ABSTRACT
Scholarship in queer studies has long discussed movements for LGBT liberation as bolstering a Western, modern, and self-sufficient idea of the subject which is predicated on a linear, developmental temporal construction. Queer critique programmatically engages sexuality as a modern discursive formation alongside other modes of difference such as race, class, gender, and nationality. This chapter offers a few preliminary reflections toward developing a "translational queer approach" as part of the ongoing interdisciplinary effort to develop a queer epistemology capable of engaging sexuality as a modern discursive formation alongside other modes of difference such as race, class, gender, nationality, and language. It analyzes "queer" localization by approaching it as a kind of "unmarked" translation work that can elicit alternative models of subjectivity. Although the project was originally devised to intervene into American public discourse, fifteen foreign versions of the It Gets Better project were produced through an atypical process of translation by the users of the online platform themselves.
