Fantasies of Identification
Описание книги
In themid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult todistinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodiedor disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define theseidentities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in aliterally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visualculture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy ofidentification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed,verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks andfingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy hascirculated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to becomeone of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society. Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasydistorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language forclaimed objective fact. Fromits early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slavesin the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question ofsex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification exploresthe roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.
Отрывок из книги
Thank you for buying this ebook, published by NYU Press.
Sign up for our e-newsletters to receive information about forthcoming books, special discounts, and more!
.....
I then explore the practical deployment of the fantasy’s conflation of body and text in part III, “Fantasies of Measurement,” through historical and current institutions of biocertification. I first demonstrate that, even in the area of physical disability, the identity category most presumptively defined by the authority of biomedical science, biocertification functions through highly contingent, contested, and paradoxical constructions of bodily meaning. In chapter 6, through close readings of the bureaucratic and cultural discourses shaping the system of disabled parking in the United States, we see that the link between body, text, and social power structures must be endlessly and proliferatively policed even in the most local and limited of examples. I then move in chapter 7 to a less obviously “physical” arena of biocertification, exploring the history and current controversies surrounding the use of blood quantum requirements for American Indian and other Native peoples of North America and Hawai’i. Here I also consider Native writers’ and artists’ reimaginations of identity that both reject and refigure tropes of blood in an ongoing process of negotiation and resistance. In chapter 8 I bring together these two local examples through the shared and mutually constitutive history of biocertification for Native and disabled people in the United States, through historicolegal connections drawn between blood quantum, mental disability, competence, and rehabilitation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In all of these cases I demonstrate the power of the fantasy of biocertification to both evoke and exceed science through claims that identity is fixed, measurable, and intrinsically connected to social worth and citizenship.
Notes on Terms and Methods
.....