Paul B. Preciado, Un appartamento su urano. Cronache del transito, 2020

Uranus, the icy giant, is the coldest planet in the solar system and also a god in Greek mythology. In 1864 Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, one of the first European transsexual activists, developed the concept of Uranusism to define the ‘third sex’. Paul B. Preciado dreams of a flat on Uranus where he can live outside of power relations and gender and sexual categories. “My trans status,” says the author, “is a new form of uranism. I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am not heterosexual. I am not homosexual. I am not even bisexual. I am a dissident of the sex-gender system.” In this book, which brings together a wide selection of the ‘chronicles of transit’ (in Italy translated in part by Internazionale) he recounts his process of transformation from Beatriz to Paul B., where hormones and a legal name change are as important as writing. This is not only the chronicle of a gender transition, but also that of a planetary transition. Preciado analyses other processes of political, cultural and sexual mutation, tackling different topics: the Catalan question, Zapatismo in Mexico, the Greek crisis, Trump’s America, new forms of male violence, the figure of Assange, sex work, the harassment of trans children or the role of museums as engines of a possible cultural revolution. This is a brave, transgressive and important book that starts from a personal experience to question the foundations of a society that excludes heterodoxy, problematises it and turns it into a disease.This is a book written from the edge, from a lucid queer radicalism, which seeks to free the body and mind from moral bonds and political restrictions. Preface by Virginie Despentes.