Positioning The Discursive Production of

Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves BRONWYN DAVIES and ROM HARRE (1990)

Referenced in Jenny Langer-Osuna’s paper, “The Social Construction of Authority Among Peers and Its Implications for Collaborative Mathematics Problem Solving”

We explore the idea that the concept of ‘positioning’ can be used to facilitatethe thinking of linguistically oriented social analysts in ways that the use ofthe concept of ‘role’ prevented.

traits -> states role & identity together-> subject-positions

    What about footing / registers? Positionalities are prepared for us! (Goffman)

‘immanentist’ view, the only language that’s real is present and past conversations. 

“Ifwe want to talk about ‘sexism’or ‘ageism’in the use of language, what weare talking about is the highlighting of certain past conversations as morallyunacceptable exemplars for talking and writing now.” Not sure this is going to work for me. 

Frazer, E. (1989). Feminist talk and talking about feminism: teenage girls’ discourses of gender. Oxford Review of Education, 15(3), 281-290. —> 

“actors’ understanding and experience of their social identity, the social worldand their place in it, is discursively constructed. By this I mean that thegirls’ experience of gender, race, class, their personal-social identity, can only be expressed and understood through the categories available to them in discourse.”

“the constitutive force of each discursive practice lies in its provision of subject positions.”

(49)  I . Learning of the categories which include some people and exclude others,e.g. male/female, father/daughter; 2. Participatinginthevariousdiscursivepracticesthroughwhichmeaningsareallocated to those categories. These include the story lines through whichdifferent subject positions are elaborated; 3. Positioning of self in terms of the categories and story lines. This involvesimaginatively positioning oneselfas ifone belongs in one category and not in theother (e.g. as girl and not boy, or good girl and not bad girl); 4. Recognition of oneself as having the characteristics that locate oneself as amember ofvarious sub classes ofdichotomous categories and not ofothers- i.e.the development of a sense of oneself as belonging in the world in certain waysand thus seeing the world from the perspective of one so positioned. Thisrecognition entails an emotional commitment to the category membership andthe development of a moral system organised around the belonging. 5. Allfourprocessesariseinrelationtoatheoryoftheselfembodiedinpronoungrammar in which a person understands themselves as historically continuousand unitary.

When one speaker is said to position themselves and another in their talk, thefollowing dimensions should be taken into account: I . The words the speaker chooses inevitably contain images and metaphorswhich both assume and invoke the ways of being that the participants takethemselves to be involved in. 2. Participants may not be aware of their assumptions nor the power of theimages to invoke particular ways of being and may simply regard their words as“the way one talks” on this sort ofoccasion. But the definition of the interactionbeing “of this sort” and therefore one in which one speaks in this way, is to havemade it into this sort of occasion. 3. The way in which “this sort of occasion” is viewed by the participantsmay vary from one to another. Political and moral commitments, the sort ofperson one takes oneself to be, one’s attitude to the other speakers, theavailability of alternative discourses to the one invoked by the initial speaker(and particularly ofdiscourses which offer a critique of the one invoked by theinitial speaker) are all implicated in how the utterance ofthe initial speaker willbe heard. This is also the case for any subsequent utterances, though theassumption is usually made by participants in a conversation that utterances byspeakers subsequent to the initial speaker will be from within the samediscourse. 4. The positions created for oneself and the other are not part of a linear non-contradictory autobiography (as autobiographies usually are in their writtenform), but rather, the cumulative fragments of a lived autobiography. 5. The positions may be seen by one or other of the participants in terms ofknown “roles” (actual or metaphorical), or in terms of known characters inshared story lines, or they may be much more ephemeral and involve shifts inpower, access, or blocking of access, to certain features of claimed or desiredidentity, and so on.