Mother Camp has Arrived: an analysis of the Spanish translation of Esther Newton’s ethnographic text on drag queens in America

ABSTRACT

This article contains an analysis of the Spanish translation of Mother Camp, Esther Newton’s ethnography, which was initially published in 1972. The 2016 translation by Belbel Bullejos and Uría constitutes a corpus that lends itself to an exploration of the limits of the translation of gender as a relational category. In the Spanish version of this ethnographic text, several equivalents proposed for identity categories point to incommensurability among various signifiers related to bodies, sexuality, and gendered life experiences. Moreover, different domesticating translation strategies adapted for Peninsular Spanish readers contribute to the Spanish translation reading like a fiction/non-fiction hybrid text. The selected strategies mask the temporally and geographically bound representation of sex/gender dissent and the experimental innovations of Newton’s ethnographic discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• cultural translation
• drag
• queer
• Esther Newton

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Iván Villanueva-Jordán

Iván Villanueva-Jordán is a research full professor at Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (Lima, Peru); he is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Universitat Jaume I, and a member of the research group TRAMA. He has researched discourses and performances of drag queens in Lima. His doctoral research addressed the translation and multimodal construction of gay masculinities in contemporary telefiction. His current research interests are audiovisual translation and LGBTQ+ studies, as well as exploring how drag is represented in different media, languages, and times. Email: [email protected]

Marco Ramírez-Colombier

Marco Ramírez Colombier is an assistant professor at Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas (Lima, Peru). His doctoral research focuses on place-making practices among the Kukama people in Peruvian Amazonia. His current research interests are Amazonian anthropology, ethnographic epistemology and the interactions between anthropology and translation. Email: [email protected]