Citational Desires: On Black Feminism's Institutional Longings

"Citational Desires" treats the growing celebration of a "Black feminist politics of citation" as indexing Black feminist theory's anxiety around its institutionalizationand its usage by an array of scholars of varied identities and with varying investments in Black feminist praxis and ethics. In this article, I interrogate the Black feminist argument that certain forms of citation reveal an ethical usage of Black feminist theory and that others index a non-ethical usage. My venture here is to treat this preoccupation with ethical usage as one of the myriad ways that Black feminist theory invests in itself as intellectual property, as terrain that must be defended from the specter of dangerous critics, colonizers, appropriators, and even from scholars who lack the requisite commitment to the tradition.