Drawing on Freudian and Lacanian understandings of the death drive and the symbolic order, queer theory has fortified an anti-reproductive stance in what has been termed the “anti-social thesis.” The first paper, by Tyler Carson, traces the trajectory of this critique and highlights how The Argonauts disrupts some of its foundational assumptions. Carson argues that in foregrounding the strangeness of pregnancy as well as the violence inherent in the act of giving birth, Nelson pushes back against the gay masculinist logic of the anti-social thesis. Nelson rewrites the anti-social thesis by positioning pregnancy not only as a queer relation of the body to the self, but as one that undoes the self. This feminized process of “falling to pieces” before, during, and after labor supplants the sacrifice of “the internalized phallic male” in Bersani’s seminal essay on queer negativity. Offering an embodied account of where the lines between inside and outside, mother and child, male and female, queer and heteronormative begin to blur, Nelson, in connection with her transman partner, Harry, and their child, Iggy, offers innovative insight into the conundrum facing queers today: namely, the impossible imperative to choose the correct political angle so as to properly perform and be read as the “queerest of the queer[s]” (104). Carson’s paper thereby works toward explicating this disjuncture between the radical and homonormative within queer politics, tracking how The Argonauts intervenes in much of what’s taken for granted in what queerness looks, feels like, and achieves in the real world.
In the second paper, Erica D. Galioto continues to build an analysis of relationality that works precisely through negativity, a domain from which women have been historically barred. She proposes that The Argonauts enacts Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection by fetishizing “the in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (PH 4). First, Galioto shows how The Argonauts eradicates the border between self and other in mutual desire, joint writing, and early motherhood. In their opposition to the subjective “I” of the conscious ego, these states are abject; however, they are not the amorphous one of the Kristevan chora but the overlapping two of unconscious extimacy. Second, Galioto joins these experiences to what Nelson terms “compatible perversities,” or the limitless potentiality that exists through shared participation in states of being that exceed beyond conscious symbolic markers of identity to unconscious identifications (TA 27). Third, Galioto concludes by aligning these compatible perversities with Kristeva’s revolutionary conclusion that the abject is, in fact, the erotic object. Whereas late capitalism would have us believe that we need firmer boundaries, lived experience, such as Maggie Nelson’s, illustrates that what we most desire is the interdependent sameness of broken borders and obliterated identity. Though we repel these states, they are necessary, not despite the fact that they temporarily dissolve conscious subjectivity but because they do. Therefore, Nelson’s relationships provide examples for Kristeva’s argument that the abject is the erotic object, and, to engage it, we must permit the extimacy that is its pathway.
The final paper by Eugenia Ulanova builds on the prior two contributions toward a theory of the affordances of queer family and community as distinct from and adjacent to those of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family. First, following Nelson’s citation of Deleuze, Ulanova disarticulates a queer temporality of non-teleological production from teleological reproduction or patriarchal self-copying in linear time. Then, she reads the queer family reparatively as a “twilight space” of queer fugitivity, a site for the enactment of what Philip Bromberg theorizes as our basic multiplicity of self, which enables and motivates self-change and stands opposed to the tyrannical expectation of a singular, consistent self in relationality. Finally, Ulanova puts The Argonauts in conversation with Elizabeth Freeman’s work on queering anthropological kinship through Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and “practical kinship,” which emphasize imitative bodily schemas, microsocial forms, and actually existing bonds of dependency and care, demonstrating the performativity of all family formations. Whereas prior conceptions of queer theory and politics made them seem incompatible with enduring kinship ties and childbearing and futurity, The Argonauts functions as proof of a vital alternative in which contradiction, surprise, and the unconscious reclaim and reanimate the wife/mother figure from reification. Therefore, the text is a political call for (re)defining the family non-genealogically and genealogically, with increased emphasis on self-determination and mutual dependence.
Nelson’s titular metaphor for queerness, the Argo, a venerable and decaying ship that must be continually reassembled through labors of love, ultimately works to articulate what constitutes human relationality: we are all Argonauts insofar as we are “feral with vulnerability” in sexual and familial relations both in private spheres and in state-directed ones. Further, Nelson finds new human potentiality in writing from multiple vantage points of the body and its various intersections with culture, biopolitics, and technology. These papers thereby argue that Nelson offers a timely simultaneity of transcendence and situatedness to bear upon urgent political questions of futurity, reproduction, and kinship in the posthuman 21st century.