Abstract

This brief meditation on Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts reads it as elaborating a politics and ethics of vulnerability in both its thinking and its formal qualities, thereby showing us the radical aesthetic, personal and political potential of this state of apparent unguardedness. I consider, in turn, the text's treatment of emotional vulnerability, physical vulnerability, the vulnerability of gender and our vulnerability to gender, as well as the vulnerabilities of the apparently confessional writer and of the text itself.