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The Sexuality of Care: On Nursing, Kink, and a Future Without Hospitals
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.
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.
272 pages, Paperback
Published July 14, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
*Thank you to Feminist Press for sending me an ARC of this book!*
This was a really incredible book. It is a memoir that is also an examination of our healthcare system and care generally in our culture. There is so much in here from discussion of the tender moments of care to our ideas of motherhood, to colonization, to transness, grief, and forgiveness. Anyone interested in carework or abolition, or anyone who has had experience in a hospital on any side of the equation should really read this one.
The author examine how both patients and nurses experience violence in the current healthcare system, delving into their experience as both patient and nurse. They also speak about their experiences of alcoholism and domestic abuse, influenced by the dissociation required of their job. We also see some of the horrors particular to the first couple years of the COVID pandemic, including the death and lack of resources, but also the ways that nurses were treated.
They also talk about how they have healed. Kink spaces allowed them a way to regain autonomy after abuse, be in their body. And it reoriented parts of how they understood care, impacting how they negotiated with patients in ways they hadn't before but ultimately there was only so much their job could allow for. This relearning and reorientation as they came to coin "the sexuality of care" - inspired by both Audre Lorde's writing on erotics and in living and materially experiencing what care is and orienting towards it in all aspects of life.
They end with a look into how healthcare could be realized outside of the current medical industrial complex (and the work that they did with others to come to these ideas). All along, they cite many really great texts on care and abolition. It is very nuanced and well written. I highly recommend it!
This was a really incredible book. It is a memoir that is also an examination of our healthcare system and care generally in our culture. There is so much in here from discussion of the tender moments of care to our ideas of motherhood, to colonization, to transness, grief, and forgiveness. Anyone interested in carework or abolition, or anyone who has had experience in a hospital on any side of the equation should really read this one.
The author examine how both patients and nurses experience violence in the current healthcare system, delving into their experience as both patient and nurse. They also speak about their experiences of alcoholism and domestic abuse, influenced by the dissociation required of their job. We also see some of the horrors particular to the first couple years of the COVID pandemic, including the death and lack of resources, but also the ways that nurses were treated.
They also talk about how they have healed. Kink spaces allowed them a way to regain autonomy after abuse, be in their body. And it reoriented parts of how they understood care, impacting how they negotiated with patients in ways they hadn't before but ultimately there was only so much their job could allow for. This relearning and reorientation as they came to coin "the sexuality of care" - inspired by both Audre Lorde's writing on erotics and in living and materially experiencing what care is and orienting towards it in all aspects of life.
They end with a look into how healthcare could be realized outside of the current medical industrial complex (and the work that they did with others to come to these ideas). All along, they cite many really great texts on care and abolition. It is very nuanced and well written. I highly recommend it!
September 28, 2026
“What I want for my patients is the same thing I want for myself: to decide what care we want, to get the care we need and refuse the care we don't, to choose the care we want to give. To say no to care that destroys the self.”
Thank you so much to Feminist Press and M.K. for the gifted copy! This book was published in the US on July 14, 2026.
The Sexuality of Care is one of those books that insists on rearranging all the furniture in your head.
M. K. Thekkumkattil begins with their experience as a critical care nurse and asks a question that becomes increasingly impossible to ignore: what if care, as we currently practice it, is often coercive, violent, and fundamentally disconnected from consent? I hadn’t considered the extent to which medical care depends on people surrendering agency, or how caregivers themselves are often denied the ability to meaningfully refuse. I gasped aloud more than once at the clarity with which Thekkumkattil names that violence.
What makes this book so compelling is the way it refuses to stop at critique. Moving between memoir, nursing history, gender transition, spirituality, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, kink, and abolition, Thekkumkattil asks what care might become if we centered bodily autonomy, pleasure, reciprocity, and the genuine ability to say no. Their exploration of kink as a framework for negotiating power and consent completely expanded the possibilities of what medical care could look like for me.
Thekkumkattil also refuses the romanticization of caregiving as inherently virtuous. Care that destroys the caregiver is not liberation. Neither is keeping someone alive at any cost necessarily care.
By the end, the book’s imagined future without hospitals feels less like provocation than invitation: a world where care is abundant, collective, consensual, and woven into everyday life rather than outsourced to institutions built around crisis and control. I fell in love with that future. I’m honored to be imagining, practicing, and working toward it alongside M.K. <3
📖 Read this if you love: Abolitionist and disability justice approaches to healthcare; books that interrogate medicine, labor, gender, and power; explorations of kink, consent, and bodily autonomy; writing about care work, burnout, and interdependence; or the works of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha or Johanna Hedva.
🔑 Key Themes: Care as a Relational Ethic, Consent and Bodily Autonomy, Medical Violence and Institutional Power, Kink as a Framework for Negotiating Power, Pleasure and Healing, Interdependence and Collective Care.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Medical Content (severe), Rape (severe), Sexual Assault (severe), Pandemic (severe), Blood (severe), Death (severe), Sexual Content (severe), Suicide (severe), Emotional Abuse (severe), Domestic Abuse (moderate), Vomit (moderate), Violence (moderate), Genocide (minor), Infertility (minor), Alcohol (minor), Suicide Attempt (minor), Alcoholism (minor), War (minor), Slavery (minor), Colonialism (minor), Cancer (minor).
Thank you so much to Feminist Press and M.K. for the gifted copy! This book was published in the US on July 14, 2026.
The Sexuality of Care is one of those books that insists on rearranging all the furniture in your head.
M. K. Thekkumkattil begins with their experience as a critical care nurse and asks a question that becomes increasingly impossible to ignore: what if care, as we currently practice it, is often coercive, violent, and fundamentally disconnected from consent? I hadn’t considered the extent to which medical care depends on people surrendering agency, or how caregivers themselves are often denied the ability to meaningfully refuse. I gasped aloud more than once at the clarity with which Thekkumkattil names that violence.
What makes this book so compelling is the way it refuses to stop at critique. Moving between memoir, nursing history, gender transition, spirituality, racial capitalism, settler colonialism, kink, and abolition, Thekkumkattil asks what care might become if we centered bodily autonomy, pleasure, reciprocity, and the genuine ability to say no. Their exploration of kink as a framework for negotiating power and consent completely expanded the possibilities of what medical care could look like for me.
Thekkumkattil also refuses the romanticization of caregiving as inherently virtuous. Care that destroys the caregiver is not liberation. Neither is keeping someone alive at any cost necessarily care.
By the end, the book’s imagined future without hospitals feels less like provocation than invitation: a world where care is abundant, collective, consensual, and woven into everyday life rather than outsourced to institutions built around crisis and control. I fell in love with that future. I’m honored to be imagining, practicing, and working toward it alongside M.K. <3
📖 Read this if you love: Abolitionist and disability justice approaches to healthcare; books that interrogate medicine, labor, gender, and power; explorations of kink, consent, and bodily autonomy; writing about care work, burnout, and interdependence; or the works of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha or Johanna Hedva.
🔑 Key Themes: Care as a Relational Ethic, Consent and Bodily Autonomy, Medical Violence and Institutional Power, Kink as a Framework for Negotiating Power, Pleasure and Healing, Interdependence and Collective Care.
Content / Trigger Warnings: Medical Content (severe), Rape (severe), Sexual Assault (severe), Pandemic (severe), Blood (severe), Death (severe), Sexual Content (severe), Suicide (severe), Emotional Abuse (severe), Domestic Abuse (moderate), Vomit (moderate), Violence (moderate), Genocide (minor), Infertility (minor), Alcohol (minor), Suicide Attempt (minor), Alcoholism (minor), War (minor), Slavery (minor), Colonialism (minor), Cancer (minor).
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Thank you to Feminist Press for sending me a gifted copy in exchange for an honest review. This book is extremely raw & for that I commend the author. They do not shirk from owning their role in the harm that is inflicted as a cog in the wheel of the health industrial complex. They take us through the journey of transitioning not just from health care, but as a trans non binary disabled south Indian (Malayali) kink enthusiast.
Their journey includes workplace mistakes which lead to scary moments of liability, sharing their history of sexually abusive relationships, family/religious trauma, workplace harassment, alcoholism, and their time in the COVID ER (amongst other things). I think this book could have benefited from a trigger warning page. It does not need to be extensive but I was not expecting some of the things that came up and needed to take breaks because of it. That does not mean that these moments were any less important to the overall point.
Some history is shared as to why nursing is predominantly a women's profession, their processing in reconciling with their place in the Indian caste system, and being a brown queer person in America. Their decision to lean into kink as a means of care for themself was beautiful to read about. Their stories of patient interactions connected actions such as poking, prodding, binding etc to kink care.
I agree with their sentiments as to what a world without hospitals could look like, though what I think they really mean is a world without for-profit medical care. The reason I am giving this a 4 and not a 5 star rating is because personally, I would have edited this differently. Some anecdotes were a bit removed from the thesis of the book. I think some of the points made at the end would have been better sprinkled throughout. The connections to health care as Care and safe kink practice as Care had space to be more woven together instead of clearly divided, instead making some of the points feel a bit tenuous- but that is my editing preference. Overall, it was an important read that I think will help a lot of people
Their journey includes workplace mistakes which lead to scary moments of liability, sharing their history of sexually abusive relationships, family/religious trauma, workplace harassment, alcoholism, and their time in the COVID ER (amongst other things). I think this book could have benefited from a trigger warning page. It does not need to be extensive but I was not expecting some of the things that came up and needed to take breaks because of it. That does not mean that these moments were any less important to the overall point.
Some history is shared as to why nursing is predominantly a women's profession, their processing in reconciling with their place in the Indian caste system, and being a brown queer person in America. Their decision to lean into kink as a means of care for themself was beautiful to read about. Their stories of patient interactions connected actions such as poking, prodding, binding etc to kink care.
I agree with their sentiments as to what a world without hospitals could look like, though what I think they really mean is a world without for-profit medical care. The reason I am giving this a 4 and not a 5 star rating is because personally, I would have edited this differently. Some anecdotes were a bit removed from the thesis of the book. I think some of the points made at the end would have been better sprinkled throughout. The connections to health care as Care and safe kink practice as Care had space to be more woven together instead of clearly divided, instead making some of the points feel a bit tenuous- but that is my editing preference. Overall, it was an important read that I think will help a lot of people
Review of advance copy received from Author
The Sexuality of Care unravels like a long winding rope, or like the truth, which always comes in layers - with many threads winding around its core ideas: death, nursing, care work, sexuality, the earth, kink, consent, love and survival. Thekkumkattil weaves together these truths and contradictions this spellbinding book that kept me absolutely riveted with every word and that I literally could not put down. They shatter binaries of patient/caregiver, life/death, care/violence and present stories that are challenging, complex, and honest. This book holds up so many precious fragments of the humanity of everyone is who is eaten up by the medical industrial complex - patients and care workers alike. And it does so mostly with stories - stories of patients, of hospitals, of people living and dying, stories from COVID, stories of pleasure and sex and kink and queerness and transness, stories of what it means to be human, weaving together stories and ideas that I've never seen written about in the ways that they are in this book.
Thekkumkattil writes like a veteran ICU nurse, handling words and ideas like someone who has spent a decade spiking IV bags, cleaning and turning patients, listening to lung sounds, programming IV pumps, and still takes the time and care to brush and braid their patients' hair through the haze of endless alarms, crises, and death. The Sexuality of Care pushes us all to keep imagining more for what care work is and could be, and how we can all be transformed in the process.
Thekkumkattil writes like a veteran ICU nurse, handling words and ideas like someone who has spent a decade spiking IV bags, cleaning and turning patients, listening to lung sounds, programming IV pumps, and still takes the time and care to brush and braid their patients' hair through the haze of endless alarms, crises, and death. The Sexuality of Care pushes us all to keep imagining more for what care work is and could be, and how we can all be transformed in the process.
Review of advance copy received from Author
A bracing and deeply challenging, DEEPLY necessary look at care and violence –– the first I have ever read, I think, in which a healthcare provider does not shrink away from their participation in the violence of institutional medicine, but also gives a raw and urgent account of what it means to be a victim of violence, the violence of cisheteropatriarchy and racial capitalism in particular.
Broken into several parts detailing the spiritual within care practices, the experience and ongoing aftermath of abuse and queer coming-of-age, and the ultimate dream, the abolition of the carceral hospital, The Sexuality of Care brilliantly balances the affective, analytical, and theoretical modes. Thekkumkattil's scene work is visceral and sometimes, given the content of the text, difficult to stomach (importantly so). Their anti-carceral, queer/crip-of-color scholarly background is robust, and they bring to this work an eye both for theoretical value and practical applications, both within the institution and beyond.
Often (almost always) I have read books about medical violence from the POV of patient-victims. I have written them, too! Here is the other half of the story, a necessary reminder that the victim-perpetrator binary is far from clear-cut, and that in order to abolish the hospital and dream something better, patients and providers need each others' unique skills, wisdom, and insight.
Broken into several parts detailing the spiritual within care practices, the experience and ongoing aftermath of abuse and queer coming-of-age, and the ultimate dream, the abolition of the carceral hospital, The Sexuality of Care brilliantly balances the affective, analytical, and theoretical modes. Thekkumkattil's scene work is visceral and sometimes, given the content of the text, difficult to stomach (importantly so). Their anti-carceral, queer/crip-of-color scholarly background is robust, and they bring to this work an eye both for theoretical value and practical applications, both within the institution and beyond.
Often (almost always) I have read books about medical violence from the POV of patient-victims. I have written them, too! Here is the other half of the story, a necessary reminder that the victim-perpetrator binary is far from clear-cut, and that in order to abolish the hospital and dream something better, patients and providers need each others' unique skills, wisdom, and insight.
Review of advance copy received from Author
If you were vocal about appreciating healthcare workers during the COVID pandemic lockdown, you need to read this book. If you are trans or a beloved of trans person, you need to read this book. If you are disabled or a beloved of a disabled person, you need to read this book. If you advocate for universal healthcare, you need to read this book. If someone you love has died in an ICU, you need to read this book. If you are interested in building a world that feels like the world you want to live in, you need to read this book.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
(publisher got me my pre-order early -- hyped as i've been waiting for this one all year)
the "kink is worldbuilding" section is what i came here for, and the title essay absolutely delivered. so thoughtful, intentional, joyous, expansive. the final essay reminded me of toni morrison's speeches & essays on dreaming as vital component in creating the futures we wish to see. really appreciate the time i spent with this one. kept reaching for a pencil. one of the first books i've annotated in years
the "kink is worldbuilding" section is what i came here for, and the title essay absolutely delivered. so thoughtful, intentional, joyous, expansive. the final essay reminded me of toni morrison's speeches & essays on dreaming as vital component in creating the futures we wish to see. really appreciate the time i spent with this one. kept reaching for a pencil. one of the first books i've annotated in years
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
This debut work of personal nonfiction bringing together issues relating to healthcare, kink, and consent blew me away with its depth of insight. I predict it will become canonical to consent studies and care work discourse and have an impact as deeply significant as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha's Care Work. Also of interest as a record of nursing experience in early COVID times. Gorgeous, stirring writing.
July 15, 2026
Oh my gosh! This was the best nonfiction I have read. The way MK writes is beautiful and it draws you in even in the tear soaked moments.
I’ve always had respect for nurses but this book raised my respect even higher. The way they were able to connect the intersection of their lives was amazing!
This is definitely a book that YOU should read. I can’t wait to read more writing from MK.
I’ve always had respect for nurses but this book raised my respect even higher. The way they were able to connect the intersection of their lives was amazing!
This is definitely a book that YOU should read. I can’t wait to read more writing from MK.
August 5, 2026
a work whose intention, consideration, thoughtfulness and care will stay with me for a long fucking time. finished it and immediately started rereading. so goddamn good, cannot recommend it enough. if you read one book i recommend this year, let it be this one!
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Feminist Press literally never misses. This book was SO GOOD!
PS: Ty to Feminist Press for sending me a copy of this.
PS: Ty to Feminist Press for sending me a copy of this.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews