Sexuality in Translation

Abstract

This chapter looks at the complications involved in the translation of sexual identities within a transnational framework, relating the psychic constitution of the subject to the complex social and political requirements governing the designation of sexual positions. Even if we accept that processes of identification are key to subjectivity, the language that enables us to make sense of these processes does not necessarily have to be tied to identity politics. Confronted with the gap between psychic processes and the politics emanating from them, I argue that both at international and local levels, the pervasiveness of the logic of identity in our ‘post-identitarian’ times corresponds to a pervasive liberal frame of mind by which sexuality becomes an attribute or a property that a subject is said to ‘possess.’ Some of the problems and arguments I bring into this discussion recall old critiques that seem to have been condemned to oblivion, thanks to the fantasy that we have already overcome them. So my interest is precisely to try to understand the pervasiveness of a set of assumptions about sexual orientation an identity when thinking about the sexual in relation to freedom and their ability to survive critique.