Talk:essentialism

Usage note (vs stereotype)

Although stereotype is a construct investigated in social psychology, essentialism is a term preferred in cultural studies, which explore issues of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, culture, and so on by drawing on feminist, postcolonial, poststructuralist, critical race, queer, and other theories. This difference in inquiry orientation indicates different assumptions underlying stereotypes and essentialism; while the former implies that distorted knowledge about a certain group causes incorrect assumptions and that accurate objective knowledge will overcome the problem, the latter suggests that fixed images of a particular group are implicitly and explicitly produced politically and ideologically. In poststruc- turalism, essentialist representations are conceptualized as constructed by discourses that produce particular meanings through linguistic and semiotic means. In contrast to stereotypes, which usually carry a negative connotation, essentialism is not always negative; it can be strategically deployed by subordinate groups to advocate for their own unique identities that have been marginalized or devalued due to slavery, colonialism, and other forms of oppression. This is called strategic essentialism. Backinstadiums (talk) 10:30, 17 July 2022 (UTC)