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.

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“Predators and Prey”: Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM; Its Bodily Psychosexual Expression and Campy Gothic Origins Stemming from Horace Walpole onwards

I wanna fuck you like an animal
I wanna feel you from the inside
I wanna fuck you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed (source)

—Trent Reznor; “Closer,” on Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral (1994)

Picking up where “‘Revolutionary Cryptonymy’ opening, and ‘Predators and Prey’ part one” left off…

The desire for a parental/protector role (and settlement) is not lost during dialectical-material struggles, especially under dreamlike but also playful conditions; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM, where power is something to interrogate and reify in ways for which we are not always master (the nightmare being the classic source of inspiration for many-a-Gothic-castle). All the same, as much as one might desire a big-strong protector or warrior “parent,” the fact remains that many animals (and their warrior positions) are hunted under capital’s settler-colonial practices and structures. A common means of negotiating and one day escaping this captive reality—and one this section of the subchapter will explore—is through prey mechanisms during ludo-Gothic BDSM: a playful willingness to camp canon with game-like Gothic poetics, but especially monstrous, painful, unequal forms of power exchange (demon BDSM[1]) that check Vitruvian, European body standards, policies and (for the focus of this subchapter) animalized stigmas; re: policing nature as alien with nature as alien (e.g., subjugated Amazons), which must be reclaimed during ludo-Gothic BDSM enacting revolutionary cryptonymy—to legitimize through what is abject, therefore canonically illegitimate (while bewaring of token Amazons punching the Gorgon; re: Autumn Ivy).

Note: This section represents a point of reflection after writing my PhD, hence coining “ludo-Gothic BDSM.” I would go on to apply ludo-Gothic BDSM much more actively in Volume Two’s Poetry Module, onwards, but here in “Uphill Battle” and its various essays like “Prey as Liberators” was already starting to reflect on the idea and apply it holistically. —Perse, 4/7/2025

I coined “ludo-Gothic BDSM” in my thesis—specifically in theory during “The Quest for Power” and prototypically in practice during the “camp map” finale with Blxxd Bunny—but the idea of practicing it is not exactly new. “Demon BDSM” reflects on many torturous devices penned by Ann Radcliffe (re: “The Roots of Camp“), and heteronormative conditions at large have been camped in a very gay way since Horace Walpole’s Gothic castle (Shakespeare toyed with such ideas, but Walpole coined “Gothic” as it’s currently understood so we’re going with him). Unlike James Cameron, who canonized Gothic peril in favor of familial dimorphism, campy monsters—through nakedly exposed, neo-medieval forms—become something to get closer to through rape play/informed consent that subvert heteronormative standards by “making it gay”; i.e., through various forms of palliative-Numinous, torture-dungeon theatre that address modern-day anxieties felt living within (or near) the state: like a captive, thus hunted, animal inside a castle-like home’s fatal nostalgia and complicated social-sexual education.

To remind people where we’re headed, part two of “Predators and Prey” examines animalistic morphological expression in the shadow of state monopolies and where we can go to subvert them: by building our own Walpolean castles to challenge those built by the state—which the next subchapter will examine, vis-à-vis Tolkien’s unironic Gothic spaces, torture devices and vampires either divorced from nature or destructive to proper forms of the “natural” world; i.e., in a very Christian, manicured sense; e.g., the Garden of Eden. After that subchapter looks at Tolkien’s coercive undead (and their haunts), we’ll consider the broader stupefying effects we’ll need to take into account when dealing with workers who may or may not assist us when fashioning castle-like dialogs out of the Gothic-Communist theories we’ve handled thus far in the manifesto; i.e., dealing with vampires (or rather vampiric weird canonical nerds) who might just as quickly suck us dry for the state as help free its teeth from ’round our throats when these theories are put to practice.

Before the “Prey” section examines camping prey-like morphological expression, I want to give a brief, ten-page note about morphology as it exists inside a Gothic castle’s nostalgia and psychosexual education; i.e., as it pertains to such “game” to begin with—the hunted quarry and their cunning ability to playfully outwit the predator pursuing them. That is, such places often canonically instruct predators to target the human body as policed and forbidden, including its prey-like morphological expression in Gothic forms (monsters and “peril”); chased after and forcefully bred for being alien (and feeling alien because of it), receivers of psychosexual violence must escape while confronting aspects of themselves that are not only animalized, but forced to intersect with fears of unironic violence that—for them—may have already collided in the past. Pleasure and harm synonymize.

The canonical Gothic space, then, is a place of institutional violence, forcing its inhabitants to act as givers and receivers of state violence who receive and embody feelings of self-hatred and self-persecution from their dangerous surroundings. Like trained animals, they become conditioned to accept these harmful positions, thus must challenge them by subverting their coded, Pavlovian instructions in ways unique to humans that nevertheless look and sound animalistic. They must fetishize the sense of feeling alien/monstrous in ways that playfully reclaim their agency during calculated risks; i.e., playful maneuvers that pointedly remove the spontaneous, uncontrolled qualities (and actual harm) from “hunting” scenarios—of suddenly being attacked without warning inside one’s habitat in ways that normally happen to historically abused groups (e.g., women, or those perceived as or treated like women, are far more likely to be raped than men are)—while also teaching would-be abusers to see them as human and as beings connected to nature who are constantly defined by human customs and complex, contested linguo-material devices from moment to living moment: our holes, roles, and psychosexual predicaments as things to play with, thus camp, using Gothic poetics during liminal expression (the devil and the angel, the thinking animal, the “helpless” actor topping from the bottom, etc).

(exhibit 9b0: Artist: Puk Puk. Rape anxiety relates to female bodies as simultaneously doll-like, animalistic, and undead/demonic, but also male bodies and heteronormative expression at large as having far-reaching and long-standing effects on morphological expression tied to psychosexual rituals; i.e., those that deal with the Gothic notion of inheritance anxiety that stems from being born into a space rife with constant historical reminders of dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites [re: Bakhtin] but also imaginary examples tied to a fearful imaginary past that comments on the present; e.g., the fear of being raped or otherwise controlled in ways that chattelize oneself as prey to serve the patriarch, the household, the state; i.e., through compelled sexual labor as harming the giver and receiver of work conflated with sexual violence and a continuation of a dangerous sovereign’s bloodline: “breeding rituals” performed between predators and prey in the same unhealthy arrangement.

[artist: Puk Puk]

These become things to camp, opening up a variety of silly counter possibilities to the state’s usual bullshit. For example, not only is it possible to be “bred” without a uterus [as Bay tells me and which I know from experience with Zeuhl, who had a hysterectomy] insofar as the act is a performance, but the parties involved can box up their trauma and play with it inside safe spaces that allow for rape play to be had without fear of confusion or harm [while not fixating on physical violence; e.g., Silent Hill‘s Pyramid Head, Fear and Hunger‘s (2018) rapacious, openly phallic monsters and bodily dismemberment]. In short, we can laugh at things that would be triggering except for the campy context granting them an ironically medicinal quality—to play and relieve stress by imperfectly recreating a silly act of “misfortune.”

The paradox of reclaiming one’s power, then, lies in how it is canonically framed as disempowering inside highly traumatic dialogs where power abuse and resistance to power abuse occupy the same theatrical, and at times very silly, space. As our thesis argued, “camping the canon” by “making it gay” camps the Gothic castle as an operatic, psychosexual “‘rape’ space”—one where the language of animalistic heraldry/war and conquest intersect with class/culture war to double unironic, abusive forms; e.g., “rape,” of course, but also, the castle being “razed,” the maidens “conquered,” the boys “put to the sword,” etc, etc. Such playfulness grants both a potent means of interrogating trauma, and a sense of agency to those normally subdued by canonical threats of force: reclaiming their labor power through subversive mechanisms that allow us to question the fatal nostalgia of a traumatic, imaginary past during revolutionary cryptonomy as a daily event. In turn, state monopolies are challenged by parodic, counterterrorist forms, their ludo-Gothic BDSM designed to weaken the state’s reign of violence, terror and hellish morphological expression in ways that reeducate workers; i.e., by teaching them to be sex-positive during Gothic-Communist development: changing socio-material[2] conditions with demon BDSM, thus camping and recultivating the twin trees of Capitalism—the Base and Superstructure—during oppositional praxis, including its synthesis and catharsis.)

This liminality—and its reclamatory performances contesting state domination through revolutionary cryptonymy—is a very complicated concept we’ll only introduce here; we’ll unpack it far more extensively in Volume Two (which is devoted entirely to humanizing and reclaiming monsters). For now, just remember that state monopolies on violence and terror—and ultimately on hellish expression at large—concern morphological expression linked to the home as simultaneously one’s place of conditioning rooted in fears about animals, the medieval, nature and sexual reproduction as canonized in hauntological forms; i.e., whose bondage enforces total, harmful submission by fearing nature, versus the ability to educate playful, healing forms of psychosexual “duress” that allow for discipline and restraint as conscious, informed acts in animalistic language. We can tie each other up and respect the rights of others (and animals as a whole) while confronting generational trauma; or, likewise, can navigate animal feelings of forbidden desire (outweighing a clear head and common sense) when capital constrains us in prey-like ways. In short, we can alter the curriculum in extracurricular ways, learning to work as a team and meet each other’s needs while limiting and eventually diminishing the state’s capacity to harm us through taught behaviors; i.e., from our own iconoclastic art as a subversive, Romantic[3] means of de facto education that  reclaims Gothic poetics and liberates workers from Capitalism with the same pedagogy of the oppressed as both outrageously over-the-top and as serious as a heart attack.

(artist: Droog)

Confusion is a cycle under capital, so it behooves us to learn how to dialectically-materially navigate the lands (and bodies) of confusion, but also menace (thieves, banditti and desperados), superstition (curses and ghosts), buried trauma, forbidden knowledge (demons), dogma, disorder, complicated excitement and psychosexual pleasure, etc, as torn between ourselves (workers) and our masters (the state). Their desire to rape then prey on our minds (then our bodies) requires we act unpredictable when using the same theatrical devices[4] ourselves; i.e, as masks that paradoxically give us away and conceal/reflect our revolutionary aims in splendid ways. In other words, while the Trojan Horse was gigantic, the Trojan Bunny (from Monty Python, left) was silly and ironic in ways befitting a splendide mendax but nevertheless suspended between bourgeois and proletarian usages:

To varying degrees, we’ve already been exiled, outlawed, and shamed by the state, so it behooves us to grow accustomed to playing with chaos, fear and taboos in ways that suit us by describing our lived realities; i.e., as nightmarishly imperiled by fatal nostalgia, its haunted pastiche/endless, echoing copies (cryptomimesis) enjoyed by humans during the calculated risk of operatic parallel spaces (the danger disco) that—when retreated into—promise half-hidden threats and otherworldly delights.

(source)

These are at odds within/at home with class and culture war as waged for the state during moral panics. For the elite and their helpers, monsters and lairs are the ghost of the counterfeit—a thing to summon and explain away in unironic Gothic pleasures; for us, the imaginary past is a weapon to pit against the Imperial Core. As something that periodically “returns,” the Gothic castle is a site of animal expression, but also confusion, isolation, alienation and ambiguous danger and excitement as a natural part of the human condition within capital’s material factors.

Apart from the exhibits of morphological variety that appear in the next handful of pages, I want to spend the remainder of this subchapter stressing how performances inside the shadow zone take on a predator/prey arrangement with visibly animalized forms that cannot be avoided, only subverted and transformed when the state-in-crisis and -decay tries to weaponize our confusion and monstrous labor against us. I also want to consider how would-be places of curiosity like human genitals and their reproductive, but also erogenous functions—so-called “private parts” relegated to the bedroom (vis-à-vis Foucault)—are intensely secret, exclusive and chased after under highly uneven and coercive social-sexual arrangements; and finally I want to explore Walpole’s castle as a camping ground of the European family unit that we can learn from when challenging canonical forces ourselves. In dimorphic, familial terms, the husband (or those groomed to play such a part) would be expected to do their duty as head of the household; conversely the receiver of this unfair bargain would also have their own part to play—wifely duties, also known as “paying rent,” which in liminal territories, comes with a fair amount of fakery and performance, but also fetishized costumes and kinky roles:

(artist: Puk Puk)

That is, performance and play conduct themselves according to honest threats, but also the generation of “threats” during calculated risks that allow the aggrieved party to confront past trauma as living within and around them in the present space and time. This includes facing fears of wifely duties as animalized: “paying rent,” and being “bred,” as part of that systematically disparate equation meant to prey upon subjugated workers; i.e., bride price. Not only is there a curiosity to face the fear as something promised to one in relation to their body as animalized, but also a desire to reclaim these characteristics in ways that transform the structure’s predatory nostalgia and education to serve future worker needs (and those of nature in association with them). To alter canonical historical materialism, one’s body is explored according to a monstrous canonical role inside a fatal structure that needs to change lest unironic harm persist; and said structure will defend itself against revolutionary cryptonymy in complicit forms. All the while, camp’s morphology of monsters is a warzone fighting to describe those actors (and animals) most challenged by state counterfeits (the latter envisioned by very scared/angry[5] heteronormative people):

(exhibit 9b1: Artist: Xuu. Gyno/androdiversity includes gynodimorphism, which uses anthropomorphic biology to divorce human gender roles from strictly human bodies; i.e., to treat human genitals, gender and sexuality as highly malleable and xenophilic—fetishizing the alien in a sex-positive, non-predatory way that likewise reduces the state’s ability to criminalize, thus prey upon, such unironic variants, mid-struggle. We’ll examine the social-sexual qualities of anthropomorphism [and the drug-like, chaotic bodies of Giger-esque chimeras; i.e., monomorphism and Acid Communism; e.g., phallic women/Archaic Mothers, exhibit 1a1c; re: “Symposium: Aftercare“] much more in Volume Two.

Also, while our focus will remain on humanoid bodies with mostly symmetrical, if not expressly Vitruvian components, it’s worth noting that asymmetrical and “cluster bodies” flirt with plurality and native, physically descriptive and divergent embodiments faced with colonial struggles; e.g., Light Years‘ [1988] dark-skinned Deformed having multiple heads and limbs, but also a lack of various pieces that are nevertheless informed by a classical monster framework: akephaloi, or “the headless ones.” It also could be an Indigenous, guerrilla, acephalous challenge to the danger of a centralized, Cartesian mind fascistically praying on nature from the future; i.e., a decapitation of the European model of genocide as an endless, predatory cycle repeating itself in relation to capital/scientific exploitation. Its fatal historical materialism is built on mad science vampirically serving the profit motive as capital defends itself, scapegoating decadence and “degeneracy” in a cyclical holocaust.

[artist: Bokuman, commissioned by me to draw the hero and princess of the film]

As the ghost of the counterfeit, Light Years is essentially a Gothic nightmare about scientific overreach with fascist results: a giant, patriarchal brain-in-a-jar that eventually goes mad, builds a time machine and ruthlessly preys upon local, native populations in the past. These natives are already abused by a moderately matriarchal, Amazonian society who—faced with the armies of the brain they designed—send a white savior away from shelter and safety to overthrow the tyrant during the typical monomyth gauntlet and its rewards: animal-alien friends “relegated to the underworld,” whose reverse abjection helps prevent the genocidal cycle; but also the princess [above] whose definitive moment amounts to passively loving the hero.)

(artist: Bay)

Fantastical signatures notwithstanding, art (and especially Gothic art) frequently expresses real bodies that deviate from the Vitruvian standard; as punishment, said bodies (and their associate cultural value/attachments; e.g., Bay and his gynodiverse labia, but also consistent, palliative drug use) are controlled, eclipsed and destroyed, but also fetishized, mid-exploitation, by Cartesian forces tied to various power centers—castles and their recursive genocides’ grim harvesting of the systemically vulnerable. In Gothic terms, castles are animalistic sites of captivity and danger with a dynastic, hereditary bent (the chronotope); re: the lover, villain, parent and protector all occupy the same uncomfortable living space. The same applies to ontological spaces—one’s body as animalistic in ways that don’t endorse, thus resist, state abuse when the unironic (non-Walpolean) castle appears (and with it, the liminal hauntology of war). Heteronormative language outlaws and fetishizes sex-positive animal demons like the ones already shown. In so-called “correct” spheres, there is only white, cis-het men and women, and women exist purely to please men; indeed, sexist men “need” subservient, cis-het women in order to prove themselves (specifically their manhoods) by having PIV sex as an animal act. Men hate and desire women in this respect, seeing the answer “no” as standing in their way to individuation and success. To overcome their childish and unnecessary fears of dying a virgin, the pussy becomes something for men to “slay” according to a mythic gradient; i.e., stemming from Grendel and Grendel’s mother as beings to rape in relation to nature-as-alien, but also identify in more seemingly human forms and behaviors that retain an animalistic stamp through Gothic poetics; re: “animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms.”

In a Gothic-Communist sense, then, overriding state mechanisms to change socio-material conditions becomes a team effort—something out of an animal parable that updates easily enough to the present space and time:

(artist: Secondlina)

This concludes our preliminary examination of Gothic morphologies, relevant to our Gothic-Communist camping of them. I want to use the rest of “Prey” to consider this chattelization as camp through ludo-Gothic BDSM, and monstrous (demon) BDSM operating as a complex, paradoxical dialog of psychosexual torture exacted for different purposes during oppositional praxis. We’ll look at their role as part of a larger aesthetic (exhibit 9b2) that either fits within European, heteronormative beauty standards/myths (exhibit 10a), or camps them (exhibit 10b2, 10b2 and 10c1).

This, I will argue, comes from the style of Horace Walpole as located in fearsome, genderqueer doubles of the European castle that invite nightmarishly illuminating-if-troublesome comparisons between the two (from my thesis): “Doubling is the black mirror in action; its confused reflections invite troubling-but-useful comparisons to alien, unhomely things (unheimlich), showing less about how we’re different from the things we abject, and more how we’re similar (albeit in discomfiting ways)” (source).

The castle, for instance, shows similarities but also potential differences (transformation/death omens) regarding home and homebodies amid imposturous, otherworldly chaos, phobias, uncertainty and change; i.e., “bad,” imperfectly decayed fakeries that don’t further the process of abjection, instead updated for modern forms of Gothic politique that, while Walpole would have admittedly been lost on, still apply his concepts in a monstrous, ludo-Gothic BDSM, dreamlike fashion: “fur fags” (exhibit 10a2) portending the death of the state within disturbed thresholds and surfaces complicated by the context of struggle whose shared aesthetic feels invaded, but also occupied by ill will that cannot neatly be divided into clean, discrete categories. The phenomenology (experience) of emotional turmoil is the code not just to decipher but speak with as a message unto itself, relayed inside a parallel space capable of intense (re)education.

The Gothic castle, then, is the mind and house as intertwined and infused with sickness—an unheimlich (“unhomely”) site of inhabited destruction, superstition, phobias, taboos, medieval psychology (demonic emotions and psychomachy) and moral panic (stigmas and bias) that can not only change hands, but ownership and function in ways that demonstrably help workers who feel uncertain about their surroundings and familiar/familial elements; i.e., to unspeakable, repressed degrees that are, themselves, tied to immense locational trauma; e.g., the mother from The Babadook (2014, above) half-secretly wanting to kill her son despite her presumed protector role. Said position is invaded and shared by buried trauma tied to the home as occupied by unconfronted psychosexual forces: objects of the household overpowering the minds of the inhabitants in ways not strictly dissimilar to a demonic possession, nightmare or curse. Mother and murderer synonymize, doubling inside one person as neither one nor the other but both at the same time oscillating in a state of agitated confusion. Conflicts like these are inevitable in such places; if you don’t confront them, you’ll kill the next in line!

Like Radcliffe, such nightmares are felt while awake, becoming something to confront and confirm as being genuine or false, harmful or safe; unlike Radcliffe, we want to weaponize it against the state in ways that escape their monopolized cycle of harm (versus “punching the mirror” and effectively ourselves as scapegoated “destroyers” blamed for the “fall” of civilization). Like The Babadook, generational trauma becomes something to ultimately face, accept, and live with—to paradoxically befriend. Just as the Babadook’s red book appears like magic, followed by doubt and nightmares that weave spells of moribund uncertainty regarding our place in the world, we can call upon the animalistic, psychosexual powers of the Gothic castle to terrify our enemies with: the state doesn’t own those, and the mere fact that the home is a giant, endless graveyard needn’t disempower us. We can paint our complicated, half-real experiences, thus giving them shape/a healing[6] voice to speak out regarding our inherited confusions, injuries and insignias.

For workers, the ritualized, animalistic trauma common to BDSM becomes a historical-material offshoot of state abuse, one that involves women (or effeminate/emasculated persons). Instead of treating sex as an unpleasant task, they can cathartically reify then seek out psychosexual, xenophilic pleasure and pain, hence adjust to the fact that they were once denied control by an abusive partner (or false protector of some kind or another) chattelizing them in animal-like ways (which, like a Gothic castle, haunts them in cartoonish forms they at least partially have some control over).

The fact remains that impotency and pain unto itself can be an immensely pleasurable experience. Likewise, the ritualized aesthetics of giving and receiving pain within animalistic dialogs doesn’t demand costumes that look like actual animals, but instead function in the manner to which animals are treated under human relations of unequal power exchange: the (to paraphrase my thesis) dog as heroic and obedient, the cat as “catty” and feminine, the rabbit as pagan and fertile, and all of them being combined with various stigmatized species during anthropomorphism; i.e., as a pedagogy of the oppressed with BDSM components of sexual healing that serve as asexual forms of public nudism to confront and interrogate heteronormative, settler-colonial trauma and its usual actors embodied by fantastical cops: knights, Amazons, and the various animalistic qualities they are recognized, celebrated and feared for during Gothic nostalgia.

(artist: Junji Ito)

In the same vein, there is a campy element to reclamation per ludo-Gothic BDSM—to say one’s body and holes are one’s own, but nevertheless tied up in heterosexual enforcement trapping one inside a body-shaped prison made for you. These liminal sensations become medicinal insofar as they can be evoked as profoundly badass/awesome; re: the palliative Numinous as discussed in Volume Zero and other kinds of calculated, psychosexual risk/informed consent. Embodiments of the Numinous and psychosexuality are ubiquitous in Western culture: the sadist, the masochist, as Gothic. Such implements aren’t entirely sex-coercive/Cartesian, allowing the performers (and their bodies) to express complicated expressions of sexual power/trauma and healing wrapped up on the same surface; i.e., in the same thresholds, using the same dark aesthetics tied to an imaginary past where one’s exact position (and animal role) is not entirely certain, but is heavily commodified during liminal expression under capital as a means of survival:

(exhibit 9b2: Artist: UrEvilMommy. The aesthetics of pleasure and pain [which can be pleasurable]—but also good and evil, freedom and bondage—often elide in Gothic media as fetishizing the woman-in-black for cross purposes; i.e., a “killer rabbit” [exhibit 100a5; re: Volume Three] phenomenon that predates Sontag’s dissection of the Hugo Boss uniform but extends beyond it into sex-coercive and sex-positive discourse. Indeed, Sontag’s famous regression to pre-fascist times in “Fascinating Fascism” conspicuously intimates an unstable presence of danger and vulnerability within the recipient of abuse as reverential towards unironic, compelled flagellation and fatal damage. The outfit codifies the exchange of power/resistance and subsequent sensations as ambiguous, thus oft-misunderstood.

Instead, unequal power exchange is worshipped for its “unfair” arrangement in nostalgic language that simultaneously subverts or plays with historically incongruent ideas of mutual/informed consent; i.e., performative irony during Gothic counterculture art. Said variants look nigh-identical to unironic, coercive [demon/undead/animalized] BDSM but the contract is respected in ways that provide for the historically abused party. She becomes worshipped in her totality as a survivor of immense trauma whose plurality denotes tantalizing attractions to pleasurable pain as a forbidden outlet. Difference denotes curiosity towards the “mother” persona [which historically would be synonymous to some extent with the daughter archetype—i.e., the incest trope; below] as something to not exclusively destroy or dominate by men, but rather a volatile force to be reckoned with and enjoyed precisely because she turns the tables on the expected patriarchal dominators. The fragmented, uncertain attraction denotes an arrangement that becomes highly sought after, the dark kitten/queen expertly demanding powerful men to surrender their power [and their wealth] to her [symbolizing a pleasurable relinquishing of responsibility through fiscal means].

Animals, despite being relegated to positions of property [thus harm] in Cartesian frameworks, are prized for their magnetism in human forms; e.g., Amazons as big dumb herbos in appearance [the role is generally divided into brains or brawn] but also as beings to bend over and breed like property during plantation-esque fantasies fetishizing the slave or bride as one-in-the-same. Out of the ancient past, the female [or monstrous-feminine] ass evolved through Capitalism into something to beat, use and discard by European men [or their emulators] claiming ownership of nature as a whole—a bestial treating of sleeping with one’s slaves to dominate them in ways that aren’t discouraged/demonized because said slaves aren’t literal animals; they’re treated like them, sitting in an uncomfortable space where they belong nowhere, and—like Satan fallen from Paradise—are painfully aware of that fact. Reversing this ontological configuration and its assorted disadvantages requires an ass that “fucks back” precisely because it faces the animalized components in way that subvert, weaponize or otherwise celebrate their proletarian psychosexual potential:

[artist: MizzzVega] 

In some shape or form, then, Gothic bewitchment communicates worker resistance through Satanic poetics’ animalistic allure, affording serious, complicated nuance and degrees of torture as negotiated and unnegotiated: the thrill of “danger” vs actual danger as being up-for-grabs. For one, it sits within a reverse charm offensive against the usual suspects; i.e., in that liminal space between freedom and imprisonment that historically-materially would have been enforced by structures of power that exhausted both parties, yet made the dom older than the sub. The schoolmaster, priest, general, executive, naval officer, or fast food manager—Capitalism and its precursors would and continue to organize these divisions of labor in arrangements that force both sides to look but not touch, while also a) alienating them from their own bodies, and b) from nature and the imaginary past associated with Man-Box positions of authority that are regularly sexualized unto themselves as animalistic; e.g., being “hot for teacher” and enthralled with said teacher’s animalized persona as “ancient.” Meanwhile, when abuses against one side by the other did occur, it was always the victim’s word against the master’s—the animal’s against its owner’s—because outside of trophies, who takes pictures of their own crimes? They survive through stories that present the animal as something to hunt, and that which sometimes hunts back.

For our purposes, abuse victims are often drawn to trauma during Gothic poetics as a paradoxical, animalized means of catharsis. A ritualized reversal of trauma’s interrogation, then, can out the would-be abuser as “cucked” by the dominatrix pinning him to the bed—taking him like the stud does the mare, or more intensely still, the wolf the lamb. Something violent and out-of-place sits onstage, expressing to colonial benefactors sitting in the audience the uncomfortable reality that sex and harm synonymize within colonial structures for those treated as prey animals by predators just like them. Incredible, systemic trauma overhangs such engagements. Indeed, if the abuse is severe enough, the eliding of not just pleasure and pain, but consent and non-consent, become permanently confused inside the victim’s mind while playing out predator and prey responses. This is, on its face, an extraordinary power play couched within Gothic poetics, but it still exists with the devil’s courtship as an inescapable material reality. The sex-positive difference is, the animalized bargainer states “show me the money” while holding the devil at arm’s length: “You can hae your silken goon…“)

The kind of sex-positive, Satanic nuance featured above is entirely lost on heteronormative actors compelled to enact harmful animalistic treatments of morphological expression on others. For women, it becomes merely a culturally appropriative costume to don and submit within a compelled role: the abuser or the abused relayed, in some shape or form, through the Gothic mode and its lies favoring the status quo. For men, “woman is other”; i.e., a caretaker sex object, but also a means to an end: societal climbing and homosocial clout. The premeditation of female ownership/enslavement becomes less a way of cheating at the game and more men playing the game of Capitalism as expected. Consequently, female or monstrous-feminine pleasure, agency and intelligence are mythologized/demonized—relegated to the lands of make-believe and stigma-animalized, “furry” bodies” (exhibit 9b1) but also advertised everywhere either as outrageous (re: hysteria/the wandering womb and the creation of sexual difference) or as commodified through the Gothic mode in ways that seem “safe enough”; i.e., ostensibly tailored around men/the Male Gaze (exhibit 9b2). Medusa’s phallic pleasure becomes either death-on-sight or an embodiment of death whose function is not set, and Amazons having sex for their own reasons amounts to “death by Snu-Snu” as a kind of silly-serious joke that frames patriarchal anxieties within half-hearted, theatrical (unrealistic) “rape” scenarios.

Except, this effects not just the practitioners, but their bodies in a cultural sense; i.e., they are viewed pejoratively in the eyes of xenophobic men, women and token groups fearful of an animalistic postcolonial. Unlike the sex-positively xenophilic, heteronormative bigots consider gender-non-conforming bodies abominable but chase-worthy (the demon/the whore) during gender trouble and normal bodies (the damsel/the virgin) working as complicated sources of animalistic shame outside of highly specific circumstances: sex—like a bad joke—is harmful. It becomes monstrous in ways that regularly personify through liminal expressions of the revived medieval: dark bodies reconstructed/recoded as sites of sin, animal hedonism, lust, rage, and other intense, alienated emotions out of the medieval period and into a settler-colonial world enthralled by fatal nostalgia.

(artist: Nya Blu)

For example, while being canonically associated with sexual reproduction as things to breed, alienation from nature while sexualizing it means that non-penetrated vaginas, mouths or assholes tend to look a little alien to cis-het men (arguably excluding lipstick lesbians, but these utilize dildos, fingers and tongues that serve a phallic role). Especially “atypical” are our aforementioned non-heteronormative vaginas; i.e., external female genitalia as “animalistic” (above). “The Classification of the Anatomical Variation in Female External Genitalia” (2023) catalogues the sheer variety of external female genitals available. Despite this proliferate biodiversity being public knowledge, said knowledge is framed as forbidden, but also iconoclastic in ways that must be appropriated and sold back during controlled forms of performative “resistance”; i.e., it appears monstrous in ways that are commonly portrayed as deserving of male/tokenized retribution: the Medusa/dark Amazon as something to masturbate to and kill, often by women acting like men vis-à-vis the state’s fear-fascination with the myth of the dark, savage continent. The morphological argument is worn like an animal costume over an hourglass white body having become “colored” and wild:

(artist: Alex Pascenko)

And yet, there remains the unspoken aspects of the human body that are implied by Vitruvian performers and their wild-animal costumes. I want to move away from standardized body types, and consider those they “speak for” as having been crowded offstage during the Gothic dialogs that emerged from Horace Walpole onwards. Before we get to Walpole, we’ll consider genitals a bit more, as well as other phenotypical components in European belief systems, as well as the heteronormative attitudes to such a cryptonymy as enacted by state forces; then we’ll explore gender and queer expression through animalistic monster dialogs (furries), whose “sodomy” within public discourse emerged from performative locations first introduced by Walpole, then reexplored by Matthew Lewis and others building on Walpole’s faithless reinventions: the Gothic castle as an operatic, ghastly site of campy violence and “rape” per ludo-Gothic BDSM, but also a hunting ground of targeted actions and bodies being tacitly associated with theatrical harm as a canonical means of preparing them for state punishment. Like bodies, castles both actual and possible share the same performative zone. They are both welcome and unwelcome, friendly and hostile, male and female, etc, as oscillating back and forth in the Gothic sense.

Before we carry on, then, a quick refresher about Gothic language as a performative device: the Gothic is chaotic and shared among warring factions for or against the state. Camping the canon during ludo-Gothic BDSM, then, requires meeting unironic violence with ironic, iconoclastic forms of cryptonymy that foster revolutionary potential during liminal expression: doubling canonical, monstrous bodies, locations and power-exchange scenarios. The language is “sticky” insofar as a castle tower or knightly lance can resemble (and potentially represent) a bare, exposed penis (often as “knife-like”) or a murky dungeon or cave can stand in for a vaginal cavity (and its classically hysterical contents) in mythological, videoludic[7] forms. A classic maiden, on the other hand, senses rape through failed modesty as threatening to her virtue; i.e., by her own hand, or when dangerously reflecting on the surface of immodest, demonic persons whose troubling existence before her challenges her own sense of self as prescribed: projection onto that which she fears will destroy her because it is different than her in a way the state will demonize and attack. Its purposeful mess accounts for the organic and inherited confusions coming out of the state’s imaginary past grappling with countercultural forms inside the same performative sphere and ambivalent, medievalized theatrics. During triangulation, the curious maiden becomes a weapon, surrendering her Amazonian potential to rebel in exchange for a state paycheck: a warrior-detective solving civil disputes for the elite with impunity and extreme prejudice.

(artist: Mike Lucas)

Keeping that in mind, let’s quickly examine genitals and body diversity under European standards, as well as the at-times incredibly odd belief systems/physiological arguments that go with them when these models remain unquestioned, hence unchallenged. As far as diversity itself goes, exhibit 9b1 introduced some fairly radical forms, except “radical” needn’t pertain to overtly animalized variants. External labia, for instance, are granted pejorative labels in relation to hysteria being canonically demonized in all its forms. Abject nicknames like the “blown-out” cooter, “lazy kebab,” or “roast beef curtains” body-shame the female body in accordance with purity politics that stymie gynodiversity or the representation of female genitalia within art as abjectly “hysterical,” but also animalized as property and food. Food-as-status has been a regular source of contention for much of human history. In short, food and animals are status symbols that communicate socio-material conditions through themselves. Except there’s scant difference between animals and food under capital, and neoliberalism controls the market to better commodify animals and their expression within food consumption (tied to famous junk food brands, below): “you are what you eat” being a series of products, including humans consuming whatever the elite use to fatten them up—themselves.

(artist: Noah Verrier)

The aforementioned point of contention regarding animals and food involves morphological expression in Gothic terms; e.g., an AFAB person’s control over their own body and environment while being treated as livestock by doctors (and requiring a specialized doctor that men think they do not: a OB/GYN) but also the sexual activity and egregores poetically associated with these things: cat women (akin to werewolves, but feline in ways that women generally are sexualized as—i.e., big cats as ferocious and wild and little cats as domestic and cute—versus dogs as tied more to protective actions, but also raw “breeding” activities: doggystyle). Gynodiverse labia are mythologized in demonic, fetishized ways on par with the visible/”enlarged” clitoris as emasculating towards men and demonizing cis women against their will. However, the canonical phobias of the latter group often project territorial animosity towards intersex/trans/non-binary people and their gender-divergent bodies; e.g., the intersex qualities of the xenomorph (exhibit 51a; re: “Making Demons“), but also the increased hairiness and clit size of witches and furries (exhibits 52f and 68; re: “Furry Panic” and Volume Three), and androdiversity and gender-non-conformance (exhibit 91b2; re: Volume Three). By comparison, heteronormativity depicts the “proper” vagina as small, dainty and unformed; i.e., infantilized, but also owned, thus dominated, by men; or policed according to its “proper” roles of PIV, heteronormative sex by men, or Amazonian women like Ellen Ripley who serve the status quo by turning their female rage against queer scapegoats (exhibit 30a; re: “Synthesis Symposium”): fuck the womb of nature for the state, for the Man, through Man Box culture’s passing of “prison sex” mentalities through all the usual methods (trifectas) and monopolies, from a position of male- and-token-oriented dominance topping the monstrous-feminine (and nature/the planet), etc, during the Capitalocene.

Ignoring idiosyncratic fetishes, cis-het men don’t even tend to masturbate to non-penetrated holes (where they aren’t imagining a cock inside the hole-in-question); they tend to jerk off to four main body parts: boobs, butts, feet, and penises, only one of which is even strictly female (during natural assignment). As for penises, this can be penises inside the vagina, but also being pleased by those who “should” be pleasing it with the “appropriate parts” during the appropriate heteronormative rituals: PIV sex, veering into increasingly fetishized and non-heteronormative, thus alien forms (re: Meg-Jon Barker’s “What’s Wrong with Heteronormativity?” exhibit 3b). So, an unhealthy attraction towards hole-owners, but also trans, intersex and non-binary people, is bound to occur. So-called traps, “transsexuals” and “she-male” porn—appropriated from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)—is condemned by fascists, but also mistreated in “prison sex” rituals that assert white cis-het male dominance against the things they’re masturbating to as a guilty act of self-disgust and genuine loneliness. This void is created by Capitalist Realism under a system that very deliberately privatizes sex through the means of production; its Superstructure discourages healthy social-sexual relationships by compelling marriage, thus systemic rape, as something to sublimate, ignore and cover up through violent canon: “Reader, I married him.”

This immortal line was said by Jane Eyre after Charlotte Brontë had Anne Causeway (Jean Rys’ name for Bertha) killed “for the sake of the story” (furthering the white heroine’s amatonormative arc by killing off the black villain). To that, white women (or token assimilators) animalize non-European parties during heteronormative Gothic stories in order to prey on them through settler-colonial violence. In Jane Eyre, while Mr. Rochester is “tamed,” Bertha the demon lover is never humanized; meanwhile, the system that demonizes black people as gender-non-conforming (vis-à-vis the European model of marriage) extends to gender-non-conforming people at large during military urbanism. Gothic canon levies settler-colonial violence against all of them, albeit to different, intersecting degrees inside the state of exception; there, it conflates them (and their non-marital, sodomic love) as “rapacious” outsiders who, like Anne Causeway, must die for “Jane Eyre” to achieve “her” equality of convenience (thus bigoted, predatory influence over others). Such expansions are commonplace within Gothic canon, insofar as Frederic Jameson’s insistence of a “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” feels apt only if it doesn’t denunciate patriarchy or protest actual rape. But Jameson only envisions what I call (from the thesis volume) “a class-conscious mirage swept up in its own endless romance, patented by Radcliffe and carried forward into the ages—i.e., to keep things the same by refusing to challenge anything in a dialectical-material sense” (source). Challenging heteronormativity and Capitalism through the Gothic mode requires some sense of steady, conscious engagement—not just with taboo subjects, but visitations, reenactments or imperfect, ironic evocations of texts that many would quickly dismiss outright as exploitative and “trashy”:

(artist: Boris Petroff)

It’s hardly a secret that critics of the Gothic tend to focus on its pulpy corpus and animation of forbidden topics (rape, incest, and murder) rather than any critical power the overall mode might yield, including when interrogating said trash as symptomatic to Capitalism’s slew of commodities (and token enforcers). Even when sensationalized, rape culture can be especially telling. It’s precisely these “tells” that we need to be conscious of when subverting them in our own works.

For example, as women start learning to say no to sexual advances, thereby establishing boundaries and knowing their own worth as workers in relation to cis-het men, these same men—as the traditionally entitled, universal clientele—become disillusioned but remain beholden to the very system exploiting men by teaching them to hate what they simultaneously fear/want: women (or beings treated as women, thus “lesser” than men) as welcome relative to an all-boys club, provided they conform (as brides near but outside the club, or token enforcers inside the club who eventually become brides); but they will always be seen as a prize, nuisance, distraction, curiosity and/or threat that weakens male power and status (e.g., Sampson and Delilah). Women—and by extension, nature and anything associated with it—must be kept in check lest it awaken and “castrate” men (or outgun them, left). Except the emasculation comes from capital: No longer able rely on marriage and spousal domination being handed to them on a silver plate, cis-het men fall victim to their own lack of education by the same system branching out through Rainbow Capitalism, which funnels them into fascist groups that conveniently fear everything of nature as gay (which neoliberals do not root out because these groups are in cahoots, defending Capitalism—wherein neoliberals/the elite are increasingly less expendable than their fascist counterparts).

(artist: Wildragon)

Note: The above image is from Axiom Verge (2014), which we discuss more in the Undead Module’s “Away with the Faeries.” —Perse, 4/7/2025

Said fears and alienation from nature leads to a variety of stupid, dangerous, heteronormative myths in Gothic canon that, like a deadly poison, bleeds into binary public thinking (non-binary thinking is anathema in mainstream discourse):

• Educated women are Medusas that need to be beheaded (exhibit 23a; re: “The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis”)—less metaphor and more heteronormative code for rape, but also beatings, torture, and murder (or silence/segregation which leads to genocide).
• Men are visually stimulated; women are not/don’t like sex or porn.
• Women can’t orgasm or experience sexual pleasure/can’t cum.
• Women pee[8] out of their vaginas/butts.
• Men’s brains are totally different from women’s.

First off, feminism is scapegoated/appropriated all the time (we’ll discuss TERFs extensively in Volume Three, Chapter Four). Second, the idea that women aren’t visually stimulated is bullshit. As women acquire more power, visually-stimulating cuties—catboys, femboys, but also trans, intersex, and non-binary persons—appear by virtue of female demand. Women want us by virtue of idiosyncratic “types,” and you can bet your collective asses they get off to us visually (queer people are also more keen to sleep with those who won’t pull a Nick Fuentes and kill us, post-coitus). Third, women definitely orgasm (they tend to twitch a lot more than dudes do, which honestly looks a little demonic in a kinky sort of way). Fourth—and I did not make this one up, I swear!—but Haz Al-Ghul really does think that women only have two holes and pee from their butts (Bad Empanada, 2022). He is also friends with Nick Fuentes, avowed hater of women and “lover” of catboys (more on him and his catboy “love” in Volume Three, Chapter Three) whose Cozy.tv is a forsaken lighthouse for dudes like Al-Ghul to go and be weird LARPers together. Fifth, male and female brains are not radically different at birth according to Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Review’s “Dump the ‘Dimorphism’: Comprehensive Synthesis of Human Brain Studies Reveals Few Male-Female Differences Beyond Size” (2021). We’re not different species; men aren’t from Mars and women aren’t from Venus. Rather, Capitalism divides/alienates workers by manufacturing sexual dimorphism in heteronormative, Cartesian language, including canonical Gothic language as culturally prevalent across space and time: myths, monsters and legends, including the “super gay ones” that really shake things up and cross barriers and boundaries—like Doctor Frankenfurter (with Jim Sharman making fun of Mary Shelley’s classic Byronic xenophobia much like Mel Brooks did with that “enormous schwanzstucker” gag from a year prior)!

(exhibit 10a: Artist, left: Edmund Leighton; right: various ensemble casts for live performances of Rocky Horror.)

Capitalism and Cartesian dualism promote European beauty standards, genders and sexuality but also morphologically abjects anything that isn’t these things. “Non-European” includes anything that isn’t an hourglass figure, skinny and/or pale-skinned (exhibit 10b1); non-missionary[9] thus “incorrect” sexual positions (e.g., doggy, islander, or anything out of the Karma Sutra, etc, as ways that “uncivilized” people have sex); but also, cocks that are “too big” (non-white): the Frankencock/frank(en)furter as monstrous, giant, and made by white madmen from spare criminal parts (implying a Cartesian function, the original novel by Mary Shelley being positively rife with racial tensions and postcolonial potential. More on this in Volume Two). This evokes various racialized porn stereotypes that we’ll examine more in another chapter (exhibit 32b; re: “A Problem of ‘Knife Dicks'”). For now, we’ll quickly examine two: the BBC (big black cock) and BBW (big, beautiful woman) as canonical porn staples that become implied outside of porn (through Gothic stories, which are porn-adjacent; e.g., torture porn, exhibit -1b) while simultaneously regulating morphological expression to serve the profit motive through threats of settler-colonial violence and control during moral panics.

Gothic fiction was written by beneficiaries of slave labor (whether they wanted to benefit from slavery or not) and tended to fetishize the enslaved groups in ways that follow the underclass into their supposed “liberation.” This includes into porn and porn-adjacent dialogs presents in Gothic media, wherein colonized groups would have been fetishized to varying prey-like degrees. As such, it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that canonical porn genres are historically body-centric, predatory and bigoted. As a settler-colonial device, BBCs advertise black people as having unusually large cock sizes compared to white men. Despite also being more prone to having smaller cock sizes than white people (according to urologist James Elist), black people are violently fetishized, pointedly associated with—if not outright raping white women using said cocks—then violating their modesty during pornographic suggestion built on problematic fantasies (exhibits 32; re: “Knife Dicks”). Made popular by American Lost Cause media like The Birth of a Nation (1911), the BBC genre was authored collectively by jealous, psychosexual white men who not only want to use a cock even if it’s not theirs—i.e., a “man chooses, a slave obeys“—but also think the only sex that exists is violent penetrative sex and that “bigger means better.” The same idea applies to BBWs, except it’s often white women (and gender-non-conforming AFAB persons, left) being implied to be “non-European” by virtue of having bodies that, again, are “too big” (thus “not white”). This exclusionary concept is further complicated by superhero comics, which play around with non-human skin colors to codify stigma; e.g., purple or green (exhibit 10b2).

(artists: Autumn Anarchy and Sinead Rhiannon)

As genres of expression, “BBC” and “BBW” must be reclaimed through iconoclastic porn that raises awareness towards marginalized, thus colonized/preyed-upon groups; i.e., by valuing and enriching them at a socio-material within pornographic dialogs (also left). Unfortunately canonical renditions of either genre are useful to Capitalism, which conflates sex with war and rape with victory and domination; i.e., like riding a mare or war horse as property “owned” by a male rider serving a higher patriarchal authority. Even Tolkien’s “killer hobbit” Bullroarer Took could do that, or George R. R. Martin’s injection of the medieval imagination with deromanticized sex, frank depictions of rape, and military scenarios that lionize manly men, not feminine ones; e.g., his twink-turned-twunk, Satin, from A Storm of Swords (2000) being “too girly” to “man the ramparts” during a siege:

He was pretty as a girl with his dark eyes, soft skin, and raven’s ringlets. Half a year at Castle Black had toughened up his hands, however, and Noye said he was passable with a crossbow. Whether he had the courage to face what was coming, though… (source).

As part of the Gothic mode, such Pygmalions mandate the virtues of binary (thus heteronormative) gender during a reimagined medieval rife with cliché misinformation.

As said medieval takes many forms, reconsider the “enormous schwanzstucker” scene—when Frederick Frankenstein speaks out from both sides of his mouth to his smitten (white, blonde) servant: “He’s going to be very popular.” Like seriously, how would you know, Mr. I-Can’t-Even-Sleep-With-My-Own-Wife? I call this Ben Shapiro syndrome (The Majority Report’s “Ben Shapiro HUMILIATED By College Student During Debate,” 2022), ol’ Ben trusting his own wife (apparently a doctor according to this very creepy 2023 glow-up piece) when she tells him it’s “normal” that she doesn’t get wet during sex. I’d say she’s violating her Hippocratic Oath for that one, but she’s already being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment by having to sleep with Ben Shapiro…

Dogmatically favoring penetration and bigger tools for the job[10] are both grossly outmoded ideas when you consider that many clitoris-owners actually require penises of a specific size for hitting their g-spot with (the so-called “Goldilocks dick”) or oral/digital/dermal stimulation (for the clitoris, nipples, skin, etc) when it comes to BDSM and sexual/asexual intimacy. Worse, penis-shaming can adopt an assimilative, racialized quality—with people of color feeling inadequate for “failing” to be the one thing they are constantly marketed as: big, black thugs with BBCs that seek out the coerced pleasure of white women. This infantilizing process—historically linked to slave rebellions as things to fear and put down with extreme prejudice (re: Howard Zinn, but also In Range TV noting that “power aggregates” against potential/actual revolt[11] in Atun-Shei Film’s “Fighting for Freedom: The Weapons and Strategies of the 1811 Slave Revolt,” 2021; timestamp: 20:55)—is essentially a more extreme, Americanized version of the Gothic villain as a vessel for dark energies and foreboding gut emotions wracking the Imperial Core; e.g. Ann Radcliffe’s Father Schedoni—the titular, severe and hulking “Italian” (1796) and his knife dick (the classic male source of pride and angst dueling with other men for women, but also with women resisting their proud[12] advances) already being an Orientalist, xenophobic trope of something “not of the West.” Like a goblin (above).

Neo-Gothic stories were written while slavery was still legal in Britain; as such, they tried to skirt racist critique/expression by displacing to an older time, but the threatening nature and aesthetic still remained. So while he’s “Italian,” not black, Schedoni’s powerful, imposing body conflates with his menacing genitals by having the former advertise the enormous dark power of the latter during psychosexual tension (Gothic novels eroticize moral panics during repressed, fatal sexual urges that arise between modest heroines and indecent, frustrated pretenders). By comparison, Zofloya the moor is noted for his gigantic stature, quasi-servile demeanor and Satanic presence (all tracking with the treatment of people of color in such stories, literally demonizing them); his body is huge so the threat he poses unto the heroine via his implied cock is also huge, but inhumanly so. Or as Parker from Alien puts it: “The son of a bitch is huge! It’s like a man; it’s big!”

As for BBWs, I can’t remember them being discussed, as Neo-Gothic heroines are classically thin, modest and delicate; however, Victoria de Loredani from Zofloya (1806) was a tragic Gothic heroine, thus notable for her unusual height, strength and masculine pride—her fierté—being a flaw in the eyes of callous, appraising men; i.e., not “wife material”:

Berenza […] beheld Victoria such as she really was, unembellished, unornamented; his keen eye that perceived her beauties, discerned likewise her defects. He appreciated her character; he beheld at once her pride, her stubbornness, her violence, her fierté. “Can I,” asked himself, “be rationally happy, with a being imperfect as she now is?” (source).

The presence of all-inclusive, preceptive irony is up to debate in Neo-Gothic stories. In short, Victoria’s the woman-in-black—the “phallic” destroyer/temptress whose conspicuously intense immodesty leads to a great deal of widespread harm by straying from the snow-white path of bridal, dainty righteousness. In short, she’s the demon and the whore—a witch-like, sex-demon harpy whose animalistic qualities lead her to literally prey on the men (and women) around her while being underestimated for her female body! Meanwhile, the “black” appearance is generally captivating unto itself; i.e., implying a sense of extramarital excitement denied to Victorian audiences, of which they are swiftly “punished” for letting their guard down and evil run rampant: sexy is dangerous, but “safe” inside so-called “terrorist literature” as easily dismissed for its base cheapness and lack of sturdy moral fiber. Ludo-Gothic BDSM camps the sacred through the abjection process as something to reverse during the whore’s revenge. She’s the black knight, the Medusa, the avenger (with gentle elements as well, but oscillating between monstrous and feminine during a monstrous-feminine dialectic of the alien)!

(artist: Lera PI)

Such tropes, it must be said, were upheld by female writers as well as male ones. However, whereas women like Radcliffe or Dacre displaced critiques (or extensions) of their own bigoted society onto an enchanting “once upon a time” before settler colonialism existed (the pre-fascist 15th century or thereabouts), more recent Gothic stories imprint a racial component onto the black figure that is difficult to ignore. Darkness represents many things, of course; and yet, while the state of exception allows for a variety of minority types (religion, ethnicity and gender) to co-exist in the same shadow zone coding them as “black,” actual black people are seen as “even less human” than Eastern European or Asian people[13] are in terms of fascist dogma assigning “bad vibes” to non-white “outsiders” (to be clear, the zombie-like assignment of an underclass is limited to whatever’s available, which—in Western Europe—would have historically been Jewish people and other ethnic minorities relatively endemic to the region. For example, Holocaust Encyclopedia in 2022 explains how there were a smaller number people of color living in Germany during the Third Reich from WW1 German colonies; conversely the Israelis are genociding the Palestinians en masse, the latter having lived in that area for thousands of years before Zionism was recently bankrolled by the British and U.S. governments).

Now that we’ve examined some of the myths and body standards regarding European morphological compulsion as a form of Cartesian violence, let’s discuss challenging it through radical bodies as things to reify (or own if they already exist) and camp the unironic European standard within, then conclude the subchapter by looking at Walpole’s castles and their complicated descendants.

Gothic camp certainly applies to genitals. For our purposes, a tremendous amount of guilt and shame are funneled into the penis as a canonical symbol of violence and rape, making sex-positive penis-shaming a useful means of owning one’s member (or pussy or any other body part). General-purpose degradation and praise are both perfectly legitimate as long as it doesn’t become toxic or lead to abusive habits, post-use. A certain degree of honesty is required to acknowledge that, regardless if it’s healthy or not, many AMAB persons are anxious about their penises. Indeed, it’s not even generally because of their size, but that they are culturally infused with a predatory sense of unironic torture, making the owner fearful of what their penis represents in regards to themselves; or conversely, a vagina owner can understandably feel small around someone who is or isn’t bigger than them, but whose penis makes the AFAB person feel small and prey-like. These are all things to negotiate through art that is self-depreciating and vulnerable in a variety of campy but also liminal, animal-themed scenarios:

(exhibit 10b1: Artist, top: Jarnqk; bottom: The Happiest Cloud. Genital shaming/parody is often an expression of gender euphoria and gender-affirming care within the trans community. This extends neatly to the shapeshifting nature of animalistic/totemic demons, whose size differences involve their whole bodies. We’ll examine this concept much more in Volume Two. For now, consider the idea of size difference as alluded to in relation to power and sexuality in Gulliver’s Travels [1726] and Alice in Wonderland [1865].)

Beyond the genitals alone, the same campiness during ludo-Gothic BDSM applies to various body types, and overlap between all of these things applying appreciative, genderqueer irony to canonical standards; i.e., “making it gay” in subversive ways that challenge heteronormativity during poetic expression; e.g., the green woman as a Medusa BBW and/or a woman of actual color who is seen as “full of sin, appetite and vigor” in animalistic ways that challenge their white male superiors, but also black men as expected to keep said “phallic” women in line with their BBC (“kaiju sex” having a totemic [14] quality to it). All of these things conflict with one another according to what is expected and what actually comes about; i.e., to varying degrees of cultural appropriation/appreciation amid racial stigmas, intraracial/interracial tension and commodification of the human form versus its artistic expression during liminal presentations thereof. During camp, the cartoonish simplicity of good-vs-evil centrism is avoided in favor of theatrical complexities that include the human body in all of its shapes, sizes and colors, including abstract/abject renditions: superheroes, or “heroic” bodies commodified in popular media forms.

(exhibit 10b2: Top-right: the Venus of Willendorf; mid-right: Freakybbygirl; bottom-right: Mog, the Final Fantasy XIII-2 version; everything else, artist: bathmank. Comic books and videogames rely on Gothic poetics, which color-code stigma, but also attribute it to exaggerated elements of uncivilized cultural markers tied to physical strength, body fat, wild emotions and gross sexual appetite: curves, muscles and sheer “endowment” associated with animalistic qualities, but also the past [and current] plundering of various [neo]colonial sites: the Caribbean and Africa, but also Brazil and other areas of the Global South personified by a given starlet of the slave class; e.g. Laura from Street Fighter V [2016]:

[source: Eden] 

Some heroes are villainous; all are monstrous. Superheroes, like animals, are trapped between two worlds: the foreign and the domestic, the wild and the tame, but also the ancient and uncolonized versus civilization as a colonial ordeal. To that, their animal considerations stem from the ancient world as something to revive in the present under Capitalism, then hide these secret identities under acceptable-albeit-conspicuous personas; to that, superheroes—like the naked wrestlers of Antiquity—supply the performer with animal qualities during kayfabe theatre as a popular-if-disposable commodity [straw dogs] that includes wearing masks and other performative devices: their statuesque bodies. Some of these animals are so-called “good animals”; others are feared and stigmatized for their inhuman strength, speed or reflexes; e.g., Spiderman. There’s also the “spider woman” as an archaic, female deity of darkness in canonical fantasy stories [or one of its many offspring that carry with them their parent’s dark skin and evil nature; e.g., the Drow, exhibit 41b; re: “A Lesson in Humility“].

[artist: Jonpadraws] 

Purely on domestic soil, this disparity expresses through characters like She-Hulk wanting to assimilate, thus survive, despite being prized and feared for the qualities of a settler-colonial slave: a gentrified woman of color wearing a snazzy business suit in the courtroom, but threatening to explode in animal-like rage. Her green skin is both stigma against her and envy for those who treat her revelation as a spectacle; i.e., displays of non-white strength fetishized by white culture fascinated with their own barbaric past lingering in the present. Though assimilated into white culture, She-Hulk’s elevation is always in doubt—marked not just by her dark skin, but her entire physique. Combined, these express her heroism through a slaver’s metric; i.e., the qualities historically prized and feared by enterprising colonists, and which are held against She-Hulk during reactive abusive: her “hulking out” a form of “uppity” behavior she must hide to try and appear more civilized, more white despite her irreversible skin color—what F.D. Signifier on YouTube calls “Black Capitalism” [2023].

[artist: Bay] 

Muscles aside, a body’s basic shape also plays an important totemic role; e.g., having a round bod instead of an hourglass or even pear-shape figure—i.e., not actually a dad, thus not allowed to have a “dad bod”—is generally seen as masculine [with AMABs naturally tending to store fat in their bellies, not their hips, thighs and buttocks, like AFABs do] but also animalistic. Zeuhl once referred to their body as “roumb” like Mog or Monty Mole [from Super Mario World, 1991] and Bay similarly takes pride in his body as squishy, fat and animal-like, but also something to blend with BDSM: pup gear. While undeniably wholesome, such non-white, trans/non-binary bodies are historically-materially relegated to fantasy by Capitalism, which genocides anything that doesn’t fit the European standard: hunting “useless” specimens to extinction, then selling their pelts. When there are no more figurative or literal non-human animals left, modern man will hunt members of his own species he deems inferior to him, regarding those he considers “precious” something to “protect.” Whether to kill or control for canonical propaganda purposes, this predation is a historical-material fact.)

The complexity of these countercultural forms during ludo-Gothic BDSM helps them combat complex canonical stigmas, biases, fears and dogma that generally intersect; e.g., for plus-sized women, fat-shaming’s Enlightenment roots are steeped in racialized phobias, but also Catholic demonization by Protestants, including a little-known group of British/Dutch exiles, the fucking Puritans (who both countries disliked quite a bit because they were horribly uptight and went on to form the cultural groundwork for American Christofascism, along with various settler-colonial offshoots like the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses).

Furthermore, racialized stigmas and their signature body types are often portrayed with non-white skin colors—a kind of non-black “whitewashing” present inside fantasy narratives justifying violence against singular characters or larger societies:

• vice characters similar to Ester (exhibit 13d; re: “Monster Modes”) except they actually have green skin; e.g., goblins (exhibit 94b1; re: Volume Three) but also the Wicked Witch of the West (whose portrayal in The Wizard of Oz functions as a form of “spectral blackface” that puts a white woman in green makeup, except it needn’t be exclusively racist in its “othering”)
• hoard-based savages like orcs (exhibit 37e2; re: “Meeting Jadis“) and their darker, non-human skin colors—green, black, brown, and ash, etc

Either numeration canonically presents dark-skinned embodiments of evil as being closer to death in the natural world; i.e., as something to fear and punish, their canonical iterations sublimating an appropriated scapegoat from a bourgeois standpoint (which we shall see with Tolkien, in the next subchapter).

From a proletarian standpoint, a character of mixed ethnicity often wrestles with their animalized heritage in the face of settler-colonial violence; e.g., Nella Larsen’s Clare from Quicksand (1928): a “mulatto” in the book’s own language and struggling to deal with the guilt/shame of not quite belonging anywhere—what Thomas Happ in Axiom Verge called “Athetos” or “without place” (exhibit 40g; re: “Away with the Faeries“) echoing a Miltonic Satanic[15] having lost its rebellious character in exchange for a Cartesian, thus genocidal one. For Athetos, this lack of place meant the scientific community but such an idea can obviously apply to any feeling of pariah-ness. With orcs in fantasy works, the placement of such figures within centrist military struggles has expanded to some “good” orcs—i.e., the noble savage (a white-savior colonizer’s term). Yet, orc goodness will always be seen as “more savage and brutal” than the white-skinned, civilized men (and elves) of the West, which invariably justifies the Cartesian breaking of agreements after the Big Evil is defeated: “Boundaries for me, not for thee.” This happens because the white man is “more Enlightened,” thus destined to conquer nature and inherit the Earth by taking it away from anyone different from himself (and all for profit).

Indeed, settler colonialism unfolds due to the colonizer’s fragile disposition towards what he’s been conditioned to fear and dominate through war and rape culture as integral to Capitalism; i.e., those with non-standard body types associated with non-white cultures’ closeness to nature, thus supplied the usual lies attached to them through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. These hostilities can be challenged, but this requires reclaiming one’s body and animal self as both a campy source of pride and something associated with various monstrous entities, including animals, that are canonically exterminated by the state to varying degrees.

This holocaust manifests inside colonized parties, wherein the state installs harmful imposters: animal devices that condition the hunted prey to guiltily repress the stigma animal inside themselves, but also identify it among other members of the underclass (and its various axes of oppression), attacking them for presenting said animal out in the open. Campy versions of a given animal consciously serve a counter-political function meant to challenge Gothic canon (and its uneven process of extermination) having evolved into itself; i.e., through the exact kinds of unironic monster dialogs that—while they certainly have varied in terms of class, time and geographical location—nevertheless concerned taboos and stigmas of various kinds to voice unspeakable abuses with: accelerated predation committed by the state (and its proponents, including class traitors/token agents punching down) against genderqueer people and various other ethnic and religious minorities treated not simply as exotic pets, but sexually and societally “incorrect.”

In natural language, this amounts to the systematic extermination of animals and humans assigned a “pest” status (thus death sentence) while living under Capitalism’s profit motive—rats and other vermin, plague-type creatures for colonized peoples to relate to under a shared genocidal struggle:

(exhibit 10c1: Artist, right: Rattfood; left: Bay. Bay has a very short torso, giving them a “shortstack” appearance [“Round and square at the same time,” according to them] which they attribute [and enjoy having others attribute] to various monster types such as the goblin or their fursona [exhibit 10c2] but also various stigma animals like the rat, which represent non-heteronormative existence; i.e., lifeforms historically annihilated or relegated to the shadows under settler-colonial rule, now out for everyone to see and appreciate as a fully human monster that remains haunted by state-sanctioned xenophobia.

For Bay, the xenophilic role of fantasy is something to experience while alive—i.e., the goblin, gremlin and rat as brought forward out of the dark forest of the past to worship and play with in the present. Doing so happens in opposition to canonical forms and their established phobias’ euthanizing of these animals. Anarchist-queer furries/”fur fags” [exhibit 10c2] are antifascist in this respect, creating iconoclastic art not just to cope, but subvert the status quo in favor of a better world than currently exists; e.g., the rat as an anti-Semitic stigma that can reclaim both human and animal through ironically xenophilic iterations that take heed of Cartesian stereotypes before consciously subverting them.)

This complex heritage is vital to consider in relation to ourselves, whose own compelled divisions and alienation demand we consider Walpole and those he inspired with his castles as hopelessly divided on various societal issues; i.e., according to sex and gender as it existed back then informing our own liberation.

For one, the Gothic dialogic—especially during the 18th century—is famously divided between moderate female/feminine forms and a more outspoken male/masculine counterpoint: the Schools of Terror and Horror but also Male and Female Gothic (outmoded terms, but nevertheless what they’re known as in academic circles). Yet the paradox, here, is that some female authors were often rather conservative (re: Radcliffe, Dacre) and some were not (re: Shelley) in relation to women only having just started to take up writing as a profession, not a hobby—whereas some male authors could be surprisingly gender-non-conforming (re: Lewis) while others toed the line (re: Coleridge) despite men having written openly for thousands of years; i.e., in relation to the latter’s longstanding ability to abstain from marriage (a luxury generally not afforded to women, even wealthy ones) but also opening up these same men to risks and labels that woman arguably didn’t experience to nearly the same degree (while having their own struggles, of course: women get raped far more often than men do, but generally don’t have to experience the yolk of the sodomite label and all that comes with it [male privilege and stigma] in quite the same shapes and forms that AMAB people do). I’d like to spend a few pages unpacking the genderqueer history of male Gothic authors before considering it in relation to our own interrogations of the Gothic mode; i.e., reclaiming it for our purposes, using atypical bodies, shapes and colors to express ourselves as we are born into our collective struggles under capital.

First, these reclamations occur despite our “inherited confusions” begot from “a sinister corner of the Western imagination.” Described as such by Chris Baldrick, his introduction to the 2009 Oxford Book of Gothic Tales writes of the Gothic period being cited as a time of darkness and unproductive history following the collapse of Rome, but also something decided by the elite in opposition to those they sought to dominate centuries later through settler-colonial xenophobia:

In its earliest sense, the word is simply the adjective denoting the language and ethnic identity of the Goths; […] Long after they disappeared into the ethnic melting-pots of the Mediterranean, their fearful name was taken and used to prop up one side of that set of cultural oppositions by which the Renaissance and its heirs defined and claimed possession of European civilization: Northern versus Southern, [Dark] Ages versus the Age of Enlightenment, medieval versus modern, barbarity versus civility, superstition versus Reason. […] Accordingly, by the late eighteenth century “Gothic” was commonly used to mean “medieval, therefore barbarous,” in a largely unquestioned equation of civilization with classical standards (source).

While Baldrick also argues how the likes of Walpole use this dichotomy to both erode the presumed “superiority” of classical culture and to fear the medieval world as a dark and brutal place amid this ghost of the counterfeit, I posit that Baldrick is astoundingly incorrect in assuming that

Unlike “Romantic,” then, “Gothic” in its literary usage never becomes a positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it […] an identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages (ibid.).

Yet, this incorrectness stems from the invented, imaginary past as “medieval” in ways that potentially rewrite the conventional wisdoms regarding said past… which Baldrick conveniently ignores. Indeed, the kinds of stories Baldrick is writing about were predominantly written by white, cis-het men and women centuries ago, when queer discourse was in its infancy and racial bias was phased out of the conversation through regressions to a pre-fascist 15th century that was more interested in enjoying one’s privilege and playing silly pranks.

(source)

This brings us to Horace Walpole, the writer of the first Gothic novel and an ostensibly homosexual (or ace) man who devoted most of his relatively long life to making Gothic not just a label to describe the medieval period, but literally a specific style of campy fakery aiming at the Numinous used to embellish the present space and time through intentionally ahistorical reinvention: the castle where such oddities could be found and observed, which is a birthplace for ludo-Gothic BDSM as I would eventually envision it; re: through a palliative Numinous tied to castles in the flesh and a queer-coded “medieval.”

Camp is rooted in fakery and privilege vis-à-vis homosexual men (the classic oddities of older times—not a female whore, but not a straight man, either). As Thomas Christensen writes in the introduction to the Mercury House edition of Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales (1993):

[Horace Walpole] lived (comfortably, thanks to a variety of sinecures—his father, Robert, had been prime minister of England under King George the 1st) in a house on the banks of the Thames near Twickenham; he called the house Strawberry Hill and made it into “a little Gothic castle” decked out with fake pinnacles, battlements, ornamental facades, and gargoyles of lath and plaster and crammed to overflowing with all manner of antiquities, curiosities, and objets d’art. Toward the end of his life and for some time thereafter (at least until a famous auction of its contents in 1842), Strawberry Hill was a tourist attraction. According to his memorandum book, Walpole personally ushered some four thousand visitors through it (complaining all the while of the inconvenience). Often criticized as a cheap, slipshod sham, it has also been lauded as a “subjunctive” edifice, an “architecture of the ‘as if,'” and as a creation that overturns conventional “rigid and stately rules of architecture.” […]

He had a diabolical (and at times rather infantile) sense of humor, demonstrated in his passing off The Castle of Otranto as a translation from the Italian and in the evil comedy of one of the Hieroglyphic Tales, “The Peach in Brandy.” He once faked a letter to Jean-Jacques Rousseau that purported to be from the King of Prussia, precipitating a heated public dispute in which Rousseau, Jacob Grimm, and others participated (source).

Both a perpetual bachelor and interior decorator (two homosexual classics) living in a “castle” named after fruit and filled with sexual predators and prey-like damsels who run and hide, there’s also the campy rape play that Walpole privately plays in, quite literally in a poem written in blank verse (a la Milton’s Paradise Lost):

Besides The Castle of Otranto, the other major literary work Walpole published during his lifetime was his tragedy in blank (at first I inadvertently wrote black) verse, The Mysterious Mother. Byron admired it, calling it “a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play.” It concerns a young man who, through a series of mistaken identities and unfortunate misunderstandings (no fault of his own), ends up marrying the daughter he has fathered by his mother (a bewildering set of relationships outdoing Bill Wyman). Dorothy Stuart, always charmingly sympathetic to Walpole, remarks, “It is, indeed, a little curious that his imagination—though in The Castle of Otranto he had toyed with the theme of incest—should have been allured by a story so sombre and so revolting.” In a contemporaneous review (1797), William Taylor rhapsodized that the play “has attained an excellence nearly unimpeachable” and that it “may fitly be compared with the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles.” Few modern readers would value it quite so highly (ibid.).

Unlike Shakspeare (who was debatably queer) writing and publishing Titus Andronicus as the gay man’s parody of Gothic stereotypes and theatrical violence (cannibalism, torture, murder and rape), Walpole never published The Mysterious Mother while he was alive. In fact, he arranged for it to be published once he was dead.

(artist: Pierre Subleyras)

Given the crime of sodomy that would have overhung Walpole, it might help to consider that Walpole was the man of privilege vamping it up in his own little, ambiguously gay “rape” castle; i.e., a person of means/property (a man) who didn’t quite fit in and was reclaiming the stereotypes of past centuries to literally reinvent the cultural imaginary known as “Gothic” through his lifestyle, home, and refusal to wed:

Though Walpole had a penchant for the company of old ladies and un­marriageable or disgraced noblewomen, he evaded matrimony, remaining to his death aged 79 what used to be called a confirmed bachelor. Instead he drew about him a collection of highly cultured “dear friends”—men of sensitive taste but lesser background, who shared his obsessions. Walpole had an especially fraught and jealous relationship with Thomas Gray, of the famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” whom he met at Eton and took with him on his European tour.

Was Walpole gay? Is Strawberry Hill the manifestation of a gay aesthetic? The questions linger, even though searching for something akin to a modern homosexual identity is fruitless. Homosexual acts were criminal—sodomy was a capital offense—but virile men were known to take lovers of both sexes, while effeminate manners were seen as a Frenchified heterosexual weakness. Walpole’s biographers have often considered him effeminate and asexual, or at most passively homosexual (source: Amanda Vickery’s “Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill,” 2010).

Passively homosexual. Take note of that. It really doesn’t matter if Walpole called himself gay or not; the markers for what would be considered gay now in relation to Gothic poetics were certainly present back then: making fun of white married people through a reinvented Gothic style.

Likewise, Walpole’s upper-middle-class inheritance was the breaking of the mold; i.e., according to a counterfeit that, if not openly endorsed by him for colonial purposes, went on to be appropriated by the state’s usual operations (the process of abjection). However, the fact remains that some men of privilege[16] chose to be more openly queer in their campiness, and that’s what I want to examine next before applying that to our own Gothic-Communist poetics. For fear of colonial guilt weighing on them in the shadow of colonial horrors yet unspoken, a tremendous doom of utter retribution plagues colonizer brains; regardless of the occupation, then, invention is the means of the colonized to bleed their occupiers dry during asymmetrical warfare, converting them to our cause or sending them as Roman fools into utter panic and retreat for fear of the colonial victim’s day of reckoning (at home, abroad or both).

This includes camp. Remember from Volume Zero how we discussed camping the canon, vis-à-vis Colin Broadmoor’s examination of Matthew Lewis:

The Monk represents Lewis’s personal struggle against the sexual politics and constraints of the English literary tradition. As Michel Foucault observed in The History of Sexuality vol. I, sexuality-as-identity did not really exist as a cultural concept throughout most of the eighteenth century. However, by the time of Lewis’s birth those social and legal constructions of sexuality were shifting:

As defined by the ancient civil or Canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life… Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.

This transition at the turn of the 19th century from act-as-homosexual to person-as-homosexual was preceded by a dramatic increase in homophobic violence perpetrated by the state. In the British civil system, sex between men first became a capital offense with the promulgation of the tastefully-named Buggery Act of 1533. For 200 years, the law was rarely enforced—though, when it was, authorities staged it as a spectacle of violence for public entertainment and social control. Victims of the law were ritually humiliated and then murdered in an extravagant and merciless display of state power. Around the middle of the 18th century, the British state initiated a long-running pogrom aimed specifically against gay men that exploded during the decades of The Monk‘s original release. As Louis Compton records in Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England: “By 1806 the number of executions had risen to an average of two a year and remained there for three decades, though executions for every other capital offense decreased dramatically.” In the 1790s, when Lewis was writing The Monk, judicial anti-homosexual persecution was at its height in England. Gangs of undercover police officers from anti-homosexual task forces infiltrated queer spaces, sending scores of gay men to the gallows or pillory and creating a palpable sense of paranoia throughout England’s underground LGBT communities (source).

Whereas Walpole was born under queerness as privately aristocratic, Matthew Lewis represented a nigh-singular form of outspoken, active queerness when the dialog hadn’t really caught up. So he did what weird nerds like Shakespeare and Walpole before him did: he used the iconoclastic language of the imaginary past to communicate queerness through the Gothic mode; i.e., from his own imaginary dark castles as highly structured and deliberate forms of theatrical, psychosexual power exchange, but also through his considerable material advantage that let him devise these fantasies as sex-positive, socio-political education devices: he was a legislator and chose to stand by his work very publicly (as Coleridge will never let us forget, the straight man pouncing on the gay man to gag him).

The takeaway is that when drafted by queer creators now, the same imaginary capsules operate as something to sex-positively revive in the Internet age: through openly xenophilic, emancipatory hauntologies on par with Lewis, but updated for more current socio-political issues; i.e., a queer castle raised in intersectional, solidarized resistance to post-fascist drives towards palingenesis (the latter coercively romanticizing “a new dark age” under the same-old oscillations: the return of the Gothic castle as a xenophobic printing house). This includes our lair-like abodes, but also ourselves as monsters who identify as part of the struggle—to exist, but also to actively fight back using revolutionary cryptonymy during ludo-Gothic BDSM to camp canon’s idea of what monsters are “supposed” to represent; i.e., by detaching ourselves from the usual synonymizing of queerness with rape, incest and murder that we’re called out for by straight folk in their own canon: to, as our thesis describes, “make it gay” in ways that will terrify them anyways, often in animalistic, warlike language (thanks to Capitalist Realism, we are canonically viewed as the end of the world no matter what).

In resistance to canon, we’re taking the self-fashioning logic of Walpole and Lewis back from the Western tradition of Gothic forgeries; i.e., by literally forging our own lies in service to workers in ways those men lacked the means (or perspective) to fully grasp. Our aim in doing so is to give ourselves a campy space to live, work and thrive, but also challenge the state through increasingly iconoclastic variations of revolutionary cryptonymy that speak to our animalized traumas in playful ways that nevertheless invoke the open language of class/culture war and resistance—to turn the tables on our captors, reversing the role of hunter and hunted through predator-prey aesthetics:

(exhibit 10c2: Artist, top-left: Undead Clown; top-right: Defiant Drills, commissioned by Barnowlren; bottom-left and -right: Bay’s fursona, by Tofu Froth and Buns Like a Truck. Gothic-Communist struggle is defined in its poetic context—of whom commissioned the artist and why—as something that is challenged during paratextual dialogs concerning the pieces and what they stand for or rather, what they should stand for. For example, in posting his piece, “hit them nazi punks” in 2020, Undead Clown writes, 

largely inspired by CRASHprez’s song “Fascists Don’t Cry” which is a really great song lmao

but ya imma knock ya out if you come up to me spoutin white supremacist or transphobic shit
human rights aint up for debate 

to which this conversation ensued [if the font is too small, refer to the conversation itself on FurAffinity.net]:

The creation of art doesn’t sit within a vacuum; it is always political, caught between dialectical-material forces during oppositional praxis.)

Canonical Gothic poetics are not just encouraged, but enforced by Capitalism’s global system of exploitation through its predatory monopoly on socio-material conditions to portray animalistic violence with, but also “legitimate” Gothic fictions and terror dialogs. As we shall see moving forward, these factors must be challenged during uphill battles waged by proletarian counterterrorists who remain critical of the elite in all their forms—the state, but also proponents of the state who uphold its monopolies in bad faith; e.g., Volume Two’s examination of the history of vampirism through intellectuals like Foucault, whose own rose-tinted view of the medieval world and its bucolic pleasures enabled him to exploit his own students, thus lend queerness a bad reputation. It’s possible to be a counterterrorist without being a bigot or a sex pest, which ludo-Gothic BDSM must aspire to.

If you might have already noticed, the fascist pageantry of “European” beauty standards becomes something to advertise amid partial state collapse through a restructuring of state power towards a more “medieval” approach that hunts state enemies to extinction in service of profit dressed up in Gothic language (all non-European standards having been totally genocided or relegated to a culturally-endangered status by now). Apart from the unironic Gothic castle, this also includes legislative preparations made well ahead of time by those in power (from SCOTUS to other areas of the world accreting from global US hegemony):

• lowering the age of consent (which often coincides with a fascist/medieval presence—e.g., the age of consent in Japan is 13. However, the age of consent is 20 in South Korea, a historically fascist government under Ilminism that was challenged with the rise of the K-pop music that, despite being monopolized by the Korean government through slave contracts, works as a limited, “bougie/consumer-based” counterculture to fight fascism at the nation-state level; source: Jake Hall’s “From Kim Jong-Un to Trolling Trump: K-Pop Has Always Been Political,” 2020)

• anti-gay/anti-sodomy laws
• anti-trans legislation Anya Zoledziowski’s “Anti-Trans Bills Are Sweeping Across the US With Alarming Speed” (2023)
• prohibiting sex education and prophylactics
• revoking Roe v. Wade to reintroduce anti-abortion laws

Fascism leans towards the openly religious/occult, whereas neoliberalism tends to keep religion out-of-sight but close by—i.e., “separate or not, church and state go hand-in-hand,” Christofascism being the result. In the process, fear and dogma slowly replace good, proletarian education—with rings, for example, becoming what they historically have always been: collars of compelled bondage/sanctioned sex with fascist, even incestuous elements.

Such a castle’s nightmarish presence denotes potential mayhem tied to one’s habitat; i.e., through the liminal hauntology of war colonizing nature and those tied to nature. When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains with counterterror. Adjacent to more classic methods of colonial upheaval, the terrifying power of Gothic poetics can serve our counterterrorist ends through the Six Doubles (of which this subchapter has focused on revolutionary cryptonymy).

So before we proceed onto challenging the state, camping its canon with our own monsters and castles’ ludo-Gothic BDSM, it behooves us to further examine state-sanctioned variations of such tortured bargains; i.e., complicit cryptonymy as illustrated by unironic rings, collars and other visible BDSM implements of undead bondage relayed within the Gothic mode, even if the author tries to distance themselves from all of these things.

To that, we’ll be taking Tolkien to task once more. Onto “Concerning Rings, BDSM and Vampires“!

---

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] “Demon BDSM” is essentially what I call “BDSM with monsters” (even though “demon” is only one class of monster, their class specializes in forbidden knowledge and power exchange); “ludo-Gothic BDSM” stresses the playful, campy nature of iconoclastic BDSM when using ironic Gothic poetics and performance, including not just demons but also animal language (e.g., puppy play) and undead components; re: “rape play” but also labor exchange in half-real, cryptomimetic forms.

[2] Versus simply material conditions; society and its materials overlap in ways that need to be accounted for beyond Marx’s centuries-old theories when synthesizing praxis ourselves.

[3] Meaning “pertaining to stories of high imagination”; re: Walpole.

[4] Death by boredom is not the Gothic style, and so many things relate to BDSM through the Gothic mode as ours to reclaim. To that, here’s an extended taste of things to come, which the chapter after this one will list more completely in relation to the rest of the book: madness, hysteria and persecution mania; zombies and other walking dead, leeches and parasites (vampires); mad science, cyborgs and composite bodies; tricksters, deadly games, puzzles and fatal riddles; black knights (fascists) and false protectors, confessors, penitents, lovers and friends; ambushes, betrayals, and deadly secrets; heists and blackmail, robbery and destruction; fatal attraction and involuntary repulsion; terminal rejection, poison and assassins; riots and mayhem, rebellion and strife; haunting melodies and seductive dances; sirens, succubae, and oracles; clones and shapeshifters; rapists and reapers, brothels and whores, rogues and cavaliers; mutants and executioners, butchers and livestock; jokers and madmen; heroes, cowards, victims, and villains—monsters and maidens and things in between; black vows, forsaken oaths, dire revenge and faithless traitors; lost legends, heavy time, open sadness and secret pain; doppelgangers and fatal portraits; wild animals and talking beasts (and other beings of nature); dreams and nightmares, witchcraft and black magic; ancient monarchs, otherworldly cathedrals, Numinous forces, and lumbering terrors; blood, gore and bodily dismemberment; asylums, prisons, and barbaric surgery and medicine; psychological torture, gaslighting and mind games; cells, crypts and live burial; drugs and incapacitation, shaken spirits, shattered dreams, lost hopes and flagging courage; doom, despair and dread; decay and death, graveyards and rot; mazes and labyrinths, dungeons and traps; giant, open spaces, claustrophobic tombs, shameful closets and endless darkness; perpetual rain, lightning, wind and fog; ignominious death, “mortification of the flesh” and exquisite torture (unironic otherwise). Truly, the Gothic mode is endless in terms of its depth, degree and flavor(s) of peril. And it’s ours for the taking.

[5] I.e., “the Straights aren’t alright,” or Man Box culture from a strictly xenophobic and harmful xenophilic perspective. If you want to know the targets of the status quo, just look at a bigoted person; they’d scared of/angry at pretty much everything (re: Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the Gothic mode); e.g., Lovecraft’s xenophobia or Tolkien’s arachnophobia, etc. Revolutionary cryptonymy helps bring out those hiding in bad faith using shared, mask-like monster language that also intimates, interrogates and addresses state trauma.

[6] Take it from me, such projects—regardless of their size—can ease tremendous suffering.

[7] Videogames are endemic to (and incredibly common inside) neoliberal Capitalism as having spawned the majority of them on a franchised level; i.e., its Cartesian, monomorphic prescriptions yielding heteronormative clichés through popular iterations; e.g., Samus Aran’s missiles and Mother Brain’s caves in Metroid (see: “War Vaginas: Phallic Women, Vaginal Spaces and Archaic Mothers in Metroid,” 2021).

[8] Isolation and enforcement of medievalized divisions lead to alienation from nature, but also the human body in all its forms. For example, the monk from Matthew Lewis’ titular novel didn’t know the difference between men and women: “reported to be so strict an observer of Chastity, that He knows not in what consists the difference of Man and Woman” (source). To this, Lewis—a gay man—was effectively making fun of weird, heterosexual, virgin nerds isolated and educated by heteronormative canon to abuse those around them.

[9] Missionary is common for several reasons. Apart from colonial enforcement through literal missionary work (with the Church telling colonized populations to fuck in a male-dominant way because God [thus the state] approves of it), missionary position is also fairly easy to perform (though doggy is easier); it’s also hypercanonical, thus ubiquitous within paratextual “instruction” documents. To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with having sex in this position, any more than having standard/non-standard bodies or genders are; the issue lies in violent prescription through a settler-colonial binary that leads to genocide on every possible register/format: those different than normal are punished, including for how they fuck unlike missionaries, but also the occupying armies that accompany the Church (and invading nation-state) into colonial territories.

[10] Male masturbation is generally described by cis-het men in violent, war-like, monstrous colonizer language (with the canonical cumshot serving as a “claiming ritual,” as illustrated by this lovely 2002 Robin Williams skit). Also, don’t mistake me; sex takes work to be fun, but it should be non-violent fun, not a brutal, numbing chore! And yes, “anger sex” can be intense, but it should still be safe and controlled, with the appropriate aftercare post-fuck; otherwise, it’s toxic (speaking from experience on this one, but we’ll get to that).

[11] The aggregation of state power happens between the private interests of the ruling elite and nation-state governments (and proponents) acting in concert. The exact ways this historically unfolded—under laissez-faire Capitalism versus the World Wars, Embedded Liberalism and Bretton Woods, or the rise of neoliberalism in 1979—is largely differentiated by the elite’s ability to crackdown against rebelling parties. In the mid-20th century onwards, a popular method of quelling potential rebellion are the bourgeois trifectas: the CIA (secret agents), strategic bombing (a misleading term used to disguise the escalation and quantity of dropped ordinance) and trade sanctions, aka “soft power” (a misleading term, as soft power and economic strength historically fare better against hard power/total war than the other way around, but until recently couldn’t be waged the way the US does now through global US hegemony/Capitalist Realism). In other words, the recipient of this shared animus is a common enemy to the elite, but also their servants (official police agents and de facto cops/fascist vigilantes) defending capital: revolting slaves, but also workers in general according to Communism as echoed after the Civil Rights Movement as engaged by women and non-whites, but also the LGBTQ and religious minorities working in intersectional solidarity. There’s nothing the state fears more.

(artist: Justin Gerard)

This often conveys in fantasy canon by fearful Pygmalions. Tolkien, for example, framed the dialectical-material arrangement of what was WW1 quickly becoming WW2 in the good-vs-evil animal language he used to gentrify war on his refrain (the treasure map); i.e., the goblins, an anti-Semitic symbol merged with fascism (dubiously conflated by Tolkien) and “evil animals/corrupt nature” versus Everyone Else fighting for “good nature” in his famous Battle of the Five Armies (above). Meanwhile, Cameron’s refrain (the shooter) depicted the barbarian horde as xenomorphic “space bugs,” vis-à-vis Starship Troopers (1959), whereas The Simpsons joked, “I’m under attack by Nazi-Communists!” All of these encapsulate American centrism and babyface dialog quite well through Capitalist Realism: the fight is always an exchange between the establishment and the unruly mob turned undead, demonic, and wild; i.e., Nazis and Communists threatening the West’s symbolic domination of nature. The code for military industry and propaganda becomes ludic, neat and lucrative (videogames), but also sacred unto itself; those who challenge it will be gatekept and kettled until they change their tune.

[12] The didactic nature of Gothic stories would have, in the medieval tradition, fixated on deadly sins and emotions like pride and lust tied to sexuality as heavily gendered.

[13] For a videoludic example of gradient xenophobia in relation to zombies, consider the excellent (and lengthy) “A Thorough Look at Resident Evil” (2022) by Noah Caldwell-Gervais. The franchise’s treatment of zombies varies per setting. However, released over time, Capcom’s use of zombies reflects displaced versions of real-world, geopolitical attitudes about places demonized by Capitalism, but also exploited like chattel; e.g., Eastern Europe and Africa, in Resident Evil 4 and 5 (2005 and 2009). They and corporations like them purposefully link cultural anxieties to undead bodies that are summoned up and swiftly and shot for profit.

[14] Godzilla, in Japanese, is Gojira, which literally translates to “gorilla whale”; but also, the vast majority of kaiju are either animals or robot animals. As a sidenote, they represent state shift of a particular kind: giant titans of the repressed natural world rising up in the face of human arrogance and interference; e.g., Studio Ghibli’s enraged forest demons in Princess Mononoke (1997) or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). Versus a Christofascist spiraling towards rapture through Capitalist Realism, the presence of such monsters (and their hellishly alien, forest-like homes) invite human viewers to recognize a collective erring of humanity and neglected responsibility as stewards of the Earth, which will survive after we kill ourselves off during military optimism (fighting everything, including nature, as an abject threat to capitalist hegemony).

[15] A similar tactic to many post-Miltonian works, whose Satanic poetics/darkness becomes blind towards critiquing patriarchal institutions. For example, Hazbin Hotel (2024) doesn’t even mention God, instead treating good and evil as essential, tediously and unnecessarily reformed by a white “nepo baby” hotel (funded by a serial killer, no less). Worse, her iconoclastic parents, Satan and Lilith, have been chained to the nuclear family unit as bourgeois. The white princess’ plan does suck, so her plight—of people not liking her stupid, small-minded idea—is an entirely unsympathetic one built on privilege, not rebellion. Its real-life author’s hard-fought success is likewise a thoroughly gross compromise with a giant mega-company churning out blind, Rocky-Horror-style pastiche. Like Tolkien’s sylvan trees, the author canonizes camp, regressing towards outmoded debates and harmful caricatures (e.g., Angel Dust as the reprobate queer sex worker) while profiting off them.

[16] The queerness of someone would have been permitted insofar as they were granted an exception as a person of means; e.g., a political, general or aristocrat of some kind wouldn’t be taken to task for refusing to follow the canonical laws… provided they didn’t “pull an Oscar Wilde” and make their activities open to the public. For example, as Brent Pickett of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes on homosexuality and the ancient world (which involves the canonical codes we’re addressing in the modern world through reimagined forms), “Some persons were noted for their exclusive interests in persons of one gender. For example, Alexander the Great and the founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, were known for their exclusive interest in boys and other men. Such persons, however, are generally portrayed as the exception. […] Given that only free men had full status, women and male slaves were not problematic sexual partners. Sex between freemen, however, was problematic for status” (source, 2020).