The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (review)

Maggie Nelson’s ninth book takes its title from The Argo as it emerges from Roland Barthes’s Roland Barthes, the fabled craft whose repeated rebuildings result in a ship that shares no scrap of timber with its prior iteration, yet somehow remains itself. So, too, Nelson suggests, are we a “snowball self ” whose coherence is shaggy and without core, but that without which we cannot venture forth. This fascination with the always unsteady relation between form and material, between that which holds and that which is held, between that in us which changes and that which persists, weaves through nearly every page of The Argonauts. In episodic fragments, Nelson tells the story of her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge, the intensity of their sexual connection, their finding and keeping of love, their excursion into the shared project of making a home and building a family, and in this she joins “. . . a long history of queers constructing their own families—be they composed of peers or mentors or lovers or ex-lovers or children or non-human animals.” Nelson cautions us not to be too quick to assume that we know what that means, or how it should be valued, held up to the light against constrictive norms. She argues for “queer family making as an umbrella category under which baby making might be a subset, rather than the other way around. It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange, that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative.” In all the terrain she covers—theory, politics, embodiment, gender, sex, kinship—Nelson insists on fully inhabiting in-between-ness, in tarrying with the liminal. Harry and Nelson marry in California in 2008, with Proposition 8 looming on the horizon, positioning them as an affront to those opposed to gay marriage on the grounds that it perverts traditional marriage, and also those anti-assimilationists who see in marriage a hijacking of a radical queer politics. As Nelson summed it up: “Poor marriage! Off we went to kill it (unforgivable). Or reinforce it (unforgivable)” (23). They wed at the Hollywood Chapel, a “hole in the wall” where “a drag queen at the door did triple duty as a greeter, bouncer and witness.” The venue was “tacky” and “the ceremony was rushed, but as we said our vows, we were undone. We wept, besotted with our luck.” One of many problems with “same-sex marriage,” Nelson observes, “is that I don’t know many—if any—queers who think of their desire’s main feature as being “same-sex” (25). She names 2011 as “the summer of our changing bodies,” when she is pregnant and Harry begins taking testosterone, a moment in which, as she puts it wryly, “You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant.” She points here toward the gap between the meanings ascribed to, and inscribed onto, the visible body, and our bodies as we live them from the inside out.

The book might be understood as posing the question: What does it look like to theorize from, and not just toward, the embodied “I”? She describes her shifting senses of embodiment, when writing, when pregnant, when laboring, when nursing, when fucking, and insists that those modes overlap more broadly than is generally recognized. What is it like to be a thinking mother (that “awful spectacle”)? Or a sodomidical mother? During labor, she considers the innervations that join the anus and vaginal canal, suggesting with a nod toward Irigaray that the anal cavity and the vaginal canal “lean on each other” and through this sharing of sensation comprise “the sex which is not one.” Or a queer mother? To the last, Nelson holds that though it may have gone unrecognized as such, pregnancy is a consummately queer form of embodiment. In place of the chiasmic reading of this summer...