Feminist Translation and Its role in the Formation of Transnational Feminist Solidarities

Dr. Ergun investigates the political potential of translation to facilitate cross-border travels of feminist theories and how they enable local feminist interventions into heteropatriarchal regimes of truth, thus connecting feminist activists across differences in their work against violence against women. In her lecture, she will focus on the central role of translation in enabling transnational feminist solidarities by drawing on her ongoing research study that explores her Turkish translation of Hanne Blank’s Virgin (2007/2008) – a popular western history book presenting a demedicalizing account of virginities and demystifying their “man-made” history – and the receptions of the translated book among a group of feminist readers in Turkey. Comparing the US and Turkey, two unevenly positioned cultures with different configurations of virginity and feminist legacies, Dr. Ergun will discuss how a western book was mobilized to unsettle Turkey’s virginity codes and what kinds of transgressive effects it generated among feminist readers. This discussion aims to reveal important political lessons on how to build transnational solidarities in a world organized around mutually sustaining oppositionalities.