Cyborg Stereoscope : A monstrous reading of bilingual viewing of X-Files subtitles (original) (raw)
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By 1985, when Donna Haraway’s essay, A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s, presented the cyborg as a hybrid between organism and machine and an alternative model of feminine subjectivity, the Mexican independent media producer Pola Weiss had been challenging normative female experiences and relations between self and technology through her video work for nearly a decade. In this article, I propose to explore Weiss’s work through the lens of Haraway’s in order to collaborate with recent efforts to locate Weiss’s practice more meaningfully in the histories of media arts. By placing particular attention on Weiss’s conceptualization of her camera as a hybrid coupling between organism and machine, I use Haraway’s Manifesto for Cyborgs to suggest a frame in which to understand Weiss’s practice as critique of the dominant intellectual traditions and conventions of representation that have produced and reproduced hierarchies of race, class, sex, and gender difference in Mexico. In doing so, I also explore how Weiss’s experiments with televisual images challenged normative female experiences and relations between self and technology. Ultimately, in proposing Haraway’s work as a vehicle through which to understand the work of Weiss, I also seek to find affinities between the two women as they inhabited parallel worlds and shared similar concerns.
Imagining the Cyborg in Náhuatl: Reading the Videos of Pola Weiss
2015
By 1985, when Donna Haraway’s essay, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s,” presented the cyborg as a hybrid between organism and machine and an alternative model of feminine subjectivity, the Mexican independent media producer Pola Weiss had been challenging normative female experiences and relations between self and technology through her video work for nearly a decade. In this article, I propose to explore Weiss’s work through the lens of Haraway’s in order to collaborate with recent efforts to locate Weiss’s practice more meaningfully in the histories of media arts. By placing particular attention on Weiss’s conceptualization of her camera as a hybrid coupling between organism and machine, I use Haraway’s Manifesto for Cyborgs to suggest a frame in which to understand Weiss’s practice as critique of the dominant intellectual traditions and conventions of representation that have produced and reproduced hierarchies of race, class, sex,...
Problematizing and relativizing components of culture and identity are a constant theme in translation studies, yet there are fields where culture and identity are radically deconstructed, rather than problematized and relativized; such is the case in the uncharted area of transgenderism. By definition, transgenderism entails both great freedom and great constraints with respect to shaping physical and discourse parameters of identity. Taking Cromwell's (2006) concept of 'transsituated identities' as a point of departure, this article discusses the English subtitles for the cinema in Koutras' recent film Strella (2009). It demonstrates that the filmic language of Strella adopts strategies which are geared towards unsettling fixed hierarchies in society. grid of strategies -namely, ludicrism, inversion, paradox and parody -is extended here for the analysis of filmic language. The analysis reveals that the move from a minor code (Greek) into a lingua franca, within the context of a transgender subculture, leads to recurrent shifts in the semiotic load of these resources in translation.
Technobabble on screen: translating science-fiction films
Intralinea - Special Issue: Across Screens Across Boundaries, 2014
This paper attempts a preliminary survey of relatively unexplored issues related to the translation of science fiction, both in television and cinema. In order to better understand the challenges met by the translators of this particular film and TV genre, in the first part of the essay some specific functions of the science fiction language are explored, namely its importance in the creation of the “cognitive estrangement” (Suvin 1979) vital to the ontological extension and the technological intensification of the future/parallel/alternate worlds proposed by science fiction (Bandiroli 2008). While visual representation is fundamental to achieve the effect of cognitive estrangement in film and TV, it must be corroborated by the dialogue, which is a key factor in creating an equilibrium between the visionary force of the futuristic world and the familiarity of a recognizable situation that will enable the viewer to develop an emotional link with the story and its protagonists. The second part of the paper focuses on three different translation issues regarding film and TV science fiction. The first issue is an extensive presence of various neologisms, typical of science fiction language. The second issue discussed is a recurrent problem of familiar patterns of polite forms used in unfamiliar situations (such as, for example, encounters with alien forms of life). Finally, translation problems stemming from the American-centered nature of film and TV science fiction are briefly considered. The analysis is based primarily on the Star Trek TV series and feature films
Languages, 2023
This study focuses on the HBO series Looking, whose two seasons and film make up a critical telecinematic artifact that reveals how authorial vision integrates ideologies on class, race, and desire that are identifiable in visual modes and language use—particularly multilingual dialogues. The analysis begins with the assumption that Looking is a relevant case of complex television and centers on the narrative structure of the series and the way that language, translation, and visual semiotic resources interact in the construction of a gay Latino character in the source version of the series and two Spanish dubbed versions—one for Latin America and the other for Spain. The findings reveal that Looking, as a televisual and aesthetic artifact, proposes a post-gay discourse of homoerotic relationships while also constructing racialized objects of desire, particularly the Latinx (male) body. A comparative linguistic analysis shows that both the dubbed versions highlight the boundaries of the so-called globalized gay identity. The data gathered demonstrate that the representation of ethnic, racial, and erotic difference changes according to the language system used. Moreover, new interactions between dubbed dialogues and visual resources result in a greater degree of semiotic layering of ideological discourses throughout the series.
Translating the Queerness of Spanglish in Audiovisual Contexts
Mutatis Mutandis, 2023
Over the past decade there has been an increase in audiovisual representation of Latinx communities in the United States. More recently an unprecedented quantity of scripted Spanglish-or radical Spanish-English bilingualism-has become an important element in this portrayal. Given the transnational shift in marketing and distribution of audiovisual platforms such as Netflix, a large amount of this content has been dubbed and subtitled for Spanish-speaking audiences. In this context, this paper serves a tripartite purpose. First, it positions Spanglish as a Queer community translinguistic practice that can serve very clear purposes in texts. This breaks from existing translation scholarship which has tended to view Spanglish as a type of accented speech that predominantly furthers character development. Second, it is the first longitudinal study to consider how Spanglish av sources have been translated into Spanish. Case studies examined in this paper include Disney/Pixar's film Coco, the Netflix sitcoms One Day at a Time and Gentefied, and the Starz drama Vida. Finally, this paper seeks to broaden Démont's "On three modes of translating queer literary texts" (2018), suggesting that his "modes" may help us understand translation practices affecting a range of minoritized communities.
The thesis addresses the representation of fantastical metamorphosis in francophone fiction, theatre, and film between 1960 and 2003. It argues that the metamorphoses represented in the chosen corpus emerge as uncontainable symptoms of interwoven processes of racialized and sexualized subjectivation. The thesis has two secondary preoccupations. It assesses what kind of threat the transforming bodies and consciousnesses erupting from these processes might pose to the signifying systems represented within the texts. And it considers to what extent the question of surviving apparently unsurvivable metamorphosis is important in an ethico-political theorization of transformation. Chapter One considers the progression from French filmmaker François Ozon's (b.1967) first feature Sitcom (1998) to his second feature Les
In other words: the journal for literary translators, 2010
Just as advocates of postcolonial translation have argued that translation could and should be a way to give colonised cultures back their voice and fight the hegemony of colonising cultures, and advocates of feminist translation have argued that translation could and should be a way for empowering women by clearly representing them in language and combating the patriarchal hegemony, it is now necessary to advocate for a queer form of translation that gives queer people greater visibility and helps them struggle against the subordinating power of the heteronormative hegemony. Even when the homoerotic content of queer texts is not downright censored, it is frequently lost in translation due to such problems as a privileging of heteronormative elements and phrasing over queer ones to increase fluency, or a simple lack of a careful reading caused by a heteronormative bias. The latter occurs because characters in most texts, like people in everyday life, are generally presumed to be heterosexual until proven queer, and an inattentive translator unaware of this kind of personal bias can thus easily albeit unintentionally turn a queer element into a heteronormative one. Through a case study of Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese subtitles of a scene from the movie Gia, whose main character is queer, this article aims to show how queer elements can be lost and/or preserved in translation, in order to further the argument that translators who translate queer texts need to be made aware of, or even specially trained in, how to do queer readings of texts and ways to prevent queer elements from being lost or turned into heteronormative ones. This article also aspires to show the need for expanding and concretising the fledgling field of queer translation studies, offers a proposal for how this could be done, and uses the case study as a concrete example of a link between theory and practice.