On the Genealogy of Women: A Defence of Anti-Essentialism

Abstract

Within feminist philosophical and theoretical contexts, third wave feminism may be defined as encompassing ‘all critical work… that points… to the homogenizing or exclusive tendencies of earlier dominant feminisms’ (Heyes, ‘Anti-Essentialism’ 161).¹ Third wave feminists object, in particular, to exclusive tendencies within the dominant feminist theories of the 1970s and 1980s, theories that emerged more or less directly from second wave feminism as a political movement (e.g. Catherine MacKinnon’s critique of pornography reflecting feminist activism around the sex industry). Subsequent feminist thinkers, writing in the later 1980s and 1990s, articulated their objections to these exclusive tendencies primarily through critiques of ‘essentialism’. The central target of anti-essentialist critique was the belief — arguably widely held amongst second wave feminists — that there are shared characteristics common to all women, which unify them as a group. Anti-essentialists of the third wave repeatedly argued that such universalising claims about women are always false, and function oppressively to normalise particular — socially and culturally privileged — forms of feminine experience.² The widespread rejection of essentialism by feminism’s third wave generated problems in turn. Ontologically, the critique of essentialism appeared to imply that women do not exist at all as a distinct social group; and, politically, this critique seemed to undercut the possibility of feminist activism, by denying women the shared identity or characteristics that might motivate them to engage in collective action.