The Argonauts

Nelson’s husband, Harry Dodge, is nearly as central to The Argonauts as Nelson herself. Dodge himself wrote several passages in the book—specifically, those dealing with his mother’s death from cancer. Dodge appears in the book as the “you” whom Nelson addresses throughout the work. Nelson’s decision to refer to Dodge in this way is partly pragmatic since Dodge identifies as neither male nor female, and consequently isn’t really “he” or “she” (though Nelson uses “he” when a third-person pronoun is unavoidable). Dodge, who was assigned female at birth, undergoes a mastectomy and testosterone therapy over the course of The Argonauts in an effort to both affirm his gender identity and to mitigate the physical pain caused by years of chest-binding.

Dodge is an artist, and his relationship with Nelson is highly intellectual from the beginning. These philosophical discussions reveal fundamental differences in the way each partner sees the world. Dodge is suspicious of language, which he feels oversimplifies and even destroys life’s ambiguities. Nelson, as a writer, clearly disagrees, although her own views soften over time as a result of their arguments. Dodge is also a deeply private person, and at times grows frustrated with Nelson’s willingness to air the details of their lives publicly. Nevertheless, the relationship remains loving and supportive over time, thanks in part to Dodge’s patience and good humor; Dodge, Nelson says, is “always the optimist” (78), even when she herself is anxious or frustrated.

Iggy is Maggie Nelson’s infant son, conceived via IVF with her husband Harry Dodge. His full name is Igasho, which is a Native American name meaning “he who wanders” (135). Because The Argonauts does not take place in chronological order, Iggy appears throughout the memoir—in references to a life-threatening illness he survived at only 6 months old, and in Nelson’s discussion of the ways in which sexual and maternal feelings flow into one another. Given that Nelson describes her relationship with Iggy as “a love affair […] romantic, erotic, and consuming” (44), it isn’t surprising that she relates the story of Iggy’s birth at the end of her memoir, and as its climax: Iggy is the culmination of the rest of the book not only because he is the culmination of Nelson and Dodge’s relationship, but also because Nelson’s experience of motherhood encapsulates many of her broader points about identity and love.

In moving in with (and later marrying) Dodge, Nelson also became a stepmother to Lenny—Dodge’s son from a prior relationship. Although Nelson doesn’t mention her stepson by name in The Argonauts, he’s an important figure in the book, in part because he offers Nelson her first taste of motherhood. She talks about the joys of caring for Lenny in much the same terms she later uses for Iggy, explaining: “[J]ust like that, I was folding your son’s laundry. He had just turned three. Such little socks! Such little underwear!” (10). However, because Lenny is Nelson’s stepson, her relationship with him also provides an opportunity to explore possible meanings of family beyond the biological and nuclear one:

Every time I see the word stepchild in an obituary […] or when, during the Olympics, the camera pans the audience and the voiceover says, ‘there’s X’s stepmother, cheering him on,’ my heart skips a beat, just to hear the sound of the bond made public, made positive (22).

Nelson’s own mother features prominently in the book’s explorations of motherhood. Early in the book, Nelson uses the image of a mug her mother gave her as a way of hinting that the relationship, though loving, is prone to misunderstandings: The mug is decorated with a holiday photo of Nelson, Dodge, and Lenny dressed up to see The Nutcracker, and Nelson admits that she was “horrified” (12) to receive something that was (as a friend put it) “so heteronormative” (13). The mug could be read to be an attempt by Nelson’s mother to impose a relatively traditional structure on her daughter’s untraditional family. As the book progresses, however, Nelson complicates this assumption by acknowledging the ways in which she herself has failed to respect her mother’s personhood—most notably, by resenting her for pursuing happiness outside her relationship with Nelson’s father.

Nelson’s relationship with her mother is complicated (in both directions) by sexist and heteronormative assumptions about family and motherhood. Nevertheless, the two women also have a great deal in common, including a tendency towards anxiety. A certain amount of anxiety goes hand-in-hand with motherhood; Nelson describes her mother’s obsession with the “Killing Tree” the Khmer Rouge used to murder babies as a need “to install in [Nelson] an outer parameter of horror of what could happen to a baby human on this planet” (121). Nelson implies that the experience of becoming a mother herself has given her a better understanding of and sympathy for her own mother:

The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time. […] Can one prepare for one’s undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I love her very much (140).

Although Nelson doesn’t spend much time discussing Dodge’s adoptive mother, Phyllis, her death (along with Iggy’s birth) forms the climax of The Argonauts. As her happy doodles on Dodge’s adoption papers make clear, she clearly cherished her role as a mother, and as she’s dying, Dodge assures her that “she had set [them] all up very well with her love and her lessons” (130). Her presence in the book therefore underscore Nelson’s interest in the nature of motherhood.

Although Dodge was always at ease with being an adopted child, he did set out to find his birth mother in his early thirties, eventually discovering her to be “a newly sober leather dyke—quick, articulate, tough around the edges” (138). She had at one point worked as a prostitute and been in a relationship with an abusive man named Jerry, with whom she’d had another child: “[A]n addict—in and out of prison, on and off the streets” (139). Dodge’s mother eventually gave up trying to help this other child and, by the time Dodge met her, had inherited enough money to buy a house and settle down with her “on-again, off-again butch lover” (138).

Christina Crosby taught feminist theory when Nelson was in college and also supervised Nelson’s thesis. Nelson describes her as “radiant and elegant and butch” (58) and implies that, as an undergrad, she was attracted to Crosby while also seeing her as a kind of mother figure. Crosby, however, was considerably more private than Nelson, refraining from coming out to her students and “[making] it very clear that she felt no kinship—indeed she felt a measure of repulsion—at [Nelson’s] interest in the personal made public” (60). Both women’s attitudes mellow as they age and become friends; Christina undertakes an autobiography, while Nelson reports feeling increasingly “alienated from social media” (60).

Nelson draws on many theorists over the course of The Argonauts, but Sedgwick—a pioneer in the field of queer literary theory—stands apart both because of the influence her work has had on Nelson and because Nelson actually met her personally. In part, Sedgwick serves as a reminder of the many possible meanings of queerness. Despite being in a long-standing heterosexual marriage, Sedgwick didn’t feel her sexuality (or broader identity) could be encompassed by a term like “straight,” and Nelson agrees:

[I]n person she exuded a sexuality and charisma that was much more powerful, particular, and compelling than the poles of masculinity and femininity could ever allow—one that had to do with being fat, freckled, prone to blushing, bedecked in textiles, generous, uncannily sweet, almost sadistically intelligent, and, by the time I met her, terminally ill (30).

Both Sedgwick’s scholarship and her presence in Nelson’s life are a testament to the fact that queer identity is about much more than gender preference. She also serves as a role model for Nelson in another sense—namely, that the joy she took in her work, coupled with her admission that she was in therapy to be “happier” (111), showed Nelson that happiness was an acceptable goal to pursue.

Of the many theories of motherhood and child development that Nelson references, Winnicott's are by far the most significant. This is partly because he couches his ideas in an “ordinary language” (45) that Nelson finds refreshing. His theories don’t stray far from the actual mental and bodily experiences of mothers and children and avoids the kind of overgeneralization that Nelson is wary of (especially as a new mother infatuated with her own particular baby). Nelson adopts and adapts several of Winnicott’s ideas—most notably, “going to pieces” and “feeling real.” The former describes the psychological effects of emotional deprivation on a child, but Nelson reworks it into a way of talking about the necessary self-destruction involved in childbirth. “Feeling real,” meanwhile, is the sense of existing as a discrete self, and Nelson views fostering this sensation in others as a central element of caring relationships.

One of the most prominent and influential gender theorists Nelson draws on in The Argonauts is Judith Butler. Nelson repeatedly references Butler’s theory of gender as “performative”—that is, an identity created through our actions rather than an innate aspect of our existence. Like Butler, Nelson is careful to clarify that this theory doesn’t mean people are free to recreate their genders at will. The ways in which we act (or can even think of acting) are determined by our societal context and its norms and values. Nelson uses Butler’s theory of performativity to explore the ways in which identity is, for good and for ill, socially constructed.