The Sexuality of Care - by M K Thekkumkattil (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Sexuality of Care:

"M. K. Thekkumkattil has created something wondrous: a radical excavation of the entwined violence and softness at the heart of both nursing and kink. The generosity and rigor with which Thekkumkattil unearths and questions the cultural, social, and political forces that drew them to both these worlds serves as a beacon, lighting the way to a future where our broken systems might reorient themselves toward the interdependence of genuine care." --Tessa Hulls, author of Feeding Ghosts

About the Author

M. K. Thekkumkattil is a trans, disabled, kinky writer and nurse whose liberation is bound up with Palestinian liberation. They have received support from SmokeLong Quarterly, Tin House, Queer Art Mentorship, Lambda Literary, VONA, and Writing by Writers. Their work can be found in the chapbook Weaving Liberation as well as in Black Warrior Review, smoke and mold, ___figuration, Year Round Queer, and In the Future There Are No Hospitals.