M+M: An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing

Photo: Marie Rouge

Interlocutor: Ivan Lopez Munuera

One night, months after I have started a process of gender transitioning, I dreamt that I had an apartment on Uranus. That dream was not like other dreams. It was like a virus, it induced the feeling that that extraterrestrial apartment existed. Why Uranus? Why having an apartment on the coldest planet in the solar system, a frozen giant named for a Greek deity? Only much later, I remember that in 1864, the writer and first sexual activist Karl Heinrich Ulrich coined the term “uranism” to define the “third sex” and the rights of those who “love differently.” My trans condition is a form of Uranism. I am not a man and I am not a woman and I am not heterosexual I am not homosexual I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the sex-gender system. I am a Uranian confined inside the limits of techno-scientific capitalism. But, what does it mean to gender transition within a gender binary and patriarchal-colonial regime? How technologies of production of gender and sexual subjectivity have changed since Ulrich times? What has been the role of architecture within the construction and normalization of gender, sexual, and racial segmentation and how is this role changing within contemporary pharmacopornographic capitalism?

Paul B. Preciado is a philosopher, curator, and one of the leading thinkers in the study of gender, sexual and body politics.

Ivan Lopez Munera is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University.

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