Translating Gender in Thirteenth-Century French Cross-Dressing Narratives:

Abstract

Focusing on two thirteenth-century narratives about female cross-dressing, the Vie de Sainte Euphrosine and the Roman de Silence, this article explores areas of productive dialogue between medieval literary studies and current perspectives on gender and translation. Translation studies have in recent times enabled a more expansive philosophical reflection on the intersections between language, ontology, and identity; here, I use a piece written by Judith Butler for an influential translation studies reference work as an illustration of such reflection. If, as Butler suggests in her article, translation is not just a matter of linguistic transfer between texts but is also connected to the processes of construing, comprehending, re-presenting, and transforming at work in lived existence, how might these different senses of translation be connected in medieval texts? How might such a reflection offer ways of linking textual modes of translation to translation’s role in subject formation?