Essentialism and Gender Roles

The Wannabe Indian Punkster, over at Days in a Wannabe Punk’s Life, blogs about gender roles and essentialism:

Basically, the essentialist position on gender states that there are distinctively feminine and distinctively masculine traits that exist outside of social and cultural conditioning and because of such qualities being wired into our brains, we must irrevocably accept gender oppression simply as part of who we are as a species. This stance is outrageous, primarily because it offers little or no insight as to how women and men can work towards changing or improving the status quo or even human nature, come to think of it. This asinine line of reasoning has been used for thousands of years to perpetuate patriarchy as a universal system ‘rooted’ in human essence and it has also been used to corroborate sexism and discrimination against women be it financially, emotionally, politically, mentally or physically.

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