For a short book, this packs one hell of a punch. It’s a memoir, kind of about everything. But if I had to try to distill it down I’d say it’s a critical assessment of society’s need to categorize people based on their gender and sexual orientation. It’s also a deep dive into what it means to identify as non-binary, trans or somewhere other than straight on the sexual spectrum. And also how confusing these concepts can be – not just for cis gender heterosexual people who’ve never had to learn about how varied these identities can be, but for the people who inhabit them and are trying to figure out for themselves where they fit and how to navigate their relationships.
Nelson’s book begins with her relationship with Harry Dodge, whose gender seems to morph and shift as the book progresses. She also works through how she frames herself and her identity. While this book does have the introspection that you’d expect from that description, it does it in a very interesting way. Nelson brilliantly tackles the vital topics of body autonomy and body politics by juxtaposing her own pregnancy and the changes it is making to her own body and how she feels within it, and her partner’s physical transition from (biologically) female to male. One performing the most archetypal female bodily act, and the other shifting away from it towards a more male physical identity.
I’m not sure if I’m using the right terms here – apologies if I’m not – but I’m doing my best to describe something that really needs to speak for itself. I found this book to be unlike anything I’ve ever read before. The subject matter is deeply personal, but the tone is academic and encompasses some complex theories around gendered norms and how other people’s interaction with our gender identity can inform and change its manifestation. She discusses what it means to form a queer family, and some of the decisions that must be made by queer parents that cis heterosexual parents not only don’t have to make, but don’t have to think about, or even be aware of.
There are so many complex and often conflicting ideas here that I felt like I’d have to read it five more times just to scratch the surface to understand it. But it was such a rich and thought-provoking read. I think we have reached a point when it is not only imperative that we learn to understand queer identities and lives, but that we put effort into doing so. This book is necessary reading to fulfilling that end. I left it with perhaps even more questions than I entered into it with, but hopefully better ones. It doesn’t offer easy information that will make the reader feel like all of a sudden they understand queer identity. But that’s a more honest, more interesting view into the issue. Identities are complex, can shift over time, and can be as confusing to the people living them as those on the outside trying to understand them.
I found this book deeply emotional and impactful. I definitely came out of it feeling like I’d had a lot of new information and ways of looking at people introduced to my brain, in the best possible way. I’m learning more about just how diverse the people in the world around us are, and just how inadequate the classification systems we use to explain them in our society are. We need better (or no) labels, we need a way to allow for more of a spectrum upon which people can exist and move freely, and we need to overcome the overly simplified ideas we have inherited. This book is a huge step towards doing so, and I’m so grateful I finally got around to reading it. I think you should, too.
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, offers a firsthand account 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. – Goodreads
Book Title: The Argonauts
Editor: Maggie Nelson
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook
Published By: Graywolf Press
Released: May 5, 2015
Genre: Memoir, Non-Fiction, LGBTQIAP+, Body Autonomy, Body Politics
Pages: 160
Date Read: August 21-23, 2021
Rating: 9/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.01/5 (37,188 ratings)
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