Nurses and doctors and discourses of healing1

Abstract

This article challenges current sociological approaches to nursing that emphas ise the universality of nursing oppression and the notion of nurses as victims who are inevitably 'caught' between structures of class and patriarchy. It is argued that, despite recent influences from post-structuralism and post-mod ernism, these approaches remain trapped within many of the assumptions of 'modernist' feminism and so focus on oppression and subordination at the ex pense of nursing agency and resistance. The article makes use of concepts from feminist post-structuralism, particularly feminist appropriations of Michel Foucault's concept of discourse, to reintroduce the notion of agency into the analysis of nursing work. Through an ethnographic study in a hospital ward, it goes on to examine some of the 'effects of truth' within the dominant dis course of scientific medicine. While these include manifestations of medical power, they also include discourses of healing, which are constituted by nurses and doctors in their daily work. Evidence is provided to demonstrate that these healing discourses reveal both an alternative, oppositional knowledge/practice framework and a level of autonomy that has generally been unrecognised in accounts of nursing work. The article concludes by drawing out the implications of the study for the sociological analysis of nursing and, finally, for the more complex and contradictory relationship between doctors and nurses.