(Sexual) Identity of Intersectional Subjectivities as a Transcultural Dialogic Operation: Analysing Carmen y Lola from a Post-Translational Approach

Abstract

This article focuses on the film Carmen and Lola. Drawing on approaches to sexual identity from a
translational perspective, this film is examined in terms of translation, and more specifically as a case embedded within complex macro-processes of (inter)cultural translation in which the discovery and experience of queer sexual orientation in a specific community and geographical context —those of two Spanish Roma women— take on a particular form. By examining post-translation rewritings of the film, it will be argued that multiple and contradictory forms of (re)creation and (mis)recognition of intersectional subjectivities, intermittently shaped by factors such as sexuality, germinate, proliferate and even collide in these dialogical transcultural operations. It will be suggested that these translations and (post)translations momentarily articulate, as particular episodes of “identity fictions” being
filmed non-stop, those multiple post-identities of individuals who are in constant transfiguration within a productive, multifaceted and inevitably conflicting multilateral and transcultural dialogue.