Testo Junkie opens with the line “This is not a memoir.”

Okay, it’s not a memoir. But it is deeply personal. It reveals something genuine and compelling about its author. It uses events from Paul B. Preciado’s actual life, real people, real moments of love, anger, passion, and grief.

If it’s not a memoir, what is it? Preciado calls it a “protocol”, a “body-essay”, a “fiction” or even a “theory of the self” (11). But these words only describe individual aspects of a very rich text.

Testo Junkie is a book with a double life.

By day it is a rigorous theoretical text dealing with capitalism, gender, trans theory and systems of. It is a discussion of gender as an operation of capitalism; how it is used to subjugate, how we perceive it, and principally, how we can subvert it. Upon close analysis, Testo Junkie shows us a complex, robust and yet fundamentally arbitrary system held together predominantly by coercion and not (as we are lead to believe) by fact.

By night, Testo Junkie is a graphic and incendiary personal narrative. Some parts of it read like journal entries: intimate and vulnerable. Sometimes the act of reading feels taboo – like a trespass. Sometimes it reads like a series of poetic field notes and letters home written by an agent on an isolated and dangerous journey. A mission up the river, into one of society’s deepest fears, undertaken all alone, while trespassing in hostile territory.

If we were feeling poetic (as Preciado often is) we might discover a parallel between the constructed binary of gender and that of written ideas. As Preciado navigates and dismantles the division of man and woman, they also begin to navigate more freely between dry academia and impassioned personal account, finding poetry in both.

Testo Junkie could be read like a narrative about gender experimentation, black market testosterone, amateur pornography, and grief – but it is interrupted routinely with historical accounts, theoretical discussion, and political contextualization. Preciado writes with the keen eye of a trans activist who’s been in the game for decades, the rigour of any good strung out European philosopher, and the charismatic forcefulness of a drag king.

“Micropolitics of Gender in The Pharmacopornographic Era: Experimentation,

Voluntary Intoxication, Mutation” is the second to last chapter in Testo Junkie and the last chapter that is explicitly academic in it’s tone (at least most of the time). Not a conclusion by any means, but more of a culmination.

Most critically, this chapter is Preciado’s call to arms. We’ve read enough evidence, we’ve heard enough personal testimony, now we need to put our money where our theory is and actually embark on something.

The structure of “Micropolitics” reflects the structure of Testo Junkie as a whole. Preceded by historical figures, personal experience, and theoretical citation, the final paragraph of the chapter is a provocation, a distillation of the message that Preciado has been building to throughout the chapter and throughout the book. The same way Testo Junkie makes use of tonal shifts - oscillating between academia and expressive prose more frequently and more dynamically as it progresses - “Micropolitics” finds skillful moments of register change, occurring without delineation and used to great effect in various places.

If we were to apply a narrative schema to Testo Junkie, then “Micropolitics” would be the climax, with the following chapter “Eternal Life” acting as a poetic denouement. Therefore “Micropolitics” makes for an excellent cross-section to study in order to begin breaking down Preciado’s main theses and to get a taste for their unique and dynamic tone.

Although the history of “queer” is far more complicated than expounded here, a quick breakdown is in order. A common contemporary definition you will often find explains queer as a rejection of simple identification, even a rejection of definition itself. For many folks, “queer” is used as a way to declare ambiguity and eschew binary or normative thinking.

Once (and in some cases still) a common epithet for homosexual people, in the 80’s queer was reclaimed by groups discriminated against for their gender or sexuality who felt that “LGBT” did not serve them as a political identifier. In recent years there has been a movement to normalize queer and find a place for it in LGBT institutions (thus the increasing addition of Q into LGBTQ).

The tension between those who use queer as a subversion of any/all normativity, and those who treat it like just another identity to bring into the fold of LGBT politics is made clear in Preciado’s writing. In “Micropolitics of Gender” Preciado forewarns an inevitable corruption and institutionalization of the term: “In the past few years queer has been recodified by the dominant discourses. We are currently facing the risk of turning the term into a description of a neoliberal, free market identity that generates new exclusion and hides the specific conditions of the oppression of transsexual, transgender people, crip, or racialized bodies.” (341) However Preciado does still hold queer as a subversive word in some situations, such as the use of the term “queeranalysis” (379).

As a prefix from Latin; denoting the movement between two points. In our case, the movement of a person from one binary point of gender to the other. Or as the term evolves, sometimes denoting someone who moves or has moved on the gender spectrum but not necessarily between the poles of the binary.

Preciado treats “trans” with a certain deference, sometimes using it to refer to the true cutting edge of gender activism, opposing the (in Preciado’s view) inadequate LGBT and even queer movements – this usage is very loaded, and can be seen expressed in Susan Stryker’s “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin”. The term continues to develop in dynamic ways and find new usages up to present day.

Personal actions, private protests, lived subversion. Power wielded by individual persons contained within a system. As contrasted with macropolitics involving politicians, lobbying, populations, and policy. Macropolitics form the power structure, micropolitics operate within it.

Think of hackers, performance artists, non-traditional families, and urban beekeepers. In Preciado’s case, micropolitics can mean getting a prescription for the pill, or buying unregulated testosterone on the black market, the injection of silicone into the body or the vulnerable experience of gluing on a fake moustache, the institutionally condoned ingestion of Viagra or the strapping on of a 9 ¾ inch black dildo. What is at question here is the extent to which these micropolitical actions subvert the structure of power that creates and polices gender.

pharmaco – Pharmaceutical: involving medications, psychotropic drugs, and sex hormones. The important concept here is how these different technologies can be used (either by a third party or by ourselves) to control the body from within. A penetrative power.

pornographic – Involving media technologies that use the “publication of the private” (266) with biological aims; arousal, masturbation, etc. Closely linked with sex work generally. Consider the similarities between porn use and drug use - a technology, manufactured for maximum profit, that directly affects the body/experience of the user. Preciado argues that the current precarity of work under neoliberalism with slowly change into a pornification of work in which oppressed groups will not only be subject to the penetrative subjectivity of pharmaceuticals and media but will also be coerced into employment that necessitates the performance and control of their very sexuality.

era - Preciado traces a line from 20^th century Fordist capitalism through Foucault’s society of discipline and Deleuze’s society of control into what they consider the next step in capitalism’s ultimate domination of humanity, control through the hormones in the body, through sexuality, through media, and as a result through gender.

Preciado argues that the once progressive politics of feminist movements began to sour in the late 1980’s and transformed into a new type of dominating ideology centred on the heterosexual white body. Sharing Donna Haraway’s criticism of identity as an exclusionary and dividing technology, Preciado is less concerned with the liberation of any in-group or out-group, but instead calls for a radical “anti-pharmacopornographic activism” (337). This resistance movement is characterized by a mass expropriation of pharmacopornographic technologies. The same technologies that Preciado is expropriating themself; hormones, gender performance, and pornographic representation. Or more specifically; black market Testogel, drag king workshops, and home-made amateur pornography tapes meant for documentation, not titillation.

This resistance must act at the cutting edge of progressive movements as neoliberalism continually commodifies new theories of identity and subjectivity. Preciado lives a “postqueer micropolitics” since, for Preciado, the term “queer” has been corrupted, made into an economically viable and marketable catch phrase.

Referencing the punk movement of 1977, Preciado illustrates the pleasure/death dichotomy of snuff films. A snuff film is a consumable media product defined by its coverage of something that should not be consumed through media. If “pornography [is] a device for the publication of the private” (Preciado 266), then the snuff film is uber-porn - the publication of the unspeakable.

In the same way we derive pleasure from pornography, there is a dark pleasure derived from snuff. Preciado argues that we are living in a “techno-porno-punk moment” (346) and that the snuff film is what characterizes our relationship to politics. The punk impulse of pleasure-in-violence extends to our fetishization of war and our mediatization of misery.

Referencing Donna Haraway, Preciado denies humanity’s escapist fantasies regarding our destiny. The idea that someone/something (God, Elon Musk, or futuristic tech) will swoop down and deus-ex-machina us out of trouble is naive. And the idea that we’re already fucked - there’s nothing we can do to stop the apocalypse - is inaccurate and useless. Preciado demands that we reflect on the reality of our snuff politics and accept our current “high-punk modernity”. From that point we might learn from it.

Here, Preciado lays the groundwork for the concept of “the common somatheque” (389) or, “body as techno-living cultural archive, as in the word bibliothèque” (389n58). In a warning to those that take physical records for granted, Preciado gives a brief history of book burning from ancient China to contemporary Iraq. To provide a more resilient “library”, Preciado advocates for an ingestion or incorporation of radical theories and scholarship into the body. A literal incorporation, as in: unite into the body, the corpus. In the face of possible destruction, we must record theories and politics into the somatheque through “collective experimentation… physical practice, [and] ways of life” (Preciado 350)

For historical inspiration of somatheque recording practice Preciado refers to the 18^th century physician Samuel Hahnemann and his process of self experimentation with quinine. Citing Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of “voluntary auto-intoxication” (8), Preciado sees 18^th century medical experimentation practice as an early example of drug use being the catalyst for subversive theories and cultural criticism. Preciado implicitly positions their experiments with testoterone into a history of voluntary auto-intoxication, and expresses an urgent need for more pharmaceutical-theoretical practices among trans-feminists.

Here is where Preciado begins their call for the expropriation of pharmacopornographic power. “We must reclaim the right to participate in the construction of biopolitical fictions… Such a process of resistance and redistribution could be called technosomatic communism” (352):

-techno – technological, whether literal, pharmaceautical, or abstract

-somatic – corporeal, of the body

-communism – used here to conjure an image of the radical redistribution of power

The principle of the auto-guinea pig is not just an important method for exploring subjectivity, but a method for record-keeping, and a method for the revolutionary redistribution of power.

Preciado furthers their case for subversive self-experimentation: “In the face of conservatism and moral indoctrination… one must develop a Micropolitics of gender, sex, and sexuality based on practices of intentional self-experimentation” (363).This section provides thorough historical examples of auto-guinea pigs, most significantly Sigmund Freud.

A historical analysis of Freud’s experiments with cocaine suggests a continuity between pharmaceutical technologies (like cocaine), early psychotherapeutic technique (like hypnosis or “the talking cure”), and sexual impulse or arousal. Often, through practice and theory, Freud conflated all three. The exceedingly specific historical anecdotes here are used to support Preciado’s larger project of muddying the waters when it comes to drugs, sex, and identity. If Freud needed to explore “narcoanalysis” as a precursor to “psychoanalysis” we can see the importance of drug use in the development of groundbreaking theory.

Preciado works to elevate pharmaceutical experimentation, to recognize it for it’s innovative potential. They argue that drugs, including sex hormones, are not just recreational, escapist, or medicinal, but rather “they are technologies of the subject… from which will issue new practices for defining frames of human intelligibility” (360).

For more insight into Preciado’s conflation of narcotics and sexuality (pharma and porno) we can analyze a stream of consciousness breakdown on pages 361-362. Preciado provides a pseudo-journal entry that lists sex alongside black market drugs as the “narcotic terrain” of the different cities they have visited. Among testosterone, cocaine, and other drugs, Preciado also lists “V” (which might indicate valium, but almost certainly indicates their lover “VD”) corresponding to Paris, and more literally they list “sex” corresponding to Vauvert. This conflation gestures toward Preciado’s wider philosophy of experimentation with sex and sexuality as another extension of gender subjectivity.

This chapter addresses Preciado’s personal experiences with gender experimentation through drag king practice. They go into detail about the ways a drag king workshop, through discussion, exercises in physicality, and the adoption of outwardly masculine signifiers can lead the participants to a state of “gender suspicion” (366). This suspicion allows the participants to see gender as mutable, as something that can be played with.

In one of these workshops, after gluing hair to their face to create a beard, Preciado catches their reflection and sees themself as a man. Not someone dressed up as man, but something more genuine, or at least more powerful than a costume. A very simple example of gender being subverted through experimentation.

This section explores what Preciado calls “drag king micropolitics” (369), “performative politics” (370), or even “performative biocodes” (372). The steps one takes to become a drag king. Including clothing, artificial facial hair, posture, and attitude. These subtle experiments can reap immense rewards when it comes to the expropriation of one’s gendered subjectivity. As such, Preciado characterizes drag king communities as a “culture of resistance” (369).

Following a portmanteau pattern of [prefix]-analysis, Preciado goes on to define a new term: “queeranalysis”. A radical distribution of reflexive subjectivity shared amongst those taking part in drag king workshops or, more generally, in any practice of gender hacking undertaken in a queer space.

-The Techno-Lamb Model

Here Preciado provides a historical example as a fable of the ideal gender hacker. “Agnes” was a young person in the 50’s. A historical case of someone who undertook a parallel pharmaceutical experiment to Preciado’s Testogel antics. Agnes expropriated their mother’s prescribed estrogen pills to redirect their biological experience in a way more satisfying to them, flying in the face of the gender apparatus. Here we see the same micropolitics between Agnes and Preciado, spanning across decades but still defined by The Pharmacopornographic Era.

-Traps of Pharmacopornographic Neoliberalism

Here Preciado begins to write a bit of near-future science fiction. They see neoliberalism on two different possible trajectories, the first would retain what we know of as nation-states, with pharmacopornographic industries operating within them. This would be a continuation of the process we already see.

The second is markedly more William Gibsonesque in its imagery, with pharmacopornographic industry devouring governmental powers, then replacing, or subsuming them. Nation-state becomes less important than brand, citizenship becomes less important than credit card number, but most importantly gender and sex are exploited more efficiently and effectively than ever.

Preciado finds that we may be much closer to the latter option than we realize. The history of neoliberal industry is that of political interference and governmental domination, and without any fetters there is no reason for it to slow down.

-Gender and Sex Hackers

This section is the big payoff of “Micropolitics of Gender” and in a way, it’s the payoff of the entire book.

Preciado comes to the radical conclusion they have been working towards throughout Testo Junkie. But by this point, if you’ve followed the journey of the book, this conclusion will come as no surprise. Indeed, if you get deep enough inside this book, or rather – let it deep enough inside you - the sensibility put forth in this final paragraph is merely the satisfying climax that Preciado has been working towards the whole time.

We are all trans already.

Gender is code. And all anyone needs to hack it is the right tool, the right space, or the right knowledge.

Testo Junkie is a thorough interrogation of the ways that gender and sex are used in society as a method of control and subjugation. Preciado writes from a very personal place but uses extensive research and theoretical contextualization to clearly define ideas and concepts. Drawing heavily from the larger narratives of social structure like Marx’s theories of Capital and Foucault’s theories of Sovereignty and Discipline, Preciado lays out a new framework to conceptualize contemporary society.

It is worth situating Testo Junkie in relation to Foucault’s The History Of Sexuality. Preciado even tips their hat to Foucault in the naming of an earlier chapter “History Of Technosexuality” (68).

Foucault’s bio-history (and by extension, bio-power) clearly inspired Preciado. His “body as a machine” (139) and “species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life” (139) are fertile ground for Preciado’s figuration of biological subjectivity. Foucault even presages imagery of the Pharmacopornographic Era, although in a limited sense, with his conception of a “society of ‘sex,’ or rather a society ‘with a sexuality’” (147).

For Preciado, the Pharmacopornographic Era lies dormant under Foucault’s Society of Discipline and is in the process of replacing it. For subjects of these power structures “supervision [is] effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population.” (Foucault 139). And for Preciado, this biopolitics must be met with a micropolitics of gender.

The “queer micropolitics” that Preciado is advocating for in this chapter are an example of a common pattern in activism of the last 40 years. This activism defined by experimentation, ambiguity, and a non-structured narrative can be linked back to Donna Haraway writing in 1985 in her important work The Cyborg Manifesto. Haraway advocated for a new progressive politics that was not defined by identit(ies)y but defined by kinship and resistance (150-151). Preciado is also advocating for non-identity oriented approach – perhaps even a Harawayesque kinship between all those brought to heel by The Pharmacopornographic Era. Preciado and Haraway write in very different eras yet the echoes are undeniable. Haraway’s concern for feminism’s shortcomings, it’s devolution into an exclusionary project is an early example of what Preciado would come to be concerned about. The corruption, or more accurately, the appropriation of feminist, gay, lesbian, and (imminently) queer movements by normative Pharmacopornographic Capital.

The more immediate historical context that Preciado is writing in, and one that is discussed directly throughout the book, is trans theory and its relationship to queer theory. Susan Stryker’s essay “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin” is a historiographic reflection of her earlier work regarding trans theory and the related literature that inspired it. A snapshot of trans thought in 2004, Stryker laments how in the early 90’s there was a certain optimism in queer theory, at that time they sought to “denaturaliz[e] and thus deprivileg[e] nontransgender practices of embodiment and identification… Embracing and identifying with the figure of Frankenstein’s monster” (213). This imagery of a patchwork man, biologically constructed, is deeply resonant with Preciado’s mad scientist patchwork gender subversion. And, like Preciado, Stryker finds that politics have not advanced in the way queer theorists of the last millennia thought they would, stating “queer theory… has not realized the (admittedly utopian) potential I (perhaps naively) sensed there for a radical restructuring of our understanding of gender” (213)

In this discussion of 90’s trans theory Stryker provides a particularly significant citation of Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, in which we find “Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion” an analysis of the film Paris Is Burning. In direct contrast to Preciado’s consideration of drag practices, Butler states that through it’s representation of exaggerated gender performance, “drag may well be used in the service of both the denaturalization and reidealization of hyperbolic heterosexual gender norms” (125).

“Gender Is Burning” was published in 1994, and “Evil Twin” in 2004, Testo Junkie’s original Spanish publication would come only 4 years later. The sphere of trans theory is immediate and relatively young. Ten years ago Preciado was at the bleeding edge of gender subversion and the history they are drawing from is recent enough to be lived memory. Even after a decade, Testo Junkie is still highly radical and we can use it to inform our reading of older works like Butler’s “Gender is Burning”.

Just as Preciado’s subject is controlled, coerced, and penetrated by The Pharmacopornographic Era so too is Lazzarato’s subject controlled, coerced, and robbed by debt. Both historicizations deal directly with neoliberalism and draw heavily from Foucault’s theories of subjectivity and biopower. These theories are meant to illuminate the unseen growth of control in the last 40 years by hegemonic power in the developed world.

Lazzarato’s book The Making Of The Indebted Man is a focused text concerned with the way financialization and debt have been inflated to egregiously powerful positions and how they are wielded by the elite bourgeois. Not just to rob the general populace of every last drop of value but, in doing so, also turn the oppressed subject towards a way of life, a morality, that is attuned to the activity of paying back your debt. Both Preciado and Deleuze see a morality being established to instigate a self-policing by populations of their own subjectivity, either through debt or through gender.

One might further historicize this particular intertextual link with Gilles Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. In 1992 Deleuze was already writing about the ways that Foucauldian “discipline” had left the “enclosure” and sublimated into something much more expansive and ubiquitous (4). For Preciado, this expansion is characterized less by a god-like ubiquity and more by an ingestion, an injection even. Pharmacopornographic power lives not just above, but within us, within our very cells.

Foucault, Deleuze, Lazzarato, and Preciado all have something in common beyond their theories, the personal subjectivity and (undeniably) the sensibility of whiteness.

In The Undercommons Moten and Harney explore power as inherently racial. They discuss blackness from a more ontological perspective. They are concerned with blackness (and whiteness in relation) as subjectivity. This subjectivity, for Moten and Harney, is characterized as “governance”. With a nod to both Foucault and Deleuze, governance is another figure of hegemonic control, as perpetrated through colonialism and white supremacy. We can see some compelling similarities to Preciado’s Pharmacopornographic subjectivity, as control becomes more internalized, “governance then becomes the management of self-management” (Harney and Moten 55). Preciado’s gendered subject is meant to self-govern just as Moten and Harney’s racialized subject is meant to self-govern – that is to say, in order to generate as much capital for their oppressors as possible.

In Moten and Harney’s chapter “Debt and Credit” we meet a theoretical figure, a fugitive student, “they study without an end, plan without pause, rebel without policy” (67). This student uses the resources available to them to live radically perpendicular to governance. This student has expropriated the active elements of their subjectivity, the moralization of debt, the gregariousness of higher education. Consider a meeting between this theoretical figure and Preciado’s figure of Agnes. A radical gender hacker with cards up her sleeve, walking into a secret study room where delinquent students conspire in solidarity. Would they be distrustful? Would they debate? Or learn from each other? Or would they simply nod in understanding and turn up the music, getting back to it, finding a new way.

Butler, Judith. “Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion.” Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex". Routledge, 1993, pp. 121-140.

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, vol. 59, The MIT Press, 1992, pp. 3-7.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Pantheon Books, 1978.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991, pp. 149-181.

Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.

Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Translated by Joshua David Jordan, Semiotext(e), 2012.

Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie. Translated by Bruce Benderson, Feminist Press, 2013.

Sloterdijk, Peter and Hans-Jürgen Heinrichs. Neither Sun Nor Death. Translated by Steven Corcoran, Semiotext(e), 2011.

Stryker, Susan. “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 10, no. 2, 2004, pp*.* 212-215.