Feminist queer translation in the digital era

: gender, sexuality and class

Abstract

In recent years, with the development of the market economy, many publishing houses in China have published Chinese translations of queer texts. These texts, which portray people who transgress gender, sexual, and class norms, are mainly translated by feminist translators in China. Facilitated by digital transformation, feminist translators use both translations and digital paratexts (online promotional materials regarding the translations) to foreground feminist elements in the queer content. However, there is a lack of research on how feminist and queer elements are reflected in the translations of queer texts and the associated digital paratexts, while the attention to both feminist and queer elements in translation can contribute to the alliance between feminist and queer translation studies (Bessaïh, 2021; Gallardo & Hermosa-Ramírez, 2024; Henry-Tierney, 2024; Yu, 2015).
This project investigates the translations of queer content from feminist queer perspectives through examining two Chinese translations of Tipping the Velvet (TTV, Waters, 1998). TTV is a picaresque novel as well as a Bildungsroman. It discusses gender transgression, transgressive sexuality, and class transgression experienced by a protagonist, Nancy Astley. Two Chinese translations of it have gained much attention in China, produced respectively by Lin (2009) and Chen (2017). Lin is a male translator from Taiwan, and Chen is a female feminist translator in Mainland China. This project adopts a feminist queer approach to examine how the descriptions concerning transgressions in gender, sexuality, and class in TTV are represented in the translations and the associated digital paratexts, and to discuss the effects from feminist queer perspectives.
Based on the textual and paratextual analysis, this project finds that Chen’s translation and its digital paratexts show strong concerns for women in the representation of queer elements, producing a strong feminist queer effect; Lin’s version seldom manifests feminist and queer concerns. It is concluded that Chen has promoted a feminist queer understanding of her translation. Demonstrating her feminist queer consciousness in the translation and the digital paratexts, Chen shows that the feminist translator can exert more agency in translation in the digital era. Meanwhile, the prevalence of feminism and creative feminist translation praxis in Asia in recent years has opened up new possibilities for exerting her agency (Lee, 2023). Chen’s case also shows the characteristics of the fourth-wave feminism in which social networking platforms become the prime sites to disseminate feminist messages (Yu, 2020). By comparison, Lin’s translation diminishes the feminist and queer elements in most of the examples analysed. His rendering of gender transgression erases the meaning of gender fluidity, neglects women’s empowerment, distorts intergenderism, and appears to misunderstand transsexualism. Lin also misrepresents the meaning of the source text when translating non-normative female sexuality. This distortion reflects heteropatriarchal views of non-normative female sexuality. While queer stances are occasionally visible in Lin’s translation of class transgression, his text often shows heteropatriarchal judgments of women.

Date of Award	19 Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Lily Yu (Supervisor) & Susan Billingham (Supervisor)