The COVID-19 pandemic presented new challenges to healthcare workers: with rising COVID cases, constantly changing guidelines, and an uncertain and rapidly unfolding situation, stress and burnout among nurses have risen as well. Narratives around work-life balance and burnout reveal some of the neoliberal systems and their effects on nurse experiences as well as how they are exacerbated by this pandemic. Coupled with the gendered nature of the profession, the experiences of frontline COVID-19 nurses are analyzed here in a critique of neoliberal feminist ideas and a neoliberalized and hierarchized healthcare system. By making visible these subtleties, better intervention into the experiences of nurses may be possible.
