Call for Papers: “Beyond Essentialisms: Translating Sex, Race and Gender”

TfL and guest editor Dr. Oscar Jansson (Lund University) are issuing a call for papers on the subject “Beyond Essentialisms: Translating Sex, Race and Gender”. Deadline: December 1st, 2022. 

Information on special issue
The object of this special issue is to examine how matters of sex, race and gender affect literary translations – and conversely, how translation takes part in the construction and dissemination of social, political and sexual categories. For what does it mean to “translate sex”? Are gender norms and identities readily translatable, or tied to particular linguistic settings? Is “race” relevant to translation? And perhaps most importantly: How can these questions be addressed without reverting to national, sexual or racial essentialisms?

In exploring these concerns, the special issue on the one hand draws on the growing impact of queer theory on translation studies, evident in the work of Brian James Baer, José Santaemilla and Heike Bauer, among others. Equally important, however, are the connections to recent developments in research on postcolonial and world literatures, marked by the attention to dynamics between local and global contexts in the figuration, circulation and translation of literary works – including how such dynamics affect the valuation of texts and form transcultural readerships.

TfL and guest editor Oscar Jansson thus invites articles that explore questions of what translating sex, race and gender means, including but not limited to the following:

–  translations of sexuality/sexualities of translation
–  figurations of racial identities in literary translation
–  translation and censorship histories of sexually explicit texts
–  untranslatability and designations of the untranslatable
–  case studies on LGBTQ and racialized authors, translators and critics
–  sexuality, race and gender in sociologies of translation

Deadline for manuscript submission: December 1st, 2022
Date for publication: Online open access, spring 2023

Questions and article proposals are directed to oscar.jansson@litt.lu.se.

Finished articles of up to 8.000 words are submitted to the TfL website on December 1st, 2022.