Stepping into the breach : disability-centered care ethics in contemporary nurse memoirs

This project examines contemporary memoirs by professional nurses in the United States with the goal of understanding and defining feminist, anti-ableist care ethics. I analyze the care encounters nurses depict in their writing primarily through the theoretical lenses of disability studies and feminist care ethics, drawing upon theories of autobiography to guide my readings. In doing so, I ask what role professional caretakers working in clinical, institutional contexts might play to help us move toward a more equitable and caring society. The impetus for exploring what it might look like for an ethics of care to center disability is rooted in our national legacy of denying care to disabled people, a legacy which continues to shape clinical experiences today and which has been brought into stark relief during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. While this project centers the aims of disability justice, it proceeds from the understanding that all of us seeking healthcare, disabled or otherwise, stand to benefit from efforts to imagine and enact more equitable approaches to care. In many ways, this project constitutes an attempt to craft a bridge between some of the texts and discourses emerging from medical institutions and the aims of disability justice. It also seeks to unsettle any easy binaries drawn between the medical-industrial complex and people seeking care. To these ends, I draw out the hierarchies of power at work within medical institutions, purposefully focusing on caretakers who are near the bottom of said hierarchy and whose work is often devalued compared to that of physicians. Ultimately, the collection of analyses I perform reveals both the promising subversive potentials of disability-centered care performed by nurses in these contexts and limitations on the types of care possible in the absence of broader cultural and institutional transformation.