Through The Kaleidoscope: Slow Violence and Binary Categorization in Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts

Abstract

This thesis will consider the categorization of intersectional identities and concepts as a form of, what Rob Nixon has named, “slow violence.” This form of violence is experienced over extended periods of time which eventually creates conditions which are not sufficient for sustaining life. Slow violence looks different than physical or extreme forms of violence as it is a not spectacular or instantaneous, it builds gradually to destroy. To categorize is to restrict or limit intersectionality by separating an identity or concept into individual categories. In The Argonauts, a work of auto-theory, author Maggie Nelson expresses the disdain she has for categorization as it is imposed on her by those who question her sexuality and her partner’s gender identity. Nelson’s experiences with categorization function as prime examples of how categorization can become a form of slow violence and what effects that this form of violence can have on an individual. With additional support from bell hooks’s theory of love, All About Love: New Visions and Julia Kristeva's Powers of Horror in Abjection, this paper will address hooks’s question of “how much easier it would be for us to learn how to love if we began with a shared definition” (hooks 4) and how abjection from a normative state of being functions as resistance to the slow violence of binary categorization. By applying Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence to Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, I will argue that the learned practice of categorization which is imposed upon intersectional queer identities and queer love is a form of slow violence that reinforces a hierarchical structure which places certain categorical frames above others.