Anatomy Lessons: Trans Life Between Portraiture and Performance in Paul B. Preciado's Orlando, My Political Biography (2023)

This article considers how trans lives are mediated across literary, painterly and filmic registers in Paul B. Preciado's Orlando, My Political Biography (2023). My analysis draws on Andrew Webber's development of reading practices applied to intertextual works that also exhibit interpictorial and interfilmic dynamics in his reading of a scene in Christian Petzold's Barbara (2012) that features the studied contemplation of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632). I adopt Webber's reading of the surgical and theatrical space of Rembrandt's painting as a point of departure for thinking about compositional scenarios that move between modes of portraiture and performance. More specifically, I approach the process of restaging — and reimagining — the literary text as one that can also render the construction and performance of trans and nonbinary identities in Preciado's personal and political documentary. In turn, I argue that the disposition of scientific investigation as an analogue for critical cultural work frames Preciado's invitation to read closely and queerly for the material and mediated presence of trans subjects across history and a range of media: from the printed page to contemporary art cinema.