"The phenomenology of hybrid bodies: rethinking bioethics and organ transplantation"

Guest Lecture with Margrit Shildrick

Reader in Gender Studies School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Queen's University Belfast

All welcome. No Registration required

In modernist paradigms, the embodied subject is not only independent of others and wholly human, but bears an identity that is unchanged over time. This presentation looks specifically at heart transplantation as an exemplary process that, in potentially disturbing aspects of identity, entails the need for organ recipients to reconceptualise the question ‘Who am I?’ in terms of the posthuman. While in the authorised narrative the replacement of a ‘failed’ organ is a matter of ‘spare part surgery’ that restores the originary self, the more pressing issue is that the post–transplant body becomes irreducibly hybrid for life: the originary self is irrecoverable. As the body makes novel connections and participates in assemblages of the human, animal and machine alike, it demands a reimagination not only of the ideologies of human identity, but of the bioethics that seeks to mediate the recipient experience.