Fantasies of Identification

Front matter

FANTASIES OF IDENTIFICATION

Ellen Samuels

FANTASIES OF IDENTIFICATION

PART III Fantasies of Measurement 7 8 9

Proving Disability Revising Blood Quantum Realms of Biocertification DNA and the Readable Self

Conclusion: Future Identifications

Notes Bibliography

Index vii

83 98

121 141 161

185 213

215 237 259

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A room of her own is a marvelous sanctuary for a writer, but even more necessary is the companionship and solidarity of other people. So many friends and colleagues have supported me through the many years of completing this project that no words I can write here can fully recognize the crucial role they have played. Every word in this book is a testimony to exquisite interdependence, and I am grateful to every person whose presence in my life enriched this work.

At Oberlin College, Carol Lasser, Yopie Prins, Wendy Hesford, and Sandy Zagarell taught me how to write, read, and exist as a feminist scholar. More than anyone else, Barbara Helfgott Hyett helped me to find my poetic voice. At Cornell University, A. R. Ammons, Ken McLane, Robert Morgan, and Debra Fried taught me fine-tuning, while Nina Revoyr, Angela Bommarito, Nancy Kok, Jennifer Gilmore, Bethany Schneider, Katie-Louise Thomas, and Dana Luciano helped me survive Ithaca winters. Lisa Diamond and Judi Hilman became family in the best sense of the word, and Sarah McKibben brought the deliciousness of salads and the vigor of scholarship back into my life. Meanwhile Andi Gladstone, Anne McLaughlin, and the other women of the Ithaca Breast Cancer Alliance reminded me of the inseparability of activism, research, and writing and taught me not to fear my future.

I had the tremendous good fortune to arrive at the University of California, Berkeley at the inception of its disability studies program, and over the next eight years I flourished in the company of brilliant

VIII / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS and outrageous crip scholar-artist-activists like Georgina Kleege, Marsha Saxton, Devva Kasnitz, Neil Marcus, Anne Finger, Cathy Kudlick, Corbett O’Toole, the late Paul Longmore, and many others. I owe more than I can say to Sue Schweik for guiding me through those years and beyond as the most generous mentor and friend anyone could hope for. Sam Otter opened my eyes to the rigorous joys of nineteenth-century American literature, while Ula Taylor kept me honest and attentive to the many intersecting meanings of race and disability. In seminars and exams and in the hallways of the department, Celeste Langan, James Turner, Cathy Gallagher, Colleen Lye, Hertha D. Sweet Wong, Bryan Wagner, and Patricia Penn Hilden taught me to be a thorough and irreverent researcher and writer, while Len von Morzé, Gretchen Case, Marja Mogk, and Anna Mollow helped keep the ground level under our collective feet.

Since coming to the University of Wisconsin, I have discovered the joys of belonging to two academic departments in which respect is combined with incisive thinking and a good dose of humor. In the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, I am grateful for the support and mentorship of Judith Leavitt, Janet Hyde, Frieda High Tesfagorgis, Lynet Uttal, Nancy Kaiser, Aili Tripp, Jane Schulenberg, Mariamne Whatley, Nancy Worcester, Jill Casid, and especially Christina Ewig, Judy Houck, Finn Enke, Cyrena Pondrom, Julie D’Acci, and Jane Collins. My compatriots and companions in this journey, Pernille Ipsen, Keisha Lindsay, Jenny Higgins, and Chris Garlough, are the wisest and most generous colleagues anyone could wish for, and throw a mean dance party to boot.

In the English Department, I rely upon Russ Castronovo, David Zimmerman, and Jeff Steele to keep me current with the tides of American literary studies, and Christa Olson, Jordan Zweck, Colin Gillis, Aida Hussen, Lisa Cooper, Timothy Yu, and Robin Valenza to bring happiness at the appropriate hours. Susan Stanford Friedman told me hard and necessary truths about writing a book, and this project is immeasurably better for her guidance. Elizabeth Bearden arrived just in time to teach me everything I needed to know about tenure dossiers, swordcraft, and graceful recoveries. My senior colleagues Lynn Keller, Susan Bernstein, Sara Guyer, Leslie Bow, Anja Wanner, Rob Nixon, Anne McClintock, and Karen Britland have been generous with their time, support, and words of wisdom. At UW, I have also been lucky in the friendship and intellectual companionship of Linn Posey-Maddox, Christie Clark- Pujara, Steve Kantrowitz, Nan Enstad, and Karma Chavez. Tom Jones

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / Ix contributed his art, his insight, and his sympathetic ear at a crucial stage in this project, for which I am deeply grateful.

It has been my tremendous luck to participate in the UW Disability Studies Initiative with Walt Schalick and Teryl Dobbs as colleagues, and Steve Stern and Cathy Trueba as our guardian angels. I am grateful also for the support of Alta Charo, Linda Hogel, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, and Rob Asen. Eunjung Kim and Jenell Johnson are the glue that holds it all together and two of the smartest and kindest people I have ever known.

I could never have made it without my brilliant and fierce community of disability scholars and activists. Love always to Alison Kafer, whom I met at my very first disability conference and who remains my intellectual muse and dearest conference companion. Cindy Wu and Robert McRuer read drafts, offered advice, and provided moral support at the most crucial stages. Gratitude and appreciation beyond words to Petra Kuppers, Mike Gill, Kim Q. Hall, Susan Burch, David Serlin, Mel Chen, Jennifer James, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Simi Linton, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, David Mitchell, Lenny Davis, Bethany Stevens, Theri Pickens, Anita Mannur, Eli Clare, Samuel Lurie, Robin Stephens, Margaret Price, Carrie Sandahl, Jim Ferris, Alice Sheppard, Kristen Lindgren, Ann Fox, Sunny Taylor, Sami Schalk, Riva Lehrer, Nirmala Erevelles, Kim Nielsen, Jeff Brune, Jenifer Barclay, the late and sorely missed Laura Hershey, and many others whom my crip brain may not recall but my crip heart assuredly holds dear.

My friends within and beyond academia have been my strength and sustenance through the decade of writing that produced this book. Rob Henn has been family for twenty years and my most faithful Boston spouse since my arrival in Madison (and his name means “chicken’”). Laura Linton is the sister of my heart and my rock in every storm. Ilene Sperling and Joy Goldsmith are there in thick and thin, even (and especially) when we're getting into trouble, and Emily Bender and Hannah Doress nourish body, spirit, and Star Trek soul. Thank goodness for Kathryn “Busfriend” Herzog, Noelle Howey, Chris Healy, Jay Williams, Timnah Steinman, Anoosh Jorjorian, Kevin Miller, Saraswati Bryer- Bass, Amy Morrissey, Margaret Carne, Sara Greavu, Rebecca Targ, Sarah Stickle, and Joanne Chao. Jonathan Zarov arrived at the end, and also the beginning.

Charlie Samser has not read a word of this book, but he is the living heart of it nonetheless. Jordan Samuels, together with Carol Madey, Maddie, and Ben, can always be counted on to support, succor, and x / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS entertain, while Joan Mohr Samuels inspires me equally with her dedication to the environment, her kindness, and her apple pie. Eric Riutort, Kevin Riutort, and Helen Madorma know me in a way no else can, and Gail Bearden is my second mother and culinary hero.

My father, Stephen Mitchell Samuels, was never prouder of me than when he admitted he couldn’t understand a word of my manuscript. My mother, Myra Lee Samuels, earned her Ph.D. at the University of California at Berkeley forty years before I did, when women faculty were few and far between, especially in the mathematical sciences. The two of them raised me with an equal passion for social justice, written words, and intellectual vigor, and this book is dedicated to their memory.

Finally, I must thank the many disability aides without whose assistance this book could literally never have been written: Katie Ramos, Paul Hurh, Len von Morzé, Caroline Roberts, Max Camp, Stephanie Rytilahti, and Anna Vitale. Ari Eisenberg also provided invaluable research assistance. Thank you for your hands, your eyes, your legwork, your brilliant minds, and most of all for your patience and dedication.

For early sponsorship of this project, I am grateful for a Chancellor’s Opportunity Fellowship at the University of California, the Phi Beta Kappa of Northern California Graduate Fellowship, and the Andrew Vincent White and Florence Wales White Scholarship of the University of California Humanities Research Institute. For crucial support to complete this book, I thank the American Association of University Women, the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the Vilas Life Cycle Professorship at the University of Wisconsin.

An earlier version of chapter 1 first appeared in MELUS: Journal of the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 31.3 (2006) and is reprinted by permission of the journal.

Portions of chapters 2 and 3 first appeared in Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies 8.1 (2006) and are reprinted by permission of the journal.

Portions of chapter 5 first appeared in the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth Century American Literature (2012) and are reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press.

FANTASIES OF IDENTIFICATION

Introduction: The Crisis of Identification

Nations provoke fantasy.

—LAUREN BERLANT, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life

In the mid-nineteenth century a crisis began to emerge within modern nations regarding the identifiability and governability of the individual bodies making up their bodies politic. This crisis of identification was driven by a multiplicity of factors, including greater geographic and class mobility; urbanization, colonialism, and expansion; the beginnings of the welfare state; and challenges to racial and gendered hierarchies. Intersecting with these material developments, and no less essential to the making of the crisis, were ontological concerns about the naming and classifying of persons as they moved within and across categories of meaning. The shift in European countries from social worlds based upon local and personal affiliations to those that Michael Ignatieff has called “societies of strangers” (87) was even more dramatic and problematic in the United States, with its tremendous geographical breadth, racial and class diversity, federalist political structure, and uneasy allegiance to ideals of equality and democracy predicated upon the exclusion of certain kinds of persons. Cultural texts from the United States during this period reveal a landscape of intensifying anxieties regarding embodied social identities, particularly those that differed from the recognizable subject of democracy: women, disabled people, and racial others.

A number of events at the century’s midpoint signal both the accelerating crisis and its attendant cultural responses. The American Medical Association was founded in 1845, the same year as the publication of the phenomenally popular Narrative of Frederick Douglass and the intensification of abolitionist movements. Three years later feminist activists met at Seneca Falls to issue a declaration of hypocrisy against American democracy, setting the stage for six decades of agitation to achieve the vote for women. Meanwhile the word normal in its modern sense of “constituting or conforming to a type or standard; regular, usual, typical” entered the English language around 1840, signaling a new social investment in regularizing objects and people.' The particular race and disability inflections of this regularization can be read through the evolution of the national census, which began to count deaf and blind persons in 1830, people labeled “idiotic” and “insane” in 1840, and “mulattoes” and physically disabled people in 1850.? In 1842 a defining legal decision addressed the increasing rates of physical disability due to industrial accidents by making it more difficult for injured workers to sue for compensation, thus consigning increasing numbers of disabled men and women to poverty and street begging (Braddock and Parish 35), a shift that not only heightened anxieties regarding real and fake disabilities but also challenged ideologies of self-reliance emerging from the American renaissance: “That a man might be a virtuous worker one day and an indolent pauper the next doubtless raised uneasy questions about an individual’s capacity for unlimited self-determinism” (Garland Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies 48). These ideological and material shifts resulted in a proliferation of charities and institutions established between 1840 and 1900, as well as the rise of eugenic practices and immigration restrictions, both responding and contributing to “the idea that a tide of disability from without and within threatened to swamp the nation” (Welke 119).° Finally, rapid expansion and urbanization taking place in the country during this period produced unprecedented anxieties regarding the knowability of identity, while the increasing numbers of light-skinned African Americans and racially mixed American Indians meant that “the nineteenth century was a period of exhaustive and—as it turned out—futile search for criteria to define and describe race differences” (Gossett 69).*

In this book I argue that, in response to this modern crisis of identification, a range of fantastical solutions began to circulate in midcentury, eventually becoming solidified into our twenty-first-century discourses about bodies and identities. These fantasies of identification seek to definitively identify bodies, to place them in categories delineated by race, gender, or ability status, and then to validate that placement through a verifiable, biological mark of identity. Fantasies of identification share certain signifying features: they claim a scientific, often medical framework and function to consolidate the authority of medicine yet in practice often exceed or contradict any actual scientific basis. Nor do they confine themselves to the scientific realm but invariably penetrate into the wider culture, influencing law, policy, and representation. Once embedded in the cultural realm, fantasies of identification stubbornly persist, despite being disproved, undermined, or contradicted, and this persistence provokes resistance and disidentifications from subjects attempting to escape the fantasy’s totalizing imposition of identity. Fantasies of identification operate on the level of the “obvious,” the “commonsense,” yet simultaneously claim that only the expert can fully discern their meanings. And because they are fantasies, they merge imagination and the real through desire, a desire that manifests in material effects on actual people’s bodies and lives. Finally, fantasies of identification are haunted by disability even when disabled bodies are not their immediate focus, for disability functions as the trope and embodiment of true physical difference.

In Benedict Anderson’s conception of imagined communities, a narrative of national coherence emerges through the “forgetting” of historical disruption and violence (205). However, the fantastic narratives discussed in this book not only serve to cover over the incoherence of the past but must be continuously circulated to reassemble a coherent present, without which the nation ceases to function. Such continuous forgettings are then best described in the language of fantasy, distinguished from mere imagination by the element of persistent and willed desire, what Lauren Berlant calls the linking of “regulation and desire” (5). Yet while Berlant is concerned with how texts doing the work of national fantasy realize or “stage” the nation through forms, I trace a dialectic between text, body, and nation that is at once mutually constitutive and highly unstable. Fantasy forms the bridge between the social and the textual, the material body and the discourses that constrain and enable that body’s intelligibility. These fantasies jarringly combine a certain wistful desire to know and understand certain identities with a persistent and often violent imposition of identity upon people whose subjectivity is overruled by a homogenizing, bureaucratic imperative. Indeed fantasies of identification are driven by a desire for incontrovertible physical identification so intense that it produces its own realization at the same time that it reinterprets that realization as natural and inevitable. And while certain discrete fantasies may be discarded, the master fantasy circulates flexibly, attaching to different types of embodied social identities according to historical, economic, and political circumstance.

4 / INTRODUCTION Fantasizing Fingerprints

Like all good fantasies, this one begins with a story. In 1903 an African American man named Will West was convicted and sent to the U.S. penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was photographed and measured according to the Bertillon anthropometric method in wide use at the time. The clerk, thinking West looked familiar, checked his records and found that a William West was already on record with the same picture and measurements. Yet West denied having been in Leavenworth before, and as it turned out, the other William West was already in custody. The two men were brought together and observed to be identical in all respects, until their fingerprints were taken and compared, proving both their unique identities and the superiority of fingerprinting to all other methods of identification known at the time.

This founding story of modern fingerprinting, famously recorded in Charles Edward Chapel’s 1941 forensic guide Fingerprinting: A Manual of Identification and told in dramatic detail in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 1991 official pamphlet, Fingerprint Identification, is indeed a dramatic example of the power of modern identification (Fig. 1.1).5 As the FBI pamphlet declares, “It would be hard to conceive a more nearly perfect case for refuting the claims of rival systems of identification” (7). For many years visitors to FBI headquarters could even view a wall-sized version of the story, which is retold in many histories and forensic textbooks.‘

There is just one problem with the story of Will West: It isn’t true. Kansas fingerprint examiner and historian Robert D. Olsen has conclusively demonstrated that, while the two Wests did exist, the scene described above simply did not take place. The Wests were never incarcerated at the same time and place, and there is no record of their fingerprints being taken and compared. In fact Leavenworth did not even begin recording prisoners’ fingerprints until 1904. Olsen concludes that it “makes a nice case to tell over port and cigars, but there is evidence it never happened” (3). Yet “over the years, popular true crime authors and professional scholars alike have repeated the Will West story as if it really happened” (S. Cole 146). The FBI pamphlet was published in 1991, four years after Olsen publicly appealed to forensic professionals to abandon the West story, declaring that “it is not necessary to use a fable to illustrate the value of the fingerprint system” (3). A decade later one could still find intellectually rigorous

N00 22S The West Case

When he was received at Leavenworth, Will West denied previous imprisonment there, but the record clerk applied the Bertillon instruments to him anyway. He knew the reluctance of criminals to admit past crimes, Sure enough, when the clerk referred to the formula derived from West's Bertillon measurements, he located the file of one William West whose measurements were practically identical and whose photograph appeared to be that of the new prisoner.

But Will West was not being untruthful about a previous imprisonment at Leavenworth. When the clerk turned over William West's record card, he found it was that of a man already in the Penitentiary, serving a life sentence for murder. Subsequently, the fingerprints of Will West and William West were taken and compared THe patterns bore no resemblance.

Iit would be hard to conceive a more nearly was the crowning coincidence of the similarity of perfect case for refuting the claims of rival systems of names. identification. Although the two Wests denied being The fallibility of three systems of personal related, there was a facial resemblance like that of twin identification—names, photographs, and Bertillon brothers. The formulas derived from their Bertillon measurements—were demonstrated by this one case. measurements were nearly identical, allowing for slight On the other hand, the value of fingerprints as a discrepancies which might have been due to human positive means of identifying people was dramatically variations in the measuring process, And, finally, there shown.

FIGURE 1.1. The story of Will West, as told in Fingerprinting Identification (1991). (Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice)

scholars citing the official version of the Will West incident (Joseph 170; Rowe 163). And still a decade after that, at the time of this writing, a simple Internet search yields numerous sites by popular and professional devotees of fingerprinting, including law enforcement officials and forensic science instructors, which repeat the legend as fact.’

This adherence to the Will West story in defiance of historical contradiction establishes it as not simply myth or fable but fantasy: a thing we not only imagine but desire to be true. The fantasy of the two Will Wests is also an inextricably racialized fantasy; it is no coincidence that the two Wests were African American.’ Nineteenth-century interest in fingerprinting was originally driven by colonialist imperatives and figured as a means to distinguish between racially homogeneous “others”—in the British context, Indian natives, and in the United States, Chinese immigrants.’ Sir Francis Galton, the figure most notably associated with introducing fingerprinting to a wide audience, was also the acknowledged “father” of modern eugenics and was deeply invested in his ultimately unrealized goal of using fingerprints in the service of racialist science.”

In the West story, and in many other examples discussed in this book, the fantasy of identification merges notions of individual and group identity: West is at once himself, a criminal, and a black man, and the supposed power of fingerprinting is to fix and merge these identities into a single knowable subject. Indeed the remarkable success of fingerprinting over the past century stems from its real and imagined ability to encompass and link different realms of identity. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno observe, the paradoxical individuality of modern culture is represented by “fingerprints on identity cards which are otherwise exactly the same, and into which the lives and faces of every single person are transformed by the power of the generality” (154). The power of fingerprints to stabilize personal identity is accomplished only through the existence of a state apparatus to organize and frame that identity, and, as historian Simon Cole convincingly argues, the primary challenge for nineteenth-century fingerprinting researchers was to develop a working system for the organization and retrieval of fingerprint data, “a link between an individual body and a paper record held by the state” (4). The centrality of this link between body, text, and state underscores the crucial difference of modern identificatory practice, what Foucault describes as “cellular power,” in which individuality is legible only in relation to a homogeneous, regularized grouping (Discipline and Punish 149). The fantasy of identification, then, is always far less concerned with individual identity than with placing that individual within a legible group.

Among the “elementary signs of modern identity... the name, the portrait, and the fingerprint,” only fingerprints provide a sign of identity rooted firmly in the physical body (Caplan 52)." While portraits (and photographs) provide a textually mimetic reflection of personal identity, and names formalize identity into language, for many years only fingerprints—what Mark Twain famously called our “natal autographs”— combined the textual, linguistic, and physical into a master signifier, “a kind of serial number written on the body” (L. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy 32). While Simon Cole claims that “fingerprinting . .. embedded firmly within our culture the notion that personhood is biological” (5), I suggest the reverse is true, that prior notions of biological personhood influenced the selection of fingerprinting as the preferred means of identification in the modern era (since the existence of fingerprints was known cross-culturally for many centuries before its modern European and American implementation in the late 1800s). Lennard J. Davis connects this development to the emergence of normative bodily models, as “the notion of fingerprinting pushes forward the idea that the human body is standardized” (Enforcing Normalcy 32). The normalizing power of the fingerprint provides an apparent resolution to the dilemma of identification outlined at the start of this introduction—the paradox of reconciling unique individuality with democratic social equality—as every individual’s fingerprints are “qualitatively unique, yet capable of being enrolled in a numerical series for the purposes of classification, retrieval, and communication” (Caplan 53). To this extent, fingerprints function as a perfectly Foucauldian mechanism that disciplines individuals into objects of state control while maintaining the illusion of individual autonomy.

However, the fissures in this totalizing view of fingerprints provide glimpses of the ambiguity, tension, and subversion that lurk within. In nineteenth-century America, with its intense “desire for coherent and legible identities” (Chinn 47), the discovery of the fingerprint signified less an advance in material technology than the power of a fantasy of identification to produce and naturalize its own systematic realization. This dynamic becomes dramatically clear when we discover that fingerprinting was deployed fictionally before it was ever used in legal or forensic settings; in fact this fantastical power of fiction may even have enabled the eventual implementation of this form of identification. Twain’s 1898 novella, Pudd’nhead Wilson, discussed at length in chapter 5, famously introduced fingerprinting to the wider cultural discourse, touting its unparalleled ability not only to distinguish between unique individuals but also to delineate the different identities of racially ambiguous subjects. This solution to the crisis of identification so deeply satisfied the nation’s fantastic desires that, startlingly, Twain’s fictional statements on the accuracy of fingerprints were repeatedly cited in actual criminal trials of the early twentieth century to produce convictions—both literally and in the sense of a powerful state of belief. Indeed Twain’s protagonist’s famous speech on the power of this “physiological autograph” is still cited and repeated in forensic textbooks, granting the power of the expert to a character who exists as pure invention.’ Thus we see that the blurring of truth, imagination, and desire in the West story is not an aberration in the story of modern identification but rather its defining feature.

Time Travels: Staging, Penetrance, Institutionalization

In Raymond Williams’s description of dominant and residual cultures, the residual comprises those “experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, [but] are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social formation” (159). In the case of fantasies of identification, representation is both residual and prescient, both preceding and emerging from social formations. The narrated fingerprinting of the two Will Wests takes place a full year before fingerprinting technology is introduced at Leavenworth. Twain employs fingerprinting in a fictional trial, and only decades later is it used in actual courtrooms. This paradoxical dynamic becomes even more complicated when we move to the current day, as modern science is increasingly evoked to support fantastic claims of identification, most notably in the area of DNA testing. As I demonstrate in chapter 9, both representations and implementations of genetic forms of identification tend to precede—and yet also skip past—the necessary scientific knowledge regarding the meaning and reliability of these identifications, and the material effects of this process are considerable.

For this reason I argue that to fully understand the persistence of fantasies of identification it is necessary always to consider not only their visible material effects but also their circulation within multiple cultural spheres. In this book the literary, filmic, and artistic texts I discuss reveal a much more complex, ambivalent, and subversive view of identification than do the corresponding legal, historical, and medical documents against which they are read.” The tensions revealed by these texts are crucial because of the deeply imbricated and mutually entangled relation of this literature to the material reality represented by the legal, medical, and historical texts, demonstrating “a powerful and effective oscillation between the establishment of distinct discursive domains and the collapse of those domains into one another,” one element of which is the attempt to isolate “fantasies in a private, apolitical realm” (Greenblatt 7-8). I foreground the public nature of fantasy in shaping racial, gendered, and dis/abled identification, as fantasy functions both to forecast and to reinforce the supposedly concrete and fixed matter of identification that takes place daily in courtrooms, medical offices, border checkpoints, and countless other realms of the “real.”

In the nearly two centuries covered in this study, we will see how the fantasy evolves from its nineteenth-century incarnation as an imagined or staged relation conveyed most tellingly in the representative sphere to its current, twenty-first-century realization as a highly institutionalized regulatory structure most visible in the workings of state bureaucracy and the law. The argument and structure of this book follow this development. In the first part I examine how versions of the fantasy emerged in literature and film in relation to social anxieties about bodily identification, with these representational fantasies often exceeding or even compensating for their relatively incomplete penetration into other spheres. In part II I bring works of literature 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.