Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
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.1 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 1850.2 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).3 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).4
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.
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. I.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.6
Figure I.1. The story of Will West, as told in Fingerprinting Identification (1991). (Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice)
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 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.7
This