‘Orlando, My Political Biography’: from Virginia Woolf’s room to Paul B. Preciado’s body

Orlando, My Political Biography is transgender philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s response to a request by ARTE (the European public channel dedicated to culture) for a documentary about his life. It is a hybrid and experimental work that explores queer theory through a film-essay, as well as a letter and poem dedicated to Virginia Woolf, the author of Orlando: A Biography. Eight decades after her suicide, haunted by depression and the recent death of her nephew in the Spanish Civil War, Woolf and her character come to life in a film that, instead of claiming a room of one’s own (to quote Woolf’s famous feminist essay), asserts Preciado’s own body and the bodies of all the Orlandos.

Speaking in measured tones, the film’s narrator (Preciado) begins the story with, “Someone asked me, ‘Why don’t you write your biography?’ And I answered: ‘Because Virginia Woolf — that asshole — wrote it for me in 1928.’ Dear Virginia, I’m sorry for calling you an asshole. I say it with much tenderness and admiration… but also a little anger.” That uninhibited attitude toward Woolf is a recurring theme in the film: “Look at all these Orlandos — they’re not poets or aristocrats. They have been reduced to psychiatric patients.” Yet, the film is also a love song to a writer ahead of her time.

Using Woolf’s literary classic as a foil, Preciado places the self in service of a collective history — the history of those who were denied their own stories. As the narrator speaks, we witness a powerful, yet universal, clandestine political act — putting up protest posters on dark streets in the dead of night.

This is a manifesto, a dreamlike declaration that embraces the absolute freedom of the body, devoid of rigid doctrines. It is a collective epistle infused with memories of injected hormones, real and imagined names, transformations, and dreams. It’s not about becoming another person, but about exploring all the possible identities. We encounter Lilie, Arthur, Janis, Oscar, Elios, Amir, Emma, Jenny, and Paul — the son of a seamstress and a car mechanic in a northern Spanish town. And then there’s Orlando, who was taken by his parents to a psychiatrist at the age of 14 for symptoms of gender dysphoria.

Sally Potter transformed a young and melancholic Tilda Swinton into Woolf’s character in Orlando (1992). Preciado, with a touch of humor, similarly explores a bevy of modern faces who might be what Chilean poet Pedro Lemebel (an important interpreter of this new body revolution) called the “children of the future.”