In the discussion about ethical citation practices I’m seeing a lot of scholars treat the secondary literature of scholars as though they’re elements on the periodic table: pure, essential, objective material. Who can study air without Oxygen? Or plant growth without Nitrogen? 1/

Of course, with the work of secondary literature we are not dealing with essential elements at all, but interpretations and approaches to the true essential elements which are the primary texts. 2/

I have not yet encountered a scholar whose work I MUST include for my own arguments. If the exclusion of a scholar damages my argument, there is always another angle or a way around. Is there only one road to Rome? 3/

It will take more work to find another argument and it may not have the same effect or impact than if I had included the work of a scholar I excluded, but I will nonetheless consider it a good argument. Why? 4/

Because it will be an argument made that does not give more power to an individual who abused their power to harm other people. My power to cite whom I want when I want will not be co-opted as a prosthetic to prop up the so-called “great work” of criminals and abusers. 5/

“Scholarship is scholarship” you might say.

This is illusory nonsense.

Scholarship is selection. A buffet of options and approaches more akin to a palette of available colours than essential and irreplaceable elements. 6/

The citation of a scholar is not the scholar’s right. It is a privilege to be cited. And that privilege can be taken away.

By whom? By me as a researcher. I am the one with the power. 7/

It is with my pen that I decide enough is enough. A scholar’s work might be good — hell, it might be groundbreaking and seminal — but, depending on the extent of their reprehensible actions, it will never be good enough to outweigh the harm they have caused. 8/

If my words can be Acts, and my citations political, then the names I choose as the literal paratextual foundation of my argument can do violence. And if the scholar I cite has done violence against others then I participate and perpetuate that violence as well. 9/

Enough with the hypotheticals, the rhetorical flourishes, the claims of universal depravity and above all the notion of pure and objective scholarship detached from the lives of those who create it. 10/

I am not an objective being. What I create carries with it my image. So too for scholars who have done irreparable violence. It is our choice to continue to reproduce that image and likeness or to bury it in the dust where it belongs. End/