La Cage Aux Folles: The use of Gayspeakin the English, French and Italian adaptationsfor the big screen

Voice is one of the means by which fictional characters reveal – among other things – their sexuality. People belonging to cultural minorities are often reduced to a few characteristics in fiction so that they can be easily recognisable to the audience. This study intends to apply the methodologies of Audiovisual Translation (AVT) Studies from the perspective of Language and Sexuality Studies, as it seeks to examine homosexuality and its linguistic representation in AVT, in line with the third approach to the study of gender in AVT research, as discussed by von Flotow – Josephy-Hernández (2019). The linguistic variety analysed in this article is the fictional representation of gayspeak, a way in which characters index their homosexuality. This case study focuses on a comparison between the French cinematic adaptation of La Cage Aux Folles (literally, “the cage of insane women”), a 1978 comedy film directed by Édouard Molinaro based on the 1973 play of the same name by Jean Poiret, and its adaptations into Italian and English. This article will analyse the way gayspeak is rendered in the three languages, as each culture indexes sexualities with different linguistic elements.