The “Day 2” readings this week focus on the themes of sexuality, health, and global politics, but what specifically interested me was the discussion of feminized labour through care work. Michelle Murphy’s “Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices” discusses of the need for confronting the non-innocent histories in which care politics currently circulate, notably in international couplings of feminism and health, focusing on a specific set of feminist engagements (with the pap smear and cervical cancer). Her work was powerful for a number of reasons, attempting to disrupt hegemonic narratives and arrangements of racism, colonialism, and political economy while recognizing different multi-local itineraries as pertinent to technoscientific concerns of care. It especially struck me due to a discussion that I’ve had on numerous occasions with friends in the medical field: why is being a nurse so gendered? A male friend of mine expressed to me recently that he would get ridiculed by people close to him for being a nurse, both in his personal life and even in the workplace. In taking this class the answer to this question became quite clear, such a norm is the result of the feminization of care work, which in turn results in nursing becoming a cause for social justice.
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo with “Maid in L.A.” illustrated that housework and childcare are devalued because they are feminized; care work is something that comes naturally to the women, so thus they shouldn’t be paid as much. Specifically, her work of charting the particular history of domestic labour done by women of color and immigrant women highlighted issues of labor conditions, class divides, racialization, and citizenship status exclusion in domestic work, and offered a historical backdrop to Murphy's piece. Domestic and care labor has historically been classified as a woman's job, which explains its devalued status in a patriarchal culture. Its connection with domesticity places it solidly within the scope of the sanctified private home, a remnant of 19th-century gendered labor divides; even paid domestic and care work “is not recognized or treated as a ‘real job'” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 114). While Sotelo focused on domestic care work, feminization of labour extends into all care work, including medical, as we can see in the Murphy piece.
“Care” is central to nursing practice. Ozdemir, Akanselm and Tunk of the Uludag University School of Health conducted a study that aimed to determine what female and male undergraduate nursing students think of males in nursing (https://www.hsj.gr/medicine/gender-and-career-female-and-male-nursing-students-perceptions-of-male-nursing-role-in-turkey.php?aid=3661). Senior nursing students (n=90) at an undergraduate program in the School of Health located in Bursa, Turkey were questioned. The questionnaire used for data collection received a response rate of 97 %, where close to half of the female nursing students (45.3 %) wanted to see males as staff nurses while most of the male nursing students wanted to occupy administrative or administrative/instructor positions after graduation. The study states that the “nursing community aims to increase the number of male nursing students and practicing male nurses lately.” and while “there is a growing body of literature on men in nursing, research has failed to question gender differences between opinions of female and male nursing students on where men should be in nursing careers and what they will add to the nursing profession.” The fact is that many female-dominated professions, like nursing, have struggled to attract male candidates. This can be ascribed in part to factors such as status and salary, but it is also a product of the profession's gender role stereotyping. As a result, it has been characterized as a profession strongly rooted in society's gender-based power relations (Murphy and class). Men's roles in patient care and the healthcare field are not new; they date back to medieval times. The emphasis placed on women and their role in society is naturally mirrored in the nursing profession due to patriarchies. For instance, the Turkish word for nurse is “hemşire”, which has two meanings-- “sister” and “woman who gives care to sick people,” clearly quite gendered (TDK Turkish Dictionary 2001). In addition, The Turkish Nursing Law, issued in 1954’s, describes nursing as a profession which only can be performed by Turkish women (http://ojin.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/vol132008/No2May08/ArticlePreviousTopic/NursinginTurkey.html).
We must oppose the dichotomization of care and politics and instead place care within the framework of power and politics. Postcolonial feminism has the potential to impact nursing research and practice in the twenty-first century, while health is still a goal to strive for and a commitment to humanity. This is especially important for nurses, who thus serve as global citizens and as advocates for the voiceless. In class we learned that it is dangerous to project the rules of your own culture upon others, but in this response I use Turkish culture for an example of feminized labor when my knowledge of Turkish culture is confined to my three month visit last year. However, we also learned that it is dangerous to only navigate within your own cultural bubble, or within the borders of your nation-state, so how can we toe that line? What I took away from Kathy Davis’ “Feminist Body/politics as World Traveler: Translating Our Bodies, Ourselves,” is that during migration, feminism allows for the articulation of a broader range of its interpretations, which may encompass many diverse viewpoints. As Davis argues in her account of global feminism, what effectively contributed to the specific goal of gender equality was the approach of allowing women to talk about and share their own experience and knowledge about body politics. Gender equality as part of feminism puts in motion diverse arguments that may have unforeseen implications for the political gender struggle, especially when traveling across different contextual and conceptual borders. Although these differences of thinking might seem inefficient, and while they might not be necessary for local change, it is only by the true examination and discussion of feminism in different nation-states that we can fully understand the topic. and help one another achieve change (and by “true examination and discussion,” I mean not ascribing your own ideals and experiences unto others, but listening to the ideals and experiences of others with an open mind).
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