Paul B. Preciado


Paul B. Preciado, is a writer, philosopher and curator whose work focuses on applied and theoretical topics relating to identity, gender, pornography, architecture and sexuality. In 2010, Preciado began a process of "slow transition" where he started the process of becoming a male, physically. From this point on he has considered himself transgender as well as a feminist.
Preciado came to The New School in New York from Spain on a Fulbright scholarship to get an MA in Philosophy. Jacques Derrida and Agnes Heller became mentors to Preciado. Despite taking a short gap during the spring of Preciado's first year at The New School, Preciado maintained close relations with many professors. In fact, in 1999, Derrida, one of Preciado's professors, invited Preciado to teach a seminar in Paris on forgiveness and the gift during transformation. After transitioning into his professional career, Preciado and his new found partner, Alberto Perez, began to hold empowerment forums in impoverished communities. Later, he came back to the United States to complete his PhD in Philosophy and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, writing a dissertation called, Pornotopía: Architecture and Sexuality in Playboy During the Cold War in 2010.
Preciado has been professor of Political History of the Body, Gender Theory, and History of Performance at Université Paris VIII and was the director of the Independent Studies Program of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona.. He was Curator of Public Programs of documenta 14, Kassel and Athens.
Since January 2013, Preciado has regularly contributed to French newspaper Libération′s website Liberation.fr, in a column having gender, sexuality, love and biopower as recurrent themes.
Known originally as a female writer and identified as a lesbian, Preciado announced in 2014 that he was transitioning and, in January 2015, changed his first name to Paul.Preciado dated French writer-director Virginie Despentes from 2005 to 2014.

''Testo Junkie'' (2008)

In 2008, the book Testo Junkie: sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era, relating Preciado's experience on self-administering testosterone, was published in Spain and in France. The work was later translated into English in 2013.
Preciado prefaces the book, stating "This book is not a memoir" but "a body-essay". Preciado takes a topical pharmaceutical, Testogel, as a homage to French writer Guillaume Dustan, a close gay friend who contracted HIV and died of an accidental overdose of a medication he was taking. Preciado investigates the politicization of the body by what he terms "pharmacopornographic capitalism".
Preciado described the act of taking testosterone as both political and performance, aiming to undo a notion of gender encoded in one's own body by a system of sexuality and contraception.
In the work, Preciado describes and analyses the changes provoked by the testosterone from the point of view of the relationship with Virginie Despentes. Testo Junkie also deals with the political aspect of other drugs that transform the body, such as birth control, Viagra, drugs used in doping, Prozac, and estrogen.
According to Preciado, all sexual bodies become "intelligible" according to a common "pharmacopornographic technology". There is no such thing as gender without technology. Technology is understood in large sense, from writing technologies, to bio-chemical and image production.

Publications