About soccer, superheroes and superheroines: Episodes from the memories of a remembered child

Abstract

This is a translation of an autoethnographic essay. In this essay, the author remembers episodes of his queer childhood and, critically, analyzes how superheroes and superheroines, represented in the most diverse media, were important for him to face the hegemonic masculinity imposed by soccer. The text features illustrations made exclusively for this essay by the Spanish artist José Manuel Palenzuela. Concerning queer language terms, my translation proposal was not to translate them, not to domesticate them, and not to italicize them, as a strategy of resistance and subversion, based on the same principles defended by the author, who, like me, is a translator and researcher in Translation Studies. Furthermore, I tried to eliminate the "universal masculine", which is present in both Portuguese and Spanish languages, through a translation that used, whenever possible, generic terms in Portuguese and, when not, I added the equivalent feminine designation.