Translating Transgressive Texts

Through close examination of references to gender identity, female sexuality and corporeality, this book is the first of its kind to shed light on the complexities of translating the recent transgressive turn in contemporary women’s writing in French.

Via four case studies, namely, the translations into English of Nelly Arcan’s Putain (2001), Catherine Millet’s La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M. (2001), Nancy Huston’s Infrarouge (2010) and Nina Bouraoui’s Garçon manqué (2000), this book explores how transgressive topoi such as prostitution, anorexia, matrophobia, rape, female desire, and transgenderism are translated. The book considers how (auto)fictional female selves portrayed are dis/placed by translation at both a textual and paratextual level. Combining feminist phenomenological perspectives on female lived experience with feminist translation theory, this interdisciplinary study offers an insight into how the experiential is brought into language, how it journeys via language into new cultural contexts via translation and creates a dialogical space in which the subjectivities of those involved (author, narrator, protagonist, translator) become open to the porosity of encounters with alterity.

The volume will appeal to scholars in translation studies, French Studies, and gender and sexuality studies, particularly those interested in feminist translation and literary translation.