Click here to read this text


Biography Essay Nonfiction Social Sciences Theory

The Waiting Room: Ontological Homelessness, Sexual Synecdoche, and Queer Becoming

By Hilary Malatino, 2013

An autobiographical reflection on the experience of being diagnosed as intersex, this essay considers the waiting room an apt metaphor for lives shaped by medical understandings of queer corporealities. Drawing upon the work of Gayle Salamon, Malatino develops the concept of sexual synecdoche as a useful analytic tool for considering the operations of medical pathologization in the realm of non-normative gender. She concludes with a discussion of queer becoming as an alternative ontology of gendered being that offers a resistant, coalitional way beyond contemporary, problematic institutionalized understandings of intersex subjectivities.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *