Abstract
Conservative or patriarchal justifications of traditional roles often invoke ideas of human nature, “In claiming that women’s current social roles and positions are the effects of their essence, nature, biology or universal social position, these theories are guilty of rendering such roles and positions unalterable and necessary and thus of providing them with powerful political justification.”1 As a response to this type of argument, cultural theory of the 1980s and 1990s worked to destabilize previously secure categories and encouraged theorists to analyze meaning and relationships of power in a way that would call into question unitary, universal concepts and radically open discussions concerning subjectivity, sex, sexualities, and gender, thereby inaugurating the “sexual equality versus sexual differences” debate.
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Notes
Sylvia Walby, Gender Transformations (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 15.
Kate Soper, “Feminism, Humanism and Postmodernism,” Radical Philosophy 5, 11 (1990): 13.
Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 107.
Vikki Kirkby, “Corporeal Habits: Addressing Essentialism Differently,” Hypatia 6, 3 (1991): 4–24.
Cressida Heyes, Line Drawings: Defining Women Through Feminist Practice. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
See, for instance, Uma Narayan, “Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism,” Hypatia (1998): 86–106.
Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (London: The Woman’s Press, 1988), 1–5.
Teresa De Lauretis, “The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain,” in The Essential Difference, ed. Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 8.
Elizabeth Grosz, “A Note on Essentialism and Difference,” in Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct, ed. S. Gunew (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 3.
J. Reid, “Natural Kind Essentialism,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80, 1 (2002): 62–74.
Christopher Norris, Hilary Putnam: Realism, Reason and the Uses of Uncertainty (New York: Palgrave, 2002).
John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 63.
See Hugh Mellor, Natural Kinds in Matters of Metaphysics (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and J. Reid.
L. Wetzel.,” Is Socrates Essentially a Man?” Philosophical Studies 98, 2 (2000): 206.
Christine Delphy, “Rethinking Sex and Gender,” in Feminist Theory Reader, ed. C. McCann and S.K. Kim (London: Routledge, 2003), 53.
Eli Hirsch, The Concept of Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 269.
C. Hill. Rethinking Identity and Metaphysics: On the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 48–52.
Natalie Stoljar, “The Politics of Identity and the Metaphysics of Diversity: Conceptions of Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy,” in The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, ed. Daniel Dahlstrom 8 (2000): 24.
H. H. Price, Thinking and Experience (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 32.
J. F. Jones, “A Modest Realism,” Philosophy in the Contemporary World 5, 2/3 (1998): 5–21.
Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (London: Verso, 1997), 209.
J.M. Vienne, “Locke on Real Essence and Internal Constitution,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 93 (1993): 142.
Diane Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (London: Routledge, 1989).
For a discussion of materialism within feminist theory, see Momin Rahman and Anne Witz, “What Really Matters: The Elusive quality of the Material in Feminist Theory,” Feminist Theory 4, 3 (2003): 243–261.
Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 22.
For a discussion of this sort, see Marjorie Miller, “Essence and Identity: Santayana and the Category ‘Women,’” Transaction of the Charles Pierce Society 30, 1 (1994).
Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London: Free Association Books, 1988), 72.
“The principles of philosophical contemplation are recovered in the dialectic which is inherent in origin”: Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 45, 46.
For a clear articulation of this in feminist epistemology, see Lorraine Code, “Taking Subjectivity into Account,” in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 15–48.
Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of Ontological Difference,” in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 415–427.
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© 2010 Gillian Howie
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Howie, G. (2010). Essentialism. In: Between Feminism and Materialism. Breaking Feminist Waves. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113435_5
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