Introduction. Translating Feminism: Transfer, Transgression, Transformation (1950s–1980s)

This Forum brings together four articles which present case studies exploring the actors, contexts, sites and practices of inter-lingual translation, in a context of feminist debate, activism and writing. This Introduction aims to engage with the findings of these case studies in a reflection on the nature and historical development of translation as a socially and culturally embedded process. These reflections resonate, we believe, with rapidly growing historical research on transnationalism and gender on the one hand, and the history of feminism on the other. 1 We aim to present elements of a theoretical framework that can enrich historical approaches to translation and gender history, and which borrows from both feminist theory and Translation Studies. The four articles presented here are all situated in contexts of political activism, whether explicitly feminist or in other ways aimed at social justice for women or equality between the sexes. Each paper demonstrates the variety of ways in which feminist agents have aimed to understand, locally re-contextualise and politically operationalise a text, a vocabulary, or a set of ideas that originated in a different cultural context. What exactly happens to a text when it is integrated into a receiving culture, why is this text translated and re-contextualised rather than others, what purpose does it serve in the host culture, how is it turned into a socially meaningful discourse which might trigger responses, and by whom? 2 The present Forum includes contributions on interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in postwar Japan (Julia Bullock), feminist transfers between Yugoslavia, France and Italy during the Cold War (Chiara Bonfiglioli), English translations of East German author Christa Wolf in the 1970s–80s (Caroline Summers), and the self-translation practices of Brazilian feminist writer and black activist Lelia de Almeida Gonzalez (Ana Margerida Dias Martins).Historians engage with issues of translation in a number of ways. For the past fifteen or so years, a number