Gender and Empowerment by Nursing Students: Representations, Discourses and Perspectives

Abstract

Nursing history is marked by stigmas of gender, race and class. Nowadays, this scenario is evidenced by the social disqualification of the profession and biomedical and male supremacy. Nevertheless, the profession has the potential to change this paradigm with an intersectional approach. The current study aims to understand how the relationships of gender, feminism and empowerment are experienced by nursing students at a Brazilian public university. This is a qualitative study, exploratory-explanatory, with the application of interviews with nursing students in their five years of training. The chosen method of analysis was the Discourse of the Collective Subject based on the central ideas categorized after the interviews: (a) Profession—female and stigmatized due to its historical construction influenced by religiosity and moral; (b) Formation—far from gender relations by the perpetuation of stereotypes; and (c) Perspectives—empowerment of the profession if close to the feminist movement. The students' discourse alert to the historical reflexes of oppressive ideological mechanisms of women and nursing in their ongoing professional training, claiming transversal learning spaces for the critical expansion of gender awareness and consequent empowerment of nursing in a feminist and intersectional perspective.