Engendering the Anti-Social Thesis: The Queerness of Pregnancy in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

Abstract

ABSTRACT The vexed debate within the field of queer theory over what it means to be queer in the social world—the anti-social thesis—serves as this article’s conceptual and theoretical starting point, but also is that which, as I argue, The Argonauts seeks to disrupt. This article thereby mobilizes Nelson’s autobiographical memoir to question whether a departure from privileging only these negative modes of being—anti-sociality—is in order. I argue that The Argonauts offers three exciting lines of flight that build upon and extend contemporary debates in queer theory: (a) the queerness of pregnancy as a self-shattering experience; (b) the experience of becoming undone alongside one another; and (c) the queer ordinary as the lifelong task of finding spaces—whether they be political, cultural, or interpersonal—that are “good enough.”