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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Jeeweon Shin
In the last decades, many researchers have embraced feminist poststructuralist
approaches to the study of language and gender (Bing & Bergvall 1996; Freeman &
McElhinny 1996; Cameron 1996, 1997; Pavlenko 2001; Pavlenko & Pillar 2001), in
which they perceive gender as a system of social relations rather than an
attribute of individuals. In this view, one’s gender identities are understood
as dynamic, fluid, multiple, and socially constructed, particularly in a
situation where one’s subjectivities change across two different cultures. Since
normative masculinities and femininities may differ cross-culturally,
border-crossers who move from one speech community to another may find
themselves in a situation where their previous subjectivities are not coherently
produced, thereby causing them to transform their gendered performances in ways
that conform to normative gendered subjects in the new circumstance (Pavlenko
2001).
Panel 4: Translation and the Construction of Gendered Identity
Negotiation of Gender Identities across Two Cultures
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
University of Toronto, Canada
While previous studies have focused on how gender roles of first generation
immigrants or refugees are affected in a multilingual setting (Hedge 1998;
Pavlenko 2001), little has been done to understand the gender identities of
subsequent generations. Second generation multilingual minority groups tend to
relate both to their ethnic origin and to the identity assumed in the
multilingual setting, and tend not to conform to either the dominant culture or
to the original ethnic culture (Bhabha 1990).
Keeping this in mind, my study probes ways in which Korean-American women
negotiate and transform gender performances in discourse, and construct gender
identities in the course of negotiating between two different cultures. As
stratified gender roles informed by Confucianism are hidden in various
linguistic, pragmatic, and discourse aspects of the language in Korean community
(Min 1998), many second generation Korean women face conflicts in becoming
‘women’ in an American vein. Data gathered from first person narratives written
by second generation Korean women will allow us to examine the conflictual
process of shaping gender identity and to identify the key sites of
transformations of gender performance.
© IATIS 2003