While reading the Hunger Games trilogy, I relished Suzanne Collins loving descriptions of food, especially given they were accompanied by a wider critique of the politics of hunger. As I read, I shook my head in dismay along with Katniss at the capitol’s fondness for purging tonic and obeisance to the body beautiful. More recently, I was dismayed to find this beloved series has been purged of its more political components on its journey to the big screen, not only via the heightened focus on romance, but also via the purging of the political critique of hunger.

Katniss Everdeen, our intrepid heroine, comes from the food impoverished District 12, where starving to death is a pressing, daily concern. Food shortages serve as a driving part of the narrative, and the astute Katniss realizes the capitol deliberately uses food as a weapon to manipulate the populace, that food is “just another tool to cause misery…A way to plant hatred between the starving workers of the Seam and those who can generally count on Supper.”

But food is more than a weapon in the book – the procuring and sharing of it is an act not only of survival, but of love. The book’s heroic characters – Katniss, Gale, Peeta  – all provide food for others while the villains – the Capitol, the Career tributes – hoard and waste food. In the book, the perennially hungry Katniss (how refreshing to see a female character that appreciates food!) is astonished by the lavish meals at the Capitol, noting “I’ve never had food like this.” When presented with delectable rich soup and irresistible desserts she shares “probably the best thing I can do between now and the Games is put on a few pounds” (again, how refreshing, a female that wants to GAIN weight!) Here, Katniss is thinking strategy – she wants to nourish herself for the games. She also realizes, though, the work required to put on such a meal, noting she would have had to hunt and gather for days to even approximate such a sumptuous meal. In a political analysis typical of her character, she muses

“What must it be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by? What do they do all day, these people in the Capitol, besides decorating their bodies and waiting around for a new shipment of tributes to roll in and die for their entertainment?”

Alas, Hollywood, like the citizens of the Capitol, seems more interested in decorating bodies and mass-producing “entertainment” than in bringing the more political messages of Collins book to life. While the film does not completely jettison the book’s focus on hunger, it is by no means a driving part of the narrative – food is relegated to a side table, so to speak, with a loaf of bread captured on screen here, a fancy dessert propped before Katniss there. But, Katniss is not driven by the threat of starvation like she is in the books, nor is Panem society excoriated for its 99%-1% divide.

While Jennifer Lawrence is brilliant in the role, and while the visual feel of the film is mesmerizing, I left the theatre feeling hungry, feeling a bit like it was one of those “hollow days” described by Katniss in the book, where her empty belly echoes the gaping maw of injustice in the society in which she struggles to survive. “I’ve lost a lot of weight in the arena, I need some extra calories,” she noted at this point in the book. The film, like Katniss’ in the games, is emaciated, lacking the weight of the densely caloric book with its meaty political analysis.

If only the filmmakers had taken Katniss’ comment in the book to heart, “I mean, it’s the Hunger Games, right?” Here, she is strategizing with Rue regarding taking action against the Career Tributes, and explaining that taking out their food supply is key. Katniss recognizes that forcing the privileged Career Tributes to be hungry, as she has been most of her life, could turn the tide of the games. If only viewers would be forced to be hungry in the same way – to have the appetizing visuals removed, the romance made less palatable, the sweet, fast-food narrative rendered harder to chew, maybe we too could experience some game-changing hunger. If only the film had not lost the more weighty dealings with food, and given us a richer, more politicized meal…

Why is it strange to see a visual of girlie-girls grooming puppies while hearing the sounds of boyie-boys* describing a Star Wars battle? Check out The HTML5 Gendered LEGO Advertising Remixer to try it out for yourself and your kids.

 In the words of my almost-8-year-old daughter trying to explain (to her feminist sociologist mom) why this website cracks her up:

“This is funny!” (“Why?”) “Because it has the gun sounds and the girl characters.” (“Why do you think LEGO makes their toys like this?”) “Because they think that there are boy-toys and girl-toys.” (“Are there?”) “No, but they think they are.  And, look at the colors.” (“The colors are different?”) “People think orange is a boy color and pink is a girl color. But, I like orange, and Dad likes pink.” 

Yep, Dad likes pink.  And, Mom likes interactive ways to show, rather than tell, why anti-sexist parents must continue to fight the good fight…whether with a light saber or a blow dryer.

*I recognize “boyie-boy” is not as common an expression as “girlie-girl,” but my daughter used that term last year when describing the gendered differences she noticed among her friends:

Some of my girl friends are girlie-girls, and they like pink and purple and sparkles and dresses and unicorns. And, some boys at my school are boyie-boys, and they only like orange and blue and red and bugs and LEGOs and dinosaurs.

My daughter self-identifies as a boyie-girl (a girl who likes girlie and boyie things), and she and I both appreciate the girlie-boys in our lives — guys who are as happy wearing a lavendar shirt while they cook dinner as they are drinking a beer while watching the big game  :-]

Must-read post by Avis Jones-DeWeever about the tragic death of Trayvon Martin at MomsRising Blog.  There’s a petition you can sign here.

I wasn’t part of this past weekend’s mad AWP melee but I was thinking about how the influx of an estimated 10,000 attendees filled with literary ambition creates its own kind of adrenaline and angst-filled elixir.  It led me to dig out a piece I wrote for an online magazine last spring, yet unfortunately, they never ran.  I corresponded with several major female poets to ask what their experience of gender bias in the literary world has been.  Plus ca change, I want to say, but the irony is that for women publishing, so very little has.

Just before this year’s AWP conference began, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts released this year’s “The Count” which starkly portrayed the woefully small pieces of the literary pie served up by women writers in major literary sources.  I wish I could say much was different from last year’s report, but it’s not the case.  One thing that is rising, however, is awareness of the gross discrepancies about who is published in the literary world. Here is the article I wrote last year, with excerpts from several prominent writers I was thrilled to correspond with:

Although T.S. Eliot called April “the cruelest month,” the first signs of spring bring the annual celebration of National Poetry Month.  This year, however, interest began to blossom early with the February release of “The Count” by the literary organization VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts.

Founded by poet Cate Marvin in 2009 during a moment she describes as an homage to Tillie Olsen’s iconic story “I Stand Here Ironing,” Marvin, while folding her infant daughter’s clothes, began to contemplate why her panel on contemporary American women poets had been rejected for the competitive national Associated Writing Program conference. An email “seemed to blast right out of my head,” she writes, and within months her cri de coeur about lack of gender parity in the literary world had picked up a fierce momentum.  A year later, VIDA is thriving, with plans for a conference focusing on women’s writing, and moreover, a community that has the desire to shake up an imbalance that has been tolerated for too long.

The Count 2010 revealed stark pie charts that indict the top literary journals and highly regarded magazines for their abysmal inclusion of women — whether as contributors or authors reviewed or book reviewers.  Immediately, both outrage and “it’s about time” comments appeared as some editors went on the defensive about the results.  One humbled male reviewer called the study “in many ways a blunt instrument” with the suggestion that breakdown of its statistics would further illuminate the nuances of bias that surface in, as he writes, “the staggering differences between male and female representation.”  Meghan O’Rourke on Slate lauds the study but adds, “a task VIDA might usefully take on is a breakdown, by gender, of the genres reviewed and represented.”  Shock, debate and denial quickly raged in many literary sources with a mix of defensiveness and admirable get-to-the-bottom-of-this persistence. But, as O’Rourke tackles, the fundamental question behind the thin pie slices served up for women is, Why?

The answer, of course, is complex.  The oft-cited information that women enroll in MFA programs at an equal, if not higher, rate than men is clear, as is the fact that more women buy books in the United States, and are likely to be readers.  But breaking into the journals and magazines that can “make” a writer’s career by laying a direct pipeline to a high-profile agent or a publishing contract, or can compound the cultural capital of a positive review into a prestigious grant or even tenure-track job interview, seems to be about something else — the tactics of how one gains ground in the po’biz world or becomes part of the g/literati.

As talk swirled around the indisputable net effects of the VIDA stats, attention began to focus on the subtler issues surrounding how ambition and promotion are gendered. Blogosphere debate raged around topics such as how networks of male influence hold impact; the subtle, but real, assumptions behind who deserves a job; how fame is won; as well as the intangible but real sense that putting oneself forward as a writer requires a certain kind of brash ego more often cultivated by men.  And while most editors responded with culpable awareness, some offered that the flip solution of tokenism doesn’t solve the root problem.

The topics raised afresh by VIDA, unfortunately, are hardly new.  Just four years ago, an essay entitled “Numbers Trouble” co-written by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young in The Chicago Review targeted gender representation in the experimental poetry world. The two women counted bylines by women within anthologies, journals, major awards and blogs, confirming a rather dismal ratio.  The blog site of the venerable Poetry Foundation responded swiftly, in part, trying to parse the social conditions surrounding women and time, caring for children, encouragement of ambition, cultivation of career, and its much-vaunted Poetry Magazine had even commissioned an essay years before (in 2003) trying to root out why women are represented in such unequal numbers.  As Spahr and Young write in “Numbers Trouble”: “We are also suspicious of relying too heavily on the idea that fixing the numbers means we have fixed something. We could have 50 percent women in everything and we still have a poetry that does nothing, that is anti-feminist.”

Spahr and Young also counted women’s bylines at a variety of small, independent presses and hardly found parity there, although “University presses are a little more skewed to gender equity.” But even Wesleyan University Press, which they point out is known for publishing mainly women, “has 90 books by men and seventy by women (44 percent); a better number, but far from ‘mainly.'”

I corresponded with four poets of different generations who published with Wesleyan, and they each came back to the idea that it’s not a question of quality that keeps them from being published–it’s systemic bias.

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Amy Chua’s 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother caused quite a stir. Apparently it was also prophetic: one year later, U.S. readers have a new crop of books about how everyone else raises their kids. Everyone except Americans, that is: the Chinese, the French, the Argentineans, the Tibetans, the Polynesians… and so on.

The verdict? Let’s just say that in the Parental Olympics, the U.S. appears to be losing, and losing big.

Over the past year, the media has reported how the Chinese are raising children capable of crushing American students on standardized math tests. (When the parent in question is Amy Chua, one of those kids also turns out to be a concert pianist.) More recently, journalist Pamela Druckerman has filled us in on the superiority of French motherhood in Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting: a certain Gallic savoir faire seems to produce tots who eat everything and behave perfectly while their mothers take frequent smoking breaks. Later this month, we’ll be treated to a slightly different explanation about French maternal superiority, courtesy of Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. Add to that the book I just finished reading, Mei-Ling Hopgood’s How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm: And Other Adventures in Parenting (from Argentina to Tanzania and everywhere in between), and even the most confident mama might begin to question herself.

As Allison Kimmich pointed out last month, these books “highlight our cultural obsession with motherhood, or the failings of American mothers.”

Even so, I confess to being fascinated by these books. I don’t know if that’s because deep down I’m insecure about my own mothering (and if I am, perhaps that’s as a result of all these books…?) or because I’ve always loved travel and the distance one gains from another cultural perspective. I welcome glimpses into other ways of doing things, particularly when it comes to parenting and family. I often wonder whether the “intensive parenting” practiced by many U.S. middle- and upper-middle class parents (mostly mothers) actually benefits kids—not to mention whether it places far more burdens on mothers and primary caregivers. (“Perfect madness” was how Judith Warner described it.) Other cultural perspectives can shed light on how we’ve constructed particular ideals of motherhood and family, and maybe even how we can change them.

Hopgood is the least judgmental of all of these writers. In fact, she goes to lengths not to judge (which can also be a problem if you forever wallow in cultural relativism, an oft-discussed topic in my Women’s Studies classes). Her book is a journalistic account of how other groups of people around the world approach various parenting practices: how the Chinese potty train early, how the Japanese let their children fight, how Polynesians play without their parents, and so on.

For example, did you know that Chinese toddlers are frequently potty trained by eighteen months, if not twelve? Or that Argentine children and their families regularly stay up until the wee hours of the night? How Eskimos Keep Their Babies Warm is full of tidbits like this.

If you’re interested in more detailed anthropological accounts of familial practices in other parts of the world, you should head straight to Hopgood’s bibliography, which contains some great sources. Or, if you’re more interested in a feminist critique of contemporary motherhood in industrialized nations, you should wait to read Badinter’s The Conflict. But if you don’t mind a breezy tour of what parenting looks like globally, mixed with Hopgood’s own personal reflections about her life as a transplanted Asian American new mom living in Buenos Aires, you should pick up her book.

Hopgood’s slightly more serious intention emerges in the final chapter. She’d like us to open up to other approaches to parenting, embrace a little more cosmopolitanism when it comes to family life, and let go of some of our judgment:

It’s unhealthy to enclose ourselves in parental parochialism, ruled by the plaintive, guilty insistence that there is a single, best way to raise children. We may or may not adopt what another family in another culture or place does, but we can take comfort in knowing that there really is more than one good way to get a baby to sleep, transport her from place to place, and feed her.

Kids are “amazingly adaptive and resilient creatures,” she writes. And there are “many ways to be a good parent in the world.”

One could certainly unpack “parent” to develop a more nuanced examination of how various cultural practices are gendered—or in some cases, how they might undo heteronormative, Western ideals of mothering and fathering. (Aka pygmy fathers turn out to be pretty interesting in this regard.) Come to think of it, Hopgood’s case studies might make some great material for my Women’s Studies students.

In the meantime, her book suggests some of the wide variations within the global landscape of parenting—as well as how parenting practices have morphed over time and continue to change today, from the U.S. to Argentina to China. And that raises an interesting question: if ideas about parenting are traveling across borders, like so many other things, is this global exchange altering how we think about what it means to parent?

First of all, please read the post, below, which I wrote today for Girl w/Pen.

Then go over to Motherlode, the parenting blog at the NYTimes, and read “Choosing to Have a Child with Down Syndrome,” a piece I wrote.  It’s pretty intimately connected to a lot of what I’ve written here, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Last weekend at the playground, a little boy around three years old approached my daughter Maybelle, who’s also three.  “Are you a boy or a girl?” he asked her.  She didn’t answer—I suspect she wasn’t sure how to process that question.  And to tell the truth, neither was I.

After a pause, I said, “She’s a girl.”

“Then why is she wearing boys’ clothes?” he asked.

This one I knew the answer to:  “Everybody can like Spiderman,” I said.

“Spiderman!” Maybelle agreed enthusiastically.

Maybelle’s dad has begun commenting that when he picks Maybelle up at preschool, the kids are divided by gender on the playground.  It’s not that they’re playing with different things, they just aren’t all playing together.

“Who does Maybelle play with?” I asked.

“Everybody,” he said.  “She doesn’t seem to understand the way they’re dividing.  Nobody turns her away.”

This is one of the interesting things about having a kid with an intellectual disability:  Maybelle doesn’t really get gender.  She calls her bed a “big girl bed,” because that’s the exciting billing we gave it when we made the transition from the crib, but “girl” doesn’t necessarily have any meaning to her.

Her speech therapist occasionally asks her to identify pictures by gender:  “Is that a boy or a girl?”  And Maybelle doesn’t know the answer.

I have to say, I’m glad that she doesn’t.  I recognize the argument that could be made here:  gender is a central component of how our culture works.  In order to be a person who functions in the world as it now operates, a person needs to understand the conventions of gender, the backpack of cultural expectations, needs to be able to use gendered pronouns appropriately and identify girls and boys, men and women.

And yet part of what I do in my job is to try to destabilize all that stuff.  I have a number of students who identify as trans, who are recognizing that they don’t fit within the gender binary that’s been taught to them from day one.  I have a still larger number of students who may identify with a gender, but want that gender to be pretty significantly reworked.  I identify with a gender, but I don’t believe that there are only two genders, nor do I believe that anybody should be automatically consigned to one.

Maybelle currently likes dinosaurs and big trucks.  She’s a tiny bit obsessed with The Sound of Music and John Lee Hooker’s song “Boom Boom.”  She plays drums, and she does “Ring Around a Rosie” with her baby doll.  She rolls a stuffed octopus around the house in a stroller.  One of her favorite items of clothing is her Spiderman sweatshirt.  This sounds like a great collection of interests, one not at all constrained by binary gendered expectations.

When people ask Maybelle, “Is that a boy or a girl?” or “Are you a boy or a girl?”, I think the correct answer might be, “I don’t know.”  Or maybe, “Who cares?”  The fact that gender isn’t intuitively obvious to her might be a benefit.  She might have the opportunity not to have to unlearn the damaging, sexist stuff that my students, my colleagues, my friends, and I have to grapple with.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post for The Forward titled “Occupy (Working) Motherhood, Anyone?“, which generated a, shall we say, interesting comment.  The post began like this:

Susan B. Anthony was born 192 years ago today; we share a birthday. I am 43. The late great suffragist once said: “Our job is not to make young women grateful. It’s to make them ungrateful so they keep going.” Much of my Jewish practice these days is about gratitude. But in light of our shared birthday this week, I’ve decided to dwell on some serious ingratitude.

I grew up in the 1970s listening to “Free to Be You and Me,” and singing joyfully that “Mommies Are People.” Who would have guessed, now that I’m one of those people, that the dilemmas my own working mother struggled with would become mine? In middle school, when I’d call home sick my mom would try to talk me into returning to class, so that she wouldn’t have to leave work or find a sitter. I’m pretty sure that’s what I’d do, too….

The post ends with the following birthday wishes:

1). Affordable quality childcare, paired with a change in the cultural expectation that women’s careers are expendable. That ingratitude is owed to President Nixon, who vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Bill. That piece of legislation would have provided a multibillion-dollar national daycare system that would have circumvented much of our struggle.

2). Workplace structures and a society transformed to allow for the fact that workers have families, too. Though we’ve made progress, we’ve still got a ways to go. Ingratitude to employers who put paternity on the books but support a culture that makes The Daddy Track anathema to all but the bravest men. And why does it have to be a track, after all? Haven’t we learned that the women who opt out eventually, in various ways, opt back in?

3). A future so bright on the work/life satisfaction front that neither my daughter nor my son will have to write this kind of post.

(You can read the full post here.)

The comment in question was in response to the wish for more affordable (meaning, yes, subsidized) childcare.  It went like this:

“By ‘affordable,’ I assume you mean ‘subsidized by others outside my family.’ Thanks, I’m spending enough on my own kids (and my wife chooses not to work outside the home) without having to subsidize your parenting choices.” -morganfrost

Now, there’s nothing I appreciate more than when, just as I’m considering a response, the perfect retort pops up in my Inbox.  In this case, a number of folks emailed me comments directly, though they experienced technical trouble posting them on The Forward’s site. Here’s what some of them said:

“‘Affordable’ means ‘subsidized by all of us.’  We need to have a society where people can have children AND careers without having to face too many impossible choices.  My career isn’t optional–it’s what pays the bills in my family.  The same is true for my husband’s career.  So we must have childcare, and we’d prefer that it be quality childcare, because our child–like EVERY child–deserves to be well cared for.  This should be a value that our entire country embraces and will help to support.” -Alison Piepmeier

“Susan B. Anthony did her job well. I’m glad you make the point that childcare should be subtracted from parental income, not maternal income, one of my pet peeves.  what matters most in a relationship, I think, is not necessarily that domestic/parental tasks be divided evenly but that each partner respect the other’s contributions, whatever form they take.  That’s harder in a society that, for all its talk of ‘family values,’ makes childcare the responsibility of individual familes.@morganfrost, relax. We’d like fewer predator drones and bank bailouts, not a crack at your piggybank. And keep in mind that your wife has a choice that many do not.” -Ashton Applewhite

YEAH.

And hey, morganfrost’s comment also inspired a wonderful post by Cali Yost over at Forbes, titled “Think You Don’t Benefit Directly from Childcare? ‘WIIFMs’ That Will Change Your Mind”.

So thank you, morganfrost.  You inspired some great stuff.

And thanks Alison, Ashton, and Cali.  I get by with a little help from my friends.

This is a brief dispatch from teaching sex. I’m teaching a sociology class at Framingham State University this semester called Sex/Sexualities in Society. Students in my class also are enrolled in my colleague Bridgette Sheridan’s history class History of Gender, Sexualities and the Body. Together these courses are part of an innovative linked learning community called “The Making of Sexualities.” Who says you can’t do sex every day?

Monday night we had a video Skype class with my colleague, Marie Bergström, who studies online (heterosexual) dating in France. Marie is from Sweden, and is completing her doctoral research in Paris. My awesome students were riveted by the topic, and by connecting across continents about sexual politics. If I could summarize, we learned that there are sexual double standards in France and in Sweden, but they aren’t the same. Ditto for the US. Last week read an article, “Casual Hookups to Formal Dates: Refining the Boundaries of the Sexual Double Standard,” about hooking up on college campuses and found the same thing: Even as we are long beyond the sexual revolution, and even though men and women experience new kinds of freedoms to have sexual desire, they end up following distinct rituals in order to manage sex-specific sexual stigma and opportunities. The learning community is fundamentally a critique of essentialism and heteronormativity. But as we read and dialogue, we have a basic puzzle: why the persistence of the sexual double standard? We just read Mary Wollstonecraft in my classical theory class; she raised the issue over 200 years ago, but it still isn’t old news.

Next week, Pepper Schwartz is coming to FSU—she’ll talk to professors, meet with students, and she’ll address the entire campus about sex across the life cycle, with the fun title “From Viagra to Hooking Up: The Sexual Life Cycle.” It will be a big day for Framingham State University. And it will be great to hear what Pepper has to say about the sexual double standard across the life cycle—and over the past four decades since the sexual revolution suggested the end of all that.

-Virginia Rutter

Last year, I read about a case of a nurse who alleged being sexually harassed by a doctor during her job interview, and a couple of months later I was struck by a report from the Netherlands about the high rate of sexual harassment experienced by female nursing and healthcare workers. Although cases like these make it seem like doctors and managers are the primary perpetrators of sexual harassment, reports show that it is patients who sexually harass nurses most often.

With a recent study suggesting that nurses simply distance themselves from patients who are sexually inappropriate, how do nurses maintain quality health care of these patients? A new book, Catheters, Slurs, and Pick-up Lines: Professional Intimacy in Hospital Nursing (Temple University Press) sheds light on female nurses’ experiences of being sexually harassed by patients.  For this month’s column, I had the chance to ask the author, sociologist Lisa Ruchti, Ph.D. of West Chester University, about nurses experiences of “intimate conflicts” with patients.

Adina Nack: Why did you decide to study the dynamics of patient-nurse interactions?

Lisa Ruchti: I initially thought that nurses’ experiences of sexual harassment by patients would be similar to waitresses’ experiences of sexual harassment by customers because they are each one type of women’s work. Instead, I found that nurses did not refer to their encounters as ‘sexual harassment’ because work culture affects definitions of sexual harassment (other sociologists have found this too; for example, Christine Williams and Kirstin Dellinger).  In nursing, it was the fact that nurses provided both professional and intimate care that contributed to differences in how and when nurses said they were sexually harassed. I became intrigued with the function of intimacy in professional care work and wanted to learn more.

AN: I’m intrigued by the concept of “professional intimacy” – how is this experienced by nurses?

LR: In my work, I found that nurses negotiated a cycle of what I call “professional intimacy” with patients. I also found that negotiating intimate conflict with patients is inextricably a part of how nurses gain their trust. Nurses start with gaining the intimate trust of their patients. This trust sometimes escalates to patients having feelings of familiarity for their nurses, which leads to conflict for the nurse. These conflicts include patients feeling entitled to service beyond the scope of care in nursing, angry verbal interactions, and/or sexualized entitlement. This conflict can also be unavoidable such as the ways that nurses negotiated the sexual encounters between patients and their visitors. Nurses negotiate care through this conflict to renew trust to ensure that quality health care is administered.

AN: How do nurses experience conflict when providing care to patients?

LR: The majority of the 45 nurses I interviewed avoided describing patient care as involving conflict. They used words like nurture, kindness, and compassion to make it seem like nurses “being caring” was a natural personality characteristic characterized by goodness. Feminist philosopher Eva Kittay discusses this in her work: patients are not usually described as anything other than “needy,” and we don’t tend to think of needy people as causing conflicts for those who provide their care. My focus on identifying conflict is as much about seeing patients clearly as it is about seeing the work of nurses clearly.

AN: You make a key point about not only a nurse’s sex but also her race/ethnicity shaping her experiences of patients’ harassment – can you give a couple of examples of how nurses described these interactions?

LR: It is one thing for nurses to manage sexually explicit language or touches; it is quite another when those are combined with racial slurs and epithets.  Imagine that a nurse not only walks in to check on a patient and sees himmasturbating, but she is also called a “dirty foreigner.” Or, a nurses isgiving a patient a bath, and the patient says you remind him of his mammy. It was incredibly important for me to look at the function of multiple identities since I was looking at intimate care as something that is constructed in interaction between patients and nurses and informed by social ideologies. Intersectionality is an incredibly useful tool when explaining complex social experiences.

AN: As a medical sociologist, I was instantly hooked by your book’s title, but I can also see why many of us — not just nurses — should read your book. 

LR: Thanks, I wrote it not just to give voice to nurses but also because almost all of us have all been patients or visited loved ones in hospitals. Many of us have or will have long medical journeys at some point in our lives, and this book can help us understand a vital part of that journey. If we can better understand the lives of those who are taking care of us, then we can help ensure that quality care occurs when we need it.  Other studies have documented how much nurses care about patients, and it’s time for us to listen to their stories – we need to understand their experiences of caring for us.