Speaking at an event held by London Fashion Week to mark International Women’s Day RCN President Professor Anne Marie Rafferty explored how nursing uniforms portray social identity. In what seems like an attempt to engage in feminist theory and social discourse the article twinned to her talk is somewhat lacking in both practical considerations and a critical understanding of the applied theory.
Real talk, not all nurses wear uniforms, and certainly not all nurses are women. The distinction between Nursing as a feminised profession rather than a female profession is not wholly tangible through the piece. The media archetypes drawn on my Prof Rafferty feel some what dated. While I am sure that Nurse Ratched and Barbara Windsor historically inform the current social identity of the hospital nurse and both symbolise the woman constructed in sexual, as the denier and the whore respectively, there are modern more nuanced and damaging archetypal examples which are at the forefront of social psyche. For instance: the effeminate gay nurse used to deny validity to men entering into caring professions; the self-sacrificing “angel” who will alleviate your suffering while denying her own needs (“…caregiving and hope”), or the “mammy” figure of the Black female care provider drenched in colonial representations which is still a factor limiting women of colours’ access to career progression (the social antithesis of the modern “svelt…independent” nurse Prof Rafferty makes reference to). All of these are sexually loaded bullshit archetypes and present many intersecting oppression ascribed to the identity and the body of The Nurse; I’d be interested how our uniforms reflect them.
To look below the material of the uniform, this article throws up some real dead-ends in terms of feminist rhetoric and theory. The opening statement of
“Nurses embody the contradictions of women and power…”
simply makes no sense. To scale it back further, by saying there is a “contradiction” is to say that women can never be powerful and power can never be wielded by women, both statements we know to be incorrect. Equally, and I’m thinking of simply making flashcards of this, we know that NOT ALL NURSES ARE WOMEN, and to continue to discuss issues in nursing focuses on the nurse as a women is limiting the possibility of engaging nursing concepts with wider social theory. Nursing needs to be approached not as male/female or carried out by men/women but as being situated in a patriarchal society which benefits from the creation of The Nurse in a feminised capacity – ascribing “feminine” characteristics to simultaneously create/maintain subordinated and politicised roles.
To understand The Nurse as socially constructed before one embodies the role links in to Judith Butler’s work on performativity – to put it lightly that identities are constructed socially and you embody those roles through both social and self-regulatory practices. Nursing is a performative role, the nurse cannot exist outside the social and every interaction we have and how we portray ourselves, both in and out of work, are constructed by our collective identity of “nurse” – one of the many ways we do this is through our uniforms. When we don our uniforms, pick up our work diary, don our personal alarm etc we are mentally and physically placing our bodies into the role of The Nurse with meanings we have learnt through society’s construction. It is not our uniforms which shape our “power” or our practice, it is society which shapes our uniforms, and thus shapes our ability to enact power through our identities and practice.
Feminist theory is not a tool which can be used as lip service. If you are the RCN President are speaking at an International Women’s Day event do your research, learn and engage with the theory you are utilising. This theory is not born out of our oppression but also out of our survival – the knowledge generated and shared by feminists everywhere speaks not only of how to break the chains of oppression but to how to survive through it, that is our legacy. If you use it to further your career you better damn well know what you are talking about, it is too important to be used lightly.
Rx