Gender and essentialism: feminist debates in the twenty-first century

Essentialism is a vexed issue for feminists because of the difficulty involved in rallying a political movement around unstable and shifting signifiers, while universalist categories which lend unifying impulses and directional force to political action threaten to reaffirm biologically determinist paradigms. Heilmann demonstrates that essentialism can be adopted as a valid strategic position for political effectiveness through the adoption of a postcolonial feminism.