Freifeld, Sam_Senior Thesis 2026

Orlando’s Many Forms: How Narrative Autonomy Shapes Trans Stories Sam Freifeld Senior Thesis | 2026

Freifeld 1 Sam Freifeld Dr. Jewell Senior Thesis March 2, 2026 Orlando’s Many Forms: How Narrative Autonomy Shapes Trans Stories ​ Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is often considered to be the first English trans novel. Orlando begins the novel as a young boy living in the English aristocracy of the sixteenth century, and ends the novel as a woman in her thirties in twentieth century London. In this paper I will use “they” to refer to Orlando as a whole throughout the novel, and “he” and “she” when talking about specific passages where Orlando uses those pronouns. Throughout Orlando’s centuries and genders, they are writing a poem about an oak tree, and have many lovers and experiences. However, readers view Orlando’s journey through the lens of Orlando’s biographer. This causes a rift between what readers can see of Orlando and the rare times Orlando can speak for themself. This limits readers’ knowledge about Orlando’s transness and takes away Orlando’s autonomy in describing themself. The presence of Orlando’s biographer warps the reader's view of Orlando, someone who defies traditional boundaries of life, attempting to make Orlando more understandable but ultimately less truthful, despite the biographer's fixation on facts.

Paul B. Preciado (1970-present) adapted Woolf’s novel into Orlando: My Political Biography, a film that both adapts the novel but expands not only who Orlando is, but also what it means when the biographer is an Orlando. Preciado creates an on screen visualization that blends fiction and non-fiction to depict a holistic view of many trans experiences. The biographer or author who controls the lens in which we view trans characters has the power to give and take autonomy, translate unknowability, and ultimately the power to give or withhold truth.

Freifeld 2 ​ Orlando’s biographer tries to create an impression of themselves that they are a scientific truthseeker who does not concern themselves with frivolous things like art. For example, the biographer states: “Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet,” (Woolf 14-15).

The biographer is excited to record the life of Orlando, and tries to distance themselves from artistic writers, foreshadowing Orlando’s poetic career. The biographer’s ideas about what is truth and fact extend to their hatred for describing emotional details: “All these sights, and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began the riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests,” (Woolf 16). The biographer hates recording emotional truth because they consider it to be beneath them, and beneath factual truth. However, when recording the life of a transgender individual, emotional truth may carry even more weight than factual truth. Knowing who oneself is internally, yet the physical world not representing that makes the truth exist emotionally, yet not physically. This makes it harder to trust the biographer’s depictions of Orlando, because we know that the biographer ignores certain emotions in favor of depicting what the biographer deems to be truth. When Orlando is doing ambassador work in Turkey, the biographer seems to have a harder time finding out what really happened. Even though there aren’t trustworthy sources available, the biographer still attempts to stick to only the facts: “There exists, even to this day, rumours, legends, anecdotes of a floating and unauthenticated kind about Orlando’s life in Constantinople (we have quoted but a few of them)” (Woolf 124). Orlando caused a lot of gossip in Turkey, and the biographer still chooses to not believe any of it, despite that it may still have some value. However, the biographer's adherence to what they think is true gives Orlando’s magical transition more credibility, because they only seem to care about the facts of what happens.

Freifeld 3 Even though the biographer does not depict certain emotions they see as frivolous, what information we do get from them we can know to be factual, even if it is not the entire story. ​ Orlando is a being who spans centuries and genders, something that the biographer must try to come to terms with in their scientific lens. The biographer chooses to ignore topics they find difficult or too big for their scope. First, when faced with an unknowability different from Orlando, time, they say: “This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation. But the biographer, whose interests are, as we have said, highly restricted, must confine himself to one simple statement” (Woolf 98). In this instance, the biographer even acknowledges that time “deserves fuller investigation,” but instead still chooses to pigeonhole their mission into creating a simplistic truth that does not engage with hard topics such as the meaning of time. When the biographer applies this dismissal of topics they find hard to describe or engage with to their core subject, Orlando, we miss out on a depiction of Orlando’s harder experiences.

Similarly, in the modern day, trans representation has attempted to ignore the harder and less heteronormative topics, just as the biographer does to Orlando. In his article “On the Necessity of Bad Trans Objects” Caél Keegan writes, “In place of the popular journalistic and internet discourses that increasingly demand the production of “good” trans objects, this analysis suggests a return to the trans object—that is, the “bad” trans object that cannot fit within the aesthetic system being agreed upon to represent reality.

The bad trans object threatens the very stability of sexual difference itself, and therefore must be either ignored or erased” (Keegan 29). Although the biographer is studying Orlando, the biographer avoids trying to describe Orlando’s gender experience, beyond her experience of the patriarchy after she becomes a woman.

Freifeld 4 ​ Not only does the biographer choose to not depict Orlando’s transgender experience, but when they must, they try to translate it into something the reader can understand. After Orlando’s magical transition, the biographer slips up on her pronouns: “His memory–but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’-- her memory then…”

(Woolf 138). The biographer knows that there is something beyond the binary about Orlando, but still chooses to go by “convention’s sake” to describe Orlando. Even though using the pronoun “she” might be an approximation of the truth, the biographer thinks that that is what will be easiest to understand for the reader. The biographer thinks they know their reader well and tries to pander to them in other aspects as well: “She played the trick twenty times on him and he paid her over £17,250 (which is about £40,885 of our own money)” (Woolf 183). The biographer tries to translate the amount of money into their modern time to make it easier for the reader to understand how much money Orlando was taking from the Archduke. However, this translation hinges on the biographer assuming the time and place of the reader. The biographer makes simplifications about Orlando to translate to the assumed reader of their work. The act of trying to make Orlando more legible to the audience removes autonomy from Orlando and tells their own story how they would want to. ​ The biographer’s obsession with facts and truth, while they simultaneously ignore the truth if it becomes too difficult to describe, gives the reader a blurry image of Orlando’s life. The scientific lens of the biographer explicitly leaves out important emotional truths of Orlando while the unwillingness to engage with hard topics leaves out large swaths of Orlando’s gender identity and thoughts about living through four centuries. Finally, the biographer attempts to translate hard topics into simple facts so their assumed reader can understand Orlando. If Orlando could speak their own experience, the reader would be able to break

Freifeld 5 through the medium of the biographer to be able to better understand who Orlando is. Preciado’s film Orlando: My Political Biography, inserts the word “my” into the title and asserts his own autonomy of telling his own trans story without the need for a secondary biographer. ​ Preciado took it upon himself to adapt Woolf’s novel into a film, transforming the original material into something that represents trans people more vividly in the modern age. He is taking back the autonomy of Orlando by becoming both Orlando and the biographer. Preciado, a Spanish transgender philosopher and writer, directs the film Orlando: Ma Biographie Politique, or in English: Orlando: My Political Biography. He applies his own philosophy about the intersection between technology and gender to the film. In his book Countersexual Manifesto, Preciado writes: “If architecture is a political technology for fabricating social space, then bodies, too, can be understood in architectural terms.

This is how I began to look at dildos and medical techniques of intersex and trans reconstruction as design, prosthetic, and bioarchitectural technologies that could be inscribed within a larger history of technological modification to our material bodies and our perception of space, time, and reality,” (Preciado 3). Preciado’s philosophy about how technology and medicine are major factors of being a transgender person in the twenty-first century contrast the magical realism of the original novel. While the outcome of being trans is the same, the methods could not be more different.

The presence of government and medicine trying to control access to life changing technology is very present in the film, bringing forth the realities of being trans. Preciado’s idea about viewing bodies through the lens of the technologies society has created, that bodies themselves are a material, contrasts Woolf’s trans magical realism by viewing technology as power. Instead of waiting around for a magical transition, trans people have the technological power to create themselves.

Freifeld 6 ​ While Preciado is no stranger to academia, his choice to create a film adaptation of the movie reflects his ideas about trans representation in media, as well as the belief that academia makes art inaccessible. He writes in Countersexual Manifesto: “Academic discourse and its grammar not only are like a forest that doesn’t allow us to distinguish between individual trees but also go a step further, forcing the researcher to cut the trees down in order to understand the forest,” (Preciado 4). In the film Preciado takes on the role of the biographer, a researcher into the lives of the subjects of his film. Instead of an academic reading of them, Preciado offers an artistic interpretation. This aligns with his ideas about the destructiveness of academic analysis. His values are similar to that of Susan Sontag. In her essay “Against Interpretation,” she explores how the meaning of art changes with the academic institution’s involvement. “The modern style of interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it digs “behind” the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one” (Sontag 4). Both Preciado and Sontag believe that academic analysis has the power to destroy something important from its subjects. When making a film about trans people, Preciado finds it important to not destroy the essence from the people he is representing on screen. ​ Preciado’s adaptation of Woolf’s Orlando is a representation of trans people that fights against stereotypes and simplification. Preciado’s film contrasts trans representation in media by giving his subjects autonomy to tell their own story.

However, representation, especially in film, has a history of harmful rhetoric around trans bodies. Eliza Steinbock discusses how trans people are often portrayed as deceitful, by undermining their autonomy: “Though the filmic reveal is often played for comedic laughs or light drama, it actually stages a forced, violent moment of physical disclosure that undermines a trans character’s understanding of themselves” (Steinbock 5). An example of this violent moment of disclosure is in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective,

Freifeld 7 when Ace tries to prove that Lois is lying about being a woman by ripping her clothes off to prove that she has a wig and fake breasts, even going so far to rip her skirt off to prove that her genitals are fake, ultimately revealing her tuck. The police force watching all descend into sounds of disgust while Lois is humiliated. This scene portrays the trans character as deceitful about her gender and removes all autonomy of her own disclosure of that fact. In addition, she is portrayed as a criminal who uses being trans to advance her crimes, further associating her gender identity with lying. This example of the dehumanizing trans reveal is an example of the type of representation that trans people had, especially in the twentieth century. ​ As acceptance of trans people grew in the twenty-first century, representation started to change. Dubbed “the tipping point era” by Keegan, trans representation started to change in major media. Representation switched to only showing trans people in a positive light without showing flaws or ways they might go against binary heteronormativity. This representation of “good trans objects” was used to contrast the extremely dehumanizing representations of trans people before (Keegan). An example of this type of representation is Laverne Cox in Orange is the New Black. Although it is a step up from things like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, it does not show a nuanced perspective on what it means to challenge the gender binary. Crucially, the “good trans object” is a binary trans person who fits the norms of their gender. The work of Preciado’s film contrasts both the objectifying representation of trans people, and also the heteronormative representation of trans people. Preciado is making a film that centers autonomy and nuance: “I wouldn’t say sexual indifference but rather the invention of a non-binary paradigm. That’s very important to me. And it’s the same for the segmentation between fiction and documentary. I didn’t want to choose between one genre and another. Once again. I wanted to make a non-binary

Freifeld 8 film” (Andriani 15). Preciado’s commitment to creating a film that is “non-binary” and has a nuanced representation of both Woolf’s novel and the real lives of the trans people he is representing on screen is a contrast to the all-bad or all-good depictions that has come before it. ​ Preciado’s choice to adapt Woolf’s novel instead of creating something original brings the ideas from the novel into the present, while also challenging some of Woolf’s unrealistic ideas about transition. When considering the adaptation of book to film, there are two kinds of visualization when reading the novel. First, the reader’s imagination, and second, in the case of Orlando: A Biography, images Woolf chose to include in the novel. Woolf’s choice to include different portraits of Orlando over the years, as well as Orlando’s lovers, shows that it is important for readers to be able to visualize Orlando throughout the centuries in a specific way. These portraits challenge the visualization that readers have in their head of Orlando (Figure 1).

Applying a trans lens to this, Woolf is challenging readers to visualize Orlando differently than how they would imagine, which is similar to the ethos of gender transition: challenging how other people visualize oneself and bringing the truest version of self into the world. Despite her inclusion

Freifeld 9 of the portraits, Woolf thought of film visualization as separate from literary visualization: “As early as 1926, Virginia Woolf, commenting on the fledgling art of cinema, deplored the simplification of the literary work that inevitably occurred in its transposition to the new visual medium and called film a “parasite” and literature its “prey” and “victim” (1926: 309). Yet she also foresaw that film had the potential to develop its own independent idiom: “cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression” in words” (Hutcheon 30). Woolf draws out the key differences of representation in books versus films. She understood the film could capture something novels could not. This is especially true for Preciado’s adaptation, especially visually. Gender transition is bringing an emotional truth into the world, especially in one's appearance, which is why having a visual representation of Orlando is important. ​ Crucially, Preciado takes on the role of both the biographer and an Orlando, while highlighting the wide range of trans experiences. When Orlando becomes their own biographer it gives Orlando autonomy to tell their story how they want it to be told.

Throughout the movie, Paul addresses Woolf directly, explaining to her how being trans is similar or different to her depiction from the twentieth century. Paul explains to her in his opening monologue of the movie: “Someone once asked me: “Why don't you write your biography?” I replied: "Because fucking Virginia Woolf wrote my biography in 1928.” I’m sorry I said “fucking” Virginia Woolf. I say it with tenderness and admiration, because your writing seemed impossible to surpass. But also, I say it with rage because you represented us trans people as aristocrats in colonial England, who, one fine day, wake up in a woman’s body. You didn’t know, perhaps, that this was not how one became trans. It was

Freifeld 10 much more difficult. We risk our lives every time. And I wanted to write to tell you that I am one of your Orlandos. I am alive. I came out of your fiction. The contemporary world is full of Orlandos. We are changing the course of history.” (Orlando: My Political Biography 0:01:000:02:00).

The first line of the movie depicts how impactful Woolf’s novel is to Paul, but also how it makes being trans into a magical thing that only happens to rich people. Paul wants to expand on Woolf’s original idea by bringing it into the present day, most importantly, by pluralizing Orlando: there is not only one trans experience but many. Another choice Preciado makes in the movie is having each actor introduce their real names and that they will be playing Orlando in the film. This gives each trans person the autonomy to name themselves for the audience, which makes their representations more authentic to who they are. Because of the mixed documentary-book adaptation genre, this is another way Preciado is bridging the gap between representing real experiences of trans people and the novel at the same time. Another way that Preciado depicts who Orlando is in the film is by having the actors wear an Elizabethan ruff around their neck. This motif is both to add continuity between Orlandos, but also to poke fun at Woolf’s Orlando’s aristocraticness. ​ Preciado depicts modern trans struggles through Woolf’s characters, for example by depicting a psychologist as the Queen.

The Queen holds institutional power over Orlando in both the novel and the film, however that power differs greatly. While film character Dr. Queen is questioning one of the Orlandos’ gender in his office, other Orlandos in the waiting room share tips and hormones together, representing how the trans community has the power to fight oppressive systems through uniting to help each other. In Woolf’s novel, Orlando is alone in her experience, with no power to fight against the legal system: “The chief charges

Freifeld 11 against her were (1) that she was dead and therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the same thing,” (Woolf 168). Orlando’s gender identity is preventing her from being able to access her inheritance because she is a woman, and the legal system is making it hard for her to live the life she chooses. While not the same type of oppression that modern trans people face today in the legal system, Orlando still faces a legal system that does not care about her gender identity. By adding a scene of trans people supporting themselves and their community to fight the medical system, Preciado shows the power of uniting and supporting one another.

The song “Pharmacoliberation” plays as the Orlandos revel in their freedom from the medical system. ​ While Preciado’s verbal thesis comes at the beginning of the film, the film's visual thesis doesn't come until the end, when Paul does surgery on the novel, where the portraits once were, Paul sews in pictures of modern trans people. The imagery of the surgery and sterile environment is especially poignant, because of the impact surgery and the medical system have on the lives of trans people. Prediaco flips the script by becoming the surgeon, choosing his own icons to place into Woolf’s novel, just as by creating the movie he is becoming the biographer. He sews in pictures of Marsha P. Johnson and Lou Sullivan. Through his movie, Preciado is updating Woolf's story, but keeping the essence the same. Especially in his first quote of the movie, he has a lot of respect for Woolf’s writing and imagination of trans life, but just needed to bring it into the modern era through a visual representation. In addition, Preciado explains why the novel means so much to him: “This is why this book is crucial for me: my future existence became possible not in reality but in fiction and thanks to fiction,” (Andriani 10). The importance of reading Orlando: A Biography made him be able to believe what was possible for him to transition, even if many of the elements were fictional, that is

Freifeld 12 precisely what made him want to believe that transition in the real world was possible. In addition, this ethos connects to the genre-bending nature of the film, that the film is not completely fictional or documentary. The fiction of Woolf’s novel inspires actions in the real world, just as actions in Woolf’s world inspired her novel. Truth and fiction are not completely different things, which is something that the film sticks to as it jumps from quoting the novel to interviews about the different Orlando’s lives. ​ In the last scene of the film, the Orlandos gather in a court room to take their power from the government and remove barriers that oppress trans people. Preciado corrects Woolf by saying: “And it is not by an oak tree that Orlando went to seek comfort, they went to the highest authorities of government to demand their recognition” (Orlando: My Political Biography 1:24:00). Woolf’s Orlando is passive in a lot of ways; she just lets life happen to her without much control or thought as to if she could change it.

Preciado’s Orlandos recognize and utilize that power to change the world to help their community. This is possible because Orlando is not one, but many, and is not isolated in their experiences. The judge enters the courtroom and declares: “By the powers invested in me by Virginia Woolf and literature, I declare the abolition of the assignment of sexual difference at birth and its legal and administrative registration. Thus, I grant planetary, non-binary citizenship to Orlando Emma…” (Orlando: My Political Biography 1:38:00-1:40:00). Once again, Preciado recognizes the power that reading Woolf’s novel gave him, and he uses it to give the Orlando’s citizenship to the world. As the Orlando’s receive their passports one by one, they experience and represent trans joy in using their power against the oppressive government. The passports not only represent that they are part of the world and here to stay, but also that they are all part of the community, one that has diverse experiences and people in it.

Freifeld 13 ​ While Woolf’s novel was a groundbreaking representation of a person who changes genders, its ideas of how that might happen do not accurately reflect the struggle of being trans in real life. Even so, her novel gave Preciado the power to imagine what life could be like as a trans person, fighting against oppressive structures like the government and medical system. Preciado’s movie goes beyond representing trans people as one-dimensional villains, or one-dimensional perfect heteronormative versions of themselves, instead he represents the trans experience as fully as possible on screen. Despite the anti-trans rhetoric of the government, Preciado is taking control of telling his own trans story, something that is true to himself and others. This act of taking control of one's own destiny, especially in a visual sense, parallels gender transition of bringing a true vision of the self into the world. Preciado’s visualization of Woolf’s novel and himself merge his Orlandoness with becoming his own biographer, making an emotional truth realized. While originally, the biographer serves as a translator for the reader to simplify Orlando’s experience, Preciado does the opposite: expanding on what it means to be trans for different people and uniting to fight against systems that are heteronormative and exclusionary.

Freifeld 14 Works Cited Andriani, Viviana. Interview with Paul B. Preciado. Les Films du Poisson, 24images and Arte. Feb 2023. https://www.thepartysales.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/0 2/ORLANDO_DP-print_A5_web.pdf Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation, Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bu/detail.action?docID =1016075.​ Created from bu on 2025-11-14 03:31:31.

Keegan, Cáel M. “On the Necessity of Bad Trans Objects,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 3, pp. 26–37, 2022.

Mr Super Sonic. “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994) “She’s a Man!” Scene.” YouTube, 6 Feb. 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=92ncM37dtBk. Accessed 14 Jan. 2026.

Preciado, Paul B. Counter-sexual Manifesto. Translated by Kevin Gerry Dunn, Columbia University Press, 2018.

Preciado, Paul B. Orlando: My Political Biography. Les Films du Poisson, 2023.

Steinbock, Eliza. “Introduction.” Shimmering Images, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2019.

Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Picador, 1966.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Harper Collins, Boston, 2022.