Abstract
Catheters, Slurs, and Pickup Lines: Professional Intimacy in Hospital Nursing is an engaging text that offers readers a fresh context for thinking about the nursing profession and the implications of gendered work through an intersectional lens. Ruchti deconstructs caring as “natural” and applies intersectionality as both an “analytical method to explain and resist oppression (p. 59)” and a way to examine how the intersections of structural oppression affect nurses’ experiences of providing care. Through observation and interviews with nurses, hospital staff, and administrators, Ruchti captures how patients experience the care that they receive on the basis of the intersections of race, gender, and nation. She discusses how patients use controlling images (p. 63) and perceive nurses of color not to be their actual nurses, to be less caring or trustworthy than white nurses (without accents), and more sexually accessible.
Ruchti uses the term, professional intimacy to credit nurses with the skills they use to provide care in ways that are invisible. Instead of defining care, nurses often described how they cared, managed interactions with patients, and used emotional labor to help patients maintain a sense of safety. Sometimes these skills came at the expense of nurses feeling uncomfortable and discriminated against.
The following quotation reveals how nurses use emotional labor to manage interactions with patients to live up to “professional” standards of providing care: “She helped him back to bed, he grabbed her arms, grabbed her shirt, and asked her to come to bed with him. She later told me that he grabbed her breasts. I heard her say, ‘Hey, what are you doing? I am not your wife!’” (p. 121). Later this nurse told Ruchti “her patient was ‘confused’ and disoriented because of his medication” (p. 121). She negotiated a difficult experience using emotional labor to protect the patient from feeling embarrassed about this inappropriate touch. She managed her own emotions to make the patient feel comfortable. This book names and contextualizes invisible skills that nurses build over time. When care is denaturalized, it suggests that these valuable skills can be learned, that people are not just born to care, and that caring looks different across intersections of race, gender, and nation.
Ruchti’s study sets a precedent that challenges social workers to reflect on our subjectivity, power, and privilege to deconstruct altruistic notions of working in a “helping” profession. This deconstruction of “helping” also pushes social work students, scholars, and activists to move beyond the micro and to work for change across intersecting systems. Not only does it push us to do better social work or social justice work, it acknowledges that we also have identities that are influenced by how we do this work. Finally, when “helping” and “caring” are situated as parallel, Ruchti’s study can be used as a motivation to recognize the skills of emotional labor that are used to do anti-oppressive and socially just work in the communities that we work with and as we navigate processes of systemic change.