Duke University Press Log

Call for Papers: Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Translation Issue

The Translation Issue

Guest Editors: David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta

Special Issue on Translating Transgender

Submissions of 4000-9000 words (in any language). Due March 1, 2015 for publication in Spring 2016

Few primary and secondary texts about transgender lives and ideas have been translated from language to language in any formal way over the centuries. Meanwhile, transgender, gender variant, and gender non-confirming people have often been exiles, translators, language mediators, and multilinguals in greater numbers and intensities historically than their cisgender counterparts have. This kind of positionality among languages has become a generative, yet often precarious aspect of trans* embodiment. Nonetheless, the discourses of transgender studies (as in the neighboring fields of LGBT / queer studies) continue to be more Anglophone, more monolingual, and less translated than they historically ought to be, given how the subjects that produced those discourses have often been prototypes of transnational and translingual border-crossing. This paradox continues to constrain disciplinary and conceptual agendas around sexuality and gender a great deal more than in other fields that have enjoyed consistent state and institutional support as well as access to international distribution pathways. This is an important problem for transgender studies in the coming decades because an Anglophone disciplinary and discursive disposition will continue to lead policy-makers, public intellectuals, and academics to fall back on ethnocentric and monolingual frameworks and resources. It perpetuates a hierarchical conceptual economy, with Anglophone and West European linguacultures at the top and trans and queer vernaculars in other languages either at the bottom of the epistemic order, or sequestered into localist, ethnicized, or neo-Orientalist fetish. If not profoundly transformed, how will this discursive hierarchization impact the multi-directional traffic in trans knowledge and ideas in years ahead? This issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly calls for multilingual and translational critique. This may take the form of:

• Essays offering a metacriticism of the field, its terms, and its methodologies from a multilingual point of view
• Essays offering a theoretical problematization of national languages and transnational lingua francae as such from a trans perspective
• Essays exploring the idea of a trans* lingua franca beyond Anglocentricity
• Trans-oriented research that often gets elided precisely because of rhetorical Anglocentricity or methodological monolingualism
• Essays critiquing the relationship between travel and multilingualism in trans* contexts
• Ethnographic studies of multilingual transgender spaces and communities
• Ethnographic studies of medical, legal, penal, educational contexts in which transgender positionality or existence are negotiated translingually
• Reflections on the craft and practice of translation
• Studies on how Anglocentricity in transgender epistemology perpetuates itself—institutionally, methodologically, politically
• Essays exploring how language normativity intersects with racial, ethnic, civic, sexual, erotic, socio-economic normativity in transgender contexts
• Studies that model a “multilingual transgender studies” or a multilingual trans-futurity more broadly
• Case studies on how language frontiers shape the planetary landscape of transgender discourse
• Reflections on the process of translating texts dealing with transgender and gender variance
• Essays on what transgender methodology in translation theory or practice might look like
• Essays exploring what working interpreters and translators (literary, poetic, technical, diplomatic) may reveal about transgender epistemology
• Historical studies linking multilingual, code-switching, and translingual practice with transgender embodiment
• Historical studies linking the genealogy of monolingualism with various kinds of gender normativity

Initial submissions may be in any language and will be peer-reviewed accordingly. Duke University Press requires publication in English, and we will commission translations of accepted submissions in the latter process of review. Accepted submissions will be published in the original language on TSQ’s Web site. Please send a complete manuscript by March 1, 2015 to tsqjournal[at]gmail[dot]com along with a short abstract and brief bio including name and any institutional affiliation. The expected length for scholarly articles is 4000 to 9000 words, and 1000 to 2000 words for shorter works. All manuscripts should be prepared for anonymous peer review. For articles engaging in scholarly citation, please use the Chicago author-date citation style. Any questions should be addressed to dgl[at]email[dot]arizona[dot]edu.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is co-edited by Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker, and published by Duke University Press, with editorial offices at the University of Arizona’s Institute for LGBT Studies. TSQ aims to be the journal of record for the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies and to promote the widest possible range of perspectives on transgender phenomena broadly defined. Every issue of TSQ is a specially themed issue that also contains regularly recurring features such as reviews, interviews, and opinion pieces. To learn more about the journal and see calls for papers for other issues, visit http://lgbt.arizona.edu/tsq-main. For information about subscriptions, visit http://www.dukeupress.edu/TSQ.

Call for Papers: The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence

The Journal of Middle East Women's Studies invites feminist scholars working in any discipline or interdisciplinary area in the interpretive social sciences and humanities to submit area-specific manuscripts on any topic related to the theme of "The Gender and Sexuality of Militarization, War and Violence."

Manuscripts may address any historical period related to any part of the region. Manuscripts are expected to substantiate a thesis based on original scholarship grounded in primary sources (literary, visual, archival, textual, ethnographic, artistic, legal, and so on) and to engage with relevant transnational gender and sexuality scholarship. The highest quality manuscripts will be published as articles in a JMEWS themed issue within approximately a year of submission. Submission guidelines may be found at www.jmews.org 

Manuscripts are due on or before 15 June 2015 to our online submission system here.

Questions may be directed to jmews[at]dukeupress[dot]edu.

Celebrate Mardi Gras with our Journals

Maybe Mardi Gras isn't celebrated in your city, but who says you can't get into the spirit? Duke University Press has published many journal articles on Mardi Gras, and we've made these two freely available for the holiday—so don your beads and mask, cut a slice of king cake, and dive into these articles.*

"Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras: English Literature, American Cultural Capital, and the Reformation of New Orleans Carnival" by Richard Rambuss in boundary 2 (27:2)

Read an excerpt:

Milton may be far from mind when one now thinks of or, better, experiences what is advertised as the world's greatest free party. Yet, as we have begun to consider, a rather detailed, even learned usage of literature—particularly English Renaissance and classical literature—played a structuring role in Comus's endeavor to appropriate and dignify the residual Latin traditions of Carnival. Propounding a caste status for its founders that was then more an aspiration than an actuality, a commemorative booklet issue by the Mistick Krewe in 1947 thus explains that 'as the members of Comus were socially important this meant that their celebration of Mardi Gras was orderly, educational and cultural.' (pages 49-50)

For more of "Spenser and Milton at Mardi Gras," click here.

 

"Mardi Gras Tourism and the Construction of Sydney as an International Gay and Lesbian City" by Kevin Markwell in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (8:1-2)

Read an excerpt:

Mardi Gras attracts many domestic and international tourists to Sydney during February, and their numbers peak just prior to the parade and party at the end of the festival. The festival, parade, and party are major events on Australia’s tourism calendar. There is a strong representation from countries such as the United States, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, as well as increasing numbers of tourists from Southeast Asia, and Mardi Gras packages are advertised in the gay and lesbian press in European and North American countries. While approximately 15 percent of the eighty events at the festival are free, many of the most popular ones require tickets... Full participation in the festival is an expensive undertaking, especially when coupled with the costs of outfits; body treatments such as waxing, tanning, gym training, hairstyling, and party drugs; and, for tourists, accommodation and transportation costs. Many people are willing, however, to spend large sums because Mardi Gras becomes for them the major yearly event that helps define their gay or lesbian identity. (page 84)

For more of "Mardi Gras Tourism," click here.

 

Don't forget to check out Matt Sakakeeny's new book Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans while you're on your Mardi Gras kick!

 

*If you're in a location that really celebrates Mardi Gras, don't be concerned. You can still read these articles through the end of the month. Recover from your festivities and then get to reading.

Remembering Robert Bellah at the AAR

The 2013 Meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in Baltimore will be hosting a special session in memory of Robert Bellah, who died on July 30. “Remembering Robert Bellah (1927-2013)” will join students, distinguished colleagues, and friends of Bellah to share memories of his life and work. If you plan on attending, this session will take place on Sunday, November 24 from 5:00-6:30 p.m.

Robert N. Bellah was the Elliott Professor of Sociology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He coauthored The Good Society and Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and has sold more than 500,000 copies. His other books include Imagining Japan, The Broken Covenant,and Beyond Belief. In 2000 President Clinton awarded Bellah the National Humanities Medal.

Perhaps best known for these bestselling books, Bellah was a truly visionary leader in the social study of religion. For more than four decades, he examined the role of religion in modern and premodern societies, attempting to discern how religious meaning is formed and how it shapes ethical and political practices. Duke University Press’s The Robert Bellah Reader (2006) brings together twenty-eight of Bellah’s seminal essays. Through critical and constructive inquiry, this Reader probes many of our deepest social and cultural quandaries, quandaries that put modernity itself, with all its immense achievements, at mortal risk. Through the practical self-understanding such inquiry spurs, Bellah shows how we may share responsibility for the world we have made and seek to heal it.

Professor Steven M. Tipton, co-editor of this work and one of the panelists for the AAR session, teaches sociology and religion at Emory University and its Candler School of Theology, where he is a Professor and Director of the Graduate Division of Religion. In a recent piece about Bellah’s legacy, Tipton explains that “Bellah illuminates the often implicit moral visions we hold and contest in the modern world . . . . Deep is the well of the past, and from it Robert Bellah drew living water. Bright and clear and encompassing, the flow of his work will go on through ever-widening waves of resonance in our thinking and arguing over religion.”

We’re excited that the AAR session and its distinguished panelists will help pay tribute to Bellah’s outstanding intellectual contributions. If you cannot attend, please consider picking up a copy of the Reader in order to enjoy Bellah’s legacy.

Farewell to Robert Bellah

We are sad to learn of the death this week of sociologist Robert N. Bellah. He was 86. We were proud to publish The Robert Bellah Reader in 2006. Perhaps best known for his coauthored bestselling books Habits of the Heart (1985) and The Good Society (1992), Bellah was a truly visionary leader in the social study of religion. For more than four decades, he examined the role of religion in modern and premodern societies, attempting to discern how religious meaning is formed and how it shapes ethical and political practices.

Bellah taught at the University of California, Berkeley, for more than thirty years. The Berkleyan ran an interview with him when we published The Robert Bellah Reader. An active commenter on politics and religion, he was both hopeful and cautious about the future: "I believe very much in the unity of human beings, that we are all part of a common project, and that we need all the resources we can get, because we're faced with challenges in the modern world that threaten our extinction as a species. My effort is to go all the way back to the Paleolithic and look at how human beings have tried to understand the world. That's my broadest definition of religion - it's the way human beings have tried to understand the world."

Read additonal appreciations of Bellah in Christianity Today, First Things, and Black, White, and Gray.

Remembering Dicle Koğacioğlu

"The Other Effect,” the most recent issue of differences, is a tribute to the late scholar, Dicle Koğacioğlu, and her work.  The issue includes articles by Timothy Bewes, Lila Abu-Lughod, Ayse Parla, Leti Volpp, Z. Umut Turem, Elizabeth Polvinelli, and Koğacioğlu herself, with important new article on honor crimes, focused upon what she called the making of “the custom.”

Leti Volpp, Professor at the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, reflects on Koğacioğlu’s life and work:

The legal sociologist Dicle Koğacioğlu was a brilliant scholar and feminist activist whose work on power, modernity, and bureaucratic forms of authority influenced many during her brief life.   Her work was deeply original, passionate, and critical, and spoke simultaneously to particular questions within Turkey and to broad theoretical debates.  A primary thread of Koğacioğlu’s writing, examined in complex contexts ranging from honor crimes, constitutional courts, to access to justice, was how public discourse on tradition always creates an “other.”  Her much cited article, “The Tradition Effect: Framing Honor Crimes in Turkey,” differences (2004), responded to a perceived increase in documentation of honor killings in Turkey by international organizations and nongovernmental organizations to show how these crimes are produced in relation to institutional practices and discourses of modern government.  Koğacioğlu argued that these institutions -- the Turkish state, Islamic parties, European Union, and the international media -- imagined as modern and standing outside of or in opposition to tradition, see tradition as an object of technical intervention, delimiting the universe of meaning through which these crimes can be understood, and removing attention from the way in which these very institutions participate in perpetuating these crimes.  Her article “Progress, Unity, and Democracy: Dissolving Political Parties in Turkey” in Law and Society (2004) examined the dissolution of Islamic and pro-Kurdish political parties by the Turkish Constitutional Court, assigned the task of dissolving anti-constitutional political parties.  Here Koğacioğlu showed that an arbitrary boundary between political and cultural domains was drawn by the Court, a boundary then used by the Court in the service of justifying its decision, as what may be harmless when an issue is cultural (use of the headscarf, the Kurdish language) may turn into a political symbol threatening the basis of the united, democratic, and progressive nation-state.   Koğacioğlu also published several works about access to justice in Turkey, looking in particular at interactions between citizens and legal authorities in the courthouse, the axes of power (class, gender) that operate in the legal system, as well as the negotiations by the disempowered who strategize within it.  At the time of her death, she was conducting research on Turkey’s justice system which promised to redefine the parameters of law and society scholarship in Turkey.   Her death is a stunning loss to feminist theory, to sociolegal scholarship, and to her many friends.

Laura L. Adams Wins CESS Book Award

Congratulations to Laura L. Adams, author of The Spectacular State: Culture and National Identity in Uzbekistan for winning this year's Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) Book Award. Each year the CESS Book Award is presented to the author of the research monograph, published in the preceding two years, that represents the most important contribution to Central Eurasian studies, or that holds the greatest potential for furthering scholarship on the Central Eurasian region.

Paul Gootenberg Discusses Inequality in Latin America

Check out the newest author interview video from Duke Press! Paul Gootenberg, co-editor of Indelible Inequalities in Latin America: Insights from History, Politics, and Culture (2010), sits down with Amanda E. Sharp, our Publicity & Marketing Assistant, to answer questions about his new, edited collection. Building on sociologist Charles Tilly's relational framework for understanding enduring inequalities, the contributors explore the processes that have combined to produce and reproduce inequalities in Latin America.

 

Dorceta E. Taylor Wins Outstanding Publication Award

Congratulations to Dorceta E. Taylor, author of The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change, for winning the Outstanding Publication Award from the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. The Outstanding Publication Award is given in alternate years for publications of special noteworthiness in the field of environmental sociology.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss Wins the Griffiths Research Award

Congratulations to Cynthia Miller-Idriss, author of Blood and Culture: Youth, Right-Wing Extremism, and National Belonging in Contemporary Germany. Her book just won the 2010 Griffiths Research Award. The award recognizes NYU Steinhardt School faculty members for their research in advancing their fields of knowledge and professional practice.