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.
Opening to Volume Three: “Regarding Tokenism” and Fighting It (feat. Nyx and Cuwu)
One lesson we can draw from the return of witch-hunting is that this form of persecution is no longer bound to a specific historic time. It has taken a life of its own, so that the same mechanisms can be applied to different societies whenever there are people in them that have to be ostracized and dehumanized. Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity.
—Silvia Federici, cited in “Hot Allostatic Load” (2015)
Picking up where “The Future Is a Dead Mall” left off…
This volume concerns tokenism mid-praxis as a proletarian concern, which the rest of the series has alluded to, until now. We’ll trace the idea, here; i.e., as an echo of Medusa to egregorically reunite with; e.g., with Nyx, who I will reference here (alongside Cuwu), as well as articulating why we’re going back into Gothic Communism’s black peach pit, which Volume Three essentially is. Furthermore, this 2025 addendum shall explain what separates Volume Three from the rest of the series that came after it, but also what connects the lot of them while giving you various quotes/exhibits to keep in mind (as I won’t be modifying this manuscript much more than I already have)!
(artist: Nyx and Cuwu [photographer, bottom: Persephone van der Waard])
To it, Volume Three explores the idea of achieving intersectional solidarity according to modern notions of sexuality and gender identity/performance-as-identity mid-struggle; i.e., as built on older poetic histories my other books have previously laid out—across different thesis arguments, but also repeated synthesis of said theory mid-praxis: versus TERFs (and other tokens) using what we got, on the Aegis. Many TERFs do sex work, for example; i.e., whores policing whores (re: “Policing the Whore“), cops raping nature in ways that go beyond the narrow idea of penetrative violence to any kind of disempowerment meant to cause harm of any sort. The whore’s revenge goes beyond simply “rape = penetration” (from “The Nuts and Bolts of Rape Play,” 2024) because that argument not only demonizes male GNC people or frankly anyone with a penis (re: Janice Raymond), but also gives pussy-havers a strange victim complex that ignores their tokenized role in things. Tokens are cops and cops rape; cops look like us and we look like them; e.g., Nyx, below, being incredibly sex-positive and for universal liberation, but having the Aegis to back it all up (so to speak). The fact remains, the Medusa and Amazons both have fat demon asses—a plump-rump “danger disco” to dance inside at cross purposes, in and out of themselves: humanizing the harvest versus harvesting the human during the dialectic of the alien, on and offstage! We must humanize the harvest to expose the state reaping us! Reap back!
(artist: Nyx)
The difference between cop and victim, then, is function relative to profit as something to uphold or defeat, which I want to unpack briefly here as we return to the past again (and again, and again…); i.e., as the whore’s recursive revenge against profit (re: “Rape Reprise” also featuring Nyx), but specifically profit as a form of tokenism we’re defeating while ensconced within “past” as something to embody and perform (also again and again and again…); re: “When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!” Except while we will examine tokenism extensively in Volume Three, we won’t have time to go into more fleshed-out ideas; e.g., like the whore’s revenge; i.e., because said volume is quite conversational, but also older than the books I published after it which took what it proposed in shadowy forms we’re redoubling back towards now.
In fact, Volume Three remains the most conversational of all my volumes, because I wrote it back in July 2022; re: due to it being written before my manifesto or PhD, but also my Monster Modules—all of which crystalize, synthesize and disseminate these concepts far further than Volume Three was ever able to (e.g., “Demon BDSM,” here, versus “ludo-Gothic BDSM” from my PhD, onwards; re: “The Finale; or ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll!“).
(artist: Nyx)
As of writing this opener in 2025, then, most of my Praxis Volume has already been written. As such, Volume Three is the oldest volume this series contains—originally written while slowly expanding to yield the Gothic-Communist manifesto and Humanities primer (the latter where I developed my signature collage exhibit style; i.e., during the Bride of Frankenstein “poster pastiche”; re: “Making Demons‘” exhibit 44b2, December 2022). I have since revisited the Praxis Volume before 2025, making some revisions[1] in April 2024 to expand on various elements to a lesser degree, but haven’t touched the writing itself in at least twelve months; i.e., as of originally writing this opener six months after April 2024. Now we’re here to finish the job.
To it, I’ve tried not to expand the writing in Volume Three any more than I have in the past; i.e., I want you to come to it and experience my thinking in its most conversational forms before I hammered out what the whore’s revenge even was (for the most recent exploration of that idea, refer to “A 2025 Foreword: On Volume One’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Cuwu)“).
(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)
In other words, Volume Three represents a liminal (and fragile) point in my life—one in which I was newly single, having just separated from Cuwu following my exit from Jadis and Florida; i.e., I had just left the closet and was starting to aggressively explore gender studies for the first time: as something to combine with Gothic theory and ludology in ways I hadn’t tried in grad school (re: “Lost in Necropolis“). In doing so, I would often talk about gender extensively and in ways exclusive to this volume; i.e., as a logical follow-through to my now-discontinued book series, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes (2021); e.g., with femboys, twinks and asexuality as conversational extensions of what that series didn’t explore, and which this series would explore predominantly in Volume Three.
Content and combinations aside, the writing style here is also noticeably different—with 2022 me pointedly favoring em dashes and commas/run-on sentences/asterisks instead of the footnotes and semi-colons, but also i.e., e.g., and re that I adopted from October 2023, onwards (when I published my PhD). Not to mention, my focus on the Medusa (re: nature as alien/monstrous-feminine, from “Nature Is Food“) and universal liberation—once the praxial bedrock had been lain and simplified with my PhD/manifesto, then run through various post-postgrad thesis arguments with my Monster Volume (e.g., “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis“)—really started to inform a style that had changed beyond mere canon vs camp/oppositional praxis. Instead, I worked with an active goal in mind; i.e., developing Gothic Communism as an artistic movement that—until late 2023—had yet to conceptualize, mid-praxis (re: “My Logo for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism!“).
To it, the flavor of the Praxis Volume remains largely unchanged precisely because we’re returning to a state of conversation before its synthesis had fully dialed in. This lends the proceedings more a historical flavor—one I have decided to preserve for archivist reasons, but also as something to return to with the benefit of hindsight at the current time; i.e., the ideas here are presented in their rawest, nascent form—Galatea lacking much of the detail and track to run along towards development again. I do so to give you something to work with, yourselves. In keeping with the circular nature of development, then, said track has already been laid in ways you’ve already explored through the earlier book volumes that came after Volume Three was written, then shelved; i.e., as ergodic and recursive, but also concentrically designed during holistic study taking Volume Three off the shelf.
As such I’ve saved this book volume for last, having educated you leading up to a return towards a prior state of ignorance expressed as the Gothic do: metamorphically and morphologically. Such (re)education happens through the preservative, fluid language of monsters and castles being things to return to in a given passage of the life cycle’s continuous radical change.
Keeping that in mind, please note the concentric approach preserved and found in the block quotes, below—the Gothic sense of mastery these suggest as returning to suitably older left-behinds again-again; i.e., a once-and-future reflection of the circuitous quest for Numinous forces; re (from the Poetry Module’s “Back to Necropolis“):
In short, “mastery” as I developed it became something to imbricate/enmesh with my living scholarship; i.e., holistic study as one of constant reassembly and rememory time and time again: “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns” (from Volume Zero) segued into “The shape doesn’t matter provided the function (and flow of power) is consistent” (from this volume); i.e., as synthesized amongst my friends, lovers, muses, fellow sex workers and I challenging the profit motive together as one, across many life times: our Song of Infinity having—like the zombie, the vampire, the demon—many shapes to assume and power to play with! The state will always try to monopolize our pedagogy to serve their aims; i.e., to recuperate what we use to release stress and confront trauma in palliative-Numinous forms: where power is, insofar as reifying and performing it goes.
(model and artist: Mikki Storm and Persephone van der Waard)
“And in strange aeons, even death may die.” My friends and I continuously place “death” in quotes, our collective ludo-Gothic BDSM a parallel, slutty “could-be” history challenging bigotry as a Cartesian, heteronormative, settler-colonial effect; i.e., one we challenge through Athena’s Aegis as reclaimed by Medusa as us, our sexy Amazonian witchcraft (and all its undead, demons and animal forms) camping the canon in ways the state thoroughly abhors: making the straightforward harvesting of us by the state and its proponent agents/sell- outs something to tie into knots. It’s a part of the experience and not one to simply slice through as Alexander the Great did, but find paradoxical liberation in knots (Amazonian or otherwise):
(artist: Evul)
Through a thoroughly chaotic, non-linear mise-en-abyme, Gothic Communism camps canon, making empathy where apathy has existed for so long. This happens by using our dark forces, our Satanic wizardry to self-define away from capital as something to camp inside of itself. To that, we camp the twin trees, fashioning a Hell on Earth to suit our designs (from “Concerning Monsters”):
This historical-material arrangement is profoundly ubiquitous, requiring workers to reclaim monsters (undead, demons and totems) away from the usual state monopolies of violence, terror and hellish morphological expression; i.e., during our own pedagogy of the oppressed—our anger and gossip, monsters and camp—having evolved into itself: a dialectical-material process whose oscillating interrogations (and myriad interpretations) of trauma took centuries while monsters were already evolving into state implements and canonical, singular interpretations thereof. Iconoclastic monsters, then, become flexible and productive critical lenses that raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness as something to “turn into”; or, as Volume One argues:
Contrary to Pygmalions and canonical weird-nerd culture, monsters aren’t just commodities; they’re symbolic embodiments of speculative thinking tied to larger issues. You don’t simply buy and consume them (commodifying struggle) but use them as a means, if not to put yourself directly in the shoes of those being oppressed, then to think about things differently than you might normally. It’s an opportunity to empathize with the oppressed and contribute to their pedagogy in ways that, to be frank, make you less stupid, nasty and cruel (source: “Challenging the State”).
Monsters are often seen as “not real” or “impossible,” relegated to the lands of make-believe and pure fantasy. Except this isn’t true. In Gothic Communism, they constitute a powerful, diverse, and modular means of interrogating the world around us as full of dangerous Cartesian illusions meant to control workers by locking Capitalism (and its genocidal ordering of nature and human language) firmly in place. Good monsters become impossible, as do the possible futures they arguably represent. Instead of saying “in a perfect world,” then, we should say “a possible world”; i.e., in a better possible world, nudity (and other modes of GNC sexual and gender expression) can be exposed and enjoyed post-scarcity and not be seen and treated as inhumanely monstrous (a threat; e.g., bare bodies being a threat to the pimp’s profit margins). Rather, the monstrous language remains as a voice for the oppressed to flourish with (source).
All this being said, this is an older part of the book, and one for the sake of time (and my sanity) I won’t be updating quite as extensively. Some changes are already in place vis-à-vis Volume Two, part one—and I will be expanding on things and signposting to make sure what I have already feels more attached to my published material, including talking about ludo-Gothic BDSM in relation to these older histories—but there will no brand-new monster essays from scratch if I can help it (no promises)!
As such, I won’t be going over this area of the book with quite as fine-tooth a comb, but will add exhibits, epigrams, definitions, visual aids and the like. The same, if not more so, goes for Volume Three (which has seen some changes since I wrote the majority of it back in early 2023) because I want to preserve its grain-of-sand quality that the rest of this book series has built around like a pearl. To that, you already have complex theory and simple theory to work with (re: Volume Zero and One), as well as my aforementioned synthesis of those combined aspects with Gothic poetics (re: Volume Two, part one) to achieve new useful conclusions building on my foundation. And yet, just as I argued with the ghosts of others to raise my cathedral, you will have to learn to debate with spirits yourself to raise your own, mid-segue.
As such, for Volumes Two, part two and all of Volume Three, you will be debating with my spectres; i.e., the oldest sections of my castle, but some of the most raw and earnest regarding sex-positivity as a liberatory Gothic poetic device whose essence remains intact, regardless if the language had yet to fully form. Per my usual backwards approach, I’ve actually done this before (from Volume One):
If you’ve read the symposium from Volume Zero (and the end of the manifesto), you’ll have an idea of what to expect, moving forward; I didn’t want to change things too much despite having written this second symposium well before my thesis. Like the thesis volume’s symposium, it represents a point when I was still figuring things out, and I think it serves as a good thought experiment insofar as it will represent a middle stage in your own thinking that will match up with [the Monster Modules. Their older partially-formed historical qualities] might speak to you better as you interpret and grapple with these ideas yourselves. And if you want increasingly more complete forms of theory that spell things out as much as possible, there is always the manifesto and thesis (source: “Challenging the State”).
Keep all of this in mind as we proceed into the Undead Module. We will meet again, our darkness visible a choking force that drives you, mid-penetration, towards post-scarcity’s unknown pleasures! Medusa’s fat undead pussy “feeding” as a war-like, indiscreetly poetic-yet-still-rebellious psychosexuality (re: our specialized Gothic poetic devices-made-flesh)!
(model and artist: UrEvilMommy and Persephone van der Waard)
Embedded in such endless graveyards, we’re all butterflies fertilized by corpses of our former selves—the caterpillar and the wasp chasing mastery in duality (a lie told by/to us and the state; re: “The Caterpillar and the Wasp“). The way out, as I’ve said before, is paradoxically inside the labyrinth; i.e., as something to transform through ourselves and our exchanges’ darkness visible.
In keeping with the sorts of fatal, transformative returns outlined above, we stand before Medusa’s Aegis before I consciously conceptualized it as such; i.e., Galatea’s mirror-like pearl having paradoxically returned to a state of dark plasticity by virtue of us returning to this moment in space-time: here in the present moment’s exploration of an older past one. Mid-hauntology and -chronotope—and reflective not just of my own prior state thereof, but yours as well—ignorance is a state of grace to return to; i.e., through holistic study of older documents reaching towards the future using “past” as bridge. The ghost of the counterfeit to further or reverse abjection (thus profit), you may look upon it and see not just either of us, but ourselves upon others who have yet to be exposed to such things—those still inside Plato’s cave, as it were.
(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: “Meeting Medusa“)
Contrary to what you might think, though, you actually have the ability to take what is less developed—both in terms of argument and audience, alike—and achieve the whore’s revenge, regardless; re: flow determines function, not aesthetics. Here, that notion shall truly be put to the test; i.e., during “revolution,” as we think of it, a thing to revive using whatever’s on hand: a cake to make from basic ingredients. And this volume—my Praxis Volume representing Sex Positivity in its darkest, most rudimentary forms; re: focused on opposition, versus thesis and destination through ludo-Gothic BDSM—is very much the eggs and flour of a grander half-real recipe: “It tastes better than it looks!” Something of a paradox, the “cake” of old friends are both delicious and described as such (above), but also not actually cannibalized save in poetic ways whose more abject consumption (e.g., Creed’s murderous womb, vis-à-vis “War Vaginas“) we can still flirt with; i.e., the world is a vampire, but so are we, and in ways we can repeatedly learn from regardless where in the cycle we find ourselves; re: learning from Cuwu’s vampirism as a continuous epitaphic pedagogy of the oppressed, and one hell-bent on pushing towards universal liberation as it instructed me, past and present (no Omelas children)!
(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: “Challenging the State“)
Paradoxes aside, Medusa is an idea, a lineage, a point of practice that mutates; she (and her worship) take many forms—i.e., insofar as the Base and Superstructure function as things to reclaim on the same shared stages (where past, present and future occupy the same shadows, or constitute what the same shadows represent through play as a half-real proposition). We’re all shadows and dust, but also pieces of meat arbitrating our basic rights (and those of nature and the environment as their stewards) through mutual consent; i.e., as something to illustrate paradoxically as the Gothic do: through the language of “rape” in quotes, camping canon not once, but in perpetuity during informed labor exchanges expressed through psychosexual art (with Medusa being the ancient enemy of the state, pimped by it until the sun burns out).
So take what’s available here and use it to bring Medusa (and the palliative Numinous) back to life again; i.e., in ways she never quite enjoyed, in yesteryear’s imaginary historical past. Concerning the Wisdom of the Ancients, there’s no clear divide between fiction and non-fiction. So give power shape in ways that readily yield new constructions, thereby showing capital your Aegis, when the harvest is once more at hand! When the reaper comes around, so does the thing to reap—but there’s no monopoly on who holds the sickle during a given reunion!
To that, we’re going back to Necropolis again, losing ourselves once more in Medusa’s castle-in-the-flesh (with Cuwu being someone that haunts Volume Three—a person I wouldn’t write about extensively until my manifesto and PhD, then show visually in the Poetry Module, onwards; re: “Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later“): a shadowy likeness (the egregore/simulacrum) to fertilize thought as it manifests between people and media; i.e., as not discrete in the present moment, but also the past of a potential future nonetheless expressed as “past” (the Neo-Gothic modus operandi, ever and always). Cakes—including shadows of cakes—still need frosting to cryptomimetically lubricate future potentiation: fucking the dead in ways that hyphenate sex, food, war and so on.
In keeping with Walpole, so does the shadow of the past represent something that never quite was, but also potentializes a given future moment to circle back around towards; i.e., again, the rememory process injecting something into something else at various phenomenological and liminal states of space and time informing the lesson (and cryptonymy process), ipso facto. We move through space and time, but also embody them as hauntological occupants thereof to reexplore (echoes of Ozymandias, swapping him out for Medusa): new dark temples to raise and “pillage.”
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
As such, the Praxis Volume constitutes an precious opportunity to anisotropically reverse the flow of power during the usual Gothic aesthetics/fakeries guiding workers in either direction during future forms of “pastness”; re: through oppositional praxis, our focus being the proletarian reclamation of such things. Raw and waiting to patiently sculpt back into fresh forms touching on older mysteries and reunions (the Communist Numinous versus Caesar’s ghost), Volume Three is closer to my blog-style approach from the 2010s than my thesis-heavy argumentation, post-PhD.
Furthermore, my collage invigilation style and collab approach with sex workers/emphasis on footnotes were both things I hadn’t hammered out, yet; i.e., doing so in the Humanities primer (re: exhibit 44b2) and my PhD’s camp map finale, respectively. But in terms of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, I was still playing with those things and the Gothic mode—indeed, had been doing so for years up to this point (re: “Sex, Metal and Videogames” but also Nyx, below).
The poetic combination, here, is more conversational while still hurtling towards thesis and theory being things I would eventually synthesize multiple times; i.e., when moving echopraxially back towards conversation, two years after my PhD released. In essence, 2025 me is confronting my own past as the future of older moments I holistically built on while pushing towards where I currently am looking backwards and forwards at the same time—now that this book series is nearly done, standing at the hellish center of the black hole’s entropic core! There and back again, the Gothic is writ in tremendous obscurity, power and fragmentation. So does Medusa haunt the mirror that Pygmalion punches, his Shadow’s Cycle of Kings trying to pimp Galatea inside the infernal concentric pattern: as something whose dominion and domination are never fully secure; i.e., from Metroidvania to mommy domme, the Gothic castle is the perfect domme, but one that has infinite power and form!
(artist: Nyx)
Medusa cannot die. So here we are, playing with the same shadows and shapes of the Medusa for you to summon; i.e., in the singularity of my larger Gothic project. If you need theory (simple or complex), refer to Volumes One or Zero; if you need poetry pointers or examples of Gothic poetics in the Humanities with ludo-Gothic BDSM, refer to Volume Two. Here, “ludo-Gothic BDSM” and even “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism” are barely mentioned; “demon BDSM” and “iconoclastic media” are where this volume was at, when I wrote it, as well as focusing fully on the creative successes of proletarian praxis (re: our “cake’s” “eggs” and “flour”). To it, they’re what I chose to stress, back then, and what we’ll be inspecting now as such. The other stuff—especially the whore’s revenge had in duality during liminal expression, thereby healing from rape to achieve universal liberation through an intersectionally solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed (re: “Healing from Rape“)—came later. These ideas highlight sex positivity versus sex coercion, the latter of which we’ll be discussing in the language I was using early in the project; i.e., as holistically part of the same Gothic return!
Furthermore, the fundamentals of sex positivity and proletarian praxis—re: mutual consent, informed consumption and informed consent, sex-positive de facto education, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation through the appreciative irony of Gothic counterculture—are arranged as I originally envisioned them; i.e., before writing my PhD and other volumes around them, encasing the pearl. In short, they are Sex Positivity‘s aforementioned grain of sand, around which you should recognize and build your own sex-positive worlds regardless of my corpus and however much of it you’ve explored! “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand”!
To that, I could have released this volume first (and actually did, only to take it down shortly after became it too large for Blogger), but still think it works best if you have some degree of theory and history to apply to your own synthetic arguments—in short, that you have something to synthesize, mid-praxis. Theory informs habits, and habits shape play as a circular means of control and expression over what we got extending into the future through “past” doubles on the Aegis as the Aegis; e.g., Nyx’s public nudism and art-through-porn, but also their clothes, tattoos, piercings, and so on! They’re one of my original muses—a dark mommy similar to Cuwu, Blxxd Bunny and many others cohabitating revolution as the Gothic do: through castles illustrating Capitalism and Communism in small and in the flesh, making battle! So have both of us continued to fight fire with fire, punching up against tokenism from the very Hell that TERFs (and other traitors) try to reinvade. Genocide is overshadowed by dead whores, but whores don’t always stay dead, insofar as the Gothic is concerned! Make it your power to fight back against state proponents policing you with, flagging their courage and wits! The cake is a lie, so make it a splendid lie!
(artist: Nyx)
As such, this volume combines the elementary aspects of gender theory with the problem of tokenism at large; i.e., as something to playfully solve with, if not ludo-Gothic BDSM, then demon BDSM through our own intersectional solidarity and universal liberation as eventually turning into what I later called ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: “Concerning Rape Play“). Forged out of old struggles merged with modernized conceptualizations of these basic ideas, I outlined them in Volume Two’s aforementioned modular thesis. Moving forwards into the past that Volume Three represents, then, I want to include a series of useful block quotes, here; i.e., that pertain to Capitalism and what causes people to tokenize, thus interrogate why they gentrify and decay when incentivized to do so! Apart from the manifesto tree (which I have also included for your convenience), keep ’em handy as we proceed into my Gothic castle’s oldest portions!
To cite in Volume Three (six quotes):
1. No one is immune from power as a structure in service to the elite, but it can be resisted in service to labor. However things reduce, division serves profit, and anything that serves profit, while predatory and unequal, can be critiqued per the elite’s usual trifectas, attempted monopolies (violence, terror and monsters), and qualities of capital (Cartesian, settler-colonial, heteronormative); i.e., as it sexualizes everything only to gentrify/tokenize and decay over and over and over while defending the state. Per Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, intersectional solidarity does not serve profit regardless of the variables at play (an inverse of the listed qualities, above). There’s several dialectical-material binaries, but loads of grey area. The only way to distinguish this from that between the constants and variables is to play with them in ways that distribute as a matter of privilege and oppression; i.e., what we’re born into: prisons, settler colonies, empire (source: “Back to the Necropolis,” 2024).
[artist: Zdzisław Beksiński]
2. White or not, the middle class are the gatekeepers of capital and its nuclear-familial design, and allow for various marginalized concessions of “representation” that eventually disappear when fascist power is formally attained; i.e., the state finally entering a “rabid” state only to be put down by another state not yet in decay to the same extent; e.g., America vs Nazi Germany […] At home and abroad, American Liberalism [and the middle class] always decay fascistically into darker versions of itself that self-defend until total collapse trying to decay into fresh forms of the same-old inequality under Imperialism—i.e., America’s true purpose (Cartesian exploitation) projected onto Nazi Germany as the “only” Nazis in town, despite America being the breeding ground for fascism having inspired others since the late 1800s: as the global economic superpower!
China’s recent developments are changing this hegemony and the chickens are already coming home to roost; i.e., token, corporatized arbitration of Imperialism-in-crisis in ways America cannot stop, no matter how many female and non-white girl bosses they turn into unironic Amazons, vampires, Medusa, etc! “Home” as a fatal portrait will decay until it eats itself, specifically the next-in-line. Our rights are stripped down and eaten by the state until our right to exist becomes anathema, zombie-like. Then the state dies. Until then, the state is always “in danger” as something to abject onto labor threatening the nuclear families of the middle class; rinse and repeat (source: “Back to the Necropolis,” 2024).
3. Per Volume Zero, fascists will predictably respond with deception and violence; i.e., acting “oppressed” when we “break” (critique/revolutionize) their canonical masks and monstrous toys (all heroes are monsters). As such, weird canonical nerds will respond with Man Box/”prison sex” behaviors tied to the profit motive: open aggression, condescension, reactionary indignation and DARVO. This applies to film critics, speedrunners, cosplayers, and basically any form of content/media you could think of/up regarding consumption, creation or privatization. […] Nazis defend Nazis, and Nazis (token or not) defend capital. Listen to the stink they pitch and expose them as you do—with your Aegis! They won’t be able to resist tone-policing or otherwise attacking Medusa out in the open, but won’t be able to harm you if you flash behind buffers (which the Internet provides, sex work being so taboo and commercialized that it becomes hard for fascists [or sex workers] to talk about at all because bare-and-exposed forms aren’t “ad friendly” but, for us, become a place to congregate and confer); e.g., Fired Up Stilettos, below, fighting for the decriminalization of sex work (sloganizing “stripping doesn’t equal consent” and “tip me” through them using their bodies to advertise inclusive graffiti/billboard activism); i.e., actual guerrillas out-maneuvering the clumsy imperial pig playing “guerilla” themselves (source: “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part 2,” 2024).
4. Hell, as I’ve said, is always a place on Earth[2]; i.e., from “Transylvania” in quotes to Palestine and neighboring territories of conquest defended by state forces even when the apocalypse denudes; e.g., the Rational National’s “Israel Strikes Sheltering Palestinians In Open Defiance Of Recent ICJ Order” (2024). To this, Rafah is being bombed to the same degree as Gaze by the IDF disobeying the ICJ (no surprise, there) because that’s what the state does. American liberals and centrists elsewhere will ignore these realities until they can’t, then condemn them with meaningless lip service that both sides everything and shed tears at the funerals of those presented as undead. We cannot avoid or hide from it, but must go where power is to calculate and learn from it, mid-calculated risk: fucking with the undead as our friends, but also speaking to state disguises posturing as such (source: “A Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches),” 2024).
(source film: Cemetery Man, 1994)
5. Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it using the same aesthetics. […] To avoid war and rape as system harm/generational trauma and stolen generations, etc, we must learn from the dead as something we embody through our Wisdom of the Ancients. Like a Gothic heroine in a castle, the liberatory ideal is exploration leading deeper inside—to heal from police atrocities, tokenistic exploitation, and compelled perversions occurring through feminism and genderqueer politics (and other minorities) in decay (e.g., TERFs, queer and Afronormativity, Zionism, etc), and genocide, et al (source: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis,” 2024).
6. Specifically keep the previous module thesis argument in mind, as I won’t have time to set it up and stress it neatly per monster type as either undead or demonic animals […] As such, bearing pain and feeding or transformation and knowledge/power exchange is anisotropic is anisotropic in animalized language; trauma makes us decay/corrupt as monstrous-feminine or fascist (token or not), albeit in ways that cause us to develop undead/demonic feeding habits that are some degree sex-positive or sex-coercive. It’s seldom clean, too, lurking in the odd grey area of the theatre stage and monster costume. Nor are these forces unique to neoliberal Capitalism, with past poets closer to death, rape and raw sexuality in ways we’re alienated from now (save in fetishized forms that serve profit). Hauntology lets us brush up with the past as nostalgic in ways that never existed and push towards Communism as aborted by capital/the project of abjection (and other Gothic theories).
You’ve probably noticed the expanding of said thesis to including undead and demonic elements over the course of the volume; this trend will only continue when we look at the creative successes of proletarian praxis (and sex, gender and identity-as-performance in Volume Three when combating tokenism) [source: Call of the Wild; or Sex Education: Trans-forming the World through the Trans, Intersex and Non-binary Mode of Being,” 2025].
These are various quotes/thesis elements that I selected arbitrarily when originally writing this new opening to Volume Three; re: six months ago; i.e., elements that stress variables tied to tokenism as a force to beware and combat while embodying Medusa: as someone to double based on prior Venus twins. I won’t stress any of these quotes, here, because they were written after this book volume was; I simply want you to have access to several on top of the explanations I just gave, with Nyx’s help. Of course, feel free to access all the book volumes and use whatever quotes or exhibits that you like; I just found these ones to be especially germane to the Praxis Volume, in hindsight—i.e., as thesis arguments wrote afterwards based on this older groundwork I’d previously laid for such things and returned to, with a basket thereof: of quotes, exhibits, and a historic backlog of thesis material while returning to where it all started (and will start again, again, again…).
The beauty of any thesis statement, then, is being able to go into an older corpus and modify it, yet spear a follow-through that endures across time insofar as liberation and revenge play out. For instance, the core, paragraph-sized goal of my project—the series abstract and breaking Capitalist Realism on the Aegis—has remained relatively constant over a million-plus words, but the thesis (skeleton) of Volume One and Volume Two’s bodies are things I’ve been able to revisit after a relative amount of time away from the drawing board.
In short, we workers can sexualize things, too, but also reinforce them in our daily lives. As such, I was able to “Wolverine” my arguments, steelmanning them (therefore Medusa) by replacing the regular bones with sturdier forms. This is standard practice in thesis writing and something had I learned gradually over time; i.e., by constantly returning to my older work, mid-reflection, effectively studying the Medusa while dancing with her as holistic study! With Volume Two, part two, for example, I didn’t have to embark upon additional thesis work; re: “Our Sweet Revenge; or, Being Ourselves While Reclaiming Anal Rape” (which Nyx [who loves anal sex and Amazonian theatrics] also appeared in, below); i.e., any more than I have to reflect on it again, here, during holistic study as I have done, have done, have done, mid-Amazonomachia. I just like doing it; Amazons rock and teaching with them is fun and effective.
Past and present, then, I have routinely figured I “might as well”; i.e., given my already having written three books before returning to this one! Each and every time, it seemed like a waste not to; i.e., especially when I had the time, resources and expertise under my belt, but also a wide group of friends to camp canon with; re: like Nyx, who I feature in “Rape Reprise” when talking about the whore’s revenge against tokenism policing nature; i.e., their “Aegis” personifies Medusa as I worship her to subvert the usual subjugation Amazons are forced to suffer and reenact! Anal back = land back as a matter of reclaimed labor through ludo-Gothic BDSM putting “rape” (ergo violence, terror and monsters) in quotes! None of this aims to confuse anyone for the Cause, instead being provided for your benefit—as a visual aid/stimulant, but also teaching device with cryptonymic potential (re: “pussy on the chainwax“)! Canon needs to be camped through what it controls; i.e., through sex with force out the Imperium of Antiquity into “antique” derelicts. What photos we leave behind are puzzles to teach with, as such. So stare and tremble!
(artist: Nyx)
To this, I wanted to cement the usual dualistic parallels, mid-Mandelbrot, but also expand on them heaven-in-a-wild-flower to account for diversity as a vital component to Gothic Communism: intersectional solidarity as a holistic response to challenging profit alienizing its usual whores to seek revenge against (re: those “of nature” to modular persecutorial degrees; e.g., witches, vampires and goblins, among others). Camping capital can’t really be done by going “bare bones,” so I used Volume Three’s “children” to build more monsters in different chapters, symposiums and essays; i.e., those that make up Volumes Zero through Two—not just a pearl, but a black pearl dense with dark data and murky origins (systemic redundancy being the key to survival, mid-passage)!
By comparison, Volume Three—as I have repeatedly explained, here and elsewhere—is largely the grain of sand before the pearl was created. Hindsight remains, of course, but referring to the ghostly essence of what eventually crystalized into the rest of my book series is important: it’s largely how you’ll be working within the mode, yourselves; i.e., how I did before I wrote my PhD, manifesto, and Monster Volume, as well as anything that comes after Sex Positivity when leaving it behind for you to find! “Look on our Works, ye Mighty!” Savor us!
(artist: Nyx)
To it, everything above amounts to reference material that came afterwards, and which you can use, moving forwards while coming yourselves; i.e., when performing and reflecting on your own proletarian praxis synthesizing mine into something closer to Gothic Communism: than I (or my friends) could manage before you. Use what remains to code your future corpses, loading their photographic likenesses with fresh data!
Rome wasn’t burned in day. Nor was capital, In keeping with my core areas of research, its transformation could occur through speedrunning and Metroidvania—meaning expressed in monomyth poetics/the Promethean Quest’s usual exchanges, and in ways where my opinions gradually changed over time (re: “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning,” 2025)—or it could be straight-up sex work mid-ludo-Gothic BDSM versus forms of sex work that tie into sex minus overt sexual activity. Regardless, form is secondary to function; re: flow determines function, not aesthetics. That’s how challenging tokenism works and why repeatedly returning to past ideas (and states of reflection) remains vital when reviving the Medusa as a sex-positive force; i.e., not a subjugated Amazon, but a subversive one! And yet, doing becomes a constant state of transition—something to roll in the hay (or around on the floor) with while passing whatever data on that you’re able to impart: the Medusas of today wear boy shorts, nerdy glasses and little pink fuck-me boots!
(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Ergo, Volume Three picks up the slack, but also is the slack; re: the spectres of the proverbial “past” as both younger and older than us, melting inside Medusa’s cauldron to make said past gayer than Marx did (with me learning from Cuwu despite them being younger than me and Marxist-Leninist, and them learning from me despite me being older than them and an-Com, above). Humanity isn’t parthenogenic, and never really “gets old” under such bio-mechanical modes of exchange; i.e., from the sense-and-sensibility psychomachia of master and apprentice to model and muse, it takes two (or more) to tango—and for which Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is social-sexual, and rebellion more broadly a famously horrendous mess because of it: while passing past knowledge down, meaning “as divided by capital” and reflective of that division in black/white language (e.g., virgin/whore) entering the usual grey areas! Time, as Bakhtin explained per the Gothic chronotope, is organic. To look on the past as the Gothic do means to revive it per the legends and language of power and death in duality (re: dynastic primacy and hereditary rites on/off the fatal portrait)! Such is how Cuwu and I did it, or Nyx and I, or anyone else breaking state tools (thus monopolies) with their own bodies together or separate from myself. It all goes into the same cosmic cum dumpster.
I think you get the gist. Before we proceed, though, let me grant a couple last-minute points to consider when penetrating the egg (four pages). Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies practicing falsehoods for the state; e.g., speedrunning as white, male and cis-het extending to streaming platform Kick’s Nazi pedophile problem but also streamers like Dr. Disrespect[3] protected by the system; i.e., like the black penitents from Ann Radcliffe’s novels (more on streamers when we look at weird canonical nerds like Caleb Hart, Ian Kochinski and Man Box culture, in Chapter Four). So when you’re playing with rape, you must remember you’re playing with power as something to revisit and alter for workers’ benefit, aggregating on their behalf (the tradition of all dead whore’s from past generations, Marx; re: “The Eighteenth Brumaire“): while facing the system aggregating self-righteously against you; i.e., the state employing DARVO and obscurantism in defense of profit, but also literally killing the whistleblower (Second Thought’s “We All Know It’s Happening,” 2024) and always while saying “think of the women and children!” The state and its territories become, to it, an unweeded garden grown to seed, thus something for the state to “weed” while keeping its pimp-like hold on things in ways that tokenize and resist tokenization in equal measure:
(artist: Rae Moon)
Simply put, profit defends itself, thus rape through violence and lies, but also costumes, bodies and masks; i.e., per my PhD thesis statement, Capitalism sexualizes everything—doing so by tokenizing outwards to police and harvest labor through nature-as-monstrous-feminine; e.g., hairy pussies (above). In turn, those touched by trauma tend to advertise it (that “goth” look) as something to play with, weird attracting weird. This includes playing with our abusers’ terror weapons; i.e., as things to reclaim through our own cryptonymy’s masks and costumes, boundaries and barriers; re: during the whore’s paradox/the paradox of rape unfolding while playing with “rape” in quotes; re: the anal Amazon thesis being “land back” and “body back” by taking our labor and rights back from the state per the whore’s revenge against profit (from the Demon Module):
(artist: Aria Rain)
First, capital sexualizes everything to rape nature in modular terror language, including Amazons and anal; i.e., the world under Capitalism arranges heteronormatively in service to capital, whose Cartesian/settler-colonial structure rapes nature through said language; e.g., Amazons being used classically to control women by Ancient Athenians, not free them; re (from a few pages back): “The state controls sex and gender in monstrous-feminine language because these are where power (and trauma) are found […] their ideas of power revolve around ideas of state revenge also dressed up: the pimp dominating nature-as-monstrous-feminine, doubling and dominating it through tokenized double standards; e.g., anal sex [and Amazons].” The state only tolerates the problematic love of Amazons and anal when their challenge (to the ancient canonical laws) is nominal; i.e., provided their counterfeits serve profit in canonical terror language that furthers abjection. As something to combine, but also canonize in different performances, anal is a place and parlance of trauma to give and receive through tokenized enforcers dressed up as warriors—Amazons being a half-real theatrical device forever trapped between genuine rebellion and false, targeting vulnerable body parts in vulnerable areas (e.g., the bathroom). Things like Amazons and anal, then, become canonically binarized to best give or receive state force (mainly police violence) pursuant to profit. To challenge profit and Capitalist Realism on and offstage, workers must camp state terror inside of itself—anisotropically with Amazons and anal to reverse terror/counterterror with subversive irony during liminal expression (source: “Our Sweet Revenge; or, Being Ourselves While Reclaiming Anal Rape, mid-Amazonomachia,” 2024).
Literal assholes aside, such forbidden zones extend readily enough to overlapping persecution networks pursuant to blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts; re: profit achieved via Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and settler colonialism (and other state tools) enforcing the ancient canonical laws into the nuclear model—i.e., as it currently exists, post-Rome but haunted by “Rome” as hauntologically something to quell or revive—among other modular-yet-intersecting forms of persecution language: monsters that, so often, tie to the body and its labor as sexualized by the state for profit (thus alienation, rape and ultimately genocide as unfolding per the usual cyclical patterns and “black” left-behinds; re: the infernal concentric pattern, Cycle of Kings, Shadow of Pygmalion, etc).
As a matter of synthesizing catharsis, mid-praxis, the only way to fight that process (of abjection) is to go to the half-real space where exploitation and liberation both call home and anisotropically flow power towards workers; re: as monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of the alien. Anything that can be pimped by the state is a whore to police through monomythic forms, which we camp to survive using what we have as whores (offshoots of the Big Whore, Medusa). That is the whore’s power to salvage from profit, on the Aegis: an undead, demonic and/or animalistic egregore to conjure up during the liminal hauntology of war and speak to what was denied in the past; i.e., which we can revive in various forms of “past” through ourselves: to pass on, thus honor the Medusa and nature, as monstrous-feminine having its revenge (female/white or not) against profit and the state! Such revenge has a home to rise from, a burial ground that—in keeping with Gothic—is also an “almost holy” graveyard that stretches wide to swallow you!
(artist: Kitty Has One)
The Gothic is a quest, one that famously searches for the Numinous, which the Medusa—as the ghost of the counterfeit—is; re: the black queen to turn the world, as capital has arranged it, upside-down! Beyond Faustian bargains (re: “Summoning Demons“), this reckoning happens during Promethean Quests from Mary Shelley onwards (re: “Making Demons“). To it, there are no kings or queens under Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, hence no gods or masters of the traditional, vertical sort; it’s a group effort—one bravely made to gradually restore horizontal stability to a devastated world ravished by capital on all registers. By challenging tokenism in neo-medieval variations of as(s)ymmetrical warfare, we’re not just whores to pimp/slaves to be productive “to the grind,” getting’ busy for the owner class; we’re allowed to hang loose/self-define through a multi-purpose (and multi-media) approach to our lives: something to look upon and savor as one does a goddess! Love feels good, as does having the Satanic power to say and show it (as avatars of the Medusa) however we all agree upon! This pandemonic covenant is collective, gooey.
To it, monopolies are a myth only once we break them on the Aegis! So be bold when doing so, your own Gothic homecomings living ever onwards! Tremble with a power the state sees in us, which we paradoxically take back, mid-exposure! Through the cryptonymy process, nudity is our armor! And while our past becomes a Gorgon-esque poetry to revisit and endlessly play with, each return remains unique and fun; re from Percy Shelley to me (from “The Quest for Power”):
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—”Two vast and shapely buns of stone
Thrust up in the desert. … Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a peerless visage sighs, whose smile,
And pillow lip, and smirk of warm delight,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that enjoyed them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, Queen of queens;
Look on my Ass, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away (source).
In keeping with Medusa, life and death are two sides of the same coin, the Gothic is a bad echo on purpose. However surreal (re: Giger), use it to make a better world while rising from the ashes of past attempts!
Your Commy Mommy (and all her friends speaking through her),
—Persephone van der Waard
(artist: Nyx)
Onto “‘Dialectical Materialism (with Monsters)’ and ‘Before the Plunge’“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] Far less than Volume Two, which similar to the manifesto actually experienced multiple expansions (e.g., the Poetry Module) and essays prior to its final release.
[2] Re (from Volume Zero): Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth- like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force (source: “Scouting the Field”).
[3] Hasan Abi’s “Kick Is Falling Apart” (2024) and “Why Dr. Disrespect Was Banned,” (2023).