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Glite Dictionary
🔑 Fixed traits belief 🧑‍🎓 Person with fixed-trait views
essentialist

essentialist

3 8.2
Believing that people and things have fixed basic traits that do not change
  • adjective
  • /ɪˈsɛnʃəlɪst/
: esencialista
  • Even a revised version would risk the assumption of an essentialist foundation that transcends local contexts.
  • essentialist rhetoric
  • essentialist notion
  • essentialist view

Hitler had different theories about what made one pure blooded in the race essentialist view of our liberal contemporaries.

Examples

  • Carroll astutely diagnoses in his book, most notably essentialist arguments for the specificity of the film medium.

    Academic text (2001)

  • I see where you're going with the essentialist thing, but it doesn't hold up.

    Blog text (34)

  • If you would prefer to take a more essentialist approach, do it elsewhere.

    Blog text (12)

  • I think you have to be a little bit essentialist, or maybe in a way I'm being the opposite of that.

  • The other group is wholly opposed to any kind of essentialist discourse.

    Academic text (2001)

  • Art historians and curators have recently challenged the characterization of 1970s feminist art as essentialist.

    Academic text (2012)

  • Johnson discovers that Hurston, like herself, deconstructs the idea of essentialist difference by presenting the other as seemingly the same.

    Fiction book (1993)

  • The ambivalence Teresa feels about all of these ideologies results, then, from her constant movement between conflicting essentialist perspectives.

    Academic text (1996)

  • Moreover, social-historical criticism rightly has made us wary of essentialist tendencies in homologous explanation.

    Academic text (2008)

  • Many philosophers argue against the essentialist view that people have fixed traits determining their behavior.

Surface Forms

essentialist positive

Morphology

essentialist = essential (transparent) = essential + ist

Formed by adding the productive agent/ideology suffix '-ist' to the familiar adjective 'essential', yielding someone who holds essentialist beliefs.

Etymology

The word essentialist comes from essential, which goes back to a root meaning 'to be' or 'being', and the ending -ist marks a kind of view. So an essentialist view sees traits as fixed and built-in, which explains the modern meaning.