Butler Traveling East: On Practices of Reading and Translating

Abstract

Theories travel, and their destinations matter. Instead of dwelling on what happens to them while they journey, the article seeks to understand how theories enter different circumstances, what facilitates or obstructs their mobility and what is the context in which they land. It proposes to consider how Judith Butler’s theories traveled to the East of Europe, more particularly to Serbia and the Balkans. The article proceeds diachronically, from the mid-1980s to today, considering the era of wars and the breakup of Yugoslavia, the transitional 2000s, and the consciously postsocialist 2010s. This trajectory appears on the background of the practices of reading and translating Butler’s works, situating the post-Yugoslavs in the wider context of Eastern Europe. The way we incorporated Butler in our knowledge production about ourselves is presented as a living archive of particular Eastern feminist quests: a search for language, a search for an identity, and lastly, a search for a political position. Ultimately, the text functions as a call for a we – a distinctly “Eastern European feminist we” – and a bid for coalitional thinking through cultural translation and pedagogy of trouble.