Paul B. Preciado: "The trans experience is as radical, and I know I'm exaggerating, as the Holocaust, exile or emigration"

• Interview with Paul B. Preciado: "I'm much more realistic than the fascists"
• Berlinale Paul B. Preciado drops a dazzling and beautiful trans bombshell in the heart of the Berlinale
• Shon Faye Interview: "Trans Visibility Has Become Toxic"

From the Berlin Festival to the San Sebastian Film Festival, from philosophy to cinema, from the Beatriz who went to the Paul who is, Paul B. Preciado (Burgos, 1970) has become one of the most influential references of a revolution in progress. Any of them. 'Orlando, My Political Biography' arrives in theaters as one of the revelations of the year. The adaptation of Virginia Woolf's classic acquires in the hands of the 'queer' thinker the gesture of a whole manifesto of the future. And, in the background, the barking.

Do you finally feel like a prophet in your homeland? It's the first time the film has been seen in Spain [at the San Sebastian Film Festival] and it's been very exciting. Suddenly, it's like a collective dream, a kind of joint political hypnosis. Also, my parents saw it. And my father, who is 92 years old and who always tells me that I am only appreciated outside of Spain, was impressed. He said, "You're an artist." For him, who is an amateur painter, that's a lot. Where does the need or whim to make films come from? I had never thought about making films. Cinema seemed to me to be the hegemonic and quite normative cultural industry. He was convinced that in cinema you don't have the freedom that you have in philosophy. Writing, obviously, is an area of incredible freedom, but it's also true that when you bring out a philosophy book, I won't say that it's between you and you, but almost. My idea was to make a non-binary film. My obsession is to be able to look at a body in a different way. But I wouldn't talk about the male gaze or the female gaze, but a non-binary gaze. What we can't do is do the same from somewhere else. I've learned a lot from feminist cinema, because that's where I come from. Filming the process of oppression is not the same as filming political liberation. But you have to be wary of this boom in supposedly trans films that, in truth, are not. They are trans-themed films but treated from a binary point of view. And then there are a lot of movies about how hard it is to be trans, about victimization... All that doesn't interest me. The idea is to show the process of survival, of political emancipation; That people leave the cinema aware of what we are experiencing. We are in a moment similar to that of the French Revolution, but it is not a bloody revolution. It is not a revolution of forms of government, but of forms of the epistemological gaze. And you know where I've noticed it the most... Where? When I started working with trans boys and girls for the film, I would get a call from parents younger than me, hetero, lifelong binaries, who would say, "I have a son or a child at home who talks like you, who is like you. And I don't understand him. And the kid tells me to read 'Countersexual Manifesto.'" If someone had ever been able to explain to my mother what was happening to me, my life would have changed.

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Berlinale.

Sofía Otero, 9 years old and who plays a trans girl, confirms the streak of Spanish cinema at the Berlinale

• Written by: LUIS MARTÍNEZ Berlin

Sofía Otero, 9 years old and who plays a trans girl, confirms the streak of Spanish cinema at the Berlinale

Debate.

Transsexual artists speak: "I'm fed up with trans, I'm retiring as an activist"

• Written by: LETICIA BLANCO Barcelona

Transsexual artists speak: "I'm fed up with trans, I'm retiring as an activist"

A moment from 'Orlando, my political biography'.

I imagine that the rejection of binarism can also be applied to other areas, that is, to cinema itself, which divides between analogue and digital, or between documentary and fiction... The very committee that selected the film at the Berlin Film Festival told me that the categories they work with no longer work. Interesting films are somehow no longer written solely as documentary or fiction. When I say a non-binary film, I mean that too. Is there such a thing as a trans phenomenon? In a short time there are two Spanish films that have this plot as their central theme. From the 1990s onwards, trans minorities began to become more visible politically, but also because of a set of demands for rights, which is very basic. For too long, the demands for trans rights themselves have been hidden under the gay and lesbian community. But it is true that some trans issues are there because they have to do with sexual and gender dissidence, but deep down they have nothing to do with it. Because at the end of the day, a trans person doesn't have papers. In the end, a trans person is in a relationship with the medical system, which is a relationship of total subordination, of subordination. It is more like the relationship that a hysterical woman might have had in the nineteenth century with the psychiatric establishment. The trans struggle is very specific. And I find it very unfortunate that there is a political instrumentalization from the extreme right of trans life, of the trans body, and that it becomes a place of battle that looks more like the fall of the West. Because it's weak. Trans people are probably one of the most vulnerable political bodies in the patriarcho-colonial system as a whole. And about the phenomenon I was asking about... I don't see any fashion. What I do see is that today it is much easier to express yourself as a trans person. Since I was four years old, I have seen myself as a non-binary person. Even the nuns said it: "There are the boys, the girls and Beatriz (that's what I was called then)." And I've always felt that way, but it's true that within the homosexual movements of the time, I couldn't express myself. Something else happened to me: I didn't know what it was exactly. Then, as a philosopher, I tried to understand that process. But it's not a fad at all. We are living in a moment of absolutely fundamental political vindication. There were many people who lived in a situation of invisibility. It was almost a matter of life and death for trans people. We're talking about people who either didn't have access to their medication or who didn't have papers. We are talking about a situation of extraordinary precariousness and political vulnerability. What do you think of the trans-themed films that I was talking about? One of them was at the same Berlin Film Festival as hers. A film is a technology that not only represents a reality but creates it. And that's why it's, to some extent, very dangerous. My obsession was and is to make a film that comes out of that genealogy of representation of the trans person as a monstrous person, as a person who is in the wrong body, as the whole genealogy of cinema shows the trans person. Since Hitchcock's Psycho, the trans person is either the killer or the murdered, or both. In the records of the horror film or the exotic-porn film, the trans person is the prostitute who is on the side of a road and who will end up naked.It gives at some point and, of course, dead. Those images are destructive of subjectivity when you're a trans person. There are a lot of people now making films about trans people after supposedly documenting themselves. It reminds me of when white people made black movies like 'Guess who's coming to dinner?' Or like people who start making films about emigration without knowing what they've read in the newspaper. It seems to me to be extraordinarily irresponsible. So, only a trans person believes they are allowed to make a film about the trans experience? It is a political experience so specific, so radical and so important that, I am aware that I am going to exaggerate, it resembles the Holocaust, exile, emigration... They are experiences of the limit, of confronting yourself with political death. When it is exoticized and treated as "a topic", it may end up fueling hate speech and generating much more normative views than before. That doesn't happen in his film... No, because the film has been built among all the 'Orlandos' and each one has demanded that their voice and body be heard. And that's critical. The opposite is similar to people who painted their faces black when they were white. There are trans actors who can bring their expertise to trans characters. Why do you think trans people arouse so much hatred, even from a part of feminism? It is no coincidence that the two arrowheads of neo-fascist hatred are migration and transgenderism, because what is being called into question is the racial and sexual taxonomy of colonial modernity. What is proposed is the possibility of crossing a border and subverting privileges, because at the end of the day that's what we're talking about. That's why I talk about a revolution like the French Revolution, because what we're talking about is what the sovereign bodies are, which bodies have access to what forms of government, and which bodies are excluded from that social contract. There is a set of bodies that have been granted sovereignty historically, but of course, sovereignty has been granted at the expense of a whole set of subordinate bodies that have been excluded. And those bodies suddenly say, "Hey, I'm sorry." They claim a position within the democratic spectrum. I think that process for me is one of the most beautiful political processes I can imagine. What we need to do is to broaden that democratic spectrum more and more. Despite everything, his film ends up becoming an optimistic musical... Yes, because I'm very optimistic. For me, optimism is a political methodology. I see all the neo-fascist and neo-patriarchal languages as the last gasp of a regime. And it is clear to me that we must take advantage of the moment of freedom we are experiencing. Freedom is a practice, one has to fight for it every day. Are you interested in women's football? I'm interested in the sense that it's part of this political revolution we're experiencing. I find it very interesting and symptomatic that what has happened in football has happened. I remember when I went to live in France, people said to me: "But why do you live in France?" And I replied because in France philosophy is like football in Spain. Football is the place where the public imagination is built in the Spanish context. Football is the space of the hegemonic gaze, it is the space of the stereotyped representation of the male body. Therefore, it seems to me thatThis is a very important battle. And boom.

• cinema
• Trans Law
• Transsexuality
• Philosophy