Tropes that use "performance" and "location" to make claims about identity and politics have been proliferating recently in cultural and critical theory. The metaphor of location currently echoes through a number of contemporary political and academic discourses. In feminist studies and activism, for one example, positionality is a strategy that locates one's personal and political investments and perspectives across an argument, a gesture toward placing oneself within a critique of objectivity, but at the same time stopping the spin of post-structuralist or postmodernist instabilities long enough to advance a politically effective action. A position is an unstable but effective point of departure.1