[Re-signification of the human in the context of the "ciborgzation": a look at the human being-machine relationship in intensive care].
This study discusses the human being-machine relationship in the process called "cyborgzation" of the nurse who works in intensive care, based on post-structuralist Cultural Studies and highlighting Haraway's concept of cyborg. In it, manuals used by nurses in Intensive Care Units have been examined as cultural texts. This cultural analysis tries to decode the various senses of "human" and "machine", with the aim of recognizing processes that turn nurses into cyborgs. The argument is that intensive care nurses fall into a process of "technology embodiment" that turns the body-professional into a hybrid that makes possible to disqualify, at the same time, notions such as machine and body "proper", since it is the hybridization between one and the other that counts there. Like cyborgs, intensive care nurses learn to "be with" the machine, and this connection limits the specificity of their actions. It is suggested that processes of "cyborgzation" such as this are useful for questioning - and to deal with in different ways - the senses of "human" and "humanity" that support a major part of knowledge/action in health.
Nursing as textually mediated reality.
Nursing and nursing practice both construct and are in turn constructed by the context in which they operate. Texts plays a central part in that construction. As such, nursing and nursing practice can be considered to represent a reality that is textually mediated. This paper explores the notion of nursing as a textually mediated reality and offers the reader the possibility of engaging in reflection on what implications this has for nursing and their own nursing practice. The analyses provided draw on aspects of the work of both Foucault and Derrida. Foucault's notion of discourse provides a vehicle for the exploration of nursing as textually mediated, as does Derrida's concept of binary oppositions. The paper thus illustrates some of the possibilities afforded nursing by poststructural analyses. In particular it does this by exploring one of the central textual constructions, impacting on the way that nursing and nursing practice are conceptualized, the mind/body binary opposition.
Tradition, rationality, and power in introductory nursing textbooks: A critical hermeneutics study
This study investigated the language used to describe, explain, and interpret the concept of nursing process in four introductory nursing textbooks. A critical theory framework was used to reinterpret the ways in which language or linguistic activities construct the social-historical reality of nurses. Themes related to tradition, rationality, and power relationships were explicated. The meanings disclosed from the world of the text provide understandings about how nurses interpret their professional autonomy and how normative structures inform what constitutes authority and responsibility in research, education, and practice.