Gray Areas: Maggie Nelson’s Ambivalent Essays

In 1969, the historian Theodore Roszak described two paths for the Left. The counterculture (his coinage) faced a choice between psychic and material liberation. Does the struggle for freedom begin in the mind: fighting repression, awakening forbidden desires, experimenting with Zen and psychedelics? Or must it begin in the concrete, economic realm: lobbying for welfare and equal wages, burning draft cards, boycotting businesses? In hindsight, it’s remarkable how casually Roszak assumes th