Whose Justice, Which Grammar?: “Stuttering Translation” of Care Justice Politics

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Partisanship (Table 14)

Abstract

How do social movements articulate radical demands leveraging the language of rights? How does this process reconfigure the scope and content of justice? What political possibilities remain within the constraints of institutional legibility? By developing a theoretical framework of “justice translation,” this article examines the political dynamics of social movements utilizing the institutional language of rights to advocate for ‘new justice.’ Drawing on South Korean health justice activism, it analyzes how activists navigate dominant vocabularies and deep-seated grammar to bring new care justice into the public conversation. To achieve “participatory parity (Fraser),” activists navigate an inherent tension between “elastic translation (risking neoliberal co-optation)” and “latent translation (having transformative potential).” This tension forces the movement’s trajectory to constantly vacillate between affirmative and transformative approaches. This oscillation is a structural inevitability because the relational and affective nature of care fundamentally clashes with an individualized, productivist capitalist lexicon. Consequently, care cannot be fully translated into the language of rights, inevitably generating “the untranslated.” This paper argues that the untranslated consists of mistranslations, non-translations, and residuals, stemming from the incommensurability between the inherent characteristics of health and care, and the dominant language’s grammatical and epistemological limits. Thus, the justice translation process is not smooth or frictionless; rather, the existence of the untranslated acts as a political engine, causing a ceaseless struggle between competing worldviews and their language. This article conceptualizes this dynamic as “stuttering translation (Deleuze),” defined as the continuous interplay between the translated and the untranslated. It operates dually: movements stutter as they struggle with the dominant language, yet simultaneously force the dominant language itself to stutter, transforming its deep grammar. By proposing stuttering translation as a mechanism to address hermeneutical injustice (Fricker), which hinders the parity of participation, this study ultimately offers a novel theoretical framework that contributes to contemporary political theory.

Author

• Jimin Gim, University of Toronto