With this paper, I will interrogate some of the implications of nursing's dominant historiography, the history written by and about nursing, and its implications for nursing ethics as a praxis, invoking feminist philosopher Donna Haraway's mantra that ‘it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’ First, I will describe what I have come to understand as the nursing imaginary, a shared consciousness constructed both by nurses from within and by those outside the discipline from without. This imaginary is (...) fashioned in part by the histories nursing produces about the discipline, our historical ontology, which is demonstrative of our disciplinary values and the ethics we practice today. I assert that how we choose to constitute ourselves as a discipline is itself an ethical endeavour, bound up with how we choose to be and what we allow as knowledge in nursing. To animate this discussion, I will outline the received historiography of nursing and dwell in the possibilities of thinking about Kaiserswerth, the training school that prepared Nightingale for her exploits in Crimea and beyond. I will briefly consider the normative values that arise from this received history and consider the possibilities that these normative values foreclose upon. I then shift the frame and ask what might be possible if we centred Kaiserswerth's contested legacy as a training school for formerly incarcerated women, letting go of the sanitary and sanitised visions of nursing as Victorian angels in the hospital. Much energy over the past 250 years has been invested in the professionalisation and legitimation of nursing, predicated (at least in our shared imaginary) on the interventions of Florence Nightingale, but this is one possibility of many. I conclude with a speculative dream of the terrain opens up for nursing if we shed this politics and ethos of respectability and professionalism and instead embrace community, abolition and mutual aid as organising values for the discipline. (shrink)

Black feminist theory and theorizations by feminists of colour have identified and explored emotions linked to race and racism in feminist movements, especially in the US context. Building on this literature, this article explores the changes in feminist emotional dynamics linked to race which have been brought up by the relatively recent adoption of intersectionality in feminist movements’ discourses in two European countries, France and Switzerland, which are both often described as ‘colour-blind’ contexts. Drawing on Hochschild’s concept of feeling rules, (...) we argue that intersectionality has changed the ways feminists are legitimately expected to feel about race and racism within feminist movements in both contexts. As feeling rules vary according to the members’ positions within the movement, we contend that these changes in emotional dynamics contribute to redefine feminists’ relations and feminist membership along racial lines. Based on interviews with young feminist activists in France and Switzerland during mobilization processes characterized by a prominent use of intersectionality, we observe how intersectionality discourses bring about new feeling rules in relation to race and racism. These feeling rules differ for white and non-white feminists: while intersectionality has led young white feminists to self-education and self-critique, racialized feminists often expressed mixed feelings about intersectionality and its use, in particular by white feminists. Importantly, these changes in feeling rules have allowed racialized feminists to renegotiate their relations with white feminists and their emotional content, as well as their position within the movement. (shrink)

This article examines some of the ways in which Black and Brown young women and men within the context of the US are consistently confronted by the silences around state-sanctioned violence enacted on our bodies with impunity while even our playful sonoric outbursts are reconfigured as threats to the state. I argue that, different from Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisation where the refrain functions to keep chaos at bay, the refrain produced by a group of Black and Brown youth at a (...) ferry station in New York brings to the fore and into confrontation the very Codes that create a sense of ‘home’ and ‘security’ for some at the expense of their well-being and often lives. However it is from navigating, what I refer to as, silent chaos that this article seeks to explore the decolonial potential of the sonoric ‘disruptions' produced by these Black and Brown young women and men, in particular by examining how they challenge the status quo and highlight the urgent need for new systems of valuation that would serve to reconstitute their collective worth. (shrink)