ABSTRACT
Godard returns to her preoccupation with feminist discourse in this important essay that examines the overlapping systems of gender and translation as relational, both functioning within specific economies of exchange, and formulates the possibility of a feminist theory of translation as combinatory. Reading “with” Irigaray’s critique of the phallocentric systems of exchange of signs (that produce gender and translation as metaphors of the same), Godard embraces Irigaray’s vision of an alternative economy of signification, premised on excess, abundance, proximity, and difference. Godard’s move from metaphor to metonymy “liberates” feminist translation from the “solid” rule of selection and substitution (“translating for the signified”) to the “fluid” flows of contiguity and combination (“translating for the signifier”). In the concluding section of the essay, she discusses the manipulation of feminist texts by Irigaray and Cixous as they are translated from one language system to another.
