too broad vs. too narrow

Anne Donadey with Francoise Linonnet have written in their article "Feminisms, Genders, Sexualities" that "The boundaries among 'feminisms, genders and sexualities,' 'race and ethnicity,' 'migrations,' diasporas,' and borders," and "cultural studies" have become more and more porous"(225). I would argue that this is to the extreme. In this article they bring in almost every type of person. By the end of the article, the authors bring in "women, LGBTQ, people, people of color, post colonial people, women with disabilities, etc." The subject matter that they cover in this article is simply too wide to be of much use. I recently watched a television show that covered the MTF sexual reassignment as well as the FTM sexual reassignment and that itself can't just be thrown in with modern feminism or people of color. That each of these different cultural communities have scholars is important and informative but that is not to say that they all belong in the cultural stew Donadey has dreamed up. She would argue that, "transnational, comparative perspective has become central to indigenous studies." That in itself begs the question: are MTF and FTM scholars indigenous to anywhere? If not, are they marginalized? I don't see how all the different types of people named in this article are being brought together and I don't feel that they can all be fairly analyzed or compared one to the other. The only common denominator that I can see is that of liminal living...people who are perhaps between worlds, although Donadey does not actually say that. If I had written this article I certainly would have included the liminality that each of the written about communities share, and investigated the influence their scholarly writing.

On the other hand, I found Venuti's article "Translation Studies" too narrow, simply because the whole book containing this article could be based on translations. I've learned through the duration of this course that translation is everything. It seems to be the most important factor in a thorough scholar's work. Venuti gives a nice overview of the practice, but the variety of people involved in translating works over the years as he mentions it leaves out so much of what translation does to a piece of work, to the translator, and to the readers. It isn't his fault, as I am sure he meant for this essay to be an overview, as he himself states that he has been "necessarily selective" (308). I understand that he is focusing on key problems. Nevertheless, his focus is too narrow for my tastes.