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"Recoil" or "Seize"?: Passing, Ekphrasis and "Exact Expression" in Nella Larsen's Passing Monique Rooney continued . . . 
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The passer is an objectified subject (for example black, female, homosexual) who refashions identity according to a superficial reading, or surface impression. In order to pass, the passer manipulates the body and the gaze so as to become legitimate. For example, the lightskinned black who passes for white synecdochically substitutes one part of the body (i.e., white skin) for the complete body (i.e., white identity). Passing for white utilises white skin as a part that stands in for a non-white body. This draws attention to two important aspects of racial identity. Firstly, the visible surface of the body is not necessarily a reliable or stable signifier of the body as a conclusively knowable entity. Secondly and contradictorily, for the passer, as an otherwise marginalised (because racialised) subject, the body's visible surface becomes the central locus of an epistemology of identity, precisely because the body is misread as white. For the opportunistic passer, white skin functions as the point of a fraudulent
entry into proper subjectivity and this inauguration (based on part not whole) destabilises the meaning of subjectivity per se. The white-looking-black proves the primacy and the ubiquity of skin as a visual surface that registers individuals as an identity, as the passer's skin becomes a surface which dissembles a personal and social "black" history. In this sense, passing-for-white relies on skin as a bodily limit that opens up the possibility and privilege of being read and treated as white (and as a mainstream subject) but also punishingly closes the body's past, its black heritage and history. 1 | 2 | Next Node | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Notes | Works Cited
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Ekphrasis, the verbal representation of a visual image, thus provides an opportunity for interrogating the difference between seeing and being and, in particular, rehearses the association of the spectacle with superficiality and incompleteness. This anomaly—of spectacle as superficialty—also arises in relation to the act and the theme of passing. Like Paglia's reading of the "Mona Lisa" and Stewart's "invisible" face, the act of passing withholds the revelation that the surface is a fabricated depth. The passer is an individual who attempts to escape definition but depends on and manipulates common categories to enable this escape. In this sense, passing is a form of catachresis, an abuse of categorical meaning that points to the inherent instability of categorisation. Catachresis, a wilful misreading, abuses the meaningfulness of meaning by articulating signification as a lack that is only made present through the act of naming. Catachresis—a
name used when there is no proper term available—highlights the way in which representation is based on and inaugurates itself through an initial misrecognition. Lee Edelman writes about catachresis in his reading of the faceless homosexual man as the signifier of face and the locus of indeterminacy in Otto Preminger's film Laura. Catachresis, for Edelman, is "the site at which the assumption of meaning confronts the disfiguring force of figuration" (238). Through this disfigured figure, meaning is found to be "only the fictional face with which we dissimulate the contingency, the randomness, or the facelessness of experience" (225). The passer is a figure for what Edelman calls the "making face" of facelessness that is necessary to narration. This act substitutes for the facelessness of the passing or crossing body, and its attempt to dissociate the gaze from the subject who looks and knows.