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

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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. 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.

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]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. 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. Hansen, Sarah (2016). "Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Paul B. Preciado". State University of New York Press. In other words, “sex” can never be extracted from the subject; the corollary of which is that it therefore can never be identified and harnessed as a political concept. Preciado, for obvious reasons in terms of the scope of the project, only cursorily touches upon the political implications of this argument. But the discourse about the difference between sex and gender, as well as the concern by many feminists that sex as a political concept has been swept under the rug by proponents of “technologies of gender” and gender fluidity, is one that has fragmented the feminist community—perhaps witnessed to be most furiously debated around MichFest’s trans-exclusion policy.

Did you want to add new chapters to Testo Junkie because of the amount of information you found after the fact? Bianco, Marcie (September 25, 2013). " 'Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era' by Beatriz Preciado". Lambda Literary. That would be disturbing enough on its own, especially the identification of Lorde as a representative of the very "dominant feminist politics" that she wrote searingly about being excluded from and harmed by. Preciado's meaning is in part that the "tools of the master" in producing modern fictions of gender - in her case, testosterone - can in fact be used to destroy those same fictions. But she continues to say that she wants to "[fulfill her] sexual and political desire to be the master...without apolog[y]...the way a biomale would." [By "biomale" she seems to mean cisgender man.] Later she restates this desire to "To acquire a certain political immunity of gender, to get roaring drunk on masculinity, to know that it is possible to look like the hegemonic gender.” There's been lots of ink spilled on why white women wanting to be more like men/enjoy the privileges of hegemonic masculinity is anything but gender liberation or revolution, so it was rather disappointing to see that this is where Preciado ends up.

In this Book

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…. What was the benefit to designing your own protocol, of being the lab rat in your experiments with testosterone? Do you think tools like Testogel and estrogen create more of a democracy in the hands of the marginalized? However, where Testo Junkie falls down is rather than drawing the reader in with these ideas (that really effect everyone), is Preciado develops a language that further distances people from them. For example, by referring to hormones as "somato-politic biocodes" and "biotechnologies" under the reign of the "pharmacopornographic regime" Preciado reduces the potential influence of these ideas when obfuscated by the additional level of a personal vocabulary. There are cases where introducing new vocabulary is useful to describe specific topics not otherwise concisely delineated, but to me this really doesn't feel like it fits into that category. Rather the introduction of this jargon distances the reader from the issues. Once you refuse the legal and medical protocol and you decide to take testosterone, you immediately have to set up your own protocol for use. You have to decide on how much and when—then a whole discipline or counterdiscipline appears. This makes you become more aware of things that you are taking, not only on a psychological level, but you also immediately start asking yourself questions like, What is this testosterone that I am taking, where is this coming from, how is this being made, how has this been fabricated both in terms of molecules and in terms of signifiers? Suddenly you see this moment of self-intoxication, and not only with testosterone—suddenly everything else appears. You become resistant to the body techniques that are being constructed constantly around you. Every other technique has to be rearranged. With this perspective applied to too many things at once, you can end up with this kind of paranoid image of the world. It’s interesting. You are then forced to produce your own knowledge, a knowledge that is not given to you. Any girl today who is around fourteen years old might go to the doctor and the doctor might immediately say, The pill, as if the female body would automatically be a reproductive body without any medical arrangements, without even knowing anything about the economy of fluids and organs in this person. They assume you are a cis female, so you are going to be taking the pill, or you’re a gay Latino guy between twenty-one and thirty-five and you’ll be taking these anti- AIDS molecules. This knowledge production cannot be done alone.

No, I think the condom is very charged. I think all technologies that actually interfere with the management of reproduction of sexuality are very politically charged. On the one side, the management of masculinity and sperm by the condom has basically been used for millions of years. That information was amazing to me when I was working on AIDS projects. There were all these discussions going on in the eighties and nineties about condoms that reproduce the discussions that were going on in the seventeenth century. This was at the same time that new reproductive technologies were occurring—the possibility of in vitro fertilization and so on. The condom is a very interesting object and technique. The French called it “second skin.” I refer to it as the necropolitical body, the body that has been marked by its relationship to power techniques of giving death. That body, up until the beginning of anatomy as a technique to make the inner body visible, was mostly a plain surface or a skin. You have this masculine body that is at the center of political power for all these years, as a skin that contains a soul, and this soul is producing sperm. It was a kind of transcendental power. The skin thing is also interesting in relation to writing. All of these ancient technologies that function as necropolitical techniques of giving death work like writing technologies on the body. Preventing the circulation of sperm prevents in a way the expansion of male virility, divine power. I still see this sometimes in the debate about AIDS.

The genealogy of capitalist control construed as first biopower, then techno-biopower, then pharmacopower is substantive and insightful. Preciado skillfully uses feminist and queer theory—working from Foucault, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, in addition to a bevvy of queer punk performers and artists—to offer us relevant, and revolutionary, ways of thinking about bodies and identities in light of evolving (medical) technologies. On one level, this book is a diary of transgression—Preciado's record of the use of herself as a lab rat. It recounts the defiant "misuse" of a pharmaceutical product normally monitored under the strictest conditions by medical professionals. On another level, Testo Junkie is a penetrating investigation into identity itself and how much of it is mediated, controlled, and, indeed, produced, by medical and pharmacologic pressures. Preciado, Paul B. (2021). Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol.32. Translated by Wynne, Frank. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781635901511. Can you talk about the AIDS preventative medication PEP and its relation to your pharmacopornographic theory?

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... 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. 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] 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.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. 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.