Waste Books

Join us this month's book club as we discuss Maggie Nelson's queer memoir The Argonauts! Overview Maggie Nelson’s 2015 book The Argonauts combines theory and memoir in a successful attempt to prove that the political is personal. Combining queer theory, feminism, a bit of Marxism, a dollop of psychoanalysis, heaps of gender theory, and a healthy dose of highfaluting post-structuralism, Nelson undertakes an odyssey like the mythic Argonauts not in pursuit of any Golden Fleece but a record of the self’s permutations and the difficulties with understanding others when all of our experiences appear so diverse. Nelson’s writing comfortably rests between the informality of a blog and the professionalism of a tenured professor. Her writing rests in this golden mean by suffusing her text with quotes as wide-ranging as Ralph Waldo Emerson to Judith Butler, Michel Foucault to her partner Harry. Rather than introduce each zinger of a quote like an academic paper she cites the quote in italics while identifying its a