Butler Traveling East: On Practices of Reading and Translating

Abstract

Theories travel, and their destinations matter. In this article, I seek to understand how theories enter different circumstances, what facilitates or obstructs their mobility, and the context in which they land. I consider how Judith Butler’s theories traveled to the East of Europe, particularly to Serbia and the Balkans. The article proceeds diachronically, from the mid-1980s to today, considering the era of wars and the breakup of Yugoslavia, the transitional 2000s, and the consciously postsocialist 2010s. This trajectory appears in the background of the practices of reading and translating Butler’s works, situating post-Yugoslavs in the wider context of Eastern Europe. The way we incorporated Butler into our knowledge production about ourselves is presented as a living archive of particular feminist quests: a search for language; a search for an identity; and finally, a search for a political position.