MESA Book Awards
Emek Ergun
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
2024 Fatema Mernissi Book Award Winner
Emek Ergun
Virgin Crossing Borders: Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation
University of Illinois Press
Virgin Crossing Borders: Feminist Resistance and Solidarity in Translation offers a groundbreaking exploration of the translation of Hanne Blank’s Virgin: The Untouched History from English into Turkish. Drawing from her own journey as a politically engaged feminist translator and scholar, Emek Ergun traces the textual and material production of the Turkish translation, Bekâret. Through collaboration with a group of feminist readers in Turkey, Ergun vividly recounts how this Western feminist text was mobilized to challenge Turkey’s heteropatriarchal virginity codes and its deeply entrenched, medicalized virginity regime. She shifts translation from the periphery to the core of contemporary transnational feminist discourse, depicting it as an ethical and politically creative practice, pivotal in fostering feminist struggles across linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries. This remarkable book not only contributes to feminist, translation, and Middle Eastern studies but also offers a vision of feminist resistance and solidarity that transcends geopolitical divides and cultural essentialisms.