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.
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