AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES
Salvific Manhood
Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience
James Baldwin’s Novelization of Male Intimacy
H I L M A L AT I N O
ERNEST L. GIBSON III
Merging critical theory, autobiography, and sexological archival research, Queer Embodiment provides insight into what it means to have a legible body in the West. Hil Malatino explores how intersexuality became an anomalous embodiment assumed to require correction and how contesting this pathologization can promote medical reform and human rights for intersex and trans people. Malatino traces both institutional and interpersonal failures to dignify non–sexually dimorphic bodies and examines how the ontology of gender difference developed by modern sexologists conflicts with embodied experience. Malatino comprehensively shows how gender-normalizing practices begin at the clinic but are amplified thereafter through mechanisms of institutional exclusion and through Eurocentric cultures’ cis-centric and bio-normative notions of sexuality, reproductive capacity, romantic partnership, and kinship. Combining personal accounts with archival evidence, Queer Embodiment presents intersexuality as the conceptual center of queerness, the figure through which nonnormative genders and desires are and have been historically understood. We must reconsider the medical, scientific, and philosophical discourse on intersexuality underlying contemporary understandings of sexed selfhood in order to understand gender anew as a process of becoming that exceeds restrictive binary logic. Hil Malatino is an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University and core faculty in the Rock Ethics Institute.
Salvific Manhood foregrounds the radical power of male intimacy and vulnerability in the novels of James Baldwin. Asserting that manhood and masculinity hold the potential for both tragedy and salvation, Ernest L. Gibson III highlights the complex emotional choices Baldwin’s men must make within their varied lives, relationships, and experiences. In Salvific Manhood, Gibson offers a new and compelling way to understand the hidden connections between Baldwin’s novels. This thematically daring and theoretically provocative work presents a queering of salvation, a nuanced approach that views redemption through the lenses of gender and sexuality. Exploring how fraternal crises develop out of sociopolitical forces and conditions, Salvific Manhood theorizes a spatiality of manhood, where spaces between men are erased through expressions of intimacy and love. Positioned at the intersections of literary criticism, queer studies, and male studies, Gibson deconstructs Baldwin’s wrestling with familial love, American identity, suicide, art, incarceration, and memory by magnifying the potent idea of salvific manhood. Ultimately, Salvific Manhood calls for an alternate reading of Baldwin’s novels, introducing new theories for understanding the intricacies of African American manhood and American identity, all within a space where the presence of tragedy can give way to the possibility of salvation. Ernest L. Gibson III is an associate professor of English and the director of Africana studies at Auburn University.
NOVEMBER 264 pp. • 6 x 9 • 5 photographs, index $30.00S • paperback • 978-1-4962-2907-6 $38.50 Canadian / £23.99 UK
Expanding Frontiers Karen Leong and Andrea Smith, series editors
NOVEMBER 244 pp. • 6 x 9 • Index $30.00S • paperback • 978-1-4962-2905-2 $38.50 Canadian / £23.99 UK
Expanding Frontiers Karen Leong and Andrea Smith, series editors
university of nebraska press 97
