Care and emotions: gendering the experience of nurses in an oncology department

Abstract

This thesis aims to illuminate the nursing practice through nurses’ narratives which are collected during an ethnographic research in the oncology department of a state hospital in Istanbul. The nursing is thought and designed to be a profession for the care for patients and the professionalization of care is contentious. Nurses are considered to perform a gender-neutral, technical, task-oriented profession due to their education; however, care is an area which is fraught with emotions, ethical considerations and unpredictable encounters. This thesis investigates how nurses act in the specific care relations, manage their emotions, found an ethical repertoire through narratives and open up a creative and collective space between professional and familial care. Detachment is examined in terms of non-display of emotions and of certain self-reflexivity of the nurses during their practice and discussed as a particular emotional labor. Also, the ethics of care as narrative is discussed to show the contextual, relational and changing nature of care. The main argument is that nurses fill the voids of their profession(alization) by particular ways of knowing, experiencing and practicing and that their experience is gendered in both personal and professional domains.|Keywords: Nursing, emotions, detachment, ethics of care, narrative, death.