The Argonauts
THE ARGONAUTS
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The Argonauts
CONTENTS
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Preface
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II
Desire
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III
Identity
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IV
Motherhood
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V
Life
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PREFACE Based on Maggie Nelson’s 2015 novel, The Argonauts, this zine focuses on the challenges of motherhood, identity, desire and life. Drawing quotes and extracts from Nelson herself while also looking at writers who pose similar ideas on such themes. The Argonauts is a love story between Nelson and artist Harry Dodge, who is fluidly gendered. They marry as an act of political protest just before the law enabling homosexual marriage is revoked in California. Nelson explores the challenges and complexities of mothering as well as queer family making. Nelson writes about love as an idea without veering into abstraction and love as an emotion. It’s a refreshing, honest take on gender, feminism, marriage, family, love and mothering.
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The Argonauts
Preface
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“WORDS CHANGE DEPENDING ON WHO SPEAKS THEM; THERE IS NO CURE.” 6
The Argonauts Preface
The Argonauts is a memoir. In essence, the book relates how Nelson encounters a lover who is neither man nor woman. Maggie becomes pregnant with a sperm donor at the same time as Harry takes testosterone and has breast removal surgery, with the simultaneity of these changes rendering pregnancy itself a queer state.
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DESIRE “A day or two after my love pronouncement, now feral with vulnerability, I sent you the passage from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes in which Barthes describes how the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” is like “the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.” Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo, whenever the lover utters the phrase “I love you,” its meaning must be renewed by each use, as “the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”
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The Argonauts
Desire
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“I had booked the room for us online, in the hope that my booking of the room and our time in the room would make you love me forever.”
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The Argonauts
Desire
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I WANT THE YOU NO ONE ELSE CAN SEE, “I keep forgetting, for lots and lots of people in the world, the notion of “falling in love” has (of all things) sexual connotations. No, that’s not what I think is happening. For me, what falling in love means is different. It’s a matter of suddenly, globally, “knowing” that another person represents your only access to some vitally transmissible truth or radiantly heightened mode of perception, and
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The Argonauts Desire
THE YOU SO CLOSE THE THIRD PERSON NEVER NEED APPLY. that if you lose the thread of this intimacy, both your soul and your whole world might subsist forever in some desert-like state of ontological impoverishment.” ―- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love
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“I FEEL I CAN GIVE YOU EVERYTHING WITHOUT GIVING MYSELF AWAY”
The Argonauts
Desire
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Kissing the stomach kissing your scarred skin boat. History is what you’ve travelled on and take with you We’ve each had our stomachs kissed by strangers to the other and as for me I bless everyone who kissed you here - Michael Ondaatje
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The Argonauts
Desire
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IDENTITY Nelson’s book is a portrait of a loosely grouped community of people exploring how to live through redefining gender. Arguing that it is wrong to see this “performativity” as a gender-identity free-for-all. She quotes Judith Butler’s definition: “Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify.” “That’s one of the things that “queer” can refer to: the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.“― - Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies
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The Argonauts
I WILL NEVER FEEL AS FREE AS YOU DO, I WILL NEVER FEEL AS AT HOME IN THE WORLD,
Identity
I WILL NEVER FEEL AS AT HOME IN MY OWN SKIN. THAT’S JUST THE WAY IT IS, AND ALWAYS WILL BE.
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“THE MOMENT OF QUEER PRIDE IS A REFUSAL TO BE SHAMED BY WITNESSING THE OTHER AS BEING ASHAMED OF YOU.” “You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, 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 beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.”
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The Argonauts
Identity
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“I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it.”
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The Argonauts Identity
“How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?”
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MOTHERHOOD Nelson highlights the gruelling sides of motherhood, giving an honest recount of her experiences. She writes in a way that makes the world seem smaller after the child arrives. “It is a mistake to think that queering motherhood is only and inevitably a matter of addition, of bringing parents who identify as ‘queer’ and/or ‘trans’ into existing unyielding frameworks. Queering motherhood can therefore start where any of the central gendered, sexual, relational, political, and/ or symbolic components of ‘expected’ motherhood are challenged.” - Gibson, (quoted in Silbergleid, 2017)
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Motherhood
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“I GUESS I HAD TO MOURN SOMETHINGTHE FANTASY OF A FEMINIST DAUGHTER” “Mothers need a matricentric mode of feminism organised from and for their particular identity and work as mothers. Indeed, a mother-centered feminism is needed because mothers—arguably more so than women in general—remain disempowered despite forty years of feminism.” -O’Reilly, A. (2016). Matricentric Feminism: Theory, Activism, and Practice.
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The Argonauts Motherhood
“For reasons almost incomprehensible to me now, I cried a little when our first ultrasound technician— the nice, seemingly gay Raoul, who sported a little silver sperm-squiggle pin on his white coattold us at twenty weeks that our baby was a boy, without a shadow of a doubt. I guess I had to mourn something-the fantasy of a feminist daughter, the fantasy of a mini-me. Someone whose hair I could braid, someone who might serve as a femme ally to me in a house otherwise occupied by an adorable boy terrier, my beautiful, swaggery stepson, and a debonair butch on T.”
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“IT IS ROMANTIC, EROTIC, AND CONSUMING— BUT WITHOUT TENTACLES. I HAVE MY BABY, AND MY BABY HAS ME.” Nelson’s accounts of the erotic experience of mothering, coupled with details of her sexual experiences within and outside of her relationship with her partner, Harry, address what has heretofore been a deep- seated contradiction between the maternal body and sexual and erotic pleasure and desire. Nelson makes space for the consideration of motherhood and the erotic not as antithetical, but deeply entwined realms of experience.
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Motherhood
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“And yet-while pumping milk may be about nourishment, it isn't really about communion. A human mother expresses milk because sometimes she can't be there to nurse her baby, either by choice or by necessity. Pumping is thus an admission of distance, of maternal finitude. But it is a separation, a finitude, suffused with best intentions. Milk or no milk, this is often the best we've got to give.”
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The Argonauts Motherhood
“THIS PIZZA DOUGH LIKE FLESH HANGING DOWN IN FOLDS WHERE THERE USED TO BE PREGNANT TAUTNESS.” 31
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The Argonauts Motherhood
“YOU MUST ALLOW HIM TO UNFURL.” “You are making the baby, but not directly. You are responsible for his welfare, but unable to control the core elements. You must allow him to unfurl, you must feed his unfurling, you must hold him. But he will unfurl as his cells are programmed to unfurl. You can’t reverse an unfolding structural or chromosomal disturbance by ingesting the right organic tea.”
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LIFE While Nelson gives honest recounts of life struggles, The Argonauts is also about finding yourself and embracing your identity. Maybe it will change the way we think and speak about others and ourselves? “Reproductive futurism needs no more disciples. But basking in the punk allure of “no future” won’t suffice, either, as if all that’s left for us to do is sit back and watch while the gratuitously wealthy and greedy shred our economy and our climate and our planet, crowing all the while about how lucky the jealous roaches are to get the crumbs that fall from their banquet. Fuck them, I say.”
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The Argonauts Life
“Empirically speaking, we are made of star stuff. Why aren’t we talking more about that. Materials never leave this world. They just keep recycling, recombining.”
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THE FREEDOM TO BE HAPPY RESTRICTS HUMAN FREEDOM IF YOU ARE NOT FREE TO BE NOT HAPPY.
The Argonauts
Life
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I find you; You survive what I do to you as I come to recognise you as not me; I use you; I forget you; But you remember me; I keep forgetting you; I lose you; I am sad.
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Life
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The Argonauts Rebecca Blackmore 2021
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