essentialize

Meanings

1. 1
   verb

   to reduce someone or something to a set of supposedly inherent traits, ignoring variation, context, or individual difference

   It is reductive to essentialize all teenagers as lazy and screen-obsessed.

2. 2
   verb

   to treat one attribute as the defining essence of a category, often as a rhetorical or critical move

   The novel refuses to essentialize women into either saints or sinners.

From essential + -ize, from Latin essentia ("being, essence"), from esse ("to be"). Coined in mid-20th-century philosophy and popularized by critical and social theory, where it is usually pejorative — charging someone with essentializing means accusing them of treating a group's traits as fixed and natural.

External links

• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary
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