Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Culture, Theory and Critique, 2026 (ESCI, Scopus)
This article examines the translation of sexological categories into Turkish during the late Ottoman Empire and Republican Turkey, focusing on how multiple frameworks for understanding desires, identities, and acts were negotiated. Through an intertextual reading of a psychiatric book by Mazhar Osman, a prominent name in the translation of sexological terms, the article examines categories of male homoeroticism and gender non-conformity. Tensions within European sexology were intertwined with late Ottoman views on male homoeroticism, which also contained its own conflicts. While translation of sexology intersected with efforts to create a monolingual Turkish nation, it simultaneously destabilised its sexual vocabulary by introducing ‘foreign' taxonomies. Textual and real-life encounters between European and the Turkish-speaking sexual modernities shaped the translation process, which, in turn, were influenced by the structural inequalities of imperialism, nationalism, and cisheteropatriachy. Translation was not a simple transfer of concepts, but a multi-layered process in which the travel of ideas is intermingled with that of people, and carries in itself the potential of subversion of pathologising discourses. The paper concludes that tracing the complex nature of turn-of-the-century translations is essential for reclaiming an anti-imperialist queer critique in confronting anti-gender politics’ instrumentalisation of anti-imperialist rhetoric.