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