Ellen Samuels

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.

Disability, Gender, Race

Fantasies of Identification

Hypermobilities is a verse-memoir in haiku, written over two years of intense engagement with the medical system. Samuels composed these poems in her head while strapped down within MRI machines, in the infusion center with IV needles snaking her arms, waiting and waiting in white-walled rooms. They are necessarily short, to be written by memory without pen or screen. A selection of these poems eventually formed into this collection, named after the hallmark sign of her genetic condition: joint hypermobility.Advance Praise: "A wondrous, nonlinear, potent proof of life, and Ellen Samuels has counted every syllable, composing in her mind. 'Draw a star/ where it hurts the most.' Each poem bursts and expands beyond its scale, moving you through a measured wormhole of body and life. 'I am the garden/ Eve never took back,' Samuels writes, 'Fist with-/in the bone, rising.' Grounded in a practice and form that began for the poet out of everyday necessity, Samuels applies pressure on language to create 'solid beings,' offering them to us now as HYPERMOBILITIES. I love this book." - Oliver Baez Bendorf, author of 'Advantages of Being Evergreen'

Hypermobilities

Noelle Howey

Offers a variety of personal accounts of achieving one's own sexual identity, coping with homophobia, reaching a modern definition of the family, and related situations, when one's parents are gay, lesbian, or transgender.

Essays on Growing Up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents

Out of the Ordinary

Elizabeth Freeman

This special issue brings together explorations of crip temporality: the ways in which bodily and mental disabilities shape the experience of time. These include needing to use time-consuming adaptive technologies like screen readers, working slowly during a pain flare-up, or only being able to look at a screen for short periods. Through accessibly written essays, art, and poems, contributors explore both the confines of crip temporality and the freedoms it provides. They offer strategies and narratives for navigating the academy as a disabled person; reclaim self-care as a tool for personal survival instead of productivity; and illustrate how crip time is mobilized in service of biopolitical projects. More than just a space of loss and frustration, they argue, crip time also offers liberatory potential: the contributors imagine how justice, connection, and pleasure might emerge from temporalities that center compassion rather than productivity. Contributors Moya Bailey, Amanda Cachia, María Elena Cepeda, Eli Clare, Finn Enke, Elizabeth Freeman, Matt Huynh, Alison Kafer, Mimi Khúc, Christine Sun Kim, Jina B. Kim, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Margaret Price, Jasbir Puar, Jake Pyne, Ellen Samuels, Sami Schalk, Michael Snediker

Ellen Samuels

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