Paul B Preciado has crossed continents and genders. With Orlando he redefines documentary film

Paul B Preciado first encountered Orlando as a teenager, at convent school. Virginia Woolf’s novel, which chronicles 300 years in the life of a young Elizabethan nobleman who inexplicably changes sex, left an indelible impression.

“I don’t think the nuns knew what it was,” the writer, trans activist and philosopher says. “Can you imagine? I chose the book by chance. And because the book was called Orlando: A Biography I took that seriously. I thought, if this is a biography, then my life is possible.

“I’m Spanish. I identify with the Irish people because Catholicism and political rebellion shape our societies. That was my context until Orlando. Suddenly, fiction became more important than reality for me. This was fantastic. I thought my life was going to be like the book; it would be full of adventure. Maybe it even determined that I became a writer.”

Orlando certainly overlaps with Preciado’s primary genre, the “body essay”. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, a chronicle of the author’s experiments with testosterone that was published in 2008, offered a dense, Foucault-inspired study of the intersection between the pharmaceutical industry, pornography and late capitalism.

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In 2019, in a wide-ranging address on the pathologisation of trans people by a field codified by European white men, Preciado told 3,500 psychoanalysts gathered in Paris: “I am a monster talking to you.” Preciado was heckled and booed off the stage.

“This is everyday knowledge among the trans community,” says Preciado, who began transitioning in 2014. “As soon as we start transitioning, someone else who has experience will tell you to play a role. I remember when I was asking for my legal documents, I was working with a fantastic representative. But all the time they said, ‘You have to shut up. You speak too much to the lawyer.’ Like they are teaching you what the script should be.

“It’s theatrical in a sense. You have to play a role: the good trans person. We always speak about the construction of identity. But it’s also the destruction of our political agency that is happening in those places.”

Preciado was born in Spain, before moving to New York as a Fulbright scholar to study philosophy under Jacques Derrida, who became a mentor. Preciado has published several intellectually rigorous, unclassifiable texts, including An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing.

Having crossed continents and genders, he has now redefined documentary film.

When Preciado was approached by the Franco-German television channel Arte to document the author’s trans journey, he suggested the French feminist theorist Monique Wittig and the transgender author Leslie Feinberg as alternative subjects. When the producers persisted, he jokingly pitched a documentary adaptation of Orlando.

As he explains in Orlando: My Political Biography, the resulting hybrid feature, he hasn’t written his biography, “because f**king Virginia Woolf wrote it for me in 1928”.

“The common narrative about what a trans person is, basically: you were assigned one gender and then it’s a long journey and a struggle for you to become something else,” Preciado says.

“This story is told with medical language and legal language. Arte were not condescending. They came to me because I guess they loved my writings. But no matter how generous they were with their proposal, they’re coming from a binary gaze. I’m not criticising them, because the binary gaze is the epistemic and political regime in which we all live.

“It’s very difficult for someone who doesn’t have a trans experience, or who is not close to a trans experience, to understand what it is to not identify with the gender that you have been assigned when you were born, or not wanting to belong to one of the two genders that are supposed to be natural.

“Beyond the trans narrative we know, there is a philosophical question: how can a life be narrated anyway? The conventional ideas – the day you were born, your family, your school – are not what I understand as life. And our lives are much longer and more collective than an individual trajectory.”

Taking a line from Woolf’s novel – “Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another” – Preciado invites a diverse group of more than 20 nonbinary and trans people to audition as and play Orlando. Each performer grafts their experiences on to Woolf’s story of courtly romance and unrequited love, making for an astonishingly rich seam of ideas.

“When you are part of a political minority, either as race, as a woman, as a migrant, you are the witness and somebody else decides how to tell your story,” Preciado says.

“Everything became possible and even more beautiful for me as soon as I realised that this Orlando identification was not just my own. When I started working on the casting I brought in some of my friends and people who were super important to me, like Jenny Bel’Air, who is the oldest woman in the film.

“It’s a kind of multiplicity of different practices and dissidents to the binary gender regime. I don’t care if people have changed their names or if they are legalised by the state. All nonbinary or trans experiences are equally important to me.”

“Every Orlando,” Preciado explains in the film, “is a transgender person who is risking his, her or their life on a daily basis as they find themselves forced to confront government laws, history and psychiatry, as well as traditional notions of the family and the power of multinational pharmaceutical companies.” His multiple Orlandos ultimately find expression – and joy – in a century-old novel. His political biography doubles as a stinging riposte of older trans-themed screen tragedies.

“I’m pathologically optimistic,” he says. “I knew I wanted to avoid a narrative that a trans person would end up completely isolated or criminalised. I never thought that the film had to be joyful. But when we were shooting the scenes, there was such an intense energy. And something that I learned from my black feminist teachers is that a political minority doesn’t have the luxury of pessimism. For me, joy is an active political methodology.”

Orlando: My Political Biography is in cinemas from Friday, July 5th