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

Book description

This visionary book on gender and sexuality weaves together high theory and intimate memoir, with "spectacular" results—"and the gendered body will never be the same again" (Jack Halberstam). 

What constitutes a "real" man or woman in the twenty-first century? Since birth control pills, erectile dysfunction remedies, and factory-made testosterone and…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Testo Junkie as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Junkie, originally published in Spanish in 2008 and republished in English translation in 2013, is lusty, hyperbolic, and explosive.

It’s part postqueer, trans-feminist manifesto, part record of a cis-female’s illicit experimentation with testosterone, and part explicit fucking. A much more enjoyable book than Judith Butler’s groundbreaking Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter, and it has the advantage of updating Butler’s Foucault-based theory with the twenty-first-century concerns.

Preciado argues that today’s “pharmacopornographic” regime utilizes drugs and erotic imagery—hormone shots and money shots—to control our subjectivity and gender, instating a system of knowledge and power in which…

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Book cover of December on 5C4

December on 5C4 by Adam Strassberg,

Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!

On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…

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