Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
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the individuality—the very humanity—of the people it enslaves. The answer offered by racialist medicine was to naturalize racial difference, thus placing it outside the realm of human control and therefore of human culpability: “Only a theory rooted in nature could systematically explain the anomaly of slavery existing in a republic founded on a radical commitment to liberty, equality, and natural rights” (Roberts 186).18 This solution became a crucial ingredient in the emergence of fantasies of identification that also naturalize identity and root it firmly in the physical body. The association of racial difference with physical immutability is a complex and deeply historicized cultural dynamic, which one contemporary African American writer describes as “the experience of black people of being reduced to their bodies . . . [with] one’s claim to individuality . . . constantly vulnerable to being erased” (Espinoza and Harris 442). Lindon Barrett similarly observes “the manner in which African American bodies are taken as signs of nothing beyond themselves—signs of the very failure of meaning—for these bodies are able to signify, in their obdurate physicality, only a state of obdurate physicality” (322).
Thus when we turn to disability, the social identity most closely associated with the immutability of the physical body, we find that it plays a dual role in these fantasies, as both the object of identification and the symbolic anchor that enables its function. As object, the disabled body presents a unique challenge to an identificatory system based upon classification, since its nonnormativity manifests itself through a vast diversity of form and function: “The concept of disability unites a highly marked, heterogeneous group whose only commonality is being considered abnormal. . . . Disability confounds any notion of a generalizable, stable physical subject” (Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies 24). On the one hand, then, disability resists identification through classification because of its instability and particularity. We can see this tension at work in histories of disability policy, such as Deborah Stone’s The Disabled State, which investigate the process by which “originally distinct classes” of “the aged and infirm . . . lunatics and defectives, invalids and the lying-in, able-bodied and impotent beggars, and orphans” came with modernity to be “lumped together in one unified category . . . with enough shared cultural meaning to serve as a defining characteristic for public welfare programs” (26). Stone shows the extent to which this process of categorization was not only arbitrary and incomplete, but also profoundly influenced by cultural differences. As a result we now find ourselves living within another identificatory paradox, in which “the category ‘disability’ begins to break down when one scrutinizes who make up the disabled” (L. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy xv), yet individuals with disabilities must nevertheless navigate social and governmental classifications of disability to obtain resources necessary for daily existence.
This paradox, with its concomitant rituals of identity testing and perpetual suspicion, can be traced in Stone’s analysis back to the inherent uncertainty of the disability category. She argues that “because no single condition of ‘disability’ is universally recognized, and because physical and mental incapacity are conditions that can be feigned . . . the concept of disability has always been based on the perceived need to detect deception” and thus “the very category of disability was developed to incorporate a mechanism for distinguishing the genuine from the artificial” (24, 32). Stone’s argument certainly holds true with regard to the examples of disability identity testing discussed in this book, such as cultural depictions of fake disabled beggars and rituals of surveillance of disabled parking permit holders. However, one may also extend her argument into the representational realm to investigate the other side of disability’s confounding of classificatory systems. The extraordinary and unique quality of the disabled body, I argue, can be seen not only as resisting identification but also, and conversely, as providing a symbolic and actual basis on which to structure a system of identification that seeks to fix individual bodily identity. As the imperative to define a coherent category of disability increasingly relied upon its supposedly solid physicality, its location in “the immutability of the flesh” (Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies 25), contemporaneous efforts at identification evoked disability in their emphasis upon fixed and legible bodily truths. Even mental or intellectual disability, subsumed at this time under the category of “feeblemindedness,” was characterized as both physical and unchanging (Marks 82; Trent 88).
This dynamic returns us to the relationship of race, gender, and modern identification, a relation I contend is mediated by the symbolic function of disability as the trope of physicality, the body that is “somehow too much a body, too real, too corporeal” (J. Porter xiii). The increasing drive throughout the nineteenth century to define “race as an unchanging, biological feature” and “an inherent and incontrovertible difference” in order to give “white supremacy . . . a logic lodged fully in the body” (Wiegman 31), drew both explicitly and implicitly on disability’s symbolic power. Douglas Baynton has demonstrated the proliferation of disability imagery in debates over slavery and the postbellum status of African Americans as well as women’s education and suffrage (37–39). I argue that the significance of disability extends beyond these explicit references to pervade racial and gendered debates centering upon the concepts of the “natural” and the “normal,” two ontological categories historically defined in opposition to disability.19
In fact it was virtually impossible to separate race from disability in nineteenth-century discourses of normalcy: “Just as medical textbook illustrations compared the normal body with the abnormal, so social science textbooks illustrated the normal race and the abnormal ones” (Baynton 39). Van Evrie’s 1854 racialist treatise Negroes and Negro “Slavery”: The First an Inferior Race: The Latter its Normal Condition insists upon the biological “fact” of racial difference as “original, invariable, and everlasting” and “fixed by the Creator himself” (132–133). Van Evrie soon afterward articulated the disability subtext of his book, claiming in the 1860s that the education of African Americans resulted in bodies “dwarfed or destroyed”: “an ‘educated negro,’ like a ‘free negro,’ is a social monstrosity, even more unnatural and repulsive than the latter” (qtd. in Baynton 38).20 This explicit evocation of disability in relation to arguments about natural or normal racial difference contextualizes the frequent deployment of those terms in nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial discourse. Colette Guillaumin describes modern conceptions of race as “a natural closed category . . . that is first of all fixed and secondly hereditary” (27). Teresa Zackodnik has documented the persistence of this concept in nineteenth-century legal cases related to racial identity, which “appealed to a notion of race as naturalized by invoking bodily differences like complexion and fractional quantities of black ‘blood’ and thereby reading the biological as ‘fact’” (425). The natural and normal often merged in these discourses, signaling a paradoxical embrace of modernity’s normative classifications coupled with a reluctance to abandon the moral certainty granted by notions of race determined by God and nature.21
Henry Louis Gates Jr. has suggested that “the biological criteria used to determine ‘difference’ in sex simply do not hold when applied to ‘race.’ Yet we carelessly use language in such a way as to will this sense of natural difference into our formulations” (5). What Gates describes as a willing of racial difference, Guillaumin identifies as the “fantastic and legalized affirmations” of racial boundaries as “immutable,” “obvious,” and “commonsense” (27). In this book I adopt Guillaumin’s language of fantasy over Gates’s “will” to emphasize the crucial role of the cultural imaginary in displacing a sense of bodily difference from the body into language.
In contrast to Gates, I also investigate how increasingly unstable the idea of biological criteria for sex has become, such that, while female bodies were repeatedly deployed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the representational grounds on which to contest racial and disability identities, by the late twentieth century “femaleness” itself became a contested category to be stabilized through biologizing fantasies. Indeed while my discussion thus far has focused primarily on the crisis of identification in relation to race and disability, sex has been hauntingly present as a “natural” bodily difference historically invoked to provide, through contrast, a sense of the comparatively artificial nature of race as social construction. Such invocations are similar