The Orlando Series:

Transgender Art, Colonial Reckoning

This talk offers a genealogy for transgender embodiment in the wake of the British empire, with a particular focus on the lives and afterlives of Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending fantasia, Orlando. Drawing on present-day responses to Orlando, including the work of Chitra Ganesh, Mickalene Thomas, and Paul Preciado, the talk is part of a larger book project on the queer/trans colonial archive. Unsettling what has been a longstanding emphasis on the criminalization of sodomy, this consideration highlights feminized migrant labor, including sex work and care work, as central to the construction of sexual normativity across empire.