Audiobook Review: The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson

Reading this book was part of my on-going quest to educate myself about all things trans, and was recommended by a reader of this blog, I believe.

Title: The Argonauts
Author: Maggie Nelson. Read by the author.
Publication info: Blackstone Audio, 2015, length 4:40. Original Greywolf Publishing, 2015, 160 pages.

Source: Library

Publisher's Blurb:
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, is an intimate portrayal 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.

My Review:
I opened this book braced for the sort of academic writing I frankly learned to loathe during my graduate school years. I was pleasantly surprised by an extremely readable book that in my opinion offered much more memoir and less theory. Or rather, the consideration of theoretical ideas about gender and sexuality are consistently explored through the lens of Nelson's own life and that of her partner, Harry Dodge.

Some parts of her discussion may prove more graphic than many readers want, though I don't think it ever felt gratuitous--after all, part of the point is to disrupt the limited ideas of sexuality and gender that most of us ingested with the culture from birth. I trust that the author is aware that her experience is her own; I found myself almost laughing at her description of childbirth, for its differences from my own. Her points about the difficulty of all female roles around parenting are valid.

Of more importance is the way in which Nelson, who is not herself transgender, grapples with the meaning of Dodge's transition, both theoretically and in her own life, which maybe is the point: all the theory in the world can't tell you how you'll feel about such fundamental changes in someone you love--and all the love in the world doesn't give you the right to say if they should or shouldn't change. 

My Recommendation:
This book was less helpful in some ways than some of the others I have read on the  topic, mostly, I think, because it is first and last a memoir--one couple's experience. I find I'm not that interested in what theorists say about "sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing" to quote the blurb. I am interested in how people live those realities, and on that score Nelson offers a convincing statement of their experience.

©Rebecca M. Douglass, 2024
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