Gender as essential without essence

In this article I describe and defend a metaphysically realist position of gender where gender is taken to be essential for our political and theoretical purposes without being defined as having an essence. I follow Drucilla Cornell’s ‘mamafesta’ and ethical feminism in rejecting essentialist accounts of gender, finding the need for the ‘feminine within sexual difference’ without specifying that difference. To do so, I apply a (W.O.) Quinean indispensability argument: for as long as there is gender-based oppression, we have an indispensable need for gender-based concepts in order to understand (and ultimately eliminate) such oppression; and if gender is indispensable, albeit contingently, then we should take gender to be real. Given that reality includes our social reality, where gendered experiences are an irreducible aspect of that social reality, I argue that debates about gender are about what the world is like, rather than appealing, as Cornell does, to an ‘imaginary domain’. In the spirit of Gayatri Spivak’s strategic essentialism applied at a meta level, gender is essential for strategic purposes, even if genders are not essentially defined, so there is nothing essential

to

gender, but plenty that gender is essential

for

. I call this (2nd order) gender

essentialism

without (1st order) gender

essencialism

. At the 1st order, I understand gender as being ontoformative, where ‘practising gender’ reinforces and reflects the structures of ‘gendered practices’, resulting in the socially co-constructed reality of gender. And at the 2nd order, gender is essential to understanding our co-constructed reality, and to feminism at large.