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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Keith Harvey
University of Manchester, UK
Although some work in lesbian and gay studies recognises that representations,
theories and models of gender and sexual identity/community developed in one
cultural area may traverse national-linguistic boundaries and exercise an
important influence in foreign cultural spaces, this work often operates with
the model of the (liberating) influence of Western discourses on the practices
of homosexuality in the ‘developing’ world. (Indeed, this is sometimes further
mapped onto a universalising – transhistorical and transcultural – view of
homosexual identity and practice.)
Panel 4: Translation and the Construction of Gendered Identity
Intercultural Histories of Cultural Identity: The Case for Sexuality
Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies,
To date, little sustained work has been done on the multiple ways in which
representations, theories and models of sexuality develop through intercultural
processes,nor indeed on the manner in which negotiations with rival
conceptualisations of sexuality operating actively within ‘the West’ are
themselves often realised through interculturality. Such research would present
multiple processes of exchange (human, textual, institutional, etc) between
cultures as centrally important to an understanding of the prevalent regimes of
cultural identity in a cultural setting at any given moment. It would also
emphasise how such exchange involves active and transformative processes.
Although not an exclusive focus, translation and translations would occupy a
central position in an intercultural studies of this type.
This paper argues the case for intercultural history in lesbian/gay studies by
examining the French fascination in the 1970s with the model of gay emancipation
in the United States. This fascination is characterised by a dynamic of
attraction, assimilation, transformation and rejection. Key figures involved in
these debates include translators, academics, and activists, such as
Alain-Emmanuel Dreuilhe, Michel Foucault, Guy Hocquenhem, Brice Mathieussent,
Philippe Mikriamnos and Georges-Michel Sarotte – many of whom lived out the
translational pressures of the time through various types of physical (as well
as textual) displacement into the foreign space. More broadly, the paper
envisages using translation and translatedness as the paradigm case for all
sorts of intercultural traffic while also intimating the possibility of an
intercultural studies predicated upon a vision of cultural space as necessarily
traversed and constituted by (mis)recognitions of cultural others.
© IATIS 2003