Redefining realness: My path to womanhood, identity, love, & so much more

Much of Mock’s association with womanhood has to do—often problematically—with the association between womanhood and appearance.In many ways, Mock explicitly associates her womanhood with the outward expression of prototypically binaried and patriarchal ideas of femininity. When she introduces herself in the Prologue, she presents her body to the audience:

I twirled and twerked to Kelis’s ‘Milkshake,’ my gold-tinted curls bobbing around my face. I felt the brightness of my wide, toothy smile and the ampleness of my cheekbones, a feature given to me by Mom, and the prominence of my forehead, inherited from Dad. My pointed widow’s peak draped a thick tendril over my right eye, shaded in bronze eye shadow and framed by an arched brown brow (2).

The first time the audience meets Mock, she is dancing at a club, letting her relationship with Aaron play out in a rom-com fairytale. In this first introduction, Mock uses her appearance to denote her womanhood, identifying herself as a male ideal, almost as a way to justify her existence as the protagonist of the memoir. In many ways, it seems as though Mock believes she is justified to take up this

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