Around the turn of the century, numerous texts emerged in the Turkish-speaking Ottoman Empire that dealt with sexuality within a scientific framework. By translating the vocabulary of European sexual science, these texts collided different regimes of gender and sexuality that made erotic desire, sexual acts, and subjectivities intelligible. The translation of scientific knowledge about sexuality was not simply a reproduction of inauthentic categories or a transplantation of foreign concepts into Ottoman Turkish, but involved complex processes of negotiation, appropriation, adaptation, and recontextualization. Using translation as a method for examining the intricate relations between the sexual modernities of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, this talk will explore how the concept of sexuality and taxonomies of perversion were shaped through translation. These processes were deeply embedded in the politics of imperialism and nationalism and the profound asymmetries between languages and epistemologies that were themselves polyglot, heterogeneous and fragmented. The translation of sexology reflected different models and regimes of sexuality, but also created an interstitial space between them through which conflicting discourses of love and eroticism could be read.
Mi 12 Jan 2022 | 17:00–18:30
Transfer, Translation and Adaptation of Sexual Discourses in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic
Ezgi Sarıtaş (Ankara University / EUME Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation 2021/22), Chair: Nazan Maksudyan (Freie Universität Berlin / Centre Marc Bloch)
Ezgi Sarıtaş received her PhD from Ankara University, Department of Gender Studies. Her dissertation was published as a book in Turkish in 2020 under the title Cinsel Normalliğin Kuruluşu (Construction of Sexual Normality). Since 2012, she has worked as a research assistant at Ankara University where she teaches courses on feminist and queer theories, history of gender and sexuality. Her current research interests focus on two distinct but related topics: sexual modernity in the Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic, and the feminist and women’s rights movements in modern Turkey. She works with various civil society organizations, groups, and journals in Turkey engaged in feminist and queer activism and research. In the academic year 2021/2022 she receives a stipend from the Gerda Henkel Foundation and is a postdoctoral Fellow of “Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe” (EUME) at the Forum Transregionale Studien as well as a visiting scholar at the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin from January to September 2022.