Occupations, Symbolic Violence, and the Possibility of Epistemic Ruptures in the Professionalization of Nursing

• In Event: 322 - Section on Medical Sociology Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 13. Medical Education I

Abstract

Pierre Bourdieu's analyis of domination and distinctions as aspects of stratification provide a conceptual framework for exploring how habitus and gender operate in all occupations to maintain women’s subordinate status within the occupatinal hierarchy. No where is this more apparent than on highly gendered occupations like nursing. This paper approaches the position of nurses within medicine and healthcare delivery using Bourdieu’s analysis of symbolic power in an intellectual lever to pry apart the structures within medicine that support the continued gender inequality in medicine. This approach is particularly suited to highly gendered occuations is in part because Bourdieu draws attention to group practices and the way that group practices define categories of distinction and exclusion. These practices become consecrated through educational, institutional, and political productions of power that seems natural and “objectively open to all but in fact are the result of capital accumulations along several dimensions of social life. In the case of medicine, like that of education, the allegedly impartial apparatus of expert knowledge, institutional regard, and credentialing all are critical mechanisms for mystifying the underlying reality of medicine’s domination through the legitimating power of symbolic violence. Nursing is an occupational exemplar of women dominated fields that illustrate the role of symbolic violence in the conceptualization and practice of professions. The position of nurses within medicine is anchored in the habitus of medicine and the gendered nature of resistance to the professional legitimacy of nurses as healthcare providers and professionals.

Author

• Elizabeth Anne Jenner, Gustavus Adolphus College