Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska. “The Abstract Soul of the Commodity and the Monstrous Body of the Sphinx: Commodification, Aesthetics, and the Impasses of Social Construction” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 16:2 (2005)
My main claim in this respect is that the protracted essentialism/antiessentialism debate is itself a symptom of the historical commodification of racialized, sexed bodies. By situating this binary in the context of commodification, we can diagnose more precisely the main difficulty that the opposition between essentialism/antiessentialism obscures and to a certain degree reproduces: namely, the schism between the abstraction of the commodity form, which determines the value of the object in total separation from its materiality, and the concomitant reduction of the nonsublated remnants of materiality to mere waste or markers of social death. This schism between the abstraction of social values and the nonsymbolizable material refuse is itself a source of social injustice, which is inscribed in the modern conceptions of racial and sexual differences.
Thus, in order to challenge both essentialism and social construction, feminist theory has not only to expose and contest the obscured social mechanisms of power but also to criticize the economic abstraction as the often invisible source of bodily injury.
This schism between the abstraction of social values and the nonsymbolizable material refuse is itself a source of social injustice, which is inscribed in the modern conceptions of racial and sexual differences. Thus, in order to challenge both essentialism and social construction, feminist theory has not only to expose and contest the obscured social mechanisms of power but also to criticize the economic abstraction as the often invisible source of bodily injury (89).