Testo Junkie

Testo Junkie, published in English in 2013 by The Feminist Press with the subtitle Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, is a work of autotheory by the writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado. It first appeared in Spanish in 2008 as Testo yonqui, published by Espasa Calpe, and Bruce Benderson translated it into English. Preciado calls it a "body-essay": it recounts his experience, while living in Paris, of applying topical testosterone (Testogel) as a political and performative act, interweaving that experience with reflections on pharmaceuticals and pornography.

The book is also an homage to the French writer Guillaume Dustan, a close gay friend of Preciado who contracted HIV and died of an accidental overdose of a medication he was taking. Preciado also works through the bodily changes brought on by testosterone by way of his romantic relationship with the writer Virginie Despentes, referred to as "VD". Sexuality is central, and the book is framed as a continuation of Michel Foucault's history of sexuality and of Judith Butler's writings on gender.

The book offers a political history of reproductive technologies, from the oral contraceptive pill to Viagra, doping substances and fluoxetine, and examines the idea of potentia gaudendi, the body's inherent potential for pleasure. Its central concept is the pharmacopornographic era, which links the pharmaceutical industry, the pornography industry and late capitalism in the control of bodies. Preciado argues that power no longer operates only from outside: subjects internalize it by taking hormones that adjust their bodies to their gender identity. Within this frame, the voluntary ingestion of hormones becomes a form of gender hacking and a resistance to binary norms.

The book was chosen by McKenzie Wark for a list of the eleven best scholarly books of the 2010s by The Chronicle of Higher Education, and its English translation was a finalist for the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.