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 legible social category is impossible without the literal construction of the body’s sex, and thus gender is here biologically constructed while sex is determined according to social demands. This interrogation of the social management of intersexuality nuances Butler’s claim that “if gender is the social construction of sex, and if there is not access to this ‘sex’ except through gender, then it appears not only that sex is absorbed by gender, but that ‘sex’ becomes something like a fiction, perhaps a fantasy” (Bodies That Matter 5).29 Butler raises this notion in part to reject it, or at least to confirm that “if ‘sex’ is a fiction, is it one within whose necessities we live, without which life itself would be unthinkable” (6). However, I find the notion of biological “sex” as fantasy deeply relevant to the project at hand, as acknowledging the fictionality of determinable sex may allow us to find new grounds for contesting oppressive practices proceeding from the fantasy of its reality. Therefore, throughout this book I speak of gender and sex as both socially and biologically constructed categories and sometimes merge them as sex/gender to emphasize their inseparability as targets and modes of fantastical identifications.
As this discussion indicates, the history of identification explored in this book is not merely a matter of the state imposing control over docile subjects nor of historical evolution producing a totalizing and inevitable system, but also crucially involves the threads of resistance, subversion, and uncertainty that accompany all cultural transformations. As fantasies of identification were beginning to take nascent shape during the second half of the nineteenth century, we can see not only their deep-rooted power investments but also their vulnerability to manipulation by wily historical subjects such as Ellen Craft and Salomé Müller and slippery characters like Melville’s Thomas Fry and Twain’s Roxy. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries we find new versions of the fantasy transformed through counter- and disidentifications in the works of writers, performers, and visual artists drawing upon indigenous and crip cultural traditions. We also see the potential of organized resistance to change policies based on the fantasy’s distorted understanding of identity, such as the abandonment of genetic sex testing in international sports just as the writing of this book was coming to a close. Thus even as this book demonstrates the power of the fantasy of identification, it also insists we remember that this power is not, and never has been, irresistible.
Part I: Fantasies of Fakery
1. Ellen Craft’s Masquerade
The crisis of identification that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century United States was fundamentally driven by the anxieties of “a culture that worried that a full knowledge of a person’s racial origins could become obscured” (Otten 231). In the antebellum period these anxieties emerged in increasingly desperate attempts to codify racial difference as biological and therefore inescapable. The ability of fugitive slaves to subvert, manipulate, and defy these attempts through their successful escapes both challenged and accelerated southern white efforts to define race as physically fixed. Additionally, by midcentury the increased public role taken by women in the abolition and suffrage movements and accompanying challenges to raced and classed notions of masculinity and femininity created new fears over the “natural” roles and attributes of the sexes.1 The many historical and literary studies of these related dynamics, however, have rarely addressed the contemporaneously emerging anxiety regarding the knowability of the disabled body. Yet this too is a fundamental and inextricable element of the identificatory crisis, and figures of feigned or suspected disability began to emerge prominently to represent this deepening fear.
In one such figure, the fugitive slave and author Ellen Craft, we find all three forms of embodied social identity unmoored from physical and representational certainty, and so her story represents a touchstone for the eventual emergence of fantasies of identification surrounding disability, race, and gender. By examining a series of representations of Craft, including critical and creative responses by African American and feminist writers, we see not only the inextricability of these identities but also the crucial role played by disability in enabling flexible understandings of other supposedly biological identities.
A Complication of Complaints
In 1845 Ellen Craft and her husband, William, escaped from slavery in Georgia by traveling disguised as a “white invalid gentlemen” and his valet. After a four-day journey they arrived on free soil in Philadelphia and soon became prominent in the Boston-based abolitionist movement, telling their story to large audiences and swiftly gaining fame that eventually led to pursuit by southern agents seeking to reenslave them. The Crafts escaped once again, this time to England, where they later authored a narrative of their escape, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, published in 1860 by London’s William Tweedie.2 The Crafts’ narrative has received a significant amount of critical attention, much of which has focused on the racial and gender passing perpetrated by Ellen, while a secondary concern has been the prominence of the Crafts on the abolition circuit before the Civil War.3 However, no historian or literary critic has yet grappled with the presence of disability in the narrative; while the fact that Ellen pretended to be disabled is often mentioned in the course of other concerns, disability has not been addressed as a social identity that can be manipulated or interpreted, as can race and gender. Yet disability,
