Pride is the name of resistance: The Stories of Florence Nightingale and Sara Josephine Baker

June is known as LGBTQIAPN+ Pride Month. But what is this pride, after all? Is it merely a festive invitation to celebrate? No. The pride we are talking about here is a political gesture, a living memory, an act of denunciation and of presence. It is a way of saying: we are here — we have always been here.

This month is not just about coloring the urban landscape with vibrant flags; it is about illuminating the shadows where violence hides. Multiple forms of violence: symbolic, physical, political, economic — and perhaps the most insidious of all, epistemic. Because when someone is denied the right to know and to produce knowledge, they are not only deprived of the right to speak, but also of the right to fully exist. And that may be the cruelest form of exclusion.

LGBTQIAPN+ bodies build culture, science, art, and thought. But it is worth asking: does science recognize these bodies as legitimate producers of knowledge? Some schools of thought emphasize that scientific knowledge must be objective, neutral, and devoid of subjectivity. From this perspective, there should be no room for affections, desires, or personal experiences in the production of knowledge—as if science could emerge independently of human, social, and historical contexts.

They forget, however, that science is a human creation — and, as such, it is cultural. There is no science without humanity. So we must ask: who are the humans who have historically been granted the right to produce valid knowledge? Who occupies this place of authorized knowledge?

It is essential to remember that the production of knowledge should not be reserved for a single category of people: all forms of intelligence and all experiences—regardless of gender, social background, or sexual orientation—are necessary to enrich science and knowledge. This is where the power of Donna Haraway's (1944) thought emerges, especially in her article “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988). She reminds us that there is no neutral knowledge, no universal knowledge — all knowledge is situated. In other words, it arises from specific bodies, experiences, histories, and social positions. Knowledge is an embodied verb. And whoever produces it matters, immensely.

Coming out as LGBTQIAPN+ often means choosing to live with the risk of erasure, not just social, but epistemic. It means having to keep your epistemologies in the closet. The thinker Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009) described this structure powerfully in her seminal work “The Epistemology of the Closet” (1990): the closet is not merely a hiding place — it is a regime of power, a filter that determines what can be said, known, or recognized. Entire forms of knowledge are locked away in forced silence.

Therefore, recovering the trajectories of LGBTQIAPN+ people who contributed to science is not only a gesture of memory, but one of justice. Bringing these figures to light breaks the pact of structured ignorance that has long rendered them invisible. It also expands our understanding of what science can be.

Take, for example, Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) and Sara Josephine Baker (1873–1945), two women whose lives, even if not openly marked by declarations of sexual orientation, are deeply inscribed within queer and feminist logics of knowledge.

Florence Nightingale made history not only as the founder of modern nursing but also as a woman far ahead of her time in many fields: public health, statistics, epidemiology, hospital management, and even health education. During the Crimean War, she observed that most soldiers were not dying from their wounds but from diseases like typhus, cholera, and dysentery—all preventable with better hygiene. To prove this, she used statistics very rigorously (which was rare at the time) and invented highly visual charts, such as the famous “polar area diagram” (the “coxcomb chart”), to communicate her message to the government and the public. Thanks to this, she influenced the British Parliament and pushed for major reforms in military hospitals.

But she didn’t stop there. In India, she mapped mortality rates in different regions and showed that the lack of sanitation, clean water, and waste disposal had a direct impact on people’s health, especially infant mortality. She proposed concrete solutions like building sewage systems and setting up health posts. On hospital architecture, she completely rethought hospital design, imagining well-ventilated, bright pavilions organized by type of disease: a concept that served as a model for a long time, such as at the Royal Herbert Hospital.

In 1860, she also founded her own nursing school at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, where she implemented a serious training program combining theory, clinical observation, and scientific rigor. She wanted nurses to be recognized as true professionals—well-trained and competent. In her book “Notes on Nursing”, she gave many very modern tips: letting sunlight into the patient’s room, avoiding noise, paying attention to subtle signs (like changes in skin color or behavior), regularly changing bed linens, and emphasizing hygiene, things that seem obvious today but were not at her time.

She also exchanged ideas with experts like the statistician William Farr, discussing methods of collecting and analyzing health data. Over her lifetime, she wrote more than 200 reports and publications, always based on facts, observations, and data. Her approach, both very scientific and deeply humane, helped transform public health and nursing care, showing that science could (and should) be used to concretely improve people’s lives.

More than just a nurse, she was a true health scientist. She never married, refused the social role imposed on women of her era, and devoted her life to her work as a way of living differently. In a functional way, she produced knowledge with profoundly transformative power.

Sara Josephine Baker was an American physician who truly changed the way children’s health was managed in the early 20th century. She mainly worked in New York, where many children from poor and immigrant families were dying from preventable diseases. To fight this, she set up a system for regular monitoring of children’s health, with home visits by nurses who taught mothers how to properly care for their babies, especially regarding hygiene and breastfeeding.

Thanks to this, illnesses like diarrhea and infections dropped significantly. She also created centers where families could get safe milk, heat-treated to kill harmful bacteria, which prevented many cases of poisoning. Another one of her great ideas was to require vaccination cards for schoolchildren, which helped stop epidemics like smallpox and diphtheria. Scientifically, she analyzed data on diseases and mortality to understand where and how to best intervene. She is also known for working on the case of “Typhoid Mary,” a woman who transmitted typhoid fever without being ill herself, and Baker helped limit the spread of the disease using epidemiological techniques that were very advanced for the time.

 On top of all this, she was one of the first to advocate for family planning and sex education based on science, which was very uncommon back then. Sara Josephine Baker showed that science and medicine could truly change people’s lives, especially the poorest, by improving public health and making care accessible to all. Baker shared her life with Louise Pearce, a relationship we can now understand as an emotional and intellectual lesbian partnership. Her remarkable work was only possible because her sexuality remained in a gray area between “you” and “us”, publicly ignored but privately tolerated.

Both women challenged the hegemonic model of science, showing that knowledge is not born only in laboratories, but also in the terrain of lived experience. Nightingale practiced science through statistics and compassion. Baker, through listening and action. Both situated their knowledge in concrete contexts, engaging with reality through sensitivity and rigor.

Reading their stories through the lenses of Haraway's situated knowledge and Sedgwick's epistemology of the closet is not just an academic exercise, it is a political act. It affirms that LGBTQIAPN+ pride is also about intellect, method, critique, and science. It rejects the notion that legitimate knowledge can only come from bodies that conform to the norm.

Let us remember, and remind ourselves, that knowledge is also an act of love. And that every time a dissident body dares to think the world, it is also reinventing the possibility of existing within it.

Written by Daniel Manzoni de Almeida and edited par Intan Sources :

• Haraway, Donna. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–599. DOI: 10.2307/3178066

• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

• Dossey, Barbara. Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer. Springhouse Corporation, 2000.

• Beaumont, Lucinda M. Sara Josephine Baker and the Science of Health Education, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2006