Critical attention to forms of material and abstract embodiment in American studies has been fostered through its interface with feminism, race and ethnic studies, and postcolonial studies. The latter critical projects enable a turn to those human subjects historically associated with the discredited life of the material body and so constituted as marginal to the arenas of cultural production and political representation: women, Africans and their New World descendants, indigenous peoples, mestizos, and Asians, among other categories of “overembodied” ethnic, sexual, and classed identity. As it emerges transformed from this intellectual contact zone, American studies has addressed how collective and impersonal forms of political agency are routinely embodied in propertied, white men, whose political privilege depends on the association of other genders, races, and classes with corporealized identities. The circulation of such “overembodied” identities as public icons and spectacle has been crucial to the protection of established political privilege. At the same time, the visibility of disqualified political subjects within public culture has also generated important opportunities for contesting their disqualification.

This is an excerpt from Eva Cherniavsky’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 28).