• DOI:10.2307/465163
• Corpus ID: 147204862

Reading the intersection of race and gender in narratives of passing

@article{Smith1994ReadingTI,
  title={Reading the intersection of race and gender in narratives of passing},
  author={Valerie Smith},
  journal={Diacritics},
  year={1994},
  volume={24},
  pages={43-57}
}

• Valerie Smith
• Published 22 January 1994
• Art, Sociology
• Diacritics

Stories of racial passing have long captivated the attention of American viewers and readers.1 These accounts of characters who are "legally" black yet light-skinned enough to live as white have fascinated the American imagination for a variety of reasons. I suspect that they compel, at least in part, because they force readers and viewers to confront conflicts raised but inadequately explored in the classic texts within the genre. In this essay I consider some of these paradoxes as sites that reveal the interconnections among race, class, and gender in the US context. I locate passing within the discourse of intersectionality because although it is generally motivated by class considerations (people pass primarily in order to partake of the wider opportunities available to those in power) and constructed in racial terms (people describe the passing person as wanting to be white, not wanting to be rich), its consequences are distributed differentially on the basis of gender (women in narrative are more likely to be punished for passing than are men).2 I begin by showing how the hierarchization of race and gender in John Stahl's Imitation of Life (1934) reinscribes the conventions of the genre and manipulates spectatorial allegiances. I argue that a reading informed by the theory of intersectionality resists such a narrative and emotional logic.3 In the second section, I discuss two recent works that problematize the assumptions of the passing plot: Julie Dash's Illusions (1982) and Charles Lane's True Identity (1991). These newer texts presuppose to some degree the intersectionality of race and gender, and thereby construct passing as a potentially subversive activity. The narrative trajectories of classic passing texts are typically predetermined; they so fully naturalize certain givens that they mask a range of contradictions inherent within them. For instance, they presuppose that characters who pass for white are betrayers of