Erica Gene Delsandro, Bucknell University
Vol. 42, No. 2 (Fall 2023), 313-341
This essay examines the resonances between Virginia Woolf’s mock biography Orlando (1928) and Maggie Nelson’s autotheoric memoir The Argonauts (2015), highlighting the trans attentiveness of both authors. Although Woolf’s and Nelson’s forays into lifewriting are separated by nearly a hundred years and both women are themselves cisgender, their challenges to oppositional sexism and cisheteronormativity craft a transgenre that, for contemporary readers, illustrates the generative possibilities latent in the proximity and reciprocity of trans and queer studies. Reading Orlando and The Argonauts as trans-adjacent texts invites scholars to cultivate a trans-attentive reading practice that both amplifies and expands upon the existing queer approaches to these texts.
