Unpacking Essentialism Research Paper

Unpacking Essentialism
Essentialism, at the most basic level, is the idea that things have essences that are unique to them and therefore can be defined. Essentialism, then, has been approached from a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, biology, and psychology to discern the essence of various facets of identity to understand what makes us intrinsically human. However, in this massive philosophical quest to understand humanity, essentialism has also been tasked with understanding more specific facets of human identity, including race and, more importantly to my argument, gender. Gender and essentialism have a long and fraught history within feminism. Essentialism has been used within understandings of gender to support the existence of a distinct gender binary. Differences between the male and female body biologically, have been used to justify the idea that there are essential differences between men and women. More than this though, distinct differences within gender have been used to subjugate women as essentially inferior to men.
From this point on, when I use the term biology, I mean the body and all the studies related to it. This includes anatomy, physiology, psychology, and so on. Within my argument, unless otherwise distinguished, when I use the term biology, what I mean is the scientific study and understanding of the body and its systems and …show more content…
This fear particularly manifests itself in the feminist use of science. Feminists seem to fear that considering the body biologically will only lead to data that supports essential differences. Elizabeth Wilson acknowledges this fear in the introduction to her book Gut Feminism, which uses biological and pharmaceutical data within a feminist argument. She