Det skriger bare feminin energi: En pædagogisk antropologisk undersøgelse af mandlige sygeplejestuderendes performance og forhandling af køn

This thesis is based on a nearly five month ‘journey’. It was the curiosity of exploring genders role in the context of education, where there is an overrepresentation of one gender that began this journey. At nursing education that traditionally and culturally is feminine connoted, the male students represent less than 6 percentages. The thesis presents an analysis of how, six male nursing students perform and negotiates gender on nursing education, and what meaning gender and negotiation of gender has for the male students’ identity as a nurse.
Scientific theoretically the thesis is based on a Social Constructivism understanding, and the itinerary has therefore not been established in advance. The chosen theories, methods and the empirical starting point must therefore be seen dialectical.
The empirical starting point is a multi-sited fieldwork, where the meaning of the male student’s performance and negotiating gender became the common denominator in relation to their movement in different contexts. The empirical material is based on participating observation and semi-structured interviews. I have followed two classes of nurse students of whom two in each class were men. Furthermore I have interviewed two male students attending the last module of the nursing education.
The theoretical perspectives present both gender and identity as a construction, which contextually is negotiable. And this context here represented by the nurse education is also changeable. The analytical perspective on gender is represented by Dorte Marie Søndergaard, who sees gender interpreted through male and female signs on the body, which indicates the ‘right way of doing gender’.
The nurse education is seen as a community of practice, where the male students participates on different trajectories named inbound, practiced inbound88 and the insider trajectory through which they negotiate their identity as a nurse. Etienne Wenger is the author representing these theoretical perspectives.
The analysis falls in three paragraphs, which presents the male students performance and negotiating gender on each of the three trajectories. The analysis is made through the three characteristics of the community of practice named mutual engagement, joint enterprise and shared repertoire. It shows through which mutual constructive and constituent processes and gendered negotiations, confrontations, and/or imitations the male students learn how to behave as a nurse.
My main findings show that the male students use four subordinate strategies; assimilation-, adaptation-, confrontation-, and the ventilation strategy, in order to legitimate their presence and by that identify themselves in the community of practice. The strategy of legitimating is therefore seen as a superior strategy. As ‘opposition’ the peripheral participation strategy is presented and is seen used, when or if the male students cannot be legitimized or legitimate themselves in the nursing community of practice.
The thesis ends with reflections concerning the ‘academic temporality’ of the thesis. On one side it describes the delimited perspectives of the thesis, where other theoretically optics could impart different knowledge than presented in this thesis. On the other side the academic temporality also describes an invitation to pave the way for gender research not only to illustrate the meaning of performance and negotiating gender, but rather pave the way to see how masculine and feminine connotations can be integrated in the nursing, but also in other gender dominated communities of practice.