The Argonauts

Nelson’s work is known for blending elements of different genres, and The Argonauts is no exception. Broadly speaking, it tells the story of Nelson meeting, marrying, and having a child with Dodge, but it doesn’t follow the typical conventions of memoir writing as it does so: Nelson skips backwards and forwards in time, quotes from and discusses academic theory, and often switches topics from one paragraph to the next only to double back later. The structure of The Argonauts is dictated more by theme than by chronology, both in the sense that telling her story in a non-linear fashions allows Nelson to more fully explore the ideas each anecdote sparks, and in the sense that the book’s free-flowing structure actually embodies one of its central themes: the nature and limitations of language.

This is the first theme Nelson introduces, in part because questions about language figured so prominently in her early relationship with Dodge. Language is at the heart of Nelson and Dodge’s intellectual discussions, but it’s also—as Nelson quickly discovers—an issue that Dodge’s very existence as a nonbinary individual raises. Although Dodge publicly goes by he/him (at least by the time Nelson is writing), there’s a sense in The Argonauts that no set of pronouns could adequately capture the fluidity of his gender identity; the very act of choosing a particular word implies a cohesiveness and permanence that simply isn’t there. This causes Nelson, who previously believed that language could capture even the “inexpressible” (3) something of an existential crisis: “How can the words not be good enough?” (7). 

The question of whether words necessarily oversimplify (or even destroy) the richness and ambiguity of reality is one that recurs throughout The Argonauts. However, Nelson does suggest that it’s possible for language to “do more than nominate” (4)—i.e. pin down the identity and attributes of something in a potentially limiting way. For one, she notes that the meaning of a word often depends on its context. Although this can create problems of its own when the speaker and the listener aren’t on the same page, it also means that words can be repurposed and injected with meanings appropriate to the particular situation or relationship: “Like when you whisper, You’re just a hole, letting me fill you up. Like when I say husband” (8). In both of these instances, the words Nelson cites have a broader societal meaning that is bound up in traditional gender roles and (in the case of the former) downright misogyny; within the context of Dodge’s and Nelson’s “queer” form of marriage, however, the words mean something entirely different.

Queerness itself is another area in which Nelson argues that there’s room for ambiguity and fluctuation. She draws heavily on Sedgwick’s idea that the term queer reveals very little about one’s sexual orientation or gender, which, for Nelson, makes it a way of avoiding aligning herself with a single identity. However, there’s also a political aspect to Nelson’s use of the word “queer.” Nelson is aware that identification with the LGBT community doesn’t necessarily translate into progressivism on issues of race, class, the environment, etc., so she uses the term “queer” to describe a kind of LGBT activism that doesn’t simply seek access to oppressive institutions:

There’s something truly strange about living in a historical moment in which the conservative anxiety and despair about queers bringing down civilization and its institutions (marriage, most notably) is met by the anxiety and despair so many queers feel about the failure or incapacity of queerness to bring down civilization and its institutions, and their frustration with the assimilationist, unthinkingly neoliberal bent of the mainstream GLBTQ+ movement, which has spent fine coin begging entrance into two historically repressive structures: marriage and the military (26).