Passing

Race Passing

Early uses of passing typically refer to race. Racial passing emerged as a plot device in many 19th- and early-20th-century novels. Often referred to as the “tragic mulatto” genre, novels such as Nella Larson's Passing (1928) featured mixed-raced, light-skinned protagonists who passed as white in an era in which the acknowledgment of “one drop” of “nonwhite” blood made them second-class citizens. Both in real life and in fiction, racial passing could expand economic opportunities and civil liberties for light-skinned African Americans and people of mixed racial ancestry. However, it often required a denial of family and heritage and carried a threat of exposure that could lead to ridicule, violence, and death.

Ethnic Passing

In public discussions about immigration, assimilation, and ethnicity at the turn of the century, American Jews were the target of anxieties about ethnic passing. Unlike racial minorities, Jews were not visibly marked as different from whites by skin color. The fear that Jews could easily assimilate into white culture, infiltrating and ultimately taking over elite “gentlemen's clubs” and financial institutions, generated the narrative trope of the wily “Jewish chameleon.” Anxiety about the passing abilities of Jews led to attempts to “root out” Jews in upper-class white society, usually by identifying them with specific ethnic markers of appearance and behavior and by surnames that “sounded Jewish.”

Gender Passing

Accounts of women who lived their lives as men in the 19th century provide examples of gender passing. These “passing women” adopted masculine personas in historical periods in which women had few rights and little mobility. As men, these individuals went to war, had successful careers, and if they had same-sex desires, married women. Beyond expanding freedoms, economic opportunities, and romantic possibilities, accounts suggest that adopting masculine identities allowed some women to realize their desire to become men. Transgender activists have reclaimed “passing women” as a precursor to transsexual and transgender identities.

Erving Goffman, Stigma, and Passing

The use of passing as a concept in sociological analysis derives from the work of Erving Goffman. In Stigma (1963), Goffman provides a framework for understanding how individuals manage two forms of stigmatized identities: discredited and discreditable. Individuals with discredited stigmas are visibly different in some way than what Goffman terms “normals,” either through physical manifestation of stigma, like a physical handicap, or through a sign recognizable as stigmatizing, such as a homeless person who has a dirty, disheveled appearance. In contrast, discreditable stigmas are not readily visible. However, individuals must adopt passing as a “normal” stigma management strategy in order to avoid being discredited, as in the case of the felon who lies about her or his prison record in a job interview. From Goffman's work has sprung a body of research analyzing the passing strategies of discredited groups, such as the physically disabled and the homeless, as well as discreditable groups, such as transsexuals and homosexuals.

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