Page 12 - e-Expert Seminar Series: Translation and Language Teaching

ABSTRACT: This presentation reviews a number of the author’s publications on gender, sexuality and translation. More specifically, I provide an overview of issues such as the struggles of translators when confronted with rendering sexual-related swearwords or the expression of explicit sexual language. I also advocate for a critical alliance between translation, feminism and sexuality in their common pursuit of sexual equality, and the use of a gender-committed pedagogy in the language and translation classroom in order to interrogate textual or sexual discrimination and the androcentric logic of human textuality or sexuality. Common threads in these publications include: (1) the constructed and negotiated character of gender/sexuality in texts; (2) the destabilising power of (the representation of) sexuality; (3) the transgressive, and profoundly ethical, nature of translation; (4) the need for an ecology of translation which includes, among others, an (eco)feminist, transnational perspective, combined with a local sensitivity; and (5) the need for a pedagogy of translation in order to counter discrimination, prejudice, misinformation, censorship, and so on.
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