Join us for this joyful conversation with Eli Clare and Hil Malatino, hosted by Nat Raha.

In this public conversation, we will take inspiration from Eli Clare’s foundational book Brilliant Imperfection and Hil Malatino’s Trans Care to look at disability, gender transition and care labour as expressions of virtuosic and innovative skills that make care – good care – possible, often in the face of domineering, medicalising practices of ‘cure’.

Care has many meanings, values, and appeals, by rejecting a one-size-fits-all approach we can explore the multivalent intimacies, solidarities, ethics, and complexities of giving and receiving care. What do collective practices of mutual aid offer for resisting and undermining dominant modes of conceiving of care and complicity? Can these practices allow us to reinhabit the present? Do they enable the building of radical futures in which no one is left behind?

Eli Clare is a generationally important thinker of the intersection of trans, disability and queer care: one of the first to explore: the notion of ‘bodymind’; and most incisive critics of the language of defect and cure, and of the  normative power of medical diagnoses (of gender, ability or wellnness). White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli lives near Lake Champlain in occupied Abenaki territory (currently known as Vermont) where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written two books of creative non-fiction, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure and Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation, and a collection of poetry, The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion, and has been published in many periodicals and anthologies. Eli speaks, teaches, and facilitates all over the United States and Canada at conferences, community events, and colleges about disability, queer and trans identities, and social justice. Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first ever Queerness and Disability Conference.

Hil Malatino’s book, Trans Care, offers a critical intervention in how care labor and care ethics have been thought, arguing that dominant modes of conceiving and critiquing the politics and distribution of care entrench normative and cis-centric familial structures and gendered arrangements. Dr. Malatino’s current work places decolonial feminist thought, affect theory, and trans studies in dialogue to investigate the investment of popular and scholarly accounts of gender transition in neo-colonial understandings of gendered embodiment. His first book, Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) examines the relationship between intersex embodiment, biomedical technologies, and the forms of subjectivity both enabled and constrained by the medicalization of gender non-conformance.

Nat Raha is a poet and trans / queer activist, living in Edinburgh, Scotland.
“Nat Raha has written some of the most exciting poetry of the last decade. Transfeminist, communist, revolutionary – with great quickness and nimble intensity, her syllables and survival codes dash through police-lines as high-level transmissions signaling absolute solidarity, insisting that other lives are still possible… They are poems that break open a space in which to think through what has happened, who we have been, and what has been done to us. These are fearsome times. Raha writes poetry that acknowledges that fear and refuses to flinch in the face of it, which is in itself an act of the fiercest solidarity.”
– Sean Bonney