Preface Traveling (with) Books How do we learn about each other? How do we do it without harming each other but with the courage to take up a weaving of the everyday that may reveal deep betrayals? How do we cross without taking over?” —Lugones, “Decolonial Feminism,” 755
Virgin Crossing Borders is a book that tells the story of a traveling book— Hanne Blank’s Virgin, a western feminist history book about virginity that crossed the Atlantic via my translation to be transplanted in Turkey and is now coming back to the United States as yet another book expanding the transnational web of relations that Virgin’s translation initiated over a decade ago. Undertaken as an epistemic project of transnational feminism, the story of Virgin’s border crossing is deeply interwoven with my own story as a transnational feminist subject who has been shuttling back and forth between Turkey and the United States, between Turkish and English, in a constant cycle of mobility—of displacement, translation, resettlement, transformation, and growth. Although I came across Virgin on this precarious path of entanglement and decided to build a bridge of translation with it while walking that path, the journey that brought us together had in fact started long before I came to the United States. I was born and raised in Turkey with parents whose unabated encouragement and unyielding dedication made it possible for me to pursue higher education so I could become an independent, self-reliant, and self-defined person. I grew up with an inspiring older sister whose fearlessly rebellious stance of justice for all both introduced me to intersectional feminist politics and enabled me to see firsthand how one could fight for social justice on multiple fronts of resistance. My family equipped me with epistemic hunger, intellectual humility, political curiosity, ethical sensitivity, and subversive energy that have over the years been sustained by many people, most of whom
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