Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address

by Douglas Robinson, Brian James Baer, Michelle Woods

Overview

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 AddressDouglas 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501366666
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/23/2020
Series:	Literatures, Cultures, Translation
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Douglas Robinson is one of the world's leading translation scholars, and cis-gendered in a male body. Author or editor of two dozen books and five dozen articles on translation, literature, linguistics, rhetoric, writing, and gender, he is Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Permissions
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1. Why Should Cisnormative Translation Scholars Care About Translation and Transgender?
Chapter 2. The Semiosphere Must Be Fed by at Least Two Languages
Chapter 3. New Worlds (the Emergence of the Unexpected): The Ecology of Gender as a Dissipative System
Chapter 4. Becoming-Trans: The Rhizomatics of Gender
Concludingly: (Peri)Performative Becoming-Queer
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

An absolutely fascinating meditation on a topic critical to modern thought.
Sandy Stone, Associate Professor Emerita of New Media and Transgender Studies, University of Texas at Austin, USA

Douglas Robinson deftly maps the tangled switch-points to be found at the intersection of translation and transgender, foregrounding attention to how transgender concepts, texts, and voices are translated from one language to another, in order to broach fundamental questions regarding how meaning must be carried across difference by any intention to communicate. It offers a smart take on issues of translation and language in transgender studies and its foundational critical texts, as well as a useful introduction to transgender studies for translation studies scholars.
Susan Stryker, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies, University of Arizona, US, and Founding Co-Editor, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

When a veteran of literary translation and Translation Studies turns his attentions to a new realm of radical, cutting-edge scholarship like Transgender Studies, one should expect the results will be audacious, searching, and richly informed. In his book, Robinson stages iconoclastic conceptual confrontations between transgender positionality and translation practice, which are flush with erudition and inquisitiveness. The writing is at turns wildly deconstructive, kinetically interactive, and provocatively humanistic, such that reading each new page's soaring lines of figuration requires heightened engagement, even readerly poise. Emerging and founding voices in both Transgender Studies and Translation Studies are brought into energetic conversation with one another-in ways they themselves would likely have least predicted. Daring readers will finish the book outfitted with new concepts, new clarity, and new questions, earned through their sojourn through Robinson's unique experimentalism.
David J. Gramling, Associate Professor of German Studies and Second Language Acquisition & Teaching, University of Arizona, USA, and author of The Invention of Monolingualism (Bloomsbury, 2016)

From the Publisher