Femalentendue

Abstract

This fictocritical experiment, self-translated between English and French, attempts a Slash fiction of Joanna Russ’s 1975 work of feminist science fiction The Female Man. In Russ’s book, characters travel in between possible worlds, encountering possible versions of themselves that are created each time an infinitesimal decision or change happens. In this work I propose that translation opens possible worlds in language in much the same way that decisions and changes do in-between Russ’s universes. I therefore propose an nth world existing in-between languages that I call ‘[xxx]’. This world [xxx] is not to be found in one version of this text nor in the other but in the space opened in-between my two translations.