The hermeneutics of gender have dominated feminist and queer scholarship for decades. Once viewed as an “essence” that precedes and therefore defines the sexed body, gender is more and more frequently understood as a series of signifying acts and performances that, in their repetition, forge a façade of essentialism that has done more to hold back women, transgender, and non-binary identities than it has to empower them. As Judith Butler posits in Gender Trouble, “no one can embody” gender (2386, italics original). Indeed, it appears that gender can no longer be a question of male subjecthood or female objectification. To Butler, “power appeared to operate in the production of that very binary frame for thinking about gender” (2376, italics mine). As such, queer and transgender scholars have spent years asking the question that bears repeating: is there a productive method through which we can understand gender as a heuristic tool of self-discovery, identity, and empowerment without falling back on outdated and circular discussions of essentialism and the sexed body? We may discover a response to this rhetorical quandary in Maggie Nelson’s 2015 autobiography The Argonauts, a memoir capturing the author’s journey as she comes to terms with gender as a discursive performance through the simultaneous transition of her spouse, Harry Dodge, and her own pregnancy with their child. Formally, the text is as genre-defying as it is gender-bending: blending prose with poetics, personal essay with professional scholarship, and ivory-tower academia with real, embodied stories, Nelson urges us to problematize binary thinking and false dichotomies in ourselves and the societies that shape us. The title fittingly refers to Barthes, quoted in The Argonauts: “the subject who utters ‘I love you’ is like ‘the Argonaut renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name.’ Just as the Argo’s parts may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo” (5). Nelson offers a glimpse into Butler’s deconstruction of gender as both her and Harry “change [their] parts” through pregnancy and transition but remain fundamentally and paradoxically unchanged. As the sexed body and the gendered subject develop discursively in her narrative, Nelson exposes gender’s beautiful multiplicity just as sharply as she does its harmful falsehoods.

This essay is organized into three sections detailing the epistemological and ontological boundaries of gender: In the first section, I discuss the linguistic and socio-cultural signification of gender as a fabricated “truth effect”; a discursive construction which hides only emptiness at its center. In the second section, I analyze the bodily dimensions of gender and gender performance. In the third section, I propose a radical reorientation towards gender, bringing both Butler and Nelson’s work towards decentering and deconstructing gender into their respective conclusions.

“Utterly Plural”: Signifying Gender Linguistically in The Argonauts

As Butler posits, “genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity” (2384). Furthering her claim, Butler writes of gender not as a “project” but as a “strategy,” a term which “better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance always and variously occurs” (2387). Centripetal forces of gender policing catalyze the signification of gender linguistically and bodily as a centrifugal series of performances, usually performed strictly under duress, and for survival. Nelson formally problematizes this signification in The Argonauts: to her spouse Harry, language is “[n]ot only not good enough, but corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow” (4). The act of naming, according to Harry, reveals the “cookie-cutter function” (4) that underlies the psychological and societal processes involved in signification. Nelson demonstrates an awareness of gendering as one of these “corrosive” signifying processes, one that is enforced culturally through linguistic and psycho-social forces. Nelson here brings our awareness to gendered pronouns: while attempting to locate Harry’s proper pronouns on the internet, she admits humbly to “tak[ing] cover in grammatical cul-de-sacs” in order to “relax into an orgy of specificity” (7). She eventually decides to avoid using signifying pronouns for Harry, aware of their “corrosive” linguistic nature bringing gender into focus as a “cookie-cutter function.”

Narrating directly to Harry, Nelson demonstrates how the linguistic signification of gender is co-opted and questioned in queer circles:

When making your butch-buddy film, By Hook or By Crook, you and your cowriter, Silas Howard, decided that the butch characters would call each other ‘he’ and ‘him,’ but in the outer world of grocery stores and authority figures, people would call them ‘she’ and ‘her’ … Because if the outsiders called the characters ‘he,’ it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure. (8)

In this passage, Nelson localizes signifying practices of gender: the harmless fun of gender-fuckery in queer spaces is perverted elsewhere by homophobia, exemplifying that gender, once again, is a survival strategy. As Butler posits, “gender practices within gay and lesbian cultures often thematize ‘the natural’ in parodic contexts that bring into relief the performative construction of an original and true sex” (2376). While the use of incongruent linguistic signification of gender carries one meaning among the queer community, one of parody and “relief,” such co-opting of language by external gender policing forces signifies something else: an abjection of gender differences and non-hegemonic performances of gender (it is the “butch” characters––women who present masculine and often or occasionally pass as male––who receive the brunt of policing in the quoted material above). As Butler posits, it is indeed through this policing and this rejection of the incongruously sexed or gendered body “by which Others become shit” (2383).

Nelson’s intimate familiarity with the signifying powers of language in relation to gender reveals gender to be an external structure rather than an internal essence. She even attempts to protect her unborn child from interpellation by repressive gender ideologies by destroying “an envelope with about twenty-five ultrasound photos of his in-utero penis and testicles” so that her son could “stay oblivious––for the first and last time, perhaps––to the task of performing a self for others” (95). The cultural maintenance of gender––as an anatomical reality rather than a performance of normativity––merely blurs the truth that all notions of the “self” are a performance. Nelson gives further attention to the signifying powers of language to hide the lack of a false Real “self”: “To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis. If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so” (14). As such, Nelson’s work fits with Butler’s argument that gender is a discursive fabrication not just for those who perform their gender “wrong,” but also for those who perform their gender in alliance with socio-cultural structures­––those who perform their gender “right.” The difference between these two groups is often reduced to a bodily ontology: someone with a male body should perform masculinity, and someone with a female body should perform femininity. But whether or not her son performs masculinity, and whether or not he does so out of a conscious effort, it remains a performance of selfhood. Butler takes issue with the notion of the “body” as a stable, primal material force that exists as the locus of a true gender. As she posits, the performance of gender means that “the medium itself must be destroyed––that is, fully transvaluated into a sublimated domain of values” (2379). The act of signifying or internalizing gender does not emerge from the body in Butler’s view; it in fact destroys the body by inscribing upon it one of two rigid, binary options, upholding not only the false dichotomy of male/female gender but also the false dichotomy of inner Body/outer World. In the next section, I will discuss the bodily dimensions of gender, and the possible consequences––and freedoms––awarded to those who cross the boundaries of gender performance and identity.

Re/Making the Body: Pregnancy and Gender Transition

The body is gendered through three means: sexual or bodily anatomy, gender identity, and gender performance (Butler 2385). Butler writes that “the body is always under siege, suffering destruction by the very terms of history” (2379). This border maintenance is tireless, unending work. But if gender is not an essence preceding from the body, where does that leave the body? In other words, how can we reorient towards a culture that affirms and uplifts those who experience a perceived incongruence between their anatomy and their gender identity? Nelson recontextualizes and problematizes the issue of the “body” by drawing our attention to pregnancy as a radically body-altering act on par with a gender transition: “Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one’s ‘normal’ state, and occasions a radical intimacy with––and radical alienation from––the body?” (13). Later, she quotes from a “postpartum website”: “Don’t think of it as, You’ve lost your body … Think of it as, You gave your body to your baby. / I gave my body to my baby. I gave my body to my baby. I’m not sure I want it back, or in what sense I could ever have it” (109). The question bears repeating: in what sense can one “own” their body? How can pregnancy and gender transition both offer a “radical intimacy” and a “radical alienation from” the body?

Harry’s physical bodily transition exemplifies another “queering” bodily act. In Butler’s words, non-hegemonic gender performance renders a “perpetual displacement” which “constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization” (2386). Nelson formally juxtaposes Harry’s re-making of their body through surgical and hormonal means with her pregnancy, suggesting that both bodily acts could represent “resignification and recontextualization”:

On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more ‘male,’ mine, more and more ‘female.’ But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging. (83)

Nelson reminds us that all bodily acts emerge merely as changes through time: whether physically transitioning to affirm one’s gender, becoming pregnant and giving birth, or, simply aging. There may be meaningful differences between these bodily acts, but perhaps there is not a similar difference between the sources of the cultural norms we inscribe upon them. As Nelson writes to Harry following their reconstructive chest surgery, “I’ve never loved you more than I did then, with your Kool-Aid drains, your bravery in going under the knife to live a better life, a life of wind on skin, your nodding off while propped up on a throne of hotel pillows, so as not to disturb your stitches” (81). Nelson’s work is both life-affirming and body-affirming, carefully reminding its reader that every bodily act is a matter of change, and that these changes are constantly re-framed and re-oriented by hegemonic socio-cultural forces. Nelson therefore offers a sense of self-determinacy in Harry’s gender transition which she describes as “[a] becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning, a certain turning inward” (53). Harry’s re-inscription of their body through physical and linguistic means is not (just) a physical transformation, nor an approach to a closure that will never be met, but is a “turning inward” towards self-determinacy and self-affirmation. In the next section, I will ask how we can affirm gender through its very deconstruction, offering a reconstruction of gender through its signifying acts in language and the body.

“No Use in a Center”: Towards Gender Deconstruction and Reconstruction

After attending a talk by Anne Carson, Nelson writes, “[i]n bonsai you often plant the tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine. But that night Carson made the concept literary. (Act so that there is no use in a center: a piece of Steinian wisdom Carson says she tried to impart to her students)” (49). It is a recurring question Nelson poses to her reader: how can we have it both ways? How can we affirm the gender of those with the bravery and courage to claim their own space as a gendered subject, while also uprooting the centering of gender as an ontological concept? But as Nelson reminds us, “There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways” (29). Jacques Derrida, a founder of deconstruction, is famously quoted as saying, “Deconstruction loses nothing from admitting that it is impossible.” At its philosophical core, deconstruction rests on the contradictions and ironies of its theoretical issues, but that does not discount the work of Derrida or Butler: deconstruction points to the very lack of an ontological truth, and to language’s inability to replace the Real. As Butler writes, “Gender is … a norm that can never be fully internalized; ‘the internal’ is a surface signification, and gender norms are finally phantasmatic, impossible to embody” (2388). The notion of an internal essence is merely a construction of language and other signifying acts on the “surface” of the body. So, if language is all we have to signify, if the Real is truly inaccessible, then it is our job to work productively within language. Through Nelson’s paradoxical dissatisfaction with language and her affinity for writing, communication, and philosophy, this idea of using language productively––through all its brokenness––defines a core ethos of The Argonauts.

Nelson asks, “How to explain … [t]hat for some, ‘transitioning’ may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others––like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T––it doesn’t?” (53). Within this rhetorical question lies Nelson’s appeal to a deconstruction of gender that offers in its place a proliferation of radical bodily autonomy, radical openness of gender, and radical confusion in the place of “a culture frantic for resolution” (53). And if our culture reflects such a frantic search for resolution, why does “resolution” need to be painted in binary, dichotomous terms? As we are reminded by Butler, “[g]enders can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived. As credible bearers of these attributes, however, genders can also be rendered thoroughly and radically incredible” (2388). Butler, in 1990, and Nelson, in 2015, both attempted to see past hegemonic discourse of the sexed and gendered body into a contemporary era of, paradoxically, gender eradication and gender proliferation. Nelson’s resolution, then, is what lies within the ability—and the bravery—to see beyond the binary dualisms of gender into a splendid, and indeed incredible, multiplicity.

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. From Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed., edited by Vincent Leitch, Norton, 2018, pp. 2375-2388.

Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf Press, 2015.