ABSTRACT
Drawing on the Nietzschean argument that morals have a history – or, better, a genealogy – Foucault famously refuted the idea that sex and desire belong to the realms of the biological and the psychological, outside of discourse. He claimed that the epistemological category call sexuality should be studied as a modern invention by focusing on the “link between the obligation to tell the truth and the prohibitions weighing on sexuality”. Harvey’s reflections on why translation as a genre of cultural production has historically appealed to sexual subcultures allow closing in on two ways in which sexual minorities have historically utilized translation to carve out a space for themselves and for alternative ideas about sex and sexuality. Foucault’s critical moves paved the way for a vast body of historical, literary and sociological scholarship that locates sexuality within discourse about subjectivity, entrenches it in the discursive practices of modernity and approaches it as a transnational formation.
