“The pervert need not die”: Queering Marriage and Motherhood in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

By repositioning various theoretical perspectives, particularly queer theory, in a genre as personal as memoir, Nelson demonstrates that people can live theory in the excitement of writing a new book, in the ecstasy of having sexual intercourse, and in the body-altering experience of giving birth. Ultimately, she offers a way to redeploy queerness, even when her family may ostensibly appear heteronormative to casual onlookers. Like the movement between genres, this book’s reexamination of gender and sexuality mirrors the way that “queer” may still be tied to its radical origins as well as, importantly, how the application of critical theory allows for new, potentially transformative ways of experiencing everyday life, regardless of assumptions about gender, sex, and sexuality.