Tell-Tale Heart: Organ Donation and Transplanted Subjectivities

After a fatal cardiac arrest in June 2009, my five-year-old niece was revived and put on life-support until her “new heart” arrived (at the awed relief of my family and the unbearable loss of another’s) on the morning of August 6th. I will explore what I call the “transplanted subjectivities” formed through the anonymous gestures of organ donation, as the transplanted organ upsets the boundaries between separate bodies and intimate, incorporated, though anonymous identities. Illuminating overlapping social, medical, psychological, and literary discourses of transplantation, I will examine the unanswerable autobiographical questions of incorporating an unknown other into one’s self.