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.

The book explores how disembodiment is relevant and productive for feminist theory. Panayotov asks how we can face disembodiment literally, as a real praxis rather than a literary trope, by colliding feminism, non-philosophy, new realisms, and posthumanities to argue for literal disembodiment in the contemporary posthuman condition.

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.