American gothic fiction works across and against the binary fault lines of U.S. somatic categorization: white and black, undead and dead, male and female, normative and monstrous, sane and insane, and also—as these identities gradually became salient—straight and queer. Taking this cultural and ideological work as a point of departure, this chapter will first provide a brief overview of the origins of the American Gothic, as it arose from three national elements that intermingled with the British Gothic novel in the late eighteenth century: hostile encounters between settlers and Native Americans, the repressions and distrust of the body of the Puritans, and the horror of the African slave’s plight in American history. In a second part, this chapter will examine how able-ness, health, race, gender and sexuality have all shaped the fluctuating boundaries of normative versus monstrous embodiment in the American Gothic.