Gender In Translation Research Articles

Gender in Translation: How the English Wrote Their Juvenal, 1644-1815

IN OR ABOUT THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, Thomas Laqueur has pithily remarked in manner of Virginia Woolf, human sexual nature changed. Laqueur's pioneering Making Sex tells a story about that is, about sexual bodies, meanings of which turn out to be historically specific and changeable rather than simply derived from some anterior biological nature. And as this quote suggests, Laqueur identifies key turning point in this story in eighteenth century, a period that witnessed replacement of an early modern understanding of male and female sexual bodies as fluid points along a boundary-blurred sexual continuum with more familiar modern understanding of sexual bodies as stable, essential, diametrical opposites. Stating that his book is about the making not of gender, but of sex, however, Laqueur does not dwell to same extent on simultaneous transformations in understandings of gender, or in assumed relationship between sex and gender; that is to say, historically specific and changeable relationship between way people perceive sexual bodies and their understandings of scaffolding of putative masculine and feminine traits erected around these sexual bodies.2 Recent scholarship spearheaded by history-conscious literary critics has been groping toward such a new, interconnected narrative of understandings of gender.3 Unlike sweeping, confident narratives that originated in women's history and were concerned primarily with social arrangements and structures of power (such as the creation of patriarchy or the separation of spheres), however, those that take as their point of departure very categories of gender that underlay these structures have so far tended to be more tentative, painting their picture in pointillist dabbings rather than wide brush strokes. Using work of these scholars as a valuable starting point, it seems possible to suggest such a generalized narrative of history of understandings of gender in relation to sex by bringing together developments in cultural sites as diverse as theater and political debate, novels and popular ballads, fashion and biographical compilations, and, again, in cultural circulation of such gender-

Sherry Simon: Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission

Sherry Simon: <i>Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission</i>

Review of Simon (1996): Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission

Review of Simon (1996): Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission

Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission

Simon, Sherry. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission