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 Wilson and “Those Extraordinary Twins.” Twain’s literary representation of racial misidentification 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
