Much like earlier feminist thinkers, Harvey is concerned with the translation of a coded, encrypted, neologistic language across cultural boundaries where different linguistic markers, and different socio-political contexts, influence linguistic performativity. The same question arises: how can linguistic phenomena that both derive from and generate a particular socio-cultural phenomenon be translated across cultural /language borders? Harvey notes the tendency on the part of the French translator of Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar, for instance, to tone down the 'camp' language, and surmises that this may be due to French homosexuals' reluctance to 'self-identify according to the variable of sexuality' (Harvey, 1998: 311). It may indeed be an expression of a certain scepticism about the construction of a subcultural community that challenges and parodies heterosexual hegemony, while the 'gayed' English translation of Tony Duvert's Paysage de fantaisie reflects the self-confident existence of such a community in the Anglo-American sphere.

In more recent work (2000), Harvey pays even closer attention to the presence of gay communities and their influence in allowing and encouraging certain types of textual, translational, transformances. This is also a topic explored by Eric Keenaghan (1998) in his work on the 'gayed' American rewriting of Garcia Lorca's encrypted homosexual images. Though Lorca can hardly be seen as having produced discursively performative gay texts of the type Harvey describes, his American translator / adaptor, Jack Spicer, with the gay community as a backdrop, could turn Lorca's subtleties into a 'vulgar (some might say obscene) and sexual register [...] importing a concrete sense of male sexuality and rendering the male body and sexual activity highly visible poetic objects' (Keenaghan, 1998: 274). Here, too, are echoes of the assertive 'feminist translator' who takes charge of the text and rewrites it for her identity-reinforcing purposes. As Matthew Kayahara (2002) has argued, Alberto Mira (1999: 112) makes this question of gay identity and consciousness-raising through translation central to his argument that 'bringing homosexuality in translation out of the closet has to be regarded, first and foremost, as a political gesture'. Again, much like translators working under the first paradigm, Mira takes the position that translators must locate and recognise gay meaning in texts, and then activate it through translation for the sake of community building. Questions about where that meaning is located — in explicit sexual references, in 'camp' dialogue or slang, in subtle evocations of homoeroticism, in intertextual appropriations from pop culture or in some other discursively performative gesture – are complicated, essentially located in the culture of the moment, and therefore contingent.

It is interesting to note the close parallels between the translation challenges that the two gender paradigms have triggered and the strong similarities between the strategies and solutions they call for. In terms of the activist positions taken by translators and by many researchers on gender in the past decades, both paradigms are based on identity-formation and group affiliations, and it is up to the translator to accept or refuse this identification. Moreover, both are constructivist (Nussbaum, 1999), viewing sexual identity as either being unwittingly constructed from childhood or deliberately constructed and acted out as an adult. Both paradigms are reflected in language and can be evoked, displayed, activated, enacted, suppressed or erased both in source texts, and in translated texts when this language is carried over into other cultures and contexts. In this transfer, political or ideological reasons play an important role. Under both paradigms, the producers – translators, publishers, editors – can choose to take assertive activist positions, rendering gender aspects and their own interventions deliberately visible, choosing to translate only those authors/ texts that suit their politics,' or deliberately intervening to make a text fit their particular mindset. Similarly, translation research in historical areas, such as Limbeck's (1999) work on the translations of Plautus that erase all intimations of homosexuality and DeJean's (1989) work on the many French versions of Sappho, can exploit the theoretical and epistemological categories devised in these gender paradigms to do revisionist analyses, and propose new readings of classical and more recent writers, and other key texts. Though deemed to be different, or theorised as differently constructed, the two gender paradigms have so far provoked stimulating versions of similar types of work. Even the warnings about erasing differences, engaging in imperialist processes, or stabilising an identification that is inherently unstable or diffident apply to both, and can be heeded.

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