Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this blog post now belongs to a promotion called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The Poetry Module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted.

Click here to see “Brace for Impact’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Further Reading: Volume Two actually divides into three modules/sub-volumes, each with its own promotion and release. “Brace for Impact” is the first (re: Volume Two, part one), but there are also promotions for Volume Two, part two’s twin Monster Modules, The Undead and Demons: “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil“!

Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically ally shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

“Welcome to the Fun Palace!” part two—”Red Scare”; or, Out in the World

As its most basic level, rape is a violation of basic human, animal and environmental rights enacted through Cartesian power abuse; this postscript concerns the complicated process that healing from rape entails— i.e., its corrupting presence through codified trauma, wherein the surviving of police abuse becomes something to relate to others through Gothic stories that constitute radical empathy as a thing forever out-of-joint: the attempt to empathize with alien experiences to gain new perspective. Such empathy needn’t concern both parties equally and its Gothic dialogs concern intense, poetic liminalities still bearing an intense potential for disguise that is haunted by the shadow of police forces. Even so, the postscript aims to showcase such a dialog and its phenomenological complexities; i.e., one held between two or more people relating through their interpretation of various texts they are either intimately familiar with or at the very least recognize the tell-tale arrangements of power and performance through traumatic markers (source).

—Persephone van der Waard’s “Healing from Rape,” from Sex Positivity: Volume One (2024) 

Picking up up from where “Medieval Expression, part one” left off…

Part one of “Medieval Expression” considered the Gothic as a bad game of telephone/copycat; i.e., the echo of a rape joke stuck in the imaginary past to speak to queer oppression by straight forces: a funerary affect for which our liberation is one begot through selective absorption, magical assembly and a confusion of the senses married to an ongoing Song of Infinity to which we are but one move in a never-ending game. Its play writes in disintegration and bad taste—not to rejoice in harm, but expose it in ways that paradoxically help us feel good through self-reference as felt among other lost souls trapped in odd prisons. Part one considered this in largely academic terms, with Hannah-Freya Blake and I in relation to Lewis. Now, I want to apply the same basic ideas to people I’ve worked with since starting this book; i.e., sex workers of various kinds, and the media that speaks to our complex, bloody and decaying struggle, seeking hugs despite how society and capital treat us.

(source)

We’ll start with the relationship between people and Gothic media, here in part two. Its theme is Red Scare as something to dance with, in a half-real sense, consider old friends: past lovers and photographs, followed by classic stories that generally hide Communism in plain sight. We’ll go from Star Wars (1977) to Old Bill (2011) and Payback (1997) to James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) to Chernobyl (2019). After that, part three will consider my relation more directly with other sex workers castrating capital together (“You do it, I’ll hold ’em down!”).

Distribution through stealth is a common Communist schtick (the Russian spy trope); for us, it’s is a horizontal trajectory whose red-tinged paradigm shift spreads power across people repeating the Song of Infinity as “immolative” not of the literal self (despite the funerary self-decaying elements), but a “flame on” act of self-defense for (often non-middle-class) workers and their rights from the state and its (often-middle-class) proponents. And like a flame, it becomes something to encourage among the kindling primed to explode: a “hideous raging inferno” groomed, dog-like, by our handlers (our friends) telling us, “get ’em,” and we—like a dog with a bone—giving capital a black eye (more like a straight-up cunt punt, but I digress: “Light up the eyes, boys!” We don’t want to kill our foes, but make fighting with us so unpleasant [through our Aegis] to make them lose the will to continue; i.e., with bluffs as much as brute force: “Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand!”).

Per the Gothic’s ever-unfurling rap-battle scroll—as something to mature towards a class-conscious attitude—the middle class is historically both the gatekeeper position for the elite and the spawning ground for ongoing rebellion; i.e., the latter spreading Communism through GNC Gothic poetics whose morbid pull (fatal attraction) and proletarian apostacy (of a bourgeois Protestant ethic and all that entails) challenge the heteronormative (thus settler-colonial, Cartesian) linguo-material order through liberated sex work. In keeping with paradox, rebellion is what sets us free, as much as the eventual escape: our minds, then our material conditions (the Superstructure, then the Base; we can’t wait to have a big-ass factory to make propaganda with. Point-in-fact, we don’t need one. We already have the Internet and similar widespread ways of spreading information through art. And those without it have the oldest tool of rebellion: word-of-mouth).

(artist: Waifu Tactical)

One follows the other, supporting and maintaining a proletarian offensive into the imaginary future once-canceled but no longer. Medusa lives, and it’s time for her nightly meal of fresh souls, of capitalist profit, of practicing what she preaches by not doing what she’s told by the elite; i.e., eating the forbidden fruit; e.g., Wayne’s World 2‘s red licorice, fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, or those leftover weed cookies Cuwu baked one time that had me (and their equally green [and epileptic] roomie) greening out (“How many of these have you eaten?” Cuwu—playing the weed mother looking after their weed babies—asked me, me not realizing you’re not supposed to eat them like ordinary food[1]). But she’s also a hugger and wants you to join in (lest the ripened fruit wither on the vine)!

(exhibit 34a1b2b1a: Model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. I’ve always had permission to share Cuwu’s eyes, but felt shy about showing them unless there was a point to make in doing so. In the interest of relating to the photograph to the fullest possible extent, I’ve decided to not censor their eyes from here on out. Look on them and see a little Commie who was still growing and developing as a person—to the degree that shortly after these photos were taken, our working friendship ended.

All language is arbitrary but arbitration occurs through sex and force as historically-materially dictated by state mandates scapegoating Patriarchal abuse/shortcomings; i.e., Original Sin. The red of the fatal apple might seem random, insofar as a green apple could do just as well. However, the color red—while its meaning is determined by stochastic factors—are, per the presence of Imperialism as a historical-material force, funneled through a Gothic lens with a historical past that revives imperfectly in present materials: the crimson red of sanguine, of the cardinal scarlet of the Catholic elite and their dogma, of the Roman imperators and their Superman-style red cloaks, etc, has having a sexist bent; i.e., the red of hysteria, of the furies, harpies, viragos, Fates, etc; e.g., Original Sin being the police rhetoric as much for sexist women-of-privilege as men, punching down at “scarlet women” for being “homewreckers” [“pretty privilege” being a threat].

Point-in-fact, the worst adulterers are classically men with virgin/whore syndrome, but also married women unhappy with their own marriages/jobs trying to have their cake and eat it, too: by abjecting open sex work as somehow “different” than the woman’s work normally done by women for their male bosses owning them. Cornered and caught red-handed, such viragos will simply concede “Let them eat cake” with a not-so-innocent shrug… which doesn’t historically pan out so well for them [e.g., the Romanovs, but also Marie Antoinette]. Payback’s a bitch and capital pits women [and all workers] against each other to glut the maws of the elite as shielded in ways the Romanovs and Marie Antoinette were not.

In turn, the traditional, heteronormative divisions of sex and force—i.e., first through Imperialism without and then with a racialized character vis-à-vis settler colonialism—have merged with the profit motive under neoliberal Capitalism’s Cold War spectres: Red Scare. Liberators must reclaim red as a Communist force—as red as the streets of Stalingrad, of Medusa’s bleeding pussy or Lewis’ Bleeding Nun, of my mother’s own red dress standing with the Red Army after the Fall in 1991.

[“Another world, another time—in an Age of Wonder!” Mom, with the Red Army boys, 1991.]

Echoes of Oedipus Rex aside, the shadow of incest is a Gothic classic [re: Walpole] that projects cryptomimetically across the monstrous-feminine to face Red Scare head on; i.e., as an imagery of the surface that invites future exchanges that, indeed, are quite martial in a poetic sense: “in the blood” as fueled by blood-pumping exchanges—of monsters, of mysterious mothers, of troubling but also exciting likenesses to past things that protected us [or our forebears] from harm: a maternal and benevolent Medusa to hug and shield us from the capitalist pigdogs’ alien doubles. What more could a girl ask for?

Well, a six-demon bag, mayhaps! Armed with her own, superstitiously-charged bag of tricks, then, what’s a girl to do but seek out similarities in extra-familial relations? The enemy is out there. Well, so are we, waiting to strike; i.e., the endless return of the living dead[2] through cryptomimesis as something we leave behind on the surface of ourselves: as part of a grander mise-en-abyme‘s addictive [and fun] Song of Infinity! Watch us revive through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, and begin to dance [“Dance, magic!” as David Bowie[3] put it, in Labyrinth, 1986]! Our hearts will not break, but swell with bittersweet joy in seeing old friends revived through likeness. Like “Scars of Time” [1999], the pattern is one whose historical materialism must be upended by dialectical-material awareness—to “Shake it, baby!” and break the Capitalist-Realist spell through what people normally consume treated in a non-harmful, sex-positive sense: ourselves in delicious, deathly echo! It helps us “tell time” by—often enough—keeping time during sex as an asexual artistic act as much as fucking [the two are not mutually exclusive, though]. Think of it as a metronome to a rhythmic ceremonial ritual—a synthesis of oral [tee-hee] and written traditions! Through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s paradoxical organs of perception, let’s throw those “doors” of perception wide, babes! So, so wide!

[Model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard] 

“Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the Earth!” again spoke Archimedes[4]. For every vampy fae, there is a castle to go with faer captivating castle-like body [“While I love you, I can never be free,” my mother wrote, in a poem to a secret love of hers]: a Gaia to shift in our favor through honest charm; i.e., a brave New World Order beyond the capitalist one and its “end of history” as predicated on people like Cuwu using what they got—their natural, counterterrorist potential and labor power corporally expressed, but also cosmetically in succulent reds [and other colors, to be fair]—to turn me [the invigilator] red[5].

True to form, this becomes a fun game of cat-and-mouse—of watching to see your audience [under your power] respond to your double operation showing to hide or vice versa, the flashing burlesque fostering a revolutionary cryptonymy in the most vivid and tempting of ways [with sex being so much more intense of a desire regarding what you can—like Macbeth’s fatal vision—see, but not grasp: “Look, not touch” an imperative enforced by space and time]. Like strange arrows in an endless quiver, it something to revisit and write about again and again; re [from Volume Zero]:

(exhibit 1a1a1i1: There was nothing strictly “new” about the mise-en-abyme of the 1980s mimesis of a commodified desire sold as “terrorist literature.” Its own controlled opposition was packaged and presented through age-old art techniques that creators then-and-now use for the profit motive, but also to make art that is profoundly anti-capitalist/sex-positive but still “of its time and place.” Indeed, “artistic statements,” “medieval expression,” and “capitalist action” are far from mutually exclusive—a delightful fact illustrated wonderfully by Andrew Blake’s superbly dreamlike Night Trips [1989]. “Vaporwave before Vaporwave existed,” Blake’s marriage of the medieval image was “joined at the hip” [so to speak] with the neoliberal variation of the “Sale of Indulgences” expertly presenting the woman as trapped inside and outside of herself. We see her bare body clinging to electrodes that monitor her vitals, with persons standing next to her looking in, as she looks down at herself, looking in at other people fucking her and each other while she fucks them. Its concentric phantasm is profoundly decayed and euphoric, but also unquestionably ’80s. You’ll know it when you see it.

Regardless of its chief aim, Blake’s film won a silver medal at the 1989 WorldFest- Houston International Film Festival, specifically in the “Non-Theatrical Release” category. This makes it the first porn movie to win a medal at a major international film festival [source: Violet Blue’s “The Helmut Newton of Porn,” 2008]. It was porn and art-as-porn that made a statement that was clearly predicated on material conditions, but also love for the raw materials themselves as “dark,” forbidden fruit tied to music, drugs and disintegration.

The Scorpion’s “Rhythm of Love” [1988] relays a similar savage amusement through the commodification of said fruit, first and foremost. It relays the woman and eponymous scorpion as fused like a chimera. Onscreen, its main product is music, but that music is relayed through Gothic retro-future pastiche. Amid the canceled future, our Teutonic knights fly in from outer space on their spaceship, hauling special “cargo”: the Star Trek starlet in a leather catsuit! They appear like shadowy ghosts, taking to the stage while ghostly women dance and writhe all around them—behind the screen, “inside” the drumkit, upon and within the mirror.

Like a Gothic castle, these sexy gargoyles squirm like animated stone. Of course, the band’s bill of sale conflates sex with music as a silly-yet-serious promise: rock ‘n roll as “sex music” deliberately fused inside a drug-like medieval portrait. Its recursion has been recuperated to serve the profit motive within a campy pastiche that undoubtedly moved monomythic merchandise in a great many forms—e.g., guitars, porn, videogames, movies, Scorpions paraphernalia. It’s all connected, but debatably far more concerned with selling out by “rocking us” with counterfeit cargo [containing ghostly stowaways] than making any kind of statement directly and openly themselves. And yet that’s the beauty of media; we can take what they did for a profit and weaponize it for class war while also having fun!

The whole meta-conversation occurs between not just the Scorpions and Blake from their respective doubled “castles”; it occurs between us on the shared wavelength, deciding what kind of art [thus monsters] we want to make while vibing within the same nostalgic, Gothic headspace and aesthetics [think Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” (1796) but less lame]. To camp or not to camp? That is the question; but also: to what degree? Allegory or apocalypse? Missionary or doggy? Vaginal or anal? Maybe a bit of both while we listen to Emerald Web’s The Stargate Tapes [6][1978-1982]? Maybe just a bit of teasing while we sit around eating questionably-shaped food objects? The sky’s the limit, really.) 

Despite all their demonstrable flaws, I love the Scorpions because their nostalgia lends itself well to camp as living in the same shadow space as a particular kind of Gothic: the love zone. I wanna rock, baby, and fuck demon mommies to metal in my castle (effectively campy recreations of Castle Anthrax [below] and its train of “wicked, bad naughty things,” all hailed by naughty nuns and false grail beacons; like, it’s made up, but I didn’t make that up). In their music video for “The Rhythm of Love” (1988), the Scorpions offer Cold-War comfort food (which would culminate with “Wind of Change,” in 1990) adjacent to, thus crossing over (if by accident) into the art-camp erotica of Andrew Blake’s porn world they were clearly peddling themselves [source].

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

Through ironic evocations of the Medusa-trapped in glass, we reach through the veil to transcend space and time—the chronotope haunted by our alien, decaying-yet-vitalistic beauty as alive in spite of so many open wounds and scars: “Can’t touch this!” The idea isn’t to trace its entire, chaotic lineage [though that can be fun] but instead join in on the endless mummer’s farce/whirling dervish dancing a pedagogy of the oppressed: echoing it imperfectly to find similarity amid difference using Gothic poetics in oft-operatic, thus musical[7] ways.)

Encouraging rebellion among a bunch of free-thinking atheists, Satanists, Pagans, et al, might seem like herding cats, but it’s not so difficult provided you make empathy and sex positivity second-nature at a cultural level (not to mention, people love monsters and sex; we just have to humanize these things through themselves: a system of thought that triggers memories of rebellion that first take root and then catch fire). Through that Wisdom of the Ancients’ labor and propaganda, everything else will fall into place; i.e., from the biggest factories to the lowliest street artist singing from the gutter to unite in a cause less rosy and naïve than Lennon’s “Imagine” (1970, from Volume One):

[S]ometimes, the desire to voice one’s oppression is told through common stories; i.e., by reclaiming the language of the oppressor class […]. However, that subversion still needs to involve a process consciously driven by a desire to alter socio-material conditions: to push away from the status quo and its exploitation of workers behind the usual groups benefitting inside these stories and in real life. Queer allies, especially well-to-do ones, need to be mindful of this in regards to peace and tolerance in the face of deplorable socio-material conditions; e.g., Tom Taylor’s 2023 writeup, “Steely Dan vs John Lennon,” reporting how John Lennon’s “Imagine” [1971] came across as more than a little naïve according to Steely Dan’s “Only A Fool Would Say That”:

Their 1972 track, “Only a Fool Would Say That” was written in response to Lennon’s parade of peace. It looks at idealism through the practical eyes of folks on the street. “You do his nine to five,” they sing, “drag yourself home half alive, and there on the screen, a man with a dream.” And with that, you get a sense of how grating and vacuous they thought that Lennon’s “Imagine” campaign had become [source].

In other words, it can’t be vague or mixed in its messaging. For resistance-in-solidarity to work, it needs to be direct, informed and conscious [of class, gender, religion and race as intersecting forces] (source).

Rebellions live and die by their ability to stay the course—to survive (which the likes of Jimmy Hendrix and John Lennon famously did not) and not sell-out to power (which will only recuperate them into forms of toothless controlled opposition); i.e., not just to “follow the white rabbit,” but fuck it through an illustration of mutual consent: to bond through humanistic interactions speaking to shared trauma. This at-times lurid exhibitionism expresses in dialectical-material terms, with capital selling us-versus-them Cartesian (alien, fetish) violence against nature in unironic, profit-driven monster forms (e.g., Frankenstein vs the Wolfman, Santa Claus vs the Martians, Ripley vs the Alien Queen, Orcs vs Humans, Plants vs Zombies, etc) that we, through careful application, turn into workers-vs-the-elite amid the shared aesthetic/stage’s ludo-Gothic BDSM! It’s a very honest, human form of rebellion because it works through what makes us human to begin: our struggles, our laughter, our sexualities and gender, ace nudism, poetry and art as a mimetic, highly biting and critical group effort suffused—per Lewis and his ilk—with graveyard “trauma” placed in quotes to dance with the ghost of the counterfeit. You might not always be sure of where it will take you in the interim (me, as I write a new transition for this subchapter’s unplanned subdivision); but rest assured, it will never be boring!

The dialectic, as Jung would put it, is synchronistic. As we proceed out into the world, then, beware those who would tone-police you as you echo people of the past amongst your contemporaries as for-or-against you to varying degrees—the latter telling you to put on your clothes (in a private gallery open to the public) or to be quiet, get back, go back whence you came/to the shadow, etc. Silence is genocide and those who take part in gagging us are complicit in some shape or form. In turn, our genius is, like Umberto Eco’s interpretive walks (from Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, 1994), manifesting through something I pioneered in 2018 (with my master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania“): ergodic motion through castle-narrative; i.e., through a Gothic chronotope of our own design in space-time as anisotropic, concentric, and non-linear to traverse and express through non-trivial effort: to assemble and communicate larger arguments through a second-nature habit(at) that lets us make connections with all manner of things while we work on it—in short, while we combat Red Scare as, in the absence of the actual color, takes on the struggles of the working poor nonetheless as alien, criminal.

To that, ludo-Gothic BDMS as I envision it is something scrappy from the old stomping ground—a pugilist old fighter’s attempt at peace (me, getting into fights when I was younger) that I compare now to assorted fictions collectively speaking to criminogenic conditions, mid-class-and-culture-war (above: Old Bill, 2011). I always had a soft spot for the underdog criminal, the outlaw trying to get by (through street duels and brothel espionage) and be more than state power wants him to be: the mad dog biting his own kind to serve capital (“the Railroad”) in all its forms. We need to be able to trounce class traitors when needed, but antifascism is as much doing so with holistic dialogs that meld spoken words with likenesses of saloon brawls (the so-called “danger disco[69]” being the usual place of girl talk, monsters and camp the state tries so hard to demonize [“a den of scum and villainy”] and cash in on; e.g., Star Wars).

Except, the Western’s rebellious allegory isn’t dead (re: Andor, 2022), and as Fury Road (2014) shows us, can be transformed into a queer-adjacent lens (that story is largely cis-feminist). As such, I’m trans and have transplanted the “old bum from the neighborhood” schtick not to posture as something I’m not (“slumming”), nor push for rags-to-riches solutions (Rocky goin’ the distance with Creed, the token immigrant slugging it out against the African American golden boy—a popular boxing refrain that maintains the status quo through marginalized in-fighting). Rather, I’m taking “Medusa? I never knew ye!” and rephrasing it to “You’re looking at her!” To that, Communism arbitrates as much through stealth as the color red, favoring black and red as an (admittedly awesome) color scheme during ludo-Gothic BDSM, but not chained to it.

(source: Reddit)

This, we shall see for the rest of part two, is true even when the color red is absent or the argumentation otherwise devoid of an obvious Nazi or Communist. As Star Wars shows us, for example, sometimes they’re dressed up in ways that have been medievalized. Sometimes, though, you can’t tell what you’re looking at until that “dog dick” of a red lightsaber pops out. Even then, what if there’s a Communist allegory behind the American Liberal and cartoon Nazi crossing swords (there is)?

The problem that part two has largely been getting at, then, is how liberation requires metatextual analysis to uproot and embody between and about texts: in a stage-like performance using shared aesthetics with a displaced locale and dormant class character that is simmering just beneath the surface; i.e., not something fascist fans of the franchise are known for recognizing and to which Lucas relied on to make his fortune (which Cameron, as we shall see, imitated rather faithfully). As Gothic Communists, we need to actively camp what has become canon: blue and red police colors that keep the Communist dialog trapped wordlessly in a never-ending lightsaber duel to move merchandise along (notice how Andor has no swordfights in it, at all? So refreshing!). This goes well beyond the scope of Star Wars and into many kinds of media as essentially talking about the same stuff: sex and force through class war as pushed to the side, but impossible to ignore regardless.

The devil’s in the details; so’s the Commie as a covert (incognito) battler for sexual elements in a capitalist hegemony. We’ve already looked at personal past examples from my life (academic: Hannah-Freya Blake; non-academic: Cuwu). I now want to outline some keys in not-so-obvious, then consider Cameron as a billionaire Marxist Lucas clone we can also critique and learn from:

(source: Paul Joannides’ 1999 Guide to Getting It On)

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a ho in possession of a great tush, rack and/or box must be in want of a husband.” Subversion of Austen’s infamous ironies aside, expressing inequality through sex-positive human wants and needs is the rebellious noir or Western’s call to action: as something to right through psychosexual “violence” as a spectrum of exchanges that are historically unkind to women/monstrous-feminine under capital; i.e., during sex work as a matter of class and culture war relayed endlessly through half-real stories on and offstage: Communist sex workers punished for being sex workers and Commies by virtue of asking for their basic human rights (an intersectional problem shared by black civil rights activists and other movements throughout American history the world over).

To that, we’re not leading anyone on to harm them, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and we have our would-be assailants (those with power over us) “by the balls.” Such people come in handy when the unironic sadist kicks down our door and we have to—in our last moments—speak truth to power: “You’re an ugly pimp who beats up women on account that he’s too afraid of his own goddamn shadow!” When and if that happens, it really doesn’t hurt to have a himbo (or herbo) in our corner willing to crack some skulls, thus save our pretty ass from yet-another-beating and rape (while Mel, despite being a royal cunt in real life, absolutely kills it in a suit, Maria Bello’s more relatable [for me] as the tough-as-nails-working-girl who-has him-wrapped-around-her-little-finger—Payback, 1997, below):

The exhibit here is twofold, but classically male-centric: one, the streetwise, hard-boiled driver (a classic noir trope all on its own) who cares more about the principle of the thing than making money-upon-money on the backs of working girls; and two, the girl he used to “drive” (in two senses of that phrase). Indeed, Payback literally calls the mob “the Syndicate” (sorry, “the Outfit“) to brand/whitewash their activities as plaguing the timeless replica of any American city’s criminogenic slums: a brothel romance, but also a slum romance—the lady (who’s not a “lady” in the middle-class sense) and the tramp, both having “pull” as a means of mutual survival through mutual action (“I have blankets” taken to its logical extreme); i.e., to do their hunting not just where the money is, but the empathy! Such exchanges might seem of the street—relegated to imaginary concrete jungles—but that’s where love (and rebellion) take place! Mmm, makes my pussy wet and my tail wag just thinking about it (the Gothic, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, often speaks in anthropomorphic GNC code: regarding sex and “violence,” below, as so called “puppy play” that’s theatrically no different[8] than Mel Gibson and Maria Bello)!

To be sure, Medusa is a dirty, red-headed slut who lives on Whore Island; by extension, systemic catharsis through subversive Amazonomachia invokes red has having assorted cultural values that overlap: the demon whore and labor activist something to canonically fetishize and reduce, Star-Wars-style, to yet-another-duel; i.e., choose your fighter!”; e.g., Jadis loved Shermie, above, from King of Fighters. To “choose your destiny” insofar as Ed Boon might ask, Communists involve a chattier cat; i.e., a slutty, loquacious ordeal challenging Red Scare—one made by this bitch (me, not Shermie) as refusing to shut up (despite Zeuhl and Jadis in particular trying to gag me): a cum-guzzling puppy acting in good faith as the world’s biggest slut for human, animal and environmental rights. I might just be trying these thoughts together after a walk ’round the old block (I took a stroll earlier, to clear my head and reflect), but they still served as fertilizer from a rich heritage I put into back the figurative soil: the enrichment of my relationship to the world through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Gothic-Communist system of thought that challenges Red Scare with; i.e., the town whore amid a train of whores achieving intersectional solidarity through all the things that people like: sex and violence, but also the Gothic (the 1977 Star Wars being a bonafide Space Western with a retro-future medieval aesthetic).

If you build it, they will cum—the sexy slutty dead walking the Earth to speak truth to power as a counterterrorist device (a real “pinch me, I’m dreaming” moment, when you start to realize just how hot and goth your friends actually are. It’s good to be me). Generally this happens through sex and force as osmotic—through selective absorption, magical assembly and a confusion of the senses that, unto itself, has serious pull. We camp canon because we must; we attract people to help us with that not just by putting our money where our mouths are (so-called “voting with your wallets”) but embodying that as an ongoing performative statement of worker struggle towards Gothic-Communist liberation using ludo-Gothic BDSM. It’s my brainchild, but like Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, steals fire from the gods to give it to the workers of the world (to spite Cartesian chudwads like Victor Frankenstein).

So, I might just be the “neighborhood bicycle,” then, but everyone likes the neighborhood bicycle (for canon: capitalist individuation “slaying” the female-coded, monstrous-feminine “chaos dragon” as a rite of passage during Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference[9]); that’s why they’re the neighborhood bicycle, the town whore, the muse, the medium, the Medusa (inspiration is infectious, including sex but also struggle as an “often-cute, often-gross” human expression against rape; i.e., foisted onto us by overbearing structures of oppression)! We are not gods, but we can echo the gods in our own breasts, where they originate from; i.e., in a half-real relationship with the material world cementing them as gargoyles sitting on cathedrals of various kinds. Our own social-sexual instrumentalities pull them back out again and send them into the world (flying castles)—with someone like James Cameron’s cutting-edge special effects, if we have them, minus his Pygmalion tendencies ultimately serving Hollywood through bad-faith activism: “speaking out both sides of his mouth” to capitalize on struggle as white cis-het business men always seem to do (for them, alliances with workers are “optional,” insofar as lucrative “success” goes—again, thirty pieces of silver but translating into so-called “billionaire/Hollywood Marxism” as its own special class of delusion).

To that, antiwar messages often convey in the language of war, and from ironic sources: Howard Zinn, Bob Ross, Edward Snowden, and Kurt Vonnegut—but also James Cameron as oscillating between anti-police-state (with The Terminator, 1984) and neocon/neoliberal revenge (with Aliens, 1986) ushering in the same-old Red Scare theatrics. The Abyss is another swing in the left direction, showcasing the warring forces both on a grand scale (at the “end” of the Cold War) whose red flags are literal Armageddon, and in-person during a underwater duel where the color red (and any Russians) are completely absent; i.e., a swashbuckling exchange that’s darker, meaner and scarier than The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn by a fucking mile (also, it’s kind of sexy [in my best valley girl upspeak]—a guy-on-guy version of the wet t-shirt contest):

(exhibit 34a1b2b1b: Say what you will about Cameron, but the man knows how to film a scene. The fight forces us to watch [from Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s perspective] through a camera [a la Scott’s Alien camera eye] at our hero and villain, switching between that perspective and Virgil’s [Ed Harris] while trying to sneak up on Coffey [Michael Biehn, in fabulous form as the villain, this time]. Virgil lacks combat training and makes a mistake: not wanting to kill Coffey but reason with/disarm him by going for the gun; Coffey—jumpy and paranoid—does the usual cop response and pulls his weapon, the two men largely conversing with their eyes and faces [nonverbally, like animals] before Virgil verbally appeals to the other man to not fire: “Coffey, wait…”

Coffey’s eyes are full of fear, blind to reason; seeing Virgil as the alien he must kill, he tries to fire—but the gun doesn’t respond [the look of shock and outrage on Harris’ face says it all, really: “This motherfucker really just tried to shoot me? Oh, hell no!”]. It’s the Cold War in small—the fate of the world resting on Virgil’s shoulders while he and his nemesis do battle: “We have found the enemy and he is us[10].” Threatened and backed into a corner, Coffey—like a frightened dog—is unpredictably violent for the state. He pulls his blade. This isn’t just saber-rattling but a full-on duel-to-the-death; the music kicks in [tropical-themed, belying Cameron’s Orientalism] and the two men cross swords.

Gives me chills, just thinking about it. I feel the Numinous weight of every strike, reminded of the scary men in my life tied to capital, to the nuclear family model, harming me instead of doing the decent thing by providing and protecting [the bare-fucking-minimum]. The little girl and grown-ass woman in me root for Virgil to stick it to the son of a bitch: “Get ‘im!” The only thing between Virgil’s body and Coffey’s thrusting knife-dick [“fuck the enemy, spill its blood!”] is a swinging fluorescent bulb and a club-like metal pipe. In true duelist fashion, the two are uneven—Virgil outclassed by Coffey but Coffey off-balance from his alienated state of mind. Our hero-in-white fends off our man-in-black’s roguish fencing for a time, the two tangling to embrace and fall into the water like “lover” [violence in duels is homosocial, even homoerotic[11]]. Virgil, fighting for his life, bites Coffey’s hand to disarm him, only to be beaten and thrown down again for his trouble [again, he’s trying to survive; Coffey’s trying to kill him]. Then—when the Destroyer persona in small appears to have our hero on the hip, when all seems lost… a surprise entrant turns the tide: our loveable himbo, Cat [who even has the good manners to get Coffey’s attention before decking him[12]]!

Faced with overwhelming odds, the coward turns tail, irrationally determined to carry the state’s wishes to their logical conclusion: extermination. In his usual coherent-but-inconsistent style, then, Cameron’s Gothic action vehicles speak to larger warring forces inspired by older sci-fi stories debating nuclear war on both sides of the political isle: Harlan Ellison’s Outer Limits and Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. In true white-boy fashion, Cameron demonstrates the ability to play both sides just like Lucas does: using anti-war allegory in hauntological stories whose seminal disasters allude to Capitalism’s routine crisis and collapse; the Gothic elements are the decay felt amid a neo-medieval aesthetic, which The Abyss cleverly disguises with an ordinary [novel, quotidian] milieu: an oil rig. But a solder and worker are easily distinguished all the same, the blue-collar everyman swinging for the fences to upend the American hawk.

It’s good stuff… expect Cameron would continue vacillating—using nuclear war to lionize European white men [T2, 1991] and demonize people of color [True Lies, 1994] to serve profit [a trend he would continue, regarding Indigenous rights as something to commercialize with his Avatar series]. And in case you missed it, he also did it in The Abyss: Virgil’s hellish swimming up through the pool to—like Benjamin Willard from Apocalypse Now [1979]—rise metatextually up through a ghost of Joseph Conrad’s original, very racist novella, Heart of Darkness [1899]: to speak to racism/colonial hysteria and decay from within an entirely privileged position; i.e., the white-man-wearing-blackface as always being, on some level, inside the Imperial Core looking out into the darkness [what Jameson calls the dialectic of privilege, which we address through the dialectic of the alien]. You see any Russians or people of color in this movie? Red Scare is Red Scare, even if the Reds are ostensibly truant [the displaced, underwater critique, this time, refreshingly falling on the American side of the fence, at least].

Cameron is a cunt, as was Coppola and Conrad: the three Cs—the Three Cunts, ACAB. I jest, sort of. All the same, these weird canonical nerds don’t own the monopoly on such things—not on the “action/adventure” cinematic genre that, through Cameron’s cartographic refrain, would clumsily evolve into FPS, Metroidvania and survival horror videogames [re: “Mazes and Labyrinths“]. Indeed, through our own Galatean media as fostered out in the world, we can use our own splendide mendax to tip the scales in favor of workers and nature; i.e., by not scapegoating the state using the usual suspect: a pasty fall guy who was “shit nuts.” To that, Coffey was merely a pawn on a larger chessboard, except regicide won’t work, either, because capital is a hyperobject that needs to be understood through the totality of its mechanisms as we can actually observe and utilize them [capital in the abstract]. So revelations of a dark parent or monarch are just different chess pieces to take off the same board [the white planet threatened by a dark one on the same battlefield]: some king to topple, with Cameron choosing a black queen for the white queen to tip in favor of capital, in Aliens. Instead, we want to dance with the ghost of the counterfeit to reverse the process of abjection and change how the game is played, in effect changing its rules to suit worker needs [often combining them—”topping” the so-called “king,” checkers-style]. This paradoxically requires exposing the state while enjoying things in a pernicious, problematic system; e.g., like chess. Bitches love chess.

Seriously, it’s not rocket science, but we learn from those we love! I.e., I once dated a rock ‘n roll poet, a non-binary gender studies expert, a metal-loving entomologist, and a stoner Marxist-Leninist fuck puppy—all followed by my current partners, an Indigenous ecologist therian and good-boy art nerd/fur-crazy roleplayer who both taught me to surrender power without harming me: to rollover like a puppy for them and see things from a humane non-human perspective—on my back, my belly and genitals exposed[13]! Picking all sorts of stuff from them [“Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas”], I absolutely love the antiwar message in The Abyss. Even so, I can still just as easily critique Cameron and the film industry to engender Gothic Communism. There’s a joy in my hellish flow state, the same way there is in having sex or baking a tasty cake. Give it a shot! Kill your darlings to make them into something that retains aspects of their former selves reclaimed dualistically by proletarian forces!)

So-called “genius” takes talent, but still needs cultivating (nature and nurture); i.e., given room to grow and develop; e.g., being neurodivergent, I always marched to the beat of my own drum and had a big-ol’ heart of gold. But all the same, nobody’s perfect. We’re all going to have good days and bad. The tie-breaker is always dialectical-material scrutiny and context, mid-genesis. The shadow of Capital’s collapse, then, is like Cameron’s mirror challenging his own refrain: “Coffee hears NTIs and thinks Russians, nukes. You gotta look with better eyes than that!” It projects internalized bigotries—of fearing the alien as informed by socio-material conditions during Pax Americana as never having stopped. There is always a Cold War relative to the state as something to challenge; i.e., we must always be building[14] something mirror-like/alien in response—to sing, dance or otherwise double spectres of Caesar (the Shadow of Pygmalion) to challenge the unironic Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern and narrative of the crypt with: as an Aegis-like mirror shield threatening state shift unless action is taken to right the ship. We gotta put the pussy on the chainwax—to start a thing as counterterrorists do during asymmetrical/guerrilla warfare, and to bring big friendly herbos and himbos (“muscle”) to our side; i.e., just in case the fash-adjacent nutjobs project their Cold-War-grade xenophobia onto our Commie asses. As Cameron showed us, size absolutely matters in a real fight (less so in bed[15], but I digress) without the element of surprise or mechanical advantage (force multipliers).

And if it sounds like I’m always repeating myself—”pussy on the chainwax” this, “pussy on the chainwax” that—well, that’s what refrains are! Make them your own flow states to vibe to, vibrating in service to workers and nature through the dialectic of the alien yielding sex-positive outcomes, not cataclysm (which often, as I shall now hint, targets our “balls”; i.e., of any gendered and/or biological makeup or persuasion).

To be sure, class and culture war is a Mexican standoff, one that requires force. Power responds to demands backed up by force; i.e., labor action and propaganda. The point isn’t scorched earth, for Gothic Communism, but transition through appreciative irony’s Gothic counterculture (and the other creative successes, which we’ll unpack in Volume Three) during praxial synthesis. Sure, we’re in a pickle—a Lt. Archie Wilcox looking for someone less loquacious at times and more someone to bear and grit it with a “Say auf wiedersehen to your Nazi balls!” when push comes to shove. But until then, we need to recruit peoples more “on the fence,” and afford ourselves the nuance required; i.e., to tell them apart when courting potential friends who might be potential enemies. Better to learn from those who already found out (me); i.e., that the two—while not the same—often look exactly alike. Punching a single Nazi is cathartic, but pointless if it doesn’t yield systemic concessions; we got bigger balls to snip. Capital’s. To that, we gotta take black-and red back, including Red Scare as something that can appear anywhere in popular media (this is a neoliberal planet we live on).

This, however, is a group effort—one that requires friends the likes of Harmony Corrupted and Blxxd Bunny, who we’ll exhibit in the next subdivision of “the Fun Palace!” Before we blast off to that otherworldly sphere (classically it would be the moon), I would like to wrap up a few points about our interactions with popular media; i.e., regarding Red Scare with Chernobyl as an ongoing issue when raising our own castles (and their dangerous confusions).

(source: Jeremy Parish’s “The Anatomy of Games,” 2013).

Of course, I can’t say what exactly will become of the Gothic (and its medieval toys) when Communism eventually happens, save that we already know what Capitalism does (and has done) for centuries. Capitalist Realism acts like it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But the sick joke is, it’s working just fine for the people it’s meant to benefit. By enriching monsters, et al, through the natural tendency of human language to deceive for survival purposes, we can expand the web of quality to drape down on all peoples, giving back to nature what Capitalism does nothing but take for the charitably sparse and empathetically bankrupt (whose gluttony will never be sated, their throats always parched for blood, brains, sanguine, sex, whatever). They privatizing busking as a means of draining wealth as the lifeforce not just of the planet, but the very nation-states they run into the ground (running off with golden parachutes). They take and take and take. Without a change in direction, it will destroy all peoples, including those with more to lose. Frankly, we deserve better than what those old vultures will toss back our way (chunks of our own dead flesh, no less). So does nature, so do monsters and the Gothic. But we must eat empathy as something to reproduce and give back, not abject and throw up; e.g., Capitalism and rainbows (save that one special month where they pretend to care). In turn, the elite are a tumor whose unchecked vampirism and cannibalism (and other such necromantic feeding habits) must be curtailed. Like with all undead who feed and demons to grant fatal bargains, the elite’s variant merit and receive only what we give them.

(artist: Queenie)

As warrior poets, we must gird our loins, flux our capacitors, fluff our pillows and give chase. The more community and education certainly helps (and some degree of neurodivergence), but apart from some basic ideas to keep in mind—e.g., humans have basic unalienable rights—isn’t required in a given, exact form. Gothic Communism is about holistic inclusion combating false hope (a neoliberal staple, per Capitalist Realism’s monopolies, refrains and trifectas) to face the music: you can’t save the world through American copaganda hero fantasies/personal responsibility theatre (those acting in bad faith, commonly referred to as “full of shit”)—can’t just buy something or kill a monster to solve capital’s problems, because they’re built into capital, which isn’t broken, just inhumane; you have to play by a different set of rules while inside capital, which predominantly involve humanizing monsters and abjuring the profit motive to help workers, animals and the environment in direct opposition to the state; i.e., there is no compromise, scapegoat or smoking gun that will work; e.g., no Commie to hang at the gallows to redeem Capitalism from itself.

In Gothic circles, this is generally likened to a “presence” that vaguely or tremendously occupies a given area by haunting it; i.e., the truant space aliens’ detritus in Roadside Picnic (1972), or the radioactive mutants from Metro or the Shadow of Chernobyl series. But the lack of either in reality doesn’t discount the reality of actual trauma expressed in half-real terms (as all Gothic castles do). In more “realistic” forms, these reduce to a cartoon Stalin—less the man himself as a “final boss[16]” and more someone else to blame who’s part of the area formerly known as the U.S.S.R.; e.g., Anatoly Dyatlov from Chernobyl (2019).

Whereas Cameron’s The Abyss held Russia at arm’s length, “Russia” in quotes remains a common stomping ground from neoliberal hauntologies, so let’s quickly explore that with Dyatlov, but also the effigy of the Soviet State that HBO tries to hang. Everything has the air of accuracy amid antiquation, but is surprisingly accurate as a hit propaganda piece America might produce for its age-old enemies (down to the exact date and time, shown on an old-fashioned clock). If fact, that’s exactly what it is, so keep it in mind for a second.

I mention this example not simply because Chernobyl is what’s currently right in front of me, but also because medieval canon and regression involve hauntologies that are far more recent-looking than the so-called Middle Ages. “What is the cost of lies?” the protagonist asks. “It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth; the real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. […] What else is left but to abandon the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stores, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are; all we want to know is, who is to blame?”

Except, this isn’t some insolvable solution; the answer is right in front of us. To see it, you have to think beyond moral panics like Red Scare (Cameron, HBO, or otherwise, speaking abject utterances in Gothic displacement[17]) to understand that the Soviets, while far from perfect, were light years better than any capitalist who has ever lived; Capitalists are unethical by design, because they require profit (an inherently unequal proposition) to move money through nature through Cartesian rhetoric (an inherently genocidal, thus brutal system of thought). Charity and inequality are not just antithetical to their thinking but anathema, insofar the mythical Good Soviet is concerned. How quickly people forget that the Nazis didn’t stop with going East; they went West, too, and will again when the chickens come home to roost (from Volume Zero):

So-called “Jewish revenge” is the Red Scare sentiment of anti-Bolshevism shared by the American elite as enacted with impunity until it “crosses a line”—in this case a national boundary into the West by the Nazis:

For four years, numerous Americans, in high positions and obscure, sullenly harbored the conviction that World War II was “the wrong war against the wrong enemies.” Communism, they knew, was the only genuine adversary on America’s historical agenda. Was that not why Hitler had been ignored/tolerated/appeased/aided? So that the Nazi war machine would turn East and wipe Bolshevism off the face of the earth once and for all? It was just unfortunate that Adolf turned out to be such a megalomaniac and turned West as well (source: William Blum’s Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1995).

The same idea plays out in displaced, fantastical forms through undead and demonic language. As such, the assorted “ink blot” stigmas elide within the same poetic shadow zone, whereupon the hungry mouths of dead labor’s zombies bear their fangs and collectively shriek and howl. Simply put, they riot, but do alongside state agents opposing them using the same aesthetics of power and death: the fascist, but also the centrist combating both fascism and labor until asking the black “dog” knight to tag team the Dark Queen and her counterterrorist zombie forces. Mid-riot, various pro-state Beowulfs are generated and sent in to quell the slaves as dissident aggressors, called “terrorist” and certainly treated as such (source).

Chernobyl works much better as an anti-capitalist allegory dressed[18] up in Soviet, Red-Scare clothes—an anti-nuclear parable that treats nuclear energy as the great terror of our age, on part with Big Oil attacking it to regress towards an older system not unlike the Catholics and the Protestants, except it’s being told now, in the Internet Age on HBO. The science in Chernobyl is absolute garbage, but the Gothic elements (fear and dogma) are suitably effective; i.e., state critiques delivered by Western actors follow polemics of an end-stage Cold War that regurgitate neoliberal talking points by treating radiation as the mysterium tremendum:

History matters not, here. What matters is how seriously the cast and crew present their threat, and boy do they ever. When the doctors say the radioactive victims are not safe to be around, they really mean it. This fact is woefully undermined by the workers themselves never getting sick. But it still doesn’t matter because everyone is so grim. When you see an unhappy plant worker falling apart in their hands, it plays out like a zombie film. […]

This is a show that deals in absolutes—of impending, ceaseless doom. The victims rot, their symptoms accelerated and overblown; graphite is radioactive enough to burn the skin off a man’s hand through his protective glove (without damaging the glove). Any exposure to such a volatile source would probably be enough to kill someone outright. For me it doesn’t matter, though; it’s the thought—of immediate danger relative to an awesome power—that counts. That’s what the Gothic is all about.

[…] the exposure of the irradiated is treated like a contagion, a disease to catch. None of the victims are allowed to be touched, becoming objects of fear in and of themselves. While radiation doesn’t spread from victim to victim, the show embodies superstitions about radiation. These remain to this day even if, in the show, they are from a scientific standpoint highly anachronistic. “Tell the truth,” Legasov is told. Yet, the “truth” in Chernobyl is bedridden with boogeymen, nightmares and total ignorance.

The whole ordeal feels less like reality and more like a nuclear physicist’s worst nightmare. Nightmares generally take bits of reality and merge them with chaos. In this respect, Chernobyl is a real place and some of the events actually occurred; likewise, HBO’s verisimilitude lends an element of realism to what would otherwise be a retro-future straight out of Alien (the control room mirrors the walls of the M.U.T.H.U.R. chamber from that movie). But the likes of Stalker (1979) were filmed in the ruins of de-Stalinized Russia. They simply had to point a camera and shoot (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Chernobyl (2019) review,” 2019).

My understanding of anti-Soviet, Red Scare propaganda has clearly grown in the five years I first saw Chernobyl (and six years since I wrote the 2018 symposium, “All that We’re Told: In the Eternal Shadow (within Shadows) of the Hypernormal, Worldwide[19]“). When all’s said and done, we want to recognize patterns useful to speculative thinking while learning from others, including our former selves as something to learn from and critique (“Not great, not terrible.”).

Beyond just a single text like Chernobyl, The Abyss or past friends come and gone, take Sarkeesian’s adage merged with Gothic Communism and apply it to all aspects of your life: right now, as something to foster with your current friends responding creatively and collectively to the same media to reify your core values within the “Russian doll” code (a concentric code pushing Trojan Communist messages through all the usual counterfeits abjecting Red things in favor of American Liberalism’s red, white and blue).

Think critically (such as a medievalist would do) about everything around you regarding intertextual patterns and ideas. Mix, match, fuse and blend whatever’s on hand, using whatever “sutures” you prefer that “do the trick.” Just know that whatever you consume, keeping with the seminal/childbirth metaphors, flavors the jizz/shapes the fetus. It can be anything regarding media, mentalities, styles or people. For us, this means recruiting people from all walks sharing common cause and ground if not casual interests: total liberation, post-scarcity. That includes a goth/gay identical twin like me living in what I previously described as “Merlin’s[20] tower,” but also thanks to the Internet can expand class and culture warriors to anyone who wants in and is able, in some shape or form, to speak as one against Capitalism and the state (a “grass roots” Gothic that uproots its middle-class origins). That’s literally what intersectional solidarity is: an untraditional foundation, barbarism and hereditary poetic lineage of workers (and nature) versus the state’s traditional (nuclear and heteronormative) familial relations/deep-rooted, addictive need to conquer everything inside (and its class traitors of all walks, from token doms and cold-blooded bounty hunters to unscrupulous shysters).

In a conservative sense, we are biting the hand that feeds; but in a progressive mindset, requires we set terms and conditions—demands—to those who wrong us: the state holding us hostage while stealing from us. Structures aren’t people, but they do pertain to them, as well as their chronic, cramping tensions—their hubris and humility—providing grounding emotional elements to intersect and perform, should we have to. The Gothic, as such, specializes in extreme, high-intensity emotional turmoil/dysfunction in theatrical forms that speak to socio-material conditions: the castle walls breached, the body walls opened, the draconian agent or benefactor manning or passing through these portals, atriums, valves (the Gothic castle a crude, “belly of the beast” morphological statement, in that respect)—all constitute performative roles and tableaux commenting on reality between onstage and off. The collective aim is to confront trauma as a mythologized source and cause; i.e., synthesize emotional and Gothic intelligence (meaning growth) and class cultural awareness through an unconventional approach to convention (which is primarily what the Gothic is made from; re: fetishes and clichés): likeness that are just a little off, even if that’s through context (which requires an invigilator).

(model and artist: Autumn Ivy and Persephone van der Waard)

Capital needs life to exploit, generally through sex work as fetishized to serve profit; i.e., as Volume Zero describes, “an absence of material conditions amounting to praxial invisibility” insofar as “the survival of neoliberalism hinges on the neoliberal’s ability to remain invisible” (source). To that, people don’t wear obvious uniforms during civil wars, but do wear loud uniforms during the allegory of class and culture war swept up in capital:

Canonical media is historically-materially vindictive towards, and exploitative of, sex workers who don’t have control over their own bodies (which obviously has shifted somewhat in the Internet Age—a fact we will interrogate much more in Volume Three). During canonical instruction (we’ll consider iconoclastic sex work too, of course), the expected victims are targeted, marked and yoked ahead of time—like a lamb to the slaughter but treated as a kind of opiate for the masses. A “tasty cake” from head to toe and bound with invisible bonds (dogma and material conditions), the sex worker is fetishized against their will to cater to market forces dehumanizing them, or the worker as sexualized for similar dimorphic reasons that suit the state’s profit motive. As we shall see, any attempt to change the structure must occur within it (an absence of material conditions amounting to praxial invisibility). Beyond normalized sex work through basic, off-canvas prostitution, monsters fulfill a canonical role as sexualized “punching bags” (ibid.).

the signs are there if you know where to look. False flags are a classic problem. Meaning our flag is hiding in plain sight. Sometimes, it’s an Amazonian dragoon’s red dress (or thong, above); others, it’s flag from the queer rainbow waved to pick up stowaways and vagrants eager to wage war however we can, when we can. To this, there isn’t a clock on trauma, but the clock for state shift is ticking. As such we must let nothing come between us and the things we enjoy as an outlet and avenue for healthy societal change.

As I’ve hopefully conveyed, this requires a maturity of expression amid a mode of expression where the war is both fought, policed and drained of subject; i.e., the apple something to eat, but also wear and fuck, perform and flaunt. Regardless of how this happens, we still have to hunt our goals down, Red-October-style, through tired, endless war stories taken from a thorough rolodex/playlist of sick[21] beats. As I’ve explained, this can be from the academic or non-academic graveyard of our pasts lives—people like Hannah-Freya, Cuwu or Autumn Ivy as gradients to a fractal-recursive splintering of Communism in Gothic media, but also said media itself as we’ve consumed it: together as something to write about, have sex to, or otherwise relate to each other as imperfect comrades fighting the true evil empire. “The pearly castles are the worst,” meaning the ones that looks good and champions Red Scare, but stink of genocide, corruption, arrested development[22] and hypocrisy that would make Stalin blush. Rebellion is about sacrifice—not of our actual lives (not if we can help it, anyways) but our illusions of safety and total power as we use Gothic poetics to give others more disadvantage a chance to speak, mid-“torture.”

But our torturing of the quarry is, itself, a paradox; i.e., we have to flush them out by frightening the state, showing the latter what it views and treats as alien: ourselves as human, using our labor to endorse a world that values said labor in ways that people regularly consume and learn from. Marx is already a household name; we simply have to camp his ghost to expand the bailiwick. Doing so is less about holding the state accountable by challenging its bigotries and more about dismantling it, because we’re taking our power back; i.e., something the state a) has no valid or logical claim to, and b) is terminally invested in causing harm through our labor as something to abuse—our false stewards, our compelled employers, our gods and masters, our overlords. Their fear and alarm regarding us is far better for us than their satisfaction, because—while the latter gradually leads to total collapse and decay of a larger organism succumbing to slow death—genocide, mass exploitation and sudden death for workers is no accident; it’s systemic, happening all the time. So while the state can’t live without us, we can very much live without it.

(source: Stephen Coles’ “‘U.S.A. Surpasses All The Genocide Records!’ Poster and Fact Sheet,” 2016)

In the absence of obvious reds—in the presence of old black-and-white photographs telling us to make friends and seize the day ourselves—these proverbial dead poets, however imperfect, out-of-touch or unable to sing a note (I’m looking at you, Yoko![23])—are pointing us to the future friendships we could have ourselves. As such, we’ll paint the town red, next—with our friends-in-struggle! Onto part three (which I had to divide in two, so: “‘With a Little Help from My Friends’; or, Out of this World: Opening and part one, ‘What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why (feat. Amazons and Witches)?'”).

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Footnotes

[1] When I shyly replied, “…Two?” Cuwu’s silent gasp of alarm (and slight nervous excitement) said it all. Turns out, weed can make you question your own existence by experiencing unreality as a medical symptom! That was a fun night! Luckily I had my Ariadne to guide me out of the labyrinth…and fuck me outside, on the island of Naxos—all without killing any poor minotaur (such monsters are generally metaphors for challenges that capital and Imperialism treat unironically as threats to serve profit; i.e., monstrous-feminine foils trapped inside violent, copaganda puzzles, but more on that in a bit).

[69] Per Capitalist Realism, Terminator‘s in-house music (“Photoplay” and “Burning in the Third Degree,” 1984)—in true hauntological/mise-en-abyme fashion—has a female voice (the Gothic heroine formulaic) singing about being trapped: in a photograph story where they’re overwhelmed with conflicting emotions of survival (fight or fight, freeze or fawn, protection and provision, etc) while being hunted; it’s very postpunk (“disco in disguise”) and Gothic—i.e., trapped in the dance hall with Dracula the impostor/infiltrator (“hey, that guy didn’t pay!”): what Volume One calls “police-light pareidolia,” merging disco lights with police lights and nuclear sirens; i.e., American as nuclear cops bringing rise to a new fascist world order before the bombs drop (“The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind has raged for decades, but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present. Tonight.”). Such a haze might seem bizarre, but—per the Gothic’s big emotions—is doing a trick similar to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1921): describing modern life (city life) as a rising new existence out of war with new technologies: that of women’s perspective in the city when threatened by bad-faith men standing impatiently on ceremony (“the gentleman carbuncular”).

Except The Terminator is, in equal hauntological fashion, evolving—regressing under neoliberal Capitalism’s shadow of nuclear war romanced through technophobic cyberpunk superimposed, shadow-like, over a quotidian L.A. nightlife/city space; i.e., as haunted by vague imitations of life and death coming from internal/external sources and conflicts. As such, the heroine (Sarah and the audience to varying degrees) holds out for a hero but feels creeped out by everything and everyone—fight or fight, in short (a criminal hauntology that we’ll explore more in Volume Three). All occur on a shared stage where women go and put on similar clothes (adopt similar hairstyles) while watched by panoptic/myopic state eyes on the hunter’s map: calculated risk as, in a pre-Internet age, coming with pre-Internet concerns for sex workers (women)—”imitation” (assassination) by physical contact, once visually acquired as the target.

In turn, the affect is puts “terror” and horror” in quotes, but also inside a Russian doll: the dark copy of L.A. disassociates per a mental exercise common to female Gothic readership; i.e., regressing into a Gothic chronotope where the medieval-grade class of power abuse (“dynastic primacy and hereditary rites”) is accurately expressed through abstraction that points to the ghost of the counterfeit as updated but oscillating between different legends and true crimes morphing horribly through a shared shadow zone. Per Gothic experience as something to view outside itself (“phenomenology”), Sarah is the stand-in woman (“the double,” in theatre terms) for the audience wanting to be the good girl but haunted by the trauma of other dead (thus past) women* tied to settler-colonial issues linked to profit (the casualties of the privileged relative to that system, pointing to dead white indentured servants; re: Howard Zinn). All raise a curious paradox: impostor syndrome and internalized bigotry, aka mirror syndrome. Sarah is our Catherine Moorland, essentially finding herself in a liminal space indicative of her own wide consumption habits: the Western, horror movies, spy dramas/romances, and a 24-hour news cycle (that she doesn’t want or like to watch: “You’re dead, honey!”).

*The imaginary/fictional nature of fiction doesn’t matter if it points to non-fiction (doesn’t require “ray guns” for proof, Dr. Silbermann). In turn, biography threatens auto-biography regarding genocide as normally experienced by “the other side”; i.e., the Global South being the North’s vision of Hell-on-Earth brought to them during the Imperial Boomerang’s return home—an apocalypse/revelation’s fatal vision: a death-omen skeleton both trapped inside us, wanting to scream, and pulled out of us, rubber-hose-style, to belt out an orgasmic “death” wail. It might seem odd, except it speaks to our universal alienation, fetishizing and sexualization under capital, which all but require the monstrous-feminine to protect themselves from rape by dressing it up as deathly jouissance; i.e., “Help, help, I’m being ‘raped’ and I’m ‘dead’ at the same time!” It constitutes a kind of perverse rape prevention theatre which others will be fearful of and fascinated towards (re: C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain and investigating tigers and spirits in the other room, which—per the Gothic—is using the bloodcurdling screams of “dying” women). Such a palliative Numinous maximizes investigation unto self-interest regarding psychosexual theatre (and just sex in general, if we’re all honest) as highly entertaining (thus persuasive) education; i.e., the testament of the Bleeding Nun, which Sarah’s bones sing to and from in turn (our bad game of telephone): “The little bombs we drop all lead back to the Big One [the spectre of Caesar stabbed to death] when the fat lady sings!” It’s less Red Scare (see any Russians here?) and more (admittedly white-savior) anti-nuke propaganda targeting the middle-class as most able to impact things; i.e., as the usual gatekeepers of capital being selfishly incentivized through rape fantasy to avoid ignominious death. Well played, Cameron. “Not great, not terrible.” But good job, home slice. 

This begs an important question: If you’re trying to change but still figuring things out on a half-real (thus half-false) stage filled with potential bad actors, are you being honest with yourself? The liar’s paradox states that the sentence isn’t true while being true; so Cameron’s disco is equally true while being false, fabricated. So is the Gothic, hence castle-narrative, hence ludo-Gothic BDSM. Sarah is torn between different sides of a divided self that may or may not describe her—but also faced with possible futures (what happens if she takes one guy home versus another) indicative of past atrocities at home and abroad relative to American police abuse across space and time: the terminator is our animal man both stinking and primal (“made with real panther parts”), foreign (a disguised version of the “Russian spy” Cold War trope, the German spy), and made metal like a posthuman robocop armed to the teeth; i.e., the walking castle-in-a-castle, wolf-in-“wolf’s”-clothing threatening foreign rape (the foreign plot) at home, scapegoating systemic police issues in a current police state projected onto the screen as much by the audience as the other way around!

All of it regresses to a false, bad childhood that speaks truth through paradox, one where the kids—appearing to have grown up—are seemingly up to no good/not behaving as they should; i.e., playing with dead things (and guns) during moral panic/witch hunts. The reality, here, is these feelings are exactly how capital wants people to feel/behave; i.e., off-balance, trapped in a canceled future, “high” with a menticidal fear from waves of terror conditioning them to become Amazons and damsels for the state: of displaced, disguised police forces they pay to deal with during canonical calculated risk. In turn, it’s addictive because we feel out of control in a world operated by cruel puppet masters (the bourgeoisie) using us for their own greedy ends, all but requiring us to liberate ourselves (and our monstrous threatres) from their spurious (false) monopoly of terror by seizing control of the nightmare while inside it; i.e., a lucid dream while awake that changes the external socio-material conditions that lead to its tell-tale feelings on all fronts: ludo-Gothic BDSM developing Gothic Communism as a similarly ergodic form of motion inside the chronotope (no outside of the text): liminal, concentric, anisotropic, mise-en-abyme, et al—all through magical assembly, confusion of the senses, selective absorption during a Song of Infinity!

Such rebellious dreaming’s reclamation of the Amazon (I mean, just look at Sarah’s queenly lion mane, contemplating armed resistance before taking a shower, only to make up her mind after fucking cute-boy Reese to humanize him and toughen her [mind and pussy] up), as The Terminator shows us, becomes something to endlessly revisit (fan videos, sequels, remakes, adaptations, etc) through dreams that speak to the cyclical nature of history as historical-material, influencing our literal dreams (“Their defense grid was smashed! We’d won! Taking out Connor then would make no difference! Skynet had to wipe out* his entire existence!”) that play with the taboo social (feelings: kill cops being a guilty but valid desire; i.e., kill our jailors presenting as false protectors actually serving the state as robots-in-the-flesh) and material factors that children are classically taught to do—with dolls (tea time for the girls and action figures for the boys, and GNC variants of emergent gameplay for the fags)—except we’re the dolls on a half-real, chessboard-esque stage (avatars, in videoludic parlance, the magic circle a half-real one). Per the pedagogy of the oppressed, similarity occurs amid difference, straight people experiencing fatal nostalgia, too; they just feel it differently than queer people as alien and fetish, hunted themselves (with cis-het women classically being monstrous-feminine [“woman is other”] enemies to the state; i.e., like Sarah is to Skynet).

*Killing rebellion by killing the mother of his enemy; i.e., killing Medusa as antithetical to state continuation/daily operations. The idea had to die, except killing Medusa is impossible (the state needs a scapegoat to exist and workers/natures to exploit), demanding a forever retro-future war inside the minds of the public that cannot be stopped, only able to cancel Communist futures by keeping potential actors lying in state, fighting forever during an admittedly white-savior plot. Again, just like Lucas, Cameron does this—and Radcliffe did this—while illustrating the problem (Capitalism) as a playground (a Gothic castle) to pacify curious and fearful workers with. We gotta take the war to the streets of imagination in ways they couldn’t: by threatening profit through iconoclasm to alter the Superstructure (thus the Base) in a proletarian direction; i.e., praxial synthesis as protective of workers, nature and the environment and liberatory towards sex work relative to the dialectic of the alien. Targeting the minds of the future youth through Gothic play is the simplest solution to an incredibly complex, hypermassive (normal, real, etc) problem. Targeting the minds of the future youth through Gothic play is the simplest solution to an incredibly complex, hypermassive (normal, real, etc) problem: by teaching future players (usually boys) to play nice in emergent, de facto (extracurricular) forms of good praxis synthesized (creative success); i.e., don’t rape and kill everything you see, you stupid little fucks (teaching children, I’ve discovered, is fun precisely because it’s wicked)!

[2] Re, Castricano:

Although some critics continue to disavow the Gothic as being subliterary and appealing only to the puerile imagination—Fredric Jameson refers to the Gothic as “that boring and exhausted paradigm” [what a dork]—others, such as Anne Williams, claim that the genre not only remains very much alive but is especially vital in its evocation of the “undead,” an ontologically ambiguous figure which has been the focus of so much critical attention that another critic, Slavoj Zizek, felt compelled to call the return of the living dead “the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture”‘ (source).

Granted, Zizek was a wuss who played the “most dangerous intellectual,” but ultimately sided with state power regarding Israel (thus America) vs Palestine (from Volume One):

When Zizek writes, “We can and should unconditionally support Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorist attacks” (source: “The Real Dividing Line in Israel-Palestine,” 2023), he’s essentially apologizing for the state model and its time-tested monopolies on terror and violence; specifically by endorsing Israel, he’s defending a fundamentally settler-colonial project, akin to supporting the Nazi regime’s right to exist while invading Poland but updated through modern-day proxy-war maneuvers (though the WW2-era US certainly expected Nazi Germany to abolish the elite’s enemies in Russia) [source].

We must be braver than that when baring it all ourselves. We can say it with camp (e.g., Bad Lip Reading’s “A Bad Lip Reading of Game of Thrones” [2014]: “I, sir, am the evil studmuffin!”), or as facts; but it must be said in some shape or form that doesn’t preclude irony as a proletarian function.

[3] Rehashing the gypsy’s dance from Lewis’ The Monk, it must be said.

[4] Allegedly. Re: “As attributed to Pappus (4th century AD) and Plutarch (c. 46-120 AD) in Sherman K. Stein’s Archimedes: What Did He Do Besides Cry Eureka? (1999)” (source: Today in Science). Note how size (for all you insecure “lever”-havers, out there) doesn’t matter. Fulcrum does! Labor is a tremendous fulcrum, especially sexual labor (capital sexualizes everything) as a means of engaging with those who will historically-materially seek it out as an opiate. Potential convents, easy pickings.

[5] Few things are so instinctively persuasive as sex is: an educational device (many of the Commies I know were persuaded in that direction by sex—myself* included; even in ace forms, nudism allows people to express and relate to “trauma” as something to put in quotes (thus interrogate and negotiation for a pedagogy of the oppressed inside the self-same shadow zone); i.e., our Aegis a mirror-like booty we take back to freeze our enemies (and playfully tease/seduce our friends) with!

*Zeuhl showed me the little rebellious queer inside myself by first feeling safe enough to sleep with me, only to wake up something more rebellious than they were (despite hilariously calling themselves “the Red Bun,” they didn’t have the gumption to take part in something more visibly rebellious. Their loss, and good riddance); i.e., by lending me not just Foucault’s A History of Sexuality or Butler’s Gender Trouble but Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1968].

[6] Something Zeuhl and I tried once; frankly fucking to metal/videogame music (e.g., Metaltool’s “Mega Man X3 – Opening Stage,” 2012) is a lot more effective: it at least carries the necessary energy and beat, even if it often sounds rather goofy in its own right (Zeuhl and I both smiled like total dumbasses while we fucked to Turrican II’s “Traps,” 1991. But much to my delight, they especially loved Amiga chiptunes regardless of what we were up to, and for good or ill, I cannot listen to that music now without their beautiful, silly ghost haunting me and the music).

[7] Camp doubles canon to empower workers, not the state; i.e., riffing on old musical principles to speak less to a “universal language” (as Major/minor scales and chords are a Western invention) but through a universal struggle: liberation. Achieving it requires employing Zizek’s notion of universal application to reclaim monstrous language in humanizing ways; i.e., that seize the means of monstrous production and reunite us with all alienated things as the Gothic does: through the feelings (and expression) of alienation-made-fetish. The way out of Hell is through Hell as something to transform into our pandemonium using our Satanic poetics/darkness visible. Accuracy isn’t really the point, but provocation (“Was it over when the German’s bombed Pearl Harbor?” / “Germans?” “Forget it, he’s rolling!”)

Also, the way to the brain is—suitably enough—medievally evoked through the ear as the portal to insert poison, honey (or poisoned honey, etc) as sound-like: the siren song a sexual earworm that can—unlike Claudius pouring poison into Hamlet’s father’s ear (“a murder most foul”)—foment the seeds to rebellion that, like a ghost of King Duncan made hella gay, declare: “I have begun to plant thee and will labor / To make thee full of growing” (source).

So camp away, my lovelies! Make Capitalism your bitch by playing with the ghost of the counterfeit (the failure to do so being at your own peril; e.g., The Babadook [2014]: “Do you wanna die?”). Capitalism thrives on selling what it can’t hide, whose reifying is dualistic, thus able to thwart monopolies that bully the usual oracles (often women and children, but also GNC people and other minorities) into silence; i.e., punching down at Cassandra, singing orgasmically because she’s in pain, but also rapture. We don’t want to unironically martyr ourselves, but will “pay the price,” partaking in a little Gothic masochism (fucking the pussy sore) to bend your ear and catch you eye: “Who is that weirdo over there and why are they… screaming? Moaning? Waving a funny red book as they do. Let’s go check it out!” It worked for Lenin, it can work for us.

To prevent us harming those tied to us that we care about, we have to face the monster inside ourselves as informed by historical-materialism—specifically socio-material conditions that lead us to become possessed (in the mother’s case) with a fearsome, unironic variant of the alien inside the house (announced by Red Scare as literally an evil book to burn); i.e., the foreign plot relayed by useful idiots: fascists. The mom in The Babadook is a Nazi mom who burns children’s literature, then eats her own kid! All kidding aside, you can’t get away from the spectres of Marx and Caesar anymore than you can the Babadook; instead you gotta—and I say this with all the irony* I can—make them gay!

*Netflix esoterically choosing to list The Babadook under LGBTQ fiction, a left-field gaffe said community happily memed to death, but also embraced. Is the Babadook gay? He is now, mate (echoing Ridley Scott when being told there’s no atmosphere in space while making Alien—using the “stellar wind” to emulate the vital affect of a Gothic castle surrounded by stormy weather)!

[8] But, in our day-to-day lives, is used between people who feel just as alienated and fetishized, regardless of their station—their puppy-like pedigree. The idea is to regain some semblance of agency through ludo-Gothic BDSM: the ability to play and think as married in animalistic forms—the handler/groomer and the good girl or boy both looking for some lovin’ under state duress! This can be sex or something that stands in for sex as a reward for being good; e.g., Lenore in Castlevania collaring Hector and taking him for walkies (Persephone van der Waard’s “Sex in Castlevania, season 3,” 2020). Take it from me, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything. In turn, people are thoroughly embarrassed to come to sex workers as the classic arbiters of unlawful carnal knowledge, let alone ask them for sex, let alone sex that isn’t standard (thinking anal is somehow risqué when it’s really just the tip of the iceberg, cuties). The same idea applies to kink, fetish and BDSM at large. We all have appetites, but also boundaries. As such, it’s useful/vital to have shorthand language that a) people like, and b) communicates things in ways that represent us and our weird, oft-horny desires. This includes safe words and release words (“red light, green light”), but also jokes/memes: “Bonk, go to horny jail!” as relaid through the monstrous-feminine as an oft-domesticated “call of the wild.”

(artist: Danomil)

Such things marry the human (or humanoid/anthropomorphic) face as both endlessly expressive and completely frozen in codified forms (there’s also the uncanny valley and doll-like facemask, which extend to “somno” sex, living latex and other dehumanization fetish/sensory control therapies, but also “resting bitch face, below”), wherein media and mediator go hand-in-hand; i.e., as indiscrete. In the Gothic, this doesn’t preclude discussion with/of abject signifieds, given a place of recognition that becomes its own stage to make in small: the bathroom and toilet activities things to exhibit and watch for at cross purposes—for profit vs for workers. Under capital, abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit inside “women’s spaces” (the house, but especially the bathroom) works like a bad smell (use your imagination, there) that doesn’t stay inside the assigned compartment but travels elsewhere to notify people of a problem but also a release (again, use your imagination, you sickos). The bedroom and bathroom overlap during psychosexual liminal expression; i.e., a call of the wild, but also of nature (sex and shit).

[Jadis was a shitty person with a phenomenal resting bitch face, which I loved and painted. Before sex, they’d say to me in their deep orc voice (their lower incisors jutting from a medical condition they referred to as “orc teeth”): “So, we doing this?” In the absence of harm, a Destroyer persona can be incredibly fascinating (re: Sontag) and endearing (which is why I’ve immortalized Jadis’ semi-friendly likeness in my work). While Jadis in the flesh wasn’t up to the task, they couldn’t spoil resting bitch face or Amazons for me; indeed, I love the good ones even more!]

Through language and its materials, such things speak war-like to social-sexual kinks, fetishes and/or BDSM as essentially social as certain activities are biological—food and its result (shit—there I said it!) as something to confront in monstrous-feminine forms yielding multiple truths all at once: beings forced to identify as women/monstrous-feminine are fetishized in ways that make them feel less-than-human (“like shit”) precisely because they shit as something to, per the process of abjection, feel fear and fascination towards; i.e., as an alien sex object that says different things with and regarding such biological processes during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a social-sexual process. This requires things normally black-and-white to mix to forbidden degrees anathema to capital save as canonical porn. Yet another thing to camp in our own work!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

While literal shit remains a “yuck” for me, one I won’t exhibit in this book, I also acknowledge that its inclusion in the broader spectrum of performance art/sex work is vital. The same idea also applies to any biological function as having a sex-positive artistic potential to comment on social-sexual issues that overlap with our biological side as collectively policed by capital; i.e., things that go into and out of our bodies; e.g., urine, semen, and pretty much anything else you can think of that normally comes out of a healthy asshole or genitals (outgoing tissue and waste*) versus sex objects (sometimes the same elements—cum, to use one example I can exhibit without feeling grossed out); i.e., like body parts or likenesses thereof, including martial ones that retain a fatal, Destroyer cosmetic but not unironic (thus capitalistic) function.

*Literally canonized through camp with Monthy Python’s admittedly transgressive “Every Sperm Is Sacred” (1983); i.e., Catholic satire yielding, through a Protestant ethic, the potential to unironically stereotype the very group of people historically used by the British to develop settler colonialism (re: Livia Gershon’s “Britain’s Blueprint for Colonialism: Made in Ireland,” 2022). Reclaiming Ireland is, like any colonized group, a messy ordeal (re: Clare, from The Nightingale [2018]: “I’m not English, I’m Ireland! [switching to Gaelic] To the devil’s house with all English people, every mother’s son of them! May the pox disfigure them! May the plague consume them! Long live Ireland!” source). To say to our oppressors, “I’m still here, white man!” In both, it becomes a song (an oral tradition) written down (onscreen, in media). Unironic merchants of death must be met with ironic imports/exports walking a tightrope; e.g., Abijah Fowler from Blue Eye Samurai [2023] being the usual jester vice character prompting Irish revenge by “bettering the instruction” in ways, onstage, that speak to state power’s habitual abuses. We’re not rooting for the bad guy but the pedagogy of the oppressed as forced, at times, into self-predation.

In turn, our basic needs extend to communication about our basic needs: to needing to go to the bathroom, kitchen or den/game room as something to say (which, if you’ve ever “had to go,” mid-sex, remains a useful skill to communicate* to your partner). Surrendering power is generally discouraged by state dogma, often to the enforcer’s detriment (if you don’t say you need to shit, you’ll shit your pants). This switches from going to a place to meet a biological need to going to a place to meet a social need regarding a biological need; i.e., needing to go onstage and play with things; i.e., to work through and understand bias as something to overcome; e.g., the black cock as zombie-like, thus rotting and fecal-esque in settler-colonial rhetoric, which can be subverted neatly and swiftly by a) simply holding it in your hands, smelling it, and tasting it; and b) invigilating that (above)—all to validate and humanize the toy as an extension of the person it’s attached to or associated with as abjectly “toy-like” under capital (concepts we’ll unpack far more in Volume Two, part two). Per Gothic Communism, it becomes creatively superpowered—an alter ego whose black mask is worn with pride!

*Often as a crude joke (“I gotta take a dump/a shit!”) versus more cutesy forms (“I have to poop!”) as something to play with unto itself; e.g., the pillow princess talking like a sailor and vice versa (with Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt [2010] utterly roasting anime tropes and weird canonical nerds fanboying unironically over moe-style characters like Sailor Moon‘s Usagi Tsukino). And yes, this likewise yields caretaker functions; i.e., having an animalized language with (at times) euphorically humiliating elements: “Aw, good girl! Did you make a mess! So naughty! Do you feel better! Yes you do!” Everything goes both ways.

[Source, collage: Articwolf0418. Liberation is a liminal affair, meaning its expression generally conveys mid-exploitation through psychosexual allegory—re [from Volume One]: Doki Doki Literature Club [2014] as furious with the player and tormenting them with an uncanny dating sim normally aimed at teenage boys who grow into misogynistic young-to-old men. The same warped-nostalgia schtick works to Panty and Stocking’s mutual advantage, camping the classic [and pedophile-adjacent] transformation anime scene by turning it into a transgressive pole dance/strip tease weaponized with action-movie tropes: “dualies” and a katana (more jabs at gamer culture). Like Lewis, Romero or Jennifer Kent’s iconoclasm, etc—it’s meant to make us uncomfortable to get us to think.]

This might all seem backwards and foolish, but rest assured, it will change your life for the better! Capital’s problems are legion, teaching people to solve them with violence—i.e., to treat each other as problems to solve—with a hammer surrounded by nails. The whole situation is completely abject, requiring the flexibility of ludo-Gothic BDSM’s “violence” to procure any solution to any question that comes up in good faith: “Do girls pee from their butts?” No, little man, they do not—but they do shit! In similar fashion, submission to such dogma can be met with complete and utter sarcasm. Point-in-fact, we drool and jump, dog-like, at the opportunity! E.g., like Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan (2006) wanting to be chained to the radiator to better her captor’s instruction (in a meta sense, of course)! Such realities aren’t so simple as comedy or drama, though. As the film communicates, Ricci’s character is guided by trauma as something to survive and express during calculated risk as—for those still figuring it out—sometimes involving others against their will: a “black comedy” if you will that often has literal, overt BDSM characteristics engaging between white women and people of color (a smaller spectrum of psychosexual violent exchange) as diametrically monstrous-feminine under Pax Americana (a larger spectrum of psychosexual violent exchange). It must be camped, which is never a small, easy (or clean) feat!

[9] (from the glossary):

the creation of sexual difference

In other words, while women are not considered full subjects, society itself could not function without their contributions. Irigaray ultimately states that Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through her.

Based on this analysis, Irigaray says that sexual difference does not exist. True sexual difference would require that men and women are equally able to achieve subjectivity. As is, Irigaray believes that men are subjects (e.g., self-conscious, self-same entities) and women are “the other” of these subjects (e.g., the non-subjective, supporting matter). Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

This applies not just to female parties or cis women, though (Beauvoir’s dated and exclusionary “woman is other”), but all of nature as monstrous-feminine harvested by Cartesian forces to different degrees/extremes (fostering tokenism, classically by white middle-class cis women—from Radcliffe to Beauvoir to Carter). Challenging capital requires intersectional solidarity against TERFs, SWERFs, afrocentrism, homonormativity and other such class betrayals routinely encouraged by capital’s assimilation fantasies yielding “Judas exchanges”: selling out one’s comrades for “thirty pieces of silver.” There’s a special rung in Hell for people who do that—reminding them such fantasies were administered by the elite in bad faith, making them Faustian bargains.

[10] “This is a twist on Oliver Hazard Perry’s words after a naval battle: ‘We have met the enemy, and they are ours.’ The updated version was first used in the comic strip ‘Pogo,’ by Walt Kelly, in the 1960s and referred to the turmoil caused by the Vietnam War (source: Dictionary.com).

[11] As Sam Reiner writes in “‘Young, Dumb, and Full of Cum’: Point Break’s Homoerotic Haze in Five Acts” (2009):

Discussions of homoeroticism in action cinema, especially of the 1980s and 1990s, frequently assume a troubled tone. The pronounced homoeroticism of these texts—from their display of male bodies to the dynamism of the camera—have led to reductive assertions that erotic percolations are indicators of latent queer orientations or activities. Rather than probing the ambiguity of these text, approaches often default to pop-analysis, aligning closely with Quentin Tarantino’s Sid in Sleep with Me (Rory Kelly, 1994), who claims “What is Top Gun? You think it’s a story about a bunch of fighter pilots…It is a story about a man’s struggle with his own homosexuality.”

This isn’t to say that these verdicts are misplaced or unsubstantiated; both Patrick Schuckmann (1998) and Yvonne Tasker (1993) emphasize the consistent centrality of homoeroticism in the history of the action genre. However, Tania Modleski, in direct response to Tarantino’s accusative interpretation, discourages the conflation of homoerotic and homosexual (2007), advocating a return to the ambiguous potential that homoeroticism elicits. It is within this frame that I revisit Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break and reconsider the boundaries and bonds of Johnny Utah’s (Keanu Reeves) homoerotic desire (source).

Similar to my earlier arguments about the monstrous-feminine (re: Black Snake Moan), such performative ambiguity isn’t to leave all groups dazed and confused, but a cryptonymic disguise mechanism and uncanny (deft) ability to express the complicated realities of queerness (which would be completely alien to a cis-het, rape-apologist, foot fetishist like Tarantino) which those “in the know” will “get” and those who don’t throwing their hands up in the air (outing themselves as bigots for us to navigate around inside the same shared space). Forget Point Break, then—it’s the Gothic in a nutshell!

Also, small side-note about Keanu Reeves (who Zeuhl, ever the twink enthusiast, was absolutely boy-crazy about): The guy might have transitioned to action-man Hollywood (he’s an excellent action star, but also martial arts movie director, to be fair); his genderqueer past—expressed most nakedly in My Own Private Idaho (1991) as speaking to the complicated, masque-ball reality that queer people have always lived in, on and offstage: one, as alienated from each other and watched by the Straights like hawks; and two, forced to copulate (in any sense of the word) through code that is likewise scrutinized by bad-faith allies who look like good-faith allies. If they’re confused, we’re in control! We have to be or we won’t survive (no hard feelings).

[12] Coffey’s war haze representing a drug addict fueled by war fervor akin to Willard’s own smoke-on-the-water psychosis (next page): the enemy is the drug he endlessly seeks, killing himself in the process; i.e., the Roman fool falling on his sword as borrowed from echoes of Caesar ad infinitum. Like Macbeth, Coffey’s very much out of control, “high on his own supply” stemming from older forms of Imperialism (empire and the Divine Right of Kings) surviving into neoliberal Capitalism. Hint: This is a metaphor for Capitalism killing itself on a planetary scale.

[13] Sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally, sometimes both.

[14] I’m always active. For example, I was working on this manuscript all week, when Bay left to go see a friend; when I looked up, suddenly a week had gone by and Bay was back! Talking about it with them, I likened the whole experience as a Renaissance girl would: through a story. As such, I recounted an imaginary analog to what actually transpired: Bay greets me, painting my own Sistine Chapel, close to the ceiling while they go off to have an adventure somewhere; they come back, a week later—dressed in vacation clothes, wearing sunglasses, and carrying bags of goodies under each arm—to find me still at all it. I look down at my towering scaffold to greet them, tail wagging: “Still painting, love?” they ask. “Yeah!” I call down. Then I descend and we fuck on the floor. The end!

[15] There’s no vertical hierarchy in polyamory but material advantage still makes unequal power something to negotiate between two or more parties (which so often happens under Capitalism, generally favoring the historically privileged group as having the money to work with, versus the historically disadvantaged group having the sex/wherewithal to navigate such alliances with greater nuance; i.e., marriage dramas).

[16] There is no final boss except the state; i.e., Capitalism is the final boss, the devil convincing the world he doesn’t exist.

[17] With Cameron’s submerged castle the usual sort authored by a formerly middle-class guy with “fuck you” money making himself the center of the universe; or as Raškauskienė again writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings, re: “Critics have often remarked on the choice of the exotic, the foreign, the barbaric as the background for and source of Gothic thrills. In other words, the Gothic castle is the world of the Numinous” (source). You go to dark places to say dark things, but per Milton, they aren’t insubstantial at all; they are very much grounded in dialectical materialism.

[18] In effect inverting Cameron’s Abyss disrobing trick.

[19] The original abstract: “In response to Adam Curtis’ HyperNormalization (2016), this symposium discusses hypernormality in the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1971) and Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation (2014). It aims to examine how Gothic can be detached from the dated past, its subsequent effect on a particular space coming from elsewhere—from indeterminate or unorthodox origins, like the future or the cold vacuum of space” (source). The paper’s focus was on spaces to be explored:

In Gothic stories, residences are built around trauma as hidden, rendering them ambiguous by virtue of what affect is projected outward, from within. In Roadside Picnic and Annihilation, everything is built around alien zones. These spread outward, affecting a residence habitually described as healthy, stable, or heroic, even when it is not. Whatever truth to be had is found by trespassing into these forbidden territories. This is not done without a fair amount of dread (ibid.)

[20] I.e., free to pursue whatever I wish, but a daunting task and a lonely one for someone bred on medieval Romances; re: the Lady of Shallot as born and bred to chase “Camelot,” come hell or high water—which, in my case, led me straight into Jadis’ big burly arms after Zeuhl left me for (in their words) “an old flame in England.”

[21] Note the duality of language, here; i.e., generally through jargon and slang but also Gothic poetics, the cramming of a synonym and antonym into the same word. Similar to puns and idioms, it reflects a common, ordinary function to parlance that, in the Gothic, can get very funny and very weird very quickly.

[22] Re: Star Wars‘ harmful, capitalist fixation on monomyth refrains that hold Communist out of sight, out of mind; i.e., teasing the ghost of the counterfeit to make as much money as possible for the usual Pygmalions unwilling to break the bank to donate intelligently or equally to the cause.

[23] From DJ Gerry from Starlight Music’s “John Lennon & Chuck Berry’s Duet Was Destroyed by Yoko Ono’s Screaming” (2022). All kidding aside, inside of whining about someone screaming ‘ruining’ a performance (in my opinion, her weird-ass undulating [and Chuck Berry’s shocked expression] is the best part of the video), maybe we should ask why she’s screaming? I.e., by actually listening to Medusa instead of scapegoating her to idolize a man who frankly had his heart in the right place but his head up his own ass. Just a thought.