Eric Plemons

About Eric Plemons

I am a medical anthropologist focused on gender and surgery. Through ethnographic, interview, and literature-based research, I study the ways that surgical experts and surgical patients theorize sex and gender as anatomical categories. In other words, I study how, where, and in what ways surgeons and their patients understand the body’s parts as distinctive markers of sex/gender and how they develop surgical procedures to intervene in them. Whether their aim is to enhance, change, affirm, or otherwise alter sex/gender, surgical practice depends on theories of its anatomical locations. Those theories are locally specific and change through time. They emerge alongside surgical innovations that make new techniques possible and thus open the body for modification in new ways. A surgical operation is a rich ethnographic event in which, through slow and careful movements, abstract ideas about bodies and their meanings get made into flesh. Paying attention to what patients want from surgical transformation and what surgeons believe they can accomplish is an exciting way to see concepts materialized in technique.

My first book, The Look of a Woman (Duke University Press, 2017), explored the development and practice of facial feminization surgery (FFS), a set of bone and soft tissue procedures intended to feminize the faces of trans women. The Look of a Woman was awarded the 2017 Ruth Benedict book prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology.

My second book, The Matter of Motherhood (Beacon Press, November 2026), examines the emerging practice of uterine transplantation. By talking with US uterus donors, uterus recipients, and the clinical experts who deliver their care, this book considers what happens when the uterus—an organ long synonymous with womanhood and motherhood—becomes mobile.

What links these projects and my other research is an interest in how body parts and their characteristics become defined as “sexed/gendered,” how doctors and patients craft a plan to change them, and what kinds of therapy such changes are imagined to enact.

Links to my published books and articles are available at ericplemons.com

At University of Arizona, I teach

ANTH 112 Introduction to Medical Anthropology

ANTH 150B Many Ways of Being Human

ANTH 325 Bodies in Medicine

ANTH 406 Gender & Sexuality

ANTH 444 Medical Anthropology

ANTH 536 Medical Anthropology Graduate Seminar

ANTH 608A History of Anthropological Theory I