MEDEA'S PERINEUM

Abstract

This essay reads The Argonauts against a preceding literature of queer and trans parenting, specifically by women of colour, to account for absences and evasions in Maggie Nelson's relation to queer feminist literary history. Resituating her quotation about “kinship systems” from Judith Butler into Butler's discussion of house mothers in ball culture, it calls attention to the erasure of queer racialized embodiment and intellection (as recounted by Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ contemporaneous Revolutionary Mothering) from Nelson's account, emblematized by Cherríe Moraga's Medea and – as embodied site of “shit and labor” – the perineum, figuring the work of connection.

Keywords:

• Medea
• perineum
• revolutionary mothering
• m/other
• Cherríe Moraga
• house mother
• labour

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.