The Shadow Heroes and Me

I have very exciting news for 2019!

In late 2018 I was emailed by Gitanjali Patel who is co-founder of Shadow Heroes.

I first heard about Shadow Heroes at International Translation Day 2017, which is where Gitanjali heard about my research as well (it pays to go to International Translation Day!).

Shadow Heroes is a series of creative workshops for secondary school and university students with three main aims:

1. To use translation to explore and broaden awareness of implicit bias(es)

2. To transform the way language and language-learning is seen and understood

3. To demonstrate the political power of translation as a tool for social inclusion

http://www.shadowheroes.org/about/

She asked me if I would like to design a workshop and I jumped at the chance!

All the workshops in the Shadow Heroes series seek to develop the skills students need to become confident and critical thinkers anywhere in the world. Each workshop is taught by a leading translator in the field and offers a guided exploration of translation in different contexts, interrogating social and ethical situations, questioning assumptions, addressing and analysing biases.

http://www.shadowheroes.org/workshops2/

Why wouldn't I want to be involved with this? My PhD research is all about questioning assumptions - the things we think we know about gender and writing.

The last thing I looked at in my thesis was non-binary identity and I’m still really interested in this and it’s what I decided to explore in the workshop:

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson is written by a first-person narrator who never has a sex or a gender. Many critics have tried to guess the sex of the narrator - why do they try to guess? Why is it important for society to label people? What textual clues do readers use to label the narrator as a man or a woman, heterosexual or homosexual? In order to guess you have to cling to gender stereotypes and this workshop would try to break apart these stereotypes.

The text has been translated into many languages with grammatical gender and we would look at what the many translators have done to remove gender from languages which use it all the time – if the translator chooses a gender for the narrator what does this do to the text? The translator has the power to silence the queerness of the text or to celebrate it. The narrator of Written on the Body is a translator and this brings up questions about what one does when one translates a text that is trans – the translator is re-writing the text and the body it narrates and I will go into more detail on how and why translation is a re-writing of a text with many lives.

Genderless novels written in French do exist and these bring up different problems for translation into English – what pronouns do you use? How do you get around using ‘he’ or ‘she’?

The aim of the workshop would be to think about the importance of seeing queerness in a text and why this is so important for translation.

This is the blurb for my workshop:

Translating queerness Led by translator Emily Rose

Texts whose narrators have no gender are queer. Translators have the power to silence the queerness of a text or to celebrate it. What textual clues do readers use to label genderless narrators as men or women, heterosexual or homosexual? This workshop challenges the tendency to cling to gender stereotypes and demonstrates the importance of celebrating queerness in texts through examples of experimental translation.

http://www.shadowheroes.org/workshops2/

I'm very proud to be involved with Shadow Heroes and I can't wait to properly start work on designing my workshop!