The Argonauts

Nelson used to struggle with drinking and says that acknowledging her dependency on alcohol was liberating after years of keeping up a facade of “total self-reliance” (102). She then discusses her graduate thesis on James Schuyler, which her advisor said seemed “oddly compelled by the idea of Schuyler’s flaccidity” (103). Although Schuyler’s impotence was likely related to his own alcoholism, Nelson says that what interested her was the absence of “a will to power, or even a will to perversity” (104).

Nelson considers Schuyler one of the “many gendered-mothers of [her] heart,” and notes that whereas many of these role models are overweight, her actual mother is “obsessed with skinniness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness” (105). Nelson wishes her mother could love herself, and thus help Nelson “imagin[e] [her] mother’s body as [her] mother” (106). Nelson also acknowledges, however, that her struggle to do so stems partly from her own insecurities; as a girl, she resented her mother for leaving her father for another man.

Moving on to how her own body looked and felt after childbirth, Nelson discusses the expectation that new mothers immediately return to their prior career, weight, and sexual availability. Nelson used to agree with Dan Savage’s

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