Testo Junkie
Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
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- $29.99
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
This visionary book on gender and sexuality weaves together high theory and intimate memoir, with "spectacular" results—"and the gendered body will never be the same again" (Jack Halberstam).
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.
In this penetrating analysis of gender, Paul B. 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 his own use of testosterone every day for one year, and its mesmerizing impact on his body as well as his imagination.</
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Insightful yet incomplete, French gender theorist Preciado categorizes our modern era as "pharmacopornographic" "a biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity." According to the author, pharmaceuticals transform "our depression into Prozac, our masculinity into testosterone, our erection into Viagra, our fertility/sterility into the Pill," while the sex industry "control the sexuality of those bodies codified as woman and cause the ejaculation of those bodies codified as men." Part theory, part memoir, the book also chronicles the author's experimental consumption of testosterone, which she took every day for a year. She reports feeling like an addict on "T," and describes her increased sexual desire and other elements of the transmasculine journey, such as going to drag-king workshops. Unfortunately, Preciado doesn't manage to tie her experiment into her theory of pharamacopornography, and her conclusions about that global phenomenon do not fulfill her smash-the-gender-binary call. Preciado frequently equates transgenderism and gender liberation with the availability of testosterone and the expression of masculinity in bodies that are assigned the gender "female" at birth. The book also nearly completely omits any mention of transgender women.
