Feminist Theory of Disembodiment

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 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 the continental tradition. 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. 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.