Biohacking Gender: Cyborgs, Coloniality, and the Pharmacopornographic Era

This chapter discusses how the concept of “biohacking, " a “do-it-yourself” approach to experimental body modification rooted in punk and anarchist sensibilities, nevertheless remains embedded in colonial and neocolonial projects. For trans people, biohacking can be a way to build medical and social networks of care that reroute and rewrite the cisgender-centric ideas of biological and social determinism that would otherwise constrain the possibilities of trans life. This definition aligns with how many marginalized people have taken up Donna J. Haraway’s cyborg as a posthuman figure of connection and kinship. Mainstream nutritional biohacking is governed by a marked disdain for corporeal connectivity and the limitations placed on living bodies by their milieu. It is shaped by an investment in the perfectibility of the body unto the point of deathlessness, and underwritten by the idea that economically privileged individuals can become the sovereign authors of their own superhumanity.