Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels

into conversation with medicolegal discourses to demonstrate the growing penetrance of fantasies in these realms, often through an illogical reversal of the usual relationship between social “realities” and their representations. Part III brings us firmly into the present, in which the fantasy of identification has been fully institutionalized through the process I call biocertification. This neologism describes the massive proliferation of state-issued documents purporting to authenticate a person’s biological membership in a regulated group. I demonstrate how biocertification began to take hold at the turn of the century and has become ever more powerfully instituted into the present.

      My focus in part III on the millennial period between 1980 and 2012 is shaped by a notable clustering of texts and events during this period, much like that of the mid-nineteenth century, and similarly provoked by a rapidly changing social world. A century after the events described in the opening of this introduction, we find a markedly similar acceleration of anxieties about identity, also spurred by rapidly increasing social and geographic mobility, now in the form of globalization; a tremendous expansion of and corresponding backlash against the welfare state; and technological innovations, such as DNA and the Internet, that render bodily identities more anonymous and unknowable while paradoxically promising to confirm bodily truths with more certainty than ever before. The parallel between the mid- to late nineteenth-century crisis of identification and that of the mid- to late twentieth century is also forecast in part I through analysis of films about disability fakery that notably proliferated during these two periods.

      The civil rights movements that took place between these two clusters of events and texts, overturning long-entrenched racial, gendered, disabled, and sexualized hierarchies of power, are a powerful background to this study, and indeed created the conditions of its very existence. Yet, ironically, such movements have not functioned, either historically or in their current incarnations, to significantly disrupt or dilute the influence of fantasies of identification in American or global power structures. These fantasies have not only persisted largely unchanged despite the radical cultural shifts produced by social justice movements but have often integrated the language and goals of those movements into their discursive structures and power regimes. So, for example, a new cultural valuation of American Indian identity, which grew out of the American Indian Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s in resistance to assimilation and relocation, provided a broader stage and greater perceived stakes for the updated fantasy of blood quantum as a measure of “Indianness,” as discussed in chapters 7 and 8. Similarly the civil and material gains of the disability rights movement, most notably the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, produced a resurgence of cultural suspicions of disabled people and a proliferation of required “proofs” of disabled status.

      Yet it is also crucial to note that the social movements of the late twentieth century enabled greater and more diverse forms of resistance to the institutionalized fantasy of identification. This resistant turn is signaled not only historically but also generically in this study. In the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts discussed in parts I and II, we find emergent fantasies of identification staged primarily through imaginative works that only gradually and incompletely affect social power structures. In contrast, in the recent period covered by part III, such fantasies have become firmly institutionalized and can be read through legal and bureaucratic documents, with works of literature, film, and visual art now functioning primarily as sites of resistant counterdiscourses to the fantasy. Thus while part I primarily focuses on traditional representational works, the part II brings such works into conversation with texts from legal and bureaucratic spheres, and part III then reads legal and bureaucratic texts as works of representation whose language is similarly revealing of deeply invested cultural assumptions.

      Fantasy Bodies: Disability, Gender, Race

      At the core of the fantasy of identification lies the assumption that embodied social identities such as race, gender, and disability are fixed, legible, and categorizable. This assumption, by now deeply naturalized in our social and ontological structures, in fact required elaborate construction and ongoing policing throughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth. In their twenty-first-century institutional forms, these governing assumptions continually fracture under the weight of their own unverifiability and thus must ever more insistently invoke the supposed empiricism of science as their bedrock truth. This process is starkly visible in the practice of genetic sex testing, which, as discussed in chapter 9, spent over four decades invoking reductive “science” to regulate identity despite the concerted opposition of the scientists themselves. This example drives home the fact that, as in the example of fingerprinting addressed earlier, our modern practices of identification are not simply mapped onto given bodily characteristics. Rather medical, legal, and political authorities have anxiously scanned our bodies in search of such characteristics—without which the increasingly unwieldy social apparatus of normalization and difference would collapse—and then made strident retrospective claims as to their obvious and natural existence: “This signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which precedes its own action” (Butler, Bodies That Matter 30). This process can be observed to accelerate in the mid-nineteenth century with regard to many subjugated groups of people, most notably those marked as racial others or as mentally or physically disabled, and to achieve full institutional power by the middle of the twentieth century with the advent of modern genetics.

      Medicine has played a central role in shaping this process. While today we are more likely to associate medical identification with disabled bodies, medicine in mid-nineteenth-century America was centrally focused on questions of race, and racialist medicine served both to buttress the institution of slavery and to consolidate medical authority during its period of professionalization. Prominent physicians such as Samuel A. Cartwright, Josiah C. Nott, and John Van Evrie argued for the biological inferiority of African Americans and American Indians and explicitly supported slavery and settler colonialism as the natural system resulting from the superiority of the white race.¹⁵ In 1851 Cartwright famously outlined “the anatomical and physiological differences between the negro and the white man,” which he claimed were “more deep, durable, and indelible . . . than that of mere color” (qtd. in Martin 54), and Nott contended three years later that “to one who has lived among American Indians, it is in vain to talk of civilizing them. You might as well attempt to change the nature of the buffalo” (Nott and Gliddon 69). These doctors and their associates peeled back layers of black skin, dissected the bodies of dead slaves, and measured hundreds of Indian skulls in their fruitless search for those “deep, durable, and indelible” differences between the races (Martin 54; D. Thomas 40). This search became ever more determined as the “visible, progressive ‘whitening’ of the slave body throughout the century,” accelerated by the banning of the slave trade in 1807, undermined the reliability of skin color as racial marker (Wiegman 47). Legal developments mirrored these medical trends, for “even though American slave codes had always articulated racial difference, in the 1830s legal formulations of slave status became increasingly dependent on the identification of ‘black’ bodies” (Keetley 4). By the antebellum period law and medicine intersected, as “doctors presented themselves to courts as experts on racial identity, claiming a monopoly on scientific racial knowledge” (Gross 10).¹⁶

      Many scholars pinpoint the beginning of “classifying according to somatic/morphological criteria” in the eighteenth century, arguing that during this period “skin color [became] visible as a basis for determining the order of identities and differences and subsequently penetrate[d] the body to become the truth of the self” (Guillaumin 32; Kawash 130).¹⁷ By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the “truth of the self” was not so clearly apparent in skin color, and so, as discussed in chapter 4, questions of racial identity were increasingly determined based upon hair, nose, feet, and other anatomical features that supposedly signaled race. In courtroom settings such features were mentioned arbitrarily and inconsistently, and no clear policy of racial identification could be formed from the competing claims regarding the true “Negro foot” or “Indian hair” (Gross 9). Thus I suggest that these claims testify not to the presence of a true fantasy of identification but rather to the dominant power structure’s deep and abiding desire for such a fantastical solution.

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