The bulk of the book is not about such things. It is rather about what one can think by extension from such experience. It is about mapping the commodity economy centered on the management of bodies, sexes, identities, or what Preciado calls the “somatico-political,” of how it finds itself both making and made over by “the sex-gender industrial complex” (28). It is an exercise in what Bogdanov calls substitution, building a metaphoric account of how the whole world is made out of one’s own experience of labor. The most interesting kind of labor is now that of the “production of the species as species.”

“I look for keys to survival in books,” Préciado writes (135). Scattered in Testo Junkie are useful lists of writers and artists for anyone who feels they need similar keys to survival: Jean Genet, Walter Benjamin, Monique Wittig, Susan Stryker, Edmund White, Faith Ringgold, Faith Wilding, Jill Johnson, Valerie Solanas, Silvia Federici, Ellen Willis, Kathy Acker, Sandy Stone, Shu Lea Chang, Diane Torr, Del LaGrace Volcano, Pedro Lemebel, Michelle Tea. As in any low-theory book, the reading list is determined by a need to live rather than disciplinary boundary keeping. What is of interest is how Préciado pulls it off.