Becoming Healing Hands: The Embodiment of Nursing Touch

• In Event: BodyWorks: (Pre)scriptive Embodiment in Diverse Educational Spaces

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a focused ethnographic study (Author 2, 2017) examining educational practices of learning to provide physical touch during nursing care. The place of touch in educational practice more broadly remains a complex, controversial, and gendered pedagogical issue that merits greater analysis. Using Foucault’s (1995) concept of docile bodies and positioning it within his larger theory of discipline in governmentality, this paper draws from a qualitative study with nursing students to analyze educational practices of touch through this theoretical lens to consider the politics and place of embodied touch in nursing education.

For Nurse Educators, teaching professional nursing is an entirely embodied practice that relies on physicality and selective physical touch. For the practicing nurse, caregiving is coterminous with care communication, nurse/patient touch relying on on physical and non-physical forms of caregiving. When practiced together, both forms can create an emotionally and intimately supportive healing environment. U.S. nursing programs devote a significant amount of time to teaching students about oral communication and ‘therapeutic use of self,' the aspect of being present but silent as integral to human healing.” Surprisingly, the use of physical touch receives less attention in nursing education forcing students into their own experimentation to learn acceptable touch and limited exposure in clinical classroom laboratories. Classroom laboratories structure clinical scenarios rely on robotic patient simulators. In this setting, there are no concerns of how to touch, because simulators do not protest. They gasp for air, moan in pain, and their hearts may stop beating, but they never say, “I don’t want you to touch me like that.”

This research questioned how gender and the absence of the nursing body shapes the politics of touch in nursing education. What gendered messages and forces shape the ways teachers of nursing and nursing students perform touch-driven care with patients as they carry out the important components of their work? What are the boundaries of “acceptable” touch in nursing education, and how does the sex/gender of the toucher/touched inform that gendered dynamic?

The methodology for this study was qualitative interviewing, including individual and focus groups, with 10 women and 10 men attending a traditional four-year baccalaureate nursing program. Questions explored touch-driven care education and negotiated touching of the ill body. Data analysis focused on the politics, institutional formation, and social prescriptions of touch. One dominant finding is that the gendered profession of nursing overlooks precise and direct attention to the politics of gendered touch. This study emphasizes the need for revision of extant nursing educational approaches to touch and rendering the gendered body more visible in the orchestration of pedagogy more broadly

Author

• Elizabeth J. Diener, Oklahoma City University