2025-06-15
Jessica Frazier et al.
The forum below came into being out of a curiosity to learn more about feminist scholars’ creation and use of digital humanities projects, platforms, and media to forward their research and teaching. Participants discussed the possibilities and perils of feminist digital humanities projects as they shared their unique experiences and perspectives. Larger trends in the conception, design, and operation of feminist digital humanities are visible in the conversation that follows—notably all three participants expressed a desire to work with digital media as a means of producing and sharing feminist knowledge and resistance narratives with broader audiences.
2024-12-28
Sterling D. Quinn
Feminist scholars in the discipline of geography have noted the ways that routine activities at the household and neighborhood scales contribute to power relations and identity formation. Geographic information systems (GIS), with their ability to create multiple visual representations of people’s experiences in space at any scale, hold great potential for revealing these local processes and patterns that are often lost or invisible in broader historical narratives, especially when they pertain to women and children. This article contributes an example by using GIS to encode and map everyday events in a diary kept by Elisabeth Koren, a nineteenth-century Norwegian immigrant to the midwestern United States. Combining GIS methods with a careful cataloging of the text, I create maps showing social and economic connections developed during Elisabeth’s routine walks; geographic realms of pleasant and unpleasant emotions she encountered while traversing the landscape; and differing ways that women, men, and children used domestic space in the home where she boarded. I demonstrate that even highly computational GIS methods, such as kernel density estimation, can be appropriated toward the portrayal of nuanced and uncertain types of phenomena such as feelings, wanderings, and sites of household chores. This case study is intended to inspire researchers of social topics to look closely for ways that life writings, interviews, or other personal data may contain themes that could be better understood using GIS and mapping tools.
2024-12-28
Kathleen (Kaye) A. Hare et al.
In this paper, we use a feminist dialogue to query publication deaths that haunt us. We ruminate on respective past publications that remain unread and uncited, despite encapsulating defining events in our development as scholars. For Author Kaye Hare this was an affective narrative that troubled a seemingly ideal moment of public scholarship; for Author Amber Moore, this was a hard-fought analysis of precarious intersectional feminist resistance in popular culture. Inspired by the horror-film genre “spectral incognizance,” we methodologically deploy a multivocal dialogical structure based on multiple revisitings that attenuate anxieties of metaphorical publication death, before revealing that this death is imminent. Through re-examining our past works, this project invites consideration of how our publications’ f(l)ailings can draw out a particular haunting temporality that holds the present open to provocative questions that are difficult to pose and sustain within current institutional, academic processes.
2024-05-28
Sandrine Sanos et al.
This conversation featuring four scholars—Sandrine Sanos, Judith G. Coffin, Lorraine Delavaud, Marine Vaslin—took place on zoom on December 1, 2023. It was organized, transcribed, and edited by Sandrine Sanos who also wrote the introduction to contextualize the conversation. The roundtable reflects on the making of the translation of Judith Coffin’s book on Beauvoir; and how it became a collective object, and the challenges and productive limitations that it involved, showing how such a project helped forge and relied upon transnational, transdisciplinary, and transgenerational feminist solidarities. The ways Beauvoir became a transatlantic object sheds light on the ways that the book and its translation allow us to see Beauvoir anew.
2024-05-28
Erin Katherine Krafft et al.
Global right-wing anti-gender movements have developed a transnational pattern in their uses of language as a means of subjugation and of control, and this article examines manifestations of this pattern in two specific states: Brazil and Russia. By exploring the anti-gender languaging, rhetoric, and legislation advanced by Jair Bolsonaro (President of Brazil 2019–2022) and Vladimir Putin (President of Russia 2000–2008 and 2012 to the present) and their supporters, we find that, in both contexts, anti-gender campaigns are reactions to and also drivers for increasingly dramatic political and social conflicts, and in each case, anti-gender ideologies are embedded in larger right-wing authoritarian aims. The anti-gender discourse advanced by these leaders and their pivotal supporters arises not from simple personal feelings but are, instead, targeted political strategies, similar aims embedded in different languages. Our examination begins by contextualizing Bolsonaro’s Brazil and Putin’s Russia within the larger landscape of anti-gender campaigns and the global growth of right-wing authoritarianism. We then move to the two case studies and their respective enactments of anti-gender languaging and rhetoric within their specific political, social, and discursive landscapes, demonstrating the transnational nature of such projects despite differences in local contexts. Finally, we synthesize these case studies and consider the roles of Feminist Translation Studies and transnational feminist exchange in responding to the rise of such right-wing anti-gender movements in both local and global manifestations.
2023-12-14
Flore Chevaillier
For Bhanu Kapil, the drafting process of writing involves the translation of non-linguistic realities into storytelling, the nature of which must leave room for the performative experience that shapes writing. In Schizophrene (2011), Kapil engaged in adventitious composition processes when she sealed her manuscript in a Ziploc bag and threw it in the garden to spend months outdoors in the Colorado winter. The text, full of gaps created by the erased parts of the “winterized” manuscript, documents schizophrenia in diasporic Indian and Pakistani communities. The decaying process of the book that created a void in her writing also impacts the narrative’s own exploration of white space, gaps, syntactic experimentation, and fragmentation. These elements attempt to translate the experience of Kapil’s family and the effect of colonization on immigrants. The initial “failed” document attests to the impossibility of telling the story of women’s inter-generational trauma inherited from postcolonial and patriarchal violence. Translating these elements into a new form of narration relies on the refusal to reproduce old narrative patterns inherited from Western and patriarchal modes of writing. Instead, resisting traditional plot structures, Kapil pays close attention to repetition and association: they echo, verbally, the “light touch,” which “regular and impersonally repeated” is healing, “for non-white subjects (schizophrenics) as anti-psychotic medication” (71). Consequently, this mode of writing proposes yet another level of translation, one that focuses on the information that comes from bodies and its transfer into the physical form of texts. While Schizophrene is not literally a translation, it involves a multi-layered engagement of what can be translated from the trauma of the multigenerational oppression of women.
2023-12-14
Aaron Hammes
The acronym SWERF, or Sex Work(er) Exclusive Radical Feminism, and its attendant ideologies brings up a number of questions and potential schisms for the enterprise of feminist thought more broadly. This inquiry examines what it means for feminism to exclude, what the excluders believe is gained by protecting certain boundaries around which identities and practices are included, and the ideological foundations and consequences of this thinking. SWERF logics are understood as mistranslations of the radical potentialities of feminism, clustered around three sites: exclusion (against bodily autonomy) , equivocation (between sex work and labor trafficking), and misrepresentation (of the sex worker as antifeminist monster). Each of these mistranslations underpins a SWERF necropolitics, an ethos (and praxis) of deathly exclusion which I argue is not only an effect of these logics, but a prerequisite for their persistence. Sex workers become the bad Other of these logic, resulting in feminist arguments for carceral control, surveillance and outing, and stigmatization, each of which creates conditions for loss of livelihood and life, as well as weakening other feminist goals premised on self-determination, harm reduction, and safety.
2023-12-14
Erin K. Krafft et al.
In this introduction to the Special Issue “Translating Transnational Feminisms,” we argue for the integral position of feminist translation practices and the theories of Feminist Translation Studies as tools for both local and transnational feminist solidarities. Beginning with the understanding that transnational feminist solidarities rely on not only linguistic translation but also cultural fluencies that allow for exchange rather than simply the import or export of locally bound feminist praxis, we illustrate that the practice of feminist translation thus carries with it the conflicts, the fraught and unfolding contestations of meaning, and the ever-evolving conceptions of gender, feminism, and solidarity that exist not only between languages but also within any language and its political and cultural landscapes.