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

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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.

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] It’s interesting that you mention design. Design is at the center of the pharmacopornographic more than anything else, because design invents techniques of the body. Chairs and buildings are designed relative to the body, and body techniques define relationships between body, space and time, and the spaces that you can or cannot use. It’s crucial that activists with the right questions permeate these fields. Designers are typically driven by the commercial. In terms of becoming a rat in your own laboratory, that’s what happens when you write. Writing is becoming the rat in your own laboratory. Writing is the main technology of production of subjectivity that we invented a really long time ago. What I do in the book is underlying this, making it hyperbolic through the invention of the protocol. There are moments when you go beyond what is traditionally done, in research and within the academy, that you think you are losing your mind, but you have to give yourself a kind of reference of heroes, whoever it is, be it Freud or Foucault. 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. 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.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. Preciado te coge de la mano y te guía como si estuvieses en uno de sus talleres drag king. Nos demuestra lo ridículamente maleable que es el género y lo arbitrario del sexo, certezas que al principio pueden causar vértigo, pero a la larga se revelan liberadoras.

a b c Preciado, Paul B. "La statistique, plus forte que l'amour". Libération . Retrieved 15 February 2015.

Did you want to add new chapters to Testo Junkie because of the amount of information you found after the fact? I actually continue taking it. What I think is interesting about any molecule, not just testosterone, is that everything is a question of dosage. With this same molecule, some of my friends have become something very close to what looks like a cis male. In my case, I take very low doses, so that I may continue the way that I am for a little bit, maybe not much longer. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do next. Some people ask me, Do you want a gender reassignment? I don’t know—probably, if I keep taking testosterone, there will be a point where I will probably say yes, but that’s not exactly my aim. I also thought about the project as a kind of collective adventure, in a sense, because I’m thinking about the body, not even just my own, as this kind of a living political fiction. 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. 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. 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.

I don’t mind if people choose to do that. Before this book, I wrote another called Countersexual Manifesto that is full of power contracts, sexual contracts that can be done like a score. It’s almost a performance. Definitely, the writing that I do has a performative dimension.

Testo Junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. 2013. [12] 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. I was surprised to see how not only testosterone was this marketed but unknown molecule, but also the pill, which is one of the most used substances in the history of humanity. Everybody is taking it and we don’t know much about it.