In this Book

  • Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race
  • Book
  • Ellen Samuels
  • 2014
  • Published by: NYU Press
    • Viewed
    • View Citation
summary

Explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity

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

Download PDF Download Full Book
  1. Cover
  2. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Title Page, Copyright Page
  2. pp. i-iv
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Contents
  2. pp. v-vi
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Acknowledgments
  2. pp. vii-xii
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Introduction: The Crisis of Identification
  2. pp. 1-24
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Part I: Fantasies of Fakery
  1. 1. Ellen Craft’s Masquerade
  2. pp. 27-49
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 2. Confidence in the Nineteenth Century
  2. pp. 50-65
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 3. The Disability Con Onscreen
  2. pp. 66-80
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Part II: Fantasies of Marking
  1. 4. The Trials of Salomé Müller
  2. pp. 83-97
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 5. Of Fiction and Fingerprints
  2. pp. 98-118
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Part III: Fantasies of Measurement
  1. 6. Proving Disability
  2. pp. 121-140
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 7. Revising Blood Quantum
  2. pp. 141-160
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 8. Realms of Biocertification
  2. pp. 161-184
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. 9. DNA and the Readable Self
  2. pp. 185-212
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Conclusion: Future Identifications
  2. pp. 213-214
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Notes
  2. pp. 215-236
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Bibliography
  2. pp. 237-258
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. Index
  2. pp. 259-264
  3. open access
    • PDF icon Download
  1. About the Author
  2. open access
    • PDF icon Download
Back To Top