Maggie Nelson, born 1973, is an American non-fiction author, poet, and literary critic. She lives in Los Angeles and is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Nelson has been the recipient of an NEA in poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship in non-fiction, an Arts Writers Fellowship in non-fiction from the Andy Warhol Foundation, and a MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship.
The Argonauts, first published in 2015 by Graywolf Press, is a non-fiction autobiographical memoir, detailing Nelson's relationship with her genderfluid partner Harry Dodge. The book appeared in various forms before its publication; it appeared in part as a talk for the series Tendencies (curated by Tim Trace Peterson in honour of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), as a zine for A. L. Steiner's 2012 Puppies and Babies installation, and in various magazines and anthologies including After Montaigne, jubilat, Flaunt, and Tin House. Its creation was funded by a Literature grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, and won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The book is widely understood to be a pioneering work in the genre of autotheory –which uses personal experience as a ground for developing and exploring theoretical argument. Nelson utilises her own experiences as a woman, a mother, and the partner of somebody who is genderfluid in order to understand feminist, queer, and family theory, including that from critics such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Paul (formerly Beatriz) Preciado, and Kaja Silverman. The Argonauts compares and contrasts Nelson's experiences of her own body changing through pregnancy and witnessing Dodge's body changing through gender-affirming medical treatment, all within context of feminist and gender theory.
Nelson's earlier works include similarly non-fictional autobiography, such as Jane: A Murder, which details the life and death of her Aunt Jane, as well as experimental prose poetry, such as Bluets, which meditates upon her experiences with the colour blue.
The book's title refers to Roland Barthes' assertion that one who says "I love you" is comparable to an Argonaut (a sailor on the Ancient Greek ship Argo), replacing parts of the ship over time while its name remains the same. This reflects the physical changes both Dodge and Nelson experience through the narrative, and the renewal of their love for one another as they develop.
