Charged Artifacts and the Detonation of Liminality: Teddy-Bear Diplomacy in the Newborn Incubator Machine

This article employs ethnography to explore the multiple significations of ornamenting the incubator, a quasi-ritual practice wherein mothers of preterm babies place rudimentary things, like stuffed animal toys, into their infants’ life-support machines. I contend that such enactments pose more or less conscious endeavors to domesticate and animate these prosthetic devices, as veritable cyborg wombs which interpolate mother-child bonding and problematize maternal identity. In these acts, the ‘technoscapes’ (Appadurai, 1990) of cheap, mundane items and exclusive, precision instruments converge in a paradoxical, but fertile juxtaposition to make the ambiguous figure of the preterm infant culturally-intelligible as well as biologically-viable. It is suggested that the liminality of toys and trinkets out of place empowers them to attenuate the alienness of the incubator and its technoliminal capacity to alienate. A kind of teddy-bear diplomacy is in play wherein juvenile playthings are enlisted to detonate the charged foreignness of the incubator-other, and bring baby into familiar cultural grammars.