He simple fact that she’s a lesbian is so blinding for some, that whatever words come out of her mouth-whatever words come out of the lesbian’s mouth-certain listener’s hear only one thing: lesbian, lesbian, lesbian. Nelson, who is also so f’ing smart, writes about Butler’s observations of her own identity, how she wrote a book questioning identity politics and then became a token of lesbian identity, a victim of commodification. I remember reading Gender Trouble and thinking, “God, she is so f’ing SMART.” She is writing about Judith Butler, and when I read it my brain started tingling, remembering the first time I read Butler’s words as an undergrad after my adviser wrote, “Sex and gender are social constructs” in the margin of my paper. It is glorious.Ībout halfway through the book, Nelson makes a point about labels and identities. They all sing the songs that make up Nelson’s life. Judith Butler dances with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Julia Kristeva with Leo Bersani. Gender theory and queer theory marry feminism and child psychology. Parenthood and motherhood are both understood and misunderstood. In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson delves into philosophy and psychology and literary theory to examine and tell the story of her life-her love affair with Harry, her role as a stepmother, their struggle to get pregnant. Over and over, we watched this tiny moment. He was just a small, shaky deer looking to make a new friend. It was the innocence of the scene that drew us in. We wanted to hear the sweet voice again, and see the soft colors of the forest and the big, overdrawn eyes of the characters. We would rewind it over and over, saying Flower’s lines along with him. Finally Flower looks over his shoulder and sighs: “Oh, gosh.”Ī minor scene, but it was our favorite. If he wants to.” There is giggling and much eyelash blinking. “That’s not a…” he trails off, before the demure skunk replies, with his head pointed down, “He can call me a Flower. Bambi, who is just learning to talk, calls him a “pretty flower.” Thumper rolls on the ground, laughing at Bambi’s faux pas and naiveté.
THUMPER BAMBI BASHFUL PATCH
The fawn bends his head into a patch of flowers and takes a whiff, and his nose touches the nose of a tiny skunk. In the beginning of the movie, a wobbly-legged Bambi meanders through the forest with his friend Thumper. When we were kids, my sister and I loved to watch Bambi-the classic Disney cartoon with the baby deer whose mother gets shot by a hunter, and whose standoffish father, “The Great Prince,” can silence the entire forest with his presence. I needed to repeat each passage immediately. Remember the paragraphs like I would remember the chambers of the heart. Make them a part of my brain so I could recollect them easily. (It is thirty percent post consumer wastepaper.
I even read the end page that tells you about cover design and font and whether it is printed on recycled paper. And then I perused her bio and acknowledgements and all the praise in the first pages. And then I took it back out and read all the praise on the back cover. After I read the last page of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, I closed it and put it in my bag.
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