Today, policymakers see Latin America and the Caribbean as a triumph in the global fight against under-registration. Governments have successfully halved the number of undocumented births, helping bring marginalised ‘outsiders’ within the reach of the formal economy and the social safety net (Garay, 2016). As we saw in Chapter 1, the ‘administrative ordering’ (Scott, 1998) of populations through the improvement of civil registries has become a fundamental component of global social policy. Over the past three decades, international actors have incorporated legal identity as a core cross-cutting theme. The region is now on track to achieve the global UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of universal birth registration by 2030.

In this chapter, I illustrate how the World Bank's involvement in sponsoring and enforcing legal identity exacerbated historical tensions over the right of Haitian-descended populations born in the country to a Dominican nationality. Although for years the authorities had informally refused to issue the Haitian-descended with their documents, I show how these problems intensified as efforts to modernise the civil registry and provide a universal legal identity expanded. International organisations, aware of disputes over access to citizenship as well as the sensitivities around questions of race and national belonging on the island, continued to fund and push for the expansion of these citizenship-stripping practices, ultimately dismissing the experiences of populations on the island as a sovereign matter for the Dominican authorities to address.

The Under-Registration of Afro-Descended and Indigenous Populations in the Americas

The international debt crisis of the 1980s had a significant impact on spending power, incomes and unemployment levels. To address the burgeoning crisis, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) renegotiated lending and introduced structural adjustment loans to promote the integration of neoliberal policies in the Americas. The regional governments that accepted these conditions subsequently prioritised deficit reduction over investment in human capital and infrastructure. This lack of social spending created a ‘lost decade’ in development, which had an overly harmful impact on the poor.

The end of the exploration era has thus deeply thwarted two basic human emotions that are strongly intertwined: wanderlust and Eros. There is another deep aspiration that our finished world could eventually frustrate: our appetite for politics. As Aristotle stated, man is a political animal, and this can also be considered as one of our most ancient characteristics. Aristotle meant not only that man needed to live in a social environment (the polis) but also that he could develop his full potential and reach happiness only when participating in the collective making of his destiny throughout history. Yet our political nature could be soon deprived of any possibility of expressing itself, for we have reached not only the end of geography but also the end of history. This concept has been so worn out through philosophical debate, often in an aim to disqualify it, that one no longer pays any attention. The true reason, I believe, is that we are actually disturbed by the thought, so we prefer to dismiss the idea, waving it away with a disdainful hand as if it were a stupid remark from a child. But as the saying goes, the truth comes from the mouth of children.

Unlike with traditional messianism, which situates all major achievements in a future that is either unspecified or constantly postponed, Hegel was the first philosopher to imagine the end of history as a tangible event within our reach, as opposed to a far-off concept. For him, the end of history will arise when the Spirit is revealed within a rational governance in which men live freely and equally, an ideal that he saw beginning to seed in the Germany and France of his era. As such, Hegel's thesis was the very first intuition that the possible combinations of governmental types were limited not only in theory (as has been put forward since Aristotle) but also in practice, as there will be a point in history at which everything will have been tested.

The trials and tribulations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries showed, provisionally, that Hegel was wrong.

Both the United States and Canada in the 1920s were cultures that were becoming increasingly focused on the visual. A burgeoning celebrity culture alongside rapidly improving technologies of film and photography were instrumental in this shift, as were the mass-market magazines.1 In addition to written content the mass-market magazine presented increasingly sophisticated images; iconography which served to construct aesthetically based ideals which their readers were encouraged to aspire to, but which were also used in a commercial capacity to sell advertised products and the magazines themselves. This use of imagery on a mass-market scale can be seen as evidence of this burgeoning visual culture, which granted growing importance to appearance. As Conor points out in her book The Spectacular Modern Woman, women were far more visible in public spaces – from the department store to the silver screen, in print and in person – with the result that, ‘for women to identify themselves as modern, the performance of their gendered identity had to take place within the modern spectacularization of everyday life’ (7), thus, ‘modernity's visions of women became part of women's self-perception as modern: gendered representations became embodied’ (8).

Conor's study focuses primarily on recognisable character types of the period, including the flapper and the screen star, who – while intermittently featured in the magazines’ pages – are not closely aligned with the intended audience of the Ladies’ Home Journal and Canadian Home Journal. Yet Conor's comment is nevertheless entirely applicable to the two magazines.

Overcoming division will be the easiest part. When technical progress brings us closer to a possible departure, I think the other major obstacle will actually be the considerable religious angst that will surely arise. Even though major religions aim at building “palaces in time,” they are all of this Earth, born in specific places with specific roots. In Ancient Greece, the Gods lived up on Mount Olympus. In Genesis, heaven is located in Eden, Mesopotamia. Moses lived between Egypt and the Promised Land, Jesus in Palestine, Mohammed in Arabia and Siddhārtha Gautama in Nepal. Can we take God, or rather our gods, up into space? If we settle on another Earth, will we build churches, synagogues, temples and mosques? Will the men and women who colonize other worlds come back to Earth as a pilgrimage? Will they look toward the Blue Planet as they say their prayers? No major religion appears to clearly mention any other worlds, inhabited or not, but there is nothing that would a priori oppose the concept of uprooting them and transferring them to another planet. At least not in theory, for in the majority of humankind's inner faith, at least as I perceived it when growing up, man is the only subject of Creation and Earth his only home.

Indeed, the Catholic education I received was a perfect reflection of how science had described the Big Bang, this monumental fiat lux that had provided the prologue to Creation itself. Without knowing it at the time, I was a concordist, in the same way that Pope Pius XII had viewed the burgeoning theory of the Big Bang, as initially developed by Abbot Georges Lemaître in the 1930s, as a scientific confirmation of the story portrayed in Genesis. In every scientific discovery, I only ever saw reaffirmed proof of the existence of God and, furthermore, His project to make humankind the ultimate and exclusive goal within the universe. For instance, I perceived the extinction of the dinosaurs as a guided quirk of fate, because had the killer meteorite been just a little bigger, smaller life-forms would have been wiped out along with the bigger reptiles and mammals would not have been able to evolve and give birth to human beings—like Goldilocks's final chair, it was just the right size to enable them to rise up from the Jurassic swamp.

Today, an estimated one billion people around the world have no formal proof of identity, and many citizens continue to lack even the most basic form of documentation. Supported by the international development sector and met with enthusiasm from global tech companies, data controllers and industry specialists alike, the en masse registration of populations has exploded in recent years. Already a multimillion-dollar industry, the improved targeting and identification of individuals around the world is now a game changer on the international stage. Laurence Chandy, director of Data, Research and Policy at the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), recently called the prioritisation of documentation within global policy, including the transition from paper to digital identity systems, ‘one of the most under-appreciated revolutions in international development’.

This chapter examines contemporary efforts to provide universal legal identity in accordance with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs aim to ‘provide [a] legal identity for all’ by 2030. This means that over the coming decade, states around the world will prioritise the implementation of registrations to ensure that every person on the planet obtains their own birth certificate. We will learn how important the concept has become for international development planning as it is widely assumed to foment the inclusion of all citizens and is therefore seen as a necessary tool in the fight against informality, under-documentation and statelessness.

Legal Identity and the Sustainable Development Goals: A Warning

In alignment with the expansion of neoliberal reforms, since the 1990s identity systems have grown to become a central pillar of the global world development agenda. Formal identification is now considered a ‘prerequisite for development in the modern world’ (Gelb and Clark, 2013) and policymakers have actively promoted the implementation of pro-poor policies that encourage the improved targeting, identification and documentation of domestic populations to ensure they can access any welfare payments or aid assistance to which they are entitled. International organisations have supported the expansion of identity measures that target the income-poor and the marginalised with particular zeal, often assuming systems that register and document individuals to be largely inclusionary.

The conceptual centrality of the home in the Ladies’ Home Journal and Canadian Home Journal is evidenced, as Fraser Sutherland points out in the case of the latter, by the presence of the word itself in their titles. Both magazines placed a great deal of importance on the home and the role of their imagined readers in that context; yet, while Sutherland seems to accept the ‘naturalness’ of the association between women and the home, Scanlon questions it. In her comment she draws attention to the role of consumerism, and hence of commercial interests, in enforcing the identification of women with the home. More broadly, it is important to recognise domesticity itself, as it is presented in these magazines, as an ideological construct which emerged in the nineteenth century in tandem with the rise of the middle classes. The consumer emphasis dominated from the turn of the century onwards, as evidenced by Christine Frederick's often-quoted Selling Mrs. Consumer (1929). Including chapters such as ‘The Facts Regarding Mrs. Consumer's Spending Power’, ‘The High Status of American Women in Family Spending’ and ‘Mrs. Consumer Is Looking for Effects’, Frederick's book champions advertising while asserting the importance of women's proper role as housewives and, in that capacity, consumers. Frederick was highly influential, yet her role was inherently conflicted; as Janice Williams Rutherford comments, ‘Disingenuously representing herself as a typical housewife, she appeared to remain in the domestic sphere while working in the public one’ (69). This tension arises from the superimposing of early twentieth-century notions of consumption on nineteenth-century conceptions of domesticity and enduring conceptions of ‘separate spheres’, which must first be understood and which this chapter takes as its starting point.

As James Mussell comments, ‘The logic of print is repetition, and of all print genres it is the serial that embodies this most fully’ (‘Repetition’ 345). In this spirit, we return to these two excerpts, included at the start of the introduction to this book. They are representative of the intentions and interests championed by the Ladies Home Journal and Canadian Home Journal, repeated throughout each issue of the 1920s and beyond. The primacy of ‘ideals of womanhood’ and ‘interests of the home’ remains apparent throughout. Indeed, the two are crucially interlinked. Yet this perhaps implies a level of fixedness in ideals and aims which is challenged by closer interrogation of each title. While the idealised version, and vision, of femininity presented to the readership remained the aspirational modern housewife, this ideal was not static and presented contradictions to be negotiated as often as it did a blueprint for self-improvement. The deployment of the ideal can be seen to mask, but certainly not efface, some of the contradictions, threats and anxieties which modernity presented to middle-class femininity. To push this line of thinking slightly further, it may be the case that this was the underlying purpose of the women's magazine: to reinforce an accepted and acceptable femininity. Even if this was true, this was not the women's magazine's only function. To return to Caroline Levine's use of the concept of ‘affordances’, these magazines can be regarded as products which afford multiple, at times unexpected, uses and functions. Perhaps the most notable of these are the ways in which each title provided a space for the negotiation of accepted and acceptable performances of femininity.

In addition to creating specific masculine disarray, the inevitable decline of men's physical utility in a tertiary and digital society is actually erasing one of our species’ most immemorial traits: the difference between the sexes. As it is accompanied by the rise in power for women in domains formerly exclusive to men,1 it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between men and women, right down to the very clothes they wear. Yet if most men no longer have any physical role to play in our explored and domesticated world, can they still truly remain men? Can women still hold any desire for the sedate office workers that so many men have become? Can our sexual alterity biologically survive this physical and mental interchangeability between men and women?

Those questions may sound controversial, for one could instantly contend, firstly, that they are based on the assumption that desire can arise only from gender differentiation, and secondly, that we should in fact be delighted with the growing similarity between men and women, as a decisive step toward closing the gender gap. In a premonitory essay, French feminist Élisabeth Badinter was already rejoicing in the convergence of the sexes, convinced that it heralded the end of the war between the sexes and the birth of a new transgender humanity:

She also writes: