#essentialism

Didn’t have time to write the past few days. Stimulated in all directions, stress and tension of enjoying and building things, worries in multiple directions and excitement. Things should subside soon. Here are my notes on two articles I read for a paper i’m writing:

“Mother Earth, the Cyborg, and the Queer: Ecofeminism and (More) Questions of Identity”

Catriona Sandlilands

Val plumwood says postmodernism has nothing to add to ecofeminism as it ‘denies the possibility of positive identity’ - “deconstructive trap”

Sandilands argues “ecofeminism must rethink- perhaps even deconstruct- some of its undiscussed assumptions about identity, politics, and the relations between the two if it is to continue as a viable social movement” (p.18)

Identity as “historically specific political myth” (p.19)

In the past, women were treated as nature was treated, perhaps still? These identities are merged

Myth of identity

Equation of women with nature

“Symbolic construction of woman is always subject to a slippage of meaning” (21)

Affinity and coalition

Haraway’s cyborg “thrives on its lack of closure, on its resistance to any form of categorical symbolization” (23)

Antiessentialism

Performativity

‘Nature’ and ‘women’ both constructs, ecofeminism identifies with both

Greta gaard quote “one task of ecofeminists has been to expose these dualisms and the ways in which feminizing nature and naturalizing or animalizing women has served as justification for the domination of women, animals and the earth” (26)

Social ecofeminism

Carlassare’s conclusion is that “the category ‘woman’ must be understood as a politically strategic invocation” (28) interesting dispute here…

Page 29-30 chaos theory!!! Destabilization of nature

Social ecology, nature as a “realm of freedom”

“Alaimo begins with the question: if the positions "woman" and "nature" have no predetermined meaning, then how can one assess the political value of two vastly different visions of their articulation, the one (ecofeminism) focused on building "woman" and "nature" as coherent and connected actors, and the other (Haraway) focused on destabilizing both?” (30)

“Not only does Griffin's text rely on a naive epistemological correspondence between women and animals (e.g., that any human can really imagine what it's like to be a horse), but its particular blurring of boundaries between women and nature occurs under the very monolithic conceptualization of "womanhood" and "victimhood"; this blurring "supports the historically ingrained position of women and animals as Other to a male subject, roles that easily fit misogynist narratives of oppression" (Alaimo 1994, 140)” (30)

Destabilizing the idea of nature

Strategic essentialism- knowing essentialism is ‘wrong’ but employing it anyway

Donna haraway talks about cyborg and coyote

In haraway “The displacement of the idea of nature as a ‘passive victim’ of the social is tied to the displacement of nature as a ‘solid ground’ to naturalize human activity” (31)

Nature as agent 

“This retrieval of nature from reductionist and determinist understandings is intentionally and intensely transgressive: nature and culture are not opposed as object and subject; nature is not a ‘realm of necessity’ to culture’s ‘realm of freedom’ in which crude and slavish cyclical repetition can be easily counterpoised to human creativity and ‘beginnings’; ties to nature are not a question of determination or inevitability. If nature is understood as an active and unpredictable character (or series of characters)–– as an agent cocreating the world with other, human agents–– it is difficult not only to justify its exploitation as passive and inert ‘resource’ for human activity but also the dualistic terms through which humanity has progressively come to understand itself as ‘separate’ from nature” (32)

Affinity

Biological determinism

“Playing in this gap is about not only creating ‘new’ ideas of women and nature (which are, in my understanding, already inadequate) but actively engaging with the old ones and disrupting notions of gender solidity, natural necessity, and reified identity in order to reveal their impossibility” (33)

Parody, irony, playfulness, perfomativity

Invoke the connection between women and nature in an ironic way that highlights the falseness of both

“The assumption that identities must remain solid for ecofeminist politics of remain solid is [...] extremely problematic” (36)

“Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism”

Greta Gaard

Charges of gender essentialism against ecofeminists

Ecofeminism becomes unpopular by the late 90s

Greta gaard looks at criticisms of ecofeminism, argues that it should be recuperated/revised

Looks at accomplishments of ecofeminism

Work of susan griffin, carolyn merchant and mary daly “exposed the historical and cross-cultural persecution of women as legitimized by the various male-dominated institutions of religion, culture and medical science [...], linking the physical health of women and the environment with the recuperation of a woman-centred language and thought” (28)

Women and eco activism - ‘women for life on earth’

Ecofeminism HAS been intersectional 

‘Rape of the wild’ 

Gaard reviews the history of ecofeminism (actions and texts) and say that it seems “very promising” (31)

Poststructuralist feminisms “portrayed all ecofeminisms as an exclusively essentialist equation of women with nature, discrediting ecofeminisms diversity of arguments” (31)

Ecofeminists critique poststructuralist feminists as being anthropocentric

Gaard argues that “the charges against ecofeminists as essentialist, ethnocentric, anti-intellectual goddess-worshippers who mistakenly portray the earth as female or issue totalizing and ahistorical mandates for worldwide veganism–– these sweeping generalizations, often made without specific and supporting documentation, have been disproven again and again in the pages of academic and popular journals, at conferences and conversations, yet the contamination lingers” (32)

Mallory (cited) concludes that “fear of spirituality is at the root of academic feminism’s resistance to ecofeminism, since spirituality is seen as both apolitical (or regressively so) and essentialist” (39)

materialism

Quote from another paper “the more feminist theories distance themselves from ‘nature,’ the more that very nature is implicitly or explicitly reconfirmed as the treacherous quicksand of misogyny” (42)

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I’m returning to panel at Arisia for (what I think may be) my ninth year. I’m not moderating any of my panels this time. I do have the pleasure of opening my con by paneling with E.C. Ambrose and Andrea Hairston again, both of whom I’ve greatly enjoyed paneling with before. In case you’re curious about attending and want to see any of my panels, here is Arisia’s website and their schedule… and…

Here's a 101 crash course on essentialism, its history, and the way it's influenced transgender politics and debates, and a criticism of the current state of essentialist belief systems in our communities

Essentialism, Plato, and 'Forms':

Essentialism as a concept comes from philosophy, with one of the most famous early Western examples being Plato himself. Plato had a specific metaphysical interpretation of the world that was built off the idea of an object or concept or entity's true 'essence'. Basically there was this other dimensional pure form of any concept that was unchanging and an essential part of the identity of any individual instance of this 'type' of thing.

The other worldly unchangeable perfect concept was a "form" or "global" depending on whose specific terminology you want to use. The real world specific examples were "particulars".

Plato's ideas were more religious in nature than scientific, with spiritual elements involving souls. He also believed a philosopher king who could connect with these pure and real 'forms' should rule in the place of a democratic government. Despite how unhinged that may sound now, these ideas have infiltrated and even shaped Western beliefs for thousands of years and are woven deeply into the fabric of the way we understand and discuss a lot of the world around us. If you ever study philosophy it will pop up everywhere, from studying the theory of knowledge, to the theory of the mind, to Kant's ethics. If you look at online discourse around any identity or label you will see it there too, attempts to define and distill the true form of something, beyond its particulars.

So how does this relate to gender and sex?

In essentialist belief systems there is a specific pure perfect and unchangeable 'form' that is the entire concept of womanhood and the entire concept of manhood. Traditionally being male and being female were crucial parts of these forms.

A man was male, strong, rational, sometimes violent, sexual, powerful, the protector and to provider using force and skill etc. All those classic stereotypical features of masculinity. This was the form of manhood, the innate features that would always be the real meaning of manhood that would apply to every particular of 'men'. When you challenge any, you challenge the form of manhood itself which is supposed to be perfect and can't change. So believers will push back, get angry, challenge you, try to shut you up, whatever it takes to defend their belief system.

Womanhood was female, quite, nurturing, emotional, volatile and more childlike, good at house work, social, but not as intelligent or strong as men. Weak, in need of protecting, etc. Again, if you challenge any part of this you challenge the form itself and will meet some intense emotional reactions to that.

How has this changed and adapted over time?

Essentialism doesn't hold the same weight in a more scientifically based world. So essentialist beliefs have been propped up and defended with more 'scientific' arguments instead of just referring to the form itself. "Males are biologically more violent!" And other claims that have about as much ground to stand on as phrenology at the end of the day. Just enough elusion to science to make essentialists feel more secure in their beliefs and arguments without actually having to refer to the results rigorous scientific study finds.

Here comes the split though. If you no longer define manhood by maleness and womanhood by femaleness, then where do those essentialist beliefs go?

For the average sexist any deviation is a failure or flaw that needs correcting punishment or eradication. Even a man wearing nail polish, a woman who's a plumber, it's improper and must be stopped. Essentialist forms are true and pure and we must all embody them properly and recognize their reality and how they define us. Trans people defy their assigned form based on their sex, or perceived sex at birth, they must be punished. The thing is they'll use the form you were assigned or the form that your gender identity 'fits' better to attack you, whatever works best. And since womanhood is seen as weaker or lesser than, anyone who isn't a perfectly conforming cis man gets attacked mainly using the steriotypes within that box. Unless it's more beneficial to accuse someone of being a sexual predator or violent etc. Intersex people either don't exist, or are subject to the same attacks and attempted corrections to fit into these two forms. Trans women and any trans person they perceive as a woman are attacked on the basis of being women. Misogyny, sexual and domestic violence, the idea that they're stupid or weak or less significant or real. Trans men and any trans person they perceive as female are attacked on the basis of being female. Sexual violence and domestic violence, forced pregnancy, being dismissed with sexist and misogynistic beliefs and being denied recognition as 'men' but instead punished for leaving your station and your role and denying your true form. Yet anyone who walks into the women's bathroom not looking like a cis woman and performing womanhood correctly is a threat to real pure women. Any trans person who looks too male is potentially violent, perverted, too strong, too likely to be an abuser. The thing is, half the time they can't look at a trans 'particular' and tell what sex they were assigned to perform and be confined to. On an individual basis it's just whatever works best, anything goes. They can't even tell who is or isn't trans. It's a flailing attempt to go after anyone who is perceived as violating their roles and not performing hard enough, that hits anyone that seems in any way GNC with whatever they can.

For TERFS the answer is they don't allow a distinction between sex and gender, they fight tooth and nail to claim that maleness and manhood are permanently tied together, as are femaleness and womanhood. And the roles you play within the system of oppression that is sexism are defined by your sex, nothing else. And they try to find any loosely scientific sounding justification for why. Then you end up with increasingly obsessive and disconnected from reality attempts to prove that trans people will always act like their sex assigned at birth, that intersex people are just broken abnormalities that don't count or need fixing, and that deviation from the essentialist values for each gender are moral crimes that should be punished. Trans men are ruined broken girls that are betraying their future husbands and their purpose as mothers nurturing babies and bringing good pure submissive womanhood into the world. Trans women are evil males using deception to carry out their evil violent sexual deviant ways. All trans people are bad evil broken lunatics who must be stopped and defy their pure and proper form. But again, they will fall back on whatever attacks work and will happily uphold sexist beliefs of what a 'true woman' is at the expense of cis and trans women, and also at the expense of trans men who are forced into the 'broken women' box. And nonbinary and intersex people as always are left batted about by unpredictable roles and attacks, always seen as deviant or broken somehow.

Within trans spaces a different approach is taking hold. Instead of abandoning essentialist beliefs many are holding onto them, but excluding sex entirely from the criteria and altering some of the traits attached to each.

A man is no longer necessarily male, but is still violent and powerful and sexual and it's still his job to protect women. But depending on who you ask, he may actually be stupid because he's a man. Others will say he is smart and independent for being a man.

A woman is not necessarily female, but is generally still considered weak. A victim. In need of protecting. Nurturing, emotional, the object of sexualization (in positive ways but also a ton of negative ways) but not sexually autonomous, not capable of abuse or harm, sometimes ethereal or less human (but in a cool spiritual way this time trust me guys!).

For the transmisogynist this means that trans women are subject to all the hostile stereotypes about women, but also may be tainted by manhood and evil and deserving of it.

For the trans-androphobic this means that trans men are subject to all the hostile stereotypes about women, not also may be tainted by manhood and evil and deserving of it

(way over simplified to just talk about the essentialist element of the beliefs, you can find some super in depth breakdowns and discussions around the many ways these beliefs pop up and manifest that aren't all based on essentialism and don't follow that exact mindset, I just need a clear example of how they manifest and how the ambiguous role of sex influences these 'forms' and 'particulars')

There's a lot of variety in how gender is defined even within essentialist belief systems, especially as more fractures and fairly isolated communities pop up online. But the set belief is the same. There's this real thing called manhood and womanhood, and we are not constructing it socially through systems of power and experiences and cultural beliefs. It's a perfect unchanging pure concept that we are trying to deduce and understand the pure and true form of.

Like Plato that might be by thinking and looking inward and upward to greater truth in the metaphysical realm. For Aristotle that might look like observing the world around us and studying the particulars to understand the nature of the form.

But the thing is, there is no form. It IS social. That's still a controversial claim to make, but what it means to be a man or woman will always be subject to change based on social norms. Our internal identities could be set or fixed by some biological code or hormones and we can only reckon with what we are experiencing, but on a social level the features and traits associated with being a man or woman are not unchanging and eternal and pure.

And within trans spaces we have that same power, we construct and define womanhood and manhood and what it means to be part of any other identity or use any other label. And that changes over time. We can't fall into the trap of essentialist thinking. We have to recognize the real factors that shape the way we live experience and understand our social and personal identities and how they relate to our bodies and lives. It will never not be oppressive or harmful to ignore those and fall back on essentialism.

Trans women are not evil and dangerous for being assigned male at birth. Trans women are not innately stronger and more powerful than 'females'. Trans women are not helpless and delicate and pure and incapable of harm for being women.

Trans men are not evil and dangerous for being men. Trans men are not innately stronger or more powerful than women. Trans men are not helpless delicate and pure and incapable of harm for being assigned female at birth.

Nonbinary people aren't deviants or failing to fit into one category or needing to be understood through one category to understand their form.

Even if you find some loose attempt at science or politics or anthropology to try back that up it is just essentialism. Even if it's essentialism that makes you feel better about yourself, or feels like the best way to push back against other forms of essentialist thinking. These are the remnants of long dead Greek men, pondering the nature of reality before we had conceptualized the scientific method or had any idea what an atom or a gene was. They do not serve us anymore, we know better. We need to look to and talk about structures of oppression, cultural beliefs, personal experiences, etc to understand ourselves and each other. And that involves listening to each other and not assuming that anyone's identity or body means they were born evil or untrustworthy. And recognizing that all trans people are being oppressed, often in the same ways as each other and sometimes in unique ways to each other, and that helping each other helps ourselves in a way demonizing and excluding each other does not. It requires some amount of good faith assumptions instead of distrusting entire groups of people based purely on their identity and the associations we've made with it. It means tearing down the binary man/woman male/female divide and talking about oppression in terms of its causes and enablers and enforcers, not as innate traits of our identities that we simply experience or exert through unchangeable forces of the universe. Misogyny is not a trait of womanhood that only women experience, that will always inescapably be a part of being a woman. Being a misogynist is not a trait of manhood that only men will enact and that will inescapably be part of being a man. The same is true if you swap the words man and woman for male and female. We live complex and nuanced lives shaped by the lattice of oppressive structures built around us, influenced by every part of our identities and lives.

Everything from our age, our race and/or ethnicity, where we live, our sex, our gender, our sexuality, our income, our religion, our family, our health/disabilities/mental illness etc all shape the lives we leave and the ways we are seen and treated by ourselves and others. And so do our own actions and choices. We are autonomous beings. These forces are external, not innate parts of us and our identities that can never be changed. No one of these categories HAS to be a form of oppression, they only remain so because every day our societies uphold the systems of power and the beliefs that justify empower and enforce them. A man does not have to be violent, a woman does not have to be oppressed and controlled. A white person is not less violent than other races, or more intelligent. A disabled person is not less human, less worthy of life. Essentialism has become the enemy of all oppressed people. It has become the core of the justification for our oppression. We will only be free by deconstructing essentialist beliefs entirely, not by trying to rewrite them to exclude ourselves from the negative connotations we do not want.

Yes I'm talking about trans women demonizing trans men, and also excusing or dismissing violence and abuse and harassment from other trans women. Yes I'm talking about trans men buying into toxic masculinity and violence and power to feel like 'real men', or painting trans women as evil or dangerous for being male. Yes I'm talking about trans medicalists' obsession with identifying the real trans person based on essentialist traits and beliefs. Yes I'm absolutely talking about the innate erasure and dismissal of nonbinary identities along with third gender and indigenous identities. I'm talking about the imposing of Western ideas of gender on other cultures by white trans people, the rewriting of other cultures ideas of manhood and womanhood and gender fluidity and third genders to fit our tidy set of forms we are trying to deduce from the universe. I'm talking about the dismissal or denial or ignorance towards the way race and culture are impacting all groups of trans people, the way any racial and ethnic identities and groups outside of white American find their experiences cliff notes at best unless they are being used to support or attack someone else's narratives or beliefs while their voices are drowned out in a sea of white American voices with an innate sense of being the default, and other experiences being deviations on their own. Essentialist beliefs are everywhere, inside and outside of our communities. And it is crucial that we learn what they are, how to deconstruct them, why they do harm, and how we navigate past them while still having meaningful conversations about how our identities impact us and our experiences in the world.