Summary Of Birthmark By Miranda July

The story “Birthmark” by Miranda July, begins with a young woman having a port wine stain on her face surgically removed, she asked the doctor if the procedure would hurt and the doctor responds by saying “it will hurt like ‘having your foot run over by a car’” (July 59). Despite this information the young women continues the procedure by adjusting her sweater to fit her properly. The protagonist is more concerned with her physical appearance than the pain she will experience from the procedure, this shows the physical pain women are capable of going through to gain social acceptance of beauty standards. The moment her birthmark was gone was the event horizon, she experiences, she lost a part of her identity which leads to the loss of her sense

In the case study by Walsh, Ani shares her experience with dating men and how that has created a toll on her emotional experience on finding true love, she states “I feel like I'm lying to men. That I’m pretending to be something I’m not. And...then I have to tell them that you know what? I have a birthmark on my face.” (Walsh 17). The same way Ani feels about hiding her makeup as she is on the quest to find love, the protagonist from birthmark hides her vulnerability from her husband. People had not seen the “birthmark version”, the defective her that was she keeping in hiding. This caused her to constantly second guess her relationship she had built with her husband,he had never loved her with her port wine stain so he had never loved her completely. Upon noticing the other couple entering the restaurant the protagonist begins to act distant from her husband, if she had not removed her stain he would not have loved her, he would not have accepted her. Noticing the growing distance, the husband tries to have a conversation about the protagonist’s sudden change towards him. The protagonist is not ready to reveal her vulnerability and decides to avoid the conversation, the narrator steps in and comments on the situation by stating the following; “It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of

Towards the last few scenes of birthmark the protagonist and her husband are in the kitchen trying to cook. The protagonist tries to open the lid not realizing her strength she smashed it, which caused jam to fall on her face on the same spot where her port wine stain birthmark had been. Her husband notices and asks her to look in the mirror and she instinctively puts her hand on her face and runs to the bathroom to hide, where she is followed by her worried husband. The narrator states what is going through her husband’s mind as he is on his knees outside the bathroom door waiting for the protagonist by stating, “He was worried she would not let him love her with the stain.”(July 63). At this moment he begins to accept all intersections of her identity and realizes that he will love her despite her physical appearance. In Tatum’s article she constructs a guideline to create acceptance of all intersections of identity by mentioning, “Our ongoing examination of who we are in our full humanity, embracing all of our identities, creates the possibility of building alliances that may ultimately free us all.”(Tatum 9). If we accept all parts of our identity we will be able to be free. In “birthmark” all she needed was someone to accept her for all of her imperfections and when her husband had seen her with the jam in the