Turn: strategic essentialism is key to dismantling gendered economics—it can be used as a radical tool of cultural defense and empowerment against the exploitation of minority bodies under capitalist accumulations

The other group of feminist responses to the post-essentialist idea of culture is less inclined toward a role for culture. One line of this response is to replace or minimize culture as a frame. Authors following this line are wary of strategic essentialism as a resource for women, emphasizing that regardless of which insider account of a culture is authorized, any account proceeds by excluding some other insider account, most often the account of those still further subjugated. 79 Ratna Kapur, for example, proposes that cultural claims be reframed; specifically, she advocates that sexual practices in India be evaluated not in terms of their cultural authenticity, but rather in terms of erotic desire and exclusion. 80 In response, Maneesha Deckha notes that proposals such as Kapur's offer a practical alternative only when such reframing is possible, whether in terms of sexuality, justice, pain, or other concepts. "Eliminating cultural claims at this historical moment would leave many vulnerable groups without any legal tool to guard against cultural disintegration, extinction, or exploitation… . Some essentialism in cultural claims must be tolerated. It will [*608] be a trade-off of potentially essentializing means for egalitarian ends." 81 In the context of immigrant women and the so-called cultural defense in criminal law, Leti Volpp formulates a modified strategic essentialism, in which cultural information going to an immigrant defendant's state of mind would only be allowed if this was consistent with the principle of antisubordination. 82 Cultural information would be permitted in the case of an Asian woman seeking to explain her mental state when she attempted to commit parent-child suicide, for instance, but not in the case of an Asian man seeking a cultural defense for his violence against an Asian woman. 83 In a similar vein, Deckha accepts the strategic use of cultural essentialism as a last resort provided that the cultural claim does not subordinate women or others within the cultural minority by impairing their autonomy or equality. She also accepts that such claims might privilege the interests of some vulnerable members and not others, so long as they meet this antisubordination condition. 84 In contrast to anthropologists like Mahmood, who seek to offer accounts of feminist insiders using strategically essentialist accounts of their culture as a tool of empowerment, legal academics like Kapur, Volpp, and Deckha are primarily interested in making nonessentialist or essentialist claims for a purpose and only secondarily as a description of how things are. Thus, they turn anthropological accounts of cultural tools into legal tools of their own.