ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses that the inattention to embodied power severely limits contemporary understandings of the political. It explores various mechanics of erasure, tracing the construction of raced and gendered bodies as biological entities to the long eighteenth century. It also demonstrates the de-politicization of embodiment coincided with the expansion of European empires through brutal conquest, labor exploitation and enslavement and the emergence of new republics that barred women from political participation. The book explores various explanations for the lack of attention to race, gender, and sexuality in a discipline that claims power as a central analytical concept. It then presents that the fallacies associated with biological determinism, but also traces the resurrection of these defective views in sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and genomics. Finally, it examines the construction of racialized-gendered tiers of citizenship within the recent past.
