Translating gender indeterminacy: the queering of gender identities in Qiu Miaojin’s Last Words from Montmartre

ABSTRACT

Qiu Miaojin, a lesbian icon in 1990s Taiwan, left behind the quasi-memoir novel Last Words from Montmartre in 1995 that features her unique hermaphroditism ideology. Through the first-person narrative, Qiu obfuscates binary gender categories, and subverts rigid gender norms and cisgenderism. A key value of this epistolary novel is her playful manipulation of fluid sexualities via pronominal markers to break free of the shackles of gender dysphoria. Since the 1990s, research attention has been given to the emerging gender/queer-related issues in translated literatures. However, issues pertaining to the de-gendering of homoeroticism and discursive intersexuality in literary translation remain underexplored. This article explores how Qiu’s queer politics in this novel have been reproduced in Heinrich’s 2014 English translation. Based on the “gender performativity” theory, findings indicate that Qiu’s queer ideology and de-gendered language have been accurately rendered for the Anglophone readership.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender performativity
• Last Words from Montmartre
• lesbian
• Qiu Miaojin
• queer literature

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 For example, “Letter Five” was put between “Letter Seventeen” (which appears twice as a chapter heading) and “Letter Eleven” simply because Zoë, intentionally or unintentionally, put her tenth letter in the lost-and-found envelope originally prepared for her fifth letter. In other words, Qiu created a non-linear framework without a clearly-drawn timeline, to which readers and translators might have difficulty clinging.

2 It should be noted that Heinrich himself underwent a female-to-male transition to accord with his internal perception of gender. In his 2017 essay “Formal experiments in Qiu Miaojin’s ‘lesbian I Ching’”, he nicknamed Last Words a lesbian I Ching, a Chinese canon based on the cosmology dyad yin-yang. The receptive female (ying) and the active male (yang) refer to the fundamental doctrine of the I Ching, which expounds how two primal forces can be complementary and mutually transformable, just like the transgenderism against the natal sex employed in Last Words.

3 Similar to modern Chinese, modern English is developed within the natural gender system based on “natural” differentiation that follows a male-female dimorphism. Singular-form nouns or noun phrases referring to males and females must take a specific gendered pronoun he or she, while an inanimate object takes the neuter pronoun it. The majority of English personal nouns (e.g. doctor, soldier, teacher, etc), however, are gender-unspecified, so they can be used either with male or female referents (Casagranda 2011, 206–207).

Additional information

Funding

The author reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Ming-che Lee

Ming-che Lee is a PhD student at Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation (GITI) of National Taiwan Normal University. His research interests focus on queer literature and translation studies. His recent publications include “The gain and loss in cross-cultural translation: An explorative study of the English & Japanese renditions of Pai Hsien-yung’s Taipei People” (Journal of Taiwan Literary Studies 32: 193–232) and “Mapping Taiwanese queer literature: A survey of globalized queer fiction produced in Taiwan in 1990s” (Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, 8 (2): 194–208).