Monstrous Gender Queerness: Codifying Feminisation in 20th Century Romanian Prose

The theme of queerness within Romanian literature remains relatively marginal and is often treated as an exotic subject, thus representing a substantial opportunity for literary scholarship. Furthermore, in Romanian cultural discourse, queerness is frequently perceived as deviant, perverse, or scandalous, and conceptually aligned with the monstrous. Employing Susan Stryker’s theory of queer monstrosity, it becomes visible how queerness is often commonly interpreted and represented as a form of monstrosity. Broadly speaking, queer characters are depicted as having grotesque and unintelligible qualities, rendered into symbolic embodiments of the monstrous and as delineating the boundaries of the (un)representable. Engaging with Stuart Hall’s coding-decoding framework, this study aims to examine the dimension of gender queerness within the construction of male characters in several key texts: Remember by Mateiu I. Caragiale (1924), Ambigen by Octav Șuluțiu (1935), and Travesti by Mircea Cărtărescu (1994). I will analyse how the ambiguity of gender identity, arising from the feminization of masculinity, is encoded through representations of monstrosity, emerging in both character portrayal and narrative structure. The selected texts exemplify an enduring trend in interwar prose characterized by a dual encoding of queerness – through both explicit and fragmented representations – a trend that Mircea Cărtărescu later reinterprets as a central thematic focus. This analysis will interpret the queerness of these characters through an exploration of the mechanisms of exoticization, racialization, animalization, and sexualisation of the feminine body, which concomitantly shape the notion of queer monstrosity.