Emek Ergun
Associate Professor
Women’s & Gender Studies and Global Studies
University of North Carolina at Charlotte, US

Abstract

Feminist texts constantly cross borders in translation, activating various political connections and transformations on their multidirectional routes across the globe. Yet, the specifics of such global mobilities and the impact of those translational encounters have not received much scholarly attention in feminist studies or translation studies. In her talk, Emek Ergun will discuss the political role of translation in facilitating global feminist solidarities by drawing on her reception studies that explored the transatlantic journey of Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History (2007) via her feminist translation – a popular feminist book that demystified the man-made histories of virginity in the context of western geographies. Comparing the US and Turkey, two unevenly positioned geographies with different virginity regimes and feminist legacies, Ergun’s talk will first reveal how a western feminist book was strategically mobilized to unsettle Turkey’s virginity codes and what kinds of transgressive effects it generated among its local feminist readers. By answering a hypothetical question, “What if the textual travel under question were vice versa, from the east to the west?”, the second part of Ergun’s talk will provide some political lessons on how to build transnational feminist solidarities in a world of profoundly hierarchical cross-border relations and considerthe political work that lies ahead of us to create a truly egalitarian and democratic global economy of translation, circulation, reception, and feminist dissent.

Bio

Emek Ergun is Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in the US. She is the co-editor of Feminist Translation Studies (Routledge, 2017) and the 5th edition of Feminist Theory Reader (Routledge, 2020). Ergun is also a feminist translator and her most recent translations include the Turkish translation of Octavia Butler’s speculative novel, Kindred (Ithaki Press, 2019) and the English co-translation titled The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics (Pluto Press, forthcoming 2022). Ergun’s first single-authored book, Virgin Crossing Borders: Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2023.