Note: The authors have made an accessible, screen readable version of this article available as a Google Document, linked here.

by Liz Lane (University of Memphis), Lori Beth De Hertogh (James Madison University), and Jessica Ouellette (University of Southern Maine)

“Feminism is at stake in how we generate knowledge; in how we write, in who we cite. I think of feminism as a building project: if our texts are worlds, they need to be made out of feminist materials. Feminist theory is world making.” —Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 14.

Introduction

Sara Ahmed tells us that “citations are feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings” (16). As three feminist rhetoricians, we research the rhetorical influence of citational practices and what those practices reveal about the kinds of gendered scholarly “dwellings” we create and inhabit.

Our journey into studying feminist citational practices began over three years ago when we wrote an article for a special issue on technofeminism and intersectionality for Computers and Composition. In that piece, we traced the rhetorical and citational migrations of feminist and intersectional work across three decades of C&C in an effort to understand what those patterns might reveal about technofeminist and intersectional thinking in the field. The following spring, while presenting data from our article at 4C19 in Pittsburgh, session attendees pointed out that the methodology we developed for that article might be productively applied to other feminist citational projects. Thus, the exigence for this Recoveries and Reconsiderations piece is to unpack the feminist mixed-methods research methodology we developed, which we call "feminist citational mapping" or "FCM."

In the piece that follows, we offer our preliminary theorizing of feminist citational mapping (FCM) and describe ways this methodology can apply to a range of feminist citational projects. In the spirit of Recoveries and Reconsiderations, we do not provide an extended analysis or definitive conclusions about this methodology. Instead, we approach this piece with the idea that we are contributing to “an incubator for new feminist research projects” (CFP: Recoveries and Reconsiderations), particularly projects that are oriented toward understanding how feminist citational practices tell stories and histories about who we are and what we value. We ground this piece in the belief that“citation is feminist memory…[and] is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way” (Ahmed 15). At this particular moment in the field of feminist rhetorics, it is critical to re-examine how citational practices are part of our feminist memory- and knowledge-making and how these citational “bricks” reveal what we value in our scholarship.

We want FCM to be a collaborative, coalitional tool that urges researchers to excavate as they research and to explore the feminist mappings of the work they reference, grow alongside, and create.

Feminist Citational Mapping: How it Works

Feminist citational mapping is a mixed-methods approach for quantitatively and qualitatively tracing and analyzing feminist citational practices. Here’s how it works: let’s say a researcher wants to trace how often scholars of color are cited in a particular journal or body/collection of data over the last decade and what the implications of those citational practices might be. They would begin their project by collecting all of the article bibliographies in the chosen journal or body/collection of data over the last ten years. Next, they would quantitatively analyze these bibliographies by identifying the number of times authors cite scholars of color. Because this researcher is trying to create a large dataset that spans a ten year period, they might use a coding analysis program like NVivo to collate and analyze their data. Then, based on their quantitative results, the researcher can now develop a qualitative analytical approach (e.g., rhetorical analysis, content analysis) that allows them to understand what these citational trends reveal about the kinds of scholarly “dwellings” authors publishing in the journal created over the last decade.

In short, feminist citational mapping works like this:

• A scholar gathers quantitative citational data;
• They then analyze the quantitative results;
• They next design a qualitative study to determine the significance of those results.

John Creswell (2014) describes this kind of research design as an explanatory sequential mixed-methods approach—or a strategy where a researcher collects quantitative data in the first phase of research, analyzes the results, and then uses the results to plan or expand the second, qualitative phase (224). The major benefit of this research design is that it allows a scholar to achieve both a “broad view” of citational practices as well as a “close view” of what these practices might suggest about values and trends within and beyond the field. Thus, over the course of the research process, feminist citational mapping illuminates gaps, connections, and crevices for further exploration and allows researchers to identify what needs to be recovered and reconsidered within a larger body of scholarly work.

In their work on feminist rhetorical practices, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch describe this kind of strategic tracing as “tacking out”—a process that enables feminist researchers to “see both patterns and possibilities that may exist in support of knowledge creation and understanding—including the traces of a stream that may become visible when we stand back, observe, reflect, and meditate about the contours of various practices and the choices that rhetors make or might make” (90). Unlike Royster and Kirsch's parallel notion of "tacking in" (where a researcher engages in a focused, close examination of existing rhetorical practices), tacking out engages a larger, more expansive feminist rhetorical landscape. Thus, the notion of “tacking out” is central to FCM because it allows us to trace broad contours created by citational choices in bodies of work and to gain a long-range view of who we are and what we value through our citational practices.

Defining Our Terms

At this point, readers might be asking: What makes feminist citational mapping “feminist?” And why the words “citational” and “mapping”?

In naming this methodology, we’ve chosen our words carefully. We identify it as feminist because this methodology is intended to excavate, uncover, and draw new boundary lines in feminist scholarship in rhetoric and writing studies, with special attention to how feminist ideologies informed, shaped, or coalesced with other emerging moments in the field. In other words, this methodology is a tool to trace what Sara Ahmed calls “desire lines,” or paths of feminist thinking within and beyond academic boundaries. We borrow Ahmed’s concept to suggest that feminist citational mapping is a tool for tracing how citational practices create “power lines,” or the paths and places where power resides and flows. Thus, FCM is a feminist endeavor in that makes visible currents of power and influence—and illuminates pathways to support marginalized voices and experiences within those power dynamics.

The word citational comes from the Latin meaning to “summon” or “invoke.” We see FCM as a tool for illuminating how, to what extent, and where feminist thinking and rhetorical practices are summoned and invoked. We believe more care should be given to citational decisions and to the desire lines they create while building feminist knowledge.

The word map often conjures images of cartographic spaces where thin lines reveal important information about identities, boundaries, and ownership. Maps, then, are designed to tell us what is, but mapping captures what is at stake. Put another way, feminist citational mapping is a rhetorical approach that traces not only what is, but also articulates the significance of what has been traced.

Case Study: Using FCM to Recover and Reconsider Feminist Citational Practices

As we mention in this article's introduction, we developed FCM after quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing the frequency of certain feminist keywords used in a corpus of journal articles published in Computers and Composition. We looked at three decades of scholarship in C&C, specifically asking: “What are the ebbs and flows, convergences and divergences of technofeminism and intersectionality over almost three decades?” We knew the journal emerged from an explicit feminist mission, as its founders Gail Hawisher and Cindy Selfe described building a venue with clear “feminist leanings” (Beck 350). Our work traces and maps how those citational ebbs, flows, covergences, and divergences appeared in three decades of the journal’s publications and what the rhetorical and scholarly significance of those citational practices might be.

We employed Royster and Kirsch’s “tacking out” as we worked, using a feminist lens to examine what we termed “broad migrations” of the journal’s feminist leanings. Phase 1, our quantitative stage, applied Creswell’s explanatory sequential mixed methods to our initial quantitative data of 454 texts across three decades and narrowed our search to 212 articles that used our keywords in their content (e.g., title, body, and bibliographic references).

We then queried this dataset using terms like “feminism” and related variations (see Figure 1 below) to see the broad contours of how authors engaged feminist concepts in the journal. We then narrowed our search terms to focus on technofeminism and intersectional/intersectionality to more explicitly study the journal’s initial feminist roots and the special issue’s call to examine technofeminist imprints in C&C. However, we noted during this process that the broad keyword field (represented in Figure 1) offered a valuable lens through which to examine a large collection of data.

Using a qualitative coding program called NVivo, we moved to Phase 2 to calculate word frequency and word counts of these terms, which allowed us to see how sources used these terms in context. Figure 2 shows one way these results were depicted in Nvivo as a “word tree”:

From here, we rhetorically mapped trends on how feminism was taken up by scholars publishing in C&C. This meant we looked to the year the piece was published, considered trends and conversations in the field, and closely examined how pieces used terms in context. For example, Figure 3 below shows a breakdown of “technofeminist” word frequency in a set of articles, developed by Nvivo:

We found that only a small number of articles published across almost three decades of C&C explicitly used the keywords we sought, a surprising find given the journal's "feminist leanings." What FCM did, then, was allow us to identify, articulate, and underscore these absences and why they were significant to the larger feminist mission of the journal and its trajectory across three decades.

For example, FCM helped us to see how trends in the larger academic world can infiltrate—and sometimes dominate—smaller fields/subfields. In looking at C&C's citational practices, we were able to see how in the early nineties, references to "intersectionality" were much more explicit than, say, in the last decade, where such references were completely absent due to the journal's shift in focus to posthumanist technologies. This kind of citational ebb and flow is due in part to the fact that Kimberlé Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality was new and "trendy" in the early nineties. However, such citational practices point to a critical need for scholars to recognize and question scholarly trends and make efforts to explicitly foreground feminist values regardless of those trends. FCM is a methodology that enables such action.

FCM as Recovery and Reconsideration

As our case study shows, feminist citational mapping is is a methodology that enables researchers to recover and reconsider feminist knowledge in a way that is flexible, adaptable, and allows for a layered approach to data collection and analysis.

In their study of the rhetorical canons invention and memory, Lisa Ede, Cheryl Glenn, and Andrea Lunsford argue that a feminist vantage point makes it “impossible not to locate [subjectivity] within the larger context of social, economic, cultural, and ideological factors, as well as what exclusionary forces...are at work” (59). Echoing this, FCM is contextual—built to spotlight those forces, those power lines, those contexts—in order to build a stronger, non-linear trend of citational knowledge as recovery and reconsideration. Specifically, recovery and reconsideration operates as feminist knowledge-building practices. For example, when we used FCM in our survey of technofeminist impressions within Computers & Composition, this methodology continually helped us approach our work from a feminist vantage point and take note of which voices were included in citational conversations and which voices were left out. Such observations were significant because they allowed us to pay attention to gaps in knowledge-making and sketch a trajectory for examining privilege and power dynamics within broader citational practices.

FCM is contextual—built to spotlight those forces, those power lines, those contexts—in order to build a stronger, non-linear trend of citational knowledge as recovery.

Put another way, FCM allows us to expose moments when existing theoretical frameworks fail to account for diverse experiences, identities, and injustices; it provides a new way to rethink difference and analyze dominant discourses that obscure difference and—more importantly—that contribute to its erasure. FCM is a methodology that subverts traditional linear and hierarchical narratives by enabling researchers to trace and question citational values and practices in order to expose what is at stake in feminist knowledge-making.

Building and Using FCM Coalitionally

As our case study demonstrates, FCM can be used to trace feminist memory-making and citational practices; however, this methodology can be applied to a range of feminist citational endeavors. For example, we suggest that FCM can be used to:

• Audit citational practices in scholarly publications
• Generate new feminist knowledge by "building" projects that meaningfully cite feminist work (Ahmed 14)
• Bring older ideas and theories back into scholarly conversations or produce new ones
• Develop research approaches that critique histories and structures of power
• Audit course readings and curricula to identify areas where more representative readings might be needed

While we have outlined a few ways FCM might be used , we want you—our reader—to share other ways this methodology can be used or remixed. For example, are there ways you might use this tool in your classrooms? In tracing “desire lines” within a dissertation bibliography? Or in considering how you make citational choices in collaborative or individual projects? We conclude this brief essay with a link to a Google document where readers can leave comments, questions, and other ideas for how to employ feminist citational mapping.