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.

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…. The primary point of contention, especially for feminists influenced by Irigaray (or those of us who believe in the raw materials of the body), is that of Preciado’s argument on the constructiveness of sex—and not just gender. The difference, as s/he even observes in their critique of second wave feminism, is that that sex has been defined as being biological, chemical and chromosomal—it is internal to the body—whereas gender is external to the body, a chain of culturally created signifiers mapped onto the body. S/he claims, however, sex is a “biofiction.” It is in large part a fiction because it cannot be distinguished in any logical or pragmatic way from its relation to gender, specifically because the pharmacopornographic regime, with its economy of chemical and hormonal drugs, has irreversibly altered the relation of one’s gender and sex: “[t]he issue no longer comes down to considering gender as a cultural force that comes to modify a biologically determined foundation (sex). Instead, it is subjectivity as a whole, produced within the techno-organic circuits that are codified in terms of gender, sex, race, and sexuality through which the pharmacopornographic capital circulates.” PRO-CHOICE at Fri Art. Fribourg, Switzerland. Curated by Petunia, by invitation of Corinne Charpentier. [24] (In show) 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] 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.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. After World War II, the somatopolitical context of the production of subjectivity seems dominated by a series of new technologies of the body (which include biotechnology, surgery, endocrinology, and so forth) and representation (photography, cinema, television, cybernetics, videogames, and so forth) that infiltrate and penetrate daily life like never before. These are biomolecular, digital, and broadband data transmission technologies. The invention of the notion of gender in the 1950s as a clinical technique of sexual reassignment, and the commercialization of the Pill as a contraceptive technique, characterized the shift from discipline to pharmacopornographic control. This is the age of soft, feather-weight, viscous, gelatinous technologies that can be injected, inhaled—“incorporated.” The testosterone that I use belongs to these new gelatinous biopolitical technologies. 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]

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 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. An Apartment on Uranus. London, United Kingdom: Fitzcarraldo Editions; Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). 2020.Tr. Charlotte Mandel. [23] 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. Testo Junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. 2013. [12]The Awards of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival" (PDF). Berlinale de. 25 February 2023 . Retrieved 26 February 2023. 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.

Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era' by Beatriz Preciado". Lambda Literary. 25 September 2013 . Retrieved 1 August 2015. The Best Scholarly Books of the Decade". The Chronicle of Higher Education. 2020-04-14 . Retrieved 2020-12-26.

Table of Contents

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.