Grandmother's Theory Was Never Footnoted

This poem explores the unrecognized intellectual labour of grandmothers, mothers and elder women whose knowledge is often excluded from formal academic traditions. Through the figure of a grandmother, the poem reflects on how feminist theory may emerge from domestic spaces, embodied memory, care work, silence, ritual and everyday survival. It challenges the hierarchy that separates ‘theory’ from lived experience and questions why women's knowledge, particularly from familial and culturally rooted contexts, is often treated as anecdotal rather than epistemic. This poem also engages with patriarchal structures that normalize women's sacrifice, emotional labour and self-erasure in the name of family harmony. By reimagining the grandmother as thinker, method, text and archive, this poem contributes to feminist debates on knowledge production, care, intergenerational memory and epistemic justice.