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An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family. Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making. Writing in the spirit of public intellectuals such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Nelson binds her personal experience to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. Nelson's insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry of this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.… (more)
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This is a slim volume, but I careened back and forth throughout between being transfixed and engulfed on the one hand and being repelled and rolling my eyes (SO MUCH eye rolling) on the other. That careening had me thinking throughout this would be a 3-star (with notes) but a lovely and instructive portion quite near the end equating the end of the life of Dodge's mother and the beginning of life for Nelson and Dodge's son, Iggy, pushed it to a high 3, rounded to 4.
Nelson is brilliant, of that there is no doubt, and her life is interesting. That she shares by bouncing back and forth between raw personal experience and a rather scholarly meander through literature on ontology, linguistics, psychology, and more is cool and challenging. It makes for a book that takes one's full attention. I like that. I realized I don't read a lot which really challenges me. While I don't want a steady diet of intellectual wrestling, I find I really miss the occasional bout.
That said, though Nelson has a far better knowledge and understanding of philosophy than I, I am bothered that she equates the greatest thinkers in the Western canon with Annie Sprinkle and other performance artists. All respect to Annie (I have seen her cervix, so I feel like we are on a first name basis) but while getting on stage and sucking dildos and then masturbating is strong messaging, it is not Thus Spake Zarathustra (even though it might contain more truth.) The urgency to see great value in all queer thought, all queer theory is silly and self-indulgent. And though it is clear throughout that Nelson is wildly self-indulgent, possibly pathologically self-indulgent, she does not appear silly other than when she waxes poetic about essentially every queer intellectual writing today. Nelson is in love with her queerness in a way that clouds her judgement. The equation of great thinkers and interesting people who are cultural commentators publicly orgasming about women's autonomy (for me that is a bit "dancing about architecture" but ymmv) is tied up in that sort of messaging that everything by people who identify as queer and comment on queerness is good. That is clearly not true and it dings up the rest.
Also worth mentioning, Nelson comes from that group of parents who believe they invented the job and the experience. I am happy parenting gives her joy, and that she is very intentional about the responsibility. Parenting changed my life too, and let me know that there was a whole facet of love separate from, and honestly greater than, all my prior loving and being in love. But good god woman, enough! You may experience wonder at nursing and seeing your placenta, but we don't. When I nursed I mostly thought, of the words of Murphy Brown; nursing is like finding out you can get bacon out of your elbow. Nelson though assumes everyone experiences nursing as an erotic experience. (I did not, I swear.) She extrapolates from that the "fact" that we are all so bothered by those sexual feelings that we force ourselves to not find joy in breastfeeding and to hide the act. Your experience of motherhood is yours Maggie, don't overtalk it, and don't assume is is the paradigm. Its just another mother child bond, like the many billions that preceded it.
In the end Nelson sucks you in and brings new perspective to life and death and birth, and she challenges assumptions with mostly cogent positions. I was also immersed in Nelson's exploration of identity and what we choose as our identifiers and even more so by the discussion of language which permeated the text. On that point, the material about words as a talisman was fascinating and moving. Also the changing definition of "I love you" or really of any words, and the truth that what we mean but what we say changes with context and must be repeatedly redefined. Ideas like this sustain me and I am grateful to Nelson for giving me a framework within which I can think about that and for inviting me into her own consideration. Worthwhile for the right reader. 3.5 it is.
Structured without chapters, but organized into short segments of thought, The Argonauts reminded me of the novel Department of Speculation, in structure and subject. The structure worked well for me, as much of the issues she addressed were either well outside of my comfort zone or familiar subjects approached from an angle I'd never viewed them from before. This was not a work written for me, someone largely unfamiliar with what life is like for those who fall outside of what is considered the norm in sexual and gender orientation, and her habit of referring to the people she's responding to solely by their surnames often left me stranded. But much of what Nelson describes is familiar to me, as she discusses her pregnancy and people's reaction to her pregnancy, as well as her experience of being a mother.
This is a meaty book, with much packed into a few pages, but what I have taken away from The Argonauts is the impossibility of a single person being a representative of the queer community, as there is such a wide range of lived experience and ways of living their lives, and the sheer universality and uniqueness of each person's experience with motherhood. This is an thought-provoking book and while much of it was inaccessible to me without a lot of research on my part, I nonetheless learned a great deal.
“That hormones can make the feel of wind, or the feel of fingers on one’s skin, change from arousing to nauseating is a mystery deeper than I can track or fathom. The mysteries of psychology pale in comparison, just as evolution strikes me as infinitely more spiritually profound than Genesis.”
As I read The Argonauts, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. Though Offill’s work is fiction, both pieces shift big ideas into compact spaces and read like a collection of swirling thoughts. Much as I felt after reading Dept. of Speculation, as soon as I closed The Argonauts I knew it was a book I would pick up again (and again and again). Perfect for book groups looking for the challenge of digging deep, Maggie Nelson has penned a piece with endless opportunities for questioning and discussion.
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Nelson seeks to bolster her personal experience with quotations of what I take are prominent thinkers and writers in the field of queer theory. Without context, however, I did feel that she was writing with some alternative Bartlett’s at her side. More than anything, it was this demanding of certain foreknowledge that, as a reader, made me feel that this book was just not written for me. That’s fine.
Her recounting of her beautifully messy journey to motherhood was amazingly honest and touching, as was the story of the passing of her partner’s mother. Here, Harry Dodge’s voice, which throughout the book is often a calm voice of reason, made me wish that I was reading Dodge’s take on everything, but that would be a different book altogether.
The last 20 pages were my favorite, as she juxtaposed her account of giving birth with Harry's experience of watching his mother die. Maggie is very forthcoming and unashamed of her insecurities. I'm glad that she wrote this book, and I'm glad that I read it.
Like the original Argonauts, Nelson intrepidly pursues a dangerous and heroic mission--in her case, to love who and how she sees fit. But the title owes more to Roland Barthes, and more to philosophy than it owes to Greek mythology. Nelson attempts to describe to Harry, her transitioning partner, what she meant by her orgasmic "I love you": saying it "is like 'the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name'" (quoting Barthes). Jason's Argo becomes the Ship of Theseus: an Ancient paradox. The paradox runs like this: can you still call the Argo "The Argo," even when all of its original components have been replaced--while at sea?
If I were a new(ish) lover receiving this explanation for a premature ejaculation of love, I would be very confused. I might ask who represents the ship being renewed and who the deckhand renewing it, or I might ask if the ship's name should not be reconsidered in light of a new crew? The apparent confusion of the metaphor makes sense only when one considers its philosophical context. 'The Ship of Theseus' was reintroduced in the 1930s by Otto Neurath, a "physicalist" and scientific philosopher who espoused a non-foundationalist epistemology.
"There is no way to establish fully secured, neat protocol statements as starting points of the sciences. There is no tabula rasa. We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from its best components. Only metaphysics can disappear without a trace. Imprecise ‘verbal clusters’ [Ballungen] are somehow always part of the ship. If imprecision is diminished at one place, it may well re-appear at another place to a stronger degree" (Neurath 1932/1983, 92).
This is Nelson's point. We are no tabula rasa(s? ae?). We are imprinted continuously with socio-cultural ideas of what it is to be woman, man, mother, father. That is the ship we're stuck with. It is our duty to repair, mend, and/or replace worn out notions, and to sail forward, onward. This isn't a process that involves a ground razing nor a starting from scratch. You are already asea, adrift, with no terra firma in sight. The process, as we see, is slow. But steady. Both active and reactive.
The Neurathian boat is not just a problem for trans/queer/LGB individuals. It is the reality for everyone. Barthes hits on something when he says that "I love you" is something like a continuous affirmation of the ship we come in on. Here we are, ever changing, ever loving.
There is so much going on here that is fairly opaque to me about gender identity and body awareness. So much of what is up in the air here is stuff I take for granted.
But this is still clear-sighted, practical, accessible and shot through with the
I've sat and pumped for many cumulative hours as well. I've drifted in and out of the various thoughts on the world that come when you are not with your child but still giving him (in my case, he's a him also) nourishment. I've drifted in and out of that feeling of spirituality that comes with that I am somehow tied to being more animal than human, but never feeling less human than I had before. It's confusing and reassuring and painful, and so is this book.
It may get a little weird sometimes, but people are weird. I used to think the weird ramblings of my mind were partial to me somehow, that there was something wrong with me. In the long succession of feminist writing that I've read in this fourth wave, I've learned that I am not weird. People are weird. Strange and uncomfortable thoughts come unbidden to our minds. Nelson has shared those thoughts with us. She has opened up her mind and her life for us to see, even for those who feel the need, to judge. That was the really powerful thing about the book.
She doesn't really make a grand statement on transgenderism or living outside the gender binary or being a lesbian or the LGBTQ movement as a whole. She just exposes the feelings, the way that life doesn't have to be more complicated and the ways that it does.
I very interesting book. I hope all feminists read it. I'm glad it was on the Our Shared Shelf reading list for May. I look forward to the discussions.
Worse still, in a culture committed to bleeding the humanities to death, along with any other labors of love that don't serve the God of capital: the spectacle of someone who likes her pointless, perverse work and gets paid -- even paid well -- for it."
I am not a theory person. I like concrete events and specific descriptions and this book is heavy on theory and light on particulars.
I really liked this book. I found it well-written and interesting and thought-provoking. I don't agree with everything, I don't think every point was equally profound (or true). But I am glad that I read it & I hope to read other books by this author.
In this case I needn't have worried.
It's a deeply odd book, intellectual and earthy, crisp and messy, abstract and personal, and lots of other binary pairs and in-betweens. It sometimes made me uncomfortable, and it's not as accessible as Bluets (the book I bought lots of copies of). It's not for everyone. But it was oh so very much for me. What it reminds me of is how when I was 18 and 19 and 20, I would often spend ALL DAY reading nearly-randomly in the stacks of 3 different McGill libraries, and then I would go find one of my friends who, while they'd not usually spent all day reading, were mostly better-educated than I was, and we would bounce ideas and personal stories off of each other until we got all muddied together and tired, at which point we would do something else - fall asleep, cook dinner, get in a laundry fight, cuddle on the couch while looking at Mapplethorpe photos... the options were multiple, and splendid. Anyway, this book makes me feel like I felt on those days, and that is a most welcome thing. It's also one of only a few books I've read that talk about womanhood and motherhood in ways that make me feel more affinity for my mostly-gender, rather than less.
My only regret is that, even though I tried REALLY hard to wait to read it until I could read it all in one day, I gave in to temptation and read it in bits and spurts when I didn't really have much time to read. I could occasionally tell that I wasn't as gloriously immersed in the interconnections and callbacks as I would've been if I hadn't had to interrupt myself. Next time I read it, it will be on a day when I don't have to put it down.
I thought at first that I was going to find this a frustrating read. It's disjointed, full of out-of-context quotes and allusions to things like literary theory (a subject with which I have little patience). But Nelson definitely won me over. She's talking about things very much worth talking about (and perhaps not talked about nearly enough) in a way that's somehow simultaneously contemplative and raw. And while her life and her experiences and perspectives are wildly different from mine in just about every respect, I found myself feeling a certain kinship with her in our apparently mutual frustration with the way in which categories and labels never seem to do justice to the messy, individual specificity of human lives and identities.
And what does she write about? Well, a) read the book and find out and b) I think it's radical feminism in the sense that it argues feminism can't be ignored or put on hold. It's everywhere and in everything. She makes structural arguments why this is the case, but she also makes biological arguments. The dirtiness and messiness of the maternal sticks to everything it touches. This book is an angry rebuke to the 1950s patriarchal dream of men who never have to deal with bodily filth or mess, apart from the regrettable necessity of a bowel motion every day or two (or three, given 50s diets in the UK and settler colonial countries). Life is full of excretion and mess and blood and general fluids that people without medical backgrounds can't correctly name. In some countries we might have successfully delegated dealing with all of this to women and people of colour, but I think Nelson is claiming that as a triumph for feminism - women deal with the stuff of life while men muck around with some nonsense or other.
Hmm, I might have gone too far down that track, but it's one of the threads of the book. I held back from giving the book five stars because I'm still not entirely convinced on how important this all is. It obviously matters, but then so does so much other stuff. Why should I concentrate on this? Well, in the case of this book, because it's beautiful and satisfying, but I'd love to read a similarly written book about economics or materials science.
PS: I read the ePub version of this and it kind of sucked because all of the references were put at the end, but they weren't superscripted or anything. In the end I had a pdf of the book on my phone and the actual book on my ereader, which still wasn't the ideal way to read it. So get the paper copy of possible.
PPS: It's astonishing to me that this book has 32,000 reviews. Whatever negative reactions people have to this book, to get 32,000 people responding to a work of theory is phenomenal.