Position (pronounced puh-zish-uhn)
(1) Condition with reference to place; location; situation.
(2) A place occupied or to be occupied; site.
(3) In military jargon, a fortified position.
(4) The proper, appropriate or usual place.
(5) A situation or condition, especially with relation to favorable or unfavorable circumstances.
(6) To be in an awkward position or to bargain from a position of strength.
(7) High standing, as in society; important status.
(8) A post of employment.
(9) A manner of being placed, disposed, or arranged:
(10) A mental attitude, a stated opinion.
(11) In ballet, any of the five basic positions of the feet with which every step or movement begins and ends.
(12) In music, the arrangement of tones in a chord, especially with regard to the location of the root tone in a triad or to the distance of the tones from each other.
(13) In music, in the construction of stringed instruments, any of the places on the fingerboard of a stringed instrument where the fingers stop the strings to produce the various pitches.
(14) In music, any of the places to which the slide of a trombone is shifted to produce changes in pitch.
(15) In finance, a commitment to buy or sell securities.
(16) In classical prosody, the situation of a short vowel before two or more consonants or their equivalent, making the syllable metrically long.
(17) To determine the position of; to locate.
(18) In language, make position (of a consonant, either on its own or in combination with other consonants, such as x in Latin) to cause a short vowel to become metrically long when placed after it.
1325-1375: From the Middle English posicioun (a positing; a statement of belief, the laying down of a proposition or thesis), borrowed (as a term in formal logic and philosophy) from the Old French posicion (position, supposition (from which Modern French gained position)), from the Latin positiōn & positionem (stem of positiō) (act or fact of placing, situation, position, affirmation), the noun of state from the past-participle stem of pōnere (put; to place, lay down)). The ultimate source is contested. Some suggest the primitive Indo-European po-s(i)nere (the construct being apo (off, away) + sinere (to leave, let) while other etymologists prefer the Proto-Italic posine-, from the primitive Indo-European tkine- (to build, to live), from the root tkei- (to settle, dwell, be home).
The meaning "proper place occupied by a person or thing" (especially as applied to a place occupied by a person or thing (hence the link to "status, standing & social rank" noted since 1832 and "official station, employment" (1890))) is from the 1540s. The sense of a "manner in which some physical thing is arranged or posed, aggregate of the spatial relations of a body or figure to other such bodies or figures" dates from 1703 and was applied specifically to dance steps by 1778 and as a technical description of certain aspects of human sexual intercourse in 1883. The technical use "to assume a position” (intransitive) dates from the 1670 whereas the transitive sense of "to put in a particular position" is recorded from 1817. The military use in the sense of "place occupied or to be occupied" ws first used in 1781.
Positionality
Second wave feminism and post-modernism grew together in the again expanding universities of the 1980s, a symbiosis of shifting cause and effect that was extraordinarily productive, at least if measured quantitatively by volume of publication. One fork, drawing in some ways from the new-left, was positionality, a theory of construct that creates (or, according to some critical theorists, imposes) identity; it also builds a framework with which to deconstruct how an identity, however constructed, biases one’s worldview.
Positionality was first applied to gender and sexuality in 1988 by philosopher Linda Alcoff (b 1955), essentially as a critique of the patriarchal overlays and suppositions that distorted feminist thought to the point where even the more abstract or radical positions were to be understood only with some reference to prevailing male views. Alcoff argued for a positional definition of woman, one where aspects of women's identity are markers of relational positions rather than essential qualities, these identities existing in a constantly shifting network.
The creation of modern identity politics has seen a revival of interest in positionality, both now seen as emergent from historical experience yet still retaining an inherently political ability to take gender as a point of departure. Gender thus is not natural, biological, universal, ahistorical or even essential yet remains still relevant because it’s the position from which politically to act. Alcoff’s concept was that the existing construct of "woman" is defined not by a particular set of attributes but by a position so the internal characteristics of the individual thus identified are not denoted so much as the external context within which the individual is situated; the position is always relative to the patriarchy. By contrast, the positional definition renders identity relative to a constantly shifting context, the swirl of the objective economic, cultural, political and ideological objects and narratives. In this analysis, the concept of positionality allows for a determinate though a fluidity of identity and feminist politics can emerge rather than being mediated through a set of defined attributes. The implication of this for second wave feminism was that positionality existed to create a location for the construction of meaning, rather than echoing the earlier tools of feminism, used where meaning needed to be discovered.
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