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  • The Argonauts

  • Written by: Maggie Nelson
  • Narrated by: Maggie Nelson
  • Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (52 ratings)

Publisher's Summary

National Book Critics Circle Award winner, Criticism, 2015.    

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family. 

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family making. 

Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book. 

©2015 Maggie Nelson (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Academic and interesting

A queer feminist manifesto to motherhood and partnership. Honestly, one of the most interesting books I’ve ingested since my English degree days. I think I would have preferred to have read the actual book, Nelson’s voice can be a bit monotonous at times and I found myself drifting in and out during what I deemed the lesser moments of the book.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Witty yet relaxed

she has such a way with words, multiple sentences in her prose made me catch my breath, and repeat it with murmured awe.
Of course, as with Stone Butch Blues and the works of Judith Butler, it is appealing to see, transcended beyond abstract speculations, into lived experience, the fluidity of identity and the performative nature of gender.
I'm drawn to her accessible presentation, University-level concepts and philosophies of Foucault and Nietschze stated breezily in tandem with references to XMen and porn stars, to weave together her interlocking ideas.
I found this book mesmerizing and listening to it had the energy of a conversation with a very engaging friend.

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