Fantasies of Identification - Ellen Samuels Cultural Front

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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, and in particular the feigning of disability—what I call the “disability con”—plays an essential function in both the Crafts’ narrative and the social context in which it appeared.4

      Indeed the disability con is an important element for many fugitive slave narrators, such as James Pennington, who pretended to have smallpox, and Lewis Clarke, who employed disguises very similar to those of Ellen Craft, including green spectacles and handkerchiefs tied around his forehead and chin (Pennington 565; Clarke and Clarke 139, 147). A number of historians have briefly noted the use of feigned illness and disability among slaves as a means of resistance, as well as the related cultural dynamics of suspicion and surveillance, yet this context is not generally invoked in discussions of Ellen Craft, unlike examples of gender or race-based masquerades.5 My consideration of disability in the Crafts’ narrative is not to negate other critics’ arguments but rather to enhance and complete them, particularly those that argue for the narrative’s portrayal of a mutually constitutive relationship between race, gender, and class. In these many insightful analyses of Ellen Craft’s “tripartite disguise” (Browder 121), the fourth crucial element of that disguise is rendered invisible and haunting.6

      Yet a close reading of the narrative evolution of Ellen Craft’s disguise clearly demonstrates the intimate and constitutive relationship of race, gender, class, and disability. In William’s narration, he and Ellen first think of racial masquerade, suggested by Ellen’s white skin. Next they decide upon gender-crossing, due to the perceived impropriety of a white woman traveling with a black man. But the class status of the white male persona adopted then presents the new obstacle of literacy:

      When the thought flashed across my wife’s mind, that it was customary for travelers to register their names in the visitors’ book at hotels, as well as in the clearance or Custom-house book at Charleston, South Carolina—it made our spirits droop within us. So, while sitting in our little room upon the verge of despair, all at once my wife raised her head, and with a smile upon her face, which was a moment before bathed in tears, said, “I think I have it!” I asked what it was. She said, “I think I can make a poultice and bind up my right hand in a sling, and with propriety ask the officers to register my name for me.” (Craft and Craft 23–24)

      At this point the concept of the invalid—of passing as disabled—enters the disguise and soon becomes its central enabling device. The crucial function of disability for the disguise is emphasized by its remarkable proliferation throughout the narrative, which begins immediately after the conversation just quoted. Ellen fears that “the smoothness of her face might betray her; so she decided to make another poultice, and put it in a white handkerchief to be worn under the chin, up the cheeks, and to tie over the head” (24). Then, nervous about traveling in the “company of gentlemen,” Ellen sends William to buy “a pair of green spectacles [tinted glasses]” to hide her eyes (24). We immediately discover the efficacy of these stratagems, as William observes that, during the escape, “my wife’s being muffled in the poultices, &c., furnished a plausible excuse for avoiding general conversation” (24). At the time of the disguise’s inception, no specific illness or condition is

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