Living in the Margins: A Qualitative Study of Epistemic Delinking Among Feminist Critics of Attachment Theory

This study examines how feminist scholars experience and navigate exclusion from mainstream citation networks in developmental psychology, focusing on attachment research. Drawing on narrative interviews with twelve feminist scholars who critique the canonical Bowlby, Ainsworth, and Main framework, we use interpretative phenomenological analysis to examine epistemic delinking: the severing of a contribution from the intellectual genealogy to which it belongs through forms of acknowledgment that contain, minimize, or reattribute it despite apparent inclusivity. We developed three superordinate themes. The first, the architecture of invisibility, captures participants’ recognition that their work was being decoupled from mainstream intellectual genealogies. The second, the labor of speaking and the cost of being heard, traces the emotional, relational, and professional toll of producing critique within a field that acknowledges feminist insight without integrating it. The third, counterpractices and alternative genealogies, documents how participants built alternative scholarly communities. We propose an integrative framework treating delinking as recursive rather than linear, working through institutional rules and relational encounters at once. Understanding citation as a lived, relational practice, not a quantitative trace, opens avenues for disciplinary reflexivity and epistemic justice.