Where Are All the Women?

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 feminist ethics of citation. This practice should be equal parts suspicious, rigorous, curious, generative, and generous. In the remainder of my response, I explore these attributes in slightly greater detail.

Be Suspicious

The hermeneutics of suspicion are familiar to feminist interpreters.⁴ Suspicion is equally useful as a starting point for a feminist interrogation of citation. When one asks, Where are all the women?, suspicion can be an effective way of putting pressure on seemingly neutral scholarship. It is equally useful when assessing the answers that are offered to this "women question." While some of our colleagues dig in their heels and insist that no women exist who have written on X (more on this below), more frequently, the response is a kind of hurried "add women and stir." But women are not seasoning packets, and this approach is rarely successful. Citing women for the sake of citing women (or to appease an editor or killjoy colleague) is not going to do much except irritate the women who are cited, aggravate the women who are not, and annoy everyone else.⁵ Such performative inclusion is usually shallow and, at worst, actually works against diversity and inclusion.⁶

While we are in this mindset of suspicion, we should also be a bit suspicious about the work of the category "women" in Where are all the women? and the response of Look, women! Women (as scholars), gender (as an object of study), and feminism (as an approach) are distinct. Where are all the women? is not the same as Where are the feminists? The second question, I suggest, is equally important. And, given feminism's broad political and intersectional commitments to dismantling oppressions, we should also be suspicious of any metric for inclusion that is limited to the category of women.⁷

Be Rigorous

Creating feminist practices of citation also requires intellectual rigor. If it is not enough to "add women and stir," then we need to know the scholarship in depth—not just the ideas or approaches that appear dominant. It bears repeating: Scholarship by women already exists; feminist scholarship already exists; these categories are not identical or interchangeable. In fact, there is a tremendous amount of both kinds of scholarship, including reference works, detailed monographs, and summative volumes. Much of this literature is even published by the most established presses in the field. There is really no excuse not to "do the work" and engage what already exists. A feminist ethics of citation includes a responsibility to be aware of all the feminist work that has already been done, along with recognizing and acknowledging that you are not the first scholar to bring a feminist perspective to biblical studies.

This may seem obvious. And yet I cannot count the number of times I have heard a conference paper or read an article that seems either wholly ignorant of feminist scholarship, or...