[Launch] THEY LIED TO YOU ABOUT THE EUNUCHS by Odete

Join us for the launch of 🕯️ THEY LIED TO YOU ABOUT THE EUNUCHS 🕯️, a book project by Odete, published by OUTLINE (2025). The book introduces the history of eunuchism through auto-theory, historiography, historical fiction and poetry, exploring this identity in the ancient world and what kind of echoes can be heard in the present day. After a reading by Odete, she will be joined in conversation with our dear Ire.

Find the book here: https://rile.space/books/they-lied-to-you-about-the-eunuchs

Schedule

17:00 Presentation and reading by Odete, followed by a conversation hosted by Ire

About THEY LIED TO YOU ABOUT THE EUNUCHS

This book project introduces the history of eunuchism through auto-theory, historiography, historical fiction and poetry, exploring this identity in the ancient world and what kind of echoes can be heard in the present day. By overlapping various histories, and drawing the line between eunuchs in antiquity and contemporary gender discourse, Odete makes a case for a history of gender that hasn’t yet been written, asking what is the relevance of eunuchs to the history of art? And what does the study of the eunuch expose about the current world? 

About Odete

Odete works between performance, text, visual arts and music. Her work is obsessed with historiographical writing, using erotics and paranoia as two somatic ways of relating to the archival materials. She writes through her body, speculating biographies of historical characters through epidermic pleasures: fashion, personality, presence, fragrance, grace, sensibility. She claims to be a bastard daughter of Lucifer, descending from the medieval practice of satanic pacts to alter one’s gendered body. Lately she has been researching and working around building connection points between “effeminate” histories, from the baroque Castrati to the 19th century dandies.