Response to “The Argonauts”
Assignment: Respond to an idea about sex, gender, masculinity, or femininity in Nelson’s text that interests or challenges you.
In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson challenges social standards and ideas of trans and queer identity as she reveals her and her partner’s experiences going through hormonal transformations. The changes that she is going through because of pregnancy are different than those of her partners with the injections of testosterone. Though they are going through these changes together, the experiences of going through changes as a woman versus a man. It brings into question how different the experiences are in choosing to become more feminine or more masculine when born in a woman’s body. Both go through physical changes, affecting the way people perceive them and incorporate them into society. With Maggie’s growing stomach, all people see is a pregnant woman successful in conceiving a child, without knowing the struggle she had in prepping her uterus and feeling like her breasts “belong to someone else” 1. While she felt sick and nauseous in her pregnancy, her spouse, Harry was “always wanting to fuck, raging with new hormones and new comfort” 2. Harry felt this transition and addition of chemically injected testosterone to be allowing him to be fully comfortable in his own skin. However, the people they interact with do not feel the same amount of comfort. People are not as willing to accept the fact that the person they are interacting with do not look the same as their “original” selves. Nelson recounts times when other men would feel a sense of betrayal or feel taken aback when they realized the person they shared male camaraderie with, was not always male. Or when state identification or credit card information did not match up with the person they were seeing. The fact that people and society see trans people as “alien” or different than “normal” people, shows how backwards and unprogressive their thinking is. They choose to stick with the boxes placed around gender and identity, because it is old fashioned and what they are used to. However, no matter what transitioning someone is going through, whether it be from woman to pregnant woman or woman to man, “on the inside, [they are] two human animals undergoing transformations besides each other, bearing loose witness. In other words, [they are] aging” 3. In the end, no matter the sexual orientation, gender, race, or whatever it is that differentiates each person, everyone meets death at one point or another. We are all the same path of aging. There is no group of people that can be considered separate or alien, when we all have so much in common.
- Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, (Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 2015), 86.
- Ibid, 85.
- Ibid, 83.
Reflection:
This was my first time using footnotes, so I acquired this useful skill for future research responses or essays. This was my first text coming across this particular issue/experience, so it was very helpful for me to write a detailed response to further investigate and understand what I had read.
