Essentialism and anti-essentialism in feminist philosophy

Journal of Moral Philosophy

Volumn 1, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 135-153

  Stone, Alison ^a  

^a LANCASTER UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 62449223536     PISSN: 17404681     EISSN: 17455243     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/174046810400100202     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. I take the locution 'anti-anti-essentialism' from Cressida Heyes, Line Drawings: Defining Women Through Feminist Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 67-72
2. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 5; italics original
3. Gayatri Spivak, 'In a Word: Interview with Ellen Rooney', in N. Schor and E. Weed (eds.), The Essential Difference (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 159
4. Heyes, Line Drawings, p. 37. Charlotte Witt argues that feminist critiques of essentialism have four similar targets: (1) the metaphysical belief that gender and sex are core attributes of the self; (2) biological determinism; (3) the belief that the word 'feminine' has a fixed meaning; (4) the practice of making false generalizations about women
5. see Witt, 'Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Theory', Philosophical Topics 23.2 (1995), pp. 321-44
6. Naomi Schor stresses that essentialism and universalism differ in 'This Essentialism Which Is Not One: Coming to Grips with Irigaray', in N. Schor and E. Weed (eds.), The Essential Difference (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 24. One might, for instance, argue that there are certain characteristics which all women share, but which are accidental rather than essential (that is, these features could be changed without women thereby ceasing to be women) - such as, perhaps, the feature of being disempowered relative to men. Yet, though universal features need not be essential, essential properties are necessarily universal, hence 'essentialism' and 'universalism' are generally assimilated in feminist discussion
7. For a classic socialist feminist critique of radical feminism, see Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female? (London: Virago, 1987)
8. See, respectively, Nancy Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (New York: Longman, 1983)
9. Catherine MacKinnon, 'Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory', Signs 7 (1982), pp. 515-44
10. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982)
11. Gilligan has subsequently revised her ethical theory to mitigate the exclusive tendencies that critics detected in it: see J.M. Taylor, Carol Gilligan and A.M. Sullivan, Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)
12. Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (London: The Women's Press, 1988)
13. See Butler, Gender Trouble
14. Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies (London: Routledge, 1996)
15. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994)
16. Schor, 'This Essentialism Which Is Not One', p. 42
17. Iris Marion Young, 'Gender as Seriality: Thinking about Women as a Social Collective', Signs 19.3 (1994), p. 713
18. 'Strategic' essentialism is, of course, primarily associated with Gayatri Spivak, who coined the term in 'Feminism, Criticism and the Institution', Thesis Eleven 10/11 (1984-85), pp. 175-87. Spivak, however, introduced strategic essentialism in relation to subaltern studies: her term was taken up within feminist contexts in ways she did not intend
19. Luce Irigaray, Thinking the Difference: For a Peaceful Revolution (trans. K. Montin; London: Athlone Press, 1994), pp. 24-26
20. Denise Riley, 'Am I That Name?': Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 112
21. Young, 'Gender as Seriality', p. 728
22. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason. I. Theory of Practical Ensembles (trans. A. Sheridan-Smith; London: New Left Books, 1976), p. 256
23. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, pp. 258-59
24. Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, p. 76
25. See, especially, Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 226-28
26. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (trans. Carol Diethe; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
27. Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History' reprinted in J. Richardson and B. Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 341-59
28. On the importance of this paper for Foucault's subsequent work, see, inter alia, Michael Mahon, Foucault's Nietzschean Genealogy: Truth, Power, and the Subject (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992)
29. See Raymond Geuss, 'Nietzsche and Morality', in Raymond Geuss (ed.), Morality, Culture and History: Essays on German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 167-69
30. Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History', p. 346
31. As Geuss explains, Nietzsche's conflictual model implies that no reinterpretation will ever 'encounter... just a tabula rasa, but a set of actively structured forces, practices etc. which will be capable of active resistance' (Geuss, 'Nietzsche and Genealogy', in Morality, Culture, and History, p. 13). This resistance ensures that new interpretations will 'not in general be so fully successful that nothing...remains' of the pre-existing meanings (p. 11)
32. Judith Butler, 'Variations on Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig and Foucault', in S. Benhabib and D. Cornell (eds.), Feminism as Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 131
33. Butler, 'Variations', p. 131
34. Judith Butler, 'Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of "Postmodernism"', in S. Benhabib et al. (eds.), Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 50
35. See, for example, Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, 'Social Criticism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism', in L. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 35