Feeling Change: Simile and the Figurality of Gender Transition

This essay argues for the usefulness of the literary figures (or the figures of speech, in rhetoric) for communicating the experience of gender transition through an attention to the specific capability of simile. Though simile has often been subordinated to metaphor due to its extension and obvious artifice, I argue that simile’s bounded duration and mixed temporality can carry the often vexed feeling of gender transformation in opposition to renderings of transition as either eternally ongoing or a series of quick, discrete shifts. Drawing on theories of affect as well as the rhetorical purposes of the literary figures, I read the work of the technical aspects of sensory language in poems by Oliver Baez Bendorf and Jameson Fitzpatrick and turn finally to a counterpoint metaphor by Cameron Awkward-Rich.