Abstract Queering nursing’s history is imperative. In a political landscape that demands compliance with legislation that infringes on the rights and well-being of people, understanding moments of queer resistance in health care and in nursing allows nurses to think about how to respond to looming threats. This article considers the ways in which cisheteronormativity was enforced in nursing in the second part of the twentieth century, beginning with health care as a site for the production of queer pathology moving into considerations of how sexuality was weaponized in higher nursing education and beyond. It then considers two organizations that imagined something different: the Gay Nurses Alliance, formed in Philadelphia in 1973, and CASSANDRA Radical Feminist Nurses Network, a lesbian separatist collective formed in 1982 in Washington, DC, Both organized in response to perceived failures of nursing’s premier professional organization to substantively engage ideas of gay liberation and feminist action. In spite of their ongoing invisibility, queer nurses have always been part of nursing. Mending this tear enriches nursing, restoring narratives and stories that reflect people who might dream of becoming nurses who otherwise may not see themselves in the discipline.
Jess Dillard-Wright (Thu,) studied this question.