English Language and Literature Commons^™

Passing, Pamela Caughie

English: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter is the first from the text, "Passing and Pedagogy" by Dr. Pamela Caughie. Caughie's discussion of passing illuminates a recent phenomenon in academic writing and popular culture that revolves around identities and the ways in which they are deployed, both in the arts and in lived experience. Through a wide variety of texts--novels, memoirs, film, drama, theory, museum exhibits, legal cases--she demonstrates the dynamics of passing, presenting it not as the assumption of a fraudulent identity but as the recognition that the assumption of any identity, including for the purposes of teaching, is a form of passing.