Yvonne P. Doderer: Shining Cities: Gender Relations and Other Issues in Urban Development of the Twenty-First Century (2016)

“In the twenty-first century, the majority of people are living in cities—at least this is the credo communicated frequently. This statement has been strengthened by the “urban renaissance” that dawned at the beginning of the twenty-first century and by a globally evident increase in capital investment in urban-development projects. Such planning endeavors are conveyed to the public, the political sphere, and the media with the help of Internet platforms. The visualizations and descriptions found on such project websites are associated with promises of modernization, appeal, and economic growth—in short, with a better life.

In this publication, images and texts from 12 projects planned for Europe, Africa, and Asia are surveyed critically: What do they “tell” about future life in these new urban districts? Who will live and work in these cities? Which forms of living and lifestyles are propagated? And most importantly: How do these designs relate to actual urban reality, including that of the inhabitants to whom the projects are addressed?

Written in a comprehensible way, supplemented by illustrations and photographs, this in-depth analysis sensitizes the reader to the interconnections between urban-space production and societal (gender) relations.”

Self-published, 2016
Digital Peer Publishing Licence (DPPL)
ISBN 9783000550188
321 pages

Publisher

PDF, PDF (8 MB)

Paul B. Preciado: An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (2019–) [FR, ES, EN]

“A ‘dissident of the gender-sex binary system’ reflects on gender transitioning and political and cultural transitions in technoscientific capitalism.

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 Ulrich, 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,” he writes. “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 gender-sex binary 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 recounts Preciado’s transformation from Beatriz into Paul B., but it is not only an account of gender transitioning. Preciado also considers political, cultural, and sexual transition, reflecting on issues that range from the rise of neo-fascism in Europe to the technological appropriation of the uterus, from the harassment of trans children to the role museums might play in the cultural revolution to come.”

French edition
Preface by Virginie Despentes
Publisher Bernard Grasset, Paris, 2019
ISBN 9782246820666, 2246820669
334 pages

Spanish edition
Introduction by Virginie Despentes
Publisher Anagrama, Barcelona, 2019
ISBN 9788433998767, 8433998765
309 pages

English edition
Foreword by Virginie Despentes
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Publisher Semiotext(e), South Pasadena, CA, 2020
ISBN 9781635901139, 1635901138
263 pages

Reviews: Eugénie Bourlet (En attendant Nadeau, 2019, FR), Kevin Lambert (Spirale, 2020, FR), Pierre Niedergang (Diacritik, 2019, FR), Thomas Liano (French Studies, 2020, FR), Bernabé Sarabia (El Cultural, 2019, ES), Emilia Holstein (Feminacida, 2020, ES), Alexandra Marraccini (review31, 2020), Megan Milks (4Columns), Bryony White (Frieze, 2020), Kevin Brazil (ArtReview, 2020).

Publisher (FR)
Publisher (ES)
Distributor (EN)
WorldCat (EN)

Un appartement sur Uranus: chroniques de la traversée (French, 2019, MOBI, updated on 2021-4-13)
Un apartamento en Urano: crónicas del cruce (Spanish, 2019, updated on 2021-4-13)
An Apartment on Uranus: Chronicles of the Crossing (English, trans. Charlotte Mandell, 2020)

3X3X6: Shu Lea Cheang (2019) [English/Chinese]

“3x3x6 is the title of Shu Lea Cheang’s project representing Taiwan at the 58th Venice Biennale and hosted at the Palazzo delle Prigioni–a Venetian prison from the sixteenth century in operation until 1922. 3x3x6 is also the standardised architecture of industrial imprisonment for ‘sexual criminals’ and ‘terrorists’ in the West: 3×3 meters, monitored by 6 cameras 24 hours a day. Shu Lea Cheang investigates historical reports based on ten cases of subjects incarcerated because of gender or sexual dissent and uses trans-punk fiction, queer, and anti-colonial imaginations to hack the history of sexuality as well as contemporary technologies of surveillance.” (from back cover)

With contributions by Matthew Fuller, Paul B. Preciado, Dean Spade, and Jackie Wang.

Curated and edited by Paul B. Preciado
Publisher Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2019
Open access
ISBN 9789860588798, 9860588791
211 pages

Exhibition
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (43 MB)