Translating Transgender: And/or, what will cislingualism have been? Part of the German Studies Colloquium Series.
When
1:30 – 3 p.m., Nov. 13, 2026
Where
LSB 346
Please join us for this colloquium presentation by Dr. David Gramling (University of British Columbia).
Abstract:
An international seminar met at the University of Arizona in 2015, supported by the LGBTQ+ Institute and the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry, which led to a double issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2016 under the title Translating Transgender. My own personal impetus for calling this seminar and double issue into being back then was 1) my own troubled work translating Murathan Mungan’s Turkish language short stories about trans life into English (i.e., from a language without pronominal gender (o/onun) to one with compulsory pronominal gender (he/she, his/hers), but also 2) to flesh out a concept I had somewhat fleetingly first proposed in The Invention of Monolingualism (2016), namely “cislingualism”. Ten years have now flown by, and the global public discourses on trans and cis have changed immensely. UA scholars during that time, including Kris Knisely (Knisely and Russell 2024), have made immense advances in how this term "cislingual" is envisioned. This talk is more of a reading from a forthcoming monograph Aniruddha Dutta (U of Iowa) and I are preparing on this topic, sounding out as many of the multilingual, social, political, and symbolic complexities immanent in this one phrase “translating transgender” in 2026, while foregrounding a central concern with what makes an utterance/method "cislingual", "translingual" or something else entirely.
Image
