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

Abstract

Translation studies have in recent times considered how translation is not just a matter of linguistic transfer between texts but is also linked to the processes of comprehending, re-presenting, and transforming that constitute individual subjectivity. This article considers how textual modes of translation connect with translation’s role in subject formation in medieval texts, focusing on two narratives about female cross-dressing, the Vie de Sainte Euphrosine and the Roman de Silence. Gender emerges in these texts through multiple intersecting modes of translation which are bound up with the female protagonists’ masculine gender presentation. These narratives explore how subjectivity can be made or remade through the translation of discursive conventions that encompass linguistic, social, and familial constructions of gender. They also point to ways of connecting gender and translation in more specifically medieval literary contexts, representing gender as part of a set of translation problems associated with “genre trouble.”

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