070058 SE Research Seminar - Translating Feminisms. Transnational Dynamics of Historical Movements. (2022S)

Translation as a practice is central to many social and political movements and yet often remains largely invisible - both in time and in historical retrospect. This has to do both with the logic of translation, which is considered successful when it is not felt, and with the logic of movements, which are generally considered particularly authentic when they emerged 'on the ground'. However, an exemplary examination of women's movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, which serve as case studies in this course, shows that translations of canonised texts, but also multilingual communication, play a simultaneously mobilising and stabilising role in a wide variety of meetings and activities in transnational space. In this course, we will examine practices of translation between women's movements, the transfer of concepts and the changes that both texts and concepts undergo on their way into another language, into another political space.
The course takes its starting point from transfers between women's movements in the transatlantic space, as they have taken place from the mid-19th century to the present. The choice of concrete projects will be coordinated with the interests of the participants and the languages available in the group.
Discussion, curiosity about the unexpected and joint empirical and theoretical work should characterise the course.