On the Circulation of Feminist Discourse via Translation (V.Woolf, S.de Beauvoir, J.Butler)

Abstract

The article is concerned with the history of translations of three canonical texts of twentieth-century feminist discourse: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Her Own, Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. Using Edward Said’s idea of travelling theory as her starting point, the author follows the reception of the above texts in Central and Eastern Europe and in selected Western countries, concluding that only rarely does a translation play a major role in the circulation of theories, disseminated primarily through secondary academic and quasi-academic discourses.