Humanities Forum: Joan S. Korenman Lecture with Emek Ergun

Virginity in Translation: A Feminist Project of Rewriting Bodies Across Borders
Emek Ergun, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
The Annual Joan S. Korenman Lecture, part of the Spring 2024 Humanities Forum

In this talk, Emek Ergun will explore the political role of translation in facilitating transnational feminist transformations and connectivities. She will discuss the transatlantic journey of Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History — a popular feminist book demystifying the man-made histories of virginity in western geographies — via her Turkish translation and its reception. Ergun will show how Turkish Virgin’s readers disrupted the heteropatriarchal hold of virginity on their bodies and will highlight the political work that lies ahead of us to create a truly egalitarian global economy of translation, circulation, and reception of feminist texts.

Holding a PhD from the Language, Literacy and Cultural Program at UMBC, where she became a Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies scholar and teacher, Emek Ergun is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Global Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Her most recent book, Virgin Crossing Borders: Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2023. Ergun is also the co-editor of Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives (Routledge, 2017) and the 5th edition of Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (Routledge, 2020), which she co-edited with Professor Carole McCann of UMBC. Ergun is also a feminist translator and her most recent translations include the Turkish translation of Octavia Butler’s speculative novel, Kindred (Ithaki Press, 2019) and the English co-translation titled The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison (Pluto Press, 2022).

Admission is free.

The Korenman Lecture is organized by the Department of Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies, and is co-sponsored by the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; the Dresher Center for the Humanities; the Center for Social Science Scholarship; Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics, and Intercultural Communication; Department of Media and Communication Studies; Women Involved in Learning and Leadership Program; Language Literacy & Culture Doctoral Program; and the Global Studies Program.