“Strategic essentialism” is a term first coined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a postcolonial feminist philosopher and literary theorist. She employs the term in her deconstructive reading of the work of the Subaltern Studies Group. Strategic essentialism advocates provisionally accepting essentialist foundations for identity categories as a strategy for collective representation in order to pursue chosen political ends. The genesis of the term follows her central academic pursuit of exploring the role of representation in subject constitution. Within human geography, strategic essentialism has been relevant for debates in feminist geographies, for development and economic geographies, and among geographers studying “race” and representation.