The 2023 Women of Color Caucus Frontiers Student Essay Award granted to graduate student

Chia-Hsu Jessica Chang, a comparative literature doctoral student, was recently awarded the 2023 National Women’s Studies Association’s (NWSA) Women of Color Caucus (WoCC) Frontiers Student Essay Award for her article, “Resistant Un/translatability as a Gate-opener and a Gate-keeper: Contributions to the Development of a Decolonial Methodology for the Politics of Women of Color.” The article is currently undergoing revisions for the Frontiers Journal, the gender studies journal in collaboration with NWSA, for potential publication.

Chang initially completed her undergraduate studies at Fu Jen University in Taipei, Taiwan, where she studied journalism and mass communication with a minor in English. While in Taiwan, Chang worked as a student journalist, where her experiences forced her to confront the problems with standard communication.

“While covering women’s and LGBTQ movements and farmers associations as a student journalist in Taiwan, amidst the island’s transition toward a more diverse society with lifted martial law and freedom of speech, I recognized that despite the coexistence of varied ethnic groups and colonial influences, people do not necessarily exhibit a better understanding and patience toward differences,” Chang said.

As a result of this realization, Chang looked towards a career where she could explore and apply forms of exchange to create a more ethical, diverse and creative form of social interaction.

After moving to Binghamton, Chang began a master’s program at Binghamton University, pursuing English. Later, she met Maria Lugones, a professor of comparative literature, who became her mentor and the advisor of her graduate study. The Argentinian philosopher is known for her many groundbreaking concepts in the politics of women of color and Indigenous communities, including “decolonial feminism. Lugones’ exploration of non-Western literature and thought inspired Chang to switch her doctoral subject to comparative literature.

As a migrant woman of color, Chang writes about experiences that relate to the way she communicates with others. She has often felt invisible, marginalized and dismissible, she said.

“These conversations drove me to think about whether there is a possibility that we can turn our untranslatability into something useful, that invites people to learn and at the same time makes us undecipherable to people who do not respect us and who seek to exploit and culturally appropriate us,” Chang said. “When we choose to speak in different tongues that challenge the mainstream expectations, we are choosing to stay ‘untranslatable,’ welcoming communicators who are sincerely interested in learning more about our substantial specificities and creativity.”

Chang’s essay was inspired in part by Lugones, but also by many other women of color and the common feeling of “untranslatability” that they often are engaged in “performing.” These inspirations include migrant women laborers in China, and the works of Chicana thinker Gloria Anzaldua, Native American thinker Leanne Betasaamosake Simpson and African-American thinker Audre Lorde. Chang couldn’t have completed her essay without the presence and moral echoes of these works, she said.

Her current dissertation advisor, Associate Professor of English, General Literature and Rhetoric Monika Mehta, also played a crucial role; in addition to sharing her ideas with Chang, it was Mehta who submitted the recommendation letter for her winning article. She calls Chang’s work “inspirational for scholars and students who wish to reflect on and engage with decolonial politics.”

“I have been impressed by the theoretical sophistication and care with which [Chang] has plotted the intersections of race, gender and sex in diverse decolonial contexts,” Mehta said. “She is easily among the finest theorists I have encountered. This essay focuses on women of color’s ‘inability’ to communicate. Instead of characterizing it as a ‘disability’ that needs to be overcome, Chang frames it as ‘resistant un/translatability.’ She argues that women of color perform such ‘untranslatability’ to reject and defy modern norms and signal their opposition to similarly inclined groups, thereby building horizontal coalitions.”

Chang is continuing her work on her dissertation, “Un/translatability, A Decolonial Praxis for Epistemic and Coalitional Resistance,” which she plans to defend in Spring 2024. It extends and goes beyond the thoughts included in her winning essay: Using marginalized groups in transpacific Asia and North America as focus subjects, she explores how “untranslatability” is strategically and playfully demonstrated as a gatekeeper that shields these people from miscommunication and a gate-opener that facilitates intercultural, inter-ethnic and community-building communications.

“As extremely multicultural and multilingual the American society is, I think of untranslatability as something always with us,” Chang said. “It marks our creativity and substantial specificities in positive ways, and connects us to different ancestral histories and communal memories, rather than merely something that makes us failed in the spheres of mainstream representation and recognition.”

Chang is also working on other projects in addition to her dissertation, and has completed several published works. She contributed a chapter in the book Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid During the Covid-19 Crisis and will have an article in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, an intersectional feminist journal based at Smith College.

“In the future, I want to draw attention to the resonances of emotions and attitudes that exist within and beyond linguistic communication,” Change said. “I believe these resonances can challenge the assumption that successful communication depends solely on linguistic transparency, monolingual performance or clear-cut translation.”