Lost in Translation: Gender Heteroglossia in Bulgarian

The paper discusses the translations of the English analytical category gender in Bulgarian culture, the humanities and social sciences during the last decades. First, it traces the shifting meanings and uses of the term in Western feminist theory and its complicated relations with language, sexuality, subjectivity, and identity to explain how they function as a set of regulatory norms that materialize and fix the body. Then it analyses how these meanings have been re-signified in the Bulgarian context, tracing various translation equivalents of gender such as “rod”, “pol”, “socialen pol”, “rodov pol”, and others until its recent usage in political discourses as an empty referent. The dispersal and co-existence of these multiple translation variants and strategies are analyzed as a process of heteroglossia, which has generated chaos and conceptual confusion but has also demonstrated the need to re-consider and transcend the archaic binary thinking and analytical structures in Bulgarian society.