Inappropriate objects: on gender, self, and parenthood in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Krys Malcolm Belc’s The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood

Reproductive ideology defaults to a cisnormative gender framework, but memoirs on parenthood by LGBTQIA+ writers reframe the taxonomy of pregnancy as a queer experience. This article will examine how the relationship between absence and intimacy in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) and Krys Malcolm Belc’s The Natural Mother of the Child: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood (2021) challenges the crisis of queer self-identification against maternal symbiosis and reproductive futurism. A depression of constant flux, Nelson and Belc reformulate the pregnant body as inherently queer, acutely symptomatic site of transgression, a reshaping of self and other. Each text describes the notion of pregnancy as inherently unstable: the dualism of reproduction, where one creates content as a revolution of form—an expansion rather than a retreat.