ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critical history of the discipline that moves beyond benign descriptions of disembodied politics to explicate the raced and gendered political world envisioned and consolidated by political science. Feminist scholars, critical race scholars, and scholars from the global South have long challenged omissions and distortions associated with disembodied conceptions of politics. Over the past few decades, several hypotheses have been advanced to explain the discipline's failure to engage embodied power. Some emphasize the pervasive assumption that race and sex are biological phenomena, and as such altogether beyond the reach of the political. Reflecting larger belief systems circulating in the United States, Charles Mills links the short-sightedness of political science to cultural values. When political actors are conceived as abstract individuals or self-maximizing rational actors, there is no need to take race, sex or sexuality into account.
