Where Are All the Women?

Abstract

Many feminist conversations about the ethics of citation begin by asking, Where are all the women? Sometimes this question is an innocent inquiry, but more frequently it signals suspicion, frustration, or doubt. Often, there is work written by women or nonbinary scholars on the topic at hand; it is simply not included.1 Frustration about the issue is well earned: our erasure is common enough to have spawned its own nomenclature; thus manel (an all-male panel) and manthology (ditto, but an edited volume) have entered the lexicon.2 Where are all the women? offers a concise way of summing up these dynamics, as well as making absence visible. It is a simple, necessary question to put to texts and their authors, and one that feminist scholarship has begun to ask with increasing frequency. This, in turn, broaches the larger issue of what citation does—what it does now, and what it can do, when we take it seriously as a feminist practice. Building on the work of my feminist colleagues who have asked, Where are all the women?, and have used this inquiry to gather data, excoriate bias, and demand new ways of doing scholarship,3 I want to explore the broader possibilities of a