SUMMARYAs the Enlightenment drew to a close, translation had gradually acquired an increasingly important role in the international circulation and transmission of scientific knowledge. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the translators responsible for making such accounts accessible in other languages, some of whom were women. In this article I explore how European women cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations. Focusing specifically on the genre of scientific travel writing, I (...) investigate the narrative strategies deployed by women translators to mark their involvement in the process of scientific knowledge-making. These strategies ranged from rhetorical near-invisibility, driven by women's modest marginalization of their own public engagement in science, to the active advertisement of themselves as intellectually curious consumers of scientific knowledge. A detailed study of Elizabeth Helme's translation of the French ornithologist François le Vaillant's Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique [Voyage into the Interior of Africa] allows me to explore how her reworking of the original text for an Anglophone reading public enabled her to engage cautiously – or sometimes more openly – with questions regarding how scientific knowledge was constructed, for whom and with which aims in mind. (shrink)

Women, Jurisprudence, Islam. By Sedigheh Vasmaghi. Translated by Mr. Ashna and Philip G. Kreyenbroek. Göttinger Orientforschungen III, Reihe: Iranica, Neue Folge, vol. 11. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2014. Pp. 162. €38.

Exemplary Women of Early China: The “Lienü zhuan” of Liu Xiang. Translated and edited by Anne Behnke Kinney. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Pp. lvi + 323. $105 ; $35.

The German translation of Frye, Marilyn (1980). Lesbian Perspectives on Women's Studies. Sinister Wisdom 14:3-7. See the links below for the original article.

ABSTRACT Republic Act 9710, or the Magna Carta of Women (MCW), is considered the Philippine version or national law translation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). Using the concept of impact translation as a framework and the Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) approach, this article examines the MCW and the minutes of committee meetings, particularly the bicameral conference committee meeting where lawmakers agreed on the finalized version of the bill. It (...) applies the concept of gender relationality in examining how legislators negotiated the provisions of the MCW, particularly those on reproductive health and the definition of gender. The analysis shows that these provisions challenged Catholic doctrines specifically on gender, childbearing, and pre-marital sexual relations. It argues that the Catholic conception of gender norms and women’s role in society shaped the law’s final version, disregarding the CEDAW Committee recommendations on abortion. Findings suggest that the legislators’ fear that the law’s ratification would serve as an opening for the legalization of abortion led to a weakened version of the law, particularly the section on women’s reproductive health. (shrink)

This volume brings the first English translation of the Confucian classics Four Books for Women, with extensive commentaries, to the English-speaking world. Written by women for women's education, this work provides an invaluable look at the tradition of Chinese women's writing, education, history, and philosophy, from the 1st to the 16th century.

This volume presents the first English translation of the complete set of Confucian classic, Four Books for Women, with extensive commentary by the 17th century literati Wang Xiang, and introductions and annotations by translator Ann A. Pang-White. Written by women for women's education, the Confucian Four Books for Women spanned the 1st to the 16th centuries, and encompass Ban Zhao's Lessons for Women, Song Ruoxin's and Song Ruozhao's Analects for Women, Empress Renxiaowen's Teachings for (...) the Inner Court, and Madame Liu's (Chaste Widow Wang's) Short Records of Models for Women. A female counterpart to the famous Sishu (Four Books) compiled by Zhu Xi, Wang Xiang's Nü sishu provides an invaluable look at the long-standing history and evolution of Chinese women's writing, education, identity, and philosophical discourse, along with their struggles and triumphs, across the millennia and numerous Chinese dynasties. Pang-White's new translation brings the authors of the Four Books for Women to life as real, living people, and illustrates why they wrote and how their work empowered women. This volume reveals the history and evolution of Chinese women's writing, education, identity, and philosophical discourse over a span of 1,600 years. (shrink)

This study examines the Korean translations of a Japanese work Joshi no rongo [女子の論語/Women’s Analects] (Yuki, Ako [祐木亜子]. 2011. 女子の論語. Tokyo: Sunmark Publishing House), a modern interpretation of the Chinese classic The Analects, with a view to identifying how the paratexts of a translated text contributed, or hindered the reception of the work in the target culture. By drawing on Gérard Genette’s (1997 [1987]. Paratexts: Threshold of interpretation, Jane E. Lewin (trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) concept of “paratexts,” this (...) study both analyses translation shifts in the peritexts (e.g., cover, foreword, table of contents) and the epitexts (reviews) of the Korean translations. The analysis shows that the additions and rearrangements of some paratextual elements in the Korean translation further reinforced the traditional view presented in the source text, which ironically brought about heavy criticisms of the original Japanese text and resulted in the Korean retranslation of the work. The scrutiny of peritexts and epitexts in this article will enhance our understanding of the interactions between the translator, the publisher, and the public readers, which jointly contextualize the production and reception of a translated work in a given culture. (shrink)

The long Nineteenth Century spans a host of important philosophical movements: romanticism, idealism, socialism, Nietzscheanism, and phenomenology, to mention a few. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx are well-known names from this period. This, however, was also a transformative period for women philosophers in German-speaking countries and contexts. Their works are less well-known, yet offer stimulating and path-breaking contributions to nineteenth-century thought. In this period, women philosophers explored a wide range of philosophical topics and styles. Throughout the movements (...) of romanticism, idealism, socialism, and phenomenology, women philosophers helped shape philosophy's agenda and provided unique approaches to existential, political, aesthetic, and epistemological questions. While during the Nineteenth Century women continued to be (largely) excluded from formal education and positions, they developed ways of philosophizing that was accessible, intuitive, and activist in spirit. The present volume makes available to English-language readers--often for the first time--the works of nine significant women philosophers, with the hope of stimulating further interest in and scholarship on their works. The Editors' introductions offer a comprehensive introduction to the contributions of women philosophers in the period, but also to individual figures and movements. The translations are furnished with explanatory footnotes and are designed to be accessible to students as well as scholars. (shrink)

This article examines the contribution that poetry written over the last fifty years might make to the established and burgeoning field of Medical Humanities. It takes poems by women about cancer and depression as a case study of how they can offer insight into the impact of these conditions on the sufferer. Collectively, the poems document and effect shifts in knowledge about, and the associated stigmas concerning, illnesses that carry secrecy and shame, specifically cancer and depression. Additionally, drawing on (...) Virginia Woolf’s remarkable essay “On Being Ill”, we see how the non-verbal features of poems, particularly metaphors and symbols, mark the space of what a patient cannot fully articulate. Accordingly, the poems discussed illuminate how literature can express human interiority but at the same time remind the reader – or health professional – that interiority can never be fully presented. Thus, poetry both contributes to and also checks the ways in which literature is appropriated by the biomedical sciences. The poets included are Eavan Boland, Julia Darling, U.A. Fanthorpe, Jackie Kay, Gwyneth Lewis, Carol Satyamurti and Jo Shapcott. Some poems specify a female subjectivity, some express agency as autonomous individuals, while others presume to speak of common human experience. (shrink)

In Pythagorean Women, classical scholar Sarah B. Pomeroy discusses the groundbreaking principles that Pythagoras established for family life in Archaic Greece, such as constituting a single standard of sexual conduct for women and men. Among the Pythagoreans, women played an important role and participated actively in the philosophical life. While Pythagoras encouraged women to be submissive to men, his reasoning was based on the desire to preserve harmony in the home. -/- Pythagorean Women provides English (...) translations of all the earliest extant examples of literary Greek prose by Neopythagorean women, shedding light on their attitudes about marriage, the home, music, and the cosmos. Pomeroy sets the Pythagorean and Neopythagorean women vividly in their historical, ecological, and intellectual contexts, illustrated with original photographs of sites and artifacts known to these women. (shrink)

This new book explores the interface between political philosophy and politics, looking at the effects of philosophical traditions on the contemporary relationship between women and politics. Analysing key concepts in political philosophy, the author illustrates how common ideas - entrenched in the development of political thought and practice - have become almost intractable 'truths' that continue to differentiate between the sexes in politics. Liz Sperling looks in detail at the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Marx, Rawls (...) and Nozick, considering general themes to which they have all contributed - such as the state of nature, the state, markets, citizenship and representation. The focus then turns to the specific contributions of the philosophers that continue to influence the association of women to politics. These include an analysis of Greek classicists' establishment of andocracy, Rousseau's treatise on education for citizenship, and nineteenth-century ideas of equality. In conclusion, the themes demonstrated throughout are drawn together to show how they translate into contemporary policy on women in politics. Offering an original insight into the ways in which political thought influences political practice, this will be essential reading in a key area of politics, philosophy and women's studies. (shrink)

Strengthening Muslim-Christian relations is very important for a nation such as Indonesia that has plurality in terms of tribes, ethnicity and religion. This study aims to analyse the role of Muslim women who live in a pluralistic socio-religious situation. This is a qualitative research that uses purposive sampling to determine the informants. The approach used by the Discovering Cultural Themes model is to understand the symptoms of the many themes, cultures, values and cultural symbols. Data analysis was conducted by (...) using software for qualitative research, which is needed in managing data found from the field, in this case, nVivo Basic 12.00 for Windows. The results show that Muslim women translate justice, empathy and rationality in religion by building relationships with other religions. This attitude is part of Islamic teachings that contain moderate, accommodating and tolerant aspects. In addition, culture has encouraged women to blend in and form egalitarian equality in the social and cultural realm. The culture of generosity and mutual help has become a tradition both in religious and customary activities. CONTRIBUTION: This article provides an insight into the contribution of Muslim women in strengthening Muslim-Christian relations. This agenda is very important because Islam and Christianity have the largest adherents in Indonesia. This contribution is very important and crucial in the midst of radicalism issues in Indonesia lately. (shrink)

The 'Therapeutae' were a Jewish group of ascetic philosophers who lived outside Alexandria in the middle of the first century CE. They are described in Philo's treatise De Vita Contemplativa and have often been considered in comparison with early Christians, the Essenes, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. But who were they really? This study focuses particularly on issues of history, rhetoric, women, and gender in a wide exploration of the group, and comes to new conclusions about the 'Therapeutae' and (...) their relationship with the Jewish allegorical school of exegesis in Alexandria. The volume includes a new translation of De Vita Contemplativa. (shrink)

This article is concerned with writing in Poland since the collapse of Communism. It focuses mainly on the generation of Polish writers who made their debut around the time of the collapse of Communism and whose work has since begun to appear in English translation. It considers the changing focus of the post-Communist generation of writers, asks how the translations of their work represent Poland to the world and what these works might indicate about changes within contemporary Polish literary and (...) political culture. In particular the article looks at recent fiction from Polish Women Writers and themes in recent writing including the ideas of Poland as Post-Communist, Post-nationalist, Post-Jewish and Post-German. (shrink)

Despite some significant advances in the creation and protection of rights affecting women's health, these do not always translate into actual health benefits for women. This collection asks: 'What is an effective law and what influences law's effectiveness or ineffectiveness? What dynamics, elements, and conditions come together to limit law's capacity to achieve instrumental goals for women's health and the advancement of women's health rights?' The book presents an integrated, co-referential and sustained critical discussion of the (...) normative and constitutive reasons for law's limited effectiveness in the field of women's health. It offers comprehensive and cohesive explanatory accounts of law's limits and for the first time in the field, introduces a distinction between formal and substantive effectiveness of laws. Its approach is trans-systemic, multi-jurisdictional and comparative, with a focus on six countries in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa and international human rights case law based on matters arising from Hungary, Portugal, Spain, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Peru and Bolivia. The book will be a valuable resource for educators, students, lawyers, rights advocates, and policy-makers working in women's health, socio-legal studies, human rights, feminist legal studies, and legal philosophy more broadly. (shrink)

This comment reflects on how the Women, Peace and Security agenda has been translated into policy and put into practice by the European Union and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Although the WPS agenda has enabled many gains by women peacebuilders, this comment identifies important challenges from these two very different contexts. First, situating WPS policy areas within a broader feminist political economy analysis demonstrates how little influence the WPS agenda has across government. Second, the WPS agenda is (...) being used to promote heteronormative, patriarchal understanding of ‘gender’, stripped of any power dynamics and excluding any gender identities that do not conform. The result, then, is that WPS policies and practice are adrift in the patriarchal policy mainstream. (shrink)

Drawing on a qualitative study of women who cared for their elderly mothers, this article explores women's experiences of feeling responsible for elderly relatives. The minimal provision of public services for old people and the relative absence of brothers and husbands from family caregiving emerge as material constraints shaping women's sense of obligation. This is affirmed by ideologies and assumptions about women's association with caring and family ties that permeate subjects' accounts of their situations. Translating their (...) sense of obligation into their lives is a contradictory process characterized by ambivalence and guilt that stifle complaint. Further exploration of the social processes that sustain the inequitable division of caring labor can contribute to interpretations, practices, and policies that benefit rather than constrain women. (shrink)

The first-century ascetic Jewish philosophers known as the 'Therapeutae', described in Philo's treatise De Vita Contemplativa, have often been considered in comparison with early Christians, the Essenes, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. This study, which includes a new translation of De Vita Contemplativa, focuses particularly on issues of historical method, rhetoric, women, and gender, and comes to new conclusions about the nature of the group and its relationship with the allegorical school of exegesis in Alexandria. Joan E. Taylor argues (...) that the group represents the tip of an iceberg in terms of ascetic practices and allegorical exegesis, and that the women described point to the presence of other Jewish women philosophers in Alexandria in the first century CE. Members of the group were 'extreme allegorizers' in following a distinctive calendar, not maintaining usual Jewish praxis, and concentrating their focus on attaining a trance-like state in which a vision of God's light was experienced. Their special 'feast' was configured in terms of service at a Temple, in which both men and women were priestly attendants of God. (shrink)

The 'Therapeutae' were a Jewish group of ascetic philosophers who lived outside Alexandria in the middle of the first century CE. They are described in Philo's treatise De Vita Contemplativa and have often been considered in comparison with early Christians, the Essenes, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. But who were they really? This study focuses particularly on issues of history, rhetoric, women, and gender in a wide exploration of the group, and comes to new conclusions about the 'Therapeutae' and (...) their relationship with the Jewish allegorical school of exegesis in Alexandria. The volume includes a new translation of De Vita Contemplativa. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany ed. by Corey W. DyckJulia BorcherdingCorey W. Dyck, editor. Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback, $85.00.In more ways than one, this volume constitutes an important contribution to ongoing efforts to reconfigure and enrich our existing philosophical canon and to question the narratives that have led to its current shape. To start, while (...) there is a growing amount of research dedicated to recovering the contributions of women to early modern philosophy, much of this work focuses on the seventeenth century, and geographically centers on England, France, and Italy. By turning the spotlight on eighteenth-century Germany, this volume broadens the scope of these efforts in an important way. Further, with the historiography of this period still shaped by a long-standing dismissive treatment of post-Leibnizian German philosophy and by the long shadow cast by the success of Kant's Critical philosophy, which eclipsed many of the thinkers opposed to it, challenges to its traditional narratives seem especially important. The editor's earlier collection (coedited with Falk Wunderlich) on Kant and his German contemporaries already succeeded in mounting such a challenge by showing that German philosophy throughout the eighteenth century in fact presents us with an extraordinarily rich tableau of intellectual life (Kant and His German Contemporaries. Vol. 1: Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]).The present volume stands as a further valuable contribution to relativizing the still dominant narrative of German philosophy as the story of a select few brilliant minds. It successfully dispenses not only with the idea that those minds were few, but also with the equally persistent one that they were exclusively male. Already in the nineteenth century, we find historians such as Karl Joël explicitly casting the new age of German philosophy inaugurated by Kant as its "masculine epoch"—an image undoubtedly furthered by its main protagonist, who cast philosophical acumen in decidedly male terms when he observed that "[a] woman who has a head full of Greek, like Madame Dacier, or one who engages in debate about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives" (Karl Joël, Die Frauen in der Philosophie [Hamburg, 1896], 48; Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [Königsberg, 1764], translation in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 146; both cited in Eileen O'Neill, "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History," in Philosophy in a Feminist [End Page 154] Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 17–62). Yet as the contributions to this volume forcefully illustrate, women in the period did—in spite of the numerous severe social, religious, and political obstacles they faced—in fact manage to gain access to its intellectual sphere, and actively shaped its philosophical landscape.While the papers collected here are of high quality throughout, they do vary in their approach. Many chapters, especially in the earlier parts of the volume, investigate female figures as philosophers in their own right, and carve out their self-standing contributions to prominent philosophical movements and debates. Focusing on Sophie of Hanover's correspondence with Leibniz, Christian Leduc's chapter begins by examining her metaphysical views and argues, against standing interpretations, that her main aim is to defend a version of the doctrine of physical influence as an account of mind-body interaction while rejecting metaphysical commitments regarding the nature of the soul in favor of a more agnostic, Lockean empiricist approach. In chapter 3, Stefanie Buchenau shows how women engaging with Wolffian Schulphilosophie began to view themselves as more than teachers and translators and started to claim the title of philosophers. Using the example of Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Buchenau convincingly argues that despite the "feminine," aesthetic garb of her thought, Unzer in fact offers a serious critique and revision of the Wolffian model of... (shrink)

David Fairchild explains that sport is an evocative symbolic system that demonstrates the apparently ‘natural’ division of humans into two separate and dichotomous genders, and also demonstrates the apparently ‘genetically based’ hierarchy between the genders in terms of sporting results. Additionally, this hierarchy of performance translates into a hierarchy of authority, such that men occupy the most powerful positions in coaching, administration and the sports media. The initial section of this paper will follow on from Fairchild to suggest some changes (...) that are necessary before women will gain semantic authority over their participation in sport. The paper will then suggest that the expansion of the discursive space in sport to include alternate standpoints produced by women [and other marginalised groups] can follow tactics employed by feminist standpoint theorists to expand discursive space in other fields. The final section of the paper will look at how a feminist politics in discursive sport will need to challenge what William Morgan has suggested is the recently acquired dominant position of ‘interpretative broad internalism’ in sport philosophy as one of the foundational underpinnings of internalism explains sport as a perfect practice. This underpinning has been used in substantive practice to undermine the knowledges of women athletes and commentators. This final section will look at some examples of translating private authorship into political authority for women in sport. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition ed. by Kristin Gjesdal and Dalia NassarAlison StoneKristin Gjesdal and Dalia Nassar, editors. Women Philosophers in the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 336. Hardback, $99.00."How plausible, [Dalia Nassar and I] kept asking, is it that women published philosophy in the early modern period and then simply ceased to (...) think and publish philosophy in the nineteenth century?" remarked Kristin Gjesdal recently (interview with Richard Marshall, 3:16am [blog], https://www.3-16am.co.uk/articles/gadamer-herder-and-the-womenphilosophers-of-the-long-nineteen-cent ury?c=end-times-series). Not plausible at all—yet this is what historians of women in philosophy often seem to have assumed, judging by the remarkably small amount of scholarship on nineteenth-century women philosophers compared with those of the early modern period or the twentieth century. Eileen O'Neill, for instance, claims that it was "not a particularly friendly century for women philosophers" (1). In fact, as Gjesdal and Nassar observe, women were "significant contributors" to the "thriving intellectual cultures in German-speaking countries" at this time (1). Gjesdal and Nassar contrast Germanic countries to France and Britain in this regard, yet I would add that nineteenth-century Britain too had a vibrant print and periodical culture that created openings for women philosophers such as Harriet Martineau, Anna Jameson, Frances Power Cobbe, and many others. The broader point remains: the nineteenth century has only seemed empty of women philosophers because we have not yet investigated the women thinkers of this period or challenged the canons and narratives from which they have been excluded.Recognizing German women philosophers is particularly important because the vast majority of scholarship on the nineteenth century focuses on the German tradition. Consequently, unless we recover the work of German-speaking women, we will never change the narrative about this period. This makes the present anthology invaluable for both teaching and research. Edited by Gjesdal and Nassar, it contains new translations, nearly all by Anna Ezekiel, of texts by historical German-speaking women philosophers.Regarding teaching, many courses on post-Kantian European philosophy include no women until Beauvoir or Arendt. Such courses typically cover Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. The editors have clearly designed this volume to enable instructors easily to bring women into such courses, by providing extracts—of suitable lengths for teaching—from women affiliated respectively with German idealism and Romanticism (Germaine de Staël, Karoline von Günderrode, and Bettina von Arnim), Marxism (Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg), Nietzscheanism (Hedwig Dohm, Lou Salomé), and phenomenology (Edith Stein, Gerda Walther). Some of these women are already well-known as political activists, as with Luxemburg and Zetkin, or under the elastic heading of "writers," as with Staël and von Arnim. But this collection presents these women's writings in a new light, showcasing their philosophical side. After all, we have learned to read Marx and Nietzsche philosophically: why not extend the same courtesy to Staël or Luxemburg?For researchers, this collection will likewise be invaluable. Post-Kantian European philosophy has been slow to respond to the wider questioning and broadening of the traditional philosophical canon. It remains sadly common for narratives of nineteenth-century German philosophy to discuss men only—a position that this book makes untenable. [End Page 336] Hopefully it will galvanize philosophers to integrate these women into the historiography of the post-Kantian tradition at last.In the introduction, the editors helpfully contextualize the selected writings, arguing that these women's exclusion from academic institutions led them to philosophize in ways that spoke to general audiences, connected with lived experience, and addressed practical and political concerns. In short, these women did a type of philosophy that was not purified but socially engaged, and can be a model for us today. Thereafter the book consists of sections on nine women philosophers, ordered chronologically. Each section begins with an editorial introduction to the philosopher and her interests, ideas, writings, and interlocutors.The writings included from Staël—whose work spans the period from the French Revolution into Romanticism—are "On Women Writers" from... (shrink)

A new translation of Liu Xiang’s 劉向 Lienü zhuan 列女傳 is long overdue.1 And most of the translation by Anne Behnke Kinney, Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienü Zhuan of Liu Xiang, is very well done indeed. At the same time, Kinney has made a series of odd and clearly intentional choices when translating the classic, choices worth querying. Most importantly, she insists on translating the classic as if it directly addressed its readers, even if this insistence rides (...) roughshod over the language used in the text, and flies in the face of the early evidence about both the composition of the text and the literary outputs of the woman, Ban Zhao 班昭.. (shrink)

It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious “facts” continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms.If these “facts” (...) were remembered, not only in the study of British literature but in the study of the literature of the European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the “worlding” of what is now called “the Third World.” To consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence of “the Third World” as a signifier that allows us to forget that “worlding,” even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline.1[…]In this essay, I will attempt to examine the operation of the “worlding” of what is today “the Third World” by what has become a cult text of feminism: Jane Eyre.2 I plot the novel’s reach and grasp, and locate its structural motors. I read Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre’s reinscription and Frankenstein as an analysis—even a deconstruction—of a “worlding” such as Jane Eyre’s.3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Longstreet Professor of English at Emory University. She is the translator of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie and is presently finishing a book entitled Master Discourse, Native Informant. Her previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “ ‘Draupadi’ by Mahasveta Devi” and “The Politics of Interpretations”. (shrink)

In this interview-essay, artist Rosanna Bruno talks with the author about her illustrations of The Trojan Women, a comic-book made in collaboration with Anne Carson. Bruno’s illustrations offer the reader an oblique entry into a devastated Troy: they are translation “at a slant.” The artist speaks on going against what is visually expected or plausible, in her use of surprising imagery to convey and counterpoint suffering, and touches upon the use of humor to bring the tragedy into sharp focus. (...) Bruno explains how the comic-book format can communicate radical ideas in the interdependence of word and image. She talks through creating the feeling of live theater and the emotional tenor brought about by an almost entirely non-human cast: dogs, cows, a huge wave, a turnip-like rootling, a pair of dungarees. The illustrator elucidates the collaborative process between herself and Carson, revealing the various iterations of characters before they settled on their final forms, and the materials and methodologies Bruno employed in its rendering. (shrink)

This research examines the emergence and development of a women's collegiate ice hockey club at a large university in the midwestern United States during the 1990s. The aim of this article is to assess the role that collective action plays in contesting sexist structures and practices within a traditionally male-dominated institution. This article draws on collective identity theory, as articulated in the social movement literature, to understand the process by which perceived injustices at an ice rink are translated into (...) collective action on the part of a women's ice hockey club. The findings, based on fieldwork and interviews, demonstrate that the club's collective identity as a legitimate ice hockey organization was an important factor in the women's successful challenge of exclusionary practices at a university ice rink. (shrink)

This article explores the contributions of women scholars, writers and artists to our understanding of the medieval past. Beginning with a contemporary artists book by Liz Mathews that draws on one of Boethius‘s Latin lyrics from the Consolation of Philosophy as translated by Helen Waddell, it traces a network of medieval women scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries associated with Manchester and the John Rylands Library, such as Alice Margaret Cooke and Mary Bateson. It concludes by examining (...) the translation of the Old English poem, The Wife‘s Lament, by contemporary poet, Eavan Boland. The art of Liz Mathews and poetry of Eavan Boland and the scholarship of women like Alice Cooke, Mary Bateson, Helen Waddell and Eileen Power show that women‘s writing of the past – creative, public, scholarly – forms a strand of an archive of women‘s history that is still being put together. (shrink)

Readings in Chinese Women's Philosophical and Feminist Thought gathers 40 original writings on women by 32 authors (many of whom are women) from the Yuan dynasty to the Republics, an important 700-year historical period during which women's learning in China blossomed as a result of economic prosperity, the development of commercial printing, and the interaction between East and West. -/- Selections are made not only from canonical texts on women's virtues, but also from less orthodox (...) literary works such as plays, poetry, novels, essays, and revolutionary writings that illuminate the lived experience of women and the perception of gender. With many texts translated into English for the first time, this reader provides the context needed to understand them. It features: -/- - Chronologically organized readings in the sequence of the Yuan, Ming, Qing dynasties, and the Republics to demonstrate historical progression of thought (or the lack of) - Introductions to each section and chapter covering essential information about the authors and the cultural, historical, and philosophical background to their work - A chronology of dynasties, Republics, key events, and a map -/- Recovering discourse so often neglected in discussion of Chinese thought, this is the first collection to pay special attention to women-authored works from the late 13th to the early 21st century. By bringing these readings together in a single volume, it juxtaposes and compares female and male perspectives from the same time and creates a new narrative of Chinese philosophical thought. (shrink)

This study, drawing upon contemporary theories in the field of migration, postcolonialism, and translation, offers an analysis of literary works by Monica Ali and Jhumpa Lahiri. Ali and Lahiri epitomize second-generation immigrant literature, play with the linguistic concept of translating and interpreting as forms of hybrid connections, and are significant examples of how a text may become a space where multi-faceted identities co-habit in a process of deconstructing and reconstructing their own sense of emplacement in non-native places. Each immigrant text (...) becomes a hybrid site, where second- and third generations of immigrant subjects move as mobile, fluctuating and impermanent identities, caught up in the act of transmitting their bicultural and bilingual experience through the use of the English language as their instrument of communication in a universe which tends to marginalize them. This investigation seeks to demonstrate how Ali and Lahiri represent two different migrant experiences, Muslim and Indian, each of which functioning within a multicultural Anglo-American context. Each text is transformed into the lieu where identities become both identities-intranslation and translated identities and each text itself may be looked at as the site of preservation of native identities but also of the assimilation of identity. Second-generation immigrant women writers become the interpreters of the old and new cultures, the translators of their own local cultures in a space of transition. (shrink)

The emergent Coronavirus Disease 2019 caused by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 could produce a maternal immune activation via the inflammatory response during gestation that may impair fetal neurodevelopment and lead to postnatal and adulthood mental illness and behavioral dysfunctions. However, so far, limited evidence exists regarding long-term physiological, immunological, and neurodevelopmental modifications produced by the SARS-CoV-2 in the human maternal-fetal binomial and, particularly, in the offspring. Relevant findings derived from epidemiological and preclinical models show that a MIA (...) is indeed linked to an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders in the offspring. We hypothesize that a gestational infection triggered by SARS-CoV-2 increases the risks leading to neurodevelopmental disorders of the newborn, which can affect childhood and the long-term quality of life. In particular, disruption of either the maternal or the fetal cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway could cause or exacerbate the severity of COVID-19 in the maternal-fetal binomial. From a translational perspective, in this paper, we discuss the possible manifestation of a MIA by SARS-CoV-2 and the subsequent neurodevelopmental disorders considering the role of the fetal-maternal cytokine cross-talk and the CAP. Specifically, we highlight the urgent need of preclinical studies as well as multicenter and international databanks of maternal-fetal psychophysiological data obtained pre-, during, and post-infection by SARS-CoV-2 from pregnant women and their offspring. (shrink)

After introducing the reader to the larger project of Claude Sumner, S.J., who gathered medieval and early modern Ethiopian philosophical texts written in Ge'ez and provided them in English translation, and then gave his own analysis of the texts, the article goes on to raise the need to engage in a feminist critique of at least one of the texts called "The Teachings and Maxims of Skendes." This particular text imparts wisdom to men, cautioning them to beware of women. (...) Thus, the paper raises the issue, what should be the response of women to philosophical projects of men that define wisdom in this way? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Women Englishing Homer RICHARD HUGHES GIBSON Seven kingdoms strove in which should swell the womb / That bore great Homer; whom Fame freed from tomb,” so begins the fourth of “Certain ancient Greek Epigrams ” that George Chapman placed at the head of his Odyssey at its debut in 1615.1 The epigram was no mere antiquarian dressing for the text. It suggests a historical parallel with the (...) translator’s own feat—for this Odyssey appeared on the heels of Chapman’s 1611 Iliad, the first complete English translation of Homer directly from the Greek. Indeed, the title page of that Iliad boasted, “Never before in any language truly translated” (italics mine). In “Englishing ” Homer (as he put it), Chapman had vanquished not only local rivals but also the whole international field.2 Through Chapman, England bore Homer anew. Yet within a few decades challengers appeared. An octogenarian Thomas Hobbes published an Odyssey translation in 1675 and an Iliad the following year. Alexander Pope’s versions (Iliad, 1715–1720; Odyssey, 1726) were bestsellers in the next century, yet others soon enough sought to better them, including the poet William Cowper (Iliad, 1791; Odyssey, 1809). The rate of Homeric production then intensified in the nineteenth century, becoming in Edith Hall’s apt phrase a “national pastime” in Victorian Britain—and, I would add, in the United States too.3 In the 1860s, a new English Iliad or Odyssey debuted nearly every year, making Matthew Arnold, then Professor of Poetry at Oxford, seem prescient in selecting “On Translating Homer” as the topic for his 1860 lecture series. Anglo-American output of new English Homers has been steady ever since. The opening decades arion 26.3 winter 2019 of our century have been especially high-yielding—more than ten new Iliads and eight new Odysseys have appeared in print alongside fresh editions of twentieth-century favorites. Digital versions now circulate, too. To Chapman we might thus reply: Once seven Greek cities strove to be Homer’s nurse; now seventy tomes vie to be his English verse. Run down the complete bibliography, and a pattern already hinted in my list of notables becomes pronounced: name after name after name belongs to a man. Flip around a bit, and one can often find traces of women in these volumes. Hobbes, for example, argued in the preface to his translations that women have as “just” a “pretence” (in the sense of “claim”) as men to the moral education afforded by heroic poems, though one might cynically read this as a marketing strategy.4 Pope readily acknowledged his debt to the scholarship of Anne Le Fèvre Dacier, Homer’s first French female translator, and listed prominent female supporters in the subscription lists at the front of his editions.5 Women thus long factored into the business of “Englishing” classical texts, though almost exclusively as paying audience members. For more than four centuries, Homer’s English audience listened to a boys’ choir. That tune has only just begun to change thanks to the efforts of three women: the classicist and nonfiction writer Caroline Alexander, who became the first woman to publish a complete English Iliad in 2015; Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, who published the first English Odyssey by a female translator in 2017; and the poet Alice Oswald, whose selective translation of the Iliad, Memorial, appeared in 2011.6 By virtue of their appearance in such short order, these books have been, and surely will be henceforth, grouped together. And rightly so: ending the male monopoly on the English channel to Homer is a major development. The Homeric epics have not only shaped Western culture; they enjoy enduring prestige. You still need to know Homer to fancy yourself “well-read.” These three books are thus 36 on women englishing homer potent symbols. They mark the passage of English-speaking women from the audience of male efforts to curate and transmit tradition to participants in those endeavors—from the subscription lists, we might say, to the title page. We sell these translations short, though, if we allow their collective meaning to obscure the patent differences in Alexander’s, Wilson’s, and Oswald... (shrink)

This reader is the first of its kind to present the work of leading French women philosophers to an English-speaking audience. Howells draws on several major areas of philosophical and theoretical debate including Ethics, Psychoanalysis, Law, Politics, History, Science, and Rationality. The philosophers include some names already well-known in North American such as Kristeva, Irigaray, Cixous, and Kofman, but also many others celebrated in France but whose innovative work has not yet achieved such widespread recognition in the English-speaking world (...) such as Sylviane Agacinski, Nicole Loraux, Monique David-Menard, Francoise Collin, Genevieve Fraisse, and Blandine Kriegel. Most of the essays in the collection have been specially translated and in several cases this is the first time any of the philosopher's work has appeared in English. The project is necessarily feminist in inspiration but takes an important step forwards in not taking the feminist struggle itself as its focus but rather engaging with influential French women philosophers on the questions they themselves choose to foreground. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Translation, (Self-)Transformation, and the Power of the MiddleAngelica NuzzoThe etymologies of the word translation—the real and the imaginary ones—are many and varied across languages and traditions. I want to frame my present remarks by appealing to the well-known derivation of the Latin traducere from trans-ducere, the verb that designates the movement of carrying across, of bringing over across and between heterogeneous and apparently incompatible terms—different languages, different places and (...) times, and more generally different identities and cultures. I propose to indicate with translation the dynamic space of the action that takes place in-between, in the middle between two extremes—whatever these extremes may be. And I propose to dwell in this in-between space—not in order to get anywhere, but to stay there and learn how to appreciate the powerful condition of the middle. My suggestion will be that translation is the intermediate and intermediary space of transformation that precedes that which it transforms as well as that into which it transforms; that translation is the middle that comes before the extremes between which it lies and which it connects, and makes them possible for the first time. The logic of translation, I submit, is the logic of immanent self-transformation that is based on the power of the middle. This is a logic that may help us advance beyond the binary static logic in which everything is instead dictated by the predetermined, fixed identity of the extremes, and by the exclusive choice of either one or the other—the logic that Virginia Woolf aptly describes in this way: “Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old” (Woolf 1990, ch. 5). While this may sound logically indisputable it is also—to [End Page 19] Woolf at least—existentially unacceptable and cognitively faulty when at issue is the understanding of the movement of our lives. Thus, in what follows, I am interested in exploring the meaning—the existential, historical, linguistic meaning—of the predicament of being-in-the-middle, of being-in-transition or in-translation—of being neither one extreme nor the other but both of them at the same time and also neither of them. I want to dwell, in particular, on the cipher of movement proper to this condition, on the idea of transformation that translation constitutively entails—the self-transformation that is proper to translation as such an in-between dynamic activity. But to push this point further, I also want to suggest that the movement of translation is essential for an understanding of how processes move on and advance precisely as processes; of how change and something truly new are achieved beyond the present standpoint and beyond the standpoint of the present; of how, more concretely, the individual and collective self is reconstituted and immanently transformed after a crisis and through it. For translation, in this sense, is the powerful, destabilizing moment of crisis and open possibility that invests individuals and societies alike (but also texts and languages); it is also, at the same time, a strategy of survival and a fundamental tool of advancement and progress.Let me begin with a famous philosophical scene. Plato’s Symposium opens with the intriguing account of Socrates’s unusual habits in a speech delivered by Aristodemus, and culminates with Alcibiades’s story regarding Socrates’s strange behavior during the campaign of Potidaea. Upon meeting Socrates all dressed up1 on his way to Agathon’s banquet, Aristodemus is asked to come along to Agathon’s house. He accepts, a bit embarrassed at the thought of showing up uninvited. On the way to Agathon’s, however, Socrates becomes absorbed in his thoughts and falls behind his companion. Aristodemus repeatedly waits for him, but Socrates encourages him to go on ahead alone. This puts Aristodemus in a “ridiculous position” when he arrives, all by himself, at Agathon’s house. He shows up, indeed uninvited, as there is still no sign of Socrates. Now everybody at Agathon’s is waiting and looking for him. This perplexing situation goes on until a servant discovers Socrates calmly standing... (shrink)

This essay offers an overview of the diversity of women’s prose writing that emerged on the Czech cultural scene in the post-communist era. To that end it briefly characterizes the work of eight Czech women authors who were born within the first two decades after World War II and began to create during the post-1968 era of ‘normalization’. In this broad sense they belong to a single generation. With rare exception their work was not officially published in their (...) homeland until the 1990s. The writers included are: Lenka Procházková, Tereza Boučková, Alexandra Berková, Zuzana Brabcová, Daniela Hodrová, Sylvie Richterová, Iva Pekárková, and Eva Hauserová. The overview is followed by a concise comparative analysis of texts by three very different writers (Procházková, Pekárková, and Hodrová), using a feminist critical approach. There is also an appendix of works by these writers available in English translation. (shrink)

This reader is the first of its kind to present the work of leading French women philosophers to an English-speaking audience. Many of the articles appear for the first time in English and have been specially translated for the collection. Christina Howells draws on major areas of philosophical and theoretical debate including Ethics, Psychoanalysis, Law, Politics, History, Science and Rationality. Each section and article is clearly introduced and situated in its intellectual context. The book is necessarily feminist in inspiration (...) but draws on an unusually wide range of thinkers, chosen to represent the philosophy of women rather than feminist philosophy. It will be ideal for anyone coming to this area for the first time as well as those seeking to extend their understanding of French thought and Continental Philosophy. Articles by the following writers are included: Francoise Collin, Sylviane Agacinski, Catherine Chalier, Luce Irigaray, Francoise Proust, Francoise Dastur, Barbara Cassin, Natalie Depraz, Elisabeth de Fontenay, Elisabeth Badinter, Francoise Heritier, Helene Cixous, Monique Schneider, Julia Kristeva, Sarah Kofman, Monique David Menard, Francoise d'Eaubonne, Genevieve Fraisse, Michele Le Doeuff, Natalie Charraud, Francoise Balibar, Anne Fagot-Largeault, Colette Guillaumin, Dominique Schnapper, Myriam Revault-D'Allonnes, Nicole Loraux, Mireille Delmas-Marty, Blandine Kriegel. (shrink)