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Comparative Perspectives Symposium
Translation, Feminist Scholarship,
and the Hegemony of English*
* The editors at Signs would like to thank Amari Verástegui for her invaluable work in
conceptualizing this Comparative Perspectives Symposium and in recruiting contributors.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2014, vol. 39, no. 3]
© 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2014/3903-0001$10.00
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558 y Symposium: Translation, Feminist Scholarship, and the Hegemony of English
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S I G N S Spring 2014 y 559
to Nelly Richard ð2002Þ, play the role of cultural mediators between met-
ropolitan theories and their peripheral translations.
To scrutinize the ways in which journals become cultural mediators in
the traffic of theories and discourses, it would be necessary to carry out
tasks such as ðhere the list is of course only suggestive, not exhaustiveÞ an
analysis of the journal’s content and the transnational quotation market,
an appraisal of the knowledges being disseminated by the journal, an
analysis of the location of the journal vis-à-vis the disciplinary fields of the
academy ðand the field of feminismÞ, an assessment of the journal’s edi-
torial board and its representation in the larger discursive context, and—as
Clare Hemmings ð2011Þ has explored so incisively in her study—consid-
eration of the issue of canonicity and the silencing of other feminist ge-
nealogies, especially in the practices of translation of foreign-language
articles. In sum, according to Richard ð2001Þ, if we are to grasp the pro-
duction and circulation of knowledge, we need a scrutiny of the local
academic and extra-academic networks and their relation to institutional
fields, the inscription rules of epistemological repertoires, and the broader
political-intellectual conjuncture.
We would like to stress that we already have incisive studies about the
processes of cultural translation operating in the economy of symbolic and
material exchanges. Such studies have traced the global circuits of theories
and their dislocations across axes structured by the relations of power and
marginality in diverse “translation zones” ðApter 2006Þ. However, the
majority of these more recent studies focus on the circulation of signs and
meanings across regions other than Latin America, and very few of them
offer a more in-depth inquiry into the specificities of the travels of feminist
theories and their analytical categories.
One such specificity to attend to, we argue, is how a feminist canon is
constructed by a transnational citation market. It is by now well known
that citation practices are not only largely responsible for the formation of
scholarly canons but are seen as the most objective measure of academic
merit ðLutz 1995Þ. There is a significant number of studies, mostly com-
ing from the fields of applied linguistics and discourse analysis and from
bibliometrics, on the uses of citations—considered one of the most rele-
vant features of academic writing—as a core activity in knowledge produc-
tion ðLillis et al. 2010Þ. Who gets cited, where, and by whom—namely,
the geolinguistics of citations—exposes the routes through which theories
travel and ðmaleÞ intellectual lineages are constructed in a global context.
Emphasizing the geopolitical dimensions of citations, Theresa Lillis and
her coauthors ð2010Þ studied the link between these micropractices and
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560 y Symposium: Translation, Feminist Scholarship, and the Hegemony of English
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S I G N S Spring 2014 y 561
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562 y Symposium: Translation, Feminist Scholarship, and the Hegemony of English
References
Alvarez, Sonia E., Claudia de Lima Costa, Verónica Feliu, Rebecca Hester, Norma
Klahn, and Millie Thayer, eds. 2014. Translocalidades/Translocalities: Feminist
Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Ame´ricas. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Apter, Emily. 2001. “On Translation in a Global Market.” Public Culture 13ð1Þ:
1–12.
———. 2006. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Braidotti, Rosi. 2000. “The Way We Were: Some Post-structuralist Memoirs.”
Women’s Studies International Forum 23ð6Þ:715–28.
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S I G N S Spring 2014 y 563
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