Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a complicated figure. The gender-bending title character of her 1928 novel exists in a fascinating tension with both the politics of Woolf’s time, and the history that they move through – spanning centuries, continents, identities –and this is something that Paul Preciado is acutely aware of when discussing his own interpretation of Woolf’s work, the film Orlando, My Political Biography.
While Preciado is effusive in his praise and love of Woolf’s writing, he also acknowledges that Orlando is 'politically positioned in a certain context: of Virginia Woolf being of a certain class, of a certain imperial British moment'. He wonders if, in spite of this, Woolf herself was 'fighting against those elements of her culture'. Preciado describes this culture, and all of the ugliness it can contain – imperialism, racism, homophobia, misogyny – as the 'layers of our own history'.
