Situating the political in nurses' lives
Subtitle: the intersection of policy, practice and career for lesbian health advocates.
Published: 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 306
Subjects: Lesbian nurses -- Ontario -- Political activity.; Health services administration -- Employee paricipation -- Ontario.; Lesbians -- Identity.; Diversity in the workplace -- Ontario.
Description: Despite professional imperatives for nurses to engage with policy and political work, there is little research describing nurses' involvement with lesbian health in a Canadian context. This study focuses on the social and material influences informing the lives of nurses who have a career focus on lesbian health and the impacts of their everyday political work on nurses themselves, their institutions and communities. I used feminist comparative life history methodology and purposive convenience sampling to explore how policies and other factors influence nurses' capacity to enhance policy change. Ten female nurses across Ontario who are publicly known as lesbian health advocates in their communities participated. They had high social privilege, were well-experienced, highly educated and represented diverse sexual orientations, geographic locations and professional settings. Semi-structured interviews addressed their personal and professional experiences, career lives, and the meanings attributed to their work. The findings indicate that complex gender dynamics inform how nurses, both insiders and outsiders to lesbian communities, experience, understand and act politically in particular contexts. As policy actors working within and outside of institutions, they accommodate to and resist dominant heteronormative discourses to enhance social reform. Their capacity to advocate is related to systems of knowledge-making in education, research, and policy domains that authorize particular knowledge-makers and forms of knowledge or inquiry over others. These lesbian, bisexual, questioning, and heterosexual nurses encounter variable institutional support to advocate and unpredictable negative career/workplace dynamics despite their high credentials. A three-part conceptual framework grounded in these career histories situates the political in nurses' lives with a focus on the interrelationships among political knowledges, political practices, and political impacts. This study opens space to discuss often-silenced nursing practices and negotiation of professional identities, while validating nurses' multiple and complex contributions to policy processes. The findings enhance understandings of political socialization processes and nursing theories related to transformative practice, ethics, political competence, and social consciousness. There are implications for theory, practice, and research that facilitate the visibility of subjugated knowledges. Policy recommendations call for institutional support by the profession and organizations to enhance career and workplace climates for sexual minorities and their political allies.
Notes: Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 66-06, Section: B, page: 3059.