ABSTRACT
Memoir’s traditional narrative arc is similarly disassembled as The Argonauts, properly speaking, is “not a story,” as Monica Pearl writes, at least not in the “old fashioned” sense that provides “a beginning, middle, and end”. Instead, The Argonauts’ narrative desire takes shape in episodic terms, more as a performative assemblage of potentially interchangeable parts than as a commitment to a knowing destination. The Argonauts overrides theory’s knowingness in its final gesture, underscoring the sustenance to be found in the register of a de-universalized “we,” one whose bonds lie in the intimate sphere where maternity, marriage, and kinship are revalued as queer. In Sophie Mayer’s analysis, absent genealogies offer limit cases for exploring the raced and classed implications of “kin-making,” demonstrating how much messier sodomitical motherhood might be if race and class were figured more centrally in the identity conundrums that The Argonauts inhabits and explores.
