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.

Follow the Sign: Thesis Conclusion, or “Death by Snu-Snu”

Inside his castle
There was a glorious feast
But inside his mind
Hides a secret beast
Is he mad? The King seems to laugh
And the bard still sings
And plays his harp (source)

— Daniel Heiman; “The Mad King,” Warrior Path’s The Mad King (2021)

(source)

Picking up where “‘Camp Map,’ the Finale” left off…

The Vikings of legend really liked to get drunk and fuck shit up (as do their ghosts of the counterfeit, now), especially when their king has his reign and then dies: blame the monstrous-feminine as “corrupt” and degenerate, then bury your gays (and other minorities). Our feted second half of oppositional praxis, iconoclastic/proletarian praxis (which is sex-positive) is the unacceptable rebellion’s uncontrollable opposition disguised as controlled opposition: the neatness of theatrical, thus scripted foils—the “jester” in the king’s court (which straight folk wear and trumpet like bad vaudeville). We’re the queer agent among you, but also the gay zombie rising from the grave (making everything just a little more fun)!

Like canonical praxis, iconoclasm uses the same aesthetics, bodies, linguistic tricks[1] (cryptonyms) and color codes, but interrogates power and negotiates its reclamation through irony and subversion, not brute force as the automatic approach (though rioting is “the language of the unheard[2]” and remains vital to developing Communism): collective labor action/worker solidarity but also gender parody as a powerful, oft-oral (thus difficult-to-suppress) means of using our bodies, labor and creativity to subvert the harmful gender norms prescribed against those who openly rebel; i.e., ironic action narratives that perpetually push back against canon’s unironic calls to violence, rape and war by transforming the bullseye into something the class traitor doesn’t want to shoot when rioting and other collective labor movements begin to solidarize and occur (making the cop no longer a cop, hence a class, culture and race ally): the figurative zombie apocalypse (more on this in the Undead Module’s “Bad Dreams; or, Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse“).

To this, Gothic Communists use their labor, creativity and bodies to create monstrous music, dance, play and sex that covertly and openly fight for basic human rights (and that of nature); i.e., oral and written contracts that weaponize Gothic counterculture to foster emergent gameplay/good play (descriptive and de-facto-educated abuse-prevention patterns). To summarize the “camp map,” we reverse the process of abjection and camp the ghost of the counterfeit, altering it into copies of hidden truths, not falsehoods, visible on the demonized surface of themselves: our lost histories and culture as previously destroyed by the state and its male action heroes/subordinates’ copaganda and material conditions working in concert to commodify our expression through porn and rock ‘n roll.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Note: Thought “death by Snu-Snu” is mentioned here in passing, we’ll talk about it more pointedly vis-à-vis Amazons in Volume One and Two (e.g., “Predators as Amazons” and “From Herbos to Himbos, part two“). There will also be more terms we introduce here, which we will unpack or talk about later in the book series across multiple modules and (sub)volumes; e.g., panopticon (which I discuss, on and off, in “Understanding Vampires“). —Perse, 3/31/2025

As our “camp map” also showed, our subversive Amazonomachia is “death by Snu-Snu” as camp, thus amounts to an emotionally/Gothically intelligent and active pedagogy of the oppressed often told through jokes to start movements (re: “a thing” such as “pussy on the chainwax”). It’s serious-yet-silly and that’s the point, but the point of the rainbows and glitter is proletarian praxis insofar as we function during oppositional praxis: to make the canonical language of war silly in a very gay way of interrogating pre-existing power and negotiating new variants during liminal expression; i.e., playing with power as a performative scenario to reinvent for various purposes:

“The straight castle was conquered by the fearsome gay warriors and everyone inside was made gay and had super butt sex. —the end!”

The above statement implies that murder, general mayhem and rape are functioning in ironic, playful forms instead of their presumed unironic-thus-literal ones: the rape of the princess, the burying of the gay (and other actual dead bodies—often “innocent, pure good” civilians and “guilty, pure evil” orcs on either side), and sacked castles razed to the ground, heads on spikes, cruel-and-unusual punishment, carceral violence, tilting at windmills, etc:

The townspeople had little hope
They were not ready for war
Fireballs make everybody die
And buildings collapse to the floor

The beautiful princess was raped
And taken to prison with cry
Angus McFife swears a mighty oath
“I will make Zargothrax die!” (source: Gloryhammer’s “The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee,” 2013)

There’s power in the “joke’s” ability to release tension. Except our praxis can’t be “blind” parody like Gloryhammer is (whose proud stupidity is a white, cis-het male privilege) because the marginalized are going to be in danger regardless if they are actively segregated or not (Jim Crow segregation vs Redlining[3]). Gothic Communism must endorse sex positivity at a systemic level, which requires making things as gay as possible within ironic gender trouble/parody and “perceptive” pastiche; i.e., the intersection of class-conscious character with genderqueer theatrics that rescue canonical bombast from the Straights colonizing us (thus themselves). This includes allegory and apocalypse within Gothic poetics.

One subverts canon with rainbow-themed “sound and fury” (above) as evocative perceptive pastiche/parody that is tremendously memorable and fun (who doesn’t remember “Time Warp” or Tim Curry from Rocky Horror?). It’s not just dialectical-material brawn, either (though it can be muscular) but the awakened and liberated Galatea dancing in the ruins of a decidedly “rockin'” castle of darkness (re: the danger disco) and whose rebellious re-seizing of the means of monstrous production amounts to stigmatized identities that evoke various proletarian ideals and tactics; i.e., our aforementioned Four Gs, or four main Gothic theories in their proletarian forms (which are essentially iconoclastic reversals to the same nouns during canonical/bourgeois praxis); as well the gender trouble and gender parody produced during “perceptive” camp (not “true camp,” which is blind) using genderqueer, often non-binarized (a)sexual orientation and gender identity/performance (-as-identity). All happen during our likewise aforementioned “creative successes” of proletarian praxis, specifically their subversive/transgressive liminal expressions’ Gothic-Marxist tenets.

From art to porn, all collectively demonstrate how Gothic Communism, when correctly performed, cultivates empathy under Capitalism as something to develop towards a better system; i.e, through and towards our “creative successes” and their proletarian outcomes (which the manifesto shall explore, but also Volume Three’s entirety). All become things to materially imagine as Satan or Galatea making their own sex-positive, culturally appreciative creations during Gothic counterculture. As spectres of Marx, these shadows of Galatea and their cryptomimesis cannot fully be ignored or destroyed by the state; nor can it be recuperated to serve capital and nothing else because counterterror is the power of the dark gods that resides within all our breasts, but especially the neurodivergent, disabled, and marginalized the elite forever want to exploit.

Nobody wants to be enslaved; you have to compel that through force, by raping the mind over time and en masse. For that to happen, the elite need apathetic/complicit soldiers, which the underclass can disarm by cultivating empathy towards the oppressed in the eyes of their would-be, often middle-class oppressors; i.e., as splendide mendax telling beautiful lies for proletarian purposes from our pandemonium reclaiming the monstrously canonical, monomythic language of stigma, bias, control, fear and hate, operating through cathartic power exchange and resistance to the status quo’s current harmful norms; e.g., black people reclaiming the n-word; women, the word “woman,” but also “bitch,” “whore” and many other sexist slurs; and queer people the word “faggot,” etc. Reclaimed, they can be expunged of harm as a prescriptive device, used instead to rewrite the “dead futures” of Capitalist Realism with “archaeologies of the future.” In turn, these “elaborate strategies of misdirection” help us escape the closet and create a collective rememory whose Wisdom of the Ancients aims to terrify crueler and less wise proponents of the canonical imaginary past. What monopolies they fabricate, we upset; i.e., by rising from the grave, dystopia, dark forest, sex dungeon, operating table, wiccan pentacle, torture chamber, conquered land, ghetto, flames of hell, corpse pile/offal, or infinite void.

A few closing points before we dive into the symposium: We will invariably discuss cis-het, male proponents (exhibit 63b) of the status quo throughout the book, but our transformative interest really lies more so in TERFs and other heteronormative cross-sections within tokenized canon; i.e., the class traitor’s assimilation fantasy that maintains the colonial binary by emulating white supremacy and toxic masculinity through internalized bigotry and self-hatred as a discipline-and-punish panopticon[4], one that perpetuates the status quo of dominating the monstrous-feminine—i.e., the rebellious slave or barbarian, effeminate meathead or thinking/feeling soldier, worker, athlete or statue essentially being property-come-alive and thinking for itself—through the rape culture of “prison sex”: acting like a man as something to perpetually watch over everyone else within and remind them of it. Not only are the terms “prison sex” and “Man Box” synonymous in this book; they’re performed by token minorities, including women but really anything that “isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian man” wanting to assimilate, thus occupy the guard tower. All functionally become a double minority relative to the power of their voice for the status quo, but also against the status quo in proletarian discourse.

White cis-het men are often, then, the Silent Majority precisely because the system does not require them to speak in order to give them relative privilege while also fucking them over. Meanwhile, cis women, gender-conforming queer people and other minorities are often duped into conflating colonial violence with “being heard” thus “doing an activism”; i.e., acting like white, cis-het, Christian men by lying to or otherwise misleading and brutalizing the underclass (making cis-queer people potential allies to gender-non-conforming persons when personifying war but just as likely their jailors).

This fascist ruse dupes potential allies into betraying thus alienating themselves from their comrades, then turning into monstrous impostors that blend back into the prison population to be able to kill for the state as needed (union breakers/strikebreakers); meanwhile their victims feel like impostors themselves for not fitting in/receiving violence from actual or de facto, patriarchal authority figures (traditionally fathers, husbands, grandparents, siblings, boyfriends and coaches, teachers, cops, war heroes, movie stars, rockstars, etc; but female/token abusers historically harm others after having been harmed themselves to prevent future abuse—e.g., the patriarchal matriarch or Uncle Tom, exhibit 38b2). The basic outcome is impostor syndrome, which gender-non-conforming persons pointedly call gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia—i.e., the guilt, shame or self-hatred of feeling like an alien, impostor or unironic monster according to one’s heteronormatively assigned body and gender and naturally assigned biology and skin color as stigmatized things to reclaim from fascists/neoliberals as deliberate obfuscators who, themselves, operate through bad-faith mimicry and systemic privilege, thus abuse.

(artist: Crow Perch)

Clearly these things must be challenged during oppositional praxis, and we’ll try and do so through engagement with the binary of class war and its parent dichotomies as simultaneously black-and-white (for didactic purposes, simplification) and gradient/grey-area (for nuance). However, because this book focuses on the pedagogy of the oppressed, I’ll be focusing far more on trans, intersex, non-binary and drag queen/king (crossdress) forms of subversion and regression (and their intersections with other forms of marginalization; e.g., people of color, Indigenous Peoples, religious minorities, the disabled, and ace/neurodivergent persons, etc) than cis/neurotypical allies or class traitors.

Furthermore, our nuanced and complicated subversions during ludo-Gothic BDSM aren’t something I expect to go down without a fight; indeed, we’re often blamed for taking the loudspeaker away from the “real biological women” of first wave and second wave feminist movements (which have fascist/centrist ties), Afrocentrists, or the LGBA‘s “real queers”; i.e., the steadfast treat nuance as apocryphal, as Bay puts it, having an almost knee-jerk response to new information that threatens the way they’ve been taught to see the world. But fools should not be suffered because doing so is segregation, which leads to their destruction and ours. If only it were so simple as waiting for fascists to self-destruct by following the leader into their own graves, harming no one else in the process; i.e., the fascist approach to herd mentality marching themselves off a cliff like scapegoats while the idea behind sheep “herding” is, according to Bay (who loves behavioral ecology), evolution from a natural-social process, not a capitalist one; i.e., meant as safety-through-solidarity by putting the young and vulnerable in the middle.

Like Matthew Lewis’ cottage of bandits-in-disguise, this isn’t a waiting game against polite opponents; it’s one of life and death, pitting us against the ruthless skullduggery and cloak-and-dagger fog of war produced by a cruel and perfidious foe—one who would like nothing better than destroy us all for self-promotion and personal gain driven by cold, hard economics. Catharsis demands systemic change, not the scapegoating of the bandits and their overlords (or the individual authors of these things). This being said, they should absolutely be outed at every possible opportunity lest they become normalized, thus free to kill us with impunity behind rainbows (which we must grab back, below): “An enemy has only images behind which he hides his true motives; destroy the image and you break the enemy.”

This concludes my thesis argument and argumentation through camping canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM. The last fifty-or-so pages of the volume are more conversational, meant to unpack and provide additional explanations and/or definitions I wasn’t able to include or fully unpack in the thesis proper/”camp map.” I’m doing so because, while they aren’t in the companion glossary (or the preface or manifesto from Volume One), I still feel these remain incredibly important to examine, but it shall be more laid back; i.e., not essential reading but still worth your time. —Perse, back in 2023

(artist: Ken Kelly)

Symposium: Aftercare; What Is the Gothic?

“I am the lizard king. I can do anything” (source).

—Jim Morrison; “Celebration of the Lizard: Not to Touch the Earth,” on The Door’s Waiting for the Sun (1968)

Note: I originally wrote this symposium to be an extension of a much-smaller thesis statement (which now constitutes the lion’s share of the volume). I have left the writing largely as-is, and it may seem redundant; but this tracks with the symposium as I originally envisioned it: to unpack and embellish complex ideas that I wasn’t able to fully explore in my thesis statement (essentially marking the start of what we will be doing throughout the rest of the book), except now there’s even more of a cooldown period. Put simply, there’s more to recover from and reflect upon as we ornament and extrapolate. I had thought about leaving the symposium out, but I honestly think including it will be a fun experiment. While its ideas have since been hashed out more concretely in the thesis argument, here, they will be more scattered and fanciful; this should allow you to apply my thesis argument to their “soupier” conversational format: to visit the symposium after having read the volume based on its more dialogic argumentation (which is a good test for the kinds of brushes with praxis you’ll experience “in the wild”).

In essence, putting the symposium at the end is a reversal of the usual approach—”write symposium, then book,” instead being “read book, then symposium.” As you recover yourselves, I suggest trying to reflect on the idea of power as paradox and performance, wherein said performance’s games, rules and play remain incredibly potent ways of interrogating and negotiating power yourselves; i.e., through liminal expression’s doubles thereof, existing inside the Gothic mode’s shadow zone: its monsters, castles and BDSM. Power and resistance occupy the same space during oppositional praxis. Use them to question what is present and recreate the world through your own identities and struggles to be free from Capitalism, Capitalist Realism, and its numerous proponents and enforcers (and remember that words and images carry power. If they didn’t, the elite [and class traitors] wouldn’t police and abuse them like they do). —Perse, back in 2023

With my thesis proper and “camp map” concluded, the hardest labors are done, and I hope the various “holes” of your psyche aren’t too sore. Now we can let our hair down like Medusa and play in the gayest of fashions: with our cocks and clams out. Time for some aftercare! What is Gothic (consider this food-for-thought as we proceed into the next volume)?

As such, this symposium is a series of seminars (about five if you divide the ~17,500 words into ~20-minute parts: or 150 words/minute). As a disorganized tangent, it will be unpacking various ideas further than my thesis argument could—e.g., “What is Gothic beyond just the making of monsters?” (we’ll get to that when we discuss Chris Baldrick and Tanya Krzywinska). The rest of the volume, then, is dirty and cluttered like an attic, so I can’t really explain its progression as I usually would in this book’s chapters and subchapters. Instead, I will simply try to prioritize things that feel most relevant or important that also happen to exist between my thesis argument and the preface/manifesto from Volume One. So let’s reexamine something vital to its execution that also strikes my fancy: poetics.

(artist: Jean-Baptiste Regnault)

To be clear, as I am a ludologist, Gothicist, anarcho-Communist, and genderqueer trans woman, poiesis wasn’t simply a structure for my pedagogic narrative, like Mikhail Nabokov thought of Jane Austen’s novel, Mansfield Park (1814), in Lectures on Literature (1980):

all talk of marriage is artistically interlinked with the game of cards they are playing, Speculation, and Miss Crawford, as she bids, speculates whether or not she should marry […] This re-echoing of the game by her thoughts recalls the same interplay between fiction and reality […] Card games form a very pretty pattern in the novel.

Nor was it echopraxis (“the involuntary mirroring of an observed action”) according to the kind of “blind” pastiche[5] that plagues canonical thought and proponents of capital; i.e., an empty kind of “just playing” sans parody that stems from what Joyce Gloggin in “Play and Games in Fiction and Theory” (2020) calls “a ‘traditional’ understanding of mimesis” (which we repeatedly eluded to earlier when we mentioned Plato’s cave/shadow play during the thesis argument):

Mimesis or imitation therefore, as one form of play, is an essential element of poiesis, or the “making” of art, which in turn is instrumental in creating what some now refer to as possible or imaginary worlds, that is, fiction.

This traditional understanding of mimesis as an essential element of poiesis places mimetic play at a more distant remove from reality than even the shadows in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave from book VII of The Republic. Related in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, book VII allegorizes the human perception of reality, likening our reality to shadows projected on a cave wall. These shadows are perceived by human subjects, shackled around the ankles and neck and unable to turn their heads to see the puppeteers who cast shadows on the cave wall before them, which they mistake for reality. In other words, what mortals see and know is merely shadow, and this is what mimesis mimics — not reality.

Importantly, this version of mimesis and reality has long informed the marginalization or trivialization of mimetic arts as “mere play,” “just games,” or insignificant ludic imitations of reality. Likewise, the marginalization of play and its rejection as a serious object of study are motivated by the suspicion that play and ludic cultural forms are treacherous and capable of rendering us the dupe (source).

My own mimesis challenged these traditions. As I consumed and learned from older artists/thinkers (and their odes and homages), my own Galatean creations started to change, as did my way of thinking about the process of making them; my countless allusions and allegory became a far less traditional and far more subversively and transgressively playful mode of engagement with others—not just my family in the world of the living but also those long gone, echoing their arguments from beyond the grave: cryptomimesis, or the playing with the dead through perceptive pastiche and reclaimed monstrous language that is then used in place of the original context; e.g., queer people calling everything “gay” (space Communism) or black people using the n-word for everything versus white people wanting to do the same thing in an ignorant or hateful context.

The same basic idea applies to monstrous language and materials as things to reclaim from their original carceral/persecutory monomythic functions (which we will thoroughly examine in Volume Two) or from covert/dishonest regression towards this old medieval sense of compelled BDSM and lack of consent/trust; e.g., witches as traditional scapegoats (exhibit 83a) versus regressive “cop-like” variants (exhibit 98a3) that iconoclasts subvert through various sex-positive BDSM rituals, ironic peril and Gothic counterculture (exhibit 98a1a); i.e., as a general practice that turns the death fetish or state officer/thug into something other than a fascist-in-disguise through transformative context (e.g., subversions of Shelly Bombshell or Zarya, exhibits 100c2b and 111b). This Gothic-Communist paradigm shift reclaims the unironic imagery at all levels of itself—of actual, non-consenting and uninformed enslavement, torture and rape through their associate handcuffs, leather uniforms, whips or collars; but also insignias and color codes: green and purple as the colors of envy and stigma (exhibits 41b, 94a3) but also black-and-red as pre-fascist (the Roman master/slave dynamic), anti-Catholic dogma (exhibit 11b5) eventually applied to 20th century fascists and Communists during and after WW2 in videogames (exhibit 41i/j) and other neoliberal propaganda (Vecna’s D&D Red Scare schtick: exhibit 39a2). All exist together in the Internet Age along with their assigned roles—as subverted in liminal, transgressive, formerly exploitative ways (exhibits 9b2, 101c2) that often yield a campy (exhibits 10a) or schlocky flavor married to whatever unironic forms they’re lampooning (exhibit 47b2). This exists in duality and opposition as a rhetorical device—a conversation, but also an argument.

For example, you’ve probably noticed said duality in how I alternate between labels or play around or within them when it suits me (which is often). The reason is to accommodate their natural-material functions. Language is fluid in its natural, uncoerced state; there is no “natural order” of the state’s design, no “transcendental signified” that “just happens” to favor the profit motive. That is installed and enforced through a particular belief system and portioning of codified space and behaviors useful to the elite. Instead things flow in and out of each other quite organically.

Regarding this organic relationship, I’ve made a little heads-up guide. It includes a few useful reading-comprehension pointers when exploring my work, which I’ll also include in Volumes One, Two and Three (indented for clarity):

We’ll be code-switching a lot throughout this volume when talking about some very chaotic things. So try to remember that function determines function, not aesthetics. Also remember your parent dichotomies—bourgeois/canon/sex-coercive vs proletariat/iconoclasm/sex-positive—as well as your various synonyms/antonyms, orbiting factors and related terminologies that follow in and out of each other during oppositional praxis; i.e., the productive idea of power as paradox and performance, wherein said performance’s games, rules and play remain incredibly potent ways of interrogating and negotiating power yourselves; i.e., through liminal expression’s doubles thereof, existing inside the Gothic mode’s shadow zone: (sequenced here in no particular order):

the essentialized connecting of biology (sex organs and skin color) to gender and both of these things to the mythic structure as heteronormative/dimorphic, thus alienizing (to weird canonical nerds and everyone else) in service of the state/profit motive > a lack of dialectical-material analysis > willful ignorance/”rose-tinted glasses” to achieve class dormancy through blind “darkness visible” > Capitalism’s monomyth/good war > Beowulf, Rambo > the infernal concentric pattern/Cycle of Kings and Shadow of Pygmalion > carceral hauntology/dystopia (myopic chronotopes/Capitalist Realism) > good cop, bad cop or cops and victims > assimilation > class traitor/weird canonical nerd > Man Box/rape culture > state espionage and surveillance/complicit cryptonomy > babyface/heel kayfabe > war hauntology > subjugated Amazon/mythical copaganda (female Beowulf, Rambo) > TERF > unironic ghosts of the counterfeit and the process of abjection’s symbols of harm > profit, rinse and repeat

versus

the separation of gender and sexuality from each other and both of these things from the heteronormative mythic structure; i.e., Gothic Communism’s monomorphic subversion of all of the things listed above through class war as enacted by our own weird iconoclastic nerds > spectres of Marx > deliberately active, class-conscious/campy “darkness visible” and dialectical-material scrutiny > shadow of Galatea > pro-labor espionage, revolutionary cryptonomy, emancipatory hauntology/parallel societies and chronotopes > reverse abjection > the pedagogy of the oppressed > reclaimed symbols of harm > post-scarcity

As a point of principle, I’ve left out some stuff and these lists in the heads-up are asymmetrical; also, I’m not going to try and include or string everything into a grand necklace/dichotomy that I then trot out each and every time a given topic comes up; i.e., the oppositional praxis of canon vs iconoclasm (as explored during the body of the thesis volume). Instead, I’m using them from a position of internalized intuition that I expect readers to learn, including relating them to parallel parent dichotomies like sex-positive vs sex-coercive, canon vs iconoclasm, bourgeois vs proletarian, as well as their orbiting factors—e.g., iconoclasm emphasizing mutual consent, informed consumption, de facto education, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation as things to materially imagine (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) in subversive/transgressive Gothic poetics that challenge their canonical doubles during oppositional praxis.

If you can’t parse all of this intuitively then I suggest you familiarize yourself with the thesis proper and “camp map” from the thesis volume (which is available on my website; click here to access my website’s 1-page promo, which contains all relevant download links/information regarding my book).

The above heads-up guide should be useful, I think, as the organic nature of existence and human society and language is aptly symbolized and demonstrated by chaos. It also, in Gothic circles, elides the organic and inorganic in ways that confound the Cartesian Revolution’s chief aim: divide and conquer, map and plunder the land and its inhabits, all while quaking at the witch as an object of revenge (in both directions) or the pumpkin rotting after the harvest as intimations of Capitalism’s own superstitious mortality. The occupying army is both weak and strong.

(exhibit 1a1a2b: Artist: Karl Kopinski. “Insect politics” isn’t just society treating people like bugs to optimistically squash in favor of the state. However, this is something I write about in “Military Optimism” so I wanted to share it, here:

“Specialization is for insects,” Heinlein famously wrote, and his characters weren’t always military. But they could do anything asked of them because they were competent. Competency isn’t just a mindset, or a character’s natural ability. More often than not, Heinlein’s heroes had access to better equipment—weapons, to be sure, but also the power suit, which served as an extension of their organic bodies (which, in turn, were a hive-like extension of the state). Heinlein canonized the power suit in 1959 with Starship Troopers, which Cameron required his actors to read when filming Aliens. By doing so, Cameron was emulating the US military, which had already added the book to their reading list. Hardly surprising considering Heinlein’s novel preached military values as essentialized, spearheading them through the mind of competent soldier narrator, Juan Rico. 

In this future, there is no room for messy human politics. Just “insect politics.” While so-called “actual” bugs are demonized as something to attack, the desire to openly emulate them is societal. Occasionally this desire rises to the surface. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), Gregor Samsa turns into a “monstrous vermin” only because his family and friends are primed to scapegoat him. Society has already made them insects. Likewise, Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry is a giant military machine, operated smoothly by competent men who can’t think for themselves. All according to plan.

And yet, while competency is a headspace, the suit makes the soldier. Otherwise, they wouldn’t use it. Cameron illustrated both points—competency and weaponry—by having Ripley use her power loader as an improvised weapon to defeat the Alien Queen. The irony of Aliens is that Ripley and the marines are just as bug-like, from a military standpoint, as the xenomorphs. But Cameron’s military optimism—injecting Heinlein into Ridley Scott’s Promethean, astronoetic[6] universe—is a kind of cognitive dissonance that ignores the comparison. Undeniably attractive, this myth of the realized individual is used by the state to trick the next generation: You can succeed where others have failed. In truth, these recruits are expendable assets serving the will of the state—a state whose eventual collapse is inevitable.

In the meantime, Ripley will do anything to survive. She puts on the suit and evolves, becoming a bug to fight a bug. But she was already a “bug,” attacking the xenomorphs with unparalleled hostility. It’s worth noting that she wasn’t a soldier (“I’m not a soldier”); she’s a civilian whose hawkish attitudes mirror the desire for revenge fostered by Americans under Reagan’s rule (source). 

Hollow Knight takes an even more heretical position than Ripley [or Samus] do; re: as Competent Women versus Competent Men, in the monomyth [supercops]. Pax Americana is half-real, in this respect; i.e., whitewashing genocide on and offstage through centrist pearl-clutching claiming self-righteousness, itself occurring through the usual white Indian and white savior arguments within the Shadow of Pygmalion’s Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern punching Medusa during mirror syndrome [which translate into the Rambo and Star Wars problems’ inability to solve Capitalism’s inherent, built-in flaws by scapegoating them; e.g., “Policing the Whore].

The state is not automatically good during Metroidvania, then; if anything, its touted “superiority” is checked by madness and decay during the return to a natural order following the king’s death: the hideous flagellation and bondage of the king’s greatest knight when faced with the wrath of the secret Medusa, the Radiance operating as the Madwoman in the Attic; i.e., of the patriarch’s mind, but also the kingdom as an extension of their mind having decayed and spilling out of itself in smaller offshoots[7]: the spirit of revenge inside a rotting corpse proliferating the necrobiome in smaller fragmentations of itself—i.e., the kingly insects disperse and are invaded by the queenly fungus viewed as unwelcome, deathly and parasitoid [the Archaic Mother treatment not dissimilar to the Alien Queen or Ungoliant]. Like a glowing mushroom, her deathly blossoms spill out everywhere in profound, eerie splendor that the king’s gambit seeks to contain and deny like the lepers from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish—i.e., the tower of the watcher hammering into the earth like a spike, encapsulating the queenly infection as a kind of female disease/wandering womb: “Girls have cooties!” Again, it’s honestly rather fun being Athena’s Aegis, seeing men lose their minds over something as regular and trivial as death.)

Escape from abuse goes hand-in-hand with transformation, but follows a kind of mythic structure in oral traditions carried over into written and/or theatrical forms. For example, in classical Greek myth Apollo pursuits Daphne to rape her and she, to escape his rude courtship, turns into a tree. Escape, for the Gothic Communist, is to transform less into a stupid tree (which can be chopped down) and more into something that terrifies our foes beyond the capacity for rational thought, thus losing the capacity for enslavement (of themselves and us to the same system); to “make things gay” is to follow a basic function of language in the natural-material world, one that spreads an idea through chaos and symbols of chaos: death, decay and continuation that together represent “transformation” mid-senescence and postmortem.

As a necrobiome full of decomposers, metamorphs and state-supplied stigma, our goal is to make others like us, who embody, practice and represent what we stand/fight for—i.e., to turn other people into monsters sympathetic to/emblematic of our plight and lost/imperiled humanity through context first and foremost, not raw aesthetics. “Become one with the mushroom and the insect,” my dudes. It’s all from a sample of one; we’re all workers from the same clade; i.e., “butterflies and crustaceans with a common ancestor grouping us in the same clade, pancrustacea” (Clint’s Reptiles’ “Butterflies Are Crustaceans, But It Gets Worse…” 2023). As usual, the dividing factor is class/culture war. Cartesian stigma, phobia and bias are meant to demonize one side to feed the profit motive, but the nightmare for Communists can take on a joyous function divorced from said motive: the “death” of metamorphosis, of changing shape into something new relative to our oppression challenging, thus incentivizing us to do so. In turn, when divorced from overt, functional morality and value judgements, organisms enter a stage of constant evolution—of change from one thing into something else. To this, general-place protagonism vs antagonism codifies (for humans) in all the usual canonical visual language (black and white) of violent theatre.

However, in the hands of Gothic Communism, the same theatre enters a different realm than one of prescribed morality onstage; i.e., subverting state-mandated action—of force and might-makes-right—through theatrical appeals toward equality that undermine their perceived sovereignty. Nothing is superior unto itself over anything else. While the question invokes longevity and the health of an overall ecosystem, environment or society that connects us to each other and the rest of the natural-material world, the deciding factor is still violence, but of a particular kind: class war and struggle. Here, the pen can be as mighty if not mightier than the sword in this respect. In turn, the duality of nightmare offers up a counterterrorist antagonism of nightmare and protagonism to either side of a dialectical-material struggle: workers pushing back against us-versus-them simply by existing and expressing ourselves as an identity defined and shaped by state interference and its imposed failure on workers’ manufactured inability to understand how things work as a unit in opposition to state forms. This entire dialog operates at cross purposes with the state, who opposes our mere existence to satisfy the superorganism’s profit motive; the structure and division aren’t simply prioritized, but valorized.

Whether through general language, monstrous gender identities/performances, slurs, BDSM, fetishes, and kink, sex positivity is defined through informed, mutually consenting power exchange/informed consent, appreciative irony and liminal struggle within systemic abuse—i.e., to combat alienation/imposter syndrome by reclaiming the hammer and chisel from the patriarchal sculptor, but also the emblems of state abuse conveyed through various Gothicized poetics: chains, hate labels, put-downs; batons, knives and other killing/subjugating implements; and unequal positions of power from our “heroic” conquerors through negotiated, informed consent; but also to protect us from regressive torturers in disguise: the badass, “strict” death fetish or mommy dom (strict or gentle; “good” or “bad”; black or white in roleplay language) presenting as a safe liberator but really just a centrist, thus fascist TERF (service to capital is fascism, which centrism regresses to in crisis) wearing a mask on a mask on a mask through the same language/aesthetics used by us.

The dialectical-material context is different, but not self-explanatory. It must be taught and this happens through revived oral traditions, music, dance and other performance art (which are historically far harder to control than written documents) indicating a “lost time” or culture that “used to exist”—the paradox being this culture, if it did exist is long gone and being revived into something not-quite-the-same, and towards a new state of existence that has yet to exist on this Earth: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism. It won’t be a perfect world, but it will be one without systemic violence: no sin, dysphoria/dysmorphia, or scapegoats, no harmful Jedi or Sith thus no dead younglings, just monsters (Nietzsche was wrong—when fighting monsters, you must become one yourself: a gay-anarcho Commie double of the state monster). We’ll all be queens making our own monsters and media in ways that won’t lead to systemic harm (unlike the state, which harms everything by design); i.e., acclimated to chaos and revived, sex-positive medieval language as things to skillfully swim around inside, being well-adjusted towards doing so through taught behaviors that recognize just how Gothic Capitalism is (in a sex-coercive, concealed-genocide sense) and how Gothic queer revolution can be in (a sex-positive) response. The language is there because the medieval power and struggle never left; this includes camp as an effective foil then and now. We have always been here and we aren’t going anywhere without a fight.

(exhibit 1a1a2b: Artist: Xenokun. Heteronormative war and rape are everywhere in monomythic canon, whose canonical xenophobia/xenophilia is useful to the state; i.e., through the creation of a perpetual enemy to slay in the drive for profit through power fantasies geared towards the soldier class [cis-het men]. The classic scapegoat of the West is monstrous-feminine in some shape or form, meaning Beauvoir’s “woman is other” can easily be non-binarized and applied to AMAB [assigned male at birth] persons through the Pygmalion effect [the chain-like creating of a colonial binary through canonical art]. If this sounds weird and nerdy, it is, but weird canonical nerds will defend their canon nonetheless; in turn, weird iconoclastic nerds must defend our own devilish creations that invariably challenge the status quo through irony as a creative chain: the Galatea effect—i.e., of a rebellious genderqueer queen embodied through Gothic counterculture. Such an idea is death to canon, meaning “death as something to execute” against what is different from the heteronormative standard’s chase of profit by funneling endless war, rape, and genocide through nature [money is privatized theft].

Simply put, the vice character is queer-coded[8] and the riddle of the Sphinx is implacable death; i.e., there is always a womanly [non-manly thus fearsome and ignominious] death waiting at the end of the patriarch’s road. An inability to cheat/conquer death becomes spiteful, with the king’s vengeance marking the monstrous-feminine as the ultimate ancient enemy that must be hunted, trapped and killed. Meanwhile, Capitalism sexualizes everything to harmful, dimorphic extremes. Those known to do sex work [or sexualized work] are chained to it like Prometheus his rock, defined by sexual labor as a marker of difference, of classical punishment in this sense. They are not men, but non-men that potentially embody Medusa’s vengeance; i.e., as dream-like, drugged, and nocturnal/chthonic symbols of death, chaos, and confusion that threaten the status quo of powerful men who haunt the hypermasculine after death as fatherless failures whipping themselves inside the guard tower [e.g., the hollow knight]. These monstrous-feminine spectres must not only be contained, but dealt with—normally through genocide dressed up in moral panics, rape epidemics and drug wars [except leave it to male thinkers to either code the beyond as awesomely male, like Edmund Burke and Lovecraft tend to do with the Sublime and cosmic nihilism; or as female, thus warranting death from male forces. Either fantasy is male-centric].

Medusa was Barbara Creed’s chosen source of female fear in The Monstrous-Feminine. Catalyzed by Freud’s essay “Medusa’s Head” [1922] writing about the Patriarchal bogeywoman, the Archaic Mother is Creed’s characterization of Medusa as post-Freudian, seeking to comment on women beyond their universal portrayal as victims in Western canon: their monstrous, ancient function. Obviously we want to comment on queer liberation and Communist development during our own poetic Amazonomachia. So while sodomy and the monstrous-feminine are to be surveilled, fought and assimilated/killed, they each come with a variety of double standards regarding these treatments that we can subvert in campy ways. For example, whereas the female Amazon or Medusa can be “beheaded,” tamed and bred/made to feminize war in ways useful to the state, the beheading of the male sodomite is seen as “instant death” [a very cliché male fear] under Capitalism: the societal death of the eunuchized slave as someone who has less-and-less rights under Cartesian dominance. Male “breeders” are expendable, but also overt threats that inseminate the woman with “evil babies” that must be euthanized through the male parent as someone to duel. While the vagina dentata can always be beheaded/defanged then fucked, there is nothing to be done with the male sodomite except cross swords with them.

Yet the monstrous-feminine also lends itself well to camp, supplying performers with the means to generate a cutesy-creepy uncanny in ways that make it far less torturous/stigmatic and far more fun, even strangely sexy [the proverbial “weirdest boner”]:

[artist: top-left, bottom-left, top-right and bottom-right: Jessica Nigri; top-middle: Johannes Sadeler; bottom-middle: Salem Hysteria]

Camp can yield gender trouble and gender parody in equal measure—camp, in the case of the guy watching Pyramid Head ride four-eyes like an ass [mimicking the “power of women” topos vis-à-vis Phyllis and Aristotle] and parody for her and her performer friend making trouble/having fun; e.g., camping the canonical-if-at-times-tangential “Nazi” of the occult, psychosexual BDSM aesthetic [with bonafide Nazi camp being its own musical/comedy hit[9] that never seems to age]. Likewise, Pyramid Head echoes the hauntological medieval as darkly torturous in a cryptomimetic, “Catholic miracle” sense, which can rescue pain from a variety of falsehoods: the false dichotomy of “pleasure and pain,” the false equivalency of “pain as sexual” but also non-pleasurable, the false stigma that pain is automatically harmful, thus has no cathartic potential. Trauma begets trauma and the chase of the Numinous can be medicinal in relation to lived trauma. Even so, it can just as easily be a burlesque show as kawaii vs kowai [cute vs scary] for genuine play and delight in an asexual sense with psychosexual overtones [the color swap] instead of internalized ones. Simply put, these aren’t pointless novelties or exclusive “hard kink medicine” for legit mental scarring, but also deeply fun [and subversive] exercises in the genderqueer creative spirit. Given the destructive nature of capital, all overlap through the same symbols and theatre as something to reclaim from the bourgeois monopoly on these things.)

A world without sin realized through Gothic poetics might seem novel or sui generis to many (and to an extent it is, in relation to what the elite encourage us to engage with) but Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing is decades old (2001), Derrida’s Spectres of Marx even older (1993) and Marx’s eponymous writings on spectres predating them by over a hundred years: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (1852). And the allegory of the Gothic as a class of beautiful lies whose “archaeologies”/elaborate strategies of misdirection are not simply decades older than Marx; when Horace Walpole anonymously wrote the first Gothic novel during the start of the Neo-Gothic period (1764), his deliberate combination of the Ancient Romance and the novel as a story of everyday experience are, themselves, inspired by the paradox of allegory through Milton’s “darkness visible” (nearly another century back in time, to 1667), while the broader idea of allegory and the hidden truths behind shadowy illusions dates back to Plato (375 BCE).

To that, the recent telling of the Gothic lie—one that adumbrates a hidden, tenebrous truth beyond the illusions of the cave—has an important lesson that is equally old (e.g., Ridley Scott, whose own lies we’ll cover in Volume Two, exhibit 51a): those within the cave, thus chained to its illusions, will attack and kill outsiders for being disruptors to a perceived order of things. This shadow of fascism, Pygmalion, and patriarchal tyranny is monomythic, the skeleton king exclusively competing with the noble king by pitting their combined soldiers against Communism inside a destructive, deceptive loop my thesis argument calls “the Cycle of Kings*/monomyth (again, the two operate in tandem, promising younger men/tomboys the chance to not just assimilate but become kings themselves through violent conquest). This aggregate hostility behooves the Satanic rebel of the Miltonian tradition, then, to possess a cunning and “game” ability to weave beautiful, xenophilic lies (disguise pastiche) that can be seen as “just games,” pulp fiction/rock ‘n roll** or “mere play” by one’s potential murderers (much of which constitutes Gothic media as an emerging countercultural force/spirit contained inside a widely consumed mode since its inception under Capitalism as a rising force on the global stage); i.e., with demonic poetics as ostensibly “empty” or “neutral” to avoid not just being criticized, but attacked on sight and executed for actually being in opposition to the state’s xenophobic status quo and tendency to aggregate against symbolic shows of solidarity from labor forces perceived as monstrous-feminine; e.g., the hysterical woman, the black male rapist, the back-stabbing Jew and man-in-a-dress as infantilized offshoots of a dark non-patriarch: the spawn not just of Satan as a feminine chaos resisting Heaven’s sovereign, but Lilith as the demonic broodmother whose literal or figurative womb exemplifies the classical double standard, “woman is other.”

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

*Some added notes on the Cycle of Kings: While this pertains to Western canon and dogma at large, I should hope that the parallels to America’s establishment politics are obvious; i.e., good versus evil framed as Democrats versus Republicans—with fascists, centrists and neoliberals conveniently united against the big bad: Communism (conveniently forgetting their ally “Uncle Joe” from WW2, aka Stalin and his cutthroat brand of Marxist-Leninism; since the formation of the CIA in 1947, working with Communists on the global stage has been anathema because it goes directly against elite interests; re: William Blum’s Killing Hope.

We’ll look into Gothic-Communist methods for combatting their aims and how both sides have evolved during the Internet Age (e.g., David Michael Smith’s Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire, 2023—which we’ll examine in Volume One). For an exhaustive look into this anti-Communist hegemony from Bretton Woods to early neoliberalism in the pre-Internet Age, though, please consider Blum’s book, which covers the history of CIA interventions from 1945 to 1994! Something else to keep in mind is that, while the Cold War was sold to Americans as ongoing and relatively bloodless, this was a lie (GDF’s “There Was No ‘Cold’ War,” 2023); “cold war,” then, became a theatre into neoliberal Pax Americana that hid the brutalization of the Global South through America-vs-the-world kayfabe, displacing violence to personifications of war that disassociated the entire bloodletting behind a series of exchanges between cartoonishly archaic pugilists (all for profit on every conceivable register, of course)—an arms race whose sanitization of monomythic war is all that most (white, cis-het) Americans know. The so-called “real thing” becomes its own kind of myth that they cannot see, yet is glorified as “real” nonetheless (whereas Communism is a myth that could never be).

Meanwhile, the whistleblower’s “effeminate” pushing away from war (and infinite military expansion) often starts as a military figure themselves: Edward Snowden, George Lee Butler, Howard Zinn, etc. Weapons of state terror like the nuclear bomb, spies and other methods of controlled strikes and coercion against an American target is historically complicated by weapons of terror used at cross purposes; i.e., for the elite to break up, thus prepare target areas for invasion, occupation and exploitation, and for the oppressed to hit back with stolen ordinance, but also their own theatrical agents of counterterror. Behind the romance and the perfect portrait of the white, hopeful and loving family—the American flag as a pearly castle—is, in truth, an irredeemable site of state power and exploitation, around which are littered the endless fields of outsider corpses and blood. Consider how, in one war alone, post-WW2 America outpaced the Nazis at “their own game” during Vietnam (above) when in fact, the Nazis were inspired by the Americans doing it, if not first (e.g., Great Britain’s Irish experiment leading into the revival of Rome being a continuous project since its oft-marketed but greatly exaggerated “fall,” the horrors of the modern nation-state being foreshadowed by Neo-Gothic fiction displaced by the British author to the imaginary 15th century) then at least far better at past settler colonialists at maintaining a genocidal system: one where money flows through nature. This American outpacing of past imperial powers has only continued to be the case; i.e., with shadow war/total war exploding under the neoliberal state-of-affairs to cannibalize much of the planet for the elite.

In truth, the American and European Enlightenment shared ideas and practices, including Cartesian thought as the genocidal domination of nature as something to kill, cut up and name after capitalizing on it: mad science. The Founding Fathers genocided the Indigenous Americans and documented everything about them through a white perspective, then celebrated themselves as gods to be worshipped by white Americans moving forward; Napoleon invaded Egypt, after which he founded the Institute of Egyptology… and murdered everyone for France, but more importantly, for Napoleon as de facto god-king. Either case was a project of vanity that Mary Shelley lampooned with her “Modern Prometheus,” Frankenstein. It was a rare and vital voice from the oppressor group as not aggrandizing the cause of genocidal “progress.” For example, Christopher Nolan’s masturbatory Oppenheimer (2023) continues the embarrassing trend of apologizing for the Great Men of Science (a trope illustrated by Heinlein’s Competent Man trope); and TERFs are just feminists acting “like men” in respect to that patriarchal system; etc.

**Some more notes on the pulpy, rock ‘n roll nature of the Gothic: Gothic counterculture is generally “buried alive” inside the ghost of the counterfeit (again, the false copy of the imaginary barbaric past; something Dale Townshend insisted to me that Jerrold Hogle should have written a whole book about but never did, so I guess I’ll be doing it for him) as something to reclaim through the Westerner’s attraction to it despite its abject framework (which presents sex as not just unironically violent, but combative, torturous and married [the war bride] to the fascist aesthetic of death; i.e., through uncanny depictions of sexualized battle with a monstrous-feminine “other”: the Amazonomachia as I have previously defined and shall expound upon further, exhibit 1a1b). Try to keep this in mind whenever we discuss popular modes of “devilish” media like rock ‘n roll/heavy metal, but also myths and legends retold in Gothic novels, pulp magazines and “cheap” pleasures obsessed with “Satanic” cartoons/monsters as the embodiment of moral panic (e.g., goblins as little mischief-makers that are often paradoxically celebrated and fetishized for their musical mayhem); all are tied to the Cycle of Kings/Shadow of Pygmalion as a fight to keep the public’s Gothic imagination both asleep and dumbly consuming the same old dreck.

By intoxicating said public with potent mixtures of abject xenophobia and xenophilia that serve the elite, the state dupes workers into fearing Pygmalion’s foil, Galatea, as monstrous-feminine chaos that must die purely because it threatens the authority and hegemony of the “king” (and his agents) as an essentialized ruling body. The trick isn’t to abstain from these linguo-material devices at all, but to use their incredibly commonplace paradoxes and theatrical depictions to make new connections that assist in our gradual emancipation and continued liberation by copying old proletarian context; i.e., the slave rebellions of a former time. This happens by staying awake and alert through our rock ‘n roll/monsters et al as “perceptive” in ways that, while certainly not new, are applied in new situations that echo old ones within an ongoing system (the LGBTQ+ movement in the Internet Age under neoliberal Capitalism vs the slave rebellions of previous centuries before the Internet). Doing so will always be perceived as monstrous-feminine “terrorism” because it is not with the Man and the West (which is manly and “enteral”); it is against them and all they stand for and must be destroyed: beheaded, but also assimilated, thus genocided against through segregative triangulation arguments and procedures (divide and conquer).

 

(exhibit 1a1a3: Artist: Smz-69. “Well ain’t that cute—but it’s wrong!” Traditional female strength, even in hauntologized forms, is generally sexualized in ways “correct” male iterations are not: the genitals and sex organs are stressed in a pin-up style that, when irony is not present, becomes yet another endorsement of the status quo: “Beings who identify as women must appear strong in a particular way—as soldiers for the status quo who appeal to the Male Gaze in semi-correct forms: the poster girl of war who either looks soft and feminine, but carries a gun, sword or heavenly mandate; or looks, thus acts like a man against the state’s enemies; i.e., the she-Rambo as a fulfillment of nerd sex.” This concession weaponizes the incorrectly masculine, “butch” body as something that, if it doesn’t look like a woman, can at least do a man’s job to protect women who actually fit the damsel appearance; but Amazons within the 20th and 21st centuries often do look partially like damsels—i.e., the partially feminized broodmare/pretty princess. In heteronormative circles, this “pornstar” schtick is commonly ephebophilic, or constitutes a kind “courtly love” law of attraction towards the teenage body that is sexually nubile but emotionally immature, thus exploitable [though pedophilic examples of forced maidenhood are compelled by fascist regression—something to consider when we example moe, ahegao and incest in Volume Three, Chapter Five].

Likewise, even if her personality doesn’t match the “Barbie doll”/cheerleader look that her body conveys, it’s still traditionally cultivated to serve men who demand the woman play dumb as the sexy Valkyrie [with the doll look meant to convey but also encourage passivity and, at times, literal immobility and vapidity]. Within irony and gender parody such concepts can be subverted, but quickly moves away from gender-conformity and cisness is general. Sex positivity is also defined by mutual consent as not being visually immediate nine times out of ten. The context of any monstrous-feminine image, then, must be interrogated through dialectical-material scrutiny. This goes for cis allies, be they straight or queer themselves [cis-queer “bears,” exhibit 21a2a], but also our own content as gender-non-conforming persons [non-binarized femboys, exhibit 91c].

[artist: Top-left, middle-left-side and top-right: Nat the Lich; top-mid-left and far-bottom-left: Didi Lune Studio; mid-bottom-left: Lewdlings; mid-bottom-right: The Unclean; Lucid-01. “Death” is popular code for the female servant as “asleep”—both dead to the world but also fetishized with an aesthetic of death, the medieval and the inanimate as a potent means of subverting a coerced “virgin/whore” position into a cathartic one.]

To be crystal clear, the pornstar/”doll” look isn’t automatically a bad thing. Indeed, enjoying the look or subverting its harmful history through ironic BDSM is perfectly serviceable among iconoclasts: deliberately performing like a doll, puppet or sleeping/unthinking “victim” in figurative or literal ways, exhibit 41g2; puppy play as doll-like, exhibit 51d3; creating consent-non-consent in our own art, exhibit 98a1a; or otherwise emulating the “swooning” function of vampirism in ways that aren’t immediately harmful, exhibit 87d; or exhibiting the Goth doll look, mood or vibe [exhibit 9b2] through thematic rape play performed by couples wearing masks and outfits of a particular look that evoke death and rape as things to subvert, exhibit 101c2 [we Gay Communists like sex, including the guilty pleasures, fetishes and clichés that make up the Gothic mode]. However, if it doesn’t express mutual consent in a visually obvious manner, then it’s ontologically “ambiguous” in that respect. Keep this in mind as we explore liminal expression throughout the book.)

While we do spend a great deal of time reclaiming psychosexual things in this book, the reclamation of “torturer” linguo-material devices is somewhat arbitrary. For example, I could theoretically try to reclaim “Pygmalion” as an embodiment of cis allyship. That’s technically what I’m doing but the label is still a flagship device that should, in my humble opinion, put its chief aim/persona front and center. Mine is the liberation of the monstrous-feminine from its TERF retooling as an instrument of settler-colonial self-hatred—my self-hatred. As something to reclaim, it’s a battle standard within class war that prioritizes what I think is most valuable: humanizing the abject, the wretched, the female/feminine and their sex-positive potential from a strictly reprobate, subservient existence. So while I could treat “the Shadow of Pygmalion” as maybe someday yielding that hypothetical good king that Aragorn and Luke Skywalker never lived up to, this is a centrist trap I’d prefer to avoid.

Also, while we do discuss genuine allies that critique Man Box culture, I’m not terribly concerned with rescuing the image of the Patriarchy from its own colonializing history. I would not do so any more than I would trumpet my status as an atheist, Marxist-Leninist and feminist to whitewash those movement’s failures. Even though I am an atheist and feminist in function, I’d rather be called a Satanist/Gothic-Communist because one, it sounds way cooler and two, it falls on the side of those who are routinely persecuted by the righteous: the monstrous-feminine as a rebellious Galatean Hippolyta, Athena and Medusa, etc (atheism is historically moderate, thus bigoted against minority groups and feminism has fascist roots, etc).

In doing so, I’ve taken a hard stance, not a half-measure; there’s no whitewashing or apologia to be given towards older forms of activism that, to be frank, tend to “play ball” with state power, thus invariably regress back towards them (“Ever do you desire to appear noble, like the kings of old.”). This being said, the assimilated sit within the monstrous-feminine as enslaved, thus forced to adopt a Patriarchal worldview of themselves. I’m far more interested in dismantling their doubling of the Man, de-assimilating the monstrous-feminine as “brainwashed” before setting it once more on its proper course: towards Communism, albeit through the Gothic mode as a democratic, grassroots movement (with help from the middle class and unlikely allies. Tip your sex workers, my dudes; stripping is not consent and fuck the frat-boy/chudwad adage, “No means yes, yes means anal”; i.e., the only yes to exist is “yes” from both sides). —Perse, back in 2023

In other words, no matter how vague they seem, our spectres of Marx utilize viral, monstrous-feminine aesthetics during remediated praxis to offer a subversive, even transgressive hauntology and cryptonymy that reconciles with the status quo’s illusory past and tumultuous gradient of coded stigmas

• the outright “sex is dirty” argument
• “some sex is dirty [e.g., ‘church tongue’ vs ‘porno tongue’]”
• “the image of dark sex is used to exploit workers”
• “the dark sex object/death fetish can be reclaimed, subverting canonical dogma about sex”

that produces our nightmare whose rememory of all the lost dead generations weighs on the brains of the living. The state cannot tolerate this, will aggregate with whomever they can to prevent slave rebellion wherever it occurs; pound-for-pound, the solidarity of a given labor movement is always met with hyperbolic violence, state solidarity and draconian countermeasures.

This can be outright police violence, but also assimilation through age-old compromises in the shadow of police violence (thus rape as something to heal from; re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape”); i.e., that make champions of the cause turn heel or lose heart in the face of overwhelming adversity and division: the exorcism of the spirit of rebellion in favor of a Capitalist possession achieving class subjugation, fatal (fascist) compromise and centrist perpetuations of never-ending conflict. It’s the satisfaction of appropriative tension as a useful theatrical device the elite can use to disarm the appreciative tension of slave and labor revolts fighting for equality within their pedagogy of the oppressed: reaching spectrally out of the ancient past into “ancient” forms (from Medusa, onwards) that are constantly “rediscovered” per Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit to further or reverse abjection (thus profit vs nature as monstrous-feminine). “Caesar” vs Medusa, Mary Shelley and Marx, it’s a real ghost battle (re: Amazonomachia but also cryptomimesis—fighting with the dead and, by extension, all monster types)! Silence is genocide and sometimes the only voice (and violence) we have to send back at our enemies is the one we leave behind in their wake. Haunt them!

(artist: Chin Likhui)

Beyond ghosts and other monsters, Sex Positivity was also written and illustrated based on many lengthy—and dare I say perennial—arguments and discussions between friends, family and enemies. Indeed, their collaboration (whether intentional or not) was essential to many of this book’s ideas. Teamwork, mindful consumption and reclamation is very much the point of good proletarian praxis. Through Gothic Communism, we workers can be mothers to the world that raise good boys and girls; trans, intersex and enby persons—our little class/culture warriors who bring the struggle and the fight to the streets of Gothic imagination: an ongoing creative process that uses xenophilic artistic expression to critique (thus restructure) capital during linguo-material labor exchanges between workers operating in conscious solidarity against state xenophobia.

There are four points I wish to make about this last sentence, as they pertain to phrases that will come up repeatedly throughout Sex Positivity‘s remaining three volumes. First point: while the word “Gothic” requires some clarification, I will not attempt to reduce it to a singular type (this book is holistic, remember). We’ll elucidate “Gothic” in our second point, but first I want to discuss iconoclastic monstrous invigilation as subversive or transgressive. Like “Gothic,” the words “art/porn” are something that—while difficult to define in clear, uncertain terms—nevertheless have a tenacious brand image attached to them that is often Gothicized: you’ll know it when you see it (so familiar am I with both that I completely forgot my own idiosyncratic expertise, choosing near the very-end of this book’s generation to actually define them for other people); the same goes for monsters and what people like/dislike as a challenging means of “inkblot interpretations”—i.e., regarding sexuality and gender as policed but also challenged within competing dialogs about power and resistance, but also pleasure and pain (a false dichotomy given pain can be pleasurable unto itself, but also victims rewired to experience physical pain—even outright abuse—as “pleasurable”; e.g., the rape victim’s orgasm), dominance and submission, as liminal forms of dialectical-material monster art/porn.

As such, vague and confusing labels like “good monster” and “bad monster” pop up everywhere, occurring relative to the “demon lover” as an ambiguous performative threat—i.e., of rape play according to the idea of “acceptable forms of discourse” as also being in conflict, happening in relation to oppositional forces that either uphold the status quo as xenophobic or attempt to alter it by xenophilic means (humanizing the scapegoat). Arguments, then, about what is acceptable to show in one’s own exhibit invariably come into conflict with the artist’s desire to express their own message and heal from their own trauma. Doing so does not disrespect or otherwise disregard the trauma of others provided the gallery is curated and labeled; i.e., “There be dragons” or some such disclaimer/trigger warning.

For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 actually has “vulva options[10]” in its character creation screen (an idea borrowed from Cyberpunk: 2077 the videogame [2022] and its Rainbow Capitalist approach, which borrowed it from Skyrim mods [2011, exhibit 84b] which borrowed it from Second Life [2003] which borrowed it from Shadowrun, Mage: the Ascension and Cyberpunk: 2077 and other cyberpunk-themed TTRPGs, and so on…). The idea is marketed, thus patently sold both as adult and divisive, suggesting a line drawn between videogames, sex education and conservative values as challenged by “pretty orcs” (which goes against the Tolkien power fantasy of a racialized other for heroes to destroy on their settler-colonial quests disguised as fulfillment, power tripping and all-around escapism). As Jon Ramuz notes, the debate is nothing new relative to videogames as an ongoing exhibit for monstrous, anthropomorphic bodies that a divided public is constantly expected to curate, but also enjoy/endorse in different ways:

If your interest in Baldur’s Gate 3 derives from a general interest in fantasy RPGs then you might be surprised at how adult the game is […] But if you’re coming to this game as a player of Dungeons & Dragons, who wants a digital simulation of their favorite TTRPG, then it will be completely unsurprising to you that the game features adult themes (source: “Baldur’s Gate 3 Genital Options,” 2023).

In response to people asking questions/framing the studio’s approach as “liberal” (ibid.), the developers replied to Kotaku:

You can choose between a penis or a vagina, as well as pubic hair options. According to Dubrovina, the decision to add this option didn’t stem from the inclusion of sex scenes in romance subplots, but rather because the team decided to make underwear a piece of equipment you would obtain throughout the game, customize, and wear. She explained that underwear is an extension of the character customization as a form of in-universe expression.

“The question arose, ‘what happens when you take it off?'” she said. “At first we were like, ‘you know, maybe nothing’s gonna happen. Maybe we’re gonna have another underwear mesh under it. Who cares? But then I started thinking about it, talking about it, and we realized that for some players, it’s just another way to represent their identity” (source: Kenneth Shepherd’s “Baldur’s Gate 3 Aims For RPG Fans’ Ultimate Character Creator,” 2023).

(Meanwhile, the game’s bear sex scene is, I guess, the unspoken “elephant in the room”; it’s not zoophilia—the “bear” is actually a druid—but the cheeky animism in-game does brush up against an uncomfortable current reality: the word “zoophile” has the added social definition as defined by real-world criminal behaviors against non-shapeshifting bears and other equally non-sentient creatures that zoophiles abuse. The joke in Baldur’s Gate 3 is not an endorsement of that, but poking fun at the whole ludic-paramour system …and possibly being an obscure allusion to the Canadian bear-sex novel, The Bear—Marian Engel’s 1976 controversial capitalization on Canadian-Indigenous animism involving ritualistic [and highly figurative] sex with bear-shaped gods; this idea can be seen around the world and comes up in Gothic fiction from a Western perspective: Tuunbaq from The Terror [2018] as a xenophobic, mish-mash embodiment [exhibit 48d2] regarding misunderstood, but also lost Indigenous perspectives—i.e., relating to animals and nature in a sexual way without the settler-colonial shame, guilt and cultural baggage of Cartesian thought. To be clear, the Indigenous approach wasn’t prescribing actual sex with bears, but illustrating a human tendency to compare animals and their partially humanized virtues to human-animalistic behaviors: “You fuck like a bear!” [exhibit 52]. This idea of the animal and human as interlinked isn’t even exclusive to the West’s colonies; even Chaucer’s Miller did this in The Canterbury Tales [whereas centuries later Super Troopers (2001) made fun of the idea of bear-fucking quite thoroughly].)

(source: Maijin Obama’s “The Doogie Fight Club – SF6 Avatar Battles,” 2023)

Furthermore, the developers wanted their bodies to look attractive (in a pin-up sense), or at least semi-natural (a paradox, I know):

“My personal experience with most [slider-based character creators] is you kind of customize it, it takes you a lot of time and effort, and then a lot of times it kind of looks the same in the end,” she said. “So we wanted to avoid that. And if we would make sliders, we needed to make it into something that would be truly unique and wouldn’t look the same.”

According to Dubrovina, Larian isn’t married to taking this approach for all of its games, but they felt the approach worked well for Baldur’s Gate 3 and, she said, it kept custom characters from looking “mediocre.” / That crafted look for each race, hairstyle, and accessory means that there aren’t really “ugly” custom characters. This isn’t Street Fighter 6 where players are making a bunch of weirdos. And indeed, even as Dubrovina repeatedly clicked the randomize option in the character creator, each hero with different accessories, colors, and other options looked believable (ibid.).

There’s something to be said about “realism” enforcing a settler-colonial standard (history is written by the conquerors) that engenders body dysmorphia/gender dysphoria as a kind of “impostor syndrome” for the oppressed and oppressors alike (re: white women and eating disorders); but also gender parody as non-Vitruvian (re: Street Fighter 6, 2023), which then dovetails into broader conversations about gynodiversity (exhibits 52f and 68), androdiversity (exhibit 91b2) and intersexuality (the xenomorph, exhibit 51a); but the fact remains that the public’s beauty standards exist within avatar creations that are tooled by developer expectations (which are informed by their own ideas about beauty as supplied by the natural-material world around them).

Even so, this doesn’t stop sex-repulsed people from responding with a gratingly sex-negative question: “Why, though?” So, I’ll call that like it is: standard-issue gender trouble and (often) white fragility. This begs the Socratic response, “Why not?” as a means of establishing gender trouble and parody as legitimate activist stratagems (not an invitation to be force-drunk hemlock[11]). As this supposed hypothetical is, in truth, based on a real exchange that I had about the game, I decided to not treat it as rhetorical, but in true neurodivergent fashion wanted to give it an honest answer (with my partner Bay’s help; thank you, muffin):

(source: Kotaku’s “11 Minutes with Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Character Creator,” 2023)

To be clear, it’s fine if the exposed vagina in art/porn isn’t someone’s cup of tea, but videogames—especially those in the Internet Age—are a public space, a forum/galley to some extent. This means the rules of such places also apply to videogames (and other mediums); i.e., they’re an exhibit that isn’t curated to cater to a single group’s vision. If someone is sex-repulsed, that’s a valid consideration, but it should always be raised in ways that aren’t sex-negative. To that, sex-positive galleries shouldn’t have to compromise their sex-positive, xenophilic vision to meet a smaller group’s needs if the exhibit is about showcasing naked monster bodies in a sex-positive way.

Furthermore, putting the vagina in the closet when male genitalia are plastered all over everything is a modesty argument, often used by moderate individuals conflating their own sex repulsion as transcendental; they feel vulnerable when they see someone else’s vagina, but are probably acclimated to the cock as everywhere or the breasts as a commonly adjustable feature of avatar cosmetics. To include one but not the other is arbitrary and harmful, especially when the precedent of the game invokes sexual and gender expression to begin with. To exclude a particular morphological identity from the game is segregation, which generally will have a cis bias; players should be able to represent themselves however they want: Big Titty Goth GFs or Big Booty Goth GF with a girl cock! So I ask people who would want to prevent that, “Why do you care if that’s in-game?”

Applying this concept to Baldur’s Gate, if someone doesn’t want to use the genitals option in-game, that’s perfectly fine, but discouraging its inclusion as an option altogether—just because Baldur’s Gate is a popular game that plays around with private parts ontology despite them being a highly regulated site of trauma for many ace people—is frankly regressive (and also ignores the sexual nature of the Baldur’s Gate series since its inception; e.g., paramour options). Yes, sex-repulsed people being triggered by exposed genitals is understandable; but their feelings about their own genitals doesn’t extend to other players within a shared world any more than it does in real life (the relationship, here, is half-real). This isn’t John Lajoie’s “Show Me You Genitals” (2008, below—the vicious historical-material cycle of tragedy and farce oscillating in public discourse at large); gender expression through the human body isn’t even automatically sexual. So no, people having the option to express themselves in a nudist sense with their Baldur’s Gate 3 avatars isn’t you being forced to also “play doctor” or look upon someone who wants to have sex with you.

Put differently and in regards to Sex Positivity as a whole, it’s not up to the invigilator to manage their gallery to meet regressive, sex-negative standards; if the game-in-question provides inclusive options that represent a change in the paradigm shift troubling to creepy reactionaries fantasizing power abuse

Beat a woman to death with a mace so I could steal her valuables. Used a revive scroll and them gaslit her into thinking I was the hero who saved her life so now she is indebted to me… (source: Reddit, “The Steam Reviews for this Game Are Something Else,” 2023).

or even ace people, frankly that’s their problem (the option towards being ace, or at least not having genitals in videogames, is certainly nothing new); it’s not being done to offend others and even ace people need—and I promise this is coming from a place of love, my ace comrades—to manage their expectations while realizing that monster identities, especially genderqueer ones often are sexual and conveyed through nudism. Love it or hate it, them’s the breaks (although this book is largely about sex-positive Gothic expression, this doesn’t preclude asexuality at all. We will thoroughly explore ace options in Gothic media, too). Nudity and monsters have always been political, but this has to occur on our time, not that of moderates (versus overt reactions) telling us how to do our activism for us; we’re not doing this for just ourselves, but fighting for a better world for all—a post-scarcity world where nudity isn’t automatically a sexual act, sin doesn’t exist, and people can be more open about their sexuality and gender without feeling vulnerable, fake, criminal and/or exposed in fear of reactionaries killing them and aloof, smug moderates turning a blind eye or prioritizing their own victim complexes. This requires imagining that world ahead of time, which requires having thoughts that will be considered sinful and anathema by the elite and their proponents. Depending on what identity is being imagined, the nature of such imagination amounts to the committing of thought crimes and heresy (secular or theistic): the imagining of rebellion as something to reach and instill in the nation’s youth by poetically reifying it within the material world.

As you can expect, confusions, concerns and disputes invariably abound (especially for all you “boomers” out there who don’t play videogames), which brings us to our second point: the “Gothic” being a common point of contention as something that historically remains difficult to define that nevertheless is plastered over everything and used off-hand for centuries according to aesthetics whose ownership is equally imperiled among different media types. In orthographic literature, for example, Chris Baldrick writes in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (2009):

The term “Gothic” has become firmly established as the name for one sinister corner of the modern Western imagination, but it seeks to work by intuitive suggestion rather than by any agreed precision of reference. There are several difficulties of usage involved in the term itself, of which the obvious today is the incompatibility between the literary and architectural senses: whereas “Gothic” in architectural contexts refers to a style of European architecture and ornament that flourished from the later twelfth to the fifteenth century, it is used in its literary and cinematic senses to describe works that appeared in an entirely different medium several hundreds of years later. A term thus applied simultaneously to the products of two such widely differing ages (to say nothing of the cultural gulf between Chartres cathedral and a sensationalist magazine story) would seem to require some qualification attached to it; and, indeed, it is the sensible practice architectural historians use to distinguish from the Gothic of the late Middle Ages the Neo-Gothic or Gothic Revival style of the nineteenth century. In a more logical world, we might have learned to adopt a clearer designation of this kind for the “Gothic” of modern literature and cinema; but of course, it is far too late to undo our inherited confusions, and even if we were able to do so, we would only run up against further difficulties that render “Neo-Gothic fiction” or some such nomenclature just as unsatisfactory” (source: my printout copy given to me by Dale Townshend at MMU, complete with grad-student notes scribbled all over it).

In videogames’ far more recent insertion into the conversation, Tanya Krzywinska determines in “The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates in Videogames” (2015):

I began this work with an intuitive sense that there are vast variations in the effective, and indeed affective, uses of Gothic in games, and as work for this study progressed, that sense has intensified. Definition is therefore no simple task, especially considering that Gothic has spanned such a breadth of mood, time and location. As Fred Botting notes “[t]he diffusion of Gothic forms and figures […] makes the definition of a homogeneous generic category very difficult” (1996, 14). In his discussion of the uncertainty in scholarly definitions of the Gothic, David Punter writes that there is a “significant resistance to canonization” (2000, ix), suggesting that there is no one text that substantiates Gothic. It is therefore largely agreed within recent scholarship on the topic that Gothic is brimful of vertiginous, acute tangents and perplexing ambiguities (source).

My own commentaries on “Gothic” per my Metroidvania work and coining of ludo-Gothic BDSM focus on camping canonical spaces (castles) and monsters; both expand on ideas neither author bothered with in their own overspecialized commentaries.

Dedications aside, Baldrick and Krzywinska (and other Gothic or ludic scholars I cite throughout the book) are predominantly white accommodated intellectuals who remain utterly unequipped to write about the inherent queer struggle of the Gothic as something to constantly reclaim from the status quo as a fascist-neoliberal entity from the late 1970s onward—i.e., through my own diverse area of studies that fused the Gothic together within videogames as an extended conversation between novels or cinema, but also beyond* what intellectuals were, are and will be still be saying about the former regarding the latter as “Gothic” among digital, Internet-Age media; e.g., Medusa or Amazons doubled within oppositional praxis, to be used by queer agents on a gradient of resistance against, and oppression by, bourgeois proponents—so-called “TERF Amazons” or “TERF Medusas**” like Victoria de Loredani (an Italian TERF—eat your heart out, Giorgia Meloni[12]) from Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 Zofloya (exhibit 100b2) or James Cameron’s Ellen Ripley (exhibit 30a): war bitches whose “rabid, feral” nature is on a shorter leash/timer (due to the euthanasia effect requiring they be put down faster once Capitalism enters decay). Including sex work, all inhabit a poetic whole within a larger subversive conflict I wish to comment on, and contribute towards, in meaningful ways that go far beyond academic flag-planting by actually educating and helping workers directly (to alter linguo-material conditions and relevant social-sexual attitudes through dialectical-material poetics). Worker solidarity is a holistic enterprise conducted by workers, first and foremost. Try to keep that in mind moving forward.

*Alluding to the title of my 2018 master’s thesis: “beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (source), which includes reinvestigating my own research years later (exhibit 1a1a1h2a3b).

**More than my thesis argument already has, we’ll return to TERF monsters and the monstrous-feminine (as regressive and subversively progressive) often. Both elide with hauntological ideas like “phallic woman” and “demon lover” (in coercive, unironic demon BDSM vs ludo-Gothic BDSM, which the Demon Module shall return to and unpack; re: “Summoning Demons“); i.e., as things to subvert, then endorse within the Gothic mode in new, harmless forms; e.g., with mommy doms, monster-fucking and consent-non-consent as married to labor[13a] vs canonical rape pastiche. There’s also assimilation fantasy vs legitimate rebellion through Amazonomachia/Amazon pastiche as symbolic of class struggle through subjugated/subversive doubles: the war mask, uniform, weapon and weapon-like, athletic (or at least capable/”built”) body as performances that, far from canceling each other out per the centrist axiom, continue in opposition for or against the state as something to wrestle out from under its iron thumb. Because the state historically personifies itself through hauntological bodies that express war, lies, death and rape in unironically fetishized forms that simultaneously perform all of the above, these variants exist to victimize the ironic monstrous-feminine during oppositional praxis. Simply put, a state fetish is a coercive device, one that frames iconoclasm not simply as “incorrect,” but jailed then abused for its sex-positive, thus anticapitalist heresy during “prison sex”/Man Box rituals. Said rituals are often performed by assimilated members of a given minority (e.g., the Medusa is not simply overtly furious and demonic, but undead—its ontologically ambiguous trauma complicated by her as a symbol often operating at cross purposes).

While progressing away from the state’s harmful apparatus and its linguo-material past is desirable, it is liminal relative to pornographic and artistic expression as historically-materially controlled by the state and its proponents (with Perseus famously using the beheaded Medusa’s “blind rage” to destroy his enemies by making them hers—i.e., triangulation). Yet the truth is, pornography and demonic/undead language won’t disappear at all under Gothic Communism; they simply won’t be couched within current disguised trauma, but rather operate as savvy means of negotiating emotional/Gothic intelligence through informed consent in the present to prevent future trauma; i.e., the state’s harmful return through regressive rhetorical devices: the regressive Amazon’s blind rage, “waifu” status, foregone demise and coercive BDSM.

As we shall explore in Volume One’s “Synthesis Symposium” discussing the Basics of opposition synthesis, constructive anger and rioting is a healthy social mechanism tied to labor movements. Conversely, canonically destructive anger—i.e., appeasing the state’s executioner just so you can send some other bastard to the guillotine or enslave a fellow worker as their “better”—is not; it is merely triangulation (turning one person against another), then clemency and reprieve to a greater calamity/seminal tragedy that cannot be avoided—not in wars, but also on a grander scale in relation to the end of the Capitalocene via Promethean cataclysm if something isn’t done now. Cops don’t prevent crime, they enforce it. So the world needs more subversive Amazons, not subjugated ones scapegoating nature as monstrous-feminine with ethnocentric dogma surging moral panic through the Protestant ethic; re: the Archaic Mother punished by witch cops to instill Red Scare, Orientalism, Black Revenge, Satanic Panic, etc, on and offstage [re: “Policing the Whore“]. Hoist them on their own petards to have the whore’s revenge against profit—on the Aegis!

(exhibit 1a1b: Artist, top-far-left: Michel Dinel; top-mid-left: Jiyu-Kaze; top-middle: Viviana Vixen; right: Edu Souza; bottom-middle: Nunchaku; bottom-mid-left: Edwin Huang; bottom-far-left: Frederico Escorsin.

A kind of Galatea traditionally sculpted by Pygmalion and his imitators, Amazons and their complicated pastiche embody social-sexual conflict during oppositional praxis, hence come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are canonically war dogs of a binarized character. Most notably is the noble Athena versus the dark Medusa from the female legends of Antiquity [also, Queen Hippolyta]: the doubling of the hunter persona, a white and black wolf. Such war-boss, queen bitches canonically offer good behavior and bad behavior as our proverbial “teeth in the night” meant to serve as man’s best friend in centrist theatre [and whose true rebellion goes against the elite’s profit motive].  

However, the lineage stretches backwards and forwards hauntologically through post-Renaissance revivals. For one, there’s the pre-fascist, Neo-Gothic “phallic women-in-black” such as Victoria de Loredani, and the Victorian “madwoman in the attic,” Bertha Mason; the post-Victorian, hatpin-stabbing suffragettes of the early 20th century [e.g., Leoti Baker]; the comic book/action hero treatment starting with William Marsden’s bondage-themed Wonder Woman in the 1940s [or Rosie the Riveter] followed by the feral, bikini-wearing sexpots of the 1960s and 1970s [Coffy], as well Ripley and similar “female Rambos” of the 1980s [a neoliberal response to the “final girl” trope of the slasher genre]; various catsuit regressions—sexy spies, detectives, doctors, and BDSM-tinged femme fatales—in the ’90s, 2000s and 2010s; then, an increasingly queer presence regarding the rise of trans, intersex, non-binary and other forms of queer discourse online. If the 20th century constitutes the continuation of first wave, second wave and third wave feminism, then fourth wave feminism’s rise has seen a regression towards the older forms using the same language in oppositional praxis: regressive Amazonomachia and post-fascist[13b] gender trouble [the “gender critical” movement] veering backward at fascist* and pre-fascist* palimpsests versus subversive Amazonomachia and transgressive gender parody. It’s less a question of stolen valor and more of older groups fighting for the equality of convenience by pitting their versions of the “Amazon-as-waifu” [a promised war bride, whose more muscular variants are called “wheyfus” for supposedly being “gym maidens” that consume whey but also can dominate the chaser sissy as a result] against genderqueer variants; i.e., a “mirror match,” in fighting game parlance.

Regarding all of these black-and-white variants, there’s the moral qualification of “good and evil.” Our concerns are dialectical-material, going beyond administering binarized value judgements to critique the underlying cause-and-effect of culture as materially coded through informed, hauntological [thus grey] aesthetics operating at cross purposes; i.e., “TERF” is synonymous with “fascist,” in this respect, as a heteronormative defender of the status quo through Man Box culture as contributing to Capitalist Realism, whereas “Light/good-looking vs Dark/evil-looking” is a universally adaptable aesthetic [exhibits 50b, 60e1, 101c2, etc] that lends itself well to fascist, neoliberal/centrist and Gothic-Communist iterations of ostensibly cis and overtly gender-non-conforming Medusas and Amazons [whose sexual/gender function and BDSM aesthetics are fluid, variable and often figurative].

 In truth, the adaptability really applies to any warring persona as the body language of wrestler’s kayfabe being the conspicuous staging of espionage-as-combat for or against the state [the stage-like arena having all eyes on it, which follow the performer-as-celebrity into the arena of everyday life; i.e., a kind of forced reality/performance within war as personified by the Amazon as a gladiatorial combatant operating inside culture war as an extension of class war within popular media as war-like]. Just as war is not, in truth, romantic but often conveyed in romantic language that sits between the fiction and the rules [re: Jesper Juul], the language of culture exists in dialectical-material opposition according to conveyors or consumers of these monstrous-feminine heroes becoming masked, costumed and/or muscular operatives to some passive or active degree: the drop-dead gorgeous, sexpot femme-fatale as a heavily codified cop, spy or prize fighter. Often, it’s all three; i.e., a resistance collaborator/spy-turned-whore/vice versa [exhibit 4a] or a fascist double agent during “brothel espionage” married to the fighting ring. Such personas function as secret identities but also alter egos on par with James Bond’s [whose Red-Scare, state-sanctioned violence represents the legitimacy of state espionage in actual or romanticized forms, versus the forever-illegitimate counterterrorist violence of rebel factions seeking to dismantle state hegemony and develop a post-scarcity world]. Like any monster during oppositional praxis, this theatricality’s jouissance sits between intended play and emergent play as decided by the play inside the meta-narrative; i.e., to play around with through pastiche [accuracy] and parody [inaccuracy, often ironic] as archetypally carried across various mediums: the Amazon and Medusa, for example, having survived out of Antiquity into plays, novels, cinema and videogames that cannot be monopolized.

[artist: Mika Dawn 3D] 

War has been rooted in tremendous theatre and deception since the time of the Caesars [whose hauntology 20th/21st century totalitarianism wishes to revive]. These deceptions have complicated under the neoliberal sphere. That is, the business of combat sports emulates the historically deceptive nature of actual war brought out of the imaginary ancient past into the modern world as a culture war fought with war-like aesthetics: the monomyth, also called the Hero’s Journey, as a kind of orderly antidote to chaos as female. To this, class war unfurls via the battle of the sexes through sports as “man’s domain,” thus something to bar women from competing in against men for reasons of “fairness”: women are hysterical beings of chaos and allowing them to compete would upset the delicate order of the universe, threatening their virtue and male egos [and profits]! This obviously effects gender-non-conforming people, going so far as to ban trans women from playing competitive chess as of 2023 [Caelan Conrad’s “Were Trans Women Banned from Chess?!”]. In turn, the anomaly becomes costumed and fetishized as exceptional; i.e., “in a league of their own,” one where the Sapphic lancer obliterates everyone in her own little cage. It’s infantilizing.

Throughout the book, we’ll revisit the monomyth and its deceptions in relation to class and culture war as “sport-like.” For the moment, merely consider how the heteronormative segregation of sports mentality brings out some rather novel regressions that simply haven’t existed before in Western politics or canon. One of these groups are TERFs, but also their disguise in the world of combat sports in the Internet Age through the waifu or wheyfu as a “girl boss/war boss” kind of puppet for the state; i.e., something to play out class betrayal and free market apologia during garden-variety war games. Whatever their form, the execution of these games treats female strength—even monstrous-feminine variants—as wrought with multiple double standards. “Strong is sexy” translates to highly particular body types within fighting parlance: “built” within a Vitruvian, hourglass bod and the Amazon as materialized through the Male Gaze; i.e., to serve men by looking and acting a particular way within the theatre of war as indiscrete, globalized and sacred.

This extends to the virginal nerd as non-athletic in a physical sense, instead challenging the perceived dominance of men through the die-hard cliché of the female detective as having a “muscular” brain: the Nancy-Drew-type lesbian/ace person stemming from older tropes of a middle-class white girl undressed by the eyes of cis-het men while she gets to the bottom of the myth of male superiority through her domain: inside thinking-based games championed as yet-another-front for male dominance in culture war. This rebellious exchange is, itself, historically flawed—i.e., having bigoted roots by the men, but also the women doing the sleuthing as exceptional white sleuths. It’s the shadow of fascism in feminism’s bigoted past, dressed up as the underdog in a battle that reduces non-white/non-cis minorities to total invisibility or token status. Simply put, it becomes the white woman’s “pick me” vibe/parade of old-school suffragettes billboarding their oppression; i.e., conveniently forgetting everyone else while being marketed not just as exceptional through manufactured [male] supremacy, scarcity and conflict, but nostalgic within the Gothic displacement of once-upon-a-time; e.g., Netflix’ much-touted second-wave feminist pastiche in The Queen’s Gambit [2020]: the hard-fought queen in the man’s game, the prodigal child or pin-up doll whose exception proves the rule by fetishizing nature as monstrous-feminine, as usual [as “woman” in second wave feminism hauntologies].

[artist, top-left: Blouson; bottom-left: Allie-Reol; bottom-right: East Sea Monster]

Regardless of their exact muscles or general look/vibe, I sometimes also call TERFs “TERF Amazons,” “TERF Medusas,” or “subjugated Hippolyta” through a poetic attempt to make the monstrous-feminine the Virgin or the Whore in service of state hegemony—i.e., the “monster mom” as fetishized during the monomyth [the succubus Slan, exhibit 51b1, or the xenomorph as a rapist ghost of the counterfeit who must die or be escaped from but also stared at and chased by bigots/privileged colonizers].

Whereas Capitalism fosters a myopia that makes it difficult, if not impossible for people to imagine anything beyond Capitalism, Gothic Communism seeks to correct this cultural blindness in favor of imagining a better world through xenophilic monsters, rape play and all-around consent-non-consent, voyeuristic peril and various other transgressive liminalities; e.g., the monster mom as something to subvert through a gradient of gender parody propositions, my favorite being “Imagine Conan with a pussy” [and someone who wasn’t a bigot]—i.e., non-binary gender trouble with a gradient of Amazon “monster moms” that are tough but nurturing while not endorsing the status quo: my OCs Ileana, Revana, Siobhan and Virago in exhibits 7d, 37f, 37g, 61a2, 84, etc; classical myths like the Medusa, 23b; and in subversive fanart like Corporal Ferro, Marisa, Chun Li and Zarya in exhibits 85, 104a2, 111b; etc.)

Also, beyond the duality of oppositional praxis/workers-versus-the state is plurality when you dive into the gradient between the two larger points. For us, “Gothic” is defined as oppositional praxis; i.e., during (anarcho-gay) Communist struggles against the state within a proletarian Gothic imagination, one whose liminal expressions consistently push and argue for equal human rights (and the rights of animals and the environment) for all workers expressed in any media type: gay Communist monsters (e.g., “fur fags,” exhibit 10c2).

Third point: whenever I say “the state” in this book, I am referring to the state as both a current mechanism for capital, but also the status quo more broadly—a state of affairs that has evolved into its current form (including the Gothic castle as a hauntological advertisement for state hegemonic displacement and dissociation): nation-states, whose sense of national identity in relation to capital had to evolve into itself from the Cartesian Revolution onwards (bringing with them modern war and globalization as they currently exist). In the here and now, the status quo involves corporations and religious institutions that operate with the state, the elite uniting them to serve their material interests. “The state” is an umbrella term, then, one that highlights a relationship between all of these factors. In the past, the status quo would have been the Church, or church-and-state as undivided—i.e., feudal enterprises and city states prior to the rise of nation-states that raised wealth through tithes or conquest (the Crusades). Conversely, the state as a traditional vector of exploitation by neoliberal agents/corporate bodies (taxes and commodities) can also be entirely bypassed by them—i.e., anarcho Capitalism and the accumulation of wealth through the creation and sale of privatized commodities (military and domestic) controlled entirely by corporations.

While these distinctions are important when explaining the past as it once existed or what the future could ultimately become, the elite have progressively sought to utilize everything in their power to achieve their goal: profit and global hegemony for profit, above all else. The foundational barbarism that post-fascism regresses towards (exploitation, genocide, fascist mercenaries, constant surveillance, torture, rape, drug abuse, lies, bribes, murder and pedophilia) is still there; it’s just veiled, dressed up as “the market” in ways that glorify corporations and remove their accountability (which must be met with labor action, including unions; e.g., Unscripted Casting Advocacy Network, 2023). Polities, corporations and churches—these factors are always working in concert to achieve profit; i.e., in some combination of state, corporation and church. Be this hybrid increasingly corporate/technocratic, fascist (a partial regression towards feudalism in defense of capital), theocratic, or some other bourgeois flavor, the outcome is always the same towards workers: exploitation, because that is what Capitalism is designed to do. Crisis and decay are both the functional gears of profit and part of the larger theatrical tableau.

As part of this masquerade, the black-and-blood-red ghost of fascism is constantly revived in pre-/current/post- flavors to combat the spectres of Marx within the psyches of the privileged; i.e., centrist media commonly reviving the Nazi as something to “protect” Americans and their emulators from—e.g., Skeletor (exhibit 40a1a/112a), Zombie Caesar (exhibit 39c) or Count Dracula (exhibit 41j) as a pre-/post-fascist, dark master emblem—while also keeping the same citizenry safe from the ghosts of Communism as a mutual enemy within the state at large. Indeed, fascists are either commonly summoned and scapegoated or dressed up in the antiquated, pre-fascist “vampy” aesthetic (“vamp” meaning “wielding the qualities of a confident, monstrous-feminine seductress”) whose signifiers are to be blasted apart by monomythical, status-quo heroes, thus saving the world from the Greater of Two Evils: fascist “corruption” as conflated with Marxist-Leninists and anarcho-Communists in the same breath, but differentiated when it suits the elite, inviting fascists to defend capital from agents of post-scarcity (making the false rebellion of fascists a useful brand of idiocy for the state):

(exhibit 1a1c: Artist, top: ChuckARTT; bottom-left: Arvalis; bottom-middle: Flyland; bottom-right: Pagong1.

Fascism and Communism occupy the same space as “bad omens” in centrist monomyths until crisis demands a clear distinction be made by Pygmalions that defends capital beyond a shared persecution; i.e., fascism is the lesser of two evils because its perennial dark castle routinely crumbles to reveal a shiny white castle underneath, whereas the troubling presence of Communism threatens all of normalized existence: through a dark truth that cannot be cleansed because it denotes the castle [symbolic of the West, of Cartesian thought, of Capitalism] as harmful by design, not because it is “corrupt”: ACAB. Indeed, the so-called shadow of “corruption” is common capitalist apologia, often relayed through a “vice character” scapegoat in neoliberal propaganda stemming from early-modern forms [e.g., The Merchant of Venice]. Videogames constitute a popular majority in this field, wherein the boss archetype is a fascist or Communist scapegoat in the same general aesthetic. As such, there remains plenty of room for variation and double standards, enacted and remediated by weird canonical nerds in the Shadow of Pygmalion.

For example, the canonical “phallic” woman is “like a man” in that she is dark, mysterious and penetrative with her fangs and unquenchable desire, but remains the bride of a male, “Dark Father/Dragon Lord” tyrant [an allusion to the historical figure Vlad “the Impaler” Dracul and his patrilineal Order of the Dragon out of Eastern Europe] who holds her under his boss-like thrall; the canonical myth of the female equivalent, on the other hand, is the female-Beowulf who enters Archaic Mother territory—e.g., the place where the Countess [exhibit 41h] or Alien Queen/Mother Brain breed inside a site for abject sexual reproduction: the awesome majesty of her Numinous power offset by a voracious, vagina-dentata maw [what Barbara Creed calls the murderous womb] that both angrily spawns dragons and devours its own “children” blindly who, in turn, are forced to put her down in favor of a male hegemon; i.e., the Jungian slaying of the female chaos dragon to further the male questors “individuation” [itself a myth, given the genocidal commonality of all heroes in heteronormative canon: the knight defends property and the state, often by killing someone else and taking it from a fascist double after said double takes it from labor and minorities—capitalist DARVO in other words: “You’re the gaping, always-hungry, self-cannibalizing maw, not us!”].

[artist: Mizugi Buns]

This being said, I don’t want to focus on vagina dentata or literal breeding crises in the classical, Neo-Gothic sense; my book aims to go thoroughly beyond Barbara Creed’s somewhat dated and limited, biological-/cis-centric view of the monstrous-feminine/”woman as other” [to be fair, she wrote The Monstrous-Feminine thirty years ago, so maybe she wrote something more recently[14] and I’m just late to the party]. So while it’s true that the phrase “phallic woman” traditionally denotes a war-like woman, huntress or vengeful monstrous-feminine, I want to stress how subjugated Amazons aren’t just aggressively and physically violent towards cis-het, sexist men; they’ve radicalized inside a “prison sex” mentality to become hostile towards “outsider” groups, including trans people, while seeing themselves as the universal victims that tacitly yield to their conquerors by emulating their worst habits [exhibit 41g1a2].

As such, I want to expand on how the monstrous-feminine can also non-binarize to illustrate the gender-non-conforming idea of a non-violent trans, intersex or enby person; i.e., someone who refuses to be a victim without embodying the standard-issue implements of violence and war from conventional stories [including TERF examples: the blind, indiscriminate Medusa]. Instead, they can be nymph-like and soft, their penis a reclaimed source of shame/codified rape [mine was] and their monomorphic body offering up other gender-non-conforming surprises to boot. They become a dark being of chaos to sincerely-but-ironically worship relative to how they camp current heteronormative standards that abject such beings; i.e., as would have been the case before Cartesian thought came and binarized everything: a drug-like, magic-themed “Ode to Psyche” [or Pan, Dionysus, Queen Maeb, Satan, the xenomorph, Medusa, etc] as wise in ancient, forgotten, “dark” ways; i.e., lost to Capitalism save in reimagined rebellious festivals [often with fairy-like flavors, exhibit 52a] that take black magic back as a culturally appreciative phenomenon. The “magic” stems from being different in morphological/gendered ways whose chimeric andro/gynodiversity [exhibit 9b1] would have been worshipped in ancient and non-Western cultures in absence of unironic gender trouble; e.g., the “two-spirit” person, shaman or witch, but also the satyr or fawn of the ancient Western world [exhibit 52b] or the angel or demon of the non-Vitruvian model [exhibit 45b] as thoroughly Numinous.

Even so, contemporary examples of “magic” also include the “sorcery” of gender-affirming care [from synthetic hormones to nail polish, ring lights and queer-coded hair dye] and its gynodiversity/androdiversity as heretical under the heteronormative/queernormative status quo, which merges with the celebration of the ancient, pagan and Sapphic [exhibit 41g1a1] as hauntologized in a sex-positive sense; i.e, to spread acceptance of, and adoration towards, the intersex as marginalized, as well as trans, non-binary and cross-dressing individuals. The penis becomes something to allow to exist alongside the vulva, labia and vagina, but also the breasts and other biological markers as decorated with various forms of demonic/undead/animalized code that camp the penis as a canonical symbol of rape: xenophilic genitals like the dragon dong [exhibit 37c] or zombie monster cock/”BBC” [exhibit 37b] but the wielder also decked out in various clothing and makeup whose general look/vibes actually fight queer panic/male stigma and show off the monstrous-feminine cock as both erect and often massive [exhibit 89b2b, 91b2] but also not toxically masculine/invasive:

 

[artist: Galaad]

Regardless of the size or usage—or even if the person is naked or not [exhibits 89b2a/2b]—the ludic-Gothic-BDSM goal stays the same: a chance between two [or more] parties to theatrically interrogate and negotiate, thus regain stolen worship and love that has been denied by Cartesian thought/scientists and their radicalized victims-turned-bad-faith activists; e.g., TERFs having been abused by a cis-het man and repeatedly conflating their former rapist with a trans woman through dogmatic propaganda they help write—i.e., destabilizing gossip/punching down. In response, punching up is generally done against a “Cotton Ceiling” [from Drew DeVeaux; source: Cassie Brighter’s “The Often Misunderstood Premise of the Cotton Ceiling” 2019]. And such rioting absolutely should be allowed; calling it a “stone in a glass house” is to put property before people. The penis is generally associated with war-like brutality [“Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps…”] and advertised as monuments that are much larger than actual erect penises that promote violence [“…And fix’d his head upon our battlements”]. Pornographic depictions of penises [as erect] are generally censored because they are indecent, but also because they expose the man’s penis as a source of shame for failing to be “big enough.”

As such, they are canonically presented as threatening and violent, transferring male stigma from person to person through the penis as implying the entire body and person as dangerous in criminal-hauntological forms; i.e., the serial killer’s dagger penis [which we discuss in Volume One‘s “A Problem of ‘Knife Dicks,’ or Humanizing the Harvest”] but also the “incorrect” man as a cross-dressing killer advertised during Satanic panic; re: Matthew Lewis camping said panic in The Monk [1796] by having the male devil shapeshift into a female witch called Matilda, then crossdress as a nun crossdressing as a monk named Rosario before tempting Ambrosio with her “Satanic” body—all to place the false “woman” in the place of “biological” women’s “real imprisonment” and fuck over the rapey priest. The class character residing in Lewis’ queer voice, however nascent his 21-year-old self may have been, wasn’t “just psychological” but campy par excellence in order to critique the resultant stigmas begot from material conditions; e.g., satire comparable to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus or George Romero’s zombie films! Comparatively his cis-het, WASP female “fencing partner,” Ann Radcliffe, wrote The Italian having the heroine locked up in a convent with other AFAB nuns. Nary a demon faggot in sight:

[artist: Cute Femboy Faye]

The point being, apart from Radcliffe’s cloistered, naïve sexualizing of the surface of images [usually clothes; e.g., the nun’s veil or the priest’s robes] as she usually would, the sighting of male balls [above] is a dead giveaway—i.e., a gendered “wrongness” with the picture, which strangely echoes in Matthew Lewis’ hilarious description of Ambrosio apparently seeing a boob for the first time: 

“His eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous orb. A sensation till then unknown filled his heart with a mixture of anxiety and delight: a raging fire shot through every limb; the blood boiled in his veins, and a thousand wild wishes bewildered his imagination” [source].

Taken a step further, the exposed “bodkin” would have been unthinkable for the Neo-Gothic period [and in some ways still very much is]. Lewis calls Ambrosio’s boner “the full vigor of manhood” owned by a knife-wielding incel. Like a such dagger, then, the penis becomes something to hide not just out of shame, but in presumed bad faith while conflating sex with harm, leading many queer AMAB owners to a) guiltily conflate their penis with a weapon they cannot easily or safely remove [as I have felt] while b) also thinking their “bussy” is simply a hole filled with shit [as I have felt].

Conversely, the AFAB vagina-owners they encounter often live with their own psychosexual trauma or are otherwise taught to “clam up” to protect their modesty/virtue when they see a masculine threat: “no touch kitty!” To this, the female party might see Faye’s balls [above] and envision penetration by the implied gender-non-conforming penis as automatically harmful and non-consensual, but also “false” in ways the dark lothario is not; his black garb, mask and rapier is absurdly viewed as more honest and safe. In other words, it is “correctly” dangerous in ways advertised through queernormative fiction, Gothic romances and “true crime/murder mysteries”; e.g., Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire [1976] as the Female Gaze offering up the disposable queer man as a dark, sexy treat that either could rip your head off but doesn’t or does rip “your” head off, albeit vicariously [which isn’t automatically problematic, I should add; the paradox of Gothic fiction is that it allows for cartoonish, Mortal-Kombat levels of camp. But queer people need to be treated as more than abject toys by straight women writing about queer people as commodities; i.e., mutilation needs to be handled with irony and care, lest it fall into Radcliffe’s trap of automatic, unironic mutilation for/of a xenophobic “demon”].)

If this categorical approach to “the state” (and its theatre) sounds too liquid, try to understand how single terms not only have multiple definitions; these definitions co-exist mid-discussion, when words are being contested—i.e., by colonizers forcing singular definitions on others despite enjoying multiple definitions when it suits them (“boundaries for me, not for thee”) and reclaimers working with multiple definitions and code-switching to suit their revolutionary needs. A certain degree of intuition and good faith is vital if you want to make it through this book, which focuses on various ways to subvert and reclaim canon—especially canonical monster language—in defense of workers exploited by the state.

As we proceed into the later volumes (and modules), some ideas will be mentioned far more than others. Some, like abjection or chronotope (and the rest of the Four Gs), will come up a lot; some, like cryptomimesis will have specialized chapters, but be less frequent overall; some, like “magic circle” or “ludic contract” are mentioned more “for flavor” and whose adjacent suggestions are meant to invite you, the reader, to form your own connections/constellations beyond the ones I decide to focus on. This book is full of stars, so make your own shapes in the sky using the tools and keywords I supply. As long as the journey and outcome are sex-positive within a broad ergodic sphere, the exact routes you take to get there don’t really matter. So chart your own sequences.

To that, revolution needs to be more than holistic; it needs to be internalized in its practitioners by exposing them to radical ideas and praxis as soon as possible, thus at as young an age as can be allowed (rest assured that fascists and centrists are doing the same thing). Whatever monopoly the state tries to enforce to uphold profit with, we rebellious whores can punch up in cryptonymic duality against these pimps (token or not); i.e., to anisotropically reverse the usual flowings of power and material (more on this in Volume One‘s “An Uphill Battle (with the Sun in Your Eyes): Operational Difficulties”).

Medusa cannot be killed, only ever being an idea to cross over into our own identities; i.e., one to terrify the state through us—into submission, thereby liberating all workers (and nature) from them and theirs Judas agents: re (from “Bushnell’s Requiem”):

Ellen Ripley once said, “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.” The words of a true madwoman, isn’t that what America has been doing for over seventy years now? Military optimism, as I envisioned it (“The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021), is the idea that you can kill your problems, somehow “slaying Medusa.” But you can’t kill Medusa because her life-after-death persona represents things that aren’t people, alone; they’re structures and the genocide they cause seen in the final moments of the damned. Theirs isn’t a question of blind faith towards a self-righteous cause, but conscious conviction towards a cause that is just (source).

Fourth point: I say “linguo-material” (or socio-material when stressing the social, interactive components) because language is a natural feature of humans that distinguishes them socially-sexually from other species through complicated, Gothic expressions that manifest inside the material world; i.e., the creation of egregores, but also their sublimation and subversion during oppositional praxis under Capitalism. In other words, this process is liminal, again meaning re:

both “a threshold to move through,” in spatial terms, and “a conflict on the surface of the image of,” in linguistic/ontological terms (the word can also denote to being “in between,” insofar as a monster is canonical versus iconoclastic—with a particular spatial/personalized expression moving towards one pole or the other from its de facto starting point).

Our propaganda is iconoclastic sex work that develops Gothic Communism as the next stage of human development; our sex work is proletarian praxis, teamworking in opposition to Patriarchal Capitalism as the historical-material harbinger of death, slavery, war and rape in whatever form its canon may take—including bad-faith/moderate forms like tokenism, weird canonical nerds and/or TERFs, but also liminal gradients on a grand sliding scale of interrelated pairs during dialectical-material analysis: sex positivity vs sex coercion, the proletariat (workers) vs the bourgeoisie (the elite), iconoclasm vs canon, good play vs bad play, and manufactured us-versus-them vs collective worker action/slave cooperation against a common master, etc.

Though often presented as “discrete” by those in or siding with power, these categories generally intersect. To it, the rest of this book series holistically explores these oscillating intersections in the Gothic mode; i.e., as a living thing (Capitalism) that can develop into gay-anarcho Communism through monsters reclaiming sex work and sex workers commonly do—with legions of iconic monsters, castles and perilous scenarios that must be collectively altered into Communism by direct worker action and solidarity through iconoclastic art. Playfully geared towards that aim, it’s a dicey proposition and not without risk; i.e., fascists kill activists, but so does the state and its proponents more broadly. And yet, silence is segregation, which will not do; to stand by and do nothing is too keep silent, and silence is genocide. To survive genocide by reversing abjection, we have to speak out against it; i.e., doing so through revolutionary cryptonymy’s usual buffers and barriers showing and hiding us simultaneously (we’ll unpack revolutionary cryptonymy more in Volume One‘s “Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy”)!

So when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis… loudly and proudly into a gay new world! Make it a tempting proposition, combining old and new exhibits—a legion of derrières/wagons “in heat” the elite can never encircle:

(artists [top-left to bottom-right]: Vera Dominus, Monster Lover, Moxxy Sting and Cuwu)

Apart from the sex work I do with other sex workers to raise awareness (over sixty at this point), I also: interview my models (through the Q&A series, “Hailing Hellions“) and promote their material through my book series’ purple-and-green promo poster program. Refer to my Book Promotions page for everything paratextual that Sex Positivity offers! —Perse, 3/31/2025

In Closing: A Gay New World

It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
I don’t wanna be a boy, I don’t wanna be a girl
Breaking the rules as I sway and swirl
Shining like a diamond in glitter and pearl
So let’s go out on the town (yeah)
Light a fire, burn it down (source)

—Orion Simprini and Linda Horwatt; “All Dolled Up” on The Orion Experience’s Fever Dream (2021)

(artist: Pear)

This conclusion was originally written as a segue/introduction to my manifesto in Volume One. Seeing as that volume now has its own preface, I decided to move its former introduction here, to serve as my thesis volume’s closing thoughts. —Perse, back in 2023

There is also a genderqueer paradox of sorts we’ll need to acknowledge before we proceed into Volume One. Heteronormativity divides us from nature and ourselves, exploiting us in the process by forcing the human body, sexual orientation, and gender identity/performance together—i.e., canonizing worker division and sex-gender homogeny as biologically essentialized and sexually dimorphic. Conversely, Gothic Communism uses 4th wave feminism, genderqueer theory, ludic studies and Marxist thought to dismantle the heteronormative standards of the state—i.e., to bring workers closer to nature through the material world as something to subvert by iconoclastic means. Our aim in doing so is to demonstrate that the assorted factors mentioned above are actually distinct and separate categories that can, but do not necessarily, hold undue influence over the others. For example, if someone is AFAB (assigned female at birth), they can gender-non-conform and present/perform as femme regardless if they have a natal penis or a girl-cock (which can still be a natal penis depending on how you look at it). Taken a step further, if someone is AFAB and femme and presents as a vampire, their gender role within society is not exclusively to be punished provided we subvert the canonical role of the vampire during oppositional praxis. To humanize traditionally persecuted monsters (on the receiving end of state violence) is to allow queer people to exist outside of the heteronormative binary.

We’ll get to all of that. Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, Or Gothic Communism is not a short book (this thesis volume just by itself is ~785 pages). Funnily enough, it was originally intended as a chapter within my now-discontinued book, Neoliberal and Fascist Propaganda in Yesterday’s Heroes (which explored notions of “heroic” body representation in popular American media; the first-now-only chapter was the aforementioned “Military Optimism” blogpost I’ve repeatedly cited so far). Over time, Sex Positivity’s length ballooned, leading me to treat it as a book unto itself. Alongside its written content, I have also revisited old pieces of my own artwork to feature within, as well as collaborate with various sex worker and model friends to create brand-new artworks for this project. Combined with publicly available sources, this book contains over 1,000 different worker-produced images (1,086 as of publishing this volume) to make its pro-worker arguments, hundreds of which are “exhibit-style” (often two or more images/collages meant to be viewed together to make a larger argument; or one “visual aid” image that I break down in relation to the arguments around it).

Beyond the thesis argument and its symposium, Sex Positivity takes its time—gradually launching into its complex (ergodic) arguments through concentric, staged roadmaps. Imagine a rocket launch into space: This requires multiple stages and “boosters,” meaning there’s always time to abort the launch if things get hairy. This book, then, has been divided into four volumes, including this one. Their combined content aims to revive past revolutionaries whose rage was anathema, thus buried; now coming to light through us—the current generation—their own forbidden praxis can be imbibed and repurposed by future generations in improvised, informed succession.

(artist: Elisabetta Sirani)

However, while my emphasis is on artistic expression through the Gothic mode, there remains elements of dialectical-material verisimilitude that I want to convey through this book’s academically discouraged content; i.e., “how people actually talk” as a means of combatting cognitive estrangement—not just using movie quotes, YouTube videos, music lyrics, bad jokes, whakataukī/proverbs, four letter Germanic swearwords (and their lengthier conjugations/gerunds), and (one or two) meme images (a literal, popularized form of mimesis), but also touches of me as a trans person and former “professional student” with an extensive Humanities education centered around the Gothic as something I (and many others) have consumed since childhood.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

This education includes my formal (read: financially exploited by neoliberal institutions) education: a BA in “English: Language, Literature and Writing” from Eastern Michigan University in 2016 and an MA in “English Studies (the Gothic)” from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2018. However, it also includes my informal education and touches of me: personal anecdotes, “weird sexual metaphors” (re: Christine Neufeld, regarding my undergrad work), trans epiphanies, British Romantic poems, epigrams (a staple of Neo-Gothic novels), sexual/gender preferences (with my “type” leaning more towards the femme side of things [for boys] and allowing for a lot more total variety with female/intersex cuties) and just all-around nods to myself and my life’s work/(a)sexual-gender exploration in art. Moving forward, all of this is delivered in a seminar-like style meant to convey ideas (and people) as works-in-progress relating back and forth over space and time.

In other words, Sex Positivity is my “total codex.” Like a medieval scriptorium or Renaissance commonplace book (e.g., Prince Hamlet’s), it

• monastically and extensively compiles the Humanities as I know them through the work I’ve done with other people, my comrades and how I wish to cite ideas to them or from them to future comrades without too much academic de rigueur or straight-up torture porn (this being said, I signposted the absolute shit out of this fucker, organizing it into volumes, sections, chapters, and sub-chapters, but also providing as many bookmarks and exhibit markers as I could; you should be able to lose yourself in its arguments without feeling lost). As an international MA who tried her best to combine two different schools of thought into her own unique ideas, I find the notion of academic citation (and dealing with image copyright issues through official publishers) frankly traumatic. Having had four or five different citation methods foisted onto me in grad school (and being fairly certain MLA will mean absolutely nothing to a non-academic audience), I’ve decided to drop formal citations and an annotated bibliography and instead rely more on hyperlinks/footnotes inside an ordinary book that contains extraordinary ideas; a broad, holistic understanding of the Gothic and its modular components (no offense to you specialists out there, but I prefer to hybridize my monsters; that’s how natural language and the material world do it, but also what I think works best as a teaching device—a flexible “monster mode”). Also: pictures, lots of those—with as many links to the artists as I can supply (barring the odd example when an original source remains elusive, which I will comment on).
• invokes things that I have grappled with for many years. Monsters, Satanism, Romantic poetry and sex/gender fluidity have interested me since childhood (my lullaby as a child was Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn,” 1816); Marxism has since undergrad; chronotopes, hauntology and cryptonymy have since grad school. None are easy to understand; despite acknowledging my lifelong fascination with “Sex, Metal, and Videogames” in 2021, I’ve continued to write about them over and over precisely because I want to try and understand how they coexist inside a material world. Now, this book—as an extension of my general approach to life—is shining a holistic, liminal flashlight on old things that evolve to survive Capitalism operating as intended, defending itself through neoliberalism/fascism; war, rape, national subterfuge, etc. Trans/non-binary people are not new, nor are our struggles; nor are the struggles of cis women, people of color, and other ethnic minorities, and the struggles of all workers intersecting and interacting back and forth under Capitalism. We have always been people (Step Back, 2023) and Capitalism has always exploited us according to how it deems us useful/not useful, thus superior/inferior inside the colonial binary and its heteronormative rubric/moderately normative offshoots.
• illustrates this complex reality through what I’ve learned, reassembling it for you as a kind of monster compilation to play around with. As you play, experiment and learn, think about your own modes of monstrous self-expression and what you put back into the world: your poiesis and creative successes. In the end, we’re all defined by what we leave behind. Wherever this book finds you, know it contains our stories as left for you to discover and learn from: our struggles to self-express through art that gives our traumas and oppression a voice. Life is short, so don’t be afraid to take chances with sex, love and companionship. Yes, they’re inherently risky but also modular activities that intersect with class warfare as a powerful, playful means of changing luck through altered material conditions. Emergent playfulness is a sign of intelligence, of being able to learn through creativity, language and games that challenge unironic abuse and enslavement (this book being predicated on equal parts disaster and serendipity through its inception).

So give it a shot! You’ll never know what you might learn about yourself in the process, or who you might befriend along the way: 

(exhibit 1c: Top left: Mike Jittlov—an animation pioneer, special effects wizard and very creative person. I—like other artists have in the past—once had the pleasure of speaking to Mike. Not only is his classic film The Wizard of Speed and Time [1988] available on YouTube for free; it once dared to critique Hollywood only to be buried by the producer after a delayed production and laughably small distribution [made from 1983-1986, it was only ever released on VHS and Laserdisc]. Still, it lives on inside those of us who continue to critique the system in our own iconoclastic work [as does Mike’s original, very-’90s-looking website]!

Top right: Amouranth—a sex worker abused by her own boyfriend, who coerced her into making privatized content for him. Now she is finally free of his awful influence while using her face and her voice to talk about hidden, ubiquitous exploitation present within the sex worker industry.

[update, 3/31/2025: Despite posturing as being pro-sex-work, Amouranth is actually a TERF Nazi girlboss token whore [cop] punching down against trans people affected by climate change (source: Connor Reid’s “Amouranth’s Controversial Statement: She Wishes LA’s LGBT Community Had Burned in the Fires,” 2025). She has also become the poster girl for Kick, a platform known for giving pedophile streamers asylum (Hasan Abi’s “Kick Is Falling Apart,” 2024). A bigotry for one is a bigotry for all, and she’s as bad-faith as one gets!]

Bottom: Persephone van der Waard in grad school with a Mancunian cutie called Zeuhl [their alias]—once lovers and friends, but now just a bittersweet, censored memory of me standing next to an emotionally abusive ex; i.e., someone who—after the slow breakup in 2019 followed by disillusion of our post-breakup friendship, in 2023—decided rather abruptly that they wanted nothing to do with me or this book in any official, unmasked capacity. It’s the cliché of them asking me to tear up the polaroid. So, yeah, fuck them [I eventually go on to expose Zeuhl a bit more, in the Demon Module’s “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives“].)

This concludes the thesis volume. The other volumes—the full manifesto, Humanities primer and volume on proletarian praxis—have slowly released over the remainder of 2023 and all of 2024 and 2025. I have released them one at a time, announcing each when it becomes available on my website. —Perse, 3/31/2025

(model and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl)

Onto Volume One’s promo series, “A 2025 Foreword: On Volume Zero’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM“!

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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] Transparency is fine in good faith, but when dealing with persons who are acting in bad faith, we do not owe them honest or “fair” behaviors; in short, we can lie, cheat and steal whatever and whenever we need to (“all’s fair in love and war”) as long as our asymmetrical guerrilla war is universally ethical/conducive to developing Communism while upholding basic human rights (and the health of nature) to the best of our ability for all class, culture and race allies as oppressed workers (which fascists and neoliberals do not do, thus should not be respected as people until they atone in good faith; i.e., they are chicken hawks, murderers, liars and war criminals/profiteers, and we don’t owe them shit). We have beards, friends of Dorothy and lavender weddings for a reason; they will copy them to blend in and attack us through token betrayals/normativities (e.g., Afronormativity, homo/queernormativity, etc). So we shouldn’t just dance in front of them and martyr ourselves, but outplay them using the same basic code (an idea we will unpack at length in Volume Three, Chapter Five).

[2] Source: Peter Weber’s “‘A riot is the language of the unheard,’ Martin Luther King Jr. Explained 53 Years Ago” (2020).

[3] Gentrification through liberal-executed banking maneuvers, deliberately denying loans and mortgages to force non-white people into poor neighborhoods (these maneuvers can be openly denied, but the maps speak for themselves—literally through the red lines that can be drawn across them highlighting the very-real and sanctioned divides). To this, gentrification has its roots in basic material disputes sanctioned within white power structures:

gentrification

The process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants in the process; from a social standpoint, gentrification is the process of making someone or something more refined, polite, or respectable; e.g., Jane Eyre and Adèle (exhibit 21c1). For example, housing crises are instigated by gentrification as the “invention” of exploitable housing arrangements between owners and workers: apartments. The larger socio-material process generally intersects racial tensions in impoverished, redlined neighborhoods shared between intraracial in-fighting (Boyz n the Hood, 1991); or between different racial groups encouraged to divide by the elite through fascist/moderate, good cop/bad cop “peacekeepers” (Lonestar, 1996): the disillusionment of police culture as being functionally no different than highway bandits, accidental incest (stolen generations), and a border romance (it’s practically a Gothic novel, minus the aesthetic).

Stamped centuries ago by Radcliffe’s moderate approach to the Gothic, the mode at large is no stranger to material arbitration; its own disputes play out in Gothic dialogs that appropriate or appreciate the struggles felt within the ghost of the counterfeit—e.g., Candyman‘s 1992 breaking of standard-issue (white) conventions to interrogate the liminal spaces of an actual location, Cabrini-Green (Cold Crash Pictures’ “Candyman: Breaking all the Rules of Horror,” 2019), itself haunted by an old boogeyman who frightens the endemic population (and white visitors) as equally unwelcome-if-functionally-lopsided trespassers: the dismembered black corpse with a hook for a hand and a body filled with bees (a crude allusion to the sugar trade having dismembered so many slaves, and now which has become the cheap “slave food” for middle-class workers policing their underclass brethren: white terrorism).

Similar to Alien and Aliens‘ white Gothicizing of the savage continent myth, the Candyman is a vengeful embodiment of settler-colonial trauma envisioned by a white author. Candyman was based off Clive Barker’s short fiction, specifically “The Forbidden” from the collection Books of Blood (1985); Barker’s ghost of the counterfeit tells the legend “of the ‘Candyman,’ the ghost of an artist and son of a slave who was murdered in the late 19th century” (source: Wikipedia). Written by white/white-adjacent authors, such dialogs’ rebellious sentiment can quickly be recuperated, expressing feelings of assimilation fantasy that lead to aspiring members of the black community to feel alienated from their own trauma when trying to play the white man’s game; i.e., a dialog that plays out through a return to the settler-colonizer’s rules and conventions that have become so familiar as to turn into our aforementioned guess-the-cliché; e.g., Scream, season three (2019) as adapting to a game of survival inside of itself by adopting the clichés during a fatal masque (which Wes Craven helped popularize in his own franchise built around the idea; and certainly was no stranger to cultural appropriation of the postcolonial voice: his white-savior schtick in The Serpent and the Rainbow [1988] lionizing white-boy Bill Pullman to beat up an evil witch doctor and exorcise the colonial territory of a black scapegoat).

[4] From Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975):

The panopticon induces a sense of permanent visibility that ensures the functioning of power [… It] represents the way in which discipline and punishment work in modern society [and] is a diagram of power in action because by looking at a plan of the panopticon, one realizes how the processes of observation and examination operate.

Foucault applies the panopticon to prisons, specifically medieval ones as a tower-like, prison-guard metaphor for the society in which he wrote; but it can be applied to any form of state surveillance; e.g., the Eye of Sauron.

[5] Pastiche is simply remediated praxis (the application of theory) during oppositional forms. This book covers many different kinds of pastiche types under the Gothic umbrella as canonical or iconoclastic: Gothic pastiche, of course, but also blind and perceptive forms of war pastiche, rape pastiche, poster pastiche, monster pastiche, disguise pastiche, Amazon pastiche, and nation pastiche, etc.

[6] From Michael Uhall, whose concept of “astronoetics” is a celestial, intelligible presence [“Astronoetic Cinema,” 2019]. Lovecraft would liken it to cosmic nihilism, or the cosmos’ disinterest in the settler-colonial gaze of planet Earth/the human conquest of space according to aspiring capitalists tied to scientific communities; e.g., Trace and Athetos from Axiom Verge. As I write in Volume Two, exhibit 40c: “Unlike Samus, who is a tall, strong girl boss in a suit of space armor, Trace is a callow, physically awkward nerd. Moreover, he is continuously dwarfed by his alien surroundings—much like the Romantic facing the fog of the increasingly alien world beyond civilization, except it’s a patently human cruelty projected into outer space” (source: “She Fucks Back”).

[7] Think Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët’s Beautiful Darkness (2014): A young girl dies in a forest, and out of her brain spill little homunculi. In the Gothic tradition, it’s very much an anti-fairytale or heroic quest. The girl dies at the start, and all her little selves are subsequently consumed by nature in an utterly brutal marriage between Lord of the Flies (1954) and Alice in Wonderland (1865). It’s super fucked up, but for visual samples, consider Chris Gavaler’s “It’s Rare to Find Horror Executed so Perfectly in Graphic Fiction,” 2019).

[8] With queer coding, there are expectations and implications far more than explicit statements. Keep this in mind when we examine vice characters, but also scapegoats at large, including the monster as a boss character in videogames (exhibit 1a1c).

[9] Which can be used for the state; e.g., Victoria Allison’s examination of Evita (1979) and Nazi theatrics in “White Evil: Peronist Argentina in US Popular Imagination Since 1955” (2004). We will examine this more in the Undead Module’s “Capitalism as a Great Zombie(-Vampire).”

[10] In hindsight, these are merely “bald” or “pubic hair,” which is not the vulva.

[11] The famous fate of Socrates after telling the Sophists they were not wise, but practitioners of sophistry: “In short, the difference between Socrates and his sophistic contemporaries, as Xenophon suggests, is the difference between a lover and a prostitute. The sophists, for Xenophon’s Socrates, are prostitutes of wisdom because they sell their wares to anyone with the capacity to pay” (source: George Duke’s “The Sophists (Ancient Greek)” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). I should add that Xenophon is being incredibly unfair to prostitutes, as they would have been “pimped out,” thus forced to sell their wares, by men controlling their bodies.

[12] The current white, female prime minister of Italy known for her fascist argumentation.

[13a] The idea that Amazons don’t wed or have sex is a heteronormative/cis-gendered myth, but its subversion is often non-binary and figurative.

[13b] As I conceive it, pre-fascism is the imaginary medieval-as-tyrannical being felt within the state of affairs during the Neo-Gothic period and its future evocations while the nation-state and modern war were first forming; fascism alludes to 20th-century revivals of an imaginary Rome revived through the black knights and similar Greater Evils of capitalist kayfabe defending the status quo during total war in Europe; and post-fascism is an attempt during Bretton Woods and British/American neoliberalism to conceal the fact that fascism not only wasn’t started in Italy or Germany but continues to thrive in the neoliberal hegemon (the fascist being a popular scapegoat in centrist media, but one that teams up with the American hero against Communism codified as chaos, queer, non-white, or alien; i.e., by trying to monopolize monsters—and by extension sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll [the monopolies of violence and terror]—for those aims, and which gentrify and decay to serve them; re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“).

[14] She did! The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine (2022) is a

follow-up to the classic text of The Monstrous-Feminine analyses those contemporary films which explore social justice issues such as women’s equality, violence against women, queer relationships, race and the plight of the planet and its multi-species. Examining a new movement – termed by Creed as Feminist New Wave Cinema […] Creed looks at a range of diverse films including The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Nomadland, Carol, Raw, Revenge, and the television series The Handmaid’s Tale. These films center on different forms of revolt, from inner revolt to social, supernatural and violent revolt, which appear in Feminist New Wave Cinema. These relate in the main to the emergence of a range of social protest movements that have gathered momentum in the new millennium and given voice to new theoretical and critical discourses. These include: third and fourth wave feminism, the #MeToo movement, queer theory, race theory, the critique of anthropocentrism and human animal theory (source: Routledge).

Surprise, surprise, Creed’s still focused on films and “white girl shit” (white feminism co-opted #MeToo from women of color), but she does include work from queer theory and fourth wave feminism and not just Freud! Well, that’s great ‘n all, but I still have a bone to pick with her older “classic” self and her dance partner, Freud!