Early Life
Paul B. Preciado, originally born, Beatriz Preciado, was born in Spain in 1970. Preciado attended The New School, in New York for philosophy, where he met Jaqcues Derrida, a controversial philosopher who became a mentor and provided various opportunities which influenced Preciado’s life monumentally. One such opportunity was when Derrida invited Preciado to teach a seminar in Paris where he resided for another ten years. In 2015 Preciado began asking friends to refer to him as Paul.
Pharmapornagraphic Regime
In his book, Testo Junkie, Preciado explores the different controlling factors of society. Most prominent is the ‘Pharmapornagraohic Regime’ which aims to control the body on a molecular level. This is accomplished through the normalization of taking pills regardless of their usefulness. This can be illustrated through the mass consumption of birth control pills to regulate hormones for purposes beyond contraceptive factors. This ideology inspired an inverse experiment by Preciado; taking testosterone recreationally. The implications of taking a drug intended to alter your hormones is a focus of Preciado’s analysis. He questions why it can be assumed that there is any one hormonal balance that categorizes a person’s gender as male or female.
Publications
Manifesto Contrasexual
Published in 2002, in Spanish, this book is a work on contemporary feminism and transgender and queer politics.
Testo Junkie
Perhaps Preciado’s most well known work, Testo Junkie chronicles Preciado’s journey into the world of testosterone usage. The book questions the social construct of gender as a binary through the process of altering one’s hormones despite their sex. Testo Junkie was originally published in 2008 in Spanish, then again, in 2013 in English.
Pornutopia
In this book, published in 2014, Preciado explores the effect of Playboy Magazine as an influence on a new way of thinking and living with the influences of architecture and pornography as well as the oral contraceptive pill.
Influence
For the many years the Paul B. Preciado has been contributing his thoughts and experiences to society, he has been a strong influence on pushing people to question what they consider gender to be. By defying the binary and implementing his own ‘gender hacking’ techniques as discussed in “Testo Junkie”, Preciado provides a basis for a new way to think about and analyze gender.
Sources
https://www.vice.com/sv/article/ppvx38/beatriz-preciado-testo-junkie-interview-199
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/oct/11/guardianobituaries.france
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hmJr3iBr48
http://www.liberation.fr/chroniques/2015/01/16/catalogne-trans_1182248
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/44/60141/testo-junkie-sex-drugs-and-biopolitics/
