#kyoo lee

[majestativa]

An afternoon sky under which I am going postmodernly mad.

— Choe Young-Mi, My Voice: A Decade of Poems from the Poetry Translation Centre, transl. by Sarah Maguire & Kyoo Lee, (2014)

[womenintranslation]

2019 was a banner year for #WiT activists! One of our highlights at the WiT tumblr was spreading the news about the gender gap in translation in the pages of philoSOPHIA, a Journal of transContinental Feminism, edited by the feminist scholars and activists Alyson Cole and Kyoo Lee.

[feelingpolitical]

Again, what would become of these femme bodies or these bodies that would become femme? How would or should they be individuated or identified as such, including and especially in their complex transitory moments? Who knows? Yet such is precisely the enduring, metaphysical force and riddle of Beauvoir’s femme thought in its originary convolution or queerness, which also illuminates our rereading of corporeal sartoriality of the femme body in its naked, material glory, in its singularized contingency.

Kyoo Lee, “Should My Bum Look Bigger in This? -Re-dressing the Beauvoirean Femme”, 192

[feelingpolitical]

...a woman is a woman by becoming one or becomes a woman by being one, so they say, as confirmed by Beauvoir. In this now classical, sociobiological trap and trappings of Beauvoirean womanhood, we can also see, however, first, evidence of the fundamental arbitrariness of gender norms. […] On closer inspection, we can see how this necessary contingency coupled with ritualized vicissitude is prescripted and transcoded into social ontological imperatives, a reciprocally reinforced circularity of being and becoming (femme).”

Kyoo Lee, “Should My Bum Look Bigger in This? -Re-dressing the Beauvoirean Femme”, 189

[feelingpolitical]

“Central to the convoluted logic of gender configuration and identification that Beauvoir captured with such deceptive simplicity is this bonded slippage, the elliptical tension between ‘a woman,’ a countable noun, on the one hand, and “women/female/feminine [femme]” with no article, on the other hand, more of traditionally or conventionally uncountable ‘stuff’ […] Femme is and becomes the invisible fabric or matrix out of which a figure, a ‘woman,’ is cut and to which it is slotted or ‘fitted’ back, at will, as the ultimate point of departure/return, which would also explain, often in the eyes of the other sex, their fundamental ‘superficiality’ or surfacelike qualities. Put another way, femme both refers to the female sex in particular and inscribes itself by metonymizing the process of ‘sexuation’ or ‘gendering,’ as in sexual or gender difference. Femme always does a double (or triple) job of being herself while becoming herself for herself (as well as the other); for a woman, to be herself is to become herself and vice versa. No wonder femme is mysteriously busy and her business remains mysterious.”

Kyoo Lee, "Should My Bum Look Bigger in This? -Re-dressing the Beauvoirean Femme", 186