Social Positionality Statement

as a transdisciplinary artist-researcher, my social position is one of

troubling the disciplinary bounds

         A social positionality statement is an acknowledgement of my location within a complex network of social relations – a network mediated by power differentials based on my identities and the privileges they afford me, within a system of social hierarchies rooted in oppression and domination. In this statement, I hope to begin triangulating my work as a researcher by critically reflecting on my positionality, power, and privilege.

         While I recognize that an acknowledgement of my positionality is not enough to begin the work “dismantling the master’s house” (Lorde, 1979), it can help us read the cultural blueprints that resulted in the house’s creation. Misapplied, a social positionality statement can be rendered into the “master’s tools” and foreclose the work of dismantling. For this reason and many others, this work of recognizing and reflecting on one’s position must be an on-going process that is subject to community critique and personal accountability. Going beyond acknowledgment, a social positionality statement should be a statement of commitments to the responsibilities rendered by one’s social position. I believe we have a responsibility to leverage the privileges afforded by our positions in service of dismantling oppressive power structures.

         As a trans-disciplinary researcher, I hope that my work will help to carry us ‘across, through, beyond’ (trans) the threshold of discipline - where ‘discipline’ (as a site of power-knowledge) is rooted in power-over and punishment. May we move towards ‘discipline’ as in devotion. ‘Discipline’ as in love. ‘Discipline’ as in together, we’re learning collective liberation.

         To begin the work of troubling the disciplinary bounds requires researching the self: researching as in going around (searching) again (re), locating the self within the complex network of social relations.

My social positionality statement is guided by the following:

“T]he research-creational struggle...is not for acknowledgment (a seat at the table...). It is for the insertion of voices and practices in the academic everyday that work to trouble disciplinary relays of knowledge/power, allowing for more creative, sensually attuned modes of inhabiting the university as a vibrant location of pedagogical mattering."   (Loveless, 2019)

“[On] Intersectionality... Ableism, coupled with white supremacy, supported by capitalism, underscored by heteropatriarchy, has rendered the vast majority of the world ‘invalid’.” (Sins Invalid, 2015)

“When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two -that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other… Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end.” (hooks, 1992)

My research asks the following questions: [CF1] 

         How do we develop accessibility as praxis? Not for a seat at the table, as Natalie Loveless asserted above, but to “trouble disciplinary relays of knowledge/power”. How do we invite in every body to the work of collective liberation? What is the role of research-creation in this work?

         Can we cultivate an aesthetic practice of access that centers the embodied knowledge of disability? As Sins Invalid calls for in their principles of Disability Justice, we must move from a place of intersectionality, challenging the ableism, white supremacy, capitalism, and heteropatriachy that has rendered us invalid. An aesthetic practice of access, again, means access for every body – regardless of their identity or position within these systems.

         Research is a relational practice. Can research work to center access as an act of care, an act of love, and support the liberating potential of theorizing? The quote above from bell hooks answers this question with a resounding yes – but only if we “direct our theorizing towards this end”. But how do we direct towards or move towards something if we don’t first know where we stand? To orient towards liberation, we must first triangulate our location with various interrelated and overlapping systems of oppression. This is the work of the social positionality statement.

Here is where I’m situated:

         I identify as a white person within a culture of white supremacy. My whiteness positions me at the focal point of power-over others within a system of racialized capitalism. Racism, as a system of collective oppression, harms us all - but let me be very clear: those who have been racialized as ‘other’, as not white, are the most marginalized and most harmed within this system. Whiteness is privilege. As a white person, my life and relationships are shaped around the privilege of “not needing to know” about the plight of racialized others. Claims to innocence, colorblindness, or appeals for “post-racial” politics are all examples of this “not needing to know”. Acknowledging this position, I commit myself to the work educating myself and other white people about anti-racism. Anti-racism is the life-long work of dismantling white supremacy at all scales, from the personal and interpersonal to the societal and structural. This is not the work of charity, but solidarity. This is the work of abandoning allyship and leaning into accompliceship. This work is informed by a long lineage of queer Black feminists, including the work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, adreinne maree brown, bronte velez, and Teju Adisa-Farrar, among many, many others.

         I identify as a queer, trans, and genderfluid person within a political climate of escalating violence towards the queer and trans community in the United States. Often, my whiteness shields me from gender-related hate and violence. This makes it ever more important that I leverage the privilege afforded to me as a white person to stand in radical solidarity with queer-of-color folks. I identify as trans in the sense of being “a person who radically transgresses gender norms”; this is a phrase offered by a founding member of Queer Humboldt, an organization in Humboldt County…(citation needed). I identify as queer as in “not as being about who you're having sex with…but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live" (hooks, 2014). And I identify as genderfluid as the kind of fluidity that escapes easy categorization, that disturbs purity culture with its rigid boundaries and the harmful enforcement of those boundaries. My gender is fluid, in flux, in-between, both/and, liminal – an ecotone of another way of being in the world. Acknowledging this position, I commit myself to the work of dismantling the cis-heteropatriarchal norms that hurt us all, but that are particularly weaponized against those outside the bounds of whiteness and/or those who hold multiply marginalized identities. Here, it feels important to note, that I believe our intersectionality should not separate our movements, but that it should lend to itself to a cross-movement synergy – a kind of murmuration (brown, 2021) led by those who are most impacted by these systems (Sins Invalid, 2015).

         I identify as a disabled person. My disability pronouns are: cane user, mobility impaired, crip, chronically ill, chronically in pain, neurodivergent, person with C-PTSD. My disability pronouns locate me within the disability community but are also offered as a way of framing my care and access needs, and not as a way of differentiating me from my disabled community. Disability justice requires of us, particularly at this moment of rupture and divisiveness, that we center cross-disability and cross-movement solidarity. It asks us to recognize that we all have needs for care and that we exist interdependently - with each other, within systems of oppression, and with all other beings, human and nonhuman. 

         I identify as a working-class person. I am college educated, with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Cal Poly Humboldt. I’m a first generation and non-traditional student. I’m an English speaker, and I speak English as a first language, a fact that privileges me within the university as an institution.

         I identify as a citizen of the so-called United States - the heart of the empire of domination. The U.S. is a fundamentally colonial, capitalist, imperialist nation-state. Acknowledging this, I commit myself to the work of anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism. I believe in dismantling these oppressive systems within myself and throughout my community, here in the U.S. and around the world. I believe in a Free Palestine. I believe in a Free Congo. I believe in a Free Sudan. I believe in the liberation of all oppressed peoples, everywhere.

         I have lived in California all my life, as a guest on the unceded homelands of Indigenous peoples. I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, the unceded homeland of the Ohlone people. I lived for a decade in the Sierra Foothills, the unceded homeland of the Nisenan people. I currently reside in Humboldt county, the unceded homeland of the Wiyot people. Wherever I may find myself, I am a guest on Indigenous lands. I’m ever striving to be a better guest and to consider my responsibilities to the Indigenous communities whose unceded homelands I reside on. Part of this work includes contributing to honor tax (Wiyot), Shuumi Land tax (Ohlone), and the Ancestral Homelands Reciprocity Program (Nisenan). Please see the resources below to find out more about each of these programs. If you live, work, or study on any these lands, I encourage you to consider your own ability to make a contribution.

         Additionally, I am in debt to the oak woodlands, chaparral covered hills, pine canyons, Yuba River, the redwood forests, and the Pacific Ocean. These lands and waters, and the plants and animals who also call them home, have deeply shaped me. I consider the more-than-human world a part of the community that holds me - a community that I am accountable to and that I strive to serve in my practice of research-creation with them.

Moving Forward From This Position:

         May my research escape the bounds of “discipline” which have decided the knowledge-production is solely a human activity. May my research destabilize the categories of human/nonhuman, self/other, the harmful systems of hierarchy and oppression they uphold, and slip into something more fluid, more free and free-ing. May this work escape the bounds of discipline, the bounds of the master’s house, and move towards theory as liberation, research as a kind of care, and a praxis steeped in reciprocity and right-relating.

         Collective liberation means building better world(s) for all beings. I am guided by the dream of healing the relationship between people, the more-than-human beings, the woven beings and vital materials that make life possible, and the earth we all share.

         May we all get free.