A review by kairhone
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

emotional reflective

4.0

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 changing, Nelson’s 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.” The autobiographical piece describes how Nelson and her partner form the archetypal hetero relationship as one cis woman and trans man. But they have individualized conformity with queerness. They've replaced antiquated expectations with their own versions of love and parenthood to create a bubble of their love.