"She didn't know i'm black, you see". Practices, body signs, and professional identity

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.