The Translating Subject

The Translating Subject explores how queer women writers use multilingual strategies to create intimacy with the unknown and enable ethical engagement across social, cultural, and linguistic differences. My book sheds new light on three of North America’s most important experimental writers: Erín Moure, Kathy Acker, and Nicole Brossard. While each writer has received much critical recognition, to date the multilingual aesthetic each introduces in their late corpuses remains one of the most striking yet under-theorized aspects of their respective bodies of work. This movement in women’s writing and especially queer women’s writing since the 1960s has not been fully discussed. These authors do not use multilingual writing as an extension of their own bilingualism as in some postcolonial literatures but as an aesthetic strategy. The authors use vulnerable languages to invoke specific histories of domination and resistance and challenge the discourse of neutrality around lingua francas. Through close readings of Moure’s multilingual texts, Acker’s overlooked propensity to write in Farsi, and Brossard’s insistence on the importance of writing in languages that are not one’s own, my work demonstrates the ways multilingual writing challenges monolingual norms and what they uphold: limiting concepts of subjectivity, community, and identity. Drawing on detailed archival research I consider why this writing came from these bodies at the time it did. The Translating Subject contributes a new approach to contemporary literature by combining theories and practices of feminist translation with theories of the avant-garde, advancing a new framework for understanding women’s writing and language politics more broadly rooted in the synergies between these fields. The Translating Subject was awarded a Scholarly Book Award in 2024 from the Federation for Humanities and Social Sciences. I was awarded both the Publication Grant and an Open Access Grant to assure a wider readership for this book.