ABSTRACT
The term “positionality”—often defined as scholarly reflexivity and transparency regarding the research process—is typically linked with qualitative research involving human subjects. While making such a link is not wrong, it has also precipitated a limited understanding of “positionality,” a far more expansive concept that can illuminate how varied subject positions, including those of woman and feminist, are germinated and molded by the shifting coordinates of time, space, and location. This chapter weaves together a scaffolding for what chapter author Radhika Parameswaran calls “Global Feminist Positionality,” a critical thinking model that can unearth the locations and dislocations that shape the arc of feminist research. Parameswaran reflects on the trajectory of her media studies research, the choices of projects and objects of inquiry that arose at different moments to ask the following questions: How do the histories of colonialism and the conditions of globalization privilege elite postcolonial feminists living in the west? How do the different subject positions we occupy across time and space stalk our intellectual paths as scholars, teachers, and citizens? Avoiding the pitfalls of narcissism, the ethical process of accounting for global feminist positionality can reveal the contingent, contextual, and historical contours of academic feminist labor.
