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

Abstract

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.