Alexandra Frankel ^1* Eva-Marie Stern ²

• ¹ York University, Toronto, Canada
• ² University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Dominant narratives of solid organ transplantation foreground vocabularies of gratitude. Solidorgan transplantation is often celebrated in biomedicine for its high-tech innovation and specialization. But transplantation also includes the organizations that oversee the distribution of donated organs to potential recipients who disproportionately outnumber available organs. Waitlisting for transplant weighs urgency and fitness for transplant against availability, as individuals must simultaneously demonstrate their conditions are severe enough to warrant transplantation while at the same time are well enough to withstand the transplant procedure that is meant to return the individual from critical illness to able-bodied health. This article considers how promises of cure make affective demands on transplant recipients. Dominant transplantation narratives and metaphors frame transplantation as "rebirth" and the "gift of life." But this framework constrains transplant recipients' affective and emotional repertoires, positioning gratitude as the primary-if not only-acceptable feeling for performing that the "gift of life" was deserved. Such narrowly sanctioned possibilities for expression elide the affective complexities of recipients-and foreclose opportunities for expressing anger and frustration. This paper unpacks the politics of verbalizing anger among solid-organ transplant recipients at a Canadian hospital. Using arts-based sensory interviews with 27 participants, this paper traces expressions of anger as an alien affect (Ahmed 2010) to understand how transplant recipients critique and protest curative imaginaries while also upholding them. Theorizations from Critical Disability Studies about how to make space for negative feeling provides important opportunities to understand how recipients evoke theory.