Nelson and Dodge aren’t demeaning the people who make such assumptions, and neither do they attempt to conceal the ways in which their relationship diverges from our culture’s default settings. I almost felt sorry for him, he was so desperate to normalize the moment.” Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours.” Later, Nelson recalls Dodge’s interacting with a cashier: “ paused for a long moment, then said, ‘This is her card, right?’-pointing at me. Of a celebratory dinner out, Nelson writes: “You pass as a guy I, as pregnant. Nelson identifies as queer, and Dodge describes himself as “a butch on T ” one child is his, from a previous relationship, and the other is Nelson’s, conceived with the aid of a sperm donor. To that end, some of the most arresting moments in The Argonauts involve strangers who assume that Nelson and Dodge are a heterosexual, cisgendered couple, and that their two children share DNA as well as a home and parents. Neither presents a manual for living beyond the usual or the binary, but each celebrates the conjunction of what American society terms deviant with what it calls domestic. Both books upend traditional familial structures, and explore the visceral strangeness of the human body. However, they complement one another in startling ways. There aren’t many surface similarities between Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Octavia Butler’s Fledgling-the former blends critical theory and personal history to chronicle Nelson’s marriage to Harry Dodge, her gender-fluid partner, while the latter is a speculative-fiction take on vampire lore.
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