Nurse Jackie The Politics of Nurse Jackie

Kathleen McHugh's 2012 article entitled "Nurse Jackie and the Politics of Care" offers an analytical discussion on 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 such critical issues 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 said argument. Specifically, the discussion will focus on the ways that the complex portrayal of the title character in the television series Nurse Jackie casts distinction in a way that the author considers positive to the public image of the profession.

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 which McHugh provides on the evolution...

Here, examples such as M.A.S.H.. St. Elsewhere and E.R. provide readers with a familiar set of portrayals, providing a successful personalization of the subject matter for author and reader alike.
The article moves forward under the premise that nursing is a profession which is 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 the public knowledge of how important this 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, which is that the relative 'invisibility' of nurses in mass media has a deleterious impact on the public support and resource availability 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 representational challenges revolve on the perceived correlation between nursing and gendered misrepresentations relating to sexuality and maternity, on the assumed connection between feminine traits such as nurturing and on the imperative for producers of mass media to dramatize events. These challenges collectively amount to a disinterest in producing accurate depictions of nurses at work.

The approach that the author takes is to first build a case that the nurse is…