Citations to Women in Theory

Tue, Jun 25, 2013

After reading Kieran Healy’s latest post about women and citation patterns in philosophy, I wanted to revisit the co-citation graph I had made of five journals in literary and cultural theory. As I noted, one of these journals is Signs, which is devoted specifically to feminist theory. I didn’t think that its presence would skew the results too much, but I wanted to test it. Here are the top thirty citations in those five journals:

Butler J 1990	117
Jameson F 1981	90
Butler J 1993	72
Lacan J 1977	71
Derrida J 1978	64
Foucault M 1977	61
Chodorow Nancy 1978	60
Gilligan C 1982	60
Fish Stanley 1980	57
Foucault M 1978	56
Spivak G C 1988	54
Bhabha H K 1994	54
Derrida Jacques 1976	53
Benjamin W Illuminations	53
Foucault M 1980	52
Althusser L 1971	51
Said Edward W 1978	51
DE Man P 1979	50
Foucault M 1979	49
Laclau Enesto 1985	48
Hardt M 2000	48
Zizek Slavoj 1989	47
Derrida Jacques 1994	46
Benjamin Walter 1969	45
Lyotard J-f 1984	44
Foucault Michel 1980	44
Anderson B 1983	44
Williams Raymond 1977	42
Frye Northrop 1957	41
Fuss D 1989	40
Irigaray L 1985	40

There are eight women (I’m counting Chantal Mouffe) in the top thirty, and Judith Butler is the most-cited author. To test my intuition that literary theory journals cite female authors more than analytic philosophy, I decided to replace Signs with College Literature. (Here is the co-citation network. Again, these work best with Safari and Chrome.)

Here are the top thirty most cited authors in that corpus:

Jameson F 1981	100
Lacan J 1977	75
Fish Stanley 1980	66
Derrida J 1978	65
Bhabha H K 1994	60
Benjamin W Illuminations	59
Butler J 1990	57
Derrida Jacques 1976	57
Althusser L 1971	56
Bakhtin M M 1981	56
Foucault M 1977	56
DE Man P 1979	52
Lyotard J-f 1984	49
Zizek Slavoj 1989	48
Frye Northrop 1957	48
Derrida Jacques 1994	48
Foucault M 1979	48
Benjamin Walter 1969	48
Hardt M 2000	46
Anderson B 1983	44
Laclau Enesto 1985	43
Marx K Capital	43
Said Edward W 1978	42
Gilroy P 1993	41
Barthes Roland 1977	41
Williams Raymond 1977	40
Freud S Interpretation Dream	40
Jameson Fredric 1991	40
Culler Jonathan 1975	40
Bass Alan 1982	40
Derrida J 1981	39

Butler and Mouffe (whose name doesn’t appear because of the way the citation data is formatted) are the only women in the top thirty (unless I missed something!).

I don’t want to draw any major conclusions from this data, but I’m a bit surprised. Neither of these citation corpora have been cleaned up as much as Healy’s has, for instance, and the choice of journals clearly affects the outcome. The journals I chose were ones that I happened to think might be representative of literary theory and also happened to be in the Web of Science database; many obvious candidates were not.