Description
Positionality and the confession of so-called ‘privilege’ as a way of revealing unequal power dynamics in knowledge production has become an increasingly encouraged and lauded reflexive practice in the academy. However, we contend that positionality should be interrogated for its potentially expropriating, violent implications for the very people it is supposed to serve. It necessitates the internal reification of material, assumed and imagined hierarchies between people, which then is advertised and (re)produced by its utterance. Firstly, we discuss the instrumentalisation of positionality. To what extent does declaring and publicly acknowledging ‘privilege’ paradoxically act as a means of centring whiteness through the narcissistic gaze. Thus public positioning, rather than ameliorating unequal power dynamics in the production of knowledge, can sometimes in fact perform the function of the redemption of guilt, or worse, constitute a hidden power move in which one is able to use a critical, feminist, postcolonial methodology to in fact signal and reinstate their privilege vis a vis women of colour. Second, we ask who is able to declare positionality? Drawing upon Barbara Applebaum’s work on ‘privilege’ as complicity (2010), we identify the role that the feminist and critical labels play in affording white speakers critical credibility while simultaneously enabling them to retain mainstream legitimacy through their proximity to whiteness. Thirdly, we explore both the burden and disadvantage that this supposedly critical and emancipatory methodology places on women of colour, who do not stand to benefit from the performative and redemptive function of positionality
