Testo Junkie By Beatriz Preciado Art as Activism, Suicide as Resistance

“How can I explain what is happening to me? What can I do about my desire for transformation? What can I do about all the years I defined myself as a feminist? What kind of feminist am I today: a feminist hooked on a testosterone, or a transgender body hooked on feminism? I have no other alternative but to revise my classics, to subject those theories to the shock that was provoked in me by the practice of taking testosterone. To accept the fact that the change happening in me is the metamorphosis of an era” Beatriz Preciado, Testo Junkie

I read Testo Junkie in one sitting, something that barely reflects my style of reading, I usually can’t focus on a reading for more than 30 40 minutes at once. I need to take breaks in between, check my Facebook, check twitter. “Professor reacts to Fidel Castro’s death” a friend tagged me in a post earlier. I am also in middle of a heated argument on the use of gender neutral pronouns on my Facebook timeline. ‘A hospital has been bombed in Syria’, ‘one million people are starving in Aleppo’, ‘what is the future of Cuba a friend asks in a comment’! Wait, what we were talking about? Yes, Testo Junkie. I read it in one sitting. No distractions.

Beatriz Preciado’s narrative style is not the only reason I was hooked on the book but also her critical reanimation of the social constructionist consensus of feminist theories of gender. This is also what I found fascinating in Testo Junkie. Preciado’s engagement with the genealogy of gender not just as a psychic identification or an embodied performance, but as a technical capacity leads to her theorization of gender as a hormonal and surgical artifact produced by mid-twentieth-century Cold War sciences and medicine. I mentioned genealogy, let me elaborate on that: On page 25, Preciado asks; “how did sex and sexuality become the main objects of political and economic activity?” and then they orders us to follow them, “the changes in capitalism that we are witnessing are characterized not only by the transformation of “gender,” “sex,” “sexuality,” “sexual identity,” and “pleasure” into objects of the political management of living ..but also by the fact that this management itself is carried out through the new dynamics of advanced technocapitalism, global media, and biotechnologies” ( p 25).

According to Preciado, the Cold War had introduced more funding into the scientific research about sex and sexuality in the United States. However, these trends builds off of earlier research on sex/gender and sexualism from the late 1930s and arguably even earlier. The World Wars served as the most suitable laboratory for re-configuring the body, sex, and sexuality, after which the necropolitical techniques of the war become biopolitical industries in attempting to produce and discipline sexual subjectivities through surveillance and biotechnologies (p 26). Necropolitical techniques, in return, have introduced us to necropolitical body, the body that has been marked by its relationship to power techniques of giving death in the pharmacopornographic era, an era that has been marked by its accelerationist and late capitalist mode of technological and chemical subjectification. As Preciado explains “contemporary society is inhabited by toxic-pornographic subjectivities: subjectivities defined by the substance (or substances) that supply their metabolism, by the cybernetic prostheses and various types of pharmacopornographic desires that feed the subject’ s actions and through which they turn into agents” (35).

By applying and elaborating on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life, Preciado argues that in the era of pharmcopornagraphy, we all are reducible to Homosaccer’s, or techno-Homosaccers (techno-naked life) and the distinctive feature of this body, which is stripped of all legal or political status is that its use is intended as a source of production of potential gaudendi1 . Thus, if we are to argue that, the pharmcopornagraphic era has reduced us to reactive objects rather than political agents, then can suicide be an interruption of liberal modernity’s commitment to ‘make life live’?

This question reminds me of Jasbir Puar article “CODA: The Cost of Getting Betting: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints” in which she argues that part of the outrages of society against queer suicide – especially white male queer suicide – is based precisely on the belief that our life should get better over time. What could be identified as a continued uninterrupted linear narrative of progress and modernity. Therefore, to commit suicide is an interruption of this linear narrative (p 151). One of the very interesting parts of Puar’s argument is her characterization of life under neoliberalism as characterized by a ‘slow death,’ profitable in its debilitation and incapacity for capitalism and medical industrial complex.

Therefore, complexities of the acts of suicide should be seen and acknowledged by placing them within the “broader context of neoliberal demands for bodily capacity as well as the profitability of debility, both functioning as central routes through which finance capital seeks to sustain itself.” (153) Contextualizing her argument in Brian Massumi’s affective theory, Puar argues that, “in neoliberal, biomedical, and biotechnological terms, the body always debilitated in relation to its ever-expanding potentiality” (154). Therefore, to put an end to this profitable slow death, suicide can or may question the current politics of bodily exceptionalism and open a discussion about affective politics, one beyond “reproduction and proliferation of grieving subjects” – ‘beginning with the very identity of the body that writes’ (157).

1 The orgasmic force that designates “the (real or virtual) strength of a body’ s (total) excitation” (41), it reminds me of Deleuzian perspective on affect as force/ontological force?

Bibliography

Beatriz Preciado. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. The feminist press in CUNY.

Puar, Jasbir K. (2011). “CODA: The Cost of Getting Betting: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18(1): 149-158.