Woman and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa

Woman and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa

Xuefei BAI
University of Massachusetts Amherst

           By far the greater proportion of art and historical record has been
           left by men. The process of ‘sexual translation’ or of the breakdown
           of linguistic exchange is seen, almost invariably, from a male focus
           (Steiner 1998: 46).

           Translators and women have historically been the weaker figures in
           their respective hierarchies: translators are handmaidens to
           authors, women inferior to men (Simon 1996: 1).

           I-feminist-and-translator am now responsible for who gets
           translated into my mother tongue, who and what becomes part of the
           cultural space I am co-authering (Lotbiniére-Harwood 1995: 55).

“Woman” as a category is as much a product of translation as translation has been eroticized
to become a semiotic sign representing femininity and subordination. To a large degree, this
has much to do with how the two terms have been defined. According to some feminists,
including those of the French and Canadian schools, “woman” in the androcentric tradition
is but the gendered being that is “not-man”, lacking man’s characteristics and qualities;
hence her inferior status from the male perspective. Likewise, “translation” is simply
assumed to be “not-original”, which suggests its “lack” of originality/authority/creativity;
hence the relegation of translation to a subordinate position, handily expressed as a passive
sexual being subordinate to an authoritative master.

Feminists in the field of translation studies (cf. Chamberlain 1988; Godard 1990;
Lotbiniere-Harwood 1991; Simon 1996; Von Flotow 1997) have drawn attention to the link
between translation and woman, as they realize that the gendering and sexualization of
translation reveals the structural relations between men and women, the essence of which
points to the struggle for power and domination of one sex over the other. However, what
the unusual but naturalized association between translation and woman can bring to
translation and feminism and how an interdisciplinary study of the intersection can

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          2

maximize the optimal strategy to empower both women and translators are yet to be
explored. This article examines possibilities through questioning the normalized pattern
seen in the gendering and sexualization of translation and discusses loss and gains of
claiming and/or reclaiming agency. It also reveals the complexity and impact of power
structure as informed by the link between translation and woman through a feminist lens.

A feminist analysis of the subjugated status of the translator in general, in contrast to the
violent (and often sexual) rhetorical remarks made by some translation scholars and
practitioners regarding the act of translation, may well shed some light on the intricacies of
gender relations to power structures implicit in the theory and practice of translation. The
former involves the rhetoric that treats translation as the gendered female sex, and the latter
the male dominance of female spaces and sexuality through violence. One may wonder what
makes translation comparable to the category of woman. The answer is not hard to identify
when we associate it with the hermeneutic model Steiner claimed for translation: translation
is a fourfold process comprised of initial trust, penetration, embodiment and restitution
(Steiner 1998: 319). The translator has to trust that the text has transferrable meaning, just
like men have to trust women to have “reproductive” capacity. Based on the bond of trust,
both need to be “protected” to ensure paternal purity (cf. Steiner 1998; Chamberlain 1988).
In translation this means fidelity to the original. In the process of protecting the “privileged”
and inferior “Other”, the hierarchy of male power/the original over women/translation is
preserved and perpetrated. Exposed in and through translation is male domination and
female subjugation, which, when intersecting with other forms of dominance and
oppression, have touched almost every aspect of human life, among them literature and art,
as is illustrated in the myth of Europa.

Myth of Europa and the Male Structure of Power

Although Walter Benjamin, in the essay “The Task of the Translator”, would not take into
consideration receivers of an art work or readers of a translation project (1968: 69), when an
artist “translates” some ancient description into visual works of art, s/he would, in some
degree or other, be aware of their beholders’ expectations to their artistic translation work.
In this paper I use an expanded definition of translation to include intersemiotic translation
(from text into picture) as defined by Roman Jakobson (1959: 233), and consider an artist an

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          3

artistic translator who transforms the literary text into the ekphrases of their works.
Beholders of such intersemiotic translation, particularly those familiar with the literary text,
would, consciously or unconsciously, compare the visual artwork to the image in their mind
formed from out of their own close readings and interpretations of the source text.
Nevertheless, despite the expectations, as with any other form of literary translation, the
artist/translator is not merely mechanically involved in making visible the images
represented in the literary text, for as Junius suggests, an artist following such a policy
without nurturing his “phantasy” can only produce some heavy, dull, and lifeless piece of
work (Junius as quoted in Dundas 1995: 159). In this sense, this article studies the highly
acclaimed works of Titian: Ratto d’Europa (Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1562, oil on
canvas, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, USA), which depicts the moment
Europa was abducted by Jove, the great ruler of the gods in the guise of a bull, and has been
considered “the most complete realization of Ovid’s description” (Dundas 1995:159).
Titian’s sensuous painting appears to be a successful translation of the rape-foreboding
abduction scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and has been widely and conventionally
appreciated for its aesthetic appeal. However, recent enlightening feminist research suggests
alternative readings of the painting. A. W. Eaton (2003), for example, points to the ethical
defect of this famous painting and criticizes its eroticization of rape. An analysis of the work
from a non-phallocentric position is revealing regarding how and why women become the
gendered and “privileged” inferior, a term used by Steiner to describe the condition as
shared by women and children, who have been the minorities even if they outnumber men in
their community (Steiner 1998: 39).

The theme of the painting is thought-provoking. It depicts the common topic of
abduction/rape, yet Europa is presented more like a seducer, or as Eaton says, a willing
participant, rather than as a rape victim. Viewers are usually impressed with the beauty of
the bull, which echoes Ovid’s poetic description of his handsome appearance and leaves
viewers the impression that Europa is not totally innocent in the rape (read: seduction), as
she is apparently attracted (read: seduced) by the beauty of the bull and has climbed onto its
back voluntarily. Ovid contributes as much verse to the act of rape-incurring abduction (or
seduction) as to the image of the bull. Ovid’s readers watch as “he rises, ever so gently, and
slowly edges/ From the dry sand toward the water […] with the girl, trembling a little/ And
looking back to the land, her right hand clinging/ Tight to one horn, and the other resting
easy/ Along the shoulder, and her flowing garments/ Filling and fluttering in the breath of

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          4

the sea-wind” (translated by Humphries 1983/2: 870-75). Titian observed this scenario, too,
and he demonstrated as much on his canvas. Through his translation and imagination,
viewers are brought to a beautiful landscape filled with Titian’s signature orange-red,
blessing sunlight and mirthful cherubs. It would not be easy for them not to interpret the
abduction/rape as a blessing for Europa, considering the alluring position of the girl and the
power and status of the rapist-to-be. Not surprisingly, Stirrup (1977) interprets the girl’s
approach as her wooing of the bull. She adorns his horns with wreaths as one presenting
gifts to her lover, and her abduction becomes “a parody of the deductio of the marriage
ceremony” (174-75).

Ovidian readers would witness that Europa the abducted girl, like other virgins raped by
Jove, ends up praying to her rapist and accepting him as her patron, while her children
become proud descendants of her rapist. Driven in the name of fate and power, Jove,
symbolic of male power, overpowers these women and grants their children noble blood by
birth. The effects of rape, ironically, turn positive: the conflict switches from women against
the rapist to women against women when the readers are informed that all sufferings Europa
and other rape victims go through are the result of Juno the jealous wife’s revenge and have
little to do with Jove the perpetrator. This blaming of women for their victimhood (because
they instigate men’s desire) and suffering (because women, specifically wives, are jealous)
rather than on the male perpetrator tends to naturalize and internalize a heterosexual
paradigm of powerful men raping, i.e., “conquering”, women, all the while ascribing the
cause and effect of said violence to women. This paradigm is reflected in Nietzsche’s claim
that “on the whole ‘woman’ has so far been despised most by woman herself – and by no
means by us [men]” (1966: 5). The gendered image of “woman” represented in mythology,
an early form of oral tradition, under the gaze of men plays a role in putting women in a
subjugated position that makes feminists such as Mackinnon (1989) sarcastically criticize:
“(t)o be rapable, a position that is social not biological, defines what a woman is” (49).

Like other Ovidian rape narratives and their visual rendering in European art, the literary
description and visual translation of the rape of Europa represent men as having the will to
power and knowledge. When Jove is struck with the physical beauty of virgins, he is
immediately burning with “love”, and employs various rape techniques in order to ravish
and make them eligible carriers of his “seeds”. For Jove and other male gods, the fulfillment
of “love” is penetration and insemination at all costs, while on the women’s side, it is about

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          5

succumbing to men’s “love” and the fate of their femininity and their assigned position as
domestic mothers. The rape myth reveals men’s manipulation of female sexuality and the
sexualization of gender inequality. Because male-focused Western art and literature are, as
Steiner suggests, largely about preceding art and literature (1998: 485), or rather,
topologically dispersed translations of translations, the rape paradigm in myth goes far
beyond literary texts and has seen its translations through various vehicles that resonate with
and perpetuate the male dominance of female sexuality and gender inequality initiated by
the anatomical penetrability of a man into a woman’s body. Therefore, and through this
artwork, as Mackinnon argues, sexuality is ideologically bound and socially constructed.
For this reason, she puts a feminist theory of sexuality within a theory of gender inequality
(1997: 159).

Feminists in the realm of art and literature, like those in other disciplines, have been
categorized into different theoretical camps according to their political objectives and
understandings of human nature. Although feminism has various forms and has been
practiced and approached in many different disciplines that interconnect, one central
paradigm of feminist theory tackles the sexualization of women’s body and issues of gender
inequality. It provides the common ground for feminists in and outside of art and literature.
For example, when we look at a literary work or artwork to analyze issues of male
dominance and oppression of women through the lens of gender, we may pose questions
such as: How are women represented in the work? By whom and for whom? What images
have been perpetuated as carriers of the signified “woman”? Representative inquiries vary
from the constitution of gender within the power system to identity politics and issues of
agency and structure in questioning the unequal dichotomy of yang (male, bright) and yin
(female, dark), which has informed other opposing dichotomies of masculinity (positive,
active and public) and femininity (negative, passive and domestic).

Feminist awareness has brought to light the gendered representation of women in the
literary tradition for the purposes of manipulation; these representations have provided
strong messages for women in real life to follow in order to be feminine and desirable
according to ‘normal’, i.e., men’s standards. In other words, the way women have been
idealized (or demonized) in literary texts or artistic works has become internalized for some
women in terms of how they judge themselves and how they fit into a socially constructed
femininity. The impact on women is what Bartky (1997) believes to be the reason why

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          6

every woman is not a feminist. Women who have been used to the patriarchal codes and
have adjusted their lives to those codes may feel misidentified and lost, and may even feel
“desexualized”, or further, “annihilated” once the system that writes the female body as
feminine is “dismantled” (Bartky 1997: 146); similarly, a rape victim like Europa may not
look like one, and readers may even be encouraged to take the abduction as a tribute to her
feminine attractiveness.

While one might defend Titian’s visual translation of the story by arguing that Europa’s
resistance against rape is not explicitly narrated in the myth. The situation is different in the
case of Ovid’s depiction of Jove’s rape of Callisto, a nymph that Diana the virgin patroness
and hunting goddess holds most dear. Callisto’s struggle is deliberately highlighted;
nevertheless, Jove in the guise of Diana takes her by force, and the author comments, “But
girls are frail, and anyway, who could conquer/the might of Jove? He won, and then, a
victor / Went back to heaven” (Ovid 2: 436-38). Female frailty and the consequent futility to
fight are emphasized in this rape process, and male power as victorious and conquering is
celebrated. The biological difference is elevated to an inevitable power inequality between
the male and female sexes, with the former being the superior and the latter the inferior
gender. The anatomical difference between men and women can easily become a reason to
disempower the female sex when it is taken as a matter of fact and as the base of gender
difference.

According to Judith Butler, men seek to discover and reinforce gender difference so that the
inequality between the sexes can be preserved out of their masculine desires (Butler 1997:
137). A feminist therefore needs to be alert to any effort that places difference into the
opposing position of equality. As Alcoff says, the crucial factor for becoming a feminist is
not learning more facts about the world, but is viewing the world from a different position
(Alcoff 1988: 436). Thus, whereas Brownmiller suggests that man’s penetrable capacity for
forcible intercourse alone may have caused the creation of a male ideology of rape,
Woodhull criticizes her for reducing the complex social processes that cause rape to a matter
of anatomical difference (Woodhull 1988: 170).

A feminist would not ignore the biological differences, neither would s/he ignore the
magnification of men’s “structural capacity to rape” and women’s “corresponding structural
vulnerability”, which can easily disguise or worse, ‘naturalize’ the implicit power relations
and gender oppression. A feminist researcher seeks to reveal the core structure underlying

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          7

apparent gender facts. More often than not s/he aims to make visible the concealed power
structure beyond apparent sexual difference. Failure to accomplish this task can be harmful
to the ultimate goal of gender equality and social justice as it regresses into the male-
centered paradigm of looking at gender. In the case of Europa and Jove, readers find that as
in many other cases of Jove’s rape acts, his mighty male power is hailed. As a “victor”, he is
not blamed for the rapes. The only obstacle on his way to and in his act of rape is his jealous
wife, whose vengeful punishment of the raped girls enables him to be their patron in
relieving them of their agony. In the act of rape and his post-rape control over the victims,
his male power is fully represented in the establishment of the rape pattern that reinforces
male supremacy. Upon critical examination, the myth of rape and its dissemination through
translation clearly reveals a male structure of power.

Feminist critics such as Annette Kolodyny suggest that attention to “male structures of
power” is what is shared by all types of feminist literary criticism (1980: 20). A feminist
perspective on the politics of rape also reveals the rape myth as ultimately a form of power
struggle rather than some anatomical difference. However, attending to the power structure
alone is not a solution. Male power continues to work within literature and beyond it, and
functions significantly in the formation of unequal gender relations. Since one of the goals
of feminism concerns the social transformation of gender relations, and this transformability
cannot be sufficient if not followed by intervention (Butler 1992: 204), the latter part of this
article focuses on feminist interventions in gendered oppression and against male supremacy
by examining how women translators and authors can build up a her-story to make women’s
experience and epistemology visible and valuable.

Dismantling the dichotomy of power

The analysis of the rape myth sheds some light on the ideological system and invites us to
explore the cause and effect of such categories as man/woman, sex/gender and
masculinity/femininity. This needs reformulating: Feminist literary theory has connected the
rape myth to the patriarchal structure of power and “his” representation of “her” in the
phallocentric tradition of the history of writing, and anti-rape politics are based on an
agenda of fighting against sexual oppression and male supremacy. They are centered on the
deconstruction of the male power structure and the building of a female representation of

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          8

herself. One of the most influential feminist literary movements that meets the agenda is
found in certain French feminists’ advocacy of women’s writing and the feminist
translators’ awareness of the gender and identity politics in translation studies. It is shared
and has been adapted by some Canadian feminist translators.

Feminist translation/literary/cultural theory, Wallace (2002) argues, emphasizes the
importance of the state of genderedness of readers, writers, translators, and other actors in
the panorama of literary creation (66). While there should be no objection to the importance
of genderedness, it certainly is inadequate to summarize the revolutionary development and
transformation feminism brings to these arenas. We need to understand, first of all, why
gender matters in translation/literary/cultural theory and how it works towards the building
of the power structure and sexual oppression.

Since the act of translation has been defined in the patriarchal mode of domination vs.
subordination fused with heavily sexualized imagery and terms, translation is an ideal site
through which to study male-dominated sexuality and rape. Anna Livia (1992), an Irish
feminist scholar, recalls encountering a male translator who declared that translation is
penetration, and said that when he translated Marilyn Hacker’s poems he felt he was
“forcing her to expose herself to him, driving his wedge into her work”, and that the poems
were a child they had made together (15). Some people may wish to take this example as an
extreme case, but the metaphor and paradigm of forcible penetration has been familiar to us,
and seems rather handy for men such as Steiner and other translators/theorists to use.

Steiner, a recent writer on the hermeneutic approach to translation, holds that men and
women cannot understand each other’s meaning since the legendary fall of the Tower of
Babel. He traces the differentiation between men and women from biological to linguistic,
although he also confesses that the grounds for such differentiation are economic and social
as well. Further, he admits that records of art and historical events have been mainly left by
men and that the linguistic difference is seen from men’s perspective. Given gender
difference, Steiner argues that few artists, not even the greatest, could totally translate
women’s speech and understand the crisis of sex differentiation; on the other hand, he
argues that women novelists and poets do not excel as “translators”, but as “declaimers of
their own, long-stifled tongue” (1998: 46-47). Based on the gendered linguistic difference
that he finds rooted in the male-focused Western art and literature, Steiner offers his

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          9

“sexual” translation of the mystic translation process deemed necessary to ensure human
communication.

The sexualized metaphor Steiner employs, known as the thrust/penetration paradigm of
hermeneutic translation, has, as Gentzler observes, continually bothered women translators
(2008: 53). However, what bothers women translators may not be the metaphor itself, but
the phallocentric ideology it bears, which reinforces what has been predominant in the
literary and social history. This certainly encourages men to manipulate the rape paradigm
to perform their masculinity and maintain the patriarchal system. The translator Livia met
eroticizes his manipulation of the translated text and the translation, much like Steiner
sexualizes the hermeneutic process of translation. Gentzler suggests that Steiner’s use of
such an aggressive metaphor tends to break the traditional categories that put source text and
translation into binary positions such as original/copy, master/slave (2008: 53). However,
such practice as Steiner’s eroticizing translation reinforces the dichotomized way of looking
at men (penetrating and productive) and women (rapable and reproductive). Steiner is using
one binary mode of thinking to replace another rather than breaking any. Of course, this
may serve as a timely warning for feminists to think seriously about how best to get
“woman” out of the subordinate position without falling back on patriarchal ideology and
hegemony. This “woman”, as Mackinnon observes, is a construct of “sexuality”, a product
of “desire”, and the “desire” that social hegemony enforces through the existing theories
while imposing female sexuality on women daily (Mackinnon 1997: 160).

Following Mackinnon’s positionality in treating sexuality, I suggest that sexuality is both a
social and cultural construct regulated by ideologies shaped under the combined forces of
literature, cultural tradition, and hegemonic social systems. In order to deconstruct
ideological conceptions of female sexuality in the term ‘woman’, feminists have to
challenge and question male sexuality in view of men’s dominant position in defining the
opposite sex as inferior. Gentzler’s observation that women translators are bothered by the
aggressive male metaphor used by Steiner is a good starting point. We may want to think
one step further about why women feel bothered, and whether some male translators
endorse Steiner’s “penetrating” way of thinking.

Chamberlain (1988: 463) contends that Steiner’s patriarchal model illustrates “the
persistence of the politics of originality and its logic of violence in contemporary translation
theory” (463). She also criticizes the recurrence of this violence in later translation scholars’

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          10

eroticization of translation, specifically that of Serge Gavronsky: “the original has been
captured, raped and incest performed, so that the son is father of the man, […] and the slave-
master dialectic reversed” (Gavronsky as quoted in Chamberlain 1988: 463). Gavronsky’s
violent and aggressive expatiation of the translation process might sound compelling but it
is nothing other than a modern hermeneutic paraphrase of the mythological rape paradigm.
It indicates that the rape pattern that appears in the myth has been eternalized, and has
become the metaphoric device that maintains and perpetuates male power. Thus Titian
would eroticize the theme of rape in his visual translation of Europa; thus women translators
feel bothered by Steiner’s rape-paradigm in his description of the process of translation.
Male aggression has been woven into a concept of male power where men comfortably
reside as the “master”.

If women want to dismantle the “master’s” house, they need to bring into question men’s
structure of power to liberate the assumed “servants” from the house. This involves both a
destruction and a reconstruction process. For both purposes, it is crucial to liberate women
from “woman” by demystifying the socially and culturally constructed gender polarity and
by re-conceptualizing “woman” as an independent entity with agency rather than the Other
being relational to ‘man’. For when concepts are defined by their relationship – i.e.,
translation implied as not-original, woman implied as not-man, or man as not-woman –
efforts to liberate the gendered sex would fall back into the phallocentric trap that sets men
as the standard.

Despite the fact that translators, like women, are under-represented in theoretical discourse,
some male translators, in their effort to disrupt the unequal dichotomy, not only sexualize
and feminize the process of translation, making themselves as oppressive as what they have
been fighting against, they also annul the authenticity of the female experience of
translating. Again, women translators are put in the Other position of the masculine
metaphor and are faced with the double task of challenging the dualisms of public vs.
private, aggressive vs. passive, rational vs. intuitive. When translating as a woman, a female
translator is placed under double oppression: first as a translator subject to the mastery of
the original author or their text, then as a woman translator subject to gender discrimination
and male-regulated codes and norms. The double oppression must certainly affect her
epistemological strategy and positionality differently than a male translator’s. As a socially

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          11

formed man, the male translator interprets the world through the lens of patriarchy, and his
normative performance can mobilize the hegemonic system that produces oppression.

The woman translator may have to consider whether her oppressed position lends her any
“epistemological privilege”, or whether it provides her with possible alternatives to access
texts celebrating male power. If a woman translator’s experience and epistemology differ
from her male counterpart’s, how does that difference function in gender relations to
reinforce male power or question/challenge/disrupt it? Is being a woman and translator
adequate for one to be alert to male power and women’s agency, or does one have to be a
feminist and a translator to resist and prevent the oppression of woman? The emergence of
feminist translators and their interventional practices provide us with tentative answers for
these questions.

Feminist Intervention and Agency

Feminist analysis illustrates that the myth of Europa is not the myth of woman by women; it
is the rape myth of ‘woman’ constructed under the eyes of a male gaze and uttered through
patriarchal languages for the weaving of a network of power relations. In the ancient text
and in Titian’s artistic work, woman is a ‘muted’ virgin deprived both of victimhood and
agency. Europa is not viewed as a victim because she is only a sexual object, assumed to
have no rational knowledge or passion to love, and can only be loved by way of rape. Jove
and his kind are imbued with the knowledge and power to love, to be aggressive and to rape.

An important aspect in any discussion of ‘woman’ or ‘women’ is that the myth of Europa
may not elicit the same response from woman recipients. Simone de Beauvoir and numerous
other later feminists have conducted research into the category of “woman” and argued that
one is not born a woman but becomes a woman. Consequently, as has been highlighted in
this article, certain women may well think from men’s perspective as a result of the
“becoming a woman” process, which applies patriarchal hegemonic norms to a “woman”
and influences her epistemological understanding of themselves and the world around them.
Even feminists, despite their common interest in changing the oppressed position of women,
have demarcations in terms of epistemological strategies and anti-rape/violence preventions.
Nevertheless, the different approaches are not meant to impede feminists from agreeing on
what is absent from the myth of Europa: namely, the girl’s agency.

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          12

In view of the crucial importance of women’s agency to the liberation of “woman” from
male dominance constructed in the long history (his-story) of patriarchal hegemony, it is
understandable that a feminist anti-rape or anti-violence discourse is set to “cultivate and
nurture women’s agency” (cf. Burton 1998: 200), and for this purpose, Marcus proposes that
we take rape as a language and define it as “scripted interaction” occurring in a language, so
that male violence and female vulnerability will not become a pattern to analyze the cause
and effects of rape, thus impeding the ultimate eradication of the social script (Marcus
1992: 390-91). This conception of social script takes women’s will, agency and capacity for
violence into consideration, but does not consider the discourse of rape or the raped body as
real. According to Marcus, metaphors of rape as trespass and invasion are responsible for
the designation of female bodies as “vulnerable, violable, penetrable, and wounded” by the
rape script (Marcus 1992: 398). Marcus argues against the victimization of women because
she realizes that what appears to be the cause of rape, male power, is often the effect of the
rapist’s belief in his stronger power that some feminists like Brownmiller (1975) would
acknowledge, making rape and male power unchallengeable and inevitable. As if
responding to Marcus’ proposal, Burton also criticizes that Brownmiller’s consideration of
rape as a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of
fear, a discourse that normalizes and universalizes fear (Burton 1998: 184). She suggests
that women’s powerless lack of agency and fear of rape leaves them no room for resistance
and puts them in status of defenseless. Anti-violence should thus aim at cultivating and
nurturing women’s agency (Burton 1998: 200).

Both Marcus and Burton agree on the importance of women’s agency and advocate for this
cause. However, their strategies for gaining agency are different. In resisting the labeling of
female bodies as vulnerable and penetrable, Marcus resists treating metaphors of rape as
invasion; Burton on the other hand suggests a Foucauldian perspective of rape: that is, rape
is not male invasion, but “interplay between persons”, so that a raped woman can even be
considered “a participant in her rape” to validate physical and verbal resistance in women’s
passivity and fear (Burton 1998: 195). Although their strategies aim at getting woman out of
the victim position, and disrupting the “male aggressor vs. female victim” structure, both of
them ignore what constructs “the rape script” or “passivity/fear as femininity” paradigm.
Without clarifying the essential problems, deconstructing the concept of female victim
cannot really influence the male aggressor, or reduce sexual assaults as Burton hopes. I
suggest that, as long as women as a category are put in the duality system as antithesis of

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          13

men and are defined by men, whether they are named “victims” or “participants” will not
produce significant effects on male power structures. Titian’s painting “Rape of Europa”
can be renamed as “Interplay between Europa and Jove”, but her trembling and
subordination to fate and power say otherwise. Unless Europa has the knowledge and power
to love, her abduction can by no means be viewed as interplay in any real sense. The term
agency does not change the theme of rape and power; neither does it help to prevent Europa
from being the sexual object under male gaze. Similarly, the erotic and violent metaphors
used by some male translators do not bring real agency to translators, nor can they break
down the patriarchal hierarchy between writers and translators. Only when one is equipped
with the knowledge of the unequal power structure, and consciously works to subvert it, can
there be real agency that is truly empowering.

Brown-Grant declares that feminist literary scholarship has two main goals: “to challenge
what it sees as the marginalization of women’s experience typical of the works of the male-
authored canon; and secondly, to construct an alternative genealogy of female writers”
(1999: 1). Because women have been excluded from the creation of literary canons, the
history was written by HIM from HIS standpoint. Under HIS gaze and (mis)representation,
woman as a category was constructed and defined by HIM alone as the other race lacking
men’s qualities and characteristics, and the social as well as ideological dichotomy was
formed, which further sexualized and objectified the female sex, relegating them to the
inferior and domesticated gender.

Obviously, in order for Europa and her sisters to liberate themselves from being the rapable
and vulnerable sex, it is crucial that they gain the autonomy to write and translate their own
fate, with knowledge and will of their own. For this purpose, feminists in literary and
translation scholarship have proposed a feminist epistemology, under which they work to
recover an alternative history of women, to have voices of women heard and to circulate
representations of women as active and creative beings. A feminist epistemology can not
only deconstruct the myth of rape and violence against women and rewrite the stereotyped
men/women dualism, not as the different thus unequal relationship but as different and equal
beings (cf. Scott 1997), which is what feminists in the field of translation and literature are
striving to achieve, it also questions the application of objective norms on translation that
resounds with positivist epistemology dominant in Western science, which presumes
translation as free of subjective judgment and creativity and relegates translators to the

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          14

subordinate position. Such being the case, the sexualization or gendering of translation will
not help a translator claim or reclaim any agency. Rather, it reinforces the system that
compares women to passive translation, and translation to a passive sexual being,
detrimental to both women and translation, as both become the Other without agency. To
avoid falling from a victim into a perpetrator that re-writes oppression, translators need to be
self-reflexive and constantly reflect on their own standpoint of utterance.

A feminist epistemology that challenges positivism and favors positionality can enable
women and translators to break down the dichotomy, (re)claim their agency, and have their
voice and knowledge heard and acknowledged. From the manifesto of women’s writing and
female creativity in French feminist Cixous’s “The Laugh of Medusa”, in which she hopes
that female creativity can be volcanic to burn out “the old property crust, carrier of
masculine investments” (Cixous 1976: 879), to the Quebecois feminist translators’ active
exploration of their identity as women and translators who question texts of “his-story” and
eventually turn to rewriting feminist works with which they felt intense affinities (Simon
1996: viii), woman and translation have created the agenda of deconstructing the patriarchal
pattern of dualism, and building up an egalitarian society where both genders are translated
by their difference, creativity and autonomy.

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html

Xuefei BAI. “Women and Translation: Beyond the Myth of Europa”                                          15

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About the author:

Xuefei Bai studies in the doctoral program in Comparative Literature at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, and works as a research and teaching assistant in the program. Her
research interests include translation studies, feminism and transnational literature.

Email: xbai@complit.umass.edu

© 2010. Omid AZADIBOUGAR (ed.). Translation Effects. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Seminar in
Translation Studies 2009. http://www.kuleuven.be/cetra/papers/papers.html