Life after Academia

At the beginning of this year I decided it was time to think about what I would do after I finished my PhD. For some time I had realised that I didn’t want to remain in academia. This isn’t because I don’t love my PhD (I do) but for various other reasons, including the fact that I don’t want to teach. I think most people think doing a PhD is part of a career move, well for me it’s because I enjoy my research and when I’m done, I’d like to move on to something else.

But what will that something else be? I had been toying with the idea of academic publishing for a while and the only problem was that I didn’t really know what it entailed. My funding body, CHASE, offers placements to its students and one of their partners is Bloomsbury – cue emailing Bloomsbury Academic to ask for a placement! It all happened quite fast and after deciding I wanted to do a placement in March, on May 14^th I found myself moving to London for three and a half months to be Editorial Intern for History and Literary Studies.

The first week was pretty intense as I was taught a lot and I think I probably did more things wrong than right (I sent quite a few people free copies of hardbacks when they should have been delivered paperbacks – lucky them!) but I found my feet eventually. Working in publishing is a varied job and I got to spend my days doing lots of different things: sending out books to authors, chasing academics, sending proposals for peer review, drawing up contributor contracts, chasing academics, researching lecturers and courses who might use our books, rejecting proposals, chasing academics… As I progressed I got to do more and more interesting things, I was asked for my opinion on book proposals and got to set up books which were to be proposed for commissioning – finding competing books, writing blurbs and ensuring the sales points were adequately pithy!

I always wanted my desk to be surrounded by books but this was a little too much!

At the end of July I had the opportunity to take over the admin for the weekly publishing meeting – where books were proposed for publication and were mostly accepted (or deferred pending further work) by both the UK and US office. This was an incredible opportunity a) to see what books Bloomsbury will be publishing in the next few years across the Humanities and Social Sciences and b) to hone my organisational skills (top tip: post-it notes are great when you have lots of bits of paper for lots of different people). As part of my application to CHASE I had to say what I would be doing at Bloomsbury and one of the jobs they’d listed to me was taking the minutes at the publishing meeting. Cue me frantically learning to touch type in the weeks leading up to the placement. On arrival I discovered that I did not have to take the minutes verbatim but only note the most important decisions by hand – weeks wasted! (Though definitely for the best as I could only ever type 24 words a minute and I couldn’t really envisage asking the managing director of Bloomsbury Academic to ‘speak more slowly’).

During my last weeks I also had the opportunity to spend two days in marketing to see what went on in another department. I was immediately tasked with a job involving Twitter, to my fright (I am not on good terms with the Twitter character limit) but it went rather well and I got a thrill out of seeing a tweet I wrote posted. I also got to write a press release which mainly involved a lot of cutting and pasting but I’ll still take credit for its construction!

During my placement I missed my PhD and now I’m back I miss being at Bloomsbury. Everyone was so friendly and welcoming and the placement helped me see that I do want to work in academic publishing. I’m very grateful to both CHASE and Bloomsbury for the experience. I also got a 75% staff discount on Bloomsbury books which greatly endeared them to me.

Cupcakes made by a colleague which greatly brightened up a Monday.

My discounted books – I was very restrained!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If  you have an inkling of what you want to do after your PhD and you have the opportunity to check it out before you finish, go for it!

Translating genderqueer

For my third chapter I’m looking at texts involving genderqueer characters. ‘Genderqueer’ is an umbrella term ‘for people who identify as not exclusively a man or a woman, or as something outside of these two concepts’ (Huston 2015, online).

The texts I am examining are Written on the Body (1992) by Jeanette Winterson and Sphinx (1986) by Anne Garréta. Both texts have nongendered first-person narrators and the narrator’s love-interest (known only as A***) in Sphinx is also genderless (no mean feat given that the text is in French). These three characters could be described as ‘neutrois’ (having a neutral gender that is neither male nor female) or ‘genderfluid’ (shifting between different gender identities or expressions) (see Huston 2015 for definitions). In real life I would never assign anyone with these terms without asking them first how they identify. However, all of my characters in this chapter are fictional.

Both texts offer a wealth of material to examine in terms of translation and to make things a little more complicated another text that experiments with concealing gender was recently brought to my attention. My supervisor had been told about a book called Dominique by Cookie Allez which came out in 2015. The book (which is in French) is about a young couple who have a baby called Dominique, the baby is called Dominique precisely because it is a unisex name (in French if not in English) and because they want to prevent the child from having a sex or a gender until it’s old enough to choose one for itself. Dominique grows up not knowing hir sex and only becomes aware of it when ze grows up. For a while ze knows what hir sex is but decides to pretend ze doesn’t know because ze really doesn’t care. Ze only acknowledges it when ze goes to school at the age of 11. In order to go to school Dominique must use the sex ze was assigned at birth. Despite this, Dominique still feels ambiguous and is seen by hir classmates as extraordinary, ‘a being irreducible to an M or an F’ (Allez 2015: 258, my translation). On the final page of the text Dominique is referred to with gendered language for the first and only time.

The text is a humdinger for translation. Dominique has French parents (Gabriel and France), a French grandmother (Lily) and a British great-grandmother (known as Knitting Granny or Knitty for short). Gabriel and France live next door to Knitty in Paris. Knitty is continually making grammatical mistakes (especially with gendered nouns in French) and interspersing English words into her French dialogue. If Knitty remains English in the English translation, all this will be lost. However, I don’t think it’s a solution to relocate the text to Britain and have Knitty be French to maintain her foreignness. The whole point of this text is that the task of Gabriel and France to un-gender Dominique is a) caused by the abundance of gender markers in French and b) made so much harder because of this very abundance. They have to continually use neutral adjectives (some adjectives can be used for men and women without distinction) to refer to Dominique:

‘Avant que lui soit révélé – assez prochainement sans doute – son sexe de naissance, Dominique ne sera jamais gentil ou gentille: Dominique sera sage, docile, calme, agréable ou tendre’ (Allez 2015: 149).

[Before to him/her it was revealed – quite soon probably – his/her sex at birth, Dominique would never be kind (masculine) or kind (feminine): Dominique would be wise, sweet, calm, agreeable or tender (all neutral)].

My gendered font works quite well here!

You could keep the text in France but make Knitty a different nationality, but she would have to be a native speaker of a language that uses gender in the same way as English. For example, Gabriel says ‘vous ne trouvez pas que c’est un bébé superbe?’ [literally: you don’t find that it is a (boy)baby superb][note that ‘superb’ is neutral]. Knitty assumes the baby is a boy because Gabriel used ‘un bébé’. However, in French bébé is a masculine noun (no matter the actual sex of the baby, in the same way as table (la table) is feminine – for, ostensibly, no good reason). They then note that in French there is no special pronoun for babies as in English and a footnote explains that that special pronoun is ‘it’. This confusion would not arise if Knitty came from a country that gendered nouns.

Dominique is a really great book, and while I’m not sure if we gain anything from having Dominique’s gender revealed at the end I think it’s important that Dominique wants to resist the gender binary all the way through (even at the end). The text retains a queer, undecidable ending and Dominique is not neatly tied up in a pink or a blue bow.

(Just as an aside, the image I’ve used above is one version of the front cover, the book I bought has no angel on the cover, it’s just plain beige with the title. Dominique is often referred to by hir family as ‘Sweet Angel’ but that this angel is blue is interesting – is it a clue? Is it a red herring? Is it criticising the idea that blue is for boys? The halo is great. I’m a bit miffed my front cover has no angel now…)

It is this undecidable ending that makes Dominique a great text for my third chapter though I don’t know how much it’ll feature because my thesis focuses on fictional and non-fictional memoirs – Dominique is written in the third-person.

If you can read French I thoroughly recommend you take a look at the book, if not, I wouldn’t be surprised if a translation was very soon underway, it’s such a fascinating book. Sphinx was translated into English for the first time in 2015 and I’m very much hoping it will open the door to many more texts and translations of this kind in all sorts of languages.

References:

Allez, Cookie. 2015. Dominique (Paris: Buchet et Chastel).

Huston, Matt. 2015. ‘None of the Above’ in Psychology Today, 28-30.

Dealing with the Peer-Review

Last year my supervisor forwarded me a call for papers for a special issue of a journal. I won’t say which but suffice to say the journal + the special theme = perfect for my research. The CFP didn’t ask for an abstract but for a fully formed article so I spent a good few weeks working my first chapter into a 9,000 word article. It’s quite a commitment for something that might not be accepted but I suppose if you want to get published you have to go for these things.

About 7 months later I heard back – my article was provisionally accepted, yay! I was sent a copy of my article with my peer reviewer’s (or reviewers’, not sure) comments which I needed to work on in order for that ‘provisional’ acceptance to become confirmed. I have a month to make these changes and it’s due back on November 15^th. As I’m new to this whole process I don’t know if it’ll then go back to review and I’ll have to work on it again or not, I think it varies depending on the journal.

This is the first time I’ve been anonymously peer-reviewed and I thought I’d write about the experience here. I’m lucky enough to be having an article published in a book my supervisor is editing and I received her comments around the same time as these. It makes a big difference when it’s not anonymous – not only does it force you to be nicer but I can have a proper dialogue with my supervisor about the specific changes she wants. One of the hardest things about this process for me is that I can’t have a conversation with the reviewer about what they mean. I have contacted the editors over something I wanted to change and they got back to me promptly but I can hardly email them about every single thing (I’m trying to maintain an air of professionality here!).

I was pretty overwhelmed when I read the comments the first time because some of the changes they wanted from me required a lot of work. I sent it to my supervisor to have a look over and he said, and I quote, ‘I’ve never seen a peer-reviewer go to town quite like this’ – lucky me!

I thought I’d share some of the choicest comments – I have no idea who the reviewer/s is/are and that’s probably a good thing:

‘Don’t reinvent the wheel where you don’t need to; it makes it sound as if you’ve just discovered principles that are well established in the scholarship’

‘a confusing, pedantic, and underspecified sentence’ (my personal favourite).

‘far too obvious and general to be meaningful’

‘Shouldn’t all translation practice be capacious enough to reader originals trans/ambiguity’ (thanks for the clarity here).

It also rather rankles to be criticised by someone who writes ‘I’m taken a bit a back by…’

A lot of the other comments are really helpful and I will definitely incorporate them into my thesis but they have required quite a bit of research and extra reading – I was horrified when they said I only had a month but my supervisor said that that was actually quite generous so I suppose I should be grateful for that! It’s also been quite a good exercise in encouraging me to defend my own work as there are some suggested changes I won’t be making and I think I can justify why. The other problem with these changes is that I keep going way over the word limit so having to cut from other places. It’s hard to know whether what I already have in the article should be sacrificed for a new idea or not. It doesn’t help that the article I submitted in March changed a lot over the summer. I’m now trying to incorporate some of those changes as well. Yesterday I battled with trying to explain in only a few sentences a pretty complicated paradox at the heart of my research which wasn’t in the original article. I could leave it out as the article has been ‘provisionally’ accepted without it but the reviewer did touch on the fact that I contradict myself a bit and this paradox explains why. I’m a bit concerned that by trying to explain this paradox I’m actually making things more confusing or that I’m just plain wrong which is eminently possible. Unfortunately, I’m the kind of person who will fiddle with something that’s probably ok as it is to try and make it better and just end up making it worse.

Aside from all these comments/word count issues I also have to get the article in line with the journal’s style guide. For my thesis I’ve chosen to follow the MHRA style guide. Unfortunately for me this journal asked for articles to follow the Chicago style guide. It’s surprising how different these guides can be and I’ve been struggling with double quotation marks, Oxford commas and American spellings among other things (as you can see from this sentence, I don’t use Oxford commas myself). The journal supplied their own limited style guide and for the extras I ended up signing up to a 30-day free trial of the Chicago Style Manual as I have no intention of paying for it.

Today I’ve been going through the resubmission process – when you send back an article you have to include a cover letter in which you address every comment the reviewers made. Trying to respond to 40 comments in a polite manner gets quite difficult after a while! And of course, I’ve gone back and changed more stuff and I’m currently 26 words over the limit again…

As I’ve never been through this process before I don’t know how lenient the editors will be if I send back an article which isn’t perfectly in line with the style guide or which needs more reviewing because it’s changed so much. I have to admit I feel very alone on this one but I guess that’s part of being an academic, at the end of the day it’s my work and it’s up to me to produce something worthy of publication. PLEASE PLEASE let it be worthy of publication!

Some helpful websites I found along the way:

Click to access wager.pdf

http://www.editage.com/insights/tips-for-authors-submitting-a-revised-manuscript

Experimental Trans*lations (Part 3)

For my second chapter I’m working on intersex narratives and looking at the translations of the nineteenth-century French text Herculine Barbin dite Alexina B. and the twenty-first-century English text Middlesex.

‘“Intersex” is a general term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with a reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t seem to fit the typical definitions of female or male […] Intersex is a socially constructed category that reflects real biological variation’ (Intersex Society of North America, online).

There are more births classed as intersex every year than most people realise: they occur in about one in every 1,500 to 2,000 births (ISNA).

Herculine starts hir memoir thus:

‘J’ai vingt-cinq ans et quoique jeune encore, j’approche, à n’en pas douter, du terme fatal de mon existence. J’ai beaucoup souffert, et j’ai souffert seul ! seul ! abandonné de tous ! […] Soucieux et rêveur, mon front semblait s’affraisser sous les poids de sombres mélancolies. J’étais froide, timide,  et  en quelque sorte, insensible à toutes ces joies bruyantes et ingénues qui    font épanouir un visage d’enfant’ (Barbin 2014: 25).

Seul, seul, abandonné, soucieux and rêveur are in the masculine while froide is feminine.

What Barbin does is use ‘[g]rammaticalized gender, which many feel as a trap to limit people in their gender roles, [to] provide linguistic devices for expressing gender fluidity’ (Livia 2002: 192).

But what can we do in an English translation?

We need a device that signifies the queerness of all identity and text by juxtaposing the natural body with the unnatural body and the source with the target to show they are not mutually exclusive.

Is there a type of text, more modern than the palimpsest, which can attempt to demonstrate how texts are never complete, always plural and made up of networks of meaning?

My answer: the hypertext

For me, hypertext signifies the messiness of writing in the same way that queer signifies the messiness of identity.

Queering a text ‘is an attempt to resist being made a slave to the discourses one is operating within at any one moment by peeling back the multitudinous layers of meaning contained within each and every pronouncement’ (Giffney 2009: 1).

The layers of hypertext are important, but so are the spaces between them, as the translator is drawn to the quiet spaces of texts so to for the queer theorist ‘[w]hat is not said – slips, silences and unfinished thoughts – garner as much interest as that which is verbalised; unpicking the latent content becomes as important a task as understanding that which is stated directly’ (Giffney 2009: 7). The point of the hypertext is not to hand the reader every possible thought they might want to have on a plate so they do not have to think at all.

The translator gives the reader what he or she wants and in a hypertextual translation of a queer text that can be only just enough to make the reader think both about translation and about queer identity.

The easiest way to make hypertext fiction without buying software is to use a blog. This means that one of the tenets of hypertext as undoing the linearity of text cannot really be explored because when you upload a new post it chronologically comes after the last. What you can explore however, is the idea of layers, of annotating a text and of giving the reader more power.

My blog is www.translatingherculine.wordpress.com

Each translation excerpt is linked using hyperlinks to other documents – sections of the source text, translator’s notes, intertexts which influence Herculine, youtube videos…

References:
Livia, Anna. 2001. Pronoun Envy: Literary Uses of Linguistic Gender (New York: Oxford University Press)
Giffney, Noreen. 2009. ‘Introduction: the ‘q’ word’ in N. Giffney and M. O’Rourke (eds.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer Theory (Farnham: Ashgate)

Experimental Trans*lations (Part 2)

For my MA dissertation I did a translation of a text called Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme [Memoirs of the Abbot de Choisy dressed as a woman]. Choisy, a seventeenth-century French priest wrote these memoirs at the insistence of a friend who liked racy gossip though it’s unclear if he ever wanted them published as they were eventually published after his death. The memoirs include two separate episodes of Choisy’s life. In one he moves to a suburb of Paris where after a few months he starts dressing as a woman, his neighbours call him Madame de Sancy but know that he is ‘biologically’ male. In the other episode Choisy moves to the small town of Bourges where he arrives already dressed as a woman and claiming to be la Comtesse des Barres. In Bourges nobody knows that Choisy is a man. Choisy is most often referred to as a cross-dresser but in my dissertation I argued that he was trans. In his writing, especially during the ‘Comtesse des Barres’ section, ‘he’ often identifies as a woman (pronouns are a tricky issue here). Furthermore, in the memoir Choisy uses the feminine grammatical voice.

My dissertation discussed experimental ways to show that Choisy uses both masculine and feminine grammatical gender. One of those ways was to create a font which used the symbols of Mars and Venus to indicate if a word was masculine or feminine. It could be argued that these strategies serve to highlight the gender binary, but they also show that it’s possible for someone to have a gender identity that a) doesn’t match their ‘biological’ sex and that b) can be ambiguous. It’s hard to say whether Choisy would have identified as a man, a woman or a transwoman (technically he can’t have identified as a transwoman as the concept didn’t exist, but just because the linguistic label didn’t exist doesn’t mean people didn’t feel that way) but this strategy shows exactly what Choisy did with his grammar in translation. Something I think is important.

When I did this strategy for my dissertation I added some lines and arrows on to letters. I had a feminine ‘p’ and a masculine ‘a’ and ‘o’. Aside from the fact that this looked terrible, it really restricted what I could do translation-wise. For example, I couldn’t translate a feminine word meaning ‘dressed’ when there’s no ‘p’ in the word! I had to go for ‘dressed up’ which is slightly different. It also caused a nightmare when I came to print my dissertation – all these makeshift letters were in the document as images, I had the margins wrong and as soon as I changed them all those letters moved out of place. It was a bad day.

I didn’t think much more of this after I did my MA until I did the UEA in the City event for my PhD. Whilst talking to one of the judges, Peter Moore Fuller, I explained this strategy I used and he said that it would be quite easy to get a professional to create a proper typography with these symbols. I contacted Jamie Clarke (www.jamieclarketype.com) and he created something great for me.

So, here is my nice new font/typography/typeface (delete as appropriate if you know the difference, I don’t) in practice, this is a small extract from the Madame de Sancy section of Choisy’s memoir:

Experimental Trans*lations (Part 1)

The first chapter of my thesis explores the translation of two transgender texts. One of the biggest questions this chapter, and my whole project, is exploring is ‘should trans identities be translated with strategies that radicalise or normalise?’ During my research it became more and more clear to me that that’s not really the right question to be asking. Instead I want to find a strategy that can actually do both at once – be radical and yet also recognisable. This view of trans identity as both normative and non-normative promotes the idea that every body is, to some degree, transgressive and strange, even if one does not identify as trans.

I want to show that Catalina de Erauso (see more about hir here) is a human, normative subject who also manages to contest normativity by critiquing gender and embodiment. I think it’d be helpful to see transgender as a kind of graft, the way that translation is often considered to be constituted from layers of text.

(Stand by for large extract from thesis)

Derrida claims that ‘[t]o write means to graft. It’s the same word’ (2004: 389). If we take ‘graft’ here to mean ‘attach layers’ we can directly compare this to how Jean Bobby Noble sees ‘transed bodies as grafted where one materialization is haunted by the other, as opposed to crossing or exiting’ (2006: 84). With the graft we can eliminate ideas of an ‘original’ or ‘right’ gender or text as Derrida says: ‘[e]ach grafted text continues to radiate back toward the site of its removal, transforming that, too, as it affects the new territory’ (2004: 390). The ‘first’ text or body is not exited or passed up but transformed by the new text or body, subsumed but not forgotten.

This graft is exemplified by the palimpsest. In the past texts were erased from parchment or papyrus to make room for different texts, those erasures being incomplete the old text would show through. We can use an analogy of the palimpsest to dispel notions of the ‘originality’ and ‘authority’ of all writing because as Barthes confirms:

‘We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (1977: 146)

The most famous palimpsest: The Archimedes palimpsest – 10th century mathematical text below a 13th century christian text.

According to Sarah Dillon, the palimpsest ‘serves as the hymen that holds the masculine pheno-text and the feminine geno-text together and apart’ (2007: 92). The pheno-text, a term coined by Julia Kristeva, is the text of the surface and the geno-text is what is underneath. In the analogy of the palimpsest, the masculine pheno-text would be the text on the page while the feminine geno-text would be the text’s influences residing beneath the surface. This holding together and apart by a membrane is ‘a process that eliminates the spatial heterogeneity between’ (Dillon 2007: 97) the two texts: as a result, they exist in a hymenic fusion or marriage which at the same time preserves their separate identities and inscribes difference within the heart of the identity of the palimpsest. The vellum of the palimpsest thus represents the ‘inter’ – the between of the texts – a between that is no longer that of difference, but of identity, an identity redefined as, and traversed by, difference. Perhaps trans* experience could be the ‘between of bodies’, a between that is characterized by queer notions of identity as unstable. Perhaps a translation should literally show its multiplicities in order to point to the multiplicity of the characters it represents.

(Serious academic bit over, phew!)

I’ve kind of skirted over how to make this translation-palimpsest work in the real world. I had my upgrade panel last week (it went very well thank you) and one of the tutors who taught me for my MA suggested making a physical version of my ideas and suggested the magic ingredient = tracing paper!!

I pretty much spent all weekend on this project and I was planning on it being a sort of prototype as I still have at least two years left of my PhD. It took so long, however, that I think this’ll have to be the one and only! I’m also not entirely sure if you can submit actual objects with a thesis – I may end up just including photos in an appendix.

Here is the story of my translation-palimpsest project:

1. Because each sheet is a certain size I wanted to make sure that the right amount of text would fit on every layer – I also decided to have four layers in total. The first layer is my translation, under that is a layer of notes, under that is the transcription of Erauso’s source text by Joaquín Ferrer and the final layer is the transcription of the text by Rima de Vallbona. [The text is from the seventeenth century but the original is lost. There are only transcriptions of that original left – one held in Madrid archives and two held in Seville archives.Both Ferrer and Vallbona’s texts are taken from the Madrid manuscript but despite this they are quite different!]

2. Write the layers and join them together!

My translation + my notes underneath

Translation + notes + one source text

All four layers

The front cover

Every chapter involves an experimental trans*lation, hence ‘part 1’. I’m working on my second translation at the moment so watch this space!

Bibliography:

Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image Music Text (tr.) Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press)

Derrida, Jacques. 2004 [1981]. Dissemination (tr.) Barbara Johnson (London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group)

Dillon, Sarah. 2007. The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (London and New York: Continuum)

Noble, Jean Bobby. 2006. Sons of the Movement: FtM’s Risking Incoherence in a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape (Toronto: Women’s Press)

Poster Girl

Showing posters of your doctoral research is quite common in the sciences but it’s gaining popularity in the arts and humanities as well.

Yesterday I showed a poster at ‘UEA in the City’ an event aimed at getting students to engage with the public and I thought I’d share my thoughts here on the process of designing the poster and on what happened at the event itself. The event was also for engaging with the business community, with 4 experts from the business world invited to judge the posters.

I have designed a poster in the past to be shown at an academic event but designing one for the public is a different kettle of fish altogether.

Things to think about before you start:

• Pick a title that will get people’s attention.
• Write a short pitch of your research to tell people who are interested, but it should be right for the audience.
• Too much text puts people off.
• Use strong images (images must be good quality and be careful about whether you need copyright permission to show them).
• Have a succinct message and a clear layout

.

See here for a bigger version of the poster.

In making this poster I realised how complicated my research is! It comprises both translation studies and transgender studies – both things the public don’t necessarily know a lot about. I’m using 6 primary texts in my research plus translations which is way too much to get on a poster so I picked just one text to exemplify my work (I really only had two to choose from as I’ve only written one chapter!). I then boiled down my research ideas to what was the one most important (and easiest to grasp) idea.

I debated over loads of different layouts and eventually decided to go for a ‘how to…’ style of layout as if giving instructions.

One of the hardest things about designing the poster for me was getting the right compromise between not making my research too complicated and not being patronising to the public. When you work so closely with your research day after day it becomes hard to judge what other people won’t know! I definitely needed a ‘things you should know’ section in which I defined the trickiest words I was using on my poster.

Because my poster was being shown to the public I had to be careful about the images I was using, I decided to go with one image in the end – one of the most interesting images available of the author of the bibliography I’m discussing (thankfully the image was good quality and copyright free being from the 1770s). It was a popular image and garnered a lot of discussion which was good. One of the biggest problems I had though was how to refer to my trans authors, there was a lot of ‘they’ and ‘he/she’ which was confusing to say the least.

I also decided to take along a newspaper article comparing my trans author to Caitlyn Jenner which I thought would be useful to try and connect my research to the real world (and to bring the author, from the 18th century, up to date). I also attached a little business card dispenser (nothing fancy, just a cardboard box cut so the cards could be taken) to put up. This was great as I’m really not the kind of person who can just say ‘here have my business card’, this way people could help themselves if they wanted and leave it if not.

I had a good number of people come to talk to me about my poster and had to sell my poster to the 4 judges, so ended up repeating myself a lot there! There was one rather hairy moment when one of the judges asked me how my poster related to business (the only response in my head was ‘it doesn’t’!), thankfully I managed to cobble together an answer of sorts. One of the judges, a graphic designer, gave me some great advice about a problem with a translation strategy that I failed to tackle adequately in my MA dissertation (which is being published as an article, plus after discussing it I’d really like to revive the idea in my new work) and it was generally really nice to hear people say that my research was interesting.

I’m not going to lie – it was a long day, but it was so worthwhile. It was great to get positive feedback and also to see other people’s posters and what people study in other schools (I was the sole representative of my school – Literature, Drama and Creative Writing). If you are a PGR student at UEA, or soon to be one, I suggest you take the opportunity to take part in this next year. If not, make a poster for a conference or even suggest your university does something similar, you never know who you might meet and what you might learn.

Some Things I Learnt about Trans Studies Now

On Friday June 12th I attended the Trans Studies Now conference at the University of Sussex, here are some bits I picked up on:

The first keynote was from Roz Kaveney, poet and author. I hadn’t come across Kaveney’s work before but found her poetry especially powerful:

Perhaps you’ll hear me if I say it clear.
You live a body set and formed and grown
I change my flesh and mind and not alone.
We come among you dancing, year by year. (from On Transness)

As Kaveney put so well: ‘Sometimes it’s important that advocacy not be polite’.

Emma Hutson’s talk ‘Passing Beyond the Single Story Narrative’ brought up some very interesting discussions about passing and the single story narrative in which gender is always a binary (so, for example, stereotypical male transitions to stereotypical female – many discussions about Caitlyn Jenner came up here). Passing is a way to avoid transphobia and violence but it can be a double-edged sword (passing is an artifact of patriarchy). There is a celebration of activists who forego passing (who are openly trans) but in practice nobody passes 100%, so is there any point to the passing/non-passing debate?

Dr Katherine Johnson gave the second keynote discussing Trans Studies Now and Then to see how we have progressed from clinical discussions to socio-cultural discussions of trans issues.

The important end note of the talk was that: Gender transition is a complex process of ‘becoming’ and ‘unbecoming’ that is insufficiently served by discourses of ‘born in the wrong body’ or ‘hard-wired brain’.

The day ended with a screening of the documentary film TransX Istanbul directed by Maria Binder. The film follows a Turkish trans woman, Ebru and the struggles she and her friends face on a daily basis. In one scene Ebru talks to some kids on the street, one claims that she cannot possibly be a woman because her voice is too low. She retorts that he can’t possibly be a human because his ears are too big (‘the size of soup spoons’, ‘is he an alien?’). It was a funny scene and a point well made – nobody fits society’s standards, nobody is ‘normal’.

It was a very interesting day and my thanks to Professor Sally R. Munt for organising. If you’re interested in Trans Studies I highly recommend you go next year!

‘She’, s/he or ze?

As I mentioned in my first blog post, I am looking at two protagonist-writers who (I believe) are ambiguous for my first chapter. Today the most common thing to do when unsure about how to address a trans person is to ask them (see Jack Halberstam’s blog/GLAAD ‘s guide). But, what do you do if the people you are referring to have been dead for centuries and cannot be consulted? I should also reiterate here that as my two protagonists, Catalina de Erauso and the Chevalier d’Eon are from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, neither could have identified as trans/transgender/transvestite/transsexual because those terms were not available. However, I’m appropriating their lives for my own agenda which looks to promote the visibility of trans identities through translation.

At the moment my chapter is a jumble. To begin with I introduce Erauso as ‘she’ and d’Eon as ‘he’, as we go further down the analysis I start using s/he and her/him. However, I’m not at all consistent and I know this is a problem that needs addressing.

In my secondary reading so far, d’Eon has always been referred to with the pronoun ‘he’ for the sex he was assigned at birth. Erauso has generated a little more debate; many refer to Erauso as ‘she’ but some use ‘she’ when Erauso is a girl and ‘he’ when Erauso is using a male alias. One theorist Chloe Rutter-Jensen even goes so far as to always use ‘he’ for Erauso.

As you can see in the above paragraph in order to avoid being confusing I’ve repeated Erauso quite a few times more that I would if this post, or this person, had nothing to do with tricky pronouns. In my thesis I probably have repeated surnames more than is strictly normal in English but I can’t do that all the time – my writing wouldn’t flow at all. But what is the solution?

I recently wrote an article based on my first chapter for the Transgender Studies Quarterly (they’ve not accepted yet but fingers crossed!) I wasn’t sure how to deal with this pronoun issue as I haven’t really tackled it yet. I tried to get in touch with the editors to see what they preferred but got no reply. Deciding to err on the side of caution I referred to Erauso as ‘she’ (with inverted commas) the first time I used a pronoun and d’Eon as ‘he’ (again including the commas) to indicate the uncertainty of these terms. I then added a footnote stating that for reasons of style and comprehension I had decided to refer to both protagonist-writers with the pronoun of their assigned sex at birth even though I believe them to be more ambiguous than this suggests. I feel this is not really an adequate solution and may really be a bit of a cop-out. So what other solutions are there?

First of all it might be useful to say that this particular chapter is currently 25,000 words. That’s very long (a bit too long) and unsurprisingly, I’m using pronouns a lot. Whatever solution I choose has got to work in a situation where one sentence may have several pronouns.

‘It is interesting that d’Eon should use the feminine gender in a passage which describes his time as a soldier. It could well have been her/his way of emphasising to the reader that s/he was a girl dressed up as, and acting like, a soldier.’

This is an example taken from part of my analysis of d’Eon’s autobiography. In these two sentences we have four instances of potential pronoun trouble – my inconsistency is well demonstrated here (and this is something I only noticed as I was writing this!) as I have:

• d’Eon
• his
• her/his
• s/he

I’m not sure that the slashes are something that I really like stylistically.

The solution that I’m most interested in (for now, at least) are epicene pronouns which are genderless and therefore promote ambiguity (see here for a wide range of possibilities). I would therefore use ‘ze’ to be he/she and ‘hir’ to be him/her. These would of course require a footnote explaining what they mean as many people are unaware of these pronouns. My only hesitation is what a sustained use of these pronouns over 25,000 words would be like – is it too confusing? (I’m very into experimental translation strategies and being ‘writerly’ in Barthes’ terms so why I’m concerned with being ‘too confusing’ here is something I’m not sure about – maybe it’s because it concerns the ‘academic’ writing of my thesis rather than strategies I’m describing).

I have yet to discuss this with my supervisors so it’ll be interesting to get their perspective but if anyone has any burning comments or questions on this mini dilemma please do let me know!

Finding Unlikely Inspiration

So far for my thesis I have written a background chapter (a.k.a the Literature Review) and chapter one. This comes to a total of about 36,000 words. Whilst I am pleased with my progress so far, I would in no way claim that thy are 36,000 words of quality.

I decided to read through my background chapter the other day and was horrified at just how much it didn’t hang together. And this is after more than one draft and after I had carefully pieced it back together once it had been ripped apart by my supervisors (though actually they were very nice about it). None of my sections seamlessly flow together and quite often there is no connection at all between paragraphs in the same section. I found this quite depressing and the idea of having to rework so many words is daunting. This is probably the plight of all first year PhD students once they begin to write: discovering that it’s not going to come out perfect the first time (or the second, or the third in my case).

Just as I was beginning to despair that I’d never finish my thesis as I’d be spending about four years on this chapter alone I can across this wonderful quote from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality Vol 2, in reference to the fact that what he was writing in this book had taken a very different direction to what he had first proposed to do:

‘As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next – as to those, in short, for whom to work in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet.’

I hadn’t picked up The History of Sexuality to find encouragement (if I’m honest I was expecting to find incomprehensibility, which I did after this introductory section) but this made me feel a bit better about the state of my work – there’s no shame in getting it wrong and going back because that’s the nature of research. If Michel Foucault worked in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension (and didn’t crumble under the weight of this precarious position) then so can I.

Merci Michel!