B – Ballot can remedy. Strike malestream cites off your flow – makes enduring sexism a priority.

The need for strategic silence in feminist citation practices

Considering feminists’ long-standing efforts to challenge the citational silences of the malestream, it is time for us to shift our efforts away from uninterested and often uninteresting scholarship. As Sophia Dingli (2015) has argued, silences can be productive as well as oppressive. As feminist scholars, we might be better served by actively using silence, refusing to engage with work that has chosen not to take gender and other topics at the “margins” seriously. When authors write on topics that have rich bodies of gendered literature but refuse to cite feminist scholarship, it would be appropriate to, in turn, refuse citation. This kind of refusal is more than just petty spitefulness; it could prove to be a political act to begin reshaping the field, to tangibly show our priorities. As feminist scholars are having valuable conversations about the engagement with Global South scholarship, the role of interdisciplinary scholarship, and the enduring sexism of the field, it seems clear to me that we should set our priorities not only with regard to whom we do cite but also to whom we refuse to engage with.

These kinds of strategic silences have already been seen to be productive outside IR, with scholars like bell hooks (1991) refusing disciplinary conventions when they run against the normative commitments of their work. IR does not need to be shown that gender is relevant, and increasingly cannot be said to simply have overlooked these perspectives when they are excluded. The current conventions of the discipline are such that it is acceptable for malestream scholarship to refuse to engage with the substantial and enduring body of feminist work. At the same time, there remains a pressure for feminist IR to shift its practices in order to become palatable to malestream IR as a pre-condition for entry into many mainstream journals (Tickner 2010, 18). This dynamic has political implications: citations as academic currency reward such a power dynamic, and they entrench the same attitudes that treat work on gender as marginal to rather than constitutive of world affairs. Such a dynamic will not change by kindly asking the malestream to read more feminist work, but maybe it will by refusing to cite mainstream scholarship that is poorly versed in feminists’ essential contributions to the field.