here's an essay i wrote for a class

I feel like there are some weaknesses in my reasoning here, and I'm not fully comfortable with this product, but in the interest of full disclosure, here it is.

One of the most frustrating tasks for feminists is that of examining history, recognizing those aspects of the present which have their origins in never-corrected historical errors, and attempting to remove these archaisms from the collective consciousness in which they are so deeply embedded. Essentialism is a prime example of this, as a long-outdated drain on political discourse, a blood-sucking tick located in an unreachable spot on history’s back. Uprooting essentialist modes of thought is vital to the integrity and political aims of the feminist movement. “Essentialism” is the belief that certain characteristics of an individual are definitional and that the individual can be judged to have a set of associated characteristics based on them. The worst applications of essentialism involve the marginalization or oppression by a self-identified group against another group that they themselves identify. This artificial dichotomy gives the oppressor group a language and basis of reason for justifying their oppression. In America, for example, the absorption of recent European immigrants into a greater community of “whiteness” in the early 20th century facilitated the racist political environment into the 21st. However, it is not enough to merely condemn essentialism; to do that is to seek the easy answers that essentialism offers. Essentialism also takes other, seemingly benign forms: As the feminist movement began to recognize differences within its own ranks, it was proposed by some that an individual’s level of oppression can be ‘added together’ from the oppressed groups that they are identified as being in. No harmful intent seems to drive this belief, but the inevitable oversimplification it brings can have unintentionally marginalizing effects. Feminism has, from its origins, sought to break away from oppressive essentialist myths; the earliest liberal feminist critiques of society focused on commonly held beliefs that women were essentially incapable of being autonomous. In order to understand how feminism has further broken away from essentialism and to flesh out a complete argument against its use, we must turn to the body of feminist literature regarding this subject. Three particular authors from our course readings address the issue of essentialism; in their own ways, Elizabeth Spelman, Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler each seek a resolution to this historical quandary.
Elizabeth Spelman’s contribution focuses most directly on the circumstances which make essentialist thought utterly unusable for analyzing society and culture. Specifically, she is attacking the ‘benign’ line of thought mentioned in the introduction, that factors such as race, sex, and class are separately identifiable within any individual who is ascribed them and are therefore identifiable as groups at large. Spelman demonstrates in her essay that these traits are totally indistinguishable within the individual: “Nothing… would meet the requirements of being a ‘part’ of me that was a ‘woman part’ that was not also a ‘white part.’” (Spelman, “Woman: The One and Many” 161) Because these traits are inseparable from each other, identifying them in two different individuals with different group affiliations tells you nothing about either individual. Spelman’s concept of an indivisible identity is a fundamental argument against essentialism; in order for something to be essential to a group, it must be identifiable within the individuals of that group. In order to better demonstrate this concept, Spelman constructs an interesting thought experiment. She represents individuals in society as immigrants progressing through a customs hall with many rooms. The rooms all possess marked doors indicating some dimension of social grouping, and the immigrants made to pass through the doors based on their own identifications. By applying only the most dimensions of race and sex to this model, Spelman is able to create four groupings of men, four groupings of women, and two sex groupings for each race, all based on where the individuals end up. Even if these were the only ways in which people were grouped and separated, our theoretical attempts to judge people by one dimension(essentially) are completely ruined and our attempts to study all groups internally become offputtingly complicated. Spelman has, in very simple terms, demonstrated that essentialist ideologies can have no theoretical integrity. Indeed, the empirical research of people as groups seems unavoidably tied to the essentialist fudging of identities. However, that does not negate the fact of essentialism’s continued existence as a political ideology, so Spelman goes further and demonstrates the ways in which essentialist thought has fostered oppression within the feminist cause. Feminism began(so to speak) with the identification of “woman” as an oppressed class, where “a subordinated people insist[s] that they have characteristics in common with their dominators(e.g. humanity, reason, vulnerability to suffering) and therefore that they are owed a higher regard than presently afford them by the dominators.” (Spelman, “Woman: The One And Many” 166) However, the identification of “woman” as a group necessarily involved including people across other politically relevant lines of domination within that group. Within feminism itself, white middle-class women held an almost total monopoly on identity formation, legislating the identities of black and poor women whose struggles they could not identify with and were likely not even aware of. Spelman correctly identifies this as an arrogant co-opting of political identities for the sake of political convenience; history tells us that it was the cause of deep and bitter divisions within feminism. This particular anomaly, that of oppression within a group designed to combat oppression, is best explained by Spelman’s theories, which clarify how essentialist views create a blind spot to the suffering created by our own machinations. We cannot reject essentialism utterly, however, without examining other opinions within feminist literary canon.
In contrast to Spelman, Elizabeth Grosz seems far more willing to give essentialism serious consideration as an ideology. Her support for it is qualified at numerous points, and it is clear that she at least accepts Spelman’s premise that essentialism is not theoretically sound and can foster oppression. She describes essentialism and its cognates(biologism, naturalism and universalism) as “problematic in both political and theoretical terms.” (Grosz, “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism”) However, because of the focus of her analysis, Grosz seems to draw a more positive conclusion about the possibilities of essentialist beliefs. To Grosz, the focus of the essentialist debate centers on the struggle between feminisms of equality—liberal feminisms in particular—which repudiate essentialism on the basis of women’s equality to men, and feminisms of difference, which seek to identify an essential difference between men and women in order to end dependency on ‘masculine’ institutions and ideologies. She discredits feminisms of equality on the basis of seven failures of liberal feminism and takes the opportunity to note approval of feminisms of difference. It should be made clear that she is misrepresenting the fundamental issue of essentialism here. Liberal feminists are not the only faction opposing essentialism, and rejecting liberal feminism does not necessarily imply accepting the ideology it opposes. The strongest arguments against essentialism are, in fact, those made by minority groups who broke from the liberal mainstream: those of black feminists, lesbians, third-world feminists, and their intellectual heirs who repurposed them into intersectional and post-structural theories. Also, in her defense of feminisms of difference, Grosz argues that feminisms of difference are using a different essentialism, one used for constructive purposes rather than maleficent ones. She claims, “In the case of feminists of difference, however, difference is seen not as difference from a pregiven norm, but as pure difference, difference in itself, difference with no identity.” (Grosz, “Sexual Difference and the Problem of Essentialism”) Is this difference pure enough to eliminate the “blind spot” of oppression that essentialism creates? Is it possible to have a ‘difference with no identity’ in any political faction formed on the basis of identity? Given what we’ve already established about essentialism, the answer in both cases would seem to be ‘no’. Conspicuously absent from Grosz’ essay are answers to the questions raised by Spelman’s claims about indivisibility of identity. If, as Grosz says, “difference resists the homogenisation of separate political struggles/ insofar as it implies not only women's differences from men, and from each other, but also women's differences from other oppressed groups,” then how do you separate ‘woman’ from other oppressed groups? Are women expected to put aside other all other aspects of their identity in order to take on the mantle of ‘woman’? Grosz’ final defense of essentialism relies on the idea that oppressed people can take up the weapons of their oppressors as tools of political struggle. She states outright that women will be inevitably implicated in patriarchy, either by adopting the ‘masculine’ objectivity that she associates with anti-essentialism or by adopting essentialism itself. Grosz insists that by creating a feminism of difference using essentialism, “being vigilant” about how it is used instead of performing “the totally counter-productive gesture of repudiating it”, women are given a new tool with which to fight their oppression. This is a problematic perspective because it makes certain assumptions about how the inclusion of essentialism in discourse will play out. If women are merely leveling essentialist claims against the patriarchy, then it is simple for the patriarchy to answer those claims with their own essentialist claims, which they have far better means to disseminate to the public. Or, they may simply repudiate women for their lack of objectivity, even when this is a hypocritical claim coming from those authorities who essentialism and irrationality has empowered. A stance which rejects essentialism entirely gives feminists a standard to hold patriarchal apologists to and an easy way of legitimating themselves in the minds of the public. The idea of women adopting patriarchal tools in their struggle is not a bad one by any means, but it is crucial to chose the right tools. Tools such as anti-essentialism and intellectual standards expose the hypocrisy inherent in oppressive structures and decrease their legitimacy; women have made their greatest gains when the institutions oppressing them have been proven illegitimate.
Judith Butler, like Spelman, rejects essentialist arguments completely, but derives her criticisms from the fundamental problems with essentialist categories themselves rather than the impossibilities created by their interactions. Butler’s argument focuses primarily on one of Grosz’ ‘essentialist cognates’, biologism, as a widely accepted but invalid source from which to make essentialist claims. Spelman, in demonstrating the difficulties of separating identities into parts, humorously noted her inability to point out her “woman part” without pointing to something contextualized by all other parts of her identity(Spelman, “Woman: The One and Many” 161). Butler takes this one step further and claims that even the body itself is not a source from where the essential category of ‘gender’ can be drawn, that even the “woman part” cannot be used as a basis to justify existing gender divisions. The category that essentialist difference feminists such as Grosz want to identify is actually a social construct. “Is there a political shape to ‘women’,” Butler asks, “that precedes and prefigures the political elaboration of their interests and epistemic point of view?” The processes which lead women to form groups based on interest are not derived from biological commonality or common experience, but those created and reinforced by perfomative behavior. As women act in ways that they are told define them as women, they begin to internalize the behaviors and see an essential difference where there is not one. The body is merely a symbol of this conditioning, not the source from which it derives. Within the confines of this proposition, combined with the body of related arguments, there is no room left for essentialism. Butler makes her own suggestion for combating this injustice: subverting the concept of ‘gender’ with the goal of eliminating it entirely. An example of this is gender parody, specifically exemplified by drag. Butler argues that by parodying the idea of the ‘original’ gender, the gender concept is made ridiculous and the essentialist tethers on women are loosened. The connection between satirizing gender concepts and ending identity-based oppression may seem like a bit of a stretch; I would argue that Butler’s specific proposals are imperfect, but the ideological underpinning of her argument is indispensable. The essentialist categories that people are put into(and, although Butler doesn’t go far enough in examining them, the varying degrees of importance we ascribe to these categories in analyzing people) create the conditions by which which they oppress and are oppressed. By undermining these categories, using humor as well as a litany of other tools, we begin to place less importance on them and therefore apply them less strictly. Is there any better way to end oppression than by cutting it off at the source?
Elizabeth Spelman, Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler’s essays focus on what is perhaps the most critical issue in the history of feminism. Each writer’s contribution is a piece of a more complete argument with which to understand and critique essentialism. Essentialism is self-defeating as a theory; Spelman demonstrated its limited ability to capture the incredibly complexity of human identity, and Butler demonstrated the futility of applying it even at the biological level. It is also largely oppressive. As mentioned previously, essentialism is the ultimate tool of patriarchy. When the ‘battles’ are fought on essentialist terms, those being oppressed have nothing but a competing essentialist idea to fight with. As Spelman pointed out, essentialism is also the means by which some feminists have arrogantly decided to legislate the identities of others they identify as female. Grosz is correct in her assertion that we cannot fully expunge essentialism from political discourse; however, it is vital to the theoretical integrity and long-term viability of the feminist cause that every effort be made to combat it. Perhaps neither Marx nor the radical feminists were fully correct; perhaps the prime contradiction is not the dualistic struggle of one group, but essentialist thinking itself.