The Argonauts
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. It binds an account of Nelson's relationship with her partner and a journey to and through a pregnancy to a rigorous exploration of sexuality, gender, and "family." An insistence on radical individual freedom and the value of caretaking becomes the rallying cry for this thoughtful, unabashed, uncompromising book.
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Community Reviews
This book is everything. Visceral personal memoir and queer theory.
"Many people doing all kinds of work are able to take pleasure in aspects of their work," Sedwick once wrote, "but something different happens when the pleasure is not only taken but openly displayed. I like to make that different thing happen."
One happy thing that can happen, according to Sedgwick, is that pleasure becomes accretive as well as autotelic: the more it's felt and displayed, the more proliferative, the more possible, the more habitual, it becomes.
"Many people doing all kinds of work are able to take pleasure in aspects of their work," Sedwick once wrote, "but something different happens when the pleasure is not only taken but openly displayed. I like to make that different thing happen."
One happy thing that can happen, according to Sedgwick, is that pleasure becomes accretive as well as autotelic: the more it's felt and displayed, the more proliferative, the more possible, the more habitual, it becomes.
Woah. This is a lot. I wouldn't know where to start reviewing it. Probably you should read it, but if you do please don't blame me for telling you to read it.
Intelligent and heartfelt meditations on motherhood, sexuality, gender, marriage and love. Sometimes the academic references went a little over my head, but other times I nodded frantically for paragraphs at a time. Most accurate description of childbirth I’ve ever read. Brave, original and quite romantic.
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