Translation or Transliteration?: ‘Gender’ Troubles in Russia

Abstract

Gender, as a word and as a concept, reached Russia only after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and nearly as soon as it was translated—or, perhaps, transliterated—the word became the target of a backlash. It represented a threat to a vulnerable new state—understood in the Russian context as the governing body of the nation—and a still-forming civil society, and the word and its roots continue to sit at the center of a heated debate about no less than the health and future of Russia itself. The primary aim of this paper is to examine the contours of the reception and uses of ‘gender’ through official church and state treatments of the word and what it carries, through the mainstream consciousness and media of an evolving civil society, and through contemporary Russian feminist commentary. This analysis is an examination of precisely the obstacles that ‘gender’ meets in transit and the ways in which these obstacles are, in the target language, transformed into multiple and sometimes conflicting opportunities. To this end, I examine the linguistic and cultural contexts of a target audience that is sensitive to the rapid imposition of ideological language, as well as the obstacles that such a context poses for translation and, most crucially, the ways in which political, mainstream, and feminist voices navigate and operationalise the foreignness of these words, either through overt rejection or through resignification.