Make Mine Melody: Building Beloved Community in Bibliography Using Mad Citation Practice

Abstract:Bibliography can be reconstructed to privilege the imaginaries of radicals that are "lesser known." The dis-visibilizing of marginalized neurodiverse scholars and theorycrafters has much in common with the institutionalization approaches that constrict and model obstructed life for neurodivergent bodyminds. In a proposal for mad citation practice, a series of hopeful strategies for nonretrofitted inclusivity and authorial diversity are constructed for the reader instead, which bear similarities to feminist and disabled care practices: explicit permission-setting, naming ontology, lived or living experience validity, commentary or subscript authorization, visibilized quotation selection, draft approval, and cocollaborator approvals all form the basis of a radically collaborative citation methodology that seeks to generate roundtable-format conversations in print, ones that are self-selected within mad communities and feature a heavy roster of neurodivergent or disabled scholars, artists, and authors. In mad citation, the draft writer is less the "manuscript author" and more equivalent to a "conversation facilitator," charged with weaving the myriad kaleidoscopic voices of the movement they seek to represent. This refiguring of the author/collaborator and reader/writer valences are central to a citation futurity that situates power not in the hands of the scholar holding the pen but in the hands of the collective they seek to speak with.