The Biodrag of Genre in Paul B. Preciado’s <i>Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era</i>

Abstract

We have the right to demand collective and "common" ownership of the biocodes of gender, sex, and race. We must wrest them from private hands, from technocrats and from the pharmacoporn complex. Such a process of resistance and redistribution could be called technosomatic communism. (Preciado, 2013: 352) This statement, from Paul B. Preciado's book Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (2013), refigures the call to arms as a call to testosterone. The text sets a fictionalised first-person account of Preciado's self-styled experiments with the synthetic androgen Testogel against a bold theory of gender in the era of hormone pharmacology. First published in Spanish in 2008, Testo Junkie appeared in a French edition translated by Preciado that same year, and an English translation by Bruce Benderson in 2013. Just as Testogel has precipitated Preciado's gendered transformation, so the book has undergone its own metamorphosis across successive editions and printings. While early editions give the author's name as Beatriz Preciado, rendered in the text as "BP", Testo Junkie was recently republished with a new name on the cover: Paul B. Preciado. A note on the fourth printing reads, "Understand that Paul absorbs and assumes all that was once BP" (Preciado, 2013: 10). This note reflects not only the author's shifting gender identity, but his exploratory relationship with the first-person narrative mode. Indeed, the book's opening sentence-"This book is not a memoir" (Preciado, 2013: 11)explicitly refuses the conventions not of gender but of genre. Testo Junkie 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. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this final dimension of Testo Junkie-its manifesto for 'technosomatic communism'-has been the most controversial (Preciado, 2013: 352). The book's central thesis argues that the post-industrial economy is structured around the material production of sexual subjectivity by means of molecular and multimedia technologies-drugs and pornography, in other words. Rather than simply describing this 'pharmacopornographic regime', Preciado finds the seeds of resistance in its biopolitical mechanisms (Preciado, 2013: 35). Modifying Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity to encompass the 'bioperformative' practices of hormonal supplementation, he writes that Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 2(2), 19

Transfeminine letter clubs, community care and the radical politics of the erotic

“…In Preciado’s writing, the autofictional is intimately connected to his theoretical and political philosophy. As Jones (2018) contends, the ‘manifesto sections leave no room for a consideration of the text’s engagement with racist and sexist dynamics of desire, which are only expressible within the codes of pornography’ (p. 19). Preciado’s trans ‘lesbian phallus’ to borrow Judith Butler’s terminology and critique of Lacan (Butler, 1993) does not disrupt or displace the cisheteronormative imaginary in the formation of erotogenic pleasure.…”

Dirty footprints and degenerate archives: Tabitha Nikolai’s impure walking sims

“…In doing so she positions herself as part of a trans tradition of mixing discursive modes, genres and registers. Motivated by the desire to assemble a vocabulary adequate to trans experience, such mixing has also been deployed as a means of escaping and exposing the normativity of genres like the autobiography, the medical history and the theoretical study, all of which require trans subjects to articulate their lives and identities according to hetero-and cis-centric templates (Jones 2018;Bornstein 1995;Jacques 2017). This approach is often metaphorised in terms of patchwork and quilting, from Kate Bornstein's 'whirl of leather and rhinestones' (1995: 87) to Stryker's viscerally gothic affirmation of her kinship with Frankenstein's monster (1994), a response to transmisogynist discourses of abjection that resonates with Nikolai's menagerie of vampires, chimaerae and demons, and with her interest in assemblage.…”

Performing the techno-self: Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie as a twenty-first century feminist narrative

“…This entanglement is important to address because it is through this intertwining of subjects/objects and discursive/material practices that Barad (2008) concludes that all bodies come to matter as ‘material-discursive phenomena’ (p. 141). Whereas Sophie A. Jones (2018) positions Preciado’s work as multi-genre rather than blended genre, I am particularly interested in the intermingled, autotheoretical aspect of the body-text (p. 2). Examining his subjectivity which contests easy categorisation in his body-essay, we gain a greater understanding of how Preciado articulates his techno-self as both subject and object, as an agent that can act and is acted upon.…”

“…I bet that mine is bigger and better at getting hard’ (p. 328). In this scene, Preciado uses the dildo to parody the eroticisation of Black male sexuality often seen in heterosexual pornography to convey racist narratives of sexuality in which a sexually prolific Black male has sex with a white woman (Jones, 2018: 7). 7 Utilising the dildo, Preciado (2013) reflects that he ‘exist[s] in the organic-inorganic continuity offered by this sex’ and that, in the process, VD becomes ‘a mutant virgin crossing the synthetic line of evolution to meet the chief of the clan of the boy-girls’ (p. 331).…”