Economies of Passing: Identity Lessons and Tragedy

Passing denominates a process wherein an individual (or in fiction, a literary or cinematic character) uses an identity strategy of mimesis to obtain an advantage in the eyes of the dominant forces in whatever specific society. This chapter analyzes a variety of cases of passing in literature and cinema. Although initially passing referred to a transgression of the boundaries between blackness and whiteness, this identity strategy of conformity came to be used in order to transgress class, gender, age boundaries as well as ideological or national imposed borderlines between people. Passing challenges the hetero-normativity of a capitalist, nationalist and gender-biased nation such as the USA. The corpus of text used in this article does suggest that the social and ideological pressures authors and film makers operate under. The texts chip away at hetero-normativity, they challenge the hegemonic version of identity performance, but the unproblematic success for the minority subject in question is still to come.