Fantasies of Identification

Ellen Samuels’s masterful first book, Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race , begins its analytical journey in 1845, which is, in her telling, a signal year in US literature, culture, and history. Three of the central events of the year that she brings to our attention seem, on first glance, unrelated: the initial report by Nathan Smith Davis that led to the founding of the American Medical Association two years later; the publication of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave ; and the transition of the word “normal” from a descriptive definition, synonymous with “typical” or “conventional,” to a prescriptive definition of the way a body should behave and function. But Samuels’s purpose is to show the deep and inextricable links between and among these events, and how histories of white supremacy, medical professionalization, and the rise to dominance of the coercive ideological power of normativity intersect and cross-pollinate from the middle of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. While scholars of multi-ethnic literature might not initially imagine that a book located in disability studies speaks directly to their research or teaching, Samuels delineates the intimate connections between racial and ethnic formation and the construction of disability discourse.

Art · Dominance (genetics) · Ethnic group · Ideology · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Sociology · White (mutation) · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Medical History and Research · Medicine and Dermatology Studies History · Psychology