ABSTRACT
Following Joan Scott’s proposition, expressed in the epigraph, to question the underlying epistemes and analytic schemes of our historical narratives of women’s pasts, this chapter explores the common representations and symbolic functions of translation in the feminist historiography of today’s feminist movement in Turkey. The chapter specifically focuses on the history of the Women’s Circle, a feminist translation collective whose establishment in 1983 is often accredited as the first and most decisive step in the emergence of Turkey’s contemporary feminist politics. I examine the strategic ways in which this translation group is deployed tactfully in the dominant “origin story” of local feminism to claim an “authentic” identity for the movement. I argue that since this story is constructed within the discursive confines of the hegemonic binary of “original versus translation,” the authenticity of the local feminist movement can only be acknowledged by downplaying the momentous translational work performed by the collective in the beginning stages of an organized feminist movement.
