Essentialism

Feminists also question "feminist" essentialism. Angela Harris defines essentialism as the belief that a monolithic race or gender experience exists that can be described independently of other social relations. To be antiessentialist means to understand that the lives of women of color and all people generate and enact multiple forms of subjectivity. It is erroneous to posit heterosexuality as the norm or that black male experience is the exemplar for black women and all minorities. The authors of the influential collection Home Girls (1983) and Elizabeth Spelman label essentialist any claim that an essential woman exists beneath differences among women. Any assertion of a universal property or position shared by all women is suspect. Such claims obscure the many important differences among women. Belief in a common identity requires conflating one group of women with the whole and erasing differences, especially those of race, class, and sexuality. Differences among women can be safely ignored or relegated to footnotes. However, this approach simply obfuscates the effects of whiteness and other dominant social relations on and as particular modes of womanhood. It obscures the ways race is constituted in contemporary practices such that only people of color are marked by race and white remains the unmarked, unraced. Within such practices, any woman leached of all color is actually white. Removing race only results in removing black women. Black women then become white women only more so. White women can then represent all women. Paradoxically, this then redounds more so to warrant assertions of the common oppression of all women, including white ones. All women, from the most impoverished "third world woman" to the wealthiest white one, are equally instances of women's universal condition.

Paul Gilroy and others within cultural and subaltern studies also critique essentialism. In their view, it enables, expresses, and reproduces global systems of domination. Colonialist discourses postulate essential human traits that non-Western others lack or could only imperfectly possess. The homogeneity of such essences existed only through contrast with heterogeneous others. Projecting all impurity, materiality, and instability on these others enabled certain subjects to imagine themselves as instances of the pure and eternal—reason, the soul, the fully human, etc. Such ideas then underwrote Western claims of the right to rule and civilize (to the extent possible) these inferior others.