The main point made by Uma Narayan in her essay titled "Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism" is that this approach to understanding human experience results in
"theoretical perspectives and political agendas that efface the problems, perspectives, and political concerns of many women who are marginalized in terms of their class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation."
In other words, as this essay will demonstrate, Ms. Narayan believes that theorists who study and regard culture through the "essentialist" perspective tend to ignore the issues that are of importance to women, especially women from disadvantaged groups. She also takes the position that much of traditional feminist theory and discourse, as well as cultural essentialism itself, tends to further the "differences among women across a variety of national and cultural concepts." This in turn leads to the further marginalization of women of color, poor women, and Third World women.
One of the first issues addressed in the chapter is that there are some very real similarities between "gender essentialism" and cultural essentialism." The author believes, for example, that both of these theoretical approaches tend to ignore the very real differences within genders. "All" women are not the same and "women" s a group have often very different needs, interests and concerns. Both gender and cultural essentialism are, therefore, seen as a form of colonialism that is promoted by systems of male dominance.
Ms. Narayan also addressed the question of how Third World women can resist cultural essentialism. She stated that "antiessentialist feminists" can and should insist on historical understanding of the contexts of particular culture. They should resist, when needed, the tendency to categorize women as representative of their cultures or as a universal "group." Running throughout the essay is the convictio...