Guest Editorial - Constructing Culture and Gender

Authors

  • Joan M. Anderson

Abstract

It is some years now since Laurie Gottlieb and I first spoke about this focus issue for the Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, and it is with a sense of fulfilment that I write this editorial. We had excellent submissions for the issue. Unfortunately, space did not permit all of them to be published, but there is the consolation that some will appear in subsequent issues and keep up the dialogue that I believe will result from the papers that appear here. We are especially pleased that this issue fosters an international exchange of ideas; in addition to contributions from scholars in Canada, we have an opportunity to hear from our colleagues in Australia, England, and the United States. This gives us a sense of how they are addressing the topics highlighted here. The invited papers, Allen's Discourse and Williams's Designer's Corner piece, have set the stage for talking about culture, gender, and ways of understanding and knowing. Though written independently of the other papers in this issue, they provide conceptual linkages among them. As Allen reminds us, neither culture nor gender is an objective reality awaiting our discovery; both are socially constructed. This theme runs through the four papers. As well as tackling the topics of gender and culture, the call for papers stressed our interest in pursuing the discourse on research from a feminist perspective that attempts to examine the intersection of gender, race, and class relations. Williams, in writing about the principles of feminist ethnography, pinpoints what I see as at the core of feminist research - it "implies a political position in relation to the production of knowledge." This theme is, I think, implicit in all of the papers and explicit in others.

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Published

1996-04-13

Issue

Section

Editorial