There seem to be two paradigms ruling current work at the interface of Anglo-American translation studies and gender studies; the first is the 'conventional' assumption that there are groups of people in the world that can be identified as women or men; the second is the relatively new idea that the diversity of sexual orientation and gender, class distinction, ethnicity, race and other socio-political factors is so great that it is meaningless to identify anyone as either male or female. Work in translation studies being done under the first paradigm tends to subscribe to ideas derived from feminist theory and practice and thus focus on women as a special, minority group. The second paradigm is still in development; it has been spawning work that focuses on gender as a discursive, performative act, and on the performative aspects of translation.