Donna Haraway observed that "illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins". This is the technobiopolitically produced illegitimate love child of Haraway and Foucault. Far from being "inessential", however, Preciado is unafraid to take them in a new subversive direction to not only offer a compelling, punk and psychotropic analysis of gender, sex, power, subjectivity, drug-taking, desire, the nature of work, and capitalist reproduction but also sketch how we could "transform such minority knowledge into collective experimentation, into physical practice, into ways of life and forms of cohabitation (pp. 350)"

The genealogy of capitalist control construed as first biopower, then techno-biopower, then pharmacopower is substantive and insightful. Preciado skillfully uses feminist and queer theory—working from Foucault, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, in addition to a bevvy of queer punk performers and artists—to offer us relevant, and revolutionary, ways of thinking about bodies and identities in light of evolving (medical) technologies.Testo Junkie is a rigorous examination of the 21st century body measured, dissected, and controlled by and circiulating within pharmacopornographic economies. Its impact will inevitably shift a range of queer epistemes. Preciado’s passion and inquisitiveness, furthermore, raises the bar for what it means to be a philosopher, a queer “lover of wisdom” who dives in, rather than shirks from, the messiness of the body. It’s interesting that you mention design. Design is at the center of the pharmacopornographic more than anything else, because design invents techniques of the body. Chairs and buildings are designed relative to the body, and body techniques define relationships between body, space and time, and the spaces that you can or cannot use. It’s crucial that activists with the right questions permeate these fields. Designers are typically driven by the commercial. In terms of becoming a rat in your own laboratory, that’s what happens when you write. Writing is becoming the rat in your own laboratory. Writing is the main technology of production of subjectivity that we invented a really long time ago. What I do in the book is underlying this, making it hyperbolic through the invention of the protocol. There are moments when you go beyond what is traditionally done, in research and within the academy, that you think you are losing your mind, but you have to give yourself a kind of reference of heroes, whoever it is, be it Freud or Foucault. Tal grado de infiltración me recordaba constantemente a esta cita de mi queridísimo Hervé Guibert recuperada por Preciado: «Yo soy como siempre en la escritura al mismo tiempo el experto y la rata que destripa para su estudio». Efectivamente Preciado disecciona su identidad, su adicción, sus afectos y su círculo al escribir; sin embargo, cuando termina deja las herramientas de quirófano sobre la mesa y te invita mediante la lectura a que realices el mismo ejercicio. Me he descubierto así pues mirándome delante del espejo e intentando visualizarme en una era presexual, sin la influencia del bombardeo farmacopornográfico; me he imaginado después hipertestosteronado, con alopecia androgénica; más tarde hasta arriba de estrógenos y con las tetas crecidas; saltando de un género a otro, revirtiendo la educación recibida y despervirtiendo mi sexualidad... The primary point of contention, especially for feminists influenced by Irigaray (or those of us who believe in the raw materials of the body), is that of Preciado’s argument on the constructiveness of sex—and not just gender. The difference, as s/he even observes in their critique of second wave feminism, is that that sex has been defined as being biological, chemical and chromosomal—it is internal to the body—whereas gender is external to the body, a chain of culturally created signifiers mapped onto the body. S/he claims, however, sex is a “biofiction.” It is in large part a fiction because it cannot be distinguished in any logical or pragmatic way from its relation to gender, specifically because the pharmacopornographic regime, with its economy of chemical and hormonal drugs, has irreversibly altered the relation of one’s gender and sex: “[t]he issue no longer comes down to considering gender as a cultural force that comes to modify a biologically determined foundation (sex). Instead, it is subjectivity as a whole, produced within the techno-organic circuits that are codified in terms of gender, sex, race, and sexuality through which the pharmacopornographic capital circulates.” When I sat down the next day with the calming but intellectually compelling B., B. laid out for me the universality of the pharmacopornographic regime, how all bodies have become biopolitical archives for the powers that be, but also how taking testosterone effects one’s cognitive experience, how we romanticize substances like opium and writing, and how the pill is just a blip on the blueprint that is you.

According to Preciado, all sexual bodies become "intelligible" according to a common "pharmacopornographic technology". There is no such thing as gender without technology. Technology is understood in large sense, from writing technologies, to bio-chemical and image production. Preciado declares that Testo Junkie is a " body- essay", and writes of his use of testosterone as a way of undoing gender inscribed on the body by the capitalistic commodification and mobilization of sexuality and reproduction, a process transcendent from the social norm expected with transitioning. [5] Testo Junkie is a homage to French writer Guillaume Dustan, a close gay friend of Preciado's who contracted AIDS and died of an accidental overdose of a medication he was taking. In the book Preciado also processes the changes in his body due to testosterone through the lens of a romantic affair with his then lover, French writer Virginie Despentes, referred to as "VD." [6] An Apartment on Uranus. London, United Kingdom: Fitzcarraldo Editions; Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). 2020.Tr. Charlotte Mandel. [23] Stuettgen, Tim. "Disidentification in the Center of Power: The Porn Performer and Director Belladonna as a Contrasexual Culture Producer (A Letter to Beatriz Preciado)." Women's Studies Quarterly 35.1/2 (2007): 249–270.

Can you talk about the AIDS preventative medication PEP and its relation to your pharmacopornographic theory?

Preciado te coge de la mano y te guía como si estuvieses en uno de sus talleres drag king. Nos demuestra lo ridículamente maleable que es el género y lo arbitrario del sexo, certezas que al principio pueden causar vértigo, pero a la larga se revelan liberadoras. What was the benefit to designing your own protocol, of being the lab rat in your experiments with testosterone? Los capítulos teóricos me dejaron sin palabras al principio: tenía la sensación de estar leyendo algo completamente nuevo, de estar accediendo a un tipo de conocimiento hasta ahora secreto que ponía de manifiesto lo endeble de las bases en las que cimiento mi identidad. Noté que incluso cuando me apartaba del texto seguía respirando un aire enrarecido, que lo que había leído me entraba en el torrente sanguíneo como la testosterona que Preciado se administra clandestinamente. The Awards of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival" (PDF). Berlinale de. 25 February 2023 . Retrieved 26 February 2023.

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Preciado, Paul B. (2021). Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol.32. Translated by Wynne, Frank. Semiotext(e). ISBN 9781635901511.