Recommendations
Books Like Redefining Realness
Best books to read after Redefining Realness by Janet Mock
Redefining Realness broke ground as a trans memoir that centered race, class, and sex work alongside gender identity, refusing the narrow 'wrong body' narrative. These 8 books share its concern with identity formation, the intersection of race and gender, and the political dimensions of the personal.
- 1Buy
The Argonauts
by Maggie Nelson
Nelson's 2015 autotheory memoir about her relationship with the fluidly gendered artist Harry Dodge is the essential companion to Redefining Realness — both books refuse the gender binary's assumptions, both place trans and genderqueer experience at the center of a serious literary work, and both changed the vocabulary through which contemporary readers think about gender.
- 2Buy
Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates's 2015 letter to his teenage son about being Black in America shares Redefining Realness' insistence on the body as a political site — the place where racial and gender violence happen — and its refusal to separate the personal from the structural when thinking about identity and safety.
- 3Buy
Sister Outsider
by Audre Lorde
Lorde's 1984 collection of essays and speeches — addressing race, gender, sexuality, and class as intersecting systems of power — provides the theoretical and political framework that runs beneath Redefining Realness; Mock has cited Lorde as a foundational influence, and Lorde's concept of the erotic as a source of power resonates throughout Mock's memoir.
- 4Buy
Fun Home
by Alison Bechdel
Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir about discovering her father's hidden gay life while coming to terms with her own lesbian identity shares Redefining Realness' preoccupation with what it costs to hide who you are, and with the specifically literary tradition that helps queer people understand their own experiences.
- 5Buy
Hunger
by Roxane Gay
Gay's 2017 memoir about her body and its history — about how childhood sexual violence shaped her relationship to food and to the space her body occupies — is the closest contemporary parallel to Redefining Realness in its political insistence on understanding the personal body through the framework of violence, survival, and the politics of whose bodies are legible as worthy of care.
- 6Buy
Stone Butch Blues
by Leslie Feinberg
Feinberg's 1993 novel about Jess Goldberg, a working-class butch woman navigating the pre-Stonewall bar scene and the labor movement in upstate New York, is the foundational work of trans and genderqueer fiction in American literature — the essential predecessor to Redefining Realness in the tradition of writing that centers gender nonconformity and working-class identity together.
- 7Buy
Giovanni's Room
by James Baldwin
Baldwin's 1956 novella about David's refusal to acknowledge his desire for Giovanni is a classic of queer literature about what is destroyed by the refusal to know and name who you are — the obverse of Redefining Realness, which is about what becomes possible when you commit to that knowledge despite everything it costs.
- 8Buy
Surpassing Certainty
by Janet Mock
Mock's 2017 sequel memoir covers her twenties in New York City as she built her career in media and navigated her identity as a trans woman of color — the direct continuation of Redefining Realness for readers who want to follow Mock's story into adulthood and success.
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