Homework

Cultural Psyc

Your thoughtful questions:

1. [Please type your first question here. Remember to include a one-paragraph explanation of where your question is coming from (e.g., what you read that inspired your question, what you were thinking, why you were confused, etc.).]

2. [Please type your second question here. Remember to include a one-paragraph explanation of where your question is coming from (e.g., what you read that inspired your question, what you were thinking, why you were confused, etc.).]

Looking at your topic through the lens of this week’s readings:

3. How did this week’s readings affect your understanding of the topic you chose in Week 0?

‘ WA S H I N G M AC H I N E S M A K E
L A Z Y WO M E N ’
Domestic Appliances and the Negotiation of Women’s
Propriety in Soweto

◆ H E L E N M E I N T J E S

University of Cape Town, South Africa

Abstract
This article explores the multiple symbolic associations of two domestic
appliances – the washing machine and the coal stove – in a neighbourhood
in Soweto, South Africa, and examines the ways in which these appliances
as symbolic objects are integral in the construction and negotiation of
women’s ‘proper’ roles and relations. The (in some cases incoherent) multi-
valence of the appliances sets them up as ideal sites for contestation over
the definition of desirable gender roles and identity. An examination of
people’s attitudes towards, and actions around, these two appliances is thus
revealing of their own notions of gender propriety.

Key Words ◆ domestic appliances ◆ gender roles ◆ ‘proper’ womanhood ◆
Soweto ◆ symbolic meaning

Gender identity is what people do, think and say about material and imma-
terial things in relation to other people conceived of as sexed. It is necess-
arily relational. Technology too . . . is increasingly understood as relational.
As deployed in production, in everyday life, in the household, technological
artefacts entail relations. They embody some (those that went into their
making). They prefigure others (those implied in their use, abuse or neglect).
But they also enter into and may change relations they encounter. There is
yet nothing gendered about this perception, but gendering is inevitably
present. (Cockburn, 1992: 40, original emphasis)

In her study of urban Zambian households, Hansen (1997: 160) com-
ments that ‘It was quite evident that [electric appliances] are cultural

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objects that play important roles in the structuring and perhaps chang-
ing of women’s and men’s experiences of everyday life.’ As she suggests,
appliances, though easily thought of as mundane run-of-the-mill posses-
sions, similar in nature and defined only by their purpose, are no differ-
ent to any other household belongings in their symbolic capacity. They
create and communicate meaning by their presence in the home and are
as much part of a meaning system in which gender and generational
relations are shaped and acted out, social status is marked, ideology is
represented, aspirations are manifested, or strategies for living are mir-
rored, as any more obviously symbolic domestic objects. Nonetheless,
historians of technology, in particular, have pointed out a hiatus in the
social sciences’ consideration of appliances in terms of their semiotic and
social role (Lubar, 1996; Oldenziel, 1996; Pfaffenberger, 1992), and have
argued the need for studies which view technological objects not only
as ‘technological texts’, but also as ‘cultural phenomena’ (Lubar, 1996:
33). Oldenziel (1996) further comments how on the whole, studies of
technology of ‘low tech’ objects or ‘daily use technologies’ (such as
domestic appliances) in particular have been ignored by scholars, and
argues that this is due to the discipline’s sexist prioritization of concern
with productive technologies. Those few studies which do look at domes-
tic technologies as more than simply mechanical objects, and which
instead reflect on them as social and political phenomena, tend to focus
on aspects of their production rather than of their consumption – or the
interrelationship between the two – (see Berg, 1994; Cockburn and
Furst-Dilic,1994; Cowan, 1983, 1985; Ormrod, 1994).1

Thus in this article, I aim to consider Hansen’s proposition further,
by exploring how gender and generational relations within low-income
households in Mzimhlope, a neighbourhood of Soweto, South Africa, are
shaped and negotiated in interactions around certain domestic appli-
ances. I demonstrate how the symbolic significance of different appli-
ances converses with widely held conceptions of the ‘proper’ place of
men and women, adults and youth. The dialogical nature of the inter-
action (Miller, 1994, 1995, 1998; Tilley, 1999; Weiss, 1996) not only
defines but also has the potential to alter the meanings and understand-
ings both of the appliances as symbols, and of intra-household (and extra-
household) gender and generational identities and social relations. I
begin the article with a discussion of the attitudes towards washing
machines vocalized by residents of Mzimhlope, not because these appli-
ances are the only symbol of how gender or generation operates in the
household, but because they capture these issues particularly clearly. I
then examine the use of coal stoves as a symbol in ongoing intergenera-
tional contestation over appropriate gender roles.

I briefly demonstrate and draw upon a notion of symbolic rub, by
which I refer to the friction, the incoherence, between the various

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symbolic meanings with which objects are imbued. My intention in this
respect is to explore some of the ways in which Mzimhlope residents’
senses of self and others are fashioned by domestic appliances around
them, and to think about the way people act with and around the mul-
tivalence of these appliances in their multiple strategies towards defin-
ing themselves and others.

The neighbourhood of Mzimhlope is a segment of Orlando West, a
part of Soweto built in the mid-1940s as one of many experiments in low-
cost mass housing in Soweto (Venables,1948; White et al., 1998), and
consisting of row upon uniform row of tightly packed pre-cast concrete
semi-detached houses, colloquially known as ‘matchboxes’ in reference
to their minute size (approximately 40 m2). In most instances, the two
tiny bedrooms and a kitchen-cum-living space that comprised the orig-
inal ‘matchbox’ have been further divided by a wall separating the
kitchen from a living room. Generations of occupant families have
slowly carried out alterations and improvements, and accumulated
domestic furnishings, equipment and decorations, commonly by enter-
ing into high-interest long-term ‘hire-purchase’ payment agreements.
Corrugated-iron shack structures have been built in the back yards of
many of the houses, to accommodate an overspill of household members
or to rent out to tenants as a means to income. Although the neigh-
bourhood was not originally electrified (a situation to which the large
numbers of old coal stoves still to be found filling many kitchen spaces
bears testimony), electrical reticulation was eventually installed after
1976. The material that I present in this article is drawn from my
research with residents of 59 of the ‘matchbox’ houses in this neigh-
bourhood between 1995 and 1998. In 1995, their average household
income was less than R900 per month (approximately £78 per month),
with a rough per capita income of R150 per month (£13).

A QUESTION OF PROPRIETY: WASHING MACHINES
AS GENDERED SYMBOL

The households documented contained a wide range of electrical appli-
ances. In most, every domestic energy function – cooking, space heating,
refrigeration, ironing, entertainment – was covered by an electric appli-
ance, often of an expensive make and high-tech design. Giant double-
door refrigerator-freezers towered over tiny kitchens, hi-fis sporting all
the available bells and whistles took their place in wall-units, large tele-
visions blared American soap opera melodrama daily. In the light of this,
there existed one glaring exception: virtually no labour-saving domestic
cleansing appliances were owned. Amongst the 59 households studied,
only 8 washing machines, 4 geysers, 5 urns, 2 vacuum cleaners and 3
floor polishers were observed. No dishwashers or tumble dryers were

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noted. Daily, many hours of women’s time were spent labouring over
soapy tubs, scrubbing, rinsing, wringing clothes and linen. More were
consumed heating water, pot after pot, kettle after kettle, preparing bath
water for members of the household. Still more time disappeared as
women toiled on hands and knees, polishing floors to a glistening shine.
Yet there had been – and continued to be – little priority given by
members of these households to acquiring appliances which could have
alleviated the time and labour involved in domestic chores. Even those
households that had found means to fit out their homes way beyond the
bounds of simple utilitarian necessity had tended to avoid investing in
labour-saving appliances for domestic cleansing. Consider the Ngcobos,
for example, who refurbished their house with all that opens and shuts,
shimmers or shines, chops, blends, heats, cools, bakes, boils, and enter-
tains.

1. THE NGCOBOS; EVERYTHING BUT ELECTRICAL
DOMESTIC ASSISTANCE

From the inside, the Ngcobos’ home was barely recognizable as one
of the original Soweto ‘matchbox’ houses. Thandi, the adult daugh-
ter who was living with her parents, her two small children, her
older sister’s eight-year-old daughter, and the two children of
another sister who had died some time before, told the story of the
renovations.

In 1994, she said, her father decided to refurbish the house to honour
the 20th wedding anniversary of his marriage to Elizabeth. It was
time at last, he thought, to improve his family’s lifestyle. And so he
began with the transformation: He demolished the wall between the
sitting room and the small front bedroom, in so doing creating an
extended sitting room which stretches right across the front of the
house. An elaborate dark wood-panelled ceiling, with decorative
carved designs in the centre replaced the previous boards. Having
removed the aged plywood room-divider that separated the kitchen
from the sitting room, Mr Ngcobo built a face-brick archway
between the two rooms instead. Two brick rooms were built in the
back yard (as new, more private, bedroom space for Thandi and the
various grandchildren), as well as a bathroom (with geyser) – a rare
luxury in this neighbourhood.

The reshaped sitting room was uncluttered, but plush. An imitation-
leather lounge suite filled most of one half, a dark dining room suite
(with velvety seat covers kept free of grime by plastic covering) the
other. Ornaments were few; a couple of plants in brassy pots

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decorated the sitting area. A large colour television, video and hi-fi
filled compartments of a wall-unit. The kitchen was similarly
ordered, fitted with brand-new units, and a range of up-to-date appli-
ances, including a built-in electric hob and separate wall oven, and
a two-door fridge-freezer. With the refurbishment, the household
disposed of a perfectly functioning electric four-plate stove and a
coal stove. ‘It is better to have a new one’, Thandi explained. In
addition, a microwave had subsequently been purchased. The
kitchen surfaces were kept clear of everything but appliances: a food
processor, a snackwich-maker, an electric frying pan, and an auto-
matic kettle. It was a scene of clean modern simplicity, of well-
equipped living.

Where then, was the washing machine? The vacuum cleaner? The floor
polisher? Where, in this home furnished with many ‘luxury’ appliances,
were those which could lighten the drudgery in a woman’s day? Thandi
Ngcobo smiled at my surprise. Most of the laundry, she said, was done
by a woman who lives down the road. She charged R40 (± 35p) per
garbage bag of washing. The children’s clothes were washed by hand,
by Thandi. ‘We just prefer it that way’, she quipped, and changed the
topic of conversation.

One afternoon, I discussed with a group of neighbours living in
Mzimhlope the absence of washing machines in their homes. At first,
concerns that washing machines are harder on clothing, that they don’t
clean as well, and that they break buttons and fray collars, were raised.
But the central thrust of the discussion revolved around the social rela-
tional aspects of these appliances. ‘Our husbands say we are lazy [if we
desire washing machines]’, Angelina complained. ‘Exactly!’ Tebogo, a
25-year-old man, responded firmly, ‘washing machines [make] lazy
women. Our culture doesn’t allow for washing machines.’ Tebogo pre-
sented a patriarchal notion of the ‘proper’ role of African women as hard-
working domestic labourers, who keep their houses and households
clean and well cared for, no matter the time, sweat or strength neces-
sary. His opinion was supported by Tsepo, an older man who lived in
the same street. He too rejected having a washing machine in his house:
‘I marry somebody, she must work for me. She’s got two hands. No
machines are necessary for polishing or washing or anything’. He added
that ‘These young girls [who are eager to own and use washing
machines], they are good for nothing. They are ‘modernized’ too much’.
Grandmother Betty was not entirely correct when she retorted in
response to these two that ‘They’re men, that’s why they say that’.
Tebogo’s and Tsepo’s sentiments were certainly not held only by men.
Joyce, mother of three and gentle grandmother to four-year-old Lebo, for
example, agreed wholeheartedly with them. Pointing with disdain at the

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carefully manicured and painted fingernails of her young woman friend
sitting alongside her, she asserted that ‘I won’t have a makoti [daughter-
in-law] with long nails like that. Why? Because she is lazy!’ Soft well kept
hands, Joyce implied, suggest to others that a woman does not do her
washing by hand, and most likely does little else around the house either.
Joyce’s comment in addition hinted at the specific impropriety of having
a daughter-in-law who appears ‘lazy’. It is fairly common amongst black
South Africans (more especially in rural areas) for women to move into
the homes of their husband’s family. There it is widely accepted by many
that one of the primary roles of the makoti is to carry out most of the
drudgery of domestic tasks in her new home (Magona, 1999; Mathabane,
1994). Joyce’s comment suggests that not only would it be objectionable
for a makoti herself to be seen as lazy, but it would also reflect badly on
the public status of her mother-in-law. The stereotype of women who
own washing machines as inappropriately slovenly and slack was, more-
over, not only valued by men and older women. Attitudes towards
washing machines were not split cleanly along generational lines: con-
trary to Tsepo’s assertion, a number of the younger women refused to
own or use a washing machine. Exclaimed one young woman partici-
pating in the discussion, ‘I am a washing machine myself! I have got
hands, I do my washing!’

The discussion between these Mzimhlope residents reveals how
washing machines in their neighbourhood had acquired symbolic
meaning that interacted with and reinforced notions of appropriate
gender relations and identity. For many, they objectified domestic indo-
lence in women, a quality that was judged by both women and men to
undermine ‘proper’ womanhood, as well as the masculinity of the men
involved in domestic relationships with such women. A ‘proper’ woman
works hard around the house to keep it, its contents and its inhabitants
scrubbed clean, and well cared for.2 In choosing to avoid self-represen-
tation as women faltering in their social roles, women in Mzimhlope
elected not to own objects such as washing machines, for fear of sug-
gesting an image of impropriety in their domestic roles and relationships.
Similarly, men non-verbally asserted fitting relations with their wives
and daughters by shunning investment in household objects that,
through their symbolic meaning, would tarnish the propriety both of
intra-household relationships and extra-household images: the absence
of washing machines in their homes asserted (and simultaneously
ensured) both their own masculinity – as husbands and fathers associ-
ated with women who know their ‘place’ – and the ‘propriety’ of the
women and girls affiliated to them.

Though projected as an absolute by many men and women, the
symbolic associations of washing machines with aspects of appropriate
gender roles and relations did not go uncontested. Some women rejected

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outright their labelling as lazy or ‘improper’ women on the basis of their
owning such appliances, and instead appreciated washing machines for
the time and effort they can save, as well as for alternative semiotic
associations of modern living3. Sinah, who laboured daily over a tub of
her baby’s nappies, and longed for a washing machine to assist with this
task, said ‘Washing machines save time. It’s three in one: washing,
rinsing and wringing’. She muttered with infuriation at Tsepo and
Tebogo’s unflinching stereotyping of women on the basis of the appli-
ances they own and use. A young girl, whose grandmother was con-
templating investing in a washing machine because her arthritis was
undermining her ability to scrub easily, relished the idea but anticipated
disapproval: ‘The boys will see the machine and think I am lazy, but I
don’t mind’, she said. Aged 15, one of her main tasks in the household
was to wash all the adults’ clothing and linen. This was very time-con-
suming, and had to be juggled with school work and other domestic
chores. A third woman, Nonhlanhla, laughed at Tebogo’s interpretation.
‘Lazy wives!’ she retorted, ‘Lazy wives? There’s no such thing!’ She
pointed out that a washing machine only diminishes one task of many
that a woman is expected to do. ‘So you have a washing machine. You
still have to do the cleaning, the cooking . . .’ This same woman however,
was quick to assert that the reason she herself had bought a machine in
the first place was because she had arthritis in her hands, and hand-
washing was therefore painful. In other words, whilst she claimed to
reject judgement on the basis of her washing machine ownership, she
nonetheless defended herself from criticism in the very terms that con-
struct the notion of a good woman as a hardworking (handwashing)
person, and not in terms that assert resistance to the basic concept itself.
Despite contesting any criticism anticipated for her ownership of a
washing machine, her remark that her arthritis was all that rendered her
incapable of doing laundry by hand, still carried with it the implication
that her value as a woman lay in her dedication to domestic work.

In the eight recorded instances where washing machines were
owned, these self-same symbolic meanings and their related notions of
gender roles were not discarded: the women owners of the machines all
appeared to subscribe to the paradigm that their ‘proper’ womanhood
lay in their domestic vigour. However, they overcame the consequence
of the unwanted symbolism by acting (or professing to act) around the
washing machines in positively sanctioned ways. Two women (including
Nonhlanhla, mentioned earlier) publicly justified their ownership of the
machines in terms of their suffering from arthritis, whilst other women
members of these two households claimed they did all their washing by
hand. Another machine was said to be used only ‘if [the woman] comes
home late’ or for its spin function ‘when it’s raining’. Otherwise, I was
told, all washing was done by hand. Two were said never to be used (nor

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were they seen to be used) at all. Three machines were broken, and
remained so for the duration of my research. Of these eight machines,
six were stored out of sight in the private space of bedrooms, their
undesirable symbolic insinuations thus hidden from most visitors to the
house. The remaining two were found in kitchens which had been
recently renovated and refurbished, where a collection of new and
modern appliances, furnishings and decorations together provided sym-
bolic consensus of the house-owners’ integration into a modern, con-
suming, 20th-century world.

WASHING MACHINES AS CONTRADICTORY
SYMBOL/UNCOMFORTABLE OBJECT

Building on Kopytoff’s (1986) and Appadurai’s (1986) notion of object
biographies, Silverstone et al. (1992) point out that objects tend to develop
more than one biography, and therefore more than one symbolic path of
meaning. In the process of developing multiple biographies, fields of what
I choose to label semiotic friction can arise around objects. In other
words, the various symbolic meanings with which objects are imbued do
not necessarily cohere. The symbolic associations of the objects can
operate in opposition to one another, resulting in a process of ‘symbolic
rubbing’ that charges objects with a potency greater than they would have
were their meanings uncontested. It is in part because these mean-
ings/biographies rub against one another, that Sowetan residents cannot
ignore them in the process of negotiating and marking their personhoods.
Washing machines in Mzimhlope emerged as one such object.

Consider the choices and actions of the Mtimkhulus mentioned here,
which provide a vivid example of how people converse with and act
around the incoherent symbolic meanings that objects can develop,
thereby demonstrating the enduring nature of ‘proper’ gender roles in
Mzimhlope.

2. THE MTIMKHULU’S LAUNDRY ARRANGEMENTS

Eunice Mtimkhulu, a pensioner who had lived most of her adult life
in Mzimhlope, shared her home with two of her daughters, Magda-
lene (41) and Agnes (35). Agnes had a daughter aged 13 living there.
Two of Eunice’s other grandchildren stayed there as well. They were
the sons, aged 25 and 27, of her own son who had died some years
previously. Magdalene owned a small hair salon in Diepkloof, and
employed one of her nephews to help her. Agnes was employed full
time at a major insurance company as a general assistant. To
augment their incomes and her pension, Eunice ran a spaza – a small
general store selling basic household supplies – from the back yard.

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In 1995 Eunice Mtimkhulu set about renovating and refurbishing
her ‘matchbox’ house. She built two bedrooms, one for each of her
adult daughters, and the spaza, all in the back yard, and restructured
the interior of the old building to create a large living and dining
room, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom. Each room was then
colour-coordinated: the bedroom blue and green, the bathroom
simply blue.

When I met Eunice, the kitchen was not yet complete, but she said
she planned for her next investment to replace the kitchen units and
install a double sink. It was nonetheless jam-packed with fancy elec-
tric appliances: an oven with a four-plate hob, a microwave, an elec-
tric frying pan, a toasted-sandwich maker, a food-processor (very
seldom used, but displayed on a counter), a large two-door fridge-
freezer, and a single-drum washing machine. Most of these mod.
cons had been purchased by Eunice’s adult and working daughters.
(She noted, for example, how they had owned a ‘very good two-plate
[electric stove]’ before her offspring replaced it with a fancy stove).

The washing machine was purchased soon after renovations began.
Yet, in the three years since, it had never once been used. There were
accessible water taps, and it would have been simple and effortless
to connect the pipes. However, all the women in the household chose
instead to do their washing by hand in the double basins installed in
the yard outside the back door. ‘They’re perfect’, Eunice said of these
basins, ‘you can wash one side, rinse the other!’

In this case, the Mtimkhulus drew on an alternative set of semiotic
associations of the washing machine to its apparently normative symbols
of laziness and hence inferior womanhood. By displaying the spanking
new washing machine alongside other ‘luxury’ appliances in their
upgraded kitchen, they presented their lifestyle as affluent, modern,
moving with the times. Whilst a washing machine was on the one hand
associated with lazy womanhood, it was, on the other, also a symbol of
modern living and of financial ease. In effect, by purchasing and dis-
playing a washing machine in their home, the Mtimkhulus chose to com-
promise on symbolic appropriateness relating to one arena of social life
– their (good, hardworking) womanhood – in order to achieve symbolic
effects relating to another – their modern upward mobility. Their actions
around the machine however, indicate that its purchase was not a state-
ment of resistance to the dominant gender symbolism centred on the
machine. It was not a refusal to submit to the paradigm of domestic sub-
ordination. By performing their washing in the open and public space of
their yard (in clear view of their neighbours), they acted out and

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displayed their ‘proper’ womanhood for all to see. In so doing, they
engaged with the processes of semiotic friction centred on the washing
machine, working with and around its symbolic inconsistencies in a way
that achieved a coherent image of their being ‘good’ women. In effect,
the symbolic ‘rub’ of the machine was made neutral, the uncomfortable
made comfortable, both through their installation of double laundry-
basins in the yard – an object which contradicted the symbolic insinua-
tions of the machine – and their actions around these.

The women in the Ngcobo household described earlier chose a
different approach to the Mtimkhulus in presenting their image, but to
similar effect. They equipped their house with a selection of those appli-
ances which signalled their living as modern and upwardly mobile. But
they shunned the semiotic benefits that washing machine ownership
could have contributed to this image. By avoiding investment in a
washing machine, but paying someone else to do some – but, import-
antly, not all – of their laundry, they eluded judgement of their woman-
hood as well as escaped most of the domestic drudgery associated with
the task. They avoided the symbolic discomfort of a washing machine,
but nonetheless achieved an image of both modern living and ‘good’,
‘proper’ womanhood.

Thus, despite the differences in their approaches, the women in both
the Mtimkhulu and Ngcobo households demonstrated their subscription
to the normative criteria of ‘good’ women through their daily practice,
and also ensured that their womanhood was not undermined by the pres-
ence of a machine in their homes.

GENDER AND GENERATION: COAL STOVES AND
CONTESTATION

Whilst most women I encountered in Mzimhlope reacted to washing
machines in the same way – as markers of the lazy women they did not
want to be, or to be seen to be – this was not the case with another
equally ‘gendered’ household appliance: the coal stove. Opinions about
owning the appliance were more polarized, on the whole between
elderly and younger women. Of the 59 households, 34 (58%) in the
formal housing sample from Mzimhlope owned large coal stoves, most
of which were kept in the kitchens of these houses. The majority of these
were inherited from the parents or grandparents of the current house-
hold members.4 Most younger5 women however, rejected retaining – let
alone using – these coal stoves in their houses and battled to get rid of
them. They protested that coal stoves require arduous labour to prepare
the fires, that they are an effort to clean, and that their emissions make
the house dirty – curtains need regular washing, walls become grubby,
ceilings grey, and so on. ‘Eish!’6 exclaimed Sobahle with vigour, ‘coal

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stoves make too much smoke in the house. And that makes a lot of work!’
In addition, many commented that these non-electric stoves are ‘old
fashioned’, appliances that are found in houses stuck in the past, not
homes moving into the future. Furthermore, for many young people, coal
stoves were imbued with symbolic associations of old times, of bad old
times of apartheid, when black people’s poverty and marginalization was
institutionalized by law in South Africa, and electricity wasn’t deemed
by the state as a necessary service in African townships.7

Pensioner grandmothers and mothers, however, on the whole lauded
both the practicality of the stoves’ use and their symbolic meanings. Coal
stoves provide heat for cooking, efficiently heat water for bathing and
for washing dishes, and warm the house once the weather becomes
chilly. ‘A coal stove makes your body and your home feel warm right
through, not like electric heaters’, said one woman in Mzimhlope.
Another who refused to part with her coal stove pointed out, ‘It’s part
of our culture’. Aside from its practical value as a cheap space heater and
cooker, she thus indicated that the coal stove was steeped in what she
perceived to be and presented as a culturally specific symbolism. Granny
Betty, who lit her coal stove daily throughout winter, hinted further at
this kind of semiotic attachment: ‘You know, old people, we like the coal
stove. Young ones, they’re always in a hurry with cooking, they just want
it quick quick. But’, she stressed, ‘it’s not the same [using electricity]’.
Rose elaborated in a similar vein, pointing to her grandmother’s teach-
ings that coal stoves – as the place of fire in an urban house – provide a
link to ancestors. She and others thus suggested that the coal stove
embodied the essence of the home, and constituted an important locus
of ‘traditional’ living around which household relations should operate.

As a result, grandmothers in Mzimhlope continually complained
about the attitudes of younger generations. The terminology they chose
for their criticism was revealing. Consider, for example, the following
discussion between four grandmothers over a mid-morning cup of tea
one winter’s day.8 Muttered Eunice, ‘The children don’t want to touch
coal . . . they must have plastic [bags] over their hands so they don’t spoil
their nails!’ Jeanette agreed, explaining to me that ‘these children, they
don’t know what it was like before. These white [enamel-coated] stoves
are easy to clean. You should see with the old black [cast-iron] ones. You
must scrub and boot polish. Yo! It was a lot of work! Now all you need
is Handy Andy [a popular brand of ammonia-based cleaning agent].’ So,
according to Jeanette, the labour necessary to maintain a coal stove in
good and visibly acceptable condition has decreased with the advent of
enamelled stoves and modern cleaning agents. Nodding her head,
MaLerato concurred with her friends: ‘Coal stoves warm the whole
house, but our children don’t want to make it [fire]’. The discussion
sparked a vivacious rant between the four women about their children

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(all of whom were well into adulthood) and grandchildren. ‘Children
don’t want to work!’ one exclaimed, ‘they want to watch TV all the time!’
Added Eunice, ‘When we were children we used to work hard.’ ‘Exactly!’
clamoured MaLerato, ‘the children, they just boycott work!’ ‘Eh! But
these young girls are lazy!’ Granny Emily concluded.

The use and upkeep of coal stoves (and the other domestic work pro-
duced through their use) is laborious, even if the labour required today
is less than it was in times gone by, as the grandmothers suggested. It
was rare that any male household members in Mzimhlope were tasked
with preparing the fire in the stove. It was virtually unheard of for men
to clean the burnt ashes out, let alone to participate in cleaning the result-
ing grime around the house. (Two cases were recorded in which a
teenage son assisted with domestic chores such as lighting the coal stove
in instances where women members were unable to be home from work
in time to do so. But in all other households that participated in the
research, at least one woman was available to do the job.) Rather then,
it was women who had to ensure that there was coal and kindling in the
house to burn. They had to stoke the fires slowly from the mid-afternoon
to be ready for cooking by the evening and to clean out the stoves daily.
If this isn’t done diligently, Tshidi explained that ‘they smoke too much!’
making it unpleasant to be inside the house, as well as creating additional
dirt around the house. Women had also to regularly wash the dirty cur-
tains, and scrub soot accumulation from the walls and ceilings. This was
a ‘women’s appliance’, inescapably domestic in its utilization and ramifi-
cations: its use created for women yet more work beyond its basic func-
tion as a cooker and space heater, in the form of house cleaning.

Clearly there appears to be a contradiction in the sampled women’s
opinions and responses to owning washing machines and coal stoves.
Washing machines were rejected on the basis that they characterize
‘lazy’ women. Yet coal stoves were being jettisoned by some of these self-
same women because they were considered to generate domestic work.
On the one hand, an appliance which undermines ‘propriety’ was
avoided. On the other, an appliance which would appear to symbolize
just that hard work which ‘propriety’ demands, was also renounced.

This is not a reflection of an inconsistency in gender ideology, but
rather a contestation within it. Through action and interaction over the
coal stoves, women across generations appear to be challenging the limits
of domestic labour required for their definition as ‘proper’ women, wives
and mothers. Elderly women, like those caught in the moment of con-
versation quoted earlier, admonished the negative attitudes towards coal
stoves held by younger women in terms of ‘laziness’, of ‘boycotting
work’, essentially of being unwilling to fulfil domestic labour in the
manner they consider to be ‘proper’ for women. In rejecting the pres-
ence of coal stoves in their homes, young women, these grandmothers

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contested, demonstrated impropriety in their notions and practice of
their gender role. A ‘proper’ woman, they asserted, works long and hard
at every domestic task. Young women, on the other hand, objected to
the extensive labour related to coal stoves, and – as a concomitant – what
coal stove ownership thus indicated about them as women. When she
asserted that coal stoves simply ‘make too much work’, 25-year-old
Rachel echoed the views of many other women. They lock women into
a role of hard domestic labour that these younger women considered to
be excessive. Rachel and others did not suggest that domestic work itself
is outside of their ‘proper’ role. In dismissing coal stoves they were
simply attempting to shift the boundaries of propriety. The very pres-
ence of a coal stove in the house seems symbolically to suggest that the
women members of the household concede to a degree of domestic
labour that is particularly severe. In other words, though few younger
women suggested that their own value should not lie in their fulfilment
of domestic work, they challenged and negotiated the extent of this defin-
itive labour. They disputed not the content of the notion of their own
‘propriety’ as women, but the degree of labour necessary to achieve it.

Other qualities of the two kinds of appliances further enhance their
nature as fitting for this particular symbolic conversation over gender
roles and identity. As with all objects, coal stoves and washing machines
are rich and complex in their multivalence. And the specific combination
of multiple symbolic meanings associated amongst these Mzimhlope
residents with each of the two appliances predisposes them to this appar-
ently contradictory response on the part of younger women. If washing
machines are semiotic markers of lazy women, so are they strong
symbols of affluence and ability to move with the times. Similarly, coal
stoves are not only symbols of (for some, excessively) hard working
women, they are also associated with tradition, and often poverty. Con-
sider for a moment the two complexes of symbols associated with each
appliance in terms of processes of symbolic rub.

For most women, the semiotic friction associated with washing
machines is rough and jarring. On the one hand, these are attractive
acquisitions. On the other, they undermine women’s presentation of self
as ‘proper’. Thus most women in Mzimhlope, it appears, elected to avoid
the troublesome semiotics with which washing machines were imbued.

In contrast, for many young women coal stoves proffered a coher-
ent symbolic complex, a multivalence which exhibited very little semi-
otic friction and thus did not present them with difficult contradictions.
For younger generations who wished to be (and to be seen as) hip and
contemporary, it made sense to respond vehemently against what, for
them, was a double negative symbolism of the coal stoves as represen-
tative not only of women dedicated in the extreme to domestic labour but
also of lifestyles rooted in the past. For elderly women, on the other

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hand, who felt a sentimental attachment to the traditions and lifestyles
of their past, the symbolism of coal stoves did not present them with an
uncomfortable representation.

Thus each appliance became loaded with meaning – through juxta-
position of symbols, and through the processes of rubbing that occur as
a result. And it is through manoeuvres around and in interaction with
the multivalence of these appliances that women in Mzimhlope acted to
define themselves and others.

Ferguson (1990) has presented a contrasting analysis of intergenera-
tional struggle over entrenched practices around cattle in Lesotho that,
while different in many aspects, is nonetheless useful to apply to the
battle over coal stoves in Mzimhlope, where there is potentially a similar
(though more low key) process at work. On the basis of his analysis of
intergenerational contestation over livestock custom that he observed in
Lesotho, Ferguson argued that generational differences were by no
means an unequivocal signal of change in custom but rather an expres-
sion of opposing interests that are a result of different structural pos-
itions in the household as well as in broader society. He notes that ‘the
loyalty of the older generation to “traditional” livestock customs is rooted
in real economic interests which they, as a category, possess, and is in
no way a “holdover” from pre-capitalist days’ (1990: 164). Thus he antici-
pated that, rather than the custom changing over time as a result of the
struggle, the young who oppose the current livestock customs would
shift their position as they age because it would come to be in their inter-
ests to do so. In this instance, cattle in effect acted as a ‘retirement fund’
for people. They occupied a particular domain of property to which the
elderly had special access ahead of other members of the society. For
example, in one of the few instances in which cattle could be sold, the
cash acquired was allocated specifically to the domain of the elderly.
Thus many youngsters opposed the custom since it trapped valuable
household cash resources out of their reach. For the elderly on the other
hand, it was beneficial to maintain these rules of ‘traditional’ practice.

Considering Mzimhlope, it could be that the older women were par-
ticularly vocal and more vehement about retaining coal stoves because
they rarely had to suffer the labour-related consequences of having them
in their homes, while they were able to enjoy the benefits of a warm, cosy
house. In the multi-generational households prevalent in Mzimhlope, the
arduous physical work associated with coal stoves was relegated to the
younger women. It could thus be that young women were objecting to
coal stoves based on interests associated with their structural position in
relation to the rest of the household, and that this was in turn challeng-
ing and reshaping their beliefs about womanhood in the late 1990s.

If one considers who benefits from these two kinds of appliances,
another contrasting layer of gendering, superimposed on the gendered

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responsibility for operating the appliances, is uncovered. Coal stoves
benefit all in the household by creating cosy warmth way beyond the
internal kitchen doorway, in a manner that a single electric heater does
not. Washing machines however, stand to benefit only the women who
are responsible for the laundry. Their presence in a household does not
affect anyone else’s time or comfort. All members of the household will
have clean shirts and socks whether a machine is owned and used or
not. Yet machines are costly. The fairly widespread ownership of coal
stoves, and the absence of washing machines and other domestic labour-
saving devices, from these households can perhaps be partly attributed
to this ‘gendering’ of benefits. Ross (1995) points out that in Galeshewe
in the Northern Cape, TVs and hi-fis were prioritized by men over appli-
ances that would alleviate some of the domestic workload that women
faced. I would postulate similarly (and indeed my data seem to support
the argument) that if expensive domestic appliances are to be bought
with household finances (even if the money is earned by women), they
are likely to be those which benefit all, such as televisions, hi-fis, and
fridges, rather than those which benefit women alone.

CONCLUSION

The symbolic dialogues that I have described here reiterate and affirm
recent material culture theorists’ positions on the conversive, interde-
pendent, engaged (as argued by Weiss, 1996), inseparable (Miller, 1995)
relationship between people and things, while providing an insight into
a specific set of negotiations around the constitution of women’s pro-
priety in Mzimhlope in Soweto.

The two domestic appliances – the washing machine and the coal
stove – were integral to the construction and negotiation of people’s
gender relations and identities in Mzimhlope. In a context where for
many, women’s propriety was seen to be located in their dedicated com-
mitment to domestic tasks, the washing machine emerged as a powerful
symbol of laziness, and was rejected by most on the grounds that it
undermined their image as ‘good’ women or as the men related to such
women. The coal stove provided an interesting corollary as an appliance
associated with hard work, but considered by many young women, in
particular, to be excessively so. Many of these young women rejected it
(in the midst of consternation and disapproval from the older generation)
in a challenge to the extent of domestic labour necessary for the defi-
nition of ‘good’ and ‘proper’ womanhood. This sometimes subtle, some-
times conspicuous dissension and debate that arose between individuals
over the appliances – and concomitantly, which images, actions and roles
were appropriate for women and which were not – marks the hetero-
geneity and flux of women’s propriety as a concept-in-process, as a

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concept of which the meaning and expression is continually being
reworked in the process of its use.

The multiple symbolic associations of each appliance manifested as
a site of creativity and reflexivity in which women worked with, around
and against the multivalence, the incoherence, the interplay of the
symbols in their searching for comfortable (or contesting uncomfortable)
personal associations. In some instances, like that of the Mtimkhulu
household, a semiotic friction pitting good womanhood against modern
living and upward mobility was in effect made neutral by women’s
actions around the washing machine. In others, like the Ngcobos, the dis-
comfort of the machine was avoided altogether and alternatives found.
Importantly, the appliances’ multivalencies resonated differently for
different people – what for some was an uncomfortable contradiction
was for others an untroubled coherence. Thus, whilst for some women
having a coal stove in their kitchen reinforced not only appropriate and
‘proper’ gender identities but also an important link with their past, for
others these two symbolic associations jarred with their images of them-
selves. In the first instance the symbols were harmonious, in the latter
they were frictional. Whatever the case, women were revealed to live
with or at times naturalize the contradictions, enabling the contesting
images to reside comfortably alongside each other, and demonstrating
women’s capacity to make sense of and live within the fractious social
spaces they inhabit.

Thus, conspicuous by their presence – or their absence – in a Mzimh-
lope home, washing machines and coal stoves produced and reinforced
both experiences and images of gender roles and relations. Furthermore,
the struggles that occurred around them were deeper than simple dis-
agreements over their use or disuse, and rather cut to the core of people’s
perceptions of women’s ‘proper’ role as mothers, sisters, daughters and
wives. By contesting appliance ownership and usage, women and men,
old and young, made explicit their personal boundaries – sometimes
battle lines – of their notions of ‘proper’ gender and generational roles.

Acknowledgements

The ethnographic material on which this article is based was collected as part
of a research project investigating the social dynamics of domestic energy use
amongst low-income households in Soweto, South Africa. I wish to acknowledge
Caroline White, who as the project coordinator, helped with the early con-
ceptualization of some of the ideas I present, as well as Tebogo Mafokoane, my
co-researcher on the project. My thanks too, to those who have provided com-
ments on the article along the way, including Louise Meintjes, Owen Crankshaw,
Sally Frankental, Andrew Spiegel, Christopher Pinney and an anonymous
referee. The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation, the Centre
for Science Development, the University of Cape Town and the Department of
Mineral and Energy Affairs, South Africa, towards the research is gratefully

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acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions reached are mine, and are
not necessarily to be attributed to any of the funders, nor those who kindly
commented.

Notes

1.. There are of course a few exceptions. In particular, Silverstone and Hirsch’s
(1992) edited collection of essays, Consuming Technologies: Media and Infor-
mation in Domestic Spaces, includes a number of studies which broach the field
of appliances from this perspective. Throughout the collection, the connec-
tion between information and communication technologies, their consump-
tion and the domestic sphere or, phrased differently, the ‘articulation of
technology and domesticity’ (1992: 5) is examined, with a predominant
interest in the meanings located in their use by household members, rather
than the meanings suggested by their mere presence in the home. See for
example chapters in the collection (1992) by Cockburn, Haddon, Hartman and
Gray, Hirsch and Morley, Livingstone, Miller, Murdoch, Silverstone,
Wheelock. See also Bowden and Offer (1996) for a consideration of the
reasons behind the slow take-up of household appliances in inter-war
England.

2. See Ramphele and Boonzaier (1988), Bozzoli (1991), Mathabane (1994) for
corroborative evidence.

3. I discuss the notion of electric appliances as symbolic markers of modern
living in more detail elsewhere (Meintjes, 2000).

4. In the remaining 42% of sampled households, coal stoves were owned at some
stage, but had been thrown out: some with the advent of electricity in the
area in the late 1970s, some because they were broken, some because they
were no longer considered necessary or appropriate appliances.

5. I use this category loosely, to refer to both teenage and older, working-age
women.

6. A common expression of emphasis.
7. In an incomplete manuscript, Spiegel (n.d.) quotes Victor Raynal, chief distri-

bution engineer in the Johannesburg municipal electricity provider during the
1970s commenting that

at no point [in the early development of Soweto] was electricity considered,
because they [the residents] seldom bathed, and there was therefore little need for
hot water. In any case, they could hardly afford food, they were so poor . . . and
electricity was non-payable. The only things that were provided were those that
were payable.

8. Note that the references to ‘child’ and ‘children’ made by these elderly
women can mean anything from young school girls to mothers well into
adulthood. These are statements of relative, rather than absolute, youth.

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◆ H E L E N M E I N T J E S is a researcher in the HIV/AIDS unit at the Childrens
Institute at the University of Cape Town. Her recent research was concerned
with notions of belonging, home and propriety amongst migrant women living
in an informal settlement in Cape Town. Address: The Childrens Institute, Uni-
versity of Cape Town, 46 Sawkins Road, Rondebosch, 7700, Cape Town, South
Africa. [email: hmeintjes@yahoo.com]

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C H A R G E D A RT I FAC T S A N D
T H E D E T O N AT I O N O F
L I M I N A L I T Y
Teddy-Bear Diplomacy in the Newborn Incubator Machine

◆ K Y R A M A R I E L A N D Z E L I U S

Visiting fellow, Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, UK

Abstract
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 techno-
liminal 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.

Key Words ◆ incubator ◆ liminal ◆ motherhood ◆ preterm ◆ prosthesis ◆
technology ◆ teddy bear

INCUBATING INFANTS AND INCUBATOR ORNAMENTS

Over the past two decades, a new techno-medical artifact has come into
prominence on the expanding frontier of cyborganized human survival

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and identities. A precision player in the dramatic theater of scientific life-
support, the miracle machine in question is the neonatal intensive care
monitor, what in the vernacular we might call an ‘incubator’. Its task is
no less than to artificially gestate to maturity a baby born before its time,
that is to say earlier than 38 weeks gestational age. The experience of
premature delivery and the ensuing prolonged hospitalization of the
infant characteristically rip asunder a new mother’s lifeworld, destabi-
lizing her post-pregnancy subjectivity and desires, and denaturalizing
her taken-for-granted maternal identity. Moreover, the incubator
machinery that labors to sustain the infant, and its attendant medical
entourage of physicians, protocol and procedures, necessarily – as an
incontrovertible feature of the therapeutic process itself – intrude upon her
relationship with her newborn and thwart yearnings for emotional and
bodily bonding with child. Nonetheless, while a mother may be periph-
eral, my ethnographic research has found that she is far from passive,
for it can be said that many a mother symbolically ‘stakes her presence’
in the machine, namely through the widespread practice whereby

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F I G U R E 1 Incubated infant with incubator ornaments
Internet photo used by kind permission of the Bruckman family.

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mothers place stuffed animal toys, dolls, ribbons, photographs, greeting
cards, and like trinkets into their babies’ incubator units (see Figures 1
and 2).

The objective of this essay is to explore how this decorative activity
embeds coping mechanisms to help women (psychological and socially)
come to terms with the exigencies imposed by the existential crisis of a
preterm baby. Given the baby’s extreme developmental immaturity and
the invasive nature of the medical treatment, and based on my fieldwork
experiences, I interpret this behavior to be directed less towards the
infant, but rather to be oriented as a kind of overture to the incubator.
My focus here is thus to probe the implications of ornamenting the incu-
bator, as I have observed it unfold through anthropological study of one
local universe of North American women. Because ornamentalizing
practices are semiotically-loaded acts with patterned formalities, a
specific context and a transformative agenda (see Bell, 1997), I argue that
they gravitate towards ritual, and hence analyze this behavior as a quasi-
ritual endeavor. It can be contended that the enlistment of juvenile play-
things and nostalgic mementos in such quasi-ritual endeavors represents
an obvious turn towards items of comfort and everyday familiarity,
which may manifest a more or less conscious gesture to mitigate the

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F I G U R E 2 Incubated infant with incubator ornaments
Internet photo used by kind permission of the Frackiewicz family.

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threatening alienation of the incubator machine. I wish to examine this
thesis by examining the nuances and multiple significations of the per-
formative and transformative acts I nickname teddy-bear diplomacy. In so
doing, I seek to ponder the role of both esoteric and trivial material
culture as meaning-making artifactual others in our consciousness and in
our relationships. In the practice of incubator ornamentation we witness
fertile incongruities at play in a paradox whereby cheap, alienable, mass-
produced toys and trinkets come to be nestled together with baby –
inside a high-tech, exclusive, vital instrument of life support and sur-
veillance.

PRECISION INSTRUMENTS AND INDETERMINATE
PLAYERS

From their crude 19th-century agricultural origins as heating chambers
for chicken eggs, to the development of the first oxygenated bathtubs in
the 1930s, to today’s multi-applianced conglomerates, incubators have
been engineered into complex cybernetic systems that traffic in nutri-
ents, gases, pharmaceuticals and waste products, whilst also monitoring
the vital statistics of their human inhabitants. During the same historical
period, ‘preterm’ infants have evolved from being freaks-on-parade at
Victorian carnivals, to being hailed ‘wonders of science’ at successive
World’s Fairs where prototype incubators were first exhibited (see Baker,
1996). Today, preterm infants constitute a not-inconsequential percent-
age of newborns who demand extensive investment with state-of-the-art
resources, and profoundly alter the taken-for-granted course of human
existence. Indeed, an entirely new field of science – the barely 4 decades
strong medical subdiscipline of neonatology – has emerged to attend this
new ‘category of person’. Or we might more accurately say that this
person has emerged as an ontological invention of the biomedical para-
digm; and, on occasion, even an iatrogenic (i.e. medically-produced) con-
sequence, because precipitating factors for premature birth in certain
cases implicate medical practice itself – like in-vitro fertilization, along-
side demographic (e.g. older maternal age) and lifestyle risks (e.g. illicit
drug use). In other words, a preterm infant is not simply a patient of
high-tech healing, it is acutely a product/byproduct of technoscientific
parentage and modes of knowing and doing. By making life possible for
a human who ‘ought’ to have been as yet unborn or fated to a near-
certain death, the technology ‘at our disposal’ introduces a taxonomic
puzzle. The ‘preterm’ infant – a being who, by another name, could well
be called a ‘post-corporeal fetus’ – begins life betwixt and between the
womb and the world. The resulting ambiguous status endows preterm
infants with a categorical indeterminacy; and I propose that this qualifies
them into a transitory condition known as ‘liminality’ in anthropological

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parlance. Turner defines liminality as the ‘state and process of mid-tran-
sition in a rite of passage’ (Turner and Turner, 1978: 249); and, follow-
ing Van Gennep, equates it with being on the threshold – the limen – of
orthodox states-of-being, particularly during major life transitions
(Turner, 1969: 94). The ideological values pertaining to liminality gener-
ally hold that the secular powerlessness of the ‘neophyte’ liminal figure-
in-transition is compensated for by a sacred powerfulness (Turner and
Turner, 1978: 249–50). Accordingly, a condition of liminality character-
istically presupposes ritual action (and vice versa); indeed, in Turner’s
theorizing, liminality is inherently the most important dynamic of ritual.
In a general sense, we can say that liminality connotes a simultaneous
vulnerable/empowering state of transition, but also of potentiality
(Turner and Turner, 1978: 3). It is problematically outside conventional
taxonomies and requires new structural responses. In adopting the
concept of liminality to situate the preterm infant, I here put forth the
conjecture that bio-technological practices are themselves implicated in
creating new forms of liminality, what we might call techno-liminalities,
like the ‘mutation’ (Dumit, 1997: 84, and passim) in the category of
person newly recognized as the preterm baby. Equipped, or burdened,
with extraordinary liminal distinctions, this person is emerging as a neo-
phyte social player to be reckoned with, and one whose identity (at least
in the formative years of childhood) is expressly brokered by mothers
through practices of incubator ornamentation. These nascent ritualizing
processes themselves work alongside other world-making venues, like
Internet solidarity-networks and (self-proclaimed) ‘cybernursery web-
rings’ where parents of ‘preemie’ babies exchange heartfelt stories about
their experiences amidst graphic photographs of their hospitalized
infants (see Landzelius, 1999).

Tiny infants connected to massive incubators present an arresting
sight indeed. As noted, incubators comprise an assembly of precision
instruments with a mission to gestate, and can be said to collectively
function as a veritable prosthetic umbilicus provisioning the extracorpo-
real fetus. Given the organic/inorganic hybridity of the incubator-child
dyad, the simulated ecosystem plus inhabitant approximate what I have
termed a cyborg womb (Landzelius, 1999). Elsewhere (1999: 95) I have
proposed that cyborg wombs constitute a type of charged artifactual other,
a category I define with triple intent. First, charged artifacts are charac-
teristically vital machines or devices charged with existential tasks to
endow life and/or to normalize, via prostheses, the human organism ‘as
we know it’. Second, charged artifacts are invested with (and evocative
of) heightened emotional charge, in ways that radically reorder our inter-
subjective relations with human and technological others. Third,
charged artifacts impose charges on us: they extract costs by making dis-
sonant taken-for-granted identities; and they extract costs in the ways

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that their irresistibility (the near-impossibility of imagining to resist them)
unhinges our pre-charged being-in-the-world. Taking these thematiza-
tions as a point of departure, I wish to note that it is mothers whose
worlds are most charged by the foreign element of simulated vitality and
surrogacy that is the artifactual incubator-other. It bursts onto the
horizon of her consciousness and her paradigmatic relationships, dis-
torting her experiential codes and relegating her to an auxiliary status
vis-à-vis her own infant – a being who exists in a state of symbiotic co-
dependency with this very machine-other. And yet, the machine meta-
phorically also holds mother: positioning her in a double bind that is
anchored in her own problematic ambivalence and the utter inconceiv-
ability of resistance towards this artifact, to which she is simultaneously
profoundly grateful and uneasily resentful (Landzelius, 1999). As I have
proposed, one way in which mothers have collectively sought to negoti-
ate these charged artifacts into their lives is by embellishing them with
simple playthings and kitsch recast in the a-typical role of incubator
ornaments. By virtue of their incongruous assignment, it is suggested
that such objects, out-of-place themselves, assume a ‘liminal’ status
characteristic of items on the threshold of conventional cultural uses,
contexts and classifications. If we apply Douglas’ theorizations on ambi-
guity and the ritual potency of disorder, the liminality of incubator orna-
ments accordingly tenders them, symbolically speaking, with ‘both
danger and power’ (Douglas, 1984: 94). ‘To have been in the margins is
to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power’
(1984: 97). It follows that liminality can have fertile consequences for
the invention of new orders, as Douglas explains: ‘disorder by impli-
cation is unlimited, no pattern has been realized in it, but its potential
for patterning is indefinite . . . We recognize that it is destructive to exist-
ing patterns, also that it has potentiality’ (1984: 94). It is the simultaneous
disorderly, but restructuring, communicative potentiality of toys and
trinkets out of place in the social drama of the NICU (neonatal intensive
care unit) that constitutes the issue under study here.

That mothers keenly recognize, even consciously exploit, the incon-
gruous nature of toys and trinkets stationed in incubators is attested to
in their narratives, which often iterated the striking differences between
furry animal toys and hard precision instruments. Notably, it is mothers
who orchestrate these enactments of polarity, a telling consideration
given the satellite position that the maternal figure occupies vis-à-vis the
cyborg womb. Given their protagonist role, mothers’ penchants to dec-
orate the machine comprise transindividual social initiatives to recon-
figure maternal status and agency within the hospital milieu. Hereby, in
response to the situational liminality of the preterm infant and the
techno-liminality of the cyborg womb, mothers invent a rejoinder limi-
nality in the contrastive form of incubated teddy bears. Like many ritual

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acts, their performances can be regarded as ‘nonformalized gestures that
emerge under experimental conditions and have the potential to gener-
ate new rituals as well as new cultural forms’ (Alexander, 1991: 16). In
seeking to distinguish the empowering ambiguity of incubator orna-
ments, I turn to ethnographic accounts of decorating the machine.

My analysis is based upon the personal stories of 124 mothers of
preterm, hospitalized infants whom I interviewed during two years
(1990–92) of participant-observation in the NICU of a major US hospital
(see Kaiser, 1993; Landzelius, 1999). These women came from diverse
ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds; however, for the sake of brevity
their heterogeneity must be glossed over herein. Likewise, citations are
here decontextualized from any given mother’s narrative (presented
under pseudonym) and untethered from the dramatic, often traumatic,
details of her and her child’s experiences. What emerges is a constella-
tion of attitudes drawn from mothers’ words and deeds. Taken together,
maternal quotes and actions express the range, but even more tren-
chantly, the convergent themes of these women’s experiences. Their re-
presentation here is framed by the tenet that ‘[h]umans always find
themselves in a world that is saturated in signification, and whose char-
acter only reveals itself gradually and in fragments’ (Thomas, 1998: 108).
By mapping mothers’ attitudes I hope to discern from such fragments
the dynamic spectrum of saturated significations that shape the world of
incubator ornamentation. The majority of things so appointed start the
venture as items of recent purchase; there were, however important
exceptions, most notably in the use of family photographs, religious
icons, and what mothers referred to as ‘good luck charms’ to which they
harbored prior attachment. The objects of adornment described here,
and collectively implied in my discussion of ‘teddy bears et al.’ (stuffed
animals by far being the most frequent) typify the repertoire of material
culture that has found its way into neonatal life-support chambers.

When asked about this behavior, one mother explained to me that it
was her ‘desire to make things cozy, more home-like’ that motivated sit-
uating a ‘family’ of stuffed teddy bear figures in different sizes and colors
inside her child’s incubator. Ginger, another mother, stated that she
found it ‘so much easier’ to see her daughter surrounded by ‘some col-
orful toys and friendly-type things,’ like the bunny-shaped rattle propped
at her baby’s feet. Emma expressed her wish to ‘soften’ the ‘cold and
impersonal’ hospital setting and ‘give it a positive boost’ by stringing
mini banners, computer-printed with cartoon graphics and her son’s
name, around the perimeter of the unit. Likewise, Rochelle confessed to
‘trying to brighten up the atmosphere’ by equipping the incubator with
a stuffed ‘happy face’ toy (a yellow cloth sphere with a smiling-mouth-
and-eye pattern, which is a mildly ubiquitous and oft-satirized souvenir
of ludic Americana). Alicia made decoration imperative, and hinged it to

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the task of enlivening the machines: ‘Watcha gonna do but decorate
these cold, hard machines, and make them cheery and homey . . . well
– as alive as we can’. Alicia’s rhetorical challenge ‘watcha gonna do but
. . .’ was given a more pointed directive in Latoya’s pronouncement that:
‘to see such wee babies in such gigantic monitors without so much as
giving them something . . . you’d have to be heartless’. Claire put the
matter in terms of sartorial decorum: ‘well them monitors should be
dressed up a bit’. Marta articulated similar sentiments in describing ‘how
sweet’ the ‘cute and classy’ white booties with blue laces looked as addi-
tions to her son’s artificial life-support chamber. Helen explained that
the family photograph and greeting card she had taped to the sides of
the chamber made her daughter appear ‘less lonely’: ‘I want her to know
I’m always here’.

Such sentiments – that incubators ‘needed’ to be made lively, pretty,
cozy, soft, more cheery, homey, colorful and the like – surfaced recur-
rently in the reasons mothers gave for embellishing high-tech medical
contraptions with low-tech toys and trinkets. Reading backwards from
these graphic adjectives, we encounter the attributes mothers tacitly
assign to incubator machines; and expose the attitudes underlying
mothers’ proactive motives for turning simple objects-of-recreation into
objects-of-transformation imbued with serious meaning-making tasks.
Borrowing the expressive phrase ‘human-object entanglement’ from
Thomas (1991), my interpretive framework maps descriptive fragments
into two predominant modes of mothers’ entanglements with the ‘object-
ness’ of the machine and the ornaments situated therein, given the ‘sub-
jectness’ of its infant inhabitant (for a psychoanalytic reading of these
practices, see Landzelius, 2001). I theorize that these ‘modes of entan-
glement’ premise and act upon desires to: (1) domesticate the cyborg
womb, and symbolically bring it into the moral economy of home; and
(2) animate the cyborg womb and enculturate it away from the global,
impersonal machinations of technoscience and engineering networks.
Both modalities work alongside other persuasions towards an ultimate
goal of socializing, humanizing, and in some cases even spiritualizing the
machine.

DOMESTICATING THE MACHINE

Considered collectively, mothers’ comments about incubator ornamen-
tation can be said to have engendered a leitmotif of ‘home’. Some nar-
ratives invoked the potent signifier itself (i.e. in expressing desires to
make the incubator ‘more homey’); whereas others discursively couched
it in synonyms or idioms approximating home (e.g. familiar, welcome,
comfy, secure, cheery, cozy). At times, the rhetorics of home yielded
more concrete references to the real article, as in Samantha’s contention

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that ‘. . . to see that [nursery] room already decorated and everything
back home, it’s too much, it’s too hard when my baby is here [at the hos-
pital] instead’. In an analogous vein, Grace poses the pregnant question:
‘Why be home? It’s lonely, empty-feeling’ to rationalize her long hospi-
tal stays. Her narrative later hints at a vicarious, compensatory resolu-
tion of her own alienation from home in her choice of ‘cuddly’ and
‘personal’ to characterize the furry koala bear cling-toy she fastened to
the mattress of her baby’s chamber. This mother’s despondent inter-
rogatory ‘why be home?’ keenly verbalizes the dilemmas facing these
women; for in the event of a sick newborn, the hospital supplies de facto
first home for baby. By default it thus becomes ‘second home’ to
mothers, some of whom adopted this clichéd, if nonetheless enigmatic
phrase; and by so doing, implicitly conceded their forfeiture of any
uncontested (i.e. emotionally and physically integrated) attitudes vis-à-
vis their own homes. Even if she is afforded sympathetic treatment and
privileged visiting hours at the hospital, a mother is ultimately relegated
to the outsider status of ‘visitor’: shuttling to and fro between home and
‘second-home’ in order simply to be near her child. This provisionally
appoints mothers to a condition of circumstantial nomadism in which
they must navigate the dialectic of public and private on a trek wherein
home-point becomes nebulous and untethered, a disengaged subjectiv-
ity – ‘empty’ in the words of Grace, ‘painful’, ‘lonely’, ‘all-wrong’ to
quote other mothers. Given such enforced (spatial and mental) migra-
tions, a mother’s psychological drama may parallel that of a refugee, for
whom the notions of home and origin ‘may . . . refer to many places and
not one fixed locus’, as Parkin (1999: 309) proposes. Indeed, one might
well say that the technoscientific invention of the preterm baby, in effect
makes mothers into classificatory ‘refugees’: exiled from traditional
maternal identities and role expectations. Notably, one of the first of
many let-downs a mother of a hospitalized newborn must endure is the
situational affront to normative expectations of home, wherein heartfelt
anticipations to bring the baby – who is, after all, the newest kinship
actor – back home are painfully thwarted. From this perspective,
mothers’ expressive ornamentalizing acts might be read as gestures to
syncretize the disparate worlds of hospital and home. Partially aestheti-
cizing pain becomes tantamount to anesthetizing it.

Hence it is suggested that by aspiring (through objects of adornment)
to make the artificial incubator – the surrogate mother – more ‘homey’,
mothers are engaged in a sort of domestication-at-a-distance. This exer-
cise proceeds by symbolically shifting the territories of home and hos-
pital both discursively (in defining the decorated monitor as more
‘homey’) and materially (in transporting items from home to hospital in
order to ‘personalize’ the medical environment). To place a familiar play-
thing or personal memento in the multiply-gadgeted high-tech crib can

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be conceived as an act of inscription, a liturgical performance to inscribe
‘unconsecrated’ (read: anonymous, dangerous, mysterious) institutional-
ized space with the (familiar and safe) kitsch of home. Decoration is thus
akin to an enculturation of the machine into the household; or more
accurately, into that protective realm of security, predictability, and idio-
syncrasy whose referent conjures the dense imaginary of home. Given
that ‘home’ is a saturated root metaphor and quasi-localizable ‘relation-
ship’ in addition to a geography, I want to emphasize that homey knick-
knacks were insignia less of a residence called home than of a cultural
schemata-made-discretionary project of ‘home’. Such private projects are
arguably wedded to an archetype (albeit individualized) whose imagin-
ary is rehearsed in the gifts of sentimental value that a mother chooses
to bestow upon the entity of incubator-plus-child.

One can discern processes of sympathetic magic at play in a quasi-
ritual wherein indices of domesticity (objects brought from, purchased
for, or constitutive of the domestic sphere) are imbued with the power
to transform the circumscribed incubator cubicle into a domicile more
like the (expected) baby’s room back home. The transference of material
proxies of home to the hospital can be said to enact an equivalence that
rehearses – in reverse – the transferal of the child, and thereby symbol-
ically ‘performs’ the wished-for exchange that one mother confusingly,
but (from a Lacanian [1977] appreciation of the significance of ‘defective
language’ for communicative intent) tellingly articulated in the remark:
‘I want to transport [my baby’s] room right here [to the hospital], or
really of course it’s the other way around: I mean that, of course, home
is where I want to picture her’. Through the ‘agency’ that is (culturally
and personally) assigned to toys and trinkets out of place, the incubator-
plus-inhabitant are thus syntagmatically brought into the moral economy
that signifies the household. Here, within the orbit of domesticity, family
affairs and personal histories, is where – naturally and rightly – the child
ought to be. Accordingly, it warrants conjecture that ornamenting the
machine harbors aspirations of mild insurrection, such that to magically
expropriate the cyborg womb into the values and significations of ‘home’
precipitates a cosmetic act of benign resistance. Because, following
Butler (1993: 35) ‘the intelligibility of materiality is an effect of power,
realized in performance’, mothers’ performative actions which stretch
the cultural intelligibility of material trinkets therefore subvert forms of
power conditioned through normative discourse and practices. From this
perspective, decorating stages a spatial contest which playfully chal-
lenges the medical regime’s disciplining of mother-visitors. By taking
space in the incubator, items of trivia are symbolically engaged in phys-
ically staking a mother’s presence and asserting kinship rights. The sub-
version proceeds despite (or perhaps because of) the subordinate status
of crude materia relative to sophisticated life-support equipment.

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Importantly, such vicarious resistance is both orderly and condoned: for
example, a contemporaneous textbook on the care of preterm babies
actually instructs nurses to extend polite indulgence, even encourage-
ment and guidelines, to mothers’ desires to place personal objects and
small toys in the intensive care chambers (see Lancaster, 1986: 411). Per-
mission to indulge these slight transgressions is defended on the grounds
of a ‘therapeutic’ paradigm: that striking out against the psychological
sterility of the hospital environment with the accoutrements of home
affords an acceptable, ‘healthy’ outlet for maternal grief, anger and
anxiety. The ironic entrapment, however, is that to some degree any
pseudo-resistance is, by default, institutionally co-opted – ‘tamed’ –
alongside a mother’s own object-oriented taming of that foreign element
which technologically nurtures her infant.

The resulting assimilation of resistance has affinities with the situ-
ation that Marcuse (1965) formulated as ‘repressive tolerance’: the ten-
dency for institutions of power to necessarily co-opt resistance. In the
asymmetrical relations characterizing dominant systems, dissonance is
elusive and illusionary; indeed the only expression dissonance can take
preconditionally renders it ineffective. Similarly, the permission the hos-
pital accords mothers to enact subliminal fantasies of resistance
bespeaks tacit recognition of the pragmatic value vested in accommo-
dating a mother’s imagined escape from the double bind the crisis of a
preterm, hospitalized infant imposes. Hereby, the opportunity to con-
structively ‘let off steam’ through ornamenting the incubator helps
mothers not only better cope with the exigencies of the crisis, but more
willingly comply with the protocols of the institution. Mothers’ pseudo-
resistances as well as their unequivocally humane indulgence by hospi-
tals (contra their strict regimens and policing of hygiene) can also be read
as adaptive responses to what I described earlier as the irresistibility of
charged artifacts like the cyborg womb, which engender challenges and
problematic ambivalences that require strategic management.

ANIMATING THE SURROGATE

Metaphorically and materially summoning movable proxies of ‘home’ as
a means to resist the disciplined sterility of the hospital enclave marks
a gambit to superficially, but nevertheless critically, punctuate the sepa-
rateness of these places. In choosing stuffed animals, dolls, pictures and
ribbons to be aestheticizing accoutrements in this endeavor, mothers are
deliberately reacting to the incongruities of hard machines versus soft
toys; high-tech versus low-tech; cold, white, lifeless appliances counter-
acted by warm, colorful, lifelike comfort items. Mothers discursively
align ornamentation with desires to: ‘enliven’, ‘soften’, ‘enrich’,
‘comfort’, ‘brighten up’, and even ‘give a heart to’ the cyborg womb. The

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word ‘color’ frequently seasoned mothers’ narratives, and by implication
was accredited with making the incubator ‘more cheery’ and bringing it
to ‘life’, possibly because color pointedly contrasts with the sterile white
landscape of the hospital. Moreover, despite the fact that bright heating
lamps keep the chamber at body temperature and its surface warm to
the touch, mothers frequently describe the incubator as ‘cold’, suggest-
ing that their attitudes are indebted less to perceptual experiences of its
operating conditions (which they certainly have) and more to a projected
schemata. Alexis’s stated purpose to make this apparatus seem ‘less
harsh’ by placing a plush teddy bear inside, presupposes to tame the
impersonal milieu through soft objects symbolically imbued with tran-
quilizing powers. Likewise, mothers talked about ‘dressing up’, ‘dolling
up’, ‘fancifying’ and ‘sprucing up’ the incubator, the latter phrase resort-
ing to slang to evoke ambitions to make the incubator ‘fresher’ and alive
– in the manner of an evergreen tree. Tanya used the vernacular in artic-
ulating her wish to ‘deck out’ the incubator with the selected greeting
cards she had placed therein. Lisa struggled to articulate her feelings:
‘[the machine] well it’s . . . there, just there, not moving, but there and
big. I know it’s doing something, something very, very important . . . but
it’s still so – there it is. Well, I can’t explain it’. Arguably, what is so ‘just
there’ is the machine’s unwieldiness, its non-negotiability, its stoic,
unpacified properties; arguably what Lisa can’t explain, in part, is the
ambiguity and contradiction of a complex contraption which nurtures
life, but which is itself inert. If we probe the meanings taking shape in
mothers’ explanatory repertoires, we can trace ideological connections
between the words mothers choose to justify ornamentation and hidden
longings to counter its implied ‘lifelessness’. This rhetorical association
prompts me to contend that decorating enacts a desire to animate the
machine. In various guises and modes of expression, the goal of enliven-
ing was sought after and lauded, almost as if mothers harbored some
kind of predilection to initiate these contraptions into the category of
vital beings.

My focus on motives of animation to help explain the behavior of
mothers is not, however, intended to indicate that incubators necessarily
strike mothers as ‘inanimate’; nor to imply that these devices are without
signs of ‘life’. To the contrary, although incubators and toys are equally
non-organic, both harbor certain simulated qualities stereotypically
(perhaps instinctively) associated with life. Neonatal intensive care
machines (perhaps like all prostheses) are quasi-lifelike: they beep, buzz,
blink as an expressive feature of their appointed task to perform cyber-
netic life-support. That is, they have sounds and lights, internal pro-
gramming and clocks that automatically turn gadgets, printers, heating
units, etc., on and off in response to critical feedback from the infant.
Their assembly of component systems thus together orchestrates a

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unique functional whole with vital communicative potential. Such pro-
found physical and informational symbiosis with their human inhabi-
tants is essential to their dynamic assignment; and, as I have elaborated
elsewhere (Landzelius, 1999) establishes the incubator to be taken as no
less than an extra-corporeal sign vehicle of the very terms of the baby’s
survival. It sustains, registers, supplies, monitors and signifies ‘a life’ by
means of mechanical, electrical, chemical grammars. But emphatically
(and to the unversed novice, decisively) its signals are intimidating, its
lights haphazard, its codes undecipherable, its constitution faceless. Such
built-in tensions (i.e. between giving life, but not living; sending vital
messages, but not interacting) may drive mothers’ resolves to animate
the machine. From this perspective, it is precisely because the machine’s
ambiguity (its own techno-liminality as simultaneously animate/inani-
mate) ‘needs’ resolution in one direction or another, that a stuffed animal
toy might redeem intentions to give a ‘face’ to the cyborg womb.

As commonplace objects in the culture inventories and cognitive tax-
onomies of western(ized) children (albeit imbued with local variation
and meanings) teddy bears and like anthropomorphized animal incar-
nations are aptly enlisted to give this face. Created in our own image,
diminutive teddy bears, et al. are almost invariably interpreted as ‘cute’
and ‘adorable’, and are cuddled, named, and animated by adults as well
as children. Given their ‘neotenic’ features (i.e. human-like frontal faces,
spherical heads, big eyes, juvenile body proportions) they have been
deemed to inspire pan-human care-giving proclivities and instincts to
nurture (Lorenz, 1950); and, indeed, they have ‘evolved’ (or rather have
been selectively designed) along a continuum of increasing baby-like
traits (Hinde and Barden, 1985). In all-too-human array, fanciful beasts
ubiquitously populate our metaphorical worlds, and become the
subject/objects of vast psychological projections in fictions whose
purpose is actually to edify us in the ways and wherefores of human
sociality. Though presupposing a great deal of semiotic plasticity, they
are nonetheless kindred to the ‘distinct category of cultural artifacts
which deflect creativity and innovation, which cultivate continuity, con-
formity and routine, which celebrate sentiment and banality’ that
Binkley (2000: 134) attributes to kitsch. By enlisting creatures of kitsch
and carriers of myth for animating tasks, a mother implicitly mines the
fertile reservoir of orthodox values associated with cute things (e.g. inno-
cence, nostalgia, dependency, domesticity, predictability). In his work on
the multivocality of ‘cuteness’ and its subordinate implications in con-
temporary Japan, McVeigh (1996: 297) explores how the ‘abstractness of
cuteness allows it to be generalized across different situations and
semantic domains’. Likewise, I would argue that the normative signifi-
cations of cute stuffed animals in the contemporary US are (more or less
consciously) mobilized in incubator ornamentation to broker a mother’s

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social relations and legitimize her role as nurturer, while simultaneously
comforting her own anxieties about the cyborg womb. Teddy bears, et
al. that ‘people’ the baby’s incubated world initiate that remote world,
and to some extent its inscrutable canon, into popular cultural gram-
mars. In addition, their semiotic elasticity as toys and trinkets out of
place allows mothers to negotiate power and powerlessness, by balanc-
ing the need for affirmation and a sense of effectuality with the need for
reassurance.

Stuffed animal toys – the graphically most obvious, most caricatured
exemplars of the inclination to animate – were also the most popular
genre in the NICU. Still, alongside them or sometimes in their stead
could be found items of related intent. In this context, greeting cards
harbor interesting collateral implications. Due to the abnormal events
surrounding delivery and the uncertain fate of the child, mothers of
preterm babies rarely receive the ‘pre-packaged sentiments’ (Jaffe, 1999)
tendered through printed cards customarily exchanged on occasions of
birth. It appears, whether because of the upbeat tone and generic lan-
guage of card discourse or because of the ambiguity of commodified
words (poised between not-pure gift and not-merely commodity status
[see Jaffe, 1999]) that celebrating the arrival of a preterm ‘family
member’ with greeting cards is deemed inappropriate. Given this com-
municative void, cards in the incubator – though uncommon – become
transactionally significant: as ‘epideictic discourse’ (D’Angelo, 1992: 337)
their presence betokens the dedication of significant others (‘senders’)
and the affirmation of mother–child (‘receivers’). By thus marking a sym-
bolic extension of the mother’s support network into the NICU, these
‘sites of virtual interaction’ (Jaffe, 1999: 117) arguably perform a
meaningful role as ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1977). They implicitly
advertise a vote of social confidence in a woman’s maternal endowment.
As tokens enlisted by a mother in her personal project to animate the
machine, greeting cards might also be said to ‘dress’ the cyborg womb
in (and into) cultural garb and values.

When the ornament in the incubator constitutes a photograph of
mother and/or other family member(s), the animating mission arguably
coalesces with a wish to participate ‘imagistically’: As one mother put
it, ‘I want to be there. I want my daughter to know she’s safe, that
Mommy’s with her’. In interpreting this notion of ‘being there’, a notion
frequently voiced in narratives, it seems clear that the photographic
image serves less for baby to ‘know Mommy’s there’ than for mother to
keep, by symbolic proxy, a watchful eye on her child. Here, a photo-
graphic visage is conceived to fulfill – vicariously, aesthetically, indexi-
cally – a form of vigilant engagement and round-the-clock involvement.
While a doubtful mnemonic device for the child, by bearing testimony
it materially/spatially serves to make tangible mother’s uninterrupted

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‘presence’, promoting, perhaps, an imaginary of seamless constancy
within the ‘temporal alternative to space, the memory’ (Morgan, 1998:
19). Accordingly, we might speculate that the act of mentally ‘picturing’
her photo in the incubator might well provide a measure of comfort to
a mother – reassuring her not only that she is ‘there’ (mentally and
through graphic representation of her embodiment), but further signify-
ing that she has never faltered in her devotion to her child. Along these
lines, one mother’s explanation that ‘it’s good to feel family around’ hints
that the placement of photographs may embed fantasies to metonymi-
cally personify, even channel, protective energies. Like a talisman of
sorts, the use of images herein gravitates towards aspirations to ‘human-
ize’ the machine.

Iconic gestures to ‘be there in spirit’ (to quote one mother) are ampli-
fied to a spiritual realm in cases where the guardian amulet affixed to
the incubator marks an icon of supernatural power. On a few occasions
I observed a Christian cross/crucifix, a Jewish star or chai, and (in one
instance) the hand of Fatima stationed in incubators. In his work on
visual piety, Morgan examines how religious images become vehicles to
objectify the self, to broadcast religious identity, to shape personal and
collective memory, and to symbolize relationships. He writes: ‘popular
religious images . . . establish and monitor the perimeter of belonging’
(Morgan, 1998: 18). Likewise, for mothers, we might say that enshrining
the incubator with religious icons serves to establish and monitor the
perimeter of her longing. ‘It is the function of religious images in visual
piety to secure the world or sense of reality in which the self finds its
existence’; and, powerfully, to preserve ‘order as the believer negotiates
change’ (Morgan, 1998: 205–6). In thus helping mothers to negotiate the
unexpected, religious icons are imbued with personal meanings;
however, like all religious symbols, they are eminently social and
‘inflected with and constitutive of the social world that binds individuals
together’ (1998: 207). Hence, in addition to private understandings of
divine power in the incubator, mothers who augment the incubator with
religious icons are arguably empowered through their apperceived soli-
darity to a community of believers. With religious symbols to grace it,
the cyborg womb – itself a testament to the grandeur of omnipotent
Science – becomes a subject of divine intervention, married to matters
of sacred import. Such a conversion is in keeping with its own powers
of authority over life and death productions. Through an assembly of
hallowed reification, the task and inhabitant of this modern biotech
miracle are commended to a protectorship of deities and entrusted to a
curative of divine energy.

Hence, it is suggested that the mothers whose trials and tribula-
tions are at the heart of this ethnography are demonstrably committed
to some kind of transformation of the cyborg womb. By virtue of

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anthropomorphized goods, sympathetic magic and divine intervention,
and in dedications reaching from the profane to the godly, they have sum-
moned a constellation of things to absolve the machine’s ‘inhumanity’.
Each artifact of augmentation affords a creative modality to construe the
agency of mother/actor. It also performatively and meaningfully inhabits
the physical space where she rightly should be, that is to say, at her child’s
side. Such a condition is in keeping with the pivotal role that articles of
decoration and animation play in projecting a mother into the turbulent
and precarious NICU reality. They are a sign of her hope, an extension
of her mothering, a testament to her kinship, the only round-the-clock
referent of her existence and her rite of passage into motherhood.

‘SCAPING’ BABY INTO BEING

If we approach the issue of decorating the incubator in terms of ‘human-
object entanglements’ taking place in a dynamic global matrix, we
encounter a strange meeting between two functionally-specific uni-
verses: the universe of medical equipment, on the one hand, and that of
ludic paraphernalia, on the other. Each of these artifactual universes is
characterized by different material-technological constituents, agents,
and objectives, with respective industrial, ideological and infrastructural
features; the former under jurisdiction of the hospital, the latter in the
dominion of the home. To probe the asymmetrical relations between hos-
pital and home that intersect in the meeting of these universes, I find
Habermas’ (1987) theorizations of lifeworld and system particularly
germane. Lifeworld implies the world of consciousness and communi-
cative action, and ‘appears as a reservoir of taken-for-granteds, of
unshaken convictions that participants in communication draw upon in
cooperative processes of interpretation’ (Habermas, 1987: 124). With the
increasing rationalization of modern societies, systemic mechanisms
potentially erode the lifeworld into one subsystem among others. In this
negative instance, ‘delinguistified’ media, like money and power – and
for our purposes here, certain technologies – in ‘hypertrophied’ form are
complicit in unleashing system imperatives that ‘burst the capacity of
the lifeworld’ (1987: 155). Such resulting ‘technization of the lifeworld’
is arguably at risk in the overlapping enterprises of productivity and
those of reproductivity at play in the technological creation of cyborg
wombs.

To recap: in decorating the machine we witness the extension of (the
domain of influence of) ‘home’ into the hospital through a traffic in cheap
goods of sentimental value. These trivial objects (of amusement and
adornment) have been mass-commodified in a system-world for
incorporation in the lifeworld, but here they are re-semanticized as sur-
rogates of domesticity and as maternal referents, and placed in the

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mechanical womb. This scenario mirrors (and rehearses in reverse) its
complement: wherein we witness the infiltration of (the domain of influ-
ence of) ‘home’ by the prosthetic umbilicus, an artifact of the ‘genera-
tive’ sciences produced as an exclusive good with instrumental value.
These vital objects (of life-support and artificial gestation) have been
engineered in a system-world for co-option of the lifeworld, and fash-
ioned as surrogates for female bodies and as replacements for the mater-
nal appointment. Both scenarios predicate complex human-object
entanglements that illustrate the ‘dialectical interplay between ordering
objects and being ordered by them’ (Miller, 1994: 415). And, in both
cases, the artifactual universes (of incubators, on the one hand, and of
ornaments, on the other) chaperone ideologies and social relations. The
invention of the cyborg womb ‘orders’ new hegemonies of science
asserting new jurisdictions over biological phenomena (e.g. the length
and manner of gestation) that were previously largely the provenance of
‘nature’. The inventiveness of incubator ornaments embodies the power
to reorder a mother’s lifeworld in ways that may attenuate its coloniz-
ation by the techno-medical system. Considered from this perspective,
mothers’ performances encapsulate desires to revitalize a familiar
horizon of meaning. Nonetheless, I would contend that designs to sepa-
rate home and hospital ultimately serve instead to highlight the junc-
tures that link public and private spheres of activity.

To contextualize incubator machines and toy playthings in planetary
networks involving resources, peoples, information and power, I suggest
employing Appadurai’s (1990) thematization of the heterogeneous and
homogeneous forces that propel the ‘disjunctures’ of today’s global
economy. These forces – the ‘building blocks’ of ‘imagined worlds’ –
work through an interplay of what he calls ‘technoscapes’, ‘medias-
capes’, ‘finanscapes’, ‘ideoscapes’ and ‘ethnoscapes’; portmanteaus for
which he enlists the metaphor ‘scape’ from the suffix of ‘landscape’ to
highlight that these are ‘deeply perspectival constructs, inflected very
much by the historical, linguistic and political situatedness of different
sorts of actors’ (Appadurai, 1990: 296). Applying Habermas’ thesis, these
‘scapes’ might be interpreted as networks interdigitating system and life-
world, transfusing them in diverse ways. For our purposes here I find
the concept of technoscape particularly apt, about which Appadurai
writes: it is the ‘increasingly complex relationships between money
flows, political possibilities and the availability of both low and highly-
skilled labor’ that govern ‘the odd distribution of technologies, and thus
the peculiarity of these technoscapes’ (1990: 297–8). Certainly, complex
transnational relations drive the peculiar technoscapes (and the other
scapes, particularly ideoscapes) that govern the emergence of vital
medical machines. These are precision objects characterized by high-
tech, high-prestige, high-profit and highly expert professionals, as well

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as by high-stakes consequences. Likewise, the flows of transnational
relations in equal measure (albeit, perhaps in less momentous ways)
drive the peculiar technoscapes governing trivial playthings, associated
with low-tech, low-wage, low-skill sweatshop labor, juvenile matters and
picayune contexts. In other words, although the exclusiveness of cyborg
wombs contrasts sharply with the banality of teddy bears, and glibly pro-
duced toys with mass exchange values differ radically from intensively
engineered medical devices obtained through closed-door bidding,
neither classes of items are immune to global (nor to local) power flows.
Because medical equipment so blatantly advertises its connections with
elite enterprises it commands authority (while largely sidestepping
accountability for its complicity in global inequities). That teddy bears
et al. (and, for that matter, cheaply-manufactured greeting cards or
religious icons) are better able to ‘hide’ their unfavorable entanglement
in worldwide economic asymmetries is a provocative corollary of their
‘cute’ charisma and unassuming associations. In this case it may well be
a condition of their success: for it is precisely such (seeming) situated
innocence that mothers’ ornamentalizing practices call into play to
counter the conspicuous ‘worldliness’ of scientific gadgets. (Notwith-
standing the charm of this deception, it might here be pointed out that
teddy bears as commodities and signs harbor their own pointedly politi-
cal history [Björk, 1994: 54–9].) In the final analysis, both incubators and
teddies are amalgamations of international intercourse, orchestrated by
dominant ideologies and commercial trends, which have accordingly
determined their shared engagement in the overdetermined nexus of the
hospital NICU under study here.

Within the circumscribed incubator chamber, the ‘scapes’ of vital
objects and the ‘scapes’ of trivial objects implode at an intersection of
arbitrary endpoints, in a curious confrontation that winds from far-flung
origins through the varied and sundry actors, materials, and values
respectively entangled with these objects. Their unseemly but fertile
‘disjuncture’ ultimately arises from their convergent cultural–historical
mission to reciprocally bring a child into being. This ‘bringing into being’
entails making the child scientifically intelligible via biomedical interven-
tions with life-sustaining and life-simulating function. This ‘bringing into
being’ equally well implies making the child culturally intelligible via
enculturating materials with pedagogical, recreational and idle intent.
Moreover, because objects of diversion stand opposite objects of reason,
ludic amusements can be effective envoys of resistance to scientific
instruments. As noted, decorating the incubator implicitly capitalizes
upon the transgressive symbolic powers associated with enigma and
ambiguity, whereby ephemeral bric-a-brac of relative insignificance
comes to temper the monolithic prosthesis.

By ornamenting the machine, mothers extend a kind of superficial

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character and individuality to this foreign object using teddy bear para-
phernalia that are colloquially ‘personalizable’ in ways that incubators
are obviously not. Nevertheless, there is an ironic twist lurking in decor-
ating practices; for we must acknowledge that few artifacts are as req-
uisitely customized as the incubator in a state of action: The strategic
configuration of instruments, functions, provisions and so on that it
caters to its infant-inhabitant in any one therapeutic endeavor and at any
given moment are unparalleled in singularity. While the exclusive cyborg
womb is verily and uniquely the patient’s private universe, nonetheless
mass-produced teddy bears command better aptitude for individuation
precisely through their vernacular appeal. This paradox reveals some-
thing telling about our relationship to both profound and mundane
materials, and illustrates how human-object entanglements are predi-
cated on degrees of proximity to conventional cultural codes.

PASSPORTS THROUGH LIMINALITY

As a charged artifactual other, the cyborg womb inaugurates an alien
logic into a new mother’s lifeworld. In Eco’s (1980: 23) words, this arti-
ficial umbilicus can be said to lack semantic ‘redundancy’; that is, it has
a deficit of standard values upon which to premise communicative
understanding in a signifying exchange. Such absence of predictability
in the meaning-making process marks a condition of entropy (Danesi,
1994:13), which in this instance problematizes the interpretive schemas
of many a mother displaced by the precision surrogate who saves her
baby. In asserting the significance of redundant codes in architectural
design, Eco argues that ‘moments of high-information content’ must be bal-
anced by ‘a certain amount of redundancy’: every flash of the unlikely rests
on articulations of the likely’ (1980: 23, emphasis in the original). Toys
and incubators enmeshed in a hospital milieu are (like a building) also
spatialized and signifying units of material culture. In this context, the
teddy bear provides a soft, furry, flexible sign vehicle saturated with
denotative redundancies, which is well equipped to articulate likely
worlds and temper the ‘flash of the unlikely’ manifest in the radically
new ‘high-information’ machine-infant dyad. Strategic, personalizing
practices to ornament the machine thus enlist comfort toys – inscribed
with sentiments of home and nurturance – to bring incubator-plus-baby
into recognizable cultural grammars and everyday experiential codes.
Given the familiarity of teddy bears et al. they are ideal ‘diplomats’ to
mediate the alien and alienating foreignness of the high-tech womb, and
attenuate the cognitive dissonance it sparks.

In keeping with the transformative capacity of ritual, a mother’s
quasi-ritual performance helps her to re-choreograph her emotional-
somatic bonding with child, in spite of the delimitations imposed by the

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treatment regime. On a collective level, over the course of two years of
ethnographic fieldwork, I witnessed how mothers inventively, if largely
unconsciously, articulated their commonality and indeed forged identi-
ties through such shared praxes. Any individual mother who personal-
ized ‘her baby’s’ incubator via these quasi-ritual acts was simultaneously
authoring herself as a member of the collective of other mothers and also
asserting herself to be a bona fide participant in the hospital milieu,
which is, importantly, a milieu of healing. While mothers’ performances
accommodated improvisational qualities, they also animated some
characteristic features of ritual, namely through what Bell calls the
‘dynamics of framing’; and in their aspiration to ‘signify or denote larger
truths’ (1997: 160; 224). The emerging formality and relative invariance
of incubator ornamentation can be said to have framed a microcosm, or
in Bourdieu’s words ‘orchestrated a habitus’, which cognitively and
emotionally pulled these women into a NICU experience that they had,
in small but significant ways, co-constructed, and in which they could
be expressive. Discussing ritual, Turner writes: ‘[t]he primary motivation
behind ritual is the desire to break free of social structure temporarily
in order to transcend its social and existential limitations and reconfig-
ure it (Turner, 1974: 260; Alexander, 1991: 17). In like fashion, I suggest
that the mothers I studied aspired to symbolically, vicariously, and tem-
porarily – but no less significantly – ‘break free’ of a lifeworld ‘technized’
by the biomedical system and its invention of existential and categorical
uncertainties. As an exercise in world-building, ritual characteristically
engenders its own categorical ambiguity: as Douglas notes ‘. . . ritual
recognizes the potency of disorder’ (Douglas, 1984: 94). By virtue of their
poetic assignment, toys and trinkets out of place in the incubator con-
figure a potent symbolic disorder in the NICU, one that takes shape in
mothers’ mildly resistant re-ordering of human-object entanglements. I
have argued that the deviant placement of incubator ornaments make
teddy bears et al. into liminal figures whose familiarity is both put into
service and put at risk. Consequently, they garner the ritual powers
associated with marginality and are thus enigmatically equipped to par-
tially detonate the piquant charge of the artifactual other that is the life-
support incubator.

From this perspective, it is the deceptively innocent counter-limi-
nality of teddy bears et al. that empowers them to broker the techno-
liminality of the preterm baby, and mediate the challenges triggered by
this new category of person. The resulting kind of ‘teddy-bear diplo-
macy’ represents mothers’ desires to bring their babies into a lifeworld
– an horizon of meaning – of their own semiotic making. Ultimately,
both domesticating and animating the machine are performances to
socialize and enculturate the cyborg womb in order to reach (out to) the
child. While the challenges produced by the biomedical enterprise are

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inscribed with a logic of zero fallibility, the teddy-bear diplomacy
employed by these mothers can be said to follow a logic of ambivalence,
one empowered by liminal inversions and indeterminacy. Stretching the
metaphor, one might say teddy bear diplomacy provides a kind of pass-
port across the borders of uncertainty. Herein, these simple acts of decor-
ating the machine facilitate the re-aggregation of the ‘neophyte’ preterm
infant over the threshold of techno-liminality and into conventional cul-
tural schemas. The move helps a mother reconfigure and re-empower
identity during her own transitional rite of passage into motherhood.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the women I interviewed for sharing their stories with me.
I am also grateful to Michael Landzelius and Henry Kenny for their intellectual
commentaries and practical assistance with this article.

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◆ K Y R A M A R I E L A N D Z E L I U S is currently a visiting scholar at the Depart-
ment of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Since 1997 she has been
a researcher in the Department of Social Anthropology at Gothenburg Uni-
versity, Sweden. Her dissertation work in medical anthropology from the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania involved a study of preterm, cocaine-exposed infants,
their mental and motor development, and the coping mechanisms of mothers.
Her research interests include medical social movements, the anthropology of
cyberspace, and indigenous empowerment. Address: Department of Social
Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, CB2 1RH.
[email: kml24@cam.ac.uk]. Address – permanent post: Department of Social
Anthropology, Göteborg University, Box 700, Gothenburg, Sweden, S 405–30.
[email: kyra_landzelius@yahoo.com]

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