The notion of passing as human is, as I have suggested throughout this overview document, a figuration or a situation that confronts a stable worldview. Here, I further suggest that this establishes the notion of passing as a form of ontological politics; a conceptualisation of the interconnections between ontological (in)stability and identity practices. As ontological politics, passing highlights how situations, embodiments and locations matter for determining authenticity, legitimacy and, in turn, normality. At the same time, ontological politics emphasises that the parameters for determining identity and ontology are not static, but flexible and contextual. As such, passing highlights the way in which the dynamics of sameness and difference are at the heart of worlding practices as structural parameters for existence. Historically, passing
describes strategies for improving the social, economic and political conditions of non-white North Americans (Myrdal 1944; Ginsberg 1996; Camaiti-Hostert 2007); to pass as white granted access to economic and social structures that otherwise would have been closed during the slavery years and in the segregationist society. In her discussion of racial passing, Anne Camaiti-Hostert argues that:
[p]assing disrupts a social and political order grounded in the expectation of two distinctive races and, hence, the act of a light-skinned black passing for white is to invite ontological, metaphysical and semantic chaos – race becomes unstable, the world seems to escape categorical discipline, and language loses its capacity to transmit meaning. (2007: 10)
The threat of passing is here summed up as a destabilisation of the established world order. In this manner, passing represents a challenge to the stability of identity and processes of identification in a society. Those who pass are impostors, fakes, who, by way of their in-between and unlocatable position, betray and defy ‘proper’ categorisation. In this respect, passing as human is a useful analytical trope for exploring issues of ontological (in)stability, performative identity practices and ethico- political accountability as worlding practices that structure the dynamics of sameness and difference. As Mol argues:
ontology is not given in the order of things, but […] instead, ontologies are brought into being, sustained or allowed to wither away in common day-to-day sociomaterial practices (2002: 6).
The chaos that Camaiti-Hostert describes is interesting because it points to the multiple ways in which passing displaces these established categories for determining ‘reality’, both in the meaning of proper, valid identities, and in the sense of the world as we know it.
Firstly, this ontological chaos arises as a consequence of the racial hierarchies established in the histories of science and in political
regulations of citizenship and civil rights. This point is reflected in Homi Bhabha’s work on the colonial mimic (1984). For Bhabha, the question of identity is inevitably linked to questions of belonging, for example in relation to definitions of family, class, nation, gender, race, religion or ethnicity. He suggests that the notion of Otherness is constructed in a way that establishes and maintains a hierarchy between the normative subject and the illegitimate, object Other. In the articles “Political monsters” and “Almost the same, but not quite”, I have used Bhabha’s work on the ‘fixity’ of the Other to argue that matters of passing also have a speciesist dimension. Like Camaiti-Hostert, Bhabha points to the ways in which race interlinks with the conditions of possibility for existence. The notion of race as a classificatory system denotes typology, categorisation and, inevitably, species (see also McClintock 1994; Puar 2007). As such, racial passing denotes ontological passing in the sense that it affects the very norms of intelligibility that Butler identified as necessary for establishing parameters for a universalised human subject. In my analyses, I highlight how such parameters inevitably rely on racialised as well as gendered structures for determining identity and ontology as categories for recognition and legitimacy.
Secondly, for Camaiti-Hostert, passing destabilises established markers for understanding the reality one lives in. She calls this a metaphysical disruption, but I think that it could also be considered a question of epistemology; a rupture in the conditions for knowledge. In this respect, the notion of passing fits well within a feminist (anti-)epistemological stance. In feminist and queer theory, passing generally means to be accepted as the gender one presents oneself as, independent of biological sex (Sullivan 2003: 106). Here, passing is not only a necessary strategy for improving social and political status, but also a confirmation of knowledge as choice. By this I mean that passing allows for a reclaiming of the regulatory frames at stake; by acknowledging identity as self- determination, the overarching structures of gender, race or species fail to control identificatory definitions. In the article “The shape of things to
come?”, I elaborate on this kind of agency as a strategy of subversion. Here, my argument is in line with Butler’s theories of passing as an unsettling of naturalised categories of identification, and therefore knowledge. As a matter of ontological politics, passing disrupts the notion of biology/nature/ontology as a fixed foundation for identity, and challenges the knowledge that biological sex or ontological race dictates sexuality, social status and the conditions of possibility for agency. Importantly, the subversive potential of passing as ontological politics destabilises the notion of fixity, and can be said to play with the notion of imitation not only as mimicry, but also as mockery.
It is here, in this landscape between mimicry, performativity and mockery, that my discussion on transpassing is positioned (see section 2.3.2). In light of passing as a confrontation between established worlding practices, my point about transpassing is, perhaps, a way of communicating the disruption rather than explaining the conditions for passing itself. Like gendered passing, the notion of transpassing points to the transformative potential of passing; to pass inconspicuously is one thing, but to acknowledge passing as a deliberate strategy to confront and perhaps change the conditions of possibility for identity and identification is quite a different one. I think that, throughout my articles, I indicate that the Cylons represent this latter form of passing. It is, however, only in “Political monsters” that I make use of the term transpassing to make this point explicit.
Nevertheless, in “Almost the same”, I discuss the Cylons’ attitude as one of mockery and even contempt for the human race. Here I suggest that they believe themselves to surpass the human, and that their strategy of passing as human is actually a way of subtly changing the rules of the game. Importantly, in both these articles I also make a point about the plurality of the Cylons, and the ways in which this multiplicity challenge the notion of a generalised Self. In terms of the subversive potential of passing, this is important because it illustrates the instability of the socio- political subject in late modern society (see Mouffe 1993). As a worlding
practice, the ontological politics concerning embodiment and position/status become noticeable, and highlight the transformative potential for change and subversion embedded in the strategy of passing. This transformative potential is also what I want to underline by elaborating on the notion of posthuman worlding as a conceptual framework.