WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES THE BODY MAKE? 63Embodied Multiplicity
Feminist epistemologies have identified the body as a vantage point of
knowledge in order to challenge masculinist, universalizing rationalism
and to address epistemic difference and multiplicity. The neurocognitive
theories of embodied mind discussed above similarly challenge rationalism
by demonstrating the inextricability of the physical body and mind. They
also contest neuroreductionism by refusing to limit the mind to the brain.
Their resonance with feminist epistemologies is clear in these respects.
However, some of these theories tacitly or explicitly assume a universal
body or a normative fit between body and world. Embodied realism uses a
conservative lens of biological constraint to assess not only what epistemo-
logically exists but also what is epistemologically possible. Its assumption
of the commonality of the human body and its epistemic relation to the en-
vironment potentially leads to the re- instantiation of universal knowledge,
the embodied counterpart to universal Reason. Extended functionalism, by
contrast, does not aim to circumscribe the content of mind, and it acknowl-
edges a wide range of differences in body- minds to include human and
nonhuman elements; it echoes Haraway’s themes of challenging human
exceptionalism and opening up the body- subject to posthuman variation.
But it presumes generic cognitive functionality, and it is unreflectively op-
timistic about cyborgian experience. In other words, it does not regard
difference as differentiating. Thus a primary insight of feminist theorizing,
that differences between knowers and contexts and worlds make a differ-
ence, is either undertheorized or undermined in this work.
Putting these literatures in conversation with disability studies high-
lights the need to address variations in bodies and embodiments, as well
as to account for epistemic multiplicity and dissonance. Read together, the
three literatures also offer lessons for exploring the differences embodiment
makes. I want to summarize these as follows. First, models of embodied
mind that shift the focus from the properties of the knower to the context
of knowing enable an understanding of epistemic multiplicity that avoids
fixing the subject. This does not mean that the properties of body- minds
are irrelevant. But because the contexts in which they are embedded are
temporally and spatially specific — that is, they are events — there are al-
ways elements of novelty as well as predictability. Embodied realism relies