Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
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resolved through fingerprints has been extensively discussed; I draw upon and also complicate these critical conversations by pointing out how the novel represents a negotiation of a fantasy of identification, as the haunting remains of its excised disability components underpin a powerful semantic link between fingerprinting, identification, race, and disability.
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.
This sets the stage for chapter 9, in which I explore how the comparatively solid scientific basis of modern genetics does not signal either an end or an answer to fantasies of identification but instead has been quickly subsumed into potent new versions of the fantasy previously attached to pseudo- or nonscience. I first look at the burgeoning industry of home DNA tests, particularly those that claim to be able to measure Native identity. I then turn to the example of sex testing in sports, focusing on the 2009 controversy surrounding the South African runner Caster Semenya. I show that when a fantasy of sex/ gender identification finally does become realized, beginning in the late twentieth century, it closely resembles the historical and ongoing fantasies about race and disability identification discussed throughout this book, demonstrating the flexibility and persistence of these fantasies from modernity into postmodernity.
Notes on Terms and Methods
I define disability quite broadly to include a range of physical and mental differences that in the 1800s were beginning to coalesce under the modern signifier of disability: differences including not only paralysis, missing limbs, blindness, and deafness but also more vaguely delineated figures such as “the invalid,” “the idiot,” and “the Siamese twins.” Here I follow the work of disability historians who recognize that “disability has never been a monolithic grouping” but has described “people with a variety of conditions, despite considerable differences in etiology, [who] confront a common set of stigmatizing social values and debilitating socially constructed hazards” (Longmore and Umansky 4, 12). The social model of disability, in which disability is understood as located not primarily in the individual but in “the set of social, historical, economic, and cultural processes that regulate and control the way we think about and think through the body” (L. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy 2–3), allows us to consider how physical and mental variation serves to reveal cultural anxieties about and investments in bodies understood as “ordinary” or “normal.” A profoundly influential concept since its inception in the 1980s, the social model of disability separates impairment, as physical or mental difference, from disability, the social effects of that difference. While the social model has been critiqued and expanded on many levels, it remains a useful construct with which to examine many historical and current practices of disability categorization and regulation.26 In this study I keep the social construction of disability firmly in mind while remaining critically aware of its inescapable connection to actual bodies and minds whose differences often result in social and material disempowerment.
Similarly I follow the work of critical race theorists in examining race as a social construction that nevertheless has material consequences. As Ian Haney López explains, “The absence of any physical basis to race does not entail the conclusion that race is wholly hallucination. Race has its genesis and maintains its vigorous strength in the realm of social beliefs. Nevertheless, race is not an inescapable physical fact. Rather, it is a social construction that, however perilously, remains subject to contestation at the hands of individuals and communities alike” (“Social Construction” 172). Thus analysis of racial fantasies of identification must at once recognize the lack of a biological basis for race and contend with the persistence of social, linguistic, and representational associations of race with biological difference. As I discuss in chapter 9, this is a particularly vexed and persistent issue in the current genetic age, when new scientific discoveries continue to be used to reinscribe old ways of understanding and classifying human difference. The persistence of claims for a physiological basis for racial divisions illustrates the fantasy’s compulsion to invoke the authority of science while ignoring its complexity; thus the ongoing “discovery” of new genetic markers for race, despite the widely accepted finding that there is more genetic variation within a given racial group than between them: “We may know that race is a fiction. . . . This knowledge, however, does not launch us into a new orbit of experience. Rather, this knowledge names and marks the historical, epistemological, and philosophical limit of modernity, a limit at which we continually find ourselves” (Kawash 21).27 One of these limits, it seems, is the refusal to give up on the fantasy of identification’s promise to locate identity firmly and measurably in the body.
Indeed rather than scientific developments undermining the power of the fantasy, they have served to offer it new realms of deployment. Thus in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while ambiguously sexed bodies posed a challenge to emerging systems of classification, physicians were unable to locate sex definitively in the body, beyond the commonsense solution of genital inspection (which failed in the case of ambiguous or changing genitalia).28 However, the discovery of sex-linked chromosomes in 1955, much like the development of fingerprint technology in the 1890s, provided the scientific underpinning for a fantasy of identification that had been increasingly searching for a home.
How to name that fantasy has been a challenge throughout this book: while the general scholarly tendency would be to speak of “gender” rather than “sex,” the fantasy’s insistent location of this identity in the body places it in the biological realm traditionally ascribed to sex in contrast to the socially constructed category of gender. Yet in the examples of sex testing discussed in chapter 9, referred to by authorities as “gender verification” tests, we find the division between the biological and the social deeply muddled, in ways that are both frustrating and potentially productive. While many have understandably criticized the inaccuracy of the term gender verification for biological sex tests, this apparent slippage coincides with a recent trend in feminist and queer theories of gender toward a denaturalization of the category of sex and a blurring of the traditional opposition between sex/biology and gender/culture. Judith Butler, the most influential proponent of this view, has rejected the idea that “sex” is “a simple fact or static condition of the body,” instead describing it as “an ideal construct which is forcibly materialized through time” (Bodies That Matter 1–2). Critical work by intersex activists and scholars has concretized this claim, responding to the prevalence of medical interventions on ambiguously sexed infants that tend to prioritize normative appearance over sexual function and bodily integrity. As Morgan Holmes observes, “Physicians produce gender because society demands that they do so, and in the process of production, through assurances that every individual has but one true sex, the demand is hidden” (Intersex 69). Here we decidedly see the presence of a fantasy of identification, which retroactively naturalizes its determinative effects. We also see a refusal to separate gender from sex, as the act of producing gender as a