Similarly Different: Exploring How Male Nurses in CAMHS Experience Difference in Their Gender Performance

ABSTRACT

This article explores concepts of gender difference for nurses working in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Nursing. Inspired by the author's own experiences he emerged ethnographic research data to explore how male nurses replicate a problematic performance sited between representing ‘similarity’ and yet ‘difference’ to their female colleagues. In this article, the author discusses how typical dichotomies of sexuality, gender and transformation are troubling for child and adolescent nursing discourses because they privilege particular representations of maleness, narratives of sexual multiplicity and disguise how the equity gaze is a persistent reminder in the minds of many male nurses that theirs is sometimes a prescribed performance of metaphorical sexless, gender nakedness and quietened voice which is disrobed and left like their sex in the locker room.

KEYWORDS:

• CAMHS
• gender studies
• ethnographic research
• male nurse

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgment given to all of the contributors. Confidentiality assured.