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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 hese 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its importance in the analysis of gender in various research fields, Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity circulates in rather restricted academic spaces in Romania, as her gender studies is not yet a wide field of research. The importation and particularization of the discussion of gender as a social construct is influenced by various factors: from the persistent patriarchal structure of a society in which the post-communist legacy is still felt, to the simultaneity of theoretical receptions of works authored by Butler and several other types of feminist discourse, such as Rosi Braidotti's posthumanist approach. This paper analyses to what extent these theories produce effects in contemporary Romanian literature, especially in prose with queer issues at its core. The paper further examines the way in which the category of socially constructed gender can be used as a tool for analysing the configurations of the human subject as a sexualised Other in contemporary Romanian literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the relationship between Romanian and world literature is becoming an increasingly present topic in current research, due to materialist-based theoretical tools of Immanuel Wallerstein and further the WReC research, the role played by queer studies in understanding networks of cultural circulation often remains neglected. An example of this is the notion of queer modernism, which could prove to be an indispensable tool in mapping the cultural relations of exchange between Romanian literature and that of Western centers in the first half of the 20th century. Feminist and queer modernist studies show that the subject of queerness, centered especially around the crisis of gender definition, constitutes one of the major forces in the development and circulation of literary modernism, where the expansion language’s limits in prose is underpinned, in subtext, by the attempt to transgress the cisheteronormativity of the era. Starting from Eugen Lovinescu’s attempt to establish a structural homology between Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu and Marcel Proust, I use the concept of queer modernism to propose, rather, an ideological homology between the Romanian writer and Virginia Woolf. Confronting two contexts marked, on the one hand, by similar patriarchal conditions and, on the other hand, by important local specificities, I aim to trace what kind of response to these conditions each author’s prose embodies, directing my attention to strategies of encoding queerness in their novels. I will observe the main point of divergence in the two authors’ representations of queerness: where Virginia Woolf conceives of a character who openly disrupts the stability of the dichotomous sex-gender system in Orlando, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu almost opaquely encodes the lesbian relationship between two female characters in Drumul ascuns [The Hidden Road]. I will argue that one of the impediments to the wider circulation of queer modernism in Romanian literature is the imperative to construct a legitimate national culture, incompatible with elements that question traditional values, especially in the post-1918 political context. The comparison with Virginia Woolf will function as a means to delineate the diverse manifestations of queerness within various contexts related to modernity, conceived as a global phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]