As the sexed body and the gendered subject develop discursively in her narrative, Nelson exposes gender’s beautiful multiplicity just as sharply as she does its harmful falsehoods. Nelson offers a glimpse into Butler’s deconstruction of gender as both her and Harry “change parts” through pregnancy and transition but remain fundamentally and paradoxically unchanged. The title fittingly refers to Barthes, quoted in The Argonauts: “the subject who utters ‘I love you’ is like ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.’ Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo” (5). Formally, the text is as genre-defying as it is gender-bending: blending prose with poetics, personal essay with professional scholarship, and ivory-tower academia with real, embodied stories, Nelson urges us to problematize binary thinking and false dichotomies in ourselves and the societies that shape us. As such, queer and transgender scholars have spent years asking the question that bears repeating: is there a productive method through which we can understand gender as a heuristic tool of self-discovery, identity, and empowerment without falling back on outdated and circular discussions of essentialism and the sexed body? We may discover a response to this rhetorical quandary in Maggie Nelson’s 2015 autobiography The Argonauts, a memoir capturing the author’s journey as she comes to terms with gender as a discursive performance through the simultaneous transition of her spouse, Harry Dodge, and her own pregnancy with their child. To Butler, “power appeared to operate in the production of that very binary frame for thinking about gender” (2376, italics mine). Indeed, it appears that gender can no longer be a question of male subjecthood or female objectification. As Judith Butler posits in Gender Trouble, “no one can embody” gender (2386, italics original).

Once viewed as an “essence” that precedes and therefore defines the sexed body, gender is more and more frequently understood as a series of signifying acts and performances that, in their repetition, forge a façade of essentialism that has done more to hold back women, transgender, and non-binary identities than it has to empower them. The hermeneutics of gender have dominated feminist and queer scholarship for decades.

Books like the argonauts