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

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[s] the sexuality of those bodies codified as woman and cause[s] 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. Agent: Mercedes Casanovas, Casanovas & Lynch. (Oct.)