Mixed Race Studies

Crossing Gender, Fantasizing Bodies

Transgender Studies Quarterly
Volume 2, Number 4, November 2015
pages 717-719
DOI: 10.1215/23289252-3151664

Michael Davidson, Professor Emeritus of American Literature; Distinguished Professor
University of California, San Diego

Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race. Ellen Samuels. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 263 pp.

Ellen Samuels’ Fantasies of Identification is about attempts since the mid-nineteenth century to establish legal identity on some scientific, empirical basis as part of a national, biopolitical imperative. In this regard, the book contributes to the intersection of US literary history, disability, gender, queer, and critical race studies. Samuels chronicles a range of methods that were developed to regularize identity and naturalize the belief that identity could be read on the body. Examples include finger printing, the infamous one-drop rule for persons of African descent, current DNA testing for disabilities, blood quantum rules to establish Native American tribal identity, and myriad techniques of sex testing to verify legal gender within binary frameworks. Samuels observes that every attempt to ground identity in blood, genes, or appearance founders on the unstable nature of the very categories it hopes to stabilize: race, sex, gender, and ability. This instability is often produced by the imbricated relationship among such categories, and Samuels argues that disability is an always-present modality by and against which race, class, sex, and gender are read. Certifiable identity categories are, as her title indicates, “fantasies” produced by institutions wanting to secure populations in strict categories for the purposes of juridical, economic, and cultural control. But since these protocols are fantastic—a “thing we not only imagine but desire to be true” (6)—they are also subject to deformation, appropriation, and carnivalization by the…

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Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion

New York University Press
August 2001
283 pages
5 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780814781227
Paper ISBN: 9780814781234

Edited by:

María C. Sánchez, Associate Professor of English
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Linda Schlossberg, Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Harvard University

Passing for what you are not—whether it is mulattos passing as white, Jews passing as Christian, or drag queens passing as women–can be a method of protection or self-defense. But it can also be a uniquely pleasurable experience, one that trades on the erotics of secrecy and revelation. It is precisely passing’s radical playfulness, the way it asks us to reconsider our assumptions and forces our most cherished fantasies of identity to self-destruct, that is centrally addressed in Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion.

Identity in Western culture is largely structured around visibility, whether in the service of science (Victorian physiognomy), psychoanalysis (Lacan’s mirror stage), or philosophy (the Panopticon). As such, it is charged with anxieties regarding classification and social demarcation. Passing wreaks havoc with accepted systems of social recognition and cultural intelligibility, blurring the carefully-marked lines of race, gender, and class.

Bringing together theories of passing across a host of disciplines—from critical race theory and lesbian and gay studies, to literary theory and religious studies—Passing complicates our current understanding of the visual and categories of identity.

Contributors: Michael Bronski, Karen McCarthy Brown, Bradley Epps, Judith Halberstam, Peter Hitchcock, Daniel Itzkovitz, Patrick O’Malley, Miriam Peskowitz, María C. Sánchez, Linda Schlossberg, and Sharon Ullman.

Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race

New York University Press
April 2014
273 pages
12 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9781479812981
Paper ISBN: 9781479859498

Ellen Samuels, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and English
University of Wisconsin, Madison

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.

Table of 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

‘True Detective’ Helmer Cary Fukunaga Teams With John Legend For Pulitzer Winner ‘The Black Count’

Deadline Hollywood
2014-04-28

Dominic Patten

EXCLUSIVE: On fire since the success of HBO‘s True Detective this year, director Cary Fukunaga has lined up his next project I’ve learned. Teaming with John Legend and his Get Lifted Film Co. partner Mike Jackson, Fukunaga will adapt and helm a big-screen version of The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, And The Real Count of Monte Cristo for Sony. Get Lifted have optioned the Pulitzer-winning 2012 biography written by Tom Reiss that chronicles the life and adventures of French Revolution-era General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas…

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The Tax Sleuth Who Took Down a Drug Lord

The New York Times
2015-12-25

Nathaniel Popper, Wall Street Reporter

Gary Alford, a special agent with the I.R.S., pored over old blog posts and chat room logs that led, eventually, to Dread Pirate Roberts. Cole Wilson for The New York Times

Gary L. Alford was running on adrenaline when he arrived for work on a Monday in June 2013, at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. A tax investigator, he had spent much of the weekend in the living room of his New Jersey townhouse, scrolling through arcane chat rooms and old blog posts, reading on well after his fiancée had gone to sleep.

The work had given Mr. Alford what he believed was the answer to a mystery that had confounded investigators for nearly two years: the identity of the mastermind behind the online drug bazaar known as Silk Road — a criminal known only by his screen name, Dread Pirate Roberts.

When Mr. Alford showed up for work that Monday, he had a real name and a location. He assumed the news would be greeted with excitement. Instead, he says, he got the brushoff.

He recalls asking the prosecutor on the case, out of frustration, “What about what I said is not compelling?”

Mr. Alford, a young special agent with the Internal Revenue Service assigned to work with the D.E.A., isn’t the first person to feel unappreciated at the office. In his case, though, the information he had was crucial to solving one of the most vexing criminal cases of the last few years. While Silk Road by mid-2013 had grown into a juggernaut, selling $300,000 in heroin and other illegal goods each day, federal agents hadn’t been able to figure out the most basic detail: the identity of the person running the site…

…But Mr. Alford also detected the sort of organizational frictions that have hindered communication between law enforcement agencies in the past. Within the I.R.S., Mr. Alford had heard tales of his agency being ignored and overshadowed by more prominent organizations like the F.B.I. The story that resonated with Mr. Alford most strongly was that of the tax agent Frank J. Wilson, who brought down the gangster Al Capone, but who was forgotten in the movie versions of the investigation, which tended to focus on Eliot Ness, the flashier Bureau of Prohibition agent.

“They don’t write movies about Frank Wilson building the tax case,” Mr. Alford said in an interview at the I.R.S.’s Manhattan headquarters. “That’s just how it is.”

Mr. Alford grew up in the Marlboro public housing projects of Brooklyn in the 1980s, a short, half-black, half-Filipino kid in a tough neighborhood. His father, a math teacher, would cite the power of the subject to teach his son how to prevail over difficulties. “If you get the right answer, the teacher can’t tell you anything,” Mr. Alford remembers his father saying. That attitude led Mr. Alford to study accounting at Baruch College and then to the I.R.S., where his skeptical, lone-wolf approach worked well…

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Black in a Foreign Land: In Defense of Dominican Identity

The Huffington Post
2015-12-17

César Vargas

I was born and raised in the Dominican Republic until I was two months shy of turning 13. The Dominican Republic has a peculiar color metric system–not necessarily on race. So it should go without saying that I wasn’t exposed to the clear cut Americentric, and very binary, concept of race in America until I set foot in the United States.

Since a very young age, I was aware of how both colorism and classism were prevalent back in the island. I noticed how people were treated and often saw how the socioeconomic standing of an individual trumped their color–up to a point if we’re to test folks by the brown paper bag. I’ve said once or twice that a Black man with money is more white than a white poor man. In a third world country where the majority of people are mulattoes, and most of the darker population would be of Haitian descent, you’d be hard pressed not to find people of most shades within families. Some of those family members were better off than others, and often, I’ve found, they could be of any shade.

Of course, like any nation of the world colonized by Europeans, power and wealth is usually concentrated with their descendants, but it would be dishonest to say that most of the power and wealth in the Dominican Republic is owned and controlled solely by its small white population. There are people of color (and visibly so), in most power and entertainment structures. A lot more, I dare say, than most Latin American countries. If we go by the one drop rule, there have been Black public figures, Black businesspeople, Black athletes, Black entertainers, Black generals, Black presidents, and so on. If you put them next to most African Americans, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference…

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How To Be A Black Girl

Thought Catalog
2014-12-03

Carmen Molina
Chicago, Illinois

I will always feel a little strange calling myself a black girl.

Whenever I am at a party or somewhere where there are new people to meet, the question that every mixed girl gets asked at least once a week, every week, for all of her life comes up.

“What are you?”

This question doesn’t offend me like it offends others of mixed race. I don’t necessarily see it as ignorant, like others do. The person doing the asking most likely thinks that I am interesting looking and I usually take it as a compliment of sorts.

What is irritating about the question is that I never know quite how to answer it. It always causes anxiety. I stammer my way through what I hope is a passable response, finish with a nervous smile and then immediately ask them where they got their shoes to distract them so that I don’t have to talk about it anymore.

This tactic works almost every time… but every once in a while someone calls my bluff and asks me to explain.

And how can I? It’s very difficult to explain it to a stranger when no one ever really explained it to me.

Here is what I know…

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When You Grow Up Mixed Race

Thought Catalog
2015-12-11

Evicka Chang

Growing up mixed-race is confusing. It wasn’t until my third year of University when the theory of hybridity was introduced in a Lit Theory class that I even began to consider the complexities of my own existence. It was also then that I started to realize that much of my own experience was not unusual for those of us who exist in the in-between.

The biggest struggle is exactly that: not fitting into either space. With a White mother and a Chinese father, neither will ever understand my experience. My mother sees me as White; never will she understand the struggles I have and will continue to face as a non-White female. My father sees me as Chinese, only with the benefit of being able to ‘pass’ when needed. My Chinese extended family only knows me as the White member of the family, the Westerner who is not quite Chinese. My White extended family continuously ‘others’ me, pushing me back into the margins because I do not look like them…

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Mixed Race Experience in Celeste Ng’s EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU

GrubStreet
2015-12-01

Sonya Larson

Not many characters in literature look like me. Half Chinese and half white, I’m used to reading about people who could occupy one half of my family tree, but rarely about the person who emerges where their branches join. I’m speaking about the mixed race experience: complex, elusive, and with a racial identity wholly separate from either person who birthed and raised you.

So I felt grateful and enriched to read Celeste Ng’s masterfully constructed Everything I Never Told You. Many have praised the novel’s confident drive, deft omniscience, and intricate storytelling, but I want to discuss its exploration of race around—and inside—of one mixed American family.

The novel concerns the Lees—a family of five struggling to make sense of the mysterious drowning death of Lydia, their middle child. James Lee, a Chinese-American, has married Marilyn, who is white, at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in much of the United States. From the beginning many see their coupledom as problematic, especially Marilyn’s mother. “Where will you live?” she says. “You won’t fit in anywhere. Think about the children. It’s not right, Marilyn. It’s not right.”…

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There is also a sort of evangelism at work. She is of mixed race, but, as Mr. [Nelson] George pointed out, she embraces her blackness, grasping every opportunity to speak out as a role model, getting out her message that a person’s so-called flaws, skin color among them, need be no hurdle to success.

“I will continue to talk about race,” she said. “I think that’s part of my purpose.” —Misty Copeland

Ruth La Ferla, “The Rise and Rise of Misty Copeland,” The Year in Style 2015, The New York Times, December 18, 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/fashion/the-rise-and-rise-of-misty-copeland.html.