Looking for Feminist Translators. Translators and the Creation of a Feminist Genealogy of Theories and Practices


Abstract


Translation has been a central tool for widening the reception of feminist theories and practices around the world from one historical/social/political context to another. Local feminisms, along with feminist theories and practices originated in one context, have been re-contextualized and reshaped in totally different situations, acquiring new nuances through translations and translators’ choices and agency. My article starts from the premise that it is through translations that feminist ideas born in the United States have been shared, because of a collaborative network among feminists, with Italian collectives, intellectuals and scholars. From these exchanges ‘translated’ feminist practices have arisen within the Italian collectives in the ‘70s and ‘80s. My intention is to offer a diachronic perspective on the translation of feminist texts into the Italian context from the ‘70s to 2020s, focusing on a number of examples of ‘canonical’ feminist theory. This article is a first result of a research on Italian feminist translators’ archives intended to retrace the translators’ names and their role in the transmission of feminist theories and practices in the Italian context. This implies considering translators as active agents of cultural change. Looking at materials preserved in different libraries and archives in Italy, my aim is to delineate a genealogy of feminist translators and to outline a corpus of texts that have been translated from English into Italian and that have had a crucial role in the transmission of feminist ideas and politics. This article presents a preliminary result of analysis.

Keywords: feminist translation; translators’ archives; feminist translators; collaborative translation; feminist activism

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