Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race

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.