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

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Did you want to add new chapters to Testo Junkie because of the amount of information you found after the fact? 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 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. 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 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.” 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. In this penetrating analysis of gender, Paul B. 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 his own use of testosterone every day for one year, and its mesmerizing impact on his body as well as his imagination.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. According to Preciado, all sexual bodies become "intelligible" according to a common "pharmacopornographic technology". There is no such thing as gender without technology. Technology is understood in large sense, from writing technologies, to bio-chemical and image production.

After 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. 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. 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]

At the library

Preciado declares that Testo Junkie is a " body- essay", and writes of his use of testosterone as a way of undoing gender inscribed on the body by the capitalistic commodification and mobilization of sexuality and reproduction, a process transcendent from the social norm expected with transitioning. [5] Testo Junkie is a homage to French writer Guillaume Dustan, a close gay friend of Preciado's who contracted AIDS and died of an accidental overdose of a medication he was taking. In the book Preciado also processes the changes in his body due to testosterone through the lens of a romantic affair with his then lover, French writer Virginie Despentes, referred to as "VD." [6]