Feminist Çeviri Aktivizmi: Türkiye’de Cinsiyet Eşitliği Anlatılarının Alıntısallık Üzerinden Yeniden Çerçevelendirilmesi

Abstract

The feminist movement that flourished in the 1980s in Turkey was widely influenced by the Western second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 1970s. As a matter of this influence, translations/translators played an essential role in importing feminist epistemes mostly from the Western context into Turkish. Women’s Circle’s translations and the translated articles that were published in periodicals such as Yazko Somut the 4th Page catalyzed the dissemination of feminist ideas that would enable the transformation of hegemonic notions of women’s rights, gender roles and gender equality that were prevalent in the society at the time. However, aside from full-text translations, feminist activists often opted for more implicit ways of cross-cultural exchanges by making citations from foreign sources in the indigenous texts that they wrote for a local readership in Turkey. This study aims to problematize the translated citations embedded in indigenous feminist texts published in the 1980s from Mona Baker’s socio-narrative perspective (2006a), disclosing that feminist activists contested and reframed the hegemonic narratives on women and gender roles in Turkey by bringing in subversive counter-narratives, elaborated by prominent feminists, through these translated citations in a much more covert yet no less effective way than full-text translations. In this regard we examine Fatmagül Berktay’s article “Eşitliğin Ötesine…” (1985) that was published in the heyday of the new feminism in Turkey, contesting the long-established notion of gender equality through the translated citations it makes use of. Regarding citations as a mode of “translation activism” (Baker, 2006b; Tymoczko, 2010), we argue that these citational chains are shaped by and shape in turn the feminist positionality of the translator/writer to the past narratives and the newly emerging feminist narratives in Turkey.