Sorry, this is long. On a previous thread I made a derisory post to the effect that the GI have no understanding, either basic or theoretical, of the charge of biological essentialism they so often lay at the door of ‘gender critical’ feminists (to my mind GC is a tautology anyway – feminism IS a critique of gender). A couple of posters asked me to expand on my understanding of this, so I’ll try to condense this as much as I can. (Disclaimer: I’m not a philosophy scholar, so all disagreements welcome).
We all know ‘biological’ essentialism as the idea that the gender stereotypes arbitrarily attached to our sex have traditionally been interpreted as fixed and immutable. Therefore, nurturing and childcare is something only women can do. ‘Feminine’ wiles are biological and attached to our sex. If we ignore our ‘human nature’, we will probably succumb to hysteria – this being another ‘human nature/common sense’ assumption that this is a female malady. Ofc, it isn’t; it's a method of oppression: the feminist Elaine Showalter wrote a polemical feminist book to that end. If you want an early-20th-century example that’ll really make you puke, try Sir Almroth Wright’s 1913 ‘Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage’ (available on Internet Archive). Says Wright, women are all hysterical shrews who should never be trusted with a democratic voice (boy oh boy does that sound familiar).
The idea of essentialism earlier came from a body of thought under the banner of humanism – one of those slippery terms that means varying things in different contexts. This isn’t the atheist movement, but the philosophical doctrine that we have a rational, unified core or essence (hence essentialism) which makes us human subjects, aside from the body. This idea had varying degrees of currency between the rationalist (Decartes, Spinoza) and idealist (Kant, Hegel) schools, and was even picked up by pessimists like Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, or Thomas Hardy, a ‘philosophical’ novelist who believed in a concept of the immanent will. An essence of what it means to be human then translated to gender, as outlined above.
The breakdown of this idea is often located with the mid-20th century existentialists, in particular Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’. But essentialism broke down way before then. There’s controversy over whether Marx was a humanist, but increasingly philosophers (Kate Soper being one) suggest he was. If humans are in part a product of the economic system, then somehow we must be constructed socially. Other thinkers have located an anti-humanist, or anthropometric turn, in the mid-end 19th century. This is also where we see modes of representation breaking down in the arts – a turn from realist representation to an emphasis on consciousness and fragmented representations of subjectivity. Freud comes along, and reckons we are a split subject with a mass of unregulated, unconscious drives vs. the conscious. This signals more breakdown of the ‘unified’ subject.
Back to mid-20th century, we see a schism between a stubborn clinging to biological essentialism to keep women in our place, vs. social constructivism (the position we are all familiar with here, that gender is a social construct; a set of stereotypes). And a key force behind that idea was Foucault (I know, I know!). For him power is disseminated through what he terms ‘discursive fields’: regulatory practices contained within sites such as the judiciary, education, medicine, and media. Within and through these fields, subjectivity is produced, governed and constrained. According to Foucault, these are always socially and historically specific. He claims that the system of social ‘planes’ we occupy is not ‘established by the synthetic activity of a consciousness identical with itself, dumb and anterior to all speech, but by the specificity of a discursive practice’. He therefore seeks to account for ‘a field of regularity for various positions of subjectivity’ (this is all in the ‘Archaeology of Knowledge’). So we get various subject positions – spinster, career woman, lesbian, wife, mother, etc.
The 80s feminists liked this: it meant gender was no longer arbitrarily attached to sex, but the catch was that we can no more change dominant social discourses than we can biological essentialism. Chris Weedon’s ‘Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory’ shows how the social positions typically occupied by women encompass the ‘othering’ discourses of superfluity, hysteria, and sequestering, and the privileged discourses regulating women’s gendered subjectivities include ‘rationality, science, common sense, superstition, religious belief, intuition and emotionality’. She expends particular attention on ‘common sense’ as a discourse regulating gendered subject positions because it ‘looks to “human nature” to guarantee its version of reality’.
I actually think Foucault was an important thinker who wasn’t saying what the GIs say he was arguing, and certainly wasn’t advocating for biological essentialism (which they are). They’ve parcelled gender non-conformity into nothing more than another set of subject positions of which 'non-binary' is one. I’ve left Butler off this account because she makes me impatient, and I also haven’t read any of her more recent work. But her earlier stuff was definitely constructivist (the essay ‘Critically Queer’ is one of the places where I think she talks most sense).
This whole argument has done an about-face on itself, and, I think, has taken us back more to a point of unified humanism/essentialism than at any point in the past 100 years. This is where the GIs have ended up, and where they want to take us, too. It’s also why I'm sceptical that intelligent academics - many of whom claim to buy this rot wholesale - really swallow it. Ironically, they accuse GCs of the very bias they demonstrably hold, but either don’t seem able to grasp or simply assume others can’t read. #NoDebate indeed.