The Argonauts

As Nelson has made clear throughout The Argonauts, she considers queerness to be about more than sexual orientation (or even sexual behavior in general). Instead, she ties queer identity to a broader willingness to challenge oppressive beliefs and institutions—most notably capitalism. This becomes especially clear in her discussion of the backlash Eve Sedgwick faced for writing an article entitled “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” which Nelson argues was motivated at least as much by the “God of capital” (114) as it was by conservative sexual mores. What truly irritated Sedgwick’s critics, Nelson claims, was the fact that her scholarship had no obvious, money-making purpose and was simply “pointless” and “perverse” (114).

Nelson isn’t truly suggesting that literary theory, and the humanities in general, are “pointless”—work of the kind Sedgwick pursued can be “happy-making” (113). However, Nelson does embrace “pointlessness” in the sense that she celebrates activity that has no specific end goal. For example, where sexuality is concerned, Nelson suggests that even those sexual practices that were once considered deviant have largely been coopted by companies concerned with turning a profit:

What if Beatriz Preciado is right—what if we’ve entered a new, post-Fordist era of capitalism that Preciado calls the ‘pharmacopornographic era,’ whose principal economic resource is nothing other than ‘the insatiable bodies of the multitudes (111).

Assuming that to be the case, Nelson finds herself drawn to “exhaustion” in place of “horniness” (111), as well as to forms of eroticism that aren’t geared toward a goal (i.e. orgasm). This is what she says interested her about Schuyler’s poetry, and it also describes her experiences of breastfeeding, which she describes as “a buoyant eros, an eros without teleology” (44).

Nelson’s praise for dependency is related to this critique of capitalism, which conventionally values self-interest and independence. However, it also intersects with Nelson’s discussion of the way identity forms and develops. When talking about her prior struggles with alcoholism, Nelson, quoting Judith Butler, says: “Most people decide at some point that it is better … to be enthralled with what is impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so lose the condition of one’s being and becoming” (102). Although Nelson makes it clear that she’s not advocating chemical dependency, she says she’s “glad” for her past experiences with it, presumably because it underscores the impossibility of “total self-reliance” (102). We never develop in isolation from our surroundings (and in particular from other people), which means taking in both the good and the bad. Nelson offers human breast milk (now tainted with pesticides, fossil fuels, etc.) as a literal example, but notes that she has also absorbed toxic attitudes from her mother: “I learned this scorn [of dependence] from my own mother; perhaps it laced my milk” (101).

However, Nelson’s portrayal of her mother isn’t unsympathetic. Nelson acknowledges that she herself has often held her mother to impossible standards, particularly in the aftermath of her parents’ divorce and her father’s death:

For the duration of her marriage to my stepfather, my mother’s maternal body seemed to me supplanted by her desiring body. For I knew that my stepfather wasn’t just the object of her desire. I knew she believed him to be her desire, incarnate. Such thinking set her up for a bitter fall when he left her, twenty odd years later […] I hated him for crushing her. I hated her for being crushed (107).

Nelson’s depiction of her mother reflects her broader ideas about the challenges of motherhood—most notably, society’s difficulty in imagining mothers as full, sexual beings.