This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “Make It Real” shall do the same, but with Volume One/the manifesto (versus “The Total Codex” promoting Volume Zero/the thesis volume). 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 “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume One is already written/was released on Valentine’s 2024! 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.
Nature Is Food, part two: A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in War Culture (feat. Robert Heinlein and Akira Kurosawa)
“Before us lies the endless city, black in the black of night, cowering as if to creep back into the earth. And we’re afraid.”
—from the diary of a young woman in Berlin; April 1945, during the Battle for Berlin (source: Robert Gerwarth’s “Daily Life before the Downfall,” 2010)
“I turned back and saw the blaze well under way. And that is when I noticed movement around the keep. I thought I knew what fear was, or that I had known fear. I was wrong. This night I have experienced true fear[1]. The army of the Dark is upon us and it has no end. They march toward us, shoulder to shoulder, for as far as the eye can see. The very earth must be crying out at the damnable weight of them” (source).
—from the Narrator’s journal, Myth II: Soulblighter (1998)
Note: My work is half-real, insofar as it compares media to real life and vice versa; e.g., the Myth franchise with the Battle for Berlin. If you want to see more of that comparison, specifically, refer to the Undead Module’s “A Lesson in Humility” for a close-read of Bungie’s franchise vis-à-vis world history. —Perse, 4/4/2025
Picking up where “The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis” left off…
In my thesis volume, we explored the sacred framing of rape and war. The two generally go hand-in-hand, synonymizing sex with violence and sexualizing workers through canon to feed the profit motive (through the bourgeois trifectas and state monopolies). Keeping the basics in mind, this section of the roadmap considers how war culture can be interrogated and synthesized in our own creative responses to canonical forms; i.e., how to recognize said canon and express our trauma in relation to it using instructional gossip, monsters and camp, using them to achieve good de facto education, then habits—back and forth when warring with state forms harvesting nature as monstrous-feminine food. This section will consider the Cartesian arrangement in relation to us-versus-them power structures: Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Akira Kurosawa’s hauntological Western, but also the kinds of legendary genderqueer expression (exhibit 27a1) and body types (exhibit 28) that regularly appear during these stories.
War is a both a profoundly basic and incredibly complex thing; i.e., that generally abstracts to shorthand forms to relay a human element amid the titanic complications. Canonical war touches us, marking us in Gothic ways that we can instruct in future forms during class/culture war—to learn from past mistakes and present abusers. To serve the profit motive, then, the state’s war against workers trumpets empty virtue with false doubles, protectors, fathers and heroes; begets manufactured scarcity, consent and conflict that endear the state to us in different, alienating ways. Endless cycles of neoliberal deception and bloodshed decay into more unstable, hauntological gradients—a fascist regression towards frontier Romance. As earlier American genocides and Manifest Destiny are dressed up in medieval, displaced language and occult obscurantism in current-day frontier wars, Capitalism manufactures war at home. In doing so, it turns workers against workers, brothers against brothers, cis-ters against sisters (that was a TERF pun) who cannot unite against the elite. Instead, the bourgeois Superstructure systematically sows worker division. The complex, transgenerational curse of a ceaseless “cold” war slowly paints the nation-state’s altars blood-red. Glutting the vampiric maw of the elite as something to celebrate, workers become violent and stupid; they horrifyingly eat their friends, but also their own children and each other. This becomes the historical-material lesson repeating ad nauseam.
(exhibit 25: Left: Photos from Blood Father, 2016; right, artist: Francisco Goya. Goya was staunchly antiwar, painting the 82-painting series, The Disasters of War [1812-1820]. While these largely speak for themselves, his 14 “Black Paintings” made later in his life were even more grotesque, with “Saturn Devouring His Son” [or as I call it, “Boomer Noms Zoomer”] perhaps being Goya’s most famous and shocking work.)
This abject, paternal cycle of death can be resisted, but also transformed through fresh instruction. For example, in Blood Father (above), an old con called Link is on the run, protecting his estranged daughter, Lydia, from a larger web of criminals. He’s sober but streetwise; this ain’t his first rodeo. Perplexed by the perils of parenthood and attacked by cartel assassins (themselves “lost children” of America’s manufactured conflict, the War on Drugs), Link smuggles Lydia to a den of thieves run by an aging man he used to serve: Preacher. Preacher is fascist, a false father who “eats” his offspring like Goya’s Saturn. So, despite owing Link for his “muscle” during the old days (and his silence in the slammer), Preacher postpones repayment indefinitely. Instead, he makes Link stick around long enough to stab him in the back (no honor among thieves).
Until that moment, Preacher leers at Lydia, who—unbeknownst to him—has already shot someone herself: “You’ve felt the bite of the mosquito, haven’t you? It leaves an enzyme inside you that other mosquitoes can sense—see in the dark,” Preacher smoothly jeers. “Run from it forever—forever!—and they’ll find their way back to you.” The predator spots the prey’s trauma within the space of courtship and speaks to it to lure them into its clutches: “I am like you; I can keep you safe.”
Preacher thinks he has Link and Lydia “on the hip,” boasting arrogantly once he sees how vulnerable they are. To this, Preacher is utterly perfidious—a false preacher/educator who thinks he knows the score, remarking smugly how bona fide rebellions are repackaged and sold as recuperated, toothless things to white girls like Lydia. She’s supposedly the “easy” mark and he the old con, but he’s also so broke he can’t afford to pay her father, Link, for keeping quiet. Forget “no honor among thieves,” Capitalism turns workers into dishonorable, broke thieves, orphans, rapists and killers-for-hire—a “prison sex” mindset of warrior/rape culture and every-man-for-himself skullduggery that gauges “success” as quick, petty theft; i.e., sublimating systemic worker oppression and widespread exploitation with “making someone your bitch” as a kind of personal responsibility dynamic that colonizes the world under more stable, ostensibly less decayed neoliberal models (the crisis remains, however).
On any register of the system, crime doesn’t pay for anyone but the elite. Link, for instance, has a tattoo on his arm that reads “lost soul.” He’s living proof the undead currently walk the earth—callously used up by Capitalism and discarded, then repackaged and reused in zombified forms whenever people demand to know where the zombies come from (they usually don’t). Oppositional praxis under Capitalism begets doubles through the menticidal language of war and rape (sexual assault and power abuse), which we’ve yet to examine thoroughly in my exhibit style. We shall do so now in two back-to-back sections, while synthesizing rape and war as a social-sexual process that involves emotional/Gothic intelligence of varying degrees (then examine them later in the Humanities primer as things to materially fashion out of the Gothic past, followed by Volume Three’s at-length discussion of proletarian praxis along five key points).
We’ll discuss systemic/canonical rape in the next section. First, war/nation pastiche and canon. According to the Six Rs, Gothic Communism is generally concerned with trauma and emotions as things to reconnect with, especially alienized or alienizing emotions (a symptom of division under Capitalism through Cartesian dualism) as things to reclaim, rediscover, renegotiate, reeducate, replay with and reproduce/release from the state. Meanwhile, canon’s warrior or scientist men of reason deal with trauma and stress by automatically distancing themselves from it; by doing so, they shut down anything outside of the state’s interests, uncreatively responding to these factors with state-sanctioned, “problem-solving” violence, not genuine attempts at dialog and understanding: shoot it[2] or bomb it. It becomes its own means of bad education, one with social-sexual consequences that reliably lead to open, unironic war and rape. Such means of instruction do not prevent state terror, violence and morphological expression; they compound them through the liminal hauntology of war—the castle, but also its battlegrounds inside and outside of itself.
Over time, this “war pastiche” and canonical rhetoric escalates, compounds and procreates through individualized “great men of history” and their deadly game of “follow the leader” made in service of Capitalism’s infinite growth, worker/owner division, and efficient profit. Historically-materially this happens through frontier genocide under Imperialism (the highest form of Capitalism); i.e., settler colonialism. Imperialism eventually colonizes itself, starting with those who resist on the fringes of empire before working inward: disgruntled workers and slaves. Violence begets violence as workers fight amongst themselves, slowly escalating until the scales tip and settler-colonial Imperialism is brought home to an empire not just in crisis, but decay. This, in turn, demands an eternal enemy, and the conflict never stops; it only waxes and wanes, menticiding worker minds through waves of terror according to the bourgeois trifectas (which leads to reactionary behaviors from state defenders when de facto educators try to facilitate good social-sexual habits; i.e., by synthesizing praxis to achieve systemic catharsis through sex-positive expression and Gothic poetics).
For instance, the asthmatic auteur of the so-called “Competent Man” trope (source: TV Tropes), Robert Heinlein, argued fervently for nuclear war against the Communists. For one, he created the Patrick Henry League, drumming up support for the U.S. nuclear testing program[3] in 1958. By extension, he wrote Starship Troopers in 1959 (and many books after that). A badly disguised ethics polemic against anti-nuke protestors, nuclear war (and a veteran-ruled planet; Knowing Better, 2022) is precisely what Heinlein argues for as something the United States was actively trying to accomplish in its own, post-WW2 foreign policy against China and Korea. As Carl Posey writes in “How the Korean War Almost Went Nuclear” (2015): “There was a second Korean war, one that has been studied and discussed even less than the first, which some have called ‘the forgotten war.’ The second one was nuclear. It consisted of a series of threats, feints, and practice runs, and it very nearly made it to the Korean battlefield” (source).
Few things captivate the American public’s imagination as thoroughly as science fiction, especially weaponized science fiction involving great men modeled after real persons; e.g., Oppenheimer’s “sadness” following the completion of the Manhattan Project, which Christopher Nolan’s Pygmalion revisionism capitalized on, only to be rightly rejected and criticized by non-white Americans like Clara Iwasaki:
Oppenheimer built the bomb that killed my great-grandmother while her grandsons were drafted into the US army and the govt imprisoned her kids. If you’re into moody great man biopics, I guess that’s cool, but I personally really don’t care how he felt while he was doing it (source tweet: Clara Iwasaki, 2023).
It’s the ultimate wave of terror, still sung about decades following the “pointless” droppings of the Bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima (Shaun, 2021):
Soon to fill our lungs
The hot winds of death
The gods are laughing
So take your last breath (Metallica’s “Fight Fire with Fire,” 1984).
To that, few things are as overtly Promethean as nuclear war—conveniently spreading fear of the nation-state and its “fire of the gods” power as inherently capitalistic. Those who serve the state, then, ultimately endorse this treatment thereof and its seminal tragedies. This can be soldiers or scientists, but there is always a militant component through the scientific side; i.e., Cartesian dualism dominating nature, even in outer space (re: astronoetics).
For example, the great man of history exemplify through “competent men” as something to ape by regressive Amazons. As I write in “Military Optimism”:
I once called Ripley the Invincible Heroine. A better way to phrase it might be the Competent Woman. The idea stems from Robert Heinlein’s Competent Man, which Walter Hill transferred to Dan O’Bannon’s unused Alien script. Like Heinlein, Hill was influenced by the Competent Man trope, saying his own father and grandfather were “smart, physical men who worked with their heads and their hands” and had “great mechanical ability” (source). However, while Alien famously transformed the Competent Man into a woman, this wasn’t Hill’s idea. Ripley was originally written to be a man, and only became female when the president of Fox suggested a gender swap. Scott loved the idea, having grown up with a strong, capable mother. Out of this complicated mess of competing ideas, Ripley was born.
Before we continue, it’s important to note that Ripley was born into a man’s world. Just as Dernhelm threatened the status quo—of war being “the province of man“—so did Ripley challenge the Competent Man is as essentially male. Though not exactly warlike, her burgeoning masculinity was inherently transgressive. To compensate, Ripley was stripped almost naked to demonstrate her feminine vulnerability. It took another seven years for her to evolve into something more militarized, lest she be seen as a threat like the Amazons of yore. The capable, heroic individual stems from overcompensation. Though not unique to Hill or Heinlein, the Competent Man came from their sickly health. Hill was an asthmatic youth; Heinlein, likewise, was a navyman who fell ill[4] and later curiously romanticized the infantry through fantastical, arguably fascist stories (see: Brows Held High). Leave it to the infantry to idealize the stupendous feats single human soldiers can accomplish, and that’s precisely what Heinlein did (with Hill’s Alien draft arguably being the suggestion, if not outright endorsement, of a civilian equivalent).
“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) [source].
The thesis volume has already established quite thoroughly that military optimism goes hand-in-hand with the Promethean Quest of Aliens and its spiritual successors’ monomythic approach to Cartesian dualism; i.e., Cameron’s refrain, the Metroidvania. Likewise, the bugs from Starship Troopers were people that the bourgeoisie wanted dead and got workers to kill through state-corporate propaganda on and offscreen. Bombs are only one component and tend to be expensive; there’s also bullets and bayonets, and worker labor thereof; e.g., the entire FPS genre (which my 2021 “Vintage and Retro” interview series has researched alongside my work investigating Metroidvania and FPS as interconnected genres; re: “Mazes and Labyrinths”) being thoroughly inspired by Aliens, by Vietnam, by Starship Troopers, by Descartes and Francis Bacon, et al. Whichever is implemented, Capitalism is a man’s world, is Promethean. Even moderates who act like they aren’t fascists still admonish revolutionary praxis, their normalizing of fascism leading to its regeneration when Capitalism enters decay, mid-crisis (which it does by design—something to remember in Volume Three when we examine canonical praxis as something to challenge in relation to neoliberals, fascists and war/nation pastiche). Part of camping canon during ludo-Gothic BDSM is subverting what canon plays at, including war and rape (sex and force) policing nature as alien vermin whore to exterminate.
Through Cartesian thought, male/masculinized workers are distanced from nature as conquered by them in defense of Civilization as inherently capitalistic. It becomes bad education, which workers must challenge in their own extracurricular forms—generally by interrogating state trauma as something to negotiate and play with, on and offstage. This is an ongoing affair that needs to be upheld constantly lest things regress back towards fascism, neoliberalism and state abuse through Capitalist Realism. To that, Paul Verhoeven might have filmed Starship Troopers to parody Heinlein’s American fascism in book form, but Americans still celebrated the movie without irony—i.e., as a blindly campy mode of expression articulating global American hegemony in imaginary worlds created after the Cold War ended; their myopic, harmful interpretations of the film gave it (and its various offshoots) an ongoing stupidity in the 20th and 21st centuries that further endorse American settler-colonialism at all registers. Anything else is unthinkable, tantamount to treason and cataclysm (re: Fisher’s adage) thus deserving of genocide.
Our education vs the state’s must be considered in ways that take the latter’s enforced divisions into consideration; i.e., when camping them during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Excluding TERFs (queen bees who “dick-measure” with their female bodies to emulate male management/executives), female/monstrous-feminine workers tend to be more in touch with nature as something to co-exist with, whether they want to or not; i.e., the natural-material order of physical nature and the material world operating in unison, not discord. This ontological teamwork includes traditional motherhood roles, but also “motherly” roles tied to things that men normally abject or otherwise distance themselves from: female bodily functions, but also intimations of death or conflict as something the living must survive and deal with in their own communities; i.e., when it happens to one’s spouses, children, family and friends.
When war happens, people die. This can be the war of bullets and blades, but also class and culture war relayed in theatrical forms on and offstage. Here, stable “telephone games” communicate trauma and abuse as protective countermeasures, insofar as either are conveyed in ways that help women (or beings forced to identify as women) process trauma from moment to waking moment. Doing so becomes a pedagogy of the oppressed that can formulate good social-sexual habits, but instruction remains a rather messy affair tangled with reactionary logic and state forces.
To that, there remains a pre-conditioned element to formulaic expressions of peace and love in wartime that is foisted onto women as the caretakers of men; e.g., the gift of flowers or one’s condolences to war widows. These can certainly be transmuted into emotionally/Gothically intelligent rituals that deescalate conflict and critique the state through class/cultural awareness and cathartic exchange. However, war is ultimately a liminal proposition, an oscillating metaphor for social-sexual exchanges at various registers. The historical-material effects of canonical war and poor emotional intelligence can be seen in domesticated spheres through the rituals of codified power exchange and hereditary rites that endlessly transpire there in performatively Gothic ways (echoes of Bakhtin).
For example, my late Uncle Dave was cuckolded from beyond the grave by his “grieving” widow, Erica. First, she had been cheating on him while he was alive while not participating in their relationship and trashing the place before and after Dave died. Then she passed the mess off to Dave’s bereaved daughter, Kelsey (exhibit 26, next page). When this happened, us girls had to spread the message: Kaitlyn, Erica’s daughter, found out through Erica’s sister, who told her, who told Kelsey, who told Mom, who told me. The boys (my brothers) were the last to know and generally had no idea; they were off working and providing as men under Capitalism generally do. We women, queers and monsters are the pallbearers of Capitalism’s ignominious dead; we fight those unglamorous battles, including decolonizing its artistic power when we become actively involved in oppositional praxis as melded unromantically with our daily lives. It became a telephone game, which isn’t wholly unlike ludo-Gothic BDSM and its own bad echoes camping the canon (re: “A Song Written in Decay“).
Seemingly unromantic, we transform it all the same into oft-romanticized forms of de facto education. After Dave had died, I wrote his eulogy and immortalized him the way Mom thought he would have wanted: I drew him as a warrior king like Conan the Barbarian (exhibit 26). Much to my chagrin, I had also drawn Erica with him, the two of them side-by-side in Dave’s “Valhalla” as I envisioned it. It became its own form of instruction on how and how not to act:
(exhibit 26: Left: My cousin Kelsey’s conversation [shared with her permission—better to ask for permission than forgiveness, as doing so illustrates mutual consent between negotiating parties] where she, ever the firebrand, completely rips a defender of her father’s abuser a new asshole.
Right: the drawing I did of my late uncle and his now-exposed wife. Dave? Rest in glory and in peace, king. Erica? Have you no decency, my dude? My exposé of you—in this book’s examination of my former artwork that featured you—isn’t a call to violence at all, but an active attempt to reveal and discourage destructive societal behaviors; i.e., bad communication that foments stochastic violence under Patriarchal Capitalism: You lied a lot, swanning theatrically for those around you. What might you be willing to do under more war-torn circumstances?
Art, once created, must be examined, especially when damning information comes to light. The aim is not to endorse war and conflict, but to use the language of war as something to speak to men in language they can understand that, all the same, hammers swords into ploughshares. I have no wish to quote Hamlet unironically—”frailty, thy name is woman!” or “from Hyperion to a satyr!”—nor to hold up Man as the “paragon of animals,” relinquishing my voice like doomed MacDuff from Macbeth: “I have no words, my voice is in my sword.” Rather, to quote Eowyn, I will declare “I am not a man!”; I am a trans woman whose experience as a man has placed me in a liminal position—one foot in both worlds, teaching me the language of men in ways I can transmute, killing the old ways forever [versus endorsing them, like Samus Aran does, for example].)
I want you to consider the educational role of such exhibits; i.e., as things we produce (and teach with) all the time in our own lives. You don’t have to be made into a teacher by the state to impart lessons through artwork; we’re a social species and the process is generally something that comes quite naturally to us (especially insofar as processing trauma is concerned). Apart from traditionally domestic, social-sexual roles like marriage and sanctioned sex, a female/feminine connection with nature traditionally involves mental and physical responses to trauma (madness) whose educational potential facilitates praxial synthesis and catharsis during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., sex-positive forms help keep workers alive in response to manmade trauma (war) on various registers they seek liberation from. In Gothic fiction, this commonly manifests through the presence of monsters that intimate systemic abuse, but also bigotries, stigmas and complex psychosexual feelings of fear-fascination (the ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection). The xenomorph, for example, is a manmade weapon, a creature of war from Ridley Scott’s point-of-view that Ripley must survive, but also learn from in regards to larger structural problems both are swept up in (and indeed, are the products of in relation to each other).
The instructional element to this kind of storytelling yields popular archetypes. The thesis volume, for example, established the at-times problematic role of the domestic detective (which we’ll explore even more during the Humanities primer alongside damsels and demons); i.e., that they constitute a common kind of Gothic heroine already suffering from intimations of something hunting them in everyday life, and whose inherited trauma—as something to grapple with in the present—feels intensely operatic and psychosexual out of a conservatively imaginary past. Per Radcliffe, the nostalgic feelings of prey invoke being hunted by the horrors of the past, which Capitalism gatekeeps, gaslights and girl-bosses the viewer with by proxy. Through displacement as hauntological, faraway or otherwise made-up, fatal nostalgia explains the unheimlich (the unfriendly castle and its monsters doubling the audience’s homes, families and friends) away through so-called “bad dreams” whose comparisons to the present cannot be avoided but can be discredited: “There’s no place like home.” In true Radcliffean fashion, the monster is summoned and then killed, itself a nightmare whose anxieties—felt within the Imperial Core about settler-colonial abuse on foreign and domestic territories—disappear along with it.
Some female detectives track down the truth, armed with their wits; others perform a “burlier” Amazonian function, tracking the past down with both brains and brawn (“Predators as Amazons“). The latter work directly as general-purpose hunters, often as retro-future variants; e.g., “Space Amazons” like Ellen Ripley or Samus Aran, whose official variants oscillate between iconoclastic/canonical praxis: “female revenge” and ambiguous “female rage-gargoyles”—the Archaic Mother and phallic woman, but also the bourgeois, warrior girl boss and proletarian warrior mom (exhibit 8b2).
In other words, not all detectives are cops, but it’s a fine line and replete with fetishes and clichés (one the Demon Module will explore; re: “Exploring the Derelict Past“). Amazons in general are commonly sexualized in animal language, but tied in theatrical forms of strength that yield many double standards. As a means of common discourse that has only expanded in recent times, these are all things to interrogate and negotiate with when fighting for our basic human rights. They become a mouthpiece for us, but also a means of self-definition and self-identity mid-struggle while battling our own trauma, but also sources of trauma through theatre as policed; deviations from theatre are required through future instruction, but said instruction is generally liminal unto itself:
(exhibit 27a1: Artist, top-far-left, top-mid-left: Claire Max; top-mid-right: Mr-Deathcat; top-far-right: Sk8ter; bottom-far-left: Denis M79; bottom-mid-left and bottom-mid-right: Deuza-art; bottom-center: Hiddend8; bottom-far-right: e.streetcar; bottom-mid-left [face]: Amber Harris Art.
The expression, “woman,” is a complicated thing and its performative nuance knows no bounds, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Likewise, “woman is other” becomes a theory routinely challenged by updates to acceptable forms of equality and representation that extend to nature as monstrous-feminine and the whore’s revenge; i.e., campy forms of woman [not female] through Gothic poetics whose revolutionary girl talk [anger and gossip] challenges Beauvoir’s [and for that matter, Creed’s] notion of the monstrous-feminine: in ways that lead to better and better instruction when interrogating trauma and attaining catharsis, mid-struggle. Amazonomachia isn’t just battling monsters, then, but making them to do battle with; i.e., to combat and embody externally during campy theatre that speaks to how one feels inside: monstrous vis-à-vis state instruction. Canonical tutelage becomes something to subvert and ultimately overcome through various monster types that prevent harm through subversive gossip; e.g., ironic versions of orcs and Amazons’ racialized tropes/”the fear of a dark continent” alongside gender-non-conforming persons’ genuine identities and orientations relayed through their biology and performance as deftly weaponized against state forces. Our existence, through struggle, becomes ironic in ways that can be appreciated and endorsed during oppositional praxis: “woman” not simply as “monster” but “counterterrorist monster” inciting pro-worker rebellions against the state [and its monstrous proponents] harming us.)
Whatever form it takes, this intersectional, “female” relationship to war messily extends across the entire Gothic mode, its myriad markers of complex trauma (monsters) haunting liminal expression during oppositional praxis. Said praxis affects not just cis-het women, but beings either perceived as female/feminine/womanly or who embrace or reject these categories regardless of their biological equipment: trans, non-binary or intersex people, but also people of color and other functional “chattel” on a hierarchy of privileged abuse towards “good” workers; i.e., coerced forms of preferential mistreatment/selective punishment towards, and from, a divided working class. While these different marginalized groups experience something naturally assigned to them (skin color or biological sex) that forces them to handle manmade catastrophes more creatively than state benefactors do, their counterterrorism remains historically ignored, dismissed or talked down to by tone-policing moderates both inside and outside oppressed circles; i.e., those monopolizing violence, terror and bodily expression for the state, exploiting these devices in ways that marginalized workers must live with from moment to moment. To compensate, the pedagogy of the oppressed must highlight this unfair gradient of abuse, bringing its painful realities closer to home for those reaping the rewards of genocide every day. Our gossip, monsters and camp must collectively and intersectionally raise intelligence and awareness about war through daily social-sexual lessons that are deeply intimate and personal in ways the state (and its own curriculum) commonly prohibit.
Indeed, the reasons I wrote Sex Positivity are largely personal—for me, as a Gothic-Communist trans woman, artist, and sex worker—to think about these social-sexual themes in relation to my own sex-positive output, Humanities education, family ties and lived trauma; i.e., as things to attribute towards praxial synthesis and catharsis during class and culture war as a combative dialog. My creation of iconoclastic trauma writing and artwork contribute towards a rebellious, Satanic process of thought that actively engages with pre-established social constructs emblematic of war as a whole—not just as material things in isolation, but whose praxial function can be redesigned: to make something new not just by imagining it, but reimagining it as it currently exists. This includes whoever is doing it—within their own lives as workers with domestic ties to art, vice versa, or either as informed continuously by the other.
To this, I can reimagine war—not as sacred, but surprisingly malleable in terms of something to convey through iconoclastic art as informed by past examples, including from other places around the world as informed by an ongoing exchange of media; e.g., Akira Kurosawa’s stamp on the Western genre and pushing back against Orientalist tropes by waging war onscreen in ways that can be honed and cultivated further and further in a proletarian direction by artists like myself (and people that I work with):
(exhibit 27a2a: Top-right and top-and-bottom-left: photos of Akira Kurosawa’s seminal classic, Seven Samurai [1954]—the titular boys themselves and director “leading the charge” into a brave new world; artist, bottom-right: Persephone van der Waard. The American Western [a cryptonym for genocide] inspired Japanese shonen as intensely hyperbolic, romanticized and [eco]fascist [exhibits 17a, 24a, and 104b1/b2]. In turn, Japanese hauntology inspired American media during global conversations that supported or resisted the original, genocidal foundation. My response to Kurosawa operates on a creative, imaginary level [though not always consciously] through my own iconoclastic work; e.g., my take on Baiken, the “samurai warrior mommy,” in a sex-positive manner through liminal expression during opposition praxis flirting with ludo-Gothic BDSM [as this entire volume has done, considering the term wasn’t crystallized and in full production until Volume Two]. She’s sexy and strong in ways that uphold and carry a rebellious sex positivity into the future.)
Reimagining war isn’t hard; it simply requires transforming already-imagined symbols in a linguo-material sense—i.e., to achieve class/cultural consciousness through monstrous poetics being a kind “stabilizing gossip,” a universal “girl-talk” that individuals master, codify and re-release into society and the material world where war is already a popular dialog (allowing for the theatrical interrogation of trauma and disempowerment, of tension and release). Girls talk, especially revolutionaries looking out for each other when threatened by the normalization of physical and sexual violence. We gotta, because there’s so much to teach and so many dangerous, badly educated people out there (especially cis-het men, let’s be frank). Spilling tea isn’t exclusive to or indicative of emotionally fickle, catty bitches (whose over-advertisement by state proponents tone-police and discredit worker legitimacy and concerns); it’s a defense mechanism in response to Capitalism’s own manufactured stupidity and risk-raising/abuse-encouragement mechanisms. To loosely borrow from Akira Kurosawa, Capitalism “made the workers wicked, stupid, foxy beasts! Its ‘samurai’ took workers’ food, land and bodies, and killed them if they tried to resist!” The samurai were a class, and Kurosawa evoked that to hauntologically touch on 1954 class struggles through a complex marriage of Eastern theatre, Japanese chanbara (“sword”) movies and Western cinema.
The subsequent “nuptial’s” class character reshaped how people saw and conceived the Western’s violent, personified interrogation of material conditions (and mercenary wealth redistribution through cutthroat arbitration of local disputes: chivalric reimbursement through class mobility during immobile time periods) in cinematic terms worldwide—one felt through a stream of “Western pastiche” whose dueling swordsmen (the samurai, ronin and ninja from the likes of Ninja Scroll or Blue Eye Samurai, 2023, echoing white and black knights, but also Amazons) and gunfighters (also white/black and Amazonian) as part of ancient military theatre (again kayfabe), but also legendarily strong-and-silent, long-lost heroes hailing from otherworldly times and places: the mixed-worlds quality of Achilles dipped in Styx, being from the world of the living and the land of the dead. Bringing wonderful weapons, but especially bullets and blades—e.g., Excalibur pulled from the depths of the Lady of the Lake, cutting magically through steel—to bear against tremendous, equally eternal adversaries (and hordes of disposable fodder to shoot, cut down or beat up) also divorced from the modern world, both are announced by heavy weather and fierce storms: monstrous assassins, demons, and dire revenge, but also beautiful damsels rescued by warriors, both doubling as detectives during violent displays of courtship—less through gaudy material parades and more through wanton, psychosexual displays of excessive medieval force. Out of that messy frontier justice and its various stages/theatres’ antiquated means of overcoming adversity through vehicular wish fulfilment (and Gothic sense of confused, conflicting emotions), new possible worlds can emerge—the settler colony upheld “as is” or transformed into something new. Something better.
In the spirit of the Gothic, these all combine and shift to produce a complicated, of-two-worlds[5] hauntology spanning decades, genres and continents (and bleeding easily into other mediums; e.g., videogames): the mercenary Magnificent Seven (1960) to The Wild Bunch’s (1969) ultraviolent, deromanticized class character of anti-government cons robbing banks and fighting the crooked, unscrupulous railroad; i.e., activist sentient in a crudely bloodthirsty, “man’s man” narrative whose cutthroat, rebellious nature would reach all the way through the dystopian ’80s cityscape of John Carpenter (Escape from New York, 1981) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to the out-and-out Space Western of the late ’70s onwards: Star Wars, Rogue One (2016) and Andor, but also Shinichiro Watanabe’s Cowboy Bebop (the space Western/space cowboy); but also the “postapocalyptic, Ozzy Western” of Fury Road and George Miller’s own stabs at “perceptive” pastiche through the Western as a thoroughly liminal territory caught between The Wild Bunch and John Ford’s Stage Coach (1939) but also Sergio Leone’s trademark frontier nihilism (and silent nameless heroes) of the “spaghetti Western” (Zeuhl, a person with Communist leanings if not outright conviction, loves spaghetti Westerns—especially Leone’s “The Man with No Name” trilogy).
(exhibit 27a2b: While Watanabe’s, Peckinpah’s, Kurosawa’s, and Lucas’ antiheroes [not Leone’s, so much] are all great warriors that—unlike the evil empire—eventually choose to forget about settling old scores/getting even or rich and instead lay down their lives for a bigger cause, Peckinpah is stuck in a very male-centric drama that “wasn’t quite there, yet.” For him and his war boys, the male drama concerns the finding of emotional intimacy amid the stoic soldiering towards inevitable death, even if said bonding is the rowdy male sort: machismo, bravado, rape jokes and locker room talk, etc.
As we already examined with Ninja Scroll‘s Jubei, hauntology is a common mode of rebellious expression in retro-future language. As such, the likes of samurai, bounty hunters, bandits, and scoundrels share a common thread among the troupes of rag-tag rebels performing them: the necessity of struggle. Desperation forces disparate, hungry peoples to bond in ways their privilege [or its lack] never could. In turn, their actions contribute towards noble-but-doomed resistance composed of smaller acts of daring and unsung courage: counter heists, espionage, sabotage, masquerades, endured medieval torture and humiliation, saloon brawls, war brides, brothel espionage [kiss and tell], bombings [dynamite], assassinations, betrayals, decoys ruses, criminal conspiracies, vandalism/graffiti, scandals, double-crosses/dry gulching and desperate last stands. All happen during asymmetrical warfare whose guerrilla actions depict one losing battle after another during an inglorious-yet-admirable war against the state; i.e., in the sense that a) there’s no glory [“Again, we have lost!”] and the enemy is someone clearly stronger than them, while also b) presenting the Cause as something that requires more than simple victories and fascist bullshit to prevail—in a word, teamwork. That’s what ludo-Gothic BDSM [and brothel espionage] is all about.
Worker solidarity through reclaimed acts of theatrical force build around the unscrupulous acquisition of funds, insofar as the money is either stolen, or earned in ways the state will do its best to regulate: violence, terror and bodily expression, of course, but also the kinds of work that sexualize in relation to these things commonly depicted in Western tropes. According to tradition, men do battle to protect women, but the Western often gives women the ability to fight as men do.
[artist: Alcololi]
Teamwork, then, goes well beyond cis-het manly men, and recruits women, GNC performers and racial/religious minorities into the heist, collectively striking at the state’s propaganda through a shared stage. Doing so is more important than traditional propaganda victories because class/culture war requires subversion far more than simply killing large hordes of enemy soldiers; i.e., Boromir’s piles of dead orcs, Crom counting Conan’s dead, or Peckinpah’s metaphor of scorpions and ants [the Wild Bunch vs the Mexican bandits] little more than extermination rhetoric tied to settler colonialism: Cowboys and Indians [which is merely Capitalism in action: grinding up the useful dead as part of the Military Industrial Complex through the rise and fall (re: Hawthorne) of great heroes, great houses, great enemies and barbarian hordes—over and over in medievalized, superhero kayfabe: “see, kill, take; repeat”].)
As something to live under through canonical and iconoclastic depictions alike, Capitalism threatens to explode into war at all times. This yields a variety of feminist clichés: “Us girls gotta stick together.” Girl power. Empowered “womaning.” However, as we’ve already determined, the Gothic is full of clichés and symbols of war prior to the Western. Moreover, these fetishes are actually historical-material clues to deeper systemic issues begot from women’s unpaid and exploited roles in society as hopelessly tied to war mentalities furthered by canon. Capitalism historically-materially turns women (and minorities) into unpaid servants, governesses and conjugal “mothers” who need to marry up. However ignominious, hypergamy becomes a means of survival through denied material advantage. Often, the wives’ husbands are soldiers or paramilitaries who abuse them far more than any faraway foe.
In turn, the state teaches men not to learn from women/”non-men” and their pedagogy of the oppressed. Rather, male workers are expected to “sow their wild oats,” then marry out (exogamy). Marrying up for men is considered an insult, but one nevertheless canonized by the mythical pile of widow’s gold (e.g., The Duchess of Malfi or Portia from The Merchant of Venice): the man swallowing his pride to steal possibly the only exception to women historically owning property in Western canon before the 19th century. Meanwhile, the canonical wars of the bourgeoisie guarantee that many boys grow up stupid and fatherless, feeling deprived of anyone who can actually advise them amid glacial shifts towards the Left in terms of socio-material conditions: Young men think feelings are “gay” thus don’t share them; they also can’t wipe their own asses and girls, in their eyes, are from Venus (misogyny is equally cliché, you dorks).
Societal “health,” then, amounts to a cultural awareness linked with iconoclastic movements, the emotional state-of-affairs determining how often systemic issues are brought to light by whistleblowers who, let it be said, are often female/GNC, especially regarding domestic/sexual abuse that men historically refuse[6] to talk about. A common example of this is the witch, a victim of state violence during the early formation of Capitalism and nation-states; her current persecution stems from ancient forms of hysteria that survive in hauntological forms the state cannot fully monopolize. This means terror, violence and bodily expression become ours for the taking—can be used by us in sex-positive lessons to challenge state fear and dogma with through extracurricular forms of solidarized labor between two-or-more laborers; e.g., Dani Is Online and myself partaking in a bit of counterterrorist expression, taking a moment post-negotiation (and payment) to appreciate the witch as a sex-positive, countercultural icon appreciating but also liberating another oppressed group in the process: fat people as harvested under Cartesian models (which the end of the final symposium section will explore even further).
(exhibit 28: Model and artist, top-middle: Dani Is Online and Persephone van der Waard; everything else: Dani Is Online. Art is a relationship between various artists interacting over space and time. While Dani makes their own content, we’ve also collaborated before; they’re also aware of my book, what it stands for and were perfectly happy to exchange services for posing in its pages [sex work for payment as negotiated by both parties]. The drawing collab that Dani and I did together [top-middle] is referenced from a sexting session nude repurposed for this book [top-right]. As such, my labor seeks to appreciate Dani as they are, and as someone I appreciate who has serviced me in the past. It is this pointed combination of person, body and labor that I wish to honor through Dani by highlighting them as they are: big, beautiful and gender-non-conforming during holistic liberation from Cartesian shackles. Through ludo-Gothic BDSM, I connect their body to paganized groups that would celebrate their fatness as something to preserve, not alienate, fetishize and harvest it for profit.)
Women, GNC persons, and racial/religious minorities make up the unified front of Gothic Communism. As such, they must gossip together using constructive anger and campy monsters; i.e., steering the public imagination away from Capitalist Realism and its manufactured scarcities, conflict and consent (and other trifectas), as well as patriarchal institutions of war perpetuated inside Cartesian models of domination. This rerouting happens in theatrical forms that “lead the charge” with Gothic poetics into a brave new world; e.g., the various Amazons examined in Volume Zero (exhibits 1a1b and 1a1a3) and Amazon warrior moms in Volume One (exhibit 8b2), as well as natured-themed auteurs like O’Keefe, Landau and others (exhibits 24c1, c2, and d1) making these creations, of which many more types will also be explored in Volumes Two and Three: magic girls/military tomboys (e.g., Sailor Moon, 1991, exhibit 56b; and Revolutionary Girl Utena, 1999, exhibit 55b) and kittens-with-claws (exhibit 91a1; also, below). Variable cosmetics aside, all share a common goal: to encourage the active absorption and embodiment of iconoclastic attitudes during praxial synthesis/de facto education reclaiming workers’ connections to themselves and the natural world as collectively brutalized by Capitalism for centuries. The only way to prevent this is face one’s trauma by fighting back through repurposed instruments thereof:
(artist: Zillabean)
Mid-fight, such a social-sexual “osmosis” should encourage enhanced self-reflection regarding the imaginary past as currently existing in the present: row after row of monsters to study and communicate with in canonical and iconoclastic forms. We have so much to teach about and teach with—oral traditions[7] and Gothic “oldwives’ tales,” but also the Humanities and sex work more broadly (and yes, even the STEM fields, though I think they’re hella sexist; but that’s not the majority of women’s fault nor queer people or other minorities).
Cis-het/token cis-queer men—and especially white men—on the other hand, have so much to learn about a great many things! To be fair, class warriors and allies can earn from each other while cultivating new habits, but the fact remains: the vast majority of domestic murders, rapes, and murder-suicides—as stated during the thesis volume—are committed overwhelmingly by white cis-het men against oppressed groups (which under the heteronormative model are predominantly white cis-het women as visible victims). Men, simply put, can be allies to Gothic Communism if they want, but do not need to join in order to experience systemic privilege as they already do. However, if they actually want to be chosen by liberated sex workers in control of their own bodies and sexual labor—to get laid, in other words, but also enjoy the perks of friendship and comraderie, mid-struggle—men (and other Man Box proponents) gotta start relying on things other than what the system offers. They have to learn from unusual, unused, and forgotten sources—from women or beings perceived as women, but also from sex workers and their unique ties to labor/nature (their bodies, their genders and sexualities, etc) and the Wisdom of the Ancients, which men under Capitalism/Cartesian dualism historically-materially tend to lack/police in stupid, harmful ways.
Working against the state and its proponents, revolutionary workers must achieve praxial synthesis in their own social-sex lives, their own creative spheres; they must engage with the trauma of war as something to face and perform, interrogating power in highly liminal thus playful ways. As such, women, queer people and other minorities must embody proletarian praxis holistically—if not a universal appeal by default, then a universal adaptability (re: Zizek) expressed in modular parts that appeal collectively to different educational and cultural backgrounds, but also what numerous peoples can collectively understand: an end to worker exploitation through commonly consumed theatrics/Gothic poetics. Uncompelled solidarity is the point, allowing emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers to “get together” in revolutionary and peaceful (non-warlike) terms across generations, but who will “go to war” if needed in defense of the oppressed—e.g., my great grandmother wanting all her children to be educated; my grandmother going to college to find a husband (and get a degree); my mom going to college; all of them encouraging me to write, create and be myself; and me writing Sex Positivity to culminate all of that in a Gothic-Communist capstone inspired by older generations of artists with a progressive bent. It’s not just a start, but one of many in the legion of “uppity” women and queer folk who came before, but also our cis-het male allies who gave us room to speak!
For example, Ridley Scott is someone we have discussed (and will continue to discuss; re: “Making Demons” and “Dissecting Radcliffe“) repeatedly throughout the book. His feminist, 20th/21st century Gothic was inspired by his mother as an exceptional authority figure in his life:
Scott attributes his no-nonsense temperament to his mother, Elizabeth, who shouldered much of the parenting for Scott and his two brothers while their father, an army engineer, worked. During World War II, it was Elizabeth who shuffled the boys to shelter under a steel table in the kitchen as bombs rained down on their home in Northeast England during the Newcastle Blitz. Her parenting style was to say, “Get out in the fields, come back at 5, and do not fall in the sea,” Scott says. “She was hard-core. She should have been in business. I could see it, as the three boys got older and there was less for her to do, she became frustrated.”
Scott’s mother’s character is also to thank, he says, for one of the signatures of his career, an extraordinary number of dynamic and groundbreaking female roles, starting with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien in 1979, and also including Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise in 1991 and, this year, Gaga in House of Gucci and Comer in The Last Duel. “Thelma & Louise had a massive impact on me when I was younger,” Gaga says. “Linking all of his films together, it’s clear that Ridley cares about the life of the woman. What he really devours as a filmmaker is this idea that we [women] are complicated and complex figures” (source: Ryan Pfluger’s “What Ridley Scott Has Learned: ‘We Don’t Know S***,'” 2022).
In turn, girl talk and its pacifist social cues and monstrous/campy body language historically come from genderqueer women (and gay, effeminate men; e.g., Walpole and Lewis) as teachers of men (and themselves) through the Gothic mode. Simply put, “girls talk” is a descriptive statement of potential rebellion when leveled against the state and its patriarchal war machines, propaganda included. Moreover, workers learn how to behave politely from their mothers, girlfriends, sisters, and aunts’ instruction when processing trauma; from Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, or Mary Shelley, etc (though none of these women are far from perfect and can be expanded upon, as we have shown).
Obviously, there are exceptions. Plenty of abusive/tokenized women exist. But likewise, these are informed by trauma as a transgenerational curse that we commonly inherit from the past. Gold-diggers, cheaters, black widows, religious zealots, TERFs, etc—all extend from the state as universally abusive towards women and children, but also boys (as well as women and minorities) taught how to act “like men”; i.e., Man Box/the “prison sex” mentality as an invitation to rape and abuse through heteronormative models. The princess is traded like chattel, then born and bred through cycles of rape during the Pygmalion fantasy pimping Galatea from cradle to grave, on and on…
(artist: Vasiliy Polenov)
Before we segue into rape culture as a taught mechanism that can be challenged by the synthesis of sex-positive educational devices (e.g., rape play) from good-faith actors, I’d like to quickly examine (for a page) the double standard present within state education that sex-positive instruction must challenge: the image of women as naturally weak and providing but also brides to give away and breed like dogs. To this, state abuse fosters the treacherous myth that “all women” are “natural caregivers,” while animalizing them in ways detrimental to all parties involved. Except girls don’t just fart, burp, spit and shit like the boys do; they cheat, lie and harm others—e.g., working people to death, then lying about it (exhibit 26, Erica vs Uncle Dave). Because of the double standard, though, they generally enjoy less systemic privilege that working-class men have had for centuries; e.g., the euthanasia effect, wherein so-called “bitches” are collared or “put down” far sooner than male agents. To that, TERFs and the LGBA are a more recent[8] example of tokenism, emerging in the late 2010s to shift the state of the exception—the Medusa as an ancient female punching bag—less onto some cis women and more onto GNC groups; e.g., the xenomorph as a second-wave feminist symbol of trans misogyny (which we’ll examine more in Volume Two when camping it).
Just as cheating can be meaningless and shallow or incredibly intense, so can healthy relationships and ludo-Gothic BDSM (which can be negotiated to operate along any of these wavelengths). All extend from Capitalism encouraging heteronormative behaviors through canonical praxis: expected gender behaviors that funnel workers into war-time mentalities. Conversely, proletarian praxis is antiwar during class and culture war as teaching opportunities that seek to antiquate war by hammering swords into ploughshares. This requires open communication that comes from honesty, trust, and negotiated boundaries developed independently of the state/vertical power as something to develop away from through praxial synthesis. Development extends towards all peoples, without double standards or token minorities beholden to patriarchal forces; e.g., soldiers, or even female astronauts playing second fiddle (Dreading’s “The Ridiculous Case of Lisa Nowak,” 2023). This pedagogy of the oppressed includes men listening to women instead of speaking for them/down to them about abuses women experience or see themselves that men usually do not; i.e., “I never saw anything like that. Therefore you must have been imagining things!”
Whether through neglect, ignorance, or scorn, second-hand abuse is still abuse. Whether from workers, management or the elite, first-hand abusers rely on community abuse to continue their acts of unchecked, predatory cruelty at a systemic level; i.e., second-hand abusers normalize first-hand abusers, creating Gothic trauma markers that condition Pavlovian harm between them. Simply put, war normalizes menticide—a rape of the natural and material worlds by canonical praxis as a form of prescribed power abuse. And where there is war among and towards the chattelized and alien, there will likewise be rape of them, too. Both go hand-in-hand while Capitalism divorces us from nature.
Now that we’ve examined war through the synthesis of iconoclastic art that fosters emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness in the face of canonical media, let’s examine the other side of that terrible coin—rape culture—and try to subvert it through the basics of oppositional synthesis relayed through trauma writing and transgressive art; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM camping rape culture through monster sex per the cryptonymy process during moral panics (re: “Furry Panic“):
(artist: Owusyr)
Like the Nazi and Communist, exploitation and liberation exist poetically in the same spaces, onstage and off. Medusa can’t be killed because the state demands she be revived and raped/reaped in perpetuity to serve profit; the state cannot die because labor—if lax in its application of development—can always decay towards state models and Cartesian thought’s rape culture. All we can do is drain the state of its power and transform it (and the world around us) in something that actively and systemically keeps the bourgeoisie (and their Shadow of Pygmalion/Cycle of Kings) from coming back!
Onto “A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in Rape Culture“!
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] A feeling, I should note, is felt most strongly by colonizing forces when Imperialism comes home to empire; i.e., the roosting of alien, undead chickens on the homefront.
[2] E.g., an unused idea from the original script for Alien had Ash the android asking the crew if they ever tried talking to the monster instead of, you know, just assuming it was hostile and trying to kill it. When this anecdote came up in the 2003 actor’s commentary track for the movie, Harry Dean Stanton testily asks Veronica Cartwright, “What the fuck would we say to it?” He’s not wrong in that dialogs between alienated groups are often confusing and tense; but Cartwright’s insistence of a dialog is still required to bridge the gap.
[3] “Worried that a skeptical public was turning against rampant nuclear testing, [Heinlein] and his wife Virginia ran an ad in newspapers around the country supporting the military and inveighing against communism. They also wrote letters and organized meetings. The group accused opponents of nuclear testing of being not just wrong, but part of a communist plot” (source: David Forbes’ “The Secret Authoritarian History of Science Fiction” (2015).
[4] Between 1933 and 1934, Heinlein served on the USS Roper and earned the rank of lieutenant. After surviving tuberculosis and chronic seasickness, he was given early retirement in 1934″ (source: Famous Veteran: Robert A. Heinlein,” 2013).
[5] Re: Walpole’s Ancient Romance and modern novel married through the Neo-Gothic castle space.
[6] Excepting male whistleblowers, who as our thesis argued often have a military/state background; e.g., Edward Snowden, candidly swapping antiwar rhetoric on Substack with Vietnam war iconoclast, Daniel Ellsberg (2021). While I can’t speak for Ellsberg in this respect, Snowden himself always gave off slight twink vibes—i.e., described in his 2019 autobiography, Permanent Record, as moving away from a fighting-youth mentality and boot camp physique to expose the entire NSA. Quite the act of courage, I think; to be against war is to be against the state, making antiwar sentiment a thought crime/sin under Capitalism.
[7] The ancient rhetors were fabled to have legendary memories; e.g., Plato in Phaedrus (c. 347-399 BC) citing technology as the death of oral memory through written communication: “In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing” (source: “Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing,” 2023). Oral traditions matter because they contain what is often unwritten (concerning culture and trauma) while also being harder to police by state forces (word of mouth); but Plato’s argument remains antiquated: Writing is not something that should be discounted, for it is where the battle for middle-class hearts are minds are fought when giving monsters shape in the material world.
[8] Tokenism has lain with the state for the entirety of its existence, but reshapes according to state dogma as something that transforms itself to disguise (or valorize) the profit motive; e.g., recruiting from queer bodies to police themselves and other groups.