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 the author'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 for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
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There is an eloquence and intensity with which Maggie Nelson addresses myriad topics in this work: a/gender and its fluidity; sexuality; feminism (namely of the white variety). During these moments of reflection and intellectual exploration, Nelson writes sublime criticism that dares to be prose poetry. This intensity and focus and deliberateness, however, is wholly lacking whenever topics of race come up, or when identity is collapsed to disinclude people of color. I had high hopes going into this work but left feeling unsatisfied and as though I had read yet another account of feminism/queerness/radical-ness that did not leave space for people of color.
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