I Am The Task: Masculine Rituals and Transfeminine Poetics
Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: “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.
Source: Libra
DOI: 10.18130/n2h0-r451
Author: Kathryn Bennington
Institution: University of Virginia
Language: English
Topic: Gender and Feminist Studies
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6925486429
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