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

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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. 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. 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 Best Scholarly Books of the Decade". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2020-04-14 . Retrieved 2020-12-26.

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. 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. 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." PRO-CHOICE at Fri Art. Fribourg, Switzerland. Curated by Petunia, by invitation of Corinne Charpentier. [24] (In show)

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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. 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.

Did you want to add new chapters to Testo Junkie because of the amount of information you found after the fact? What constitutes a "real" man or woman in the twenty-first century? Since birth control pills, erectile dysfunction remedies, and factory-made testosterone and estrogen were developed, biology is definitely no longer destiny. 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.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. Williams, Richard J. "Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics, by Beatriz Preciado", Times Higher Education, 16 October 2014. 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. 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.

Pulsing with ideas that come from Preciado's unique perspectives on queer politics and theory, Testo Junkie develops into an analysis of the cultural signification of the human body in an era that she refers to as "pharmaco-pornographic." 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. 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. In this penetrating analysis of gender, Beatriz Preciado shows the ways in which the synthesis of hormones since the 1950s has fundamentally changed how gender and sexual identity are formulated, and how the pharmaceutical and pornography industries are in the business of creating desire. This riveting continuation of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality also includes Preciado's diaristic account of her own use of testosterone every day for one year, and its mesmerizing impact on her body as well as her imagination. Paul B. Preciado (born Beatriz Preciado, 11 September 1970), [1] is a writer, philosopher and curator whose work focuses on applied and theoretical topics relating to identity, gender, pornography, architecture and sexuality. [2] Originally known as a female writer, in 2010 Preciado began a process of "slow transition" where he started taking testosterone to medically transition. From this point on he has publicly considered himself transgender as well as a feminist. [3] Career [ edit ]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…. 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.

Donna Haraway observed that "illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins". This is the technobiopolitically produced illegitimate love child of Haraway and Foucault. Far from being "inessential", however, Preciado is unafraid to take them in a new subversive direction to not only offer a compelling, punk and psychotropic analysis of gender, sex, power, subjectivity, drug-taking, desire, the nature of work, and capitalist reproduction but also sketch how we could "transform such minority knowledge into collective experimentation, into physical practice, into ways of life and forms of cohabitation (pp. 350)" 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. Splitting the difference. As a scholarly product in the abstract - quite impressive, in the tradition of and remixing from Foucault, Butler, Haraway, Wittig, and many other (primarily French) philosophers. But not quite satisfying in the end.

In this Book

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. 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. Testo Junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. 2013. [12] 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 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.