Feminism and translation in India: Why do we need to think about language in feminist activism
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26512/belasinfieis.v14.n2.2025.53447Keywords:
translation and feminism; post-colonialism; India.Abstract
The theorizing of translation in the colonial context in the 1990s, initiated in part by my book Siting Translation, opened up new questions about language and power, inequality and representation. Critiques are now available of both humanistic and ethnographic ideas of translation, which were based on grasping literary value or cultural value through a universalist lens. Such critiques have helped open up the realm of linguistic translation to questions of the political, drawing attention to the asymmetries structuring all acts of translation. In the present essay, I focus on these questions: Why should we open out Translation Studies to questions coming out of feminism, and why should feminism pay attention to translation? What goes into the making of the feminist subject in India? How do we understand the conjuncture of culture and gender in its specific manifestations in the subcontinent?
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