Becoming (Trans)ient: Queer Motherhood and Becoming-Queer in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

Transformation, or as Maggie Nelson borrows from Deleuze and Guattari, “becoming,” is a trajectory threaded throughout Nelson’s work, namely Bluets and The Argonauts, which theorize hybridized or multiplied identities. The Argonauts marks a distinct turn to autotheory¹ as Nelson details her journey through maternity and motherhood as a queer woman questioning what it means to be or become (if possible) a “queer” family. An appreciation of modes of becoming is not a dismissal of forms of identity, however; what I examine in this paper is the slipperiness Nelson comes up against in examining the lived reality of becoming-queer and the assemblage of queer kinships. By bearing us witness to her life, Nelson exposes the gap between becoming-queer for oneself and becoming-queer in public, emphasizing the stagnation embedded in the discourses of queer and feminist identity. I look to Nelson’s Argonauts (and how it builds off her earlier work of poetry Bluets) as an example of life writing which embodies personal and political becoming. The Argonauts is a text in movement, in the middle, as Nelson narrates her own shifting thoughts and transforming body, converses with theorists in the margins, and continually displaces any claim to a fixed knowledge of self and being. What makes The Argonauts a uniquely twenty-first century autotheoretical text is her mimicking of social media forms and her awareness of the complexity of self-representation in the age of the selfie. Nelson uses these new forms to pose new questions that articulate life experiences that exceed the existing approaches to life writing, queer, and feminist theory.

“Becoming,” for Deleuze and Guattari, indicates an “increase in valence” (229), a “becoming-molecular” (277), a “middle” and “movement” without “beginning nor end, departure nor arrival” (293). “Becoming” as a mode of existing in the world then is intrinsically linked to multiplicity as beings seek bonds with each other and are transformed by every encounter. “There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority never becomes” (291), Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, as becoming is a rhizomatic process of multiple linkages and assemblages that destabilize the hierarchal structure of the majority state. As each being takes on new forms and becomes a part of multiple stable bonds, centralized power structures and allegiances to fixed entities are weakened. For Nelson, this becoming is the lifelong practice in which we engage as creatures who evolve without a finite teleology (143).

In Bluets, Nelson examines practices of becoming by embedding personal, almost confessional, poetry in a narrative of passion for the colour blue. “Some things do change, however. A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can” (9), she writes, allowing personal transformation to be intimate, individual, portrayed as a series of painful, bruised blues: “18. A warm afternoon in early spring, New York City. We went to the Chelsea Hotel to fuck. Afterward, from the window of our room, I watched a blue tarp on a roof across the way flap in the wind. You slept, so it was my secret” (7). The fragment is at once intimate and public, listing the facts of the memory alongside details of eros and pain. Bluets reads as if written by an anonymous blogger describing, captioning, and uploading memories like personal photographs, tagging time and place. “Tagging” on most social media platforms allows the user to indicate a photo or text post’s location, people involved or pictured, or “hashtag” key words that link the post to other related posts within an online space. The user thereby creates rhizomatic instances of “becoming”: they come into contact with others, making connections and communities, transforming the meanings of words, images, and identities, and consequently transforming the corporeal world. Nelson’s text is at once intimate and impersonal—New York City, springtime, the Chelsea Hotel, and the figures “you” and “I” create multiple associations, tag multiple realities, experiences, and memories. The sparsity of words mimics the limited word counts of social media posts and indicates the awareness of a public...