Transgender Studies Quarterly: The Translation Issue
Guest Editors: David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta (Duke University Press)
Special Issue on Translating Transgender
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS (March 1, 2015).
Submissions of 4000-9000 words (in any language). Due March 1, 2015 for publication in Spring 2016. Few primary and secondary texts about transgender lives and ideas have been translated from language to language in any formal way over the centuries. Meanwhile, transgender, gender variant, and gender non-confirming people have often been exiles, translators, language mediators, and multilinguals in greater numbers and intensities historically than their cisgender counterparts have. This kind of positionality among languages has become a generative, yet often precarious aspect of trans* embodiment. Nonetheless, the discourses of transgender studies (as in the neighboring fields of LGBT / queer studies) continue to be more Anglophone, more monolingual, and less translated than they historically ought to be, given how the subjects that produced those discourses have often been prototypes of transnational and translingual border-crossing. This paradox continues to constrain disciplinary and conceptual agendas around sexuality and gender a great deal more than in other fields that have enjoyed consistent state and institutional support as well as access to international distribution pathways. This is an important problem for transgender studies in the coming decades because an Anglophone disciplinary and discursive disposition will continue to lead policy-makers, public intellectuals, and academics to fall back on ethnocentric and monolingual frameworks and resources. It perpetuates a hierarchical conceptual economy, with Anglophone and West European linguacultures at the top and trans and queer vernaculars in other languages either at the bottom of the epistemic order, or sequestered into localist, ethnicized, or neo-Orientalist fetish. If not profoundly transformed, how will this discursive hierarchization impact the multi- directional traffic in trans knowledge and ideas in years ahead? This issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly calls for multilingual and translational critique. This may take the form of:
- Essays offering a metacriticism of the field, its terms, and its methodologies from a multilingual point of view
- Essays offering a theoretical problematization of national languages and transnational lingua francae as such from a trans perspective
- Essays exploring the idea of a trans* lingua franca beyond Anglocentricity
- Trans-oriented research that often gets elided precisely because of rhetorical
- Anglocentricity or methodological monolingualism
- Essays critiquing the relationship between travel and multilingualism in trans* contexts
- Ethnographic studies of multilingual transgender spaces and communities
- Ethnographic studies of medical, legal, penal, educational contexts in which transgender positionality or existence are negotiated translingually
- Reflections on the craft and practice of translation
- Studies on how Anglocentricity in transgender epistemology perpetuates itself—institutionally, methodologically, politically
- Essays exploring how language normativity intersects with racial, ethnic, civic, sexual, erotic, socio-economic normativity in transgender contexts
- Studies that model a “multilingual transgender studies” or a multilingual trans-futurity more broadly
- Case studies on how language frontiers shape the planetary landscape of transgender discourse
- Reflections on the process of translating texts dealing with transgender and gender variance
- Essays on what transgender methodology in translation theory or practice might look like
- Essays exploring what working interpreters and translators (literary, poetic, technical, diplomatic) may reveal about transgender epistemology
- Historical studies linking multilingual, code-switching, and translingual practice with transgender embodiment
- Historical studies linking the genealogy of monolingualism with various kinds of gender normativity
Initial submissions may be in any language and will be peer-reviewed accordingly. Duke University Press requires publication in English, and we will commission translations of accepted submissions in the latter process of review. Accepted submissions will be published in the original language on TSQ’s Web site. Please send inquiries and submissions to tsqjournal@gmail.com. TSQ’s style guide is available here.