Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > The Argonauts

This is my fourth book by Maggie Nelson, and she is a good and entertaining and provocative writer. I read her books about the murder of her aunt in Ann Arbor because I recalled that serial killer story from that time when I lived in Michigan, and "enjoyed' her take on the scene. She's unpredictable, "genre-bending," as her publisher says, and is never boring, though she is by now predictably unpredictable. The first paragraph either invites or repels, as she discusses anal sex with her partner, the gender-fluid Harry Dodge. In other words, if you can handle this, dear reader, read on! It's like a password. But not to worry, in case you want more of that kind of talk/sharing, just when you least expect it, boom, you will get it, right in the. . . nose.

What you will only discover if you keep reading for awhile (because there is no clear indication for a long time) is that she is, surprisingly, angling toward the main "thrust" of the book, about a queer couple making a baby. Though Dodge is largely out of this, except as gender-fluid rep. This is mainly about a woman who refuses to be categorized who is having a baby. Ach, and this is my second unconventional baby birth book this spring, the first from Lucy Knisley. I recall at the moment another, too, A. K. Summers' Pregnant Butch.

So, Rebel Yell Nelson as wife and mom and domestic worker?! Well, yes, this is her radical intervention into queer theory, a work of "auto-theory" carefully designed to speak to gender and women's studies students, as she references every bit of theory from her own women's studies education, and updates that theory by reflecting on how a queer couple can possibly justify actually procreating. At one point she jokes that a friend saw an oversized coffee cup from which she was drinking and said, "That must be the most hetero-normative thing I have ever seen!" Uh, that is, unless you are making a baby!

People who feel uncomfortable saying the word hetero-normative or who have to look it up now, or better yet, are inclined to say screw that, let her use words I can effing understand, will not enjoy this book, it was not written for you, you will not feel welcome to its world. So if one central potentially off-putting aspect of this book is about the viscera, the body, sexual acts, bodily fluids, a virtual home movie of the actual birth, (deal with it, she would say, this is me, I must be naked when I write!), the other is an almost constant stream of quotations from psycho-social feminist/gender queer theory, ugh.

The second paragraph signals this second emphasis, this here, take it or leave it aspect of Nelson; she quotes and glosses the quote from Wittgenstein, and then throughout the book quotes everyone on the planet from poetry to music to film to queer theory, jumping from High Theory to Lowbrow Shockmom sometimes in the same paragraph.

So it sounds as if I hate it. I actually don't. I'm kinda channeling her here, truthfully, this ballsy stop reading if you don't like it dimension of her. . . life. Some of it, I love, some ideas, and some of what she expects will be highly quotable nuggets (for your paper!), as here when she tries to justify how "born this way" may not be true for everyone; can a woman who does not identify as a lesbian love a woman and still identify as straight (or cis-gendered)?!:

“I get why it’s politically maddening, but I’ve also always thought it a little romantic—the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.”

Nelson can be kind of charming and funny about her complicated relationship with her mother. And also sometimes about becoming a mother; finally, when all is said and done, when all of the Jane Gallop and Eve Sedgwick and Winnicott and every teacher she has ever had is swept away, just plain making this baby Iggy (whoa, a gender neutral name!) and loving this child, is the most important thing for her. And this is the point she wants to make to gender and women's studies, that becoming a mother is more than okay, it is good. Whoa, revolutionary! She makes a baby! Could we have done this without all the theorizing and skipped straight to the baby love? Nope, not Maggie, she is what she is.

I often love her voice, which I heard because she read the (shortish) book I heard on audiotape. And I sometimes am moved by her poetic juxtapositions, as much as the moves seem familiar to me now. And the central story is interesting to me: She became pregnant in 2011, at the same time that her partner was starting testosterone injections; she writes about “the summer of our changing bodies. Me, four months pregnant, you six months on T.” I thought often as I read of the complex making of a son that my sister and her wife went through, with me as straight male cheerleader to my Trump-happy, anti-glbtq family (this is the part where the cis-gendered guy tries for some queer cred, right?).

So five stars, I loved it, I'm a total Nelson fan, she says screw you, I can say whatever I want, she's the Bukowski and Robert Crumb of Women's Studies, you go, Maggie. . .

and one star, I hated the pretentiousness and the stooping to speak theory to her various audiences as if to make her experiences reasonable to them (yes, she doesn't care what y'all think, and then she so does!). I am a straight older white dude, I'm like a joke I'm so far from the intended audience of this book, but on the whole I love/hate it in equal measures.