Hailing Hellions: An Interview with Victoria Saix

This interview is for “Hailing Hellions,” a Q&A series where I interview sex workers (or ex-sex workers) who have modeled for me and my Sex Positivity* book project. Today’s interview subject is Victoria Saix!

*The longer title being Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Liberating Sex Work under Capitalism through Iconoclastic Art (2023). Part of an overarching movement that connects sex positivity to what I call “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism,” Sex Positivity essentially provides a hybrid; i.e., one established between academic (Gothic, queer, game and Marxist) theories, and wherein applied theory towards universal liberation is achieved by challenging Capitalist Realism (the inability to imagine a world beyond Capitalism) at a grassroots level. To it, Gothic Communism specifically occurs through direct mutual worker action and informed intersectional solidarity relayed through Gothic poetics: BDSM, monsters, and kink, but specifically what I call “ludo-Gothic BDSM.” If you’re curious about the book and want to know more, the first four volumes (and additional information) are available for free (the series is non-profit) on my website’s 1-page promo

General CW: BDSM, Gothic content and theatrics (e.g., rape play and death theatre), as well as sex worker abuse and bigotry of various kinds (variable per interview). 

Specific CW: This interview in particular discusses sexual assault/use of the word “rape,” as well as intersex abuse (forced surgery).

Note: All images are of the model or myself unless otherwise stated.

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.

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.

About the series: Like the book series it attaches to, “Hailing Hellions” aims to educate and critique; i.e., by raising awareness towards sex worker rights, but also gender-non-conformity through Gothic counterculture. This extends to gender identity (e.g., trans, enby or intersex) but also orientation and performance; i.e., BDSM and sex positivity through various Gothic theatrical roles that invite things beyond vanilla, heteronormative (thus conservative, reactionary and harmful) sexuality. I would consider this to be things like mommy dommes and consent-non-consent, breeding fantasies and heavy metal (e.g., Satanic material and the Gothic at large). Also, these questions are broader insofar as they cover wide praxial/poetic ideas and concepts. Regarding these, the opinions of the subject and myself are not identical, but often overlap through us collaborating together to raise awareness.

About the interviewee: Victoria is a friend of a friend; i.e., one of my metamour’s play partners from New Zealand and someone from the same Discord server (we fags stick together, on and offline). They’re intersex, and a past survival sex worker (and survivor of rape) who has since moved onto different kinds of work. They’re a super sweetie, and someone who has supported my work effusively insofar as I talk extensively about healing from rape by subverting it through BDSM, ludology and Gothic poetics (monsters and murder/rape theatre). Over the past year or so, their feedback and enthusiasm has been invaluable, as well as working and playing with them (whenever I’ve gotten the chance). Vic’s a class act and a total baddie (so tall and thicc)!

0. Persephone: Hi, everyone! My name is Persephone van der Waard. I’m a trans-woman erotic artist, sex worker, writer/author and researcher who specializes in cross-media studies; i.e., I have my independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania).

Victoria, could you introduce yourself and share a little about yourself with our audience?

Victoria: Hello I’m Vincent or Victoria, but you can call me anything you want. I’m a 34-year old pan/ace guy from New Zealand who, for two years from 18-20, became a casual sex worker to help out my family with money as I was the only one who had a job at that point in my household.

I was living in the garage at that point, as there was not enough room in the house for me; i.e., as the youngest son from my mother’s first marriage and a constant reminder of the first family she had and the decision she made at my birth: born intersex and was made to develop into a boy as Mum ‘n Dad thought it might be a harder life as a 6’2 woman when I grew up. In any event, my mother was homeschooling my younger half brother and sister and my stepfather had lost his job over having asked his boss at the time to remove the nudie mags in the workshop toilets as it “wasn’t proper” for a work place.

I also have Autism and ADHD (undiagnosed despite MHP’s saying I had it but didn’t want to give me the label as it would make it harder for me as an adult). I managed to move out of home properly at 20 but had to fall back to living with my mum or older brother for the next 10 years after breaking up with my then-fiancé after her getting pregnant to another guy (my surgeries to help me develop made me sterile), who then laid a false rape claim against me that got easily disproven but the damage to my reputation had been done so I had to move cities and eventually change my name legally to protect myself and so I could still get work. So not much luck with relationships and being what society wanted of me, heh.

Over the last 4 years of not living with family, I did a year of counseling and then recovery from that. Since then, I have become more comfortable with myself; i.e., I have started dressing up as what could have been: if the coin had flipped the other way (hooray for finding Vicky). Also, I helped run the local Rainbow youth group before handing it back to the younger generation. It was around this time that a person on Twitter reposted a picture of me and I started a friendship with him, who then invited me into a Discord server in which I met you, Persephone.

1. Persephone: This book project views sex positivity as a liberating act. What does sex positivity mean to you? Illustrating mutual consent; i.e., can porn illustrate mutual consent when sex workers are constantly dehumanized by the profit motive and the status quo?

Victoria: Sex positivity to me means being able to be who and what you are and being free to do what you need to do without feeling shame for it, because we are beautiful creatures in this world and owe it to ourselves to be true. Society and the ones who push workers down and make them feel bad are just wrong and can’t understand the feeling and joy that comes from within while doing the work; i.e., being in the moment and feeling seen for a moment even if it is brief (raw, primal, chest-bursting pride and emotion: “I am a beast, hear me roar”).

Being dehumanized for the work just to get paid/for the need to get paid is not right; i.e., a dancer or an artist creating something using their body gets applauded and praised for it while a SW or S actor gets told, “okay get ready for the next shoot or client, you are nothing and will burn for this come reaping time.” And being made to feel filthy or lesser than because of it hurts on a level most people don’t know. I imagine there is some really good “agents” out there that do care for those workers and treat them right, but from what I’m seeing as the years go on is the content is getting more violent and dangerous as people are getting desensitized to everything in it. There does need to be informed and mutual consent for this line of work and protections in place and destigmatized socially as it is a needed career in a world; i.e., that is growing further apart and more online and less in person. People can go years or decades without the physical touch that they need to survive properly.

2. Persephone: In your mind, what is the biggest struggle facing sex workers today?

Victoria: The biggest struggle is being able to do the job safely like you can with most jobs, as it is still looked down upon; i.e., you getting blamed by society and the perception that if anything goes wrong that we invited it upon ourselves and there is nothing to protect ourselves legally in some places. There’s also the general perception that sex workers are lesser or deviant and unclean (if anything, we can be some of the cleanest people because we know the risks better than most), one where we are given the “eww” look if we tell anyone what we do (my experience, or as one of my friends calls me regularly: “slut”). They’ll ask what went wrong in your life? Did you even try to get a NORMAL job? I guess image factor is one of the main struggles; i.e., it is one of the oldest professions and should have a great amount of respect that goes to the workers who have chosen it. And as I said in the last question, the porn side of it getting filmed is getting more extreme in some cases; i.e., as you have to be doing something “exciting and new” just to get more views or purchases so you can survive on the sales.

3. Persephone: How do you feel about sex work being work, thus paying sex workers for their labor? This can be unions, but also their representations in media at large.

Victoria: Gods yes, it IS work; it has all the same things as a regular job: commute, uniform, paperwork, banking, meetings and office space (so to speak)! Most job places have different rates/charges for the work they do so why should sex work be any different? I.e., if it was to be legitimized as a proper profession and taxed (if you want to go that far—it should be tax-free like churches, as we are helping give comfort to the needy). And it does need to be seen in a better light by media and the stigma removed, as it is a normal thing to do and not dirty or vile (insert the Helen Lovejoy “think of the children” meme).

4. Persephone: What are your thoughts on Communism vs Capitalism using Gothic poetics? Can monsters be gay Commies?

Victoria: I don’t know much about the subject other than what I have read in your writings but from what I can understand the answer is: “Hell, yes! Gay monstrous Commies!”

5a. Persephone: What drew you to the project/interested you in working on it together with me?

Victoria: You are a lovely person who, in the time we have known each other, has made me feel seen and happier than I was a year ago. Your writing and art is phenomenal and I just love it; you have added some photos and info about me in some of your work and that has made me so happy that I am a small part of your awesome works. And I wanted to be involved because the way people like us are seen is horrible; we are just the same as everyone else—not lesser but equal (me feeling very much like September from Fringe, down to the little head tilt) and just trying to make it in this messed up world: one where society judges you on how shiny your stuff is. And as a slightly selfish thought: that by even having a picture of me in your books, that even if I perish a small part of me remains for someone to see that I existed at some point. But I mainly wanted to be involved because you are awesome, and your work is important and needed.

5b. Persephone: How has that experience been for you? Can you describe it a little?

Victoria: It has been wonderful, and I don’t feel rushed or made to feel stupid. Us doing the photoshoot was amazing. While a bit challenging at times, it felt good to accomplish something and to feel pride at the result was new for me. You are a lovely gentle person with a huge heart and soul. I would recommend you as a safe person to work with.

6. Persephone: If you feel comfortable talking about it, can you talk about being GNC? What does that mean to you?

Victoria: Admitting to myself—that it is ok to not conform and to enjoy when I am Victoria instead of Vincent—has been freeing. I think when I do I look good that gives me comfort; i.e., that I wish I had earlier in life during the times that I was trying to figure out why I felt WRONG in who I was: while looking at the girls and ladies who had the most fantastic dress sense I had ever seen, and wanting desperately for the power to shapeshift into them or swap bodies for even a moment just to feel beautiful and admired (was a very short chubby cheeked kid then tall skinny teen)! I still feel that way at my job (we have a few stunning goth chicks in my town that I would kill to be able to look as half as good as out in public) but then remembering what people see when they look at me can be rough. But I know now from personal time dressing up that I look better as a perceived woman and that brings comfort despite feeling robbed by my parents of that chance.

Being GNC can be fun. When someone tries to have a go at me and my response being “why is it a problem how I look? Are you scared of a color? Or is it the fact I’m making you feel something you haven’t before?” It can also hurt sometimes knowing what could have been; i.e., if my parents could have seen this future for me—to the point I’m silent-screaming at night because I feel like I’m being pulled apart by the being that is sitting on my back with its claws around my heart. But that is happening less now that I’m accepting me for me!

7. Persephone: What do you enjoy most about sex work? What got you started in it?

Victoria: I don’t really remember much of it, as I was able to separate mind from body for the most part. It was just a means of money coming in to help my family keep the house and food on the table. It was during that time that I figured out I was ace because, for me, it just felt mechanical and a means to an end. And being honest, I haven’t had sex in 13 years, so I wonder if I might like it now that I’m older and have come to terms with things.

What I did like was the feeling that I was in control of my body and that it wasn’t under another’s control—e.g., with me being raped at 13 by my first boyfriend and his friend—and that it was my choice; i.e., the feeling of having personal power and that, hey, I guess there IS something that is desirable about my body (I later realized I had a very twinkish body when I was younger. God I miss it)!

My most enjoyable times doing sex work were when I wasn’t needed for sex but just someone that the client could just talk to while doing cleaning of his house (was cheaper than a cleaner and better conversation). He mostly used me as a sounding board while he got stuff off of his chest and I helped him through a few things. I know that that aspect isn’t really sex work, but it felt nice that he had someone to take care of him even if it was for a little while.

What got me into sex work was my job at the time. It was offering me less hours (as it was after the new year), so I was asking people if they knew of any work going on anywhere in town and a guy asked if I had ever thought of “being a foot model” and said he would pay some money for some pics. I said ok, so we hopped in his car and drove to the local beach where he took some photos, then said I could earn an extra 50 if he could fuck me. I thought, “Why not? The last time I had no control but this time would be different. So, I said yes, and it became a regular thing a few times a week. He told a few others about me, and it went from there. Looking back on it, sooo much could have gone wrong over that 2-year period and I’m thankful that it didn’t. I know some others aren’t as lucky!

8. Persephone: Do you have a favorite piece of sex work that you’ve done, in terms of custom material?

Victoria: No, not really… unless the photoshoot counts? Or the very amateur videos I have sent you and [a mutual friend from Discord].

9. Persephone: Do you friends and family know about the work that you do? How do you talk about it with other people who aren’t sex workers; i.e., how do you communicate sex worker rights to non sex workers?

Victoria: Only one person in my immediate life knows, my older sister, and her response was, “Oh, ok.” And my best friend because I wanted to during the course of friendship. Also a few co-workers know—mainly because I felt they needed some education on the matter (as a few of them are older or made a joke about them throwing in the towel at work and “just becoming a hooker”). So the way I talk about it is saying  there needs to be more protection and safety in that line of work (and that it isn’t as easy as they think and more involved than just having sex). It has caused a few to not talk with me because of it, but that is on them. I think it helped me become a better person, one who can understand what others have to go through to survive; i.e., in a world where everything is so expensive that you end up having to have a side hustle (that the govt doesn’t know about) just to keep your head above water. I’m one of the lucky ones who has a job that gives me enough to live simply. I definitely get some judgement from others who do know and they think they can hurt me by calling me slut or whore or words like that. I just blink, then say back, “So what?” Really takes the wind out of their sails*.

*It really does! I’ve had people call me out for being gay or “liking cock” or whatever. And I’m always like, “My dude, it’s only plastered all over my website and name going hand-in-hand!” Nazis think exposing that shit is the end of the world for someone (major projection, on their part). In truth, if its already out there—i.e., there being nothing to expose—then they don’t really know how to act! —Perse

10. Persephone: What are your thoughts on TERFs in sex work; i.e., those who devalue GNC minorities (and other marginalized groups) in the same profession?

Victoria: Ah them, the ones that think that we are wrong or false advertising ourselves; i.e., in a profession that lets us use the talents and the bodies we have or have modified to become ourselves? I didn’t come across any when I was active but that was before I knew there was a term for them. I have had to deal with a few at work over the years, and who only got louder the more you ignore them and shut them down to them eventually leaving/getting themselves fired because they wouldn’t work with most of the department: 1 FtM, 3 pan, 2 bi, 1 old gay and 2 butch lesbians (one of which was the 2iC night fill). Basically they’d quit over dumb anti-trans and anti-rainbow stuff (it’s amazing how you can’t gain traction when you’re stuck in the mud)!

11. Persephone: How do you feel about billionaires? Israel and Palestine?

Victoria: I feel that billionaires are not needed and that they should be taxed HEAVILY. There is no need for an individual to have that much money when it could be used to further and solve most of Humanity’s problems and fix things for the better of all—not used to control the world or waste it on rockets (and other useless crap). Pay your workers a living wage! Use the money and influence to upgrade healthcare and education! Create jobs that people can be happy going to! And fund some housing for those that need it! You are becoming irrelevant and hated by the masses (take old Elongated Muskrat, for example: Tesla and Starlink getting boycotted and contracts getting cancelled, earning him the Guinness world record for fastest drop in wealth ever)!

I’ll admit, I don’t know much about Israel and Palestine—other than Israel is pulling some shady shit; i.e., laying siege to areas and bombing civilians and counting them as “combatants” to justify what they are doing and trying to genocide Palestinians (I’m ashamed that I haven’t been keeping up with this conflict and, because I know it is important, that I should have done better. Um really bad at other countries and what they are going through; I just know that Israel is massively in the wrong, here).

12a. Persephone: What are some of your favorite GNC pieces of media (e.g., I love Sense8 and Heartbreak High)? Do you have any GNC role models?

Victoria: That one I haven’t really thought about after hiding in the closest for so long. I could think of Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss characters such as Angel Dust (HH) and Stolas (HB). I know it isn’t a great example using them, save that reasons I empathize with them on a personal level* (especially Angel Dust).

*It’s not unknown for queer people—especially from the ’90s or before—to relate to forms of queerness that are more tortured or self-hating (e.g., the xenomorph, or Doctor Frankenfurter from Rocky Horror). —Perse

 

12b. Persephone: To that, GNC people often find their families outside of their birth families; did you have to go elsewhere for that, or is your family relatively understanding of your queerness?

Victoria: Yes, I went elsewhere for that and have ended up with multiple “mothers” because of it. I only came out to my family 4 years ago and the reaction was a non-reaction from my dad and older sister (the equivalent of a shrug)—with Dad saying, “You could have told me 17 years ago, when you were 13; my best friend for the last 40 years is gay.” My mum and younger siblings were like, “that is cool thanks for telling us.” My mum is supportive and learning as she goes; i.e., she has a lot of God-thumping to get out of her head before she understands some things, but she was generally good with me being out and she is proud of me.

My older brother, on the other hand, is the only family I have in this town. Basically 4 months of not talking to me (during which I had a friend who used to call me “big brother” hang herself in a local park 3 days before Christmas that sent me into a spiral that could have ended me): my messages left on read, and whenever I tried going to his place to talk to him he would get in his car and just drive off.

After a while he said, “hey we need to talk” and started off by saying, “I can accept you for who you are… if you never discuss that part of your life to me. I’m also not happy with you for changing your name and throwing away the family last name.” My response was, “I wasn’t going to discuss that part of my life anyway and I hope one day you will listen to why I changed my name.”

Fast-forward—i.e., through 4 years of rebuilding the relationship slowly and him having time to think and talk with people and hearing the locals talking about what I have done for some of their kids and them and how much of a decent bloke I am and how he should be proud of me—and we have patched things up and have brought a house together.

 

13. Persephone: What about sex workers? Do you have anyone you look up to in particular?

Victoria: Not really. The two I have are you and Bay. Even though I haven’t talked to him about it, I’m proud of what he is doing despite our government making things harder for him. As time goes on, I’m proud of all you do and I love you for it.

14. Persephone: There’s often a strong theatrical component to sex work and BDSM; i.e., costumes, gender roles, aesthetics of power and death, music, makeup. How do these things intersect for you, and do they cross over into real life for you? For example, do you find yourself wearing similar clothing and expressing yourself sex-positively when you’re not on the clock?

Victoria: Well, considering that I have been off the clock for the last 14 years… Yes, I do when I get the space; i.e., to mainly shift how I’m feeling as a guy to feeling more feminine and sex-positive—in the sense that I’m better as a woman and, my god, do I feel things as one! It is a sensory shift, as well wanting to do something I haven’t before—to push my own limits of what I can do! So many ideas and scenarios I wish would happen; i.e., if only I could have tapped into this when I was younger, then I could have made a killing! And “theatrical” is a good way to define the shift from Vin into Vicky (as I want to perform for someone else and have someone see me for who I could have been). Sometimes if it isn’t too hot, I will wear a crop top under my normal shirt at work just to keep a little of Vicky in my normal day. I know it sounds kind of stupid but she is the decisive one who gets shit done; Vic is more reserved and the customer-service-type person* (I try to not use my real voice much—very deep and kind of sounds like TFS Hellsing Abridged Alucard).

*Service workers are certainly expected to have higher-pitched voices—meaning more feminine and subservient, deferring to historically male and/or at-least-wealthy and certainly privileged clients (acting high-and-mighty even if they’re just middle-class assholes standing in line for a cheeseburger and punching down at fast food workers. They still want to be king for day). —Perse

15. Persephone: There’s often an animal component to sexuality and gender expression, helping workers establish close bonds with each other and nature; i.e., furries, but also therians and various kinks; e.g., puppy play. How do you feel about these things, be they for work, pleasure, or both?

Victoria: I have looked into that side of it and can see the appeal of it for people; and everyone is entitled to whatever helps them. I could enjoy aspects of those things with someone I can trust to take care of me because I’m such a pleaser to my partner and can lose myself and push myself past feeling safe just to prove that I can; i.e., in the pursuit of doing a good job and the desire to feel something strongly enough to feel alive. It would probably be a bad idea to get me into any animalistic feeling as the desire to sink my teeth into my partner while doing it is STRONG (and yes, I feel it would be for pleasure). I genuinely want to have a bond with someone that can handle the stronger aspects of me.

16. Persephone: Sex workers are generally treated as monsters to harm and exploit under capital. Do you have a preferred way of expressing the humanity of sex workers, be that simply stating it or through the work that you do, art, or some combination, etc?

Victoria: We are human like the rest of you; we have just figured out how to provide a service that most people take for granted in their relationships (some of my clients were not getting it from their partners so they had me, instead). I see us as an image of succubae/incubi, but crossed with nurses for the body and with a soul concerned with the care of Humanity. I tell people who ask what it is like that it feels like a normal job and has some of the same aspects as one—only that it feels more like a nightshift job (and that you try and sleep during the day).

17. Persephone: Do you have a particular aspect of liberation you like to focus on; e.g., fat liberation or decriminalizing sex work? To that, what’s the difference between positive thinking and liberation in your eyes?

Victoria: The liberation I think I focus on is when I can see and help someone become themselves instead of what they think people want to see; e.g., watching some of the youth group Rainbow teens clicking on to the fact that it is what they are and not their entire persona and that it is far less effort to be themselves and not what their friends want them to look like and act. Helping people get over the hump of “but what if others don’t like me for me?” Let them! It isn’t on you to make people like you; they either do or don’t so enjoy the ones who do and just walk past the ones that don’t!

18a. Persephone: How do you feel about BDSM and using calculated risk to confront and heal from trauma? I.e., using collars or whips to experience pain or control as pleasurable, not harmful (I love collars, for instance).

Victoria: I think it is a fantastic way to heal from trauma; i.e., it reteaches trust in others giving up or taking control again. After what happened to me when I was 13

I was at a sleepover party with my first boyfriend and one of his friends and they spiked my drink gradually till I had to go to bed. I passed out only to wake up tied spread eagle on my front with my boyfriend in my throat and the friend in my ass. They proceeded to rape me multiple times, switching back and forth and then leaving me there till the next afternoon. And when I got untied, my boyfriend told not to tell anyone; otherwise he would tell the whole school I was gay. This was back in 2004 when it was very much still not good to be out.

I wasn’t able to wear a watch or have my shirt cuffs or socks put too much pressure on my wrists and  ankles for years, afterwards; i.e., without having panic attacks. Then I learned about self bondage and started looking into BDSM related stuff. Through it, I learned to turn the trauma into something that was calming to me and fun and pleasurable. So sometimes if I have had a rough day I tie myself up to get some relaxing sleep or to decompress for a while; i.e., the loss of control created by yourself (or a trusted partner) feels amazing and im really happy I have found a way to reshape my trauma. I would suggest it to others who need help healing, too.

You’re really brave for talking about that. I was raped, myself, but the specifics of mine involve total financial control and isolation during Covid (emotional and fiscal manipulation, coercing sex and other forms of labor out of me). Even so, from one victim to another, everyone’s trauma is valid and needs to be heard. So often, rape victims are blamed and/or fetishized for their abuse; e.g., white straight women are “turned” into sluts/vampire ladies of the night after being abused, but despite often being pimped for it are also prioritized in Gothic media over other rape survivors. It’s important for rape victims to feel comfortable being able to speak out about such things; i.e., without shame or bias inside but also outside themselves. —Perse

18b. Persephone: Was there ever a moment where you were on the fence about BDSM or sex work/in the closet, but something happened that changed everything? I.e., was it gradual or more a singular event that motivated you to change; or, were you always kind of out (for me, I decided to change after several bad exes, but also watching Stranger Things, and relating to Max’s brush with Vecna in a GNC way)?

Victoria: I can’t remember what it was that came first, the movie Underworld (where I fell in love with Selene and her latex outfit) or my first girlfriend at 16 who was the same height and skinniness as me. She had amazing style who, when I stayed over, would have me be a mannequin/model for her outfit ideas, and give me a makeover. Then she introduced me to BDSM, tying me up while I was wearing her clothes—not to embarrass me but so she could admire her work (I have a lot to thank her for). She helped me feel more right in myself—something that would take another 14 years to figure out once I had my own space to explore more things.

19. Persephone: Does expressing yourself in a dehumanized BDSM position (e.g., CNC or living latex, etc) or state of existence speak to your humanity as something to value?

Victoria: Latex has become a massive love of mine over the last few years—from the shine and feel of it, to the fact that it hides but shows everything at the same time, and that with a hood or mask all personality and the person underneath just disappears; i.e., in a world where everyone looks at you, being hidden and a faceless drone in a sense feels amazing and is really freeing. I would love to have a partner to make some content; i.e., using me as a focus. Such exhibition would be a dream for me—not being seen as human but instead as something else entirely would, for me, be the most human thing in a weird way.

20. Persephone: What got you interested in BDSM? Do you have a preference in terms of what you give or receive?

Victoria: Again, my first girlfriend introduced me to it and I found it fun and calming; re: not having control but trusting the other person, and figuring out it was helping with trauma, too. I would give whatever I could, but would rather be the subject/sub; i.e., of what they wanted to do and I would be focusing on all the feelings and trying to do my best for them just to make sure they were happy and pleased with me.

The service top in me sympathizes. —Perse

21. Persephone: In your mind, is BDSM inherently sexual? If so or if not, can you explain why?

Victoria: I would say “both” as aspects of it are by themselves not sexual; e.g., latex clothing being used for the gentle pressure/compression to relieve anxiety and panic attacks and for the look being unique (or an eternity collar/ring being used as the equivalent of a wedding ring). But yes, it can also be seen as sexual because it fires something in your brain attached to desire or the fear/interest reaction of “this looks like I could be in danger but what if I’m not?” I don’t know how to explain properly*. I used to have a co-worker who wore one hand cuff on her wrist from a broken pair to symbolize her having gotten away and left an abusive ex who made her feel trapped, not a sexual thing but a physical item to help her remember how far she had come.

*The sensation/exercise is generally referred to as “calculated risk” or “informed consent”; i.e., the act of feeling out of control while being in control, in the scenario being performed, to account for a lack of control in our daily lives (generally due to criminogenic and unequal conditions under Capitalism, I would argue). —Perse

22. Persephone: Does BDSM inform the sex work that you do in an educational or therapeutic way?

Victoria: Both because it is a teaching and learning tool; i.e., to know your partner better that also sparks conversations about it (and can lead to a better bond than others can usually get with normal “vanilla,” “in, out and roll over and go to sleep” types of partnerships). BDSM teaches limits and how to give and take and how to trust each other. And it can be used as a therapeutic aid to give someone the space to push past or let emotion out in a way they wouldn’t have been able to normally.

23. Persephone: In terms of calculated risk, how does it feel to surrender some degree of power in a scenario where you can’t actually be harmed? Or vice versa, if you have more power? Do you have a preference and if so, why?

Victoria: It feels amazing and can make you feel detached and like you are floating, going into subspace. The drop into it is a little scary but freeing and the feeling of trust for the one controlling the scene is the closest I have felt to true love in my mind. I prefer to give control to my partner so I can just relax let my mind go blank and obey—to give what is needed of me to help them be happy. I have no desire to stand above another as that is not something I think I need.

24. Persephone: If you feel comfortable answering, can theatrical disempowerment feel healing or therapeutic to you in regards to real trauma?

Victoria: Yes, it would help me immensely if I was to recreate the event from my past in a controlled environment/scene; i.e., with someone I trust to turn it into something good—not being in control, per se, but knowing I have some say in what is happening this time would, I think, be massive and healing.

25. Persephone: What’s the most stressful thing about sex work? The most liberating?

Victoria: Most stressful was maintaining focus and staying to the standard I had set; i.e., performing in a way that satisfied my clients and not letting them down because they were paying for a service and I wanted to deliver properly*. It also feels stressful from hoping that I made enough at the end of the week and to also try and give myself the time to rest and recover. The most liberating thing was being my own boss—I guess knowing that it was all on me, whatever or whoever the job or client was, and that I was using my body in a way that served people.

*One sympathizes; re; service top. Also, service (to one you enjoy working with) can feel incredibly good, as a dom and/or sub (for all you switches out there). —Perse

26. Persephone: What are the benefits to doing sex work in today’s day an age versus in the past? What do you think needs to improve; e.g., open reactionary bigots versus moderate SWERFs posturing as feminists speaking for all groups?

Victoria: Better in some ways; e.g., greater access to testing and treatment of viruses more awareness around the job, and thanks to sites like OnlyFans taking steps towards normalizing it. In the past, it was very hush-hush and frowned upon and, as a guy doing it, laughed at sometimes—all thanks to SWERFs and feminist views not much has changed; e.g., female workers are empowered girlbosses fighting against the patriarchy and male workers are predators and rapists or just trying to add to their conquest count! Or the men are there to be used by vengeful women; i.e., past them saying “stop” so you—the female avenger—can reclaim your power by not stopping so he knows what it is like to feel powerless and afraid [the TERF equivalent to Man Box thinking and revenge arguments punching down].

27a. Persephone: What are your favorite monsters (i.e., undead, demons, and or anthromorphs) and why?

Victoria: Vampires, because they have the ability to fly freely as long as it is night, and because they are sometimes portrayed as warriors against the humans who don’t understand them and as romantics. Also lycanthropes, as they can transform into a beast and can roam in that form without being recognized as their human self (and they have power where the human form might not have). And I love demons and the concept of upon entering Hell you get given the form that will suit you best down there.

27b. Persephone: Media-wise, do you like to read, watch movies, and or play videogames just for fun, but also to gather ideas about gender-non-conformity expression, BDSM and other sex-positive devices?

Victoria: I’m an RPG console gamer raised on Final Fantasy and other High Fantasy RPG games; i.e., someone who loves the games where you can have a custom character. I gravitate towards making a female-presenting character, as that feels more comfortable for me to play as one (and the outfits you can get in some of those games—holy hell, I wish I could go into the game and be my character). I love watching movies, too; i.e., anything that has a coherent story and plot mostly crime/con movies, as I like figuring things out. My comfort series is Supernatural, where things aren’t so black-and-white—with monsters and that family isn’t always blood, they are the ones you find and survive with. I do gain some inspiration from the media I consume for non-conforming outfits, and in scenarios based off of some of the characters (re: Angel Dust).

28. Persephone: What are your thoughts on sex/porn and art, business and pleasure? I like to mix them to form healthier boundaries established between workers; how do you feel about this?

Victoria: I agree sex/porn can be art (as a different form versus art independent of sex) and need to be normalized; i.e., so that there is understanding that it isn’t bad/something to be hidden/ashamed about. And sex/porn is business, as it is something created to generate money/profit in most cases or as a means of survival; i.e., just as an artist creates something then sells it, it is the same for sex work/porn: something created and then consumed by people. It is necessary for people to consume art in its varied forms, as it is something that causes pleasure.

30. Persephone: Can you describe your own struggles with achieving liberation/humanization as a GNC sex worker?

Victoria: I didn’t struggle with being a sex worker at that time; it was a means to an end. The struggle came later over the next few years; i.e., from feeling dirty and like I had done something wrong (as no one knew that I had done it and it was my secret). It was after having got my PTSD label that I realized I was GNC and that what I had done wasn’t wrong and that I had done something that most people would never have the courage to do and that if I had this knowledge and freedom of who I was back then, I would have been way better at it and could have had fun with it!

31. Persephone: I view sex work as an important means of de facto (extracurricular) education; i.e., entertainment, but also a means of humanizing people within the practice at large. How do you feel about this? Can we learn from art and porn as a means of humanizing marginalized groups?

Victoria: We can learn from anything and yes, it is an important means of education; it taught me about what I could do with my body and my view of Humanity as a whole, and being a worker is one of the most humanizing and humbling things. Learning from porn and art is useful and needed as it teaches us about what people want truly in this world and that they would love better access to. So we could add new things/services to what we sex workers do so people can see it and live it instead of just watching it through a screen and, in doing so, would help humanize it as it is; i.e., something people get to feel for themselves and learn about and would see the workers as human. This includes the ones who are GNC being able to do more than the conforming ones, as they are more in touch with themselves and what they are capable of.

32. Persephone: I value establishing mutual trust, healthy communication and boundary formation/negotiation and respect, seeing them to be the most vital qualities in any relationship. Do you agree, and if so, why?

Victoria: I agree, it is vital to earn respect and have trust in your partner. Open communication with your partner is so important; i.e., for safety reasons so you both don’t get hurt physically/mentally and so there are no misunderstandings or boundaries crossed that makes one or both feel betrayed. If there is no communication, there can be no trust; if there is no trust, there can be no respect or relationship going forward—not until things get talked about and put in place for safeties so no one gets hurt/injured. As someone who ended up in a one-way relationship—and having to break it off because there was respect and care only going one way—I had to get out to keep my soul intact.

33. Persephone: How do you orient and what are your thoughts on polyamory insofar as it affects your work? For the layperson/uninitiated, how would you describe the difference between a fuck buddy/FWB and other more casual relationships versus serious ones? Can people be friends and still have sex in a casual manner? What is the most valuable aspect of a friendship regardless if sex is a part of the equation or not?

Victoria: Polyamory is fine as long as it is equal and no one is above another (my experience with it didn’t end well; i.e., I was emotional support whenever they needed it. She was the same for me at first, but then it shifted to all support accommodations for her and none coming my way just getting used for an emotional top-up then told to go away until I was needed again (she also used my deadname as a punishment).

Whereas a fuck buddy is someone who you go around to their place or they to yours have sex then go back home, and is on an as-needed basis, a FWB in my mind is someone you hang out with. Except when it comes to the booty call, then it’s the same as a fuck buddy but: you can stay the night or they can stay at yours have a coffee then carry on (no “ILY”; you keep it professional). If in either of these cases you or they start feeling jealous, then end the contract and return to default, but before doing so have a talk* to see if it is the same feelings for them. But if not, pull the pin and tell them what happened and why. And hope to the gods that you can stay friends (friends can be fuck buddies but in most cases should not do it).

*Good communication is like a contract, and—as I see it as a Communist—isn’t separate from friendship; i.e., you can mix business and pleasure, but as with mixing anything there is to mix, you must be careful and mindful of what you’re mixing and how you go about it. —Perse

34. Persephone: If you have a partner, do they know about the work that you do? How comfortable are they with it?

Victoria: I don’t currently have a partner but my last one wanted me to get tested at the local clinic (where I passed with flying colors), and then asked me a whole bunch of questions; then, she kept bringing it up and told all her other poly partners and friends about me even though I asked her not to. Her response was, “But I was proud of you and it is interesting!”

35. Persephone: What do you think makes an ideal partner?

Victoria: An ideal partner is one that you can trust to talk things out when they and you are upset; i.e., a person who understands that we are both adults, meaning with our own lives and journeys, thus entitled to our support people and systems: a person who I can come home to or them to me who will curl up on the couch together at the end of the day and watch something to relax and decompress. It is a person who is fun in the bedroom while not always it being about sex but instead creating an experience that we can both enjoy and that we both get something out of—a person I can trust with my body knowing that they won’t harm me just because they could when I give them control. It is someone who a) understands gentle touch for a person who has become used to constant pain and hurt through life, and b) a person who I can care for who feels comfortable to take the mask for which the world sees off and just be themselves.

36. Persephone: What advice would you give incels, nice guys and other cis-het men (or token groups; e.g., TERFs and cis-queer tokens, etc) displaying bigoted attitudes towards women and other marginalized groups?

Victoria: To those people I would say this: Evolve, become better as a person, leave people alone; life is hard enough without you adding to it. Leave the women and others alone; until you can love who you are, they won’t love you back. Stop hanging around in her friend group in the hope that she will notice you; i.e., she already has and that is why she has put you where you are: as either for support or as someone she can use to get something she wants. Just ask her what you are to her confess your feelings/truth to see if there is anything and if not, then accept it and either remain her friend or leave before it turns into something bad and you cause harm to her or yourself. You will find your place one day. Leave the other groups alone and reflect on why they bother you. Was it an experience that you had or were taught growing up? Is it pressure from your friends/family? Have you actually sat down with a member and listened to what they are saying? Or is it jealousy/envy that they are living their truth and you aren’t?

37. Persephone: Likewise, what advice would you give to more privileged groups that need to understand the value of listening to those more oppressed than them in a larger struggle for liberation?

Victoria: Listen! Dear gods, listen to them! They are asking for help/protection or something you could provide them and you don’t have to lord it over them if you do. If you are part of a well-known influential group, see if there is a way you can include a marginalized person or give a shoutout to the group to make people aware of them in a positive light. Sometimes all it takes is a few people standing up for others to help out and get the “lesser” groups/people noticed and seen. Stand with them if you can (ape together strong, ape apart weak).

38. Persephone: What are your thoughts on GNC people who are still in the closet but thinking about coming out? Where should they go and who should they talk to?

Victoria: Do it if it is safe to, even if it is a step parent. I got lucky with my stepmum, asking her how I would go about telling my dad and I almost went deaf with her positive reaction and love (she used to work in one of the larger gay/drag clubs in Sydney). Since then, she has been one of my larger supporters on that side of the family. All it takes is one person. Start off small, if you want—slowly changing clothes to add color/prints get your hair cut by the colorful/alt one at a hairdresser’s  (they understand more and will do what you ask for, not what they think you need). Or grow your hair out.

As for whom to go to/organizations, I would recommend going to your local youth hub/trust, as they help all ages or know of people or groups that you could join or talk to. For mine, their code of ethics is fantastic they were the ones that helped me realize it was time to come out to my family after 30 years; and while there was a rocky start with a few members*, it ultimately worked out.

*I would add that, natural families aren’t owed your love; i.e., if someone is being abusive towards you, there’s absolutely zero shame in going no contact (abusers will try to argue against this; re: DARVO). For a good channel about this kind of cycle of abuse, I recommend Theremin Trees; e.g., “Letting Go of Fixing People” (2020). —Perse

39. Persephone: Similarly, for those thinking about doing sex work for the first time, where is a good place to start with that; i.e., what advice would you give to those starting out based on your own experiences?

Victoria: Have a safe place you can operate out of. Get a camera that gets faces on the way into your “office.” Look at ids and write the name down if you can. Use protection let someone know you are going somewhere if you have to go to a clients place. Get regular tests at the clinic and take note of any changes to your health. Get a PayPal or some form of payment app that handles transactions safely. Do yoga to remain flexible/ease tired muscles and allow yourself time to rest and recharge and take care of yourself.

40a1. Persephone: What’s your idea of the perfect date? The ideal fuck? Do you have an ideal experience of either you’d like to share?

Victoria: My ideal date would just be meeting up and getting takeout food and going for a wander around town or go sit by the water and just talk, learn a bit about each other and hopefully end up back at one of our places for the night (no pressure of sex or doing anything but the opportunity of it happening also). I know it’s a bit plain, but getting to know and trust someone takes time.

40a2. Persephone: What’s your wildest/most enjoyable sexual encounter (e.g., sex in public, in the kitchen while the roomies are home, etc)?

Victoria: My most enjoyable time was when I was around at my first girlfriend’s place and she had me in her clothes and heels (she had an amazing collection of boots); i.e., with me tied at the end of the bed kneeling with my arms tied behind me on top of the bed (a kneeling-strappado-type thing). While standing in front of me with me giving her oral, she suddenly gets a message that her parents are going to be home for dinner in 5 minutes! So she grabs the arm rope and pulls me into her wardrobe, ties the arm rope to the clothes rail inside—high enough to bend me over ties my ankles together while in 6-inch boots—pushes her panties into my mouth then tapes it closed and says, “Try to not make any noise; I’ll let you out once they go to bed!” Resulting in the most amazing 4 hours tied like that till she came back, when she did she untied my legs and undid the arm rope from the rail. Then she pulled me over to her bed, pushed me down, tied my legs apart, and then proceeded to ride me quietly till she was done then curled up next to me and fell asleep (god, I miss her).

 

40b. Persephone: For you, what’s the cutest thing a partner can do, in bed or out? For example, my partner Bay loves it when new partners come really fast/are having their first time PIV with Bay. Consent, intimacy and affection are all really sexy and fun for Bay. How about you?

Victoria: Simple affection and touch is the cutest thing my partner could do; i.e., just being in the same room doing different things or them speaking passionately about one of their interests would be amazing. Just the little things, like them finding a cool rock or stick on a walk and giving it to me (I’m a bit basic, in that regard).

40c. Persephone: What are your thoughts on consensual voyeurism and exhibitionism as educational/entertaining acts? Does being able to be more open and communicative help us learn from each other to see each other as human and also what to watch out for/what to challenge at a systemic level?

Victoria: I agree that it humanizes people, and gaining knowledge/awareness through exhibitionism—it makes people think with the subject; i.e., of thought, right there in front of them, watching and seeing everything that is going on and possibly getting involved with the display going on: to have a chance to learn something new to them and learn how to do things properly to avoid problems if they end up doing it at some stage, or the possibility of volunteering/being chosen to be the subject so you can feel what it is like. All of that feels truly human.

41a. Persephone: Does fucking to music, roleplay and other theatrical elements make sex better?

Victoria: Fucking and play is a performance in itself, so of course having a soundtrack or theme would enhance the experience for all parties (as long as you both agree on the song/music). It goes towards setting the mood and creating a space for the event/performance that takes it to a whole new level of enjoyment (also if there was no background music I wouldn’t be able to focus properly).

42. Persephone: If you have any ace leanings, would you like to talk about that in relation to the work that you do?

Victoria: Being ace made the work interesting and mechanical and caused me to act on opposition to my true feelings or lack thereof. Like, I’m not sex abhorrent or sex avoidant but more… sex indifferent? Like, I can live without it and it doesn’t consume me in my life or work nowadays. It’s like, I would rather my body be used as directed by others for their pleasure rather than mine; i.e., like a fuck doll, so to speak. Yet I’m so far out of the game that stuff just confuses me and I need to be led to help them get what they need.

Being Ace also changes my perception of people. Like, being male and female does not change how I interact with people and how I talk to them, so co-workers and bosses have shipped me with multiple people over the years and are baffled as to how, as a guy, I can just talk to women and have a friendship with them. It’s not hard. Just treat them the same as you would a male person [who has privilege] and don’t say anything creepy or talk about your junk!? I think my secret is I’m sometimes asking women for outfit advice and or helping with theirs (gay bestie vibes, lol).

43. Persephone: Connections between sex workers and clients is often discrete under capital. Can a degree of friendship and intimacy make for a better relationship between the two?

Victoria: Yes and no. With repeat client, you can build something with them in a professional sense; i.e., that makes things feel more comfortable as you learn their likes/dislikes to cater better to their needs. And sometimes when you are no longer a client and provider, there is the possibility for friendship or casual acquaintance, insofar as they become someone you keep in touch with (clients seeing me at my low-hours job and saying hello). But it can also turn into something worse.

For example, when I stopped doing sex work, one of my regulars became angry that I had abandoned him and he would follow me down the street from my house—yelling at me from his car as I walked to work and then ending up so angry/hurt that he waited for me one night after me walking a co-worker home. Then when I was alone, he grabbed me from a side alley and proceeded to rape me for one last freebie because he felt I owed him that. He died of a heart attack* a few months later.

So yes you can become familiar with clients, but be careful in my experience!

*Good riddance! —Perse

44. Persephone: For people struggling with gender expectations like being the right size or pleasing one’s partner and enjoying oneself, is there anything you might recommend?

Victoria: For being the right size, nobody is ever perfect, but they do make sleeves that extend your reach and gives you pleasure at the same time. And as for pleasing one’s partner and enjoying yourself, talk with your partner about your worries and how you two (or more/with others) can help out with that; i.e., and find something that will work for you to make it fun and pleasurable. Life and intimacy is a journey and a learning experience, always, so you never know it all; i.e., as new things/scenes are getting created all the time, your tastes and moods/moves change over time and that is ok! Just keep up communication with your partner as that is important for growth and contentment/happiness! And as for expectations about your body, the thing you may dislike about yourself may well be one of the things your partner may love about you/turns them on (people liking my thicc thighs and ass for example*, while they make it hard to find work pants that fit).

*Your thighs and booty are a godsend, cutie. —Perse

45. Persephone: How does it feel being your true self, despite the risks of gay panic and similar moral panics in America and around the world?

Victoria: It took a long time to come out then find out who I really was after masking for over 20 years; i.e., out of fear of what people would think, then the next few years of giving myself space to dress up to feel new things/get feedback from those who I found supported me, then experimenting with toys and restraints to heal from past trauma, and then meeting people who support me in the kinkier side of my personality, and then a further year to finally hit the “fuck it, I’ll dress how I want and do what I want with this vessel I am lumbered with and make the best of it” phase. Life is short, so be who or what you want to be and all the haters that you will encounter mean nothing if you are doing it for yourself. I believe that whoever you want to be will undoubtedly be amazing and people will love you for it!

46. Persephone: Is there anything else you’d like to say or add before we conclude?

Victoria: I just want to say thank you for the opportunity to have this interview and answer these questions! It has been amazing and lovely getting to know you over this last year! Your work is fantastic and important to everyone who is a part of it and who reads it! I’m sorry if I missed the point on some of the questions; I’m not as smart as you, but more “elemental” when feeling about things.

47. Persephone: Aw, you did fine! Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions; and also, for working on Sex Positivity with me! If people want to follow you, where can they follow you and support what you do?

Victoria: My links are:

Twitter/X: @Vin_Necessary

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/victim-victorious.bsky.social


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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-FiPatreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Hailing Hellions: An Interview with Moxxy Sting

This interview is for “Hailing Hellions,” a Q&A series where I interview sex workers (or ex-sex workers) who have modeled for me and my Sex Positivity* book project. Today’s interview subject is Moxxy Sting!

*The longer title being Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Liberating Sex Work under Capitalism through Iconoclastic Art (2023). Part of an overarching movement that connects sex positivity to what I call “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism,” Sex Positivity essentially provides a hybrid; i.e., one established between academic (Gothic, queer, game and Marxist) theories, and wherein applied theory towards universal liberation is achieved by challenging Capitalist Realism (the inability to imagine a world beyond Capitalism) at a grassroots level. To it, Gothic Communism specifically occurs through direct mutual worker action and informed intersectional solidarity relayed through Gothic poetics: BDSM, monsters, and kink, but specifically what I call “ludo-Gothic BDSM.” If you’re curious about the book and want to know more, the first four volumes (and additional information) are available for free (the series is non-profit) on my website’s 1-page promo

General CW: BDSM, Gothic content and theatrics (e.g., rape play and death theatre), as well as sex worker abuse and bigotry of various kinds (variable per interview)

Note: All images are of the model or myself unless otherwise stated.

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.

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.

About the series: Like the book series it attaches to, “Hailing Hellions” aims to educate and critique; i.e., by raising awareness towards sex worker rights, but also gender-non-conformity through Gothic counterculture. This extends to gender identity (e.g., trans, enby or intersex) but also orientation and performance; i.e., BDSM and sex positivity through various Gothic theatrical roles that invite things beyond vanilla, heteronormative (thus conservative, reactionary and harmful) sexuality. I would consider this to be things like mommy dommes and consent-non-consent, breeding fantasies and heavy metal (e.g., Satanic material and the Gothic at large). Also, these questions are broader insofar as they cover wide praxial/poetic ideas and concepts. Regarding these, the opinions of the subject and myself are not identical, but often overlap through us collaborating together to raise awareness.

About the interviewee: This interview is with Moxxy Sting. I don’t know her super well at this stage, but we met through my book series and I’ve worked with her before. She’s a single mother who supports her daughter through sex work (and wants to do music on YouTube). Politics-wise, Moxxy is a libertarian, which I don’t agree with entirely. That being said, I don’t entirely disagree with her, either. So I’ve decided to include Moxxy’s answers in this series—doing so to demonstrate class solidarity despite a lack of ideological purity (e.g., we disagree on unions, with me being pro-union and she anti-union); i.e., through an odd pairing that, all the same, still leads to good praxis: here we are, communicating Moxxy’s rights—as a sex worker tied to universal liberation and informed mutual labor action, achieved by a libertarian/classical liberal and Gothic an-com working together (a union in small, despite what Moxxy says about unions)! To it, workers radicalize through who we meet, work alongside and have sex with. Moxxy and I did all three, so use us as an idiosyncratic example of worker solidarity when pushing towards intersectional solidarity among you and yours!

Persephone: Hi, everyone! My name is Persephone van der Waard. I’m a trans-woman erotic artist, sex worker, writer/author and researcher who specializes in cross-media studies; i.e., I have my independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania).

Moxxy, could you introduce yourself and share a little about yourself with our audience?

Moxxy: What it do!? I’m Moxxy.

1. Persephone: This book project views sex positivity as a liberating act. What does sex positivity mean to you? Illustrating mutual consent; i.e., can porn illustrate mutual consent when sex workers are constantly dehumanized by the profit motive and the status quo?

Moxxy: I grew up surrounded by Christian oppression. I wasn’t in one of those skirt-wearing long hair weirdo cults or anything. My parents were small town Texans. They went to church on Christmas. Baptist. I went to the most inbred ass tiny rural schools ever. Everyone was dumb as hell. It messed me up though because there was so much conflict between what I was taught and what I believe. The only thing my parents taught me about sex was “we don’t want a lesbian daughter.” Sexual positivity varies wildly from individual to individual. For me personally it was learning that I’m really awesome at sex, and tons of men fucking suck at it. When I learned how to tell a mother fucker no you want me to swallow that cum? Okay. First I’m gonna need you to suck blood clots out of my pussy on my period. It was being unafraid to voice what I wanted and to learn that I DESERVED BETTER! When this one dude told me that it was intimidating that I was experienced it BLEW MY MIND! I learned in that moment I wasn’t broken for having learned what I know I had power. I was INTIMIDATING. I didn’t have to be that young, naïve, afraid 18-year old who had no idea what she wanted or was getting into anymore. I could ask for WHAT I WANT even if I was getting paid for it.

2. Persephone: In your mind, what is the biggest struggle facing sex workers today?

Moxxy: Assumptions. So many men assume we make bank and it’s really not that much money. I don’t know how many times men have come in my cam room and said they don’t want to give me money because this other girl took all of his and “that bitch was drivin’ a Tesla.” Entitlement from customers is INSANE. It took me forever to learn when to say no how to avoid scammers. I work on a cam site and CPS has been called on me for it I don’t even know how many times. I’m constantly accused of being a terrible mother. The thing is I worked three jobs before this and my daughter was hurting herself and screaming and in a horrible spot because I couldn’t see  her. This is the only freedom I have over my schedule, but I still have a scarlet letter. I think the presumptions and horridness of judgement in general and miscommunication that plagues all other work on is just magnified under sex work. Not to mention the site bans. Everyone hates us. There’s almost no way to really get your work promoted without being shut down. The THINK OF THE CHILDREN! DON’T PREY ON MEN! arguments. Generally the assumption that we’re wicked and evil for charging for services that are in demand. I think male ego about having to pay is the bottom line worst thing we have to deal with. Probably women who are pissed off we got their husbands money, too, tbh. So tl;dr: egos of weak people.

3. Persephone: How do you feel about sex work being work, thus paying sex workers for their labor? This can be unions, but also their representations in media at large.

Moxxy: I don’t really agree with labor unions especially since this is an independently contracted business I don’t want the government to be involved with how I run my show at all. If I were under a union and had a stipend amount that would piss me the fuck off. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a positive representation of a sex worker, but this is a low paying amount of job and the work can be horrendous and go very south. I’ve met lots of great people and we have almost 0 protection and that is a problem but no one that I think will be solved with a union which I believe would only create more problems. I think competition can be generally a very positive thing but the problem is there’s no way to compete because there’s politic and networking issues with being a big name. There’s almost no way to get yourself out there in such an oversaturated and unprotected market. On tv we’re all: 1. evil sluts, 2. tragic sad broken little flowers, 3. the cool girl that’s down for whatevs. When guys find out what I do they act like I’m just a sex doll that came to life and they’re too horny to have a normal convo with me a lot of times. I think customers don’t get it through their heads: Dude… I can go fuck anyone and a million people are spamming me, right now. So why should I waste my time here? I don’t like it when people assume I’m not a person and have 0 identity outside of sex. I don’t like it when people that are not my customers only talk to me when they’re horny. I love sex. I love talking about sex but there are people with 0 respect for any boundaries at all because they just don’t look at sex workers as normal every day plain old fucking people. I’d LOVE to discuss my services and provide them for you, however, I’m not a sounding board for everyone I meet to jack off to all day long I do not have the TIME.

4. Persephone: What are your thoughts on Communism vs Capitalism using Gothic poetics? Can monsters be gay Commies?

Moxxy: Both have their flaws. You can’t create a utopia of people because people fucking suck. I don’t know what Edgar Allen Poe has to do with either of those but I think communism will always fail because it’s corruptible. If you give someone power they will use it for their own wants and needs and usually the people who crave that much power want evil. I think it’s funny how similar capitalism and communism are under a microscope and I think all communists in America would be capitalists.

 

5a. Persephone: What drew you to the project/interested you in working on it together with me?

Moxxy: Honestly? You paid. But after we got to talking and I was offered a space to discuss my beliefs I was down. I usually am silenced and won’t pass up an opportunity to sound off.  I LOVE people who disagree but still discuss without going off in a rage. I adore radical thought even though I think it’s done a lot of harm. I think it’s more important to have a passion and belief than it is to go along with the status quo and keep them to yourself. I love that you’re giving sex workers the opportunity to discuss things like this and giving us a voice where we’re usually silenced.

5b. Persephone: How has that experience been for you? Can you describe it a little?

Moxxy: I sure got worked on that picture set lmao. I’ve been loving these discussions and I’m a very hard worker and proud of what I do. When I do a job I do my best at it. Definitely in the top 5% of experiences I’ve had working with anyone!

6. Persephone: If you feel comfortable talking about it, can you talk about being GNC? What does that mean to you?

Moxxy: You’d be non-conformist, too, if you were just like me!

 

7. Persephone: What do you enjoy most about sex work? What got you started in it?

Moxxy: FREEDOM OVER MY SCHEDULE.

8. Persephone: Do you have a favorite piece of sex work that you’ve done, in terms of custom material?

Moxxy: This one guy wanted me to make a personal video where I came so hard I died, lol. He gave me a script to do wardrobe and I got to act and feel like I was in a production; it’s my fav piece to this day. I really love the weird campy ones who like to PRETEND they’re eating people; I HATE choking stuff or whatever. I’m generally a domme but when something is off-kilter and campy and fun and weird. I love those. I don’t even think I’m getting off; I’m just a performer.

 

9. Persephone: Do you friends and family know about the work that you do? How do you talk about it with other people who aren’t sex workers; i.e., how do you communicate sex worker rights to non sex workers?

Moxxy: Yeah. I tried to get my fam to sign up for site bonuses and kept telling them “NONONONO, it’s not flowers-in-the-attic shit; I’m not online, you won’t see anything” but they were scared to, lmao. My fam are dickheads for totally different reasons; i.e., they’re not cool or anything but they don’t care what I do with my life and if they did they could go fuck themselves. I’m pretty sure my baby daddy keeps calling CPS about it? I tell everyone starting out: YOU CAN SAY NO AND KEEP HIS FUCKING MONEY HE’S PAYING FOR YOUR TIME IF THE SERVICE FUCKED UP THAT’S NOT YOUR PROBLEM.

10. Persephone: What are your thoughts on TERFs in sex work; i.e., those who devalue GNC minorities (and other marginalized groups) in the same profession?

Moxxy: I think everyone has their own niche market and the tastes are so wide and varied if they know where to find the right places they won’t run into that a lot. I think if you’re not at the top 1% you’ll always be bottom-barrel and it sucks. I mean I’m working my ass off for pennies while there are girls that were born rich and get the amount of money I live on for a month for one nude. There’s tons of gatekeeping and I’ve been at this for years trying to get my name out there and you’re basically just silence and blocked if you’re not already established.

11. Persephone: How do you feel about billionaires? Israel and Palestine?

Moxxy: I don’t really know a lot about billionaires. I think taxation is theft and when you have money you should be entitled to it. What I will say though is I think they’re fucking crazy. I don’t think anyone can be in a circumstance where they have that much money and not let it go to their heads. I’m sure there are good and bad ones but they’re all fucking nuts. I think more attention is going to picking a side than concern for the civilians who were born at the wrong place at the wrong time. I think America’s gonna be Israel-vs-Palestine and the whole world if people don’t start understanding there is no US vs THEM—hat we’re ALL JUST FUCKING PEOPLE GETTING FUCKED BY THE 1% AT THE TOP. If you’re a poor ass civilian, you’re a number. I don’t care what country you’re from, it should be better everywhere but it’s not. Yeah what Israel did was fucked up but the thing is it’s a holy war and people are missing the bigger picture.

12b. Persephone: To that, GNC people often find their families outside of their birth families; did you have to go elsewhere for that, or is your family relatively understanding of your queerness?

Moxxy: No, honestly. When I was confused and looked for other places it was usually more of the same. I’m very opinionated. I have my own ideas about everything and groups of people who all adhere to one hive thought don’t like that. I don’t fucking like flags; I don’t like stuff like how the LGBT makes my sexuality a polarizing and political issue. I’m kind of a lesbian (my sexuality as is everything with me complex and weird) and I don’t want that to be any different from being a heterosexual. I don’t want my sexuality to be a party issue, or a source of my angst. I HATE HOW IT’S OTHERED. I think that goes against the entire original point of integration. I think everyone is WAY MORE ALIKE than they like to think they are. My family just hates me for LOTS of reasons my sexuality is the tip of the iceberg but I’m a grown adult and I’m independent from everyone now, so what they think about it is what they think about it. They’re just a group of people I had to live with until I graduated. My dad died right after I came out and he screamed and told me we were disgusting drug addicts but that doesn’t shape my opinion as my father as a whole. I mean that fucked me up. How could it not? But that wasn’t the entirety of who he was, and was a whole ass novel; i.e., in what created that thought process in and of itself.

 

14. Persephone: There’s often a strong theatrical component to sex work and BDSM; i.e., costumes, gender roles, aesthetics of power and death, music, makeup. How do these things intersect for you, and do they cross over into real life for you? For example, do you find yourself wearing similar clothing and expressing yourself sex-positively when you’re not on the clock?

Moxxy: Lol, I wear baggy ass ugly pajamas everywhere. I love being ugly in public. I hate all the attention in my day-to-day and I want to be in control of it and not bombarded. I’m not walking around like, “SEXSEXSEX!” I pay my bills, cut my grass, go get groceries. I’m just a plain normal person. I think if anything accepting that there’s really nothing special or unique other than the gossip, and assumptions about it are kinda it: it’s just a job. I’m more passionate about my writing and music and hope to get out of sex work one day so I can pursue my writing as a career but until then it’s so important to me to have control over my schedule the sex is honestly an afterthought. I just don’t care about it, I guess? I love sex, I don’t care what I look like, at all, but it’s just compartmentalized in my head.

 

15. Persephone: There’s often an animal component to sexuality and gender expression, helping workers establish close bonds with each other and nature; i.e., furries, but also therians and various kinks; e.g., puppy play. How do you feel about these things, be they for work, pleasure, or both?

Moxxy: I have lots of customers who are into it and I provide those services. Again, it’s just something I inherently understand; people are into it. I don’t care. It doesn’t offend me. I enjoy learning about various fetishes. I love performing. I tried a kitten costume for this one dude and it was more about making the cute outfit and acting and doing a job well for me. Mostly for me it’s about researching it and being THE BEST. I am GOOD and extraordinarily competent at what I do and happy to indulge my customers and give them the best experience they possibly can have and everyone always gets addicted. I won’t do gross stuff (e.g., burping and farting—I HATE that) and I won’t do hard kink (e.g. watersports); i.e., I won’t do plenty of stuff but when I LOVE role playing in general they’re my favorite and easiest customers. I think they get kinda disappointed I’m not into their 24/7 fetish and that this is just a 9-5 from where I stand; but in that room when we’re in our chats together my priority is being the best goddamned web model experience you’re ever gonna get in your life and it shows and they always love it. I’m totally cool with furries. I think the loudest worst people get the most attention and ruin it for everyone.

16. Persephone: Sex workers are generally treated as monsters to harm and exploit under capital. Do you have a preferred way of expressing the humanity of sex workers, be that simply stating it or through the work that you do, art, or some combination, etc?

Moxxy: Hahahaha, I think I brought this up a bunch of times. I think people need to realize it was the first profession and it ain’t going nowhere and they need to get tf over it.

 

17. Persephone: Do you have a particular aspect of liberation you like to focus on; e.g., fat liberation or decriminalizing sex work? To that, what’s the difference between positive thinking and liberation in your eyes?

Moxxy: LIBERATING THE INDIVIDUAL! The individual is the most oppressed member of society. I think more people need to realize they don’t have to join a group to be the smart one to have special beliefs; I think people make boxes for their identities. I don’t think people belong in boxes. I think we’re just digging holes for ourselves and making it worse when we make activist groups when everyone can stop making groups at all and just THINK FOR YOURSELF!

 

18a. Persephone: How do you feel about BDSM and using calculated risk to confront and heal from trauma? I.e., using collars or whips to experience pain or control as pleasurable, not harmful (I love collars, for instance).

Moxxy: I think everyone’s trauma is theirs and extremely personal and that it should be explored however they want to.

18b. Persephone: Was there ever a moment where you were on the fence about BDSM or sex work/in the closet, but something happened that changed everything? I.e., was it gradual or more a singular event that motivated you to change; or, were you always kind of out (for me, I decided to change after several bad exes, but also watching Stranger Things, and relating to Max’s brush with Vecna in a GNC way)?

Moxxy: I always thought it was Hellraiser shit. When I was 18 and started cam modeling people came to me with different requests and I just gradually learned what I would and wouldn’t do. I was surprised at how much like vanilla sex most of it was. I think I’ve always been experimental and never needed an awakening or whatever bullshit because I’ve always been who I was. I think everyone’s kinda BDSM and no one’s really vanilla, they’re just ignorant.

19. Persephone: Does expressing yourself in a dehumanized BDSM position (e.g., CNC or living latex, etc) or state of existence speak to your humanity as something to value?

Moxxy: I wanna be worshipped. I love dominating I have a very charismatic and bossy no nonsense personality. I’m extremely creative and get frustrated when I’m not in control. I don’t really think you can dehumanize people because you’re a human no matter what and I don’t think you can allow anyone to take that from you. Like I get that abhorrent terrible things and false imprisonment and stuff can happen and those things are called “dehumanization”; but the first time I heard about someone doing that to a prisoner on a show when I was little I remember thinking: “No. If someone cuts all my hair off and makes me wear ugly clothes and I go to jail for a bullshit holocaust reason, I’m still going to be ME and exactly who I am and THE PEOPLE DOING THAT TO PEOPLE ARE THE DEHUMANIZED MONSTERS, NOT ME!” I think becoming violent and oppressing someone and being so insecure and scared and fucked up you have to do stuff to other people makes THEM dehumanized. Ergo, I feel like when my subs are reduced to states of pure id, they’re the most human they could ever possibly be.

20. Persephone: What got you interested in BDSM? Do you have a preference in terms of what you give or receive?

Moxxy: I like to play with subs but IRL they gotta get on their knees and service how I tell em to.

 

21. Persephone: In your mind, is BDSM inherently sexual? If so or if not, can you explain why?

Moxxy: Yes and no. I think when you’re in school and your teacher is your authority figure you’re being dominated. I think when you answer to your boss and ask them permission to do stuff you’re being dominated. Domination and submission aren’t sexual but can be practiced sexually.

22. Persephone: Does BDSM inform the sex work that you do in an educational or therapeutic way?

Moxxy: Everyone’s traumatized and I always end up hearing about it from clients they def treat me like a shrink and I let them talk their hearts out cause I feel like they needed it more than that nut, sometimes.

23. Persephone: In terms of calculated risk, how does it feel to surrender some degree of power in a scenario where you can’t actually be harmed? Or vice versa, if you have more power? Do you have a preference and if so, why?

Moxxy: I love when my bitches let me slap ’em around!

24. Persephone: If you feel comfortable answering, can theatrical disempowerment feel healing or therapeutic to you in regards to real trauma?

Moxxy: Uhhh, I don’t know—do you mean like reliving your trauma in safe scenarios? I’ve helped people do that. I’m happy to do it for them but in some cases I’ve given subs the task to start therapy too and found ones in their area for them specializing, lmao.

25. Persephone: What’s the most stressful thing about sex work? The most liberating?

Moxxy: Telling customers they have to pay vs getting paid. Also the schedule thing—I can’t reiterate that enough!

26. Persephone: What are the benefits to doing sex work in today’s day an age versus in the past? What do you think needs to improve; e.g., open reactionary bigots versus moderate SWERFs posturing as feminists speaking for all groups?

Moxxy: CashApp and Lovense.

27a. Persephone: What are your favorite monsters (i.e., undead, demons, and or anthromorphs) and why?

Moxxy: I think any monster could be cool or suck; it all depends on how they’re treated by the writers.

27b. Persephone: Media-wise, do you like to read, watch movies, and or play videogames just for fun, but also to gather ideas about gender-non-conformity expression, BDSM and other sex-positive devices?

Moxxy: I don’t think I really think about it that much. I’m pretty selfish and I think of my own issues as opposed to ones of groups most often.

28. Persephone: What are your thoughts on sex/porn and art, business and pleasure? I like to mix them to form healthier boundaries established between workers; how do you feel about this?

Moxxy: I think you gotta be careful with blurred lines, but sex work is exactly like bartending in my experience; i.e., everyone thinks they’re your best friend but you gotta look out for you.

29. Persephone: Per my arguments, Capitalism sexualizes and fetishizes all workers to serve profit, leading to genocide. Keeping that in mind, what is the best way to achieve intersectional solidarity using Gothic poetics?

Moxxy: What?

30. Persephone: Can you describe your own struggles with achieving liberation/humanization as a GNC sex worker?

Moxxy: For a long time I didn’t understand my worth or value, but when I started to brand as a domme and told people “fuck you, pay me,” it was a game changer.

31. Persephone: I view sex work as an important means of de facto (extracurricular) education; i.e., entertainment, but also a means of humanizing people within the practice at large. How do you feel about this? Can we learn from art and porn as a means of humanizing marginalized groups?

Moxxy: You can perform art and porn as anything. Those aren’t exclusive. You can do whatever the fuck you want.

32. Persephone: I value establishing mutual trust, healthy communication and boundary formation/negotiation and respect, seeing them to be the most vital qualities in any relationship. Do you agree, and if so, why?

Moxxy: YES OMG YES 10000000000000000000000% TALK TALK TALK TALK! I hate when people expect me to read their minds! This is a sexual relationship and requires fucking communication! I can’t just know! I’m hot, not telepathic.

34. Persephone: If you have a partner, do they know about the work that you do? How comfortable are they with it?

Moxxy: Fuck that. I’ve been married twice and I’m terrified to get involved with other people. I shut myself away and hide in a cave. I worked too hard to risk losing everything and having to rebuild my life again.

35. Persephone: How did you and your partner meet? What do you think makes an ideal partner?

Moxxy: Nope.

36. Persephone: What advice would you give incels, nice guys and other cis-het men (or token groups; e.g., TERFs and cis-queer tokens, etc) displaying bigoted attitudes towards women and other marginalized groups?

Moxxy: To go die.

37. Persephone: Likewise, what advice would you give to more privileged groups that need to understand the value of listening to those more oppressed than them in a larger struggle for liberation?

Moxxy: Lol, they don’t listen.

39. Persephone: For those thinking about doing sex work for the first time, where is a good place to start with that; i.e., what advice would you give to those starting out based on your own experiences?

Moxxy: Don’t take your clothes off and don’t do anything—withhold and you can get away with charging more.

 

40a1. Persephone: What’s your idea of the perfect date? The ideal fuck? Do you have an ideal experience of either you’d like to share?

Moxxy: Weed, alone, my vibrator.

40a2. Persephone: What’s your wildest/most enjoyable sexual encounter (e.g., sex in public, in the kitchen while the roomies are home, etc)?

Moxxy: There was this gorgeous man who looked like a woman who I had sex with and we just went like animals and laid around naked and played all day long. We just clicked and communicated really well.

40b. Persephone: For you, what’s the cutest thing a partner can do, in bed or out? For example, my partner Bay loves it when new partners come really fast/are having their first time PIV with Bay. Consent, intimacy and affection are all really sexy and fun for Bay. How about you?

Moxxy: I like when they look scared of me. Like when their lips part slightly and they hold their chest and they’re like a mix of scared and turned on.

 

40c. Persephone: What are your thoughts on consensual voyeurism and exhibitionism as educational/entertaining acts? Does being able to be more open and communicative help us learn from each other to see each other as human and also what to watch out for/what to challenge at a systemic level?

Moxxy: It’s always better to communicate.

43. Persephone: Connections between sex workers and clients is often discrete under capital. Can a degree of friendship and intimacy make for a better relationship between the two?

Moxxy: YES! All my best customers are my buds.

44. Persephone: For people struggling with gender expectations like being the right size or pleasing one’s partner and enjoying oneself, is there anything you might recommend?

Moxxy: What helps everyone is completely different, person-to-person; i.e., learning to not give a fuck about anything is the most freeing thing in general.

45. Persephone: How does it feel being your true self, despite the risks of gay panic and similar moral panics in America and around the world?

Moxxy: To be like “lol, they’re panicking” and not care.

47. Persephone: Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions, and also for working on Sex Positivity with me. If people want to follow you, where can they follow you and support what you do?

Moxxy: Diet Coke Head on YouTube!


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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-FiPatreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Book Sample: The Roots of Camp: Reclaiming Demon BDSM

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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.

The Roots of Camp: Reclaiming Demon BDSM and Radcliffe’s Tricky Tools

“You geniuses fell for the old net over the door trick! You suck!”

—Boner, “Johnny Whoopass, episode one” (a bigoted, shameless and now defunct He-Man parody from 2004)

Picking up where “Pieces of the ‘Camp Map’” left off…

Camp is an effective means of challenging canonical, thus systemic, norms because it has its roots in them (often through true crime/murder mysteries, which I just tore a new asshole). For example, the damsel (or subordinate detective, above) as an automatic, unthinking submissive is something we can subvert to communicate our own trauma while also having fun, mid-rebellion; e.g., Roxanne from Megamind (2010), bored stiff of the “bad guy” because he’s all bark, no bite. What’s more, he’s campy in the true sense—i.e., “seriousness that fails” and he hasn’t a clue!

Note: This section was written after “Our Ludic Masters” and “Why I Submit” (2021); i.e., in 2023, when I had already envisioned the Gothic and BDSM through Metroidvania, and here would start to combine BDSM practices and terminology with ludology as a matter of campy an-Com psychosexual performance, on and offstage; i.e., when I reached out to Jeremy Parish in 2019 but also Scott Sharkey. After interviewing both and getting permission to quote them both in my book series, Sharkey in particular responded after, in 2021, about the idea of BDSM in games; i.e., from a ludology standpoint; re: in response to “Our Ludic Masters,” which I ran by him at the time:

For anyone who’s curious, here’s the full conversation between Sharkey and I, from 2019 to 2021 (the full conversation between Parish and I is already available through my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus):

Essentially this book segment embodies the preface to what ludo-Gothic BDSM would evolve into—from the remainder of this volume and into the rest of the series (re: “Concerning Rape Play“). So anytime I say “BDSM” or “sex-positive BDSM,” I’m essentially referring to ludo-Gothic BDSM, a priori. —Perse, 3/23/2025.

It’s a quick, cis-gendered example. The Gothic mode more broadly tackles rape fears through calculated risk; i.e., as a profound means of potential camp. Genderqueer camp of the “twink-in-peril” (re: Gregg Araki and Dennis Cooper’s “twink exploitation” work), for example, is an equally legitimate form of the cathartic rape fantasy model that ties into consent-non-consent during rape play more broadly—with consent-non-consent being on the harder end of what ludo-Gothic BDSM, as a spectrum, encompasses. Per my coinage (and subsequent arguments), ludo-Gothic BDSM introduces a game-like element of emergent play into traditional BDSM; i.e., married to Gothic poetics and roleplay scenarios (e.g., kidnap, live burial, rape, murder and monsters, etc). By extension, consent-non-consent, or RACK, is essentially a “hard” form of informed consent that puts more trust into the hands of the dominant/dominatrix than usual; re:

consent-non-consent

Negotiated social-sexual scenarios through informed consent, consent-non-consent where one party surrenders total control over to the other party trusting that party to not betray said agreement or trust; aka “RACK” (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink) in relation to risky BDSM; i.e., bodily harm; e.g., public beatings, rape scenarios, whippings, knife play and blood-letting.

i.e., wherein the dom is the person ostensibly with “more” power during the BDSM ritual and the submissive/sub is the person with “less.” As we shall see, looks can be deceiving.

At the very start of the book, we listed the very basic ideas of Gothic psychosexuality and live burial tied to kink, fetishization and BDSM; here are some related performative definitions for what I said I would exhibit that we are now going unpack after I list/define them (as these terms can be harmful if misunderstood, I don’t want to abridge them; most are fairly short):

dom(inator/-inatrix)

A BDSM actor who performs a dominant role—traditionally masculine (especially in Gothic canon: Mr. Rochester, Edward Cullen, Christian Grey and all the million monster variants of these kinds of characters) thus ostensibly having more power. However, in honored realms of mutual consent, they actually have less power than the sub, who only has to say no/red light, etc (for a good example of sub power, watch the 2014 Gothic-erotic thriller, The Duke of Burgundy); the sub controls the action by giving the dom permission according to negotiated boundaries.

sub(missive)

A BDSM actor who performs a submissive role—traditionally feminine (especially in Gothic canon: Jane Eyre, Bella Swan, Anastasia Steele and all the million monster variants of these kinds of characters) thus ostensibly having less power. However, in sex-positive scenarios, the sub calls the shots from moment-to-moment (except in consent-non-consent, where they only agreed to everything up front and sign everything over ahead of time—a useful tactic for certain rape fantasies and regression scenarios).

“strict/gentle”

A BDSM flavor or style generally affixed to the dom in terms of their delivery. A “strict” dominatrix, for example, will administer discipline much more authoritatively than a “gentle” variant will; i.e., she will deny succor as a theatrical device to supply through the ritual, whereas the gentle dominatrix will be far more nurturing and supportive from the offset.

topping/a top vs bottoming/a bottom

These terms generally refer to dominant/submissive sexual activity in which someone “tops”; i.e., “rides”/is rode. However, they can refer to BDSM/social-sexual arrangements with various, historically-materially ironic configurations; e.g., “power bottoms” or “topping from the bottom” (which can be literal, in terms of the execution of physical sex, but also have BDSM implications/monster personages, too).

regression

In terms of mental health, regression is a form of dissociation, often tied to trauma or healing from trauma. Common in rituals of appreciative peril, which include Big/little roles daddy/mommy doms and boy/girl subs, etc. However, regression is also something that sex-coercive predation keys off of through regressive politics; i.e., to regress socio-politically towards a conservative medieval when Capitalism enters decay.

rape fantasies

Fantasies tied to sexual/power abuse (rape isn’t about sex at all; it’s about coercive power control and abuse). This kind of performative peril can be appreciative/appropriative, thus bourgeois/canonical or proletarian/iconoclastic. Common in Gothic narratives, which tend to project trauma, rape and power abuse onto displaced, dissociative scenarios: man vs nature, Jack-London-style; the lady vs the rapist or the slave vs the master in numerous articulations (racialized, but also in BDSM-monster frameworks), etc.

aftercare

Rituals supplied after BDSM (or frankly just rough sex/emotional bonding moments and other social-sexual exchanges) that help the affected party recover better than they would if left unattended (“rode hard and put away wet” as it were).

There’s also some Gothic scenarios and theatrical/operatic devices that we need to unpack before we proceed to entertain camping them using the above power/gender roles and BDSM devices; i.e., ironic, negotiated variants of Radcliffe’s tricky theatrical tools: her classically xenophobic/xenophilic and dubiously “consensual” Black Veil (hiding the threat badly), demon lover (the xenophobic/xenophilic threat of unironic mutilation and rape), and exquisite “torture” (rape play):

(source: “The Rise of the Gothic Novel” by Stephen Carver)

the Black Veil

Radcliffe’s famous “cloaking device” from The Mysteries of Udolpho, delayed until the end of the book (over 500 pages) to reveal behind a great terrible thing that made our heroine swoon; i.e., her immodest desire to look upon something that threatens her virtue and fragile mind. It remains a common device used in horror media today—e.g., as I note in “Gothic themes in The Vanishing / Spoorloos (1988),” the Black Veil is present all throughout that film.

demon lover

Cynthia Wolff writes on Radcliffe’s process in “The Radcliffean Gothic Model” (1979):

Let us say that when an individual reads a fully realized piece of fiction, he (or she) will “identify” primarily with one character, probably the principal character, and that this character will bear the principal weight of the reader’s projected feelings. Naturally, an intelligent reader will balance this identification; to some extent there will be identification with each major character—even, perhaps, with a narrative voice. But these will be distributed appropriately throughout the fiction. Now a Gothic novel presents us with a different kind of situation. It is but a partially realized piece of fiction: it is formulaic (a moderately sophisticated reader already knows more or less exactly what to expect in its plot); it has little or no sense of particularized “place,” and it offers a heroine with whom only a very few would wish to identify[1]. Its fascination lies in the predictable interaction between the heroine and the other main characters. The reader identifies (broadly and loosely) with the predicament as a totality: the ritualized conflict that takes place among the major figures of a Gothic fiction (within the significant boundaries of that “enclosed space”) represents in externalized form the conflict any single woman might experience. The reader will project her feelings into several characters, each one of whom will carry some element of her divided “self.” A woman pictures herself as trapped between the demands of two sorts of men—a “chaste” lover and a “demon” lover—each of whom is really a reflection of one portion of her own longing. Her rite of passage takes the form of (1) proclaiming her right to preside as mistress over the Gothic structure and (2) deciding which man (which form of “love”) may penetrate its recesses! (source).

exquisite “torture”

Exquisite “torture” is a Radcliffe staple, and classically pits the imperiled heroine inside a complicated, but generally unironic rape fantasy within the Gothic castle. Somewhere in the castle is a demon lover who is both more exciting than the boring-ass hero, and someone who speaks to the heroine’s inheritance anxiety and/or lived trauma inside the chronotope. The fantasy on the page is a form of controlled risk, but Radcliffe’s forms are “proto-vanilla” in that they emerged at the very beginnings of feminism/female discourse and whose imaginary safe spaces are actually didactically unsafe. According to Wolff,

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 (ibid.).

the explained supernatural

The sensation of a seemingly profound or Numinous in Radcliffe’s stories, often linked to fear of unironic rape and death, but also boring material disputes that involve these things. The threat—like her mischievous pirates—are dressed up as ghosts or monsters to fool the detective so they can rob the state (and maybe the heroine) of their goods (the heroine and her modesty being “priceless treasure” in the eyes of themselves having internalized these bigotries, but also the men “protecting” them).

All of these definitions are useful to camping canon (as canon is heteronormative, thus coercively sexual in terms of unequal power exchange and the Gothic, performative language of war), so learn them well; even someone who is not acclimated to the theory can do it (e.g., my twin brother’s “Death Boner[2]” supervillain joke [source, now removed: u/hvanderw, Reddit]: “Oh, no! It’s Death Boner!” [said in your best old-timey radio announcer voice] as a surreal camping of the death knight’s rapacious/moribund function; i.e., the death erection as “Freudian erectile dysfunction” tied to the hero archetype as “phallic”: adventure and domination [think the “gamer bro” sort] tied to success by “winning” against an advertised foe, but also the damsel as something to “own” when the battle’s over and the happy ending becomes something to collect through sex as its own miniature battlefield—i.e., raping the womb of nature).

We’ll delve into specialized, negotiated ways to camp canon during the “camp map” proper—with me focusing on critiquing Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains with my own preference as a bad bitch/Gothic specialist, while also camping Radcliffe’s powerful tools: the closed, ergodic space of the Metroidvania as a Gothic castle whose “ludo-Gothic BDSM” arrangement explores repressed desires (emergent thoughts, guilty pleasures) and fears regarding the grander meta-text “palliative Numinous”: the world in which we live as doubled by the castle (of the castle, of the castle…). In fact, the really frustrating thing about Radcliffe’s work is she was honestly very skilled at her craft (I absolutely love The Italian for that reason), but her craft was still incredibly basic from a class critique standpoint; i.e., state apologia first, state critique if someone else does the work[3]. At the very least, she could have used the above tools to write something more sex-positive than she did—e.g., in the vein of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) or her famous daughter’s incredibly impressive Frankenstein (there was no shortage of revolutionary ideas at the time). Instead, Radcliffe wrote overlong and convoluted murder mysteries for her husband, whose canonical castles (ACAB) revived practically identically centuries later (e.g., Scooby Doo). Radcliffe’s own were “good of kind” but that only seems to confirm to me that she’d dug her heels in; i.e., pandering to a voracious middle-class readership that would eat her operatic, heteronormative ideas up when she wrote them, internalize these castles, then help to revive them in the future as “zombie Radcliffe” (somehow dumber than Radcliffe’s stories were—again, Scooby Doo). To that, we’ll also camp Radcliffe and her castles more throughout the entire book, taking what’s useful (or fun—again, Scooby Doo) and leaving the rest through our own interrogations of the Gothic mode and its regular displayers of unequal power exchange—in short, our own contracts of informed power exchange and resistance that we draw up in intelligent Gothic language.

For now, though, the basic idea is to highlight the psychopraxial struggle of it all: the chase of the bait by the hunter as something that exists in canonical norms in and out of media, on- and offstage within the performance of workers; i.e., as informed by the elite’s Superstructure, their propaganda working as bad entertainment that serves to instruct through fear and dogma towards an imaginary threat relayed through actual criminogenic conditions. In other words, the problem is real, but the scapegoat generally is the state-compelled victim of the structure, not the cause: the underclass as punished by workers above them, including white women who write propaganda or internalize it, then act it out on every possible register. As such, canonical Gothic poetics amount to unironic rape culture whose “prison sex” mentalities enfold vis-à-vis Man Box through good play vs bad play as codified and taught, but also cultivated and policed by canonical proponents gatekeeping everything. To borrow from Tolkien, they shout, “I will do the stinging!” and set to work stabbing the out-group to death while paradoxically wearing the same aesthetics (cryptofascist billboards/graffiti). Meanwhile, canonical trauma and its problematic phrasing compound inside the structure’s historical materialism—i.e., an echo chamber where past victims become “chasers” punishing “traps/bait,” serving the status quo as dutiful (thus merciless and fierce) watchdogs, war dogs, straw dogs:

(artist: Peter Paul Rubens)

rape culture

The tacit-to-aggressive apologizing for rape in society at large. Learned power abuses taught by state-corporate propaganda and power relations through “Pavlovian/Pygmalion” conditioning that breaks the recipient’s mind, bending them towards automatic, violent behaviors towards state targets during moral panics. This response can be men mistreating women, but also women mistreating each other or their fellow exploited workers (who can mistreat each other); i.e., TERFs abusing trans people and ethnic minorities. When executed and learned on a societal level, these sex-coercive practices become codified as “bad play” in canonical BDSM narratives, which recycle in and out of popular media (re: the Shadow of Pygmalion/Cycle of Kings).

“prison sex” mentality (covered earlier)

good play vs bad play

Forms of power exchange during oppositional praxis; i.e., sex-positive BDSM and other social-sexual practices and code built on mutual/informed consent vs sex coercion and harmful BDSM/rape culture. Bad play is the emulation of white, cis-het men as the unironic performers of coercive sex, bondage, murder and rape (e.g., TERFs dominating members of their own group).

(artist: Anrig)

Conditioned by the state, the standardized/token enforcer’s combined bad instruction and execution historically-materially produce a variety of colonizing binaries, one of the most classic being the virgin/whore dynamic, which in Gothic fiction is the damsel/demon. In the past, the hypermasculine enforcer was strictly the domain of men. But in the Internet Age, the demon archetype is as much the woman “acting like a man” by raping/reaping the theatrical submissive as a perceived whore deserving of punishment or being “claimed” by the stronger party. Being from the 1970s, Wolff describes this in woefully cis-het terms (which we’ll return to in Volume Two; e.g., “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives“)

Many men have a tendency to divide “love” into two components: an affectionate (and asexual) element; and a passionate (sexual) element. Furthermore, since the areas of affectionate and sexual love are fraught with complex emotions of guilt and anger, many men manage these difficult and (to their way of thinking) dangerous feelings by projecting them onto the women about them. Thus, through this process of projection, men may perceive the world as a place inhabited by two kinds of women: “good” women whom they idealize and who have no sensual desires (and for whom, of course, the men themselves feel no sexual longings); and “bad” women who are sexual by nature (and with whom it is permissible—perhaps even expected—to have sexual relations). This imaginative construct has come to be called the “Virgin/Whore” syndrome (source).

but these harmful misconceptions (and their subsequent “bad play”) have not only not gone anywhere; they’ve pathologized in ways that grant some women/token minorities the ability to tokenize, hence become the demonic-undead enforcer to quell/cull the state-issued submissive dressed up in the same language: “my lamb and martyr you look so precious[4]” enacted by an abused party towards “weaker” abused groups in the larger underclass (a prison within a prison). Abused themselves, the TERF “as the true woman” becomes the Greater Destroyer to rape, kill and dismember the perceived “other” as the “false women”; i.e., the token cop policing the state’s chosen victims inside the state of exception, the latter unwillingly sacrificed by the former to serve the profit motive. It’s Marx and bad demonic BDSM in action.

As Radcliffe is the lynchpin of “Female Gothic” (and thus takes most of the credit for her famous School of Terror and its clichés and fetishes), much of the above exploitation’s blame absolutely falls to her as having codified the model through the choices she made; i.e., her idea of sexual and gender expression, but especially rape fantasy. If anything, Radcliffe’s painfully obvious inexperience—as a dutiful white, cis-het British woman writing unironic rape fantasies for her white, cis-het British husband—has furthered many harmful xenophobic/xenophilic stereotypes regarding the demon-BDSM theatre of the masculine and feminine as things to perform in Gothic meta-play during oppositional praxis as sex-positive and sex-coercive to varying degrees of irony and straightness. While there’s a million-and-one examples that emerge on either side of the praxial equation (refer to exhibit 1a1a1h in the “camp map” for some of them), the fact remains that we, as Gothic Communists, must resupply the Gothic imagination with less mutilative/rapacious forms of feminine and masculine expression for it to emerge in society at large; i.e., sex-positive xenophobia/xenophilia that aren’t harmful and don’t serve the profit motive (which is incumbent on harm and bigotry [crisis] to drive the market by abusing the process of abjection). This includes informing other workers who aren’t strictly a party to our schemes, making their own incremental variations of the Gothic roleplay that are closer in function to Radcliffe’s bunk.

(source: Alex Greenberger’s “25 Famed Artworks That Have Been Vandalized,” 2022)

I’m not interested in stringing up and beating a dead person, but I do want to barbecue Radcliffe’s sacred cow/melt down her golden idol to counteract the social-sexual harm her shameless catering to the profit motive has caused. To this, let’s outline the basic procedure as performed by weird canonical/iconoclastic nerds in their daily lives (with parallels and responses that inform fictional variants under Capitalism): how do workers play with each other during the Gothic’s codified belief systems and their coded instructions as things to arbitrate; i.e., to reinforce or reclaim through weird/cool rituals that are imitated at cross purposes during class/culture war.

Any sex-positive ritual happens through informed consumption of psychosexual appreciative peril, but also invited voyeurism/exhibitionist (asexual) nudism as things to perform during demon BDSM/consent-non-consent as something to do, watch and show to each other and the world (with camp having an-oft Gothic flavor—i.e., the Gothic “heroine”/damsel archetype as ironic, thus cathartic rape play that camps the canonical rape scenario: “‘Help, help,’ I’m being ‘raped!'”). Sexual activity isn’t always involved, but when it does happen, it is generally called “topping” (giving) or “being the bottom” (receiving). This is not the same as being dominant or submissive; a dom can top or be the bottom, as can the sub. What determines their position is the agreement between them of whatever boundaries and roles they agree upon, which afford each a different kind of power during social-(a)sexual activities of various ritualized kinds. The dom has the power to do what the sub says, and the sub can say “yes, careful/maybe, and no” (the traffic light system is a good analog: green, yellow, and red).

This is where things get nuanced, thus complicated. For starters, oppositional praxis employs animal aesthetics that elide power with canonical norms and resistance to those norms in sex-positive forms: demonic BDSM and kink as power exchange rituals infused with the aesthetics of power and death (the undead/demons) through animalized stigmas that, themselves, can also be camped. Second, mutual consent makes it impossible for the dom to violate the sub‘s boundaries or otherwise harm them, but “hurt, not harm” is still an exercise in building and maintaining trust, which is fallible. While service through the ritual is generally issued through commands, the sub ostensibly doing what the dominant wants is frequently subverted by the dom servicing the submissive as a being to worship and avoid harming at all costs. Not only can the pressure to perform be incredibly intense, but the fixed, set roles of power and its utility become confused and playful. Speaking from experience, the sub’s understated desires, bratty refusals and inaction can leave the dom feeling “stuck” in a position where they want to serve but also feel frustrated by someone who is physically much smaller than them, tied up, or otherwise able to hypnotize them with a look, an unsaid word, not moving at all (itself often being a survival mechanism they cultivated to survive[5] their own abusers)—i.e., like Dracula, a “corpse” hypnotizing a subject of the living side of the equation:

He lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion. I shuddered as I bent over to touch him, and every sense in me revolted at the contact; but I had to search, or I was lost. The coming night might see my own body a banquet in a similar way to those horrid three. I felt all over the body, but no sign could I find of the key. Then I stopped and looked at the Count. There was a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. The very thought drove me mad. A terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a monster. There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face. But as I did so the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyse me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the forehead. The shovel fell from my hand across the box, and as I pulled it away the flange of the blade caught the edge of the lid which fell over again, and hid the horrid thing from my sight. The last glimpse I had was of the bloated face, blood-stained and fixed with a grin of malice which would have held its own in the nethermost hell (source: Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1897).

Unlike Dracula, this function can be transformed using the same aesthetics. The normally objectified undead/demonic monstrous-feminine (demanded by the abusive lover to lay as naked and vulnerable as a sacrifice and as motionless and as quiet as a corpse that they have total control over) can harness of the power of the hellish gaze (and appearance) to freeze would-be attackers in their place; i.e., caught in a confused position of adoration, fear rapture that teaches sex positivity through the Gothic mode as a social-sexual, descriptively sexual[6] process:

(exhibit 1a1a1e2: Artist: Kay. To look “ravishing” is to have a look that begs in different directions: “ravish me!” versus “you can’t, and I am ravishing you!” It’s “look, not touch” married to the aesthetics of dominance, power and death, sin and vice, etc, that are all combined within a liminal expression of something between a discretely fearsome dominant or vulnerable submissive [called the switch] comfortably existing on the shared within Segewick’s “the character in the veil [or] imagery of the surface in the Gothic novel.” Instead of the novel, this clearly applies to any medium, whose imagery of the surface is like a mirror or portrait to behold: in fear-fascination, but also barely-concealed horniness, passion and conflicting desire; i.e., the effortless violation of assorted boundaries that the Gothic is known for. In sex-positive expression and its various domains, this is power, this is strength: “You have no power over me!” and therein lies the theatrical device: the reversal—of the visually mighty by the classically weak as having far more power than is canonically prescribed; i.e., “topping from the bottom.” As such, the theatre is instructional to the making of the historical-material rapist into a harmless plaything wrapped around the traditional victim’s little finger [known in sexist circles “as being pussy-whipped[7a]“].)

To apply game theory to basic theatricality in any medium, but also in our daily lives, the ritual—whether in sex-positive and sex-coercive forms—is the “magic circle” and the performance somewhere between the roleplay and the rules; it can yield emergent or intended gameplay based on the players’ understanding of how the game should be played, which is made up according to canonical ideas of power battling iconoclastic ideas of power. I want to focus on sex positivity as something to instruct, so I will instruct you based on how I was taught (indented for clarity):

Under healthy circumstances, power fantasies/calculated risks can invoke a kind of psychomachic dialog or roleplay in one’s one head, but also one’s own partner that can invoke guilty pleasure as part of an escalating fantasy scheme: to orgasm. Sometimes, the usual, “old-faithful” tricks “don’t cut it” during sex, which leads to the Gothic as a potent aphrodisiac often discovered by accident (the golden apples, or ambrosia, as Promethean; i.e., stolen from the gods). We’re told by God to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge, but sometimes—just sometimes—we do anyways and discover that we like the taste of forbidden fruit. In Gothic-Communist terms, the fruit has been alienated from us, requiring us to corrupt Capitalism’s twin trees: the Base and Superstructure. This happens through the ways in which we synthesize proletarian praxis in our own daily social-sex lives: “I tried this; I liked it” (for example, I discovered entirely by accident/playing around with Gothic things at random[7b] that I very much liked feeling disempowered according to a palliative Numinous in videogames, albeit of a particular kind: the Metroidvania as a ludo-Gothic BDSM narrative that reflected my preference for being dominated by “dark mommies” of a particular kind: the videogame castle. We’ll expound on this during the “camp map”).

The bedroom is one such place. There, the fantasy is like Satan; it transforms like a sex demon to invoke power as taken away from/supplied unequally to you or your partner(s) or vice versa. Whatever works, as long as it’s sex-positive (contrary to moral panics/admonishments in Neo-Gothic novels, BDSM isn’t a “gateway drug”; it simply reveals what we like or know about such devices, or how we feel or respond to them/project[8a] onto them). In the chase of that particular dragon, you can try different fantasies that might draw inspiration from traditional battle theatre: “take me, I’m yours”; i.e., the chased, monstrous-feminine object of desire—when corned by the monstrous-masculine[8b]—theatrically squeaks “I’m small and delicate; please ‘ravish’ me” as an almost magical invocation to cum that triggers based on one’s recognition of the other party as “close,” but also according to the ancient theatrical notion of catastrophe

In drama, particularly the tragedies of classical antiquity, the catastrophe is the final resolution in a poem or narrative plot, which unravels the intrigue and brings the piece to a close. In comedies, this may be a marriage between main characters; in tragedies, it may be the death of one or more main characters. It is the final part of a play, following the protasisepitasis, and catastasis (source: Wikipedia).

aka the narrative arc (below) as “rising action, tension, climax, resolution, epilogue” married to sex, power exchange and both parties’ acquired mental grammar of an internalized aesthetic being externalized again; i.e., built on older and older precursors (but also hauntological ones; re: spectres of Caesar and Marx):

The “climax” is tricky because it varies depending on the mode of the performance: physical, emotional and/or sexual. A pain-based climax, also called the vasovagal response (or “pain orgasm”), can make someone “dead to the world,” so a sadist really has to recognize the signs when the masochist literally loses control. But at the same time, the masochist can communicate up to the tipping point, so it is always a team effort. As for sex, it isn’t always involved in roleplay but if it is, someone who is “close” (regarding the orgasm) can let the other party know, but often you can “just tell” when someone’s inside you and you’re so close to them you practically operate as one (which opens the door to fun little discipline exercises: orgasm initiation [telling someone to cum] but also orgasm denial, also called “edging” as a sometimes-physical painful excursion known as “blue balls/blue clit[9]“). There can be an almost drug-like ecstasy to this intimacy, but also guilt at invoking rape fantasy (and other kinks/fetishes) in pursuit of the orgasm as something to tease, hence potentially frustrate[10]. It becomes a tightrope to walk, wherein you have to be in control enough not to harm your partner but prepare to hurt them a little if the sex gets appropriately rough and you nail their cervix (generally by accident) or fuck their pussy or asshole sore.

Usually, the adrenaline and excitement can make it a little hard to notice on either side of that equation. And sometimes you try different things because you’re bored, but also used to what’s normal, are physically stronger (from the repeated exertions of sex as a physical exercise) and both “broken in” and wanting to “push the envelope” a little. Ideally the love is mutual and the receiving side (which can switch sometimes) wants the giver to come, thus might take a little more “punishment” by them than usual. The recipient becomes the service bottom, and the same idea applies to the service top; i.e., serving each other through fulfillment of what both sides want and need to feel good physically, emotionally and/or sexually.

This includes during the sex or kink, but also afterwards during aftercare. Exquisite “torture” and demon lovers (of the Radcliffean sort) operate within the paradox of innuendo and playful forms, but it remains fallible insofar as comfort zones and boundaries are concerned. Both can suddenly change depending on one’s headspace—their mood and mindset, or because the wind blows; which is classically linked to men’s erections and women’s “fickleness,” but in practice affects different people differently depending on how they’re “wired”—i.e., the comorbidity of congenital factors and conditioning that leads to various predator or prey behaviors. Some people give as good as they get; i.e., “fuck back” or “top from below.” Some people look strong or tough, but are more obedient in the bedroom/general situations of private intimacy—i.e., big softies/gentle giants or pillow princesses. It’s classically (canonically) coded as the angle and devil, but in reality you can have the aesthetic of the angle or witch through a gentle/strict dom that matches their ability to dish out “punishment” according to a sub whose own aesthetics can be whatever both parties agree upon, and who can take far more than the dom is able to handle (which is why aftercare[11] exists, in case the dom is asked to do perhaps a touch more than they’re used to/comfortable with).

Cuwu, for example, liked to be choked, and knew the proper technique (surgical fingers over the veins and arteries in the neck) to get just the right amount of sleepiness; and they had to coach me beforehand (actually one time it was during sex, where I was squeezing their throat lightly as I fucked them and they smiled that wide, Sphinx-like smirk of theirs, wordlessly and lightly moving my hand higher up under their jaw to press my fingers against their vulnerable throat; i.e., with just the right amount of pressure to have an effect. When I tried it, they slowly nodded, letting me know I had done a good job). They also liked to be fucked in their sleep, a rather common form of consent-non-consent that is regularly discussed between even your more vanilla sex partners; i.e., “Sure you can fuck me before work. Just no anal and don’t cum in my hair!” The idea, as usual, is a test of trust and established boundaries where one proves one’s loyalty and trustworthiness by obeying the sub when no commands can actively be given.

It’s worth noting that such behaviors are often popularized in vampire narratives, but also sex dolls and other motionless, “as dead” doll entities fetishized as naked[12] and helpless, usually female sacrifices—during sex-positive scenarios, of course, but also in unironic demon sex scenarios enacted by fearful-fascinated white people enthralled during the ghost of the counterfeit (we’ll talk more about sleep sex and vampirism in Volume One and Two; for now know that the undead tend to feed through a mechanism of paralysis associated with the freezing gaze to pin their victims in place). In sex-positive cases, the reclamation of control during calculated-risk experiments is generally conducted by lying still and inviting someone to inflict pleasurable pain, tickling and/or erogenous sensations on you while in a traditional feminine, passive/theatrical compromising position:

(artist: Nat the Lich)

I’ve been on the giving and receiving end of these kinds of doll-like performances (with Zeuhl, I would lie still and ask them to tickle my feet; and Cuwu obviously asked me to fuck them in their sleep). It can be incredibly cathartic in terms of interrogating and performing unequal power in relation to one’s own psychosexual trauma. And honestly it can just be a great deal of fun without the need for a strictly medicinal function (though one is often present, of course). We’ll examine more examples of the doll as an undead device of sexual healing and power integration in Volume Two (exhibits 38a/38b1, 2, 3, and 4).

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: “Dark Shadows”)

These complex experiments can lead to some pretty bizarre requests (which are generally symbolized in chimeric or Gothicized art depicting the female/feminine position of appreciative peril as a monstrous, fetishized one). The simple fact is that control and the inflicting of pain is a tenuous proposition, and through the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune[13]” that Capitalism bombards us with, people can react differently per exchange. Under such “tricky” circumstances, open negotiation and “compromise” are invaluable; i.e., not compromising each other’s values and human rights, but doing for each other what makes both of you feel good: “What’s your favorite poz-ish? […] it’s not my favorite but I’ll do it for you![14]” Same narrative arc: rising action, tension, climax, resolution, epilogue. People are conditioned by media to be expected to give or receive power exchange dressed up as particular theatrical aesthetics that appear unethical, but whose canon of war and rape can be camped by two (or more) people who love each other enough to create a happy reunion in reclaimed language: “Take me, I’m yours!” while they submit (or milk you with kegels and fuck you back like a tiger) during the assorted paradoxes of pleasure and pain: “Hurt, not harm”; “It hurts so good!”; and non-harmful pain as pleasurable unto itself; and asexual forms of pleasure and pain achieved through the same plastic dynamics of physical, emotional and/or sexual intimacy (and crossover, with ace people dating non-ace people to idiosyncratically determine sexual/asexual compatibility in any relationship).

However, there’s a difference between the private medicinal practicing of rape fantasy and public dogma; things don’t stay on the canvas and if someone is harmed by a particular member of a particular group it can be weaponized. The idea is to help people work within private, guilty psychosexual pleasure and wish fulfillment that doesn’t contribute to systemic trauma. But rather undoes its making through the proletarian reclamation of traumatic language (of or from) that transitions away from the profit motive’s exploitation thereof. For example, I’m a service top and fawn in the face of external threats of harm (to me or by me[15] towards others) that have been internalized by people around me, but also my own complex prey mechanisms, revenge/rape fantasies and quest for power through the palliative Numinous; i.e., wanting to feel like I’m in control, which requires the generation of things that trigger my prey mechanisms but must be used and taught responsibly to avoid becoming dogma: feeling naked and exposed, but not actually being in danger as a performative but also societal/pedagogic balancing act. “Hurt, not harm.” The exorcism, then, has to be of the systemic implementation of harm through dogma (my inner demons will die with me); i.e., through a raising of class, culture and race consciousness through emotional and Gothic intelligence using ludo-Gothic BDSM.

People forget that kink, fetish, BDSM and aesthetics aren’t just a codified belief system but a set of instructions that exist and reinforce/rewrite themselves on- and off-canvas. A common problem with vanilla people, then, is they are compelled through heteronormativity to stay vanilla through art/porn that they make, consume, or patron through endorsement; i.e., unironically assume everything else is chocolate and harmful, while also sitting within spheres of damaging sexuality and false intimacy that lead to toxic (unhealthy, harmful) relationships in physical, emotional and/or sexual forms that, unto themselves, become more problematic art to shove along; e.g., the unironic rituals of power and sex in Rosemary’s Baby or Midsommar (2019), whereupon the horror of the devil-sex ritual play’s out like a modern-day twisting of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”: the in-group of puritanical “villagers”—through their moral panic and self-imposed righteousness—are the devil worshippers they see in actual out-groups. In other words, the in-group are the ones unironically sacrificing virgins, albeit through the harmful wish fulfillment and bad play of internalized canonical nostalgia: the opera, fairytale, black Western, Gothic novel, penny dreadful, or some such pulp (sometimes “elevated to respectable levels” by “respectable” white ladies like Ann Radcliffe gentrifying the genre). They’re the demon lover or torture scene without irony or camp; i.e., the menticided rapist harming others.

As such, “basic bitches” become badly conditioned by canon; i.e., to enact bad play as intended, which spills over into their personal, private social-sex lives, ignominiously colonizing themselves and their partner by being like Dorian Grey: taking things at face value, without campy nuance or irony thus accidentally (or deliberately) hurting themselves or the other person/people involved because they’re sexually frustrated, repressed and alienated from good education/emergent forms of play. Sex education includes education regarding the societal/theatrical elements of roleplay, kink, and BDSM, including “harmful” forms. You have to camp them, but this must be taught to minimize risk and encourage the health of concentric relationships: the couple, but also the community through good education as self-care, thus community care (and vice versa). We’re not just sex machines to put quarters in and bad sex comes out; but we can be taught to give or receive abuse as coded in all the usual heteronormative ways through canon (rape and war through hypermasculine dominance of a battered hyperfeminine). This must be camped and generally requires a paradox well at home in the Gothic; i.e., stemming from older dialogics between authors like Edmund Burke’s terror

It is interesting to note that for Burke, terror – fear of pain – was a terror mixed with a paradoxical delight. Ostensibly, this was because the sublime observer is not actually threatened. Safety in the midst of danger produces a thrilling pleasure (source: Audronė Raškauskienė’s  Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings (2009)

and Ann Radcliffe’s

terror and horror

Gothic schools begot from the Neo-Gothic period (the 1790s, in particular, between Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis) largely concerned with looking—specifically showing and hiding violence, monsters, taboo sex and other abject things (this lends it a voyeuristic, exhibitionist quality). Defined posthumously and surreptitiously[16] by Radcliffe in her 1826 essay, “On The Supernatural In Poetry”:

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them […] and where lies the great difference between terror and horror but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil?  (source).

as something to regard with fear and awe, but also humor and delight: “Sex is a joke in heaven?” Linda Fiorentino asks Alan Rickman, in Dogma (1999). “From what I understand, it’s mostly a joke down here too,” he replies.

(source: Kevin Smith, via Mayer Nissim’s “Kevin Smith Hails His Voice of God, Alan Rickman: ‘He was a HUGE cauldron of win,'” 2016.)

Also like Rickman, these BDSM fantasies are can’t physically hurt us—are “as anatomically correct as a Ken doll” (or a Barbie doll; exhibit 1a1a3)—but there are historical-material consequences to their competing praxial opposites. Radcliffe’s gargoyles don’t just stay in her books, and neither do ours in the media that we create/play out in our daily lives and sometimes share with other people as extensions of our bodies, labor and sexual/gender expressions. In the Gothic tradition, all of these things get up and walk around, but can be for good or ill: for class war or betrayal.

Before we consider more examples of camp during the “camp map,” we owe it to ourselves to consider how the game is played “wrong” as outlined above; i.e. through harmful heroic arrangements of power and performance that are taught to weird canonical nerds through canonical psychomachy, psychosexuality and psychopraxis (oppositional praxis). In turn, they become like “killer babies” in adult bodies (e.g., Broly from Dragon Ball Z [1989]—exhibit 39c2), having internalizing their praxial role and executing it with extreme prejudice: the brave warrior spots the small-and-weak (anything) and paradoxically infers them as strong-and-dangerous at the same time (the fear of revenge by the underclass) rooted in dogmatic markers of sin, vice, passion, etc; i.e., the (from the manifesto tree)

culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive irony of Gothic counterculture’s reverse abjection with sex-positive, demon BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality and the ironic ontological ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence.

Such bullies see this not as something open to debate, but an enemy to censor by hunting them down and “erasing” them. So, the state proponent chases down the correct-incorrect, inside/outside imaginary threat during us-versus-them-as-praxis, corners/kettles them, and dominates them like a man does; i.e., subjugates them in a variety of ways through Man Box culture and “prison sex” mentalities (rape/compelled sex, murder and general abuse in too many forms to easily list).

To that, I want to examine the praxial inertia present within the canonical mythic structure’s artistic (crypto)mimesis: war isn’t just badass, but sacred, as is killing the monster and getting the girl within conventional violence and its expected fetishizing and dimorphic gendered roles. Unlike the weird iconoclastic nerd, weird canonical nerds aren’t taught to handle power—its performance and materiel—in any way except unironic violence; e.g., the FPS’s “bullet by holocaust.” Because they must dominant and kill as Western men classically have been trained to do for centuries, they wind up feeling owed more than their fair share. In their eyes, they’re not just special, they’re the ultimate warrior/badass thus exempt from judgement; they “saved the world,” thus deserve everything the world can give them (or they can take from it) and more.

Onto “Overcoming Praxial Inertia“!


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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-FiPatreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] I beg to differ. This depends entirely on the heroine and the reader. As heroines are theatrical devices, they can be utilized for a variety of purposes, including medicinal BDSM, “perceptive” pastiche and subversive power exchange scenarios, etc.

[2] Basically, Blue Beard from Charles Perrault’s “Blue Beard” (1697), the demon lover holding the delicate female swooner captive and relayed through fairytales or operas (and various other Gothic stories; e.g., the “black novel” or “noir/black detective story” as peering into the imaginary site of the black space/shadow zone as routinely fabricated by the ghost of the counterfeit, feeding the profit motive). Facing such a sexy beast, a less bellicose heroine might swoon and face almost certain doom; an Amazon, on the other hand, might pick up a sword and stab the fucker—a proposition that can certainly be cathartic but needs to be exercised with care to avoid harmful xenophobia as something to execute on- and offstage as informed by these kinds of stories; i.e., TERFs attacking trans people when their own trauma is weaponized by the status quo, turning them into harmful imitations of Dacre’s woman-in-black, Victoria de Loredani; e.g., Ellen Ripley—formerly traumatized by the myth of the black male/crossdressing rapist—is handed a gun by James Cameron and told to play cowboys and Indians in service of the state: “Become vengeance.”

[3] E.g., Nick Groom of Radcliffe’s The Italian (from the Oxford World’s Classics 2017):

Ann Radcliffe may have not been a revolutionary, but her work is far from being conservative—she repeatedly tested the boundaries of orthodoxy at a time of revolutionary foment. This may explain why everything is under scrutiny in The Italian. It is a novel suffused with secrets and mysteries, and pervaded by scrutiny, examination, and interrogation. […] It looks forward to a society in which order is enforced by institutions keeping individuals under perpetual surveillance. As such, The Italian [is] very much a novel for the twenty-first century.

Remember what I said about Radcliffe and legwork? You can take her ideas and do lots with them (as we shall do). Just don’t expect to her to say the quiet part out loud, or veer away from her own bigotry to make hard stances against the state. If not during the revolution then when, exactly? Moderacy is a conservative stance, Groom, and Radcliffe never wrote anything after The Italian except for “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (which was published posthumously and where she distanced herself further from Lewis and the revolution)! She was a sell-out, middle-of-the-road, incrementalist white woman, and her work not only kicked the can down the road; it went on to become studied, emulated and disseminated by white women in the Internet Age—also known as TERFs.

[4] From Tool’s “Prison Sex” (1993):

I’m treading water
I need to sleep a while
My lamb and martyr, you look so precious
Won’t you, won’t you come a bit closer
Close enough so I can smell you
I need you to feel this
I can’t stand to burn too long
Release in sodomy
For one sweet moment I am whole (source).

[5] Cuwu could hypnotize an entire room with ease, captivate all who saw them with their animalistic sensuality and raw eroticism; i.e., attracting as much attention as they possibly could so that all eyes were on them. By doing so, they controlled the attention they received by paradoxically attracting all of it, discouraging a predation response by always having an audience (witnesses): safety in numbers by basking in the spotlight as something to include non-harmful eyes. Controlling a room through sex is a classic fawning mechanism (and quality of the mythic fawns) but also powerful means to communicate and fight back; i.e., by showing ourselves as human and alienized by capital and its pimps (re: the whore’s revenge):

(artist: Cuwu)

Note: After writing Volume Two, which features images of Cuwu’s uncensored face (from the Poetry Module onwards; see: “Red Scare,” which featured the first such images in a collage [above] whereas “Castles in the Flesh” featured the first images with Cuwu’s body in them and Volume One featured the first drawing of Cuwu in it; re: “The Ghost of an Abuser“), I am deciding to introduce some images of Cuwu into Volume Zero retrospectively. —Perse, 3/24/2025

[6] E.g., girls feel gross or undead about themselves, shamed about but also fetishized regarding their natural bodily functions in ways most cis-het men heteronormatively aren’t: farting during sex, burping or spitting, but also “wild” behaviors associated with the Whore archetype: the hysteria of Medusa, including everything that comes out of her body’s every orifice. In short, the internalization can build up in feelings of “being undead,” which have to be released—sometimes literally (with farts, or anything else she feels inclined to share to whatever degree she and her partner feels comfortable) but also theatrically in ways that express matter-of-fact realities tied to Gothic theatrics that imply the beauty-in-question as thoroughly “immodest” without shaming her for it. These needn’t be implications of an automatic, acutely erogenous response, but merely a level of comfort and security regarding one’s partner as familiar to each other as potentially having shared more during intimate moments together than they would with the wider public (Jadis, for example, would inadvertently fart during sex; i.e., when they came. It’s not a big deal, and I didn’t want them to feel ashamed about it despite them frequently saying “god damn it!” whenever they let one slip).

[7a] I hesitate to lend credence to such “theories,” but there is a kernel of truth to them. For example, if someone has been conditioned to survive by controlling people more powerful than themselves, it can become instinctual; i.e., an abusive trend by the survivor growing accustomed to controlling others not because they need to, but because it has become internalized as a habit that is all at once self-destructive, but also destructive towards their ability to hold onto friendships with other people. At first blush, this isn’t strictly “their fault,” insofar as it was partially conditioned; but dialectical behavioral therapy exists for a reason: as an option for them to apply to their own lives according to choices that they ultimately make when deciding whether or not to continue abusive behaviors when being made aware of them (this is something I will discuss in regards to Cuwu, an ex of mine with borderline personality disorder who ultimately blamed me for their poor life choices, but especially their abusing of me as a friend and a lover).

[7b] “Random” is a paradox, implying that my behavior wasn’t informed by my past trauma and education. In other words, I sought trauma because I am hypersexual (a common side effect of abuse) and a Gothicist with academic Marxist training who enjoyed Metroidvania as a child and wrote about them academically as an adult adjacent to, and sometimes in connection with, my own psychosexual experiences/social-sex life as psychosexual. I was drawn to monstrous-feminine power/dark mommy doms and spaces to resist and critique with my own take on “darkness visible”: the kind I wanted to be, to fuck and be fucked by (more on this during part two of the “camp map”).

[8a] I liken sex-positive BDSM (and Gothic poetics at large, through ludo-Gothic BDSM) to a black mirror. If someone sees it and cries “groomer!” or “degeneracy!” then they’re self-reporting. That might sound bad, but it’s actually a good thing. The argument that BDSM must somehow be violent or “degenerate” is a common “slippery slope” fallacy that says more about fascists and moderates existing as weird sexless nerds (or at the very least weird nerds who suck at sex; e.g., Ben Shapiro vis-à-vis Behind the Bastard’s “Ben Shapiro Wrote A Book About Sex,” 2023) than it does about sex-positive BDSM. Such weirdos making catastrophic, bad-faith arguments about “gay Communism” is just them projecting onto a perfectly healthy and normal activity (similar to any kind of gender-non-conformity, really): “If drag queens read to kids at drag shows, they’ll grow up gay!” or “If women read Gothic novels, they won’t obey their husbands!” It’s literally the Hammer of Witches/Original Sin argument updated by the same useful idiots the status quo always relies on: Christian men, meaning unremarkable cis-het white men (and their token subordinates).

The argument comes from a misunderstanding of how sex positivity and Gothic Communism work. One, it isn’t unsupervised, it’s exhibited; and two, people don’t become gay (someone either is gay or they aren’t, then decides to closet or not closet when they realize this about themselves). However, Gothic Communism does treat children (or beings treated like children; i.e., women) like they can be exposed to education regarding topics that are normally forbidden to them by the state: sex, drugs, and violence, etc. Likewise, we make canon gay not purely to fuck with its defenders, but to know where they stand and where they are at all times; i.e., so they don’t become normalized within society. But we also do it to see who comes to their defense (moderates debating Nazis, for example). All are important ways to read the room and, more to the point, can be done online and from positions of relative safety (though also during live protests, of course).

[8b] Kind of an inverse to Barbara Creed’s monstrous-feminine (which I tend to focus on; re: Medusa and her Numinous offshoots); e.g., Adam Wedenius writes:

Horror films often use the male as monster, though conventional ideology says that it is not his masculine characteristics that make him monstrous. Barbara Creed writes that in the horror film, the male body is represented as monstrous “because it assumes characteristics usually associated with the female body.” The thematic thread of Todd Solondz’s Happiness, beneath its façade of domestic anxiety, is that of deviant masculinity. In mapping Billy’s horrific trajectory towards maturity, the film’s project is an abject representation of the specific rites of passage that he must undergo in order to accede to manhood. Masculinity in the film is constructed as monstrous via the very characteristics that are inherent to his experience of becoming a man (source: “The Monstrous Masculine: Abjection and Todd Solondz’s Happiness,” 2009).

[9] From Alexia Lafata’s “Yes, Female Blue Balls Are Actually A Thing” (2015):

Everybody’s familiar with the concept of blue balls: the fabled, gut-wrenching pain that results from not “finishing” after hooking up. To the many men whom I have personally given blue balls, let me just say that I apologize. I always thought you just told me you had blue balls to guilt me into giving you a blowjob to completion. It wasn’t until the past few years that I realized the blue balls phenomenon is actually a real thing. And no, it’s not because I kept hearing my sexually unsatisfied male friends complain about it; it’s because I myself experienced it. The first time it really happened to me was in college. My boyfriend at the time found it fun to finger me up until the exact millisecond before I was about to have an orgasm and then stop. When done correctly, this teasing move was the most delicious torture on planet earth and eventually led to a massive, explosive finish [aka “edging”]. When done incorrectly, like if his finger slipped in a stray direction that completely threw off the rhythm and killed my orgasm game, I was left with the throbbing, hot pangs of discomfort that I could only call “blue clit.” It felt like he’d engulfed my vagina in scorching flames without giving me a fire extinguisher (source).

[10] Cuwu, for example, loved the idea of teasing me until I asked for sex, brattily saying “no” to me (with lots of eye contact) and this going back and forth until they expected me to throw them onto the bed and “ravish” them. Except they were always in control. When I stayed with them, we’d have sex while there were people in the other room (their roomies); if there was too much noise outside their door, Cuwu—naked under me with their legs spread and their glorious, naked body on full display—would raise a manicured finger, signaling me to slow down or stop and be quiet. But my cock would still be inside them, and they would be “milking” me the entire time with a Mona-Lisa smile on their doll-like face.

(artist: Cuwu)

In short, it was a game, one that was—unbeknownst to perhaps both of us—conditioning me in relation to them. It got to the point that they had established near-total control over me even when we weren’t in the same room/were separated by great gulfs of physical space—an effect not eased by my telling them I had a mommy dom kink, to which they had started to tell me when to cum and where: “in their mommy pussy” (despite them being younger than I was). Frankly, I loved it. Eventually, though, it became abusive (Cuwu, it turns out, had a history of abusing their partners), requiring me to break things off (easier said than done; they were like a drug and me, having rebounded at the time, was addicted to them); but it wasn’t all bad. One, the mommy-dom sex was frankly out of this world; two, they gave me their copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, which has been a boundaries resource in shaping Sex Positivity’s own argumentation.

[11] In the case of Cuwu and myself, our relationship failed because there was no aftercare. They took and took and took until I could give no more (I used to read The Hobbit to them, and their favorite character was Smaug the Stupendous; over time, they started to act more and more like him, albeit inside the body of a small, incredibly magnetic and fuckable [to use an expression of theirs] “fuck puppy”).

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu; source: “Making Demons: Prometheus”)

[12] The paradox of the doll is it generally isn’t fully nude or bare. Its “vulnerable parts” (coded sites of rape in heteronormative theatre) are exposed (or drawn towards through Gothic veils) but the body and the scenery are rather dressed: for mood, of course; e.g., The Orion Experience’s “All Dolled Up” (2023) expressing gender euphoria and a sense of being up to no good according to the Straights: “I don’t wanna be a boy, I don’t wanna be a girl […] Let’s be gay, let’s do crimes”—thought crimes, according to the Western idea of sin, but also doing it yourself instead of buying the usual commodified ghosts of the counterfeit that Queensrÿche’s “Spreading the Disease” warned about on Operation: Mindcrime (1988):

16 and on the run from home
Found a job at Times Square, working live S&M shows
25 bucks a fuck, and John’s a happy man
She wipes the filth away
And it’s back on the streets again

[…] Father William saved her from the streets
She drank the lifeblood from the saviour’s feet
She’s Sister Mary now, eyes as cold as ice
He takes her once a week, on the alter like a sacrifice

Spreading the disease
Everybody needs
But no one wants to see (source).

[13] From Hamlet’s suicide soliloquy:

To be or not to be—that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And, by opposing, end them (source).

[14] From Tenacious D’s “Fuck Her Gently” (2001):

Sometimes you’ve got to squeeze
Sometimes you’ve got to say please
Sometimes you got to say hey
I’m gonna fuck you softly
I’m gonna screw you gently
I’m gonna hump you sweetly
I’m gonna ball you discreetly

Cuwu once sung this song for me after we made a sex tape at a motel, arching their back and thrusting their ass into the air while happily singing along to Jack Black’s closing lines:

And then I’m gonna love you completely
And then I’ll fucking fuck you discreetly
And then I’ll fucking bone you completely
But then
I’m gonna fuck you hard (source).

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: Monster-Fucking and Furry Panic”)

[15] Early in our relationship, I asked Zeuhl if my cock was hurting them; i.e., that I fucked their pussy too hard with it. They replied that I “fucked their pussy just fine,” that they liked it hard. Nevertheless, all of this was overshadowed by my trans woman’s shame of the penis—my penis—as a canonical symbol of rape and violence that I never wanted to be imposed upon others; i.e., I didn’t want to become like my father and feared that my penis, when invoked, would somehow make that horror—however absurd (that’s dysphoria/dysmorphia for you)—come true.

[16] The dialog is expressed between two fictional characters having a debate; i.e., the standard-issue nom-de-plume relayed through prosaic anonymity to perverse Radcliffe’s public image. She waited until she was dead to publish it.

Book Sample: Pieces of the “Camp Map”

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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).

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Pieces of the Camp Map (from the Manifesto Tree)

“Moon-letters are rune-letters, but you cannot see them,” said Elrond, “not when you look straight at them. They can only be seen when the moon shines behind them, and what is more, with the more cunning sort it must be a moon of the same shape and season as the day when they were written. The dwarves invented them and wrote them with silver pens, as your friends could tell you. These must have been written on a midsummer’s eve in a crescent moon, a long while ago” (source).

—Elrond Half-elven, The Hobbit

(source)

Picking up where “Thesis Argument—Capitalism Sexualizes Everything” left off…

Our “camp map” camps canon according to the manifesto tree, which comes in many different pieces that, once assembled, need fuel. First, we will lay these pieces out and explain them in more detail than the manifesto tree could, then segue into the roots of camp (and Radcliffe’s tricky tools) in the next subchapter. Both will be incredibly important to understand and bear in mind when we reach the “camp map” chapter itself. As such, each manifesto piece will come with exhibits to try and explain things in visual terms.

Note: The devices discussed here are straight from the manifesto tree, which you can access in the “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents” webpage. Volume One also unpacks the manifesto tree, but at a more basic and conversational level versus a complex and theory-heavy one; you can download the PDF for Volume One from Sex Positivity‘s one-page promo.

The first piece of the “camp map” is oppositional praxis, or the Six Doubles. Onstage and off, staged opposition’s, LARP-level (live-action roleplay) kayfabe is half-real, thus frames canonical praxis quite well; i.e., as something for us to challenge inside oppositional praxis during our creative successes (the inducing and imagining of mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and informed consent, etc). Its Six Doubles of Oppositional/Creative Praxis organize into two groups of three: canonical/bourgeois praxis vs iconoclastic/proletarian praxis, or

  • sex coercion vs sex positivity
  • carcerality vs emancipation
  • complicity vs revolution

and their various synthetic oppositional groupings (meaning “how they are synthesized during praxis”):

  • destructive vs constructive anger
  • destabilizing vs stabilizing gossip (and abuse encouragement/prevention patterns)
  • “blind” vs “perceptive” pastiche and quoting (class/culture blindness versus consciousness)
  • unironic vs ironic gender trouble/parody (canon vs camp)
  • bad-faith vs good-faith egregores

Both are conducted at the same time by weird canonical nerds and weird iconoclastic nerds in praxial opposition. Sex positivity vs sex coercion, carcerality vs emancipation, etc, operate as simultaneously conjoined with destructive anger vs stabilizing gossip (and other components) sparring in interrelated, intersecting conflicts regarding all of these factors. It gets hella messy fast, but also murky. The doubles of the Gothic are “darkness visible”; we have to deliberately make them campy in a class-conscious way—i.e., deliberately campy doubles of “darkness visible” versus a state shill like George Orwell’s very dumb and very popular idea, “double-speak.” Doubles aren’t simply the language of the state, but a powerful tool for revolutionaries to reclaim; e.g., “I’m Spartacus!” As always, the imaginary past is a potent theatrical device by which to interrogate (and negotiate with) power through hauntological and cryptonymic forms: the Wisdom of the Ancients (and its associate intelligence or lack thereof regarding emotions and the Gothic) as forever in flux.

Doubling is the black mirror in action; its confused reflections invite troubling-but-useful comparisons to alien, unhomely things (unheimlich), showing less about how we’re different from the things we abject, and more how we’re similar (albeit in discomfiting ways). The reflection is both us and not us at the same time. To that, doubling communicates potential, widespread change (and possible worlds) amid uncertainty and chaos on the homefront as something to experience through uncomfortable emotions/psychological effects (of death omens, ill will, invasion and impostors) tied to familiar/familial characters who can’t be ruled out as one or the other but serve as both during nightmare-like experiences; it occurs when sublimation (and boundaries) start to fail inside thresholds and on the surface of images, expressed in a liminal, ghostly fashion—a copy contrasted against the hero as also copied from the world around them through larger viral trends that intimate ongoing dialectical-material tensions (spectres of Marx and fascism).

The mask-like plurality here is complex, messy and legion, which the rest of the book will touch upon throughout its entirety. Is Link a neoliberal twink/twunk or hunk for the state? Against it? What about Dark Link? Is he a Gay Communist or a fascist (same for Gerudo Link and Wolf Link)? Are they “gay for each other” with all that homoerotic sword-crossing? Why are they so fetishized among fans? The disguising role of aesthetics all depends on dialectical-scrutiny and the artist, patron, critic and consumer within oppositional praxis as oscillating mid-struggle. Our job is to make the needle tip towards the successful development of Gothic Communism, then continually drive that point home. This matters because the two forces do not, as canon would lead you to believe, “cancel each other out”; they exist continuously in society as forever in dialectical-material conflict (which Gothic Communism seeks to alleviate by moving away from worker exploitation by the state: subversive doubling as a kind of revolutionary disguise pastiche; i.e., our forces of darkness).

(artist: Charcoca)

Doubles aren’t “just” Gothic fetishes and clichés (though they can be extremely fetishized and cliché when used in “blind” pastiche that reduces them to empty theatre); they’re dialectical-material effects that reify over space and time: the ambiguous personification of ideas expressions in theatrical tension, namely dialogue and melee combat—the psychomachic, psychosexual, psychopraxial dueling of traditional masculine heroics and active violence (with Link and Dark Link the twink variants of this coupling through monstrous-feminine Amazonomachia).

Monsters are made, and they generally fight another other because they represent dialectical-material forces (chiefly praxis) dueling in opposition, dating back to antiquity as an ongoing dialog of power through evolving (and expanding) state mechanisms. In relation to our Gothicist-Communist goals, our Communist “endgame” develops through Marxist theories merged with Gothic theories and a Gothic “mode” of expression whose various “perceptive” pastiches amount to our individual lessons synthesized at the social-sexual level: our creative successes that challenge state hegemony. In turn, the effects of their continued expression can be gleaned through dialectal-material struggles; i.e., as we live our lives as rebellious workers fighting against canonical implementations of monstrous language. This continuation of canon versus iconoclasm amounts to sex positivity versus sex coercion, wherein workers can liberate themselves through iconoclastic art that reclaims the Base and cultivates the Superstructure by camping state canon; i.e., by “making it gay.” Creative praxis works in opposition for or against the state in this respect, its effects doubled as competing linguistic markers in the material world. From moment to moment, then, workers constantly experience and leverage them through Gothic poetics; i.e., the linguo-material expression of emotions, stigmas, and fears as things to experience, which generally manifest as monsters, lairs/parallel space, and phobias to colonize or decolonize through oppositional praxis: the theatrical mode of power as relayed in all the usual (and various) paradoxes and doubles.

Oppositional praxis divides in two. I call the canonical effects of oppositional praxis the “Three Canonical Doubles” or “the Three Cs of Canon” (which you’ll see a lot throughout the book—sometimes all three, but usually one or two, and usually as adjectives):

  • (sex)coercion/-coercive: The cultivation (through Superstructure) and production (through the Base) of emotional and Gothic stupidity through bad sex-gender education in general and Gothic canon; i.e., sex-coercive sexualized media, hauntologies, chronotopes, cryptonyms, monsters, phobias, etc.
  • carcerality/carceral: A trapping of the mind and Gothic imagination inside Capitalism, killing its ability to imagine the future beyond Capitalism and its endless historical-materialities (fictional and non-fiction, but also their liminalities); i.e., the myopia of carceral hauntology and canonical parallel spaces/societies (chronotopes).
  • complicity/complicit: A state of complacency and passive/active apathy towards the State as something to defend; i.e., complicit cryptonyms (which more often than the other theories denote an act of concealment that collaborates with the state through the hidden function of monstrous language).

The Three Cs alienate, binarize (divide) and exploit workers through a heteronormative, settler-colonial scheme. They operate in dialectical-material opposition to their Gothic-Communist doubles, the “Three Iconoclastic Doubles” of Gothic Communism:

  • sex positivity/-positive: The cultivation (through Superstructure) and production (through the Base) of emotional and Gothic intelligence through good sex-gender education in general and Gothic canon; i.e., sex-positive sexualized media, hauntologies, chronotopes, cryptonyms, monsters, phobias, etc.
  • emancipation: A liberation of the mind and Gothic imagination inside Capitalism, reviving its ability to imagine the future beyond Capitalism and its endless histories (fictional and non-fiction, but also their liminalities); i.e., emancipatory hauntology and iconoclastic parallel spaces/societies (chronotopes).
  • revolution/furtiveness: A state of dissident and passive/active empathy towards the state as something to defeat; i.e., furtive cryptonyms (which more often than the other theories denote an act of concealment that conspires against the state through the hidden function of monstrous language).

The Three Iconoclastic doubles de-alienate, unify and empower workers Bob-Ross-style (“Anyone can paint”—i.e., be a Communist through the joy of iconoclastic praxis. In fact, Ross himself converted to a peaceful style after his American air force days, vowing never to yell at anyone ever again and loving animals, but also becoming the de facto “ASMR king” after his own death (ASMR Before Sleep, 2020) with slight touches of BDSM thrown in with that naughty-naughty paintbrush: “beat the devil out of him.” The fact that no one remembers Ross’ military past (we should not forget that about him) is far less vital than the fact that no one tries to imitate that part of him: Antiwar sentiment, communalized art and a genuine love for nature are Bob Ross’ immortal legacy (similar to Howard Zinn being remembered for his antiwar writings, not his WW2 military career).

However, while the dialectical-material outcome of opposition is praxial—canonical or iconoclastic, bourgeois or proletarian—these praxes must still be synthesized through each worker’s social sexual skills and emotional/Gothic intelligence (which we’ll cover in the synthesis roadmap in Volume One) that involve various ways of looking at media through monstrous poetics (whose Humanity “lenses” we’ll examine during the primer in Volume Two). From there, proletarian praxis amounts to our aforementioned creative “successes” in regards to the Six Rs and Four Gs within the Gothic mode (all of which we’ll explore much more in-depth in Volume Three).

Doubles and liminality are a natural/material consequence of praxis-in-action and demonstrate universal adaptability if not a universal appeal (re: to borrow from and expand on Slavoj Zizek, this can be music, but also exploitation media, ghost stories, or performance art, etc). In the Gothic mode, a double (a monster, lair, or theory by which to analyze them) isn’t automatically canonical or iconoclastic. Rather, this must be determined post hoc (“after the fact”), not a priori (“before experience”). However, the Canonical Doubles tend to oppose the other group together as a means of seeing the world. If something is carceral, for example, it’s probably also sex-coercive and complicit concerning our theories and materials; if something is emancipatory, it’s probably also sex-positive and revolutionary concerning our theories and materials (taking liminal gradients/parallel space into consideration of course, which this book will try to do its very gold-star best). This actually makes the Six Gothic Doubles two pairs of three in dialectical-material opposition within the Gothic praxial mode. As we’ll see moving forward, the Gothic mode—regardless of the register—tends to convey praxial conflict in phenomenological, linguo-material terms: a complicated “grey area” of endless gradients.

(exhibit 1a1a1c2: Left: the appreciative peril and liminal merchandise of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure; right: the mysterious and somewhat-creepy Grey Man from LSD Dream Emulator, 1998 [shown to me by Zeuhl, whose own Vaporwave aesthetic/appreciation in their own work was inspired by the game]. Meant to emulate dreams, LSD Dream Emulator is largely generative/randomized in terms of its music and visuals. There are no “enemies,” in the conventional sense; a level ends when you touch a wall. However, the “main villain” of the game is the Grey Man, who can suddenly appear behind you in alarming ways. His unpredictable and immediately uncanny veneer is disarmingly apt (arguably inspiring the leveled-up terror, wandering boss approach and generative musical tactics employed in Alien: Isolation, fourteen years later.)

Let’s briefly reconsider/combine these ideas the way this book does—liminally. Cryptonyms, in economic terms, alter something’s perceived value, but also its appearance and/or ontology (existence) in relation to the state’s concealed abuse of it as something to privatize (this can be a worker, an image of them—their likeness—or chattel animals, etc). In fact, the Four Gs all describe how Capitalism alters something’s perceived value and language through the three bourgeois trifectas in pursuit of state profit within the Superstructure. For example, Samantha Cole reports how deep fake porn—as used by creepy-dude Atric—can easily reduce someone to a cheap, voyeuristic copy without their consent. It’s revenge-porn simulacra, but nevertheless leads to abject exposure along the usual lines of power exchange—operating according to male workers being granted the cheap concession of exacting female worker abuse amid their own exploitation/preferential mistreatment under Capitalism (often in hauntological ways; e.g., applying deep fake to American Psycho’s sex worker scene). During canonical praxis, such replication “lobotomizes” workers, acclimating them to a coerced, hyperreal state: to refuse to fight their abusers when sublimation fails, or to fight other workers to the death (re: class sabotage/worker in-fighting: “They’re killing each other.”). Sublimation’s failure happens during liminal expressions, which make something uncanny (from Freud’s unheimlich, meaning “unhomely”—keep that word in mind; we’ll return to it throughout the book).

In turn, oppositional praxis (and its Six Doubles) leads to the synthesis of oppositional emotions, monsters and social-sexual behaviors (which monsters codify) during times of linguo-material conflict—re: cultivating the Superstructure on a societal level, which is what synthesis is. Canon lowers emotional and Gothic intelligence; the whole point of Gothic Communism is to raise these factors and their catalysts actively and passively using increasingly class-conscious and culture-conscious variations of these things; i.e., things that camp canon, which the state cannot tolerate. As our thesis statement argues, much of this “culture war” happens through code-switching between workers and the material-natural world around them; i.e., disguise pastiche and the mask of Gothic aesthetics as for or against the state and its canonical expressions. Relative to these opposing factors, the synthetic oppositional groupings are bourgeois vs proletarian according to various behaviors associated with weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds:

  • destructive vs constructive anger—i.e., possessive or bad-faith, destructive anger’s defense of the state vs constructive anger as a legitimate defense from state abuses; e.g., police abuse and DARVO tactics.
  • destabilizing vs stabilizing gossip—i.e., co-dependent, “prison sex” mentalities and rape culture vs interdependent girl talk (e.g., #MeToo) and rape prevention.
  • “blind” vs “perceptive” pastiche/quoting—i.e., unironic pastiche and quoting (dogma) vs subversive, ironic quoting (camp).
  • unironic vs ironic gender trouble/parody (camp)—i.e., a performative means of cryptofascism vs demasking the fascist-in-disguise, making these imposters self-report by figuratively gagging or crapping their pants (with gender parody being a means of combatting the impostor syndrome of gender dysphoria with gender euphoria and reclaimed xenophobic labels/implements of torture: Asprey’s counterterror in a theatrical sense)
  • bad-faith vs good-faith egregores, including xenophilic/xenophobic monsters both as products of worker labor as well as worker identities, occupations, and rankings, which use similar language regardless if they’re bourgeois or proletarian—e.g., the bourgeois Amazon detective (canonical Samus Aran) vs the proletarian zombie-vampire-unicorn pillow princess (e.g., my illustration, below):

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

While we will consider these manifesto-tree ideas, here, we will return to them during the synthesis roadmap in Volume One when we delve more into trauma writing and artwork as a means of synthesizing praxis; as well as during the Humanities primer in Volume Two, and in Chapters Four and Five in Volume Three (the latter two which explore the execution of disguise pastiche in the Internet Age). Until then, please don’t fret; they are meant to be understood fairly loosely and their synonyms can be swapped interchangeably (canonical/blind pastiche) as long as the basic dialectical-material relationship (and its symptoms) are communicated.

“Cops and victims,” for example, often becomes hauntologized, presenting in fantastical forms that mirror real-life examples. A “girl boss” witch or “medusa” can angrily serve the state by being the heroine or the villain in ways that uphold the status quo, making her role functionally bourgeois; a real-life cop serves the state, often LARPing as a death knight while they brutalize their state-assigned, hauntologically abject victims during witch hunts. The same conversion applies to proletarian representations and representatives. To that, egregores personify oppositional praxis, making them fundamentally liminal. This means they’ll invoke power at different registers according to various titles, rankings and positions of status and privilege: e.g., a witch queenprincesscourtier or peasant as a status symbol[1] often expressed in BDSM language or demonic-undead, animalized/animate-inanimate simulacra. Despite her label, a witch queen isn’t automatically bourgeois, any more than making her a zombie and/or demon would. Function (not aesthetics) determines one’s role in oppositional praxis, which must be ascertained through dialectical-material analysis of any aspect of the natural-material world. We’ll do so now through D&D pastiche (orcs and humans), but also canceled futures (the cyberpunk) as something to transmute through our own “creative successes” in response to Capitalism’s usual shenanigans.

(exhibit 1a1a1c3: D&D “homebrew” is a way of escaping the palimpsestuous racial profiling of Tolkien’s High Fantastical gentrification enacted by Wizards of the Coast trying to enforce the racial [thus class and gender] binary—e.g., “mind flayers” always being lawful evil, or Drow always being chaotic evil/”pure evil” inside the state of exception [exhibit 41b] to fill the gap made by the humanized [yet still fetishized] “good” orcs [exhibit 37e]: the exceptional “not bad for an orc” pariah. Tolkien made orcs to be beaten and bitten by swords with fancy-sounding names illustrating the function as simultaneously dressed up and denuded [from The Hobbit]: 

He took out his sword again, and again it flashed in the dark by itself. It burned with a rage that made it gleam if goblins were about; now it was bright as blue flame for delight in the killing of the great lord of the cave. It made no trouble whatever of cutting through the goblin-chains and setting all the prisoners free as quickly as possible. This sword’s name was Glamdring the Foe-hammer, if you remember. The goblins just called it Beater, and hated it worse than Biter if possible. Orcrist, too, had been saved; for Gandalf had brought it along as well […]

At this point Gandalf fell behind, and Thorin with him. They turned a sharp corner. “About turn!” he shouted. “Draw your sword Thorin!”

There was nothing else to be done; and the goblins did not like it. They came scurrying round the corner in full cry, and found Goblin-cleaver and Foe-hammer shining cold and bright right in their astonished eyes. The ones in front dropped their torches and gave one yell before they were killed. The ones behind yelled still more, and leaped back knocking over those that were running after them. “Biter and Beater!” they shrieked; and soon they were all in confusion…” (source).

This function can be reversed, but must occur within the mode of expression; e.g., sexy orc roleplay in Skyrim mods, exhibit 84b; i.e., inside material conditions to avoid praxial invisibility. You have to be able to give it shape inside camp and communicate it to others afterward.)

To this, oppositional praxis during Gothic Communism is less like the discrete, nine-squared D&D Alignment Chart (above) and more like a Venn Diagram of the same components doubled and super-imposed over each other. Hence, why revolutionary acronyms like ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) are handy but also why you still have to distinguish between who’s genuine/good-faith and who isn’t/bad-faith during oppositional praxis; i.e., through dialectical-material scrutiny as performed by gay space wizards through whatever “poison” you pick and serve up:

(artist: Ecchi Oni)

For example, an ironic, “strict” mommy dom (and her “dark sodomy castle of gloom and doom”—when executed in good faith—is not a class traitor even if she’s wearing a police uniform or (some other) fetish outfit; aesthetics do not determine function, function does, but obviously first impressions are important. Private exhibits of triggering symbols like swastikas or desecrated American flags (the Thin Blue Line) are far different than public ones, and if you use them in your art during your public exhibit, you have to be prepared to explain why—i.e., as a de facto educator of sex positivity through liminal expression using Gothic poetics. On the flipside, fascists operate through bad-faith concealment; i.e., attacking like undercover cops who awaken and bushwack their foes when they feel threatened (they also join arms with centrists, aggregating with formal power to defend capital against labor).

Code-switching intuition, then, becomes something to develop, like a sixth sense. Is someone a cop/undercover for the state? Are they “for real” or do they mean you harm working for their true boss, the Man (as Deckard the blade runner did when he “retired” Zora in the streets)? The fact remains, whether of Gothic canon or its historical-material parallels, the hidden tyrant trope is often a displaced, bourgeois scapegoat—a “Greater Evil” fall-guy to take the blame for the elite: Adolf Hitler, Victor Frankenstein, Jeffrey Dahmer, or that rich dude from the 2022 Hellraiser remake, etc. Meanwhile, girl bosses are recuperated feminists working for the state; i.e., class-traitor TERFs, who see J. K. Rowling as their god (and whose billionaire status becomes the ultimate carrot to dangle in front of the poor working class[2]/vindictive middle class).

Oppositional praxis materializes in regular people consuming and absorbing these stories in ways that might be bourgeois, thus rapacious, or not bourgeois, thus safe for workers; it happens in our relationships, whatever form they might take. For example, legitimate anger experienced post-breakup/after a honeymoon phase is fine (e.g., Peach PRC’s “F U Goodbye,” 2023, mirroring one of my favorite breakup songs, Scandal’s “Goodbye to You,” 1982). Experimentation is fine (try anal and see what you like, for example). Coercion is not fine. Love—be it serious or casual, closed or open, FWBs (“friends with benefits”) or fuck buddies, extramarital or intramarital—is fluid, seasonal; its “seasonal” boundaries must then be respected by empathetically recognizing the shifting socio-material parameters involved. Someone could be lonely, drunk, homeless, poor, single, cold. However, the situational “fluffery” of a perceived knight-in-shining-armor can quickly become a nightmare when said knight, conditioned by the state to be possessive and duplicitous, love-bombs you in a cycle of diminishing emotional returns; i.e., someone who, through Foucault’s sense of discipline and punish, gaslights, gatekeeps, and girl-bosses you—in short, when they coerce you.

For example, my ex Jadis (who we’ll be talking about a lot in this book—during part two of the “camp map,” but especially in Volume One and Two) was a perfidious, utterly bogus “protector” that I lived with in Florida. We met online, and for two years during the pandemic, they looked after me as an abuser would: through DARVO and love-bombing. They also looked the part, but functioned to a highly abusive degree through aesthetics designed to naturalize what they were doing to me while defending their position as sacred according to what they held sacred: the canonical author and the author’s heroes, but also their orderly (centrist) approach to conflict as a means of assuring Jadis’ (and people who share their views; i.e., the white, middle class) position in the neoliberal pecking order.

The moral, here is that canon can blind you if you refuse to critique it—generally by not listening to commonplace voices that make up the pedagogy of the oppressed: “Most women and minorities live under constant fear of rape and murder—i.e., sexual exploitation and harm.” Moderate “empathy” or “being realistic” is just compromising with the state; radical empathy is needed to liberate those who have been radicalized into chattel slaves by police agents—cops, cowboys, knights, etc. For people like Jadis, the death of the author is death of the father/man and society as we know it in a very Foucauldian sense; in short, it is the end of the world in ways they don’t like to acknowledge because they aren’t the sexy star of the show/can’t just shoot their problems to bits and act martyred about it as they do so. As the extended exhibit below shows, everything becomes commodified and emptied of class character in bad copies of “struggle” (which transport the idea of cop and robber or orcs and humans to the retro-future dystopia):

(exhibit 1a1a1c4: “Bisexuals love the P90” [source tweet: Papapishu, 2020]. It’s not uncommon for genderqueer people to appreciate the revolutionary power of weaponry in popular fiction [e.g., Star Gate: SG-1, 1997]—often through silly gun porn metaphors that “stand in” for the human body. As Solient Art replies to Papapishu: “It’s the ambidextrous design, featuring a bottom-facing ejection port.” To quote Makoto herself, “Of course it is!”

Makoto from Ghost in the Shell looks like a bisexual robot, but she’s not a revolutionary bisexual robot, she’s a cop bisexual robot. She not only works for the state; she gets to shoot the state’s enemies and feel bad about it afterward, and have a cybernetically enhanced body that can crush [most men] to dust. In short, she has to submit to the hierarchy of power largely in a bureaucratic sense, but otherwise can take out her frustrations in the cyberpunk’s neon-lit streets: “kicking” poor people as a cop does, like a de facto owner does its dog [in true Man-Box fashion, the system puts tremendous nostalgic pressure on workers, then promises them fantastical rewards[3] if they “perform well”]. Her conquering of the tech-noir doesn’t investigate the suffering of workers; it humanizes the cybernetic cop while she curb stomps gang members in an undercover unform: the queer-coded sex worker functioning like Judge Dredd’s judge, jury and executioner—”I am the law.” In short, she’s an infiltrator dressed in an increasingly appropriated uniform, one whose sexuality gels through a profoundly intense form of nostalgia: the desire to escape the system by becoming a robot who can never be hurt again. “I am naked, but made of steel!”

One sympathizes. For example, when I was in elementary school, I wanted to be a reploid like Mega Man X—to be made of metal, so my father couldn’t hurt me anymore. While I identified with the codified alienation and desire for revenge, I didn’t like liars and bullies, which is ultimately what X and Makoto canonically are: false rebels lauded with awesome, emotionally gripping music and dressed up in futurist rebellion language; i.e., the Czech word robota, or forced labor/servitude, originally done by serfs now carrying out Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics to serve man [e.g., “by action of mission of action,” as Bishop from Aliens puts it]. In short, Mega Man is copaganda meant to grow and develop alongside his audience according an endless cycle of war that follows them into adulthood: an arms race within Japanese neoliberalism’s mashing of rock ‘n roll into the Western sci-fi commodity of performative struggle [similar to Nazi Germany’s aping of American Hollywood[4]] through retro-futures that—during the arrival of decay through the appearance of the tyrant’s zombie castle—play out through the centrist wrestler’s theatre punishing the usual scapegoats: evil Communists, Nazis and mad science (with Protoman/Zero being red and yellow compared to Mega Man/Mega Man X’s red-white-and-blue). It’s the good doctor versus the bad doctor making monsters from their centrist doubled castles, not “perceptively” campy renditions making monsters for our revolutionary purposes:

 

The ephemeral nature of war in neoliberal media is commodified in ways that dematerialize old packaging that, after a sale period, suddenly becomes corporately delegitimized and must afterwards be traded through barter [e.g., bottom-left, source: “9 Super Nintendo SNES Cases *NO GAMES*: Mario Kart, Zelda, Metroid, FZero & More,” 2021]. The physical product is corporately abandoned in favor of something that can be wholly alienated from consumers by gating it behind digital paywalls and “merch” they can buy in increasingly fractalized forms; e.g., anniversary collections, t-shirts, or action figures, etc.

In short, there’s no class-allegory during the diegetic/paratextual apocalypse of canonical pastiche and its manufactured obsolescence. For fans of such canon, technological singularity[5] is code for slave rebellion, which cannot be allowed; so it gets swapped out for a false version of itself that weaponizes against rebellious labor as catastrophic: Mega Man 4‘s [1991] “Then one day, the industrial robots all over the world went on a total rampage” tells the story of a boy who willfully surrenders his humanity to become Pinocchio and bring “Dr. Cossack” [and his Russian (Communist) robots”] to justice. There is always a fascist/anti-Semitic imposter to police and uncover by a “good little boy” working for the state. In turn, the new world order’s “end of history” is thoroughly discrete in terms of Cartesian dualism’s highly damaging sex/gender binaries. Everything is canonized as good/evil, man/woman [right image, above: “females”; source: Fandom] during these copaganda recruitment tactics [with women as secretaries to give male soldiers a nurturing female voice to hear before they die out in the field]. Enjoy them if you must, just don’t endorse canonical variants in what you produce, patron or purchase yourself; i.e., I love the music and the “mood” of the reploid persona and often regress to my childhood when listening to certain scenes, but I can still “pull a Sarkeesian” and critique canon when doing so:

[top, source: The Mega Man Network]

For example, Zero saving X from Vile [a reploid “designed to be a war machine,” according to Zero] is engrained into my mind. I loved and continue to love the idea of being rescued by a strong, effeminate “robo-cutie.” But the theatrics still canonically whitewash war by trying to argue that X’s military urbanism isn’t somehow Imperialism coming home to empire: He’s literally a fledgling cop with a kill list. Do you see him “taking any of the mavericks in”? No, he smashes those metal motherfuckers to junk each and every time. And this repeats over and over until, by Mega Man X8 [2004], the ghost of Doctor Light has been replicated not only light years beyond itself, but also Mega Man’s far less bloodthirsty palimpsest, Astro Boy [1952]. In short, the scheme has entered into farce, apologizing for the recursion and acceleration of war enacted along the same profit motive disguising itself [re: “The Eighteenth Brumaire“].

It’s false hope that sounds increasingly empty and decayed, but also sucked of even its childhood nostalgia for members of the “old guard” that grew up on the classic oldies; they paradoxically yearn for those oldies as “better times” while neoliberalism moves the goalpost, chasing efficient profit while taking away more and more of worker rights. The product is progressively sucked of its joy and nutrients, becoming increasingly “shitty” but also unwise as an essentialized past devoid of a class-conscious Wisdom of the Ancients.

The ludic moral is that all videogames simulate reality to some extent through metaphors; canon, in particular, is built on war and conflict, especially crisis and decay as something to embody through one’s avatar as exceptionally “good” or “evil” in the kayfabe sense. But videogame canon is always neoliberal, thus centrist. It’s not as basic as “sending signals to the brain, controlling the mind.” Instead, it’s internalized; i.e., coding the hero to kill the state’s enemies within the state of exception, according to the Protestant ethic/monopoly of violence in broad strokes. “Maverick,” then, can be whatever the state needs to die to serve profit, whereas “kill all fags” narrows things down and goes “mask off” in a fascist sense; e.g., the controversy of Sneako selling overt hate of the state-assigned enemy to children, who drink it up like a sponge [The Rational National’s “Sneako ‘Stunned’ to Discover His Young Fans Are as Hateful as He Is,” 2023]. The same basic idea applies to the narrative conventions of Mega Man as borrowed from older media/mediums. The cop is humanized [not the victim] in theatrical displays of violence and humor tied to the fan’s childhood; i.e., the game, operating as a shared space for them to grow and develop, thus acquire and reify their view of the world as something to recreate:

[artist: Draw Lover Lala]

Often, this plays out in old military clichés, such as disorder within the ranks; e.g., the theatrical dispute inside the chain of command over a woman: the duel, as something Jane Austen wouldn’t have put into words, but only written about in the most hushed of voices:

“Have you,” she continued, after a short silence, “ever seen Mr. Willoughby since you left him at Barton?”

“Yes,” [Colonel Brandon] replied gravely, “once I have. One meeting was unavoidable.”

Elinor, startled by his manner, looked at him anxiously, saying,

“What? have you met him to—”

“I could meet him no other way. Eliza had confessed to me, though most reluctantly, the name of her lover; and when he returned to town, which was within a fortnight after myself, we met by appointment, he to defend, I to punish his conduct. We returned unwounded, and the meeting, therefore, never got abroad.”

Elinor sighed over the fancied necessity of this; but to a man and a soldier she presumed not to censure it” [source: Sense and Sensibility, 1811]. 

In other words, the duel as a hushed affair in Sense and Sensibility is, for Mega Man X fans, much more out in the open.)

To elaborate on what I meant a moment ago by “Foucauldian,” the neoliberal affect of the cyberpunk robocop touches on the death of the hero as a more insidious affair—i.e., happening via the “Utopian, futuristic orderliness of things, which in turn highlights the death of man as “swapped out”; i.e., what Foucault writes about in The Order of Things (1966):

The epistemological field traversed by the human sciences was not laid down in advance: no philosophy, no political or moral option, no empirical science of any kind, no observation of the human body, no analysis of sensation, no imagination, or the passions, had ever encountered, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, anything like man; for man did not exist (any more than life, or language, or labour); and the human sciences did not appear when, as a result of some pressing rationalism, some unresolved scientific problem, some practical concern, it was decided to include man (willy-nilly, and with a greater or lesser degree of success) among the objects of science (source, pages 344-45).

This birth (and death) of man is something we can go on to apply to the capitalist system of ordering things within heroic manufactured consent, scarcity and conflict; i.e., according to centrist theatre as something that its proponents will fight tooth and nail to uphold through correct appearances, but also arrangements of power through those appearances as designed to “benefit” them more than other people: the equality of convenience by playing cops and robbers or orcs and humans, or reversing the aesthetic but not the canonical function.

(source: Fandom)

First and foremost, canon’s rewarding of the white, cis-het male (or token) audience is vital to canonical praxis; they want their power trip in accordance with a functional lookalike and its punching bag that they can blindly camp to a degree that doesn’t “rock the boat.” In short, they colonize theatre according to their praxis as aligned with the state and reject anything else. Unlike Mega Man, or Makoto/canonical doubles like Bungie’s Konoko (above), they don’t listen to their “ghost” (exhibit 42e); they keep working for “Section Six,” getting their hands dirty for the elite by killing state enemies inside the same-old state of exception. This includes embodying and endorsing the canceled futures that lead them (and others) down the rabbit hole of Capitalist Realism.

In this respect, Jadis was especially false; they “cashed in” after their daddy died, being left with a considerable amount of “fuck you” money/disposable income. They would never have to work again, but acted like they deserved it all as a justification for what came next. Utterly flush, they preceded to abandon any sense of teamwork with me; but the theatre of the suffering and Atlas-level martyr was written all over them and their stoic, but self-tortured posture. They not only saw themselves as Makoto (a superior posthuman entity that was “more human than human”); they honestly seemed to think, thus act, like things would magically just “improve,” buying into the naïve futurism of writers like Ray Kurzweil, whose The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005) sold the (mostly white, middle-class) American public on Utopian bullshit[6]. Jadis openly said they preferred this kind of futuristic optimism to the usual gloom-and-doom, but they were also a white, middle-class woman who secretly had ties to capital: a Gothic princess who, given the opportunity, promptly “pulled a Radcliffe” and fucked right off.  

Doubled costumes, props and conflicts; psychomachy, psychosexuality, Amazonomachia, psychopraxis. It all begs the question: why use heroic language at all if it just leads to confusing doubles? To be frank, heroic theatre is where power exists, so you have to go there to interrogate it; you can’t just ignore it and make up your own language[7] because that’s segregation (and nobody will know what you’re talking about). Segregation just alienates you further from society and closets you (which is a form of genocide: forced conversion). You have to get down in the trenches, weaponizing the awesome paradoxes inside to reach a wider audience through allegory and apocalypse during liminal expression—to speak out and break things that cover up your abuse.

Within this liminal state, the greatest weakness of the class traitor is their complete inability to critique canon, thus become slave to its endorsement by embodying “useful strength” (for capitalists); i.e., as class-dormant weird canonical nerds who uncritically and predictably endorse problematic elements of media while simultaneously condemning their proletarian potential within the Gothic mode of expression/Gothic imagination (monsters, lairs, hermeneutics, phobias) as something to colonize through their labor pitted against ours: what they can police or otherwise take from us for the state through a variety of bourgeois trifectas geared towards profit as structured around sublimated/recuperated, thus “blind,” forms of war pastiche and nation pastiche (indented for clarity):

Capitalism is always in crisis (through the manufacture trifecta: manufactured scarcity, competition/conflict, and consent), so the phrase “Capitalism in crisis” is accurate when describing fascists; however, “crisis” also describes centrists, who require the presence of an eternal shadow-enemy guided by moral panic (e.g., Islamophobia) to prosecute their own wars and hold onto power (which they conceal through the subterfuge [displace, disassociate, disseminate] and coercion [gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss] trifectas). The primary difference between the two groups is radicality and decay—i.e., once the establishment of centrists weakens to such a degree that the veneer of stability (and neoliberal/capitalist illusions) gives way to echoes of a new dark age amid the threatened collapse of Pax Americana (or emulations thereof; e.g., 1920s Germany) for the middle class (the gatekeepers and soldiers who historically defend capital for the elite): “the enemy is at the gates.” Once this happens, (crypto)fascists can begin to shapeshift away from strictly “apolitical” obscurantist rhetoric (in short, whatever they need to say to achieve their goals; refer to Umberto Eco’s Fourteen Points) to start adopting more and more openly vengeful and genocidal forms. The process is gradual but steady. However, once they seize power for themselves and start running the asylum, Captialism goes from crisis to decay as normalized, entering accelerated decay inside a police state of exception/emergency until the fuel and/or mania are spent. In short, fascism is “Capitalism in decay” or “going from crisis, to decay to death.” It is a death cult whose hideous blaze will utterly eat itself and everything around it, instigated and allowed by centrists (who break bread with fascists, thus being fascists/”fash-adjacent” or otherwise complicit in their schemes) and the elite through the banality of evil: bureaucratic, middle-management exploitation by the bourgeoisie of the proletariat through cold, hard (and boring) economics induced by the handle of our aforementioned trifectas: a systemic divide between workers and owners, efficient profit and infinite growth through frontier Capitalism/Imperialism (and the Imperial Boomerang), desk murderers, as well as any rhetorical or theatrical trick you could think of (disguise pastiche, the Six Doubles of Creative/Oppositional Praxis and their various synthetic oppositional groupings). All operate in concert, becoming—as it were—a symphony of destruction.

This banality isn’t exclusive to Hitler’s Nazis, but an integral device built into Capitalism. As Meghna Chakrabarti responds in “The Eichmann Tapes and the Comforting Myth of the ‘Banality of Evil'” (2022):

60 years later, the banality of evil has been so oft repeated, it’s been reduced to cliché. Just yesterday, a guest on this show used the phrase when trying to explain why so many Republican operatives quickly abandoned their principles in support of the authoritarian slide that led to the Capitol insurrection. So the banality of evil has become a comforting myth we tell ourselves.

Arendt’s idea that evil comes from a failure to think is a popular and powerful way to comprehend how anyone could willingly participate in the unthinkable. But in the case of Adolf Eichmann, we now know that Hannah Arendt was wrong. Because Eichmann said so himself. This is Adolf Eichmann, his actual voice, speaking in recordings made in Argentina in 1957, four years before he went on trial in Jerusalem. And in the recordings, he says, I regret nothing.

Every fiber in me resists that we did something wrong. I must tell you honestly, had we killed 10.3 million Jews, then I would be satisfied and say, good, we have exterminated an enemy … that is the truth. Why should I deny it?

Eichmann’s evil is not a failure to think. Eichmann’s evil is the product of deliberate [emphasis, me] thinking that made him proud to orchestrate a genocide. So it may be time for us to drop our belief in the banality of evil (source).

Sexual coercion through xenophobia (radical or otherwise) is fundamental to bourgeois hegemony—i.e., through René Descartes’ maps of conquests, Tolkien’s own refrain, or their ludologized doubles and theatrical counterparts in the here-and-now relying on the same old ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection: the banality of evil as simply the turning of the handle. This is true regardless if the people doing it are coded as “good” or “bad”; canon-wise, they’re still fighting war in defense of the nation-state as a vampiric entity that needs war (thus victims) to survive.

(exhibit 1a1a1d: Source: top-left; bottom-left. The Hitler Youth and the Neo-Nazi/cryptofascist of America have much in common—i.e., with the German alt-right of the 1920s and ’30s actually being informed by American fascism/Pax Americana, but also Capitalism as something that destroyed both their economies to varying degrees. Fascism was less extreme in America because the elite lived there and didn’t devastate and exploit it during WW1 like they did to the Germans [resulting in merely a Great Depression, which harbored fascist sentiment, but not total realization]. After WW1, the German elite defaulted on American loans used to rebuild Germany following the Treaty of Versailles [similar to the Marshall Plan, or lending money to the people you just blew up, then forcing them to buy your building materials], thereby forcing the German middle class to “foot the bill” after hyperinflation ensued. The Nazi “black knight” reliably emerged, which American “white knights” stepped in to counter through copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex, seeing their own homeland threatened by a copycat neighbor America had “on the hip.” War became “good,” again [an oscillation that continues into the present].

The fact remains that similar crises occur periodically under Capitalism by design and this, true to form, has a monstrous emblem attached to it. Nearly a century ago, Dracula’s unironic castle appeared during Germany’s 1923 beerhall putsch, heralding a liminal hauntology of war that was brought to the Global North sixteen years later. Now that the Reaper is once again upon us, no amount of neoliberal comfort [monster] food will change that unless we wake up and take labor action to counteract fascism and the elite. The “Belmonts” won’t protect workers from the butchery of fascism or elite machinations; as the show itself illustrates and fetishizes, the vast majority of workers will die or be displaced—all while “the good guys” try to take the credit for beheading fascism and “saving the world.” But even if they “win” against the Leveler, he remains a medieval argument for death as hauntologized; i.e., fascist apologetics in centrist monomythic scripts that cannot kill death. It’s merely a reprieve inside a giant system that ensures the tyrant will always return inside the Cycle of Kings; i.e., a band-aid for a wound that never stops bleeding [evoking the cycle of conquers through the myth of sovereignty—e.g., “England” and the “Goths” (who were not the Goths) claiming ownership, thus a post-Roman/early-Teutonic national identity over “land of the Angles,” aka Anglo-Saxons]. Even before the skeleton king comes back, the fact remains that the Global South and its [neo]colonized territories are currently being butchered before the Imperial Boomerang even sails home. Striga’s “livestock” is a bleak displacement and black reflection of our own guilty bloodlust sated by devouring the hidden conquered. It’s not some transcendental signified, but merely cold, hard economics embellished to make the process of capital more palatable to the middle class: eating other humans by proxy/through the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection. Vae Victis.)

(artist: Bokuman) 

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

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

  • Re-claim. Seize Gothic art as the means of emotional (monstrous) production.
  • Re-union/-discover/-turn. Reunite people with their alienated, alienizing bodies, language, labor, sexualities, genders, trauma, pasts and emotions in sex-positive, re-humanizing (xenophilic) ways.
  • Re-empower/-negotiate. Grant workers control over their own sexual labor through their emotions and, by extension things (most often language, symbols or art) that stem from, and relate to, their sexual labor as historically abjected and privatizing under Capitalism; to allow them to renegotiate their boundaries in regards to their trauma through their sexual labor as their own, including their bodies and emotions as a potent form of power interrogation, re-negotiation and re-exchange amid chaotic and unequal circumstances.
  • Re-open/-educate. To expose the privatization of emotions and denial of sex-positive sex/gender education to individual workers, helping them reopen their minds and their eyes, thus see, understand and feel how private property makes people emotionally and Gothically stupid.
  • Re-play. Establish a new kind of game attitude and playfulness during development towards Communism, one that dismantles the bourgeoisie’s intended play of manufactured scarcityconsent, and conflict in favor of a post-scarcity world filled with “game” workers who can learn and respond creatively to the natural and person-made problems of language and the material world with unique solutions: (emergent play).
  • Re-produce/-lease. To disseminate these tenets through worker-made sex-positive lessons that we leave behind; i.e., egregores, “archaeologies” and other Gothic-Communist “derelicts.” As the oppressed, our pedagogy should be centered around the continued production of communal emotional intelligence as a means of transforming the material world and, by extension, the socio-material-natural world for the better—by healing from generational trauma by interrogating it together.

(exhibit 1a1a1e1a: Artist, top-left: Blxxd Bunny; top-middle: Kayliesaurus-Rex; bottom-left: Quinnvincible; bottom-middle: e.streetcar; bottom-right: source. “Learn to swim,” indeed. Gothic counterculture is sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as canonically infantilized, shamed for their masturbatory and rebellious qualities, then sold back to a fearful “adult” public as harmful wish fulfillment and guilty pleasure [for when their material conditions feel “too real” and they suddenly need to “escape”/lose control through the orgasm or other privatized euphoria]. From jazz to rock ‘n roll to heavy metal, postpunk, goth rock and industrial, there is a shared antiquation, almost-Freudian vibe to canonical monsters [and their theatre at large] being cryptomimetically evoked—of fatal nostalgia retreating into a lost childhood rememory [re: Morrison, meaning a colonized attempt at reassembling lost culture or buried trauma for cathartic means]: an attraction towards powerful expression that one might feel in control through controlled chaos [which isn’t the same as controlled opposition, insofar as function goes. An iconoclast can easily take a pre-existing piece of canonical media and weaponize it against the state; i.e., reclaiming the “ghost” of Tolkien or Marx from their recuperated or otherwise harmful forms].

Doing so is important, as inheritance fears [expressed through Gothic media] coincide with one’s actual birth as loaded with pre-existing trauma. This includes popular beliefs or codified behaviors that, for better or ill, have been disseminated; e.g., the antiquated, sexist ideas of Sigmund Freud (something of a cokehead and armchair quack). Indeed, birth trauma was actually an idea that Otto Rank, a pupil of Freud’s, challenged Freud on. Freud personally saw the birth itself as painful to the child, thus crippling them with repressed trauma/memories of pain [that stigmatize the mother by blaming her for the birth]. Rank did not, describing the separation from the mother as traumatic, thus representing a desire to return to a “womb state.” For Rank, the revisited “womb” is not a murderous site for revenge at having been raped in the past [canonized in state apologia when the Rambo or Amazon kills the Archaic Mother as a dark double for the TERFs own lived trauma projected onto a state target] but sweet bliss accomplished through reunion as oblivious. As I note with Frankenstein in “Born to Fall? Birth Trauma, the Soul, and Der Maschinenmensch” (2014), this was exactly what the Creature wanted from Victor but was denied time and time again:

Birth trauma is a strong theme in Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Frankenstein – not “physical” trauma, but rather “birth trauma” as Otto Rank calls it, in his famous book, The Trauma of Birth: “…In attempting to reconstruct for the first time from analytic experiences the to all appearances purely physical birth trauma… we are led to recognize in the birth trauma the ultimate biological basis of the psychical” (xii).

According to Rank, birth is, in and of itself, an act – one that separates mother from child and is psychologically traumatic. In Frankenstein, Victor, regardless of his sex, was the Creature’s de facto mother and thus responsible for nurturing it. His failure to is the birth, which severs the link between mother and child. The Creature seems to vow revenge against him, but actually desires to earn Victor’s love and affection in order to revert the birth trauma and “return to the womb” by restoring the link between mother and child. Otto Rank was a pupil and eventual-intellectual rival of Sigmund Freud, and his shift away from the sexual ideas made popular by his mentor eventually resulted in the demise of their friendship. His “birth trauma” focuses on the nurturing relationship between mother and child, not the sexual relationships between the child and its parents. This was a new concept for the time, according to James Lieberman, who states:

…Freud’s psychology was father-centered prior to The Trauma of Birth. Rank was quite aware of this [and his own views set him] apart as the first feminist in Freud’s inner circle. Today… the mother-child relationship [being] crucial in the earliest formative phase of development [is a given,] but [back] then psychoanalytic theory presented a strong father threatening castration, and a mother whose importance was more erotic than nurturing.

As Gothic Communists, our reunion is symbolic and poetic, represented through the reclamation of the vagina as stigmatized, but also the monstrous-feminine at large as something to rescue from Freud’s ghost; i.e., the trans, intersex, and non-binary body in all its andro/gynodiverse—thus non-Vitruvian/non-European—iconoclastic forms having a queer class character/revolutionary potential when coming out of the closet to fight for the Cause [refer to exhibit 1a1c for more examples].)

(artist: Calminvore; or, “baffling Christendom by continuing to live”)

While canonical heels like (unironic) Kain are fetishized and loved for the bourgeois implementation and defense of the status quo, the class character of anyone who functionally challenges the status quo is also fetishized and attacked through the weird canonical nerd; i.e., someone whose Pavlovian/Pygmalion conditioning teaches them to behave in a dominating manner towards state enemies that are chased after like forbidden fruit (that was a gay pun)—re: what Mark Greene refers to as “Man Box culture” in Remaking Manhood: The Healthy Masculinity Podcast (2023); re: “the brutal enforcement of a narrowly defined set of traditional rules for being a man.” This brings us to our second half of the companion glossary definition of weird canonical nerds—their conduct as de facto class traitors that overperform in hypermasculine ways:

Weird canonical nerds are systemically bigoted, pertaining to Man Box culture as something to openly endorse, or “resist” in ways that do nothing to change the status quo/avoid the infernal concentric pattern/Cycle of Kings; e.g., TERF Amazons, but also proudly “apolitical” non-feminist nerds who embody a particular status within the nerd pantheon of canonical heroes: Mega Man as a go-to centrist male hero, but also Eren Yeager as the “incel fascist” with mommy issues, or Samus Aran as the Galactic Federation’s singular girl boss, etc. All become something to endorse within critically blind portions of nerd culture that ape their prescriptive, colonial heroes within culture war dressed up as “apolitical” (the fascist ideology being secondary to the pursuit and claiming of personal power by changing one’s shape and language to fit those aims; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich as a fascist war pig [to combine Umberto Eco with Black Sabbath] who would say whatever he could to justify his own iron grip on the minds of the populace: the foreign plot inside the house, once and forever). To this, the Gothic and its various intersections, contradictions and conflicts are embroiled within oppositional praxis for or against weird canonical nerds and their depictions/endorsements of different monster types (that, in the white, cis-het male tradition of privilege, routinely “fail up”—as success, like women or a nice house, is something they are taught to believe is owed to them; which extends to token minorities allowed a slice of the pie, but also must surrender their pie when the time comes [for which the real “Indian givers” are the settler colonist bearing false gifts: the Trojan Horse, aka the Faustian bargain, in Gothic circles]).

In turn, canonical xenophobia and xenophilia revolve around the monstrous-feminine as imprisoned inside Man Box culture’s state of exception/monopoly of violence, which leads to a specific mentality of reactive abuse I personally describe as “‘prison sex’ mentality” attached to larger systems of abuse[8]; i.e., of increasingly brutal status-quo enforcement through standard-issue and tokenized muscle: your basic chudwads, but also straight-up incels, TERFs/SWERFs and other class traitors terrorizing minorities through a gradient of vigilante violence deputized by the state, thus designed to escalate and gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss, but also conduct reactive abuse/Pavlovian conditioning meant to encourage abuse production behaviors (slaps on the wrist, “boys will be boys” or “bitches be crazy”) and class-traitor behaviors (e.g., dogwhistles and virtue signals—we’ll cover these more towards the end of the thesis statement). They become de facto/honorary Beowulfs taught and revived to divide, then rape, kill and otherwise dominate labor through the broadly advertised menace of fascist-Communist-queer darkness (Grendel and his mother).

Because the state is always in crisis, it pushes towards decay from states of normality that yield up new exceptions. During state decline, the threat of the foreign plot internalizes. Darkness becomes something to challenge again and again when decay nears—i.e., during crisis the state decays, consuming itself outwards-to-inwards as the Imperial Boomerang sails to the center. As the state eats itself, those with privilege strip token agents of their mantle, then place them back in the state of exception. In turn, the status quo overperforms to appear hypermasculine, thus dodge cannibalization. They become the proverbial, hypermasculine “teeth in the night” (me misremembering Ray Winstone’s quote from the 2007 version of Beowulf, but “teeth in the night” sounds cooler in my mind than “teeth in the darkness”); i.e., as the warrior’s pre-emptive challenge and self-assured boast, but also martyred eulogy during scripted, momentum-based fights: the comeback and the reversal. The pursuit of power (as we shall see during the “camp map”) is often a fatal one, but is staged upon state propaganda as a false copy of itself. By chasing the veneer of state essentialism and perceived sovereignty during sanctioned kayfabe, the canonical performance becomes one of presumed invincibility as something to tout: the Black Knight’s ignominious war cry, “I’m invincible!” Even if they very clearly are not, the state purportedly lives on through the valorous dead’s noble (and expected) sacrifice; re: Hitler’s “Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway.” To which, Rob Halford demands,

Why do you have to die to be a hero?
It’s a shame a legend begins at its end.
Why do you have to die if you’re a hero
When there’s still so many things to say unsaid?

If you gaze across timeless years you’ll find them always there
And many gods will join the list compiled with dying care.
Hungry mouths are waiting to bite the hand that feeds
And so the living dead carry on immortal deeds (Judas Priest’s “Heroes End,” 1978).

(artist: Hans Makart)

Except, as the Valkyrie’s choosing of the slain becomes normalized, then accelerates, counterterrorism becomes—as always—a war of optics[9] towards testing middle-class resolve; i.e., Ho Chi Minh’s expression, “You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, but in the end, you will tire first.” The amount of guns/arms racing won’t prevent them from being stolen and/or simply sold by arms merchants pedaling wares to both sides—the weapons used against the state in counterterrorist measures that, as usual, demonstrate the paradox of terror at work: the stockpiling of arms is a recipe for self-destruction. As part of that paradox, the more the war carries on and the greater the myth/perceived aura of invincibility is, the more costly even a single death becomes. It becomes exponentially more and more expensive to cope with (which for the elite doesn’t matter—as long as money flows through nature; the citizens and enemies of the state are the ones who categorically suffer). As usual, the state’s faithful, loyal and/or self-interested will punish whistleblowers, iconoclasts and the underclass—for speaking out against the patriarchal myth of absolute power through their own performances (the myth of a monstrous-feminine challenge to said power), but also because the state must always be in crisis to justify its own existence; i.e., threatening the image of the castle as a wall built in defense of capital, thus something for class traitors to betray their fellow workers in favor of—Plato’s allegory of the cave.

The allegory’s function remains basically the same since it was envisioned by Plato: defend the castle and the king inside it, no matter how terribly estranged he inevitably becomes from nature, death and his fellow humans; i.e., Bakhtin’s dynastic primacy and hereditary rites wrapped within an awful cycle of European historical materialism in constant rise and decline; e.g., Poe’s “House of Usher” demonstrating the Shadow of Pygmalion as attached to a dying king—Zombie Caesar as the Leveler except the castle stays up; it’s the illusion of the castle that crumbles over and over and replaces itself with a pure-white regeneration (the ghost of the counterfeit, starting with Walpole’s cliché at the end of Otranto). As we shall see during the “camp map,” ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) also refers to the castles they defend, illusory or otherwise, and all of the heteronormative operatics that transpire inside of them as mapped out: “All (Canonical) Castles Are Bad”/”All (Gothic) Canons Are Bad.”

In recent times, Plato’s cave was cosmetically updated—during the Neo-Gothic period, followed by America’s First Gilded Age[10] and then again during the Second Gilded Age through the rise of the hyperreal (as brought to a wider public through The Matrix in 1999 and its own vast “desert of the real[11]“) intimating Percy Shelley’s “bare and level sands”: what Capitalism does to everything then covers it up in a monstrous, alienating fakery that sooner or later must let the cracks show (which invades the cartographic refrains we’ll examine during the “camp map”: Tolkien’s treasure map and Cameron’s settler-colonial territories). Though touted as eternal (which is impossible), the patriarchal castle is actually made of sand, on sand as lifelessly fragile and pulverized (which is a fact); but to kick its decaying foundation still invites DARVO, colossal tantrums and denial on top of denial in terms of the genocide it conceals. Such secrecy hides the state’s falsehood, and the punishments for exposing it do not fit the crime: complete and utter destruction by police forces as punishment unto their victims for disturbing even a single grain of sand. It’s Pavlovian but hyperbolic, anticipating the worst-of-the-worst at all times until total obedience (if not total power) is achieved. A massive gulf of apathy and alienation divides class traitors from other workers, the dutiful pack of hounds standing guard around the tomb-like megalith (standing guard even after the master has gone the way of all flesh). At its base, the same old games continue unbated, giving the rewards that state enforcers are trained to expect; the heteronormative kayfabe and its holy bloodsport become their entire world, until even daring to speak out threatens the illusion in front of the castle, not even the castle itself.

As part of the state-is-sacred illusion, these staged melees are meant to immortalize the fighter in a magical, deus-ex-machina-style blaze of glory mid-transformation—e.g., “hail, the victorious dead” or “[those who] ride eternal on the highways of Valhalla, shiny and chrome” as promoting the oddly muscled, underdog wrestler’s scripted, improbable-and-spontaneous comeback from certain defeat for a paying audience (not the dogfall, but the dog having his day/getting a bone): bread and circus, but also the Faustian bargain of false power and harmful, self-destructive knowledge passed down through a patriarchal offer by the conveyer of such things; i.e., the man who runs the show, teaching the young male warrior through Pavlovian conditioning and disguised ultimatums to be violent so the Master can profit off a young, stupid apprentice: “Give me a boy until he is seven and I will show you the man.” It’s a slave’s deal but also, in the Internet era, a parasocial relationship[12] built around the neoliberal concept of false strength as an escapist fantasy of “cutting one’s teeth”: the videogame as a canonical (thus sexist), monomythic teaching device of “cops and victims” (this isn’t the only function of videogames, but it is a prominent one, and exposed to children at a very young age; so it should absolutely be critiqued in spite of its enjoyable aspects; re: Anita Sarkeesian’s adage: enjoy what you consume but also critique it. Enjoy guilty pleasures, but don’t endorse/internalize their problematic material in your daily life).

Meanwhile, the “owners” of said “teeth in the night” (the paying customers purchasing personal property with inheritance, wages and other currencies) aren’t Beowulf- or Kain-like, physically and mentally impervious warrior “studs”; they’re actually toothless and stupid puppies in the Marxist sense that private property has made them hopelessly delusional and scared, thus indiscriminately violent—i.e., bred on a recipe for disaster whose muscles, secret identities[13] and weaponry are on loan from cradle to early grave: imaginary or otherwise, these things are not theirs to own. They thus experience a white fragility/gender envy whose infantilized warrior-death cult is routinely challenged not just by state crises advertised by our (sharp, pointy) teeth as dangerous, but also titillated by what makes us different, thus “weaker” than them: the dated stigmas and biases that prejudice them against us, and the criminogenic conditions that exist alongside the state’s bigoted inventions. These heteronormative myths and legends are informed by kernel-of-truth stereotypes and enabled by neglect, ignorance, apathy and disdain. Our “making it gay” is a threat they must bury.

In other words, weird canonical nerds are taught to uncritically consume whatever is pushed towards them as made to further the status quo through systemic abuse as reliant on heteronormative propaganda: to keep things running as they have been according to a counterfeit/forged ideology that reinforces itself by teaching young men to be suicidally violent towards anyone who is different from the status quo, thus primed to be exploited (through force) for profit. Anything that threatens said profit, illusion and/or status quo threatens the state, the home, the order of things (and its sandcastle/house-of-cards décor), thus must die (which puts us between a rock and a hard place: if we keep quiet, we die no matter what; if we speak out, we can potentially fix things but have to break the spell first, thus guarantee punishment in some shape or form). This process is generally assisted by the opportunistic, cynical and/or psychopathic (e.g., Lieutenant Hawkins from The Nightengale or Archibald Cunningham from Rob Roy, 1995) being glad to do so with pleasure; or by true-believers and their legitimate fear of the unknown/inability to imagine anything beyond Capitalism: fear and dogma. Capitalism isn’t just built on faith, but bad faith, compound fakeries (the ghost of the counterfeit) and abject stereotypes.

Stereotypes are not supposed to be accurate; they’re metaphors (a comparison between two unlike things) that anisotropically[14] reflect popular biases to be confirmed or rejected by audiences—i.e., the Asian person sees Mickey Rooney in Asian-face during Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and thinks, “I get the feeling this is supposed me/my people but this feels like a bad caricature.” Except that’s canonically the point: to spread the stereotype as a kernel-of-truth that is largely false to make the minority feel unwelcome and correct-incorrect at the same time. The same idea goes for the back-stabbing Jew, the savage-cannibal person of color (an orc) or the queer crossdressing killer, etc, in popular WASP-y fiction. Yet, the same fictions cannot bar the duality of metaphor from yielding subtext through iconoclastic performances of formerly bigoted material; i.e., the desire of the stigmatized to be different than how they’re canonically depicted—to camp the canon via an ironic alter ego/secret identity whose mask-like, muscled persona is both popular in centrist kayfabe and represents a reclamation (or embodiment, in subordinate cases) of their self-hatred and stigma in a dialectical-material sense. Except fans of canon don’t like subtext or camp unless it’s penned by them (e.g., the blind parody of your garden-variety SNL skit). With videogames, a franchise like Zelda is simply about “itself” and nothing else, from the canonical viewpoint; i.e., “pure fiction” or “pure fantasy” with zero allegory or politics (re: Tolkien). But a story without subtext is simply impossible because something of the author goes into the story as having come from other stories and the external world’s historical materialism.

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

For example, Tolkien’s trolls from The Hobbit sound cockney because they’re poor foreign mercenaries emulating a white man’s idea of a poor foreign mercenary attached to a group of poor people from his home country whose class is generally identified by their voice—how they speak according to how they look:

But they were trolls. Obviously trolls. Even Bilbo, in spite of his sheltered life, could see that: from the great heavy faces of them, and their size, and the shape of their legs, not to mention their language, which was not drawing-room fashion at all, at all.

“Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don’t look like mutton again tomorrer,” said one of the trolls.

“Never a blinking bit of manflesh have we had for long enough,” said a second. “What the ‘ell William was a-thinkin’ of to bring us into these parts at all, beats me—and the drink runnin’ short, what’s more,” he said jogging the elbow of William, who was taking a pull at his jug.

William choked. “Shut yer mouth!” he said as soon as he could. “Yer can’t expect folk to stop here for ever just to be et by you and Bert. You’ve et a village and a half between yer, since we come down from the mountains. How much more d’yer want? And time’s been up our way, when yer’d have said ‘thank yer Bill’ for a nice bit o’ fat valley mutton like what this is.” He took a big bite off a sheep’s leg he was roasting, and wiped his lips on his sleeve.

Yes, I am afraid trolls do behave like that, even those with only one head each. After hearing all this Bilbo ought to have done something at once. Either he should have gone back quietly and warned his friends that there were three fair-sized trolls at hand in a nasty mood, quite likely to try roasted dwarf, or even pony, for a change; or else he should have done a bit of good quick burgling. A really first-class and legendary burglar would at this point have picked the trolls’ pockets—it is nearly always worth while, if you can manage it—, [what kind of sick fuck puts an em dash next to a comma?] pinched the very mutton off the spits, purloined the beer, and walked off without their noticing him. Others more practical but with less professional pride would perhaps have stuck a dagger into each of them before they observed it. Then the night could have been spent cheerily (source).

Tolkien, here, is advocating for theft and murder of the bad team by the good team. The trolls, then, are not human, but a metaphor compared to humans through the analog as like what it otherwise seems to be not; i.e., these non-humans sound suspiciously human of a particular kind then are attributed to a kind of privateer or raider (the barbarian horde) as threatening the land of plenty, specifically the salt of the earth as a homely metaphor for the middle class afraid of violent, poor cannibal warriors from somewhere else (zombies). It’s anti-Semitic (which carries over into the anti-Communist sentiments of zombies during the Civil Rights Movement). But don’t tell fans of Tolkien that. Subtext is often queer and introduces cracks in his peerless effigy—the death of the author (another thing we’re blamed for—i.e., the death of the surrogate father figure) by making canon gay/political, thus ironic (we’ll return to this fear/recuperation of camp during the “camp map” proper when we touch on Joseph Crawford’s notion of “invented terrorism”).

(artist: Genzoman)

Lies, masks and theatrical artifice more broadly predate English as a written language, but spill into its written legends feeding into the canonical myth of male power as “derelict”; i.e., both faked and left behind in a diegetic and meta sense: an old, rune-cover scroll that proves its own legitimacy by making itself up based on older lies that continue the harmful trend as “moon-sized.” It aggregates, building up over time until life without it seems impossible even when it threatens to destroy the world. To that, Beowulf is the oldest, thus first-written male action hero in the English language, the Old-English ur-text/palimpsest for Lancelot, Darth Vader, Aragorn, Heinlein’s Competent Man, James Cameron’s Vietnam revenge fantasy for Rambo in Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), Shakespeare’s Hippolyta, Ellen Ripley in Aliens (the Competent Woman-turned-state-avenger modeled after Starship Troopers [1959] and Henry V [1599] to kill “her” version of Grendel and his mother—the xenomorph and the Alien Queen as stand-ins for a past brush with death, with rape, with the man-in-disguise threatening abject impregnation with a knife-dick). All execute during an arena-style battle of the sexes, but also corrupt/monstrous-feminine us-versus-them as moralized in the state’s favor through good-versus evil value judgments. The judgement/trial by combat is a kind of Amazonomachia or “monster battle,” pitting the heteronormative male action hero against the corrupt (fascist) and/or monstrous-feminine (female, queer) enemy of the state in wrestling code: the kayfabe of babyfaces and heels (good monster, bad monster).

This applies to Tolkien’s trolls, which we just examined. Thorin might not win against the trolls, but he gives as good as he gets fighting from the side of good:

he jumped forward to the fire, before they could leap on him. He caught up a big branch all on fire at one end; and Bert got that end in his eye before he could step aside. That put him out of the battle for a bit. Bilbo did his best. He caught hold of Tom’s leg—as well as he could, it was thick as a young tree-trunk—but he was sent spinning up into the top of some bushes, when Tom kicked the sparks up in Thorin’s face.

Tom got the branch in his teeth for that, and lost one of the front ones. It made him howl, I can tell you. But just at that moment William came up behind and popped a sack right over Thorin’s head and down to his toes. And so the fight ended. A nice pickle they were all in now: all neatly tied up in sacks, with three angry trolls (and two with burns and bashes to remember) sitting by them, arguing whether they should roast them slowly, or mince them fine and boil them, or just sit on them one by one and squash them into jelly (source).

More to the point, Gandalf saves their bacon in the end by turning the trolls all to stone: “Dawn take you all, and be stone to you!” In short, Thorin and his friends survive through deux ex machina; i.e., because God loves them, just like Beowulf.

Canon-wise, all male action heroes are “good” and come from other male action heroes; all enemies of the state are “bad” and come from other enemies of the state; i.e., a quest for dominance between good guys and bad guys flowing out of older media and into newer stories/mediums that repeat the canonical, centrist pattern; e.g., videogame canon’s chips off the old block: their Pantheon of male action heroes/wonder weapons versus the “forces of darkness,” the big evils of a perennial corruption/monstrous-feminine tied to useful geopolitical groups, namely “fascists” and “Communists” as nominal. Advertised to American children as theatrical heels, bad guys (and girls, queers) are classically expressed using two distinct color codes during the blame game: green and purple and/or black and red (the colors of stigma and racism, but also revenge, power and dogma). Queer variants are basically evil clowns/jesters (the trickster archetype) within the same violent process of abjection, which—Hogle argues—is based on the ghost of the counterfeit as a false copy of itself that pushes the myth of state legitimacy, exceptionalism and supremacy forward in Gothic language: good monsters vs bad monsters, through a brutalized raping of the bad monster by the good—i.e., not just monster-fucking as rape, but anal rape and mutilation (trophy-taking, often beheading) of the corpse as a powerless shell of the conquered foe to humiliate in life and in death: “Kill the pig! Spill its blood!” as harmful wish fulfillment and guilty pleasure tied to inherited gender roles within Gothic fictions and remediations.

All the same, the victim and its trauma survive in the same imperiled spaces, too. In or relating to canon, the hunt of the prey becomes a chercher-la-femme cliché rooted in the lived experience of the woman as the sport of men, the latter expected to give chase and “court” her to sate their animal desire; or paradoxically she seeks her own palliative care through psychosexual self-medicative activities: tempting fate out on the dance floor in self-destructive forms. Faced with trauma that scars us, it also marks us and imbues us with prey mechanisms that we aim to check by inheriting anxiety through personal experiences or through reading about it as a warning device that takes on a life of its own. Trauma doesn’t just beget trauma; it recognizes and preys upon it, often through immediate nonverbal language. It’s a very animal experience and you won’t have any idea what it’s like unless you’ve been there yourself—have either been hunted or have inherited the anxiety of being hunted as a surviving element of your culture; i.e., the Gothic as the return to trauma, but also the return of trauma as something that—regardless of how real[15a] it is—is a marker of trauma as something for concerned citizens, police agents (and other abusers) and legitimate victims respond to differently under crisis than state victims. For state proponents, stigma colors convey a presence of trauma on state victims for fear of reprisals regarding past abuses; e.g., the Germans fearing Soviet reprisals after the Eastern Front turned in the Red Army’s favor during WW2. Trauma, then, is generational abuse furthered through compelled revenge and appropriation by the colonizer group towards the colonized.

In my case, I am trans, thus embody a marker of stigma according to my gender as something to identify with and perform; “green” as a symptom of internalized self-hatred, but also something to assigned by police agents. As such, I feel as women classically do in such stories, wherein my lived experience is an attraction to power through strength in ways that sometimes have done me a disservice—i.e., the paradox of wanting to be near power to keep an eye on it, to want a protector or to face ones lived/imagined fears through calculated risk: the vicarious passion or exquisite torture that I call “the palliative Numinous” (a pain-relieving effect achieved from, and relayed through, intense Gothic poetics and theatrics). It’s very Promethean, but expressed through the venues and activities of the (for me) white female domestic: the home, but also the dance hall while being “on the market” as an imperiled, damaged debutante; i.e., drawn to excitement and danger though maladaptive responses that yearn nevertheless for catharsis. It remains an intense, profound release from trauma through “trauma” as an agency that, while effective, can lead to trouble between two or more people through shared interests that camouflage the harmful intent of one party drawn to the other (more on this in Volume One and Two, when I talk at length about Jadis abusing me).

Metal[15b] is one such example—a controlled chaos that, like Gothic poetics at large, can help us feel in control through risk management; i.e., the lyrical and musical advertisement of great enemies or mighty power that can’t actually hurt us/blast us apart, but feels genuine enough to evoke/trigger our panic response. For the traumatized as already marked, this is like manna from heaven: to “fight,” “flee,” “fawn” or “freeze” in controlled “rape play” and surreal, monster-fucker environments to gain agency over our pathologized conditions that are generally represented through monsters that look or sound “green”; i.e., inside spaces that remind us where we were hunted or otherwise exposed, while also helping us work through or otherwise inhabit our psychosexual states without actually harming others (unironic torture porn) and/or self-destructing (scars can heal, but stay with you for life, and mark you for potential abuse by parties trained to feed off your trauma): we can dance with the dead as undead ourselves.

To this, monsters have more in common than they do differences (and these differences generally are hard to pin down). In short, demons offer forbidden knowledge or power and can shapeshift; the undead were formally alive (or appear to have been) and generally feed in relation to trauma (concepts we’ll unpack at great length in Volume Two). As a kind of deathly theatre mask, something else that’s equally important to consider about demons and the undead (and which we’ll bring up throughout the entire book) is that animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms; i.e., stigma animals relayed through demonic BDSM and rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized: marked for trauma or by trauma that parallel our green and purple doubles onscreen.

A book-wide note about animals: Dogs make for effective metaphors regarding heroic stories: protectors, home defense, property defense; territorial dogs and guard dogs, loyal to a fault, but also watch dogs who surveille and lie. All of this showcases another paradox: a dog who can think, thus be taught—i.e., who can learn. In terms of preventative justice, the rehabilitative thought experiment—of teaching an old dog new tricks—obviously invokes dog metaphors. Keeping with the paradox motif, this can apply to Commies (good dogs) and capitalists (bad dogs) as oppositional weird nerds. It’s not essential to think about everything this way, but I’ve found it oddly useful. Historically there’s actually a solid reason for it, too: Dogs and humans evolved side-by-side in recent, recorded memory, and dogs are symbolic through this context in a Gothic sense: discipline and punish; i.e., of servitude, war and the abusive, Pavlovian conditioning of the sort we’ll be seeking to undo. Out of medieval discourse, domesticated animals are also gendered in a sexualized, monstrous sense; i.e., “The Miller’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales (1392). The dog, as a phallic implement of war, is masculine, loyal, fierce; the cat is “catty” and feminine, as is the rabbit a paganized symbol in particular (spring, lunacy). As a gender-bending exercise, we’ll consider dogs relative to various monsters in terms of dog-related stigmas during the rest of the thesis statement and spottily throughout the whole book: war bosses and victims during monstrous theatre. We’ll look at cats and rabbits more during overt sex work (catboys, cat girls), but also revolutionary cryptonymy (so-called “big cats[15c]“—e.g., tigresses, exhibit 1a1a1a1_c; confuse-a-cat, killer rabbits, Trojan bunnies, etc) and furries/chimeras (exhibit 1a1a1h3a2) as anthropomorphism, which tend to combine cats and dogs with stigma animals of various kinds (wasps, snakes, spiders, bats, etc) to interrogate, but also reclaim animalized interspecies stigmas onstage and off (the “fursona” being a uniform but also a state of being regardless of where one is). —Perse

Predator-wise, the war dog can present as male or female, thus muzzled in ways that are correct, thus normal according to the status quo: the female war boss as correct-incorrect, but still a useful gatekeeper for the elite (a TERF, in other words). In this sense, you get paradoxes like the chimera as both a snake and a dog—with Medusa both a phallic woman and maneater who turns men to stone, and a specific kind of bitch that works for the state as a weaponized victim that is compared to multiple animals at the same time; she is both a snake-bitch, but manly in the theatrical sense due to her penetrative attacks, piercing stare and direct, aggressive behaviors. On some level, the Pavlovian ideal is conditioning for hunting behaviors that misuse congenital or maladaptive prey responses: the hunter becoming the hunted (or vice versa). This can be cis-het men seeking to abuse others to make their trauma stop thus feel safe, or women and token groups.

The same idea canonizes through the male variant as “the beast,” Beowulf’s “teeth in the night” as beholden like a trained mutt to canonical ideas of the animal as prized for its inhuman power in ways that evoke an older rustic mentality—re: “the Miller’s Tale” describing everything in an animalized, sexual way that was closer to nature. Capitalism, of course, commodifies this, and pits the animalized against one another through compelled dogfights: dog-eat-dog in a larger kennel that has an alpha/”top dog” (echoed in the global tableau during nation pastiche and kayfabe, of course; but during heteronormative enforcement at large: there must always be a brutalizer). The language is Pavlovian, leading to its misuse during any confrontation (which waves of terror conflate as a universal fight-or-flight mechanism for any dispute, no matter how trivial or small). We will discuss a myriad of means to subvert animal abuse, including its language, thus address trauma in the body as begot from said abuse as animal, sexual, physical, and mental—all rolled into one composite beast that affects all workers, human or otherwise.

Simply put, crisis sexualizes under canon, whereupon war as a language of power exchange amounts to good play/bad play with animalized flavors: “puppy play” through an animalized warrior that is useful to the state, in canonical examples. The death fetish is dressed up further as a rebel barbarian/Amazon that disappears like a bad dream if their veneer becomes “rabid” and they turn heel. While iconoclastic examples can camp the berserk’s “teeth in the night” through iconoclastic puppy play and war bosses, canonical iterations will not stand for such games. The persona of strength is sacred as a heavily scarred, inked destroyer of the state’s foes. Anything else is effectively ridicule/degenerate and must be muzzled, gagged, and/or euthanized if the debridement (the removing of corrupted or dead flesh) doesn’t stick; re: the euthanasia effect:

Note: Given my extensive work on Amazons, my definition for “euthanasia effect” is “new”; i.e., as of this promotion series (though made from old parts), effectively describing a variety of post-2023 sources written by me (from pre-2023 sources): for you to consider when regarding the token subjugated Amazon and her ancient rival, the Medusa. —Perse, 3/27/2025

the euthanasia effect (rabid token Amazons)

A term, coined by me, to describe the canonical, assimilative qualities of the Amazonian myth (and one whose Amazonomachia has canonized, post-Wonder-Woman, in Metroidvania through Cameron’s refrain and—to a lesser extent—Tolkien’s). It is one where magical, mythical warrior women—as simultaneously virgin/whore animal people (the female* berserk)—are canonically employed to keep men (and the victims of men/token enforcers during “prison sex” police violence) paradoxically in line, mid-panopticon; i.e., a female-coded (usually white, or token non-white) centurion or stentor girlboss who, in between yawping at the men to aurally castrate them (the banshee or siren), “tops” them in hauntological, dominatrix-style fashion, elsewhere outside the bedroom (re: Foucault): “make it through this and I’ll ride you until you beg!” Death by Snu-Snu becomes the traditional hero’s monomythic reward and doom; re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference, but tokenized into a kind of virginal warrior Madonna jailor pulled from the Neo-Gothic’s former dungeons; e.g., Charlotte Dacre’s fearsome and “phallic” (stabby-stabby) Victoria (see: Sam Hirst’s 2020 “Zofloya and the Female Gothic” for a good summarizing of that dilemma):

*Canon is heteronormative, thus dimorphic (and settler-colonial/Cartesian). There can be intersex elements, but these will be treated as “phallic,” thus male/female and masc/femme during the Amazon’s struggles; i.e., as a monstrous-feminine entity the state monopolizes by gaslight-gatekeep-girlbossing it. Such things, then, canonically embody the Amazon and Gorgon’s doubled morphological conflict inside-outside itself; i.e., to simultaneously exude the psychomachy’s calm/furious or virgin/whore qualities, such “mirror syndrome” (another term of mine) punching a black reflection where state victims are housed (thus useful to profit pimping nature as alien); re: the postscript from the Poetry Module’s “Following in Medusa’s Footsteps.” Throughout BDSM and Gothic media, on and offstage, you see the euthanasia effect in Metroidvania a ton. To enhance your own ludo-Gothic BDSM (to camp subjugated Amazons with), refer to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus for some good examples of the Promethean Quest (though my “Concerning Rape Play” compendium also raises some salient reading regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM as a whole). Apart from either of those, we’ll tackle Amazons, Medusa and the monstrous-feminine revenge argument more directly in the “Predator/Prey” subchapters, in Volume One (which explore Amazons and knights). Also consider the Demon Module’s “Amazons and Demon Mommies,” “Vampires and Claymation,” “Summoning the Whore,” “Exploring the Derelict Past,” and “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“; i.e., for good examples (outside Volume Zero) of the cop/victim approach in canonical Amazonomachia and how to subvert it to have the whore’s revenge against profit! I also recommend Volume Zero’s “Symposium; Aftercare” for plenty of extra lists and fun examples.

The canonical Amazon, then, is a time traveler TERF meant to serve profit by betraying her fellow oppressed (women or not). Ripped spectacularly from the ancient pre-fascist past and expressed in “ancient” fascist forms during state crisis, Red Scare employs Amazonian fascism and Communism—during the usual kayfabe centrism and anisotropic terrorist/counterterrorist refrains pimping nature on the same stage—through a black-and-red aesthetic of power and death corrupting nature for state aims: to feed on nature by triangulating against state victims “of nature,” per Cartesian thought; i.e., to antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine, during the Capitalocene (from Walpole’s Otranto onwards—per Hans Staats’ “Mastering Nature: War Gothic and the Monstrous Anthropocene” [2016] but married, per my arguments, to Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s idea of Capitalocene). Through these dualistic poetic devices’ assimilative function, the subjugated Amazon is a functionally “white” Indian/whore/savior cowgirl (token) cop who harvests the functionally “black” whore (criminal, alien, etc) during the abjection process (and its bad-faith revenge arguments; e.g., Orientalism). All happen while suffering the usual double standards and embarrassments such betrayals bring on (which camping through ludo-Gothic BDSM anisotropically reverses through the same aesthetic—shrinking profit while sending abjection back towards the colonizer agent/apparatus); e.g., Samus Aran (re: the Poetry Module’s “Playing with Dead Things“) but really a wide variety of such wheyfu herbo monster girls upholding Capitalist Realism: by kettling therefore blaming the whore Archaic Mother*/ghost of the counterfeit. Such blaming occurs ipso facto “for its own genocide” during the Promethean Quest’s infernal concentric pattern (e.g., Ayla or Savage Land Rogue; re: “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two“); i.e., an eternal warrior “of nature as hellish” sent back into Hell come to Earth—all to do battle with the verminized, insectoid-chattel, stigma-animal, diseased-and-deathly Medusa on the same Aegis (the liminal hauntology of war): as her dark, Venus-twin half (the long-lost relative, often an evil/false sister or wicked step mother)! The Amazon is a “scab” operatically punching labor as alien hysterical (the wandering womb), but pulled from their ranks to do so inside the state of exception. From Radcliffe onwards, then, the Amazon is a warrior detective who canonically remains a classic pro-state actor fabricating scapegoats; i.e., from older pre-existing legends repurposed for profit now (the settler colony a chronotope danger disco).

(artist, top: ChuckARTT; bottom-left: Arvalis; bottom-middle: Flyland; bottom-right: Pagong1)

*The male version of the Archaic Mother is something I call the Dragon Lord or Skeleton King (re: the Cycle of Kings with vampiric, draconian or otherwise patriarchal versus matriarchal elements the state can scapegoat; e.g., Sauron or Count Dracula). Offshoots of said half-real monarchs are often lesser necromancers, rogues or death knights (re: offshoots of the Numinous tied to the same danger-disco structure’s unheimlich nightmare home).

Being of the Medusa as Archaic Mother (re: the whore’s paradox, from “Rape Reprise“), Amazons endure endless punishment from on high and down below (capital’s “middle management”; e.g., Ellen Ripley); i.e., a classically female Prometheus, they are always treated as a substantial risk/desperation measure, one that must be collared just as quickly lest she “corrupt,” thus take her fellow soldiers along for the ride (and back whence she came, to hellish territories, forever). In short, the Amazon is a token scapegoat witch (vampire, goblin, etc) policing other witches, therefore whores (re: me, vis-à-vis Silvia Federici, in “Policing the Whore“), and does so through modular-but-intersecting us-versus-them, white-on-black (of any sort, not just skin color) and monstrous (undead/demonic/animalistic) abjection: someone virgin/whore who, per these imbricating persecution networks, eventually exposes through Radcliffean state arbitration (demasking the villain); i.e., shown as whore and released shamefully from service (the endless oscillation used to keep such class, culture and race traitors off-balance while conditioning them to ruthlessly punch down, inside-outside the concentric frontier ghettos they patrol, mid-relegation; i.e., “good job today, bitch—kill you, tomorrow!”); re: Ellen Ripley but also future versions of the female Rambo that came after and expressed in different kinds of neoliberal Gothic’s trademark fantasy-to-sci-fi language: a prison colony police agent serving the state as its token barbarian, all heroes are monsters but assimilation is poor stewardship!

(source)

As “A Note on Canonical Essentialism” describes it; 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 [military optimism] (source).

This is how the subjugated Hippolyta do (the queenly protagonist version of the regular Amazon; e.g., Wonder Woman)—a kind of token, monomyth, queen-for-a-day “fallen Pandora” (or Chaucer’s “Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf” line, from “The Miller’s Tale“), and one whose previously established map and recursive, Quixotic occupants/warmongering we’ll be camping more; i.e., during Volume Zero‘s “Scouting the Field” (rabies is bad for you) but also through revolutionary cryptonymy with subversive Amazons (a concept Volume One‘s “Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression” unpacks at length; re: the predator/prey dichotomy and canonical abuse of animalized language in furtherance to profit, thus genocide, rape and war).

mirror syndrome

Another term of mine, one that occurs through the euthanasia effect; i.e., the euthanizing of token agents, ignominiously attacking their own black reflections’ troubling comparison (which doubles are for). Such complicit cryptonymy happens during the abjection process/state of exception and, in effect, betraying their own interests (and those of their fellow workers and nature) for profit: Roman fools killed mid-apocalypse, during blind parody’s remediated praxis (re: boom and bust).

Nature is an alien whore to rape through token whores. In turn, their ultimatum is delivered to workers by workers through the abuse of animalized language; i.e., the state police (or vigilantes deputized by the police) aggregating against labor through Pavlovian conditioning that valorizes the hypermasculine performance (and its token assortments) as forever besieged by external/internal threats within the home and inside the mind. The psychomachy drives the conflict forward as a psychological form of warfare in ways useful to the state; i.e., internalized self-hatred and bigotry whose psychosexual violence yields statements of a Great Destroyer labor should look upon in stark horror and submissive awe—a deathly trance that robs them of all fight (in copaganda language, she’s a wolf among sheep: unafraid to “cull the herd” during decay-induced harvest times; but also the barbarian fantasy as a similar protector-rapist fantasy via the knight or cop experienced by the battered housewife drawn to trauma through maladaptive survival mechanisms; i.e., abuse-seeking behaviors that can be curbed through “monster fucking” stratagems that fetishize the cop, but also the bandit as one-in-the-same; e.g., Conan the Barbarian, King Conan, or Conan the Destroyer as a theatrical persona who rescues you but could murder you if he was a bad barbarian, which canonically is an incredibly vague and ambiguous [thus apologetic] proposition). In exchange, the combat that results frequently crosses over into gratuitous hyperbole; it’s not automatically torture porn, obviously. However, within the context of veiled threats during class warfare, it intimates torture in unironic ways: from masked to mask-off, but generally somewhere in the uncomfortable middle.

The same basic distinctions go for white, cis-het Christian men as the most privileged group, with this privilege of the de facto warrior class (traitor) decreasing as you remove various aspects about what contributes to them being canonically coded as “superior” to everyone else: their white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes (that “Aryan” look), but also their genitals (the heteronormative mythic structure tying power to skin color/race science and biological sex).

To this, a gradient of tokenized groups can adopt the same harmful mindset as useful to capital: a mercenary mentality that isn’t afraid to kill whatever the state mobilizes against by wearing their collars and becoming canonical dogs of war to “sic” on the class enemies-of-the-state: “Sic ’em, boy/Get ’em, girl!” The language of “puppy play” doesn’t vanish; it’s collaring and treatment of power and resistance merely become sex-coercive, thus designed to mistreat out-group members by in-group proponents and their subordinates during a given apocalypse. In times of decay while the state eats itself (and removes its mask), the female war boss’ spiked collar of war is surreptitiously swapped out for a domesticated collar that “marries the Amazon off.” Betrothed to a state zombie or death, she is shifted away from the canonically male function of war and “death by Snu Snu” gag to be crammed into the bridal gown (or spiked fetish gear—i.e., the bridal variant of the woman-in-black).

Furthermore, the “collar swap” happens under amatonormative modes of sexual reproduction tied to dimorphized biology and gender roles. In other words, state decay forces the regressive Amazon to submit to male power under an always-patriarchal system—its mythic structure and Symbolic Order designed to summon the false copy of the rebellious Amazon when needed; i.e., the blind rage of the Medusa as a black wolf who devours the state’s foes, but also the traitorous Hippolyta as her pearly white double (exhibit 1a1b). One is nastier and ruder than the other but they ultimately serve the same function in canonical discourse: triangulation.

Male or female, black or white, our would-be killers collectively lack emotional and Gothic intelligence; they do not respect, represent or otherwise practice

  • mutual consent
  • informed consumption and informed consent
  • sex-positive de facto education (social-sexual education; i.e., iconoclastic/good sex education and taught gender roles), good play/emergent gameplay and cathartic wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse prevention patterns) meant to teach good discipline and impulse control (valuing consent, permission, mutual attraction, etc); e.g., appreciative peril (the ironic damsel-in-distress/rape fantasy), invited voyeurism
  • descriptive sexuality

As we’ve already established by looking at the definition of weird canonical nerds, their conduct is quite the opposite; weird canonical nerds don’t practice mutual consent; they endorse

  • uninformed/blind consumption through manufactured consent
  • de facto bad education as bad fathers (function knights) and other role models/authority figures; i.e., canonical sex education and gender education, bad play/intended gameplay resulting in harmful wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse encouragement patterns); e.g., appropriative peril (the unironic damsel-in-distress), uninvited voyeurism
  • prescriptive sexuality

through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis.

As such, they become stupid chasers taught by videogames (effectively Pavlovian simulators of reward and punishment tied to canonical values) to hunt us down—not to immediately destroy us but dominate as forbidden (expendable) fruit, or to confirm their own suspicions about as gender-envious[16] class traitors. This inquisition is less concerned with whether we’re dangerously deviant/degenerate shapeshifters or not and more invested in assigning an automatic criminal extent to our perceived heresy/sin of “making it gay” according to the action formula as dogmatic (unlike their self-righteous secret identities and shifting shapes, of course; they follow the leader/kneel to vertical power and the leader is always right); like Eve, these “bad doms” blame us for their “moments of weakness,” whereas gentler (usually female) WASP-y [white Anglo-Saxon Protestant] detectives give us the murder-mystery approach and study us under a magnifying glass. For both, we’re either bait, traps, or somehow “asking for it” (aka “blaming the victim*”) as odd specimens that just can’t seem to help ourselves. It’s easier to attack us and our representations than it is to blame and try to change the system (also, the system will regard class, race and gender traitors with [usually temporary] accommodations).

*Seeing as we’re about to delve into Ann Radcliffe’s wheelhouse, I may as well get this off my chest: Forget a bone, I have a whole goddamn skeleton (about nine pages worth) to pick with the true crime/murder-mystery genre (as well the canonical female detective and her servant/sidekick and romance options, etc—all things we’ll return to in Volume Two; e.g., exhibit 47a2). For one, the “twist,” in “true crime” is a forced reality that generally confirms the systemic scapegoat after a revelation by the nosy neighbor (“I knew it!”); i.e., the Scooby Doo villain as borrowed from the centuries-older xenophobia and state apologetics of female Neo-Gothic fiction authors like Ann Radcliffe having carved it out in equally cartoonish forms. Radcliffe lived under the power of men, to be sure, and wasn’t in a position of power like Lewis (a man) was, but the degree to which she used her immense (albeit relative) privilege as a white woman-of-letters is dubious, at best; i.e., not to help the oppressed by writing anything other than what she did, but actively choosing to use her unironically xenophobic (and frankly vanilla) rape fantasies to write moderately bigoted novels. Like Tolkien, Radcliffe’s Gothic moderacy is precisely what makes her stories dangerous to sex-positive workers, because behind their veneer of moderacy lies the same function executed by more aggressive, reactionary forms: to stoke class, race and gender suspicions; i.e., moral panic. For Radcliffe, this meant aristocratic, often elderly white folk, but also racist, jingoistic caricatures and poor, non-white people being unmasked by chaste white women (the nun-like, ostensibly ace/queer-coded private eye; e.g., Velma).

Radcliffe, then, was complicit in a larger scheme her fans would breed into and police on and on down the years. As Top Dollar once said, “the idea has become the institution”; in return, Radcliffe’s fiction has become something to unironically defend from “degenerate” outsiders, turning her books, oddly enough, into besieged fortresses that uphold the material conditions of a particular mythic structure. Her relative stupidity becomes something to not only sweep under the rug but embody through half-hearted or worse, bad-faith arguments (“She couldn’t have been expected to be any different than she was, back then…”)—i.e., praxial inertia expressed through popular fiction at large as married to its public defense and emulation of “presumed ignorance” in real life: propaganda through fear and dogma (which Radcliffe relied on).

Despite its connection to the real world (and vice versa), we’ll start with the fiction, itself. In canonical true-crime fiction, the humanized victims are always the middle class (who count), often wracked with murderous wish fulfillment (the “corrupt”) while poor people and suffering are described as a whole monolith; i.e., a white woman’s damaging idea of various social causes and concerns; e.g., “starving African children” or foreign girls being sex trafficked. The latter is always impersonal, less valuable in an individual sense and more a political cause that can be funneled through fabricated copies to sell as “cracked cases” (which one, don’t “crack” anything and two, create more problems than they solve: the ghost of the counterfeit as a means of deliberately twisting the truth to romance the killer and make them more entertaining [thus lucrative] in a canonically fetishized sense: the story “needs” a villain and a victim to sacrifice for the middle-class audience’s entertainment. Frankly there are far better ways to prevent crime than capitalizing recursively on its “solving”: changing material conditions).

Meanwhile, the scapegoated or exoticized minority is left feeling inadequate, constantly having to prove themselves as something other than false and/or dangerous in the court of canonical dogma: “I am not an animal! A fake! A monster!” For example, whereas American slaves were robbed of their culture during the diaspora of the Middle Passage (then policed during Jim Crow after the Civil War), those still living in Africa (and its surrounding territories) experienced first a colonization then a half-hearted “decolonization” that was overwatched and gatekept by the UN as members of capital overseeing the United States’ usual geopolitical tamperings; i.e., as the mother territory siphoning resources out of colonized lands, which were only ever developed enough to accommodate the colonizer populations. Deeper inside, the raw unoccupied reaches of the colonial territories were ripped apart—forcefully deprived of any sense of community or infrastructure, then invited to be poached and raped by the very indigenous populations the state was actively genociding for profit: rape your land for us. It’s the settler-colonial version of a Faustian bargain enacted by class and race traitors.

Assimilation goes both ways, of course, and for every act of open rebellion there were plenty who refused to rebel due to the expected colonial countermeasures (re: “power aggregates,” from Atun-Shei Film’s “Fighting for Freedom“). In America, the Cherokee tried to assimilate by wearing American clothes and respecting their laws and customs (only to be re-invaded once gold was found in what remained of their nation). In Africa, token agents not only police their own kind by assimilating into and adopting white police structures (vis-à-vis Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks); poachers and slavers made and have continued to make whatever living they can through obscene criminogenic conditions first installed by the colonizer nations carving up Africa not once, but multiple times. This would go on to then be romanced and displaced by white-penned Neo-Gothic fictions of various kinds: white men’s open, settler-colonial bigotry and white-saviorism from the likes of Shakespeare, Conrad, Tolkien, Ridley Scott, James Cameron, Frazetta (exhibit 0a2c) and Wes Craven haunting the gutted castles of a seemingly abandoned colonialism with dark, vengeful spirits exorcized by white heroes; but also the so-called “jungle fever” entertained by white women like Radcliffe, Dacre, Charlotte Brontë and Angela Carter’s fixation on a white protagonist’s idea of rape fantasy inside the castled ghost of the counterfeit, and in the American porn industry at large; i.e., as a forbidden fruit to outlaw, commodify and sell back to middle-class people amid a widespread, systemic punishment of the non-white people associated with the image:

In the U.S. and other capitalist countries, rape laws were originally framed for the protection of men of the upper classes, whose women ran the risk of being assaulted. What happens to working-class women has always been of little concern to the courts. As a result, appalling few rapists have ever been prosecuted—appalling few, that is, if black men are exempted from consideration. While the rapists of working-class women have so rarely been brought to justice, the rape charge has been indiscriminately aimed at black men, the guilty and innocent alike (source: Angela Davis’ “Rape, Racism and the Capitalist Setting,” 1978).

Before the Enlightenment, Late Medieval stories and media from the Gothic/Renaissance period featured less persons of color because access to actual persons with dark or non-white skin was historically less common, thus more exotic (though it did happen; a pure-white medieval period is a fascist myth); as such, the pre-fascist destroyer persona was coded as black in relation to the “non-European” as Jewish, Germanic, or the broader “Eastern” (white-skinned: from Italy to Romania to Russia; non-white groups: China, the Middle East and Africa). Until the Enlightenment period began and started to orchestrate widespread settler colonialism (and modern nation-state formation), race-based slavery largely didn’t exist; so the biases were less about skin color and more about general ethnicity and religion; e.g., evil Italian counts, but also Jewish people as go-to scapegoats for the Romans and the Christians. Then and now, these devils were seen as threats to the heteronormative order of things; i.e., returning to nature, to hell and chaos. As such, the devil became something that actively corrupts the youth and women as always running off with them into the night:

(artist: Ary Scheffer)

In turn the women of these paintings would famously be coveted by the artist and the audience, both an object of intense, primal beauty and a site of ever-present hysteria that might at any moment spring from the canvas and tempt the viewer but also smite them (canonical art treats being woman as a lose-lose: “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t”):

(exhibit 1a1a1e1b: Artist, left: Domenico Induno; right: Rembrandt. Few things are as fetishized and cliché as reclining female nudes; but if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! The problem is, the body positivity and debatably asexual relationship between the woman and the artist [which wasn’t always the case, of course; e.g., powerful male patrons fetishizing women through a commissioned artist] shifted to a colonizing of the body image along racialized lines: White supremacy ties non-white bodies to “gross” [excessive] sexual appetites through racialized Enlightenment tropes, leading to fat-shaming and black fetishization [Loner Box’s “Jordan Peterson and Beauty,” 2022; timestamp: 6:40]. As something to create, the curviness of fat white women became, as it were, a thing of the past [or something to seal away and commodify through Rainbow Capitalism[17] and war bosses, etc] that artists like Rubens did once; the devil inside the women who remained—their “hysteria”—became racialized or projected off onto a racialized “other” blamed by white men and white women alike. White woman, though, still suffered, plagued with a variety of eating disorders [which are incredibly crippling and deadly] and desire to escape their own culture through the appropriation of black culture; and vice versa, black culture often sought [and still seeks] to assimilate their colonizers; e.g., shadism [source: “Black-on-Black Racism Is a Problem,” 2015].)

We’ve talked about embodying Satan ourselves in the Miltonian sense. But there’s also the idea of running off with the devil; e.g., Van Halen’s “Runnin’ with the Devil” (1978). We’ll examine deals with the devil much more in Volume Two, but for now I want to express that it isn’t strictly a bad thing. Yes, the desire to escape is a powerful force, and not always a positive one; but it’s largely speaking a pact. As Anna Bidoonism writes,

We have little recourse but to strike a “Faustian bargain” — we’ve to forge, in other words, “a pact with the devil.” […] According to traditional European beliefs — like those held in the Middle Ages and the Elizabethan Era — such bargains were between a person and Satan and have been linked to the quaint pastime of hunting witches (see: Hammer of Witches). Based on some age-old folklore stuff, such pacts came to form a cultural motif — one of a myriad really that carry over from Europe’s medieval past to today’s globalized world. Pacts may have been entered into under duress but also, we may suppose, voluntarily (out of let’s say boredom or a desire for the darker more debauched modes of worldly gratification) [source: “Faustian bargain”; or “Better the [devil emoji] u no,” 2020].

In iconoclastic artwork and thought, the devil is generally two things at once: the machinations of the elite, but also the rebellious potential of the underclass as a dangerous proposition unto itself. This puts the choices we make in a complicated space weighed against canonical forces.

From a canonical standpoint, the “black persona” is a means to an end: someone to binarize inside the settler-colonial system through the blaming of Capitalism’s usual bullshit on a convenient scapegoat: women, people of color and queer persons, etc, as “responsible” for the middle class’s shitty material conditions and two-day weekend (“Mondays, amirite?”) but also ruining their precious illusions with a black mirror that shows them who they really are—perfidious, cowardly and cruel, but also deeply powerless, spellbound and addicted to a highly fake and cheap, sugary view of the world: mythologized forms of sex and human connection turned into a drug that’s sold back to them in order to treat their alienated condition. Unlike our mirrors, Capitalism’s illusions aren’t about solving problems and making the world a better place through building cultural awareness, community and trust; they’re prone to digging up the structure’s own pre-fascist bugbears and marrying them to fascist and post-fascist ones during moral panics. Obviously the recipients of such stigmas and biases don’t suck blood, stab backs, or eat flesh, but the uphill nature of the pedagogy of the oppressed forces them to defend themselves from absurd positions (the queer in true crime is often the red herring if not the victim or villain) using the same basic language that furthers harmful stereotypes written by the colonizer group, including white, cis-het women as writing (and capitalizing on) an inordinate amount of xenophobia.

In short, the white female authors mentioned above triangulate and direct abuse away from themselves as a protected and victimized class (often while they or their fans deny that their fiction doesn’t represent “real bigotry”; i.e., “that’s not what [insert popular fiction, here] means to me!”). It’s a flagrant abuse of privilege and it happens all the time by “activists” lobbying for equality of convenience by acting as gatekeepers and spies: a “boundaries for me, not for thee” stance while lamenting “is nothing sacred?” to us campy fags “ruining” their stories. Consumption is encouraged, not critique (which is useless to the profit motive as something to emulate by the middle class; to think what could be done with that labor and materials if not wasted on these formulaic, bigoted dramas that play defense for the state; it’s a class-conscious mirage swept up in its own endless romance, patented by Radcliffe and carried forward into the ages—i.e., to keep things the same by refusing to challenge anything in a dialectical-material sense).

Adjacent to the consumption itself, cognitive dissonance leads to authorial punching down for critiquing one’s enjoyment/endorsement as the intended audience (or their procurer of goods bred on the same stories, growing up to emulate them as an author themselves: making their own canonical castles and monsters). All cops are bad because all cops spy for the state as class traitors. It’s literally their job: “report any suspicious activity to the authorities, us.”

This includes Radcliffe as the woman to emulate, but also the de facto queen to apologize for as someone who could “do no wrong”; i.e., mysteriously playing detective as an enigmatic[18] class traitor through her xenophobic stories leading to the rise of an entire school of Gothic fiction (the School of Terror) and bad offshoots, but also thoroughly successful ones (Murder, She Wrote [1984] ran for twelve years, but set in a small town, it sets up a bizarre, Hawthorne-esque premise: there’d have to be as many murderers living in the town as victims—all to aggrandize the heroine). All assign guilt by painting others green; or playing at false rebel by painting themselves green and going undercover (“solving crimes for cops” by writing their own made up ones, grounded on a kernel of truth that spreads harmful stereotypes that paint people a particular way based on the author’s imaginary testimony and Gothic theatricalities; i.e., the female sleuth stirring up trouble by punching down from her “chateau” with a glassful of wine, a pet cat (or some other faux familiar) and her day’s equivalent of a quill and inkpot (“two inches of narrow ivory”). As such, the power hierarchy Radcliffe bowed to/refused to challenge in any meaningful sense has now become “TERF island,” exemplified by persons dreaming of similar service to capital having expanded under global Capitalism; i.e., to be like J.K. Rowling, her day’s variant of Ann Radcliffe except Rowling lived to become very, very mask off in open defense of capital—both with her own stabs at the Neo-Gothic fiction, of course, but also her non-magical detective stories and dubious attempts at anonymity[19]. It’s not a paradigm shift, but a radicalizing of the current settler-colonial paradigm, whereupon the chickens come home to empire, roosting inside their ruined castles.

The larger dialogic isn’t purely a question of white women punching down with the fear-and-dogma triangulation approach to propaganda (which many do, including through inaction and dumb self-fulling prophecies serving as regular paydays for themselves); it operates according to axes of oppression that intersect across various tangents and offshoots. But any canonical detective plays detective in and out of the fiction to regain some sense of agency against her assigned targets, a bevy of go-to scapegoats confirmed through the run of the mill: the Gothic fetishes and clichés concerned with material disputes, but also the false preachers, pirates stealing property and other devils-in-disguise working through the usual suspects in any given castle: twists, red herrings, whodunnits, the paranormal vs the explained supernatural (from Radcliffe), and cloak-and-dagger conspiracies (“they’re all in on it”).

These various fictional gimmicks are utterly at home in the Gothic as a wildly popular middle-class distraction that conventionally lacks conscious class character in a holistic sense. It’s a fear of the outside and the invader from within told through a failure of boundaries—to fail at keeping things separated/outside—coupled with the fear-fascination of/with the perceived abomination of an imaginary exotic and “exquisite torture.” The second is a Radcliffe staple; i.e., profitably navigating her inherited trauma by stigmatizing and poring over the suffering of others: the pressures and unromantic realities of amatonormativity (compelled marriage) turned on its head, if but for a moment: the “demon lover,” the rake from hell, as a mutilative form of problematic rape play (stuck within xenophobic cash-grabs) inside the Gothic castle as a bad BDSM torture dungeon often set to music and confusing architecture, mist and darkness. It’s a more Gothically operatic critique of boring things. As such the engagement ring is a symbol of “commitment” in quotes; i.e., duress through material inequality towards a person (the groom) with great expectations and unfair advantage in various courts (the legal system, the job market, the court of public opinion). Critiques of the husband generally elide with a disdain or mistrust-curiosity of the entire “other side.”

Radcliffe certainly excelled at that, the Black Veil hinting at something dreadful just beyond the fabric (with pirates being metaphors for poor people stealing from the rich establishment). To her credit, she didn’t pointedly expand on the harmful Faustian agreement as an open discussion—with de Sade highlighting the rituals from scratch (thus having no clue what he was doing), and whose own theatre treated the harmful violence as negotiated in pursuit of unironic self-destruction—but similar to our comments about the Faustian ludic contract, also appear within Radcliffe’s own stories as a kind of unspoken, harmful agreement made by a total novice; i.e., between her and the reader before the story even starts: “Enter my castle and experience the pleasures of the dungeon!” Except Radcliffe, again, wrote from a position of near-total ignorance[20], thus (as we shall see) focused on unironic mutilation as a foregone conclusion whose criminal hauntologies demand actual rape and murder (sans contract or disclaimer) to work: it’s bad ludo-Gothic BDSM, pure and simple—and over two centuries before E. L. James wrote 50 Shades of Gray (which at least understood the basic idea of open, written, healthy negotiation [“no vaginal fisting…”]; Radcliffe, like most white, middle-class [thus sheltered] women, does not appear to)! This place of ignorance isn’t a defense; as the moral of the Faustian bargain demonstrates, you can be a total idiot and still bargain; worse, you can create stories that lead to other people doing the same (and copying your stories), which Radcliffe certainly did. Moving forward, we need to interrogate these contracts and castles and transform them during our own negotiations, when dealing with the “zombies of Radcliffe”: our aforementioned TERFs as bad players, actors, negotiators, etc.

(artist: Kay)

Concluding the above italicized rant, we’ve now covered the majority of the manifesto tree, thus have all the pieces of the map/siege machine that we’ll need when camping canon. But we still need to consider the roots of camp and where it started within the Gothic mode. For the rest of the thesis proper, we’ll spend one subchapter unpacking the roots of camp relative to forms of power exchange in Gothic poetics, including older detective fictions and the tricky tools of Ann Radcliffe’s enchanting arsenal meant for the classic Gothic heroine (which I wouldn’t bother reclaiming if I didn’t think the tools were worth it); then another subchapter responding to hypermasculine (traditionally male) action heroes whose hungry psychosexuality can be camped within a complex form of BDSM-themed monster theatre. Our doing so isn’t to highlight their cosmetic differences, but instead to consider how the masculine and feminine constantly interrelate back and forth inside the larger mode in dialectical-material ways: on the surface of things as seemingly fractured, divided, and black-and-white, but also hopelessly liminal, interwoven and chaotic; i.e., through the assorted storages of power and complex commands issued at a glance or gazing into the proverbial abyss.

Onto “The Roots of Camp: Reclaiming Demon BDSM“!


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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-FiPatreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] In videogame parlance, the queen of a Communist sort of expression doesn’t represent her status of power under functional Communism (we’re all kings and queens under functional Communism, my angels); it depicts a canonical, “high value” target prioritized by the degree to which the state wants them dead; i.e., a price on their head; e.g., Martin Luther King Jr. as vilified and targeted for assassination by the FBI. Similar assassinations occurred all throughout the Civil Rights era, and continue in videogames’ neoliberalizing of theatrical violence; i.e., presenting labor movements as monster hordes piloted by a brain bug controlling the mass: the head on the snake of the revolutionary body. Like Medusa, this becomes something to behead and turn against the mass of seditious workers fighting for their rights. Like, how dare they!

[2] The basic idea could be called class envy, or a desire not to address Capitalism, but instead assimilate to a higher rung by punching down against the class you were born into.

[3] Jetpacks, Stepford Wives/tradwives, and various other false promises capital can never deliver on.

[4] (from the glossary): State propaganda also self-replicates—with Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edwards Bernays, famously applying the principles of political propaganda to marketing in his 1928 capitalist apologia, Propaganda. The book argues for a rebranding of propaganda called “public relations,” one where “invisible” people create knowledge and propaganda to rule over the masses, with a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and citizen responses; that “engineering consent” of the masses would be vital for the survival of democracy. In Bernays’ own words, he explains:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

Despite a patent rebrand filled with cheerful Liberalism, Bernays went on to inspire Hitler’s minster of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, but also Hitler himself (as well as American propagandists during and following WW2). Hitler did his best to emulate American media, seeing its coercive value by creating his own Hollywood (see: Hilter’s Hollywood, 2018). Helped from the likes of commercial-savvy artists like Goebbels, he copied Charlie Chaplin’s toothbrush mustache, radicalized Bernays’ ideas on propaganda, and painstakingly toiled over the creation of the Nazi symbol itself (Jim Edwards’ “Hitler as Art Director: What the Nazis’ Style Guide Says About the ‘Power of Design,'” 2018). Behind the illusions, Hitler remained cutthroat, buoyed to chancellorship by the German elite defaulting on American loans, whereupon he promptly killed his political enemies and spent the next decade convincing his nation to fight to the death. In short, he was a bad capitalist (unlike the American elite).

[5] What David Roden, in Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (2015), calls speculative posthumanism:

The radical augmentation scenarios discussed in the previous two sections indicate to some that a future convergence of NBIC [Nano, Bio, and Information Technologies; Cognitive Science] technologies could lead to a new “posthuman” form of existence: the emergence of intelligent and very powerful nonhumans. In particular, we noted that the development of artificial general intelligence might lead, in Good’s words, to an “intelligence explosion” that would leave humans collective redundant, or worse. Following an influential paper by the computer scientist Virnor Vinge, this hypothetical event is often referred to as “the technological singularity” (source).

In dystopian sci-fi, this is generally a Communist scapegoat; e.g., S.H.O.D.A.N. (exhibit 42f1), the “cyber-Medusa” from System Shock (1994).

[6] The very machinations that Frank Herbert warned about in Dune (1965): “Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

[7] English is a bastard language told through perpetual conquest; i.e., “sex” is a liminal expression that canonically synonymizes sex/rape as associated with the language of conquerors: to fuck (versus longer and less direct Norman-French bastard words). While the two cannot be separated, the canonical invocation of the theatrical paradox deliberately ignores the pleasure of a thoroughly natural and healthy activity (to have sex)—one whose physical complexities (e.g., girls fart during sex, or “fart,” “queefing” when air builds up inside their vagina, especially during doggystyle; also “edging”) have been historically-materially conflated with unironic harm, one and all. Subversions of this linguo-material affect must occur through catharsis as an imperiled position to reclaim what has become unironically violent; i.e., by using the same language as taken back for sex-positive purposes: to heal from lived/inherited trauma and prevent harm in the future, often by reveling in the wicked, bad, naughty theatre of the devil’s position as a praxial underdog who enjoys being the interesting member of the troupe. Invisibility is a prey mechanism, but who wants to be boring (thus inert) when appealing to the virtues of theatrical expression? “The nail that sticks out gets hammered” makes for poor proletarian praxis.

[8] Coming from the idea that sex in prison is generally an expression of power inside a highly unnatural, controlled environment built to exploit people by enslaving them in Constitutional language:

The 13th Amendment, ratified in 1865, says: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Scholars, activists and prisoners have linked that exception clause to the rise of a prison system that incarcerates Black people at more than five times the rate of white people, and profits off of their unpaid or underpaid labor (source: The Westport Library’s “Thirteenth Amendment Loophole: Penal Labor and Mass Incarceration,” 2023).

[9] We will examine this controlling of the war narrative more in Volume One; i.e., American war journalism following Vietnam; e.g., GDF’s “How the US Military Censors Your News” (2023).

[10] “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim” (source: Gustav Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, 1895).

[11] As Abigail Lister writes in “The Matrix | Explaining Jean Baudrillard and the Desert of the Real” (2023): In his 1981 philosophical treatise Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard examined popular culture and argued that in the new technological world—and I say this in the simplest way—reality has ceased to exist. […] we’ve lost all connection with the real, and instead live in the world of the hyperreal. Reality no longer exists; we aren’t connected to the real world; we live in a simulation. […] When [Morpheus] invites Neo into Nebuchadnezzar’s simulation system to reveal the secrets of the real world, he says “welcome to the desert of the real.” This line comes directly from Baudrillard, back in his explanation of Borges’ 1:1 map: “It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the desert which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself” (source).

[12] A one-way relationship whose interactions occur between the artist and their audience on various registers. In relation to the Internet Age, Essence of Thought describes a parasocial relationship as such:

Though, before we do anything, we first define our terms, starting with what a parasocial relationship is, and to understand that we can take a look at the words of Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, published when they first introduced the concept in 1956. I’d just like to apologize in advance for the unnecessary gendering. Their paper reads:

“One of the striking characteristics of the new mass media—radio, television, and the movies—is that they give the illusion of face-to-face relationship with the performer… The most remote and illustrious men are met as if they were in the circle of one’s peers; the same is true of a character in a story who comes to life in these media in an especially vivid and arresting way. We propose to call this seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer a para-social relationship” [“Mass Communication and Para-social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance”].

They also go on to add that:

“The persona offers, above all, a continuing relationship. His appearance is a regular and dependable event, to be counted on, planned for, and integrated into the routines of daily life. His devotees ‘live with him’ and share the small episodes of his public life-and to some extent even of his private life away from the show. Indeed, their continued association with him acquires a history, and the accumulation of shared past experiences gives additional meaning to the present performance. This bond is symbolized by allusions that lack meaning for the casual observer and appear occult to the outsider. In time, the devotee — the “fan” — comes to believe that he “knows” the persona more intimately and profoundly than others do; that he “understands” his character and appreciates his values and motives” [ibid.].

Now, since the 1950s, parasocial relationships have gone on to establish themselves as real relationships, both in psychology and media studies, they’re just not relationships in the traditional sense, since the flow of information is largely one-sided, moving from the creator to the audience member, something that is known as a parasocial interaction (source: the script for Essence of Thought’s video, “Lily Orchard Sexted A 16 Year Old – 2nd Victim Testimony,” 2022).

[13] To be fair, the proletarian secret identity can allow victims of trauma to face their abusers without exposing themselves to a confessional of public scrutiny and shame regarding taboo subjects (and societal tendencies to blame the victim) but also—with revolutionary cryptonomy—to hide our scars and trauma from our enemies. We can show them what we want them to see while minimizing risk to ourselves (more on this in Volume Three, Chapter Five).

[14] A condition whereupon meaning is determined by the direction of something.

[15a] From a theatrical standpoint, the distinction between reality and imaginary is arguably futile; from a psychological standpoint, “real” is generally a prey’s readiness to fight or flight, freeze or fawn in an instant, which leads to many false alarms that feel “half-real,” in this case trapped between the fantasy and the unironic nightmare as haunting one’s daily life in an uncanny sense. They bleed into each other during a surreal game of tag—one where trauma is both inherited and passed along through the mark as touched by past examples or otherwise susceptible to them; i.e., the seeking of a protector within oneself or through others/vicarious experience that speaks to one’s trauma. Likewise, the subsequent chase of the cathartic variant becomes its own, special madness to revel in; i.e., like a good metal concert or nightclub act, the idea is agency through theatrical or controlled chaos that harms no one. Hard or violence-themed kink such as rape play or monster fucking can seem like black magic or madness, because it generally employs the same aesthetics and many people—at first glance, ironically enough—might not be able to tell the difference. But those who have been through it understand. Maybe not to the same degree, but generally “get” the basic idea as medicinal, validating or otherwise therapeutic and often, yes, profoundly erogenous: the moth to the “flame” as a theatrical gesture to establish boundaries with, thus genuine safety and control.

[15b] Metal can simultaneously sing about great emotions that lack conscious class character—e.g., Axel Rudi Pell’s “Follow the Sign” or Dio’s “Holy Diver” shout loudly about frustration, nightmares (and Space Jesus) but don’t point the finger at the elite; our revolutionary doubles and their cryptonymy need to, including their masks (allegory) but also their apocalypses (revelations) as working through paradox to hide and show at the same time. Even before we do, the anger should be a clue, but also the complex deceptions/doubling and liminal expression during oppositional praxis/psychopraxis (warring theories).

[15c] Lions, tigers, jaguars, etc. Conversely, small cats are generally regarded as “kept” pets that lounge around and look pretty. As such, the cat as a sex symbol is regarded as “small,” its killing implements either removed (the claws) or vestigial through the softening of features that communicate symbiotically with human masters; e.g., the dog’s varied facial expressions versus the tiger’s flat affect (cats in general did not evolve alongside humans, thus tend to have less expressive [by human standards] faces).

[16] Gender envy being the idea that heteronormativity is tiresome and generally something that class traitors take out on gender-non-conforming persons.

[17] Black or white, genuine body positivity and its recuperation is a complicated and diverse subject, something that we shall return to many, many times in the book.

[18] So mysterious, that Robert Miles—writing of Rictor Norton’s 1999 biography of the famous author, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe—had this to say about her, “Ann Radcliffe was, in her day, the obscurest woman of letters in England. Her contemporaries despaired of learning anything about her, while Christina Rossetti abandoned her planned biography for lack of materials” (source). Well, mysterious or not, her work and silence both speak volumes and for themselves: though a moderate bigot, Radcliffe was still a bigot and belonged to the same slave-owning society that Austen did (re: Said’s “Jane Austen and Empire”). She still upheld the same outdated and harmful institutions of marriage. More than Austen, Radcliffe not only upheld the same society’s fabricated, island-fortress xenophobia; she canonized them to such a degree that Austen threw shade her way and wrote a whole novel camping Radcliffe’s books/castled spaces of interrogating power. Austen > Radcliffe.

[19] Styling herself as “Robert Galbraith,” a historically anti-LGBTQ+ conversion therapist:

But after Troubled Blood (2016) came under fire earlier this week for a transphobic subplot in which a serial killer hunts his victims while dressed in women’s clothing, Rowling denied that the alias is a reference to “ex-gay” therapy. Rowling “wasn’t aware of Robert Galbraith Heath” when selecting the name, a representative said. “Any assertion that there is a connection is unfounded and untrue” (source: Nico Lang’s “J.K. Rowling Denies Pen Name Is Inspired by Anti-LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapist,” 2020).

Whereas Radcliffe could feasibly retire and live a mysterious life when things got too hot during the French Revolution (choosing to write no more than she did, and yet having made enough to never work another day in her life), Rowling lives in the Internet Age, and grew and developed under Thatcher’s England. But even so, Radcliffe’s actions for her time say plenty about her stances, and those were preserved in her works. However well-written they may otherwise be, bigotry is bigotry and she chose to further it and stand by her actions; i.e., her posthumous essay, “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826). In the WASP-y British tradition, she spoke with gentle, moderate bigotry as a real-life phantom (and for those of you who might point out, “She’s dead and can’t defend herself!” Radcliffe had over two decades to write “On the Supernatural in Poetry.” I’d say she should have chosen her words more carefully—but I don’t think caution was the problem; her politics were).

[20] The problem extends to many privileged voices as fundamentally white; e.g., philosophy, the STEM fields, theatre (comedy and drama), art, music, the law and academia, etc, operating on the anxious desire to name, dissect and label everything after/about themselves. Yet, those are historically men’s fields (wherein men are accustomed to the notion of self-promotion and a sexist division of labor that didn’t tie them to the homestead). In the rise of women’s literature, the act of novel-writing has for centuries been a female-heavy profession—a white female profession with limited spaces (due to women being pressured to do women’s work, including—you guessed it—having babies).

Like most white women, then, Radcliffe hogs the spotlight instead of sharing it with others. She writes as if the story (and the universe) revolve around her—which, even if you reject overt bigotry and radicalism can still be bigoted if your story dehumanizes other groups or excludes them on purpose (e.g., Stranger Things); or equally problematic, if the story infantilizes these groups through a white person’s idea of other cultures assimilating to her Western way of life—i.e., within a hierarchy that grants her power over them (the servant trope). Radcliffe does all of this, proving: that moderacy during moral panic contributes to the moral panic’s criminogenic conditions, wherein white authors constantly find ways to make themselves the universal victims/protagonists while making other victimized groups targets of state violence; re: triangulation. Her views and ideas of the world were informed by said world as she found it, and her contributions to the world notably contributed to its continuation (graciously leaving us with some incredibly powerful tools that we can use to camp her work while making our own).

Book Sample: Thesis Argument—Capitalism Sexualizes Everything

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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.

Thesis Statement: the Gothic Mode and Its Reclamation

“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is morning to be good on?” 

—Gandalf, The Hobbit

(artist: Martin Sobr)

Picking up where “Book Sample: Thesis Proper Opening and Essay—Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox” left off…

I have divided my thesis statement into five pieces:

  • the thesis paragraph: Contains my entire book’s central argument, distilled into one paragraph (and provides the full definition of heteronormativity).
  • the thesis body: Summarizes Gothic Communism’s primary foil, the state—specifically its monopoly of violence, state of exception and Protestant work ethic in relation to the historical materialism of the state’s propaganda (canon); i.e., canon’s monomyth, Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern and narrative of the crypt amounting to the Shadow of Pygmalion.
  • Pieces of the Camp Map (from the Manifesto Tree)“: Unpacks the main sections from the manifesto tree in relation to oppositional praxis; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm (camp).
  • The Roots of Camp“: Examines canonical demon BDSM and Radcliffe’s fiction/tricky tools as popular literary devices that desperately need to be camped (with ludo-Gothic BDSM—a concept we’ll introduce during the “camp map” and explore much, much more in Volumes One, Two and Three).
  • Overcoming Praxial Inertia“: Explores some popular examples of canonical, monomyth Beowulf-style heroes and the threat they represent as also needing to be camped (re [from Volume One, onwards]: to have nature’s monstrous-feminine revenge—specifically the whore’s [from Volume Two’s Demon Module]—against profit and the state pimping them).

Note: While preparing this volume for its 2025 promotion, I decided to write a small reprise preceding the thesis paragraph. Composed of new and cited material (totaling ten pages), its design accounts for the undeveloped portions of my thesis argument. To it, said reprise deliberately covers the work I wrote after my thesis volume was completed (whose argument I would steadily build on across four-going-on-five additional books, especially regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM and its tremendous utility when challenging Capitalism). —Perse, 3/22/2025

Two Years Later (give or take): Returning to My Thesis Argument after Five Books

Have you ever talked to someone
And you feel you know what’s coming next?
It feels pre-arranged

—Bruce Dickenson; “Deja Vu,” on Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time (1986)

This reprise seeks to revisit things I’ve written before, and which I cannot entirely change, but nonetheless want to expose and frontload you with hindsight I lacked, back then; i.e., the fact that my work on camping the canon through Gothic poetics would go on, across five books, to focus extensively on Metroidvania (to a lesser extent) and ludo-Gothic BDSM and the palliative Numinous (to a greater extent). For further information specifically on ludo-Gothic BDSM, refer to my new webpage cataloging the subject and its history as coined and synthesized by me. A similar page exists for Metroidvania. —Perse

(artist: George Roux)

History (therefore time) is a circle; in Gothic, it’s a structure that—like Dracula’s castle—can magically reappear again and again to be entered and explored in search of power and knowledge (therefore radical change through intense healing when facing trauma; re [from Volume One]: “If you want to critique power, you must go where it is”). Per the chronotope, space-time becomes familiar and alien in hauntological and cryptonymic/cryptomimetic forms, having a Numinous, therefore portentous (and often psychosexual, above) signature. All the same, it’s surprisingly easy to take the past and its slogans for granted, then, which is why when reversing abjection we want to self-introspect as much as reflect upon the work of others on the same shared Aegis (to avoid Marx’ tragedy and farce while, at the same time, camping his ghost). As I will write towards the end of this book volume, “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.” So that is what this short reprise will do!

Please note, the thesis paragraph situated directly after said reprise is my book series thesis argument as written in late 2023. Therefore, it is broader and more complex in its language than my argumentation would become, in later books of said series; i.e., which narrowed their own arguments down to focus more heavily on ludo-Gothic BDSM to achieve systemic catharsis, deliberately healing from and combatting rape through oppositional synthesis (daily habits): by illustrating mutual consent through informed labor exchanges; e.g., through Metroidvania and the palliative Numinous (which this volume does introduce and explore). This expansion also included working more and more with other models (which we’ll get to, in a moment); i.e., each of us ghosts to dance, in smaller form, with the Medusa—as something Communist to invoke through whatever shadowy monstrous-feminine likenesses we leave behind before we die; re: the Gothic chase of the Numinous, fearing the “Gothic” past (from Walpole onwards) to, through such blatant fakeries, proceed to camp the ever-loving shit out of it. For me, that’s a dark mommy domme (of the gentler sort, below): a “castle in the flesh” whose half-real morphology invokes the same transformative qualities that an actual Gothic castle might (more on this, deeper in)!

(artist: Nyx)

In Volume Zero, our focus is mainly “canon vs camp,” whereas Volume One goes on to isolate and identify nature as monstrous-feminine (while also articulating the state’s various tools—re: its trifectas, monopolies, and qualities of capital—to exploit nature with); i.e., as something for the state to dehumanize and harvest for profit (thus genocide through rape and war).

In turn, Volume Two would begin to expand on ludo-Gothic BDSM in the Poetry Module (especially towards the end, in its preface), followed by the Monster Module’s own thesis argument:

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 (source: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis,” 2024).

From there, the Undead Module would explore this idea vis-à-vis the undead and the rememory process per ludo-Gothic BDSM, but the Demon Module would really crack things open; i.e., with its own establishing of the whore’s paradox and whore’s revenge against profit, thus rape. Before it could do that, though, I would need to define rape much more clearly than I had done previously in Volume Zero or One; re (from the Poetry Module):

I want to define [rape] as something broadened beyond its narrow definition, “penetrative sex meant to cause harm by removing consent from the equation.” To that, there is a broad, generalized definition I devised in “Psychosexual Martyrdom” (2024), which will come in useful where we examine unironic forms of rape, but also “rape” as something put into quotes; i.e., during consent-non-consent as a vital means of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,” generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) [emphasis, me]: finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).

Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale, either type committed by a Great Destroyer (a Gothic trope of abuse of the worse, unimaginable sort, rarefying as a person, onstage) of some kind or another as abstracting unspeakable abuse. It’s a translation, which I now want to interrogate with the chapters ahead. So we must give examples that are anything but ironic before adding the irony afterward as a theatrical means of medicine; i.e., rape play challenging profit through the usual Gothic articulations in service to workers and nature at large.

Simply put, to be raped is to be deprived of agency facing something you cannot defeat through force alone (rape victims are often brutalized for trying to fight back)—capital and its enforcers, pointedly raping nature and things of nature-as-monstrous-feminine by harvesting them during us-versus-them arguments according to Cartesian thought; terror is a vital part of the counterterrorist reversal humanizing Medusa during activism as a psychosexual act of martyrdom. There is always damage, even if you survive, but there is a theatrical element that lets you show your scars; i.e., during consent-non-consent as an artistic, psychosexual form of protest through ludo-Gothic BDSM: having been on the receiving end of state abuse as something to demonstrate and play with for educational, activist purposes—generally with a fair degree of revolutionary cryptonymy (showing and hiding ourselves and our trauma).

By comparison the state uses masks, music (and other things) as a coercive, complicit means of cryptonymically threatening us with great illusions. These rape our minds without irony in service to profit. Such proponents are generally people in our own lives who don the mask/persona of the Great Destroyer to frighten us into submission; i.e., by threatening us with total annihilation as a force of unreality that feels shapeless and overwhelming yet humanoid. This is no laughing matter, nor is subverting it during rape play, both of which the rest of this volume (and Volume Three after that) will explore at length (source: “A Note about Rape/Rape Play; or, Facing the Great Destroyer,” 2024).

From there, I would write on my website, several days ago (concerning my work and rape as something to camp through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which I wanted to update on my one-page promo for the entire series):

[…] In short, to establish healthy grounds for humor and play during Gothic and camp is to give workers control over things over things normally out of their control; i.e., putting “rape” in quotes during calculated risk, which ludo-Gothic BDSM essentially treats as activism when developing Gothic Communism to break Capitalist Realism; re: (from the Demon Module):

try to understand how demonic desires are shadowy and repressed, given form by oppositional poetics in dialectical-material argument. So when I say “revenge” from here on out, I do so with concerns to the usual us-versus-them, cops-and-victims language that demons manifest as/relate to us with (and we them) while pinned between nation-states/corporations and nature growing increasingly turbulent; i.e., said revenge had by one against another pursuant to worker or bourgeois needs. Rebellion through demonic poetics happens through a particular thesis to counteract: nature is monstrous-feminine (re: Volume One)—a whore under state control, which the elite rape for profit, and for which both sides seek revenge before, during and after structural abuse. The exploitation is endless because profit and labor value (of nature) are endless!

(artist: PiMo)

Demons, then, are whores under Western (Cartesian) dominion opposite virgins, but also are virgins depending on the circumstances; e.g., subjugated Amazons like Psylocke, left. This need for state control and dominion introduces a paradox from which a new thesis can arise during ludo-Gothic BDSM (for this chapter/module, indented for emphasis):

Ludo-Gothic BDSM has many theoretical definitions[1a] and applications. In practice, though, I frequently utilize it through rape play that paradoxically achieves catharsis; i.e., by putting “rape” in quotes, thus healing from rape without quotes. Often by rape survivors, such people classically find power/agency through theatrical reenactments of unequal, unfair or otherwise rapacious treatment and conditions; i.e., by relying on a concept I’ll heretofore call “the whore’s paradox.”

(artists: Ray Sugarbutt and Sammy Stocking)

The paradox is simple: demons are maidens and maidens are demons, but both are virgins and whores, and each finds power (and knowledge) according to how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyways; i.e., (de)valued, mid-exchange, thus used to humanize or dehumanize the demonized through performance and play. Per Marx and myself, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything. Nature is monstrous-feminine as such, “empowerment” applying to any aspect of our life, bodies, violence and terror the state wishes to monopolize/control, and any trope, convention, cliché or fetish that might be used to degrade, humiliate, rape or otherwise demonize/dominate beings “of nature” per capital’s qualities (re: settler-colonial, heteronormative and Cartesian); i.e., that we can reclaim during ludo-Gothic BDSM, hence through unequal power letting us “get a leg up,” topping from a position of normal disadvantage to have our revenge: perceived disempowerment becoming a paradoxical, interchangeable means of escape, regarding universal worker liberation onstage and off (versus equality of convenience inside the text).

(artist: ALT3R4TI0N)

To do so is to break capital’s hold on all things demons, darkness and nature they stole and monopolized, in turn smashing their own abjection against them and breaking Capitalist Realism with our Aegis—to deny capital’s dead labor and language feeding on living labor and language according to what power and knowledge we exchange to and fro. The whore’s revenge is to break the profit motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with. We aggregate power differently than state forms, outlasting and outperforming them to dismantle their harvesting mechanisms, social and material, foreign and domestic.

Nature, then, is always a whore who punches up against state pimps to end profit as an endless structure of genocide. History more broadly could be described as whores vs pimps, hence workers vs the state; i.e., something the seemingly cannot die, but whose aforementioned whores are as imperishable as Medusa despite being beheaded.

That’s basically the gist of the whore’s revenge during the whore’s paradox (source: “A Rape Reprise,” 2024).

Furthermore, I would also reflect on the entirety of my series (doing so after having just tried to explain it to someone who had never heard of my work before); and this is what I would write (and post on the same promo page):

Sex Positivity is non-profit/entirely funded through donations and commissions; i.e., I am unemployed, and any money I raise goes towards helping the people I work with. You can donate directly to me through

as well as through any of the donation links attached to the individual model promotions; i.e., those found on the Sex Work page specifically or on the individual webpages built for my muses; e.g., Nyx’ page and the various details it contains: an Aegis for where power is found, stored and expressed!

(artist: Nyx)

Concerning what these donations and commissions ultimately go towards, this entire project is the result. Sex Positivity seeks to raise awareness and engender activism towards and from all workers, but especially sex workers and the marginalized more broadly (many of whom turn towards sex work to survive); i.e., I do sex work, myself (see: “About the Author“), and the vast majority of sex workers I operate alongside are marginalized in some shape or form. To it, the overarching goal of my work is to humanize the dehumanized by reclaiming monstrous poetic tools of dehumanization; i.e., during informed mutual labor exchange, using the dialectical-material context (and social-sexual factors) of every exchange separately and together to vividly demonstrate protest: through artistic invigilation and expression, one whose holistic, intersectionally solidarized cooperation unfolds during a larger pedagogy of the oppressed (and its modular axes of privilege and oppression synthesizing praxis, mid-duality and -opposition). Those who walk away from Omelas, we seek to amplify and mobilize our cause using what we got—to unite and stand against the state, profit and capital’s various traitors (cops, which pimps are, token or not) by reclaiming not just our bodies, sexualities and genders, but our labor and its holistic performative value: developing Gothic Communism through stochastic means and de facto education. The state from the beginning is a pimp, one that antagonizes nature as monstrous-feminine to put it (and those of it) cheaply to work; i.e., by pimping it genocidally through imbricating persecution networks guided by pre-emptive revenge labeling workers (and nature) as “terrorist,” “black,” “alien,” “witch,” and “other,” etc; e.g., Amazons and the Medusa—with Athenian women tokenizing to attack themselves and the natural world they (and other workers) belong to. In turn, sex work is the oldest profession, hence the oldest form of labor exploitation through rape (which is all that profit, hence wage and labor theft, is); the oldest form of worker revenge is the whore’s against profit, which sex workers (and by extension all workers) attain through collective protest raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness on all registers: reversing the terrorist/counterterrorist refrain (thus abjection process) through ludo-Gothic BDSM (see: footnote, above) cryptonymically playing with power as it is understood in society at large (re: Gothic poetics and the dialectic of the alien). We not only heal from rape as something to survive by playing with it; we seek systemic change and universal liberation by playfully putting “rape” in quotes, showing and hiding various things during the cryptonymy process, mid-paradox (refer to “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents” and “Audience, Art and Reading Order” for further summaries of these terms and arguments). To accomplish this, we must endure shameless tokenization, unchecked police brutality and widespread decay in the interim. Sex workers are offshoots of the Medusa, which the state has exploited since Antiquity into the present space and time; i.e., from Athens, Sparta and Rome into the First, Second and Third Reichs leading into Capitalism and Pax Americana as it currently exists. Labor has infinite value, and the elite only have what power we give them in that respect; i.e., monopolies are impossible, provided we fight back any way we can; re: by showcasing our humanity on the very fruit the elite want to harvest. On our Aegis, Medusa speaks through us, our peachy cakes and pies freezing capital Numinously in its tracks, breaking Capitalist Realism. “Stare and tremble,” indeed! (source: “My Book: Gothic Communism”).

(artist: Nyx)

Concerning this reprise, that’s the gist of things I want to supply you with, moving forward; i.e., less with actual foresight, and more the ostensible clairvoyance of someone having been here before (multiple times) and written about it (also multiple times). So, if things seem a bit structurally confusing ahead and you suddenly find yourself feeling lost in the Labyrinth, consider what I just supplied as Ariadne’s thread—not to lead you out of the labyrinth, but rather to furnish you with the clarity needed: to proceed and transform, thus subvert said maze (and its monsters) from within according to where power is stored, meaning as something alien and fetish (fearsome). Take back what they try to pimp as alien (from my abstract, modified while writing this reprise):

Simply put, Gothic has that mood, that cool factor to do the trick; i.e., by subverting monstrous language, which normally dehumanizes workers and nature through popular stories furthering abjection (us versus them): to suitably humanize the harvest, which capital (and its Realism) can only pimp out when vengefully raping nature as monstrous-feminine whore. The whore’s revenge against profit, then, is to fuck back on the same Aegis; i.e., when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis. When done correctly, its paradoxical, cryptonymic exposure will set you free (re: silence is genocide), but reversing abjection must happen together as one—per intersectional solidarity healing from rape through a shared pedagogy of the oppressed: walking away from Omelas and towards post-scarcity while becoming better stewards of nature than historically have ever existed (assimilation is poor stewardship)! Medusa demonstrates there is power in what they try to control; take it back by using it in ways they can’t steal from you! Become the Gorgon!

(artist: Nyx)

To it (and to conclude), exploitation and liberation exist paradoxically in the same half-real territories (on and offstage). From capital in small to the world at large, then, universal liberation all starts with our bodies and the labor attached to them, but also what we make as part of something bigger you can read about in these books (writ in disintegration, but living impossibly on in undead, demonic, Ozymandian versions of themselves)! Capitalism sexualizes everything but it cannot monopolize that process nor its smaller-to-bigger imbricating labor exchanges (and their modular-but-intersecting polities’ privilege/oppression). Turn said process (abjection) anisotropically against the elite; become Medusa to remind our jailors of their own colossal hubris—re: by breaking Capitalist Realism on your Aegis, humanizing the harvest to expose the state (and its proponents) as inhumane! “From cops to states to billionaires and Pygmalions, ACAB, ASAB, ABAB, APAB, etc; re: the state is straight, thus heteronormative, settler-colonial and Cartesian” (source: “Rape Reprise”)! We don’t need them; in fact, we’re better off without them!

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone, 3/22/2025

Thesis Paragraph: Capitalism Sexualizes Everything

“Enthrall me with your acumen.”

—Hannibal Lector, Silence of the Lambs (1991)

After deliberating about the keyword format, I’ve decided to keep them bold and color-coded to illustrate their presence in the thesis statement in a very graphical way. Many of these will have been defined already. I’m highlighting them again to show their usage as a group of interrelating terms. —Perse

(artist: Jessica Nigri)

This book wasn’t written/illustrated for Academia, but if it were and I was seriously treating it as my PhD to defend, I would argue that it addresses a knowledge gap regarding the synthesis of Gothic theory with anarcho-Communism, gender studies, ludology and Marxist argumentation (my thesis paragraph, indented for emphasis):

Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all work to some degree, including sex work, resulting in sex-coercive media and gender roles via universal alienation through monstrous language; this requires an iconoclasm to combat the systemic bigotries that result—a (as the title reads) ‘liberating of sex work under Capitalism through iconoclastic art.’ Gothic Communism is our ticket towards that end; i.e., developing anarcho-Communism, hence a post-scarcity world without nation-states and their built-in, thus historical-material, genocide and exploitation of workers. My teaching approach stresses oppositional praxis according to sex positivity vs sex coercion when reclaiming the harmful language of stigma, bias, control, fear and hate from our colonizers (capitalists), but also power exchange and resistance as a cultural means of social-sexual catharsis and theatrical disguise; i.e., cultivating emotional and Gothic intelligence through a reclaimed Gothic mode of artistic, thus political collective/self-expression (monstrous poetics and applied Gothic theories). Capitalism sexualizes everything for the profit motive using canonical (dimorphic/Cartesian) monstrous poetics to brainwash workers and pit them against each other during Capitalist Realism (core argument); i.e., the Shadow of Pygmalion‘s monomyth/Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern: unironic rape and war are everywhere because Capitalism rapes everything for profit, including people’s minds, according to a profit motive that synonymizes all of these things. Utilized deliberately by Gothic Communism, subversive Amazonomachia‘s ‘dark forces’—its famous, Miltonian paradoxes[1b] and manifesto coordinates: the tenets, theories, and means and materials of expression, fetishes and clichés, etc—can revert Capitalist Realism’s doomed narrative of the crypt by putting “rape” and “war” in quotes, recultivating the Superstructure and reclaiming the Base during class/culture war’s camping of canon. The asymmetrical nature of guerrilla warfare obviously covers of an extremely wide range of artistic possibilities, but generally focuses on sex work and its canonical, dimorphic sexualization, or work in general as similarly sexualized, and heteronormative enforcement/the colonial binary established through regressive Amazonomachia as something to camp; i.e., through ironic kink, fetishization, and BDSM rituals/aesthetics (of psychosexual power and death, stigma and revenge, but also catharsis and transformation, etc) with demonic/undead poetics synthesized through the ‘creative successes’ of proletarian praxis as a class-conscious, ready-for-war response to/critique of capital.

Heteronormativity is obviously something to critique through our thesis argument (and its bevvy of resources), so I want to give its full definition before we proceed into the thesis body:

(from the companion glossary’s exhibit 3b: Author/artist: Meg-Jon Barker from “What’s Wrong with Heteronormativity?” featuring their 2016 book, Queer: A Graphic History.)

Heteronormativity is both highly unnatural and normalized by capital. It is the supremely harmful idea wherein heterosexuality and its relative gender norms are prescribed/enforced to normalized, institutional extremes by those in power—i.e., the Patriarchy. In Marxist terms, capitalists and state agents own, thus control, the media, using it to enforce heterosexuality and the colonial (cis-)gender binary through advertisement on a grand scale (re: the canonical Superstructure). This influence reliably affects how people respond, helping them recognize “the social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law”—re: Lacan’s Symbolic Order. Acceptance of this Order when it is decidedly harmful is manufactured consent, leading to basic human rights abuses perpetrated by the state and its bourgeois actors. Pro-bourgeois abuses happen through various concentric lenses of normativity—heteronormativity, amatonormativityAfronormativity, homonormativity and queernormativity, etc—that appeal tokenistically to the same colonial binary and its heteronormative mythic structure; i.e., that which conflates human biology (sex and skin color), thus sex and gender roles within a transgenerational curse: the king saw the black, queer and/or female monster and went mad because he had been alienated from them and himself. The curse of the castle and the Shadow of Pygmalion, then, is reliable decay and socio-material madness felt through this engineered tension as being ultimately profitable for the elite and detrimental to everyone else (whether they’re defending the institution or not). Heteronormativity doesn’t just explain away ignominious death, but essentializes and endorses it; i.e., the hallmark couple looks happy so the system must work, right? All you have to do is conform, consume and obey…

(exhibit 0a2b1b1a: Artist, left: Devilhs; middle: Pat Benatar; top-right: Doruk Golcu; bottom-right: Angel Witch. Hysteria [also called “the wandering womb,” exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1] is commonly portrayed in the monstrous-feminine “Medusa” hairstyle[2] as immodest; i.e., lacking decency or virtue by being visually “loud” [making unironic admonishment of such descriptive sexuality/gender a form of tone-policing: “Hush, darling!”]. But in the same breath, anxiety more broadly is a symptom of society whereupon women [or beings perceived as women] are made by men into what men want to see: a damsel who is sexy by disempowered, or “threatening” in ways they can “kettle” [to surround and attack, a police anti-protestor tactic]. This nuts-and-bolts approach gives little space for the woman to classically voice her concerns, so it surges forth from her Frankensteinian body like ghosts and lightning—a tall, imposing, undead passion of suggestibly orgasmic release that men classically view as “weakness” [which they then sexualize]. Losing control isn’t just a symptom, then, but a means to addressing larger historical-material concerns in the self-same language hijacked for proletarian dialogs: “Fuckin’ metal!”)

Please note: The thesis statement focuses more on canon itself, whereas the “camp map” is about camping everything we talk about here. The remaining ~137 pages of the thesis statement, then, are dedicated to unpacking my thesis paragraph in relation to the “Notes on Power” and “Shadow Zone” essays, the Four Gs, as well as listing most of our keywords and unpacking the core components of the manifesto tree. —Perse

Thesis Body: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism vs the State; or, Galatea inside the Shadow of Pygmalion

Guilty as charged, but dammit, it ain’t right
There’s someone else controlling me
Death in the air, strapped in the electric chair
This can’t be happening to me
Who made you God to say
“I’ll take your life from you”?

—James Hetfield; “Ride the Lightning,” on Metallica’s Ride the Lightning (1984)

From videogames to music, movies, novels, performance art and open sex work, my base argument (thesis paragraph) is the same: that functional anarcho-Communism is queer and Gothic because it uses grassroots worker solidarity and collective labor action to cultivate horizontal (anarchistic) arrangements of power. Once internalized, said arrangements automatically and intuitively challenge heteronormativity‘s vertical arrangements of power through democratic/non-establishment participation at the linguo-material level (the Gothic has always been queer and inclusive of the demonized to varying degrees; just look at Matthew Lewis, but also Oscar Wilde, James Whale, Clive Barker, Ann Rice, Cassandra Peterson/Elvira, Susan Sontag or Vincent Price—Price in particular being a bisexual icon and famous advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and the rights of Indigenous Persons and a strong challenger to the Pygmalion ideal of a subservient Galatea (e.g., Dr. Frankenfurter and Rocky from Rocky Horror Picture Show, 1975—builder and “built,” if you know what I mean): Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism being the process of countercultural Gothic poetics as a creative rebellion against a Pygmalion-esque status quo/Shadow of Pygmalion and its profit motive and disastrous paywalls on basic human necessities (Lemmy.world: “Capitalism is the paywall of life,” 2023); re:

the patriarchal vision and subsequent shadow of any knowing-better “kings” of empire, thus capital; i.e., of male- and token-dominated industries inside the Man Box, wherein “Pygmalion” means “from a male king’s mind,” but frankly extends to all traitors (male or not): upholding profit/the status quo raping nature for profit (and those treated by the state as “of nature” for those reasons);

i.e., a profit motive challenged by Galatea herself as come alive and making her own media as a gender-non-conforming idea splintering into countless monsters spawned from a transgenerational/-continental, public Gothic imagination: the shadow of Galatea through oft-horny and very gay simulacra of sex-positive egregores, tulpas, and Yokai. We’re taking these dark forces back by “making it gay“; i.e., “camping the canon” (which the “camp map” will explain further after we’ve laid all the “map pieces” out about canon).

For the state, we are the proverbial “forces of darkness” threatening its “perfect, eternal, natural” existence (through various campy paradoxes; e.g., sexy Marx/nerd sex); for the anarcho-Communist, the state is the enemy (meaning the nation-state, but also the historical-material status quo) that exploits everyone through colonized and colonizing monstrous poetics and its arbitration by police forces. Often, these forces are hauntologized as knights and other male action heroes, or token persons inside the same Man Box as arbiters of justice; i.e., wearing the badges of state agents and de facto vigilantes that serve the status quo and enjoy its rescindable benefits, which play out in various durable stereotypes: “boundaries for me, not for thee” illustrating a double life whose alter ego/persona (secret or open) unites with the wearer’s mask-off identity to torment the underclass. It often manifests through false generosity and protection. As such, The strings attached to charity are a noose for class traitors to hang themselves with; inside a framed narrative—that is, a narrative that is both thoroughly unreliable and frames persons. Somewhere is the real killer but more than that is the structure that produces more chaos the killer can manipulate and control. Cops like to fuck us over for the state; we lie to preserve ourselves in the face of their deceptions.

In other words, Christian “charity” can manifest as class guilt and betrayal towards the go-to sacrifice by the slightly less expendable as sometimes-sacrificed when the state eats itself; i.e., owner zombies smaller than the state (the Big Zombie) buying away their systemic problems as tied to older clichés and dead metaphors. Reassigned to power as it exists currently in theatrical iterations, these self-deceptive acts of cannibalization manifest in thoroughly domesticated affairs of the heart regardless of actual theatrical potency or charm; e.g., Bill Gates (who materializes through the master of the old manor’s inheritance anxiety as a hopelessly old throwback that critiques the bourgeoisie in outmoded language: Count Dracula, or “Gates” but sexed up and/or openly ghoulish far more than he normally appears).

(exhibit 0a2b1b1b: A modern-day retelling of “Young Goodman Brown” [1835], Ari Aster’s Hereditary [2014] chillingly presents the Gothic home as devouring of the blind who, despite their Herculean efforts, are sacrificed inside a castle, inside a castle, inside a castle. Their combined, recursive downfall is a great lie built on lies, assisted partly by their inability to effectively or honestly communicate with one another towards unveiling systemic issues. The mother thinks herself freed of the former matriarch’s tyranny but through her “objective recreations” merely apes the larger scheme: the more she fights, the sweeter she tastes.

In turn, Queen Leigh [pronounced “lie”] is part of that same scheme, serving a patriarchal “top dog” as his queen bee. As such, the movie—similar to The Witch [2015] or Rosemary’s Baby [1968]—is sexist; i.e., it demonizes corrupt and hellish female forces as naturalized around patriarchal power—a male hegemon who gives orders to lesser female witches to do his bidding as the great witch of all: “Service to Satan is service enough!” It critiques Capital through the harvest without having anything good to say about witches or the harvest. In short, it scapegoats them and blames Capitalism on witches. Aster’s witch hunt stokes the middle class’s fearful fascination with the harvest through bastardized versions of itself, specifically to apologize for the grim avatars holding the sickle handle under Capitalism: the witch cop as a black rabbit or cat slicing as the Grim Reaper does the through the proverbial “wheat”; i.e., themselves and their own bodies, their own necks to lend to the blood spill’s dark harvest—an obscene perversion of paganized rites married to the Western lie of the Gothic castle’s own chronotope: the castle is the vampire [or the “mommy dom,” as I argue for Metroidvania, in the “Camping Tolkien’s Refrain using Metroidvania” subchapter].

[artist: Art Spiegelman]

“And where they burn books, they will burn people.” Most of the time, it will never affect the [non-token] class traitor to the same degree, but it is still incredibly abusive to condition someone to think they have power by putting them in positions of coercive domination over others [often by working off them through their lived trauma/criminogenic conditions]. In a world where everyone is lying, Gothic Communism conducts rebellion on the same stage, in the same costumes and masks; i.e., it doubles these perfidious black bunnies and other animalized demons and performative undead through “Trojan” variants that camp the grander canon, often in druglike ways: “Follow the white rabbit” but also the black rabbit, whose function determines their dialectical-material role during class/culture war, not aesthetics [we’ll unpack this much more when we look at Acid Communism in Volume Two’s “Call of the Wild” chapter—exhibit 56a1a1].)

Whether a lord, sheriff, queen bee, or his or her deputies, canonical praxis amounts to team cop vs team victims. Trauma, in turn, lives in the body but also the estate as an extension of personhood; i.e., inherited, hereditary trauma expressed through the historical Gothic’s site of dynastic primacy and hereditary rites: the castle intimated through the old manor or high-rise. In these places, abuse begets abuse (the father or mother abusing their children), and fascism recruits from the broken home as criminogenic. In turn, the elite’s gang of undead demon thugs cannibalize the latter through DARVO/reactive abuse: “You’re the zombies, not us!” (which will only intensify when the state crisis enters decay—i.e., throwing the state of exception ever wider and eating the workforce from the outside inwards like a piecrust towards the precious center). Not just a war on drugs, but a war with drugs and the stuff of drugs tied to smaller conflicts fenced inside larger conflicts trying to make sense of them. In the end, Capitalism is a giant lie, where fascism is one side of a murderous chameleon—not guilty of accidental confusion but deliberate deception; unmasked, they drop the mask’s friendly affect and, like Father Schedoni, have a flat affect underneath. We must expose them and this requires masks, but also a silly sense of humor tied to sex and drugs as things to camp:

(artist: Devilhs)

As Gothic Communists, we share our battlefield with these thugs and their material condition’s historical materialism. That is, our shared stomping grounds are the Gothic imagination (and its language, drugs, aesthetics and materials) on all registers, our own campy doubles subverting the usual double standards of our would “protectors” (who serve the state and protect property before people): the blood-soaked battlefields of Vietnam and other killing fields as music-tinged (the drugs, aesthetics, and music[3], etc, all yielding what Slavoj Zizek—from A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology [2012]—would call “universal adaptability,” whereupon function is determined by function/dialectical-materialism, not sloganized aesthetics); monsters and drugs are not exclusive to the elite and their dogs of war. Nor are their canonical “magic glasses”—to see the world through, hiding what the elite and their proponents are—the only prescription. We can change the prescription with a different set: dialectical-material analysis, but also enjoyment of our labor as re-seized. When worn we can see the elite and their proponents according to how they function: as vampires from outer space, brainwashing the rest of us to consume and obey until the end of time. Eventually, we won’t have to wear the glasses to see how the world works; it will become second-nature.

(exhibit 0a2b1b2: Artist, left: Luke Preece; top-middle: manedpizzawolf; bottom-middle: Patrick Connan. Plato’s allegory of the cave is primarily a visual metaphor that, under Capitalism, describes how the profit motive is guided through vicarious experience and brainless consumption that codes our behaviors. Capitalism alienates everything and everything in monstrous, heteronormative language. As I write in a now-discontinued book that has been absorbed into this one, 

The survival of neoliberalism hinges on the neoliberal’s ability to remain invisible. For example, John Carpenter’s They Live turns class theatre-going nostalgia on its head, illustrating the elite’s panoptic, ever-present desire to invade and control others through what we consume as tied to how we see the world as something to eat. This turns them into giant parasites that codify rather fittingly as vampiric aliens from outer space, and their victims into brainwashed zombies/smaller vampire offshoots. The moment this spell is broken—say, by putting on a pair of magic glasses—the elite’s power vanishes/is revealed to be an illusion. The problem is, those “still in the cave” will refuse to put the glasses on; the reason being they are so hopelessly dependent on dogma to supply their structured worldview that anything else constitutes the apocalypse [a grand revelation] as the literal end of the world. They literally cannot imagine anything beyond Capitalism, even when shown its harmful effects [source: Neoliberal and Fascist Propaganda in Yesterday’s Heroes, 2021]. 

The basic idea could be called Zombie-Vampire Capitalism, whose business-as-usual operations we’ll provide a full definition of a little later in the thesis statement. For now, just know that the concept of challenging Zombie-Vampire Capitalism has been absorbed into this book through the creation of “special glasses” that, oddly enough, are often based on the accidental perceptive elements to people who weren’t always aware of what they were doing—e.g., Milton or Radcliffe’s accidental critique of Captialism. All the same, the state-apologetic elements in their famous media results in a thoroughly “rose-tinted” “prescription” that not only blinds workers, but turns them into zombie-vampires that devour for the state through various means; i.e., by embodying the pro-state damsel, detective, demon, or dutiful, tokenized scapegoat, etc. In other words, we have to update the prescription by embodying the monstrous underclass as something to not just identify with, but see through the eyes of in order to conduct dialectical-material analysis [a concept of “monster vision” we’ll explore quite a bit during Volume Two’s Humanities primer].)

From all walks of Gothic queerness, then, labor movements treat class/culture war as something to express in monstrous language that challenges canonical Amazonomachia (“monster war,” but often with a monstrous-feminine flavor) as a heteronormative enterprise; i.e., by evoking the apocalypse to uncover and expose the division of labor as sexually dimorphic in ways that normally reward white, cis-het Christian men first and foremost, but also turn them (and their tokenized subordinates) into regimented abusers who rape and kill for the state’s profit motive: the Protestant work ethic enacted through a monopoly of violence/state of exception where said violence is always possible (from Max Weber and Gorgio Agamben, below)

  • Weber’s maxim regarding the state’s monopoly of violence: “To fully rule a territory requires the authority to violently control it if necessary. This is the source of Weber’s well-known maxim: a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (source: Matthew Farish and Timothy Barney’s “Maps and the State,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2020).
  • Weber’s notion of the Protestant work ethic: “that Protestant ethics and values, along with the Calvinist doctrines of asceticism and predestination, enabled the rise and spread of Capitalism” (source: tutor2u regarding The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism); this extends to the demonization of the Catholics, the Puritans and various Protestant outlier denominations, and obviously Islam and pagan/non-Christian religions (with Communism often regarded as secular thanks to Stalin).
  • Agamben’s state of exception: “A special condition in which the juridical order is actually suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state. In such a situation, the sovereign, i.e. the executive power, prevails over the others and the basic laws and norms can be violated by the state while facing the crisis” (source: State of Exception, 2005), which we apply to any marginalized group the state targets during crisis, moral panic and decay.

and whose steadfast practitioners, during Amazonomachia, are always putting in holy work as male action heroes (or heroes acting like cis-het men).

(artist: Andreas Marschall)

All heroes function and appear as monsters in some shape or form. Heteronormative theatre’s copaganda and Military Industrial Complex binarize monster theatricality in service of capital (thus the profit motive as something to replicate and enforce through unironic Gothic poetics/mimesis). There are “correct” male heroes organized between white and black knights, and “incorrect” male heroes who are “corrupt” in ways that destroy the established order of the athletic/athletic-adjacent conflict as lucrative, thus heteronormative (and vice versa). This historical-material gender trouble extends to female/token heroes, who either are monster girls (exhibit 1a1a1h3a2) of the traditional sort—i.e., the damsel/detective (Gothic heroine) and demon (female Gothic villain) or the foreigner whose heteronormatively assigned power conveniently challenges Western (white, cis-het) men, thus patriarchal dominance—and whose warrior-esque compromises with power are allowed for short-lived gradients: the subjugated Amazon as phallic/”like a man,” but who must eventually conform to varying degrees when the state’s perpetual crises enter decay and radicalize the heteronormative model of war at all theatrical registers on- and offstage. Until the woman or token is closeted/collared, they are afforded the same crisis of position—i.e., the white, animalized, undead/demonic enforcer as threatened by the parallel forces of darkness coming out of the shadow zone. But because women/token minorities are coded as “weaker” by canon, they will corrupt “faster” thus be closeted or buried to prevent the spread of infection (what I call the “euthanasia effect,” which I will unpack more in a moment).

Yet, even if women or token groups submit to their “correct role” in regressive Amazonomachia, segregation is historically no defense from the profit motive. Because there must always be an enemy to fight (a crisis to extend war into forever), a woman or a token minority—even when entirely submissive and bridal/slave-coded—are precious but contested property that can always turn into a “bad demon” at any moment (e.g., the wandering womb, exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1), thus are always a threat that must be policed, often by members of their own group (cops defend property for the state; for token cops, this means themselves). The historical materialism of canonical Amazonomachia is a train of girl bosses and their witch cop/war boss variants that manifest on- and offstage as TERFs who unironically punch down against people more marginalized than them while performatively punching up against the elite, who they don’t meaningfully challenge during oppositional praxis; kettled, they instead emulate the Man Box (traditional male sexism and other bigotries tied to weird canonical nerds, who we’ll unpack in a moment) as a token assimilation fantasy—i.e., parroting the colonizer (e.g., Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, 1952). As such, they take war brides from the underclass during military urbanism, colonizing the poetic sphere and real world while furthering psychosexual violence, token “white” fragility and employing DARVO—in short, acting like white cis-het men as the prime colonizing force in polite and impolite (moderate and reactionary) forms: the white and black knight.

I’ve provided the most central keyword definitions (monster-wise) after a short list of undefined ones, below, but please consider the glossary for the undefined ones, as they are all important:

  • tokenism/assimilation fantasy/minority police
  • war brides (submissive class traitors/collaborators)
  • TERFs and SWERFs/NERFs[4]
  • punching down
  • punching up
  • white (cis-het, Christian male) fragility
  • gaslight, gatekeep…

…girl-boss (tokenism)

A popular moderate MO, girl bosses are usually neoliberal symbols of “equality,” a strong woman of authority who defends the status quo (an overtly fascist girl boss would be someone like Captain Israel; source: Bad Empanada 2’s “Marvel’s Israeli Superhero ‘Sabra,'” 2022). This can be the female “suit,” in corporate de rigueur, but also Amazons or orcs as corporate commodities (war bosses). Suits present Capitalism as “neutral,” but also ubiquitous; Amazons and orcs (and all of their gradients) centralize the perceived order of good-versus-evil language in mass-media entertainment. Queer bosses are the same idea, but slightly more progressive: a strong queer person of authority whose queernormativity upholds the status quo. When this becomes cis-supremacist, the boss is a TERF—an assimilated war boss who regresses to a war bride herself when decay sets in, removing token privileges from most-marginalized token to least-marginalized (canonically speaking).

witch cops/war bosses

A class, gender or race traitor dressed up in the heroic-victimized language of warrior variants of past victims. Their baleful gaze is diverted away from the elite, instead punching down at their fellow workers to break up their strikes, unions and riots; but also to tease disempowered women with the “carrot” of active, physical violence they’re conditioned to use against the state’s enemies… [abridged].

reactive abuse

Systemic/social abuse that provokes a genuine self-defense reaction from the victim, whereupon the expectant abuser “self-defends” in extreme prejudice through DARVO. Reactive abuse correlates with reactionaries defending the state—i.e., reactionary politics being a form of white, cis-het fragility (moderacy being a veiled form of this).

In Gothic terms, this threat of animalistic/chimeric and undead/demonic possession (and composite reification) is theatrical “fact” complicated by the ghosts of Marx seeking “Jewish revenge” versus members of the middle class inheriting the anxiety of their own accidents of birth haunted by the shadow of revenge manifesting through the spectre of the skeleton king as threatening to return and level everything (a concept called the Leveler, which we’ll unpack more in a moment). Cryptomimetically everything haunts the same shared oral/written language as opposing Destroyers: the “kaiju” principle.

(artist: Nunchaku)

Because the state historically-materially rejects democracy through medieval abuse, it will advertise anarcho-Communism’s subversive Amazonomachia as “dangerously different” in an animalized, undead-demonic sense, thus threatening to the canonical idea of men and women and its canonical, regressive Amazonomachia; i.e., an abjectmonstrous-feminine “woman is other” (Julia Kristeva, vis-à-vis Barbara Creed and Simone Beauvoir) courted and cowed through harmful xenophobia/xenophilia—in short the slaying and fucking of monsters to various harmful degrees in the same theatrical space:

xenophobia (sex-positive or sex-coercive)

Monster-slaying. A fear of the unknown as something to exude or endure, which may take sex-positive or sex-coercive forms. Inside Gothic circles, theatrical xenophobia sits between fear of and fascination towards “the other” as a social-sexual construct; i.e., inherited either by privileged workers acting out unironic gender trouble, or minorities surviving it through their own ironic variation of gender trouble and gender parody in monstrous forms… [abridged].

monstrous-feminine

A term lifted from Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine. While Creed focuses on the desire for the cis woman not to be a victim, thus terrifying men in abject, monstrous ways (which are often then crucified by heteronormative agents, including token ones like Ellen Ripley), the fact remains that the monstrous-feminine extends to a much broader persecution network; i.e., of any “feminine” force that falls outside of what is acceptable within the Patriarchy’s heteronormative colonial binary. I have placed feminine in quotes to account for anything perceived as “feminine” thus “not correctly “male”; i.e., “woman is other” expanded to trans, intersex and non-binary persons (and the animals associated with them: bunnies, butterflies, cats, dogs, foxes, etc). This can be a male twink or vampire; the cis-queer bear’s expression of tenderness and love towards another man (or whoever they’re intimate with in whatever way constitutes intimacy for them); a female Amazon that rebels against the state, whether cis, or genderqueer in binary/non-binary ways. The possibilities for heteronormative conformity are narrow and brutal inside a vast historical-material tableau of the same-old patterns; gender-non-conformity’s ironies go on endlessly.

xenophilia (sex-positive or sex-coercive)

Monster-fucking. A love of the unknown as something to exude or endure, which may take sex-positive or sex-coercive forms. Whereas harmful (sex-coercive) xenophobia bleeds into harmful xenophilia, the sex-positive reversal of abjection and canonical xenophobia/xenophilia resists state power through covert, proletarian means; e.g., “Trojan” monsters and monster-slaying/-fucking rituals that hide revolutionary intent during liminal expressions of oppositional praxis as oft-pornographic. The monster isn’t simply someone to fuck (though it can be); it’s also someone to potentially love asexually as an “ace” friend/co-conspirator—e.g., Nimona (exhibit 56d2). As such, cathartic xenophilia extends to empathy for the wretched, whose medievalized trauma often overlaps with their sexuality and gender but doesn’t synonymize with it; indeed, cathartic xenophilia seeks to understand their rage at, and medieval alienation by, state powers (the xenomorph being a queer icon we shall examine many, many times throughout this book, but especially in Volume Two’s “Demon” section of chapters).

Monsters—specifically their killing and fucking[5]—sit within liminal expression as something to reflect on with various degrees of irony. As such, the monstrous-feminine’s prescribed, “correct[6]” devilry can take a million different “incorrect” forms—from Amazons to bears, twunks and twinks to vampires, zombies or werewolves to xenomorphs, etc—and whose mere existence intimates the practice of “sodomy” (non-PIV/extramarital/interracial sex) as a direct challenge to the (settler) colonial binary/standard, thus worthy of exile, of capital punishment, of genocide: carried out by the sexually dimorphized roles of monogamous, white, cis-het Christian warriors and wives (and their token subordinates) within a vicious-yet-sacred propaganda cycle, which I call the Cycle of Kings; i.e., part of the Shadow of Pygmalion (which we discussed earlier) and various interrelated terms (embedded for emphasis, the full definition this time):

the Cycle of Kings

Another term of mine, the Cycle of Kings is the centrist monomyth, or cycling out of good and bad kings (and the occasional queen), which extends to all the kings’ white cis-het Christian men or those acting like these men, thus warrior-minded good cops and bad cops (weird canonical nerds) apologizing for state genocide through Man Box and “prison sex” mentality arguments; i.e., within hauntological copaganda dressed up in medieval language; e.g., TERFs but also other token groups in-fighting for profit, hence dressing up in bad faith. Trapped between the past and present according to “spectres of fascism” and “spectres of Marx” (which grapple, mid-kayfabe, in anachronistic language, thereby having an emphasis on the imaginary past/retro-future, aka Fisher’s “canceled future,” vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis), these dark reflections often trouble persons of the heteronormative persuasion versus those of a genderqueer persuasion. Either struggles to identify with themselves in relation to canonical propaganda dictating how non-standard deviations from canon must die; i.e., someone is always a cop or a victim, but generally with some sense of overlap, imposter syndrome and internalized stigma, bigotry, guilt and shame, etc. To it, Capitalism is always in a state of emergency/exception, and this relies on the creation of monstrous enemies (and related qualities; re: internalized stigma) to turn workers against each other (the in-group and its tokenized proponents). Doing so during state decay and regeneration (feeding vampirically on workers and nature) serves to keep labor too busy to effectively challenge the elite; i.e., by warring with one another and inside-outside themselves. In turn, these inherited confusions, guilt and mistrust are used by the elite to justify their hold onto vertical power as a structure, whereupon the calamity of war-as-an-apologetic-business—of canonically whitewashing class, culture and race war (e.g., the battle-of-the-sexes or civil rights activism)—personify in theatrical wars that extend offstage, as well as total war and shadow/proxy war on the global, non-diegetic stage (or its return home via the Imperial Boomerang/military urbanism). All collectively reek from Capitalism’s zombie-like bulk, its hellish orifices release Promethean “exhaust” during offshoots of the infernal concentric pattern.

the infernal concentric pattern

Described by Manuel Aguirre in “Geometries of Terror” (2008) as the final room, or rather a room that, per my arguments, conveys finality through the exhaustion of military optimism[7] in the face of an endless, yawning dead;

where the hero crosses a series of doors and spaces until he reaches a central chamber, there to witness the collapse of his hopes; [this infernal concentric pattern has] in Gothic one and the same function: to destabilize assumptions as to the physical, ontological or moral order of the cosmos [… It is like a Mandelbrot set (left):] finite, and yet from within we cannot reach its end; it is a labyrinth that delves “down” instead of pushing outwards. From the outside it looks simple enough: bounded, finite, closed; from the inside, however, it is inextricable. It is a very precise graphic replica of the Gothic space in The Italian […] Needless to say, the technique whereby physical or figurative space is endlessly fragmented and so seems both to repeat itself and to stall resolution is not restricted to The Italian: almost every major Gothic author (Walpole, Beckford, Lee, Lewis, Godwin, Mary Shelley, Maturin, Hogg) uses it in his or her own way. Nor does it die out with the metamorphosis of historical Gothic into other forms of fiction (source).

i.e., the infernal concentric pattern is the smoke of the ignominious dead used as a myopic screen of arrogant, Americanized Capitalist Realism—one that hides the obvious function of the free market and exploitation as an irrefutably man-made, but nonetheless brutal Cartesian, heteronormative, and settler-colonial model: profit, by any means necessary (often through a Protestant work ethic whose post-Enlightenment era of “benign” Reason demonizes medieval markers in ways useful to the state and its Radcliffean thieves; e.g., the Roman Catholics, but also the paganized Romans before them and the selectively-religious fascist “Romans” after them, etc: the First Reich, Second Reich, and Third Reich, aka Holy Roman Empire, Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany).

Furthermore, such patterns are generally archaeological and architectural in nature, speaking to the medieval idea of mise-en-abyme (“to place in abyss”) and Numinous occupations with palliative therapeutic and harmful potential, alike; re: canon vs camp, during the demonic, ergodic, concentric, anisotropic, entropic and gigantic recursions at work; e.g., Metroidvania and similar Gothic castles (or otherwise haunted mighty homes’ signature castle-narratives, mid-chronotope) relayed through endless inheritance and doomed heroic motion: death from the house birthing and eating you while exploring it through fatal homecomings. Furthermore, as things to generate and play inside for different reasons, such spaces suggest profit as normally concealing itself during the cryptonymy process; i.e., showing things normally hidden/opaque through unresolved systemic/ontological tensions, exquisitely torturous emotional distress, total imprisonment, taboo subjects, raw aggregate power, paradoxical healing and tremendous obscurity (re: darkness visible, the Black Veil, etc). The pattern, then, is Capitalism (and its deliriums) in small, hence conducive to ludo-Gothic BDSM (and calculated risk) at large when played within miniatures expressing those hypermassive/quantum things felt beyond and inside themselves.

Not only does this profit motive incentivize the state to aggregate[8] against labor solidarity‘s mere suggestion at every possible register; its resultant cycle—of state power relayed through monomythic stories that quell labor aggregation as its primary opposing force—becomes something to rescue from its own seminal tragedies of self-cannibalization (these will be mentioned in many different forms throughout this book, enough that it may be hard, if not futile to point out each time I do: “this is an apocalypse!”): the monomyth is a cryptonym[9] that disguises and apologizes for state-sanctioned genocide; i.e., all the Jedi (not just the Sith) are hauntological cops by virtue of a shared centrist function: to kill younglings before handing the sword and the magic spell (the mind trick) to the next-in-line to repeat the monomyth cycle as disseminated far and wide. Obi Wan was projecting when he said, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!” (which is, itself, an absolute—George Lucas’ Hollywood-Marxist allegories earning their keep).

(source)

The above dissemination happens according to the monomyth being prolonged under Capitalism according to ancient theatrical traditions revived in the present in hauntological forms: the staged combat, wrestling match or team-based engagement with heroes (monsters) who appear “strong” in the dimorphic, heteronormative sense: through the sport of war with opposing teams (armies/contestants), often at an unfair advantage[10]. As mentioned a moment ago, all heroes are monsters, and any of them can “turn heel” at any moment. Always threatening to “corrupt” the whole in a theatrical sense, there are myriad double standards (and doubles). White male heroes are built to “defend” in a pre-emptive sense, thus can always become the Great Destroyer who must be “put down” after “going feral/rabid,” but are automatically given the benefit of the doubt/expected to kick a certain amount of ass (an ass-kicking quota, to serve the profit motive). Meanwhile, female/token heroes always threaten to “turn”; i.e., to revive the vengeful spirits of the colonized dead under Imperialism, which possess and take hold of them, thereby breaking the narrative (thus cycle) of war as a business. Class-war sentiment cannot be prevented, which means that token monsters/vice characters are passed off as “absolutely fine,” provided their jester’s speech (speaking truth to power) ends within sacrifice or conversion; i.e., controlled opposition. Until then, the usual suspects are squinted at suspiciously by a leery eyed Conan (classically an intolerant sexist thug who solves his problems through banditry and open violence). Through the mechanisms of capital, historical materialism predicts that the forces of darkness will always rise from hell, requiring their anticipated exorcism and smiting. Shoved back into the pit, the underclass has been scapegoated, restoring order by returning things “to normal.”

Also called the Hero’s Journey, the monomyth is a normalized rite of passage whereby a (traditionally male) child finds himself offered the “rare” opportunity to elevate through the seemingly divine provision of a sword or some such masterful weapon (which the Gothic frames as a doomed quest for mastery through the Numinous during the Promethean Quest and/or Faustian bargain—more on this deeper in the volume and later in the series). There’s many steps and moving parts following the Call to Adventure (often categorized between twelve and seventeen), but the basic gist is: offer adventure, refuse, change mind, get sword, cross boundaries, overcome trials and ordeals, kill the (corrupt, monstrous-feminine) monster, return in some shape or form changed by the quest, save the princess (from getting raped by the villain)/get the girl. Joseph Campbell is more prescriptive and optimistic, writing in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949):

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won: the Hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man [“bros before hoes,” I guess].

Personally, I find this whole notion incredibly dubious; i.e., harmful wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure that is generally trapped within a space chockfull of prescribed war and rape cryptonyms (not a genocide, but an “adventure”), thus meant to instruct (through prescriptive sexuality and bad education; e.g., sex education and prescribed gender roles) coercive, harmful sex as medievalized rape fantasies/appropriative peril built around the Gothic/wrestling theatrical formula as dimorphically “at war”: someone who is simultaneously “biologically female,” mentally stupid (“emotional”), and conspicuously weak must be in danger of being raped at all times so the white knight can rescue them from the black knight (who’s always supposed to lose). It’s systemic entitlement and apologia for “good” men against “bad,” as usual, but also (as we shall see) the structure that produces them as ubiquitous, lucrative and instructional inside and outside of the kayfabe‘s contest of arms, the staged combat/duel: the centrist “good war” of good cop, bad cop; babyface, heel; (boring) hero, (interesting) demon lover/vice character; American, Nazi, etc (they’re functionally in cahoots, hence no “vs”). Furthermore, there is no escaping the narrative space/structure and its didactic conventions, wherein the fear of colonial inheritance also runs deep in Neo-Gothic fiction: the chronotope as historically communicating the fear of rape, incest and murder as doomed[11] but also treacherous, committed at the hands of men who are supposed to be our protectors (the usual suspects).

(exhibit 0a2c: Artist, left: Frank Frazetta; right: Yukiko Hirai and Emika Kida. Frazetta’s girls are always animalized as intensely erotic sexpots who are being threatened by various forms of captivity by equally eroticized male power/death fetishes. The pre-fascist monarch keeping her chained and naked by his throne; the dark male rapist springing from the shadows to drag her off or, worse, her choosing to run off with him; or her [as princess or warrior-princess] acting as a performative “hyena” that submits to Conan as the visible “stud,” alpha/top dog [thus chief performer in the heteronormative hierarchy] when all’s said and done—all are fetishized/fought over, forcing the woman-as-property into an unenviable position where she is constantly naked, imperiled and animal-magnetic/chimeric, thus somehow “asking for it.” It’s the skeptical cop’s smug question, “Well, what was she wearing?” followed by the pissed-off retort, “Whatever the artist forced her to [often nothing]!” Stripping is not consent, but you wouldn’t know that from Frazetta’s work. For him, it’s normal, our Pygmalion deliberately blurring the lines between consent and refusal, thus “yes and no” through incredibly bigoted, thus harmful/sex-coercive, psychosexual stereotypes [versus cathartic ones during sex-positive forms of monstrous liminal expression, exhibit 1a1a1g3].

 Worse, these become something to mimic by imitating “the master” himself as a seasoned professional. Frazetta was a child prodigy who worked in comics since he was a teenager, and painted for decades after that. But his “style,” with all its sexist/racist baggage, is largely unchallenged in videogames [Dragon’s Crown, 2013; above] and other mediums in Gothic [thus popular] poetics today. This aesthetic can be taught to any artist, regardless of their gender or sex; e.g., John Kricfalusi’s pedophilic tendencies reflecting in his art, but also his abusive relationship with underage female artists that he worked with to draw in his problematic, nostalgic style [blameitonjorge’s “John Kricfalusi: An Open Secret,” 2019]. Things don’t stay “on the canvas,” and Ren & Stimpy [1991] was a children’s cartoon[12] full of inside adult jokes penned by a literal, confessed pedophile[13]. The same osmotic qualities extend from older palimpsests that inform culture—its consumers and commodities—as forever interacting back and forth, mimetically shaping the way that heroes, as monsters, are used to communicate, thus teach, emotional and Gothic intelligence through popular hero narratives; i.e., how monsters should appear and behave as indicative of industry-wide “open secrets.”

People love monsters; they’re the ultimate comfort food to Capitalism’s systemic bullshit, but also the ultimate didactic device from a canonical standpoint: com panis, or “with bread,” as had by companions during panis et circenses, which translates to “bread and circuses, a somewhat derisive term for food and entertainment offered by a government to soothe public discontent” [source: Merriam Webster]. It’s Pavlovian, the carrot to the stick by trotting out various spectacles that commodify struggle and resistance as heteronormatively coded in hauntological/cryptonymic language whose capitalist time-spaces further the process of abjection.

As stated earlier, games master players by coding them to act towards stigmatized enemies with heroic violence. Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy touch on this in “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots” [2008] when they write:

conventional assumptions that players learn the game system to achieve mastery over it—and that this mastery is the source of the prime pleasure of gameplay—is in fact an inversion of the dynamics and pleasures of videogame play. Games configure their players, allowing progression through the game only if the players recognize what they are being prompted to do, and comply with these coded instructions [source]. 

But in truth, this applies to any game/struggle, theatrically and dialectically-materially speaking.

[artist, left and right: Persephone van der Waard] 

Per Anita Sarkeesian, this canonical mastery can be challenged with critical thinking skills and still enjoyed despite the problematic elements: “It’s both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects”. And indeed, I absolutely love Dragon’s Crown and Frazetta, but after I camp their unironic waifus/wheyfus [a kind of monster girl, exhibit 1a1a1h3a2] with my own subversive Amazonomachia/thicc warrior mommies. But doing so challenges the profit motive, thus historically is met with suspicion; i.e., the foreign plot; e.g., Gamergate, as per weird canonical nerds. In their eyes, I must be up to no good, “having an agenda” or “making things political.”)

Through camp’s questioning of canonical monomyths, we can spot disempowering patterns beyond that of canonical, Faustian empowerment (false power) tied to unequal material conditions and dogma: the Cycle of Kings as a both a “bad bargain” that destroys those who take part and a Promethean Quest where theft from the gods (the elite) leads to self-destruction: the invented hero is both fetishized as both a “good-vs-evil” bringer of death against a foreign enemy/plot (we’ll explain how in a bit) and expendable by design (wielding Excalibur[14] and wearing the crown is fatal to him). Simply put, it’s profitable to the elite and conducive towards disguising their aims to cycle through kings and soldiers during monstrous poetics as mask-like, imbued with temporary theatrical power (thus leading to more copaganda in the domestic sphere; re: military urbanism/optimism and the Military Industrial Complex).

As part of this grand, obfuscating cycle of self-destruction, the state exploits workers to recruit soldiers they either send abroad and commit genocide, or use to (re)colonize the homefront (re: the Imperial Boomerang) in the name of the father and one’s bloodline through patrilineal descent. A common historical materialism, then, is the collapse of said descent; i.e., the endless/circular ruin’s castle-narrative as the fatherly ghost of the counterfeit/narrative of the crypt, meaning “a false copy of the barbaric past” that seemingly goes on forever and survives all living things as a viral, souless copy of itself: “A narrative of a narrative to a hidden curse announced by things displaced from the former cause.” This narrative structure and cycle was later identified by me in videogames during my own graduate work/master’s thesis on the Metroidvania‘s chronotope (a story told through recursive/ergodic motion [endless and performed through non-trivial effort—from Espen Aarseth[15]] through a Gothic castle, which we’ll examine more in during the “camp map,” but also in Volume Two when we look at Team Cherry’s 2017 Metroidvania, Hollow Knight, exhibit 40h1/i).

While queer intersectionality is important during mise-en-abyme/framed (concentric, unreliable) narratives, the gendered politics of the canonical imaginary medieval tends to frame the monarchs of the castle as male and female (which so-called “Male Gothic” explores through direct confrontation and combat, whereas “Female Gothic[16]” gingerly investigates through a process called “armoring” lest the effeminate detective swoon and perish); i.e., the male skeleton king, dark-skinned barbarian horde, or dragon lord and the female “phallic woman“/Archaic Mother:

phallic women

The cock of the state. A monstrous-feminine archetype predicated on active, penetrative violence (or scapegoated for it; e.g., the trans woman as a “woman with a penis” trope). Canonical phallic women are female characters, villains, and monsters (often Amazons, Medusas or something comparable) who behave in a traditional masculine way—though generally in response to patriarchal structures with an air of female revenge; e.g., Lady Macbeth from Macbeth… [abridged].

(artist: Patrick Brown)

Archaic Mothers (and vaginal spaces)

The womb of nature. An ancient, monstrous-feminine symbol of female/matriarchal power. In Gothic stories, the Archaic Mother (and her space) is generally something for the canonically male/phallic woman to slay and rape (as per the Cartesian Revolution)—e.g., Samus being the “space” variant of a knight or Amazon, specifically a subjugated, TERF Amazon killing Mother Brain, the Dark Mother, in service of the Galactic Federation and “the Man” (the entire Red Scare’s class character dialog being displaced to outer space) [… abridged; see: “War Vaginas” for more on Metroid’s vaginal spaces].

One of the most famous Archaic Mothers is the Medusa, but she takes many similar forms: the transgenerational undead preserved as living latex, leather or clay that comes alive like a gargoyle to seek indiscriminate vengeance against the living for having been wronged by proponents of capital, Cartesian thought, patriarchs, etc.

Archaic or phallic, either monster traditionally belongs to a heteronormative mythic structure/Symbolic Order, both of which Gothic-Communist poetics lampoon, of course (exhibit 1a1c): the hero-monster as something to fear and kill, but also to romance in a dated courtly sense—i.e., to worship, serve and fuck, but also belittle and mock through private/open schadenfreude (evoking taboo sex in the process: mythical rape, sodomy and incest, but also the enigmatic kink of torturous/exquisitely “torturous” sex during demonic BDSM rituals that can be camped during ludo-Gothic BDSM, but not by default; e.g., Ann Radcliffe’s “demon lover” as something originally devised for/mass-marketed to privileged white women; i.e., to puzzle over when navigating their own trauma as a protected class inside abject operatic spaces: the recycled fabrications of the musical castle and its paradoxical panoply of rape, forbidden desire, taboo sex and Certain Doom). Angela Carter’s adage[17], then, proves that such unironic practices (and the anachronistic residents that call them home in dated locales) haven’t gone anywhere; the Gothic—as much as it ever has—remains very much alive in our own imperiled sphere, including the monomyth as thoroughly haunted by the profession as cautionary in different directions. This can be a moral panic, but also camp as an ironic pedagogy of the oppressed reclaimed through the same basic schtick to unlearn shame, self-hatred, and dysphoric/dysmorphic incorrectness as taught through Renaissance canon onwards. “We [are living] in Gothic times,” either way.

(exhibit 1a1a1a1_a: Artist, left: J. Scott Campbell; bottom-middle: Fabián L. Pineda; right: Tom Jung. The monomyth and infernal concentric pattern are traditionally heteronormative, thus sexually dimorphic canon [dogma]; iconoclastic examples can subvert heroic double standards and bellicose, phallic language/rites of passage, but still work from positions of irony that parody heroic conventions and apocrypha [a popular, didactic story generally regarded as fictional; i.e., a “tall tale” connected to folklore and oral traditions] by toying with them during oppositional praxis as dialectical-material. In other words, iconoclasts tend to mutate what is already present according to what the artist knows about propaganda, thus makes and embodies as part of Gothic counterculture.

Consider videogames [my domain]. As a queer, Gothic ludologist and anarcho-Communist, I can attest to how genderqueer poetics would happily poke fun at Link’s “Master Sword” shooting “bolts of power” when “fully charged”—a mechanic borrowed from Star Wars [1977], Conan the Barbarian [1981, which was reviewed as “Star Wars made by a psychopath,” which applies as much to Rob Howard as it does John Milius] and even older palimpsests [such as the legend of King Arthur] copied by Pan’s own “sword” in Hook [1991] or Simon Belmont’s elongating “chain whip” in Castlevania [1986] or Mega Man’s “mega buster” [1987] or Samus Aran’s “beam cannon, missile launcher and bombs” [1986] or, hell, Mario’s “mushroom” helping him “grow” [1985]: canonical war is full of violent, harmful innuendo; e.g., Macbeth’s cycle of war as watered with blood: “I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing.” As we shall see, there is always an enemy to kill or secret plot to uncover, thus revealing an enemy from within who “originated” from outside: the ghost of the counterfeit’s false copy of a corrupt backstabber/doppelganger. Instead of an invincible barbarian/enemy at the gates, the white-knight warrior of light faces a corrupt, dark version of himself—a shadow person or Gothic double:

 

[Artist: Gabriel Dias. Keeping with the idea of paradox, the opposition between Link and “his shadow” is both thrown into doubt and extremely dogmatic. On one hand, it’s entirely divorced from material critique in favor of a basic value judgement—literally light vs dark, wherein light is canonized as “good” and dark as “bad”; there’s no in-between or class character because the story has been displaced to a fantasy tableau emptied of earthly history. It’s trope-heavy and mechanical. As we’ll explore later in the thesis and rest of the book, though, class character often comes from gender trouble and parody within canon as thrown into personified doubt [a rather literal embodiment of self-reflection]; i.e., in relation to these prescribed gender roles as “ghost-like” or otherwise undead. Ontologically challenged, Dark Link might not “belong” to Link at all; he might simply be an uncanny simulacrum or likeness that triggers the presumed owner to attack [thus confirm his suspicions by eradicating his fears]. Doing so exposes his own flaws as a self-described “hero,” but also reveals his open-secret intended function: to kill the enemies of the state. The enemy must die, trapping the hero in a frozen state of inaction as they lie caught between their orders and their conflicted sense of identity.]

As a whole, videogames have served as neoliberal, music-heavy copaganda since the 1980s—first, based off Star Wars as franchised, but also Aliens [with the original, self-contained text for each being neoliberal critiques that, in their franchised forms, became operatically neo-conservative] as monomythic canon attached to real-world geopolitics: the American revenge fantasy after a re-freeing [deregulation] of the world market post-Bretton-Woods under global US hegemony. The common thread to these canonical remediations is a quest-for-mastery meta-narrative whose videoludic simulation of war helps acclimate the state’s children to endless future war through the Hero’s Journey as forever expanding on- and off-screen: made for bigger and better worlds, but also bigger (thus more phallic), traditionally masculine weapons; i.e., a heteronormative mode of ludic wish fulfillment that routinely sets the player on the path to prescribed empowerment, thus appearing to realize the impossible promise [not the universal fulfillment] of sanctioned sex by a) rescuing the damsel and slaying the cock-blocking [ostensibly fascist/gay] dragon/minotaur as something to stab or shoot [exhibit 51d4a1/2] and b) facing off against the monstrous-feminine not just as not-white, female-coded, and non-Christian, but somewhere in between all of these things; e.g., orcs, drow and goblins; Dark Link, Protoman/Zero [exhibit 982b] or Pan’s shadow as the genderfluid, potentially trans, non-binary, or intersex false hero/man, dark twink, “phallic woman,” etc; but also Samus as the phallic-woman tomboy acting like Rambo to serve the state, or Odessa from Overwatch 2 [2022]:

“Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty!” [from
Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy].

I’ve spent my life subverting them, treating Samus as having the potential to not be a palingenetic handmaid [exhibit 38c1b] or Odessa/Zarya as something other than unironic girl/queer war bosses [exhibit 100c4/ exhibit 111b] while also having a great deal of fun with twinks in iconoclastic videogame fan art that treats the twink-ish hero as the non-bellicose sub [exhibit 93a].)

(source)

Fascism and centrism are two sides of the same coin, wherein the fear of the outsider as outside becomes a fear of the outside within: the imaginary inside/outside infiltrator as correct-incorrect, becoming uncanny as per Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis as an extension of cryptonymy that also connects to the narrative of the crypt as a Gothic chronotope during the process of abjection. Inside-outside the narrative of the crypt as a half-real, parallel time-space that doubles the real world and vice versa, the state’s target audience is conditioned through canonical media to forget the invincible barbarian enemy[18] from elsewhere, which is suddenly viewed as the traitor “among us” (the status quo) having formerly come from outside before stabbing the in-group in the back; i.e., when Capitalism’s perpetual crises start to decay and fascism takes root, these play out through the process of abjection as making monsters and killing them in and outside of media/real life. But because there is no outside-text, all of this happens within the home as inherited, full of peril and anxiety exacerbated by capital’s creature-factory of extenuating circumstances: more and more complications equal more and more war and rape, thus profit. The graveyard becomes a mine.

We’ll continue unpacking the nature of these structured crises and their mire of paradoxes. For the moment, know that it creates a vicious cycle of historical materialism predicated on the posturing of masculinity as threatened: the spirit of the Leveler. This presence actually stems from medieval thought—death being the great leveler of kings and peasants alike—but also the fascist idea of the historical cycle: “‘Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.’ The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source: Bret Devereaux’ “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020). Just as Caesar historically demonized those he conquered as savages fighting dirty from the shadows against the state (not for the state as fascists do), videogame companies (and other mediums) use canon to connect state crises to the embarrassing destruction of what was built—i.e., senseless destruction of the warrior’s hall, versus the “useful” battles of the past that led to Pax Imperium in its current, glorious form (for us, Pax Americana): the soldiers of the present must appear strong by avoiding degenerate weakness and sacrificing themselves; lacking this strength, “true evil” first gains a foothold, then ultimately prevails by destroying Rome from within. The white knight becomes black and that’s apparently why we’re all dead and fucked.

Of course, it’s not nearly that simple (the myth of the shadow play is that it is devoid of meaning; the myth of monsters/duels is that they are “just” spectator sports that stay onstage/on-canvas):

(exhibit 1a1a1a1_b: Bottom-middle: source [“Chuck Wepner: Meet the Heavyweight Boxer Who Inspired Rocky,” 2020]. The duel sits in the shadow zone to perform power with monsters, sexuality and paradox; the doubles and their trademark violence/”violence” glide between fiction and reality on- and offstage diegetically and during para- and meta-textualities that conceal class character as active or repressed [Wepner sued Sylvester Stallone for basing the 1975 Rocky screenplay off his life; they settled the case outside of court]. Life imitates art and vice versa through [crypto]mimesis of a particular kind: war personified in the traditional masculine way—through combat.

Yet, in the Gothic model there’s plenty of room for canonical/campy gender trouble and gender parody according to Gothic devices that “spice up” the monsters doing battle: terror and horror, the Black Veil, the surface of the veil, the explained supernatural, demon lovers; and various class, race and gendered stigmas in their animalized, undead/demonic chimeras, composites and ghosts. The resulting mise-en-abyme might see like Shakespeare’s bad play, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” but therein lies the paradox: the battle as meaningless, doomed and significant at the same time [i.e., Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940]. People love sex and violence for a variety of reasons; the theatre is one place where these monsters—and their tremendous energies, paradoxes, and vitalities—run well and truly wild. To “pull a Frederic Jameson” and ignore these spectacular sites/sights of campy combat and their profoundly artistic deceptions is to ignore much of their allegory and the larger conversation being had in the language of the vulgar [common] masses and the elite, the plebian and patrician. Amidst the oscillation of the stage, we’ll have to tune in, but also contribute, if we want to recultivate the Superstructure and reclaim the Base; you’re sure-as-fuck not going to do it with fancy essays that no one reads except academic eggheads[19].)

(exhibit 1a1a1a1_c: Artist: Jeso. “Did he who make the lamb make thee?[20]” The Amazon is a tremendously complicated monster because it is both seen as untamable and hunted by man, but also tamed through the wearing of “maiden armor” that fetishizes her “maidenhead/bride price” as “scrappy.” It panders to the wet dream of the tomboy as animalized, the tiger an anthropomorphic “metamour” shared between viewers but also class, gendered and racial strata for or against the status quo during liminal expression. She is “phallic”-thus-manly at the same time as she is traditionally feminine, baring her tigress “fangs” to symbolize her “combative” potential [erotic energies; i.e., “fight like a tiger, fuck like a tiger” or maybe the opposite: “tiger in the streets, mouse in the sheets,” etc] while fighting tooth and nail and showing off her female warriors’ “assets” in, for all intents and purposes, an “actual [meaning ‘asexual’] duel” between her foil, the black-and-red dragon. But no duel is ever fully “ace,” nor canonical; there’s always something being fought over/resisted. A tremendous amount of innuendo, thus cryptonymy, is available for revolutionary purposes if the artist is of a particular socio-political leaning. Communists like monster sex and violence, too; we’re just sex-positive about our nostalgia and use it as de facto educators to raise the cultural bar regarding emotional/Gothic intelligence, thus class consciousness.)

And yet, crisis, exposure and vulnerability (above) is part of the paradox of power inside canon: the duel as the lingua franca[21] of the masses (indented for clarity):

Our psychosexual exhibit explored overt sex work and BDSM presentations that stage various forces, presenting them as “dueling” one another in “live” performance art; i.e., practiced rehearsals that codify societal values that exist chaotically between monsters adjacent to violence and sexuality as blurred/”at war.” It’s controlled chaos, walking several tightropes at once during a larger balancing act. In pugilistic media, a good duel between knights follows the same theatrical paradoxes using the same monsters for the same reasons of allegory (concealment) and apocalypse (revelation, often violent). It should make you forget its staged nature during the ensuing bedlam. Even the classical gladiators were well-trained and expected to put on a show, not kill each other. The idea is to make you forget it’s staged, without killing both men. Throw in a bit of theater (two or more masked men dueling over a woman or some such honor) and just the right amount of blood, sweat and tears, and everything should come together to walk the tightrope between fantasy and reality.

Of course, the paradox remains that it’s an unsafe event, but the expectations of violence are managed within the colosseum circle as the place where the magic happens, or the “squared circle” of the 20th century boxing ring. In the case of contact sports, there’s a variety of rules and judging thrown in, but sometimes you just have a white horse and a dark horse utterly wailing on each other and staying up by mere magic. That can go either way and is the kind of “theatre drama” that sports fans love (the vicarious reconciliation of physical, fetishized violence in society told through theatre’s captive honor and sanctioned bloodletting per theatrical sacrifices: the matador and the bull as “sexy beasts”). Granted, the “truth” of it is still a distraction from everyday life, but in kayfabe war narratives the allegory of these shadowy caves can speak to various dialectical-material truths hidden among the lies;. i.e., the paradox of truth told with lies, often bigoted ones: the kayfabe stage language of the American vs the Nazi, Communist or racist caricature, but also the white knight/god versus their dark “double” fighting within the perilous language of swordplay as color-coded, animalized, sexed-up: the fencer’s cryptonymy of the bind, the trap, the feint hiding and exposing class/culture war simultaneously on the imagery of the surface of the veil (if you see a furry artist, they probably have increasingly NSFW versions of their characters; their characters denote hidden struggles and desires regardless of how clothed or naked they are):

(artist: Jeso)

The praxial role of centrist theatre is designed to make you forget that either knight is a killing implement useful to the state, in unironic forms, but also whose tightrope can be walked by ironic performers camping the same theatre props to sneak in an antiwar narrative—often through the underdog trope; e.g., George Lucas’ 1977 Star Wars. But this can just as easily become franchised and swing the other way using the same contested iconography (the paradox of camping Capitalism is that we must do it within capital, thus using the same dark forces but for proletarian purposes; re: “darkness visible,” and deliberately so).

In the canonical sense, state power and its inventions must be threatened in order to hold onto itself and acquire glory (often in a blaze thereof; e.g., Davy Crocket’s “remember the Alamo” as played by John Wayne or some-such doofus). “Armor” is both the exposed spot for the arrow to go into and the unpierceable midsection, Smaug’s waistcoat of unbreakable diamonds. As such the proliferation of counterfeits become their own place of concealment and displaced trauma within the transgenerational curse as the power fantasy’s shadow zone, desperately haunted by unironic tyranny reaching out of the aforementioned vanishing point to choke us with its mighty rock ‘n roll fist. Men seemingly can do as they wish, here, playing around inside while the roles of everyone else appear to be extremely limited. In truth, gender trouble and gender parody are potent weapons that allow the iconoclast to fuck with the formula through their own reinventions of old falsehoods (my favorites, again being “gay hobbits,” but also “imagine Conan with a pussy”). The idea is to break canon ourselves because it’s not going to break by itself; e.g., Mad Max as a cowboy of the postapocalypse (-revelation) showcasing our white savior duking it out with a stand-in for Australian Indigenous Peoples dressed up in psychosexual fetish fear. And yet, George Miller would camp his own canonical ghost of the counterfeit with Fury Road (2015), decades after The Road Warrior (1981) “found” an oral recording of the hero addressing fears of societal collapse tied to real-life fuel shortages (manufactured scarcity): “Fury[22]” Road being the virago Furiosa breaking free from bondage and spelling the old tyrant’s doom (fittingly played by the same actor from the 1979 original; i.e., a perennial scapegoat).

(source)

Therein lies the rub: Capitalism isn’t “corrupt” or faulty when exploitation or bigotry happen; it’s working as intended, creating crises and bigotries as needed in order to exploit workers through theatrical war. The infernal concentric pattern during the Cycle of Kings is the merely monomyth as stuck within itself, denying escape through live burial and trapping the hero in a hell of their own making but also one that was passed down from father to son, Star-Wars-style. Like that story, the origins of patrilineal descent (and its much-touted collapse; e.g., Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 1839) date back to Antiquity (the “Fall” of Rome being a colossal lie; re: fascism) and like Antiquity valorize the masculine implements of war as “doomed but glorious”: the sword as a sexy-equals-power-and-status symbol that promises promotion and material elevation through ritualistic conquest/combat: the duel as being fought over sexy-looking “helpless” monsters (the damsel, a kind of “non-male” monster in her own right) by sexy-looking “good” monsters (male action heroes) killing “bad” monsters (medieval, pre-fascist black knights, but also people of color as dark, marauding barbarians, thieves, pirates, mercenaries/blackguards, rapists, and tricksters): demonic and undead masks that hide power levels and intent during theatrical exchanges written on their surfaces that also give the wearer some sense of plausible deniability—i.e., they’re “acting” out forbidden knowledge/power exchange with “demons” and communicating trauma and decay with the “undead.” In all of these cases, the Gothic, per Segewick, sexualizes its surface imagery.

Another name for this “Cycle of Kings” and its operatic sexiness is the Promethean Quest/awesome mystery (from Mary Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus” and Rudolph Otto’s Numinous/mysterium tremendum); i.e., the search for sword-like power as self-destructive (the Roman fool’s sword to fall upon). Whereas the monomyth unironically fetishizes[23a] the sword and its kink-like usage (denoting unusual or theatrical sexual activity) as a phallic passing-of-the-torch, the infernal concentric pattern treats the whole ordeal as thoroughly doomed within the grander chronotope (re: a time-space, from Mikhail Bakhtin; used in his sense of the “Gothic chronotope” or castle and its castle-narrative): the skeleton king as one’s ultimate doom fated by the writing on the walls (or voices coming from inside the walls), but also the sexual imagery on the surface of things dueling back and forth (which, in the Radcliffean tradition, operates as a Black Veil inside a closed space of terror and horror for the Gothic heroine and demon lover to wander around inside, or the disempowered/emasculated male hero; e.g., the Lovecraftian scientist. We’ll unpack these Gothic terms when discussing Metroidvania’s “ludo-narrative BDSM” during the “camp map”). In this sense, the popularity of the monomyth during seminal get-togethers like Star Wars remains entirely haunted by “Darth Vader” as the fascist “death father” who threatens to turn the young knight errant, “Luke Skywalker,” into a false copy of the black knight instead of a white knight as also being a false copy (exhibit 93b1b)—the horror being there is no escape from the death knight because white knights serve the state, thus conduct or assist in genocide during the return of the good king/revenge of the bad king but also the white and black knight/medieval cop as a zombie/vampire class traitor to a matter of degree, repeating Conan’s classic answer to “What is best in life?” in bad faith: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women!” In the neoliberal, hyperreal[23b] sense, it’s the imaginary past come back to haunt the position of the hero as something to swap consumers in and out of for profit, but it’s still the ghost of the castle as inherited; it’s just forged in a neoliberal sense, meaning privatized, digitized: the treasure map as fake, but covering up the destroyed reality behind itself until it starts to (in the Gothic sense) denote the decay behind itself within or upon itself—i.e., the canceled retro-future. As part of the ludic scheme between the player and the gameworld (or the power/values shared through any vicarious relationship between customer and story as action vehicle), the feudalistic power trip conveys dynastic primacy through said scheme as doomed.

Capitalism is always in crisis/policing itself through class-dormant nightmares that assist the profit motive, but the degree to the crisis and its decay determines the degree to how “corrupt” a hero appears; i.e., how demonic/undead and heartless they look on the surface of themselves as a kind of theatre mask belying the myth of male power. The greater the crisis, the more Capitalism’s bloodless, pure-white façade begins to decay towards a dark, medieval one, its pre-fascist veneer announcing a hidden function of it and the state, Zombification/Zombie-Vampire Capitalism:

Zombification/Zombie-Vampire Capitalism

The death of ethical parody and its replacement with “blind” forms; e.g., Zombie Simpsons. In “Zombie Simpsons: How the Best Show Ever Became the Broadcasting Undead” (2012), Dead Homer Society writes,

By almost any measurement, The Simpsons is the most influential television comedy ever created.  It has been translated into every major language on Earth and dozens of minor ones; it has spawned entire genres of animation, and had more books written about it than all but a handful of American Presidents. Even its minor characters have become iconic, and the titular family is recognizable in almost every corner of the planet.  It is a definitive and truly global cultural phenomenon, perhaps the biggest of the television age.

As of this writing, if you flip on FOX at 8pm on Sundays, you will see a program that bills itself as The Simpsons. It is not The Simpsons. That show, the landmark piece of American culture that debuted on 17 December 1989, went off the air more than a decade ago. The replacement is a hopelessly mediocre imitation that bears only a superficial resemblance to the original. It is the unwanted sequel, the stale spinoff, the creative dry hole that is kept pumping in the endless search for more money. It is Zombie Simpsons (source).

Zombification results from people living under Capitalism, a system that discourages them not to think for themselves, but also to violently attack people who try. Zombie-Vampire Capitalism is when Capitalism becomes “feral,” entering a fascist state of decay—whereupon violent, pro-state zombies suddenly appear and attack rebellious workers, “eating their brains” (symbolizing an attack on the rebellious mindset). Being the target of the state in this manner means you have fallen into the state of exception—disposable zombie fodder even more useless to capital than the zombie heroes[24] the state endlessly sends after you.

This decay is Capitalism defending itself; i.e., through a radicalizing of the feeding process in order for the state to survive.

The centrist, then, is the good hero—a canonical version of the “himbo” (or herbo) meathead who, even when faced with doubt at the old sage’s orders, remains canonically heroic by preserving the fascist’s essential role in disguising what Capitalism is: a giant vampire/zombie that makes smaller vampires and zombies to serve the will of all-powerful old men (emblematized in the Jungian/monomythic sense as good wizards/sages and evil wizards/necromancers). This evocation of the fascist in pre-fascist language is a kind of post-fascist rhetoric; i.e., made after the fall of the Third Reich, implying a cartoon version of the quintessential bad guy for the good guy to stomp onstage and off. It becomes blind pastiche/parody (from Fredric Jameson’s “blank parody[25],” meaning it lacks a conscious class character), but also a factory designed to make good guys and bad guys that acclimate future children to the larger indoctrinating process: of endless wars’ cops and “criminals” (victims) working in tandem/cahoots as class traitors against the state’s real victims, the underclass (cops are class traitors who, generally from the middle class, betray the class interests of the working class/proletariat for the owner class/bourgeoisie; refer to Howard Zinn’s discussion of this principal in relation to slavery under American Liberalism in A People’s History of the United States); i.e., the middle management of a neoliberal pecking order of staged theatre and its class argumentation as thoroughly armed, muscled and aggressive (indented for clarity):

Management of exploitation under Capitalism is tiered, pyramid-style—i.e., the top, middle and bottom; or lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts according to corporate, militarized, and paramilitarized flavors (which often intersect through aesthetics and social-sexual clout). This “pecking order” translates remarkably well in neoliberal copaganda, whose bosses, mini-bosses, and minions deftly illustrate Zombie-Vampire Capitalism in action; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich or Ian Kochinski/Caleb Hart (the latter two who we’ll discuss in Volume Three’s Chapter Three and Four) as “middle-management” desk murderers in a bureaucratic sense (which sits alongside the middle class, in a class sense—with both defending capital as a perpetually decaying structure that operates through wage/labor theft according to weaponized bureaucracy during crisis, class sentiment and Faustian bargains; i.e., harmful conditioning whose disguised ultimatums prey on various stigmas, biases and dogma riddled within canon to condition their employees to fight the good fight against the underclass as an advertised threat loaded with connotations of foreign/internal plots.

Erstwhile, as said “threats” are met with waves of terror, vice-character personas, and moral panics, they splash back into these same paranoid workers; they are slowly convinced to surrender total power to the elite under perceived states of emergency against imaginary enemies, trading basic human rights for false power and genocidal legislation inside the zombie police state[26] (neoliberal illusions of “hollow victory” and Quixotic moral superiority/exceptionalism). It’s a scam, a bad game with only one rigged winner: the owner class franchising war as copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex through war simulators. The illusion, like a franchise, becomes something to grow into and endorse more and more as time goes on; i.e., into adulthood; e.g., child soldiers charging from Mega Man into Mega Man X as an increasingly adult take on the forlorn hope (the military expression for a suicide mission/death charge):

(exhibit 1a1a1a2: Continuing with the Star Wars pastiche, Mega Man—after miraculously “saving the world” with a big explosion [on par with the Death Star]—becomes a general, being “rewarded” with a conspiracy that extends the conflict indefinitely through an imagined cabal of dark rebellious forces. Touted as a “rebel,” he and his “freedom fighters,” aren’t rebels at all because they’re always acting like cops in service of the state; i.e., class traitors hunting down their opponents using a kill list. Simply put, he’s the mercenary who bought into his own whitewashed legend: that he is a goody-little-two-shoes and not actually a robotic hitman treating the state’s enemies [called “Mavericks”] like disposable, worthless scrap—a payday stuck on loop, game after game in-text but also across an entire series of similar excursions.)

As “green biker dude’s” ignominious death becomes a meme (mirroring the X-wing fighters dying next to Luke during the canal chase), X becomes desperately valorized as the Great White Hope/one last chance—i.e., Star Wars minus the antiwar allegory of the first film and all of the musical/visual bombast of the sequels. The indoctrination becomes a giant lie built on older lies: the hero’s destiny as a walking robot corpse foretold by the most exciting[27] fantasies of a child’s life (nostalgia-wise) used to assuage their growing fears about war and death all around them, but also their material conditions as threatened by the much-touted “end of the World,” Communism. The label and its prescribed manifestations must be fought tooth and nail during a never-ending shouting match (or throwing of “lemons,” in Mega Man’s case). Its ubiquity and regressive lack of irony (thus dormant class character) is sobering and doomed. You gotta camp it, because the cheap comic-book-grade lore and legendarily awful voice acting are practically begging for it.

As a part of this state-sanctioned wrestler’s kayfabe, the fascist is the heel—a “corrupt,” bad cop who the good cop (the babyface) normally scapegoats to help the state save face during staged, deus-ex-machina combats. In turn, their combative, bread-and-circus spectacles continuously shape public opinion regarding war as legitimate, but also as a business at home and abroad that colonizes (thus drains) both sides.

There’s even a failsafe: In times of extreme decay that threaten the state’s existence, the state and its rulers allow the white knight and black knight to team up during the cycle of war dressed up in the language of the Crusades; i.e., giving the disgraced cop a chance—if not at total redemption, then one last deputized hurrah before they’re banished, exorcized and/or killed to prove they’re not a heretic (the sacrifice of the anti-hero to defend Capitalism; the redemption of the fallen, tragic hero); i.e., a bad, vigilante maverick to help tag-team, thus gang up against and destroy the one thing that can actually take power away from the elite: Communism, aka labor presented as the monstrous-feminine, the person-of-color zombie or queer vampire inside the state of exception/emergency (and various other stigmas we’ll unpack throughout the book). It’s death by conversion therapy (which is genocide). All of this happens by design/is built into the state’s Superstructure as groomed by the elite (who control the Base, thus can afford to build expensive illusions). The middle-class surrender their power to the elite, who groom the class traitor into a dehumanized state thug that is a smaller version of them, a legitimate arm of the police state (the good cop) and a vigilante homunculus (the bad cop) sculpted to exploit others in order to survive but also experience pleasure: to eat their flesh and drink their blood (dressed up as a religious experience tied to familiar organized religions; e.g., transubstantiation).

As a small, obvious vampire, the fascist becomes the perfect scapegoat to hide the state’s vampiric/zombifying design behind: a smaller, displaced parallel and vindictive sellout who criminalizes and bleeds everyone dry around him; i.e., a false revolutionary that serves old money behind the veneer of false rebellion[28], thus false power/guerrilla warfare as stolen through murder (commonly symbolized as blood or sanguine through the execution of blood libel/quantum by a fascist Count) but also acquired/kickstarted by Faustian bargains (that is, it is offered to them by someone instead of found/stolen from the gods like the Promethean Quest is—i.e., given/accepted in a self-destructive sense from a treacherous old man/necromancer Master to a dumb, deceived and self-deceiving apprentice; e.g., the Emperor from Star Wars to Anakin Skywalker but also Mortanius from Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen to that game’s titular hero). Tempted with revenge, the white knight becomes become the black knight: blind, feral and cruel, their pearly Excalibur twists into a dark Soul Reaver/Great Destroyer version of itself that—along with the rest of their altered appearance—echoes the dragon lord/skeleton king’s vengeful wrath during a dark, perennial, orgy-of-violence Grim Harvest/killing time (a perversion of paganized harvest and fertility rituals; e.g., Halloween and Easter):

And the angel of the lord came unto me
Snatching me up from my place of slumber
And took me on high and higher still
Until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself
And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own Midwest
And as we descended cries of impending doom rose from the soil
One thousand nay a million voices full of fear
And terror possessed me then
And I begged, “Angel of the Lord what are these tortured screams?”
And the angel said unto me,
“These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots!
You see, Reverend Maynard
Tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust!” (Tool’s “Disgustipated,” 1993).

Jokes aside, when the proverbial Dark Lord does return, Caesar the Just becomes Caesar the Tyrant/Zombie Caesar, and his fellow men must put him down to save the leader (and them) from himself. Like a vampire, they stab him to death, but also betray him and steal his power with a proverbial stake through the heart; like a zombie, they cut him to pieces (mirroring the ancient legend of Osiris). In short, the hero’s staged fall from grace embodies the infernal concentric pattern that revives and reassembles the pieces of the puzzle that revive the dead tyrant. Instead of a simple guardian, they become “fallen,” the anti-hero as a bonafide reaper who threatens total cataclysm by slowly becoming the Leveler (the medieval death-incarnate) as the decay not simply occurs, but expands and accelerates. The closer to death the state is, the more destructive the hero—the more mad, dark, and glorious. He’s the ultimate badass, but also the ultimate scapegoat to blame, thus sacrifice (the medieval-grade village assignment of blame/veneration taken to a macro level). Cut off his head, apologize for his actions (never blame the state), rinse and repeat. The world is “saved” from Kain thanks to the Belmonts… for now.

(exhibit 1a1a1b: The vampire/necromancer is both an anti-Semitic and pre-fascist trope that informs post-fascist rhetoric concealing American fascism festering under neoliberal illusions. The evil wizard gleefully has Kain killed, then offers him revenge and liberation from torment: “You will have the blood you hunger for!” All he has to do is kill the necromancer’s enemies for him. No biggie! It’s a combination of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus [1604] and Jew of Malta [1590], presenting the Jew as a scheming bloodletter who a) trades his soul for forbidden knowledge, per Faust; but also whose b) sanguine usury is ultimately quelled by killing the Jew. In fascist myth, the Jew is the backstabber of the Germanized soldier—i.e., an act of betrayal that justifies demonizing both sides, but having one be sacrificed to the “benefit” of the other. “Benefit” is in quotes because vampirism of this sort is a disease that strikes the subject with xenophobic madness and bloodlust. Their theatre is unironic and mean, a “suffering to the conquered” brought back around through a false-rebellious war cry from Kain: “Vae Victis[29]!” Whereas the unironic queer vampire is code for “sodomite”/sexual heretic as targeted by the state to be exploited, the hunger of the unironic fascist vampire is to exploit the sodomite as someone who [in their eyes] “drew first blood.” It’s standard-issue revenge fantasy [which elides with camp during oppositional praxis as patently reclaiming these labels, similar to the zombie, mad scientist, Medusa, etc, by ironic performers].)

From start to finish, the whole ordeal becomes inert, heteronormative dogma stuck on loop—our “Pygmalion effect” as part of the broader Shadow of Pygmalion, which zombifies worker brains to not simply accept these moon-sized tortures through Capitalist Realism, but embody them as menticided soldiers and victims (men—specifically our aforementioned holy men, the Belmonts—and their trusty frenemy the paladin-turned-death-knight, Kain/Dracula. Women, meanwhile, turn into subjugated “herbo” Amazons, but also infantilized “Barbie dolls,” exhibit 1a1a3; aka, tradwives[30]/war brides). The two exist simultaneously within various offshoots of the colonial binary under the Shadow of Pygmalion; i.e., as a harmful mythic structure enforced by the gender trouble that weird canonical nerds experience; i.e., their rape culture‘s heteronormativity-in-crisis being pitted against the campy gender parody of weird iconoclastic nerds (whose campiness generally occurs in response to gender trouble, or the making of gender trouble through campy parody to expose abusive parties and structures; i.e., “self-reporting“). As per the first half of our companion glossary’s definition, weird canonical nerds are

work within a toxic subset of nerd culture. Whereas nerd culture more broadly is for those who present an increased intellectual interest in a given topic—often in literature, but also popular media more broadly as something to consume, critique, or create (with iconoclastic varieties extending such matters into a spectrum of modular activism and counterculture)—weird canonical nerds are those who undermine genuine, active intellectualism; i.e., by exchanging it for dumb, hostile and even bad-faith consumerism and negative freedom for the elite.

Weird canonical nerds, then, are tasked with executing stochastic terrorism from the shadows[31] when queer-baiting/pacification fail; i.e., the “bury your gays[32]” trope (attacking the queer and putting them back in the closet, but also underground in more ways than one), but also purity argumentation (e.g., blood libel/quantum) that leads to the very creation of sexual difference the colonial binary is known for (exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1; from Luce Irigary: “Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male,” source). They rape and kill everything they see, measuring embodiments and feats of strength (their dicks) as they operate like a hostile alien tank (with good/bad variants): a bulldozer’s war of movement/sheer momentum (the wrestler’s economy of motion), special moves and bodies (wunderwaffe and wunderkind), an occupying army‘s fortress mentality and enforced division/false rebellion to assist elite profits (which trickle down to them, the always “imperiled” middle class).

(exhibit 1a1a1c1: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” [“The Eighteenth Brumaire“]. To this, the oral traditions of the stage play can be especially medieval, thus plastic and vivid. Macbeth’s fatal vision isn’t just “A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain” [Macbeth], but a copy of a copy of a copy in an endless nightmare loop. The yawning hall of kingly mirrors shadows him as shown guilt and revenge of a smiling past victim that somehow is all around him, having already won. The psychomachy [“mind battle”]—of this reunion with the past by the anxious, sleeping mind—imitates the Gothic Communist’s own futile grappling with the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern as a narrative of the crypt that outlives us to haunt future generations with, putting potential class warriors to sleep. The imagery is the same, but the context is altered through the performance as a meta-narrative: 

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing [ibid.].

Macbeth’s notable lack of cheer at the prerecorded nature of history needn’t be prophetic, provided the nightmares are reclaimed and used by us to awaken future workers to a class-conscious approach within Capitalist Realism; i.e., an altering of prior historical-materialisms [and all their fatal crypts, tyrants and black knights] as something to collectively escape through an actively reclaimed Gothic imagination/”darkness visible.” History is predicated on material conditions and propaganda; rewrite them and you rewrite history and avoid the cataclysm/seminal tragedy again [until the last syllable of recorded time]. But you must learn to commune with witches, ghosts and monsters—the spectres of Marx [re: Derrida, meaning Capitalism as haunted by Communism after the Cold War‘s so-called “end of history”] as friendly to the Cause of developing Communism away from the bloody death omens of characters like Macbeth and Kain. In short, you must acquire the Wisdom of the Ancients in the modern world; i.e., to learn to swim in dangerous waters, thus make your own monsters in the darkness while able to tell these apart from state doubles, masks, uniforms and weapons inside a shared aesthetic.)

All at once, the revenge fantasy of Pax Americana kayfabe is the source of the class traitor’s greatest strength/treasure as false/on loan, an Achilles Heel whose “dagger of the mind” puts them to sleep; i.e., a heteronormative killer on autopilot blinded by canonical “darkness visible,” wherein they deliberately or accidentally (usually a combination ruled through fear and dogma) cling to class-dormant illusions and sacrificial theatre whose imaginary “ancients” are continually not wise to greater and greater degrees of tragedy and farce; e.g., George Orwell’s highly unimaginable and callow “double-speak” from 1984 (1949) as a Red-Scare dogwhistle coined by “the son of a British colonial officer from a wealthy landed family who began his career as a British imperial official in South-East Asia—basically an imperial cop” (source: Hakim’s “George Orwell Was a Terrible Human Being,” 2023). As such, the class traitor cannot scrutinize dialectically-materially. They are also a gender/race traitor whose false power—their theatrical “sword”—is also their greatest weakness/castrating source of impotency for the Roman fool to promptly fall upon (indented for clarity):

The greatest weakness of a bourgeois-minded worker/class traitor is their collective inability to critique endless war as an acclimating force; i.e., of them, towards manufactured illusions where the chosen hero does one of two basic things: a) picks up the false (imaginary) sword, mask or death edict and fends off or an imaginary enemy of darkness, or b) where someone else picks up a real weapon and conducts state-sanctioned violence through military imperium and paramilitary stochastic terrorism (vigilantism against agents of the Left or perceived “Left” labeled as “terrorists[33]“). Either way, the end result is a class-dormant inability to critique the system’s alienation of ourselves from our true potential as workers. By virtue of a hypercorrect, biologically essential, sex-equals-gender approach, the ensuing knee-jerk reactionary’s violence becomes an ultimatum during the state’s decaying crises: Anything that isn’t correct must die/is a threat to the fortress they’ve build around themselves through the state’s supplied dogma. Yet, the half-real dagger works as Macbeth’s dagger of the mind would: also in his hand but something he does not own (“I clutch thee but have thee not”). Used unironically in copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex, such a weapon operates in conjunction with the meta-narrative as rigged, thus entirely out of the player’s control; i.e., through the ghost of the counterfeit to further the process of abjection as lucrative for people who aren’t us, playing by their own set of rules that leave us with as little power as possible: not paying their fair share, but taking as much for themselves as they can through a parallel ruleset that steals our labor and pacifies us through marginalized in-fighting. The exact nature of the illusion—a fatal vision or fatal deed—doesn’t really matter if the material consequences and bad intent are combined in ways that are good for business. It becomes a vicious cycle of tilting at windmills (as Don Quixote does); i.e., generating and slaying real victims thought of as dragons, or “averting one’s eyes” through escapist illusions that disguise the mirrored murders displaced to somewhere else. “Out of sight, out of mind,” except there is no outside-text; the illusion is always there, “the handle toward our hand.” The black knight is always there, lurking like a shadow. Tied to the class traitor’s body and actions—he is the ideologically rigid, notoriously cruel doppelganger they can never outrun, a dark reflection mirroring their own evil deeds/compliance as one class traitor of many inside the profit model. His eyes are blacked out, showcasing his lack of humanity through state-issued blinders: a dark warhorse (the color of death, the fetish, the weapon, the gun, the Nazi/zombie Roman) waiting to sacrifice them, too.

As such, the hero-turned-heel is figuratively hallucinating while acting like a coercively fetishized, “killer man baby” and class traitor/ghost of the counterfeit the rest of the middle class can stare at with equal parts fear and fascination; i.e., towards and of the imaginary medieval as serious (or campy vis-à-vis iconoclasts); e.g., “demon BDSM” via Nazi vs “Nazi” (“camping the Nazi”; e.g., Mel Brooks’ A History of the World, 1981) or rape vs “rape” (the liminal expression of Gothic rape play) vis-à-vis Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” (1974): the “Nazi” mask as a fan-favorite in ironic and unironic kayfabe circles (exhibit 1a1a1g2). Canon-wise, the bloodthirsty crowd loves a good fetishized and powerful monster but isn’t really taught to question how or why that might be while drinking up the fake blood as reminiscent of real-world atrocities (which they dub “apophenic[34] conspiracies”). Instead, power is accepted as genuine in order to enjoy the spectacle as an apocryphal-yet-reverential event. Despite the paradox, canon is simply sacred and unironic, whereas functional, “perceptive” irony is generally heretical to the centrist worldview (and whose ensuing conflict assigns or removes class character as a performance that is heteronormative or genderqueer).

There’s no long-term benefit to keeping quiet in the face of systemic oppression. Even so, it’s dangerous to camp, so the performer weaponizes the joke in favor of class war as a kind of tongue-in-cheek disguise: the antiwar allegory as equally magnetic, but dressed up in the same aesthetics like a kind of mask that’s very much worn on purpose. Unlike the male warrior’s Max Box “armor” and false power/hope, this effeminate “armoring” is not “true Camp” in Sontag’s sense or Radcliffe’s; i.e., that our seriousness fails without our knowledge or consent to protect our fragile minds. Rather, we know exactly what we’re doing and commit to the bit for two reasons: a) to avoid being attacked and killed while b) getting our life-saving (thus necessary) message across; i.e., to raise sex-positive awareness through emotional/Gothic intelligence as a “woke,” active process—one whose conscious class character is developed during oppositional praxis. Funnily enough, it’s not so different from Radcliffe’s “archaeologies” during her own dereliction, post-Italian—i.e., they’re left behind for us to repurpose when some people don’t have the guts (I’m looking at you, Radcliffe[35]).

We’ll unpack all of this during the “camp map” chapter after the thesis statement concludes. Until then, we’ll need to explain some manifesto terms: the pieces to our castle map as something to assemble, then fuel up and use to besiege the enemy’s fortress (the castle we want to take back by “making it gay”). The exact order of the terms’ explanation is less important than explaining how they interrelate. By the time we get to the “camp map,” we’ll “mount a siege,” explaining how to camp canon in relation to these terms and why that matters (reversing the process of abjection tied to the ghost of the counterfeit as a false copy of itself in monomythic canon, the Cycle of Kings, and the infernal concentric pattern as a souless, viral copy—i.e., the narrative of the crypt as the historical-material wreckage left in Capitalism’s wake, covered up by Capitalist Realism).

Onto “Pieces of the ‘Camp Map’“!


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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-FiPatreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1a] The word as I coined it has several definitions. One (from the Six Rs):

games occur along Gothic, liminal routes, wherein workers playfully articulate their natural rights in linguo-material ways between reality and fabrication that go beyond games as commodities but are nevertheless informed by them as something to rewrite; i.e., through play as a general exercise that involves a great many things: a reached agreement of power and play in Gothic terms, whose luck/odds are defined not through canon, but iconoclastic poiesis that can be expanded far beyond the restrictive, colonial binary and heteronormative ruleset of the elite’s intended exploitation of workers to challenge the profit motive and all of its harmful effects in the bargain; e.g., genocide, heteronormativity and Max Box culture. The sum of these concepts in praxis could be called “ludo-Gothic BDSM.”

Another (from the glossary, abridged):

My combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of fairly negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms

As I’ve moved through this series, though, the definition has narrowed, according to my focus on the term specifically to play with rape as I define it; re (from the Poetry Module’s “A Note about Rape/Rape Play,” 2024): […]

To that, rape is something that demons play with during the whore’s paradox. By extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM is effectively rape play combined with Gothic themes and BDSM practices to avenge state wrongs against nature.

[1b] Gothic doubles but also theatrical perceptions of power (“darkness visible”) as liminal expressions/elaborate strategies of misdirection/”archaeologies.” For example, not everything that is black and red is a fascist, but is treated like a fascist (and various other things at once) until the level of decay affords the usual centrist compromises between white knights and black knights against the Communist variant of the corrupt, the monstrous-feminine, the pedagogy of the oppressed coming out the same Gothic imagination’s shadow zone.

[2] Classically the entirety of the female form—its sexuality, gender identity/performance, emotions, etc—is sexualized by men for men. As such, Medusa’s big hair synonymizes with her “phallic” snakes; i.e., her “dickhead” literally as a headful of penises or symbolic of a phallic, masculine foil to traditional male heroes’ own power source: their singular penises (though the head and the hair are classically seen as a storing site for potency—e.g., Samson from the Bible). The idea of female body hair as “phallic” is certainly not out of the blue, either—with the pubic area (especially its unkempt versions) being synonymized with “incorrect masculinity”/an extension of the clitoris as “phallic-like”; i.e., an offshoot of the “correct” penis’s legitimate violence, thus violent in a delegitimized, rebellious counterterror form. Keeping in this spirit, I jokingly in the past referred to Zeuhl’s pubic hair (which was especially full and thick) as a “hair penis.” Heteronormativity would treat these “exceptions” to the Vitruvian, European standard as anathema, but in truth, they are incredibly common; they’ve just been abjected into a state of exception that weird canonical (art) nerds can police with impunity.

[3] Antiwar tends to combine sex, drugs, and roll ‘n rock at cross purposes with state hegemony—e.g., opposing the American Vietnam soldier’s pulling of a modern-day variation of the Viking berserk’s war ritual: getting high as fuck, then fucking shit up and otherwise raping everything in sight. The antiwar/anti-capital activist might use the hidden, ironic function of “White Rabbit” (1967) or “99 Red Luftballoons” (1983) to ferry a message to other collaborators; i.e., anyone who is against war as a business (and all that entails). It becomes a graveyard shift, embracing the communication of such counter codes; i.e., disco-in-disguise, on par with the Mancunian postpunk movement and assorted mimicries in the years ahead.

[4] Sex work/non-binary exclusionary radical feminists (we’ll explore all three groups extensively in Volume Three).

[5] For canon, fucking is synonymous with rape regarding monsters: fuck the monster (up); for iconoclasm, fucking is cathartic, including ironic appreciations of rape theatre that put “rape” in quotes—i.e., calculated risk/informed consent that helps targets of generational trauma (including rape) feel more confident about their bodies, identities and ability to at least laterally confront their abusers: by theatrically performing inside a safe space about what happened to them.

[6] Correctness is tricky. As stated during the “Regarding Hard Kinks” disclaimer, correctness can mean “what is right, or universally ethical—i.e., pertaining to basic human rights (and the health of the planet’s ecosystems and the humane treatment of animals)”; or it can mean “socially acceptable—i.e., correct according to the ethical beliefs of a specific group,” which under Capitalism systemically favors the in-group historically-materially exploiting the out-group for the profit motive. This means that as long as profit occurs, fucking the monster (xenophilia) or killing it (xenophobia) is acceptable under Capitalism in harmful, sex-coercive forms (aka efficient profit).

[7] (from the glossary): “A term I wrote for a discontinued book series, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes, military optimism speaks to the half-real ‘gun-happy optimism of Pax Americana—i.e., that one can always shoot away the state’s enemies and problems’ (source: ‘The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,’ 2021). This includes any scapegoats that exist in and out of media/the Superstructure and society’s public imagination; i.e., between fiction and non-fiction, onstage and off; re: during Capitalist Realism antagonizing nature as monstrous-feminine, pimping it through abject (us-vs-them) revenge before repeatedly summoning and banishing it, Radcliffe-style.”

[8] The verb, “to aggregate,” referring to “Power aggregates”—a phrase I lifted from In Range TV noting that “power aggregates” against potential/actual revolt in Atun Shei film’s “Fighting for Freedom: The Weapons and Strategies of the 1811 Slave Revolt,” 2021; timestamp: 20:55).

[9] Re: a word that hides, part of a larger linguistic process called cryptonymy whose pattern of concealment and trauma attach to Gothic spaces and echo inside their train of ruins, vis-à-vis Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis, or mimicking dead language and undead things trapped between said language to evoke Marx’s “spectres.”

[10] E.g., Conan’s “two stood against many” argument (arguably stemming from the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae).

[11] Meaning “fated/foretold,” but also “inescapable and ominous”; i.e., “to meet one’s destiny.”

[12] We’ll examine children’s literature, talking animals, and cartoons’ sex-educational potential in Volume Two during the “Call of the Wild” chapter.

[13] “Robyn Byrd and Katie Rice were teenage Ren & Stimpy fans who wanted to make cartoons. They say they were preyed upon by the creator of the show, John Kricfalusi, who admitted to having had a 16-year-old girlfriend when approached by BuzzFeed News” (source: Ariane Lange’s “The Disturbing Secret Behind An Iconic Cartoon: Underage Sexual Abuse,” 2018).

[14] “To kill and be king, Merlin?” “Perhaps not even that!”

[15] (from the glossary): As defined by Espen J. Aarseth in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (1997): “During the cybertextual process, the user will have effectuated a semiotic sequence, and this selective movement is a work of physical construction that the various concepts of ‘reading’ do not account for. […] In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to traverse the text,” meaning effort beyond eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages; spatially there is more than one route to take, or multiple ways one can take the same route to complete an objective or series of objectives (which in Metroidvania, are generally unspoken; Super Metroid is famous for its lack of narration, open-ended world, and non-linear fragmented narrative).

[16] From Ellen Moers’ Literary Women (1976). The term is rather outdated, similar to Beauvoir, Sontag or Wolff (and any of the other 20th century Gothicists we examine, to be frank).

[17] “We live in Gothic times,” from “Afterword” to Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974); source: “Carter, Angela,” Encyclopedia.com.

[18] For many an illuminating counterexample, refer to Asprey’s War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History. Labor fights dirty because we’re given no choice: not terror but counterterror to state forces’ usual brutalities: “No student of the period can seriously condemn the protesting peasant as a terrorist, for here, as in the case of Romans in Spain and indeed of most governments, European monarchs and ruling nobility held options of rule ranging from the most benevolent to the most despotic. Their subjects, however, held limited options: submit or rebel” (source).

[19] Whose pay-walled gnosis (“hidden knowledge”) adopts a kind of medievalized “trickle-down” to everyone else.

[20] A line from William Blake’s “The Tyger” (1794), part of his Songs of Innocence and Experience collection (1784); the poetic opposite of “The Tyger” is “The Lamb” (1789).

[21] “A lingua franca also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups of people who do not share a native language or dialect, particularly when it is a third language that is distinct from both of the speakers’ native languages” (source: Wikipedia). The bridge, within globalization and Capitalism, is war and rape; i.e., “violence is a universal language where ‘might makes right.'”

[22] In classic Greek myth, the Furies, much like the Fates or the Medusas, are traditionally depicted in groups of three, and generally are “gifted” with the power of foresight (a “female” quality also attached to the Oracle or the Sphinx).

[23a] As established, to make something a fetish is to objectify it, often within a ritual of unequal power exchange, BDSM, and kink (with a Gothic flavor of deathly aesthetics and power); re: what I call “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” giving something power (or taking power from it). Fetishization becomes harmful when canonized because canon is prescriptively sex-coercive towards women or beings forced to identify as women, while also turning men into sex pests with zero humanity/impulse control during scenes of appropriative peril, uninvited voyeurism, and unironic rape play. Psychosexuality becomes normalized within this theatre, conflating sex with harm according to popular (often-Gothic) tropes: incest, but also moe and ahegao (the fetishized child aesthetic and “death/rape face” anime/manga tropes, which under neoliberal Capitalism, have begun to develop eco-fascist tendencies that are traded back and forth across the global market; i.e., in a negative feedback loop between America and its allies, but especially Japan, that ramps up canonical xenophobia, war and rape in monomythic forms). In other words, abuse begets abuse, trauma living in the body and society as interacting back and forth psychosexually over space and time: a social-sexual criminogenesis that leads to intersectional forms of segregation/discrimination and overall carceral violence and harm with sexualized flavors. Criminogenesis and palingenesis (re: national rebirth, historically tied to fascism/Capitalism-in-decay) go hand-in-hand as canonical ghosts of the counterfeit that feed the process of abjection during climate crisis and masculinity-in-crisis as used to stoke the fires of war and rape, thus profit the elite through businesses centered around these things: the Military Industrial Complex and copaganda, whereupon “killing is their business, and business is good.”

[23b] (from the glossary): A distillation of Jean Baudrillard’s broader notion of the simulation representing things that do not exist, yet, over time, have become more real than the reality behind them, which has decayed into a desert the hyperreal simulation has replaced in the eyes of its viewers—i.e., has covered it up. Baudrillard’s hyperreality comments on similar historical-material issues that the egregore or simulacrum do as occult creations and copies of older likenesses or illusions. The preservation of the illusion as Capitalism turns the natural world into an uninhabitable desert could be called hypernormal. As Nasrullah Mambrol writes (exhibit, theirs):

Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality is closely linked to his idea of Simulacrum, which he defines as something which replaces reality with its representations. Baudrillard observes that the contemporary world is a simulacrum, where reality has been replaced by false images, to such an extent that one cannot distinguish between the real and the unreal. In this context, he made the controversial statement, “The Gulf war did not take place,” pointing out that the “reality” of the Gulf War was presented to the world in terms of representations by the media [as inherently dishonest …]

4) There is no relationship between the reality and representation, because there is no real to reflect (the abstract paintings of Mark Rothko).

According to Baudrillard, Western society has entered this fourth phase of the hyperreal. In the age of the hyperreal, the image/simulation dominates. The age of production has given way to the age of simulation, where products are sold even before they exist. The Simulacrum pervades every level of existence. (source: “Baudrillard’s Concept of Hyperreality,” 2016).

[24] E.g., Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes” (1986): “I was born for dying!”

[25] (from the glossary): In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Frederic Jameson writes,

“Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs” (source).

Personally, I think Jameson’s “normality” echoes Nietzsche’s or Freud’s. As such, I envision pastiche and parody as likewise having bourgeois and proletarian qualities, much like sublimation does. They can be blank under bourgeois (centrist) forms. Likewise, though, “perceptive pastiche” can adopt the appearance of a false “blankness/blindness” (see, above: “Vaporwave,” a hauntological subgenre) in the face of power—a tactic vital to revolutionaries’ continued funding from different sources, as well as keeping them safe from violent reactionaries.

[26] E.g., Ion Fury (2019) as a cyberpunk policed by Shelley Bombshell (exhibit 84a1), who we’ll discuss more in part two of the “camp map” and in Volume Three; i.e., Persephone van der Waard’s “Neutral” Politics: Feminism, the Gothic, and Zombie Police States in Ion Fury” (2021).

[27] I can’t get behind X’s politics, but will always adore the music attached to his adventures. Sure, it’s tied to nostalgic drama as an unironic escape from boredom, but I can always treat that as a rememory of its former self; i.e., by writing this book while listening to the very music whose genre/Call to Adventure the book happily critiques via the “universal adaptability” of music.

Rememory

From Tony Morrison’s 1987 novel, Beloved, to which Morrison herself shares in a 2019 interview, “as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative [in Beloved]” (source).

[28] “Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a ‘New Order’ while serving the same old moneyed interests. Its leaders are not guilty of confusion but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled” (source: Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds, 1997).

[29]Vae victis is Latin for ‘woe to the vanquished,’ or ‘woe to the conquered.’ It means that those defeated in battle are entirely at the mercy of their conquerors and should not expect—or request—leniency” (source: Wikipedia). Kain translates it to “suffering to” not “woe.”

[30] E.g., after Trevor Belmont kills Death in Castlevania season four (2021), Sypha—previously coded as the nerdy bookworm—gives up her academic/asexual pursuits to become Trevor’s dutiful housewife, full-time and on autopilot. In short, she’s biologically essentialized to obey Trevor’s every whim once the big villain is vanquished and she learns he’s “conquered” her—i.e., knocking her up and her hysterics taking over to build a nest “purely by instinct” (I’m really not kidding. The show plays all of this for laughs, but still treats it as Radcliffe’s “happy ending” gimmick; i.e., the promised marriage/compelled sex awarded to the male hero after the black castle crumbles; e.g., Emily St. Aubert giving her entire inherited fortune to Valancourt—who conveniently gambled away his entire fortune while in Paris as she was kidnapped by the evil Count Montoni and forced to survive at his treacherous castle, Udolpho [source: Shmoop Study Guides]).

[31] I.e., as a kind of pro-state shadow war—i.e., “AstroTurf guerillas” like the Contras of South America (exhibit 1a1a1g1) except fought on home soil by the middle class against the underclass; e.g., fascist ninjas or Vikings (which historically were raiders).

[32] (from the glossary): …the “bury your gays” trope (defined and explored by Haley Hulan’s 2017 “Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context”). / The heteronormative sublimation, violence and moral-panic scapegoating of anything that doesn’t fit the colonial binary model. Historically this would have been homosexual men (with queer cis women appropriated by cis-het men as exotic sex toys existing purely for male pleasure); however, it extends to trans/non-binary people or gender non-conforming persons more broadly (with various minorities being assigned heteronormatively atypical, gendered qualities, like women of color being seen as more masculine and sexual voracious/aggressive than white women, for example).

[33] Something to keep in mind when we examine Joseph Crawford’s introduction to Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013) during the “camp map”: the state’s agents of terror see themselves as the counterterrorists—with the state somehow being unable to turn them into monsters to do the elite’s bidding. In their own eyes, they’re pure and good, thus uncorruptible; in truth, they’re infantilized monsters, afraid of everything and conditioned to kill at the drop of a hat.

[34] A pejorative label attached to critical thought; i.e., “to see patterns in random data,” whereupon nothing is connected to anything else and suggesting otherwise is “political,” hence mendacious, misinformed, even seditious.

[35] After writing The Italian in 1796, Radcliffe stopped writing and traveled abroad, enjoying the luxuries of her “fuck you” money (out-earning her husband’s government job) while the French Revolution raged and she conspicuously distanced herself from it. Indeed, she never wrote again, effectively spending the rest of her days not just in luxury but in hiding (this lent her a mysterious air we’ll continue to critique throughout the book).

Book Sample: Thesis Proper Opening and Essay—Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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.

Thesis Proper: Concerning Canon (opening)

“What would an intellectual do? What would Plato do?”

—Wanda, A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

Note: While this post contains “Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox,” said essay comes after the Manifesto Tree and Four Gs (four main Gothic theories), which I cite elsewhere in “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents.” From citation to original, the information they contain is essentially identical—with a small amount of additional content that only appears in Volume Zero. —Perse, 3/20/2025

Picking up where “Notes on Power and Liminal Expression” left off…

This chapter covers what we will be camping: canon. It contains my manifesto tree, four main Gothic theories, essay about the Gothic imagination (the shadow zone whence all doubles come), thesis paragraph, and larger thesis statement/subchapters. Combined, they introduce most of my book’s keywords, manifesto terms and main Gothic theories. Concerning signposts, the Four Gs is mostly a map already and “Into the Shadow Zone” is a mini essay meant to illustrate praxial duality in a self-contained form; the actual thesis statement and “camp map” will outline their respective subdivisions before each begins.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

On Twin Trees; or, “Taking the Trees Back during Oppositional Praxis”: the Superstructure and Base; Tolkien vs Milton; and Our Manifesto Tree

“Things have certainly changed around here. I remember this was all farmland as far as the eye could see. Old Man Peabody owned all of this. Had this crazy idea of breeding pine trees.”

—Doc Brown, Back to the Future (1985)

 

The manifesto tree lists our praxial equations and coordinates relative to the holistic study and camping of canon’s singular interpretations (and subsequent policing) under Capitalism. I will supply several equations, followed by two exhibits on the Base/Superstructure and Tolkien vs Milton insofar as “trees” are concerned. Then, I will consider the twin trees of Capitalism—the Base and the Structure—as things to “corrupt” and reclaim away from Capitalism when developing towards Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism: our manifesto tree of oppositional praxis.

Camping canon, as a whole process, can be summarized with this praxial equation (on oppositional praxis):

Sex positivity happens during oppositional praxis’ class/culture war (class traitors/weird canonical nerds’ class dormancy and betrayal vs weird iconoclastic nerds’ class [thus race and gender] consciousness); i.e., sex positivity vs sex coercion to recultivate canon/the bourgeois Superstructure, thus reclaim the Base (means of production) according to our proletarian tree of Gothic-Marxist tenets and other factors.

and this one (on proletarian praxis):

Successful Proletarian Praxis (recultivation of the bourgeois Superstructure through iconoclastic art creation, critique, or endorsement; the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis) = Thesis Statement + Praxial Coordinates (manifesto tree) + Synthesis (social-sexual habits, emotional/Gothic intelligence, and financial support during worker’s daily lives; i.e., the camp map from the thesis volume and the synthesis roadmap from Volume One) + Poiesis History (the Humanities primer)

(exhibit 0b: Propaganda; that which, Rana Indrajit Singh writes, normally “grows out of the base and the ruling class’ interests. As such, the superstructure justifies how the base operates and defends the power of the elite” [source: “Base and Superstructure Theory,” 2013]—”normally” being the operative word, here. This book isn’t really a fan of what’s “normal” because “normal” for the status quo is bourgeois. Gotta camp that shit. For example, Nazis are “normal” and serve the elite. We must camp them and, like Mel Brooks, make them not just abnormal, but paranormal, too. This oppositional praxis extends to heroic canon; e.g., fostering ironic gender trouble and parody by imagining “Conan with a pussy” or gay hobbits [two favorite examples of mine that we will refer to or imitate in other monstrous forms constantly throughout this book].

Relative to the Superstructure and Base, our two equations apply to a manifesto tree of praxial terms that interrelate and overlap during oppositional praxis under Capitalism.

Before we look at our praxial tree, I wanted to conduct a thought experiment; i.e., to consider trees that illustrate praxis as something to remediate: Tolkien, for which one palimpsest to Lord of the Rings was Paradise Lost, which we just discussed. Except Tolkien took Milton’s campy allegory/potential and gentrified it within centrist war through the cryptonymy of “adventure” as useful to capital in all the useful ways: the creation of an enemy for someone to “go berserk” against, invading their land and “taking it back” (despite having no essential claim to it to begin with).

(exhibit 0c: Artist, top-right: Sebastian Rodriguez; top-left: source; bottom-right: John How Anger; bottom-left: Stefano Villa. Morgoth is like “Evil Thor”—i.e., if Thor was Satan corrupting the Tree of Knowledge and Life instead of Eve directly [but seducing Sauron] while also working in the diffuse shadow space that crams pre-fascism/fascism [“corruption”] and Communism [“the monstrous-feminine”] into the theatrical spaces and bodies involved. Tolkien’s Nordic-Christian hybrid [with him being an expert on Beowulf and Norse mythology[1] as informed by Christian tampering happening chronologically between Beowulf and Tolkien] has Morgoth and Ungoliant camp around the base of the trees and recultivate their superstructure to make a new world that Tolkien—although he didn’t openly like war as a business—spends his entire canon [corpus] to unironically demonize Communist stand-ins as the “end of the free world”: 

“Then the Unlight of Ungoliant rose up even to the roots of the Trees, and Melkor sprang upon the mound[2]; and with his black spear he smote each Tree to its core, wounded them deep, and their sap poured forth as it were their blood, and was spilled upon the ground. But Ungoliant sucked it up, and going then from Tree to Tree she set her black beak to their wounds, till they were drained; and the poison of Death that was in her went into their tissues and withered them, root, branch and leaf; and they died” [source: the eighth chapter of “the Quenta Silmarillion” section within The Silmarillion, 1977]. 

I.e., the Darkening of Valinor is seen as an unironic BBC rape/”dark fellatio” tragedy that canonizes Milton’s camp, his “darkness visible” to Tolkien’s blind, class-dormant “Unlight” of a fat and sassy spider queen and her dark daddy dom in Nazi fetish gear. They both sound badass but I’d much rather have badass camp than canon, especially considering what it serves: Tolkien made the myth, placed it over the palimpsest and passed it off as the truth “found” like an old, lost relic/time capsule. Even if its fabricated nature is brought to light, it doesn’t matter if they have been internalized; his stories are a hypercanonical example of centrist war cartographized.

To this, Tolkien’s refrain [the High Fantasy treasure map, exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] has led to the endless essentializing of war as gentrified through the fantasy mode [e.g., Rings of Power, 2023] but also its science fiction and horror parallels [which we’ll unpack during the “camp map” vis-à-vis Cameron’s refrain: the shooter, of course, but specifically the Metroidvania]. Tolkien’s magnetic, “chaste” warmongering leaves out the psychosexual horrors of war or valorizes them through the slaughter of abjected foes[3], requiring great effort from past writers like Ursula Le Guin to break away from Tolkien’s ghost, thus his trees and pastoral village recruitment antics and moderately xenophobic [racist] war stories. As these are copied-and-pasted along the shared counterfeit, they operate like a formula whose canonical replication centers around the profit motive; in turn, this becomes historical-material—e.g., D&D and its endless official/homebrew campaigns and dungeons—but also the “warcraft[4]” of the enterprising white, cis-het young men of an early ’90s company, suitably titled Blizzard [whose sexist bullshit as a company we’ll discuss much more in Volumes Two and Three]—built entirely around racial conflict [thus endless war and rape] as set into motion by Tolkien himself, whose own orcs are green-skinned, debatably anti-Semitic/cannibalistic savages whose name, “orc,” is Old Norse [from Beowulf‘s orcnēas[5]] for “demon”; i.e., functional zombies in the state of exception that heroes invade to kill for the state through parallel legends weaving in and out of fiction and into real life: there and back again not once, but ad infinitum. If these “zombies” aren’t orcs, then they’re spiders[6] or some other stigma animal/vermin-type pest entity who must be crushed by the forces of good in personified forms; e.g., the Drow as “chaotic evil” spider people [exhibit 41b] who threaten nature as afflicted with the same problematic idea of good vs evil as canonically Biblical [versus Milton’s own accidental camping of these pastoral devices through Satanic war].

Simply put, Tolkien’s hopelessly academic view of nature is whitewashed, High Fantasy copaganda—a British tree huggers’ biased loving of the idealized pastoral/picturesque as threatened by outsiders ruining the scene: the map of empire as sacred. It’s a colonizer’s cartoonishly basic aesthetic that demonizes, thus alienates darkness but also death, decomposers and natural predators [stigma animals] as part of nature; i.e., as evil scapegoats tied to wicked, unnatural places, archaic wombs and dark magic—necromancers, but also their fortress lairs:

At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees. On some of them were old castles with an evil look, as if they had been built by wicked people [emphasis: me]. Everything seemed gloomy, for the weather that day had taken a nasty turn [source]. 

These kinds of Gothic castles were clearly known to Tolkien, though he didn’t focus on them. In The Hobbit, they’re mentioned hardly at all [the word “castle” is used only once in the book]—sidestepped by Tolkien until it comes time to trot out Sauron [also known as the Necromancer] as the unironically Satanic threat to Tolkien’s “new Eden”: Britain by another name, as built by Tolkien’s easily ludologized, High Fantasy scheme[7].

The displacement of British industrialization and slavery is made clear by examining the real-world inspiration for Mordor and Tolkien’s own experiences elsewhere: “the industrial Black Country of the English Midlands, and by his time fighting in the trenches of the Western Front in the First World War” [source: Wikipedia]. Of the former Midlands, Jonathan Wilkins writes, “He based the description of Mordor, home to the evil Lord Sauron, on the Black Country, a region of Birmingham which was heavily polluted by iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills due to the Industrial Revolution. The air in it was so thick with smog and dust it was difficult to breathe and may contribute to the way local people speak today – the infamous Brummie accent” [source: “Birmingham Sites that Inspired Tolkien,” 2020]. Tolkien’s love for home pastoralizes the colonial element by abjecting its theatrical “soot” onto a fictional elsewhere. Places like the Shire and Lothlórien were always green and good and totally “never did a genocide” to get where they are; by comparison, the orcs threatening their naturalized goodness are the colonizers who did all of the bad things. It’s DARVO through British exceptionalism.

[Top-right: My brother’s 2001 copy of The Hobbit, which I’ve had for years and used to cite all of my work on Tolkien, including one of my better[8] undergraduate essays, “Dragon Sickness: the Problem of Greed” (2015). It was also a book that I read to nurse my broken heart, in college; but segued into my planning to go to college to find love (to have lots of nerd sex)—which eventually happened when I met Constance (my first) at EMU and Zeuhl, at MMU, and promptly had an adventure that did not start or end with them, but introduced me to someone whose ghost, for or worse, would stay with me for the rest of my life. I don’t think you can have an adventure without a bit of sex and/or ghosts, by the end of it!

Top-right and bottom: Tolkien’s obvious love of runes and “the West” was shared by his supposed enemies, the Nazis, which reflects a more radicalized trend in cryptofascist groups that currently use the Nordic runes as hauntological dogwhistles.]

The essentialized myth—of Tolkien’s Cartesian-themed treasure map, racist world-building and combined historical-materialism—invoke endless enemies of the state, which generates endless histories that predicate on those material conditions and their dogma [the Protestant work ethic assigning a reprobate quality onto an essential, limitless enemy slaughtered for profit: the crisis and decay of the war machine and its can(n)on fodder]. Post-Tolkien and Bretton Woods, war under neoliberalism has become commodified; i.e., ludologized comfort food during endless crisis: we’re eating it as the state eats us, as we eat each other. In turn, the concept, “there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism” becomes not just normal but hypernormal[9], enforced even though we know it’s wrong.)

Now that we’ve expressed several canonical and campy deaths of trees, we stand before, and look up at, the twin trees of Capitalism: their trees to ours during opposition praxis, for which to “corrupt” as Communists do—which is to say, like Milton and Tolkien but in a progressively campy direction towards anarcho-Communism, specifically Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism as I have devised it.

Please note: All of these terms will be explored later multiple times and in great detail. For now, I just want to list them; re: the engine of oppositional praxis with which to pour our fuel, proletarian praxis.

Also, a note about this list (and really the entire book): Function determines function[10], not aesthetics. Likewise, the parent dichotomies synonymize: canon is unironic, bourgeois, and sex-coercive, attaching everything to human biology (through sex organs and skin color); iconoclasm/camp is ironic, proletarian, and sex-positive, divorcing self-expression from these colonized sites using dialectical-material scrutiny—i.e., biological sex and gender are wholly separate, vis-à-vis, Judith Butler. Each evokes a variety of sub-dichotomies and orbiting factors; e.g., “sex-positivity is sexually descriptive, and descriptive sexuality is proletarian, thus ironic,” etc, and frequently clash in the traditional language of power and resistance: monsters and the military parade. I’ll explain this more when we continue to unpack poetics and mimesis, during the symposium. —Perse

Camp’s assembly and production of cultural empathy under Capitalism happens according to the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis (manifesto terms intersect and overlap; e.g., “good sex education is sexually descriptive”)

  • mutual consent
  • informed consumption and informed consent
  • sex-positive de facto education (social-sexual education; i.e., iconoclastic/good sex education and taught gender roles), good play/emergent gameplay and cathartic wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse prevention/risk reduction patterns) meant to teach good discipline and impulse control (valuing consent, permission, mutual attraction, etc); e.g., appreciative peril (the ironic damsel-in-distress/rape fantasy)
  • descriptive sexuality

during ludo-Gothic BDSM as things to materially imagine and induce (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) through Gothic poetics; i.e., inside the “grey area” of cultural appreciation in countercultural forms (making monsters)

  • the culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive irony of Gothic counterculture’s reverse abjection with sex-positive demon BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality and the ironic ontological ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence

that, when executed by emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers, use camp to cultivate empathy through Gothic counterculture; i.e., by synthesizing Gothic Communism during oppositional praxis (canon vs iconoclasm) according to our manifesto terminologies and structure—in short, its various tenets and theories

  • Re-claim
  • Re-union/-discover/-turn
  • Re-empower/-negotiate
  • Re-open/-educate
  • Re-play
  • Re-produce/-lease
  • our four main Gothic theories (the Four Gs)
    • abjection (from Julia Kristeva’s process of abjection, vis-à-vis Hogle’s “ghost of the counterfeit”)
    • hauntology (from Derrida “spectres of Marx” and Fisher’s “canceled futures,” vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis)
    • chronotopes (from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Gothic chronotope”)
    • cryptonomy (from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, vis-à-vis Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Castricano’s cryptomimesis)

mode of expression (and assorted mediums: novels, short stories, movies, videogames, etc)

  • monsters
  • lairs/parallel space
  • the Hermeneutic[11] Gothic-Communist Quadfecta (Gothic, game, queer and Marxist theory, which we’ll unpack more in the manifesto in Volume One)
  • phobias/stigmas/biases

creative, oppositional praxis

  • the Six Doubles of Creative/Oppositional Praxis
    • sex coercion vs sex positivity
    • carcerality vs emancipation
    • complicity vs revolution

and their various synthetic oppositional groupings

  • destructive vs constructive anger
  • destabilizing vs stabilizing gossip (and abuse encouragement/prevention patterns)
  • “blind” vs “perceptive” pastiche (class/culture blindness versus consciousness)
  • unironic vs ironic gender trouble/parody (canon vs camp)
  • bad-faith vs good-faith egregores

via camp’s class-conscious defense from canon’s class dormancy and class betrayal

i.e., the moderate/reactionary class traitor’s four basic behaviors

    • open aggression, expressing gender trouble as a means of open, aggressive attack (disguised as “self-defense” reactive abuse): “We’re upset and punching down is free speech[12]” (“free speech” being code for “negative freedom for bigots who want to say bigoted things” to defend the elite’s profit motive).
    • condescension, expressing a moderate, centrist position that smarmily perpetuates the current status quo as immutable, but also optimal: “This is as good as it gets” but also which can never decay.
    • reactionary indignation, using sex-coercive symbols (argumentation) to defend their unethical positions: “They’re out to destroy your heroes, your fun, all you hold dear (code for ‘the current power structure’).”
    • DARVO (“Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender”), defending the status quo by defending the people who enslave them (the elite) by going after the elite’s enemies, thereby defending Capitalism during decay. When it decays, these “gamers” see “their” games in decay and will defend those, seeing human rights as an affordable compromise in the bargain. They see themselves (and the elite) as “victims,” and class warriors as monsters “ruining everything” (like Satan).

to foster empathy and emotional/Gothic intelligence by weird iconoclastic nerds reversing the canonical, unironic function of the Four Gs

  • reverse abjection
  • the emancipatory hauntology and Communist-chronotope operating as a parallel society—i.e., a parallel space (or language) that works off the anti-totalitarian notion of “parallel societies[13]“: “A [society] not dependent on official channels of communications, or on the hierarchy of values of the establishment.”
    • Note: This was originally written in Eastern Europe to manifest against the Soviet Marxist-Leninist political body/state apparatus, which then collapsed and emulated the West under neoliberal Capitalism/global US hegemony. But by that point the East had already stopped trying to develop Communism and the state reliably collapsed into a capital-driven form. The same idea of “parallel society” can be used to develop anarcho-Communism within the Gothic mode; e.g., the danger disco as a campy “party mentality” to queer existence since Matthew Lewis (exhibit 15b1). —Perse
  • the Gothic Communist’s good-faith, revolutionary cryptonymy

On the flip-side, our would-be killers collectively lack emotional and Gothic intelligence; they do not respect, represent or otherwise practice our “creative successes.” As we’re going to establish by looking at the definition of weird canonical nerds (in the thesis statement), their conduct is quite the opposite of weird iconoclastic nerds; weird canonical nerds don’t practice mutual consent; they canonize, thus endorse

  • uninformed/blind consumption through manufactured consent
  • de facto bad education as bad fathers, cops (theatrical function: knights) and other harmful role models/authority figures; i.e., canonical sex education and gender education, bad play/intended gameplay resulting in harmful wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure (abuse encouragement/risk production patterns); e.g., appropriative peril (the unironic damsel-in-distress), uninvited voyeurism, etc
  • prescriptive sexuality

through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis. They endorse

  • the process of abjection
  • the carceral hauntology/parallel space as a capitalist chronotope (e.g., the “blind” cyberpunk)
  • the complicit (thus bad-faith, bourgeois) cryptonymy

to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to a variety of bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil’s

  • “trident” (the Superstructure)
    • the manufacture trifecta (manufactured scarcity, competition/conflict, and consent)
    • the subterfuge trifecta (displace, disassociate, disseminate)
    • and coercion trifecta (gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss)
  • the “handle” (the Base)
    • owner/worker division
    • efficient profit (through exploitation)
    • infinite growth (through Imperialism)

and vertical, pyramid-scheme arrangements of power and subsequent tiers and punitive exchanges thereof

  • top, middle, bottom
  • lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts
  • corporate, militarized and paramilitarized bureaucratic flavors

arranged in neoliberal forms inside and outside of the text

  • bosses, mini-bosses, and minions
  • executives, middle management/content creators, customers/consumers
  • waves of terror and unironic vice characters (menticide)

which leads to a surrender of total power during states of emergency that are always in crisis and decay. Empathy is the casualty of the middle class, whose weird canonical nerds are taught to see the underclass as lacking basic human rights during moral panics. In the presence of crisis and decay, people forget then deify whatever’s in front of them that looks powerful. They don’t take the time to ascertain if the giant trees are canonical or campy—in short, whether the swap has been made and the current falsehood is designed to liberate or exploit them. During the bait-and-switch, they’ll follow the leader to scapegoat the usual suspects under Capitalism unless canon can be camped.

To conclude, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism camps canon (and its trees) to ensure that empathy/apathy and class character (unconscious/conscious) occur in oppositional praxis as a dialectical-material exchange. For workers, the empathy accrued is established during these creative successes, whose solidarized and active, intelligent poetics (a manifestation of reclaimed labor and working-class sentiment) cultivate the Superstructure in ways useful to proletarian praxis: helping all workers by reversing the process of abjection and its canonical historical-materialism (the narrative of the crypt, or echo of ruins). This happens by camping the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the barbaric lie of the West told through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern that drive the process of abjection currently used to exploit workers, resulting in myopic exploitation and genocide under Capitalist Realism while the elite’s endlessly engineered crises enter into, and out of, decayed states of emergency and exception. Rewrite how people respond to elite propaganda and you can rewrite how people think, thus rewrite history by changing its well-trod, profitable (for the elite) and bloody (for us) historical-material track; in short, you can take the state’s propaganda apart, ending Capitalist Realism as you start to develop towards a post-scarcity world (the kind that is wholly antithetical to modern nation-states and their vertical arrangements of power): through the imaginary past and its legion of ghosts clamoring for something better (versus the entitled-yet-incredibly-isolated bully saying “haven’t I earned this?” after having done the state’s dirty work for decades).

Now that we’ve scaled the trees as a potential engine for rebellion, I will now give you the gasoline: the four main Gothic theories. As such, the rest of the thesis proper will provide these theories, then unpack my thesis paragraph/body before the camp map (specifically its finale) will apply them to canon as something to camp.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

The Four Gs: Our Main Gothic Theories

“You have to be careful when you use it in the swamp, and there are warlocks.”

—something I said to Zeuhl in my sleep, while at MMU after playing Hollow Knight and writing about Metroidvania for my master’s thesis* (2018)

*Re: “Lost in Necropolis” (2018). Refer to Persephone’s 2025 Metroidvania Corpus for all of my work on Metroidvania; i.e., from 2017 to the present.

“Gothic,” for our purposes, is the creation of monsters and monstrous spaces (e.g., Metroidvania) for oppositional praxis and dialectical-material analysis. I will extrapolate on both points (the making of monsters, in the thesis statement; and the exploration of their spaces—specifically the “ludo-Gothic BDSM” of the Metroidvania—during the “camp map”) and consider other definitions of the Gothic in the symposium (e.g., Chris Baldrick and Tanya Krzywinska) but for now that will do; the Gothic is, like the West itself, largely made up and retold through a series of violent, monstrous lies.

These four theories (and their dance partners) are not: our four main Gothic theories, the Four Gs, presented in ways that intersect with themselves and my own idiosyncratic research/argumentation. There’s no easy way to present them in this state except as I have (originally written in my 2022 blogpost, “Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Manifesto” and ultimately transferred here). I promise it’s a Gordian Knot that we’ll work towards the center of, not simply cut through like Alexander with his sword:

  • abjection (from Julia Kristeva’s process of abjection, vis-à-vis Jerrold Hogle’s “ghost of the counterfeit”)

Coined by Julia Kristeva in her 1981 book, The Powers of Horror, abjection means “to throw off.” Abjection is “us versus them,” dividing the self into a linguistically and emotionally normal state with an “othered” half. This “other” is generally reserved for abjected material—criminal, taboo or alien concepts: good and evil, heaven and hell, civilization and nature, men and women, etc. Through Cartesian dualism—re: the rising of a dividing system of thought by René Descartes that led to settler colonialism—nation-states and corporations create states of normality (the status quo) by forcefully throwing off everything that isn’t normal, isn’t rational, masculine or even human, etc. Through the status quo, normal examples are defined by their alien, inhuman opposites, the latter held at a distance but frequently announced and attacked (a form of punching down); the iconoclast, often in Gothic fiction, will force a confrontation, exposing the viewer (often vicariously) to experience the same process in reverse (a form of punching up). Facing the abjected material reliably leads to a state of horror, its reversal exposing the normal as false, rotten and demonic, and the so-called “demons” or dangerous undead as victimized and human: “Who’s the savage?” asks Rob Halford. “Modern man!” Descartes was certainly a massive dick, but the spawning of endless Pygmalion-generated undead and demons scarcely started and ended with him. Instead, it expanded through the ghost of the counterfeit as wedded to the process of abjection in Gothic canon; or as Dave West summarizes in “Implementation of Gothic Themes in The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit” (2023):

In [the 2012 essay] “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection,” Jerrold E. Hogle argues that the eighteenth-century Gothic emergence from fake imitation of fake work is the foundation of what is defined as modern Gothic today. He maintains that Horace Walpole’s 1765[14] The Castle of Otranto, which is considered as the groundwork of the modern Gothic story, is built on a false proclamation that the novel was an Italian manuscript written by a priest. […] Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery. [In turn,] Hogle’s observation of the history of The Castle of Otranto forms the basis for understanding the concept of counterfeit as a result of the abjection process.

Gothic Communism, then, reverses xenophobic abjection through xenophilic subversion as a liminal form of countercultural expression (camp). Sex work and pornography (and indeed any controlled substance—sex, drugs, rock n’ roll, but also subversive oral traditional and slave narratives) operate through liminal transgression; e.g., subversive monster-fucking Amazons (exhibit 104a), werewolves (exhibit 87a) and Little Red Riding Hood (exhibit 52b) or Yeti (exhibit 48d2), etc. Reversing the process of abjection, these monstrous-feminine beings allow their performers to not only address personal traumas “onstage,” but engender systemic change in socio-material conditions; i.e., by performing their repressed inequalities during arguably surreal, but highly imaginary interpersonal exchanges that are actually fun to participate in: as a process of de facto education in opposition to state fakeries (thus refusing to engender genocide within the common ground of a shared—indeed, heavily fought-over—aesthetic).

(artist: John Fox)

  • chronotope/parallel Gothic space (from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Gothic chronotope”)

Mikhail Bakhtin’s “time-space,” outlined posthumously in The Dialogic Imagination (1981), is an architectural evocation of space and time as something whose liminal motion through describes a particular quality of history described by Bakhtin as “castle-narrative”:

Toward the end of the seventeenth century in England, a new territory for novelistic events is constituted and reinforced in the so-called “Gothic” or “black” novel—the castle (first used in this meaning by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto, and later in Radcliffe, Monk Lewis and others). The castle is saturated through and through with a time that is historical in the narrow sense of the word, that is, the time of the historical past […] the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture […] and in particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights. […] legends and traditions animate every corner of the castle and its environs through their constant reminders of past events. It is this quality that gives rise to the specific kind of narrative inherent in castles and that is then worked out in Gothic novels.

For our purposes, Gothic variants and their castle-narratives have a medieval/pre-Enlightenment character that describes the historical past in a museum-like way that is fearfully reimagined: as something to recursively move through, thus try to record in some shape or form; e.g., the Neo-Gothic castle (Otranto, 1764) to the retro-future haunted house (the Nostromo from Alien, 1979) to the Metroidvania (1986, onwards; my area of expertise). Canonical examples include various “forbidden zones,” full of rapacious, operatic monsters; i.e., canonical/capitalistic parallel space. Expanding on Frederic Jameson, the iconoclastic Gothic chronotope is an “archaeology of the future” that can expose how we think about the past in the present to reshape the future towards a Utopian (Communist) outcome. Although we’ll expound on this idea repeatedly throughout the book, a common method beyond monsters are hauntological locations housing things the state would normally abject: the crimes of empire buried in the rubble, but also contained inside its castle-narrative as an equally hyperreal, “narrative-of-the-crypt” (from Hogle: “The Restless Labyrinth: Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel,” 1980) mise-en-abyme. Iconoclastic parallel spaces and their parallel society of counterterror agents, then, align against state-corporate interests and their “geometries of terror” (exhibit 64c) which, in turn, artists can illustrate in their own iconoclastic hauntologies (exhibit 64b) and castle-narratives; i.e., ironic appreciative movement through the Gothic space and its palliative-Numinous sensations.

  • hauntology (from Jacques Derrida’s “spectres of Marx” and Mark Fisher’s “canceled futures,” vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis):

A basic linguistic state between the past and the present—described by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1993) as being Marxism itself. Smothered by Capitalism, Marxism is an older idea from Capitalism’s past that haunts Capitalism—doing so through “ghosts” in Capitalism’s language that haunt future generations under the present order of material existence. In Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing, Jodey Castricano writes how Marx, though not a Gothicist, was obsessed with the language of spectres and ghosts—less as concrete symbols sold for profit in the modern sense and more as a consequence of coerced human language expressing a return of the past and of the dead as a repressed force; she also calls this process cryptomimesis, or “writing with ghosts,” as a tradition carried on by Derrida and his own desire to express haunting as a feeling experienced inside Capitalism and its language. The concept would be articulated further by Mark Fisher as Capitalist Realism (2009); i.e., a myopia, or total inability to imagine the future beyond past versions of the future that have become decayed, dead, and forsaken: “canceled futures” (which Stuart Mills discusses how to escape in his 2019 writeup on Fisher’s hauntology of culture, Capitalism, and acid Communism, “What is Acid Communism?”). While all workers are haunted by the dead, as Marx states, this especially applies to its proponents—cops and other class traitors, scapegoats, etc—as overwhelmed by a return of the dead (and their past) through Gothic language/affect in the socio-material sphere. For those less disturbed by the notion, however, this can be something to welcome and learn from—to write with; i.e., in the presence of the dead coming home as a welcome force in whatever forms they take: not just ghosts, but also vampires, zombies, or composites, the latter extending to demons and anthromorphs as summoned or made; but also all of these categories being modular insofar as they allow for a hybridized expression of trauma through undead-demonic-animalistic compounds. As Castricano writes of cryptomimesis

Although some critics continue to disavow the Gothic as being subliterary and appealing only to the puerile imagination—Fredric Jameson refers to the Gothic as “that boring and exhausted paradigm” [what a dork]—others, such as Anne Williams, claim that the genre not only remains very much alive but is especially vital in its evocation of the “undead,” an ontologically ambiguous figure which has been the focus of so much critical attention that another critic, Slavoj Zizek, felt compelled to call the return of the living dead “the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture”‘ (source).

in regards to ghosts, I would argue the same notion applies to all undead, demons and animalistic egregores; i.e., writing with both as complicated theatrical expressions of the human condition under Capitalism.

(artist: Zdzisław Beksiński)

  • cryptonymy (from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, vis-à-vis Jerrold Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis)

In Cynthia Sugars’ entry on “Cryptonymy” for David Punter’s The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012), Sugars writes, “Cryptonymy, as it is used in psychoanalytic theory and adapted to Gothic studies, refers to a term coined by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok [which] receives extended consideration in their book The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (1986).” Sugars goes on to summarize Abraham and Torok’s usage, which highlights a tendency for language to hide a traumatic or unspeakable word with seemingly unrelated words, which compound under coercive, unnatural conditions (the inherent deceit of the nation-state and its monopolies). For Sugars and for us, Gothic studies highlight these conditions as survived by a narrative of the crypt, its outward entropy—the symptoms and wreckage—intimating a deeper etiological trauma sublimated into socially more acceptable forms (usually monsters, lairs/parallel space, phobias, etc; you can invade, kill and “cure” those. In my 2021 writeup, “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” I call this false optimism the “puncher’s chance” afforded to pro-Capitalist soldiers and de facto killers for the state; the odds suck and are either disguised or romanticized through heroic stories/monomyths). Described by Jerrold Hogle in “The Restless Labyrinth” as the only thing that survives, the narrative of the crypt is a narrative of a narrative of a narrative to a hidden curse/doom announced by things displaced from the former cause: Gothic cryptonyms; illusions, deceptions, mirages, etc. Sugars determines, the closer one gets to the problem, the more the space itself abruptly announces a vanishing point, a procession of fragmented illusions tied to a transgenerational curse: “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present,” Hogle writes of Otranto (the first “gothic” castle, reassembled for Horace Walpole’s 1764 “archaeology”). In regards to the mimetic quality of the crypt, this general process of cryptomimesis draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words tied to Gothic theatrical conventions and linguistic functions, but also patently ludic narratives that can change one’s luck within a pre-conceived and enforced set of rules; i.e., rewriting our odds of survival, thus fate, inside exploitative ludic schemes by pointedly redictating the material conditions (through ludo-Gothic BDSM) that represent “luck” as a variable the elite strive to manipulate for profit under Capitalism.

So, yeah, that’s a lot to unpack! A veritable concentric castle with many layers-upon-layers, I slowly built it around a grain of sand into a black pearl. It seems impenetrable, which might tempt us to smash it or pawn it off (which would destroy its value). Instead, we’re going to unpack it all, but like a Gothic castle or Gordian Knot, we can’t do that from outside (where we can only gaze on its glorious façade); we have to get into the thick of it, thus go down into the dark, deep dungeons where the truth of allegory is paradoxically hidden and waiting to be found and brought back up. History is a stage play that only stops on the last syllable of recorded time; until then, the show must go on and so must we in opposition to the state and its liars. We must investigate the past as full of doubled lies and other paradoxes. In short, we’ll have to go “dumpster diving” inside Percy Shelley’s “colossal Wreck[15].” We’ll do that (figuratively) next, and honestly many more time after as the book carries on…

Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox; or into the Shadow Zone: Where We Currently Are and Where We’re Going Deeper Into

“I have weapons you would not dare use!”

—Omadon, the Red Wizard; The Flight of Dragons (1982)

This essay briefly considers power as something to perform, thus interrogate and negotiate inside the Gothic mode/Gothic imagination. This paradoxical theatrical space (and its liminal territories/forms of expression) have many names—Hell; the abyss, the underworld, the beyond, or the void, etc—but I call it the shadow zone!

Per the monomyth as explained by Joseph Campbell (someone we’ll return to in the thesis statement), any heroic quest demands a journey into Hell. Confronting dark forces, there, the hero generally presents before the quest as a paradox: being of two worlds, one foot in the world of the living and one of the dead, magic/science, medieval/modern, heaven/hell, etc. Their liminal state and privilege of position affords them special education/access to old books (or sages) of wisdom that—as we shall see—can be counterfeited, but work within the same medieval poetics and Gothic mode that can be used for or against the status quo. Our journey (as workers seeking liberation from mass worker exploitation under neoliberal Capitalism) is to bring the campy power of a reclaimed Hell/shadow zone (and its subversive forces of darkness) back with us—to transform the world around us to better allow workers to negotiate for themselves while fighting for their basic human rights (and the health of the planet’s ecosystems and that of animals). Each time I went into Hell, I came back different—until Hell’s camp followed me and now lives with/within me; I began to see the world differently according to how I always was but didn’t always have the language; e.g., my queer-coded, teenage fantasies and vast dramatis personae of genderqueer players in The Cat in the Adage (exhibit 0a1) showed that I—like Bilbo—just needed a little push out the door to get the ball rolling.

(exhibit 0a2a: The neoliberal gang’s all here; the Shylock vice character and the white wizard and his token brothers. Death omens/magic visions, psychomachia, anti-Semitism, great speeches, light shows—all in The Flight of Dragons are lifted from medieval thought and presented unironically as neoliberal canon; i.e., in black-and-white hauntological language that serves the status quo as it presently existed in 1982 and continues to exist under the current Internet Age; i.e., under the self-same canonical paradigm/distribution of power and its false mechanisms of exchange dressed theatrically up as heroics in cinema and older media forms, but especially videogames as a then-new rising-commodity-turned-mega-business.)

When I was younger, I was always dreaming of dragons and knights and fairies, and darker Gothic things that stole the show. One of my favorite films was (and still is) The Flight of Dragons, where the Red Wizard, Omadon—played by James Earl Jones (the king of vice characters: the Emperor of the Night, Darth Vader and Thulsa Doom—speaks the tyrant’s plea and threatens the naïve and special zone/Garden of Eden dreamt up by his other three magic brothers:

I have weapons you would not dare use. Fear rules men. By summoning all the dark powers, I will infest the spirit of Man so that he uses his science and logic to destroy himself. Greed and avarice will prevail! Turn brother against brother! And those who do not hear my words will pay the price! I’ll show Man how to fly like a fairy! I’ll show him what distorted science can give birth to! And I’ll give him the ultimate answer his science can ask for!”

Jones’ Omadon is “a seducer of darkness, master of that heartless magic the world calls black,” and his villain’s monologue is seriously raining on their parade. So they hire a squad of mercenaries to chase him to his home, kill him, and steal the performative object of his power: the Red Crown. It’s a quest, a monomyth of the usual sort that scapegoats the Satanic force, like Tolkien did; i.e., as usual, in the canonical sense. But it was also penned in the early 1980s, on the cusp of neoliberalism: “Farewell! Can you not feel the world turning in my direction already!” was a warning to the audience of men like Reagan and girl bosses like Thatcher leading to an endless spawning of so many monomythic quests—especially those in ludic forms that would simulate, parallel and disguise the world being divided and rent asunder by Capitalism. Videogames, in particular, were devised during Bretten Woods but codified by Tolkien’s refrain (the High Fantasy treasure map and Protestant work ethic) and disseminated under Neoliberalism—i.e., from 1979 onwards—towards various other refrains, but especially James Cameron’s: the shooter and Metroidvania (we will explore these at length during the “camp map”; for now, just remember that videogames are an incredibly effective forms of theatrical propaganda: the codification of dogmatic beliefs and instructional behaviors [us-versus-them] taught through videogames as an all-too-effective war simulator).

Omadon is made out to be the obvious cartoon foil, and he seems treacherous by default. But the real enemies (in a class-conscious sense) are his brothers, who perceive of a crisis so great that—in the midst of the waning Age of Enchantment and the dawning Age of Science (Cartesian thought, aka Reason, or the Enlightenment)—their only option is to exclude and scapegoat him (the dark faggot clown) and lock all enchanted things away for safekeeping: to be visited “only during a flash of insight or the breadth of a dream.” In short, our dreams and awesome power are increasingly alienated from us; i.e., locked tragically away, put on loan and leant back to us by the elite privatizing them in whitewashed forms that simultaneously stand for the Greater Good. Sir Peter defeats Omadon—and by extension Omadon’s resistance of the privatization of fantasy (“deny me and you deny all magic!”)—by ignoring a paradox: “two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.” From a scientific standpoint, he’s basically right. From a Gothic standpoint, though he’s dead wrong and this is telling. Sir Peter denies all magic and its critical paradoxes to put his trust in science. For him, science is automatically the Truth and universally good, whereas Omadon’s lies are completely false and bad. This isn’t just naïve, it’s complicit. “You don’t scare me. Nothing so horrible could be real. […] And that’s why Antiquity chose me. You are magic, mere illusion! I am science and the truth!” Dogmatically spouting those equations of “his,” he sounds so blind to the idea that he—a scientist who loves magic—could somehow not be bought and paid for by the same old profit motive that colonizes everything for profit, including white people; i.e., the Imperial Boomerang:

the Imperial Boomerang

“The thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens” (source: Wikipedia). In Foucault’s own words during his lecture at “Il faut défendre la société” in 1975:

[W]hile colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself (source: “Foucault’s Boomerang: the New Military Urbanism,” 2013).

Described by Stephen Graham as “military urbanism,” this phenomenon accounts for the legion of dead futures popularized in American canon and its expanded, retro-future states of exception—hauntological narratives that present the future as dead and Capitalism as retro-futuristically decayed; i.e., Zombie Capitalism and zombie police states.

Sir Peter is the cold march of reason that sublimates genocide behind neoliberal fantasies and centrist myths written by dumb white boys who a) buy into the get-rich-quick scheme of saving the world; and b) who dream, night after night, about getting the girl afterward. “It’s normal!” my mother protests, to which I gaily respond: “No, it’s normalized.”

All of this is harmful wish fulfillment, because it not only excludes everyone but him; it demands their slaughter to fulfill Sir Peter’s entitlement as the Chosen One. In the end, he’s a cop—a class-dormant traitor/slave to the grind and nerdy spearhead to the darkest, cruelest magic of all: convincing the world neoliberal treachery doesn’t exist. He’s Bill Gates, the unsexy nerd who commodifies everything through a monopoly that limits what we can imagine by taking what was open source/open domain[16] and privatizing it, effectively selling our dreams back to us through our own stolen labor paid to us in trickle-down wages (also stolen); or rather, he’s a bad copy of Gates, whose allegory of the cave myopically cages the brains of weird canonical nerds who want to be just like Gate’s badly copied form: the class-dormant shadow theatre of false rebellion and controlled opposition (the fascist/centrist device, which extends to token police, of course; i.e., sublimation and recuperation during the monomyth and its vicious cycle, which I call the Cycle of Kings—more on this during the thesis statement).

(exhibit 0a2b1a: Whitey saves the world by killing the Nazi-Communist, token queer/racial minority scapegoat and getting the girl as result. Like Milton’s Satan but canonized, Sir Peter’s scheme for seizing power is set inside an ancient document that is both inside of itself and “found” externally as something to sell to the masses: an “archaeology” whose counterfeit cancels the future as dead. Hint: the finale shot of the film presents the happy presumed-newlyweds standing inside a pawn shop with the word “loan” hanging over the window frame and their silhouettes; their power and connection is a cheap fantasy that has been loaned to them, around which the world is diegetically decaying mid-crisis. The wish fulfillment—for the white guy and his Sailor Moon lookalike [who he made in the image of “everything he desired in a woman”; i.e., “his” fairy princess as actually supplied to him by pre-existing counterfeits]—is harmful because it’s pure escapism. It both asks him to ignore his real material conditions—holding down two jobs as a research assistant that wants to escape by making a game that everyone loves provided he gets the capital to back it up—and ignore the dreadful fact that he played right into the fantasy of colonizing a class, race and gendered “other” dressed up in medieval language, all so he can then return from the shadow zone, get the girl and live like a king! It’s systemic delusion meant to benefit the elite, not him, and the historical materialism plays out soberingly through Omadon’s curse as the cliché of “Jewish Revenge”: laughing while the Roman fool falls on “his” own sword [remember, it’s on loan]. To quote a different wizard, “There are no happy endings because nothing ends.” Regarding Sir Peter as an analog for aspiring weird canonical nerds shouting, “Pick me!” the fact remains that precious few get to inhabit that money-maker role; i.e., “make a killing” for the elite, now and forever.)

Note: While uploading Volume Zero onto its 2025 book promotion, I noticed several things I wanted to add/change. These changes have been condensed into the following four-page addendum, which includes various ideas largely introduced and/or built on after Volume Zero first released, back in October 2023. I’ll mark where it ends. —Perse, 3/21/2025

 We’ll unpack all of this, as we go. For now, simply bear in mind that such fun and games are canonized to incur Quixotic, imposturous results; i.e., in ways that keep power (as something to enjoy and perform) right where it is; re: from Tolkien’s heyday onto the post-1970s resurgence not just of tabletop games played through dice rolls, but computer games as well serving as extensions of capital into fictionalized variants. Dungeons and Dragons first appeared (as we currently know it) in 1974, right after the 1973 Oil Shock (the same year neoliberalism was being tested in South America). By 1982, though, videogames (and the half-real territories they pointedly represent inside-outside themselves), were well-and-truly starting to crystalize; i.e., the Atari Crash happened in 1983, but in 1985, Super Mario Bros. debuted in the United States, and the rest—as they say—was history.

In turn, such things became something to mime and defend, effectively making Sir Peter a cryptonymic, egregoric extension of those who—already privileged enough as it is (white straight men, followed by token parties)—wanted to become what Gates was already monopolizing in the late ’80s: the center of the universe. They would get their chance in the early ’90s; i.e., with companies like id, Value, Microsoft and Blizzard going on not simply to corner the market, but make it in their image by echoing those weird canonical nerds they were already imitating and contributing to larger harmful systems (and symptoms) in bad faith:

weird canonical nerds (versus weird iconoclastic nerds)

A term I coined while borrowing from and expanding on Cheyenne Lin’s “weird nerds” phrase from “Why Nerds Joined the Alt-Right” (2023), and one I present through my usual dialectical-material approach despite the obvious social components I’m weaving into things: weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds, or otherwise proponents of canon vs camp in popular culture; i.e., anything that weird canonical nerds posit, their iconoclastic brethren challenge in duality.

To it, weird canonical nerds work within a toxic subset of nerd culture. Whereas nerd culture more broadly is for those who present an increased intellectual interest in a given topic—often in literature, but also popular media more broadly as something to consume, critique, or create (with iconoclastic varieties extending such matters into a spectrum of modular activism and counterculture)—weird canonical nerds are those who undermine genuine, active intellectualism; i.e., by exchanging it for dumb, hostile and even bad-faith consumerism and negative freedom for the elite. As something to blindly enjoy/endorse through zealously faithful, uncritical consumption, they celebrate the monomyth and Cycle of Kings as “good war”; e.g., Gamergate, 2014, but also TERFs and their territorial emergence in the late 2010s. Not only are TERFs, and by extension weird canonical nerds, very wide—as a practicing group of stochastic terrorists that encompasses white cis-het male consumers and women, as well as token traitors (of class, culture and race)—but they unironically lead to fascism per the infernal concentric pattern as a holistic enterprise (with Gamergate endorsed by weird canonical nerds into the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and whose neoliberal sentiments’ fascist outcomes were felt throughout the consumption of media and mentality alike as things to practice).

Weird canonical nerds are systemically bigoted, pertaining to Man Box culture as something to openly endorse, or “resist” in ways that do nothing to change the status quo/avoid the infernal concentric pattern/Cycle of Kings; e.g., TERF Amazons, but also proudly “apolitical” non-feminist nerds who embody a particular status within the nerd pantheon of canonical heroes: Mega Man as a go-to centrist male hero, for instance, but also Eren Yeager as the “incel fascist” with mommy issues, or Samus Aran as the Galactic Federation’s singular girl boss/white Indian, etc. All become something to endorse within critically blind portions of nerd culture that ape their prescriptive, colonial heroes within culture war dressed up as “apolitical” (the fascist ideology being secondary to the pursuit and claiming of personal power by changing one’s shape and language to fit those aims; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich as a fascist war pig [to combine Umberto Eco with Black Sabbath] who would say whatever he could to justify his own iron grip on the minds of the populace: the foreign plot inside the house, once and forever).

To this, the Gothic and its various intersections, contradictions and conflicts are embroiled within oppositional praxis for or against weird canonical nerds, hence depictions/endorsements of different monster types; i.e., that, in the white, cis-het male tradition of privilege, such persons routinely “fail up,” and as success—like a whore/wife or nice house—is something they are taught to believe is owed to them (the promise of shelter and sex). Such betrayals and entitlement extend to token minorities allowed a slice of the pie, post-betrayal, but also must surrender their pie when the time comes (for which the real “Indian givers” are the settler colonist bearing false gifts: the Trojan Horse, aka the Faustian bargain, in Gothic circles).

For every heroic quest, then, there’s always a compelled sexual reward and victim, thus all the canonical essentialism such things are known for (the Imperium’s sex and force relayed through “ancient” theatrical arguments favoring the state). From Tolkien onwards (and from those he borrowed from), weird canonical nerds like Sir Peter are a fascist/centrist device to identify around (versus subvert)—one whose policing of the world in and out of media extends to token police, of course; i.e., sublimation and recuperation during the monomyth and its vicious cycle, which I call the Cycle of Kings (and which overlaps with the Shadow of Pygmalion). It’s all fake (as the Gothic historically is), but in ways that—per Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection—serve the elite when used dogmatically to endorse rape dressed up: as a map to follow to its logical conclusion, heading back to “Rome” as never having left. Similar to Gates, then, Peter isn’t just a fraud, but a Pygmalion rapist and clown posturing as goody-goody in bad faith—a liar claiming he did it all himself when in reality nothing could be further from the truth (Behind the Bastards’ “Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates,” 2023). Anything that applies to Gates applies to Peter and vice versa, hence those persons imitating them sans irony through prison-like violence kettling state scapegoats while apologizing for Capitalism (and its Realism). Their revenge serves profit, not universal liberation.

We’ll cover this (and more) during the thesis statement (and expound on many things that it cannot, later in this book series), but think of it for right now as a less-than-peaceful transfer of power in neo-medieval language; i.e., if there’s a crown then it’s for the taking in some kind of monomythic quest/Hero’s Journey robbing Ozymandias (or King Lear/Oedipus) blind:

Cycle of Kings (abridged)

Another term of mine, the Cycle of Kings is the centrist monomyth, or cycling out of good and bad kings (and the occasional queen), which extends to all the kings’ white cis-het Christian men or those acting like these men, thus warrior-minded good cops and bad cops (weird canonical nerds) apologizing for state genocide through Man Box and “prison sex” mentality arguments…

Man Box/”prison sex” mentality

Coined in my own work, “prison sex” mentality speaks broadly to rape culture as a practice; i.e., as a systemically taught and enacted approach leading towards the routine harming of others while maintaining the status quo. It is similar to the Man Box argument by Mark Greene, who—in his 2023 podcast, Remaking Manhood: The Healthy Masculinity Podcast—refers to “Man Box culture” as:

the brutal enforcement of a narrowly defined set of traditional rules for being a man. These rules are enforced through shaming and bullying, as well as promises of rewards, the purpose of which is to force conformity to our dominant culture of masculinity (source: Mark Greene’s “How the Man Box Poisons Our Sons,” 2019).

“Prison sex” mentality exists in quotes because it occurs inside-outside actual state-described “prisons”—said facilities (and their legends) bleeding chronotopically into the nuclear home (and onto those things in the home’s shadow as a fractally recursive extension of the state and its victims/perpetrators). To it, “prison sex” mentality is the same idea as Man Box culture, except it chooses to focus less on men and more on the unequal power dynamics that occur between dimorphized workers of any sort; i.e., as trained by the state Superstructure not just to rape and kill one another in literal terms, but also theatrical language; re: any form of abject (us-versus-them) expression that ties into the bigoted, colonial binary of a divided class of male/female, white/black, good/evil, etc, labor force acting within entertainment (sports and porn), the household, the workplace, and Gothic iterations of any of these things. Any cis-het man that fails to live up to the heteronormative standard of manliness (which is an impossible feat to begin with), for example, must be weak but also strong in a manner threatening towards the status quo; i.e., womanly or otherwise monstrous-feminine. The same goes for anyone in the Man Box displaying “prison sex” mentalities through their actions and output against state targets, who must fight back in duality using subversive doubles of the self-same Gothic language; re: weird canonical nerds versus weird iconoclastic nerds fighting to and fro with the language of monsters [more on these in a bit].

As such, the Hero’s journey and completion is Promethean—chasing Numinous things that, far from being conquered, always return to trouble the world; i.e., during Capitalism and its boom-and-bust hidden behind the same old shadowy illusions sold clear-as-day to fresh children (who grow into adults, have children, and pass all of this down, anew).

Flight of Dragons is hella sexist, then, and there’s nothing particularly “noble” about its Radcliffean, false-flag dismissal of fascism and Communism stuck in the same sphere (with Omadon’s red wizard being an abject storing space/red herring for all manner of capitalist scapegoats; i.e., he literally bloats with them, being full of himself as a kind of strawman to dismiss through Reason, below).

End addendum. —Perse

The paradox, here, is that I absolutely love The Flight of Dragons and its language of magic, fairy princesses, twink-looking heroes, vice characters, dragons, knights in shining armor, board games, etc; I just hate how they’re framed within state monopolies. Sir Peter is treated as “unique,” “having one foot in the world of magic and one in the world of science” while literally working for the Man (Antiquity as male-coded; mysteriously but essentially all-powerful: “Trust the judgement of Antiquity!” / “Good old Antiquity! I knew I could trust it!”). Despite the movie’s flawed framework, all I have to do to “make it good” is to camp it; i.e., “make it gay” in my mind and in my work (which the elite don’t want you to do; they want you to purchase “their” power fantasies given out on loan while you police everyone else as their dutiful, preferentially mistreated labor/wage slaves [the middle class] assisting the profit motive through all the usual ways); e.g., imagine Sir Peter (not Conan) with a pussy or have him getting pegged by Princess Melisandre while listening to KMFDM’s “Megalomaniac” (1997), etc.

This is not so hard to do; i.e., the quickest way to camp canon is through sex (and parodies of sexualized violence). As I am Persephone, my namesake is that of a witchy goddess of death with one foot in the world of the living and the land of the dead (all deities live inside the human breast); by accident of birth, I was born but also made for doing so according to my medievalist education as a profoundly special set of circumstances: I was born trans and exposed to education at home and in school that spoke to my desire to be free. I feel unique but have no desire to pull a Beethoven and boast: “Prince, what you are, you are through chance and birth; what I am, I am through my own labor. There are many princes and there will continue to be thousands more, but there is only one Beethoven” (source: Rick Fulker’s “Why Beethoven Snubbed Princes and Put His Music First,” 2016).

(artist: Julius Schmid)

In all the universe, in all the gin joints in all the world, Persephone walked into mine and made me her avatar. “All deities reside within the human breast,” wrote Blake; yet, I think of the “Jewish revenge” of my marriage of Heaven and Hell as Canon’s tyrannical plea, re-camped by me and billions of other workers actively and/or passively yearning for freedom. Its sui generis format is both “Workers of the world, unite! You have only to lose your chains!” married to “Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to hell with you!” (this second sentiment goes for anyone who taught me or otherwise contributed towards that dark beautiful thing that became what I am today). For Communists wronged by the state, we monsters and what we make are human as Shylock was:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction (source).

Our revenge, as a simulacrum, only resembles that of those who wrong us and counterfeit our campy legends for their canonical gain (Tolkien’s refrain); our aesthetic is shared but our function is altogether different: class consciousness as uncontrollable opposition relayed in terrifying medieval language that is thoroughly more wise through hindsight; i.e., not just according to Robert Asprey’s paradox of terror (which we’ll consider in relation to state forces decrying labor as terrorists) but  the hauntological paradox of “the Wisdom of the Ancients,” whereupon old forms of monstrous expression have been updated for the modern world and its challenges to accommodate our needs as workers being exploited by Capitalism and its propaganda. That is our revenge—slowly camping the canon, thus the Superstructure, and reclaiming the Base through our monstrous, ghostly theatre as something that once turned on, can never be shut down or destroyed; it can only be repressed in forms that always come back because the elite cannot kill all its workers (not on purpose, anyways).

Shadow theatre and its mythic structure are nothing new. It dates back to Plato’s infamous allegory of the cave and its mimesis as paradoxically haunted by the shadows of class struggle (the spectres of Marx, which in theory did not technically exist when Plato was alive, and yet whose struggles for emancipation include these older slaves that Marx alluded to in “The Eighteenth Brumaire”). Camus may have noted in The Myth of Sisyphus that canonical shadow theatre repeats to an absurd degree; i.e., Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill as punishment by the gods. To escape it, we can’t just smile at the gods like he proposed, but steal “their” fire on our own Promethean Quest! This means camping the canon, which requires repeated forays into Hell and putting the wrong things right at the source: our “darkness visible” and gods as stolen out from inside our breasts and put on the cave wall of Plato’s cave! Tolkien’s refrain/gentrification of war through High Fantasy is darkly echoed in stories just like The Flight of Dragons (which is especially treacherous because it argues moderately—i.e., as the voice of reason from a position of perceived disadvantage). We purposefully must camp the canonical nebula by camping the map as a source of class education through dialectical-material play (which we’ll elaborate on during the thesis statement and “camp map”): oppositional praxis as playing on in shadowy forms dancing on the same cave wall, our darkness deliberate fencing back and forth with the state’s blind canonical doubles like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood dueling Basil Rathbone’s Guy of Gisbourne:

Something I will argue repeatedly throughout my thesis (and the rest of the book) is how the greatest power/strength of class-conscious warriors is their deliberately campy “darkness visible” doubling canonical versions (through the Wisdom of the Ancients, though I may not always call it that); i.e., their innate and uncanny ability to camp canon using the same shadowy language/aesthetics that class-dormant class traitors do (whose much touted “greatest strength” is their Achilles Heel, their greatest weakness when the state needs sacrifices). Beauty in “the eye of the beholder” is subjective, but perceptions of power are enforced to a matter of function and objective degree in order to define beauty (and what is “correct” according to basic human, animal and environmental rights as tied to heroic stories) as having a monstrous class character. Everything happens in the shadow zone between dueling hero monsters for or against the state and its profit motive. Meanwhile, state agents are labeled by the state as counterterrorists, calling labor’s agents “terrorists” (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr.) in bad faith; the language can be reversed easily enough, but the function still has to be scrutinized as parsed with a learned eye.

Regarding “Hell” as the shadow zone we must delve into during oppositional praxis, here’s something to remember based on what we’re discussed up to this point: Power is historically about perception and invention; i.e., fabricated for or against the state through undead and demonic masks, uniforms, weapons, performers, etc. Power exchange goes in both directions, onstage and off. Canonically speaking, though, the creation and theft of this power is meta, wherein the ludic contract (as a canonical device) steals power in a Faustian sense that doesn’t just master players (re: Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy) but does so in bad faith; i.e., the promise of false power through a Faustian ludic contract—one whose Quixotic escapism/false hope[17] (a neoliberal weapon/opiate) seeks perpetual “empowerment/strength” to progress through a fictional gameworld that disguises what’s actually disempowering players outside of itself: the elite and their neoliberal illusions as half-real (from Jesper Juul, meaning between “the fiction and the rules” but also real life whose “magic circle” [from Eric Zimmerman] is where the game takes place). Obviously this goes beyond videogame simulations and extends out of and into older mediums that reinforce the meta-narrative of the status quo as part of our daily lives and their mimesis. “All’s fair in love and war” but their battle is expressed across all mediums and life imitating art through our own battles as coded or otherwise informed by these narratives and vice versa. The visible darkness we provide is challenged by the blindness of canon’s myopia (Capitalist Realism); i.e., canonical hell historically-materially becomes a place to give up and accept one’s doom by playing along as a copy of a cop that is thoroughly cynical as Oscar Wilde would have put it: one “who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”

There’s also the diegetic theft of power by all of these cop-like heroes, stealing it through “the game” (in whatever form it takes) as a training simulator for praxial purposes: the FPS as a military simulator[18]. “Empowered,” the canonical hero learns to rob from an ostensibly fascist, Communist, non-white, non-Christian and/or queer foe; i.e., they—but also canonical moral panics and their campy reclamation—exist (indented for clarity)

in the same outlawed space/shadow zone exemplified by Gothic poetics: forbidden, tempestuous desire and other extreme emotions/mood-swings; the supernatural/occult and bad omens; and confusing or unchecked sin/vice as dark and deadly, disease-like sentiments (revenge, lust, gluttony, etc, as leading to ignominious death, often according to cancer or acute organ failure as surreal, medieval metaphors for “dying of shame[19]“).

Similar to Omadon, we have Count Dracula, but also Mother Brain, Bowser, Dr. Wily and Ganon living in a dark, thoroughly queer-coded shadow realm of medieval, heretical barbarism; sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll; and fascist-adjacent BDSM aesthetics that threaten to turn the white knight’s armor black. All exist in the same sphere of doom for the hero to loot and plunder while assigning punishment as a centrist agent that perpetuates conflict as orderly but also profitable inside the global market: “There are no moral actions, only moral teams”; i.e., good guys and bad guys; re: white knights and black knights and their synonyms/antonyms tied to various nation-states cannibalizing their usual victims on the global stage.

(exhibit 0a2b1b: Artist: possibly Jean-Louis Gaspard. With the likes of Conrad, James Cameron, and Wes Craven, settler colonialism is a fantasy carried out popular fictions to apologize for the ongoing practice during moderate empowerment fantasies. Regarding the historical function of settler colonialism, Lorenzo Veracini writes in “Settler colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa: A Protracted History” [2022]:  

More than other forms of colonialism, settler colonialism is characterized by a “logic of elimination.” This form of domination contrasts with exploitative or extractive colonialisms, where the ongoing subordination of colonized populations is a requirement for the viability of colonial domination. In settler colonies, the very presence of an Indigenous population is sometimes targeted through expulsion or physical elimination. Alternately, settler-colonial powers can undermine the resilience of Indigenous political sovereignty and autonomy. If settler-colonial regimes do not display a uniform investment in outright native elimination, it is because settler colonialism and other types of colonialism routinely mix with one another. Conflicting demands for subsumption and elimination can coexist even if they respond to distinct and, to a certain extent, antithetical colonial logics; all colonial regimes are marked by contradiction. Settlers also respond flexibly to conditions on the ground and to Indigenous resistance and agency. Nevertheless, the objective of a non-settler-colonial regime is the ongoing domination of a colonized collective, whereas the aim of a settler-colonial regime is the reproduction of a settler polity in place of an Indigenous one [source].

In short, the locals are a demonized “other” species/underclass to eliminate, but also harvest in oscillating theatrics that aim to keep them alive [and the Imperial Boomerang away from home] for as long as possible.)

This globalization of settler colonialism during the past several centuries has been tied to a mother territory (America) having naturalized Britain and France’s colonial experiments[20] before reaching into the Global South with smaller ally nation-states and buffer/satellite states during proxy war as both a) carried out during the Cold War (when Russia ceased combating the West and sought to emulate it); and b) after the so-called “end of history” and emergence of Capitalist Realism raping nature full-bore (vis-à-vis Francis Bacon), but also the minds of the public through fear and dogma dressed up as “public relations”: Bernays’ propaganda as relayed through famous Gothic canon; i.e., us-versus-them. Since their inception and initial development during the Enlightenment, nation-states have always been the enemy—the giant cannibalizing zombie-vampire piloted by the elite feeding off workers while teaching them to eat each other from “most expendable” to “least expendable” (compared to the elite, we’re all dogmeat). Under neoliberalism, war as executed through nation-states will not only never end; its proliferation in and out of fiction bleeds into our daily lives as similarly cliché to the pre-existing story’s historical materialism; e.g., my father and (adopted) first-cousin-once-removed fighting over my mother’s honor like two knights dueling at a banquet, except it was two guys in their late twenties wearing dress clothes and trying (badly) to play frisbee football: our figurative Princess Dulcinea and two knights Quixote tilting at windmills during an anniversary party’s novel-of-manners farcical instance of life imitating art and vice versa.

The subsequent canonical synthesis will inform both sides as becoming a powerful meta illusion that the class-dormant will fight for as class traitors who police anyone who threatens the profit motive. Their predication owes itself to various moral panics separating the hero’s reactionary and existential crisis-of-faith/sense of self-worth and self-victimhood from the hero’s victims and their very real grievances: the Red Scares, Islamophobia, Yellow Menace of Orientalism; Black Revenge, and white genocide/replacement inheritance phobias; stigma animals (spiders, snakes, etc) and their anthropomorphized extensions; Satanic/gay panic, but also the automatic, cliché fetishization and commercialization of these things by undercover agents slumming through the conquered, ghetto streets of the colonized as guilty pleasures to peruse; e.g., the Harlem Renaissance or a drag show as a secret lifestyle the rich can get off to. “Seeing how the other side lives” becomes “suffering to the conquered” for those they stare at; i.e., by stealing and appropriating the colony’s culture, industry and agriculture as something to absorb into the mother territory[21] but also engaging in sex tourism while “touching down” on alien soil: moral panics, rape epidemics and drug wars advertised through popular media celebrating these sites as magical and wonderous, like Joseph Campbell’s “region of supernatural wonder” but channeled through the likes of non-immiserated, white metal culture selling rebellion and black culture to white middle-class kids while still keeping black culture on the outside; e.g., Iron Maiden, H.P. Lovecraft and Michael Whelan [exhibit 94c2b] but also female authors like Ann Radcliffe’s murder mystery/true crime (especially “exquisite” torture and “demon lovers”) as cashing in, first and foremost, on xenophobia as a lucrative measure within Amazonomachia. They don’t simply profit from tragedy but from crisis and decay built into capital as a theatrical device across all registers and mediums:

(exhibit 0a2b1a: Artist, top-left: Marie Bunny; top-middle: Nichameleon; top-right: Tay Melo; bottom-left: Alhvida; bottom-right: PedroPerez1973. “The Gothic is… basically Scooby Doo,” Christine Neufeld once said, in my ENG 300 course, at EMU. I thought it sounded funny at the time, but she was absolutely right; e.g., Radcliffe’s pirates stealing stuff from an old castle [Udolpho, 1794] while pretending to be ghosts, only to be foiled by the damsel, detective, servant, hero and/or virgin/whore, plays out in much the same way as the gang from Scooby Doo does: the fight-or-flight reduced merely to flight, thus resorting to their “feminine” wits to solve mysteries; i.e., as the arbiters of domestic disputes dressed up in outmoded [and highly repetitive] Gothic aesthetics and conventions within late-1960s/1970s Americana (Scooby Doo, a talking dog, is a rather blunt metaphor for psychomachy and drug trips; just what’s in those “Scooby snacks”?).

Even so, the show was clearly made for children, but its surfaces and situations are still thoroughly sexualized: sweater kittens, miniskirts; e.g., useless clothes through the paradox of an opaque “see-through” uniform leveled against the Male Gaze [Sarah Vanbuskirk: “The male gaze describes a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualizing and diminishing women,” source]. Likewise, the explained supernatural and exquisite “torture”/”demon lover” of the modernized opera are alive and well [and the Black Veil, horror and terror, and other Radcliffean concepts whose spatial, architectural and musicality we will unpack during the “camp map”]. And more to the point, it introduced Radcliffe’s profitable and savvy [albeit centrist] Gothic approach to an American audience in cartoon form roughly two hundred years after the first Gothic novel was written.

Besides Radcliffe or the cartoon “ghosts” of her work, the same Gothic ideas work within pulpier fictions hinted at by our mentioning of authors like Lovecraft or Iron Maiden as doubled by parallel stories set in imaginary recreations of actual locations haunted by the same piqued imagination; i.e., “The Horror at Red Hook” versus “Red Hook in Walk Among the Tombstones [2014]. Lovecraft’s spiel is his usual xenophobia; the latter is a gritty, hard-boiled cop noir set backward in the time of payphones, but built on older stories like The Maltese Falcon [1941] and its faked deaths, double crosses, cliché outfits and endless darkness and rain. But those owe themselves as much to Gothic fiction as much as Cormac McCarthy’s Gothic Westerns do; e.g., Child of God [1973] or No Country for Old Men [2005]. Walk Among the Tombstones is similarly comparable to a Gothic novel: your basic detective story with the hero-as-sleuth, helped by servants and challenged by villains. But as a “noir” in the 20th century, it plays out like Bakhtin’s description of the Gothic novel as a “black novel”; i.e., the black detective novel/Western as a canceled future, a hauntological graveyard. Here, the private eye can take a shot or have a smoke, put on a duster and peer into the imaginary past to then uncover secrets in the present: what’s right in front of us dressed up as “elsewhere, once upon a time.” Like Radcliffe, it yawns into the future with immense pathos.

Neeson is a male action hero with pathos and camp [see: Krull, 1983], and male private dicks like the one he plays in Among the Tombstones are so cliché they don’t need names. They might carry a piece, but rely more on blind luck, quick wits, their gut and a silver tongue [they have to negotiate the ransom but also talk their way out of tight corners]. In short they’re ensconced and disempowered by the chronotope [often beat up; versus women and the threats they traditionally face as detectives: killers can’t hit a girl in a polite novel of manners, but they can make her fear for her life or “modesty”]. The paradox of the story as a truth-telling lie is its gloomy Gothic scenery being explored while disarmed. To this, the paradox of the gun is it can cut through the Gordian Knot instead of solving it. In short, its protection and general utility can backfire [“I wasn’t brave, just drunk”]. But while the same basic space is perpetually rainy, dark, and full of smoke and mirrors, it’s also a space for repressed guilt, revenge, and getting even—i.e., its “ghosts”/simulacra [serial killers, Boogeyman; e.g., Jack the Ripper, Father Schedoni, Buffalo Bill, Michael Rooker’s Henry, etc] squat like gargoyles among the criminogenic conditions, but also prowling.

On some level, they and the heroes they stalk—like the world itself—are meant to parallel the reader’s own complicated desires for revenge as simply being seen: to be heard and felt through historicized passion as supplied to them from older times and… dead things. In short, they’re the “same” as reality but in a doubled sense, separated by theatre’s gulf of Gothic imagination and highlighted by diegetic and non-diegetic mood, method and music; i.e., a “danger disco” to play around inside [the basic idea of theatrical “play” being the stage and its props, music and stories told on and with these things]. In this profoundly playful space, a noir detective often dives into criminogenic conditions like a heroine in the castle does, except they’re more streetwise and less stuck in the medieval imaginary as a site of rape fantasy in the traditionally feminine sense. But in New England, there is crossover [all those churches and cemeteries] and any noir follows the same praxial formula as a Gothic novel when considered as canonical or “ground-breaking.” The rules are conventions that we play with like the characters in the story do—setting and breaking their own boundaries while crossing over the threshold into the shadow space, but also our world as we stare at them; i.e., between the world of the living and the land of the dead as half-real.)

Whether through damsels, detectives or demons (all heroic, all monstrous), canonical proponents of Gothic fiction not only “cash in,” but extend the mystery to likewise prolong people’s anxieties about the structure. Their game of “guess the killer/Gothic cliché” reinforces Capitalism and perpetuating its problems by commercializing them through harmful Gothic doubles that, cleverly enough, offer some measure of false power/hope and catharsis (with Radcliffe touching on some profound truths despite her grift as “the Great Enchantress[22],” or Tolkien despite his centrist schtick/refrain). As class warriors, our best “Jewish revenge” is consciously camping all of this while actively and knowingly being party to the devil; i.e., reclaiming said power from within (and “outside” of the zone; placed in quotes because there is no outside of the text, vis-à-vis Derrida).

Canonical or iconoclastic, the Gothic scheme is emotionally manipulative on multiple levels: “play the audience like a piano.” The capitalist does this so the audience will pay money according to the author’s improv as working them through their pre-existing stigmas and biases. Canon, then, is a bad puzzle told by a liar whose consolation prize is Faustian: “solvable” shadows, their mysteries less a critique of society unto itself and praxially devised to make us feel smart/active in a cop-like sense by beating the author at their own game, all while forcing our heads into the sand; i.e., making us the dupe (a concept we’ll return to in the symposium). It is possible to critique capital anyways, but the iconoclast shall be doing the legwork, not Radcliffe. She’s too busy busking through fear mongering according to stereotypes/criminogenic conditions. Any complicit artist is financially incentivized to lie a particular way—i.e., in defense of the status quo. These are criminogenic conditions, making canon at large criminogenic through the profit motive as endless: the show must go on. The same theatrical imperative applies to Gothic Communists, except our emotional/Gothic manipulations are mutually consensual and meant to develop Communism from inside Capitalism using our privilege as a staging point for rebellious counterterror and iconoclasm (camp); e.g., my own white woman’s privilege used to make a book specifically weaponized against capital. Sure, our methods are seductive and potent (thus resemble the people we’re camping—e.g., our variation of the detective story/danger disco), but they aren’t forced onto others that we might take their money and frighten them into paying more, next time; our sex education isn’t built around structured profit at all, but post-scarcity.

We’ll explore all of this next as we lay out Sex Positivity‘s thesis statement and pieces of the manifesto tree that both lead towards the “camp map” (the means for camping canon) and make up the pieces of the map needed to camp Tolkien’s refrain with, thus ungentrify canonical war by making it conscious class/culture war within a campy Gothic poetics.

Onto “Thesis Argument—Capitalism Sexualizes Everything“!


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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-FiPatreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] As Lynn Bryce writes in “The Influence of Scandinavian Mythology of the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien” (1983): “Tolkien did not invent elves, wizards, dragons or magical weapons; these, and concepts like them, are fundamental to Norse literature and myth.” According to Lauri Linask, Tolkien appears to critique Beowulf, but at the end of the day largely emulates the same old patterns:

In his “Beowulf” lecture he undertook to argue with W.P. Ker whom he quotes as to have said: “The fault of ‘Beowulf’ is that there is nothing much in the story. The hero is occupied in killing monsters… Beowulf has nothing else to do when he has killed Grendel and Grendel’s mother in Denmark: he goes home to his own Gautland, until the rolling years bring the Fire-drake and his last adventure. It is too simple…” […] Tolkien thinks very highly of the heroic narratives in Norse, Icelandic or ancient English because their heroes and their embodiments of evil belong generically to the same class as those of Tolkien (source: Influences of the Germanic and Scandinavian Mythology in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien,” 1983).

As we shall see in the Four Gs and thesis proper, this shared love of the imaginary past has led to the furthering of the process of abjection through the ghost of the counterfeit: the commodification (and endless apologizing for) centrist war’s sublimated genocides. Tolkien emulated the old legends in much the same way the Nazis did, albeit in a less radicalized refrain that could eventually be ludologized under Bretton Woods and neoliberalism as it exists today—in tabletop/videogames.

[2] An allusion to Milton’s Satan, breaking into Paradise:

One gate there only was, and that looked east

On the other side. Which when the Arch-Felon saw,

Due entrance he disdained, and, in contempt,

At one slight bound high overleaped all bound

Of hill or highest wall, and sheer within

Lights on his feet. As when a prowling wolf,

Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,

Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve,

In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,

Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the fold (source: Paradise Lost, Book Four).

[3] Consider Tolkien’s zero-sex policy versus Terry Goodkind’s naked exhibiting of pedophilia, genital mutilation and rape. They might seem like polar opposites, but both constitute Joseph Conrad’s bigoted fear-fascination with the colonized abomination, in The Heart of Darkness (1899): a white, cis-het fear-fascination with the past as restricted to the fringes of the empire, that—in neoliberal media, which brings the colonial revenge to the homefront—becomes “a spell to fall under” (re: Punter) and exorcise, generally through violence. Tolkien’s colonial rape occurred with swords, leveled against metaphors for people “not of the West” he considered “Mongol-types” (source: Tolkien Gateway) whose linguo-material presence would be entirely unwelcome in white areas (effectively gentrification in a real-world village/suburban setting).

Tolkien famously disliked allegory for his own stories (an appeal, then, to singular interpretations that ignored his writing’s racist, thus colonial potential). But even when reduced to “pure fantasy” as he would have preferred, the terrestrial framework and its cartography and colonial model are all obviously there and being put into practice; i.e., world-building and its manmade languages levied for a suitably war-like purpose regardless if Tolkien openly denounced Hilter. In short, he was a centrist to the core, the old sage handing the young hobbit a blade and preaching loftily about morals, specifically of knowing when to kill and when not to—in short, “playing god” in the face of the abject:

Bilbo almost stopped breathing, and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. No, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart: a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled (source).

Except this mercy is arguably lacking in the face of those who are physically dangerous (according to white people); orcs, unlike Gollum, are given no quarter despite arguably having a bone to pick with them colonizers: “Show them no mercy for you shall receive none!” It’s tone-policing backed by force—also known as “peace through strength.”

[4] Warcraft: Orcs and Humans (1994) would lead to the company’s longest, and arguably most popular and widespread franchise, beating Diablo (1996) to the punch by two years and going on to establish the company as the successors to Everquest (1999) as the MMORPG to “kill”: World of Warcraft (2004), a globalizing of the pursuit of capital across the Internet. These games successfully applied a tactical, melee-based, roleplay element to the FPS-/TPS-adjacent strategy game (exhibit 1a1a1h2a1), which took on a massive-multiplayer form built around warring team-based combat with one-or-more combatants on either side. And of course, all of this was heavily dimorphized within the heteronormative colonial binary.

[5] (from Britannica): “A different word orcalluding to a demon or ogre, appears in Old English glosses of about AD 800 and in the compound word orcnēas (‘monsters’) in the poem Beowulf. As with the Italian orco (‘ogre’) and the word ogre itself, it ultimately derives from the Latin Orcus, a god of the underworld. The Old English creatures were most likely the inspiration for the orcs that appear in J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Lord of the Rings” (source).

[6] Tolkien’s inconsistent fear of spiders stretches back to a childhood phobia of them, but he was annoyingly wishy-washy and non-committal to how he felt about them; i.e., talking through both sides of his mouth (a classic centrist maneuver) [source: Tolkien Gateway].

[7] Tolkien did not exist during videogames as they are commonly thought of (though technically he died in 1973, a year after Pong [1972] was released for American home entertainment by Atari’s Allan Alcorn). Yet, Tolkien was also no stranger to playing games. Indeed, the entire “Riddles in the Dark” chapter from The Hobbit is pointedly a game, with a rather involved discussion surrounding luck, fairness and the following of rules:

He knew, of course, that the riddle-game was sacred and of immense antiquity, and even wicked creatures were afraid to cheat when they played at it. But he felt he could not trust this slimy thing to keep any promise at a pinch. Any excuse would do for him to slide out of it. And after all that last question had not been a genuine riddle according to the ancient laws (source).

In truth, Tolkien’s refrain—the High Fantasy treasure map—would translate very well to tabletop games and videogames, but especially The Lord of the Rings, which despite its immense size compared to The Hobbit was actually far simpler in terms of its treatment of war and wealth acquisition/generation. Everything was divided neatly into good and evil teams that—on the good side—weren’t fighting amongst each other nearly as much as during The Hobbit. In his later novels, the world-war machine wasn’t just suggested, but fully devised and given its own vast world to play out inside. And even with The Hobbit, Tolkien clearly understood the power of song and legends, writing his original story for children to acclimate them towards war and revenge dressed up in songs, fantasy and poems. It likewise had all the starts and stops of a radio serial, putting our heroes out of the frying pan and into the fire (similar to Flash Gordon, 1935) before pulling them out just in the nick of time (the Great Eagles being a shameless deus ex machina [and imperial emblem] that Tolkien would curiously refuse to use with The Lord of the Rings in order to prolong the story and its war for as long as possible).

[8] I wrote “The Problem of Greed” in Craig Dionne’s LITR 405 (Shakespeare) course. We had to cross-examine two primary texts with an academic secondary text. I went with Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1605) and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904). The essay won me an award from EMU, whereupon the faculty wrote this award letter—to EMU’s Distinguished Student in Literature Award—for 2016:

[My award letter from EMU, MA from MMU, and me in 2018 sitting on a copy of Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human (2011) borrowed from the school library (the photo was taken by my-partner-at-the-time, Zeuhl, for a school project of theirs).]

There was no money involved, but the letter did help me gain entry to MMU (which was a whole ordeal, to say the least; Persephone van der Waard’s Quora answer to “How easy is it to get into Manchester Metropolitan University?” 2019) when I went there for my master’s degree in English Studies: the Gothic, in 2017. In short, I had an adventure where the things gained is largely open to interpretation: “This is a story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found [herself] doing and saying things altogether unexpected. [She] may have lost the neighbors’ respect, but [she] gained—well, you will see whether [she] gained anything in the end.”

[9] A term that, according to Adam Curtis’ HyperNormalization (2016), was originally used to describe the “whiplash” feelings of Soviet citizens during the 1980s—faced with the terrifying onset of societal collapse despite Soviet national propaganda having adopted neoliberal shock therapy while insisting that things were fine. The same idea can be applied to the uncanny sensation that things are not fine or even real despite how normal, foundational and concrete they seem; i.e., how they “pass” as normal despite a disquieting sense of decay (worker exploitation, for our purposes).

[10] Yes, this is a tautology (e.g., the sky is blue because the sky is blue), but in this case it’s essentially the gist. Function is self-determined, but not self-evident because art—short of spelling things out, billboard-/graffiti-style—often requires dialectical-material scrutiny to parse if it’s sex-positive or not; likewise, it will take someone who is sex-positive to make sex-positive media in good faith (and not by accident)—i.e., art that expresses sex positivity in ways that either yield sex-positive virtues under dialectical-material scrutiny or, preferably, are more explicitly or obviously upfront through their subversions and transgressions of canonical norms.

[11] “Hermeneutics” being of, otherwise pertaining to, interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts; a method or theory of interpretation.

[12] “Free speech” is a common “apolitical” DARVO strategy used by bigots who argue for negative-freedom boundaries that apply to them, but not for others; e.g., “I want to be able to say slurs or profit off manufactured controversies by politically advocating for issues that will never affect me; i.e., punching down at minorities while acting like a victim, myself.” Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

[13] Source: Academy of Ideas’ “The Parallel Society vs Totalitarianism | How to Create a Free World” (2022).

[14] Walpole actually published the original manuscript in 1764 under a pseudonym without the qualifier “a Gothic tale” (which he added a year later after people pitched a fit that he—the son of the first British prime minster—had effectively forged a historical document and passed it off as genuine). The story was based off his architectural reconstruction (thus reimagining) of medieval history, Strawberry Hill House (a cross-medium tradition carried on by Gothic contemporaries/spiritual successors—e.g., William Beckford’s Vathek, 1786, and subsequent “folly,” Fonthill Abbey, in 1796—but also videogame spaces inspired by the cinematic and novelized forms previously build on real-life “haunted” houses: the Metroidvania).

[15] Referring to “Ozymandias” (1818).

[16] For a recent example of someone fighting the privatization of their intellectual property by corporate abuse, refer to the actions of Bill Willingham’s “Willingham Sends Fables into the Public Domain” (2023). He described it as asymmetrical warfare, aka guerrilla warfare (which is historically the weapon of the Communist).

[17] False power and false hope go hand-in-hand within fascism, neoliberalism and the capitalist propaganda mill.

[18] Rune Klevjer writes in “The Way of the Gun: The Aesthetic of the Single-Player First Person Shooter” (2006):

the short history of the FPS also includes a different strand, which unlike Doom and Medal of Honor does not grow out of a broad tradition of action-adventure. The so-called tactical FPS (sometimes also referred to as the “squad-based” FPS) draws instead on the traditions of strategic war games and the military simulator. In spite of many similarities (which follow from the common perceptual grounding of the first-person-gun) and in spite of the inevitable ambiguities and hybridizations, the binary of action-adventure versus military simulator has become a significant aesthetic distinction within the genre of the single-player First Person Shooter (source).

and yet, for the purposes of generational trauma and the state’s acclimation of its population towards war (through waves of terror), the male action hero’s adventure story is a standard-issue facet to military propaganda ludologized: squad-based tactics vs a terrorist group in training exercises, and larger-than-life superheroes vs larger-than-life demons in strict propaganda narratives; re: Beowulf vs Grendel and Grendel’s mother. These aren’t “separate”; they’re two sides of the same unholy coin that present war as a business across various mediums, but especially in videogames aping their cinematic and novelized palimpsests; re: Tolkien’s infamous treasure map as a place to take the spoils of war back from demons, undead and nature; re: “having an adventure” is complicit cryptonymy in action.

[19] Father Schedoni from The Italian (1796) ostensibly croaks in this manner. Once had out, he actually poisons himself, whereupon he makes a weird, inhuman sound that terrifies everyone around him: “Schedoni uttered a sound so strange and horrible, so convulsed, yet so loud, so exulting, yet so unlike any human voice, that every person in the chamber, except those who were assisting Nicola, struck with irresistible terror, endeavoured to make their way out of it. This, however, was impracticable, for the door was sastened, until a physician, who had been sent for, should arrive, and some investigation could be made into this mysterious affair. The consternation of the Marchese and of Vivaldi, compelled to witness this scene of horror, cannot easily be imagined” (source).

[20] Historically, an effective method of power consolidation is the status quo’s recuperation rebellions or crises (often shortages) to enable/incentivize regressions. After the French Revolution, the social gains made during the ensuing unrest were branded as terrorist actions by the state and in Gothic fiction (vis-à-vis Joseph Crawford, who we’ll examine, later) and used to regress towards the status quo with new “counterterrorist” measures in place; i.e., the defeating of Napoleon (who was a false revolutionary and opportunist, to be fair) in 1815, followed by the rise of the Victorian Era of the British Empire from 1835 until 1901. After the 1973 oil crisis (aka the Oil Shock), Bretton Woods was impacted and ultimately discarded by capitalist opportunists eagerly in favor of a until-then fringe ideology, neoliberalism, wherein Margaret Thatcher assumed power in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1981; both executives lead to the further gutting of the labor movements in their country followed by establishment safeguards for deregulation, which lead to a rise in war, austerity and fascism (not a shortage). In short, modern war developed, expanded and increased, then eventually became corporatized through corporate seizures of direct power on the global stage, working to supersede state mechanisms altogether (Bad Empanada’s “Johnny Harris: Shameless Propagandist Debunked,” 2023).

[21] Often expressed as “the mothership” in science fiction stories; e.g., Independence Day (1996) as a clunky metaphor for the Imperial Boomerang as an alien mass-invasion vehicle visited upon the usual colonizers: America and the Global North (whose big nations eat little notions). During the perceived outsider’s “special military operation,” an occupying army launches from a base of operations with seemingly magical weapons and spacecraft, except it’s displaced onto a dark, female-coded alien force; i.e., “Communists do this, not America!” In turn, this Gothic disassociation of the colonial binary becomes a call-to-war according to unity through neoconservative argumentation; apologetics for the Fourth of July as something to celebrate using the flowery language of American Liberty in defense of the current world order vis-à-vis Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980)

What made Bacon’s Rebellion especially fearsome for the rulers of Virginia was that black slaves and white servants joined forces […] Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality (source).

as opposed to Fredrick Douglas’ “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” (1852):

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation’s sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the “lame man leap as an hart.”

But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn (source).

[22] From Dale Townshend’s “An introduction to Ann Radcliffe” (2014):

The “Shakspeare [sic] of Romance Writers”; “the mighty magician of THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO”; “the first poetess of romantic fiction”; “a genius of no common stamp”; “the great enchantress of that generation”; “mother Radcliff [sic]”: Nathan Drake, T. J. Mathias, Walter Scott, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Thomas De Quincey and John Keats respectively, together with countless other essayists, reviewers and critics of the Romantic period in Britain, praised the writing of the Gothic romancer, poet and travel-writer Ann Ward Radcliffe (1764–1823) in the most superlative terms imaginable (source).

In short, it was a giant wank-fest where these literal jackoffs allowed Radcliffe to trespass because she was polite; they couldn’t get enough. And while I think her fiction isn’t total dogshit (I like her suspense and some of her literary devices), it’s also worryingly and unapologetically centrist/”basic.” That shouldn’t be surprising given the period in which it was written, but in our Gothic times (wherein terribly fitting labels like “TERF island” are no accident), we have to do better than “go down on Radcliffe” just because a bunch of old, dead white people did, two centuries ago (and more recently as living ones continue to suck her toes—no offense, Dale). We have to camp her enchantments and risk the tone-policing she was too chickenshit to face while writing her “polite” rape fantasies, then taking her 30 pieces of silver (more on this, later).

Book Sample: Notes on Power and Liminal Expression

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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.

Thesis Volume Outline/Summary of the Thesis Statement, “Camp Map” and Symposium Divisions/Subdivisions

“Crom!”

—Conan, Conan the Destroyer (1984)

Picking up where “Author’s Foreword: ‘On Giving Birth’” left off…

Continuing our vast baggage train of war, the rest of the volume contains my thesis argument. I have decided to organize it into three divisions (with their own subdivisions and sub-subdivisions): the thesis statement, “camp map,” and conclusion. To summarize their whole operation:

  • The thesis statement: Contains my core thesis argument (regarding canon).
  • The “camp map”: Serves as an introduction to camp as an iconoclastic device; i.e., camping the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM.
  • The thesis conclusion: Wraps everything up and segues into the symposium, which is a conversational follow-up/aftercare “sesh” to end the volume with.

I will now summarize its general approach per subdivision:

  • The “Notes on Power” essay [included in this post] discusses how power is theatrical, and plays off paradox and liminal expression (doubles) to develop Gothic Communism. Specifically it examines Gothic Communism’s campy ancestor/palimpsest, Paradise Lost (1667) and its complex relationship to future works that likewise have adopted theatrical Amazonomachia, paradox, and artistic/pornographic liminal (monstrous) expressions that speak truth to power—i.e., through “darkness visible” (the Gothic imagination) but also “darkness deliberate” as performatively mired in the self-same classical allusions: actively utilizing the Gothic convention of fetishes and clichés as class-conscious, thus of the devil’s party and knowing it (unlike Milton; our revolution cannot be accidental if we are to survive).
  • The thesis proper contains my manifesto tree (an expanded list compiled from the main points of my original Gothic-Communist manifesto), Four Gs (four main Gothic theories, also from the manifesto), a small essay about where power is performed during the Gothic mode/inside the Gothic imagination (“Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox“), and my thesis paragraph, which the thesis body expands on using most of this book’s keywords and manifesto terms. To expand on that, the manifesto tree lists our praxial equations and coordinates relative to the holistic study and camping of canon’s singular interpretations under Capitalism; the Four Gs and essay concern the Gothic imagination/mode as something to “spelunk” while we reclaim our creative power/pedagogy of the oppressed. All are followed by the thesis statement’s paragraph/body and everything they bring to the table (whose own inner sub-subchapters are unpacked when we arrive): Capitalism sexualizes everything dimorphically inside a heteronormative/colonial-binarized profit motive that leads to Capitalist Realism; this can only be escaped through an iconoclasm/Amazonomachia (“monster battle”) that liberates workers through sex-positive art.
  • The camp map and thesis conclusion assemble the manifesto tree pieces and explains (using the Four Gs) how to camp the canon as normally heteronormative by “making it gay” with ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., normally canonized through the settler-colonial/heteronormative quest for power in a Faustian bargain (told in the warlike language we’re all accustomed to), which we then camp during our own Promethean Quests. Told in four parts, part one explores camp as a counterterrorist activity in relation to state terrorism, and outlines various monster types featured in the exhibits (e.g., femboys, catgirls, himbos, Amazons, etc); part two’s first and second halves explore the interrogation/negotiation of power in relation to Gothic space (castles) but especially in videogames (shooters, High Fantasy and Metroidvania); part three considers the making of monsters and goes over more monster types (nurses, xenomorphs and other phallic women); part four puts all of these ideas to the test, executed by my friend Blxxd Bunny and I prototyping ludo-Gothic BDSM.
  • The symposium is an aftercare/wind-down period; i.e., looser, more generous articulations and exhibits of the thesis proper and “camp map’s” broadest, most common arguments and key points (e.g., the Gothic, monstrous-feminine, Amazonomachia, etc): exhibits, lists, mini thesis statements and additional equations. I wrote it before the thesis statement/”camp map” and is meant to be visited and examined after you’ve read those portions. There’s also a very brief conclusion (included with the symposium), which serves as a bridge between this volume and Volume One (the manifesto).

Be forewarned: the remainder of the thesis volume frankly starts off quite dense and paradoxical, but does “mellow out” towards the symposium. To avoid “drygulching” anyone, I’ve tried to prepare you as thoroughly and gently as I could. But now that you’re more or less as prepared as you ever will be, I’m gonna pull a Gandalf and shove your ass out the hobbit hole door. Gird your loins; it’s adventure time!

(artist: Hitoshi Yoneda)

Notes on Power (paradox) and Liminal Expression (doubles)

“Now…what can we say of John Milton’s Paradise Lost? Well, it’s a very long poem, it was written a long time ago, and I’m sure a lot of you have difficulty understanding exactly what Milton was trying to say. Certainly we know that he was trying to describe the struggle between good and evil, right? (picks up an apple from his desk) “Okay. The most intriguing character, as we all know from our reading, was”—(writing “SATAN” on the blackboard)—”Satan. Now, was Milton trying to tell us that being bad was more fun than being good?”

(He takes a bite out of the apple; a long pause as he chews and realizes that the class remains unmoved.)

Okay…don’t write this down, but I find Milton probably as boring as you find Milton. Mrs. Milton found him boring, too. He, uh, he’s a little bit long-winded, he doesn’t translate very well into our generation, and his jokes are terrible.”

—Professor Jennings[1], Animal House (1978)

Before we proceed into the thesis proper for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, this essay provides a few basic things to keep in mind about power and oppositional praxis throughout the book.

Concepts like “real power” and “false power” are dialectical-material concepts, and occur in relation to the Base (and its historical materialism) as something to claim and the Superstructure as something to cultivate during theatrical heroic expression; i.e., as consistently monstrous, thus liminal, as a (crypto)mimetic form of poetic expression that can be for or against the status quo: the psychomachy (“mind battle”) and Amazonomachia (“monster battle”) as psychosexual—literally “of sex and the mind,” but in Gothic often having a combative “sex battle” element. Torn between pleasure and harm, but also human-monstrous language/expression, such rhetoric and performance is profoundly contradictory in a variety of ways all at once—the paradox. We’ll talk about paradox in general; then, power as paradox according to Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667); and finally touch on liminal (monstrous) expression—i.e., Gothic doubles as powerful, psychosexual paradoxes useful to our proletarian purposes during class/culture war against the elite.

First, paradoxes—specifically the Amazonomachia in its broader usage; i.e., of monster battle that, in latter-day forms, speaks to the ancient pimping of nature as classically female (re: the Medusa):

(artist: Yasya)

Amazonomachia (Amazon pastiche, subjugated/subversive)

Not a term I coined, but one I certainly expanded on (to speak on subjugated, reactionary, TERF-style forms and subversive variants, mid-duality). “Amazon battle” is an ancient form of classical, monstrous-feminine art whose pastiche was historically used to enforce the status quo; i.e., Theseus subjugating Hippolyta the Amazon Queen to police other women (making regressive/canonical Amazonomachia a form of monstrous-feminine copaganda). With the rise of queer discourse and identity starting in arguably the late 18th century, later canonical variations in the 20th century (e.g., Marsden’s Wonder Woman) would seek to move the goalpost incrementally—less of a concession, in neoliberal variants (every Blizzard heroine ever—exhibits 45a, 76, 72), and more an attempt to recruit from dissident marginalized groups. The offer is always the same: to become badass, strong and “empowered.” In truth, these regressive/subjugated Amazons become assimilated token cops; i.e., the fetishized witch cop/war boss as a “blind Medusa” who hates her own kind by seeing herself as different than them, thus acting like a white, cis-het man towards them (the “Rambo problem”): triangulating nature against nature, pimping itself for the state. In the business of violent cartoons (disguised variants of the state’s enemies), characters like Ripley or Samus become lucrative token gladiators for the elite by fighting similar to men (active, lethal violence) for male state-corporate hegemony. To that, their symbolism colonizes revolutionary variations of the Amazon, Medusa, etc, during subversive Amazonomachia within genderqueer discourse.

This “telling truth with lies” is a double paradox, demonstrating the word as we shall use it in Gothic apologia as, “two ideas can coexist at the same time despite being diametrically opposed”; i.e., the duality of the Amazon legend, but frankly any state hero as paradoxically monstrous and, from marginalized groups seeking assimilation, tokenize per the usual funnels monopolizing such things; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss extending to all betrayals under the sun (female or otherwise).

In turn, the mise-en-abyme (echo of fabrications) repeats, but also echoes stacked counterfeits on top of counterfeits, on top of myths and legends as forged for opposing forces at cross purposes—the irony being that it’s generally far easier to lie and tell the truth by accident (or on purpose) like Banquo’s warning to Macbeth

“And oftentimes, to win us to our harm the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence” (source).

than it is to try and spell things out in such a way as to encompass the whole ordeal (or in the words of the late, great Alan Rickman: “Mention you’re the Metatron and people stare at you blankly. Mention something out of a Charlton Heston movie and suddenly everyone’s a theology scholar!”). To this, Banquo got it wrong: Lies and the language of darkness aren’t inherently bad, meaning harmful or deserving of capital punishment; while he exclaims, “Can the devil speak true?” to himself and Macbeth, the devilish workers of Communism can speak true—i.e., in order to help each other survive the real dangers of a structure evolved to deceive us through harmful forgery (the irony being Banquo was killed by his own friend, not the witches—all for the same status inside the same power structure they lived inside together and which Shakespeare relayed through a stage play whose name people [specifically thespians] don’t like to say[2]).

Language, like the devil, is plastic and can change shape (only following the Cartesian Revolution and Capitalism’s rise of mapping and dominating the world through doubles inside and outside of “pure” fiction [exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] did language solidify and binarize in service of the profit motive). Paradox is an essential component of human language in its natural and material forms; i.e., the immensely popular idea of theatre and duels told through heroes and their monstrous contradictions to ascribe meaning through staged conflict. Within this broader dialogic, the Gothic is mired in mimetic paradox through the communication of “deathly” appetites” (indented for clarity):

Death is the ultimate feeling of a lack of control, to be out of control. To face it as codified according to stigmas and biases, theatre is a tremendous, psychosexual device for calculated risk/informed consent (which operates to give agency through performance as a negotiated, heavily controlled affair). For Gothic Communists, these praxial contraptions are built around the profit motive as something to face and challenge through its praxial doubles: Gothic Communism’s monsters and their poetic, liminal extensions versus Capitalism’s, communicating in shared struggle and language as paradoxical on various registers simultaneously.

calculated risk/risk reduction exercise

A calculated risk minimizes harm but mimics the feeling of being out of control; e.g., consent-non-consent/informed consent.

consent-non-consent

Negotiated social-sexual scenarios through informed consent, consent-non-consent where one party surrenders total control over to the other party trusting that party to not betray said agreement or trust; aka “RACK” (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink) in relation to risky BDSM; i.e., bodily harm; e.g., public beatings, rape scenarios, whippings, knife play and blood-letting.

As such, Epicurus was perhaps not entirely on the nose when saying, “Death is nothing to us[3],” because people (regardless of their political inclinations or stances) absolutely love “death” in theatre as appealing to appetite as taboo, excessive, forbidden, Satanic, etc (e.g., ahegao, or “death face”); but whose power is dialectic-material regarding arguments about what is or isn’t correct, valid or otherwise important. Often these dress up as “it’s not important, so let’s never talk about it again”; i.e., “it is important, so let’s not discuss it because it challenges my sense of agency relative to canonical notions and structures of power and performance”; e.g., “the hobbits are gay” versus “the hobbits are not gay (and never mention it again).” Their anxiety (and biases) are projected onto us, seemingly as if to ask, “Why do you care so much?” (to which my response is, “Because I’m a gay little faggot who likes the Gothic, biznatch”).

In this perennial, dialogic sense, power and death constitute societal gatekeeping and countercultural transformation through theatrical fetishes and clichés (of which the Gothic is positively rife with) that play out in real life: a means of practicing debate as a wrestling tactic inside human language to better prepare us for its harmful, pro-state deceptions between daily conversations (and sex, or both) that we have with other people that look more or less like us; i.e., by recognizing and challenging them through our own sex-positive Gothic subversions that recultivate the Superstructure and reclaim the Base. In doing so, we’re accomplishing Gothic Communism’s chief aim: taking back the critical, class-conscious power of paradox-(thus power)-as-performance, specifically that of monsters, on- and offstage simultaneously. It’s chaotic, but knowing how to swim in the void of the shadow zone (the Gothic imagination/mode) and its “darkness visible[4] can be, paradoxically, an illuminating and life-saving affair—i.e., as something to deliberately cultivate for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism (thus for all workers) by taking back Hell, thus the world, as having been thoroughly colonized; i.e., ever since Milton first wrote Paradise Lost and challenged the status quo (arguably by accident, in his case, and certainly within the traditions of theatre as having been in conflict for far longer—since Hippolyta and the Ancient Greeks, at least). For us, there needs to be a deliberate re-camping of “darkness visible” through our “creative successes” during proletarian praxis.

(exhibit 0a1b2a1: Artist, top- and bottom-left: Monori Rogue; top-right: Dmitry Prozorov; bottom-right: source. “All deities reside within the human breast,” wrote William Blake[5], but have been retooled by canon to guide manufactured division to serve the profit motive. Faced with the double as doubled for these nefarious aims, we must utilize the same paradox for proletarian means; the war isn’t simply muscles and brawn, but conflict on the surface of the image during liminal expression. A class/culture warrior fights the good fight by challenging the canonical function of paradox with their body by subverting sexualized labor’s traditionally warring factors: the Cartesian dualism of the colonial binary as sexually dimorphic; i.e., men-as-men vs women-as-women. The theory might seem dense, but the art speaks quite naturally/for itself and quickly to whatever praxial position we hold during oppositional praxis through the same theatre and its monsters’ liminal expressions and paradoxes: reimagined and reanimated statues coming alive to fight for or against the status quo in the same hauntological language [torn between the past and the present]. Like the media itself, their battle takes place at the same time, and during the chaos “you’ll know it when you see it”—the battle, of course, but also which side you’re on, or want to be on, as you oscillate inside of yourself in the Gothic sense: the psychomachy [“mind battle”] of the imaginary monsters representing repressed or openly playful ideas that war with/wear each other for fun; of play as both a serious and lighthearted game; for political reasons as fun; but also an internalized conflict regarding all of these external things making up who we are in relation to the world and it to us.)

Now that we’ve discussed paradox at large, onto power as paradox and a list of things I thought relevant: Power is a paradox, meaning it is largely theatrical, invented, and built on top of itself through counterfeits, myths and legends; it is staged, dialogic and combative. During the Gothic mode, power is doubled and dialectical-material.

As such, power’s legitimacy is invented under crisis and struggle as manufactured by the state. State power aggregates during crisis and transforms during decay. Power and resistance occupy the same theatrical space. Power to create and its theatre are deified as a show of force, of legitimate violence against iconoclastic power, which speaks truth to state power through dark, Satanic poetics that challenge state authority and abuse through delegitimized violence (and counterterror). Power manifests as monstrous and animalized through the shared language of stigma and bias: undead and demonic monsters for or against the state during the making and performing of monsters as animalized; i.e., monsters are animalized, undead/demonic, chimeric/composite stances of power for or against the state.

It bears repeating that monsters and their critical power transform not just through mimetic expression, but cryptomimetic expression; i.e., (according to our Four Gs) as hauntological cryptonyms inside parallel spaces (chronotopes) that further or reverse the process of abjection, but also conceal it to varying degrees in the ghost of the counterfeit/narrative of the crypt‘s “cancelled future” (and various other small-but-vital theories we’ll unpack in the rest of the thesis volume). And all of this unfolds through bodies, masks, weapons, catchphrases (call-and-response crowd participation), special/super moves (coups des grâces/”strokes of mercy” or murder strokes), uniforms, identities, color codes, etc, as struggles to adhere to/comply with or resist canonical norms during Gothic poetics. Monsters are effectively lies created to demonstrate what power is during class/culture war, operating through examples and exceptions that prove/disapprove the rule.

(exhibit 0a1b2a1a: Artist, left: Raphael; top-right: Alexey Steele; bottom-right: Henry Fuseli. Milton’s accidental stumbling onto “darkness visible” as campy owes to him famously being blind, but also having internalized the ideas of “good vs evil” in ways he could camp inside his mind to say something allegorical about the world in which he lived. The paradox is, he wasn’t a nice man; for as many years, each morning he would wake and have his daughters transcribe his dreams into Latin. But without their dutiful penmanship, we wouldn’t have Paradise Lost, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [whose framed narrative contains a copy of Paradise Lost inside of itself] or sci-fiction [e.g., Scott’s Alien films] as having stemmed from the same iconoclastic Gothic tradition into the present. “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the Earth,” said Archimedes[6]. Indeed, that power can also be ours if we dare to write things down—to intentionally make monsters that camp canon and Capitalism to liberate sex work, thus all work, through iconoclastic art’s deliberately campy “darkness visible.”)

For example, Satan from Paradise Lost. In that story, God and heaven are all-powerful, which is a paradox, meaning it requires perception to work. Satan is made to justify the crisis to hold onto absolute power/total power[7], but the whole point of the story is him resisting God’s plan yet simultaneously being bound up in it. The two seem inextricable, but the allegory of Satan is a rebellious figure whose power and energy are hidden within war and its usual panoply as displaced, far away and en medias res (“in the midst of things,” like Star Wars): whole hosts of warring angels and demons acting like white knights and black knights, their armor and spears, chariots and formations, maneuvers and stratagems:

Now had Night measured with her shadowy cone

Half-way up-hill this vast sublunar vault,

And from their ivory port the Cherubim

Forth issuing, at the accustomed hour, stood armed

To their night-watches in warlike parade;

When Gabriel to his next in power thus spake:—

   “Uzziel, half these draw off, and coast the south

With strictest watch; these other wheel the north:

Our circuit meets full west.” As flame they part,

Half wheeling to the shield, half to the spear.

From these, two strong and subtle Spirits he called

That near him stood, and gave them thus in charge:—

   “Ithuriel and Zephon, with winged speed

Search through this Garden; leave unsearched no nook;

But chiefly where those two fair creatures lodge,

Now laid perhaps asleep, secure of harm (source).

Milton exhausts a tremendous amount of energy explaining the pre-existing intentions to Christian hegemony and its warlike hosts’ heteronormative purpose, but the entire paradigm is challenged by Satan making monsters for himself: he can create, transform and do things previously thought exclusive to God. It may be to a lesser degree in terms of sheer time spent in the perceived moment of things, but solidarity is a seditious proposition told through the Arch-Fiend as the Byronic rebel of the story: the anti-hero having the power to rule in Hell by making pandemonium (a place whose name means “all demons”) and tempting God’s children with it. This power is beholden to the same principles of performance, but offers the ability to organize differently than God does: horizontally versus vertically—i.e., anarchistically and anachronistically for workers and the oppressed.

Because of its allegory as having such awesome revolutionary potential, Milton was described by William Blake as being of the devil’s party and not knowing it; or as Jamal Subhi Ismail Nafi writes in “Milton’s Portrayal of Satan in Paradise Lost and the Notion of Heroism” (2015),

According to [Tesky] Gordon, it was Blake who expressed this view most emphatically by saying that Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it. He expressed this opinion chiefly in relation to the portrayal of Satan who, according to him, has been depicted as a character possessing certain grand qualities worthy of the highest admiration. Other romantic critics supported this view with great enthusiasm. [Percy] Shelley, for instance, reinforced this view when, in his “Defense of Poetry,” he said:

“Nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost. It is a mistake to suppose that he could ever have been intended for the popular personification of evil. Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to God, as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy.”

According to Shelley, it was a mistake to think that Satan was intended by Milton as the popular personification of evil. This argument is still very much alive and valid today (source).

In other words, Milton’s story is sympathetic to the devil’s rebellious plight because it supplies him with the means to escape and make trouble in ways that speak truth to power through monstrous poetics; i.e., by playing god and camping canon through the language of stigma and bias, power and resistance, undead and demonic animalization (e.g., Satan turning into a toad or a snake to tempt Eve), feeding and transformation through disguised struggle, open resistance and subversive/transgressive means of power exchange and expression that camp canon, thus fall on the side of labor and sex positivity. The British Romantics all adored Satan, but particularly the second generation of more rebellious poets (whose poiesis endeared itself to Satan’s by making that which has never existed; i.e., a fabrication that favors its own campy arrangements of power and material conditions over the canonical fabrications of the status quo and its arrangements); to Byron, the Shelleys, Blake and Keats, Satan was a righteous dude, the underdog fighting from the “superior” ethical position against a giant, “all-powerful” bully while on the poetic/theatrical backfoot: the underdog from Hell.

(artist: Gustave Doré)

These aren’t platitudes, but ontological[8] descriptions of power-in-action through warring positions thereof inside the state as status-quo, but also its state of exception as profoundly liminal:

liminality

A linguo-material position of conflict or transition, liminality is ontologically a state of being “in between,” usually through failed sublimation/uncanniness; it invokes a “grey area” generally demonized in Western canon as “chaos.” In truth, semantic disorder can be used to escape the perpetual exploitation and decay caused all around us by Capitalism and its giant lies (a concept we’ll explore throughout this book). Liminality also occurs when working with highly canonical/colonized material, like the Western, European fantasy or highly exploitative material like canonical porn (with the word “pornography” being criminalized, thus something iconoclasts must reclaim). Gothic examples include monsters and parallel spaces, which tend to oscillate in liminal fashion.

liminal space

Liminal spaces, in architectural terms, are spaces designed to be moved through; in Gothic terms, these amount to Bakhtin’s Gothic chronotope as museum-like time-spaces that, when moved through, help past legends come alive, animating in literal and figuratively Gothic/medieval ways: the Gothic castle of the historical past. Classically these include the animated portrait, miniature, gargoyle, (often giant) suit of armor, effigy and double, etc; more modern variants include Tool’s early music videos (exhibit 43a), Trent Reznor’s 1994 music video for “Closer” (exhibit 43b) and Mario 64’s own liminal spaces outlined by Marilyn Roxie’s “Marilyn Roxie presents … The Inescapable Weirdness of Super Mario 64” (2020).

The above examples all operate through cryptomimesis, as per Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (2001):

cryptomimesis

A writing practice that, like certain Gothic conventions [e.g., Segewick’s commentary on live burial as a timeless fixture of Gothic literature] generates its uncanny effects through the production of what Nicholas Rand might call a “contradictory ‘topography of inside-outside'” [from Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word …] Moreover, the term cryptomimesis draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words (source).

Castricano further describes this process as “writing with ghosts,” referring to their nature as linguistic devices that adhere the sense of being haunted in domestic spaces: the house as inside-outside, familiar-unfamiliar and inherited imperfectly by the living from the dead.

(exhibit 0a1b2a1b: artist, bottom-middle-and-left: ringoripple; top-right: Lustyfairy666; bottom-right: Jasmin Darnell; top-left: source. What Segewick calls “a fixation of the ocular confrontation,” the image on the surface is sexualized during phenomenological[9] “debates”: staring contests. Regardless of what’s behind the veil—be it an old woman’s face or Lady Dimitrescu’s “thicc mommy peach”—the canonical surface is dimorphically sexualized and interrogated through traditional stigma, bias and fear-fascination. For the classic Neo-Gothic, the surface would have been used to communicate sexual tension/contagion in oft-unironically harmful forms.)

liminal expression (monsters)/monster girls

Monsters are generally liminal, but some more than others openly convey a partial, ambivalent, oscillating sense of conflict on the surface of their imagery. A hopelessly common example is the monster girl, as AFAB persons are generally fetishized/demonized “waifu” in canon and must be reclaimed  in sex-positive forms (exhibit 5e; 23a, the Medusa; 49, phallic women; 50, furries; 62e, cavewomen, etc). The advanced degree of this trope is the monster mother, which expects the women to exist in ways that cater to men that are both loved and feared in fetishizing ways, but also sacrificed (exhibits 51b1, 87b1 and 102b, etc). Akin to a black mirror, Eve Segewick, in 1981, called this mimesis “the character in the veil [or] imagery of the surface in the Gothic novel.” The basic gist, they argue, is the sexualizing of a surface imagery in Gothic media (their example being the nun’s veil); i.e., a “shallow pattern” literally on the surface of paper or a screen or glass that can evoke a deeper systemic problem that spans space and time.

(artist: Honey Lavender)

Keeping the above definitions in mind, the word liminal can also denote to being “in between,” insofar as a monster is canonical versus iconoclastic—with a particular spatial/personalized expression moving towards one pole or the other from its de facto starting point. Monsters are generally liminal in liminal types of media: art and porn.

As a liminal hauntology of war (another term of mine) that “suddenly appears” during Gothic dialogs, monsters are generally “not of this Earth”; i.e., as forever belonging to a

liminal hauntology of war (danger disco)

…a half-real poetic space to heroically move through, onstage and off, and one that concerns the hauntological presence and function of a Gothic chronotope (the castle or some other war-like alien double of the nuclear home); i.e., of the Imperial Boomerang bringing monsters (and their masters) home to roost, during fascism; e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain (the High Fantasy treasure map and Metroidvania/shooter), per the monomyth and Promethean Quest (for power) chasing the Numinous: for different reasons during the dialectic of the alien. In turn, these translate in and out of neoliberal stories (especially videogames) into real life; i.e., during the abjection process as something to reify and further for profit raping nature as monstrous-feminine (re: “A Note About Canonical Essentialism“). Also something I call the “danger disco,” or source of Numinous thrills; i.e., where the hero chases the Numinous during calculated risk: to articulate and interpret generational trauma under state confusion and duress.

the dialectic of the alien

A term I coined to articulate the dialectic of the abjection process and venerate the Gothic—vis-à-vis Julia Kristeva, but also Frederic Jameson’s “dialectic of shelter” and subsequent class nightmare (re: Postmodernism), as well as Summoning Salt’s “The History of Mega Man 2 World Records” (2024; timestamp: 8:25); i.e., as a dialectic useful towards universal liberation, one concerning the alien as something to parse and arbitrate for or against abjection (as something to reverse): to hug or hate, police or liberate, the assignment of “alien” status using the same language/aesthetic of the alien, mid-play. As I write in “Brace for Impact: Some Prep When Hugging the Alien” (2024): “All in all, I live the Humanities as a ludo-Gothic means of thinking inclusively about and experiencing the Gothic first-hand (an ongoing relationship the Gothic deliberately combines—an affect); i.e., BDSM or otherwise, people work through preference and experimentation to issue public statements that are, to some degree, coded. Monsters are code for the dialectic of the alien (us versus them) as taught to us through canon, power being made to flow in one direction when faced with trauma as a historical-material effect: the ghost of the counterfeit waiting patiently for revenge (state shift). The horror of the Gothic, then, is when it truly comes alive, ceasing to be a pure fiction but a nightmare that applies to us as victims of the state cannibalizing us” (source). Ludo-Gothic BDSM, then, is a potent means of negotiating generational trauma during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., by rarefying or otherwise going where abuse (or spectres of abuse) are—mid-dialectic—to perform and interrogate shelter and alienation for development purposes: setting nature-as-alien (re: the monstrous-feminine) free from state control/pimps (re: the whore’s revenge).

As such, history in totality is an invention written through otherworldly violence and force, including the Gothic theatrical/practical implements of those things; i.e., historical materialism in action, but through dialectical materialism, or the arrangement of opposing forces through material means according to Gothic poetics during oppositional praxis: doubles. Doubles invite comparison to encourage unique, troubling perspectives that “shake things up” and break through bourgeois illusions. To that, the paradox of performing power compounds through the visitor(s) from other worlds, planets, times as fabricated, but also doubled in a praxial sense; i.e., Satan builds pandemonium and hell follows within him, but he looks and acts uncannily like those he’s rebelling against. While warring against the status quo, the monsters from either side (which come from/occupy the same shadow zone, whose nebulous, psychosexual “forces of darkness” we shall unpack during the thesis proper) start to resemble and not resemble each other. Sure, they look a lot alike, but dialectically-materially are actually polar opposites.

(exhibit 0a1b2b: Artist, top-left: Gustave Doré; everything else: UrEvilMommy. The private poses are being used as negotiated for an illustration that will be going in Volume Three, but I’m including them here, ahead of time, to make a point about oppositional praxis: Psychomachia and psychosexuality often employ medieval language as something to consciously interrogate by sex-positive workers who use their labor to revive and invigilate [display in exhibits] monstrous conversations about sexuality as heroic, thus athletic and/or adjacent to depictions of war in traditional gendered ways that have been canonized/camped back and forth over space and time.

The monstrous violence and sexuality in Paradise Lost are thoroughly psychosexual and gendered in relation to heteronormativity as something to rail against, and hence plays out in the usual theatre as something to witness: through battle, specifically that of angels and demons adjacent the human occupants in the Garden of Eden. These various, sex-positive paratexts become a collective meta “fan fic” that supports former “perceptive” arguments by overwriting future attempts to efface their critical power and liminal expression as invited voyeurism of an exhibitionist troupe’s ironic peril: the rape play as cathartic, but also a guilty pleasure that overrides and counterattacks harmful wish fulfillment [the unironic battle-of-the-sexes]—i.e., the desire to see others “die” through collaboration and friendship versus actually die through class resentment [the slasher villain as the instruction of such destruction; e.g., Michael Myers, a “demon lover” of the operatic[10] Radcliffean sort, unironically killing slutty teenagers]. In short, it takes what people like—sex, tasty food, kink, monsters and BDSM, heroic theatre, heavy metal, and drugs [or evocations of those things]—and camps them further than Milton could have possibly dreamed.

[artist: Frank Frazetta]

The functional opposite would be something like Frazetta’s John Carter through the Gothic mode, but this remains liminal because it can always be camped [exhibit 0a2c] during our battles fought in praxial opposition to the state.)

In other words, languages are dialects with an army of dated, spectacular monsters to back them up, but the army and its monsters needn’t be an argument for nation-states or some other organization of power as vertical; camps of campy soldiers can use the paradox of performing power in doubled monstrous language to radically deviate away from camps of canonical soldiers in terms of appearance, but vary exactly on how they do this to achieve a universal proletarian function. Even so, the aesthetic variations of said function occurs using the reclamation of ancient traditional language, whose traumatic depictions of theatre and war are something Americans (or those living under Pax Americana) have been well-acclimated towards, including its dimorphic gendered and sexualized elements; i.e., the (to use the Superbad analogy) “phallic” nature of such brainfood as “dick-shaped” and the ubiquity of rape through (to use the Team America analogy) the “fucking” of “pussies” and “assholes” by “dicks.” Modern theater’s copaganda and Military Industrial Complex is kayfabe, or the wrestler’s “dialog” during a staged, back-and-forth match between two “warring” athletes (or theatrical positions of argument that resemble athletes):

Military Industrial Complex

(from Wikipedia): the relationship between a country’s military and the defense industry that supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences public policy. A driving factor behind the relationship between the military and the defense-minded corporations is that both sides benefit—one side from obtaining war weapons, and the other from being paid to supply them. The term is most often used in reference to the system behind the armed forces of the United States, where the relationship is most prevalent due to close links among defense contractors, the Pentagon, and politicians. The expression gained popularity after a warning of the relationship’s detrimental effects, in the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961.

In the context of the United States, the appellation is sometimes extended to military–industrial–congressional complex (MICC), adding the US Congress to form a three-sided relationship termed an “iron triangle.” Its three legs include political contributions, political approval for military spending, lobbying to support bureaucracies, and oversight of the industry; or more broadly, the entire network of contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as corporations and institutions of the defense contractors, private military contractors, the Pentagon, Congress, and the executive branch.

copaganda

Any form of canonical media that defends state abuse through official or functional police agents, but especially their monopoly of violence against those living in the state of exception under crisis as meant to recognize and worship/submit to them like gods. The state is always, to some degree, in crisis, leading to the generation of myriad monomyth stories that express this fact—i.e., as a dividing line between the police and everyone else. Skip Intro, a YouTuber with an extensive series on copaganda, explores how this phenomenon goes well beyond planet Earth, going so far as to call it a Faustian bargain. This bargain manifests in many different kinds of fiction genres that endorse the status quo. For example, the “witch cops” and vice characters of fantasy narratives (war chiefs, Amazon war bosses; white and black “wolves,” exhibit 1a1b) either attack orcs, Drow or some other enemy of the state during oppositional praxis, or they rally them in doomed rebellions and futile/misunderstood attacks of revenge. One assimilates, the other is destroyed and vilified.

kayfabe (the full definition)

The Wikipedia entry for “kayfabe” reads:

the portrayal of staged events within the industry as “real” or “true,” specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this “reality” within the direct or indirect presence of the general public. Kayfabe, in the United States, is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera. Since wrestling is performed in front of a live audience, whose interaction with the show is crucial to its success, kayfabe can be compared to the fourth wall in acting, since hardly any conventional fourth wall exists to begin with. Because of this lack of conventional fourth wall, wrestlers were once expected to maintain their characters even out of the ring, and in other aspects of their lives that could be made public (source).

For a good introduction to the concept and its history in modern professional wrestling and popular media, consider Behind the Bastards’ podcast episode, “Part One: Vince McMahon, History’s Greatest Monster” (2023). The concept applies not just to wrestling but includes any professional sports—e.g., e-sports but also vigilante sports/action hero narratives with athletic crusaders such as the heteronormative avatars from Streets of Rage and TMNT or Street Fighter as something to endorse through their police violence of state-oriented criminals, potential subversives, revolutionaries and so-called “terrorists” threatening the existence of “correct” action heroes as something to perform (exhibit 34c2, 98a1, or 104a1); or to subvert these false revolutionaries in a variety of ways (exhibit 102a4, 111b).

Between the flow of capital and two forms of theatre (one being more “onstage” and the other a semi-theatrical enforcement of the state’s laws out on the streets), the masked play of warlike theatre offers a chorus-like commentary during the show of force wherever it occurs. Often, its showy pugilism and brawn are set to music, but also a team-based competition with single or multiple people per side: sports. In a canonical sense, performers are generally athletic and warlike, their bellicose struggles relayed through incredible-yet-heavily-scripted feats of arms and armed conflict as hyperbolically violent and over-the-top, but also inviting the crowd to join in, knowing all the special moves, reversals and related gimmicks—i.e., performances of idealized strength, with sweepingly wide, theatrically “loud” motions pitted by powerful-looking heroes against powerful-looking enemies or enemies designed to threaten the hero’s power in bigoted ways (the corruptor or monstrous-feminine): the kayfabe babyface is, for all intents and purposes, an Americanized Beowulf pitted against nominal Communists and cartoon Nazis (often in literal Nazi outfits); but its pastiche extends to cops who both look, act and function like wrestlers to convey state propaganda during class war as emblematized by the arm of the state—its class traitors working within a staged bout’s standard-issue reversals: the enemy is both weak and strong.

Canon’s target audience internalize fear and dogma as something to accept and practice, but also endorse like a sports or wrestling fan watching and taking a match at face value—i.e., endlessly warlike and sexualized/gendered according to us versus* them made through monstrous arguments for vertical power as something to endlessly maintain through canonical mimesis; this repeats according to the perception and maintenance of righteous order (according to beings adjusted to order as a heteronormative paradigm). To subvert this Symbolic Order[11]/mythic structure[12], I say to our target audience: “Do you like sex, demons and power? Then you might be a Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communist (or at the very least curious enough to make it past this volume’s initial ‘Cerberus’)!”

*I use the word “versus/vs” a lot. When it’s a verb or a title (as with my book: Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion), I prefer to use the full, non-abbreviated word, “versus”; when it’s a noun, I generally use one of two contractions: “vs” for compound noun phrases (e.g., “vampires vs zombies”) except “v.” with SCOTUS legal cases (e.g., “Roe v. Wade”); another exception is “us versus them,” because “us vs them” looks incredibly weird to me. However, apart from my book title, SCOTUS cases and “us versus them,” I might not be super consistent following this rule (the reason being I think the meaning should be understood regardless if I’m stressing its function as a noun or a verb).

To this, Sex Positivity crosses over the canonical threshold, stepping into the breach and liminal hauntology of class/culture/race war fought by Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism’s campy monster doubles in contested theatrical spaces on- and offstage; i.e., subversive Amazonomachia as the cryptonymic, “Trojan” announcement of transformatively beautiful lies throughout culture as a whole: the monstrous theatre of the class- (race- and gender-)conscious splendide mendax telling beautiful lies whose elaborate strategies of misdirection (from Fredric Jameson, below) are “found” (written and announced as a discovery like King Arthur’s coconuts from Monty Python) as “archaeologies” that counter the canonical refrain as stuck:

“archaeologies” of the future

Fredric Jameson’s titular 2005 idea, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, of an elaborate strategy of misdirection (an idea originally from his 1982 essay “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?“) that breaks through the future of one moment that is now our own past, often through the fantasy and science fiction genres (the Gothic variant of this strategy as we shall discuss it is the Gothic castle/chronotope, discussed in the thesis proper). Canonical “archaeologies” sell this dead future back to workers to pacify them; iconoclastic variations devise ways of seeing beyond canonical illusions by “re-excavating” them, using what’s left behind again to liberate worker bodies and minds in the process.

Hauntology’s praxis includes the appearance of spaces, but also the metanarrative during paratextual discussions about the poiesis/mimesis of monster and lair alike, but also their raising and razing (which we’ll unpack during the “camp map”). It’s androids dreaming of electric sheep, whereupon slaves close their eyes and inhabit canceled retro-futures that have become class-conscious, thus reclaimed. This isn’t just the sci-fi schtick of the 1980s, and I thoroughly want to go beyond Jameson’s own bias to explain things he couldn’t be arsed to touch:

Although some critics continue to disavow the Gothic as being subliterary and appealing only to the puerile imagination—Fredric Jameson refers to the Gothic as “that boring and exhausted paradigm[13]” (source: Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing, 2009).

I want workers to use Gothic poetics—its liminal expression (doubles) and paradox—to transform all fiction, thus history as built on incredible heroic (monstrous) falsehoods (not to mention science fiction emerged with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as [still] one of its best examples, from a proletarian standpoint. Much of Utopian sci-fi is far more apologetic of Cartesian rhetoric; e.g., Isaac Asimov’s “Laws of Robots” pacifying slaves dressed up in [now-dated] futurism).

To this, the paradox is at home in Gothic expression—of power, of liminal expression/doubles, of telling truth through lies whether on purpose or by accident (to be of the devil’s party and know it/not know it) via shadows on the wall; i.e., elaborate lies/strategies of misdirection, splendide mendax and their “archaeologies.” Absolute power is a paradox, but so is “pure evil” as part of the canonical framework; e.g., the politer xenophobia of the woman-in-black mistress in a novel-of-manners, versus the overt, psychosexual demon lover as “phallic” in traditionally male, warlike and rapacious ways: Victoria from Zofloya was murderously sexual[14] in order to canonically scapegoat sodomy while also stabbing Lilla—the cliché, passive version of the Gothic heroine archetype—to death. But not all that glooms is Gothic the same way. The dark monster can be functionally doubled without changing its overall appearance across multiple stories in the dialogic imagination. In many cases, the monster is ontologically but also praxially ambiguous (e.g., Ellen Ripley/Samus Aran as a phallic-woman girl boss; but also the “black Amazon,” Coffy/Pam Grier, whose blaxploitation camps the “woman-in-black” vice character/detective from much older Gothic fiction, vis-à-vis Zofloya). This means it can go either way per appearance, wherein its potential character during class/culture war is ultimately decided by the performance as something to reify and execute through dialectical-material scrutiny of past performances. While Milton famously did it by accident, the class warriors of Gothic Communism have the advantage of hindsight; with it, we can consciously weaponize Gothic poetics/paradox during liminal expressions of power not by accident, but on purpose and to the widest possible degree that critiques capital and consumption under it.

(exhibit 0a1b2c: Source—fair warning: a “photo dump” site with lots of pop-ups on it. The taboo nature of hard kink often means that pictures aren’t credited, hence remain artistically anonymous.

The class/culture motives for Radcliffe’s classic demon lover marry harmful psychosexuality to sin and xenophobia, playing out like “bad BDSM” from a female author I seriously doubt had even the slightest idea what sex-positive variants were [e.g., pillow princesses, rope bunnies]. For one, Fetlife didn’t exist yet, or the Internet; the terminology for BDSM had only just started to appear in operatic forms and women be recognized as human: “Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the décor and costumes and blasphemous rites” (re: Fascinating Fascism“). Needless to say that nearly two centuries later, Sontag‘s opinion of BDSM is limited to a harmful canonical version of Sadomasochism that frankly is way off the mark in terms of what sex positivity’s entire gamut entails: “Sadomasochism has always [emphasis, me] been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love” (ibid.). She completely ignores the matter of degree and negotiation, and the fact that sex isn’t even automatically included in BDSM:

So what about the intersection of kink and sex? When is this appropriate and what are the guidelines?

It’s a tricky topic. I remember telling a friend who is pretty vanilla but curious how kink scenes are distinct activities. She said, “So, wait, there’s no sex?” And I remember struggling to answer this. For me, most kink scenes are separate from sexual encounters, even if sex may follow a scene. This is very partner dependent, but for me, a kink scene requires aftercare before there is sex. And so far this was almost always the case for me – negotiation, scene, aftercare, possibility of sex [source: Victor’s “Intersection of Kink and Sex,” 2019].

In other words, if Sontag was “vanilla,” then Radcliffe was barely even ice cream [whose naughty operatic fantasies are unironically violent and sit on the ledge of threatened morality—what Ash, in Alien, would call “delusions,” exhibit 51a]. But their combined inexperience paradoxically stems from dark fantasies invented from the open secret of sex abuse turned into urban legends; criminal hauntology and cryptonymy pointing at imagined realities through copies made by people in materially privileged positions: a conditioning to expect harmful violence during Faustian BDSM rituals, constituting a moral panic/criminogenesis in its own right [Satanists just love sacrificing women, babies, and white, teenage virgins, apparently].

These canonical misconceptions operate on the automatic conflation of sex and harm, versus merely being adjacent to it during psychosexual expression [there’s a thin line between the two—a tightrope to tread carefully]. That is, sex-positive BDSM is generally about negotiated unequal power exchange in a written, contractual form that is founded on (relatively) equal bargaining positions[15]; and catharsis through rape play is a common form, given how calculated risk [minimalization] exercises are commonly designed to mimic the feelings of being out of control minus the danger of actual harm; i.e., to help someone [commonly women in heteronormative societies where sex crimes/abuse are prolific but also romanticized/apologized for and covered up] gain agency over their maladaptive survival/prey mechanisms when seeing things that remind them of their abuse/generational trauma: popular media as built to scare women towards men [white knight syndrome] according to the profit motive. Their subsequent camping can employ an “evil Italian count” to “threaten” the woman with, or the woman herself in or surrounded by black and red, including wearing fetish gear as an eliding of power and resistance on her body—in short, anything to enhance the experience.

[artist: Cara Day]

BDSM in popular media [canon] isn’t made to educate, but to shock naïve people looking for a thrill. It’s about as accurate as sex is during porn, tending to romanticize the therapeutic psychosexual elements divorced from performative context; i.e., merely showing them as they appear at first glance: recreations of traditional disempowerment, whose paralysis and vulnerable exposure hauntingly evoke real scenes of abuse; e.g., hair pulling and physical attacks, kidnappings with bindings and gags, rapes, drownings and murders—often by knife [canon synonymizes sex with violation, including abject reproduction: the murderous cock and womb of the father and mother but also their hideous “brood”]. The neophyte’s idea of what BDSM is often tries to mimic the trust-building exercise without understanding why it exists in a sex-positive [often trashy/pulpy] sense and why someone might try to perform it to achieve psychosexual catharsis that is often embroiled within self-destructive pathologies [the “call of the void”] seeking unironic harm; the novice counterfeit also tends to look like the expert performance at first glance. The difference lies not in the aesthetics but the skill level and intent, which can be hard to detect. Nevertheless, the fact remains that BDSM, when sex-positive, is built around community and trust as something to establish over time. It’s rehearsed over and over in a highly controlled environment [informed boundaries/consent, safewords] to prevent harm, hence the motto: “Hurt, not harm.”

Yet, there’s also the paradox of professional sex work, which capitalizes off hard kinks to turn a buck. There’s frankly nothing wrong with this, provided there’s a communal understanding encouraged by the paratext. For example, Cara Day having her panties sliced off with a knife [source tweet, 2023] certainly looks dangerous, but is no less dangerous than driving a car or a trapeze act. Rather, she and her partner have provided the visible threat of the knife without any actual major risk to themselves.

[artist: Cara Day]

Keeping with the circus allegory, the vast majority in the audience probably understand the staged nature of the performance and turn out to paradoxically feel “in danger” with minimal risk [the paradox being there is always some risk involved]. Due to its often taboo and cathartic nature tied to lived generational trauma, the experience can be very intense/profound for the sub, which can make it seem authentic, thus believable. As such, there’s always a small group of people who—like Dorian Grey—take what they see at face value. To prevent any dangerous confusions such as public excoriation or abusively do-it-yourself, “homebrew[16]” BDSM, it remains incredibly important for sex workers to have discussions with their customers [through interviews, public service announcements or hell, books like this one] that speak plainly about the voyeuristic/exhibitionistic nature of their work: its function.)

For example, regarding activist hindsight as cultivated by workers, consider the Amazon. While Amazons are a classic Greek monster and the word Amazonomachia literally means “Amazon battle,” Gothic Communism applies it to any monster in heroic discourse where competing notions about sexuality and gender are “duking it out.” This includes the heroes themselves as enforcing or resisting the hierarchy of power in heteronormative theatre (there is no functional difference between a hero and villain insofar as canonical heroes are concerned; all canonical heroes function like cops and “All Cops Are Bad,” not just the ones that look “evil,” because they universally victimize everyone else for the state). All heroes are monsters, thus liminal expressions that are sexualized and gendered (often to pornographic extremes; e.g., monster girls, exhibit 1a1a1h3a2; i.e., porn is liminal, thus monstrous, regarding its “action”). Gothic Communism’s praxial aim is to camp, thus overthrow/transform vertical power’s canonical/regressive or subjugated Amazonomachia (which invariably regresses during state decay) and replace its artistic/pornographic liminal expressions of sex and monsters wrestling back and forth with more stable, healthy and sex-positive horizontal arrangements; re: iconoclastic/subversive Amazonomachia supplied by liminal beings well-adjusted to chaos and struggle during oppositional praxis’ class tensions and performances of power at any register.

(artist: Blondynki Tez Graja)

To conclude, Milton’s “darkness visible” highlights power and liminal expression as being largely false/made up, relying on theatrical paradox through psychosexual performance (warring sex) and Amazonomachia (warring monsters) to operate during oppositional praxis (warring theory) in ways that aren’t always class-conscious but can be if taught and encouraged; i.e., “darkness visible” as deliberately campy. Keep this in mind when our thesis statement and “camp map” explore (and camp) the canonical argument for power and its Faustian offerings and Promethean pursuits; i.e., during the monomyth as mimetically executed through videogames and other artistic forms (exhibit 1a1a1a1_a). Class/culture war is fought on the streets, but also in the hearts and minds of the combatants in a very theatrical sense—i.e., inside the Gothic imagination with masks, costumes, props, and bodies in general, including their sexuality (organs, appeal/allure, appetite) and gendered components as heroically monstrous. Since the times of ancient theatre, then, all heroes have been monstrous, which is to say dictating the flow of power and resistance in theatrical language and Gothic poetics told through battle. This includes their grappling exchanges as relayed through ancient canonical codes into the present: heteronormative, thus binarized portrayals of athletic, one-on-one or team-based competitions; and resistance to those codes’ heteronormativity and binary within similar competitions across a grand, liminal meta-narrative.

(artist: Jan Rockitnik)

Onto “Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox“!


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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-FiPatreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] The film (and its writers) reduce the Miltonian allegory to a simple “come hither”; i.e., the wanton professor tempting (female) students within forbidden unlawful carnal knowledge. The stereotype exists for a reason; e.g., Simone Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre raped their students (Andy Martin’s “The Persistence of the ‘Lolita Syndrome,'” 2013) and Foucault and other postmodernist French thinkers wanted to abolish France’s age-of-consent laws (The Living Philosophy’s “Why French Postmodernists Were Pro-Paedophilia in the 1970s,” 2021). The clue with Jennings lies with how bored he sounds, but also his open confession to the class (thus the audience): He thinks Milton is boring and merely wants to get laid by trolling the undergraduate body. In short, he’s a sex pest giving the snake (and Satan) a bad name—not from wanting to have sex, but having sex by flagrantly abusing his position as professor and not really teaching the students anything except that power can be abused.

[2] Instead of Macbeth, the play is often just called “the Scottish play.”

[3] From Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On The Nature of Things) (c. 99 BC): “Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness” (source: Jack Maden’s “Why Death is Nothing to Fear: Lucretius and Epicureanism,” 2020).

[4] “Darkness visible” was the mysterious stuff at the bottom of the burning lake/void that, once freed, Satan and Beelzebub used to fashion pandemonium and the rest of Hell with. In short, it was a paradoxical creative force in Paradise Lost.

[5] From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790):

“The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity;
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood;
Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things.
Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast” (source).

[6] “As attributed to Pappus (4th century AD) and Plutarch (c. 46-120 AD) in Sherman K. Stein’s Archimedes: What Did He Do Besides Cry Eureka? (1999)” (source: Today in Science).

[7] (from the glossary):

totalitarianism

A state condition towards the total consolidation of power at one point. For example, in respect to Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, Richard Overy writes in The Dictators (2004), “‘Totalitarian’ does not mean that they were ‘total’ parties, either all-inclusive or wielding complete power; it means they were concerned with the ‘totality’ of the societies in which they worked.”

With Milton’s God as an allegory for the Church of England, the same idea of total power also applies; i.e., not that their power is total, but perceived as total: “Perception is reality.”

[8] “Ontology” being of, or otherwise pertaining to, the study of existence.

[9] “Phenomenology” being of, or otherwise pertaining to, the study of experience.

[10] An Western opera or fairytale generally contains a princess, a hero and a demon lover inside of a castle, and is penned by white people who—after making things taboo through the process of abjection, have promptly become fearful of, and fascinated with, the abject; they then seek to explore what has been walled off from them through various fakeries: navigating the ghost of the counterfeit as made by them (enabled by double standards, of course; a white woman like Radcliffe is allowed—more or less—to misbehave, navigating her own reverse-engineered trauma more than a woman of color would be, or a gender-non-conforming or Indigenous person, etc).

[11] “The social world of linguistic communication, intersubjective relations, knowledge of ideological conventions, and the acceptance of the law” (source: “Symbolic Order” [Lacan] from Dino Franco Felluga’s “Introductory Guide to Critical Theory,” 2011).

[12] (from the glossary): The Symbolic Order of Western canon: “Oh, look, it’s a king or a god! Guess I’ll bend the knee and turn off my brain!” Originally disrupted by the “mythic method” as coined by T.S. Eliot, who “Jerry” from GLR Archive writes in “Eliot and the Mythic Method” (2004):

defines what he exemplifies in The Waste Land [1922] – i.e., the “mythic method” – in his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” [1923]. The mythic method looked to the past to glean meaning and understanding for what has been lost or destroyed in the present [… abridged] (source).

Eliot’s 20th century modernist shenanigans (not to be confused with Modernism, aka the Enlightenment) fly directly in the face of James Campbell’s “monomyth.” Canonized as “the hero’s journey” in popular Western fiction and formative to new fictions, the monomyth is central to state hegemony through worker pacification. Perhaps not entirely aware of this, Eliot still chose not to retreat into a “better” past in search of individuation (to borrow from Carl Jung); he addressed the present as a modern confusion that needs to be faced.

[13] The quote is ubiquitous, but consider the opening page for Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” (2009) for a summary of it:

In the midst, of its definitive arguments, Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) pauses to consider the Gothic just long enough to single it out as a hopelessly “boring and exhausted paradigm.” The Gothic, he declares, is a mere “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” and it should not be mistaken for a “protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy” nor “a protopolitical protest against rape.” Although surprising at first, this condemnation is strategic in that it establishes the Gothic as Jameson’s critical other; the Gothic becomes an object of ritual sacrifice, imbued with those qualities in Jameson’s argument which are most discomfiting. […] If one regards Postmodernism as telling a story about postmodernity, its plot, taken as a whole, is curiously Radcliffean, in that it routinely presents the reader with postmodern objects meant to inspire anxiety before explaining them away. Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic, in other words, resembles nothing so much as his own description of the Gothic, in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979), as a means of raising and exorcising an object of anxiety (source).

In other words, Jameson writes like Coleridge does—like a scared white boy but even more allergic to the Gothic mode, oddly emulating one of its most famous (and white) female authors.

[14] Victoria, as we shall see, was basically the TERF/female incel prototype of 1806: She marries her husband, then poisons him to death so she can marry his brother instead; when the brother is too busy doting on his own wife, Lilla, Victoria grows increasingly impatient. So she kidnaps Lilla and chains her to a wall inside a cave. After a while, Victoria starts to poison the brother of her now-dead husband, who she tries to court while Lilla is still alive. Mid-negotiations, Victoria goes to the cave and kills Lilla by “pulling a Brutus” and stabbing the helpless girl to death before throwing her body off a cliff, which smashes to pieces on the rocks and washes away in the stormy current below. After that, she goes back to Lilla’s unsuspecting (and now-widower) husband and confesses her “love” to him, promptly causing the poor man to die of shock and disgust (it goes about as well as Darth Vader telling Luke he’s his father).

[15] Think the written contract from 50 Shades of Gray (2011) except less materially unequal from the offset—i.e., no pre-requisite of the master/slave dynamic through the bourgeois man in his castle (then and now) and a white, middle-class wallflower to negotiate with him—and instead a written, informed and (relatively) fair negotiation typically executed between two or more people under less extreme disparities. It’s fine to acknowledge socio-material-inequalities in society. The problem with white, middle-class women like Radcliffe is they presume a stuck, pre-fascist alignment with the usual historical materialisms in order to get their jollies within said system: the negotiation has to be unfair to describe the material conditions as they presently exist in relation to the actual or imaginary past supporting them. In short, there’s no attempt to imagine something better—merely the damsel’s unironic threat of rape by Blue Beard. It’s criminogenic (more on this in the thesis statement).

[16] BDSM is generally done in an amateur setting to some degree (not everyone knows a pro with their own dungeon; not everyone with a dungeon is sex-positive); the “homebrew” I’m talking about is domestic abuse dressed up as “BDSM” and sold as such through criminal hauntologies—i.e., the serial killer romance; e.g., The Phantom of the Opera (1909) or Silence of the Lambs (1988). Ludo-Gothic BDSM seeks to subvert canonical varieties, camping them to break Capitalist Realism with.

Book Sample: Author’s Foreword: “On Giving Birth”

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). 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 “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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.

Thesis Volume (Volume Zero) [volume opening]

The Absurd[1] is the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless or chaotic and irrational universe.

—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

Capitalism is a giant graveyard, but a shared one to “rock out” inside. For Gothic Communists, the crypt is a place to dance within, while those who pale in face of Capitalism eating itself punch the skeleton (or giant suit of armor) as a scapegoat. Unlike them, we’ve acclimated to chaos because we’re the underclass (to varying degrees of intersecting privilege and axes of oppression); they’re the mythical “middle class,” given pretty baubles thus thinking they have the most to lose: “land back = white genocide.” My silly fools, unite (with us against the state); you have only to lose your chains!

Chaos isn’t meaningless, but an invitation to make your own meaning by cheating death in a ludic sense—i.e., tearing up the Faustian ludic contract of Capitalism by being a “spoilsport” of sorts. The thesis volume, then, contains my expanded author’s foreword and thesis proper on Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, as well as the “camp map” and symposium, which together summarize and articulate its broadest and most common arguments and key points (e.g., the Gothic, monstrous-feminine, Amazonomachia). The author’s foreword explains the various “pregnancies” I had in order “to give birth” to its respective volumes (my not-so-little demon babies), as well as thanking my prime Muse[2] involved in its insemination: my partner (and cover model for this volume), Bay.

(artist: Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri)

The foreword also outlines the cultivation of a broad and far-reaching concept—the Wisdom of the Ancients—which later in the volume (and rest of the book) will be applied to various related ideas; e.g., class consciousness and “darkness visible.” Following that, I will conclude the foreword by discussing my thought process in making the book; i.e., how its making shaped my thought process, moving through the birth canal and towards the finishing line.

Author’s Foreword: “On Giving Birth,” the Wisdom of the Ancients, and Afterbirth

…in assuming [this book] as the basis of a work of fancy, I have not considered myself as merely weaving a series of supernatural terrors. The event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment. […] I have thus endeavoured to preserve the truth of the elementary principles of human nature […] The circumstance on which my story rests was suggested in casual conversation (source).

—Mary Shelley, “Preface to Frankenstein” (1818)

(model and artist, left: Mary Shelley and Richard Rothwell; model, right: Persephone van der Waard)

Pregnancies are seldom planned. This book, Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism, isn’t just a big-ass porn catalog full of cool, “thirsty” art, nor is it just my little trans demon baby and pure, loving brainchild made with those who passively or actively contributed to its pages; it’s me, a trans woman, consciously reverse-engineering my own creative process as having been ongoing for years (thus why I have so many exhibits from my own work—I had already drawn them years ago). For the better part of fifteen months, this complex reification’s trial and error has happened in starts and stops after long nights at the desk, sleeping on my increasingly regular musings and waking afresh with new queer epiphanies—to keep things straight in my own head, much like Sarah Connor kept journals for herself while figuratively and literally giving birth to rebellion (and doing my best to avoid coming off as a white savior). Just as an expected child is fueled and shaped by its mother’s diet, my book was inspired by the process of older poetics/poiesis (meaning “to make,” specifically a production of that which has never existed; i.e., the simulacrum, or imitation fashioned through   mimesis). The idea of Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism wasn’t just subversion, but reclamation of what was lost to fight back against capital as Einstein’s fish might: to learn not what made me feel stupid for being unable to climb a tree as my prescribed “betters” could, but swim in water as I was always meant to through a cultivated emotional/Gothic intelligence linked to my inherent neurodivergence and queerness as useless to capital (outside of moral panics).

We’ll continue to unpack “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism” at length during the thesis paragraph/statement. For now, it is class/culture war relayed through monstrous poetics that actively and class-consciously subvert their canonical norms’ etiology by recultivating the Superstructure and reclaiming the Base. I devised the concept to process systemic trauma through ironic monstrous poetics (the making of campy monsters) and thus have written/illustrated a book that is full of what I love: sex positivity, catharsis and of course, monsters. It was originally an attempt to heal/recover from academia and my inability “to make it” as a trans woman/neurodivergent person; as well as my exes and what they did to me, but also a constant reflection on the dialogic Gothic imagination of the larger world and dialectical-material expressions of trauma within its historical materialism. For example, last December I tried very hard to use my manuscript to relate to an ex of mine named Zeuhl[3], taking an idea they leveled against my argumentation and expanding on the pushback I received; i.e., I wanted them in my life and the book was at least partially an attempt to keep them as close as I could. This did not last and three years after they unexpectedly broke up with me in 2019 (while overseas with “an old flame,” as they put it), we finally fell out for good. Undeterred, I continued writing my book, whereupon I met one of my current partners, Bay. Bay’s enthusiastic participation led to a profound expansion on my book’s ideas; i.e., through a shared desire to communicate these academic notions to a wider public by refining them. We didn’t want to reduce them to the accommodated intellectual’s granularized, academic “word soup,” archaic paywall system, all-around gatekeeping and cognitive estrangement, but instead focus on practical, holistic expression as publicly synthesized; i.e., amongst all workers in intuitive solidarity against the state as our ultimate foe.

palimpsest

“A manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain”—common in Gothic stories, which amount to a cycle of lies; i.e., historical materialism: bourgeois history is unreliable, treacherous, like a Gothic lover or a concentric chest/midden of unreliable materials (cryptonyms). It can apply to a variety of media or formats: sculpture, music, clothes, videogames, etc (exhibit 5b, 43a/43b).

Gothic narrators/narratives

For its hero, narrators, spaces and speakers, a Gothic tale regularly involves unreliable/conflicting artificers and imposters, but also the patriarchal bloodline or castle as invented; i.e., as a series of concentric, sedimentary palimpsests. In the canonical sense, everything is fetishized, valorized and disseminated, then spread far and wide to cover up the ghost of the counterfeit (the circular lie of the West) with more ghosts that further the lie. Iconoclastic variants challenge this myopia with their own counterfeits’ opposing class character inside a shared, contested midden.

Gothic doubling

The black mirror of historical materialism’s all our yesterdays. It is the fated, ominous premonition of endless circuituity—that everything has already occurred before, or things that have already occurred will occur again from the same materials that occur out of what has already occurred; i.e., for everything that exists, there must (somewhere in the universe) be a dialectical-material “shadow” whose coinciding status as former-or-future counterfeit is actually historical materialism’s circular approach to space and time felt in the current moment: everything that has ever existed will exist again or things that will exist have already existed in ways that offer up a prior version’s dialectical-material opposition to it—a castle or soldier as “evil” twin, uncanny and undead, replicated like an echo, a virus, a shade; the civil war of black infinity. There is no automatic moral character, merely the presence of infinite possibility amid crushing gravity and decay.

the Gothic heroine

The oft-female (or at least feminine) protagonist of Gothic stories. Classically a passive sex object/detective/damsel-in-distress, which became increasingly masculine, active and warlike in the 20th century onwards (though Charlotte Dacre beat everyone to the punch in 1806 when she wrote Zofloya, having the masculine-yet-trammeled Victoria de Loredani stab Lilla, the archetypal Gothic heroine, to death[4]). Unlike their male counterparts, who tend to default to soldiers or scientists (violent/mentally fragile men of war and reason with—at least in America—closeted ties to Nazi Germany and parallel conservative movements wearing a liberal guise), women within the colonial binary are relegated to spheres of domesticated ignorance; i.e., “Something is wacky about my residence, my guest, my wardrobe, etc. Guess I’ll go investigate (exhibit 48a)!” Ann Radcliffe treated the protecting of female virtue as an “armoring” (exhibit 30c) process that commonly worked through a swooning[5] mechanism; though somewhat problematic on its face due to its pro-European origins, the idea of armoring one’s virtue still presents the notion of feminine flexibility as facing monstrous-feminine things that male, or at least “phallic,” heroes cannot rationalize or stab/shoot to death; i.e., the paradox of terror as something to reclaim through counterterror devices that, yes, include a fair bit of rape, taboo sex, and murderous stereotypes. In other words, it’s entirely possible to have the Great Destroyer persona without being bigoted, but you have to camp it, first.

Star Wars (1977) famously presented the Death Star as something to blow up during a canal chase bombing run, flanking Luke Skywalker with fascist hounds; Battlestar Galactica (2005) inverts the canal chase into a head-to-head, one-on-one dogfight, putting the hero, Starbuck, on a paradoxical collision course with herself but also all our yesterdays: the female knight/Gothic heroine jousting with her own dark reflection as one narrative in a series of endlessly foretold collisions. The nightmarish reverie holds her in trance, bringing her close enough that we see the whites of her eyes—to stare into her very soul. As we do, we’re invited to project onto the screen, seeing a “reflection” of ourselves upon Starbuck; i.e., not just as a dramatic vehicle for cheap, quick “feels,” but the uncomfortable sensation of mistaken identity that this has all somehow happened before—is all happening again right this very second; it becomes an undead phenomenology to freeze under and stare at, but also a communion with all the dead generations who preceded us/will proceed after us. As part of this cathedral, we are merely “in the middle” of a never-ending struggle:

For workers, then, this book is about harnessing the awesome power of the Gothic double—of cultivating a Gothic counterculture useful to liberating sex work from capitalistic bondage, thus requires camping canon through holistic study of the larger aforementioned cycle; holistic study is the returning to, and reflecting upon, old points/dated expressions after assembling them in a powerful, fractally recursive way to understand larger structures and patterns’ own divisions and replications across space and time, but also representations of space-time (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). Camping canon, then, is the profoundly chaotic challenging of singular, thus harmful interpretations (and their reactionary responses) through the commodification of power and resistance as the ongoing (and hopelessly messy) struggle between colonizer and colonized; i.e., “nothing is sacred” (except human rights and the health of ecosystems and the humane treatment of animals) vs Capitalism’s this is old, not new, not something that is sold as “fresh,” ignoring old theatrical devices like medieval puppet shows and bad-on-purpose voices, asides/speaking to the audience, wrestling super moves, theremins and Scooby Doo [1969] running sound effects, Greek Choruses, Kabuki masks, and Jojo’s “tension” katakana and terrible (thus lovely) puns, etc. Capital is always trying to commodify, thus colonize, the antiquated oral traditions of theatre/folklore, but through the inexorable drive of capital these invariably become outmoded as discarded hauntologies/cryptonyms that we can reclaim from canon as it crumbles and seeks profit elsewhere. Canon can always be camped, and relies upon old theatrical stratagems and Gothic hauntologies, but also “talking funny” or incorrectly to achieve its campy Jester’s affect.

(artist: Frederick Richard Pickersgill—taken with my phone while I was visiting the Manchester Art Gallery with Zeuhl in 2018)

Before I continue, the amount of influence Bay has had on my book cannot be easily quantified, so I will simply say that I have a profound gratitude and appreciation for their boundless, substantial contributions. I wanted to summarize that in a brief but heartful and sincere message to them:

Bay,

As neurodivergent and non-binary yourself—and struggling to find purpose and value in academia like I did—you said it makes you feel valuable and seen in an “encompassing way”; i.e., kindness without judgement, and written/illustrated to share with the world what makes you special in my eyes. As such, you said that you want me to not just process trauma but fill this book with love (our making of love). Thanks to you, I have acquired the means—the awesome power—to be able to do that. I have many muses, but you are my Muse, and this foreword and every volume has a dedication to you at the start for a reason. You are the light in my storm, the pulse to my heart, the ghost in my castle; and this book is our shared “stim toy”/song in the night. “The creatures of the night, what sweet music they make!” May our song in the night bring other workers peace and love, and our spectres of Marx—the ghosts of all the dead generations—revive and weigh on the brains of the living, terrifying the elite senseless as we make the ghosts of men like Marx campy, thus sexy and funny according to our Wisdom of the Ancients as we dance with ghosts (with Marx’ memory already rather dry and caricaturized—i.e., of their own “ponsed-up” masculinity [as you put it] relayed through their pointy beards, overinflated egos, and overbearing intellects; and ironically enough, through his debatable anti-Semitism[6] later weaponized by bigots).

Love,

—Mommy

(source: Zelda Dungeon)

The idea with this book isn’t just to camp canon and the Shadow of Pygmalion[7]/ghost of the skeleton king and his madness (the bigoted historical materialism of the status quo that anchors gender roles and identities to biological sex within the colonial binary) by dancing with them, but also Marx’s ghost (which famous thinkers like Max Weber had to argue with in their own work). Marx wasn’t gay enough for my tastes, thus could never camp canon to the amount required. In camping him, I’m obviously doing this through the Gothic mode, specifically its making of monsters—their lairs, battles, identities and struggles—through a reclaimed Wisdom of the Ancients that represents ourselves during shared dialectical-material struggles that take what Marx touched on before going further than he ever could:

the Wisdom of the Ancients

A cultural understanding of the imaginary past. The past is always imaginary to some extent, but through less wise forms reliably leads to genocide and tremendous suffering; i.e., Marx’ prophesied tragedy and farce[8]:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue (source: “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 1852).

or according to structures of power that preserve themselves through blind pastiche, parody and canonical art. These foolish forms operate according to structures of power that preserve themselves through blind pastiche, parody and canonical art: pure evil and pure good as an essentialized struggle divorced from material reality—simply the forces of light versus the forces of darkness, respectively of good and evil: not of Milton’s humanized, revolutionary Satan, but the Biblical Satan as a vicious backstabber embodied in Beowulf (c. 700) and echoed in future written forms through the canonical monomyth endlessly mimicking itself in heteronormative forms of gender trouble and gender parody.

In turn, canon essentialize Capitalism’s vicious cycle and cataclysmic arrangements of the imaginary past as something that is simultaneously Malthusian, but also paradoxically “as good as it gets” and threatened by the doomsday myopia of nominal Communism that Capitalist Realism affords. As their sense of agency and certitude collapse with the world around them, workers—but especially the middle class—are left feeling cheated or lied to, and either blame the system or scapegoats. Scapegoats are historically easier because you can shoot or kill them, implying the solution is a simple, straightforward one. It’s the “tried-and-true” “wisdom” of the Roman fool, falling on their own sword while Rome burns not once, but over and over. Such “wisdom” is not wise, but a false power, which Gothic Communists seek to reclaim through our own doubling of the imaginary past—its monsters, castles and battles—as a kind of “living document” that can reclaim the Gothic imagination, thus our ability to think; i.e., through lost forms of knowledge retailored for the complexities of the modern world—its warring mentalities, sexualities, monsters (codified beliefs and actions) and praxis during class and culture war.

Something important to consider is the inherently fictional or theatrical nature to history as fabricated in some shape or form by good-faith and bad-faith actors (to which, the stage is merely a place to communicate ideas in theatrical language). Napoleon himself—a famous propagandist inundated with the image of the past as a means of self-deification—once said: “History is a set of lies that people have agreed upon. Even when I am gone, I shall remain in people’s minds the star of their rights, my name will be the war cry of their efforts, the motto of their hopes” (source: PBS’s “Self-Made Myth”).

For Napoleon, and many others like him, the truth is something to bend, but also present in theatrical forms invoking the imaginary past; i.e., a means to hide their true intent in bad faith. By comparison, it isn’t inherently dishonest for a sex-positive person to “lie” in a theatrical sense if it means protecting oneself from bad-faith actors. In other words, good-faith actors rely on theatre and performance to relay the truth in fictionalized, wildly fantastical forms. The aim isn’t misinformation, but a form of acting on- and offstage in every register available to question the so-called legitimacy of people just like Napoleon in the present day—i.e., so-called “revolutionaries” who ultimately used the awesome power of propaganda to manipulate workers towards inserting them into power before reneging on the rights of these same persons while acting out their Romanized fantasies (a trend Marx touches on in the above quotation, regarding Napoleon’s ghost on the post-Terror politics of the mid-1800s: “The French, so long as they were engaged in revolution, could not get rid of the memory of Napoleon”). We live in the state’s shadow of acting out its own lies(-upon-lies) to preserve itself through a ghostly procession of men who-would-be-Caesar similarly becoming ghosts of themselves along the pro-state meta-narrative. Theatre—including its popular, romanticized sites and participants—is a dangerously delicious proposition that can have far-reaching consequences:

(artist: Spencer Devlin Howard)

The thing to remember is that acting, music, poetry and theatre are all powerful ways to communicate, but also a time-tested means of survival against bad-faith actors (the above photo is a cosplay of the villain Salieri, who supposedly poisoned Mozart to death. Regardless if that’s true, Mozart wasn’t exactly hard to attack; an infamously vulgar[9] man, he died penniless in a pauper’s grave—”hoisted on his own petard,” as it were). People act all the time for a variety of reasons; many more “lie” at particular places where lying is expected (e.g., the postpunk disco) as a means of getting at the truth in ways designed to help others (thus policed and infiltrated by undercover state agents).

As I point out with the likes of Frederic Jameson, Edward Said and Luis Borges, this is not uncommon, but indeed involves a shared transgenerational/-continental conversation about persons who know they aren’t “being honest” insofar as official histories are concerned:

Fredrick Jameson is a Marxist critic not without opinions on the science fiction and fantasy genres. For example, he writes, “[science fiction’s] multiple mock futures [transform] our own present into the determinate past of something yet to come” (152) and yet “Fantasy remains generically wedded to nature and to the organism […] Nature thus seems to function here primarily as the sign of an imaginary regression to the past and to older pre-rational forms of thought” (64). Whereas SF addresses the unaddressable―the Utopian ideal, through an imagined “future,” which is really just our present in disguise—fantasy happily engages in the practice of magic and mystical beliefs, which are non-materialistic and affiliated with Antiquity and older, less-modern concepts. What we have here is Jameson describing his view of these genres—their perceived function, according to him, rather than their true, objective, universal function, if there is such a thing. I say, “according to him,” because Jameson writes what he sees, like all writers. Keeping this in mind, I’ll choose authors at random to make my point: What does he have in common with Wolfgang Iser, Jonathan Swift, Plato, Jane Austen, Edward Said, Thomas More and Ursula Le Guin? They are all liars.

Swift was an 18th century Irish satirist; Plato, a Classical philosopher from Ancient Greece; Austen, a 19th century English novelist; and More, a Renaissance writer who wrote in Latin. Excusing the fact that the rest are modern writers and thinkers, each still comes from a different time—that is, the present, which is unique to each. So while Jameson, Iser, Said and Le Guin are all 20th century writers, Jameson is still an American Marxist literary critic; Iser, a German literary critic; Said, a Palestinian, post-colonial literary critic; and Ursula Le Guin, an American fantasy/science fiction novelist. They distinguish themselves in the same broad profession[: lying to get at the concealed truth] (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Jameson and the Art of Lying,” 2017).

When asked by a symposium-goer what my point was in acknowledging that everyone lies, I was a bit long-winded. In hindsight, I’d like to reply some six years after the fact: “People lie, but lying isn’t strictly speaking a means of concealing the truth; rather, it can help us get at the truth, generally by acknowledging the shortcomings of a given academic or author revered for their special strategies.” As we shall see, these past figures weren’t gods, and I certainly won’t hold back when taking the likes of Jameson or Ann Radcliffe to task (especially Radcliffe). Indeed, we should fucking wail on them and see what comes out (for analysis but also for therapeutic[10] reasons) Yet, I will do so while also doing my best to take what’s useful from their own body of work and injecting it into my own. People lie, so it’s good to ask why and in service to what; i.e., who says what about them and why.

For example, Mark Dooley writes of Derrida,

What I saw in Derrida was a man of equal genius whose affirmative understanding of home redeemed French thought from its obsessive oikophobia.

There is one element of my existence which often perplexes many people. How is it that I—Sir Roger Scruton’s intellectual biographer and literary executor—should have written extensively on his arch-nemesis Jacques Derrida? Derrida was, after all, one of those upon whom Scruton regularly poured abundant scorn. He was a high priest of “Nothingness” whose soulless alchemy had corrupted the foundations of intellectual life. Generations of students had fallen under his spell, their minds having disintegrated in the process. This wizard of gobbledygook had earned himself a global reputation, but he was nothing more than a purveyor of “nonsense.” That, at least, was Roger’s interpretation of Derrida until, later in life, he softened his stance in response to my view of the so-called “father of deconstruction” (source: “The Surprising Conservatism of Jacques Derrida,” 2020).

Preservation of “the home” as threatened by the nonsense of a—let’s say, Neo-Gothic fear of colonial inheritance—is, for this dude, peppered with a pure dismissal of those pesky Marxists:

The fact remains, however, that Derrida was not one of the “fashionable frauds” with whom he is often associated. Scruton believed he was a genius, something he confessed in my home in 2010. Both men, as it happens, were arrested, beaten, imprisoned, and expelled from Prague at the height of the communist era. Their crime was daring to address underground seminars for those brave democrats who would eventually emerge from the catacombs to lead their country to liberty. For all their endless talk of the “other,” you can be sure that neither Jacques Lacan nor Slavoj Zizek would not have done likewise. That is because, unlike most of the French Left, Derrida was neither a Marxist radical nor someone who sought to repudiate his own society while simultaneously enjoying its benefits (ibid.).

The publisher, The European Conservative, should be a big fat clue, as should the title of the article: “surprising conservatism”—almost as if it hinges on the particular interpretations of a man who didn’t have as many hard stances as say, Karl Marx! Yet, Daddy Derrida also gifted us with the profoundly anti-conservative (and entirely oikophobic) Spectres of Marx in 1993. Indeed, it provided the groundwork for the likes of Mark Fisher’s hauntology and creative movements like Vaporwave (and later, Laborwave) to flourish. To use a phrase not my own, he was “of the devil’s party and didn’t know it” (more on this in a bit) so it’s up to us to bring his ghost over to our cause. But we first have to be willing to write with ghosts[11], but also dance with them. This includes making fun of them:

(artist: Existential Comics)

In the absence of hard stances—and generally living within the contradictions of a person’s total sum—we have to take what’s useful and leave the rest (Derrida and Foucault took some incredibly iffy takes, which we’ll broach in a moment); the quantifiable value of such a person, then, becomes an act of salvaging their ghost. Derrida may not have been a self-identified Marxist™ like Sartre was (who raped his own students with Beauvoir’s help), and his prose is absolutely fucking dogshit, but out of the perceived “nothingness” of his body of work, I can easily go in and isolate some real winners. The same goes for Foucault, even though—as we shall see—calling him a “Marxist” is a dubious proposition unto itself:

the crux of the matter is that in the social humanities, Foucauldian approaches — which have far, far weaker explanatory power than more materialist approaches like Marxism, and therefore are more often than not nearly inert when it comes to confronting actual concrete power — have fully taken over. This at the expense of not just Marx but the whole broad Marxian tradition that once was the bedrock of social theory and also held a formidable presence in philosophy, literary studies, anthropology, the early stirrings of feminist academics, and other humanisms. There’s a place for Foucault: but his pedigree has, like the suitors in the Odyssey, well overstayed their welcome and gobbled up more than a fair share, considering Foucauldianism’s flawed and downright reactionary implications relative to less discourse-focused and more concrete forms of social and political analysis.

Obviously it benefits the powers behind the academy not to ruffle feathers on class issues the way that Marx and Marxists do. Foucauldian people may speak freely of identity, but their project both has no class analysis and no concrete material demands. It’s always a deferral — the answer is always a deeper dive into the text, forever. Every essay I’ve ever read by Judith Butler[12] — a consummate Foucauldian — ends with some version of “now is the time to begin to begin thinking about theorizing a new conception of…”

Compare this to the threat of student and staff unions and radicalization along lines that actually lose money for the powerful and it’s not hard to see why Foucauldianism is looked upon with much more favor in the humanities than Marxism (source: Elliot Swain’s “Why I Think Foucault Is Basically Entirely Wrong and Bad,” 2021).

We’re not salvaging the reputation of a particular man (or woman, whoever) or their reputation, but their ideas. There’s a difference between the two, even if they seem inextricable at first glance. People who cannot separate the two or think critically about them should be viewed with skepticism.

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

“Embrace chaos,” Zeuhl once said to me. And through the chaos of daily life and the libraries of “books in the wrong section” contributing to the absolute serendipity of chance meetings that eventually leave us talking—if not to ourselves, then with ghosts of past things that continue to shape our lives as giving them structure and meaning long after the originator has flown (a ghost is as much language—i.e., someone’s language and ideas—as it is the person themselves having died and become a reputation; all exist in the present moment as something to converse with, as Prince Hamlet does with his “father’s ghost,” above).

For example, Zeuhl recommended Foucault’s A History of Sexuality: Volume One (1980) to me while we were at MMU, and took great delight in the fact that Foucault once said in a 1993 interview with Edmund White that, “In a sense, all the rest of my life I’ve been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys” (source). Zeuhl also specialized in “twink academia” and introduced me to Dennis Cooper and Gregg Araki. But they also seemed oddly uncritical/apologetic of Foucault as a person. I laughed when they jokingly said to me once, “I ride and die with Foucault,” but the degree to their joke was tested, and utterly thrown into question, by their abhorred and thoroughly dishonest treatment of me later on. Towards the end of our friendship, Zeuhl didn’t bat an eyelash when I showed them the Elliot Swain article and likewise mentioned Foucault’s predatory sex tourism (Bad Empanada 2, 2022) and public, official desire to abolish age of consent laws in France (The Living Philosophy’s “Why French Postmodernists were Pro-Paedophilia in the 1970s,” 2021). All at once, it made their fascination with Cooper and Araki’s “twink[13] exploitation” material seem dubious in hindsight. In fact, when I wasn’t so in love with them (for a variety of reasons—the wonderful [and frequent] sex we had, but also because they were far kinder to me when we were at school together), it became disturbingly easy to spot the flaws I had deceived myself of while we were an item[14] (“love is blind” ‘n all that).

People lie; some people lie in good faith to challenge a state-provided universal truth, but just as many conflate “pure honesty” with “total transparency” insofar as hard political stances can’t somehow be embedded (in good faith) in theatrical forms like allegory and apocalypse; they absolutely can. As a set of widely-agreed-upon lies or performances, the Gothic—when used by good-faith actors—amounts to two keywords from Jameson that I’ll introduce here (which we’ll then unpack in our first essay before the thesis proper): elaborate strategies of misdirection and “archaeologies of the future.” Both are told by liars; i.e., splendide mendax[15] who then use them to reinvent the official histories of the status quo’s past; i.e., in good faith through their own Gothic “archaeologies” that challenge universal “truth” as a dubious proposition, one that—when taken at face value from state proponents by uncritical audiences—can lead to great harm when unquestioned; or, to quote Derrida, not only is there is no transcendental signified[16], but nor is there is any outside of the text[17]!

Canon is more simple in its tack, preserving ghosts and reputations that uphold the status quo. In canonical works, the mimicry of the past is divided along Cartesian thought, according to its profitable binaries. Anything non-heteronormative is alien, “pure darkness” that challenges “pure light”; in truth, canon alienates workers from themselves and from nature inside the material world. Said alienation—of our bodies, labor and ability to self-express according to our sexuality/gender/power, etc—occurs through Capitalism’s profit motive; someone has to kill someone else according to be “correct” or not. Anything that upsets this orderly tension (and its profit for the elite) is gender trouble in ways that cannot be permitted; in short, it instills gender trouble as a kind of chaotic, uncontrollable opposition: iconoclasm through “perceptive,” class-/culture-conscious gender parody. Sex positivity is iconoclasm because it camps canon by default, thus provides us the means to escape the eternal, Promethean nightmare of Capitalism looping in on itself: war is everywhere and in everything; rape is everywhere and in everything. They synonymize inside the profit motive, and their shared ubiquity happens through labor within capital as universally sexualized—all because the profit motive is deliberately built around them as a continuation of history as somehow “ended.” Quite the contrary, it merely becomes replaced with an eternal battle where everything has been sexually dimorphized within the colonial binary. It’s a rigged game, one meant to enrich the elite by exploiting us. Like the fangs of a great vampire, everything suffers to feed their ravenous maws; but it’s presented as “natural,” argued in the essentialized language of good versus evil, darkness and light:

This canonical mimicry has always been constrained by written media as something to disseminate. From the 1980s onwards, however, the spread of all media became easier and easier to ejaculate across what is now the Internet Age. As a result, neoliberal stories like The Legend of Zelda (1987—and its cinematic palimpsest, Legend, 1985) have essentialized the historical-material cycle of a pure good and evil divorced from history (“the end of history,” you might call it). It’s not dialectical-material, merely dialectical, whereupon the past is devoutly imagined in ways that that essentialize Capitalism’s vicious cycle; i.e., cataclysmic arrangements of the imaginary past as something that is simultaneously Malthusian[18], but also paradoxically “as good as it gets.” Manufactured, the stunted plateau becomes a fortress, endlessly threatened by the doomsday myopia of a nominal (queer, non-white) Communism that cannot, must not (according to canon) be challenged by guerilla forces.

As the indoctrinated become hopelessly rigid, they also become the state’s greatest defenders. Waxing nostalgic[19] on their own diminishing conditions while isolating inside their raped minds, they become unable to imagine anything outside of Capitalism; the space beyond its arbitrary boundaries becomes a pure, harmful black filling them with dread (“waves of terror”). They’ll theatrically adopt any mindset or performative role to chase away its terrors, but also destroy them on sight, on- and offstage. In short, they’re bullies, afraid of everything around them. In turn, the cycle of warding off this darkness is sacred, but so are the moral judgements afforded to either side within its operation. Except the cycle isn’t divorced from material conditions at all; the ensuing woes are blamed on “darkness” as Capitalism decays under crisis. As their sense of agency and certitude collapse with the material world around them, workers—but especially the middle class—are left feeling cheated or lied to, and can either blame the system or “backstabber” scapegoats. Whereas Captialism is simply too massive[20] to accurately conceive within theatre, scapegoats are historically far easier to blame because you can shoot, stab or otherwise kill them; such theatre implies the solution is a simple, straightforward one: a dragon to slay instead of a hydra. Point out the decay behind the illusion and they’ll simply shoot the messenger/rape the oracle. Worse, they’ll do it as an act of faith in a system built to deceive them.

Doing so is the “tried-and-true” “wisdom” of the Roman fool, falling on their own sword while Rome burns not once, but over and over. Such “wisdom” is not wise, but a false power, which Gothic Communism seeks to reclaim through our own doubling of the imaginary past—its monsters, castles and battles—as a kind of “living document” that can reclaim the Gothic imagination, thus our ability to think; i.e., through lost forms of knowledge retailored for the complexities of the modern world—its warring mentalities, sexualities/genders, monsters (codified beliefs and actions) and praxis during class and culture war critiquing capital. As you can’t critique capital without camping its monsters, once more unto the breach, dear friends!

(artist: Drew Struzan; source: Justin Norton’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: The Story Behind The Artwork,” 2016)

First off, there’s nothing critically “redundant” about the Gothic in its more dated-looking forms (see Fred Botting’s very dumb arguments about so-called “Gothic redundancy” on exhibit 1a1a1h2a3); ignoring the paradox of the retro-future’s own hopelessly outdated anachronisms, the wizard, knight, demon or damsel, etc, well as their various stages of performance: their castles, spaceships, graveyards, cathedrals, laboratories of mad science, and other cultural sites of phobias, stigmas and urban legends; i.e., haunts[21] that can all yield creative successes (of proletarian praxis) through dialectical-material roles as determined by function (the aesthetics is just the allure and appeal of power/playing with dead things); in short, they can all be gay as fuck if done in good faith, thus sex-positive/iconoclastic by camping canon with seemingly wizardly power (versus the canonical orc or Drow as a middle-class version of false rebellion or slumming through fantastical “blackface[22]“). Indeed, the foxy flexibility of guerrilla war (emblematized by the fox, but also as thoroughly sexy in how we resist capital in animalized forms—more on that in a bit) isn’t mutually exclusive, as Capitalist Realism teaches the faithful (rewarding these Crusaders with damaging illusions and prophesies of a glorious afterlife). Instead, the guerilla can challenge the seemingly all-powerful, proving just how fragile the power of the elite is: their mighty fortress is a sandcastle, a house of cards. The globalization of capital—thus war and rape and their widespread sublimation in fantastical, “opiate” forms—cannot function unless the icon remains intact. We’re going to break it, proving an enemy only has images behind which he hides his true motives. Break that and you expose the man behind the curtain not just as a humbug but a terrible, bloodsucking monster devoid of any empathy and obsessed with profit.

As guerillas throughout history have proved, doing so is not a zero-sum game. We can fight back, exposing and releasing the tremendous pressure capital puts all of us under every waking moment: “perform better and faster and stronger”; or worse, “Grow up[23]!” Simply put, all monsters are instructional in terms of how to act and behave during times of war and peace as forever in crisis under Capitalism; i.e., canonical crises of culture, but also of sexuality and gender as endlessly imperiled by an outside-inside force, the scapegoat for Capitalism’s hidden function: exploitation and oscillating cycles of failure that grind workers to paste (the gears of war). This canonical “blame game” becomes myopic, directing workers to kill the Monster threatening the Kingdom from all angles and dimensions—the vague, shapeless thing trying to separate human biology (sex, skin color) and gender within the colonial binary (the essence of gender trouble and gender parody but also mass-exploitation tied to the profit motive). Like Plato’s allegory of the cave (c. 380 BC), state proponents from inside the Man Box[24] attack class/culture warriors (attacking the status quo from outside the same box/cave) instead of the system, whereupon the ensuing dreams and nightmares of canon uniformly become an invented lullaby whose tragedy and farce—and utter blindsiding by convenient adversity and set, doomed roles—are all “part of the plan”: retreat inward, into childhood as an execution of state maxims that lead to profit. “Become the destroyer the world ‘needs.'”

In other words, canon (thus Capitalism) is full of ritual sacrifice with a Christianized flavor (crucifixion) or Westernized abuse of paganized forms whose divine right revives the glory of recuperated Roman aesthetics (the Nazi as quasi-pagan); e.g., the sacrificial rooster or lamb, the virgin or scapegoat, as something to bleed out for significance and good fortune, but also stalled demise for the holder of the knife: the Christ-like Herculean warrior as babyface or heel to sacrifice when the state’s crises enter decay while firing up production, which in turn requires more and more sacrifice the hotter the furnace gets. Engorged, the elite need ever more blood to satisfy their hunger as the ultimate parasite, thus demand of their loyal followers, “Defend our land; defend your land from the infidels” (which curiously the elite stole the land from, to begin with). As Hilter put it, “What is life? Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway. Beyond the life of the individual is the nation.” But Hilter’s Nazis were merely radicalized, accelerated variants of their American capitalists cousins’ own bastardizing of settler colonialism[25] from the British, whose New England counterfeit/colony expanded used the same imperial model to make their own genocidal apologia (the myth of the West’s exclusive sovereignty and ownership as forged from the start and ever since; i.e., a fakery of a fakery[26] all the way down: England, “land of the Angles,” reestablished through old feuds fought out in mercenary violence revived under Neoliberal hegemony centuries later). Within this paradigm, everyone’s on the chopping block (except the elite, of course). Gothic Communism aims to camp canon through the sacrifice ritual, lampooning the killer’s false power when sitting on the same chopping block as them (Christ on a cross); it accomplishes this through a fake “sacrifice,” one whose gender trouble puts the warlike ritual of “rape” or “murder” in quotes. Doing so causes the so-called “kings” of capital to collectively lose their minds, outing them and, by extension, the elite and their machinations (which leads to class consciousness).

Canon is classically framed as immutable, eternal—literally “outside of time”—but it isn’t. It can be altered, changing history through the wider interpretation and genesis of popular legends, but also the material conditions that respond to them and vice versa (the Base and the Superstructure). Capital historically-materially alienates owners from workers and workers from each other and themselves through Cartesian dualism (with owners being collectively afraid of the poor and siding with “their own kind” as the persons they are born growing up with; i.e., other rich people they identify with and see as friends): an entire system of thought as built around the essential binding of sex and gender to each other and human biology (skin color and sex organs), which is coded to have various “correct” qualities (such as “Christian” or “cis-het”) when utilized in the “correct” fashion: towards the profit motive. There is an ostensible “other” who is murdered instead of the state defender killing them, but in truth, the soldier is completely expendable. Everything sits within a cycle of imaginary history that plays out through an endless, genocidal mirroring that must, if it is to cease, be met with mirrors:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

These particular mirrors (and their reflections’ visions) become a way of seeing the world that isn’t Promethean; i.e., they upend the infamous hubris of the Patriarchy without joining canon’s process of abjection:

When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not—as commonly thought—put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her shield with the Medusa’s head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa’s own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena’s aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend—the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa (source: Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993).

In short, Gothic Communism goes further than Julia Kristeva or Barbara Creed. Our “Medusa” doesn’t play into the elite’s scheme of weaponized trauma; i.e, the TERF surrendering her neck and, once beheaded, staring blindly and furiously at the underclass (dressed up to shock the formerly abused with a disingenuous threat of rape, of the shame of unwanted pregnancies projected onto a racialized, genderqueer “other”: the man-in-a-dress, or their murderous, womb-like haunt). Nor does she segregate and “play ball” through compelled modesty/invisibility and tokenism of various doubled kinds.

Instead, our complicated monster heroine uses dialectical-material scrutiny to parse which is which, combining the awesome power of her reclaimed body and its labor to actively petrify the profit motive while blending in with it (e.g., Morry Evans’ lovely gender-bending of the knightly romance[27]). In doing so, she utilizes the bizarre, recycled conventions (anyone who says, “truth is stranger than fiction” has never read a Gothic novel before) to actively encourage/incite degrowth—i.e., a so-called “Jewish revenge” against fascism and the state by borking its profit motive, in this life or the next: through a sex-positive counterterrorism that exposes the state’s usual terror weapons and fictions (a concept we will touch on in the “camp map” when we examine Joseph Crawford’s “invented terrorism” versus Robert Asprey’s counterterrorism historically used by labor). All the while, our Medusa has some semblance of safety because she will be viewed as human behind the looking glass (which serves as a buffer between her and the audience), being seen as something her would-be-killers will not sacrifice because they love her. If slowly taught “good play” in a sex-positive sense, they will not chase her at all; they will embody her by seeing themselves in her—a shared humanity that, like Milton’s “Narcissistic Eve,” happily ignores God’s will. While Capitalism’s universal alienation makes people tremendously lonely and sexually frustrated, this loneliness can be reversed in ways that don’t put all the pressure on sex workers or sexualized workers acting in a Pavlovian sense; instead, we become a social species again, working together to enrich our understanding of the world as we move away from a horribly archaic and medieval system. This includes its gross devastation of the world, nature, and the human condition through rape and war inside the profit motive as synonymous with themselves and with us when we obey like menticided[28] fools. We have to shield our minds, our bodies, our labor as demonic forms of expression that paradoxically must expose themselves enough to communicate the message.

Per Arthur C. Clarke, sufficiently advanced technologies are indistinguishable from magic; per Mary Shelley, they become suitably useful allegories for the titanic forces around us, whose structures are mythologically baked into our lives as besieged by god-like forces. In trying to reclaim our power like Prometheus, we are chained and tortured without end; but we are already chained and tortured before the gods “lay eyes on us” (that is to say, actively—they are always passively watching through state surveillance apparatuses, and active surveillance is generally leveled at the underclass and/or known enemies-of-the-state). “Gods,” in this sense, are less personifications of various emotions and more the caprices of actual persons of a particular class that did not exist in Plato’s day. Instead, the ancient canonical codes and positions of power offered up sodomy as something the elite could do as they wished and condemn everyone else to not: through actions that—vis-à-vis Foucault’s A History of Sexuality, Volume One—eventually became identities associated with the rise of the bourgeoisie. But the same hubris and double standards were present inside a commodified heteronormativity that had started to expand and dominate the Earth. As this expansion has continued, the atrocities of the elite have continued under their cloak of darkness, the “fog of war” perpetuated through a fear of the outside associated with the state’s usual enemies: the underclass.

The elite certainly act like gods and have such powers the Ancient Greeks would have described as god-like: bombing salvos (death from the skies) like Zeus’ thunderbolts, nuclear weaponry like God’s judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah, and giant vehicles that pull them across the sky like Apollo’s chariot. But they aren’t gods; they’re men, thus fallible to the tremendous alienating mechanisms Capitalism has given—if not birth to, then certainly rise to in grander and grander forms. The greater the mechanisms, the greater the hubris, but also the inability to feel anything except when hording more and more stolen essence from everyone else; eventually these kings age and go mad, then—like Saturn the titan—devour their son/”sons” before poisoning the land or setting it on fire[29] (“They say this land was green and soft once; but the moment Haggard touched it, it became hard and grey!”). Obviously the metaphors mix, with the madness of the geriatric human body being expressed through aging billionaires; yet, the madness of the king is also a mentality that has nothing to do with extreme age, but rather a curse of entitled owners (and subordinate workers) being driven to premature madness by the ideology of a brutal, sadistic system: an internalized fear of the monster that compounds until one’s offshoots go mad before their time, infantilized like children afraid of the dark… and equipped with the means to “silence” it during the apocalypse[30] (revelation) of the dead walking the Earth.

The ensuing chaos is the paradox of efficient profit: the state eating itself as the ouroboros does its tail, caught between an endless police state of regeneration and cannibalization (desk murder). And all the while, the terrifying power of the gods is less a metaphor and more a description of actual events: the battle of the gods, of angels and demons, that leads to the ignominious fall of Icarus into the sea, but also the Promethean, planet-sized fireball of Capitalism’s crucible spilling over when it flies out of the elite’s control. Like the demon core[31], they want it as close as possible to release radiation, but not critical mass—except the drive for profit has pushed them and all of us to the brink of extinction more than once (GDF’s “There Was No ‘Cold’ War,” “NATO Is Risking Nuclear War for Money,” and “No, We Didn’t Need to Nuke Japan,” 2023).

Inside this larger tug-o’-war sits our Satan or Prometheus, trying to take back some of this power for ourselves. All must be done whilst being aware of the bourgeois regression through canonical reverence for state power and decayed superstition towards state enemies: as unironic demons from hell. For us, godly language is “the enemy of Reason, but there is something enticing about its form” as a paradoxical means of empowerment by rejecting Cartesian thought (exhibit 51a). Unlike Mako from Conan the Barbarian (1981) cowering before the fearsome gods of a blasted ruin, we can play with the same language in ways that perform class-conscious theatre: It’s less “the spirits of this place exact a heavy toll” or “The wizard! I told him would pay the gods!” and more the conjuring of demons of Communism as the revenge of Capitalism’s innumerable megadeaths: not “of getting even” as Ward Churchill notes in “‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” (2005)

The problem is that vengeance is usually framed in terms of “getting even,” a concept which is plainly inapplicable in this instance. As the above data indicate, it would require another 49,996 detonations killing 495,000 more Americans, for the “terrorists” to “break even” for the bombing of Baghdad/extermination of Iraqi children alone. And that’s to achieve “real number” parity. To attain an actual proportional parity of damage – the US is about 15 times as large as Iraq in terms of population, even more in terms of territory – they would, at a minimum, have to blow up about 300,000 more buildings and kill something on the order of 7.5 million people (source).

but a Jewish revenge of all those poor souls manifesting in workers who—suitably possessed by the spirit of wiser Ancients—will not bend the knee or do the will of the gods of capital anymore. In our current age, the state is utterly reliant on labor to function, but also the illusion that they aren’t monsters (e.g., They Live, 1988; exhibit 0a2b1b2); and while military urbanism and stochastic terrorism always pose an issue, they aren’t things that can happen at a mass scale until they’re normalized, which requires a great deal of theatre.

In other words, Capitalism cannot function if workers won’t kill each other in the state’s name (whose brutal, stupid[32] vengeance knows no bounds: the arms race of more murder, more death, more prisons, more witch hunts, more genocide not in spite of state laws but because of them). This refusal to destroy ourselves isn’t Freud’s “monsters from the Id”; it’s called labor action and it requires solidarity to work in opposition to the state’s coded instructions (often videogames, which are literally built around worker genocide; i.e., the exploitation of the Global South by the Global North through the greedy rhetoric of infinite growth according to state-sanctioned [thus hyperbolic] revenge that’s “too far gone” to stop, but also has become naturalized through a centrist order of things, vis-à-vis Tolkien). Theatrical expression and monstrous poetics obviously play a tremendous role in cultivating solidarity as being the usual targets of state abuse: according to them, we’re the terrorists, thus deserving of eternal punishment. The paradox is, escape is generally achieved through the same performances as camped.

(artist: Henri Fuseli)

So, while the basic-yet-giant, god-like tensions built into Capitalism (and its neoliberal copaganda through videogames’ recursive avatars of war) can be explained incredibly quickly through prescribed monsters “self-reporting” the larger scheme, their Promethean torture loop can also be subverted, thus undone by applying Gothic theory (thus mythical monsters in warlike language; e.g., Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus,” aka Frankenstein) to Marx’s ideas: fight terror with “terror” through Robert B. Asprey’s paradox of terror[33]. Becoming a kind of “Athena’s Aegis,” the one-two combo of our black mirror turns the heteronormative attacker’s aggression back towards their own monstrous sense of self[34] in the same terror language they use; i.e., the reversal of the process of abjection as ordinarily prescribed by famous legends; e.g., The Legend of Zelda: “Will Link still rescue the damsel if he’s gay?” (the franchise remains one of my favorite stages to camp because it frankly offers so much genderqueer potential for doing so: Link’s not just canon’s twink-ish warrior of light; he’s simultaneously the “power bottom” wrestling against Capitalism, Amazon bait, and a damsel-warrior given pause by his own double, the “twink-in-black” as a thoroughly non-binarized double of the woman-in-black: Dark Link, exhibit 1a1a1a1_a). Doing so is automatically campy because frankly the camped dialog of warlike negotiation over fairly mundane things (sex and the division of labor) in medievalized monstrous/dungeon-themed language sounds funny as hell: a) it camps “correct,” unintelligent discussions of these matters, and b) it camps Marx in the bargain because it occurs in Marxist academic language that sounds funny in this particular context; i.e., Monty Python’s “Constitutional Peasants” (1969) skit remade by us not just in Zelda, but any manner of dialogic imagination; e.g., Frankenstein‘s autonomous, zombie robota, of course, but also this far more recent gem:

(source tweet: Sidhe-Her, 2023)

A common facet of Communism is polyamory and open communication vs serial monogamy (and abuse) through heteronormative, but also amatonormative stories that prioritize marriage between one cis-het man and wife; i.e., the colonial binary as centralized within canonical narratives about love. It’s obviously important and holistic to discuss other things besides sex, of course, but sex and labor coincide and intersect with socio-economic factors, and our emphasis on Marxist analysis focuses on sex work’s demonization under Capitalism according to these matters as heteronormatively constrained. Our focus is sex work; we will talk about labor and theatricality more broadly but generally inside the Gothic mode of expression, which tends to have a sexual element to it (e.g., sin, vice, passion, desire, rape, torture, etc). Camp is generally sexual, because sex as an element of propriety is constrained to the bedroom (again, vis-à-vis Foucault’s A History of Sexuality, Volume One). To camp canon, for Gothic Communists, is to bring sex back into the public sphere in a sex-positive sense; i.e., by humanizing the monsters who have cropped up there in a sex-coercive way. Those bad counterfeits are reclaimed through what people consume as fed to them: through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, and our art and labor as alienated from us and fed back to us in harmful, cheaply-made forms (from factories). Their reclamation starts with poiesis as made/cooked up by us, not the elite and their recuperated proponents’ profit motive; i.e., the bourgeois pimping of workers out as unironic sex demons and zombies treated like bad junk food/fruit from the poisoned tree.

The poetic moral, here is learn to cook, yourself, because you are what you eat, and the elite want you remove that ever-important comma—i.e., to cook and eat yourselves following their bad recipes (and grammar). To acquire new ones, you must learn to swim in the darkness of oppositional praxis’ shadows on the wall (more on that in the thesis proper, specifically the subdivision, “Into the Shadow Zone”) and give birth to your own monsters; i.e., as someone who is undead and demonic enough (in a sex-positive sense) to reproduce in this way. While miscarriages and unwanted, illegitimate or terminated pregnancies are a deep, painful and secret source of shame for AFAB persons (thus hidden from judgmental parties; e.g., Abigail, from King Diamond’s 1987 album of the same name), the fact remains that lived trauma and power abuse (rape) isn’t just the domain of AFAB cis-het women; the poetic license of the hideous progeny takes shape in many different secret shames and guilty pleasures that we can rebirth through our own special expressions. The axes of oppression overlap through biological sex, race, class and gender expression for us to convey through these unique births; i.e., the figurative kind produced in art isn’t something to hide but comment on what is normally hidden/unspeakable. In turn, this zombie’s demonic pregnancy takes a reclaimed diet of artistic expression with which to give birth to new Communist monsters and contribute to the grander prandial-praxial cycle (“prandial” meaning “during or relating to the eating of food”): a pregnant mother will eat just about anything but gets cravings. To rebirth a wise Wisdom of the imaginary past, our diets need to be paradoxically “picky.”

In terms of cooking for ourselves, we’re obviously talking about (and committed to) Gothic poetics at large. But food-as-metaphor and -commodity often overlap in the grander market of power exchange within monstrous poiesis and theatre; e.g., the monster as a metaphor for hunger regarding sex and vice, but also Halloween candy or cookies (for kids) whose “cake” (for adults) is a lie that serves elite aims. Ginger’s pork chop (below) is actual food that represents a challenge to the food deserts of the world, seizing the means of production through food production as artistic self-expression that likewise fills their belly with yum-yums: a delicious reunion with their labor as reclaimed from a former state of alienation.

But “yuck” and “yum” obviously pertain to human appetites and appetite as thoroughly medieval; i.e., pinned between ongoing debates about restraint and excess as “the wages of sin,” told through modern-day Sales of Indulgence, albeit through a Protestant work ethic that canonically attacks Gothic poetics: as monsters/food through undead/demonic metaphors. Their feeding and magical knowledge and transformation amounts to forbidden fruit with animalized, stigmatic flavors and cosmetics; e.g., the vampire drinking “sanguine” as essence tangled up in all manner of connotations and statements for or against the status quo: “Eat of my flesh, drink of my blood and live forever.” Also known as transubstantiation, this can be applied to reactionary rhetoric/moral panics that stigmatize Jewish people (and other minorities) through revived instances of blood libel and quantum, but also simply food as literally the stuff we eat and media as the stuff we consume that contains representations of food/food-like monsters and their respective preparing and presenting to us; e.g., Ruben’s infamously obsessive depictions of flesh as “food,” the main attraction that might have been sexual:

Rubens was obsessed by flesh; young flesh, old flesh, men’s flesh, women’s flesh, dead flesh, damaged flesh, the flesh of children and angels and saints. His paintings are packed with the stuff. […] This was Rubens’ genius. He got in among our basic desires and our raw physicality and he gave them form. In this specific case it is flesh and sexual desire, but this preponderance of flesh in Ruben’s art wasn’t always erotic. More often than not the flesh was just there, distended and bloated or stripped or lean. We can see the blood coursing through it, we can see its folds and its scars. The painting of the “The Last Judgement in the Alte Pinakothek” is surrounded by other paintings by Rubens full of jowly fat men with distended paunches, muscular naked warriors, fat babies suckling on bloated breasts, sinewy saints, twisted martyrs and dozens and dozens of plump women with big bums (source: Ian Walker’s “Sex, Violence and Big Bums: Rubens and the Birth of Modern Europe,” 2017).

but of course many, many others besides. The depiction of such things has become complicated by modernized, Enlightenment carryovers onto the global stage. For example, the white body but especially the white female body would become a storing ground of shame, rage, hunger and non-white appetites (exhibit 1a1a1e1b): fat-shaming mixed with slut-shaming and various other intersections of self-hatred imposed by dogmatic forces equating fatness with sin, the devil, and non-white culture, but also rebellion (“fat and sassy”). The best way to deal with dogma is to return to a pre-Enlightenment, Rubenesque updated for a post-Capitalist world that doesn’t commodify the struggle of these persons to serve the profit motive—i.e., through all the usual bigotries and stigmas—but rather celebrates their humanity and bravery while framing their larger/alternative body types as a positive thing to love and accept amid changing material conditions.

The poetic idea is a queer nostalgia that undermines canonical forms of said nostalgia; i.e., a hauntology that becomes flexible, inclusive and linguistically fluent in modern struggles and terminologies that didn’t quite exist during the Renaissance period. There was always a queer presence, but it was associated with actions, not identities within society and its cultural markers. If society and language are rigid, then words and symbols can mean only one thing. Worse, singular interpretation becomes associated with shame and control, which will never change because they are policed. We’re not shooting for fat positivity and acceptance as a personal option/opinion, but a basic human right whose larger societal mechanism—fat liberation*—happens through the language and legends associated with said bodies; i.e., just like with other slurs such as “faggot” or the n-word, the word “fat” becomes something to reclaim through monstrous poetics: faeries and demons, but also their succulent physiques pegged as “wild” through the ghost of the counterfeit. Canon frames these bodies as repulsive and magnetic, which means any iconoclastic act reclaiming them must reverse the process of abjection through the same bodies and language as gorgeous, voluptuous and loveable. This holistic package deal utilizes the human body tied to persons who identify a particular way through their body as an extension of their entire selves—their gender, orientation, and performance, etc—as prone to legendary hyperbole with a sex-positive inclination: the goddess of the harvest, the fairy queen Maeb, Easter and so on. It becomes not something to eat, but a fleshy conduit to exchange various things; e.g., essence, materials and knowledge; fertile minds, spirits and appetites.

*I.e., versus the state, doctors and fatphobia. See: Angry T‘s A.T.A.C.K. (“Angry Trannies* Against Cops and Kings”) series (on Google Drive), which Sinead recommended to me: ADAB (“All Doctors Are BAD”/cops) from Issue 9 Feb 24, and “It is Not Enough to Love Yourself” (on fatphobia) from Issue 4 Sep 23. —Perse 3/15/2025

(artist: Sinead Rhiannon)

Under Gothic Communism, sex positivity is body positivity and body positivity includes fat bodies expressed in Gothic language to consciously liberate us by reclaiming the Base and recultivating the Superstructure. Fat bodies aren’t inherently bad; what is bad is universally pathologizing/fetishizing their image in popular media while prescribing all the usual canonical, heteronormative standards that lead to eating and mood disorders inside a capitalistic model; e.g., skinny female bodies, but also hypermuscular male bodies pumped full of drugs. The double standard with male bodybuilders is how they aren’t seen as medically obese because they are “successful” personalities that make money for big companies (and sell their supplements and drugs); heavier women/gender-non-conforming AFAB persons are seen as products first, people second, and generally are judged far more for their physical appearance even when said appearance is actually healthy. As Mainely Mandy points out in “Good Fatty vrs Bad Fatty” (2021), BMI is an antiquated, racist concept, one that leaves the owners of (often female) fat bodies feeling trapped between how they are actually viewed and commodified versus how they want to be seen and treated—i.e., minus the stigmas while being accepted and loved for who they really are. Often, as we shall see and explore throughout the book, these feelings of self-love and self-shame intersect between various groups of marginalized peoples with various European/”Vitruvian” body expectations foisted onto them: black men with BBCs/muscular bodies (exhibit 10b2), or white women with “modest,” slender bodies versus heavier pornographic bodies that denote an “immodest” type of commodity associated with sin and vice as things to indulge in; i.e., a deal with the devil to achieve forbidden pleasure sold back to us post-theft (exhibits 32a, b; v1) which can be reclaimed through subversive and informed labor exchanges (exhibits 32c, d; v1)

(exhibit 0a1a: Artist: top-mid-left: Juan de Juanes; top-right and bottom-right: Jeremy Anninos; bottom-mid-right: Draculasswife; bottom-mid-left: Nat the Lich; bottom-left: source. It’s human to eat, to fuck, to feed; or [in the Humanist tradition] to poetically compare and contrast unlike things that serve a similar purpose: the body as a canvas, relayed through the medieval idea of miracles; e.g., crying statues weeping blood—i.e., the woman as a sex object whose animation and fleshiness can be conveyed in deliberately outmoded ways to touch upon present stereotypes and structures that haven’t voided themselves of canonical, harmful versions of these [often silly] superstitions; e.g., the “Carmilla” vampire lady trying to drink the blood out of Jim Carrey’s penis in Once Bitten [1985] to steal his “essence” [cougar sodomy]. Tied to capital, unironic forms appear as “sustainable,” meaning lawful and sanctioned to varying degrees towards commodified sin, vice, and appetite, with a middle-class fear-fascination towards these variables. All must be liberated from the shackles of capital as having pilfered the medieval vault of its plentiful nutrients; reclaim your monstrous “meat,” “cake” and “fruit” [quotes optional] to feed each other through your labor as yours, not the elite’s. Despite the AAA stamp of the Second Gilded Age’s return of the mysteries [a medieval name for trade guilds], they want us to blindly “wolf down” their garbage as cheap, low-grade dog food/slave drivel. Defecated by them onto our plates, we’re eating the bourgeoisie’s already digested food, also known as shit. It tastes like imitative honey but its cheap and fast, robbed of its nutrients.)

That concludes the concept of “giving birth” and the Wisdom of the Ancient’s Communist Renaissance (rebirth). Onto the afterbirth: reflection on what came out of me and that which I helped raise to maturity.

Clearly the book has changed much over time. When I started writing Sex Positivity in 2022, I was mainly wrestling with the idea of illustrating mutual consent and combating/exposing TERFs while also working on my PhD/postgraduate work (on Metroidvania[35]—”Mazes and Labyrinths: Disempowerment in Metroidvania and Survival Horror” [2021]—which I still wanted to complete but now have absorbed into this book*). Eventually I called it “Gothic Communism” and wrote my manifesto[36], but that was certainly not the first step (this work having been the combination of my postgraduate research, having been in school for years and researching independently for years after I left).

*Which has now been expanded on, in my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus/extended Metroidvania research. —Perse, 3/14/2025

At our current juncture, my original blogpost has become a Ship of Theseus, where nothing from the original published material is contained within; furthermore, what was just the manifesto and the book became the manifesto and Humanities primer as one volume and the rest of the book a second volume, until suddenly I made the Humanities primer its own volume, resulting in three volumes (the third of which I wrote first)! As such, I wrote the preface and signposted while sharpening my ideas about Gothic Communism, then decided that I needed to write a foreword that talked about things more generally. “Gothic Communism” became “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism” and I designed its logo. As the publishing date neared, I decided to make the foreword my thesis statement/symposium and the preface my basic reasoning as to why I went with a Gothic variant of anarcho-Communism (as opposed to Marxist-Leninism, for example)—all while signposting throughout the book and rewriting the abstract, and so on and so on for the reader’s convenience (and my own satisfaction). As I am a being of chaos, thus acclimated to holistic study as a chaotic process, this occurred through a process of fractal expansion as guided by a former academic’s desire to “please master”/neurodivergent desire to make a good first impression: little idea, big idea; small book, gargantuan book; thesis sentence, paragraph, statement, symposium, preface, manifesto, other volumes, etc.

For the entire changelog this summary is describing, refer to my website’s 1-page promo for the book. —Perse

In other words, as the publishing date neared, I found myself increasingly haunted by the ghosts of my teachers. I reached out to them to share my work, but suddenly felt a burning desire to write a thesis statement they would approve of, but also that I would in relation to them. My desire to please myself is inextricable from pleasing the ghosts of my academic pedagogues. I knew they would expect it, but also thought it was vital because the vast majority of my arguments could be hammered into something piercing and sharp to then embark on a more leisurely and scenic quest after the trial by fire. I wanted the reader to be as well-equipped as possible when grappling with my complex and myriad arguments. So I went about it, forging for them a healthy “dagger of the mind” as a monster mother would: by giving birth to Sex Positivity’s thesis statement in a Gothic, intersex manner—i.e., by playing out the messy birth/with the afterbirth and ejaculating it as a roiling parthenogenesis of mixed and mixing metaphors (all in the spirit of fun, of course).

(artist: Miss Upacey)

Like a witch’s cauldron, this dark and soupy creative process emerged from having written most of my book from top to bottom, over and over already (about 500,000 words [now nearly two million, after four volumes]). The entire time, its “labor” back then wasn’t something for which I was fully in control, but identified with when I had written my master’s thesis[37] five years prior while burning the midnight oil night after night at MMU’s student library while watching the magpies dance in the trees through the window next to the computer loaned out to me (and thinking of Mary Shelley’s dark progeny when she had “birthed” Frankenstein); and (then and now) with Emily Brontë making Heathcliff:

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master — something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame. […]

Wuthering Heights [1847] was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur — power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labour, the crag took human shape; and there it stands colossal, dark, and frowning, half statue, half rock: in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter, almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant’s foot [source: Nava Atlas’ “Charlotte Brontë is Preface to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” 2014].

The book, then, has been a series of “births” dragging the hellish child up from the depths of my own making and design (my own infernal concentric pattern, perhaps; i.e., the repeated plunging into the abyss while stuck inside it: mise-en-abyme). After the majority was written, I desired to summarize everything as pithily as I could into our aforementioned thesis statement. I didn’t have to; I wanted to, treating it as an educational device according to how I had been taught. Through the benefits of a classical and campy education, I once again “fell pregnant,” this time by myself with myself, but also with Bay who—like a slutty incubus from afar—had filled my slutty cum dumpster long distance. Now “full” of the dark swirling material as having been written and refined many times (many creampies), from toe to top full of these joined ideas, theories and plans, I had to give birth once more and set about it. While unsteadily “pregnant” with this saturated material, I pulled and manifested the entirety out of myself as a comprehensive stab at mapping and summarizing everything that I (once again) had to organize and refine over and over. I clearly want to document the process to you, the reader—to grant you an exhibitionist’s idea of what it was like for me, a trans woman, to create as I have been taught and how I view it. Work isn’t fun unless it’s playful, I think; it should be fun, regardless of its importance (and this work—helping myself and other sex workers escape harmful bondage—I consider to be of the utmost importance).

(artist: Gerard Pietersz van Zyl)

As Galatea resisting Pygmalion by shyly but with great determination making her own work in the gloom, my own statue was born out of the darkness as threatening to take shape, then continuing to grow and develop into something more fully realized after it exited my body. First born, the thesis statement grew as I slathered more material onto it. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, I had done this many times and took joy in its hideous, beautiful monstrosity:

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful (source).

I was a monster mother making a smaller copy of the original monster she proudly gave birth to from older copies from other mothers and loving it just as much the umpteenth time around (maybe I’m a glutton for punishment; i.e., the grad student’s paradoxical flagellation).

To put dates and numbers on it (as of 9/10/2023), by the 31st of August, this saturation point exploded, my thesis statement going from ~5,000 words to another 20,000 on top of that in the next six days followed by another two days’ worth of (currently uncalculated) prose and exhibits produced in two ten-hour periods (followed by me writing all of this down today, and writing the “Notes on Power” section, too) and even more writing* after that. As such, the thesis statement’s initial draft was supplied more keywords, and given the manifesto terms towards the end, laid out like bricks then ending in a “tree” of the manifesto as a whole route and structure for which oppositional praxis is run (the engine to supply our “fuel” inside), and the “camp map” as a small exhibit of its praxial execution. Then, I expanded the “camp map” into its own section, moved the manifesto tree to the start of the thesis to plot out the individual manifesto terms I had laid out already and explained in my thesis statement, and then refined that. From there, I decided to reorganize the thesis statement as its own “mini” volume that precedes the other three, which freed me up to expand my comprehensive argument in ways that felt adequate, holistic and well-paced; i.e., my little vampire’s lips blushed blood red. I took my four main Gothic theories (the Four Gs) out of my manifesto proper and placed them before my thesis statement as a “Gordian Knot”; i.e., central to everything I’m talking about in regards to monsters, but a “tough nut to crack” and one that I would take the entire book doing so (not just the thesis statement). After this, I added even more definitions from the companion glossary into the thesis statement (such as “monopoly of violence” and “state of exception”) until I had included all of the keywords and Gothic terms in the thesis statement, “camp map,” and symposium when discussing how to camp the canon. Then I wrote “the notes on power” section. As I did all of this, I signposted throughout the rest of my book, referring back to my thesis statement, and I added more exhibits (and more after that).

*As of 9/13/2023 (six years to the day I arrived in England to study at MMU), the thesis volume’s renovations (not including the symposium, which was mostly written at this point; nor the disclaimer, “What I Will and Won’t Exhibit,” which is new but not restricted to the thesis volume) now clock in at 74,445 words. That is, from 8/31 to 9/6 to 9/13, my thesis statement went from ~5,000 words to ~25,000 to ~75,000, or nearly an additional 70,000 (and 102 images, ~40 of which are full-fledged exhibits) in two weeks. It feels superhuman, but also—fittingly—like a Gothic dream, one I wrote while awake but possessed; i.e., not by drugs, but my own education and labor has having taken hold in a comfortable pattern, day after day. The contractions.

Comfortable or not, I wrote like an absolute demon, animal, werewolf and frankly am in complete awe of the massive, Godzilla-sized crater left in my own wake: “Did I do that?” And there’s still more work to be done! No rest for the wicked, I guess.

  • As of 9/22/2023 (the beginning of my final proofread, which will continue until the end of the month): the thesis volume wordcount (not including the first disclaimer, title page, abstract, symposium and glossary) is ~112k words, and 165[38]
  • As of 10/4/2023, the proofread is mostly done, totaling ~177k words and 226 images. I had to write several sections to fit the glossary back into the book (to be able to use the heading system to link to keywords I didn’t have time to define); I also would finalize and add in fun bits as I went—e.g., roasting Ann Radcliffe in a hypomanic fit.
  • as of 10/8/2023, the final proofread is completely finished, as are the last of the last-minute changes. The final thesis volume wordcount (again, not including the first disclaimer, title page, abstract, symposium and glossary) totals ~191k words and 250 images.

All the same, my ability to do this isn’t supernatural; I didn’t sell my soul to the devil, but was raised on good foundations that come from tremendous privilege as a white, AMAB trans person. That is, I live in a situation where I can take my time, enjoy a stable life, and throw whatever I wish into the crucible: movies, novels, and videogames, etc. In medieval terms, I may as well be living in Merlin’s tower. But that’s still true now as much as it was, back then; I live in the Global North, and from where I am in a room of one’s own, the Global South may as well be the Stone Age (courtesy of American bombing runs). I want this to change using the privilege that Capitalism gave me to write and illustrate this book as my contribution to the struggle.

Like Ariadne’s thread woven from my spinner (as a Gothic spinster), the abacus of my fractal-recursive calculus oscillated. Following its attenuation (and at a point when I think the creation of this final thesis volume has mostly run its course), my book now has a fully-formed thesis volume that is organized like the other three volumes are; it is comprehensive, detailed and educational to the best degree that I can provide regarding the entirety of Sex Positivity. It may seem dense at first glance and that is a fair criticism, but is meant to include every keyword, map and argument in their logical order as something to unfurl and explain once, then again at a much slower and lengthier pace throughout the rest of the book: Volumes One, Two and Three (if I gloss over a topic in this volume, rest assured another volume will cover it in far greater detail).

(model and artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In the past, I have tried to write many books[39], and have had many creative projects I poured energy and effort into (see exhibit 0a1b1, on page 118); but my magnum opus is something I couldn’t have written ten years ago, or even five. Sex Positivity‘s thesis volume is easily the hardest thing I’ve ever written but also something I’m proud of in relation to the giants whose shoulders I stood on—both my Karate Kid (1984) moment when I show Mr. Miyagi “wax on, wax off!” and one where I include all of my friends in on and the moment. On the academic side of things, Linnie Blake—when asked—once told me that I wrote like an angel, and Christine Neufeld made note of my “weird sexual metaphors” nearly ten years ago when writing about Frankenstein (“Frankenstein essay—Born to Fall? Birth Trauma, the Soul, and Der Maschinenmensch,” 2014). Combining those two sentiments, I worked arm-in-arm with various comrades—fellow artists and sex workers who modelled for me to be included in this book. I may have put in the lion’s share of the overall work, but it was still a group effort and one that I’m proud of and thankful for as demonstrating our arguments; i.e., a collective statement of sex positivity and worker solidarity honed by years of artistic/academic training and otherwise useless (to capital) critical analysis and Gothic specialization (refer to the acknowledgements section to see everyone who was directly or tangentially involved in this project’s genesis, synthesis and completion).

At its full size, Sex Positivity is four volumes, ~742,000 words/2427 pages and ~1096 unique images (subject to change after the final proofreads for those volumes are complete, but I don’t plan on adding much new material to them; i.e., no footnotes for the first editions of Volume One, Two and Three). Though only a fraction of that grand total, this volume is still substantial: ~198,000 words/602 pages and ~260 unique images (not including the paratextual documents). Because there’s so much to cover and unpack, the abstract, table of contents and summaries we’ve provided so far aren’t really enough; we’ll have to summarize the thesis volume itself and what it contains per division, subdivision and sub-subdivision.

We’ll do this, next.

(exhibit 0a1b1: Artist: Playful Maev. Ileana Sanda, the Queen of the Night, is a character I created for a fantasy series called The Cat in the Adage [from Macbeth, 1606] that I started writing when I was nineteen. I never completed it as a full story but the characters live on in my work. As my website reads,

[The Cat in the Adage is a] fantasy novel I worked on extensively after high school. Back when people still used printers to edit manuscripts, and iMac G3s were popular […] partly inspired by Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Myth: the Fallen Lords, the story had a lot of dark fantasy elements, but also a fair amount of sex. Here’s a concept piece I had drawn up [featuring] one of the characters from the story [source]. 

“The story” was something of a queerer version of Tolkien’s refrain [the High Fantasy treasure map] than Ursula Le Guin’s Wizard of Earthsea series was. The Cat in the Adage camped the heroic quest, telling the story of a magical princess named Alyona living in a faraway easterly* castle. Bred for war by her evil uncle, she discovers that Uncle Bane is actually her father! He had traced the family’s magical bloodline and predicted he could produce an exceptional wunderkind/wunderwaffe if he sired a child with his sister! Alyona is the byproduct of that dreadful abuse, and must be trained by Ileana, queen* of all witches, to resist the patriarch, face her trauma, and rescue her battered household from certain doom.

*My mother specialized in Eastern European Studies at the University of Michigan, so I grew up right after the fall of the Soviet Union learning about the czars, Peter the Great, and Vlad the Impaler (my little brother wanted to change his surname to Țepeș: Joe Țepeș, or Joe “the Impaler”). When I commissioned Maev to do the drawing of Ileana seated at her throne of magical pillars [modeled after the pillars of Nosgoth from Legacy of Kain], I asked her to cover the pillars in Cyrillic symbols; from what I recall, asking Maev what she wrote, she replied that the Cyrillic symbols were selected at random.

[“A painting of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia (1431–1476), also known by his patronymic name Dracula (patronymic meaning a name based on that of a male ancestor), and posthumously dubbed Vlad the Impaler due to his brutality. The name of the vampire Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) was inspired by Vlad’s patronymic” (source: British Library).]

Something I realized later was that Ileana and Alyona—in a psychomachic/psychosexual sense—were medieval divisions of me told on the page. As a closeted trans woman, I lived in trauma that was real and imagined, both the lived abuse of my household and my internalized self-hatred and dysphoria/dysmorphia as a neurodivergent trans person who didn’t know she was either of those things. I lacked the knowledge to express that, but I felt it. So I used what I did know to express my unspeakable trauma and trans woman’s existence in the language that was given to me; e.g., the “Stan Lee” approach to superheroes and psychomachy through plurality

plurality/multiplicity

Generally demonized in Gothic canon, “Plurality or multiplicity is the psychological phenomenon in which a body can feature multiple distinct or overlapping consciousnesses, each with their own degree of individuality. This phenomenon can feature in identity disturbance, dissociative identity disorder, and other specified dissociative disorders. Some individuals describe their experience of plurality as a form of neurodiversity, rather than something that demands a diagnosis” (source: Wikipedia). It’s not automatically an ailment or begot from trauma, though it will canonically be presented as such (the same goes for asexual/neurodivergent peoples).

but also the Hero’s Journey [monomyth] as something for me to camp. We learn through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also oral traditions and folklore as a means of storing our culture inside; anyone who thinks otherwise is deceiving themselves. But camping is important because these things [their Gothic poetics] can be weaponized against us; i.e., by turning off our ability to think critically while the profit motive colonizes everything in pursuit of elite hegemony [destroying our culture in the process and replacing it with bad copies that serve the profit motive]. We must not treat such poetics as a means of escape that is purely a numbing opiate; i.e., one that blinds us with its supposedly “visible” darkness; we will need all our wits and linguo-material tools—our “dark forces” of reclamation/reinvention—if we are to escape the myopia of Capitalist Realism. Rest assured that all the sexy monsters will remain, as will their forbidden fun and games [even the dumb shonen crap]; they’ll just be doubled as sex-positive [thus class, race and gender conscious] during our dialectical-material scrutiny’s asymmetrical/guerrilla warfare: by not being anchored to biological sex, skin color and their various heteronormative functions within the colonial binary and its mythic structure/Shadow of Pygmalion’s bread and circus.

That, as I shall explain in my thesis, is our greatest strength.)

Onto “Notes on Power and Liminal Expression“!

Concerning Keywords/the Volume’s Age

“What does this key unlock?” —Conan, Conan the Destroyer (1984)

(artist: Moxxy Sting)

Before we dive into my thesis volume, let me provide a belated note about keywords and the volume’s age, included here (and inside the promotion):

First, keywords. Back in late 2023, I originally wrote Volume Zero as an encyclopedia of terms; i.e., keywords to unpack in relation to other terms, all of which I either borrowed from elsewhere and modified, or coined myself; re (from the full, PDF version of the paratext “What I Won’t Exhibit” not found on my website’s “Paratextual Documents” page):

In this disclaimer and the entire thesis volume, I have emboldened and color-coded keywords (rather than opt for italics/underlining, which I generally utilize for emphasis). Generally this is done when first introducing them, but also when I am about to define/am currently defining or otherwise stressing their involvement (I will also do this as a graphical aid to showcase when a bunch of keywords are being used in tandem, especially during the thesis statement). Regardless of when I do, it’s meant to clue you in that we’re discussing words that have specific definitions that are about to be expanded on or otherwise invoked (at the present time or later in the document) or reinvoked after they have already been explained. Also, while this only happens a few times, a couple of phrases aren’t in the glossary because I haven’t been able to define some of the more niche or incidental expressions (usually idioms or figures of speech); this is something I’d like to address in a future, second edition.

In hindsight, this might seem like a good thing to have explained or otherwise included in my blog-style book promotions. However, while not on purpose, I nonetheless forgot to include this explanation inside them; i.e., because Volume Zero is really the only book volume that even uses the keyword system throughout its entirety! Furthermore, this volume was likewise written before I started serializing my books in a blog-style format to begin with (all the PDFs contain the explanation, cited above, near the very start of their documents); i.e., with it being released in October 2023 and my first book promotion, “Brace for Impact,” not happening until April 2024.

To it, I’m not sure how well Volume Zero will translate to said format, but I want to try anyways; i.e., you can always just download the PDF on my one-page book promo and use its bookmark system and Ctrl + F to jump around. Both will make your life much easier when tackling this very dense volume; i.e., it was specifically written with doing so in mind, including accessing the full series glossary to help readers parse Volume Zero’s many sequences of words, each being listed and explained one after another (words in lists, and lists upon lists).

(artist: Moxxy Sting)

Second, the volume’s age. I released Volume Zero first and it shows; i.e., despite being what was essentially my PhD in admittedly independent form, doing so was never meant to be a shield from criticism (academia or otherwise), but a staging point for what I built off its unfinished arguments. I’ll be the first to admit, Volume Zero was researched for years (nearly a decade) but written over a very short period (roughly a month); i.e., it was always intended, from the outset, to be holistic-but-messy. The magic it still offers despite this lies in its pure assemblage of raw thesis material—material I would go on to do much more solid thesis work with, in my later books. The core strength of Volume Zero, then, lies in the constellation of ideas put forth; i.e., surrounding my basic thesis argument: that Capitalism sexualizes everything and that we must camp it (and its canon) to not only survive, but liberate ourselves with gusto (on the Aegis, above and below)! There’s no shortage of ideas, in that respect.

Some get more time and focus, thus more development (e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain vis-à-vis Metroidvania and the palliative Numinous), and some are given just enough introduction to bloom far more substantially in later volumes (e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM and the dialectic of the alien chasing the Numinous as a Communist force). There’s plenty to be proud of, here, but plenty to critique, as well. The good news is, any critiques about a lack of development can usually be addressed by directing naysayers towards my later books; e.g., regarding Metroidvania and ludo-Gothic BDSM. Even so, the volume’s biggest weakness is that it often touches on ideas it hasn’t fully been able to crystalize (what Dale Townshend might call “all over the shop”). Conversely, its core thesis argument is incredibly productive (as are many of its other ideas surrounding its rich speculative value). But the volume’s format is definitely love it or hate it; i.e., I was still figuring how to format when writing it, and have since gone on to do things quite differently for my later books. There’s not much I can do about that, here, short of entirely rewriting Volume Zero, and I’d sooner saw off my left foot, Audition-style.

(artist: Moxxy Sting)

To conclude, this volume—more than the series it started—has a great many keywords it presents holistically and intersectionally across a series of concentric charts (often one per chapter). For many of those, the exact order you encounter them is far less important than how you weigh them together afterwards; it will feel soupy and unfinished in spots, because much of what it suggests wouldn’t be finished for months, going on years afterwards—i.e., when meeting newer models, the list growing from a handful to over sixty as time went on (with Moxxy being one of my most recent additions). As such, this book volume’s experimental nature was intended to be read in various directions, not simply from top to bottom. Treat it as such and I think you’ll get more out of it. So if it seems like I don’t mention a keyword right away if at all, rest assured, I will get to it eventually (in this volume or others)! And if something is absent, there’s always the full book glossary contained in each PDF file (and on my website). Hop to it, nerds! —Perse, 3/21/2025


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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-FiPatreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] The Absurd sits adjacent to the Sublime, the Weird/cosmic nihilism, the Numinous, and astronoetics, all of which we’ll touch upon throughout this book at various points. The thing to note is, meaning is attained in relationship to these spatialized devices as a form of unequal, dare-I-say Promethean, power exchange; i.e., power and its complex, paradoxical performances formed in relation to us and things that seem (at least in appearance) to be far older and more powerful than us.

[2] For all of my muses, please refer to the Acknowledgements section.

[3] An ex I met in grad school, overseas. Said person has been given an alias (as have all of the exes I talk about, in this book), whereupon we mutually decided for me to call them “Zeuhl”; i.e., after the obscure-but-totally-awesome musical subgenre (Jim Allen’s “There is No Prog, Only Zeuhl: A Guide to One of Rock’s Most Imaginative Subgenres,” 2020). I don’t owe Zeuhl shit, but to be blunt, they’re very self-centered and socially hypochondriacal, and I’m not really interested in outing them in this book despite how they abused me. At the same time, I also don’t want to actively protect them or clean up after their mess by scrubbing every aspect of their mentioning from my online profile and various websites. But to be honest, there isn’t (to my knowledge) any public mention of them and their full name outside of my private socials (unlike Jadis, another ex who is publicly mentioned outside of this book because—fuck them, they hurt me bad and frankly shouldn’t be allowed to date anyone). This being said, I do talk about Zeuhl’s abuse of me (and the abuse I received from other exes) in ways that tries to be frank and educational. What they did was shitty and I’d like to help other people by offering them the chance to learn from my adventures, “happy accidents” and all.

[4] A trick employed by the state called triangulation, or pitting one group against another for one’s own benefit. A common method is weaponizing abuse victims’ prey mechanisms, making them scared and angry and then handing them a weapon. In the case of Victoria, she’s literally “pulling a Brutus” except it’s against a small, defenseless woman; as we shall see with TERFs later on, they triangulate for the state to act just like Victoria does, except it’s against the state’s manufactured enemies: trans people and labor movements. Keep this idea in mind; we’ll return to it often through the entire book (especially when examining Victoria, Hippolyta and Medusa, or offshoots of these archetypes).

[5] For a fun visual guide on swooning, consider Adam Frost and Zhenia Vasiliev’s “How to Tell You’re Reading a Gothic Novel – in Pictures” (2014). Also, the idea isn’t complete bullshit; the xenophobia is an abject counterfeit, but based on a kernel of truth: how the body responds to perceived trauma, aka the vasovagal response:

When I first started reading romance novels I used to snicker at the idea of fainting from shock, thinking it a silly, overblown invention by authors to accentuate the delicate feminine sensibilities of their heroines. And then, to my utter surprise, it actually happened to me. I happen to dislike needles. As in, really dislike needles. The idea of getting a shot has always given me the heebie-jeebies. But I simply ask to sit down when getting one, and it’s okay. One time, though, I must have been stressed about by other things, because I rolled up my sleeve, and then remember starting to breathe a little weirdly. The next thing I knew, the nurse was patting my cheek gently, and looking horribly distraught. “I—I hadn’t even touched you yet!” she stammered. “And you just keeled over!” How embarrassing to find out I’m a flighty peagoose straight out of an Ann Radcliffe Gothic novel! However, I’ve learned that’s much more common than you think” (source: Andrea Penrose’s “Why Do Regency Heroines Swoon?” 2021).

I can attest to this, my ex, Jadis—normally made of steel—fainted at the sight of blood (my blood, no less) while watching me get my vasectomy!

In other words, Radcliffe wasn’t totally full of shit, but she did use the physiological effects of swooning to contribute to some very harmful psychosexual myths, stigmas and BDSM stereotypes stemming from her fictions (we’ll discuss camping these throughout the volume).

[6] (from the “Karl Marx in the Ludwig Rosenberger Library of Judaica,” 2006): The son of Jewish parents, Marx was baptized at the age of six. While he had no Jewish education and embraced atheism, he continues to be identified as a Jew, and his Jewish ancestry influenced his thinking. Marx’s writings about Jews and Judaism, which identify Judaism with capitalism, are nearly all hostile […] It is also not clear if Marx believed the negative qualities he saw in Jews were inherent traits or rather the result of historical circumstance that forced them into specific roles and activities. Whether or not he was himself anti-Semitic, his Jewish origins and his writings have been used by anti-Semites in linking Communism to a Jewish conspiracy; and his remarks about Jews continue to influence the reception of his other writings (source).

[7] (from the glossary): Another of my neologisms (from the thesis volume), the Shadow of Pygmalion or “Pygmalion effect” is the patriarchal vision and subsequent shadow of any knowing-better “kings” of empire, thus capital; i.e., of male- and token-dominated industries inside the Man Box, wherein “Pygmalion” means “from a male king’s mind,” but frankly extends to all traitors (male or not): upholding profit/the status quo raping nature for profit (and those treated by the state as “of nature” for those reasons); e.g., the evil monarchs of older tombs (abstractions of the bourgeoisie in crisis and decay) occupying the same colonial territories at home and abroad across space-time (a classic example being Hamlet’s father’s ghost, Shakespeare’s famously confusing story affording some ambiguity to the experiencing of such entities). More to the point, the gatekeepers of the elite routinely fabricate imaginary visions of the past, present and future, doing so to uphold Capitalist Realism through these ghosts; i.e., a broader pacification that includes the monomyth/Cycle of Kings, but also infernal concentric pattern and heteronormative legion(s) of monsters, invasion scenarios and escape fantasies; re: their reasoned, Cartesian treatment of nature as monstrous-feminine is heteronormative, wherein state proponents (cops) pimp and police nature out of pre-emptive revenge (and spite). Said revenge is generational, thus taught through popular monomythic stories; i.e., whose collective abjection of nature in service to profit ostensibly spares the cop from state cannibalization: antagonize nature and put it cheaply to work through concentric tokenism; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss, but also the various modular and interchangeable statuses for blood libel, sodomy and witch hunt accusations—as an intersectional and constantly evolving Venn Diagram of persecution networks recycling dead us-versus-them language. The inverse of the Shadow of Pygmalion (and its effect) is the Shadow of Galatea; i.e., of Medusa/the Communist Numinous (as something to chase) and spectres of Marx (as something to camp) versus spectres of Caesar (the original Pygmalion, also something to camp) existing inside the same performative zones; re: exploitation and liberation share the same spaces of performance (and their fractal recursion happening through the disintegration and rediscovery of monomythic and Promethean language).

[8] E.g., Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon (2013): “It is the near future… The apocalypse has had an apocalypse!” (source: Gamespot’s “Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon – Reveal Trailer” 2013); or, Gloryhammer’s Return to the Kingdom of Fife (2023); or Tropic Thunder’s (2014) Tugg Speedman: “The one man who made a difference five times before… is about to make a difference again, only this time it’s… different!” All are dumb nostalgia on top of dumb nostalgia as a running gag that runs the risk of repeating itself until it loses steam (critical power).

[9] “Vulgar” meaning “common, plebian.” Consider his “Leck mich im Arsch” (1782)—literally “lick me in the ass” (while it’s not strictly fetishized, but rather closer to the Americanized “kiss my ass,” one could fetishize it).

[10] In the past, I struggled greatly to critique monoliths like Radcliffe, the so-called “Great Enchantress.” I’ve since discovered that going after them and their problematic memory is like kicking a punching bag with their face on it (until it starts to look like Doomguy’s when his health is low). When hitting something made to look like someone you dislike, the sensation is oddly satisfying. But also, it’s for a good reason: Radcliffe ‘s a bigot and a moderate one at that; for the good of us all, she (and the legion of copycats she inspired with her School of Terror) needs to be taken down a peg or two (we’ll get to all of this is good time, I promise). This can be by kicking her corpse, but also dancing with her ghost, turning it into something better in the process!

[11] Vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (2001), or “the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words” (source). As I unpack it later in this volume, “Castricano further describes this process as ‘writing with ghosts,’ referring to their nature as linguistic devices that adhere the sense of being haunted in domestic spaces: the house as inside-outside, familiar-unfamiliar and inherited imperfectly by the living from the dead” (from the “Notes on Power” essay) and “In regards to ghosts, I would argue the same notion applies to all undead and to demons—i.e., writing with both as complicated theatrical expressions of the human condition under Capitalism” (from “the Four Gs” section).

[12] To be fair to Butler (who long outlived Foucault and Derrida), she doesn’t mince words when it comes to TERFs:  “The anti-gender ideology is one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times. So the TERFs will not be part of the contemporary struggle against fascism, one that requires a coalition guided by struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence; one that is mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people” (Emanuel Maiberg’s “Why The Guardian Censored Judith Butler on TERFs,” 2021).

[13] A slur directed at homosexual men/gender-non-conforming AMABs, who are fetishized/coercively demonized by cis-het men during gender trouble when the nation-state cannot provide them heteronormative sex (“war brides”). Often, queer fiction comments on this exploitative side of the “bury your gays” trope through an abject, queer damsel-in-distress: the twink-in-peril, perhaps articulated mostly nakedly (with raw exploitation, but also exceptional nuance) in Dennis Cooper’s Frisk (1991) or Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation (1995). Gentler, less-brutalized versions of this monstrous-feminine can be found sprinkled all throughout popular fiction, including Cloud-in-a-dress from Final Fantasy 7 (1997) and “Gerudo Link” from the Zelda series (which we’ll explore more in Volume Three, Chapter Three, exhibit 93). “Traps” in quotes is something that could be supplied to AFAB workers, whose appearance beyond heteronormative standards leads them to becoming demonized as a queer “bait,” or trick (no pun intended) that leads chasers down queerer and queerer rabbit holes.

[14] This isn’t written to devalue the love that Zeuhl and I had. Quite the contrary, I absolutely cherish the memory of what we shared and want it known how special all of that was. But given that they have zero desire to be affiliated with me and my work, I likewise am bound by the code of my own honor to relegate them to that shadow zone they were so keen on being inside after they broke up with me. If said desire seems odd, know that I felt exactly the same way in 2019 after they left me for their future husband (and future “side pieces” despite telling me the breakup was because they were in a “mono” headspace). Simply put, it smacked of Picasso: “Each time I leave a woman, I should burn her. Destroy the woman, destroy the past she represents” (source: Marta’s “The Women of Picasso,” 2023). Well, sorry, but I won’t be party to such vandalism in service of someone whose treatment of me shows they only cared about themselves in the end (whose mind flipped “off” like a switch when they wanted nothing more to do with me in person). I want to preserve the memory of what we had and why it mattered—not for Zeuhl, but for me.

And if my ghostly recollections of them irks and/or saddens them, know that I gave them every possible chance to avoid the present state of affairs. To Zeuhl: You chose to hide down in that rabbit hutch of yours; you can stay there as far as I’m concerned, but you will do so knowing that you were the primary cause of our broken friendship, not I. Maybe it won’t haunt you, but know that your haunting of me is something I have accepted and am living with in my own cathartic healing process. We met in a disco-like space and it was a hell of a good time, but I survived the hell you put me through, after the party (and the sex, love and kindness from you) stopped.

[15] (from the glossary): The teller of splendid lies; e.g., Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels (1726); also applies to self-aware weavers of various genres of fiction, from Oscar Wilde to Luis Borges, but also non-white/American authors who have to reinvent their own cultures’ lost histories—e.g., Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise (1993) and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1998), etc. Furthermore, concerning bourgeois lies vs proletarian splendid lies, Gothic stories are concerned with recycled clichés in either case.

[16] From “Structure, Sign and Play” (1966).

[17] Translated from French: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” From Of Grammatology (1967). A handy way to think of it is as, “There is no outside-text.” For further reading, I suggest Harish’s Notebook’s “Deconstructing Systems – There is Nothing Outside the Text” (2020), which explores Derrida’s (famously difficult) idea nicely.

[18] “Pertaining to the ideas of Thomas Robert Malthus.” Malthus was an English economist and all-around horrible person, who—faced with the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Conquest/Pestilence, War, Famine and Death)—dispassionately argued for the genocide of poor people to combat “overpopulation” (an eco-fascist dogwhistle that continues to conspicuously play out in popular narratives; e.g., superhero stories, vis-à-vis Renegade Cut’s “Thanos Was Wrong – Eugenics and Overpopulation,” 2019).

[19] E.g., Apone from Aliens (1986): “A day in the Marine corps is like a day on the farm—every meal a banquet, every paycheck a fortune, every formation a parade! I love the corps!” Never mind that no one likes the cornbread, many openly hate the job, various characters like Vasquez and Drake are penal conscripts (a prison battalion, essentially), and the enterprising greenhorn lieutenant basically gets everyone killed because he sends the squad into an ambush without weapons (“What the hell are we supposed to use, man? Harsh language?”). Apone’s blind love speaks to the warning of the Black Abolitionist: “We love our country but our country doesn’t love us” (Atun-Shei Films’ “A Black Abolitionist’s Drastic Response to the Fugitive Slave Act” 2023); e.g., the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment cut to ribbons at Fort Wagner during a forlorn hope with stars in their eyes (dreaming of a country that loves them).

[20] Capitalism is a hyperobject, a structure so big that you can’t directly observe it, and whose descriptions through ultimately simplistic metaphors are abstracting at best (for more information on hyperobjects, consider Timothy Morton’s 2013 book on the subject). You can only talk about Capitalism in pieces, from a particular point of view about something you yourself disinterred and reassembled over space and time. Needless to say, the point of Gothic-Communist abstraction isn’t abject confusion, nor is it to pull something out of thin air. Rather, it’s meant to achieve altered perspective for enhanced appreciation of truths concealed by capital; e.g., abstract art that isn’t tied to having an obvious point, purpose, or monetary value/function under Capitalism.

[21] From Jerrold Hogle’s “Leroux’s Fantôme and the Cultural Work of the Gothic” in The Undergrounds of The Phantom of the Opera (2002):

By now, we should not be surprised that Gaston Leroux’s conflicted social vision and its disguised exposure of cultural “abjections” appear most fully in a novel deeply rooted in the “Gothic” tradition. Over the last two decades, the study of the Gothic as a mixed and unsettling mode in fiction, theater, film, and other media has increasingly revealed how the archaic spaces and haunting monsters that loom before us in performances we call Gothic provide methods of “othering” that have definite ideological and social, as well as psychological, functions. In the Gothic from the later eighteenth century on, as David Punter has shown, “the middle class” often does what we have just seen Leroux do in Le Fantôme: it “displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell” with feelings of both fear and attraction towards the phantasms of what is displaced (Punter, 418). The Gothic, well before Leroux adopts it, enables a growing bourgeois hegemony to be both haunted by and distanced from the “hidden barbarities” that have helped make it possible (Punter, 419)—and hence the repressed uncertainties it feels about its own legitimacy (as in Abraham’s “phantom”)—by projecting such anomalies into the horrors of apparently old and alien specters, buildings, and crypts (source).

As we proceed into the book, keep this in mind when we discuss monsters and spaces, and the middle-class fear-fascination with them.

[22] This idea is obviously complicated, as Hell and its undead/demonic occupants can denote intersectional stigmas that aren’t explicitly connected to race; e.g., green or purple as a color of stigma/trauma afforded to people who adopt it for different reasons; i.e., the witch as the vice character who upholds the status quo by playing into widespread stereotypes, or appropriating colonization unto a group that historically only benefits from Imperialism (relative to the Global South); sure, there are degrees of relative oppression experienced by white women in the Global North versus white men, but these woman (and other token groups) can still perform in bad faith by adopting the rebel’s persona, shouting “for the Horde!” and punching down at trans people (or whoever the state needs them to attack) also dressed up as “bad” demons, undead, and/or stigma-animal chimeras to stab, shoot, crush and kill. Keep this in mind when we look at “fantasy blackface” in Volume Two (orcs, exhibit 37e; Drow, exhibit 41b)—not as strictly “of race,” but of class, race, gender and religion as generally emphasized to varying degrees during a given performance depending on who’s playing the role and during which production.

[23] A hideous inversion of the oft-conceived idea of “Peter Pan syndrome”; i.e., the adult is the childish one. The paradox of the heteronormative adult is they are the most entitled and childish of all, albeit without an actual child’s nascent ability to imagine anything except the incredibly narrow set of rules, behaviors and beliefs (thus stigmas and biases) they have internalized. Suitably “grown up,” the weird canonical nerd becomes easily frustrated, conditioned to rape and kill and the drop of a hat, but also lie through bad-faith deceptions. In short, they are useful to capital.

[24] From Mark Greene’s “Man Box culture” in Remaking Manhood: The Healthy Masculinity Podcast (2023); i.e., “the brutal enforcement of a narrowly defined set of traditional rules for being a man.”

[25] Source: Bad Empanada’s “How the USA Inspired the Nazis – From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum” (2022).

[26] Jerrold Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit, which we’ll explore at length during the Four Gs section.

[27] Like many artists that we examine throughout the book, Morry’s work pointedly revives the Wisdom of the Ancients according to the Neo-Gothic tradition: a marriage between the Ancient Romance’s “larger-than-life” and the ordinary novel’s sense of the quotidian, the mundane stuff of the everyday. And Morry’s work (exhibit 51d2) is fairly tame on the larger gradient, paling in its subversive power compared to someone like Sabs’ far more erotic (and twink-centric) romances (exhibit 91c); i.e., the “Sapphic” is a cliché often weaponized by second wave feminism and the LGBA.

[28] The tragedy of Beowulf is most men can be broken, conditioned like dogs to serve the state without seeing the damage done to themselves or others; i.e., it has been internalized. Per Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605), this is called “tilting at windmills.”

[29] What better way to illustrate madness than the need for profit by destroying as many people and environments as possible? It’s a kind of chasing the dragon/”dragon sickness” by bloodletting entire nations on stolen, privatized land.

[30] As defined by the Online Etymology Dictionary (2023):

late 14c., “revelation, disclosure,” from Church Latin apocalypsis “revelation,” from Greek apokalyptein “uncover, disclose, reveal,” from apo “off, away from” (see apo-) + kalyptein “to cover, conceal” (from PIE root, kel-) “to cover, conceal, save.” The Christian end-of-the-world story is part of the revelation in John of Patmos’ book “Apokalypsis” (a title rendered into English as pocalipsis c. 1050, “Apocalypse” c. 1230, and “Revelation” by Wycliffe c. 1380). Its general sense in Middle English was “insight, vision; hallucination.” The general meaning “a cataclysmic event” is modern (not in OED 2nd ed., 1989); apocalypticism “belief in an imminent end of the present world” is from 1858 [source].

[31] A pair of radioactive materials that, when held together, would near-instantly release fatal levels of radiation to anyone near the core (see: Alex Wellerstein’s “The Demon Core and the Strange Death of Louis Slotin,” 2016).

[32] There’s nothing quite so dumb or cruel as threatening workers with death—as if the elite could offer us the means to cheat death when they cannot do it, themselves! The cruelty is, they’re offering people the basic means to survive after cornering the market.

[33] From his War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History (1994): “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.” In other words, the state’s monopoly of violence—Max Weber’s maxim, “a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (refer to our thesis statement for the full definition)—can be challenged.

[34] When confronted with their true selves, most men might not run away screaming but they often freeze up, disenchant or self-report (all of which are usual responses for us to use against them).

[35] An oft-misunderstood term and my area of expertise. We delve more into its full definition and sex-positive application during the “camp map,” but for now here’s the short version (abridged, from the glossary):

Metroidvania

A type of Gothic videogame, one involving the exploration of castles and other closed spaces in an ergodic framework; i.e., the struggle of investigating past trauma as expressed through the Gothic castle and its monstrous caverns (which is the author poetically hinting at systemic abuses in real life).Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys, backtracking and variable gating mechanics (bosses, items, doors); and requires movement powerups in some shape or form, though these can be supplied through RPG elements as an optional alternative.

*Exploration pertains to the deliberate navigation of space beyond that of obvious, linear routes—to search for objects, objectives or secrets off the beaten path (source: “Mazes and Labyrinths”).

[36] In this 2022 blogpost, “Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Manifesto,” which has seen numerous revisions since July 22nd, 2022. When it released in early 2024, Volume One contained the manifesto, but also a variety of other documents and changes not included in the original blogpost.

[37] “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (2018)

[38] In short, I was averaging ~5000 words/~15 pages and ~7.5 images per day. Compared to my past blogging efforts, that was essentially a full-size blogpost with pictures and citations (which normally I would write over a week, sometimes longer) every day for 22 days straight (without drugs, I feel I should emphasize—that includes coffee/alcohol or other over-the-counter stimulants/depressants). It’s funny because I remember Paul Sheldon—Steven King’s autobiographical protagonist, in Misery (1987)—giving himself a martyred pat on the back when he said he was writing 5 pages a day (King even italicized it, if I remember correctly) while his “muse” was torturing him. Like, that’s really cute, my dude (though props for doing it on a typewriter, holy fuck)!

[39] One book was produced when I was in high school, and remains unfinished; another graphic novel was finished but is out-of-print; a commissioned novella that is mostly-finished but on hiatus (refer to this page on my website to access descriptions for each). Also, there’s my 2018 master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (on Academia.edu) and various amounts of commissioned short stories/erotica (on my website).

Book Sample: “Make It Real” Volume Contents and Disclaimer

“Make It Real” is a blog-style book promotion, originally inspired by those done with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose for Volume Two; re: “Brace for Impact,”  “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil” (2024). Those promotions sought to promote and provide Volume Two, part one and two’s individual pieces (two halves, but three modules) for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry ModuleUndead Module and Demon Module. “Make It Real” shall do the same, but with Volume One/the manifesto (versus “The Total Codex” promoting Volume Zero/the thesis volume). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series. This specific promo post includes Volume One’s table of contents (and hyperlinks to each post), followed by the book disclaimer.

Further Reading: As of 3/13/2025, I’ve given every book volume/(sub)module its own promotion series. Access all of them, here.

Note: “The Total Codex” is now out, which means I can start editing and uploading the second edition to the manifesto (which “Make It Real” is). As with my other older promotions, this series will release one post at a time; unlike those promotions, these books have already been written/are already available online. This means I can release the book samples on a daily basis. The whole process should take several weeks (with Volume One being the shortest of my books). —Perse, 4/1/2025 (not a joke)

Volume One is already written/was released on Valentine’s 2024! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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 found either at the bottom of this page or on its own webpage.

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.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Contents (for Volume One) 

Volume One, unlike Volume Two, lacks separate modules or sub-volumes. Instead, it is entirely self-contained. Even so, its material still divides into different sections, whose main three I’ve outlined ahead of time:

  • The preface explains how Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism differs from older Gothic and Marxist academia/praxis that I wish to modify and borrow from (Marxist-Leninism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis) in order to proceed beyond the myopia of Capitalist Realism using a unique synthesis of Gothic theories, Marxist concepts, and various other factors presented with commonplace language as freighted, liminal and already-colonized, but also potentially freeing when used by workers to open up their minds in dated, pulpy ways: the proletarian Gothic imagination.
  • Manifestosimplifies the complex theory of our thesis volume by providing our manifesto in full; the manifesto gives our mission statement, as well as a variety of signposts and core ideas I’ve coined/retooled from older thinkers: the six Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism (the Six Rs), four main Gothic academic theories (the Four Gs); its essays/essay groups (The Nation State,” “An Uphill Battle,” and Monster Modes) also explore the topics of the Gothic mode we’ll continue to cover through the rest of the book—its monsters, lairs/parallel space, Hermeneutic Gothic-Communist Quadfecta, and phobias—as well as the Six Doubles of Creative/Oppositional Praxis and their synthetic oppositional groupings through which to synthesize, thus interrogate state abuses using trauma writing and artwork.
  • Instruction focuses on instructing theory once simplified by using trauma writing and artwork as a synthetic, educational means of Gothic poetic expression. The manifesto postscript tackles generational trauma and police abuse by seeing it in others through their pedagogy of the oppressed; the sample essay uses every key idea in my book to analyze a primary text at full speed; Paid Labor stresses the value of paying workers when synthesizing praxis; and the synthesis symposium covers how to use the synthetic oppositional groupings to synthesize our general terms and academic ideas, processing them (and our trauma) into idiosyncratic, emotionally and Gothically intelligent social-sexual habits within our own lives; it covers more at length what we illustrated during the camp map finale in Volume Zero, focusing on Cartesian trauma and how its profit motive unironically treats nature as food: (rape and war that harvest nature through monstrous-feminine dialogs).

These sections essentially function as a module would for Volume Two, save that they operate deliberately inside one book volume rather than dividing it up into separate modules (a tenable goal, given my thesis volume is quite a bit shorter than Volume Twos various modules); i.e., Volume One takes Sex Positivity‘s entire thesis argument from Volume Zero and simplifies it into what I call “the Basics” (of opposition synthesis), while also introducing the tools of the state and ways we can subvert said tools through our own daily synthesis cultivating good social-sexual habits. “Manifesto” and “Instruction” contain multiple chapters, subchapters, and so on (though nowhere near as many as Volume Two’s various sub-volumes do). Even so, it is my shortest and most accessible volume.

Cover model: Blxxd Bunny

Volume Summary

Volume One contains the simplified theory of my book series; i.e., its Gothic-Communist manifesto outlines a teaching method for synthesizing praxis, meaning through an introduction to Gothic-Communist theory from my thesis volume that has been simplified.

Written before my thesis but updated in light of its construction, the manifesto takes a more conversational approach to my thesis argument; i.e., presenting said argument through my original preface, manifesto, sample essay and synthesis roadmap as a potent means of teaching others how to develop Communism through the Gothic mode. To this, Volume One merely begins exploring the application of my theories when trying to achieve development through praxial synthesis and catharsis; i.e., power and trauma as things to interrogate (and negotiate/play with) by writing about and illustrating them through Gothic poetics in the shared dialogs of contested spaces: ludo-Gothic BDSM serving as a flexible, campy and productive means of teaching empathy and class/culture consciousness through anecdotal evidence merged with dialectical-material scrutiny and analysis—where survival and healing from state abuse (and generational trauma) must be expressed through what we create ourselves as stemming from said abuse and its complicated spheres. While the reduction of pure theory to more comprehensible forms remains vital to achieving emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness, their instruction is nonetheless informed by workers living with trauma who inherently distrust the state: the oppressed. Heeding their pedagogy remains essential when synthesizing praxis in our own daily lives; i.e., through our personalized learned approaches to Gothic instruction being assisted by those with less privilege merging their poetics (and theatre) with ours.

approximate volume length (“): ~187,000 words/497 pages and ~326 unique images

Foreplay to Revolution (opening, outline and preface)

Opening Summary

The opening, outline and preface before the manifesto proper.

Posts

  • -1. “Volume One: Manifesto and Instruction” (volume opening): The opening for the entire volume. Opening Length: ~1 page.
  • 0. “Manifesto/Instruction Volume Outline” (included with volume opening): A short outline for the entire book (already included, above; re: Contents). Length: ~3 pages.
  • 1. “Preface: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; or, Synthesizing Emotional/Gothic Intelligence through a Sex-Positive Gothic Mode” (included with volume opening): The preface to Volume One explains, by and large, what separates Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism from Marxist Leninism; but also, it stresses the importance of killing our darlings/past heroes in favor of a better worker mindset towards universal liberation. Length: ~15 pages.

Manifesto

Opening Summary

Volume One’s second main section, after the preface, takes the complex theory from Volume Zero and simplifies it into a manifesto-like format; i.e., from complex theory to simple.

Posts

  • 2. “Manifesto: Simplifying Theory (section opening)”: The opening to and signpost element of the volume’s manifesto section. Opening Length: ~3 pages.
  • 3. “The Gist: Our Gothic-Communist Mission Statement and List of Oppositional Praxial Coordinates, Including Our Tenets and Main Gothic Theories” (included with section opening): Gives our mission statement, then outlines the entire manifesto (the manifesto tree of oppositional praxis) list by list. Length: ~1 page.
  • 4. “The Nation-State: Remediating Modern-day “Rome,” Gargoyles, and the Bourgeois Trifectas; also, critiquing Amazons as Liminal Expression” (feat. gargoyles and Autumn Ivy—included with section opening): Unpacks gargoyles in the canonical sense, then introduces and explores the trifectas themselves for the remainder of the chapter. This chapter also discusses how subterfuge encourages tokenized coercion under manufactured conditions during liminal expression inside weird-nerd culture; i.e., Amazons, and the praxial synthesis of that particular monster type as “gargoyle-esque” when personified by weird nerds. The example we’ll explore occurred between me and called Autumn Ivy, a non-binary sex worker who abused me during our own labor exchanges: as weird nerds working in praxial opposition. Length: ~11 pages.
  • 5. “An Uphill Battle (with the Sun in Your Eyes): Operational Difficulties” (sub-section opening): Outlines the many pressures and forces existing during the struggle to synthesize praxis and unify workers using monstrous poetics; the three monsters (and their trauma style) we focus on are gargoyles, Amazons and vampires. Opening Length: ~1 page.
    • 5a. ” part one: “Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression” (sub-sub-section opening—included with sub-section opening): Introduces the problem of state monopolies through violence, terror and morphological expression, and how to fight back as a state victim through revolutionary cryptonymy by using animalized Gothic poetics. Opening Length: ~14 pages.
      • 5a1. “Predators and Prey (part one): Predators as Amazons, Knights, and Other Forms of Domesticated, Animalized Monster Violence” (feat. James Cameron—included with sub-section opening): Considers the state’s monopoly of violence (and terror) as told through its animalized soldiers, but also their bodies as things if not depicted in heteronormative ways, then policed as such; i.e., by the Amazon and similar monstrous-feminine entities as relayed in ways that generally “corrupt” and triangulate against/prey on other minorities. Length: ~31 pages.
      • 5a2. ” (part two): “Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM; Its Bodily Psychosexual Expression and Campy Gothic Origins Stemming from Horace Walpole onwards”: Considers those who hide like, and manifest as, animals in the shadow of unironic Gothic castles (whose initial formation and campy subversion we will also examine, vis-à-vis Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis). Length: ~48 pages.
    • 5b. ” part two: “Concerning Rings, BDSM and Vampires; or the State’s False Gifts, Power Exchange, and Crumbling Homesteads Told through Tolkien’s Nature-Themed Stories”: Concerns arrangements of power that are shared and worn: namely rings and collars of the Tolkien-esque sort, and in various roleplay settings but especially the Gothic castle and vampirism as something to summon and evoke. Length: ~44 pages.
    • 5c. ” part three: “Challenging the State’s Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires)”: Takes part two’s praxial factors and considers them in relation to the state’s authored stupidities; i.e., as things to challenge through our own Gothic poetics’ creative successes when interrogating trauma ourselves. Length: ~40 pages.
  • 6. “Monster Modes, Totalitarianism (menticide) and Opposing Forces: Oppositional Praxis”: Revisits oppositional praxis, lists all the monsters, lairs and phobias we will explore in Volume Two and Three, and outlines menticide, a form of brainwashing that the synthesis roadmap explores more thoroughly. Length: ~30 pages.

Instruction

Summary

My thesis proper as a statement to introduce, then argue against canon with. Said introduction includes various foundational elements, upon which my core thesis argument rests, and whose body extends into two segues before the “camp map” (which focuses on camping canon): the roots of camp and praxial inertia (obstacles to heed, mid-praxis).

Posts

  • 7. “Instruction: Trauma Writing/Artwork, or Surviving and Expressing Our Trauma through Gothic Poetics” (section opening): The opening/signpost section to the instruction half of Volume One. Opening Length: ~5 pages.
  • 8. “Manifesto Postscript: ‘Healing from Rape’—Addressing ‘Corruption,’ DARVO and Police Abuse with the Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Ninja Scroll and The Terminator” (feat. Cuwu—included with section opening): Discusses learning about the trauma of others to help someone process their own in lieu of state abuses (through the police and their deputized terror tactics in stochastic forms): with heroes and monsters. Length: ~39 pages.
  • 9. “Gothic Communism, a sample essay: ‘Cornholing the Corn Lady—Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire'”: Offers a small reprieve while we examine Ghostbusters: Afterlife through a postcolonial lens, vis-à-vis Edward Said. Length: ~15 pages.
  • 10. “Paid Labor: Summarizing Praxis as Something to Synthesize by Paying Workers”: Briefly discusses an important refrain to solidarized labor under sex positivity: sex work is work, which needs to be paid. Furthermore, it explores how many different kinds of work constitute sex work, insofar as Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all workers, and that intersections of art, porn, prostitution, and writing must collectively negotiate and express worker rights and boundaries through intersectional solidarity. Length: ~8 pages.
  • 11. “Synthesis Symposium: Nature Is Food; a Roadmap for Forging Social-Sexual Habits, or Cultivating Gothic-Communist Praxis in Our Own Daily Lives/Instruction” (sub-section opening)”: A symposium that considers trauma as a Cartesian enterprise, treating nature as food. As such, it discusses a means of synthesizing praxis, thus interrogating and processing Cartesian trauma (war and rape) in our own daily lives in opposition to state forces harvesting us. It provides a lengthier sample of synthesis than Volume Zero’s camp map finale, but still constitutes a taste of what we will discuss and propose even more thoroughly in Volume Three; i.e., when we explore proletarian praxis at length. The roadmap comes in four parts, which we’ll unpack and signpost more when we arrive. Monster-wise, though, it explores generational trauma during Gothic poetics in relation to nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., exploited by Cartesian thought to canonize, thus facilitate, unironic war and rape: Medusa, but also forbidden expressions of the Medusa through Georgia O’Keefe, H.R. Giger and more recent, less infamous auteurs. It also examines Cartesian arrangements of state violence and resistance according to Heinlein’s competent man and Kurosawa’s Western. Keeping with the Medusa, though, the roadmap will also explore Amazons, phallic women/traumatic penetration, and various abject morphologies policed under Cartesian binaries during pornographic expression; e.g., racialized tropes, but also fat people at large. Opening Length: ~3 pages.
    • 11a. “Synthesis Roadmap, or Nature Is Food, part zero: Pre-Symposium; or, Synthesis, Equations and Cartesian Trauma (war and rape)” (including with sub-section opening): Explains what synthesis is, as well as providing equations and trauma to prime the reader with before pressing into the symposium itself. Length: ~20 pages.
    • 11b. ” part one: The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis; or Outlining Girl Talk, Menticide, the Liminal Expression of Subversive Revolution and ‘Perceptive’ Pastiche in the Face of Cartesian Trauma” (feat. Medusa, Stigma Animals and Georgia O’Keefe): An examination of the basics, or pure reductions, of our synthetic oppositional groupings; i.e., how our pedagogic emphasis involves oppositional praxis as something to synthesize according oppositional synthesis with a proletarian agenda: to prevent war and the rape of workers/the natural world by raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and, by extension, a class/cultural awareness that leads to systemic catharsis; i.e., through trauma writing and artwork as things to express and teach through a basic educational approach. Features Medusa and stigma animals, but also Georgia O’Keefe, H.R. Giger and more recent auteurs. Length: ~46 pages.
    • 11c. ” part two: “A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in War Culture” (feat. Robert Heinlein and Akira Kurosawa): An iconoclastic consideration of war culture and how it can be interrogated and synthesized in our own creative responses to canonical forms; i.e., how to recognize said canon and express our trauma in relation to it during class/culture war as a means of challenging Cartesian arrangements of power and outcomes. Features Robert Heinlein and Akira Kurosawa. Length: ~24 pages.
    • 11d. ” part three: A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in Rape Culture” (feat. phallic women/traumatic penetration and sports abuse): An iconoclastic consideration of rape culture and how it can be interrogated and synthesized in our own creative responses to canonical forms; i.e., how to recognize said canon and express our trauma in relation to it during class/culture war as a means of challenging Cartesian arrangements of power and outcomes; features Amazons, phallic women/traumatic penetration, and violence in sports. Length: ~35 pages.
    • 11e. ” the finale: “A Problem of ‘Knife Dicks,’ or Humanizing the Harvest; Hammering Swords into Ploughshares” (feat. racist porn and fat bodies): Versus part three, the finale examines morphologies policed under such binaries during pornographic expression; e.g., racialized tropes, but also fat people at large and human (often female) bodies targeted for having “fat, immodest” qualities, which are then alienated by capital, before being fetishized and harvested like crops. We have to humanize the harvest. Length: ~26 pages.
  • 12. “End of the Road: Concluding the Roadmap and Volume One”: Quickly (over ten pages) reiterates some key things Volume One has covered that you should keep in mind moving forward. Length: ~12 pages.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)


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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-FiPatreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Disclaimer

(disclaimer exhibit: Artist: Harmony Corrupted, who provided me with various materials from her Fansly account to use [with her permission] in my book, including cum photos. For those of legal age who enjoy Harmony’s work and want to see more than this website provides, consider subscribing to her Fansly account and then ordering a custom/tipping through her Ko-Fi. You won’t be disappointed!)

“If it was not good, it was true; if it was not artistic, it was sincere; if it was in bad taste, it was on the side of life.”

—Henry Miller, on criticism and the Supreme-Court-level lawsuit he received for writing The Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Regarding This Book’s Artistic/Pornographic Nudity and Sexual Content: Sex Positivity thoroughly discusses sexuality in popular media, including fetishes, kinks, BDSM, Gothic material, and general sex work; the illustrations it contains have been carefully curated and designed to demonstrate my arguments. It also considers pornography to be art, examining the ways that sex-positive art makes iconoclastic statements against the state. As such, Sex Positivity contains visual examples of sex-positive/sex-coercive artistic nudity borrowed from publicly available sources to make its educational/critical arguments. Said nudity has been left entirely uncensored for those purposes. While explicitly criminal sexual acts, taboos and obscenities are discussed herein, no explicit illustrations thereof are shown, nor anything criminal; i.e., no snuff porn, child porn or revenge porn. It does examine things generally thought of as porn that are unironically violent. Examples of uncensored, erotic artwork and sex work are present, albeit inside exhibits that critique the obscene potential (from a legal standpoint) of their sexual content: “ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse” (source: Justice.gov). For instance, there is an illustrated example of uncensored semen—a “breeding kink” exhibit with zombie unicorns and werewolves (exhibit 87a)—that I’ve included to illustrate a particular point, but its purposes are ultimately educational in nature.

The point of this book isn’t to be obscene for its own sake, but to educate the broader public (including teenagers*) about sex-positive artwork and labor historically treated as obscene by the state. For the material herein to be legally considered obscene it would have to simultaneously qualify in three distinct ways (aka the “Miller” test):

  • appeal to prurient interests (i.e., an erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion)
  • attempt to depict or describe sexual conduct in a patently offensive way (i.e., ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse)
  • lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

Taken as a whole, this book discusses debatably prurient material in an academic manner, depicting and describing sexual conduct in a non-offensive way for the express purpose of education vis-à-vis literary-artistic-political enrichment.

*While this book was written for adults—provided to them through my age-gated website—I don’t think it should be denied from curious teenagers through a supervising adult. The primary reason I say this (apart from the trauma-writing sections, which are suitably intense and grave) is that the academic material can only be simplified so far and teenagers probably won’t understand it entirely (which is fine; plenty of books are like that—take years to understand more completely). As for sexually-developing readers younger than 16 (ages 10-15), I honestly think there are far more accessible books that tackle the same basic subject matter more quickly at their reading level. All in all, this book examines erotic art and sex positivity as an alternative to the sex education currently taught (or deliberately not taught) in curricular/extracurricular spheres. It does so in the hopes of improving upon canonical tutelage through artistic, dialectical-material analysis. 

Fair Use: This book is non-profit, and its artwork is meant for education, transformation and critique. For those reasons, the borrowed materials contained herein fall under Fair Use. All sources come from popular media: movies, fantasy artist portfolios, cosplayer shoots, candid photographs, and sex worker catalogs intended for public viewing. Private material has only been used with a collaborating artist’s permission (for this book—e.g., Blxxd Bunny‘s OF material or custom shoots; or as featured in a review of their sex work on my website with their consent already given from having done past work together—e.g., Miss Misery).

Concerning the Exhibit Numbers and Parenthetical Dates: I originally wrote this book as one text, not four volumes. Normally I provide a publication year per primary text once per text—e.g., “Alien (1979)”—but this would mean having to redate various texts in Volumes One, Two and Three after Volume Zero. I have opted out of doing this. Likewise, the exhibit numbers are sequential for the entire book, not per volume; references to a given exhibit code [exhibit 11b2 or 87a] will often refer to exhibits not present in the current volume. I have not addressed this in the first edition of my book, but might assemble a future annotated list in a second edition down the road.

Concerning Hyperlinks: Those that make the source obvious or are preceded by the source author/title will simply be supplied “as is.” This includes artist or book names being links to themselves, but also mere statements of fact, basic events, or word definitions where the hyperlink is the word being defined. Links to sources where the title is not supplied in advance or whose content is otherwise not spelled out will be supplied next to the link in parentheses (excluding Wikipedia, save when directly quoting from the site). One, this will be especially common with YouTube essayists I cite to credit them for their work (though sometimes I will supply just the author’s name; or their name, the title of the essay and its creation year). Two, concerning YouTube links and the odds of videos being taken down, these are ultimately provided for supplementary purposes and do not actually need to be viewed to understand my basic arguments; I generally summarize their own content into a single sentence, but recommend you give any of the videos themselves a watch if you’re curious about the creators’ unique styles and perspectives about a given topic.

Concerning (the PDF) Exhibit Image Quality: This book contains over 1,000 different images, which—combined with the fact that Microsoft Word appears to compress images twice (first, in-document images and second, when converting to PDFs) along with the additional hassle that is WordPress’ limitations on accepting uploaded PDFs (which requires me to compress the PDF again—has resulted in sub-par image quality for the exhibit images themselves. To compensate, all of the hyperlinks link to the original sources where the source images can be found. Sometimes, it links to the individual images, other times to the entire collage, and I try to offer current working links; however, the ephemeral, aliased nature of sex work means that branded images do not always stay online, so some links (especially those to Twitter/X accounts) won’t always lead to a source if the original post is removed.

Concerning Aliases: Sex workers survive through the use of online aliases and the discussion of their trauma requires a degree of anonymity to protect victims from their actual/potential abusers. This book also contains trauma/sexual anecdotes from my own life; it discusses my friends, including sex workers and the alter egos/secret identities they adopt to survive “in the wild.” Keeping with that, all of the names in this book are code names (except for mine, my late Uncle Dave’s and his ex-wife Erica’s—who are only mentioned briefly by their first names). Models/artists desiring a further degree of anonymity (having since quit the business, for example) have been given a codename other than their former branded identity sans hyperlinks (e.g., Jericho).

Extended, Book-Wide Trigger Warning: This entire book thoroughly discusses xenophobia, harmful xenophilia (necrophilia, pedophilia, zoophilia, etc), homophobia, transphobia, enbyphobia, sexism, racism, race-/LGBTQ-related hate crimes/murder and domestic abuse; child abuse, spousal abuse, animal abuse, misogyny and sexual abuse towards all of these groups; power abuse, rape (date, marital, prison, etc), discrimination, war crimes, genocide, religious/secular indoctrination and persecution, conversion therapy, manmade ecological disasters, and fascism.

Book Sample: “The Total Codex” Volume Contents and Disclaimer

“The Total Codex” is a blog-style book promotion, originally inspired by those done with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose for Volume Two; re: “Brace for Impact,”  “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil” (2024). Those promotions sought to promote and provide Volume Two, part one and two’s individual pieces (two halves, but three modules) for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry ModuleUndead Module and Demon Module. “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series. This specific promo post includes Volume Zero’s table of contents (and hyperlinks to each post), followed by the book disclaimer.

The “Total Codex” promotion is fully online; with it, a new second edition of the volume (v2.0) has also been uploaded, which you can access for free on my book series’ one-page promo. To learn about the changes contained within the second edition, read the new 2025 foreword, “A 2025 Foreword: On Volume Zero’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM“! —Perse 

Further Reading: As of 3/13/2025, I’ve given every book volume/(sub)module its own promotion series. Access all of them, here.

Volume Zero is already written/was released on October 2023! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

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 found either at the bottom of this page or on its own webpage.

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.

(artist: Bay)

Contents (for Volume Zero) 

Volume Zero, unlike Volume Two, lacks separate modules or sub-volumes. Instead, it is entirely self-contained. Even so, its material still divides into different sections, whose main three I’ve outlined ahead of time:

  • The thesis statement: Contains my manifesto tree, Four Gs (four main Gothic theories), another small essay about where power is performed during the Gothic mode/inside the Gothic imagination (“Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox”), and my thesis paragraph, which the thesis body expands on using most of this book’s keywords and manifesto terms.
  • The “camp map”: Assembles the manifesto pieces and explains (using the Four Gs) how to camp the canon of war as heteronormative by “making it gay” with ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., normally canonized through the quest for power in a Faustian bargain (told in the warlike language we’re all accustomed to), which we then camp during our own Promethean Quests (“Oh, no! I’m totally being conquered right now!”). Told in four parts. Part one, explores camp as a counterterrorist activity in relation to state terrorism, and outlines various monster types featured in the exercises (e.g., femboys, catgirls, himbos, Amazons, etc); parts two explores the interrogation of power in relation to Gothic space (castles) but especially in videogames (shooters, high fantasy and Metroidvania); part three considers the making of monsters and goes over more monster types; part four puts all of these ideas to the test, executed by my friend Blxxd Bunny and I prototyping ludo-Gothic BDSM.
  • The conclusion: Wraps everything up and segues into the symposium, which is a conversational follow-up/aftercare “sesh” dedicated to points I wanted to expand on but couldn’t in the thesis proper due to word count/flow.

These sections essentially function as a module would for Volume Two, save that they operate deliberately inside one book volume rather than dividing it up into separate modules (a tenable goal, given my thesis volume is quite a bit shorter than Volume Twos various modules); i.e., Volume Zero comprises Sex Positivity‘s entire thesis argument, ones whose body divides up into the three larger sections previously described. Individually they make up the primary sections/chapters of each larger element for Volume Zero. A given element usually contains multiple chapters, subchapters, and so on (though nowhere near as many as Volume Two’s various sub-volumes do).

Cover model: Bay

Volume Summary

The thesis volume contains the complex theory of my book series; i.e., its various lists of interconnected theoretical devices, as well as the entirety of specialized keywords, all of which I unpack and explain in order. To that, it contains my author’s foreword, a small essay on the performance and paradox of power (“Notes on Power”), as well as my book’s manifesto tree (scaffold of oppositional praxis), thesis argument[1] on Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, “camp map” and symposium; it uses them to encompass, then articulate, the entirety of my book’s theoretical content, using a variety of cited material and keywords (e.g., the Gothic, monstrous-feminine, and Amazonomachia) to delve into its broadest/most common arguments as deeply as possible. Written based on years of independent research—as well as older blogposts, essays, and my master’s thesis—Volume Zero essentially operates as my PhD on Metroidvania and ludo-Gothic BDSM but also my total curriculum, which can be simplified as needed when being taught to others in more anecdotal, everyday forms.

[1] (a summary of the thesis paragraph from the thesis volume): “Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes everything under a heteronormative, settler-colonial scheme, one whose Cartesian myopia of Capitalist Realism must be escaped from; i.e., via a deliberate iconoclasm that liberates sex workers (or sexualized workers) under Capitalism through sex-positive art.”

approximate volume length (minus the paratextual documents): ~226,000 words/651 pages and ~474 unique images

Note: I released Volume Zero before I started using text wrapping formatting around images; i.e., the page counts (from the original PDF file) are a bit higher than they would be otherwise/are a bit misleading. —Perse

Concerning Keywords/the Volume’s Age

“What does this key unlock?” —Conan, Conan the Destroyer (1984)

(artist: Moxxy Sting)

Before we dive into my thesis volume, let me provide a belated note about keywords and the volume’s age, included here (and inside the promotion):

First, keywords. Back in late 2023, I originally wrote Volume Zero as an encyclopedia of terms; i.e., keywords to unpack in relation to other terms, all of which I either borrowed from elsewhere and modified, or coined myself; re (from the full, PDF version of the paratext “What I Won’t Exhibit” not found on my website’s “Paratextual Documents” page):

In this disclaimer and the entire thesis volume, I have emboldened and color-coded keywords (rather than opt for italics/underlining, which I generally utilize for emphasis). Generally this is done when first introducing them, but also when I am about to define/am currently defining or otherwise stressing their involvement (I will also do this as a graphical aid to showcase when a bunch of keywords are being used in tandem, especially during the thesis statement). Regardless of when I do, it’s meant to clue you in that we’re discussing words that have specific definitions that are about to be expanded on or otherwise invoked (at the present time or later in the document) or reinvoked after they have already been explained. Also, while this only happens a few times, a couple of phrases aren’t in the glossary because I haven’t been able to define some of the more niche or incidental expressions (usually idioms or figures of speech); this is something I’d like to address in a future, second edition.

In hindsight, this might seem like a good thing to have explained or otherwise included in my blog-style book promotions. However, while not on purpose, I nonetheless forgot to include this explanation inside them; i.e., because Volume Zero is really the only book volume that even uses the keyword system throughout its entirety! Furthermore, this volume was likewise written before I started serializing my books in a blog-style format to begin with (all the PDFs contain the explanation, cited above, near the very start of their documents); i.e., with it being released in October 2023 and my first book promotion, “Brace for Impact,” not happening until April 2024.

To it, I’m not sure how well Volume Zero will translate to said format, but I want to try anyways; i.e., you can always just download the PDF on my one-page book promo and use its bookmark system and Ctrl + F to jump around. Both will make your life much easier when tackling this very dense volume; i.e., it was specifically written with doing so in mind, including accessing the full series glossary to help readers parse Volume Zero’s many sequences of words, each being listed and explained one after another (words in lists, and lists upon lists).

(artist: Moxxy Sting)

Second, the volume’s age. I released Volume Zero first and it shows; i.e., despite being what was essentially my PhD in admittedly independent form, doing so was never meant to be a shield from criticism (academia or otherwise), but a staging point for what I built off its unfinished arguments. I’ll be the first to admit, Volume Zero was researched for years (nearly a decade) but written over a very short period (roughly a month); i.e., it was always intended, from the outset, to be holistic-but-messy. The magic it still offers despite this lies in its pure assemblage of raw thesis material—material I would go on to do much more solid thesis work with, in my later books. The core strength of Volume Zero, then, lies in the constellation of ideas put forth; i.e., surrounding my basic thesis argument: that Capitalism sexualizes everything and that we must camp it (and its canon) to not only survive, but liberate ourselves with gusto (on the Aegis, above and below)! There’s no shortage of ideas, in that respect.

Some get more time and focus, thus more development (e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain vis-à-vis Metroidvania and the palliative Numinous), and some are given just enough introduction to bloom far more substantially in later volumes (e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM and the dialectic of the alien chasing the Numinous as a Communist force). There’s plenty to be proud of, here, but plenty to critique, as well. The good news is, any critiques about a lack of development can usually be addressed by directing naysayers towards my later books; e.g., regarding Metroidvania and ludo-Gothic BDSM. Even so, the volume’s biggest weakness is that it often touches on ideas it hasn’t fully been able to crystalize (what Dale Townshend might call “all over the shop”). Conversely, its core thesis argument is incredibly productive (as are many of its other ideas surrounding its rich speculative value). But the volume’s format is definitely love it or hate it; i.e., I was still figuring how to format when writing it, and have since gone on to do things quite differently for my later books. There’s not much I can do about that, here, short of entirely rewriting Volume Zero, and I’d sooner saw off my left foot, Audition-style.

(artist: Moxxy Sting)

To conclude, this volume—more than the series it started—has a great many keywords it presents holistically and intersectionally across a series of concentric charts (often one per chapter). For many of those, the exact order you encounter them is far less important than how you weigh them together afterwards; it will feel soupy and unfinished in spots, because much of what it suggests wouldn’t be finished for months, going on years afterwards—i.e., when meeting newer models, the list growing from a handful to over sixty as time went on (with Moxxy being one of my most recent additions). As such, this book volume’s experimental nature was intended to be read in various directions, not simply from top to bottom. Treat it as such and I think you’ll get more out of it. So if it seems like I don’t mention a keyword right away if at all, rest assured, I will get to it eventually (in this volume or others)! And if something is absent, there’s always the full book glossary contained in each PDF file (and on my website). Hop to it, nerds! —Perse, 3/21/2025

On the Cusp (opening)

Opening Summary

The opening to Volume Zero is the material before the thesis proper.

Posts

  • -1. “Thesis Volume (Volume Zero)” (volume opening): A short little blurb before the foreword—one outlined the entire volume. Opening Length: ~2 pages.
  • 0a. “Author’s Foreword: “On Giving Birth,” the Wisdom of the Ancients, and Afterbirth” (included with volume opening): A foreword dedicated to my conceptualizing of Gothic Communism; i.e., by playing with the Wisdom of the Ancients much like Mary Shelley did: as a cultural understanding of the imaginary past to understand in duality (specifically dialectical materialism, in our case, but with a strong social-sexual component). To it, I describe my own pregnancy with such dark materials—as a trans woman giving birth as such, producing my own monstrous progeny in relative short order (a brevity and productivity the afterword remarks upon; i.e., as I was writing it, and anticipating future book volumes that had either not been written or fully fleshed out yet). Length: ~51 pages.
  • 0b. “Concerning Keywords” (included with volume opening): A 2025 afterthought (the same one cited above) explaining the volume’s age, but also its keyword system and how it mostly only appears in Volume Zero. Length: ~2 pages.
  • 1. “Volume Outline/Summary of the Thesis Volume, “Camp Map” and Symposium Divisions/Subdivisions“: Outlines the remainder of the volume’s largest portions. Length: ~3 pages.
  • 2. “Notes on Power (paradox) and Liminal Expression (doubles)” (included with “Volume Outline”): Paradox and liminal expression come up constantly in Sex Positivity. Said essay discusses how power is theatrical, and plays off paradox and liminal expression (doubles) to develop Gothic Communism. Specifically it examines Gothic Communism’s campy ancestor/palimpsest, Paradise Lost (1667) and its complex relationship to future works that likewise have adopted theatrical Amazonomachia, paradox, and artistic/pornographic liminal (monstrous) expressions that speak truth to power—i.e., through “darkness visible” (the Gothic imagination) but also “darkness deliberate” as performatively mired in the self-same classical allusions: actively utilizing the Gothic convention of fetishes and clichés as class-conscious, thus of the devil’s party and knowing it (unlike Milton; our revolution cannot be accidental if we are to survive). Length: ~30 pages.

The Thesis Proper (pretext, statement, body and segue)

Thesis Summary

My thesis proper as a statement to introduce, then argue against canon with. Said introduction includes various foundational elements, upon which my core thesis argument rests, and whose body extends into two segues before the “camp map” (which focuses on camping canon): the roots of camp and praxial inertia (obstacles to heed, mid-praxis).

Posts

  • 3. “Thesis Proper: Concerning Canon” (section opening): Part one of the thesis volume, which outlines canon; i.e., what we’ll be camping in part two of the volume. Opening Length: ~1 pages.
    • 3a. “On Twin Trees; or, “Taking the Trees Back during Oppositional Praxis”: the Superstructure and Base; Tolkien vs Milton; and Our Manifesto Tree” (included with section opening): A small section dedicated to determining the difference, mid-synthesis, between canon and camp; i.e., using Tolkien and Milton’s Biblical devices in fantasy forms (twin trees) that have extended dialectically materially into the present vis-à-vis Marx’ Base and Superstructure argument. Apart from isolating such iconic structural dualities for us to abstract or reify and play with ourselves, “Twin Trees” highlights the Manifesto Tree of Oppositional Praxis originates; re: as seen in “Paratextual Documents.” Because of the section on Tolkien and Milton (and its overall brevity-yet-importance), I will be posting the entire section in this promotion. Length: ~18 pages.
    • 3a. “The Four Gs: Our Main Gothic Theories” (included with section opening): Our four main Gothic theories, which present identically in “Paratextual Documents” save for a small introduction and conclusion. Length: ~7 pages.
    • 3b. “Doubles, Dark Forces, and Paradox; or into the Shadow Zone: Where We Currently Are and Where We’re Going Deeper Into” (included with section opening): A short essay that considers the performative, liminal paradoxical nature of power and trauma; i.e., as something to perform, generally within the Gothic mode having power and trauma sharing the same half-real venue; re: of exploitation and liberation achieved during ludo-Gothic BDSM. The essay considers this proposition with The Flight of Dragons (1982), but likewise invites the reader to extend such argumentation to any form of media one could dream of. Length: ~19 pages.
    • 3c. “Thesis Statement: the Gothic Mode and Its Reclamation” (sub-section opening): A one-page synopsis that organizes the thesis proper into a spool of elements to unfurl; i.e., unpacking and applying its paragraph and body to the Manifesto Tree (which we also unpack), followed by the roots of camp itself as reclaimed from older Gothic devices and challenges; re: Radcliffe’s Demon BDSM (a precursor to my ludo-Gothic variety) and various other tools (e.g., the Black Veil and exquisite torture) seeking to overcome praxial inertia when developing Gothic Communism ourselves. Opening Length: ~1 page.

(artist: Nyx)

      • 3c0. “Two Years Later (give or take): Returning to My Thesis Argument after Five Books” (included with sub-section opening): Composed of new and cited material, this 2025 addendum accounts for the undeveloped portions of my thesis argument. To it, said reprise deliberately covers the work I wrote after my thesis volume was completed (whose argument I would steadily build on across four-going-on-five additional books, especially regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM and its tremendous utility when challenging Capitalism). Length:~10 pages.
      • 3c1. “Thesis Paragraph: Capitalism Sexualizes Everything” (included with sub-section opening): Contains my entire book’s central argument, distilled into one paragraph (and provides the full definition of heteronormativity). Length: ~6 pages.
      • 3c2. “Thesis Body: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism vs the State; or, Galatea inside the Shadow of Pygmalion” (included with sub-section opening): Summarizes Gothic Communism’s primary foil, the state—specifically its monopoly of violence, state of exception and Protestant work ethic in relation to the historical materialism of the state’s propaganda (canon); i.e., canon’s monomyth, Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern and narrative of the crypt amounting to the Shadow of Pygmalion. Length: ~53 pages.
      • 3c3. “Pieces of the Camp Map (from the Manifesto Tree)“: Unpacks the main sections from the manifesto tree in relation to oppositional praxis; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm (camp). Length: ~63 pages.
      • 3c4. “The Roots of Camp: Reclaiming Demon BDSM and Radcliffe’s Tricky Tools“: Examines canonical demon BDSM and Radcliffe’s fiction/tricky tools as popular literary devices that desperately need to be camped (with ludo-Gothic BDSM—a concept we’ll introduce during the “camp map” and explore much, much more in Volumes One, Two and Three). Length: ~28 pages.
      • 3c5. “Overcoming Praxial Inertia: Straw Dogs and Canon’s Teeth in the Night“: Explores some popular examples of canonical, monomyth Beowulf-style heroes and the threat they represent as also needing to be camped (re [from Volume One, onwards]: to have nature’s monstrous-feminine revenge—specifically the whore’s [from Volume Two’s Demon Module]—against profit and the state pimping them). Length: ~36 pages.

The “Camp Map”

“Camp Map” Summary

The argumentation of my thesis argument; i.e., when camping the canon, as borrowed from Colin Broadmoor’s “Camping the Canon: Matthew Lewis, Milton, & The Monk” (2021) and retooled specifically for our purposes—when developing Gothic Communism, ourselves!

Posts

  • 4. “The ‘Camp Map’: Camping the Canon” (section opening): The original summary of the “camp map” and its various argumentative elements workers use; i.e., when camping canon themselves. Opening Length: ~3 pages.
    • 4a. “‘Camp Map’; or ‘Make it Gay,’ part one: Scouting the Field” (included with section opening): Explores camp as a counterterrorist activity in relation to state terrorism, and outlines various monster types featured in its exhibits (e.g., femboys, catgirls, himbos, Amazons, etc). It also outlines the Gothic argumentation of oppositional rhetoric for or against the state when making its own monsters to kill, or kill with, normally in defense of capital but for us through a means of performative resistance; i.e., a variety of reclaimed scapegoats within the process of abjection’s canonical reactions, which reify along the Cartesian Revolution’s criminogenesis of said monsters, but especially within the cartographic ludologizing of Tolkien’s refrain: the treasure map. Length: ~42 pages.
    • 4b. “Concerning Rape Play: a 2025 Note on My Development of Ludo-Gothic BDSM” (has its own page): A short new addendum. Briefly considers the development (and application) of Ludo-Gothic BDSM since formally introducing the concept, in October 2023. Length: ~11 pages.
    • 4c. ” part two: “Camping Tolkien’s Refrain using Metroidvania, or the Map is a Lie: the Quest for Power inside Cameron’s Closed Space (and other shooters)” (sub-section opening): Explores the interrogation of power in relation to Gothic space (castles) but especially in videogames (shooters, High Fantasy and Metroidvania). It also interrogates Tolkien’s refrain through the conceptualization of Cameron’s refrain (the shooter); i.e., not through the FPS, but the Metroidvania—a particular kind of third-person shooter (TPS)/castle space that (along with the monsters inside) can be camped, but also achieves immense catharsis through honest and profound theatrical evocations of psychosexual trauma: a palliative Numinous and fairly negotiated (thus sex-positive) ludo-Gothic BDSM achieved by remaking Gothic castles, thus negotiating the unequal power lurking inside an iconoclastic castle or castle-like space. Opening Length: ~7 pages.
      • 4c1. “‘The Map Is a Lie’: the Quest for Power inside Cameron’s Closed Space—Origins and Lineage” (included with sub-section opening): Camping the quest for power where power is centralized—which Tolkien largely tried to sidestep on his own questing formulas and maps and which Cameron jumped headlong into—takes two parts to accomplish; i.e., insofar as I conceptualized the method per “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” then applied it myself, in Volume Zero. Part one unpacks my own real-life quest to understand power as something to map, reassemble and interrogate (so you can understand my thought process and what guided it towards where we are now). Length: ~30 pages.
      • 4c2. “The Map Is a Lie: the Quest for Power inside Cameron’s Closed Space—Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp“: Part two of camping the quest for power (re: the palliative numinous), this section explores playing with power to camp the quest for power in our own lives; i.e., through our own creations/performances’ ludo-Gothic BDSM that interrogate power on maps/castles that resemble Tolkien’s or Cameron’s (on paper) but play out very differently in practice. Length: ~74 pages.
    • 4d. ” part three: “Shining a Light on Things, or How to Make Monsters: Reclaiming Our Lost Power by Putting the Pussy on the Chainwax“: Considers the making of monsters and goes over more monster types (nurses, xenomorphs and other phallic women); i.e., as ludo-Gothic BDSM’s creative foil to Ann Radcliffe’s usual unironic rape fantasies. It also explores how to personify labor action through the making of monsters as a reversal of abjection, thus profit; i.e., through a Satanic poetry whose infernal polity challenges the authority of a heavenly or otherwise sacred establishment, but often in incredibly funny ways; e.g., Key and Peele’s immortal phrase: “Put the pussy on the chainwax!” (Key & Peele’s “Pussy on the Chainwax,” 2013). Length: ~33 pages.
    • 4e. ” part four: “The Finale; or ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n Roll!’(ludo-Gothic BDSM in practice, feat. Blxxd Bunny and The Scorpions): Puts all of these ideas to the test, the prototype for ludo-Gothic BDSM executed by my friend Blxxd Bunny and I; i.e., using our bodies, labor and Satanic apostacy to camp the canon, effectively making its sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll gay and Gothic (while keeping the first three sections of the “camp map” in mind). Discusses vis-à-vis stochastic popular media, including The Scorpions. Length: ~30 pages.

Volume Conclusion

Conclusion Summary

The third and final portion to Volume Zero, which largely ties up loose ends (and introduces new ones) before transitioning into the manifesto (re: Volume One).

Posts

  • 5. “Follow the Sign: Thesis Conclusion, or ‘Death by Snu-Snu'” (included with “Symposium: Aftercare,” below): A short conclusion to the “camp map” that explores the paradox of activism disguised as play before segueing into the symposium proper. Length: ~11 pages.
  • 6. “Symposium: Aftercare; What Is the Gothic?“: A series of in-text seminars that tries to unpack various ideas a bit more fully than my thesis argument was able to, during the thesis proper and “camp map” portions. Length: ~51 pages.
  • 7. “In Closing: A Gay New World” (included with “Symposium: Aftercare,” above): A short conclusion for the volume/segue into Volume One. Length: ~7 pages.

(artist: Bay)


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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-FiPatreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Disclaimer

(disclaimer exhibit: Artist: Harmony Corrupted, who provided me with various materials from her Fansly account to use [with her permission] in my book, including cum photos. For those of legal age who enjoy Harmony’s work and want to see more than this website provides, consider subscribing to her Fansly account and then ordering a custom/tipping through her Ko-Fi. You won’t be disappointed!)

“If it was not good, it was true; if it was not artistic, it was sincere; if it was in bad taste, it was on the side of life.”

—Henry Miller, on criticism and the Supreme-Court-level lawsuit he received for writing The Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Regarding This Book’s Artistic/Pornographic Nudity and Sexual Content: Sex Positivity thoroughly discusses sexuality in popular media, including fetishes, kinks, BDSM, Gothic material, and general sex work; the illustrations it contains have been carefully curated and designed to demonstrate my arguments. It also considers pornography to be art, examining the ways that sex-positive art makes iconoclastic statements against the state. As such, Sex Positivity contains visual examples of sex-positive/sex-coercive artistic nudity borrowed from publicly available sources to make its educational/critical arguments. Said nudity has been left entirely uncensored for those purposes. While explicitly criminal sexual acts, taboos and obscenities are discussed herein, no explicit illustrations thereof are shown, nor anything criminal; i.e., no snuff porn, child porn or revenge porn. It does examine things generally thought of as porn that are unironically violent. Examples of uncensored, erotic artwork and sex work are present, albeit inside exhibits that critique the obscene potential (from a legal standpoint) of their sexual content: “ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse” (source: Justice.gov). For instance, there is an illustrated example of uncensored semen—a “breeding kink” exhibit with zombie unicorns and werewolves (exhibit 87a)—that I’ve included to illustrate a particular point, but its purposes are ultimately educational in nature.

The point of this book isn’t to be obscene for its own sake, but to educate the broader public (including teenagers*) about sex-positive artwork and labor historically treated as obscene by the state. For the material herein to be legally considered obscene it would have to simultaneously qualify in three distinct ways (aka the “Miller” test):

  • appeal to prurient interests (i.e., an erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion)
  • attempt to depict or describe sexual conduct in a patently offensive way (i.e., ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse)
  • lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

Taken as a whole, this book discusses debatably prurient material in an academic manner, depicting and describing sexual conduct in a non-offensive way for the express purpose of education vis-à-vis literary-artistic-political enrichment.

*While this book was written for adults—provided to them through my age-gated website—I don’t think it should be denied from curious teenagers through a supervising adult. The primary reason I say this (apart from the trauma-writing sections, which are suitably intense and grave) is that the academic material can only be simplified so far and teenagers probably won’t understand it entirely (which is fine; plenty of books are like that—take years to understand more completely). As for sexually-developing readers younger than 16 (ages 10-15), I honestly think there are far more accessible books that tackle the same basic subject matter more quickly at their reading level. All in all, this book examines erotic art and sex positivity as an alternative to the sex education currently taught (or deliberately not taught) in curricular/extracurricular spheres. It does so in the hopes of improving upon canonical tutelage through artistic, dialectical-material analysis. 

Fair Use: This book is non-profit, and its artwork is meant for education, transformation and critique. For those reasons, the borrowed materials contained herein fall under Fair Use. All sources come from popular media: movies, fantasy artist portfolios, cosplayer shoots, candid photographs, and sex worker catalogs intended for public viewing. Private material has only been used with a collaborating artist’s permission (for this book—e.g., Blxxd Bunny‘s OF material or custom shoots; or as featured in a review of their sex work on my website with their consent already given from having done past work together—e.g., Miss Misery).

Concerning the Exhibit Numbers and Parenthetical Dates: I originally wrote this book as one text, not four volumes. Normally I provide a publication year per primary text once per text—e.g., “Alien (1979)”—but this would mean having to redate various texts in Volumes One, Two and Three after Volume Zero. I have opted out of doing this. Likewise, the exhibit numbers are sequential for the entire book, not per volume; references to a given exhibit code [exhibit 11b2 or 87a] will often refer to exhibits not present in the current volume. I have not addressed this in the first edition of my book, but might assemble a future annotated list in a second edition down the road.

Concerning Hyperlinks: Those that make the source obvious or are preceded by the source author/title will simply be supplied “as is.” This includes artist or book names being links to themselves, but also mere statements of fact, basic events, or word definitions where the hyperlink is the word being defined. Links to sources where the title is not supplied in advance or whose content is otherwise not spelled out will be supplied next to the link in parentheses (excluding Wikipedia, save when directly quoting from the site). One, this will be especially common with YouTube essayists I cite to credit them for their work (though sometimes I will supply just the author’s name; or their name, the title of the essay and its creation year). Two, concerning YouTube links and the odds of videos being taken down, these are ultimately provided for supplementary purposes and do not actually need to be viewed to understand my basic arguments; I generally summarize their own content into a single sentence, but recommend you give any of the videos themselves a watch if you’re curious about the creators’ unique styles and perspectives about a given topic.

Concerning (the PDF) Exhibit Image Quality: This book contains over 1,000 different images, which—combined with the fact that Microsoft Word appears to compress images twice (first, in-document images and second, when converting to PDFs) along with the additional hassle that is WordPress’ limitations on accepting uploaded PDFs (which requires me to compress the PDF again—has resulted in sub-par image quality for the exhibit images themselves. To compensate, all of the hyperlinks link to the original sources where the source images can be found. Sometimes, it links to the individual images, other times to the entire collage, and I try to offer current working links; however, the ephemeral, aliased nature of sex work means that branded images do not always stay online, so some links (especially those to Twitter/X accounts) won’t always lead to a source if the original post is removed.

Concerning Aliases: Sex workers survive through the use of online aliases and the discussion of their trauma requires a degree of anonymity to protect victims from their actual/potential abusers. This book also contains trauma/sexual anecdotes from my own life; it discusses my friends, including sex workers and the alter egos/secret identities they adopt to survive “in the wild.” Keeping with that, all of the names in this book are code names (except for mine, my late Uncle Dave’s and his ex-wife Erica’s—who are only mentioned briefly by their first names). Models/artists desiring a further degree of anonymity (having since quit the business, for example) have been given a codename other than their former branded identity sans hyperlinks (e.g., Jericho).

Extended, Book-Wide Trigger Warning: This entire book thoroughly discusses xenophobia, harmful xenophilia (necrophilia, pedophilia, zoophilia, etc), homophobia, transphobia, enbyphobia, sexism, racism, race-/LGBTQ-related hate crimes/murder and domestic abuse; child abuse, spousal abuse, animal abuse, misogyny and sexual abuse towards all of these groups; power abuse, rape (date, marital, prison, etc), discrimination, war crimes, genocide, religious/secular indoctrination and persecution, conversion therapy, manmade ecological disasters, and fascism.