Historical Materialist Feminism
Feminism has a metaphysics problem. This isn't specific to feminism: it's just that feminism is a label applied to a variety of discourses which all claim to have the same political premise or subjective vantage, while differing in both respects—usually this is visible when describing white feminism, bourgeois feminism, liberal feminism, cishet feminism, in contrast to some idealized black feminism, proletarian feminism, radical feminism, trans feminism. It's a hall of mirrors no matter where you look. But I'm interested in the discursive function of "essentialism": a theoretical term which encapsulates a critique of naïve materialism, that one can't reduce social phenomena to a superficially materialist basis, which became a cudgel against any materialist analysis in general. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex first distinguished between sex and gender, not as objective scientific reality versu...