Abstract
In this essay I approach The Argonauts (2015), specifically Nelson’s attention to maternal desire and eroticism through the lens of motherhood studies and matricentric feminism. I argue that The Argonauts provides a compelling contribution to a fairly new, but increasingly pertinent, discourse of empowered mothering. Nelson’s accounts of the erotic experience of mothering, coupled with details of her sexual experiences within and outside of her relationship with her partner, Harry, address what has heretofore been a deep-seated contradiction between the maternal body and sexual and erotic pleasure and desire. Nelson makes space for the consideration of motherhood and the erotic not as antithetical, but deeply entwined realms of experience. By drawing on Audre Lorde’s meditations on the erotic, as well as scholarship on maternal eroticism, I contend that The Argonauts exposes aspects of feminine and maternal experiences that transgress a patriarchal institution of motherhood which ultimately seeks to contain these experiences within the private sphere of the family.
Highlights
In her genre-defying poetic/critical memoir The Argonauts (2015), Maggie Nelson explores the interstices of sex, mothering, and language in the age of North American neoliberalism
While Silbergleid is right in suggesting that Nelson certainly raises these important questions about queer mothering, maternal eroticism, and the transgressive power inherent in motherwork, I argue that more critical work needs to actively attempt to interrogate these questions, rather than let our thinking remain at the level of speculation
According to O’Reilly, academic feminism has historically elided the maternal and ‘the disavowal of the maternal in twenty-first-century academic feminism is deliberate and necessary, (...) enacted in order to protect and promote the illusion of the autonomous subject favoured by neoliberalism and celebrated in much of feminist theory (O’Reilly, 2016: 209)
Summary
In her genre-defying poetic/critical memoir The Argonauts (2015), Maggie Nelson explores the interstices of sex, mothering, and language in the age of North American neoliberalism. By drawing on Audre Lorde’s meditations on the erotic (1984), as well as the (still scant) body of scholarship on maternal eroticism (de Marneffe, 2004; Kinser, 2008; Oxenahndler, 2001), I argue that Nelson’s writing on erotic experiences in relation to both her child and her partner underscore the complexity of pleasure in its abundance of forms.
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