For one year Beatriz Preciado gave doses of testosterone to herself every day. She writes: "I don't take testosterone to transform myself into a man but to betray what society has wanted to make of me . . . to feel a form of pleasure that is post-pornographic, to add a molecular prostheses to my low-tech transgendered identity." The pharmaco-pornographic regime: sex, gender, and subjectivity in the age of punk capitalism" in Stryker, Susan, and Aren Z. Aizura. The Transgender Studies Reader 2. 2013. OCLC 824120014 Preciado, Beatriz; Benderson, Bruce (17 September 2013). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. The Feminist Press at CUNY. p.11. ISBN 9781558618374. Hmmmm. Here's the thing: in the abstract this book is great as exposure to a different perspective than more "conventional" transsexual narratives or feminist treatises. BUT, to really you need to already be well versed and very well read in feminist theory to the most out of this book, because Preciado sure isn't gonna explain it to you. As soon as you open the book, you're jumping onto a roller coaster where Preciado is battling it out with the ideas of Foucault, Haraway, Butler, and others with no lead-in explanation. It's just assumed you're familiar with philosophies of each. Preciado prefaces the book, stating "This book is not a memoir" but "a body-essay". [14] Preciado takes a topical pharmaceutical, Testogel, [15] as a homage to French writer Guillaume Dustan, a close gay friend who contracted HIV and died of an accidental overdose of a medication he was taking. [16] Preciado investigates the politicization of the body by what he terms "pharmacopornographic capitalism". [17]

Tal grado de infiltración me recordaba constantemente a esta cita de mi queridísimo Hervé Guibert recuperada por Preciado: «Yo soy como siempre en la escritura al mismo tiempo el experto y la rata que destripa para su estudio». Efectivamente Preciado disecciona su identidad, su adicción, sus afectos y su círculo al escribir; sin embargo, cuando termina deja las herramientas de quirófano sobre la mesa y te invita mediante la lectura a que realices el mismo ejercicio. Me he descubierto así pues mirándome delante del espejo e intentando visualizarme en una era presexual, sin la influencia del bombardeo farmacopornográfico; me he imaginado después hipertestosteronado, con alopecia androgénica; más tarde hasta arriba de estrógenos y con las tetas crecidas; saltando de un género a otro, revirtiendo la educación recibida y despervirtiendo mi sexualidad... Pornotopia: an essay on Playboy's architecture and biopolitics. New York, Zone Books. 2014. OCLC 883391264. [21] Can you talk about the AIDS preventative medication PEP and its relation to your pharmacopornographic theory? 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 thoughtsAfter World War II, the somatopolitical context of the production of subjectivity seems dominated by a series of new technologies of the body (which include biotechnology, surgery, endocrinology, and so forth) and representation (photography, cinema, television, cybernetics, videogames, and so forth) that infiltrate and penetrate daily life like never before. These are biomolecular, digital, and broadband data transmission technologies. The invention of the notion of gender in the 1950s as a clinical technique of sexual reassignment, and the commercialization of the Pill as a contraceptive technique, characterized the shift from discipline to pharmacopornographic control. This is the age of soft, feather-weight, viscous, gelatinous technologies that can be injected, inhaled—“incorporated.” The testosterone that I use belongs to these new gelatinous biopolitical technologies. My ambition is to convince you that you are like me. Tempted by the same chemical abuse. You have it in you: you think that you’re biofemales, but you take the Pill; or you think you’re biomales, but you take Viagra; you’re normal, and you take Prozac or Paxil in the hope that something will free you from your problems…. If anything, the threading of these two narratives is met in the book’s intellectual vigor and the outright aggressiveness of tone. Preciado is not a reluctant philosopher or scientist. S/he is a willing “auto-guinea pig,” experimenting in the “do-it-yourself bioterrorism of gender”:

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.” Preciado has been professor of Political History of the Body, Gender Theory, and History of Performance at Université Paris VIII and was the director of the Independent Studies Program (PEI) of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA). [5] He was Curator of Public Programs of documenta 14, Kassel and Athens. Do you think tools like Testogel and estrogen create more of a democracy in the hands of the marginalized? Well, now I’m working on another book. It’s a political history of the body. Some of the images you saw last night come from the same research. This book goes a bit beyond Testo Junkie, but for me, it stands in the same area. It is not only about a personal experience of taking testosterone. There is more political theory behind it.Testo Junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. 2013. [12]

Preciado described the act of taking testosterone as both political and performance, aiming to undo a notion of gender encoded in one's own body by a system of sexuality and contraception. [18] PRO-CHOICE at Fri Art. Fribourg, Switzerland. Curated by Petunia, by invitation of Corinne Charpentier. [24] (In show) 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. 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.

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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.

The Awards of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival" (PDF). Berlinale de. 25 February 2023 . Retrieved 26 February 2023. Este libro llegó a mis manos cuando tenía catorce años y recuerdo que lo devoré en pocos días, sin entender del todo el marco teórico que despliega Preciado pero con la intuición de que ahí había algo muy importante. Tenía razón, pero no entendí por qué hasta muchos años después, cuando descubrí que era una de las obras clave de las teorías queer en España. Sin embargo, como ocurre con tantos libros de estudios de género, hemos tenido que esperar diez años para tenerlo de vuelta en las librerías.

Did you want to add new chapters to Testo Junkie because of the amount of information you found after the fact? 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. 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. Cogí reticente este libro, con miedo a encontrarme con la imagen poco accesible e intelectualoide que tenía de la filosofía, pero al final me dejé llevar por recomendación del chico que me gusta (<3) y no podría haberlo disfrutado más.