The Biodrag of Genre in Paul B. Preciado’s <i>Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era</i>

• Main Author: Sophie A. Jones
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Lectito Journals 2018-09-01
• Series: Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics
• Subjects: hormones; queer; transgender; gender; genre
• Online Access: http://www.lectitopublishing.nl/download/the-biodrag-of-genre-in-paul-b-preciados-testo-junkie-sex-drugs-and-biopolitics-in-the-3887.pdf

Paul B. Preciado’s <i>Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era</i> (2013) is many things at once: a fictionalised account of its author-narrator’s use of synthetic androgens, an alternative history of post-Fordism, and a manifesto for gender revolution. The text juxtaposes a number of disparate genres, including the fictionalized life narrative, the epistolary elegy, political theory, pornography, and the revolutionary manifesto. In this article I suggest that this aesthetic of juxtaposition figures genre as a form of drag, which I understand, in light of Elizabeth Freeman’s work, as both a mode of gender performance and a way of articulating the persistence of the past in the present. In <i>Testo Junkie</i>, genre becomes a way of organising a central tension in the book between the hormone’s history as an agent of oppression and the hormone’s speculative future as an agent of liberation. The text’s bifurcated form, I argue, ultimately works to compartmentalise difficult questions about the psychological legacies of racism and patriarchy, and to separate its manifesto for revolution from the histories that produce the revolutionary subject.