Paul B. Preciado

Last updated

Paul Preciado
2017-06-07 Documenta 14 Paul B. Preciado by Olaf Kosinsky-10.jpg
Preciado in 2017
Born (1970-09-11) 11 September 1970 (age 53)
Burgos, Spain
Education New School (MA)
Princeton University (PhD)
Era 21st-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Continental philosophy
Main interests
 Sexuality, gender identity, history of technology
Notable ideas
The pharmaco-pornographic regime

Paul B. Preciado (born Beatriz Preciado, 11 September 1970), [1] is a writer, philosopher and curator whose work focuses on applied and theoretical topics relating to identity, gender, pornography, architecture and sexuality. [2] Originally known as a female writer, in 2010 Preciado began a process of "slow transition" where he started taking testosterone to medically transition. From this point on he has publicly considered himself transgender as well as a feminist. [3]

Contents

Career

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 newfound 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, which in book form later won the Prix Sade in France. [4]

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 (PEI) of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA). [5] 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. [6]

In 2023, he directed a documentary film Orlando, My Political Biography . The film was screened at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival in festival's Encounter section on 18 February 2023, [7] where it was awarded a Special Jury Prize. In its announcement the jury described the film as "revelatory, moving and spirited." [8] The film received a special mention in the festival category Best Documentary Film, and also the Teddy Award as best documentary film. [9]

Personal life

Known originally as a female writer and identified as a lesbian, [10] Preciado announced in 2014 that he was transitioning [6] and, in January 2015, declared that the person formerly known as Beatriz was now Paul. [11] Preciado dated French writer-director Virginie Despentes from 2005 to 2014. [10] [6] [12]

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 (as Testo yonqui) and in France. [13] The work was later translated into English in 2013.

Preciado prefaces the book, stating "This book is not a memoir" but "a body-essay". [14] Preciado takes a topical pharmaceutical, Testogel, [15] 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. [16] Preciado investigates the politicization of the body by what he terms "pharmacopornographic capitalism". [17]

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. [18]

In the work, Preciado describes and analyses the changes provoked by the testosterone from the point of view of the relationship with Virginie Despentes (referred to as "VD" in the book). [19] 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". For Preciado, there is no such thing as gender without technology. Technology here is understood in large sense, from writing technologies, to bio-chemical and image production.

Can the Monster Speak?

On 17 November 2019, Preciado gave a speech before the École de la Cause Freudienne (School of the Freudian Cause)—a society of Lacanian psychoanalysts—in which he described his life as a trans man and challenged the precepts of psychoanalysis. Preciado claims that he faced booing and heckling, and was only able to read a quarter of his prepared speech before he was told his time had run out. [20] The complete text of the speech was later published as a small book.

In the complete text of the speech, Preciado considered himself as an object of the audience's medical gaze, likening himself to Red Peter—a character in the Franz Kafka short story "A Report to an Academy" who begins life as an ape, learns human speech, and gives an account of himself at a scientific conference—and Frankenstein's monster. Preciado claimed that the practice and concepts of psychoanalysis (and its pathologization of transgender people) are not based in scientific objectivity, but instead reflect the heteronormative worldview of the white men who founded and practice the discipline. In the second half of the text, Preciado made three observations. He claimed that the binary view of sex and gender (men and women) informing psychoanalysis is not an intrinsic property of reality, but is simply a current historical view which was preceded by earlier paradigms. Preciado cited Hippocrates, Galen and Vesalius to claim the existence of a previous "one-sex" model of humanity in which men and women existed on a continuum, with each being simply the superior and the inferior instances of organisms in the same one species. Second, Preciado noted that psychology and medicine invented vocabulary throughout the twentieth century (e.g. transexual, intersex) to describe exceptions to the notion of the gender binary, and also to pathologize them while preserving the disciplines' paradigmatic frameworks. Third, Preciado predicted the increased problematization of gender throughout the twenty-first century, and therefore called on the society to revise its psychoanalytic premises. [21]

Publications

Art and curatorial

Film

Related Research Articles

Radical feminism is a perspective within feminism that calls for a radical re-ordering of society in which male supremacy is eliminated in all social and economic contexts, while recognizing that women's experiences are also affected by other social divisions such as in race, class, and sexual orientation. The ideology and movement emerged in the 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sexual revolution</span> 20th-century Western social movement

The sexual revolution, also known as the sexual liberation, was a social movement that challenged traditional codes of behavior related to sexuality and interpersonal relationships throughout the developed Western world from the 1960s to the 1970s. Sexual liberation included increased acceptance of sex outside of traditional heterosexual, monogamous relationships. The normalization of contraception and the pill, public nudity, pornography, premarital sex, homosexuality, masturbation, alternative forms of sexuality, and the legalization of abortion all followed.

Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field now overlaps with queer studies and men's studies. Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, coincided with the rise of deconstruction.

The sex-positive movement is a social and philosophical movement that seeks to change cultural attitudes and norms around sexuality, promoting the recognition of sexuality as a natural and healthy part of the human experience and emphasizing the importance of personal sovereignty, safer sex practices, and consensual sex. It covers every aspect of sexual identity including gender expression, orientation, relationship to the body, relationship-style choice, and reproductive rights. Sex-positivity is "an attitude towards human sexuality that regards all consensual sexual activities as fundamentally healthy and pleasurable, encouraging sexual pleasure and experimentation." It challenges societal taboos and aims to promote healthy and consensual sexual activities. The sex-positive movement also advocates for comprehensive sex education and safe sex as part of its campaign. The movement generally makes no moral distinctions among types of sexual activities, regarding these choices as matters of personal preference.

Sex-positive feminism, also known as pro-sex feminism, sex-radical feminism, or sexually liberal feminism, is a feminist movement centering on the idea that sexual freedom is an essential component of women's freedom. They oppose legal or social efforts to control sexual activities between consenting adults, whether they are initiated by the government, other feminists, opponents of feminism, or any other institution. They embrace sexual minority groups, endorsing the value of coalition-building with marginalized groups. Sex-positive feminism is connected with the sex-positive movement. Sex-positive feminism brings together anti-censorship activists, LGBT activists, feminist scholars, producers of pornography and erotica, among others. Sex-positive feminists believe that prostitution can be a positive experience if workers are treated with respect, and agree that sex work should not be criminalized.

Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, fictional, or philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women's and men's social roles, experiences, interests, chores, and feminist politics in a variety of fields, such as anthropology and sociology, communication, media studies, psychoanalysis, political theory, home economics, literature, education, and philosophy.

Antisexualism is opposition or hostility towards sexual behavior and sexuality.

Bruce Benderson is an American author, born to parents of Russian Jewish descent, who lives in New York. He attended William Nottingham High School (1964) in Syracuse, New York and then Binghamton University (1969). He is today a novelist, essayist, journalist and translator, widely published in France, less so in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virginie Despentes</span> French writer, novelist, and filmmaker

Virginie Despentes is a French writer, novelist, and filmmaker. She is known for her work exploring gender, sexuality, and people who live in poverty or other marginalised conditions.

<i>Female Chauvinist Pigs</i> Book by Ariel Levy

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture is a 2005 book by Ariel Levy that critiques the highly sexualized American culture in which women are objectified, objectify one another, and are encouraged to objectify themselves. Levy refers to this as "raunch culture".

<i>Sexual Politics</i> 1970 book by Kate Millett

Sexual Politics is the debut book by American writer and activist Kate Millett, based on her PhD dissertation at Columbia University. It was published in 1970 by Doubleday. It is regarded as a classic of feminism and one of radical feminism's key texts, a formative piece in shaping the intentions of the second-wave feminist movement. In Sexual Politics, an explicit focus is placed on male dominance throughout prominent 20th century art and literature. According to Millett, western literature reflects patriarchal constructions and the heteronormativity of society. She argues that men have established power over women, but that this power is the result of social constructs rather than innate or biological qualities.

Feminist sexology is an offshoot of traditional studies of sexology that focuses on the intersectionality of sex and gender in relation to the sexual lives of women. Sexology has a basis in psychoanalysis, specifically Freudian theory, which played a big role in early sexology. This reactionary field of feminist sexology seeks to be inclusive of experiences of sexuality and break down the problematic ideas that have been expressed by sexology in the past. Feminist sexology shares many principles with the overarching field of sexology; in particular, it does not try to prescribe a certain path or "normality" for women's sexuality, but only observe and note the different and varied ways in which women express their sexuality. It is a young field, but one that is growing rapidly.

This is a list of topics related to the issue of masculism, men's liberation, the men's movement, and men's rights:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sheila Cavanagh</span> Canadian academic, playwright, and author

Sheila L. Cavanagh is a Canadian academic, playwright, and psychotherapist doing a psychoanalytic formation at the Lacan School in San Francisco. She is a professor of sociology and former chair of the Sexuality Studies Program at York University. Cavanagh teaches courses in gender studies, sexuality studies, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. She is best known for her book Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination (2010) and for a special double-issue she edited on Trans-Psychoanalysis in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

Feminist pornography is a genre of film developed by or for those within the sex-positive feminist movement. It was created for the purpose of promoting gender equality by portraying more bodily movements and sexual fantasies of women and members of the LGBT community.

Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, is an American feminist scientist and gender studies scholar. Her research focuses on social medical science, sex, gender, sexuality, and epidemiology. She is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College.

Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.

<i>Testo Junkie</i> Book by Paul B. Preciado

Testo Junkie is a book, described as "auto-theory", by contemporary writer and philosopher Paul B. Preciado, first published in Spanish in 2008, then in English in 2013 by The Feminist Press, translated by Bruce Benderson. It chronicles Preciado's multifaceted and liminal experience taking a topical testosterone called Testogel as a political and performative act, while working in Paris, France, as well as intertwining perspectives on pharmaceuticals and pornography. The book was the choice of McKenzie Wark in a list of the 11 best scholarly books of the 2010s by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In sexuality studies, potentia gaudendi or orgasmic force is the physical and mental potential for pleasure in a body. The term was coined by philosopher Paul B. Preciado, who says contemporary economies exploit the body by offering services to increase pleasure—such as Viagra and cocaine—which turn it into a commodity. It is similar to jouissance in Lacanian psychoanalysis and libido in Sigmund Freud's works.

Autotheory is a literary tradition involving the combination of the narrative forms of autobiography, memoir, and critical theory. Works of autotheory involve a first-person account of an author’s life blended with research investigations. Works of autotheory might bring in broader questions in philosophy, literary theory, social structures, science and culture to interpret the politics and history within personal experiences.

References

  1. ↑ Preciado, Paul B. "Catalunya Trans". El Estado Mental. Archived from the original on 13 February 2015. Retrieved 13 February 2015.
  2. ↑ Stuettgen, Tim. "Disidentification in the Center of Power: The Porn Performer and Director Belladonna as a Contrasexual Culture Producer (A Letter to Beatriz Preciado)." Women's Studies Quarterly 35.1/2 (2007): 249–270.
  3. ↑ Molina, Ángela (29 January 2016). "Llamadme Paul". El País.
  4. ↑ "Gender Talents Special Address." Archived 7 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine Tate Modern. February 2013.
  5. ↑ “Beatriz Preciado," (author bio) Feminist Press. Archived 7 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine
  6. 1 2 3 Preciado, Paul B. "La statistique, plus forte que l'amour". Libération. Retrieved 15 February 2015.
  7. ↑ Ntim, Zac (23 January 2023). "Berlin Film Festival: Sean Penn, Philippe Garrel, Margarethe Von Trotta & Christian Petzold In Competition — Full List". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved 9 February 2023.
  8. ↑ "Berlinale Dokumentarfilmpreis und Jury". berlinale.de. Retrieved 26 February 2023.
  9. ↑ "The Awards of the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival" (PDF). Berlinale de. 25 February 2023. Retrieved 26 February 2023.
  10. 1 2 Cécile Daumas, " Tête à queue Archived 17 November 2012 at the Wayback Machine ", Libération, 14 October 2008.
  11. ↑ Catalogne Trans, Libération, 16 January 2015
  12. 1 2 "Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics". E-Flux.
  13. ↑ "Meet the 'Testo Junkie' Who Hacks Her Gender with Testosterone | VICE | Canada" . Retrieved 1 August 2015.
  14. ↑ Preciado, Beatriz; Benderson, Bruce (17 September 2013). Testo Junkie : Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. The Feminist Press at CUNY. p. 11. ISBN   9781558618374.
  15. ↑ "'Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era' by Beatriz Preciado". Lambda Literary. 25 September 2013. Retrieved 1 August 2015.
  16. ↑ Pila, Renaud (11 October 2005), "Mort de l'écrivain gay Guillaume Dustan, adepte du sexe à risques", La Chaîne Info (in French), retrieved 24 September 2008[ permanent dead link ]
  17. ↑ “Pharmacopornography: An Interview with Beatriz Preciado.” The Paris Review . 4 December 2013.
  18. ↑ Tucker, Ricky (4 December 2013). "Pharmacopornography: An Interview with Beatriz Preciado". Paris Review Daily. Retrieved 1 August 2015.
  19. ↑ Fateman, Johanna. "Bodies of Work" . Retrieved 2 August 2015.
  20. ↑ Gherovici, Patricia. "Why I Did Not Write a Book on Lacan and Tango". e-flux Notes. e-flux. Retrieved 1 March 2024.
  21. ↑ Preciado, Paul B. (2021). Can the Monster Speak? Report to an Academy of Psychoanalysts. Semiotext(e) Intervention Series. Vol. 32. Translated by Wynne, Frank. Semiotext(e). ISBN   9781635901511.
  22. ↑ Williams, Richard J. "Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics, by Beatriz Preciado", Times Higher Education, 16 October 2014.
  23. ↑ "The Contra-Sexual Manifesto". Total Art Journal. April 2013.
  24. ↑ "Fitzcarraldo Editions". fitzcarraldoeditions.com. Retrieved 20 April 2020.
  25. ↑ "Beatrix Preciado", Contemporary Art Daily, September 2014.
  26. ↑ “'La Pasión Según Carol Rama' at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona" Archived 1 November 2014 at the Wayback Machine . Art Media Agency (AMA). 22 October 2014.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.