Foucault and nursing: a history of the present

While a commitment to the development of nursing theory has been a significant force in nursing scholarship, particularly in the US, the authors have noted a recent trend among nurses in different countries to develop Foucauldian interpretations of nursing. The objective of this paper is to identify those publications by nurses that employ a Foucauldian perspective and to provide a useful summative review of these works to date, which illustrate the potential contribution of a Foucauldian reading of nursing. The authors have reviewed 27 publications written by nurses which present a Foucauldian analysis. These publications were issued between 1987 and 1998 in English, Portuguese and German. The most frequent concepts treated in the literature reviewed are power/knowledge, surveillance, discourse, discipline, resistance, docile bodies, clinical gaze, and panopticon. The literature reviewed illustrates that Foucault's concepts can have a profound impact on the way we conceive of nursing as a discipline and as a profession. Nursing care becomes a political event, nursing knowledge contributes to the dissemination of regimes of truth, and nurses, rather than being powerless, are perceived as professionals who exercise power over life in society. A Foucauldian reading of nursing enables nurses to move into a broader interdisciplinary and critical scholarship.