The Sexuality of Care: On Nursing, Kink, and a Future Without Hospitals - Paperback
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The Sexuality of Care: On Nursing, Kink, and a Future Without Hospitals is M. K. Thekkumkattil's essay collection from life as an ICU nurse.
The essays mix memoir and manifesto, setting the radical consent of queer kink against the way the hospital system fails patients and the nurses who work in it.
From the publisher
A unique, conversation-starting essay collection about critical care work, kink practices, and how one might transform the other.
M. K. Thekkumkattil is an ICU nurse looking for ways to show real care for their patients in the age of COVID. When not working in critical care, they struggle with chronic illness, endure controlling partners, and write letters to former patients that wrestle with the violence of professional nursing. At the same time, their slow gender awakening and the new, kink-informed relationships that accompany it begin to shape a way out of the brutalities the hospital system requires.
In essays that blend memoir and manifesto, The Sexuality of Care builds a convincing new argument for how the present-day medical system fails both its patients and its laboring nurses, as well as how the vision of radical consent found in queer kink practices lets us imagine a future where hospitals are abolished, yet care thrives.
Sophie Lewis is a theorist of care communization and queer utopias whose work has been translated into many languages. She is an antiwork transfeminist writer and self-described "recovering academic" who hails from Europe but lives in Philadelphia and teaches short courses online at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Her essays appear everywhere from the London Review of Books to n+1, and she is the author of Full Surrogacy Now (2019), Abolish the Family (2022), Enemy Feminisms (2025), and the essay collection Femmephilia (2026). Her forthcoming books include a monograph from Penguin Random House, The Liberation of Children (2027). You can follow or support her writing at patreon.com/reproutopia/ or lasophielle.org/.
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