Death-Making: Nursing Neutrality, Biopower, and Institutional Complicity

Danisha Jenkins

doi:10.25071/2291-5796.177

Authors

Danisha Jenkins San Diego State University https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6365-152X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25071/2291-5796.177

Keywords:

biopower, neutrality, parrhesia, Foucault

Abstract

This paper critiques the enforced neutrality of the American nursing profession, and positions it’s neutrality as a mechanism of institutional power that sustains structural violence. Drawing on theoretical concepts of comfort, parrhesia, and biopower, the paper examines how professional norms, framed as “objectivity” and “civility”, discipline nurses into silence in the face of fascism, racism, state violence, and global injustice. Institutional responses to dissent are analyzed as affective and biopolitical strategies that prioritize comfort in protection of dominant power structures, and render parrhesia, or political truth speaking, deviant. In light of the suppression of abolitionist and anti-colonial discourse in professional spaces, the paper argues that silence is not passive, it is death-making. This paper calls for a reimagining of nursing as a site of collective care, resistance, and ethical refusal aligned with movements for mutual aid, healing justice, and abolitionist praxis. In doing so, it insists that nursing’s future lies not in neutrality, but in the healing practice of discomfort and resistance.

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Author Biography

Danisha Jenkins, San Diego State University

Dr. Danisha Jenkins PhD, RN, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at San Diego State University. Her research and scholarship focuses on institutional power structures, the carceral logics of nursing and health care, and nursing’s role in resisting systems of oppression.

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