Donna McCormack

Title: Post doctor

Cellphone: +47 452 60 084 SMS

E-mail: Donna.Mccormack@skok.uib.no

Visiting address: Allegt. 34

Queer and Monster Theories

Contemporary Postcolonial Fiction and Film

Disability Studies

Biotechnologies (especially transplantation)

 

PhD (2009) in Postcolonial and Queer Theories and Literature, University of Leeds.

MA (2003) in Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change, University of Sussex.

BA Hons. (2000) in French Language and Literature, University of Leeds.

Publications in Cristin

MONOGRAPH

Queer Postcolonial Narratives and the Ethics of Witnessing (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 

SPECIAL ISSUE JOURNALS

Co-Edited with Damien W. Riggs, 'The Ethics of Biomedical Tourism', Somatechnics (forthcoming).

Co-Edited with Suvi Salmenniemi, 'Rethinking the Self', European Journal of Cultural Studies (forthcoming).

PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES

'Intimate Borders: The Ethics of Organ Transplantation in Contemporary Film', The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies 34.3–4 (2012), 170–83.

'Multisensory Poetics and Politics in Shani Mootoo's The Wild Woman in the Woods and Valmiki's Daughter', The Journal of West Indian Literature 19.2 (2011), 9–33.

'Gender and Colonial Transitioning: Frantz Fanon's Algerian Freedom Fighters in Moroccan and Caribbean Novels?' Journal of Transatlantic Studies 7.3 (2009), 279–93.

'Intersections of Lesbian and Postcolonial Studies: One Possible Future for Class', Journal of Lesbian Studies 11.3–4 (2007), 213–21.

'Queer Postcolonial Space: Forging Ethical Practices Out of Violence in Shani Mootoo's Literary Works', Canadian Studies in Europe 6 (2007), 237–50.

'"Dreaming Across the Sea": Queer Postcolonial Belonging in Shani Mootoo's Novels', Journal of Critical Race and Whiteness Studies 2.2 (2006). 

CHAPTERS IN EDITED COLLECTIONS

'Illicit Intimacies, The Rāmāyana and Synaesthetic Remembering in Shani Mootoo's Valmiki's Daughter, in Mariam Pirbhai and Joy Mohabir (eds.), Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women's Literature (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 203–28.

 

 

TRANSPLANT IMAGINARIES: EMBODIED BORDERS, COLONIAL HISTORIES AND BIOTECHNOLOGICAL POTENTIALITIES

Organ transplantation, most commonly, enables the extension of life by removing organs from cadaveric donors and suturing the viscera into an ill body. Human life is revitalised through ‘foreign’ flesh and sustained through persistent technological, pharmaceutical and clinical interventions. Transferred from one human to another, the organ becomes a part of someone else’s body and their sense of self. Whilst transplant teams refuse to engage with the possibility that these parts may carry traces of their donors (basing their scientific models on the Cartesian split between the mind and the body), many recipients report a disturbance in their post-transplantation sense of self. My research explores the tensions between biomedical rhetoric and fictive representations of organ donation, addressing how the human comes into being during and after this biotechnological intervention. Without seeking to prove or disprove that memories or personality traits may be transferred through body parts, this project investigates the cultural significance of such potentialities and the possible ramifications for graft therapies.

My research focus is biotechnological interventions and embodied identity formation and I situate this analysis in the broader socio-cultural meanings of organ transplantation. I am interested in how literature and film create a tension between the viscerality of individual and social identity and the emotionality and historiography of national belonging. I therefore examine the extent to which organ transfer is an embodied metaphor for socio-cultural anxieties concerning the borders between (individual and national) self and (‘foreign’) other. Transplantation necessitates an opening up to the other, a literal openness to the other who is putatively different, alien and separate. This project is concerned with the extent to which representations of transplantation are embodied metaphors for national hospitality, transnational (legal and illegal) migrations, and violence towards ‘different’ others.