Mixed Race Studies

Introduction: Passing, Imitations, Crossings

Humanities Research
Volume XVI. Number 1 (2010)

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

When it was revealed that Anglo-Australian writer Helen Darville had passed as Ukrainian to publish a novel about the Holocaust, there was much public and scholarly debate about the nature of identity and the meaning of multiculturalism. Such ‘passing’ controversies have the capacity to unsettle everyday perceptions about personhood and about social classifications and identifications. The essays collected in this special issue of Humanities Research, ‘Passing, Imitations, Crossings’, explore the theme and act of ‘passing’ in a range of social, historical and cultural contexts. Put simply, passing is a type of border crossing, one that normally involves a movement from social disadvantage to advantage or from a socially stigmatised position to one that grants some privilege, or at least allows avoidance or evasion of group classification. Passing is distinct from other identity performances in that it generally refers to a surreptitious transgression of widely accepted social practices. That is, the passer normally masks the fact of his or her ‘true’ identity—he or she might rely on subterfuge or might remove him or herself from a telling context or simply suppress information that might lead to disclosure of his or her identity—in order to cross social boundaries. In the case of African-Americans, passing for white historically entailed crossing the social divide that separated black and white according to changing cultural, scientific and legal measurements of what constituted racial identity. As St Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton observed in their study of African-American social life in Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s, ‘there are thousands of Negroes whom neither colored nor white people can distinguish from full-blooded whites, it is understandable that in the anonymity of the city many Negroes “pass for white” daily, both intentionally and unintentionally’. The prospect of passing multiplies in societies in which the often anonymous flow of people sets the scene for opportunism, masquerade and other forms of role-playing. There are women who have cross-dressed as male to publish books or participate in war and gays and lesbians who have passed as straight to avoid homophobia. There are those who pass out of necessity, to escape war or life-threatening discrimination, and those who pass for greater gain or simply for the thrill of experiencing life on the ‘other side’, as passing provides the opportunity to temporarily or permanently depart from a designated identity.

The transport and communications revolution that took place in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and in the early decades of the twentieth centuries—a time also of great movement and mixing of diverse social groups in American cities, as well as a period of new strictures and the terrors of lynching—created a fertile context for passing. The many fictional and sociological recordings of African-Americans who ‘passed as white’ to cross the colour line, from the middle of the nineteenth century through to the 1950s and 1960s—when African-Americans began to win civil rights—suggests how prevalent the act was in a US context. In his encyclopedic study of ‘inter-racial’ themes in US history, Werner Sollors differentiates the passer from the parvenu (the social climber or upstart). While the act of passing potentially encompasses ‘the crossing of any line that divides social groups’—and Everett V. Stonequist argues that ‘passing is found in every race situation where the subordinate race is held in disesteem’—Sollors’ study locates the phenomenon firmly in US social history. In particular, Sollors connects passing with the burden of racial ancestry for the descendents of slaves. While the general expectation is that newly arrived immigrants will gradually assimilate, the descendents of slaves—in what Sollors calls America’s ‘hypodescent’ system—have been treated as members of a caste. African-Americans have been subject to a form of ‘ancestor-counting’ that reduces personhood to a racial part…

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“Recoil” or “Seize”?: Passing, Ekphrasis and “Exact Expression” in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture
Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2001

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

Part One: Deep Nothing

Mona Lisa’s famous smile is a thin mouth receding into shadow. Her expression, like her puffy eyes, is hooded. The egglike head with its enormous plucked brow seems to pillow on the abundant, self-embraced Italian bosom. What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear.

—Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia’s analysis of “Mona Lisa,” the “world’s most famous painting” (155), plays on the ambiguous meaning of the spectacle—the visual image—in reading and writing practices. “Mona Lisa,” for Paglia, is an exemplary instance of the fascination and the anxiety surrounding the menacing power of the visual in Western epistemologies. She is an icon that is not only, as Paglia writes, “eternally watching” (154), she is also eternally watched. The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile displays but also dissembles the narcissism attributed to the feminised image. The portrait is often read as a nothing in and of itself but a something if it gestures, as the Mona Lisa’s smile appears to, towards the unreadable. Traditionally a sign of the “Mona Lisa”‘s intangibility, the smile in Paglia’s reading autoerotically evokes elusiveness through secrecy and distance (“receding into shadow”). The “Mona Lisa” wallows in this solipsism: she is “self-embraced” and enormous within the enclosure. Characteristically, Paglia’s polemic repudiates a more mysterious Mona Lisa beyond the surface of the painting, or a “thinking” woman who possesses an unreadable, interior, depth which transcends the limitations of the body. Her trivialisation of the much studied mysterious smile as hiding “nothing” is contradicted, however, by a close-up reading of the painting’s depth; she emphasises the “thin mouth receding into shadow,” the “hooded” eyes and the pillowed “brow.” The portrait overall evinces a grim determination to efface the representation of the feminine as vagina dentata, the toothed vagina or castrating woman. A disappearing line, the image retains its menacing reputation. For Paglia, the Mona Lisa’s threat is that she passes as an enigma.

Paglia’s ekphrasis of the famous face is of a partly open, partly closed surface. The description of deep “nothing” threatens the authority of the looking subject and is also thoroughly engaged in the pleasure of reading. According to Susan Stewart, it is an alluring opacity which places the human face at the centre of representations of subjectivity. “Because it is invisible,” writes Stewart, “the face becomes gigantic with meaning and significance” (125). The face is only ever visible to the other and it is a visibility that is elusive, revealing “a depth and profundity which the body itself is not capable of” (125). The eyes and mouth create the appearance of “depth,” as “openings onto fathomlessness, they engender the fearful desire to ‘read’ the expression of the face, for this reading is never apparent from the surface alone; it is continually confronted by the correction of the other” (127). The face appears to withhold its full meaning through openings such as the eyes and the mouth, stimulating the reader’s questing gaze which is always disrupted and fragmented by the broken surface. The act of looking, for Paglia and Stewart, delineates a process between subject and object which does not get beyond the surface but which generates meaning nonetheless…

…The passer is an objectified subject (for example black, female, homosexual) who refashions identity according to a superficial reading, or surface impression. In order to pass, the passer manipulates the body and the gaze so as to become legitimate. For example, the lightskinned black who passes for white synecdochically substitutes one part of the body (i.e., white skin) for the complete body (i.e., white identity). Passing for white utilises white skin as a part that stands in for a non-white body. This draws attention to two important aspects of racial identity. Firstly, the visible surface of the body is not necessarily a reliable or stable signifier of the body as a conclusively knowable entity. Secondly and contradictorily, for the passer, as an otherwise marginalised (because racialised) subject, the body’s visible surface becomes the central locus of an epistemology of identity, precisely because the body is misread as white. For the opportunistic passer, white skin functions as the point of a fraudulent entry into proper subjectivity and this inauguration (based on part not whole) destabilises the meaning of subjectivity per se. The white-looking-black proves the primacy and the ubiquity of skin as a visual surface that registers individuals as an identity, as the passer’s skin becomes a surface which dissembles a personal and social “black” history. In this sense, passing-for-white relies on skin as a bodily limit that opens up the possibility and privilege of being read and treated as white (and as a mainstream subject) but also punishingly closes the body’s past, its black heritage and history…

…Part Two: Reading and Writing the Passer

The passer is thus an enigma, a subject who is marked through his/her indeterminacy and whose attempt to escape categorisation is made visible in the passing narrative. This tension is explored in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), a novella which thematises both the racial and sexual passer (201). Passing is the story of two women, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, who are reunited after a long separation. Irene who occasionally passes for white tells Clare’s, the permanent passer’s, story. Irene lives in Harlem with her husband and her two sons where she does conscientious “race work” for the black community. Once childhood friends in their hometown Chicago, Irene and Clare are accidentally reunited while Irene is holidaying in Chicago and visiting her father. It is on this occasion that Irene discovers that Clare is passing for white and married to a racist white financier, John Bellew. Disturbed at finding Clare is passing for white, Irene discourages Clare’s desire for renewed friendship even though Irene can, and occasionally does, pass for white herself. Irene’s passing position is to some extent faceless (as narrator Irene evades self-description) whilst Clare’s passing body is obsessively and erotically pictured. In Passing, the permanent passer is spectacularised through the gaze of the casual passer who already partly knows what he/she looks for. As Edelman writes: “the fact of our ability to catch a glimpse of it [the faceless face of the homosexual] here bespeaks the possibility that we might not have done so had we not been prepared to identify what otherwise has the ability to ‘pass'” (219). Irene’s evasion is, typically, unsustainable: Clare eventually follows Irene back to Harlem where she becomes dangerously involved with Irene, her family and the “black” community. It is there that Clare’s hidden racial identity is eventually outed to her white husband. This outing, or what Butler refers to as a “killing judgment” (175), threatens Irene’s exposure and climaxes in her murder of Clare…

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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.