Vi(Abilities): Biology, Personhood, and Agency in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in the U.S. and Taiwan Open Access

Abstract

Vi(Abilities): Biology, Personhood, and Agency in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
in the U.S. and Taiwan

This dissertation is about beginnings and pre-beginnings. It is about what happens to
small human bodies that are birthed before their organs have acquired the very basic
capacities for life, before they are capable of corporeally existing in a world separated
from the bodies of their mothers. It is about jumpstarting the premature lives of small
human bodies that were perhaps never intended for life and sustaining these lives within
neonatal intensive care units (NICUs)- buying time, dodging the limits of human
biology, and waiting for physiological capacities for life to emerge. It is equally about
how the many individuals who care for, are related to, and come to love them, cope with
the heartbreak of knowing that technological interventions for sustaining premature lives
necessarily include pain and the possibilities of a diminished quality of life. Most
critically, it is about how individuals find their way in the midst of these uncertainties,
indeterminacies, and hardships to transform a small premature human body, alive or
dead, into a home for a soul; and in the process, transform and re-examine their own
ideas of who they should be (or not be) and who they are (or are not).

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE 1
CHAPTER 1: IT'S TOO SOON
40
CHAPTER 2: DOUBLE JEOPARDY
87
CHAPTER 3: FROM EXHIBITION TO PATIENT
108
CHAPTER 4: AN INTERLUDE
141
CHAPTER 5: MAKING PERSONS, DOING MONTHS
154
CHAPTER 6: GETTING TO KNOW YOU--ONE SIDED INTERACTIONS AND
EPISTEMOLOGICAL IDIOMS
200
CHAPTER 7: FINDING AGENCY, FINDING ABILITIES
247
CHAPTER 8: DOUBLE PASSAGES: ZUO YUE AS RIGHT(S)/RITES OF
PASSAGE 279
CHAPTER 9: "RIGHTS TALK": RIGHTS OF PASSAGE-RITE TO LIFE 306
CHAPTER 10: SOULS, HOMES, AND THE EXPERIENCES OF LIFE
342
BIBLIOGRAPHY 350
APPENDIX 1: CHART OF HUMAN MATURATIONAL MILESTONES BY
WEEK 372

About this Dissertation

Rights statement

• Permission granted by the author to include this thesis or dissertation in this repository. All rights reserved by the author. Please contact the author for information regarding the reproduction and use of this thesis or dissertation.

School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Anthropology
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Anthropology, Cultural Law Anthropology, Medical and Forensic
Keyword	Abortion Viability Personhood Taiwan Law Agency Right to Life NICU Rites of Passage
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Lampl, Michelle, Emory University
Committee Members	Karp, Ivan, Emory University Kratz, Corinne, Emory University

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