The contribution of nurses is a significant but notably underresearched aspect of hospital-based eating disorders treatment. This paper reports a qualitative interview-based study in which 15 nurses were interviewed about nursing children and adolescents diagnosed with eating disorder. A discourse analytic methodology was employed to analyse the resulting interview transcripts and focuses, in particular, on elucidating the various ways in which 'eating disorders nursing' was construed in participants' accounts. Three key constructions were revealed in which 'eating disorders nursing' was discursively constituted (i) as 'loving' or empathetic support, (ii) as a surveillance and disciplining of patients and (iii) as a constant and ever-present care. The implications of these constructions are discussed.

Numerous studies have elucidated how a multiplicity of contemporary western cultural ideas and values that constitute `normal' femininity are enmeshed in and central to the discursive production and regulation of girls' and women's `eating disordered' subjectivities, bodies and body management practices. In this article, we seek to build on that work by exploring how discursive constructions of `the feminine' are articulated in nurses' accounts of nursing in-patients diagnosed with `eating disorders'. We have used a feminist post-structuralist, discourse analytic, interview-based methodology to explore how gender and gender power-relations are articulated not only in constructions of `eating disorders' and of those diagnosed as `eating disordered', but also in constructions of nurses and their relationships with (and to) patients. Our analysis illustrates how `the feminine' persistently appears and reappears as a multiplicity of binarized gendered subject positions that constitute, delimit and regulate `pathology', patients and nurses, suturing nurses and patients into a matrix of dichotomously structured femininities and a complex circulation of gender power-relations.

For most of the twentieth century infant feeding knowledge has been constructed by medical scientists and health professionals. However, for a short time around the 1970s, New Zealand women (re)claimed the power to author their own knowledge based upon experience. This coincided with a dramatic return to breastfeeding on a national scale. Using New Zealand women's narratives of their infant feeding experiences over the past 50 years, this article brings to the foreground the importance of women's subjective construction of knowledge, their positioning within it, and the suppression of rudimentary discourses when that power is removed or relinquished in the process of remedicalization.