Paul B. Preciado

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 in Ulrich's footsteps, 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,' writes the author. `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 genus-gender 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, a chronicle of a crossing, recounts the process of transforming from Beatriz into Paul B. during which the author transformed his body and subjectivity through the self-administration of testosterone. Yet An Apartment on Uranus is not simply an account of gender transitioning, but rather of a global transition: Preciado analyses other processes of political, cultural and sexual transition, reflecting on socio-political issues including the rise of neo-fascism in Europe, the migrant crisis, the Zapatista struggle in Mexico, the fight for Catalonian independence, Julian Assange, sex work, Trump's America, the harassment of trans children, the technological appropriation of the uterus, and the role museums might play in the cultural revolution to come. AN APARTMENT ON URANUS is a bold, transgressive and necessary book which takes a personal experience as a starting point to question the foundations of a society which excludes heterodoxy and proclaims it deviancy or illness, putting forward a radical argument for a new gender politics.

What constitutes a "real" man or woman in the twenty-first century? Since birth control pills, erectile dysfunction remedies, and factory-made testosterone and estrogen were developed, biology is definitely no longer destiny.In this penetrating analysis of gender, Paul B. Preciado shows the ways in which the synthesis of hormones since the 1950s has fundamentally changed how gender and sexual identity are formulated, and how the pharmaceutical and pornography industries are in the business of creating desire. This riveting continuation of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality also includes Preciado's diaristic account of his own use of testosterone every day for one year, and its mesmerizing impact on his body as well as his imagination.

In November 2019, Paul B. Preciado was invited to speak in front of 3,500 psychoanalysts at the École de la Cause Freudienne’s annual conference in Paris. Standing up in front of the profession for whom he is a ‘mentally ill person’ suffering from ‘gender dysphoria’, Preciado draws inspiration in his lecture from Kafka’s ‘Report to an Academy’, in which a monkey tells an assembly of scientists that human subjectivity is a cage comparable to one made of metal bars. Speaking from his own ‘mutant’ cage, Preciado does not so much criticize the homophobia and transphobia of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis as demonstrate the discipline’s complicity with the ideology of sexual difference dating back to the colonial era, an ideology which is today rendered obsolete by technological advances allowing us to alter our bodies and procreate differently. Further, Preciado calls for a radical transformation of psychological and psychoanalytic discourse and practices, arguing for a new epistemology capable of allowing for a multiplicity of living bodies without reducing the body to its sole heterosexual reproductive capability, and without legitimizing heteropatriarchal and colonial violence. Causing a veritable outcry among the assembly, Preciado was heckled and booed and unable to finish. The lecture, filmed on smartphones, ended up published online, where fragments were transcribed, translated and published with no regard for exactitude. Eighteen months on, Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts is published in a definitive translation for the first time.