Eric Plemons is a medical anthropologist focused on the politics and practice of transgender medicine and surgery. Primarily focused in the United States, he has also conducted ethnographic research in surgical clinics in Northern Europe and South America. Before joining the University of Arizona, Plemons was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows.
SHC Project
What To Make of Me: Transplant Medicine and the History and Future of Sex
Research is underway that would transform the tissues removed during transgender people’s reconstructive genital surgeries from medical waste into valuable resources. This project investigates the conditions and interrogates the implications of the uses to which researchers hope these tissues might be put. In conversation with clinicians and patients, and through an engagement with medical history, bioethics, and the politics of care, What to Make of Me asks: What are the implications of identifying a trans person’s value in the utility of their body parts to others? How might the special case of genital and reproductive tissue sharing imagined in this work reconfigure current policies and theories of organ transfer that are based on concepts of debt and reciprocity?
My book, The Look of a Woman
An article on building surgical capacity for trans genital reconstruction
An article on the impact of Catholic hospital ownership on access to trans medicine
An article on the work of race and ethnicity in facial feminization surgery