The purpose of this thesis is to explore whether the act of ‘passing’ affects the protagonists’ self-understanding in Nella Larsen’s Passing (2004). The novel Passing revolves around the lives of two mixed-race women, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, and their ways and different motives as to why they choose to ‘pass’ as white. The thesis will use the concept of intersectionality, coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) to analyze the life and motives of each protagonist. As Nella Larsen was considered a modernist author, it is of importance to mention the effect the unreliable narrator in the novel has on the perception of the reader as actions occurring and retellings are being narrated, often centering around the character Irene making the narrative focalized through her point of view and capturing her internal thoughts. I will argue that the concept of intersectionality can be useful to understand how the act of ‘passing’ was justified in a segregated USA by analyzing how it affects the lives of the protagonists.The analysis is done by discussing the plot and analyzing important scenes to highlight how the protagonists think of ‘passing’ and how their strategies of ‘passing’ affect their lives and self-perception. The thesis concludes that although the protagonists have partly destructive and traumatic relationships to the act of ‘passing’, they both find the act strategically beneficial because of what they gain.