Side Affects

On Being Trans and Feeling Bad

De: Hil Malatino

Narrado por: Hil Malatino

Some days—or weeks, or months, or even years—being trans feels bad. Yet as Hil Malatino points out, there is little space for trans people to think through, let alone speak of, these bad feelings. Negative emotions are suspect because they unsettle narratives of acceptance or reinforce virulently phobic framings of trans as inauthentic and threatening.

In Side Affects, Malatino opens a new conversation about trans experience that acknowledges the reality of feeling fatigue, envy, burnout, numbness, and rage amid the ongoing onslaught of casual and structural transphobia in order to map the intricate emotional terrain of trans survival. Trans structures of feeling are frequently coded as negative on both sides of transition. Before transition, narratives are framed in terms of childhood trauma and being in the "wrong body." Post transition, trans individuals—especially trans people of color—are subject to unrelenting transantagonism.

By moving these unloved feelings to the center of trans experience, Side Affects proposes an affective trans commons that exists outside political debates about inclusion. Acknowledging such powerful and elided feelings as anger and exhaustion, Malatino contends, is critical to motivating justice-oriented advocacy and organizing—and recalibrating new possibilities for survival and well-being.

©2022 The Regents of the University of Minnesota (P)2022 Tantor

Read for class and loved it

Was assigned this book for my Affect Theory class and I found it very theoretically engaging and an interesting inroad to further trans studies while still being accessible and listenable. Really enjoyed this

Informative, interesting, insightful

...and important book for trans and cis people alike, as well as anyone outside of those categories. Especially for us white people. I'll be buying a physical copy when I can!

Good, but have a dictionary handy

I was hooked by the uncanny description of dysphoria in the sample and i was very much looking forward to an honest and in depth exploration of the topic. However, the writing is practically inaccessible in the vocabulary needed to comprehend what the author is communicating.