Deconstructing the En-Gendering Binary Mechanisms of Interpreting Technologies: A Posthumanist Feminist Inquiry

The largely a-feminist background of interpreting studies essentializes technology in the field as gender-neutral, in turn overlooking its socio-political and legal implications. Embracing a practice-oriented, posthumanist line of feminist inquiry, this chapter fills this theoretical and analytical lacuna through the close examination, problematization, and politicization of interpreting-related technologies. I argue that interpreting technologies imagery, materiality, and narratives construct relations and practices that most often propagate dominant and normative binary ideologies of gender. I propose three analytical examples that might spark new thinking about the material en-gendering of technology in relation to: the reason/emotion split propelled by machine interpreting; the institutional oppression of asylum-seeking women through machine translation; and masculinist bias of efficiency, productivity, and control vis-à-vis the ideological illusion of independence, agency, and alternative working styles in remote interpreting. Through this critical questioning, the chapter interrogates what lies behind the veneer of machineries, to unmask what kind of en-gendering mechanisms—what technologies of gender binarism—are in operation. In so doing, it offers unchartered ways to conceptualize technology in popular and academic interpreting discourse that move beyond deterministic meanings and genderless modes of signification.