Wa(i)ving It All Away

Chakraborty, Mridula Nath

doi:10.1057/9780230593664_8

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…By calling into question the legitimacy of the political concept of a material, embodied reality shared by members of a cohesive group, some strands of third‐wave feminism dismiss the experience of racism and sexism faced by women of colour; they thus assume the very same hegemonic stance of which they accuse second‐wave feminism. Chakraborty draws on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's endorsement of a ‘strategic use of essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest’ with the objective to ‘affirm political identity’ in order to call on feminists to embrace an ‘embodied epistemological essentialism’ that is ‘imagined within the locus of race in … its nominal and constructed force and … acknowledges woman as an essentially racialised category’ . Recognition of this different location of black and Asian women is key to a feminism which pursues a dedicated political agenda.…”

Section: Strategic Essentialismmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Without this political agenda third‐wave feminism threatens to pay mere lip‐service to difference: ‘The discourses of “all of us are Others” and “all of us are Different” that have become alarmingly prominent in feminist phraseology, negat[e] the experiential and essential fact of being racialised and embodied entities’ and make for a ‘historically amnesiac and politically crippling model of feminism’ . Hence the imperative ‘to claim back’ essentialism as ‘a political tool for epistemological feminist transformation’ . This reclamation of essentialism might appear of equally paramount importance for a critical re‐evaluation of current popular and feminist sexual politics.…”

Section: Strategic Essentialismmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Gender and essentialism: feminist debates in the twenty‐first century

Heilmann¹

2011

Critical Quarterly

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Historically, essentialist ideas of gender have served both to rationalise and, conversely, to contest social, legal and political inequities. Major strands of first-wave feminism summoned female housekeeping as a metaphor of civic maternalism, invoking traditional notions of women's moral and spiritual superiority over men in the political claim to citizenship. Simone de Beauvoir's mid-twentieth-century disaggregation of biological sex and socially constructed gender, 1 key to second-wave feminism in the 1970s and 1980s, and late twentieth-century postmodernist and queer theory's anti-foundationalist explorations of the performativity of gender, sex and sexuality have been succeeded by a new strain of essentialism in popular culture's mainstreaming of pornography as a central site of female sexual experience and self-definition. At the same time, scientific studies which posit innate differences in mental aptitude as a context for gendered career destinies attract considerably more media attention than work which challenges such findings. 2 If gender essentialism is more likely to have an adverse effect on female than male career progression, a notable exception is the prominent resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University following his 2005 pronouncement that the paucity of women in top science and engineering positions was due to the 'unfortunate truth' of women's greater reluctance relative to men to work excessively long hours and their 'different availability of aptitude at the high end'. 3 The subsequent public debate between leading psychologists Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke further underlines the ease with which societal factors -gendered life choices that originate from overarching social and familial structures and socialisation processes -can be claimed as biological evidence of inherent sex traits. There remains, Pinker stressed, a 'reliable average difference [between women and men] in life priorities, in an interest in people versus things, in risk-seeking, in spatial transformations, in mathematical reasoning, and in variability in these traits '. 4 In her riposte Spelke cited numerous experiments pointing to the crucial recognition that the presupposition of gender difference effectuates a 'difference in perception': 'feminine' and 'masculine' traits manifest themselves in the mind of the observer, not the body of the observed. Our gender-inflected expectations shape our interpretation of the ANN HEILMANN

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Section: Strategic Essentialismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Strategic Essentialismmentioning

confidence: 99%