Negotiating Identities from Intersectional Perspectives: Gendered Translation and Accessibility in Audiovisual Fiction

This chapter explores the challenges of portraying gendered identities in translation and the accessibility of audiovisual fiction. We first revise how contemporary audiovisual translation studies can incorporate the notions of identity, intersectionality and multilingualism. Our starting premise is an inclusive view of gender, with an emphasis on three aspects of diversity: linguistic, functional or sexual. We analyse research that intersects gender with multilingualism (broadly understood as language variation), with functional diversity (or disability), and with sexual and gender diversity. We present an overview of current research in each section and examples to observe the way in which audiovisual fiction presents or constructs gendered identities. We analyse to what extent diversity is deleted, maintained or highlighted when it is translated or audio-described for blind and visually impaired consumers of multicultural media, with a focus on English and Spanish.