The passion and melancholia of performing dietitian

Abstract

Dietitians provide nutritional care in various contexts and it is expected that dietetic subjectivity shapes and is shaped by health/nutrition discourse, but this has not been sufficiently explored. The purpose of this study was to further understand dietetic subjectivity, dietitians’ experiences of their education and relationships between educational and practice discourses. Twelve dietitians were recruited to participate in semi-structured research interviews. Feminist theoretical perspectives informed the research including the interpretation of data, which was analyzed according to the Listening Guide, a feminist voice-centered relational method. A theory of dietitian performativity informed by Butler (1999) emerged whereby dietitians expressed passion and melancholia for their practice. Also, participants experienced discontinuity between educational and practice contexts, which highlighted the need to integrate embodied epistemic perspectives throughout undergraduate education. These findings support a critical gesture in dietetic educational discourse away from positivism towards embodiment as a means for highlighting and reinforcing the complexity and fluidity of dietetic performativity.