These are just snapshots of a postindustrial, global and mediatic regime that […] I will call pharmapornographic. The term refers to the processes of a biomolecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity. […] There is nothing to discover in sex or in sexual identity; there is no inside. The truth about sex is not a disclosure. It is sexdesign. Pharmacopornographic biocapitalism does not produce things. It produces mobile ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions and conditions of the soul. In biotechnology and in pornocommunication there is no object to be produced. The pharmacopornographic business is the invention of a subject and then its global reproduction.
Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie, New York 2013, 33–6
polity
Copyright © Dana Kaplan and Eva Illouz 2022
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Dana Kaplan’s research for this book was supported by the ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (grant No. 1560/18) and by the Open University of Israel’s Research Authority. She wishes to thank Roy Zunder and Rona Mashiach for their invaluable assistance.
Ella and Gal, this is for you.