I Am The Task: Masculine Rituals and Transfeminine Poetics

“I am the Task: Masculine Rituals and Transfeminine Poetics” is a self-reflexive investigation into some of the ways in which men confer, verify, challenge, and deny masculinity to each other in poetry and in science fiction. The work is underpinned by theories of gender based on Simone De Beauvoir’s emphasis on womanhood as a process of “becoming.” By reading masculinities as existing within a system of challenge and defense based in labor and local environments, I argue against the traditional idea of the coming-of-age ritual as offering stable entrance into the masculine gender. Instead, this work shows how masculinities must be proven again and again throughout a lifetime. As a piece of self-reflexive scholarship, my methodology in “I am the Task” blends critical close readings with memoir to provide a transfeminine perspective on the masculinities under consideration.