Gender springtime in Paris: A twenty-first-century tale of seasons

Abstract

From its founding, women's and gender studies developed along a transatlantic epistemological and geopolitical axis. An interdisciplinary field, it fostered difficult conversations among disciplines that had each developed its own conceptual language. Women's and gender studies is thus centrally concerned with crossing(s), whether crossing(s) functions as a political goal, a meta-metaphor for the field's variegated theoretical endeavor, or as the name of a multifaceted epistemological problem. This essay focuses on the problem of translation as a form and act of crossing in the geopolitical context of globalization. It asks whether translation, a neohumanist practice of transnational exchange premised on the irreducibility of idioms and the hospitality to differences, can withstand the homogenizing pull of globalization. And it asks what the collapse of differences might do to an intellectual, political, and social field whose very raison d'être has been and continues to be the excavation of unrecognized or unwanted differences and the promotion of plurality.