Emek Ergun

Feminist theories travel across the globe, activating political trans/formations on their multidirectional routes across geopolitical and historical borders. Yet, the geohistorical and textual specificities of such global mobilities have not received much scholarly attention. By offering a renovated form of Edward Said's traveling theory, so that it attends to the feminist translation and reception factors, this dissertation offers a theoretical and analytical model on global translational flows of feminist discourses in the hope of reducing the gap in the literature and encouraging more research on the subject. The dissertation investigates the praxis of "feminist translation" conceived as a form of local and transnational activism drawing its ethical stance particularly from the feminist notions of self-reflexivity and interconnectedness. Built on an analysis of my Turkish translation of Hanne Blank's Virgin: The Untouched History, a popular feminist historical a...

FEMINIST THEORY READER: LOCAL AND GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES - THIRD EDITION: TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface to the Third Edition Acknowledgements Introduction: Feminist Theory, Local and Global Perspectives SECTION I Introduction: Theorizing Feminist Times and Spaces Feminist Movements * Yosano Akiko, "The Day the Mountains Move" * Nancy Hewitt, "Re-Rooting American Women's Activism: Global Perspectives on 1848" * Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, " Introduction," * Linda Nicholson, "Feminism in 'Waves': Useful Metaphor or Not?" * Becky Thompson, "Multiracial Feminism: Recasting the Chronology of Second Wave Feminism," * Amrita Basu, "Globalization of the Local/Localization of the Global: Mapping Transnational Women's Movements" * Michelle Rowley, "The Idea of Ancestry: Of Feminist Genealogies and Many Other Things" Local Identities and Politics * Muriel Rukeyser, "The Poem as Mask" * T. V. Reed, ...

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. ... A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name – and therefore live – afresh. ... We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.

This study analyzes t-shirt slogans containing the expletive bitch that both oppose and support Hillary Clinton. The findings show that anti-Clinton slogans employ genderized and sometimes even dehumanized and sexualized implications of the word bitch to present an extremely negative image of Clinton. On the other hand, pro-Clinton slogans are shown to either reverse and reclaim the sexist term bitch or reject the term altogether, refraining from using the word directly to refer to Clinton. It is the contention of this paper that "gender-conscious slogans," those critiquing the use of bitch, are potentially more disruptive for the status quo than the "reclaiming" pro-Clinton slogans. Pro- Clinton t-shirt slogans rejecting bitch, rather than using it, may lead the audience toward a more gender-conscious problematizing of the term by calling attention to its gendered usage and its sexist implications.

Edited by:

Olga Castro, Aston University, Birmingham, UK – [email protected]

Emek Ergun, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, US – [email protected]

Rationale:

Research and scholarship on the dyad “gender and translation” has been experiencing a remarkable growth in the last few years, with many publications and conferences devoted to exploring the multifaceted nature of translation theory and practice as approached from a gender perspective. The forthcoming collection of essays, tentatively entitled Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives, eds. Olga Castro (Aston) and Emek Ergun (UMBC), seeks to put the “F” word (i.e. feminism) back in debates on gender and translation; and more specifically, to generate innovative approaches to the studying of translation in the contemporary era of transnational feminism. By doing so, the volume purports to emphasize the critical role of translation in the formation and transformation of feminist movements and politics at local and transnational stages.

Although feminist translation began as a Western-dominated praxis and remained so for decades, we are recently observing an increasing interest in the subject across different cultures and disciplines. However, some significant literature gaps can still be identified at the dialogic interplay between translation studies and feminist studies:

§  The centrality of feminist politics appears to be missing in the recently produced theories and studies on gender and translation.

§  Most of the existing volumes on the topic fail to reflect the geographical (especially non-Western) and disciplinary diversity within the field.

§  The greater focus on literary translation at times disregards the contributions of non-literary translation to local and transnational production and circulation of feminist knowledges.

§  There seems to be a lack of exploration of the links between feminist translation and other disciplines, despite the fact that translation studies is an interdisciplinary field.

By addressing these four main gaps, Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives aims to play a catalytic role in the growth of the field. The goal of our proposed volume is to bring together original essays on contemporary developments and innovations in the theorizing and practicing of feminist translation from different disciplinary perspectives and across diverse sociocultural, geopolitical and historical contexts. In this regard, we seek not only to provide a comprehensive survey of the ever-changing field of feminist translation studies – expanding its epistemological, theoretical, methodological, practical, geopolitical, and pedagogical dimensions – but also to revitalize feminist scholarship in translation studies, therefore making an impact on the development of the discipline of translation studies in general.

Possible Topics:

Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives pursues a balance between theoretical/methodological and empirical chapters. In order to ensure such a balance, the chapters will be grouped in two main thematic categories:

1) Possible theoretical/methodological themes about Feminist Theories in/and/of Translation might include, but are not restricted to, the following:

·        The central role of translation as an enabler (or disabler) of cross-border contact,

·        Trans/formation of local and transnational feminist movements and discourses via translation,

·        Local and global feminist knowledge production, dissemination and reception via translation,

·        Transnational feminism in translation,

·        Travelling feminist theories and their situated receptions,

·        Travelling feminist writers (feminist/women writers in translation),

·        Travelling feminist translators (the activist work of translators),

·        Travelling languages (the challenges of translating feminist concepts and discourses across differently situated and equipped languages),

·        New approaches to translation from the perspectives of queer studies and masculinity studies.

2) Scholars are also encouraged to propose articles on empirical aspects related to Feminist Translation as Political Activism, which might include themes such as:

·        Hetero/sexist practices in translations and translation studies,

·        Strategies to overcome the prevalent hetero/sexism in translation,

·        Feminist translation practices in the context of local and global feminist movements,

·        Gendered metaphors of translation,

·        Women translators’ theoretical thinking (excluded from mainstream accounts and canons in translation studies),

·        Gaps in feminist literature due to a lack of circulation through translation,

·        Pedagogies of feminist translation in translation studies and other disciplines.

Submitting a Proposal
All potential contributors are requested to send in a detailed summary of their proposed paper by the end of November 2013 (as indicated below) to the editors Olga Castro ([email protected]) and Emek Ergun ([email protected]).

Format:

·        Title of the article

·        Author’s name, affiliation, e-mail

·        Proposal of 600-900 words, including the description of the proposed article, its theoretical and methodological framework, its rationale and its relevance for the field of Feminist Translation Studies.

·        Keywords

·        Times New Roman, 12 pt, single space

Timeline:

·        Deadline for submitting proposals: 30 November 2013

·        Notifications of provisional acceptance will be sent by: 31 January 2014

·        Deadline for submitting full articles: 1 September 2014

Contact:

Please email enquiries and proposals to the editors. See above for contact details.

Do I think it must always be so? Certainly not. It can be changed. It can be better. Life on this earth need not always be some humans being gods and others being sacrificial animals. Indeed, that can be changed. But it would take so much. No, not time. There has always been enough time for anything anyone ever really wanted to do. What it would take is a lot of thinking and a great deal of doing. But one wonders whether we are prepared to tire our minds and our bodies that much. Are we human beings even prepared to try?"