Passing: Race, Disability, and Gender

What do Michael Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and a 17th-century Frenchman named Marin le Marci have to do with the debates about the North Carolina bathrooms bill? Marissa, Sarah, and Katie weave together a discussion of ways people have defied socially constructed systems of race, ability, and gender, and “passed” as something else.

**Correction: Sarah mentions “David Wilson” – she meant Daniel Wilson. (Sorry!)

Show Notes & Further Reading

Applebaum, Yoni. “Rachel Dolezal and the History of Passing for Black.” The Atlantic (15 Jun 2015)

Bates, Karen Grigsby. “‘A Chosen Exile’: Black People Passing in White America.” NPR (October 7, 2014)

Brune, Jeffrey, ed. Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity. 

Carter, Julian B. The Heart of Whiteness Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880-1940. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Daston, L., & Park, K. (1985). “Hermaphrodites in renaissance france.” Critical Matrix,1(5), 1.

Fikes, Robert. “The Passing of Passing: A Peculiarly American Racial Tradition Approaches Irrelevance.” blackpast.org

Haynes, Monica. “Passing: How Posing as White Became a Choice for Some Black Americans.” Pittsburgh Gazette (October 26, 2003). 

Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1990.