Introduction: Undoing and Unfolding Temporal Modes of Transplantation

Transplant medicine is frequently hailed as a pinnacle of biomedical achievement. Curative imaginaries in the field often situate transplant as a cure and a return to health, producing bifurcated temporalities of before and after transplant and proposing futures that erase disability and disabled bodies. This Special Section centers the frictions in transplant temporalities, offering examinations of how transplant troubles the binaries of life and death, self and other, and illness and health through attending to frictions of futures and cure in transplant medicine. We question how new technologies perpetuate, exacerbate, and complicate the promises of curative imaginaries in transplant medicine; interrogate tropes and technologies of transplant as destination; trace practices of inequitable access to transplantation and livable futures; foreground transplant’s looping, haunting temporalities; and introduce more-than-human lessons and the necessity of imagining collective futures. Developed with attention arts-based and experimental ways of knowing transplant through a feminist STS and critical disability studies ethos, this Special Section invites the undoing and unfolding of conventional, harmful logics of transplantation.