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.13 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).14 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.
Yet it is also crucial to note that the social movements of the late twentieth century enabled greater and more diverse forms of resistance to the institutionalized fantasy of identification. This resistant turn is signaled not only historically but also generically in this study. In the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century texts discussed in parts I and II, we find emergent fantasies of identification staged primarily through imaginative works that only gradually and incompletely affect social power structures. In contrast, in the recent period covered by part III, such fantasies have become firmly institutionalized and can be read through legal and bureaucratic documents, with works of literature, film, and visual art now functioning primarily as sites of resistant counterdiscourses to the fantasy. Thus while part I primarily focuses on traditional representational works, the part II brings such works into conversation with texts from legal and bureaucratic spheres, and part III then reads legal and bureaucratic texts as works of representation whose language is similarly revealing of deeply invested cultural assumptions.
Fantasy Bodies: Disability, Gender, Race
At the core of the fantasy of identification lies the assumption that embodied social identities such as race, gender, and disability are fixed, legible, and categorizable. This assumption, by now deeply naturalized in our social and ontological structures, in fact required elaborate construction and ongoing policing throughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth. In their twenty-first-century institutional forms, these governing assumptions continually fracture under the weight of their own unverifiability and thus must ever more insistently invoke the supposed empiricism of science as their bedrock truth. This process is starkly visible in the practice of genetic sex testing, which, as discussed in chapter 9, spent over four decades invoking reductive “science” to regulate identity despite the concerted opposition of the scientists themselves. This example drives home the fact that, as in the example of fingerprinting addressed earlier, our modern practices of identification are not simply mapped onto given bodily characteristics. Rather medical, legal, and political authorities have anxiously scanned our bodies in search of such characteristics—without which the increasingly unwieldy social apparatus of normalization and difference would collapse—and then made strident retrospective claims as to their obvious and natural existence: “This signification produces as an effect of its own procedure the very body that it nevertheless and simultaneously claims to discover as that which precedes its own action” (Butler, Bodies That Matter 30). This process can be observed to accelerate in the mid-nineteenth century with regard to many subjugated groups of people, most notably those marked as racial others or as mentally or physically disabled, and to achieve full institutional power by the middle of the twentieth century with the advent of modern genetics.
Medicine has played a central role in shaping this process. While today we are more likely to associate medical identification with disabled bodies, medicine in mid-nineteenth-century America was centrally focused on questions of race, and racialist medicine served both to buttress the institution of slavery and to consolidate medical authority
