Unwieldy Desires Care and Crisis in The Baudelaire Fractal and A History of My Brief Body

Reading Billy-Ray Belcourt's A History of My Brief Body and Lisa Robertson's The Baudelaire Fractal against the backdrop of the COVID-19 crisis, I suggest that a feminist ethic of care emerges from the authors writing of queer performativity. Against a neo-liberal model of care that individuates and isolates, Belcourt and Robertson offer theories of the self as historical and multiple. Following a brief close reading of their work, I argue that the overlapping crises of the present require a politics of decision. Precisely because caring for oneself as a protective gesture against social contagion does not scale up in the ways that the uneven distribution of life chances bears down on subjugated communities, Belcourt and Robertson suggest we must decide when to abandon the narrative enclosures of the self-as-isolation and embrace the radical exposures of collectivity.