Passing, Policing and the Economy of Sex

The African-American who crosses or resides on the color line, the woman who works and lives as a man, the homosexual who seems to be heterosexual, the "born criminal" whose character cannot be read, the "low born" mimic of the "well-bred," the person who is transgendered, and the alien who plays at being a "true American" make up a family of passing figures. Each of them was familiar to late 19th and early 20th century American audiences, and their descendants are with us yet.

This seminar is about passing--primarily as a different race, class, sexuality, or gender. It is equally about individual and national anxieties which reports of passing and related practices of surveillance beget. One set of practices types cultural minorities as sources of criminality, disorder, degeneracy and/or deviance; a second examines bodies, gestures, tastes, etc. for signs that differentiate "them" from "us"; a third pinpoints sexuality as the locus of (moral) health and disease; a fourth warns that corporeal differences are slippery and difficult for untrained eyes to detect, and it insists that an unremarkable appearance may disguise an "abnormal" appetite, "degenerate" character or "deadly" threat. Accordingly, this seminar is equally about ongoing efforts to teach mainstream Americans how to read. The pronounced aims of this reading lesson are to render unremarkable differences remarkable (i.e., visible and significant); to track and often circumscribe the movements of cultural minorities; and thus to assure "normal" Americans that they are safe and the reproduction of their kin(d) is assured. Nonetheless, because not all cultural differences are discernible, and because passing renders every identity uncertain, the very act of reading potentially triggers a more intimate form of anxiety, raising the question: am I really the character I seem? Our study of passing figures and policing strategies draws on a range of cultural practices (eg., fiction, law, bioscience, sexology, criminology, sociology, film, and other popular media) some of which are frankly regulatory, whereas others challenge normative regimes. We will focus on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century works; we will selectively examine cold war and presentday texts; and in the process we will identify continuities and departures in the production and policing of normal and deviant Americans.
Texts will include: Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson; James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex Colored Man; Nella Larsen, Passing, and a large course packet.