The Argonauts

“Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase ‘I love you,’ its meaning must be renewed by each use, as ‘the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.’”

The Argonauts takes its title from this passage by philosopher Roland Barthes, which Nelson sends to Dodge shortly after she first tells him she loves him. As Nelson explains in this passage, Barthes uses the image of the mythical ship Argo as a way of talking about the constant process of reinvention at play in a relationship. Although the people involved in the relationship and the dynamic between them change over time, the couple still finds ways to see their relationship in the phrase “I love you.” This makes the Argo a particularly fitting symbol for Nelson and Dodge’s relationship, which changes but endures as the pair themselves change (most obviously through Nelson’s pregnancy and Dodge's transitioning). Nelson also uses the figure of the Argo to symbolize the nature of personal identity, which is constantly evolving, but which is also assumed to be (and in some ways is) stable over time.

“Soon after we got together, we attended a dinner party at which a […] woman who’d known Harry for some time turned to me and said, ‘So, have you been with other women, before Harry?’ I was taken aback. Undeterred, she went on: ‘Straight ladies have always been hot for Harry.’ Was Harry a woman? Was I a straight lady? What did past relationships I’d had with ‘other women’ have in common with this one? Why did I have to think about other ‘straight ladies’ who were hot for my Harry?”

The above anecdote introduces several issues that Nelson will explore throughout The Argonauts—most notably, the dangers of generalization, and the way in which those dangers overlap with personal identity. Given that Nelson herself was unsure of how Dodge identified at the beginning of their relationship, the easy assumption that he’s a “woman” is jarring to her. Even beyond that, however, Nelson implies that there’s something upsetting about being asked to place her relationship with Dodge in the context of other sexual and romantic relationships (her own with other women, Dodge’s with women primarily attracted to men, etc.). 

Although Nelson will later acknowledge that it can be politically useful to classify relationships and people as “same-sex,” “straight,” etc., she also suggests that doing so often erases what’s most unique or distinctive about those people and relationships. She implies that even if Dodge did identify as a woman, that wouldn’t necessarily mean Nelson’s relationship with him resembled her past relationships with women in any meaningful way.

“When or how do new kinship systems mime older nuclear-family arrangements and when or how do they radically decontextualize them in a way that constitutes a rethinking of kinship? How can you tell; or rather, who’s to tell? Tell your girlfriend to find a different kid to play house with, your ex would say, after we first moved in.” 

As Nelson and Dodge’s relationship progresses, it increasingly comes to resemble the traditional “nuclear-family arrangement” she alludes to here; Nelson effectively acts as a mother to Dodge’s child, the couple marry, Nelson becomes pregnant, and Dodge passes more often as a man. Although Nelson is generally happy with these developments, she’s also wary of inadvertently buying into or helping to uphold an oppressive power structure, and therefore repeatedly questions whether it’s transgressive or conformist for a queer couple like her and Dodge to make the choices they have.

In this passage, however, Nelson also illustrates the limitations of thinking about a personal relationship in such abstract terms. On the face of it, Dodge’s ex is mocking the domesticity of Nelson and Dodge’s living arrangements when she makes the jab about Nelson “playing house.” Given the context of a failed relationship, the implication is that the ex’s remarks are motivated at least as much by spite or jealousy as they are by genuine political sentiment. Similarly, Nelson’s rhetorical question “who’s to tell?” implies that making any sweeping statements about what is or isn’t transgressive is always going to be difficult, given the personal stakes involved.  

“Perhaps this is why psychologist D. W. Winnicott’s notion of ‘feeling real’ is so moving to me. One can aspire to feel real, one can help others to feel real, and one can oneself feel real—a feeling Winnicott describes as the collected, primary sensation of aliveness […] For Winnicott, feeling real is not reactive to external stimuli, nor is it an identity. It’s a sensation—a sensation that spreads. Among other things, it makes one want to live.”

Nelson introduces the motif of “feeling real,” which she will later suggest is one object of “holding” those closest to us. Although feeling real isn’t, as Nelson says in this passage, a particular identity, it’s broadly related to identity in the sense of selfhood: “feeling real” means feeling affirmed in one’s sense of oneself as a particular, living being. Instilling this sensation in others is central to Nelson’s idea of what care taking involves, whether in a parent-child relationship or in a romantic relationship. It’s also, as Nelson’s use of the word “collected” implies, the opposite of the absence of love and acknowledgment that can cause someone to “go to pieces”—that is, experience a “disintegration” of both “the psyche and the body” (33).

“In other words, [Sedgwick] wanted it both ways. There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways.” 

As part of her exploration of what it means to be queer, Nelson discusses the work of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Sedgwick, who was herself “married to man with whom she had, by her own description, mostly post shower, vanilla sex” (29), didn’t conceive of queerness solely as a question of sexual orientation, but rather as a broader form of subversiveness. Nevertheless, she also recognized the political importance of claiming queer identity to the LGBT community since Western society has traditionally punished or ignored same-sex relationships. This is what Nelson means when she says that Sedgwick “wanted it both ways,” and although Nelson herself generally errs on the side of the more abstract definition of queerness, it’s significant that she also sympathizes with Sedgwick’s mixed feelings: The Argonauts is a book that embraces ambiguity and constantly warns against the false assumption that one always has to pick a side.

“The more I thought about Biola’s doctrinal statement, the more I realized that I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please. If this particular cluster of adults doesn’t want to have sex outside of ‘biblical marriage,’ then whatever. In the end, it was this sentence that kept me up at night: ‘Inadequate origin models [of the universe] hold that (a) God never directly intervened in creating nature and/or (b) humans share a common physical ancestry with earlier life forms.’ Our shared ancestry with earlier life forms is sacred to me. I declined the invitation.” 

This illustrates Nelson’s ideas about what it means to be queer and her reluctance to link the term too tightly to sexual preference. Nelson initially has misgivings about speaking at Biola because it’s an evangelical university with anti-LGBTQ policies; she’s then further unnerved by the fact that even the school’s “Queer Underground” accepts LGBTQ relationships only in the “proper context” (28) of Christian marriage—an idea that doesn’t strike Nelson as particularly progressive. 

Her ultimate decision not to accept the invitation has nothing to do with the university’s LGBTQ policies, implicitly suggesting that the school’s anti-science position is more troubling and destructive than its views on sexuality. This is in keeping with Nelson’s belief that queerness shouldn’t simply be about sexual orientation but should signal a broader willingness to challenge a status quo that also oppresses women and people of color, worsens economic inequality, and destroys the environment. She hints that placing too much emphasis on sexuality may simply play into the hands of those in power, since sex is fairly easy to commercialize and sell.

“But how can it be a mix-up, if it’s the same hormones? How does one go about partitioning one sexual feeling off from another, presumably more ‘real’ sexual feeling? Or, more to the point, why the partition? It isn’t like a love affair. It is a love affair.

“Or, rather, it is romantic, erotic, and consuming—but without tentacles. I have my baby, and my baby has me. It is a buoyant eros, an eros without teleology. Even if I do feel turned on while I’m breast-feeding or rocking him to sleep, I don’t feel the need to do anything about it (and if I did, it wouldn’t be with him).” 

One of the ways in which Nelson challenges the supposed normalcy of pregnancy and childrearing is by questioning its “partitioning” from the realm of sexuality. Despite the obvious relationship between sex and pregnancy, society frames childrearing as a completely un-erotic undertaking, probably (as Nelson earlier notes) because of concerns about pedophilia. By contrast, Nelson argues that this strict separation is problematic, and not only because it glosses over the realities of what many women experience while (for example) nursing.

Implicitly, this passage suggests that the way society thinks about sexuality is limiting, because it hinges on an idea of “teleology”—that is, the idea that sexual feelings have a particular purpose or goal (i.e. an orgasm, a pregnancy, etc.). Nelson, however, is often suspicious of the idea that a feeling or action must have a purpose to be meaningful (elsewhere in the book, she associates this idea with the capitalist preoccupation with value). This is one reason she describes the feelings she experiences while caring for Iggy as “buoyant”; they don’t require anything additional to be pleasurable and meaningful, and that, for Nelson, is liberating.

“One problem with lyrical waxing, as Snediker has it, is that it often signals (or occasions) an infatuation with overarching concepts or figures that can run roughshod over the specificities of the situation at hand.” 

One of the limitations of language that Nelson discusses in The Argonauts is its tendency to erase “specificity.” A certain amount of generalization is unavoidable in speech or writing, because words refer to categories of things. It’s therefore easy, according to Nelson, to veer too far in the direction of generalization—for instance, by writing a love letter that ends up being more about the concept of love than it is about the recipient.

Nelson says that she herself is “fearful […] of this nothingness, this waxing lyrical about those [she] love[s] the most,” and she attempts to avoid it through a variety of stylistic “tics” (98). She often follows abstract discussions of theory with personal anecdotes that either contradict or complicate what precedes them. Nevertheless, Nelson also acknowledges that she doesn’t always succeed in capturing the particularities of her own life and relationships: “I finish a first draft of this book and give it to Harry […] At lunch he tells me he feels unbeheld” (46).

“Cordelia could not heave her heart into her mouth. Who can? No matter: her refusal to try famously becomes her badge of honor. But her silence has never moved me, quite; instead it’s always struck me as a bit paranoid, sanctimonious—stingy, even.

“What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted? Can it be that words comprise one of the few economies left on earth in which plenitude—surfeit, even—comes at no cost?” 

For all the failings of language that Nelson discusses elsewhere, she also frequently expresses frustration with those who “make a fetish of the unsaid” (49), claiming superiority for refusing to even try to speak. In this passage, Nelson offers a reason for her suspicion of this kind of silence: She feels that there is something “stingy” about it. This is a significant choice of words, given that Nelson elsewhere suggests that writing (and using language in general) can be a way of demonstrating care for other people, whether by testifying to those others’ experiences or by offering one’s own experiences up for others’ benefit. If that is in fact the case, staying silent could be construed as a form of selfishness. Nelson hints at a connection between this “stinginess” and the philosophy of capitalism—in particular, the emphasis it places on self-discipline and frugality. For Nelson, this is all the more reason to “waste” words: not only does doing so “cost” nothing (at least in economic terms), but it functions as a reminder that not everything needs to be useful or valuable to be worthwhile.

“I stayed busy trying to puff up my uterine lining by downing gobs of foul-smelling beige capsules and slick brown pellets from an acupuncturist with a ‘heavy hand,’ that is, one who left my legs covered with bruises; you had begun to lay the groundwork to have top surgery and start injecting T, which causes the uterus to shrivel. The surgery didn’t worry me as much as the T—there’s a certain clarity to excision that hormonal reconfiguration lacks—but part of me still wanted you to keep your chest the way it was.” 

Throughout The Argonauts, Nelson juxtaposes her experiences of becoming and being pregnant with Dodge’s experiences of medically transitioning. Although these two events did happen to coincide chronologically, Nelson also places them side by side in order to challenge her readers’ ideas about what constitutes “normal” bodily change, or even to challenge the very concept of normalcy itself; although most readers would likely consider pregnancy the more “natural” state, Nelson reveals that her own pregnancy, at least, was just as “artificial” as Dodge’s transitioning, in the sense that both were medically induced.

At the same time, Nelson suggests that there’s nothing wrong with embracing the strangeness, ambiguity, or even artificiality involved in both kinds of changes. Since identity unfolds and evolves over the course of life regardless (and often in response to choices that we ourselves make), these physical transformations are simply an extension of that endless “becoming” (53).

“The presumptuousness of it all. On the one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories—predator, twilight, edible—on the other, the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live. Becoming, Deleuze and Guattari called this flight: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-molecular. A becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning, a certain turning inward.” 

The above passage is one of the book’s most explicit statements on the nature of personal identity. It immediately follows Nelson’s discussion of Dodge’s transitioning, and his insistence that he’s “not on [his] way anywhere” (53). Dodge is nonbinary, and doesn’t think of his gender identity as a fixed point he’ll arrive at some time in the future. According to Nelson, however, this is true of identity in general; she describes identity as a process rather than a settled trait, explaining that it changes continuously over the course of a person’s life. She denies that this process is geared towards an ideal identity (an “asymptote” that can be approached but not reached), or towards an identity that is useful and helps us survive (“evolution”).

Instead, she describes the process of “becoming” as a “turning inward,” implying that we become increasingly more ourselves. This underscores Nelson’s warning about the “Aristotelian need to put everything into categories” since identity is necessarily personal, ambiguous, and fluid.

“I’m all for adult nights out, and for cabaret atmospheres. This isn’t a tract arguing for the right to carry a baby everywhere. I guess what annoyed me is that I wanted my friend to make the call, as she had invited us. Coming from the bouncer, I felt (paranoically? he was just doing his job) the specter of what Susan Fraiman has described as ‘a heroic gay male sexuality as a stand-in for queerness which remains ‘unpolluted by procreative femininity.’” 

Nelson discusses an incident where she and Dodge were barred from attending a burlesque show because Nelson had her newborn child with her. She uses this to further explore questions of conformity and queerness, suggesting that LGBT communities aren’t necessarily any more forward-thinking on questions of misogyny than heterosexual ones. More specifically, Nelson quotes an excerpt from Fraiman to argue that there’s often a knee-jerk mistrust of anything associated with femaleness and the female body in these spaces, even if this particular bouncer wasn’t motivated by that mistrust. The fact that Fraiman describes this femaleness as something seen as “polluting” is significant, given Nelson’s use of contamination and dirtiness as a motif throughout The Argonauts. The implication is that certain aspects of femaleness (e.g. menstruation, childbirth, and breastfeeding) are conventionally viewed as messy or disgusting, partly because women themselves are viewed as inferior, and partly because these functions are (in Nelson’s words) reminders of our “animal status” (99).

“[O]ne of the gifts of genderqueer family making—and animal loving—is the revelation of care taking as detachable from—and attachable to—any gender, any sentient being.” 

Nelson’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth are central to The Argonauts, but she doesn’t present these experiences as necessarily different in kind from other forms of “family making.” Instead, she seeks to make these experiences (conventionally seen as normal) “new and strange,” which also means finding the points of commonality between them and other forms of “care taking” (72). Nelson suggests that a form of “motherhood” is accessible to everyone, regardless of whether they’re mothers or not.

“But as Opie here implies, it’s the binary of normative/ transgressive that’s unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing.” 

The question of conformity versus resistance is one that surfaces repeatedly in The Argonauts, with Nelson most often expressing sympathy for the latter. In this passage, she admits that she feels “freaked out” by Opie’s assertion that, as a lesbian, her “becoming homogenized and part of mainstream domesticity is transgressive” (74). Of course, Nelson also becomes more “homogenized” over the course of the book, buying a house with her partner, entering into a marriage that increasingly reads as heterosexual, and carrying and raising a child.

However, she acknowledges that the problem isn’t so much these choices in and of themselves, but rather the idea that they are inherently “normative” (and that other choices are therefore abnormal). It’s the “binary” that confines people by forcing them to consider whether their desires are appropriately normal (or, for someone like Nelson, transgressive). This is one reason Nelson herself does what she can to blur the lines between convention and transgression (for instance, by discussing pregnancy as a “queer” state). 

“While we talked we said words like nonviolence, assimilation, threats to survival, preserving the radical. But when I think about it now I hear only the background buzz of our trying to explain something to each other, to ourselves, about our lived experiences thus far on this peeled, endangered planet. As is so often the case, the intensity of our need to be understood distorted our positions, backed us further into the cage.” 

The above passage touches on Nelson’s interest in both questions of conformity and questions of language. The debate in question arises after Nelson and Dodge watch X-Men: First Class, and explicitly centers on the question of whether it’s pointless (and dangerous) for a person to try to become part of a society that oppresses them. This is an issue that Nelson raises periodically throughout The Argonauts, although she argued—uncharacteristically—for assimilation. In Nelson’s retelling, however, the episode also becomes a reflection on the limits of language as a means of connecting with others.

As Nelson portrays it, language actually drives her and Dodge farther apart by making their positions appear more definite and extreme (even to themselves) than they actually were. This is related to what Dodge previously called the “cookie-cutter function”—the way in which words limit our ability to see and recognize ambiguity by referring to one thing (or aspect of that thing) rather than to others. In this sense, there’s a parallel between the limitations of language and the topic Nelson and Dodge are debating, since assimilating involves shedding anything that doesn’t fit into the existing social structure.

“I was wrong on all counts—imprisoned, as I was and still am, by my own hopes and fears. I’m not trying to fix that wrongness here. I’m just trying to let it hang out.” 

Nelson’s admission that she was wrong, as a young woman, to look down on people who chose to have children is a good example of her style as a writer and the ideas that influence it. Her remark that she’s “trying to let [her wrongness] hang out” reflects what she earlier describes as her interest in “experimenting with the personal made public” (60), even to the point of revealing less than flattering details about herself.

Owning this kind of “wrongness” publicly is central to Nelson’s writing, both because it illustrates the contradictions and evolutions of personal identity and because it places her in a vulnerable position relative to her readers. The latter is in turn important because of the relationship between vulnerability and intimacy in The Argonauts; caring for someone, Nelson suggests, always involves vulnerability and dependency, and Nelson frequently implies that writing can be a way of caring for others. For instance, by “offering up [one’s] experience and performing [one’s] particular manner of thinking, for whatever they are worth” (97) to her readers.

“Just let him wheel around in his sac for Christ’s sake, I thought, grimly folding the genital triptychs into my wallet, week after week. Let him stay oblivious—for the first and last time, perhaps—to the task of performing a self for others, to the fact that we develop, even in utero, in response to a flow of projections and reflections ricocheting off us. Eventually, we call that snowball a self (Argo).” 

Although Nelson depicts identity as fluid and evolving, that doesn’t mean that we are free to recreate ourselves at will. Nelson notes that this is a common misreading of Judith Butler, whose theory of performativity she references in this passage. In reality, our identities are shaped by our social context, and in particular by the expectations of those around us. Nelson reacts with dismay to the ultrasound tech making a fuss over Iggy “showing off” his genitals because of the ideas about masculinity that are already being projected onto her unborn son.

Nevertheless, as Nelson notes a moment later, there’s also a “cheery way” to approach the fact that our identities form socially: “We are for another, or by virtue of another” (95). If we aren’t entirely free to reinvent ourselves, that’s partly because of our relationships with others, and the ways in which those others depend on our maintaining a particular identity; as burdensome as some social expectations can be, a life that was entirely free of them would also lack all human connections and intimacy.

“One of the gifts of recognizing oneself in thrall to a substance is the perforation of such subterfuge. In place of an exhausting autonomy, there is the blunt admittance of dependence, and its subsequent relief. I will always aspire to contain my shit as best I can, but I am no longer interested in hiding my dependencies in an effort to appear superior to those who are more visibly undone or aching.” 

Although Nelson says she’s grateful to have gotten sober, she also says that she’s grateful for her past struggles with alcohol because they forced her to reckon with the fact that she wasn’t and couldn’t be entirely “autonomous”—to the extent that she wasn’t relying on other people, she was relying on a drug. Nelson therefore suggests that we are culturally conditioned to aspire to a kind of “self-reliance” that’s both impossible and unhealthy, because our identities only take shape through our various kinds of “dependencies.” As Nelson implies in this passage, this is one reason why her own writing is so personal in tone; by showing herself at her lowest points, she’s demonstrating the kind of vulnerability that makes both intimacy and growth possible.  

“When my stepfather finally left, my sister and I felt as much relief as grief. The intruder had finally been expelled. The sodomitical mother would melt away, and the maternal body would be ours, at last.” 

Given how central the subject of motherhood is to The Argonauts, it’s not surprising that Nelson spends some time discussing her relationship with her own mother. More specifically, Nelson acknowledges the difficulty she had accepting her mother’s decision to leave her father, connecting it the way that society as a whole attempts to deny mothers any sexual expression outside the realm of reproduction. The tacit implication is that becoming a mother herself has helped Nelson better understand the demands society places on mothers, and thus helped her appreciate her mother as a full, flawed human being rather than as someone who exists solely to cater to her children’s needs.

“But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, or persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion.” 

The Argonauts is a book that celebrates ambiguity and uncertainty, especially in the context of personal identity. However, Nelson suggests that even this celebration of uncertainty and impermanence should be provisional, because it’s “limiting” in its own way. In particular, she suggests that her own reluctance to pin herself down to a single identity has often been rooted in fear, calling it her “identity phobia” and implying that she’s used it as a way of avoiding intimacy by “demur[ring]” or “disengag[ing]” (112). In this passage, she therefore contrasts her earlier “slipperiness” with the greater permanence and stability that’s demanded of her in her life with Dodge, Iggy, and Lenny. Although the demands of these relationships are in some sense limiting—she can’t simply disavow her status as Iggy’s mother, or the “obligations” that that entails—they are also fulfilling.

“By the third night of Malcolm’s watch, I started having delusions that he could sit outside our house forever, to protect against whatever. But the money had run out, as had the logic of the enterprise. We were on our own.” 

Although the episode involving Nelson’s stalker occurred before she became pregnant, Nelson’s account of it immediately precedes her description of labor. More specifically, it precedes her discussion of the role of the cervix during pregnancy and labor, explaining that there comes a point where the barrier “protecting” the baby needs to “become an opening” (124) so that the child can be born. This passage is therefore a good example of the way in which Nelson uses a non-chronological narrative to draw attention to parallels in theme and meaning—in this case, about the dangers of the world the child (or, in this passage, Nelson) is about to enter, and about the impossibility of holding those dangers at bay forever. Implicitly, this is one reason why giving birth involves “going to pieces”—it requires relinquishing the belief in what Nelson calls “prophylactic anxiety” (120), or the sense that it’s possible to control for every possible outcome by worrying enough. 

“You don’t do labor, I was counseled several times before the baby came. Labor does you.

“This sounded good—I like physical experiences that involve surrender. I didn’t know, however, very much about physical experiences that demand surrender—that run over you like a truck, with no safe word to stop it. I was ready to scream, but labor turned out to be the quietest experience of my life.

“If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way. You will have realized that death will do you too, without fail and without mercy.” 

Nelson’s decision to juxtapose her own account of Iggy’s birth with Dodge’s account of his mother’s death stems partly from her belief that labor necessarily involves a brush with death. The sheer intensity of the pain, combined with the fact that—as Nelson notes in this passage—it’s entirely out of one’s voluntary control functions as a reminder of one’s physicality, weakness, and mortality. However, birth is also related to death in more figurative ways—most notably in that a parent’s experience can be a one of “obliteration” (37), first because of the demands of child-rearing, and later because of the way in which their work is “undone” (140) when the child grows up.

“To me, at the moment anyway, it is […] an incitement to give Iggy no memory, save the sense, likely unconscious, of having once been gathered together, made to feel real.” 

Throughout The Argonauts, Nelson draws on the image of “holding” as a way of describing the ways in which we affirm one another’s selfhood and existence—or, as she puts it in this passage, one another’s sense of being “real.” In this excerpt, Nelson uses the motif literally, describing the experience of physically cradling a child, and thus laying the groundwork for their healthy growth and development. The principles behind this form of care taking, however, aren’t unique to motherhood, and Nelson often uses the motif in a more abstract sense as she tries to imagine what it would mean (for example) to give Dodge a sense of being “gathered together” through her writing.