The following article analyses the nexus of sex and gender, pathology and autofiction in Ingeborg Bachmann's prose through Preciado's self-experiment Testo Junkie, one of the most controversial works on gender, sexuality and society of the last decade. In Bachmann's novel Malina metaphors of injection and infection shape the relationships between the three protagonists. The margins between genders, drugs as medicine and drugs as narcotics turn out to be continuously shifting -those dynamics are

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... not restricted to motifs but also affect style. According to Preciado, we live in a pharmapornographic regime in which the ways we shape our bodies and minds are controlled by authorities who restrict the access to mind-and body-altering drugs. The manipulation of one's biocode without diagnosis and state supervision, the creation of a new narrative of the self in a rogue operation is therefore an act of resistance and gender-terrorism. Bachmann's self-observing autobiographical notes, dreams and the imagined speech to the medical faculty (»Rede an die Ärzteschaft«) in Male Oscuro display the consequences of not being able to identify oneself with the illness-narrative created by doctors -in particular when it turns out to be a thinly disguised version of classic female hysteria. By reclaiming her symptoms as an individual expression of artistic value, Bachmann is able to free herself from such harmful prescriptions.