Positionality and Knowledge Construction

The philosopher Linda Alcoff introduced the concept of positionality in 1988. She argued for a positional definition of woman, one that sees important aspects of women's identity as markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities. These identities exist in a shifting context that is a network of elements involving other people, economic conditions, and cultural and political institutions and ideologies.

The idea that certain important aspects of our identity—for example, gender, race, social class, age, and national origin—are markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities opened up new ways of seeing the lived experience of women and men in the world. Feminists began to call for descriptions that are not based on categories but on positionality, on relations. This meant that what is perceived as marginal at any given time depends on the position one occupies. For instance, we can say women are marginal compared to men. But Black women are marginal compared to White, middle-class women. What is perceived as marginal at any given time depends on the position one occupies.

From this perspective, knowledge is understood to be valid when it takes into account the knower's specific position in any context. The idea that our various frameworks are neutral or free from the commitments that accompany our social positions was turned on its head with the recognition that different perspectives are a source of knowledge and truth. For instance, one's ethnicity, cultural background, and religion can all be sources of different understandings and different questions. We all gain our knowledge about what is good, what is bad, what is real, what is right, what is beautiful, and what is just from the specifics of our situations.

In diverse classroom environments position—perhaps more than any other single factor—influences the construction of knowledge; positional factors reflect relationships of power both within and outside the classroom itself. It matters whether teachers and students are male or female, White or African American, heterosexual or lesbian or gay.

Efforts to see centrality and marginality, oppression, oppressor, and oppressed as relational concepts eventually revealed how positions of privilege are left unexplored. Privilege, often silent and unseen, works for or against individuals and groups. Ingrained assumptions of these forms of privilege gain much of their power by passing as “normal,” as the norm amid the persistence of gender and race oppression. For example, in a 1988 autobiographical essay enumerating her own unearned racial advantages, Peggy McIntosh wrote, “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in on each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious.”