"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."--back cover.

Ellen Craft's masquerade -- Confidence in the nineteenth century -- The disability con onscreen -- The trials of Salomé Müller -- Of fiction and fingerprints -- Proving disability -- Revising blood quantum -- Realms of biocertification -- DNA and the readable self -- Conclusion: future identifications.