Fantasies of Identification

Fantasies of Identification PDF Author: Ellen Jean Samuels
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479855049
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
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 identificationOCothe 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, a Fantasies of Identification aexplores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity."

Fantasies of Identification

Fantasies of Identification PDF Author: Ellen Jean Samuels
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479855049
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Get Book Here

Book Description
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 identificationOCothe 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, a Fantasies of Identification aexplores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity."

Fantasies of Identification

Fantasies of Identification PDF Author: Ellen Samuels
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479859494
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 277

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity 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.

Theatricality of the Closet

Theatricality of the Closet PDF Author: Michelle Liu Carriger
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 081014591X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
A richly illustrated exploration of fashion and its capacity for generating controversy and constructing social and individual identities Clothing matters. This basic axiom is both common sense and, in another way, radical. It is from this starting point that Michelle Liu Carriger elucidates the interconnected ways in which gender, sexuality, class, and race are created by the everyday act of getting dressed. Theatricality of the Closet: Fashion, Performance, and Subjectivity between Victorian Britain and Meiji Japan examines fashion and clothing controversies of the nineteenth century, drawing on performance theory to reveal how the apparently superficial or frivolous deeply affects the creation of identity. By interrogating a set of seemingly disparate examples from the same period but widely distant settings—Victorian Britain and Meiji-era Japan—Carriger disentangles how small, local, ordinary practices became enmeshed in a global fabric of cultural and material surfaces following the opening of trade between these nations in 1850. This richly illustrated book presents an array of media, from conservative newspapers and tabloids to ukiyo-e and early photography, that locate dress as a site where the individual and the social are interwoven, whether in the 1860s and 1870s or the twenty-first century.

Passing

Passing PDF Author: Maria C. Sanchez
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814781233
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Ten contributions from academics in a variety of disciplines consider the social phenomenon of "passing." The focus is on the construction of identity and its relationship to visibility. Topics include, for example, Jews passing as Christians and the politics of race; "slumming" and class analysis; and 20th century male impersonators and women's suffrage. The volume is not indexed. c. Book News Inc.

Post-fascist Fantasies

Post-fascist Fantasies PDF Author: Julia Hell
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822319634
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Employing an approach informed by Slavoj Zizek's work on the Communist's sublime body and by British psychoanalytic feminism's concern with feminine subjectivity, Hell first examines the antifascist works by exiled authors and authors tied to the resistance movement. She then strives to understand the role of Christa Wolf, the GDR's most prominent author, in the GDR's effort to reconstruct symbolic power after the Nazi period.

Consuming Fantasies

Consuming Fantasies PDF Author: Lise Sanders
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814210171
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
"In Consuming Fantasies: Labor, Leisure, and the London Shopgirl, 1880-1920, Lise Shapiro Sanders examines the cultural significance of the shopgirl - both historical figure and fictional heroine - from the end of Queen Victoria's reign through the First World War. As the author reveals, the shopgirl embodied the fantasies associated with a growing consumer culture: romantic adventure, upward mobility, and the acquisition of material goods. Reading novels such as George Gissing's The Odd Women and W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage as well as short stories, musical comedies, and films, Sanders argues that the London shopgirl appeared in the midst of controversies over sexual morality and the pleasures and dangers of London itself. Sanders explores the shopgirl's centrality to modern conceptions of fantasy, desire, and everyday life for working women and argues for her as a key figure in cultural and social histories of the period. This study will appeal to scholars, students, and enthusiasts of Victorian and Edwardian life and literature."--BOOK JACKET.

Information Fantasies

Information Fantasies PDF Author: Xiao Liu
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452959498
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
Winner of the Science Fiction Research Association Book Award​ A groundbreaking, alternate history of information technology and information discourses Although the scale of the information economy and the impact of digital media on social life in China today could pale that of any other country, the story of their emergence in the post-Mao sociopolitical environment remains untold. Information Fantasies offers a revisionist account of the emergence of the “information society,” arguing that it was not determined by the technology of digitization alone but developed out of a set of techno-cultural imaginations and practices that arrived alongside postsocialism. Anticipating discussions on information surveillance, data collection, and precarious labor conditions today, Xiao Liu goes far beyond the current scholarship on internet and digital culture in China, questioning the limits of current new-media theory and history, while also salvaging postsocialism from the persistent Cold War structure of knowledge production. Ranging over forgotten science fiction, unjustly neglected films, corporeal practices such as qigong, scientific journals, advertising, and cybernetic theories, Information Fantasies constructs an alternate genealogy of digital and information imaginaries—one that will change how we look at the development of the postsocialist world and the emergence of digital technologies.

Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World

Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World PDF Author: Danielle Knafo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113491301X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
What is the role of unconscious fantasies in psychological development, in psychopathology, and in the arts? In Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World, Danielle Knafo and Kenneth Feiner return to these interlinked questions with a specific goal in mind: a contemporary appreciation of fantasy in its multiform relational contexts. To this end, they provide detailed examinations of primal scene, family romance, and castration fantasies, respectively. Each category of fantasy is pushed beyond its "classical" psychoanalytic meaning by attending to the child's ubiquitous concerns about sexual difference and feelings of incompleteness; her perception of the parental relationship; and the multiple, shifting identifications that grow out of this relationship. Evocative clinical examples illuminate the manner in which patients and analysts play out these three core fantasies. They are balanced by chapters that explore the generative side of these same fantasies in the arts. David Lynch's film Blue Velvet provides an artistic rendering of the primal scene; Jerzy Kosinki's life and work illustrates the family romance; and French multimedia artist Orlan's "carnal art" recreates the trauma of castration. Unconscious Fantasies and the Relational World is a tightly woven study of broad and basic questions. It is in equal measure a contemporary re-visioning of the grounds of fantasy formation, a relationally informed guide to clinical techniques for dealing with unconscious fantasy, and an examination of the generative potential of unconscious fantasy in the arts. Out of the authors’ broadening and broad-minded sensibility emerges an illuminating study of the manifold ways in which unconscious fantasies shape lives and enrich clinical work.

Who are You?

Who are You? PDF Author: Valentin Groebner
Publisher: Mit Press
ISBN: 9781890951726
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The prehistory of modern passport and identification technologies: the documents, seals, and stamps, that could document and transform their owner's identity. Who are you? And how can you prove it? How were individuals described and identified in the centuries before photography and fingerprinting, in a world without centralized administrations, where names and addresses were constantly changing? In Who are You?, Valentin Groebner traces the early modern European history of identification practices and identity papers. The documents, seals, stamps, and signatures were--and are--powerful tools that created the double of a person in writ and bore the indelible signs of bureaucratic authenticity. Ultimately, as Groebner lucidly explains, they revealed as much about their makers' illusory fantasies as they did about their bearers' actual identity. The bureaucratic desire to register and control the population created, from the sixteenth century onward, an intricate administrative system for tracking individual identities. Most important, the proof of one's identity was intimately linked and determined by the identification papers the authorities demanded and endlessly supplied. Ironically, these papers and practices gave birth to two uncanny doppelg ngers of administrative identity procedures: the spy who craftily forged official documents and passports, and the impostor who dissimulated and mimed any individual he so desired. Through careful research and powerful narrative, Groebner recounts the complicated and bizarre stories of the many ways in which identities were stolen, created, and doubled. Groebner argues that identity papers cannot be interpreted literally as pure and simple documents. They are themselves pieces of history, histories of individuals and individuality, papers that both document and transform their owner's identity--whether carried by Renaissance vagrants and gypsies or the illegal immigrants of today who remain "sans papier," without papers.

Black for a Day

Black for a Day PDF Author: Alisha Gaines
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469632845
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
In 1948, journalist Ray Sprigle traded his whiteness to live as a black man for four weeks. A little over a decade later, John Howard Griffin famously "became" black as well, traveling the American South in search of a certain kind of racial understanding. Contemporary history is littered with the surprisingly complex stories of white people passing as black, and here Alisha Gaines constructs a unique genealogy of "empathetic racial impersonation--white liberals walking in the fantasy of black skin under the alibi of cross-racial empathy. At the end of their experiments in "blackness," Gaines argues, these debatably well-meaning white impersonators arrived at little more than false consciousness. Complicating the histories of black-to-white passing and blackface minstrelsy, Gaines uses an interdisciplinary approach rooted in literary studies, race theory, and cultural studies to reveal these sometimes maddening, and often absurd, experiments of racial impersonation. By examining this history of modern racial impersonation, Gaines shows that there was, and still is, a faulty cultural logic that places enormous faith in the idea that empathy is all that white Americans need to make a significant difference in how to racially navigate our society.