Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race |
Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race
New York University Press
April 2014
273 pages
12 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9781479812981
Paper ISBN: 9781479859498
Ellen Samuels, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and English
University of Wisconsin, Madison
In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy of identification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society.
Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact. From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.
Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Crisis of Identification
- Part I Fantasies of Fakery
- 1. Ellen Craft’s Masquerade
- 2. Confidence in the Nineteenth Century
- 3. The Disability Con Onscreen
- Part II Fantasies of Marking
- 4. The Trials of Salomé Müller
- 5. Of Fiction and Fingerprints
- Part III Fantasies of Measurement
- 6. Proving Disability
- 7. Revising Blood Quantum
- 8. Realms of Biocertification
- 9. DNA and the Readable Self
- Conclusion: Future Identifications
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index