The Argonauts

As a writer, Nelson is conscious of both the possibilities and the limitations of language. Early in The Argonauts, she even suggests that these two things may be one and the same, saying that before she met Dodge, she “had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed” (3). Although there are aspects of reality that may elude language, whatever we end up saying will still gesture towards or encompass that reality in some way. As a result, Nelson says, she has tended to feel that “words are good enough” (3)—that is, able to adequately capture even the tensions and ambiguities of life.

Meeting and debating Dodge challenges Nelson’s faith in language, however, and not simply because he himself argues persuasively that words, in prioritizing or describing one aspect of something, inevitably cause everything else to “[fall] away, [get] lost, [be] murdered” (4). Rather, Dodge’s very existence demonstrates this point, as Nelson is reminded every time she has to “make an airline reservation or negotiate with [her] human resources department on [their] behalf” (7) Because Dodge is nonbinary, the pronouns to describe him in the third person simply don’t exist; although Nelson, when necessary, refers to him as “he,” certain elements of his gender identity are presumably “lost” in this description.

Variations on this problem recur throughout The Argonauts. It’s arguably at the heart of Nelson’s own fear of labeling herself one way or another. She notes that she was sympathetic to her professor Christina Crosby’s reluctance to come out, saying she understands “those who refuse to engage with terms or forums that feel like more of a compromise or distortion than an unbidden expression” (59). These limitations are then often compounded by the fact that the meaning of language hinges to a large extent on context—most notably, on the attitudes and experiences both the speaker and the listener bring to bear on a word or phrase. Nelson recounts her reaction to an essay Dodge shared with her about butches and femmes:

I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty. You said I misunderstood what you meant by honor. We haven’t yet stopped trying to explain to each other what these words mean to us; perhaps we never will (32).

At its worst, then, language can actually hinder interpersonal connections rather than facilitate them, because the act of explanation locks each person further into their own particular worldview.

However, if Nelson becomes more receptive to Dodge’s concerns about language’s failings, she never entirely loses confidence in its power. The ability of words to shift in meaning from one context to the next can be a source of confusion, but when looked at differently, it’s also liberating, and a possible antidote to language’s tendency to pin things down to definitely. They key, according to Nelson, is to remain “alert to the multitude of possible uses […] the wings with which each word can fly” (8). By doing so, Nelson suggests, it’s possible to create new meanings, including ones that challenge conventional and rigid thinking. Nelson’s continued faith in language is best demonstrated by the fact that she addresses Iggy directly at the very end of The Argonauts—something she earlier admitted she was afraid to do, because of the risks of “involv[ing] a tiny human being in this difficulty, this misfiring [of language], from the start” (76).

As a work of “autotheory,” The Argonauts is constantly moving between Nelson’s own memories and experiences and the broader conclusions she draws from them, often by bringing different works of philosophy, psychology, etc. to bear on them. At the same time, however, she’s wary of overgeneralization, noting that “lyrical waxing […] often signals (or occasions) an infatuation with overarching concepts or figures that can run roughshod over the specificities of the situation at hand” (45).

Nelson’s interest in specificity is therefore related to her understanding of the limitations of language: Any verbal description of something necessarily chooses to emphasize certain features over others, and therefore fails to capture the full complexity of the object, person, or idea. It’s also related to what Nelson calls her “identity phobia” (111) since describing oneself in terms of one category (e.g. “woman” or “bisexual”) prioritizes that facet of one’s identity over all others. Politically speaking, this kind of generalization can have significant consequences. Nelson is sympathetic to criticisms of LGBT public figures who refuse to label themselves, presumably because in doing so, they’re declining a chance to raise awareness and reduce stigma. At the same time, however, Nelson suggests that generalizing oneself in this way can obscure other important truths about both the relationship and the society it exists in. She says that she personally finds the term “same-sex” an inadequate description of relationships she’s had with women, since “whatever sameness [she has] noted […] is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy” (25). Since this “shared, crushing understanding” could presumably develop in relationships with no sexual or romantic component, the insistence on categorizing people by sexual preference arguably prevents them from mobilizing around other shared concerns (e.g. misogyny).

Nelson also ties the tendency to generalize towards the suspicion (particularly in academia and other “serious” spaces) of anything coded female. This is especially clear in her discussion of the criticism Jane Gallop faced for showing pictures of herself and her baby during a scholarly presentation:

Krauss acted as though Gallop should be ashamed for trotting out naked pictures of herself and her son in the bathtub, contaminating serious academic space with her pudgy body and unresolved, self-involved thinking (41).

However, as Nelson (quoting Gallop herself) notes, women speaking as mothers are always seen as “troublingly personal, anecdotal, self-concerned” (40) because it’s assumed that their interests begin and end with their own particular child. Nelson suggests that even if mothers do consider their “utterly ordinary experience[s] […] uniquely interesting” (41), that isn’t in and of itself a reason to dismiss them as irrelevant. Just a few paragraphs later, Nelson describes the joy she takes in her own child’s particular body, in response to the idea that there is nothing “profound” (42) about this kind of personal experience.

Finally, Nelson’s interest in “the particular” often overlaps with her interest in the “seemingly useless,” as in her account of the conservative backlash against Sedgwick’s scholarly work. Although Nelson describes this work as “pointless, perverse” research, she clearly doesn’t mean that in any negative sense; she simply means that Sedgwick’s work, though interesting to her and useful to other scholars, doesn’t “serve the God of capital” (114). It’s “pointless,” in the sense that it doesn’t produce anything that has market value (or arguably anything at all beyond the pleasure of writing, reading, and thinking about it). However, in a capitalist society, where everything is expected to serve a specific profitable function, this indulgence in an activity that has no clear end goal beyond personal enjoyment is a kind of resistance.

To the extent that it has a conventional plot, The Argonauts follows two physical transformations: Nelson’s pregnancy, and her husband’s mastectomy and testosterone injections. These transformations, which take place more or less simultaneously, serve as a focal point for Nelson’s broader questions about the relationship between conformity and resistance. Western society has traditionally viewed marriage and motherhood as the high point of a woman’s life, and central to womanhood itself; Nelson’s decision to have a child with her husband could therefore be seen as a tacit acceptance of gender norms. However, Dodge’s decision to undergo gender reassignment is one that society has typically viewed as subversive—all the more so because he rejects the female gender he was assigned at birth without fully embracing a male gender identity. The Argonauts describes a period when Nelson’s life appears to be both at its most transgressive and its most traditional when held up against societal norms surrounding sexuality, family, and gender.

This tension is important tin part because Nelson is wary of any form of “queerness” that adheres to social norms in every area but sex or gender identity. Early in The Argonauts, she describes a conversation she had with Dodge about the photographer Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Cutting that depicts “a house and two stick-figure women holding hands”: “I don’t get it, I said to Harry. Who wants a version of the Prop 8 poster, but with two triangle skirts?” (11). Her point here is that while the piece depicts a same-sex relationship, it otherwise depicts a very traditional household: a monogamous married couple, both dressed according to gender norms, standing next to a house they presumably own. As Nelson sees it, the piece doesn’t do enough to challenge all the other forms of oppression at work in society beyond homophobia—sexism, capitalism, racism, etc. Not surprisingly, then, Nelson is acutely aware of the potential implication of marrying and having a child herself—particularly because, as Dodge undergoes surgery and hormone treatment, she and her husband increasingly “pass” as a heterosexual couple.

At the same time, however, Nelson suggests that the opposition between conformity and resistance is itself artificial and confining; quoting an interview in which Opie suggests that “becoming homogenized and part of mainstream domesticity is transgressive for somebody like [her],” Nelson says that “it’s the binary of normative/transgressive that’s unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing” (74). Nelson’s experiences of pregnancy and childbirth are a good example of this. Society may depict motherhood as the “ultimate conformity” (13), but Nelson suggests that it can also be viewed as a rebellious—or “queer” (14)—state. This is often how she herself describes it, as when she notes: “The pregnant body in public is also obscene. It radiates a kind of smug autoeroticism: an intimate relation is going on—one that is visible to others, but that decisively excludes them” (90).

Since society conventionally demands that individuals (and particularly women) channel their sexuality outwards (and typically towards a person of the “opposite” sex), the spectacle of a woman wholly content with the self-involved “intimacy” of pregnancy can be threatening. With this and other similar examples, Nelson is suggesting that actions aren’t inherently either subversive or conformist but are rather interpreted as one or the other. This in turn opens up the possibility of reading those same actions in different and more productive ways.