Please join us for a CuSPP Seminar in person (BPB W3.03) and online on Thursday 19 Feb from 1-2. Please refer to the CuSPP email or email Wesley.Lim@anu.edu.au for the link.

Abstract
Since the 1990s, tongzhi/queer literature in mainland China and Taiwan has flourished amid neoliberalism, queer movements, and the introduction of Western queer theory, exposing heterogeneous local expressions of queerness. Yet English translations of these texts have received little critical attention. This seminar asks: what does queer translation do, and what does a queer translator do? Drawing on queer translation studies, I examine Ta-Wei Chi’s fetish-themed short stories, Jin Xing’s trans autobiography 半夢：金星自傳 (Shanghai Tango: A Memoir), and my own translation of Xia Mucong’s puppy-play story 軍犬 (Military Dog). These examples show how cultural and linguistic negotiation, narrative transformation, and the transgression or assimilation of norms are revealed through translation. This seminar argues for an anti-normative, interdisciplinary approach to queer translation studies, informed by textual, historical, and sociocultural diversity, and attentive to the voices of queer translators and the textualisation of our identities and desires for queering translation.

Bio
Dr. Yahia Ma is a Visiting Fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and has interdisciplinary training in journalism, English, and translation studies. His research has appeared in Babel, Transcultural, Journal of Literary Multilingualism, Made in China, and Melbourne Asia Review. He has translated works by Ta-Wei Chi, Cui Zi’en, and Xia Mucong, published in Taiwanese Queer Literature: A Reader, Queer Time: A Special Notebook of Taiwanese Tongzhi Literature, and Made in China. His translation of Gui Hong’s nudism-focused book 歐洲之新生活寫真 (Birthright Bodily Freedom: Portrayal of the New Life of Europeans) is forthcoming. He is co-editor of Queer Literature in the Sinosphere (2024) and Sino-Queer Translation: Sexualities across Languages, Cultures, and Media (forthcoming). He is currently writing his monograph Translating Queer Desires: Chinese-Language Queer Literature and English Translation.