The architectures of translation : a magic carpet-ride through space and time (or, the awkward story of how we dis/placed Krisztina Tóth’s short fiction from Hungarian to English)

This interdisciplinary paper unfolds an account of a collaborative translation project, which draws on Ellen Eve Frank’s concept of “literary architecture” to propose a process of “architectural translation”. Our proposal is illustrated by a detailed account of our experiences translating the short fiction of contemporary Hungarian writer, Krisztina Tóth (b. 1967) into English. Staged as a journey through space, time and text, our enquiry frames the process in Barbara Godard’s terms as one of dis/placement, finding resonances with Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subject and practices of feminist mimesis. Situating Tóth’s fiction in a European feminist literary heritage, we deploy a range of concepts drawn from translation, architecture, literary criticism and feminist philosophy to synthesise a translation strategy which engages the spatial, not only as a metaphor but a methodology for our project. In this account, we propose an architectural methodology as a tool for radical translators, and offer the process of translation as a way of thinking about internal and external spaces in postcolonial contexts

‘I don’t know what gender is, but I do, and I can, and we all do’: an interview with Clare Hemmings

What follows is an interview with Clare Hemmings, Professor of Feminist Theory and Head of the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. A leading figure in UK feminist theory, her research insists that we acknowledge matters of ambivalence and uncertainty in our history-making, storytelling and theorising. As such, it contributes to and has productively intervened in many fields, including feminist epistemology, affect theory, historiography and sexuality studies. Beginning with her first book, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender (2002), continuing in Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory (2011), and most overtly in Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (2018), Hemmings interrogates and challenges dominant modes and expressions of gender and sexuality from a feminist positionality that is itself under-theorised and rarely articulated: that of a feminine bisexual woman. As Hemmings notes, bisexual positionality encompasses the affective capacity for a ‘combination of heterosexual and homosexual desire’ (Hemmings, 2002a; 2002b: 17) and thus generates ‘radical reconfigurations’ (Hemmings, 2002b: 197) of our understanding of the relations between gender, sex and desire. Yet bisexuality has been repeatedly reproduced, within both feminist and queer theory, ‘as an abstract and curiously lifeless middle. As a lesbian and feminist who has occupied that supposedly ‘lifeless middle ground’, albeit differently (I have had two long-term relationships, one with a man, one with a woman), I was interested in speaking with Clare about these issues, and was compelled to do so after I attended an event that she co-organised at the London School of Economics, a screening of Sylvie Tissot’s film about the French feminist Christine Delphy that included Delphy herself. As soon as Delphy entered the theatre and began walking down the stairs to the podium, the audience burst spontaneously into a standing ovation and long applause: '[T]his moment involved both a shared jouissance and the returning of haunting conflicts within feminism – conflicts that we wish had been resolved long ago –because it entailed both exhilarating and dissonant affects, it became a sort of feminist moment par excellence, a moment where solidarity is never exempted from the (re)emergence of disagreements, and where the fantasy of a collective fusion becomes the condition for those conflicts to emerge' (Eloit in Delphy et al., 2016: 151). Delphy’s presence, and the film about her, reminded me that (1) feminist thinkers from the 1970s and 1980s were extraordinarily sophisticated in their understanding of how gender constitutes us as men and women; (2) this analysis is still mostly absent from public conversations; and (3) we still long for such conversations. My interview with Clare Hemmings is thus a continuation of this moment of shared jouissance and haunting. It was conducted informally, in 2017, in Clare’s office, in what was then the Gender Institute, in Columbia House at the LSE. For over 90 minutes during a grey afternoon in London, we spoke on a range of topics, from Clare’s intellectual history to her (then) forthcoming book on Emma Goldman. We discussed her background as a poststructuralist theorist who also carries out empirical research and the challenge of studying sexuality in the archive. In the portion of the interview that appears below, we talk in detail about Clare’s early work on bisexuality and how her thinking contributes to theorising gender in the present

Clubbing masculinities: Gender shifts in gay men's dance floor choreographies

This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journal of Homosexuality, 58(5), 608-625, 2011 [copyright Taylor & Francis], available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00918369.2011.563660This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the intersections of gender, sexuality, and dance. It examines the expressions of sexuality among gay males through culturally popular forms of club dancing. Drawing on political and musical history, I outline an account of how gay men's gendered choreographies changed throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Through a notion of “technologies of the body,” I situate these developments in relation to cultural levels of homophobia, exploring how masculine expressions are entangled with and regulated by musical structures. My driving hypothesis is that as perceptions of cultural homophobia decrease, popular choreographies of gay men's dance have become more feminine in expression. Exploring this idea in the context of the first decade of the new millennium, I present a case study of TigerHeat, one of the largest weekly gay dance club events in the United States

Why is there no queer international theory?

Over the last decade, Queer Studies have become Global Queer Studies, generating significant insights into key international political processes. Yet, the transformation from Queer to Global Queer has left the discipline of International Relations largely unaffected, which begs the question: if Queer Studies has gone global, why has the discipline of International Relations not gone somewhat queer? Or, to put it in Martin Wight’s provocative terms, why is there no Queer International Theory? This article claims that the presumed non-existence of Queer International Theory is an effect of how the discipline of International Relations combines homologization, figuration, and gentrification to code various types of theory as failures in order to manage the conduct of international theorizing in all its forms. This means there are generalizable lessons to be drawn from how the discipline categorizes Queer International Theory out of existence to bring a specific understanding of International Relations into existence

(Un)becoming women: Indian factory women's counternarratives of gender

This paper portrays the life stories of five factory workers in Delhi whose life trajectories run counter to normative femininity. As daughters and wives, they are neglected, abandoned or rejected by their families; they live alone, with their parents past the age that is their natal right, with siblings, or with families and men who are not related to them. I explore the circulation of their counternarratives and how their gender transgressions go public through ordinary forms of talk, such as gossip and rumor. I argue that their move out of the normative is not produced by, but produces, their gender politics; that their agency emerges cognitively from the telling of their stories in tandem with their interlocutors' credulity and uptake; and that the site of gender politics for working class Indian women lies in the informal subaltern publics that are formed by the circulation of their stories. Contrary to the notion of a stable unitary subject that precedes the political, these women's counternarratives demonstrate the subject‐in‐process as a political effect. Their alterity does not exist outside the heteronormative gender order but demarcates the boundaries of its historicity, hinting at both the internal contradictions of existing gender relations and their future possibilities.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112196/1/j.1467-954X.2011.02026.x.pd