at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis. The tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of its own production. The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one's belief in its necessity and na
The notion of programmatic gender's retro-prophylactic occlusion of its own origin, or gender as an ourobosed redux of individual and collective performance, reminds me of Paul B. Preciado's text Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. In Testo Junkie, Preciado uses the structural and administrative history of birth control to elucidate the Foucauldian notion of an "anatomo-chronological scheme of action" which "combines architecture, design, and body movement, transforming the user into an efficient (non-)reproducing machine" (Preciado 197). Thus, the pharmacological ordinance of medical intervention, particularly regarding microprosthetic calibration of endocrinological and hormonal subjectivities within the body, internalizes the grammar of gendered performance through the orchestration of micro-axiomatic pharmaco-fictions. In other words, these pharmacological programs inscribe micro-subjective gendered performances within the temporal umbra of application guidelines (particularly for medications like birth control or pre-exposure prophylaxis), effectively gendering the body within and across time and manipulating the temporal ontologization of gendered selfhood. In Testo Junkie, Preciado performs renegade hormonal auto-experimentation, applying gel patches of testosterone beyond the radius of a programmatic medical intervention and creating a novel grammar of endocrino-semiotic gendered becoming. However, the criticality of temporal homogeneity for the “success” of various medications (for example, erratic PrEP administration may compromise the drug’s efficacy and create drug resistance) inoculates individuals within a hegemonic “anatomo-chronological scheme of action,” a daily re-inscription of temporal and semiotic regularity that, in the case of hormonal medications, reaffirms the binary physiognomy of a collapsed sex-gender presentation. Preciado poses a critical question: in what way do medical and pharmacological interventions problematize the notion of gendered interiority or Butler’s corporeal style? Is it possible to have a corporeal style of the interior, a shadowed underskin of pharmaco-narrative performance?