Reading Incivility Through Camp: Moral Binaries in Nursing Education

In the United States context, incivility in nursing education is widely studied as a behavioral problem to be measured and remedied. In contrast, civility has been conceptualized as a professional virtue that is foundational to nursing identity. Together, these civility and incivility orientations sustain a moral binary for nursing education in which civility functions as virtue and incivility as its violation. This paper re-orients the discourse by reading incivility through camp. Drawing on Susan Sontag and Fabio Cleto, camp serves as an analytic lens to show how exaggerated seriousness, affective escalation, and performative staging produce incivility as a violation of moral authority. We offer a synthesis of how civility and incivility are written in the nursing education literature and reflect on their conceptual asymmetry. Then, we present and examine a three-scene vignette featuring two behaviors codified in the Incivility in Nursing Education-Revised (INE-R) scale: lateness and eye-rolling. Through a camp analysis of the vignette, we trace moral regulation via policy, surveillance, affective escalation, and racialized cultural coding. What can appear as a behavioral violation according to the literature is shown through camp and contextualization to be instead affective attachments to normative expectations of comportment and professionalism. We show how incivility and its associated behaviors function as performative judgments of disposition within a moral binary. Camp transforms how incivility is perceived by revealing how ordinary behaviors become moralized in nursing education. By unsettling the civility/incivility binary, this conceptual analysis invites greater reflexivity in scholarship and pedagogy and opens space for more contextually attentive engagement with professional identity.