‘The teachers would refer to boys, girls – and you’: trans philosopher Paul B Preciado on reinventing Orlando
![‘The teachers would refer to boys, girls – and you’: trans philosopher Paul B Preciado on reinventing Orlando](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/42de7f792a297218e309afa57c3cb4567a7defa9/60_0_1800_1080/master/1800.jpg?width=460&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=730a93e1f4fd1a2d081e94c5d91af89e)
He was mentored by Jacques Derrida, amd his memoir about taking hormones broke new ground. Now, Preciado’s radical cinematic riff on Virginia Woolf’s novel explores a life spent defying the gender binary
In the opening seconds of Orlando: My Political Biography, a shadowy figure in a quiet city street says: “Someone once asked me, ‘Why don’t you write your autobiography?’ And I replied, ‘Because Virginia Woolf fucking wrote it for me in 1928.’” The scene takes place in the dead of night, with the silence broken only by the swish of a brush as this speaker pastes up a large gold poster. “Orlando,” it reads, “où es tu?”
Moments later, this fly-poster apologises to Woolf for his profanity: “I say it with tenderness and admiration, because your writing seems impossible to surpass. But I also say it with rage, because you represented us – trans people – as aristocrats in colonial England who one day wake up in a woman’s body.”
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