Nurse Jackie and the Politics of Nursing in Media

Introduction

Kathleen McHugh's 2012 article "Nurse Jackie and the Politics of Care" offers an analytical discussion of the portrayal of nurses and the nursing profession in popular culture. The discursive assessment of nursing as seen in mass media centers less on the content of the media itself than on the sociological implications of common portrayals in relation to critical issues such as prescribed gender roles and the dynamics of care. The discussion here provides a deconstruction of the McHugh article, identifying its perspective, its primary arguments, and the approach taken to delivering those arguments. Specifically, the discussion focuses on the ways that the complex portrayal of the title character in the television series Nurse Jackie casts a distinction that the author considers positive for the public image of the profession.

McHugh's Audience and Premise

McHugh composes this article for members of the nursing profession with the goal of exposing the public image of the profession as conveyed through popular culture. The brief history she provides on the evolution of the nurse as depicted on television is especially useful in helping this targeted readership accept the author's premise. Examples such as M*A*S*H, St. Elsewhere, and ER provide readers with a familiar set of portrayals, successfully personalizing the subject matter for author and reader alike.

Invisibility and Misrepresentation of Nurses in Media

The article moves forward under the premise that nursing is a profession rarely — if ever — given significant and accurate representation in the media. Cinematic and television-based representations of nursing have employed various archetypes that reduce nurses to female objects of desire, agents of goodness, or purveyors of dominance, according to McHugh. The author works from the assumption that this has not only produced a limited understanding of what nurses actually do, but that it has also undermined public knowledge of how important the profession is to our shared health. McHugh asserts that "how the mass media portray nursing affects the politics of human resource allocation, development and utilization. An informed public can contribute to the advancement of the nursing profession and, by so doing, promote the nation's health" (p. 13).

This argument underscores the primary thesis of McHugh's article: that the relative "invisibility" of nurses in mass media has a deleterious impact on the public support and resources actually dedicated to the nursing profession. McHugh asserts that in addition to this invisibility, there are representational challenges to be overcome in the way that visible nurses are depicted. These challenges revolve around the perceived correlation between nursing and gendered misrepresentations relating to sexuality and maternity, the assumed connection between feminine traits such as nurturing, and the imperative for producers of mass media to dramatize events. Collectively, these challenges amount to a persistent disinterest in producing accurate depictions of nurses at work.

Conclusion

The resolution of such an approach is that the reader is compelled to recognize the complexity of the nursing profession. Consequently, this underscores the complexity of the lives of those who work within it.