She offers some examples of people who have tried to get round this by seeking contexts in which homosexuality can still be illicit. Living with her is like an epileptic with a pacemaker being married to a strobe artist But she’s conscious of the dangers of “homonormativity” – of the speed with which gay Americans have married and even joined the military – and aware that the more the state opens its institutions to the GLBTQ world, the less that world will “be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe”. She follows the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (a frequent interlocutor in the book) in thinking that queerness can hold together forms of strangeness that have nothing to do with sexual orientation. She, like Barthes’s lover, is surprised by the newness of each experience of intense love: the sense that the world is remade.Ī question hovering within the book and confronting its more demanding readers is whether Nelson’s love, housed within an increasingly conventional domestic setting, is at odds with her claims to radicality.

Early on she explains that her title is a nod to Roland Barthes’s suggestion that the subject who utters the phrase “I love you” resembles the Argonaut, constantly renewing his ship during its voyage without changing its name. The appeal of the book is that it’s about love, as much as about queerness: about the conjugal and maternal love that amazes Nelson with its unexpected plenitude, coming after years of solitude.

The argonauts book