I’ve been thinking a lot about disembodiment lately, probably because I spend hours holding court in Zoom’s kingdom of floating heads. As I discuss literature about illness with my students, I savor the irony: we’re discussing texts obsessed with the body even as we’re estranged from each other’s.

Literature glories in disembodiment. In fiction from around the world, limbs disappear. Whole bodies fade. Human flesh is lost in fabric or spirited away to spectral form. Sometimes, these happenings serve as political allegories or erotic fantasies. In other cases, they dissect notions of identity, memory, gender norms, racism, or cultures of violence.

Inspired by our current predicament, I decided to anatomize the literary body of works about female disembodiment through fiction and nonfiction by Yoko Ogawa, Yasunari Kawabata, Carmen Maria Machado, Gaurav Monga, Anne Boyer, and Murasaki Shikibu.
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