Another way of making friendship, brotherhood and nursing is possible, when we unlearn what we have learned, we question our identity, we break categorised structures of interaction, we leave academic and work time to occupy ourselves in a meeting that has no limits, territorial spaces, agenda, roll call, obligatory nature, exploitation of the other, interest in maintaining a status quo. None of this accommodates us when we are willing to discomfort privileges and to defend care over the normative, hierarchies and structures.
By Karla Mijangos Fuentes
Frontier knowledge, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s terms, is what dis(unites) them from this stickiness that runs through their bodies, emotions and affections. That is to say, the moment in which they were epistemologically and physically displaced from nursing, was the moment in which they rediscovered their self-knowledge, sovereignty, recognition and diversity; and with it to reinvent and deconstruct themselves in and for nursing in collectivity and friendship.
They are the so-called Diverse and Dissident Nurses, who, as their name and identity define them, emerge from the frontier, from the diverse gender identities, indigenous, black, mestizo, disabled, fat, skinny, racialised, oppressed by the medical patriarchy, dominated by hegemonic and hierarchical structures, but utopian, critical, historical and empowered beyond the cardboards that may adorn them.
The Diverse and Dissident Nurses (EDyD), as they call themselves, are a collective of social fighters and a movement that arises from ontological approaches to the human being and care, therefore, in exercises of self-reflexivity they question how nursing, care, ethics, aesthetics, interactions, subjectivities, colonised and patriarchalised thoughts and/or acts, as well as political and territorial affections were configured.
REHUNO: How was this collective created? And who are its members?
The EDyD collective arose from the Covid-19 pandemic, as a result of the connection and interaction with the multiple social networks where they interacted, and where they were able to recognise each other and talk to each other to create this space of friendship and frontier. There is a lot of talk about the term frontier, because most of them migrated to other sciences such as philosophy, history, social and/or political sciences, the arts, holistic therapies, other medicines and/or knowledge, to return to nursing and look at the realities with those eyes that only a migrant could recreate and paint with the colours of diversity and interculturality.
In this sense, going through this border area, living the experiences of being and not being at the same time, because one was a nurse, but not a sociologist, anthropologist, philosopher, etcetera. In this journey of wanderings, undressing, deformations and disattitudes, they were able to question their identities as nurses and human beings, therefore, they had a very particular type of thread in their sutured bodies that nested them to the same history, to the same horizon of meaning and to a permanent dialogue that did not end with a single encounter.
Thus, Carmen Ayde Fernández Rincón (Peasant Nurse of Diversity_Colombia); Sara Domínguez (Indigenous Nurse Philosopher and Gender Specialist_Argentina); Lucy Jure Cares (Holistic Mapuche Nurse_Chile); Renata Virginia González Consuegra (Public Health Nurse and supporter of just causes_Colombia); Yesica Yolanda Rangel Flores (Feminist nurse, specialist in studies of and with women and social analyst_Mexico); Edilma Marlen Suárez Castro (Nurse and social fighter, specialist in political, bioethical, social and human studies_Colombia); Marta Milena Carvajal George (Nurse specialist and creator of sanarte cuántico_Colombia); Claudia Marcela Velásquez (Nurse and President of the National Technical Council of Nursing_Colombia); Adiela Henao (Nurse, professor at the University of Quindio and social fighter_Colombia); Karen Correa (Nurse epidemiologist and social analyst of children and youth_Colombia); Evanilda Carvalho (Nurse, teacher, researcher and social and human rights activist_Brazil) and Karla Ivonne Mijangos Fuentes (Zapotec Indigenous Nurse and activist for the decolonisation of health, nursing and care_Mexico) initially came together to make this collective a space for deconstruction, emancipation and decolonisation.
Subsequently, more sisters, brothers and sisters, as they call them, who have identified with and appropriated this movement in order to recognise, de-essentialise, repair and reconstruct themselves, joined the collective. Some of the names that appear in the collective are: Marina Rakel Checalla Poma, Adriana Serrato, Alexa Magaña, Amalia Osuna, Berenice Juan Martínez, Ma. Bernardita Pilquinao Pilquinao, Liliana González, Edda Cayotopa, Juana Castro, Kati Alveal, Laura Cazuza, Laura Ojeda, Leticia Jiménez, Mirtha del Valle Negrete, Liliana La Rosa, Mariana Cecilia, Marta Marucco, Nancy García, Natalia Sofia Gallego, Patricia Tiseira, Silvone Silva, Ma. Cristina Malerba, Hugo Tellez, Nancy Osses and Sauli.
And from this individual and collective epistemological turn, they intend to transcend towards the de(structuring), de(theorisation), de(patriarchalisation), de(colonisation) and de(totalisation) of nursing, of health, of life, of care and of the human being.
REHUNO: What is expected from this dissident nursing movement?
This movement, just as its name indicates, is about mobilising emotions, affections, thoughts, ways of knowing and understanding what is already believed to be acquired about the person, about nursing and about care.
And just in this collective search for answers, they have encountered their own experiences that constantly surround and question them, such as: Is it better to talk about care or nursing? Are there voices that are listened to more than others? What is the true meaning hidden in the modern concept of health? Do nurses care for people or for the capitalised system? Can the recognition of nursing be detached from the history of women? Why continue to build nursing from the academicist, the desk and the decontextualised and critical theory? Do diagnostic taxonomies move us away from or closer to interaction and transpersonalisation? Can we speak of health outside of illness? Can we think of a non-hegemonic and biomedical nursing? How can we recognise our colonial matrices and overcome our traps of narratives that recolonise and subalternise?
And it is from all these questions that, with a moscato wine, a Colombian coffee, a tequila, a mezcal, a beer, a mate, a caipirinha, a pisco, a water, a chocolate, a laugh, a compas hug, a poetry, a music, a story, a video, a therapy, an auto ethnography, they find the possible answers in a circle of words. All this, from horizontality, respect, active listening, friendship and brotherhood, is how they meet every Tuesday to look at each other virtually, to re(think), recognise and admire each other.
They consider that the pandemic only materialised what the universe had already planned, because this meeting is nothing more than the union of those red threads and those traces that each one of them followed to arrive at this moment of hope and dystopias. As they affirm, perhaps in each of the encounters they won’t find all the answers, others are mere chimeras, but the important thing about this movement is that they can make a mirror, that is to say, look at their own social representations of the world and their individual being among themselves.
Thus, recognising this internalised and reproduced self, they try to rebuild it collectively, not only for individual healing, but also for the transition and shaping of a more humane, more conscious, more just, more supportive, more ethical, more empathetic and more thought from the inter(care) than from the hierarchy and hegemonic power that dominates and violates the othernesses, including among them, the nursing professionals themselves.
REHUNO: Where are Diverse and Dissident Nurses going?
As María Lugones once said, this collective does not propose a simple friendship, a simple clash of drinks, a disproportionate and capitalised productivity, a power struggle for leadership and recognition of academic cards.
On the contrary, this brotherhood territorialises them and offers them a sense of belonging in order to feel communality, a common and collective struggle. In Lugones’ words, in this collective we can speak of “naked and uncomfortable relations and of fraternities without imperialism”, that is to say, in this twinned group, there are no borders and limitations of thought, but there is interaction and interrelation, because the connections tend to overcome hierarchical and instrumental, violent and categorised, self-interested and egocentric relations, of superiority and unique truth, of scientificity over other knowledge, because their objective will never be to colonise, dominate, acculturate and believe themselves to be the centre of the universe because they are health professionals.
In this sense, the nakedness of the soul that unites them, commits them and gives them a sense of belonging to this collective, which in each of the meetings proposes to continue repairing and rebuilding a nursing that looks and fights for human rights, dignity, personal sovereignty, free choice, inter-care, interculturality and horizontality of knowledge.
Diverse and Dissident Nurses believe that nursing is possible outside of the hierarchies, the social constructions of gender, the colonial matrices that the biomedical model has injected into their profession and their caregivers, and furthermore, they believe that it is possible to transcend the egoic self, the enmities and the violence they have gone through in the journey of professional care.
They maintain the hope that at some point they will be able to meet in person, and for this, they are already thinking about a possible congress of diverse and dissident nurses, where not only the conferences, research projects and work tables will unite them, but also the arts, photography, poetry, field work, cultural exchange of concepts and practices, and also proposals for social struggles, movements, marches, new slogans and revolutions, de-structuring, re-elaboration of meanings and processes.
It only remains to add that, among their first projects, the Diverse and Dissident Nurses have set out to reconstruct their self-ethnographies of identities, dissidences and transformations. They are also working on the re-elaboration of a prosaic or aesthetic of the everyday in nursing based on Katya Mandoki’s proposal. Finally, the EDyDs also started with the critical and social historical analysis of some of the nursing curricula.
To conclude with this text, the Diverse and Dissident Nurses, starting from this solidarity and horizontal tendency, invite all nurses to join their collective and/or movement, because the struggle of the EDyDs is the struggle for health, the person and care.
