Translating Desire – On Transgression, Queer Subjectivities and Diasporic Yearnings

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez

“No, its not about a gay relationship” the film director Yüksel Yavuz points out in response to a spectator’s comment about the relationship between his two protagonists, Chernor and Baran, in the film Kleine Freiheit (A Little Bit of Freedom, 2003). The director’s reaction caught my attention as I too had identified the friendship between these two boys as a same-sex relationship. I pondered further, trying to understand what Yavuz might mean by this statement. Was he talking about a process of ‘translation’, even though he didn’t mention this aspect? Could we understand my interpretation of the movie as an attempt at translating the story within my horizon of understanding, as Gadamer called it “Verstehenshorizont”? What might happen in this process of translation with the original message of the film? Would it be transformed to a new set of meanings, in which the original code becomes an attributed name? As Walter Benjamin (1970) reminds us, translation is not bound to reception or mediation, it does not involve per se a communication process. ‘Translation’, seen as a genuine process of creating meaning has its own logic that cannot be confused with the task of interpretation. Nonetheless, an interactive process – a transfer - takes place when we try to understand a text.

In relation to the representation of same-sex desire, it could mean that our attempt to read the ‘identical’ in a text of ‘différance’ could lead us to overlook the moments of mis/disidentification. An assumed ‘universal sign’ like ‘gay’, could then be pushed to the limits of signification, when it is set within the space of migration and diaspora. Yavuz’s observation could thus indicate the lack of correspondence between a “queer discourse”, influenced by the struggles, movements and intellectual debates that took place within a white Anglo-Saxon context and the language of his protagonists marked by a complexity and ramification of deferring and referring experiences. To situate the two protagonists Chernor and Baran within a theoretical framework that does not spell out the processes of subjectivization and subjectification in the context of migration and diaspora, omits the complexity of the ‘mode of being’ that the film might try to show us. It is in relation to this observation that the question of how to read or translate the text using the productivity of the movement of ‘différance’ emerges. This form of translation could be considered a tool of transversal reading. Following this idea I will try in my contribution, to spell out the tension between ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ in the process of translation by thinking through a deconstructive perspective to a hermeneutic approach to the notion of ‘understanding’. Departing from this idea I will link ‘translation’ to ‘transversal reading’ by discussing the film “Kleine Freiheit”. In short, my attempt will be to explore the relationship between ‘translation’, ‘queer theory’ and migrant/diasporic subjectivities.

Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez

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