Paul B. Preciado makes his filmmaking debut with a film about his sexual identity

With the same impetus of questioning to which he appeals in texts such as contrasexual manifesto oh Pornotopia to dismantle the canonical perspective on power, gender or sexuality, the Spanish philosopher Paul B Preciado has just presented his first film at the Berlin Film Festival, Orlando, my political biographyan adaptation of Orlando of Virginia Woolf published in 1928 which chronicles the life of an English nobleman who changes sex over four centuries.

Preciado, known for neglecting the boundaries between literary genres in works that cross medicine, public policy and the pharmaceutical industry to tell how the gender binary disciplines culture and excludes bodies that resist regulation from the system, presented now in the Meet the So section – called Berlinale, a sort of autobiography that includes that of many members of the trans collective in this adaptation of Woolf’s work which already had a film version directed by Sally Potter in 1992 with Tilda Swinton as the protagonist.

The author defines himself as nonbinary trans man and calls for overcoming the assertive patterns that determine sexual difference, a statement that dialogues with Woolf’s visionary text. Indeed, the rookie director said shortly after the screening that he wanted to tell his life, but that it had been told a century ago by the author of Waves in the text featuring a young man growing up to be a 36-year-old woman.

“It’s a great philosophical question. What is a life? How to tell a life? For me, for example, telling my life is easier with the Orlando of Virginia Wolf than to go to Burgos, where I was born, to go to the school where I studied, because these places do not say exactly what my life is. The storytelling of a life is always an exercise in fiction, basically, that we choose”, he defined in a recent interview.

Preciado is one of the most persistent and recognized voices in queer theory and gender studies today. follower of Jacques Derridaare queer manifesto (2002) is the reference title in its field and published last year World dysphoriaan analysis “on disease as a tool of political control” born of the pandemic, a moment of political, social and economic crisis in which an “insurrection of subjugated knowledge” flourished thanks to feminist struggles, the anti-racist movement and the trans collective

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Philosopher accustomed to the French media – he lived for a long time in Paris – this also activist and art curator has now become a director with his first film, Orlando: My Political Biographywhich caused a stir when it was screened at the Berlin Festival, not only for its ingenious story – which mixes all kinds of genres and uses all kinds of scenic resources – but also for its sensitivity, humor and originality.

woolf wrote Orlando: A Biography inspired by the life of his former partner, the poet and novelist Vita Sackville Westwho was the protagonist of several scandals in England in the 1920s due to his extramarital affairs with women, with whom he fled a family that always forced him to return home with her husband, the diplomat Harold Nicolson.

In his film, Preciado reviews the evolution of transsexuality throughout history and proposes a new world freed from the impositions of capitalist and colonialist patriarchy: he insists on the need to abolish gender, or at least their impositions and inherited biases, to include those who are not. perceive themselves as male or female, or as heterosexual or homosexual.

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“If the masculine and the feminine are ultimately political and social fictions, ‘Orlando, my political biography’ wants to show us that change is no longer just a question of gender, but also of poetry, love and the color of skin,” she said.

The work is in line with the formulations of his book world dysphoriawhere he asserts that we are in the transition from an analog society to a digital society and before the dismantling of a society which was organized “around binary taxonomies (heterosexual-homosexual, male-female, machine-organism, animal- human) and hierarchies of race, species, gender and sexuality of modernity, which served to legitimize the domination and violence of some bodies over others”.

Source: Telam

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