Introduction:

The Politics of Passing

ELAINE K. GINSBERG

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100 DOLLARS REWARD. Will be given for the apprehension of my negro Ed-
mund Kenney. He has straight hair, and complexion so nearly white that it is
believed a stranger would suppose there was no African blood in him. He was
with my boy Dick a short time since in Norfolk, and offered for sale ... , but
escaped under the pretence of being a white man.-Richmond Whig, 6 January
18 36

Love Hurts: Brandon Teena was a woman who lived and loved as a man. she was
killed for carrying it off. - Village Voice, 19 April 1994

slave owner placing the above ad, typical of many seen in

t:7 antebellum newspapers, announces two aspects of Edmund Ken-
ney's identity in the phrase "my negro": Kenney's legal status as property
and his legal race as Negro. That Kenney's legal status was an imposed,
socially constructed identity is self-evident; that his race was also im-
posed and socially constructed is not. To his owner, and under Virginia
law, Kenney's race was Negro. No matter that Kenney's physical ap-
pearance made it obvious that his legally invisible white ancestors likely
outnumbered the African and that "a stranger" would see a white, and
presumably free, man. The law and the social custom that defined Kenney
as a Negro and a slave privileged that "African blood" -invisible on the
surface of the body-over the obviously dominant and visible heritage
that would cause a "stranger" to assume Kenney is both white and free.
Thus Kenney's creation of a new "white" identity-that is, his "pass-
ing" -was a transgression not only of legal boundaries (that is, from
slave to freeman) but of cultural boundaries as well. Kenney and the
unknown thousands of others who passed out of slavery moved from a
category of subordination and oppression to one of freedom and priv-
ilege, a movement that interrogated and thus threatened the system of
 Elaine K. Ginsberg

racial categories and hierarchies established by social custom and legiti-

mated by the law.

Teena Brandon, biologically and legally female, wanted to live as a man. As

Brandon Teena, he moved in early fall 1993 to Falls City, Nebraska, where,

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with no knowledge of Brandon's origins, the young people saw a slightly
built but interesting young man who was attractive to women. Ironically,
Brandon's passing was definitively revealed upon his arrest for forgery. The
arresting sheriff remarked that Brandon's gender was ambiguous: "When
you looked at her you couldn't really tell. she was a good looking person
either way." Yet Brandon's passing was convincing enough that, even after
the local law enforcement officers and some angry men exposed him, both
legally and literally, women still insisted that he was "one of the nicest men"
they had ever met and the "best boyfriend" they had ever dated. Gender
identity in this instance, like racial identity in the case of Edmund Kenney,
has a dual aspect. It is from one perspective performative, neither con-
stituted by nor indicating the existence of a "true self" or core identity. But,
like racial identity, gender identity is bound by social and legal constraints
related to the physical body. Brandon was able for a time to pass success-
fully; and the young women who dated Brandon remember "him" (they
continue to use the male pronoun) as an attentive and loving young man.
But the law and social custom insist on the relationship between an individ-
ual's gender identity and his or her physical being, and when that relation-
ship is subverted, the cultural logic ofgender categories-and privileges-is
threatened. The two young men who, at a party on Christmas Eve, angrily
exposed Brandon's female body allegedly shot and killed Brandon on New
Year's Day. Thus it seems that Brandon's murder was a tragic consequence
of a female's transgression and usurpation of male gender and sexual roles. 1
As the stories of Edmund Kenney and Brandon Teena illustrate, pass-
ing is about identities: their creation or imposition, their adoption or re-
jection, their accompanying rewards or penalties. Passing is also about the
boundaries established between identity categories and about the individ-
ual and cultural anxieties induced by boundary crossing. Finally, passing
is about specularity: the visible and the invisible, the seen and the unseen.

The genealogy of the term passing in American history associates it with

the discourse of racial difference and especially with the assumption of a

2
Introduction

fraudulent "white" identity by an individual culturally and legally de-

fined as "Negro" or black by virtue of a percentage of African ancestry.
As the term metaphorically implies, such an individual crossed or passed
through a racial line or boundary-indeed trespassed-to assume a new
identity, escaping the subordination and oppression accompanying one

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identity and accessing the privileges and status of the other. Enabled by
a physical appearance emphasizing "white" features, this metaphysical
passing necessarily involved geographical movement as well; the individ-
ual had to leave an environment where his or her "true identity" -that is,
parentage, legal status, and the like-was known to find a place where it
was unknown. By extension, "passing" has been applied discursively to
disguises of other elements of an individual's presumed "natural" or
"essential" identity, including class, ethnicity, and sexuality, as well as
gender, the latter usually effected by deliberate alterations of physical
appearance and behavior, including cross-dressing. Not always associated
with a simple binary, some instances of passing, as illustrated by the
s
"Spanish masquerade" of George Harris in Uncle Tom Cabin, demon-
strate the multiplicity of racial or related identity categories into which
one might pass. Nor is the pass always permanent; it may be brief,
situational, or intermittent, as in the case of Nella Larsen's protagonists,
James Weldon Johnson's "ex-coloured man," or women, such as Loreta
Velazquez, the "Woman in Battle," who cross-dressed temporarily to
enter professions or occupations or to seek experiences barred to them as
females. And although the cultural logic of passing suggests that passing
is usually motivated by a desire to shed the identity of an oppressed group
to gain access to social and economic opportunities, the rationale for
passing may be more or less complex or ambiguous and motivated by
other kinds of perceived rewards. Both history and literature present
numerous examples. Jazz musician Billy Tipton, whose female sex was
revealed only upon his death in 1989 at the age of seventy-four, lived his
professional life as a man, presumably because his chosen profession was
not open to women, but lived his personal life as a man as well, conceal-
ing the fact of his female sex even from his three adopted sons. John
Howard Griffin and Grace Halsell, both white journalists, passed for black
by temporarily darkening their skin to write exposes of racism. Adrian
Piper, who tells her own story in the last essay in this collection, prefers to
identify with the cultural heritage of her black ancestry although her

3
 Elaine K. Ginsberg

visible appearance leads most people to assume that she is white "passing
for black." Ann Powers, writing in the Village Voice, has chronicled the
emergence of "the queer straight," a product of the "political impact of a
rejuvenated gay and lesbian movement" (74) which in some quarters has
made an androgynous and sexually ambiguous look "chic."2

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Whatever the rationale, both the process and the discourse of passing
interrogate the ontology of identity categories and their construction. For
the possibility of passing challenges a number of problematic and even
antithetical assumptions about identities, the first of which is that some
identity categories are inherent and unalterable essences: presumably one
cannot pass for something one is not unless there is some other, pre-
passing, identity that one is. 3 Further, passing forces reconsideration of
the cultural logic that the physical body is the site of identic intelligibility;
as noted by Amy Robinson, "The 'problem' of identity, a problem to
which passing owes the very possibility of its practice, is predicated on the
false promise of the visible as an epistemological guarantee" (716). Fi-
nally, allowing the possibility that "maleness" or "whiteness" or ethnicity
can be performed or enacted, donned or discarded, exposes the anxieties
about status and hierarchy created by the potential of boundary trespass-
ing. For both the process and the discourse of passing challenge the
essentialism that is often the foundation of identity politics, a challenge
that may be seen as either threatening or liberating but in either instance
discloses the truth that identities are not singularly true or false but
multiple and contingent.
As illustrated by the ease with which assimilation has so often been
accomplished, class, ethnic origin, and sexual orientation are not difficult
to enact or to disguise. Race and gender, however, present other com-
plications. First, cultural logic presupposes a biological foundation of race
visibly evident in physical features such as facial structures, hair color and
texture, and skin color-what Frantz Fanon has called the "epidermal
schema" of racial difference (112). Gender, even when recognized as a
pattern of culturally constructed behaviors discursively produced, has
been assumed linked to biological features that distinguish the binary set
male / female. Cultural associations of the physical body with both race
and gender, and the putative visibility of these two identity categories,
thus make race and gender passing seem more problematic than other in-
stances of passing. Second, the status and privilege accompanying "white-

4
Introduction

ness" and "maleness" highlight the similarities of black-to-white race

passing and female-to-male gender passing as sources of cultural anxiety,
for both "not-white" and "woman" are sites of difference that affirm the
priority of "white" and "man" in the hegemonic ideology.4 Further, both
visibility and difference (or "otherness") are linked by what Marjorie

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Garber describes as the necessity for the "hegemonic cultural imaginary"
to see difference to interpret it and "to guard against a difference that
might otherwise put the identity of one's own position in question" (130).
Finally, the genealogy of the concept in American culture reveals the
origins of passing in the sexual exploitation of black slave women by
white men. The children born of these encounters inherited the abject
status of the mother even as, through successive generations, a visible,
albeit culturally inauthentic, "whiteness" was reproduced from "black"
female bodies. At the same time, to insure the reproduction as well as the
purity of his whiteness, the white man also needed to exert control over
the sexuality of both the white woman and the black man, effectively
enslaving the former and emasculating the latter. Consequently, in Amer-
ican history, race, sex, and gender have been inextricably linked, first
through a system of slavery that placed white men in control of the
productive labor of black men and the productive and reproductive labor
ofboth black and white women, and then nationally through an economic
and political system and a cultural ideology that established a fundamen-
tally racist and sexist hierarchy of privilege and oppression. Thus, al-
though the essays in this volume consider, in addition to black/ white and
female / male passing, some issues of national identification and of sex-
uality where those issues impinge on the political questions related to race
and gender, the assumption underlying this volume is that critical to the
process and discourse of "passing" in American history and in the Ameri-
can cultural imaginary are the status and privileges associated with being
white and being male. Focusing on race and gender and demonstrating in
addition the ways that race, gender, nationality, and sexuality are imbri-
cated, the essays in this collection therefore expose the contingencies of
all identities as well as the "politics" inherent in their construction and
imposition.

The epistemology of the concept of "race" and its specific deployment in

American history reveal the discursive process that has operated in the
 Elaine K. Ginsberg

construction of that identity category and the ways putative racial differ-
ences have served social and political ends. Historians of race remind us
that, although some concept of race has existed throughout time as "an
organizing, explanatory principle, what the term refers to-that is, the
origin and basis of 'racial differences' -has not remained constant" (Out-

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law 61-62).5 In popular discourse, racial categories refer not only to
persons with discernible and visible physical characteristics such as skin
color but also to persons who share language, nationality, and religion.
Often used as "ethnic intensifiers,"6 racial categories have throughout
history been created for the deliberate purpose of exploitation, domina-
tion, or persecution of one group by another. In the American colonies, as
the English imported more and more Africans as slave labor, it became
important not only to emphasize the physical differences between them-
selves and the Africans but also to fuse these differences with religion,
nationality, and morality. According to Winthrop Jordan, for the English,
"vis-a-vis the Negro ... to be Christian was to be civilized rather than
barbarous, English rather than African, white rather than black" (94).
Christian, English, and white supremacy were thus all affirmed and
justified. 7
Marion Rust's discussion in this collection of the autobiography of
Olaudah Equiano, an early (1789) example of the slave narrative, demon-
strates the process through which that African in particular internalized
the dominant ideology described by Jordan. Initially viewing whiteness
as disfigurement and the English as monsters, Equiano comes not only to
accept the ideologies of his imperialist masters but also to employ and
articulate their economic ethics. The former slave becomes slave owner,
and the African, Englishman, substituting national identification for com-
plexion as he passes from slave to imperialist. The ruptures in the text,
however, as Rust suggests, are warnings that for the African, integral
subjectivity is not so easily maintained; the danger is always that Equi-
ano's self-mastery will disintegrate, forcing him back into subalternity
and silence.
In a study of the legal history of race identity in the United States,
Cheryl Harris observes:

By the 1660'S, the especially degraded status of Blacks as chattel slaves was
recognized by law. Between 1680 and 1682, the first slave codes appeared,

6
Introduction

codifying the extreme deprivations of liberty already existing in social prac-

tice. . . . Racial identity was further merged with stratified social and legal
status: "Black" racial identity marked who was subject to enslavement; "white"
racial identity marked who was "free" or, at minimum, not a slave. The ideolog-
ical and rhetorical move from "slave" and "free" to "Black" and "white" as

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polar constructs marked an important step in the social construction of race.
(17 18 )

The ideological and rhetorical equivalence of slavelblack and freel

white was undermined, however, by the generations of miscegenation
that made invisible in some individuals those ever smaller percentages of
African heritage that would have visibly marked them as "slave," en-
abling legally "black" men and women, like Edmund Kenney or Ellen
Craft, to pass as white and free. 8 Had emancipation brought full social and
legal equality, the story of race passing might have ended in the 1860s. But
in the aftermath of the Civil War, numerous legal as well as cultural
barriers were erected to full citizenship for persons defined as "Negro."
And well past the middle of the twentieth century, some states defined
Negro as someone with a single Negro great-grandparent; in three states,
one great-great-grandparent was sufficient. 9 As Harris observes, "In a
society structured on racial subordination, white privilege became an
expectation and . . . whiteness became the quintessential property for
personhood" (1730). Accompanying any such privilege, like the right to
join an exclusive club, is the right to determine who else shall be permit-
ted to join or, to put it another way, the right to exclude, the right to
define who would be deemed "not white." The Supreme Court of the
United States, in the 1896 Plessy Y. Ferguson decision, confirmed that a
person with one-eighth Negro ancestry could be legally defined as Negro
under Louisiana law, even though, as in the case of Plessy, that ancestry
was not physically visible. lO For the white majority, that decision had
important consequences.

At the individual level, recognizing oneself as "white" necessarily assumes

premises based on white supremacy: It assumes that Black ancestry in any
degree, extending to generations far removed, automatically disqualifies claims
to white identity, thereby privileging "white" as unadulterated, exclusive, and
rare. Inherent in the concept of "being white" was the right to own or hold
whiteness to the exclusion and subordination of Blacks. (Harris 1737)

7
 Elaine K. Ginsberg

Although little is documented about the actual extent of race passing

by blacks in the United States, the specter of passing derives its power not
from the number of instances of passing but as a signification that em-
bodies the anxieties and contradictions of a racially stratified society. This
specter of race passing-enabled by what Joel Williamson calls "invisible

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blackness" -threatened the security of white identity, on both a societal
and an individual level. Although for the legally or culturally black
individual race passing is an attempt to move from the cultural margin to
the center, from the perspective of a dominant race, passing is deception,
an attempt to claim status and privilege falsely. But when "race" is no
longer visible, it is no longer intelligible: if "white" can be "black," what
is white? Race passing thus not only creates, to use Garber's term, a
category crisis (16) but also destabilizes the grounds of privilege founded
on racial identity. "Identity only becomes an issue," Kobena Mercer has
written, "when it is in crisis, when something assumed to be fixed, co-
herent and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty"
(43). William Craft, for example, in his account of his and his wife's
escape from slavery, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), plays
on white anxieties about racial identity by interpolating into his story
accounts of white children deceptively sold into slavery on the pretense
that they were "black." Harriet Beecher Stowe also warns of this pos-
s
sibility, suggesting in the Key to Uncle Tom Cabin that a system that
traded in light-skinned slaves would eventually tempt an enterprising
entrepreneur to sell white orphans as octoroons.
The arbitrariness of racial classifications as well as their political moti-
vation lead Henry Louis Gates Jr. to define race as merely a metaphor,
"the ultimate trope of difference" ("Writing 'Race' " 5). Nevertheless, the
reality of racism and its effects cannot be denied. According to Toni
Morrison, who echoes Gates, "Race has become metaphorical-a way of
referring to and disguising forces, events, classes and expressions of social
decay and economic division far more threatening to the body politic
than biological 'race' ever was" (63). Morrison argues that one effect of
such threats was the use of the Africanist character and the Africanist
presence as surrogate to enable white authors "to limn out and enforce
the invention and implications of whiteness" (52). In a different approach
to similar issues, Katharine Nicholson Ings's discussion of E. D. E. N.
Southworth's The Hidden or, Capitola the Madcap (1888) demon-

8
Introduction

strates how that white Southerner and prolific writer of sentimental nov-
els, in a book replete with masquerades and disguises, resemanticizes
"whiteness" as "blackness" through the old black woman "Hat" and the
novel's white heroine, Capitola Black ("Cap"). The novel also represents
a meditation on identity and specularity and thus, perhaps unconsciously,

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on the visibility of race and gender identity. As such, Southworth's novel
destabilizes both racial and gender expectations as well as the moral order
of sentimental fiction. Written almost three quarters of a century later,
John Howard Griffin's autobiographical account of his experiment in race
passing, Black Like Me (1961), is a conscious meditation on black oppres-
sion and white privilege. For that white author, however, as Gayle Wald
argues, passing becomes also an unconscious journey to self-knowledge,
a way of discovering the meanings of his own white racial identity and his
own implication in the system of oppression he sets out to expose. Wald
foregrounds Griffin's internalization of the "Southern economy of spec-
tatorship under the dominant social order" and demonstrates how his
experiment in passing "proves instructive in these 'invisible' laws of
looking, under which spectatorship is a function of economic and social
power and hence dependent on race, class, and gender."
One of the assumed effects of a racist society is the internalization, by
members of the oppressed race, of the dominant culture's definitions and
characterizations. This is the context in which the literature of race pass-
ing has most often been read. This body of literature as traditionally
discussed includes the narratives of those who escaped slavery by passing
as white, in addition to works of fiction and nonfiction by both white and
black authors, some of which complicate identity issues with multiple
boundary crossings, both literal and figurative. Although some critics
have accused black authors who write passing fiction of pandering to
white audiences by portraying passing as a source of anxiety and aliena-
tion for the passer,11 it is significant that most of these authors were
individuals for whom the ambiguity of their racial identity was likely the
source of their creative concern. 12 As one of the characters in Nella
Larsen's Passing observes, perhaps echoing her creator's thoughts: "It's
funny about 'passing.' We disapprove of it and at the same time condone
it. It excites our contempt and yet we rather admire it. We shy away from
it with an odd kind of revulsion, but we protect it" (18;-86). Samira
Kawash foregrounds the fallacy of any singular interpretation of the

9
 Elaine K. Ginsberg

passing narrative; she argues that "blackness or whiteness as they emerge

in the passing narrative belie the possibility of identity or authenticity that
would allow one to be unequivocally black or white." Her essay on James
Weldon Johnson's Autobiography ofan Ex-Coloured Man (1912) demon-
strates that neither the "blackness" nor the "whiteness" of the narrator of

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that novel is intrinsic; both are merely specular identifications, acts of
volition accomplished through "studious spectatorship." Following this
view, "all race identity is ... the product of passing." Nevertheless, once
raised, the specter of "blackness" haunts Johnson's narrator, so that he
fears "that something invisible in himself will give him away." That
something, Kawash argues, is "the mark of difference itself, the empty
signifier of race." Marrying a white woman and fathering white children
paradoxically insures the "authenticity" of his white identity, even as he
expresses some regret for "having sold [his] birthright for a mess of
pottage."
Although at first glance James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956) might
not seem appropriately a passing narrative, in her discussion of that novel
and its central (white) character Valerie Rohy argues that Baldwin's novel
is a passing narrative in that it "articulates the ways in which identities,
including 'nationality,' 'race,' and 'sexuality,' are retrospective, indeed
nostalgic constructions." In this novel, race is figured as nationality,
Giovanni's swarthy color, his Italian nationality, and marginalized class
status contrasting with David's blonde whiteness and American privilege.
David's conflicted sexuality alludes to the homosexual subtexts of Nella
Larsen's Passing as well as the erotic connections between Johnson's
narrator and his white patron. The knowing glance of a sailor who
"reads" David as gay and David's panicked reaction recall the specular
identification of the passing black. As David considers his return to
America, "home" represents a "nostalgic ideal of secure gender and
sexual identity," a coherence that can never be attained. Baldwin's novel,
writes Rohy, is a text that "poses questions of nationalism, nostalgia, and
the constitution of racial and sexual subjects in terms that are particularly
resonant for contemporary identity politics."
As a psychoanalytic concept, nostalgia suggests an imaginary pre-
Oedipal and prediscursive state of subjective wholeness, an originary
identity that cannot be recovered. As a longing for a lost culture or sense
of belonging, nostalgia is an element in Nella Larsen's novels Quicksand

10
Introduction

(1928) and Passing (1929) as well as in Johnson's Autobiography ofan Ex-

Coloured Man. While in Europe, both Helga Crane and "Ex-Coloured
Man" experience a strong desire to return "home" to the black commu-
nity. To suggest that fictional race passing may be read as a metaphor for
alienation and self-denial, however, is to ignore the rich complexity of

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this genre and its permutations. "Home," a mythical place of coherent
identity, turns out to be for these characters, as for Baldwin's David, a
phantasm. And although the nostalgia of Passing's fair-skinned, blond-
haired Clare Kendry for her black community would seem to confirm the
equation of passing with loss, Martha Cutter's essay on passing as a
narrative and textual strategy in Larsen's fiction persuasively argues that
for Larsen, passing is a tactic that allows an individual creative subjec-
tivity. Helga Crane, protagonist of Larsen's first novel, Quicksand, seek-
ing an elusive unitary identity corresponding to her essential self, be-
comes trapped in a stifling role as the wife of a country preacher. Clare
Kendry, on the other hand, refuses the constraints of a singular identity
and uses passing as a subversive strategy to transcend the limitations of a
racist, classist, and sexist society. Although some have pointed to Clare's
death as demonstrating the penalties of passing for what one is not, the
two novels may be read as inverse images of each other: Quicksand
illustrates the consequences of a fixed and limited identity; Passing leaves
its characters and its readers in a destabilized universe in which identities,
and texts, refuse suffocating closure.
Although the discourse of race passing and discussions of race-passing
narratives traditionally assume a black/ white binary and a related class
system, complications of that dichotomy in fiction belie any such simple
assumptions. In Larsen's Passing, for example, Irene Redfield comments
that she is often assumed to be "an Italian, a Spaniard, a Mexican or a
gipsy" (150), anyone of which identities might enable access to social
privileges that her black identity would not. A vignette in an earlier text,
however-the Spanish masquerade of George Harris in Uncle Tom s
Cabin (1852)-more pointedly exposes the fictions grounding rigid racist
and classist assumptions. Possessed of a "fine set of European features"
and light-skinned enough to pass as white, George confounds the logic of
passing and darkens his skin to pass as a "Spanish" gentleman in order to
help his wife and child to freedom. Julia Stern argues that this brief
episode in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel presents that author's "most

II
 Elaine K. Ginsberg

subtle meditation on race and domination in America." George's mas-

querade exposes the inability of his audience-representative of the rural
antebellum South-to read "otherness" in anything but black/white
terms. All that is needed for George's performance to be convincing are
the accoutrements of social status, which include, ironically, the atten-

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dance of a "slave" who in reality is a free black. Stern reminds us,
however, that America's most famous abolitionist author was also a sup-
porter of the plan to establish a colony in Africa for freed slaves. In
George's last speech in Uncle Tom's Cabin, he declaims: "I have no wish
to be an American, or to identify myself with them. It is with the op-
pressed, enslaved African race that I cast my lot" (608). It seems that
Stowe could not consciously envision an American society constructed on
the lesson taught by her own narrative-that racial identity is not only a
social construction but also unrelated to an individual's worthiness.
The sex-gender system of American society is a subtext in many pass-
ing narratives, beginning with slave narratives such as Harriet Jacobs's
Incidents in the Life ofa Slave Girl (1861), which records how the gender
of Harriet's light-skinned uncle allows him the mobility of flight in con-
trast to her freedom/ confinement in her grandmother's attic. It is re-
flected as well in stories such as Kate Chopin's "Desiree's Baby," in which
it is the mother who is mistakenly branded with the presumption of racial
impurity. Charles Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars (1900) demon-
strates the inability of Rena Walden to overcome the passivity of her
learned gender role to pass as white in South Carolina society along with
her brother. The complex imbrications of race and gender are reflected in
a number of passing narratives that combine race passing with cross-
s
dressing. Eliza Harris in Uncle Tom Cabin, light enough to pass for
white, dons boy's clothing and dresses her son as a girl to effect a dan-
gerous and courageous flight to freedom. But this subplot ends with Eliza
being recuperated in her appropriate gender role as George Harris's wife.
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom chronicles the real escape from
slavery of William Craft and his wife Ellen, whose light skin enabled her
disguise as an invalid (or in / valid) white man attended by a Negro
slave-in reality, her husband. Discussed by Ellen Weinauer in this book,
Ellen Craft's passing is a multiple boundary crossing, from black to
white, slave to freewoman, woman to man, wife to master. That a black
woman could make "a most respectable-looking [white] gentleman" con-

12
Introduction

founds utterly the cultural logic of specular identification and reveals the
performative fictions at the center of such categories. A close reading of
William Craft's narrative makes it clear, however, that for William to
claim his manhood, indeed his subjectivity, Ellen must return to her
"true" identity as "woman," a gender identity William underscores in

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recounting the "feminine" fears and frailties she displays both before and
after the successful escape. Freed from the legal system of slavery (and
from the legal prohibition against slave marriages), Ellen can inhabit the
subject position of "wife" to her true master, her husband.
Thus, although Henry Louis Gates wants to insist that race is "the
ultimate trope of difference," it can be argued that gender, in the arbitrari-
ness of its cultural prescriptions, is a trope of difference that shares with
race (especially in the context of black / white passing) a similar structure
of identity categories whose enactments and boundaries are culturally
policed. In most cultures, it is assumed that the distinctions between
"man" and "woman" are not only visible and readily discernible but also
inextricably related to the binary set male / female. Nevertheless, just as
the ontology of race exposes the contingencies of the categories "white"
and "black," so the ontology of gender exposes the essential inauthen-
ticity of "man" and "woman."13 Like race, gender is defined "within the
terms of a hegemonic cultural discourse" (Butler, Gender Trouhle 9).
Further, like race passing, gender passing creates category crisis as Garber
defines it: "a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes
permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently dis-
tinct) category to another" (16). The very real possibility of gender
passing-cross-dressing-thus is likely to threaten not only the security
of male identity, as race passing threatens the security of white identity,
but also, as does race passing, the certainties of identity categories and
boundaries. It is perhaps these threats that were responsible for the violent
reaction to Brandon Teena's passing. The recorded history of numerous
instances of cross-dressing women being prosecuted for fraud and decep-
tion illustrates the more usual cultural response to female "usurpation of
[male] rights and privileges" (Friedli 237).14
Given the asymmetry of privilege and power in most societies, it is not
difficult to understand the rationale for most female cross-dressing. When
women cross-dress, they usually do so to gain access to professional and
economic opportunities or to experiences seen as available only to men.

13
 Elaine K. Ginsberg

Two examples are jazz musician Billy Tipton and Salvador Sanchez, a
bullfighter, both of whom were revealed to be women, Tipton at his death
and Sanchez when he was gored by a bull in Pamplona. Although male
transvestites, like some women cross-dressers, may be committed to sub-
verting phallocentric gender constructions and constraints, their motiva-

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tions for cross-dressing obviously may also be more varied and complex.
There are those who, like Venus Xtravaganza in Jennie Livingston's 1992
film Paris Is Burning, express the essentialist notion that they are fe-
male "inside." Yet some theorists have suggested that "drag" not only is
not expressive of a desire to be a woman but may in reality be motivated
by a misogynistic impulse. Others have argued that, rather than being
subversive of gender binarism, male transvestism in reality reinscribes
gender norms and hierarchies. Madeline Kahn claims, however, that male
transvestites generally do not create a permanent female persona; the
male transvestite's interest is in the success of the illusion, which is not
complete until it is revealed as an illusion (14).15 Finally, no discussion
of gender identity can ignore the ways sexuality is implicated in gen-
der ambiguity-from the assumption that both female and male cross-
dressers are homosexual to the accusation that cross-dressing merely
reinscribes heterosexual norms, to the homophobia that is incited by the
"unveiling" of a cross-dressed individual. 16
Seeking access to economic opportunities, or even to the excitement of
adventures unavailable to them, some of the most famous cross-dressing
females in history have masqueraded as men to fight as soldiers, that most
masculine of professions. 17 The Female Review; or, Memoirs ofan Ameri-
can Young Lady (1797) tells the story of Deborah Sampson who fought
for eighteen months in the American Revolution until her sex was dis-
covered. The presentation of Sampson's story by Herman Mann illus-
trates how historically an attempt on the part of a female to transgress
categories, by assuming either the privileges or the visible accoutrements
of masculinity, has been seen as a subversive act that threatens the stability
of the social structures perpetuating male dominance. Mann "compares
enlisting as a soldier, an unnatural act in a woman, with civil war, an
unnatural event in society" (qtd. in Friedli 243). Thus, appropriately, the
American Civil War provides the context for the narrative of a cross-
dressing woman discussed in this collection by Elizabeth Young, Loreta
Introduction

Velazquez's The Woman in Battle (1876). Young argues that the impor-
tance of cross-dressing in this text "inheres in its figurative as well as
literal meanings" and that the "military masquerade functions . . . as a
metaphorical point of exchange for intersections among individual bodies
and the body politic in Civil War and Reconstruction America." Masquer-

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ading at various times as a Confederate soldier, a spy, or a pro-Union
woman, Velazquez crosses boundaries and borders between armies and
regions-North and South-as well as genders. Significantly, in her Con-
federate masquerade, Velazquez needs the presence of her male black
slave to authenticate "Lt. Buford's" "masculinity" as well as his social
position. Also embedded within this narrative of Civil War cross-dressing
is a protolesbian plot of same-sex seduction. Thus, read as a burlesque of
both Confederate manhood and virtuous Southern womanhood, The
Woman in Battle "makes visible the gender mythologies of the postwar
South." It exposes the truth that Southern masculinity is authenticated
only through the subordination and abjection of white women and black
men. Framing her discussion of Velazquez's narrative, Young also dem-
onstrates how the I 993 sex discrimination suit of Lauren Burgess against
the U.S. Department of the Interior for barring her participation in a Civil
War reenactment brings the complex implications of Velazquez's story
home to present-day America.
The historical occasion of the Civil War appropriately brings the dis-
cussion of passing back full circle to issues of race and identity. Adrian
Piper's autobiographical essay that closes this book relates her experi-
ences as a light-skinned woman who chooses to identify with her black
ancestry although she "looks," and is generally assumed to be, white. In
effect a mirror image of the traditional passing narrative, her account
foregrounds the threats to white complacency and security, as well as to
social privilege, that passing represents, for Piper's decision to "pass" as
black, to self-construct an identity perceived by a white majority as less
desirable, disrupts the assumptions of superiority that buttress white priv-
ilege and self-esteem. Piper demonstrates how challenging racial catego-
ries threatens those whose sense of self-worth depends on their racial
identity and the social status that accompanies it. She concludes that not
until "we have faced the full human and personal consequences of self-
serving, historically entrenched social and legal conventions that in fact

15
 Elaine K. Ginsberg

undermine the privileged interests they were designed to protect will we

be in a position to decide whether the very idea of racial classification is a
viable one in the first place."
In their focus on the phenomenon of passing, the essays in this collec-
tion reveal the political motivations inherent in the origins and mainte-

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nance of identity categories and boundaries. And they suggest as well the
especially well guarded boundaries demarcating race and gender. What
these essays also make clear, however, is the positive potential of passing
as a way of challenging those categories and boundaries. In its interroga-
tion of the essentialism that is the foundation of identity politics, passing
has the potential to create a space for creative self-determination and
agency: the opportunity to construct new identities, to experiment with
multiple subject positions, and to cross social and economic boundaries
that exclude or oppress.

Notes

I. Facts about the life and murder of Teena Brandon / Brandon Teena, as well as
quotes, are based on stories in the following news sources: New York Times 4 Jan-
uary 1994: A6; Des Moines Register 9 January 1994: I; Advocate 8 March 1994: 28-
30; Village Voice 19 April 1994: 24-30. These sources, plus letters in subsequent
issues of the Voice, variously characterize Brandon and Brandon's life, generally
reflecting societal uncertainty about transgendered individuals: Brandon is referred
to as a transvestite, cross-dresser, transsexual, or "stone butch," and headlines
featured such words as "charade" or "masquerade."
2. This discussion suggests the seriousness of purpose behind what I am calling
"passing"; it therefore does not include such performances as minstrelsy. Nor does it
consider instances of "camp" or "drag," parodies of gender in which the performer
intends for the viewer to finally "read," or see through, the performance. This
discussion also does not consider the case of transsexuals, those who wish to alter
their physical body surgically so that it more closely conforms to their felt gender
identity.
3. The OED defines "pass (for)" as "to be taken for, to be accepted, received, or
held in repute as. Often with the implication of being something else." The implica-
tion of this definition is that the vague "something else" is an irreducible "being" or
essence, a "true identity."
4. This is not to deny that other identities, such as "Christian" and "heterosex-

16
Introduction

ual," do not have great cultural exchange value. The focus here, however, is on
identity categories as they are related not only to privilege and status but also to
putative visibility.
5. For extensive discussions of the concept of "race," see Stepan, The Idea ofRace
in Science; Guillaumin, "The Idea of Race and Its Elevation to Autonomous, Scien-

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tific, and Legal Status"; and Outlaw, "Toward a Critical Theory of 'Race,'" and
other essays in Goldberg, ed., Anatomy ofRacism.
6. I take this phrase from an essay by Lawrence Wright, "One Drop of Blood," in
which he discusses the u.S. census and the political forces that have through the two
centuries of its existence affected the racial categories by which respondents were
classified.
7. Winthrop Jordan's massive study of race in America, White over Black, is the
most extensive history of black/ white social and legal relations before the 1960s. See
also Gossett, Race: The History ofan Idea in America. Cheryl I. Harris, "Whiteness as
Property," discusses the legal history of definitions of black and white and their
implications.
8. Jordan observes that it is impossible to know how many slaves escaped by
passing as white; passing depended on a "conspiracy of silence not only for the
individual but for a biracial society which had drawn a rigid color line based on
visibility" (174). Nevertheless, enough testimonies exist to suggest that it was not a
rare phenomenon. See also Williamson, New People, and Harris, "Whiteness as
Property."
9. This asymmetrical definition of race came to be known as the "one-drop rule";
its function, according to Paul Spickard, was to maintain "an absolute wall sur-
rounding white dominance" (16).
10. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) involved the claim of Plessy, whose heritage was
"seven eighths Caucasian and one eighth African ... that the mixture of colored
blood was not discernible in him, and that he was entitled to every recognition,
right, privilege and immunity secured to citizens of the United States of the white
race." The Supreme Court upheld Louisiana law defining Plessy as Negro and at the
same time sanctioned the constitutionality of "separate but equal" (Harris 1710).
II. Early examples are Bone, The Negro Novel in America, and Arthur Davis,
From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-l960. See also Washington, "The
Mulatta Trap: Nella Larsen's Women of the 1920'S," in Invented Lives.
12. Charles W. Chesnutt, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset,
for example, were all of mixed racial heritage.
13. On the ontology of "sex" and "gender," see Laqueur, Making Sex, and Fuss,
 Elaine K. Ginsberg

Essentially Speaking. On gender as cultural construction, see Butler, Gender Trouhle;

de Lauretis, Technologies ofGender; and Nicholson, "Interpreting Gender."
14. At times in the past, even when women were not attempting to pass as men
but merely adapting an item of men's clothing for ease and convenience, they have
been accused of usurping male privilege. For example, in America in the 1850s,

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when numbers of women began wearing trousers (called "bloomers," after Amelia
Bloomer, who popularized them), "there was a strong suspicion that trousers repre-
sented a usurpation of men's rights and prerogatives, and, as such, were an instru-
ment of the newly organized Women's Rights movement" (Luck 200).
15. For extensive discussions of cross-dressing, see Bullough and Bullough, Cross
Dressing, Sex, and Gender, and Garber, Vested Interests. Butler's discussion of Paris Is
Burning in Bodies That Matter also addresses the issue of the readability of drag.
16. In Neil Jordan's 1992 film The Crying Game, the unveiling of Dil's male body
causes in Fergus perhaps an extreme homophobic reaction: he becomes physically
ill.
17. See Wheelwright, Ama't0ns and Military Maids; Garber, Vested Interests; and
Bullough and Bullough, Cross Dressing.

18