David Johannes Gees

In 1987, Gloria Anzaldúa published Borderlands/La Frontera, a boundary-bending and poetic journey through the histories of Chicanx and borderland communities, the colonial violence of European imperialism, and the bleeding wound carved by the 1,950-mile border separating Mexico and the United States.
32 years later – in 2019 and across the Atlantic Ocean – Paul B. Preciado releases An Apartment on Uranus, a collection of essays grounded in his trans crossings through corporeal and legal borders, toward a contemporary Uranism and a dwelling on planet Uranus.
The project approaches Anzaldúa and Preciado in a relational cross-reading, emphasizing the bio- and necropolitical violences that mark their respective histories and bodies. Through this lens, it examines how both authors mobilize topological figures to articulate a politics of crossing.
„[E]very step forward is a travesía, a crossing. I am again an alien in new territory,“ Anzaldúa calls. „The crossing is a place of uncertainty, of the unobvious, of strangeness. It is not a weakness, but a power,” Preciado responds.