Book Sample: Chapter Five: Rebellious Subterfuge (opening and “A Plan of Attack”)

Posted on by Persephone van der Waard

This blog post is part of “All the World,” a sixth 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” (2024), as well as “Make It Real” for Volume One and “The Total Codex” for Volume Zero. Those promotions sought to promote and provide their respective volume’s individual pieces for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry Module, Undead Module and Demon Module, followed by my PhD and manifesto. “All the World,” by comparison, caps off my book series with a promotion for Volume Three; re: my Praxis 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 “All the World’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

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

Chapter Five: Rebellious Subterfuge. “Rise up, comrade zombies!”—The Revolutionary Undead’s Covert Activism/Cryptonymy during Liminal Counter-Expression

When you argue with a fool, be sure he isn’t similarly engaged (source).

—Evan Esar, “Esar’s Comic Dictionary” (1943)

LGBT ideologues use doubt to create a fog of confusion. For them, the best recruits are the youngest. If you confuse kids about fundamental questions like, “What am I?” early enough, the recruit will be ripe in a few years and the ideologues can then tell them what they are — soldiers in the war against Western civilization (source).

—Jack Gist, The Western Journal (2023)

Picking up where “My Story of Trans-on-Trans Violence” and “Trans TERFs, NERFs, and Queer Bosses” left off…

(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)

Whores communicate through sex; in Gothic through monster sex as something to reclaim, mid-cryptonymy lubricating the gears of war. We whores are beings of nature as hellish, this have to be our own detectives versus witch cops tokenizing mid-decay as something to perform. For us, detection is a process of concealment; re: surviving through dualistic aesthetics that we must use and the state will copy to also survive; i.e., our performance versus theirs, onstage and off. Gothic colonizes and decolonizes, mid-cryptonymy as dualistic! That’s oppositional praxis, regardless of the theory!

Furthermore, the more crisis the state is in, the more decay occurs, hence cryptonymy being what the state will scapegoat: to regenerate itself, which we employ to survive, solidarize and speak out with, infiltrating them anisotropically in duality (crisis when the state is actually at its weakest)! Again, once the killing starts, it snowballs. So it’s best to avoid fascism by preventing it. This cannot be done without developing Communism. Ergo, Gothic Communism reclaims monstrous language; i.e., to remind token cops of their own futile betrayals and self-conquest: the state betrayals all, regardless of loyalty (to save the Judas “for last,” as it were, or doom them to a lonely existence where none of their kind remain)!

This chapter considers cryptonymy per the actions and consequences of Gothicism; i.e., as something to patron through iconoclastic artists, or personally express its spectres of Marx for others to respond to in concert.

We’ll start by outlining the plan of attack, cover several popular examples to subvert during our own kayfabe spy games (the Amazon and Medusa as conspicuous icons studied for authenticity within canonical norms), provide trauma-confrontation targets and stratagems, and discuss potential consequences to our dissident aggressions on the Aegis; i.e., during revolutionary cryptonymy as something I would introduce here (in mid-2023) before building on the idea vis-à-vis ludo-Gothic BDSM in my PhD and manifesto.

  • “A Plan of Attack: Escaping the Man Box” (included with this post): Considers the basic idea of escaping the Man Box, hence Capitalist Realism; i.e., on the same stage populated by bad actors (re: witch cops).
  • 5b. “Transgressive Nudism; or, Flashing Those with Power (re: Cryptonymy’s Origins)“: Introduces public nudism (and its buffers, online); i.e., as a vital instrument to practicing revolutionary cryptonymy on the Aegis.
  • 5c. “‘Borrowed Robes,’ or Countering Nation Pastiche’s Sublimated War and Rape with Revolutionary Cryptonymy and Liminal Monster Porn in the Internet Age”: Considers the idea of performative disguise, said borrowed robes conducive to revolutionary cryptonymy in a variety of forms.
    • 5c1. ” part one: “Proletarian Warrior Moms and Breeding Kinks” (feat. Nyx): Explores one of my favorite monsters—Amazons, but also the rape fantasies (and fears) they classically embody and which revolutionary actions can gleefully subvert canon with.
    • 5c2. “part two: “Moe/Ahegao, Incest, and Eco-Fascism in Japanese Exports”: Explores various theatrical devices of rape play that workers must camp; e.g., Moe/Ahegao, Incest, and Eco-Fascism; i.e., as they’re exported to American from Japan in the neoliberal age.
  • 5d. “Rockstars: From Rock ‘n Roll Fans and Jimmi Hendrix’ Penis to Horror Movie Special Effects” (feat., Cynthia Plaster Caster): Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll are an ancient form of protest; i.e., as reclaimed bread and circus, which this section considers through the social-sexual embodiment/reenactment of such things: the human body and memento mori.
  • 5e. “Stand to Fight, then Raise Your Fist and ‘Bow’ to Duck the Imperial Boomerang: Further Expressions of Ironic Girl War Bosses, Sexy War, and Gender Irony”: Delves into more examples of revolutionary cryptonymy with which to protest through war-like imagery and riot.
  • 5f. “Sexist Ire: Persecuting Iconoclasts (and Iconoclastic Vice Characters; feat. Elphaba Thropp)”: Warns of iconoclasm’s performative risk, and how reclaimed vice characters are punished without irony by state actors doubling our own subversive approaches.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

While I wish to say that our violence is illegitimate in the state’s eyes, that should be obvious at this point; our solidarity is fated to experience violence, but our appeals are still made with grace under pressure when facing Capitalism as the destroyer of all things. Yet, we are not Pourtalès or Sazonov bickering in abject futility while the mechanisms of the state turn their fatal gears; there’s an awesome power we can harness from having lived inside it our whole lives—i.e., a “darkness visible” that transmutes the state through Gothic poetics that reclaim the lost culture, spells and illusions stolen by the state.

Furthermore, we may us them once reclaimed to further our cryptonymy’s pedagogy of the oppressed that creates giants, demons, and undead who break the shadowy spell of Plato’s cave (the Superstructure) in ways that simultaneously keep us alive and save workers from a cycle of never-ending abuse (whose enforcers—bred conspicuously for size, strength and passivity—become freakishly chattelized; e.g., like a Flemish giant rabbit; i.e., as the literal product the state cannibalizes to keep itself alive and continue the grift): the Seminal Tragedy stalled not through clemency or reprieve during periods of decay and restoration under crisis, but attenuation through gradual degrowth and transmutation of the system as the source of the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection that brings said decay back around.

Degrowth (thus de-escalation), in turn, happens through a reclaimed, proletarian Superstructure via worker poetics in the Gothic mode, often with powerful, sexy monsters: the ironic, gender-parodic monstrous-feminine. That is our power and it is not false; it’s solidarity and labor potential is what the elite fear most: our dignity, rights and labor as not things to bargain away for cheap illusions under Rainbow Capitalism.

One thing I do wish to consider before we start is Gothic Communism/revolutionary cryptonymy in action; i.e., labor exchanges between different works subsisting under Capitalism. The basic procedure is often commissioned:

(exhibit 101a1: Artist: Persephone van der Waard—a commission by Odie of their OC, Christiana Seay, with two of Persephone’s: Siobhan and Revana. Originally drawn in 2021, I wrote at the time: “Obviously I was inspired by Disney’s Fantasia [1940] However, I also drew inspiration from Anato Finnstark and Wlop.” As shown in exhibit 61a2, commissions are tremendously important for artists to be able to survive/continue their craft as a form of sex-positive expression. Whereas exhibit 61a2 shows me commissioning another artist, this exhibit is the other way around; without Odie’s generous help over the years, I wouldn’t have been able to continue my art—the raw fiscal support, but also having a reliable patron who genuinely cares about my work as inherently valuable in helping them express something important: sex-positivity through body positivity and artistic representations beyond the status quo:

These are more commissions from Odie. As a client, Odie is very sex-positive, his commissions covering themes including fat body positivity as well as muscular female bodies and all-around flexibility training and fitness. His commissions also include ethnic and queer diversity and a variety of poses and reoccurring characters [both his and mine; the model for the bottom-right photo is Miss Nia Sax]. Hannah Gadsby rightly states, “diversity is strength!” While such strength is important when striving towards holistic solidarity and sex positivity among workers, it also just feels nice being able to celebrate each other’s birthdays through art collabs! To stand and be recognized as part of a group of friends; i.e., evolution as a feature of evolution, not a flaw, explains Chats with the Void 

If everyone was “normal,” then every individual would have the same the same passions and aversions, the same potential. But throw in a few weirdos, and an entire species benefits from a wider array of strengths, weaknesses and possibilities! Your weirdness is insurance for the future” [source tweet].

while also explaining in reality that we “are not superior to anyone, and no one is superior to us. For we are creatures too complex for honest comparison” [source tweet]. Perhaps, though I would argue that fascists and Capitalism, as manmade, Promethean devices, are wholly inferior from a survival standpoint and will need to evolve or die. We can’t afford to closet ourselves. We must be sassy through cryptonymy to speak out with, mid-disguise.)

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

A Plan of Attack: Escaping the Man Box

“Excitable little fellow,” said Gandalf, as they sat down again. “Gets funny queer fits, but he is one of the best, one of the best—as fierce as a dragon in a pinch.”

If you have ever seen a dragon in a pinch, you will realize that is was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hobbit, even to Old Took’s great-granduncle Bullroarer, who was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse. He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul’s head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment (source).

—Gandalf and the narrator, The Hobbit

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Cryptonymy is way to speak rebelliously through buffers; e.g., me through Madikken as both a disguise and revelation (above); i.e., to break out of the Man Box, thus the closet and Capitalist Realism while its occupied by TERFs. We can’t do that without ruffling some feathers!

As stated during Volume Zero, the class traitor’s Achilles Heel is their inability to critique capital, to see it as largely made up but also about canonical perceptions that can be camped: a blinding “darkness visible” that leads to the myopia of Capitalist Realism. Our greatest strength as warriors (of class, culture and race) is our conscious ability to endure tragedy and farce within canonical historical materialism; i.e., mid-cryptonymy in order to deliberately expose the systematic rot (Capitalism in decay) that fascist cryptonymy upholds (from our thesis statement):

State proponents are straw dogs (throwaway effigies)/sacrificial roosters, believing themselves immune to the elite’s gain while the owner slits the faithful worker’s throat sooner or later. Their “greatest strength” is actually what dooms them to an ignominious death: complete alienation driven by a dimorphic connecting of everything to biological sex, skin color and their canonical-monstrous connotations in service of the profit motive but refusing to scrutinize things at a dialectical-material level (willful ignorance/”rose-tinted glasses”). Conversely our greatest strength class-/culture-/race-conscious warriors is our “darkness visible” doubling theirs through the Wisdom of the Ancients as something to cultivate relative to the modern world; i.e., our deliberate, cultivated ability to critique capital and its agents/trifectas through dialectical-material scrutiny and iconoclastic, campy behaviors that synthesize the Superstructure to our purposes (rehumanizing ourselves by separating from the colonial binary in monomorphic fashion) all while suffering the fools of canonical tragedy and farce within canonical historical materialism. Our aim is to “make it gay” by reclaiming the Base through our Four Gs: abjection, hauntology, chronotopes and cryptonymy—but also our Six Rs, or goals/Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism (abbreviated here; we will unpack these fully in Volume One’s manifesto) during oppositional praxis [re: “Paratextual Documents“].

As stated at the start of the volume, their collective idea is to make Marxism a little cooler, sexier and fun than Marx ever could through the Wisdom of the Ancients (a cultural understanding of the imaginary past) as a “living document”; i.e., to make it “succulent” by “living deliciously” as an act of repeated reflection that challenges heteronormativity’s dimorphic biological essentialism and bondage of gender to sex, thus leading to a class awakening at a countercultural level through iconoclastic (sex-positive), monomorphic Gothic poetics (source: “Pieces of the Camp Map”).

Our exposing of the rot happens by using our dark forces’ “perceptive” Wisdom of the Ancients to out the cop and their heel [so to speak] through campy “darkness visible”; i.e., as deliberately doubled to overwhelm our foes (indented for clarity):

unmasking the American class (thus culture, race) traitor/fascist behind the cartoon white knight, black knight and “Captain American” vs “Nazi,” thus expose the capitalist qualifier “as it should be” as self-destructive, heteronormative (warlike) dogma; i.e., penned by or for the state to keep capitalism running, thus always in crisis and decay through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern and resulting process of abjection/narrative-of-the-crypt hyperreality (the half-real dystopia).

In short, our iconoclasm is an informed decision, but a risky one because we challenge the profit motive, which is defended by our aforementioned killer babies[1] as monstrously violent towards uncanny duplicates. Along with its complicit cryptonyms and carceral hauntologies, and capitalist chronotopes, canonical war become a besieged position of correct-incorrect that troubles true believers; i.e., shakes their faith, but demands they stay true and smite unbelievers. All of this must be camped, parodied, and played within to escape our collective doom; i.e., as made by proponents of capital and the state’s Capitalist Realism, it’s harbinger of devastation and blindness inside and outside of the mind, on- and off-stage.

This chapter discusses the aforementioned neoliberal/fascist war and its Judas-level internalization by TERFs as something to expose, transmute and deliciously embellish during ironic, liminal expression by Satanic rebels; i.e., those who work in opposition to Capitalism’s vicious, Man Box reactionaries and duplicitous moderates (whose own heroic personas are really just fascists in disguise, in disguise, in disguise…). Code/guerrilla war in queer circles is nothing new. Pre-20th century discourse was vague, but still presented itself in monstrous, campy language.

In the 1970s, though, queer people kept up the monstrous camp after the lexicon for identifying what queer was had appeared; we weren’t gay at all, we were just “friends of Dorothy!” The reasons for this are not complicated: queerness is tied to labor as a non-heteronormative, thus dissident, demonic force. In other words, worker solidarity presents us as a fearsome, dark monolith whose monstrous-femininity must be confronted as the end of all existence, thus condemning us to execution by those siding with fascists: our would-be friends, the so-called “paladins” of the world (whose crusader purpose is generally to look the other way but also conduct genocide themselves).

(artist: ND Stevenson; source: Caroline Cao’s “Nimona’s Radical Page-to-Screen Story Changes Were a Queer Necessity,” 2023)

To prevent this betrayal, we must convince those who would destroy us that we aren’t the enemy, the state is. As Amazons to Godzilla to vampires to orcs and xenomorphs, the iconoclast’s demonic, xenophilic counter-bestiary must adopt the same-looking disguises and rise up as the emotionally/Gothically intelligent dead—i.e., not in acts of blind revenge, pastiche and endorsement, but in synthetic oppositional groupings that counterattack proponents of the status quo (and their own liminal expression/disguise pastiche) through proletarian de facto educators that help the next-in-line escape the Man Box by transmuting it. This breaking of the Capitalist-Realist myopia happens by internalizing the means of synthesizing Gothic Communism not as Godzilla does—a dumb Greater Destroyer angrily stomping destructively everything until he is simply banished into the sea—but rioting in ways that help us affect material change through the hearts and minds of those who would do the punishing of this rioting force.

To be clear, violent resistance/uncivil disobedience is entirely legitimate in the absence of justice from a moderate (thus white supremacist and heteronormative) “benefactor”—i.e., for the revolutionary fighting for their rights, their constructive anger is entirely legitimate in terms of challenging the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence by aiming to transmute the structure by violence if necessary. Damaging property to the elite’s bottom line (the latter of which exploits and genocides workers and defenseless peoples) is valid, but this violence is weaponized against us; i.e., presenting us as the monsters who need killing. At the very least, we will need to be humanized as we do it.

Humanizing demands theatrical nuance and clever masks (cryptonyms) but also empathy whose cultural counterweights operate through cultural media that speaks to the very people who fear for their homes and their livelihoods as synonymous with the status quo; re, the synthetic oppositional groupings (from Volume One’s “The Basics of Opposition Synthesis“):

  • constructive anger—i.e., the commune/comrade worker’s constructive anger as a legitimate defense from state abuses; e.g., police abuse and DARVO tactics
  • stabilizing gossip—i.e., interdependent girl talk (e.g., #MeToo) and rape prevention tactics and patterns
  • “perceptive” pastiche/quoting—subversion and irony
  • ironic gender trouble/parody (camp)—i.e., a performative means of outing cryptofascist “trouble” by using parody to demask the fascist-in-disguise, making them “self-report” by figuratively gagging or crapping their pants: “flashing” exhibitionism, private/public nudism, “breeding” kinks, rape play/consent-non-consent.
  • good-faith egregores, including xenophilic monsters both as products of worker labor as well as worker identities, occupations, and rankings, which use similar language to bourgeois counterparts in order to disarm and persuade them to join our cause.

We won’t really have time to cover everything, here, but I should leave you with plenty of food for thought!

First, while the camp map from Volume Zero discussed the basic idea of camping canon, our synthesis roadmap pointed regarded these concepts as the means to synthesis in our own daily lives/theatre. Now I want to get in-depth regarding them in relation to proletarian praxis as our “true power” insofar as Gothic poetics are concerned: our ability to create campy riot (counterterror) through our bodies, our labor, our ability to relate to our hallucinating killers, thus to break them out of their berserker’s rage brought on by the sound and fury of endless war as taught to them since they were small.

Unlike them, there’s no Faustian bargain taking place because we aren’t recognizing the state as legitimate or safe; we’re reclaiming our power by taking back the Gothic imagination, thus disarming our killers of the dagger in their hand, but also their desire to use it by showing them the error of their ways by breaking the spell of canonical war as “good” but also “true” (“signifying nothing”): camping its arbitrary sanctity and bloodthirst through the iconoclasm of subversive and transgressive irony/gender parody that shows them their own serious failure. Our camp is not true camp, using Sontag’s definition; we know what we’re doing. We have to show them what they actually know and then lead them to question these concentric falsehoods with the emergence of empathy and critical thinking.

While the iconoclast’s anger, gossip, pastiche/quoting and xenophilic egregores actively absorb and counteract Capitalism in all its forms, the deed—of consigning its tyrants to ignominious burial (turned to stone like embarrassed gargoyles as Communism developers)—is an ongoing effort that is canonically met with neglect, abuse and denial; re, the four basic behaviors of class dormancy and betrayal (from “Scouting the Field“):

  • open aggression, expressing gender trouble as a means of open, aggressive attack (disguised as “self-defense” reactive abuse): “We’re upset and punching down is free speech” (“free speech” being code for “negative freedom for bigots who want to say bigoted things” to defend the elite’s profit motive).
  • condescension, expressing a moderate, centrist position that smarmily perpetuates the current status quo as immutable, but also optimal: “This is as good as it gets” but also which can never decay.
  • reactionary indignation, using sex-coercive symbols (argumentation) to defend their unethical positions: “They’re out to destroy your heroes, your fun, all you hold dear (code for ‘the current power structure’).”
  • DARVO (“Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender”), defending the status quo by defending the people who enslave them (the elite) by going after the elite’s enemies, thereby defending Capitalism during decay. When it decays, these “gamers” see “their” games in decay and will defend those, seeing human rights as an affordable compromise in the bargain. They see themselves (and the elite) as “victims,” and class warriors as monsters “ruining everything” (like Satan).

The elite use fascists to box rebels camping the canon in, the latter kettled by the close-minded defending canon; i.e., workers who are still “in the cave.” As such, those dependent on the system desperately attack those who are trying to liberate them by any means at their disposal: with elaborate strategies of misdirection, dark poetics and all-around Gothic allegory during a war of appearances; i.e., disguise-pastiche aesthetics and doubled, subversive cryptomimesis of particular artistic movements (the Vaporwave, Laborwave, “perceptive” cyberpunk; re: exhibit 42d1a, “Seeing Dead People“) through parallel societies that produce these things (e.g., Joy Division’s Haçienda).

The aim, here, isn’t to harm our opponents, but use the cryptonymy process to reverse abjection, thus destroy the worldview that guides their killing hand. If they should freeze in place and blush at the response, their shattered pride and deflated ego is a small price to pay for humanizing us in their eyes. Nevertheless, spies are often sexy in spy fiction, and the Gothic is no exception; the allegory for revolution is hidden behind the sexually descriptive body presented as mythical, legendary and strong in a very cliché, fetishized sense: camping the canon, thus reclaiming it for our own purposes (e.g., Amazons; re: exhibit 1a1b, “Symposium; Aftercare“).

We’ve already discussed the parenthetical examples earlier in the book. We’ve also touched upon the idea of elite panic versus fascist panic against labor solidarity as their shared ultimate foe in ushering in a world without sin, without state control and genocide through regressive assimilations of Gothic aesthetics and counterculture. Their shared class-war narrative can be countered by us, but targeting the elite and their hand on the Superstructure is more “big picture,” whereas dealing with fascists reprisals is more “little[r]” picture.

Obviously the two concepts overlap and have plenty of room for gradients: Trump is a fascist and a billionaire at the same time, as are J.K. Rowling or Bill Gates engaged in deplorable acts of systemic violence, harmful rhetoric and rape apologia; the capitalist and the cutthroat might duel from time-to-time, but are two sides of the same coin. Only by being betrayed by the elite can the fascist potentially “wake up” and become class conscious, but historically-materially they do not do as Guts does; they retreat further into delusion, seeking revenge and continuing to make Faustian bargains with the elite.

These historical romanticizations are conspicuously propelled into the present not just through gladiatorial sports and knightly romances, but also through gallant swashbuckling stories like Sir Walter Scott’s 1817 Rob Roy or David Gemmell’s 2001 Ravenheart, as well as the aforementioned Gothic variety as haunted; i.e., by the spectre of a pre-fascist dark medieval in post-fascist readers born and bred on combat sports, on dueling armies, on the romance of the soldiers’ short and brutal life. The biggest fantastical threshold that any of these romances offer is a proximity between the elite and the commoner that is seldom broached in reality the same way it is in media: through codified backroom deals, the tableaux of dashing violence and cloak-and-dagger espionage, and of course, the proverbial crossing of swords as a vivid extension of these men’s bodies, their genitals, their women and conquests reduced to a basic theatrical device: the politics of the duel as kayfabe, but also sung about through the highwayman’s ballad: “Stand and deliver!”

Sedition and heresy are, for all intents and purposes, often mimetic in appearance thanks to modern fears and dogma. For this chapter, then, we’ll summarize the general subterfuges listed above as forms of “bad” play that, while transgressive, push back against capitalist abuses by subverting them in open acts of rebellion disguised as toys, play and jouissance (thus, is actually good play from a proletarian standpoint). These tactics be employed covertly by revolutionaries when playfully turning sexual-gender expression away from bad social-sexual practices into good, forming connections and bonds with other revolutionaries however they wish to; e.g., rape play (exhibit i.e., 101c2); i.e., a chorus of Gothic-Communist spectres, whose subversive doubles (masks, bodies, weapons, plights, theatrical appeals) ontologically challenge state hegemony as the sole, “correct” mode of existence.

Diversity is strength through solidarity enacted on various registers using the Gothic mode to combat our own gender-non-conforming insecurities as doubled by state torturers. Monster-wise, this includes the Amazon or the Medusa as something to reclaim from its fascist, badass portrayals in centrist media; i.e., as internalized by TERF xenophobia during moderate moral panics that lead the charge with girl war bosses (which lead regressively towards fascists ones, all while widespread immiseration and genocide are affecting the Global South now). Irony is a key tool in subverting war/nation pastiche—a kind of ironic war boss that opposes the policing of state power using the same basic language as a form of espionage told in plain sight; e.g., Queen Maeve or Starlight (exhibit 108b4) from The Boys as positions within praxis to recreate during our own conspiracy of monstrous poetics.

The basic code of doing so is what I called “girl talk,” during the synthesis roadmap in Volume One (re: “The Basics“); i.e., a metaphor for community defense by teaching people to play nice, but also the literal conversations that occur when collaborating together towards this aim. We already have a basic idea of what girl talk and good play are, so I’d like to focus on cryptonymy through various forms of revolutionary “gossip” and linguistic corruption as the literal data for said code as something to code-switch using shared language against competing lines of code in praxial opposition. Being Promethean, Capitalism encompasses canonical morals and their codes of ethics and bad-faith tactics, which wrestle with iconoclastic morals and ethical codes as covertly humanizing various monsters by subverting their harmful biases and stigmas away from the elite’s Symbolic Order (the monomyth, Symbolic Order and mythic structure, etc).

Delineation can be done subtly to a degree, but invariably veers into the transgressive; i.e., as queer minorities and other oppressed groups fight not just to survive, but to exist openly as unoppressed peoples through their own abilities to create: playing god against the state and its uncritical hordes promoting moral panics in the face of slave rebellion/oppositional poetics that refuse to recuperate. This requires activism as a means of changing the Base and its material conditions, which in Marxist parlance further demands a recoding of the Superstructure through Gothic-Communist means. Simply put, culture war is class war and class war is a fight for the minds of workers as previously conditioned by lobotomizing agents of menticide. Their brainwashing must be undone and the factors that lead to it subverted and replaced through linguo-material displays of emotional/Gothic intelligence; i.e., the creative successes of proletarian praxis inviting a new age of darkness unlike the pulpy doomsaying of authors like H.P. Lovecraft, which fascists and centrists take to heart.

In other words, “death” isn’t something to fear because it is conquering us (as a coercive lever within heteronormative propaganda); it is something to appreciate as a status of immense change—i.e., by becoming an instrument of sex-positive charge through the Superstructure into society at large through the things we all eat: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll; heavy metal; comic books, myths and legends; powerful warriors, gods, and monarchs. As such, the Gothic imagination is obscenely overburdened with cultural-countercultural freight (so much so that Frederic James or Coleridge washed their hands of most of it)—not in a vacuum or at rest, but during dialectical-material engagements on the surfaces of these things in conversational thresholds where sublimation is attempted or torn down.

Please note: The nebulous, uncanny relationship between these opposing forces will make them immediately ambiguous. While I will do my best to signpost and elucidate their differences per example in ways useful to proletarian praxis, I also trust you to have acquired a fair bit of intuition; i.e., when cryptonymically parsing canon and iconoclasm within the same warring aesthetics and language. —Perse, back in 2023

(exhibit 101a2: Derrida’s idea—of playing with language in small pieces whose spectres of Marx haunt Capitalism—can be embodied and performed by Gothic-Communist revolutionaries on various registers; e.g., Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey, 1991, vs The Seventh Seal, 1958, as a dialogic imagination that is hardly exclusive to big film studios. Indeed, the concept can be used by consumers, artists and producers through various modes of production: written poems, movies, videogames, artwork, sex work and various other praxial outcomes interacting back and forth. To quote Derrida himself, “There is no outside of the text.” Everything exists in opposition/solidarity within a continuum; i.e., onstage and off, both “just a game” and cops/victims during oppositional cryptonymy.)

As we’ve discussed throughout the book, there is a ludic stamp to opposition that must be re-played to develop Communism away from Capitalism. For example, war represses trauma through seemingly unrelated signifiers, which can themselves be reclaimed as a kind of war unto itself: culture war as yet another battlefield for class war to unfurl in plays on words, but also reclaimed symbols of games, of people, of things (of classic examples to make fun of; exhibit 101a2, above). Things seemingly as ordinary as heroes and villains (e.g., Captain American and Nazis) become things to challenge and subvert in cryptonymic stratagems with a game flavor. “Good play” becomes not just sex-positive but deft, “poker face” maneuvers within a game where the other peoples on the societal “board” hide their true intentions/endorsement of rape culture, genocide and general abuse; i.e., “bad play” as made in bad faith, in disguise, in ludic symbols but also within actual games to play as a form of oppositional discourse.

Through these deft cryptonymic maneuvers, sex becomes not something to cover up through submissive modesty tactics but rather employs quasi-acceptable/”correct” disguises that serve a Trojan function. The game, then, is a trick, wherein being clever is an emergent form of deceiving one’s enemies; deft play and deception are synonymous within gameplay as a means of survival, but also changing the way the game is played—i.e., the meta—while dealing with harmful impostors using the same basic masks, thus espionage maneuvers and attacks: the enemy looks like us, but also plays and fights like us during the harrowing process of reclamation.

Revolution, then, require performances where gender parody is a costume—one to not simply wear but remove at times, “flashing” people with an oppressed body being reclaimed by those fighting their own exploitation. There is also an exchange of stealing “borrowed robes” from TERFs during oppositional praxis; i.e., literally fighting over clothes, language, and status/sex symbols, which heroes represent and—par for the course in canonical expression—repress said abuses.

We shall thus cover examples of revolutionary satire as liminal expression, one whose cryptonymy grants the unheard their much-needed pedagogy of the oppressed: the “Trojan-esque” subterfuge as splendide mendax. Such “beautiful liars” stealthily-but-in-plain-sight inject irony and critique through cryptonymy into various, often boss-like positions; i.e., tied to war, BDSM and gender expression as forever policed by token traitors (we’re all kings and queens under Communism, loves). Lastly, we’ll explore some of the consequences one can experience when conducting oppositional praxis ourselves: as the Aegis in question! Survival is sass, but also ass as sass! Let the booty bounce abjection back at our colonizers. Fuck the alien blue, revolutionary cryptonymy your means of survival, solidarity and speaking out to dodge Judas overtures of token genocide, thus replacement (the whore a cheap plaything the state uses to antagonize nature with)!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Onto “Transgressive Nudism; or, Flashing Those with Power (re: Cryptonymy’s Origins)“!

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!

Footnote

[1] It might seem morbidly cruel to punch babies, but these dumbasses aren’t actually infants, just infantile cannibals eating us to defend the state in crisis. They desperately need to be checked, challenged and disarmed by any means that doesn’t have us functioning as they do (class traitors) and doesn’t sacrifice our humanity in the process. So, “lay on, Macduff, and damned be he who cries, ‘hold, enough!'” Just don’t be a Nazi, about it; i.e., use your “dark forces” (your body, poetics and labor) to hamstring and gobsmack them, then document it. It’s not hard, considering they’re terminally allergic to sex positivity at large (e.g., “girls have cooties”); just hold up the mirror and watch them turn to stone like Top Dollar does (re: exhibit 40k1, “Ruling the Slum“).