The Argonauts

The Argonauts is about personal identity—both what it is, and how it changes over the course of one’s life. Even the title is a reference to this since it alludes to a thought experiment (developed by Plutarch and adapted by Roland Barthes) surrounding the identity of a ship that is being replaced one plank at a time: Eventually, nothing tangible from the original Argo will be left, but the ship will still be called the Argo and will therefore in some sense still be the Argo. This paradox illustrates the way identity operates in The Argonauts—most obviously in the case of Nelson’s husband Dodge, whose gender identity evolves throughout his life, and who undergoes a mastectomy and testosterone injections during the course of his relationship with Nelson. Nelson suggests that the transformation Dodge undergoes isn’t radically different from the transformations all humans undergo over the course of their lives:

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 transformation beside each other, bearing each other loose witness.