ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with feminist acts of citation and strategic silences. Feminist academic research has commonly noted the silencing practices which are directed towards women and other marginalised voices in the academy. This has resulted in a robust literature demanding that mainstream scholarship engage with disciplinary silences and give voice to the voiceless. This chapter expands the discussion of academic silences by drawing on art theory and linguistics to make the case for a positive use of silence as a citation practice. It suggests that by actively not engaging with scholarship that is antithetical to feminist normative goals, silence can be powerfully reclaimed by feminist scholars. The chapter contributes the concept of ‘negative space’ as a way to understand active non-engagement as a tool for academic work. Theorising disciplinary silence as a kind of productive absence through the notion of ‘negative space’ the chapter makes a case for a more normatively aware deployment of citational silences.
