Reviewed by: Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad by Hil Malatino Eric Warren (bio) Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad by Hil Malatino. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. 240 pp. , 21. 95 paper. As a trans scholar, I often find myself writing about topics that I feel passionate about, usually issues that move me to action because of the emotions they stir up for me, including negative emotions. In Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (2022) Hil Malatino gives voice to what he refers to as a "trans affective commons, " considering the negative feelings frequently associated with trans cultural production and experience. By focusing on trans-specific affective experiences, Malatino "thinks through what so-called bad feelings make possible, open up, shut down, disclose, and foreclose in relation to trans arts of living" (5). In the book, Malatino maps out several major trans-specific End Page 126 experiences that are not exclusively about medical transition or euphoria, but rather surround how these experiences affect us and shape us, through fatigue, numbness, envy, rage, and burnout. As he explains in the introduction, he "started actively seeking out accounts of transition that sat in certain kind of tension with transnormative structures of feeling, that were messier, more ambivalent, more complex, " motivated in part by his desire to find connection with his own experience of transition "which was circuitous, stop-start, and decades long, mediated by poverty, insurance exclusions, rurality, and a complicated, ongoing grappling with the cultural politics of white masculinity" (8). Trans survival is an intricate theme across the chapters, and Malatino exposes the daily mundane traumas that trans folx experience as well as the affective aspects of and responses to these traumas. The chapters of Side Affects are structured around specific bad feelings, beginning with Chapter One: "Future Fatigue: Trans Intimacies and Trans Presents (or How to Survive the Interregnum). " In this chapter Malatino draws on concepts of transition and visibility, framing them in relation to fatigue. This fatigue is reinforced by medical discourses focused on pre/post-transition dynamics while Malatino highlights the journey of transition rather than the destination or outcome. Transition guides and personal narratives, such as vlogs, surround the process of medical transition, with a prominent focus on trans masculine transition. Malatino parses through the language of becoming vs. being regarding trans experiences. The phrasing of becoming emphasizes the active experiences related to transition, highlighting the different experiences and goals associated with transition. Malatino's understanding of becoming subverts rigid categories, making space for more fluid understanding of identity. Utilizing the concept of "trans-ing, " transition can instead be understood as a process of "assembly and reassembly, " not tied to a specific outcome (32). In reading works by Kai Cheng Thom and Torrey Peters, Malatino also delves into the origins of Craigslist's t4t, exploring the potential intimacies of recognition and validation, and noting that "t4t is inevitably a difficult practice of love across difference in the name of coalition and survival" (49). Chapter Two, "Fuck Feelings: On Numbness, Withdrawal, and Disorientation, " opens with a focus on Sara Ahmed's understanding of disorientation in Queer Phenomenology. Disorientation, Malatino writes, is "a fundamental part of trans experience" (51), marked through misgendering, use of the wrong name, pronoun, honorifics, and bodily descriptions, and a misrecognition which can trigger a myriad of negative emotional memories. Malatino recounts a situation where an incorrect name was called at a work function as well as the work their colleagues did to quickly address the situation. Such experiences, while mundane, create disorientating spaces of embarrassment and withdrawal. Withdrawal and numbness become tactics for survival, protective mechanisms to work through the disorientation. Malatino also discusses flat affect and underperformance as key aspects of withdrawal in which smoking, for example, End Page 127 may function as a technology of retreat. The disorientation Malatino describes results in emotional absence or unavailability and numbness is a tactic in the art of trans survival. Chapter Three, "Found Wanting: On Envy, " highlights different narratives of envy as intimate, feminized, and associated with transition, and here Malatino continues thinking through processes of becoming and belonging. Through discussions of privilege and oppression. . .
E. Scott Warren (Fri,) studied this question.