BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    The biodrag of genre in Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie: sex, drugs and biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era

    Jones, Sophie A. (2018) The biodrag of genre in Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie: sex, drugs and biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics 2 (2), ISSN 2542-4920.

    [img]
    Preview
    Text
    SA Jones, The Biodrag of Genre in Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie.pdf - Published Version of Record
    Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

    Download (255kB) | Preview

    Abstract

    Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (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 Testo Junkie, 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.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): hormones, queer, transgender, gender, genre
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Research Centres and Institutes: Medical Humanities, Centre for
    Depositing User: Sophie Jones
    Date Deposited: 01 Oct 2018 07:29
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:44
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/24050

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    499Downloads
    6 month trend
    302Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item Edit/View Item