Feminist Theory of Disembodiment

Explores how feminist theory can engage disembodiment as a real and historically grounded praxis, offering a feminist realist framework that integrates continental theory, posthumanist thought, non-philosophy, and disembodying technologies.

Can feminist theory work with the ancient ideal of disembodiment? How can disembodiment become a beneficial notion for contemporary feminisms? In Feminist Theory of Disembodiment, Panayotov claims that there can be no general theory of disembodiment today without a serious embracing and deep explication of disembodiment as historically male discursive praxis. The book makes the case for a specific, yet normative feminist framework for understanding the notion and practices of disembodiment from a distinctly feminist realist framework within/of the continental tradition. The project for feminist disembodiment bases its main argument on the strategic feminist appropriation of non-standard philosophy, new realisms, and the posthumanities. Panayotov argues that disembodiment—a much resisted and rarely embraced phenomenon in feminist theory—is comfortably embraced from a realist perspective within a preventive feminist type of reasoning about its real and material implications. By drawing a fundamental distinction between literary and literal disembodiment and by conceptualizing “disembodying technologies,” the author demonstrates how, in today’s posthumanist momentum, the realness of literal disembodiment is avoided to the detriment of progressive critical thought and action, and that such avoidance only delegitimizes the stakes of feminist reason and action. Set within a niched yet powerful canon of continental theory, both feminist and realist, the book provides theorizations on contemporary forms of dis/engaging with disembodiment as real praxis and a desired result for the posthuman condition. This book blasts open the feminist anti-realist consensus, depriving feminist theory of its capability to play with what it forbade itself to think: the vista of immortality.