Literary activism and the gendered politics of translation: Iraqi women writers & feminist translation approaches My PhD project focuses on Iraqi women writers’ novels in Arabic-English translation alongside various feminist translation approaches. Previous to my PhD, I had worked as a health advocacy worker for many years, often translating between Arabic, French and English to help people have fair access to health services. I became aware of feminist translation theory when I enrolled in the MA Translation and Interpreting programme at the University of Salford in 2010. Seven years later, I am now an AHRC-funded third year PhD candidate in the Centre of Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester, which is part of the NWCDTP consortium. My project has two main aims: the first, to highlight aspects of Iraqi women writers’ literature previously not explored in current English language scholarship; the second is showing how Iraqi women’s literature in Arabic and English translation offers new insights into feminist translation. So why do I believe that the study of Iraqi women writers’ literature is so important? And what does feminist translation actually mean? To start with the first question: the study of Iraqi women’s literature. Since the 1990s, Iraqi academic activists have expressed fears that “collective violence (in Iraq)…presents the temptation to homogenize a collectivity” (Al-Ali & Al-Najjar 2013, xxx)i post 1991 and 2003 wars in Iraq. Iraq’s charged contexts of war (which historically involve the US and UK) and media images of “Middle Eastern women” as victims (Jabbra 2006)ii raise questions on whose politics mediate Iraqi women writers’ novels when published in English translation. Twelve Iraqi women writers, to my knowledge have had fiction translated from Arabic into English either novels, plays or short stories. Their writing in Arabic brings to life the many peoples, places, cultures and histories of Iraq, past and present. With richness and vividness of expression, Iraqi women writers re-create how different Iraqi women and men “speak”, using different gendered writing techniques. But how do the nuances of their gendered writing “read” in English? To what extent do translation decisions shift the gender politics of Iraqi women’s novels in English translation, how and why? This was my starting point of the project. The second starting point was feminist translation. Feminist translation scholarship engages with gender and translation in many different ways: shifts of feminist thought in and via translation; the historical roles of women as translators; why translation has been framed as less creative or “original” than the activity of “writing”; why a translated work – and the translator’s labour – is expected to read “invisibly”, with most credit assigned to “the writer” (and publisher); how gender markers in language transmit gendered roles via translation; why some gender and language identities are more visible in translation than others. Feminist translation, in effect, looks at writing and translation as intimately connected to wide-ranging gendered and geo-political power relations. The dynamics underpinning the translation of particular languages, literatures, writers or social/cultural groups are thus always open to question. Feminist translation analysis, then, does not focus exclusively on women and feminism but also on identity, geo-political location and gender as ongoing spheres of concern. So why feminist translation alongside Iraqi women writers’ literature? : after all, no Iraqi women writers in my project identify themselves or their novels as feminist. First of all, feminist translation is a creative engagement with the gendered power relations in any given translation situation to foster new ways of critically thinking about translation and writing. So, increasing critical awareness of important texts by women and other identity groups to new audiences is one mode of activist feminist translator praxis, or approach. In this vein, my project foregrounds Iraqi women writers’ literature as an important literary canon in terms of creativity, themes and writing techniques, both in Arabic and English publication. Secondly, as an engagement with concerns about receptions of Iraqi creativity, I analyse the gendered politics of Iraqi women writers’ novels in (and as) English translations. So in my analyses of the novels, I explore, among other questions: how the gendered politics of the Arabic novels “travel” into English; how the novels creatively engage with media discourses on Iraq and women; how perception of the “Iraqi woman writer” shapes the novels’ meanings and receptions; representations of translation and writing used by Iraqi women writers for political effect. So questions of gender intertwine every aspect of my thesis; at the same time Iraqi women writers’ literature constantly questions and diversifies my interpretations of feminist translation and gendered literary activism. I look forward to sharing my findings, post-thesis completion. i Al-Ali, Nadje Sadig and Deborah Al-Najjar. 2013. Introduction: Writing Trauma, Memory and Materiality. In We Are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War, eds. N. S. Al-Ali and D. Al-Najjar, xxv-xl. New York: Syracuse University Press ii Jabbra, Nancy W. 2006. Women, Words and War: Explaining 9/11 and Justifying U.S. Military Action in Afghanistan and Iraq. Journal of International Women's Studies, 8(1), 236-255.