Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Transgressive Truth Telling

2014; Duke University Press; Volume: 1; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/23289252-2685696

2328-9260

Lara Rossana Rodriguez,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

Within the field of trans- studies, a heterogeneous body of artists, activists, scholars, and pornographers have been coming together in order to address within their respective projects, performances, collaborations, and disciplines: what is the potential of the trans-body in the twenty-first century? Beatriz Preciado's Testo Junkie, translated from the French by Bruce Benderson, wrestles with this question, among others, in order to theorize the body in transition as it moves within and against a Western landscape corrupted by pharmacopower and pornpower. Preciado (who is fluent in Spanish, English, and French) delivers a theoretically cogent and compelling account of the “pharmacopornographic” regime as it functions under capitalist, colonizing practices; throughout hir analysis, the author maintains that these forms of control do not produce docile, self-surveilling subjects but instead seductively aid in their design. To use the words of contemporary artist Mike Mills, the cops are inside us. In the same spirit, the author of Testo Junkie claims, “In the pharmacopornographic age, biopower dwells at home, sleeps with us, inhabits within” (207). Throughout Testo Junkie, Preciado labors to describe with fascinating precision how we all, to our sexopolitical detriment, have consented to living in “hormonal straightjackets” (118). According to the author, committing to a lively mesh of biotechnophilic performative practices may be our best bet for refusing the prescriptive, prepackaged, hormonally regimented genders we have been sold.As dystopic as things may seem, Preciado's rogue approach to hir topic allows hir to advance hir argument in terms no less sharp than they are original. As a varied and increasingly techno-gendered public endeavors to negotiate the pharmacopornographic era, where “the body swallows power” in pill form, Preciado anticipates the molecular and political potential of the testo junkie as a noncompliant biosynthetic trafficker of gender (207). Testo Junkie investigates: to what ends can the trans-body inhabit and alter these super-endocrinologically managed times, and in addition, how might cisgendered subjects come to queer their own relationships to gender by choosing to undermine the prescriptive regimes that regulate the dispensation of hormones? Cis, it seems, was never so cis to begin with. Preciado's philosophical inquiry, equal parts seducer's diary, mourning diary, and cyborg manifesto is a formidable treatise on gender that, under the auspices of T, anticipates the potential of the new insurrectionary trans-feminist-punk politics to come.One important aspect of Preciado's treatise is that the author never allows the body to lag behind as s/he endeavors to put to words the various haptic knowledges arriving to every organ, every orifice. Within Testo Junkie, the author often supplements a discussion of these knowledges with hand-drawn diagrams and winding word maps in order to provide some charismatic visuals for the intersecting and often contradictory knowledge flows as the author has perceived them; typically, these diagrams depict how various bodies of knowledge intersect and come to constitute some of the problematic logic and assumptions informing the relations between sex, power, pornography, and endocrino-politics. Ultimately, these conflicting knowledges and divergent styles of knowledge reporting collide to stunning effect.For instance, in the text's introduction, Preciado asserts that the book is “a body-essay. Fiction, actually” (11). Well, which one is it, BP? But the genre ambiguity asserted by the author is a way of enacting and textually embodying the pleasures that accompany gender ambiguity: the refusal to capitulate or identify singularly once and for all informs the narrative and the performative swerves made possible by testosterone, taken by the author in the form of Testogel. These swerves propel the feminist philosopher to confront the difficult question, “What kind of feminist am I today: a feminist hooked on testosterone, or a transgender body hooked on feminism?” (22). As Preciado narrates hir 236-day T-trial, the author fluently integrates a historical account of the production of hormones with dizzying, testosterone-induced reflections and critiques of Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault in order to question the classics. The effect of such a method is a hybrid work in which ficto-criticism meets the philosopher in the bedroom as s/he immerses hirself in hir object of study, T, and its many intersecting and attendant histories.In order to examine the biopolitical narratives that accompany the history of hormones, rather than assert T equals X (masculinity, machismo, maleness), Preciado observes, “T is only a threshold, a molecular door, a becoming between multiplicities” (143). Beyond this threshold is the reader who receives the confessions of Preciado's self-intoxicated “I” submersed in the city, always lucid, always in transit. Such a narrator promiscuously transitions across genres in order to repair the damage done by moralizing pogroms, referred to as “somato-political fictions”—fictions that legislate the political limits of the body. Preciado's “body-essay,” on the other hand, opposes the oppressive somato-political fictions by embracing a trans-cyberpunk style of reportage, one that imagines beyond the limits of a coherent, unified, and universal narrative “I” in order to claim: “I'm the residue of a biochemical process … I am T” (140). As a reader bears witness to Preciado's process, this poststructuralist narrative may read surprisingly for some like William Gibson's Neuromancer spliced with Samuel Delaney's Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. “Neither testo-girl nor techno-boy,” one wonders if the testo junkie is beyond gender when s/he is transformed into “a port of insertion for C19H28O2” (140). The body as “somatic filter” has never sounded so sexy nor spoken so eloquently (237). Testo Junkie makes a bold case for writing under the influence; such a practice involves the scholar's submitting to the rush of the high that comes with ingesting intellectually provocative content. In this case, testosterone is presented as one of the possible political fuels for an emerging techno-somatic transgressive politics.Moreover, when the difficult challenge of recombining disparate discourses in desperate times presents itself, the testo junkie exhorts: “Blend” (133). Blend methods, blur genders, for “we must reclaim the right to participate in the construction of biopolitical fictions” (352). One might come to value in such radical acts the transing of scholarship, in which an author, rather than disclosing his or her identity or disciplinary home, moves within a work from one genre to another, from one language to another. As Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore have written in their introduction to the “Trans-” issue of Women's Studies Quarterly, transing “assembles gender into contingent structures of association with other attributes of bodily being” (2008: 13). In the transmission of knowledge, from one body to another, we need not restrict ourselves to one mode of truth seeking or telling. In order for new kinds of counterknowledges to proliferate, Preciado exhorts the theoretical urgency with which novel narrative strategies must continue to be deployed.The author makes no secret of the fact that such strategies as are brought to bear in this project are largely indebted to and intertwined with hir friend Guillaume Dustan and hir lover Virginie Despentes, (referred to in the text as GD and VD, respectively). Both GD and VD (GD, deceased at the book's beginning, VD, disturbingly alive throughout) contribute to the urgency with which Preciado fucks, thinks, and writes. Conversely, if one were to reread VD's King Kong Theory (2010: 17) where Despentes writes, “I wanted to live like a man, so I lived like a man,” it would be equally apparent the intellectual impact Preciado had on Despentes. GD, however, remains a more elusive figure, perhaps especially so for the English reader, as most of his writing, with the exception of the controversial autobiographical work in my room (1996), has yet to be translated into English. Dustan died in 2005, and although the circumstances of his death remain unclear (was it an AIDS-related accidental overdose or a suicide?), the grief and rage that follows haunts Preciado's study. In a similar fashion, Hervé Guibert, author of To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life (1990), also appears as one of the influential French writers whose premature AIDS-related death prompts Preciado to ask in the form of apostrophe, “Do I belong more to your world than I do to the world of the living? Isn't my politics yours; my house, my body, yours?” (Preciado 20). The author's perpetual acknowledgment that hir intellectual drives and impulses are foregrounded by a queer dead readership confronts the haunted and unacknowledged practice in our scholarship in which we endeavor to speak of the dead, but seldom do we allow ourselves in our scholarship to speak to the dead.Mourning, however, as Douglas Crimp has suggested, may move a subject powerfully beyond melancholia to militant ends. As Preciado admits in the beginning of Testo Junkie to the ghost of GD, “I take [testosterone] to foil what society wanted to make of me … I do it to avenge your death”(16). To take testosterone as a gesture of mourning, refusal, and tribute may strike one as genuinely risky business. For example, before applying a 50 mg swath of Testogel, Preciado is forewarned in the Testogel's package insert: “Attention: TESTOGEL should not be used by women” (58). Why not? The packaging prompts one to wonder if Testogel is in fact toxic or physically harmful and potentially life threatening when consumed by anyone who might identify as a woman. Although Testogel was originally designed as a low-tech treatment for men who suffer from “illnesses related to a deficiency of testosterone,” a combination of skepticism, doubt, and frustration rouses Preciado's desire to know: for whom is it dangerous if women start stealing testosterone? (58). The gender outlaw, inevitably, goes forth and disrupts notions of bodily integrity and mores of social hygiene by layering on the gel; curiously, because testosterone is “one of the rare drugs that is spread by sweat, from skin to skin, body to body,” the testo junkie, as a result of hir intoxication, becomes a high-risk harbor for future potential contaminations (65). Queer contact = contact high.Preciado, however, is careful not to confuse hir desire for testosterone with that of hir trans friends'; s/he distinguishes these friends as “taking hormones as part of a protocol to change sex” while “others are fooling with it, self-medicating without trying to change their gender legally or going through any psychiatric follow-up. They don't identify with the term gender dysphorics and declare themselves ‘gender pirates,’ or ‘gender hackers.’ I belong to this latter group of testosterone users” (55). Preciado's decision to “self-medicate” is self-marginalizing as s/he groups hirself with “the others.” Such a self-naming locates hir desires in a different discourse than that of hir trans friends and colleagues and aligns hir curiosity (and hir subsequent guilt) with that of the drug user; s/he writes: “When I decide to take my first dose of testosterone, I don't talk about it to anyone. As if it were a hard drug, I wait until I'm alone in my home to try it” (56). As Preciado has marked hir interests in and illegal acquisition of testosterone apart from those of hir trans friends rather than relying on a trans discourse in which to justify hir actions, Preciado narrates hir fears and anxieties using the discourse of the junkie. Given Avital Ronell's claim in her book Crack Wars: Literature Addiction Mania (2004: 63), “Drugs make us ask what it means to consume,” Preciado, a philosopher of gender, wears the guise of the testo junkie in order to speak in new ways of the body as it consumes gender outside medically sanctioned protocols. Perhaps if we consider the user of gender as a junkie, we will no longer feel compelled to go along with the policing and pathologizing of gender as it does and does not belong to the State, to “feminism or to the lesbian community or to queer theory” (Preciado 397).To speak of the junkie hooked on “political drugs,” one begins to grasp some of the risks Preciado faces in hir project (396). The narrator's refusal to recognize hir experiment with T as simply a flirtation with trans politics marks hir within a trans discourse as a transgressive subject. As Foucault has observed in his “Preface to Transgression,” transgression “affirms limited being—affirms the limitlessness” into which being leaps (1977: 35). Preciado's self-imposed alienation marks hir as an agent and an experiment more invested in the leap toward possible identifications (and disidentifications) than in theorizing a project whose aims prioritize assimilation and passing. Anticipating judgment and accusations of betrayal from hir own community, s/he admits, “I know they're going to judge me for having taken testosterone … because I took testosterone outside of a medical protocol … because I used testosterone like a hard drug … and gave bad press to testosterone at the very moment when the law is beginning to integrate transsexuals into society” (Preciado 56). However, Preciado also acknowledges that the decision (and privilege) to keep hir “legal identity as a woman and to take testosterone without subscribing to a sex change protocol” need not “enter into conflict with the position of all the transsexuals who've decided to sign a contract with the state” (61). In the eyes of the testo junkie, no matter what our relationship to liberationist goals of integration, “all of us are united by the same carbon chains, by the same invisible gel” (61). We are all uncanny harbingers of gender, and so to that effect, perhaps Preciado is proposing we add to our list of fundamental inalienable rights the right to enact, perform, and consume gender in the fashions and forms we desire without fear of reprisal.