Turkish literature through the eyes of women translators: Maureen Freely and Amy Spangler in the Anglosphere

This article argues that the translation of Turkish literature by Maureen Freely and Amy Spangler is shaped to some extent by their women-centered agenda, which enhances global reciprocity in the translational flows of feminist narratives. The analysis is based on the methodology developed by Emek Ergun, who outlines distinct categories, including feminist politics of translation, geopolitics of translation, post-oppositional ethics of interconnectivity, and politics of reception, in order to explore the translational travels of feminist texts and discourses. Ultimately, it is concluded that five potential motivations underlie Freely’s and Spangler’s textual, paratextual, and extratextual strategies for promoting the transnational travels of Turkish feminist texts in a non-fetishising context: expanding the global visibility of marginalized women authors, revealing women’s agency, challenging normative gendered embodiment, highlighting women’s intersectional struggles, and demonstrating parallelisms within world literature to transform commercialized images.