TRANSIT

This paper addresses the (im)mobility of queer sexualities in an era of labor migration and globalization. With my discussion of the 2004 documentary by Pauline Boudry, Brigitta Kuster, and Renate Lorenz, “Copy me – I want to travel,” I am particularly interested in analyzing how this film offers a queer-feminist perspective on a transnational issue without representing queer sex or queer life in any central way.

The film tells a story of Bulgarian computer production while cutting across national, economic, ethnic, gendered, and sexual borders. Through a practice of strategic mistranslations, it reworks such dichotomies as reality and projection, or fiction and documentary. Its focus on the reverse engineering of the Apple-II model marketed successfully during the Cold War as Pravetz II, a socialist product, destabilizes the polarities of copy and original as well as of socialism and capitalism. The dominant role of women in the Bulgarian computer industry, its decline with the transition to capitalism, and the subsequent migration of highly skilled female computer specialists to Germany foregrounds gendered notions of work and productivity. Those are supplemented by the film’s insistent gender re-imagining of Bulgaria’s most infamous virus writer, “Dark Avenger.” The documentary is interspersed with drag scenes citing classic spy films, which comment on the discursive link between heteronormative image making and Cold War ideology. Taking my cue from this mobilizing of drag and discipline, I make an argument for transformative translation as a way of queering the audience rather than representing queer subjectivities.