A patient's experience unfolds through a nurse's personal conversation with herself. Conveyed through three voices, the nurse's dialogue highlights her many internal struggles; those with her conscience on what she understands to be best practice, those important to her as a person, those of an ethical nature that profoundly affect one's search for meaning, and those in the personal–professional realm driven in part by institutional culture. These multivoiced knowledges are confronted in ways that foreground language and understanding as performative acts. (...) At the same time, another journey is co‐constructed with the reader, one that weaves in‐between the symbolic and the real, engaging the imaginary in (inter)play. The nurse's response to the inner conversation with her ‘self/selves’ problematizes practice, illuminates the patient's perspective while highlighting the nurse's sense of her marginal position. Insight into reified and hegemonic assumptions, strategies of how control is maintained through organizational surveillance, trust and moral agency help to foreground personal expectations as the nurse begins to grapple with her own feelings of betrayal. Tackling these insights offers opportunities to rethink oppressive practices in the provision of care. It also enables an alternative appreciation of the everyday dilemmas confronting nurses and offers new meaning to practice. (shrink)

One of the most fundamental premises of feminist philosophy is the assumption of an invidious asymmetry between the genders that has to be overcome. Parallel to this negative account of asymmetry we also find a positive account, developed in particular within the context of so-called feminist philosophies of difference. I explore both notions of gender asymmetry. The goal is a clarification of the notion of asymmetry as it can presently be found in feminist philosophy. Drawing upon phenomenology as well as (...) feminist difference theory , I argue that a gender asymmetry does exist that cannot-as in the first assumption-be transformed into symmetry. (shrink)

One of the most fundamental premises of feminist philosophy is the assumption of an invidious asymmetry between the genders that has to be overcome. Parallel to this negative account of asymmetry we also find a positive account, developed in particular within the context of so-called feminist philosophies of difference. I explore both notions of gender asymmetry. The goal is a clarification of the notion of asymmetry as it can presently be found in feminist philosophy. Drawing upon phenomenology as well as (...) feminist difference theory, I argue that a gender asymmetry does exist that cannot-as in the first assumption-be transformed into symmetry. (shrink)

The article explores the need to eat as a biological and social practice among children in a preschool in Norway. The children in this preschool are aged from one to two years of age, and some of them have just started there. Different events from mealtimes relate to Derrida's concept of touch and Grosz's notion of bodies in‐place and out‐of‐place. How food touches the children and the practitioners is further discussed through a consideration of body/place relations, which are both material (...) and reflect pedagogical discourses. Its overall context is not only touching the food in a concrete sense, but also food as touch seen as a philosophical concept. Analyzing touching relations around the table including movements in materiality, bodies and discourses of eating may empower the youngest children in a preschool setting. (shrink)

This paper examines the temporality of agency in Judith Butler's and Saba Mahmood's writing. I argue that Mahmood moves away from a performative understanding of agency, which focuses on relations of signification, to a corporeal understanding, which focuses on desire and sensation. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's reading of Henri Bergson, I show how this move involves a changed model of becoming: whereas Butler imagines movement as a series of discontinuous beings, in Mahmood's case, we get an understanding of becoming.