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. 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. Testo Junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. 2013. [12] No, I think the condom is very charged. I think all technologies that actually interfere with the management of reproduction of sexuality are very politically charged. On the one side, the management of masculinity and sperm by the condom has basically been used for millions of years. That information was amazing to me when I was working on AIDS projects. There were all these discussions going on in the eighties and nineties about condoms that reproduce the discussions that were going on in the seventeenth century. This was at the same time that new reproductive technologies were occurring—the possibility of in vitro fertilization and so on. The condom is a very interesting object and technique. The French called it “second skin.” I refer to it as the necropolitical body, the body that has been marked by its relationship to power techniques of giving death. That body, up until the beginning of anatomy as a technique to make the inner body visible, was mostly a plain surface or a skin. You have this masculine body that is at the center of political power for all these years, as a skin that contains a soul, and this soul is producing sperm. It was a kind of transcendental power. The skin thing is also interesting in relation to writing. All of these ancient technologies that function as necropolitical techniques of giving death work like writing technologies on the body. Preventing the circulation of sperm prevents in a way the expansion of male virility, divine power. I still see this sometimes in the debate about AIDS. 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.

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. Preciado, Beatriz; Benderson, Bruce (17 September 2013). Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. The Feminist Press at CUNY. p.11. ISBN 9781558618374. Cogí reticente este libro, con miedo a encontrarme con la imagen poco accesible e intelectualoide que tenía de la filosofía, pero al final me dejé llevar por recomendación del chico que me gusta (<3) y no podría haberlo disfrutado más. 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.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. 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.

PRO-CHOICE at Fri Art. Fribourg, Switzerland. Curated by Petunia, by invitation of Corinne Charpentier. [24] (In show) I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the State will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it. I am a copyleft biopolitical agent that considers sex hormones free and open biocodes, whose use shouldn’t be regulated by the State commandeered by pharmaceutical companies. 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. 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. However, where Testo Junkie falls down is rather than drawing the reader in with these ideas (that really effect everyone), is Preciado develops a language that further distances people from them. For example, by referring to hormones as "somato-politic biocodes" and "biotechnologies" under the reign of the "pharmacopornographic regime" Preciado reduces the potential influence of these ideas when obfuscated by the additional level of a personal vocabulary. There are cases where introducing new vocabulary is useful to describe specific topics not otherwise concisely delineated, but to me this really doesn't feel like it fits into that category. Rather the introduction of this jargon distances the reader from the issues.

Hansen, Sarah (2016). "Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era by Paul B. Preciado". State University of New York Press. Preciado te coge de la mano y te guía como si estuvieses en uno de sus talleres drag king. Nos demuestra lo ridículamente maleable que es el género y lo arbitrario del sexo, certezas que al principio pueden causar vértigo, pero a la larga se revelan liberadoras. 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….

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

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. 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 Tal grado de infiltración me recordaba constantemente a esta cita de mi queridísimo Hervé Guibert recuperada por Preciado: «Yo soy como siempre en la escritura al mismo tiempo el experto y la rata que destripa para su estudio». Efectivamente Preciado disecciona su identidad, su adicción, sus afectos y su círculo al escribir; sin embargo, cuando termina deja las herramientas de quirófano sobre la mesa y te invita mediante la lectura a que realices el mismo ejercicio. Me he descubierto así pues mirándome delante del espejo e intentando visualizarme en una era presexual, sin la influencia del bombardeo farmacopornográfico; me he imaginado después hipertestosteronado, con alopecia androgénica; más tarde hasta arriba de estrógenos y con las tetas crecidas; saltando de un género a otro, revirtiendo la educación recibida y despervirtiendo mi sexualidad... 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.

Manifiesto contrasexual (Countersexual Manifesto). 2002. – Inspired by the thesis of Michel Foucault. [22] OCLC 745998182 T1 - The biodrag of genre in Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era 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.

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The Best Scholarly Books of the Decade". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2020-04-14 . Retrieved 2020-12-26. Preciado, Paul B. "Catalunya Trans". El Estado Mental. Archived from the original on 13 February 2015 . Retrieved 13 February 2015. 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.