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Testo Yonqui (2000)

by Beatriz Preciado(Favorite Author)

4.31 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

8467026936 (ISBN13: 9788467026931)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

review 1: A long time ago one of my teachers told me it wasn't enough just to write a love song to Foucault, you had to actually build on him, and I was like come on that's impossible, but Preciado totally does it here. And that is only one of several ways this book blew my mind. Crazy compelling, it is a sex/drug/philosophy page turner that will keep you up late and make you wonder if you should take testosterone too.Before I read this, I was going to go see her at NYU but I spent so much time eating falafel and EVERY LAST sweet potato fry that I didn't get there until it was already full. Wish I had ditched some of those fries because, I feel like I have to know what she is doing NOW -- this book was already out for awhile before it was translated, and what will the nex... moret be?
review 2: Splitting the difference. As a scholarly product in the abstract - quite impressive, in the tradition of and remixing from Foucault, Butler, Haraway, Wittig, and many other (primarily French) philosophers. But not quite satisfying in the end. The "pharmaco" bit of Preciado's argument is engagingly and convincingly presented; the "p*rnographic" bit, for all the words expended on it, never quite comes together. I'd say it's hampered by a level of introspection and self-centering that is extremely indulgent - no doubt deliberately so, but nevertheless to the detriment of the argument. Preciado's conclusion is that "gender hacking" - conscious, micromanipulations of the body from without and within to resist gender binaries and produce new possibilities of gender - is "revolution" against the fictions of gender produced and circumscribed by a pharmaceutical regime (bodies disciplined by The Pill, Viagra, synthetic hormones, etc) and globalized p*rnified audio-visual media. But it's ultimately unclear what connection, if any, there is between such "revolution" (creating "open biocode[s]" of gender) and actual benefit to the groups Preciado rightly identifies as most exploited, oppressed, and dehumanized by these regimes (people of color/working classes/trans* and queer people). Relatedly, Preciado's discussion of these oppressions reduces those who experience them to an undifferentiated mass. When race and class come up - not nearly often enough - she seems to say the right things, for most of the book. But it's all very abstract. The increasingly nagging feeling I had as I read the book that Preciado's "gender revolution" involves more than a little bit of white feminist identification with hegemonic male power and privilege is unfortunately confirmed near the end of the book - she reduces Jimi Hendrix to an organ/sexual potency in a way that disturbingly resembles so many other examples of white women fetishizing Black men. She then dismisses the only Black feminist thinker that (as far as I noticed) she engages with at all in the entire book - expressing annoyance at the "prohibitions" of "dominant feminist politics," including the "prohibitions about destroying the house of the master with the tools of the master." This is a reference to a well-known Audre Lorde quote and essay (though Preciado doesn't bother to even name Lorde). That would be disturbing enough on its own, especially the identification of Lorde as a representative of the very "dominant feminist politics" that she wrote searingly about being excluded from and harmed by. Preciado's meaning is in part that the "tools of the master" in producing modern fictions of gender - in her case, testosterone - can in fact be used to destroy those same fictions. But she continues to say that she wants to "[fulfill her] sexual and political desire to be the master...without apolog[y]...the way a biomale would." [By "biomale" she seems to mean cisgender man.] Later she restates this desire to "To acquire a certain political immunity of gender, to get roaring drunk on masculinity, to know that it is possible to look like the hegemonic gender.” There's been lots of ink spilled on why white women wanting to be more like men/enjoy the privileges of hegemonic masculinity is anything but gender liberation or revolution, so it was rather disappointing to see that this is where Preciado ends up.The first, last, and intercalary chapters are all personal memoir centered on Preciado's self-administration of testosterone (turning herself into an "Auto guinea pig), her love and sex life during this time, mostly with French author Virginie Despentes, and her reminiscences about and engagement with the memory of a close friend and fellow author who died a few months into her experiment with testosterone. It's self-indulgent and exhibitionist by design - this works a lot better on an individual level, as an individual account of gender, than as a manifesto for collective gender revolution. These chapters are pretty engaging reading when they avoid getting too abstract (much of it is outright erotica) and they tie in to the more historical/theoretical sections in interesting ways.A perhaps minor point: Preciado's chronology is partially wrong - she takes as fact Thomas Laqueur's argument about the premodern "one sex body," which Katharine Park and other medieval/early modern scholars have persuasively debunked. It doesn't change much in terms of the validity of Foucault's concepts of biopower and biopolics, or Preciado's concept of pharmacopornopolitics (*sigh*), but it does have some implications for her argument about understandings of the body that it would have been nice to see her explore. Unfortunately Laqueur's argument has quite a bit of traction in this field despite not being supported by the historical record.I realize this review is a bit opaque, but believe me, the book is even more so. Writing a completely lucid review of the book would require far more words and time than I have the luxury or inclination to spend on this. In any case - if virtuosity were the only measure, I'd give it 5 stars; for not quite being coherent and for extremely individualistic political ends that are ultimately troubling, I'd give it quite a few less. 3 stars seems about right. less

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