ABSTRACT
This essay intends to problematizse the academic definition of translation as ‘feminist’, call into question its theoretical and political basis, and address contemporary academic feminism’s ‘eroded historical vision’. By looking at documents produced in the 1970s by the women’s movement in the West, the essay illustrates the discrepancy between feminist translation as conceived of by activists, and ‘feminist translation’ as theorized in the academia from the 1980s to this day. Feminist translation in the 1970s was characterizsed by the features of ‘authenticity’, anti-professionalism, and collective authorship (in opposition to those later attributed to ‘feminist translation’ in the academia): in a pre-internet era, it was the sparkle for action and transnational organization, a conscious form of political engagement in the women’s struggle for social change. This analysis reveals the anachronisms and distortions perpetuated by the historiographical narrative that reads the complexity of 1960s and 1970s feminism through the lens of ‘sexual difference’, a theory which that gained prominence only in the following decade. In the 1980s, when mass movement action declined, a version of feminism, mediated by the so-called ‘French theory’, entered the academia and the field of Ttranslation Sstudies under the guise of réécriture au féminin’ and a celebration of difference (today revised as a celebration of diversity). As attested by a wealth of documents, radical feminism’s concept of sisterhood across borders and languages in the 1970s, on the contrary, was based not on essentialism but on class consciousness.
