The Argonauts
Much of the narrative is a portrait of Nelson’s relationship with Harry Dodge, who identifies as neither male nor female. Nelson refers to Dodge as “you” throughout the memoir: “You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds” (4) and “then, just like that, I was folding your son’s laundry” (12). Not only is Dodge the recipient of Maggie’s writing, but Dodge is simultaneously a character within it: “I finish a first draft of this book and give it to Harry” (57). This duality of Harry’s presence in the pages in itself queers and dismantles the subject/object binary.
The Argonauts is largely a reflection on queer motherhood, describing in poignant detail the birth of Nelson’s and Harry’s son Iggy. The ups and downs of her pregnancy, as well as giving birth to Iggy, are pervasive events that comprise the plot of the memoir.
Nelson queers the idea of mothering. The temporal birth of her child Iggy in the memoir is directly juxtaposed with narration by Harry on the nearing death of his mother. As Harry describes his mother’s exiting of life— “her mouth needed less air, less often” (164)—Nelson simultaneously describes the process of giving birth to Iggy in the hospital— “On the fourth or so contraction, he starts to come” (164).
Nelson transcends the cultural idea of the mutually exclusive relationship between birth and death: “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” (167). In this statement, Nelson challenges the binary between birth and death, queering both of them; Nelson demonstrates that these two phenomena are not mutually exclusive but are related to and communicate with each other.
Furthermore, in the memoir, Nelson challenges audiences to avoid making assumptions based on appearances about subscribing to normativity. Although to outside eyes Maggie and Harry look like a heterosexual couple, this is not the reality of their pairing; Maggie views herself as queer and is frustrated by the classification of her relationship by others as falling into normative patterns: “On the outside, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine, more and more ‘female.’ But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations” (103). Nelson refuses to be defined by normative structures, challenging rigid definitions of queerness as specific practices that stand in opposition to traditionally ‘normative’ ways of living. She explains how, “no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative” (91). She applies this reasoning to her pregnancy as well: “How can an experience so proudly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?” (16).
In general, Nelson proves herself to be an advocate for non-categorical views of identity: “I’ve always thought it a little romantic—the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one” (10).
Overall, The Argonauts challenges traditional ideas of normativity. Nelson’s self-perception of her own queerness and the theories she draws from to understand events that have happened in her life are largely a result of her personal experiences. The Argonauts, therefore, confronts readers with a proximate lens through which one can see and read queerness.
