Gender & Sexuality dictionary
positionality
[puh-zish-uh-nal-i-tee]
黑料网 does positionality mean?
Positionality is the social and political context that creates your identity in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability status. Positionality also describes how your identity influences, and potentially biases, your understanding of and outlook on the world.
Where does positionality come from?
The term positionality first appears in epistemology,聽a branch of philosophy that studies how we know what we know. When it聽was first used in the mid-1920s, positionality wasn鈥檛 describing social and political forces, but simply where things are in space in relation to other things 鈥� the nature of their position.
During progressive movements in the 1960s, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists started to wonder if there was such a thing as objectively observing a phenomenon (i.e., without being influenced by your own background). For example, if you鈥檙e an educated white man from Connecticut studying midwifery in sub-Saharan Africa, how might your identity and privilege 鈥� your social position 鈥� impact your research? That is the crux of positionality.
Positionality was applied to gender and sexuality in a 1988 article by philosopher Linda Alcoff called 鈥淐ultural Feminism versus Post-structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory.鈥� Alcoff was trying to figure out how feminists could understand women, broadly speaking, arguing that nearly everything we know about women comes from a male context. In other words, she investigates how a patriarchal worldview creates blinders when we try to come up with 鈥渢rue鈥� things about gender.
Alcoff further argued that聽one’s position as a woman, queer person, straight person, etc., isn鈥檛 inherent to us but rather it is created by social and political forces that are constantly changing.
Even though gender isn鈥檛 an innate, stable characteristic of a person, it still exists and is politically relevant and consequential. Positionality asks people to understand and describe how gender and other identity markers inform how we see the world around us.
Examples of positionality
Who uses positionality?
Positionality is a term widely used by feminist and queer theorists in academic spaces.
Researchers who rely on qualitative research like anthropologists, social scientists, and psychologists think a lot about their own positionality in something called a reflexivity or聽positionality statement. These are often included in published papers and are reflections on how the researcher鈥檚 positionality shapes their thinking and research.
Social workers may use positionality to think about how their own identity impacts how they work with clients of different backgrounds then their own.
In the 2010s, positionality started spreading out of the academy and into more progressive, queer-identified, feminist media. Positionality is also used in the context of race. In a 2018 music review for 础耻迟辞蝉迟谤补诲诲濒别,听an online community of queer women, writer Abeni Jones wrote that artist 鈥淢ama Alto continues this [countercultural] tradition, weaving it with her experience and positionality as an Australian trans femme of color, and the results are beyond beautiful.鈥�
Note
This is not meant to be a formal definition of positionality like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of positionality that will help our users expand their word mastery.