Nursing as social control: An ethical perspective on care in dystopian contexts

This article offers a comprehensive analysis of the representations of nursing and healthcare in contemporary and classic dystopian literature and film. It explores how these narratives employ the professional figure of the caregiver to critique mechanisms of social, biopolitical, technological, and patriarchal control within healthcare systems. Using a qualitative approach to critical narrative discourse analysis, it examines foundational works, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Brave New World ), the film adaptation of 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, The Grief Nurse, and One Widow's Healing. These texts are analyzed alongside recent theoretical contributions in posthumanism, critical nursing theory, and the ethics of care. The findings demonstrate that dystopian nursing operates as a powerful metaphor for the tension between an ethics of care and structures of domination, also revealing gendered and racialized dimensions of oppression. These narratives reflect urgent contemporary concerns about dehumanization, the commodification of health, the erosion of privacy, neoliberal bureaucratization, and the growing role of artificial intelligence in healthcare systems. It is concluded that these fictions offer a critical antidote to transhumanist and technocratic ideologies, reaffirming shared vulnerability, embodied empathy, and relational justice as irreducible foundations of nursing practice. The study advocates for collectivized political resistance in nursing, the integration of narrative competence in nursing education, and a critical engagement with the discipline's historical complicities.