Marginality can only be evidenced by shuttling into the center, never by remaining outside.

Evidence

I have so far been explaining our symposium in terms of what had better be called a masculist centrism. By pointing attention to a feminist marginality, I have been attempting, not to win the center for ourselves, but to point at the irreducibility of the margin in all explanations. That would not merely reverse but displace the distinction between margin and center. But in effect such pure innocence (pushing all guilt to the margins) is not possible and, paradoxically, would put the very law of displacement and the irreducibility of the margin into question. The only way I can hope to suggest how the center itself is marginal is by not remaining outside in the margin and pointing my accusing finger at the center. I might do it rather by implicating myself in the center and sensing what politics make it marginal. Since one’s vote is at the limit for oneself, the deconstructivist can use herself (assuming she is at her own disposal) as a shuttle between the center (inside) and the margin (outside) and thus narrate a displacement. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 306

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘shuttle between center and margin’ concretely models how the reader’s subject — the ironic positioner of strategic essentialism — must implicate itself in what it critiques rather than claim the innocence of pure outsideness.