LAUSR

This special issue explores developing understandings of the limits and possible extensions of organ and tissue transplantation. Encompassing interdisciplinary research around biomedicine, philosophy, literature and film, science and technology studies, anthropology, and transplant studies, the special issu demonstrates how our understanding of embodiment is being transformed in the age of advanced biotechnologies. As the centuriesold project of the European Enlightenment is reaching inadequacy, what is urgently needed is a thorough reconfiguration of the bioethics, epistemology and ontology of what has hitherto been understood as normative human embodiment. In our own era, these parameters are already highly contested, and it is necessary to think different presents and futures that do not take for granted the wholeness, separation and independence of the normatively healthy human body. As a discourse of immense power in shaping social expectations, mores and practices, biomedicine is a prime site for generating critical rethinking, and we aim to elucidate the impact of specific biotechnologies on how we comprehend the transformative possibilities of varying human embodiment. Our attention is focused on the uncertainty of the body with the specific aim of giving voice to developing understandings of the inter/intracorporeal embodiment that transplantation entails. The contributions to this special issue work across a number of urgent issues and take on a wider range of corporeal entanglements than the analysis of transplantation usually entails. The transplanted materials themselves may be solid organs such as human hearts or wombs (Guntram 2021), tissues such as faces (Lafrance 2021), or porcine xenotransplants (Haddow 2021). Such articles explore the recipient experience, while others address the issue of the deceased donor (Shildrick 2021). Some are empirically based, others more concerned with teasing out a theoretical framework (McCormack 2021; Shildrick 2021). And all touch on the bioethics of the procedures. What is at stake is the assumed purity—or at least clarity—of human embodiment and that our bodies and selves be acknowledged as assemblages of disparate and often inter/intrarelated parts. In short, the project of rethinking the sociocultural imaginary in the context of transplantation offers a transformatory response to otherness and difference that can go beyond the dominant conventions of biomedicine to facilitate understandings of embodiment as intrinsically multiple, hybrid and inter/intradependent (Giffney and Hird 2008; Luciano and Chen 2015). Moreover, in reconfiguring the ontological and epistemological bases, it becomes apparent that what is required is a differently composed and intrinsically flexible bioethics. Each article offers expanded dimensions to transplant studies, whether through the lens of a relatively new procedure, such as faecal transplantation (Houf 2021), or through an exploration of how temporality is central to embodiment (Wasson 2021). This special issue offers a critical approach by opening up the conversation on biotechnologies to issues of time, space and difference, as well as to changing imaginaries of the human and its relationality with nonhuman, technological and nonliving others. A related starting point for contributors is the need to reimagine how we approach transplantation, offering insights regarding the technology’s ongoing development, as well as how it comes to be imagined by publics and cultural texts. Over the last 50 years the capacity for, and biomedical success of, solid organ transplantation and tissue grafts has risen dramatically with enhanced prospects of survival and recovery. At the very same time, however, there is a mismatch in public attitudes to transplantation. On the one hand, the seemingly beneficent nature of organ donation and transplantation is broadly supported as a welcome medical advance, and yet, on the other, the same procedures appear to provoke individual and sociocultural anxiety (Haddow 2021). Not surprisingly, this response varies according to the nature of the organ or tissue itself with the longstanding ambivalence about heart or corneal transplants related to the status of hearts and eyes as supposedly expressive of a donor’s essence. Similarly, the more recent occurrence of face grafts has aroused strong feelings of uncertainty and at times disgust, as does one of the latest additions to the list of possibilities, that of faecal transplantation. The transplant process is generally represented as an unproblematised and fully therapeutic social good, but the sociocultural and personal responses indicate that something far more complex and ambivalent is at stake (Wasson 2020). Studies show that it is not the biomedical risk of transplantation that causes concern, but the manner in which the procedures pose irresolvable difficulties, not least around the question of identity and self and other relationality (Haddow 2005). This observation holds true both for older, more familiar forms of transplantation such as livers or hearts and for the emerging fields that concern the gut or the reproductive system. All forms of transplantation can deeply disrupt the sociocultural imaginary of what it means to be an embodied individual (Poole et al. 2009; Waldby 2016), as well as what relationality means when one may feel physically and psychically connected to a living or deceased donor (McCormack 2015b). While transplant teams insist on anonymity between donor (or donor family) and recipient, personal narratives and fictional representations engage with the profound connection that ties the donor to the recipient, including— and often especially—in the case of deceased donation (McCormack 2021). Transplantation disrupts any easy definition of death (Lock 2002) and thereby raises sociocultural issues around not only the moment of death, but what life, death and relationality mean when organs from a (sometimes deceased) donor give vitality to another human. Margrit Shildrick argues for an undoing of the binary of life and death, through a queering of the very terms. Specifically engaging with Deleuzian philosophy, her piece offers new ways for thinking life and death, particularly in the context of microchimerism and epigenetics. Where Shildrick engages with the imaginaries that transplantation is structured through and produces, Lisa Guntram addresses an emerging procedure in which the creation of new life is the defining rationale, namely uterine transplantation. Guntram’s article explores interviews with women who were considering or had undergone a womb transplant, examining the ethical implications of such women needing to find their own donors. The utility of the transplanted uterus as a shortterm reproductive goal School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK ERG, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden