Subordination by Design: Rethinking Power, Policy, and Autonomy in Perioperative Nursing
Jennifer Dunn
Abstract
This discussion paper critically examines how power, policy, and autonomy intersect within perioperative nursing practice. In surgical environments engineered for precision and control, perioperative nurses operate in spaces that simultaneously depend on their expertise and suppress their professional voice. Drawing on feminist theory, relational ethics, and organizational sociology, this paper interrogates the structural, spatial, and symbolic forces that subordinate perioperative nursing. Hospital design, procedural norms, and entrenched hierarchies are shown to reinforce the containment of nursing authority. Power dynamics manifest through gendered labor expectations, professional gatekeeping, and policy constraints, all of which limit nurses' capacity for advocacy, leadership, and autonomous decision-making. Issues such as moral distress, workplace aggression, and educational marginalization are reframed as systemic, rather than individual challenges-embedded within a broader architecture of exclusion. Through comparative analysis and reform models, the discussion re-articulates perioperative autonomy as a strategic reclamation of professional agency, grounded in interdisciplinary respect and structural inclusion. Ultimately, this paper argues that authentic transformation in surgical settings requires a cultural shift: one that repositions perioperative nurses not as assistants to innovation, but as architects of surgical care and co-authors of policy and practice.