Queer in Translation

As the field of translation studies has developed, translators and translation

scholars have become more aware of the unacknowledged ideologies inherent
both in texts themselves and in the mechanisms that affect their circulation. This
book both analyses the translation of queerness and applies queer thought to
issues of translation. It sheds light on the manner in which heteronormative soci-
eties influence the selection, reading and translation of texts and pays attention
to the means by which such heterosexism might be subverted. It considers the
ways in which queerness can be repressed, ignored, or made invisible in translation,
and shows how translations might expose or underline the queerness – or the
homophobic implications – of a given text. Balancing the theoretical with the
practical, this book investigates what is culturally at stake when particular texts
are translated from one culture to another, raising the question of the relation-
ship between translation, colonialism and globalization. It also takes the insights
derived from intercultural translation studies and applies them to other fields
of cultural criticism. The first multi-focus, in-depth study on translating queer,
translating queerly and queering translation, this book will be of interest to schol-
ars working in the fields of gender and sexuality, queer theory and queer studies,
literature, film studies and translation studies.

B.J. Epstein is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Public Engagement at the

University of East Anglia in Norwich. Her work focuses primarily on literary
translation, queer studies, and children’s literature, and intersections between
them. She is the author or editor of several books and over 160 articles, book
reviews, personal essays and short stories.

Robert Gillett is Reader in German and Comparative Cultural Studies at Queen

Mary University of London. He has published widely on modern German-
language literature and film and on all things queer, and is co-editor of Queer in
Europe and a special issue of Sexualities on European Queer.
Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies
  1 Translating Feminism in China
Gender, Sexuality and Censorship
Zhongli Yu
  2 Multiple Translation
Communities in Contemporary
Japan
Edited by Beverley Curran,
Nana Sato-Rossberg, and
Kikuko Tanabe
  3 Translating Culture Specific
References on Television
The Case of Dubbing
Irene Ranzato
  4 The Pushing-Hands of
Translation and its Theory
In memoriam Martha Cheung,
1953–2013
Edited by Douglas Robinson
  5 Cultural Politics of Translation
East Africa in a Global Context
Alamin M. Mazrui
  6 Bourdieu in Translation Studies
The Socio-cultural Dynamics
of Shakespeare Translation in
Egypt
Sameh Hanna
  7 Ubiquitous Translation
Piotr Blumczynski
  8 Translating Women
Different Voices and New
Horizons
Edited by Luise von Flotow and
Farzaneh Farahzad
  9 Consecutive Notetaking and
Interpreter Training
Edited by Yasumasa Someya
10 Queer in Translation
Edited by B.J. Epstein and
Robert Gillett
11 Critical Translation Studies
Douglas Robinson
Queer in Translation

Edited by
B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett
First published 2017
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 selection and editorial matter, B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett to be identified as the authors
of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters,
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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without intent to infringe.
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Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Notes on contributors viii

Introduction 1
B.J. EPSTEIN AND ROBERT GILLETT

  1 Re-mapping translation: queerying the crossroads 8

SHALMALEE PALEKAR

  2 Queering narratives and narrating queer: colonial queer

subjects in the Arab world 25
NOUR ABU ASSAB

  3 Revealing and concealing the masquerade of translation

and gender: double-crossing the text and the body 37
EMILY ROSE

  4 A poetics of evasion: the queer translations of

Aleksei Apukhtin 51
BRIAN JAMES BAER

  5 Translation failure in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room 64

MARGARET SÖNSER BREEN

  6 Globally queer? Taiwanese homotextualities in translation 77

ANDREA BACHNER

  7 Queer translation/translating queer during the ‘gay boom’

in Japan 87
JEFFREY ANGLES
vi Contents
  8 Gaps to watch out for: Alison Bechdel in German 104
ROBERT GILLETT

  9 Eradicalization: eradicating the queer in children’s literature 118

B.J. EPSTEIN

10 The queer story of your conception: translating

sexuality and racism in Beasts of the Southern Wild 129
JACOB BRESLOW

11 The translation of desire: queering visibility in

Nathalie. . . and Chloe 144
CLARA BRADBURY-RANCE

12 Translation and the art of lesbian failure in

Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body 156
MILLER WOLF OBERMAN

13 Queering translation: rethinking gender and sexual politics

in the spaces between languages and cultures 172
WILLIAM J. SPURLIN

Index 184
Acknowledgements

First, we are grateful to Wiley and Taylor & Francis respectively for permission
to print revised versions of the chapters by William J. Spurlin and Jeffrey Angles.
We are also grateful to Alison Bechdel and her publishers for permission to repro-
duce frames from her work.
As noted in the introduction, this book grew in part from a Critical Sexology
seminar, so we wish to thank those who attended and participated in that seminar,
as well as Lisa Downing, who helped with the organization of the event.
We also want to thank all the contributors to this collection for their generosity,
enthusiasm and thoughtfulness, for their flexibility in responding to criticism, and
for their commitment to queer translation and translating queerly. We are grateful
as well to Ashgate and in particular to our editor, Neil Jordan, for allowing us the
space to explore these important issues.
On a personal note, B.J. Epstein wishes to express her gratitude to her co-
editor, Robert, for his hard work and dedication. And B.J. is most appreciative
to her wife, Fi, and their daughter, Esther, for their love and support. They make
everything possible and worthwhile.
And apart from Astrid, of course, Robert Gillett wishes to thank B.J. for her
amazing patience and persistence, and Andrea von Kameke for her invaluable help.
Contributors

Nour Abu Assab has extensive experience as a practitioner and an academic

in the fields of human rights, gender, ethnic and sectarian conflict, LGBTQ
rights in the Middle East, queer politics and activism, postcolonialism, queer
and race theory, as well as the general fields of development and stabilisation.
She was awarded a PhD in Sociology from the University of Warwick in 2012,
and an MA in Race and Ethnic Studies in 2006. Her PhD thesis, which looked
at Narratives of Ethnicity and Nationalism among the Circassian community
in Jordan from a feminist perspective, was awarded the Middle East Research
Competition Award in 2008 for its quality and excellence. Nour currently
holds the position of Director of the Centre for Transnational Development
and Collaboration, through which she is leading research on Syrian refugees,
LGBTQ groups in the Middle East and sexual violence in conflict. Nour is
currently working on a forthcoming book to be published by I.B. Tauris, under
the title of Ethnic Minorities and Nationalism in the Middle East: The Kurds of
Syria and the Circassians in Jordan.
Jeffrey Angles is Professor of Japanese and Translation at Western Michigan
University. He is the author of Writing the Love of Boys (University of
Minnesota Press, 2011), which examines with representations of male-male
love in early twentieth-century Japanese literature, and These Things Here and
Now (Josai University, 2016) about the ways that Japanese poets responded
to the 2011 disasters in Japan. He is also the award-winning translator of
dozens of Japan’s most important modern Japanese authors and poets; for
instance, his translations of Tada Chimako won both the US-Japan Friendship
Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature as well as the
Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. He believes
strongly in the role of translators as social activists, and much of his career
has focused on the translation into English of socially engaged, feminist, or
queer writers. He also writes poetry, mostly in Japanese, his adopted second
language. His collection Hizuke henkō sen (International Date Line) was pub-
lished by Shichōsha in 2016.
Andrea Bachner, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell
University, holds an MA from Munich University, Germany, and a PhD from
 Contributors  ix
Harvard University. Her research explores comparative intersections between
Sinophone, Latin American and European cultural productions in dialogue with the-
ories of interculturality, sexuality and mediality. Her first book, Beyond Sinology:
Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Cultures (Columbia University Press, 2014),
analyses how the Chinese script has been imagined in recent decades in literature
and film, visual and performance art, design and architecture, both within Chinese
cultural contexts and in different parts of the ‘West’. She is the co-editor (with
Carlos Rojas) of the Oxford Handbook of Modern Chinese Literatures (Oxford
University Press, 2016) and has published articles in Comparative Literature,
Comparative Literature Studies, Concentric, German Quarterly, Modern Chinese
Literature and Culture, Taller de Letras as well as in several edited volumes.

Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State
University. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting
Studies, general editor of the KSU Monograph Series in Translation Studies,
and co-editor of the Bloomsbury series Languages, Cultures, Translation. He
is author of the monographs Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of
Post-Soviet Identity (2009) and Translation and the Making of Modern Russian
Literature (2015), and editor of the collected volumes Beyond the Ivory Tower:
Re-thinking Translation Pedagogy (2003), Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts:
Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (2011) and Russian Writers
on Translation. An Anthology (2013). His most recent translations include No
Good without Reward: Selected Writings of Liubov Krichevskaya (2011) and
The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (2013), by Juri Lotman, and Short
Stories in Russian (2016).

Clara Bradbury-Rance finished her PhD at the University of Manchester in

spring 2016. Her thesis, ‘Figuring the Lesbian: Queer Feminist Readings of
Cinema in the Era of the Visible’, explored the ways in which queer theory
has generated the potential for new conceptualizations of lesbianism’s figura-
tion in contemporary cinema. She is the author of ‘Querying Postfeminism in
The Kids Are All Right’ in Postfeminism and Contemporary Culture (2013)
and ‘Desire, Outcast: Locating Queer Adolescence’ in International Cinema
and the Girl (2016). Clara’s research interests include feminism, queer theory,
affect theory, psychoanalysis and visual culture.

Margaret Sönser Breen is Professor of English and Women’s, Gender, and

Sexuality Studies and a member of the Comparative Literature Program at
the University of Connecticut. She specializes in LGBTQ literature and, more
broadly, gender and sexuality studies. Her publications include Narratives of
Queer Desire: Deserts of the Heart (2009), Butler Matters: Judith Butler’s
Impact on Feminist and Queer Studies, co-edited with Warren J. Blumenfeld
(2005) and Genealogies of Identity: Interdisciplinary Readings on Sex and
Sexuality, co-edited with Fiona Peters (2005). She has also edited or co-edited
four collections on evil and wickedness and, most recently, for Salem Press,
teaching volumes on good and evil and on gender, sex and sexuality.
x Contributors
Jacob Breslow is a doctoral researcher at the London School of Economics
Gender Institute. His thesis, ‘The Theory and Practice of Childhood:
Interrogating Childhood as a Technology of Power’, explores the relation-
ships of power that investments in childhood structure as childhood gets
applied to individuals and populations within the contemporary US. His
research asks specifically about the role of childhood in shaping and challeng-
ing the disposability of young black life, the queer life of children’s desires,
and the steadfastness of the gender binary. In 2015, Jacob was accepted
on to the LSE’s Academic Partnership with the Institute for Research on
Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and Columbia University. He has attended,
and presented his research at international conferences and short courses; his
forthcoming publications theorize in new ways the promises and tensions
inherent to conceptualizing queer, trans, feminist and racialized lives and
world-building projects.
B.J. Epstein is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Public Engagement at the
University of East Anglia in Norwich. She is the author of over 160 articles,
book reviews, personal essays and short stories. Her most recent book, Are
the Kids All Right? Representations of LGBTQ Characters in Children’s and
Young Adult Literature, was published in October 2013. She has also pub-
lished a book on EFL and a book on translating children’s literature, edited two
books on translation in the Nordic countries, and translated a number of other
works. She is a translator from the Scandinavian languages to English. More
information about her can be found at www.awaywithwords.se.
Robert Gillett is Reader in German and Comparative Cultural Studies at Queen
Mary University of London. He heads the Cultural Transfer section of the
Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations and has been teaching German-
English translation for twenty years. He is the editor, with Lisa Downing, of
Queer in Europe, and of the special issue of Sexualities devoted to European
Queer Culture. He is a convener of the seminar series Critical Sexology, and
has run sessions both on Queer in Europe and on Queering Translation, as well
as contributing to further sessions on pornography and AIDS. He is the author,
either alone or with Lisa Downing, of a number of articles and reviews on queer
topics, including a joint-authored article on the English translation of Michel
Foucault’s La volonté de savoir. His monograph on the proto-queer German
author Hubert Fichte appeared in 2013, and he has written some twenty articles
either on queer in German or on German queer topics.
Miller Wolf Oberman is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of
Connecticut, studying poetry and poetics from Old English to the contempo-
rary avant-garde, as well as queer and translation theory. Miller’s translation
of the “Old English Rune Poem” won Poetry Magazine’s John Frederick Nims
Memorial Prize for Translation in 2013, and he is a winner of the 92Y’s Discovery
Contest for 2016. Miller has published poems and translations in Poetry, Beloit
Poetry Journal, and Berfrois, among others and has work forthcoming in Poetry,
 Contributors  xi
Tin House, The Nation, and Boston Review. Miller’s book The Unstill Ones,
a collection of poems and Old English translations, will be published by
Princeton University Press in 2017. Tin House, The Nation and Boston Review.
Miller is currently finishing ‘The Ruin’, a collection of poems and Old English
translations.
Shalmalee Palekar is Research Associate in English and Cultural Studies at the
University of Western Australia. Her research areas span postcolonial and
transcultural theories/practices, South Asian literatures and Indian cinemas.
She has taught at renowned Indian and Australian universities, and has won
national awards for excellence in teaching. Shalmalee is also a published poet,
a translator of Marathi poetry, and she performs to critical acclaim with three
women and a cello, collectively called ‘Funkier than Alice’.
Emily Rose is currently writing a PhD in Literary Translation at the University of
East Anglia, supported by a CHASE AHRC studentship. Her thesis explores
the translation of trans identity from French and Spanish into English and vice-
versa. She did an MA in Literary Translation at UEA in 2012/13 and also
interned for the British Centre for Literary Translation. She did her undergrad-
uate degree in French and Spanish at Royal Holloway, University of London.
William J. Spurlin is Professor of English and Director of Teaching and Learning
in Arts and Humanities at Brunel University London. His recent books include
Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (2009),
Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of
Culture in Southern Africa (2006) and Comparatively Queer: Interrogating
Identities across Time and Cultures (2010; co-edited with Jarrod Hayes and
Margaret R. Higonnet). He also has published numerous essays on com-
parative queer studies, most recently in A Companion to Translation Studies
(2014) and in the volume The Future of Postcolonial Studies (2015), and he
has guest-edited a special issue of the journal Comparative Literature Studies
on queering translation studies (2014). The chapter he has contributed to this
volume is part of a monograph project tentatively titled ‘Contested Borders:
Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone
Writing from the Maghreb.’ Professor Spurlin chairs the Comparative Gender
Studies Committee of the International Comparative Literature Association
(ICLA), and he is a Section Editor (postcolonial queer studies) for the journal
Postcolonial Text.
Introduction
B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett

What does ‘queer’ have to do with translation? Well, that depends on what you
mean by ‘queer’ and what you mean by ‘translation’. The former term is notori-
ously slippery, covering not only a wide range of non-normative sexualities and
genders under the sign of the postmodern, but also a multifaceted set of political
and theoretical interventions, at once ludic and profoundly serious, that originate
in the sexual but are by no means limited to it. The latter word, translation, though
it might seem deceptively straightforward and for a long time was only sparsely
and partially theorized, turns out on closer inspection to be comparably indetermi-
nate and similarly imbricated with issues of gender and sexuality, playfulness and
power. In this edited collection, we explore the multifarious intersections between
queer studies and translation studies in literature, media, politics, linguistics and
culture. The aim is to queer and ‘queery’ ideas of translation and to analyse how
queerness ‘translates’ – as a sexuality, a politics, or a concept.
On a larger theoretical level, notions of translation as a performative practice,
as an imitation with at best tenuous links to the idea of an original, as an indefinite
deferral of meaning, but also as a site of othering, hegemony and subalternity,
mark it out as always already queer and as an appropriate metaphor for the explo-
ration of queerness itself. Conversely, queer, accustomed as it is to mediating
between the prongs of binaries, and situated as it is, above all in its intersectional
mode, at a series of crossroads, has more in common with practices of translation
than might at first appear. In both cases, there is an urgent intellectual need to
interrogate lazy and partisan assumptions using the arsenal of modern theory, and
in both fields, this re-thinking has immediate political and practical implications.
So by exploring the two modalities together, it becomes possible to free each from
its narrowly specific boundaries and make it applicable more widely not just to
other fields, but also to ways of thinking about art and activism.
Thus to imagine that language is some sort of transparent medium ‘through’
which meaning is conveyed, and that it is therefore possible to transfer this mean-
ing from one language to another, with necessary adjustments but no irreparable
losses, is as tendentiously delusional as to suggest that gender is an essential given
which in most cases is satisfactorily aligned with the teleology of sexuality, but
which occasionally fails to achieve this coherence. Nowhere is the constructed-
ness of gender and sexuality more glaringly evident than when attempts are made
2  B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett
to find equivalents in other languages and cultures. English, for example, simply
does not do gender in the same way as certain other languages do, and is there-
fore notoriously ill-equipped to convey the sorts of games that writers in these
languages can play with gender markers.1 And the awareness that sexual acts,
preferences and orientations are construed quite differently in different linguis-
tic contexts – that ‘Greek love’, for example, does not begin to equate either to
homosexuality or to paedophilia, even though the participants and the mode of
gratification involved may be exactly the same – is one of the founding insights
of queer theory itself. In the twenty-first century, of course, cultural barriers seem
a great deal more porous than they once were. After all, it is hard to retain local
specificity in a world where everyone is drinking Coca-Cola – even though it
is far from sure that even that beverage tastes the same in different places. As a
global brand, queer can be seen to occupy the same position in the field of sexual-
ity and gender studies as Coca-Cola does in the transnational market-place – so
studies of how it may be assimilated, rejected, or imposed have a great deal to tell
us about the neocolonial enterprise of late capitalism. Despite some apparently
paradoxical shifts, the parallels between this new hegemony and its now discred-
ited predecessor display at the very least a strikingly similar mindset, which also
impinges upon discourses of sexuality. For just as aid – and AIDS – now work
to construct the colonized as consumers rather than as producers or purveyors of
raw materials, while maintaining the same view of them as backward, infantile,
or even simian, so in the field of sexuality and gender studies the colonial legacy
of homophobia and the shared tradition of Abrahamic misogyny are regularly
represented as the exclusive regressive and repressive purlieu of what used to
be the uncontrollably licentious, hypersexualized and perverted oriental. And
because, in the process, tolerance towards non-normative forms of sexuality has
become the literal touchstone of that enlightened liberalism which, contrary to
overwhelming evidence, is seen to be synonymous with Western values, men who
have sex with men have come to figure as queer heroes even where the structure
of their relationships was obviously inflected by unreconstructed colonial think-
ing. At the heart of that thinking are practices and malpractices of translation: a
failure properly to understand and take into account both cultural difference and
the skewed conditions of cultural transfer that pertain when Western needs neces-
sitate Eastern compliance. And for all the progress we think we have made in
the name of queer and advanced translation studies, failures of this kind are still
endemic in much of our thinking and haunt much of what we do.
These difficulties of translation and comprehension do not only occur when a
text is translated from one language to another. In a way that is precisely analo-
gous to the intersectionality of queer, translation between languages can serve as
a paradigm for all those processes of bungled appropriation, barely acknowledged
plagiarism, exploitation and distortion which together constitute the habitus of the
colonizer towards the colonized, the adult towards children, the imitator and the
adaptor towards the alleged original. It is often maintained that the ideal transla-
tion is a kind of seamless assimilation in which the status of a translation as a
translation is all but invisible, in which, in other words, the translation is able to
 Introduction  3
‘pass’.2 But precisely because this is not something that a non-translated text has
to go through, the very existence of the ideal bespeaks an operation of power and
a position of subalternity. What is striven for in such a translation is conformity,
a lack of distinction, something perfectly familiar, and the means to achieve it
is a form of shamelessly pandering self-censorship. This is not only an opposite
of queer and anathema to it – but also in the end literally self-defeating. In all
these cases, the parameters of the original remain like a palimpsest in and behind
the new version – visible both as a lack, something ‘unnatural’, a need to pad,
and as an effect of excess whereby what is understated is drawn out and what
is ambiguous is made explicit. By drawing attention to comparable aporias, by
camping it up, shaving imperfectly, overdoing their makeup and dressing extrava-
gantly, drag artists from the beginning have called into question the legitimacy of
the allegedly authentic and thus became the prototype for queer. In underlining
the parallel between the ‘trans’ of ‘translation’ and that of ‘transvestism’, then,
queer translation theory is able to point up, and to a certain extent shrilly parody,
the constitutive incoherence of the totalitarian thinking through which a domi-
nant ideology asserts itself. And by insisting on being ‘trans’, it thwarts (queers)
certain operations of power, builds bridges across gulfs and opens up what in
postcolonial theory is a third space, a third form of language and of being in cul-
ture which enriches the target with the source and vice versa.
Those who translate must necessarily be acquainted with two languages. Like
Teiresias in the field of gender and sexuality, they are archetypally bi; this con-
veys on them both privileged insights and a particular form of blindness. Working
within duality, they must also be aware of the essential doubleness of language
itself, of the arbitrary correlation between sign and signification, of the duplica-
tion that is made possible by the existence of the metaphorical dimension as well
as the literal one, and of the complexities of cultural interpellation. They know
what it means to switch languages, to write in a language perceived as foreign
and/or to make language choices that are dependent on the intended audience.
They can pun across languages and within them, play hide and seek with other
insiders and suddenly withdraw from those who do not have that privilege. But
they can never return to that state of primal innocence in which a word and a thing
were co-extensive. Like Teiresias, they have unlearned essentialism. Just as for
Judith Butler gender and sexuality were performative, conditioned by the ineluc-
table audience but not proceeding from any authentic core, so the central insight
of bilingual and translingual individuals is that all speech acts are acts of transla-
tion, swirling endlessly round the black hole of the intraduisible, and only able
to escape the tyranny of alleged authenticity by having continual recourse to the
ludic. The mode of understanding these translators operate in, then, is inevitably
intertextual. And just as Julia Kristeva linked the notion of intertextuality with
Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic text, so the relativism of translational intertex-
tuality can help to resist the hegemony of monological monolingualism. In this
sense, translation itself is directly analogous to queer as a form of critique.
Thus, if all translations ultimately and necessarily fail, so queer re-evaluates
failure as refusal and resistance. If all translations entail an important element of
4  B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett
approximation, so queer too is always only there or thereabouts and refuses the
totalitarian certainties of many of its neighbours. If translations refuse the notion
of the unique and immutable source text, queer too is in the business of deliberate
proliferation. The purpose of that proliferation, in queer as in translation, is anti-
hegemonic. Instead of the gesture of exclusion, that separates sheep from goats,
good from bad and right from wrong (and by analogy colonizer from colonized,
men from women and gay from straight), queer and its translation insist on the
importance of seepage and contamination, hybridity, in-betweenness and indeter-
minacy. In the process it does not, as its enemies pretend, renege on its intellectual
responsibilities and open the floodgates to chaos. On the contrary, it demonstrates
how conventional categories are themselves incoherent and chaotic and make sense
only as an operation of power. The use of gender-neutral pronouns, for example, like
the installation of gender-neutral toilets, requires a far greater level of consistency
and probity than the normal and lazy alternative. And translations which refuse the
illusion of domestication but insist on eliciting an awareness of foreignness require
a great deal more care and attention from both writer and reader than those which
gloss over difference. To our mind, it is precisely this care and attention, this inter-
rogation of categories and attitudes, and this constant uncovering of operations of
power in structures of thought that constitutes the common ground between queer as
an oppositional attitude of mind and critical translation studies. And it is the single
thread that links together the apparently disparate contributions to this book.
This book has its origins in a special number of the translators’ journal In Other
Words, which was edited by B.J. Epstein, and a follow-up Critical Sexology semi-
nar on Queer and/in Translation, organized by B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett at
Queen Mary University of London in December 2012, and it shares concerns with
the Ashgate volume Queer in Europe, edited by Robert Gillett and Lisa Downing.
It brings together contributions from across the academic spectrum and carefully
balances the theoretical with the practical, the monolingual with the polyglot,
Europe and the New World, East and West, adult and child, gender and sexuality,
queer in translation and translating queerly.
It begins with a chapter by Shalmalee Palekar in which she sets out the param-
eters of the enterprise. Drawing on a wide range of sources, she traces such
theorization of queer translation as has so far happened, before focusing particu-
larly on the situation in India, with all the postcolonial complexity that implies.
In the following chapter, Nour Abu Assab is similarly concerned to trace the
way in which colonial thinking has structured narratives of the encounter between
Caucasian homosexuals and their Arab sexual partners. In so doing, she estab-
lishes narratives, the fraught transmission of narratives, and hence translation
itself as a constitutive arena for the operation of queer. And crucially, by dissoci-
ating sexual orientation from political positionality, and by insisting on reserving
the term ‘queer’ for the subaltern minority rather than those whose only unprivi-
lege lay in their sexuality, she reminds us of the work the term ‘queer’ is capable
of doing and makes possible the category of the straight gay text.
It is a term that definitely does not apply to the works discussed by Emily Rose
in her chapter. On the contrary, both the seventeenth-century French Mémoires
 Introduction  5
de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en femme and Rose’s own contemporary English
translations from them perform drag in language in ways that directly parallel
the defamiliarizations of queer theory and the carnival spirit that underlies them.
In presenting her work in this area, Rose offers a model for the queer transla-
tion of texts which can also be seen to apply to Aleksei Apukhtin, the chief subject
of Brian Baer’s chapter. Working under notoriously homophobic conditions in the
second half of the nineteenth century, and in a language no less gender-inflected
than French, Apukhtin developed what Baer terms a ‘poetics of evasion’– a way
of performing the open secret in language by not marking gender and equivocat-
ing over voice. The latter strategy, of course, is an inescapable corollary of all
translation – thus helping to establish translation itself as a paradigm for this kind
of queer writing.
In James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, which is discussed by Margaret Sönser
Breen in her chapter, the protagonist is guilty of equivalent, involuntary evasions
and pays the price. In examining the role of language in the novel, Breen is able to
show how, for both lovers, this is a relationship conducted in translation, and that
the distinction between translation as an amateur pursuit, as dalliance, and trans-
lation and a socio-economic, existential necessity precisely mirrors the nature of
the relationship and prefigures its failure. Here too then issues of translation turn
out to be paradigmatic. And the factors that condition its failure – the operations
of neocolonial power in the field of sexuality – are, not accidentally, the founding
target of queer.
That same neocolonial power, of course – and a comparable failure to translate –
has helped to establish the American notion of queer as a global phenomenon. The
extent to which, and the ways in which, this phenomenon is and is not appropriated
by other cultures therefore says a great deal about practices of translation in the
twenty-first century. Looking to Taiwan, Andrea Bachner in her chapter explores
how ‘queer’– both the word and the concept – have been translated into Chinese;
how the reception of the term – and its history – have been thematized in a queer-
themed novel by a non-queer-identified Taiwanese woman, and how that novel
in turn has been translated into American English. In the process she tells a story
about hegemony and resistance, imposition and adaptation, minority specificity and
global universality which in itself, and especially in its twists and turns, has some-
thing indicatively queer about it.
This sets up interesting points of comparison and contrast with Jeffrey
Angles’s chapter on the reception of gay Western literature in Japan. The non-
queer-identified woman Angles writes about is a translator, who achieved a
measure of success and renown translating gay-themed Western novels for a
Japanese readership which, if readers’ surveys are anything to go by, is itself
predominantly female. Thus where the Chinese translation of queer has a cruelty
in it that conveys something of the activist or interventionist side of the term, the
Japanese translations of American novels about desire between men tend towards
the romantic. And where the Taiwanese novel uses disruptive techniques typical
of postmodern high culture, the Japanese translations are assimilated to the hugely
popular home-grown (but now global) genre of Manga.
6  B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett
Continuing the discussion of how American queer gets translated into other
cultures, Robert Gillett in his chapter also discusses work in the graphic genre.
Dykes to Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel’s comic strip snapshots of lesbian life in
the US, ran from 1983 to 2008, and were uniquely perceptive in charting the rise
of queer in the lesbian community. In examining the German translations of these
comics, Gillett concludes that they are rather more indebted than the original to
a liberationist model of gay identity and suggests that they might fit into the cat-
egory of the straight gay text established by Assab.
B.J. Epstein identifies a comparable tendency in her chapter. She analyses
queer texts for younger readers, comparing English texts to their Swedish transla-
tions. Epstein is inspired by feminist translation studies and adapts some of those
ideas to the field of queer translation studies, and she proposes two strategies
translators can employ: ‘acqueering’, which increases queerness, or ‘eradicali-
zation’, which eradicates the radical nature of queerness. With regard to young
people, Epstein finds that adult translators are more likely to attempt to protect
them from queerness via eradicalization.
Clara Bradbury-Rance identifies similar processes of eradicalization in Atom
Egoyan’s re-make of Anne Fontaine’s film Nathalie. . . . Paradoxically, though,
it is because Egoyan makes the lesbianism of his film more explicit, erasing the
evasions of the ellipsis of Fontaine’s title, that his film strays beyond the purlieu
of the queer. This process of explicitation is again often a necessary accompani-
ment of the process of translation itself. And in all those areas in which Fontaine’s
film was able to tease the viewer – with its narrative perspective, its thematization
of disrupted transmission, its visual suggestiveness and its deployment of genre,
for example – Egoyan’s errs on the side of the obvious and the conventional. In
so doing, in the language of translation theory, it domesticates its predecessor.
In Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, which Jacob Breslow analy-
ses in his chapter, this process of attempted domestication becomes the actual
subject of the film. Like the texts discussed by Epstein, Zeitlin’s film explores
how children learn about and understand sexuality. In Breslow’s analysis, this
involves a process of translation in which, exactly as in the queer view of hetero-
sexuality, a fictitious hegemonic position (the adult), constructs as the recipient
of its performances an imaginary other (the child), which it addresses in a hybrid,
palimpsestic language whose real purpose is to reinforce the status of adults as
adults. Shifting genres in the film, he argues, produce ‘queer recontextualizations
of the anxieties that structure the desire for adults and children to be separate’.
And he concludes with the suggestion that queer translation might start here, in
these recontextualizations.
Miller Wolf Oberman acts on this suggestion, using Monique Wittig’s ideas
about lesbians being a third sex – or not a sex at all – and Judith Halberstam’s
concept of queer failure to discuss connections between the impossibility of
expressing sex or gender and the act of translation. Oberman explores Jeanette
Winterson’s novel Written on the Body as an adaptation and mis/translation of
Wittig’s work and the politics of translating/adapting a queer text. This involves
revisiting the issues of genderless narration, and of translation as eradicalization,
 Introduction  7
which in the context are linked explicitly to feminist theories associated with
queer, including Gayatri Spivak’s feminist theory of translation.
In much the same way, William Spurlin, in the final chapter of the book, returns
to themes adumbrated elsewhere – the gamut of trans*, the application of gender
theory to translation, the notion of failure as continual critique, domestication and
dissidence, euphemism and excess – and brings them together in a summative
exploration of the common ground between queer and translation.
Individually, then, the chapters cover a huge geographical, historical, generic
and linguistic range, and they approach the theme of the book from a wide array
of different angles. Yet there is also a striking degree of common ground between
them. Similarities of approach, theme and vocabulary bespeak a considerable
depth of shared concerns and bind the book tightly together. Especially when read
as a whole, therefore, this volume constitutes the first multi-focus in-depth study
on translating queer, queering translation, queer as translation and translation as
queer. And it proves beyond reasonable doubt that what is meant by queer literally
depends on what is meant by translation – and vice versa.

Notes
1 This does not mean, of course, that translators into English are not occasionally guilty
of degendering or regendering; a classic example is John Herman Merivale’s version of
Sappho’s ‘Ode to Aphrodite’.
2 The analogy of course is with non-white performers who contrive to be accepted as
white by the white community. See in particular Jennie Livingstone’s film Paris is
Burning (1991).
1 Re-mapping translation
Queerying the crossroads
Shalmalee Palekar

My chapter focuses on the nexus between translation, postcolonial and queer

studies. Specifically, I shall be re-examining translation practices by foreground-
ing the perspectives of queer translators as well as dynamic, queer textual tactics
in postcolonial (and particularly Indian) texts/contexts. Such tactics might entail
‘discovering’ or ‘exhuming’ texts considered queer in our contemporary under-
standing of the term; or examining how (primarily Western) queer theory is being
translated and retranslated across various cultural contexts to codify a kind of
globalized queerness; or of tracing how queer writing might work in repressive
societies that engage in censorship.
At the same time the effects of neo/imperialism, neoliberalism and globalization
should not be underestimated. Queer researchers from postcolonizing societies are
increasingly wary of the ways in which US-centric ideas of what constitutes queer-
ness are becoming tools of ‘legitimization’ and in turn, neo-imperialist control.
Culturally specific literary practices and communities are often appropriated and
decontextualized by researchers in search of proof of a globally legible and trans-
parently translatable queer experience/identity. The work of postcolonial queer
translators is thus crucial in crafting lexical and methodological strategies of resis-
tance that might allow for more productive engagements with local modes of queer
life. When framing/translating queer communities and cultures, then, it is unwise
to reject all queer theory as an instrument of imperialistic hegemony on the basis
of a crude Western/non-Western binary. Rather, it is vital to construct a hybrid
queer theory which is capable of accommodating local specificities and pluralities.

Translation of queer theory/experiences and

translation as identity construction
A common question facing queer translators across the postcolonial/neocolonial
spectrum is the question of translating ‘global’ (read US-centric) articulations of
queer identities and communities into and onto the ‘local’ subjects that concern
them, without setting up simplistic binaries of foreign/native, Western/non-Western,
and while also not ignoring the effects of neo-imperial and neoliberal forces. Maria
Viteri’s (2008) study of the Latino LGBT community living in Washington, DC
between 2004 and 2006 is a case in point. Viteri points out that
 Re-mapping translation  9
U.S. identity categories such as ‘queer’ and ‘Latino/a’ are not stable cat-
egories but are constantly reinvented and politicized according to diverse
constructions of race and sexuality where notions of ‘queer’ space (US) are
blurred with narratives from the homeland. That is to say, LGBT Latinos/as’
refusal to occupy a ‘queer’ and ‘Latino’ fixed identity acts as a way to con-
test, negotiate and re-signify a ‘western’ (colonial, Eurocentric) ‘authority’
embodied by these scripts and labels in a translation/border crossing continu-
ous flux. (Viteri 2008: 63)

Viteri’s idea of translation connects the concept of ‘border thinking’ with a meth-
odological bilingualism in which all the original informant text is in Spanish
followed by Viteri’s own translation of it into English. Viteri contends that this
technique

provides the reader room to think in-between English and Spanish destabi-
lizing any mechanical rendition of the texts. The notion of ‘border thinking’
constructs a concept of identity that goes beyond biological fixation, construc-
tivist disembodiment and harmonious homogeneity. It is a space for ambiguity
in constant transition that ‘translates’ the cultural baggage that seeks to define
and fix it. (Viteri 2008: 67)

Queerying translation can also be seen as part of an active construction of queer

identity/ies across different cultural contexts. Translators often ask the question,
‘What happens when localized representations of “camp” and “gay identity”
are translated?’ In one such study, Cristiano Mazzei (2007) reads three novels
originally written in Brazilian Portuguese that explore the gay-male subculture in
Brazil, and examines the issues translators face in interpreting sexuality/gender
subversions. He also looks at how well translators have captured the ‘campiness’
of the source texts, and analyses how queer camp responds to the process of trans-
lation. He then goes on to imagine a future for queer translation studies:

In the collaboration that I envision between translation and queer studies, and
since sexual identity adds another dimension to cultural specificity, one fur-
ther area of research might include how to factor our Western notions of male
homosexuality and representation in translation when analyzing non-Western
characterizations of same-sex desire, with questions such as ‘Can we apply
the same categories of gay camp to the hijra in India or the yan daudu of
Nigeria?’ (Mazzei 2007: 98)

Considering the same idea, Roland Weißegger (2011) also interrogates the degree
to which translators take part in the construction of identities. Drawing on Butler’s
(2006) theory that neither grammar nor style is apolitical, Weißegger debunks the
‘neutrality myth’ in translation studies, arguing strongly that translation is neither
an innocent nor a powerless act. In order to textually underline the point, the author
uses the term ‘oq’ as both a personal pronoun and an ‘all-purpose ending for nouns
10  Shalmalee Palekar
describing people’ (2011: 164) and continues: ‘By submitting to certain hege-
monic discourses, translatoqs construct identities according to these hegemonic
views (and possibly influence these views themselves)’ (2011: 169).
The problem of translating the concepts of a ‘gay’ identity/community has
exercised many scholars. Keith Harvey explores the theoretical and ethnographic
aspects of the issue. He examines both the theoretical underpinnings of ‘queer’
and the ethnographic implications of the ‘gay community’, drawing on the work of
Carol Warren (Harvey 2000: 145). One of Harvey’s key concerns is whether ‘gay
writing’ suffers a ‘translation deficit’ in certain cultures (2000: 147). Drawing on
his own experiences as a young gay man in Britain, reading translated versions
of French authors such as Genet, Gide and Proust, Harvey contends that without
access to such translations he would probably have struggled to find ‘homosexual
voices’, since he was not aware of other contemporary sources of ‘gay fiction’
like that emerging in the US. He also points to the importance of these texts hav-
ing a ‘canonical status’ and so gaining legitimacy or respectability for a young
man coming to terms with his identity. Harvey further recounts that ‘the translated
text was queer in every sense of the word, and I could use its queerness in the
formative process of imagining a community above language and cultural differ-
ences’ (p. 150). And he concludes by affirming that

translated literature occupies a special place within the space of literature for
gay readers in that translated texts can suggest models of otherness that can
be used in processes of internal identity formation and imagined community
projection. Translations can achieve this through their subject matter itself, if
this presents the reader with explicit accounts of homosexual experience and
struggle. (Harvey 2000: 159)

But what does ‘queer’ mean?

The problematics of the translation of specific terms and the shifts in their ref-
erents can also be implicated in the issues of appropriation and a ‘hierarchy of
legitimacy’. While this is most commonly found in societies which are seen as
‘regressive’ in terms of the contemporary queer rights movements in the West, it
also seems to follow a hierarchy of language use. These aspects are seen in three
different studies revolving around the translation of the term ‘queer’ and by exten-
sion queer theory, across Taiwan, Finland and Canada.
Song Hwee Lim’s ‘How to be Queer in Taiwan: Translation, Appropriation
and the Construction of a Queer Identity in Taiwan’, for instance, discusses the
fact that one of the words for ‘queer’ in Taiwan is ku’er; coined by a ‘radical
intellectual journal’ in 1994. The term has specific implications for Taiwanese
queer identity. It is a compound term consisting of the Chinese characters ku
(meaning ‘cruel’, ‘cold’ and also ‘very’ or ‘extremely’) and er (meaning ‘child’,
‘youngster’ or ‘son’).1 And Lim considers the impact the translated meaning has
on Taiwanese discourses of same-sex sexualities, asking the question, ‘What does
queer theory teach us about Taiwan?’ (2008: 235).
 Re-mapping translation  11
In order to answer this question, Lim first considers the early 1990s terms for
same-sex sexualities in the Chinese language; then the effect of translating queer
to ku’er and the politics of translation and appropriation and finally the construc-
tion of hybrid queer identities in Taiwan. He links the emergence of the term
ku’er with the proliferation of popular ‘queer’ publications, and the subsequent
competition between them to capture readers’ attention:

As the translation of queer as ku’er was partly occasioned by the publication

of two translated novels, the introduction of a queer discourse in Taiwan
may have as much to do with marketing strategies as with identity politics.
I would therefore argue that this instance of translation can be appreciated
within the context of competing discursive terms for same-sex sexuality in
contemporary Taiwan. (Lim 2008: 239)

Lim also considers hybridity, arguing that the connotation of ‘coolness’ associ-
ated with ku’er does not translate back to queer (2008: 243). Fran Martin (2003)
considers the same processes particularly in terms of how the mix of Chinese and
English in Taiwan has led to a kind of ‘cultural translation’ (2003: 3) drawing on
the nuances of both languages.
In the case of Finland, Joanna Mizielinksa (2006) asks questions equivalent to
Lim’s: ‘how does “queer” function in the Finnish language and reality? Does it
have its equivalent translation? And if it remains un-translated, what does it mean
or what does it mask? How does it change when it is introduced in the Finnish
context? Does it capture something in the Finnish reality that had not been noticed
before? In the second part of this chapter, I will consider the American character
of queer theory and to what extent it can be transposed into different cultural con-
texts in general, and into the Finnish context in particular’ (Mizielinksa 2006: 88).
Mizielinksa uses Finnish translations of ‘queer’ as a starting point for asking
Finnish queer activists/scholars about the place of English in the queer academic
movement in Finland. She finds that one of the local effects of using the English
term is that it endows queer theory with an aura of safety and respectability (‘bet-
ter, more sophisticated, and international’ (2006: 90)) in an academic context.
Ultimately she challenges and queries the dominance of American scholarship in
the queer field, asking why the US model of queer life still remains the most influ-
ential even in those European countries which far outstrip it in terms of progressive
legislation regarding sexual minorities (2006: 101). Clearly then the influence of
US-centric queer theory is bound up with the use of English and is seen as having a
deterministic impact even in spaces that are ‘liberated’ and ‘progressive’.
Finally, Michela Baldo (2008) focuses on the translative meanings of the
word ‘queer’ in the post-migratory setting of Italian-Canadian and Italian-North
American women writers. She considers ‘translation as a form of displacement’
for the writers she discusses, using as examples specific Italian-Canadian texts
and especially those printed in Curraggia, a literary journal founded by and for
Italian women living in North America. Theorizing the journal as a space in which
these women can explore their (often transgressive) identities, Baldo contends
12  Shalmalee Palekar
that ‘the writing of Curraggia, like Italian-Canadian writing, revolves around a
cultural and linguistic translation which is fundamental in this revisiting of the
concept of queer’ (2008: 43).
On the basis of specific close textual readings of poems and stories in the
journal, Baldo also coins the term ‘transqueer’ in order to explain how ‘queer
and translation participate in the “narrative construction” of these women writers’
(Baldo 2008: 56). Accordingly, translation is a key theme in the journal as a
whole, not just in terms of language but also in terms of experience. The miscom-
munication between generations, for instance, is a result of a gap in both these
aspects of the women’s lives and results in a ‘constant process of translation that
seeks to enable communication’.

Tracing and erasing the queer: translation as

both interventionist and repressive
The above examples notwithstanding, the role of queer translators in highlighting
the queer potentialities of texts is as yet under-researched but holds the poten-
tial of opening up some intriguing questions. Kieran O’Driscoll (2008) considers
one such case: the translation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days
(1873/1995) by William Butcher. O’Driscoll points out that the ‘nature of trans-
latorial self-inscription and creativity may include an original deconstruction of
a source text, indeed, a radical reinterpretation of the same’ (2008: 1). Butcher’s
translation does just such a reinterpretation, taking into account Verne’s life his-
tory, the original manuscripts of the novel (before they were censored by their
publisher Hetzel), as well as textual analysis. O’Driscoll examines in detail
Butcher’s strategies of accentuating a sexual and at times particularly gay sub-
text in the novel and ultimately concludes that Butcher knowingly ‘overdid’ the
homosexual references. Nonetheless, for O’Driscoll, Butcher still offers a very
useful case study of the potential methodology that other queerious translators
might use. He notes:

The ‘gay’ case study presented in this article has offered examples of
how a translator such as William Butcher can, through the use of both his
translational linguistic choices and paratextual commentary, present new
and sometimes radical interpretations of a canonical work of literature.
(O’Driscoll 2008: 28–9)

Conversely, the process of translation can also lead to an erasure of the queerness
of both texts and authors, sometimes due to direct censorship and sometimes to
the queerphobic biases of a particular translator. Deborah Giustini (2015) sets out
to explore this aspect of translation with specific close attention paid to lesbian
writers. Drawing on translations of Sappho’s works, Giustini illustrates how the
renowned ‘lover of women’ has been retranslated into a heterosexual paradigm.
In particular, the editing of the pronouns in the 1652 translation of Fragment
31 by John Hall of Durham is examined (2015: 16). She also looks at Simone
 Re-mapping translation  13
de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) because it ‘has given rise
to a good range of gender and lesbian-conscious translation criticism’. Giustini
explains how translations (particularly one by Parshley) obliterate any references
to a ‘taboo’ lesbian relationship (2015: 17–18).
Giustini then tracks the beginnings of feminist translation works in English
Canada in the 1980s as a direct response to the avant-garde work of Quebecker
radical feminist writers in the 1970s. She traces the impetus behind these works
to a ‘desire to build transcultural bridges between women’. She further maintains
that the application of these practices to both heteronormative and queer texts
could result in ‘productive’ examples of queer translation. She notes that while it is
important to rigorously contextualize practices of oppression, queer(ying) transla-
tors can learn a lot from subversive feminist translation techniques and strategies,
and work to defamiliarize entrenched gender and heteronormative stereotypes:

Understood in this way, queer translation is, perhaps above all else, a literary
expedient that explores the parameters of queer experience in order to validate
an identity position and create an interactional space for the formulation and
reception of queer voices through language . . . By rendering homophobia
startlingly clear in a source text and appending an anti-oppressive paratext,
inversion would transmogrify a homophobic work into a sort of queered work.
(Giustini 2015: 18)

Another instance of erasure-through-translation is examined in Jack Hutchens’s

(2007) examination of the rising popularity of Allen Ginsberg and other Beat
poets in Poland in recent times. Hutchens suggests that Ginsberg’s searing cri-
tiques of American culture resonate with Polish youth who are witnessing the
rapid ‘Americanization’ of their country. At the same time, he notes with concern
that ‘Rybowski’s translations of Ginsberg’s poems seemingly erase all references
to Ginsberg’s gayness. This reflects not only the state enforced censorship of the
Polish Communist Party, but the negative attitude of Poles toward gays in this
largely Catholic country as well’ (Hutchens 2007: 980). And he examines key
Polish translations of Ginsberg’s poems to provide an illustration of the ways in
which the poet’s queerness is erased – notably by eliding the term ‘queer’ itself:

The truly problematic element of Rybowski’s translation hinges on his ren-

dering of the word ‘queer.’ It is obvious that when Ginsberg describes him-
self as ‘queer,’ he intends the gay connotation. Rybowski uses the adjective
‘dziwaczne.’ Though ‘dziwaczne’ can be translated as ‘queer,’ it is only in
the idea of ‘odd,’ and not ‘gay.’ In this translation any idea of gayness simply
does not exist. (Hutchens 2007: 988)

The role of queer/translation in exoticization/Orientalism

So far the role of queerying translation has been examined in the light of its
activist and resistant model, which has sought to overturn the historical erasure
14  Shalmalee Palekar
of textual queerness. However, it must also be kept in mind that homoeroticism/
homosexuality has also been a consistent trope of exoticization and Orientalism
in literature and film produced by Western writers such as T.E. Lawrence, André
Gide, Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Lawrence Durrell, Gustave Flaubert,
Edmund Backhouse, John Moray Stuart-Young and E.M. Forster (Lim 2014).
As Cristiano Mazzei points out, the combination of eroticism and exoticism has
repeatedly been used to sell queer translations. He examines the paratext of Bom-
Crioulo by Adolpho Caminha, a text originally published in 1895 which was the
first major Latin-American work to tackle male homosexuality as a central theme.
Mazzei notes that, ‘its English translation, by E.A. Lacey, was published in 1982
by the Gay Sunshine Press of San Francisco, under the title Bom-Crioulo – The
Black Man and the Cabin Boy’ (2014: 310). As Mazzei points out, while the work
itself was undeniably concerned with male homosexuality, the ways in which
the paratextual apparatus was used to frame the 1982 translation for US markets
reshaped the novel considerably, exoticizing it by highlighting the traditional
tropes of colonial representation of male homosexuality which include a simulta-
neous hypersexualization and infantilization of the non-white gay male body. The
downplaying of the text’s negative attitudes towards homosexuality, which were
based on nineteenth-century legal-medical literature, is also examined. The essay
is a reminder that queerying translation studies also means a continued focus on the
intersection of racialization and language, as well as the frames of representation.
In a more contemporary study of similar themes, Dredge Byung’chu Käng
(2011) examines the complexities of queer life in Bangkok, a site that has been
constructed as a ‘gay paradise’ in the Western popular imagination. Käng does a
comparative analysis of an exhaustive array of sources – from expat blogs to local
language gay Internet forums to examples of popular culture including maga-
zines, TV programmes and YouTube clips – to examine how Thai identity is
affected by this hypersexualization, including both a homophobic backlash and
reactions from gay Thai individuals and activists. He argues that mis/translation
occurs in multiple forms in this mediascape, noting:

Lack of access to Thai media perpetuates farang [white] belief in their cen-
trality to Thai desire. Additionally, Western gazes that depict Thailand as
especially tolerant of homosexuality and gender variance may in fact inhibit
the free expression of male-bodied effeminacy. Finally . . . the hypersexuali-
zation of Thais and new regional alignments are moulding local desires and
subjectivities away from the West. Relationships with farang are increasingly
stigmatized in favor of relationships with East Asians. Farang partnerships
can carry a stigma because the Thai partner is visually marked as a potential
sex worker (money boy, kept boy, etc.) and thus of low social status. This is
particularly salient because of Thailand’s reputation for sex tourism. At the
same time, the figuring and enactment of desire for East Asian partners has
been enabled by the circulation of media, Internet sites such as fridae.com,
and the proliferation of discount airlines that makes regional communication
and travel possible. (Käng 2011: 170–71)
 Re-mapping translation  15
Käng’s research shows the crucial need for postcolonial queer translation stud-
ies to intervene fruitfully in these analyses. The projection of the imperialist/
Orientalist fantasy onto the body of the Thai ‘boy’ (note again the simultaneous
hypersexualization and infantilization at work) can be resisted in multiple ways,
both anticolonial and nativist. Moreover, the intersection of these discourses
makes for a deft and nuanced methodology that is vital in order to resist simplistic
dichotomies. Paying attention to regional relationships is also important so as not
to lock all inquiry into a hierarchized Western/non-Western binary, thus privileg-
ing the former once again in an echo of the colonial and creating its own queer,
postcolonial marginalia.

The role of queer/translation in colonial

and postcolonial encounters
In the colonial encounter between two different cultures, the act of translation
has a dual function; it makes the colonizing subject accessible to the colonized
readership, because it expresses it in terms of the other’s experience, and it also
‘appropriates the cultural texts of the colonized subject by assigning them the
signs that are familiar to the colonizers’ (Ur Rehman 1997: n.p).
How then, do we translate the ‘global’ onto the ‘local’? Or, how do we best
consider ‘Western’ translations of the ‘ethnic’ and similarly, ‘ethnic’ translations
of the ‘West’?
Given that postcolonial and queer studies examine the representation of mar-
ginalized and/or colonized cultures, it follows that theoretical issues arising from
interlingual translations of alternative genders, sexualities and identities could sit
comfortably together. Indeed, postcolonial and queer studies can work together
to shine an often uncomfortable spotlight on cultural practices (especially those
related to translation). Thus the practice and study of translation and queerness
has the ability to radically dismantle and deconstruct notions of Western power,
language and heteronormative dominance. As Mazzei writes:

If Queer Studies problematizes the representation of otherness, then

Translation Studies highlights the otherness of representation. Bringing
together Queer Studies and Translation Studies, therefore, should destabilize
not only traditional models of representation, understood as mimesis, reflec-
tion, copying, but also the authorial voices and subjectivities they produce.
(Mazzei 2007: 2)

The iceberg theory

This theoretical crossroad of ‘queerying translation’ highlights one of the key
problems for the translator—the temptation to try and make explicit a certain kind
of globally legible and homogenizing queerness. In light of this, the translator
is required to perform a balancing act; one that recognizes the need to repre-
sent queer practices in non-Western countries, yet does not deliberately ‘overdo’
16  Shalmalee Palekar
reading queerness into culturally specific (oblique) representations. In ensuring
queerness is visible in non-Western texts, Mini Chandran draws on David Katan’s
writings on the ‘iceberg theory’. The theory, borrowed from Edward T. Hall’s
(1952) ‘triad’ of culture, consists of three levels of culture – technical culture,
formal culture, and informal or ‘out of awareness’ culture. ‘Technical culture’
refers to ‘communication at the level of science’ (Katan 2009: 78) where equa-
tions result in only one correct answer. ‘Formal culture’ refers to the culture
ingrained in traditions, customs and idioms, that is, the correct and accepted way
of doing things in a society, though the specifics can vary from society to society.
‘Informal culture’ is that which we are unconscious of – the form of culture that is
not learned, but rather acquired informally and through interaction.
This triad, constantly shifting through all kinds of communications, is in the shape
of an iceberg; that is, what is visible is well above the water (‘technical culture’),
‘formal culture’ sits in the middle (just below the water) and ‘informal culture’ sits
the deepest. Chandran contends that the triad is ultimately what is ‘visible, semi-
visible and invisible’ (2014: n.p). Of the three, it is the part that comprises these
unquestioned, unconscious beliefs about our identities and the world (that is, what
is deeply submerged) that is the most difficult for translators to deal with, because it
constitutes part of an ‘informal realm where word meanings that have connotative
layers are accessible mostly to native users of the language’ (Chandran 2014: n.p).
This triad comes into play not only when we communicate in everyday life but also
when we consider the process of translating a text. The translator, then, placed at
the interface of two different languages, performs the role of cultural intermediary,
bringing together that which is visible, semi-visible and invisible.
The implicit and explicit levels of the iceberg theory are highly applicable in
the context of ethnicity. At its most basic the concept of ‘ethnic’, that is, ‘of or
relating to large groups of people classed according to common racial, national,
tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin or background’ (according to the
Merriam-Webster dictionary), carries with it an implicit and instant meaning of
non-Western, non-European and non-Christian. To evoke the ‘Ethnic’ is to denote
a composition of ‘different’, or ‘other’, and according to Mini Chandran, ‘one
also gets the whiff of cultural inferiority’ (2014: n.p.). Further illustrating this
notion, Chandran points out that the first meaning given by the Merriam-Webster
online dictionary for ‘ethnic’ is ‘heathen’; she writes:

Ethnicity thus implies quaint, if not strange, cultures whose condition of alter-
ity constitutes the attraction for essentially Western communities. Translating
ethnicity therefore is to fight a difficult battle on a ground that is skewed by
unequal power relationships between cultures, haunted by expectations of/
from the exotic ‘other’ which the translator feels obliged to fulfil. The situation
is further vexed if the translation is from a relatively ‘powerless’ or ‘minority’
language into a major language such as English. (Chandran 2014: n.p.)

Chandran contends that one of the key battles for the translator from an-other lan-
guage is that the ethnic minority is ‘expected to either showcase their culture with
 Re-mapping translation  17
all its anthropological features or provide a smooth avenue of fluency to their indig-
enous worlds’ (2014: n.p.). Thus, once again, the onus is on the ethnic translator to
provide an easy and understandable interpretation/translation for the Western read-
ership/audience. This pressure requires the translator of ethnic literature to be a kind
of ‘performing monkey’ (Chandran 2014: n.p.), one who is a native correspondent,
working to represent his/her exotic world of difference to the West. Geeta Patel
echoes Chandran’s concerns and extends the ‘ethnic’ analysis into queer translation
terrain, arguing that ‘Disquisitions on queerness seem to require acts of untenable
translation when they travel through the machinery of race/imperialism/colonialism.
Instead of looking for the hybridity in homogeneity, the homogeneity in hybridity,
they tend to generate purified sexual subjects’ (1997: 138).
Translation practice in colonial and postcolonial India reflects all these issues
and more, providing fertile ground for queerying them.

The Indian context

The act of translation has long been an inherent practice in India – the Hindi/
Marathi terms ‘anuvad’ (‘speaking after or following’) and ‘rupantar’ (‘change
in form’), as Sujit Mukherjee reminds us, ‘are the commonly understood sense of
translation in India, and neither term demands fidelity to the original’ (1994: 80).
Ancient literary and religious texts are available today because they were translated
from classic languages such as Sanskrit into Hindi, Marathi and other languages
including English. Translation is the Indian context, as Indra Nath Choudhuri
notes, ‘Being polyglots, we use more than one language while speaking or even
thinking’ (2010: 1). Similarly, Gayatri Gopinathan writes, ‘few attempts have been
made to churn out theories of translation in India, since the theories are embedded
in the practice itself’ (2016: 1).
Earlier studies in the Indian context generally sought to trace queer local histories
through translation of a wide range of literary and mythological texts. Particularly
influential texts include Queering India: Same-Sex Love and Eroticism in Indian
Culture and Society by Ruth Vanita (2002), as well as Devdutt Pattanaik’s work
on Hindu mythology in The Pregnant King (2008). In Vanita’s edited collection,
Michael J. Sweet’s examination of queerness and sexuality in English transla-
tions of the Kama Sutra is particularly relevant (2002: 77–84). Sweet uses Alain
Danielou’s translation of the Kama Sutra and draws on specific textual examples
to illustrate the various meanings conveyed in the descriptions of sexual activity.
Vanita’s Gender, Sex and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India, 1780–1870
(2012) also considers the issue of translation of specifically Urdu romantic poetry
or ghazals. Vanita outlines her strategy for translation, writing specifically about
translating Urdu references to lovers and railing against Western critical interven-
tions that ‘privilege the heterosexual’ (2012: 38). More recently, Vanita has also
translated Chocolate (1927), a collection of eight stories in Hindi by Ugra (the
pseudonym of a twentieth-century writer, Pandey Bechan Sharma). The stories
were written for an express purpose – to expose and denigrate male homosexual-
ity as perverted – but Vanita discusses her choice of translation text as important
18  Shalmalee Palekar
because ‘it was very important to show that, in certain periods, homophobia was the
only mode in which one could speak about homosexuality’ (2009: 56). According
to Vanita, such repressive/negative modes of writing are not only worth studying
in a contemporary context; even at the time of publication, they provided space
for the expression of modes of sexuality that were otherwise completely unspeak-
able. She quotes gay Indian activist Ashok Row Kavi to the effect that older gay
men (Ugra’s contemporaries), welcomed the publication of his stories – because
despite his obvious homophobia and the conventional tragic ends meted out to gay
men, at least he wrote unequivocally about homosexuality. To the queer reader-
ship, this kind of explicit enunciation of homosexuality was better than complete
invisibility in literary/public culture. Indeed, as Vanita points out, ‘[Ugra’s] critics
accused him of writing in a way that made [homosexuality] seem very attractive
. . . So it is not just we today reading it subversively. Some readers read it that way
in its own time’ (Vanita, cited in Bhan 2007: 56).
But while work like Vanita’s serves an important historically situating and
queerying function, some commentators are also concerned about the problemat-
ics of translations that seek to make explicit a certain kind of globally accessible
queerness. In a blogpost, a queer Indian academic (who identifies herself only
as ‘B’) (2012) writes about her own experiences with these themes (and most
recently teaching Translation Studies):

[we must] take a hard look at this business of ‘finding queer practices’ in
many ‘third world cultures’ that authors like Devdutt Pattanaik and Ruth
Vanita are invested in. Such studies and fictional retellings are almost always
along the lines of, ‘See these people can be queer too’ or (worse) saying, ‘This
is our legacy! This is our history!’ without seeing the ‘we’ is constructed at
the cost of excluding [any Indian] who doesn’t have ‘sacred Hindu texts’ as
a part of their history. The more dangerous subtext of this emerging genre is,
queerness can exist in [a regional language], but has to be rescued by English,
receive its marks of legitimacy and then we can have a ‘tradition’ to consume
and call our own. (2012: n.p.)

B’s concerns have much merit and, of course, the ‘effective history’ of a text
(Niranjana 1992: 33) must always be rigorously considered in this queerly
recuperative context. Not every piece of queer writing/translation can be read
as resistant merely because it comes from the ‘non-West’. Additionally, queer/
queerying translators need to guard against a facile fluency that seeks to homog-
enize the sometimes radical alterity of queerness and queer writing around the
world. However, I contend that such a recuperation must simultaneously exist,2
precisely to counter the exclusionary and essentialist Nativist/Nationalist claims
that ‘we’ were never queer until the colonial encounter; that to publicly ‘speak’ or
write queerness in India is to be brainwashed and corrupted by the West. Queer
translations across eras make visible the rich multiplicity of queer identities and
queer writing/translation in India, which, like any other identities and writing, have
manifold histories. As Naisargi Dave points out, translators and scholars of India
 Re-mapping translation  19
have dragged out the ‘[queer] submerged bodies that lie nearly forgotten under the
thick stratum of official history’s obfuscations’, and that ‘such archaeologies have
uncovered a host of vernacular terms denoting same-sex sex, gender non-normativity,
and their practitioners’ (2012: 18). Ironically, the insistence on a completely separate
national/cultural/linguistic/queer/postcolonizing narrative retards the decolonizing
enterprise itself by continuously situating neo/colonial discourse at the centre and fix-
ing it there. Therefore, hegemonic, globalizing discourse can only ever be partially
replaced, and the emphasis on the neocolonial continues to flourish – what Harish
Trivedi wryly posits as ‘translation being thoroughly colonized by the postcolonial’
(Trivedi 2000, 2 July, personal comm.).3
In India, translation must perform a triple act: one that shows how India is rep-
resented to the outside world, how India (particularly as situated in the regional
and local) is represented to itself, and how the world is represented within/to India.
Chandran’s works wrestle with the intercultural exchange that occurs during the
process of interlingual translation, an act that she argues makes writer-translators
‘ambassadors of the source culture they translate from’ (2014: n.p.). Along with
ambassadorship, the writer-translator also functions as an intermediary of ‘inter-
cultural exchange’. This exchange however extends both to translations and to
writings in any languages other than the writer’s native language. In her article
‘Writer-Translators of Ethnicity: Translations and Literatures Written in English’,
Chandran compares Indian writing in English (in this case, Arundhati Roy’s The
God of Small Things) with Indian literature in English translation (in this case,
versions of two Malayalam novels from Kerala) in order to study the process of
translation across two poles. She points out that Malayalam is doubly marginal-
ized because it is an Indian language in an English-dominated world, and because
it is a regional language in a Hindi-dominated country. Similarly, Sujit Mukherjee
considers the imbalance implicit in translating from ‘native’ (and less powerful
regional) languages to English, and vice-versa:

If it is accepted that any act of translation means the naturalisation by transfer

of an alien quality, the Indian translator is involved in transferring an Indian
(native) text through a non-Indian language such as English (alien) into the
Indian culture (native), whereas [a Western speaker of English] is transfer-
ring an Indian text (alien) through his native language into his native culture.
(Mukherjee 1994: 82)

Chandran tackles this concept by calling out the process of ‘chutnification’ in

translation, something she deems the ‘obsession’ with exotic India that became
prominent post-Rushdie. Whereas the ‘trinity’ of Commonwealth writers – R.K.
Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao – wrote in an English that was actually
influenced by Tamil, Punjabi and Kannada respectively, and therefore ‘seem more
willing to compromise with the language’ (2014: n.p.), later writers, like Rushdie,
merely enhance ‘the exotic component by adding ethnic languages to English,
with an eye on the reader in a distant locale’ (2014: n.p.). Roy does the same
with Malayalam words in The God of Small Things, placing the ‘exotic’ or native
20  Shalmalee Palekar
words or phrases in italics. Chandran argues that this practice makes it clear that
the implied reader is a ‘stranger to the region and the language’: the implied reader
is like the unquiet dead haunting the Indian translator of Indian texts into English.
This is an apparition that cannot be located in a specific language or culture –
(s)he could be Indian or non-Indian, bilingual or even multilingual, urban or semi-
urban. The Indian translator translating into English is like the actor in the spotlight
addressing a darkened auditorium, sure of an audience but unsure of their response.
This notion of the implied reader is an interesting one – Chandran argues that
the process of using italicized native words ends up muddying both languages,
resulting in a language that is ‘less recognisable as a separate linguistic entity’,
and instead a ‘pallid imitation of the source language in translatorese’ (2014: n.p.).
The composition of the target readership therefore, has a direct impact on the
translation of ethnicity the translator undertakes. Spivak notes that the translator:

Apart from the knowledge that their implied readers are from outside their
cultures (almost invariably at the centre as far as these writers from the
periphery are concerned), what is apparent in Roy and translators such as
Anita Nair is their distance from the source culture that they are translating
in their different ways. Their ethnic subjectivities are constituted by metro-
politan centres and are aimed at a culturally diffuse readership inhabiting a
globalised world. (Spivak 1992, cited in Chandran 2014: n.p.)

What’s cooking in the queer Indian kitchen and beyond?

Spivak’s theorizing of ‘ethnic’ subjectivities as translated and reconstituted by
metropolitan centres, raises a challenge for queer translators in India and queery-
ers of Indian works to also guard against ‘chutnification’ in their translations of
texts and queer local lives. Geeta Patel’s work confronts this challenge head on.
In a deeply personal ficto-critical intervention, she explores queerness and resist-
ance when considering her childhood fascination with the hijra. For Patel, as a
self-described Indian woman in the West (the US), the state of translation that
characterizes her own self and sexuality can also be applied to the act of transla-
tion in an academic sense:

The stories I now told about myself were in translation. In the process, I
became translation. I wore all of the accoutrements of a fluency as I traversed
the distance from a ‘minor’ to a ‘major’ language: Boston, white, upper-
middle class. Only in retrospect do I realize that I had translated my gender,
without marking the move, into a different set of narratives. The narratives,
however feminist, parcelled off men from women and separated masculinity
and femininity into two oppositional poles. These gendered binaries repro-
duced themselves in spatial terms, the standard demarcation into public and
private with the ‘outside’ streets and political economy given over to men
and the domestic ‘inside’ to women. I became a creature of the house, house
bound, family bound, woman bound, in my remembrances. (Patel 1992: 135)
 Re-mapping translation  21
Patel’s refers to the hijra as ‘heroic gender benders in queer theory’ (1992: 138), and
considers that her obsession with them began because they inhabit a third space,
even if she was unaware of this as a child. Drawing on a rich metaphor first explored
by Latina writer Maria Lugones, Patel argues that home-cooked mayonnaise,
which appears homogenous (and ‘helps certain edibles go down more easily’), in
fact differs entirely from shop brought mayonnaise. This difference Patel argues,
supplies ‘a useful metaphor for hybridity because the final product is visually and
viscerally different from its constituents’ and because once the eggs are broken
and the vinegar emulsified, the eggs cannot be unbroken, or the dish restored to
its ‘original’ form (1992: 136). Quipping that as mayonnaise is not a vegetarian
condiment it is ‘likely to degenerate into a translator’s nightmare’, Patel writes:

Mayonnaise as the only trope for hybridity turns rancid as it travels; so too
does a distilled and bottled queerness. Though queerness, if one mixes up
the myriad uses of the term, is closer to an amalgam than an emulsion (in
that it falls apart into its components easily), like mayonnaise it looks dif-
ferent than its ingredients – the practices, identities and sexualities that give
it texture. In practice queerness has been deployed as an umbrella term for
identities and embodied multiplicity (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender,
butch-femme, cross-dressing, third gender) as well as manipulated to read
texts against the grain for sexualities that do not fit ‘norms’. Queerness as a
(if one can precede the word by the singular article a) site produces a space
for sexual hybridity alternate to and in excess of simple identity categories.
Once identity categories have been dumped under the rubric of ‘queer,’ even
when people attempt to distil them into something more ‘elemental,’ they
carry the faint whiff of complexity, the taint of infection. (Patel 1992: 138)

Outside of the kitchen, in broader cultural and performative contexts, Akshay

Khanna examines the conditions wherein ‘epidemiological knowledge about
“men who have sex with men” is produced’ (2009: n.p.). Writing of a group
he meets at Pride Week in Kolkata, he considers the epistemology and transla-
tions of key words like launda (adolescent/teenage boy) and naach (dance)
that come to represent the homoerotic because of their association with words
like laundebaazi and the laundebaaz (‘boy-lover homosexuals’). When an anti
sex-trafficking group sponsors the sex-workers, he also explores the identifica-
tory terms used by an HIV research drop-in centre on their official registers.
These registers contain categories in which to classify those bodies coming
into contact with the centre: the kothi (the penetrated male); the dupli (effemi-
nate male who is penetrated and also penetrates); the hijra ‘which is an obvious
category, of “thirdness”, and increasingly of “transsexuality”’ (2009: n.p.); and
the ‘Pareekh: the masculine male or “original man”, who often is a kothi’s
lover’ (2009: n.p.). These indigenous Indian queer identities are themselves
bodies-in-translation, and Khanna maps out how these marginal bodies (socio-
cultural bodies, fleshly bodies) are translated and by/for whom, in the process
of becoming textual bodies.
22  Shalmalee Palekar
In conclusion: translators queerying the crossroads
Thus there is always something potentially monstrous and illuminating when
attempting to write both of, and sometimes unavoidably, for another in trans-
lation. The narratives are queered, dispersed, unsettled, and arrogated. They
arrive at their destination transformed, sometimes beyond recognition. For exam-
ple, Naisargi Dave, while facilitating a discussion on sexuality and rights at a
Christian school in Hyderabad is struck by how, whether in Hindi, Urdu, Sanskrit,
Marathi, English, or other Indian languages, ‘the [contemporary] words that are
called up to talk about Indian homosexualities always seem to have a ring of
the strange’ (2012: 17). But it is perhaps the willingness to be transformed in
the first place, that swings queer literary/cultural/translation studies and prac-
tices from heavily monitored Western narratives to the rich, mutable discourse of
other cultures/‘insider’ translations and transfusions. The only position to take to
queery translation, then, is part medium, part cryptographer, in awareness that any
insight will oscillate between these two poles.
As queer Indian translators and texts become more globally visible, it is vital
that we do not lose sight of local and regional translation practices and textual
strategies; that we do not subsume these under a chutnified, homogenized queer
translation model, and that we formulate the Indian translator as always rewriting,
recreating and reconstituting queer India, just as India continues to rewrite, recre-
ate and reconstitute the queer translator.

Notes
1 See the contribution by Andrea Bachner in this volume.
2 It is worth noting that Vanita and Kidwai’s seminal work Same-Sex Love in India (2000)
undertakes an in-depth examination of numerous non-Hindu queer texts, and that Vanita
herself examines queer Urdu erotic poetry in Gender, Sex and the City – neither conflates
‘Hindu sacred texts’ with all Indianness/Indian history.
3 I am grateful to Harish Trivedi for this formulation.

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2 Queering narratives and
narrating queer
Colonial queer subjects in the Arab world
Nour Abu Assab

They were an instance of the eastern boy and boy affection, which the segregation
of women made inevitable. Such friendships often led to manly loves of a depth
and force beyond our flesh-steeped conceit. When innocent they were hot and una-
shamed. If sexuality entered, they passed into a give and take, unspiritual relation,
like marriage. (Lawrence 1935: 228)

This is how Thomas Edward Lawrence, renowned Arabist and British spy in the
Arab Middle East, described a homosexual encounter between two Arab men. On
another occasion he remarked

our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s few needs in their own
clean bodies – a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and
even pure . . . friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate
hot limbs in supreme embrace. (Lawrence 1935: 12)

In the second quote, Lawrence describes homosexual encounters between British

soldiers. The contrast is striking: whereas the colonial subject practising homo-
sexuality is portrayed as ‘unspiritual’,1 the colonizer is portrayed as ‘even pure’.
His descriptions came at a time when homosexual encounters were not only
frowned upon in Britain, but also perceived as acts punishable by law. A quick
search on Lawrence and homosexuality today returns a myriad of results dis-
cussing and celebrating his support of homosexuality, and suggest that, at times,
he himself was engaged in homosexual encounters.2 Those attempting to prove
Lawrence’s homosexuality often cite his relationship to an Arab boy from north-
ern Syria, Selim Ahmed, also known as Dahoum. However, what most accounts
fail to mention is that when Lawrence met Dahoum in 1909, he was 12 years old,
while Lawrence was in his twenties.
The focus of this chapter, however, is not T.E. Lawrence or his homosexual/
paedophilic encounters in the Arab world, but rather on the narrative promoted
and embraced by colonialists about sexuality in the Arab Middle East, through a
translation and narration of culture that serves and has served colonial interests in
the region. In this chapter, I argue that there is a multidisciplinary need to inter-
rogate the colonizers’ transmission of culture and narratives, rather than merely
26  Nour Abu Assab
translating and narrating a culture. By doing so, I propose an approach that aims to
de-queer the homosexual colonizer identity, and considers it a normative sexuality,
that has been complicit in creating a dominant orientalist narrative of the Arab,
by suggesting that queerness is context-dependent and its use, except for a few
exceptions, has not been interrogated enough within disciplines. While these nar-
ratives mutate and change over time, throughout this chapter I aim to show that,
despite some historical discontinuities, orientalizing and colonialist approaches to
the sexually deviant ‘Arab’ still persist in Western ‘dominant’ cultures.3
To do this, I survey a few textual examples taken both from the colonial times
of the British Empire, and from postcolonial times. This chapter is divided into
four main sections. The first section focuses on the concept of narrative and its use
to explore the translation of culture from a queer perspective. It aims to demon-
strate how the use of narrative to describe the transmission of culture is important,
and allows room for an alternative form of queering. Building on the first section,
the second section reviews how the creation of a homoerotic narrative of the Arab
has been used by colonial powers to describe a decadent Arab culture, while Arab
places provided safe havens for white travellers in pursuit of homosexual activity.
It sheds light on shifts and continuities in the narrative, and sheds light on how
an analysis of those narratives must focus on a queering of the marginalized, as
disturbing of dominant practices, and a de-queering of dominant cultures. The
third section of this chapter previews dominant narratives of homosexuality in the
Arab world, and pushes for a reclaiming of a culture that has been monopolized,
and even borrowed by the West. The concluding section sheds light on how de-
queering dominant narratives can pave the way for new approaches to emerge
within queer theory, constituting major steps towards decolonization.

Queering narratives in colonialist discourse

Translation as a practice and a field of study has played a major role in shaping cul-
tural understandings, in so far as narrators, whether sociologists, anthropologists,
political scientists, historians, or cultural theorists, depended to a great extent on
the translation of encounters, interactions, behaviours, dialogues and texts. These
interpretations can also be linguistic and non-linguistic, such as descriptions of
incidents, reactions and behaviours. However, the narrator in all of these instances
serves as a translator and a transmitter, and their role is crucial in constructing nar-
ratives around cultures, and also shaping policy and attitudes. The narrator, at the
same time, is subject to dominant modes of knowledge production, thus making
it almost impossible to produce ‘objective’ ‘value-neutral’ knowledge (Roseneil
1993: 180). Unlike what positivists may assume, a narration of culture can never
achieve absolute objectivity. For a long time, feminist scholars have warned against
scholarly insistence on objectivity, and indeed for social actors ‘social life itself is
storied’ (Somers 1994: 614). The effect is to make narration subjective.
Highly popular British travel writings about the East and specifically the Arab
world, were narrated in the form of stories, and even though stories are subjective,
these narratives were celebrated as ‘objective’ portrayals of the ‘Arab’ at that time,
 Colonial queer subjects in the Arab world  27
and within mainstream media nowadays. In her highly celebrated book, Syria, the
Desert and the Sown, Gertrude Bell narrates a story of a Bedouin man speaking
about Jinn,4 as a cause of fear for the Arabs (Bell 2007 [1907]: 36). She describes
how ‘an Arab’ was startled ‘almost out of his wits’ (37) by confusing seeing a
naked man in the dark for Jinn. As with Tibetans in Mills’s work on women’s
travel writing (Mills 1991), the Arabs are portrayed as ‘simple, child-like, unedu-
cated people who lack western “objectivity”’ (147). On another occasion in the
same book, Bell describes an Arab man:

Jada’llah, a tall young man with a handsome but rather stupid face, who
greeted me with ‘Bon jour,’ and then relapsed into silence . . . just as he had
borrowed one phrase from a European tongue, so he had borrowed one article
of dress from European wardrobes: a high stick-up collar was what he had
selected, and it went strangely with his Arab clothes. (Bell 2007 [1907]: 85)

Similarly, Lawrence in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom repeatedly describes the Arabs
and the Turks as ‘stupid’. For instance, while describing the Palestinian peasants
he says ‘the sullen Palestine peasants, more stupid than the yeomen of North Syria,
material as the Egyptians and bankrupt’ (322). Texts like these have created a nar-
rative about the Arabs, as ‘lesser’ and of ‘lower’ status than their observers, and
these narratives have been widely used to justify colonial interest (Said 1978).
The term ‘narrative’ here is used to refer to how colonial powers have used
stories to promote a specific imagery of the Arabs at that time. It has been chosen
in preference over the term ‘description’, because narratives are fluid, subjective
and changing, and can be contested. Mona Baker’s (2005) argument on the impor-
tance of looking at narratives in and of translation echoes with previous feminist
accounts of narratives and objectivity. She says about translation studies:

we have a master narrative of the translator as an honest intermediary, with

translation repeatedly portrayed as a force for good, a means of enabling dia-
logue to take place between different cultures and therefore (the logic goes)
improving the ability of members of these different cultures to understand each
other. Thus, communication, dialogue, understanding, and indeed knowledge
are assumed to be ‘good’ in a moral sense. They lead – unproblematically – to
justice, peace, tolerance, progress. (Baker 2005: 9)

Baker does not assume that discourses about culture and translation are ‘intention-
ally’ or ‘openly manipulative’ (Baker 2005: 4). However, I disagree, suggesting rather
that an accrual of narratives can be intentionally manipulative, and used overtly
or covertly to justify political actions. The rationale behind most colonizations
has drawn heavily from discourses around the ‘backwardness’, ‘stupidity’ and
‘primitiveness’ of the culture of the colonized. Orientalists such as T.E. Lawrence
and Gertrude Bell, who are hugely celebrated in dominant Western cultures,5 the
former as a homosexual and the latter as a feminist, have contributed through
their narratives to the creation of a discourse about the ‘other’ Arab to justify
28  Nour Abu Assab
colonization. These narratives, through their ‘accrual’ (Bruner 1991: 18), consti-
tute strong discourses in the Foucauldian sense.6 A discourse, nonetheless, must
be preceded by an accrual of narratives. In other words, stories about the Arabs,
for instance, accumulate to create a meta-narrative of the colonizer’s relation to
the Arabs, and the accumulation of narratives consequently leads to the creation
of discourses through which power and authority can be expressed. For example,
Lawrence and Bell, among others, have told stories of their interaction with the
Arabs and within these stories they have used descriptions such as ‘stupid’ and
‘dirty’. These stories have reinforced an image of an Arab as stupid and dirty,
making the colonizer look smart and hygienic, and consequently gives the colo-
nizer power and authority based on the discourse those stories have created.
These narratives and discourses can manipulate our perceptions of the ‘other’
in areas such as sexuality, hygiene, the possession of weapons of mass destruction,
women’s oppression, intellectual capacity, aggression, and, crucially, terrorism. In her
book, Bell repeatedly uses phrases like ‘a dirty dressing gown’ (1907 [2007]: 157),
‘dirty cotton garment’ (120), an ‘extremely dirty place’ (78), and ‘a dark and dirty
sort of out house’ (81). Lawrence, on the other hand, describes a ‘dirty old blear-
eyed Mohammad’ (1935: 136), a ‘dirty face’ (190), ‘dirty’ houses (305), ‘dirty
clothes’ (401) and so on.7 It is important to note that such colonial narratives of
the Arab as dirty, backward, primitive and uneducated are not confined to the past.
As Abu-Saad (2007) has noted, such narratives are continually propagated in the
Israeli national curriculum, to posit the inferiority of Arab and Palestinian culture;
Bashford (2004) has identified a comparable colonialist narrative in relation to lack
of hygiene among Australian aboriginals. She states that ‘imperial cleanliness’ has
become ‘colonizing by means of the known laws of cleanness rather than by mili-
tary force’ (Bashford 2004: 1).
These examples highlight the importance of narrative analysis to understand-
ing colonialism. And if narratives are crucial to the understanding of colonial
relations, and colonial ways of knowing and knowledge production, they are
also integral to the concept of ‘queer’. Narratives of queerness have become
associated with sexual minorities, and are used within a variety of disciplines
to establish and police identity categories for LGBT individuals. I argue that in
fact LGBT subjects can be complicit in marginalizing the voices of others that
do not conform to identity categories. It must be noted here that in fact at the
heart of queer theory there is a rejection of notions of identity. Here, I adopt
Edelman’s take on the term. As he says, ‘queerness can never define an identity;
it can only ever disturb one’ (Edelman 2004: 17).8 Placing this definition within
a narrative analysis, queerness can be used to describe narratives placed in jux-
taposition to those adopted by a majority, a dominant culture, or a colonizing
power. Yet power and dominance are contextual, and this contingency in space
and time makes the term as fluid as it should be, as a method of understanding
and analysis, rather than as an identity category limited to LGBT individuals.
Thus, a queering of translation narratives involves looking at dominant narra-
tives, and their queer opposites in contextualized terms, rather than focusing on
LGBT subjects.
 Colonial queer subjects in the Arab world  29
Defining a context, however, is the main challenge for scholars working in
fields involving multicultural interaction. This also applies to other disciplines
such as history, literature and even political science. Defining a context can prove
to be difficult especially because we live in a world that is interconnected and
interdependent. In other words, our contexts as scholars are large and global. For
instance, a study of a specific historic moment in Britain must at all times take into
account Britain’s interconnectedness with and interdependency on other nations,
and vice versa. Homoerotic portrayals of the Arab have been used to create hierar-
chies of sexual subordination, notions of sexual deviance and paradigms of sexual
aggression, vis-à-vis the other ‘pure’ colonizer.

Homoeroticism of the Arab: shifts and continuities

Political contexts, power relations and narratives of the othering of different cul-
tures, particularly colonized cultures, profoundly govern processes of knowledge
production, and of translation (Mason 1994; Said 1978). This process of producing
knowledge of the Eastern, Oriental other in ways that serve colonial interests and fit
within the colonial imaginary, agenda and policies, and with an attitude of superior-
ity and dominance, has been termed ‘Orientalism’ (Said 1978). The narrative of the
Arab, and particularly the Arab man, as being sexually deviant, dates back to long
before British colonial expansion in the Arab world. One example of older narratives
is the story of the Passions of St Pelagius,9 who was allegedly a chaste boy, ordered
to convert to Islam and become the lover of the Muslim Caliph Abd-ar-Rahman III
of Andalusia. However, being a ‘good Christian’, Pelagius refused, which led to his
being tortured and killed in the most horrific way in 926. Texts about Pelagius, the
boy of 13, have been used as a Christian narrative to demonize Muslims (Andrews
and Kalpaklı 2005). A queer analysis of this story must take into account the dom-
inant narratives at that time. In Islamic Andalusia, some Christian minorities and
Christian groups felt discriminated against and persecuted. And in that context, the
Pelagius story can be seen as a queer marginalized narrative, even though its effect is
to demonize homosexual activity. This is not to acknowledge the reality of the story
or its actual events, but rather to give an example of how important it is to contextu-
alize narratives in order to queer them. Interestingly, and importantly, given the age
of the boy, the Caliph’s alleged homosexual desire for the boy was later portrayed as
sodomy, rather than paedophilia. In the current context, such acts and desires would
undoubtedly be interpreted as paedophilic.
The same narrative, positioned at the time of great colonial expansion, shifts
its allegiances and becomes associated with the dominant colonialist culture,
making it not only un-queer, but also a misrepresentation of Arab Muslim cul-
ture as ‘immoral’, ‘perverse’, ‘primitive’ and ‘deviant’ (as opposed to the ‘purity’
and ‘piety’ of the ‘civilized’ colonizer) and thus as a justification for invasion.
Returning to the time of T.E. Lawrence, when Britain was in the process of expan-
sion in the Arab Middle East and fighting against the Ottoman Turks, eastern
Arab boy-on-boy affection was portrayed as ‘unspiritual’. On another occasion,
Lawrence speaks of the ‘perversion of the eastern man’, by which he means a
30  Nour Abu Assab
case of someone being subject to sexual abuse and torture in Deraa, in the
south of contemporary Syria, as a result of refusing to succumb to an Ottoman
Bey,10 who had asked him to become his lover. This story echoes the story of
Pelagius, most importantly with both stories focusing particularly on the charm
and attractiveness of their white male bodies. Pelagius had a ‘purity of mind
and body’ (Boone 2014: 9). Lawrence (1935), who was taken by guards to the
Bey’s room and told he would be released if he had ‘fulfilled the Bey’s pleasure
this evening’ (1935: 433), records the Bey’s saying ‘how white and fresh I was,
how fine my hands and feet’ (434).11 In both stories, there is a clear emphasis
on refusal to succumb to temptation. The Caliph and the Bey offered Pelagius
and Lawrence, respectively, wealth and freedom in exchange for love, yet both
characters heroically resisted temptation.
In both cases, we find two main sentiments: (1) a sense of superiority and high
moral standards among the Western characters, and (2) a prejudice against same-sex
desire in the West. The first narrative has continued in many ways, while the second
has shifted slightly. Shifts in the political sphere and in power relations undoubtedly
affect the position of the narrative. Whereas Lawrence is nowadays celebrated as
a gay hero, his friends at the time rushed to his defence and vehemently rejected
rumours about his inclination towards same-sex sexual encounters in post-First
World War Britain. This not only de-homosexualizes Lawrence’s narrative in the
LGBT sense, but also un-queers it as it has become part and parcel of the discourse
of dominance and subordination. Celebrating Lawrence’s legacy, for example, and
the legacy of others contributing to the same orientalist narrative, entails a pink-
washing12 and whitewashing of Britain’s colonial history. Therefore, a queering of
the narratives about the sexual deviance of the Arab should be read and treated in
contextualized terms, which take dominance and subordination into account, and as
the Arab remains subordinate within a global context; so it is the Arab narrative that
must be considered as constituting the ‘queer’ voice.
To elaborate: male homosexual activity in Britain was deemed illegal and pun-
ishable by law until 1967. In the Arab world, before colonization, there were no
laws governing sexuality; however, the colonization of the Arab world imposed
regulations governing sexuality in the region. Before colonization, the region was
deemed a safe haven for men interested in homosexual encounters. The American
writer William Burroughs, who had moved from the US to Tangier in the 1950s,
explains the lure of the place in one word: ‘Exemption. Exemption from interfer-
ence, legal or otherwise. Your private life is your own, to act exactly as you please’
(Burroughs 1989: 59).13 Longing for permissiveness, Burroughs had access to male
sex workers in Tangier, which was under French colonial rule at the time. Whereas
Burroughs can be historically reclaimed as a ‘gay’ figure, his access to and narra-
tive of the Arab world is one of dominance. Although what he stands for in the US
at a time when homosexuality was not allowed is queer in nature within that par-
ticular local context, his positioning within the world, and particularly as a white
traveller, is a position of dominance that thrives on the exploitation of colonized
bodies. In those terms, the homosexual identity becomes one that does not disturb
identities or practices, but rather one that reinforces Western hegemonic discourses
 Colonial queer subjects in the Arab world  31
of and practices over the Arab world, and for that reason I argue for the un-queering
of Burroughs and his like, to move on towards a process of decolonizing queer.
The relevance of this to Translation Studies is the crucial role the field can play in
processes of decolonization, through giving attention to queer histories and texts
that have been marginalized by dominant modes of knowledge production.
In recent years in the West, LGBT rights ‘have become a barometer by which
the right to and capacity for national sovereignty is evaluated’ (Puar 2013: 336).
In the same period, LGBT subjects have started digging up figures from the past
in order to create a lesbian and gay history, a practice Laura Doan (2013) mildly
critiques and calls ‘queer genealogy’ (2013: 2). Doan suggests that the practice of
tracing back a queer genealogy with a view to highlighting LGBT figures from
the past had been useful politically, although there are alternatives that can be
explored to create a queer critical history without necessarily abiding by identity
categories. I agree with Doan’s approach, but I also suggest that there is a need to
review that history with an eye that takes the interconnectivity and interdepend-
ency of the modern world into account. There is also a need to interrogate the
processes through which this reclaiming of a gay and lesbian history in the West
has affected perceptions of homosexuality in the Arab world.

Pre-histories of Arab queerness

While the homoeroticization of the Arab played a major role in justifying coloniza-
tion through the construction of Arab culture as degenerate, this has created a major
backlash towards homosexuality in the Arab world itself. In his book, Desiring
Arabs, Joseph Massad (2007) demonstrates how oriental depictions of Arab
sexuality caused a counter-narrative among Arab intellectuals, which led in many
cases to censorship of texts implying homosexual desires. One of the examples is
the homoerotic poetry of Abu Nawas, as editions of his poetry in 1898 and 1905,
before British colonization, included homoerotic verses about his love to Ghazal.14
In the 1937 edition, published during the colonization of the region, the homoerotic
verses were removed. The impact of these depictions persists to this day, as coloni-
zation created a need to redefine and reconstitute national boundaries, and to protect
authenticity. Historical accounts of the British Empire demonstrate that in times of
war, women15 and sexuality became a site of control, as reproduction and procrea-
tion took central stage in regulating bodies within the Empire (Garrity 2003).
In many cases, ‘ideas of authenticity are defined in terms of fixed gender roles
and heterosexual norms . . . The prioritisation of irreducible gender differences –
that also signal irreducible heterosexual complementarity – acts as a display of
cultural continuity’ (Fortier 2000: 168). In postcolonial Arab states, the redefining
of group boundaries has become essential given the Western superior interven-
tionist approach to the Arab world, currently in the form of an alleged concern for
women’s and LGBT rights. Narratives have changed places completely, as if in
fact ideas of sexuality had been exchanged between the Arab world and the West.
Homosexuality, sexual obsession, permissiveness and perversion are labels that
are being used to describe the West and Israel.
32  Nour Abu Assab
Massad (2007) succeeds in rejecting alien Western notion of sexuality as a
form of identity category, and the binary system of the homosexual/heterosexual,
which do not necessarily apply to the Arab context. However, he fails massively,
in his critique of the Gay International, and international discourses of human
rights, to acknowledge that in present times there are people within the Arab
world who do identify as LGBT. His book, as a matter of fact, reinforces the cur-
rent hegemonic discourse of what is now known as gay culture being Western,
as a new form of orientalism. A queering of this narrative would include taking a
closer look at Arabic literature and history, before censorship, and assessing it in
its own terms, in order to find alternative terminologies used to describe homo-
sexual activities. Massad’s argument, although well intentioned, could also serve
what I call neo-orientalism, one that does not challenge the regulation of bodies
and sexualities in Arab states, which was originally imposed by colonization.
Following his argument, it becomes a matter of fact that this is where Arabs are
at, rather than a look at their sexual histories that were regulated by colonization,
or an outlook on the future of how things could possibly unfold.
For instance, Samar Habib (2009) looks at the medieval Islamic text from
the thirteenth century, Nuzhat al-albab fima la yujadu fi kitab, translated as ‘The
Delights of Hearts in What You Will not Find in Any Book’, by Muslim scholar
and traveller Ahmad al-Tifashi. Habib’s efforts to educate the Arab and Islamic
world about how same-sex love was depicted positively by Islamic theologians
and scholars in medieval times is a daring attempt to reclaim a history that has
long been lost and censored. However, a queering of the narrative of same-sex
desire in the Arab world would benefit from an inclusion of and an opening-up to
terminology alternative to ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’.
One way to provide a close reading of al-Tifashi and offer an alternative trans-
lation for the homosexual activity depicted in his book would be to look into the
etymology of the terms used in that depiction. Al-Tifashi uses two main terms to
describe same-sex love between women: Th’arifa and Sahaqa. He says: ‘when a
woman is said to be Th’arifa it becomes common knowledge that she is a Sahaqa.
They make love like men do, and even more intensely.’ Th’arifa according to
Lisanu al-‘Arab, or the Tongue of the Arabs,16 comes from the root Th’arf, used to
describe wit and the intelligence of the heart, a term that can describe young men
and women, but not a Shaykh or master. Sahaqa, on the other hand, refers to a doer
of the action of sihaq, rather than an identity category or ‘emotional attachment’
(Amer 2009: 216). It refers to the action of rubbing, similar to the Greek tribades.17
Thus it is important to respond to Massad’s narrative, and when looking at Arabic
literature, there needs to be a point of departure from Western narratives, to con-
struct an identity of one’s own that is not relational or dependent on an other.

De-queering dominance: conclusion

This paper sought to demonstrate that a queering of narratives in translation must
take into account practices that disturb, and do not conform to, dominant culture,
within our interdependent, interconnected, globalized context. I have argued for
 Colonial queer subjects in the Arab world  33
a conception of queer as non-conforming practices, rather than an identity cat-
egory for sexual minorities, and I have demonstrated the ways through which
LGBT subjects from colonizing nations can be complicit in propagating an
oriental narrative of the other, emphasizing their superiority. With changes in
the political sphere, narratives of the other Arab have also changed, and what
remained consistently is the view of the other Arab as less ‘moral’, less ‘pure’,
and as ‘perverse’. A quick look through newspapers nowadays, and one cannot
but notice the demonization of the Muslim Arab, through images of ISIS fighters
beheading Westerners, or stories about their sexual brutality and bestial behav-
iour towards women, or even their executions of gay men in ISIS-controlled
areas – a transmission and translation of information from one region to another.
Their expansion across the Arab world is undoubtedly disturbing, and their vio-
lence and aggression must be condemned at all levels; however, the accrual of
this narrative about the other is alarming, in light of the lack of representation of
other Muslim Arabs in the media.
An analysis of such narratives about the Arabs, as previously colonized
peoples, can benefit from a process of queering, which takes into account margin-
alized voices that disturb mainstream practices. This approach can be termed also
a method of decolonizing queer, aiming to critically assess the narrators of orien-
talist discourse as dominant and not necessarily well intentioned. This approach is
one that does not only assess dominant voices from the past, but also from the pre-
sent, and assesses the impact of voices from the past on our understanding of the
present. It comes as no surprise that the Arab world is still dealing with the reper-
cussions of colonization. The failure of the Western imposed nation-state system
on the Arab world is only one manifestation of the devastating impact of coloni-
zation. Yet, to decolonize, there needs to be a shift in the way we conceptualize
our own identities. It is important to acknowledge identity as a state, a becoming
rather than a being. We miss out on so much when we think of ourselves as being
something, as if a being is made non-changing and with little agency we only
explore it. If we think of the nations we are born into, and if we desire inclusive-
ness and equality, a forward-looking consideration of what a nation can become,
rather than what it is, will make a difference. That said, a being is necessary for
a becoming; thus one cannot equate a colonized with a colonizer – whereas the
colonizer exercises an agency to become, a colonized is caught up in a fight to be.
A decolonizing prompts a de-queering of Western practices towards the East, put-
ting an end to the celebration of Western homosexual figures as queer. This can
only take place if we shift attention to the colonizers’ intentions before looking at
the behaviours of the ‘barbaric’, ‘primitive’ colonized.

Notes
  1 It is important to note here that in the first quotation the description of eastern boy-
and-boy affection is initially portrayed in positive terms as being of a ‘depth and force
beyond our flesh-steeped conceit’, this positive portrayal fades when ‘sexuality’ enters.
His initial praise is for a love that is not sexual, and when the relationship becomes
sexual, it becomes ‘unspiritual’.
34  Nour Abu Assab
  2 Examples of these include and are not limited to Gay History and Literature Essays by
Rictor Norton: http://rictornorton.co.uk/lawrence.htm, Gay City News: http://gaycitynews.
nyc/lawrence-gay-arabia/ and Gay Heroes: http://www.gayheroes.com/law.htm.
  3 By Western culture, here I mainly refer to the dominant cultures that emerged as a
result of colonization. Despite its problematic, as a geographical category, it is placed
here in opposition to the Eastern Arab. This article, however, is mainly concerned with
British narratives of the ‘Arab’ in specific.
  4 The term Jinn refers to supernatural creatures in Islamic and pre-Islamic Arab mythologies.
  5 Critiques have been levelled against Bell and Lawrence, and their like, within academia
and it is important to acknowledge these critiques, and I include some of them in the
paper. However, there remains a gap and a disjuncture between academia and mainstream
media. For instance, in 2014, BBC Radio 4 dedicated several programs on Gertrude Bell
and her legacy as the ‘uncrowned queen of the desert’, her book featured as book of the
week in 2015, and many other episodes were aired about her great life as a feminist, trav-
eller, writer and Arabist, with no critical mention of the role she played in colonization.
There is even a film about her, Queen of the Desert (2015), featuring popular Hollywood
star Nicole Kidman and directed by Werner Herzog. The celebration of Lawrence, on the
other hand, takes many forms apart from celebrating him as an alleged-homosexual. For
example, there is a charity registered in England since 1985 called the T.E. Lawrence
Society, which provides a platform for people ‘to share their enthusiasm for a man who
has greatly enriched their lives in many ways’. There is also a festival celebration that
takes place in France to celebrate his legacy called the ‘Lawrence d’Arabie et Châlus’
Festival. There is also a Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal. In July 2015, a dagger
previously owned by Lawrence, was sold for £122,500. A signed first edition of his book
Seven Pillars of Wisdom was up for sale for £75,000. On 20 May 2015, BBC News South
covered ceremonies marking the eightieth anniversary of T.E. Lawrence’s death, during
which they describe Lawrence as ‘a soldier, scholar, and a writer, best known for helping
the Arabs fight the Ottoman during the first World War’.
  6 By the Foucauldian sense here I mean a view of discourse with a focus on power
relations within society in general, which manifest themselves through linguis-
tic expressions of power and authority, but can also be challenged and undermined
through the creation of other discourses. See Foucault 1998.
  7 It is worth noting here that the majority of Lawrence and Bell’s descriptions were more
of peasant and Bedouin characters, rather than the urban inhabitants of the Arab Middle
East at that time.
  8 See also Halperin 1997: 62, on the definition of queerness: ‘Queer is by definition
whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in
particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. “Queer”
then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.’
  9 Different versions of the story of St Pelagius are explored in Jordan (1998: 10).
10 A Turkish title used to refer to a governor or an officer serving the Ottoman State, the
term is currently used to refer to people in high positions of authority in Turkey and
Egypt.
11 The story of Lawrence’s sexual abuse by the Turks remains contentious, as many have
argued that he was unable to distinguish between fact and fantasy. See Boone 1995.
12 By ‘pinkwashing’, I mean the use of acceptance, tolerance and friendliness towards
LGBT rights to conceal violent acts, or mistreatment of specific groups. For more on
this, see Puar 2013.
13 See also Boone 1995, for more on homosexual men travellers to the East.
14 Abu Nawas used to refer to his boy lovers as Ghazal, meaning a dear in Arabic. The
verse form of his poetry is called Ghazzal, which is usually an expression of admiration
towards a loved one.
15 It is beyond the scope of this paper to address the portrayal of Arab women in colonialist
literature, but also important to note that the Euro-androcentric perspective portrayed
 Colonial queer subjects in the Arab world  35
Muslim women in the Middle East generally as ‘secluded, mysterious, erotic’ (Hale
1989: 247) because, as Waines (1982: 643) puts it, they were seen ‘through a veil
darkly’. However, this portrayal of women as secluded further served in demonizing
the ‘controlling’ ‘Arab’ man.
16 Lisanu al-‘Arab is one of the most comprehensive Arabic language dictionaries, com-
piled in 1290 by Ibn Manthur, and collected from five Arabic language sources.
17 See Greene 1996: 115.

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Imaginary, Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Greene, E. 1996. Re-reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, Berkeley: University
of California Press.
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36  Nour Abu Assab
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3 Revealing and concealing
the masquerade of translation
and gender
Double-crossing the text and the body
Emily Rose

Introduction
Nobody is born masculine or feminine; we all learn our gender roles as children
and they are reinforced by society over time. Men do not have to be masculine nor
women feminine; not because sex is biological and gender cultural but because
both are constructed and ‘the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be
no distinction at all.’ This invites the question: ‘If gender is constructed, could
it be constructed differently . . . ?’ (Butler 2006: 10). Judith Butler’s influen-
tial conception of gender as performative, as a set of repetitive acts that we all
perform on a daily basis was, and still is, radical because this performance is
so well integrated into our lives; in my opinion, this makes its exposition even
more important. Gender performativity is best exposed by the people who ‘fail
to conform to those norms of cultural intelligibility’ (Butler 2006: 24), such as
cross-dressers or drag artists; drag is ‘not an aberration from the norm; it shows us
how the norm actually functions, how the norm is instituted through our bodies’
(Butler 2004c: 344).1
Translation has long been conceived of as ‘the redressing of a body of mean-
ing in the clothes of another language’ (Van Wyke 2010: 18). A cross-dresser
covers and conceals their physical body with clothing and, according to this meta-
phor, a translation covers and conceals the original textual body with a new text.
Translation and transvestism are two disciplines which, together, reveal specific
and important connections. However, as Luise von Flotow says, ‘the potentially
convenient fit between the contingency of meaning that translation performs and
the contingency of gender that notions around gender performativity promote
has not yet been explored to a great extent’ (2011: 3). In order to explore these
connections, I carried out an experimental translation of the Mémoires de l’abbé
de Choisy habillé en femme [literally, memoirs of the abbot de Choisy dressed
as a woman].2 A seventeenth-century French memoir by François-Timoléon de
Choisy, it is divided into two chapters in which Choisy takes on two female per-
sonas: as Madame de Sancy he is a man in drag, while, as the Comtesse des
Barres, he is a man disguised as a woman. I took two different approaches to my
translation, inspired by the two different chapters and by two different metaphors
of ‘translation as clothing put on the body of the original’ (St André 2010b: 9).
38  Emily Rose
One states that the original text should be clothed in ‘appropriate garb for the
new situation’ and the other ‘ridicul[es] the idea of, say, a classical author such
as Homer dressed in eighteenth century French courtier clothes’ (ibid.). I have
transformed Choisy’s memoirs with experimental translation strategies in order to
allow me to argue that through an exploration of (trans)gender and/in translation
one can expose the very constructedness of gender and writing – both original
and translated. My strategies for translating ‘Madame de Sancy’ clothe Choisy in
seventeenth-century French attire and play with the visibility of translation while
covertly subverting gender norms by laying bare the binary. My strategies for
translating ‘la Comtesse des Barres’ clothe Choisy in twenty-first-century English
attire and play with the invisibility of translation while overtly subverting gender
norms by hiding the binary.

Translating ‘Madame de Sancy’

The context
Before I could begin translating the first chapter, ‘Histoire de Madame de Sancy’
[Story of Madame de Sancy], I had to take one crucial factor into consideration:
the context of my source text. Thomas Laqueur (2012: 802) believes that before
the eighteenth century, people followed a one-sex model in which men and women
were placed on a continuum and sex and genders were not distinguished. If gender
was not seen as essential, could Choisy have seen his gender as ‘fluid’ or ‘change-
able’? This is unlikely because, according to studies carried out by Ruth Gilbert
(2002: 40) on the early-modern period and by Robin Headlam-Wells (2005: 6–7)
on the Elizabethan period, a rigid sex-gender system was followed in which men
and women were binary opposites and every person could claim a unifying yet
irreducible essence. The idea that this ‘essence’ was complex is very important,
especially when examining Choisy’s memoir from a (post)modern position.
In Choisy’s Mémoires, ‘after a transitional period of his being perceived and
addressed as a woman but still writing himself in the masculine, his coincidence
with what he is representing is grammatically marked by the presence of the
feminine gender’ (Guild 1994: 182). The French language marks gender on
third-person singular and plural pronouns, nouns, adjectives and some past parti-
ciples, while English marks only third-person singular pronouns (Simon 1996: 17).
In deciding whether or not to use strategies which would explicitly represent gen-
der in the English language, I looked to feminist writers and translators. Many
feminists believe that the ‘feminine [must be] visible in language so that women
are seen and heard in the world’ (de Lotbinière-Harwood 1991: 112). I apply this
theory to language in general because my protagonist feels himself to be both
a man and a woman. Because of this I shall henceforth refer to Choisy using
the epicene, or gender-neutral, pronouns ‘ze’, ‘hir’, and ‘hirself’ to mean ‘he/
she’, ‘him/her’, and ‘herself/himself’ respectively.3 In order to hear Choisy’s
feminine voice, we need to mark hir masculine voice too; Carl Lewis Seifert has
a similar idea: ‘rather than relying on a conception of women and femininity as
“marked” categories opposed to men and masculinity, the “unmarked” universal,
 The masquerade of translation and gender  39
I show that men too can be and are “marked”’ (2009: 17). This is about putting
masculine and feminine on an equal footing in language in order to understand
that Choisy deliberately plays with standardized grammar: in French, if there is a
group consisting of ten women and one man, they would be referred to with the
masculine ‘ils’ [they] (see Simon 1996: 19). However, in one instance, Choisy
uses the feminine ‘amies’ [friends] (1995: 91) to refer to a group of friends involv-
ing men and women.
The linguistic emphasis of the male/female divide is an essentialist project advo-
cated by feminist theorists. They take inspiration from linguistic relativism, the
weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that posits that ‘one’s native language
exerts a powerful influence over one’s perception of reality’ (Livia 2001: 11) and
that language represents who we are. I have also been inspired in my endeavour
for visibility by the only English translation currently available; in my opinion, the
translator, R.H.F. Scott, has missed what is important about this text as he fails to
highlight Choisy’s unusual use of language. For example, one important point that
Scott glosses over occurs when Choisy notes that ‘j’avais des amants’ [I had lovers]
(1995: 82). ‘Amant’ is in the masculine which suggests that Choisy entertained men
as well as women while in drag; Scott uses ‘admirers’ (1994: 27). Even if the reader
could read between the lines to glean that these were men, I would argue that an
admirer is not the same as a lover.

Strategies
In the early modern period ‘there were few possibilities for the expression of
intermediate or shifting positions in sexual definition’ (Gilbert 2002: 40). What
Choisy does in ‘Madame de Sancy’ is use ‘[g]rammaticalized gender, which
many feel as a trap to limit people in their gender roles, [to] provide linguis-
tic devices for expressing gender fluidity’ (Livia 2001: 192). As English does
not show grammaticalized gender in the same way as French, unusual linguistic
strategies are necessary to replicate Choisy’s shifting gender position. My first
strategy integrates the feminine and masculine symbols inside words. It is subtle
but suggestive because the words look the same yet have a fundamental differ-
ence. For example, on page 89, Choisy (as Sancy) describes to hir friends how ze
is treated, I translated this with:

I go into town as I am as little as possible; the world is so cruel, and

it is such a rare thing to see a man wishing to be a woman, that one is often
to malicious jokes. (Choisy 1995: 89, my translation)4

The ‘s’ of ‘dressed’ carries part of the symbol of Venus while the ‘o’ of ‘exposed’
carries part of the symbol of Mars.
My second strategy is influenced by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood. In
her translation of Nicole Brossard’s Le Desert Mauve [Mauve Desert], she uses
‘auther’ (1990: 131) to denote a feminine version of ‘author’. I have, therefore,
incorporated words which carry gender in English into words which do not:
40  Emily Rose
I think something of our little friendship has been discovered; you, on your
loneSONe are the cause: why do you whisper in my ear? (Choisy 1995: 97–8,
my translation)

Monsieur de Maulny, at my request, had had his hair cut in the style of a man,
so that after I LA(d)Y down he appeared in a robe de chambre. (Choisy 1995:
104, my translation)

This strategy is more estranging than the first because it was inspired by the
carnivalesque atmosphere of this part of the chapter – Choisy persuades hir
young lover Charlotte to dress as a boy (and be called Monsieur de Maulny);
as Joseph Harris points out, ‘Choisy’s cross-dressing prompts others to behave
in a spirit of self-conscious and playful falsehood’ (2005: 225). Choisy’s cross-
dressing prompts me to be playful; such words as ‘LA(d)Y’ and ‘loneSONe’
are not subtle. The use of capital letters and parentheses allows me to create
neologisms; as de Lotbinière-Harwood says, ‘The English grammatical code
provides a few options for marking gender. One alternative way to feminize is
to use typography’ (1991: 122), my typography masculinizes as well as femin-
izing. These translation strategies attempt to reflect the queerness of Choisy’s
text. But I also doubly queer the text by using unusual linguistic strategies for
a reader who wishes to question gender norms or who cannot see themselves
in texts which deal with concrete identity categories: ‘The queer statement
creates a space for reflection. It demands self-reflexivity and personal engage-
ment. It refers beyond and outside of itself’ (Giffney 2009: 2). These strategies
allow for an expression of gender fluidity and self-reflection, but they are also
fallible: they point to the gender binary. This particular way of queering the
text can also ‘show . . . up language and discursive categories more specifically
for their inadequacies’ (Giffney 2009: 7), as well as emphasizing the ‘signifi-
cance of words and the power of language’ (ibid.), which is also highlighted
by translation.

Translating transvestism
Critically engaging with Choisy’s cross-dressing has repercussions for my
translation decisions. Even though it is anachronistic to talk of Choisy as a
transvestite and to apply modern concepts to hir seventeenth-century life, a
modern perspective helps bring Choisy to a modern audience. And there is cur-
rently much debate about how transgressive transvestism really is. Harris says
that ‘the problematic questions of motivation which cross-dressing raises can
cast it as an affront to sexual vraisemblance, thus implicitly reconfirming con-
ventional sexual categories’ (2005: 234) (see also Butler 2006). Nevertheless,
this conventional view of the gender binary can ‘reveal ontological inner depths
and gender cores as regulatory fictions’ (Salih 2004: 93). According to Sarah
Chinn, cross-dressing ‘denaturalizes gender only if it is self-conscious and its
agenda, or the agenda of its audience, is antiessentialist’ (1997: 301). In other
 The masquerade of translation and gender  41
words, Chinn is claiming that Choisy can only show that gender is not a core,
essential part of every body if the audience already believes it not to be so. I
would argue that even though Choisy does not cross-dress for antiessentialist
ends, ze can still inadvertently expose gender as a masquerade. As Harris says,
‘in his writings at least, [Choisy’s] cross-dressing helps to dissociate “gender”
from “sex”—that is, femininity from the women who are supposed to embody
it’ (2005: 229).
This conservative side to transvestism was another factor, along with feminism
and linguistic relativism, which encouraged me to choose my particular strategies.
They may be taken from feminists but they do not seem to aim to champion
women. I am preserving Choisy’s seventeenth-century thoughts to highlight the
binary that hir transvestism confirms. Choisy actually seems to oscillate between
feeling hirself to be a transvestite and transgender; indeed, Seifert believes, ‘the
Abbé is difficult to classify other than through the intentionally broad definition
of “transgender”’ (2009: 213). I think there is a case for the argument that Choisy
could have been a precursor to what we would now call a transgender person and
I agree with Seifert when he argues that Choisy’s cross-dressing should not be
understood as ‘exclusively performative’(2009: 16).5 I believe Choisy’s cross-
dressing should not be singularly categorized as it comprises many different
elements, including drag, transvestism and transgender experience. Choisy uses
many different verbs to describe hir experience and they need to be treated with
care in translation.
A verb which adds to Choisy’s ambivalence is ‘s’ajuster’. It means ‘to adjust’,
‘to alter’, but it also suggests that Choisy changes hir appearance little by little to
look like a woman: ‘ainsi, j’accoutumai le monde à me voir ajusté’ (1995: 84–5).
I translated this with:

‘thus, I accustomed the world to seeing me ’.

It is crucial that the masculine form be highlighted, and the peculiarity of ‘adjust’
is necessary as it

suggests . . . adjusting his gender to the represented feminine—although not

yet fully adjusting, as the still unadjusted masculine form of the past parti-
ciple, ajusté, marks. Even when Choisy is to all appearances fully adjusted,
throughout the text the terms continue to remind of the place of adjustment
. . . in the construction of the feminine (as representation). (Guild 1994: 183)

Elizabeth Guild confirms that even though cross-dressing may serve to highlight the
gender binary, it exposes gender as a construction. Butler goes further to write that
drag reveals that there is no true gender identity: ‘it implies that all gendering is a
kind of impersonation and approximation. If this is true, it seems, there is no origi-
nal or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which
there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion
of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself’ (2004a: 127).
42  Emily Rose
This idea of gender as a copy with no original can be directly applied to trans-
lation. As transvestism parodies an original gender that does not really exist,
translation parodies an original text that is also problematic. I cannot, and I do
not, deny the existence of a source text, but what I do deny is that the source text
is authoritative and original.

Translating gender as resistance

The translation is not derivative of the original but both are, in fact, derivative.
The translation-as-clothing metaphor states that the ‘translator-tailor’ must only
change the clothes and not the body underneath (Van Wyke 2010: 23). But there
is no unchanging, stable essence underneath, as Ben Van Wyke states: ‘We can-
not discover and recover essences, but, instead, add veils’ (2010: 43). These
veils create a palimpsest: ‘on the same parchment, one text can become superim-
posed upon another, which it does not quite conceal but allows to show through’
(Genette 1997: 398-99). These theories of extra layers refute the notion of origins
because each text no longer has specific boundaries or single sources.
Transvestism reveals gender’s performance just as certain strategies reveal
translation’s performance. These strategies are what Lawrence Venuti would term
‘minoritizing’; minoritizing translation is that which ‘cultivat[es] a heterogeneous
discourse, opening up the standard dialect and literary canons to what is foreign to
themselves’ (1998: 11). In order to introduce the foreign into my translation I used
footnotes and kept French punctuation. The footnotes are a way of flagging up the
status of my text as a translation, to reiterate that the culture is French and the time
is distant. I also decided to leave words in French and italicize them. The words I
chose could be guessed at from the context (‘and a train which measured a demi-
aune’ (Choisy 1995: 83, my translation)), or were too complicated for a translation
without an explanation so they were kept in French and a footnote added, for exam-
ple, fontange: ‘A hairstyle created by a brass frame supporting fabric ornaments
separated by ribbons and ringlets of fake hair’ (Choisy 1995: 82, my translation).
My translation is a performance of Choisy’s text and to stage this performance
I have looked to Venuti’s idea that the translator must ‘seek to reproduce what-
ever features of the foreign text abuse or resist dominant cultural values in the
source language’(1992: 12). Choisy’s appropriation of the feminine grammatical
gender must be highlighted as something unusual in the source text. When faced
with similar texts, other translators have used strategies (though not as experi-
mental as mine) to make visible the shifting gender identity of their protagonists.
For example, Roland Champagne, Nina Ekstein and Gary Kates use an ‘m’ and
an ‘f’ in superscript beside masculine and feminine words in their English trans-
lation of the Chevalier d’Eon’s eighteenth-century French memoir, The Maiden
of Tonnerre: The Vicissitudes of the Chevalier and the Chevalière d’Eon (2001).
My experimental translation attempts to show what Choisy really wrote – my vis-
ibility as a translator does not encroach on the visibility of the author, quite the
opposite. The idea of translation as capable of hiding certain elements of the text
requires further investigation.
 The masquerade of translation and gender  43
Translating ‘La Comtesse des Barres’
The context
My second approach involved two sections from the chapter entitled ‘Histoire
de Madame la Comtesse des Barres’ [story of madame the countess des Barres].
There is one crucial difference between this chapter and ‘Madame de Sancy’: as
des Barres, Choisy is disguised as a woman; ze is still a man dressed as a woman
but ze is not merely playing at being a woman, and rather ze often feels hirself to
be one. Again ze is both transvestite and transgender, both man and woman yet
at the same time neither man nor woman. I decided that I could take advantage
of this concealment in my exploration of translation and gender as two kinds of
performance.
My strategies for the translation of ‘Madame de Sancy’ were influenced by
linguistic relativism, but Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis stated that ‘the structure of
anyone’s native language strongly influences or fully determines the world view
he will acquire as he learns the language’ (Kay and Kempton 1984: 66). This
section explores the idea that language ‘fully determines’ our worldview, that
we are constructed through the very language we use. This version of the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic determinism, plays a large role in what it means
to write gendered bodies when the speaker is merely what is being performed by
a language that is doing the performance. It naturalizes the binary conception of
gender. The only way to challenge this deeply ingrained view of gender in lan-
guage is to use traditional gender markers in a different way: ‘the alteration of
gender at the most fundamental epistemic level will be conducted, in part, through
contesting the grammar in which gender is given’ (Butler 2004b: 97).
Harris’s idea that ‘an apparently playful or subversive attitude towards gender
does not always operate against the interests of patriarchy’ (2006: 77) is what
encouraged me to think of this translation in a different way. Choisy’s writings
can be interpreted as a challenge to the gender binary but ze did not cross-dress
in order to challenge the gender binary and nor did ze write hir memoirs to do so;
the Marquise de Lambert ‘encouraged Choisy to write of his deplorable youth’
(Scott 1994: 24) because of her ‘liking for racy gossip’ (ibid.). If Choisy has writ-
ten a text that confirms the gender binary, can I write a translation that hides it,
and should I try to operate against the interests of patriarchy?
My strategies explore different possible ways to hide gender, and, at the same
time, what happens when a translation masquerades as an original work. If we
erase gender binaries from language, can we erase them from our minds? How
much can a translation hide and yet still call itself a translation? The aim of my
strategies is to make the reader question the meaning of the text and their collu-
sion in the creation of this meaning. The efficacy of my strategies as challenging
can be accounted for by a comparison with Scott’s translation strategies. Aside
from maintaining some French words, he uses nothing that would cause his reader
to work for meaning. In my opinion, he does not invite his reader to see more to
the text than a sensationalist anecdote, something I think can be seen in his title,
The Transvestite Memoirs. I want any potential reader of my translation to play
44  Emily Rose
a part in the meaning of this text rather than be the passive receiver of the words
on the page.

Strategies
This chapter is not playful in the way that the Sancy chapter is, because Choisy is
now in disguise, not drag. This experiment had to be less carnivalesque and more
serious; it had to fit in with the status quo while implicitly challenging it and my
strategies are ones that, while estranging, are used in the world today. To erase
any link to a binary in this section I used epicene pronouns which would be rec-
ognizable to those who take an interest in non-gendered pronouns. For example:

I put de La Grise on the other side of the bed, nearest the guests, like the night
before; ze turned onto hir back (ze knew exactly how ze needed to be) and I
advanced on hir to kiss hir. (Choisy 1995: 55, my translation)

This strategy was influenced by linguistic determinism and the idea that if we
are to stop conceiving of gender as a binary we must change the way we refer to
the two sexes. I cannot deny that these pronouns sometimes obscure meaning and
sense but I want my reader to work for this meaning and have their perception of
gender as masculine or feminine challenged. I want the text to become writerly
(or translatorly). One of the few female members of the Oulipo, Anne Garréta,
removed both the gender of her narrator and the narrator’s love interest in her 1986
novel Sphinx (see Mathews and Brotchie 2011: 153). In a 2009 interview, Garréta
stated that, for her, the Oulipo has been a queer project from the start, that to be
Oulipian is to be queer and to be queer is to participate in the potential (online
interview). Removing gender from my translation queers the text and gives it the
potential to re-imagine gender norms and standard values. The epicene pronouns
challenge the reader’s view of the world as always divided between two opposing
gendered poles and they must ask: ‘Why have these pronouns been invented? What
is wrong with the traditional pronouns they replace?’ (Livia 2001: 58).
This strategy conceals the genders of the people around Choisy. As Choisy uses
‘I’ hir gender is apparently already concealed: Anna Livia (2001) claims it is less
disruptive to conceal gender in the pronoun ‘I’ because it does not carry gender
in the same way ‘he’/‘she’ does. However, I do not want to shy away from being
‘disruptive’ and moreover, this is a point Monique Wittig would not agree with:

Gender is not confined within the third person and the mention of sex in lan-
guage is not a treatment reserved for the third person. Sex, under the name
of gender, permeates the whole body of language and forces every locutor, if
she belongs to the oppressed sex, to proclaim it in her speech. (1985: 5)

According to Wittig, the pronoun ‘I’ belongs to men who are the only ones who
have the right to use it without question. Choisy is not an absolute in terms of one
gender or the other, and I do not want to ascribe hir with a pronoun which forces
 The masquerade of translation and gender  45
hir to choose. This is why I have taken up Wittig’s on of L’Oppoponax (1964) as
‘one’ for my second strategy: a device that is ‘beyond sexes, that the division of
sexes [is] powerless against’ (Wittig 1985: 7). It may seem that ‘one’ is rather for-
mal and has royal overtones in English, but I feel this problem can be overcome
by the fact that Choisy was a member of the aristocracy and was nothing if not
eccentric: ‘The next day one returned to Crespon and dined with the curate and
d’Hanecourt. One treated the latter better than normal and showed hir signs of
friendship’ (Choisy 1995: 60–61, my translation).
As with my previous section, this one would be hard on any reader. But I am
echoing the fact that

Queer theory is often difficult to read (and write). There is a valuing of dif-
ficulty because of the concerted effort made by theorists not to make things
easy or palatable but to challenge the reader to work through concepts with
the same expenditure of energy exerted by the writer [or translator]; to use
the text as a tool to open up and provoke further thinking about the theme in
question. (Giffney 2009: 9)

English-language novels using epicene pronouns have been published before (see
Livia 2001) and I think this type of experimental translation could find a pub-
lisher. According to a list of innovative publishers compiled by Alana D’Ambrosio
(online), Dalkey Archive Press publishes experimental, innovative and subversive
fiction and translation. Furthermore, the ‘about’ page of Action Books (www.
actionbooks.org/about/) claims that they are ‘interlingual’; the website sug-
gests they ‘believe in historical avant-gardes’ and ‘unknowable dys-contemporary
discontinuous occultly continuous anachronistic avant-gardes’. Action Books
believes that ‘Art, Genre, Voice, Prophecy, Theatricality, Materials, the Bodies,
Foreign Tongues, and Other Foreign Objects and Substances, if taken internally,
may break apart societal forms’ (ibid.). So there potentially is a market for chal-
lenging works of this kind.

Translating identity in disguise

Choisy’s disguise poses interesting questions about identity. What is the real iden-
tity under the disguise? Or is the disguise the real identity? Hir unstable gender
performance shows that there is no such thing as a fixed identity:

That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has no ontological

status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This also sug-
gests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very inte-
riority is an effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse.
(Butler 2006: 185)

The deletion of ‘I’ can go some way to verbalising this idea, that ‘there is no “I”
who stands behind discourse and extends its volition or will through discourse’
46  Emily Rose
(Butler 1997: 12). I am removing it because discourse precedes and constrains
every subject. Many believe that the subject originates its speech and its gender,
that a person is a gender rather than does a gender; taking away the ‘I’ can untan-
gle these fallacies. If Choisy is not the origin of hir words then, as a translator, I
can take them and replicate the idea that all the words we speak really belong to a
stranger (see Butler 1997: 25).
Choisy is in disguise so that hir companions cannot get to the truth of hir identity:
‘Choisy’s phallic pleasures involve trickery, they feed on deceiving the eyes of
viewers and perhaps readers, daring them to see what he is and is not showing
them’ (Ferguson 2013). My translation takes up this idea: my reader would be in
the same position as most of Choisy’s audience – they only see what is presented
to them at face value but are encouraged to question what is between the lines
and behind the mask. My reader is also deceived by my disguise as translator
because, if I portray this text as an original work, my audience is identifying with
my representation of Choisy and not the wo/man as ze wrote hirself. This is where
we can question the idea of transparent translation as a clear representation of the
author’s thoughts.

Translating gender as resistance in disguise

When a translation masquerades as an original text, the translator becomes invisible
and the foreign writer visible. But how does a translation masquerade as an origi-
nal? Can a text seem ‘original’ if it is not fluent? According to Venuti, a fluent text
has an ‘absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities [that give] the appearance
that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning
of the foreign text’ (2008: 1). However, a text that is not linguistically fluent can
still appear to reflect the writer’s personality. Scott’s translation, like my strate-
gies, would not necessarily be labelled ‘fluent’: Scott uses endnotes, there is an
introduction and an afterword to the text and he keeps French words throughout.6
But Scott does not openly state that he is ignoring grammatical gender and so this
part of his role as translator is invisible. I too would not openly tell the reader that
the way I use gender is not the way Choisy first used it if this part of my transla-
tion were for publication. Scott and I both mislead the reader. Any potential reader
coming to my translation (without recourse to this article) would believe that what
I have written is either an original text, or a ‘faithful’ representation of the origi-
nal author’s ideas: ‘by producing the illusion of transparency, a fluent translation
masquerades as a true semantic equivalence when it in fact inscribes the foreign
text with a partial interpretation’ (Venuti 2008: 16). I have used a target-language
discourse that is mine (ze/hir/one) to re-appropriate Choisy’s use of grammatical
gender for my own means; this discourse is not ‘fluent’ in the sense that it includes
‘linguistic and stylistic peculiarities’, but it is in the sense that it ‘masquerades as
a true semantic equivalence’ – my experimental translation could easily seem like
a ‘faithful’ representation of an equally experimental source text. My translation is
only half a reflection of Choisy’s personality because it is also half a reflection of
mine. I am double-crossing my reader just as I am double-crossing the text.
 The masquerade of translation and gender  47
This chapter reveals how texts are formed of layers, how ‘source text’ and
‘target text’ can become indistinct, and how, like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, they
are not two mutually exclusive opposing poles but categories that interact and
feed into one another. Because I have made Choisy’s text my own, I am denying
the power of the source text as authoritative; my translation is not a representa-
tion but an interpretation. Gender is a performance of repeated acts which are
covered up, just as every translation is a performance of repeated words which
are covered up by a cloak of originality. As Choisy hides the layers of gender
identity that constitute hir, my translation hides layers of textual identity that con-
stitute it; it is made of layers of theories I have studied, ideas from the source
text and ideas from Scott’s translation. What is hidden is that ‘in the space of a
given text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralize one
another’ (Kristeva 1980: 36). In her work on intertextuality, Julia Kristeva writes
about the ‘pheno-text’ as the text we see before us and the ‘geno-text’ as the ele-
ments underneath that come together to bring that text to life (Dillon 2007: 86).
According to Sarah Dillon, this opposition can be gendered:

In its fluid plurality, as well as its etymological link to birth . . . the geno-text
aligns itself with the feminine side of this binary; on the other hand, with its
origin in science . . . the manifest pheno-text might easily be aligned with the
masculine side. (2007: 92)

However, this binary is upset if one considers the analogy of the palimpsest which
‘serves as the hymen that holds the masculine pheno-text and the feminine geno-
text both together and apart’ (Dillon 2007: 92). All translation is palimpsestuous,
every target text has the source text underneath it and other influences beneath the
surface must exist (even if the reader is not always aware of them). So my transla-
tion as an attempt to dispel the gender binary reflects this new vision of translation
as a combination of both the masculine and the feminine, the source and the target.

Conclusion
My translation explores what looking at gender theory and performativity can
mean for translation studies and how an investigation into one can combine with
and expand the other through a particular text. I expose gender and writing as
constructions and the strategies I have used are extreme; they each contribute to
the idea of gender and translation as a performance and to the idea of using per-
formance to reject cultural and translational norms instead of adhering to them.
We need to be extreme in order to challenge views of both gender and translation
and we should not shy away from publishing these translations. As it is important
to question the masculine/feminine binary and the performance of gender, it is
equally important to question the source text/target text binary and the perfor-
mance of writing. Just as the former is a continuum, so is the latter – as queer
theory questions the idea that feminine and masculine identities are dichotomous,
it helps question whether translation and source text are really dichotomous either.
48  Emily Rose
Over the years, translation has been described using many different meta-
phors (see St André 2010b). The clothing metaphor speaks of translators giving
texts new clothes but never daring to change what is really underneath (Van
Wyke 2010), and this investigation has tried to challenge the idea that there is
a stable essence, both underneath the translation, and underneath a person who
cross-dresses. James St. André suggests another metaphor which I believe can
help us to see translation in a new light—he uses cross-identity performance
as a metaphor in itself because ‘it is polyvalent, depending on who is crossing
as what, under which circumstances. Ambiguity and multiple meanings for the
same act are therefore to be expected and explored’ (St André 2010a: 286–7).
Translation is a performance, just as Butler has suggested that gender is, and
as Choisy puts on a performance that is impossible to firmly categorize (trans-
vestite, transgender, transsexual, drag queen?), my translation implies that a
performance can be made up of multiple meanings that are not right or wrong,
faithful or unfaithful. With this article, I have produced a dialogue between my
translation process and the finished product—the organs and cells that reside
below the body, the parts that keep us alive but cannot be seen, are visible
for all to see and to understand how the body works. Other translators may
find that using these strategies in their translations can challenge how gender is
viewed or bring queer authors and characters to the fore. Gender, whether ‘cis’
or ‘trans’, and writing, whether ‘original’ or translated, are both constructed
and queer, and to experiment with them is to expose what lies underneath – as
Choisy shows, what is on the surface is never the whole story.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jamie Clarke for creating the gendered typography I use in my
translations, which was based on a design I originally used in my MA dissertation.

Notes
1 Butler’s 1990 theory has often been misread as indicating that all gender is drag and that
gender is something theatrical, something we can put on and take off at will (see Prosser
2006 and Butler 2006). Butler has since clarified that drag is an example of performativ-
ity, not a model for it (1993).
2 This translation formed part of the creative-critical dissertation I wrote for my MA in
Literary Translation.
3 For more information on epicene pronouns see “Gender Neutral Pronoun Usage”
(MIT).
4 As my translation is unpublished, all references will be to the appropriate page in the
French source text.
5 In this article, I use ‘transvestite’ to refer to someone who dresses in the clothes of
the opposite sex or who gains pleasure from wearing these clothes, while ‘transgen-
der’ refers to someone who sees themselves as ambiguous in the male/female gender
system or who moves between these two positions (The Oxford English Dictionary,
online).
6 For example, ‘robe de chambre’ and ‘just-au-corps’ are in French with endnotes
(1994: 28).
 The masquerade of translation and gender  49
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4 A poetics of evasion
The queer translations of Aleksei Apukhtin
Brian James Baer

The latter half of the nineteenth century was an especially interesting time in the
evolution of what Michel Foucault (1978) describes as the modern homosexual,
conceived as a totalizing identity. This transformation in the social construction of
homosexuality was brought about by a variety of material and discursive develop-
ments. In terms of material culture, rapid industrialization led to mass migration to
urban centres, where young, unmarried men and women lived often communally
in boarding houses or workers’ dormitories, making it possible if not to pursue
a homosexual lifestyle, then to conduct homosexual liaisons on a regular basis.
Queer cruising grounds and meeting places emerged in most large European cit-
ies at this time. At the same time, the emergent science of sexology, as well as
legal discourse, meant to regulate behaviour and social roles in the modern city,
contributed to the discursive construction of a homosexual identity.
The social networks that arose at that time in large urban centres fulfilled a
number of functions, as George Chauncey notes in the introduction to Gay New
York. In addition to providing practical support – ‘many people used their gay
social circles to find jobs, apartments, romance, and their closest friendships’
(Chauncey 1994: 3) – these gay social networks provided emotional support ‘as
they developed values and identities significantly different from those prescribed
by the dominant culture’ (ibid.). But while increasing numbers of individuals at
this time began to see themselves as ‘gay’, until the emergence of gay and lesbian
rights organizations in the final decade of the nineteenth century, few attempted
to enter the public sphere as gays or lesbians. The existence of a totalizing iden-
tity without the means to publicly express it led to the development of ‘strategies
of everyday resistance that men devised in order to claim space for themselves in
the midst of a hostile society’ (Chauncey 1994: 5). One of the strategies of eve-
ryday resistance that developed in the literary realm was an aesthetics of evasion,
which allowed gay-identified individuals to produce and publish works that were
acceptable to a general audience but open to queer reading by ‘the happy few’
who were capable of decoding the Aesopian references and euphemisms embed-
ded in these texts. And while Wayne Dynes claims that ‘since the representation
of homosexual relations was not permissible in the West until fairly recently, art-
ists have had to present such subject matter in disguised form, often by deriving
imagery from classical mythology’ (Dynes 2003: 41), this aesthetic of evasion
became especially bold in the latter half of the nineteenth century, bolstered by
52  Brian James Baer
the emergence of a modern homosexual identity and of gay social networks,
which provided an eager audience.
Oscar Wilde, of course, is the great exemplar of that aesthetics, who, until his
arrest on charges of gross indecency, managed to successfully practise – indeed,
one might say, to perfect – this queer aesthetics of evasion. In naming one of his
most famous fictional characters Dorian, for example, Wilde was able to reference
the theory among classical philologists that the Greek people known as Dorians
celebrated male homosexuality. While conservative critics charged Wilde with
sexual decadence, it was difficult for them to provide concrete evidence – until
his trial – from his literary works, allowing Wilde to achieve enormous success
with the general public. As Daniel Mendelsohn notes with reference to Wilde’s
education in the classics, he had very good models to follow (Mendelsohn 2010).
Mendelsohn discusses a work that appears to have had enormous influence on
Wilde, John Addington Symonds’s two-volume Studies of the Greek Poets (1873,
1876). A ‘secret homosexual’, Symonds ‘sought, through readings of the Greek
classics, to find both expression for and justification of his own sexual nature’
(Mendelsohn 2010: 62), which he then put forward in his own book:

However flowery his style and whatever lip service he paid to conventional
condemnation of ‘paiderastia’ there were those who were able to read between
the lines of Symonds’s work – especially the lines of the final chapter of the
second volume of Studies of the Greek Poets, with its controversial defense
of Greek, rather than Judeo-Christian morals. (Mendelsohn 2010: 62)1

In his study of Aesopian language in Soviet literature, Lev Loseff (1984) notes
that authors are able to evade censorship to speak to an elite community of ‘shrewd
readers’ by placing in their texts both screens, designed to block a subversive
interpretation of a text from the eyes of the censor, and cues, meant to signal that
very interpretation to the knowing reader. To apply Loseff’s terms, Symonds’s
condemnation of pederastia served as a screen, while his flowery language and
defence of Greek morals cued queer readers to an alternative reading that resisted
the dominant values of the time.
Perhaps the greatest exemplar of this subculture in Russia was Aleksei
Apukhtin (1840–93), a poet and musician who led about as open a gay lifestyle
as was possible at that time. Not only did he frequent gay locales, such as the St
Petersburg restaurant Medved [The Bear], he referenced them in his poems. Unlike
his friends and artistic collaborators Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich
Romanov, who published poetry under the initials K.R., and the composer Petr
Chaikovskii, Apukhtin never married. Romanov, married and the father of nine
children, pursued homosexual liaisons in the bathhouses of St Petersburg, as doc-
umented in now-published excerpts from his diaries (Maylunas and Mironenko
1997), whereas Chaikovskii, at the age of 36, married Antonina Miliukova in
order to protect his reputation, but the marriage ended soon and in scandal. In
terms of his lifestyle, then, Apukhtin had more in common with Chaikovskii’s
younger brother Modest, who also never married.
 The queer translations of Aleksei Apukhtin  53
Although homosexuality was not prosecuted as vigorously in tsarist Russia as
it was in England, especially following the passage of the Labouchère amendment
in 1885, it should be made clear here that leading an openly gay lifestyle was not
without its risks. In fact, Chaikovskii’s biographer Alexander Poznansky con-
jectures that the Chautemps affair, when the guests at the Chautemps restaurant,
including Chaikovskii and Apukhtin, were ‘defamed throughout the whole city
as buggers’, was one of the factors leading to Chaikovskii’s disastrous marriage
(Poznansky 1996: 10–11). Moreover, Apukhtin’s relationships with men were not
only the subject of society gossip but were also ridiculed in the press (Poznansky
1996:40–46, 92, 123, 362).
While Kostya Rotikov (pen name of the late Iurii Piriutko) in his ‘gay’ his-
tory of the then Russian capital Drugoi Peterburg [The Other Petersburg] writes
that Apukhtin wrote verses ‘astonishing in their time for their openness’ (Rotikov
1998: 267), and Alexander Poznansky describes Apukhtin as leading ‘an openly
homosexual life-style, embarrassed by nothing, fearful of nothing, and making
his life-style the butt of his own jokes’ (Poznansky 1996: 5), the reality is that
Apukhtin was ‘judicious in [his] behaviour, avoiding excess and using the right
measure of discretion, tact, and taste’ (Poznansky 1996: 6). This circumspection
led him to develop in his lyric poetry an aesthetics of evasion, which, like much
of Wilde’s work, allowed him to avoid direct references to homosexuality while
leaving his poetry open to queer reading. Moreover, Apukhtin addresses the whole
question of being the object of social opprobrium in his original poems and in his
translations in a way that suggests he was not as carefree about his homosexuality
as some contemporary scholars would like to think.
Thus, while Mikhail Kuzmin, the author of Russia’s first gay novel and of
openly homoerotic verse, is often referred to as the Russian Wilde, in many
respects Apukhtin, with his refined and often daring poetics of evasion, is, I would
argue, more deserving of the title. Apukhtin and Wilde (1854–1900) were in fact
contemporaries. Apukhtin did not live to experience the effect of Wilde’s trial on
charges of gross indecency – which coincided with the founding of the first gay
rights organization in Great Britain in 1894 – whereas Kuzmin (1872–1936) was
only 23 at the time of the first trial and so spent the greater part of his creative life
in the post-trial era.
Below I examine the various devices that characterize Apukhtin’s aesthetics
of evasion in his original writing and then show how he adapted those devices in
his translations of Western European lyric poetry. It should be noted though that,
while this strategy was perfected by Apukhtin, it was not invented by him. I there-
fore preface my study of Apukhtin’s translations with an overview of the Russian
tradition of queering poetic works through translation.

Queer translation
The conservative religious nature of Russian culture before the eighteenth
century retarded the emergence of a high erotic culture; for example, Russian
artists were forbidden to paint nudes until the eighteenth century. And so, when
54  Brian James Baer
a secular culture began to emerge following Peter the Great’s policy of forced
Westernization, the role of translation in the evolution of Russia’s erotic litera-
ture cannot be overestimated. In fact, many Russian translations of works dealing
with same-sex desire were undertaken by writers who were not homosexual-
identified but sought to contribute through their translations to the evolution of
Russian secular literature, which they associated with modernity and cultural
sophistication. One of the peculiar features of Russian erotic literature is that it
was primarily in verse. Unlike in France, the Russian novelistic tradition, until
the early twentieth century, remained quite chaste. This may help to explain why
the greatest works of Russian gay and lesbian literature are poems. Moreover,
under conditions of censorship, poetry offered opportunities largely unthinkable
in prose. As the Czech poet Josef Holub explains:

Poetry was the language, poetry was the communication, not only because it
could be more loaded with hidden meanings than prose. Poetry was higher
above the heads of censors, but it was not so much found in the words as in
the suggested tacit solidarity, in the silence between words, between lines and
between poems. (Holub 1994: 5)

Moreover, translation complicates any direct relationship between the lyric voice
and the text. In many circumstances, the responsibility of the translator for the
text is further attenuated when the gender of the translator and that of the lyric
subject do not align. Perhaps the first work of Russian literature to deal with the
theme of same-sex desire was Gavrila Derzhavin’s first translation of Sappho’s
second ode, dated 1797 (Derzhavin 1865: 39). Derzhavin was the first Russian
translator of the fragment to leave the sex of the three individuals in the poem
intact, thereby leaving the poem open to a queer reading (Tyulenev 2014: 262).
Another source of erotic literature was Arabic poetry, which was popularized in
early nineteenth-century Russia in French translations, such as the anonymous
Anthologie arabe: ou, choix de poésies arabes inédites, traduites pour la pre-
mière fois en français, et accompagnées d’observations critiques et littéraires
(1828), which featured poems dedicated to, among other things, man-boy love.
Aleksandr Pushkin, influenced by Europe’s fascination with Arabic culture, wrote
a (homo)erotically-charged poem ‘In Imitation of the Arabic’ in 1835.
In 1907, the Symbolist poet Aleksander Kondratovich published his translation
of Pierre Louÿs’s pseudo-translation Les chansons de Bilitis, which was a collection
of lesbian-themed poems purported to have been written by Bilitis, a contempo-
rary of Sappho on the Isle of Lesbos. Kondratovich’s translation fit the mood of
Russian society following the 1905 revolution, when the loosening of censorship
restrictions and increased social mobility brought about by rapid modernization
introduced issues of sexuality into the public sphere. Russia’s first gay novel,
Mikhail Kuzmin’s Wings, which was originally published in the Symbolist journal
Vesy, was republished in 1907 in book form and became a succès de scandale.
Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal’s novel of a decadent lesbian relationship, Thirty-Three
Abominations, was also published in 1907. Kondratovich’s translation of The
 The queer translations of Aleksei Apukhtin  55
Songs of Bilitis was reissued in 1911, a testament to the popularity of the volume.
While not themselves gay-identified, these authors produced Russian texts that
were available to queer readings. In fact, Lada Panova (2006) has documented that
Louÿs’s pseudo-translations influenced Mikhail Kuzmin’s original poetic cycle
The Alexandrian Songs. Such an example of transnational, transgender and even
transsexual exchange, of course, problematizes the monologism that continues to
organize the study of national literatures in most parts of the world.
At the same time, there is evidence that gay-identified Russians used the
translation of works by authors who may or may not have been gay-identified
to give semi-public expression to their desire, thus making these texts available
to queer readings. For example, Sergey Tyulenev discusses how Ivan Dmitriev
(1760–1837), Minister of Justice under Alexander I, translated two fables by La
Fontaine, ‘Les deux pigeons’ [Two Pigeons] and ‘Les deux amis’ [Two Friends],
queering the homosocial bonds celebrated in the tales. For example, in the first
poem Dmitriev translates the formal French vous with the more familiar Russian
ty, and where the two pigeons bid each other adieu ‘in tears’ in the French source
text, they exchange loving pecks in Dmitriev’s version (Tyulenev 2010: 265).
Similarly, in ‘Two Friends’, Dmitriev introduces physical contact between the
two men that is not present in the source (Tyulenev 2010: 268).
Such strategies became even more salient in the Soviet period when homosex-
uality was not only criminalized but largely expelled from public discourse. With
few exceptions, documented by Samantha Sherry (2015), Soviet censors removed
any mention of homosexuality from the translations of Western literary texts, even
when it was presented in a derogatory light or in association with a clearly nega-
tive character. This was also the case in Russian translations of ancient Greek and
Roman poetry (Gasparov 1991). Moreover, the view that Sappho was a lesbian
was rejected by Soviet scholars, and the homosexuality of cultural figures such
as Michelangelo was written off as a philosophical and aesthetic pose (see Baer
2015). Those conditions made the strategy of evasion through translation even
more relevant. As I discuss in Baer (2011), the gay-identified poet-translators
Mikhail Kuzmin, Ivan Likhachev and Genadii Shmakov found ways to express
their desire in the selection and translation of Western poetic works by such poets
as Shakespeare, Baudelaire and Cavafy. Again, the rejection by Soviet schol-
ars of the hypothesis that Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed to a male lover
made possible the translation of these texts (for more on this, see Baer 2011).
Chaikovskii’s gay younger brother – and his librettist – Modest, also translated
the sonnets of Shakespeare.

Apukhtin’s queer poetics

The late nineteenth century marks a milestone in the evolution of Russian queer
literature as a gay subculture began to emerge in Russia’s two capitals, Moscow
and St Petersburg. As Dan Healey has documented, a gay social network emerged,
which ‘developed its own geographies of sexualized streetscapes, its rituals of
contact and socialization, its signals and gestures, and its own fraternal language’
56  Brian James Baer
(Healey 2001: 29–30). It was at this time that a sub-cultural literature began to
appear, the most flamboyant example being the Похождение пажа [Progress
of the Page], which appeared in the volume Русский эрот не для дам [Russian
Eroticism Is Not for Ladies]. This work, however, because of the sexually explicit
nature of its content, could not be published in Russia and was printed in Geneva.
The poetics of evasion, practiced by authors such as Apukhtin and Wilde, on
the other hand, allowed texts to circulate in public that were nonetheless open
to a queer reading. Many of the strategies developed by Apukhtin involve sup-
pressing any specific mention of the gender of either the lyric subject of the poem
or the object of the lyric subject’s affections. Because the Russian language has
three grammatical genders – masculine, feminine and neuter – that are reflected
in the endings of nouns, adjectives and past-tense verbs, it is often difficult to
avoid completely any reference to the gender of the lyric subject or of the poem’s
addressee. In the famous love lyric by Aleksandr Pushkin, ‘Я помню чудное
мгновение’ [I Remember That Miraculous Moment], for example, the addressee
is revealed to be female in line 2 through the poet’s use of явилась, the past tense
of the verb ‘to appear’, with its feminine singular ending (1978: 198).
Thus while Modest Chaikovskii insists that Apukhtin’s poem ‘Сухие, редкие,
нечаянные встречи’ [Dry, Infrequent, Unintended Meetings] was addressed to
Apukhtin’s love interest at the time and Modest’s classmate at the juridical insti-
tute, Aleksei Alekseevich Valuev, nothing on the textual surface of the poem
reveals the addressee to be male:

Сухие, редкие, нечаянные встречи,

Пустой, ничтожный разговор,
Твой умышленно-уклончивые речи,
И твой намеренно-холодный, строгий взор, –
Все говорит, что надо нам расстаться,
Что счастье было и прошло . . .
Но в этом так же горько мне сознаться,
Как кончить с жизнью тяжело. (1991: 154)

[The dry, infrequent, and sorrowful meetings,

The empty, meaningless conversation,
Your deliberately evasive speeches
And your intentionally cold, stern glance –
All this says that we must part
That the happiness that was is gone . . .
But it’s as bitter for me to acknowledge
As it is difficult to part with life.]

Evident here and throughout Apukhtin’s poetic oeuvre is an elaborate poetics of

evasion, the defining characteristic of which is a reliance on metonymy (‘Your
deliberately evasive speeches’ and ‘your intentionally cold, stern glance’),
which allows the poet to avoid any indication of the addressee’s gender. This
evasion is brilliantly achieved in the poem ‘In the Theatre’: Apukhtin’s own
 The queer translations of Aleksei Apukhtin  57
gender is clearly indicated as male, but the gender of his addressee is never
revealed, relying on a string of metonyms (your eyes, your childish laugh, your
heart) (1991: 131).
Similarly, in an untitled poem from 1884, ‘Два сердца любящих и чающих
ответа’ [Two Hearts in Love and Expecting a Response], Apukhtin avoids indi-
cating the gender of the two lovers described in the poem by referring to them
with the metonym ‘two hearts’. At the beginning of stanza 2, he teases the reader
by using the masculine singular pronoun: ‘нем’, but then reveals in the follow-
ing line that the pronoun refers to ‘day’ (the word день in Russian is masculine)
‘Иночи целые я думаю о нем / Об этом близком дне’ [And for entire nights I
think of it [or: him] / Of that approaching day] (1991: 237).
In addition to metonomy, Apukhtin avoids making any direct reference to the
addressee’s gender by using only present or future tenses and/or the imperative
mood, which do not reflect the gender of the grammatical subject. This strategy is
evident in the poem ‘Ответ на письмо’ [An Answer to a Letter] where the gender
of the addressee, referred to repeatedly as Вы (you, formal or plural), is never
revealed in the 42 lines of the poem (1991: 240–41).
Reliance on the word друг also plays an important role in Apukhtin’s poetics
of evasion. A masculine singular noun meaning ‘friend’ or ‘beloved’, друг can be
used to refer to either a man or a woman, and in both cases will take masculine
adjectives. Perhaps the most flagrant use of друг in creating a text open to a queer
reading can be found in the lyrics of Lensky’s aria in Chaikovskii’s opera Evgenii
Onegin.2 The lyrics, written by Konstantin Shilovsky, with the composer and his
younger brother Modest, employ exclusively male nouns and modifiers:

Желанный друг – приди, я твой супруг,

Приди, я твой супруг.
Приди, приди.
Я жду тебя, желанный друг,
Приди, приди, я твой супруг.

[Desired friend (masc. sing.) – Come, I am your spouse (masc. sing.)

Come, I am your spouse (masc. sing.)
Come, come!
I await you, desired friend (masc. sing.),
Come, come, I am your spouse (masc. sing.)]

Another crucial element in Apukhtin’s poetics of evasion involves implicitation,

made possible by shared background knowledge among a select group of ‘shrewd
readers’, to use Loseff’s term. For example, there are references to queer hang-
outs, as in the poem ‘Сон’ [The Dream], where he describes the figures on the
wallpaper in the restaurant Медведь [The Bear] (1991: 226–7). Similarly, readers
who knew the nature of Apukhtin’s relationship with Chaikovskii might read the
title of the poem addressed to the composer, ‘Дорогой′, as ‘Dorogói’ (masc. sing.
nominative case), or ‘dear’, instead of ‘Dorógoi’ (fem. sing. instrumental case),
or ‘on the road’ (Apukhtin 1991: 226–7).
58  Brian James Baer
On occasion, Apukhtin queers his lyric verse by adopting the Byronic stance
of the despised outsider, which, for those who know the poet’s sexual orientation,
is easily read as defiantly queer, as in the following oft-quoted verses from the
poem ‘Когда, в объятиях продажных замираю’ [When, reconciling in merce-
nary embraces]:

Тебя не устрашат ни гнев судьбы суровый,

Ни цепи тяжкие, ни пошлый суд людей . . .
И ты отдашь всю жизнь за ласковое слово.
За милый, добрый взгляд задумчивых очей! (1991: 260)

[You are not frightened by the wrath of a cruel fate,

Nor by heavy chains, nor by the vulgar judgment of people . . .
You would give your whole life for a gentle word,
For a sweet, kind look from pensive eyes!

The elitism of this Byronic pose is evident in the phrase ‘the vulgar judgment of
people’. Moreover, the sex of the lyric subject is not revealed nor is the sex of the
addressee and of the addressee’s love interest, which is masked by the metonym
‘pensive eyes’.

Queering translation
Fluent in French, Italian, and German – he in fact composed verses in French –
Apukhtin practiced and further developed his poetics of evasion in his translations
of lyric poetry. Dealing with texts authored by poets who, in most cases, were not
gay-identified, Apukhtin employed a number of strategies in his translations that
allowed him to conceal the gender of the original poem’s lyric subject and/or the
poem’s addressee.
The removal of gender-marked language is one of the most common strategies
he employs. In the poem ‘Ständchen’ by Ludwig Rellstab, for example, he does
not render the feminine singular adjective Holde, which clearly indicates the gen-
der of the poem’s addressee as female, and translates Liebchen (neuter diminutive
form in German), as drug prekrasnyi, or ‘beautiful friend’ (masc. sing.):

СЕРЕНАДА ШУБЕРТА
Ночь уносит голос страстный,
Близок день труда . . .
О, не медли, друг прекрасный,
О, приди сюда!

Здесь свежо росы дыханье,

Звучен плеск ручья,
Здесь так полны обаянья
Песни соловья!
 The queer translations of Aleksei Apukhtin  59
И так внятны в этом пенье,
В этот час любви,
Все рыданья, все мученья,
Все мольбы мои! (1991: 347)

[A Schubert Serenade
Night carries away a passionate voice,
The work day is nigh . . .
O, do not tarry, excellent friend,
Come hither!

Here the breathe of dew is fresh,

The babbling of the brook rings out,
How filled with charm
The nightingale’s song!

And how distinct amid this singing,

In this hour of love,
Is all my torment, all my weeping,
All my supplications!]

Similarly, in translating a romantic lyric by Schiller, Apukhtin replaces the origi-

nal title ‘Amalia’ with the generic ‘Из Шиллера’ [From Schiller], thus removing
the only indication that the lyric subject of the poem, which opens with a paean to
male beauty, is female:

Чуден был он, точно ангел рая,

Красотою кто б сравнился с ним?
Взор его – как луч от солнца мая,
Отраженный морем голубым. (1991: 347)

[Miraculous was he, a true angel from paradise,

Who in beauty could compare to him?
His gaze was like a ray of May sunlight
Reflected off an azure sea.]

Apukhtin is also drawn in his selection of texts for translation to lyrics featuring
the Romantic outsider, such as Byron’s ‘Among Them but Not of Them’, taken
from Childe Harold (Canto iii, Stanza 113). The original reads:

I have not loved the world, nor the world me;

I have not flatter’d its rank breath, nor bow’d
To its idolatries a patient knee,–
Nor coin’d my cheek to smiles,– nor cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such; I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still could,
Had I not filled my mind, which thus itself subdued.
60  Brian James Baer
In Apukhtin’s rather free translation, the ending is decidedly more defiant than in
Byron’s original:

Из Байрона
С душою, для любви открытою широко,
Пришел доверчиво ты к ним?
Зачем же в их толпе стоишь ты одиноко
И думой горькою томим?

Привета теплого душа твоя искала,

Но нет его в сухих сердцах:
Пред золотым тельцом они, жрецы Ваала,
Лежат простертые во прах . . .

Не сетуй, не ропщи – хоть часто сердцу больно,

Будь горд и тверд в лихой борьбе –
И верь, что недалек тот день, когда невольно
Они поклонятся тебе! (1991: 358)

[Did you soulfully, for a wide open love,

Go trustingly to them?
Why do you stand alone there in their crowd
And wallow in bitter thoughts?

Your soul sought a warm greeting,

But there was none in their dry hearts:
Before the golden calf, they, priests of Baal,
Lie prostrate in the dust.

Neither lament nor grumble – though your heart may ache,

Be proud and firm in the heat of battle,
And believe the day is nigh, when despite themselves
They will bow down to you.]

We see a similar outsider’s perspective in Apukhtin’s translation of a French poem,

the source of which is unknown, which Apukhtin titles simply С французского
[From the French]:

С французского
О, смейся надо мной за то, что безучастно
Я в мире не иду пробитою тропой,
За то, что песен дар и жизнь я сжег напрасно,
За то, что гибну я . . . О, смейся надо мной!

Глумись и хохочи с безжалостным укором –

Толпа почтит твой смех сочувствием живым;
Все будут за тебя, проклятья грянут хором,
И камни полетят послушно за твоим.
 The queer translations of Aleksei Apukhtin  61
И если, совладать с тоскою не умея,
Изнывшая душа застонет, задрожит . . .
Скорей сдави мне грудь, прерви мой стон скорее,
А то, быть может, Бог услышит и простит. (Apukhtin 1991: 257)

[O, do not laugh at me for apathetically

Not taking the more-travelled path,
For burning through the gift of song and my life for naught,
For dying . . . O, do not laugh at me!

Mock and guffaw in merciless reproach –

The crowd honors your laughter with a lively sympathy;
Everyone will be after you, a chorus of curses will rise up,
And stones will fly obediently after yours.

And if, unable to control the ennui,

My soul lets out a moan and trembles . . .
I’d better squeeze my chest, interrupt my moan,
And then, perhaps, God will hear and forgive.

The defiant stance of the outsider was similarly appropriated by the queer translator
Ivan Likhachev when he translated Baudelaire’s ‘Epigraphe à un livre condamné’
while in prison, a poem that ends with the line: ‘Pity me, or else I curse you!’ (for
more on this, see Baer 2011).
Perhaps the most complex or layered act of queering occurs in Apukhtin’s trans-
lation of Delphine Gay’s lyric ‘Il m’aimait tant’, in which the translator, one could
say, ventriloquizes a female voice. In assuming the position of the female lyric
subject, Apukhtin can utter the line that ends every stanza: Он так меня любил!
Он так меня любил! [He loved me so! He loved me so!] (Apukhtin 1991: 352–3).
His translation was then set to music by his friend and one-time lover Chaikovskii,
suggesting a multitude of queer overtones. As Philip Ross Bullock explains:

Gay published her collected poems as ‘Madame Emile de Girardin,’ using

her husband’s name to strike a decorous balance between feminine modesty
and masculine authority. Subsequently translated into Russian by an infamous
aesthete and homosexual, and set to music by a composer whose sexuality
constitutes part of his own constructed identity (whether expressed or con-
cealed), the poem serves less as a tribute to sincerity and stability than as a
shrewd exercise in the ambiguous projection of character. The poem survives
not as originally written, but in the polyphonic rendering of Tchaikovsky’s
multiply displaced setting, in which the gender of the lyric heroine is revealed
to be performative fantasy. (Bullock 2008: 115; emphasis added)

Conclusion
The queering of lyric verse in translation is predicated on destabilizing the site
of enunciation, leaving it provocatively open. That destabilizing is achieved not
62  Brian James Baer
only by removing any gender markers in the texts but also by their very status
as translations, which introduces a double-voicedeness into the text and attenu-
ates the whole question of textual ownership, and of completion – texts can be
translated ad infinitum. Moreover, the fact that the choice of texts is not based
on the original author’s sexual orientation suggests a radically text-centred rather
than author-centred approach to the production of queer literature, one that does
not seek to document queer subjects but to provide opportunities for performing
a queer subjectivity. Such texts are ‘queer’ only in the moment of their perfor-
mance, when the site of enunciation is temporarily occupied by a queer subject.
As such, Apukhtin’s translations of lyric poetry represent a model of queer
literature that stands in rather sharp opposition to the privileged genres of Western
gay and lesbian literature, specifically the Bildungsroman, or coming-out story,
which narrates the consolidation and harmonization of the individual’s identity
through time. The site of enunciation in lyric poetry, on the other hand, resists
narration – it is ephemeral, a ‘miraculous moment’.

Notes
1 For more on the relationship between Hellenism and homosexuality, see also Dowling
1994 and Eribon 2004.
2 In the opera Evgenii Onegin, there are indeed homoerotic motifs that appear at the inter-
section of the music and libretto. The duel scene is particularly striking in that regard,
as has been stressed in various productions (as well as in the Soviet film opera, and in
Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate).

References
Apukhtin, A. 1991. Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii. Leningrad: Sovetskii Pisatel’.
Baer, B.J. 2015. Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature, London and
New York: Bloomsbury.
———. 2011. ‘Translating Queer Texts in Soviet Russia: A Case Study in Productive
Censorship’, Translation Studies, 4(1): 21–40.
Bullock, P.R. 2008. ‘Ambiguous Speech and Eloquent Silence: The Queerness of
Tchaikovsky’s Songs’, 19th-Century Music, 32: 94–128.
Chauncey, G. 1994. Gay New York. Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay
Male World, 1890-1940, New York: Basic Books.
Derzhavin, G. 1865. Sochineniia Derzhavina s ob”iasnitel’nymi primechaniiami Ia. Grota.
Vol. 2, St. Petersburg: Izd. Imp. Akademiia nauk.
Dowling, L. 1994. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Dynes, W. 2003. ‘Does Persecution Make for Better Art? A Review of A Hidden Love: Art
and Homosexuality, by D. Fernandez, trans. D. Radzinowicz’, The Gay and Lesbian
Review Worldwide, X(2): 41–2.
Eribon, D. 2004. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. M. Lucey, London and
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Foucault, M. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley, London and New York: Penguin.
 The queer translations of Aleksei Apukhtin  63
Gasparov, M. 1991. ‘Klassicheskaia filologiia i tsenzura nravov’ [Classical Philology and
the Censorship of Mores], Literaturnoe obozrenie, 11: 4–7.
Healey, D. 2001. Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia. The Regulation of Sexual
and Gender Dissent, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Holub, M. 1994. ‘The Poet and Human Solidarity’, Comparative Criticism, 16: 3–6.
Loseff, L. 1984. On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Russian
Literature, Munich: Sagner.
Maylunas, A. and S. Mironenko. 1997. A Lifelong Passion. Nicholas and Alexandra. Their
Own Story, New York: Doubleday.
Mendelsohn, D. 2010. ‘Oscar Wilde, Classics Scholar’, New York Review of Books
(11 November): 61–5.
Panova, L. 2006. ‘Aleksandriiskie pesni Mikhail Kuzmina: genezis uspekha’, Voprosy
Literatury, 6.
Poznansky, A. 1996. Tchaikovsky’s Last Days. A Documentary Study, Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Pushkin, A. 1978. Sochineniia v trekh tomakh. Tom I. Stikotvoreniia, 1814–1836 godov
[Works in Three Volumes. Volume I. Verses, 1814–1836], Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia
Literatura.
Rotikov, K.K. 1998. Drugoi Peterburg, St. Petersburg: Liga Plius.
Sherry, S. 2015. Discourses of Regulation and Resistance: Censoring Translation in the
Stalin and Khrushchev Era Soviet Union, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
Tyulenev, S. 2014. ‘Strategies of Translating Sexualities as Part of the Secularization of
Eighteenth– and Early Nineteenth-Century Russia, Comparative Literature Studies,
51(2): 253–76.
———. 2010. ‘Translation as Smuggling’, in J. St. André (ed.), Thinking Through
Translation with Metaphors, Manchester: St. Jerome Press, pp. 231–74.
5 Translation failure in James
Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
Margaret Sönser Breen

Introduction
Translation is a recurring trope for queerness in Anglophone LGBTQ literature.
For writers such as Edward Carpenter and Xavier Mayne in the early twentieth
century, and Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries , the translation trope has proven a crucial vehicle for
claiming and rendering visible literary and cultural traditions and, perhaps most
poignantly, the worth and value of queer peoples and individuals whose sexual
practices and kinship formations have historically been disrupted, criminalized,
derided and marginalized. Writing at mid-century, James Baldwin deploys the
trope toward a different end. In his landmark gay novel Giovanni’s Room (1956),
Baldwin fashions a narrator-protagonist, David, whose translation strategies of
omission and evasion – what I term ‘translation failure’ – offer readers a power-
ful pedagogical tool with which to evaluate and learn from his rejection of love.1
Baldwin’s second novel, which he wrote in France, tells the story of David,
a young Anglo-Saxon American, who, conflicted about his sexuality, travels
to Paris, where he meets Giovanni, an Italian migrant who works in a gay bar.
The meeting between the two men is momentous. Attracted to each other, they
immediately become involved. For all the intensity of the relationship, though,
David holds himself apart. He is unable to reconcile his same-gender desires with
his investment in heteromasculinity, particularly as it plays out within a mid-
century American context. So, once his fiancée Hella, also American, returns to
Paris from her travels in Spain, David abandons Giovanni. Thereafter, Giovanni’s
life takes a downward turn. Presumably out of emotional and, later, economic
despair, he becomes involved with various men. He is eventually charged with
the murder of Guillaume, the owner of the bar in which he worked, and is sen-
tenced to death. David, in turn, understands his own culpability with regard to
Giovanni’s downfall. The recognition chastens him. Even as it precipitates the
end of his relationship with Hella, it also opens up (or perhaps more accurately
does not foreclose) the possibility that he might accept his own gay desires. David
can, however, only gesture toward such a possibility, whose potential realization
lies beyond the novel’s narrative frame. Narrator-protagonist, he recounts in the
course of a night – the night before Giovanni’s execution by guillotine – the story
of their relationship. Giovanni’s Room is a confessional and coming-out novel in
 Translation failure in Giovanni’s Room  65
which Baldwin offers David’s confession of his double betrayal (his refusal to
accept both himself and his love for Giovanni) as a cautionary coming-out story
for the benefit of readers, who must in turn decide whether to regard his narrative
as evidence of his sins or of his atonement and, relatedly, of his continued invest-
ment in or nascent resistance to homophobic belief systems.
While critics of Giovanni’s Room have focused on narrator-protagonist David’s
strategy of rhetorical evasion and have rightly linked it to Baldwin’s explora-
tion of homophobia and racism (for example, Fabre 1991; Leeming 2015 [1994];
Henderson 2005; Abur-Rahman 2007), they have overlooked a key context and
aspect of this strategy: David’s account depends largely on his role as a translator.
David tells the story of his love affair with Giovanni in English, even as their
relationship plays out in French. Translation is a primary narrative vehicle for
David. Within this context, David’s rhetorical evasion may, in turn, be understood
as in part a failure in translation. In this chapter, I examine two different strands
of translation failure. The first of these concerns the actual languages used to
communicate in the novel, French and English, as well as the striking absence of
Giovanni’s primary language, Italian. The second aspect regards the issue of cul-
tural translation and entails reading the novel through a comparative cultural lens
and so complicating the understanding of this novel as an American literary work.
Regarding the first of these concerns, within the novel, David and Giovanni,
whose primary languages are English and Italian respectively, encounter one
another in French. That language functions as a tenuous vehicle for their short-
lived love affair. To a degree, David’s speaking French accords the relationship a
validity he fails to grant it when speaking English, but the words that he records
in French also convey his sexual and emotional ambivalence. That is, David
and Giovanni’s relationship has very little other than a marginal presence in the
English David uses – either in the letter he writes his father (in which there is no
mention of Giovanni) or in his exchanges with fiancée Hella (in which he trivial-
izes it), and when he describes Giovanni, his narration is shaped by indirection,
refusal, withholding. At the same time, the words that David in his role as narrator
fails to translate into English are significant in that they mark David’s distancing
of himself from Giovanni and, of course, from himself.
Regarding the second aspect of translation failure, cultural translation,
Giovanni’s Room is not simply an American novel by an African-American novelist.
Instead, it is a novel that is informed both by American politics and by the sexual
and racial politics of mid-century France, where it was written. Thus, David’s
adherence to understanding his attraction to men in terms of sexual panic and
guilt not only reflects his investment in mainstream American culture but also his
resistance to being shaped by France’s long-standing tradition of homosexual tol-
erance.2 David’s homophobia is, in other words, a refusal of cultural translation.
Two other socio-economic and political realities are worth considering here; they,
too, inform issues of cultural translation. France at mid-century witnessed both an
influx of migrant workers (most notably from Italy) and the start of the Algerian
War of Independence. These last two features complicate a critical understanding
of the novel’s presentation of whiteness (much as, indeed, they draw attention to
66  Margaret Sönser Breen
ongoing multiple competing and contradictory definitions of whiteness within
Europe and elsewhere).

The translator as gatekeeper: David’s

selective translation of French
Translation is a dynamic operation. It is selective. It facilitates and it denies
the exchange of meaning. It can be fraught with violence and loss and excess.
Translation exposes cultural codes of meaning and accordingly functions as a
gatekeeper to determine which meanings will pass, and be deemed acceptable and
legitimate, and which will be barred, discarded and termed illegitimate. Exercising
a protean authority and presence within the text, translation straddles the border
between production and reproduction. In so doing, it exposes and enacts the para-
dox discussed by Judith Butler in her essay ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’
(1993), for the act of translation confounds the distinction between copy and origi-
nal.3 This understanding of translation is particularly important for Baldwin’s
novel in which the narrator-protagonist, who narrates his unhappy love story in
large part through translation, never arrives at a point where he can accept homo-
sexuality as no less authentic and viable than heterosexuality. From the vantage
point of translation as a trope in the service of gender, David proves unable to
translate same-gender desire into a sustained and sustainable lived reality, even as,
at the end of the novel, he comes close to avowing his intention to do so.
Within the context of Baldwin’s love story told in translation, translation
directs the kind and degree of intimacy, where intimacy should be understood
as, on the one hand, the admission and acceptance of groups or bodies of people,
and, on the other hand, the trust and love of individual bodies. Such gatekeeping
plays out both among characters, for whom the crossing of languages is a vital
means of establishing intimacy, and between the text and readers, whose ability
to interpret David’s role as a narrator and, relatedly, to determine the depth and
significance of his gay love story is dependent on the selectiveness of his transla-
tion of that story.
While David narrates primarily in English, it is imperative to recognize the
significance of his decisions to leave certain words in French: translation failure
marks his homophobia. Generally speaking, these untranslated words fall into
two categories: words that are part of the Parisian gay subculture in which the two
men meet; and words that point to the emotional and cultural separation between
the two men. So, for example, early in the novel David recounts how from the
outset of his time in Paris he has associated with people who are part of the gay
subculture, people, ‘as Parisians sometimes put it, of le milieu’ (Baldwin 1956: 32;
italics in original). He then continues, using the English version of this French
term: ‘while this milieu was certainly anxious enough to claim me, I was intent on
proving, to them and to myself, that I was not of their company’ (32–3).4
Such verbal distancing recurs throughout David’s narrative. So a few pages
later, when David describes the people who frequent the gay bar where he meets
Giovanni, he mentions ‘les folles’ (38):
 Translation failure in Giovanni’s Room  67
they always called each other ‘she’ . . . I always found it difficult to believe
that they ever went to bed with anybody, for a man who wanted a woman
would certainly have rather had a real one and a man who wanted a man
would certainly not want one of them . . . [They] made me uneasy; perhaps
in the same way that the sight of monkeys eating their own excrement turns
some people’s stomachs. They might not mind so much if monkeys did not –
so grotesquely – resemble human beings. (1956: 38–9)

As Matt Brim has discussed, les folles inhabit a gender identity that contrasts
with and threatens not only mainstream society but also ‘“homophile” culture’,
with ‘its insistence on gay male virility and the assimilation it could provide’.
They foreground the ‘difference between the pure and profane of gender’, even as
they portend that difference’s ‘collapse’. In the passage, which reworks the trope
of racial other as monkey, they signal the ‘degeneracy’ (Brim 2014: 82) of ‘le
milieu’. Within the context of 1950s America, les folles would have been under-
stood as ‘queens’. David, though, offers no translation. Rhetorically speaking, he
keeps himself separate from the homosexual subculture he encounters.
Such strategies of self-distancing are woven throughout David’s account of
meeting Giovanni, and in that sense, they structurally anticipate the arc of the
lovers’ story. So, for example, in a moment of ethnographic horror reminiscent
of Victor Frankenstein’s description of the animation of his monster, David sus-
pends his recognition of the person who approaches him on the night that he and
Giovanni meet:

Now someone who I had never seen before came out of the shadows toward
me. It looked like a mummy or a zombie . . . It carried a glass, it walked
on its toes, the flat hips moved with a dead, horrifying lasciviousness . . . It
glittered in the dim light . . . the eyelids gleamed with mascara, the mouth
raged with lipstick. The face was white and thoroughly bloodless . . . it stank
of powder and a gardenia-like perfume. The shirt, open coquettishly to the
navel, revealed a hairless chest . . . A red sash was around the waist, the cling-
ing pants were a surprisingly somber grey. He wore buckles on his shoes.
(Baldwin 1956: 54; emphasis added)

The person’s gender incoherence and sexual coding frighten and disgust David;
for most of the passage he uses the pronoun ‘it’, and with the masculine pronoun
at the end he underscores the gender discord. David’s own use of French here –
va te faire foutre (1956: 56) (that is, ‘go get yourself fucked’) – acts as a doubled
verbal bar against male homosexuality and gender instability.
The spectre of this encounter hovers over David’s relationship with Giovanni,
as the former fears the loss of his masculinity and, with it, a loss of identity that
encompasses not only his gender and sexuality and race but also his American-
ness. At first, Giovanni appears to him as a masculine ideal: ‘He stood, insolent
and dark and leonine . . . looking out at the crowd’ (1956: 39–40). Yet this percep-
tion of Giovanni’s masculinity inevitably erodes, as does David’s own ability to
68  Margaret Sönser Breen
affirm and stabilize his own masculinity through his lover. David fears becoming
a housewife, and so he tells himself, ‘men can never be housewives’ (1956: 116).
In recounting the end of their relationship, David records how Giovanni lost his
job at the bar. The owner, Guillaume, accuses Giovanni of being a thief and fires
him. Guillaume also calls Giovanni a ‘tapette’ (‘fag’ or ‘nancy’) (1956: 143),
while Giovanni calls Guillaume and the bar clientele who do nothing to intervene
‘les encules’ [sic] (‘ass fucked’) and ‘les gonzesses’ (‘sissies’) (1956: 144). David
withholds the translation of all of these words. Within the context of translation’s
function as a narrative vehicle within the novel, the French slang terms signal
both David’s fear of the gender instability that loving Giovanni produces and his
linguistic self-distancing from that fear. And it is this doubled fear that does not
allow David to comfort and reassure Giovanni in this scene. When Giovanni tells
him, ‘Je t’aime, tu sais?’, David cannot respond in kind. He answers instead by
acknowledging Giovanni’s love for him: ‘Je le sais, mon vieux’ (1956: 146). As
narrator, David records Giovanni’s plea, ‘Ne me laisse pas tomber, je t’en prie’,
and his own reaction, ‘His touch could never fail to make me feel desire; yet his
hot, sweet breath also made me want to vomit’ (1956: 139).

Translation, cultural supremacy and cultural erasure

Starkly contrasting with the French slang that for David delineates the gay sub-
culture that he frequents and aligns ultimately with Giovanni are the pat French
phrases employed by the Americans in the novel. For David, in his encounters
with fellow Americans in France (most notably fiancée Hella and Sue, a woman
with whom he has a one-night stand), French tellingly functions as a linguistic
embellishment to their communication in English, a conspicuous flourish of local
colour. So David, in search of ‘a girl, any girl at all’ (1956: 126) in a moment of
homosexual panic, positions himself at an emotional remove from Sue, whom he
is about to seduce. He touches his glass to hers and says, ‘À la votre.’ Unaware that
he is using her, she corrects him: ‘à la votre? À la tienne, cheri [sic]!’ (1956: 134).
Hella’s French, too, bears this quality of emotional remove, which in her case
masks her wish for David to commit to her. Writing David of her return to Paris,
she begins her letter as follows:

Mon cher . . . Spain is my favorite country mais ca [sic] n’empêche que Paris
est [sic] toujours ma ville préferée [sic]. I long to be again among all those
foolish people, running for metros and jumping off of buses and dodging
motorcycles and having traffic jams and admiring all that crazy statuary in
all those absurd parts. I weep for the fishy ladies in the Place de la Concorde
. . . I want to come home, to come home to Paris. It’s funny, I’ve never felt
anyplace was home before. (1956: 123)

Here, as much as Hella’s limited use of French reveals her reluctance to confront
David on the subject of marriage, as much as one can sympathize with her in her
mistaken but poignant investment in a conventional sense of gender identity that
 Translation failure in Giovanni’s Room  69
can only be confirmed through heterosexuality, one understands that her French
acts as a verbal accessory, a souvenir of American consumption and a marker of
cultural mobility. In a passage that ironically works to underscore her lack of ease
with David, Hella can assert that she is at home in Paris, even when she is not at
home in French, because all the world seems part of post-war America’s back-
yard, accessible, though not meant for prolonged habitation.5
On this level of cultural privilege, French becomes a vehicle for solidifying not
simply the characters’ American-ness, but indeed their position as examples of a
certain kind of American for whom some knowledge or even facility with French
is a mark of leisure rather than exigency. In other words, for David, Hella and Sue,
French is both a sign of their own privileged status as Americans and the corollary
of that status: the marginal subject. There is no speaking of French out of necessity.
Stated in slightly different terms, David, Hella and Sue’s French points not only to
the cultural imperialism that allows them to enjoy the local colour but to the fact
that, in post-war France, much of the local colour is not that local after all.
French is the language in which David and Giovanni encounter each other.
In this sense, the speaking of French suggests a potentially egalitarian meeting
ground, one devoid at least of inherent linguistic advantage. But, of course, the
lovers come to the language and speak it with their own set of privileges and
disadvantages: David the American, taking time off from his life in America,
is on his continental interlude; Giovanni is a foreign worker in a country in
which, between 1945 and the late 1950s, Italians made up the largest group of
European migrant workers, occupying positions in public works, construction
and heavy industry, as well as the service sector (McDonald 1969; Nicholls
2012). Giovanni also reveals that he is from southern Italy, a region marked
by a history of conquest (Zaccaria 2011: 14) and diaspora, and by racialized
imputations of ‘denigration and decadence’ (Tapaninen 2008: 89); since at least
the early nineteenth century and even down to the present day, inhabitants of
‘the Italian Africa’ (Cimino and Foschi 2014: 283) have been characterized as
racially inferior to not only northern Europeans (including the French) but also
northern Italians (Tapaninen 2008: 89).6 In contrast to David’s, Giovanni’s is a
French of necessity. This is not to say that Giovanni did not learn his French in
Italy. After all, at the time, French (rather than English) was the most commonly
taught second language in the Italian school system. Rather, within the context
of the novel, French is, at least in part, an extension of his status as a foreign
worker. For Giovanni, French is a marker not of local colour but rather of migra-
tion and exile, as well as a tradition of racialized oppression.
Baldwin has David approach and then refuse recognition of this relation to
French for Giovanni. For all the recurring images of his lover’s face, which haunt
him, in both his roles as character and narrator, David has a rather mono-cultural
view of Giovanni. So, for example, David recalls, ‘I saw myself, sharply, as a
wanderer, an adventurer, rocking through the world, unanchored.’ Giovanni, by
contrast, ‘belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me’ (1956: 84).
But Giovanni does not really belong to the city. His separateness is clear not only
from his disclosure that he is from southern Italy, but also from the press coverage
70  Margaret Sönser Breen
of his capture and trial for the murder of the bar owner, Guillaume, whom David
terms ‘a disgusting old fairy’ (1956: 199):

It was fortunate . . . that Giovanni was a foreigner. As though by some mag-
nificently tacit agreement, with every day that he was at large, the press
became more vituperative against him and more gentle towards Guillaume. It
was remembered that there perished with Guillaume one of the oldest names
in France . . . Guillaume’s name became fantastically entangled with French
history, French honor, and French glory, and very nearly became, indeed, a
symbol of French manhood. (1956: 198–9)

David the narrator only gestures toward Giovanni’s migrant status and the social vul-
nerability that that status entails. He does not offer what within feminism is known
as an intersectional analysis. In the early morning hours of their first meeting, as they
ride in a cab together, David records Giovanni’s reaction when he asks him where
he lives: ‘for the first time he seemed slightly uncomfortable. “I live in a maid’s
room”’ (1956: 63). As the cab makes its way to Les Halles, the working-class district
known for its ethnic diversity (Washington 2014) and its mix of foreign and colonial
workers from Italy, Algeria, and other French colonies, David imagines Giovanni
blending into the quarter’s gritty and chaotic streets:

The pavements were slick with leavings, mainly cast-off, rotten leaves, flowers,
fruit, and vegetables which had met with disaster natural and slow, or abrupt.
And the walls and corners were combed with pissoirs, dull-burning, make-shift
braziers, cafes, restaurants, and smoky yellow bistros—of these last, some so
small that they were little more than diamond-shaped, enclosed corners holding
bottles and a zinc-covered counter. At all these points, men, young, old, middle-
aged, powerful, powerful even in the various fashions in which they had met, or
were meeting, their various ruin . . . Nothing here reminded me of home, though
Giovanni recognized, reveled in it all. (1956: 65–6; emphasis added)7

Yet Giovanni’s own comments on Les Halles do not suggest revelling: ‘“When
I first came to Paris,”’ he recalls, ‘“I worked in Les Halles – a long time, too.
Nom de Dieu, quel boulot! I pray always never to do that again”’ (1956: 66).
David the narrator leaves Giovanni’s French untranslated – ‘Christ, what a job
– and the withholding suggests his unwillingness to recognize more than a tempo-
rary sadness on the part of the Italian. David discloses to readers that Giovanni’s
motivation for leaving home is the death of his newborn; yet it is important to
realize that, in the post-war period and throughout the 1950s, tens of thousands
of Italians, especially from the south, who were recruited to meet the demands of
France’s severe labour shortage (Nicholls 2012: 516), were also fleeing a ‘desper-
ate economic crisis’ (McDonald 1969: 119).
There is more to Giovanni than meets the narrative eye or ear. It is tempt-
ing to wonder whether Baldwin is deliberately drawing attention to David’s
superficial reading of Giovanni’s ‘politics of location’ (Rich 1985) and with
 Translation failure in Giovanni’s Room  71
it his imperviousness as narrator to the fact of the massive influx of Italians in
France in the post-war period. Baldwin himself left the US in 1948 in order to
allow his writing to develop beyond the cultural context of America’s racism
and homophobia. His essays from the 1950s disclose his own keen awareness of
the suffering of foreign workers and colonial subjects in France. Michel Fabre
records how upon his return from a 1954 trip to the US, Baldwin registers a dif-
ference in the Parisian police’s treatment of colonials:

After the fall of Dien Bien Phu [in 1954], which signaled the crumbling of
the French colonial empire, the attitude of the police toward the Arabs had
become more vindictive, as though challenged authority was taking revenge
on any colonials at hand. Most of the Arab cafés Baldwin used to haunt had
been closed: tales circulated of Algerians being corralled in special camps,
jailed, killed in the streets as the revolutionary movement spread, and each
Algerian was forced to take sides for or against the FLN. (Fabre 1991: 203)

In a 1973 interview with Henry Louis Gates, Baldwin notes that, by comparison,
‘the French left me alone . . . I was freed from the crutches of race.’8 Similarly,
in ‘Equal in Paris’, published in 1955, Baldwin recounts his experience of being
arrested and spending eight days in jail in December 1949, before the case against
him was dropped. He writes the following:

It was quite clear to me that the Frenchmen in whose hands I found myself
were no better or worse than their American counterparts. Certainly their uni-
forms frightened me quite as much, and their impersonality, and the threat,
always very keenly felt by the poor, of violence, was as present in that com-
missariat as it had ever been for me in any police station. And I had seen, for
example, what Paris policemen could do to Arab peanut vendors. The only
difference here was that I did not understand the people, did not know what
techniques their cruelty took, did not know enough about their personalities
to see danger coming, to ward it off, did not know on what ground to meet it.
(1985 [1955]: 118)

Here as elsewhere in his non-fiction, Baldwin evinces a nuanced understand-

ing of the varying meanings produced by different intersections of race, class,
ethnicity, citizenship and cultural context. Perhaps, similar to the version of him-
self that Baldwin records in the above passage, David does not understand the
French whom he encounters, but it is difficult to overlook his readiness to ignore
Giovanni’s own ‘politics of location’.
Relatedly, in a novel in which French is a steady presence and, so often, indica-
tive of a deliberate strategy of rhetorical evasion on David’s part, the lack of any
mention of any Italian utterance seems significant. Language is a powerful vehi-
cle for creating intimacy, and this is perhaps especially apparent in cross-cultural
relationships. What, then, are readers to make of the absence of Italian in the
novel? The man who cannot respond to Giovanni’s ‘Je t’aime’ with a reciprocal
72  Margaret Sönser Breen
French phrase does not allow for the linguistic intimacy that Giovanni’s spoken
Italian would convey. No ‘buona notte’ or ‘ciao’ or ‘amore’. Niente. In his twin
role as translator-narrator, David cleanses his account of Italian. Keeping open
this possibility that Baldwin wants readers to notice the ethnic and racial limits of
David’s narration, one can tease out the import of the location of Giovanni’s room
on a street ‘with fairly recent apartment buildings’ (1956: 86): the city that David
in his leisure is enjoying is one that is being rebuilt by men such as Giovanni.

Translation dirt
For Baldwin, David’s selective translation across languages and cultures is a key
narrative strategy. With it, Baldwin allows readers to recognize David’s translation
choices as attempts to guard against admissions and connections that could sully
his vision of America, his story and, of course, himself. Yet David’s choices also
open up the possibility of understanding his narration as an attempt to overcome the
homophobia that shapes so many of his actions, most damagingly so with regard
to Giovanni. This possibility is evident in his recording of Giovanni’s comments
on American culture, especially concerning an American sense of temporality, to
which Giovanni refers as a ‘time . . . chez vous’ (1956: 48). Importantly, both the
temporal structure of David’s own narration and his account of the experience of
time that his relationship with Giovanni engenders stand in marked contrast to
Giovanni’s description of American time. Recounting their love story in one night
and identifying the stoppage of time as the legacy of that story, David offers read-
ers a narrative that, despite and indeed through its encoding of his resistance to
loving Giovanni, enacts a queer temporal sensibility.
In his initial conversation with David, Giovanni remarks, ‘You have a funny
sense of time . . . Time always sounds like a parade chez vous’ (1956: 48). David
Leeming sees in this moment ‘an attack on the white American myth embodied in
such terms as “the American Dream”, “upward mobility”, “the melting pot” and
“the work ethic”’ (2015 [1994]: 125–6). Today, readers of queer theory might
draw on Lee Edelman and Elizabeth Freeman’s respective terms ‘reproductive
futurism’ (2004: 3) and ‘chrononormativity’ (2010: xxii), and see in the moment
Giovanni’s attack on structures of time that shape life as a progress, a life wherein
investments in health, cleanliness, longevity, marriage and children are all mark-
ers of accumulating success. Within such a scape of ‘time . . . chez vous’, there
is no room for validating and valuing the encounter with time that David’s love
relationship with Giovanni engenders:

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea.
Time flowed past indifferently above us; hours and days had no meaning. In
the beginning, our life together held a joy and amazement which was new-
born every day. (Baldwin 1956: 99)

Indeed, the possibility of abandoning the measurement of one’s march through

time and instead translating oneself into a present that continually undoes itself
 Translation failure in Giovanni’s Room  73
through the experience of love frightens David. So he must discount and discard,
as if it were something dirty, not only the time spent with Giovanni but also the
encounter with time that his relationship with Giovanni creates. And so, again and
again, he insists on the differences between himself and Giovanni, who remains
beyond the borders of a time chez vous.
Yet David’s narration, despite so much evidence to the contrary, also positions
him beyond those borders. David does not offer a linear account; he himself does
not march sequentially through time; instead, he disrupts and rearranges chrono-
logical events. As a novel, Giovanni’s Room performs what Elizabeth Freeman
has termed ‘temporal drag’: ‘a counter-genealogical practice of archiving cul-
ture’s throwaway objects, including the outmoded masculinities and femininities
from which usable pasts may be extracted. [The] name for this practice, as well
as for the set of feelings that informs it, is temporal drag’ (Freeman 2010: xxiii).
Time, in Giovanni’s Room, is simultaneously compressed and porous. By figuring
David’s narration as a temporally queer performance, Baldwin in effect facilitates
the reading that David can change and that he himself understands his potential
for self-acceptance. Two moments that are part of his frame narrative – one at the
beginning of the novel and another at the end – suggest David’s queer location,
beyond a time chez vous.9
So, for example, in the first paragraphs of the novel, before he recounts his
love story, David imagines how the next morning, the morning of the execution,
he will take the train to Paris:

I may be drunk by morning but that will not do any good. I shall take the train
to Paris anyway. The train will be the same, the people . . . will be the same. We
will ride through the same changing countryside northward . . . At each stop,
recruits in their baggy brown uniforms and colored hats will open the compart-
ment door . . . There will be a girl sitting opposite me who will wonder why I
have not been flirting with her, who will be set on edge by the presence of the
recruits. It will all be the same, only I will be stiller. (1956: 7–8; emphasis added)

David pictures how, aboard the train hurtling forward, the soldiers and young
woman will engage in flirtatious exchanges. The scene allegorizes and puns on
heteronormativity’s ideological investment in a narrative structure that relies on
reproduction, sameness and linearity. David, while on the train, is nevertheless
not en train, not becoming part of the normative gender Bildung that the scene
stages. As he says a few paragraphs later, he ‘shall never be able to have any more
of those boyish, zestful affairs’ (1956: 10). On the train, he will be not simply still
but rather ‘stiller’, a grammatical impossibility; his separateness both helping to
define the scene and prefiguring his own queer narrative performance. Thus, from
the start of the novel, Baldwin allows for the interpretation not only that David
the narrator but also that the novel’s readers may understand that he has achieved
a form of self-acceptance, albeit at a terrible cost.
The last paragraph of the novel, with its parting image of David the morning
after, sustains this interpretive possibility. David describes how he tears up a note
74  Margaret Sönser Breen
that, written by his acquaintance Jacques, gives the day and time of Giovanni’s
execution:

The morning weighs on my shoulders with the dreadful weight of hope and
I take the blue envelope which Jacques has sent me and tear it slowly into
many pieces, watching them dance in the wind, watching the wind carry them
away. Yet, as I turn and begin walking toward the waiting people, the wind
blows some of them back on me. (1956: 224)

The text announcing Giovanni’s death, which David would discard as trash, sticks
to him. Within the context of the novel’s thematic opposition of cleanliness and
dirtiness, an opposition that pits David’s sanitized aloofness against the dirty inti-
macy of Giovanni’s room, what Giovanni calls ‘the stink of love’ (1956: 187), this
final moment enacts a queer, albeit negative, annunciation, with which Baldwin
returns to the question that saturates the novel: can David the narrator be at home
with himself as a gay man? Is the narrative space that is Giovanni’s Room ulti-
mately inhabitable and hospitable?
With the strategy of selective translation, Baldwin offers readers a subtle yet
significant tool for recognizing and learning from David’s homophobia. Even so,
the question of how readers are to interpret the novel’s ending remains unsettled
(as well as unsettling). Does David’s use of language and languages only entail a
loss of intimacy that is at once communal, private and personal? Do the words and
phrases that David ignores and leaves untranslated themselves only function as
totems of his refusal of love? The verbal excesses that he bars from his American
English are translation dirt: do they serve to mark his translation failure but noth-
ing else? Or do they border a queer time in which he recognizes his possibilities
for belonging? Within his frame narrative, is it possible that this translation dirt
ultimately become David’s ‘dreadful weight of hope’?

Notes
1 I am grateful to Elena Basile, who suggested this particular formulation.
2 France’s tradition of homosexual tolerance led, among other things, from the early
twentieth century forward, to a flourishing American expatriate community of lesbian
and bisexual women artists, including Josephine Baker, Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney,
Gertrude Stein and Thelma Wood, famously described by Radclyffe Hall in The Well of
Loneliness (1928). I am grateful to Robert Gillett for this point.
3 I am indebted to Miller Wolf Oberman for conversations regarding the relevance of
Butler’s discussion of original and copy to an understanding of queer translation.
4 The 1997 Payot & Rivages French edition of the novel bears out this reading: ‘milieu’ is
marked out as French and ‘milieu’ as English. See p. 33.
5 Hella’s bad French offers one example of the text’s consistent sloppiness with regard to
diacritical marks here and elsewhere – missing cedillas and accents – reflects not only
the American characters’ but also the American editors’ indifference to correct French,
an indifference that necessarily extends to American readers as well. Dial first published
the novel; Dial was later acquired by Dell. My thanks to Richard J. Bleiler for helping
me trace out the publication history of the novel.
 Translation failure in Giovanni’s Room  75
6 For substantial discussions of this issue, see Moe (2002) and Schneider (1998).
7 ‘Pissoirs’ is italicized in the original; I have italicized the last sentence in this passage.
8 This interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., from 5 September 1973, appeared in James
Olney, ed. Afro-American Writing Today (Baton Rouge: LSU, 1989), 14. See Fabre
1991: 205.
9 My thanks to Françoise Dussart, Margaret Higonnet, Charles Mahoney and David
Sonstroem for helping me think through this discussion of the frame narrative.

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6 Globally queer?
Taiwanese homotextualities in translation
Andrea Bachner

Sinophone circulations of queerness

The circulation of queer texts and representations from and to the Chinese-speaking
world has largely been one of unequal exchange.1 Even as Chinese queer-themed
films (and to a lesser extent literary texts), both from the PRC and other Sinophone
places, started to garner international acclaim, the late 1980s and 1990s witnessed
the importing of texts and theories about non-normative sexualities from Europe and
the US, first to Taiwan and Hong Kong, and then to China. As Western audiences
welcomed Chinese representations of non-heteronormative sexualities, motivated
by a sympathy for queer expressions elsewhere, such texts were also frequently
celebrated as examples of resistance against non-Western and hence supposedly
more oppressive contexts. Meanwhile, theoretical formations of queerness in these
Sinophone places were mainly shaped directly on the basis of Western models,
brokered by Chinese-speaking intellectuals who, after spending time abroad, trans-
lated and circulated key texts of Western theory. From the outset, the circulation
of queerness in the Sinophone world and from Chinese-speaking cultures to global
audiences has been an interculturally sensitive issue, both terminologically and
politically. And it is one that implicates multiple processes of translation.
To address the question of queerness in Chinese-speaking contexts automati-
cally ushers in the issue of translation. After all, even as acts and articulations
that we now describe as queer have existed in different epochs and cultures, the
modern understanding of sexuality, and thus also the bases for the theorization of
non-normative sexualities and queer politics, are Western inventions, European
imports to China in the early twentieth century.2 The influx and translation of
scientific knowledge from the West (often via Japan) into China not only changed
the epistemological frameworks for thinking sexuality. It also led to a reconsider-
ation of same-sex relationships and acts as pathological phenomena that had to be
catalogued, controlled and repressed.3 When cultural expressions, theoretical for-
mations and activism around non-normative sexualities began to proliferate in the
1980s and 1990s, first in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and then in China, these reacted
to and challenged such heteronormative patterns by having recourse to Western
models and renegotiating these with locally and culturally specific formations.
The term queer, that had become a rallying point for non-normative sexu-
alities and theoretical discourses under the heading of queer theory in the US,
78  Andrea Bachner
was translated in Taiwan in 1994 as ku’er 酷兒, before it became common cur-
rency among intellectuals throughout the Chinese-speaking world, gradually
replacing the Chinese translations of homosexuality (tongxinglian 同性戀 and
tongxing’ai 同性愛) in intellectual and cultural contexts.4 As Song Hwee Lim
points out, the term ku’er, coined for a special issue of the Taiwanese journal
Isle Margin (Daoyu bianyuan) featuring translations of queer-themed literary
texts from the West ‘consists of the Chinese characters ku (meaning “cruel” and
“cold” as well as “very” and “extremely”; it is also the transliteration of the
English slang “cool” meaning fashionable or having street credibility) and er
(meaning “child,” “youngster,” and “son”)’ (2008: 235). It coexists and is in
friction with a variety of other terms, translations from the English, locally spe-
cific terms, or combinations of both, most prominently the term tongzhi 同志,
or ‘comrade’, which had been translated from communist parlance to the realm
of same-sex sexuality in Hong Kong’s first lesbian and gay film festival in 1989
and has since then gained wide currency in the Chinese-speaking world.5 In a
felicitous process of transliteration-cum-translation, ku’er constitutes not only
a phonetic approximation to queer that exhibits its alliances to the English term
and its conceptual background, while also sinographically transcribing and thus
appropriating it for a Taiwanese (and subsequently larger Sinophone) context.
With its resonances with cruelty and coolness, the term also captures the spirit
of irony and contestation at play in queer (Li 2003: 1). Unlike the importation
of queer into other languages and cultures, this suggestive rendering rewrites
queerness in a Chinese shape while not doing away with its global Anglophone
legacy. In spite of its deviations from queer, ku’er does not completely escape
the potentially problematic status of the term in other linguistic and cultural con-
texts, where it often stands as a loanword that contests heteronormativity on the
one hand, but risks becoming a weapon in the reiteration of the West’s global
hegemony on the other. And yet, ku’er does not merely underpin the illusion of a
unilateral dissemination of queer knowledge from the West to the rest either.6 As
a hybrid term suspended between its Western roots and its Sinophone twist, ku’er
draws attention to the productivity and challenges of translation.
Even on the level of terminology, then, queerness has already been multiply re-
appropriated, refracted, even twisted in Sinophone contexts. These terminological
debates and quandaries, however, are symptomatic of more fundamental prob-
lems connected to the intercultural circulation of ideas about and expressions of
queerness: between (often politically and strategically useful) identity politics and
the performative and anti-essentializing tendencies of queer thought. If, as Judith
Butler argues in ‘Critically Queer’, queer, being ‘a site of collective contestation,
the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and futural imaginings’ is
‘never fully owned, but always and only redeployed, twisted, queered from a prior
usage’ (1993: 228), what about its intersections with various cultural identities?
The field of queer studies, divided as it is between queer universalism and cultural
particularism, between emphasizing the global continuity of queer expressions
and the cultural and local specificities of queer formations, risks re-introducing
and stabilizing the kinds of boundaries and categories it set out to destabilize.7
 Taiwanese homotextualities in translation  79
An insistence on cultural specificity against a supposedly universal experience
of queerness needs to avoid reifying national and ethnic categories. Hence Fran
Martin (2015: 35) calls upon critics to ‘[emphasize] the multiplicity and frag-
mentation of Chinese identities today’, instead of invoking Chineseness as an
essentialized category. After all, as Helen Hok-Sze Leung reminds us (2008: 129),
both ‘Chineseness’ and ‘queerness’ are already phenomena that travel beyond
national boundaries and question cultural and sexual identity politics. Yet, how
can we think the multiple volatile intersections of queerness and Chineseness in
the force field of global circulation and local (as well as regional, linguistically
specific, cultural, subcultural, communitarian and individual) articulations? One
possible way of approaching this question is through the lens of translation, not
only of treating the circulation of ‘queer’ knowledge and expressions as a type of
translation, but also of scrutinizing how queer-themed texts are translated and thus
put back into the global circulation of queerness. In what follows I will develop
this double perspective by analysing two queer-themed novels from Taiwan and
their translations into English: Pai Hsien-yung’s 白先勇 1983 novel Niezi 孽子
(translated by Howard Goldblatt as Crystal Boys in 1990), and Chu T’ien-wen’s
朱天文 Huangren shouji 荒人手記 of 1994 (translated as Notes of a Desolate
Man by Goldblatt and Sylvia Lin in 1999).

Retranslating gay Taiwan

Pai Hsien-yung’s novel Niezi, a path-breaking gay-themed text by one of the
foremost Taiwanese novelists, narrates the vicissitudes of a group of homosexual
adolescents in 1960s Taipei. The homosexual boys who populate the fictional
world of the novel have lost or have been rejected by their fathers and seek refuge
in the marginal spaces of the gay cruising and prostitution scene, such as Taipei’s
gay bars or New Park. Even though the novel is full of references to Taiwan and
Taipei – albeit presented as an intersection of American, Japanese, Chinese and
local Taiwanese influences – its focus on the protagonist A-qing’s coming of age
and the context of gay subculture resonates with many familiar gay-themed nov-
els and films from the 1980s.
Niezi was translated into English in 1990 by Howard Goldblatt, now one of the
best-known translators of Chinese literary texts into English, and published by
Gay Sunshine Press, a press that caters to an audience interested in gay-themed
texts (Gay Sunshine Press, founded in 1975, describes itself on its website as
‘the world’s oldest continuing gay book publisher’). In spite of Pai’s status as
one of the most important Taiwanese writers at the time and his integration into
the writerly and academic world of the US, the novel was marketed in the US
for its gay credentials, as ‘[the] first modern Asian gay novel’ (1990: cover).
Together with titles translated from the Japanese and Spanish, Crystal Boys fits
the press’s emphasis on transcultural gay experiences. In this guise, Pai’s novel
targets American gay readers seeking echoes of their own experience beyond their
own culture. Such translations of gay-themed works function as proof of shared
gay identities and experiences across the globe, creating a titillating mixture of
80  Andrea Bachner
the known and the unknown: there everything is (almost) like here, also and espe-
cially when it comes to queerness.
Goldblatt’s translation, especially in its choice of title, both underlines and
complicates the commodification of Pai’s novel in the US. In his ‘Translator’s
Note’, Goldblatt comments on the English title as follows: ‘In Taiwan, the gay
community is known as the buoliquan [sic], literally “glass community,” while
the individuals are referred to as “glass boys.” The term “crystal boy” has been
used in this translation’ (1990: 7). While the term ‘crystal boy’ (Goldblatt 1990:
42; literally ‘little crystal’, xiao boli 小玻璃; Pai 1983: 34) is used in the text, it is
not a literal translation of the title of the Chinese original, niezi 孽子, a fact that
Goldblatt does not mention in his ‘Note’. Niezi, which can be translated as ‘son of
evil’, alludes to a structure of karmic retribution, namely that the sins of the par-
ents are being repaid by the moral corruption of their offspring. One of the novel’s
characters, Longzi, whom A-qing meets toward the beginning of the novel, bears
the stigma of ‘nie’ in his first name, Kuilong, a type of ‘nie’ (‘evil’) dragon. As
he explains to A-qing: ‘Wang Kuilong is my real name . . . I was told that in
ancient times “kuilong” was a sort of evil dragon that caused natural calamities
wherever it went. I never did find out why my father gave me such an inauspicious
name’ (Goldblatt 1990: 35; ‘王夔龍才是我的真名字。據說夔龍就是古代一種
孽龍，一出現便引發天災洪水。不知道為什麼我父親會給我取這樣不吉祥
的名字’; Pai 1983: 26, emphasis added).
Goldblatt’s choice to change the title to Crystal Boys is not motivated by an
avoidance of cultural specificity. In fact, the literal translation of the Taiwanese term
into English makes it necessary for the translator to step in with an explanation so
that readers understand its reference to Taiwan’s gay community. Rather, while the
English title underscores the gay subject matter of the novel (with a Taiwanese twist),
it downplays the novel’s focus on male filiation – at least on the book’s cover. It thus
also elides a culturally specific reference of Pai’s text: not only to the family-based,
patriarchal structures of Chinese society and the special bond between fathers and
sons,8 but also to the special historical backdrop of Taiwan. Niezi presents a society
in which the (hetero)normative structures of filiation have been voided. The fathers
in the text see the chance to turn their sons into replicas of themselves ruined by the
shamefulness of the sexuality that ‘dares not speak its name’. The logic of procre-
ation, of a father’s afterlife in his sons, is thus endangered, since the desired mirror
images are tainted by the stigma of homosexual desire, one that does not desire to
become the same (like the father), but that desires the same sex.
The focus on the loss and contestation of paternal authority figures in Taiwanese
culture in the novel has close connections to Taiwan’s history, namely the post-
1949 relocation of the Nationalist government to Taiwan, where the eroticization
of Chiang Kai-shek as symbolic father of the nation was coupled with a question-
ing or absence of father figures. In Niezi, Pai translates the topos of Taiwan as
‘orphan of Asia’ onto the plights of gay boys and their search for identity and
affection. Thus one of the characters in the novel likens the gay boys to ‘a bunch
of fledglings who’ve lost [their] nest’ (‘一群失去了窩巢的青春鳥’) and says of
them that they are marked by a ‘strain of wildness in [their] blood, just like the
 Taiwanese homotextualities in translation  81
typhoons and earthquakes that are part of [Taiwan]’ (‘帶著這股野勁兒，就好像
這個島上的颱風地震一般’) (Goldblatt 1990: 81; Pai 1983: 77). This allegorical
connection asserts itself from the outset, as the description of the gay community
of New Park by the first-person narrator A-qing resonates with the uncertain,
ambiguous status of Taiwan: ‘As soon as the sun comes up, our kingdom goes
into hiding, for it is an unlawful nation; we have no government and no constitu-
tion, we are neither recognized nor respected by anyone, our citizenry is little
more than rabble’ (Goldblatt 1990: 17; ‘天一亮，我們的王國便隱形起來，因
爲這是一個不合法的國度：我們沒有政府，沒有憲法，不被承認，不受尊
重，我們有的只是一群烏合之衆的國民’; Pai 1983: 5).
Of course, the allegorical overtones of Pai’s novel do not erase its queer content.
Nor do the references to Taiwan and to Chinese structures of kinship weaken the
global appeal of Niezi – after all, Taiwan’s precarious situation is the outcome of
the frictions between and intersections of different cultural and political forces
in a Cold War context. And yet the novel also questions the easy translatability
of gay identities across national and cultural borders. When Longzi recounts his
US experiences to A-qing, these are marked by alienation and violence. Instead
of finding an equivalent to the gay community in Taipei’s New Park, Longzi is
gang-raped in New York’s Central Park by gay individuals whom his account
transposes from fellow gay individuals (‘同路人’, literally ‘those who follow the
same path’, translated by Goldblatt as ‘those like us’) into wild beasts that con-
sume his flesh (Goldblatt 1990: 36–7; Pai 1983: 27).9 While some of the gay
boys of the novel dream of leaving Taiwan, Longzi’s experience abroad speaks
of alienation, self-destruction and madness, and not of the potentially liberat-
ing, promiscuous gay space of New York (or San Francisco, which is already a
global reference for A-qing). And while Pai’s novel travels to the US thanks to
Goldblatt’s translation on its credentials as a gay-themed text that adds intercul-
tural flavour to a common queer experience, Niezi/Crystal Boys itself presents a
less optimistic picture of queerness in translation.

Queering Taiwan
By 1999, ten years after the English translation of Crystal Boys, when Goldblatt’s
and Sylvia Lin’s translation of Notes of a Desolate Man by Taiwanese author Chu
T’ien-wen came out, the market for Sinophone literature in translation as well as
for queer-themed texts had radically changed. Instead of by a press catering to a
gay niche-market, Notes of a Desolate Man was published as part of Columbia
University Press’s series of ‘Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan’. After all,
Chu was not only an established author by then, well-known for her novels and for
her collaborations on the scripts of most films by Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-
hsien 侯孝賢; the book had also won one of the most prestigious literary prizes in
Taiwan, the China Times Novel Prize. Furthermore, in spite of the queer-themed
subject matter of Notes (the novel features the reflections and reminiscences of its
first-person narrator, Xiao Shao, as he witnesses the death of his friend Ah Yao
from AIDS), Chu T’ien-wen’s status as a woman writer who does not identify as
82  Andrea Bachner
queer herself would have made Notes a less than ideal vehicle for a gay quest for
identity, especially since its postmodern style, with plentiful cultural, literary and
theoretical allusions, resists an experiential mode of reading. In fact, originally Chu
conceived of the novel as written from the point of view of a heterosexual woman,
before settling on the perspective of a man mourning his gay friend as a reflection
on his own queer identity, a choice which in turn allows for the author’s ‘ventrilo-
quistic identification with the story of her unnamed friend’ (Rojas 2008: 281), upon
which the gay character of the novel is based.
Much as Chu’s novel sports a complexly mediated and multiply translated per-
spective, it also dazzles readers with a kaleidoscopic array of texts and images
through which the protagonist’s personality is rendered as if refracted by a broken
mirror. Both in the original and in Goldblatt’s and Lin’s translation, Notes is a
tour-de-force of palimpsestically interwoven references, from popular music to
film classics, from the Bible to classical Chinese poetry, from Japanese manga
to anthropology and cultural theory. With its intricate labyrinth of allusions and
citations that led the translators on a veritable ‘treasure hunt’ (Goldblatt and Lin
1999: vii), Notes presents itself explicitly as a global text. Its first-person narrator
is well travelled, both literally and textually. The lifestyle choices and the cultural
penchants displayed by the protagonist partake of a cosmopolitan construction of
queerness. If queerness is couched as a shared sensitivity across different nations
and cultures, augmented by the global circulation of commodities, the novel’s
focus on AIDS and HIV also conjures up another global spectre: Ah Yao’s infec-
tion with AIDS dates from his promiscuous life in the US, in such gay centres
as San Francisco and New York in the late 1980s (Goldblatt and Lin 1999: 4).
The novel thus already adumbrates a complex scenario based on processes of
exchange, transfer and contagion between commodities, bodies and texts.
With its multiple intercultural references, Chu’s novel frames its protagonists
explicitly within a queer context, that is, as aware of and exposed to the globally
circulating paradigm of queerness. At one point in the novel, for instance, Xiao
Shao reflects on Ah Yao’s self-definition as queer as follows:

所謂同志，queer 。新品種的同性戀，驕傲跟舊時代斷裂。前愛滋與後
愛滋，其間並無連續，氣質之異是要開國改元，重新正名的。故而先
得釐清楚，不是 gay，是 queer。阿堯說，queer，怎麼樣，我就是這個
字，我們跟你們，本來不同，何須言異！
阿堯堅持，gay，白種的，男的，同性戀，這是政治不正確說
法。queer 則不，管它男的女的黃的白的黑的雙性的變性的，四海一家
皆包容在內，queer 名之。 (Chu 1997: 39)

The so-called comrades: queer. A new breed of homosexuality, a proud

break with earlier times. There is no link between pre-AIDS and post-AIDS.
The essential difference is the creation of a new age, a rectification of names.
Therefore, it is important to make a clear distinction: It’s not gay, it’s queer.
Ah Yao taunted, queer, so what? I am that word. You people and we are
fundamentally different, so why split hairs?
 Taiwanese homotextualities in translation  83
Ah Yao insisted that gay is white, male. The term homosexual is politi-
cally incorrect. queer is not like that at all. Male, female, yellow, white, black,
bisexual, transsexual, there’s room for everyone, that’s queer. (Goldblatt and
Lin 1999: 25)

The passage not only transitions between free indirect discourse, direct speech
and indirect speech, thus variably marking the distance or closeness between
Ah Yao’s opinion and Xiao Shao’s thoughts; it also reflects on queerness as a
problem of terminology, one that involves questions of inclusion and exclusion.
Thus, Ah Yao rejects the terms gay and homosexual because of their limi-
tations. Whereas the translation ties gay to whiteness and male identity and
designates homosexual as politically incorrect, in the original, gay, (racially)
white, male, and homosexual appear as a series of apposite terms divided by
commas. Consequently, the relationship between the four adjectives remains
more ambiguous than in the translation which frames gay as negative because of
its alignment with white and male, whereas the original allows both such a reading
and an interpretation that puts all four terms into a category of exclusive, and
thus politically incorrect terms.
But even as the novel, filtered through Xiao Shao’s perspective, espouses queer
as the most positive, since most inclusive term, the beginning of this passage
introduces the Chinese term tongzhi (‘comrade’) only to replace it immediately
with queer, without, however, dwelling on the relation between the two. In the
Chinese original, queer (which had not yet been translated as ku’er when Chu
wrote the novel) appears in English, a fact that attentive readers of the translation
can pick up on, since the translators explain their strategy of rendering Western-
language words in small caps (Goldblatt and Lin 1999: vii). Ah Yao’s praise of
the inclusive nature of queer is already tainted with the erasure of the more local
term tongzhi. For those who, like Ah Yao, embrace the word as a self-descriptor,
the term queer promises to usher in a brave new non-normative world, to break
with the old strictures of heterosexuality. But the Chinese language used in the
passage – supposedly Xiao Shao’s rendition of Ah Yao’s wording – resonates
with traditional Chinese culture, even as it also uses English terms such as gay
and queer, as well as Chinese coinages from the English, such as ‘pre-AIDS’ or
‘post-AIDS’. Ah Yao (in Xiao Shao’s account) uses four-character phrases in a
formal register reminiscent of classical Chinese, such as ‘何須言異’ (‘so why
split hairs’) or ‘四海一家’ (‘everyone’), which Goldblatt’s and Lin’s translation
render into relatively register-neutral English. Furthermore, he describes his insis-
tence on naming, on being or not being that word (queer versus gay), explicitly
with the Confucian terminology of a ‘rectification of names’ (正名), where only
knowledge of the proper designation of things allows for a correct positioning of
the individual in a web of (mostly) hierarchical relationships.
The juxtaposition of postmodern jargon and reflections with references to
and formulations of traditional Chinese culture in this passage echoes the pro-
tagonist’s frantic search for the meaning of queerness. What is the place of those
people, like the first-person narrator, who stand outside of traditional kinship
84  Andrea Bachner
relations as defined not only in the Confucian structures of Chinese society, but
also by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose theories of filiation Xiao Shao
cites and reflects upon? If queer individuals, as Xiao Shao ponders, make up 10
percent of the world’s population, then how can they be excluded from Lévi-
Strauss’s all-encompassing system of kinship (Chu 1997: 56)? And what does
that tell us about the rules of inclusion and exclusion and the productivity of large,
global systems? Is queer, as Ah Yao seems to believe, the panacea against exclu-
sionary practices or does it inevitably inherit the limitations of its cultural and
linguistic contexts, even setting up yet other categories of difference – such as
the one between ‘you people’ and ‘we’ that Ah Yao insists upon? Rather than
providing a straightforward answer, Chu’s novel puts emphasis on the translation,
mediation, fragmentation, and multiplication of meaning itself. Rather than in
an alternative frame of reference for queerness, the protagonist finds a tentative
solution in a post-structuralist belief in discursive multiplicity and constructiv-
ism. Even as its postmodern, global web of references makes Notes interculturally
portable, however, it also puts pressure on the translators. Not only because of
the multiplicity of references that, though sketching a shared global repository,
tax any reader’s knowledge with their idiosyncratic composition, but also since
queerness, most explicitly in the novel’s reflections on the term queer, is already
multiply refracted, and indeed translated even before Notes is rendered in another
language, not least because it also self-consciously participates in the construction
of queerness.

Homotextualities and double translation

The translations of these two novels that plot homotextualities from a Taiwanese
perspective – as specific nodes where different cultural expressions and national
interests intersect – bear witness to the changing patterns of circulation and com-
modification of queer-themed texts from the Sinophone world in the US. Queer
texts from Taiwan continue to find new markets and readerships, beyond the very
specialized audiences targeted by their publications in English, either those with
a specific investment in representations of queer experiences or those interested
in literature from Taiwan. For instance, the 2014 translation of Qiu Miaojin’s 邱
妙津 lesbian-themed novel Last Words from Montmartre (蒙馬特遺書) by Ari
Larissa Heinrich shows that queer-themed Sinophone texts still find their place
in the very limited market of Chinese literature in English translation. As queer-
themed texts from Taiwan in English translations leave behind the Sinophone
circuit and enter into a different, now Anglophone global trajectory, they not only
speak to the limitations and (in)visibility of certain world literary contexts, but
also to the challenges of the transcultural circulation of queerness. Even before
the translated versions of Pai’s and Chu’s novels were circulated beyond their
Sinophone contexts, they were already engaged in queer translations, as they
reflect critically on the circulation of queer discourses between Taiwan and the
rest. As such, their translations into English also potentially allow us to bring
different takes on queerness back to a US context. After all, such transcultural
 Taiwanese homotextualities in translation  85
movements might challenge facile notions of global queerness and allow us to
maintain the radical definitional openness of the term queer.

Notes
1 I use queer here as a convenient envelope for texts and theories about non-normative
sexualities, even as the chapter pays close attention to the specific circulation of the term
and its cognates in Chinese-speaking cultures.
2 In her introduction to a collection of Chinese lesbian-themed stories in English transla-
tion, Sieber (2001) points out that the translation of queer texts from Sinophone places is
based on earlier translations of notions of sexuality and sexual difference from the West
to China.
3 For in-depth discussions of the translation of Western notions of non-normative sexuali-
ties in early twentieth-century China with its complex processes and negotiations, see
Sang (1999) and Chiang (2010).
4 In this chapter, I quote from the Chinese in traditional characters and use pinyin tran-
scriptions for Chinese words, with the exception of some names for which established
transcriptions exist.
5 On tongzhi, see Lim (2008: 237). For an overview of the wealth of translingual queer
terminology in Chinese cultural contexts, see the glossary in Leung (2009).
6 See the reflections on the potential pitfalls of translating queer into other languages and
cultures in Epps (2007).
7 For an overview of the debates between universalism and particularism in queer studies,
see Chiang (2014).
8 Much as early critical appraisals emphasized questions of kinship, often discussing
these at the expense of its queer content, Niezi is now a classic of Taiwanese queer
criticism.
9 Longzi’s account focuses on African American individuals and espouses a primitivist,
even racist tone.

References
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Chiang, H. 2010. ‘Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of Homosexuality in China’,
Gender and History, 22(3): 629–57.
———. 2014. ‘(De)Provincializing China’, in H. Chiang and A.L. Heinrich (eds), Queer
Sinophone Cultures, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 19–51.
Chu T’ien-wen 朱天文. 1997. Huangren shouji 荒人手記 [Notes of a desolate man] [2nd
edn], Taipei: Shibao Wenhua.
———. 1999. Notes of a Desolate Man, trans. H. Goldblatt and S. Li-chun Lin, New York:
Columbia University Press.
Epps, B. 2007. ‘Retos y riesgos, pautas y promesas de la teoría queer’, Debate Feminista,
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7 Queer translation/translating queer
during the ‘gay boom’ in Japan
Jeffrey Angles

Introduction1
Literature projects strong images that shape people’s perceptions about the subjects
that it describes. This is especially true of writing pertaining to love and sexuality –
literature strongly shapes perceptions of how we should feel when we are in love,
how we might express those feelings, what we should and could feel when experi-
encing erotic desire, and the ways people act on their erotic urges. In fact, because
literature tends to provide such good access to the interiority of characters, one might
argue that it teaches us even more about the inner, psychological workings of sexual
desire than other media, such as film.
Because of this, literature about queer desire has often taken on special mean-
ings for sexual minorities. Especially in societies where minority sexualities such
as homoeroticism, sadomasochism and polyamory are met with silence, homo-
phobia, legal oppression, or outright violence, it is not uncommon for people with
those interests to seek out examples of other people like them. Carolyn Dinshaw
has noted how often sexual minorities turn to history in order to make cross-
temporal, affective connections between ‘on the one hand, lives, texts, and other
cultural phenomena left out of sexual categories back then and, on the other hand,
those left out of current sexual categories now’ (Dinshaw 1999: 1). Such impulses
are grounded in the attempt to extend ‘the resources for self- and community-
building’ and to create an ‘affective connection’ across distances of space and
time (1999: 21). Needless to say, it is not just to the past that people turn in their
search for community. They often turn to the writing of their contemporaries or
near-contemporaries in other nations to learn about how people in other places
deal with feelings outside the ones their particular society sanctions. Through
identifying across the boundaries of time and culture, many activists have gained
the confidence to argue that compulsive heterosexuality has not necessarily been
the norm everywhere across time.
In recent years, queer studies have undergone what Patricia Ticineto Clough
(2007: 7–8) and others have called an ‘affective turn’, as more and more schol-
ars pay attention to the roles that cross-cultural and cross-temporal identification
plays in shaping ideas about sexuality. Interestingly, however, there has been strik-
ingly little examination of the role that translation plays in affective identification,
despite the fact that most of this cross-cultural and cross-temporal identification
88  Jeffrey Angles
also happens across linguistic lines. One of the key assumptions of this chapter is
that in writing the history of queer thought and identity, it is crucially important
to examine the mediating role of translators since it is through their interventions
that affective links form. Rather than treating the gateway of translation as an
invisible, empty opening that allows unmediated access to another culture, one
should pay attention to who is translating what and how translators shape the
kinds of cross-cultural affective links that emerge.
This chapter focuses on translation and affective relationships in an important
moment in Japanese-Western cultural exchange, a moment during which many
Western texts about non-heteronormative desire – and male-male eroticism in
particular – were being translated into Japanese. Although numerous Japanese
writers such as Edogawa Ranpo, Inagaki Taruho, Mishima Yukio and Takahashi
Mutsuo had written about same-sex eroticism off and on over the course of the
twentieth century, there was a wave of cultural production around the year 1990 as
writers, directors, artists and activists began to treat the subject of male homoerot-
icism with even greater directness and frequency (Angles 2011: 1–35; Buckley
2000: 215–20; McLelland 2005: 175–7; Miller 2000: 83–7). In the late 1980s
and early 1990s, there was a small flood of Japanese translations of Western lit-
erature that described various forms of non-heteronormative experience. Among
them were many translations of classic texts, such as those of Oscar Wilde, André
Gide, Herman Hesse and E.M. Forster, but there were also many translations
of contemporary writers, including Hervé Guibert, Manuel Puig, Gore Vidal,
Gordon Merrick, Michael Chabon and Christopher Davis. Not all of these figures
specifically wrote about Anglo-American models of gay identity, in which same-
sex eroticism is often portrayed as a sexual preference, means of identification
and the key factor giving rise to a ‘gay’ lifestyle; however, a very large number
of the Western authors translated during the ‘gay boom’ of the 1990s did focus
on American gay culture, including Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, David
Leavitt, John Fox, Michel Nava, Christopher Bram and John Rechy.
This chapter looks at two influential translations created during the ‘gay boom’
to illustrate the impact that the translations of these books had on the Japanese
reading world and, more specifically, on the Japanese gay community. It argues
that the translation of these and other books performed important cultural work –
not only did they help shape images of queer sexuality for audiences that went well
beyond a queer readership in Japan, but also provoked debate within the gay male
community about the relationship between queer identity and literary production.

John Fox and The Boys on the Rock

Over the course of the twentieth century, Japanese writers translated a number
of European and American authors who had written about various forms of non-
heteronormative sexuality, including figures as varied as Edward Carpenter, Walt
Whitman and the Marquis de Sade. Some of these translations earned a great deal
of attention; for instance, Shibusawa Tatsuhiko’s infamous translation Akutoku
no sakae (1959) of Sade’s L’histoire de Juliette, ou les Prospérités du vice led to
 Queer translation/translating queer in Japan  89
a prominent and widely publicized court case that, when finally settled in 1969,
helped define the parameters of ‘pornography’ in Japan (Cather 2012: 164–6).
While this and certain other translations of queer literature earned significant
admiration, translations of Western queer literature appeared in a relatively spo-
radic fashion, with works by different translators appearing once every few years
with different publishing houses. In other words, until the 1990s, there were no
single voices or institutional forces that produced translations of Western queer
literature in any sustained, consistent way.
A watershed in the history of queer literature in Japanese was the 1989 transla-
tion of The Boys on the Rock, a 1984 novel by the American writer John Fox. This
translation started a mini-domino effect: it was followed by a large number of
translations of novels about queer desire – more specifically, about gay men in the
West. The idea for the translation of The Boys on the Rock came in the late 1980s,
when Murakami Haruki, the prominent novelist and translator, recommended a
number of recent American short stories and novels, including Fox’s work, to
Matsuie Masashi, an editor at the publishing company Shinchōsha. Matsuie was
editing a collection of new American fiction about adolescence (Amerika seishun
shōsetsu tokushū), which would appear as a special issue of the journal Shōsetsu
shinchō (New Tide – Fiction) (Koshikawa 2011). To translate this work, Matsuie
chose Koshikawa Yoshiaki, a translator and scholar who specialized in American
fiction, and who would eventually come to be well known for his translations of
Paul Bowles, Gary Indiana and Thomas Pynchon. Koshikawa’s translation of Fox
ended up being the longest story in Matsuie’s collection, which was published
in March 1989. Later, in 1989, Shinchōsha published it in book form, and in
1993 it was republished in paperback in the Shinchō Bunko series. According to
another translator, Kakinuma Eiko (Kakinuma et al. 1994: 112), the book sold
‘explosively well’, and, for reasons that will be discussed below, reached an unex-
pectedly wide audience, thus showing Japanese publishers the potential market
for Western gay literature in Japan, and forging the way for other publishers to
release other translations of novels about the American gay experience.
Fox’s works sold very well in Japan, but he is barely remembered in his home-
land today. Born in 1952, Fox grew up in the Bronx; he participated in writers’
workshops in college along with future ‘brat pack’ author Tama Janowitz. The
Boys on the Rock (1989) was the only full-length novel he published during his
life, which like that of so many talented artists of his generation, was cut short
by AIDS at the age of 38. The Boys on the Rock describes a handsome, athletic
boy who experiences a powerful attraction to other men but who, shackled by the
expectations of a society that eschews anything but heterosexuality, struggles to
understand how to express his feelings and what they might mean for his identity.
The blurb on the back of the 1994 English edition sums up the story as follows:

Written with uncanny precision and wild humour, this is the story of Billy
Connors, high school student in the Bronx, member of the swim team, and
all-around regular guy, who in his sixteenth year has to face the fact that he’s
a little different from everyone else, a little ‘weird’.
90  Jeffrey Angles
Though he’s sort of going steady with a girl and popular at school he’s
always worried that the secret fantasies he has about men would set him apart
and make him ‘different’ if anyone knew about them. How Billy faces up to
himself – and his friends – as he discovers the complexities of life, the exuber-
ance of sex, and what it means to be an adult in our imperfect world, makes
for a touching, wise, and very moving novel. (Fox 1994 [1989]: back cover)

In other words, the novel is a coming-out story, which the publisher thought
could be of benefit to sexual minorities dealing with their own issues of iden-
tity and self-expression, as well as straight readers who are trying to understand
the struggles of sexual minorities. As these comments suggest, the book is in its
inception, content, and presentation deeply related to the American gay liberation
movement, which had gained great public visibility two decades previously with
the Stonewall Riots in New York City. In fact, the 1994 edition that provides the
source of these comments was part of St. Martin’s Stonewall Inn Editions, which
specialized in contemporary gay and lesbian writing from the United States. As
the name of the series, as well as the pink triangle on the upper left cover of the
book suggest, the series was a product of the liberation movements of the 1980s
and early 1990s, which adopted historical motifs of repression and turned them
around to use as symbols of a proud, liberated identity.
The original English title contains an implicit reference to a very American
symbol of repression, namely ‘the Rock’, the jailhouse on Rikers Island located in
the East River just outside the Bronx, where the novel takes place. Metaphorically,
the title suggests that the queer boys are trapped in a sort of jail – a lower middle-
class, hawkish, conservative slice of America, which does not welcome, much
less nurture, sexual minorities. Throughout the book, the threat of violence –
both real, physical violence and psychological terror – looms over the characters
caught in this metaphorical ‘jail’. In the last chapter, in the scene that gives the
book its title, the protagonist Billy dreams that he and his friends are on a rock in
the ocean, being shot at by straight acquaintances. The bullets, however, swing
around and fly back at the straight aggressors, killing them (Fox 1994: 144–5).
This self-assured fantasy provides momentary hope, but for people trapped in
America’s working class, such fantasies quickly run up against the harsh reali-
ties of homophobia. The same chapter informs us that one of the characters was,
in reality, knifed to death in a subway, whereas another is so afraid his sexual
identity will ruin his career that he abandons the man whom he loves. Only the
central character seems to come away from the novel with any sense that he might
conceivably be better off living a non-heterosexual life.
The Japanese translation of Fox’s novel is entitled Shiosai no shōnen (The
Boys in the Roar of the Sea), which sounds much more optimistic than the original
English title.2 This shift eliminates the reference to Rikers Island, which could
easily cause confusion for Japanese readers if translated in a way that suggested
the work was somehow a jailhouse novel. At the same time, Koshikawa has sub-
stituted a poetically suggestive image of the tide – a symbol of slow, shifting
change that has long been part of the lexicon of Japanese poetry. This title also
 Queer translation/translating queer in Japan  91
contains romantic overtones in that it echoes the title of the novelist Mishima
Yukio’s famous 1954 novel Shiosai (published in English as The Sound of Waves
in 1956), one of the most famous heterosexual love stories of mid-twentieth cen-
tury Japanese literature. These romantic associations were not missed on Japanese
readers, especially women who tended to see the story as one of a doomed love
that goes against the grain of society.
The advertising band (obi) wrapped around the first edition of the Japanese trans-
lation of The Boys on the Rock, published by Shinchōsha in 1989, uses flowery terms
to describe the plot and hook potential readers. In writing about Fox, it describes
him as a new voice writing within the subgenre of ‘novels of adolescence’:

Summer at sixteen, a sexual awakening

The youthful muscles of an adolescent boy
His scent among the tide

From this depiction of the homosexual experiences of a handsome boy from

the swim team and a college student, emerges a briskly depicted novel of
adolescence, a ‘new classic’ by an author who, following in the tradition of
Salinger, represents a new generation! (Fox 1989: back cover)

The comparison of Fox to J.D. Salinger, the author of the famous novel The
Catcher in the Rye, was no doubt meant to appeal to Japanese readers who knew
and loved this contemporary American classic, which had already been trans-
lated twice into Japanese and had earned Salinger a dedicated following during
the introspective and tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s.3
Koshikawa Yoshiaki, who does not identify as gay, has commented that he
did not have any overt liberatory or political motives when he began translating
Fox. He states that during the late 1970s and 1980s, Japanese translations of
foreign works of literature experienced an ‘ice age’ of sorts, during which the
number of translations, which had been relatively plentiful, began slowing to a
trickle. As a result, Koshikawa was eager to see the introduction of new literary
works. His goal in responding to Matsuie’s request was not necessarily to con-
tribute to the rise of ‘gay literature’, but more simply to provide access to many
of the new developments in the English-speaking world (Koshikawa 2011).
Nonetheless, the impressive afterword that Koshikawa provided for his
translation, ‘Gei to issho ni kangaete miyō’ [Let’s Try Thinking Together with
Gays], shows a great deal of sympathy for gay Americans, as well as a good
understanding of the sociocultural factors affecting gays and lesbians in late
twentieth-century America (Koshikawa 1993: 251–8). He notes that the civil
rights and women’s rights movements helped set the stage for Stonewall and
the subsequent flourishing of the gay liberation movement, which saw some
successes, including successfully pressuring the American Psychological
Association into removing homosexuality from its list of diseases in 1972
(Koshikawa 1993: 253). Koshikawa quotes cultural critic Frank Rich’s 1987 arti-
cle in Esquire to argue that as a minority, queer men have made many critically
92  Jeffrey Angles
important and visible inroads into mainstream American culture. At the same
time, Koshikawa notes that American law has failed to grant gays and lesbi-
ans full civil rights, including protection from discrimination and the same
partnership rights accorded to cross-sex partners. It is precisely in the midst
of such tensions that post-Stonewall writers began to candidly treat issues of
self-discovery and sexual identity that previous generations of writers had only
dealt with obliquely. Koshikawa argues that this literature, as well as many
aspects of 1980s gay culture represent a psychological reaction on the part of
sexual minorities who, finding little acceptance in a homophobic mainstream
American society, responded by creating their own institutions and customs – a
subculture that, in some cases, valued free sex and bar culture, and in others,
constructed alternatives to the traditional family. It is in this context, he argues,
that we should read John Fox’s novel.
In short, the translator’s afterword positions this work as representing the gay
American experience. Yet as Keith Harvey (2003, 2004) has noted in his pio-
neering studies of the ways that depictions of ‘gayness’ have travelled across
linguistic lines, it is not unusual that when novels about homosexuality are
translated, passages having to do with queerness are often subtly reconfigured
to match expectations already present within the target culture. Accordingly, cer-
tain elements of the Japanese translation suggest a subtly different relationship
between sexual preference, sexual practice and identity than that found in the
original English text. One sees this for instance in one of the climactic scenes
in which the main character Billy, who is struggling with his attraction to other
men, goes to talk to his swimming coach. As he describes his feelings, the coach
interrupts him:

‘Are you saying you’re homosexual?’

‘What?’
‘Are you homosexual?’
‘Uh, well—’ (Fox 1994: 89)

In the Japanese translation, however, the coach’s question seems to be much

less about sexual identity than sexual feelings (Fox 1993: 153). His first question,
‘Omae, dōseiai na no ka?’ contains the word dōseiai, which literally means
‘same-sex love’, and has been one of the dominant words referring to the con-
cept of homosexuality since at least the 1920s, when it emerged as a translation
of the Western word (Pflugfelder 1999: 251–2; Angles 2011: 5–7). Interestingly,
however, he does not use the word dōseiaisha, which literally means ‘same-sex
love person’ and serves as the most common translation for the word ‘homosex-
ual’. In other words, the coach’s question sounds something like, ‘You, is [what
you are talking about] same-sex love?’ His question seems to be confirming
the nature of Billy’s feelings, not whether or not he has an identity character-
ized by those feelings. When the coach repeats the question, the subject is left
out entirely, so the question becomes even slightly more ambiguous: simply
 Queer translation/translating queer in Japan  93
‘Dōseiai na no ka?’ meaning something like ‘Is it a case of same-sex love?’
(Fox 1993: 153).
One sees a similar ambiguity regarding identity in another important scene
that follows soon on the heels of this one. Billy goes home and, looking in the
mirror, says to himself, ‘You. Are. A. Ho-mo-sex-u-al’, as if testing out the label
that his swim coach has just provided him with (Fox 1989/1994: 96). In the
Japanese translation, he looks into the mirror and says to himself, ‘Omae . . . Wa
. . . Dō . . . Sei . . . Ai . . . Da’, meaning ‘As for . . . You’, followed by the compo-
nent characters of the word dōseiai meaning ‘same-sex love’ or ‘homosexuality’,
plus the copula da, which means something like the English verb ‘is’ (Fox 1993:
166). Once again, Billy seems to be probing the nature of his own feelings more
than his identity. This choice of language might have to do with the fact that
the word dōseiaisha (homosexual) sounds relatively clinical in Japanese and did
really not catch on among the queer population itself, although many magazines
and queer bars used the abbreviated form homo in the 1960s and 1970s. In the
United States and United Kingdom, however, ‘homosexual’ was frequently used
as a self-identifying label until eventually liberationists shifted toward the more
positive-sounding ‘gay’.
The subtle difference in language, however, also reflects rather different atti-
tudes toward the relationship between queer desire and identity in the US and
Japan. In Japan, far fewer people are eager to take on a self-identifying sexual
identity. It is generally more common to hear one describing one’s sexual feel-
ings and activities in terms of emotion or sexual play than in terms of something
associated with an outward, political, social, or subcultural identity. As a result,
identity-based language that implied a continuity between one’s sexual prefer-
ences and one’s social and political subjectivity has been slower to catch on than
in the West (McLelland 2005: 159–69). This is not to say that there are no people
in Japan who identify according to their sexual feelings, but the numbers are
smaller than the number of people who actually engage in same-sex eroticism. In
general, Japanese have seemed more reluctant than Anglo-Americans to embrace
an identity that suggests that their sexuality represents the root of their entire
personality; in fact, not all have even agreed with the need to do so.4 Given this
context, the choice of language in Koshikawa’s translation, which explores feel-
ings more than identity, can be seen as reflecting non-American attitudes toward
identity and demonstrates the way that attitudes might be subtly reconfigured in
the act of translation.
One could point to a number of other small shifts in language in the text,
but the purpose of pointing out these differences between Fox’s English and
Koshikawa’s Japanese is not to criticize the translator or suggest that some-
how the translation is ‘wrong’. Instead, it is to indicate the subtle differences
between the ways that the language present in the American and Japanese texts
relates to the idea of homosexuality, and to suggest that, in fact, these subtle
differences, either consciously or unconsciously, reflect different notions pres-
ent within the two cultures. To borrow from Keith Harvey, ‘the translator has
(inevitably, one might say) produced a text that harmonizes with the prevailing
94  Jeffrey Angles
view of human subjectivity that obtains in his – the target – culture’ (Harvey
2004: 415). The point is that although The Boys of the Rock served as an impor-
tant moment in the translation history of Western queer literature into Japanese,
some of the specific problems that the novel raises – questions of language, how
to relate to it, and how to apply that language to oneself in the construction of
identity – have in fact been subtly reconfigured in the translation to better fit
the Japanese context. What the Japanese readership sees is a fine-tuned version
of the novel that has to do with their culture just as much as with the American
culture from which it originated.

Female readership and the rise of the ‘gay novel’

Since the 1970s, when the female manga artists Takemiya Keiko and Hagio
Moto started writing about boys experiencing their first pangs of love in all-
boys’ schools, one of the major themes of the comics for girls (shōjo manga) has
been romantic relationships between boys. Manga belonging to this subgenre
often feature beautiful young men with lithe bodies, large and expressive eyes,
and long hair that gives them romantic and often pensive looks. It is not just the
styling of the characters that is highly romanticized, but the plotlines as well.
They often emphasize love at first sight, brief but powerful connections, and in
many cases, star-crossed relationships that end with separation or even death.
Both partners in these love stories are often male, but manga authors typically
replace gender difference with other sorts of difference: body type, size, age,
sexual experience, or aggressiveness (Welker 2006). Young girls reading these
manga often relate to them in intensely personal ways, seeing the stories of boy-
on-boy love as romantic tales of star-crossed lovers, unable to find a place for
themselves in the world.
Interestingly, Shinchōsha editors discovered that the Koshikawa translation of
The Boys on the Rock appealed not just to gay men, but to young women who were
passionate readers of manga and wanted to read more about men who love men.5
Koshikawa has commented that he heard the translation was sold in the gay book-
stores of Shinjuku Ni-Chōme, the biggest gay area of Tokyo, but it seems that the
largest number of sales, which he estimated at around 60,000 copies for both the
hardback and paperback editions, came from young women (Koshikawa 2011).
There is little doubt that this motivated the editors at Shinchōsha, when repack-
aging the translation for publication as a paperback novel in 1993, to include an
image on the cover that looks like it might be found in shōjo manga. In the novel,
the protagonist Billy is described as a trim, muscular athlete on the swim team of
his school, but instead of a figure of a tough, masculine young man, the cover of
the 1993 paperback edition shows a dandy, complete with the long, floppy hair,
skinny jeans, and sultry looks that one might find in girls’ manga about boys’ love
(see Figure 7.1).
Similarly, the description on the back of the paperback contains starry-eyed,
exaggerated language that seems more akin to the language one might find in
manga than in the novel itself:
 Queer translation/translating queer in Japan  95

Figure 7.1 Cover of the paperback version of Koshikawa Yoshiaki’s translation of John

Fox’s The Boys on the Rock (Shinchō Bunko, 1993).

Summer at sixteen years old, when all looks like it is going well, but nothing
goes quite as planned. Billy, who goes to a high school in New York, is over-
come by lethargy. Teachers who are devoted exclusively to serious things,
foolish classmates who do nothing but have sex. Exhausted parents who can
do nothing but give orders and ask questions. But in the older college student
Alfred alone, he begins to see a sparkle of light . . . In the scent of summer
and the rising sensations of the skin, this novel depicts two men setting out on
the ‘supreme relationship’ of homosexuality. (Fox 1993: back cover)

The reference to the ‘“supreme relationship” of homosexuality’ (dōseiai to iu

‘shikō no kankei’) sounds very much like the kind of florid language about same-
sex desire that one might find in manga. This blurb also appeals to the idea that
96  Jeffrey Angles
the story depicts two ideal lovers, alone, misunderstood, and pitted against the
world – a common plotline in shōjo manga.
Because the book sold well among an unexpectedly broad demographic,
Japanese publishers started translating more novels in the 1980s and early 1990s,
including books by American novelists such as Edmund White, David Leavitt and
Michael Nava, who embraced a gay identity and wrote about the American gay
subculture in their literature. As a result, a distinct subgenre of gei shōsetsu (gay
novels) began to emerge from the already popular category of seishun shōsetsu. In
fact, during the mid-1990s, a number of larger Japanese bookstore chains began to
include sections in their stores with this label over the shelves. The very fact that
such sections began to appear around the country suggests that queer novels were
selling to populations broader than the small number of people who openly self-
identified as sexual minorities.6 Because so many of these novels were translations,
it was only natural that the word gei, the Japanese transliteration of the English
word ‘gay’, came to be used to describe this subgenre instead of other words that
already existed in Japanese, such as the terms dōseiaisha or homo mentioned
above. Another reason the term gei seemed more appropriate for this emerging
subgenre was that a number of these works featured Anglo-American models of
gay identity, in which term ‘gay’ meant not only a sexual preference but an entire
lifestyle and identity that placed one’s sexual preference at the core of one’s being.
The translator who played the biggest role in the boom in translations of Western
queer literature in the 1990s was Kakinuma Eiko, a prolific translator who produced
dozens of translations of works by openly gay American and British novelists. In
a roundtable discussion published in a 1994 issue of Barazoku (Tribe of Roses),
Japan’s longest running magazine for queer men, Kakinuma notes with a laugh that
she is a straight woman who identifies as an okoge, or ‘fag hag’: a woman fascinated
with the lives of gay men (Kakinuma et al. 1994: 119). She notes that she became
interested in ‘the love of boys’ (shōnen’ai) through manga in high school, although
she, like many of her schoolmates, fed her fascination by looking at pictures and
stories of queer men in Barazoku (1994: 119–20). She notes that her own interest in
gay literature represented an extension of her interest in manga by female authors
for a female audience, but as she read more and more literature actually written by
self-identified gay men, she found her sensibilities shifting away from the images of
young, lithe, pretty young men she found in manga.

Kakinuma: It may sound strange, but my sensibilities came to resemble those of
a gay guy. I guess you could say they became the same.
Fushimi: You turned gay?!
Kakinuma: In the old days, I used to think big muscles were gross and hated
them. However, now, big muscles and genitals – I’ve come to like
those things . . . (Laugh) (Kakinuma et al. 1994: 120)

After doing a series of articles introducing English-language gay fiction to queer

audiences in the magazine June, Kakinuma began discussing gay literature with
the editors at the publisher Hayakawa Shobō. The result was that in 1990, she
 Queer translation/translating queer in Japan  97
published a translation of A Boy’s Own Story, a semi-fictional novel published
in 1982 by Edmund White, one of the US’s most prominent openly gay authors.
Kakinuma’s translation, Aru shōnen no monogatari (literally ‘the tale of a certain
boy’), published in 1990, quickly sold through the first printing of 7,000 copies
and entered a second printing within a single week. Between 1990 and 1992, it
went through six printings – something relatively unusual for a book that had
not yet been released in paperback. Works of translated fiction usually sell only
2,000–3,000 copies, so going through six printings of 7,000 copies apiece repre-
sented a small coup (Kakinuma et al. 1994: 112).
Kakinuma has commented that her readership seems to have been largely women
(Kakinuma et al. 1994: 112–13). In Japan, books typically include postcards, which
publishers use to encourage readers to send in thoughts about the book. The over-
whelming majority of responses that came in from her translations of American gay
fiction were from young women who, like her, were fascinated by gay men; how-
ever, the limits of these readers’ ability to identify with the novel came during the
sexual scenes of the books. Kakinuma’s translation of the sequel to White’s novel,
the book The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988), published as Utsukushii heya wa
karappo (literally ‘the beautiful room is empty’) in 1990, just two months after the
prequel, sold far less well than its predecessor. By 1992, it had only gone through
three printings, compared to the prequel’s six. The sequel, in other words, sold only
half as well. The reason, Kakinuma commented, is that it follows a young man
through his adulthood and his budding sexual adventures, including many that hap-
pen in places a young heterosexual female audience might have found unpleasant
and sordid (1994: 113). In particular, she notes, a sexual encounter that takes place
in a public toilet seemed to have put off many of her female readers – no doubt
because those scenes were not in keeping with the beautiful, highly aestheticized
illusions about the purity of boyish love that readers had acquired from girls’ manga.

Conclusion: translated ‘gay novels’

and the gay male community
Although women seem to have provided the largest audience for the flood of trans-
lations published in the 1990s, the texts did make an impact on the gay community
as well. It is important to point out that although the majority of reader-response
postcards returned to publishers were from women, that percentage may not have
been entirely representative of the entire readership of the book. Closeted queer
men who were afraid that others might see them reading the book would, no
doubt, have been concerned about writing down their feelings and sending in their
thoughts to the publisher. The translator Kitamaru Yūji has commented that the
1990s was an era when many queer men still found it difficult to talk about their
sexual desires. In fact, many were afraid even to be seen reading books about
homoerotic desire, so reader-response cards are most likely not an accurate mea-
sure of the full readership of these novels (Kitamaru 2011).
One can tell, however, that these translations of Western homoerotic novels
were noticed within Japan’s gay community by looking in the magazine Barazoku.
98  Jeffrey Angles
As Jonathan Mackintosh (2011) has described at length in his study of homosexu-
ality in postwar Japan, Barazoku began publication in 1971, creating somewhat
of a stir in the publishing world, but it proved enough of a success to ensure that
it went on to become Japan’s longest running magazine for queer men, continu-
ing for over three-and-a-half decades.7 By the 1990s, a typical issue of Barazoku
would include a glossy section at the front of pictures of scantily clothed and nude
men, lightly censored photographs of intercourse, and sometimes short reviews
of things related to queer male culture – most often films or plays that contained
some homoerotic content. This would be followed by a long newsprint section of
one-handed reading material, more photos, erotic manga, down-to-earth manga
about the lives of gay couples, personal ads, letters from readers, and lots of infor-
mation about bars and sex clubs. Without question, it was sex that sold copies of
Barazoku, and judging from the make-up of the magazine, it seems safe to assume
that most readers spent the majority of their time with the pictures, erotic stories,
personals and racy advertisements.8 Queer activists in Japan have sometimes criti-
cized Barazoku for favouring erotic titillation to the exclusion of queer social or
political activism, but the magazine deserves credit for its important role in cir-
culating information (Mackintosh 2011: 3–6). It was by creating a base of shared
information about bars, saunas, hot models, films, photograph collections, manga
and books on queer themes that Barazoku’s editors believed they could contribute
to the formation of a Japanese homoerotic culture – a culture centred on shared
erotic practice and cultural sensibility, more than on social or political subjectivity.
It is interesting to note that in the 1990s, Barazoku published a number of short
reviews of literary works, including several novels in translation. In fact, more of
the literary reviews in Barazoku are about Western queer literature in Japanese
translation than about queer literary works written by Japanese authors them-
selves.9 In a number of these reviews, the reviewers, who are usually unnamed,
use the space of the review as a forum to make comments about the state of
queer literature in Japan. One example is an April 1991 review of Kakinuma
Eiko’s translation of The Beautiful Room is Empty. The review begins by draw-
ing attention to the book’s homoeroticism in bold letters, and then moves on to a
discussion of the politics of writing. Below is a translation of the entire review.

A story that develops from awakening, trepidation, toward full-fledged

gay experiences – a work worthy of note. The second gay novel (gei-noveru)
from the author of the previously published book A Boy’s Own Story, Edmund
White. A tale in which a fretful, brooding boy (shōnen) puts his desires into
action and starts engaging in bold sexual adventures. This author was the first-
ever recipient of that most American of literary awards, the ‘Bill Whitehead
Award’, which is granted for long-term contributions to gay and lesbian lit-
erature (gei & rezu bungaku) over many years. Recently, in Japan, as well,
there have been quite a few novels about gays (gei), but there is not yet any
such prize. It is said that in Japan, there are approximately 140 different prizes
for fiction, criticism, poetry, and so on. If there are so many, we seem to take
prizes a little too lightly. Perhaps someone like Shinchōsha, which sold quite a
 Queer translation/translating queer in Japan  99
lot of copies of The Boys on the Rock, or Hayakawa Shobō, which has brought
out this book, should create a prize for gay literature in Japan? It is worth not-
ing that the translator of this book was a woman. There are a number of places
that are quite juicy, but she did a pretty good job with the translation. Before
long, could gay literature be subsumed by women’s power . . . ? Thinking
about it is enough to make one uneasy. (Anon. 1991: n.p.)

Clearly, the author – most likely Fujita Ryū, one of the contributing editors to
Barazoku who was especially interested in literature – is suspicious about the fact
that it is not gay men themselves who have produced many of the recent trans-
lations of ‘gay novels’. The author seems irritated by the fact that the Japanese
literary system does not bring Japanese queer authors to the fore, giving them
visibility and a voice, and whenever queerness is given a voice in the mainstream
publishing world, he notes that women are the ones doing the talking.
In fact, the author is correct in that many of the translators of literature about
non-heteronormative desire during the 1990s ‘gay boom’ did not profess an
openly queer identity, apart from two clear exceptions. One was the lesbian trans-
lator Ochiishi Ōgasutomūn, who gained attention with her translations of Andy
Warhol, Gertrude Stein, Sara Schulman and (somewhat later) Chris Kraus. The
other was Kitamaru Yūji, a self-identified gay male journalist who has translated
several novels about gay men by Patricia Nell Warren, Alan Hollinghurst and
Paul Monette, as well as the gender-bending play Hedwig and the Angry Inch by
John Cameron Mitchell. Significantly, both of these writers were living in New
York at the time so in both their literary and personal lives, they were somewhat
freer to act as outsiders, choosing projects that they felt were important and that
might benefit society.
When asked about his motivations for translating these novels, Kitamaru (2011)
said that he undertook the translation of Warren as a response to what he saw as
a lack of good information in Japan about gay male life. He notes that during the
1980s and 1990s, certain Japanese magazines were advocating closeted and sham
marriages as a technique for gay men to survive in heterosexist society, and when
the mass media did talk about gays and lesbians, they only treated them as sexual
aberrations. Worse of all, the AIDS epidemic was in full swing so there was no way
to fight the HIV virus without talking openly about sexual activity and desire. As a
result of this situation, Kitamaru recognized the urgency of providing positive and
reliable information about the lives of LGBT people to Japanese readers. Since the
Internet was not yet widely available and it was difficult to obtain books and maga-
zines in Western languages in Japan, translating literature seemed like an effective
way to share information about gay life. Around that time, Kitamaru had become
too busy with his journalistic career in New York to do the research needed to write
his own book on the subject, so when the publisher Dai-san Shokan approached
him to talk about doing some translations, he proposed Warren’s modern gay clas-
sic The Front Runner (1974). This novel depicts the lives of two generations of gay
men; the social conditions in which they live; the necessity for social justice for
them and other sexual minorities; the ways that homophobia can affect the body
100  Jeffrey Angles
and mind, and the way in which one might begin to combat negative forces and
find happiness – all within a gripping plot. Kitamaru undertook the project hoping
that gays and lesbians in Japan could put this information to good use, changing
their own lives and thus slowly constructing a society in which sexual minorities
would be freer to talk about their lives. He also states that he hoped he could use
‘outside pressure’ to bring about change by helping Japanese readers understand
that not all places in the world required one to be closeted, and that if Japanese
sexual minorities failed to talk about their lives more openly, they ‘could not face
the rest of the world’ (Kitamaru 2011). Kitamaru estimates that his translation
Furonto rannā (1990) sold around 20,000 copies in all.
It is clear from reading Barazoku that a number of queer Japanese readers
learned a great deal about gay identity and life in the West from translations of
foreign novels. In 1994, there was an exchange between the Barazoku editor
Fujita Ryū and the queer activist Fushimi Noriaki that reveals some of the dif-
ferent ways that the Japanese queer community relate to translations of Western
fiction. Fujita states that for him, novels about gay life from abroad helped guide
him as a young man:

Fujita: [When I was young] I didn’t have information [about homoeroticism], so

what I wanted to know was what men did together and where they did it –
that kind of concrete information, but there wasn’t much of that.

And then there was the era when I wanted graphic descriptions of sex.
However, I couldn’t find those. Instead, I suffered because all I could find
were philosophical things or things about human rights. So when John Rechy
came on the scene, I got incredibly turned on. That was almost thirty years
ago. (Kakinuma et al. 1994: 115)

City of Night, which describes the daily life of a hustler and his sexual encounters
in several cities across the United States, was published in English in 1963, and
then translated by Takahashi Masao as Yoru no tokai in 1965. (Takahashi, a critic
and translator of American literature, is perhaps best known for his translations of
Faulkner.) Fushimi challenges Fujita, suggesting that he just liked those books for
their homoeroticism and not because they depict the full dimensions of queer life:

Fushimi: It suits me much better if more political things are introduced, but you
– shall I say this in a more straightforward way? (Laugh) – you seem
to enjoy literature that rejects more political things.
Fujita:  That’s because I don’t have any ideology. (Laugh) (Kakinuma et al.
1994: 116)

Here and in the ensuing discussion, there is a standoff between two generations:
an older generation who preferred literature that focused on gay male homoeroti-
cism, and a younger generation that preferred literature that explores the politics,
subjectivity and lives of people living queer lives. Fushimi writes regretfully that
 Queer translation/translating queer in Japan  101
unlike in the US where novelists like David Leavitt are able to make it big, it is
not possible for writers to emerge and write relatively mainstream novels about
the complicated lives of characters who just happen to be queer:

Fushimi: In Japan, we still do not have the groundwork laid for an author like
Leavitt to emerge, but, well, that does not mean I think we will neces-
sarily proceed along the same path, as if we were chasing after America.
The flow of information is even faster than the changing of our situation
so even though we are not yet equipped to receive American liberation
ideology, suddenly it rushes in, and we get an intellectual situation that is
hard to figure out. Two generations coexist: a generation with a mentality
like yours, Mr Fujita, and a generation geared toward politics like mine.
In addition, there continues to emerge a generation with sensibilities like
Leavitt’s. I believe that gay expression in this country will emerge from
the midst of this confused situation. (Kakinuma et al. 1994: 116–17)

What is clear from this discussion is that different portions of the Japanese queer
world related to translations of Western literature in different ways. While certain
readers turned to Western literature for information about how to behave and
how to engage in erotic encounters, there were others that read Western literature
for its representations of politics and identity. In addition, there was a group that
turned to Western literature in order to unsettle stereotyped notions about sexual-
ity, including even homo-normative notions of gay identity. In sum, all turned to
translations of Western literature to forge invisible but productive affective links,
finding sustenance, gaining self-awareness, and sometimes even giving new shape
to their erotic practices and sexual identities, even when their own experiences did
not necessarily mirror Western experiences in all respects.

Notes
1 This chapter presents a summary of the arguments first presented in Angles (2015).
2 All translations from Japanese are the author’s own, except for the titles of books that are
already available in English translation and that are listed in the bibliography.
3 The Catcher in the Rye was first translated by the social critic and Marxist writer
Hashimoto Fukuo in 1952, and then re-translated by Nozaki Takashi in 1964. Nozaki’s
translation remained the standard Japanese version until 2003, when the popular novelist
Murakami Haruki published his own translation.
4 In the 1990s, the hesitancy of young Japanese to take up a visible identity as a sexual
minority was a source of anxiety and frustration for political activists such as the queer
Japanese activist group OCCUR. Readers interested in the contestations over sexual
identity in contemporary Japan should see the two studies by Fushimi Noriaki (2004)
and Jonathan Mackintosh (2011).
5 While writing this essay, I searched online to determine what people had written about
Fox’s novel on the Internet. The overwhelming majority of the reviews that turned up
were written by women who also seemed to share an interest in girls’ manga and young
women’s fiction. For one representative blog entry, see Kotobuki Neko (2008).
6 For instance, the first time I remember seeing a bookshelf labelled gei shōsetsu was in
the large bookstore Shinshindō in Kobe in 1996.
102  Jeffrey Angles
7 For more detail about the history of Barazoku, see Itō (2006).
8 Barazoku made money not just through sales of the magazine, but also through the enor-
mous number of ads in each issue. Readers responding to personal ads would include a
handling fee with their response, which was sent to the editorial offices before the editors
passed it along to the intended recipient. The rise of online advertising, hook-up sites and
pornography in the 1990s, however, helped render many of Barazoku’s functions obso-
lete, reducing sales and eventually leading to the decision to close the magazine.
9 In fact, there were a number of books published around that time by Japanese authors
on queer themes. Kakinuma and Kurihara (1993) contain a thorough list of books on
the subject, but of course, numerous additional works have also been released since the
release of this guide in 1993.

References
Angles, J. 2011. Writing the Love of Boys: Origins of Bishōnen Culture in Modernist
Japanese Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2015. ‘Translating Queer in Japan: Affective Identification and Translation in the
“Gay Boom” of the 1990s’, In Multiple Translation Communities in Contemporary
Japan, London: Routledge, pp. 99–123.
Anon. 1991. Review of Aru shōnen no monogatari [A Boy’s Own Story] by Edmund White,
trans. Kakinuma Eiko, in Barazoku, 219: n.p.
Buckley, S. 2000. ‘Sexing the Kitchen: Okoge and Other Tales of Contemporary Japan’,
in C. Patton and B. Sánchez-Eppler (eds), Queer Diasporas, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, pp. 215–43.
Cather, K. 2012. The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan, Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.
Clough, P.T. and J. Halley (eds) 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Dinshaw, C. 1999. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern,
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Fox, J. 1989. Shiosai no shōnen [The Boys on the Rock], trans. Koshikawa Yoshiaki,
Tokyo: Shichōsha.
———. 1993. Shiosai no shōnen [The Boys on the Rock], trans. Koshikawa Yoshiaki,
Tokyo: Shinchō Bunko.
———. 1994 [1989]. The Boys on the Rock, Stonewall Inn Editions, New York: St. Martin’s
Press.
Fushimi N. 2004. Gei to iu ‘keiken’ [The ‘Experience’ of Gayness] [2nd edn], Tokyo: Potto
Shuppan.
Harvey, K. 2003. Intercultural Movements: American Gay in French Translation,
Manchester: St. Jerome Press.
———. 2004 [1998]. ‘Translating Camp Talk: Gay Identities and Cultural Transfer’, in L.
Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader [2nd edn], London: Routledge, pp. 402–22.
Itō, B. 2006. ‘Barazoku’ no hitobito: Sono sugao to butaiura [The People of ‘The Tribe
of Roses’: Their Bare Faces and Behind the Scenes], Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha.
Kakinuma, E. and C. Kurihara 1993. Tanbi shōsetsu, gei bungaku bukkugaido [Aesthetic
Novels, Gay Literary Guide], Tokyo: Hakuya Shobō.
Kakinuma, E., N. Fushimi and R. Fujita 1994. ‘Gei shōsetsu toppu hon’yakuka ga kataru
kaigai gei shōsetsu shūhen no omoshiro-hanashi’ [Interesting Banter Surrounding
Foreign Gay Novels as Heard from the Top Translators of Gay Novels], In Barazoku,
257: 112–23.
 Queer translation/translating queer in Japan  103
Kitamaru Y. 2011. E-mail communication, 9 October.
Koshikawa, Y. 1993. ‘Gei to issho ni kangaete miyō: “Kaisetsu” ni kaete’ [‘Let’s Trying
Thinking Together with Gays: In Place of an Explanatory Comment’], John Fox,
Shiosai no shōnen [The Boys on the Rock], translated by Koshikawa Yoshiaki, Tokyo:
Shinchō Bunko, pp. 251–8.
———. 2011. E-mail communication, 29 September.
Kotobuki, N. 2008. ‘Gei e no mezame o egaita seishun shōsetsu Shiosai no shōnen’ [A
Novel of Adolescence that Depicts the Awakening to Gayness: The Boys on the Rock];
accessed 3 December 2015 http://zazie.at.webry.info/200812/article_2.html.
Mackintosh, J.D. 2011. Homosexuality and Manliness in Postwar Japan, London:
Routledge.
McLelland, M. 2005. Queer Japan from the Pacific War to the Internet Age, Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Miller, S. 2000. ‘The (Temporary?) Queering of Japanese TV’, in A. Grossman (ed.),
Queer Asian Cinema: Shadows in the Shade, Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press,
pp. 83–109.
Mishima, Y. 1956. The Sound of Waves, trans. Meredith Weatherby, New York: Knopf.
Pflugfelder, G.M. 1999. Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese
Discourse, 1600–1950, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rich, F. 1987. ‘The Gay Decades: Out of the Closet and into the Living Room: Nine
Episodes in the Most Dramatic Cultural Assimilation of Our Time’, Esquire, 108(5):
87–99.
Warren, P. N.1974. The Front Runner, New York: Morrow.
———. 1990. Furonto rannā, trans. Kitamaru Yūji, Tokyo: Dai-san Shokan.
Welker, J. 2006. ‘Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: Boys’ Love as Girls’ Love in Shōjo
Manga’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 31(3): 841–70.
White, E. 1982. A Boy’s Own Story, New York: Dutton.
———. 1988. The Beautiful Room Is Empty, New York: Knopf.
———. 1990.Utsukushii heya wa karappo [The Beautiful Room is Empty], trans. Kakinuma
Eiko, Tokyo: Hayakawa Shobō.
8 Gaps to watch out for
Alison Bechdel in German
Robert Gillett

Introduction
The year 2016 saw the thirtieth anniversary of the first publication in book form
of Alison Bechdel’s ground-breaking chronicle of American lesbian life, Dykes to
Watch Out For (Bechdel 1986). Since the decision of the Supreme Court to legalize
gay marriage, the political significance of this event might seem merely historical.
In the context of Bechdel’s own life, too, there is a danger that the achievement
of Dykes might be overshadowed by the runaway success of Bechdel’s graphic
memoir Fun Home (Bechdel 2006).1 Certainly, such academic interest as there has
been in Bechdel has tended to focus on the memoir rather than the chronicle (see,
for example, Diedrich 2014; Fantasia 2011; Freeman 2009; McBean 2013; Scherr
2011; Warhol 2011, to name but a few). And it is undoubtedly true that, given the
contemporary fascination with life writing, the genre of the graphic autobiography
is particularly topical (see Chute 2010 and Watson 2011). Apparently too America
is still more at ease with a book about a nuclear family, in which the father is a
closeted gay man who ends up under a truck, than it is with alternative lifestyles in
which the only violence is perpetrated by children under the influence of the main-
stream. For Europeans with an interest in queer, though, Dykes to Watch Out For is
an invaluable resource, not least because of the way in which it reflects American
queer history. Precisely because it is not autobiographical, it is a good deal more
wide-ranging than Fun Home. And it is also, frankly, much subtler, funnier and
hence more rewarding than its best-selling successor.

Dykes
Dykes started life as a cartoon of the kind that regularly appears in daily news-
papers, addressing contemporary issues in individual strips. Accordingly, the
first volume was merely a collection of separate strips, not unlike the annual
series produced by the Daily Express cartoonist Carl Giles (see, for example,
Giles 2014). Starting with the second volume, though, More Dykes to Watch Out
For (Bechdel 1988), the series began to focus on ‘Mo and her Pals’; to be held
together by a series of cliff-hangers, and to conform to a dramatic logic that gave
the strip a quality somewhere between a superior soap opera and an serial novel.
From the third volume, then, New, Improved Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel
 Gaps to watch out for: Bechdel in German  105
1990), the protagonists in this drama were duly presented in the frontispiece
(Figure 8.1). Through them and with them, Bechdel is able to explore issues such
as monogamy versus promiscuity, activism and juridical intervention, respect-
ability and alternative lifestyles, capitalism and unemployment, racial diversity
and multiculturalism. In the course of the series, Harriet is replaced as Mo’s
lover by Sydney Krukowski, who, as a university teacher with a propensity for
maxing out on her credit cards, introduces the themes of consumerism and queer
theory. Clarice and Toni have a son called Rafael, who allows Bechdel to deal
with questions of gay parenting, masculinity and non-violence. Sparrow forms a
relationship with, and has a child by, a man called Stuart, who, alongside Lois in
her drag king persona, a butch dyke called Geraldine who becomes a submissive
gay man called Gerry, and a teenager originally called Jonas who is desper-
ate to transition into Janis, enables Bechdel to run the whole gamut of trans.
Significantly, in the wake of 9/11, Ginger becomes involved with an Arabic
teacher called Samia, but has in her class a student called Cynthia, who, although
a lesbian, has distinctly right-wing attitudes and views. The whole group is com-
plemented by a larger cast of other characters, all of whom have something to say
about and contribute to the pageant of American life sketched out in these books.
In all, there are eleven such books. Following the last of them, Invasion of
Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel 2005), Bechdel continued writing and publish-
ing her strips on line, until, on the 13th of May 2008, she posted what she called
‘the last episode for who knows how long’. In the same year, Houghton Mifflin
brought out a sizeable compendium called The Essential Dykes to Watch Out
For, which in some ways feels like a tombstone for the series (Bechdel 2008b).
This means that there are almost exactly 25 years’ worth of Dykes to watch out
for. Those 25 years constitute a very particular period in the history of the United
States, its allies and its enemies. It is also a very particular period in the history of
homosexualities. It is moreover the period of the TV shows Ellen and The L-Word,
of Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble and the film Brokeback Mountain (to say
nothing of Harry Potter). And it is the period of globalization and technological
advance. In her books, Bechdel chronicles these developments minutely. Starting
with newspapers and television and then gravitating to smart phones, she repeat-
edly has her characters reacting, sometimes with hysteria and/or mental paralysis,
to the known events of American and international politics, notably of course suc-
cessive American elections, 9/11 and the Iraq War. The increasing stranglehold of
big corporations on American life is chronicled in the demise of the independent
women’s bookshop and the lawsuits which Clarice, with mixed success, brings
against, say, firms suspected of damaging the environment. For those interested in
intertextuality, the books offer very rich pickings indeed. It is not for nothing that
these texts are set partly in a bookshop and partly in a university. But even beyond
that, there are hilariously incongruous references to a wide variety of American
cultural icons, as when Harriet, still woozy from the anaesthetic accompanying
her Caesarean, suddenly quotes from Dr Seuss (Bechdel 2000: 73). Equally, not
only is the whole strip modelled consciously both in its rhythms and in its titles
on Hollywood cinema; the characters also often go to see films, if for no other
Figure 8.1  Alison Bechdel, New, Improved Dykes to Watch Out For, Frontispiece
 Gaps to watch out for: Bechdel in German  107
reason than that cinemas are air-conditioned (Bechdel 1998: 18–19). And espe-
cially when Sydney is using her credit card to help her overcome the effects of
chemotherapy, we are treated to a series of in-jokes featuring things such as the
i-pud or Kose technology (Bechdel 2008a: 305).
Most obviously, though, these books set out to chronicle as accurately as possi-
ble the history of lesbianism as Bechdel had lived it. That is why, in the preface to
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, we are treated to glimpses of slide-shows
bearing titles such as ‘Precambrian DTWOF, Mesozoic DTWOF, Cenozoic
DTWOF, Big Bang DTWOF, Late Modern DTWOF and Rococo DTWOF
(Bechdel 2008b: xv, xvii). As Bechdel puts it in that same preface:

The underground scene of the fifties, the revolutionary ferment of the sixties,
the radical gay and lesbian subcultures of the seventies . . . it was all over by the
time I showed up. Everyone seemed to have things pretty much under control
. . . But some absurd old actor seemed to be running the country. The tidal wave
of AIDS hadn’t hit yet . . . As the months wore on . . . I saw that, in fact there
was plenty of revolutionary ferment still afoot. (Bechdel 2008b: xi–xii)

Referencing Marilyn Liebman, Andrew Sullivan, Camille Paglia, and of course

Judith Butler, she goes on to say ‘My tidy schema went all to hell in the nine-
ties. Lesbians could be reactionary provocateurs. Arch conservatives and neocons
could be gay. Oh, and apparently no one was essentially anything. I could barely
keep up’ (Bechdel 2008b: xvi, emphasis in the original). It is hard to imagine a
more succinct summary of the constellation of post-modern politics and queer
theory. And as we have already noted, the strip itself shows not just the alignment
of lesbianism with the left, but also categories of gender, forms of protest and
notions of identity (to say nothing of dress codes, relationships and modes of co-
habitation) all going to hell in the nineties. In other words: what makes the strip so
valuable is the thorough and playful way in which it chronicles Queer.

Translating Dykes
Anyone translating Bechdel, therefore, will be translating queer. It is a formida-
bly difficult task, but nonetheless, as the bibliography makes clear, it has been
attempted a fair number of times. One of the languages into which Bechdel
has been translated is German. Indeed, with seven of the eleven titles, more of
Bechdel’s books have been translated into German than into any other language.
This in itself seems to me to be a significant fact, and tells us a great deal both
about the openness of the German market and about the special relationship
between the Germans and American queer culture. The translations themselves,
of course, offer a paradigmatic instance of the possibilities and impossibilities of
rendering queer material into a foreign, specifically a European language. The pro-
cesses of negotiation involved in the transaction can be seen as representative of a
division in translation practice that offers a parallel to equivalent differences within
the GLTBQI community. And in one instance the way in which the translations
108  Robert Gillett
were presented to the reading public gives an insight into how translation choices
can indeed reflect specifically political positionings along this complicated con-
tinuum.
The problem begins with the title, for ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’ is a formida-
bly resonant phrase. Not only is there no word in German that has even remotely
the same connotations as ‘dyke’; ‘to watch out for’ also has at least three possible
meanings. Accordingly, the French has ‘à suivre’ (Bechdel 1994, 1998b), empha-
sizing the extent to which one might become involved with the dykes in question.
The Spanish has ‘de cuidado’ (Bechdel 2004, 2005b–d, 2007, 2014), which has
both a warning and care in it somewhere, but ultimately emphasizes the inimi-
table feistiness of the ladies concerned. The Czech has ‘k pohledání’ (Bechdel
2010), which has something to do with looks and looking, but again has that sin-
gularizing quality of ‘the dykiest dykes you are ever likely to see’. The German
Wikipedia article has ‘vor denen man sich in Acht nehmen sollte’, which means
something like ‘whom you ought to beware of or be careful of’ and thus altogether
overemphasizes the dykes’ dangerous dimension, without allowing that one might
be interested in sightings of them or indeed that one might care about what hap-
pens to them.2 Birgit Müller, the person responsible for the German versions of
the cartoons, does not go down that road at all. Instead she relies on the similar-
ity between ‘Lesben’, lesbians, and ‘Lebens’, the form that ‘life’ takes on in the
genitive or in compounds. Like Bechdel, who omits the volume from her compen-
dium, Müller does not translate Bechdel’s first book at all. So the initial volume in
her series really is the one in which the characters set out on their careers. It is thus
wholly appropriate that Müller begins with a series of CVs. These CVs are drawn
in the form of comics, of course, but they are also absolutely exemplary. And so
More Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel 1988) becomes, brilliantly, ‘Lesbenläufe
. . . wie aus dem Bilderbuch’, ‘curricula vitae for picture-book lesbians’ (Bechdel
1991). For the next volume, the exemplary cartoon character is taken for granted,
but the ladies in question are going up in the world, so New, Improved Dykes
to Watch Out For (Bechdel 1990) becomes Feine Lesbenart (Bechdel 1993b), a
phrase which expresses approval for a particular kind of lesbian but also plays on
the German term for a sophisticated lifestyle. After a five-year hiatus, in which
neither the Sequel not the Spawn (Bechdel 1992, 1993a) gets translated at all,
Müller is able to continue the pun, but ends up on the wrong side of civilization,
I think, when she renders Unnatural Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechdel 1995) as
Wilde Lesbenwelt (Bechdel 1998c), a title which puts the lesbians in the middle of
a world of untamed savages and hence of ‘natural men’. (What Bechdel is doing
in this title, of course, is referencing the homophobic designation of homosexu-
ality as a sin against nature, and offering her readers the titillating prospect of
‘unnatural acts’. Müller’s title, with its promise of wild parties, does the latter,
but not the former.) The translation of Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For
(1997) as Turbogeile Lesbenlust (1999) seems to me to be a stroke of genius,
since ‘geil’, which really is a standard translation for ‘hot’ in the sexual sense,
has, not unlike the English word, become so debased that it needs another word
(like ‘throbbing’) to restore its vigour. ‘Turbo’ of course refers to thrilling speed,
 Gaps to watch out for: Bechdel in German  109
like a powerful internal combustion engine such as might be found between the
legs of a motorbike rider; but in German it has also been reduced to a general
all-purpose multiplier. ‘Lebenslust’, as the constituent parts suggest, is a ‘lust for
life’; but the ‘Lust’ of ‘Lesbenlust’ is at least as lustful as it is lusty. The epithet
‘split-level’, which Bechdel applied to her dykes in the next volume (Bechdel
1998a) puts its possessors on a par with ovens and apartments, while suggesting
distinctions of class or income that can fracture communities, cities and society as
a whole. The title Müller chooses for that particular story, which features a finely
crafted sitcom based around four different sets of house moves, is Lesbenchaos
(Bechdel 2000b), which conveys the essence of what happens when inverts get
involved with real estate, but not the specific details of Bechdel’s original title. For
Post-Dykes (Bechdel 2000a), Müller uses the ability of the German language to
make dubious abstractions and weighs in with Postmoderne Lesbenheit (Bechdel
2003), a phrase made up by Müller, which might be translated back as something
like ‘post-modern lesbianity’. For Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life
Forms (Bechdel 2003a), the last volume she has translated to date, Müller returns
to her original pun, this time made explicit and spelt out in Lesben und andere
Lebensformen auf Kohlenstoffbasis (Bechdel 2005e).

Not translating Dykes

The trademark phrase, though, does not only occur on in titles. Not unusually
for a work straddling the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Dykes to Watch
Out For is a highly self-conscious work of art. Every so often, the story is inter-
rupted so that the author can reflect on the conditions of production. In one such
intervention, we are given the following apology: ‘Sorry, readers. This week’s
episode has been cancelled while our staff scrambles belatedly for a crumb of the
e-pie’ (Bechdel 2000a: 70). This is followed immediately by the following image
(Figure 8.2). (Notice the joke of referring to a dilapidated caravan as a ‘campus’
and situating it in a plot that is the opposite of the capital of Silicon Valley.) The
tag line makes Dykes to Watch Out For into an incorporated company – that is,
a traditional commercial enterprise as opposed to the modern dot.com. And the
frame as a whole makes double play with the brand – first with the ambiguous
meaning of ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’ and secondly with an alternative comple-
tion of the abbreviation. And how does Müller deal with this? Effectively she
doesn’t. Of course she leaves Palo Bajo as it is; but with the brand name too
the only thing she does is to change ‘inc’ into the German equivalent AG, while
adding a note to the effect that this was the comic’s original title. The marvel-
lously pompous ‘Gesellschaft für Binnengewässerdeiche’ (literally ‘Society for
Dykes on Inland Waterways’) is both more explicit than the ‘river embankment
monitors’ and misses the crucial activity of watching out. And only those who are
able to translate the ‘Zahnärzte für Behandlung ohne Fluor’ back into the original
American English will be able to understand their prior claim to the domain name
and the joke this implies.3 This reveals a great deal about the sort of translation
this is and the audience for which it is intended. Almost no attempt is made to
110  Robert Gillett

Figure 8.2  Chick Lit for the Digital Age (from Alison Bechdel, Post-Dykes to
Watch Out For)

translate, explain, or communicate the many in-jokes that Bechdel includes wher-
ever she can. Thus the resonant and witty titles appended to each strip – which
often make complex play on previously existing phrases, whereby, for example,
Freud’s ‘polymorphous perversion’ becomes ‘polyamorous perversion’ (Bechdel
2000a: 72) – are simply left in the original, re-scaled, and given a German approx-
imation. If Bechdel then presupposes that many of her readers will be sufficiently
educated and aware to understand what she is doing, then Müller for her part
assumes that for her readers the necessary inadequacy of the translation will be
part of the joke. Or, to put it slightly differently, there are enough different forms
of humour in these strips, ranging from relatively obvious comedy of character
and situation, through satire and parody down to tiny visual jokes and recondite
verbal allusions to ensure that they remain effective even if many of the details are
not translated or understood.
There is one set of such details, though, which are so important that failure to
translate them runs the risk of symptomatic misrepresentation: details that impinge
directly on American queer history. The problem starts with the very first trans-
lated strip. In the original, this bears the title ‘Sodomy blues’ (Bechdel 1988: 6).
The reason for this is that the strip is particularly concerned with a legal judgment
 Gaps to watch out for: Bechdel in German  111
(the infamous Supreme Court ruling in the Bowers vs. Hardwick case, which
also exercised Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick
1990: 6–7)). The term used in the relevant law, and hence in the judgment, is
indeed ‘sodomy’. Sodomy is of course a very old term for sexual misdemean-
our, associated with the Bible. Hence the reference to ‘ante-diluvian’, which
Müller translates, quite rightly, as ‘vorsintflutlich’ (Bechdel 1991: 6). In trans-
lating ‘sodomy blues’ as ‘Homo-Blues’, Müller removes reference to one of the
traumatic moments in the history of homosexuality in the United States, and sub-
stitutes a rather toothless, general term which if anything suggests an unspecific
dissatisfaction with gayness. A few pages further on again, in a strip concerned
with the difficult art of identifying lesbians, one of the ‘judicious but leading
remarks’ designed to elicit conclusive proof one way or the other is ‘That’s a
lovely lavender sweatshirt . . . Lavender’s my favorite color, it’s so festive and
gay’ (whereby the ‘and gay’ is separated from the ‘festive’ by the head of the
speaker). (Bechdel 1988: 16). In the translation, this remark has become ‘Das ist
ein tolles lila Sweatshirt . . . Lila ist meine Lieblingsfarbe, sie ist so vielverspre-
chend weiblich’ (Bechdel 1991: 16). In a monochrome strip, of course, the use
of colour is purely connotative; and ‘lila’, the German colour of Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple (Walker 1982 & 1984), certainly has ample connotations of
lesbianism. What is missing, though, are the specific references to the women’s
movement in the United States. (Famously, ‘Lavender Menace’ was a term first
used in a derogatory sense by Betty Friedan to refer to the danger that the wom-
en’s movement might be derailed by lesbians, and then taken over by those same
lesbians, in a zap that has gone down in history.4) Equally, ‘Vielversprechend
weiblich’ is wonderfully suggestive and ambiguous, with the first word promis-
ing a great deal and the second identifying femininity as the locus of the promise.
But it omits completely the reference to the double-edged history (and present) of
the word ‘gay’ in English. By much the same token, Müller works hard to retain
the placement and some of the implications of the word ‘queer’ while sedulously
avoiding the word itself, when an elated Mo, in the first flush of a new love, says
of the 1987 Pride March: ‘It was like being 100% queer and proud of it, but at
the same time not being queer at all anymore . . . y’know?’ (Bechdel 1988: 70,
emphasis in the original) and this is rendered in German as: ‘Es war, als wären
wir anders, 100% lesbisch und stolz darauf, aber gleichzeitig überhaupt nicht
mehr anders, verstehst du’ (Bechdel 1991: 70). Here the word ‘anders’, or ‘dif-
ferent’, with its connotations of one of the first depictions of homosexuality in
German cinema, Richard Oswald’s Anders als die anderen (Different from the
Others) of 1919, does begin to do the work of referencing cultural history while
at the same time capturing that aspect of ‘queer’ that is peculiar. But because
the word has neither the derogatory overtones, nor the cussedness of ‘queer’, the
effect is to miss one of the crucial terminological turning-points in the history of
the latter word. Since the word ‘anders’ doesn’t have the same breadth of con-
notation as ‘queer’, its use to refer to the historical moment when queers did not
feel queer any more here comes dangerously close to signifying absorption into
the mainstream, when in fact it means the opposite. And glossing it as ‘lesbisch’,
112  Robert Gillett
when we know from the previous strip that the march in question also featured
cowboys, has the effect of negating that inclusiveness which is one of the reasons
for the adoption of the word ‘queer’ in the first place.
Not unsurprisingly, the word ‘queer’ recurs repeatedly in Dykes to Watch Out
For, though a trick of perspective means that it is to some extent taken for granted.
The Sequel, for example, features a kiss-in in a shopping mall organized by Queer
Nation – a group to which Lois belongs, and where she finds at least one sexual
partner (Bechdel 1992: 48–50, 57, 66). In Spawn, reference is made to the ‘momen-
tarily queer Capital’ and to how men, unlike women, get to be ‘totally queer’
(Bechdel 2008b: 104, 106). By a curious coincidence, neither of these volumes
has been translated into German. Later, the queer splinter-group with which Lois
is allied is the Lesbian Avengers. And while the strip gives us ample details of the
sort of stunt this group is famous for pulling (dressing up as flaming crêpes suzettes
at a fundraising pancake breakfast for a traditionalist politician, Bechdel 1995: 14),
when Müller translates the name of the group literally as ‘lesbische Rächerinnen’
(Bechdel 1998b: 14), an important dimension of cultural specificity is lost. Later,
when reference is made to a ‘Rächerinnenbenefizveranstaltung’ (Bechdel 1998c:
129) – a fundraising event of or for women intent on revenge – it requires a fair
amount of cultural knowledge or an impressively retentive memory to understand
what is meant. Later on in the book, there is a flashback to an even earlier phase in
Lois’s development, where she briefly becomes involved in the anti-pornography
side of the sex wars. There the group she belongs to is called ‘Furious Women
Avenging Pornography’, and she is clearly visible, with a bandana over her face
and a tee-shirt proclaiming ‘FWAP’ (Bechdel 1995: 135). In the German version,
the picture remains unchanged; and Müller has solved the notorious difficulty of
the English present participle (avenging) with a relative clause, so ‘FWAP becomes
‘wütende Frauen’ (a good rendering of ‘furious women’ which, like the English,
has both anger in it and the wreaking of havoc), ‘die sich an Pornographie rächten’,
‘who avenged themselves on pornography’ (Bechdel 1998c: 135). So not only do
we lose the correlation between what is on the tee-shirt and the tag-line, the whole
thing has become clumsy and inflated in a way that has more of commentary about
it than equivalence. In the same book, a creative artist called Deirdre invites Mo
to ‘the queer film fest’ (Bechdel 1995: 61), which later turns out to have been ‘an
evening of experimental lesbian film’ (Bechdel 1995: 66). In Müller’s German,
this becomes ‘das Queer Filmfestival’, thus negating the effect of the use of the
Germanic word in the American, and the significant singular ‘film’ has been
reduced to mere films, ‘Filme’ (Bechdel 1998c: 61 & 66). Equally, in Split-Level
Dykes to Watch Out For, Ginger, an African-American lesbian academic with
an investment in identity politics, on being asked to carry the books of Professor
Sydney Krukowski, poses the rhetorical question: ‘Ah! You’ve finally realized
what a crock Queer Studies is’ (Bechdel 1998a: 13, emphasis in the original).
(The book she is holding in her hands in both the American and the German
editions bears the telling title Que(e)rying Everything.) Müller for her part offers a
masterly translation for every part of the sentence except queer studies: ‘Ah! Hast
du endlich eingesehen, was für ein Beschiss Queer Studies ist?) The suggestion,
 Gaps to watch out for: Bechdel in German  113
of course, is that Queer Studies is both a global phenomenon and a foreign body
within European discourse.

Gaps to watch out for

To show just how foreign, here is the blurb from Post-Dykes to Watch Out For
(Bechdel 2000a):

Mo’s having a touch of performativity anxiety – a post-feminist, post-gay

kind of moment – as she considers a panoply of possible gender permu-
tations. Angst with her as she inquires: Is gender essential? If she were a
transsexual woman, a bisexual man, or a straight woman with a penchant for
lesbians, would Mo still be a dyke to watch out for?

These and other similarly searching questions of our time are queerly addressed in
Post-Dykes To Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel’s ninth collection on the cartoon
continuum:

Whether you yearn for the days when lesbians were wimmin and men were
assumed to be mutants, or are just over it all, this witty critique on the fringes
of heteronormative discourse – i.e. the straight world – will have you doo-
dling in the margins of your theory books. Put the Mo back in PoMo!

In German this becomes (Bechdel 2003b):

Mo leidet unter einem Anflug von Rollenkonflikt – einer Art post-feministischer,

postschwuler Verwirrung – während sie über die schier unendlichen Möglichkeiten
des Geschlechtertauschs nachdenkt. Angst durchdringt ihre Psyche, während sie
sich fragt: Ist das Geschlecht überhaupt von wesentlicher Bedeutung? Wenn sie
nun eine transsexuelle Frau wäre, ein bisexueller Mann, eine Heterofrau mit einer
Neigung zu Frauen, wäre Mo dann immer noch eine Bilderbuch-Lesbe?
Diese und andere ähnlich bohrende Fragen unserer Zeit werden in Alison
Bechdels Comic “Postmoderne Lesbenheit” ziemlich schräg beleuchtet.
Wenn Ihr Euch nun nach den Zeiten zurück sehnt in denen Lesben Frauen
waren und Männer im Aussterben begriffene Mutanten, wird Euch diese wit-
zige Kritik an den Randzonen des heteronormativen Diskurses doch dazu
bringen, in Euern alten Theoriebüchern herumzukritzeln:
Mo steckt auch in der PostMoDerne!

What is interesting about this translation is the way in which it so consistently

misses the point. Clearly, ‘performativity anxiety’ is not the same thing as
‘Rollenkonflikt’. For one thing, ‘anxiety’ is quite a different kind of psycho-
logical condition from ‘conflict’, which is why the understatement of ‘a touch
of’ is so funny. The whole point about ‘performativity’ is that it is not a matter
of roles, but of a quality of being in the world. Moreover ‘performativity’ is a
114  Robert Gillett
specialized term: it belongs specifically to the Butlerian school of queer theory,
whereas the question of role play has been a disputed part of lesbian life more
or less from the beginning. (One of the earliest strips in More Dykes to Watch
Out For is concerned with precisely that – see Bechdel 1988: 10–11.) And of
course the whole point about Mo is that she is constituted as a character by the
performance of anxiety – a joke which is entirely lost in the German translation.
To suffer from something (‘leidet unter’) is altogether weightier than to ‘have
a touch of’ it, and ‘confusion’ (‘Verwirrung’) almost always lasts longer than
a ‘moment’. (The ‘moment’ with its double meaning of something very short-
lived and momentous, and its connotations of historical turns that don’t mean very
much, is anyway untranslatably subtle and funny.) ‘Geschlechtertausch’ is not
‘gender permutations’, it is ‘gender swapping’, as witnessed by a celebrated col-
lection of short stories edited by Edith Anderson as early as the 1970s (Anderson
1975). And a ‘panoply’, because it consists of everything you need in battle, here
in particular what you need to put on in order to defend yourself properly in the
battle of the sexes, could scarcely be less infinite (‘unendlich’) in the possibilities
‘Möglichkeiten’) it implies. The absence of the invitation, with its verbalization of
one of the most Germanic nouns in the American language, is regrettable, but not
fatal; but when the italicized question ‘Is gender essential’ is watered down to the
wholly unemphatic ‘Ist das Geschlecht überhaupt von wesentlicher Bedeutung’
(‘is gender of fundamental importance, anyway?’), another constitutive debate in
gender studies – about essentialism versus constructionism – is simply lost. (In
The Essential Dykes, Bechdel records her own anxiety in the face of this debate –
see Bechdel 2008b: xvi.)
With ‘eine Bilderbuch-Lesbe’, the translation falls back on the original solution
for ‘to watch out for’. However, because there is only one German word – Lesbe –
for both ‘dyke’ and ‘lesbian’, repetition is avoided by broadening the preferences
of Bechdel’s dyke-tyke straight to include women in general. This suggests a dif-
ficulty which goes to the heart of the whole translation enterprise: namely that the
terms used to describe and hence conceptualize the history of homosexualities in
the two countries are significantly different. Symptomatic of this is the inability
of the German blurb to account for the term ‘wimmin’, a deliberate mis-spelling
rich in cultural associations, which refers in the first instance to the revaluation
of the feminine which took place as part of the second wave. Here as so often
Bechdel is using specialized vocabulary to make glancing reference to the history
of the women’s movement, especially to the history of lesbian feminism. (Another
example occurs in More Dykes, where the feminist opposition to nuclear weapons
is summed up in the shorthand of ‘Common Womon’ – see Bechdel 1988: 48).
In the same paragraph, there is a rare but significant instance of actual mis-
translation. Instead of ‘or whether you, the lesbian reader, are just over it all’,
which is the sense of the original, the German has men threatened with extinc-
tion. The failure to render the former on the cover of a book about postness is
almost Freudian in its implications. The idea of men as superfluous and endan-
gered, while it has been a timeless commonplace of feminism at least since
Helene von Druskowitz (see Druskowitz 1988 [1905]; Solanas 1997 [1969];
 Gaps to watch out for: Bechdel in German  115
Klonovsky 2013), is associated in West German history especially with the
second-wave feminist Alice Schwarzer and her magazine Emma. The gratuitous
insertion of the word ‘alt’, ‘old’ into Bechdel’s blurb also makes the theory
referred to feminist rather than queer. The simple suppression of the gloss on
‘heteronormative discourse’ – ‘i.e. the straight world’ – means that a further
crucial discussion – about the extent to which the nature of reality depends
on who is allowed to talk about it – cannot take place. And in a translation
which otherwise allows realia to stand and speak for themselves, the rendering
of the culturally specific ‘queerly’ by ‘ziemlich schräg’ (‘totally weird’) has the
effect of making queer itself seem extraordinarily peculiar. That in turn suggests
very strongly that what we have here is intercultural blockage. That blockage of
course is not innocent; it reflects a very real struggle over the ownership of dis-
course in Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Trans, Queer, Asex and Intersex studies – a struggle
largely fought between those with a vested interest in a particular identity, such
as lesbian publishers, and those who see that identity as an effect of oppres-
sion, like queer theorists. It also raises questions about cultural hegemony more
broadly.
What I hope to have done here is to demonstrate the correlation between
these issues of discursive power and questions of translation. It was with a view
to investigating that nexus that I started work on Bechdel in the first place. It
is not just that she is untranslatably wonderful, though she is. It is not just that
the existence of the German translation is an important cultural phenomenon,
though it is. It is also that Birgit Müller, of necessity but also by design, has pro-
duced a remarkably straight translation of these queer texts, and thereby afforded
her audience a curiously hybrid reading experience. This suggests at least the
possibility of thinking translation too in terms of straight and queer. There also
seems to be something paradigmatic about queer resistance to translation and
resistance to queer translation. One of the elements in that paradigm concerns
the contradiction between globalization on the one hand and local specificity
on the other. Bound up with this is the ineradicable fact that the experience of
non-heterosexuals and other minorities is largely determined by the language in
which they are referred to and in which they refer to themselves. Both that lan-
guage and that experience are equally inflected by particular histories, which,
although they do not take place in isolation, are nonetheless not transferable.
Bechdel herself almost never attempts such transference. Rather, like quite a lot
of American culture, including American queer culture, her books concentrate
virtually exclusively on the world of the United States, specifically of ‘small-
town America’. And because the same is almost necessarily true of them too,
Müller’s translations demonstrate with uncanny clarity what is at stake in the
translation of queer texts. With the rare exception of the blurb, where we cannot
be sure that the translation is even by Müller, the gaps between her transla-
tion and the original are virtually never mere mistranslations. They are almost
always bound up with specific issues of cultural transfer. And it is because they
draw such careful attention to these issues that for our purposes they are indeed
gaps to watch out for.
116  Robert Gillett
Notes
1 The book sold over 50,000 copies, won numerous awards, was regularly cited as one of the
best books of 2006, was adapted as a musical and in that incarnation won yet further awards.
2 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Bechdel [accessed 30 August 2015].
3 Dentists for Treatment Without Fluoride.
4 See Leila J. Rupp, ‘Lesbian Organizations’ in: Wilma Mankiller et al., (eds), The Reader’s
Companion to U.S. Women’s History. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin 1998. http://
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA176833538&v=2.1&u=fub&it=r&p=AONE&
sw=w&asid=1207dbb8d87390f4ff769bc979e4d449 [accessed 1 September 2015].

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———. 1992. Dykes to Watch Out For: The Sequel. Added Attraction: “Serial Monogamy”,
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9 Eradicalization
Eradicating the queer in children’s literature
B.J. Epstein

Introduction
Translations are an excellent way of bringing new ideas and new worldviews into
another culture. Similarly, there is little argument about the fact that literature for
children and young adults helps young people to understand themselves and others
through its representation of children’s experiences, thoughts and feelings, and can
expand their comprehension of the world. When children’s literature is translated,
however, it is not an infrequent occurrence that certain aspects of a text get changed
to better suit what is considered appropriate for children in the target culture. One
can consider whether this is especially the case when it comes to traditionally chal-
lenging or taboo topics, such as sexuality and, in particular, non-heterosexuality.
In this chapter, I explore the translation of queer texts for young adults. First, I give
some background on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or otherwise queer litera-
ture for children and young adults, and then I discuss queer approaches to translation,
basing my ideas on earlier feminist approaches. Then, I briefly compare two texts
for young adults from English-speaking countries and their Swedish translations in
order to discuss how sexuality is portrayed in books for young people in the UK and
how sexuality gets translated. The books are Dance on My Grave (1982) by Aiden
Chambers and Sugar Rush (2004) by Julie Burchill. My expectation when setting out
on this research project was that texts for children that feature non-heterosexuality
would be altered when translated from a more permissive, liberal culture to a more
conservative, traditional one, and that this would obviously affect the reading of the
texts. However, as I discuss below, this is not necessarily the case.

Background on LGBTQ children’s books1

Over the past four decades, increasing numbers of books have been written in
English for children and young people that portray LGBTQ characters. Authors
of such works include Nancy Garden, Jacqueline Woodson, Julie Anne Peters,
David LaRochelle, David Levithan, Ellen Wittlinger and Alex Sanchez. Many
of the early books were for young adults, and they tended to show young people
struggling with their sexuality; as a result of this struggle, the characters often had
to choose between a ‘happy’ forced heterosexual life or an unhappy, frequently
 Eradicating the queer in children’s literature  119
solitary homosexual one. That is to say that LGBTQ characters were not given a
chance to be out, proud and satisfied with their lives.
One of the first picture books for children to feature LGBTQ characters
was Mette bor hos Morten og Erik by Danish writer Susanne Bösche (1981
in Danish, 1983 in English, as Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin). Bösche has
written:

I wrote Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin back in 1981 because I became
aware of the problems which some children face when meeting family group-
ings different from the ones they are familiar with, i.e. mum and dad, possibly
mum and dad divorced, maybe a step-parent. It’s not possible to go through
life without meeting people living in different ways, and they shouldn’t come
as a shock to anybody. (Bösche 2000: n.p.)

Some of the first picture books written in English were Heather Has Two Mommies
by Lesléa Newman (1989) and Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite (1991).
The queer LGBTQ characters in them are always parents, not young people.
Nancy Garden’s Annie On My Mind (1982) and Aidan Chambers’ Dance on My
Grave (1982) were among the first books for older readers and to feature LGBTQ
characters who were not parents. Still, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s,
most of the books with LGBTQ characters were picture books, aimed at young
children. Perhaps this was the case because more gay couples were having or
adopting children and they wanted books to read aloud to their children that fea-
tured families like theirs, suggesting that these books were meant to mirror those
families. Whatever the reason, there are quite a few picture books2 with same-sex
parents (although not as many as one would expect given the number of LGBTQ
parents raising children).
In more recent years, LGBTQ characters have also increasingly been included
in books for older children and young adults. The characters are now not just
parents but young people themselves, although a surprising number of the books
for young adults still feature LGBTQ parents, and some have a combination of
LGBTQ adults and LGBTQ young people. This suggests that despite the publica-
tion of some fairly explicit books about sexuality such as those by Judy Blume,
authors, publishers, readers and parents may be uncomfortable with young peo-
ple’s sexuality, especially if that sexuality is not hetero. There are many issues
with these books, such as their lack of intersectionality, but this chapter is not the
place to discuss them (see Epstein 2011, 2012b and 2013 for more on these books
and what is problematic about them).
In Scandinavia, and Sweden in particular, queer characters are not especially
unusual in children’s literature. As Eva Heggestad points out, in a series of Elsa
Beskow’s classic children’s books that were published between 1918 and 1947,
there are three women who live and raise children together, although the relation-
ship between them is never fully explained (2013: 223). Heggestad argues that
from around 1999 that we can find texts that
120  B.J. Epstein
question the heterosexual norm in terms of sex and sexuality. Here we find
depictions of children or adults who don’t fall under a traditional representa-
tion of gender but also descriptions of families that deviate from the tradi-
tional nuclear family in that one or both parents live with someone of the
same sex. (2013: 224)3

While it might appear from this that such books were published earlier in English
(that is, the 1980s in English and 1990s in Swedish), it is worth remembering
that (a) one of the books mentioned above is a translation from Danish, and (b)
that many of the books published in English were and still are negative, because
the characters often face problems such as depression or familial rejection. In the
Scandinavian languages, queer texts tend to be more accepting; the characters are
queer, and even if the authors at times seem to have pedagogical aims with their
writing, the queerness is generally not a major issue.
While I would not claim that the Swedish books are perfect in their repre-
sentation of queerness in children’s literature, I would suggest that the way in
which LGBTQ books in different countries portray queerness reflects the wider
society in which they are written (see Epstein 2012a for more on this in relation
to the ways in which same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting are shown in
children’s books in the US, the UK and northern Europe). With regard to young
adult novels in particular, I would argue that Swedish works are more open about
sex and sexuality, and rely less on euphemism and subtlety. I therefore hypothe-
sized that when queer texts were translated from English to Swedish, they would
retain the queerness of the originals, whereas in translations from Swedish into
English, it might be toned down. But before I could explore case studies, I had to
consider what a queer translation would look like.

Queer approaches to translation

As translation studies has developed as a field, translators and translation scholars
have become more aware of the biases inherent in texts themselves and in the
ways in which people choose, translate, edit, publish and use these texts. For
example, postcolonial approaches to translation have looked at, among other top-
ics, how particular works might be chosen and translated by one group of people
in order to gain or retain control over another group. The act of translation, then, is
seen as one of power. To analyse this is to question who has power, how they use
it, and against whom, and to work against it is to attempt to give control back to
under-represented or otherwise less powerful groups. For instance, feminist trans-
lators use particular translational strategies to highlight issues such as sexism or
to emphasize an author’s gender or an author’s feminist views (see Simon 1996:
149 for some connections between postcolonialism and feminism in translation).
Now the time has come to queer or queery translation, which means analysing it
from the perspective of queer studies and using queer strategies to translate texts.
LGBTQ writers and translators may look at the ways in which the heteronor-
mative society in which we live influences how we write and translate, and are
 Eradicating the queer in children’s literature  121
beginning to think about how to fight against and subvert this heterosexism.
Translators using a queer approach might want to call attention to an author’s
queerness or queer perspective or, alternatively, they might translate in such a
way that reveals an author’s heterosexism or homophobic, biphobic, or transphobic
views. Researchers, too, are noticing how queerness might be ignored, repressed,
or made invisible in translation; the opposite, of course, can happen too (see
Epstein 2010, for some of the research that has been published on this so far).
What I would like to propose are some strategies for queering and queerying
translation. How can sexuality and gender be expressed in literature, and how
can this be translated and analysed? Furthermore, how can this take place in liter-
ature for younger readers, whom adults often want to ‘protect’ from certain types
of knowledge? My inspiration stems directly from work by feminist translation
scholars, such as Luise von Flotow (1991, 1997, 2011) and Sherry Simon (1996).
In their work, von Flotow and Simon have proposed supplementing, prefacing
and footnoting, and hijacking as feminist translation strategies (Simon 1996: 14),
and translator Suzanne de Lotbiniére-Harwood uses notes or radical changes,
such as invented spellings (Conacher 2006: 250). In other words, translators can
draw attention to gender itself and to related issues, such as the treatment of
female characters, by choosing to highlight, to add in, or, indeed, to remove
particular aspects of a text. They may not do this in all cases (for example, there
may be a text where gender does not seem relevant, or where a translator does
not feel like pointing the reader towards gendered ideas), but there are options for
translators to use if they want to or believe there is a need for them.
Queer translators/translators of queer texts can do likewise. They can focus on
the queerness of a character or a situation, or they can push a reader to note how a
queer character is treated by another character or by the author, or they can otherwise
‘hijack’ a reader’s attention by bringing issues of sexuality and gender identity to the
fore. Such strategies can be called ‘acqueering’, as they emphasize or even increase
queerness. For example, a translator can add in queer sexualities, sexual practices or
gender identities or change straight/cis identities or situations to queer ones; remove
homophobic, biphobic, or transphobic language or situations, or highlight it in order
to force a reader to question it; change spellings or grammar or word choices to bring
attention to queerness, or add in footnotes, endnotes, a translator’s preface, or other
paratextual material to discuss queerness and/or translatorial choices.
On the other hand, a translator may choose – or be encouraged by the publisher
to choose – strategies that remove or downplay queer sexualities, sexual practices,
gender identities, or change queerness to the straight/cis norm. Doing so can be
considered ‘eradicalization’, as this eradicates the radical nature of queerness.
In what follows, I will explore two texts to see whether their translators decided
to acqueer or eradicalize them.

The texts
I chose two young adult novels, one with a queer male storyline and one with
a queer female one. Besides having sexuality in common, both texts explore
122  B.J. Epstein
teenagers’ relationships with parents and also issues of class. While these are
just two cases, analysing them can be instructive, as they offer insights into how
adult translators approach queer material for your readers and suggest approaches
future translators might want to take.
Aidan Chambers’s novel Dance on My Grave (1982), which was mentioned
above as an early queer text, tells the story of working-class Hal and his friendship,
and then romantic relationship, with Barry. They become lovers, Barry cheats on
Hal with a Norwegian woman called Kari, and then Barry dies in a motorcycle
accident. The book is quite experimental/daring in terms of style and format, in
that it is a mixture of newspaper clippings, psychologist’s reports, narration and
other materials. About the novel, Cart and Jenkins have written:

The complexity of the novel extends to its treatment of homosexuality,

which seems to be an admixture of love and sex, of power and submission, of
obsession and compulsion, of elation and despair, of one thing and another,
of certainty . . . and uncertainty . . . In the richness of its context, in its use
of ambiguity and symbol, in the maturity of its uncertainty, Dance on My
Grave was a significant advance in the evolution of GLBTQ fiction for young
adults. (2006: 67)

Meanwhile, Julie Burchill’s book Sugar Rush (2004) is about Kim, an upper-
middle-class teenage girl. Her mother leaves the family, financial difficulties
ensue, and Kim switches to a state-run school. There she meets Maria ‘Sugar’
Sweet and they become friends. They start a sexual relationship, but it is rather
one-sided, and eventually it fizzles into ‘lesbian bed death’. Sugar also cheats on
Kim with a number of men. Sugar never defines herself as queer, and Kim is also
quite reluctant to, even looking down on queer teens. The book was made into a
Channel 4 TV programme, which added more drama and made Kim seem more
certain of her lesbian sexuality. In this, it goes further than Burchill herself, who,
while admitting that she has had relationships with other women, insists: ‘I would
never describe myself as “heterosexual”, “straight” or anything else. Especially
not “bisexual” (it sounds like a sort of communal vehicle missing a mudguard). I
like “spontaneous” as a sexual description’ (Burchill and Bindel 2009: n.p.).

Depictions of sexuality
What I am interested in here is how the characters describe their sexuality and
how they enact it, and then how this gets translated.
Hal in Aidan Chambers’s novel uses subtle terms regarding his growing
understanding of his homosexuality. He learns about the Old Testament’s David
and Jonathan in religious studies class and how they shared ‘bosom palship’
(1982: 51). This intrigues him and ‘I then discovered the even more riveting
information that D. and J. found their love, as the Bible puts it, “passing the love
of women”.’ (1982: 52) A less than careful reader could be forgiven for thinking
that Hal would just like a best friend, especially as Hal has continually referred to
 Eradicating the queer in children’s literature  123
his desire for a ‘bosom buddy’ (1982: 44, and elsewhere). Hal has multiple close
male friendships that are verging on romance but he still views them, or at least
refers to them, as ‘bosom buddy’ship and he does not redefine them or reconsider
the terminology until much later. It may simply be Hal’s way of thinking about
his gayness and it could also be the time and the place (England in the 1980s), but
Hal does not use any stronger or clearer terms for referring to his homosexuality.
Incidentally, Hal’s lover Barry does not seem to use any terminology to describe
his orientation, which perhaps could be described as bisexuality or as ‘spontane-
ous’, to cite Burchill, as he sleeps both with the male Hal and the female Kari.
Burchill’s novel has a quote from controversial young adult novelist Melvin
Burgess on the cover: ‘A fabulous story of sexual fascination – guilt-free, intoxi-
cating and delicious’ (2004: n.p.). There is also a ‘warning: explicit content’ on
the book. This suggests that the book is very sexual and/or about sexuality, and
perhaps is also meant to intrigue and excite readers. In the novel, Kim initially
tries to deny the strength of her feelings for Maria:

I suppose you’re wondering why I’m not more het up about my new feelings
for Maria. Well, I told you I was level-headed, didn’t I, and naturally as a
good little library-ticket-holding girl with liberal parents I’ve read all those
novels which bend over backwards to reassure you that it’s perfectly normal
for your haywire hormones to make you believe that you’re in love with your
same-sex role model. Whatever.
It was ‘only natural’, wasn’t it, to get a crush on someone of the same sex
who seemed to have all the qualities – beauty, confidence, absence of parent who
brought oversized jars with French words written on them into the house, thus
driving away other parent, that you wanted for yourself? If you really WERE
a proper gay teenager, you’d get so much I-hear-you-and-it’s-only-natural-at-
your-age eyewash from parents and agony aunts about loving someone of the
same gender that you could easily end up totally confused and isolated, in fact
more so than years ago, when they were telling you it was a filthy sin.
Poor gay teenagers! I thought smugly as I eyed my treacherous, respect-
able self in my bedroom mirror. So lonely, so sad, so. . .stuck. Not like me,
who’s totally on top of her totally temporary pash for the naughtiest girl in
the school. (2004: 49–50)

Kim’s ‘pash’ turns out not to be ‘temporary’, but even if she has been told that ‘it’s
only natural’ and has been raised to be ‘liberal’, she still seems to have trouble
accepting what seems to be her obvious lesbianism. Her lover Maria repeatedly
tells Kim that she is unwilling to settle down with just one person or with partners
of one gender and also sometimes calls Kim ‘pervy’, to show she is not satisfied
with their relationship (2004: 120, 123, 165, 187, 189, etc.), but she never uses
terms such polyamorous, bisexual, or, indeed, ‘spontaneous’.
Both these novels, it may be worth pointing out, feature teens who do not have
close relationships with their parents, do not seem sure of their sexuality, and have
same-sex partners who eventually cheat on them with people of the opposite sex.
124  B.J. Epstein
Their partners are also unsure of their sexuality, even as they sleep with people
of the same sex (Sugar calls lesbians ‘creepy’ and ‘sad’ and ‘ugly’ (2004: 94),
while Barry makes it clear he does not want to be held back or tied down by a man
(1982: 179)). And, strangely, the protagonists seem to try to parent their partners.
So the depictions of sexuality, while undoubtedly queer in some ways, are also
negative to a certain extent in the original English in that they imply that queer-
ness may be caused by difficult parent-child relationships and that queer people
may be more likely to cheat or be cheated on.

The Swedish translations

Many changes happen in the Swedish translations of both books: the English con-
texts are made Swedish to a certain extent (through the use of product and other
names, if not the actual settings). Slang and dialect terms are often deleted or
changed, which also affects the context and the reader’s understanding of the text,
and the style is not always retained (for example, Kim in Sugar Rush uses lots of
capitalization and terms such as ‘olde world’, and these are often deleted). But in
relation to the primary concern of this chapter, in both novels, the queer sexuality
seems to have been eradicalized in translation.
Aidan Chambers’s novel was published in Sweden in 2006 as Dansa på min grav,
translated by Katarina Kuick. Many terms that reference sex or sexuality in general
have been changed or deleted. For example, ‘nut-cracking scared’ (1982: 19) becomes
‘skiträdd’, or ‘shit scared’ (2006: 22), and ‘impotent sails’ (1982: 22), becomes ‘slaka
seglen’, or ‘slack sails’ (2006: 25), and ‘his presence fingered me pliant’ (1982: 126)
turns into ‘blev jag alldeles knävsvag av hans blotta närvaro’, ‘I got weak in the knees
from his very presence’ (2006: 139). Much of the sexuality in this book is quite euphe-
mistic, so it is possible the translator did not recognize the sexual connotations, but it
also changes the tone so that it is less sexually charged.
Similarly and more importantly, terms that subtly suggest gayness are changed.
For example, ‘effete’ (1982: 29) becomes ‘dekadenta’, ‘decadent’ (2006: 33), ‘You
crafty young bugger’ (1982: 95) is ‘Din smarta lilla skit’, ‘You smart little shit’
(2006: 104), ‘Lazy bugger’ (1982: 99) becomes ‘lata jäkel’, or ‘lazy devil’ (2006:
109), and ‘hello-sailor clothes’ (1982: 175) turn into ‘matroskläder’, or ‘sailor
clothes’ (2006: 194). Again, the translator may not have understood these queer ref-
erences or associations, but it is also possible that she felt they were inappropriate.
At one point, bullies stop Hal and Barry and seem to recognize them as a
male-male couple. The bullies taunt them with phrases such as ‘a little Southend
pier’ and ‘couple of bottle boys’ (1982: 133), while also pretending not to know
whether they are male or female, and acting camp. In Swedish, this scene is short-
ened and simplified so that the taunts are just well-known slang words for ‘gay’
(‘akterseglare’ and ‘fikusar’) (1982: 147). So in translation, the insults and the
threats seem less menacing and there is also less of a poetic, euphemistic sense.
There are also many references to ‘body’ in the book in English, and these are
most often translated as ‘lik’, or ‘corpse’, rather than ‘kropp’, or ‘body’. While
‘corpse’ is relevant in some places, as Barry is dead, these changes also make the
 Eradicating the queer in children’s literature  125
book less physical and active. The vital, sometimes confusing sexuality of the
original has become dead and passive in translation.
In short, Chambers’s references to sexuality, especially gay sexuality, are
removed in translation, and the book generally feels less sexual and less active as
well as less queer.
Burchill’s novel was published in 2010 in a Swedish translation by Moa
Andersdotter, with the English title retained. Here, too, sexuality is softened in
translation. Terms or phrases that reference sex and sexuality are toned down or
even removed in translation. For example, words such as ‘frig’ (2004: 56) are
deleted and terms such as ‘hot perving date’ (2004: 81) are softened into ‘het date’
or ‘hot date’ (2010: 86), with the queer perviness eradicated. ‘Wanker’ (2004: 42)
becomes the English word ‘loser’ (2010: 48), ‘het up’ (2004: 49), with its subtle
nod to heterosexuals, becomes ‘upprörd’, or ‘upset’ (2010: 55), and ‘buggered’
2004: 51) turns into ‘fan’, or ‘damn’ (2010: 57).
Also, intriguingly, lots of challenging words are kept in English rather than
being translated to Swedish; examples include ‘bitch’, ‘freak,’ ‘ladee-lovers’,
etc., and this occurs throughout the Swedish translation. While it is true that many
Swedish texts include English words and that many Swedes, especially young
ones, have some level of English competency, this translatorial strategy of direct
retention may also imply either a translator who does not know how to translate
such slangy and sexual terms or a translator who does not want to translate them.
Readers are kept at a distance from the meaning of the novel when the words
are not translated; if readers wanted to read the text in English, presumably they
would have chosen to do so.
One of the most interesting aspects of this novel is that the character of Sugar
explains how she does not want to be tied down to one person. She compares love
to liking music:

But say I got a favourite CD – a single. Can I only EVER play that single,
because it’s my favourite? Can’t I ever play another single or . . . not even
PLAY it, say, cos that implies, you know DOING IT, but more to the point
can’t I ever HUM another song? Can’t I have it as my mobile tone? Can’t
I be happy when it comes on the radio and go ‘Oh I really love that song!’
(2004: 121, capitalization original)

Sugar repeatedly says to Kim that she wants to enjoy other songs, while Kim
wants a traditional monogamous relationship (one song only), and this is a source
of tension between them. So Sugar both is queer in that she is having a relation-
ship with a woman, but also queer in that she is probably what we would call
polyamorous, even if, as already mentioned, she does not use the term.
Although Sugar says she may not want to ‘PLAY’ another song, towards the
end of the book, Kim nonetheless finds Sugar outside a party having sex with
four boys. This is no surprise to the reader, given Sugar’s repeated hints about her
tendencies. What is shocking is that the Swedish translation changes this scene to
Sugar having sex with just one boy. In English, Sugar is with four young males
126  B.J. Epstein
(2004: 207) and she is described as ‘ENJOYING BEING GANGBANGED . . .
with four boys’ (2004: 209, capitalization original) and to be ‘THEIR Sugar’
(2004: 210, capitalization original). After having sex with the first boy, Sugar
‘smiled – and pushed her damp hair back from her sweating brow, and held her
arms out to the next one’ (2004: 208). In Swedish, she is with only one boy (2010:
210), is said to ‘NJUTA AV ATT GÖRA DET . . . med en kille’, or ‘ENJOY
DOING IT . . . with a boy’ (2010: 212, capitalization original), and to be ‘HANS
Sugar’, or ‘HIS Sugar’ (2010: 213, capitalization original). This is to say that
Sugar’s radically queer nature – her pleasure in being gangbanged by four boys
at once, while her girlfriend is first just inside the nearby house and then outside
watching – is drastically eradicalized in translation.
Perhaps the translator was uncomfortable with this scene of hedonistic orgy, or
even felt it was anti-feminist to show a young woman being gangbanged, though
Sugar is clearly said to be ‘enjoying’ it. I wondered if the publisher requested these
changes. Vombat, the publishers, describe their aims on their website as follows:

Vombat publisher is the little publisher that thinks big. Our foundation is the
idea of equal value through visibility. Our primary target group is children
and young adults aged 2–18 years. The idea of our books is to show the many
different aspects of children’s and young people’s lives without that which
goes against what we sometimes call the norm being presented as something
unusual or something that has to be problematized. Quality, humour and
warmth must go alongside diversity and that which sometimes deviates from
the expected. We want children who read our books to recognize themselves,
be amazed, be challenged and perhaps conquer new worlds. (Vombat Förlag
website 2005: n.p., my translation)4

It somehow seems unlikely that given this description, the publisher insisted on
such a dramatic change, but then again, it could be that Vombat felt young adults
would not, or should not, ‘recognize themselves’ in a polyamorous, gangbanged
teenager. In an analysis of how women’s sexuality and sexual activity was trans-
lated in subtitles from English to French, Anne-Lise Feral found that women who
are ‘sexually masculine’ (2011: 190) or even ‘promiscuous’ (2011: 194), that is,
who are active and who enjoy sex, are often punished. This is to say that the French
subtitles ‘shift’ meaning and ‘re-establish . . . women as passive objects as desire’
(2011: 195), and ‘punish . . . these women for displaying the masculine sexual qual-
ities of agency and desire’ (2011: 196). Perhaps this is part of what is happening
with Burchill’s novel; we are unaccustomed to viewing women, especially young
ones, as active sexual beings, and this makes the translator uncomfortable and thus
causes the translator to choose to remove certain radical elements from the text.

Conclusion: (de-)queering approaches to translation

In short, both these novels have been de-queered and eradicalized in translation.
My assumption, when starting this research project, was that on the contrary, the
 Eradicating the queer in children’s literature  127
Swedish texts would have had the queerness retained and acqueered, so this was a
surprising finding. Words/phrases about the protagonists’ sexuality are toned down,
changed, or even deleted. In the case of Burchill’s book, many challenging words
are left in English rather than being translated, and the orgy/gangbanging scene is
changed to one-on-one sex. In other words, these two queer YA texts are not so
queer in translation. Perhaps the translators were uncomfortable with queer sexual-
ity, and/or did not know how to translate it, and/or did not think it was appropriate
for young Swedish readers. Beatriz Preciado argues that the term ‘queer’ ‘has lost
a large part of its subversive energy and can no longer serve as today’s common
denominator to describe the proliferation of strategies of resistance to categories
of gender and the normalization of sexuality as well as to the processes of industri-
alization and privatization of the body as “product.”’ (2013: 342). While I would
not go as far as Preciado, I would suggest that, at least in these examples, queer
translation strategies do not seem to have the ‘subversive energy’ one would expect
and like to see. Far from dancing or rushing, the queer characters in Dance On My
Grave and Sugar Rush have been slowed down and made passive in translation.
Translators and translations are often ignored, which is one reason why
researchers are attempting to make the work of translators and translators them-
selves more visible (Venuti 2008). Likewise, LGBTQ people are frequently
invisible or are expected/hoped to be invisible by society. So the question I have
been interested in here is what happens when LGBTQ issues are made visible
(even if subtly so) in a text and, furthermore, what happens when that queer text is
then translated. I thus have attempted to explore a doubly ignored/invisible topic.
These two case studies suggest that translators may not recognize queer-
ness in texts, which can lead to us wondering whether translators of queer texts
themselves ought to be queer. But the analysis of these texts also implies that
translators may be uncomfortable with queer topics and/or may be protective of
young readers, which causes them to choose eradicalizing translatorial strategies
that downplay, soften, or even remove queer elements. This was especially inter-
esting here in that Sweden is generally considered to be more liberal than the UK,
and yet the analysis indicates the opposite. Further case studies would be needed
in order to see whether this is a Scandinavian-wide effect, or whether this has to
do with these particular novels (which in themselves were not quite as comfort-
able with their queerness as one would have imagined), or with the fact that the
novels were for young readers. And additional research should be carried out into
acqueering translatorial strategies and ways in which translators and academics
can continue to queer literature and translation.

Notes
1 See Epstein 2013 for more detail on this. Much of this background is taken from there.
2 Besides the ones mentioned here, others include Josh and Jaz Have Three Mums,
Antonio’s Card, The Purim Superhero, Dad David, Baba Chris and Me, Donovan’s Big
Day and Mom and Mum Are Getting Married.
3 My translation from the Swedish. The original text reads: ‘ifrågasätter den heterosex-
uella normen vad gäller kön och sexualitet. Här finner vi skildringar av barn eller vuxna,
128  B.J. Epstein
som inte faller in under en traditionell genusrepresentation men också beskrivningar av
familjer som avviker från den traditionella kärnfamiljen såtillvida att en av eller båda
föräldrarna lever tillsammans med en person av samma kön’.
4 The original reads: ‘Vombat förlag är det lilla förlaget som tänker stort. Vår grund är tan-
ken om allas lika värde genom synliggörande. Vår primära målgrupp är barn och unga
vuxna från 2–18 år. Tanken med våra böcker är att viza många olika aspekter av barn
och ungdomars liv utan att det som bryter mot, det vi ibland kallar, normen framställs
som något avvikande eller något som måste problematiseras. Kvalité, humor och värme
får gå jämsides med mångfald och det som ibland avviker från det förväntade. Vi vill att
barn som läser våra böcker ska känna igen sig själva, förundras, utmanas i tanken och
kanske erövra nya världar.’

References
Burchill, J. 2004. Sugar Rush, London: Young Picador.
———. 2010. Sugar Rush, translated by Moa Andersdotter, Stockholm: Vombat.
——— and J. Bindel. 2009. ‘I Know We’ve Had Our Spats’; accessed 6 June 2014 http://
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/may/13/julie-bindel-burchill-feminism.
Bösche, S. 2000. ‘Jenny, Eric, Martin . . . and Me’;. accessed 6 June 2014 http://www.
guardian.co.uk/books/2000/jan/31/booksforchildrenandteenagers.features11.
Cart, M. and C.A. Jenkins. 2006. The Heart Has Its Reasons, London: Scarecrow Press.
Chambers, A. 1982. Dance on My Grave, London: Bodley Head.
———. 2006. Dansa på min grav, trans. Katarina Kuick, Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren.
Conacher, A. 2006. ‘Susanne de Lotbiniére-Harwood: Totally Between’, in A. Whitfield
(ed.), Writing Between the Lines, Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press,
pp. 245–66.
Epstein, B.J. (ed.) 2010. In Other Words: Translating Queers/Queering Translation, issue 36.
———. 2011. ‘Not as Queer as Folk: Issues of Representations in LGBTQ Young Adult
Literature’, Inis, 36: 44–9.
———. 2012a. ‘The Gay Nuclear Family’, Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology
Review, 8(3): 142–52.
———. 2012b. ‘We’re Here, We’re Not? Queer: LGBTQ Characters in Children’s Books’,
Journal of GLBT Family Studies, 8: 287–300.
———. 2013. Are the Kids All Right? Representations of LGBTQ Characters in Children’s
and Young Adult Literature, Bristol: Hammer On Press.
Feral, A.-L. 2011. ‘Sexuality and Femininity in Translated Chick Texts’, in L. von Flotow
(ed.), Translating Women, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, pp. 183–202.
Flotow, L. von 1991. ‘Feminist Translation: Contexts, Practices and Theories’, TTR,4(2):
69–84.
——— (ed.). 2011. Translating Women, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.
———. 1997. Translation and Gender: Translation in the Era of Feminism, Manchester:
St. Jerome Press.
Heggestad, E. 2013. ‘Regnbågsfamiljer och könsöverskridande barn: Bilderbokens nya
invånare’ [Rainbow families and transgender children: Picture books’ new residents],
Samlaren, 134: 222–50.
Preciado, B. 2013. Testo Junkie, trans. Bruce Benderson, New York: Feminist Press.
Simon, S. 1996. Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission,
London: Routledge.
Venuti, L. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility, Abingdon: Routledge.
Vombat Förlag website; accessed 6 June 2014 http://www.vombatforlag.se/.
10 The queer story of your conception
Translating sexuality and racism
in Beasts of the Southern Wild
Jacob Breslow

The storm has devastated everything in the Bathtub, a swampland town, and the
few lone survivors are gathered together in a bar on a floating barge when Wink,
a dying, sometimes abusive, and often drunk black man, turns to his 6-year-old
daughter and asks her: ‘Hushpuppy, did I ever tell you the story of your concep-
tion?’ (Beasts: 35’29). Hearing the question, the other bar patrons chuckle with
anticipation and recognition. We get the sense that this question, and the story
that it heralds, have been relayed before: ‘When me and Hushpuppy’s Mamma
first met we was so shy, we used to sit around, and drink beer, and smile at each
other. One day we was so shy we just napped’ (Beasts: 35’40). Cut between shots
of Wink, Hushpuppy and the bar, we are transported to dreamlike sequences of
a younger, fresher Wink whose gaze never strays from a woman, clad only in a
pair of white briefs, as she lingers about, and shoots, kills and cooks an attacking
alligator. ‘Your Mamma battered that gator up, and set it to fry’ (Beasts: 37’06),
Wink tells Hushpuppy and the crowd, ‘and Hushpuppy popped into the universe
maybe four minutes later’ (Beasts: 37’14). What are we to make of this shared
dreamlike fantasy sequence of Hushpuppy’s conception? In this chapter, I shall
argue that this scene from Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012),
and the film itself, can be approached in a way that offers up and problematizes
a queer mode of translating sexuality – and other joyous, pleasurable and painful
aspects of adulthood – for children.
This might seem like an odd project, but it is not one without precedent. The
question of how to explain sex and sexuality to children remains highly contentious,
shaping everything from what books (or teachers) are allowed in schools and what
media and speech are acceptable in the public sphere, to the framing of the politi-
cal itself (Edelman 2004). In this chapter, I shall use a framework of translation to
offer up a queer reading of these questions. Here, drawing on Zohar Shavit and
Virginia Jewiss, I define translation broadly, as ‘conveying something well beyond
the normative question of language’ (Jewiss 2013: 78) and as being ‘the process by
which the textual models of one system are transferred to another’ (Shavit 2006:
25). As for Jewiss, the ‘transfer’ at issue for me is ‘primarily one of genre: from
high to low, or from adult literature to children’s story’ (2013: 78). Here, however,
less concerned with the written word than the spoken one, I additionally ask after
the production of ‘adult’ and ‘child’, and the distinction of their semiotic cultures,
130  Jacob Breslow
in the process of translation itself. Translation (queered or otherwise) is important, I
argue, because it addresses in novel ways the dynamics of power that structure what
is told to children, and how. Inspired by the work in queer theory about childhood
(Bruhm and Hurley 2004; Burman and Stacey 2010; Edelman 2004; Halberstam
2012; Stockton 2009; Vänskä 2011), I frame this chapter by asking: ‘How do stories
of sexuality get told to children?’ Doing so, I unpack the ways in which heteronor-
mative and reproductive notions of sexuality get queered through the failures that, I
shall argue, are inherent to translating sexuality for children. And I work to situate
this queering within the context of Beasts, a context in which the usual and prob-
lematic representations of race and racism in the US are extended, contested and
negotiated.

Childhood, fantasy and translation

In this chapter, I approach the child as simultaneously a living subject and a figure.1
By attending to the ways subject and figure intermesh, I bring together the layers of
identification with the child/children such that the idea of childhood is allowed to
take on various positions or claims in and as the political (Berlant 1997; Bernstein
2011; Castañeda 2002; Levander 2006). Understanding the child as a product
of desire, I draw upon Jacqueline Rose, who, in The Case of Peter Pan (1984),
famously argues that the child for whom children’s fiction is written is a fantasy.
For Rose, while children’s fiction ‘rests on the idea that there is a child who is
simply there to be addressed and that speaking to it might be simple’ (1984: 1), in
actuality, ‘children’s fiction sets up the child as an outsider to its own process, and
then aims, unashamedly, to take the child in’ (1984: 2, emphasis in original). In
producing the very child for whom the work is intended, children’s fiction, Rose
argues, rests on the ‘impossible relation between adult and child’ (1984: 1). This
‘impossibility’ means that the divide between adult and child is a fantasmatic one,
and one that is produced through the adult’s desire for a particular understanding
of childhood and adulthood (cf. Probyn 1995; Steedman 1995). Centring the desire
for the child is important in this case because it suggests that the subject/figure
of the child is entangled with, and provides a space for, the displacement of the
anxieties and fantasies ‘we have about our psychic, sexual and social being in the
world’ (Rose 1984: xvii).2
This understanding of the subject/figure of the child being produced through
fantasy, and particularly through fictional stories for children, resonates with vari-
ous debates within translation studies, often from postcolonial scholars (Bassnett
and Trivedi 1999; Bhabha 1994; Niranjana 1992; Said 1978; Simon 2000; Spivak
1993), about the production of the culture of (source) texts as stemming from
the translator’s positionality and relationship to power. Here, as Anaruadha
Dingwaney notes, ‘translation is . . . the vehicle through which “Third World”
cultures (are made to) travel – transported or “borne across” to and recuperated by
audiences in the West.’ This recuperation, she writes, is an ‘exercise of power –
colonial power [which] seeks to constitute the “Third World” as an object of its
study’ (1995: 4). Thus, literary translation is not just, in Sara Friedman’s words,
 Sexuality and racism in Zeitin’s Beasts  131
about ‘preserving the foreignness of the source text and the source culture in the
target text without reducing it to the familiar’ (2004: 107–8), as the notion of
‘preserving the foreignness’ of the source culture is not void of the relations of
power that produce cultures as foreign in the first place. As such, preserving the
foreignness of a text is a productive colonial or biopolitical practice that actively
seeks to create the source text’s culture as a culture, and as a foreign one.3
The desire for the ‘foreignness’ of the foreign text is as much about producing
knowledge about the culture of the source context as it is about producing the
target text and its culture.4 So, while Sherry Simon rightly argues that ‘Translation
was part of the violence, then, through which the colonial subject was constructed’
(2000: 11), we might also consider the violence of the constitution of the other
when translation moves in the other direction. In the context of telling stories to
children, the circumstances change: the translator, as a subject of the ‘source’ cul-
ture, actively works to translate the ‘domestic’ source text into what they imagine
to be – and create as – the culture of the (childish) foreign reader. Gillian Lathey,
writing on the role of translators for children’s literature, elaborates on this:
‘Translators writing for a child readership adopt translation strategies in order to
conform to or challenge contemporary constructions of childhood. Childhood is,
after all, a volatile concept, changing its boundaries and social position according
to adult requirements’ (2010: 6).
Lathey thus argues that translators use censorship and manipulation to keep
texts ‘in line with contemporary norms and expectations concerning childhood’
(2010: 7). Riitta Oittinen additionally argues that ‘Translators always bring along
their own child images: anything that is created for children – whether it involves
writing, illustrating, or translating – reflects the creator’s views of childhood’
(2004: 172). Because this process is undertaken as a means of establishing the
intelligibility of the cultures of adulthood and childhood, as well as their separa-
tion, a technique of separation takes place within the translation.
I am situating this technique of separation within the telling of stories to chil-
dren through what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls ‘the politics of translation in a
general sense’, or the processes of ‘“cultural translation” in English’ (1993: 194).
For Spivak, these processes can be used to interrogate the moments that ‘a certain
historical withholding intervenes’ in ‘the representation of [a] message’ between
parent and child (1993: 195). Centring the practices of withholding and interrup-
tion as integral to the translational relationship between adult and child – practices
which emerge from the adult’s desire for the psychic and material realities of
racism and sexuality to be separated out from the realities of childhood – Spivak
analyses the refusal, or rather the inability, to pass down a story of the violence of
enslavement from mother to child in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. In Beloved, Spivak
argues, Sethe’s act of withholding her violent past is both an attempt at protecting
her child from something she should be innocent of, as well as a refusal to allow a
history of racism and sexual violence to continue through its re-telling. Beginning
from this position – one that situates questions of representation, sexual violence,
racism, and the multiple layers, power dynamics, and meanings of translation as
central to the production of stories for children – I turn to Beasts and its primal
132  Jacob Breslow
scene to queer (to the extent that this is fruitful) the act of translating stories of
racism and sexuality for children.

Beasts and the child’s imagination as genre

Beasts, which won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, and the Caméra d’Or at
Cannes, both in 2012, is Zeitlin’s first feature film. It was written by Lucy Alibar,
who also wrote the play Juicy and Delicious from which the film is adapted.
Beasts tells a story of Hushpuppy, whose mother has passed away; whose father,
Wink, is dying from a mysterious blood disease, and whose world is under threat
from mythical beasts. Hushpuppy and her father live in an impoverished area
called the Bathtub in South Louisiana that is just beyond the limits of a levee
system. The Bathtub, with its precarity in the face of an upcoming storm, and
its residents’ poverty, racialization and steadfastness to staying in their homes
despite forced evictions to shelters on the ‘dry side’, mirrors not too subtly the
Lower Ninth Ward and its devastation following racist economic neglect and
Hurricane Katrina.5
Particularly in the wake of Katrina, the critical reception of Beasts has been
ambivalent about the film’s representations of race and poverty. In her biting
critique, bell hooks argues that the film’s vibrancy is ‘generated by a crude pornog-
raphy of violence’ that stems from its romanticization of poverty, its stereotypical
portrayals of Hushpuppy as a racialized feral child (cf. Hackett 2013), and its
‘conservative agenda’ proposing that only strong individuals can (and should)
weather the storm (hooks 2012). This reading, however, is not uncontested. While
many are uncomfortable with the film’s romanticization (Brown 2013; Hackett
2013; hooks 2012; Sharpe 2013), this straightforward reading of the film’s rep-
resentations of black life as a violent continuation of racist stereotyping is not
evenly held. Arguing against hooks, Travis Bean cautions against her sugges-
tion that the characters within Beasts are incapable of signifying anything other
than the initial images of blackness in early cinema (2012). This ambivalence is
complicated by Alibar and Zeitlin themselves, however, as for them the questions
of race and representation do not have a stronghold in the ‘utopian’ space of the
Bathtub. Describing an opening scene reminiscent of a New Orleans Mardi Gras
Carnival, Alibar writes in the script:

The townspeople charge in a rousing parade . . . They are the hard faces of
fishermen and their feisty wives, downtrodden but with a sense of fortitude
among them, a community of heart, spirit, passion, and reckless abandon. We
see none of the separations that we’re used to in modern society. There is no
evidence of politics, religion, class, race or any other divisive ideology. The
Bathtub is a place of true and honest unity. (Alibar and Zeitlin 2012: n.p.)

In Alibar and Zeitlin’s post-racial fantasy-land, race, dismissed as a ‘divisive

ideology’, goes completely unmentioned even as it structures both the conditions
of possibility for the film’s setting, and, in contested ways, the representations of
 Sexuality and racism in Zeitin’s Beasts  133
its main characters. I present these multiple readings of the film – as post-racial
utopia, as reifying sedimented and historical racist stereotypes, and as ambiva-
lently representing the very trouble of racialized representation itself – as the
precise conditions of emergence from which any questions of queering neces-
sarily begin.
The questions of Beasts’ racial representations are directly related to its genre.
And yet, while the film has been described as a vibrant emblem of the ‘new
American genre’ of magic realism (Hoad 2012), a genre whose codes make central
the ways in which fantasy scripts negotiations of belonging and identity,6 Alibar
depoliticizes this link and suggests instead that the fantasy elements stemmed
from Zeitlin’s and her desire to make a film that inhabited a child’s imagination:

By the end, we stopped thinking about it as a fantasy film and it became much
more a film through the perspective of a 6 year old, when reality and imagina-
tion are not necessarily different things or reality is built out of both what’s actu-
ally happening and what you imagine to be there and you’re not making those
distinctions. For me now, it certainly has a heightened reality, but it’s the height-
ened reality that exists when you’re six. (Alibar, cited in Boone 2012: n.p.)

In Hushpuppy’s world, massive horned hog-like beasts who were frozen in gla-
ciers are threatening to break free and eat everyone, the seas produce untold heaps
of fish and creatures to eat, and the ‘heightened reality’ of a 6-year-old governs
daily life. The film’s fantastical storytelling, then, is understood as more accu-
rately depicting the culture of childhood, and as such, many of the lessons that
the children learn within the film – about conception, society and history – are
translated through the generic conventions of magic realism. Magic realism, as
William Spindler defines it, is a genre in which ‘two contrasting views of the
world (one “rational” and one “magical”) are presented as if they were not con-
tradictory’ (1993: 78).7
What becomes apparent in Beasts, however, is that only the lessons that
approach the anxieties about the divide between adult and child get translated
through this genre’s conventions. Take for example two lessons that Hushpuppy
is taught. The first lesson takes place after the storm, when Hushpuppy and Wink
are floating down a marsh on a raft made from an old truck bed. They are both
hungry, and Wink is determined to teach Hushpuppy how to catch fish. Wink
leans over the opened door of the truck bed and reaches in the water as Hushpuppy
diligently follows his instructions:

Now, stick your left hand in this water, stick it in there. Ok, what you do is
you hold your hand steady and you just wait for your fish to come. You gotta
ball your fist up, this is your punching hand. Ball your fist up in case you have
to whack it when they come up. (Beasts: 30’42)

After successfully catching a fish with a single hand, Wink draws it out of the
water, punches it in the head, and instructs Hushpuppy to do the same; she punches
134  Jacob Breslow
it, but in doing so cuts her hand. Wink chortles, asks her if she is alright, and then
responds to her pain by saying, ‘That’s all a part of it’ (Beasts: 31’55). This practi-
cal instruction is, in a sense, a delivery of a few types of knowledge. Hushpuppy
is being taught how to take care of herself, and she’s learning that sometimes, in
the process, you get hurt. The pain is a part of the lesson because – just like taking
the life of a fish – it’s simply a part of going on living. While this scene has some
fantastic elements to it (Wink’s uncanny ability to snatch a fish),8 the lessons
delivered in it follow Wink’s realist logic, not Hushpuppy’s supernatural one.
In contrast, during one of Hushpuppy’s moments of rambling self-reflection,
she relays the story of her mother’s death: ‘Daddy says, the first time she looked
at me, it made her heart beat so big, that she thought it would blow up. That’s
why she swam away’ (Beasts: 13’00). This creative narrative (accepted as reality),
like others in the film that Hushpuppy relays to us, indicates the difficulty Wink
has had in telling his daughter about her mother’s untimely death. The shift in
the temporal and affective registers through which Wink assumes Hushpuppy is
experiencing a painful event (from immediate and physical to long-lasting and
emotional), is negotiated through a shift in genre. Perhaps scared that Hushpuppy
cannot handle the death of her mother (and perhaps recognizing that he cannot
bear her loss either), Wink provides a fantastical explanation which attempts to
mitigate the reality of their loss. Importantly, then, while this tale itself might
seem to fit in with the imaginative reality of Hushpuppy’s 6-year-old mind, it is in
fact the narrative of an adult both beyond the parameters of the film, as a narrative
written by Alibar, and, internal to the film’s diegesis, as one constructed by Wink.
Hushpuppy’s imagination is not beholden to her.9
In the story of Hushpuppy’s mother’s death, as well as in the narration of
Hushpuppy’s conception, the shift in logic from reality to supernatural points to
the power dynamics at play in translating the realities of adulthood – here, pain and
loss – into a genre for children. Genre, Jacques Derrida writes, is an entrenchment
in form, a determining of kind that is layered with consequence: ‘As soon as the
word “genre” is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive
it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not
far behind’ (1980: 56). For Derrida, genre is productive of typological designations
which function through a similar impossible separability as the divide between
adult and child. Indeed, if, as Derrida and others argue, genre-as-kind gets meaning
from and gives meaning to gender and race (1980: 56), it might, I am suggesting,
also give meaning to the boundary between child and adult. Thinking about genres,
then, highlights the production of a difference in type (imagined or otherwise) that
the movement between genres is attempting to keep stable.
Rather than understand Wink’s narrative of Hushpuppy’s mother’s death as
merely an explanation (or a lie), the language of translation and genre help point
to the structuring pre-assumed disjuncture in reception by the reader (Hushpuppy)
because of her location in childhood. A shift in genre might thus be understood
as both a refusal to translate, and a mitigation of the anxiety that stems from com-
ing into contact with things that are uncomfortable – children and death, children
and sex.10 Ashis Nandy, speaking about the West’s refusal to translate Ayatollah
 Sexuality and racism in Zeitin’s Beasts  135
Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie in terms beyond ‘a known form of
insanity’, argues that in using ‘familiar categories’ – which I am locating here
as ‘familiar’ conventions of children’s generic conventions such as fantasy and
the supernatural – to discuss things that are unfamiliar, unnerving, or ‘outside the
convenient frame of reference, it reveals the limits of the frame’ (Nandy, cited
in Papastergiadis 1990: 100). Death, then, becomes the limit to Wink’s frame of
reference for what he understands childhood to be. He can thus only ever fail to
tell her about death, even as he strives to explain it to her, because he refuses to let
go of his notion of childhood.

The (queer) story of your conception

What then does the shift in genre mean for the way in which Wink translates the
story of Hushpuppy’s conception? When Wink tells Hushpuppy about her con-
ception, his story follows the same generic lines of his tale about her mother’s
death. As before, the taboo subject goes unmentioned. There is no sex in his story,
nor is there a birth, and the suggestions of physicality are obfuscated: Wink and
Hushpuppy’s mother slept together, but this is described as them taking a nap.
This concealing of sex is reiterated as Hushpuppy relays Wink’s description of
her mother’s attractiveness: ‘Back when Daddy used to talk about Mamma, he’d
say she was so pretty she never even had to turn on the stove. She just walk into a
room and water start to boil’ (Beasts: 36’34). Again we are transported back into
the shared imaginative scene where Hushpuppy’s mother indeed brushes her hand
across a stove and it lights – the water immediately coming to a rolling boil. This
scene, in which Hushpuppy’s conception is described and visualized through the
literal representation of sexiness-as-fire, is not, perhaps, a very good lesson in sex
education, but I want to take it seriously as a queer story.
While the notion of queerness has a vast and contested history and set of mean-
ings, queer, in this sense, operates through what Judith Butler calls a ‘resignifying
practice’: ‘Within queer politics, indeed, within the very signification that is
“queer,” we read a resignifying practice in which the de-sanctioning power of
the name “queer” is reversed to sanction a contestation of the terms of sexual
legitimacy’ (1993: 23). As a response to violent interpellation that challenges the
terms of sexual normativity, or, as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner write,
as evoking a ‘wrenching sense of recontextualization’, queering ‘has animated
a rethinking of both the perverse and the normal: the romantic couple, sex for
money, reproduction, the genres of life narrative’ (1998: 345–6). If queerness is
then, at least in part, a refusal of the primacy of heterosexuality, then a queer story
might be one that refuses the primacy of heterosexuality in relation to reproduc-
tion. We might, then, think about a queering of conception as emerging from
a translation such that it produces a narrative that privileges the various means
beyond coupled heterosexual procreation by which children come into the world.
Here, queered conception becomes a ‘reformation of kinship’ (Butler 1993: 28)
such that, for instance, IVF, adoption, surrogacy and cross-couple or cross-friend
child-rearing practices are made possible or de-marginalized.11 Additionally, a
136  Jacob Breslow
queering of conception might instead refuse the centrality or primacy of conception
to sexuality itself. Here, reproduction and sexuality become uncoupled and queer
conception might mean the erotic conditions of emergence through which a new
life, or a new (way of) being is brought into the world. It is this latter notion of
queering that I want to think through in regards to Hushpuppy’s queer conception.
This understanding of conception allows us to rethink Wink’s narrative.
Perhaps, rather than concealing sexuality from Hushpuppy – not telling her about
the precise embodied mechanics by which ovulation, penetration, insemination,
fertilization and birth bring about a new life – Wink might be understood as pre-
senting Hushpuppy with some queered alternatives. Instead of privileging these
mechanics, Wink privileges safeguarding, nourishment and care (at least as under-
taken by Hushpuppy’s mother). His story, and the shared imaginative scene it
narrates, lingers on moments of being together, sharing food and living through
potential dangers.12 In translating sex and birth into the culture (genre) of child-
hood for Hushpuppy, the erotic, sensual, narrative, relational, fantasmatic and
protective elements of sex-as-intimacy emerge and are centred.
The story of Hushpuppy’s conception might then be understood as accurately
documenting the intimate and erotic conditions necessary for her to be conceived.
These conditions, detached from a specific sexual act and thus (perhaps) gendered
configuration – although the onus on her mother’s sexualized body to carry the
burden of the scene’s erotic charge might suggest otherwise – place the impor-
tance of relationality and care over that of a specifically heterosexual sex act.
The shared nature of this scene is also important: as a story told in the intimate
yet public space of the bar, Wink and Hushpuppy’s collective fantasy scene is a
bringing into being of an erotic world that is also the creation of a sexual public.13
Particularly in a post-Katrina moment, and in the face of a national conversa-
tion in the US about the devaluation of black life, this queer shift within a public
space from reproductive mechanics to the intimate and erotic valuation of and
between Wink, Hushpuppy and Hushpuppy’s mother, could be understood as a
challenge to the otherwise limited, stigmatizing and dehumanizing representa-
tions of blackness. Here I am asking that we read this scene through the lens of
queer reproduction that Sharon Holland offers, which moves away from connect-
ing reproduction to heteronormativity and to patriarchal gender roles, and focuses
instead on ‘biology, race, and belonging’ (2012: 74). It is thus through Wink’s
failure to ‘properly’ document the reality of sex (a ‘failure’ on behalf of an anxi-
ety which he seeks to mitigate by using the techniques of translation and genre)
that he engages in a more creative and queer approach to imagining sexuality.14
But perhaps this framing of queering only gets us so far. By focusing specifi-
cally on Beasts’ ambivalent relationship to race and racism, I want to conclude
by asking after the forms of racial (in)justice that take place when the notion of a
queerly negotiated translation is situated within a context in which race and rac-
ism are simultaneously extended and challenged. One could argue that race and
racism become the limits to Wink’s (or perhaps Alibar and Zeitlin’s) frame of
translatability for Hushpuppy, as in the moments when the impact of racism could
be most obviously mentioned – in the naming of the structures that impoverish and
 Sexuality and racism in Zeitin’s Beasts  137
segregate the residents of the Bathtub – racism is not only unnamed, its absence
is translated into a narrative of colourblind individualism.15 The implications of
not mentioning racism – refusing to even set it up as something that is acknowl-
edged but ‘queerly’ explained – complicates the notion of the queerness of ‘failed’
translations. It suggests, perhaps, that unlike in the queer framework of transla-
tion – wherein the object that is deemed internal to the culture of adulthood is an
object that, because it needs to be produced as incompatible with childhood, gets
imagined in queer ways when translated into a children’s genre – in this moment,
the object (racism) is so disavowed that it is deemed beyond the reality of both chil-
dren and adults. While obfuscating reproductive mechanics and heteronormativity
produces some interesting alternatives, ones that do indeed attend to processes of
racialization, muddling or not-naming racism, when indeed racism is what needs
to be named, simply allows that racism to go unchallenged.
This analysis, however, while indeed an important challenge to the poten-
tial ‘transgressiveness’ of queer resignification, flattens out the representational
and translational work that Beasts does. To explain this further, I return again to
Spivak’s analysis of the translation that takes place in Morrison’s Beloved. As I
noted earlier, Spivak argues that Sethe’s act of withholding her history from her
daughter is an attempt to interrupt the perpetuation of racism even through its
retelling. Sethe’s refusal, however, is also a failed one, as the spectre of the vio-
lence of her enslavement is resurrected in and as Beloved herself. Because of this,
Spivak argues that certain stories – ones that are difficult, violent and too pain-
ful to share with children – only get passed on with what she calls ‘the mark of
untranslatability’ (1993: 195, emphasis in original) precisely because they are, as
Morrison writes, not stories to pass on (1987: 275). The mark of untranslatability,
then, is something that is felt beyond the book’s pages: the story that cannot be
told gets passed on not between the characters, but rather by the readers’ engage-
ments with the text. As such, part of understanding the ways in which stories get
told to, or withheld from, children, is attending to the multiple layers of telling and
listening: the communication that takes place through the things that are not said.
Thinking along the same lines as Spivak, what emerges for the viewers of Beasts
in the film’s ambivalence towards representing race and racism is the production
of racism’s untranslatability. Racism becomes marked as the Bathtub’s haunting
and structuring absence even as queerness flourishes. But to be marked as absent
does not mean that racism gets left off the hook. Indeed, the film itself ends up
becoming precisely about how, and through what stories and conventions, race
and racism can be represented in a post-Katrina moment.

Conclusion
In this chapter, I have argued that shifts in genre should be understood as a transla-
tional technique, one that, in Beasts, gets used to negotiate and produce the separation
between adults and children. Putting this technique through a queer reading, how-
ever, I have argued that because Wink’s use of genre is an attempt to mitigate an
anxiety about childhood and sexuality that cannot be fully reconciled, his narrative
138  Jacob Breslow
of conception exceeds its own frame in proliferative ways. For viewers engaging
with the narrative being translated for Hushpuppy, and indeed for Hushpuppy her-
self, the story of her conception becomes less about the instructive character of what
is said, but rather about the importance of the negotiation of the sexual, racial and
generational anxieties and bonds that respectively position Wink and Hushpuppy as
adult and child, and father and daughter. As such, while I have argued that translation
across genres can be understood as allowing for and producing queer recontextualiza-
tions of the anxieties that structure the desire for adults and children to be separate, I
want to end this chapter by suggesting that a queer approach to translation might best
be understood as one that begins at the site of these techniques, and attends to them in
ways that challenge their underlying desires. Using the language of translation helps
to do this; it gets us to attend to the production of binary sites as emerging through
and being exceeded by the passing on of stories, histories, pains and pleasures.

Notes
  1 My purposeful entanglement of subject and figuration follows from an intermeshing of
the interventions in childhood studies that understand the child to be an agentic subject
and childhood to be a social construction (Ariès 1962; Firestone 1971; James and Prout
1990; Jenks 1982; Prout 2005; Thorne 1987; Walkerdine 1984) with the work spanning
feminist, queer and critical race studies that theorizes childhood’s figuration (Bernstein
2011; Castañeda 2002; Johansson 2011; Levander 2006; Rose 1984; Sánchez-Eppler
2005; Taylor 2011).
  2 The ramifications of this attempted displacement have been theorized in queer theory in
various ways. For Kincaid (1994, 1998), what becomes displaced is the admission that
the contours of the child (youthful innocence), and the erotic, have been mapped onto
one another. For Edelman (2004), the heteronormative figure of the child, stands in for
and structures all of politics, disavowing queer desire by casting queers and queerness
as the social’s irredeemable death drive. For others, most notably Bruhm and Hurley
(2004), Halberstam (2012) and Bond-Stockton (2009), the failures inherent to these
attempted displacements allow for a flourishing of queerness within, and of, childhood.
  3 The ‘cultural turn’ of translation studies, in other words, does not inherently solve or
mitigate the violences that take place in the practice of translation. Rather, attending
to the culture of texts, rather than simply the text of texts, presents new sites through
which the dynamics between (and the production of) self and other need to be attended
to. For more on the cultural turn, see Bassnett and Lefevere (1990); Lefevere (1992).
  4 The object of such knowledge about a culture, as Said writes, ‘is to dominate it, to have
authority over it. And authority here means for “us” to deny autonomy to “it” [. . .] since
we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it’ (1978: 32, emphasis in original).
  5 For analyses of Katrina that situate questions of race and poverty, see Chambers
(2006); Dyson (2007); Marable and Clark (2007); Ortega (2009); Woods (2005). For
two accounts which centralize questions of sexuality to Katrina’s devastation, see
Bibler (2008); Richards (2010).
  6 The centrality of fantasy to projects of national belonging has been outlined by many
scholars. Here I am specifically drawing upon Brown (2010) who marks the centrality
of wish-fulfilment and desire to nation-state wall-building projects, as well as Berlant
(2006) and Hemmings (2012), who theorize the forms of promise, optimism and
attachment to the state despite its doing away with social welfare provision and politi-
cal economy more generally.
  7 Magic realism plays an additional role in film’s relationship to questions of race,
racism and poverty. More so than fantasy and fairy tale, genres which are also
 Sexuality and racism in Zeitin’s Beasts  139
understood to deeply resonate with children’s imaginative understandings of the world
and to help them cope with trauma and distress (Bettelheim 1976; Emmambokus
2012; Hayes and Amer 1999), magic realism’s centrality to colonial and postcolonial
texts and contexts (Adams 2011; Aldea 2011; Durix 1998; Warnes 2009) necessarily
positions its narratives – and thus Beasts’ narrative – in relationship to questions of
power, domination and racialization.
  8 Wink’s ability to catch a fish one handed without looking is both a testament to his
‘embeddedness’ in his culture, a stereotype of the wild native with all his ‘local knowl-
edges’, and an act in keeping with the happenstance of the film’s generic codes. In her
critique of translation studies’ overdetermined understanding of culture, Simon notes:
‘Translators are told that in order to do their work correctly they must understand the cul-
ture of the original text, because texts are “embedded” in a culture. The more extensive
is this “embedding,” the more difficult it will be to find equivalences for terms and
ideas’ (1996: 137). While Simon herself critiques this notion, it resonates with the ways
in which telling stories about sexuality to children is undertaken. Here, both Wink’s
‘authentic’ nativeness (Chow 1994) and Hushpuppy’s childish ‘cultural field’ of recep-
tion (Simon 1996: 137) are produced through a problematic understanding of culture
as overdetermined and locatable.
  9 In an interview, Alibar explains that Hushpuppy’s dialogue was carefully scripted. Alibar
is asked: ‘Hushpuppy has so many zingers in the film, and so many age-appropriate lines.
Even something as simple as her calling it the “Iced Age” instead of the “Ice Age.” Was
that a line improvised by Nazie [Quvenzhane Wallis, the actress who plays Hushpuppy],
or did you write it?’ To which she responds: ‘No, that was in the script early on. It was a
lot of both – we went through many, many drafts of the script. And then some stuff Nazie
and Dwight [Henry, the actor who plays Wink] could connect to, some stuff was just off
the mark on my part and his [Benh Zeitlin’s] part. And sometimes we’d have to go away
and completely re-write a scene. But I mean, we were all very fluid and . . . it was all in
service to the story’ (Calautti 2012: n.p.).
10 While the tone and content of literature on death and sex for children is rapidly broad-
ening and shifting, the anxieties about how and what to convey to children, and at
what age, are ongoing and pressing questions. Jewiss, explaining the serious reflections
she engaged in while translating Dante’s Divine Comedy for children, for example,
recounts asking: ‘Should one tell children about death, damnation, divine judgment,
and gruesome punishments, and if so, how? Where is the line between pleasurable
fear and terror? What happens to a classic work of literature when it is distorted and
oversimplified for a younger audience? To the reader?’ (2013: 78). For more debates
about the topic of death in children’s literature, see Bosmajian (2002); Carroll (2012);
Gibson and Zaidman (1991); James (2009); Maguire (2012); Wells (1988). For more
on the topic of sex and sexuality, see, among others Clarke (2012); Gill (2012); Kincaid
(1994, 1998); Mills and Mills (2000).
11 Nahman’s work on the racist, anti-Arab utilization of state-sanctioned IVF and sur-
rogacy in Israel – through racialized notions of acceptable physical traits and ova
selection (2006) is just one example of what Winddance Twine identifies as ‘the ways
that racism, class inequalities, colonial legacies, religious beliefs, and transnational
capitalism structure the use of assisted reproductive technologies and gestational sur-
rogacy’ (Winddance Twine 2011: x). As such, we should be more than hesitant to
uncritically celebrate the ‘queer’ potentials of these forms of ‘alternative’ conception,
as they cannot be so easily separated from their uses and contexts.
12 While, following Probyn, I am not trying to advocate ‘that we should celebrate
food-and-sex . . . [as] the hyphenization of food-sex tends to merely reproduce the
normativity of sexuality’ (1999: 423), I do want to extend her line of thought that
‘bodies that eat connect us more explicitly with limits of class, gender and eth-
nicity than do the copulating bodies so prominently displayed in popular culture’
(1999: 423).
140  Jacob Breslow
13 For more on queer publics, see Berlant and Warner (1998).
14 For more on the notion that failure is inherent to all translation, see Derrida (2001:
178); Johnson (1985: 147); White (1990: 257).
15 Relaying her father’s explanation for her life in the Bathtub and the levee system,
Hushpuppy says: ‘Daddy says, up above the levee, on the dry side, they’re afraid of
the water like a bunch of babies. They built the wall that cuts us off. They think we all
gonna drown down here. But we ain’t goin’ nowhere’ (Beasts: 04’50). Wink has gone
from naming, yet failing to explain, and thus queering, conception, to not naming, and
not explaining racism.

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11 The translation of desire
Queering visibility in Nathalie. . .
and Chloe
Clara Bradbury-Rance

Troubling the requisites of both mainstream publicity and lesbian subcultural

recognition, Nathalie. . . (Fontaine 2003) accompanies a corpus of films in
which explicit heterosexual activity is counterbalanced by erotic looks between
women. Films such as Swimming Pool (Ozon 2003) and Adore (Fontaine 2013)
exhibit a charge of eroticism in tandem with jealousy and competition. Even if
these films fail – and indeed challenge the terms of – the famous “Bechdel test”
of gender equality (Bechdel and Wallace 2005), which measures a film’s merits
based on its inclusion of ‘at least two women’ who ‘talk to each other’ about
‘something besides a man’, their structures of homoerotic looking complicate
their ostensible foci on heterosexual desire in action or in conversation.
The eponymous protagonist of Nathalie. . . is introduced to us in a point of view
shot (12’43) that roves around the bar in which she works, panning across the faces
of other women before pausing and zooming in on Nathalie (Emmanuelle Béart)
in isolation.1 As the shot becomes a close-up, Nathalie turns towards the camera.
The gaze she returns is that of Catherine (Fanny Ardant), a middle-aged woman
whose incongruous presence in the bar is matched by her unusual motivation.
Discovering early in the film that her husband Bernard (Gérard Depardieu) has
been cheating on her, she decides to hire a prostitute who will seduce Bernard and
recount tales of their affair. This transaction introduces the potential for a deriva-
tive voyeurism. In Nathalie’s episodic retellings of these sexual encounters, we
are given no visual clues, no graphic exposition of events, but merely the telling
of a story by one woman to another, through which the second woman is allowed
to participate retrospectively. The first shot of the two women together (13’54) is
one in which their coupling is tentative, Nathalie brought into the frame through
the mirror behind Catherine’s seat. The visual doublings in this shot alert us to
a broader tension between duplicity and immediacy foregrounded in the film’s
complicated plot. Yet while the mirror multiplies them and moderates our access
to Nathalie, whom we see only through reflection, the women look directly at one
another without mediation. This intense shared gaze connects the women before
any words are spoken, establishing the mood of a film in which it is what remains
unsaid that eroticizes a relationship unconsummated through sexual action.
In his reading of Nathalie. . ., Slavoj Žižek (2006: 190) rejects any claim to
the relationship between Catherine and Nathalie as lesbian: ‘the trap to avoid’, he
 Queering visibility in Nathalie. . . and Chloe  145
writes, ‘is to read this intense relationship between the two women as (implicitly)
lesbian: it is crucial that the narrative they share is heterosexual, and it is no less
crucial that all they share is a narrative.’ Countering Žižek, I argue that the dynamic
in Nathalie. . . is defined by the eroticism of the gaze. What the women share is not
just a narrative, not just a heteroerotic recollection of a heterosexual act, but rather a
potentialized homoerotic intimacy that is re-inscribed through fantasy. Žižek refers
to the shared narrative as ‘lesbian subtext’ (2006: 189). However, if we see Nathalie
and Catherine’s relationship as involved in the queering of heterosexuality through
the eroticizing of the homosociality that triangulates it, rather than the narrowly
defined and singular figuration of lesbianism, the eroticism in their relationship
is neither text nor subtext. Recounted through a series of homosocial spaces, the
women’s shared experience of sexual interaction with the same man creates a third
relation of queer recollective eroticism that first depends on, but then sidelines, the
heterosexual narrative.
The queer eroticism of Nathalie. . . is thus based on what we might call a series
of queer translations: derivations, reflections and impersonations. This proposed
reading is complicated by a more conventional translation, a remake of the film
entitled Chloe (Egoyan 2009), which orchestrates a far less ambiguous delinea-
tion of the erotic triangle. Emma Wilson (2010: 29) suggests in the introduction to
an interview with the director Atom Egoyan that his films ‘have always dissolved
divisions between queer and straight, showing characters discovering unexpected
possibilities in erotic situations’. Yet in Chloe, these divisions are arguably
solidified again by the dissolution of eroticism’s ambiguity. In the original film,
the genesis of the plot occurs when Catherine hears a romantic voicemail from
another woman on Bernard’s phone (5’42). In Chloe, Catherine (Julianne Moore)
sees a romantic photo of her husband David (Liam Neeson) and his student via a
text message on his iPhone (11’07), just the first instance of many in which the
remake makes graphic what is only implied or obscured in the original.
There are two crucial differences between the two films related to this ‘making
graphic’. Firstly, in Nathalie. . ., the tales that Nathalie brings back to Catherine
remain at the level of language, while in Chloe they are not only verbally described
in detail by Chloe (Amanda Seyfried) but also visually re-enacted. Secondly, in
Chloe, the first stage of narrative climax is provided by the ‘lesbian’ sex scene
that is absent from the first film. This chapter explores the effect that the predomi-
nance of visually coded sex in the remake has on our reading of its absence in the
original. I consider how the tension between absence and presence characterizes
the desire for visibility in contemporary mainstream genre cinema. Chloe’s mar-
ketable generic adherence, bigger budget and superior box office figures coincide
with the move towards a heightened lesbian visibility at the end of the first dec-
ade of the twenty-first century (see, for instance, Beirne 2008). However, this
chapter challenges the easy ‘translatability’ of ‘the original’s mode of significa-
tion’ (Benjamin 1999: 71), most particularly its erotic signification. What might
be lost in a move to make sex the visible object of sexuality’s representation?
The chapter also, however, considers how a reading of the two films in conjunc-
tion ‘open[s] them up’, in Fiona Handyside’s words (2012: 56), ‘to new relations
146  Clara Bradbury-Rance
beyond themselves’. By addressing the relationship between Nathalie. . . and its
remake, not through the analysis of particular lines but rather of mise en scène and
affects, I complicate the terms through which the burden of the visible asks the
newly available image to stand in for all prior facets of its invisible form.

Making graphic
In contrast to Nathalie, whose potentially thrilling storyline remains somewhat
muted, Chloe embraces the demands of the thriller, forcing the potential of les-
bian desire to its ultimate conclusion. The explicit consummation of sexual desire
between Chloe and Catherine is necessarily paired with the explicit violence that
is invoked through citation as a generic inevitability. Obsession and excessive
desire are quintessential characteristics of the psychological thriller’s generic
appeal (see, for instance, Hart 1994). Lesbian desire is conflated with obsession
and then (usually fatal) punishment in films such as Basic Instinct (Verhoeven
1992) and Single White Female (Schroeder 1992). Sex becomes shorthand for the
thriller’s mandatory figuration of female sexuality, signifying three conflicting
registers of failure: excess, disappointment and violence.
Dangerous processes of conflation and obscuration occur, moreover, when
sexuality is made visible through sex. Peggy Phelan (1993: 1) has addressed ‘the
implicit assumptions about the connections between representational visibility
and political power’. Contrary to the liberating march of progress that a politics
of visibility assumes, the move to represent what Phelan calls the ‘hitherto under-
represented other’ actually serves to ‘name, and thus to arrest and fix, the image
of that other’ (2). Once made visible, the lesbian becomes an arrested object of
burdened recognition. The weight of meaning generated by her image obscures
sexuality’s complexity behind sex as a visualized act. Aligning the inevitability of
sex with the inevitability of death, Chloe’s visibility is reworked by a genre that
traps her in a double bind: the visibility of sex fixes the figure of the pathological
lesbian along the lines of her generic heritage.
In the most basic synopsis of the plot, Catherine has negotiated for Chloe to
seduce Catherine’s husband David and report back. This almost exactly replicates
the transaction at the heart of the original film. But while in the original Catherine
initiates their first interaction, in the remake it is Chloe. In a bathroom of a res-
taurant she drops a hairslide on purpose and then, pretending that it is not hers,
suggests that Catherine adopt it (12’57). The rest of the narrative proceeds with
Chloe as the initiator. Such an apparently subtle difference forces Chloe into the
role of the obsessive disruptor of family life, setting in motion a series of disturb-
ing engagements with Catherine and her family. In a final act of desperation,
Chloe threatens Catherine, pressing the sharp end of the now symbolic hairslide to
her throat before kissing her. It is when Catherine realizes that her son is watching
this climax of sex and violence that she pushes against Chloe, letting her fall back-
wards to her death through one of the dramatic glass walls of the architecturally
ostentatious house (1’24’09). Chloe’s characterization thus intertwines lesbian
sexuality, lesbian impotence, lesbian menace and lesbian punishment.
 Queering visibility in Nathalie. . . and Chloe  147
Two versions of visibility emerge in contrast to each other in the considera-
tion of Nathalie. . . alongside its remake: the diagrammatic visuality of sex as
act on the one hand, and the social or symbolic visibility of sexuality as pleasure
or desire on the other. While the absence of sex in Nathalie. . . may recall the
historical invisibility of the lesbian in cinema (see, for instance, White 1999),
Chloe’s sexual presence is reminiscent of the threat of the woman immortal-
ized in the figure of the femme fatale or the murderess. Chloe’s register of
heightened sexual visibility is tied up in the film’s adherence to the dramatic
principles of the thriller (see, for instance, Derry 1988 and Bordwell 1989).
Worked out through suspense, sexual visibility is a generic diegetic necessity
for the sake of the narrative twist, as in films from Basic Instinct to Side Effects
(Soderbergh 2013).
Anne Fontaine’s regretful recollection (Talking Chloe, 2009) of what she
sees as a lack of ‘erotic rapport between the two actresses’ accompanies the
2009 release of Egoyan’s film rather than her own. Through the ‘hypervisibil-
ity’ (Pidduck 2011) of sex in Chloe, it becomes in Nathalie. . . a structuring
absence. When we read Nathalie. . . through the visual language made avail-
able by its translation, we fix the image of desire in the language of sex.
However, as Jacqueline Rose (2005: 231) writes, ‘sexual representation’ or
‘representation as sexual’ must ‘take in the parameters of visual form (not
just what we see but how we see – visual space as more than the domain of
simple recognition)’. Sexuality in cinema does not just exist in the transplant
of sexual activity from our idea of it in reality to a recognizable representation
on screen. The ‘parameters of visual form’ that Rose asks us to consider here
draw our attention as much to what is not shown as to what is. Even if, as in
Rose’s argument, the visual’s incitement to recognition is not the only variable,
it does generate a dominating effect. The ‘updated’ translation of Nathalie. . .
threatens to confine a reading of the two films to a linear assumption of the vis-
ible’s predominance over the invisible (see Jagose 2002). Yet, as Rose insists,
the relationship between image and sexuality can neither be purely imposed
from the outside as it is by the mandatory reading of Nathalie. . . in the con-
text of more recent advances in lesbian visibility, nor can it be left unnoticed.
Instead, our engagement with what we might call the anticipatory pre-sexual
image emphasizes the sexuality of that image ‘in potentia’ (Rose 2005: 231,
original emphasis).

Queering heterosexuality
My use of the term ‘queer’ in this context is informed by Jackie Stacey’s reading
(1994: 29) of ambiguous aesthetic modulations of eroticism and desire, in which
she argues for the ‘eroticis[ation] [of] identification’. Positing queer as a develop-
ment of ‘homoerotic’ – which Stacey chooses for its role as a psychic category
rather than a social one – I see queer as an elaboration, rather than replacement,
of ‘lesbian’ (see also Villarejo 2003). Stacey’s work urges us to consider those
multiple processes of identification that are yielded by sometimes-fixed identities.
148  Clara Bradbury-Rance
In Nathalie. . ., these identifications are given shape by Nathalie’s erotic recollec-
tions. It is this construction of a narrative within a narrative that performs the task
of making the queerness of sexuality the register of its visualization.
In Nathalie. . ., Catherine’s sexuality is translated by Nathalie, who speaks the
words that Catherine cannot. The film visualizes this not by explicitly representing
the actions that Nathalie describes but through the settings in which these verbal
narrativizations take place. In the dressing room at the back of the bar – a women-
only space to which Catherine gradually gains more legitimate access – Catherine
and Nathalie are constantly framed and re-framed by their doubles in the mirrors
situated around the room (28’54). As the women actively inhabit the room, Nathalie
tells in graphic detail the story of her first sexual encounter with Bernard. Not only
do the women’s spatial positions transfer but their reflections also confuse and
distort their singularity. Rather than determining Catherine’s sexuality or gender as
‘hers’, we might read them instead through Judith Butler not as ‘possession[s], but
. . . as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another or, indeed, by virtue
of another’ (2004: 19, original emphasis). Sexuality as a way of being ‘by virtue of
another’ is articulated through the relationship between Nathalie and Catherine’s
verbal and spatial translations of desire and subjectivity.
Instead of replacing or sublimating the heterosexual gaze as in scenes between
Catherine and Bernard, these movements exacerbate or accentuate the intensity of
the homoerotic gaze. Nathalie’s recreations of her (fictional) sexual encounters with
Bernard create an erotic of recollection in spite of a distancing from sexual activity.
Catherine’s scheming arrangement with Nathalie is ostensibly designed in order to
re-ignite her relationship with Bernard. Yet he remains visually sidelined. Nathalie’s
recollection is pivotal, but even more so is the fact that these events are only recol-
lected in dialogue with Catherine. The encounters are necessitated by Catherine,
without whom they would have no reason to occur. Even Nathalie’s name, her char-
acterization and her fabricated occupation are all constituted by Catherine’s wilful
imagination. Fontaine describes this genesis as a ‘rebaptism’ and a ‘creation of the
character’ of Nathalie (Nathalie Interview 2011). The French word that Fontaine
uses is ‘personage’, which can be translated not only as person or character, but also
figure. Just as we are asked to consider when watching Persona (Bergman 1966)
whether the “persona” of Alma (Bibi Andersson) is created prior to or through her
engagements with Elisabet (Liv Ullman), so too in Nathalie. . . we are asked to both
construct and disintegrate the persona and its singularity. The multiple translations
of Fontaine’s ‘personage’ capture the way in which Catherine effectively creates
a figure who can figure, or bring into representation, her own desire. Just as both
original film and remake are ‘derivative’ (Venuti 1995: 18) of ‘cultural materials’
that do not originate in the text, so this figuration reveals a multiple derivation.
In both Nathalie. . . and Chloe, the climax of the narrative occurs when we
discover that the alleged sexual encounters between Nathalie/Chloe and Bernard/
David have never actually taken place; they are strangers to one another. Each film
discloses this fiction very differently. Chloe’s general advance of visibility exposes
a particularized mode of desire for authenticity on the part of the eponymous
character, who insists that her romance with Catherine is ‘so, so real’ (1’05’24).
 Queering visibility in Nathalie. . . and Chloe  149
In Nathalie. . ., however, there are clues that disrupt any such bid for authenticity:
‘Je fais semblant – c’est mon métier’ (I fake it – it’s my job), Nathalie says of the
necessary duplicity of her role in Catherine’s fantasy and beyond it (32’49). If
sexual climax is something that can be faked through professional repetition, then
sexual fantasy can be too (see Jagose 2012). ‘Faking it’ is part of Nathalie’s adop-
tion not of another person’s identity, but of her identification. Through this double
layering of identification, the two women are merged in their shared ownership
of desire for one man. Catherine’s desire for Bernard, and her growing desire for
Nathalie, are acted out in auto-erotic fantasy. Because Nathalie and Bernard’s
encounters are not shown on screen, the focus must be on the space of the telling.
In the dressing room scene, Catherine is reincarnated as a reflection in the mirror
and as the fantasized object of Nathalie’s recollected sexual encounters. If the
‘boundary between self and ideal . . . produces an endless source of fascination’,
as in Stacey’s formulation (1994: 173), Nathalie. . . simultaneously fictionalizes
and articulates a desire that holds that boundary within it. The reflections that
expose the cyclical imitations that the women take on by and for one another also
expose the inherently imitative structure of the image itself.
The eponymous protagonist of Nathalie. . . represents both an impersona-
tion of someone else’s fantasy and a fantasy of impersonation itself: she is what
Catherine would like to be, just as Bernard is what Catherine would like to be.
Because the impersonation is not visually rendered, we are allowed to imagine
that Catherine might play both roles. Nathalie. . . thus refuses any singular ‘posi-
tion of desiring subject’ (de Lauretis 1994:103). The desire for desire is found on
the part of all of the characters. Desire is the object of the film’s narrative, but
is only made available through impersonations that undo the subjectivity of that
supposed desiring subject.
Nathalie. . . suggests not just a single reversal of sexual roles, but a series of
reversals. This model of same-sex desire speaks to Stacey’s reading of Gattaca
(Niccol 1997) through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theorisation of ‘vicariation’
(2008: 157): the film’s ‘genetic impersonations figure’, Stacey writes, ‘multiple
chains of vicariation that disrupt the singularity of gender and sexuality and the
authenticity of its embodied form’ (2010: 133). In Gattaca, we are presented with
what we might see as a conventional love triangle: Irene (Uma Thurman) is the
woman who triangulates the homoeroticism between the film’s male protagonists,
Vincent (Ethan Hawke) and Jerome (Jude Law). But although Irene ‘might be
understood as a heterosexual object of desire’, her ‘role is inextricable from the inti-
macy between Vincent and Jerome – an intimacy that is itself founded on a desire
to become the other’ (133). What is important here is, firstly, that heterosexuality
is not the automatic obstacle to homoerotic desire but potentially its unexpected
source; and, secondly, that the disentanglement of heterosexual presumption from
hetero-social interrelations figures a divergent eroticism. We might argue that it is
the equivalent substitutions emergent from Catherine and Nathalie’s non-literalized
erotic explorations that queer the ‘singularity, intentionality and directionality’ of
desire (133). Chloe’s direct depiction of lesbian sex reinforces, on the other hand,
the very intentionality that the original film disavows.
150  Clara Bradbury-Rance
Spatializing the unspoken
It is what remains untouched, unsaid, between Catherine and Nathalie that pre-
sents a queer affective register of desire in Nathalie. . .. In one scene, the women
dance together in a busy nightclub (1’21’27). They face one another and then
simultaneously throw their heads back, exposing their necks and opening their
bodies. The voyeuristic gaze we must occupy as spectators matches the earlier
statement of Catherine’s own voyeurism on her first visit to the bar in which
Nathalie works: she sits on a seat looking out at the bar, a mirror behind her, and
in a close-up from her point of view we see the arched-backed bodies of sex work-
ers standing at the bar, the camera contemplating their bare necks (12’43).
The repetition of this pose in Catherine and Nathalie’s dancing scene reminds
us, through a recollective visual grammar, both of the foundational eroticism of
the bar, in which the women’s poses are professionally seductive, and also of
Catherine’s gradual initiation into Nathalie’s world. It is this world, far removed
from domesticity, that becomes the foremost space of the film (in Chloe, on the
other hand, the domestic realm remains necessarily dominant in order to shore
up the pathologizing demands of the thriller). One of the most intimate scenes
in Nathalie. . . occurs between Catherine and Nathalie in a taxi on the way home
from this night of dancing. Catherine puts her head on Nathalie’s shoulder and
closes her eyes (01’23’20). If we view this scene with what has been called the
‘future anterior’ (see Derrida 1998; Cho 2008; Berlant and Edelman 2014) – or in
this case the anticipatory mode of the future remake – we notice that the remake’s
replication of this taxi ride occurs not after dancing, but after the lesbian sex scene
that is missing from the first film. With this anticipation of the ‘future anterior’,
we might recast the taxi scene in Nathalie. . . as even more intensely erotic, and
the dancing scene as one that incorporates the potential and expectation of its
future replacement, the sexual act.
The nightclub scene, followed by a quiet and understated moment of intimacy
in the taxi, puts forward these liminal spaces in counterpoint to the stasis of the
home-based settings. In the women’s final meeting before the deception is revealed,
a climax of emotional intensity sees Catherine and Nathalie caress each other in
the doorway of the apartment that Catherine has rented for Nathalie (01’34’26).
From the taxi, to the bar with its ephemeral sets of clients, to the doorway threshold
of a rented bedroom, Nathalie. . .’s potential erotic spaces are those of transience:
neither inside nor outside but in-between. These spaces are queer not just because
they are homosocial, but also because they reside on the verge, but are not quite
part, of heterosexual space. In de Lauretis’s reading of She Must Be Seeing Things
(McLaughlin 1987), that film’s two characters enact for the spectator ‘the function
of the “threshold” between viewing and fantasy, spectator and image, seeing and
being seen’ (1994: 99). Even in the absence of the visualization of lesbian desire
through sexual acts, the threshold space functions cinematically as a queer space of
desire.
In Chloe, the women’s desires are made manifest in spaces already hetero-
sexualized by husbands and clients – the hotel where Chloe works, Catherine
 Queering visibility in Nathalie. . . and Chloe  151
and David’s home. The marital home is off limits, however, for Catherine and
Nathalie’s coupling: Nathalie never enters Catherine and Bernard’s home, and
Catherine is rarely seen there once she has met Nathalie. The one scene in which
Catherine and Nathalie do share the traditionalized space of the family home is at
the house of Catherine’s mother (1’07’26). Having been called on to help restyle
Catherine’s mother’s hair, Nathalie is then invited to linger in this homosocial
space and she ends up staying the night, sleeping in Catherine’s childhood bed.
Catherine enters the room to say goodnight in a shot that replicates her first entry
into the bar to preempt her first meeting with Nathalie.
In the earlier shot (11’59), Catherine emerges from behind a curtain into the
bar that she has twice passed – but until now ignored – on the route that has been
staked out to symbolize her transition from work to home. The curtain, red and
lined with neon beads, acts as a buffer between two worlds: a threshold of public
versus private space that mimics the division between personal and professional.
The colour red is then carried through every scene between Catherine and Nathalie.
In the later shot, Catherine again appears through curtains, yet this time she is the
one introducing the erotic into an otherwise conventional family room, that which
she inhabited as a child. The thread of eroticism from that earlier bar to this child-
hood bedroom is borne in the form of colour: flashes of red in furniture, clothes and
a shared lipstick are all reminiscent of the memorable red décor of the bar.
The generic mode of Chloe gestures to the protagonists of films like Basic Instinct and
Fatal Attraction who are drawn by the desperation of their own domestic situations to allow
themselves to be seduced by the inevitably murderous woman whose sexuality presents
her ultimate threat. A scene in a hotel room – the anticipated ‘sex scene’ that is withheld in
Nathalie. . . – reproduces the climax of an erotic thriller (56’53). As they sit together on the
bed in the warm glow of the hotel room light, Catherine stares into the cracked and tarnished
mirror, whose murkiness cites, but distorts, earlier mirror images of her dressing room table
(in a pose that Chloe will later mimic in anticipation of a reverse-Oedipal scenario: having sex
with the son of her lover and would-be lover in their bed).
The hotel room sex scene, which emphasizes Catherine’s ambivalence regard-
ing Chloe’s demonstrative desire, shows not a radical embrace of lesbianism
unfounded in the earlier film, but rather a now clichéd move to utilize lesbianism
in order to progress the otherwise straight female character onwards in her journey
of self-discovery. The climax of Chloe occurs in Catherine and David’s marital
home, which acquires status as the film’s most significant location. The abun-
dance of windows and mirrors remains a visual motif that in Nathalie. . . evokes
the mediated relationship between Bernard and Catherine, and in Chloe literally
precipitates Chloe’s demise. The house in the latter film is architecturally majestic
and dominant in its quaint residential context, with walls of glass both internally
and externally that allow for shots from Catherine’s point of view that look through
two glass walls from the bedroom into David’s study as he chats inappropriately
with a student. In this way Chloe sharpens the architectural lines of Nathalie. . .,
just as it sharpens the lines of desire towards the explicit as bearer of the visible.
Lee Wallace (2009: 131) has explored the apartment as the ultimate lesbian
space in film, one which evades what she sees as the necessarily oppressive
152  Clara Bradbury-Rance
domesticity of the family home. That home sublimates, she writes, ‘the erotic
aspect of [any gay or straight] relationship into a “major” system of social con-
tinuity and conformity’. Following Wallace’s argument, we might suggest that
Fontaine’s decision to segregate Nathalie from the domestic realm effectively
maintains the erotic tension that has been allowed to build throughout the rest
of the film. In contrast, the remake’s introduction of Chloe’s character into the
heterosexual home disturbs it but also sublimates the erotic relationship between
the two women. Domestic disturbance is a theme that has commonly generated
anxiety in genres from the thriller to the melodrama. Often associated with this
trope, Moore’s screen presence in films from Safe (Haynes 1995) and Far From
Heaven (Haynes 2002) to The Hours (Daldry 2002) and The Kids Are All Right
(Cholodenko 2010) has evoked a domestic maternal promise that fails to provide
what we want from it and from her: reassuring (familial) familiarity. Far From
Heaven looks back to a melodramatic aesthetic in which the home has a heavy
presence; indeed, key to the family melodrama, according to Thomas Elsaesser
(1987: 61), is the ‘function of the décor and the symbolization of objects’, whose
excessive dominance in the mise en scène takes on the significance of domestic
oppression. In The Kids Are All Right, on the other hand, we see how a trajectory
towards the domestication of lesbianism via adoption rights, equal marriage and
the wider acceptance of “new” forms of the nuclear family brings lesbianism into
the home, but never unproblematically (see Bradbury-Rance 2012).
As if to capture these contemporary anxieties, the home itself becomes, in
Chloe, a site of lesbian demise, as Chloe falls through a window of the house fol-
lowing a final embrace with Catherine (1’24’09). Rather than the de-eroticization
of the lesbian relationship that Wallace argues is the home’s modus operandi, what
we observe here is the forcing of lesbianism into conformity because the primary
lesbian subject (Chloe, the initiator) is killed off by the home itself. This act does
not only allow for the continuity of the film’s heterosexual relationship; it also rein-
troduces a relationship that had already begun to break down. Early on in the film,
a party scene shows Catherine arguing with her son and lamenting the absence of
her adulterous husband (05’05). In a final party scene (1’25’35) that echoes the
earlier one, the three characters, mother, father and son, share a sequence of close-
up looks of complicity, creating a visual unity reminiscent of the idealized image
of family reunion literalized in a picture postcard at the end of Fatal Attraction.
Chloe’s demise, like that of Alex (Glenn Close) in that earlier film, has brought
around the reinstitution of heterosexuality (though not without visual hints of lin-
gering disturbance in the form of the hairslide). Each film negotiates the space of
domesticity, rejecting it as in Nathalie. . . to create female homosocial spaces, or
embracing and foregrounding it as in Chloe to reassert heterosexual dominance.

Recollections, impersonations, translations

In Nathalie. . ., the protagonist’s stories of her fabricated sexual encounters with
Catherine’s husband are fictions both visually and narratively: the encounters
between her fantasized alter ego and Bernard are only projected – to Catherine
 Queering visibility in Nathalie. . . and Chloe  153
and to the film’s audience – by her verbal narrations of them. Catherine fabricates
a name and an occupation, and chooses clothes and accommodation for Nathalie,
a character with whom she can experience desire for her husband through a play
on the other woman’s sameness to herself. Together, Catherine and Nathalie
create and occupy a space of queer recollective eroticism that is premised on,
but not inhabited by, the man. In Chloe, that potentially homoerotic space is
immediately precluded by the visual reiteration of Chloe’s (otherwise fabricated)
sexual encounters with David. ‘I can become your living, breathing, unflinching
dream . . . and then I can actually disappear’, says Chloe in her opening voiceo-
ver (02’35). This potential for simple disappearance is precisely what is at stake
in the overt signification of Chloe’s erotic situations as unambiguously erotic.
The problem with Chloe’s updating of Nathalie . . ., in the wake of an unprec-
edented increase in lesbian visibility on screen between 2003 and 2009, is that
it hinges on a need for visibility to work in relation to the invisible. Chloe is not
only graphically but also generically less ambiguous. It depends on the capacity
for the revelation of lesbian sex to act as a twist. Surprise is a generic inevitabil-
ity that is premised on the predictability of invisibility (we will only be surprised
if we never saw it coming).
Chloe sharpens the visual evidence of desires that remain at the level of affect
and suggestion in Nathalie. . . . Chloe fixes desire in the language of the immobile
image of ‘the sex scene’, falsely leading us to assume that what we are witness-
ing in the move from original to remake is a linear progression from the invisible
to the visible. If it is desire that is lost in the move to make sex the visible object
of sexuality’s visualization, this lost desire has been rendered already queerly
ambiguous in Nathalie. . .. It is formed through heterosexual acts but homoerotic
gazes and a queer spatialization of desire. In Nathalie. . ., desire is revealed to
hold within it the complexities of identification, impersonation and vicariation.
This chapter has posited queer as a divergent translation of lesbianism, thinking
outside of the dominant paradigm of sex as evidence of sexuality and eroticism.

Note
1 It is in this scene that Béart’s character changes her name from Marlène to Nathalie at
Catherine’s instruction. For the sake of clarity, I will use the name ‘Nathalie’ throughout.

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Stacey, J. 1994. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship, London and
New York: Routledge.
Stacey, J. 2010. The Cinematic Life of the Gene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
 Queering visibility in Nathalie. . . and Chloe  155
Swimming Pool (dir. François Ozon, 2003).
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16 December 2015 https://www.youtube.com/user/TheHotButton/featured.
Venuti, L. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, London: Routledge.
Villarejo, A. 2003. Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire, Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Wallace, L. 2009. Lesbianism, Cinema, Space: The Sexual Life of Apartments, New York,
NY: Routledge.
White, P. 1999. Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Quarterly, 64:1: 29–37.
Žižek, S. 2006. The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
12 Translation and the art of lesbian
failure in Monique Wittig’s
The Lesbian Body
Miller Wolf Oberman

Where does the body stop and the mind begin. (Spivak 2000: 13)

Monique Wittig is a poet—of the vaginal tract. (Knapp 1974: 738)

Introduction: the boundaries of translation

in queer literary projects
In the spring of 1998, during my second semester of college, I took my first course
in queer literature, and there encountered, for the first time, Monique Wittig’s Les
Guérillères, ‘the women warriors’, in English. I recall almost nothing about it,
except for a foggy memory of one evening sitting down on my kitchen floor in
total frustration and mystification. I had been in school just north of New York
City for less than a year, and like so many young queer Americans who leave
small towns for cities, I was thrilled and intoxicated to have discovered I was not
alone in the world, not the only one, that there were others, that I was not despised,
that I was possibly even desired. I wanted to love Les Guérillères for its violence,
separatism and women warriors, but I was put off by the text itself, which felt
like a hazy, drug-induced abstraction. I could not pin it down, and I was, at that
moment, in love with definition.
Earlier that term I had read Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and Radclyffe
Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, both of which marked the discovery that not only
was my experience of gender a shared one, but that it was shared through time, and
that, perhaps most importantly, it had been written about, translated from a bodily
experience to a textual one. Both of these texts offer first-person narratives from
subjects whose gender expression feels essential to them but is received as mas-
sively troubling to the world. After spending all my remembered life feeling like
some vaguely abject ‘other’, whose only identity was one of shadowy, indefinable
and unacceptable difference, these texts were revelatory, but I had no patience
for Wittig, whose projects, in both creative writing and scholarship, move away
from essential definition and toward incoherence, or what Jack Halberstam might
term ‘failure’. For Halberstam, ‘failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing,
unbecoming’ as well as ‘not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more coop-
erative [and] more surprising ways of being in the world’ (Halberstam 2011: 2).
 Translation and lesbian failure in Wittig  157
‘Failing,’ Halberstam reminds us, ‘is something queers do and have always done
exceptionally well’ (Halberstam 2011: 3). This act of reclamation makes even
Halberstam’s book title a site for multiple acts of translation: failure is a queer
art, as in strange or peculiar. But it is also the art of queers, who have historically
been seen as physical sites of failure in terms of proper performance of both gender
and sexuality. Halberstam’s reminder that queers are exceptional at failing not only
claims failure as a site of possibility, but draws attention to the word ‘queer’ itself; a
word once used exclusively for ridicule, but now available for the titles of scholarly
journals, reality shows, university departments and ordinary self-identification.
In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam invokes Wittig as a ‘renegade feminist’
and as an example of what he terms ‘shadow feminism’ (Halberstam 2011: 4). As
early as 1980, Wittig had argued, in her essay ‘The Straight Mind’, that ‘lesbians
are not women’ (Wittig 1980: 32) because inhabitation of the category of woman-
hood is, for Wittig, entirely dependent on heterosexuality. For Halberstam, these
‘shadow feminisms’ have ‘haunted the more acceptable forms of feminism that are
oriented to positivity, reform, and accommodation rather than negativity, rejection
and transformation’ (Halberstam 2011: 4). It is interesting to note that Halberstam
writes that Wittig made these arguments ‘in the 1970s’, and then refers to the two
essays above, which were not, in fact, written in the 1970s. Le Corps Lesbien, on
the other hand, was published in 1973 in French and printed as The Lesbian Body
in 1975 in an English translation by David Le Vay, this text, through a series of
lyrical prose poems, aims to transform patriarchal language itself into language
that can be used not only to describe a or the ‘lesbian body’, but is also conscious
that by doing so it makes the body. Although Halberstam refers to Wittig’s essays
while laying the groundwork for a theory of ‘queer failure’, The Lesbian Body is
perhaps the text which most contributes ‘shady, murky modes of undoing, unbe-
coming, and violating’ (Halberstam 2011: 4).
In this consideration of queer translation, using Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body
as a source text, I attempt to draw connections between the imperfect act of translat-
ing language and the imperfect act of expressing or translating gender and sexuality.
It was Wittig’s experience, as she wrote Le Corps Lesbien, that there were almost no
models in existence describing her subject explicitly, and that there was a poverty of
source material for her to work with. Presently, this is far from the case: we now have
slightly more than twenty years’ worth of queer theory to draw on, much of which
relies heavily on Wittig’s work as a source, including the work of both Judith Butler
and Jack Halberstam. Furthermore, Wittig’s work in general (and The Lesbian Body
in particular) embodies one of the most important strains of argument in queer theory
and perhaps the most vital of Butler’s arguments: the idea that gender is not essential,
not primary, but conceptual and performative. This performance can be translated into
language; both words and bodies themselves can be split infinitely.
If gender performance, as Butler has argued, is an attempt at making copies of
something for which no original exists, so too is translation an attempt at making a
copy of something for which no original exists. Since the first and only translation
of Le Corps Lesbien into English was published in 1975, huge amounts of work
has been done in the fields of gender studies and queer theory. By examining the
158  Miller Wolf Oberman
reception of The Lesbian Body in the 1970s and tracing its later impact on feminist
and queer theory, most importantly in terms of Judith Butler, I hope to make links
between the violences of translation and the formation of ‘lesbian’ bodies and
texts, culminating in a reading of Jeanette Winterson’s novel Written on the Body
as an adaptation and mis/translation of The Lesbian Body. Wittig’s work has been
of crucial importance to queer, gender and feminist theory, and yet it is a text that
still has more to offer, perhaps including as a starting point for a merging of queer
and translation theory, and the possibilities of a politics of queer translation. It is
now time to reflect our new ways of reading both texts and bodies back onto The
Lesbian Body, and to re-translate it, in all possible senses of the word.

‘I sow disorder in the arrangement of your feathers’:

violence and language in The Lesbian Body
‘Our reality,’ Wittig writes in her Author’s Note to The Lesbian Body, ‘is the fictional
as it is socially accepted, our symbols deny the traditional symbols . . . we possess an
entire fiction into which we project ourselves and which is already a possible reality.
It is our fiction that validates us’ (Wittig 1975: 10). The connections between bodies
and words, between discourse and culture, between truth and story-telling, between
violence and power, are complicated. Much of the initial (and some of the more recent)
work done on Le Corps Lesbien, as I will discuss here, sees it as a violent, unpleasant
and sometimes incoherent text. The incoherences of Wittig’s text allow a platform for
discussion of incoherence itself, not just in the text, but also in our own readings of it.
Approaching these incoherences offers the possibility for examining the limits of our
own understanding of language, gender, sexuality and translation. The landscape of
the body of the text is the site of a beautiful and partially unknowable failure that can
and should be read on its own terms, but with awareness of our own. In this sense, the
opposite of mastery is not failure, but proximity to the unknowable and indefinable.
Following its English translation in 1975,1 Wittig’s epic was described in a
scathing Kirkus Review article as ‘likely to churn your stomach’ (Anon. 1975:
n.p.). In ‘The Critical Mind and The Lesbian Body’, Namascar Shaktini gives a
useful overview of The Lesbian Body and the criticism, both positive and negative,
it has accrued over time. As Shaktini reminds us, much of the lesbian and feminist
scholarship up through (and especially including) the early 1990s, struggles and
argues with the implications of work done by lesbian or feminist writers which was
deemed to run counter to their own political aims, or the aims of the movement at
large. Shaktini discusses negative critical responses to the violence in The Lesbian
Body, including readings such as Penelope Englebrecht’s, which excoriates the
text for ‘reinforc[ing] a phallic violation which objectifies . . . the lesbian Subject’
(Englebrecht 1990: 85). It is easy enough to look through the book and find imme-
diate evidence of multiple kinds of violence, phallic and otherwise – although,
based on many of the feminist critiques of the violence in The Lesbian Body, it may
be that in this literalist mode of reading, ‘violence’ and ‘phallic’ are synonymous.
For Wittig, however, violence is the only way, textually, to merge form and
content, which is revealed not just in the actions of the lovers, but in the formal
 Translation and lesbian failure in Wittig  159
violence of the text, shown most explicitly in her use of the forward slash
sometimes called a “bar” or a “separatrix” to split all personal pronouns as an
acknowledgement and rejection of their assumed maleness. Wittig introduces the
English translation with a discussion of this choice, describing j/e as ‘cutting in
two which throughout literature is the exercise of a language which does not con-
stitute me as a subject’ (Wittig 1975: 10–11). Her final prefatory comment: ‘I
[J/e] am physically incapable of writing ‘I,’ [Je],’ Wittig writes, and ‘[J/e] have
no desire to do so’ (11). Wittig uses the forward slash to split the word je (and
m/e, m/es m/oi etc.) in French into two halves: ‘j/e’. This j/e is unrecoverable
in an English translation, since the English I cannot be split. In French, the split
personal pronouns allow Wittig to make visible the violence she sees as necessary
in order for a female subject to enter a ‘masculine’ language – which can only be
done by force. Translator David Le Vay uses the forward slash when possible; in
English it can split ‘m/e’ or ‘m/y’, but never ‘I’, which Le Vay marks with italics
in an attempt to approximate Wittig’s j/e. Although the italicized ‘I’ stands out on
the page in a way that marks it as visually different, it fails to approach the violent
split of j/e because it lacks the ability to hold the constant reminder that the subject
is not whole, but is ‘alien to her own writing at every word because this “I” [j/e]
uses a language alien to her’. Furthermore, the split j/e is ‘a sign of excess’, the
speaker may be split, and forced to use an ‘alien’ language, but she is also forcing
her own body and language into the body of the alien text, expanding it through
disruption. For Wittig, this disrupted ‘I’ ‘is so powerful that it can attack the order
of heterosexuality in texts and lesbianize the heroes of love, lesbianize the sym-
bols, lesbianize the gods and the goddesses, lesbianize Christ, lesbianize the men
and the women’ (Wittig 2005: 47). While The Lesbian Body may not have suc-
ceeded in mass lesbianization on quite that grand a scale, (and I think we might
read this passage as slightly tongue-in-cheek), the book does offer a striking new
anatomy in language for writing about the body.
Without exception, the locus of these poems are bodies, and Wittig describes
them in great detail, whether they are human, animal, interior, exterior, or the body
of earth itself. While many reviews cite the most obviously ‘grotesque’ sections,
read on its own terms, nothing is grotesque in The Lesbian Body. All parts of the
lover become equally revered, as opposed to traditional views of ‘women’ where
bodily locations that are appropriately adorable are quite few. These blood-and-
guts passages are gloriously plentiful: ‘M/y neck involved bends and separates
from m/y trunk, m/y entire body separated into its parts directs black stomach
black intestines black heart vulva green bile into the black darkness inhabited only
by your voice’ (Wittig 1975: 108). Some readers might be put off by lines such as
‘I discover that your skin can be lifted layer by layer, I pull it, it lifts off, it coils
above your knees’ (Wittig 1975: 17) or ‘you full of juices corroded in an odour of
dung and urine crawl up to m/y carotid in order to sever it. Glory’ (Wittig 1975: 86).
And certainly there is violence, not just in the ‘natural’ body, but in what is done to
it, because at times ‘it is not the gentle sound of rain that I hear just now, but your
blood falling on the metal, it spurts from the seven openings, the temporal arter-
ies are severed . . . I am spattered from top to toe’ (Wittig 1975: 90). In the above
160  Miller Wolf Oberman
images, which were gathered from different sections of the book, body parts dam-
age and are damaged, give and receive pain, and leak or gush or rain a variety of
fluids. However, the lesbian speaker of this text, precisely because of these images,
is able to create a world where no part of the lesbian body is untouched, and the
lines between violence and worship are utterly immaterial – ‘dung and urine’ never
fail to passionately create ‘glory’.
Sometimes these bodies are not human at all, as in the section of text that
begins ‘Two black swans swim in a solitary lake’. The swans quickly become the
lovers, ‘you with bent head I ready to support the fall of your neck to touch the
curve of your breast with m/y beak’ (Wittig 1975: 36). The attention Wittig pays
to her language here renders these swans as real as they are metaphoric: ‘I sow
disorder in the arrangement of your feathers, I turn them the wrong way, I destroy
their sleekness’ (Wittig 1975: 37). ‘Of your body,’ Wittig writes:

I perceive nothing a blackness merging with the black waters. I commence a

long descent m/y neck entwining your neck dragging you dragging you down
to the golden thickness of the mud from which we cannot extricate ourselves
because of our firm entanglement. I experience the song of the black swans,
at the dark hour of their death. (Wittig 1975: 37)

Swans are birds as notoriously violent as they are beautiful, but while we are used
to the familiar and romantic image of two swans with their beaks touching, their
necks making the shape of a heart, we are far less used to images such as Wittig
employs here, which are as ghostly as they are lovely. ‘I have forgotten the swans’
cry of victory when they move toward the shade to rest after a day without com-
bat,’ Wittig writes; but these lovers-as-swans are not resting at all, although at the
end of the poem they rest, we might imagine, in the ‘dark hour of their death’.
Both subject and object inhabit a space of restlessness and incoherence: ‘we can-
not extricate ourselves because of our firm entanglement’, seems to be about the
lovers, but in the end it is the I who experiences the swans’ death, which seems to
belong, no longer to the humans, but to the swans (Wittig 1975: 37).
This curious movement between self and other, between text and body is pre-
sent throughout The Lesbian Body, and it may be the swans above or any other
number of passages that Fran Moira was considering in April 1976, when in a
review of The Lesbian Body in Off Our Backs, she noted that the book ‘conjured
up the physical – bestial – exchanges between women,’ and that reading it ‘may
cause readers to shudder in disgust or fear’ (Moira 1976: 16). In proclaiming
the body, Moira continues, Wittig ‘tears out the heart, the intestines; she swims
in cerebrospinal fluid; she gnaws at the colon, the lungs’ (Moira 1976: 16).
Moira admits that although Wittig’s evocations of ‘intense physical and sexual
sensations, including abandon, possession, [and] absorption’ are not politically
acceptable, they do ‘strike home’. Moira acknowledges the inherent paradox of
a feminist reading of the text – even though its violence may be politically unac-
ceptable, it is also necessary: ‘because the politics we hammer out on typewriters
deny that we have bodies, they become irrelevant, laughable, when confronted
 Translation and lesbian failure in Wittig  161
by “the lesbian body”’ (Moira 1976: 16). Although Moira recognizes the incred-
ible importance of Wittig’s work to bring ‘the ignored body sharply back into
consciousness’, she nonetheless is forced to conclude that ‘the world of my revo-
lution does not include atavistic goddesses but an end to the atrocities that trap us
from the moment of birth’ (Moira 1976:16). Although this review is less reaction-
ary than the Kirkus Review, Wittig would likely take issue with several of Moira’s
points, particularly her admission that the ‘ignored body’ needs to be returned
‘back to consciousness’. For Wittig, ‘the lesbian body’ was never rendered con-
sciously enough in text to merit a return. Crucial to Wittig’s method of discourse
is her belief that she is bringing something to text that never existed previously in
narrative or in language, and that that kind of creation (like birth itself) can only
happen violently. If, for Wittig, writing a text is violent, reading becomes part of
the struggle as well. Reading a text in translation is itself a potentially violent act,
one that foregrounds the inherently unstable, if passionate, relationship between
reader and text.
Wittig’s essay ‘Some Remarks on The Lesbian Body’ is invaluable as a guide
through the text, which can, at times, seem impenetrable. The text itself describes
a lover’s body that is constantly changing, and so the poems can seem equally
mercurial and indefinable. Wittig describes the challenge of writing a book
‘totally lesbian in its theme, its vocabulary, its texture’ as a ‘double blank’. One
blank is the same blank page that confronts all writers, but the other blank was
‘of the nonexistence of such a book until then’ (Wittig 2005: 44). As Wittig (who
enjoyed playing the role of the polemicist) described it when she conceived of the
project, ‘there were no lesbian books except Sappho’, and so in addition to the
challenge of a ‘double blank’, there was also the necessity for a double violence
(Wittig 2005: 44). The first kind of violence is that inherent whenever a new
form is needed, a new form ‘threatens and does violence to the older ones . . .
you do it with words that must bring a shock to the readers’ and ‘a good reader
could be blasted in the process’. The second kind of violence, Wittig writes, is
‘the violence of passion’, which had to be written in a ‘cryptic and realistic . . .
expression’ because it had previously been written only ‘as the mildest kind of
love’ expressed ‘out of compassion’, and descriptions of which had skipped ‘over
the peak of passion’ (Wittig 2005: 45). ‘For what is total ecstasy between two
lovers,’ Wittig asks, ‘but an exquisite death?’ (Wittig 2005: 47). Wittig’s project
is, then, by putting the words ‘lesbian’ and ‘body’ into proximity, to ‘destabilize
the general notion of the body’ (Wittig 2005: 46).
This act of violent translation begins and can only begin with the primary loca-
tion of subjecthood, the pronoun for the self as a subject, ‘I’, which the forward
slash grounds, makes conscious, problematizes and expands. In the early 1990s, at
the moment when some feminist scholarship was becoming queer theory, Wittig’s
work, especially because of the attention it received in Judith Butler’s founda-
tional Gender Trouble (1990), gained new life and readership. In the 1990s, Erika
Ostrovsky points out, Wittig’s fiction was seen as writing defined by its desire to
reverse and subvert language, but can now be seen more clearly as accomplish-
ing something more subtle: ‘transformation, transmutation, and transfiguration’.
162  Miller Wolf Oberman
Indeed, ‘transfiguration’ may be one of the most accurate ways to describe the
effect of The Lesbian Body on literature. This is ‘the most complete type of altera-
tion’, Ostrovsky writes, and implies ‘an exalting, glorifying metamorphosis’
(Ostrovsky 2005: 115). In Wittig’s case, this metamorphosis had a crucial impact:
Wittig troubled the lines of subjecthood by asserting that the pronoun ‘I’ or ‘je’
was culturally unavailable for a lesbian body, a framework Butler would extend
to trouble the gender binary as a whole.

Butler and Wittig: translation and imitation

In Gender Trouble, Butler observes that ‘Wittig refers to “sex” as a mark that
is somehow applied by an institutionalized heterosexuality, a mark that can be
erased or obfuscated through practices that effectively contest that institution’
(Butler 1990: 26). For Wittig, as opposed to Irigiray, ‘language is an instrument
or tool that is in no way misogynist in its structures, but only in its applications.’
This opposition is of crucial importance in terms of gender and sexuality studies:
Butler correctly identifies Wittig’s critique of Irigiray’s attempt ‘to expose the
ostensible “binary” relation between the sexes as a masculinist ruse that excludes
the feminine’. For both Wittig and Butler, this argument achieves the opposite of
its intent: it actually works to solidify the supposedly natural binary between the
sexes and reinvigorates the ‘mythic notion of the feminine’ (Butler 1990: 26).
Wittig’s rejection of any notion of the ‘real’ or the ‘natural’ in bodies or in lan-
guage, and her troubling of these spaces provides an incredibly strong foundation
for Butler’s continued assault on concepts of naturalness and primacy in gender
and sexuality.
In ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, Butler challenges one of the most
common homophobic critiques of lesbian identity: that lesbians and their relation-
ships are shoddy copies or ‘fakes’ of heterosexuality. This trope, she points out, is
entirely dependent on heterosexuality’s understood place as the ‘original’ mode of
sexual expression: only when heterosexuality is assumed as original can homosex-
uality be a bad copy. In a nifty little thought experiment, Butler exposes the notion
of heterosexuality as original, or coming before homosexuality as ridiculous, and
marks both sex and gender as ‘a kind of imitation for which there is no original’
(Butler 2003: 378, italics in all cases Butler’s own emphasis). Butler concludes that
‘heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and approximating its own
phantasmic idealization of itself—and failing’ (Butler 2003: 378). In an attempt
to extend the troubling of solid identity to the lesbian ‘I’, Butler finds a paradox:
‘it is precisely the repetition of that play that establishes as well the instability of
the very category that it constitutes’ (Butler 2003: 375). Essentially, ‘I’ can only
establish identity through its own repetition, but each time it is repeated, it is also
replaced and changed. Although Butler is not writing about Wittig’s j/e here, the
connection is implicit: Wittig’s repetition of the forward-slashed j/e as an attempt
at a ‘Lesbian’ ‘I’, by its nature a split self, produces ‘a string of performances’
which simultaneously ‘constitute and contest the coherence’ of that j/e. (Butler
2003: 375) Butler’s clear, logical dismantling of the notion of primacy in terms of
 Translation and lesbian failure in Wittig  163
gender and sexuality begins to fray and fail (I use ‘fail’ here in the Halberstamian
sense, as discussed above) when applied to ‘I’ as a subject, a failure that is not
necessarily negative, but may instead offer up a constructive incoherence when
considered in terms of the impossibility of translation. Wittig’s j/e offers a use-
ful paradox: it is always already conscious of its own subjecthood as a linguistic
impossibility, it cannot have or be an ‘I’ or a ‘je’, and in the repeated moment of
this recognition, continuously makes and unmakes a translated self.
‘In every possible sense, translation is necessary but impossible,’ Gayatri
Spivak begins her essay ‘Translation as Culture’, an article that seems to be about
Melanie Klein, a Viennese psychoanalyst. Melanie Klein, Spivak writes, ‘sug-
gested that the work of translation is an incessant shuttle that is a “life”’ (Spivak
2000: 13). Strangely, life is in a state of half-quotation here, which Spivak
explains in a footnote is because ‘what follows is my own interpretative digest of
Melanie Klein, Works, Volumes 1–4 [sic]2 . . . giving specific footnotes is there-
fore impossible’ (Spivak 2000: 24). There are few things more self-reflexive than
writing about translation, and there are few writers more prone to self-reflexive
writing than Spivak, so the impossibility of specific footnotes is to be expected.
The language Spivak uses in her footnote, that her work is an ‘interpretive digest’
of Klein’s book, seems to suggest she has consumed Klein – or that her article
may not really be about Klein’s book, or that ‘about’ is a mistaken way to talk
about anything, because ‘life’ itself is an incessant motion of ‘shuttling’ a back-
and-forth between inside and outside translation, an ‘entire fiction into which we
project ourselves’.
By returning to Spivak’s discussion of Melanie Klein and her concept of ‘the
work of translation’ as ‘an incessant shuttle that is a “life”’, Spivak seems to be
making a similar argument about primacy of translation as Butler makes about
gender. Spivak writes:

The human infant grabs on to some one thing and then things. This grab-
bing (begreifen) of an outside indistinguishable from an inside constitutes an
inside, going back and forth and coding everything into a sign-system by the
thing(s) grasped. One can call this crude coding a ‘translation’. In this never-
ending weaving, violence translates into conscience and vice versa. From
birth to death this ‘natural’ machine, programming the mind . . . is partly
metapsychological and therefore outside the grasp of the mind. Thus ‘nature’
passes and repasses into ‘culture’, in a work or shuttling site of violence.
(Spivak 2000: 13)

In understanding Melanie Klein, Spivak explains, ‘the word translation itself loses
its literal sense, it becomes a catachresis’3 (Spivak 2000: 13, original emphasis). In
this case, Spivak’s observation of ‘translation’ as a catachresis is in regard to Klein,
but her observation can be applied to a far larger target.
If, as Butler suggests, sex and gender are ‘imitation(s) for which there is no
original’, translations, for Spivak, seem to exist in the same category. In highlight-
ing the word ‘natural’, Spivak foregrounds the fact that the relationships between
164  Miller Wolf Oberman
nature and culture and language and the body are far more obscure than we might
think, and that language itself is always already a translation. Central to Butler’s
attack on the notion of primacy in gender and sexuality is the destruction of the
timeline that we suppose them to exist on, the mistaken belief that one has come
first, preceded the other, and that that initial mode is, based on nothing more than its
having come first, proper and natural. If this is not so, then there can be no ‘copy’
since there was no original. So too, Spivak’s definition of ‘translation’ renders it
almost unusable except as an acknowledged catachresis. In problematizing its lin-
earity, Spivak removes its place in time as multiple points on a line moving forward
by stating that ‘translation’ begins at birth. If ‘translation’ takes place immediately,
what possible primary text preceded it? In this line of reasoning, there is no primary
text, and ‘translations’ are copies of nothing. Speech, writing and thought itself are
‘translations’ which are ever moving, ‘shuttling’ between the inside and the outside
of ‘life’. This perception causes a radical realignment of text that is crucial to any
reading of The Lesbian Body, in terms of reading it in ‘translation’, that is, in terms
of Wittig’s argument that lesbians are not women, in terms of how it rewrites and
reshapes bodies and other texts, and in terms of how Wittig uses form. ‘I used for
The Lesbian Body,’ Wittig writes in ‘Some Remarks on The Lesbian Body’, ‘a tech-
nique of montage (of editing) as for a film. All the fragments were spread flat on the
ground and organized. The book has been constructed according to this principle.
The final organization produced an asymmetrical symmetry’ (Wittig 2000: 48–9). It
is in part through this formal choice that Wittig produces a body of text that rejects
narrative linearity while imposing and revealing the transformative ‘shuttling’
motion Spivak describes as central to life as a never-ending cycle of translation.

Incoherence and failure

Because Wittig’s work informed much of the queer theory that followed it twenty
years later (including Butler, Sedgwick, Winterson, De Lauretis, Halberstam,
Spivak, and others), it is now possible to look back on The Lesbian Body from the
new landscape these subsequent works created. In the introduction to The Queer
Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam offers Wittig as one of the ‘renegade feminists of
the past’, who understood that failure, or ‘not succeeding at womanhood can offer
unexpected pleasures’ (Halberstam 2011: 4). In Halberstam’s ideology, failure is
not really failure, but can be a site of rebellion, a place where normative expecta-
tions are refused and ‘the goal is to lose one’s way, and indeed, to be prepared
to lose more than one’s way’ (Halberstam 2011: 6). Halberstam embraces texts
like James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State wherein Scott argues that ‘legibility
is a form of manipulation’ (quoted in Halberstam 2011: 10). Illegibility, then,
as a kind of failure, seems to be a site for risk, creativity and dissent, and ‘may
be one way of escaping the political manipulation to which all university fields
and disciplines are subject’ (Halberstam 2011: 10). In this paradox, that which
is illegible, unnamable and incoherent may become more ‘real’ than those pro-
jects that adhere too closely to their expected trajectories and knowledges. The
Lesbian Body can be read as having many sites of wilful and intractable refusal
 Translation and lesbian failure in Wittig  165
to participate in the expected disciplines of academic or artistic heterosexual dis-
course, but also expected lesbian and feminist discourses. But these discourses
have changed, and work like The Queer Art of Failure offers new ways of engag-
ing with Wittig’s work.
After nearly a quarter-century of queer theory, the language and tools we have
for reading this text have changed so drastically that I believe it is past time for
a new translation of The Lesbian Body. The Le Vay translation has many fine
points, but the ways in which we now conceive of gender, sex, sexuality, time,
translation, the determinacy and indeterminacy of bodies, and text itself have
gone through major shifts, all of which are highly relevant to Wittig’s project.
Johanna Dehler, for example, observes that ‘In the French original . . . she [Wittig]
includes a curious neologism – cyprine’ (Dehler 1999: 132). ‘This term,’ Dehler
writes, ‘meekly translated as “the juice” by David Le Vay (Wittig 1975: 28)—
is Wittig’s inventive new word for “vaginal secretions”: what the lesbian body
produces in a state of pleasure is finally named.’ As Shaktini and Dehler both
discuss, ‘cyprine’ is a term borrowed from geography, as it is related to the island
of Cyprus, where Aphrodite hailed from, and is sometimes used as her surname.
Wittig has re-appropriated the word for her own purposes, and her use ‘establishes
an etymological, mythological, and geographical connection between the body
and other domains. The eroticism of the lesbian body emerges in an epistemologi-
cal interplay between differing semantic fields and physical pleasures’ (Dehler
1999: 132). Dehler rightly points out that ‘neologisms such as cyprine constitute
a Sapphic discourse that enacts an “undomestication” of the female body much in
the same way as Sappho, from the perspective of twentieth-century feminist criti-
cism, portrays “undomestication” in her texts’ (Dehler 1999: 133). Might a new
translation not consider simply retaining more of Wittig’s neologisms?
One of the great joys to be had in contact with ‘translated’ texts is the con-
sciousness of them as translations, and one of the finest acknowledgments of that
is through the use of such neologisms as cyprine. This is a text brimming with
fresh possibilities for a re-engagement with language itself. It is worth noting that
in the French original, the capitalized list sections of the text are quite different
visually than they are in the Le Vay translation. In Le Vay, these lists or titles are
fit to one page. They appear list-like, and visually orderly. In the French edition
this is not so at all; rather, the bold capitalized words are flung over two pages,
not one, and appear far less orderly: each instance of these sections shows the
words spread out on two pages, which always face one another. This correlates
with Wittig’s comments in her ‘Remarks’, where she concludes: ‘The book is thus
formed in two parts. It opens and falls back on itself. One can compare its form
to a cashew, to an almond, to a vulva’ (Wittig 1975: 48). Indeed, the effect of the
spread pages covered in words that have, sometimes, gaps between them, and do
not always look orderly, has nearly the opposite effect of the lists in the English
translation. In addition, in the non-translated version, the poems themselves now
look shockingly ordered in comparison to the flung out lists of body parts that
separate them, and this creates an altogether different perception of how the lists
and the poems interact.
166  Miller Wolf Oberman
Sex, gender and violence in Winterson and Wittig
As many4 have noted before me, the connections between fiction, identity and
translation are at the center of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body in a way
that runs parallel to or intersects with Wittig’s Le Corps Lesbien. Winterson’s work
as a whole follows some of the same trajectories as Wittig’s, as many of her novels5
position themselves on the boundaries between the corporeal and non-corporeal
body and the mind; moving across (and disrupting) traditional categories of sex,
sexuality, gender, relationships, time and reality itself. In Written on the Body,
however, Winterson directly refers to The Lesbian Body, not only with the title,
but also by setting up the last third of the book to visually refer to Wittig’s text.
Winterson’s narrator is a person who works as a translator, who has had both
male and female lovers and whose sex is never given. For the purposes of this
chapter, I will use the pronoun “they” to refer to this narrator, who falls desper-
ately in love with a married woman, Louise. After a brief affair, Louise decides
it is too painful to continue in that way, and asks the narrator for three days to
figure out what to do next. ‘I sat in the library on the first day,’ the narrator tells
us, ‘trying to work on my translations but jotting on the blotter the line of my true
enquiry.’ Rather than working on the translations, they are tortured by doubt and
fear at the possible loss of Louise, and break the cardinal rule of the library, speak-
ing out loud (and worse, to themself): ‘“I love her what can I do”’ (Winterson
1993: 91). What the narrator does, on the second day, is this:

I took a pair of handcuffs to the library with me and handcuffed myself to my

seat. I gave the key to the gentleman in the knitted waistcoat and asked him
to let me free at five o’ clock. I told him that if I didn’t finish my translation a
Soviet writer might fail to find asylum in Great Britain. (Winterson 1993: 94)

Unfortunately, the ‘gentleman in the knitted waistcoat’ was not worthy of the nar-
rators’ trust, and ‘disappeared . . . after about an hour,’ causing them to request
help from the British Library Reading Room’s guards, and resulting in a visit to
the library supervisor’s office, where the narrator is ‘cut loose’ but ‘charged . . .
for Wilful Damage to Reading Room Chair’ (Winterson 1993: 95).
Naturally, many of the responses to this text by a well-known lesbian novelist
have focused on Winterson’s refusal to gender her narrator. For the most part, these
responses have taken two main views: seeing this choice in the novel as either a
brilliant move which highlights the ambiguity of gender and the purity of love,
or as a dastardly move (or gimmick)6 which, in a hollow attempt to attract atten-
tion, has the effect of keeping Written on the Body from taking its proper place in
lesbian fiction. However, some studies, like that of Francesca Maioli, claim it is
actually not possible to have a narrator unmarked by gender. Maioli sees Written
on the Body as a masculinist ‘discourse of colonization’ (Maioli 2009: 144). ‘In
spite of most readers’ perceptions,’ Maioli writes, ‘the genderless narrator turns
out to be everything but a feminist device as it speaks with a definitively male
voice.’ For Maioli, ‘the novel shows that there can be no such a thing as “genderless”
narrator, since “ungendered” ends up coinciding with “universal”, and, in Western
 Translation and lesbian failure in Wittig  167
culture, it stands for “male”’ (Maioli 2012: 144). While Maioli makes some strong
arguments for the text’s use of colonial metaphor as violence enacted on Louise’s
body (she is correct in drawing our attention to a good deal of textual evidence
for this reading), she overlooks the possibility that Winterson is using this trope
to re-inscribe queerness and incoherence onto previously heterosexual modes of
narrative. This move on Maioli’s part pushes her argument in line with the literal-
ist moves many other essays on the novel desire. One crucial component of this
desire for certain literal readings of texts is the assumption or hope that even in
‘fiction’, a writer’s narrator must represent their own supposed identities of sex,
gender, sexuality, etc.7 Within the scope of these expectations, it is a disappoint-
ment for Winterson’s novel not to be a ‘lesbian’ novel. These critiques share much
in character and substance with the critiques of Wittig’s Le Corps Lesbien in the
years following its publication and translation.
I now wonder, looking at Winterson’s capitalized lists of body parts as chapter
headings in Written on the Body, how much her use of Wittig’s capitalized sec-
tions was influenced by looking at the Le Vay translation of the text, for hers look
as orderly and neat as Le Vay’s, and entirely unlike the sprawling spread pages
of the French edition. Both texts, Wittig’s and Winterson’s, attempt to know the
unknowable, name the unnamable, explore that which is so mysterious no amount
of exploration, textual or physical, can entirely reveal it. Similarly, both texts take
gloriously for granted the idea that writing the body of the beloved is no more
dislocated than touching it – that they are touching it, that text has its own body. In
doing so, both texts suggest that Spivak’s question, ‘where does the body stop and
the mind begin’ is always already rhetorical. But where Wittig’s narrator seems
rooted in abandon, Winterson’s seems anxious – or perhaps seems to ‘shuttle’
back and forth between anxiety and abandon (Spivak 2010: 13). The difference
between Le Vay’s capitalized pages and Wittig’s is that his orderly lists mirror
the blocks of prose poems they separate, while Wittig’s do the opposite, they ‘sow
disorder in the arrangement’ and contradict the sleek blocks of text. Perhaps Le
Vay’s translation of these capitalized words reflects an editorial need to keep them
to one page, rather than spread out over two, or perhaps they display his desire to
rein in the chaos of the poem’s images. Either way, the visual effect of his transla-
tion of these pages is quite different, from, and even opposite to that achieved by
the original. Whether Winterson read the French edition of The Lesbian Body, the
Le Vay translation, or both, her visual structure references Le Vay’s, reflecting a
desire to bind and organize the chaos the speaker is experiencing. Perhaps this is
because Winterson’s narrator is more firmly located in the kind of ‘real’ world,
where one’s ticket is one’s livelihood, and emotional and physical chaos must be
anxiously catalogued rather than flung out over the page.
In returning to the British Library, and Winterson’s narrator (who quite logi-
cally responded to being banned from the library by going to bed with a bottle
of gin), I cannot help but wonder what property was truly damaged in that most
holy locus of study? Given the removal of translation, gender and sex from the
timeline of primacy, perhaps Winterson’s narrator was punished and exposed
not for destruction, but for untranslatability. Or, for the destruction caused by
168  Miller Wolf Oberman
their inability to conform to the suitable modes of behaviour which could be
properly translated in the British Library. They had already spoken aloud in
a space where such was forbidden, and the act of handcuffing themself to the
chair compounded the problem: the space was being misused, which is itself
anxiety producing, in that it causes others to consider other modes of translat-
ing themselves in the space. The chair was then submitted to violence, but the
true violence was one of translation: the narrator’s actions called into question
the ‘natural’ or primary use of the space. Anyone who uses it differently must
be stopped immediately, because, as Butler views the subject, and the ‘I’, ‘it is
precisely the repetition of that play that establishes . . . the instability of the very
category that it constitutes’ (Butler 2003: 375). As the chair is rendered unus-
able and unstable by its destruction, the library is rendered equally unstable by
the narrator’s desperate choice to attach themself to the chair with handcuffs.
Furthermore, the punishment meted out to the narrator does not stop within
the text itself – the narrator is considered unsuitable in more than a handful of
critical pieces due to the same problematic instability of self: a gender represen-
tation which is not properly stable and coherent. Halberstam might see in this
scene a site of brilliant failure, whereby Winterson’s narrator destroys expec-
tations, ‘escaping the political manipulation to which all university fields and
disciplines are subject’ (Halberstam 2011: 10).
This failure is also a failure of translation on the part of some readers, but
texts that continually ask us to grapple with indeterminacy seem to hold equal
parts repulsion and attraction. B.L. Knapp, in a review of Le Corps Lesbien,
found Wittig’s ‘sentence[s] . . . sharp, imagistic, sensual, [and] cadenced’, but
he was put off by the fact that ‘every follicle and orifice of the woman’s body is
divinized, idolized, apotheosized. Nothing is left to the imagination; all mystery
has been banished.’ ‘When Genet wrote of homosexuality,’ Knapp observes,
‘his novels and plays had dimension and scope; they were metaphysical and
mythic dramas in which he participated most poignantly. His writings were
unique.’ Knapp unfavourably compares Wittig to Genet, disdainfully remark-
ing that: ‘Monique Wittig is a poet—of the vaginal tract’ (Knapp 1974: 738).
These insights from 1974 emphasize what Wittig was up against—she too sees
Genet as part of her lineage, but is aware that although there have been some
extraordinary texts by and for gay men, there has been no counterpart for lesbi-
ans. In The Thief’s Journal, Genet describes a thief who has just been arrested
watching police officers handle ‘the tube of vaseline, which was intended to
grease my prick and those of my lovers’. While the officers are holding the tube,
the thief imagines an old woman he had once seen, who he would ‘be glad to
slobber over’ and is ‘overflowing with love’ at the thought of. He thinks of the
word ‘glaviaux’8 or, ‘gobs of spit’ and would be overjoyed to ‘slobber over her
hair or vomit into her hands’ (Genet 1964: 21).
Is this kind of abjection more acceptable to Knapp simply because it includes
maleness, or because it is a strangely heterosexual image in a ‘homosexual’ text?
Knapp makes clear in his reference to Genet that he is comparing Wittig’s queer
text to what he sees as a better and more original one – one which came first. In this
 Translation and lesbian failure in Wittig  169
way, Knapp’s inability to see The Lesbian Body as anything other than a bad copy
of Genet reveals a failure on his part to recognize failure in Halberstam’s sense.
When we do not find what we expect to find, we hold up what we see as a copy
of something that does not exist. Knapp can only see ‘the fictional as it is socially
accepted’, and when Wittig’s ‘symbols deny the traditional symbols’, they become
unreadable and untranslatable in the framework of definition, much as Winterson’s
non-pronouned speaker in Written on the Body infuriates some readers by deny-
ing them an effortlessly ‘lesbian’ text (Wittig 1975: 10). Winterson sows a kind
of critical disorder in refusing a gendered pronoun for her narrator, while Wittig’s
speaker in The Lesbian Body ‘sow[s] disorder’ by both refusing to name her lover,
and fracturing pronouns themselves. While the ‘body’ Winterson is able to write
on is not a copy of Wittig’s ‘body’, readings of it are nevertheless informed by
the lesbian body Wittig brought violently forth, and reflect to its readers a similar
desire in their capacity as reader-translators to translate or make coherent a kind of
disorder which holds refusal to name as a crucial part of naming itself in the nego-
tiation between textual and corporeal bodies. For Wittig, the refusal to name offers
what is perhaps the queerest kind of failure: multiplicity. By withholding a single
name, Wittig instead gains the space for many.
In this way, The Lesbian Body continues to remind us that texts and bodies are
irrevocably multiply translated. If the intervention of being an ‘I’ is one of the first
and most crucial interventions each of us makes, it remains essential to be aware
of the ways in which for many of us, ‘I’ holds no meaning as a personal pronoun,
rendering it untranslatable, a word void of meaning. In this sense, Wittig’s radical
destabilization of ‘I’ does the opposite of banishing mystery, rather, it reveals it.
This act of dialogic translation changes words not only in this instance, but in all
previous and future instances as well. For Wittig, what is at stake is in a sense, a
meta-divergence, or a divergence within a divergence; By rending her I, Wittig
brings an ongoing and profound attention to the state of the existential relation-
ship between the utterer and her utterance.

Notes
1 It is worth noting that there is almost nothing written about Le Vay’s translation itself.
In the only mention of Le Vay in the introduction to the English language text, Margaret
Crosland describes him this way: “David Le Vay, who is an eminent practising anatomist
and surgeon, has abandoned any male chauvinism long enough to translate this book”
(Crosland 1975: 7).
2 Spivak has even given her own ‘interpretive digest’ of the title of Klein’s collection, but
is referring here to The Writings of Melanie Klein (1984), New York: Free Press. It does
indeed comprise four volumes.
3 I will skip Spivak’s justification for her use of the term ‘catachresis’, which seemed,
perhaps, to be a defence against a previous criticism for her lexical impenetrability, a
charge that it is interesting to note has been equally levied against both Wittig and Butler.
‘Catachresis’ most simply means the use of a word incorrectly, either accidentally or
purposefully, because there is no word for the intended signified.
4 For more on this, see Leigh Gilmore’s ‘An Anatomy of Absence: Written On The Body,
The Lesbian Body, and Autobiography Without Names’ (1997), Pauline MacPherson’s
‘Constructions of Violence: Destabilising the Fe/Male In Wittig and Winterson’, Cath
170  Miller Wolf Oberman
Stowers’s ‘The Erupting Lesbian Body, Reading Written on the Body as a Lesbian Text’,
and Jennifer J. Gustar’s ‘The Body of Romance: Citation and Mourning in Written on
the Body’.
5 This is particularly true of The Passion, Sexing the Cherry and Gut Symmetries.
6 See Sarah Schulman’s particularly polemical argument as discussed in Shaktini’s ‘The
Critical Mind and The Lesbian Body’.
7 For a strong critique of the expectation of ‘autobiographical’ fiction that deals with Le
Corps Lesbien and Written on the Body, see Leigh Gilmore’s ‘An Anatomy Of Absence:
Written On The Body, The Lesbian Body, and Autobiography Without Names’.
8 Bernard Frechtman makes the excellent choice here as a translator to maintain Genet’s
French when Genet is remarking specifically on language itself.

References
Anon. 1975. ‘The Lesbian Body by Monique Wittig, 5.9.75’ Kirkus Reviews; accessed 17
January 2016 https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/monique-wittig/the-lesbian-
body/.
Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York:
Routledge.
———. 2003. ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in J.D. Culler (ed.), Deconstruction;
Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, New York: Taylor & Francis,
pp. 371–87.
Dehler, J. 1999. Fragments of Desire: Sapphic Fictions in Works by H.D., Judy Grahn, and
Monique Wittig, Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang.
Engelbrecht, P.J. 1990. ‘“Lifting Belly” is a Language: The Postmodern Lesbian Subject,
Feminist Studies, 16(1): 85.
Genet, J. 1964 [1949]. The Thief’s Journal, trans. B. Frechtman. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
Gilmore, L. 1997. ‘An Anatomy Of Absence: Written On The Body, The Lesbian Body,
And Autobiography Without Names’, in T. Foster, C. Siegel and E.E. Berry (eds), The
Gay ’90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies, New York:
New York University Press, pp. 224–51.
Gustar, J.J. 2005. ‘The Body of Romance: Citation and Mourning in Written on the Body’,
Aesthethika International Journal on Culture, Subjectivity and Aesthetics, 2(1): 25–41.
Halberstam, J. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Knapp, B.L. 1974. ‘Le Corps Lesbien by Monique Wittig’, Books Abroad, 48(4): 738.
Macpherson, P. 2008. ‘Constructions Of Violence: Destabilising the Fe/Male In Wittig and
Winterson’, in P. Macpherson (ed.), Sub-versions: Cultural Status, Genre and Critique,
Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press.
Maioli, F. 2009. ‘Palimpsests: The Female Body as a Text in Jeanette Winterson’s Written
on the Body’, European Journal of Women’s Studies, 16: 143–58.
Moira, F. 1976. ‘The Lesbian Body by Monique Wittig’, Off Our Backs, 6(2): 16.
Ostrovsky, E. 2005. ‘Transformation of Gender and Genre Paradigms in the Fiction of
Monique Wittig’, in N. Shaktini (ed.), On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political, and
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Shaktini, N. 2005. On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political, and Literary Essays, Urbana:
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———. 2005. ‘The Critical Mind and The Lesbian Body’, in idem (ed.), On Monique
Wittig: Theoretical, Political, and Literary Essays, Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
pp. 132–5.
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Spivak, G. C. 2000. ‘Translation as Culture’, Parallax, 6(1): 13–24.
Stowers, C. 1998. ‘The Erupting Lesbian Body, Reading Written on the Body as a Lesbian
Text’, in H. Grice and T. Woods (eds), ‘I’m Telling You Stories’: Jeanette Winterson
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Winterson, J. 1993. Written on the Body, New York: Knopf.
Wittig, M. 1973 Le Corps Lesbien, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
———. 1975. The Lesbian Body, translated by D. Le Vay, London: Owen.
———. 1992. The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
———. 2005. ‘Some Remarks on The Lesbian Body’, in N. Shaktini (ed.), On Monique
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13 Queering translation
Rethinking gender and sexual politics in
the spaces between languages and cultures
William J. Spurlin

As the world becomes increasingly transnational, and borders between sovereign

nation-states become more permeable, the interstitial spaces produced in the
encounters between cultures become salient sites for addressing how multiple
lines of social invention, domination and resistance continue to be activated both
within national borders as well as across them. My own work, situated at the
intersections of postcolonial and queer studies, that is, at the borders between two
disciplines, has addressed how sexuality has operated as a vector of social organi-
zation and cultural arrangement in emergent democracies in specific locations
in the postcolonial world. Yet how does the study of borders, and their decon-
struction and rearrangement, impinge upon discourses and practices of sexual
dissidence as they circulate across the globe? Taking this further, I would like to
address in this chapter what these global circulations may imply for translation as
a mediating and transcultural practice.
An obvious beginning point for me in doing postcolonial queer work has been
to explore the gender and sexual politics of translation by asking how to work with
the specificity of the term ‘queer’, which has its origins in Western Anglophonic
cultures, when translating texts from non-Anglophonic and non-Western con-
texts, as well as texts from the past, which may not use terms translatable to
modern, Western understandings of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or
queer identities. What new translation issues arise when one recognizes that in
some postcolonial cultures, for example, terms for same-sex sexual practices may
be inscribed discursively in indigenous languages, but may name gender-defined
performances of same-sex desires for which equivalent terms may not exist in
modern European languages? This does not mean that ‘queerness’, as a concept
or cultural referent, does not exist in non-Western languages or cultures, or in cul-
tures of the past, but that it is always already differentially inscribed, and connects
critically with a key issue in contemporary translation studies to the extent that
translation is not merely about language alone. At the same time, the politics of
gender and sexuality are not intended to override translation studies in this chapter
as I am interested in asking how translation theory may be broadened through the
pressures of queer theoretical orientations, while asking the extent to which trans-
lation operates as a queer praxis. Moreover, how can translation studies challenge
the somewhat still prevalent Anglophonic biases of queer studies?
 Queering translation  173
As already stated, we have come to understand translation not as a mere lin-
guistic process or linear operation but as intimately intertwined with new forms
of textual and cultural production, exceeding the reproduction of a text from one
language into another. Catherine Porter, who organized a Presidential Forum on
translation at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention in 2009,
reminds us that translation is a multidimensional site of cross-lingual correspond-
ence on which diverse social tasks are performed (Porter 2010: 6), including,
I would add, those pertaining to gender and sexuality. As comparatists, we are
trained to read texts and cultures relationally rather than to look at what is thought
to be given ontologically. This relational focus, what Emily Apter has described
as ‘the places where languages touch’ (Apter 2010: 61), is at the heart of trans-
lation work, creating crossings not only across linguistic and national borders,
but across social categories as well, producing new, hybrid forms of meaning
and new knowledge through these very encounters, even calling into question
the actual borderizations, linguistic or otherwise, at the point at which they are
crossed. Writing on translation as a form of hybridity and cross-cultural negotia-
tion, Alfonso de Toro argues that he prefers the term translation over the more
commonly used term in French traduction because the latter, he says, is linked
in a rather limited way only to the linguistic and semantic domains of working
across languages. The linguistic and semantic domains he mentions are part of
the broader term ‘translation’, but translation also includes the spaces where vari-
ous cultural systems, in addition to language, intersect, converge and transform.
Because language is both cultural and ideological, that is, a social invention, the
act of translation, according to De Toro, will always already produce an array of
new codifications, textualities and cultural meanings, as well as deterritorializations
and reterritorializations of social and discursive systems (De Toro 2009: 80), rather
than simply repeating what is thought to be given in the so-called original text in
another linguistic code. Indeed, Derridean theories of signification remind us that
all language works by a process of translatability, whereby one signifier continu-
ally replaces, and simultaneously displaces, another through an endless play of
signification in the absence or deferral of a final meaning.1 In translation work,
in working between languages, this suggests a sort of epistemological pause, or
an attempt, as Apter argues, to allow contradictory meanings to emerge so that
complexities are not oversimplified; this enables us, she says, to pay attention
to what gets lost in translation and to activate translation as theory (Apter 2010:
53). Certainly, analyses of gender and sexual difference(s) in translation work
can provoke new sites of knowledge production, as well as stimulate significant
shifts in social identities and categories, while focusing attention on the complex
and nuanced ways in which gender and sexuality are inscribed in languages which
becomes elided when one works in and through only a single language. Moreover,
are the very terms used for gender and sexual identities in one language neces-
sarily reducible to equivalents in other languages, particularly when one works
across historical periods and/or across cultures? Attention to these very transgres-
sions, these slippages of signification, these differences, when we work across
languages and cultures is, in effect, a comparatively queer praxis.
174  William J. Spurlin
To give specific textual examples, in researching the politics of sexual dissidence
emerging out of post-apartheid South Africa in the 1990s, and the effects in the
region, I was very struck by work I had found on the affective and sometimes erotic
bonds common between women in Lesotho which start during adolescence and
often continue alongside heterosexual marriage, whereby one women refers to her
‘very special friend’ as motsoalle in Sesotho language (Nthunya 1995: 4). In writ-
ing about these relationships, anthropologist Judith Gay found that the affective ties
between women usually include an intense level of genital eroticism where women
are able to exercise a great deal of initiative and autonomy, unlike the formal rules
of marriage, where they are constrained by the male-dominated family and migrant
labour systems. But the romantic and sensual bonds that women initiate and sustain
often continue alongside and are compatible with conventional heterosexual mar-
riage (Gay 1986: 111), and frequently serve as the primary erotic relationship for
the women and the basis for lifelong support. It would be erroneous, however, to
translate the Sesotho term motsoalle (to describe intimate bonds between Masotho
women) as ‘lesbian’. Even the use of the term ‘very special friend’, which is the
way in which Limakatso Kendall has translated motsoalle in the short life writings
she has collected and translated by Masotho women who speak of their intimate
lives, does not quite name the relationships precisely, especially if there is an erotic
component to them, and the translated term serves also as a sort of euphemism to
mask the potentialities of same-sex eroticism within the relationships. This implies,
then, a moving toward, and a meticulous lingering over the space of that which is
not stated directly, as well as critical attention to the transgressive, anti-normative
spaces where contradictory or deferred meanings may emerge. This is the space
where we look for what Emily Apter has described, in citing the late critic Barbara
Johnson, as the various pressure points lost in translation (Apter 2010: 53). These
slippages, these silences, these spaces of indeterminacy, these irreducible remain-
ders in working across languages are the very spaces where desire resides and they
also instantiate translation as a queer praxis.
To give another example, I am now researching emergent forms of sexual dissi-
dence as sites of cultural struggle as represented in new francophone queer writing
emerging from the Maghreb. I find the Maghreb to be a politically and intellectual
compelling area of comparative enquiry because both feminist writing and writ-
ing by lesbians and gay men in the region, and in diaspora, have located sites of
resistance in the interstices between multiple languages and cultures, thus point-
ing to the importance of an even more politicized comparative praxis and the need
in queer studies to examine sexual difference(s), and the indigenous cultures from
which they have emerged, relationally rather than as self-contained and autono-
mous. A very vibrant tradition of Maghreb feminist writing in French, especially
in Algeria, emerging within, and not separate from, existing social formations
has attempted to blur the generic borders between personal autobiography and
history; I am thinking here of the work of the late Algerian feminist writer Assia
Djebar (especially her book Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement or Women of
Algiers in their Apartment), which is often double-voiced and circulates nomadi-
cally in the spaces between multiple languages, histories and cultures. Djebar
 Queering translation  175
often punctuates hegemonic narratives with her own experiences and interjections
and those of other women as a strategy for interrupting and rewriting colonial as
well as postcolonial history and attempts by cultural nationalists to replace one
history by another through erasing the significance of women’s lives within the
colonial history of Algeria. Somewhat similar to Djebar’s blurring of the bor-
ders between history and autobiography, Rachid O., in his autobiographical work
L’Enfant ébloui, dispels myths around the development of masculine gender iden-
tification through a separation from femininity, which also resists, metaphorically
perhaps, a broader, though normative, postcolonial narrative from feminized
colony, ideologically penetrated by the European colonizer, to the hypermascu-
linized nation-state. Rachid’s narrator writes of embracing femininity at a young
age when he is allowed to go to the women’s hammam with female relatives until
about the age of seven. He writes: ‘C’est un endroit, le hammam, où les femmes
sont intimes et rigolent entre elles’ (O. 1995: 33) [The women’s hammam is a
space where women are close and enjoy each other’s company2]. Rachid O.’s
use of the French verb rigoler, in describing the intimate bonds women share
in the hammam, takes the adjective form rigolo or rigolote, which can mean
plaisant, amusant, or curieux, étrange, or in English, ‘pleasant’, in the first sense,
but also ‘odd’ or ‘queer’; there is a space here of uncertainty and ambiguity. As
Gayatri Spivak reminds us, here ‘meaning hops into the spacy emptiness between
two named historical languages’ (Spivak 2012: 313). More importantly, the term
‘rigoler’, does not quite translate into English from the multiple layered meanings
it may have in French in the context of young Arab Muslim boy’s embrace of,
rather than his separation from, the feminine cultural codes, meanings and sym-
bols in the women’s hammam in Morocco.
At the same time, translation work implies that analyses of gender and sexual
difference are not reducible to feminist and queer studies respectively; rather they
intersect with each other as well as with other disciplines and modes of enquiry
as I have argued elsewhere (see Spurlin 1998). As Christopher Larkosh argues,
working across languages can both complement and question the ways in which
we think about gender and sexuality within established disciplines, such as femi-
nist and queer studies, whilst challenging our sense of certainty around our own
gender and sexual positionality (Larkosh 2011: 4), through bringing to the fore-
ground the slippages I mentioned earlier, and the gaps in the spaces between
languages and cultures. This implies, then, a radical rethinking of the traditional
ways in which translation work has been gendered, whereby the translated text
is feminized, always already referentially beholden to the more authoritative
‘original’ text. As Carolyn Shread points out, this traditional view of translation’s
fidelity to the master text reinvents the masculinist privileging of autonomy, self-
sufficiency and independence of the individual in highly gendered terms (Shread
2011: 52). Yet taking a view of femininity as multi-layered, as ensconced by
severality, as more than or less than one (Shread 2011: 52), calls to mind Hélène
Cixous’s notion of l’écriture féminine . As Tutun Mukherjee reminds us, Cixous
uses the metaphor of the heterogeneity and multiplicity of female sexuality to
celebrate feminine writing as transcending linearity, univocality and the fixity
176  William J. Spurlin
of phallogocentric discourse through excess and circularity, thereby challenging
phallogocentric ways of reading and articulating the world (Mukherjee 2011: 135).
(Re)gendering translation studies in this manner also politicizes it, and points to
the multiple strategies and approaches to explain a text’s movement from one
language and culture to another, whilst exposing the translation of a text ‘faith-
fully’ from one language to another as an impossible task (Mukherjee 2011: 133).
Preserving the gendered binary between the sovereign (masculinized) original text
and the peripheral (feminized) translated text depoliticizes translation by evacuat-
ing the ideological inflections inherent to a textual practice like translation that
operates in the very spaces where disparate languages and cultures meet and clash.
Moreover, it fails to situate translation socially and masks relations of power in the
very act of translation, such as the ways in which translation historically may have
served the apparatus of colonialism as well as resisting it.
Dismantling the gendered binary further calls to mind the performativity of
translation to the extent that translation does not merely facilitate communication
across languages, as my examples show, but is a site of struggle in the negotia-
tion and production of meaning, always already capable of new possibilities of
counter-translation. The meanings negotiated and produced in translation are not
simply embodied in textual structures alone, but similar to Judith Butler’s theory
of gender performativity (where gender is not located on the body), these meanings
are located culturally or transculturally, always missing the mark of the original
whilst simultaneously calling it into question. In other words, when Butler writes
about the impossibility of separating out ‘“gender” from the political and cultural
intersections in which it is invariably produced and maintained’ (Butler 1999: 6),
what she is saying about ‘gender’ can similarly be said about translation in so far
as it exposes the myth of an ‘original’ textual body and speaks to the uneven cor-
respondence between languages and to translation as a performative act which is
always already influenced by culture and not reducible to the textual body. This, in
my view, takes the metaphor of femininity, heterogeneity and multiplicity further,
and creates a space in between that is amorphous, ambiguous, different and quite
possibly queer.
Speaking of translation and the spaces between multiple languages in the
Maghreb, the area in which I am currently working, Abdelkébir Khatibi, in
Maghreb pluriel, asks us to focus on what cannot be translated directly, that is, on
what is deferred, what is absent, what is untranslatable. He writes:

la langue étrangère transforme la langue première et la déporte vers

l’intraduisible . . . la traduction opère selon cette intraitabilité, cette distan-
ciation sans cesse reculée et disruptive’ (Khatibi 1983: 186). [. . . the foreign
language transforms the first language and moves it toward the untranslatable
. . . translation operates according to this untranslatability, this gap [between
languages] always being a setback and disruptive.]

In this regard, the translated text no longer forms a dependency on the so-called
original text, but actually transforms it, subverting radically the binary between
 Queering translation  177
original and copy. Taking this further, Gayatri Spivak sees translation as a form
of social activism against the capitalistic conveniences of monolingualism which
demand the homogenization of linguistic differences in a globalized world. She
points out, in citing Barbara Cassin, that our obligation to translate should be
determined by this idea of the untranslatable as not merely something that one
is unable to translate, ‘but something one never stops (not) translating’ (Spivak
2010: 38), thus hinting again at the performativity of translation itself. And I
would surmise that attention to this disruptive, subversive space of indeterminacy
between languages, the space of l’intraduisible, is a queer space, one that chal-
lenges any normative idea of straightforward translatability.
But translation also operates at the encounter or contact zone between cultural
borders. As I mentioned earlier, translation is a site of both textual and cultural
production; therefore, it must not only be conceived of as a linguistic praxis, but
one that addresses also the vast system of codes, symbols and signifying practices
we understand as culture. Coming back to my previous example of the affec-
tive and erotic bonds between women in Lesotho, Judith Gay, the anthropologist
who studied these relationships in the 1980s, has argued that the compatibility
of intimate female relationships with heterosexual marriage challenges Western
insistences on the hetero/homo binary. But her anthropological perspective is
somewhat limiting politically and is a case of missing the epistemological pause,
or the space of l’intraduisible in cultural translation, given that one of her con-
clusions is that same-sex relationships between women in Lesotho point to the
growing recognition of bisexuality in the psychosexual literature, which, she
claims, is specifically supported in non-Western societies (Gay 1986: 111–12). So
while Gay applauds how these affective ties between women rupture the Western
hetero/homo opposition, she still nonetheless ‘translates’ directly the gender and
sexual codes of the West (by referring to the relationships as bisexual) into an
indigenous context without sufficiently deconstructing them. This calls to mind
Gayatri Spivak’s critique of the sex/gender systems of the West as one political
economy that plays a role in the ways in which Western scholarship acts as a site
of discursive (re)recolonization by assigning ‘a static ethnicity to the Other in
order to locate critique or confirmation of the most sophisticated thought or act of
the West’ (Spivak 1999: 110). Can the close, affectionate and sometimes intimate
bonds women in Lesotho share be reduced to bisexuality? Thus, serious questions
are raised about the ‘translation’ of desire from one culture to another and risks
repeating the imperialist gesture.
Furthermore, what can the political shifts and recent forms of feminist and lesbian/
gay writing in French from the Maghreb tell us about the rupturing of gender and
sexual hegemonies through the mediation of cultures? I do not have the space here
to analyse in detail the ways in which new forms of queer francophone writing are
located strategically in the gaps between a rich inheritance of languages, cultures
and histories in the Maghreb as a way of (re)negotiating new forms of dissident
gender and sexuality. Sexual dissidence has always had a history of representa-
tion in relation to the nation-state in francophone literature of the Maghreb; in
Rachid Boudjedra’s 1969 novel La Répudiation, for example, as Jarrod Hayes
178  William J. Spurlin
has argued, sexual resistance is not a mere mimicry of the sexual categories of
the West, but may be connected intimately with a critique of the neo-imperialist
tendencies of postcolonial nationalism and religious fundamentalism in post-
independent Algeria (Hayes 2001: 92). Yet the negotiation of split subjectivity
and borders, geopolitical and otherwise, is strongly evident in the texts of les-
bian writer Nina Bouraoui, who is multiply positioned and living in diaspora; she
asserts in her book Poupée Bella, written in the form of a journal: ‘J’ai plusieurs
vies. J’ai plusieurs corps sous mon corps’ [I have several lives. I have several
bodies under my body] (Bouraoui 2004: 21), which confounds singular under-
standings and simplistic oppositions around sex, gender and national belonging.
In her novel, Garçon Manqué, Bouraoui writes: ‘Tous les matins je vérifie mon
identité. J’ai quatre problèmes. Française? Algérienne? Fille? Garçon?’ [Every
morning I check my identity. I have four problems. French? Algerian? Girl?
Boy?] (Bouraoui 2000: 163).
An emphasis here on border encounters, crossings, and forms of cultural medi-
ation between North Africa and Europe, as well as between the binaries of gender,
necessitates not only a challenge to the homogenizing impulses of postcolonial
nationalism in the country of origin, and its hegemonic hold on national belong-
ing, on the one hand, and a queering of an imagined fully integrated Europe, on
the other, but cultural translation operating as a strategy of agency and resistance
in the spaces between two totalizing cultural worlds (as well as between the dual-
ism of gender).
Another form of cultural translation as a site of textual and political struggle is
evident in the fracturing of traditional cultural distinctions between gender-defined
performances of homosexuality (active/passive) that seem to have their roots in
various forms of Arab Muslim cultural nationalism as the paradigm for sexual
relations between Arab Muslim men, on the one hand, and the search for a sexual
identity as a discursive position (gay, lesbian, queer, etc.) not merely reducible to
its manifestations in the West. Some work suggests that the active role in male
same-sex sexual relations between Arab Muslim men fulfils the same sexual posi-
tion of virile masculinity within a regime of compulsory heterosexuality, and the
passive role is seen as a betrayal of manhood and male power and is therefore stig-
matized (see, for example, Murray and Roscoe 1997). However, Joseph Massad, in
his book Desiring Arabs, whilst seeming to question this as strictly paradigmatic,
nonetheless makes use of the active/passive binary himself in describing social
and sexual configurations of desire in Arab Muslim societies which he accuses
Western gay activists and scholars, or the so-called ‘Gay International’, of destroy-
ing (Massad 2007: 188–9). He also uses such terms as practitioners of ‘same-sex
contact’ to describe sexual relations between Arab Muslim men in contradistinc-
tion to the taking-on of a sexual identity by gay men in the West, since according
to Massad, the hetero/homo distinction did not emerge historically or culturally out
of Arab Muslim societies but is a distinctly Western (that is, foreign) phenomenon
(Massad 2007: 173, 41). Despite Massad’s eloquent and well-researched history
of homosexuality in the Arab Muslim world, he still, nonetheless, maintains a
problematic occident/orient opposition that does not entertain the possibilities of
 Queering translation  179
reciprocal interchange or cultural mediation through the effects of international
travel, the media, the Internet, and social networking sites. For Massad, cultural
translation would be reducible to the tainting of a supposedly pre-existent cultural
purity of Arab Muslim culture through the hegemonic filter of Western taxonomies
of sexual identities. Yet, if we accept that translation is never a straightforward, lin-
ear operation, but is always already a form of cross-cultural negotiation, this opens
up new spaces for the (re)negotiation of dissident sexualities that are reducible
neither to Western understandings of sexual identity, nor to simplistic understand-
ings of active and passive homosexuality, including Massad’s rather static embrace
of non-identitarian, even perfunctory, sexual bonds between Arab Muslim men.
Massad seems to hold up still the occident/orient binary as a way of preserving
the specificity of Arab Muslim culture and resisting the ideological penetration of
Western hegemony. But the more crucial question to be asking is: Can any cultural
system be purely itself and none other?
Tunisian-French writer Eyet-Chékib Djaziri addresses this very struggle and
renegotiation of dissident sexuality in his novel Un poisson sur la balançoire. The
young protagonist, Sofiène, seems to occupy early in the novel the space between
gender. Two boys he meets on the street see Sofiène and say, ‘Regarde ce qui
arrive! C’est un garçon ou c’est une fille?’ [Look at who’s here! Is this a boy or a
girl?] (Djaziri 2001a: 30). At first, Sofiène seems to take on the more passive role
in his affective and sexual ties with boys, exchanging kisses with them, referred
to as poissons to veil their forbidden nature. Here the French term poisson cannot
simply be translated into English as ‘fish’, as the term is acting as a site of resist-
ance to social surveillance and social prohibitions of homoerotic desire between
men; thus understanding poissons as kisses exposes translation as a performa-
tive site where diverse social tasks are performed, as Porter has argued, and as a
transcultural practice rather than merely being a linear process of finding equiva-
lents for messages in another linguistic code. Yet the shape of the lips in forming
the utterance poisson forms the shape of a kiss, or the connection can be to the
shape of the mouths of some fish as they swim or feed which resembles the shape
and motion of a human kiss. In either case, this is a form of cultural translation not
determined by the linguistic code alone or even by prevailing cultural codes, but
by the overdetermination of lips which incite and symbolize homoerotic desire.
In the sequel to Un poisson sur la balançoire, entitled Une promesse de douleur
et de sang, Sofiène moves to Cherbourg in France to live with his grandparents
and continue his schooling. Required by his French teacher to study Molière’s
Malade imaginaire by performing various scenes with a partner, Sofiène works
with Sébastien to whom he is attracted. While rehearsing a scene from the play,
Sofiène observes Sébastien:

Je n’écoute plus les paroles qu’il prononce. Seule sa voix résonne à mes
oreilles tandis que mon regard s’attache à ses lèvres qui remuent . . . J’observe
sa peau, blanche et fine . . . Mes yeux remontent de nouveau vers ses lèvres
au moment où, d’un mouvement de la langue, il les humidifie. Mon soudain
silence l’intrigue. Il lève les yeux du livret et dit
180  William J. Spurlin
–Qu’y a-t-il? Tu ne continues pas? Pouquoi me regardes-tu ainsi?
Sans réfléchir, n’y tenant plus, je réponds:
–Donne-moi un poisson!
–Un quoi?
–Un poisson. Je répète patiemment comme si je m’adresse à un enfant ou
à quelqu’un qui ne parlerait pas ma langue.
–Comment ça, un poisson? réplique-t-il ahuri.
–Comme ça! dis-je, en approchant mon visage, n’arrêtant mes lèvres
qu’aux abords des siennes. (Djaziri 2001b: 14–5)
[I no longer listen to the words that he is pronouncing. Only his voice
resounds in my ears while I’m watching his lips which are moving . . . I
observe his skin, white and pure . . . My eyes move up again toward his lips,
at the moment where the movement of the tongue moistens them. My sudden
silence intrigues him. He lifts his eyes from the booklet and says:
–What is it? You don’t continue? Why are you looking at me like that?
Without thinking, no longer holding back, I reply:
–Give me a fish!
–A what?
–A fish, I repeat patiently as if I am speaking to a child or to someone who
does not speak my language.
–How do you mean, a fish? he answers back bewildered.
–Like this, I say, approaching with my face, stopping only when my lips
meet his.]

Even though both speak the same language, Sofiène remarks that he feels as if he
is addressing someone who does not speak his language because Sébastien does
not share the cultural code that aligns poisson with a secret, transgressive kiss
between men.
Coming back to Sofiène’s younger days in Un poisson sur la balançoire, while
he is still in Tunisia, the gendered roles of active/passive, which have historically
been deemed paradigmatic of sexual relations between Arab Muslim men seem,
at first, very much inscribed in Sofiène’s relations with other boys and men and
they are also inscribed textually. Yet this is by no means the full picture, though
it serves as an anchoring point for same-sex relations between Arab Muslim men
specifically in the Maghreb. Through Sofiène, Djaziri later writes in the novel:

Il est vrai que les mentalités ici sont ainsi faites que celui qui a le rôle actif
ne perd rien de sa virilité et peut même raconter ses exploits, il n’en sera
qu’applaudi, encouragé. L’homme qui aura eu le rôle passif se verra, lui,
traité de pédé et sera méprisé. D’où ma surprise de constater qu’une inter-
version des rôles existait sous d’autres cieux, avec Frédéric par exemple.
(Djaziri 2001a: 70)

[It is true that thinking here is so wrapped up with the man who is active, los-
ing none of his virility, and even being able to talk about his conquests – this
 Queering translation  181
in fact will be applauded, encouraged. The man who takes the passive role
will find himself treated with contempt as queer. Imagine my surprise to find
out that a switching of these roles existed elsewhere, as with Frédéric, for
example.]

Here, there is a hint to an opening of another kind of sexual intimacy between

men with an interchange of sexual roles not prescribed in advance through
binary taxonomies of gender. More importantly, in both novels there are imag-
inative and actual crossings of borders, between France and Tunisia (given
also that Djaziri’s mother is French and his father Tunisian and that he learned
to oscillate between both cultural worlds, living both in France and Tunisia),
between masculinity and femininity, between active and passive, between self
and other, as well as locations in the liminal spaces between these binary oppo-
sitions where agency and resistance reside in the struggle to attempt to name
one’s relation to the world. At the same time, this location in the space between
two cultural worlds is potentially transformative of fixed national and cultural
hegemonies in the West and in the Maghreb and is neither a simple capitulation
to the sexual categories of the West, nor to the forces of economic globaliza-
tion, but shows that multiple and hybrid forms of same-sex sexual desires can
coexist within the same culture, both in the performative and in the discursive
sense, and come about relationally in the dialogical encounter between Africa
and Europe in both societies, rather than in the sense of progressive moder-
nity, where one cultural model of sexuality is simply thought to replace a more
pre-modern, more primitive form. More interesting, these slippages of signi-
fication, these differences, these crossings, these anti-normative spaces where
contradictory meanings emerge are creating new linguistic terms. According
to gay Moroccan writer Abdellah Taïa, in an interview with Marc Endeweld in
Minorités, there has been a shift in the Maghreb, especially in Morocco, from
the use of the Arabic term zamel, which Taïa translates as pédé passif (a pas-
sive homosexual in a pejorative sense), to mathali, an invented, more neutral
term to designate a gay man in Arabic without reference to gendered active/
passive roles.3
Both ‘queer’ and translation mediate between hegemonically defined spaces,
and their critical conjunction offers the possibility of new sites of heterogeneity
and difference as a vital heuristic for work in comparative literary and cultural
studies. The work of translation, like queer work, is never finished as both
modes of enquiry are committed to the endless proliferation of difference(s).
Both are invested in setting aside understandings of our own cultural worlds and
in creating critical discursive spaces for others to speak and to be heard. Queer
is not simply about sexual rights in the same way that translation is not simply
about seeking equivalences in one language from another, and the critical con-
junction of translation and queer studies offers broadened opportunities for civic
engagement and citizenship in a transnational world, as well as an important
tool for knowledge production about sexual difference and for the decoloniza-
tion of desire.
182  William J. Spurlin
Notes
1 Think, for instance, of looking up a word (a signifier) in the dictionary for its mean-
ing (what it signifies); indeed, the definitions of the word you find (assumed to be
signifieds) are really made up of other words (that is, signifiers), and none of the
definitions coalesce completely with the meaning of the original word looked up in the
dictionary. There will always be a space or a gap or space of indeterminacy between
them, a space of excess. And to talk about these definitions (which are really other
signifiers) requires other words, and so on. There is a trace of meaning in this chain of
signifiers that links them together, but any full, final, fixed meaning is always already
deferred. But Derrida’s point would be that signification operates through a process of
translating one signifier into another. As Derrida writes, ‘the signifier first signifies a
signifier, and not the thing itself or a directly presented signified’ (Derrida 1976: 237).
In this sense, then, signification is an endless play of substitutions or translations: ‘the
signified is originally and essentially . . . trace, that it is always already in the position
of the signifier’ (Derrida 1976: 73). Translation work, then, is more than a system of
equivalences across languages, but also operates on the level of the signifier and the
systematic play of differences which defer or postpone any final, straightforward, or
transcendental meaning.
2 All translations are my own, unless otherwise noted.
3 From the interview Taïa states: ‘Je constate que l‘homosexualité est passée de “zamel”
(pédé passif) à “mathali” (mot neutre inventé, il y a trois ans pour designer en arabe
un homosexuel).’ [I note that the term ‘homosexuality’ [in Arab Muslim contexts] has
moved from the use of the [Arabic] term ‘zamel’ (passive queer) to ‘mathali’ (a neu-
tral, invented word coming about in the last three years to designate a homosexual in
Arabic—brackets mine.] See Endeweld 2009.

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Index

Abd-ar-Rahman III, Caliph 29 Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne) 12

acqueering 6, 121–7 assisted reproduction 135, 139
Action Books 45
actively sexual women 126 B (blogger) 18
adjusting 41 Baker, M. 27
Adore 144 Baldo, M. 11–12
aesthetics of evasion 5, 51–63 Baldwin, J. 5, 64–76
affective and erotic bonds between Bangkok 14–15
Lesotho women 174, 177 Barazoku 96, 97–9, 100, 102
affective turn 87–8 Bashford, A. 28
Ahmed, S. (Dahoum) 25 Basic Instinct 146, 151
AIDS 82, 89, 99 Baudelaire, C. 61
Algeria 174–5 Bean, T. 132
Alibar, L. 132, 133, 139 Beasts of the Southern Wild 6, 129–43
al-Tifashi, A. 32 Beat poets 13
‘Amalia’ (Schiller) 59 Beautiful Room is Empty, The (White) 97;
ambassadorship 19 review of 98–9
American Dream 72 Bechdel, A. 6, 104–17
American gay literature, Japanese ‘Bechdel test’ of gender equality 144
translations of 5, 87–103 Bell, G. 27–8, 34
American Psychological Association 91 Beloved (Morrison) 131, 137
‘Among Them but Not of Them’ (Byron) Berlant, L. 135
59–60 Beskow, E. 119–20
Anand, M.R. 19 Bey 30
Andersdotter, M. 125 Bildungsroman 62
Anderson, E. 114 Bilitis 54–5
Annie On My Mind (Garden) 119 Bom-Crioulo (Caminha) 14
Anzaldúa, G. 64 border thinking 9, 178, 181
appropriation 10–12 Bösche, S. 119
Apter, E. 173, 174 Boudjedra, R. 177–8
Apukhtin, A. 5, 51–63 boundaries of translation 156–8
Arabic poetry 54 Bouraoui, N. 178
Arabs: colonial narratives of the Arab 4, Boys on the Rock, The (Fox) 88–96
25–36; in France 71; sexual dissidence Boy’s Own Story, A 96–7
of Muslim men 178–81 Brim, M. 67
 Index  185
Bullock, P.R. 61 communal living 51
Burchill, J. 118, 122–7 community 87; gay male community in
Burgess, M. 123 Japan 97–101; Latino LGBT community
Burroughs, W. 30–1 8–9
Butcher, W. 12 ‘Comtesse des Barres’ 37, 38, 43–7
Butler, J. 3, 66, 78; drag 41; gender conception, queering of 129, 135–7
performativity 37, 45–6, 157, 176; coolness 78
resignifying practice 135; and Wittig Critical Sexology seminar 4
161, 162–4 cross-dressing 3, 4–5, 37–50
Byron, Lord 58, 59–60 cross-identity performance 48
Crystal Boys (Pai) 79–81
Caminha, A. 14 cues 52
care 136 cultural erasure 68–72
Carpenter, E. 64, 88 cultural supremacy 68–72
Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger) 91, 101 cultural translation: Baldwin’s Giovanni’s
catching fish, lesson in 133–4 Room 65–6, 68–72; interstitial spaces
censorship 54, 55 177–81
Chaikovskii, M. 55, 56, 57 culture: embeddedness in 139; triad of 16
Chaikovskii, P. 52–3, 57, 61 Curraggia 11–12
Chambers, A. 118, 119, 122–7 CVs 108
Champagne, R. 42 cyprine 165
Chandran, M. 16–17, 19–20 Czech 108
Chauncey, G. 51
Chautemps affair 53 Daddy’s Roommate (Willhoite) 119
cheating in relationships 123–4 Dalkey Archive Press 45
Chiang Kai-shek 80 Dance on My Grave (Chambers) 118, 119,
children: childhood, fantasy and translation 122–7
130–2; child’s imagination as genre Dave, N. 18–19, 22
132–5; learning about sexuality 6, de Beauvoir, S. 12–13
129–43 de Lauretis, T. 150
children’s books 6, 118–28, 130; de Toro, A. 173
eradicalization and acqueering 6, 121–7 death 134–5, 139
China 77 Dehler, J. 165
Chinese-speaking contexts 5, 77–86 demonization of Arabs 33
Chinn, S. 40–1 Derrida, J. 134, 173, 182
Chloe 6, 144–55 Derzhavin, G. 54
Chocolate (Ugra) 17–18 desire 144–55
Choisy, F.-T. de 4–5, 37–50 Deuxième Sexe, Le (de Beauvoir) 12–13
Chu T’ien-wen 79, 81–4 Dillon, S. 47
chutnification 19–20 Dingwaney, A. 130
City of Night (Rechy) 100 Dinshaw, C. 87
Cixous, H. 175–6 dirtiness 28
clothing metaphor 37, 48 disguise 37, 43–7
Clough, P.T. 87 Djaziri, E.-C. 179–81
Coca-Cola 2 Djebar, A. 174–5
colonialism 2, 8–24; queer subjects in Dmitriev, I. 55
the Arab world 4, 25–36; queering Doan, L. 31
narratives in colonialist discourse 26–9 domestic disturbance 152
186 Index
domestication 6 failure in Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room
dominance 30–1; de-queering 32–3 5, 64–76
Dorians 52 faking 149
double translation 84–5 family home 152
double violence 161 fantasy 130–2, 133, 138
drag 3, 4–5, 37, 38–42 Far From Heaven 152
‘Dry, Infrequent, Unintended Meetings’ Fatal Attraction 151, 152
(Apukhtin) 56 father figures, absent 80–1
Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based feelings vs identity 92–3
Life Forms (Bechtel) 109 Feinberg, L. 150
Dykes to Watch Out For series (Bechtel) female readership 94–7, 101
6, 104–17 feminine writing 175–6
Dykes to Watch Out For: The Sequel feminist approach to translation 120
(Bechtel) 112 Feral, A.-L. 126
Dynes, W. 51 filiation 80
Finland 11
Edelman, L. 28, 72 Flotow, L. von 37, 121
Egoyan, A. 6, 145 fluent translations 46
Ekstein, N. 42 folles, les 66–7
embeddedness in culture 139 Fontaine, A. 6, 144, 147, 148
Emma (Schwarzer) 115 formal culture 16
Englebrecht, P. 158 forward slash in pronouns 159, 162–3
English 2, 7, 65; retention of English Fox, J. 88–96
words in Swedish translation 125 France 65, 74; Paris 69–70, 71
English children’s books 118–19, 121–7; Freeman, E. 72, 73
Swedish translations 124–7 French 65, 68–9, 108; selective translation
epicene pronouns 44–5 of 66–8
eradicalization 6, 121–7 Friedan, B. 111
erasure 12–13; cultural in Baldwin’s ‘From the French’ (poem) 60–1
Giovanni’s Room 68–72 Front Runner, The (Warren) 99–100
eroticization of identification 147–8 Fujita Ryū 99, 100–1
Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, The Fun Home (Bechtel) 104, 116
(Bechtel) 105, 107 ‘Furious Women Avenging Pornography’
essentialism 114 group 112
ethnic subjectivities 20 Fushimi Noriaki 100–1
ethnicity 16–17 future anterior 150
evasion: aesthetics of 5, 51–63; translation
failure in Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room gangbang scene 125–6
5, 64–76 Garden, N. 119
Evgenii Onegin 57, 62 Garréta, A. 44
exemption 30 Gattaca 149
exoticization 13–15 Gay, D. 61
explicitation 6, 144–55 Gay, J. 174, 177
extinction of men 114–15 ‘gay boom’ in Japan 87–103
gay liberation movement 90, 91–2
Fabre, M. 71 gay male community, in Japan 97–101
failure: art of failure in Wittig’s The ‘gay novel’ 94–101
Lesbian Room 6–7, 156–71; translation Gay Sunshine Press 79
 Index  187
gay Western literature in Japan 5, 87–103 Holub, J. 54
gaze 144–5 home, the 152
gender: expression in translation 6–7, homoerotic narrative of the Arab 26,
156–71; performativity 3, 4–5, 37–50, 29–31
157, 176; translating as resistance 42; Hong Kong 77
translating as resistance in disguise hooks, b. 132
46–7 Hot, Throbbing Dykes to Watch Out For
gender-marked language, removal of 58–9 (Bechtel) 108–9
genderless narrator 166–7, 169 humour 109–10
generational differences 100–1 Hurricane Katrina 132
Genet, J. 10, 168–9 Hutchens, J. 13
geno-text 47 hybridity 11, 21
genre: child’s imagination as genre 132–5; hypersexualization 14–15
shifts in 6, 129–43
German translations of Bechtel’s Dykes iceberg theory 15–17
series 6, 104–17 identification, eroticization of 147–8
Gide, A. 10 identity 101; construction 8–10; feelings vs
Giffney, N. 40, 45 92–3; totalizing 51; translating identity
Ginsberg, A. 13 in disguise 45–6
Giovanni’s Room (Baldwin) 5, 64–76 ‘Il m’aimant tant’ (Gay) 61
Giustini, D. 12–13 imagination, child’s 132–5
God of Small Things, The (Roy) 19–20 imitation 162–4
Goldblatt, H. 79–84 implicitation 57
grammaticalized gender 39 implied reader 19–20
‘Greek love’ 2 ‘In the Theatre’ (Apukhtin) 56–7
Guérillères, Les (Wittig) 156 incoherence 164–5
Guild, E. 41 India 17–22
informal culture 16
Habib, S. 32 intercultural blockage 115
Hagio Moto 94 intercultural exchange 19
Halberstam, J. 6, 156–7, 164, 168 interstitial spaces: gender and sexual
Hall, E.T. 16 politics 172–83; Nathalie 150–2
Hall, J., of Durham 12 intertextuality 3
Hall, R. 156 interventionism 12–13
Halles, Les 70 Invasion of Dykes to Watch Our For
Harris, J. 40, 41, 43 (Bechtel) 105
Harvey, K. 10, 92, 93–4 Irigaray, L. 162
Hayes, J. 177–8 ISIS 33
Healey, D. 55–6 Isle Margin 78
Heather Has Two Mommies (Newman) Italian-North American/Canadian women
119 writers 11–12
Heggestad, E. 119–20 Italy 69; migrants in France 69, 70
Heinrich, A.L. 84
heterosexuality, queering 147–9 Japan 5, 87–103
Heynen, N. 83–4 Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin (Bösche)
hierarchy of language use 10–12 119
hijra 20–1 Jewiss, V. 129, 139
Holland, S. 136 jokes 109–10
188 Index
Kakinuma Eiko 89, 96–7, 98–9 Maghreb, the 174–5, 177–81
Käng, D. 14–15 magic realism 133, 138–9
Katan, D. 16 Maioli, F. 166–7
Kates, G. 42 Malayalam 19
Katrina, Hurricane 132 manga 5, 94–6
Khanna, A. 21 mark of untranslatability 137
Khatibi, A. 176 Martin, F. 11, 79
Kids Are All Right, The 152 Massad, J. 31, 32, 178–9
Kitamaru Yūji 97, 99–100 mathali 181, 182
Klein, M. 163 Matsuie Masashi 89
Knapp, B.L. 168–9 Mayne, X. 64
Kondratovich, A. 54–5 mayonnaise 21
Koshikawa Yoshiaki 89–94 Mazzei, C. 9, 14, 15
Kristeva, J. 3, 47 Mémoires de l’abbé de Choisy habillé en
ku’er 10–11, 78 femme 4–5, 37–50
Kuick, K. 124 Mendelsohn, D. 52
Kuzmin, M. 53, 54, 55 metaphors for translation 48
metonymy 56–7
Laqueur, T. 38 Miliukova, A. 52
Larkosh, C. 175 minoritizing translation 42
Last Words from Montmartre (Qiu) 84 Mishima Yukio 91
Lathey, G. 131 mistranslation 114–15
Latino LGBT community 8–9 Mizielinka, J. 11
lavender (colour) 111 Moira, F. 160–1
Lawrence, T.E. 25, 27–8, 29–30, 34 Moore, J. 145, 152
layers of textual identity 47 Moraga, C. 64
Le Vay, D. 159, 165, 167 More Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechtel)
Leavitt, D. 96, 101 104, 108
‘Lesbian Avengers’ splinter group 112 Morocco 181
Lesbian Body, The (Wittig) 156–71 Morrison, T. 131, 137
Lesotho women 174, 177 motsoalle 174
Leung, H.H.-S. 79 Mukherjee, S. 19
Lévi-Strauss, C. 84 Mukherjee, T. 175–6
LGBT rights 31 Müller, B. 108–15
Likhachev, I. 55, 61 multiplicity 169
Lim, S.H. 10–11, 78 Murakami Haruki 89
Lin, S. 79, 81–4
linguistic determinism 43, 44 Nandy, A. 134–5
linguistic relativism 39 Narayan, R.K. 19
literary reviews 98–9 narratives 4, 25–36; queering in colonialist
Livia, A. 44 discourse 26–9
Loseff, L. 52 narrator, genderless 166–7, 169
Lotbinière-Harwood, S. de 39, 40, 121 Nathalie . . . 6, 144–55
Louÿs, P. 54, 55 Nava, M. 96
lyric poetry 56–62 Nawas, A. 31, 34
neo-imperalism 8
Mackintosh, J. 98 neologisms 165
‘Madame de Sancy’ 37, 38–42 neo-orientalism 32
 Index  189
neutrality myth 9 postcolonialism 4, 8–24, 120, 172; India
New, Improved Dykes to Watch Out For 17–22
(Bechtel) 104–5, 108 Post-Dykes to Watch Out For (Bechtel)
New York 81 109, 113
Newman, L. 119 poverty 132
Niezi (Pai) 79–81 Poznansky, A. 53
Notes of a Desolate Man (Chu) 79, 81–4 Preciado, B. 127
nourishment 136, 139 Pride March 1987 111
primacy 162–4
Ochiishi Ōgasutomūn 99 Probyn, E. 139
O’Driscoll, K. 12 Progress of the Page 56
Oittinen, R. 131 proliferation 4
omission translation failure 64–76 Promesse de douleur, Une (Djaziri)
‘oq’ 9–10 179–80, 181
orgy scene 125–6 pronouns 4; epicene 44–5; Wittig’s use of
orientalism 13–15, 29, 30 a formal slash in 159, 162–3
Ostrovsky, E. 161–2 Proust, M. 10
Oswald, R. 111 Pushkin, A. 56
Other Words 4
Oulipo, the 44 Queer in Europe 4
outsider stance 58–61 queer genealogy 31

Pai Hsien-yung 79–81 race and racism 131–8

parent-child relationships 123–4; in Beasts Rachid O. 175
of the Southern Wild 6, 129–43 Rao, R. 19
Paris 69–70, 71 reader-response postcards 97
particularism 78–9 Rechy, J. 100
Patel, G. 17, 20–1 refusal to name 166–9
Pattanaik, D. 17, 18 relational focus 173
Pelagius, St. 29, 30 Rellstab, L. 58–9
performativity: anxiety 113–14; gender repressiveness of translation 12–13
3, 4–5, 37–50, 157, 176; of translation reproduction: assisted 135, 139; queer 129,
176–7 135–7
Persona 148 resignifying practice 135
personal ads 98, 102 resistance: everyday strategies of 51;
personal pronouns see pronouns translating gender as 42; translating
Phelan, P. 146 gender as resistance in disguise 46–7
pheno-text 47 retention of English words 125
picture books for children 119 Rich, F. 91–2
pinkwashing 30, 34 Rock, the (jailhouse) 90
poetics of evasion 5, 51–63 Romanov, K.K. 52
Poisson sur la balançoire, Un (Djaziri) Rose, J. 130, 147
179, 180–1 Rotikov, K. 53
Poland 13 Roy, A. 19–20
police 71 Rushdie, S. 19
politics of location 70–1 Russia 52–3, 53–6
Porter, C. 173 Rybowski’s translations of Ginsberg’s
postcards for reader-response 97 poems 13
190 Index
Sade, Marquis de 88–9 Split-Level Dykes to Watch Out For
safeguarding 136 (Bechtel) 109, 112
Sahaqa 32 St. André, J. 48
Salinger, J.D. 91, 101 St. Martin’s Stonewall Inn Editions 90
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 39, 43 Stacey, J. 147, 149
Sappho 12, 54, 55, 165 ‘Ständchen’ (Rellstab) 58–9
Schiller, F. 59 Stone Butch Blues (Feinberg) 156
Schwarzer, A. 115 Stonewall 91; Riots 90
Scott, J.C. 164 Studies of the Greek Poets (Symonds)
Scott, R.H.F. 39, 43, 46 52
screens 52 stupidity 27–8
Sedgwick, E.K. 149 Sugar Rush (Burchill) 118, 122–7
Seifert, C.L. 38, 41 swans 160
selective translation 64–76 Sweden: children’s books 119–20; Swedish
separation 131 translations of children’s books 124–7
sexual dissidence 174–5, 177–81 Sweet, M.J. 17
sexual representation 147 Swimming Pool 144
sexuality: depictions of in children’s books Symonds, J.A. 52
122–4; how children learn about 6,
129–43 Taïa, A. 181, 182
shadow feminisms 157 Taiwan 5, 10–11, 77–86
Shakespeare, W. 55 Takahashi Masao 100
Shaktini, N. 158 Takemiya Keiko 94
shared gaze 144–5 technical culture 16
Shavit, Z. 129 Teiresias 3
She Must Be Seeing Things 150 temporal drag 73
Shibusawa Tatsuhiko 88–9 Thailand 14–15
Shilovsky, K. 57 Th’arifa 32
Shinchosha 89, 94 theorization of queer translation 4, 8–17
Shiosai (Mishima) 91 Thief’s Journal, The (Genet) 168
Shmakov, G. 55 thriller film genre 146–7
Shread, C. 175 time 72–3
signification 173, 182 totalizing identity 51
Simon, S. 121, 131, 139 transfiguration 161–2
Single White Female 146 translatability 173, 177; mark of
Sinophone contexts 5, 77–86 untranslatability 137
social networks 51, 55 translation dirt 72–4
‘Sodomy Blues’ (Bechtel) 110–11 translation failure 5, 64–76
‘Some Remarks on The Lesbian Body’ transqueer 12
(Wittig) 161, 164, 165 transvestism 3, 4–5, 37–50
Songs of Bilitis, The 54–5 triad of culture 16
spaces, interstitial 150–2, 172–83 ‘Two Hearts in Love and Expecting a
Spanish 108 Response’ (Apukhtin) 57
Spawn of Dykes to Watch Out For Tyulenev, S. 55
(Bechtel) 112
Spindler, W. 133 Ugra 17–18
Spivak, G.C. 7, 20, 131, 137, 163–4, 167, United States of America 81, 82; Bechtel’s
177 Dykes series in German 6, 104–17;
 Index  191
Japanese translations of American gay Warren, P.N. 99–100
literature 5, 87–103; queer history in the Weißegger, R. 9–10
German translations of Dykes 110–12; Well of Loneliness, The (Hall) 156
US-centrism 8–9, 11 Western gay literature in Japan 5,
universalism 78–9 87–103
Unnatural Dykes to Watch Out For White, E. 96–7, 98–9
(Bechtel) 108 Whitman, W. 88
untranslatability, mark of 137 Wilde, O. 52, 53
Ur Rehman, S. 15 Willhoite, M. 119
urban migration 51 Wilson, E. 145
‘wimmin’ 113, 114
Vanita, R. 17–18 Wings (Kuzmin) 54
Venuti, L. 42, 46 Winterson, J. 6, 158, 166–9
Verne, J. 12 Wittig, M. 6, 44–5; The Lesbian Body
vicariation 149 156–71
violence: in The Lesbian Body 158–62, women’s hammam 175
166–9; in Written on the Body 166–9 women’s movement 111
visibility 144–55 Written on the Body (Winterson) 6, 158,
Viteri, M. 8–9 166–9
Vombat 126
zamel 181, 182
Wallace, L. 151–2 Zeitlin, B. 6, 129, 132
Warner, M. 135 Zinovieva-Annibal, L. 54
Warren, C. 10 Žižek, S. 144–5