Failed Passing
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hi. Siri. Siri.

Welcome to High Theory. In this podcast, we get high on the substance of theory. I'm Kim Adams. And I'm Sharanik Bhoshu. We are two tired academics trying to save critique from itself.

Hello and welcome to High Theory. My name is Sharanik and today we are here with Ian Fleischman to talk about failed passing. Before we do that, Ian, would you mind introducing yourself to our listeners?

Of course, Madhulam. Thanks for having me. Thank you. My name, as you said, is Ian Fleischman. I'm currently chairing the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Given the subject of this podcast, I should probably mention that I serve on the executive board of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies there as well, and I'm faculty in Comparative Literature and Theory.

And I do want to shout out the Department of Francophone, Italian and Germanic Studies. I'd like to say a shorthand that my work focuses on sex and violence, and I think that's a pretty good encapsulation of what it does. My first book is called An Aesthetics of Injury. It was an examination of the imagery of wounding in literature and film writing, ranging from Baudelaire to Tarantino. And in about 10 days time, we're recording this on the 6th of December 2024.

I have a new monograph coming out called Flamboyant Fictions, The Failed Art of Passing. And that's where I work through the concept of failed passing that we'll be talking about today. Thank you. Okay, so let me ask you my very first question, which is, what the heck is failed passing? Yeah, I love the format. At a basic level, I just mean passing in the colloquial sense. So the idea of somebody who's queer or trans, quote unquote, passing as straight or passing as cisgendered.

Or if you think of somebody like, you remember Rachel Dolezal, who presented herself as black for however much of her career, and I think truly sees herself as black, but was then outed about a decade ago as white in a sort of media frenzy. So that would be a fascinating example of kind of failed passing around closeting. To give maybe a more personal example, think

thinking to the podcast format brought to mind a frequent experience from my own life, which is being recognized as gay from the way that I talk, from my speech patterns. Your listeners will be able to judge that themselves surely better than I can. Right. But especially when I was younger, because who the hell really talks on the phone anymore? Yeah.

I was more closeted. I remember being irritated that people would recognize me as gay or assume that I was gay even over the phone. And even when I thought that I was doing my best to self-police any possible signs of feminacy, say, or campiness. So the so-called gay voice or gay accent would be another example of a failed passing.

On a more theoretical level, I'm really just following up on one, I think so far kind of underappreciated aspect of Judith Butler's early work on gender performativity. Right. For Butler and like books like Gender, Trouble, and Bodies That Matter. So these really foundational queer studies texts from the early 90s. Well,

What we tend to think of as subjectivity is shown to be an imperfect citation of an established identity model. Right. Yeah. What Butler calls catacresis, he's a rhetorical term, you know, a misusage or a strange usage of a figure of speech. So basically misspeaking. So, for example, I might know from experience and from childhood discipline and from cultural cliche what it supposedly means to look like or sound like or to act like.

a woman or a man but in mimicking these models both consciously and unconsciously even where we're doing our best to try and be say the girliest girl in the world the manliest man you're never getting it quite right there's always going to be that difference there yeah i'm making the trope my own and giving it another turn even where i'm explicitly trying not to do so

What this means, and I think this is really the central insight of my own admittedly far from perfect and intentionally cataclystic citation of Butler's thinking, is that what we might otherwise think of as free will could be better conceptualized as a form of failed passing. So it's a slip up or a fuck up for my autonomy. I don't know if I can swear on this. For my autonomy and individuality. Our podcast is called High Theory, if I might remind you. Okay, yeah, perfect. Yeah.

So rather than thinking of it as free will, as this purely autonomous self-expression, you think of it as I screwed up and I let myself come into view, my individuality, even just as an accidental deviation from what might be an expected norm.

So obviously all this is in dialogue, it's often in debate with some of the central moments in queer theory, you know, early on Butler's idea of performativity, Yves Kostasovsky Sedgwick's thinking on the closet, José Esteban Muñoz's really influential work on disidentification.

Sandy Stone's arguments against passing, later complications to that argument offered by somebody like C. Radley Snorton, more recently what Madison Wormight theorizes as the fabulousness of certain queer of color creatives. But in conceptualizing this for myself, I'm also performing a kind of failed passing in my own way. And I'm hoping that this book gives those more established, older queer theoretical tropes another twist.

Yeah. You know, I was going to ask you about like the genealogy of this book and, you know, what went before. And I think you've already started answering that question. It's also funny because, well, not funny, but I... Funny is fine. I like funny. No, I just finished teaching Twelfth Night and we talked about how Viola is constantly, you know, just setting herself up for failure. Yeah. You know, she just can't help giving it away.

you know, her secret. That would be a really good place to look for Philip Passing. You know, it took me a while to sort of figure out what the central concept of the book was. I sort of had the case studies and couldn't quite figure out how they fit together. And for a long time, I thought I was negotiating between, you know, sort of queer theories of objection on the one hand or camp on the other. And it took me a while to realize that I wasn't, that camp was

And the way that I was thinking about it was a form of failed passing, part of the broader concept that it's not just as, you know, Munoz might want to see it, that camp is a sort of celebratory expression of what once was derogatory, but rather that you can see camp as, you know, as I said, you might be able to hear just from my speaking, even if I'm trying to conceal it, that I'm gay. So there's also a sort of non-volitional aspect to that as well.

Right. Okay. Yeah. How do we use failed passing? Yeah, I had to think about this because I think I think a failed passing less is something that we use. Right. That is something that we just inevitably do. I've given you already a few examples of failed passing might look like in an everyday context.

I think there's a temptation to think of passing as universally hierarchical or even as pejorative as a form of, say, internalized racism or transphobia or homophobia. So I do want to be clear that failed passing isn't limited to minoritized subjects. To my mind, it's something that

all of us do all the time in the broadest strokes what I describe as failed passing as a theory of subjectivity and subject formation of agency or free will and not just queer free will and so I am hopeful that the idea will translate well and that we might start seeing some more studies that failed passing in any variety of social political and aesthetic context including the queer context

where I found that questions of passing were surprisingly understudied. There are studies of passing, but not really as many as you'd expect.

That's it. I do think that queer kids especially can be made aware of the high stakes of passing or of failing to do so from a young age. I tell an anecdote about this at the start of the book, but I can recognize myself now as having been clearly marked as gay by those around me based on the way that I dressed or acted or the kinds of things that I liked or I didn't like, you know, musical theater versus sports long before I

I was aware that being seen this way had anything to do with sexuality. You know, I would have had a paradigm of sexuality to fit that into.

Yeah. When we were discussing the title of this podcast episode, we made a choice not to use your book title, which is Flamboyant Fictions, and to go with Fail Passing. So let me just refer to your book title a little bit. Flamboyance, of course, it's ostensibly hard to associate a sense of failure with flamboyance. Flamboyance is usually read in terms of a kind of

agent of spectacle. So, I mean, my question is a bit vague. So, you know, is that a tension or not something else masquerading as a tension? I think that is very much a tension and it's one of the central tensions. You know, when we get to the question of how this will save the world, which I know is the hardest one for anyone to answer. But, you know, I mentioned Munoz before. Right.

I've always been a little bit skeptical or maybe just curious about the apparent alchemy by which we transmute some sort of pejorative designation, like queer, as Butler points out, and the title of the discipline, queer studies, that it's

initially meant as something derogatory and then it's reclaimed. And I've never been quite sure of how that happens without remainder. So I look at flamboyance not only as something shiny and sparkly that we can do because we want to perform and to be seen, but rather something that also conceals, I think, a sort of silent wish to disappear, to be able to determine the

determine the parameters of our own visibility or invisibility to say, hide behind that kind of flamboyance. You know, and some of those say art house filmmaking that I look at, for instance, that there's a way in which an extravagantly gay style, you know, sort of like gay film as a trope or as a genre comes to stand in for the sort of

absent sexuality in the work, you know, where the content of the work might be desexualized, but there's still this sort of gay style so that it can be marked as a gay film regardless of what it's about. People might be surprised in reading a book that's called Flamboyant Fictions

and is about failed passing, that these aren't necessarily narratives. I'm not necessarily treating narratives like, say, Twelfth Night, where it could be about uncloseting or about a failure to pass in that sense. Are you also reading, going back to the question of usage or utility, which is always a fraught question for all of our guests, but is it...

You know, when you say the use of gay style in film or any other text, which is, you know, which is desexualized, are you seeing this as kind of simultaneous hollowing out of queer sex at the same time as this kind of over imposition of homosexuality?

gay style in other kind of cinema of today? That's a hard question. I'd have to think about that. Sorry. Because I'm focused on my corpus. I think that it's there from the origins of Inosur in a lot of ways. The book itself, I don't want to drift too far from failed passing in its broader sense, but

The book itself is a subject of a specific identity formation, gay male, cis gay male, white identity, moving from these canonical figures like Gide and Genet onwards. And I do think that you can see it already in Gide. I'm looking at the counterfeiters, like Pomoneoff, which is by almost all accounts his sort of masterpiece, Gide's that is.

of a novel, but it comes at the same time when he's writing very openly about homosexuality and very openly about his

own homosexuality in a sort of, you know, decadent and deviant way, you know, sort of owning of the stigma. And at the same time, this book, although it's very clearly about homosexuality and it's almost sort of pornographic in its impulse of treating its characters in order to couple them up in erotic arrangements, that although it's quite subterranean,

and I don't think that there, I can't recall a single mention, you know, direct mention of homosexuality in the book. The closest that we get, you know, is an account of childhood masturbation that looking through Gide, you can see is linked to, you know, his own autobiography and his own experience of childhood and linked to sexuality in that way. But yeah, I mean, it's, oh, you know what? I can think of examples like Saltburn, for instance. I watched last year and I was thinking, I gotta write an essay

I'm still passing in this. Because there's class passing, you know, and all of these other things that become part of that as well.

I was actually thinking about Scott Berman. Well, maybe you can write that. That would be great. No, I so deeply dislike that film. I mean, I found it very interesting because I was looking at it through this analytic. Right, right. But I'm critical of a lot of the things that I work on. Anyway, this is not what we're here about. Okay, let me ask you.

My final question, which is, how will fail-passing save the world? I've been listening to the podcast, and I know that all of the guests struggle with this. And I was thinking this would be particularly difficult for me because I tend to eschew utopian thinking in general. I already expressed my skepticism or curiosity. I mean, you can say a blanket no. That's accepted.

It's not a blanket no. You know, the instance, the idea, for instance, that we can just sort of take a phobic racist representation and re-signify it and embody it and by embodying it, you know, repurpose it to our own ends. It's a lovely thought. I'm not quite sure how we're meant to own our objection and re-signify it in that way, but I'm drawn to it.

Similarly, I'm sometimes very critical of the modes of failed passing, I think generally, that I examine in my book. But that doesn't mean that they don't have purchase or purpose as an heuristic that might be used more productively. On the whole, I think my contribution here, you know, leaving aside

the methodological questions until we got to this part was strategic. Because I think that I'm making an argument in favor of reviving practices of close reading and a paranoid reading or for the kind of de-idealization as championed, for example, by Kaji Amin or maybe even recent attempts to reimagine what queer studies might look like in the absence of an insistence on anti-normativity.

In a world where failing to pass by whatever standard that might be racial or heteronormative or whatever, you know, we're being marked as different fields and is increasingly is dangerous. Paranoia seems to me to be a sort of necessary survival mechanism. And so I'm very much in favor of paranoid reading also for those reasons.

what practices of failed passing often despite themselves can be sort of surreptitiously essentializing. I think that a recognition of failed passing, so failed passing as a readerly analytic, attending to failed passing as a cultural critic, it can undo this

centralizing aspect and remind us that no identities are natural, you know, that all identities are also in their own way normative, that the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and in order to invent ourselves are mutable. I think that while still passing, you know, in some ways, as I've been saying, is just something that we do and that we inevitably do in the course of transforming ourselves into subjects. We've been working, um,

in literary studies, in the humanities and queer theory for a really long time to sort of demythologize and decenter the subject. And I think that failed passing is a really good way of doing that. In part because we're talking about the repetition

iteration of tropes and concepts. So failed passing is also a nice self-reflective gesture to understand, say, what I'm doing with Butler or what I'm doing with Munoz or how I'm trying to emulate but also

rival certain thinkers working in my field and other fields whose concepts and ideas I'd like to deploy, but at the same time, re-signify in a new way. So I do think that failed passing, well, it's not going to save the world to go out and say, fail to pass

whatever that would mean in any given context, I do think that an attentiveness to failed passing might be able to do something useful for us. Absolutely. Ian, thank you so much for coming to High Theory and talking to us about failed passing. Congratulations on your new book, and we can't wait to read it. Thank you so much. My absolute pleasure. Thanks so much. And thank you for listening to High Theory.

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