Essentialism

Broadly understood, essentialism is a belief that things have certain core characteristics that are crucial to making up their identities. Without those core characteristics, the things would not be as they are. Inasmuch as essentialism is an aspect of form, it cuts across various domains including philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, ethics, psychology, and more. Each domain, not surprisingly, has its own twist on essentialism.

In legal studies, essentialism became a prominent concept in connection with feminist jurisprudence and critical race theory. In an important article published in 1990, Angela Harris argued that feminist jurisprudence had to move away from an essentialist conception of woman. Harris wrote that scholars could not adequately describe woman's experience independently of class, race, and sexual orientation. She argued that the predominant conception of woman in feminist jurisprudence was based upon the experiences of white women. This view quickly became known in legal circles as “anti-essentialism” or “the anti-essentialist critique.”

Harris and other proponents of the anti-essentialist critique meant the claim to be a politically contingent one. Indeed, they explicitly refrained from adopting the view that scholars should avoid all essentialism. Nonetheless, the anti-essentialist critique was quickly turned into a politically decontextualized abstraction. As such, opponents of the critique were able to argue that anti-essentialism was unavoidably self-refuting.

In its guise as an abstract all-purpose critique, antiessentialism quickly ran into the oft-repeated objection that anti-essentialism was itself rendered possible only in virtue of affirming its own essentialist categories. Anti-essentialism was thus unavoidably suicidal. Whether this claim was right or not, of course, depends upon whether categories must themselves necessarily be conceived as essentialist in character or not—a matter of some debate not only in cognitive psychology, but in philosophy as well.

Another critique of anti-essentialism, in its political as well as its abstract version, was the claim that the [Page 503]anti-essentialism was politically demobilizing. Some feminists argued that the critique was politically demobilizing. They argued that the deconstruction of woman's identity effectively eliminated feminism's key political client and the epistemological vantage of feminist jurisprudence as well.