I will be playing the role of Orlando (My Political Biography)

Flaunting their usual penchant for engaging and—excuse the pun—novel screenings, AFS’s Paper Cut series pairs films with books in partnership with local bookshop Alienated Majesty. Given Alienated Majesty is home to some of the best independent book curation in Austin, the partnership is a well-made match; the pairings are not simply adaptations but titles in conversation. 

Naturally, for the screening of Orlando, My Political Biography (2023), directed by Paul B. Preciado, Alienated Majesty displayed Preciado’s own written work, highlighting his 2008 book Testo Junkie. For the unfamiliar, Preciado is a contemporary Spanish philosopher and a preeminent writer on gender and sexuality in Europe. Like My Political Biography, Testo Junkie blends formats, being one of the first titles to popularize “autotheory,” a blend of memoir and critical theory that draws from feminist-of-color writings like Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera.

Preciado describes Testo Junkie as a “body-essay.” As in the film, in Testo Junko he blends the autobiographical with the perhaps-fictional with the theoretical, examining through the assemblage of convention the way gender is done and undone, itself an assemblage of technologies. 

At the most reductive, Orlando, My Political Biography is a documentary-of-sorts, exploring Virginia Woolf’s Orlando through interviews with transgender folks and narration from Preciado in the form of a letter to Virginia Woolf. Each of the 26 subjects introduces themselves as “playing the role of Orlando,” Orlando becoming a stand-in for transgender subjectivity. As Preciado is Orlando, so is he, so is she, so are they. The title of the film is instructive: it is Preciado’s “political biography”–not an autobiography, but a tapestry of trans experiences united under the concept of Orlando.

This approach artfully dislodges the typical framing of a trans biography. Instead of presenting a well-worn formulaic “truth” about transition, the film presents a multiplicity of lives and gender feelings, where they meet at critical, sociopolitical institutions. Preciado constructs scenes that blend fiction and nonfiction, staging the interviews through and adjacent to scenarios that often take on heightened tension for trans people, such as visiting the doctor, or navigating having government-issued identification documents at odds with your lived experience. These moments are where “documentary” as a label wears thin, as Preciado does not follow his subjects in their day-to-day lives, but instead examines the underlying structural forces that shape the kinds of experiences he and his interviewees discuss. 

Importantly, the film does not take a realistic approach but pulls on deliberately theatrical–even artificial–conventions. We cut between interviews and scripted segments, real locations in France and visibly constructed setpieces. The waiting room of The Psychiatrist, who will approve a hormone prescription only if you meet his predetermined heteronormative criteria of gender, transforms into a site of trans resistance as the subjects swap tips on how to present to the doctor before breaking into a song and dance number complete with disco party lights. The solidarity between patients in this clearly scripted scene moves the encounter with the oppressive force of the state into a moment of mutual recognition between the subjects. We can take, assuming this is documentary, as truth the structuring of this event (the trans patient must perform a heternormatively gendered identity to obtain life-saving medication; the doctor is a gatekeeper of trans life; trans patients teach each other how to navigate this system) and understand through the break in literal depiction the complex affective minefield that Preciado and his subjects name pharmacoliberation in the chorus of their song, as they sway together in the neon glow of the waiting room-turned-club. 

As far as an object of trans “representation,” Orlando, My Political Biography is an important piece. Preciado covers a wide ground as he weaves through Orlando’s story, embodied through the Orlandos, past and present, interviews and archival footage and scripted moments of play. There is a danger to this approach. To cast all trans people as Orlandos is to suggest a single narrative, each fragment ultimately part of the same whole of “transness,” even if some stated lived experiences differ. But the film mostly manages to avoid this through interrogating what Orlando represents to begin with, correctly pointing to the societal, structuring forces that condense trans lives into a shared narrative while using that narrative to criminalize how trans people live. 

By playing with the documentary format, teasing apart how an interview is conducted, toying with the lines between autobiography and fiction, Preciado pushes us away from a single truth toward a more critical engagement with depictions of transness, of gender difference, from the juxtaposition of archival footage of Christine Jorgensen and Coccinelle and Sylvia Rivera to the 26 trans subjects of the film to, of course, Virginia Woolf and Orlando him/herself. 

It’s a rich, dense text. It is not, nor does it pretend to be, a manual for understanding transness, the pretext of many nonfiction (and fiction!) films about transgender lives. And in this regard, it is one of the more successful films directly about transness I’ve seen, and as a film about media about transness. As always, the opportunity to see this sort of work at AFS is a delight, one I hope that my Austin-based readers will continue to take advantage of.