A character with a body is a social creature while a character without a body, I believe, is a thought experiment. To some ways of thinking, it is perhaps more honest to write characters without bodies. After all, should fiction be striving for mimetic reality through exact physical recreation? This question has been central to art ever since the introduction of the printing press. The photographic camera. The record player. Etc. With our ability to generate better and better replicas of our exact physical worlds, what good is there in trying to capture the physical dimension of the world in fiction?
