Book Sample: Chapter Three: Liminality (opening and “Exquisite Torture in the Internet Age”)

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 Three: Liminality. “A Zone… of Danger!”—Fifty Shades of Gay (Area)

“I’m Bad Ash! You’re Good Ash. You’re goody-little-two-shoes!” 

—Bad Ash, Army of Darkness (1993)

Picking up where “Gothic Ambivalence: Canonical Torture in the Internet Age” left off…

The spirit of the Gothic mode is liminal expression, which invokes the crossing of various boundaries into uncertain, alien territories. As such, there are many shades of grey area to consider during culturally appreciative performance art as a form of oppositional praxis whose complex, liminal xenophilia challenges a xenophobic status quo. This chapter examines these iconoclastic ambiguities along various gradients that often intersect, including: Gothic counterculture, paid/un(der)paid sex work, asexual culture and transgender persons, intersexuality and crossdressing.

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

  • “Exquisite Torture in the Internet Age: The Appreciative Irony of Gothic Iconoclasm; or, the Subversive Power of Good Play and Sex-Positive Demon BDSM during Counterculture Performance Art”: Explores playing with demon BDSM iconoclastically for the first time in this book series, eventually evolving into ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: from my PhD, onwards; see: “Concerning Rape Play“).
  • “Selling Sex, SWERFs and Un(der)paid Sex Work” (feat. Art Frahm): Explores the basic mechanisms of selling sex (as something to play with and perform, using Gothic poetics); i.e., vis-à-vis SWERFs and the generally underpaid nature of said activities and how art portrays them as automatically sexual despite there being an ace component; re: public nudism as often coming out of canon as something to camp; e.g., Art Frahm.
  • “Crash Course: An Introduction to Asexuality and Demisexuality“: Having introduced an “ace” potential during Gothic poetics merged with public nudism/sex work at large, we’ll now unpack asexuality and demisexuality versus sexual expression; i.e., on the same larger gradient.
  • “Queer-/Homonormativity in Sex-Centric Canon” (feat. The Matrix, Sense8, Sherlock, etc—included with “Crash Course”): Explores the normative elements to queer-coded stories in popular media.
  • “Sexualized Queerness and Ace Voices in Sex-Normalized (Fan/Meta)Fiction” (included with “Crash Course”): Considers queer normativity as sexualized, with ace voices navigating said sexualization in various kinds of fan/meta fiction (e.g., Harry Potter).
  • “Defined Through Sex: Sex Normativity in Popular Media” (included with “Crash Course”): Considers the amatonormative side to sex as normalized in popular media; e.g., Wentworth (2013), Heartbreak High (2022), or Game of Thrones (2009).
  • “Pigtail Power and Crossdressing: Sex Repulsion in Gothic/Queer Narratives” (feat. Wednesday and Barbarian): A close-read, one that considers the “ace” ability of pigtailed Radcliffean Gothic heroines; i.e., to explore psychosexual trauma while navigating its homely perils from the outside, in; re: during the liminal hauntology of war.
  • “Artistic Nudity and Asexual Bodies/Relationships in Art; Gay Artists”: Considers how artistic nudity and asexual bodies/relationships help form special bonds between workers; i.e., between (historically gay) men and feminine/female models.
  • “Inside the Man Box; or, Patriarchal, Nerdy Hatred Against Transgender/Non-binary People, Intersexuality and Drag” (feat. Caleb Hart, She-Hulk, twinks/femboys, goblins, and more): Takes the above ideas and considers the etiology (causes) of GNC genocide under Capitalism as something to interrogate through our relationships; e.g., trans, enby and intersex people/drag performers, whose monstrous-feminine relationships (re: twinks, femboys, etc) are informed by medieval art and Gothic fiction; i.e., under capital as a system that sexualizes its victims, teaching future police agents to neglect, attack or otherwise abuse those parties for profit: within the Man Box and “prison sex” mentality furthering the Shadow of Pygmalion’s patriarchal influence to harm nature as monstrous-feminine.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Exquisite Torture in the Internet Age: The Appreciative Irony of Gothic Iconoclasm; or, the Subversive Power of Good Play and Sex-Positive Demon BDSM during Counterculture Performance Art

Two hundred years ago Ann Radcliffe introduced Gothic conventions into the mainstream of English fiction. For the first time the process of feminine sexual initiation found respectable, secular expression. Yet the terms of this expression were ultimately limiting. It is important to recognize and acknowledge the heritage of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic tradition; it is even more important now to move on and invent other, less mutilating conventions for the rendering of feminine sexual desire (source).

—Cynthia Wolff, “The Radcliffean Gothic Model”

Note: This chapter effectively concerns playing with demon BDSM in ways that are increasingly iconoclastic, but also fixated on play as iconoclastic; re: what would eventually become “ludo-Gothic BDSM” in my PhD, and later what the Demon Module would considering camping through Radcliffe’s exquisite “torture” in “Exploring the Derelict Past.” We don’t have time to focus on that evolution, here, but it is something to bear in mind: the earliest instances of what ludo-Gothic BDSM evolved into started here. —Perse, 4/20/2025

In Volume Two we outlined exquisite torture as an older form of, if not outright xenophilia, then at least queer-curious “good play” and demon BDSM pioneered by Ann Radcliffe as an admittedly milquetoast kick-starter (whose novels are incredibly violent in ways channel the harm of canonical bondage as politely obscured but nevertheless meant to threaten readers with canonized rape, bondage, misdirection and death).

(artist: Rizdraws)

Whereas the end of last chapter touched on canonical torture, the first section of this chapter explores appreciative irony in Gothic iconoclasm per exquisite torture (which this book treats as synonymous with Gothic counterculture, reverse abjection, monstrous-feminine xenophilia and mutually consensual voyeurism unless specified otherwise); i.e. counterculture performance art and how it re-empowers the Gothic imaginations of historically oppressed groups and their artists through emancipatory hauntology of a sex-positive demon BDSM that is, if not totally pain-free, then harm-free for those looking in/performing the roles in question (not an inability to imagine the future beyond past forms, vis-à-vis Fisher, but Derrida’s linguo-material, spectral sense of pastness that opens the way to future liberation from carceral forms).

Furthermore, the discipline of sex-positive engagement is the point; i.e., a bolstering of societal good faith in torturous cultural markers that denote unequal power and master/slave deathly aesthetics, but teach the performers to respect the rights of each other when performed and viewed: our ironically safe police-like whips and chains, knives and batons, handcuffs and collars, commands and deference, stations of power and lack thereof, leather and lace, angels and demons, etc—i.e., not “the real thing” but a substitution of the status quo variant for what will, over time, become the norm: informed consent.

Note: What follows is a brief introduction to what has been discussed extensively over five prior volumes; re: Gothic theatre and the sediment it was built on. Here, such things are strictly conversational regarding informed consent during appreciative irony. In keeping with the rest of the volume, there’s no dedicated topic beyond introducing the basic idea. The subjects I picked, here, are The Boys and Northanger Abbey as well as Lady Dimitrescu and Lil Nas X, but informed consent/appreciative irony can apply to any examples per holistic study. —Perse, 5/4/2025

Performance art is anything that requires performance, with general performativity including social-sexual roles illustrated by art of all kinds: illustrations, photographs, video, and live performance. Though actively sex-positive, Gothic[1] counterculture performance relies on appreciative irony towards historically exciting-but forbidden activities: BDSM, kink and fetishes, which are themselves historically wedded to ambivalent, xenophobic imagery and rituals historically associated with brutal torture, outright rape, coercive sodomy and general criminalized behavior (e.g., Radcliffe’s Confessional of the Black Penitents).

There is no immediate visual difference between sex-positive or sex-coercive examples (the couple having sex and “dying” in the slasher film’s criminal hauntology vs the horror-happy Goth couple fucking in performance art that demands a willing voyeur to their eager JO-crystal-style exhibitionism). Instead, context differentiates them—namely the presence of xenophilia irony as something to hauntologically perform, power’s flow something to perform by workers by virtue of dialectical-material context; i.e., differentiating the violence, terror and monsters for state monopolies, profit and abjection, upholding and maintaining them, or changing the flow.

Delayed resolution is the name of the game, in Gothic, as well as crippling lust and warring emotions on the surface of things (what critics call “atmosphere”). So roll with the punches! Adapt within the usual conventions to warp them, hence the world; i.e., the world as barbaric, with dated perversions and systems of thought as the lever to move it; e.g., the humors, in theatre. What do you think sanguine is, for vampires? We live in Gothic times, dueling in a variety of ways.

From shadows on walls, masks/costumes, sports, Amazonomachia and kayfabe of oral traditions to medieval staged and increasingly written, mirror-like varieties (not just sanguine, but black bile’s dark passions and “bad blood” bastard inclinations to betray and make trouble/exact brutal petty revenge), play and theatre are ancient forms of learning and communication that have become “ancient,” hauntological. During the cryptonymy process furthering abjection (scapegoating nature by blaming the whore), we regress towards them in times of state predation and decay to joust in all the usual places, onstage and off.

(artist: Black Salander)

So forget concealed weapons; our weapons are concealment—i.e., as staged, exhilarating and mercurial, on the surface of things (re: Segewick). Less tragic, in the Greco-Roman sense, and more reinvented to be abandoned and found by others, in the Neo-Gothic, we become the barbarians that never were—the destroyers of so-called “Rome” finishing the job while Medusa smiles up on us from Hell as trash. The whore is trash, history her weapon to avenge through fabrications so many don’t take seriously yet consume as opiates. Therein likes our Trojan Horse, Zofloya’s ampule of poison administered less by Victoria to chase her absurd desires and more our own minus the token Amazon. We nullify such nonsense through our own shadows of state rule; forced contrition, we hand them a poison chalice, ruining their reputation while keeping up appearances: the chameleon ghosts of all dead generations haunting the relic, the leering gargoyle decolonizing the church as prey-turned-hunter making the hunter the hunted (re: corruption is the data—exhibit 37b1a, “Healing through ‘Rape’“).

By appreciating mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and informed consumption as things that sexism historically abjects, sex-positive performativity becomes ironic in opposition to sexist, unironically xenophobic norms. This includes hauntology as carceral under normalized circumstances; i.e., weaponized under normalizing circumstances, which counterculture abjures through emancipatory hauntology (we’ll introduce these ideas here, then return to them again in Chapter Five when we examine non-Western kinks and fetish demons).

While we won’t talk about ludo-Gothic BDSM itself much more in the rest of this volume, the rest of this subchapter explores appreciative irony in the professional and amateur art of Gothic counterculture pointing to what ludo-Gothic BDSM ultimately became (re: “Concerning Rape Play“). We’ll start with professional examples, but first need to consider professional art’s troublesome relationship to corporate production and how this limits its potential to be fully ironic in a Gothically appreciative sense. The workers of Gothic counterculture are human, but bound to the complex (and coercive) material conditions present within capital:

(artist: Susu and Sinnocent)

Corporate shareholders dictate cultural production as something to advertise, generally through scripted performances loaded with sexist stereotypes. Even when it lacks strictly “Gothic” visuals, canonical BDSM displays the same sex-coercive bias normalized in Gothic canon: abusive female doms.

Even The Boys does this, for example; i.e., showcasing an evil, Russian dominatrix conspicuously subjugating “Frenchy,” the subby French boy she coerces into performing serialized murder. He’s not bad; she made him do it, all while making him wear a collar to mirror his childhood abuse. Not only does this appropriation play off geopolitical stereotypes—the docile, prurient Frenchman and the Russian/German she-wolf (a conflation of fascism and Communism)—it’s showered in abject gore and checked by an American “paragon”: the alcoholic, self-serving Queen Maeve (itself a stereotype of Irish people).

Unquestionably off-brand, Maeve’s irony remains curiously unappreciative: For one, she likes to flaunt her power against smaller, nonconsenting people. To the writers’ credit, Maeve never physically abuses her lovers; she still remains unattractively pushy towards her human, female ex, and loves emasculating Hughie every chance she gets: ‘You really need a neon sign, one that says, “I’m a sub; rawdog me.”‘ Eventually the story emasculates Maeve, blinding her in one eye like Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre before reducing her to a vulnerable, non-superhero state. Here, Maeve doesn’t learn to use her unequal power so much as it’s taken away from her entirely. She only changes when the show forces her to, ejecting her from the narrative in the same breath.

Prior to exile, Maeve’s irony lacks sex-positive appreciation because it centers peripheral, self-depreciation around countless implied failures. She’s a fuck-up side character who drowns her woes in booze and boys, entirely without merit or joy. Even so, her disgruntled, tough-girl performance lacks much of the Gothic ambivalence of Castlevania‘s Lenore, who openly deceives Hector to imprison and emasculate him; or 50 Shades of Grey‘s (2011) titular lothario, who continuously violates his negotiations with his BDSM partner (and was originally conceived as Twilight [2005] fan fiction). In short, she’s a surly herbo/disgraced Irish cop with a drinking problem who learns to get a better person, but remains a top who enjoys being the dom against twinks: “It’s like you have a neon-lit sign that says, ‘Rawdog me!'” Amazons are sex demons, remember (re: including magical ones, “I’ll See You in Hell“).

While Lenore and Christian Grey feature positive, protector-based elements, their central relationships remain conspicuously toxic, built on lies and broken trust. By comparison, Maeve doesn’t lie. However, she also doesn’t relate to anyone in a romantic sense. A perpetual loner, her story starts after the romance is dead, en medias res. So while appreciative stories highlight genuine trust as vital to healthy BDSM, Maeve barely shows what healthy BDSM looks like. Instead, she lacks appreciative irony as a functioning dom with one or more healthy relationships: She’s physically strong and masculine, thus accustomed to getting what she wants from other women. Yet, Maeve’s connective paucity intimates the broader material relationship present between professional media and sexual appropriation: critical restraint and praxial inertia (re: the false rebel dressed up as classic victim/white Indian). Akin to classic Simpsons episodes biting FOX’s hand, The Boys can only chew so hard until Amazon reins them in. This substantially limits whatever irony they can perform in regards to BDSM, kink and fetishes (within Gothic language or not); re: Pygmalion syndrome.

Far more common is the “safe” method: the default manufacturing of coercive variants on a massive scale—cheap, dangerous knockoffs that encourage manufactured consent towards sexist ideas about gender and sexuality. Composed of popular tropes and symbols that survive into 2022, these larger misconceptions originate from unironic interpretations of famous ironies; e.g., Shakespeare’s infamous tale of woe in Romeo and Juliet or later, Austen’s satirical voice in her 1813 novel, Pride and Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged…”). Over time, these interpretations have become canonized, eclipsing the original satire; as such, they treat toxic love as something to uncritically devour. By swooning over romanticized abuse, their readers fail to grasp how Shakespeare or Austen needled dated, abusive standards in their own eras: prescriptive, surface-level appeals towards love as spontaneous, but also fixated on physical beauty or extreme wealth—where death following one’s separation from raw passion is normalized inside the minds of impressionable, horny youths, be they girls of marrying age or eligible bachelors expected to propose.

As something to perform, xenophilic irony exists within a lengthy historio-material process of authors embroiled within sexist consumer culture. The Boys was hardly the first, but the latest in a longstanding Western tradition that normalizes the celebration of romantic abuse in professional media. For example, Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ 16th century works coincided with a rising English identity structured around toxic love. By the late 1700s, mounting pressure to feed the British market with fresh suitors and debutantes all but exploded; artifice became something to embrace by large groups of young middle-class people thirsty for “correct,” heteronormative knowledge on manners, modesty and love. It wasn’t transcendental, but it was code inside a burgeoning system of oppression; i.e., one whose inheritance anxiety and subsequent fear of replacement (re: “Toxic Schlock Syndrome“) would eventually span the entire globe.

Note: Northanger Abbey was Austen’s 1803 critique of Ann Radcliffe, published posthumously in 1817. In Volume Zero, I critique Radcliffe myself in “Pieces of the Camp Map,” but also discuss her relationship to Austen and Northanger Abbey in “Shining a Light on Things.” —Perse, 5/4/2025

Consuming blind pastiche from various popular genres, hungry English readers soaked up information wherever they could; i.e., gazing into it voyeuristically in ways that felt guilty (for fear of punishment by the state) but nevertheless were encouraged because it, like the 1980s porn business centuries later, was profitable for the elite in ways they could condition superstitious, lonely and horny audiences with. This included appropriative material centered on sexism themes, which informed the real world and vice versa: the moral panic of Neo-Gothic novels. So popular and sudden was this “Gothic craze” that Austen parodied it in Northanger Abbey (written in 1803 but published after her death in 1817)—a story written about Catherine Morland, a girl whose curious life mirrors the very Gothic novels she ravenously devours (sweet, delicious “terrorist literature”).

As we’ve established, this rising consumption lacked universal appeal and was generally rejected by the more serious (and pretentious) Romantics. Regardless, peak Victorian abjection helped these novels flourish under a growing middle-class expected to repress whatever prurient activities were regularly happening between cis-het persons. In the face of mounting tensions, sexist canon manufactured consent through prescriptive ideas, codifying an immutable gender binary whose various roles fed back into the practice in ways whose hegemony did not always survive. Indeed, Morland’s story plays out much like a Gothic novel—a direct consequence of those books affecting her life in parallel ways: making the formulaic promise of sex and danger seem delicious to a “princess” who views them as mysterious and intoxicating. It’s only a matter of time before xenophilia as a pedagogy of the oppressed begins to solidarize workers in opposition to the state.

As we also explored in Volume Two, the Neo-Gothic Revival was hardly unified, with many schools and strains emerging in the following decades besides the ones I’ve mentioned or cited. Nor did it stop, leading Angela Carter to write, “We are living in Gothic times” nearly two centuries later (and nearly 50 years ago). Regardless, many BDSM scenarios in canonical literature stem from Gothic horror and terror, which famously injected the Ancient Romance into commonplace, “novel” (quotidian) formats and situations: heteronormative marriage and property disputes. Morland’s peril is basically spoof, the nosy heroine consigned to a solo carriage ride—at night, without protection(!)—back to her family. More earnest examples generally pitted their moral positions on sex and love against settings of extreme terror, horror, abject sexuality and numinous sensations—i.e., often tied to various qualities and locational markers of the Gothic chronotope: murder, ancient castles, black magic, and spectral burial sites.

(artist: F. Bedford)

While the Graveyard Poets would have enchanted these time-spaces with an unshakable feeling of supernatural otherworldliness, exact cultural attitudes are a deeper context that carries imperfectly into newer generations—re: Marx’s nightmare as idiosyncratic per generation as pulverized into a plurality of dissident, even seditious fragments. Usually only the tropes survive—ghastly predicaments like live burial, cannibalism, infanticide or ritual sacrifice; but also taboo sexual themes like incest, rape or necrophilia as a theatrical voice for the oppressed. While these notions can seem dated, superstitious and absurd, they endure remarkably well through Gothic pastiche, which tends to slap them together devil-may-care. Modern conservatism exploits these Old-World variables, crafting cheap horror stories that draft carceral chronotopes, arresting viewer imaginations by coding them along sexist-reactionary lines; the same dialogic imagination affords xenophiles a Trojan horse to wheel backward at our would-be invaders, on the Aegis as contested.

As we’ve established, Gothic canon fetishizes unequal power exchange and descriptive sexuality to stereotypical, rapacious extremes—not simply power, but power abuse tied to sacred coercive demons. Their cheap construction makes them easy to produce; their scandalous, fear-mongering proliferation makes them (and their respective myths) hard to avoid or ignore. So marginalized professionals and amateurs must reclaim them through active, informed irony that appreciates sex-positive examples of unequal power exchange during furtive rebellions. In turn, appreciative irony becomes a force to challenge its own absence inside the Gothic mode, offering up ironic liberators within Gothic hauntology retailored for sex-positive imagination as one of concealment.

First, you have the scream queens—ostensibly cis-het (often white) women who play the sexy heroine under attack, surviving sexism in fairly conventional ways (with the perils of the middle class, cis-het white woman being a centrist position reinforced by Gothic pastiche). However, performative irony extends to increasingly persecuted/scapegoated positions. Practicing witches; trans, intersex, and non-binary people, and other social outsiders/targets—once reliable objects of abject ridicule, fear and punishment—suddenly become cool, fun, and sexy within hauntological positions. Through their newfound xenophilic appreciation, these reverse-abjections remain haunted by their historical function: as sex-coercive symbols of fear (which more recently has become token exploitation under neoliberal Capitalism, promoting the same-old biases dressed up as false hope).

However, inside parallel spaces, performative irony allows sex-positive performers activists to reclaim their use through parody and pastiche (a concept we’ll continue to explore throughout the remainder of this book): the imperfect recreation of old things reinfused with new, sex-positive meaning. To this, we’ve discussed in Volume Two how ironic performers of canonical monsters like Medusa and the xenomorph frame sex empowerment as a legitimate-if-liminal position—reclaiming the agency of their marginalized users by presenting as something sex-positive for society-at-large to emulate but also empathize with by making fun of old classics in ways that bring out their sex-positive elements through perceptive pastiche:

Note: Ridley Scott is far less problematic than James Cameron (re: “Military Optimism“) but remains a man whose career was demonstrably sexist; i.e., in the ’70s and ’80s (re: “Half-Real: Recognizing And Performing Empathy“) into more recent times. He’s a man paradoxically weighed down by neoliberalism (re: “The Roots of Enlightenment Persecution“) while, in the same breath, camping Cameron (re: “Dissecting Radcliffe“) and giving Alien a curiously neoliberal critique—one with its own ethnocentric baggage (re: “Giger’s Xenomorph“). To it, Alien isn’t just one of the most important Gothic works of the 20th century but of all time, and one wedded to Radcliffe, Lewis and the classic Neo-Gothic as revived by Scott and friends in a more sex-positive and liberatory way from the 1970s onwards (re: “A Vampire History Primer“). Ergo, while I discuss and reference Alien as much as I do Aliens (too many to count), I hold it in a far more positive light (versus Aliens‘ shameless Vietnam revenge fantasy going on to fuel neo-colonialism under neoliberalism and its most popular media form: videogames and the entire shooter genre raping nature-in-small by simulating war bleeding back into the natural world; re: “Nature versus the State“). —Perse, 5/4/2025

(exhibit 87c: Artist, left: Kathy of the Bog; middle: Ridley Scott; right, source: “Brett’s Original Death,” 2016. Kathy’s quick-and-dirty inking style curiously resembles Scott’s famous “Ridleygrams” that he made to storyboard Alien with. But her depiction of the monsters is one of posthuman/queer harmony versus Scott’s liminal framing as more phobic towards the alien unknown. In any of his “Gothic seafaring” stories, Scott does not divorce queer sexuality and homosexual/-social themes from psychosexual voice. While its vital to recognize the existence of violent bias and stigma against queer people, it’s equally important not to synonymize the two or essentialize the future as dead in ways that capitalists want; i.e., the future is dead like the medieval past as something to regress toward in apocalyptic fashion. Kathy demonstrates how queerness needs to move beyond carceral hauntological symbols of queerness that are useful to capitalist hegemony [scapegoats] and arrive at emancipatory portrayals that humanize gender-non-conforming people as liminal beings under capital as an exploitative system.)

Proletarian witches—be they figurative or literal—shouldn’t be burned at the stake like village scapegoating revived in the present sphere; the kinky sex and asexual, pagan relations they have and BDSM they perform should be mutually consensual and their testimony regarding their own victimization shouldn’t be dismissed automatically. Likewise, the specialized hauntology they offer doesn’t compel these horrors; it leads to the freeing of sex workers on the road to Communism by opening the open through sex-positive dialogs about where worker abuse comes from: the state.

Appreciative emulation isn’t homogenous; it’s performative and, like a Halloween costume, occurs according to varying degrees of commitment. Furthermore, whether professional-grade or amateur, these performances inevitably fall under various levels of scrutiny. Not only does canon already exist; the elite employ a variety of tactics to keep canon relevant. We’ve already discussed

  • how moral panic operates through prescribed (xeno)phobias
  • how abjection can be reversed through descriptive sexuality as xenophilic (acknowledging the biases that queer people and other minorities continue to face under Capitalism)
  • the historical context inside Gothic canon that sex-positive irony grapples with—regarding BDSM, kink and fetishes, but also the dialectical constraints imposed on performative irony in canonized forms

I want to continue examining irony as something to perform. Ironic performers reverse abjection, undermining patriarchal hegemony through the bourgeois fear of socio-material change. Regardless if they’re divided on how best to do this, professionals and amateurs replace bad-faith, sex-coercive symbols with sex-positive counterparts. In doing so, their relative disobedience fosters a countercultural artistic trend, one that helps minorities improve their material conditions through increased cultural appreciation—the treatment of performers and their real-life counterparts as human, normalizing their basic human rights in neo-medieval language:

(artist: Axel Sauerwald)

So while Gothic canon is historically fetishized—systemically appropriating marginalized bodies for profit—performer irony allows for active, personal engagement inside a system designed to materially benefit the elite. Workers who become ironic performers can self-fetishize to materially benefit themselves, thus gain the potential to challenge the current social order through cultural appreciation as something to personify using demonic poetics and undead voicings. Even if their creative output is visually ambiguous—i.e., doesn’t spell out mutual consent at first glance—the context needed to infer its existence can be identified by the sexist backlash (and ironic adoration) it receives: the so-called “gag reflex.”

If we’re dealing with Gothic symbols, this backlash may present as confused; the attackers will oscillate, not quite knowing what to think or how to behave. Consider how reactionaries paradoxically worship the loved-feared monster mom from Resident Evil, Lady Dimitrescu. By extension, they cannot help but worship the many professional and amateur sex workers who bring Lady Dimitrescu to life—most notably cosplayers as dark figures to peep at and worship.

(artist: Danielle DeNicola)

Note: Lady Dimitrescu is another character I elude to throughout my book series, but have never written a dedicated chapter towards; i.e., a phallic woman/female demon lover with a calm and furious form, but also giant figure; e.g., exhibit 0a1b2a1b from Volume Zero’s “Notes on Power” and exhibits 43e2a and 49 from the Demon Module’s “Of Darkness and the Forbidden” and “Dissecting Radcliffe,” respectively. She’s not just an Amazon mommy domme, but a dark vampiric avenger the monomythic hero must canonically de-mask and castrate before she returns the favor! —Perse, 5/4/2025

An already-complicated character, Lady Dimitrescu threatens patriarchal norms created by abject, volcanic Amazonomachia while simultaneously empowering marginalized groups through reverse-abjection as an eruption; i.e., as much likened to a force of nature as giant castle (a common monstrous-feminine gimmick), advanced in its age but paradoxically de-aged through force. This complicated duality leaves hauntology feeling embattled, troubling reactionaries with a curious paradox as they try to weaponize the mode: a vampire Amazon queen/giant Hippolyta whose “uppity” trespasses must be checked by masculine force, while simultaneously nurturing and gratifying her would-be attackers’ repressed sexual urges: the kinks and fetishes of cis-het boys and men (fascist lost boys). What’s more, their gratification occurs through ironic performers who receive an unusual amount of socio-material power during the exchange and after.

In postmodern language, this theatre plays out “inside the text.” Abjection occurs through in-game action, our Bond-like protagonist suffering the evil queen’s fetishizing abuse before destroying her bloodline and exposing her “true” ugly form: the Archaic Mother as the ultimate Dark Mother to sacrifice, thus pave the canonically masculine hero’s way forward to Great Success. To counteract this, reverse abjection and xenophilia occur in the real world in relation to the text, cosplayers de facto educators who

  • return Lady Dimitrescu to a human shape
  • restore her power within the social-sexual exchange
  • present the ambivalent imagery and demonic BDSM activities in a sex-positive, appreciative light

The half-real power relations can stay lopsided, kinky and fetishized, provided they grant our queen perceived authority over a very thirsty audience. The sex-positive power she holds over them isn’t abusive, but nurturing and mollifying towards the audience’s pre-coded, abuser tendencies. With it, cosplayers restore balance through a different kind of gaze; not one of fear, but love, using it to pacify viewers into realms of total, emasculating worship: “Step on me, queen!” became less of a command, and more of an eagerness to please and serve her highness as someone to relate to through sex-positive BDSM. Such reverence must be conditioned—i.e., taught over time by sex-positive instructors rewriting canonical norms through appreciative irony.

In this sense, Lady Dimitrescu isn’t simply the in-game character at all, but a motherly persona adopted by professional and amateur cosplayers looking to advance their own sphere of influence in the material world. By dressing up as someone feared and loved in an Oedipal sense, female cosplayers carried a sense of Gothic power inside the smitten gaze of their male admirers. Female cosplayers rode the wave, but also extended it, creating a rising tide that raised all ships. Meanwhile, Capcom returned their investment long before the game hit shelves, recuperating sex-positive ideas to turn a profit: Monsters sell; sexy (female) monsters sell better.

(artist: Lil Nas)

Granted, there’s definitely a market for sexy male monsters, too (Lucifer, Lucifer, 2016; Alcide Herveuax, True Blood, 2008; and Sephiroth, FF7, 1997). However, such roles quickly run the risk of feminizing men in a non-heteronormative way(!)—not only visually (especially Sephiroth), but performatively. The latter happens when a story—instead of centralizing men as universal clients with “full-grown, manly appetites”—decides to make them servants servicing unusual clients: women, homosexuals, trans people, even demons. This needn’t be overt sex work, but generally functions like sex work through abjected content; the “feeding” of the sex worker comes through service, the pleasures of being the bottom that cis-het “alpha males” won’t understand in the slightest; Capitalism has alienated them from this kind of xenophilic work, but also the fruits of its labor shucked off as dated cultural perversions to pimp all over again.

As something that conceptualizes queer persons within boundaries of enforced constraint, gay abjection is less about queerness being monstrous in a physically dangerous sense, and more that it challenges the current order of things through humanizing appeals—an ideological threat to the status quo. It’s the primary reason someone as terrible (J. Aubrey’s “The Decay of Andrew Tate,” 2022) and as ironically fake as “real man” Andrew Tate (Shaun’s “Andrew Tate: How to be a Real Man,” 2023) can continue his grift (or at least plead is self-victimhood complex from a Romanian prison because he pissed off the wrong people). Provided he tows the conservative line, he doesn’t need to be rhetorically intelligent because the status quo doesn’t require him to; he just needs to dogwhistle (a tool used by useful idiots, ideologues, and downright stupid persons[2] alike, even when they fight amongst each other). By condemning Lil Nas for ostensibly receiving anal sex from the devil during a music video (update: Tate’s “response” video-in-question was removed for hate speech), Tate is dogwhistling to sexist, racist homophobes through a moral purity argument—literally crying “Think of the children!” while condemning male-on-male anal sex. This homophobic rhetoric intersects with racism through abject heteronormative standards about androphilic anal sex—i.e., sex “with the actual devil” as an overt, immoral stance.

Tate’s xenophobic attack on Nas is heteronormative because it conflates the anus—specifically the male anus as penetrated by a male object—with abject devilry. Double standards regarding anal sex demand that Tate condemn Nas, who very clearly isn’t female. This is because heteronormativity venerates sexual reproduction centered around male pleasure. For this reason, it appropriates lesbian sex and female anal sex, conflating them with PIV sex by proximity with the vagina (and female anus/sex organs) as owned by men, a priori. Said ownership ensures that sexual reproduction is always an option, while also framing any rejection of it as a kind of guilty pleasure: temporary male disempowerment by avoiding one’s reproductive duties, versus female empowerment through bodily autonomy as something to take back from men.

(artist: Coil)

However, because androphilic anal sex belongs to male bodies where no vagina or reproductive organs are present, any androphilic sex act that is mutually consensual occurs entirely for physical pleasure not owned or controlled by heteronormative men. Heteronormativity stresses the feminine paradox of gay men as automatically hysterical. Imposturous and broken, their alien, dirty anuses are entirely incompatible with sexual reproduction, thus heteronormative male pleasure. As such, androphilic anal sex becomes something to deny in any artistic statement, hiding it from children and adults by coercively demonizing it. Meanwhile, these same gatekeepers embrace submissive female anal sex as an acceptable trespass; e.g., Garfunkel and Oat’s “The Loophole” (2013) singing about a guilty pleasure that won’t threaten the heterosexual cycle of arranged marriage: PIV sex, childbirth and nuclear parenthood as inextricably linked to heteronormative (often religious) values; or Peach PRC’s “God is a Freak” (2022) noting the hypocritical and controlling nature of the Christian God.

Tate’s xenophobia becomes racist through the content of the video itself—i.e., the actual devil, not simply as a dark figure, but literal man of color. In Gothic canon like Zofloya and Rosemary’s Baby (1967), white authors classically depict Satan as a threatening agent, despoiling women and steering them from virtue. Stories like these intersect with the broad racist trope of the rapacious black man, which has demonized men of color in real-life (re: the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, Luckhurst) and in historical fiction outside of Gothic media (re: Birth of a Nation) for centuries. Unanchored from a particular approach, Andrew Tate dogwhistles to a racist crowd through basic moral statements, puffing up his “virtue” while abjecting homosexual men of color through dated, popular tropes. Exploitation and liberation exist side-by-side, using the same monstrous language in duality.

(artist: Lil Nas)

By comparison, Lil Nas’ music video appreciates black kink through a transgressive, counterculture response. By having two gay men consent to anal dry-humping (as opposed to oral, which would be harder to show in a music video where both actor’s faces need to be showing), Nas’ celebrates homosexuality amongst black men dressed up in devilish attire, rescuing the trope of the devilish black man as a rapist of white women. Combining his rap-star status’ material advantage with the overnight exposure of a smash-hit music video, Nas tips the scales in a sex-positive direction, humanizing multiple, intersecting scapegoats in the process: black men, Satanism, anal sex, sex workers, BDSM and homosexuality as modular but often intersecting in idiosyncratic ways (also note his non-fascist usage of the black-and-red color scheme, evolving Sontag’s dated argumentation into xenophilic territories); e.g., AFAB anal signifies its own qualities versus queer men of color, and so on, having the whore’s revenge by existing in undeniably positive ways:

(artist: Ruby Soho)

Culture war through moral panic generally manifests in a lopsided treatment of feminine, servile gender and sexuality—with sex-positive variants becoming unimaginable in the hauntological shadow of old pejorative stereotypes. Even when they’re not explicitly queer, forays into unconventional male servitude under Patriarchal sexism become queer-coded caricatures by the elite, framed as fantastical (meaning “non-existent make-believe”; e.g., James Somerton’s argument of queer people historically-materially being viewed similar to fairies or unicorns in Tolkien’s canon as something to enjoy if not fully endorse: “The Diversity of The Rings of Power,” 2022). Or fatal; i.e., so-called “realistic” fantasy endorses status quo heteronormativity by violently murdering its token queer standouts in short order during Goldilocks Imperialism. Often before they’re killed, the parading of so much disposable man flesh is generally played for laughs—callously supplied to thirsty straight women for whom queerdom is merely something to appropriate (re: Killing Stalking).

Regardless of which, canon transmisia and homophobia uphold minority abuse through appropriated queerness, passing it off as genuine representation in the process. “Genuine” examples only prolong harmful stereotypes in media that keep minority groups oppressed, usually according to a hierarchy of relative privilege inside an incredibly recent market. Slow to expand, said market originally focused on cis women, which it barred from expressing sexual desire and unprompted romantic affection well into the 20th century. Women in classic gothic novels, for instance, weren’t simply cis-het; they were generally passive, compelled into roles of dark imagination (the Radcliffean School of Terror), but also painful modesty and emotional fragility when facing the so-called “dreaded evil” (which, like the woman’s mute, faint-hearted response to it, would’ve been highly exaggerated and overhyped; re: the “swooning” chart, exhibit 30c from “Rape Culture“):

(exhibit 87d: In classic, Neo-Gothic novels, “swooning” was a formulaic [and sexist] way for Gothic heroines to preserve their “virtue”; i.e., their modesty as virgins within the Virgin/Whore dynamic. Ann Radcliffe specifically referred to this procedure as “armoring.” However, in vampiric language, this “sleepy” quality portrays women as perpetually delicate somnambulists by virtue of fainting around dangerous, powerful, attractive men; i.e., exposed to danger as “sexy” and sex as dangerous, their brains overheat and they inexplicably faint. As Lynne Lumsden Green writes in “Fainting and Swooning – the Degrees of Syncope in the Victorian Era” [2017]: 

In literature, there is a difference between a faint and a swoon. A faint is something that occurs when a person gets a terrible shock – a mother reading of the death of her child – or the person is suffering from blood loss – a wounded gentleman can faint and not seem unmanly. Women swoon. They see an old lover … and swoon. A rogue tries to make love to them … and they swoon. Their father asked them a hard question … and they swoon. A swoon seems to be more ‘convenient’ [source]. 

In other words, the convenience of the narrative-as-patriarchal assists in perpetuating dated, sexist stereotypes about women’s “natural” weaknesses in Gothic canon, but also prescribed sex as inherently coercive, forceful and disempowering through cryptonyms of or about sex. There is a sexually descriptive element, of course. To swoon is to be involuntarily powerless, under an erotic, sleep-like spell spoken in code about the orgasm as “sleeping” under a little death; i.e., to temporarily lose control. This can enshrined in ways other than problematic canon, but often occurs in liminal, silly forms like ahegao [exhibit 104d]. But sleepiness is, itself, a literal and very physical side effect of cumming—to which Gothic canon and its “wilting” inexperienced damsels have it backwards: you get sleepy after sex, not before it. There’s also sleep sex in a literal sense [re: exhibit 11b2, “Challenging the State“] and exhibitions of “sleep-like” sex [exhibit 101c2] with doll-like or drugged components that induce, evoke or otherwise symbolize such conditions [scarecrow].

Returning to the idea of cryptonyms as disjointed markers of trauma, vampiric paralysis presents a disguised element of disassociation, the already-abused “checking out” to avoid the bodily anticipation of sexual peril. These victims historically would have been women tied to sex work as an ancient profession, though male sex workers have existed for arguably as long [exhibit 87e] and into the present—e.g., Rivers Phoenix in My Own Private Idaho, 1991: a sex worker who falls asleep before the sex starts. Whether through the body’s natural functions, or through the taking of drugs to block out the dreadful experience, such “armoring” is not done to protect the victims’ virtue from rape, but their sanity.)

(artist: Henri Gervex)

Nowadays the market has moved beyond cis women to include trans, intersex and non-binary people. However, they have only just begun to appear in mainstream Gothic narratives as something other than the monster, token queer, or perpetual victim. But even in these cases, the characters don’t exclusively appreciate queer people descriptively (Cyberpunk: 2027, Ghost in the Shell, Terminator: Dark Fate); they’re also fetishized—appropriated for cis-het men (and various other chasers) by cis-het male (or girl bosses). There’s also TERF logic regarding queer appropriation, whose sex-coercive methods (and weaponized hauntologies) we’ll examine in Chapter Four.

Now that we’ve examined appreciative irony in professional and amateur Gothic art, let’s quickly look at some everyday examples—not sex cosplayers using kinks, fetishes, or BDSM inside a social-social exchange, but everyday people dressing for themselves.

Despite canonical/countercultural worship of various powerful female beings, sexism rejects the general principles behind sex-positive fashion statements. This includes those made by everyday people, regardless if they’re professional artists or goth (though perhaps being inspired by either of these things). Regardless of whom, fashion statements are still gender roles. Moreover, when they aren’t canonical—that is, aren’t directly catering to sexist consumers in a globally prescriptive sense—their performers will invariably experience sexism far more hostile and open from reactionaries’ moral panic.

(artist: Axel Sauerwald)

This hostility proliferates because the status quo invariably treats women—or people perceived as women—as constant performers. This means that any woman (cis-het or queer) who appears in public will always have an audience with expectations and entitlement, sans respite. Her clothes don’t need to be goth/monster mom cosplay to garner unwanted attention; in fact, they don’t need to be sexy at all (Key & Peele’s “Karim and Jahar,” 2013). She will be watched regardless—by sexist men, but also by sexist women. This happens because women, unlike men, are sexualized by default—in real life as informed by material examples of popular conventions. Incumbent reactionary women will defend these rules regardless of the harm they cause, reliant on the lie of protection instead of genuine, sex-positive forms.

By comparison, class emancipators (women or otherwise) will strive to expose the harm as symptomatic, then cure it through cryptonymy as the desired effect. For example, the cis-female performer’s agency stems from her choosing to perform for herself, an amateur who loves makeup or pretty clothes despite the threat of sexist control (therefore violence). These decisions are ironic because they are informed, deliberately setting a precedent beyond the status quo. By facing inevitable risk in emancipatory fashion, the performer is choosing to actively rebel over the passive victimhood guaranteed by the status quo (Gothic heroines are historically passive). Like the Medusa, this “prickly” counterculture resistance can be something to appreciate—sass, essentially! Women are classically blamed, whore or no, because capital pimps all women to tone police them; i.e., outside the household kitchen or bedroom: to be seen, not heard. Their revenge, then, is to be heard, “loud and proud.”

In this manner, live performers become iconoclastic images. Easily divorced from context (see: above), the performer’s underlying decision only becomes clear when she is visibly confronted, thus forced to defend her position as a monster in the eyes of sexist men. In this street interview (Noah Samsen, “Incel Street Interviews,” 2022; timestamp: 23:02), the person being questioned declares that no one told her to dress the way she does. Instead, she proudly tells the interviewer she wears these clothes for herself despite sexist people telling her not to. Her performance is iconoclastic because it consciously engages with a sexist audience to demonstrate positive freedom not just for herself, but anyone exploited by sexism. Conversely, “true intent” is largely irrelevant from a historical-material standpoint, as Capitalism—whether fascist or neoliberal—is incumbent on bad-faith performances to function; e.g., acting tough, scared, or like you own people, places or things, like someone died and made you boss (dynastic primacy and its lineal power exchange, hereditary rights).

The interviewee demonstrates social-sexual freedom in several appreciative ways. She appreciates or assigns positive value to

  • make the money required to buy nice clothes.
  • wear nice clothes to showcase her wealth.
  • like nice clothes and how they look, wearing them for herself.
  • advertise sexiness as a choice by choosing to display herself in an openly sexy manner.

None of this might be clear before the interview takes place. However, the moment sexist people criticize her behavior, she vocally defends her sex-positive position, making it an open, articulated act of defiance. Not only does she refuse to be modest; she self-expresses in ways that make her feel good despite how others (sexist people) want to control her. She self-appreciates despite the elite and society appropriating and abjecting her appearance and behaviors, making her a kind of witch that loves herself xenophillically (which extends to one’s abject, bodily responses and animal side; re: anal and that area of the female/feminine body policed and patrolled but also embraced by the asshole-havers[3], below). Any aspect of women, biological or not, is controlled; any unsanctioned displays of said thing = speaking out, hence the whore’s revenge!

The patriarchal, sexist control the interview fights against extends to the sale of actual sex: fucking. There’s nothing inherently sexist about selling sex, nor the people doing it. This includes buying and selling sex, whether one is the consumer, the product, or the producer (or all three). Marginalized peoples and privileged dissidents love sex/the whore, including a Gothic Communist like yours truly (I’m a total slut, your Honor); i.e., nature as monstrous-feminine, out in the open; i.e., as barter through “pussy (or butthole) exchange,” putting either on the chainwax, mid-camp (re: “Shining a Light on Things“). Free the anus on the Aegis as the Aegis during the cryptonym process!

To see what is potentially sexist/sex-positive about selling sex as open, we’ll have to go in for a closer look…

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Onto “Selling Sex, SWERFs and Un(der)paid Sex Work“!

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] Gothic, here, includes more than “goth” subculture and its various musical and clothing styles; it also includes the myriad stories told through movies, videogames, novels, etc.

[2] Marjorie Taylor Greene is so dumb it hurts, but still manages to dogwhistle even when fighting with fellow alt-righter (and gender envious rapist) Nick Fuentes (The Rational National, “MTG & Crowder Fans Turn On Them After They Denounce Nazis,” 2023). Both are victims of the state and its propaganda—class traitors with a shortage of courage, brains and heart after killing the Wicked Witch of the West for Oz.

[3] Anal being not just a terror weapon (re: “Reclaiming Anal Rape“) but a classic contraceptive—the sex of whores avoiding pregnancy out of revenge as much as a not.