Affective Chemistries of Care: Slow Activism and the Limits of the Molecular in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous

In this article, I explore care work outlined and performed as emotional and erotic support labor in Ocean Vuong’s novel, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (2019). The illnesses around which Vuong stages salient scenes of care work are not those easily addressed by surgery or a course of antibiotics. Instead, the novel focalizes those who are “[sick] in the brains” (122)— formally diagnosed with a mood disorder like bipolar, observed for behaviors of PTSD, addicted to narcotics, or grieving the loss of a body part. The unique contribution of Vuong’s novel to those interested in health and environmental humanities, disability studies, and reproductive labor, I argue, requires noticing that its portraits of care work come interleaved with its depictions of atmospheric dangers. Those atmospheric dangers include weather effects as well as sequelae from military weapons deployment and the un(der)regulated circulation of slowly violating chemicals. In relation to the theme of molecular intimacies, I introduce several heuristic terms: molecular entreaty, affective chemistries of care, hypo-interventions and intimate or slow activism, the latter two building on the work of science and technology scholars. Drawing out On Earth’s focalization of irruptions of care in atmospheres dense with chemistry, this essay both models a humanistic, decolonial and intersectional method that (re)values crip practical knowledge, and limns the novel’s provocation as to the political limits of queer interracial intimacy.