KEN SIO reads Paul B. Preciado’s theorisations of the Covid-19 pandemic in his 500-page “mutant text”, Dysphoria Mundi.
Situate yourself half a decade ago, amidst the politics of the COVID-19 lockdown: TikTok doomscrolling, globalising digital capitalism, activism with viral semiotic circulation, and an American election playing out in real-time.
First released in the aftershocks of that global rupture, Dysphoria Mundi is Paul B. Preciado’s diagnosis of our collective condition: a planet fragmented, its living bodies subjected to what he terms the “petrosexoracial regime”. This regime, simply put, is an era shaped by the extension of colonial technologies and the pollution of sexual infrastructure. Preciado transforms the clinical diagnosis of dysphoria from an individual pathology into a planetary metaphor: a lament for capitalist ruin, and a manifesto for revolutionary possibility.
Preciado—a radical philosopher and queer transfeminist theorist—has built his reputation on crafting a lexicon to dissect modern capitalism’s technological fronts. His method weaves discourses of literature, sociology, philosophy and biology to probe the questions at disciplinary fault lines. As a synthesis of his career-long theories, Dysphoria Mundi extends this project, written in the pandemic-era urgency of the unprecedented realities of lockdown.
Best known for his autotheory and deconstruction of biopolitical theory, Preciado expands on Foucauldian biopolitics in 2013’s Testo Junkie, through his inspection of a “pharmacopornographic” regime. He describes modern capitalism’s use of pharmaceutical products, such as contraceptives, and the use of pornographic technologies, like Playboy, to impose a hegemonic understanding of gender. Preciado does this while documenting his experiments with Testogel, crafting an intimate diary of personal relationships and his body’s transformations across a provocative narrative.
Dysphoria Mundi plays out through a similar genre-shifting: fragmentary, evocative, and playful. Consisting of essays, letters, auto-fictional accounts, melodic lyrics, and written prayers from his experiences during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the book is split into three core areas: Dysphoria Mon Amour, Dysphoria Mundi, and Letter to a New Activist. Chapters, diverse in length and mode, target different facets of “petrosexoracial” capitalist society: our bodies, our breath, the ground beneath us, all described as “out of joint”. His prose is often pedantic, occasionally jarring: “open hole/squirt of sperm = national sovereignty.” But it delivers on modern politics, surveillance, sexual subjectivities, history, and religion. If that sounds like a lot to interrogate—it is.
This “mutant text” opens with a medical report—Preciado’s official diagnosis of gender dysphoria. The diagnosis becomes a political modality of rejection and control over agentic subjectivity. Preciado writes that transgender people “have culturally constructed themselves as souls in exile and bodies in mutation.” From this intensely personal beginning, he disseminates the dysphoria concept extensively.
Across the book, dysphoria is no longer an individual malaise, but an examination of a new global reality in which “living bodies of the planet [are] being subjected and dispossessed within a petrosexoracial regime of knowledge and power.” This is the conceptual spine of the book; Preciado argues that capitalism objectifies the planet as a commodity, and he renders a colonial, patriarchal, and carbon aesthetic that seeks to normalise machines, consumerism, and the eroticisation of racialised populations.
If you’re unfamiliar with his work, you may be surprised to find that he explains his theoretical frameworks with surprising depth and accessibility. Preciado loves an analogy, a metaphor, or a detour—and they often land. Across the main section, spanning 400 pages, the globally shared experience of COVID-19 is paralleled with the neoliberal governance of the AIDS crisis. Preciado thus illustrates a modern society haunted by politicised histories, from which he gathers insight. Allusions to modern media, past romances—or Hamlet—form a mosaic of political thought on technologies of control and surveillance. Preciado observes isolation and the treatment of trans bodies, shaping a text that resonates beyond the page.
The author confidently threads nuance and critique into rousing declarations. As a result, reading Dysphoria Mundi is a disorienting experience; melodic structure gives way to provocative essays on how racism is rooted in sexualisation, and how, simultaneously, sexualisation reproduces racism’s techniques of domination.
Several sections stood out—particularly his critiques of the proliferation of fake news as a fragmented consciousness embedded in semiotic verification systems. Similarly, his analyses of biologists imagining the body as a fortified state and the virus as a war-inducing aggressor are innovative and effective. His arguments are both intelligent and charming. Heavy prose gives way to respite in an entertaining moment from his broken notes on the 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden: “All national anthems are requiems / But in Gaga’s voice the memorial takes on a BDSM tone.”
Yet, not all of what Preciado says is unique or without issue. Structural repetition becomes a fault. Chapters often begin with the same formula repeating dichotomies such as “Full, empty.” or “Digital, analogue.” Arguments are similarly repetitive, losing force when evidence feels like a new iteration rather than a needed expansion. Preciado’s prose sometimes slips into melodrama—as he struggles to close his eyes and try to sleep without hearing the echoes of neoliberal fascism and familial tragedies—or falls into a tendency to make grandiose declarations, like “Wuhan is everywhere.” Perhaps most pressing is the question of positionality. Preciado’s grounding in personal narrative occasionally obscures the lived realities of others. What is framed as universal dysphoria may risk subsuming and flattening the differentiated realities of racialised and precarious life—intersectional moments could be elaborated, yet the book often finds itself distracted.
This tendency of pontificating diversion over cogency is evident in the motif of funeral prayers across the core chapters. Ranging from statements of “Notre-Dame of the Rich, pray for us”, to addresses of “Our Lady” of FIFA, Globalisation of Financial Markets, the Industrial Revolution, Deportation, Alibaba, JP Morgan Chase, Bronchial Asthma, to OxyContin, these prayers are liturgical shopping lists of late-capitalist affliction, presenting a critique of religious capitalism and its relationship with the ever-present figure of death—especially in a publicised manner during lockdown. These inclusions are vivid at first, satirical and sad. But across twelve iterations, their potency thins. The form becomes a gimmick.
Still, Preciado’s call remains urgent. In his letter to new activists, he names Gen Z’s inheritance the “heroin of capitalism”, our addiction to symbolic consumption; but equally, a wealth of revolutionary heritage. “Use your dysphoria as a revolutionary platform,” he urges.
Dysphoria Mundi cannot be passively consumed. It demands engagement, annotation, emotional response, and ultimately, action. Where often there is a dissonance between theoretical critique and practical politics, Preciado offers a rare bridge between analysis and activism. His reminder that “Revolution is always a process…Now and always. Here. It is happening” suggests that our collective dysphoria might yet birth new possibilities—if only we remember that the revolution has “already begun.”
Dysphoria Mundi was first published in 2022. It was released by Fitzcarraldo Editions on March 27th, 2025.
Featured image: Illustration by Paul B. Preciado. Courtesy of El País.
