How to Use essentialism in a Sentence
essentialism
noun-
So there is a whiff of gender essentialism of the Mars/Venus variety threaded through the script.
—Kerry Reid, chicagotribune.com, 11 May 2018
-
A lot of our answers came from essentialism, the Plato and Aristotle thing.
—Los Angeles Times, 22 Mar. 2021
-
Communities of color have always have to deal with this essentialism when one of our own commits a massacre.
—Los Angeles Times, 25 May 2022
-
Tied in with this essentialism is the idea that humans in particular have souls (the mind-body dichotomy), or specific seats of their being.
—Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 26 Mar. 2013
-
That bears repeating: To undo the racial essentialism of D&D would drastically alter the character of the game.
—Cecilia D'anastasio, Wired, 24 Jan. 2021
-
Now Over the years, however, D&D has made only trivial movements away from racial essentialism.
—Cecilia D'anastasio, Wired, 24 Jan. 2021
-
What drives Trump is racial essentialism, a rage at the post-racial, integrative center that the mixed-race Obama represented.
—Andrew Sullivan, Daily Intelligencer, 18 May 2018
-
Now, in the shadow of electrification, Lotus’s lo-fi essentialism has become quite chic and collectible.
—Dan Neil, WSJ, 11 Mar. 2022
-
On the first level, that idea could be leveraged to get women opportunities to tell some stories, but also to reinforce a gender essentialism that shuts them out of other projects.
—Alyssa Rosenberg, The Denver Post, 12 Apr. 2017
-
The essentialism examined in Descarte's Baby is being taken for another spin, though with a more precise focus.
—Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 26 June 2010
-
The psychologist Paul Bloom, among others, has written about the tendency toward innate essentialism (see a Descartes' Baby) at length.
—Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 26 Mar. 2013
-
The world of Middle-earth betrays forms of paternalism, imperialism, and racial essentialism that have no use today.
—Vann R. Newkirk Ii, The Atlantic, 22 Sep. 2017
-
Except that among testers who claimed no knowledge of genetics, race essentialism increased nearly 12 percent.
—Caitlin Harrington, Wired, 2 Oct. 2020
-
Kwan’s theory of Chinese identity is marked by a similar tinge of essentialism.
—Jenny G. Zhang, Washington Post, 11 Jan. 2023
-
As a result of this essentialism, Bacevich glosses over a vital point about the Middle East today: A historic and brutal struggle between radicals and modernists for the future of the region is underway.
—David Rohde, New York Times, 15 Apr. 2016
-
At the very least, Yellowjackets—a superb Showtime thriller that riffs on Flies without repeating it—suggests the author’s benevolent gender essentialism might have been a mistake.
—Judy Berman, Time, 5 Nov. 2021
-
There was also a lot of blather about that season's philosophical earworms, from cancel culture to gender essentialism.
—Virginia Heffernan, Wired, 31 Mar. 2022
-
With a writer as talented as Giffels, though, this reader could accept the bromances and the gender essentialism as the prices of an emotionally satisfying narrative.
—Samuel G. Freedman, New York Times, 22 Dec. 2017
-
One of the most important practical applications of essentialism is being able to pivot quickly.
—Marianella Manzur, Forbes, 6 July 2022
-
The first furry PubMed hit was this one from earlier this year, which studied ‘Biological essentialism in a stigmatized fan community’.
—Neuroskeptic, Discover Magazine, 26 Nov. 2014
-
In the writing process, Docter delved into research on essentialism, nihilism and existentialism to better articulate the plight of his characters.
—Los Angeles Times, 24 Dec. 2020
-
This belief in essences, called essentialism, is compellingly intuitive.
—Lisa Feldman Barrett, Scientific American, 27 Apr. 2022
-
This is sometimes called psychological essentialism — or seeing your brain function as destiny.
—Leah Shaffer, Discover Magazine, 2 Dec. 2020
-
More recently, many of these traditions are intentionally expanding to reject ideas of gender essentialism and embrace a range of identities.
—Alyssa Beall, USA TODAY, 13 May 2023
-
The ire towards Midler was especially intense as such hand-wringing about gender-neutral language is often a hallmark of the gender essentialism that defines the anti-trans and trans-exclusionary feminist movements.
—Jon Blistein, Rolling Stone, 6 July 2022
-
Doing so re-creates the same gender essentialism, in which certain traits are supposedly masculine or feminine, that Rosalind obliterates.
—Mike Fischer, The Mercury News, 24 Apr. 2017
-
Finally, true believers in racial essentialism have always twisted scientific results to support their views.
—John Timmer, Ars Technica, 15 Mar. 2023
-
Relaying tales of natural women through a supernatural grammar flips essentialism on its head; these accounts offer up feminine bodies and performance at once.
—Amanda Hess, New York Times, 17 Dec. 2019
-
This has often resulted in perpetuating ideas about racial essentialism rather than questioning how race is constantly constructed.
—Kerri Greenidge, The New Republic, 14 June 2021
-
Passages like this one, which directly contradict their characterization of the book’s alleged determinism, reductionism, and essentialism, are easy to find!
—Jessica Riskin, The New York Review of Books, 21 Apr. 2022
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'essentialism.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
Last Updated: