text of pp. 26-31

I suggest, instead, that their written explanations consisted of their attempts to instruct me in how to use what the parties said as a method for seeing what the conversationalists said. I suggest that I had asked the students to furnish me with instructions for recognizing what the parties were actually and certainly saying. (p.29)

They stumbled over the fact that the question of how a person is speaking, the task of describing a person's method of speaking, is not satisfied by, and is not the same as showing that what he said accords with a rule for demonstrating consistency, compatibility, and coherence of meanings. ... "Shared agreement" refers to various social methods for accomplishing the member's recognition that something was said-according-to-a-rule and not the demonstrable matching of substantive matters. The appropriate message of a common understanding is therefore an operation rather than a common intersection of overlapping sets. (author's italics) p.30

The work of achieving and making secure their rights to live in the elected sex status while providing for the possibility of detection and ruin carried out within the socially structured conditions in which this work occurred I shall call "passing". (Garfinkel's italics. p. 118)

Passing: a definition

'Passing' as work (practice, labor) is a fundamental process in which everyone is always involved, and this includes the possibility that anyone can at anytime challenge the identity that we have been working at and which has been the default identity our others (significant or not) have used, is in fact not the identity that others should work with in our future. At any point we can be "discovered" as having always been someone else leading either to degradation or graduation ceremonies (depending on whether the new identity we will now be know for is a positive or negative one within the polity of relevance--thus the importance of the examination)

[full text of Chapter V on passing]

February 2, 2007 [ 2003]