ABSTRACT
There is someone missing from Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a ghost in its machine for making sodomitical mothering: Medea. The Argo, the ship whose infinite capacity for change without loss of identity Nelson finds in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, was her home, too. The absence of Medea marks, the almost complete absence – in fact, persistent erasure – of people of colour in The Argonauts, either as lived beings or through Nelson’s citational practice of queer kinship. As a queer object of/enabling sodomitical maternity, the perineal body would appear to be a central term to be uncovered from The Argonauts: like Medea, it is a limit or test case of both gendering and physical/intellectual capacity. Concerned with presenting dirty secrets, The Argonauts – in missing Medea and the perineum – realizes, subtextually, that it has more, of and in, and especially about, itself, to reveal.
