Reading Order
The Argonauts Reading Order
Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015) is a hybrid memoir combining autobiography, queer theory, and philosophy, following her relationship with the fluidly gendered artist Harry Dodge, her pregnancy and the birth of their son, and Harry's testosterone treatments and top surgery, all interleaved with thinkers from Roland Barthes to D.W. Winnicott. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
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The Argonauts
Complete The Argonauts Book List
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The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson·2015·The complete work. Entirely standalone. - Buy
Bluets
OptionalMaggie Nelson·2009·240 numbered propositions about the color blue, and about heartbreak and desire — Nelson's earlier hybrid prose poem; the closest companion to The Argonauts in its refusal of conventional generic categories and its investigation of how intellectual form can hold emotional experience.
The Argonauts — Frequently Asked Questions
What genre is The Argonauts?
The Argonauts resists classification in a way that is central to its argument. It is published as 'nonfiction' but it is also a work of theory — it engages seriously with queer theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist philosophy — and also a love story and a pregnancy memoir and a philosophical meditation. Nelson has described the form as 'autotheory': a mode in which the personal and the theoretical are not kept separate but are interwoven, so that the lived experience illuminates the theory and the theory illuminates the lived experience. The book's citation style — she quotes from other writers (Roland Barthes, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, D.W. Winnicott, Donald Winnicott, Judith Butler, and many others) without quotation marks, integrating their voices into her own prose — is part of this formal argument: the intellectual tradition and the personal experience are parts of the same continuous text, not separate domains. The title refers to the ship Argo in Greek mythology, which was continuously rebuilt until no original part remained: like the Argo, the self and language are continuously remade by use, and the question of what remains the same across transformation is the book's central preoccupation.
Who is Harry Dodge?
Harry Dodge is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work includes sculpture, video, performance, and drawing; they identify as fluidly gendered and use they/them pronouns (though The Argonauts, which predates widespread adoption of the singular they, describes the relationship in the language of that moment). Nelson and Dodge met in 2007 and married in 2012; their son Iggy was born in 2012. The Argonauts is organized partly around the parallel that Nelson notices between their own pregnancy (which proceeds over the course of the book) and Harry's testosterone treatments and eventual top surgery (which also proceed over the course of the book): both are bodily transformations that challenge the assumption that bodies have fixed identities, and both are celebrations of the body's capacity for change. Harry Dodge has written and directed the short film My Barbarian (2007) and the feature film By Hook or by Crook (2001, with Silas Howard), and their work is informed by the same engagement with gender and embodiment that characterizes The Argonauts.
What is the "queer family" that The Argonauts describes?
The Argonauts is partly a portrait of the family that Nelson and Harry Dodge have built — Nelson's pregnancy and the birth of their son Iggy, Harry's son from a previous relationship, the presence of Harry's terminally ill mother in the book's final sections — and partly a theoretical argument about what queer family formation looks like and means. The book resists the assimilationist argument (that queer families are valuable because they are just like straight families) and the anti-assimilationist argument (that queer families should resist the institution of marriage and family entirely), arguing instead for a more nuanced position: that queer people can choose family forms that draw on traditional structures (pregnancy, marriage) while also transforming them through their particular circumstances. The book's title comes from Barthes's idea that the meaning of 'I love you' changes each time it is spoken even though the words stay the same — like the Argo, whose parts are all replaced but which remains the Argo — and this idea of transformation-within-continuity is the argument that the book makes about queer family as well as about language.
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