Keywords:
Identification - Social aspects
;
Electronic books
;
Gruppenidentität
;
Identität
;
Geschlechterforschung
Description / Table of Contents:
In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the "fantasy of identification"-the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society. Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact. From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource (X, 263 Seiten)
ISBN:
9781479855049
,
9781479812981
Series Statement:
Cultural front
URL:
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kxp/detail.action?docID=1662898
URL:
https://swbplus.bsz-bw.de/bsz409080683inh.htm
DDC:
305.9
Language:
English
Note:
Description based upon print version of record
,
Cover; Contents; Acknowledgments; Introduction: The Crisis of Identification; PART I: Fantasies of Fakery; 1 Ellen Craft's Masquerade; 2 Confidence in the Nineteenth Century; 3 The Disability Con Onscreen; PART II: Fantasies of Marking; 4 The Trials of Salomé Müller; 5 Of Fiction and Fingerprints; PART III: Fantasies of Measurement; 6 Proving Disability; 7 Revising Blood Quantum; 8 Realms of Biocertification; 9 DNA and the Readable Self; Conclusion: Future Identifications; Notes; Bibliography; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; R; S; T; U; V; W; Z
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