Plastic Bits

Abstract

In Countersexual Manifesto, Paul Preciado claims that we are on the verge of a historic planetary mutation. ‘We will soon stop printing the book’, Preciado tells us, ‘and start printing the flesh, thus entering the new era of digital biowriting.’ The radical juncture of which Preciado speaks is the potential rewriting of sex alongside recent advances in 3D bioprinting, a process of combining cells, nutrients, proteins and biopolymer gels to fabricate biomedical parts which imitate natural tissues or organs of the human body. The commercialization of 3D bioprinting might liberate the productive forces of desire and equip countersexual revolutionaries with the tools to invent new bodies without persecution. Yet bioethical frameworks continue to exclude access to bioprinting technologies for the production of sex organs, citing moral concerns. This article returns to Preciado’s rallying call for access to 3D bioprinting, to examine the importance of sexual plasticity as it appears today and to consider whether sex is always already interfaced with plastic technologies in quotidian life, for better or worse.