Douglas Robinson. Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address. London and New York, Bloomsbury, 2019, 248 p.

In the Preface to his latest book, Douglas Robinson admonishes the reader that Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address “is not a book about transgenderism” but “about dialogical engagements between and among communities” and, not least of all, “about translationality/translinguality across sex/gender divides” (p. x). Two ideas undergirding the reasoning behind these statements merit close attention, as they go to the heart of this study. First, and despite the author’s conviction that most people to varying degrees of awareness actually experience gender identity on a nonbinary continuum (“in the sense of being in the middle, […] being on (or off) some kind of gender spectrum,” p. xxvii), Robinson affirms that he is a cisman who will not speak for transgender men and women. His point with this study is to insist on the inherent limitations of any perspective on transgender in a range of contexts that are under investigation. The book’s theoretical underpinnings draw on Michel Callon and Bruno Latour’s understanding of translation as an act of manipulation in which one or several actors wield an “authority to speak or act on behalf of another actor or force” (1981, p. 279, in Robinson, p. xvii). This is where the second idea (regarding “dialogical engagements between and among communities”) comes in: in four chapters and a conclusion, the book forges a series of dialogical encounters between sometimes remarkably divergent—or even opposing—perspectives, relying on the premise that “[i]n the very act of crossing-over between this side and that side of whatever boundary one cares to posit, those dialogues are trans(versal): translingual, at least, and arguably transgender” (p. xxix; italics in the original). This statement reveals a flexible use of the prefix trans as a convenient figure for traversing fixed boundaries (be they conceived as linguistic, or in terms of gender) that is also apparent in Robinson’s concern with what he calls “[t]ranslingual address. This is a term for transitional intersubjectivity, the hermeneutical movement of a subject-in-transit” (p. xi; italics in original). Citing Naoki Sakai’s notion of heterolingual address as a model for ethical engagement with translation in the context of inter-and intracultural communication (see Sakai, 1997), Robinson’s aim with this study is thus to manage a transformative dialogue between translation studies and transgender studies that encourages an “ability to shift attitudinally, perspectivally” (p. xi) across academic disciplines, language communities and subject positions. As even this succinct description of the book’s key terms suggests, Robinson offers a resolutely theoretical (rather than practical) investigation into mostly metaphorical terrain shared by transgender and translation. Robinson thereby capitalizes on the semantic valences of trans to denote a dynamic crossing-over between languages (trans in translation), between gender identities (trans in transgender), and between cis- and trans communities caught in the challenges of (trans-lingual) communication. This expansive approach allows for a wide-ranging scope and a host of topics that are joined for analysis with an interdisciplinary array of theories and concepts. While occasionally dense and serpentine in its manner of exposition, the book’s central premise remains clear: transgender and translation are at heart a problem of address (a form of “speaking for others” in Callon and Latour’s sense), which for Robinson greatly matters beyond whether one identifies as cis or trans; rather, his aim is to query all claims of belonging “on another side of that boundary or barrier” (p. xvi; italics in original). Or as the author has it, the book “is an experiential participation in communal acrossness” (p. x). Robinson follows up on the highly condensed ideas expounded in the book’s Preface in four chapters that set out to construct …