Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the question of how translation and sexuality are connected or potentially interrelated. It demonstrates the analogies between sex and the scene of translation: just as sex bears witness to a "coming undone" of the corporeal self, translation manifests the coming undone of the linguistic body as an independent, sovereign, and territorialized entity. The book offers another approach to the sexualization of translation, employing translation as a mode of queering global sexuality studies and a tool for calling into question the illusion of the universal prerogative of theories. It also demonstrates how an ethnographic viewpoint can capture the many different processes involved in the translation of nonnormative genders and sexualities into the context of present-day Turkey. The book examines Frederick Marryat's Pacha of Many Tales as a queer translation, in which various textual modes such as pseudo-translations, real translations, and imitations co-exist.