Pharmaco-pornographic larking; a kindof reveiw of that book Testo Junkie which is pretty lit tbh and makes me wanna go on a sex-store spree and blow rent-money on a dildo collection coz at the moment I only have two and one of them was stolen so meh (how awesome is stuffing yourself with dildos and huffing poppers omg love it!!??!!)

What even is the importance of things like sex and gender and 'body sovereignty' in a world on fire? 

Recently finished Paul Preciado's Testo Junkie and can't recommend it enough, thought it definitely bought into the affective 'ultra-modernity' of trans and queer narratives in a way that made me both exhilarated and uncomfortable; uncomfortable maybe because there are trans and queer life-worlds without access to the cultural and theoretical abundance of Preciado's semi-affluent cosmopolitan lifestyle which gives primacy to city spaces as well as travel. I mean, we really need to talk about how we premise travel as a general good, because in all seriousness it's access is entirely classed and it has a hefty carbon emission which is anything but negligible at this late stage. It's packaged with normative versions of success that, frankly, worship cosmopolitan meccas like London or Paris or New York as the only sites through which success can be measured, while anything else is small fry. Can a climate of detrimentally heavy identity rhetoric really be so blind to the ecological (and human) cost of privileged mobility? How can that same rhetoric decry post-colonial deficits in one breath and capitalise on affective victimhood aspiring towards planet-destroying affluence with the other? Double-think lol. 

That said I can't count the times I've been forced to prostitute my affective brown-ness or gay-ness, exacerbating difference to give myself an edge. Though in fairness if equity actually existed then we wouldn't be in this strange and paradoxical predicament where alleged victims are asked to perform their specific traumas for a penny, and educate well-meaning 'allies' for a dime. It's akin to being a member of the SPCA and making a liberated circus animal retell it's experiences of battery and captivity through contemporary dance. Not that I'm not a good dancer, but in the words of esteemed neo-Marxist Slavoj Zizek, 'I'd prefer not to'. 

Anyway Preciado talks about gender being a prosthesis, not just a chemical-hormonal one as per the premise of their book which sees them experimenting with testosterone doses and transforming their own makeup along lines outside the nascent prescriptions of trans-realisations (which is fun to watch and is it's own adventure in radical body sovereignty, which also really calls into question the nature of addiction and whether we can rightly pathologise any substance dependency whatsoever in a society that's gleefully integrated industrial by-products). But also they talk about gender itself being a somatic fiction, somatic here meaning enclosing desiring apparatuses which more often than not are supplemented by drugs. Though drugs in Preciado's loose designation includes things like sex (it's own ritualised initiator of the body's pharmacopeia) and even books, perhaps extolling the transformative nature of the act of reading; maybe specifically when it comes to radical theory such as their own. 

I can understand gender being some collection of fictions embodied 'somatically' and in that being a prosthesis, which makes the gendered body some kind of Frankenstein's monster (or cyborgian), and I can even more excitedly understand likening the reading of books to the ingestion of drugs, which as a notion characterises culture itself as a mind-altering substance (and by proxy a field of body-transformative resonance with changing requirements and context-specific needs, kind of like being extremely hay-feverish and alternately wading through country and city; or not, maybe that's a useless metaphor but it's Spring right now and my body is reading the world with feverish congested rejection, and I'm terrified of climate change whipping up pollen storms and asphyxiating me to death like those people in Melbourne last year because death by hay fever would just be humiliating).  

If gender is so porous then could we possibly shift this grasp of fluidity to the body itself, latent in Preciado's book, experiment freely and wantonly with the flesh sitting on these bones like a goopy catsuit, harness the dissonance which living through collapse will undoubtedly induce to look at embodiment as a game, the body not as bonded gendered signifier but as the unfathomably bottomless ground of everything, the keystone to every experience you could possibly have in this life and thusly available for adjustment per whim and fancy (or dire necessity). Which it is. 

Because I'm sick of versions of the future that preclude bodily dysfunction, that harangue every culturally conceived (normally gender-specific) imperfection or allegedly humiliating defect of the body's that technology will purportedly either gene-splice and patch up or transcend in an immaterial bolt of pixel-blue, uploading us forever from the material plane into virtual vistas and vessels of fractal quanta compounding action and thought. 

Lol.

Body sovereignty, in my opinion, means radical ownership of the body and deploying whatever means within your arsenal to feel powerful, centred, to feel whatever you need to feel day to day and however you can, even if your methods of body-fashioning go against the dictums of public health and sanity. Who the fuck is anyone else to tell you otherwise? So long as you're not hurting anyone (itself a murky concept when every purchase contributes to misery-spreading dictatorships and irreparable planetary harm; condoms, lubricant, strap-ons, poppers, all industrial by-products and all very much emerging from eco-fucking/blood-lusty consumerist complexes). 

Mechanising life and eventually the body itself, subjects becoming available to themselves as sources of capital (Instagram, cough) has always been something of a darkness in my mind like some dystopian trope, heralding society's total degeneration. But now, all things considered, the self becoming available as a tool of resource-generation appears as a school in self-fashioning, is maybe teaching people (myself included) to consider themselves as finite and malleable resources as much as the ground under our feet is comprised of finite and malleable resources. I feel like practices of treating the self and thusly the body as a technology is only opening human potential wider, and rather than slipping into some austere ontologies of post-abundance with the collapse of the western world, perhaps adorning the body in more and more somatic fictions and their tangible accoutrements (drugs, dildos, poppers, laser-eyes etcetera) is a play-book for survival. 

Or at the very least an ingredient list for a few party-focused decades of tribute to a dying planet.