This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog 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 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.
“Make it Gay,” part three: Shining a Light on Things, or How to Make Monsters: Reclaiming Our Lost Power by Putting the Pussy on the Chainwax
“You’re trying to start a thing, aren’t you? A thing.”
—Jordan Peele, “Pussy on the Chainwax”
Picking up where “Metroidvania and the Quest for Power, part two: Interrogating Power through Camp” left off…
“Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp” explored how silly the angers of those who fear us are, yet nevertheless make up the things we must camp in order to be ourselves (anything less is segregation, because our identities are defined by struggles against the state’s profit motive); we specifically examined camp in relation to the mapping of war in ludologized forms, and how we could camp that cartography through our ludo-Gothic BDSM negotiations and palliative-Numinous interrogations inside the Gothic castle’s closed space out into open battlefields (re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains).
Except that was merely one option; there are many more and all are valid insofar as they challenge heteronormativity’s essentializing of the Base and Superstructure as currently owned and cultivated by the elite or their proponents. I want to shine a light on how we can corrupt these twin towers by making monsters, or “putting the pussy on the chainwax” any way we can with ludo-Gothic BDSM to develop Gothic Communism: not just clearing space and theatre to play around in, but making monsters that speak for us—i.e., not purely to the sexual confusion of our enemies (e.g., Kevin Smith’s Pillow Pants[1]) but to our own desire to self-define and be free of state abuse. Doing so is not simple, a fact we’ve already hinted at by making iconoclastic monsters (sex workers) within canonical monstrous language (cops); re: Samus and Shelly (the monstrous-feminine).
To this, it might seem ridiculous to even try subverting such things wherever we go, but we must because these expressions will always be liminal to some extent; the point is to develop monsters that aren’t sex-coercive, thus don’t serve the state and its profit motive.
However ridiculous an expression might seem, it can take on life of its own in ways that assist labor. Jordan Peele’s “pussy on the chainwax” (source tweet: Jordan Peele, 2013) is one such example. It was provided to me as a joke by an abusive ex (Jadis, of all people); I took it and made it “a thing” by writing a book with it in mind. My whole idea of rebellion is built around Communism as this nominal thing that’s never been done—i.e., like Key in the skit, who coins the phrase after he loses his wife and his job and just wants to have some fun with his friends. And while I don’t think they intended it directly as a Communist metaphor (though if they did it wouldn’t surprise me, given their body of work), the sentiment is certainly easy enough to implement; i.e., more so than, say, Mien Kampf (1925, which would need to be camped pretty hard before I’d sloganize it) and certainly enough for me to feel compelled to grab it and make it a slogan for my book. Key and Peele are funny and class-conscious, Hitler isn’t.
So now that we’ve mapped out canon and why its Superstructure’s Cartesian, settler-colonial, and heteronormative elements need to be camped—re: within Tolkien’s refrain (and rotted contemporaries revived into the present day with Cameron)—let us now discuss how to go about that; i.e., while keeping the earlier parts of my “camp map” (and thesis statement) in mind. Recultivate the Superstructure and you gain whatever bargaining power you need to reclaim the Base with through hearts and minds: labor as humanized through ironic monstrous-feminine language. Marx is dead, and people have forgotten what he himself only imperfectly touched upon; they need reminders, camping his spectres (which point to older revolutionaries and victims, like Mary Shelley and Medusa, among others). Camping canon, then, starts within canon as something to transform through our labor expressing ourselves (and our identities), mid-persecution, and nothing is older in terms of persecution than the whore (female or not; re: the ancient canonical codes upholding the nuclear model, per Foucault)!
To it, poison is the cure; i.e., you take something sacred to capital—a popular commodity like the whore that, when abused, sublimates violence and recuperates struggle and critique—and turn that promptly on its head; re: making it gay by camping it with ludo-Gothic BDSM, which we’re going to reiterate, here, with the virgin/whore as monstrous-feminine before Blxxd Bunny and I put it to practice, during the finale:
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
The Gothic, then, is a valley of contrast—an Ozymandian desert stacked on top of itself, and one where empathy becomes something to recultivate away from unironic fight-or-flight (and the other predator/prey mechanisms: freeze, flop and fawn); i.e., from dualistic, alienized positions, mid-liminal-expression: those which capital has installed and reinforced, fetishizing them in cops/victims perpetuity (endless rape).
In turn, nature—as something to exploit or liberate anisotropically inside performative spaces (castles or castle-like bodies)—is “scary cute” (above); i.e., in ways that lend themselves well to camp breaking the state’s “fetish monopoly” (sexualizing everything for profit as a privatized scheme). So while workers are whores pimped by capital, whores communicate their revenge through sex (and force): universal liberation putting “rape” in quotes (adjacent to historical harm). This occurs during the whore’s paradox (re: virgin/whore as monstrous-feminine), including the pick-and-choose neo-medieval language that regularly comes with these poetic territories: “I have no mouth and I must scream,” and Medusa was a power-bottom homewrecker who fucks back (often in oxymoronic language, embodying paradox to upend state orders, thus police violence; re: the Poetry Module in the flesh)!
So often, camp projects onto the performance, playfully bouncing such eyes of confusion (the gaze of the Medusa, including butt plugs with jeweled eyes, below) back at our would-be assailants: to freeze any potential harm that might befall us, were we otherwise less prepared to stop it. Often through song and dance, but also the soft, oft-cute (though sometimes strict) bodies that wiggle hypnotically along to said music, all occupy the same modal territory’s liminal spaces (consider “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress” for more fun examples; e.g., Sailor Moon and teenage detective girls fightin’ demons with their sexy bods and cute “Space Amazon” outfits). Let’s flesh that out, now, but also pull aside the veil while putting the pussy on the chainwax to abjure profit during the whore’s revenge (to disrupt the status quo pimping us)! Yoink!
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Note: I’ve revisited these closing elements to pad their bones a bit; re: with my thesis vector “ludo-Gothic BDSM” vis-à-vis the monstrous-feminine as something to camp (subvert) profit through cryptomimesis. It’s not the changing of any of my arguments, from 2023—merely a bit of signposting to ornament the underlying chateau and material (the tools of the trade)! This isn’t just our mall, but castle, too, and the raven himself is hoarse, announcing the fatal entrance of the bourgeoisie unto our battlements! You wrecked our home first, dickwads! Have a taste of your own medicine during as(s)ymetrical warfare! Our “dummy thicc” Great Enchantments clamor in protest for revenge! How riotous a strain! How Numinous its decree! Not a disease, but a survivor in constant (r)evolution, punching rapturously up from Hell!
The point is, if sex and gender through Gothic didn’t work, they wouldn’t use it to enslave us. Except, nobody’s immune to propaganda in either direction. So make an informed choice; get down with our sickness—by hugging a hot, nerdy and irresistible Medusa-in-small during the dialectic of the alien! “Solve” the mystery of capital (and its Realism) by transforming it through yourselves, one castle (and naughty princess) at a time! Whereas canon appoints knowledge as a status (owned by men/token agents), camp trusts the expert, not the virgin; it eats from the Tree of our “orchards” and learns how to love the monster in all of us by camping the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM! No gods, no masters; only stewards of nature, including us as beings of nature.
So kill your darlings (those that capital prescribes to you, per the Protestant ethic) and use what’s useful of their corpses flip the elite the bird (an idea we’ll return to in “Double Standards and Challenging Them (Killing Your Darlings, feat. Angela Carter)” from the Demon Module’s “Cops and Victims, part one: the Riddle of Steel; or, Confronting Past Wrongs“)! Work not just through darkness, wishes and exchange (the language of demons), nor trauma and feeding (the undead vector), nor through vibes and mood, like the Gothic classically does! Instead, try to recognize that we’ve all canvases tied to that of the world as a larger one (a stage to play upon, marking our place in history’s shadows). Whether from makeup and photos to cartoons and videogames to woodcarving and pastels, use any media type (and medium) to get the point across; explore monstrous creation as a rebellious, Miltonically Satanic act. Question blind faith through darkness visible! Buns and boobies; square and round at the same time (employing Senan Berne’s dreaded helium balloons, thereby sending us on what Tolkien might dare call “an Adventure”: “No, it’s too late; we’re flyin’ away!“)!
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
To revive Medusa as such, be like the Pokémon, except of a more actively ironic sort; i.e., one that consciously enjoys what it critiques but doesn’t endorse it while exposing profit as dangerous (re: Anita Sarkeesian)! Complement and compliment; make whole and be wholesome (to love language as a means of expressing love-as-controlled substance—a slippery notion the Poetry Module will extensively explore; e.g., “Green Eggs and Ha(r)m“)! In turn, history is a splendid lie, using cakes and pies to tell all manner of things true and false. As splendide mendax wreaking havoc/raising Cain/fashioning pandemonium on Earth, evolve into not just harmless bunny rabbits, but tank rabbits (of death) weaponizing lunacy against the state through your own bakery feeding the hungry masses (re: “Follow the White-and-Black Rabbit,” “From Ace to Ass” and similar discussions of “Trojan” animals, throughout this book series; e.g., Volume One’s “Predator and Prey” sections)! —Perse, 3/30/2025
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
“The Quest for Power” covered these ideas through Metroidvania and the old castle; re: as something to map and conquer by the dashing hero/gun nut, which we’re camping here through our own monsters following familiar-yet-alien formulae chasing the Numinous in small. Keeping that spatial focus (and recursive modification) in mind, we’re now going to take the quest for power and shift it to the Left; i.e., to develop Gothic Communism using monsters, thereby basing such cryptomimesis (and its assorted fragmentation) off something that’s less neo-conservative than Castlevania but still famous (similar to when Key and Peele were while starting their own thing); e.g., Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (1987) as based off Castlevania, having come out a year later than it (and some examples tied to Radcliffe’s Neo-Gothic, after that, which helped inspire Jojo as it became—almost to the year [1789 vs 1987]—two centuries after Radcliffe wrote her first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne):
(exhibit 1a1a1h5: Source: bottom-left; source tweet [2020]: top-left. Artist, right: Frank Frazetta.
Castlevania was released in 1986. The artwork and imagery are very hypermasculine, full of manly heroes, unironically violent and homoerotic/-phobic BDSM iconography [the whip, a slaver’s tool in the hands of a bad dom] and unironic dragon lords based off Frazetta’s 1973 Norseman. It’s the Japanese neoliberals’ take on the Western heroic quest in Neo-Gothic forms—a knotty and disjointed mess of various legends, clichés and fetishes slapped together and ripped apart, then painted over and over and over [in the tradition of the mode, except now globalized and sold back and forth between nation-states]. It’s traced like a gravestone, but also worn like a theatre mask. The hero is invincible and threatened at the same time, trapped between enormous, palimpsestuous tensions that all come together to support the status quo.
[Artist, top-left: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-left: Michelangelo; right side: Hirohiko Araki, his Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure manga/anime [1987/2012] inspired by a variety of real-life musicians and clothing brands.]
This entirety can be camped not just through mimesis, but cryptomimesis to varying degrees of straight face and irony [Jojo/pieta]: the palimpsest surfaces are sexualized even before the clothes come off; i.e., the lie on the lie as traced, but also played with in campy ways mid-sediment:
[model and artist, top-left: Angel and Persephone van der Waard; artist, top-middle and bottom-right: Hirohiko Araki]
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure is an excellent example of camp in the re-revived Neo-Gothic, applying the replication and cohabitation of operatic music, fairytale imagery and the vampire narrative in a very pastiche-oriented manner—a campy approach to queer material expression by crossing boundaries for fun, thoroughly ribbing the “rock opera”/wrestler’s theatre by propping it up with numerous rock ‘n roll allusions purely for their own sake, not because they add anything musical[2] to the show. Rather than fail, Jojo’s aptly-titled “bizarre adventure” becomes uniquely memorable [and hilarious] for making the seemingly-out-of-place, anachronistic musical references the show’s defining trait [followed up by a highly expressive variety of cosmetic styles]. Its tailored, composed mimesis appears to copy Castlevania [which came out the year previous]—albeit with ironic shonen himbos [and lite on monster girls] inside post-Occupation Japan as thoroughly fascinated with the West, but especially its Gothic tradition of operatic music, monstrous bestiary and dated tableau of hypermasculine wrestler heroes, corrupt effigies and monstrous-feminine men: an odd coupling that is mirrored in a variety of Japanese paranormal media that haunts the Japanese side of neoliberalism; e.g., Perfect Blue, Fatal Frame [2001] or the Shin Megami Tensei franchise.)
Jojo isn’t perfect, mind you; it was a product of its times and doesn’t go nearly far enough, but is still closer to Tim Curry than Tolkien was by a mile, and even Curry’s character wasn’t perfect (not his performance, which was sublime): he’s buried at the end. Hence why our above example with my friend Angel as Dio works within older camp to make newer camp that preserves the spirit of rebellion before it was commodified while getting people’s attention with what’s trendy. Jojo is campy and trendy but so is queerness and the Gothic as things that have a very wide appeal. Vampires, rock ‘n roll and old hauntological castles never go out of style; they just change the décor and keep on rocking. Perfect for allegory! As stated in part two, “ACAB,” or “All (Canonical) Castles Are Bad,” but some can be played with to hide our allegory inside: less Star Wars and more Castle Wars (despite the former being a fairytale set in outer space[3]), with the appeal of the monsters and their combat a Shakespeare-level allure to the wider bloodbath through staged bloodsport. It’s a tale as old as time (or at least Shakespeare’s plays)!
Yet, allegory sits within the usual ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection. That is, in today’s day and age, Castle Wars becomes the place to set up the female demon lover as someone for the effeminate Japanized male bishonen hero/monstrous-feminine to bravely stab to death; i.e., just as Ellen Ripley’s phallic Amazon faced the Archaic Mother and pumped her womb full of lead, the latest Belmont boy can stake our naughty “mother of dragons” to death with his own phallic implements (from what I can tell, the new Castlevania basically frames the French Revolution as an attack on the French Monarchy by scapegoating them though ‘Marie Antionette’s revenge!’; i.e., as putting a stop to the revolution—instead of, you know, the elite at large doing so in far less romantic terms: dogma, legislation and economics)!
Seeing as there’s no shortage of fortresses (or vampires) in the police state, I’ve devised the finale of our “camp map” (which we’ll get to very shortly) to chart the synthetic process according to how it relates to us as actively rebellious sex workers/workers who are dimorphically sexualized in the Pygmalion shadow of these heteronormative castles; i.e., how to camp canon through Gothic Communism’s entire assembly and production of monsters as a gay double of the castle: a sassy fag-master’s Communist lair/parallel space being invaded by the Straights’ interpretation of what is correct and what is not, meaning they colonize us but also our reclaimed, monstrous language.
To it—and because Gothic Communism (and ludo-Gothic BDSM) are a holistic discipline whose enterprise aims for intersectional solidarity when pushing towards universal liberation away from profit—our current charting shall involve examining the larger process; i.e., of making monsters being a campy process, and one that dates back to Radcliffe. To learn how to camp, we must look at camp as an imperfect and oscillating affair when relating to the imaginary past—one we’ll consider subverting through more recent female monsters (re: the virgin/whore monstrous-feminine, exhibit 1a1a1h6a) and phallic women (evil nurses and xenomorphs in two separate exhibits) before getting to Radcliffe, herself; i.e., as someone to camp by a later generation remaking said author’s Gothic pastiche themselves: Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817—but written in 1803)!
The praxial vector, as usual, is selective lineage tracing whatever family trees (and surrounding factors) to get to the bottom of things. In essence, then, the “camp map”—as something to execute by workers making monsters from monsters from monsters—is actually a rather small, self-contained introduction to camp and ludo-Gothic BDSM (which Volume Two will expanded on exponentially when we go over as many monster types as we can); i.e., as the iconoclastic counterweight to unironic war as heteronormative and spanning the entire globe (that part one and two of the “camp map” did their best to outline as succinctly as possible). Even if we never see a real battlefield, our fiction ties into the mechanisms that reach those points and back around, thus teach people we do see and engage with to act hostile towards us if we stick out (evoking the corrupt, the monstrous-feminine, the barbarian or backstabbing impostor, etc); i.e., camping the canon through its “seriousness that fails” by our design.
For example: camping Beowulf, the Amazon or Nazi as Americanized, and the heteronormative idea of war as monomythic, centrist and fake. Fakery is something we can reclaim; re: from state monopolies on the self-same Aegis.
Doing so starts with checking the unironic worship of Beowulf and his echoes of pursued power from “Scouting the Field” and “The Quest for Power,” but also “Overcoming Praxial Inertia,” before that. Regardless of the various comorbidities, canonical war personifies to look and sound a particular way. Whereas the ghost of the counterfeit refers to the false copy as the basic legend driving the process of abjection on a larger map, the Shadow of Pygmalion focuses on the creative process as made by the status quo, which results in the Cycle of Kings (the centrist monomyth) as a particular kind of simulacrum—one tied to human locales and bodies, thus work that are dimorphically sexualized relative to war and one’s role inside it: as heteronormative throughout the larger counterfeit scheme of map and castle like (the lie of the West and its endless crises) filled with endless monsters.
To that, the Shadow of Pygmalion is recursively fractal, as is Galatea’s. Everything has to look like the manly statue—its likeness, including a compelled physique and façade of good war as defined by the damsels always being saved by always-gentlemanly knights from always-bad knights and a disturbing lack of anyone who isn’t any of those things (re: “No [non-token] Girls or Trans People Allowed”); the perceived lack of empathy occupied by the theatrical shadow fencer (the death knight) as haunted by the shadow of the oppressed occupying that same aesthetic, but also the shadow of the hero as an unironic death knight themselves: their deceitful shadow stretched across the floor and wall, following them around and returning at inconvenient times to break the illusion of their false goodness and power with our own counterfeits (the monstrous-feminine ghosts of the counterfeit).
In other words, Pygmalion is the crafter of the shadow as a prescriptive and dishonest theatrical device that serves the state through monsters that go the state’s way during the general bloodspill, battlefield rape, and sanctioned sex. Power is largely invented—a fiction writing over itself as forged, designed to perceive shows of force that arbitrarily insist on patriarchal hegemony. Men are strong but need a wife to nurture them, to show her off; they are bare muscled but can crossdress in bad faith (usually to make fun of women or the monstrous-feminine at large); etc.
(exhibit 1a1a1h6a: Top-left: AyyaSAP; top-mid-left and bottom-right: Flower XI; top-middle and bottom-middle: Cyan Capsule; top-mid-right: DSloogie; top-right: Angel Witch; bottom-left: Blue the Bone.
More examples of the female monster and how it takes many different shapes in Gothic media. “Women is other” is traditionally dimorphic, mind you, but can easily be non-binarized and camped by the Galatea playing the role [of any of these characters/peoples] or illustrating it [as various artists do]. So while the Jedi and the Sith are basically “sword porn” when it comes to female knights [a military-style pinup comparable to any other service weapon] in blind pastiche, that idea can be camped in far more perceptive and sex-positive forms. To this, the softer body can have the look of the war bride, but convey autonomy through the agency of the owner and their body as iconoclastic; i.e., having ownership over herself through her self-expression as tied to her body during demonic, sex-positive BDSM [the sword isn’t always just for show]. Likewise, the herbo military-looking body can be turned away from canonical war’s Pavlovian conditioning by “teaching an old dog new tricks” instead of euthanizing her as the state would: the “euthanasia effect” as something to disarm by embracing the muscle mommy as something that isn’t chained to the profit motive.
Regardless of the waifu/wheyfu, the heroine’s performative context—her function as a class warrior illustrating empathy through mutual consent—is generally subtext: it doesn’t tend to announce itself at first glance, but instead often relies on allegory. Uncovering said allegory requires dialectical-material analysis. This might seem like an ineffective messaging system, but it actually constitutes as code-switching and appeals to a shared interest in aesthetics; i.e., the very thing that can help humanize us in the eyes of our would-be colonizers. Divorced from the canonical scheme, allegory can make them see us as human without changing our appearance at all.)
Compared to Pygmalion, the Galatea (the author and the creation) is normally made to suffer inside the same staged gimmick. It’s canon to be corrupt and monstrous-feminine in ways the status quo expects, either group a punching bag (to varying degrees) in order to “play along.” The resultant theatricalities—and the decayed, thus harmful realities behind those unironic fictions—all co-exist on- and offstage as canon. Canon is the endorsement, but also tolerance and acceptance of, the status quo as “the way things are,” thus unalienable.
The truth is, alienation is central to the lie, to the prescribed monster’s destruction at the hands of the hero working for capital. White knights and black knights function identically in regards to what canon is, in this respect: the shadow of good and bad kings, and their respective good cops and bad cops, as always coming back to harm—separately and together—the oppressed as the perpetual state of exception (our zombies and demons, furries and chimeras, exhibit 1a1a1h3) which are harder to canonize that the more ordinary looking monster boys and monster girls (exhibit 1a1a1h1); though as Angel demonstrates with our Dio exhibit, you can do it within a spectrum of tolerance—i.e., through a shared love of something that has allegorical power that can be turned towards revolutionary aims, hence “putting the pussy back on the chainwax” (e.g., from Star Wars the franchise focusing on labor with Andor, 2022).
In rare times of compromise (wherein the state grants false-gift olive branches to labor), the oppressed are even invited to join in on the fun—to assimilate; i.e., the woman-in-black becoming not just a corrupted whore, but the dark/feral Medusa or virginal/dutiful Hippolyta whose tokenized service (and marriage) to Theseus belies the same Shadow of Pygmalion chasing them around.
Trauma lives inside and outside of the body as fetishized according to structured exchanges of power that are valued through their use: the profit motive and its trickle-down incentives (cops and criminals, aka cops and victims). Their hard boundaries are drawn up, then pathologize and become accommodated within the same “prison sex” mentality: the hiding of the rapist/murderer in plain sight as a sterling/good fixture of society that can conduct violence against the usual codified villains and victims.
Furthermore, doing so tends to ignore the adage that “a few bad apples spoil the bunch” but also that they’re “fruit from the poisoned tree.” This, in turn, is canonically prioritized over the victims, whose own seeking of power (subby or dominant) is generally made in pursuit of agency when living in fear, post-trauma; i.e., psychosexuality. Seeing as this subchapter is about monsters and making them, here’s an extended exhibit tracking psychosexual expression through various monstrous-feminine types—the demon lover and the whore in art and porn, but specifically the nurse and the xenomorph’s “phallus” and “semen” metaphors that cross over into militarized and domesticated forms of eroticized violence:
(exhibit 1a1a1h6b1: Artist, right: ringoripple; bottom-middle: Jorgo Photography. Canonical Gothic is unironically psychosexual, thus violent on or regarding its surface imagery and props. It might seem random, but there are actually some rock-solid dialectical-material reasons for their continued historical-material generation. For one, nurses are like mothers; i.e., they are fetishized as virgin/whore for the Male Gaze/profit motive, but also damsel/demonic caretakers who—through the accumulation/accretion of medievalized systemic distrust as transmitted via various bad-faith and good-faith recollections of the medical system as capitalist/patriarchal—have led to the nurse symbol as a complicated monster archetype: angry expressions of power and revenge.
The syringe, for example, exemplifies a common fear of needles that conflates medicine with harm through phallic metaphors of unequal power exchange during positions of disadvantage relative to the bed-ridden patient; they are under the nurse’s power. At the same time, the nurse is a site for resentment and trauma, but also fetishization of either relative to the psychosexual adjacency they share with legitimate harm and grievances towards it. A fear-fascination of/with the nurse is a fear-fascination of/with unequal and unfair power exchange that might bear a grudge for concealed or otherwise unapologetic abuse committed at the hands of powerful doctors with awful bedside manner also mistreating their staff [the topic of many a soap opera]. Such a phobia/philia extends to concerns about the impostor in the hospital ward, but also someone who might be triggered precisely for those reasons; i.e., trauma that lives within the “ghost” of the body wrapped in uniforms that date back to the nuns of the medieval period as “sisters of mercy” that were both angels of death and givers and takers of life that looked the part; e.g., Ambrosio’s brush with “Rosario” as really Matilda in disguise.
On the surface of the nun/nurse image, the angelic/demonic collides with the soft and the nurturing as expected gender behaviors of women from men/entitled patients, who might suddenly feel quite uneasy if and when the tables are turned. In canonical circles, the nurse is often fetishized as a serial killer who, either wronged by someone or “born different,” doesn’t discriminate between genuine abusers and helpless victims. Often, there is a kernel of truth to an otherwise systemic problem [Dreading’s “The Red Surge: the Case of Elizabeth Wettlaufer,” 2023]. All the while, the syringe is “phallic” in the sense of a harmful, unwanted injection that causes pain, not unlike the standard-issue male penis as “knife-like” [more on this, in Volume One and Two—exhibits 11b2/3 for the vampire’s fangs as bladed; exhibit 31, the serial killer’s eponymous MO, “Jack the Knife”; exhibit 37a, dreamlike male variants of the same urban legend like Freddy Krueger’s infamous knife fingers; exhibit 49, featuring female “phallic” demons with knife hands; as well as totemic “dickheads” like Pyramid Head and the xenomorph as not simply gender-swapped (exhibit 1a1a2b) but profoundly intersex (exhibit 60d), etc]. Of course this can be camped, “ejaculating” the needles’ contents or inserting and injecting them with another paradox: the hard kink of needles being medicinal, but easily able to kill someone if performed incorrectly [air bubbles in the solution].
[Artist, top-far-left: unknown; middle-far-left: Mandy Muse; bottom-far-left: Gloss; top-mid-left: unknown; middle-left: Sabs; bottom-mid-left: Grand Sage; top-right: unknown; bottom-right: unknown. Continuing our examination of psychosexual metaphors, if the knife is foreplay then the “money” shot is the fireworks, the payoff, the release of tension during theatre and sex; in canonical porn, it is the “claiming” of the (female) object by the (male) subject. Yet, the psychosexuality of Gothic aesthetics with canonical war and porn create some strong divides that contrast bizarrely when they overlap (which the profit motive forces them, too; i.e., both are heteronormative businesses predicated on state dominance and abuse of particular victims): bullet porn as levied against things that go splat by treating the “cumshot” as an unironically violent marking procedure towards the colonized (who must either swallow or accept the colonizer’s load during “sex” of an insect-political sort [exhibit 1a1a2b]: traumatic insemination via rape and unwanted, harmful penetration). In Cameron’s response to Lucas’ own space Western, his white-savior treatment of cowboys-and-Indians loses the Marxist critique; instead, it makes the classic monster battle tremendously exciting from a visual standpoint, but also highly prescriptive in a white man’s medicinal sense: military optimism against an abject foe within the ghost of the counterfeit (I love the battles’ for their sheer craftsmanship, but if I think about their context for more than two sections, I get very angry).
The xenomorph’s “medicine,” then, is “just what the doctor/soldier-playing-doctor ordered”: the Amazon’s “wad” of ordinance, which—delivered in pure alarm and fright at a perceived Great Destroyer—embarrassingly bounces back onto Drake (friendly fire) through an “acid bukkake” that reverses abjection by melting his face off. The xenomorph is ripped apart, but has her counterterrorist revenge by redirecting the attack (through a wonderful defense mechanism during asymmetrical warfare)—effectively throwing it back in her attacker’s face. It’s an abject war metaphor for “sex-as-violence” that mirrors cis-het male fears at home and abroad about being on the receiving end of their own brand of hypermasculine violence in literal terms—i.e., settler-colonial violence through state bullets, and bastardized bullets, bombs and knives—but also figuratively through a psychosexual eroticism that brokers a different kind of revenge; i.e., one tied to poor bedroom etiquette/psychosexual domination in sex work as privatized in the studio and translated to domesticated forms. Viewed as such, Drake’s ignominious death becomes a highly funny and satisfying revenge of the genderqueer/female-monstrous sort: “Here’s jizz in your eye, for once! Burns doesn’t it, asshole?”]
But regardless of the praxial stance, everything shares the same stage and aesthetics. There’s room for paradoxical/guilty pleasure and endorsement, but should be used by us to deliver messages of a class/culturally appreciative and aware character—i.e., looking at Aliens in this manner, I feel like Athena’s Aegis, bouncing Perseus’ weaponized Male Gaze back at himself: I can enjoy the movie again by looking at it in ways that aren’t simply realizing the state and its propaganda suck; I can weaponize and apply it towards my aims. The unironic, “apolitical” satisfaction of monster war and rape is ubiquitous and desperately needs to be criticized through “perceptive” pastiche/camp and gender trouble/parody but is generally not, in canonical, thus heteronormative spheres. In fact, quite the opposite.)
Again, trauma lives in the body and the canonical nurse who poisons/imprisons their patient or the cop who beats their spouse (all of this is traditionally dimorphically gendered, of course) was either abused themselves according to systemic flaws, not reprobate human nature (which, under the Protestant ethic, can confuse the pleasure mechanisms to respond physically to death fantasies in abusive or hard-kink, psychosexual forms); i.e., conditioned to abuse others (which people forget, is a form of abuse) or born with congenital factors that pathologize within society as coded to valorize them as unrecognized, thus untreated: the useful psychopath, “made of sterner stuff.” The promise of power through the false hope that things will get better via the same-old action clichés as industry-grade cryptonymy: the cheerleader/damsel-in-distress, the star quarterback/white knight flattening the goon/black knight, the last-second touchdown/victory, the fireworks, the happy ending after “murder will out.”
Regarding the sports metaphor overlapping with war personified and all of its euphemisms for sublimating genocide but also its recuperating root cause: Capitalism’s promise of sanctioned sex operates in exchange for services rendered, including aiding and abetting to murder, theft, lies, and rape within copaganda and the world stage interacting back and forth, on and on. It’s all a stalling process meant to compel willful ignorance regarding the fact that the skeleton king (or Archaic Mother) will return, and with him greater and greater Malthusian tragedies spilling over into places and populations largely unused and unprepared for self-colonization (the Global North).
It’s equally important to remember that the Gothic is apocryphal on either side of the praxial equation, but also rife with paradox (with power and resistance sharing the same space). While, the heroic, villainous and victimized fictions all come out of the same chaotic, operatic soup, the difference lies in context and function within a half-real theatre; i.e., the chaos is something to acclimate to within false copies of itself: the white woman officer from the mothership stuck in the smaller life raft with the escaped slave, both boats named after works from Joseph Conrad’s own canon[4]: The Nostromo (1904) and “The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897). In such close proximity with the monster, it’s time for Radcliffe’s unironic rape fantasy/exquisite to play out in operatic panache: even the monster’s kiss is fatal; i.e., a black statue/lawn jockey with the capacity for sexual violence!
(exhibit 1a1a1h6b2: In the finale of Alien, the slave analog blends into the bio-mechanical space[5] around it; realizing she is not alone, Ripley initially panics and makes herself as small as possible, also blending into her surroundings. But she observes the monster through her stained-glass window, seeing the proverbial rapist she [and so many other white women like her] have heard so much about. Its tail is a knife penis, but so is its mouth—containing a “dick with teeth” and lubed up in 1970s, drug-fueled, psychosexual hysteria. So our white Hippolyta, facing the dark Medusa, puts on her chastity belt/anti-predation device [a “body condom,” essentially] and goes to work.
During her own battle with the monstrous-feminine, Ripley reinvokes the settler-colonial spirit of the vessel by using a harpoon to launch the space whale[6] back into the void—re-abjecting it from “her” womb [still owned by the elite, who will come to collect, 57 years later] and debriding the snow-white Nostromo offshoot [and persona] of its pitch-black ghost of the counterfeit—all in patently Freudian birth-trauma argumentation, too: the dark child trying to return to its “mother’s” womb and Ripley utterly rejecting it by aborting the creature, the afterbirth symbolized by her harpoon gun attached to the monster baby she ejects from herself as one might a piece of shit: with a fart from the vessel’s engines. Afterward, Ripley’s post-dyspeptic relief is obvious.
Like Aliens’ own finale, the duel scene from Alien is tremendously exciting and climactic, but also settler-colonial in its utter dehumanizing of the slave while humanizing the struggles of the white woman utterly enraptured with the spell of displaced colonial trauma: the myth of the black male rapist as “incorrectly male,” thus monstrous-feminine; its sodomy actually enables it to breed in hideously violent, unnatural [from a Cartesian human vantage point] ways: through wasp-like, parasitoid rape and marriage to the metal hull of the ship, making it like the underground, hellish dark castle once more [we’ll examine the latent transphobia/racism of Alien—and its intersex, rebellious potential—more in Volume Two]. This fear of rape is something that white women paradoxically recreate in their own unironic rape fantasies—a problematic trend that, if not started with Ann Radcliffe, certainly was codified by her famous School of Terror as something to emulate, then simulate centuries down the road.)
As with Ripley in 1979, armor was Radcliffe’s antidote to chaos as fabricated and sprung up all around her to then comment on as she did. Except for Radcliffe, the mask as laid bare within the performance as largely without physical armor: the heroine’s white dress and exposed breast ripe for knifely plunging (as opposed to for herself and her right to flash her tits without being harmed for it, or judged; telling a woman to “cover up” is not going to make her feel safe because it both blames the victim and implies that she’s going to be victimized if she doesn’t comply because she’s surrounded by sex pests).
Physical or emotional, though, canonical armor is sex-coercive and camp is sex-positive, but Radcliffe’s cryptonymy (as we’ll see in Volume Two) was complicit within her own gentile fabrications as limited to negotiating for a narrow group of people that demonized a great deal of others xenophobically for cash (not unlike Scott’s ending (though he’s much more genderqueer and Satanic about what he leaves room for). Radcliffe could have written other stories that were more sex-positive from the same veil of anonymity but chose not to; for her betrayal, she was paid well for her fictions and promptly fucked off after. She hid and let the gay man, Matthew Lewis, take the heat while she played it safe with her husband (dick move, Radcliffe).
There is a familial element to trauma and concealment to protect family members if one is abused; women, as well, will wear makeup to protect themselves through the paradox of negotiation when one is exposed and under the power of greater forces that threaten rape as simply being a far greater reality for them under Capitalism then and now. I certainly have no doubt that Radcliffe lived under such forces herself, but her contributions were still sexist, cis-centrist and written from a middle-class white woman’s point of view (the privileged author’s ghost of the counterfeit furthering the process of abjection within her own white woman’s fakeries and unironic rape fantasies/demon lovers: “I’m going to rape you,” sings Blue Beard [or some such double of that character]. “Oh, no! Please don’t rape me!” sings the heroine, crossing her legs; then thinks about it, uncrosses them slightly and adds, “Well, maybe just a little!”).
Radcliffe could have written differently than she did (a topic for Volume Two; re: “Exploring the Derelict Past“), but chose to profit from it and hide clues of a larger problem in her entitled, liminal fictions; these Gothic, operatic “derelicts” and their exquisite “torture”/demon lovers, as we shall see in Volume Two, are still profoundly useful to us. That is, we can learn from them and apply them to the complexities of the Internet Age: Father Schedoni, as much as he was a caricature of a caricature, denotes a performative reality to oppositional praxis—that those who mean to harm us do so in bad faith, hide in plain sight, and have systemic help. The serial killer of criminal hauntology/the murder-mystery has friends of friends of friends, and the convoluted nature of their interactions combined nature and nurture to yield something supremely awful, of which the killer and victim is only a piece of the puzzle: the whole damn mess as complicit to capital as a voyeuristic, leering circus starring at the legendary monster as all at once animal-coded and undead/demonic; i.e., a wild, hungry and “feral” apex predator but also a zombie, vampire, werewolf, demon, succubus/incubus, etc (of which, we’d see come to pass with Ted Bundy in the 20th century).
(source: “‘Black Narcissus’ Trailer: Gemma Arterton Stars in FX’s Remake of the Classic Film,” 2020)
This circus of pure, easily-camped artifice includes more than just the rapist; it includes white women looking in at endless, cheap copies of themselves frozen like dolls and then killed or nearly killed over and over again in disposable pulp fiction with highly formulaic and repetitive cover art (Gary Pullman’s “The Covers of Gothic Romance Pulp Fiction Novels: Advertising a Genre,” 2018). Indeed, a huge problem with detective stories (and other Gothic fictions: fairytales, novels, Westerns, etc) written by white cis-het women is that they’re full of outdated, operatic clichés that reinforce the status quo’s usual process of abjection. For example, the Gothic heroine is always conventionally pretty and threatened with rape because of it; i.e., they have to be threatened with rape, thus must look pretty, and “pretty privilege” = rape according symbols of rape and raped; e.g., the penis and the panties (the former of which isn’t a universal symbol of rape and the latter of which—like makeup or a nice dress—can be worn for the wearer regardless of their sex, gender or performance). Except these devices become theatrically coded in canonical entertainment that demands the threatening to happen, specifically the princess be threatened by virtue of her theatrical status as “pretty” according to killers who are conventionally handsome, themselves.
Bare panties or flashy makeup = vulnerable or hysterical; penis = rape. It’s unironically psychosexual and instructive towards such a mentality’s semiotics inside of the same market. The problem with these interpretations is they become legitimatized artifices that ignore much more complicated realities: that you can be raped even when you aren’t conventionally attractive: cis-het women, but also minorities, children, the elderly or really anyone who is rendered vulnerable by the system. Rape, then, isn’t merely the silly fictions of a bored housewife exciting herself through problematic, commodified rape fantasies (re: Radcliffe), but her bullshit as generally prioritizing the struggles of white women by conflating queer persons/persons of color with sodomy and interracial sex as automatically rapacious; e.g., the theatrical metaphor of queer persons between compared to Ed Gein or his cinematic counterpart, Norman Bates; or to Jeffery Dahmer’s own pathological compulsions (murder is not a sexual orientation) in bad faith—i.e., to keep selling copies of fiction, like overt porn, that fetishizes criminal depictions of queer people (especially queer AMAB persons as active deviants) and bad play/unironic demon BDSM[7] despite the comparison being patently absurd (similar to Tolkien’s orcs, the female author needs the blackguard, unironic banditti or rapey “man in a dress” to exist in order to threaten the storybook princess with unironic exquisite torture).
Combined, such unironic fictions feed a larger cultural habit of guilty pleasure to enrich a small number of predominantly white, cis-het female authors allowed by those in power to build their own castles and walk around inside them; i.e., those who want their abusers and victims to look as sexy as possible, but also cartoonishly bigoted in sexist, queerphobic, and racist ways; e.g., Radcliffe’s problematic enchantments refusing to take hard political stances, thus stray off into dangerous waters. Everything is built on a kernel of truth, but very quickly spirals into self-indulgent, Anglicized/Americanized vaudeville: sizzling with a highly controlled, vetted sexiness that is anything but the truth. Quite the contrary, it misinforms the public in ways that refuse to change how they think; i.e., by giving rape culture what it wants because the story (and its expectations) have become essentialized (virgin/whore and white knight syndrome).
Like a battered housewife giving her husband what he wants (wearing makeup or covering up), such approaches merely preserve the status quo. We have to stop doing that and try to change things by threatening the profit motive as privileging a specific group of workers (white people). We can still have sexy women wearing red (below), but our renditions need to use these theatrical markers to negotiation for our own rights; i.e., to challenge the status quo’s punitive, sex-coercive devices (versus endorsing them as Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s Black Narcissus [1947] does) precisely because they affect us but also those united with us in solidarity facing oppression.
(artist: Cutesexyrobutts)
As such, we must continue to be mindful of how a gradient of individuals—largely unaffected by struggle—are constantly pedaling controlled opposition or rote entertainment disguised as class-conscious: Radcliffe’s naughty novels and that of the usual white women profiting off murder fiction to brick over real atrocities with, but also the assorted nerdy stock of white cis-het men; e.g., Iron Maiden, Tolkien, or Blizzard’s ideas of Satan and rebellion, as previously mentioned, but also the “polite ones” like Rush—effectively weird nerds who, through their own products and services, caution for “balance” or “order” as an absence of tension instead of a presence of justice.
To that, Rush got a little too cozy with Ayn Rand with “2112” (1976) but also were dismissive of Dionysus as a poetic device; i.e., “Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres” (1978) effectively being the Nietzschean dialogic[8] of Apollon versus Dionysius, which is rooted in a highly classist argument vis-à-vis Nietzsche’s ressentiment, aka class envy. This isn’t some dead, outdated idea, but one that can be revived in socio-political circles that have no business entertaining it: women, including trans women who, often enough, are white; e.g., Natalie Wynn’s lengthy and self-indulgent polemic on class envy (“Envy,” 2022) as something that adopts a I-clearly-know-better-than-you-do, centrist attitude towards her fellow queer persons, while simultaneously punching down at the poor [who tend not to be white] and non-binary people.
We’ll unpack Wynn’s enbyphobia in Volume Three, Chapter Four when we look at her and other NERFs in greater detail. For now, merely watch Essence of Thought’s video, “Let’s Discuss ContraPoints’ Open Worship of Domestic Abuser, Buck Angel” (2021) and consider how, when I showed Zeuhl—a non-binary person themselves—the same video, they merely shrugged and remarked that Wynn had introduced people at large to the notion of trans rights; except, we still have to critique what Wynn is teaching us.
Doing so isn’t mutually exclusive, any more than camping canon in general is. At the very least, we have to hold such persons—white men and women, and tokenized gradients of them—accountable for their own bigotry and shitty behavior (which Zeuhl couldn’t do with Foucault or Ian Kochinski, either) in our own creative responses. Indeed, not doing that historically-materially does us no favors; it all but requires (vis-à-vis Sarkeesian) asking tough, even sacrilegious questions[9] that challenge the shortcomings of authors generally celebrated/deified in their own times as “progressive” (when, in truth, their own fakeries spearhead oppression against minorities by excluding or demonizing them, the spear expanding on and on like Pinocchio’s nose).
This includes camping recent fabricators and their castled, operatic throwbacks, but also famous, super-dead authors like Radcliffe; i.e., someone whose privileged, bigoted works weren’t “just” silly novels (any more than Tolkien’s stories or Cameron’s were “just” High Fantasy or cowboys-and-Indians), but continue through their perceived wackiness and/or veneration to teach society various stigmas, biases and dogma within the capitalist model of dissemination; i.e., the problematic conventions of the canonical Gothic novel (and other true crime/murder mystery mediums) clearly spending a lot more time in suspense than it does actually getting to the bottom of things in ways that help other workers at large. Doing so reflects the kept stillness of these woman’s lives while the readers of such stories gossip about it quite cheerfully (when they’re not turning pages, or pushing play or holding a controller nowadays). Austen really was on the money when making fun of “the Gothic craze” in Northanger Abbey (1803):
“But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?”
“Yes, I have been reading it ever since I work; and I am got to the black veil.”
“Are you, indeed?” How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?”
“Oh! Yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me—I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.”
“Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”
“Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?”
“I will read you their names directly; here they are in my pocketbook. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”
“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”
“Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of the sweetest creatures in the world, has read everyone one of them” (source).
Obviously the dialog isn’t realistic (I asked my professor who taught me Austen, Laura George, if people actually talked like Austen’s novels back when she wrote them; she replied, probably not) but its operatic, otherworldly sensibilities do match the zealous hunger of white women to read about other people’s suffering in adherence to Gothic conventions abiding the profit motive (trust me; I grew up in a household full of reading ladies born and bred on murder mysteries). In short, Austen’s Isabella and Catherine are written to sound kinda basic as a critique of Radcliffe’s exact readership, including how they ward off boredom as middle-class ladies do: devouring the so-called “horrid” as a viral and proliferate commodity to ravenously tear through, not as “terrorist” literature in any active revolutionary sense (vaudeville, in other words, which Radcliffe’s Gothic essentially is)!
Furthermore, if Austen could do this to Radcliffe (in an admittedly limited, novel-of-manners approach, to be clear), then so can we critique the same champions of the Gothic fictions (today’s and yesterdays’) drawing a line of compromise in the sand while profiting off it: A soft-spoken stance of genuine rebuke is better than staying silent and making money through the same Gothic poetics: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”; or, the wacky novels of 18th century sell-outs.
To this, Radcliffe—a seasoned pro, at this point—chose to stay utterly silent for decades; then, at the time of her death, she further distanced herself from the French Revolution and Lewis while handing the next generation her recipe to terror and horror as she saw them in her own “terrorist literature”:
As Nick Groom writes (again, from the Oxford World’s Classics of The Italian):
As to risibility, a notorious letter condemning ‘Terrorist Novel Writing’ accused [Radcliffe] of provoking a fashion:
To make terror the order of the day, by confining the heroes and heroines in old gloomy castles, full of spectres, apparitions, ghosts, and dead men’s bones […] If a curtain is withdrawn, there is a bleeding body behind it; if a chest is open, it contains a skeleton; if a noise is heard, somebody is receiving a deadly blow; and if a candle goes out, its place is sure to be supplied by a flash of lightning.
Groom notes how the letter in question explicitly attacks Radcliffe’s “system of terror” for being monotonous, ignorant, and “contaminated” by “Monk” Lewis’ horror writings—to which Radcliffe herself would never write another novel, but whose 1826 posthumous appearance with “On the Supernatural in Poetry” distances herself from the French Revolution (and its terrors), radicalism and Lewis.
In short, she expected future “terrorist literature” to be respectable and gentrified as hers were, effectively tone-policing everyone else’s counterterrorism (including Lewis’) in the process, but from the veil of anonymity and from the safety of writing beyond the grave. Very Gothic, Radcliffe, and very safe; i.e., exactly as a white cis-het woman would play her hand, getting her xenophobic jollies while basking the limelight of the British status quo and throwing sex positivity under the bus.
As for Radcliffe’s uncritical fans, armor played a large role in what was being wolfed down. Like a debutante in a foreboding, lair-like chateau, Radcliffe wasn’t really about camp as an active demonic intentionally stirring up class/gender trouble through “darkness visible” (for that you’ll have to read Lewis); she drafted canonical feminine armor as soft, delicate and exposed, and masculine armor as that of classical strength; assertive, egotistical intellect; and direct, unwavering force (which allows for crossdress and makeup as something that man have parodied, but also celebrated and embraced in different cultures for millennia; e.g., Japanese theatre’s genderqueer culture parallel to its heteronormative, warlike forms: Jojo‘s beef-lord Pillar Men camping its maker’s idea of Western canon, but specifically the West’s musical stars imported as action heroes with completely made-up magical powers). Radcliffe’s concept of strength and masks is generally left behind in derelict, “archaeological” romances of itself that the author “found”; re: like King Arthur’s coconuts from Monty Python. It seems unlikely but here they are being presented to us anyways! Like a Gothic castle that never existed, we peer inside their armories to see they’re full of empty suits that might get up and walk around without a body inside: dresses or suits of mail, piloted by the viral ghost of the counterfeit to serve a warlike purpose (the process of abjection). Rape! Threatened modesty! Time to swoon!
Radcliffe, like Tolkien, in involves the “archaeological” creation of xenophobically stereotypical myths; they’re written and then found, justifying “timeless” stigma and bias as mere historical materialism driven by profit, first and foremost; e.g., orcs or evil Italians as things to fear and kill in connection to the other side of the metaphor: people of color or actual non-British people (immigrants). Like Tolkien, her myth is created, “found” and then solved (through violence or detective work) to essentialize it as “the truth.” It becomes a blind game to repeat for capital, a Murder Mystery™ of guess-the-cliché filled with superhuman foils made for the night’s entertainment first, allegory second: sexy monsters, detects, damsels, demons; rape and murder as staged affairs/problematic comfort food for pampered/terrified white women (first and foremost) to salivate over (a kept/”protected” class) as polite/vicarious hunters of scapegoats presented as “worthy opponents.”
Fake or not, and with or without a pilot, masculine armor looks and behaves “hard,” weaponized, and built for physical combat in the ancient sense; i.e., a knight’s suit of plate mail and his materiel, his squire, and train of killing implements. But the performative truth is even more complicated: the serial killer (“the modern-day apex predator”) as arrested, development-wise; or worshipped, adored and commodified in a modern-day freakshow designed to perpetuate the older spectacle of power as cryptomimetic—copied from the dead in order to look at and feel fascination and fear in the same breath. “True crime” and “true power,” then, are perceived through largely staged affairs where nothing is new under the sun. Shuttled into the present by Gothic poetics, their rote patterns collectively reinforce systemic inequality through sex coercion as foundational to negative freedom for the elite (thus something they police through their agents): stalled resolutions and gimmicky twists that can be subverted in a million ways through sex-positive people’s identifying as such; i.e., yielding positive freedom for workers to do what they like unmolested by the bourgeoisie.
The trick is masks (re: the cryptonymy process). To this, Nick Groom (ibid.) says Radcliffe wore no mask, that her non-Jacobinical fiction (a Jacobin being a revolutionary republican of the times) painted an unmasked portrait of the tyrannies of the later centuries, but also bore no love for rebellion. I agree with the second part, but not the first. While Radcliffe was politically a giant wuss, her fictions—much like the rest of her—were mask-like in a variety of ways. She hid much and said much on what she hid with, but certainly made compromises passing as just a woman-of-letters. She showed how “words that hide” aren’t merely blockers of information, but conveyors that communicate hidden truths through the paradox of exposure/concealment, inside/outside, correct-incorrect, etc; e.g., the oni mask that gives the devil away but suggests something behind the mask through the flavor of the wearer’s performance. The meta-nature of staged allegory also serves to complicate the surface of the body as sexualized during class/culture war’s endless fragmentations; i.e., of gender and its monomorphic roles breaking away from canonical norms and dimorphic, heteronormative enforcement of “correct” power for all those concerned. It is what William Blake called “the narrow chinks of [man’s] being”: the narrow slit of one’s metal visor, perhaps (or Clint Eastwood’s squinting eyes)?
Luckily for Galatea, then, service to Pygmalion’s shadow play can be upstaged in a variety of campy ways that throw the Doors of Perception wide during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the rape play as cathartic in relation to those performing it and why. Unlike Radcliffe’s exquisite, murderous “tortures” and unironic, xenophobic “demon lovers,” an aware Galatea can camp these same devices as conveniently left behind by Radcliffe herself: her milquetoast “terrorist literature.” In short, we can build upon them, developing a better world expressed in the same basic language Radcliffe used, but differently in terms of praxis; i.e., as performatively awake to the false nature of theatre as oppositional praxis that can be tweaked to serve worker needs consciously through counterterror (versus fucking off for the last 26 years of one’s life; re: Radcliffe).
By extension, the rebellious Galatea’s physical body and labyrinthine body of work becomes openly cathartic in a historical-material left-behind: as an incisive Gothic performance/critical tool whose corpus camps the canon of the status-quo heroes they expose by doubling them, in and out of singular pieces of media (which bleed into others); i.e., of writers like Radcliffe as being part of a shadowy process whose own falseness benefits the status quo. We don’t have to “go down on Radcliffe” because she’s an auteur of the highest order. In pursuit of Gothic, nothing is sacred, including her lily-white ass.
In other words, auteurs like Radcliffe produce heroes (male and female) whose bodies, power and righteousness are false but also harmful or otherwise tied to a harmful process: the shadow on the wall being the shadow cast by “their” body as actually the Shadow of Pygmalion that always comes back! It’s an evil double, a phantasmagoria. The comparative falseness of the rebellious Galatea, then, “breaks the play” through her own campy theatricalities and subversive deceptions; i.e., by often “playing along” just enough to surreptitiously occupy the role while simultaneously haunting it with hidden rebellious truths that find their way to the surface as shadows on the self-same wall: “We are not your slaves though you want us to be; everything you made is a lie and we are living proof, standing before you as the pedagogy of the oppressed as resurrected: demons and undead who don’t exist to aggrandize your false image, your (mono)mythic structure, your Cycle of Kings. That’s been done to death.”
I’m continuing to use so many shadow metaphors here because one, they’re vivid and consistent with my arguments, but also germane to the notion of theatre and dangerous falsehoods that allow us to play games in much the same methods as they would have been done thousands of years ago: with our bodies, but also with light, shadows and costumes on a largely bare stage. It also highlights Plato’s infamous allegory of the cave as canonical and subversive simulacra to mimic for dialectical-material purposes.
So whereas state shadows deceive to perpetuate state hegemony through unironic participation, the likenesses of class-conscious workers can denote countercultural fictions that, on the same stage, highlight a better world through seemingly inanimate things that spring to life in ways they ostensibly shouldn’t. This happens through shadows, but also egregores at large as having all been done before in some shape or form; i.e., of the victims’ creations foreshadowing the state’s lies, collapse and transformation—of worker solidarity collectively rising up to spoil the fun of those “inside the cave” having bought into the canonical interpretation of a shared illusion.
To it, our doing so during ludo-Gothic BDSM is to be done in an informed, intelligent way—i.e., in a manner that whose movement builds towards the setting of these harmful fakeries aside in favor of worshipping new, healthier ones instead: to “start a thing” that doesn’t lead to mass exploitation and genocide behind the shadows dancing on the wall. We gotta—again, using the words of Key and Peele—”put the pussy on the chainwax!”
The entire “camp map” is instructional towards these aims, but the finale tries to illustrate the revolution as a lived-and-breathed attempt by making our own sex-positive monsters. This means it doesn’t perfectly encapsulate the entirety of my thesis, manifesto or their orbiting arguments and theories (from the “camp map”); instead, the finale takes the manifesto terms that we laid out earlier in the manifesto map/thesis statement and returns to them—i.e., after having discussed canon’s making of monsters through the canonical quest for power (as tied to Tolkien’s map and Metroidvania) and camping them through a variety of counterexamples: our jokes, “swords,” “slings and arrows,” “rape” and “murder,” etc. Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about. As such, I’ve reduced the manifesto tree list as a trio of paragraphs before the finale. I will also introduce even more terms as we go into the finale after the list. Just know that if it ever seems like overkill, you will be seeing them plenty throughout the book as you learn to camp canon yourselves during ludo-Gothic BDSM (which is what Blxxd Bunny and I will be doing during the finale!
Crank it up to eleven!
(source: Robert Kolker’s “This Lawsuit Goes to 11,” 2017)
Onto the finale!
Note: The “camp map” finale aims to camp canon through ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: per Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains, while making monsters ourselves/putting the pussy on the chainwax as outlined and discussed through the prior elements of said map mapping out my thesis argument; i.e., as something to argue through our own labor versus labor theft; e.g., AI (source tweet, Shad M. Brooks: March 28, 2025). Challenging profit’s monopolization and abuse of monsters is what Blxxd Bunny and I will—by disrobing the Medusa to whatever degree we decide (a Numinous strip tease, below)—effectively be demonstrating in the finale with our ludo-Gothic BDSM, so keep these ideas handy (and refer to all the Paratextual Documents if you feel the need to)! —Perse, 3/29/2025
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
From the manifesto tree (as a refresher):
Camp’s assembly and production of cultural empathy under Capitalism happens according along the manifesto tree: the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis as things to materially imagine and induce (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) through Gothic poetics; re:
- mutual consent
- informed consumption and informed consent
- sex-positive de facto education (social-sexual education; i.e., iconoclastic/good sex education and taught gender roles), good play/emergent gameplay and cathartic wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse prevention/risk reduction patterns) meant to teach good discipline and impulse control (valuing consent, permission, mutual attraction, etc); e.g., appreciative peril (the ironic damsel-in-distress/rape fantasy)
- descriptive sexuality
during ludo-Gothic BDSM as things to materially imagine and induce (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) through Gothic poetics; i.e., inside the “grey area” of cultural appreciation in countercultural forms that, when executed by emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers, uses camp to cultivate empathy through Gothic counterculture; i.e., by synthesizing Gothic Communism during oppositional praxis (canon vs iconoclasm) according to our manifesto terminology and structure—in short, its various tenets and theories, mode of expression (and assorted mediums: novels, short stories, movies, videogames, etc); creative, oppositional praxis, and their various synthetic oppositional groupings to ultimately foster empathy and emotional/Gothic intelligence by reversing the canonical, unironic function of the Four Gs.
On the flip-side, our would-be killers collectively lack emotional and Gothic intelligence; they do not respect, represent or otherwise practice our “creative successes.” As we’ve already established by looking at the definition of weird canonical nerds, their conduct is quite the opposite; weird canonical nerds don’t practice mutual consent; they endorse the canonical variant of “creative success” through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis. They endorse
- the process of abjection
- the carceral hauntology/parallel space as a capitalist chronotope
- the complicit (thus bad-faith, bourgeois) cryptonymy
to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to a variety of bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil; its vertical, pyramid-scheme arrangements of power and subsequent tiers and punitive exchanges thereof
- top, middle, bottom
- lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts
- corporate, militarized and paramilitarized flavors
arranged in neoliberal forms inside and outside of the text
- bosses, mini-bosses, and minions
- executives, middle management/content creators, customers/consumers
- waves of terror and vice characters (menticide)
which leads to a surrender of total power during states of emergency that are always in crisis and decay. Empathy is the casualty of the middle class, who are taught to see the underclass as lacking basic human rights during moral panics.
In summation, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism ensures that empathy/apathy and class character (unconscious/conscious) occur in oppositional praxis as a dialectical-material exchange. For workers, the empathy accrued is established during these creative successes, whose solidarized and active, intelligent poetics (a manifestation of reclaimed labor and working-class sentiment/counterterror) cultivate the Superstructure in ways useful to proletarian praxis: helping all workers by reversing the process of abjection and its canonical historical materialism (the narrative of the crypt, or echo of ruins). This happens by camping the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the barbaric lie of the West told through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern that drive the process of abjection currently used to exploit workers, resulting in myopic exploitation and genocide under Capitalist Realism while the elite’s endlessly engineered crises enter into, and out of, decayed states of emergency and exception. Rewrite how people respond to elite propaganda and you can rewrite how people think, thus rewrite history by changing its well-trod, profitable (for the elite) and bloody (for us) historical-material track; in short you can take the state’s propaganda apart, ending Capitalist Realism as you start to develop towards a post-scarcity world (the kind that is wholly antithetical to modern nation-states and their vertical arrangements of power).
(artist: Blxxd Bunny)
Onto “‘Camp Map,’ the Finale“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] “Pillow Pants is her pussy troll? Duh!” From Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2. It’s funny as hell, but also low-hanging fruit (“Christian fundamentalists don’t know how sex works!”).
[2] Not all Japanese hauntologies take the same approach. For example, Nobuo Uematsu’s literal opera, “The Dream Oath Opera – Maria and Draco” (1994), has been written to play out in-game as a faithful staged performance of the star-crossed lovers, possessive love, captive fantasy and duel. And to its credit, such operas are not strictly negative; as Blue Öyster Cult says, “Aeroplanes make strangers of us all,” and the great gulf produced by Capitalism can lead people to feel horribly divided, seeking refuse in popular fictions that communicate our human condition vividly. A woman’s theatrical voice, then, becomes as much her trying to exist in a man’s world that pulls her in multiple directions at once. Relegated to an abstract stage of theatrical conventions, she simultaneously wields tremendous influence, but feels powerless to stop those she cares about (or detests) from trying to own her or fight over her honor while loving one more than the other (the love triangle). It might seem like it fails to represent “reality” but contains within itself the ability to parody extensions of reality that have become heavily codified and dogmatic, while also giving someone a chance to relate to the intense feelings onscreen. Despite “the Dream Oath’s” fictional and bombastic nature, I can certainly relate to Maria’s intense operatic longing; the same goes for Jojo and its campiness. Been there, done that.
[3] The Death Star wasn’t a moon or a space station, Obi Wan; it was a castle.
[4] Cameron would continue this trend, calling his own gunship the Sulaco (an allusion to The Nostromo). The name game is a rather blind one, seemingly if only to credit Conrad and leave the ghosts of colonialism trapped inside the ghost of the counterfeit.
[5] Evoking Foucault’s bio-power in a Gothic shipping narrative; the cargo isn’t just ore—it’s the alien as a ghost of old slaves that, in the eyes of the capitalist, are no different and continues to be smuggled into the Global North through the eyes of the ghost of the counterfeit; re, Hogle: “as David Punter has shown, ‘the middle class’ often does what we have just seen Leroux do in Le Fantôme: it ‘displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell’ with feelings of both fear and attraction towards the phantasms of what is displaced (Punter, 418)” (source).
[6] A colonial metaphor/stowaway that Jeff van Dyck—captivated with the original sound design of Alien—would allude to in his work on Alien: Isolation:
“To help make a game that was as close to the first movie as possible, 20th Century Fox gave The Creative Assembly [team] access to the original sound effects, taken from eight-track and dumped to a single ProTools session of the entire film. The audio quality wasn’t high enough to simply copy sounds across, but it gave them a base to faithfully re-build from using modern technology. “That article comparing the visual in the game to the visual in the movie? We were doing the audio equivalent of that.”
A sound that did make the transition was one of the first things you hear as the camera pans across the stars. “I used it in the main menu music,” says van Dyck, “what we dubbed the ‘space whale.’ It’s this weird bending WOOO sound right at the very beginning.” He wanted to let players know from the start they were in for a genuine Alien experience. “It’s so authentic it’s actually got a piece of the movie in it. To me it sounds fantastic, and then we did a surround mix with it. Rather than it being echoey we have it spinning around all the speakers” (source: Jody Macgregor’s “Seeing with Your Ears — the Audio of Alien: Isolation” (2015).
The structural perfection [counterterrorism] of Alien is only matched by its hostility towards colonizing forces: Ripley, without realizing it, is a colonial foil to the usual recipients of the “savage dark continent myth” projected into the stars; i.e., Uhall’s astronoetics, or the settler-colonial gaze of planet Earth.
[7] Specifically the written BDSM contract demonized as Faustian vis-à-vis 50 Shades of Gray or the Cenobites from Hellraiser, etc. Often these implements are hauntologically criminalized and disseminated in mythic, harmful forms—a phenomena we will discuss even more in Volume Three, Chapter Two.
[8] “According to Nietzsche, the Apollonian attributes are reason, culture, harmony, and restraint. These are opposed to the Dionysian characteristics of excess, irrationality, lack of discipline, and unbridled passion” (source: Britannica).
[9] Just what is a woman, Angela Carter, when you write in The Sadeian Woman (1979) “A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster”? Of course, Matt Walsh’s hideous refrain is normally bad-faith nonsense directed at us, but it becomes quite important when defining what a woman is (and a monster) when regarding the likes of Carter’s platitude, but also Simone Beauvoir, Cynthia Wolff, Ellen Moers, or hell, Janice-fucking-Raymond (author of The Transsexual Empire, 1979—more on them in Volume Two). Second-wave feminism was (and still is) infamously cis-supremacist and white, and we can’t just rely on a bunch of fancy (and highly problematic) white, cis-het female academics to accomplish the sum of all activism for all workers. Even if Carter wouldn’t have been caught dead in Rowling’s company today, she still died in 1992—one year after Michael Warner introduced “heteronormativity” to academic circuits, two years after Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble and one year before Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx.
To be blunt, Carter’s most famous works feel oddly dated in terms of what they either completely leave out or fail to define, and thereby supply clues to the vengeance of proto-TERFs like Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani that Carter doesn’t strictly condemn. As Brittany Sauvé-Bonin writes in “How Angela Carter Challenges Myths of Sexuality and Power in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ & ‘The Company of Wolves'” (2020):
The men in de Sade’s stories exercise sexual perversions which enforce annihilation. However, it is the women in de Sade’s stories that are seen as even more cruel as once they get the rare opportunity to exercise power, they begin to use this power to seek retaliation over the submissiveness they were forced to endure in society (The Sadeian Woman 27). Carter bluntly concludes that “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster” (27). Due to women being oppressed for so long, when they get the opportunity, they can retaliate in the most extreme ways (27).
According to Henstra, this has resulted in critique by other feminists including Andrea Dworkin, who have concluded that The Sadeian Woman displays a “complete disregard for the actual suffering endured by Sade’s – and pornography’s – victims” (113). Carter chooses to focus more on how women had an outlet to retaliate that de Sade had openly introduced. While some of his women suffered, some of his women indeed inflicted the pain. Hence, Carter rationalizes de Sade’s work by saying “pornography [is] in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical [harmful] to women” (The Sadeian Woman 37) [source].
Again, what is a woman, Carter? And what did they do with this outlet? The vast majority turned it against other minorities more disadvantaged than themselves—i.e., from 1979 into the present (we’ll revisit this footnote in “The Riddle of Steel“).