Abstract
Like transgender studies, literary translation has historically suffered marginalization within the academy and has only recently become established. The marginalization of both, it seems, stems from rigid binaries—namely, the binaries of male/female and man/woman in the context of the transgender, and the binaries of author/translator, original/translation, and source language/target language in the context of translation. By applying the deconstructive work of transgender and queer theory that undertakes the project of destabilizing cisgender, heteronormative, patriarchal systems, we can dismantle these binaries to reconceptualize the translator as the translatxr—a trans*, nonbinary, or genderqueer subjectivity—and translation as translatxrsation, a nonbinary embodied practice with the potential to produce multilingual, decolonizing strategies and discourses. Such a practice actively resists the erasure and colonization of texts by and about trans*, trans, nonbinary, or genderqueer persons and lives. This article looks to the work of Chilean writer and performance artist Pedro Lemebel's urban chronicles to reveal the antinormalizing, decolonizing practice of becoming-translation. The article concludes with the translatxrsation of Lemebel's performance poem “Manifiesto,” to reveal the embodiment of the translatxrsation.
