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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 June 2023
From his title alone, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, it is obvious that Paul B. Preciado chooses words carefully and, when the right ones are not presently at hand, he constructs new ones. So it is telling that in the first sentences of his startling, sexy, somatic account of hormone-induced gender hacking, he clarifies that ‘[t]his book is not a memoir. This book is … [a] body-essay.’ For Preciado, it is not at all precise to call his book a memoir, but it is also not enough to identify it as merely an essay (at least initially), or even a ‘body essay’; he insists they be conjoined.
Perhaps, they already were. Although essayists have been writing about bodies as long as essayists have been using their bodies to write essays (at least as far back as Montaigne’s ‘Of Thumbs’), the essay has long been theorized as an expression of ideas, disembodied and set free. But essayists not only write their bodies into essays, many have also recognized that essays themselves are bodies. In ‘She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body’, Cynthia Ozick describes the form as she sees her: ‘[t]he essay – an essay – is not an abstraction; she may have recognizable contours, but she is highly colored and individuated; she is not a type’. Ozick declares the essay a body and assigns her feminine pronouns.
Ozick’s choice of pronouns is not the only reason one might make the assumption that the body of an essay is a woman’s. ‘Being female makes it difficult to forget that one has a body, that one is a body’, writes Amy Bonnaffons in her essay ‘Bodies of Text: On the Lyric Essay’, citing the embodied work of Maggie Nelson, Jenny Boully and Eula Biss, among others. Bonnaffons writes that ‘[i]f the lyric essay’s associative structure, its deployment of visual tropes and of blank space, are tools particularly suited to exploring the bright mess of embodied experience, then the genre opens new possibilities for anyone with a body’. Nancy Mairs, who professed that she ‘couldn’t write bodiless prose’, produced unflinching essays that push against ableist assumptions.
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