Mixed Race Studies

Crossing Gender, Fantasizing Bodies

Transgender Studies Quarterly
Volume 2, Number 4, November 2015
pages 717-719
DOI: 10.1215/23289252-3151664

Michael Davidson, Professor Emeritus of American Literature; Distinguished Professor
University of California, San Diego

Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race. Ellen Samuels. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 263 pp.

Ellen Samuels’ Fantasies of Identification is about attempts since the mid-nineteenth century to establish legal identity on some scientific, empirical basis as part of a national, biopolitical imperative. In this regard, the book contributes to the intersection of US literary history, disability, gender, queer, and critical race studies. Samuels chronicles a range of methods that were developed to regularize identity and naturalize the belief that identity could be read on the body. Examples include finger printing, the infamous one-drop rule for persons of African descent, current DNA testing for disabilities, blood quantum rules to establish Native American tribal identity, and myriad techniques of sex testing to verify legal gender within binary frameworks. Samuels observes that every attempt to ground identity in blood, genes, or appearance founders on the unstable nature of the very categories it hopes to stabilize: race, sex, gender, and ability. This instability is often produced by the imbricated relationship among such categories, and Samuels argues that disability is an always-present modality by and against which race, class, sex, and gender are read. Certifiable identity categories are, as her title indicates, “fantasies” produced by institutions wanting to secure populations in strict categories for the purposes of juridical, economic, and cultural control. But since these protocols are fantastic—a “thing we not only imagine but desire to be true” (6)—they are also subject to deformation, appropriation, and carnivalization by the…

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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