Reinstating the marginalized body in nursing science: epistemological privilege and the lived life

Abstract

For nursing, the presence of bodies, the body of the patient and the body of the nurse are self-evident. Illness, pain and disability are essentially constituted as embodied experiences. Similarly, the nurse herself, in her body, is the primary and essential instrument of her practice. What is to be refuted, is the way in which the body is taken up in nursing discourse, the way in which the body of the patient and the body of the nurse are objectified, sanitized and stripped of embodied emotion and physicality. The authors propose that the 'scientification' of nursing limits what counts as nursing knowledge. This limitation undermines the central experience of nursing: the subjective and embodied experience of care. A number of factors contribute to the marginalization of the body and of embodied experience in nursing science. By privileging objective data and placing subjective experience outside the brackets of dominant scientific knowledge, practice disciplines such as nursing can become marginalized. To combat this marginalization, nursing and other professions have sought to situate themselves within the dominant frameworks. The result is that bodies are objectified, and person, practice, and embodied experience are subordinated to rational empirical intervention.

Embodiment and Embodied Engagement: Central Concerns for the Nursing Care of Contemporary Peacekeepers Suffering from Psychological Trauma

“…The nurse–patient embodied experience is insufficiently present to us in the care encounter and is insufficiently valued and integrated into our generation of nursing knowledge (McDonald & McIntyre, 2000). There is an impoverishment of language about the body that accounts for our social, sentient, embodied ways of being in the world (Gadow, 1999).…”

“…It has been argued by Van Manen (1998) that “nursing especially is involved in helping the patient, the elderly, the disabled, or the person who for reasons of circumstance is out of step with the body, to recover a livable relation with his or her psycho‐physical being” (p. 7). In the nursing context, illness, pain, and disability are essentially constituted as embodied experiences (McDonald & McIntyre, 2000). Good nursing practice relies on the human backdrop of embodiment, and our embodied capacities that meet, comfort, and empower vulnerable people (Benner, 2000).…”

Dilemmas, Tetralemmas, Reimagining the Electronic Health Record

“…37(p236) Implicit in this choosing is the valorizing of one part of nursing practice (that drawing on technical, empirical knowledge) and the devaluing of nursing practice informed by the subjective experience. 37 How then might we move beyond the dichotomy that forces us to view nursing knowledge in this hierarchical manner? One way to enlarge upon conceptualization and decision making is to move beyond the Western philosophical framework of dilemmas, to the Eastern (Indian) tradition of the tetralemma, in which each proposition is defined 9 by 4 possibilities, rather than 2.…”

Gadow's relational narrative: an elaboration

“…Human experience cannot be understood by means of consciousness or thinking separated from the body. Yet, the body has been marginalized in nursing discourse, ‘stripped of embodied emotion and physicality’ (McDonald & McIntyre, 2001, p. 238).…”