Orlando, My Political Biography (Paul B. Preciado, 2023) (Patreon)

Going into Orlando, I knew only a little about Paul B. Preciado, a queer theorist who completed his dissertation under the tutelage of Jacques Derrida. Much of his work has been about transgender experience as a liminal state that severs the presumed connection between gender and assigned sex, and in his book Testo Junkie, he likens the transformation of his body through testosterone with other phamacological interventions (birth control, steroids, psychoactive medications) that alter the chemical composition of the human body. Although this is a radical simplification, Preciado's work on sex and gender seems aligned with the post-humanist movement, and his identification with the figure of the "monster" echoes Donna Haraway's notion of the cyborg, or Jasbir Puar's concept of the terrorist -- that subject who exists outside of the confines of Western explanatory modes.

Taken as a debut film, Orlando, My Political Biography is a triumph. Preciado's facility with the language of post-Godardian modernism is formidable, and taken as both a film and an extension of his critical theory, Orlando is a work that combines philosophical investigation with the free play of poetry. In fact, poetry itself becomes a key term in Preciado's project. For him and the various subjects who appear in the film (all playing different "Orlandos"), poetry, or perhaps more properly Poiesis, is the radical action of forging understanding from inchoate feelings, undefined affect, and the creative yearnings that have no name within our ideologically limited vocabulary.

Preciado's Orlando is a Brechtian film. Actors exchange roles, announce themselves as performers within a production, sets and backdrops are patently fake, and in the margins of nearly every frame, the studio apparatus -- lights, scaffolds, cameras -- are quite visible. What is unique about Preciado's approach to Brecht, however, is the fact that here distanciation is a kind of material metaphor for Orlando's conception of transgender existence. Most of the people who appear in the film actively identify against the gender binary. Some are nonbinary. Others state that they are not men or women, but specifically trans men or women. And still others feel no need to identify with any gender at all.

Early in the film, Preciado takes aim at the field of psychiatry and its historical role in gatekeeping, deciding who is "really" trans and who is not, and then allowing or prohibiting gender confirming care on that basis. Orlando features a musical number with a group of people in a shrink's waiting room -- folks who present across the gender spectrum -- all singing "you are not the doctor's bitch." Using Virginia Woolf's novel as an ur-text, Preciado rejects the compulsory heterosexuality traditionally associated with the gender dysphoria diagnosis -- aka, the transmedicalism or "truscum" narrative -- since in Woolf's novel, Orlando changes gender without explanation and, more importantly, without internal crisis. Orlando's challenges are come from without, as they are stripped of rank and property when they appear as a woman.

There is a joyous rebellion coursing through Orlando, and this has everything to do with Preciado's critical engagement with Woolf's novel. It is what we might call a redemptive or collaborative reading, with Preciado taking what he needs from the book and leaving the rest aside. And the director is quite right to identify Orlando as a radical intersection of literary modernism and a radical reconception of gender. Again, if we treat Preciado's film is a text somewhere between a film and a critical essay, it becomes possible for us to at least acknowledge its oversights. The film's attempt to recuperate Woolf's patrician worldview is not always successful, particularly when Preciado argues that by situating Orlando's transition in Constantinople, Woolf was drawing attention to the otherness of British colonialism, rather than betraying just how steeped in that ideology she inevitably was.

The great value of this film is that it highlights people, bodies and souls, who have found their place not inside the gender binary but somewhere else. They are inevitably disruptive bodies, within the binarist and heteronormative regime. But they are also just individuals who rewrote their bodies and lives according to their desires. As Preciado says, trans people are "gender poets," limning the frontiers of gender and sexuality in ways that had previously been unimaginable.

Perhaps of more concern is Preciado's deconstructionist attitude towards gender and the blind spots that it creates. He is quite correct that the film's various Orlandos should not be forced to manipulate their identities to fit into the dominant fiction, and this has very material consequences that Preciado addresses, from anti-trans violence to the "un-personing" impact of being denied legal paperwork reflecting their true selves. At the same time, Orlando fails to acknowledge that some trans experience does exist along a gender binary -- a transition from one to the other -- and this cannot simply be chalked up to ideology. After all, if desire is the repository of fugitive desires that are irreducible to the workings of power, then that must go for all desires.

Near the end of Orlando, Preciado states "to be trans is to discover the backstage of sexual and gender difference." In other words, to be trans is to be a gender Brechtian, looking beyond surface reality, discerning underlying relations of power and desire, and ideally revealing those hidden realities to others. In this regard, passing or "stealth" trans life is positioned as an uncritical "realism," one that promotes the falsehoods Preciado wants to destroy. It is of course very common to begin a project of deconstruction with a mere reversal of the binary opposition. Science, psychiatry, and politics reward a "correct" trans identity, and denigrate identities that don't fit. So let's flip the hierarchy. That's empowering as far as it goes, but it forgets that Derridean deconstruction is a two-step process. One doesn't just flip the binary, but takes it apart by showing that the ostensibly different terms are so interpenetrating that, in the end, there is no difference at all. Orlando, My Political Biography is a brilliant film, but it mostly makes me optimistic about the films to come.