Revaluing Memoir and Rebuilding Mothership in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts

Abstract

While much of the scholarship on Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts has analysed it through the framework of auto-theory, I argue that considering it through the genre of memoir enables a better understanding of its political reach, particularly in achieving its aim of transforming cultural constraints and anxieties around social reproduction. As a roomy vehicle to explore complex, lived experiences of care and diverse relationality, the memoir was important to the feminist movement and gay liberation of the late twentieth century and remains crucial in the twenty-first century. Analysing mothership as a form of citizenship, Nelson shifts from identity to iterative practice through D.W. Winnicott’s concept of ‘good enough’ mothering. I consider how Winnicott’s ‘good enough’ mothering limits Nelson’s engagement with mothership and her journeying between connection and separateness as well as between responsibility and freedom. Lastly, I explore how her construction of an alternative genealogy and focus on happiness risks rebuilding a hegemony of social reproduction.