Reading Homosexuality through Textuality:

A Study of Chinese Translations of Call Me by Your Name in Taiwan and Mainland China

Abstract

Translation studies has paid relatively little attention to queer literary translations and their contributions to queer community building in Taiwan and mainland China. This study aims to fill this knowledge gap by examining four editions of the Chinese translation of André Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name (Call), produced by Wu Yanrong and published first in Taiwan and later in mainland China. The thesis investigates nuances at both the textual and paratextual levels in these translations and contextualizes these intricacies within the socio-political landscapes of the respective target societies. It also discusses the role of queer literary translation in the overall production of queer knowledge in both societies.

This inquiry is guided by four research questions: (1) How are the paratextual multimodal gay homographesis framed in the English source text of Call Me by Your Name, and how are they reframed for the respective target audiences in mainland China and Taiwan? (2) What strategies are adopted in translating Call’s verbal camp as a form of gay homographesis in both regions, and how do the translations serve as performative and transformative sites of male homosexuality? (3) How is the homographesis of gay intertextuality in Call reconfigured in the translations for mainland China and Taiwan? (4) How does queer literary translation actively shape the landscape of queer knowledge in these societies, and to what extent does it serve as a catalyst or significant contributor to queer knowledge production?

To answer these questions, I employ queer theory as my theoretical framework and utilize various analytical tools (Chapter Two) to investigate the three identified areas of gay homographesis in translation, the paratextual framing of the translations, the translated verbal camp, and gay intertextuality in translation. After providing a contextual overview of male homosexual representations in both mainland China and Taiwan, and introducing Call’s contextualized queer representation, its global significance and the receptions of its Chinese translations in Chapters One and Three, Chapters Four, Five and Six correspond to the three areas of gay homographesis and their Chinese translations. Chapter Four adopts a constellational perspective of paratextuality (Freeth 2023) and applies Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) visual grammar, along with Roland Barthes’s (1977, as cited in Bateman 2014) theory of text-image relationships, to examine the Chinese reframing of the multimodal paratext in the source text. Chapter Five employs Keith Harvey’s (2000) framework of verbal camp and Marc Démont’s (2017) modes of translating queer literary texts for a comparative analysis of the Chinese translations of camp talk. Chapter Six uses Barthes’s poststructuralist approach to analyze the reconfiguration of gay intertextuality within the novel. Finally, Chapter Seven synthesizes the findings and suggests that Taiwan tends to adopt a more “queering” approach while mainland publishers vacillate between “misrecognizing”, “minoritizing” and “queering” approaches, which reveals the degree to which social activism or governmental control can frame translation. By contextualizing my major findings, I discuss the role of queer literary translation in engaging with queer cultures in mainland China and Taiwan, and underscores the significance of queer literary translation in contributing to queer knowledge production and fostering queer communities in these two regions.