ABSTRACT
Feminist thought in the last few decades has both drawn on and contributed to a variety of critical social and intellectual movements. From a feminist perspective, there are two major factors that help explain the discipline of nursing's minimal involvement in genetic research and its applications in clinical settings: the subordination of nursing to medicine and conflicting epistemologies present in nursing and medicine. Discussions in nursing raise important questions about what counts as knowledge, how knowledge is obtained, and the ways it is applied in human contexts, questions to which many of the conclusions of feminism have great relevance. As a practice, the art of nursing is founded on traditions of caring, nurturing, healing, listening, intuiting, presencing, and understanding holistically instead of curing disease and prolonging human life, practices dominant in medicine. If the current promising possibilities for human genetics are to be realized in a positive way, greater involvement by nursing is inevitable and desirable.
