The Argonauts

Queerness is a recurring motif in The Argonauts, both in the feminist and gender theory Nelson draws on and in the way she makes sense of her own identity and life. In everyday speech, “queer” is sometimes used as a catch-all synonym for LGBT, and this meaning is relevant to Nelson’s story; her partner Dodge identifies as both butch and nonbinary, and Nelson implies that she herself has had romantic and sexual relationships with both men and women in the past. Both Nelson and the theorists she draws on see queerness as about much more than gender identity or sexual preference. Most notably, The Argonauts questions whether an LGBT individual who otherwise conforms to or participates in oppressive societal norms is “queer” in any way that matters: “[T]here is some evil shit in this world that needs fucking up, and the time for blithely asserting that sleeping with whomever you want however you want is going to jam its machinery is long past” (27). Conversely, Nelson implies that a person might be (or appear to be, as she herself does after Harry begins taking testosterone) heterosexual while also being “queer” in their resistance to other social norms and structures.

The idea of queerness is intertwined with Nelson’s broader exploration of conformity vs. rebellion. This is a tension she never fully settles, so it isn’t surprising that her treatment of queerness is equally ambiguous. The closest Nelson comes to offering a definition is recognizing that the word “queer” is context-dependent, and thus ambiguous in and of itself. Speaking of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Nelson writes: “She wanted the term to be a perpetual excitement, a kind of placeholder—a nominative, like Argo, willing to designate molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip” (29). The term allows a person to claim an identity that is entirely open-ended because the word doesn’t commit the speaker to a particular sexual orientation or gender identity, either now or in the future.

This is an important point to Nelson because it means that each individual person and relationship can retain some of its uniqueness rather than being entirely subsumed into a generic type (“straight,” “lesbian, etc.”). In this sense, the idea of queerness also reflects Nelson’s interest in language, which she at times worries similarly “ride[s] roughshod over specificity” (98). The Argonauts can therefore be read as an attempt to write “queerly”—that is, in a way that preserves idiosyncrasies, contradictions, and ambiguities; even Nelson’s attempts to “go back in later and slash [the ‘tics of uncertainty’] out” (98) reflect an unwillingness to commit absolutely to any one position, even if that position is uncertainty itself.

One of the ways in which Nelson explores the fluidity of identity is through bodily imagery. On the face of it, an individual’s body is one of the most unambiguous aspects of identity since it exists as a physical reality rather than a preference, habit, character trait, etc. However, as Dodge’s choice to undergo surgery and hormone therapy demonstrates, bodies aren’t as fixed as they appear, and their relationship to identity isn’t always obvious. Dodge doesn’t identify as a man, and the fact that he ends up “passing” as male doesn’t mean he is male any more than his prior physical reality meant that he was a woman.

Nelson further underscores the fluidity and construction of identity by juxtaposing Harry’s transformation with two forms of physical “transitioning” society regards as natural—aging and (most notably) pregnancy. Nelson extensively describes her use of IVF in order to conceive, implicitly asking readers to consider it as analogous to Dodge’s own use of medical technology in order to transition: Why, Nelson asks, is the end result of Harry’s treatment less real than the end result of hers? Even more to the point, Nelson suggests that pregnancy isn’t (or isn’t necessarily) the sign of “ultimate conformity” (13) to feminine identity that society frames it as. As Nelson describes it, pregnancy dramatically alters not only the body but also one’s relationship to one’s body, challenging the supposedly one-to-one correspondence between the visible body and an individual person: “[T]he soul (or souls in utero is pumping out static, static that disrupts our usual perception of an other as a single other. The static of facing not one, but also not two” (91). Pregnancy challenges the very idea of a self that exists in isolation, even on the most basic physical level, and can therefore serve as an example of the ways in which identity develops socially and across time.

The phrases “falling forever” and “going to pieces” recur throughout The Argonauts, often in connection with one another. They first appear in an excerpt from D. W. Winnicott discussing what happens to a child’s psyche when their emotional and physical needs aren’t met. The result, Winnicott says, is a primal form of anxiety centered on “falling forever” and “going to pieces”—sensations of brokenness, unreality, despair, etc.

Nelson uses these motifs not in connection to childhood but in connection to motherhood—and, more specifically, as a way of describing her anxieties about childbirth. In part, the phrases are simply a way of evoking the physical facts of labor, as when Nelson describes wearing an elastic band to support her postpartum belly: “Falling forever, going to pieces. Maybe this belt would keep it, me, together. When [the nurse] handed it to me, she winked and said, Thanks for doing your part to keep America beautiful” (109). However, by the time Nelson describes her labor, it’s clear that she’s also using the phrases in a more figurative way in order to capture the psychological impact of such a grueling physical experience.

Giving birth, according to Nelson, always involves “touching death” (134), and therefore involves a kind of disintegration or destruction of the self. Significantly, however, this experience of “falling forever” and “going to pieces” isn’t entirely negative; Nelson implies that giving birth (and becoming a mother) has made her more attuned to the limits of “exhausting autonomy” (102) and the “pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency” (112). Whereas a baby’s experience of “going to pieces” involves “losing all vestige of hope of the renewal of contacts,” Nelson in some sense has to “go to pieces” (33) as part of forming deep and meaningful connections to those around her.

The motif of contamination appears throughout The Argonauts in connection to the personal and ambiguous. Nelson remarks that she enjoyed reading Winnicott as a new mother because of his reliance on “humble, contaminated sources” (20), including “BBC broadcasts to mothers; a Q&A for a BBC program titled Woman’s Hour; conferences about breast-feeding; lectures given to midwives; and ‘letters to the editor’” (19). Nelson’s use of the word “contaminated” here is in part a reference to her earlier discussion of particular feelings attached to particular relationships, and the idea that that particularity could actually “make deep” in a way that broader, supposedly more objective stances can’t.

As Nelson sees it, “heavyweight” (20) thinkers like Freud and Lacan generalize so much in their pursuit of an overarching theory of childhood that they lose sight of its realities—the “dirt[iness]” (19) their theories can’t account for. Relatedly, Nelson uses the idea of dirt or messiness in her discussions of the pressure to conform, as in this passage on Dodge’s gender identity: “How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?” (53).

This decision to describe ambiguity and particularity in terms of contamination is tied to her interest in the body, which changes and evolves in ways that can be messy or even off-putting. She describes giving birth to Iggy’s placenta: “I had always imagined the placenta like a rare fifteen-ounce steak. Instead it’s utterly indecent and colossal—a bloody yellow sac filled with purple-black organs, a bag of whale hearts” (133). This “indecent” and disgusting object, however, is a necessary part of creating a child, so Nelson’s point is that messiness and contamination are essential parts of our own self-creation as well.