Gender Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism

Abstract

It is a widely accepted feminist claim that gender injustice is not incidental and individual, but systematic and structural - it targets women as women. Feminism thus seemingly lends itself to identity politics: a form of political mobilization based on membership in women's social kind, where shared experiences or traits delimit kind membership. Essentialism may be characterized as the thesis that some of an entity's properties are necessary to it, whereas other properties are merely accidental. Classificatory anti-essentialism has been extremely influential in feminist philosophy and the failure to think intersectionally about social identities is considered to be a grave intellectual error. Classificatory anti-essentialism is not alone in challenging the viability of women's social kind. Both essentialist and anti-essentialist perspectives have afforded valuable theoretical insights, but they generate a stalemate. Individual essentialism, rather than kind essentialism, intersects with questions of agency, and the issue of agency is central to feminist theory.