Essentialism

These antiessentialist arguments are controversial. Some insist that social movements require a deep notion of shared position and condition. Writers such as Diana Fuss and Gayatri Spivak argue that essentialism itself has no essence; the problem is how it is used. Oppressed groups can deploy essentialism strategically. Essentialist concepts enable the oppressed to organize resistant forms of identity and sustain a powerful sense of solidarity.

Other theorists such as Luce Irigaray, Catharine MacKinnon, and Martha Nussbaum also deploy a feminist essentialism. Irigaray argues that the problem is not that woman has been conceived in essentialist terms but rather the content of those terms. Woman's essence has been defined by men, as not-man or lesser man. Women have never articulated their own difference, among themselves and for themselves. For Irigaray, this essence can never be one; it does not conform to the unitary logic of homo-centric discourse. Irigaray employs the metaphor of the labia; two lips, always two, not divisible into one; neither one nor two. Two lips provide the basis for a speaking (as) woman, to articulate a feminine imaginary. MacKinnon insists that gender difference is a socially constructed concept invented to sustain male dominance. Under patriarchy, all women share a common essence—sexuality. Sexuality is a social process that creates and directs desire. Woman is produced through this process as an object whose only purpose is to gratify men. While Nussbaum situates herself within the language of rights and human capacities, she too insists that male dominance is universal and universally experienced by all women. Their liberation requires stipulating universal norms. Justice cannot exist without a binding consensus on a universalist account of human functioning and its regulative force. Those most deprived of support for the essential human capacities (often women outside the West) are most in need of such norms.

Despite ingenious attempts to rescue it, modern essentialism has yet to provide satisfactory responses to skeptical inquiries regarding how we know if we have grasped a true essence. While problems of meaning, representation, intelligibility, and identity remain, essentialists have yet to persuade skeptics to abandon their doubts.