Tongue and Groove

In her essay “Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation,” from 1989, the Canadian critic Barbara Godard reframed translation as a feminist intervention into society’s dominant discourses. With The Translating Subject, Melissa Tanti expands on this idea as she examines how a “translating subject” emerges from the space where “languages encounter each other.”

Analyzing works by the Montreal writers Erín Moure and Nicole Brossard along with the American punk virtuoso Kathy Acker, Tanti explores textual multilingualism, including the experimental use of unfamiliar languages. A research fellow at Coventry University, in the United Kingdom, with a doctorate from McMaster University, she suggests that these authors participate in a larger “queer feminist knowledge project.” Moure’s approach to translation, for example, is compared to Judith Butler’s depiction of the body, which refutes the “erotics of mastery” that informs “Western humanist philosophies of the...