Akiva Reads

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

by Paul B. Preciado, Bruce Benderson

FINALLY MADE IT. The trick with this one was to not read sentences more than twice (and ideally not more than once). Didn't have any idea what the fuck they were talking about? Fuck it, press on! I still can't use the word necropolitics in a sentence but I learned some interesting shit about the Pill being tested on PR women and I got the outlines of Preciado's gender theory.

And the interpersonal drama, and lots of details and intellectualizing about Preciado's sex life and drug use, and so on and so forth. I don't think that was the point, but you know what, it wasn't contrary to the point either, and I'm here for it.

Either the translator or Preciado himself does not know what "cis" means; I understood more when I realized that every occurrence of "cis woman" was supposed to be "dyadic female-assigned person." There's a limit to how much of the confusion between those two things you can chalk up to Preciado being in denial about being trans at the time he wrote it; some of those sentences just don't make sense otherwise.