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

Bibliographic Data

ID8891468
AuthorsAnn Vickery (0000-0002-6701-1017, corresponding author)
Year2020
Publication date2020-04-14
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAustralian Literary Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0004-9697 • E-ISSN: 1837-6479
PublisherAustralian Literary Studies (PUBLISHER • AU)
DOI10.20314/als.ad45a0d006
OpenAlexW3016352231
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited15

While much of the scholarship on Maggie Nelsonâ 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. Winnicottâ s concept of â good enoughâ mothering. I consider how Winnicottâ s â good enoughâ mothering limits Nelsonâ 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

Aesthetics · Art · Autoethnography · Hegemony · Identity (music · Literature · Memoir · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Autobiographical and Biographical Writing · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law · Short Stories in Global Literature

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