Paul B. Preciado’s queer hospital: healthcare architectures for pleasure, transformation and subversion

Abstract

This article brings the contemporary philosopher Paul B. Preciado’s work on queer sexuality and embodiment into close contact with his work on architecture, asking how Preciado’s work can help us to reconceptualize the design of clinical spaces and environments to care more effectively for queer and non-normative bodies. In Testo Junkie (2013), Preciado explores how the body is constructed in advanced capitalism as a work of both social construction and bio-technological engineering. The focus of Pornotopia (2014), meanwhile, is the specific role played by architecture in the construction of modernity’s bodies, genders and sexualities. Across both works, Preciado dialogs closely with Michel Foucault, showing how normative genders and sexualities are actively produced and policed through the complex interplays between social, biomedical, technological and architectural forces and structures. Preciado, however, goes one step further, exploring how we might “hack” these same structures and use biomedical technologies and architectural concepts to emancipate the bodies and desire from normative constraints, thus liberating the body’s true capacities for pleasure and transformation. Reading Preciado alongside interdisciplinary scholarship on queer healthcare design, this article questions investigates how “hacking” clinical architecture through queer interventions can transform the sensory landscapes of healthcare.