Ad
related to: biological essentialism examples in sociology definition list
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Biological essentialism may refer to: Biological determinism, the belief that human behavior is biologically predetermined; Gender essentialism, the belief that human genders are biologically innate; Essentialism#Biological essentialism, the belief that species are unchanging throughout time
Winsor, Ron Amundson and Staffan Müller-Wille have each argued that in fact the usual suspects (such as Linnaeus and the Ideal Morphologists) were very far from being essentialists, and that the so-called "essentialism story" (or "myth") in biology is a result of conflating the views expressed and biological examples used by philosophers going ...
Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to explain social behavior in terms of evolution.It draws from disciplines including psychology, ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, and population genetics.
Scientific essentialism, a view espoused by Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, [1] maintains that there exist essential properties that objects possess (or instantiate) necessarily. In other words, having such and such essential properties is a necessary condition for membership in a given natural kind.
Gender essentialism is a theory which attributes distinct, intrinsic qualities to women and men. [1] [2] Based in essentialism, it holds that there are certain universal, innate, biologically (or psychologically) based features of gender that are at the root of many of the group differences observed in the behavior of men and women.
In philosophy, essentialism is the belief that "(at least some) objects have (at least some) essential properties". [14] In the case of sexual politics, essentialism is taken to mean that "women" and "men" have fixed essences or essential properties (e.g. behavioral or personality traits) that cannot be changed.
Sociologist Joan Acker, analyzing the concept of patriarchy and the role that it has played in the development of feminist thought, says that seeing patriarchy as a "universal, trans-historical and trans-cultural phenomenon" where "women were everywhere oppressed by men in more or less the same ways […] tended toward a biological essentialism."
Of significant importance in understanding the positions of most of the feminists above is that gender is taken to be a social construct. That is, the differences between men and women are not by and large biological (essentialism) but are insociated from an early age and are defined by existing patriarchal categories of womanhood.