Essentialism

Essentialism is a concept that suggests that a thing or a class of people has an inherent quality that comes from nature rather than from culture or history. Essentialism is studied and debated often in philosophy and also plays an important role in studies of race, gender, and sexuality. In philosophy the notion of essence can be found in Platonic idealism, in which all forms in their ideal state have eternal and unchanging characteristics. Essence is related to being and concerns the special nature of a thing that makes it different from everything else.

NATURE AND DIFFERENCE: RATIONALES FOR RACISM AND SLAVERY

Essence thus is concerned especially with both nature and difference. Humanists are said to be essentialists insofar as they see something basic in human nature that remains stable over time and is not affected by culture or geographic location. Human nature is natural in that it is inherent in all human beings as a quality of the species. Essentialism also is concerned with difference in that it separates humans from all other creatures in the natural world.

Essentialism has functioned for centuries to promote and enforce racism and human slavery. In the past it was convenient to believe that human beings differ from each other in quality and humanness because that belief justified treating others inhumanely. From the eighteenth century onward European and North American culture developed a strain of scientific racism that insisted that some races are inherently inferior to others. That form of essentialism justified genocide in the Americas, the British conquest of India, the European colonization of Africa, and slavery in the American South. Scientific racism was used in the twentieth century to oppress African Americans under Jim Crow and to murder 6 million Jews and others during World War II. It still is used by white supremacists and by regimes around the world to promote what is termed ethnic cleansing.

GENDER ESSENTIALISM

One of the oldest, strongest, and most pervasive forms of essentialism relates to gender. It is found the world over encoded in religious texts and customs, social and gender roles, art, literature, and science. Gender essentialism holds that men and women have distinctly different natures, or essences, that are particular to them. Women are thought to be closer to nature because they are considered to have more difficulty transcending their bodies, whereas men are seen as more easily able to distance themselves from embodiment so that they can engage in abstract thought, political and social activity, and other pursuits not linked to reproduction. This difficulty of transcendence among women is viewed in many societies as natural rather than cultural, though it is imposed on women culturally to ensure that someone will raise the next generation.

Sexually active men bear no physical burden and little social burden that tie them to reproduction; after ejaculation a man can walk away from the woman he has copulated with and resume his life. Without some form of birth control, however, a sexually active woman may become pregnant and physically tied to the fetus growing inside her body for nine months. The burden of the body grows heavier for her as she becomes larger and more uncomfortable, though women throughout history have continued to work, hunt, farm, and fight until they give birth to their children. After giving birth to the baby, a woman may wish to be free to abandon the child and resume a pursuit or adventure, but custom, culture, and law bind her to care for her children until they can sustain themselves, something that takes years.

Essentialism naturalizes gender inequality by maintaining that it is women's special nature to care for children and men's special nature to create culture and commerce. Woman's nature is held to be more passive, nurturing, peaceful, domestic, emotional, and content; men's nature is seen as more aggressive, intellectual, competitive, worldly, remote, and restless. Such views naturalize both sexual difference and a social structure in which women stay home and men run the world.

Essentialism was the first gender prejudice to be challenged by the successive waves of feminism. However, some feminists have embraced essentialism because it grants special strengths and powers to women on the basis of sexual difference. American cultural feminism in the 1960s and 1970s attributed the presence of large numbers of women in antiwar activism to the natural expression of their peaceful and motherly natures. That form of essentialist thinking was adopted by antinuclear feminist activists around the world in the 1970s and 1980s in defense of the natural world and the environment against nuclear testing and nuclear power.

In dealing with the traditional devaluation of women in culture and history, French feminism in that era viewed the essentialisms linked to women's bodies as sources of separatist resistance to patriarchal culture and its phallocentric, logocentric chauvinism, embracing essentialism and physical difference as a basis for women's empowerment. Thus, the two lips of a woman's genitalia might offer multiple possibilities for meaning in stark contrast to the unyielding singularity of the extruded male phallus, and the soft mellifluous sounds of the body and the womb of the mother offer another linguistic alternative to the violence of patriarchal language and its focus on castration and enforced gender normativity.

Strategic essentialists attempt to retain a critique of the social construction of gender roles while hanging on to the specificity of female experience in a gendered body. They argue that women deserve the same economic and political advantages that men have but that they are not the same as men and their difference from men should be respected. This type of essentialism often has racial and cultural undertones; many women of color argue that although they should have access to the same advantages as white men and women, they do not want their differences to be devalued and erased. Strategic essentialism maintains that the embodied experience of gendered beings of color should be seen as specific and important and can be employed by women of color as a locus of identity, political organizing, and social and economic empowerment.

SOCIAL CONSTRUCTIVISM

Social constructivism is the opposite of essentialism, holding that all the qualities of a person are socially constructed and are made to seem natural only to establish an ideological advantage for one group over another. If men and women believe that women are essentially equal to men but have been coerced into assuming dependent and subservient roles by cultural institutions controlled by men, they probably will view a woman's lot as unjust and work for social change. However, if everyone believes that female inferiority is natural, men and women will be more likely to accept the status quo, in which men dominate the cultural, political, religious, and economic institutions of their society.

Marxism was one of the earliest theories of social constructivism, followed by psychoanalysis, feminism, deconstruction, postcolonial theory, Foucaultian historical analysis, and queer theory that employs elements of all of those systems. Nineteenth-century Marxism argued that people's material relationship to the means of production entirely shaped their lives, whereas twentieth-century Marxist considered ideology crucial as well. Freudian psychoanalysis uncoupled the libido from essential gender, arguing for the innate bisexuality of all infants and outlining the cultural processes of sex and gender differentiation. Feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir (1993) described the cultural construction of woman as other to man and traced the advantages men gained from an investment in this myth. Deconstruction argued that binary opposition is a self-serving cultural construct that often is used to justify the oppression of one group by another. Foucaultian analysis showed the body and sexuality to be historical constructs that changed over time, taking their shape from operations of power and resistance. Queer theory uncoupled sexuality from gender, using all those theories to celebrate queer identities and queer cultural forms as parodic and transformative social projects.

More recently, transgender theorists and activists have taken the essentialist-social constructivist binary a step further, coupling and uncoupling gender behavior, bodily sex, and sexuality by insisting that gender can be experienced as an essence but that one's essence does not have to match one's physical body and that one's sexual expression can be heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual, regardless of one's physical sex or felt gender essence. Sex researcher John Money (Colopinto 2000) held that gender and sexuality are constructed by society, and he performed an experiment on a set of identical male twins in which a boy who accidentally had been castrated during a circumcision was raised as a girl. Money insisted that the experiment was a success, but the boy's subsequent depression, reversion to a male identity, and suicide helped expose the violent repression of gender variant and intersex bodies by the medical profession and helped spark new interest in hormones as agents of biological determinism.

Some scientists and activists continue to seek a biological component to gender and sexual behavior, and this is highly controversial. Many queer activists believe that if a physical component to homosexuality, such as brain type or genetic markers, can be identified, it will be less defensible to persecute gay men and lesbians as social deviants. Others believe that this type of science resembles the disturbing historical essentialism of scientific racism and misogyny, in which physical differences were used to justify social inequality, oppression, and extermination. Opponents of essentialist science fear that homosexual genetic markers will be used to screen out and abort fetuses that might become lesbians, gay men, or transgender people. Despite this possibility there is strong support for the role of biology as a determinant factor in gender and sexual behavior. Thus, society can be said to be experiencing a new era of essentialist thought that no doubt will spur more scientific study of the degree to which biology essentially determines the eventual gender and sexuality of children.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beauvoir, Simone de. 1993. The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley. New York: Knopf.

Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Colopinto, John. 2000. As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. New York: HarperCollins.

De Cecco, John P., and John P. Elia. 1993. If You Seduce a Straight Person, Can You Make Them Gay? Issues in Biological Essentialism versus Social Constructionism in Gay and Lesbian Identities. New York: Haworth Press.

Fausto-Sterling, Anne. 2000. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.

                                                   Jaime Hovey