Speaking through the voice of another is a practice-based PhD that employs art practice to interrogate translation (as a textual and verbal practice). It uses linguistic translation as both the subject and the method to make multimedia artworks (text, sound, performance and events) that examine and analyse the translation process itself. The research has been conducted from my own subjective position, as an artist and monolingual speaker (a translation user rather than translation professional), investigating translation as a dialogic, subjective, embodied and performative phenomena. It adopts a self-reflexive methodology that places equal value in theoretical and experiential knowledge and proposes that an artist-led inquiry challenges assumptions, translation protocols, conventions and normative behaviour. The artists and artworks discussed in the thesis examine the translators /translation s agency and its linguistic performativity; exploiting it s creative potential as an artistic process/medium and amplifying its pivotal role within the expanding global art world. This transdisciplinary approach has resulted in the creation of translation zones - works and events devised to engage monolingual and multilingual individuals, professional translators, practitioners and public(s) in the process of translation - that offer an alternative perspective on translation (to research carried out within Translation Studies). Consequently, generating new knowledge that contributes to our understanding of translation and art and beyond both disciplines, creating a new transdisciplinary genre of art-and-translation. The artworks are an integral part of the thesis submission; samples and documentation of these are accessible within the full interactive PDF ersion. The layout of the thesis has been specifically designed to ease communication of the research, it uses various visual cues to distinguish between different types of information and to demonstrate my research praxis; the continual movement between theory and practice.

Fondé sur la force performative de l’injure qui travaille l’écriture de trois poètes québécoises, ce mémoire s’intéresse aux stratégies discursives grâce auxquelles elles renversent la stigmatisation du féminin inscrite dans le discours haineux. Les « fées mal tournées », « plotes de riches », « crisse de folles », « bâtardes », « sorcières » et « chiennes » sont légion dans Filles-commandos bandées (1976) de Josée Yvon, Royaume scotch tape (2015) de Chloé Savoie-Bernard et La dévoration des fées (2017) de Catherine Lalonde. Les poètes font toutes trois entendre des voix qui se réapproprient des injures pour les « resignifier », au sens où l’entend Judith Butler dans Le pouvoir des mots (1997). À la fois injuriées et injurieuses, elles s’emparent du pouvoir qui anime l’insulte pour la dévier, y aménagent des significations inattendues et la transforment même parfois en un lieu positif d’identification. Reprenant à leur compte les injures reçues, les écrivaines les entremêlent aux personnages puissants de l’Amazone, de la sorcière et de la fée, et façonnent des figures qui rejettent les corsets dans lesquels on tente d’enserrer non seulement leur corps, mais également leur discours. Parfois violentes, vulnérables, souffrantes ou effrayantes, ces « filles » brillent d’une souveraine irrévérence. Ainsi, elles apparaissent toutes comme des incarnations de la « femme ingouvernable » (1995) de Kathleen Rowe, symbole d’insoumission. Emportés par les affects qui les habitent, leurs corps excessifs, désirants, désacralisés et parfois grotesques, voire abjects, sont traversés de pulsions et de fantasmes violents. Ce mémoire se penche donc sur les manières dont les « filles » d’Yvon, de Savoie-Bernard et de Lalonde s’approprient le pouvoir de la colère et, en se positionnant entre vulnérabilité et ingouvernabilité, se font à la fois menaçantes et rassembleuses. / Based on the performative force of insults that shapes the writing of three Quebec poets, this dissertation explores the discursive strategies through which they reverse the stigmatization of women embedded in injurious speech. Such vocabulary as “fées mal tournées”, “plotes de riche”, “crisse de folles”, “bâtardes”, “sorcières” and “chiennes” is plentiful in Filles-commandos bandées (1976) by Josée Yvon, Royaume scotch tape (2015) by Chloé Savoie-Bernard and La dévoration des fées (2017) by Catherine Lalonde. The poets all create voices that reclaim insults in order to “re-signify” them, as Judith Butler conceives in Excitable Speech (1997). Being both the insulted and the insulting, they seize the power that animates insults to deflect them, endowing them with unexpected meanings and transforming them into neutral and even positive terms of identification. Taking up the insults received, the writers intertwine them with the powerful characters of the Amazon, the witch and the fairy, and shape figures who reject the corsets that enclose not only their body, but also their speech. These “girls”, at times violent, vulnerable, suffering or frightening, all shine with sovereign irreverence. In that, they appear to be incarnations of Kathleen Rowe’s Unruly Woman (1995), a symbol of insubordination. Carried away by the affects that inhabit them, their excessive, desiring, desacralized and sometimes grotesque, even abject bodies, are filled with impulses and violent fantasies. This research thus examines the ways in which the “girls” of Yvon, Savoie-Bernard and Lalonde appropriate the power of anger and, positioning themselves between vulnerability and ungovernability, reveal themselves as both threatening and unifying.