To pass//in drag: Strategies of entrance into the visible

This dissertation constructs a vocabulary of passing by examining African American and/or Gay and Lesbian strategies of entrance into representation in the early to mid-twentieth century. Employing an interdisciplinary approach to read such texts as Jessie Redmon Fauset\u27s Plum Bun, Joan Nestle\u27s A Restricted Country, the Supreme Court brief for Plessy v. Ferguson, and John Howard Griffin\u27s Black Like Me, this projects links a study of passing to the problem of identity, a problem to which passing owes the very possibility of its practice. Taking as my starting point a peculiarly American tradition of posing race and sexual preference as opposite ends of a culture of readable identity, the project is structured as a series of interpretive frames through which to consider the relation between passing and those visual models of identity that sustain its plausibility. Chapter One introduces the central argument of the project: by replacing the inadequate dichotomy of visibility and invisibility with an acknowledgement of multiple registers of intelligibility, identity politics can most productively be considered a skill of reading. My second chapter considers the African American narrative of passing and the customary intersection of the passing plot and the marriage plot in the context of the minstrel logic of Jim Crow. In contrast to the limited subversion of the pass articulated by Chapter Two, my third chapter explores Plato\u27s Allegory of the Cave as a narrative of passing that throws the fundamental logic of social hierarchy into disarray. This tension between the theoretical threat contained by the logic of passing and its relation to the narrative and social conventions of race and gender is addressed by my fourth chapter where I consider the white-authored passing narrative and the dangerous consequences of a disembodied politic of universality. Taking up the issue of appropriation through a detailed reading of an historical instance of passing--the 1892 Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson--my last chapter considers the problematics and possibilities of resistance in a visual culture