Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era

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Los capítulos teóricos me dejaron sin palabras al principio: tenía la sensación de estar leyendo algo completamente nuevo, de estar accediendo a un tipo de conocimiento hasta ahora secreto que ponía de manifiesto lo endeble de las bases en las que cimiento mi identidad. Noté que incluso cuando me apartaba del texto seguía respirando un aire enrarecido, que lo que había leído me entraba en el torrente sanguíneo como la testosterona que Preciado se administra clandestinamente. The primary point of contention, especially for feminists influenced by Irigaray (or those of us who believe in the raw materials of the body), is that of Preciado’s argument on the constructiveness of sex—and not just gender. The difference, as s/he even observes in their critique of second wave feminism, is that that sex has been defined as being biological, chemical and chromosomal—it is internal to the body—whereas gender is external to the body, a chain of culturally created signifiers mapped onto the body. S/he claims, however, sex is a “biofiction.” It is in large part a fiction because it cannot be distinguished in any logical or pragmatic way from its relation to gender, specifically because the pharmacopornographic regime, with its economy of chemical and hormonal drugs, has irreversibly altered the relation of one’s gender and sex: “[t]he issue no longer comes down to considering gender as a cultural force that comes to modify a biologically determined foundation (sex). Instead, it is subjectivity as a whole, produced within the techno-organic circuits that are codified in terms of gender, sex, race, and sexuality through which the pharmacopornographic capital circulates.” I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the State will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. I am a copyleft biopolitical agent that considers sex hormones free and open biocodes, whose use shouldn’t be regulated by the State commandeered by pharmaceutical companies.

I went to the New School, for philosophy. I had come from Spain on a Fulbright scholarship, which was very different then. Continental philosophy was more of what I studied at the New School. But what was great for me was that in this context, I had the great chance of meeting Derrida, who became for me a mentor. He was my teacher in a seminar with Ágnes Heller, and I spoke French, so it was fantastic. He was the most generous professor I ever had. He invited me to teach a seminar. I then ended up living in Paris, and now I’ve been there for the last ten years. N2 - Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) is many things at once: a fictionalised account of its author-narrator's use of synthetic androgens, an alternative history of post-Fordism, and a manifesto for gender revolution. The text juxtaposes a number of disparate genres, including the fictionalized life narrative, the epistolary elegy, political theory, pornography, and the revolutionary manifesto. In this article I suggest that this aesthetic of juxtaposition figures genre as a form of drag, which I understand, in light of Elizabeth Freeman's work, as both a mode of gender performance and a way of articulating the persistence of the past in the present. In Testo Junkie, genre becomes a way of organising a central tension in the book between the hormone's history as an agent of oppression and the hormone's speculative future as an agent of liberation. The text's bifurcated form, I argue, ultimately works to compartmentalise difficult questions about the psychological legacies of racism and patriarchy, and to separate its manifesto for revolution from the histories that produce the revolutionary subject. A perhaps minor point: Preciado's chronology is partially wrong - she takes as fact Thomas Laqueur's argument about the premodern "one sex body," which Katharine Park and other medieval/early modern scholars have persuasively debunked. It doesn't change much in terms of the validity of Foucault's concepts of biopower and biopolics, or Preciado's concept of pharmacopornopolitics (*sigh*), but it does have some implications for her argument about understandings of the body that it would have been nice to see her explore. Unfortunately Laqueur's argument has quite a bit of traction in this field despite not being supported by the historical record.

En un momento en el que los debates feministas son más vivos que nunca y que resurgen con fuerza cuestiones como la necesaria (y ya inaplazable) ampliación del sujeto político del feminismo, las modulaciones del capitalismo y su giro hacia el control del cuerpo, la subjetividad y el deseo, la crítica al binarismo y la apropiación de las técnicas de producción de género (en este caso la testosterona que Preciado se aplica en gel), Testo Yonqui es más necesario que nunca. In 2008, the book Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, relating Preciado's experience on self-administering testosterone, was published in Spain (as Testo yonqui) and in France. [13] The work was later translated into English in 2013. No, but it’s interesting—more and more people think I do performance, but it’s really not what I do. It’s writing for me that is the performative device. My refusal to engage in performance art is also in part because sexuality and gender are reduced to representation and translated into visual objects. I refuse the theatricality of that. Though, in Europe, people are using the book to create performances.

Bianco, Marcie (September 25, 2013). " 'Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era' by Beatriz Preciado". Lambda Literary. Pettman, André (2021). "Get hard or die trying: Impotence and the displacement of the white male in Michel Houellebecq's Sérotonine". French Forum. 46 (3): 37–51. doi: 10.1353/frf.2021.0002. S2CID 243419283. While s/he does not quite convince this reader to try of DIY bioterrorism (at least, not again), the genealogical mapping and subsequent critique of the “pharmacopornographic”regime is wonderfully compelling and seductively mind-blowing. In the chapter “The Pharmacopornographic Era,” Preciado documents the pervasive effects of biopower as it has metamorphosed throughout the 20th century, particularly through the evolution of medical and virtual technologies in tandem with aims of capitalism. Our bodies are in control of the state, yet we persist in believing that we control them, as well as control our sexuality, gender, sex, and any other identity we appropriate under the delusion of self-fashioning. T1 - The biodrag of genre in Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic EraThe changes within neoliberalism that we are witnessing are characterized not only by the transformation of "gender," "sex," "sexuality," "sexual identity," and "pleasure" into objects of the political management of living, but also by the fact that this management itself is carried out through the new dynamics of advanced techno-capitalism, global media, and biotechnologies. We are being confronted with a new type of hot, psychotropic punk capitalism. These recent transformations are imposing an ensemble of new micro-prosthetic mechanisms of control of subjectivity by means of biomolecular and multimedia technical protocols. Our world economy is dependent upon the production and circulation of hundreds of tons of synthetic steroids, on the global diffusion of a flood of pornographic images, on the elaboration and distribution of new varieties of synthetic legal and illegal psychotropic drugs (e.g., enaltestovis, Special K., Viagra, speed, crystal, Prozac, ecstasy, poppers, heroin, Prilosec), on the flood of signs and circuits of the digital transmission of information, on the extension of a form of diffuse urban architecture to the entire planet in which megacities of misery are knotted into high concentrations of sex-capital. Testo Junkie is a rigorous examination of the 21st century body measured, dissected, and controlled by and circiulating within pharmacopornographic economies. Its impact will inevitably shift a range of queer epistemes. Preciado’s passion and inquisitiveness, furthermore, raises the bar for what it means to be a philosopher, a queer “lover of wisdom” who dives in, rather than shirks from, the messiness of the body. Hansen, Sarah (2016). "Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Paul B. Preciado". State University of New York Press. AB - Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013) is many things at once: a fictionalised account of its author-narrator's use of synthetic androgens, an alternative history of post-Fordism, and a manifesto for gender revolution. The text juxtaposes a number of disparate genres, including the fictionalized life narrative, the epistolary elegy, political theory, pornography, and the revolutionary manifesto. In this article I suggest that this aesthetic of juxtaposition figures genre as a form of drag, which I understand, in light of Elizabeth Freeman's work, as both a mode of gender performance and a way of articulating the persistence of the past in the present. In Testo Junkie, genre becomes a way of organising a central tension in the book between the hormone's history as an agent of oppression and the hormone's speculative future as an agent of liberation. The text's bifurcated form, I argue, ultimately works to compartmentalise difficult questions about the psychological legacies of racism and patriarchy, and to separate its manifesto for revolution from the histories that produce the revolutionary subject. The changes within neoliberalism that we are witnessing are characterized not only by the transformation of “gender,” “sex,” “sexuality,” “sexual identity,” and “pleasure” into objects of the political management of living, but also by the fact that this management itself is carried out through the new dynamics of advanced techno-capitalism, global media, and biotechnologies. We are being confronted with a new type of hot, psychotropic punk capitalism. These recent transformations are imposing an ensemble of new micro-prosthetic mechanisms of control of subjectivity by means of biomolecular and multimedia technical protocols. Our world economy is dependent upon the production and circulation of hundreds of tons of synthetic steroids, on the global diffusion of a flood of pornographic images, on the elaboration and distribution of new varieties of synthetic legal and illegal psychotropic drugs (e.g., enaltestovis, Special K., Viagra, speed, crystal, Prozac, ecstasy, poppers, heroin, Prilosec), on the flood of signs and circuits of the digital transmission of information, on the extension of a form of diffuse urban architecture to the entire planet in which megacities of misery are knotted into high concentrations of sex-capital.

The first, last, and intercalary chapters are all personal memoir centered on Preciado's self-administration of testosterone (turning herself into an "Auto guinea pig), her love and sex life during this time, mostly with French author Virginie Despentes, and her reminiscences about and engagement with the memory of a close friend and fellow author who died a few months into her experiment with testosterone. It's self-indulgent and exhibitionist by design - this works a lot better on an individual level, as an individual account of gender, than as a manifesto for collective gender revolution. These chapters are pretty engaging reading when they avoid getting too abstract (much of it is outright erotica) and they tie in to the more historical/theoretical sections in interesting ways. Do you think tools like Testogel and estrogen create more of a democracy in the hands of the marginalized? When I sat down the next day with the calming but intellectually compelling B., B. laid out for me the universality of the pharmacopornographic regime, how all bodies have become biopolitical archives for the powers that be, but also how taking testosterone effects one’s cognitive experience, how we romanticize substances like opium and writing, and how the pill is just a blip on the blueprint that is you. PHILOSOPHY /// Modes of Subversions against the Pharmacopornographic Society: Testo Junkie by Beatriz Preciado - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE". THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE. 2013-05-14 . Retrieved 2018-07-22.

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Ntim, Zac (23 January 2023). "Berlin Film Festival: Sean Penn, Philippe Garrel, Margarethe Von Trotta & Christian Petzold In Competition — Full List". Deadline Hollywood . Retrieved 9 February 2023. We don’t have to be afraid of questioning democracy, but I’m also very interested in disability, nonfunctional bodies, other forms of functionality and cognitive experiences. Democracy and the model of democracy is still too much about able bodies, masculine able bodies that have control over the body and the individual’s choices, and have dialogues and communications in a type of parliament. We have to imagine politics that go beyond the parliament, otherwise how are we going to imagine politics with nonhumans, or the planet? I am interested in the model of the body as subjectivity that is working within democracy, and then goes beyond that. Also, the global situation that we are in requires a revolution. There is no other option. We must manage to actually create some political alliance of minority bodies, to create a revolution together. Otherwise these necropolitical techniques will take the planet over. In this sense, I have a very utopian way of thinking, of rethinking new technologies of government and the body, creating new regimes of knowledge. The domain of politics has to be taken over by artists. Politics and philosophy both are our domains. The problem is that they have been expropriated and taken by other entities for the production of capital or just for the sake of power itself. That’s the definition of revolution, when the political domain becomes art. We desperately need it.

As a body—and this is the only important thing about being a subject-body, a techno-living system—I’m the platform that makes possible the materialization of political imagination. I am my own guinea pig for an experiment on the effects of intentionally increasing the level of testosterone in the body of a bio-female. Instantly, the testosterone turns me into something radically different than a cis-female. Even when the changes generated by this molecule are socially imperceptible. The lab rat is becoming human. The human being is becoming a rodent. And, as for me: neither testo-girl nor techno-boy. I am just a port of insertion for C19H28O2. I’m both the terminal of one of the apparatuses of neoliberal governmentality and the vanishing point through which escapes the will to control of the system. I’m the molecule and the State, and I’m the laboratory rat and the scientific subject that conducts the research; I’m the residue of a biochemical process. I am the future common artificial ancestor for the elaboration of new species in the perpetually random process of mutation and genetic drift. I am T. Preciado, Paul B. "Catalunya Trans". El Estado Mental. Archived from the original on 13 February 2015 . Retrieved 13 February 2015. Stuettgen, Tim. "Disidentification in the Center of Power: The Porn Performer and Director Belladonna as a Contrasexual Culture Producer (A Letter to Beatriz Preciado)." Women's Studies Quarterly 35.1/2 (2007): 249–270. Por otra parte, los capítulos autobiográficos me han cautivado por los diversísimos tipos de apegos y vínculos que expone más allá de la matriz heterosexual y sus dictámenes afectivos. Me ha encantado leer sobre amistad, amor, sexo, rencor, celos, inseguridad y chulería desde una perspectiva tan queer: me ha inspirado a abrirme al extenso abanico de la experiencia humana lejos de preestablecidos. También le agradezco la generosidad a la hora de citar y recomendar, de ensalzar y poner en valor la obra y las contribuciones de su círculo de intelectuales, escritores y artistas queer franceses de finales del XX y principios del XXI. The Best Scholarly Books of the Decade". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2020-04-14 . Retrieved 2020-12-26.On 17 November 2019, Preciado gave a speech before the École de la Cause Freudienne (School of the Freudian Cause)—a society of Lacanian psychoanalysts—in which he described his life as a trans man and challenged the precepts of psychoanalysis. He only managed to read a quarter of his prepared speech before being booed off the stage. [ citation needed] The complete text of the speech was later published as a small book. Manifiesto contrasexual (Countersexual Manifesto). 2002. – Inspired by the thesis of Michel Foucault. [22] OCLC 745998182 Honestly, when I was doing my research on the pill and read this, I couldn’t believe it. We’ve been working with all of these theories of gender performativity for so long, the last ten years, and we have a lot of weird ideas, but when you see what was happening in the 1950s, you find that it was even worse than anything we ever imagined. It’s what I refer to in the book as “biocamp,” this kind of theatricality or mimesis being taken to the level of the production of the organic. In the 1950s, if you took the first pill consistently, you would stop because you wouldn’t produce monthly bleedings any longer; your period would stop. The first pill was equally efficient in terms of preventing pregnancy, but the Food and Drug Administration entered into a type of epistemological crisis. Women wouldn’t be women anymore if they were not being marked by the difference of bleeding every month. I started speaking about it last night—sometimes I like to present a blow down of information and then run away. But basically, the invention of the pill implies the end of disciplinary heterosexuality. Of course, we continue using that notion as if it isn’t the end, but the heterosexuality we live with today is different. They decided at that point that it was necessary to go into research and find a way of reproducing the bleedings. You have to imagine—between 1960 and 1965, Enovid gained ten million consumers. It was a mass consumption. really fun read ! just a punchy style for the theory chapters, and a exhilarating-heartbreaking momentum in the memoir sections. book too big for my little pea brain ofc so here's some glancing thoughts