Review by New York Times Review
TO BECOME A MOTHER is to learn, among many other things, that mothers are treated as both central and peripheral to American culture. "The most important job in the world" is such a sentimental truism that even women who don't want to have children report having to explain themselves to incredulous busybodies. Yet actual mothering is accorded little social or economic value beyond hazy reverence and pious declarations. Mothers are allowed some authority when it comes to their homes, their children and their bodies; their domain is one of domestic necessity, which is supposed to stand in mute contrast to the wider world of work, of ideas, of rationality, of free will. That, at least, is the traditional binary, though the assumptions behind it are pervasive even among those who otherwise stand in opposition to the traditional and the mainstream. In "The Argonauts," the poet and critic Maggie Nelson recalls an art history seminar she attended with the scholars Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. Gallop talked about being photographed as a mother with her infant son, wanting to suggest that motherhood had some significance beyond the "troublingly personal, anecdotal, self-concerned"; Krauss, who helped found the poststructural journal October, wanted to keep the structural divide pristine. As Nelson remembers it, the undercurrent of Krauss's argument was that discussion of such photos was "contaminating serious academic space" and "Gallop's maternity had rotted her mind." When Nelson attended the seminar, she was more than a decade away from having a child herself, and she writes searchingly of becoming a stepmother to her partner's son and eventually having a son of her own. "Whenever anyone asked me why I want to have a baby, I had no answer," she recalls. "But the muteness of the desire stood in inverse proportion to its size." She became pregnant in 2011, at the same time that her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, was transitioning from female to male; she writes about "the summer of our changing bodies. Me, four months pregnant, you six months on T." They traveled from Los Angeles to Fort Lauderdale for Dodge's mastectomy, cooking meals on a hot plate in their hotel bathroom in order to save money. Nelson remembers it as a time of happy intimacy. Flipping channels on the television, they came upon a reality show that featured a breast-cancer patient who had just had both breasts removed: "It was uncanny to watch her performing the same actions we were performing - emptying her drains, waiting patiently for her unbinding - but with opposite emotions. You felt unburdened, euphoric, reborn; the woman on TV feared, wept and grieved." At 143 pages, "The Argonauts" contains much more than its unassuming size would suggest, a discrepancy befitting an exploration of what may and may not be contained by our physical selves. The title comes from Roland Barthes, who wrote about how the Argonauts gradually replaced each piece of their ship, the Argo, during their voyage "so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form." As Dodge's body is transitioning from female to male, Nelson's body is undergoing its own transition too, and she begins to ask how an experience like pregnancy, "so profoundly strange and wild and transformative," has also come to "symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity." She wonders whether there is "something inherently queer about pregnancy itself," and if the notion of the pregnant woman as the embodiment of convention "is just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case nonconformity, or radically)." Or has she been too fixated on those distinctions? Does the problem lie with the impulse to quarantine and to separate, to mark out categories and impose some semblance of order, to harness what might otherwise be free? Nelson questions everything - her assumptions, her motives - and her ensuing uncertainty becomes the trellis for this book. Her thoughts are presented in discrete paragraphs, some as short as a sentence, as she considers whether "prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness (fidelity to sense-making, to assertion, to argument, however loose)." She quotes the child psychologist Winnicott (approvingly), the French theorist Baudrillard (critically), and recounts a debate she had with Dodge about the movie "X-Men: First Class." She points to some unexpected parallels in the marriage advice doled out by evangelical Christians and Dan Savage. She pays tribute to the young woman in "The Shining" who embraces Jack Nicholson's character and turns into a "decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away," because "she didn't get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted." Genres in this book are bent beyond recognition; boundaries are transcended and ignored. "They do want to keep it separate," the artist Catherine Opie is quoted as saying, responding to an interviewer's question about how someone who once photographed herself wearing a shiny black bondage mask, the word "pervert" carved into her naked chest, was now taking pictures of children in her sun-dappled kitchen. "Becoming homogenized and part of mainstream domesticity is transgressive for somebody like me. Ha. That's a very funny idea." But then to say that Nelson is simply blurring distinctions doesn't sound quite right either; it's the kind of easy reversal that's too convenient, too consumable - as if there were only two modes available to her, and if she isn't working in one, the other one is all that's left. Her small book is much bigger than that. In her previous work, "The Art of Cruelty," she wrote about the moral imperative of "wading into the swamp, getting intimate with discomfort and developing an appetite for nuance." Yet as a critic she's in the business of clarifying, of naming what hasn't been named, and so she also admitted an attraction to "precision" and "sharpness" and "rigor." When I first read "The Art of Cruelty" several years ago I was suspicious of her to-and-fro, which I was quick to deem an erratic inconsistency, a bothersome unwillingness to commit. Reading "The Argonauts," I now see how I was mired in a middle ground that wasn't quite seeing both ends. Equivocation can expand what we thought was possible and ultimately make some room. "There is much to be learned," Nelson writes, "from wanting something both ways." When Nelson's son is finally born, her elation is soon cut with worry. At 6 months, he is stricken by a potentially fatal nerve toxin, and Nelson remembers climbing into the hospital crib to lie beside him, "unwilling to move or let go or keep living until he lifted his head, until he gave any sign that he would make it out." But she doesn't say much more about what she calls his "time with the toxin." She wants to write about what happened before, and what happened - what will happen - next. So much writing about motherhood makes the world seem smaller after the child arrives, more circumscribed, as if in tacit fealty to the larger cultural assumptions about moms and domesticity; Nelson's book does the opposite. Like the Argo, her ship's been renewed, and her voyage continues. Nelson became pregnant as her partner was transitioning from female to male. JENNIFER SZALAI is an editor at the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In a fast-shifting terrain of "homonormativity," Nelson, poet and author of numerous works of gender and sexuality (The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning; Bluets), plows ahead with a disarmingly blushing work about trying to simultaneously embrace her identity, her marriage with nomadic transgender filmmaker Harry, and motherhood. She mixes a memoir of her love for Harry with clinical depictions of their attempts to get her pregnant, as well as a critical meditation on the queer craft of "becoming," investigating the ways that "new kinship systems mime older nuclear-family arrangements" and whether those older models are good, oppressive, useful, or fair. Nelson takes her title from the notion that the Argonauts could continually replace their ship's parts over time, "but the boat [was] still called the Argo." The new waters she's sailing include learning how to be a stepparent to Harry's young son and then a mother to her newborn, no longer scorning heterosexual "breeders," and becoming much more forgiving of what she once saw as too-outrageous queer radicalism, since all-including her husband, undergoing his own gender voyage via testosterone therapy and surgery-have a "shared, crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy." Nelson writes in fine, fragmented exhalations, inserting quotes from numerous theorists as she goes (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, D.W. Winnicott). Her narrative is an honest, joyous affirmation of one happily unconventional family finding itself. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this short but incredibly rich autobiographical meditation, Nelson (The Art of Cruelty) explores sexuality, childbearing, child rearing, and what it means to love and be loved. No mere romance, this book erases the physical, emotional, even literary boundaries that help human beings categorize their thoughts and feelings. Through the story of her love for, and marriage to, Harry Dodge (who is treated with testosterone and has a double mastectomy yet prefers to be labeled with no established gender), Nelson enacts the erasure of limits she explores in her writing. Drawing upon work by Judith Butler, Jean Baudrillard, and Roland Barthes (from whom she takes the book's title), as well as pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, Nelson blends philosophical inquiry, memoir, and gender criticism in a form she has dubbed "autotheory." Like her writing, Nelson's theory blurs, eradicates, even breaks the margins of binary thinking and of the prevailing normative notion that we should each live a life that is "all one thing." Verdict Read by the author, this work is highly recommended.-Wendy Galgan, St. Francis Coll., Brooklyn © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A fiercely provocative and intellectually audacious memoir that focuses on motherhood, love and gender fluidity.Nelson (Critical Studies/CalArts; The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, 2012, etc.) is all over the map in a memoir that illuminates Barthes and celebrates anal eroticism (charging that some who have written about it hide behind metaphor, whereas she's plain from the first paragraph that she's more interested in the real deal). This is a book about transitioning, transgendering, transcending and any other trans- the author wants to connect. But it's also a love story, chronicling the relationship between the author and her lover, the artist Harry Dodge, who was born a female (or at least had a female name) but has more recently passed for male, particularly with the testosterone treatments that initially concerned the author before she realized her selfishness. The relationship generally requires "pronoun avoidance." This created a problem in 2008, when the New York Times published a piece on Dodge's art but insisted that the artist "couldn't appear on their pages unless you chose Mr. or Ms.You chose Ms., to take one for the team.' " Nelson was also undergoing body changes, through a pregnancy she had desired since the relationship flourished. She recounts 2011 as "the summer of our changing bodies." She elaborates: "On the surface it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more male,' mine more and more female.' But that's not how it felt on the inside." The author turns the whole process and concept of motherhood inside out, exploring every possible perspective, blurring the distinctions among the political, philosophical, aesthetic and personal, wondering if her writing is violating the privacy of her son-to-be as well as her lover. Ultimately, Harry speaks within these pages, as the death of Dodge's mother and the birth of their son bring the book to its richly rewarding climax. A book that will challenge readers as much as the author has challenged herself. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
