Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
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of study based on certain embodied social identities have “sought to unmoor their identities from debilitating physical and cognitive associations, they inevitably positioned disability as the ‘real’ limitation from which they must escape” (Narrative Prosthesis 2). Throughout this book I note instances of methodological distancing—from sex, from race, and, as Mitchell and Snyder attest, most often from disability, which I argue frequently functions in a supplementary fashion to enable fantasies of racial and sexual identification, as well as their resistance. Indeed historically “both abolitionist and feminist discourses countered the inscription of the black and the female body as an incontrovertible signifier of otherness and inferiority by attempting to define selfhood as a product of something other than physical being” (Klages 5), and in so doing often explicitly defined their movements in opposition to disability (Baynton 34). In recent years much scholarship has addressed the intersection of gender and disability, producing crucial works on disability’s relationship to women, feminism, and queer identity, while a smaller but significant body of work has appeared addressing the intersections of disability with race.22 In the context just outlined, however, we can see the urgent need for a new kind of intersectional analysis to address how these categories have often formed mutually constitutive frameworks in support of—or in resistance to—dominant social, political, and economic structures of power.23
The mutually entangled and constitutive dynamic of disability, gender, and race in modern fantasies of identification determines the shape and trajectory of this book. If, at times, one of these embodied social identities comes to the foreground, such that parts of the book address disability or race or gender more centrally, the overarching argument remains structured around the inseparability of their meanings. In particular I highlight the supplementary role of disability in precisely those cases that may seem to be “just” about race or gender. In each case, identity is structured by intersecting vectors of power: not only disability, race, and gender, but also economic status, geopolitical location, sexuality, medicalization, and enslavement. Thus at no point do I centralize a single identification to the exclusion of others. Rather I seek to expose the mutual constitution that allows fantasies of identification to persist as powerful and flexible mechanisms of social discipline in relation to a wide variety of bodies and categories.
Visualizing the Body of Fantasy
The fantasy of identification, like many features of modernity, is predicated on an epistemology of visibility, in which identity can be easily read upon the body. Yet as the nineteenth century increasingly produced ambiguous and illegible bodies, the fantasy also began to look inside those bodies, invoking the “simultaneous strengthening of the corporeal as the bearer of . . . meaning and a deepening of that meaning as ultimately lodged beyond the assessing gaze of the unaided eye” (Wiegman 23). Modern systems of identification rely upon the authority of the expert whose authoritative gaze trumps not only an individual’s appearance but, more disturbingly, her own narrative of bodily and social identity. Yet, paradoxically, these systems also depend upon the easy recognizability of bodies, the “commonsense” ability to discern identity visually through markers as historically charged as skin color and as deeply naturalized as biological sex and physical disability.24 Language becomes the means by which fantasy attempts to close this gap even as language also functions to signify the multiplicity of cultural responses to its existence: this is the paradox at the heart of biocertification.
The fantasies I discuss exist in a state of perpetual tension between physical and linguistic means of identification—a tension figured by race, mediated through disability, and often inscribed onto contested female bodies. This tension is crucially shaped by the simultaneous reliance upon and undermining of the visual knowability of bodily identity, the haunting “possibility that the body, which is meant to reflect transparently its inner truth, may in fact be a misrepresentation” (Kawash 132). Such mis/representations then evoke fantasies of bodily identification authorized in the medico-administrative sphere by the “assumption that . . . the body is a surface that is written on and read out of and that the information one can read on a body can provide essential and reliable information” (Chinn 25). This assumption links body and text in a scheme of biocertificative legibility in which identity is at once marked upon the body and buried within it, requiring expert scrutiny to be revealed.
Fantasies of identification are then predicated upon the rejection of individual identity claims, as Garland Thomson argues in the case of disability: “Medical validation of physical incapacity solved the problem of malingering by circumventing the testimony of the individual. Under this confirmation scheme, the doctor sought direct communication with the body regarding its condition, eliminating the patient’s ability for self-disclosure and, ultimately, for self-determination” (Extraordinary Bodies 50). The same dynamic operates with regard to race from the nineteenth century onward and with regard to sex and gender in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The physician-detective scrutinizes the body for clues that will support or disprove the individual’s claims about that body’s status, and then issues or denies biocertification according to his (or occasionally her) findings.25 This privileging of medical authority in validating identity reflects the modern turn toward visualizing bodies such that “the ‘glance’ has simply to exercise its right of origin over truth” (Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic 4).
In part I, “Fantasies of Fakery,” I explore early negotiations of the crisis of identification during the late nineteenth century and the resonances of these negotiations through the present day. In these chapters the fantasies at work are not yet fully realized structures of identification but circulate as anxious dreams, occupied with the looming possibility that unknowable bodies in a newly mobile world provide unprecedented possibilities for deception. These fantasies of fakery demonstrate the reversal of cause and effect, proceeding from the possibility of imposture to the assumption that imposters are everywhere. The dramatic emergence of cultural fantasies about fake disabled bodies in this period intersects with and sustains concerns about other forms of identity imposture based on gender, race, and class. This enmeshed anxiety emerges vividly in my analysis of representations of Ellen Craft, a light-skinned African American woman whose escape from slavery was enabled by her disguise as a white, wealthy, disabled man. Craft’s successful manipulation of ideas about race, gender, class, and disability demonstrates that the instability of these identifications could be a source of resistant mobility. Yet later retellings of her story in the twentieth century are marked by the consolidation and immobilization of her identity, in particular through the erasure of the disability component of her disguise. This dynamic, I argue, must be understood in the context of a profound anxiety regarding disability imposture—what I call the disability con—which emerged powerfully in late nineteenth-century American culture and again in the late twentieth century through the present, in both cases in response to new extensions of social benefits to disabled people and others understood as the “worthy” poor. In chapter 2, then, I turn to an early representation of the disability con in Herman Melville’s 1857 novel The Confidence Man: His Masquerade, exploring its complex negotiations between body and text, appearance and essence, to show the unfixability of identity. In chapter 3 I extend this discussion to examine how the new medium of cinema adopted the disability con as a central trope, finally realizing it as a fantasy of identification in which false disability could be identified and unmasked—and yet how the instability of categories of “real” and “fake” bodies continues to haunt these filmic representations.
In part II, “Fantasies of Marking,” the penetrance of the fantasy into areas of policy and law can be read in its dramatic courtroom appearances, both real and representational. Birthmarks and fingerprints appeared in mid- to late nineteenth-century legal and cultural realms as possible solutions to problems of identification, often merging questions of individual and racial identification through the figure of a suspect on trial. In chapter 4 I examine the 1845 suit for freedom by Salomé Müller, an enslaved woman in New Orleans who claimed to be a white German immigrant kidnapped in childhood. Müller won her freedom largely due to the evidence of her birthmarks, yet this apparently physical and incontrovertible evidence, I argue, is ultimately verified discursively through verbal testimony. This dynamic is even more apparent in the case of fingerprinting, which I explore in chapter 5 through further discussion of Twain’s 1894 novel and story, Pudd’nhead