Law and Gender in Translation

Abstract

Translation provides both an analytical tool and conceptual model for feminist legal research. Drawing on translation studies, feminist theory, and scholarship on gender and legal language, we show how translation assists in identifying how gendered points of difference and friction in law are articulated in communicative practice. The article moves from translation as the mechanical movement of meaning across linguistic boundaries to a sociocultural conception of translation as transformative of meanings assigned to ideas, knowledge, representations, and practices. We outline a conceptual agenda that addresses the relationship between law, gender and translation showing how focus on context, circulation and change harnesses and enables feminist legal method and research. Gendered aspects of linguistic practice and discourse include the power to interpret, translate and provide particularistic representations that both silence and enable. The article proposes a framework of use in promoting new modes of interdisciplinary research and dialogue in feminist legal studies.

1.0 Introduction to the Special issue

This special issue situates the concept of translation at the centre of feminist legal research. Over the past decades, understandings of ‘translation’ has grown beyond the linguistic to include translations of cultural, political, and historical norms and contexts.¹ Shaped by insights from transnationalism,² subaltern³ and feminist⁴ studies, translation has become an important analytical device to record and understand how ideas, concepts, and practices travel and acquire meanings across sites, disciplines, and events. Feminist approaches to translation have similarly emerged both as interdisciplinary framework and political praxis to interrogate the links between the politics of translation and gender.⁵ This interdisciplinary focus on translation has not, however (and as yet), taken root in feminist research on law to the same extent, despite multiple shared areas of concern. These include gendered aspects of language use, discursive manifestations of gender, the power to interpret and assign meaning, and representational distortions and silences.

It was with the desire to anchor the concept of translation more prominently in feminist legal research, and legal research more broadly, that we launched the call for papers. Having drawn on the concept of translation to examine encounters and exchanges across borders and boundaries that are central to the production of meaning in law in our own research,⁶ our ambition was to make a contribution to discussions about the potential of translation to expand feminist critiques of law. To explore the potential of this approach, this introduction to the special issue provides a roadmap and a research agenda situating translation in the theoretical and empirical landscape of feminist legal research. We posit the key role that translation and the intellectual legacy established by feminist scholars engaging with translation, can have in addressing questions of law, language, and gender, and in confronting the universality underpinning mainstream – understood as liberal and positivist – understandings of law. Feminist legal scholars are well placed to unravel the problem of translation in law, particularly in trans- and international law.

Because law is a language of authoritative interpretations, those who come to it must try to fit their version of events into its terms. But because legal language is assumed to be legitimate for all, because it understands itself as being aperspectived, it does not even comprehend that there might be fit or translation problems.⁷

In different ways, the contributions to this special issue engage with the dynamics of translation and the relationship between law, gender, and the question of how meaning travels across divides of difference and under conditions of uncertainty and contestation. The interactions and encounters presented in the articles, across local and transnational fields and spheres of knowledge, in varying ways underline the contingency of gendered meaning as it circulates and is reproduced in legal texts and practices. They foreground dynamics and hierarchies of representation, knowledge and power. Translation as an analytical tool can, in this sense, help to articulate points of difference and friction in law as a communicative practice. It can help us to better understand the contingencies within which gender is performed, negotiated, and contested in legal settings, and generate new insights into women’s experiences with the law. The project itself is an act of translation – aimed at the creation of a space in which translation as an analytical tool and conceptual model can facilitate new modes of interdisciplinary research and dialogue in feminist legal studies.

In this introduction, we relate existing scholarship on gender and legal language to the concept of translation to demonstrate how this approach can contribute to feminist legal critiques. We provide a roadmap that shows how translation has moved from its initial conception of transmitting meaning across linguistic boundaries in an unproblematic, apolitical fashion to a sociocultural conception of translation as transformative of meanings assigned to ideas, knowledge systems, representations, and practices. We outline a research agenda which we hope can provoke further discussion of the relationship between law, gender and translation, underlining three particular aspects of translation – context, circulation and change – which we argue shares the intent of feminist methods, ‘to disrupt; to question; to render problematic the “objective”, “the neutral” and the “normal”’.⁸

2.0 Law, Language and Gender

Legal language, like all language, conducts and projects power and struggles, acting as an integral part of the constitution of social contexts and contests. ‘Through legal language, the state imposes its interpretations and its appropriations (of physical and symbolic power), and social actors struggle to shift existing power relations.’⁹ It is a site where social power and legal power interact; ‘where the translation of everyday categories into legal language effects powerful changes’.¹⁰ For these reasons, questions of language have always been at the centre of feminist research in law. Critical feminist legal theories, like other critical schools of thought, have drawn attention to the role of language as a site for struggle over social power, including gendered relations of power, and the mutual imbrication of legal language and cultural meaning.¹¹

The disjuncture between the language of the law and women’s lives and concerns, as well as the way gender roles and binaries are constructed and inscribed into legal vocabulary (eg male/female, public/private, market/home, work/non-work, and mind/body) are central to the concerns of feminist legal researchers.¹² Mirroring broader feminist critique that has called attention to the historical role of language in constructing and reinforcing inequalities by reification of assumed universalities and Cartesian dualisms, these concerns include the structural inequalities that occur through such inscriptions. When translated into law, in particular, sociolinguistic and ideological constructs become naturalised, normalised, and authoritative – bolstering not only law’s epistemic power, but the relations of social power upon which it relies. Carol Smart, for example, has explored the tensions in attempts in legal discourse to reproduce subjective (gender) positions by constructing particular understandings of (naturalised) difference.¹³ Exploring tensions between local legal systems and imposed models of Western laws in a colonial context, Ulrike Wanitzek similarly argued that legal language is a medium of social power in which legal concepts and cultural representations are interwoven.¹⁴ Exploring relations between law, language, and gender is critical, therefore, to both understanding the social and institutional construction and operation of gender, and identifying opportunities for contestation and change.

The insights drawn from feminist legal scholarship comprise part of a broader body of work on law and language which has broadened our conception of legal language to the social and contextual levels, and therefore moved away from language as an abstract system.¹⁵ Within legal anthropology and sociology in particular, the role of legal language in reproducing power structures and patterns of colonial domination has been the subject of sustained critique.¹⁶ Much like work within Critical Legal Studies (CLS), this has called attention to the manner in which language shapes and forms ideas, positing alternative forms of discourse to contest dominant legal language and open space for previously excluded voices and ideas.¹⁷ Drawing on literary, linguistic, and critical theory, scholarship within law and literature has similarly often drawn on a deconstructionist approach to analyse legal language as a form of storytelling.¹⁸ Other more empirically focussed work has explored the impact of language in legal settings, such as courtrooms. For example, psycholinguists have explored the role of language in eyewitness accounts.¹⁹

Translation has often made an appearance as a conceptual or analytical device within this body of work. Law and literature scholar James White, for example, has argued that law is a process of translation where legal texts embody discourse about social or political issues.²⁰ Others have used the idea of translation to frame the attorney/client relationship, with the lawyer as a translator to and for clients.²¹ Legal anthropologists have drawn on the idea of translation to discuss the circulation of norms through processes of global integration.²² Sally Merry Engle established translation as a powerful tool to analyse the reception, circulation, and transformation of global norms, such as human rights, at the local level.²³ In ethnographic accounts of the global diffusion of human rights law, she explores how international actors ‘translate’ international legal categories to the local level, and how these are in turn translated (in the sense of being ‘vernacularised’) by local actors who both mobilise and transform legal language. This process is shaped by cultural practices, political interests, and the legal cultures of human rights elites and activists. Other socio-legal scholars have employed translation to guide examinations of how law changes from one context to another.²⁴ However, a broader ‘turn’ to translation within legal studies – understood as a movement drawing on critical and cultural translation studies – has yet to take off, despite increasing momentum.²⁵ To open up how translation can be integrated with feminist legal research – as we explore in this special issue – we now outline some of the aspects of cultural and sociological approaches to translation that are central to that project.

3.0 The Turn to Translation: A Roadmap

Translation has been untethered from its traditional interlingual moorings and is now understood to encompass ‘a form of intercultural mediation located in a specific sociocultural and ideological setting’.²⁶ In this sense, translation is not reducible to language but foregrounds the intimate relationship between the social and semantic, and the embeddedness of this relationship in political contexts and power relations. We conceptualise translation as an ‘interstitial communicative process and exchange’²⁷ between different social groups, frames of reference, knowledge systems and professions, and different idioms of expression and communication.²⁸ As the ‘in-between [of] multiple knowledges’,²⁹ translation is always relational, incomplete, and in the making. It is a social practice of meaning construction which does not only expand over and integrate spatial scales but also across (historical) time.³⁰ This aspect of translation is explored by Leila Brännström and Markus Gunneflo in their contribution to the special issue.³¹ In the following, we plot the various uses of ‘translation’ in social sciences onto a roadmap that aligns feminist, postcolonial, and sociological approaches.

The traditional conception of translation rests on the idea that texts and words can be transferred from a source context to a target context without change in meaning. The purpose of translating, according to this ‘transfer model’, is to establish and ensure equivalence, symmetry, and correspondence across source and target texts. Translation is simply the act of mapping meanings encoded in one language onto meanings encoded in another. In this mapping of meanings, the translator must remain faithful to the source (con)text, and the key challenge to be ‘overcome’ is linguistic difference.³² In this model the possibility of translation rests on the idea of a shared reality – ‘an assumed shared cultural referent that stands outside all languages as universal foil’³³ – in ‘source’ and ‘target’ contexts. We refer to this conception as ‘translation as transmission’.³⁴ In a legal setting, a parallel dynamic can be observed in positivist understandings of the globalisation of international law as a process of ‘transfer’ between legal orders facilitated by its universal, acultural tenants – despite its normative and geographic origins in European law.³⁵

The transfer model and the understanding of translation as transmission of meaning between different languages was the object of critique in the ‘cultural turn’ in Translation Studies in the early 1990s.³⁶ No translation can replicate the original; there are only ‘re-translations’, as Walter Benjamin asserted.³⁷ Translation scholars argued that translating is a purposeful – and political – act of knowledge (re)production. Semantic equivalence and symmetry in meaning are an illusion, disguising the authorship, agency, and epistemic power of the translator.³⁸ ‘The problematic of translation’, Tejaswini Niranjana wrote, ‘becomes a significant site for raising questions of representation, power, and historicity.’³⁹ In this approach, the notions of scale and context fixity (ie the relationship between source and target) in the understanding of translation as transmission become naïve. The epistemic power of the translator as a broker and intermediary between different semantic webs and sociocultural contexts rests on erasing and rendering invisible what does not fit the ‘parameters of legibility’ of a particular knowledge system.⁴⁰ This can generate problematic practices of misrepresentation, as shown by Rosemary Grey in her contribution to the special issue.⁴¹

Insights on the relationship between the social and the semantic and the intermediary position of the translator, mark the work of translation scholars on the intimate link between colonialism and translation. Whereas the translation as transmission model suggests that translation operates between autonomous and homogenous contexts, postcolonial approaches show how translation is inscribed into specific power dynamics constitutive of scale. Here, scale and particular properties of place are not prior to the translation process but are the product – and project – of translating. Niranjana argues that the colonial project itself is an act of translating, transforming colonised subjects into objects familiar to the coloniser.⁴² ‘Nothing comes closer to the central activity and political dynamic of postcolonialism than the concept of translation.’⁴³ The purpose of orientalist translations were to convey particular ideas and images of submissive or backward ‘natives’ and the ‘local context’, which recursively represented and forged the hierarchies in which these ideas and images were made.⁴⁴ In the context of land appropriation by European settlers in North America, kinship-based indigenous relations to land were translated into Anglo-Saxon legal concepts of property based on a formal contractual relationship.⁴⁵ These concepts, in turn, were translated into universal concepts of natural law.⁴⁶ This translation and reconfiguration of social relations served as a justification for European settler colonialism. Postcolonial translation scholars have also identified when translation can catalyse contestation and change. For example, before and after independence, Irish translations of mythological tales in Old Irish into English were used to assert Irish cultural identity and resist colonial stereotypes to advance an anti-colonial agenda.⁴⁷ Homi Bhabha names such spaces of negotiation between cultures, ‘cultural translation’.⁴⁸ Translation can cut across binaries and established patterns of cultural differentiation in denoting spaces in-between where migrants, for example, negotiate (hybridised) collective identities.

Feminist translation scholars have noted that the ‘politics of colonialism overlap significantly with the politics of gender’.⁴⁹ Adrienne Rich reminds us that ‘our whole life [as women is] a translation’.⁵⁰ Feminist translation studies emerged in the late 1980s.⁵¹ It builds on a political conception of translation and conceives translating as an inherently political act. Inspired by feminist literary theory and its concerns with images and representations of women in literature,⁵² feminist translation scholars have challenged the discursive formations and manifestations of gender in text. For example, in the first English translation of Le Deuxième Sexe, Howard Parshley, a professor emeritus of zoology, ‘deleted fully one-half of one chapter on history, cut one-fourth of another, and eliminated the names of seventy-eight women’.⁵³ It is on the basis of such epistemic distortions and misrepresentations that the philosophical work of Beauvoir was often considered to be incoherent and intellectually premature.⁵⁴ In response, feminist translation scholars have unearthed and translated texts by forgotten female writers and have retranslated translated work, including religious texts, to unsettle patriarchal forms of language and bring to light gender misrepresentations and power differentials.⁵⁵ For feminist translation scholars, translation is a significant site of social activism and a means to disclose the discursive operations of power. Translations is part of ‘the process of creating and disseminating meaning within a contingent network of feminist discourses’⁵⁶ and a tool to inscribe new feminist meanings into language.⁵⁷ Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes, ‘the task of the feminist translator is to consider language as a clue to the workings of gendered agency’.⁵⁸

In contrast to postcolonial and feminist translation scholars who retain a focus on language, sociologists have transcended this focus in their conceptualisation of translation. Influenced by the work of French philosopher Michel Serres on translation,⁵⁹ scholars using Actor-Network Theory (ANT), under the label of a ‘sociology of translation’, have been concerned with how social networks form between different actors and the power relations involved in such processes.⁶⁰ Translation mediates and constructs the various stages of network formation, including creating and extending a social discourse on the problem of concern to all network members and the process by which an actor (either a group or an individual) comes to represent and speak on behalf of the entire network.⁶¹ Translation is therefore not without conflict.⁶² It is the contested process of forming social relations and formulating social power. Boundaries and cleavages in society emerge in this process. Rather than an intermediate space between two bounded cultures where social relations are prior to translation (as Bhabha would posit),⁶³ for ANT scholars translation is foundational to the formation and form of social networks and the relations within them. Translation, Michel Callon writes, ‘involves creating convergences and homologies by relating things that were previously different’.⁶⁴

4.0 Law and Gender in Translation: A Research Agenda

The rich body of work that has emerged in the cultural turn to translation offers multiple routes to integrating ‘translation’ with feminist legal research. From the roadmap above we highlight several key areas of concern that we share and upon which we draw in proposing the following conceptual framework and research agenda. Our shared concerns include: a foregrounding of the formation and dynamics of power relations generated through the circulation of discourse; an attendance to questions as to who is imbued with the authority to represent and speak on behalf of others; a questioning of essentialised and static understandings of social categories and norms; and an awareness of how meaning is constructed, negotiated, and potentially changed in dialectical processes involving different, and at times diverging, frames of reference and social registers brought together in the act of translating. We suggest these concerns should animate work on translation in feminist legal scholarship and we draw upon them to delineate our conceptual framework in terms of context, circulation, and change.

4.1 Context

With the growing need for feminist legal theory to engage in dialogue and critique across trans-legal, geopolitical and theoretical borders, translation becomes a productive analytical heuristic for both critiquing and ‘bridging’ epistemologies.⁶⁵ The embedded ‘politics of location’⁶⁶ in which any act of translation occurs, prompts us to be attuned to the situatedness of subjects – including ourselves – and knowledge.⁶⁷ Sonia Alvarez and Claudia de Lima Costa argue that any speech act encompasses an aspect of translation, for ourselves as well as for others, involving a ‘process of displacement of the self’.⁶⁸ Therefore, they write, ‘in translation there is a moral obligation to uproot ourselves, to be, even temporarily, homeless so that the other can dwell, albeit provisionally, in our home’.⁶⁹ Against what Donna Haraway terms ‘view from above, from nowhere’-notions of objectivity and impartiality, our conception of translation shifts the analytical lens away from correspondence towards subjective and embodied experiences.⁷⁰

A focus on translation confronts law’s traditional claims and adherence to objectivity and liberal tenets (eg individualism, rational choice, and abstraction), revealing the hidden gendered bias of law. However, what is called for is not simply another alternative gendered form of objectivity or ‘feminist empiricism’, to quote Haraway.⁷¹ The limitations of such an approach have been observed in attempts to retranslate the masculine frames of law into a more inclusive register, including the framing of women’s rights as human rights or practices of gender mainstreaming within various legal regimes.⁷² Karen Engle argues that this has paved the way for the increased attention devoted to women and law, and directed attention to the difficult circumstances in which many women live globally.⁷³ However, it has also raised tensions surrounding the universality of female experience of gender and the production and circulation of ‘woman’ as a category.

The failure of Western approaches to attend to cultural nuances in their reliance on the idea of a globally shared identity contained within the unitary category of ‘woman’, has been widely criticised by feminist scholars.⁷⁴ As Ratna Kapur argues, the

emphasis on the commonality of women’s experience in a woman-centered approach to gender equality places the analysis on a slippery slope where it can easily slide into the essentialist and prioritizing category of gender; it can blunt rather than sharpen our analysis of oppression.⁷⁵

Malia Stivens has also drawn attention to concerns among many scholars and groups particularly in the human rights context around the translation and use of the European terms ‘gender’ and ‘woman’, posed in purportedly universal terms and ‘reeking of Eurocentric neo-colonialism’.⁷⁶ Such contests have been acute for women of the Third World as they seek to navigate the changing, shifting, and highly contested meanings of gender. These ideas of gender build on an understanding of translation being unproblematic, value-free, and unencumbered by existing power structures.⁷⁷

Transnational and postcolonial feminist theories stress the importance of detecting overlapping social and political positions, without recourse to commensurate or transcendental claims.⁷⁸ In other words,

a feminist politics of translation would more specifically allow us to challenge the institutions and social norms built on the false universal categories and dichotomies (male vs female, white vs black, centre vs periphery) disseminated and perpetuated in and through globally dominant languages.⁷⁹

Rebuffing the claim that individuals across the world share the same experiences, privileges, and oppressions, a feminist ethics of translation suggests that difference and complexity benefit understanding, rather than act as a barrier to be removed or collapsed under an appeal to universals.⁸⁰ Translation is thus not a single act, but a process encapsulating multiple epistemological and semiotic practices that may lead to shared networks and relations of meaning. A feminist translational approach to critique within law should develop approaches that focus on how cultural contexts and lived experiences vary across space and time.

4.2 Circulation

Translation as transmission suggests that ideas or norms travel through predefined spatial sites and scales, from the global to a local context where they are translated. Our notion of circulation and its relation to translation rather than presupposing fixed scales, posits that the trajectories through which ‘things’ travel are generative of scale, space, sites of translation and meaning making.⁸¹ Such a – socio-spatial-legal – analytical move is attentive to both overlapping and at times competing sites of power and social networks expanding space and time. It calls for what Pinar Bilgin terms a ‘contrapuntal reading’ of the transnational, focusing on connections between things, rather than assuming ideas can be traced back to an original, singular source.⁸² In the words of Edward W Said, ‘To prefer a local, detailed analysis of how one theory travels from one situation to another is also to betray some fundamental uncertainty about specifying or delimiting the field to which any one theory or idea might belong.’⁸³ In this sense, there are no originals but ‘only a heterogeneous continuum of translations’ in which meaning and claims of originality are made and circulate through continuous processes of rewriting.⁸⁴

Translation is useful in detecting connections between law and space; a relationship which legal geographers have suggested is mutually constitutive.⁸⁵ Laws often conventionally organise and represent space through means of functional differentiation, juxtaposition, and boundary-drawing. These means have significant legal effects in terms of claims to jurisdiction and legal authority in particular sites. However, law’s organising power and its spatial imprints have become more and more complex. Particularly in the transnational context, law is increasingly qualified by overlapping jurisdictions, conflicting normative orders and legal regimes.⁸⁶ Legal subjects and the distribution of legal rights are often constructed in transnational ‘legal borderlands’, understood as ‘spaces of socio-legal relations at the intersection of and in frictions between established legal regimes and conceptual binaries; categories which are linked to socio-economic hierarchies of oppression, including race, gender, class and migrant status’.⁸⁷ This necessitates rethinking ‘the research site as multileveled and multidimensional’⁸⁸ to disentangle the intimate relationship between positionality, location, and the production of (legal) knowledge.⁸⁹

Two empirical examples illustrate how we understand the link between translation and circulation. First, questioning claims to ideas’ original sources, scholars have traced how feminist theory takes on different meanings in and through transnational exchange and reception.⁹⁰ Feminist NGOs, legal activists and organisations, and academics operate as brokers in (culturally and linguistically) translating feminist ideas and concepts in locally situated encounters.⁹¹ Here, translation is marked by local de- and re-contextualisations as the process often involves scarce if any reference to or understanding of the context in which ideas and concepts originated.⁹² Ideas and concepts, fashioned in other contexts, are intentionally reassembled and renegotiated to fit the particular circumstances and needs of a given space and time. As such, translated – and re-signified – meanings can both help in constructing transnational alliances across social movements,⁹³ and be a source of conflict in such alliances.⁹⁴ For example, Kathy Davis traces how the renowned feminist book Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published by the Boston Women Health’s Book Collective in 1970, disseminated globally through its multiple translations in the following three decades, in a time where ‘it was through interactions around the written word that [feminist] ideas spread most vigorously’.⁹⁵ While the book is ‘a distinctively North American product in both content and format’,⁹⁶ its global trajectories through varied local translations reveal its significance – and the power of cultural ‘translocal’ translation⁹⁷ – for circulating (feminist) knowledges and creating a transnationally connected feminist politics and identification.⁹⁸

Second, translation similarly entails a focus on sites in which exchange of and encounters between legal meaning take place, particularly against the backdrop of ‘transnational legal assemblages’ that constitute regulatory networks across space and time.⁹⁹ For example, the rise of transnational labour markets has challenged the traditional conceptual and legal boundaries of domestic labour laws. Workers and jobs are increasingly matched across borders. This has, for instance, been a notable phenomenon in the construction and health care sectors.¹⁰⁰ The interplay of the normative and narrative underpinnings of labour law across jurisdictional settings (worker vs non-worker; citizen vs non-citizen; workplace vs home; formal vs informal) inform the often precarious and disenfranchised subjectivities of transnational workers. For example, we have previously argued that through legal narratives and categories surrounding work and care, migrant domestic workers can be stripped of labour protection via categorisation as ‘au pairs’ on cultural exchange.¹⁰¹ In this transnational setting of labour regulation and governance, the need for ‘new analytical tools to grasp the multiple and multi-layered embeddedness of transnational labour markets in local, national, transnational, regional and global institutions’¹⁰² suggests an approach that can detect how legal subjects and their rights in the labour market are translated and transformed at the intersection of a number of different legal frames of reference (eg employment, tax, and migration laws) and extra-legal relationships.¹⁰³

4.3 Change

We relate translation to transformation and change in two ways. First, the radical potential of translation resides in its duality of being both constraining and enabling. As an exercise of power, translation can both serve to exclude and repress, and include and resist. White writes in Justice as Translation, that translation ‘forces us to respect the other – the other language, the other person, the other text – yet it nonetheless requires us to assert ourselves, and our own languages, in relation to it’.¹⁰⁴ On the one hand, translation can mean ‘erasure’, which ‘speaks of the coloniality of translation; that is, the way in which translation performs a border-keeping role and expands the epistemic territory of modernity’.¹⁰⁵ In other words, translation is a powerful tool to assert epistemic authority, to police boundaries (eg public/private), and advance certain ideas, including the European tradition of thought and its universal validity claims.¹⁰⁶ As a means of domination, translation attempts to ‘homogenize and standardize difference’.¹⁰⁷ On the other hand, translation can also mean ‘plurality’ and emancipation; this ‘speaks of the configuration of dialogues and the thinking of the borders that challenges the modern/colonial system of oppression’.¹⁰⁸ It is through translation that interaction and exchange across borders occur and become meaningful. As feminist translators have demonstrated,¹⁰⁹ translation – and ‘translating back’ – enables the challenge of hegemonic power structures and provides a space for resistance. In this sense, translation denotes a practical means to establish dialogues transnationally, across or despite location and positionality, and engage in cross-border feminist encounters and struggles.¹¹⁰

Second, translation enables us to disentangle dialectical processes of interaction between multiple and contrasting forces through which (relational) change happens. In other words, translation is ontologically conditioned upon the presence of functionally and socially differentiated world views, material contexts, ideas, groups, and practices. It is a process of the enactment of contradiction and, as emphasised by the sociologists of translation, of bringing together and creating convergences between things that were (previously) different.¹¹¹ Frictions between these opposites provides the conditions for change in opening up an infinite space of possible meaning.¹¹² As conceptual historians have argued, society is a sphere of semantic struggle over the determination of the meaning of essential concepts, which represent social facts and power.¹¹³ In this sense, translation denotes the struggles and contestation between differently situated groups over the control of political – and legal – language.¹¹⁴

For example, battles over the cultural and legal meaning of concepts, such as rape and sexual assault, between advocates for women’s rights and racial justice and the political and legal elite as well as organised conservative groups have been ongoing for over half a century.¹¹⁵ Approaching these concepts as both linguistically malleable, fluid, and culturally determined has allowed feminist activists to shift and reshape their conceptual meaning and political implications. This has involved unpicking narratives informing rape and translate them into specific legal definitions. In British common law, the term rape (from the Latin raptus or rapere) was a property offence involving violent theft.¹¹⁶ It was not until the fifteenth century that it encompassed the ‘theft’ of a woman’s virtue; a crime committed against the father or husband of the woman.¹¹⁷ Later iterations of rape defined the act as the forced carnal knowledge of a woman by a man other than her husband. These three elements – force, lack of consent and evidence of female resistance, and penetrative sexual intercourse – have defined common understandings of rape to the present.¹¹⁸

One key element of challenging legal articulations of rape has therefore involved redefining its central meaning; most prominently, its link to the concept of ‘consent’. Until the mid-to-late twentieth century, the ability of a woman to withhold consent was dependent upon her relationship to the perpetrator.¹¹⁹ Wives were unable to withhold consent from their spouses and the status of marriage removed the criminal protection against violent and forced sex with respect to a spouse.¹²⁰ There have also been ongoing debates about whether a prostitute can be raped. The move towards criminalising marital rape, by feminist activists and scholars, thus required reconceptualising who can withhold consent.¹²¹ More recently, the focus has been on shifting the notion of consent once more towards ‘affirmative consent’ rather than implied, implicit, or passive consent.¹²² This shift expands the legal definition of rape from violent, coercive behaviour, towards non-violent, non-consensual sex, and marks an important advancement in cultural and legal understandings of rape.

5.0 Contributions

Translation is at the heart of this special issue in more ways than one. To begin with, our call for papers’ broad framing largely left it up to the individual authors to translate the concept of translation as an analytical device into their own work. The result is a collection of articles that engage with the relationship between law, gender, and translation in diverse ways. First, Rosemary Grey interrogates the translation as transfer model in the context of the United Nations-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), and the mapping of Global North gender and sexuality theorisations onto the Global South through the cross-lingual approach applied by translators in court. Grey relates the experience of Sou Sotheavy – a non-binary person – who in 2013 and 2016, gave evidence at the ECCC. Sotheavy was referred throughout the proceedings as ‘transgender’/‘transgenres’, a term that not only failed to convey Sou’s own sense of gender identity, but erased the nuance and specificity of gender identities contained within the Khmer language. Here the necessity of an approach to translation that attends to cultural context becomes deeply apparent. In place of the translingual approach employed by the tribunal, Grey argues for a transliterate approach, which illuminates, rather than obscures, the fact that there is no direct equivalent term in English or French. The need for international criminal law to confront its approach to translation and extend its capacity to recognise the rights and identities of gender diverse people is particularly pressing against the backdrop of a number of cases newly referred to international criminal courts (such as the plight of ‘hijra’, non-binary Rohingya people who have fled persecution in Myanmar).

Second, in their paper, Stu Marvel adopts a conceptual approach to translation to explore how metaphors of financialisation and efficiency circulate within the context of human fertility and reproduction. Tracing the way in which the metaphor of the ‘bank’ moves across human reproduction, Marvel explores how the iterative relationship between the materiality of the body and the translation of our embodied experience into metaphor, forms the backdrop of constructions of value within the American oocyte industry. Here the dynamics of translation work to normalise both the legal tools required to manage this largely self-regulated industry and our capacity to relate to such objects. Translations construct the boundaries of how we conceive of bodily identity at the intersection of law, medicine, and capital. Third, continuing this conceptual approach to translation as a means of interrogating the social and semantic underpinnings of legal and political orders, Brännström and Gunneflo explore the history behind the adoption of Sweden’s feminist foreign policy (FFP). Tracing the historical trajectories of two very different FFP projects in Sweden, Brännström and Gunneflo explore how feminist policies and agendas are translated and transformed as they circulate between legal orders – from the international to the transnational to the local. One project, articulated in the late 1960s by the prominent Social Democratic parliamentarian Birgitta Dahl, linked support for socialist and progressive governments and liberation movements to women’s liberation. The other, which rose to prominence in the early 1990s, marked a shift in Swedish feminist policy to a broader transnational naturalisation of market operations and wealth distribution through capitalist relations.

In the final two articles, the translation of sexual norms is explored, albeit in very different forms and contexts. In their article on how the agency of younger victims of sexual crimes is constructed by the argumentative practices of legal actors in statutory rape cases, Luisa Teresa Hedler Ferreira and Maj Grasten follow how normative translation is constitutive of the sociolegal boundaries of violence, vulnerability, and victimhood in these cases. Drawing on 17 habeas corpus cases that reached the Federal Supreme Court of Brazil in the period from 1996 to 2013, Ferreira and Grasten show how in the ambiguous legal space surrounding the interpretation of statutory rape, prevailing norms in society about childhood and moralising discourses about women’s sexuality are deployed in the construction of childhood victims. In the context of these statutory rape cases, children are placed in a legal-semantic space in which they are concurrently denied the agency that characterises adulthood and the special protection that compensates for this lack of agency in childhood protection laws – a situation the authors dub the ‘Lolita paradox’ of law. Sara Kolah Ghoutschi, Alina de Luna Aldape and Thorsten Bonacker trace similar processes of normative translation within the context of implementing internationally drafted Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) programs in Ethiopia and Kenya. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork, the contributors focus on practices of translation in and between transnational sites to examine the question of how actors from different backgrounds (eg from international programs and schools in Ethiopia and Kenya) vernacularise norms and rights related to CSE, including sexual and reproductive health. Raising the difficulties of the universal language underlying human rights approaches, they underline how a focus on researching sites of translations allows us to grasp the varieties of translation in context and how processes of change are shaped by such situated encounters between opposite and at times contradictory frames of reference.

Common across the contributions to this special issue is an analytical focus on one of the three aspects of translation – context, circulation, and change. Each contribution shows how these relate to situatedness, sites and sources, and semantic duality and dialectical dynamics in translations. In aggregate, the special issue explores translation as a unique opportunity to provide critique of legal language and representation. The contributions show how unravelling the politics of translation reveals what is rendered invisible and being silenced, and what is misrepresented, suppressed or simply unnamed in the process of meaning-making and making meaning known. This is taken further in the special issue’s concluding reflection in which Matilda Arvidsson engages the contributions and point to ways forward for feminist legal theory and critique. Drawing on Hélène Cixous’ idea of écriture feminine (‘writing in the feminine’), Arvidsson relates translation to an urgent need to interrogate understandings of ourselves in our (mode of) writing and by doing so challenging dominant systems of representation and hierarchies. Feminist legal critique is thereby itself an act of translating.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See, for instance, Piotr Blumczynski, Ubiquitous Translation (Routledge 2018); Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (Routledge 1995); Maria Tymoczko, Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (Routledge 2007). On the ‘cultural turn’, see Mary Snell-Hornby, The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? (John Benjamins Publishing 2006).

2 Talal Asad, Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason (Columbia University Press 2018); Lydia H Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity – China, 1900–1937 (Stanford University Press 1995).

3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’ in Lawrence Venuti (ed) The Translation Studies Reader (Routledge 2000) 397.

4 Luise von Flotow, ‘Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories’ (1991) 4(2) TTR: Traduction, Terminologie et Rédaction 69.

5 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Verso 2004); Lori Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphories of Translation’ (1988) 13(3) Signs 454; Claudia de Lima Costa, ‘Being Here and Writing There: Gender and the Politics of Translation in a Brazilian Landscape’ (2000) 25(3) Signs 727; Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ (1988) 14(3) Feminist Studies 575; Hala Kamal, ‘Translating Women and Gender: The Experience of Translating “The Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures” into Arabic’ (2008) 36(3-4) Women’s Studies Quarterly 254; N Rajaram and Vaishali Zararia, ‘Translating Women’s Human Rights in a Globalizing World: The Spiral Process in Reducing Gender Injustice in Baroda, India’ (2009) 9(4) Global Networks 462; Kornelia Slavova and Ann Phoenix, ‘Living in Translation: Voicing and Inscribing Women’s Lives and Practices’ (2011) 18(4) European Journal of Women’s Studies 331; Lucy Tatman, ‘Subjects Through Translation’ (2011) 18(4) European Journal of Women’s Studies 425; Millie Thayer, ‘Translations and Refusals: Resignifying Meanings as Feminist Political Practice’ (2010) 36(1) Feminist Studies 200; Linda M G Zerilli, ‘Toward a Feminist Theory of Judgment’ (2009) 34(2) Signs 295; Ingrid Palmary, ‘A Politics of Feminist Translation: Using Translation to Understand Gendered Meaning-Making in Research’ (2014) 39(3) Signs 576.

6 Zeynep Gulsah Capan, Filipe dos Reis and Maj Grasten (eds) The Politics of Translation in International Relations (Palgrave 2021); Maj Grasten, Rule of Law or Rule by Lawyers? On the Politics of Translation in Global Governance (PhD Thesis, Copenhagen Business School, 2016); Miriam Bak-McKenna, ‘Remaking the Law of Encounter: Comparative International Law as Transformative Translation’ in Zeynep Gulsah Capan, Filipe dos Reis, and Maj Grasten (eds) The Politics of Translation in International Relations (Palgrave 2021) 67; Miriam Bak-McKenna, ‘Feminism in Translation: Reframing Human Rights Law through Transnational Islamic Feminist Networks’ in Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Activism (Routledge 2020) 317.

7 Lucinda M Finley, ‘Breaking Women’s Silence in Law: The Dilemma of the Gendered Nature of Legal Reasoning’ (1989) 64(5) Notre Dame Law Review 886, 904 (emphasis added).

8 Alison Diduck and Katherine O’Donovan, ‘Feminism and Families: Plus Ça Change?’ in Alison Diduck and Katherine O’Donovan (eds) Feminist Perspectives on Family Law (Routledge-Cavendish 2006) 1, 1.

9 Elizabeth Mertz, ‘Legal Language: Pragmatics, Poetics, and Social Power’ (1994) 23(1) Annual Review of Anthropology 435, 441.

10 As above.

11 See, for instance, Deborah L Rhode, ‘Feminist Critical Theories’ (1990) 42(3) Stanford Law Review 617; Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’ (1989) 1 University of Chicago Legal Forum 139; Rosemary Hunter, ‘Deconstructing the Subjects of Feminism: The Essentialism Debate in Feminist Theory and Practice’ (1996) 6(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 135.

12 See, for instance, Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism, and Political Theory (Stanford University Press 1989); Dianne Otto, ‘International Human Rights Law: Towards Rethinking Sex/Gender Dualism’ in Margaret Davies and Vanessa E Munro (eds) The Ashgate Research Companion to Feminist Legal Theory (Ashgate Publishing 2013) 197; Dianne Otto, ‘Lost in Translation: Re-Scripting the Sexed Subjects of International Human Rights Law’ in Anne Orford (ed) International Law and its Others (Cambridge University Press 2006) 318. In this journal, see, for example, Rebecca Scott Bray, ‘Suturing The Narrative Body’ (1999) 13(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 119; Emma Cunliffe, ‘(This is Not a) Story: Using Court Records to Explore Judicial Narratives in R v Kathleen Folbigg’ (2007) 27(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 71; Elyse Methven, ‘“A Woman’s Tongue”: Representations of Gender and Swearing in Australian Legal and Media Discourse’ (2020) 46(1) Australian Feminist Law Journal 57.

13 Carol Smart, ‘Law’s Power, the Sexed Body, and Feminist Discourse’ (1990) 17(2) Journal of Law and Society 194. See also Carol Smart, Feminism and the Power of Law (Routledge 1989); Carol Smart, Law, Crime and Sexuality: Essays in Feminism (Sage 1995).

14 Ulrike Wanitzek, ‘Bulsa Marriage Law and Practice: Women as Social Actors in a Patriarchal Society’ in E Adriaan B van Rouveroy van Nieuwaal and Werner Zips (eds) Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and Power in West African Societies: Perspectives from Legal Anthropology (Lit Verlag 1998) 119.

15 See for instance, Bernard S Jackson, Semiotics and Legal Theory (Routledge and Kegan Paul 1985); Domenico Carzo and Bernard S Jackson (eds) Semiotics, Law and Social Science (Gangemi 1985); Gregory Leyh, Legal Hermeneutics: History, Theory, and Practice (University of California Press 1992); Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns (eds) The Rhetoric of Law (University of Michigan Press 1994); Peter Goodrich, Reading the Law: A Critical Introduction to Legal Method and Technique (Blackwell 1986); Peter Goodrich, Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis (Macmillan 1987).

16 Laura Nader, ‘The Anthropological Study of Law’ (1965) 67(6) American Anthropologist 3; Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People (University of Chicago Press 1985); Rosemary J Coombe, ‘The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity: Native Claims in the Cultural Appropriation Controversy’ (1993) 6(2) Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence 249.

17 Patricia J Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Harvard University Press 1991); Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (Basic Books 1987); Richard Delgado, ‘The Imperial Scholar: Reflections on a Review of Civil Rights Literature’ (1984) 132(3) University of Pennsylvania Law Review 561.

18 See Jacques Derrida, Force de Loi (Galilée 1994) 35–8; Richard Delgado, ‘Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative’ (1988) 87(8) Michigan Law Review 2411; Duncan Kennedy, ‘A Semiotics of Critique’ (2001) 22(3-4) Cardozo Law Review 1147; Mark Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commissions (Stanford University Press 2007).

19 Anthony G Amsterdam and Randy Hertz, ‘An Analysis of Closing Arguments to a Jury’ (1992) 37(1-2) New York Law School Law Review 55; Robert P Charrow and Veda R Charrow, ‘Making Legal Language Understandable: A Psycholinguistic Study of Jury Instructions’ (1979) 79(7) Columbia Law Review 1306.

20 James Boyd White, Justice as Translation: An Essay in Cultural and Legal Criticism (The University of Chicago Press 1990).

21 Clark D Cunningham, ‘The Lawyer as Translator, Representation as Text: Towards an Ethnography of Legal Discourse’ (1992) 77(6) Cornell Law Review 1298; William LF Felstiner and Austin Sarat, ‘Enactments of Power: Negotiating Reality and Responsibility in Lawyer-Client Interactions’ (1992) 77(6) Cornell Law Review 1447.

22 Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry (eds) The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local (Cambridge University Press 2007); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘The Future of the World Social Forum: The Work of Translation’ (2005) 48(2) Development 15; Ziya Umut Türem and Andrea Ballestero, ‘Regulatory Translations: Expertise and Affect in Global Legal Fields’ (2014) 21(1) Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 1.

23 Sally Engle Merry, ‘Anthropology, Law, and Transnational Processes’ (1992) 21(1) Annual Review of Anthropology 357; Sally Engle Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (University of Chicago Press 2006); Sally Engle Merry, ‘Transnational Human Rights and Local Activism: Mapping the Middle’ (2006) 108(1) American Anthropologist 38.

24 Laura A Foster, ‘Critical Cultural Translation: A Socio-Legal Framework for Regulatory Orders’ (2014) 21(1) Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 79; Kregg Hetherington, ‘Regular Soybeans: Translation and Framing in the Ontological Politics of a Coup’ (2014) 21(1) Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 55. Among International Relations scholars addressing global law issues, see Tobias Berger, Global Norms and Local Courts: Translating ‘the Rule of Law’ in Bangladesh (Oxford University Press 2017); Lisbeth Zimmermann, Global Norms with a Local Face: Rule-of-Law Promotion and Norm-Translation (Cambridge University Press 2017); Susanne Zwingel, Translating International Women’s Rights: The CEDAW Convention in Context (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).

25 See Matthew Canfield, ‘Banana Brokers: Communicative Labor, Translocal Translation, and Transnational Law’ (2019) 31(1) Public Culture 69; Tine Destrooper, ‘The Travel, Translation and Transformation of Human Rights Norms’ in Esperança Bielsa and Dionysios Kapsaskis (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Globalization (Routledge 2020) 441; Shweta Singh, ‘In between the Ulemas and Local Warlords in Afghanistan: Critical Perspectives on the “Everyday”, Norm Translation, and UNSCR 1325’ (2020) 22(4) International Feminist Journal of Politics 504; Kristina Simion, Rule of Law Intermediaries: Brokering Influence in Myanmar (Cambridge University Press 2021).

26 Jeremy Munday, ‘Translation Studies’ (2006) 14(1) The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 195, 195.

27 Zeynep Gulsah Capan, Filipe dos Reis and Maj Grasten, ‘The Politics of Translation in International Relations’ in Zeynep Gulsah Capan, Filipe dos Reis and Maj Grasten (eds) The Politics of Translation in International Relations (Palgrave 2021) 1 at 2.

28 See, for instance, Susan Gal, Julia Kowalski and Erin Moore, ‘Rethinking Translation in Feminist NGOs: Rights and Empowerment across Borders’ (2015) 22(4) Social Politics 610.

29 Rolando Vázquez, ‘Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence’ (2011) 24(1) Journal of Historical Sociology 27, 29.

30 Pinar Bilgin, ‘On the “Does Theory Travel?” Question: Traveling with Edward Said’ in Zeynep Gulsah Capan, Filipe dos Reis and Maj Grasten (eds) The Politics of Translation in International Relations (Palgrave 2021) 245.

31 Leila Brännström and Markus Gunneflo, ‘Swedish Foreign Policy Feminisms: Women, Social Democracy and Capitalism’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 207.

32 Andrew Chesterman, Memes of Translation (John Benjamins Publishing 1997); John Cunnison Catford, A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press 1965).

33 Capan and others, above note 27 at 3.

34 As above at 6.

35 Bak-McKenna, ‘Remaking the Law of Encounter: Comparative International Law as Transformative Translation’, above note 6.

36 On the ‘cultural turn’, see Mary Snell-Hornby, The Turns of Translation Studies: New Paradigms or Shifting Viewpoints? (John Benjamins Publishing 2006).

37 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Schocken Books 1968).

38 Venuti, above note 1; Maria Tymoczko, Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (Routledge 2007).

39 Teraswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (University of California Press 1992) 1 (emphasis altered).

40 Vázquez, above note 29 at 27.

41 Rosemary Grey, ‘Translating Gender Diversity In International Criminal Law: An Impossible But Necessary Goal’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 163.

42 Niranjana, above note 39.

43 Robert JC Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2003) 138.

44 Edward W Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books 1979).

45 Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (Oxford University Press 1997). See also Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Duke University Press 1993); Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (St Jerome 1997); Sabine Fenton and Paul Moon, ‘The Translation of the Treaty of Waitangi: A Case of Disempowerment’ in Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (eds) Translation and Power (University of Massachusetts Press 2002) 25.

46 See, for instance, Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Duke University Press 2018).

47 Maria Tymoczko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (St Jerome Publishing 1999).

48 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge 1994). For an overview of various ‘cultural translation’ approaches, see Anthony Pym, ‘Cultural Translation’ in Anthony Pym, Exploring Translation Theories (Routledge 2010) 143.

49 Chamberlain, above note 5 at 460.

50 Adrienne Rich, ‘Our Whole Life’, The New Republic (New York), 2 May 1970.

51 Key publications in Feminist translation studies include: Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (Routledge 1996); Luise von Flotow, Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’ (St Jerome 1997); Carol S Maier, ‘A Woman in Translation, Reflecting’ (1985) 17(1) Translation Review 4.

52 See, for instance, Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Doubleday 1970).

53 Margaret A Simons, Beauvoir and the Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (Rowman & Littlefield 1999) 62.

54 Olga Castro and Emek Ergun, ‘Translation and Feminism’ in Fruela Fernández and Jonathan Evans (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics (Routledge 2018) 125 at 133.

55 See, for instance, María Laura Spoturno, ‘On Borderlands and Translation: The Spanish Versions of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Seminal Work’ in Luise von Flotow and Hala Kamal (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Translation, Feminism and Gender (Routledge 2020) 239.

56 Castro and Ergun, above note 54 at 128.

57 See, for instance, Suzanne McCarthy, Valiant or Virtuous? Gender Bias in Bible Translation (Wipf & Stock 2019): Luise von Flotow, ‘Women, Bibles, Ideologies’ (2000) 13(1) TTR: Traduction, Terminologie et Rédaction 9.

58 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’ in Lawrence Venuti (ed) The Translation Studies Reader (Routledge 2004) 397 at 397.

59 Michel Serres, La Traduction: Hermès III [The Translation: Hermès III] (Éditions de Minuit 1974).

60 Michel Callon, ‘Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay’ (1984) 32(1 suppl) The Sociological Review 196; Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Open University Press 1987); Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press 2005).

61 Callon, above note 60.

62 Michel Callon and Bruno Latour write: ‘By translation we understand all the negotiations, intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence thanks for which an actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force’ in Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macrostructure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So’ in K Knorr-Cetina and AV Cicoural (eds) Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1981) 277 at 279.

63 Bhabha, above note 48.

64 Michel Callon, ‘Struggles and Negotiations to Define What Is Problematic and What Is Not: The Socio-logic Translation’ in Karin D Knorr, Roger Krohn and Richard Whitley (eds) The Social Process of Scientific Investigation (D Reidel Publishing 1980) 197 at 211.

65 Agustin Laó-Montes, ‘Afro-Latinidades: Bridging Blackness and Latinidad’ in Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Agustin Laó-Montes (eds) Technofuturos: Critical Interventions in Latina/o Studies (Lexington Books 2007) 117.

66 Caren Kaplan, ‘The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Practice’ in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds) Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (University of Minnesota Press 1994) 137.

67 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ (1988) 14(3) Feminist Studies 575.

68 Claudia de Lima Costa and Sonia E Alvarez, ‘Dislocating the Sign: Towards a Translocal Feminist Politics of Translation’ (2014) 39(3) Signs 557 at 557.

69 As above.

70 Haraway, above note 67 at 589.

71 As above at 579.

72 Karen Engle, ‘Female Subjects of Public International Law: Human Rights and the Exotic Other Female’ (1992) 26 New England Law Review 1509; Felice D Gaer, ‘And Never the Twain Shall Meet? The Struggle to Establish Women’s Rights as International Human Rights’ in Carol Elizabeth Lockwood and others (eds) The International Human Rights of Women: Instruments of Change (American Bar Association 1998) 4; Arvonne S Fraser, ‘Becoming Human: The Origins and Development of Women’s Human Rights’ (1999) 21(4) Human Rights Quarterly 853.

73 Engle, above note 72.

74 As above at 1509; Karen Engle, ‘International Human Rights and Feminisms: When Discourses Keep Meeting’ in Doris Buss and Ambreena Manji (eds) International Law: Modern Feminist Approaches (Hart Publishing 2005) 47; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ in Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Indiana University Press 1991) 51 at 70.

75 Ratna Kapur, ‘Un-Veiling Equality: Disciplining the “Other” Woman through Human Rights Discourse’ in Anver M Emon, Mark Ellis and Benjamin Glahn (eds) Islamic Law and International Human Rights Law (Oxford University Press 2012) 265 at 276.

76 Maila Stivens, ‘Gendering Asia after Modernity’ in Helle Rydstrøm (ed) Inequalities in Asia: Configuring, Contesting and Recognizing Women and Men (NIAS Press 2010) 1 at 25.

77 Mohanty, above note 74.

78 Arvonne Fraser describes feminism’s ‘original meaning’ as ‘the theory of and struggle for equality for women’, but the reality is that multiple strands of feminism have informed human rights theories and practices: Fraser, above note 72 at 859.

79 Damien Tissot, ‘Transnational Feminist Solidarities and the Ethics of Translation’ in Olga Castro and Emek Ergun (eds) Feminist Translation Studies (Routledge 2017) 29 at 29–30.

80 See Matilda Arvidsson, ‘Laugh All You Medusas! Hélène Cixous’ Écriture Feminine as Feminist Legal Translation, Transformation, Transgression, and Translactation in the Era of AI and the Anthropocene’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 283.

81 See, for example, Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry (eds) The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law between the Global and the Local (Cambridge University Press 2007); Marianne Valverde, Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance (Routledge 2015). See also Stu Marvel, ‘Speculative Egg Freezing and Oocyte Markets: Translating Metaphors of Body and Bank’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 187.

82 Pinar Bilgin, ‘“Contrapuntal Reading” as a Method, an Ethos, and a Metaphor for Global IR’ (2016) 18(1) International Studies Review 134. See also, Edward W Said, Culture and Imperialism (Knopf 1993).

83 Edward W Said, ‘Traveling Theory’ in Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin (eds) The Edward Said Reader (Vintage Books 2000) 195 at 197.

84 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, ‘Transitions as Translations’ in Joan W Scott, Cora Kaplan and Debra Keates (eds) Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics (Routledge 1997) 253 at 253.

85 David Delaney, ‘Beyond the Word: Law as a Thing of This World’ in Jane Holder and Carolyn Harrison (eds) Law and Geography: Current Legal Issues Volume 5 (Oxford University Press 2002) 67; Nicholas K Blomley, ‘The Properties of Space: History, Geography, and Gentrification’ (1997) 18(4) Urban Geography 286; Nicholas K Blomley, Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property (Routledge 2004); Maj Grasten, Leonard Seabrooke and Duncan Wigan, ‘Legal Affordances in Global Wealth Chains: How Platform Firms Use Legal and Spatial Scaling’ (2021) Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space <http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0308518X211057131>.

86 Robert Wai, ‘The Interlegality of Transnational Private Law’ (2008) 71(3) Law and Contemporary Problems 107; Hans Lindahl, Fault Lines of Globalization: Legal Order and the Politics of A-Legality (Oxford University Press 2013); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Law: A Map of Misreading. Toward a Postmodern Conception of Law’ (1987) 14(3) Journal of Law and Society 279.

87 Miriam Bak-McKenna and Maj Grasten, ‘Legal Borderlands in the Global Economy of Care’ (2022) Transnational Legal Theory <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20414005.2022.2081911> at 3 (emphasis in original).

88 Mark Goodale, ‘Legal Ethnography in an Era of Globalization: The Arrival of Western Human Rights Discourse to Rural Bolivia’ in June Starr and Mark Goodale (eds) Practicing Ethnography in Law: New Dialogues, Enduring Methods (Palgrave Macmillan 2002) 50 at 53.

89 See Sara Kolah Ghoutschi, Alina de Luna Aldape and Thorsten Bonacker, ‘Translating Sexuality Education in Ethiopia and Kenya: A Multi-Sited Approach’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 251.

90 Kathy Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders (Duke University Press 2007); Kathy Davis and Mary Evans (eds) Transatlantic Conversations: Feminism as Travelling Theory (Ashgate 2011); Lata Mani, ‘Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception’ (1990) 35 Feminist Review 24; Mary E John, Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory, and Postcolonial Histories (University of California Press 1996); Zhongli Yu, Translating Feminism in China: Gender, Sexuality and Censorship (Routledge 2015); Min Dongchao, Translation and Travelling Theory: Feminist Theory and Praxis in China (Routledge 2017); Min Dongchao, ‘Toward an Alternative Traveling Theory’ (2014) 39(3) Signs 584.

91 Millie Thayer, Making Transnational Feminism: Rural Women, NGO Activists, and Northern Donors in Brazil (Routledge 2009).

92 Maud Anne Bracke, ‘Our Bodies, Ourselves: The Transnational Connections of 1970s Italian and Roman Feminism’ (2015) 50(3) Journal of Contemporary History 560 at 563.

93 See, for example, Nicole Doerr, ‘Social Movements and Translation’ in Zeynep Gulsah Capan, Filipe dos Reis and Maj Grasten (eds) The Politics of Translation in International Relations (Palgrave 2021) 151; Claudia de Lima Costa, ’Lost (and Found?) in Translation: Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue’ (2006) 4(1-2) Latino Studies 62.

94 Thayer, above note 5; Uma Narayan, Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism (Routledge 1997).

95 Maud Anne Bracke and others, ‘Reconsidering Feminism since 1945 through Encounter, Translation, and Resignification: Toward a Historical Narrative’ in Maud Anne Bracke and others (eds) Translating Feminism: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Text, Place and Agency (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) 1 at 17.

96 Kathy Davis, ‘Feminist Body/Politics as World Traveler: Translating Our Bodies, Ourselves’ (2002) 9(3) European Journal of Women’s Studies 223 at 225.

97 Sonia E Alvarez and others (eds) Translocalities/Translocalidades: Feminist Politics of Translation in the Latin/a Américas (Duke University Press 2014).

98 Davis, ‘Feminist Body/Politics as World Traveler: Translating Our Bodies, Ourselves’, above note 96.

99 Gavin Sullivan, ‘Transnational Legal Assemblages and Global Security Law: Topologies and Temporalities of the List’ (2014) 5(1) Transnational Legal Theory 81; Peer Zumbansen, ‘Transnational Law as Socio-Legal Theory and Critique: Prospects for “Law and Society” in a Divided World’ (2019) 67(3) Buffalo Law Review 909.

100 Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Duke University Press 2003); Mireille Kingma, Nurses on the Move: Migration and the Global Health Care Economy (Cornell University Press 2006).

101 Bak-McKenna and Grasten, above note 87.

102 Ursula Mense-Petermann, ‘Theorizing Transnational Labour Markets: A Research Heuristic Based on the New Economic Sociology’ (2020) 20(3) Global Networks 410 at 411.

103 Kellynn Wee, Charmian Goh, and Brenda SA Yeoh, ‘Translating People and Policy: The Role of Maid Agents in Brokering between Employers and Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore’s Migration Industry’ (2020) 54(4) International Migration Review 992.

104 White, above note 20 at xvii (emphasis added).

105 Vázquez, above note 29 at 27.

106 See, for example, Yangsheng Guo, ‘The Politics of Time in Early Chinese Translation of Western Modernity’ (2020) 28(5) Perspectives 674.

107 Türem and Ballestere, above note 22 at 23.

108 Vázquez, above note 29 at 27.

109 See above.

110 Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Re-belle et infidel: La traduction comme pratique de réécriture au féminin/ The Body Bilingual: Translation as a Rewriting in the Feminine (Women’s Press 1991).

111 Callon, above note 60.

112 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton University Press 2015). See also Jacques Derrida, ‘Différance’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press 1982) 3.

113 For example, Reinhart Koselleck traces the conceptual history of ‘revolution’ which ‘can conveniently be defined as a flexible “general concept,” meeting worldwide with a certain initial comprehension, but which in a more precise sense fluctuates enormously from country to country and from one political camp to another’: Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Columbia University Press (2004) 40 (emphasis added).

114 See Luisa Teresa Hedler Ferreira and Maj Grasten, ‘Law’s Lolita Paradox: Translating “Childhood” in Statutory Rape Jurisprudence’ (2021) 47(2) Australian Feminist Law Journal 229.

115 Sabine Sielke, ‘The Politics of the Strong Trope: Rape and the Feminist Debate in the United States’ (2004) 49(3) Amerikastudien/ American Studies 367; Trine Rogg Korsvik, Politicizing Rape and Pornography: 1970s Feminist Movements in France and Norway (Palgrave Macmillan 2021).

116 Estelle B Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard University Press 2013) 4.

117 As above.

118 See Susan Ehrlich, Diana Eades and Janet Ainsworth (eds) Discursive Constructions of Consent in the Legal Process (Oxford University Press 2016); Susan Ehrlich, Representing Rape: Language and Sexual Consent (Routledge 2001).

119 Freedman, as above at 4.

120 As above.

121 See Jill Elaine Hasday, ‘Contest and Consent: A Legal History of Marital Rape’ (2000) 88(5) California Law Review 1373; Melanie Randall and Vasanthi Venkatesh, ‘Criminalizing Sexual Violence against Women in Intimate Relationships: State Obligations under Human Rights Law’ (2015) 109 AJIL Unbound 189.

122 Scott A Anderson, ‘Conceptualizing Rape as Coerced Sex’ (2016) 127 Ethics 50.