Orlando

Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari

The chief charges 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; (3) that she was an English Duke who had married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which sons now declaring that their father was deceased, claimed that all his property descended to them.... Thus it was in a highly ambiguous condition, uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman, Duke or nonentity, that she posted down to her country seat, where, pending the legal judgment, she had the Law’s permission to reside in a state of incognito or incognita as the case might turn out to be.

Virginia Woolf’s genre-bending Orlando: A Biography is not quite a novel, and not quite a biography of Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West. But it is a playful text, thick with possibilities. The book covers the long life of Orlando, a young man born in the sixteenth century, who somehow continues living up to the present day (that is, the 1920s)—and who unexpectedly transforms into a woman halfway through her life. Suzanne and Chris explore how the book’s playfulness both interferes with and enables its depictions of wreaking havoc on perceived gender binaries and its vital considerations of the relationship between sex, gender, history, and identity.