Call for Papers
Australian Feminist Law Journal: A Critical Legal Journal. Volume 47(2), 2021
Special Issue Editors: Miriam Bak McKenna and Maj Grasten
A core concern of critical feminist legal studies is the gendered nature of the language of law. Language conducts and projects power and struggles. Its usage is both a political tool and a means of domination, while it also provides opportunities for contestation and change. Despite this, the concept and practice of translation has been and remains a key but relatively neglected concept in feminist legal theories. Practices of translating are constitutive of (gender) hierarchies, categories, and dichotomies. Translation promises to transcend boundaries and efface difference but in doing so conceals and enacts boundaries and binaries, such as male/female, public/private, core/periphery, and North/South. It is in translation that boundaries are inscribed with meaning, become legible and determinate. Translation is therefore not a neutral act of transferring meaning from one context to another where meaning remains stable and determinate throughout the process of translating. Translation is transformative in the sense that it is in and after translation that difference is (re)produced, negotiated, and performed.
This Special Issue seeks to shed light on translational practices and theories as they relate to gender and law in order to map past uses and the potential for engaging with translation and translation as activism in the pursuit of women’s rights. In this way it fosters a dialogue between feminist translation studies and feminist legal studies. Feminist translation studies is an expanding discipline, encompassing fields including gender studies, postcolonial studies, conflict studies, and migration studies. Shared concerns include gendered aspects of language use, discursive manifestations of gender, the power to interpret and assign meaning, and representational distortions and silences.
We invite contributions that question how legal concepts, categories and subjects travel and are translated and with what effects, how feminist jurisprudence is translated and transformed into feminist activism, the translation of conceptions of gender relations between different (con)texts and translation problems related to gender and law, and the role of translators as brokers and intermediaries in negotiating and contesting legal knowledge production and flows.
Deadline for Submissions Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted to the Co-Editors, Miriam Bak McKenna Miriam.bak.mckenna@jur.lu.se and Maj Grasten mlg.mpp@cbs.dk by 10 January 2021. Manuscripts will be due by 15 April 2021. Earlier submissions are welcomed.
Refereeing of Articles
The Australian Feminist Law Journal referees all manuscripts submitted for publication and follows the double-blind refereeing procedure. Referees will be selected with expertise in the author’s area of scholarship. Authors are requested to place their name and affiliation on a separate page, and eliminate any self-identifying citation of one’s own work. This can be done by leaving such citations or reference material blank or otherwise referring to the work in a way that disguises the name of the author. The journal will not accept manuscripts for consideration that are already under consideration by another journal.
The Australian Feminist Law Journal is published by Routledge/Taylor and Francis UK. Please direct general academic journal enquiries to the Editorial Board at aflj@griffith.edu.au. An electronic version of the journal style guide can be found on the AFLJ Griffith University website: http://www.griffith.edu.au/criminology-law/australian-feminist-law-journal/contributor-guide. For subscription enquiries, email subscriptions@tandf.co.uk