ABSTRACT
This chapter explores conceptual tools developed in trans and queer theory, namely trans and animacy, and preliminarily develops a new analytic neologism, transplant. It examines the specific ways in which trans, the nonhuman, the visual, and the colonial are tangled historically and how those entanglements resonate currently in politically powerful ways through the species organizing work of entities such as the Arcus Foundation. The chapter theorizes from the abstract philosophical association between species, from the interstitial area wherein these species, racial, gender, and sexual attributions are naturalized. How and why certain rights and protections should or should not be extended to those who embody the interstitial space of human/nonhuman is implicated in broader understandings of life, itself. Transplant, developed as a means of assembling and extending the useful conceptual framings of trans and animacy, and colonial so that we might attend to the potentials that those and future enmeshments politically enable or attenuate.
