ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the ways in which nurses are generating new subjectivities that challenge the borders of the formal economy, national boundaries or secular liberal values. It examines two sets of practices that assert different kinds of values: supranational and theocratic. For nurses, it is because the field of citizenship extends beyond the workplace, beyond the state-protected sphere of professionalism – such as to patients themselves through the discourse of ‘rights’ – that competing tensions emerge around how one’s citizenship status is defined and what this actually means. The hierarchies of the nursing profession, mirroring those of society at large were racialized, so that to be aspirational meant to traverse the boundaries and adorn the symbols of racial otherness. Nurses have typically been associated with the former; they are now engaging in various ways with the latter, as new avenues to income creation, prestige and moral purpose become visible.
