Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy

The heated feminist debates over 'essentialism' of the 1980s and early 1990s have largely died away, yet they raised fundamental questions for feminist moral and political philosophy which have still to be fully explored. Centrally at issue in feminist controversies over essentialism was whether there are any shared characteristics common to all women, which unify them as a group. Many leading feminist thinkers of the 1970s and 1980s rejected essentialism, particularly on the grounds that universal claims about women are invariably false and effectively normalise and privilege specific forms of femininity. However, by the 1990s it had become apparent that the rejection of essentialism problematically undercut feminist politics, by denying that women have any shared characteristics which could motivate them to ask together as a collectivity. An 'anti-anti-essentialist' current therefore crystallised which sought to resuscitate some form of essentialism as a political necessity for feminism. i One particularly influential strand within this current has been 'strategic' essentialism, which defends essentialist claims just because they are politically useful. In this paper, I aim to challenge strategic essentialism, arguing that feminist philosophy cannot avoid enquiring into whether essentialism is true as a descriptive claim about social reality. I will argue that, in fact, essentialism is descriptively false, but that this need not undermine the possibility of feminist activism. This is because we can derive an alternative basis for feminist politics from the concept of 'genealogy' which features importantly within some recent theoretical understandings of gender, most notably Judith Butler's 'performative' theory of gender. To anticipate, I will develop my argument for a 'genealogical' and anti-essentialist recasting of feminist politics in the following stages. I begin by reviewing the history of 2 feminist debates surrounding essentialism, identifying in these apparently highly disparate debates a coherent history of engagement with an 'essentialism' that carries a relatively unified sense. My overview of these debates will trace how anti-essentialism came to threaten feminism both as a critique of existing society and as a politics of change. I shall then assess two attempts by feminist thinkers to surmount the problems posed by anti-essentialism without reverting to the idea that all women share a common social position and form of experience. These attempts are, firstly, strategic essentialism and, secondly, Iris Marion Young's idea that women comprise not a unified group but an internally diverse 'series'. Both these attempts, I shall argue, are unsatisfactory, because they continue tacitly to …