ABSTRACT
The notion that traditional gender categories are historical or cultural productions and not natural or empirical givens is, as we have seen, pre-eminently a constructionist position. In recent years, antiessentialists have carefully documented and rigorously critiqued those theories (both non-feminist and feminist alike) which seek to reduce the complex questions of sexual, racial, and even class differences to irreducible biological imperatives. Social constructionist feminists have brought under suspicion the idea of an irreducible, immutable, metaphysical essence defining "Woman" and have suggested instead that we can speak only of particular "women" constructed by variable and historically specific sets of social relations. It is my contention in this chapter that in our well-intentioned efforts to unmask and to denounce essentialism as a dangerous conceptual fallacy, we may have too quickly and perhaps too uncritically embraced constructionism as the necessary or only corrective. Constructionism is not quite the unproblematic, "safe" critical position we have so often taken it to be; indeed, constructionism creates certain methodological, epistemological, and political problems of its own, and these need to be discussed with the same vigor, intelligence, and healthy skepticism that feminists in the past have directed toward questions of essentialism. A consideration of some of the hitherto ignored problems with anti-essentialism necessarily entails a re-consideration of its theoretical Other, essentialism; if anti-essentialism is not entirely the secure philosophical position we have always presumed, then it may also be that essentialism fails to deliver as an infallible term of criticism and dismissal.
