Writing Untranslatability: Transnational Feminist Writing and the Politics of Ambiguity

This article develops the “politics of ambiguity” as a transnational feminist methodology that frames the refusal to translate embedded concepts not as communicative failure but as decolonial praxis. Grounded in auto-theoretical reflection and fieldwork with Korean birth mothers of transnational adoptees, I argue Western academic and media discourse operate through translational violence: demands for “clarity” extract non-Western knowledge from its context, rendering it legible through dominant frameworks. I examine the resistance of Korean affective concepts han and jeong to this domestication, the subordination of comfort women activism to #MeToo’s temporal authority, and the reduction of 4B to an exportable “sex strike” stripped of its Korean feminist genealogy. Its inter-Asian rearticulation as 6B4T in China complicates extractive models of translation and provincializes Western epistemic authority. Positioning myself within “multiple peripherality,” I propose “linguistically situated knowledge” to argue that epistemic justice requires redistributing the translational labor that transnational feminists have long borne alone.