The article examines the literary representation of masculinities in the context of border crossings in the Mediterranean area and specifically the relationship between multilingualism and gender identity. Literary representations of exile and migration are interesting laboratories for the portrayal of multifaceted identities. This article will examine the representation of masculinity and translingual practices in two literary narratives of border crossings in the Mediterranean area.
The Mediterranean has historically been a site of border crossing, and remains even more so today. It is also characterised by multilingualism and the co-existence of languages, both historically and to the present day. In addition, situations of border crossing are often the site of the encounter of conflicting and conflicted gender identities. This article seeks to examine literary representations of the enactment and interpretation of gender identities in the context of border crossings, and specifically how the practices of multilingualism that characterise such contexts interact with the negotiation of gender identities.
The notion of border crossings has been used as a metaphor in discourses about gender identities, and more specifically transsexuality, but we follow Halberstam in considering this perspective as overly reductive. Notions such as journey , home and belonging associated with border crossing imply and foreground a neat and desired movement from one place to another, and may implicitly provide an essentializing reading of gender and sexual identities as discrete and unitary categories, as well as potentially contribute to the cultural appropriation of the experiences of the migrant.
In order to reconceptualize or redirect this metaphor from its potential pitfalls, we argue that multilingualism and heteroglossia may be more fruitful metaphors for understanding how gender identities are navigated in migrant narratives. The novels have been selected for analysis because they both present fluid gender identities, and use multilingualism as an aesthetic strategy. The two novels also complement each-other, as they present different facets of the exilic experience in the Mediterranean area.
Thus, the novel examines questions related to multilingualism, gender and sexuality, as well as post-colonial tensions in the French-speaking world. Princesa is the autofictional story of the Brazilian boy Fernandinho who becomes Fernanda or Princesa, a transsexual prostitute. She leaves Brazil and ends up in Italy where she tries to save up money for a sex reassignment surgery.
