Nelson begins The Argonauts in October 2007, during the first throws of her relationship with Harry Dodge. In the first third of the book, Nelson details how various friends and family reacted to her relationship with Dodge, sharing their well-meaning but often problematic questions, concerns, and opinions. We also learn that Nelson lived in New York City for a few years while working toward her PhD, and that she struggled for a time to determine the right pronouns to use for her partner before they moved in together. In this first section we also learn of Dodge’s son, a feisty toddler who bonds with Nelson via role-playing games in their apartment.
Nelson spends much of the first third of the book analyzing several social constructs and concepts that have directly impacted her life, including the labeling of gender and sexual orientations, heteronormativity, and pregnancy. In doing so, Nelson quotes many illustrious authors, thinkers, and scientists, notable among them the psychologist D.W. Winnicott. Through Winnicott we learn about Nelson’s child, Iggy, and his first years of life. Nelson details how she “polices” Iggy’s mouth, protecting, guiding, nurturing him with as much love as she can muster. Meanwhile, Nelson analyzes and describes her role as a stepparent to Dodge’s son and her attempts to parent him lovingly in light of her stepfather’s role in her own life.
We skip to November 3, 2008, the day before Election Day and the vote to pass Proposition 8 in California, a state constitutional amendment that suspended the right of same-sex couples to marry in the state. Nelson and Dodge marry at Norwalk City Hall and then have a ceremony at the Hollywood Chapel, a hole in the wall on the same street where Nelson lived for three years. Marriage was not part of the conversation for Nelson and Dodge before this, but Proposition 8, which passed with 52% of the vote, compelled them to make their partnership official in the eyes of the state.
In 2012, we now visit Nelson as she wrestles with the queer anti-capitalist movement. Her son, Iggy, is now 8 months old and her stepson is now 9. Nelson receives an invitation to speak at Biola University, a Los Angeles-based evangelical university that expels students for being gay. Nelson uses this opportunity to relay her opinion that all private groups of consenting adults should be allowed to live however they please. What sticks out to her in Biola’s doctrinal statements, however, is the denial of humanity’s shared ancestry with earlier lifeforms. This is the last straw for Nelson, and she declines the invitation.
Nelson then details some of the difficult periods in her marriage, such as Dodge’s increasing discomfort in his skin, the question of Dodge’s son’s custody, and Nelson’s desire to get pregnant. Nelson’s delves into several poets and thinkers and their private lives, such as Mary and George Oppen, searching for places where they slipped up and their relationship was challenged. At this point, Nelson documents how the birth of Iggy changes her entire perspective on the world, making it hard to concentrate on both writing and raising her child at the same time.
We then return to 1998, when Nelson was in graduate school at CUNY and attended a seminar with Jane Gallop and Rosalind Krauss. At this seminar, Gallop presented a number of intimate photographs cataloging her motherhood, to which Krauss responded with contempt and even disgust. Nelson goes on to articulate how motherhood has brought up feelings of intense attachment to Iggy, and how she copes with erotic feelings that many psychologists and doctors indicate are normal, including Winnicott.
Nelson next relays how she discussed and negotiated her first draft of this book with Dodge. She describes how difficult it is to write from a place of honesty while maintaining his wishes. At this time, Nelson describes the struggles of trying to get pregnant while Dodge begins to take testosterone and take steps toward top surgery, key components for him in his exterior gender transition.
As Nelson delves deeper into her personal experience, she recalls how her college feminist theory professor, Christina Crosby, initially resisted making the personal public but later came around to the idea. Nelson then delves deeper into her sexual experiences with Dodge, questioning the erasure of women’s sexuality in light of motherhood and gay male self-revelation through Susan Fraiman’s term sodomitical maternity, or the concept of a mother’s sexuality as expanding beyond that of procreative capacity. She links this to her concern with the binary construction of queer radicalism and child-rearing, citing Lee Edelman’s emphasis on the destruction of capitalism and fighting for the here and now.
Nelson moves into a discussion of her attempts to conceive, and her eventual success through many attempts of artificial insemination. In the summer of 2011, while 4 months pregnant, Nelson accompanies Dodge to Florida where he undergoes top surgery. Nelson then details her bodily changes throughout her pregnancy and Dodge’s changes through his continued dosing of testosterone and changed chest. Nelson continues to catalog her pregnant state, discussing her body in relation to her own mother’s body-image challenges.
Nelson brings us back to the days before Iggy’s conception, when a stalker sought her out on the Cal Arts campus, triggering her to smoke for the first time in two years. She then discusses her mother’s near-constant state of anxiety, and how motherhood accentuated these anxieties in Nelson herself. Iggy, she reveals, was afflicted by a serious and rare nerve toxin when he was six months old.
Nelson ends the book by telling the story of Iggy’s birth alongside Dodge’s account of his own mother’s death as a result of breast cancer. Leaving us on a positive note, Nelson speaks of the incredible happiness brought upon by Iggy, Dodge, and her stepson—her family of “Irish guys.”
