March Meeting, "The Argonauts" by Maggie Nelson

That was an interesting evening! Our March book was The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Only half of our group made it to the meeting. I’m wondering if that was because they were so put off by the book that they didn’t read it and/or didn’t want to discuss it. I‘ll have to ask them next month. In any case, the six of us who braved reading the entire 143 pages had a great discussion – an XXX-rated one because of the provocative and sexual content that included topics such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues; class; personal identity; sex; and pregnancy and parenting.     

Harriet Dodge,
Fairmont High School, 1968

Life with Harry: A Memoir

Maggie Nelson

Let’s start with the tamer stuff. This book is ostensibly an autobiography about a lesbian, the author, and her fluidly gendered partner, Harry/Harriet. According to the Urban Dictionary, fluidly gendered is defined as: “a gender identity best described as a dynamic mix of boy and girl. Being gender fluid has nothing to do with which set of genitalia one has, nor their sexual orientation.” Nelson movingly describes Harry’s inability to live in his skin and his practice of painfully binding his breasts, a situation that is resolved by undergoing a double mastectomy and taking regular testosterone injections. These extreme measures allow Harry to partially transition to male, living as a “butch on testosterone.” This “irresolution is ok” for Harry, as it should be. The only problem is that his driver’s license still reads Harriet Dodge, which makes for interesting challenges if he gets pulled over for speeding or tries to book a plane ticket. Why not legally change your ID cards and solve the problem?  

Harry Dodge, 2014

The memoir is actually interesting and thought provoking when Nelson talks about her relationship with Harry, his young son, and her son who was conceived through IVF. They shared the experience of undergoing major physical transformations when she was pregnant and he underwent his surgery. There is a poignant part at the end of the book where we learn about Harry’s relationship with his adoptive mother. Rather than feeling a sense of disconnectedness over being adopted, he felt less bound by gender and able to believe that he had “come from the whole world.” We felt his grief as he sat with his adoptive mother while she takes her last breath. Similarly, Nelson rages against the debate that pits femininity and reproduction against sexuality and queer resistance, suggesting that these conditions should be mutually exclusive. Ultimately, she gives us a very detailed description of her own pregnancy experience, sharing her guilt of hoping for a daughter but being thrilled with the birth of her son.  

The Joy of Sex  

Alas, two things overshadow this glimpse into her personal life: her penchant for rough sex and her need to emphasize her knowledge of esoteric philosophical criticism. The former is made clear in the very explicit sex scene that opens the book, which is obviously meant to shock. And just in case she hasn’t made herself clear enough, she tells us, “If you want to talk about female eroticism, buckle up: “I’m not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphysics, of my anus,” she writes. “I am interested in ass-fucking.” Overall, it seems her main intent is to wax poetic about female anal eroticism (her words). According to Jenny Turner, of the London Review of Books, Nelson’s emphasis on anal sex has a political function: it defines the sodomitical mother, the idea that there is no contradiction between people enjoying “non-normative, non-procreative sexuality” and loving, caring for, protecting, and enjoying children. In other words, a woman’s pleasure does not come purely from procreative or reproductive activity; she demands others to acknowledge that her sexuality far exceeds her biological function.” Although I agree with her completely that motherhood should not preclude an interest in sex for pleasure, Nelson wants us to be sure that she really, really likes ass fucking, that she and Harry share “perversities [that] are not only compatible but perfectly matched,” and that she is joyous about the stack of cocks that Harry keeps near his bedside. Thanks for sharing! This hard sell (pardon the play on words) on the joys of rough sex is cloaked in a theoretical and philosophical blanket that I believe is an attempt to make it more acceptable to the rest of the world. That’s fine. If you like nonnromative sex, good for you, but don’t criticize the rest of as unenlightened because we don’t share your tastes.

Normativity, Patriarchy, and Misogyny

One of Nelson’s big obsessions is “the tired binary that places femininity, reproduction, and normativity on the one side, and queer resistance on the other... a last, desperate stand against homo- and heteronormativity.”

Let’s define these terms:

1) heternormativity expresses heterosexuality as the norm, making it the widely accepted default sexuality;

2) homonormativity suggests that anybody with an LGBT (homosexual) connection is and acts as if they were homosexual.

Harry Dodge (left), 2002

According to Nelson, homonormativity creates a sexual citizenship for a marginalized group of people that have a commonality – a difference from heterosexual orientation. Her primary concern is figuring out how to resist a conception of queerness that shoehorns complex lives into a neat dichotomy of normative versus not. This includes an awareness that “not only are those who are more obviously opposed to a radical queer feminist’s decisions going to try to police you, but so will your peers, your compatriots in the fight against the patriarchy.” Nelson declares “whatever sameness I’ve noted in my relationships with women is not the sameness of Woman... it is the shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy.” Her argument is that this hetero/homo binary categorizes “procreative femininity” as a pollutant both of queerness and radicalism. In other words, you can’t be gay and have kids.

Many of Nelson’s insights into anti-normativity are arrived at through her experience of pregnancy and motherhood, which brings her into conflict with the underlying misogyny of anti-procreative rhetoric. After she becomes pregnant, Nelson wonders if pregnancy itself is inherently heteronormative. Blogger Sam Huber points out that Nelson hypothesizes that pregnancy might be an inherently queer experience in the way it reconfigures one’s relationship to their body. However, much male-authored queer theory either ignores or condemns procreation and the reproductive body as inherently heteronormative. A analysis published in the Boston Review goes so far as to assert that procreation is a more “ghettoized” topic in art and academia than “ass fucking” or genderqueerness. Nelson’s goal, according to Blogger Moira Donegan, is to resist the unhelpful demonization of motherhood, domesticity, and the other supposedly reactionary forms that love can take. Blogger Elizabeth Sherman quotes Nelson saying that "the binary of normative/transgressive is unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that's just one thing… that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical or the so-called normative."

Oddly enough, this is where I find myself agreeing with Nelson. What she objects to, and rightly so, are the misogynistic and patriarchal attitudes pervasive in today’s society. Nelson talks about this very thing in her memoir, pointing out that almost every society emphasizes having children as the norm to a meaningful life and that there are numerous ways to punish women if they do not procreate. It’s become painfully obvious that the radical religious and Republican right would like to take us back to another time when women remained barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen. Their regressive legislation has succeeded in eroding women’s access to healthcare, pregnancy prevention, and abortion; they also continue to resist any advances recognizing the civil rights of the LGBT community. Nelson might be surprised to learn that some straight women are facing a similar conflict. Those of us who have not followed the typical nuclear family model – dad, mom and the kids – remain outliers, even in the 21^st century, despite the gains made as a result of the women’s and civil rights movements. This means that we too are defying heternormativity by not procreating.

Fun with Formatting

You would think that a book of only 143 pages would be easy to get through. You would be wrong. It was a disconnected mess that bounced around from memoir, to queer theory, to existential criticism. According to Jennifer Turner in the London Review of Books, the text drifts around in time and space through “individual, untitled paragraphs, some longer, some shorter, some linking, some discrete, diary entries, mini-essays, some unsent letters.” Christopher Schaberg concurs in his blog: “Sometimes it feels like the nearly unedited transcripts of a journal, entries jumping around in time or associatively in ways that make the reader struggle to connect the dots.” Here’s how I think Nelson put this book together: she jotted notes on little slips of paper, threw them in a big bowl, pulled out one scrap at a time, then typed that bit into her “manuscript.” The result is random chaos.  

As if this wasn’t confusing enough, Nelson uses an unorthodox method to cite references. She drops someone’s name into the margin in a tiny that font is essentially illegible and then usually (but not always) uses italics to suggest that the quotation belongs to the margin reference.   and I both found this tactic annoying and self-aggrandizing, a way for Nelson to let us know that she went to grad school and we should be impressed with her academic knowledge. Good for her. The problem with this is that it’s a sophomoric approach to scholarly writing. It’s a cheap trick, citing without adequately giving credit to the author. Apparently, this type of writing is now referred to as life writing instead of. What this style of writing really represents, with all of the stripped down citations, lack of context, and absence of paragraph breaks, is a blog or diary that’s been turned into a book. Another great advance in modern writing.

In Conclusion

While there are parts that were interesting, it might have been better, at least to me, if Nelson had spent more time talking about her relationship with Harry and their children and less time proselyting about anal sex. Their personal lives are quite absorbing, but the weird format and her overuse of psychology, philosophy, postmodernism, gender studies, queer and critical theory is annoying. The theoretical babble was mostly incomprehensible and there was way too much sharing of sexual proclivities. It’s obvious that the author is very impressed with herself, her education, and her unusual life circumstances. The whole thing feels much more like an exercise meant to amaze us with her talent for spouting highbrow theoretical concepts. Schaberg agreed ; he was frustrated that The Argonauts “seemed to be demanding too much homework from lay readers.” That’s an understatement.

Late in the book, Maggie wonders if writing about her nontraditional family might be a bad idea. But then she goes on to declare that she has “gained an outsize faith in articulation itself as its own form of protection.” What a conceit! Unfortunately, most reviewers agree with her. While Schaberg and Turner did have some negative things to say about the format, that was the extent of their, or anyone else’s, criticism of Nelson’s “life writing.” Everyone seems fascinated with her willingness to flaunt her perversities and to display her rage against normativity. The gibberish that passes as scholarly writing these days!  

Here’s my problem with this memoir. This is one of those books that gets praised by everyone, no matter how bizarre or nonsensical is it is. This publication was made possible through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant; a Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota grant; support from Target, the McKnight Foundation, and the Amazon Literary Partnership; and contributions from numerous other sources. Do you think anyone at Target read the manuscript before they gave her money to publish this sexually charged memoir? As I’ve said elsewhere in this blog, a book should not automatically qualify as a literary masterpiece just because the topic is controversial or because the author has an unusual background. I feel like The Argonauts is another case of someone who managed to nab big money from enthusiastic backers who had no idea what kind of drivel she was putting on paper.

In the end, I was left with a feeling that Maggie is so determined to assert herself as the liberated, sodomitical mother that she comes across as somewhat hostile and dismissive of heterosexuals. She makes it clear that the “assumption of heterosexuality can be very harmful to those who do not entirely fit within its bounds.” While that may be true, she expresses her own opinion about heterosexuals and who they are: “…you know, people acting like underdogs when really they’re reaping the benefits of normativity, of being on top of the heap.” She also confesses she is sometimes embarrassed by heterosexuality and so wary of becoming normative,” that she targets both conservative and queer thinkers for focusing on “normative” domesticity and procreativity. She writes, “I beheld and still behold in anger and agony the eagerness of the world to throw piles of shit on those of us who want to savage or simply cannot help but savage the norms that so desperately need savaging.” Guess what Maggie. While you’re battling the societal imperative that makes it necessary for all women to have children to achieve their purpose in life, some of us straight women are doing the same thing. We’re just as fed up with the patriarchal and misogynistic attitudes as you are – being told by old white men what we can and cannot do with our own bodies; being told to have children; being told we can’t make our own reproductive choices. I’m betting it will piss her off when she realizes that just because she’s queer and has kids she’s not the only pariah on the block. In fact, having a child makes her way more heteronormative than childfree women. Take that, Maggie!

Afterthought

I checked Amazon and found that the praise for Maggie was almost unanimous. It was the #1 best seller in Philosophy criticism, no less. But there were a few dissenters. Some said they had a hard time following it because it was “like a really long conversation” and “not much of a story.” There was consensus that it should have been a textbook on gender studies. Others found her writing to be “extremely angry and self-pitying” and “extremely egocentric” and a “solipsistic self-referential piece of junk.” That last is one of my favorite. As one person put it, Nelson is “an obviously highly self-absorbed author who only cares about herself and her gender identity and that of her lover.” But the best review is the most direct: Self-indulgent crap, plain and simple.

Bibliography (Unlike Ms. Nelson, I will give credit where credit is due.)

 §   Moira Donegan. Gay as in Happy. On Maggie Nelson. On Blog: n+1.

 §   Sam Huber. Feministing Reads: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. On Feminizing.

 §   Christopher Schaberg. A Book Review That Is Not One: On Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. On 3:AM MAGAZINE

 §   Elizabeth Sherman. What is Queer Theory? 10 Things You Didn’t Know that Maggie Nelson’s ‘The Argonauts’ Will School You On. May 12, 2015. On Bustle.

 §   Jenny Turner. Like a Manta Ray. In the London Review of Books. Vol. 37 No. 20 · 22 October 2015, pages 11-14