Excerpt from "It Takes One to Know One: Passing and Communities of Common Interest" by Amy Robinson

"In this essay, I will argue that identity politics is figured as a skill of reading by African American and/or gay and lesbian spectators of the cultural performance of passing. Indeed, what the in-group recognizes in the passing subject corroborates what Marilyn Frye proposes in The Politics of Reality: "What lesbians see is what makes them lesbians." (Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, California, 1983), p.173) Disrupting the conventional dyad of passer and dupe with a third term-- the in-group clairvoyant-- the pass can be regarded as a triangular theater of identity. Considered as a hostile encounter between two ways of reading, the pass offers competing rules of recognition in the place of discrete essences of "natural" identities. In an academic milieu in which identity and identity politics remain at the forefront of a battle over legitimate critical and/or political acts, the social practice of passing offers a productive framework through which to reimagine the contours of this debate.

To imagine identity politics as a skill of reading is to replace the inadequate dichotomy of visibility and invisibility with an acknowledgement of multiple codes of intelligibility. If we shift from a politics of substance to a politics of optics, identity itself no longer possesses the the reassuring signs of ontological distinction that we are accustomed to reading. In this sense, however, a study on passing broaches an archaic notion of identity. For 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. In the absence of this ancient covenant, this essay asks how it is possible to preserve the value of situated knowledges..."

© 1994 by The University of Chicago. All excerpts appear in Critical Inquiry, Volume 20, Number 4 (Summer 1994). This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or reduplication of this text in other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.

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