Drawing parallels between gender essentialism and cultural essentialism, I point to some comnum features of essentialist pictures of culture. I argue that cultural essentialism is detrimental to feminist agendas and suggest strategies fur its avoidance. Contending that some forms of cultural relativism buy into essentialist notions of culture, I argue that postcolonial feminists need to be cautious about essentialist contrasts between "Western" and "Third World" cultures.In recent decades, feminists have stressed the need to think about issues of gender in conjunction with, and not in isolation from, issues of class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, and have forcefully illustrated that differences among women must be understood and theorized in order to avoid essentialist generalizations about "women's problems" (Anzaldba 1987; hooks 1981;Lugones and Spelman 1983). The feminist critique of gender essentialism does not merely charge that essentialist claims about "women" are overgeneralizations, but points out that these generalizations are hegemonic in that they represent the problems of privileged women (most often white, Western, middle-class, heterosexual women) as paradigmatic "women's issues."Such essentialist generalizations result in theoretical perspectives and political agendas that efface the problems, perspectives, and political concerns of many women who are marginalized in terms of their class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. For instance, analyses that trace women's subordination to their confinement to domestic roles and the private sphere can constitute problematic essentialist generalizations if they ignore that the links between femininity and the private sphere are not trans-historical but have arisen in particular historical contexts. Thus, while the ideology of domesticity may have immured many middle-class women in the home, it also sanctioned the Hypatia vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 1998) 0 by Uma Narayan

This essay analyzes why women whose immigration status is dependent on their marriage face higher risks of domestic violence than women who are citizens and explores the factors that collude to prevent acknowledgment of their greater susceptibility to battering. It criticizes elements of current U.S. immigration policy that are detrimental to the welfare of battered immigrant women, and argues for changes that would make immigration policy more sensitive to their plight.

Uma Narayan attempts to clarify what the feminist notion of the ‘epistemic privilege of the oppressed’ does and does not imply. She argues that the fact that oppressed ‘insiders’ have epistemic privilege regarding their oppression creates problems in dialogue with and coalitionary politics involving ‘outsiders’ who do not share the oppression, since the latter fail to come to terms with the epistemic privilege of the insiders. She concretely analyzes different ways in which the emotions of insiders can be inadvertantly hurt by outsiders and suggests ways in which such problems can be minimized.

I point to a colonial care discourse that enabled colonizers to define themselves in relationship to “inferior” colonized subjects. The colonized, however, had very different accounts of this relationship. While contemporary care discourse correctly insists on acknowledging human needs and relationships, it needs to worry about who defines these often contested terms. I conclude that improvements along dimensions of care and of justice often provide “enabling conditions” for each other.

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