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

Testo Junkie is a wild ride. Preciado leaves the identity politics of taking T to others, and instead, in the tradition of William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Jean Genet, s/he conducts a wild textual experiment. The results are spectacular... The gendered body will never be the same again.

JACK HALBERSTAM, author of THE QUEER ART OF FAILURE

Beatriz Preciados brilliant book oscillates between high theory and the surging rush of testosterone. Flush with elegant theoretical formulations, lascivious sex narratives, and astute histories of gender, Testo Junkie is a key text to comprehend the deep interconnectedness of sex and drugs today.

JOS ESTEBAN MUOZ, author of CRUISING UTOPIA

The ideas in Beatriz Preciados pornosophical gem are a thousand curious fingers slipped beneath the underpants of conventional thinking. Teach the sex scenes in your seminars, and read the flights of theory aloud to your latest lover amid a tangle of sweaty sheets.

SUSAN STRYKER, author of THE TRANSGENDER STUDIES READER

Testo Junkie is unlike anything Ive ever read. Beatriz Preciado has produced a volume of work that goes far beyond memoir to create an entirely new way of understanding not only the history of sex, gender, and the body, but of life as we have come to know it. Powerful and disturbing in the most pleasurable way.

DEL LAGRACE VOLCANO, author of FEMMES OF POWER

Beatriz Preciado offers an exhilarating and sometimes shattering portrait of how gender shapes the ways we live and fuck and grieve and fight and love. Testo Junkie is a fearless chronicle of the gender revolution currently in progress. Anyone who has a genderor has dispensed with oneshould read this book.

GAYLE SALAMON, author of ASSUMING A BODY

Inventive, daring, and blindingly lucid, Beatriz Preciado opens a new branch of philosophical practice. Driven by a flair for technological adventure and the uncommon ability to craft somatic and political fiction, Testo Junkie probes the limits of textual trafficking, gender-hacking, and the different regimes of prosthetic imposition that govern our existence. This book is not for the faint of philosophical heart!

AVITAL RONELL, author of CRACK WARS

Question: If you could see a documentary on a philosopher, on Heidegger, Kant, or Hegel, what would you like to see in it?

Jacques Derridas answer: For them to talk about their sex life....

You want a quick answer?

Their sex life.

Published in 2013 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York

The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406

New York, NY 10016

feministpress.org

Text copyright 2008 by Beatriz Preciado

Translation copyright 2013 by Bruce Benderson

Originally published in Spanish as Testo Yonqui by Espana Calpe in Madrid in 2008.

Published in French as Testo Junkie by Editions Grasset & Fasquelle in Paris in 2008.

This English-language edition is translated from the French.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First printing October 2013

Cover design by Herb Thornby, herbthornby.com

Photograph by La Crespi

Text design by Drew Stevens

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Preciado, Beatriz.

[Testo yonqui. English]

Testo junkie : sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era / Beatriz Preciado ; translated by Bruce Benderson.

pages cm

Originally published in Spanish as Testo Yonqui by Espana Calpe in Madrid in 2008.

eISBN 978-1-55861-838-1

1. Transsexualism. 2. Gender identity. 3. Queer theory. 4. TestosteronePhysiological aspects. I. Title.

HQ77.9.P7413 2013

306.76'8dc23

2013017587

For our dead ones: A., T., E., J., K., S., T.

For William

For Virginie, Pepa, and Swann

Contents

T his book is not a memoir. This book is a testosterone-based, voluntary intoxication protocol, which concerns the body and affects of BP. A body-essay. Fiction, actually. If things must be pushed to the extreme, this is a somato-political fiction, a theory of the self, or self-theory. During the time period covered by this essay, two external transformations follow on each other in the context of the experimental body, the impact of which couldnt be calculated beforehand and cannot be taken into account as a function of the study; but it created the limits around which writing was incorporated. First of all, there is the death of GD, the human distillation of a vanishing epoch, an icon, and the ultimate French representative of a form of written sexual insurrection; almost simultaneously, there is the tropism of BPs body in the direction of VDs body, an opportunity for perfectionand for ruin. This is a record of physiological and political micromutations provoked in BPs body by testosterone, as well as the theoretical and physical changes incited in that body by loss, desire, elation, failure, or renouncement. Im not interested in my emotions insomuch as their being mine, belonging only, uniquely, to me. Im not interested in their individual aspects, only in how they are traversed by what isnt mine. In what emanates from our planets history, the evolution of living species, the flux of economics, remnants of technological innovations, preparation for wars, the trafficking of organic slaves and commodities, the creation of hierarchies, institutions of punishment and repression, networks of communication and surveillance, the random overlapping of market research groups, techniques and blocs of opinion, the biochemical transformation of feeling, the production and distribution of pornographic images. Some will read this text as a manual for a kind of gender bioterrorism on a molecular scale. Others will see in it a single point in a cartography of extinction. In this text, the reader wont come to any definitive conclusion about the truth of my sex, or predictions about the world to come. I present these pages as an account of theoretical junctions, molecules, affects, in order to leave a trace of a political experiment that lasted 236 days and nights and that continues today under other forms. If the reader sees this text as an uninterrupted series of philosophical reflections, accounts of hormone administration, and detailed records of sexual practices without the solutions provided by continuity, it is simply because this is the mode on which subjectivity is constructed and deconstructed.