Mixed Race Studies

Grave endings: the representation of passing

Austrailian Humanities Review
Issue 23 (September 2001)

Monique Rooney, Lecturer and Honours Convenor
College of Arts and Social Sciences
Austrailian National University

At the 2000 Academy Awards, Hilary Swank won the award of “Best Actress” for her role as Teena Brandon/Brandon Teena in Kimberley Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (2000). Based on the true story of Teena Brandon who was murdered in Nebraska in 1993 after she passed as a boy (Brandon Teena), Boys Don’t Cry depicts scenes of crossdressing. Like most passing stories, the film ends with the brutal exposure of the passing girl, with her rape and finally her murder. Even though Swank, dressed in ultra feminine gown and jewels, had just been awarded “Best Actress” in the role, she found it necessary to refer to Teena Brandon, repeatedly, as “he” and as “Brandon Teena”. Further, Swank’s acceptance speech—beginning with the words, “We have come a long way”—intimated that the film’s overt and explicit (rather than censored) coverage of sexual violence and gender passing was somehow more politically radical and progressive.

Defining truth through identity, Swank’s self-congratulatory exposure of the passer’s authentic, because visible, identity, in fact contrasted with film’s representation of this identity. The liberal humanistic and nationalist values affirmed in Swank’s speech and paraded at the Academy Awards are, moreover and ironically, critiqued in the film. Asserting the film’s “acceptance” of “difference” and “diversity”, Swank thanked Brandon Teena for “teaching us” to “always be ourselves” and to “follow our hearts” and “not conform”. This sentimental flagging of the passer’s transformative potential and hypervisible presence (as a boy) simplifies the film’s more complex treatment in which Teena, the passer, is exposed and murdered because he/she represents indeterminacy. Swank’s celebration of the passer’s role in Boys Don’t Cry thus misreads but also re-presents the film’s characterisation of passing as an inexpressible presence, as a crisis at the heart of representation itself. The liminality of the passing role is unable to be articulated; but it emerges in Swank’s ambiguous appearance both on screen and off.

Swank’s performance on Awards night stresses the passer’s political and rhetorical efficacy, as the passer functions in Swank’s discourse as a vehicle for propaganda. Through an analysis of this and various other narratives of passing, this essay will interrogate ways in which the passer both represents, and is an effect of, the mobility of discourse. This is to say, the representation of passing facilitates critical discourses about essentialist categories such as race, gender and sexuality. At the same time, the passer is deployed as a device of this rhetoric who signifies the unstable ground of representation. Beginning with the practice of passing for white in late nineteenth and twentieth century American fiction and non-fiction, the discussion here will first identify the importance of the topic to the emergence of critical discourses about race as well as gender and sexuality. I will then go on to analyse recent critical receptions to this theme and its current relevance to debates not only about minority group politics and deconstruction but about how the critic is positioned in relation to this debate…

…The many black Americans who have allegedly crossed the colour line to live as whites suggests that passing is a desire to flee the constricting condition of belonging to a racial minority. Not that passing for white is purely about escape from racial heritage. The black American author, Walter White, passed in order to travel to the South to investigate lynching and other crimes against blacks. White’s autobiographical self-portrait articulates the challenge the passer poses to racial classifications:

I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blonde. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me.

Passing not only problematises classifications of the visible body, thereby challenging the meaning of racial belonging, but also the possibility of accurate representation.

The passer’s abstraction of self from too legible identifiers such as race, nationality, sexual orientation—margins that define the invisible centre of subjectivity—suggests that classificatory boundaries are more arbitrary for some individuals than others. Yet these margins continue to define individuals, like the white-skinned “Negro”, who experience both the possibility of freedom from and the restrictions of being a marginalised identity. The attraction of passing lies in the hope of reaching a destination at which the previously illegitimate body may become legitimate, the marked body may become discreet, the socially and culturally determined body may become an abstract, free body. The desire to pass is the desire to make less visible a stigmatised identity…

Read the entire article here.