Epilogue

Abstract

As my co-editor Paula McGee (2009) rightly notes, this collection of papers on gender and nursing was diffi cult to assemble. Despite the fact that our call for abstracts was catholic in its scope and had to be extended a number of times to increase the possibility that papers would eventually amass to form a special issue of Contemporary Nurse, alas this was not to transpire; both Paula and I pondered and vexed over this problem during the many, many months of this collection's gestation. To be honest neither of us could muster a plausible theory as to why the issue of nursing and gender failed to grab the individual and collective imaginations of our colleagues.This failure to arouse signifi cant interest is certainly perplexing as Paula (2009) also rightly notes in her considered and comprehensive prologue. Gender is undoubtedly still a pressing and perennial one for nurses in terms of the gender divide that separates men's and women's health issues into quite disparate and sometimes contradictory spheres of concern and eventual resolution. The tensions between men's and women's health status and the ways in which we respond to these were evident in this collection and amplifi ed by the various reports and literature cited by Paula but, clearly, gender as an underpinning narrative to the larger story of how health and sickness are conceived, planned for, managed and evaluated is perhaps not the priority some of us would like to imagine it should be.What, then, might this mean for nurses themselves in what is a profoundly gendered profession? Given that we have only one paper (Brown, 2009) on this topic perhaps this too, is not as relevant today as I recall it was in the late 80s through the late 90s. During this decade a reasonably vibrant corpus of feminist and postmodern nursing scholarship was fi nding its way into print exploring concerns about the gendered nature of nursing and the issues this invoked.In closing this small collection I indulge in some refl ections on nursing and gender from my own perspective as a man and as one for whom nursing and gender has always created in me a sense that 'I'm stuck, I cannot get out, I'm helpless' (after Aristotle in Derrida, 1993, p. 13). This is not suggesting that I am a victim of some sort of existential anguish; rather, it is to say that it's all about power, as Foucault (1980) would say. And if that is the case, then everything is dangerous and there is always something to be done (as he would also say!).In a still deeply patriarchal healthcare system, where mostly male medicos and executives continue to call the shots and nurses struggle to be heard at the decision making tables, if they are even invited to them, nursing - as a profession comprised almost exclusively of women - has much work to do. By this I mean that still far too many asymmetries of knowledge and power operate to render nurses' voices and actions as less authoritative and compelling than those of doctors and health administrators; our future potential as a profession still hinges far too acutely on the desires and wishes of these omnipotent 'others' than I and many of my colleagues consider necessary or appropriate. And for those who think that several decades of feminist thought and activism has changed all this; think again. Almost daily I read in the press of situations where women generally struggle to gain recognition and rewards commensurate with their male counterparts (e.g. far too few female professors in the academy; far too few female politicians in the parliaments; far too few female CEOs of major corporations; far too few female surgeons - the list is longer than I have space for).Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that the profession's profoundly feminised culture and the effects this perpetuates on nurses and non nurses alike is and always has been one of its deep and abiding aporia. As Murray (2009, p. 11) explains:The term 'aporia' comes from the ancient Greek aporos and literally means 'without passage' or 'impasse' If we arrive at an aporia, it means we are in doubt we are perplexed, we are confused about how (best) to proceed. …