Paul B. Preciado and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Une Valise Transféministe, 2019

Une valise transféministe is an ensemble composed of three suitcases containing books and a film.

The film brings the books to the screen. Between a portable library and transition kit, Une valise transféministe gathers photographic excerpts of feminist, lesbian, queer, anarcho-libertarian, and trans texts. A visual representation of shared reading, the film poses (and seeks to give one possible answer to) the question of how text and books can be exhibited. From the underlined sentences, highlighted passages and footnotes of references marked for further study, a portrait of a reader—or several readers—emerges, as well as a powerful legacy of feminist and transfeminist thought.

All the texts depicted in the film recur as physical books in the three suitcases. Each of the used suitcases is filled with a particular set of books from a specific era: one with books published before 1900, another with works dating to 1900-2000, and a third with publications since 2000. Each comes to represent epochs of feminist and transfeminist thought.

Among the books are novels, memoirs, historical and political treatises, philosophical tracts, manifestos and theoretical essay, classic and foundational feminist and transfeminist texts, on topics that include, among others, class and race relations, colonialism, suffrage, the rights of women, human and nonhuman animals, gender and sexuality, and love.

Feminism, it has been claimed, begins again every generation: a fragmentation that can undermine the achievements of previous generations. Une valise transféministe, then, is also a gesture of recuperation, against this forgetting, stipulating a long trajectory of feminist and transfeminist thought and activism. In addition to histories of thought and activism, the book-filled suitcases also evoke transitional spaces, both literally—travel—and metaphorically—the state of becoming. The work also recalls Gonzalez-Foerster’s series of works, entitled tapis de lecture, composed of carpets and piles of books forming the bibliographies of the work itself.