ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what queerness and its specific sub-cultural history can teach healthcare professionals about an ethics of care that extends beyond how to treat LGBT+ people, and instead teaches us about how our ethics of care can be critiqued from a queer perspective. In doing so, it argues that rather than limiting our thinking to the ethical treatment of LGBT+ people with regard to the specific issues that they face, we should instead think about what a queer critique of care may mean more widely for our approach to the ethics of care. In order to do this, Maurice Nagington takes inspiration at least in part from Ward’s argument in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality that queer people can act as critical allies to the prevailing normative culture with regard to engaging in ethical relationships. This chapter uses this inspiring inversion to argue that no longer should we think about the ethical problems that LGBT+ may face, but instead ask what LGBT+ people’s radically different sub-cultural history and experiences of care structures can teach about the ethics of care. Maurice Nagington terms this a “queer ethics of care”.
