Calderwood Seminars
Impact: Student Reflection
On the topic of domesticity, I’ve learned a lot about the way domestic spaces are constructed and referenced artistically. Domestic relationship dynamics were familiar to me through queer theory, but I hadn’t really considered ‘the domestic’ as a topic itself. I’ve gained a much better understanding of “transgression” and “subversion,” now that I’ve thought about the basic principles underlying my concept of normal, which are anchored in domestic spaces....In writing, I’ve learned the best version requires me to completely reorient from my first draft. I want to write about big things, which just ends up being vague; specificity makes my writing impactful. (However, when writing to a word count that specificity should be saved for the stuff that matters.) My first drafts look nothing like my final drafts right now, and I think it would benefit me to either relearn draft writing so that my focus is on target from the beginning. It’s easier to write about the things that don’t matter, which is why I can do so much of it, but if I want to be happy with something important I’ve learned it will always take longer than I think it will. —Vivian Price
Outcome: Student Work
“The Argonauts: Attempting the Incommunicable”
by Vivian Price, COLT 399, Spring 2026
Dr. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a tapestry. On the warp, made up of separate threads in parallel, are themes of love, identity, transformation, motherhood, and queerness; on the weft, a continuous thread throughout, is an experiment with language. She’s written a genre-bending book, unbroken by chapters and without citations, considered “autotheory” because of its blend of critical academic theory and autobiography. Her anecdotes are told with saccharine domesticity, or biting sardonicism, or with utter irreverence to enhance the shock value. They concretize a deep, very personal analysis of identity theory that Nelson explores throughout, and they are her contribution to a legacy of great thinkers.
Nelson, an accomplished writer and academic, stands on the shoulders of giants she calls “many-gendered mothers of the heart” including Barthes, Sedgwick, and Winnicott and references the work of Catherine Opie, Anne Carson, Audre Lord, and Wittgenstein. Their quotes are the dialogue of her romance with her now-husband Harry, what she read in preparation for the birth of their child, and part of her search for community and identity. They become a dialogue all their own, of great thinkers arguing amongst themselves, in which Nelson’s own voice can get lost. As she once used words from Barthes and Ondaatje as love letters, she has returned to using others’ words, sometimes in lieu of her own, to write a book about expressing Wittgenstein’s “inexpressible.”
The book is also a love letter, by the way. It is dedicated and addressed to Harry. Meeting a person for whom words were not enough, and experiencing things traditionally “inexpressible” like the birth of their child, is the catalyst for an exploration of labels, identity, and bodily experience. The intimacy of the address and some of the stories she tells beg questions about exploitation, and also reveal some of Nelson’s blind spots around her privilege and a defensiveness about portraying an experience that appears less and less radical.
While objectively a good writer and academic, Nelson is not a classicist and neither was her icon Barthes, which is why they refer to the central motif of this book as ‘the Argo.’ It’s a simple ontological paradox–that of a ship, replaced piece by piece, called by the same name until no original piece remains. The paradox is enshrined in the language we use to talk about it, and makes way for questions about what it means to be an entity, changing. The problem is, I am a classicist, and those questions have already been posed by Plutarch and Hobbes and their successors with regard to the “ship of Theseus.” “The Argonauts” makes us sound like we’re in the same changing boat together, which is nice, but Nelson makes the point herself that actually, we’re all changing in our own ways, and just like when she and Harry were doing hormone therapy side-by-side, change is not monolithic. Her experience of being the thing that changes comes across well, and the stories she tells about sex, gender, aging, making a body, and expelling that body, among other things that are replaced, renewed, and redefined are all well-told and connected. However, using the wrong term to describe one of the most famous paradoxes in history does not sit well.
As far as terminology goes, Nelson describes herself in this memoir as “identity phobic,” cites philosophies and personal heroes that embrace fluidity, and frequently returns to the idea that people are complicated. Yet, she returns to the subject of terminology through feminist and queer theory often, critiquing everything from revolutionary language to the new “cisgender,” but not engaging in depth with their utility, reclamation, or any contemporary discourse or scholarship. Additionally, she names her child “Igasho,” and refuses to address the implications of this choice as white parent to a white child, except to assure the audience that she got retroactive permission.
I don’t believe she was able to communicate the singular experience of birth and parenthood. To be a writer and parent and spouse is to be committed to an individual beyond reason–it necessitates “narcissism” or “devotion,” in Nelson’s words. This makes it hard to stay interested, except for the parts that are relatable to their audience. She also speaks of the difficulty of “[speaking] to someone instead of to the nothingness at the end of writing.” It’s hard to connect through a memoir, and connection is necessary for interest. While she has written a beautiful account of her life, the concepts in it are universally understood and better told elsewhere, sometimes by the people she quotes. Autotheory may be a valuable medium to add context to theory, but ultimately I wonder who this book was for.