In loving memory of those who departed during this book’s time: Phyllis DeChant (1938–2010), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009), Lhasa de Sela (1972–2010), and Maximum Dodge (1993–2012). You are missed.
This book would not exist without Harry Dodge, whose intelligence, foxiness, vision, fortitude, and willingness to be represented have made this project, along with so much else, possible. Thank you for showing me what a nuptial might be — an infinite conversation, an endless becoming.
NOTES
Note to the Reader: In the print edition of The Argonauts, attributions for otherwise unattributed text appear in the margins in grayscale. Because of limitations in the conversion of printed books to reflowable ebook files, there is not an adequate way to reproduce those marginal citations alongside the main text in the ebook. Therefore, all quoted text that is not attributed within the body of the text is listed below, with italics indicating the quoted material.
I stopped smugly repeating Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly and wondered anew, can everything be thought. — Ludwig Wittgenstein
Nuptials are the opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines: question-answer, masculine-feminine, man-animal, etc. This could be what a conversation is — simply the outline of a becoming. — Gilles Deleuze/Claire Parnet
(What is that triangle, anyway? My twat?) — Eileen Myles
Many feminists have argued for the decline of the domestic as a separate, inherently female sphere and the vindication of domesticity as an ethic, an affect, an aesthetic, and a public. — Susan Fraiman
When or how do new kinship systems mime older nuclear-family arrangements and when or how do they radically recontextualize them in a way that constitutes a rethinking of kinship? — Judith Butler
If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so. — Jacques Lacan
It’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered selfconsciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature. — Denise Riley
The bad reading [of Gender Trouble] goes something like this: I can get up in the morning, look in my closet, and decide which gender I want to be today. I can take out a piece of clothing and change my gender: stylize it, and then that evening I can change it again and be something radically other, so that what you get is something like the commodification of gender, and the understanding of taking on a gender as a kind of consumerism…. When my whole point was that the very formation of subjects, the very formation of persons, presupposes gender in a certain way — that gender is not to be chosen and that “performativity” is not radical choice and it’s not voluntarism…. Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in. — Butler
What if where I am is what I need? — Deborah Hay
The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy. — Sara Ahmed
And I have long known that the moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you. — Ahmed
Do castration and the Phallus tell us the deep Truths of Western culture or just the truth of how things are and might not always be? — Elizabeth Weed
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. — Susan Sontag
If there’s one thing homonormativity reveals, it’s the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority. — Leo Bersani
You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is — working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows. — Pema Chödrön
Spirit is matter reduced to an extreme thinness: O so thin! — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sometimes mothers find it alarming to think that what they are doing is so important and in that case it is better not to tell them. It makes them self-conscious and then they do everything less well…. When a mother has a capacity quite simply to be a mother we must never interfere. She will not be able to fight for her rights because she will not understand. —D.W. Winnicott
In other words, the articulation of the reality of my sex is impossible in discourse, and for a structural, eidetic reason. My sex is removed, at least as the property of a subject, from the predicative mechanism that assures discursive coherence. — Luce Irigaray
What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted? — Anne Carson
I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. — Beatriz Preciado
A becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning, a certain turning inward, turning into my own / turning on in / to my own self / at last / turning out of the / white cage, turning out of the / lady cage / turning at last. — Lucille Clifton
It’s painful for me that I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity. Either people didn’t really read the book, or the commodification of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write, even when it’s explicitly opposed to that politics, gets taken up by that machinery. — Butler
We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. — William James
And I said, do labia really start to hang? She said, yes, just like men’s balls, gravity makes the labia hang. I told her I never noticed that, I’d have to take a look. — Dodie Bellamy
I think we have — and can have — a right to be free. — Michel Foucault