°Trespass
Apropos previous notes on passing:
Passing presupposes borders, segregation, demarcation, impasses and filters both legal and conventional. In seeking to pass, one does not abolish boundaries but attempts to cross them. Passing is trespass, constantly shadowed by the threat of exposure, and of the violence that, by passing, one seeks to leave behind or evade. Passing is always a question of one and of the visible, however multiplied; an individual’s movement across the terrain of ocular classifications, an individuated fluidity in and across the fabrication of binaries. Passing can be inadvertent or clandestine, an instance of shape-shifting or the invocation of claims to authenticity, a challenge to the naturalisation of identity or its reinscription. How these are assembled along the axes of recognition and misrecognition is the key, or the passport. Passing is a question of the distribution of violence, the assignment of conditions to attributes, property to properties. Passing illustrates the tenuous links between identification and characteristics, but only insofar as it is revealed, at some point, as passing. When no one passes, all do; when everyone passes, no one can.
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