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The Female Subject in Mulan through A Room of One's Own and The Woman Warrior : the Overlapping Between Politics and Ethics in Judith Butler's Cultural Translation

Feminism and Korean Literature / Feminism and Korean Literature, (P)1229-4632; (E)2733-5925
2016, v.0 no.39, pp.375-411
Cho Scarlet Hyun June
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Abstract

This study examines the significance of 'competing universalities' and 'constitutive contradiction' in Judith Butler's 'cultural translation' and explores the possibility of overlapping between politics and ethics of the cultural translation in the female subject of Disney's animated feature Mulan(1998) through A Room of One's Own(1929) by Virginia Woolf and The Woman Warrior(1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston. For this it investigates the task of Butler's cultural translation in the various rhetorical and cultural contexts of the three texts in which the meaning and force of universal claims of human rights of women as modern subjects are made, focused on the meaning of 'money' and 'a room' that Woolf suggested as requirements of women's liberation. According to Judith Butler, no assertion of universality takes place apart from a cultural norm and no assertion can be made without at once requiring a cultural translation given the array of contesting norms that constitute the international field above all things. Without the translation of 'competing universalities', the very concept of universality cannot cross the linguistic and cultural borders it claims to be able to cross. The politics of multiculturalism could be understood as a politics of translation in the service of adjudicating and composing a movement of competing and overlapping universalities. Secondly, assimilation of the particular into the universal leaves its trace, an unassimilable remainer, which renders universality ghostly to itself. The task of cultual translation is one that necessitated precisely by the 'performative contradiction' of the ghostly particular, the spectral doubling in the universal that takes place when one with no authorization to speak within and as the universal nevertheless lays claims to the terms. For the translation to be in the service of struggling for hegemony, the dominant discourse will have to alter by virtue of claiming universalities of excluded and marginalized particular ones in the discourse, admitting the foreign vocabulary into its main lexicon, and changing the dominant discourse itself. Transformed cultural translation of 'money' and 'a room' represented in Mulan through A Room of One's Own and The Woman Warrior can shed light on the possibility of connecting the politics and ethics and broaden the horizon of cultural translation in terms of 'competing universalities' and 'performative contradiction'. By creative chasms and violent shuttling, Butler's cultural translation can restage competing universalities and lead to performative re-signification and re-articulation of regulatory norms and laws. The chasm in translation can become the condition of contact with what is outside me, the vehicle for an ec-static relationality and the ethical scene where one language meets another and contact with alterity happens.

keywords
『자기만의 방』, 『여인 무사』, 「뮬란」, 주디스 버틀러, 문화 번역, 경쟁하는 보편성, 수행적 모순, 탈아적 관계성, A Room of One's Own, The Woman Warrior, Mulan, Judith Butler, Cultural translation, Competing Universalities, Performative Contradiction, Ec-Static Relationality

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Feminism and Korean Literature