Representations of masculine speech in the Japanese dub of the movie Call Me by Your Name: virtual spaces and bodies of otherness.

This case study analyses adult male language in the Japanese-language version of the American movie Call Me by Your Name (2017). Building upon audiovisual translation and recent Japanese sociolinguistic studies, this article intends to highlight the gap between the non-native actors' language and the actual speech of Japanese speakers, as well as the hypermasculinization of fictional speech aimed at indexing a hard masculinity model through the so-called phenomenon of transduction. By intertwining the analysis of the Japanese male markers in dubbed texts with the phonetic analysis of the original voices and Japanese voice actors, this study testifies to a different orientation in the Japanese dialogues compared to those in English and highlights the exploitation of the speakers’ bodies which become themselves vehicles to portray certain ideologies of masculinity. In particular, it reveals a clear polarization between hard and soft masculinity mediated by a set of metapragmatic stereotypes that inherit, in turn, a homonormativity vision which is directly borrowed from the imagery of different gender relationships in Japan.