Call for Papers: Transgressive Translations

We are pleased to invite submissions for the 16th issue of Kohl: a Journal for Body and Gender Research, slated for publication in December 2021. Young activists, independent researchers, graduate students and fresh graduates are particularly encouraged to apply. We also welcome submissions from seminal contributors in the field.

With the urgency of transnational organizing, we would like to explore the pedagogies of translating (beyond) borders. We are often trapped in cycles of violence that limit our political action to “responding” to dominant orders and realities. Our radical potential is therefore bound to an existence that can only be articulated in relation to the systems of power we seek to dismantle. These impasses are multiple: our knowledges are provincialized; our contexts are treated as data; our bodies are ruled by necropolitics, border controls, and biological determinism; our languages are delegitimized. How do we leave the languages, contexts, and fields that we are assigned? How do we build an elsewhere?

We would like to be able to reach out and across to each other without the mediation of the sites of power that make our respective contexts unlivable, and/or that operate at a global level. This work of transnational weaving is what we call a work of translation. Translation is not merely a process of conveying terminologies or meaning, but is a language in and of itself, as it travels across contexts and imaginaries. It is the political act of organizing differently, as radical movements, against cultural and political untranslatability and normativity. This issue aims to engage with queer and decolonial feminist interventions in (interpolitical and linguistic) translation and writing paths, so we can destabilize existing borders and limitations, and trespass into other circulations.

For this issue of Kohl, we welcome articles, texts, debates, translations, collaborative work, personal pieces, literature, and art pieces that go beyond linguistic and institutionalized understandings of translation. We are also looking for work that envision ways of being together and of transnational world-making through intercultural translation. We particularly encourage those who position themselves at the margins of systems of oppression (women, trans, intersex, gender non-conforming individuals, migrants, refugees, people with disabilities, workers) to submit.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• Trespassing: documenting and imagining other circulations for transnational organizing
• Utopia and elsewhere: new languages and structures of speech/writing
• Untranslatable bodies: how do we understand and communicate sex, body, and desire away from the conventional projected hegemonic language(s) and discourse(s) of global and local systems of power?
• Making sense out of disposability, “killable” bodies, and unauthorized movement
• Translating police and prison abolition transnationally
• Queer theory as it is explored or experienced in native tongues, languages, and dialects of the Global South
• Dissonance in transnational organizing: what happens when we cannot transpose one context to another? How do we talk with and to each other?
• Beyond nation-state borders: building theory/praxis across resistance movements in the South
• Translation as world-making: processes of creating new languages that disrupt and transgress
• Producing knowledge and theories in the language(s)/context/discourses ​​of the Global South: what knowledge(s) do we need? What languages? How do we understand political struggles and how do we write/convey them?
• Locating the reader in the processes of writing/translation/knowledge production: how can the reader inform, feed, collaborate, and engage with translation?
• Critiques of the theories of translation
• Translators as workers: how do systems of legitimacy (institutional and geopolitical) operate when it comes to translation and translators?

The deadline for submission is Saturday, July 31, 2021.

To submit a paper, please send your blinded piece to submit@kohljournal.press as a .doc or .docx file, with “Submission Issue 16” as the subject of your e-mail.

We accept work in progress, provided full drafts are submitted. If accepted for inclusion, please note that your paper will be translated to a second language by our team.