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.
Pigtail Power and Crossdressing: Sex Repulsion in Gothic/Queer Narratives
They say, “Well, she hardly knew the man. Isn’t she a cranky old maid?” It is true, I have not married. I never had time to fool with it.
—Mattie Ross, True Grit (2010)
Picking up where “‘Crash Course: Asexuality and Demisexuality’ + ‘Queernormativity’ + ‘Sexualized Queerness’ + ‘Sex Normativity’” left off…
Note: This section considers camping the Radcliffean detective/Gothic heroine investigating a queer-coded crossdressing killer/alien imposter to eventually and triumphantly demask them, mid-correspondence. We would unpack this much more thoroughly in “Exploring the Derelict Past,” but especially “Dissecting Radcliffe.” “Pigtail Power” just flirts with the idea, but especially the “ace” notion of interrogating social-psychosexual abuse through Gothic stories that are, at the very least, adjacent to rape; i.e., as a structure to push into from an ace maiden detective interrogating such things. It was inspired by my friendship with Sam Hirst, an ace person who taught me—a highly sexual trans woman—about asexuality through our mutual interest in Gothic. —Perse, 4/24/2025
Though often sexualized, Gothic stories commonly divorce viewers from sexual enjoyment, forcing them to see the world through a sex-repulsed, asexual lens: Sex is stressful, traumatic, and dangerous, and must be weighed accordingly in how it survives in the material world through xenophobic subversion. In therapeutic terms, this can be likened to “clinical detachment”—not a flaw, but a unique perspective about commonplace things (sex and gender) that remains tremendously useful in any social-sexual scenario. I want to examine this phenomenon in Gothic and queer narratives, namely by expanding on the tropes of the sex-repulsed female detective and crossdresser from Volume Two (we’ll examine the gay artist in the next section of this chapter): someone alien, thus different, in ways that stand out—not green skin, this time, but pigtails and naughty-yet-nun-like, woman-in-black aceness!
Before I delve into these ideas in more recent texts or suggest how you might foster them yourself, I want to highlight a classic case of the asexual detective, specifically using the nature of asexuality within amatonormativity—i.e., narratives and relationships that socially and legally prioritize and valorize central, exclusive, amorous relationships; e.g., Jane Austen.
Despite being a novelist renowned for her amatonormative focus, Austen prioritized sense (reason) and sensibility (emotions) in her titular novel-of-manners, where one could divorce both elements from a story of erotic love-making and still have a profound, impactful narrative. Indeed, Austen’s own stories—even her Gothic ones—do this, pointedly revolving around heteroasexual romantic courtship and emotional bonds that push physical sex to the purely imagined. Imagining sex becomes a choice, should the reader want to. If the reader doesn’t, her novels remain utterly flush with other goodies: sarcastic italics, silly pranks, quaint gambling rituals and free indirect discourse. So while she’s a lady-of-letters detective similar to Radcliffe or the Brontë sisters, she’s also a liminal domestic detective like those women were. Is she somewhat canonical? Bitch, please, she’s hypercanonical (a symptom of others taking and colonizing her work, then disseminating those versions instead of the original works. But all the same, much of what Austen did in her own life was novel—that was a pun).
Despite seemingly writing in her own lane, Austen wrote her stories, not her daddy’s like Milton’s daughters did. In doing so, she gamely critiqued her material world in a very Marxist way (as much as an unmarried spinster could writing on two inches of narrow ivory in the dark. Maybe Edward Said famously disagreed, but as our sample essay points out (re: “Cornholing the Corn Lady“), many others famously disagreed with him). Extend the same liberties to pointedly ace or demi persons being “game” in their own works. In a highly sexual world with legions of symbols interpreted in typically sexual ways, how might an ace person detach from these norms and still have something human and profound to say—even if they are sometimes writing “from their own lanes”? Indeed, ace people have relationships; theirs are simply social-sexually divergent from the prescribed behaviors present within heteronormative canon—chiefly marriage, childbirth, and a social-sexual division of labor inside the colonial binary.
Diverging from this arrangement frequently calls for more than the Nancy Drew archetype (white, materially privileged female heroines reaching back to the Neo-Gothic revival); it “Gothicizes” them in frequently ace ways: pigtailed female detectives dressed in black—intensely nun-like, thoroughly profane, and bored to death/repulsed by prescribed love (a cross between the detective nun as virgin, scholar and monstrous-feminine, de-aged by her child-coded pigtails). Whether ace or grey ace (usually walking the line, mid-liminal expression), the female detective ostensibly rejects compulsory sexuality (the societal endorsement of sexual desire as natural, normal and rewarded) on every register, though especially physical appearance: a “dark” spoof of the American Puritanical WASP (re: John the Duncan’s “A Funhouse Mirror? The Addams Family and the Failure of Netflix’s Wednesday,” 2023), haunted by death and rape, serial murder and so on.
I say “ostensibly” because Wednesday Adams from Wednesday exemplifies the Gothic female detective as semi-xenophilic: a non-white[1] and ace, vocalizing her disdain for sexual love: “I’m not like you, Mother,” she says. “I will never fall in love, get married, have children.” And yet, despite her solemn vow and funeral, pigtailed appearance, she’s comfortably herself, repulsed socially and sexually by others. Meanwhile, her colorful, blonde-roomie (the kitten variant of a lycanthrope, but also the extraverted golden retriever to Wednesdays’ purrless black cat/killer rabbit: two animals that symbolize a prey status, but also a facially blank quality “at home” to neurodivergent people) is utterly distressed at the prospect of never meeting anyone: “I don’t want to die alone!” the girl whines. “We all die alone!” Wednesday drones in reply. For our protagonist, tears are useless, compunction a far worse ally than deft sword hands, scrappy rejoinders or a well-placed scorpion kick.
Wednesday is autistically-coded, rejecting love as a prescriptive device, but still exudes an uncanny ability to bond with others, especially those who feel out of place. She doesn’t cry or hug (though eventually learns to); she plays the cello, writes novels, and chews the fat—the perpetual rebel utterly enamored with xenophobic Gothic Romance (of the Radcliffean sort) and dressing in black. A lesser story might consummate a conventional relationship down the road, but Wednesday couldn’t care less. Indeed, the whole story revolves around her behaviors while single, marching clearly and confidently to the beat of her own asexual drum. Despite being functionally white (lacking the original series’ parody of WASP culture; re: John the Duncan) and aloof, she remains surprisingly moral behind the amoral veneer, citing chivalry as “a tool for the Patriarchy” and calling the pilgrims “religious fanatics bent on genocide.” And while she can’t initially comfort her unhappy roommate the way she wants her to, she opts for her own brand of comfort: the brutal honesty of a well-to-do, sex-repulsed ace person.
To be clear, Wednesday’s entirely capable of performing sex. She just doesn’t except when it suits her—i.e., helps advance her asexual goals, namely the veneration of outcasts’ basic human rights (again, the “boarding school problem”: those who present as outcasts under upper-middle-class conditions, a status that Tim Burton has shamelessly commodified over the years; source: Broey Deschanel’s “The Decline of Tim Burton,” 2022). And if she did make love in pursuit of these humanitarian goals, she would be totally in control, divorced from erotic euphoria (not entirely unlike Elphaba Thropp, Gregory Maguire’s queer-sexualized variation of an arguably trans character, which we’ll explore more in Chapter Five).
In other words, Wednesday’s the sort to keep her eyes peeled, even during sex: against the false “queer” love of the mask-wearing lothario/seducer incubus as ordinary-looking (an inversion of the Scooby Doo schtick, which Wednesday as ace surveilles through her own alien forms of affection/social engagement). These “play it cool” elements of disguise during oppositional cryptonymy demand Wednesday get down and dirty despite arguably being sex repulsed, or at least “grey ace.” All the same, she explores his castle-in-small to hoist him on his own predatory petard (the villain actually a werewolf—a kind of disarmingly sweet and attractive impostor-monster synonymous with vampires; re: “Call of the Wild“). A girl must keep her wits to survive, mid-sampling!
From an ace point of view, Wednesday is a social-activist sleuth who uses sex to get at the truth. Initially frigid, she ostensibly warms to a local cutie named Tyler. Unbeknownst to us, she’s always on the case, and treats the school like a perpetual crime scene. This makes her potential “suitors” suspects to be ruled out, including Tyler. Sweet and innocent, but with a violent past, he’s a tough nut to crack. To get close to him, Wednesday accepts his advances, eventually kissing him(!). She wields an excellent poker face, though, being subtly and brutally honest inside a dangerous game-inside-a-game: “You’re making a mistake,” she tells him, before they smooch.
Wednesday appears to be warning Tyler—to back off, thus avoid getting attached to someone who undoubtedly will break his sweet innocent heart. Only later do we learn the deeper meaning of Wednesday’s words: “You’re making a mistake, my enemy.” Tyler isn’t innocent, you see; he’s the killer. By presenting himself as outwardly banal and romantically distracted, Tyler aims to woo the detective investigating his own crimes. This makes his disguise two-fold and premeditated. He knows Wednesday is trying to find the killer and is using sex to intentionally throw her off the scent! Jinkies! Eventually his hesitation to kill her outright leads to his downfall: Wednesday’s onto him, using the same deceptions to deceive the deceiver, but also an older audience arguably accustomed to canonical hauntology and a younger audience perhaps discovering it for the first time. Hopelessly cliché for some, others might regard the assemblage more innocently. They might internalize it as something to seek out in other forms.
More to the point, Wednesday—an ace person who physically fights back (unlike Velma)—is using sex to solve the mystery in Gothic masculine panache: fatal attraction amid a lovers’ duel, where cooler heads prevail against a perfidious caller. By staying detached from carnal pleasure, she remains a better detective than her sentimental roomie. This helps Wednesday stay one step ahead of Tyler, whose powers of affection Wednesday must visibly resist. She’s still human, just capable. By controlling her emotions in the dogged pursuit of truth, she triumphs, saving her own life and a great many others, too. I would say this happens by accident except she’s always on guard, taught to be by her family since she was young. The fact that her training of her privileged background is worth considering—i.e., its abandonment of the actual poor to be voiced by a tempered Gothic regressive posturing as more progressive than she actually is. The xenophilic pitch is her love for social outcasts while self-labeling as a misfit, herself. She is weird, but remains rooted in classical Gothic moderacy. This makes her fairly recuperated/token in the grand scheme of things (a Netflix tradition, mind you).
Though not strictly of the Gothic school, Mattie Ross from True Grit conveys similar degrees of sex-repulsion through another formulaic genre: the Western. Frequently regarded as “dead,” the genre’s own hauntologies often bleed into retro-future and Gothic spheres with just as much iconoclastic potential. While not openly Gothic, Mattie remains a curious iconoclasm from the Cohen brother’s reimagined Western (a genre known for historical revisionism and colonial cryptonyms only recently dissected and challenged with iconoclastic blockbusters like Fury Road). Despite being treated like a sex object (one whose sexualization and eventual maturity is assumed and automatic), Mattie frankly couldn’t care less about sex or marriage. Yes, she’s fourteen and fixated on her father’s revenge, but there’s plenty of room for pigtails, personality and spunk. Framed as a shrewd, precocious detective, Mattie arms herself with education, money and guns; she rides with the boys and dreams of adventure, even telling them ghost stories ’round the campfire when they each have to play a part (eat your heart out, Rudolph Otto). Again, she’s the white, privileged, Protestant-coded girl in a Western, but she isn’t mean-spirited (essentially a nice way of saying, “It could be worse!” It could, but it could also be better).
Despite all this, Mattie cares nothing for marriage or sex when the deed is done. Instead, she grows into a spinster, vocally dismissing marriage and fondly recalling her time spent with aging gun hands and Texas rangers. She loved them like she loved her daddy: with grit, the “grey” side of the law dispatching justice to ruthless highway men. Throughout the film, the trueness of Mattie’s grit is questioned, but eventually accepted by the men. Yet, despite proving herself capable in the realms of gun violence and assistant pathfinding, Mattie remains Mattie. She isn’t Rooster Cogburn, La Boeuf, or any of the other men. However, nor is she patently “manly” in a cowboy sense; in xenophilic terms, she’s an oddball, her relative privilege allowing her to undermine Queen Elizabeth’s famous idea of the simple gender swap: “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king!”
Whether strictly “Gothic” or not, or canonical or not (a canonical “plateau” being Nancy from Stranger Things, a canonical, nostalgic mind prison—the do-gooder white-girl whose dated antics aren’t really Marxist at all, but the status-quo re-reassignment of Nancy as a tolerable form of rebellion against dated, cartoon-character sexism), the female detective is generally disinterested in sex as something to enjoy, solving its socio-material role as part of a larger puzzle; e.g., Velma Dinkley (re: “Non-magical Damsels and Detectives“). Like Velma, Wednesday is socially awkward and shrewd, but remains conventionally attractive, like any Radcliffean heroine; Mattie embodies the cold spinster trope as more historically framed in the Western sense: as modest, ostensibly gay or unattractive (Sarah Plain and Tall, Ruby Thewes, Putter, etc) and guided unapologetically by Christian revenge against a homewrecker who killed her daddy. While hardly threats to the reproductive order, the same cannot be said for the crones of “hag horror,” often presented as fearsome, ghost-of-the-counterfeit mysteries for the female detective to uncover before barely escaping the wicked sex dungeon with her life.
In Volume Two, we examined Gothic domestic detectives as mastering their emotions while surviving the traumatic past. Let’s apply that here (seeing as Wednesday doesn’t really have emotions we can see) to asexuality as something to convey through the Gothic mode. Historically men have punished women for not wanting to sleep with them, a hidden barbarity concealed within spaces that treat a reimagined, coercive past as “spellbinding.” To facilitate this purge, they create moral panics, declaring their victims a public menace: physically hideous viragos who ate babies, skulking about in special habitats that popped up seemingly out of nowhere. To this, coercive sexuality and its carceral hauntologies become something to escape altogether, generally in the form of a tyrannical, reimagined copy of the Gothic “castle.” Unlike their coercive counterparts, though, sex-positive matriarchs teach female detectives (a metaphor for inquiring female minds) to fear or “repulse” reproductive sex, often with masculine, “crossdresser” bodies inside patently cliché predicaments: the Spooky basement of Doom (called “the closed space” by Ann Radcliffe, and popularized in ludic-Gothic spaces through the Metroidvania; see: exhibit 64c).
Barbarian (2022), for example, conveys sex-repulsion by presenting the hag as an Archaic Mother—an infantile, superhuman, coerced “breeding mare” that rages against patriarchal men. The crossdressing elements are metatextual, which we’ll examine in a moment. First, we’ll examine the dress itself. While the Archaic Mother trope frames reproductive sexuality as something to fear (re: Alien), Barbarian specifically portrays it as gruesome inside a seemingly ordinary house: a rich dude’s rental. Above ground, things appear harmless; below ground, rape and incest extend the patriarch’s counterfeit bloodline. Over several generations, the curse wanes, the weakened, dying king unable to control his final bride. Manufactured underground, she wanders the crypt-like halls, warning the next generation against potentially dangerous men.
Leave it to our beleaguered, put-out heroine to solve the case. Rained out in the dead of night, she finds herself in abandoned Detroit (which might as well be a dark forest). Before long she’s face-to-face with her double: a fearsome, all-powerful hag.
Here, the monster is also the victim, straining to asexually communicate a deeper horror between daughters and mothers: There is no difference to the killer, who forces teenage girls into surrogate daughterhood-motherhood. Protecting the heroine from men like the patriarch, the old hag cannot tell the difference. She savagely kills one, then another, finally gouging out the eyes of the heroine’s perfidious friend: the ostensibly charming homeowner (recently fired from his job for raping a female co-worker). The hag’s idiotic violence denotes her as a generational victim under his roof, murdering potential threats to warn the heroine of a lateral threat: the serial killer squatting inside the homeowner’s basement! By climatically killing the homeowner, Barbarian warns how patriarchal abuse turns women into irredeemable monsters, the heroine putting the hag down like a rabid dog. The hauntology concerns the decay of the gentry to reveal (and revel in) their imperfect, messy exposure: catching dickheads and, in turn, injecting returning bourgeois crimes onto state victims through token cryptonymy (the Radcliffe scapegoat narrative).
Note: The liminal hauntology of war is a very important concept that I coined; i.e., vis-à-vis Bakhtin and Walpole per my studying of the Neo-Gothic; re (from Volume One):
Such a castle’s nightmarish presence denotes potential mayhem tied to one’s habitat; i.e., through the liminal hauntology of war colonizing nature and those tied to nature. When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains with counterterror. Adjacent to more classic methods of colonial upheaval, the terrifying power of Gothic poetics can serve our counterterrorist ends [cryptonymy or otherwise] (source: “Prey as Liberators”).
This connects to Metroidvania, but also Gothic novels; i.e., stories famously explored by modest warrior-maidens and nosy female detectives exploring rape spaces to interrogate their trauma in ace-like ways. —Perse, 5/5/2025.
(source)
Before we move onto the metatextual aspect of the hag’s performer, a note about liminal hauntologies (which Chapter Four will address further). We’ve already touched upon its iconoclastic functions in Chapter One (and societal role within moral panics and canonical praxis, in Chapter Two). I want to further suggest the heroic function of the space as something to occupy by iconoclastic avatars in Gothic stories. As a hauntological construct, the Gothic castle is generally something that materializes under times of perceived crisis—not so much actual cataclysm and more a threshold of chaotic change: revolution. For example, under the light of a full moon, Dracula’s castle suddenly appears every century (or two). seemingly by magic. Despite its ridiculous size and uncertain construction, it operates almost like clockwork in response to something bigger than itself.
So while the timely appearance of the castle could symbolize the seasonal nature of the harvest tied to cultural anxieties and taboos: the harvest, a blood moon, killing time, the season of the witch, etc—all bleeding together during notions of intense threatened change—I view it as endemic to Capitalism’s seasonal decay that threatens not mere collapse, but desired change to a tyrannical, unequal system that obscures people’s imaginations. Thereupon, the weakened boundaries between the world of the living and the land of the dead allow for a variety of material responses to pass through, moving back and forth: heroes, hunters, witches, vigilantes, survivors, and so on.
There are different ways one can examine this. Barbara Creed examines cis women in horror literature beyond their historical portrayal as universal victims: often, the avenger of past wrongs. This can be grotesque, like the “archaic” hag from Barbarian (or the xenomorph from Alien); or ghosts who warn the protagonist of danger, waiting to be avenged by them. There’s also vigilante variants, which straddle the fence between victim and victimizer (exhibit 71, but also: Brünhilde Blum from Woman of the Dead, 2022). And often, like a Count presiding over a castle, there is a Patriarchal overseer. All can potentially represent something different, but understanding if they do or not requires careful holistic, dialectical-material study.
However, like “good” witches and “bad” witches, the matter of female revenge differs not in its visual iterations, but one, in whether it is functionally for or against Capitalism, and two, who’s piloting the avatar. We’ll see this in the fascist/neoliberal iterations, which we’ll explore more in Chapter Four. For now, let’s return to Barbarian. The film is certainly over-the-top. Yet, to merely call it “dumb hag horror” would ignore the iconoclastic/campy conversation it has about coercive sexuality—something to escape from, Gothically performed in sexual terms through asexual motive. It’s a complex performance, one told through “lights, camera, action!” but also crossdressing and makeup. The character was played by a man covered in prosthetics (source: “Matthew Patrick Davis Went ‘Ass Out’ to Transform Into Horror Film’s Creature,” 2022):
Indeed, Barbarian‘s crossdressing meta-narrative mirrors pre-Renaissance art, using male models to represent women’s bodies through a kind of Archaic Mother to ultimately euthanize by a vigilante detective. While certainly performative, its liminal threshold allows for various asexual stories to be told through sexual tropes to a traditional audience, thus change how they think about bodies and how they’re “supposed to look”:
When I give a talk, or run a class that includes work by Michelangelo, generally at some point someone will suggest that Michelangelo’s female figures look like “men with breasts.” I have to admit, that I sometimes deliberately task students with describing a picture of Michelangelo’s “Night” just so I can elicit this reaction – it’s a really useful starting point for discussing ideas about what we expect men and women’s bodies to look like, whether renaissance art is naturalistic, differing ideals of beauty and so on. Because this has happened so frequently, my title for yesterday’s masterclass at Glasgow Uni was “Men With Breasts: Michelangelo’s Female Nudes and the Historical Context for Body Image” (source: Jill Burke’s “Men with Breasts [or Why Are Michelangelo’s Women So Muscular?] part 1,” 2011).
This has all the makings of a profoundly queer-ace narrative celebrating the beauty of the physical form—not the veneration of sexual reproduction, but nude art and crossdressing as asexual by rejecting compelled sexual reproduction (and witch hunts against monstrous-feminine crossdressers). The movie’s behind-the-scenes reframes sex repulsion through an asexual meta-narrative—not simply a cautionary, Gothic tale about challenging the established reproductive order or an altered state, but an alternate state expressed through liminal art: a neurodivergent mode of being.
Before we move onto trans ambiguity as its own thing to appreciate in sexual and asexual ways through iconoclastic praxis and the cryptonym process (re: masks and cryptonymy as Harmony Corrupted does it, below—see: “Perceptive Zombie Eyeballs“), I want to briefly outline the metatext of asexuality in nude art; i.e., “artistic” nudes, but also the trope of the gay artist diverging from homonormativity by asexually relating to persons of different genders and orientations. Like the ace/grey ace portions of this chapter, both sections are less an examination of hauntology themselves and more about instructing viewers to interpret art in non-heteronormative (thus non-canonical) ways.
his will prove useful when we dialectically-materially analyze TERFs in neoliberal/fascist media (which are both incredibly perfidious); i.e., in Chapter Four, which explores how canonical praxis—gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss—often owes to reactive abuse based on defense of canon with token, witch-cop elements (which we, as detective-esque workers, will challenge with revolutionary cryptonymy in Chapter Five). While there’s value in sex repulsion and “grey ace” detectives like Wednesday interrogating rape trauma in Gothic stories, Gothic heroines are classically ace cops exposing whores in modesty narratives loaded with rape trauma (with Wednesday outsmarting a deadly lothario shapeshifter/crossdresser dating back to problematic love [re: vampires] hiding in plain sight); whores must turn that on its head—i.e., by hugging Medusa (the Big Sassy Whore) to have their naked/crossdresser revenge against profit as Commie detectives baring it all: “butter my muffin if you dare!” This wild survival through exposure (re: segregation is no defense) happens through artistic nudity and ace bodies—to show off in social-sexual, “greyly” queer model/muse relationships (re: Harmony and I, below), whose base premise we’ll explore next!
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Onto “Artistic Nudity and Asexual Bodies/Relationships in Art; Gay Artists“!
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] The praxis, here, is semi-canonical. Netflix making Wednesday’s parents Latin American largely feels appropriative—i.e., functionally white, blue-blooded do-gooders conspicuously loaded with “old money.” While bourgeois Marxism is entirely possible provided it quickly delineates from the status quo, it very much needs to be recognized amid the neoliberal AAA conventions that celebrate ostentatious wealth as the “best” means of achieving social-sexual activism.
To this, Wednesday‘s biggest failing is the setting itself: a magical boarding school for rich kids, which strongly reeks of assimilation fantasy in both directions (the desire to go to such a school; the entire world is like the school, an ideological site that brands activity for a select group: those who can afford the tuition fees). I much prefer Andor (re: “Marxism in Space“) whose widespread holistic revolution incorporates working and owner class peoples into a grand collective action against Capitalism).