Citation

Abstract

This experimental essay examines citation as a multifaceted feminist keyword and praxis that is political, epistemological, mathematical, personal, temporal, navigational, correctional, capital, methodological, and aspirational. The piece itself is a performative journey through the myriad processes, politics, and poetics of citation, an attempt to embody citation's inherently in/elegant awkwardness, the way it can serve as a deeply personal window into the process of writing, living, and being. This journey reveals how citation, though often portrayed as a neat kind of resolution, remains splayed open and unresolved in numerous ways. It is an attempt to lay bare the process of building toward something that is not entirely one's own, a process routinely contained in a tidy footnote or cradled between two parentheses. Intentionally raising more questions than it answers, the following prompts the reader to interrogate various assumptions about how certain words become keywords, the boundaries of their definitions, and the emotional, epistemological, and conceptual baggage that accompanies them.