Studies of queer history and culture have frequently confined themselves to national or regional traditions, with the effect that queer cultures are often seen as autonomous or relatively unaffected by foreign traditions or politics. Even Gregory Woods’ magisterial Homintern (2016), which has an impressive international scope, organizes its subject by country (and within each country by city or region), thus encouraging the notion that queer cultures are discrete, localized phenomena. The problem is more pronounced in studies of queer fiction, which overwhelmingly stay within the disciplinary boundaries of distinct national or linguistic traditions. On the occasions where queer literature crosses such boundaries (Arenas, Gide, Cavafy), the complicating effects of translation are seldom remarked.

This session will present work that directly challenges the linguistic and disciplinary boundaries often observed (quietly) by queer fiction studies. In doing so, the session sheds light on some important, and understudied, areas of queer culture and history. First, is focuses attention precisely on those works whose translational, multilingual status has often marginalized them and made them peripheral to more canonical studies of queer writing. Second, it highlights the ways in which translation uniquely exposed the fissures in national or global constructions of queerness, homosexuality, and sexual identity. The writers and translators wrestling with these fissures and noncongruences often discover new models of sexual subjectivity and new models of sexual liberation.

In “Against Anglo-Normative Objects: Queer Theory and Translingual Poetics,” Serena Bassi appropriate uses queer fiction in translation to challenge the essentializing models of early gay liberation discourses and highlight peripheral archives of queer fiction. Her paper focuses on Nino Gennaro’s “Baronessa Valenti” (1974). a text written in three languages (Italian, Sicilian, English). In the mid-1970s Gennaro had founded “Teatro Madre,” a little-known gay liberationist group in Sicily. Bassi’s reading of Gennaro’s poem shows that, by focusing on peripheral archives and de-centering monolingual Anglo-American texts, a version of gay liberation discourse may emerge that is itself critical of reductive transhistorical ideas of “sexual repression” and “sexual liberation.”

In “Queering Translation Studies in New Queer Francophone Autofiction from the Maghreb,” William Spurlin argues that emergent queer francophone writing from the Maghreb negotiates and produces new forms of sexual subjectivity. Franco-Maghrebi spaces of sexual dissidence are inflected by globally-circulating discourses of queerness that are irreducible to received conceptions of homosexuality or Western forms of sexual identity. Spurlin’s paper considers the work of Rachid O., Eyet Chékib Djaziri, and Abdellah Taïa, all diasporic writers in France. Their autofictional work shows how postcolonial forms of sexual dissidence may be best understood through the dialogical, contradictory, and liminal spaces produced in the encounters between cultures, and especially through writers who foreground translation.

In “Two Snails and A Ship Returned to Port: The Metaphorics of Lesbian Eroticism in Uruguayan Fiction,” Liz Rose discusses the potential of queer fiction in translation from their own perspective as a literary translator. Their paper focuses on the Uruguayan writer Cristina Peri Rossi, whose use of cultural references from around the world dislocates her writing from any single linguistic or cultural context. While current translation theories highlight cultural mediation, there is a paucity of literature examining the effects of migration and politics on the translation of metaphor. The paper discusses strategies for translating lesbian fiction from a Latin American diaspora, highlighting the impact of such work in a U.S. literary context. The ethical imperative to dramatize queer dislocation in the current American geopolitical context informs the formal and thematic aspects of translation that foregrounds the operative role of linguistic and sexual difference in literary production.

Each of the three papers will run 15-20 minutes, which will leave at least fifteen minutes for unstructured discussion. The innovative and theoretically informed work of all three presenters, as well as the diversity of languages treated in the session (Spanish, Arabic, French, Italian, Sicilian, English), will prospectively suggest several different avenues for further research on queer fiction and translation. The session will be an especially fitting contribution to the conference’s presidential theme.