'Womanhandling' the text: Feminism, rewriting, and translation (Carol Maier, Suzanne Jill Levine, Amanda Powell, Electa Arenal)

In examining the assumptions underlying traditional disciplines of scholarship, the feminist critique has always been interdisciplinary in nature and in practice. Recently, translation studies has undertaken a re-examination of many received cultural and literary notions, including the supposed neutrality under which translations are produced and received. It has focused on the manipulations to which literature is subjected and has gone so far as to place translations in the broader category of rewritings, analyzing the personal, cultural, social, economic, and commercial contexts that act as determinants of any act of translation.; A growing number of translators whose work is touched by a commitment to feminist politics have entered the interdisciplinary fields of both translation and feminist studies. The union of translation studies and feminist criticism is a natural and logical next step.; New questions about the many ways the variable of gender comes into play are being added to the questions that translation theorists have long asked about the constraints that bear upon a text as it is carried between languages, cultures, and times. For feminists working as translators, questions about censoring in the name of feminism stand alongside those about the legitimacy of supplementing, subverting, and appropriating a source text. The lure of resistive translation is both felt and self-critically examined. This dissertation uses case studies of translations by women who have specifically addressed the issue of feminist translations in their critical work. After an introduction which surveys the theoretical writings that have addressed this intersection of feminism and translation studies, it goes on to explore the work of Carol Maier on Octavio Armand and Ana Castillo; Suzanne Jill Levine on Guillermo Cabrera Infante; and Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell in their translations and in their critical writings and commentaries on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz's La respuesta.; This dissertation contributes to the growing body of feminist theory and translation studies by attempting to define the broad spectrum of feminist translation. Ultimately, by examining individual translators' politics or "poetics" vis-a-vis their "poetry," it shows where and how these two fields intersect.