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It has been argued that gender essentialism impedes progress towards greater gender equality. Here we present a new gender essentialism scale (GES), and validate it in two large nationally representative samples from Denmark and Australia. In both samples the GES was highly reliable and predicted lack of support for sex-role egalitarianism and support for gender discrimination, as well as perceived fairness of gender-based treatment in the Australian sample, independently of two established predictors (i.e., social dominance orientation and conservative political orientation). In addition, gender essentialism assessed by the GES moderated some manifestations of the backlash effect: high essentialists were more likely to respond negatively towards a power-seeking female political candidate relative to a male candidate. Given the implications for possible workplace interventions, further work could usefully explore whether gender essentialism moderates other well-established forms of gender bias.

2019 marks thirty years since the publication of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s groundbreaking article, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. While scholars across the disciplines have engaged intersectionality from a range of theoretical and normative vantage points, there has been little effort to analyze intersectionality in relation to two other enormously influential theoretical frameworks: Angela Harris’s critique of gender essentialism and Catharine MacKinnon’s dominance theory. This Essay endeavors to fill that gap. Broadly articulated, our project is to map how anti-essentialism, dominance theory, and intersectionality converge and to articulate the places where they do not. In the context of doing so, we advance three core claims. First, scholars erroneously conflate intersectionality with anti-essentialism and thus erroneously perceive a strong opposition between intersectionality and dominance theory on the view that dominance theory is essentialist and that intersectionality is not. In the context of disaggregating intersectionality from anti-essentialism, we contest the view that feminism and critical theory must always avoid essentialism to achieve normative commitments to social transformation. Second, we argue that scholars have largely overlooked the fact that dominance theory and intersectionality share a critique of conceptions of equality structured around sameness and difference. Third, we contend that while there is an affiliation between dominance theory and intersectionality, there is also at least some tension between their respective framings of race and gender. We explore this tension by examining how intersectionality potentially stages a “soft” critique of MacKinnon’s defense of dominance theory against charges of essentialism in her provocatively titled essay, From Practice to Theory, or What Is a White Woman, Anyway? Our hope is that the Essay will both challenge the prevailing ways in which many scholars, including some feminists and critical race theorists, frame anti-essentialism, intersectionality, and dominance theory, and underscore the critical importance of attending to how racial power is gendered and gender subordination is racialized. Much is at stake with respect to the theoretical terrain we mean to cover. In addition to taking women’s theorizing seriously and facilitating the production of knowledge in historically marginalized areas of legal scholarship, we believe that engagements with anti-essentialism, intersectionality, and dominance theory have profound implications for the substantive form and content of political organizing, civil rights advocacy, and legal reform initiatives. Indeed, underwriting our effort in this Essay is the view that how we theorize social problems, including the subordination of women, necessarily shapes the scope and content of our social justice imaginary — which is to say, our freedom dreams.

In this article, we present the development and validation of an implicit association test for measuring secondary school students’ associations between genetics concepts and teleology concepts on the one hand, and between genetics concepts and essentialism concepts on the other hand. In total, 169 students from 16 school classes took part in the study, from January 2018 to May 2018. We investigated the strength of the aforementioned associations and the influence of various covariates such as gender, age, school class, or previous learning of biology on the association of teleology or essentialism concepts with genetics concepts through an analysis of covariance and a multi-level analysis. We found moderate associations between genetics and teleology concepts, as well as between genetics and essentialism concepts. These results might reflect a tendency of students of different ages and with various backgrounds to think about genes in terms of goals (teleology) and stability (essentialism), which should be investigated further in future research.

Purity is a component of morality, which relates to perceptions of cleanliness (i.e., physical aspect) and divinity (i.e., symbolic aspect). Purity violations threaten one's traditional values and beliefs and motivate people to recover purity by avoiding something atypical. Like the physical aspect of purity, violating the symbolic aspect of purity can lead people to recover the purity status by excluding out-group members. However, this link is possibly influenced by psychological essentialism, which is the degree of one's perceptions about a clearly built boundary between social categories (e.g., men and women). Therefore, this study investigated the moderating role of essentialist beliefs in the relationship between purity-related morality in a symbolic sense and exclusionary attitudes toward foreigners. Two experimental studies were conducted in Japan, where immigrants play an essential role in securing the working-age population because of its recent \"super-aged\" situation. It was predicted that only lower essentialists would be sensitive to the threat, but not higher essentialists. The results did not support the hypothesis in the expected direction, but some valuable implications and suggestions for future research were made. In particular, this study revealed that symbolic purity may play a role in intergroup relations.

One of the first book-length English-language treatments devoted to Francisco Suárez's metaphysics Long considered one of late scholasticism's most important thinkers, Francisco Suárez has, paradoxically enough, often been treated only in relation to other medieval authors or as a transitional figure in the shift from medieval to early modern philosophy. As such, his thought has often been obscured and framed in terms of an alien paradigm. This book seeks to correct such approaches and examines Suárez's metaphysical thinking as it stands on its own. Suárez is shown to be much more in line with his medieval predecessors who developed their accounts of being to express the theological commitments they had made. Central to Suárez's account is a fundamental existential orientation, one that many interpreters have overlooked in favour of an understanding of being as reduced to essence or to the thinkable. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

It is well established that emphasizing a biogenetic etiology of mental health problems in anti-stigma interventions inadvertently increases potentially stigmatizing attitudes. The “mixed-blessings” model suggests that biogenetic explanations and greater stigma are linked by essentialism. The present study tests this hypothesis experimentally. In this online experiment, 367 subjects read either a biogenetic or a psychosocial explanation for the etiology of schizophrenia, followed by a vignette describing an individual who has schizophrenia. Subsequently, we measured (a) causal beliefs on the etiology of schizophrenia (as a manipulation check), (b) the degree of essentialist beliefs (mediator), (c) the extent to which subjects subscribed to assumptions of dangerousness, (d) prognostic pessimism, and (e) desire for social distance. Subjects reported a stronger agreement with the etiology they had been presented. Against our expectations, this did not result in higher levels of stigmatizing attitudes in the biogenetic vignette group. Correspondingly, mediation through essentialism could not be tested. In the psychosocial vignette group, biogenetic causal beliefs were associated with a stronger desire for social distance. Essentialist thinking fully mediated this effect. The evidence we found for the assumptions of the mixed-blessings extended to the psychosocial vignette group only. We explain this by the subjects’ different readiness to subscribe to biogenetic and psychosocial causal beliefs. We argue that the same levels of essentialism between the experimental groups contributed to the equal levels of stigmatizing attitudes. This underlines the fundamental importance of essentialism in stigma, going beyond a role in the psychological effects of biogenetic causal models.

This Article examines how World Athletics, a private regulatory body, has shaped the legal norm of gender equality. Focusing on three landmark legal challenges to World Athletics’ regulation of gender, this Article shows how the organization has constructed the meaning of gender equality as it has pursued global, monopolistic, and autonomous authority. World Athletics has retrofitted this norm to align with its longstanding regulatory practices by essentializing women, coopting rivalrous actors, and depoliticizing sex. In doing so, the organization has repeatedly construed and constrained the meaning of gender equality to bolster its private regulatory authority.

Video games are enjoying a flourishing of critical studies; they are finally taken as consequential forms of visual culture worthy of historical, theoretical, and cultural attention. At one time, their scholarship was largely overdetermined by issues of medium and treated largely as an entertainment product. But with the complexifying of the form, combined with a new generation of dynamic scholars and an expanded understanding of how to write about them, games now constitute a robust area of critical engagement with topics in race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, ability, and other markers of difference. Those interventions have been key in driving the discourse forward, but game studies now faces a new set of strategic challenges. The gains have likely come at great methodological cost. This essay explores the consequences of identity-focused analyses and the roles of intersectional considerations of self and anti-essentialism as crucial tools in combatting enforced notions of belongingness. The author argues that the frontier of methodology in critical game studies may be to think outside of the prescribed ways in which academia encourages monolithic affiliation (or even false segregation) by validating and codifying identity-driven forms of expertise.