In this, both forms of passing differ fundamentally from gender performativity, where the strong motivation to resist all appeal to the body stems from the traditional identification of femininity with the body—that is, from the assurance that the body has always been (and will always be) there. To cite only the most famous example, in her account of interpellation, Judith Butler shows how the body emerges as an excess or residue in the very act in which it is materialized through a particular socially or institutionally sanctioned coding.x The kinds of transgressive performative practice Butler valorizes function by making this bodily residue culturally intelligible, i.e., visible. Such a model of the body is precisely what is missing in the case of blackface performance, racial passing, and, we might add, online self-invention, whose similarity in this regard helps to show the limitations of a theory that builds bodily excess into the scene of interpellation and thus denies it any standing outside the interpellative act.
In these instances, the problem is that interpellation works all too well: the mimicry at work in all three requires a wholesale replacement of the lived body with a new prosthetic body—whether it is the text-body of Internet communities or the cultural image of the black body operative in blackface and passing.xii The absolute discontinuity between the materialized body and the lived body means that there simply is no possibility for embodiment to form a site of resistance within the process of interpellation; insofar as it constitutes a prosthetic body that replaces the lived body, passing can leave no bodily residue that could be made visible or otherwise rendered culturally intelligible.
For Thomas Foster, this transcendence of visibility makes cyberspace a promising frontier for reconceptualizing race. By altering the accustomed grounding of social interaction in the physical facticity of human bodies," as Sandy Stone puts it, cyberspace opens possibilities for identity-performance that are not “simply expressive or mimetic."xiii Insofar as it dispenses with the category of visibility, cyberspace holds the potential to broker raced identity through means other than the imitation or expression (the visible or epidermal traits) of a body.xiv Yet, to stop there—and to see in the generalization of passing nothing more than the suspension of the constraint of visibility and the possibility for variant couplings of self and body thus afforded—is to underestimate its impact massively. The license passing affords us to try on other and multiple representational selves (the experimental function foregrounded by Poster) is at the same time a call into being of that heretofore invisible domain of our existence: the life of the body.xv
BODIES IN CODE
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