Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address

Douglas Robinson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501345555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Finalist for the 2020 Prose Awards (Language and Linguistics Category) The emergence of transgender communities into the public eye over the past few decades has brought some new understanding, but also renewed outbreaks of violent backlash. In Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address Douglas Robinson seeks to understand the "translational" or "translingual" dialogues between cisgendered and transgendered people. Drawing on a wide range of LGBT scholars, philosophers, sociologists, sexologists, and literary voices, Robinson sets up cis-trans dialogues on such issues as "being born in the wrong body, " binary vs. anti-binary sex/gender identities, and the nature of transition and transformation. Prominent voices in the book include Kate Bornstein, C. Jacob Hale, and Sassafras Lowrey. The theory of translation mobilized in the book is not the traditional equivalence-based one, but Callon and Latour's sociology of translation as "speaking for someone else, " which grounds the study of translation in social pressures to conform to group norms. In addition, however, Robinson translates a series of passages from Finnish trans novels into English, and explores the "translingual address" that emerges when those English translations are put into dialogue with cis and trans scholars.

1

Why Should Cisnormative Translation Scholars Care About Translation and Transgender?

From this point of view, thus, both Transgender and Translation Studies are concerned with the hetero-normative foundations of culture and language that have to be subverted by characters that shift within the gender continuum and by translations that maintain such polymorphism. Indeed, Transgender Studies promotes and supports an intersex/transgender person’s right to refuse a traditional and binary gender role produced by societies and by their clinical extensions, i.e. surgery, while Translation Studies deals with the strategies that can be adopted in the target language to maintain such ambiguity.

Mirko Casagranda, “Bridging the Genders? Transgendering Translation Theory and Practice” (2013: 114)

Rigid loyalty to the original in the translated version was, in effect, the intentionality of the translation of the doctrines and precepts that constituted the colonial discourse. What is lost in translation is untranslatable (Lavinas and Viteri 2016: 4). The politics of translation that disavows loyalty is rather concerned with the need of the discourse to be a liberating impulse from the precepts of the colonial—that is, a decolonizing ­translation.

Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba, Translating the Queer (2016: 5)

As the first epigraph, from Mirko Casagranda, seems to suggest, the audience for this book would seem to fall more or less neatly into two trans-groups: Translation Studies scholars and Transgender Studies scholars. Both trans-groups represent fairly new disciplines—but of course the former is a youthful fifty or sixty years old, while in zir 2014 Transgender Studies Quarterly (TSQ) keyword piece “Guerilla,” Sandy Stone calls Transgender Studies a “zeroth-generation discipline” (92). “Keep in mind,” ze exults, “that no one working in transgender studies has a degree in transgender studies. That’s how close to the origin of our discipline we are” (92). When I was getting started in Translation Studies, in the mid-eighties, no one had a degree in it; now I’m beginning to feel a bit dinosaurish for not having one.

It should be obvious, then, why the latter group should be interested in this book: Transgender Studies is very much in its infancy. Not much has been done in it yet. The field is wide open. As Sandy Stone puts it in “Guerilla,” “To some extent it’s a fragile moment, but it is also heady and bursting with possibilities” (93). It’s how I felt when The Translator’s Turn came out between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, 1990, and was joined by Eric Cheyfitz’s The Poetics of Imperialism (just before) and Tejaswini Niranjana’s Siting Translation (just after). By the same token, for Transgender Studies scholars any new translating-transgender book that is not patently transphobic is a cause for celebration. But why should cisnormative Translation Studies scholars care?

This first chapter tracks five possible answers.

First answer: It’s being done

Let us start off with a crass answer to the crass question: other people are writing about translating transgender.

We’ve already seen some of this: my first epigraph to this chapter comes from an early intervention into the convergences between Transgender Studies and Translation Studies, Mirko Casagranda’s 2013 article “Bridging the Genders? Transgendering Translation Theory and Practice,” which in fact cites Casagranda’s own earlier piece in Eleonora Federici’s Translating Gender, “Trans/Gendering Translations?,” from 2011. The second comes from an exciting 2016 book by Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba titled Translating the Queer, about the transnational conceptual traffic between North and South America on the topic of queerness (see also Brian Baer’s 2018 “Beyond Either/Or” and Serena Bassi’s 2018 “The Future is a Foreign Country”). Alvaro Jarrín’s use of Latour’s sociology of translation, mentioned in the “Transgender and Translation” section of the Preface, appeared in the November 2016 special Translating Transgender issue of TSQ; and as we’ve also seen, David Gramling, one of the coeditors of that special issue, has been referring recently to “cislingual” perspectives on translation.

From a Translation Studies perspective, the longer or fuller trajectory of this history moves into the domain of translation and transgender as the fourth step of a (so far) four-step process:

First step—translation and gender :

Carol Maier’s “A Woman in Translation, Reflecting” (1985); Lori Chamberlain’s “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation” (1988); Tina Krontiris’ Oppositional Voices (1992); my own “Theorizing Translation in a Woman’s Voice” (1995); Sherry Simon’s Gender and Translation (1996); Carol Maier and Françoise Massardier-Kennedy’s “Gender in/and Literary Translation” (1996); Luisa von Flotow’s Translation and Gender (1997); Oana-Helena Andone’s “Gender Issues in Translation” (2002); Luisa von Flotow’s Translating Women (2011); Eleonora Federici’s Translating Gender (2011); Christopher Larkosh’s Re-Engendering Translation (2011)

Second step—translation and gay/lesbian identities :

Eric Keenaghan’s “Jack Spicer’s Pricks and Cocksuckers” (1998); Keith Harvey’s “Translating Camp Talk” (1998), “Gay Community, Gay Identity and the Translated Text” (2000), and Intercultural Movements (2003); Margaret S. Breen’s “Homosexual Identity, Translation, and Prime-Stevenson’s Imre and The Intersexes” (2012)

Third step—translation and the queer :

William J. Spurlin’s The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation (2014b) and “Queering Translation” (2014a);¹ Héctor Domínguez Ruvalcaba’s Translating the Queer (2016); B. J. Epstein and Robert Gillet’s Queer in Translation (2017); Brian Baer and Klaus Kaindl’s Queering Translation, Translating the Queer (2018)²

Fourth step—translation and transgender :

Mirko Casagranda’s two early articles (2011, 2013), cited earlier; A. Finn Enke’s “Translation” (in the first issue of TSQ, 2014); David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta’s special Translating Transgender issue of TSQ (2016)

Arguably the umbrella category for all four steps there would be what José Santaemilia calls “sexuality and translation: questions for a common exploration” (2018: 11), involving both “the translation of sexuality and the sex/ualization of translation” (12). At this broad level, perhaps—especially in the former category, dealing with the translation of sexualized discourses—one would not expect much backlash from cisnormative Translation Studies scholars. As Santaemilia adds, “translation studies has been incorporating sexuality as an analytical category since the 1990s, with sexuality understood as ‘a field that is notoriously difficult to translate for reasons of cultural and generational differences—a cas limite that in some ways serves as a test of translation’ ([von] Flotow 2000: 16)” (2018: 12). The further down that list of four steps one pushes the interface between sexuality and translation, however—into queer and transgender translations—the more radical the assault becomes on cisnormative assumptions. As Santaemilia puts it,

In this sense, translation and sexuality can together form a powerful interdiscipline uniquely capable of unveiling the most intimate textualizations of our identities and desires for queering translation; in particular, it demands “critical attention to the transgressive, anti-normative spaces where contradictory or deferred meanings may emerge” (Spurlin 2014a: 300), bringing to the forefront “the heuristic power of translation to navigate and linger in the ambiguities and gaps woven into the asymmetrical relations between languages and cultures” (Spurlin 2014b: 213), between sexual performances and identifications. Queer theory has adopted Michel Foucault’s post-structuralist notion that “sexuality is not an essentially personal attribute but an available cultural category” (Jagose 1996: 78). (12–13)

Note that in 2011, Christopher Larkosh highlights gender and sexuality in zir title and focuses mainly on gay and lesbian identities, but also glancingly introduces queerness in Carolyn Shread’s chapter (56, 63) and makes two passing mentions of transgender in zir Editor’s Introduction (5, 8; see also zir article in Gramling and Dutta 2016); in 2014, William J. Spurlin’s selections in the edited essay collection focus entirely on gay and lesbian identities, without a nod toward transgender, and in zir chapter in the Companion to Translation Studies volume the one brief nod in that direction comes in the omnibus phrase “Western understandings of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer identities” (298); in 2016, Domínguez Ruvalcaba has one full chapter (4) on transgender; in 2017, Epstein and Gillet raise transgender issues in the context mainly of cross-dressing (Emily Rose, who also has a chapter in Gramling and Dutta 2016); and in 2018, Baer and Kaindl have one chapter with “Transgenderism” in its title (my former Lingnan colleague Leo Chan), two more with transgender playing significant roles in their discussions (Clorinda Donato and Serena Bassi³ ), a serious engagement with transgender in the editors’ Introduction “Queer(ing) Translation,” and, as we’ve already seen, a playful/wicked nod at what I’m calling equivalencefuck in Elena Basile’s “A Scene of Intimate Entanglements, or, Reckoning with the ‘Fuck’ of Translation” (see also Baer’s chapter in Gramling and Dutta 2016).

Margaret S. Breen’s 2012 article covers “the role of translation in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies” (2), with a central focus on the short novel Imre: A Memorandum (1906) and history of homosexuality The Intersexes: A History of Similisexualism as a Problem of Social Life (1908) by Edward Prime-Stevenson (aka Xavier Mayne)—texts that, as Breen argues,

are key to understanding the importance of translation as both a linguistic and metaphoric act in fin-de-siècle writings concerning sexual and gender identities and behaviors; more broadly, these texts attest to the value of comparative cultural and literary approaches for the study of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) literature from the late nineteenth century forward. (2)

“Simply put,” Breen notes—indeed putting it very simply, before launching into salutary complication—“translation facilitates the making of meaning within and across languages” (2):

One might even say “sanctioning,” for in validating certain terms as linguistic and cultural equivalencies, translation necessarily discards others as inappropriate and undesirable. Thus, as it selectively moves and creates meaning across geographical, temporal, cultural, epistemological, and discursive spaces, translation may entail not only empowerment but also restriction, loss, and even violence (see Butler [2000:] 36–37; Spivak [2000:] 15). Translation is an operation capable of erasure and consolidation, preservation, and subversion. Given this dynamic capacity, it is not surprising that not only cultural gatekeepers but also marginalized groups would be drawn to translation. Thus, the civil rights, democratic, feminist, gay, lesbian, and queer movements of the late twentieth century have made possible the increased creation, publication, circulation, and availability of LGBT literary works across cultural, linguistic, and national boundaries. Within the context of these movements, it is easy to recognize translation’s political register. Of course, this register is fraught with issues of linguistic, cultural, gender, and racial privileging: not all languages and not all lives are valued equally. Even so, translation can be transformative. The rendering of access to queer stories in different languages answers that ever-present yearning across cultures to hear stories that reflect queer desires and so affirm and nourish queer lives. (2)⁴

The inaugural issue of TSQ, back in May of 2014, consisted entirely of eighty-six keywords, one of which was “Translation,” by A. Finn Enke:

Translation is a necessary and profoundly hopeful act for those who trans gender, for we have been taught that transgender is marked by dysphoria, a word from Greek that means difficult to bear, difficult to carry. In order to carry or bring across, we become poets, storytellers, and artists. (241)

Gender becomes legible through acts of translation that betray disciplinary success and failure simultaneously. Perhaps few things point out the failure of words to convey our arrival in this social body quite so well as transgender. Transgender highlights the labors of translation, inhering an implied “before” and “from which.” The present moment does not tell the story, only that there is one worth telling. (242–43)

Transgender—an explicitly imperfect translation—itself carries institutional and imperial discipli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Permissions
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Why Should Cisnormative Translation Scholars Care About Translation and Transgender?
• 2 The Semiosphere Must Be Fed by at Least Two Languages
• 3 New Worlds (the Emergence of the Unexpected): The Ecology of Gender as a Dissipative System
• 4 Becoming-Trans: The Rhizomatics of Gender
• Concludingly: (Peri)Performative Becoming-Queer
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright