Queer in Translation
Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies Series

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 societies 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 relationship 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 scholars working in the fields of gender and sexuality, queer theory and queer studies, literature, film studies and translation studies.

Acknowledgments

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett

1. Re-Mapping Translation: Queerying the Crossroads

Shalmalee Palekar

2. Queering Narratives and Narrating Queer: Colonial Queer Subjects in the Arab World

Nour Abu Assab

3. Revealing and Concealing the Masquerade of Translation and Gender: Double-Crossing the Text and the Body

Emily Rose

4. A Poetics of Evasion: The Queer Translations of Aleksei Apukhtin

Brian James Baer

5. Translation Failure in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room

Margaret Sönser Breen

6. Globally Queer? Taiwanese Homotextualities in Translation

Andrea Bachner

7. Queer Translation/Translating Queer during the ‘Gay Boom’ in Japan

Jeffrey Angles

8. Gaps To Watch Out For: Alison Bechdel in German

Robert Gillett

9. Eradicalisation: Eradicating the Queer in Children’s Literature

B.J. Epstein

10. The Queer Story of Your Conception: Translating Sexuality and Racism in Beasts of the Southern Wild

Jacob Breslow

11. The Translation of Desire: Queering Visibility in Nathalie… and Chloe

Clara Bradbury-Rance

12. Translation and the Art of Lesbian Failure in Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body

Miller Oberman

13. Queering Translation: Rethinking Gender and Sexual Politics in the Spaces between Languages and Cultures

William J. Spurlin

Index

B.J. Epstein is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Public Engagement at the University of East Anglia, 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.