Dr Lourdes Monterrubio Ibáñez (Pompeu Fabra) on Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography, Tues 3 March, 3pm

Philosopher and activist Paul B. Preciado’s essay film Orlando, My Political Biography (2023) reflects on the epistemic transition necessary to achieve a nonbinary reality. To do so, Preciado addresses his transition as a nonbinary transgender man from a self-representational premise, by considering Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928) as his own political biography. 

The essay film develops as a voiceover letter to Woolf, merging the reflection on the literary work, its appropriation, and the self-representation of numerous contemporary Orlandos, who perform the character and express multiple aspects of their identities. From a nonbinary gaze, Preciado generates transitional thinking to reflect on a nonbinary epistemology by showing the continua between the supposed binary structures: literary representation and audiovisual self-representation, past and present, fiction and reality, character and person, individuality and collectivity. This transitional thinking also generates contemporary utopian thinking through collective embodiment, creating symbolic political actions that realize trans and nonbinary people’s rights.

LOURDES MONTERRUBIO IBÁÑEZ is Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow (Spanish State Research Agency) at Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. She was previously awarded a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Fellowship with the project “Enunciative Devices of the European Francophone Essay Film”, developed at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary cinema, filmic writings of the self, literature-cinema relationships, and female authorship. Her numerous publications include extensive research on epistolary cinema and the essay film. She recently published the monograph Audiovisual Thinking and the Essay Film: The Case of Francophone Europe (Routledge, 2025).

Tuesday 3 March 2026 at 3 p.m.
Film and Screen Media Auditorium, Kane Building B10B (Basement)