Page 212 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

STRUCTURALISM

Strategic essentialism The idea of strategic essentialism involves philosophical
acceptance of the anti-essentialist argument that there are in principle no essential
identities while nevertheless suggesting that in practice people act, and need to act,
as if there were. Thus strategic essentialism means acting ‘as if’ identities were stable 189
for specific political reasons. For example, one might temporarily accept the
category of ‘woman’ as a stable unity for the purposes of mobilizing women in
feminist political action. Here, it is argued, the practical character of social and
political life can render the theoretical distinction between essentialism and anti-
essentialism somewhat redundant.
The concept of strategic essentialism is deployed in order to modify anti-
essentialist conceptions of identity, arguing that such discourse-based theories efface
human agency. In particular, for their critics, anti-essentialist arguments about
identity are said to be of no practical value. That an identity category can be
‘deconstructed’ does not mean that people do not and cannot mobilize around it
as a device for the improvement of the human condition. This is an argument that
has some merit for practical purposes and indeed ‘strategic essentialism’ may be the
process that is enacted in practice in day-to-day life as well as in political action.
That is to say, any sense of identity and community of identification (nations,
ethnicities, sexualities, classes etc.) are necessary fictions that mark a temporary,
partial and arbitrary closure of meaning. Some kind of strategic cut or temporary
stabilization of meaning is necessary in order to say or do anything.
Nevertheless, as the basis for political strategy, the idea of strategic essentialism
is open to the criticism that at some point certain voices have been excluded. Thus,
the strategic essentialism of feminism in taking ‘woman’ to be an essential category
for tactical reasons may lead to differences between women, for example between
white, black or Hispanic women, being ignored. The idea of strategic essentialism
always raises the question of where to draw the tactical line and can lend itself
towards ethnic or gender ‘absolutism’. The trick is to try to hold both the plasticity
and the practical fixity of identity in mind at the same time thereby enabling one
to oscillate between them for particular purposes.

Links Anti-essentialism, cultural politics, essentialism, feminism, identification, identity,
poststructuralism

Structuralism Structuralism is best approached as a method of analysis concerned
with social and cultural structures or predictable regularities that lie outside of any
given person. As such, structuralism is anti-humanist in its de-centring of human
agents from the heart of inquiry. Instead, structuralism favours a form of analysis
in which phenomena have meaning only in relation to other phenomena within
a systematic structure of which no particular person is the source. Thus, a
structuralist understanding of culture is concerned with the ‘systems of relations’
of an underlying structure (usually language) and the grammar that makes meaning
possible.
Structuralism can be traced back at least to the nineteenth-century sociologist
Durkheim who searched for the constraining patterns of culture and social life that