Queering Translation (QT) Manifesto: Enhancing Clarity and Understanding

Introduction

Queering Translation (QT) is a political and transformative practice that centers on marginalized and non-conforming bodies. It emphasizes movement, transformation, and the fluidity of expressions and embodiments. QT challenges traditional notions of identity by complicating language and grammar, using synonyms, antonyms, and rhetorical dissonance. It rejects binary gender pronouns that erase same-sex desire and embraces playful use of pronouns.

Trans-Living and Recuperation of Silenced Voices

QT connects to Walter Benjamin’s concept of “trans-living,” the idea that an original text can “live on” through translation. This process allows previously silenced or erased queer subjects to be rediscovered and acknowledged. By engaging readers in dialogue with these voices—even if they belong to the past—QT fosters community and connection across time.

Community and Mestizo Consciousness

QT envisions community as an active, intersubjective creation. It invites a mestizo-like consciousness that acknowledges and asserts coexisting paradigms. This approach encourages us to inhabit the liminal spaces between words, embracing the nuances and potential for deeper connections and meanings.

Embracing Complexity and Challenging Norms

QT practice values entanglement, ambiguity, and a spectrum of emotions—from angst to exuberance. It seeks to make the invisible visible, give voice to the silenced, and restore what has been erased. By highlighting the uncomfortable aspects of a text, QT unsettles readers and opens them to unexpected perspectives. It employs techniques that, through a critical lens, destabilize and denaturalize gender and sexual norms.

Reflexivity and Affirmation of Diversity

QT embodies a high degree of self-awareness and reflexivity. It affirms the political significance of diversity in culture, gender, race, sexuality, class, ethnicity, disability, and indigeneity. QT reveals and highlights alternative worldviews that are often overshadowed by dominant capitalist ideologies enforcing normative binaries. Rather than conforming, QT questions and destabilizes these norms, asserting its position outside hegemonic thinking and outdated philosophies.

Resistance to Alienation and Emphasis on Becoming

QT resists the alienation and isolation produced by dominant knowledge systems. It emphasizes the continuous movement and transformation of bodies, rejecting the illusion of static identity. QT practitioners recognize that the facade of a “civilized,” economically empowered progress often conceals patriarchal and imperial desires that perpetuate control and oppression. QT does not create a discourse that reinscribes colonial domination; instead, it affirms the existence and equal validity of diverse histories. It creates interactive spaces where queer experiences can be intensified and expanded.

Integration of Affectivity and Rationality

QT embraces emotional embodiment without rejecting rationality. It challenges the complacency of rational thought by questioning its historical context and authority. QT promotes a vital synesthesia that engages all senses—seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and feeling. It honors intuition and reveals inner emotional, spiritual, and intellectual truths. Recognizing that systems contain the seeds of their own transformation, QT practitioners seek to cultivate new ways of living and thinking that emerge from the old.

Building on Past Movements and Rejecting Objectification

QT acknowledges the contributions of feminist, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual, and questioning individuals who have challenged hegemonic power structures. QT practitioners aim to inhabit and share the spaces these movements have carved out. While acknowledging that we may sometimes feel like passive subjects in an objectified world, QT rejects the reduction of individuals to mere objects. Instead, it fosters a liberating sense of identity, space, and time.

Embracing Intersectionality and Collective Activity

QT practice embraces intersectionality, recognizing that a full spectrum of identities and experiences coexist and shine together. It captures the richness of lived experiences in diverse spaces, challenging hierarchical structures. In QT’s embrace of ambiguity, we witness a dynamic, collective activity that moves bodies and pulls the cosmos toward a renewal of life. It understands identity as something constituted from within, not imposed from without.

Engagement with the Present and Creation of Community

QT engages with intercultural, transgender, and intersubjective living, bringing the entirety of history into the present moment. By focusing on modes of being (“how”) rather than causes (“why”), QT involves its practitioners in the concrete creation and performance of community and habitat in the here and now. It represents authentic being as a movement within a living and vibrant social organism.

Promoting Justice and Revitalizing Imagination

QT practice embraces ultratranslation, discomfortable translation, and language justice as means to achieve intersectional justice. It revitalizes the imagination’s ability to envision a transnational and trans-living community. QT interrogates the true meaning of liberation, questions our own prejudices, and examines how they might hinder our understanding of texts. It explores ways to decolonize our thinking and identity, and how to engage in liberatory collectivity, carrying evolving practices into new traditions for the future.

Conclusion

Ultimately, QT practice must be experienced and experimented with to be fully understood. It resists being codified, canonized, colonized, or contained. QT is an ongoing, dynamic process that invites continual participation and evolution, fostering deeper connections and a more profound understanding of ourselves and others.