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ABSTRACT
This article looks at the role played by emotions and affect in activist translation, that is, translation understood as a tool for political change, by analyzing the Italian queer transfeminist group ideadestroyingmuros. Translation is conceived by this collective as a bodily act, a transformation of oneself in the act of migrating, as a way for, in the words of the collective, ‘redeeming life,’ that is, improving living conditions. This transformation, for ideadestroyingmuros and other queer transfeminist groups, can indeed stem from the creation of more affective, supportive and cooperative conditions of living. The article will draw on the concepts of emotion and affect, as theorised by some scholars who dealt with them. Emotion and affect, with their emphasis on relationality and on the capacity to create action and to be affected by action, can demonstrate how translation impacts on translators, and how sociopolitical studies of translation can benefit from a view of ideological positioning as the outcome of a series of intricate emotional and affective journeys.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. A seminal work on queer theory is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990).
2. The predominant languages used in the website seem to be, however, Spanish and Italian.
3. Paul Preciado is a scholar from Spain who worked at the Sorbonne University in France.
4. Given the popularity of Paul Preciado in Italy, this translation has been recently published by publisher Fandango (Preciado 2018).
5. The website of Ideadestroyingmuros is http://www.ideadestroyingmuros.info All the art projects and installations descriptions mentioned in this article are found on the website under various links.
6. I conducted a skype interview with ideadestroyingmuros on the 25 November 2016 and another interview via WhatsApp on 25 July 2018. I met the collective in Rome for the first time in May 2015, during Genderotica festival, where they presented their theatrical piece Borrador Battonz.
7. The number of pages is not present in the textual material available on the website and thus is not reported when quoting from these online pages. The quote is present in the website in English, Italian, Spanish and French.
8. This is the author’s translation of the text from Italian into English. When the text quoted from the website is in English then this won’t be stated in a footnote.
9. This is the author’s translation of the text from Spanish into English.
10. Some members of the collective are originally from the North East of Italy and they studied at the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Venice.
11. In Spain the post-porn movement is very strong and is best represented by post-porn performer Diana Torres. In Citation2001 Torres wrote a book entitled Pornoterorismo, in which she explains how she performs sexual practices not represented in mainstream porn, in order to shake up the audience and make it feel the violence and terror inflicted on bodies and desires by the hetero-patriarchal system.
12. See Laboratorio Smaschieramenti. https://smaschieramenti.noblogs.org/.
13. See SomMovimento NazioAnale. https://sommovimentonazioanale.noblogs.org/.
14. See Consultoria Transfemminista Queer. https://consultoriaqueerbologna.noblogs.org/.
15. The transfeminist movement in France dates its genealogy back to the Zoo, the first French queer group, established in 1996, which ‘helped raise feminist consciousness for many trans people doing trans politics.’ (Espineira and Bourcier Citation2016, 86).
16. Vicarious trauma can be understood as the absorbing of another person’s trauma. Interpreting studies have shown that language interpreters very often experience symptoms of burnout as a result of their exposure to traumatic information (Lai, Heydon and Mulayim Citation2015).
17. Studies which have applied Bourdieu’s theories to translation have been so numerous in the last years to coin the term ‘sociological turn in translation studies’ (Angelelli Citation2014).
18. The Shakirail is located in Paris XVIII.
19. Here there is a reference to the forced diaspora toward Italy, after the Second World War, of Italians who lived in the areas of Istria, Quarnaro and Dalmazia (belonging to the territory of former Yugoslavia).
20. This is the author’s translation into English from Italian.
21. Although the focus of the present article is more on the self-transformation of translators/ interpreters, we can say that their work has also had an impact on the territory, by modifying the space that the group occupied while doing their projects, and by giving birth to affective networks that continued after the projects ended. As an example, the pirogue built through the project Radici nel mare has been taken around Italy by other associations as part of events aimed at contrasting increasing racism in this country, and the anti-immigration politics of the current Italian government.
22. The idea that translation is not an intervention of suturing gaps between monolithic and separate languages and cultures is also found in the textual project by ideadestroyingmuros entitled Geographies intermittentes, in which the collective defines translation as a challenge to the system of fences between languages.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Michela Baldo
Michela Baldo is an honorary fellow in Translation Studies at the University of Hull and holds a PhD in translation Studies from the University of Manchester. Her past research revolves around the written and audio-visual translation into Italian of Italian-Canadian works, and she is the author of Italian-Canadian Narratives of Return: Analysing Cultural Translation in Diasporic Writing (forthcoming 2019). More recently she has been investigating queer drag performances in Italy and the role of translation in Italian queer feminist activism. On this topic she has published articles and coedited a book, Il re Nudo. Per un archivio drag king in Italia (2014).