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Identity Revisited and Reimagined pp 187–205Cite as

“She Didn’t Know I’m Black, You See”. Practices, Body Signs, and Professional Identity

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Abstract

This chapter is about the bodies of nurses; how they are interpreted by patients, and how such interpretations figure in negotiations of nurses’ professional identity. Based on an interactionist, practice based approach to professional identity, the chapter presents research conducted in Norwegian nursing homes with an ethnically diverse staff and an unusually high proportion of male employees. Residents were almost exclusively white ethnic Norwegians, some of whom would reject nurses they disliked or distrusted on the basis of the nurses’ appearance. Certain skin colours, accents, and markers of gender were ‘body signs’ (Søndergaard 1996, 2005) that could be construed as grounds for residents to dismiss a nurse as an inappropriate care giver. The chapter focuses on how nurses account for such situations in research interviews, and on what kind of identity work their accounts accomplish.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term ‘discourse’ is used here in accordance with established usage in various forms of linguistics, about what conversation analysts often call talk-in-interaction.

  2. 2.

    While professional identity is grounded in a body of knowledge shared with colleagues, institutional identity is derived from position in the institutional hierarchy, and personal identity is built on personal experience.

  3. 3.

    The project Gender equality—a boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’? was funded by The Norwegian Research Council and was approved by the privacy ombudsman for research in Norway, NSD.

  4. 4.

    For an analysis of how eldercare is situated in the crossroads of the national gender regime and globalised distribution of care-work, see Seeberg 2012.

  5. 5.

    ‘Accent’ in Norwegian usage never refers to regional dialects, but exclusively to ‘foreign’ accents.

  6. 6.

    Again, while the transcription is simplified, the talk is rendered as it unfolded between us in the interview.

  7. 7.

    This means that, even in milder cases, they are prone to anxiety, fear, and confusion. This group also has reduced tolerance for linguistic ambiguity, and may find it hard to cope with unfamiliar accents.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Ellen Andenæs

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  1. Ellen Andenæs
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Correspondence to Ellen Andenæs .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden

    Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta

  2. Department of Research and Development, Statped, Trondheim, Norway

    Aase Lyngvær Hansen

  3. Language and Communication Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Julie Feilberg

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Andenæs, E. (2017). “She Didn’t Know I’m Black, You See”. Practices, Body Signs, and Professional Identity. In: Bagga-Gupta, S., Hansen, A., Feilberg, J. (eds) Identity Revisited and Reimagined. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58056-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58056-2_9

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