Research Guides: NYU Reads: Positionality

Positionality

Introduction

Author Clint Smith states that he was trained largely by sociologists. He asserts that sociology in part demands in an engagement and interrogation of one's positionality related to the subject one is studying and researching.

What is positionality?

As per Salem Press, 2019, positionality refers to the idea that a person’s understanding of the world is unavoidably influenced by the opinions, values, and experiences the person holds. This is an important consideration when conducting research because it can have a significant effect on how the person conducts the research and the conclusions that are reached. This in turn can affect the outcomes of subsequent projects and studies that apply the information gathered through the initial research. Positionality is nearly impossible to avoid, but its impact can be minimized if the researcher identifies and discloses any personal background that may have affected the study and its results.

How is positionality relevant to How the Word Is Passed?

Smith states, "I am mindful that my experience at each of these pages, are tied to various parts of my identity: being Black, being born and raised in the South, being a straight cisgendered man, and...a doctoral student at an Ivy League university" (p. 291). As Smith indicates, this is all part of his identity and his positioning related to our society, which is entrenched in systems of oppression. While our analytical and research approach cannot be solely reduced to these social locations (e.g. race, gender, class), understanding our positionality through our social locations provide us with insight into how he may be approaching our research which is embedded in a history and reality of power imbalances, and also how we may not be. For example, throughout the text, there is an assumption of the gender binary by using the words and categories "men and women," "boys and girls" and "mothers and fathers" (e.g., pgs. 61, 62, 172, 211, and 229). However, what about enslaved Black people who did not fit into a gender binary? Moreover, what about the critique that colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade perpetually impose and enforce a gender binary on Black people in the first place? While Queer and Trans Black people are not the only people who can have a queer analysis, positionality reminds us that experiencing a form of marginalization can inform our research lens and approach in the world in unique ways. Smith's statement of his positionality help us further our critical thinking and reflect on other avenues of research related to reckoning with the history and ongoing legacy of slavery in America. For example, we can ask, since Smith tends to engage with the gender binary, possibly given his positionality as a cisgendered straight Black man, what Black Queer and Trans perspectives can we also learn from in understanding and reckoning with the history of slavery?

The following sections offer resources on Black Queer & Trans stories and analysis.

Read on for more information on positionality as it relates to intersectionality.

Beyond Making a Statement: An Intersectional Framing of the Power and Possibilities of Positioning by Boveda and Annamma
In this essay, two women of Color researchers examine the intersections of race and disability and ask, “What is the power and purpose of positioning and positionality statements?” Informed by Black feminist theory, and drawing from the DisCrit tenets of intersectional oppressions, historicity, and whiteness and ability as property, the authors focus on researchers’ positioning in relation to how they engage and communicate knowledge about multiply marginalized people. Positionality statements, they argue, must be more than a listing of identities or a claim on authority through the naming of professional proximity to marginalized communities. Recognizing the increasing expectations for education scholars to articulate positionality in their scholarship, the authors offer a three-pronged intersectional framework, with provocations about the onto-epistemic, sociohistoric, and sociocultural elements of positioning. Education researchers interested in conveying how intersectional oppressions effect knowledge production will find this framework useful for crafting positionality statements that consider the multidimensional nature of power, oppression, and research in relation to their field, the literature, and multiply marginalized participants.

Black Queer and Trans Scholarship: Articles

Black Women beyond Scandal by Nathalie Batraville
In this article, I examine the contested homosocial space that Black and white women shared in Saint-Domingue, a space fraught with multifarious articulations of scandal. As I track the colonists’ uses of scandal, I explore how the construction of gender through whiteness renders Black women’s autonomous sexuality and reproductive capacities as always already scandalous and therefore disruptive, threatening, and destabilizing to the colonial order.
The First Drag Queen by Channing Joseph
This article is about William Dorsey Swann (aka "The Queen").
The First Self-Proclaimed Drag Queen Was a Formerly Enslaved Man by Cari Shane
This article discusses drag and William Dorsey Swann's private balls in Washington D.C. known as drags.

Toward radical healing: A qualitative metasynthesis exploring oppression and liberation among Black queer people
The revised guidelines for working with sexual minority populations encourage psychologists to recognize and intentionally consider the personal, interpersonal, and institutional stressors and resiliencies in queer individuals and communities (American Psychological Association [APA], 2021). Yet without an understanding of how queer folx describe the experience and impact of identity-based oppression and hate, as well as justice and liberation, psychologists may struggle to apply the guidelines. The qualitative research studies conducted in the decade since the last guidelines (APA, 2012) were released provide a wealth of information about how Black queer people describe oppression and liberation. Thus, the current qualitative metasynthesis provides an analysis of the qualitative studies that focus on Black queer people and their experiences of oppression and hate, as well as justice and liberation (N = 106). Thematic analysis was utilized within the metasynthesis. Four major themes were uncovered: (a) the omnipresence of oppression and hate at the collective level, (b) absence of safety at the relational level, (c) pain and possibilities in the cycle of HIV stigma for Black queer men, and (d) self-acceptance and social support. The findings are discussed in light of extant scholarship, and a discussion and table of implications are provided for psychologists seeking to be accountable to the thematic findings in their practice.

Black Queer and Trans Scholarship: Books

Black Queer Freedom by GerShun Avilez
ISBN: 9780252043376
Publication Date: 2020-11-09
Whether engaged in same-sex desire or gender nonconformity, black queer individuals live with being perceived as a threat while simultaneously being subjected to the threat of physical, psychological, and socioeconomical injury. Attending to and challenging threats has become a defining element in queer black artists' work throughout the black diaspora. GerShun Avilez analyzes the work of diasporic artists who, denied government protections, have used art to create spaces for justice. He first focuses on how the state seeks to inhibit the movement of black queer bodies through public spaces, whether on the street or across borders. From there, he pivots to institutional spaces--specifically prisons and hospitals--and the ways such places seek to expose queer bodies in order to control them. Throughout, he reveals how desire and art open routes to black queer freedom when policy, the law, racism, and homophobia threaten physical safety, civil rights, and social mobility.
Black Queer Ethics, Family, and Philosophical Imagination by Thelathia Nikki Young
ISBN: 9781137584991
Publication Date: 2016-06-06
This book acknowledges and highlights the moral excellence embedded in black queer practices of family. Taking the lives, narratives, and creative explorations of black queer people seriously, Thelathia Nikki Young brings readers on a journey of new, queer ethical methods that include confrontation, resistance, and imagination. Young asserts that family and its surrounding norms are both microcosms of and foundations for human relationships. She discusses how black queer people are moral subjects whose ethical reflection, lived experience, and embodied action demonstrate valuable moral agency for those of us thinking about liberating and life-giving ways to enact "family." Young posits that black queer people enact moral agency in ways that ought to be understood qua moral agency. Refusing to recognize the examples from this (and any other) community, Young argues, denies us all the learning and moral growth that come from connecting with diverse human experiences. This book investigates how acknowledging and critically engaging with the moral agency within marginalized subjectivities allow us to consider and bear witness to the moral potential in us all.
Queer times, Black Futures by Kara Keeling
ISBN: 1479841994
Publication Date: 2019
A profound intellectual engagement with Afrofuturism and the philosophical questions of space and time Queer Times, Black Futures considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism. Kara Keeling explores how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. In doing so, Keeling offers a sustained meditation on contemporary investments in futurity, speculation, and technology, paying particular attention to their significance to queer and black freedom. Keeling reads selected works, such as Sun Ra's 1972 film Space is the Place and the 2005 film The Aggressives, to juxtapose the Afrofuturist tradition of speculative imagination with the similar "speculations" of corporate and financial institutions. In connecting a queer, cinematic reordering of time with the new possibilities technology offers, Keeling thinks with and through a vibrant conception of the imagination as a gateway to queer times and black futures, and the previously unimagined spaces that they can conjure.
Sister Outsider by Audre. Lorde
ISBN: 1299161707
Publication Date: 2012-01-01
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, SISTER OUTSIDER celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to "never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is. . . ." Reviews..".it's been almost a quarter of a century since Audre Lorde's essays and speeches in Sister Outsider made an indelible mark on 20th-century literature. But the words of the black lesbian feminist poet seem as lyrical and unforgettable, and, sadly, as relevant today as when she first tackled everything from racism and homophobia to ageism and class dichotomies. A must-have book that every lesbian should read."--Curve Editor's Pick "Lorde was a brilliant feminist poet and intellectual whose theories on the power of embracing our internal contradictions as well as the differences between people and groups is the way to powerful coalition building and social progress." --New York Post, Sunday "Poet and librarian Lorde collected 15 of her finest essays and speeches in this 1984 volume. With her poet's command of language, she addresses sexism, racism, black women, black lesbians, eroticism, and more. Still powerful."--Library Journal, Starred Review"Audre Lorde is a passionate sage. I say 'is' and not 'was' because her keen insights continue to provoke and sustain us and give us courage. The reissue of this book is a gift to longtime admirers and to new readers who have yet to discover the power and grace and splendid audacity of Audre Lorde."--Valerie Miner, author of After Eden and professor of feminist studies at Stanford University" Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware."--New York Times "From the Trade Paperback edition."