Spanning a period of about forty years and its profound socio-political changes, Porpora traces her trans genealogy by adding essential pieces to the historical reconstruction of a culture often relegated to the margins. And she does so as the protagonist of the collective path, still devoid of shared reading, of those who have consciously placed themselves in the border space between genres. With "visual" writing able to render in images what she has seen and experienced, Porpora accompanies us in a world populated by legendary trans women who have given life, form, scene, and screenplay to an experience in many ways closer to the spectacular or performative dimension than to that of real life, from which they were absolutely excluded.
Living that life meant having muscles, calluses, and hard skin. The absence of recognition and rights could only favor illegality, and prostitution - a phenomenon in many respects with characteristics different from those of today - became the backbone of existence. But precisely this path has produced the ability to talk about oneself in a time when there was only the contemptuous appellation of "transvestite" and the vocabulary had still no words like transgender or gender variant.
The anecdotes, myths, and "scandalous" stories that Porpora tells with his ironic and "fabulous" style, are intertwined with reflections on collective awareness, on the birth of MIT (Trans Identity Movement) and on the conquest of legal recognition with law 164 of 1982. Porpora recovers the trans epic of the origins to claim the extraordinary path of persecuted, raped, and wounded in their human dignity, who had the strength to crack the dominant narrative that makes transsexuality a pathological dimension, telling a unique life experience, which also eschews the attempts at normalization of the postmodern era.
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