femininity

The present article defends he argument that there were tendencies in both mythological and pre-Socratic thought that paved the way for an explicit philosophy of disembodiment inherited by the Hellenistic mind, which flowered in the shapes of gendered ambivalence. By focusing on personification of boundlessness and the notion of apeiron, I discuss the genesis of the problem of disembodiment, and investigate its tendencies in mythical (pre-philosophical) thought and in single-element theories, abetted by arguments from feminist poststructuralist theories and from feminist philosophy, to pre- and post-Socratic/post-Platonic attitudes that spliced embodiment and femininity. The article aims to demonstrate that the problem of disembodiment is characterized by a pre-Platonic ambivalence concerning physis emanating in the relations between femininity, elementality, and death. I reveal that the problem of disembodiment is intimately tied to gendered ambivalence in both mythology (female mythic figures) and pre-Socratics (i.e., “elements” and “principles”) that transformed female boundlessness into male heroism. Hence, in the postmythological world the relation between women and death became problematic, which in turn led to a male anxiety over reproduction: an anxiety that was reliant on constellating women, death, boundlessness, and formlessness, and a process that eventually decries a lost preternatural male physis.

In literary, film, and computer realities, a woman is projected in different ways. One of these transformations of the feminine is the witch. The knowledgeable woman is subjected to a number of taboos and (re)makings since ancient times. Creators embody diverse variants of the witch in their works to turn the image into a sustainable model. Wheth- er nurtured by the mythological, the gothic, or the popular, the witch embodies femininity that arouses fear because it cannot be completely rationalized. Female writers use the witch as a special type of femi- ninity – sometimes punished for her nature (Madeleine Miller’s Circe), sometimes able to overcome taboos and prohibitions (Angela Carter). How these “old” and at the same time “new” essences manage to coexist in modern prose, what implications and interpretive models are set for the image of the woman and the witch: these are some of the questions that this paper aims to raise and unfold in the context of the remake as a cultural practice.