The Perfect Organ to Give Away: Uterus Transplant as Exception
The first successful birth after a human uterus transplant (UTx) occurred in Sweden in 2014. Now there are nearly two dozen UTx centers of practice around the world. The therapeutic aims and attitudes guiding UTx are those of reproductive medicine. But because it takes the form of organ transplant, the roles and relations among donors, recipients, and the parts they exchange are structured by the bioethical frameworks and institutional norms of transplant medicine. This disjuncture creates strange effects around an organ whose fleshy presence is often made synonymous with womanhood and motherhood and in whose transfer those very roles are at stake. Through interviews with uterus donors, recipients, and the surgeons who manage their care, in this talk, I use the case of American UTx to argue that the formal insistence on transplant medicine’s “gift” dynamic obscures the uniquely gendered conditions under which uteri become desirable and available, and the distinct form of therapy their transplantation is understood to enact. There’s never been a transplantable organ quite like this before.
Dr. Eric Plemons is Associate Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona where he also holds affiliations with the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Institute for LGBT Studies, and the graduate program in Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory. He earned his PhD from UC Berkeley and was a postdoc in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows before joining the faculty at Arizona. Eric is a medical anthropologist whose work focuses on the use of surgical medicine as a tool for crafting the gendered body. His first book, The Look of a Woman: facial feminization surgery and the aims of trans medicine (Duke UP) was awarded the 2017 Ruth Benedict Book Prize by the Association for Queer Anthropology. Today he’ll be presenting research gathered for his forthcoming trade book, The Matter of Motherhood, coming out this fall from Beacon Press.
