Masculinities in Rita Indiana’s Tentacle and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves. Approaching the two climate fiction novels mentioned above, I expected to look more into the climate disaster and protagonist syndrome attached to these novels by virtue of them being post-apocalyptic fiction. More particularly, I expected to scrutinize the ways in which the authors use hyperbole and synonymous examples to bring out the imminent climate disasters in our world. However, the question of identity and how it can make or break a world was something I couldn’t take my mind off of while perusing these novels. Reading Tentacle and The Marrow Thieves in a post 2010s dystopian fiction world where the selfless female protagonist leads the entire nation…show more content… Acilde describes herself as a tomboy and someone with masculine hands “but that wasn’t enough: she wanted the rest.” From the get go we see Acilde appeal to masculinity for herself, especially playing up her masculine features to make money through prostitution. She has both disdain for the masculinity she sees around her, and aspires to masculinity that her surroundings provide for her. Much as is the case with most of Acilde’s life (at least as she describes it), her masculinity and her agency to seek out further masculinizing forces are bestowed on her, usually without her consent. The administering of the Rainbow Brite, a.k.a. an injection that promised complete sexual change without surgery, was the only change in Acilde’s life that she chose. However, as we find out soon after, even this change was, in a sense, fated since Acilde was destined to be the Olokun’s legitimate…show more content… Post Rainbow Brite, Acilde seems to find it difficult to let go of those impulses, but those impulses also seem to serve him better (especially as Giorgio Menicucci). Giorgio Menicucci is a different type of masculinity, especially because we first encounter him through the eyes of Argenis. He is put together, has a beautiful wife, enough money to keep him sated and afloat, and is successful in most (if not all) senses of the word. As we see things from Acilde’s point of view, we see that the Giorgio who had been recruiting artists for his wife’s environmental cause is the same as Acilde’s Giorgio. Giorgio’s masculinity, unlike Acilde’s, is determined at the point of inception by virtue of having penis and testicles. He doesn’t feel the dysphoria that Acilde felt and is far more confident in his adulthood where Acilde seemed stubborn and brash. There is, unfortunately, not really a space for us to explore Acilde’s experience as a man post Rainbow Brite since he is mostly jailed for the duration after which he commits suicide using sleeping
