Pharmacopornographic Subjectivity and Human Rights : Reading Preciado's 'Testo Junkie' through a Human Rights Narrative Lens

Abstract: This thesis examines the implications of Preciado’s 'Testo Junkie' for our understanding of subjectivity and human rights. Preciado’s political project of embodied and performative selfexperimentation with testosterone constructs a self against normalization techniques and static identities. As such, it may be read in line with postmodern critiques that complicate the justification of the human rights project. Adami’s theory of the narratable self and human rights is deployed in a narrative analysis structured as a thematic close reading of Preciado’s text. This is accomplished by identifying four themes within Adami’s approach that structure the analysis of Testo Junkie: narration as political subjectification; equality of difference and uniqueness; the singular other and relationality; and fluidity, becoming and learning. Within these categories, significant common ground between Preciado’s ideas and a human rights narrative framework is found. This points to the possibilities a discursive human rights theory that focuses on narratives may hold for reading transgressive projects of justice aligned with postmodern understandings of the self such as Preciado’s.