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

Product Information

Hansen, Sarah (2016). "Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Paul B. Preciado". State University of New York Press. 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."

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. T1 - The biodrag of genre in Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era 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."

In this Book

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. The Best Scholarly Books of the Decade". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2020-04-14 . Retrieved 2020-12-26. PHILOSOPHY /// Modes of Subversions against the Pharmacopornographic Society: Testo Junkie by Beatriz Preciado - THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE". THE FUNAMBULIST MAGAZINE. 2013-05-14 . Retrieved 2018-07-22. 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. 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]

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.Fateman, Johanna. "Bodies of Work: Two books of autofiction examine the sexual politics of the postporn era". Bookfroum. Bookforum . Retrieved June 25, 2015. 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. 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.

Bianco, Marcie (September 25, 2013). " 'Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era' by Beatriz Preciado". Lambda Literary.