is a feminist citation project taking shape across a library, a bookmark, a webring and this online hub. It asks who gets remembered in the archive, and proposes weaving — instead of shelving — as an answer.
Where My Girls @t? began as a question about the library: who gets remembered there, and how? In an era of shrinking public space, the library remains one of the last non-commercial places you can enter without being asked to buy something, a "third place" free of the demands of home or work. But that openness has always been conditional. Its classifications, its canons, the logic of what gets shelved and where, were built by and for a Western, white, male subject. For many readers, the library's promise of universal access has meant something closer to absence: their work relegated to the margins, misrepresented and their lineages left uncited.
This project takes that contradiction as a starting point. Rather than critiquing the library from the outside, it asks what it might mean to reweave it from within. It draws on Emily Drabinski's radical librarianship, which treats classification as a political structure rather than a neutral given, and on Melissa Adler's recovery of poikilia: an ancient, feminist method of "pleasurable mixture," named for the scholar-weaver Pamphila, that favours variety and connection over rigid categorisation. Where the canon builds a house, poikilia weaves a fabric that can hold contradiction, digression, and multiple lineages at once.
In practice, this reweaving takes shape across three intertwined interventions: a feminist citation manual, offering a practical method for auditing and reorienting one's own bibliography; a bookmark intervention within the ArtEZ library, in which visitors leave behind recommendations — by way of highlighting a passage and a source it calls to mind — turning private reading into a shared, physical network of reader-made connections; and an accompanying publication to hold and to keep exercising feminist citation in one's own time and space. This website is the fourth node, one that pushed the project beyond its original site.
The bookmark intervention is, by design, local and bound to the shelves of one's personal library. The webring is an attempt to extend its way of thinking outward. Just as the bookmark reveals the connections that readers draw across a single collection, a webring does the same on a larger scale: it is a self-organising, non-hierarchical chain of feminist researchers, writers, artists and collectives that are (hyper)linked through manual citation, in an age defined by algorithmic recommendations. Each site that joins the ring hosts a small piece of navigation — a banner or widget — that lets visitors move sideways through the network: next, previous, or at random, rather than up or down a ranked list. To join is to acknowledge, publicly, that your work is shaped beside someone else's.
This site is the ring's home base. It holds the project's open-access materials, including the citation manual, the essays, its references (ready for you to download) and documentation of the bookmark intervention. It is also where the ring itself can be joined, via a simple embed snippet that connects a site to the chain, and a submission form for those who want in. Like the bookmark left in the stacks of the library, the webring is a gesture towards (hyper)textual intimacy; in hopeful waiting for someone else to follow it.
Joining the ring means placing a small widget on your own website, in the form of a logo and a bit of navigation (previous / next / random) that connects your site to everyone else's. Someone lands on your page, clicks "next," and ends up somewhere else in the ring. That's it. No algorithm decides what they see next; you and the other participants do, simply by gathering and settling next to each other in the chain.
Think of the widget as a citation in code. Adding it to your site is a small, public way of saying { my work is shaped beside this work }.
There are no strict entry criteria. Membership here is provisional and evolving. That said, a few things hold the ring together:
When submitting your site to the ring, there will be a short approval node. This is meant as a light check that all the links work and that a new addition genuinely resonates with what's already here.
If you're not sure where the snippet goes, or run into trouble installing it, reach out :) part of maintaining a ring is helping each other keep it running!
The project’s title, Where My Girls At?, borrows from the 1999 song of the same name by American R&B trio 702. An anthem of female solidarity—now with broken links and good intentions.
a feminist citation project
syllabus website
critical fashion practice + online cultures
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Submissions are reviewed by the admins before going live. Your website's name, URL and description will appear on the webring; your email stays private. More in our Legal notice and Privacy.
Where My Girls At? is initiated by Hanka van der Voet and Chinouk Filique de Miranda, both lecturers at the MA Critical Fashion Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts. The project brings together the ArtEZ Library and the Library of Unruly Fashion Practices, an emerging “library in flux” foregrounding anti-capitalist, queer, feminist and decolonial approaches to fashion, textiles, clothing and identity.
Hanka van der Voet & Chinouk Filique de Miranda
Marie Madonna
Xiaoyuan Gao
The project is financially supported by the Nederlandse Onderwijspremie, which resulted in a collaboration between ArtEZ and the Amsterdamse Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, and by the ArtEZ Fashion Professorship. It is intellectually supported by the MA Critical Fashion Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts.