Passing is the ability of a person to be regarded as a member of an identity group or category, such as racial identity, ethnicity, caste, social class, sexual orientation, gender, religion, age or disability status, that is often different from their own. Passing may be used to increase social acceptance
Passing may require acceptance into a community and may lead to temporary or permanent leave from another community to which an individual previously belonged. Thus, passing can result in separation from one's original self, family, friends, or previous living experiences.
Academic framework
Passing, as a sociological concept, was first coined by Erving Goffman as a term for one response to possessing some kind of stigma that is often less visible. Stigma, according to Goffman's framework in his work Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963), "refer[s] to an attribute that is deeply discrediting" or "an undesired differentness from what [was] anticipated". These can be a persistent source of psychological issues. Notions of cultural appropriation, racial fetishization, and reverse passing entered public debate particularly in 2015, after a former college instructor and president of the Spokane, Washington, NAACP, Rachel Dolezal, was discovered to be white with no black racial heritage after she had presented herself as black for several years. As many point out, reverse passing crucially differs from passing in that individuals who reverse pass are not stigmatized and therefore are not subject to the harms of stigma that may force stigmatized individuals to pass.
With that interpretation, avoiding stigma by passing necessitates intimate understanding and awareness of social constructions of meaning and expected behaviors that signal membership. Shippee explains that "far from merely appraising situations to determine when concealment is required, passing encompasses active interpretations of several aspects of social life. It requires an understanding of cultural conventions, namely: what is considered "normal" and what is required to maintain it; customs of everyday interaction; and the symbolic character of the stigma itself.... Passing, then, embodies a creative mobilization of situational and cultural awareness, structural considerations, self-appraisals, and sense-making".
Nella Larsen's 1929 novella, Passing, helped to establish the term after several years of prior use. The writer and subject of the novella is a mixed African-American/Caucasian who passes for white. The novella was written during the Harlem Renaissance, when passing was commonly found in both reality and fiction. Since the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, racial pride has decreased the weight that is given to passing as an important issue for black Americans. Still, it is possible and common for biracial people to pass based on appearance or by hiding or omitting their backgrounds.
In "Adjusting the Borders: Bisexual Passing and Queer Theory," Lingel discusses bell hooks' notion of racial passing in conjunction with discussion of bisexual engagement in passing.
Romani people have a history of passing as well, particularly in the United States and often tell outsiders that they belong to other ethnicities such as Latino, Greek, Middle Eastern, or Native American.
Social class and caste
Class passing, similar to racial and gender passing, is the concealment or misrepresentation of one's social class. In Class-Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster suggests that racial and gender passing is often stigmatized but that class passing is generally accepted as normative behavior. Class passing is common in the United States and is linked to the notions of the American Dream and of upward class mobility. it is proposed that through the expression of a visual identity, others "read" a person's appearance and make assumptions about their wider identity. Therefore, visual identity is a prominent tool of non-verbal communication. The concept of passing is showcased in research by Jennifer Taub in her Bisexual Women and Beauty Norms. Some participants in the study stated that they attempted to dress as what they perceived as heterosexual when they partnered with a man, and others stated that they tried to dress more like a "lesbian." That exemplifies how visual identities can greatly alter people's immediate assumptions of sexuality. Therefore, presenting oneself as "heterosexual" is effectively "passing."
Ability or disability
Disability passing may refer to the intentional concealment of impairment to avoid the stigma of disability, but it may also describe the exaggeration of an ailment or impairment to receive some benefit, which may take the form of attention or care. In Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity, Jeffrey Brune and Daniel Wilson define passing by ability or disability as "the ways that others impose, intentionally or not, a specific disability or non-disability identity on a person." Similarly, in "Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence," Robert McRuer argues that "the system of compulsory able-bodiedness...produces disability."
Passing as disabled
People with disabilities may exaggerate their disabilities when they are evaluated for medical care or accommodations often for fear of being denied support. "There are too many agencies out there with the ostensible purpose of helping us that still believe that as long as we technically can do something, like crab-walking our way into a subway station, we should have to do it," writes Gabe Moses, a wheelchair user who has a limited ability to walk. Those pressures may result in disabled people exaggerating symptoms or tiring out their body before an evaluation so that they are seen on a "bad day," instead of a "good day."
In sports, some mobility impaired individuals have been observed strategically exaggerating the extent of their disability to pass as more disabled than they are and be placed in divisions in which they may be more competitive. In quadriplegic rugby, or wheelchair rugby, some players are described as having "incomplete" quadriplegia in which they may retain some sensation and function in their lower limbs that may allow them to stand and walk in limited capacities. Based on a rule from the United States Quad Rugby Association (USQRA) that states that players need only a combination of upper- and lower-extremity impairment that precludes them from playing able-bodied sports, the incomplete quads may play alongside other quadriplegics who have no sensation or function in their lower limbs. That is justified by classifications the USQRA has developed in which certified physical therapists compare arm and muscle flexibility, trunk and torso movement, and ease of chair operation between players and rank them by injury level.
However, inconsistencies between medical diagnoses of injury and those classifications allows players to perform higher levels of impairment for the classifiers and pass for being more disabled than they are. As a result, their ranking may underestimate their capacity and they may attain a competitive advantage over teams with players whose capacity is not equivalent. That policy has raised questions from some about the ethics and fairness of comparing disabilities, as well as about how competition, inclusion, and ability should be defined in the world of sports.
Passing as non-disabled
Individuals with invisible disabilities such as people with mental illness; intellectual or cognitive disabilities; or physical disabilities that are not immediately obvious to others such as IBS, Crohn's disease, or ulcerative colitis may choose whether or not to reveal their identity or to pass as "normal". Passing as non-disabled may protect against discrimination but may also result in lack of support or accusations of faking.
Autistic people may employ strategies known as "masking" or "camouflaging" to appear non-autistic. That can involve behavior like suppressing or redirecting repetitive movements (stimming), maintaining eye contact despite discomfort, mirroring the body language and tone of others, or scripting conversations. Masking may be done to reduce the risk of ostracism or abuse. Autistic masking is often exhausting and linked to adverse mental health outcomes such as burnout, depression, and suicide. However, that perspective has been challenged in a 2023 review of autistic masking by Valentina Petrolini, Ekaine Rodríguez-Armendariz, and Agustín Vicente who question whether all autistic people see "being autistic" as a central aspect of their identity and whether all autistic people are capable of truly hiding their autistic status. Both conditions, they argue, would have to be fulfilled for the analogy to hold and conclude that only a subgroup of autistic people experiences masking as passing.
Intersectional
Though passing may occur on the basis of a single subordinate identity such as race, often people's intersectional locations involve multiple marginalized identities. Intersectionality provides a framework for seeing the interconnected nature of oppressive systems and how multiple identities interact within them. Gay Asian men possess two key subordinated identities; in combination, they create unique challenges for them when passing. Sometimes, those men must pass as straight to avoid stigma, but around other gay men, they may attempt to pass as a non-racialized person or white to avoid the disinterest or fetishization often encountered upon revealing their Asian identities. By recognizing the hidden intersection of the gendered aspects of gay and Asian male stereotypes, these two distinct experiences make even more sense. Gay men are often stereotyped as effeminate and thereby insufficiently masculine as men. Stereotypes characterizing Asian men as too sexual (overly masculine) or too feminine (hypo-masculine) or even both also exhibit the gendered nature of racial stereotypes. Thus, passing as the dominant racial or sexuality category also often means passing as gender correct.
When Black transgender men transition in the workplace from identifying as female to passing as cisgender men, gendered racial stereotypes characterizing Black men as overly masculine and violent may affect how previously acceptable behaviors will be interpreted. One such Black trans man discovered that he had gone from "being an obnoxious Black woman to a scary Black man" and therefore had to adapt his behavior to gendered scripts to pass.
See also
- Beard (companion)
- Closeted
- Closet Jew
- Dramaturgy (sociology)
- Identity politics
- Masking (behavior)
- Minority stress
- Model minority
- "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"
- Stigma management
- Uncanny valley
- Undercover