International Queer Arts Festival (FAQ5): Elizabeth Duval

Elizabeth Duval, a controversial Spanish intellectual who, since she published the essay "Después de lo trans" (After trans), has shaken Spain by interspersing reality shows with studies at the Soborna, criticism of the ruling left and ideas of gender self-determination, visits Argentina as part of the fifth International Queer Art Festival (FAQ5) and assures that "it is more important" for her to be feminist than trans: "being trans, in my case, is not a political position, being feminist is".

Duval was born in 2000 in Alcalá de Henares, 30 minutes from Madrid, a city famous for being the birthplace of Cervantes and for having one of the oldest universities in Europe.

He is z generation and in addition to the famous essay, presented to La Caja Books when he was 19 years old, "just a day before his 20th birthday" he tells Télam during the conversation he had in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo, he has already written a collection of poems, "Excepción", and two novels: the self-referential "Reina" and "Madrid será tu tumba", which has as a common thread of its many layers the romance of two squatters, Santiago and Ramiro, one a neo-Nazi, the other a communist, a book that, she says, "dialogues with works like 'Los justos' by Camus or 'Romance del comunismo americano', by Vivian Gornick".

All these books were well reviewed in Europe. Only one book, "Después de lo trans", is available in Argentina, and only during the festival until Saturday.

This was made possible thanks to the mediation of the Centro Cultura de España en Buenos Aires (CCEBA), largely responsible for Duval's visit to the country, his first visit, to participate in the FAQ, this meeting that seeks to make visible works, personal stories and identity politics around queer, a term taken from English that is defined as 'strange' or 'unusual' and relates to a sexual or gender identity that does not elude the hegemonic.

Elizabeth Duval is the name that the writer formally assumed at the age of 19, as a result of the Trans Law in Spain, but she has been using it since much earlier, when at 13, just before her 14th birthday, she told her parents of her desire to transition.

Desire that excluded her from the Catholic school from which she was invited to leave and for which she had to wait two years taking blockers, until she was 16 legal in Spain to start hormones.

Elizabeth Duval is a name that grew out of her love for her grandmothers, both Isabel, one of whom she spent a lot of time with in her childhood. Duval comes from the surname Del Valle, the surname of one of those grandmothers.

The writer will share two events at the FAQ. Next Thursday at 7 pm she will chat with writer Dolores Reyes at the Centro Cultural Kirchner (CCK) at Sarmiento 151 (free admission, limited capacity) and on Friday at 8 pm at Casa Brandon, Luis María Drago 236 (CABA), she will share a live writing set with poet Silvina Giaganti. The latter is free of charge.

"I became friends with Dolores and Selva Almada this year, first at 'Centroamérica Cuenta' and then at the 'Oaxaca Book Fair', we coincided both times", she enthuses in dialogue with Télam, in fact there is a column that Almada wrote for the newspaper Perfil, "Muerteada", about one of those meetings between them; "In the afternoon we went with Liz Duval, with whom we became very close these days, to Xoxocotlán, a small town next to Oaxaca. The night before, in the zocalo, while we were walking around among gringos with their faces painted and music in the streets, some girls told us that if we wanted to see a real muerteada we should go to the Xoxo cemetery".

Duval gives the interview after a 13-hour flight, still jetlagged, and repeats that he has already turned the page on trans and that he has gone "to think about other things." He says this while correcting the essay "Después de lo trans" for a German reversion that aims to internationalize it, to "remove some chapters that only interest Spain and add others. A roll," he assures.

Because "I don't totally agree with everything I wrote, but I already knew that, now it's about nuancing, it means that I have advanced, I have learned, otherwise it would be very boring, but it makes me lazy to face the text and the framework is very good, that's why I say that I also agree with what I wrote", he reflects.

Will this text open debate in Argentina? "They say they are very argumentative here, I don't know," he answers. Spain is a very instructive country where everyone says his own opinion but none of the parties wants to listen to each other and then the debate does not take place. For some time now, everyone speaks for those who are already convinced, for small trenches, the same mechanism as the algorithm of likes".

In the preface to the third edition of "Después de lo trans", September 2021, she notes: "if I were to write it again I am sure I would be less pedantic and a little wiser", but "you don't just write what you want when you want to", the text "comes from us in a specific time", with its specific issues.

"I'm not tremendously angry, which I am too: I'm sick to death of trans," begins the essay that goes to the bone of the current cultural identity disputes and that overflies the trans from science, sociology, aesthetics and philosophy to account for its "diverse" and "incongruous" reality.

Questions gender socialization, the notion of self-determination, rereads the relationship between transactivism and transsexual feminism. Discusses with Judith Butler and Paul Preciado.

"A big problem from the political, as from the literary or from everything else that has very reductionist positions is not to admit the copulative conjunction -says Duval behind his metallic and rounded reading glasses-. There is always a question that is disjunctive, it's either this or that, and in that way important things are lost," just as "if we build ourselves only as islands independent of each other," he points out. "I'm a big advocate of community, of bonding and belonging."

In the dissolution of individuality in the group there is a possibility of multiplying, in identity there is a possibility of being more," he says. It is different when identity becomes a kind of pedestal or object to which we have to worship, or mount an altar".

"It is not my goal," she writes in that essay, "to invalidate" those "who have made the non-binary a political brand of trans" in order to "convince others of the possibility of a genderless future." "I do not believe in that future, and I do not believe that gender will ever become a dead language."

"Trans is," he also writes, "a tool for the integration of apparently anomalous subjectivities" within the "liberal democracies" in which we live, an "instrument of intelligibility that is granted as a consolation prize to those who deviate from the norm and allows them to be integrated, assumed, given a name, domesticated; to reduce the subversive possibilities of different trajectories within the gender system, to narrow the path, to add fences.

The trans, he insists in this text, "does not serve us as a political instrument, it does not serve us as a sociological instrument, it does not serve us as a concept of analysis. That is, in the end, the conclusion of this essay".

The essay "is not written with inclusive language -I could have used a generic feminine, she warns Télam-, but I didn't want it to be an alienating reading for a spectrum of possible readers".

Although "I don't usually use the inclusive -she clarifies-. I'm not particularly shocked that they do and its political use seems to me that it's fine, I even think it's a laudable cause, but those of us who come from philology have a little more difficulty to accept it", he says about the fact that the organic modifications of language are read in other time scales.

And what is queer for Duval? "A non-concept, an escape. It has been applied to so many things that it no longer means anything. I find the field of queer theories very interesting, but that term in my work I have only used to criticize it, I have never done anything constructive with it, it has a very minority range of possible appeal and I am not interested in political articulations for minorities."

Now he is working on an essay where he quotes several times the Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau, "I think he is the one who best dissects and analyzes the phenomenon of fascism, against a purely organic definition of how the ruling class arises, he treats it as the mass phenomenon that it was, he looks at why this desire arises".

Any conception that politics is a rational event where the effects of passions do not play a primary role seems to me an impossibility," he says. I disbelieve that liberal, European, Anglo-Saxon position that says that the political arena is too dirty and that it is necessary to aspire to be more crafty and rational, it reflects a dominant position and the perception of being above the people, who let themselves be dragged by their passions".

SOURCE: Télam