Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the images that comprise hospital based websites of Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs), which is situated as a form of technology in the reproductive process, to reveal how they promote particular forms of heteronormative kinship and draw from "normative" racializations.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1980s neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) have proliferated in the United States. These space are where reproduction and prematurity are technologically mediated, thus earning them the lauded position of "savior." Yet other aspects of the social are also mediated in NICUs. Specifically, while prematurity in the U.S. Is often linked to race, and familial making is made flexible through various forms of technology, the representation of both infants and families in NICUs masterfully privileges whiteness and heteronormative kin structures. Because race and heterosexuality fuel so much about reproduction, as Dorothy Roberts points out in "Killing the Black Body," I explore how kinship is assembled and disassembled in the representational practices of (social media) hospital websites of NICUs. This paper draws on two years of fieldwork on prematurity and neonatal intensive care units and seeks to explore how queerness and non-whiteness are dis assembled in NICU's? I ask in what ways does these (social) media practices orchestrate ideas of hope, futures and projects of kinship perfectibility.