Nursing Werk¹: Camp and Performance in Nursing

The nursing imaginary is populated with a plurality of feminine and feminized archetypes. These images reinforce a particular order of things for nurses and nursing, marching out well-worn stereotypes link gender and sexuality. Less attention has been paid to the productive, affirmative, and playful dimensions of these archetypes and the possibilities they offer. Using feminist theory, queer theory, and lessons from camp, I ask why sometimes it might be useful to be a Madonna or a whore or a battleax. Recognising some potential for misunderstanding, I want to be clear that I am neither dismissing these myths as innocuous or unproblematic nor am I endorsing any particular version as the way, the truth, the life for nurses. Rather than a fixed identity or intractable cage, I want to stay with the trouble to think through what happens when we conceptualise these tropes as personas or characters nurses may don and doff at will like personal protective equipment, stylized to suit the cast with whom they perform, inclusive of patients and colleagues alike. I do this not as a technique to undermine the professionalism of nurses or nursing but rather to recognise this kind of performance as an important piece of emotional triage, acknowledging the skilful affective decision-making that goes into choosing how to occupy a particular role in a particular moment to elicit particular outcomes, conjuring the realities and feelings and ethics. Attending to nursing in this way, I think, can offer some points of entry for thinking about nursing and its work differently: playful, practiced, performative, powerful.