(Im)possible Futures

Abstract

In a Western post – Cold War era, the pharmaceutical industry, state, and capitalism have merged to regulate gender and sexual normativity. According to Paul Preciado in Testo Junkie, the illicit and self-regulated use of hormones destabilizes gender and sexual binaries, a methodology that he calls “gender hacking.” This article argues, however, that an expanded interpretation of Preciado's historical narrative and understanding of hacking could better account for how race mediates gender and sexual normativity. This piece offers a rereading of Preciado's analysis on the historical regulation of gender and sexuality by analyzing how race has been used to justify medical experimentation and management as a starting point for an intersectional perspective on hacking. Further, by building on José Muñoz's and micha cárdenas's readings of queer and racial futurity in relation to communalism and non-Western kinship formations, this article contends that an expansion of “gender hacking” toward “queer hacking” can read the intersections of racial, gender, and sexual resistance as processes that create glitches in the sociopolitical code of racial capitalism. By examining hacking as a social, rather than biological or digital, phenomenon, queer hacking uses spatial relations, communalism, and visions of futurity to discuss how potential frameworks for kinships and identities that operate outside Western norms can be created.