«But, bitch, I’m still serving it». La subtitulación de un verbo del lenguaje drag en RuPaul’s Drag Race al portugués brasileño: nuevos significados, viejas palabras

Willian Henrique Cândido Moura; Luciana Iost Vinhas

doi:10.17533/udea.mut/v16n1a11

Authors

Willian Henrique Cândido Moura Federal University of Santa Catarina
Luciana Iost Vinhas Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1026-2277

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.mut/v16n1a11

Keywords:

Drag language, queer language, camp talk, materialist discourse analysis, audiovisual translation

Abstract

RuPaul’s Drag Race is a reality show that has been on air since 2009. Throughout its seasons, the show received multiple spin-offs and became a franchise with versions in several countries around the world. Due to this popularization, we consider that Drag Race plays an unavoidable role in the way that we socially understand drag culture nowadays. In this paper, we analyze the translation into Brazilian Portuguese of a drag language verb used in the speech of Season 13 contestants of the reality show broadcast in Brazil by Netflix. We present a contrastive analysis between the subtitling and the entries for the verb in general bilingual Portuguese-English/English-Portuguese dictionaries. The analysis is based on materialist discourse analysis, on theorizations about camp and drag, and on research on the audiovisual translation of the show. Our findings indicate that the subtitling of RuPaul’s Drag Race
allows the circulation of other unforeseen meanings for verbs that are part of this semantic-discursive network in Brazilian Portuguese. We reflect on the effects of meanings put into circulation by verbs in drag language, which do not compose what can and should be said from the dominant ideological position in our social formation, and on its dictionary use, which obeys processes of institutionalization of the hegemonic knowledge. Through this study, we stated that the functioning of drag language comes to be understood as “drag words,” as it performs caricatures of femininity by subverting the barriers imposed by the gender binarism that dominantly regulates social relations.

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Author Biographies

Willian Henrique Cândido Moura, Federal University of Santa Catarina

Ph.D. student in Translation Studies at Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil (CAPES scholarship). M.Sc. in Translation Studies at Federal University of Santa Catarina.

Luciana Iost Vinhas, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul

Professor at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Ph.D. in Discourse Analysis at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.

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