The historic significance of the current democratic primary in which the candidates are a black man and a white woman has generated much rhetoric about the politics of identification, with most pollsters making the assumption that women will vote for Clinton and blacks for Obama. But such understandings of the way gender and racial identification work fail to account for those who identify with more than one position (black women? multiracial individuals?) as well as the complexities of cross-identification. This panel seeks to investigate identifications and translations across boundaries (racial, national, gender, etc.) and the relationship between such border crossings and democratic ideals. Please send brief abstracts by April 10 to Lori Harrison-Kahan at lharriso@conncoll.edu.