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

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

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. Preciado prefaces the book, stating "This book is not a memoir" but "a body-essay". [14] Preciado takes a topical pharmaceutical, Testogel, [15] as a homage to French writer Guillaume Dustan, a close gay friend who contracted HIV and died of an accidental overdose of a medication he was taking. [16] Preciado investigates the politicization of the body by what he terms "pharmacopornographic capitalism". [17] 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. The nail in the coffin for me, so to speak, was some of the false equivalencies Preciado makes, for example likening the circular Pill dispenser design to the panopticon design of a prison building enabling optimal surveillance on the prisoners, like the state's surveillance over females. This, without a stronger argument for why they are connected, feels far fetched and unfortunately casts a shadow over other points Preciado raises that I know to be valid (such as the particular exploitation of "non-white bodies" and the rise of sexual dimorphism thinking in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). 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.In 2023, he directed a documentary film Orlando, My Political Biography. The film was screened at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival in festival's Encounter section on 18 February 2023, [7] where it was awarded a Special Jury Prize. In its announcement the jury described the film as "revelatory, moving and spirited." [8] The film received a special mention in the festival category Best Documentary Film, and also the Teddy Award as best documentary film. [9] Personal life [ 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…. 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.

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. En un momento en el que los debates feministas son más vivos que nunca y que resurgen con fuerza cuestiones como la necesaria (y ya inaplazable) ampliación del sujeto político del feminismo, las modulaciones del capitalismo y su giro hacia el control del cuerpo, la subjetividad y el deseo, la crítica al binarismo y la apropiación de las técnicas de producción de género (en este caso la testosterona que Preciado se aplica en gel), Testo Yonqui es más necesario que nunca. On 17 November 2019, Preciado gave a speech before the École de la Cause Freudienne (School of the Freudian Cause)—a society of Lacanian psychoanalysts—in which he described his life as a trans man and challenged the precepts of psychoanalysis. He only managed to read a quarter of his prepared speech before being booed off the stage. [ citation needed] The complete text of the speech was later published as a small book.

In this Book

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. really fun read ! just a punchy style for the theory chapters, and a exhilarating-heartbreaking momentum in the memoir sections. book too big for my little pea brain ofc so here's some glancing thoughts 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