Trans*plantations: How Race and Gender Move across Scales of Life

Abstract

This dissertation develops the analytic trans*plantation, which is used to examine transnational movements of capital among LGBT-focused philanthropy, regenerative or transplantation science, and art. It is at this nexus that the dissertation analyzes how power and domination mutate, shifting certain bodies from mere things to objects of management, from nonhumans to humans, from animals to objects and back again. In the dissertation, trans* and connectedly, trans*plantation, are used to complicate extant hierarchies of life, to examine how they became hierarchized in those ways, and to tell other possible stories of survival. Throughout the dissertation, trans* enlivens movements of power across hierarchies of embodiment and highlights plantations—target sites for the investment of resources, sites of resource and agential extraction, and interstitial spaces between the two. Each chapter offers a way of reading trans*plantatively, from engaging the ways power shifts between species attributions to analyzing the logics of racism and racial representation in transplantation surgeries.