Overview

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.

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9781501366666

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Reviews

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) * 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) * 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 *

Author Information

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.

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