Berkhout, Suze, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley. 2024. “Troubling Transplant 
Temporality through Crip Technoscience and a Sensory Aesthetics of Time, Machine, and Health.” 
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2): 1–25.  
http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 
© Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 | Licensed to the Catalyst 
Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license 
 

                                                                                                                                             

 
 
Troubling Transplant Temporality through Crip 
Technoscience and a Sensory Aesthetics of Time, 
Machine, and Health 

 
 

Suze Berkhout   
University of Toronto 
Suze.Berkhout@uhn.ca 
 
Kelly Fritsch 
Carleton University  
kellyfritsch@cunet.carleton.ca 
 
Brian Keeley   
University of Aberdeen 
b.keeley.19@abdn.ac.uk 
 
Bibo Keeley  
Visual artist  
b.keeley@rgu.ac.uk 
 
 

Abstract 
Taking up technologies that act as a “bridge” to transplant, we explore what the 
lifeworlds of a transplant patient and their loved ones interacting with these 
technologies tells us about the temporality of transplantation and the imperative of 
cure. By engaging with clinical literature and practices, transdisciplinary crip 
technoscience theorizing, and multimodal, multisensory artistic form, we bring 
together sick and disabled people’s expertise and diverse ways of knowing that 
enable a rich and nuanced exploration of transplant time that complicates 
biomedical expertise while at the same time recognizes its embrace as one with 
opportunity and potential for care and collaboration. In troubling transplant 

mailto:Suze.Berkhout@uhn.ca
mailto:kellyfritsch@cunet.carleton.ca
mailto:b.keeley.19@abdn.ac.uk
mailto:b.keeley.19@abdn.ac.uk


 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
2   

temporality through crip technoscience and a sensory aesthetics of time, machine, 
and health, we demonstrate how perspectives often excluded or minimized in 
acute care offer innovative ways in which to think through the material limitations 
of taken-for-granted understandings within transplant settings. 
 

Keywords  
bridge to transplant, crip technoscience, disability art, sensory aesthetics, ventricular 
assist device (VAD), extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), ableism  
 
 

Introduction 
Worldwide, over 150,000 solid organ transplant operations are carried out on an 
annual basis (GODT 2022). Country by country, rates of deceased donor organ 
recovery and living organ donation are outstripped by the numbers of individuals 
in need of transplant (Lewis et al. 2021). In Canada, for example, more than 4,000 
people await transplant each year and 250 to 270 individuals will die on the wait 
list (CIHI 2023). The discrepancy between those who are in need of transplant and 
the limited number of organs available for donation results in significant clinical, 
technological, and research attention given to, and resources focused on, how to 
best optimize the health of individuals being listed and how to maximize 
possibilities for timely organ retrieval. Over the past three decades especially, 
technoscientific innovations in transplant medicine have proliferated in response 
to these supply-demand challenges, including, for example, how to prolong the 
viability of organs ex vivo, such as through the “heart-in-a-box” technology, which 
can extend a heart’s ischemic time from the traditional four hours to up to twelve 
hours (Sunjaya and Sunjaya 2019), or the use of ex vivo lung perfusion in concert 
with gene therapies (Gao et al. 2022); how to transplant marginal tissues that 
would otherwise be unable to thrive in a new bodily ecosystem (Resch et al. 
2020); how to fine-tune medical interventions for optimal physiological health 
even as the reason one barrels toward transplant is the acceleration of end-stage 
organ failure (Wood-Trageser et al. 2020); or how to expand donor pools through 
xenotransplantation (Cooper et al. 2018).  
 
Within this focus on the supply-demand dilemma, it is easy to overlook other 
pressing challenges associated with the complexities of life pre- and post-
transplant. What is more, these challenges can be difficult to articulate and 
address because of the dominant cultural scripts that surround the temporality of 
transplant. These scripts mark post-transplant life as a kind of “afterward,” 
steeped in imaginaries of cure and of health and vitality restored, even as 
difficulties exist and persist prominently across transplantation’s full temporal 
span (Heinemann 2020; Wasson 2021). As noted by heart transplant recipient 
Andrea Barrett, “people feel they cannot share certain facets of transplant life and 
the harsh realities of transplant medicine because it could potentially reduce the 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
3   

pool of organ donors” (2023, 38). Barrett links this hesitation to ableism and the 
socially ubiquitous notion that people are better off dead than disabled. If, as an 
intervention, transplant itself qualifies recipients as socially undesirable 
chronically ill disabled people, attaching negative and nuanced narratives to 
transplantation could further reduce an already scarce supply of donor organs. It 
is precisely because solid organ transplantation is often considered a pinnacle of 
achievement in contemporary biomedicine, bringing “second chances” and 
“rebirth” to individuals facing end-stage organ failure, that other complications 
and experiences are left unexplored and unspoken. Hope and gratitude are 
normative affective orientations to transplantation, at times contributing to 
isolation, guilt, and disillusionment when the optimistic outlooks expected of 
organ recipients are challenged by difficulties and unmet expectations (Schipper 
2014). The field of transplantation, as a field marked by exceptionality and 
technological prowess as well as a normative optimism attached to cure, has 
struggled with not only how to understand and represent the quotidian 
challenges of transplant in ways that are patient-centered, but also how to 
mobilize insights from patient perspectives to enact changes that can improve 
post-transplant liveability. It is necessary to address this struggle to mobilize 
insights from patient perspectives to improve patient agency and thriving both 
pre- and post-transplant given that so many medical and psychosocial 
complications are common throughout the experience from threats to survival 
and traumatic interventions while wait-listed, to postoperative complications and 
the complexities of long-term adherence to intensive medical regimens and 
accompanying biomedical surveillance, through to the emotional challenges of 
survivorship, the sequelae of immune suppression, graft failure, and end-of-life 
care for transplant patients (Abbey 2011; Colman et al. 2015; Molonado, Sher, and 
Lokak 2017). While developments in transplant procedures since the 1980s have 
resulted in a marked increase in one-year survival rates, thereafter the annual 
mortality rate of 3 to 4 percent has remained constant.1 The long-term outcomes 
of organ transplantation, therefore, remain limited largely due to the inability to 
address the complications of rejection and the damaging effects of 
immunosuppressant drugs (Claeys and Vermeire 2019; Wilhelm 2015). Given the 
ubiquity of these medical and psychosocial challenges and poor long-term 
outcomes, it is imperative to amplify and act on the insights of those with lived 
experience of transplantation to improve access to healthcare and technologies 
that enhance quality of life and also to acknowledge the needs, wants, expertise, 
and contributions of sick and disabled people. 
 
Considering these tensions, in this paper, we bring together clinical practices, crip 
technoscience theorizing, and forms of multimodal and multisensory artistic 
research-creation to forge new knowledges troubling the temporality of 
transplantation. Crip technoscience (Fritsch et al. 2019; Hamraie and Fritsch 2019) 
approaches transplant medicine from the agentive perspective of sick and 
disabled people, drawing attention to inequities and injustices in healthcare 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
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access and treatments and tracing how ableism and the hegemonic force of the 
curative imaginary impacts their experiences and quality of life. At the same time, 
crip technoscience highlights how the creative practices of sick and disabled 
people navigating transplant contributes to, and can potentially transform, 
healthcare practices, cultural scripts of transplantation, and offer expertise about 
what it means to continue living on, and the strategies and ways of being that 
enable continuance. Through a crip technoscience lens, we mobilize clinical, 
patient, and artistic research-creation perspectives to improve pre- and post-
transplant liveability and contribute to troubling notions of “health” as a temporal 
destination of transplantation, especially as the “temporal hauntings of before 
shape the afterward” (Berkhout, Fritsch, and Wong-Mersereau 2023, 2). The 
contemporary proliferation of transplant technologies offers a rich domain in 
which to explore how material constraints arise from ableist exclusions within the 
field of biomedical technoscience. These ableist exclusions intersect with other 
structural inequities and forms of oppression. It is crucial to recognize and 
incorporate the expertise of patients, those with lived experience of chronic 
illness and disability, and the contributions of artistic practices, which can lead to 
significant positive change.   
 
In what follows, we begin by taking up technologies that act as a “bridge” to 
transplant, exploring what the lifeworld of a transplant patient utilizing these 
technologies tells us about the temporality of transplantation and the imperative 
of cure. Transplant technologies that are referred to as a “bridge” emphasize the 
capacity for the machinery to enable survival by taking over endogenous organ 
function until the more definitive intervention of transplantation can take place. 
We employ crip technoscience to analyze bridge to transplant technologies such 
as ventricular assist devices (VAD) and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation 
(ECMO) techniques. These technologies are positioned as a bridge offering 
passage away from solid organ failure and toward what is purported to be a 
destination of health post-transplant. Often lost in the orientation to health, cure, 
and the overcoming of organ failure is the temporal, sensuous, and machinic 
embodied experiences of living in, with, and through organ failure, chronic illness, 
and disability, not only as a result of the orientation of bridge to organ transplant 
process as a kind of overcoming, but also in how post-transplant life is described 
and hoped for as a “new and improved state” (Standing et al. 2017).  
 
We draw on clinical literature and practices to trouble some of the ways bridge to 
transplant is frequently positioned through a linear temporality of biomedical 
cure that orients a person with organ failure to transplant as a destination of 
health. We juxtapose this positioning to artistic explorations of the lived 
experience of bridge to transplant and its aftermath, including drawings by visual 
artist and double lung transplant recipient Dominic Quagliozzi (2023), and Brian 
and Bibo Keeley’s digital short film Breathe (2021). We also engage other 
multimodal artistic works that take up issues surrounding transplantation and 

https://youtu.be/Kv2VtFtJOyk?si=nrTzZH3Cw7DNv4T_


 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
5   

temporality more generally, including Jonathan Kawchuk’s soundscape Boundary 
Loss (Kawchuk and Berkhout 2023), and a narrative essay by now deceased heart 
transplant recipient Amy Silverstein (2023). Combined, these artistic works 
engage with the sensory aesthetics of time, machine, and health, illuminating 
aspects of living in, with, and through organ failure in important ways that are 
obscured not only by the dominant temporality of transplantation but also by the 
bridge to transplant practices themselves. Convivial with crip technoscience, 
sensory aesthetics articulate knowledge and experience from a multisensory 
perspective, incorporating senses like smell, texture, and sound. This approach 
illuminates and communicates subtle perceptions that challenge conventional 
biomedical views of the body, which often prioritize uniform understandings of 
the body that are grounded in a temporality of transplant as a destination of 
health. We take up crip technoscience and sensory aesthetics to more deeply 
engage with the embodied insights of sick and disabled people that challenge and 
complicate entrenched biomedical discourses about solid organ transplantation 
experiences, premised on the position that not all experience or knowledge is 
empirically quantifiable or best expressed through words (Culhane 2016; Frankel 
et al. 2024). In so doing, we take up transplant temporality as “borrowed and 
looped and experience lived in ways that undercut the seemingly straightforward 
and linear relationship between transplantation and cure” (Berkhout, Fritsch, and 
Wong-Mersereau 2023, 2). 
 
In troubling transplant temporality through crip technoscience and a sensory 
aesthetics of time, machine, and health, we demonstrate how perspectives often 
excluded or minimized in acute care offer innovative ways in which to think 
through the material limitations of taken-for-granted understandings within 
transplant settings. Through this, we forge possibilities for improving the quality 
of recipients’ and families’ experiences. By engaging with transdisciplinary crip 
technoscience theorizing and multimodal, multisensory artistic form, we bring 
together sick and disabled people’s expertise and diverse ways of knowing that 
enable a rich and nuanced exploration of transplant time that complicates 
biomedical expertise while at the same time recognizes its embrace as one with 
opportunity and potential for care and collaboration.  
 

Transplant Machines  
The spectrum of transplant-related interventions runs from the spectacular to the 
mundane: mechanical ventilation, ventricular assist devices, dialysis, cooling 
machines, portable aspirators (suction machines), nasogastric feeding tubes, 
shunts, ports, drains and intravenous (IV) lines—the number of ways that 
someone can be tethered and have usually bodily boundaries of inside/outside 
blurred is almost endless. Within this list, there are those devices or machines that 
are purpose driven to improve a critically ill individual’s chances of survival long 
enough to be eligible for a transplant, or while wait-listed to receive a donor organ 
and create what is often termed a “window” for transplant (Sakpal et al. 2018). 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
6   

One such technology is extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), a 
technique for providing prolonged cardiac and respiratory support by pumping 
and oxygenating blood outside of an individual’s body. ECMO “is routinely offered 
to patients with a rapidly declining end-stage disease as a bridging strategy to 
transplantation or, in the case of instability or inadequate graft function, as intra- 
and/or post-operative support” (Faccioli et al. 2021, 291). Unlike a heart-lung 
machine, which is used for a number of hours in a surgical context such as 
coronary bypass, ECMO is designed for longer term use and can be deployed for 
several days, or even weeks, to enable the survival of individuals with heart and/or 
lung damage, injury, or rapidly declining end-stage disease (Johns Hopkins 
Medicine, n.d.).  
 
This technology is characterized as especially advantageous given that the 
number of patients on transplant wait lists far exceeds the number of available 
organs and can act as a bridge to transplant (Faccioli et al. 2021). A range of 
cannulation strategies and implantation techniques exist and are described in the 
literature as ways to personalize and optimize cardio-respiratory function. ECMO 
is described as adaptable, with multiple configurations (for instance, it can be 
used for pure pulmonary support or for combined cardio-pulmonary support in 
critically ill individuals). Technical advances since the early 2000s have led to 
improvements in survival following intervention as well as exponential increases 
in the use of ECMO, particularly prior to lung transplantation (Gulack, Hirji, and 
Hartwig 2014). That said, there is a paradox at the center of this technology: 
those who would most benefit from ECMO are the urgent patients with high 
predicted pre-transplant mortality; these same individuals are often considered 
too critical to be suitable for ECMO as a bridge to transplant (Faccioli et al. 2021). 
In light of this, various transplant societies have created guidelines that detail 
liabilities for ECMO, including septic shock, multi-organ dysfunction, obesity, 
advanced age, or underlying irreversible neurological disease (Faccioli et al. 2021). 
For example, the International Society of Heart and Lung Transplantation reports 
that ECMO “support should be recommended in the case of young age, absence 
of multiorgan dysfunction and good rehabilitation potential” (Faccioli et al. 2021, 
293). For as much as there might be a physiological rationalization for such 
exclusion criteria, they align with (and reinforce) other forms of exclusion in 
transplantation that have been challenged from equity and justice perspectives, 
especially in relation to structural factors that influence interpretations of what 
“good” rehabilitation potential means (Lorusso et al. 2021; Mattar, Chatterjee, 
and Loor 2019). 
 
Another technology used in heart transplantation is the ventricular assist device 
(VAD), an increasingly common way to support individuals whose heart failure is 
worsening despite active medical management and require temporary cardiac 
support. A short-term VAD is used for those who may be seriously ill in a hospital 
setting. It supports the heart, either until it recovers, or if the heart is permanently 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
7   

damaged, the VAD can offer extended life support while other non-cardiac 
complications—such as renal or respiratory failure—might improve enough for 
the patient to be listed for an urgent transplant. A long-term VAD is a portable 
device for non-critical patients, who may have already been listed for a transplant, 
and who are often able to return home while waiting until a donor organ becomes 
available. Patients may live with a long-term VAD for several years while waiting 
for a transplant. VADs are likewise referred to as a bridge to transplant (Sharp 
2014). Seen as “durable and reliable” forms of mechanical circulatory support, 
these technologies are now a standard of care when end-stage organ failure or 
life-threatening exacerbation of existing heart failure occurs (Holley, Harvey, and 
John 2014, 1110).  
 
The bridge as metaphor is multi-layered, hailing objects of engineering, 
components of musical instruments and musical composition, as well as the 
command center of a ship (Huser, Dockett, and Perry 2016). At another level, the 
bridge serves as a symbol that denotes the passageway between “the mortal, the 
transitory, and the immortal,” connecting the profane with the sacred (Gordon 
2018, 2). Giving access to the supra-sensory, to heaven, the bridge-builder is seen, 
then, as outwitting gods of death or the devil (Gordon 2018). As Rosemary 
Gordon has described, the bridge presupposes boundaries and separateness, 
configured as a “here” and a “there,” a “then” and a “now” (2018, 4). As it is 
employed within the field of transplant technoscience, the symbol of the bridge 
denotes support as a passage is navigated, as well as expert guidance through 
that navigation. The movement it reflects is forward, linear—toward a better 
place, a place of restored health.  
 
The bridge metaphor orients transplant experience, spotlighting certain issues as 
relevant and attending in particular to the perspective of the transplant team. 
And while the “crossing” aspect of the bridge metaphor speaks to the liminality 
and uncertainty of the experience of being wait-listed, in some cases, this 
liminality refers to people who are often too sick for life yet too well to be 
prioritized for transplantation (Larson and Curtis 2006); in other instances, people 
are too sick for life, too sick for transplant. In either case, the metaphor belies the 
notion of transplantation as a destination.  
 

Sidedness, Linearity, and Loops: Temporalities of 
Transplant 
Embedded in the sidedness of the bridge metaphor is an understanding that one 
reaches an end or target location. ECMO is considered an interim measure that 
will facilitate an individual’s crossing the chasm of organ failure, reaching a 
destination of restored health in the aftermath. VADs were initially conceived of 
as a so-called destination intervention as the VAD itself is sufficient to support 
longevity and quality of life such that it is an alternative to cardiac 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
8   

transplantation. Indeed, some patients go home with VADs as a permanent 
transformation of their bodies, and not simply as a bridge in anticipation of a 
future transplant. However, since the mid-1990s, interventional research has 
focused on the importance of VADs for supporting post-transplant success, 
including improved one-year survival (Frazier et al. 1995). With “health” as the 
destination, the crossing then becomes the work to be done, and the technical 
prowess of the intervention is the locus for improvements and innovation. The 
notion of health as a sought-after destination is likewise marked by the 
simultaneous connotation of ECMO as a rescue strategy for post-transplant 
support when complications arise—intervention remains inevitable and attempts 
to approximate cure through transplantation continues as an ultimate endpoint 
(Faccioli et al. 2021). These viewpoints arguably take resources and attention 
away from what it means to live well in the post-transplantation lifeworld, or what 
it can mean to not pursue transplant at all. That is, mechanical intervention can 
act as a bridge to transplantation, but for the patient, the transplantation is never 
the end destination, even if dominant cultural scripts and the temporality of 
transplantation orients patients to perceive it as a destination. Instead, it is a vital 
but single step on the journey to some sense of recovery from organ failure as 
well as a form of living with altered embodiment. 
 
Contra dominant cultural scripts and temporalities, transplantation is not, in and 
of itself, a final destination. This is because the afterward of transplantation is a 
continuity of numerous medical and psychosocial challenges—from 
transplantation, from bridging technologies themselves, and the interventions 
that surround these. Improvements to technologies such as ECMO have not 
altered common complications, including bleeding, infection, and renal failure; 
less usual are issues such as stroke and limb ischemia, resulting from a restriction 
in blood supply to the brain or limbs (Faccioli et al. 2021; Gulack, Hirji, and 
Hartwig 2014). Within the transplantation literature, comparative analyses in 
primary graft dysfunction focus on the metrics of the technologies used to sustain 
life and attempt to prevent further end organ damage while “rescue” therapy 
takes place (whether this is rescue by ECMO or devices such as VAD). And while it 
is certainly meaningful to examine whether ECMO is superior to VAD, the 
literature leaves unquestioned the centrality of technological intervention as well 
as the impact of needing such therapies on those who are struggling in the 
aftermath of graft failure (see, e.g., Takeda et al. 2017). The bridge metaphor 
shifts focus away from the challenges and difficulties that are undeniably a part of 
transplant recipients’ lived experience—whether these challenges are embedded 
in the uncertain liminality of being listed or experienced by those who have 
“crossed” the bridge.  
 
The complexities of life pre- and post-transplant cannot easily be communicated 
if the assumption is that the destination has been (or will be) expertly reached, 
and (potential) transplant recipients are always under scrutiny to demonstrate 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
9   

their wholehearted commitment to transplant and their capacity to follow the 
medical obligations generated by transplantation (Barrett 2023; Berkhout et 
al.2022). The silence that surrounds the complexities of transplant is particularly 
problematic considering how the field’s technological advances (and the expert 
guidance attached to these) contrast with the lack of advances in the post-
transplant lifeworld, including long-term survivability. For example, the drug 
regimens of transplant recipients typically includes the twice daily use of 
immunosuppressing drugs such as cyclosporine, first introduced in 1983, or 
tacrolimus, introduced in the 1990s. Tacrolimus continues to be the standard drug 
for immunosuppression among new transplant recipients (Chang et al. 2021) and 
is often paired with other maintenance agents such as mycophenolate mofetil, 
introduced in the 1990s, and prednisone, a steroid introduced in 1955. These 
drugs need to be taken at specific times of the day, some with food, some 
without; tremors are a common side effect after ingesting some, fading as the 
day continues. Medications heavily regiment the daily lives of recipients in ways 
that draw continuities with medicalized life pre-transplant rather than marking a 
“new beginning” (Heinemann 2020). This sentiment is expressed in the work of 
double lung transplant recipient and visual artist Dominic Quagliozzi. In Visceral 
Diary Drawings (2023), Quagliozzi captures his life on the pre-transplant waiting 
list with lung failure through to two years post-transplant. One drawing in this 
series, titled “I Am Support Devices,” shows Quagliozzi’s barely visible pre-
transplant body entangled with devices, wires, tubes, liquids, and oxygen. 
Another drawing, completed three months post-transplant simply asserts in 
comic-style bubble lettering, “My immune system is pills.” Quagliozzi’s art 
attends to the complexity of an afterward of transplant as a kind of continuity of 
enmeshments with transplant technologies that radically alter bodies and 
subjectivities—here, taking the form of an ongoing reliance on pills. Pills that fix 
certain problems and create others, pills that solve the problems created by the 
first set, and so on. The avant-garde quality of Quagliozzi’s work is, in part, for 
naming the frustrations that have previously remained unnamed. 
 
To articulate to the difficulties of the post-transplant lifeworld is, in some ways, to 
undermine the tacit understanding of transplant technologies as cure, and the 
nebulous concept of health as destination. And while there may be a sense of 
restored vitality post-transplant, it is also the case that as physical and emotional 
challenges build and the complexity of post-transplantation medical needs 
becomes apparent, recipients can easily enter what has been termed “the fall”: 
tormented by the restrictions and responsibilities of caring for their donated organ 
(Sheikhalipour et al. 2018). In longer-term survivors of transplantation, the post-
transplant experience is one where the illness narrative is never finished—not only 
from memories of past illness, but a present marked by medication side effects and 
where the intrusion of further illness or graft dysfunction is ever present (Boaz and 
Morgan 2014). And although survival rates one-year post-transplantation have 
improved dramatically across most domains of solid organ transplant, recipients 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
10   

remain at risk for numerous conditions including cancer, infection, metabolic 
diseases such as diabetes, ulcers and delayed wound healing, high blood pressure, 
and immunologic graft damage due to the combination of medications that are 
necessary for immunologic suppression, impacting longer-term survivability 
(Claeys and Vermeire 2019). As such, there remains a pressing need “for newer 
drugs that promote immune tolerance without the side effects observed with 
current immunosuppressive agents” (Claeys and Vermeire 2019, 15).  
 
Laura Heinemann has articulated how the curative possibilities of transplantation 
are ones that “epitomize the power and promise of biomedicine” (2020, 82). At 
the same time, as her ethnographic work demonstrates, when one is living with 
transplant, one is “never quite beyond illness” (83). Two-time heart transplant 
recipient, Amy Silverstein’s (2023) essay likewise offers this perspective, noting 
how the experience of long-term transplant survivorship is more complicated 
than messages surrounding transplant, which “tend to follow a familiar narrative 
of dramatic transformation: the gravely ill patient becomes a thriving, active 
individual through high-tech medicine and the generosity of organ donors and 
their families.” Silverstein’s first donor heart died as a result of insufficient 
treatment options to offer protection from rejection while her life with her 
“perfect” and “beautiful” second heart was ultimately cut short due to incurable 
cancer caused by her drug regimen.  
 
The intensive self-monitoring required to maintain one’s transplanted organ also 
places a psychological toll on recipients, their loved ones, and caregivers, and the 
medical events leading to critical illness and pre-transplant organ failure can also 
have persistent emotional impacts lasting well beyond the surgical healing 
process (Lai, Ufere, and Bucuvalas 2020). In the weeks leading up to her death, 
Silverstein writes in the New York Times, 
 

The side effects of transplant immunosuppression can be sickening 
day to day, as my small posse of stalwart organ recipient girlfriends 
knows well; we talk about the vomit bags stashed in our purses, the 
antacid tablets we tuck into our front pockets for quick-nibble access 
at a cocktail party or when giving a presentation at work. We’ve 
encouraged one another to be inventive and keep finding little fixes or 
at least ameliorations. 
 
Yet over time, each of us tolerate significant challenges and damage, 
the kind that prompt us to call late at night in tears, reeling from the 
intractable infections that land us in emergency rooms and hospital 
beds, the biopsies that pluck pieces of our donor organs leaving us 
scarred and shaken, the skin cancers that blossom rapidly beside an 
eyelid or ear. We’ve learned that there can be no clearing every single 
cancer cell with a suppressed immune system; we will get cut again, 
and again, and again. 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
11   

 
In addition to these stressors, many transplant recipients report a sense of 
indebtedness to their clinical team and donor that complicates negative 
emotional responses and experiences of stress resulting from complex 
medication regimens with numerous side effects (Tong et al. 2011). But because 
transplantation is often conceptualized as a “new beginning,” a “second chance,” 
and the “gift of life” (Siminoff and Chillag 1999; Stubber and Kirkman 2020), a 
curative imaginary frames transplant medicine. This frame is practically “a genre” 
(Heinemann 2020, 83) and can prevent a robust engagement with the challenges 
of survivorship, including how to live well with chronic illness and disability. As 
Heinemann puts it, “While illness might be periodically obscured in the tangle, it is 
never truly severed from the experience of living with transplant” (83). Silverstein 
(2023) notes that this “narrative discourages transplant recipients from talking 
freely about the real problems we face and the compromising and life-
threatening side effects of the medicines we must take.”  
 
Kidney transplant recipients are, for instance, less likely to meet clinical targets 
for anemia, blood pressure, and blood sugar control compared to non-
transplanted individuals with chronic renal disease, a finding thought to relate to 
the challenges of adherence to medications and clinical regimens (Bissonnette et 
al. 2013). As compared to non-transplanted counterparts, transplant recipients 
are also less likely to have important discussions regarding goals of care and 
palliation should their disease progress (Berkhout et al. 2022). In the case of heart 
transplant, the newly transplanted organ does not offer the same characteristics 
as a non-transplanted heart. That is, while a successful heart transplant can offer 
an immeasurable improvement in quality of life (given that end-stage heart 
failure offers no viable alternative), a transplanted heart retains limited 
functionality compared to that of a non-transplanted heart. The donor heart is 
completely denervated in the process of transplantation, with the loss of 
sympathetic and parasympathetic regulation. Although some reinnervation can 
take place over several years, the denervation results in a higher resting heart rate 
(c. 90 beats per minute) as well as an impaired cardiac response to the demands 
of physical exercise (Grupper, Gewirtz, and Kushwaha 2018). Although levels of 
fatigue in heart transplant recipients are reportedly moderate overall, in some 
cases it has significant impacts on the ability of a recipient to participate in life 
activities, as for example, there are higher levels of fatigue reported among 
younger heart transplant recipients, whose expectations of health post-transplant 
and quality of life may be higher (Almgren et al. 2021). 
 
Discussing such factors and experiences can enable transplant recipients to have a 
sense of agency regarding their goals and quality of life in light of the very real 
complications that exist for them. Primary graft dysfunction is one such major 
complication whereby intervention can beget further intervention, including 
“rescue” ECMO, ex vivo lung perfusion, the implantation of VADs in the case of 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
12   

heart failure, as well as dialysis. For some, these are interventions that are 
embraced to allow them to extend their lives. For others, returning to 
interventions following primary graft dysfunction such as dialysis reinscribes 
feelings of loss, grief, failure, guilt, anger, and depression (Gill and Lowes 2014). It 
is imperative to question and unpack the extent to which imagined futures 
shaped by a curative biomedical frame contributes to these challenges. For as 
Heinemann asks, “How do we understand the relationship between biomedicine 
and the everyday when there is no ‘after’ to illness?” (2020, 83).  
 

Sensory Aesthetics of Time, Machine, and Health 
Our crip technoscience lens brings us in contact with a need to appreciate the 
embodied, sensory, and affective aspects of transplant technoscience—what the 
lifeworld of a patient-machine-recipient-health system assemblage might tell us 
about transplant temporality and the imperative of cure. To explore how crip 
technoscience troubles transplant temporality and the imperative of cure more 
deeply, we turn to recent multimodal and multisensory artistic engagements with 
critical illness and technologies in relation to transplantation. We take up artistic 
work that considers the technologies active in bridging to transplant as well as 
medical practices and temporalities at play more generally in both pre- and  
post-transplantation. 
 
Artists and co-authors Brian and Bibo Keeley have worked in various media to 
explore their respective and mutual perspectives on Brian’s experience of an 
unexpected heart attack while vacationing in a remote area of Scotland in 2013, 
and the subsequent events that have shaped their lives since then. After 101 days in 
critical care, supported by Bibo, countless clinical staff, as well as numerous 
machines, tubes, pumps and wires, Brian received a heart transplant. Following an 
in-hospital cardiac arrest, he had an extended administration of AutoPulse, a 
machine that delivers automated cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). He then 
spent a period of time on ECMO during his early critical care. There followed more 
than three months on a “short-term” VAD until his eventual transplant. His life 
support systems also included a dialysis machine, a ventilator, and a nasal-gastric 
feeding tube. In order to achieve the ultimate goal of transplantation, several 
chasms had to be bridged. Only when his kidney and respiratory functions showed 
some improvement was he considered a candidate for an urgent transplant, which 
took place just a few weeks after being listed. While much of Bibo and Brian’s 
individual and collaborative artistic works explore the physicality, trauma, sensory, 
and emotional vortex of that time, we look in particular to their artistic digital short 
film Breathe (2021) to think about the juxtaposition of artistic engagement with 
lived experience of transplant, versus the image of the bridge as the conventional 
metaphor that dominates the field of transplantation technologies. 
 
Breathe opens with the subtle movement of fluid within the letters of the word 
“Breathe,” shifting into an image of a beating heart rendered through functional 

https://youtu.be/Kv2VtFtJOyk?si=nrTzZH3Cw7DNv4T_
https://youtu.be/Kv2VtFtJOyk?si=nrTzZH3Cw7DNv4T_


 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
13   

magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The beating heart transitions to a seascape, 
from which a screaming face, submerged in the water emerges. The rhythmic 
beeping of a telemetry monitor sonically marks the next shift, to an fMRI body 
superimposed on close-up shots of insects engaging with plants. At various 
points, the sway of wildflowers coordinates with the pulsations of the fMRI. A 
sonic return to a beating heart is overlayed with a whispered voice, “Open your 
eyes. Take my hand. Can you hear me?” The scene becomes simultaneously 
soothing and monstrous, as hands wrap around the trunk of a tree, eyes within 
the tree’s knots. Shifting between the linearity of the tree and hands touching the 
linearity of a surgical incision, we then hear the whoosh of a heart doppler along 
with a different whoosh of breath—the slow internalized breathing from inside 
one’s own head. The forest becomes a nightmarish dreamscape, trapping an 
individual wearing a hospital gown in a waking coma-like state. The sound of the 
heartbeat merges into the faster rhythms of erratic drumming and through 
flames we start to see a masked creature, various skulls, and then a half-human, 
half-bird figure draped in a shroud of white torn cloth, which dances a grotesque 
slow-motion dance in a verdant forest. Huge undulating earthworms intersect 
and engulf the figure like tentacles. Finally, a face drifts slowly underwater, with 
eyes open, blending with the sand and the seaweed, as a woman’s voice sings “in 
Zeit und Ewigkeit,” or, “in time and eternity.” 
 
Reading Breathe against the literature where we see the bridge metaphor, it 
becomes clear that perspective matters. The bridge metaphor, invoking a 
linearity of crossing and the expertise and command of captain/architects, fails to 
capture essential aspects of the sensory and affective qualities of actually being a 
living, breathing, bleeding, shitting, and agentive person that—to stay alive 
another day—is imbricated with a mass of machinery and experiencing side 
effects of various medications. Breathe expresses a non-linear experience, where 
hope and angst co-exist in an ever-present way, where memories merge with 
imagined realities, and where death and loss are the ultimate threat of critical 
illness, as well as of the subsequent non-critical, yet relentless, chronic health 
condition. The dual perspective of the artist couple’s trauma merges into one 
shared visual and aural assemblage that is rooted in the embodied experience of 
critical illness and heart transplantation, where medical technologies are a part of, 
and witness to, the compassion, co-suffering, helplessness, isolation, and a sense 
of eroded confidence in life. If, metaphorically, bridges are technological feats 
that escape the clutches of death and the devil (Gordon 2018), Breathe offers a 
sensorial feast that enunciates counter-logics of the conventional views of 
transplant technologies, situating these within the artists’ respective and shared 
lived experience.  
 
The immersive, suffocating fever dream provides a vastly different sensory 
landscape for viewers than what we might take from the imagery of the bridge. 
Breathe offers messiness, repetition, and loops, as well as blurred boundaries of 

https://youtu.be/Kv2VtFtJOyk?si=nrTzZH3Cw7DNv4T_
https://youtu.be/Kv2VtFtJOyk?si=nrTzZH3Cw7DNv4T_
https://youtu.be/Kv2VtFtJOyk?si=nrTzZH3Cw7DNv4T_
https://youtu.be/Kv2VtFtJOyk?si=nrTzZH3Cw7DNv4T_


 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
14   

self/other and human/machine, contra the linearity, precision, and cleanliness of 
conventional and normative images of a bridge. What becomes palpable when 
reading these against each other is the way that transplant technologies are part 
of a doubling back: the machines have a central, crucial, agentic role in the drama 
of transplant, bridging to surgery. At the same time, these technologies are 
typically discounted as relevant affective actors in the situation—machines are 
not considered in the sensory or affective milieu that shapes the transplant 
experience. Technological objects—machines and monitors—become so 
commonplace to those doing the work of caring for the transplanted patient that 
their role (and their din) become backgrounded. In our own fieldwork, these 
machines were only occasionally noted by healthcare providers routinely working 
with patients for hours on end: personal support workers, constant observers, 
care aids, and some nurses at the bedside. This sensory story and its impact on 
lived experience is obscured by the metaphor of the bridge.  
 
And yet, as Breathe so clearly demonstrates through visual image and movement, 
these sensory experiences are crucial to understand, both from the perspectives 
of those receiving care and their families and loved ones. In the microcosm of the 
critical care setting, the incessant sensory experiences can be terrifying and 
overwhelming during a period of time when people may be at their most 
vulnerable. The constant alarms and beeps intended to alert staff are more 
intense for the patient whose ears are at much closer proximity to the machines 
emitting the sounds. These machines and monitors, with their cacophony of 
pumps, fans, and humming, are also typically placed behind and out of the 
patient’s field of vision, potentially adding to the unnerving experience of the 
unknown, unpredictable, and incomprehensible. Harsh hospital lighting, which is 
beyond the control of the patient, and depressingly functional ceilings may for 
prolonged periods be the dominant stimuli from the perspective of someone in an 
intensive care bed. Neither aesthetics nor sympathetic aural considerations are 
typically engaged as an important part of the patient experience. Just as the 
visuals and movements of film can both express a sensory and affective landscape 
that is otherwise left untouched, unexplored, and unacknowledged in the 
dominant conceptualizations of transplant technologies, the sonic experience of 
transplantation also blurs the bifurcations of familiar/strange, insider/outsider, 
and self/other aspects of this medical field.  
 
This is also apparent in the soundscape Boundary Loss, by Jonathan Kawchuk. In 
an interview with the artist accompanying the recording, Kawchuk and Berkhout 
(2023) explore the sonic qualities of transplant spaces. Kawchuk’s soundscape 
developed from field recordings in a Canadian hospital, capturing acute care areas 
of transplant such as the transplant ward and intensive care unit (ICU) but also the 
mundane, quotidian spaces of transplant such as the hallway, the elevator bank, 
and the atrium where patients and families might meet if someone is well enough 
to move from their hospital bed. The soundscape enables listeners to become 

https://youtu.be/Kv2VtFtJOyk?si=nrTzZH3Cw7DNv4T_


 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
15   

attuned to the frictions between absence and presence in transplantation: 
sensory experiences that are simultaneously dulled and sonically overwhelming 
within a single acute care transplant setting. The sound experience, as described 
by Kawchuk, is “actively brutal, it’s mundane” (Kawchuk and Berkhout 2023, 117). 
The sonic environment is, he notes, “stark, sterile. The sound experience in the 
hospital isn’t going to reveal a truth that is easier to handle than that, because it’s 
not easy to handle. The essence of the thing is difficult” (117). “The soundscape 
doesn’t give you a sense of what is living,” Kawchuk continues, nor “a sense of 
time. There’s a stasis that is sonically present. Everything is regulated, monitored, 
static. It felt like I wouldn’t know what time of day it was” (119). Brian comments 
on this unsettled sense of time, directly after his heart transplant, when he was 
still affected by anaesthetics and powerful painkillers:  
 

The clock on the wall says that an hour has passed since I last checked, 
but I am confused because the same procedure is repeating. The same 
nurse who came in an hour ago does so again and asks me the same 
questions. Other members of staff come in and repeat what has been 
done already, and in exactly the same order. I tell them all to stop 
because this has already happened, but they don’t believe me. Then I 
notice that I know what they are going to say next, because they said 
the same thing previously. I continually protest that they are wasting 
time because I want to move forward. I feel overwhelmed by everyone 
in my room moving around and repeating things. I feel they are not 
helping me to move out of this continuous present. I point to the clock 
to prove that time is passing, and we are still repeating the same 
routines. A nurse comes in and says the same thing to me for a third 
time. I sink back into my pillow, knowing that I will have to lie here and 
watch another hour of the same repeated activity. (Keeley and Keeley 
2023, 16) 

 
Kawchuk’s soundscape captures “something about disorientation, feeling both 
overwhelming and underwhelming” (Berkhout and Kawchuk 2023, 119). For 
example, in asking permission to enter a care space with various microphones, 
recording equipment and transducers, Kawchuk confronted the ways that 
patients, like Brian, have already become conditioned to intrusions, many of 
which include unknown machines and technologies and where the purpose of the 
interaction may be incomprehensible or bizarre. Kawchuk reflects,  
 

The hospital can be a magic place where magic happens, or it can 
have so much mistrust and pain. It was surprising to go into 
everyone’s room. I was thinking, “Why is he letting me do [this 
recording]?” But what’s happening to him is, so many people are 
already doing weird stuff anyway, so it’s like, “Sure. Do whatever 
measurements you want.” If you have only a tiny bit of energy for self-



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
16   

advocacy, where do you aim? How you figure out what you push at is 
very hard, I think. (118) 

 
Perhaps critically ill patients become conditioned to receiving little or no 
explanation of the technologies and procedures that are being delivered to/used 
on them such that a request to record the sounds of machines in their rooms was 
just one of many hundreds of interactions in the acute phase of transplantation 
that are without sense or meaning to individuals. ICU patients have no privacy 
and often receive no advance notification of the multitude of daily interventions 
by staff. The physical passivity and de-personalization that is observed from the 
outside may also assume some lack of capacity or interest in understanding the 
technologies and the clinical interactions. Or it may be that vulnerable patients 
are not routinely afforded the opportunities, or that they do not have the 
confidence to engage with staff about the complex systems involved in their care.  
 
In Brian and Bibo’s experience, there was no routine explanation of the sounds 
and technologies surrounding Brian’s hospital bed and body. Bibo would 
photograph everything out of Brian’s line of sight, and she asked questions of the 
staff that Brian was not able to articulate. Their creative process was adapted into 
the service of managing an ongoing tension that surrounds the “good” transplant 
patient: one who adeptly alternates between being a docile, passive patient 
(particularly during the wait-listing and surgical periods) and being activated, 
motivated, and self-managing in the right kinds of ways. It can be a very quick 
pivot (Wong-Mersereau et al. 2023). This kind of inhabiting—of a complex and 
contradictory transplant subjectivity—is left unspoken within the imagery of the 
bridge but the sense of this inhabiting emerges from the affective space that 
forms within creative practices. They contribute to a sensory aesthetic of 
transplantation that eschews what Susan Squier (2007) refers to as the “epistemic 
narrowing” of biomedical information, opening up new ways to imagine and 
engage with transplant’s multiplicities.2 
 

Unsettling the Curative Imaginary  
Better technologies and better treatments are often taken to be the answer to 
the problem of illness, disease, and disability. Better technology and treatments 
are framed as a way of overcoming and curing illness, disease, and disability. But 
these approaches are also responsible for long histories of institutionalization, 
eugenics, sterilization, lobotomies, and other violent interventions that have led 
sick, mad, and disabled people to have an “ambivalent relationship to 
technology” (Kafer 2013, 119), medicalization, and cure (Clare 2017). At times, 
healthcare providers working in transplantation themselves offer critiques of 
device-centered (rather than patient-centered) care (Sharp 2014; Wong-
Mersereau et al. 2023). A nascent literature on the notion of survivorship in liver 
transplant also points to a growing recognition of the need to attend to extended 
temporalities in transplantation (Lai, Ufere, and Bucuvalas 2020). Crip 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
17   

technoscience approaches to the innovations and interventions of transplant 
medicine require both disability world building and ableist world dismantling. This 
means calling attention to the complexity of non-compliance with the curative 
imaginary of biomedicine, what it means to continue living on, and the strategies 
and ways of being that enable continuance.   
 
One important point to be made at this juncture is that while biomedical 
approaches frequently view patients as autonomous individuals, those living with 
transplant rather need to be understood as living in relation with others. They 
care for living others, for example, and enter into caring relations with the 
donated organ and its relation to the deceased or living donor. Relationality is an 
important consideration because transplantation is not simply about extending 
the life of an individual but also can restore the “possibility of engagement with 
the day-to-day contexts of kinship, friendship, leisure, and occupation” 
(Heinemann 2020, 83). As Heinemann notes, some transplant patients may not 
have any interest in pursuing an intensification of medicalization for their own 
selves as “everyday living, rather than life itself, becomes the stake” (83).3 Paying 
greater attention to relational context also means being attentive to the 
temporalities of transplantation: “Transplant recipients and clinicians alike point 
out that the procedure trades one set of problems for another: the difficulties of 
[pre-transplant] dialysis [for kidney patients] for the side effects of 
immunosuppressants [post-transplant]; the fears of organ failure for the fears of 
organ rejection…immunosuppressant medications can increase risks of cancer, 
osteoporosis, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other complications” (83–84). 
Solid organ transplant recipients are at risk of various forms of longer-term organ 
damage (their own endogenous organs and their new graft) from the very same 
medications that help to ensure their more immediate survival. The lived reality 
of transplantation “reveals that normalcy is elusive,” marking life as “tethered to 
the chronicities…of enduring medical intervention and monitoring” (84). Despite 
the impossibility of the restoration of a prior, self-same “healthy” embodiment, 
transplantation, as conceptualized in Western biomedicine, attempts to enact 
temporally normative forms of biocontinuity and linear life extension through 
notions of scientific progress while simultaneously being replete with disruption, 
non-linearity, and hauntings. These temporal frictions capture, for many 
recipients, the presence of the absent other (the organ donor) and the 
intersections of histories of dead and living (McCormack 2021; McCormack et al. 
2023; Wasson 2021).4  
 
Our engagement with multimodal and multisensory artistic research-creation 
attends to the sensory aesthetic aspects of time, machine, and health that 
demarcate acute illness experiences in the transplant context, displacing certain 
valorized understandings of the body that are based in a temporality of 
transplantation as a destination of health. When transplantation technologies are 
configured through the imagery of the bridge—always in offer of a destination in 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
18   

which illness and disability serves as the agreed-upon limit of our projected 
futures (Kafer 2013)—the skills and resources for living well with disability and 
illness may not be cultivated or recognized. How to live in the visceral present 
(Clare 2017), how to be with oneself and with each other in the meantime, how to 
embrace healing that is “neither a departure nor a destination, neither 
overcoming nor tragic” (Sandahl 2019, 130). These are questions prompted by our 
critical engagement with the bridge. Even if unintended, dominant transplant 
temporality binds to the past and glorifies the future, producing detrimental 
impacts on those whose lives cannot so simply be considered to be in a new or 
improved state post-transplant.  
 
Instead, we have opted to engage crip technoscience and sensory aesthetics that 
seeks to transform the ableist curative imaginary that drives so much of the 
rehabilitative sciences and medicine. We do so to unsettle progression and 
reconfigure time through loops, repetition, speeding up and slowing down; it is a 
relational orientation that disrupts the myth of autonomous, self-sufficient 
personhood as a pinnacle of achievement (White 2017). We reimagine spectacle 
and speculativeness in order to access sick and disabled futures and non-
normative embodiments that politicize the relationships between sick and 
disabled people and medicine, technology, and design. We do so not as an 
esoteric commentary, but to improve access to healthcare and technologies that 
enhance quality of life and also to acknowledge the needs, wants, expertise, and 
contributions of sick and disabled people and disabled communities. If any 
aesthetic act is a political act, when it affects and effects a reordering of the world 
(Rice et al. 2017), the sensory aesthetics of crip technoscience is one that can 
reorient transplant spacetime, opening a multiplicity of possibilities for sick and 
disabled futures.  
 
Notes  
1 Between 1982 and 2001, global figures showed that the 50 percent survival rates 
of heart transplant recipients—who survived the first year—was 11.8 years (Hertz 
et al. 2002). As recently as 2018, a US study showed that the 50 percent survival 
rate for heart transplant recipients was 12 years (Hsich et al. 2020).   
 
2 The epistemic narrowness we are considering here, structured by biomedical 
ways of knowing, likewise extends to a narrowness of how temporality is 
conceived. As one reviewer helpfully identified, temporality itself cannot be 
universalized—understandings of time (particularly in relation to life and death) 
are shaped by cosmologies, cultural beliefs, and spiritual practices that are 
themselves far more diverse than the linearity presumed in a westernized 
biomedical context. 
 
3 Within her ethnographic work, Heinemann articulates, for instance, how some 
individuals within her field site “turn toward transplant out of a sense of obligation 



 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
19   

to children or grandchildren, aging or infirm parents, or others who rely on them 
and suffer the ripple effects of their life-threatening illness” (2020, 83). 
 
4 There is a rich literature on absence/presence, which is out of the scope of this 
piece to engage with. For additional sources in anthropology and material culture, 
see Bille, Hastrup, and Soerensen (2011). 
 

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     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
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     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
21   

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Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
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Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
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Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
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Author Bios 
Suze Berkhout is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the 
University of Toronto, and a Clinician-Investigator in the University Health Network’s 
Centre for Mental Health based out of Toronto General Hospital. She has expertise in 
feminist philosophy and qualitative research experience that draws on ethnographic 
and narrative frames, including using visual arts to explore unspoken aspects of 
biomedical experience.  
 
Kelly Fritsch is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and 
Anthropology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. As a crip theorist and critical 
disability studies scholar, her research examines ableist social relations, the 
neoliberal biopolitics of disability, and anti-assimilationist crip culture and politics.  
 
Brian Keeley is an artist based in Scotland whose collaborative practice with Bibo 
Keeley is rooted in their shared experience of living post-heart transplant. Brian 
graduated with an MA from The Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s and is currently a 
doctoral candidate in the Department of Film & Visual Culture at the University of 
Aberdeen. 
 
Bibo Keeley is an artist based in Scotland whose collaborative practice with Brian 
Keeley is rooted in their shared experience of living post-heart transplant. Bibo is a 
graduate in Fine Art from Robert Gordons University, Aberdeen. She has received 

https://doi.org/10.1093/ndt/gfq376
https://mh.bmj.com/content/47/4/447
https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/knots/article/view/29201
https://doi.org/10.3978/j.issn.2072-1439.2015.01.46
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.liver.2023.100183
https://doi.org.10.1097/MOT.0000000000000772


 
Special Section: Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine                                                

 
 

     | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 10 (2)    Suze Berkhout, Kelly Fritsch, Brian Keeley, and Bibo Keeley, 2024 
 
25   

several artist awards and commissions and was selected for The Royal Scottish 
Academy's 2020 New Contemporaries Exhibition.