《translation trouble-gender indeterminency》.pdf

Translation Trouble: Gender Indeterminacy in English Novels and their French Versions Ina Schabert In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse. Virginia Woolf, Orlando ‘I call for a feminist degendering movement’, Judith Lorber exclaimed in the first issue of Feminist Theory, 2000.1 She later put it differently: ‘A world completely without gender may be unattainable, but a world without gender all the time is revolutionary.’2 Lorber argues against the habit of taking body differences as a reason for dividing human beings into two groups, opts for acknowledging and enlarging the ‘genderless’ areas which already exist in society, and tries to undermine the supremacy of gender difference by stressing the importance of other differences between people, such as in age, race, and social ´ status. In an essay published in 2003, Ljiljana Markovic finds that differences in professional work and ways of life have by now become as important as difference in sex. She concludes, certainly ahead of her time: ‘the world of binary opposition is behind us’.3 Priscille Touraille from a socio-anthropological perspective, and Sandra L. Bem from a psychological one, endorse the view that the distinction between male and female should no longer organize most of our cultural practice and thought.4 1 Judith Lorber, ‘Using Gender to Undo Gender: A Feminist Degendering Movement’, Feminist Theory, 1 (2000), 79–95 (p. 79). 2 Judith Lorber, Breaking the Bowls: Degendering and Fem