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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how prosthetic users live between technological promises and material limits across China and the U.S. Sustaining prosthetic use involves ongoing adjustment, care, and endurance, as users navigate uncertainty, breakdown, and shifting bodies over time.

Paper long abstract

Prosthetic technologies are often embedded in techno-utopian imaginaries that promise restoration, enhancement, and control over bodily difference. Drawing on comparative ethnographic research with prosthesis users in China and the United States, this paper examines how people live in between these promises and the material realities of sustaining prosthetic use over time. Based on fieldwork with lower-limb prosthesis users in China and upper-limb prosthesis users in the U.S., we show that technological sophistication does not resolve the everyday conflicts of prosthetic life. Across both contexts, users face recurring breakdowns, bodily change, financial strain, and limited insurance coverage, which demand continuous tinkering, adjustment, and care. Rather than treating these difficulties as technological failure, we argue that prosthetic use is an ongoing negotiation with uncertainty, in which frustration, adjustment, and compromise become ordinary conditions of living with technology. Bringing these two sites into dialogue moves the analysis beyond explanations centered on national healthcare systems or technological insufficiency, revealing how prosthetic care is structured around assumptions of completion that do not align with long-term bodily and material instability. By foregrounding maintenance as an everyday practice rather than a response to breakdown, this paper contributes to discussions of repair, care, and vulnerability by showing how users “repair the future” through acts of endurance amid conflicting technological promises.