Can you talk about the AIDS preventative medication PEP and its relation to your pharmacopornographic theory? 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 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] 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, Paul B. "Catalunya Trans". El Estado Mental. Archived from the original on 13 February 2015 . Retrieved 13 February 2015.

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. Stuettgen, Tim. "Disidentification in the Center of Power: The Porn Performer and Director Belladonna as a Contrasexual Culture Producer (A Letter to Beatriz Preciado)." Women's Studies Quarterly 35.1/2 (2007): 249–270.

At the library

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.

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 Testo Junkie is a rigorous examination of the 21st century body measured, dissected, and controlled by and circiulating within pharmacopornographic economies. Its impact will inevitably shift a range of queer epistemes. Preciado’s passion and inquisitiveness, furthermore, raises the bar for what it means to be a philosopher, a queer “lover of wisdom” who dives in, rather than shirks from, the messiness of the body. 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." 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. 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.The Best Scholarly Books of the Decade". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2020-04-14 . Retrieved 2020-12-26.

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] 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. Do you think tools like Testogel and estrogen create more of a democracy in the hands of the marginalized? 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. 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.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. Hmmmm. Here's the thing: in the abstract this book is great as exposure to a different perspective than more "conventional" transsexual narratives or feminist treatises. BUT, to really you need to already be well versed and very well read in feminist theory to the most out of this book, because Preciado sure isn't gonna explain it to you. As soon as you open the book, you're jumping onto a roller coaster where Preciado is battling it out with the ideas of Foucault, Haraway, Butler, and others with no lead-in explanation. It's just assumed you're familiar with philosophies of each. Hansen, Sarah (2016). "Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Paul B. Preciado". State University of New York Press. The real stake of capitalism today is the pharmacopornographic control of subjectivity, whose products are serotonin, techno-blood and blood products, testosterone, antacids, cortisone, techno-sperm, antibiotics, estradiol, techno-milk, alcohol and tobacco, morphine, insulin, cocaine, living human eggs, [Viagra], and the entire material and virtual complex participating in the production of mental and psychosomatic states of excitation, relaxation, and discharge, as well as those of omnipotence and total control. 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.

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. While s/he does not quite convince this reader to try of DIY bioterrorism (at least, not again), the genealogical mapping and subsequent critique of the “pharmacopornographic”regime is wonderfully compelling and seductively mind-blowing. In the chapter “The Pharmacopornographic Era,” Preciado documents the pervasive effects of biopower as it has metamorphosed throughout the 20th century, particularly through the evolution of medical and virtual technologies in tandem with aims of capitalism. Our bodies are in control of the state, yet we persist in believing that we control them, as well as control our sexuality, gender, sex, and any other identity we appropriate under the delusion of self-fashioning.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.