Symposium description
Organisers: Dr Michela Baldo, Elena Basile, Samuele Grassi
The University of Birmingham
The Alan Walters building LT2 G11
With this one-day event, we aim to explore and reframe the horizons, challenges, and possibilities of transfeminist queer translation in its interconnection with theories of affect and decoloniality.
The conference’s idea was born out of reflections stemming from the translations into Italian of the work of leading feminist writer and independent scholar Sara Ahmed, who will give the opening speech at the event, and of other recent translations into Italian of feminist and queer thinkers and writers. It also stems from a special issue on affect and queer feminist translation that Michela and Samuele are co-editing for the journal Italian Culture.
Although queer and feminist translation studies (Baer and Kaindl 2017; Baer 2021) have started exploring more and more the notion of affect, studies on translation and affect are still scarce (Basile 2017; Baldo 2019, 2023; Koskinen 2020). Drawing on considerations based on the notion of affect as theorised by Sara Ahmed and other thinkers (Ahmed 2004; Gregg and Seigworth 2010; Berlant 2011), the conference aims to further a conversation around queer translation as an embodied and affective practice. It seeks to explore how we translate affects and what it means to do it following an affective translation practice. We want to discuss what it means to translate as an act of intimacy (Spivak (1993), and what kind of affective connection/s translation can produce. This is an ethical question, as stated by Ergun (2020), which is also a decolonial one: How do we translate each other without harming each other? […] How do we cross without taking over? (Lugones 2010).
We are thus also interested in looking at a queer feminist translation as a decolonial practice that can resist colonial legacies of dominant regimes of thinking “as a potentially transgressive textual border-space where asymmetrically situated subjects of difference may engage in acts of mutual recognition, confrontation, reconciliation, collaboration, and transformation” (Ergun 2020, 121). Leaning on the figures of the feminist killjoy or the angry black woman in Sara Ahmed’s work and examining translation scenarios and controversies in which this epistemic violence has been exercised, participants in the symposium will discuss how to challenge and queer colonialist epistemologies of translation practice.
Starting from how the translation of Sara Ahmed’s work and other queer feminist writers have been performed and examining the discourses it has generated, the event will further a dialogue on the ethics of queer feminist translation focusing on affect and (de) coloniality.
References
Ahmed, S. (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York and London. Routledge.
Baer, B. (2020) Queer theory and translation studies: Language, politics, desire. New York and London. Routledge.
Baldo, M. (2019) “Translating affect, redeeming life. The case of the Italian transfeminist group ideadestroyingmuros.” The Translator, 25(1): 13-26.
Baldo, M. (2023) “Translation and the formation of collectivities. The case of Onna Pas”, Translation in Society, 3(1): 1-18.
Basile, E. (2017) “A scene of Intimate Entanglements or, Reckoning with the ‘Fuck’ of Translation”. In Baer, B.J. and Kaindl, K. eds. Queering Translation, Translating the Queer, 26-37. New York and London: Routledge.
Baer, B., & Kaindl, K. (2017) Queering translation, translating the queer. Theory, practice, activism. New York and London. Routledge.
Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham. Duke University Press.
Ergun, E. (2021) “Feminist Translation Ethics”. In Koskinen K. and Pokorn N. eds The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Ethics, 114-130. New York and London. Routledge.
Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. J. (2010) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Koskinen, K. (2020) Translation and Affect: Essays on Sticky Affects and Translational Affective Labour. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Lugones, M. (2010) “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25, 4: 742-59.
Spivak, G. (1993) Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York and London, Routledge.
List of abstracts
OPENING SPEECH
“Killjoys in Translation”
Sara Ahmed
In this lecture I will reflect on what I have learnt from how the figure of the feminist killjoy has been translated into different languages. I will return to some of my earlier considerations on the ethics of translation in Strange Encounters (2000) and also connect ‘killjoy translations’ to my recent concern with how ‘no’ is a sociable utterance. I will explore how activism might require the perpetual act of translating our refusals of gendered, institutional, state and colonial violence.
PANEL 1
“Feminist killjoy translation and affects”
Michela Baldo (University of Birmingham) and Laura Scarmoncin
Our contribution will look at the role that affect has played in our translations of some of Sara Ahmed’s work, namely The Feminist Killjoy Handbook translated as Il manuale della femminista guastafeste (2024); The Promise of Happiness translated as La promessa della felicità (2023); and an anthology of the author’s work entitled Un’altra cena rovinata (2023) (“Another ruined dinner”). In the first part of the presentation, we will discuss our affective motivations for translating Ahmed’s work by drawing on affect theory (Gregg and Seigworth 2010), and on Ahmed’s (2004) work on affect and emotions. We will then examine our efforts to tune in with Ahmed’s affective language, a language focused on the sonority of words, and which uses a lot of repetitions, metaphors and wordplays. We will also analyse how our translation choices have been influenced by our affects and our positioning within Italian affective activist networks. In the second part of our presentation, we will discuss how our affects are mobilised by the Italian publishing industry, which in recent years has become more and more interested in publishing translations of queer feminist works, greatly profiting from their emergent cultural appeal and marketability. We will argue that an open discussion on the material conditions of queer and feminist translation labor is needed to envision collective ways of countering unspoken but effective and harmful forms of exploitation that levers on our political affections to build a reservoir of extremely low-wage and legally unprotected cultural workers. To do so we want to embrace the figure of the «killjoy translator» (Scarmoncin), reflecting on how we can intertwine queer-feminist affect theory and labor activism, to add to the manifold politicalness of queer feminist translation an empowering form of shared class consciousness and practice.
“Killjoyfully translating. A feminist index of his publishing house”
Elpida Karaba and Valia Papastamou, University of Thessaly
Starting from the double translation of the term ‘killjoy’ that we have attempted, we will refer to the two renderings of the word (ξενέρωτη, χαρασκοτώστρα) as differentiated affective positionalities. The first one (ξενέρωτη) reclaims the adjective and designation often attributed by the patriarchy to those who self-identify as feminists, and remains in the arsenal of the queer feminist struggle in the Greek language. The second one (χαρασκοτώστρα) marks the literal translation of ‘killjoy’; a compound word of joy (χαρά) and the one who kills it (σκοτώστρα), that is a common word in English, but not in Greek, which, nevertheless we have so far enjoyed using and spreading further and seeing how easily is can be adapted. Feminist translation has been grounded as a significant methodology for the collective work we undertake in the Centre of New Media and Feminist Public Practices, a spectral institution dedicated to the nexus between art, feminism and technology. Having worked in various ways on the different notions of technology from biopolitics to (post)human rights, language and feminist coding, use of API and AI, we aim at repurposing the term technoaesthetic. In this context, translation is reconceptualized via looking to the geopolitical structures involved as well as issues of labour. By moving beyond its conventional linguistic function, translation is theorized as a dynamic and transformative process, in relation to technological challenges which as always reveal hegemonic structures, but at the same time invite us to unsettle normative paradigms and contribute to emancipatory futures. From this position, we will discuss issues concerning queer feminist activist claims of language and their intersection with aspects of the affective labour of translation and its discontents within the cultural and technological economy, especially of minor/soft languages – such as Greek – and in the geographies of the South. Further rethinking the interconnected practices of translating and publishing, we will exercise another technoaesthetic practice introduced in the CNMFPP. We will work on art mapping technology and feminist index to quest for publishing houses that support soft languages translations of feminist theory texts, aiming to look at the inequalities and the immanence of power relation within the field of translation through an affirmative way to joyfully undoing, to create a facilitating tool for future possibilities.
PANEL 2
“Of Reparation and Repair: Colonial Contact Zones and the Wagers of Implicated Translation”
Elena Basile, York University
This presentation addresses a cluster of ethical issues in translation, which continue to emanate from the Zong! affair – a controversy that erupted on social media in 2021 in the wake of Trinidadian-Canadian poet nourbeSe philip call for the destruction of the Italian translation of her own poem Zong!, on the grounds of its violation of the text’s ‘Protocols of Care’ and its deep equivocation of the text’s reparative intent as a wake meant to honour the dead of the Middle Passage. While the controversy itself has long since subsided, the case continues to offer fertile ground for reflecting on the ethical wagers that texts from the Black diaspora demand especially of its European translators, who are structurally positioned as “implicated subjects” (Rothberg 2019) in the colonial archive. Building on Rothberg’s notion of the implicated subject, this paper suggests that translating from an implicated positionality requires a careful acknowledgment and re-calibration of issues of reparation and repair in translation.
“Decolonizing Birth: A Feminist Approach to Translation and Publishing in Brazil”
Luciana Carvalho Fonseca, University of São Paulo
Childbirth varies significantly across cultures, and women are not always at its center. In colonized-capitalist-patriarchal countries like Brazil, cesarean section rates exceed half of all births. Within higher income brackets, the percentage of cesarean births in the country is even greater, approaching 90%. Consequently, physician-led hospital births dominate the Brazilian obstetric landscape. A feminist approach to women’s health emphasizes placing women at the center of the birthing process and of the decision-making regarding their bodies. Therefore, a feminist approach to translating pregnancy and childbirth-related texts involves selecting and translating content from global women’s health movements and introducing them into target systems to help transform the contexts in which they are received. This presentation discusses the colonization of birth and addresses the challenges faced by Ema Livros, a small independent feminist press, in translating and publishing books for expecting families and birth professionals in Brazil.
ROUNDTABLE on Translation, Affect and Decoloniality
Michela Baldo (University of Birmingham), Laura Scarmoncin (independent scholar),Elpida Karaba and Valia Papastamou (University of Thessaly), Elena Basile (York University), Alberica Bazzoni (University for foreigners of Siena), Luciana Carvalho Fonseca (University of São Paulo), Angelica Pesarini (University of Toronto) and Sandrine Montin (Université Côte d’Azur)
Moderated by: Samuele Grassi (Monash University, Prato-University of Florence)
This roundtable examines the role of affect in queer, trans-feminist and decolonial translation practices. It addresses how translation moves beyond language to lived experience and how collective knowledge-building can be both complex, situated and accountable. The discussion will also explore the challenges of building a shared glossary and the dynamics of learning and unlearning across activist, academic, and creative work.
List of Speakers/Contributors
Sara Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of colour. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her most recent book The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (Allen Unwin, 2023) has been translated into Spanish, Korean, French, Italian, Polish, German, Catalan and Turkish with Chinese, Greek and Croatian translations all forthcoming. Previous books (all published by Duke University Press) are Complaint! (2021), What’s The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019) and Living a Feminist Life (2017). She has just completed a new book, No Is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining, which is coming out with Allen Unwin later this year. She blogs at feministkilljoys.com and has a newsletter https://feministkilljoys.substack.com. You can also find her on bluesky @saranahmed.bsky.social and instagram @feministkilljoyatwork.
Michela Baldo is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). Her research revolves around two strands. One is Italian-Canadian writing, especially queer writing, and its translation into Italian. On the topic she has authored a book, Italian-Canadian Narratives of Return: Analysing Cultural Translation in Diasporic Writing (2019). Her second strand of research concerns the role of translation in Italian queer transfeminist activism. On this topic she has published various articles and co-edited a special issue of TIS (Translation and Interpreting Studies) (2021) on translation and LGBTQ+ activism, and a special issue of Perspectives (2023) on translating queer popular culture. She has also co-translated into English with Elena Basile the book Queer Theories (2020), by Italian scholar Lorenzo Bernini, and co-translated into Italian, with feminoska, an anthology of writing by Sara Ahmed, Un’altra cena rovinata (Fandango 2023) and The Feminist Killjoy Handbook by the same author with the title Il manuale della femminista guastafeste (Fandango 2024).
Elena Basile teaches literature, sexuality, and translation studies at the University of Toronto and at York University. Her collaborative research and art practice seeks to stay tuned to the entangled relations of bodies, objects, languages, places — and the complex stories of displacement, resistance and resilience that recursively seep out of their interactions. Recent projects include a poetic contribution to Here and Now. An Anthology of Queer Italian-Canadian Writing (Longbridge 2021); Translation, Semiotics and Feminism: Selected Works of Barbara Godard coedited with Eva Karpinski (Routledge 2022). She is a contributor and poetry and translation editor of rumi roaming. contemporary engagements and interventions curated and edited by Gita Hashemi (Guernica/subversive press 2025). Currently she is co-editing with Heather Milne The Bloomsbury Handbook of Poetry Gender and Sexuality (Bloomsbury 2026).
Alberica Bazzoni is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the University for Foreigners of Siena and Hon. Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Writing for Freedom. Body, Identity and Power in Goliarda Sapienza’s Narrative (Peter Lang 2018), and co-editor of “The Politics of Translation”, special issue of Comparative Critical Studies (2023), Performing Embodiment (ICI Berlin Press, forthcoming 2025), Gender and Authority (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and Goliarda Sapienza in Context (Fairleigh Dickinson UP 2016). Her main research areas are comparative literature, literary theory, sociology of culture, and feminist, queer and decolonial studies, with a focus on temporality, power, embodiment, and subjectivity. Her most recent research is concerned with literary imaginaries of trauma and resistance.
Luciana Carvalho Fonseca is an Assistant Professor of English and Translation at the University of São Paulo, and a translator and interpreter. She is book reviews editor with the Feminist Translation Studies Journal. Between 2022-2024 she was a visiting researcher at Leipzig University, where she researched the birth experience of Brazilian women in Germany, with funding from the São Paulo Research Agency (FAPESP) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She co-authored ‘Feminist Interpreting (studies) – the story so far’ (Susam-Saraeva et al. 2023) and ‘Translation in maternal and neonatal health’ (Susam-Saraeva e Fonseca 2021). Her most recent publication is ‘Feminist Translation and Corpus Linguistics at the Crossroads’ in The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Translation Studies (Fonseca 2025). She has recently coordinated to completion the collective translation of Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism, and the Early Modern World by Jane Ohlmeyer (Ohlmeyer 2024). She runs a tiny independent feminist press called Ema Livros, founded to counter interventionist Brazilian birth culture
Samuele Grassi is Lecturer in European Languages and Italian at Monash University in Prato, and Adjunct Lecturer in English language and Digital Cultures at University of Florence. He has co-translated into Italian José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Cruising Utopia. L’altrove e l’allora della futurità queer, NERO Editions), and other works in the sociology of sexualities. His current research focuses on gender and sexuality studies, as well as modern and contemporary literary and cultural studies in the Anglo-sphere, including English-Italian translation.
Elpida Karaba is an Associate Professor at the Department of Culture, New Media and Industries, University of Thessaly, Greece (https://cult.uth.gr/staff/karaba-elpida/). Her work and publications focus on art history and theory, feminist theory, performance, activist art, new media and research based art practices and curating and critical pedagogies. She works at the intersection of public art, critical theory, of art with systems of knowledge and emerging art, political manifestations in the public sphere. She is the founder and research member of the Center for New Media and Feminist Public Practices (CNMFPP), www.centrefeministmedia.arch.uth and of the collective Temporary Academy of Arts (PAT), https://temporaryacademy.org.
Sandrine Montin is an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France, and member of the CTELA research laboratory. Her research has focused on poetry and the links between silent films and poetry (Cinéma, opérateur poétique, L’Harmattan, 2021). As a founder and member of the Cételle translation collective, she has contributed with six other translators the translation of a play by Annie Baker, The Antipodes, and two poetry books by Audre Lorde, Coal (Charbon, L’Arche, 2023) and Undersong (Contrechant, Les Prouesses, 2023). Her current teaching and research focus on the theory and practice of creation in literature. She is particularly interested in how emotion, creation and disobedience are articulated in literary practices (reading and writing), especially when these practices are hybridized with somatic and bodily practices and with tools from the fields of psychology and Non-Violent Communication.
Valia Papastamou is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology of the University of Thessaly, Greece. Her PhD dissertation, entitled “Artistic-research performative practices in the contemporary transnational condition: Feminist transformative politics of knowledge” examines the performative relation between research and art and is funded by the Center of Research, Innovation and Excellence (CRIE) of the University of Thessaly. With studies in architecture, cultural management and visual arts, her research interests are interdisciplinary and include art theory, postcolonial theory, feminist/queer theory, contemporary critical theory. She is an associate researcher at the Centre for New Media and Feminist Public Practices, Department of Architecture, University of Thessaly.
Angelica Pesarini is an Assistant Professor in Race and Cultural Studies/Race and Diaspora and Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her work seeks to expand the field of Black Italia focusing on dynamics of race, gender, identity, and citizenship. She is interested in the racialization of the political discourse on immigration, and she is among the co-founders of The Black Mediterranean Collective, which published The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). She wrote several essays, peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and delivered numerous talks and public lectures internationally. She is the author of a short story in Future. Il domani narrato dalle voci di oggi (Future. Tomorrow narrated by today’s voices, 2019), an anthology written by eleven Italian women of African descent, and she co-translated into Italian Undercommons. Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, and Blues Legacies and Black feminism by Angela Y. Davis. Angelica is currently writing a book on the lived experience of Black “mixed race” Italian women during the (post)colonial fascist period in East Africa, and the use of oral sources as counter-narratives. As a scholar- activist, she is engaged in the Italian anti-racist movement, and she is investigating the impacts of BLM in Italy.
Laura Scarmoncin is an Italian literary translator from English and French, and a lesbian-queer feminist activist. After more than a decade in the international academia as a scholar of Women’s & Queer History and Gender & Sexuality Studies, they now live with their two cats and one of their partners in the countryside near Milan (Italy), where they freely cultivate their queer Catholic spirituality. They are also an independent scholar in Queer Christian Theologies and Hermeneutics, and an active member of Strade, the Italian Union of Literary Translators. Their research interests revolve around the politics of language as well, with specific attention to translation practices and ethics. Among others, they translated feminist and queer thinkers such as Gloria E. Anzaldúa and Sara Ahmed, neo-Marxist philosophers such as Bojana Kunst, and the Pulitzer Prize novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson. They are currently writing their first book, a queer commentary on the Bible Book of Wisdom, with which they hope to trouble the Catholic stance on sex and pleasure drawing on queer radical history, stories and practices.