An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing

by Paul B. Preciado, Virginie Despentes (Foreword by)

Overview

A “dissident of the gender-sex binary system” reflects on gender transitioning and political and cultural transitions in technoscientific capitalism.

Uranus, the frozen giant, is the coldest planet in the solar system as well as a deity in Greek mythology. It is also the inspiration for uranism, a concept coined by the writer Karl Heinrich Ulrich in 1864 to define the “third sex” and the rights of those who “love differently.” Following Ulrich, Paul B. Preciado dreams of an apartment on Uranus where he might live beyond existing power, gender and racial strictures invented by modernity. “My trans condition is a new form of uranism,” he writes. “I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am not heterosexual. I am not homosexual. I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the gender-sex binary system. I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a uranist confined inside the limits of technoscientific capitalism.”

This book recounts Preciado's transformation from Beatriz into Paul B., but it is not only an account of gender transitioning. Preciado also considers political, cultural, and sexual transition, reflecting on issues that range from the rise of neo-fascism in Europe to the technological appropriation of the uterus, from the harassment of trans children to the role museums might play in the cultural revolution to come. An Apartment on Uranus is a bold, transgressive, and necessary book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635901160
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	01/28/2020
Series:	Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
File size:	521 KB

About the Author

Paul B. Preciado is a writer, philosopher, curator, and one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender and sexual politics. He is the author of Pornotopia (Zone Books) for which he was awarded the Sade Prize in France, and other books. He lives in Paris and is Associated Philosopher to the Centre Pompidou.

Table of Contents

Preface Virginie Despentes 13

Introduction: An Apartment on Uranus 21

We Say Revolution 43

Who Defends the Queer Child? 45

Politically Assisted Procreation 50

Candy Crush Rehab 53

Monkeys of the Republic 56

Necropolitics-French-Style 59

Women's Right to (Sex) Work 62

Declaring a Uterus Strike 65

The Bullet 68

Onfray in the Fray of Gender Confusion 71

Love in the Anthropocene 75

Amnesic Feminism 78

Marcos Forever 81

Statistics Are Stronger Than Love 84

The Attractive Force of a Break-up 88

Feminism Is Not Humanism 91

"Snuff" Sovereignty 94

The Courage To Be Yourself 97

Trans Catalonia 101

Pedro Lemebel, Your Soul Will Never Give Up 104

Valentine's Day Is Crap 106

The Neoliberal Museum 109

Necromodernity 112

Calling the Ajayus 115

Chemical Condoms 118

Orlando on the Road 121

Strays 124

In the Arms of the Rodina Mat 128

An Other Voice 132

Your Wheelchair Turns Me On 136

Beirut Mon Amour 140

Agoraphilia 143

Who Is the Greek Debt Keeping Warm? 146

A School for Alan 149

Forgetting the Idea of Being Special 153

Etymologies 156

Homage to the Unknown Nanny 159

Journey to the End of the Bed 163

Sleepless Night 166

The New Catastrophe of Asia Minor 169

Identity in Transit 172

My Body Does Not Exist 175

Journey to Lesbos 178

First Names: Paul Beatriz, Request 34/2016 181

My Trans Body Is an Empty House 184

For Marx, Happiness Is Political Emancipation 187

The Place That Welcomes You 191

Destruction Was My Beatriz 194

Athens Teen Spirit 197

Pack Up Your Things 200

Our Screens Are Watching Each Other 203

After the Book, Let's Print on Flesh 206

History's Backside 209

San Francisco, the "Clitoris of America" 213

The Stateless Exhibition 216

I Would Like to Live 220

Our Bison 223

Intersexicide 227

The South Does Not Exist 231

Tweety Bird Has a Meeting with History 234

My People are the People of the Ill-Born 238

Democrats against Democracy 242

Moving Bodies 246

Celebrations 249

I Don't Want a President 252

The Son 256

Letter from a Trans Man to the Sexual Ancien Régime 259

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Paul Preciado has the magic ability to fire off imperatives that don't feel bossy, but rather incite us to join him in whatever crackling energy, urgent curiosity, and dynamic nomadism is flowing through him. Reading these chronological missives offers the real pleasure of Preciado's company in time, and inspires us not just to stay with our trouble, but to greet it with unstoppable speech, complex solidarity, glitter, and defiance.

—Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts

Editorial Reviews

Paul B. Preciado's New Novel Longs for a World that May Never Come. 'An Apartment on Uranus' is a book about horizons, possibilities, love, desire and alternate spaces of gender-dwelling, written in a time, as the foreword puts it, 'that has not yet arrived.'—FRIEZE—

An important philosopher-theorist of gender and sexual politics for more than two decades now, Preciado is an electrifying writer: capable of packaging damning analysis, utopian vision, and flamboyant drama into one fell swoop.

—4Columns—

From the Publisher

03/27/2020

Preciado, author of the seminal Countersexual Manifesto and early explorer of gender and sexual politics and theory (e.g., the sexual ramifications of architecture), includes here columns written from 2013 to 2018, relating his transition from Beatriz to Paul and much more. The frame of reference to Uranus in the title is multivaried, deriving from the 19th-century term, uranism, or third sex, and Preciado's vision of living beyond contemporary conceptions of race and gender—"I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am not heterosexual. I am not homosexual. I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the gender-sex binary system." Essay topics range from the trans-crip movement to the fate of the bison, with pieces arranged chronologically and running one to three pages in length. Many are riffs on their subjects and digestible in small portions. What sets these entries apart from other writings in the queer and trans theory tradition is the clarity of prose and thought. VERDICT Preciado engages complex ideas from a number of ancient and modern-day philosophers and theorists, which might challenge the uninitiated, but the dreamlike quality of the work is sure to resonate with readers of the great French writers Jean Genet and Albert Camus. Highly recommended.—David Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Libs., Philadelphia

Library Journal