The making of transplant kin

This is a paper about the relational and more-than-human matters of living and dying. Drawing on Australian fieldwork and interviews with bereaved families, I extend anthropological work on bodies and kinship in the context of organ donation and transplantation. Reorienting boundaries between bodies, life, and death, through an expansive category of 'transplant kin', I engage feminist science and technology studies (STS) to trouble imaginings of human exceptionalism and biological essentialism. In so doing, I argue that the making of transplant kin is an interembodied act which offers possibilities for recognising mutually constitutive relations with others and the world we live in.