The contemporary focus on theatre/stage and media translation accompanies the equally contemporary trend to view gender as a theatrical representation, as a performance, or as a 'performative' activity in which the individual discursively and often parodically struts his or her particular gender affiliation. Gender as performance, as an act that adults can choose to perform, counters the assumption of a seamless, stable identity imposed or acquired from childhood. Based on the much-discussed Gender Trouble (1990) by Judith Butler and other work in queer studies, the notion has highlighted one of the great weaknesses of early Anglo-American feminist theorising and current 'UN-style feminist universalism' (Spivak, 1996: 253) — i.e. that the term 'woman' is stable — across history, cultures, ideologies, and can be used as a basis or a category from which to engage in abstractions or political theorising. Much has been written on this topic and translation studies has felt the impact.

One of the first to connect gender instability and translation was Carol Maier. Indeed, she and Francoise Massardier-Kenney claim that translation is wonderfully suited to reveal such instability:

Recent work [...] subjects the terms 'feminism' and 'woman' themselves to what could be likened to exercises in translation, in which those terms are shown to be unstable points of departure for either theory or practice. Such questioning has made evident — and to a degree perhaps possible only through the practice of translation — the extent to which gender definitions are neither universal nor absolute manifestations of inherent differences but relatively local, constantly changing constructions contingent on multiple historical and cultural factors. (Maier & Massardier-Kenney, 1996: 230)

It has probably always been clear to translators that translation reveals such differences. By and large, however, translation has sought to minimise difference, and translation in the 'era of feminism' has focused on differences between the two first paradigm genders, tending to occult those between women. Now, in the wake of queer theory, gender instabilities and post-colonial critiques by authors such as Spivak, Maier is advocating a:

woman-interrogated' approach to translation, which she explains as 'an endeavour to work less from confidently held definitions than from a will to participate in re-definitions, to counter the restrictions of a gender-based identity by questioning gender as the most effective or the most appropriate point of departure for a translator's practice. (Maier,

1998: 102)

This may seem paramount to striking the first paradigm from translation and translation studies — yet, as Maier explains, though gender may no longer be a clearly identifiable or even an important issue, this contingency need not lead to a feeling of impotence. Translation is always a representation, always a performance of another author's work, and hence, is invested with power. The point is that translators may choose to privilege women authors, say, or emphasise their own understanding of gender issues in a text, yet these are selective, performative aspects of the translation and do not represent intrinsic qualities of the text. An example of such 'selected' performativity has been noted and criticised by Harveen Sachdeva Mann (1994) in her article on the massive two-volume collection entitled Women Writing in India (see Tharu & Lalita, 1991, 1993). Mann points out that the editors of the collection focused on first paradigm gender in compiling the materials, with the major criteria being that the work be written by women. Mann sees this as eliding issues of class differences and ethnicity, which she considers of far greater importance in the Indian context. Similarly, Maier's 'woman-interrogated' translation practice leads her to produce a translation of Delirio y destino. Los veinte afios en la vida de una espatiola (Zambrano, 1999), a book on the philosophical writings of Maria Zambrano, that first-paradigm translation practitioners would doubtless find hard to understand. Maier translates the second part of the title as 'Twenty Years in the Life of a Spaniard', deliberately eliding the fact that 'una espatiola' refers to a Spanish woman. Maier's explanation is that, since the book has appeared in a series on women writers, there is a danger of misrepresenting Zambrano, who did not see herself as a woman philosopher (Godayol Nogue, 2000).

Similar ideas about gender as a contingent and only subjectively meaningful aspect of texts and translations are evident in recent studies focusing on gay men's writing and translation (with the exception of brief passages in De Lotbiniere-Harwood (1991) there is very little material on lesbian textuality in translation.) Echoing the realisation that there is no one definition of woman that would hold within one culture or across diverse cultures, Keith Harvey's recent work notes the 'whole range of homosexual identities in French and English fiction' (Harvey, 1998: 295), which must be taken into account in the evaluation and translation of 'camp' talk. There is no one homosexual identity either. Instead, diverse contexts produce diverse identities, and performances of these. Harvey argues that the camp style privileged by certain of these (Anglo-American) homosexual groups signifies 'performance rather than existence' which leads to 'a deliberately exaggerated reliance on questions of (self)-representation' (Harvey, 1998: 304). He also describes 1990s queer theory notions of identity as a 'pure effect of performance' (Harvey, 1998: 305). Under this performance paradigm, then, certain types of writing and speech, in this case 'camp', are 'extrasexual performative gestures' (Harvey, citing Butler, 1998: 305) that both denote and generate gay self-identificatory activity. In other words, 'camp' talk is a code used by some gay individuals to signal their 'gayness', identifying themselves to others in the public sphere, and generating a special exclusive language for a group of insiders.