-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Clotilde TorregrossaAbstract:
This article revisits the ethical and political questions raised by feminist debates over essentialism, the belief that there are properties essential to women and which all women share. Feminists’ widespread rejection of essentialism has threatened to undermine feminist politics. Re-evaluating two responses to this problem—‘strategic’ essentialism and Iris Marion Young’s idea that women are an internally diverse ‘series’—I argue that both unsatisfactorily retain essentialism as a descriptive claim about the social reality of women’s lives. I argue instead that women have a ‘ genealogy’: women always acquire femininity by appropriating and reworking existing cultural interpretations of femininity, so that all women become situated within a history of overlapping chains of interpretation. Because all women are located within this complex history, they are identifiable as belonging to a determinate social group, despite sharing no common understanding or experience of femininity. The idea that women have a genealogy thus reconciles anti-essentialism with feminist politics.
Comment: This text contributes to a key debate in metaphysics of gender, while providing clear overview of past scholarship. The proposal draws on Nietzschean genealogy to defend a version of gender anti-essentialism. As such, this text could be used for interesting discussions in a seminar on metaphysics of gender, or metaphysics of social kinds more broadly.
Stone, Alison. Essentialism and anti-essentialism in feminist philosophy
2004, Journal of Moral Philosophy 1(2): 135–153
Can’t find it?
Contribute the texts you think should be here and we’ll add them soon!