Abstraction should not be confused with spiritualism, which is just abstraction from location.
In an age when technology and materialism seemed to have undermined religious faith, a new 'modern spiritualism' was suddenly born, and it exploded into prominence.
At the core of spiritualism as a social practice was the medium.
The failure of spiritualism may be attributed to a schism within its own defining concepts.
The discourses of spiritualism and occultism collapse the poles of this defining dichotomy by insisting that the supernatural is natural.
I will argue, however, that spiritualism violated not only the notion of stable gender identity but of identity altogether.
Thus, spiritualism necessarily entails "gender trouble," just as its attempt to combine faith and science necessarily entails epistemological confusion.
The history of spiritualism thus adds a cautionary note to those postmodern theories that see a subversive, utopian subject as a desideratum.
