Positionality Powers: An Immature Perspective of Positionality Statements & Its ‘Problems’

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1. Feminist Methods and Queering Sociology

Abstract

Is the “positionality statement” a useful feminist method? Positionality statements are statements in which a researcher explores their identities in relation to their research question, method, and sample. They articulate how a researcher arrives at their study and delimits the study’s findings to audiences of the research. While often lauded as an exemplar of culturally humble “feminist method/ology”, recent critiques of the positionality statement have raised questions about its ongoing use in the social sciences. Anti-feminists have argued that positionality statements overly emphasize essentialist identity politics, to the detriment of other factors that could restrict a given study, like funding or theoretical constraints. Even feminist methodologists suggest that positionality statements inadvertently pathologize the researcher’s identities, leaving no room for ongoing reflexivity in future research. Moreover, statements are colonial in nature, erasing histories of colonization by elevating one academic way of writing positionality and neglecting consideration of other but no less significant ways of speaking authentically.
This article presents some challenges with positionality statements in social sciences research using feminist, queer, and crip methodologies. We approach this article by performing alternative language to “standard” academic writing, deliberately toying with the “maturity” of feminist knowledge production to illuminate feminist lessons. Through our subversive writing, we suggest that positionality statements as they are currently employed by most “feminist” methodologists rarely strengthen connections between researchers and subject-participants, thus losing its feminist valence. However, we do not disabuse ourselves of positionality statements entirely. Instead, we outline another way of conducting statements of positionality that lend themselves to solidarity alliances and future feminist research-activism. We offer two examples of our statements that provide room for ongoing relations with the people who ground our work and will continue to inspire us, affirming our communities’ voices in our work.

Authors

• Melinda Chen, University of Oklahoma

• Brittney Morrissey, University of Oklahoma