The Argonauts

The Argonauts Plot Summary

Introduction

I still remember the first time I truly felt seen. It was at a small gallery in San Francisco, where a photographer had captured images of people in various states of becoming – not who they were expected to be, but who they felt themselves to be. One photograph showed a person whose face radiated both vulnerability and defiance, their body simultaneously revealing and concealing, existing in a beautiful in-between space that society rarely acknowledges. Standing there, I felt something unlock inside me – a recognition that identity isn't fixed but fluid, that transformation isn't just possible but inevitable, and that love can flourish in this space of constant redefinition. This journey through gender, love, and transformation invites us to question our most deeply held assumptions about who we are and how we connect with others. Through intimate personal narratives and philosophical explorations, we witness how language both liberates and constrains us, how bodies change and adapt to express inner truths, and how families form beyond conventional boundaries. What emerges is not a definitive map but rather a constellation of possibilities – showing us that the most profound connections often happen when we embrace uncertainty, when we allow ourselves and others the freedom to evolve, and when we recognize that identity itself is an ongoing conversation rather than a final destination.

Chapter 1: The Beginning of Us: Finding Love in Complexity

October 2007. The Santa Ana winds tear bark from eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. Two people meet, and something electric happens. "I love you" tumbles out during their first intimate encounter, words spoken in a moment of vulnerability on a cement floor. One brings Molloy by their bedside and a collection of sex toys; the other brings a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein's idea that "the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed." They argue passionately about whether words are good enough to capture reality. One believes language corrodes authentic experience; the other believes in its power to illuminate. "Once we name something," says one, "we can never see it the same way again." They exchange meaningful texts. Roland Barthes becomes their mediator: "the subject who utters the phrase 'I love you' is like the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name." Love phrases must be renewed with each utterance, made forever new. What one sees as romantic, the other interprets as a possible retraction. The relationship forms around this tension – between words and silence, between naming and experiencing, between solitude and connection. By February, they're looking for a home together. They find a house on a hill with gleaming dark wood floors and a view of a mountain. On the day they get the keys, they sleep together on a thin blanket spread over the wood floor of what would become their first bedroom. "That view," they recall. "It may have been a pile of rough scrub with a stagnant pond at its top, but for two years, it was our mountain." Soon, they begin folding a child's laundry together – the three-year-old son from one partner's previous relationship. "Such little socks! Such little underwear!" They make lukewarm cocoa each morning and play "Fallen Soldier" for hours, a game where the child collapses with sequined chain mail and sword, wounded from battle. One partner becomes the good Blue Witch who sprinkles healing dust to bring him back to life. What makes this story of love and family formation so compelling is how it exists in the spaces between established categories. Their relationship demonstrates that authentic connection happens not through adherence to predefined roles but through a continuous process of becoming together. The mountain view they cherish isn't conventionally beautiful, but it becomes meaningful through their shared perception. Similarly, their family isn't formed through traditional means, but through acts of daily care and imagination that create bonds just as profound as any biological connection.

Chapter 2: Bodies in Transition: Pregnancy and Testosterone

2011, the summer of changing bodies. Four months pregnant, six months on testosterone. They travel to Fort Lauderdale for top surgery, navigating monsoon season and the beachside Sheraton. Less than twenty-four hours after arrival, one partner is wheeled away for surgery with a "party hat" – a sterile green surgical cap. The other waits, drinking gritty hot chocolate in the waiting room, watching Diana Nyad attempt to swim from Florida to Cuba. Four hours later, the surgery is complete – torso tightly bound, drains hanging off each side, pouches filling with "cherry Kool-Aid" colored fluid. To save money, they cook on a hot plate in the hotel bathroom. They buy a small tent for the beach rather than renting expensive cabanas. They splurge on virgin strawberry daiquiris by the infinity pool, surrounded by Europeans on cheap vacation packages. The air is "hot and lavender with a night storm coming in." They make daily pilgrimages to empty the drains into Dixie cups, flushing the blood down the hotel toilet. "I've never loved you more than I did then," one writes, "with your Kool-Aid drains, your bravery in going under the knife to live a better life." Watching television one night, they discover a reality show featuring a breast cancer patient recovering from a double mastectomy. The coincidence is uncanny – this woman performing the same post-surgical rituals they are, but with opposite emotions. While one partner feels "unburdened, euphoric, reborn" after top surgery, the woman on TV "feared, wept, and grieved." Their bodies change in parallel yet opposite directions – one seemingly becoming more "male," the other more "female." Yet internally, the experience feels different: "On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging." Their bodies grow strange to themselves and each other. New hair sprouts in unexpected places; muscles fan across hip bones; breasts become sore and unfamiliar. One partner, previously "stone," now goes swimming shirtless; the other encounters "the pendulous, the slow, the exhausted, the disabled" through pregnancy. This chapter reveals how bodily transformation challenges our assumptions about gender as a binary system. We witness two people simultaneously experiencing profound physical changes that society typically associates with opposite gender trajectories. Yet rather than reinforcing separation, these parallel journeys create deeper understanding. Their story suggests that true intimacy comes not from static sameness but from witnessing each other's transformations with compassion and wonder.

Chapter 3: Creating Family Beyond Norms

Throughout that fall, yellow "YES ON PROP 8" signs sprout everywhere, jabbed into an otherwise beautiful mountain. The signs depict four stick figures raising their hands to the sky in "a paroxysm of joy" – celebrating heteronormativity with the slogan "PROTECT CALIFORNIA CHILDREN!" This political backdrop intensifies as the couple wakes up on November 3, 2008, realizing Proposition 8 (banning same-sex marriage) might actually pass. They Google "how to get married in Los Angeles" and set out for Norwalk City Hall. The journey takes them through suburban landscapes dotted with church marquees promoting "one man + one woman: how God wants it" and lawns filled with YES ON PROP 8 signs. At City Hall, they find white tents and news vans outside, while inside a line forms – mostly same-sex couples of all ages, alongside young straight couples who seem bewildered by the day's crowd. The chapel is fully booked, forcing them to look elsewhere for their ceremony. They call 411 and discover "The Hollywood Chapel" – a hole in the wall with tacky maroon velvet curtains, cheap gothic candelabras, and fake flowers. A drag queen serves as greeter, bouncer, and witness. "Reader, we married there," they write, "with the assistance of Reverend Lorelei Starbuck." Though the ceremony is rushed, they find themselves "undone" during their vows, "besotted with our luck." They accept heart-shaped lollipops with THE HOLLYWOOD CHAPEL embossed on the wrappers, pick up the little boy from daycare, and eat chocolate pudding together in sleeping bags on the porch, looking out over their mountain. By day's end, 52 percent of California voters pass Proposition 8, halting same-sex marriages across the state. The Hollywood Chapel disappears as quickly as it appeared, "waiting, perhaps, to emerge another day." Meanwhile, the couple continues building their family, navigating the complexities of stepparenting and alternative family structures. "One of the most annoying things about hearing the refrain 'same-sex marriage,'" they note, "is that I don't know many—if any—queers who think of their desire's main feature as being 'same-sex.'" What emerges from this narrative is how families form not through institutional validation but through daily acts of love and commitment. Against a backdrop of political attempts to narrowly define family, these individuals create meaningful bonds that transcend conventional categories. Their story challenges us to recognize that authentic family connections arise not from conformity to prescribed models but from the courageous decision to build loving relationships even when society questions their legitimacy.

Chapter 4: Language and Its Limitations

"Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed." This philosophical foundation undergirds one partner's belief in language's power. "Words are good enough," they insist. Meanwhile, the other partner has spent a lifetime equally devoted to the conviction that words are "not only not good enough, but corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow." They argue feverishly on this account – not with malice, but with passion. The tension extends to the challenge of pronouns. One partner struggles with which pronouns to use for the other, researching online rather than asking directly. They become "a quick study in pronoun avoidance," learning to "take cover in grammatical cul-de-sacs" and "relax into an orgy of specificity." Yet practical situations – making airline reservations or dealing with human resources – trigger "flashes of shame or befuddlement" when systems demand binary categorization. This challenge of language appears again when trying to describe their sexual partnership to others. At a dinner party, a presumably straight woman asks one partner, "So, have you been with other women, before Harry?" The question reveals assumptions about categories that don't quite fit. "Was Harry a woman? Was I a straight lady? What did past relationships I'd had with 'other women' have in common with this one?" Even choosing a label like "queer" presents complications. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wanted "queer" to hold "all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation." Yet simultaneously, she argued that "given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings... would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself." In other words, "she wanted it both ways. There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways." This exploration of language reveals how our most intimate experiences often exist in the spaces between established categories. The struggle to find adequate words isn't merely an intellectual exercise but a lived reality for those whose identities and relationships challenge conventional frameworks. Yet rather than seeing this as a limitation, we might recognize it as an opportunity to expand our understanding – to create language that better reflects the rich complexity of human experience rather than forcing that experience into predefined boxes.

Chapter 5: Motherhood and Desire

When the baby comes, everything changes. The narrator describes the visceral surprise of meeting their son: "No matter how many ultrasounds you've had, no matter how well you feel you've gotten to know your baby's rhythms in utero, the baby's body is still a revelation. A body! An actual body!" They marvel at his "fantastic little body," his "big almond eyes, skin just starting to freckle." Though initially hesitant to touch him freely, they eventually delight in his "little butt" and pouring water over his blond curls. The experience challenges cultural assumptions about motherhood and sexuality. In Dr. Sears's The Baby Book, there's a sidebar called "Sexual Feelings While Breastfeeding," reassuring mothers that such feelings don't make them "pedophile freaks." The book explains that the hormones released during breastfeeding are the same as those released during sex. But the narrator wonders: "How can it be a mix-up, if it's the same hormones? How does one go about partitioning one sexual feeling off from another, presumably more 'real' sexual feeling?" Their conclusion: "It isn't like a love affair. It is a love affair... It is a buoyant eros, an eros without teleology." While some feminist theorists have deliberately underplayed the erotics of childbearing to make space for erotics elsewhere ("I fuck to come, not to conceive"), the narrator rejects such divisions. "But one can make of either freedom a habit, and only you know which you've chosen." The narrator pushes against cultural anxieties around maternal sexuality and desire. During pregnancy, they encountered a well-known playwright who asked during a Q&A: "I can't help but notice that you're with child, which leads me to the question—how did you handle working on all this dark material [sadism, masochism, cruelty, violence] in your condition?" The question reveals assumptions about pregnant bodies as incompatible with intellectual or sexual complexity. This chapter invites us to reconsider conventional narratives about motherhood that separate nurturing from desire, intellectual work from bodily experience. By acknowledging the complex interplay of love, desire, and care in the maternal experience, we can develop a more honest understanding of what it means to connect with others. The narrator's willingness to inhabit these contradictions offers a model for embracing the full spectrum of human experience rather than accepting artificial separations.

Chapter 6: Danger and Protection

At the pinnacle of the narrator's pregnancy journey, a threatening figure emerges – a stalker obsessed with the murder of the narrator's aunt, a crime they had previously written about. It begins with a disturbing voice message at work, then escalates when a strange man appears on campus, stopping people in the cafeteria and library, talking obsessively about the aunt's murder and needing to deliver an "important message." Campus security describes him as "a balding, heavyset white man in his early fifties, carrying an attaché case." The threat awakens primal fears, especially intense during pregnancy. Within forty-eight hours, the narrator begins smoking again after years of treating their body as "a prenatal temple." They sit in the backyard at night, "inhaling egg-shriveling nicotine in the dark, a cylinder of pepper spray by my side." The moment feels like "its own kind of bottom" – a combination of fear and nihilism that threatens the future they've been working toward. The narrator hires an ex-LAPD detective to watch over their home, paying $500 per night for an armed guard in an unmarked car. Though intellectually understanding they aren't responsible for the man's actions, they feel "sick with a sense of late-breaking comeuppance." The image of the stalker merges with that of Jared Lee Loughner, who had recently shot Representative Gabby Giffords, a man known for saying "women should not hold positions of power." Meanwhile, their partner has created a series of "art-weapons" – small, handheld weapons assembled from household items within minutes, including "a steak knife affixed to a bottle of ranch dressing and mounted on an axe handle" and "a dirty sock sprouting nails." One night, the narrator comes home to find one of these weapons – "a wooden stump with a clump of urethane resin stuck to one end with dull bolts protruding from it" – lying across their welcome mat. "I knew you loved me. It was a talisman of protection... I've kept it by my bedside ever since. Not because I think they're coming for us per se. But because it makes the brutal tender." This narrative reveals how vulnerability and protection intertwine in intimate relationships. In a world where danger is real and sometimes targeted, love manifests not just through romantic gestures but through fierce protection. The partner's art-weapons represent an understanding of both vulnerability and resilience – acknowledging threats while transforming everyday objects into tools of protection. This chapter reminds us that safety isn't merely the absence of danger but the presence of those willing to stand guard over what matters most.

Chapter 7: Birth and Transformation

After thirty-nine weeks of pregnancy, labor begins. The narrator walks across a college campus, feeling "feral, a little sad, very full." Back home, contractions intensify while they inexplicably rearrange bookshelves. Their partner calls Jessica, their birth assistant, who arrives and transforms their home – rigging the bathtub with duct tape and a plastic bag so it can "grow big with water." Birds chirp in the middle of the night while labor progresses in the tub. "Night passes quickly, in the time that is no time." Morning brings a brisk walk to Rite Aid for castor oil, which they mix with chocolate ice cream to accelerate labor. Hours pass on the red couch with a heating pad, in the tub kneeling on towels, in bed holding hands. When they finally reach the hospital, pain intensifies: "The car is where the pain turns into a luge. I can't open my eyes." They count through contractions, noting each lasts about twenty seconds. "I think, any kind of pain must be bearable for twenty seconds, for nineteen, for thirteen, for six." At the hospital, they're measured at five centimeters dilated. Jessica assures them "the hard part is over," but hours later, they're still at seven centimeters. After twenty-four hours of labor, they decide to try Pitocin to accelerate contractions. "The midwife says I have to be ready to get a lot more uncomfortable than I am now. I am scared. How deep can pain go." Finally, fully dilated and effaced, they begin pushing. When the baby starts to emerge, the doctor rushes in "throwing on his gear: a visor, an apron." After several pushes, they're told to stop momentarily while the doctor stretches the perineum. Then, with one final push: "I feel him come out, all of him, all at once... My first feeling is that I could run a thousand miles, I feel amazing, total and complete relief, like everything that was wrong is now right. And then, suddenly, Iggy. Here he comes onto me, rising. He is perfect, he is right." This vivid account of childbirth serves as a powerful metaphor for transformation itself. The narrator describes moving through pain that seems unbearable, facing moments of doubt and fear, only to emerge into a new reality that makes everything before it seem distant and changed. Like all profound transformations, birth requires surrendering control and moving through, rather than around, difficulty. "You don't do labor," they were told. "Labor does you." The story reminds us that our most significant transformations often demand not only our active participation but also our willingness to be fundamentally changed by forces larger than ourselves.

Summary

Through these intimate narratives of love, gender, family formation, and childbirth, we witness how identity emerges not as a fixed destination but as an ongoing journey of becoming. The stories reveal that our most profound connections form not through adherence to conventional categories but through the courageous act of witnessing each other's transformations with compassion and wonder. We see how bodies change, families form beyond traditional boundaries, and language both liberates and constrains as we struggle to articulate experiences that exist in the spaces between established definitions. What emerges from these explorations is an invitation to embrace the beautiful complexity of human experience. Rather than seeking fixed certainties about who we are, we might instead cultivate an openness to continuous evolution – recognizing that identity is never complete but always in process. This perspective offers liberation from rigid expectations and creates space for authentic connection across differences. As one partner writes to their child: "You were thought of as possible—never as certain, but always as possible... when, in a love sometimes sure of itself, sometimes shaken by bewilderment and change, but always committed to the charge of ever-deepening understanding... we deeply, doggedly, wildly wanted you to be." Perhaps this is the ultimate lesson: that love itself is an act of witnessing possibility rather than demanding certainty, and that our most meaningful connections arise when we allow ourselves and others the freedom to continuously become.

About Author

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Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson is the author of nine books of poetry and prose, many of which have become cult classics defying categorization. Her nonfiction titles include the National Book Critics Circle Award winner and New York Times bestseller The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015), The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning (Norton, 2011; a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Bluets (Wave Books, 2009; named by Bookforum as one of the top 10 best books of the past 20 years), The Red Parts (Free Press, 2007; reissued by Graywolf, 2016), and Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (U of Iowa Press, 2007). Her poetry titles include Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and Jane: A Murder (Soft Skull, 2005; finalist for the PEN/ Martha Albrand Art of the Memoir). In 2016 she was awarded a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction, an NEA in Poetry, an Innovative Literature Fellowship from Creative Capital, and an Arts Writers Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She writes frequently on art, including recent catalogue essays on Carolee Schneemann and Matthew Barney. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and has taught literature, writing, art, criticism and theory at the New School, Pratt Institute, and Wesleyan University. For 12 years she taught in the School of Critical Studies at CalArts; in fall 2017 she will join the faculty of USC. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

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