This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “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.

Click here to see “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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 (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.

Nature Is Food, the finale: A Problem of “Knife Dicks,” or Humanizing the Harvest; Hammering Swords into Ploughshares (feat. racist porn and fat bodies)

All hear my warning:
Never turn your back
On the Ripper! (source)

—Rob Halford; “The Ripper” on Judas Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny (1976)

Picking up where “A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in Rape Culture” left off…

Having addressed Cartesian trauma as alienizing and fetishizing nature in dimorphized, heteronormative forms, the symposium finale considers the root of the problem—the knife dick—followed by its solution; i.e., by subverting the mechanisms of Cartesian abjection in racialized porn normally fetishizing nature as a fat-and-sassy bitch (demon, whore, etc) needing to be tamed, thus carved up while fucking her with the knife. Settler colonialism conflates sex and harm within a lack of consent burdened with genocidal overtones: the harvest. We need to humanize it with ludo-Gothic BDSM while acknowledging the sharpness of the blades we’re transforming.

To that, let’s quickly exhibit the knife dick/demon lover in these unironic rape/torture fantasies, then examine how the penis (and other body parts/phenotypes—fat bodies and dark skin), despite being normalized into alien fetishes during canonical porn, can—through informed, iconoclastic acts of praxial synthesis—prevent traumatic penetration’s symbolic proliferation, and with it, Cartesian violence against nature by its usual jailors; i.e., by using our own bodies in highly subversive forms of “strict” monstrous pornography and ludo-Gothic BDSM starting from these earlier points:

(exhibit 31: The bogeymen and bogeywomen for and [sometimes] against Patriarchal Capitalism/Cartesian dualism generally orbit around rape/sexual violence as synonymized with sexual activity at large; i.e., implements of torture that suggest [or explicitly perform] a biologically essentialized erotic function associated with psychosexual human bodies and their assorted compulsions, stigmas and fetishes. These historically-materially divide into a gender binary that GNC dialogs must challenge, subverting cis-het expectations of rape and violence within, and outside of, these fictions.

Top: Thoroughly broken, many men who cannot enjoy women—only “murder to dissect” them in cold, child-like curiosity [and boredom] in between hunts. As bourgeois agents—e.g., police, witches, detectives, et al—become “rabid,” men/man-like entities fuck their victims like Pavlovian chattel animals, coerced to give and receive violence, not love. This has the added effect of scaring women into “good girls” who hide indoors and don’t try to make money for themselves using what they got.

Bottom: The women who detect and investigate these braindead cretins often belong to problematic media, themselves; i.e., true crime [of which it, and the Radcliffean tradition it stems from, I took no prisoners towards during the thesis volume]. Fragile and superstitious—like Arthur’s knights cowering in utter terror before the awesome might of the killer rabbit [a pagan symbol of fertility]—nothing is more terrifying to a canonical warrior [overcompensating for his own broken brain and dick with literal knives and swords] than a moderate-to-well-educated woman-of-means who doesn’t need to rely on men to keep her safe, say nothing of trans folk and other minorities united together through worker solidarity! United against Capitalism, rebellious workers can collectively expose the cowardice of oft-male class traitors for the sad, mind-raped torturers of nature they embody alongside token ones.

To that, historical self-preservation makes for strange bedfellows. For example, TERFs are a liminal category pushed into a radical position of “home defense” by past brushes with trauma [re: canonical dick-measuring—their “cocks” are bigger than other women’s, but not men’s]. We’ll explore these “bad-faith” or unwitting [“sleeper agent”] detectives, witches and she-warriors in Volume Three, but for now just remember that phallic women embody/confront the myth that women cannot stab their victims or become class traitors through Cartesian abjection; they absolutely can. Medusa—a famous female being of nature—revives as the furious, indiscriminate rapist of civilized men and women alike: ancient hysteria as “phallic” cosmic destroyer of the nuclear home [a scapegoat].

Rape play and Radcliffe’s Black Veil, then, are essentially a giant gaslight that ludo-Gothic BDSM must camp while feeling its affects; i.e., knife [dick] play dealing with “wandering womb” variants of vaso vagal personified: an unruly whorish jouster to fear and punish to harvest nature as monstrous-feminine, per the usual monomyth pimpings of the Medusa. But such monopolies are impossible, making the whore’s chance at revenge all the more tantalizing with a strict aesthetic as much as a gentle one during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

[artist, left: Stephanie Drew; right: Jan Rockitnik]

In Zofloya, Victoria famously stabs Lilla to death. Written by a white, cis-het woman, the story’s confrontation occurs between two women, testifying to marginalized in-fighting during a moralized conflict: cis-het [often white] women fear rape, see the penis as rape, and use the “penis” to rape their prescribed enemies: trans people. And yet, given the universal adaptability of gender and “darkness” in Gothic stories, Dacre’s symbols yield countless interpretations.

For example, within queer dialogics, symbols of the battered woman can either be Lilla cowering in fear or Victora advancing on her with an open blade, stabbing and destroying “her” idea of weakness as conditioned into her by men: the diminutive feminine. The idea of stabbing that to death might seem symbolic in a purely abstract sense, but the historical-material reality is that abused women are frequently weaponized and mislead by Patriarchal forces against other women—i.e., to see softness as weak, or as an imposter that must be outted and slain [the “woman” with a penis]. It becomes paranoid, but also kill-or-be-killed. In fascist circles, “monstrous-feminine” accounts for anything man is not; in centrist circles, it’s anything that protests or commits abuse; in leftist circles, it’s one of survival against either of those things by using the same shared language: the knife and penis as ontologically confused. Except, while I like being a little princess dominated by Dark Amazon/Gothic aesthetics, I don’t actually want to be abused by my partner[s]. Even if my preference towards mommy doms were “strict” instead of “gentle,” being a strict dom or sadist never gives you to the right to harm your partner.)

Knife dicks (and similar weapons) are the so-called “virgin-killer” (one cannot have sex using a dagger for a penis, only rape) being secretly terrified by powerful women/monstrous-feminine types and—to borrow from Monty Python (again)—”desperately needing to be confused” (“Confuse-a-Cat,” 1969). Like, maybe fascists could learn something from the rabbit instead of blowing it up with the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch (a very bad habit)? In the interim, the Patriarchy’s natural/material toys and games “overcompensate” in violent, often knife-like bombast that compels the status quo through a gradient of veiled/exposed threats and explosive executions of social-sexual violence through Cartesian (thus rapacious) synthesis. The visible result isn’t just small knives, but big knives/multiple knives and a canonical treatment of them towards nature through fear and dogma when faced with settler-colonial trauma; i.e., “I was hurt in the past, but now I will hurt others to avoid that pain in the future”; e.g., Ellen Ripley.

The paradox of this entire arsenal is impotency—a social-sexual inability to actually bond with women/minorities as fellow workers, all of whom Capitalism frames as alien, animal, the enemy per Cartesian thought; i.e., the white rabbit as something to fear, not follow and certainly not someone to learn from. The physical effect on men (and token enforcers) is often literal impotence—a curious, often tragically sad inability “to get it up” unless dominating someone through threats, or executions of, authoritative force. A cultural desire to “be the man” radicalizes male/tokenized workers into more and more monstrous worker roles. Said roles condition men and other class traitors/state torturers to become easily-threatened by nature and those of it as abject, functioning as such through the holistic disempowerment of alienizing positions.

In turn, Cartesian proponents blanch at our social-sexual habits as cultivated by us, including calculated risk and informed consent, but also worker identity-through-struggle as something the state tries to commodify, thus project its trauma, abuse and complicit attitudes on. To that, our own identities and behaviors must become like Athena’s Aegis; i.e., a black mirror that paralyzes the state through revolutionary cryptonymy by showing them (and us) their true fragility in the face of ridiculously “dangerous” things. Like brave, brave Sir Robin, the state’s sexist enforcers promptly recoil and soil themselves the first moment the rabbit—normally a prey animal—bares its “sharp, pointy teeth” and draws blood. Remember, boys, it’s only a flesh wound!

(concept art from Dragon’s Crown, 2013)

Like a killer rabbit, “the enemy is both weak and strong.” And though language is naturally fluid, Capitalism—like a deck within a house of cards—mixes canonical metaphors to defend itself with (whereas Gothic Communism furtively swaps in iconoclastic doubles to undermine Capitalism’s hold on worker minds). In order to fortify their own tenuous, absurd positions under Capitalism, fascist ‘fraidy-cats install various superstitions informed by their own menticide and broad canonical praxis interacting back and forth over time; i.e., moral panic as increasingly vengeful against nature, blaming anyone except for those actually responsible for rape as an ongoing apology: the state, but also the state’s actors.

To this, canonical “decks” shuffle and exchange cards, doing anything they can to, as Meerloo’s Rape of the Mind describes it, turn words into “verbocratic” emotional triggers/conditioners instead of sources of independent thought

Propagandistic lies and catchphrases are an inexorable feature of totalitarianism. Repeated countless times from countless angles, the effect is to drill the desired thinking until accepted as truth. “Double talk” characterizes much of the narrative, with words like “freedom” [or witch] redefined to support the lies [e.g., of the witch as dangerous]. Words become emotional triggers and conditioners instead of sources of independent thought (source).

“Verbocracy” historically-materially crystalizes through various Cartesian-coded behaviors the state encourages through bourgeois propaganda in all its forms—the knife dick as something to brandish. This “saber-rattling” becomes something to challenge through our own praxial synthesis during liminal expression; e.g., porn and monsters as things to camp, thus raise awareness about rape through our bodies as things to gossip with in opposition to state education as endlessly repeated; i.e., Cartesian dualism as predicated on raping the natural world through “unthinking” (according to Descartes) extensions of said world (the paradox being that so-called “thinking beings” become knee-jerk killers who don’t think at all; they react).

I want to end this section of the roadmap—and by extension conclude Volume One—through a series of four exhibits that examine rape in pornographic, liminal expression; i.e., as a transgressive commentary on human bodies that can synthesize proletarian praxis, mid-opposition, counteracting the state’s Cartesian takes on porn to blunt their proverbial knife dicks. Just as liminality is expressed through conflict within thresholds and on the surface of things, pornography is generally controlled and fought over by those who wish to compel profit through binary sexuality versus those who want to liberate sex and gender from the state’s heteronormative constraints using Gothic expression. The emphasis of these exhibits is racialized; i.e., the gender binary as settler-colonial in ways that stress a racialized character from bodies of different skin colors (exhibits 32a and b), physical types (skinny vs fat, exhibit 32c) and monstrous forms of expression (vampires, exhibit 32d) that speak to Cartesian trauma as something to live with and prevent in the future.

Sex-coercive BDSM actually includes a gradient of impotence echoed in canonical porn pastiche; i.e., not just “knife dicks,” but someone “under” the state worker—a slave or token class traitor (which is basically a slave)—aping the blade: “prison sex” mentality. Under this mindset, an unwilling third can be conditioned to fuck another worker the way the state, thus the privileged worker, wants them to: according to the torturer’s canonical, alien-fetishistic worldview (and fatal promised glory, post-slaughter[1]) handed to them like a knife by the state, then synonymized with their biology as “all they are.” Insect politics.

(artist: Pancake Pornography)

One “card” in the state’s aforementioned “deck,” then, is racialized fetishization through traumatic penetration; i.e., the BBC as an internalized, “fattened” metaphor for phallic implements of state terror by black men against women (and other recipients) but classically white women. Originally on the plantations and colonies of the antebellum American South, the white man’s toxic view of the black man’s “giant animal cock” historically has become slave canon, post hoc—mythologized and repurposed to be turned on white women as a fearful prophecy fulfilled through sex-coercive rituals, then gargoyle-ish abstractions and extensions of those rituals: female gargoyles attacking perceptions of rape inside but also outside white populations, becoming vigilantes during interracial rape fantasies where they embody givers and receivers of sexual abuse in terrifying forms (state terror as a weapon). The cock needn’t literally be black, even—simply “too big” to be considered “white” within settler-colonial models, thus able to cause pain relative to traumatic penetration as something to threaten in oft-Gothic forms: being too big(size queens notwithstanding).

(artist: Slugbox)

Ludo-Gothic BDSM plays with rape, hence its clichés as urban legends (re: the chronotope, including less medieval-looking versions of the embodiment and/or localization of the Western home).Echoes of nightly slave abuse, then, have survived into the present—first lauded by powerful men like Woodrow Wilson towards D. W. Griffith’s aforementioned “black, rebellious slaves violate white women” rape fantasy, The Birth of a Nation, followed by Giger’s xenomorph as a postcolonial “lawn jockey” later crystalized by 1980s’ porn hauntologies (below). Something for moderates to preserve and for reactionaries to return to, said porn becomes an unironic product to consume and embody through canonical praxis; and it is precisely this kind of pornography we must de facto synthesize into healthier forms of sex-positive education (counterterror) during ludo-Gothic BDSM (re: “Concerning Big Black Dicks“):

(exhibit 32a: Artists: Victoria Paris and Sean Michaels. Since I’m writing about oppositional praxis as liminal expression [the execution of dialectical-material theory within thresholds] in porn pastiche, here’s a collage thereof: the black star athlete enjoying his forbidden prize, the white blonde in wifely silks. They kiss, then begin, him removing her panties and starting to fuck her. From every angle you can think of, the camera is curious and invasive, showing you things normally left to the fearful-fascinated imagination. Literally “sex with the lights on,”  the makers have placed these sights behind a canonical paywall; i.e., in medieval language, it’s a Catholic “sale of indulgence” or return to canonical norms. Rejected by Martin Luther and Protestantism during the Iconoclasm, this only led to the Protestant work ethic and Puritanism through American labor during the 20th century—work being holy and sold sex being unholy but profitable. In turn, this oscillating schism remained curiously in place under Reagan’s tenure, a high time of profitability during the latter-end of the “Golden Age of Porn.” VHS offered up a mass-produced, widely disseminated reprieve from one’s holy work through a taste of unholy decadence, laziness and unlawful carnal knowledge: blondie likes that big black dick, not only taking all of it like a champ but fucking back, power-bottom style. The potential for camp, thus ludo-Gothic BDSM, is there.)

The above exhibit might seem “harmlessly” cliché, but Gothic canon treats “black” as synonymous with “aggressively violent and racist” according to repressed sexual desires in the 20th and 21st centuries; i.e., black men sleeping with white women as a common source of contention among reactionary white men (and their token subordinates) declaring a state of emergency spearheaded by foreign knife dicks: a crisis of unwanted black penetration against white women. While canonical porn is full of whitewashed appropriations like these, it reaches back to older conflicts in American history we must dig up and confront. Generally uglier things are proceeded by cryptonyms of various kinds, including sex; but sex is generally a part of the problem being discussed in psychosexual bedlam.

For example, before the Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the Reconstruction-era town had black-owned businesses and politicians—until a white-supremacist mob retaliated with violence. This included a local racist editorial printing malicious slander against the black population, saying the latter were the rapists of white women (and implying that having “sheathed black daggers,” the modesty of white women was compromised forever):

Newspapers meanwhile spread claims that African Americans wanted political power so they could sleep with white women, and made up lies about a rape epidemic. When Alexander Manly, owner and editor of the Wilmington Daily Record, published an editorial questioning the rape allegations and suggesting that white women slept with black men of their own free will, it enraged the Democratic party and made him the target of a hate campaign (source: Toby Luckhurst’s “Wilmington 1898,” 2021).

Afterward, the town exploded into violence, resulting in the only successful domestic coup in American history. The massacre included a machine gun-armed white mob targeting and killing people of color and their allies. Sound familiar? Kyle Rittenhouse and the Proud Boys are merely copycats in a long tradition of upholding racist violence in the United States. This is not a glitch, but the system defending itself through bad-faith arguments projecting state rape onto state victims. Any voice of the oppressed must occur through the same basic dialog—in short, because that’s where power is concerned, thus amounts to where people are already looking and surviving.

The blindness of such gazes can be undone through iconoclastic narratives that subvert rape; i.e. ironic or critical rape fantasies that remove the harmful capabilities of the knife dick as a settler-colonial tool. These aren’t always playful in an obvious sense. For instance, the Wilmington Massacre inspired Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Morrow of Tradition (1901), an Austen-style novel-of-manners that devolves into a horrible riot partway through due to escalating racial tensions inspired by a local white supremacist newspaper. This paradigm shift was codified—teased decades later, post-Civil Rights movement, by canonical ’80s wish fulfillment; i.e., of canonical American pornography as a widespread extension of unchecked systemic American racism. The general sentiment stems from Lost Cause, Jim Crow and white supremacy and extends into various future groups like the Proud Boys. This happens through canonical behaviors and sentiments; i.e., coded behaviors taught by porn as incredibly body-centric, but also divisive regarding nature as alien under Cartesian rule.

This brings us to a corporal threshold, one the elite—try as they might—cannot fully monopolize in demon BDSM linked to Satanic morphological expression; i.e., the body and its knife dick (or vagina dentata) as a poetic offshoot of a greater inhuman[2] presence; e.g., Medusa’s snakes, Lilith’s demons; Sauron’s orcs, the alien queen’s insect brood or Dagon’s spawn; Cain’s son Grendel, Dracula’s thralls, etc, that reproduce in non-heteronormative ways (sodomy effectively meaning “non-PIV sex”) to endlessly produce armies of invincible barbarians, which as “forces of darkness/nature-run-amok” (e.g., Alex Jones’ “gay frogs”) must be conquered by state champions during returning “hard times[3]” that demand the knife dick’s resumed employment (which promises a bloody harvest to enrich the state-in-decay to a former glorious position).

First, we’ll examine the elite’s attempts at monopoly through Cartesian domination, then our counterterrorist responses dulling their blades in relation to what they cannot fully control as ours for the taking: our bodies reversing the process of abjection, hence psychosexual expression tied to various alien body types embodying nature and dark godly power that, in iconoclastic hands, can sever themselves from heteronormative sexuality (several of which we explored already in the manifesto; re: the BBC and BBW, in “Prey as Liberators“).

For us, this accounts for transition within thresholds amid perpetual trauma (in and around the body as part of nature) as a lived and inherited experience; but for those with relative privilege, said bodies are consumed—especially their swollen/cursed status (and tortured expression regarding state trauma) invoking those naughty of-nature sex fantasies that cis-het men—as beings of Civilization—aren’t supposed to have, watching

• their white women get fucked by a well-endowed black man’s BBC (exhibit 32b)
• a white man (their avatar) fucking a woman of color (exhibit 32b)
• a PAWG (“Phat [already colonized vice: “pretty hot and tempting”]-Ass White Girl,” exhibit 32b/41b)
• BBWs, which fetishize the female body in a return to pre-Cartesian appreciative forms; i.e., the Rubenesque, zaftig form revived in the modern age (exhibit 32c)

Such sanctioned voyeurism frames nature as grossly abject, its excessive trespasses tied to “interracial mixings” that aren’t allowed in “decent” society but curiously wait on standby in racialized pornographic forms; i.e., by powerful American companies with lateral neoliberal ties to a Christian executive. Under Reagan’s rule, porn flourished, as did the AIDS crisis and moral panic. Simply put, it was profitable. It might have clashed with his pure, family-friendly image, but it was far more lucrative to simply look the other way or scapegoat “the Gays” than it was to prevent harmful porn outright.

Canonical fetishes concern psychosexual violence through a Cartesian profit motive under which bodies become swollen fruits to harvest by knife-life genitals—albeit in a variety of psychosexual, alienizing ways per marginalized group: fat people vs white women vs people of color and their various intersections in undead, demonic and/or totemic forms. It is here where we must recognize the clichés and fetishes on their face; i.e., on our own bodies as fundamentally made of the same stuff in subjugated/complacent forms, but which offer up a proletarian function whose decision to fetishize ourselves in a subversive “exquisitely torturous” manner pointedly challenges the Cartesian profit motive (and knife dicks’ unironic rape scenarios brutalizing nature) in service to our basic human rights.

In keeping with duality and liminal expression, both types exist at the same time, and invoke similar forms of Gothic nostalgia presenting the body (and its genitals) as terrifying and powerful. Except, canon occurs in ways that are controlled by state forces serving Cartesian ends; i.e., exploited for their labor value along racialized lines (exhibit 32b) that must be reclaimed during ludo-Gothic BDSM: through bodies of all kinds employing a dark Satanic power that—while adjacent to sexual reproduction—isn’t the same thing as it or its knife-like enforcement.

(artist: Lera PI)

Nor is it a perfect copy of the state’s function of such devices. Instead of creating demons, per se, you have creative morphological expression as a double of state implements, resembling them but divorced through the paradox of terror[4] from the Cartesian means of alienating and fetishizing the monstrous-feminine as human-versus-animal: abject sexual reproduction, wherein the genitals become a knife to cause harm against nature. State predation fattens the human body but also consequently makes it into something that feels hideous, insect, and brood-like despite a relatively comely (or at least humanoid, above) outer guise. To that, any creativity that upends the status quo (also above) in this respect must humanize the usual targets of Cartesian violence treating people like vermin-in-disguise—a broad iconoclasm whose Satanic rebellion includes fat people (exhibit 32c) as “non-white” extensions of the natural world as normally penetrated and drained of their resources by Cartesian agents. If someone is fat, they are “dark,” thus incorrect for anything but the harvest, whose traumatic penetration and exterminatory slicing during harmful BDSM turns them into a variety of food types, but especially porn fetishizes (thus unironic psychosexual violence) for those both starved of sex and addicted to harmful, fetishized (thus alien) versions of it.

This reprobate punishment becomes something to face and acknowledge, mid-harvest inside Americanized media “stabbing the peach” on the Aegis as the Aegis according to anisotropic revenge arguments

(exhibit 32b: Artists: Heavenly Peaches and Advoree [the others are unknown or Google searches]. Pardon the expression, but interracial porn isn’t black-and-white. Rather, it assigns forbidden qualities to different fetishized bodies that historically-materially have different degrees of preferential mistreatment as “fruit for the harvest.” On paper, men are the universal clientele, with black men [and their BBCs] being framed as rapacious and white men as reprobate [which in Calvinism, a form of Protestantism, means “predestined to damnation”—i.e., “damned at birth,” but also “god-fearing”]. Women, meanwhile, are divided in settler-colonial terms: white women as “modest” provided they avoid being “like black women,” the latter being animalistic and full of gross, “demonic[5]” indulgences.

However, these various qualities can transfer from body to body—the fucker, the fucked, the sinner and the sinful associated with a gradient of skin color, organ size and body type. Generally, too, the booty and “doggystyle” are seen as sinful, secular or pagan ways of performing sex—non-missionary sex, in other words. Colonized variants of doggy generally present sexual activity and its attached body parts to rituals of compelled social-sexual domination, historically-materially tied to state violence. Pornographic expression can be reclaimed, of course, but those reclaiming it must partake in stigmatized rituals symbolically loaded with racist phobias and guilt; e.g., “It’s bad luck to do it doggy because God is watching.” Not only does Capitalism instill a sense of guilt within all workers; it grants the sinner a desire to rebel against a higher power by said power—i.e., the Paradox of Evil materialized as reactive abuse inside a high-control group’s test of faith, then disseminated under neoliberal Capitalism. Porn is a test destined to fail, thus meant to instill already undernourished workers with even more social-sexual guilt—menticide, through and through.)

and then transition endlessly away from psychosexual self-harm (seeing oneself as “knife-like[6]“) as a Cartesian byproduct regardless of where one is relative to the settler colony (which commodifies bodies differently based on location and type); i.e., towards an ironic, xenophilic state of self-acceptance whose complicated self-liberation happen though self-(GNC)-expression: humanizing the harvest. The fruit’s still delicious; it’s just not dehumanized and sliced up for profit, or slicing others up as such.

Synthesized within capital using our bodies’ counterterrorist function, doing so rescues our forbidden fruit and Satanic potential; i.e., girl talk, camp and monsters that yield creatively rebellious, liberating forms to exonerate Hell with, thus poetically open up hellish channels whose otherworldly gateways of exquisite, pleasurable “torture” hammer swords into ploughshares. This playful, consciously sex-positive xenophilia deftly subverts Cartesian norms, half-real perceptions of sovereignty and pretend state monopolies backed by actual lies, force and xenophobic manufacture (the trifectas) using Gothic poetics; i.e., across our lives and the lives of those we touch within a shared, at times incredibly soupy dialogic: a caterpillar that less turns into a butterfly whose symbolic metamorphosis the state fears, and more staying as it is (“dummy thicc”) while remaining equally fearsome[7]:

(exhibit 32c: Model and artist: Sinead Rhiannon and Persephone van der Waard. Sinead describes faer chubby caterpillar body as “basically a fat Barbie with holes”—not to depreciate its transformative value, but appreciate something that is desirable precisely because it is different and can be played with accordingly by two [or more] consenting parties. Larger bodies are canonically associated with/fetishized as stigma animals, Satanic hunger and vice, but also nutrients and vitality as something to enjoy in an iconoclastic, bacchanal manner between both sides; i.e., fruit-like, ripe and waiting to be sampled: the BBW as a pornographic treat laced with shame, which must be reclaimed by subverting said shame and its psychosexual violence harvesting fat bodies like chattel. The trick is to reverse European beauty standards [thus heteronormativity and settler-colonial dogma and animal stigmas] while expressing the desires and frustrations that these persons have, and which they express through their Satanic bodies and art in ways that evoke and revive the Rubenesque imaginary past to challenge the status quo in more inclusive, animalistic hauntologies.

 To that, fatness becomes a symbol to reclaim through language and negotiated play going hand-in-hand; e.g., as Sinead explains, “fat” is a generally-accepted neutral term in the fat community whereas a word like “ob*se” is considered a slur and should be avoided. Beyond spoken or written language, the reclamation of fat bodies through fat liberation [and not just positivity as something to sell to those with means] is partially devoted to consumption as a symbol that can be reclaimed from canonical forms, but has a hauntological [nostalgic] flavor—i.e., the likes of Rubens, Rembrandt and other Renaissance painters who had a different way of appreciating larger bodies in that period that has since become commodified in Western society and American hegemony on the global stage, but whose modern canon still has a dated flavor to it that evokes the stigmas of the Catholic church and fears of “outside” groups tied to forbidden desires and knowledge. The idea is to challenge Cartesian “othering” through our bodies and artwork, the collaborations that we do with other artists/SWers working towards the same goal: humanizing each other as normally harvested by the elite and their watchdogs.

For Sinead, this theatricality is highly specific: “My specialty is creatively costumed characters and corresponding fantasy-scene concepts including a super-wide variety of kink and dynamic options, and that I have a passion for glitter and chaos.” And fae often specifically caters to queer porn consumers using faer succulent body as plentiful, but also fantastical; i.e., the content fae makes for cis men is usually kind of an afterthought [and said men usually pay the misgendering upcharge]. Fae thinks it’s important, since content designed for people who aren’t cis men can be harder to find in general. And this is something I can help fae with through my art. The message I hope to convey through our negotiated labor exchange is something Sinead feels strongly about: “Like, it’s definitely getting easier to find queer porn, but a lot of queer and trans porn creators will still market heavily to cis men because they’re at least perceived to be the vast, vast, vast majority of the consumer market.” In other words, we want to appreciate queer culture sans pandering to the status-quo customer base who normally objectify us and commodify our struggles as Satanic during moral panics; i.e., fat bodies, in Sinead’s case, tied to pagan precursors to Satan as an animalistic religious figure of pre-Christian natures harvested by Cartesian forces: witches and faeries, Easter and Samhain [re: the monstrous-feminine “lady of the harvest,” but also said lady’s wild, forest-animal servants]. For us, the struggle[s] and solution[s] intersect.)

With exhibits 32a, b, and c, we’re returning to past forms of canonical media and studying them (and their Cartesian trauma) as codified worker relations and BDSM rituals; i.e., in anti-Cartesian ways that let workers learn to interpret canon for themselves—to understand its imaginary past from every angle, then repurpose and recreate demonic BDSM (the knife dick and the “pumpkin” it carves) through iconoclastic praxis in their own liminal forms. To this, pornography is extremely liminal under Capitalism, forced between states of consent and non-consent that cannot be easily determined; i.e., due to hyperreal depictions of beautiful smiling workers that historically cannot consent slowly having more rights but being tied to images traditionally associated with trauma: sex demons. The aim, here, is to challenge the “ghost of the counterfeit” in canonical porn: the penis (and traumatic penetration) as a codified threat of Cartesian rape and violence and the pussy (and by extension nature as “fat, sassy and dark”) the recipient; i.e., the torturer and the tortured through all the usual harvests. Whether a literal knife or dark “horseflesh,” these manmade rituals and coercive, toy-like fetishes invoke canonical praxis to evoke a rapacious Symbolic Order that compels sex worker submission. For example, unironic xenophobia affects men of color as scapegoated, animalistic rapists, while generations of cis-het white women collectively recognize rape through oral traditions passed down under reactive abuse. Over time, man’s natural “toy” starts to mirror the historical-material version, becoming one-in-the-same for wounded, scared victims: “Parents with sons have to worry about one penis; parents with daughters have to worry about all of them” (as if fathers can’t rape their sons).

The grander counterterrorist moral isn’t simply that traumatic penetration is psychosexual violence, which fetishes corporally represent; it’s that such devices can be reclaimed through iconoclastic praxis during liminal expression, wherein one chooses to fetishize oneself in controlled, informed psychosexual terms. Despite the ambivalent, conflicted nature of Gothic language, the awesome power to set ourselves free lives within us and our bodies as transcendent gateways to better worlds of infinite possibility framed as “impossible” by Capitalist Realism. Except, Hell—if it is to be a home for all of nature criminalized by Cartesian thought—must be a place on Earth. We must become of two worlds, then, “half-bred” to wreak havoc and sow discord towards a better kind of place than Cartesian order does when enforced by moderate cunning and reactionary brutes’ usual dogma. Their knife dicks rape and kill; ours “rape” and “kill” to drain our would-be-murders’ potency when aiming their weapons against us. They freeze under our power insofar as we humanize ourselves in their eyes and expose them as the brutalizers.

To this, Gothic-Communist instruction occurs through praxial synthesis telling a different story than canon does, the latter’s norms preying on nature and bodies tied to nature as something to harvest (“fat” being the classic state of something “ready-for-harvest”). By humanizing the harvest, the butt needn’t be a symbol of chattel, nor its owner’s smiling face a forced Doki-Doki-Literature-Club-style mask. The smile of the soon-to-be-fucked can be genuine; when the owner raises their butt, they can illustrate mutual consent, indicating how they actively want it from being hard-up: begging for some dick a particular way from a particular type of person while reclaiming the activity with their body and all too happy to do so—i.e., “We are not animals, nor are we guilty or afraid. Now gimme.” It becomes vitalistic in a vampiric way that celebrates the transmission of essence and vitality through all the usual vectors, minus the stigmas; i.e., a revival of older pre-Cartesian ways for seeing the world, updated for the kinds of dialogs-under-capital that have carefully evolved to bring these monsters (and their complicated humanity under state oppression) out into the open: a vampire standing in daylight, making them sparkle.

Trauma is always adjacent to sexuality and performance, but needn’t determine the outcome. Insofar as harm can be reduced to calculated risk in forms of iconoclastic playfulness, the imaginary past remains plastic, thus can be recoded by empowering monstrous aesthetics with a critical-instructional edge, but also jouissance; e.g., the vampire as a play on rape theatre, traumatic penetration (stakes and fangs) and vitalistic power exchange through medieval language as reclaimed by ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., from Cartesian thought’s bad instruction under capital: a harvesting of sanguine that enriches both parties through informed consent that profanes the church and returns to nature.

(exhibit 32d: Model and artist: Casper Clock and Persephone van der Waard. A huge part of my work is about updating pre-Enlightenment/settler-colonial nostalgia with a more inclusive Renaissance hauntology [medieval nostalgia]. Older authors discussed sin, pleasure and vice, and while they didn’t necessarily have queer language and queerness was [at least in the West] associated with sexual/gendered actions and not identities, this changed in the late 18th century in ways that canonized harmful variants of the medieval past and Gothic nostalgia; e.g., the demonization of Catholic excess linked to “non-white” bodies and heteronormative standards that basically fetishized other standards and descriptive genders and sexualities as “other.” Basically anything “Satanic”/sodomic became subject to state violence and control, whose abuses were then turned into shameful commodities; e.g., the homosexual man as a vampire, or the fat white woman as “black” in the stigmatized but also racialized sense. Race and sin, but also forbidden knowledge/devil worship, smashed together in the Enlightenment period, sold as vapors in Neo-Gothic novels before becoming more and more commodified during the 20th and 21st centuries.)

As we’ve discussed, vampirism (and porn at large) operates through various degrees of visibility and stealth during the liminal hauntology of war (and rape): “cruising” behind various layers of anonymity that treat the closet, dive bar bathroom stall, or backseat of a car as a cryptonym to turn Athena’s Aegis on our menticided foes, immobilizing them. We want to challenge this synonymous fusing of the marginalized body with violence, but also the canonical linking of all of these things to nature-as-alien; i.e., to a heteronormative binding of sex to gender hopelessly tied to human biology that weaponizes our shame against us while throwing our descriptive genders, sexualities and performances into an abject, self-policed state of existence.

So however ancient or modern—and whether it occurs inside a bathroom stall, church antechamber or coffin recorded at high definition or on a potato—the violent and sexual stories of kayfabe and the Gothic should speak to our experiences inside a settler colony while enjoying psychosexual likeness of systemic adversity we overcome on all performative and lived registers; e.g., the palliative-Numinous inside the castled Gothic opera. This intersectional solidarity also includes whatever generations we hail from, or degrees to which we openly or not-so-openly get by and off as on and offstage blend together (to various degrees of stillness and trembling under disturbing sensations speaking to our trauma as inherited across generations). But this also requires accounting for potential allies during revolutionary cryptonymy while speaking to and from own complicated experiences intermingling with others’ similar to, and incredibly different from, ours. Sooner or later, it has to meld, but it’s up to us fags (and other minorities) to speak with our voices: our drama not as a piece of popcorn food for the Straights (who are often part of the problem), but a means to tell them know, however imperfectly, the way we feel in relation to them inside the Imperial Core.

To escape the closeted freakshow status of nature-as-abject, we can employ monstrous language that allows for sex-positive forms of essence, knowledge and power exchange through ludo-Gothic BDSM; e.g., not just the Amazon or knight, damsel or demon, but the vampire (queer person), gross person (fat/muscular) or person of color, etc, as combined with a whole army of Gothic status symbols and arrangements of power and control. As profound ontological statements concerned with Cartesian abuse, these make up a collective ludo-Gothic paradox/educational act; i.e., rooted in Gothic play and psychosexual performance, thus adjacent to phallic harm as normally produced by the state and which we to overthrow through cryptonymic rebellion: to look the part, but no longer play it by refusing to obey the elite’s evil commands; e.g., as Anubis does to Emperor Tulpa: “Ronins, I am one of you!” Such is intersectional solidarity pushing towards universal liberation while rejecting tokenized forms during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Per the knife dick, there are legions of examples in how Cartesian thought fetishizes nature to chattelize it, and the non-white/fat body or vampire are only three by which to camp canon with. Regardless of the monster (or body type/gender) being performed, reverse-abject revelations reunite viewers with an old truth mythologized by Capitalism, but also liminalized by it: Maybe women/GNC persons like being “ravished,” playfully using the old rituals and monstrous language in transformative studies of subversive, even transgressive expression—i.e., an iconoclasm that respects the past and wisely fears its tyrants, then laughs in their withered, old zombie faces by placing “rape” in quotes as a means of applying theory through cultivated habits that humanize the harvest. It does so by reclaiming the “tools” of worker enslavement for these same workers to “revisit” linguistic sites of Cartesian trauma with, and heal from its traumatic penetration through a reclaimed social-sexual ritual (we’ll be sure to examine asexual modes of expression in Volume Three, I promise): “Watch us get fucked the way we want to, by whatever sex organs (or toys) we choose together!”

During ludo-Gothic BDSM, the knife or the stake becomes camped, thus placed in quotes, but remains a time-consuming process; intelligence and awareness are drained by state xenophobia and must be restored over time through good-faith instruction—i.e., through reliable, time-tested means: power and sex, but also ironic xenophilia and appreciative peril more broadly acting as rewards. Their instructive pleasure and pleasurable pain (divorced from harm) can synthesize good social-sexual habits according to our manifesto arguments (and thesis backbone): a culture of state terror versus a Gothic counterculture of worker counterterror performing informed mutual consent, whose pedagogy of the oppressed delivers appreciative irony vis-à-vis Cartesian trauma. Power lies in Gothic theatre as something to reclaim from our colonizers.

(artist: Iahfy)

Cartesian thought treats workers as meat without ironic “rape” scenarios/calculated risk to safeguard them from genuine xenophobic harm; e.g., the palliative Numinous as an ironically xenophilic, thus beneficial ritual. As stewards, not harvesters of nature, we need to heed the dual function of fetishes when partaking in “exquisite torture” ourselves (and in ways that avoid Radcliffe’s openly spifflicating demon lovers). Subversion is our most potent weapon because its gender trouble and parody can transform the relationship between Heaven and Hell as a dialectical-material conversation. Post-Milton, anything that has the power to liberate through creation—especially morphological expression divorced from sexual reproduction—will be canonically fetishized by default; i.e., the Gothic and its “darkness visible” of the Satanic rebel; e.g., the thinking woman as alien and insectoid, but also darkly delicious when put to heel by Cartesian forces. In iconoclastic terms, such a double can hijack the aesthetic of power and death (re: Sontag’s black leather) to willingly act out the powerful mommy dom “destroying” the subby femboy (above) as they repurpose torture language (and “traumatic” penetration) as decedent, salubrious and various other complicated emotions[8]; i.e., speaking to our experiences as identities (not simply actions) mid-struggle while cruising inside the liminal hauntology of war—all to protect themselves from capital treating them as vermin-like extensions of nature-run-amok: things to sugar-coat, then exterminate. All the same, while fetishes humanize the alien as routinely harvested by Cartesian thought, it’s also vital to recognize the oppressed are not the fetishes they use to liberate themselves with; e.g., Satan, Dracula or Medusa is a performance, not a person. Even if those fetishizes concern their bodies as dark, queer, fat, or otherwise “other” in the eyes of the state, a fetish is an informed action—a performance tied to a body as one’s own by which to identify with nature as abjected by Cartesian dominators.

We’ll examine the history of demon BDSM and its evolution/regeneration in Volume Two, and our own present praxis in Volume Three as informed by the past during appreciative irony in Gothic counterculture. For the moment, just remember that, in a post-scarcity world without sin or scapegoats, iconoclasts can use monstrous-liminal expression to return to an older time in a new linguo-material world replete with implements of harm that have yet to be fully reclaimed. This reclamation can be appreciative rape fantasies, but also complex forms of subversive wish fulfillment that instill a liminal, “perceptive” sense of control into the ritualized pastiche of war and rape. It becomes a messy-yet-vital means of gossip through monsters and camp fundamental to proletarian praxis’ instruction: revolutionary cryptonymy through torturous devices like the knife dick as fundamentally liminal—a piece of the monster but also a historical-material reflection of state violence interwoven with queer people and other oppressed existences exploited by Cartesian forces. Part of the trauma is interrogating and disentangling ourselves from unironic forms, which involves ambiguity through a shared aesthetic whose function is not set. There’s a simultaneous application of disguise and exposure through competing codes that make up revolutionary theatres (which Volume Three’s Chapter Five will conclude on): “flashing” exhibits, exhibit 53; breeding kinks, exhibit 87a; and even ahegao when handled with care, exhibit 140d, as risky behaviors portrayed as safely as possible: depicting rough sex/consent-non-consent, where workers ultimately stay in control and simultaneously communicate the state’s Cartesian divisions to better emancipate sex workers from the harm said divisions cause.

And if the canonical knife penis still sounds like a stretch, remember that a) women are historically the heroines in, and traditional audiences of, Gothic literature; and b) that Joseph Crawford, writing in his introduction to Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism (2013), described “terrorist literature” in the late 18th century (the peak of the Neo-Gothic novel in Britain) as having developed in connection with state fears of worker rebellions’ counterterrorism deliberately mislabeled as “terrorism”:

The idea of a single Gothic literature of terror, stretching continuously from the 1760s to the present day, imposes a false unity on these early works, which were referred to as “Gothic stories” only because they were set in the “Gothic ages” (i.e. the medieval or early modern period) rather than the present day, and were more likely to be sentimental romances than tales of terror; the preoccupation with evil, fear, and violence, which is the defining characteristic of later Gothic literature, did not become a prominent part of the genre until the success of Radcliffe’s later novels in the 1790s. I thus became increasingly convinced that, although works referring to themselves as “Gothic” had existed since the 1760s, the true roots of the Gothicised rhetoric I had observed in the nineteenth century were to be found not in the anxieties of the mid-eighteenth-century middle classes, but a generation later; in the fearful decade at the century’s end.

It was in the 1790s that Gothic fiction and rhetoric first became truly popular in Britain; it was also in these years that Britain, like the rest of Europe, was struggling with the consequences of the French Revolution. […] In a very real sense, the Revolution created Gothic, transforming a marginal form of historical fiction chiefly concerned with aristocratic legitimacy into a major cultural discourse devoted to the exploration of violence and fear (source)

but also, I would argue, on account that it would potentially condition women to disobey their husbands(!) and GNC/colonized workers more broadly to rebel against Cartesian models likes of which Mary Shelley called out in her own works; i.e., to invent not as the state does (us-versus-them) but in the Miltonian Satanic tradition taken beyond what Milton, Marx or many others since thought possible.

The collective idea, then, is to evoke a pedagogy of the oppressed that can be applied through compounding habits that came from Gothic stories reflecting on rape through nature as abjected by Western forces raping the criminal, fetishizing the alien, etc, for profit. The passive, dubious rebellion of Ann Radcliffe (and her demon lovers) is literally history in this regard. Even so, I completely disagree with Jarad Fennell when he writes that only female authors “identify the source of fear and terror as existing outside the self and involve a critique of institutional power” (“Sublime Terror and Uncanny Horror in Gothic Novels,” 2023); Lewis, as we’ve already established in our thesis and manifesto, clearly had much to say about institutional power, but was merely more outlandishly queer/violent about it in ways Radcliffe stayed quite quiet on. Even if you aren’t female, of color, queer or non-Christian, you can still be an ally to these postcolonial struggles (far more than Radcliffe was); you needn’t be Radcliffe’s banditti towards nature, the Cartesian man-of-science/capitalist stealing everything behind an abject veneer framing others as alien criminals while you pilfer them and the natural world as dumb, monstrous-feminine and unthinking—easy prey for the Pygmalion genius, the patriarchal overlord, the Gothic villain.

Having considered the patriarchal nature of Cartesian dualism raping nature through traumatic penetration—i.e., as enacted by men and tokenized, Amazonian agents, but also pornographic expression—I want to conclude the symposium and the volume with a matriarchal afterthought for you reflect on when synthesizing praxis and subverting potential state trauma, yourselves. To that, I want to give an imperative, lesson, and anecdote to close out the chapter with.

First, the imperative. Now’s the time to be active! Absorb, learn, create and share! Whereas Wordsworth once implored, “Let nature be your teacher!” we need to account for nature as it exists presently informed by past-and-future ideas. Help you and your fellow workers, then, by creating a fresh socio-educational line of Matrilineal descent; i.e., whose Wisdom of the Ancients challenges the status quo’s rotting nepotistic standards. But also? Be bold! Don’t be cowed or discouraged. Don’t listen if you’re told you’re “wasting” your time or your talents. Coming from me, a former playmate once chided me for using my Gothic MA degree to get laid (that’s a long story but essentially I was writing Gothic roleplays on Kik, Reddit and Fetlife). However, when they told me “that’s not what a master’s degree is for!” I replied, “Why not both?” Why not, indeed! The whole point was to expand my mind/intelligence and awareness, hence ability to instruct new people in regards to my trauma; i.e., as something to contribute to a growing pedagogy of the oppressed. If that gets me laid and demonstrates revolutionary praxis in defense of nature, then mission accomplished!

(artist: Hiddend8)

Second and third, a lesson and anecdote. Lesson-wise, sex is a wonderful educator but so are sources of education prohibited by capital: performance and play when camping canon in ways that asexualize sex and prey on nature; i.e., through public nudism as de facto education, versus simply a Cartesian device to arouse visual excitement and nothing else. While there’s nothing wrong with visual stimulation through porn and dark aesthetics (mommy or otherwise), the abject function of Capitalism demonizes Mother Nature to devour her as an unironic psychosexual fetish. Generally this is very bad in how it routinely leads to the rape of nature and workers “of nature” through Cartesian, thus patriarchal, systems of capital justifying nature’s “incorrect” forms to sanction her own rape. Porn needs to be perceptive!

However, as Volume Two’s exploration of monsters will show us, nature isn’t just monstrous-feminine; it’s tied to forbidden knowledge, an iconoclastic, xenophilic Wisdom of the Ancients whose combined Humanities modules reveal Cartesian dualism’s myriad abuses and xenophobic alienations of nature—as food, but also undead, demonic and totemic. Matrilineal descent, then, is a maverick intellectual pursuit tied to the struggles of everyday life under Patriarchal Capitalism, and one that can cultivate powerful social-sexual habits/pathways in service of sex positivity liberating nature from its patriarchal rapists’ perceived air of omnipotence. The door to other worlds—be they the proverbial stars, Hell, or simply “the beyond”—isn’t something to dread, but welcome and relish as a precious opportunity to change into something new. But it must occur using the same basic language and aesthetics “passed down” through older monstrous-feminine educators pilfered from Cartesian forms. We’re not whitewashing Heaven or breaking into it through some kind of trial to prove ourselves[9] to a higher power. We’re making Hell our home-to-perceive through the Satanic deities caged inside our own breasts: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

(artist: Asu Rocks)

To that, I want to give a short anecdote valorizing the very things Cartesian thought would seem to alienate, fetishize and rape: female/monstrous-feminine education/reinvention as criminal, once-upon-a-time, but also unthinkable by Cartesian proponents then-and-now crippled by Capitalist Realism (the paradox of the thinking zombie, demon, animal[10] and alien, etc). Just as Mary Wollstonecraft passed down the privilege of progressive education onto her daughter, Mary Shelley, the women on my mother’s side were/are all intellectuals. From my great-grandmother to me, they found ways to be active and do things “beyond their stations”; or within them—i.e., my grandmother throwing absolute shade Erica’s way for doing what she did to Uncle Dave, but also “staying in her lane” by generally letting men cheat because “men cheat, and it’s the woman’s fault.” No one ever said that Gran was perfect, but her imperfection is not absolute, either. Habits are like broken bones; you have to break old injuries to help the bone heal, thus achieve praxial catharsis through synthesis.

For example, my grandmother might be an old battleaxe who actually “does a sexism” quite often; she’s still fought plenty of battles for children, including those who weren’t her own (she worked in an asylum for mentally ill children for years and looked after the boys and the girls, which the state eventually released back out onto the street to die). To be sure, she often wore her rose-tinted glasses and didn’t speak out “for the children’s sake” when my grandfather had his psychotic breaks; but the moment my mother remembered her own abuse as a child and confirmed it through the wife of a relative (again, girls talk), my grandmother synthesized her daughter’s trauma through girl talk as a means of preventing future harm: she confronted the perfidious old man and told him to his face that she fucking knew what he did. The old creep confessed and later, Gran and Mom danced on his grave. How’s that for Gothic?

(photographer: Robert Massa)

End of the Road: Concluding the Roadmap and Volume One

How easy it is to deny the pain / Of someone else’s suffering

—Chuck Schuldiner; “Suicide Machine” on Death’s Human (1991)

With the roadmap finale concluded, so ends Volume One. Before we segue into Volume Two, I want to quickly (over the next ten pages) reiterate some key things Volume One has covered that you should keep in mind moving forward. You should now have a fairly sound idea of synthesizing praxis through our manifesto and its instruction; i.e., the conscious cultivation of social-sexual habits (and those in connection with you) into emotionally and Gothically intelligence and class/cultural awareness regarding state trauma, power and general abuse as things to interrogate, negotiate and replay out on the same shared stages. Your habits should collectively subvert the Cartesian trauma of war and rape using perceptive pastiche and liminal expression during proletarian creative success—in short, to express your own sex positivity and interrogations of trauma and power in opposition to state synthesis and pushback via reactionary behaviors: your instruction of simplified theory through a collective pedagogy of the oppressed vis-à-vis the basics’ gossip, monsters and camp versus the state’s harmful, unironic forms; i.e., good instruction versus bad, generally through cathartic psychosexuality and ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(artist: Fugtrup)

We’ll examine proletarian praxis amid Gothic poetics during Volume Three. As we move onto Volume Two, we will consider past proletarian praxis as a social-sexual process of Gothic poetics conveyed through various Humanities-themed modules: the undead, demons and totems. Each will demonstrate how sex-positive egregores have the power to reimagine the material world through creative expression conveyed by a living chain of workers responding to what other workers have already left behind; i.e., subverted trauma as something to reexamine and continuously negotiate with through a constantly updated Wisdom of the Ancients that reclaims the Base and recultivates the Superstructure by camping canon, raising worker intelligence and awareness during class/culture war amid a shared, intersectional pedagogy of the oppressed. Organically enacted by actively imaginary revolutionaries at various levels, Gothic Communism responds to the status quo of popular media as a disjointed collective seeking to reunite against the state. For this purpose, I’m not entirely trusting of the galaxy-brained eggheads in academia, leaning far more into Edward Said’s notion of non-accommodated/marginalized intellectuals. I specifically want to apply Said’s concept to various generations of artistic and sex-working persons: those of the Baby Boomer generation, Gen X, the Millennial generation, and Gen Z synthesizing praxis on artistic platforms and social media more broadly.

In doing so, Gothic Communism seeks update the flow of absorption—the literal direction and control of disseminated information and how it changes the way mass media is perceived and consumed; i.e., how we see ourselves as workers in relation to nature and the material world, and how praxial inertia and resistance are overcome through paradox. This elaborate strategy of misdirection (re: Frederic Jameson) can use iconoclastic praxis to push back against canon in ways those in power will notice and respond to, albeit in ways state-sanctioned force cannot “solve.” Indeed, state reprisals only historically-materially bring marginalized communities closer together, “girl-talking” more and more as a means of community defense/rape and trauma prevention against an ancestral, systemic foe that exposes their embarrassing failings in ways only impotent, callow men can generate.

(source: Maya Oppenheim’s “Incel Culture Should Be Classed as Terrorism,” 2021)

Iconoclasm is seldom black-and-white. Rather, development requires decolonization as a liminal proposition of gatekept thresholds; re: whose “Imperialism of theories” (re: Norton) extend historically-materially beyond the academic world and into a public Gothic; i.e., Gothic language and its complex, liminal expressions of power as colonized/decolonized during oppositional praxis by everyday workers, literally synthesized through the social-sex lives of those for or against the state. Gothic-Communist revolution is prolonged, subversive struggle, reclaiming canonical pastiche/praxis in liminal, “perceptive” forms that slowly open the gates and keep them open: our minds, our language, our creations, our praxis liberated through intersectional solidarity.

As already stated, I don’t consider pastiche to simply be “blind parody” like Jameson’s Postmodernism (1991) does; there’s room for ironic parody and satire, as well as enjoyment of canonical material without endorsing it. Through complex co-existence, the collective action of iconoclastic media’s liminal-didactic components manifest in ways that, over space and time, historically-materially make all of us better teachers and students in an active and passive sense: Put in more colloquial language, “Suddenly we girls are running the show, tellin’ the good from the bad and pushin’ the creeps to the side for our socio-material benefit.” Involuntarily celibate? Tough shit! Ain’t got time for bad students who don’t want to learn (or pay out)! If you can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum, don’t “play” by trying to cheat, or by forcing someone to play with you the way you want them too; i.e., abuse encouragement patterns that treat us like chattel. That’s gross and super fucked up. Might does not make right, my Manosphere dudes; if we can’t get that through your thick skulls, then at least we don’t have to sleep with you! As weird iconoclastic nerds, we can play our own games and make our own rules, odds, luck, fate, monsters, poetics, and covert maneuvers (e.g., “poker faces”) during revolutionary cryptonymy and the other Four Gs.

As mentioned in Volume Zero, our enemy is as much cognitive estrangement as it is dissonance. My (and your) instructional emphasis, then, lies in how people “actually talk”; i.e., “how people talk” in the Internet Age, according to a complex, organic blend of everyday speech, memes, anecdotes, code (a lot of queer activism is tied to memes and humor that pokes fun of the status quo, for example; Ty Turner’s “The STRAIGHTS Are STRUGGLING,” 2022)—and various other linguistic elements and artist expression that operate passively or actively as de facto exhibits of proletarian praxis. As a whole, Gothic Communism seeks to cultivate a sex-positive approach that avoids the pitfalls of academia (and if academics feel alienated by this approach, that’s ultimately a hazard of their overspecialized professions). Within oppositional praxis, the Gothic mode’s means and materials of production—it’s monsters, lairs, and mediums—are praxis when synthesized, are for or against Capitalism in ways that invite the viewer to look at Athena’s Aegis and be changed by it.

Our aim is revolution and development, which happens in active resistance to canonical praxis and its various pastiches. Pastiche is merely the presence of remediated praxis, which Capitalism reduces to cheap, mass-produced counterfeits; liminality is largely an attempt to enter the threshold and convey something different with pastiche (something to keep in mind as we talk about pastiche and liminality throughout Volumes Two and Three); e.g., porn, monsters, BDSM, etc. Thereupon, our furious, gossiping exhibits of ironic, “perceptive” pastiche become an active invitation to look—partly at this former midden with fresh eyes, but also our exhibits as refashioned from old parts to give you those eyes. Let the scales fall from them. Per my expansion of Castricano’s cryptomimesis, gossip with monsters, camping canonical ones in the process. “Make it gay” with your own Satanic power adding to the spectres of Marx chorusing already.

Gothic Communism is about overcoming praxial inertia and state violence by exposing state decay and abuse through monstrous language; it is not the rotting corpse of canon, but a perceived end of the world that challenges Capitalist Realism by killing Capitalism and its myopia of apocalyptic forces designed to rape and destroy your minds. If canon uses fear and dogma—but also freezing terror and a carefully cultivated inability to imagine a better world than the current socio-economic order—then Gothic Communism reverses this process through the same aesthetics to achieve an opposite function: the liberation of workers through iconoclastic art; i.e., sexualized, oft-Gothic counterterror and delight. We are not defined by how the state tries to criminalize us, but our own bodies, sexualities, genders and identities do lie adjacent to very-real harm as something to disentangle ourselves from. It requires a confrontation with ourselves as devils ordinarily persecuted by state forces, except proletarian logics assist us in ways that free us from state enslavement; i.e., by accepting the ontological irony of our own psychosexualities and subsequent catharsis, and developing a language for that we can share with others. This is often literal, but maintains a monstrous appearance adopted by new generations of people working through their own trauma, guilt and shame; i.e., subverting canon to better acquire joy and community in the process:

(exhibit 32d: Artist: Danomil, of their OC, Vilka the marshmallow dog. As Danomil says, “I’ve been really horny lately so here are 8 more stickers for you! […] Use them for your pleasure!” Indeed, my partner Bay and I often use them when communicating and playing on Telegram together. Vilka speaks to me and how I feel around Bay but also how I want to fuck them.)

A common Biblical symbol of death is the white horse; subversion achieves class and culture war as a conscious effort—i.e., through monstrous language that introduces incongruous new elements; e.g., a white dog (above) or rabbit, etc, as challenging canon’s heteronormative instruction to interrogate power and trauma. From an iconoclastic standpoint, then, “death” is simply change, transformation regarding these complicated matters. Active, informed iconoclasm (and its darkness visible) invite one to look at forbidden, satirical, half-real, undead/demonic and animalized things that, once seen, have the power to transform workers through what they consume; i.e., not the totalitarian myth of turning one to stone, but turning workers into something new and the world slowly with them: your minds, but also your language and how you present yourselves in relation to the natural-material world.

(artist: Danomil)

To that, do not fear chaos and death; embrace it! Follow the white rabbit or dog when you see its fur stained with the blood of canonical abuses; heed its pedagogy of the oppressed and inhabit the same spaces through empathy and love. The food will taste better, the sex will hit harder (all the good spots). Make it a part of yourself that instructs better behaviors moving forward; you’ll be surprised how different things seem. Precisely these mechanisms, once adopted, will slowly change how you think but also how you act; i.e., what you synthesize through your own creative successes.

Through the fulfillment of the Six Rs, the bourgeoisie will “turn to stone,” but also their victimized servants: the canonical rapists and warriors; proverbial trolls, silver-tongued vampires, and legions of the fascist undead, heroes and warlords, but also the entire structure that makes them and their false fears, their empty hopes, their deadly dreams. This includes their sell-out thought leaders, shills, and politicians telling you how to think (or not think) with canonical praxis—in effect, warning you not to look and see for yourself while turning you into canonical monsters that abuse yourselves and your fellow workers to support a select few “lucky ones.” It becomes a brand, so challenge that with your own praxis; synthesize it into something that doesn’t sell out like past groups have:

(exhibit 33a: Artist: Mick Cassidy. Metallica isn’t just a giant sell-out band; they’re “class traitors” who monopolized the metal industry for their own base ends. Or as Top Dollar once put it, “The idea has become the institution.” What once were young and hungry Bay Area thrashers from the streets slowly but deliberately became aging grandpas that can’t hold a candle to their former selves, or their career competitors actually keeping the genre energized. But Zombie Metallica won’t stop touring! Even so, I can shine a light on this corrupt monopoly and still love their first five albums [and some of their latter-day songs, even if the production sucks] and their merch. God, these guys really know how to promote themselves—by paying other talented artists to sell their brand for them, of course! But Metallica doesn’t own art or metal [despite them dominating the algorithms with fan-made pastiche [Persephone van der Waard’s “My Two Cents: Ep 3., Lux Aeterna on KEA,” 2023] riding that wave: “Metallica pastiche” and its various offshoots [refer to the Acknowledgements section to see examples from my “Two Cents” interview Q&A series]. This includes Megadeth and other famous contemporaries reanimated by fans decades later [Ali’s “ Tornado Of Souls w/Peace Sells Tone,” 2023]. Much like the entire NWOTHM movement, it becomes its own thing for fans to work at as endless labors of love. Take what they produce and make it your own. Make metal your ironic anthem, a cornerstone of your praxis as you “set the world on fire,” iconoclastically transforming the status quo for workers everywhere.)

The state and its defenders aren’t sacred, nor are corporations or industry giants, celebrities and greedy musicians. Become informed and aware then help other workers do the same, collectively instructing a collective means to interrogate generational abuse. But also, don’t put the cart before the horse (with you being the horse in this case). Yes, all iconoclastic workers must be “motherly” to some extent—protectors, providers, teachers with liminal-iconoclastic language: those who hunt the hunters in linguo-material ways, through countercultural “war” mascots (we’ll examine these more in Volume Three; e.g., Chapter Five, exhibit 102). Be that the “memeing” of (or as I call it, “transformative quoting”—usually in relation to campy films with memorable scenes; e.g., “Garbage Day!” from Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2, 1987) or some other form of creative playfulness, Gothic subversion works at an individual and societal level when creating for other workers, not for the bourgeoisie (all bourgeoisie [and their proponents] are war profiteers within Man Box culture). Ludo-Gothic BDSM is the holistic approach, and one that gets to the core of the issue; re: Capitalism sexualizes everything.

Have fun with it and don’t be afraid to try new things to make something special; e.g., Russkaja’s “Russian Turbo Polka Metal.” There’s nothing new under the sun, but all things are made up and remade again, so give it a shot! Be brave, be visible, and stand up for yourselves; otherwise the image of you—like Picasso’s women—is destroyed, along with your history the image represents. This history is generally annihilated and whitewashed in Capitalism’s rainbow façade as “true activism/controlled opposition.” Opposition isn’t just a t-shirt for sale (though it can involve t-shirts and logos, like the Raised Fist or Che Guevara, exhibits 8b2); it involves the destruction of property for the betterment of workers, animals, children and nature, etc: rioting in demonstrable ways that protest very real (and repressed) abuses of power. You have to take that power back by finding your own voice to speak out with; even if you’re punished, you’ll have made that visible—something that cannot easily be ignored.

For example, as Kathryn Ferguson says of Sinéad O’Connor in Nothing Compares (2022): “So many women are reduced to footnotes in history. I couldn’t bear that for Sinead” (source: Sylvia Patterson, 2022). But O’Connor’s famous destruction of an image of the pope for him defending pedophiles was, itself, tantamount to seditious vandalism of Catholic canon—i.e., a very real and precocious stand against the state-of-affairs that threatened her burial by the state through a banning by SNL (itself a centrist institution filled with American liberals supportive of Pax Americana):

Perhaps her most iconic moment was in 1992, on Saturday Night Live. O’Connor, who was raised Catholic, was performing a version of Bob Marley’s “War.” She changed some of the lyrics to reference child abuse and then held up a picture of Pope John Paul II as she reached the final line: “We have confidence in the victory of good over evil.”

Then she ripped up the photo and said, simply, “Fight the real enemy” (source: Tori Otten’s “Banned From SNL for Calling Out the Pope,” 2023).

(source tweet: Feminist Collages, 2023)

All the same, as girl-talking “mothers of the world,” this isn’t some zero-sum game where class/culture consciousness makes it impossible for you to subsist in the barren fields of Capitalism, its endless retro-future hauntologies treating worker unity and teamwork like a fantasy with a price tag. It starts with you looking out for yourself and yes, having fun (remember Sarkeesian’s adage). Decide your level of commitment to the Cause, being that rioting or commercial protesting or extracurricular education. But also: figure out for yourself what you like in terms of self-care as a means of political-material endorsement; experiment, look, swim, fuck, try on new clothes, use new toys, speak in code, in memes; laugh, cry and share. Make friends—boys, girls, queer folk, animals, mythical creatures—and go from there. Inform your own consumption and production habits as praxial factors; don’t settle for those given to you by the bourgeoisie.

And if the end result is that you want to do your part by making a podcast that speaks out against oppression instead of rioting in the streets—and that, in terms of cuties, you prefer chubby androgynes/deep-throated nerds who wear college alumni sweaters, have fuzzy pussies, freckles and horn-rimmed glasses (that “Velma” look) and “know what they’re doing” in the bedroom when it comes to toys, fucking and getting topped or topping you—then cool, that’s what you like! The same goes for being sex-repulsed and “grey ace” gradients. Canonical praxis, on the other hand, is workers actively wanting to like what Capitalism deems acceptable and abjecting everything else, including sex-positive workers and their art as something to extinguish entirely. It’s the canonical desire to “fit in” and punish those who don’t—i.e., violent genocide, but also neglect, scorn, and ignorance thereof administered by literal or figurative police agents.

Zeuhl did that to me, telling me not to write because it concerned them as someone who didn’t want to be seen or associated with me and my work (and who did their best to appropriate activism through BLM as a recuperated movement that ultimately sold out); Jadis told me not to write either. Anyone who tells you not to stand up for yourself serves the status quo. Books exist to critique and hold power accountable; so does music (e.g., New Zealand reggae: Kora’s “Politician,” 2004; or inuk circumpolar hip-hop/rap[11] [a combination of rap, metal, and traditional inuk folk] Uyarakq’s “Move, I’m Indigenous,” 2021). Telling others not to riot or stand up for themselves is at worst, openly abusive, and at best, controlled opposition/centrism as a kind of suppressed abuse, the latter entirely befitting of zombie metal acts like Metallica who, at the end of the day, really only care about making as much money as possible for themselves by monopolizing the market; they’re shit activists and shrewd, aging businessmen—i.e., the very thing they were protesting against in their heyday! Don’t be like Zeuhl, Jadis or Metallica; don’t snuff out your fire because those in or aligned with power tell you to. Be like O’Connor, instead. Have courage and express that courage; i.e., in ways whose ludo-Gothic BDSM discourages systemic abuse, priming the conditions for a proper blaze among the kindling. Better to burn property than people. Silence will not stop abuse, but prolong it:

In defense of his own people, Bruce Lee once said, “We are not sick men of Asia!” We are not terrorists; we’re counterterrorists, activists. Ignorance of worker abuse is no excuse towards demonizing us—not in the Internet Age when the entire world is at our fingertips, waiting to be reexplored, rediscovered, and reclaimed, along with our labor, our power, our bodies. Unified workers can lead sex and its ambivalent markers away from their current traumatic history (and dissociation with canonical “pleasure”) towards new pleasurable histories. The dick can certainly feel good, or the little toy or getting royally pounded, rapidly fingered, softly licked, tenderly cuddled post-fuck, snuggled without sex at all, etc; but only under sex-positive socio-material conditions between emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers who have the means to master their emotions, but also “mother” new connections and bonds that unteach the old fearful, menticidal ways under Capitalism.

In more dialectical-material language, I’m framing creativity itself as a proletarian thought response to a historical-material world and the natural processes contained therein—either activity informed by material production (the Base), which art affects differently depending on how it’s controlled and cultivated (the Superstructure). Material image production, for example, determines the images that people consume—i.e., as products to endorse, reject or reinvent through a cultivated imagination tied to class consciousness (and “false conscious” variants forwarded by neoliberal ideologues, patrons and consumers). While this socio-material process involves various factors, I’ve chosen to focus on sexuality within sex work as a means of transforming popular artwork as it already exists, thereby treating iconoclastic imagery as a sex-positive, educational mode that allows people to become sex-positive themselves, thus emotionally/Gothically intelligent. This, in turn, can help already-exploited workers imagine a world beyond Capitalism by pointedly highlighting the trauma it causes surrounding our own bodies and identities as entangled, specifically its targeted exploitation through heteronormative canon of sex workers using various codified stigmas that make abusers abuse and victims victimized: blind, deaf and dumb to the world as it decays around them and their “god” falls silence (the cruelty and eventual death of the owner class); the only way out is through solidarized intersectionality according to what we produce together and speak out against state forces with using what we have at our disposal: iconoclastic art as liberating workers under Capitalism by humanizing the harvest during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(artist: Sinead Rhiannon)

This concludes the roadmap and Volume One. Now that we’re armed with both the thesis argument from Volume Zero and the “basics”—of girl talk (and an expanded understanding and vocabulary of trauma recognition/rape prevention language), menticide, the liminal proposition of subversive revolution, constructive anger and “perceptive” pastiche (of rape and war); along with the core manifesto of Gothic Communism—I want to proceed into the Humanities primer in earnest. To that, Volume Two will examine the past history of monstrous expression; i.e., its canonical usage made to sexually exploit non-heteronormative workers, as well as the oft-queer mechanics used to humanize these same workers through ludo-Gothic BDSM. It will be something to learn from when we consider enacting monstrous sex positivity and proletarian praxis towards universal liberation ourselves in Volume Three.

Onto “A 2025 Foreword: On Volume One’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Cuwu)“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Generally of the hero, but also the hero’s victims, whereupon the conqueror’s death is enshrined in a vault of worship pushing the mythic life-and-death glory forward into new, unsuspecting minds. Or as my thesis volume argues; re (from “Author’s Foreword”):

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” (source).

[2] Nature-as-alien canonically achieves demonic power (allegory through transformation) through sexual reproduction tied to an inhuman stigma-animal life cycle; e.g., Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915) but also the xenomorph.

[3] From Bret Devereaux’ “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020): “‘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).

[4] Further paradoxes endemic to capital (and its ghoulish maintenance) include the precarious existence of a stigma-animal monster that should both not exist in the presence of immutable sovereignty and, conversely, a decayed imperium that requires an exterminable chattel to conjure up like a plague and exterminate/prey upon to demonstrate so-called “total power” as faced with “external,” alien menaces. As an elaborate and conflicting series of lies, then, Capitalism yields bizarre liminalities by design (the inside/outside, correct-correct).

[5] A Neo-Gothic trope—of demonizing Catholic excess—that stuck to people of color through racist Enlightenment thought/settler colonialism haunting the ghost of the counterfeit.

[6] A very trans-femme fear—speaking from experience with this one.

[7] Like the zombie, pain lives in the body and around it, the broader world. It bottles up like a potion, that if not “uncorked,” will explode in ways the state knows how to handle (through settler-colonial force). Sometimes, the best course of action is to open it and let things breathe, giving others a taste in the process—not fruit from the poison tree, but from the Tree of Knowledge exposing God (and Cartesian thought) as tyrannical. We’ve already discussed how state forces like to invade discos as breeding grounds for rebel action. If they invade this time, they won’t find a monster to kettle, but Athena’s Aegis; i.e., as a part of collaborators actually having fun that, when opened, like Pandora’s Box cannot be closed again. Like the xenomorph, it cannot be killed and will never obey the state: a liminal, spirit-monarch “Galatea” that will serve no one, can never be destroyed or fully recuperated and may create anything out of anything. In short, it is free to self-fashion and self-determine, but is hunted by xenophobic canonical agents, who style its uncontrolled, xenophilic opposition as their Great Destroyer—e.g., the arch-fiend, or technological singularity (more on this, in Volume Two; e.g., “Seeing Dead People” or “Making Demons“).

[8] Hollow, gutted, like dead meat; reduced to chattel, vermin; but also destroyed in a Numinous sense, trapped between the living and the dead, often in animalized forms of an undead/demonic poetic. Volume Two shall examine why someone inside the state of exception might choose to identify with a given stigma animal as alien: the parasitoid insect, gory worm, hoarding vermin, bloated broodmother or slimy octopus, etc. And likewise we’ll consider why these feelings might be close to trauma and home as confused, thus closeted, contradictory and repressed: like a vampire in a coffin or a corpse underground, surrounded by the likeness of death, ensconced within self-hatred and decay as something to, like Sontag’s death theatre, turn inside-out. Doubles make this potent, campy inversion not only possible, but practical, even preferable inside alien costumes while interrogating and negotiating power and trauma inside the shadow zone; or as my thesis argues—re (“Interrogating Power through Your Own Camp”):

good play amounts to Gothic poetics as a potent means of regaining control through reclaimed implements of terror (the manacle, castle, rapist, slur or baton, etc) but also being that which terrifies the state and its proponents to no end: a refusal to conform or obey […] Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (source).

Paradox, performance and play during ludo-Gothic BDSM, then, process Cartesian abuse through praxial synthesis, gradually achieving catharsis through a newfound perception of/reunion with nature as liberated from Cartesian models—the harvest freed from the knife.

[9] I.e., as Milton put it: ” Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”

[10] Mary Wollstonecraft was commonly demonized as animal: “Brickbats hurled her way were pretty vicious, ‘a hyena in a petticoat,’ as well as the usual whore, vixen, emasculator of men” (source: Rosita Sweetman’s “Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘Hyena in a petticoat,'” 2017).

[11] Hip-hop/rap and metal historically are music of protest that has been recuperated over time. Like monsters (and generally in concert with more overt, fantastical forms), these musics demand reclamation by workers creating music to stand up for their own rights; likewise, dancing in slave culture and music should be used while exploitation and genocide are currently going on—any form of art-as-protest to make these abuses known. Genocide isn’t just death camps, but every abuse of power leading up to fascist hegemony that was permitted by those the Nazis emulated, including American police states and pro-police individuals within society at large consuming “neutral” media that attempts to commodify genocide/settler colonialism; e.g., Laura from Street Fighter V (exhibit 10b2; re: “Prey and Liberators“) but also Deejay as a black capitalist, smiling ear-to-ear from having “made it” out of the colony gutter.

Genocide is culture and societal death at a pace that is meant to be so large and gradual that it becomes normalized, denied and invisible. This bigotry must be challenged, including against so-called “progressive” branches of society and establishment politics; e.g., Rosario Dawson, a cis-queer person, abusing trans woman, Dedrek Finley (source: Derrick Clifton’s “Trans Man Details Abuse Allegations Against Rosario Dawson,” 2019). Solidarity is not refusing to punish the lesser of two evils while singing about them. And the singing must continue, lest history carry on much as it has. This includes demonizing the Left and its activists not simply as “fake” or “childish,” but as “terrorists” (or useless according to liberal moderates, who simultaneously rely on the Left for votes, but also insist they never did and never will:

There is no outcome to any election in the United States in which the Democratic Party acknowledges votes from Communists and thanks them for their grudging support. If the Democrat wins, the most that the Left gets is not a Republican, and is then discarded, ignored and mocked—at least until the next election when the Left is needed but somehow also not needed. It is always the leftists who are accused in the media of ruining the alliance, even though there is no real alliance and the disagreement is on both sides […] Our capitalist media will favor voices from those who support Capitalism [which the Left does not, making them terrorists in the eyes of both sides of establishment politics; source: Renegade Cut’s “2024 – Thoughts and Speculation,” 2023].)

The moment the singing stops, the abuse will continue unabated. So it must continue regardless of what is thought by either side of the American establishment.

This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “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.

Click here to see “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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 (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.

Nature Is Food, part three: A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in Rape Culture (feat. phallic women/traumatic penetration and sports abuse)

[Francis Bacon, the father of modern science,] argued that “science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her.” Further, the “empire of man” should penetrate and dominate the “womb of nature.” […] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was “gyn/ecological” from the outset (source).

—Raj Patel and Jason Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things

Picking up where “A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in War Culture” left off…

War and rape go hand in hand. Now that we’ve examined (but not exhausted) the Cartesian trauma of war culture as something to subvert when synthesizing praxis, the roadmap’s next two sections considers how rape culture can be interrogated and synthesized in our own creative responses to canonical forms; i.e., how to recognize said canon (and its Man Box mentalities) in part three, and express our trauma in relation to it through successful praxis, during the finale. Systemic catharsis requires praxis as conveyed through our extracurricular instruction’s cultivation of good social-sexual habits; i.e., de facto educators relaying a pedagogy of the oppressed through trauma writing and artwork that speak to living with rape under warlike conditions, raising the collective, solidarized awareness and intelligence required towards preventing future abuse (ultimately dismantling the state). Except Capitalism is Cartesian, targeting anything with the power to creatively liberate itself through psychosexual theatre. To serve the elite, canonical forms of demon BDSM frame nature as monstrous-feminine food tied to the profit motive, which rapes and disempowers workers and nature by fetishizing their regal, empowering monstrous-feminine aspects; e.g., Medusa’s rage or Satan’s ability to shapeshift; i.e., through physical and mental violence of a highly divisive and terrifying sort. Nature is a fat, sassy bitch, which Capitalism thus divides (and cuts) into fetishized pieces of alien material before rendering it fatally into profit, chaining the bodies to an endless Cartesian Gothic brutality. Alienate, fetishize, dissect and feed. Genocide by design.

(source: “Vulvine Reine d’Extase” by Gobelins, 2022)

Part three considers Cartesian violence inside the Gothic mode; i.e., in relation to phallic women and their traumatic penetration but also male violence in sports; the finale examines the knife dick as something to reshape, disarmed through racialized porn tropes fetishizing dark/fat bodies (and body parts): as things to liberate through themselves using ludo-Gothic BDSM, whose ironic, Satanic-rebel variants of psychosexual violence are prohibited during canonical fetishization under Cartesian models of domination (through the state’s trifectas and monopolies).

Rape is a serious and complicated topic, and we won’t have time to unpack all the theoretical aspects to ludo-Gothic BDSM, here (refer to my thesis volume for the entirety of them), nor all the various forms of alienation that habitually occur under Cartesian violence. Instead, we’ll combine concepts we have already touched upon, juggling them holistically to arrange around us and connect like a constellation, while also promoting various poetic scenarios the rest of the book will explore deeper than this symposium has thus far (or its remaining fifty pages). For now, just remember that Cartesian dualism (and its subsequent rape) historically-materially reduce workers and nature to three main xenophobic (or harmfully xenophilic) classes of alien—and by extension criminal/slave status—as something that is born into, then fetishized and raped because of it; i.e., inside prison-like structures that, through the state of exception, perpetuate crime-and-punishment inside an established order of cops and victims: undead, demonic, and totemic[1] (which Volume Two will explore at length).

(artist: Legion)

Moving forward, part three exhibits nature and human bodies as irreversibly transformed into Man Box enforcers (female, then male) and pitted against criminal, monstrous-feminine fetishes; i.e., during rape less as a single event and more as an ongoing structure by Cartesian forces (who go on to rape these groups again and again during reactive abuse driving them to madness, but also portraying them as hideous, violent and inhuman). Then, the finale explores the resulting trauma and monstrous-feminine language synthesized through rebellious counterterrorist bodies, liberating themselves by pointedly reversing the Patriarchy’s bedrock notion of “counterterror and terror” in favor of workers, not the state (and its knife dicks); i.e., beings from the stars, the beyond or Hell whose devilish gnosis offers a delicious, forbidden gateway for future liberation, not a death warrant. Before part three continues, I want to spend the next four pages discussing various important ideas concerning rape in connection to ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as a playful, potent means of reclaiming nature through Gothic poetics’ shared sphere: camp, intent, function, double standards, and assimilation.

First, camp. In our thesis, we discussed rape as synonymous with war under capital but also something to place in quotes when camping canon. Just because something is camped doesn’t mean an unironic harm can’t be found; it merely means that unironic violence is challenged as a dogmatic tool through ironic/appreciative forms of fetishized Gothic peril—our ever-important (from a cathartic standpoint) rape fantasies, guilty pleasures and wish fulfillment during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Rape is both invisible and ubiquitous under Capitalism. This paradoxical arrangement has just as much to do with the arm of the state as the public imagination, though the two generally go arm-in-arm during military urbanism. According to the Marshall Project’s “Overlooking Rape: New Orleans Is Not the Only City Where Police Don’t Get It” (2014):

The undercounting of rape is becoming more common, according to [Dr. Corey Rayburn] Yung. Between 1995 and 2012, he found a 61 percent increase in the number of cities providing the FBI with rape statistics that seemed suspiciously low according to his methodology (source).

Power, as we have discussed up to this point, is something to tally and perceive, but also perform during expected roles enforced by state powers and obedience towards said powers: to do one’s duty no matter how painful or ignominious. Medusa is the ghost of the counterfeit, and the ghost of the counterfeit is always rape.

(artist: Grand-Sage)

Cartesian thought is predicated on harmful invention: Nature and Society vis-à-vis Bacon, but also the invention of terrorism through the Neo-Gothic vis-à-vis Joseph Crawford: the invention of us-versus-them to magically summon things “from beyond” like a Radcliffean nightmare, then execute or banish again with xenophobic impunity inside and outside a given police state. It canonizes power as something to perceive through nature not just as food, but criminal, alien food that must be kept down through force. Capitalism, then, automates war and rape as a canonical, police means of fetishizing[2] and harvesting nature-as-alien (thus dark) until both are all workers know and anything else is unimaginable. While both synergize under Capitalist Realism, the latter often targets the mind through menticide as a torturer/tortured dynamic predicated on isolation. Neoliberal Capitalism does something similar decades after Meerloo, breaking the minds of all workers (not just men) in sexually dimorphic, deliberately isolating ways: a Capitalist-Realist myopia that cripples their ability to see, think, create, or relate to, thus form relationships with, other workers and nature as brutalized.

Second, intent. Contrary to popular thought, rape isn’t just sexual or even physical abuse, but emotional and mental abuse conducted through nebulous threats of violence over long periods of time; it is synonymous with violence in all its forms, regardless of intent. Jadis, for example, would threaten me with abandonment, which served as a reliable trigger for them to manipulate me with: I couldn’t tell if they meant to, only deepening and extending their torture of me. Mavis actually feared behavioral conditioning far more than physical rape; physical violence demands work and effort from the rapist, whereas propaganda does much of the work for you inside the victim’s own mind. Exposed to threats of violence through “waves of terror” and brief pauses thereof, victims of menticide become subconsciously compliant towards rape culture as conspicuously gendered; e.g., women broken by Pavlovian conditioning often lash out at perceived threats offered up by conservative leaders during moral panics; i.e., triangulation, a common TERF tactic when manipulating members within their own social circles. And before you ask, “What about their intentions?” consider that rape is rape regardless of intent; moreover, intent can be ascertained by what historically-materially persists through structures that lead to, and generally apologize for or obsess about, rape through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection.

(exhibit 29: Top: In vino veritas, “In wine, there is truth.” Cersei getting plastered to prepare for the worst [as even under sex-positive scenarios, alcohol can loosen one’s body cavities]; in this case, the “hair of the dog that bit her” is also rape: She’s speaking from experience. Bottom, artist: Edward Munch, feeling alienated from the world, utters a terrific [and silent] scream.)

Third, and in other words, function. Express, conscious intent doesn’t matter if the historical-material outcome demonstrably contributes to, thus functions as, successful canonical praxis and abuse encouragement patterns. James Cameron, regardless if he “meant to” or not, still “pulled a Pygmalion”; i.e., making a giant, Communist, T-Rex “dragon lady” with an African tribal mask for “Girl Rambo” to catfight with. Offstage, rapes happen regardless if someone “intended” to, or if they lied or hid their intentions behind bad-faith performances before, during or after the crime, defending their abusive actions to whatever court they find themselves in (we’ll pointedly refer to this with Ian Kochinski’s own slimy tactics, in Volume Three, Chapter Four[3]). Rapes, however, not only leave behind scant physical evidence; they affect the testimony of those who survive who are reminded of them in stories that first-and-foremost aim to profit off the perception of rape under criminogenic conditions; i.e., heteronormative Gothic fiction.

In other words, canonical praxis turns workers (classically men) into stupid rapists who “accidentally” or intentionally rape their victims, then try to cover it up—often in Gothic forms; it turns men (or tokenized workers within Man Box culture) not just into soldiers, but mind-raped killers-for-hire who rape themselves and their fellow workers in perpetuity across all registers. Rape culture compels widespread, self-destructive service through threats of vague annihilation at all moments; it leaves behind no bruises, but the scars run deep and permeate all aspects of public life, but especially Gothic media as a voice for things normally shirked away from in politer dialogs.

One such inheritance anxiety is how the state is always in crisis and crisis leads to decay as something to normalize in canonical Gothic media. Ultimately this will fragment the state when Imperialism comes home to roost, but the brunt of the burden is historically bourne out by workers abused by the ruling class. For instance, the Nazis’ industrialized Holocaust offered their nation-state no material benefit; in fact, it actually used up tremendous amounts of valuable resources, bureaucracy and sheer labor that could have been diverted elsewhere during the war effort. Instead, top Schutzstaffel [the SS] like Heinrich Himmler, Reinhardt Heydrich, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner (The People Profiles, 2023) kept up appearances purely for profit so efficient it contributed to the Nazi state’s entire destruction. Long after the Nazis came and went, though, rape culture is very much alive and well in America—a constant, living force felt through Gothic language, but also reactionary politics that abuse the Gothic’s liminal potential to cultivate bad education. Enslavement is taught, and generally relates to trauma as something to express, surviving inside people and the media that survives them to inform future generations. In short, there is no clock on trauma; it heals when it heals and until then, you simply have to live with it; i.e., synthesize through your own daily habits.

Fourth, double standards, which heteronormativity leads to. Female servitude under Capitalism is different to male servitude, the latter of which tends to receive preferential mistreatment as the universal clientele. Both are raped under Capitalism, but differently through Man Box culture. Women (or beings forced to act and appear as women) are raped through figurative and literal labor theft and wage slavery—sold to male clients like useful animals or chattel slaves, but also as highly cultivated products that “beastly” men are likewise conditioned to rape, kill, or otherwise eat like gruel: Stepford spouses, “as calm as Hindu cows,” their minds and their eyes dead inside. Intersectionality extends this relationship to overlapping axes of oppression within the same basic pedagogy (and its complicated traumas) as perpetually contested under state mechanisms; e.g., people of color or GNC persons as corrupt, monstrous-feminine and correct-incorrect. An oppressed pedagogy will account for these complexities, synthesizing them in practical ways, including parody and irony as an unfolding, ambiguous proposition (e.g., Fight Club [1999], left); a state pedagogy (and its own means of instruction) will not.

Fifth, assimilation. Conformity to state education is generally unhealthy to workers, including the perceived benefactors. For example, Man Box culture conditions cis-het men to physically and materially prepare their bodies and minds for war and “home defense,” only to die on the front lines historically far away from women (save as voices, media, prostitutes, or medics). In turn, both sides of the gender binary invoke settle colonialism, thus sex within war and violence. Settler colonialism trains men (or token agents) to torture those around them through a “prison sex” mentality that bleeds into media as instructional towards state aims. Unable to stop because it’s the only way they can feel “like a man,” such persons regain their manly essence by taking it from others through traumatic penetration; they become killer babies—both violent, impulsively vampiric creatures-of-habit, and trophy-keeping serial killers (soldiers and cops, but also weird canonical nerds debating Nazis within nerd culture, etc) working for and trained by the state to rape others: manufactured competition inside us-versus-them, good-vs-evil teams instead of collective teamwork and intersectional worker solidarity. The consequence is internalized fear and dogma that keep workers violent and stupid, but also divided and afraid of nature; a raped mind is an isolated, dead mind.

Emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/culture/race awareness aren’t just social skills and know-how, but perseverance and resilience under struggle, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., it’s not something privileged groups—especially white, cis-het men—experience to the same degree, leading them when feeling the slightest bit threatened to automatically jump to conspiracies like the shadow state, Qanon and the Jewish globalists, and white replacement. It makes them highly susceptible to bullshit, thus easy to manipulate by unscrupulous ringleaders. They start to feel threatened by everything to a higher and higher degree, demanding real victims to alleviate their own terror at absurd, imaginary “threats.” Little by little, their home becomes a fortress, which they will defend from outsiders invading from a perceived elsewhere (again Hell, but also the stars, the unknown, the wild, etc).

(artist: Niki Chen)

This insecurity also regards property (things of nature) as potentially “compromised”; i.e., something for men to collect and obsess about, but also feed on/objectify in tremendously harmful ways for all parties (and natures) involved; e.g., necrophilia, pedophilia and zoophilia, etc (the removal of consent within canonical Gothic poetics). Women inside the colonial binary—which, beyond women, excludes anyone who doesn’t conform, turning them into hostile alien fetishes attack (re: the Medusa)—are canonically valued by sexist men as “porn food” that, when fattened up or starved (usually a combination, left), helps “grown-ass, manly specimens with manly appetites” indulge in “grownup junk food.”

This not only cheapens women, but nature more broadly through porn, reducing both to a cheap, disposable, sinful product that men “give into” when they’re “weak”; i.e., when their judgement “lapses” and they taste of the forbidden fruit “outside” of Cartesian society. But men conditioned through the state still prefer these conspicuously monetized “snacks” versus disobedient “ladies (3D or otherwise) who don’t know their place,” and other non-female embodiments of natural as “wild.” It’s easier for men (or token groups emulating men to triangulate against nature) to cope with their own exploitation and trauma; i.e., if they have control over something they can simply eat. This double standard usually presents as isolated, downplayed or displaced, but in reality stems from Capitalism having relied on men to do its dirty work since day one and is now trying quite badly to make up for the paradigm shift: women not wanting to sleep with every man they come across.

Through assimilation, female autonomy becomes something to appropriate under Capitalist Realism—specifically appropriative peril, whose expanded recruitment leads to canonical “TERF gargoyles”; i.e., girl/war/queer bosses; e.g., female drill instructors, lady Rambos and Amazons—all figurative and literal “sleeper agents” who respond stochastically to trauma as phallic women do: through traumatic penetration’s knives and bullets, but also a Cartesian willingness to turn these against other so-called “emergent beings.”

With that, let’s take one more page to outline the criminogenic conditions that sanction Cartesian violence to begin with; i.e., the paradoxes of violence, terror and morphological expression that ludo-Gothic BDSM camps. As we do, remember two things: One, both they and their linguo-material forms exist in dialectical-material opposition, doubling inside chaotic liminal territories and positions occupied by class traitors (cops) and warriors alike using opposing forms of cryptonymy. Two, once established by state forces, the illusory maintenance of state righteousness, sovereignty and legitimacy must never be challenged lest “the world end”; i.e., Capitalist Realism. On one side, the state preys on nature and human bodies as raped by Cartesian forces, the latter feeding on the former by transforming them into walking apocalypses: zombies, demons, and totems as hyperbolically menacing. On the other side, state victims endure police brutality’s embodiment of presumed, conspicuous guilt (the dark exterior) and internalizing of self-hatred and bigotry while subverting police misuse of Gothic poetics through a pedagogy of the oppressed: counterterror with a proletarian function.

I’ve repeatedly said that function determines function. Another way to conceptualize this is flow determines function. That is, during oppositional praxis’ dialectical-material struggles, terror and counterterror become anisotropic; i.e., determined by direction of flow insofar as power is concerned. Settler colonialism, then, flows power towards the state to benefit the elite and harm workers; it weaponizes Gothic poetics to maintain the historical-material standard—to keep the elite “on top” by dehumanizing the colonized, alienating and delegitimizing their own violence, terror and monstrous bodily expression as criminal within Cartesian copaganda: treating terrorism and counterterrorism as a Cops-and-Robbers lullaby to soothe white army brats (and other children during military urbanism) having become afraid of nature as one might be the dark: “My mommy said there were no monsters, no real one. But there are, aren’t there? Why do mommies tell little kids that?” / “Because most of the time it’s true.” Ripley and Newt’s conversation speaks to the abjection of nature as dark, rapacious and wild by colonial forces—the Medusa concentrated into an inhuman-yet-maternal dominatrix (the dark “mommy dom”) whose vivid, liberating combination of undead, demonic, and animalistic[4] will be criminalized and attacked by class traitors adopting more civil, outwardly “white” forms of medieval violence like Ripley (and similar Amazons, below) teaching “Newt” to fear the dark by raping it; i.e., subjugated phallic women castrating a female master rebel, once she visibly tries—through a dissident question of mastery—to reverse the status-quo binary (and flow) of terrorism and counterterrorism by showing her trauma, anger and willingness to fight back against a presumed overlord.

In doing so, a Galatea threatens the canonical, Pygmalion decree of what’s appropriate, insofar as the giving and receiving of xenophobic violence unfold inside a compelled moral order—one whose fear and dogma (during endless crisis, decay and moral panic) establishes the police and the state as good, thus legitimate, and those aliens inside the state of exception as bad, thus illegitimate. Per Radcliffe, the invention is one of state forces accusing others of banditry in bad faith; i.e., while functioning as banditti themselves, robbing others blind behind the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection to deliberately further genocide (re: “Who’s the savage? Modern man!”). Cops are always good, human, safe and nature is always alien, criminal, dangerous. Anything that breaks the spell must be discredited, destroyed and/or exiled, scapegoating it all the more.

Within the reactive abuse of settler-colonial models, rebel villainy and outrage is manmade to receive state violence during moral panics: orchestrated by Cartesian hubris through arrogant, fame-seeking men like Victor Frankenstein (more on him in Volume Two) but also female protectors classically enslaved[5] during Amazonomachia to serve men (often through marriage) and kettle state enemies with a smile on their face. First, we’ll look at how through subjugated Amazons and other tokenized female agents’ traumatic penetration/carceral violence against state victims; after that we’ll look at violence against men in the sports world, then segue into the finale, which inspects racialized and GNC forms of pornographic expression before concluding the symposium (and volume) with a matriarchal anecdote.

(artist: Morry Evans)

Already-codified under Max Box culture, state abuse strategies become something to assimilate, internalize and release back into the world using canonical Gothic poetics’ fixation on phallic violence; e.g., knights, Amazons and their dick-shaped weapons as sexualized killing implements swept up in hauntological courtship. The unnatural coercion of the women involved becomes naturalized, normal; reacting to trauma, cis-het or cis-queer women (and male feminists and gay men) either bow to its markers through damsel-style regression; or they assimilate them, the Amazon angrily “dick-measuring” with Medusa in the canonical, bourgeois sense to their own and everyone else’s detriment: sheathing her sword inside her foe. They triangulate and attack the state’s enemies through phallic means: stabbing and shooting other marginalized groups. In other words, the “prison sex” phenomenon co-opts classic female/queer rage as false activism; i.e., a divide-and-conquer strategy to pit workers against workers through workers. The marginalized in-fighting is specifically performed by reactionary women, whose past trauma is weaponized—a Pavlovian conditioning that promises further abuse unless they act against state enemies to restore balance now.

As such, these TERFs reliably respond to moral panics in ways the state requires: through “prison sex” dominance hierarchies and rape culture coopted by second wave feminists against sex workers, but also trans, intersex, and non-binary people (and their allies) belonging to nature-as-food. All become something to harvest by Cartesian means—through rape and torture (as Francis Bacon would put it) by presenting Mother Nature (and her various offshoots) as “asking for it.” The monstrous-feminine becomes dark, queer and violent, but also composed of two unfair halves; i.e., a being of two worlds, both to blame for all of Capitalism’s woes and tied to the granting of savage secret desires and dark, repressed wishes Capitalism advertises in cliché forms: the bringer of fresh life amid intense, orgasmic torture, power, decay and death. A rival master to Cartesian dominators, the monstrous-feminine (often the Archaic Mother/rebellious phallic woman, among other such “corruptions” of nature) is both the obscene penetrator that drains you of your lifeforce, and the necrotic womb that takes you in before vampirically eating you alive: absorption, or a reverse birth.

 (artist: John Tedrick)

We’ve already examined Amazonomachia and the triangulation of women considerably in Volume Zero, and we’ll unpack its “prison sex” moderacy and TERFs (and their Amazons and Medusas) much more in Volume Three. In the meantime, keep this in mind this as part three proceeds: women who assimilate tend to emulate cis-het men’s typical Cartesian actions against nature. By extension, this books’ pedagogy of the oppressed isn’t really on cis-het men, because cis-het men generally aren’t oppressed compared to women and various minorities. That being said, this section will examine men briefly as givers and receivers of phallic state violence; e.g., by injecting their bodies full of dangerous chemicals (exhibit 30b1) or placing heroes within sacrificial positions of Gothic danger (exhibit 30b2) that demonize the imaginary past as vengeful against the current generation, not the elite; or turning them into serial killers who not only kill women, but transform them into phallic implements of Cartesian binaries, hence psychosexual violence (exhibit 31): brides of Dracula. Said men (and the women imitating them to whatever degree they’re allowed within the Imperial Core) need to stop using said violence to fetishize and attack those workers alienated, then preyed on, by the state: us-versus them porn (exhibits 32a, b, c, and d).

Of course, there are moments throughout the remainder of Sex Positivity that delve into patriarchy on different registers of power—e.g., weird canonical nerds in Volume Three, Chapter Three—but the emphasis still remains on sex positivity for all workers, who the state (and its proponents) rape. This goes well beyond cis-het men or women. Even so, assimilation fantasies (and their rapacious elements) require subversion and irony if they are to become cathartic during proletarian praxis and its creative successes’ de facto instruction; i.e., when processing state abuses and generational trauma through our own labor (and its myriad expressions/arrangements). These are very much discussed for the rest of the roadmap, but also in Volume Two and Three; i.e., their misapplication by TERFs and their battered, canonical girl bosses; e.g., Ellen Ripley (exhibit 30a) and Samus Aran, her palimpsest (exhibit 71).

As someone who grew up in love with these space cowgirls, I absolutely can recognize their liminal, oft-canonical background; i.e., as something to challenge within oppositional praxis during ludo-Gothic BDSM. We’ll explore that now, before returning to rape as tied to Gothic symbols of phallic violence when committed by men, but also women and other tokenized, Man Box proponents: the knife dick[6] as something to brandish at what the state has divided you (us) from and made alien (them) compared to yourself.

(artist: Kyle James)

To this, state hegemony threatens and executes invasion in the same complicated sphere. Per Cameron’s refrain, the imperial castle becomes a black fortress, an indiscriminate killing ground with one grim message: “kill the enemy.” Except, its broadcast travels inside a place where the distinction between friend and foe is eliminated. The colony doubles as a concentration camp for both sides, but also a territory to conquer over and over. Inside its state of exception, civil distinctions become meaningless; everyone is a threat (the xenomorph a potential invader hiding inside state employees) and the state can do anything to defend itself, to profit. Hostages, soldiers, and terrorists alike not only become confused, but collateral damage serving the profit motive. Cops, the prescribed hero class, transform; they become demons, pirates, and black knights—rabid-dog torturers, jailors and assassins who threaten everyone except the elite, far, far away.

This harrowing reality plays out in videogames under neoliberal hegemony, but also the movies that inspired them coming out of older, pre-cinematic works. In either case, us-versus-them owes itself to Cartesian thought pitting state violence—i.e., the traumatic, dick-like penetration of knives and bullets—against guerrilla forces wielding abject variants of the same ordinance inside prison-like conditions. Historically this would have been stolen American materiel, but in many shooters is symbolized as biomechanical/cybernetic during a prison break. This chimeric fusing of nature and the unnatural creates something utterly fearsome that America cannot defeat without “outside” help: the ancient male mercenary (the knight) hauntologically revived, but also the Amazon updated through neoliberalism as a war-themed girl boss “from another world.” As my PhD argues,

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

Threatened, the state always responds with violence before anything else. Male or female, then, the hero becomes the elite’s exterminator, destroyer and retrieval expert, infiltrating a territory of crisis to retrieve the state’s property (weapons, princesses, monarchic symbols of power, etc) while simultaneously chattelizing nature in reliably medieval ways: alienating and fetishizing its “wild” variants, crushing them like vermin to maintain Cartesian supremacy and heteronormative familial structures […] Neoliberalism merely commercializes the monomyth, using parental heroic videogame avatars like the knight or Amazon pitted against dark, evil-familial doubles—parents, siblings and castles (and other residents/residences)—in order to dogmatize the player (usually children) as a cop-like vehicle for state aims (often dressed up as a dated iteration thereof; e.g., an assassin, cowboy or bounty hunter, but also a lyncher, executioner, dragon slayer or witchfinder general “on the hunt,” etc): preserving settler-colonial dominance through Capitalist Realism by abusing Gothic language—the grim reaper and his harvest. Doing so helps disguise, or at least romanticize (thus downplay, normalize and dismiss) state abuses through their regular trifectas and monopolies; i.e., the CIA and other shadowy arms of state mercenary violence fronted by myopic copies—pacifying the wider public by mendaciously framing these doubles as (often seductive) “empowerment” fantasies. Dogma becomes “home entertainment” as a palliative means of weaponizing the idea of “home” against those the state seeks to control and exploit on either side of a settler-colonial engagement: the cop or the cop’s victims. Either is sacrificed for the state through its usual operations; i.e., for the Greater Good, except heroes are glorified as monstrous sacrifices serving “the gods” (the status quo) out of Antiquity into capital, whereas their victims are demonized as evil, thus deserving of whatever holy (thus righteous) retribution comes their way. Both are chewed up and spit out, the state’s requisite “grist for the mill” as it uses its own citizens to move money through nature: by defending itself from an imaginary darkness “From Elsewhere.” A fortress’ sovereignty is forged, as are its manufactured crises and saviors, but the outcome is still profit; the castle remains haunted by the ghost of genocide, suggesting the unthinkable reality that the hero is false.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In neoliberal copaganda, canonical heroes are sent solo or in small groups, deployed as much like a bomb as a person; hired by the powerful, these “walking armies” destabilize target areas for the mother country to invade and bleed dry (a genocidal process the aggressor sanitizes with cryptonymic labels like “freedom” and “progress”). To this, they are authorized, commissioned or otherwise sanctioned by those with the means of doing so; i.e., a governing body centered around elite supremacy at a socio-material level. After infiltration occurs, they work as a detective[7]/cop, or judge, jury and executioner—either on foreign or domestic soil, the place in question framed as loosened from elite control, thus requiring the hero [and their penchant for extreme violence] to begin with. This makes them an arbiter of material disputes wherever they are: through police violence for the state in its colonial territories at home and abroad. They always follow orders: “Shoot first, ask questions later and enslave what survives.” In stories like Aliens, Doom and Metroid, the fatal nostalgia of the “false” doubled homestead is used to incite genocide, thus conduct settler colonialism inside of itself; i.e., through standard-issue Imperialism but also military urbanism; e.g., Palestine abroad[8] versus the death of Nex Benedict at home[9]. This has several steps. First, convince the hero that a place away from home is home-like; i.e., the thing they do not actually own being “theirs” (the ghost of the counterfeit) but “infested” (the process of abjection). Then, give them a map and have them “clean house”—an atrocious “fixer” out of the imaginary past who repairs the “broken” home room-by-room by first cleansing it of abject things “attacking it from within,” then disappearing with the nightmare they constitute; i.e., purging these alien forces through blood sacrifice or even total destruction of the home itself. The iconoclast can reverse this two-step process, but must protect those queenly things of nature normally persecuted by Cartesian forces and their cartographic schools of violence; i.e., by using counterterrorist language and ironic roles of violence, terror and monsters redirected towards the state: Athena’s Aegis and the dark queen’s chaotic stare of doom, but also literal, manmade weapons illustrated during performative shows of force against state invaders attacking Galatea (source: “Scouting the Field”).

Canonical heroes triangulate against state targets, then, becoming the necessary exterminator of the settler-colonial model, but also the sexy destroyer and superheroic retrieval expert during the monomythic fetch quest (hyperbole and state heroism go hand-in-hand, exaggerating the menace, emergency and rescue to equal measure); i.e., a budding flower of war and larger-than-life tempter-of-fate (and the audience) walking the tightrope between Heaven and Hell, life and death, protector and aggressor, child and parent, but also wild and tame, pleasure and pain, black and white, strong and weak, invincible and vulnerable, good and evil—all while delivering state subjects (and the nuclear family unit) from evil, chaos, death, darkness, Hell, etc: the dark chronotope as a false copy whose hellish architecture and monarchy (the medieval bloodline) threatens the perceived legitimacy of the West’s own forgeries (while also haunting them). A school of canonical violence, then, the liminal hauntology of war predictably emerges, summoning the hero to occupy then suppress a prescribed “disorder” during an orderly chaos/Amazonomachia that breaks and repairs the symbolic home; i.e., over and over when ludo-Gothic BDSM disrobes in public (a narrative of the crypt, circular ruin, infernal concentric pattern, Cycle of Kings, etc): a whore to closet and kettle by design, but where camp shares the same space of play with/without irony.

(artist: Gerald Brom)

And since we’re focusing on the monstrous-feminine, here, I consider the most famous of all modern phallic women to be Hippolyta-married-to-Theseus: James Cameron’s neoconservative, “feral mother” take on Ellen Ripley serving as a warlike, parent-themed mentor for the children of the present (or those who, thanks to waves of terror, regress to child-like states). She’s the housemaid with a gun, facing the barbaric imagery of the imaginary past mirrored by actual colonial abuses, upholding the latter by banishing the former to benefit the elite—in short, by playing out a heroic story much in the same way that modern versions of Beowulf would: through sex and force, rape and war expressed in theatrical language that maintains Capitalist Realism.

(exhibit 30a: Volume Zero extensively explored how rape is a triangulation device employed by state forces in Gothic media; i.e., of Amazonian women raping state enemies/targets: the state’s chosen female war bosses giving police, “prison sex” violence to nature-as-alien. Biological similarities and differences aside, their xenophobic function is identical to men’s—an assortment of gun, war, and rape pastiche through a co-opted, centrist Amazon: the good monster woman, Ellen Ripley, furiously slaying her evil double, Medusa, in service of the state [who redirect her rage at their abuse of her in the first movie towards whatever target they want killed next: destructive anger]. Policing the whore through bad BDSM, the neoliberal, neoconservative “revenge fantasies” of Aliens and Predator [1986-87] are rape fantasy in that regard, as are their videogame offshoots: “Rape the Communist; kill the pig, spill its blood!”—all in service of the owner class back at home posturing as righteous, but also displaced by neoliberal “arms merchants” like James Cameron and John McTiernan [the former’s other franchise, the Terminator movies, having a much more left-leaning “Western” flavor surprisingly Gothic/critical of Capitalism, exhibit 8b2]. These neocon fantasies canonically disassociate through state violence, producing a “bouquet” of “war daises” echoing T.S. Eliot’s infamous “Wasteland” [1922]: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land” [source].

Just as the shared, us-versus-them rhetoric owes a symbolic debt to Beowulf’s post-Roman treatment of monsters inside a Christian hegemon that survived in future English forms, neoliberalism’s prime videogame mode—Cameron’s refrain, the shooter—owes its own abject warrior symbolism to earlier stories putting future ghosts of Beowulf in seemingly unusual environments like outer space [whose dark hostility emulates Grendel’s mother’s underwater cave]: Starship Troopers. Beowulf’s various offshoots survived into a retro-future copaganda whose military optimism contributes to the ongoing myopia under Capitalist Realism in male and female videogame forms; i.e., “Conan with a gun” aping Rambo [the white savior playing guerrilla] and Amazonian, Hippolyta-in-spirit Beowulfs like Samus Aran doing the same. Both offer a de facto “good” parental role to challenge the bad parentage of corrupt and/or monstrous-feminine entities [the evil double of the hero’s homestead and its occupants]. Conjured up, Beowulf aborts the spawn of Cain and Grendel’s mother on their illegitimate home turf encroaching on colonized lands; Samus crushes her own tall, hideous enemies using her own armored body and superior “phallic” weaponry. He’s the Great Destroyer shooting Red Falcon’s biomechanical offshoots to dust; she’s the Medusa, as strong as the Earth as she cuts Mother Nature [and her draconian offspring] down to size [below].

Per the kayfabe clichés of wrestling monsters, its not long before both hero types get naked, reviving binaries from Antiquity stressed post-Renaissance—he, stripped down to stress his masculine “invulnerability” and she, her feminine “vulnerability” during a recent creation of sexual difference. Within this settler-colonial trend, they pointedly denude towards a native, “white savior” state, mid-combat, which then regresses back to nuclear family roles after the action lulls: Hippolyta, the if-not-bridal-then-at-least-maternal role, playing house/mother while Beowulf goes home to be a family man… until the fight begins anew [which it always will under Capitalism; if there’s no one left to fight, the elite will make new enemies to confront based on Cold War kayfabe archetypes: the Nazi or the Communist as a bad parent to the hero’s good parent].

[artist, bottom-right: Blue the Bone]

Through this canonical, neoconservative chase back to war—to track down and kill her own trauma—Ripley “pulls a Rambo” like Arnold and the boys do, becoming Beowulf, the fabled Great Destroyer persona and very thing she feared in the first film, during Amazonomachia: a cosmic, female war boss catfighting with a female-Numinous, xenophobic symbol for Communism in order to become “top dog,” queen bitch, etc, in service of Patriarchal Capitalism preying on nature. As such, Ripley’s “teeth in the night” performance murders, pillages and rapes the land and its inhabitants around her for the company and for Capitalism [with Cameron making FOX lots of money and contemporary videogame companies like Konami and Nintendo also becoming indebted to Aliens in future installments]. In this sense, her short fuse mirrors Victoria de Loredani’s short life in Zofloya, except “Lilla” [the recipient of state violence, exhibit 100b2] is disguised as both a killer army of queer, Communist space bugs and their abject, queenly broodmare’s Satanic power to create things that—like Satan or David from Alien: Covenant [more on him in Volume Two]—threaten “the end of the world” simply by existing at all; i.e., a termination of the status quo’s socio-economic order relayed through monster kayfabe/Amazonomachia and Galatean poetics: good monsters and bad, good nature and bad, good war and bad.

Cartesian thought emblematizes nature-as-alien through stigma animals as things to war against—often insects and other decomposers that mass produce through inhuman means of sexual reproduction, but also symbolize Indigenous culture and pagan religions; e.g., Tolkien’s fearsome spider women and orcish subterranean barbarians, or Lovecraft’s sea creatures “from the deep.” To some degree, all symbolize death, decay and ancient forgotten gods feared from a Western colonizer’s perspective; in turn, the ghost of the counterfeit abjects mighty-yet-weak [re: Umberto Eco] cultures that, once unleashed, lead to a black planet through a dark uprising’s hoard-like, black, queer and/or Jewish revenge: from the transgenerational surrender of “slaves give birth to slaves” to a slave uprising dressed in reclaimed implements of counterterror scaring whitey senseless. It’s a doomsday prediction built on colonist anticipations of eventual, inevitable collapse [no colony lasts forever]: Nature must be kept “in check” to preserve the world “as is”; i.e., Capitalism, which dominates the world/nature through military optimism as a brutal-but-effective means of maintaining the generational myopia of Capitalist Realism. As such, it also treats nature as savage—an unthinking “hive” multiplying in ways that, according to the West, “cheapen life.” Doing so abjects the West’s usual cheapening of nature [and subsequent kettling through psychosexual violence/reactive abuse] onto its victims around the world, claiming the East doesn’t “value life” the way the West does in its own good-war canon [Kay and Skittles’ “How Enemy at the Gates Lies to You: Saving Private Ryan, Othering, and Cold War Narratives,” 2023].

To this, Ripley is the CIA cop [the “advisor”] who, working for the Man in search of Promethean power [rival mastery] under a Faustian bargain, becomes the temporary Nazi to wade into the prison-like colony’s risen Hell and punch the Communist-framed-as-Nazi: the Archaic Bug Mom in fetish gear operating as the Satanic rebel, but punished as the zombie, demon, patchwork-animal cyborg when she invariably snaps under Western occupation/carceral violence. Once Medusa is vanquished and her feral legacy in chains, our Hippolyta seemingly returns “back to normal,” exiting Hell and coming back from the dead at the end of the Hero’s Journey. Except, the ontological horror—of the hero’s conditioned desire to attack such a monster—is it turns the fearful party into a genocidal murderer of the helpless [and their children] passed off as tyrannical, disgusting vermin reflecting state trauma perpetrated against the abuser towards the abused, in a ceaseless cycle of abjection, of extermination. Dark reflections of their own abuse cause TERFs to triangulate against the state’s intended underclass, the refuse of Capitalism’s bowels, its relegated, infantilized pieces of shit: the “killer queen” of the Goths and her den of abominable thieves. Hysteria isn’t quelled, then but maintained by abusing Athena’s Aegis to pass state violence along viral reflections of a perceived exotic bride to tame, an alien queen “of nature” to dominate, penetrating her fearsome womb until the end of time while Capitalism sexualizes everything.

[artist: Lera PI]

To this, Cameron’s Ripley was always a TERF Amazon, a phallic woman playing Brutus putting “Caesar” [corruption] down by abjecting white fears of medieval human childbirth [and the hysteria and humiliation of state-compelled birth trauma—of placental blood, amniotic fluid, slime and involuntary shit] onto alien bodies, biology and compelled reproduction metaphors forced away from Western powers and onto the Archaic Mother as a settler-colonial scapegoat; I’m merely exposing Ripley as one now through my instruction speaking to my trauma at the hand of cis-het/cis-queer TERFs who lionize Ripley and demonize me in the same breath. The irony is canon puts the hero-turned-heel to heel, and in the case of tokenized straw dogs like Ripley or Victoria, puts them down when they become man-eaters/”rabid.” On the flipside of this “euthanasia effect,” male “dogs” that “go mad” are normally prized for their valor and ferocity as useful to capital. They’re seen as “used to it” but also expected to “last longer” before they tire/fall apart like a spent animal corpse. Regardless, the praxial inertia remains, demanding opposition to state menticide through our own de facto education challenging its usual climaxes erupting out of exploited forms; e.g., traumatic penetration depicted as insectoid/queer to abject anything performing it, robbing them [and the endemic counterterror of their murderous, slimy “womb spaces,” but also biomechanical, stabby-stabby girl cocks, below] of valid revolutionary potential in the eyes of would-be converts; i.e., when the chickens come home to roost during mirror syndrome [re: “Always a Victim“].)

Enough about Ripley and Amazons. Now we’re going to look at those who women like Ripley emulate—men within Man Box culture through the sports world—before returning to knife dicks (for both genders) during the finale on page 547. In the meantime, remember that war and proving one’s manhood (or female place) through rape is generally to the detriment of male and female workers, queer people and other minorities (orgasmically raping and dismembering these faithful servants to serve a centrist kayfabe narrative, above: Mother Nature’s animal, but also posthuman, black/androgynous[10] revenge-by-wasp-ovipositor must be stopped, whatever the cost): policing Hell’s infernal territory is an always-needed job in canon, one performed by the hero—as Joseph Campbell put it—of a thousand faces; i.e., not just Ripley aping Hippolyta but millions of women just like her based on similar manly legends and recuperated stories of female rebellion, genderqueer potential and echoes of Beowulf inside the monomyth.

Except policing Hell is not just unattainable; it’s Faustian and Promethean in neoliberal power fantasies and ludic contracts—an ’80s “training montage” of assorted martial contests and feats of strength that lead to individual disempowerment and systemic downfall (the collapse of the male bloodline and Patrilineal descent). Gothic canon, but especially Pax Americana, abuses kayfabe theatre to synonymize strength with monomythic weapons, leaping from pugilism and swords to guns and bombs as rapacious, but also righteous. Simply put, it’s sold to us in small; i.e., the same quests for power that Capitalism exploits, weaponizing worker traumas through violent, monomythic refrains journeying into Hell that disseminate throughout popular media, but especially cinema and videogames in the neoliberal age lending us the illusion of power as false hope that utterly evaporates during state decay. Just as retro-future, throwback heroes like Mega Man or Samus Aran magically appear when darkness threatens the land (waves of terror), they suddenly disappear again when these anxieties are quelled; i.e., when pastoral bliss resumes onscreen, leaving a giant Walpolean helmet behind with no one inside. Like Walpole, it’s a sham, but one abused by capitalists (and complacent, thus complicit benefactors) to pacify workers nonetheless. What could be more Gothic than that?

(source)

My thesis has already established that conscious rebellion between the player and the game, but also workers and the world, can negotiate the unequal arrangement of power and distribution of information/consent as something to transform that, nevertheless, is shared between players and games during ludo-Gothic BDSM formulating new contracts of mastery and submission (from the glossary): “In other words, the ludic contract is less a formal, rigid contract and more a negotiated compromise occurring between the two; i.e., where players have some sense of agency in deciding how they want to play the game even while adhering to its rules and, in effect, being mastered by it.” Said transformation must be conscious and willing in order to demonstrably challenge Capitalist Realism’s centrist illusions of power that rape nature ipso facto; it must be inventive and game as a rebellious mindset cultivated by players interrogating Cartesian abuse while taking power away from the state—i.e., in game-like, emergent ways borrowed from centrist kayfabe (again, to interrogate power, you must go where it is).

Under capital, there are only masters and slaves, the hurly-burly likes of He-man (the babyface) and Masters of the Universe (the heels) being emperors with no clothes, no power as they’re sacrificed for the Greater Good (the heroic cult of death—of death before dishonor—part of an essential “tough guy” routine well at home in kayfabe, but also those who consume kayfabe presenting themselves online as “macho” to varying degrees of anonymity and public brand images); under Gothic Communism, there are no masters or slaves, only workers reunited with nature through monstrous critical lenses revived in various media types that help us process and relieve stress: in relation to psychosexual forces giving us palliative-Numinous, but also post-coital focus while grappling with complicated ideals normally alienated from us by capital. Hidden among them is the trauma of the state, but also the oppressed—our spectres of Marx yearning to be free through the same dreadful cryptomimesis.

To this, holistic, intersectional approaches like Gothic Communism combine various theories and social-sexual habits for new synthesis, or—as my teachers described my work—”new vistas of reflection.” These emerge through diversity and combination, not as so-called “weaknesses” but a flexible and mixed, playful ability to reimagine the Wisdom of the Ancients during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., with fresh interpretations of old language, thus overcoming the complex and brutal enslavement of nature and the human mind through singular, Cartesian interpretations thereof: set paths vs paths made by us veering away from traditions that, while old, aren’t nearly as established as you might think. Keeping the prominence of these dialogs in mind (the Hermeneutic Gothic-Communist Quadfecta: Marxism and Gothic, queer and game studies), let’s reconsider the way that the rape of nature is educated through hypermasculine, sports-like stories as a kind of “opiate for the masses,” then explore the way that men, as beings to imitate through Man Box culture, are affected by Cartesian thought in ways that women historically aren’t (certainly not to the same degree, anyways).

For one, the Promethean outcome is foregone in ways that absolutely disempower men while punishing them and nature. Like Jonathan Swift’s “Little-Endians” and “Big-Endians” from Gulliver’s Travels or Dr. Seuss’ Butter Battle Book (1984), these foolish enterprises march like lemmings towards the same desolate outcome: yet another pile of used-up war dogs, their chattelized corpses spent like fuel in the engines of Capitalism’s profitable war/rape machine. Inside it, though, the petal-raining glory of fleeting conquest becomes replaced with a funeral march—one of glass jaws (Rummy’s Corner, 2023), chronic traumatic encephalopathy (Mixed Martial Academic, 2022); morbid obesity (which bodybuilders, professional wrestlers and other habitual steroid users constitute), non-steroid drug use and nepotistic exploitation dressed up in deceptive, hauntological theatre practices that bleed into real life (Behind the Bastard’s “Vince McMahon,” 2022) and the gladiatorial fool’s dogged chase of “immortality.”

These male chasers of glory can be literal military members, as well as athletes who personify war in drugged forms. The latter aren’t class traitors (at least not in the active sense)—more like Roman fools falling on their swords over and over. The guts-and-glory drama—of online, Joe-Vincent-style “neoliberal colosseum pastiche” (e.g., “Julio Cesar Chavez – 89-0 – Greatest Mexican Boxer Ever,” 2023)—tends to outshine the dialectical-material reality faced by often-poor men of color, white men (who can be poor though Tommy Morrison was not; he was related to John Wayne and had that man’s connections) and brown people from the streets of former US colonies, the US as an ongoing settler colony and current neo-colonies fighting for scraps every single day of their lives (a literal “victory or death” material reality). The fact remains, the product is sold in ways that are incredibly drug-like; i.e., a bread-and-circus approach having bonded to current mechanisms of capital from older, antiquated forms; e.g., from the Roman Empire to the United States of America.

Drug abuse is a common facet of Capitalism brutalizing nature through workers; rape, then, extends to drug abuse in relation to one’s body image in pursuit of unnatural strength as sold to workers very much like a drug. While actual drug use is a widespread problem as a response to trauma, both plague the sports world as a habitual site of rape and unequal power exchanges through theatrical forms that speak to trauma as Cartesian; i.e., “if only we (usually men, but also TERFs and various token groups) could be strong enough to face our demons and elevate ourselves by conquering our natural limits, thus the world!” The pushing of steroids through these kinds of stories serves to control people through addiction for profit, making consent just that much more of a myth.

This happens on and offstage and not just to men in the sports world. For example, studio executives would push drugs onto Judy Garland (exhibit 30b1), hounding her day and night to drink coffee, take uppers, and smoke cigarettes but not eat food. This sent her down a road known to many child stars. She was dead at 47. In the world of combat sports theatre, though, many athletes were and are abused by similar parental figures and arrangements forcing them to try and live up to hypermasculine gender standards: the impossibly manly men that, through the abuse of science, only have higher and higher hills to climb but never actually surmount (the “fodder” role is the point). Like Dr. Jekyll’s potion, suddenly men are turning into ‘roided-out Hulksters, trying to an imitate a literal giant who, in wrestling canon, had a disease that would ultimately kill him: acromegaly (an increasing of organ sizes, which eventually leads to heart failure, killing André the Giant when he was 46).

However different these men seem to Garland, they suffer from similar problems, their comorbidities shoving them into early graves to enrich the vampiric old men who own them, their bodies, their jobs, their livelihoods, their business contracts, etc. In turn, this becomes something to instruct through Gothic poetics as historically wrapped up in kayfabe narratives; i.e., the Amazon myth, but also Achilles as “superior” to nature—to any phallic woman with a sword (or sword-like implement). For them, such extensions of actual possibility go beyond Capitalism’s ordering of things, thus become aberrations to demonize and dismiss, but also fetishize and rope back into the usual schemes of patriarchal domination; e.g., Mizu from Blue Eye Samurai fighting to be recognized while appearing alien to the culture of 1600s feudal Japan (and, per the Amazon device, upsetting the archaic division of labor—sex and force—in medievalized spaces. Said spaces’ demand for these speaks to our confusion and intensity of feeling mid-disempowerment, always ensuring that such heroes find themselves employed from a diegetic and meta standpoint): “I’m vulnerable and will defend myself in ways normally denied to women in Gothic Romances/the liminal hauntology of war (the spectral warzone).”

In the case of Garland and the dead wrestlers of American kayfabe, the illusion to which these workers were part of is what ultimately killed them, in part because its continuation (and education of future workers to rape themselves and those around them) was seen as more valuable than the lives of the people propping it up (Emp Lemon’s “The Wizard of Oz and the Dark Side of Hollywood,” 2021)—by the directors, but also by critics like Roger Ebert, who cherish American cinema to a fault: “Maybe it helped that none of them knew they were making a great movie,” he wonders, prefacing this with,

Judy Garland had, I gather, an unhappy childhood (there are those stories about MGM quacks shooting her full of speed in the morning and tranquilizers at day’s end), but she was a luminous performer, already almost 17 when she played young Dorothy. She was important to the movie because she projected vulnerability and a certain sadness in every tone of her voice (source: Roger Ebert’s “The Wizard of Oz,” 1996).

Ebert cares more about what Garland brings to the performance than the actress behind the scene being raped (we’ll get back to him; re: “Summoning the Whore“); i.e., the cliché of suffering not merely for one’s art, but the art that others long to give them “transcendental” lessons that apologize for rape. This isn’t communal; it’s predatory and does little but essentialize the status quo through rape apologetics in the face of trauma bleeding out of canon and into our own lives echoing those who should seemingly be far better off. Yet rape haunts their glamorous (and at times ridiculous) portraits:

(exhibit 30b1: Drug use generally effects men and women differently according to a growing divide in heteronormative dimorphism, hauntology and poetics furthering Cartesian dualism; but its effects on both are infamously torturous and fatal. Judy Garland didn’t live to see fifty and James Brian Hellwig—aka “The Ultimate Warrior” [a hideous commodifying of Indigenous culture by white America]—was tremendously unhealthy from steroid use and cocaine binges afforded to him by those banking on his absurd, hypermasculine performances. Dying at 54 from sudden heart failure [a common side effect of steroid use], Hellwig was tremendously out-of-shape despite looking “in shape” per the Cartesian statuesque model; like Frankenstein’s Creature, minus the pathos—a dead man walking whose appearance of power was utterly hollow.)

In their own ways, then, hulking wrestlers like the Ultimate Warrior and dainty actresses like Judy Garland have quite a bit of common ground: dying for their art as literally injected into them (their skin penetrated by invasive needles). Beefed-up, they push themselves to exhaustion, then keep going because they were whipped into doing so until it became habit (and when raw habit wasn’t enough, addiction certainly did the trick). They became chattelized, as disposable as insects, their power false. Under more recent years, this horrendous, Cartesian exploitation has only increased and rewritten its own story under neoliberalism—i.e., to better chew workers up and spit them out, at greater quantities and faster speeds. More and more, consent vanishes, worker rights becoming an unattainable dream as the studio rapes bodies and minds to apologize for rape as something whose education (and Capitalist Realism) should never be threatened by the creative successes of proletarian praxis’ synthesis and catharsis. A failure to alleviate the trauma (and spell-binding glamor) of rape during ludo-Gothic BDSM is entirely what capitalists want. Centrism delivers such instruction, and delves into physical and mental cultivation well beyond the girlish innocence of Garland’s monomythic fairytale’s journey into Hell (and facing of the witch).

While there is violence and struggle in trying to synthesize a means of expressing and subverting trauma under capital through such stories as reclaimed by us camping the canon, centrism is fundamentally violent and physical in terms of the rape-like abuse it espouses. Its theatre globalizes martial arts and combat sports, whose good cops, bad cops and robbers materialize differently depending on the genre; e.g., white knights and black knights. Where such beings exist, and where critical thought is absent, there will be unironic rape as a criminogenic means of instruction dominating nature.

To understand how men suffer under Cartesian dualism, let’s briefly consider rape inside kayfabe. The sports world has many clichés that defend rape as normalized, and defended, by fans of the genre: “David vs Goliath” and similar underdog/deus ex machina narratives (e.g., the postcolonial fantasy of the iron-skinned Chinese Boxer beating the British officer, post hoc) that go hand-in-hand with the “tough hombre” language of sanctioned violence (usually against hordes of ’70s-style ninjas conveniently attacking the weak/strong hero one at a time in obviously choreographed body language). Their canonical quoting and blind war pastiche feed endlessly into a perpetual “Who is the greatest?” debate that can be summed up as mere “Bakhtinian” dick-measuring—i.e., dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites, often through symbols of actual dicks (and the warlike bodies attached to them, below): freaks of nature like Hellwig made mad by Cartesian science but presented as “of the past” and pitted against one another to make the elite money by demonizing nature in favor of a patriarchal hegemon.

(artist: Ichan-desu)

In other words, it is not conducive towards abuse prevention (thus successful proletarian praxis) to argue if the judges robbed Marvin Haggler during his fight with Sugar Ray Leonard. This is doubly so for professional wrestling narratives, whose racist tropes and fascist leanings[11] historically-materially leads to the deaths not just of single performers, but entire families driven by greed (re: “Vince McMahon“): Jack Barton Adkisson Sr., better known by his stage name, Fritz Von Erich, became a wrestling baron who—following his retirement in 1982—drove five of his six sons into early graves (four of which died in their twenties, and three of which committed suicide) by forcing them to play an infamous heel-type from professional wrestling’s Cold War equation: the Nazi. It’s a brutal business and always has been (ibid., timestamp: 1:02:21); according to Robert Evans from Behind the Bastards, it’s only gotten worse because McMahon a) doesn’t look like a Nazi and b) has proven to affect politics through his close friendship with Donald Trump (the latter having profited himself off the basic formula in the 1980s, bringing his own brand of fascist theatre into the White House). Love towards these kings of the sports world (often as patrons of gladiators) leads to an ubiquity of rape tied to the profit motive, but also the dogma and fear of things changing in ways that “extend the theatre”; i.e., in ways customers romance in relation to themselves as educated by the imaginary past as apologetic towards rape in sports-like narratives.

Full confidence, I say this even though I enjoy Rummy’s Corner, Second Base’s leftist politics/graph porn (“Fighting in the Age of Loneliness: Supercut edition, 2021) and a slew of martial artists/movie stars/athletes/stunt people, ranging from: Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Scott Atkins, Cynthia Rothrock, Andy Hug, Mike Tyson (and his various videogame offshoots like Mr. Dream and M. Bison/Balrog—Street Fighter‘s neoliberal, combat sport “nation pastiche” something we’ll touch upon in Volumes Two and Three), Michael Yeoh, Michael Jai White, etc. I enjoy these artists, while still being consciously mindful of their professions, but also their politics and how said politics code their own art and day jobs as violently standardized; i.e., leading to an encouragement of rape towards various groups under the status quo. As beings of nature, women are historically fetishized and raped as alien to men, but also devoured by them as paradoxically delicious (“forbidden fruit”). Concerning men within this arrangement, queer men and men of color are demonized as incorrect but prided for their prescribed differences to white men in relation to nature: the draw of the dark horse or the fag when outside of the closet being part of nature-as-abject. Per the doomed sons of Von Erich, whitey also pays the price.

Per Sarkeesian’s adage, my enjoyment of sports (and camping “rape” in my own psychosexual stories; e.g., Amazonomachia) includes me enjoying the work of someone like Gina Carano in Haywire while abjuring her awful, awful politics and those she works for, the Daily Wire (José, 2022); or conversely recognizing Manny Pacquiao’s extreme generosity for the people of his homeland[12], despite being part of the same destructive business that advocates for cruelty “merely” as part of a brand[13] (this advocation often made by white men, however). Any way you slice it, rape is always somewhere close by. Be that the rape of minority culture, women or white cis-het men, we can subvert it in our own social-sexual habits; in doing so, we must be unafraid to examine how such abuse survives (and perpetuates) in canonical forms of instruction that can be recoded through liminal expression on and offstage. For example, people learn from the movies, and generally endorse the binarized, gendered violence found there with their wallets: the human condition expressed liminally through theatrical, psychosexual combat.

(exhibit 30b2: To quote the shaolin monk from Enter the Dragon, 1973, “An enemy has only images, behind which he hides his true motives; destroy the image and you break the enemy.” In Gothic stories, the same is true for the villain looking to rape his victim; we want to critique neoliberals who appropriate Gothic narratives to hide their own crimes behind, but also the Cartesian structure that enables the genocidal rape of nature and workers to begin with.

Top: In Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, 1993, Bruce Lee must fight his greatest foe: his own inner demons. Except the film presents these as a transgenerational curse that follows Bruce wherever he goes—across space and time, even onto his film sets! Luckily for him, his nightmares eventually become lucid, with Bruce finally taking control and “saving” his next-in-line from the family curse. While the filmmakers’ prophecy sadly erred in real-life—Brandon Lee was killed less than a year later during a tragic shooting accident on-set—the concept still enabled Bruce, in-film, to defeat a largely illusory demon with pretensions of invulnerability informed by the victim’s own insecurities as fed to him his entire life: by the world and other workers around him; i.e., his father’s theatre troupe.

Bottom: Gina Carano is misled and ambushed by a trusted friend, who agrees to kill her for the main villain of the movie. Said betrayer’s greatest defense is his ability to lie and backstab, as unfortunately for him, Gina can fight better than he does. Not only does she absolutely trounce him; she illustrates the value in not swooning as Gothic heroines history-materially are prone to do. Their fight scene is quite erotic, intimating one of the usual places “vanilla” people learn about sex-coercive BDSM from: action movies—second only to murder mysteries, thrillers and Gothic horror, of course.)

(exhibit 30c: Adam Frost and Zhenia Vasiliev’s “How to Tell You’re Reading a Gothic Novel – in Pictures” [2014]. Neo-Gothic heroines were historically very passive, requiring them to be rescued by a male protector. Such a contrivance generally leads many women in fiction [and in real life] to suffer at the hands of their attackers dressed up as “protectors.” Canon, then, treats rape or threats thereof as essentialized within canonical, blind pastiche: “There’s gotta be a damsel-in-distress, because the status quo demands it in relation to Capitalism’s historical-material mistreatment of female workers!” Further explorations of swooning are crystalized in vampiric hypnosis as demonized code for the same basic event [exhibit 87c].)

From a capitalist standpoint, rape is a business tied to Man Box culture; challenging said business, and by extension the bigoted culture associated with it, is tantamount to rebellion of nature against the civilized world—i.e., a threat to the profit motive. Simply put, you have to be awake to rebel and you can’t do that if you’re constantly bending the knee, quoting canon and reducing your own “girl talk,” campy rejoinders and monstrous creative output to codependent, blind forms; canonical war pastiche is little more than sanctioned, mainstream violence, pointedly designed to put your minds to sleep and open your wallets: war tithes for the bread-and-circus “church” of war personified and its hypermasculine “soldiers” (whose rape of each other [and nature] parallels the state’s monopoly on violence, terror and morphological expression the world over).

These are not gods onstage, and they do not prevent rape; even if they “clean house,” they often die young and in sudden, embarrassing fashion—e.g., Bruce Lee, from a cerebral edema; Andy Hug, of acute leukemia; and Ramon “the Diamond” Dekkers, of sudden, acute heart failure. Enjoy their violent displays if you must (which I certainly do) but do not endorse the brutal structure of Cartesian dualism and its ruthless, greedy engineers’ education, thus canonical synthesis (rape apathy). It’s bourgeois kryptonite-for-the-brain and its raw consumption isn’t critical engagement. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite, designed to pacify consumers outright while worshipping rape-like spectacles, violence and lies encouraging future violence towards nature and things “of it”; i.e., in American iterations of the Colosseum praising the financial successes of the elite as a kind of Icarian “trickle-down” mechanism: basking in the glow of stolen, blood-drenched gold. Rape is a part of that, reflecting in the gilded shimmer as stolen from the natural world: money running through nature like a sword.

And if this all seems like “an outsider’s perspective,” I can wholeheartedly assure you it’s not. But I had to learn to see the difference between canon and camp insofar as nature was concerned, “making it gay” by embracing my truth as given to me by my surroundings[14]. Yes, I’m a girly bitch and hate team-based sports, but I’m also an American, thus no stranger to hearing about sports, war or rape (to borrow from common parlance, “raping” is what the winning team does to the losing team). For one, the United States has been at war for most of its existence (according to economist and mathematician, Arthur Charpentier, who calculated the number in 2017 to be for 222 out of 239 years). While professional sports have existed well before global US hegemony commenced in the 1890s, they utterly exploded in popularity afterwards. In American media, then, rape and war are commonplace—on the streets, in our stories, in our lives interacting back and forth through the social-sexual habits we cultivate as informed by Cartesian models. As for me, I am no stranger to violence or sports in my past life while living “in the closet” (exhibit 30d). Also, my father’s father fought in the Dutch resistance and I loved hearing his war stories as a child (especially the harrowing ones about Nazi war atrocities and their survivors’ testimonies: my bloodline’s raw courage). Here is Gramps, being interviewed about the war by Linda Meloche in 2005.

Simply put, I was born and bred on Pax Americana, exposed to its war-nation pastiche loop at a tender age. Yet in high school, I was also mocked for being “like a girl,” for drawing sexy anime pictures in class and for liking Alien and its Gothically “femme” stance on Cartesian war more than Cameron’s sequel (“Outlier Love: Enjoying Prometheus/Covenant in the Shadow of Aliens,” 2021). Sticks and stones; I saw my same classmates sent off to war and killed, or returning broken and shot up but worshipping their plights. In war, no one “wins” but the elite, and only until their palaces crumble around them (during state shift). Until then, workers are raped inside the Capitalocene—their minds and bodies, but also their homes; i.e., the land around them.

(exhibit 30d: Photos of me in TKD class/at tournaments in 2012.)

I can understand my (mostly male) classmates’ jingoism somewhat; I fought in TKD tournaments and attended classes sold to men, women and children (taught by a local SWAT sniper I very much didn’t like). Cheap platitudes of “moral character” and value were pitched to us with the express intent of wealthy Michigan parents paying out for they and their kids to progressively train for battles they would never fight (and when my twin—afro lad next to me, ponytail; exhibit 30d, above—broke his arm, our “master” ghosted him and left my brother to foot the bill and go under the knife through the nightmare that is the American healthcare system). Canon-wise, it’s just state-sanctioned violence under a bourgeois Superstructure that acclimates workers to a pacified mindset, one entirely accepting of manufactured scarcity, glorified war and rape, naturalized criminogenesis, and ubiquitous, displaced genocide.

To that, I’m not just a pretty trans face, sweeties. I came out from the same masculine closet as many Americans. Many more are still on the inside, guarding their fortress from nature-as-alien like a hawk. Sports is sacred, as is the unironic peril inside informing our own basic social-sexual habits; i.e., our gossip, monsters and camp. Under Capitalism, rape and war are constant, but also roiling back and forth during oppositional praxis as a battle for our minds, consent, and labor in service to or in resistance of the rape of nature on and offstage. Under complex conditions of systemic, transgenerational and menticidal abuse, men (and other weird-nerd practitioners of Man Box culture) transform into xenophobic, nationalist, ethnically “pure” monsters. They become mistrustful of nature, but also intellectualism and foreigners defending it. As such, American bloodthirst is boundless and bipartisan, directed by American consumers at those the state exploits first: the Global South (re: Ward Churchill’s “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” 2005).

As such, defenders of capital codify markers of fascism that appear more moderately under neoliberal Capitalism, but especially Gothic canon as its own reactive abuse. Recipients of this abuse (women, racial minorities, GNC people, etc, as “of nature”) frequently lash out, submit, or break down in response; i.e., resort to playing the game by patriarchal rules even when those same rules don’t apply to non-men/tokenized groups (“boundaries for me, not for thee”). And if potential war brides seem scarce or mum to white cis-het men as the most privileged benefactors of genocide, it’s because women more generally fear men as historical-material sources of ghastly murder and hyperbolic rape. No joke, the false protector is literally enshrined within Gothic canon and always will be: our aforementioned knife penis[15] (re: the “stabby cock dagger“) as having good versions and bad versions of either gender under settler-colonialism’s heteronormative dichotomy. In medieval language, this plays out through white and black knights; in more recent criminal hauntologies, it plays out through damsels, detectives and demons. This includes Amazons, but also serial killers as wild, “rabid” predators terrorizing polite society (and its white women) with traumatic penetration; i.e., as a fetishized form of alien, psychosexual violence that nevertheless commodifies nature-as-abject through the ghost of the counterfeit’s unironically mutilative, patriarchal rape fantasies (re: Radcliffe’s demon lover).

The finale, next, shall consider the knife dick, then, as the prime implement of Cartesian abuse (traumatic penetration) before investigating how to subvert it: by humanizing the harvest.

Onto “A Problem of Knife Dicks (and Conclusion)“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Zombies are shot, demons banished, and totems hunted, trapped, and killed/tamed inside the state of exception; i.e., skinned in ways whose trauma is worn on the outside by people who may or may not be acting in good faith (more on this in Volume Two; re: “Bad Dreams“).

[2] “Fetishizing” as in, “to reduce to alien, psychosexual objects of darkness, power and force.”

[3] Said chapter considers years of abuse by Kochinski, which I shall list when the time comes. However, said evidence more recently has been confirmed through Kochinski accidently revealing to the world his private lolicon (and horse) porn collection (Bad Empanada Live’s “Vaush is a P*dophile (CONFIRMED),” 2024).

[4] Again, such categories of alienation generally overlap under Cartesian domination, while also making room for curious hybrids and subclasses. This includes the occult demon, but also composite bodies (cyborgs) and chimera animals produced with the undead, demonic and totemic modules (which Volume Two will unpack at length).

[5] Slavery, then, goes both ways—of the underclass, but also the middle class enslaved to, and disguised as “service” towards, God/the state; i.e., an endless paranoid duty chasing ghosts, dragons and other state inventions for the Greater Good until death and/or your assigned foil claims you; e.g., Inspector Javert chasing Jan Valjean in Les Miserables (1862) but also in more alien, thus Gothic forms of police/criminal behavior—Van Helsing vs Dracula, Beowulf vs Grendel, or Ripley vs the xenomorph (exhibit 30a; re: “Knife Dicks“), etc.

[6] And bullets/variants of either kind tied to state force, but especially carceral or lethal force; i.e., capital punishment for challenging the state’s patriarchal monopoly on violence, terror and hellish morphological expression. Again, zombies, demons and totems are destroyed to serve a Cartesian profit motive during the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection.

[7] We’ll examine the Gothic role of various (often female) detectives in science fiction more in Volume Two, including the sections “Exploring the Derelict Past” and “Call of the Wild.”

[8] Which is generally something to deny (Noah Samsen’s “Genocide Denial Streamers,” 2024) or debate when, as the Youtuber Shaun points out, there is nothing to debate whatsoever—a genocide is occurring and it is wrong (“Palestine,” 2024).

[9] Persephone van der Waard’s “Remember the Fallen: An Ode to Nex Benedict” (2024).

[10] I.e., Freud and Kristeva’s handling of the Archaic Mother myth, but also the myth of the black male rapist/sexually aggressive black woman as “manly” being projected onto the same dark kayfabe figure as the Nazi or Communist. To this, canon presents rape as something that “dark” (non-white) creatures do. Or as my thesis writes (re: “Pieces of the Camp Map“),

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“) […] 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).

Aside from strictly animal arguments, posthuman considerations would ask us to respect how alien spheres present the chattelized animal and robot as ally commodities; i.e., whose shared, biomechanical rebellion is foretold, demonized and sold back to American consumers within the Imperial Core: the xenomorph as part-insect, part-machine in ways that resemble a shared uprising—of slave animals, but also dissident robata (the Czech word for “slave” that “robot” originates from) defying Asimov’s Laws of Robotics by fighting back against their humanized masters’ “correct” hegemony. Nature is alien, thus roboticized in slave-like ways that, unlike an actual machine, aren’t strictly “unthinking” at all; they’re undead, made “like machines” and traumatized against their will. The trauma isn’t incorrect, according to Cartesian thought; its outcry is.

We’ve already considered the posthuman relative to Mega Man and Ghost in the Shell in Volume Zero (rogue robot masters and cyborg cops, exhibit 1a1a1c4), but will deliberately consider it more vis-à-vis the xenomorph’s composite, undead nature (and Mary Shelley’s posthuman critique using composite demonic bodies) in Volume Two.

[11] As Griffin Kaye writes in “Nazism in Wrestling—Wrestling’s Most Controversial and Troubling Booking Strategy” (2022):

Wrestling plays upon the source of controversy. Whether it is related to evil foreign heels, real-life deaths, and horrific social events outside the wrestling landscape – these are often seen as distasteful and offensive but one gimmick can encapsulate all 3: Nazism. Over the many decades, many bookers have utilized the use of this strategy to full effect, playing off understandable post-World War 2 fears to create a monster figure (source).

[12] “Asia Game Changer of the Year” (2022).

[13] Sam R. Quinn’s “Manny Pacquiao: Why Pacquiao’s Kindness Has Hurt His Legacy” (2012).

[14] E.g., camping Lovecraft’s patented racism and crippling xenophobia by consuming stories made by others; or in the case of videogames, played by others in a very meta sense: The Academic from Darkest Dungeon II (2021) lamenting, “I should have never bought that cursed clay, from which sprang this anathema!” to which Randy Potato deadpans, “I hate when I buy some clay and it just springs up an anathema—relatable!” (“Beacon GAMING w/ Random Party! Big Update is now LIVE!” 2024). Or as my grandfather or my mothers and uncles might say about Lovecraft’s ever-present “sanity damage” relayed then-and-now across media: “I hate it when that happens!”

[15] While traditional masculinity and the status quo are generally defended through active force by cis-het men, the brutal, direct violence of a knife, club or bullet can be emulated by fearful women in ways that make them triangulate, acting “like men” for men and the Patriarchy against state enemies: TERFs attacking workers fighting for their basic human rights and those of animals and the environment (which the state calls “terrorism”); i.e., “pulling a Brutus,” as TERFs—being token cops, good or bad—classically do, inspired by older Neo-Gothic examples; re: Sam Hirst’s “Zofloya and the Female Gothic” (2020).

This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “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.

Click here to see “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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 (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.

Nature Is Food, part two: A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in War Culture (feat. Robert Heinlein and Akira Kurosawa)

“Before us lies the endless city, black in the black of night, cowering as if to creep back into the earth. And we’re afraid.” 

—from the diary of a young woman in Berlin; April 1945, during the Battle for Berlin (source: Robert Gerwarth’s “Daily Life before the Downfall,” 2010)

“I turned back and saw the blaze well under way. And that is when I noticed movement around the keep. I thought I knew what fear was, or that I had known fear. I was wrong. This night I have experienced true fear[1]. The army of the Dark is upon us and it has no end. They march toward us, shoulder to shoulder, for as far as the eye can see. The very earth must be crying out at the damnable weight of them” (source).

—from the Narrator’s journal, Myth II: Soulblighter (1998)

Note: My work is half-real, insofar as it compares media to real life and vice versa; e.g., the Myth franchise with the Battle for Berlin. If you want to see more of that comparison, specifically, refer to the Undead Module’s “A Lesson in Humility” for a close-read of Bungie’s franchise vis-à-vis world history. —Perse, 4/4/2025

Picking up where “The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis” left off…

In my thesis volume, we explored the sacred framing of rape and war. The two generally go hand-in-hand, synonymizing sex with violence and sexualizing workers through canon to feed the profit motive (through the bourgeois trifectas and state monopolies). Keeping the basics in mind, this section of the roadmap considers how war culture 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 using instructional gossip, monsters and camp, using them to achieve good de facto education, then habits—back and forth when warring with state forms harvesting nature as monstrous-feminine food. This section will consider the Cartesian arrangement in relation to us-versus-them power structures: Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and Akira Kurosawa’s hauntological Western, but also the kinds of legendary genderqueer expression (exhibit 27a1) and body types (exhibit 28) that regularly appear during these stories.

War is a both a profoundly basic and incredibly complex thing; i.e., that generally abstracts to shorthand forms to relay a human element amid the titanic complications. Canonical war touches us, marking us in Gothic ways that we can instruct in future forms during class/culture war—to learn from past mistakes and present abusers. To serve the profit motive, then, the state’s war against workers trumpets empty virtue with false doubles, protectors, fathers and heroes; begets manufactured scarcity, consent and conflict that endear the state to us in different, alienating ways. Endless cycles of neoliberal deception and bloodshed decay into more unstable, hauntological gradients—a fascist regression towards frontier Romance. As earlier American genocides and Manifest Destiny are dressed up in medieval, displaced language and occult obscurantism in current-day frontier wars, Capitalism manufactures war at home. In doing so, it turns workers against workers, brothers against brothers, cis-ters against sisters (that was a TERF pun) who cannot unite against the elite. Instead, the bourgeois Superstructure systematically sows worker division. The complex, transgenerational curse of a ceaseless “cold” war slowly paints the nation-state’s altars blood-red. Glutting the vampiric maw of the elite as something to celebrate, workers become violent and stupid; they horrifyingly eat their friends, but also their own children and each other. This becomes the historical-material lesson repeating ad nauseam.

(exhibit 25: Left: Photos from Blood Father, 2016; right, artist: Francisco Goya. Goya was staunchly antiwar, painting the 82-painting series, The Disasters of War [1812-1820]. While these largely speak for themselves, his 14 “Black Paintings” made later in his life were even more grotesque, with “Saturn Devouring His Son” [or as I call it, “Boomer Noms Zoomer”] perhaps being Goya’s most famous and shocking work.)

This abject, paternal cycle of death can be resisted, but also transformed through fresh instruction. For example, in Blood Father (above), an old con called Link is on the run, protecting his estranged daughter, Lydia, from a larger web of criminals. He’s sober but streetwise; this ain’t his first rodeo. Perplexed by the perils of parenthood and attacked by cartel assassins (themselves “lost children” of America’s manufactured conflict, the War on Drugs), Link smuggles Lydia to a den of thieves run by an aging man he used to serve: Preacher. Preacher is fascist, a false father who “eats” his offspring like Goya’s Saturn. So, despite owing Link for his “muscle” during the old days (and his silence in the slammer), Preacher postpones repayment indefinitely. Instead, he makes Link stick around long enough to stab him in the back (no honor among thieves).

Until that moment, Preacher leers at Lydia, who—unbeknownst to him—has already shot someone herself: “You’ve felt the bite of the mosquito, haven’t you? It leaves an enzyme inside you that other mosquitoes can sense—see in the dark,” Preacher smoothly jeers. “Run from it forever—forever!—and they’ll find their way back to you.” The predator spots the prey’s trauma within the space of courtship and speaks to it to lure them into its clutches: “I am like you; I can keep you safe.”

Preacher thinks he has Link and Lydia “on the hip,” boasting arrogantly once he sees how vulnerable they are. To this, Preacher is utterly perfidious—a false preacher/educator who thinks he knows the score, remarking smugly how bona fide rebellions are repackaged and sold as recuperated, toothless things to white girls like Lydia. She’s supposedly the “easy” mark and he the old con, but he’s also so broke he can’t afford to pay her father, Link, for keeping quiet. Forget “no honor among thieves,” Capitalism turns workers into dishonorable, broke thieves, orphans, rapists and killers-for-hire—a “prison sex” mindset of warrior/rape culture and every-man-for-himself skullduggery that gauges “success” as quick, petty theft; i.e., sublimating systemic worker oppression and widespread exploitation with “making someone your bitch” as a kind of personal responsibility dynamic that colonizes the world under more stable, ostensibly less decayed neoliberal models (the crisis remains, however).

On any register of the system, crime doesn’t pay for anyone but the elite. Link, for instance, has a tattoo on his arm that reads “lost soul.” He’s living proof the undead currently walk the earth—callously used up by Capitalism and discarded, then repackaged and reused in zombified forms whenever people demand to know where the zombies come from (they usually don’t). Oppositional praxis under Capitalism begets doubles through the menticidal language of war and rape (sexual assault and power abuse), which we’ve yet to examine thoroughly in my exhibit style. We shall do so now in two back-to-back sections, while synthesizing rape and war as a social-sexual process that involves emotional/Gothic intelligence of varying degrees (then examine them later in the Humanities primer as things to materially fashion out of the Gothic past, followed by Volume Three’s at-length discussion of proletarian praxis along five key points).

We’ll discuss systemic/canonical rape in the next section. First, war/nation pastiche and canon. According to the Six Rs, Gothic Communism is generally concerned with trauma and emotions as things to reconnect with, especially alienized or alienizing emotions (a symptom of division under Capitalism through Cartesian dualism) as things to reclaim, rediscover, renegotiate, reeducate, replay with and reproduce/release from the state. Meanwhile, canon’s warrior or scientist men of reason deal with trauma and stress by automatically distancing themselves from it; by doing so, they shut down anything outside of the state’s interests, uncreatively responding to these factors with state-sanctioned, “problem-solving” violence, not genuine attempts at dialog and understanding: shoot it[2] or bomb it. It becomes its own means of bad education, one with social-sexual consequences that reliably lead to open, unironic war and rape. Such means of instruction do not prevent state terror, violence and morphological expression; they compound them through the liminal hauntology of war—the castle, but also its battlegrounds inside and outside of itself.

Over time, this “war pastiche” and canonical rhetoric escalates, compounds and procreates through individualized “great men of history” and their deadly game of “follow the leader” made in service of Capitalism’s infinite growth, worker/owner division, and efficient profit. Historically-materially this happens through frontier genocide under Imperialism (the highest form of Capitalism); i.e., settler colonialism. Imperialism eventually colonizes itself, starting with those who resist on the fringes of empire before working inward: disgruntled workers and slaves. Violence begets violence as workers fight amongst themselves, slowly escalating until the scales tip and settler-colonial Imperialism is brought home to an empire not just in crisis, but decay. This, in turn, demands an eternal enemy, and the conflict never stops; it only waxes and wanes, menticiding worker minds through waves of terror according to the bourgeois trifectas (which leads to reactionary behaviors from state defenders when de facto educators try to facilitate good social-sexual habits; i.e., by synthesizing praxis to achieve systemic catharsis through sex-positive expression and Gothic poetics).

For instance, the asthmatic auteur of the so-called “Competent Man” trope (source: TV Tropes), Robert Heinlein, argued fervently for nuclear war against the Communists. For one, he created the Patrick Henry League, drumming up support for the U.S. nuclear testing program[3] in 1958. By extension, he wrote Starship Troopers in 1959 (and many books after that). A badly disguised ethics polemic against anti-nuke protestors, nuclear war (and a veteran-ruled planet; Knowing Better, 2022) is precisely what Heinlein argues for as something the United States was actively trying to accomplish in its own, post-WW2 foreign policy against China and Korea. As Carl Posey writes in “How the Korean War Almost Went Nuclear” (2015): “There was a second Korean war, one that has been studied and discussed even less than the first, which some have called ‘the forgotten war.’ The second one was nuclear. It consisted of a series of threats, feints, and practice runs, and it very nearly made it to the Korean battlefield” (source).

Few things captivate the American public’s imagination as thoroughly as science fiction, especially weaponized science fiction involving great men modeled after real persons; e.g., Oppenheimer’s “sadness” following the completion of the Manhattan Project, which Christopher Nolan’s Pygmalion revisionism capitalized on, only to be rightly rejected and criticized by non-white Americans like Clara Iwasaki:

Oppenheimer built the bomb that killed my great-grandmother while her grandsons were drafted into the US army and the govt imprisoned her kids. If you’re into moody great man biopics, I guess that’s cool, but I personally really don’t care how he felt while he was doing it (source tweet: Clara Iwasaki, 2023).

It’s the ultimate wave of terror, still sung about decades following the “pointless” droppings of the Bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima (Shaun, 2021):

Soon to fill our lungs
The hot winds of death
The gods are laughing
So take your last breath (Metallica’s “Fight Fire with Fire,” 1984).

To that, few things are as overtly Promethean as nuclear war—conveniently spreading fear of the nation-state and its “fire of the gods” power as inherently capitalistic. Those who serve the state, then, ultimately endorse this treatment thereof and its seminal tragedies. This can be soldiers or scientists, but there is always a militant component through the scientific side; i.e., Cartesian dualism dominating nature, even in outer space (re: astronoetics).

For example, the great man of history exemplify through “competent men” as something to ape by regressive Amazons. As I write in “Military Optimism”:

I once called Ripley the Invincible Heroine. A better way to phrase it might be the Competent Woman. The idea stems from Robert Heinlein’s Competent Man, which Walter Hill transferred to Dan O’Bannon’s unused Alien script. Like Heinlein, Hill was influenced by the Competent Man trope, saying his own father and grandfather were “smart, physical men who worked with their heads and their hands” and had “great mechanical ability” (source). However, while Alien famously transformed the Competent Man into a woman, this wasn’t Hill’s idea. Ripley was originally written to be a man, and only became female when the president of Fox suggested a gender swap. Scott loved the idea, having grown up with a strong, capable mother. Out of this complicated mess of competing ideas, Ripley was born.

Before we continue, it’s important to note that Ripley was born into a man’s world. Just as Dernhelm threatened the status quo—of war being “the province of man“—so did Ripley challenge the Competent Man is as essentially male. Though not exactly warlike, her burgeoning masculinity was inherently transgressive. To compensate, Ripley was stripped almost naked to demonstrate her feminine vulnerability. It took another seven years for her to evolve into something more militarized, lest she be seen as a threat like the Amazons of yore. The capable, heroic individual stems from overcompensation. Though not unique to Hill or Heinlein, the Competent Man came from their sickly health. Hill was an asthmatic youth; Heinlein, likewise, was a navyman who fell ill[4] and later curiously romanticized the infantry through fantastical, arguably fascist stories (see: Brows Held High). Leave it to the infantry to idealize the stupendous feats single human soldiers can accomplish, and that’s precisely what Heinlein did (with Hill’s Alien draft arguably being the suggestion, if not outright endorsement, of a civilian equivalent).

“Specialization is for insects,” Heinlein famously wrote, and his characters weren’t always military. But they could do anything asked of them because they were competent. Competency isn’t just a mindset, or a character’s natural ability. More often than not, Heinlein’s heroes had access to better equipment—weapons, to be sure, but also the power suit, which served as an extension of their organic bodies (which, in turn, were a hive-like extension of the state) [source].

The thesis volume has already established quite thoroughly that military optimism goes hand-in-hand with the Promethean Quest of Aliens and its spiritual successors’ monomythic approach to Cartesian dualism; i.e., Cameron’s refrain, the Metroidvania. Likewise, the bugs from Starship Troopers were people that the bourgeoisie wanted dead and got workers to kill through state-corporate propaganda on and offscreen. Bombs are only one component and tend to be expensive; there’s also bullets and bayonets, and worker labor thereof; e.g., the entire FPS genre (which my 2021 “Vintage and Retro” interview series has researched alongside my work investigating Metroidvania and FPS as interconnected genres; re: “Mazes and Labyrinths”) being thoroughly inspired by Aliens, by Vietnam, by Starship Troopers, by Descartes and Francis Bacon, et al. Whichever is implemented, Capitalism is a man’s world, is Promethean. Even moderates who act like they aren’t fascists still admonish revolutionary praxis, their normalizing of fascism leading to its regeneration when Capitalism enters decay, mid-crisis (which it does by design—something to remember in Volume Three when we examine canonical praxis as something to challenge in relation to neoliberals, fascists and war/nation pastiche). Part of camping canon during ludo-Gothic BDSM is subverting what canon plays at, including war and rape (sex and force) policing nature as alien vermin whore to exterminate.

Through Cartesian thought, male/masculinized workers are distanced from nature as conquered by them in defense of Civilization as inherently capitalistic. It becomes bad education, which workers must challenge in their own extracurricular forms—generally by interrogating state trauma as something to negotiate and play with, on and offstage. This is an ongoing affair that needs to be upheld constantly lest things regress back towards fascism, neoliberalism and state abuse through Capitalist Realism. To that, Paul Verhoeven might have filmed Starship Troopers to parody Heinlein’s American fascism in book form, but Americans still celebrated the movie without irony—i.e., as a blindly campy mode of expression articulating global American hegemony in imaginary worlds created after the Cold War ended; their myopic, harmful interpretations of the film gave it (and its various offshoots) an ongoing stupidity in the 20th and 21st centuries that further endorse American settler-colonialism at all registers. Anything else is unthinkable, tantamount to treason and cataclysm (re: Fisher’s adage) thus deserving of genocide.

Our education vs the state’s must be considered in ways that take the latter’s enforced divisions into consideration; i.e., when camping them during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Excluding TERFs (queen bees who “dick-measure” with their female bodies to emulate male management/executives), female/monstrous-feminine workers tend to be more in touch with nature as something to co-exist with, whether they want to or not; i.e., the natural-material order of physical nature and the material world operating in unison, not discord. This ontological teamwork includes traditional motherhood roles, but also “motherly” roles tied to things that men normally abject or otherwise distance themselves from: female bodily functions, but also intimations of death or conflict as something the living must survive and deal with in their own communities; i.e., when it happens to one’s spouses, children, family and friends.

When war happens, people die. This can be the war of bullets and blades, but also class and culture war relayed in theatrical forms on and offstage. Here, stable “telephone games” communicate trauma and abuse as protective countermeasures, insofar as either are conveyed in ways that help women (or beings forced to identify as women) process trauma from moment to waking moment. Doing so becomes a pedagogy of the oppressed that can formulate good social-sexual habits, but instruction remains a rather messy affair tangled with reactionary logic and state forces.

To that, there remains a pre-conditioned element to formulaic expressions of peace and love in wartime that is foisted onto women as the caretakers of men; e.g., the gift of flowers or one’s condolences to war widows. These can certainly be transmuted into emotionally/Gothically intelligent rituals that deescalate conflict and critique the state through class/cultural awareness and cathartic exchange. However, war is ultimately a liminal proposition, an oscillating metaphor for social-sexual exchanges at various registers. The historical-material effects of canonical war and poor emotional intelligence can be seen in domesticated spheres through the rituals of codified power exchange and hereditary rites that endlessly transpire there in performatively Gothic ways (echoes of Bakhtin).

For example, my late Uncle Dave was cuckolded from beyond the grave by his “grieving” widow, Erica. First, she had been cheating on him while he was alive while not participating in their relationship and trashing the place before and after Dave died. Then she passed the mess off to Dave’s bereaved daughter, Kelsey (exhibit 26, next page). When this happened, us girls had to spread the message: Kaitlyn, Erica’s daughter, found out through Erica’s sister, who told her, who told Kelsey, who told Mom, who told me. The boys (my brothers) were the last to know and generally had no idea; they were off working and providing as men under Capitalism generally do. We women, queers and monsters are the pallbearers of Capitalism’s ignominious dead; we fight those unglamorous battles, including decolonizing its artistic power when we become actively involved in oppositional praxis as melded unromantically with our daily lives. It became a telephone game, which isn’t wholly unlike ludo-Gothic BDSM and its own bad echoes camping the canon (re: “A Song Written in Decay“).

Seemingly unromantic, we transform it all the same into oft-romanticized forms of de facto education. After Dave had died, I wrote his eulogy and immortalized him the way Mom thought he would have wanted: I drew him as a warrior king like Conan the Barbarian (exhibit 26). Much to my chagrin, I had also drawn Erica with him, the two of them side-by-side in Dave’s “Valhalla” as I envisioned it. It became its own form of instruction on how and how not to act:

(exhibit 26: Left: My cousin Kelsey’s conversation [shared with her permission—better to ask for permission than forgiveness, as doing so illustrates mutual consent between negotiating parties] where she, ever the firebrand, completely rips a defender of her father’s abuser a new asshole.

Right: the drawing I did of my late uncle and his now-exposed wife. Dave? Rest in glory and in peace, king. Erica? Have you no decency, my dude? My exposé of you—in this book’s examination of my former artwork that featured you—isn’t a call to violence at all, but an active attempt to reveal and discourage destructive societal behaviors; i.e., bad communication that foments stochastic violence under Patriarchal Capitalism: You lied a lot, swanning theatrically for those around you. What might you be willing to do under more war-torn circumstances?

Art, once created, must be examined, especially when damning information comes to light. The aim is not to endorse war and conflict, but to use the language of war as something to speak to men in language they can understand that, all the same, hammers swords into ploughshares. I have no wish to quote Hamlet unironically—”frailty, thy name is woman!” or “from Hyperion to a satyr!”—nor to hold up Man as the “paragon of animals,” relinquishing my voice like doomed MacDuff from Macbeth: “I have no words, my voice is in my sword.” Rather, to quote Eowyn, I will declare “I am not a man!”; I am a trans woman whose experience as a man has placed me in a liminal position—one foot in both worlds, teaching me the language of men in ways I can transmute, killing the old ways forever [versus endorsing them, like Samus Aran does, for example].)

I want you to consider the educational role of such exhibits; i.e., as things we produce (and teach with) all the time in our own lives. You don’t have to be made into a teacher by the state to impart lessons through artwork; we’re a social species and the process is generally something that comes quite naturally to us (especially insofar as processing trauma is concerned). Apart from traditionally domestic, social-sexual roles like marriage and sanctioned sex, a female/feminine connection with nature traditionally involves mental and physical responses to trauma (madness) whose educational potential facilitates praxial synthesis and catharsis during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., sex-positive forms help keep workers alive in response to manmade trauma (war) on various registers they seek liberation from. In Gothic fiction, this commonly manifests through the presence of monsters that intimate systemic abuse, but also bigotries, stigmas and complex psychosexual feelings of fear-fascination (the ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection). The xenomorph, for example, is a manmade weapon, a creature of war from Ridley Scott’s point-of-view that Ripley must survive, but also learn from in regards to larger structural problems both are swept up in (and indeed, are the products of in relation to each other).

The instructional element to this kind of storytelling yields popular archetypes. The thesis volume, for example, established the at-times problematic role of the domestic detective (which we’ll explore even more during the Humanities primer alongside damsels and demons); i.e., that they constitute a common kind of Gothic heroine already suffering from intimations of something hunting them in everyday life, and whose inherited trauma—as something to grapple with in the present—feels intensely operatic and psychosexual out of a conservatively imaginary past. Per Radcliffe, the nostalgic feelings of prey invoke being hunted by the horrors of the past, which Capitalism gatekeeps, gaslights and girl-bosses the viewer with by proxy. Through displacement as hauntological, faraway or otherwise made-up, fatal nostalgia explains the unheimlich (the unfriendly castle and its monsters doubling the audience’s homes, families and friends) away through so-called “bad dreams” whose comparisons to the present cannot be avoided but can be discredited: “There’s no place like home.” In true Radcliffean fashion, the monster is summoned and then killed, itself a nightmare whose anxieties—felt within the Imperial Core about settler-colonial abuse on foreign and domestic territories—disappear along with it.

Some female detectives track down the truth, armed with their wits; others perform a “burlier” Amazonian function, tracking the past down with both brains and brawn (“Predators as Amazons“). The latter work directly as general-purpose hunters, often as retro-future variants; e.g., “Space Amazons” like Ellen Ripley or Samus Aran, whose official variants oscillate between iconoclastic/canonical praxis: “female revenge” and ambiguous “female rage-gargoyles”—the Archaic Mother and phallic woman, but also the bourgeois, warrior girl boss and proletarian warrior mom (exhibit 8b2).

In other words, not all detectives are cops, but it’s a fine line and replete with fetishes and clichés (one the Demon Module will explore; re: “Exploring the Derelict Past“). Amazons in general are commonly sexualized in animal language, but tied in theatrical forms of strength that yield many double standards. As a means of common discourse that has only expanded in recent times, these are all things to interrogate and negotiate with when fighting for our basic human rights. They become a mouthpiece for us, but also a means of self-definition and self-identity mid-struggle while battling our own trauma, but also sources of trauma through theatre as policed; deviations from theatre are required through future instruction, but said instruction is generally liminal unto itself:

(exhibit 27a1: Artist, top-far-left, top-mid-left: Claire Max; top-mid-right: Mr-Deathcat; top-far-right: Sk8ter; bottom-far-left: Denis M79; bottom-mid-left and bottom-mid-right: Deuza-art; bottom-center: Hiddend8; bottom-far-right: e.streetcar; bottom-mid-left [face]: Amber Harris Art.

The expression, “woman,” is a complicated thing and its performative nuance knows no bounds, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Likewise, “woman is other” becomes a theory routinely challenged by updates to acceptable forms of equality and representation that extend to nature as monstrous-feminine and the whore’s revenge; i.e., campy forms of woman [not female] through Gothic poetics whose revolutionary girl talk [anger and gossip] challenges Beauvoir’s [and for that matter, Creed’s] notion of the monstrous-feminine: in ways that lead to better and better instruction when interrogating trauma and attaining catharsis, mid-struggle. Amazonomachia isn’t just battling monsters, then, but making them to do battle with; i.e., to combat and embody externally during campy theatre that speaks to how one feels inside: monstrous vis-à-vis state instruction. Canonical tutelage becomes something to subvert and ultimately overcome through various monster types that prevent harm through subversive gossip; e.g., ironic versions of orcs and Amazons’ racialized tropes/”the fear of a dark continent” alongside gender-non-conforming persons’ genuine identities and orientations relayed through their biology and performance as deftly weaponized against state forces. Our existence, through struggle, becomes ironic in ways that can be appreciated and endorsed during oppositional praxis: “woman” not simply as “monster” but “counterterrorist monster” inciting pro-worker rebellions against the state [and its monstrous proponents] harming us.)

Whatever form it takes, this intersectional, “female” relationship to war messily extends across the entire Gothic mode, its myriad markers of complex trauma (monsters) haunting liminal expression during oppositional praxis. Said praxis affects not just cis-het women, but beings either perceived as female/feminine/womanly or who embrace or reject these categories regardless of their biological equipment: trans, non-binary or intersex people, but also people of color and other functional “chattel” on a hierarchy of privileged abuse towards “good” workers; i.e., coerced forms of preferential mistreatment/selective punishment towards, and from, a divided working class. While these different marginalized groups experience something naturally assigned to them (skin color or biological sex) that forces them to handle manmade catastrophes more creatively than state benefactors do, their counterterrorism remains historically ignored, dismissed or talked down to by tone-policing moderates both inside and outside oppressed circles; i.e., those monopolizing violence, terror and bodily expression for the state, exploiting these devices in ways that marginalized workers must live with from moment to moment. To compensate, the pedagogy of the oppressed must highlight this unfair gradient of abuse, bringing its painful realities closer to home for those reaping the rewards of genocide every day. Our gossip, monsters and camp must collectively and intersectionally raise intelligence and awareness about war through daily social-sexual lessons that are deeply intimate and personal in ways the state (and its own curriculum) commonly prohibit.

Indeed, the reasons I wrote Sex Positivity are largely personal—for me, as a Gothic-Communist trans woman, artist, and sex worker—to think about these social-sexual themes in relation to my own sex-positive output, Humanities education, family ties and lived trauma; i.e., as things to attribute towards praxial synthesis and catharsis during class and culture war as a combative dialog. My creation of iconoclastic trauma writing and artwork contribute towards a rebellious, Satanic process of thought that actively engages with pre-established social constructs emblematic of war as a whole—not just as material things in isolation, but whose praxial function can be redesigned: to make something new not just by imagining it, but reimagining it as it currently exists. This includes whoever is doing it—within their own lives as workers with domestic ties to art, vice versa, or either as informed continuously by the other.

To this, I can reimagine war—not as sacred, but surprisingly malleable in terms of something to convey through iconoclastic art as informed by past examples, including from other places around the world as informed by an ongoing exchange of media; e.g., Akira Kurosawa’s stamp on the Western genre and pushing back against Orientalist tropes by waging war onscreen in ways that can be honed and cultivated further and further in a proletarian direction by artists like myself (and people that I work with):

(exhibit 27a2a: Top-right and top-and-bottom-left: photos of Akira Kurosawa’s seminal classic, Seven Samurai [1954]—the titular boys themselves and director “leading the charge” into a brave new world; artist, bottom-right: Persephone van der Waard. The American Western [a cryptonym for genocide] inspired Japanese shonen as intensely hyperbolic, romanticized and [eco]fascist [exhibits 17a, 24a, and 104b1/b2]. In turn, Japanese hauntology inspired American media during global conversations that supported or resisted the original, genocidal foundation. My response to Kurosawa operates on a creative, imaginary level [though not always consciously] through my own iconoclastic work; e.g., my take on Baiken, the “samurai warrior mommy,” in a sex-positive manner through liminal expression during opposition praxis flirting with ludo-Gothic BDSM [as this entire volume has done, considering the term wasn’t crystallized and in full production until Volume Two]. She’s sexy and strong in ways that uphold and carry a rebellious sex positivity into the future.)

Reimagining war isn’t hard; it simply requires transforming already-imagined symbols in a linguo-material sense—i.e., to achieve class/cultural consciousness through monstrous poetics being a kind “stabilizing gossip,” a universal “girl-talk” that individuals master, codify and re-release into society and the material world where war is already a popular dialog (allowing for the theatrical interrogation of trauma and disempowerment, of tension and release). Girls talk, especially revolutionaries looking out for each other when threatened by the normalization of physical and sexual violence. We gotta, because there’s so much to teach and so many dangerous, badly educated people out there (especially cis-het men, let’s be frank). Spilling tea isn’t exclusive to or indicative of emotionally fickle, catty bitches (whose over-advertisement by state proponents tone-police and discredit worker legitimacy and concerns); it’s a defense mechanism in response to Capitalism’s own manufactured stupidity and risk-raising/abuse-encouragement mechanisms. To loosely borrow from Akira Kurosawa, Capitalism “made the workers wicked, stupid, foxy beasts! Its ‘samurai’ took workers’ food, land and bodies, and killed them if they tried to resist!” The samurai were a class, and Kurosawa evoked that to hauntologically touch on 1954 class struggles through a complex marriage of Eastern theatre, Japanese chanbara (“sword”) movies and Western cinema.

The subsequent “nuptial’s” class character reshaped how people saw and conceived the Western’s violent, personified interrogation of material conditions (and mercenary wealth redistribution through cutthroat arbitration of local disputes: chivalric reimbursement through class mobility during immobile time periods) in cinematic terms worldwide—one felt through a stream of “Western pastiche” whose dueling swordsmen (the samurai, ronin and ninja from the likes of Ninja Scroll or Blue Eye Samurai, 2023, echoing white and black knights, but also Amazons) and gunfighters (also white/black and Amazonian) as part of ancient military theatre (again kayfabe), but also legendarily strong-and-silent, long-lost heroes hailing from otherworldly times and places: the mixed-worlds quality of Achilles dipped in Styx, being from the world of the living and the land of the dead. Bringing wonderful weapons, but especially bullets and blades—e.g., Excalibur pulled from the depths of the Lady of the Lake, cutting magically through steel—to bear against tremendous, equally eternal adversaries (and hordes of disposable fodder to shoot, cut down or beat up) also divorced from the modern world, both are announced by heavy weather and fierce storms: monstrous assassins, demons, and dire revenge, but also beautiful damsels rescued by warriors, both doubling as detectives during violent displays of courtship—less through gaudy material parades and more through wanton, psychosexual displays of excessive medieval force. Out of that messy frontier justice and its various stages/theatres’ antiquated means of overcoming adversity through vehicular wish fulfilment (and Gothic sense of confused, conflicting emotions), new possible worlds can emerge—the settler colony upheld “as is” or transformed into something new. Something better.

In the spirit of the Gothic, these all combine and shift to produce a complicated, of-two-worlds[5] hauntology spanning decades, genres and continents (and bleeding easily into other mediums; e.g., videogames): the mercenary Magnificent Seven (1960) to The Wild Bunch’s (1969) ultraviolent, deromanticized class character of anti-government cons robbing banks and fighting the crooked, unscrupulous railroad; i.e., activist sentient in a crudely bloodthirsty, “man’s man” narrative whose cutthroat, rebellious nature would reach all the way through the dystopian ’80s cityscape of John Carpenter (Escape from New York, 1981) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner to the out-and-out Space Western of the late ’70s onwards: Star Wars, Rogue One (2016) and Andor, but also Shinichiro Watanabe’s Cowboy Bebop (the space Western/space cowboy); but also the “postapocalyptic, Ozzy Western” of Fury Road and George Miller’s own stabs at “perceptive” pastiche through the Western as a thoroughly liminal territory caught between The Wild Bunch and John Ford’s Stage Coach (1939) but also Sergio Leone’s trademark frontier nihilism (and silent nameless heroes) of the “spaghetti Western” (Zeuhl, a person with Communist leanings if not outright conviction, loves spaghetti Westerns—especially Leone’s “The Man with No Name” trilogy).

(exhibit 27a2b: While Watanabe’s, Peckinpah’s, Kurosawa’s, and Lucas’ antiheroes [not Leone’s, so much] are all great warriors that—unlike the evil empire—eventually choose to forget about settling old scores/getting even or rich and instead lay down their lives for a bigger cause, Peckinpah is stuck in a very male-centric drama that “wasn’t quite there, yet.” For him and his war boys, the male drama concerns the finding of emotional intimacy amid the stoic soldiering towards inevitable death, even if said bonding is the rowdy male sort: machismo, bravado, rape jokes and locker room talk, etc.

As we already examined with Ninja Scroll‘s Jubei, hauntology is a common mode of rebellious expression in retro-future language. As such, the likes of samurai, bounty hunters, bandits, and scoundrels share a common thread among the troupes of rag-tag rebels performing them: the necessity of struggle. Desperation forces disparate, hungry peoples to bond in ways their privilege [or its lack] never could. In turn, their actions contribute towards noble-but-doomed resistance composed of smaller acts of daring and unsung courage: counter heists, espionage, sabotage, masquerades, endured medieval torture and humiliation, saloon brawls, war brides, brothel espionage [kiss and tell], bombings [dynamite], assassinations, betrayals, decoys ruses, criminal conspiracies, vandalism/graffiti, scandals, double-crosses/dry gulching and desperate last stands. All happen during asymmetrical warfare whose guerrilla actions depict one losing battle after another during an inglorious-yet-admirable war against the state; i.e., in the sense that a) there’s no glory [“Again, we have lost!”] and the enemy is someone clearly stronger than them, while also b) presenting the Cause as something that requires more than simple victories and fascist bullshit to prevail—in a word, teamwork. That’s what ludo-Gothic BDSM [and brothel espionage] is all about.

Worker solidarity through reclaimed acts of theatrical force build around the unscrupulous acquisition of funds, insofar as the money is either stolen, or earned in ways the state will do its best to regulate: violence, terror and bodily expression, of course, but also the kinds of work that sexualize in relation to these things commonly depicted in Western tropes. According to tradition, men do battle to protect women, but the Western often gives women the ability to fight as men do.

[artist: Alcololi] 

Teamwork, then, goes well beyond cis-het manly men, and recruits women, GNC performers and racial/religious minorities into the heist, collectively striking at the state’s propaganda through a shared stage. Doing so is more important than traditional propaganda victories because class/culture war requires subversion far more than simply killing large hordes of enemy soldiers; i.e., Boromir’s piles of dead orcs, Crom counting Conan’s dead, or Peckinpah’s metaphor of scorpions and ants [the Wild Bunch vs the Mexican bandits] little more than extermination rhetoric tied to settler colonialism: Cowboys and Indians [which is merely Capitalism in action: grinding up the useful dead as part of the Military Industrial Complex through the rise and fall (re: Hawthorne) of great heroes, great houses, great enemies and barbarian hordes—over and over in medievalized, superhero kayfabe: “see, kill, take; repeat”].)

As something to live under through canonical and iconoclastic depictions alike, Capitalism threatens to explode into war at all times. This yields a variety of feminist clichés: “Us girls gotta stick together.” Girl power. Empowered “womaning.” However, as we’ve already determined, the Gothic is full of clichés and symbols of war prior to the Western. Moreover, these fetishes are actually historical-material clues to deeper systemic issues begot from women’s unpaid and exploited roles in society as hopelessly tied to war mentalities furthered by canon. Capitalism historically-materially turns women (and minorities) into unpaid servants, governesses and conjugal “mothers” who need to marry up. However ignominious, hypergamy becomes a means of survival through denied material advantage. Often, the wives’ husbands are soldiers or paramilitaries who abuse them far more than any faraway foe.

In turn, the state teaches men not to learn from women/”non-men” and their pedagogy of the oppressed. Rather, male workers are expected to “sow their wild oats,” then marry out (exogamy). Marrying up for men is considered an insult, but one nevertheless canonized by the mythical pile of widow’s gold (e.g., The Duchess of Malfi or Portia from The Merchant of Venice): the man swallowing his pride to steal possibly the only exception to women historically owning property in Western canon before the 19th century. Meanwhile, the canonical wars of the bourgeoisie guarantee that many boys grow up stupid and fatherless, feeling deprived of anyone who can actually advise them amid glacial shifts towards the Left in terms of socio-material conditions: Young men think feelings are “gay” thus don’t share them; they also can’t wipe their own asses and girls, in their eyes, are from Venus (misogyny is equally cliché, you dorks).

Societal “health,” then, amounts to a cultural awareness linked with iconoclastic movements, the emotional state-of-affairs determining how often systemic issues are brought to light by whistleblowers who, let it be said, are often female/GNC, especially regarding domestic/sexual abuse that men historically refuse[6] to talk about. A common example of this is the witch, a victim of state violence during the early formation of Capitalism and nation-states; her current persecution stems from ancient forms of hysteria that survive in hauntological forms the state cannot fully monopolize. This means terror, violence and bodily expression become ours for the taking—can be used by us in sex-positive lessons to challenge state fear and dogma with through extracurricular forms of solidarized labor between two-or-more laborers; e.g., Dani Is Online and myself partaking in a bit of counterterrorist expression, taking a moment post-negotiation (and payment) to appreciate the witch as a sex-positive, countercultural icon appreciating but also liberating another oppressed group in the process: fat people as harvested under Cartesian models (which the end of the final symposium section will explore even further).

(exhibit 28: Model and artist, top-middle: Dani Is Online and Persephone van der Waard; everything else: Dani Is Online. Art is a relationship between various artists interacting over space and time. While Dani makes their own content, we’ve also collaborated before; they’re also aware of my book, what it stands for and were perfectly happy to exchange services for posing in its pages [sex work for payment as negotiated by both parties]. The drawing collab that Dani and I did together [top-middle] is referenced from a sexting session nude repurposed for this book [top-right]. As such, my labor seeks to appreciate Dani as they are, and as someone I appreciate who has serviced me in the past. It is this pointed combination of person, body and labor that I wish to honor through Dani by highlighting them as they are: big, beautiful and gender-non-conforming during holistic liberation from Cartesian shackles. Through ludo-Gothic BDSM, I connect their body to paganized groups that would celebrate their fatness as something to preserve, not alienate, fetishize and harvest it for profit.)

Women, GNC persons, and racial/religious minorities make up the unified front of Gothic Communism. As such, they must gossip together using constructive anger and campy monsters; i.e., steering the public imagination away from Capitalist Realism and its manufactured scarcities, conflict and consent (and other trifectas), as well as patriarchal institutions of war perpetuated inside Cartesian models of domination. This rerouting happens in theatrical forms that “lead the charge” with Gothic poetics into a brave new world; e.g., the various Amazons examined in Volume Zero (exhibits 1a1b and 1a1a3) and Amazon warrior moms in Volume One (exhibit 8b2), as well as natured-themed auteurs like O’Keefe, Landau and others (exhibits 24c1, c2, and d1) making these creations, of which many more types will also be explored in Volumes Two and Three: magic girls/military tomboys (e.g., Sailor Moon, 1991, exhibit 56b; and Revolutionary Girl Utena, 1999, exhibit 55b) and kittens-with-claws (exhibit 91a1; also, below). Variable cosmetics aside, all share a common goal: to encourage the active absorption and embodiment of iconoclastic attitudes during praxial synthesis/de facto education reclaiming workers’ connections to themselves and the natural world as collectively brutalized by Capitalism for centuries. The only way to prevent this is face one’s trauma by fighting back through repurposed instruments thereof:

(artist: Zillabean)

Mid-fight, such a social-sexual “osmosis” should encourage enhanced self-reflection regarding the imaginary past as currently existing in the present: row after row of monsters to study and communicate with in canonical and iconoclastic forms. We have so much to teach about and teach with—oral traditions[7] and Gothic “oldwives’ tales,” but also the Humanities and sex work more broadly (and yes, even the STEM fields, though I think they’re hella sexist; but that’s not the majority of women’s fault nor queer people or other minorities).

Cis-het/token cis-queer men—and especially white men—on the other hand, have so much to learn about a great many things! To be fair, class warriors and allies can earn from each other while cultivating new habits, but the fact remains: the vast majority of domestic murders, rapes, and murder-suicides—as stated during the thesis volume—are committed overwhelmingly by white cis-het men against oppressed groups (which under the heteronormative model are predominantly white cis-het women as visible victims). Men, simply put, can be allies to Gothic Communism if they want, but do not need to join in order to experience systemic privilege as they already do. However, if they actually want to be chosen by liberated sex workers in control of their own bodies and sexual labor—to get laid, in other words, but also enjoy the perks of friendship and comraderie, mid-struggle—men (and other Man Box proponents) gotta start relying on things other than what the system offers. They have to learn from unusual, unused, and forgotten sources—from women or beings perceived as women, but also from sex workers and their unique ties to labor/nature (their bodies, their genders and sexualities, etc) and the Wisdom of the Ancients, which men under Capitalism/Cartesian dualism historically-materially tend to lack/police in stupid, harmful ways.

Working against the state and its proponents, revolutionary workers must achieve praxial synthesis in their own social-sex lives, their own creative spheres; they must engage with the trauma of war as something to face and perform, interrogating power in highly liminal thus playful ways. As such, women, queer people and other minorities must embody proletarian praxis holistically—if not a universal appeal by default, then a universal adaptability (re: Zizek) expressed in modular parts that appeal collectively to different educational and cultural backgrounds, but also what numerous peoples can collectively understand: an end to worker exploitation through commonly consumed theatrics/Gothic poetics. Uncompelled solidarity is the point, allowing emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers to “get together” in revolutionary and peaceful (non-warlike) terms across generations, but who will “go to war” if needed in defense of the oppressed—e.g., my great grandmother wanting all her children to be educated; my grandmother going to college to find a husband (and get a degree); my mom going to college; all of them encouraging me to write, create and be myself; and me writing Sex Positivity to culminate all of that in a Gothic-Communist capstone inspired by older generations of artists with a progressive bent. It’s not just a start, but one of many in the legion of “uppity” women and queer folk who came before, but also our cis-het male allies who gave us room to speak!

For example, Ridley Scott is someone we have discussed (and will continue to discuss; re: “Making Demons” and “Dissecting Radcliffe“) repeatedly throughout the book. His feminist, 20th/21st century Gothic was inspired by his mother as an exceptional authority figure in his life:

Scott attributes his no-nonsense temperament to his mother, Elizabeth, who shouldered much of the parenting for Scott and his two brothers while their father, an army engineer, worked. During World War II, it was Elizabeth who shuffled the boys to shelter under a steel table in the kitchen as bombs rained down on their home in Northeast England during the Newcastle Blitz. Her parenting style was to say, “Get out in the fields, come back at 5, and do not fall in the sea,” Scott says. “She was hard-core. She should have been in business. I could see it, as the three boys got older and there was less for her to do, she became frustrated.”

Scott’s mother’s character is also to thank, he says, for one of the signatures of his career, an extraordinary number of dynamic and groundbreaking female roles, starting with Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien in 1979, and also including Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise in 1991 and, this year, Gaga in House of Gucci and Comer in The Last Duel. “Thelma & Louise had a massive impact on me when I was younger,” Gaga says. “Linking all of his films together, it’s clear that Ridley cares about the life of the woman. What he really devours as a filmmaker is this idea that we [women] are complicated and complex figures” (source: Ryan Pfluger’s “What Ridley Scott Has Learned: ‘We Don’t Know S***,'” 2022).

In turn, girl talk and its pacifist social cues and monstrous/campy body language historically come from genderqueer women (and gay, effeminate men; e.g., Walpole and Lewis) as teachers of men (and themselves) through the Gothic mode. Simply put, “girls talk” is a descriptive statement of potential rebellion when leveled against the state and its patriarchal war machines, propaganda included. Moreover, workers learn how to behave politely from their mothers, girlfriends, sisters, and aunts’ instruction when processing trauma; from Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, or Mary Shelley, etc (though none of these women are far from perfect and can be expanded upon, as we have shown).

Obviously, there are exceptions. Plenty of abusive/tokenized women exist. But likewise, these are informed by trauma as a transgenerational curse that we commonly inherit from the past. Gold-diggers, cheaters, black widows, religious zealots, TERFs, etc—all extend from the state as universally abusive towards women and children, but also boys (as well as women and minorities) taught how to act “like men”; i.e., Man Box/the “prison sex” mentality as an invitation to rape and abuse through heteronormative models. The princess is traded like chattel, then born and bred through cycles of rape during the Pygmalion fantasy pimping Galatea from cradle to grave, on and on…

(artist: Vasiliy Polenov)

Before we segue into rape culture as a taught mechanism that can be challenged by the synthesis of sex-positive educational devices (e.g., rape play) from good-faith actors, I’d like to quickly examine (for a page) the double standard present within state education that sex-positive instruction must challenge: the image of women as naturally weak and providing but also brides to give away and breed like dogs. To this, state abuse fosters the treacherous myth that “all women” are “natural caregivers,” while animalizing them in ways detrimental to all parties involved. Except girls don’t just fart, burp, spit and shit like the boys do; they cheat, lie and harm others—e.g., working people to death, then lying about it (exhibit 26, Erica vs Uncle Dave). Because of the double standard, though, they generally enjoy less systemic privilege that working-class men have had for centuries; e.g., the euthanasia effect, wherein so-called “bitches” are collared or “put down” far sooner than male agents. To that, TERFs and the LGBA are a more recent[8] example of tokenism, emerging in the late 2010s to shift the state of the exception—the Medusa as an ancient female punching bag—less onto some cis women and more onto GNC groups; e.g., the xenomorph as a second-wave feminist symbol of trans misogyny (which we’ll examine more in Volume Two when camping it).

Just as cheating can be meaningless and shallow or incredibly intense, so can healthy relationships and ludo-Gothic BDSM (which can be negotiated to operate along any of these wavelengths). All extend from Capitalism encouraging heteronormative behaviors through canonical praxis: expected gender behaviors that funnel workers into war-time mentalities. Conversely, proletarian praxis is antiwar during class and culture war as teaching opportunities that seek to antiquate war by hammering swords into ploughshares. This requires open communication that comes from honesty, trust, and negotiated boundaries developed independently of the state/vertical power as something to develop away from through praxial synthesis. Development extends towards all peoples, without double standards or token minorities beholden to patriarchal forces; e.g., soldiers, or even female astronauts playing second fiddle (Dreading’s “The Ridiculous Case of Lisa Nowak,” 2023). This pedagogy of the oppressed includes men listening to women instead of speaking for them/down to them about abuses women experience or see themselves that men usually do not; i.e., “I never saw anything like that. Therefore you must have been imagining things!”

Whether through neglect, ignorance, or scorn, second-hand abuse is still abuse. Whether from workers, management or the elite, first-hand abusers rely on community abuse to continue their acts of unchecked, predatory cruelty at a systemic level; i.e., second-hand abusers normalize first-hand abusers, creating Gothic trauma markers that condition Pavlovian harm between them. Simply put, war normalizes menticide—a rape of the natural and material worlds by canonical praxis as a form of prescribed power abuse. And where there is war among and towards the chattelized and alien, there will likewise be rape of them, too. Both go hand-in-hand while Capitalism divorces us from nature.

Now that we’ve examined war through the synthesis of iconoclastic art that fosters emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness in the face of canonical media, let’s examine the other side of that terrible coin—rape culture—and try to subvert it through the basics of oppositional synthesis relayed through trauma writing and transgressive art; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM camping rape culture through monster sex per the cryptonymy process during moral panics (re: “Furry Panic“):

(artist: Owusyr)

Like the Nazi and Communist, exploitation and liberation exist poetically in the same spaces, onstage and off. Medusa can’t be killed because the state demands she be revived and raped/reaped in perpetuity to serve profit; the state cannot die because labor—if lax in its application of development—can always decay towards state models and Cartesian thought’s rape culture. All we can do is drain the state of its power and transform it (and the world around us) in something that actively and systemically keeps the bourgeoisie (and their Shadow of Pygmalion/Cycle of Kings) from coming back!

Onto “A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in Rape Culture“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] A feeling, I should note, is felt most strongly by colonizing forces when Imperialism comes home to empire; i.e., the roosting of alien, undead chickens on the homefront.

[2] E.g., an unused idea from the original script for Alien had Ash the android asking the crew if they ever tried talking to the monster instead of, you know, just assuming it was hostile and trying to kill it. When this anecdote came up in the 2003 actor’s commentary track for the movie, Harry Dean Stanton testily asks Veronica Cartwright, “What the fuck would we say to it?” He’s not wrong in that dialogs between alienated groups are often confusing and tense; but Cartwright’s insistence of a dialog is still required to bridge the gap.

[3] “Worried that a skeptical public was turning against rampant nuclear testing, [Heinlein] and his wife Virginia ran an ad in newspapers around the country supporting the military and inveighing against communism. They also wrote letters and organized meetings. The group accused opponents of nuclear testing of being not just wrong, but part of a communist plot” (source: David Forbes’ “The Secret Authoritarian History of Science Fiction” (2015).

[4] Between 1933 and 1934, Heinlein served on the USS Roper and earned the rank of lieutenant. After surviving tuberculosis and chronic seasickness, he was given early retirement in 1934″ (source: Famous Veteran: Robert A. Heinlein,” 2013).

[5] Re: Walpole’s Ancient Romance and modern novel married through the Neo-Gothic castle space.

[6] Excepting male whistleblowers, who as our thesis argued often have a military/state background; e.g., Edward Snowden, candidly swapping antiwar rhetoric on Substack with Vietnam war iconoclast, Daniel Ellsberg (2021). While I can’t speak for Ellsberg in this respect, Snowden himself always gave off slight twink vibes—i.e., described in his 2019 autobiography, Permanent Record, as moving away from a fighting-youth mentality and boot camp physique to expose the entire NSA. Quite the act of courage, I think; to be against war is to be against the state, making antiwar sentiment a thought crime/sin under Capitalism.

[7] The ancient rhetors were fabled to have legendary memories; e.g., Plato in Phaedrus (c. 347-399 BC) citing technology as the death of oral memory through written communication: “In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing” (source: “Socrates on the Forgetfulness that Comes with Writing,” 2023). Oral traditions matter because they contain what is often unwritten (concerning culture and trauma) while also being harder to police by state forces (word of mouth); but Plato’s argument remains antiquated: Writing is not something that should be discounted, for it is where the battle for middle-class hearts are minds are fought when giving monsters shape in the material world.

[8] Tokenism has lain with the state for the entirety of its existence, but reshapes according to state dogma as something that transforms itself to disguise (or valorize) the profit motive; e.g., recruiting from queer bodies to police themselves and other groups.

This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “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.

Click here to see “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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 (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.

Nature Is Food, 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)

“Gossip is instructive. It tells which way the wind is blowing.”

—Oz, the Great and Terrible, Wicked (1995)

Picking up where “Synthesis Symposium: Nature Is Food (opening and part zero)” left off…

We arrive at part one of the roadmap, which again is a symposium-style examination/illustration of “the basics,” or pure reductions of our synthetic oppositional groupings. It explores our pedagogic emphasis during oppositional praxis as something to synthesize and instruct to others; i.e., oppositional synthesis with a proletarian agenda that is cultivated—to prevent war and rape against nature, specifically Cartesian treatments of nature as food: nature as female/monstrous-feminine food tied to the profit motive, which alienates workers from nature by fetishizing and commodifying them as extended beings ripe for the harvest. Ending the harvest demands raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and, by extension, a class/cultural awareness that leads to systemic catharsis through trauma writing and artwork as something to express and teach through a basic, de facto educational approach. Our instructional focus during ludo-Gothic BDSM is something I call “girl talk,” or open, preventative communication versus state menticide and bad communication; i.e., our challenging of the state’s bad education through liminal, monstrous expression that encourages subversion and perception useful to proletarian aims confronting trauma by suggesting it (aka revolutionary cryptonymy). In the interests of issuing healthy girl talk, we’ll also have to discuss Medusa and stigma animals, but also people like Georgia O’Keefe who attempt to express themselves in relation to nature-as-abject (re: the whore to harvest, and for us to camp).

We’ll get to them. First, the basics, themselves.

For the proletariat, the goal of synthesizing praxis is to prevent universal war and rape (of workers and nature) by processing systemic (Cartesian) trauma and dogma through creative successes that invoke monstrous language; i.e., by establishing social-sexual connections through basic behaviors useful to the development of a post-scarcity (non-capitalist) world versus hopeless alienation and blind revenge; e.g., the abject, furious slaughtering of the Romanovs or the beheading of Louis XVI.

In terms of making social-sexual connections, our Gothic-Communist aim is to teach workers to holistically “put two-and-two together,” thus reconnect with nature and the material world in ways that Capitalism abjects: nature as alienated from workers and workers from it, including workers as natural beings—our labor, bodies, sexualities, genders and emotions, pastiche, genitals, etc. Though all are valuable to think about, with, or through, our emotions are especially useful as a critical-thinking device that likewise learns from the past through the Gothic mode; i.e., a return to irrationality or pre-Enlightenment expression, minus the Cartesian stigma of pointless madness or disempowering hysteria (often presenting in literal bodily forms; e.g., “immodest” fat bodies presented in a “dark” aesthetic, below) as grappling with “correct” and “incorrect forms” through the basics of oppositional praxis. Keeping with the spirit of instruction, part one will introduce and outline these basics in a symposium-like style.

 (artist: Tana the Puppy)

The “basics” constitute something that we’ve touched upon so far in the book, but now which I thoroughly want to stress: instruction of good praxis through basic-yet-essential social-sexual behaviors. While our thesis was pure theory, which the manifesto focused on simplifying—i.e., through intimate and interpersonal expressions of trauma—doing so has led up to the cultivation of rudimentary social-sexual habits that make up good praxis as something to instruct; Volume One’s second (shorter) half concerns instruction through said habits inside an anti-Cartesian, non-binarized way of life. Good praxis, then, is demonstrably achieved when theory becomes productively synthesized to challenge Cartesian dualism; i.e., can be simplified to common behaviors that amount to collective worker action solidarized against the state. The basics boil down from the synthetic oppositional groupings that the Six Doubles manifest through:

• 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.

Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, they reduce from these groups according how workers communicate in simplified forms; i.e., according to cultivated social-sexual habits: anger, gossip, parody/pastiche (subversion) and monsters—aka, the “basics,” except we can simplify even them further!

We’ll do so in just a second. First a note about opposition. The basics are my attempt at formulating a simplified teaching approach that I feel makes up how people actually operate on a daily level; i.e., according to common social-sexual devices that connect to complex theories that are often in conflict. In turn, these basic habits constitute actions that can be cultivated through Gothic poetics, which can gradually and collectively camp canon, reclaiming the Base and recultivating the Superstructure in a sex-positive sense; i.e., by making them (and their violent, rapacious theatre) gay. Doing so can alter historical materialism (and undo Capitalist Realism) through dialectical-material opposition to state forces, including menticide as something to counteract. A raped mind is a stupid, fearful mind unaware of structural manipulation as malleable. Keeping those forces in mind, it’s also important to remember that my attempts at theoretical reduction also include reductions of what we’re up against—that sex positivity, emancipation and rebellion (the Three Iconoclastic Doubles) involve proletarian synthetic groupings that are routinely met with varying degrees of open aggression, condescension, canonical indignation and DARVO towards camp in defense of canon (and that these have only accelerated according to a growing profit motive on the global stage). So while the preface already explained that synthesis is vital to good praxis, this praxis can be challenged by bad instruction working in opposition to the pro-worker habits that we cultivate in their most basic forms, often piece by piece:

(artist: Zuru Ota)

As the preface also stated, synthesis can be adequately summarized as the cultivation of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness; i.e., the deliberate utilization of Gothic poetics during the practical application of simplified theory between activist workers formulating healthy social-sexual habits. The state will try to undermine this everywhere it can, including through its own forms of instruction transforming these basic patterns to oppose ours; i.e., during oppositional praxis using ludo-Gothic BDSM to synthesize:

• 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 (monsters/doubles)

Again, the idea is to think in terms of opposition and what both sides represent as they engage back and forth through battles of instruction; i.e., psychopraxis, including good education versus bad education (a concept we’ll touch upon here, and reexplore more thoroughly in Volume Three when considering weird canonical nerds as bad educators). The creative successes of proletarian praxis encourage their own results, but so does bourgeois praxis; e.g., mutual consent is challenged by manufactured consent according to someone who—through varying degrees of passivity and action—seeks to encourage abuse and risk-production behaviors that emerge through a lack of intelligence, awareness and empathy, hence constructive anger, stabilizing gossip, perceptive pastiche, ironic quoting and gender trouble/parody, and good-faith egregores.

For the purposes of this symposium, then, I want to acclimate you towards chaos as a state of existence that Gothic poetics capture well (something my thesis discussed in relation to paradox and play through Milton’s “darkness visible”). I want us to consider the above groups in the simplest, most conversational language:

• girl talk (anger/gossip): People talk, often with excitement and anger but also theory through their own de facto forms of instruction.
• monsters (doubles and liminal expression): People self-express through extensions of trauma that reclaim state language, generally as a means of identity.
• camp (“perceptive” pastiche/ironic parody): People perform, but also subvert canon, often through gender trouble and parody using identity and instruction to achieve praxial catharsis at a structural level; i.e., by redistributing power and its understanding and application/interrogating through a healthier Wisdom of the Ancients.

All of these go hand-in-hand; reclamation happens through gossip and gossip can be campy and monstrous, etc. Moreover, these are the very basics to successful praxis, which the rest of part one will explore in order using the most rudimentary of terms. Doing so should hopefully reflect how the instruction of synthesis (and de facto education of said habits) work at an intuitive, everyday level.

First up, girl talk preforms through various thresholds that protect the mind from rape and war (thus menticide) while discouraging either in the future as having learned from the past as something to repeatedly conjure up and tinker with. To avoid automatic, traumatizing violence, rape prevention (war through Imperialism is rape on a mass scale) demands subversion/liminal expression and “perceptive” pastiche in the face of powerful enemies who lack the nuance needed to root us out. Through gender trouble and parody (camp), we can expose them by making them self-report before their positions in society become normalized again (crisis never stops and decay repeats); we can furiously gossip and remediate praxis through parody and pastiche, preventing war and rape via Gothic poetics, using said poetics to humanize us and expose our abusers as coercive and ghoulish by breaking their concentric veneers down, one layer at a time. In short, we’ll examine how their menticided status can be opposed, mid-conflict[1].

I want to start with an older historical example of canonization, before poking and prodding into more recent iterations that have cropped up during the 20th and 21st centuries. We’re going to look at the history of Gothic poetics extensively in Volume Two, and a much, much more fleshed out examination of praxis in Volume Three. For now, this is merely grease for the wheels. As such, we’ll consider a brief example of slavery from Britain’s Victorian period, then touch on the basics as you might encounter them in your own day-to-day existence; i.e., as a means of reflecting on various forms of abuse that amount to slavery under capital and through which you can relate to according to an imaginary past (and its conspicuous darkness) as a dialog unto itself: the darkness (and its emergent corruption) are the data and work as potent, if-at-times paradoxical, leverage towards a better world, not simply a whitewashed castle to hide the spilled blood and open fields of exhausted laborers. To do that, you have to humanize not just alien that is fetishized, but their fat and meat as belonging to them while representing who they are through morphological expression as a liberatory device; e.g., fat liberation becoming a postcolonial critique of settler-colonial forces, working with various tissues to give rise to new levels of appreciation and resistance.

(artist: Dani Is Online)

The 18th and 19th centuries were a place and time of tremendous mid-war/post-revolutionary sentiment, wherein sex positivity (and its various praxial relatives) would have been utterly vilified by Ann Radcliffe as “useless sorrow” or Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha, the “madwoman in the attic” that colonizer Rochester had no idea how to treat: his first, literal slave wife. By extension, it could be argued that neither did Charlotte. We’ve already blown Radcliffe to bits in Volume Zero; here, I want to use an exhibit to extrapolate on Charlotte Brontë’s bigotries to make my point. Bear in mind, you can stretch out these arguments with anyone you critique during your own sacred-cow barbeques (often while also offering up your own variations [above] to worship without harm):

(exhibit 21c1: Source. British female hypercanon is white and cis-het, thus super problematic. Edward Said once described Austen as belonging to “a slave-owning society” [and stuffy Brits gave him hell for it]. Before him, Jean Rys highlighted Charlotte Brontë’s internalized racism with her own 1966 postcolonial critique, Wide Sargasso Sea. Even in 1847, though, Charlotte’s repressed bigotries spilled out inside a recently emancipated Britain having preyed on its colonies for centuries: a displaced, disassociated patriarchal critique projected onto a demonic, racialized other—Antoinette Cosway by another name. Charlotte’s framing of female virtue, then, is rather sexist/cis-gendered, but also xenophobic and racist—i.e., the white woman’s “wildness” as needing to be tamed or regulated to tolerable levels while also punching down at various non-white groups with fleshier bodies.

To this, Charlotte would treat Bertha’s body as alien, describing her—a woman of color—as a vampire and a goblin whose nightly wanderings Jane would look on at in fascination and horror [and who Rys would humanize over a century later]. Jane’s bildungsroman [coming-of-age story] frames her, the child, as wild and uncouth, eventually evolving into a firm, measured governess [who isn’t “as wild” as her and Rochester’s technically unadopted French bastard, Adèle; at the end of the novel, Jane tries to Anglicize Adèle, gentrifying her by making the girl “less French”]. Similar problematic themes [and highly dysfunctional love-as-a-stalkery-trap written by women about men who can’t handle rejection from women can be found in Victorian forebears[2] like Austen, whose Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood respectively represent the titular Sense and Sensibility [reason and passion]: Marianne loves the uncommitted Willoughby too much and is consequently married off to Colonel Brandon [Austen allows no unmarried heroines at the end of her novels; despite her ironies needling the institution but also the profession of writing about marriage, the narrative ultimately demands for it from her each and every time. Not without irony, Austen still obliges the formula].

However art also imitates life in that Charlotte’s sister, Emily [and her fiction; e.g., Wuthering Heights] were considerably wilder and more passionate [and fun, in my opinion] than her sister’s fictions. Yet, without Charlotte’s patience and dedication to cultivate Emily’s poetry after she died, the younger, more reclusive sister would have remained largely unknown. As I write in “Beneath the Church-Isle Stone: Posthumous Liberties” [2015]:

 “One day, in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a [manuscript] volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting. Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse…” (“Bibliographical Notice” v). Charlotte Brontë already knew that her sister was a poet, but here, found proof that Emily was a good, productive one. It would not do to hide this work from the world, she thought—not when the three sisters needed to start supporting themselves. Determined, Charlotte swore to get published, and after much persuading was able to convince Emily to participate in a collective project where the three sisters, including Anne, each contributed poems to a single volume. This volume, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, was published in 1846 and sold only two copies. Undaunted by this underwhelming reception into the literary market, each sister continued to write, and in 1847 published a single novel apiece: Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre was published last, but enjoyed the most success, becoming something of a Victorian “best-seller.” The other two novels were subject to relatively harsh criticism, polarizing Victorian readers. Emily and Anne ‘s reputations as writers were tarnished, and shortly after their novels were published, both died. In an attempt “to rescue [them] from the notoriety surrounding the novels, [Charlotte Brontë reconstituted] their battered reputations around their verse” (Bauman 32). To do this, she waited until her sisters were dead before introducing never-before-published poems, notably altering and changing them to acclimate Emily and Anne’s works to a fussy Victorian audience unused to the writing style of either woman [source].)

(exhibit 21c2: Model and artist: Charlotte Brontë and George Richmond. While there exist two portraits of Emily painted by her brother, Branwell, she is often mistaken for a portrait of her sister, Charlotte. Mistaken identity is a common theme in Gothic fiction, one that plays out quite literally in Radcliffe’s 1796 The Italian when Father Schedoni sees “his” daughter in a miniature portrait around her neck; or as I write in “Gothic Themes in Perfect Blue“:

In [The Italian] Father Schedoni, a master manipulator, is deceived by appearances. Preparing to plunge his dagger into Ellena Rosalba’s breast, Schedoni freezes, having seen a pendant whose miniature “resembled” him. In truth, while it did, the picture was actually of Schedoni’s brother, the Countess di Bruno. Killed by Schedoni years earlier, the Countess’ likeness is similar enough to Schedoni’s stolen role that he thought he saw himself. In a cruel twist, he grows convinced that Ellena bears his likeness, is actually his long-lost daughter. While Schedoni had sired a child through his brother’s wife, it had died while he was abroad. In truth, he is actually Ellena’s uncle, and her father was Schedoni’s murdered brother, the Countess. Unable to safely murder Ellena, Schedoni forces her to travel with him through the Italian countryside. There, both spend the better part of the novel in a state of mutual confusion [source].

Dead ringers and wacky murder plots aside, portraits and miniatures were incredibly expensive, and most families would have been hard-pressed to afford even one. “Emily” Brontë’s portrait was painted in 1850, two years after she died—a testament to her fame competing with Charlotte’s [whose money following Jane Eyre‘s success helped her afford the privilege] but also owing to the simple fact that multiple women weren’t allowed to be famous. For this reason, Charlotte had elected to publish their pennames as “neutral,” meaning agendered: Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell.)

Our point in examining older women like Radcliffe, Austen and Charlotte Brontë before we dive into the symposium proper is to consider how their emotional/Gothic intelligence—especially regarding slavery and critiquing the Patriarchy’s amatonormative focus to achieve heteronormative models of exploitation—was and is outmoded and underdeveloped (versus Mary Shelley’s precocious, “Satanic” science-fiction, whose iconoclastic, queer-adjacent and anonymously published desire “to be the witch” [unlike Margaret Hamilton] we’ll unpack in Volume Two): their Gothic novel, novel-of-manners and bildungsroman operating as imperfect tools of menticide, meaning they can be reclaimed and repurposed to heal the mind from rape. By relying on our intelligent and informed emotions/Gothic imagination as things to learn from a collective, dialogic past, we can improve on what came before through our own contributions (with pen names also being a trans strategy of publication—e.g., Grace Lavery’s Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques, 2023); by improving on ways of Gothically imagining the world, other stratagems—our basics reduced to nouns and simple, executable verbs—reliably emerge that are equally vital to iconoclastic praxis, but also our own survival while performing it as teachers that cultivate rudimentary behaviors that, while ubiquitous in day-to-day life, are also punished during daily moral panics.

With all of this unpacking done, and a brief nip into the past as it once was imagined, let’s press on into the symposium’s consideration of Gothic media in the present space and time: our own means, materials and methods of instruction.

The Gothic, as we’ve established, addresses sex worker trauma through liminal expression, often tied to an imaginary past derived from older texts. Special emphasis, then, should be given to phenomenological expression (the study or expression of experience) and markers of abuse; i.e., the cultural gargoyles we mentioned earlier in the manifesto; e.g., Charlotte’s Bertha as a historical-material relic of 1840s Britain. Whereas iconoclasm seeks to dismantle the social-sexual stigma assigned to these symbols by state-sanctioned laws, religion and violence, Gothic canon codifies canonical stigmas. In turn, the stigmas themselves serve as cultural “cement” in regards to how workers are treated or viewed, including by themselves in relation to psychosexual trauma as already-materialized: rape as the ever-present threat of power abuse and poorly concealed harm; if Imperialism comes home to empire, the usual recipients of state abuse will feel it the worst, but the minds of all will be subject to powerful forces that induce harmful social-sexual habits through menticide.

As we have already discussed, Meerloo describes “waves of terror” that traumatize people in ways useful to the state: “the use of well-planned, repeated successive waves of terror to bring the people into submission” vis-à-vis “the core of the strategy of menticide is the taking away of all hope, all anticipation, all belief in a future.” In 2023, the workers of today see these waves constantly reverberating across the real world through fictional and non-fictional variants imitating each other in continuum: rape and war culture, but also the material, personifying articulation of thought crimes—e.g., sin. Meerloo calls the outcome of this abusive continuum “menticide,” a rape of the mind—something we’ll continue examining through the state’s proliferation of Gothic canon and how said canon whittles down the working class’ emotional reserves and Gothic imagination; i.e., to foster Capitalist Realism through a Gothic myopia. That is, arrayed conspicuously around the viewer at various registers, bourgeois monsters serve to constantly terrify workers in ways useful to the state through bad instruction: threats of violence and rape carried out over not just single moments, but a victim’s entire life span through transgenerational trauma; it becomes a curse, one afforded by egregores-made-material.

These days, canonical gargoyles don’t just sit on literal churches; they pertain to ever-present likenesses existing everywhere in the material world, spat out in mass-produced forms. As the manifesto argued, they are “anything that can be looked upon with fear as a dogmatic source of instruction.” In purely cis-het circles, simply look around and you’ll see: macho men acting like canonical monsters towards women, while faithfully quoting their favorite sexist literature or persona (e.g., Andrew Tate); and battered women responding in ways that either submit to toxic-masculine abuse or fight back in ways that ostracize women from society—with society tending to blame the historical-material victim(s): women and minorities (who often victimize themselves as they internalize bigotry and attempt to assimilate).

Our holistic goal with iconoclastic praxis and ludo-Gothic BDSM, then, is teaching emotional and Gothic intelligence through the acquisition of stabilizing behaviors that enjoy the flexibility of play (and language to play with). Girl talk, liminal subversion and transformative quoting/perceptive pastiche, then, are reductions of theory into useful actions that alleviate state-manufactured crises and push towards praxial catharsis. These require emotional/Gothic intelligence—i.e., an active desire to avoid politically “passive” competition under a punitive hierarchy that occurs through various measuring “contests”: dick-measuring, female asset-measuring and the gauging of tokenistic assimilation (e.g., whiteness, but also class, religious and cultural values at large). These behaviors develop in relation to the historical-material world as something to subvert and “quote” in liminal, transformative ways. In turn, idiosyncratic[3] love language, but also fear language, become things to vocalize and double in our own subversive artwork—extensions of our own lives as teaching devices of societally beneficial stratagems:

• trauma/rape awareness-and-prevention tactics and terms (“reactive abuse,” “love-bombing,” “hovering” “isolation,” “red flags” and other sadly-but-deliberately extracurricular things under Capitalism)
• emotional health terms that describe how we actually feel
• a heightened awareness towards traditionally female/feminine predicaments: experiencing rape or threats of rape; being gaslit, gatekept or assimilated (with a queer, all-inclusive flavor of course: abused workers include more than cis-het white women acting as girl bosses; i.e., queer bosses; e.g., Natalie Wynn, who we’ll examine in Volume Three, Chapter Four)

Such basic goals are instructional, but also vocal; i.e., a kind of “tea spilling” unto itself—one whose bold, playful investigating of repressed or policed social-sexual factors are designed to help workers get “in touch” with their older, emotional selves, nature, and trauma through gossip, but also society’s emotional self and trauma as normally being monopolized historically-materially by the elite (who alienate workers from nature and sex, but also their emotions [anger] and ability to think critically by camping canon in Gothic ways). In turn, said gossip talks about how canonical “gargoyles” repress worker willpower and resistance by attacking workers’ ability to imagine anything else. Gossip isn’t just useful, but paramount to our very survival when the elite divide and pit us against each other.

Once combined and put to proletarian praxis, revolutionary workers can generate sex-positive lessons in ludo-Gothic BDSM and other elements of sex positivity that assist in putting Capitalism (and its menticidal abuses) behind us. This requires subversion, which happens by making canonical praxis—including its bourgeois monsters, worker atrocities and ruthless tyrants/soldiers—a dated paraphernalia we continue to examine and learn from during our own means of subversive instruction; i.e., our girl talk, monsters and camp. All enable us to survive while mastering an iconoclastic doubling of social-sexual expression that evolves away from Capitalism and into Gothic Communism: Ann Radcliffe’s happy ending without the dancing peasants celebrating the new princess’ felicitous, exclusive inauguration (we’re all princesses under Communism, my sweets).

Conscious rebellion also includes the Gothic mastering of madness and monsters present in the evolution of the female detective/damsel-in-distress into holistic, inclusive forms, merging into increasingly liminal/queer iterations (the imperiled twink) that transform themselves, and the material world around them, as things to “quote” imperfectly on purpose; i.e., to invoke gender trouble (whose progression and praxial friction we’ll examine throughout this roadmap, but also in Volumes Two and Three; e.g., the “Conan with a pussy [except not bigoted]” concept seen in exhibits 84a and 112). As something to expound upon ad infinitum, our Gothic-Communist making of gender trouble is two-fold, then: to one, synthesize old terms with our individual/collective artistic output and exhibits; and two, invent new terms and codes (this book is full of such things) that likewise “do the trick.” Development towards Gothic Communism will constantly put us in uncharted territory that requires updating the lexicon as needed—i.e., by pulling out old classics, but also making new ones to adjust to the social-sexual, linguo-material “growing pains.” All of the synthetic terminology outlined thus far should be a clue. All the same, it generally comes from older language that was (and is) used to maintain the status quo.

Take, for example, C.S. Lewis’ four outmoded words for love (the guy straight up treats eros as synonymous with romantic love). There should also be different words for fear that describe worker submission under Capitalism—not just fear of death, but fear of a world without Capitalism, thus without “protection” as synonymous with the symptoms of capital: the ghost of the counterfeit, Shadow of Pygmalion, Cycle of Kings, monomyth, infernal concentric pattern (and its endless semantic wreckage) and any and all reliable historical materialisms that result from business-as-usual under the elite. Our expanded language through our own instruction attacks a Symbolic Order whose language and fear-mongering are used by reactionaries and moderates alike (and that Fisher’s hauntology touches upon): bourgeois phobias and stigmas tied to cultural gargoyles that can be synthesized; i.e., transmuted according oppositional praxis and expressed through our successful, iconoclastic forms over space and time. Gay gargoyles, monsters, wizards, slutty detectives (exhibit 22)—through such darkness visible, we can make whatever’s needed to get our point across: Capitalism sucks and can be improved upon through the same devices reclaimed by us.

Keeping with our examination of the past as brought into the present—and previous stabs at Radcliffe—consider Velma again (and not for the last time; re: “Non-Magical Detectives“):

(exhibit 22: Artist, top-left: unknown; top-right: unknown, but links to a Velma cosplay subreddit; bottom right: Steven Stahlberg; bottom-left: Valentina Kryp. Especially popular or remediated characters tend to get virally shared. Such sharing can be hard to regulate or track. In this case, we not only have detective pastiche, but Velma pastiche. Seriously, this foxy nerd is legion, but also a regular practitioner of the “explained supernatural” trope originally formalized by Ann Radcliffe. Defrauding the “supernatural” through spooky piracy is a common theme in Radcliffe’s works, or embattled marriages, false relatives and various ordinary things taken to performative extremes; e.g., the mother being sent to live in a nunnery for the rest of her days. To this, Radcliffe was following suit with Walpole, injecting the supernatural into ordinary events, getting at the truth of things through outrageous narratives that still, in the end, feel cliché and homely.

As for Velma, her subversive liminality is complex—empowering for performative nerds who want to let it all hang out, but also solve mysteries of a highly conventional sort using subverted conventions: a surrender of corporal modesty and surviving the danger ahead by becoming closer to nature and one’s shapely body while still being smart as a whip. Velma is a character whose tasty “slut reclamation” dares to ask, “Why not both?” Sure, it’s arguably appropriative from a commercial standpoint—i.e., tailor-made JO material for weird male nerds and their ravenous, horny gaze—but the iconoclastic exhibit has multiple functions. One of them is to keep the revolutionary lights on, and cis-het dudes got money to pay out with in support of sex work, allowing for purely asexual or nonheteronormative reasons amid the usual sexual ones: charity without the expectation of sex. In development’s increasingly better world, however, such codependent transactions will become less and less necessary. Re: Socialism’s “From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] work” to Communism’s “to each according to [their] need.”)

Regardless of what (or who) we retailor towards rebellion, Gothic Communism is easier said than done. Revolutions occur over time, and as we discussed before the symposium must constantly be funded, organized, and taught through collective worker action/activism as something that evolves the Superstructure in a proletarian direction. Simply put, revolution requires constant awareness, application and discipline at a societal, collective level: one of and towards people and language as they function in (dis)harmony as a presently divided working class learning over time to heal; and two, how Capitalism slowly wears down our defense mechanisms using reactive abuse over generations that shape natural and material language, binding them (and our responses to them) to the elite’s will. This includes how we communicate “on and off the clock”; i.e., when we’re actively working or just shooting the shit. Gossip and anger.

For example, the bourgeoisie can easily infect the way women, as motherly educators, gossip about rape and war—at parties, general social gatherings, or over the phone, etc.

Indeed, I noticed something recently while my mother and grandmother were talking on the phone. They had been chatting about a friend’s suspicious mother not wanting her undercover policeman husband going near their children because he looked like a “criminal/underworld person” (a “hobbit,” according to my grandmother). Both women seemed to be innocently gossiping about broad, nebulous markers of violence, yet both were associating things of the underworld as inherently dangerous; i.e., Gothic markers, monsters. My family was taught to think this way by the state, but also state proponents like Tolkien (re: hobbits) passing their teachings along compromised social practices: outmoded, harmful gossip through the lessons they leave behind; e.g., The Lord of the Rings. In this manner, communication can quickly become a kind of “stranger danger” that spreads moral panics like a virus across oral language informed by recorded language; i.e., according to how language naturally tends to work and how we tend to acquire it through socio-material means: osmotic transference through reified stigmas and fears that stochastic terrorism further exacerbates. Before you know it, monsters aren’t things to consume, but scapegoat state enemies and victims with, blaming them for the state’s regular “failings” (worker, animal and environmental exploitation).

However “random” and “disconnected” such terrorism might seem, it nevertheless remains a manmade consequence to the bourgeois machinations of the state (whose spontaneous gun violence, for example, enters the American hydra of cycling reactive abuse, much like Jack the Ripper once did in Britain over a century ago; the criminal hauntology of either myth continues to be enshrined in popular media, which we’ll explore more deeply in Volume Three, Chapter Two). To turn a phrase, generational violence and the people who commit it are “cut from the same tree”—of the natural and material world interacting back and forth during oppositional praxis.

To that, Gothic Communism happens from moment to moment, using variable counterterrorism to slowly reclaim these natural-material functions for workers’ universal benefit. Over generations, it slowly liberates them and the larger Gothic mode from the bourgeoisie by making said mode amenable to worker rights. Bit by bit, stochastic terrorism (and its associate monsters and fears; e.g., getting raped and murdered by false boyfriends) can gradually disappear at home, and settler-colonialism abroad. However, the abolishment of state violence at all levels can only happen while consciously moving forward into the future; i.e., as emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers who grow increasingly aware of the wars taking place on all fronts. Establishment politicians only serve each other and the state; we must diminish the influence they have over worker minds insofar as monsters take part. Except, our focus needs to on ourselves replacing the elite, subverting their monstrous tools of menticide and, in effect, weakening the elite’s grip on us as normally enacted by unironic variants.

In light of established monopolies, then, we must reclaim Gothic poetics (and the required emotional labor) from state forces in the present moment. Doing so happens through individual means of camping canon that, once combined, make up a dialogic Gothic imagination. Comprised of social-sexual “girl talk” that subverts heteronormative conventions with “perceptive” pastiche, this social network—and its cultural synthesis of iconoclastic praxis in Gothic language—defends the exploited with a holistic checklist that no one educator, student or lesson could hope to impart single-handedly (this book will try to encapsulate everything but doubtless will miss something): fostering “friendly monsters” (and monstrous sex toys) whose camp reverses abjection and uses the natural complexity of human language as navigated easily by fluent practitioners of the Gothic mode; i.e., building sex-positive parallel societies with Communist chronotopes, achieving mental emancipation with hauntology and revolution with cryptonymy to liberate all workers and, by extension, the nature world from Capitalism.

For the rest of part one, I want to focus on synthesizing the basics through one famous monster type, the Medusa and Athena’s Aegis, before talking about the history of female expression (through Georgia O’Keefe, exhibit 24c1) and increasingly gender-non-conforming variations enacted by us (myself and Eldritch Babe, exhibit 24d2) in defense of nature-at-large as classically exploited by Cartesian (settler-colonial, heteronormative) forces.

First, Medusa and her tricky concept of “double mirroring” (re: mirror syndrome during subjugated Amazonomachia):

(exhibit 23a: Artist, top left: Yneddt; bottom-right: unknown; middle: Drawingfreak77. Medusa is an ancient, “phallic” [androgynous] form of the monstrous-feminine, one that that needs to remain conscious lest older waves of feminism triangulate her against new inclusive movements trying to camp the canon during ludo-Gothic BDSM; or as my thesis writes of Barbara Creed [whose 1993 book, The Monstrous-Feminine, focuses on refusing to be a victim vis-à-vis Freudian models and Julia Kristeva, while simultaneously omitting the rights and experiences of gender-non-conforming groups that cis women historically attack]: 

my book aims to go thoroughly beyond Barbara Creed’s somewhat dated and limited, biological-/cis-centric view of the monstrous-feminine/”woman as other” [to be fair, she wrote The Monstrous-Feminine thirty years ago, so maybe she wrote something more recently^[4] and I’m just late to the party]. So while it’s true that the phrase “phallic woman” traditionally denotes a war-like woman, huntress or vengeful monstrous-feminine, I want to stress how subjugated Amazons aren’t just aggressively and physically violent towards cis-het, sexist men; they’ve radicalized inside a “prison sex” mentality to become hostile towards “outsider” groups, including trans people, while seeing themselves as the universal victims that tacitly yield to their conquerors by emulating their worst habits [exhibit 41g1a2].

As such, I want to expand on how the monstrous-feminine can also non-binarize to illustrate the gender-non-conforming idea of a non-violent trans, intersex or enby person; i.e., someone who refuses to be a victim without embodying the standard-issue implements of violence and war from conventional stories [including TERF examples: the blind, indiscriminate Medusa] [source: “Symposium: Aftercare”].

Small note, but giant female monsters are generally shot in the boobs or other sexualized parts of the body—castration/bullet rape by “civilized,” technologically “advanced,” male attackers.)

Medusa (above) shows us how gossip, monsters, and camp are powerful, fetishized weapons. In terms of reclamation, let’s consider abjection at large; i.e., monsters as things to gossip with/about and reclaim through camp using Athena’s Aegis ourselves. Monsters tend to conflate with systemic harm as adjacent to them, expressing shared qualities of generational trauma/stigma that are animalized (from our thesis statement):

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 through 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. […]

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 (source).

To this, Medusa is classically binarized, the “dark mother” with a good and bad side (exhibit 23a, above). The “Athenian” side produces a more human-looking Amazon that represents life; the wild side—an unmasked, “feral dog” Medusa—overtly associates with death, but also the ocean and the (often gross, alien) mysteries of the womb as hysterical: “rabid” female rage established by the female body’s natural reproductive functions being hounded and coerced by state forces; i.e., her “wandering” womb as venomous, but also a rebellious form of girl talk. I liken this to “back talk,” wherein the classic recipient of patriarchal abuse, the Medusa, angrily reflects her endless trauma and alienation back at state proponents using Athena’s Aegis. In short, she takes it back:

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: The Monstrous-Feminine).

(artist: JL Seagull the Best)

In the past, I have stressed the Aegis as a counterterrorist weapon with revolutionary potential as a kind of “spectre of Marx”; i.e., when removed entirely from its state function, but also haunting it vengefully from the inside during all manner of inheritance anxieties; e.g., the Radiance from Hollow Knight (left) operating as an ancient queen, haunting the mind-like tombs of mere mortal men and eventually being banished back to Hell once hunted down and exposed by a male hunter inside his fallen master’s ruinous crypt (the entire game is effectively a prolonged, Gothic-style witch hunt meant to reclaim patriarchal territories: find the bared exposed power of the matriarch and stab her for exposing herself in immodest ways—in her melon-like tits as something they both freeze at and lack the language to effectively describe[5] while wanting to cut up and eat). Please keep this in mind as we continue through part one; i.e., the whore is something to police through mercenary force ludo-Gothic BDSM is known for camping (re: “Policing the Whore,” which returns to the Radiance and Hollow Knight, camping the witch hunt by testifying to the rape of the jailed Numinous).

Also remember that, aside from the Medusa, many ancient, Chthonic deities (meaning “of the underworld”) were inspired by the ocean as a vast place of mystery and death feared by superstitious men—especially lonely European sailors, who, while they probably wanted to fuck a mermaid or something similar, generally settled for each other or unlucky Indigenous peoples once the Americas were discovered. Indigenous rape occurs in relation to nature as something to dominate by proxy. To that, human rape historically happens far more than animal rape in a literal, zoophilic sense; in a figurative sense, the raping of nature is total. And if this distinction seems bizarre, it owes itself to the function of empire as brutal and all-consuming on both sides of the Imperial Core. So while demonologist Kevin Meares asserts Christopher Columbus once mistook a manatee for a mermaid (source: Quora), Columbus was a well-documented rapist, establishing sex-trafficking on an unprecedented, settler-colonial scale (source: Bad Empanada’s “The Truth About Columbus – Knowing Better Refuted,” 2020).

Columbus was arguably the father of settler colonialism, but America has since carried and continues to carry its genocides out to a much more successful degree. David Michael Smith writes in his introduction to Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire (2023) how the extent to this degree is something that evolved into itself through a system built for exploitation from the start (excuse the three-page quote, but it’s vital writing so I want to include it):

That the United States is a colonialist and imperialist country—an empire—can hardly be questioned. The conquest and near-extermination of several hundred Indigenous nations by European and U.S. settlers provided the land on which the contiguous United States was built, and Native peoples continue to live in colonial conditions, deprived of sovereignty and self-determination. The United States also colonized Liberia, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the eastern Samoan Islands, the Philippines, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Panama, which Washington carved out of Colombia to build a transoceanic canal, and Cuba were U.S. protectorates for decades. The United States recognized the independence of Liberia in 1847 and the Philippines in 1946 and admitted Alaska and Hawaii as states in 1959 but refused to relinquish the Panama Canal Zone until 1999 and still occupies forty-five square miles of land and water at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. […]

In addition to its long history of conquest and colonization, the United States has always energetically exploited other peoples’ resources, markets, and labor. The enslaved labor of people of African descent fueled early U.S. economic development and the Industrial Revolution. By the 1820s, U.S. merchants were shipping opium from Turkey to China so they could sustain imports of tea, spices, porcelain, and nankeen. As Greg Grandin has noted, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 “announced to European empires that Latin America fell under Washington’s exclusive sphere of influence.” In the mid-nineteenth century, the mounting need to export surplus products led the U.S. Empire to threaten and use violence against China, Japan, and Korea. In the last quarter of the century, intensifying industrial development and agricultural production contributed to unprecedented economic growth. By the 1890s, U.S. businesses were shipping steel, iron, oil, and agricultural machinery to foreign markets, and the export of capital had begun. During that decade, the United States replaced Britain as the world’s largest economy. In 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney, referring to South America, claimed that “the United States is sovereign on this continent.” In stark contrast, after acquiring most of Spain’s colonies in 1898, the United States demanded an “Open Door” for U.S. trade and investment in China and did not even consult its government.

The U.S. Empire’s imperatives of expansion and accumulation have dramatically grown in the era of modern imperialism, and so has its exploitation of the resources, markets, and labor of people in other countries. As Grandin has explained, in the early decades of the twentieth century “American corporations and financial houses came to dominate the economies of Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, as well as large parts of South America.” To protect its investments and promote its interests, the empire militarily intervened in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and invaded and occupied Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. / Industry, agriculture, and trade grew significantly when the United States funded and armed, and then joined the Entente Powers during the First World War. Afterward, the United States invaded Soviet Russia, supported the Guomindang regime in China, and welcomed European fascism as a bulwark against communism—entering the Second World War only because the Axis powers threatened its own imperialist interests. By 1945, the United States had become the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world. Since then, the imperium has vigorously sought to obtain the oil, strategic materials, and other resources it requires and to keep, in the words of Harry Magdoff, “as much as possible of the world open for trade and investment by the giant multinational corporations.”

[photograph insertion, mine; source: The Digital Collections of WWII Museum’s “Mushroom Cloud over Nagasaki, Japan, 9 August 1945”]

These imperatives led to unrelenting confrontation with the Soviet Union and other socialist states—at horrific human expense. The later collapse of most of these states, which occurred partly because of U.S. actions over the decades, made the world a more dangerous place as the empire found itself to be the sole superpower and moved to establish its presence in those and other lands. Since 1945, the United States has fought devastating large-scale wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan. It has launched proxy wars on four continents, routinely attacked countries, overthrown and installed governments, destroyed popular movements, assassinated foreign leaders, engaged in economic sabotage, and supported its allies’ violent domestic repression and acts of war against other nations. The only country to ever use atomic bombs, the United States has deployed nuclear weapons around the world, developed ominous plans “to win a nuclear war,” and brought humanity to the brink of nuclear holocaust on several occasions. Today, the empire has a network of client states encompassing about 40 percent of the world’s countries, about eight hundred foreign military bases, and more than 200,000 military personnel and contractors deployed in about 140 countries. But the rise of China, the return of Russia, and the mounting economic, social, and political crises [e.g., foreign plots and crises of masculinity, below] at home make clear that the United States’ “unipolar moment” is already fading (source).

(artist: Stacy Cay)

All systems die, changing into others. Communism allows for this change and prepares for it in non-heteronormative ways—i.e., that reflect on alienation and genocide through mirrors of what the state normally abjects and what queer communities celebrate; Capitalism tries to prevent this, forcing gender-non-conforming persons to the margins (or assimilating them); and both sides utilize the basics through workers to achieve oppositional goals. Said opposition is palpable, for instance, when masculinity and Capitalism are in crisis by perceived “abominations” and progressions away from the colonial binary towards a postcolonial outcome (above), as well as campy dialogs that push back against state abuse; i.e., pitting ludo-Gothic BDSM against harmful notions of sexuality and gender (e.g., this hilariously Austenian 2023 [source tweet] conversation between Professor Grace Lavery and a bigot potentially confusing Lavery with the author for Detransition Baby, 2021). Though not exclusively female, nature-as-female is a common monomyth scapegoat, including its mythological forms parsed by outdated psychoanalytical models; re: Creed vis-à-vis Freud, and Kristeva. Outdated or not, the Medusa remains Creed’s chosen source of cis female rage and patriarchal fear in The Monstrous-Feminine.

To her credit—initially catalyzed by Freud’s essay “Medusa’s Head” (1922) and the patriarchal bogeywoman, the Archaic Mother—Creed’s characterization of Medusa is post-Freudian to some extent. Again, Creed stresses the weapon-like power of the Aegis as a means of paralyzing men, but leaves much room for improvement (re: my thesis quote, exhibit 23a) insofar as Marxist, intersectional solidarity is concerned; i.e., seeking to explore cis women beyond their universal portrayal as victims in Western canon: their monstrous, “ancient” function standing in during Amazonomachia, or brushes with Amazon pastiche, to mask Communism as a rising way of life during the beginnings of Capitalism’s decline a mere century after the US rose to geopolitical prominence in 1890. Creed appears to make up for it in her follow-up book, The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine, but only seems to have done so thirty years later. It’s a bit tardy (typical of cis women who aren’t feeling the pressure [and pain] of state abuses to the same degree as gender-non-conforming people).

In canonical terms, this sexist hauntology has endured well into the present, with women being the chaos dragon that “needs” to be slain according to Jung’s mythic structure (a model still upheld by Jordan Peterson today and many other “great” men besides). In terms of Cala Maria from Cuphead (exhibit 23a, 2017), Maria embodies the outer “beautiful form” until provoked. Then she unfurls her penis-like snakes, presenting them to the hero to petrify them (the game’s original protagonists being coded as male). Her genderqueer transformation—as with other examples of the Medusa like Giger’s xenomorph or Géricault’s raft (exhibit 23b, below)—invoke the Archaic Mother as a recursive, gender-non-conforming nightmare borne out of the pre-Civilized, pre-enlightened, primordial past as female, feminine, and furious at Capitalism and fascism having resulted from Cartesian hegemony long after Athens fucked off (though, like Rome, it never fully left). To prove their own dominance, lest they turn to stone like scared little children, heteronormative heroes must either kill Medusa, putting her down like a disobedient bitch; or weaponize her gaze against[6] enemies of the state. But Medusa still wins in the end because her killers invariably go mad and eventually die, turning to stone themselves (state shift being the last laugh of Mother Nature).

(exhibit 23b: Artist: Théodore Géricault; model and artist: Mischievous Kat and Persephone van der Waard. Again, though not exclusively female, nature-as-female [or at least monstrous-feminine] has women and feminized minorities treated like food under Cartesian models. Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” [1818] was a commentary on real-world atrocities tied to industrial norms and covered up by the elite, which his painting vividly depicts while also breaking racialized boundaries through camp of a serious sort. In the process, he showcases the solidarity-in-struggle of a diverse group of survivors, trying to be heard amid bourgeois attempts from the French Monarchy to silence workers and save face [while struggling to maintain settler-colonialism’s harvesting of nature].

In keeping with ludo-Gothic BDSM as simply the act of playing with power in Gothic language to punch up with, mid-camp, the concept of worker isolation and solidarity under harsh, capitalized conditions is, indeed, a common Marxist fixture; i.e., under capitalist oppression—one which my own drawing deliberately marries to transgressive sexuality and queer subversion, framing the Medusa: as a fat, intensely awesome GNC creature of the vast depths, not a ship. As she and her animalistic [chimeric] trauma rise to the surface through erotic pleasure and monstrous, genderqueer expression during ludo-Gothic BDSM, my instructional aim is to venerate everything through the combined, sex-positive labor of workers unified against the abuses of Capitalism then and now.

Much like Géricault’s original piece, there’s a debatable presence of anger and unheard frustration amid the basic visual pattern and its playtime, but also rebellion as a constructive rage against the machine; i.e., rebellious subterfuge and perceptive pastiche as a transgressive, pre-fascist [Gothic] means of proletarian praxis whereupon resistance and power exchange “share the floor.” Time is a circle and the bugbears of yesterday haunt everyone during the debate. As they should; cryptomimesis comments on fascism as something to expose through Gothic displacement; i.e., pre-fascist ghosts of the counterfeit that whisper its continuation in the present space and time.)

Beyond Medusa, abjection more broadly is a form of settler-colonial menticide codified into a linguo-material status quo—i.e., what its canonical gargoyles stand for and how heteronormative society conversely stands for them in response: manufactured consent. Historically, Patriarchal Capitalism makes white cis-het men the most privileged worker class, those most prone to class betrayal and lying (and the most afraid of death): universal “heroes” or “protectors.” Everything else is alienated or abused, either a victim or persecuted monster to varying degrees (usually on a hierarchy of descending privilege—with white women closer to “the top/civilization” [and Simone Beauvoir claiming “other” for cis-het white women] but still closer to nature than men are, and intersections of queer people, people of color, disabled people and/or the mentally ill closer to the bottom, along with non-human animals and nature).

To this, canonical praxis treats iconic monsters like Medusa as challenges to overcome in defense of the state—literal dragons to slay or things to keep hidden, locked up like a secret peril or damsel in a tower (with the ones that dare to try and escape compared to dragons, shamed as sluts, or blamed for their own murders—re: the madwoman in the attic, exhibit 21c1); iconoclastic praxis treats monsters as language to reclaim, exposing the systemic, settler-colonial trauma committed by assigned “heroes” behaving like sex-coercive monsters against their coercively demonized and abused victims—e.g., “monstrous” witches being burned at the stake by the creepy, self-righteous and utterly horrible Puritans. Once reclaimed, iconoclastic monsters become problems for Capitalism to “solve”—an abusive system that nevertheless employs the same poetic language to try and hide its own exploitation of workers, demonizing them while robbing them of their rights, wages and literal time as laborers. This becomes the thing to gossip about/with, through monsters as canonical or campy forms of theatre that play and perform power as a means of interrogating trauma—often in relation to trauma as lived, but also generationally inherited; i.e., through class nightmares that are, for those trapped inside the state of exception, just another day that escapes notice for those outside of these brutal zones; e.g., the Kashmiris of the Kashmir Valley who, Tariq Ali et al write in Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011), “the valley of Kashmir now hosts the biggest, bloodiest, and most obscure military occupation in the world” (cited and summarized in GDF’s “How Kashmiris Got So Good At Smoking Indian Soldiers,” 2024).

In terms of raising class/culture awareness and intelligence through the Gothic mode and ludo-Gothic BDSM liberating the whore to have their revenge against profit , Medusa is an incredibly ubiquitous example; one that speaks to trauma in our own lives, she readily comments on commonplace struggles of AFAB workers, but also those perceived as monstrous-feminine at large (which extends to “incorrect” AMAB persons and intersex people). Throughout the rest of the book, then, we’ll of course consider gender trouble in relation to historically ironic (from the Western heteronormative perspective) biological factors; e.g., trans women being seen as “false women” for a distinct lack of female sex organs, but also as “non-men” who fail to perform with their male sex organs and gender roles as essentially indiscrete; i.e., in the ways expected of them by the state (which essentializes human biology insofar as sex and gender are, for them, one-in-the-same).

For the moment, though, I want to examine an aspect of misogyny that classically female monsters like Medusa historically represent in Western culture: biological reproduction and animalization.

Whether cis or not, all workers are sexualized and of nature. However, AFABs are closer to nature in the sense that they have bodily functions they cannot avoid and which the state wants to control and chattelize by having them bear children and identify around this fact. To this, AFAB people are forced, to some extent, to identify as women—the identity generally being tied to their reproductive functions as systemically exploited and viewed as abject by patriarchal forces. By this same token, sexist cis-het men are simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the vagina and what comes out of it (except their own semen, which they love): babies, period blood of various consistencies, and yeast infections. Pee (and female ejaculate) don’t actually exit the vagina but many men think both do; men also incorrectly call the woman’s pussy her “vagina,” denying her sexual pleasure outright by ignoring the clitoris, labia, and vulva while emphasizing her reproductive functions as compelled for the state’s continued existence—i.e., a broodmare thereof, kept stupid, powerless and dumb (as well as her children, implying a cycle of feudalized rape to keep the patrilineal bloodline “strong”).

The simple fact is that patriarchal men fear women—but also AFABs in general alongside male and intersex monstrous-feminine during ludo-Gothic BDSM—because heteronormative canon frames female bodies, periods and PMS as mythically terrifying to men fearful of past revenge hinted at by camp: something that must be contained or else. The UK’s Royal College of Nursing states that “Women have long been seen as at the mercy of their biology”—with doctors having called “hysteria” (female madness) “wandering womb” for millennia (2021). However, hysteria was also a convenient excuse to kick modern women out of the American workplace, post-WW2 (exhibit 3a1). This goes well beyond factory work, with computers being a socialized, female field until it was colonized by men—culminating with neoliberal dickheads like Bill Gates privatizing operating system softwares that were largely open-source for decades (Another Slice’s “King Of Neoliberalism,” 2020); forgetting computers, the entire STEM field currently is systemically sexist[7] according to the Society for Women Engineers (2021) and has been since the Enlightenment/Cartesian Revolution.

Relegated to the realms of women’s work, female workers often see life and death in ways male workers do not: as intertwined, but also integral to female bodies in ways that are generally controlled uniquely to women as workers. Yet it’s something that Capitalism can’t alienate entirely from women, but can frame as monstrous by dehumanizing the whole reproductive process and making all aspects of female labor somehow tied to reproduction and female biology (which, again, ties into gender-non-conformity and trans, non-binary and intersex peoples): women are monsters who must be dominated to preserve the species’ current arrangement.

Enslaved to childbirth as a privatized system of compelled labor that reduces mothers to breeding vats, AFABs experience death in stages generally ignored by cis-het men, because cis-het men will not experience these things directly in relation to themselves (versus GNC persons, who regardless of their biology can be labeled as monstrous-feminine). Indeed, bourgeois-inclined men only care about those children most “useful” to the state: the cherished son as a would-be father, husband, soldier, doctor, philosopher, patriarch, politician, Caesar, etc; the daughter as a wife, bride, or aforementioned broodmare (a much more narrow role). To cater to men in this respect, women must face more than simply period blood and menstrual cramps, but miscarriages, stillborn babies, postpartum depression and various other things that make them feel possessed by their own bodies and sex organs as hijacked by the state. They become animalized, but also goaded into abusive dialogs that pit them against other women in marginalized circles; e.g., “I am woman, hear me roar” at trans people, not the state.

We’ve discussed animalization throughout our thesis argument in Volume Zero, which we’ve cited here as well. Animalization isn’t strictly a negative insofar as class and culture war are concerned. On the state side of things, though, sexual reproduction becomes systemically compelled, but also mirrored by horror canon shouting, “childbirth is abject!” from American rooftops for decades. It becomes its own form of gossip that harbors a great deal of genuine anger, monsters, and camp on both sides of oppositional praxis. But on the state side of things, the aesthetics of rebel culture become subordinate, thus complicit in state aims—with furious Medusa archetypes and subjugated Hippolytas triangulating against state enemies; e.g., GNC women as bad animals and cis-queer women (and cis-het feminists) being “good bitches” for the state; i.e., TERFs. While this abjecting of animalized workers is common in female human workers, and while people who menstruate/give birth are generally treated like chattel for their reproductive capabilities, our own gossip, monsters and camp also need to consider the needs (and ironies) of non-human animals as well and how we relate back and forth.

Before we move onto George O’Keefe as someone who expressed her own rebellion relayed in natural forms, let’s quickly consider the plights of animals and nature as something to acknowledge.

The paradox of the pedagogy of the oppressed is that animals cannot talk, so we must listen to them through our own performances of them as a means of identifying with their oft-silent struggles; we must speak for them by identifying with them. For these reasons, the struggle of animals might not always seem obvious at first glance. Capitalism, for example, is marginally kinder to dogs and cats and other non-human, “pet”-type animals (especially chonkers and lomgbois), and (as my thesis argument explored at length) tends to valorize these qualities when applying them to humans who serve the state. The same goes for various hunting animals, beasts of burden or chattel; i.e., valuable, lucrative property that you’re not supposed to have sex with (though if patriarchal men could have babies with animals, they undoubtedly would). However, excluding specialists speaking out for their favorite critter (entomologists stanning for bees or mantids, for example), a collective push should be made to see all animals in a more positive light, not just the cute ones; i.e., how Capitalism exploits the natural world by citing non-human animals as useful or not according to the bourgeoisie and what they “own” through structural, positional, and material advantage. It’s important, because it affects humans, too, insofar as we’re compared to animals all the time.

As YouTube creators like Ze Frank or Casual Geographic demonstrate, humor and slang serve these humanizing aims, code-switching between science, comedy and myth to reclaim stigma animals (and their associate human pariahs by proxy); i.e., in the minds of a casual audience bred on theatrical clichés (while still, both of them, essentially being white moderates/token liberals who refuse to critique Capitalism on their large channels). Anti-animal sentiment overlaps with human stigmas; e.g., anti-dog sentiment in Isle of Dogs (2018) being a canine cryptonym for “rabid” Japanese eco-fascism (which we’ll briefly touch on here before returning to in Volume Three) and Imperial outrage: segregation, immiseration, persecution, and genocide adjacent to real-world assassinations like that of Inejiro Asanuma by right-wing ultranationalist, Otoya Yamaguchi:

(photographer: Yasushi Nagao)

Gothic Communism is holistic and its means of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM must include “stigma animals” (and the marginalized peoples associated with them; e.g., Medusa and snakes; Drow and spiders) as symbols to rescue (which “Call of the Wild” shall do, in the Demon Module):

• wasps, “monster bugs” that actually pollinate flowers (Cerruti R. Hooks and Anahí Espíndola’s “Wasps, Surprisingly Cool Pollinators,” 2020).
• snakes, “danger noodles” that are largely harmless towards people, but stigmatized to Hell and back: “Just a quarter of snake species are venomous, and most snakes aren’t a threat to humans or pets. Yet snakes inspire fear in many people, whose overblown reactions often result in snakes being unnecessarily killed or removed from their habitats” (the Human Society’s “Snakes Have a Bad Reputation that Doesn’t Match Their Behavior, 2023).
• bats, “sky puppers” that eat tons of insects but also fertilize/pollinate plants (the USDA’s “Bat Pollination”) but are also constantly endangered (the Bat Conservation International, 2023).
• spiders, “spooters” that also eat tons of insects
• frogs and toads, “hoppy bois” that remain incredibly sensitive to the changing of the world climate due to human intervention, thus useful to determining the health of a given environment (Candace Thomson’s “Nature Center Notes: “How Toxic Is Your Environment? Frogs Will Tell You,” 2019); also, they look super cute when fighting each other
• sharks, “stuffed animals” disarmed ignominiously underwater by flipping them on their noses, yet still are demonized as “supreme killer machines” by aspiring Hollywood directors; e.g., Spielberg and his many imitators)
• shrikes, which despite being “headbanging, prey-impaling death-birds” (Hannah Waters’ “Shrikes Have an Absolutely Brutal Way of Killing Large Prey, 2018) are still songbirds.
• parasitoids (which help combat overpopulation and starvation—i.e., in a natural way not tied to the profit motive and genocide).

Even some dogs and cats[8] are stigmatized, or rabbits, for being stupid and weak (a concept we’ve already discussed and will look more into at the end of Chapter Four/start of Chapter Five in Volume Three, exhibit 100a5). For example, so-called “bad dogs” overlap with the deliberate weaponizing of real/robot dogs tied to national fervor and anti-intellectual, xenophobic behaviors; e.g., Isle of Dogs‘ complex blending of Japanese media with anti-vaxxing and isolationism (exhibit 24a, below).

In the film, these happen in spite of an existing vaccine in order to perpetuate fear and dogma versus the fallibility of the state despite its widespread abuses, general skullduggery and master/slave, dynastic-familial posturing through propaganda as righteous and “invincible”: “Brains have been washed, wheels have been greased, fear has been mongered.” Amid this, the narrative makes room for humanized narratives with animal personas: the lady and the tramp, but also a boy and his dog tied to larger geopolitics parodied as “cat-and-dog” hysteria. So-called “dogs of war,” then, historically take on a literally meaning through warrior pups that have since become lost to history as nightmarish, Baskerville-style hell hounds trained to do Capitalism’s dirty work (Unknown5’s “The Man-Eating Spanish War Dogs That Crushed the Aztecs,” 2023).

Such anthropomorphic stories can be useful to bridging gaps within geopolitical divides and radically different political stances during oppositional praxis. For instance, while Jadis was inarguably a stone-cold biznatch, they absolutely adored stigma animals. Indeed, it was their most endearing quality and something I very much enjoyed about them; it was also how they identified, worshipping the wasp and performing as “wasp” through BDSM analogs. The same idea applies to cats and dogs, but also the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate. Dogs can be disposed of, and ghost or zombie dogs can bridge the gap between the colony and colonized, sacred and profane, trickster and tricked, etc, during liminal expressions that—through ludo-Gothic BDSM—often have deep ties to nature as a profoundly alien experience that must be reclaimed:

(exhibit 24a: Artist, top-left: Persephone van der Waard; top-middle: Tommypocket; top-right: Neal D. Anderson; bottom-left: source, modeled after Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”; bottom-right: Gobifrip. Eco-friendly art is predicated on artists, including poets, being in touch with nature by identifying with it through animals; e.g., the “inhumanist” poet, Robinson Jeffers. Often there’s a pastoral element, connected with fishing or tourism in medieval/pre-Capitalist depictions of peacetime and demilitarization.)

(exhibit 24b: Artist, far-top-left: George Roux; top-middle-left: unknown; top-middle-right: Escape Pearly; top-far-right: Georgia O’Keefe; bottom-far-left: unknown; bottom-middle-right: Takato Yamamoto; bottom-far-right: H. R. Giger.)

Reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM is a liminal proposition, and compounds through intersecting liminalities amid an animalized Gothic. As the manifesto explored, this applies to Capitalism’s continuation as a menticidal system towards workers, which can be reversed through remediated praxis; i.e., pastiche, whose campy monsters can potentially introduce “perceptive” parody, ironic gender trouble and constructive anger, etc, in opposition to DARVO and other state tactics of control. Vis-à-vis the paradox of violence, terror and hellish bodily expression, the potential for resistance to state abuse is always present, but must be realized through de facto good education that raises awareness, intelligence, empathy and understanding through the Gothic mode. This requires gossip, monsters and camp, which require the other interrelating devices (our creative successes, the Six Rs, etc). Round and round.

This symposium has already touched on liminality in one form of pastiche (re: Velma pastiche, exhibit 22); Capitalism more broadly results in a series of paradoxes and conflicts captured in Gothic pastiche at large, often through poetic thresholds. Their crossing includes not just monstrous surfaces, but their lairs’ parallel space as liminal-by-design; i.e., built to be moved through. Said motion encapsulates a crossing of social (often taboo) barriers through occupation and movement inside; re: Bakhtin’s chronotopes (with Gothic chronotopes being especially “heavy” in terms of historical-material time, thus trauma, as felt concentrically within the scenic decay of a given space-time narrative: its historical, but also hauntological [nostalgic] signature). Once ventured, these “routes” can be retaken for entirely different reasons depending on how one leans socio-politically as continuously informed and challenged by the material world and vice versa; i.e., ergodic motion, whereupon these same routes have already been taken (and remade) time again and time again. What Luis Borges called “The Circular Ruin” (1940) or “Garden of the Forking Paths” (1941) also applies to the cultural attitudes assigned to chronotopes’ occupants, familiars, creators, and homes.

(artist: Jamie Lee Curtis)

Women, for example, become alien as a status and location whose time and place are complicated by societal bias during uneven mistreatment and estrangement in professional roles; e.g., within acting as something whose pedagogy of the oppressed becomes regularly denied to anyone whose mother isn’t cinematic royalty (which Jamie Lee Curtis’ mother was). Alienated within or removed from society (“‘woman is other’ symbolizing chaos and darkness, a priori” vs “society others women and relegates them to darkness”) or otherwise concealed from in-groups, the result is constant female displacement and dissociation; i.e., through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection, which throws women off of and away from society’s half-real, imaginary forms that, in turn, bleed back into daily life. She becomes alien, as does nature and her in relation to it; e.g., Samus Aran, but really any heroine, insofar as Gothic treatments of women are difficult to escape in popular media/real life. The point of ludo-Gothic BDSM is to conceptualize this through play as going beyond what we might think “women” even means; i.e., as something to abject, including by tokenized agents policing nature as monstrous-feminine, thus not automatically female.

At times, a setting and its inhabitants synonymize to some degree. For example, Georgia O’Keefe was a “monster” (a gay[9] woman) painting “flowers” (vaginas, 24b) in ways that allowed her to express herself as freely as she felt comfortable in her time period, but whose resultant tableau implied the artist behind the canvas through non-humanoid, nature-themed abstractions—flowers. Giger likewise straddled the fence between the living and the dead (exhibit 24b)—the sacred and the profane—to subversively convey the symbolic body as erotically “biomechanical,” a retro-future “vice character” recreating old medieval ideas “discovered” by his surreal portfolio, then shown to Ridley Scott by Dan O’Bannon, who facilitated the ideas through Alien, which FOX distributed, selling the entire thing to 1979 America and eventually the rest of the world in various figurative and literal copycats. Like Medusa, the flower-as-feminine or xenomorph as monstrous-feminine frame nature as alien, insofar as we no longer recognize our connection to it, but also abject (displace and disassociate) settler-colonial abuse elsewhere, onto an “other” being in an “other” place: some combination of women, plant life, stigma animals, Indigenous life, and queerness in a spatial arrangement that conveys and houses them. This is the framework that ludo-Gothic BDSM eventually seeks to camp at all, requiring the objects of camp be bottled, first: an invigilation to work within.

(artist: Rocky Schenck)

To that, Giger might seem more overtly monstrous than O’Keefe, but the paradoxes of power and play were on full display in both their galleries’ liminal expressions. In turn, these expressed shared ideas about the surreal and the feminine as something to portray in relation to nature as a battleground of Gothic ideas, of which the human body is but one. The feminine/female form as monstrous-feminine could be readily be expressed by Giger’s drug-addled gimp suit as oversaturated with overt, corrupt expressions of psychosexual trauma; but O’Keefe’s own body was—bare and exposed—equally inhuman and forbidden in the eyes of those who might see her younger, openly queer self as something to stare at while thinking of things associated with darkness, nature, sin and vice, etc: Grendel’s mother but also her lake, and the flowers surrounding it that “weaker” individuals associate with soft feminine things, which the “strong” insist are hiding untold terrors; i.e., the kiss of death; e.g., the “blossom” blooming boldly between O’Keefe’s legs:

(exhibit 24c1: Nude photos of O’Keefe taken by Alfred Stieglitz—all but one, of Ellen Morton that male art critic, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, mistook for O’Keefe because of Stieglitz’ conditional patronage of O’Keefe and its legacy of “controlled vice” that O’Keefe would challenge for the rest of her life; likewise, Hayward would be burdened with a hermeneutic “blind spot,” tending to favor men and male interpretations of things; i.e., exhibit 24d1.)

In other words, Gothic abstractions intersect in highly dreamlike and chimeric ways, which—in the absence of emergent play during ludo-Gothic—become stuck, dogmatic (which the abjection process is). Already male-dominated, the entire struggle of a nature-oriented, sexually descriptive dialectic was hardly ground-breaking by 1979 (when O’Keefe’s flowers were old news). As a Pygmalion chain of visual facilitation—from Giger to O’Bannon to Scott to FOX—the sequence had a love-hate treatment of female nudity as monstrous, occurring through liminal expression during oppositional praxis. Whereas Giger’s xenomorph (exhibit 24b/50b/51/60c and many more) is a liminal being tied to Gothic hysteria and the necrotic, murderous “womb space” as an unstable, escaped slave, the viewing of the creature’s Numinous power brought home to empire from a perceived “elsewhere” extends to male art critics stupidly conditioned to think of women as monstrous in sex-coercive ways (exhibit 24d1, Hayward). O’Keefe’s own nudity was liminal in the same respect, and generally in relation to “ancient” spaces, which Giger’s Gothic-surreal poetics conveyed: caves, lakes, darkness and the underground (exhibit 24d1).

Through informed, dialectical-material study, their doubled condition highlights functional similarities amid cosmetic differences. Brought to light, both are exposed to Cartesian assaults. However, O’Keefe was “vulnerable” (as this 2023 article by Ayanna Dozier puts it) because society made her so in relation to heteronormativity and its enforcers’ constant policing of nature-as-alien: women as beings of nature, hence alien themselves minus Giger’s male privilege, but also his bizarre creation’s animalistic, Amazonian defenses (teeth, claws, armored skin, a phallic ovipositor and “concentrated acid for blood”). However, O’Keefe—like the xenomorph—was also incredibly subversive, brave and free to experiment and try new things within financial constraints. The same applies to anyone perceived as monstrous-feminine, including other women experimenting with nude photography during O’Keefe’s lifetime; e.g., Ergy Landau (source: Rob Baker’s “The Nudes of Hungarian Photographer, Ergy Landau,” 2023):

(exhibit 24c2: Photographer and model: Ergy Landau. Her fascination with nude women gathered around water feels similar to Milton’s “narcissistic Eve[10]” loving her own reflection instead of her God-ordained husband, Adam. This, unto itself, is ludo-Gothic BDSM: playing with mirrors and one’s place in a predetermined order beyond what said order dictates unto an unruly extended being.)

From Pygmalion into the present, such Galatean bodies (female or not) are incredibly controlled, even amid perceived liberation. O’Keefe’s husband, Stieglitz, was not only 24 years older than O’Keefe; he also provided financial support, arranging for a residence and place for her to paint in New York in 1918. During their marriage, Stieglitz took hundreds of nude photos of O’Keefe when she was young. O’Keefe lived to be nearly a hundred. In 1978, eight years before her death, O’Keefe remarked, “When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives” (source: Hilton Kramer’s “Stieglitz’s ‘Portrait Of O’Keeffe’ at Met”). Furthermore, Stieglitz’ provisions had strings that have to be reflected on—reflections on reflections of reflections (calm yourself, Borges).

For example, as male art critic Alex Waterhouse-Hayward himself remarks in “Ellen Morton, Georgia O’Keefe & Anne Brigman” (2018):

In 1987 on my first trip to New York, I saw a photograph [of Ellen Morton] at MOMA that impressed me and which I have not forgotten. Other variations of the above photograph say Stieglitz’s subject was Georgia O’Keeffe.

It came to mind on Saturday night when I was reading the Sunday New York Times […] I read a fine essay on almost-forgotten American photographer Ann Brigman written by Rebecca Kleinman.

What took me back to that photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe taken by Alfred Stieglitz was this quote:

She never really fit in [with] Stieglitz’s salon and city, seeking a breath of fresh air in Maine. He brought the theories of Havelock Ellis, the founder of modern sexology, that linked artists’ works and their sexuality, particularly concerning female artists. But eroticizing nudes wasn’t [Brigman’s] thing. Brigman went back to the West Coast for good, and Stieglitz eventually fulfilled his Pygmalion fantasy with the more compliant O’Keefe (source).

Regardless, O’Keefe’s infamous depictions by Stieglitz not only effaced other women and their own self-made attempts at nudity at the time—re: Landau and Morton; they were something she had to escape through her own “monstrous” work, but also reflect on later in life by quoting for interviewers about her own body of work as alien (or works taken with her as the subject to be captured by men). This wasn’t always immediately transformative, but it did happen as a means of play that—through workers after O’Keefe—would draw inspiration from someone working within the confines of their own present. Camp is relative, ergo ludo-Gothic BDSM as a means of camp.

For example, early in her life—post-marriage but for the rest of their lives together—the relationship between Stieglitz and O’Keefe, writes O’Keefe biographer Benita Eisler in O’Keeffe And Stieglitz: An American Romance (1993), was “a collusion […] a system of deals and trade-offs, tacitly agreed to and carried out, for the most part, without the exchange of a word. Preferring avoidance to confrontation on most issues, O’Keeffe was the principal agent of collusion in their union” (source). She “topped from the bottom,” in other words.

Moreover, this occurred as much through abstractions of herself—her flowers, but also things associated with parallel dialogs focused on shared abstractions that might seem totally different and yet concern a Gothic dialogic’s Wisdom of the Ancients. Coded and recoded through a shared aesthetics but also psychopraxis, the appearance of things belonging to this Wisdom is far less important than what they signify in relation to marginalized elements of nature applied to workers: the female and the feminine as monstrous and fetishized in ways historically unkind to anyone who isn’t a cist-het (and later white, Christian) man. The evocation of the cave becomes an affront to canon, but also a violent, fetishistic opera whose spaces of darkness, terror and rape allow the historically marginalized to reclaim their voice through the self-same tools of terror, bodies and violence. Trauma and power becomes things to associate with, and communicate through, nature as feral, hungry and feminine:

(exhibit 24d1: Photographer/model: Ann Brigman‘s “Cleft of the Rock” [c. 1907]. Photographer, bottom-middle: John McNairn [2021]; right: Jeff Dunas [1954]. Women and caves/rocky structures remain a tremendous fixture of classical art that has survived out of the oldest English written works—Grendel’s mother’s underwater cave in Beowulf—into photography and beyond [“Women getting stuck to rocks is the top-two greatest hobby of all time!” says Hannah Gadsby of male-authored classical art]. Regarding “The Cleft of the Rock,” Hayward writes, “There are some that believe that Brigman’s photograph above represents a vulva in the same way that O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers do. I am not so sure.” Yeah, right; says the guy with dick-colored glasses, who mistook Ellen Morton for O’Keefe. More to the point, iconoclastic art extends to iconoclastic interpretations of art as something to teach to sexist men like Hayward. He’s right on the cusp; you gotta drive that point home, right into the brain—to [and this is a Plato pun] decolonize the female “cave” and lead him out of the allegorical [man-brain] cave. However, this takes practice, and often intermingles between men and women working together in unfair systems to say something unsaid; e.g., Neil Marshall’s 2005, “I am woman, hear me roar!” feminism of The Descent devoting much of its screen time to alienating and killing everything in sight.

The taming of the female cave as “the womb of nature” is something we’ll return to in Volume Two, when we look at Francis Bacon’s spearheading of the Cartesian Revolution as responsible for gendering nature as something to conquer by men and tokenized women; i.e., to rape.)

Such education requires an awareness from the student imbibing the lesson. Despite O’Keefe “holding the reins,” for example, she still negotiated (wordlessly by the sound of things) from a position of material disadvantage. Likewise, the existence of canonical gargoyles’ and their ubiquitous presence (the egregore and the chronotope) is gaslit then-and-now by those who keep the power of such things for themselves in favor of state arrangements: “monsters aren’t real” remaining a frustratingly common, if generally supercilious, expression of so-called “guy talk.”

For one, it relegates descriptively sexual/gendered bodies to the void of total image death, but also abjects the idea that sex workers can even negotiate with their bodies to begin with; i.e., to reshape how they are viewed through art in ways that decolonize the Superstructure, re-visualizing bourgeois egregores as sexually descriptive according to humanizing narratives; e.g., the undead/demonic egregore as animalized in ways that treat them as the stuff of dreams, but also the natural world (and feral, primal sex) as increasingly legendary (and rare) under a Capitalist-Realist mindset: the unicorn.

(artist: Zuru Ota)

We’re not talking about equine, horn-headed things, here, but an availability of sex known to a closer bond with nature as freed from Cartesian, heteronormative bondage. Over time, iconoclastic depictions of unicorns become valuable to Gothic Communists through their humanized, unexploited labor enjoyed by all those participating. As something to synthesize in socio-material terms, their representees can become autonomous, helping them escape chattelization by horny men; i.e., those who crave a willing and compartmentalized third—often a bisexual woman, but in reality extending to any effeminate receiver regardless of their sex (e.g., twinks)—to sleep with him and his complicit wife (or vice versa). This isn’t a fluke, but canonically advertised and sold incessantly to heteronormative couples all the time.

Cis bias remains. While Emile Lavinia of Cosmopolitan writes on “how to survive [unicorn season]” (2022),

A unicorn, quite simply, is a person who hooks up with couples – the key component of a threesome. Unicorns might be looking for a one off or something regular. […] A unicorn can be a person of any orientation or gender and there’s no right way to have a threesome or be a unicorn (source).

she focuses on bisexual women who unicorn:

Some women love to unicorn and others find it frustrating and frankly disrespectful having to field proposals from couples looking for a third throughout the colder months. Bisexual women have a long history of being fetishized and viewed as sex objects by heterosexuals (ibid.)

As the remainder of part one shall stress, Lavinia’s fixation on the bisexual female experience can be expanded on by trans, intersex and non-binary artists like Eldritch Babe and myself (exhibit 24d2) through iconoclastic Gothic poetics (which Volume Three shall likewise focus on; e.g., exhibits 87a and 101b). To this, O’Keefe was far less overt than Giger was, but plenty of artists portray the fetishization of the human feminine in far more open terms that point back to her vaginal, gently alien flowers. This doesn’t preclude sex positivity at all, provided the poetic context—and the instructional means of interrogating and negotiating trauma and power through paradox and play—are actively present. A “rose” by any other name can still function as a rose towards liberatory aims, especially when its viewed as monstrous, magical, and out-of-this-world (re: “Red Scare“):

(artist: Sasha Khmel)

Gothic Communism, then, seeks to highlight the dangers of “monsters aren’t real” as apophenic conspiracy—one that that smugly calls iconoclastic art and interpretations of it as “totally random” (apophenia meaning to see “patterns” in random data). Proponents of capital will discredit us, but also use and abuse us to enrich themselves through bad play. Such bad-faith instruction becomes something to beware, including how Capitalism commodifies our own trauma and pedagogy through ludo-Gothic BDSM as shackled to profit (and Capitalist Realism). This, on its own, is already a complicit cryptonym that conceals the Capitalist atrocities that sex-positive artists are desperately trying to suggest when they create seemingly random bonds using ostentatious Gothic language (or other artists taking what they see and riffing off it, or other artists like me making a collage of art, of art, of art). Not only does calling it “random” take away artist voices by making their work seem “fake”; but doing so utterly misses the forest for the trees connecting all of us in grander statements across space and time. It doesn’t matter whether anything “real” (an actual, literal vampire) is connected to them or not; material depictions of monsters (or things historically framed as monsters) very much do exist and furthermore, have deep-seated social-sexual anxieties and trauma attached to workers exploited under Capitalism.

The pedagogy of the oppressed relies on monsters to gossip about, thus prevent rape by placing it in quotes; i.e., camping its usual aliens. To avoid an abject, Foucauldian torture loop, iconoclastic monsters must be more than art, but emotionally/Gothically intelligent artists that reverse-abject the entire structural blueprint back into domesticated spheres, flaunting dark flowers, Satanic unicorns, and biomechanical demigods for the purposes of communicating trauma and preventing its actualization in the future. Meanwhile, “undead/demonic” workers with the mythical booties, thick thighs, buxom breasts, and tight li’l pussies—they’re the zombie unicorns who fuck to metal and possess a mythical, uncanny ability to shrewdly negotiate with those things in order to sleep with whomever they damn-well choose; i.e., to tame the rapacious tendencies in sexist Man-Box consumers through appreciative, mutually consensual peril: “Fuck me like this, in this outfit, the way I want as we agreed upon (we’ll explore BDSM negotiation much more in Volume Three, Chapter Three). By extension, these autonomous, BDSM-savvy workers permit whoever they want to draw them or photograph them as based on emotionally/Gothically intelligent boundaries (what Gamma Ray inadvertently calls “The Heart of the Unicorn,” 2001); i.e., illustrating mutual consent through negotiated labor exchanges that also, as it turns out, interrogate trauma as something to reduce through calculated risk while camping canon.

This largely concludes part one of the roadmap. However, a few assurances before we proceed onto part two.

First, after this roadmap is concluded, we’ll continue to refer to abjection throughout the entirety of the Humanities primer and Volume Three. We’ll also discuss hauntology, chronotopes and cryptonyms. For now, simply understand that all are academic terms that comment on commonplace symptoms under Capitalism. To be sex-positive, I must critique them in connection to capital and how they at times support and resist it, oscillating back and forth but not changing all that much visually or orthographically through popular, haunting depictions of monsters or sexuality in recursively wending stories (the endless, revisiting nightmare again being the mythical, cliché source of many-a-Gothic yarn). This will require the social-sexual habits of our currently unfurling roadmap as guided by interdependent girl talk from younger people, but also aimed in good-faith at older people initially stumped by these mysterious concepts—whose minds probably feel ” fucked” right now by what I’m trying to say.

(artist: Chris Bourassa)

Second, per Chris Baldrick, confusions are inherited, generally by those who sense the presence of trauma in Gothic situations shared between uneven victims of state abuse. Chaos, then, becomes something to acclimate towards during psychopraxis, psychomachia, Amazonomachia and psychosexual displays; i.e., as state education battles rebellious workers’ de facto education through the same basic poetics and synthetic oppositional groupings, mid-opposition. It’s never as simple as it seems because language is always in conflict (though generally for historical-material reasons that concern the state). So try not to fret too much about understanding things perfectly! Stay loose!

However, before we move onto part two, the idea here is to be loose enough within chaotic, interconnecting positions. My teaching style tends to be very fluid, organic and spontaneous; i.e., covering the likes of Medusa, George O’Keefe, H.R. Giger and Neil Marshall, but also far less famous gender-non-conforming persons in order to make my larger point. I would encourage my readers to try the same, and with friends who share you views:

(exhibit 24d2: Model and artist: Eldritch Babe and Persephone van der Waard, portraying an animal-themed BDSM scenario celebrating the subversion of Gothic canon through a dark breeding ritual [the background photobash is based partially on Franck Sauer’s BG art for the old Amiga shoot-’em-up, Agony, 1992].

As my thesis argues, monsters have a tremendous genderqueer potential to be Satanic rebels; i.e., queerness as simultaneously antithetical to state aims but nonetheless required by the state to be sacrificed in animal-like ways. As Eldritch Babe and I demonstrate, this butchery can be camped, and generally with a fair amount of psychosexual fun overshadowed by canonical trauma as something to camp through gender trouble; i.e., by putting “rape” and “death” in quotes, but also dissolving the line drawn between sex and gender and their state-sanctioned connection to biology set easily to rock ‘n roll as a theatrical assist: 

“We eat the night, we drink the time
Make our dreams come true
And hungry eyes are passing by
On streets we call the zoo” [The Scorpion’s “The Zoo,” 1980].

Demons, the undead and animalized egregores, then, are not things to summon strictly from “somewhere else,” but are evoked through a liminal sensation closer to home; i.e., of another world that speaks to generational, systemic trauma in our own lives. All the same, there are profound levels of jouissance onstage; i.e., exquisite torture and ironic peril/rape play and xenophilia. To that end, the aim of the ritual isn’t to summon outright destruction, but cultivate a sense of catharsis through communion with psychosexual, palliative-Numinous forces during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s unequal exchanges of power and knowledge as things to negotiate time and time again. A demon or ghost might not appear each time, or it may—as a creature of chaos—appropriately take different forms; e.g., Eldritch Babe and I cultivated an especially animalistic ritual during one particular exchange, but it could have easily manifested a different way. What matters is the attempt and its goals during oppositional praxis; i.e., as a means of creative success through de facto education towards sex-positive instruction of future social-sexual habits, thus praxial synthesis. Function determines function, not aesthetics.)

Third, for those of you referring to these ideas yourself, also try and remember that the Six Rs, Four Gs, Gothic-Communist mode of expression, Six Doubles of Oppositional Praxis and synthetic oppositional groupings are simply things to keep in mind as general teaching objectives, means and techniques while testing them out in various holistic ways. You certainly won’t need to invoke all of to them in a given moment in order to achieve proletarian praxis, but merely should keep the basics in mind during your creative successes: gossip, monsters and camp. All demonstrate praxial synthesis as an attempt made many times over leading to praxial catharsis. More important than hammering any of them into peoples’ heads, then, is mirroring them in sex-positive ways that people can intuit at their own speeds; i.e., cultivating them during their own reflections on capitalistic trauma inside a hall of mirrors: our revolutionary goals and creative successes being things to repeatedly “shoot for” per performance as echoed across all. Each is instructional, constituting good education (camp) versus bad (canon) as occupying the same space during an ongoing and highly plastic Gothic dialog.

(artist: Vetyr)

When you’ve been through Hell, it becomes something to bring back with you and express in opposition to what put you through it to start with (the state). Above all else, the cultivating of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness remains paramount—to help workers and society liberate itself (and nature) from Capitalism, thus assist in the renewed development of Gothic Communism through sex-positive (art)work. As things to cultivate, emotional and Gothic intelligence are synonymous with social-sexual activism begot from our own diving into the imaginary past. So please, swim around and play—with language, yourselves, and figurative and literal BDSM games that renegotiate labor and unequal power exchange in sex-positive ways. Mix, match, and blend; inject or insert (so to speak). Whatever it takes to do the job in some shape or form; i.e., to recultivate the Wisdom of the Ancients, thus achieve a Gothic-Communist outcome. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” If it works, it works! The signs of praxial success lies in how your students, viewers and customers respond to your own checklists and their idiosyncratic constellations, but also what you put into the world around you: through your own basic approaches that can be extrapolated on through theoretical analysis if need be, but also by and large speak for themselves.

When liberating workers (all of whom Capitalism sexualizes) through iconoclasm, remember that, as iconoclasts, you will generally be compared to vice characters along the way (exhibit 13d). Be mindful of reactionaries, moderates and class traitors more broadly. They are undercover cops who, at any moment, might disrobe, transform and attack you, but just as likely will retain their outward appearance while seeking to cause harm in bad faith. The more openly ironic gender parody and trouble are displayed, the more likely someone is wedded to the Cause; but even so, context is key in telling good actors from bad, and must be scrutinized through dialectical-material analysis each and every time. Eventually it becomes second nature—a means of reading the room:

(artist: Eris Allure)

This concludes the basic synthesis roadmap and its exhibits—to cultivating good social-sexual habits through our teaching methods/synthetic oppositional groupings, thus achieving proletarian praxis through what we create to camp canon with, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as Galateas, not Pygmalions. With it concluded, as well as my current assurances in place, we can further demonstrate how the basics operate according to oppositional praxis through my teaching style. Before we finally delve into the Humanities primer and the various “poetic histories” within the Gothic mode that each section examines, let’s conduct a deeper look at war and rape as things to be mindful of in our own social-sex lives while synthesizing praxis. We’ll do so one at a time, starting with war as something to camp, thus prevent its unironic harm when canon goes unchallenged.

Onto “A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in War Culture“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Though we won’t stress these terms here, this includes conflicting theories (psychopraxis), monsters (Amazonomachia), mentalities or identities (psychomachy) and sexualities (psychosexuality).

[2] Toxic love bleeds into modern pop culture, too; e.g., Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album, Rumours, which was written while the entire band was cheating on each other and presumably knew about it. Lorna Gray writes:

Forty-five years ago, Fleetwood Mac released their 11th studio album, Rumours—widely considered one of the best albums ever made. But while Fleetwood Mac’s music has inspired, comforted and captivated people for almost five decades, it’s easy to forget the tumultuous and downright crazy sh*t that was going on behind the scenes. Namely, the fact they spent a heck of a lot of time on cocaine, and they’ve all been embroiled in some sort of scandalous love affair, usually with each other. The somewhat incestuous affairs of the band members were at their peak when they spent 11 months recording Rumours. Mick Fleetwood has admitted recording the album “almost killed us” (source: “Inside the Affairs that Nearly Destroyed Fleetwood Mac,” 2023).

[3] I’ll never forget when Zeuhl called me “cutie” for the first time; the word sounded alien to me, but was something I very much wanted to hear more of as time went on. Every partner I’ve had has used their own special terms of endearment to refer to me as.

[4] (original footnote abridged): “She did! See Routledge’s The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine (2022).”

[5] I.e., Matthew Lewis having Ambrosio freeze at the sudden sight of Matilda’s exposed boob—i.e., “her tits were there” (source tweet: Patti Harrison, 2019)—while likewise describing it in a highly unnatural, statuesque fashion (effectively camping/reverse-engineering Genesis in the process):

As She uttered these last words, She lifted her arm, and made a motion as if to stab herself. The Friar’s eyes followed with dread the course of the dagger. She had torn open her habit, and her bosom was half exposed. The weapon’s point rested upon her left breast: And Oh! that was such a breast! The Moonbeams darting full upon it enabled the Monk to observe its dazzling whiteness. His eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous Orb. A sensation till then unknown filled his heart with a mixture of anxiety and delight: A raging fire shot through every limb; The blood boiled in his veins, and a thousand wild wishes bewildered his imagination (source).

[6] A sadly apt metaphor for TERFs if ever there was one—like a battered housewife, the abuser pits the second wave feminists’ Amazonian female rage against trans people (and minorities) instead of men: a Dark Medusa or Hippolyta like Victoria from Zofloya (exhibit 100b2) or Ellen Ripley (exhibit 30a) told in badass wrestler’s, action-hero kayfabe, thus allowing centrist gradients like muscle mom Marisa “Glory Seeker” (98a1), queer boss Natalie Wynn (100c10) or queen bitch Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West (exhibit 98a4) to emerge (which synonymize “badass” with defense of the nation through “waifu bait”: the promise of war brides to male consumers). At the same time, these “TERF Amazons and Medusas” can be dutifully met by various subversions produced by iconoclasts like myself—e.g., Nyx posing as an Amazon warrior mommy (exhibit 102a4), but also various franchised simulacra: Odessa Stone (exhibit 100c4), Marisa (exhibit 104a2), Elphaba (exhibit 112c) and Zarya (exhibit 111b). We’ll examine all of these oppositional variables in Volume Three, Chapters Four and Five.

[7] It is also queerphobic, insofar as my ex, Jadis, would “stealth” as a woman (“girlmoding”) to avoid trans misandry by cis male and female scientists (re: “Showing Jadis’ Face“).

[8] Orange cats are often seen as more stupid than other cats, and black cats as witches’ familiars. It might seem “harmless,” but leads to the actual harming of animals based on their phenotypical presentations: the color of their skin and their fur coats (similar to humans). The apathetic divide generally stems from them being seen as animals to begin with, except their relation to us is one between two (or more) animal groups—with humans preying upon non-humans in ways unique to our species: Capitalism.

[9] Used in the loose sense, “gay.” However, to be more accurate and clear, O’Keefe was a bisexual, polyamorous woman who slept with married and unmarried people and their (often-artist) partners in normative and non-normative inclinations. As such, she—and her paintings and my language to describe her—are “more than meets the eye” transformers that shapeshift when needing to disguise the vulnerable workers associated with them. The rebellious subterfuge becomes a revolutionary cryptonymy that shields iconoclastic workers like O’Keefe from heteronormative power and its centrist/reactionary enforcers: things that appear like ordinary flowers but speak on forbidden subjects like female agency.

Likewise, to try and say O’Keefe was “just” bisexual and not queer in the broader sense is to colonize interpretations of the artist, post hoc. It was a different world, a different time, but she was still queer in ways that defy singular, Cartesian definitions of commonplace terms.

[10] From James W. Earl’s “Eve’s Narcissism” (1985), though I don’t see Eve’s seduction by Satan as a bad thing like Earl does: “Eve’s problem, though, is that she invests only some of her narcissistic libido in Adam. It is the fate of what remains that concerns us—because by means of her residual narcissism she is seduced by Satan” (source). Or maybe Adam sucks?

This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “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.

Click here to see “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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 (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.

Synthesis Symposium: Nature Is Food; a Roadmap for Forging Social-Sexual Habits, or Cultivating Gothic-Communist Praxis in Our Own Daily Lives/Instruction

“People don’t really connect, you know?” “What?” “Like those dots simulating humans. We all live totally separately. That’s how it seems to me.”

—Harue Karasawa and Ryosuke Kawashima, Kairo (2001) 

Picking up where “Sample Essay and Paid Labor” left off…

Approaching the end of Volume One, we have moved beyond outlining our manifesto’s stated goals—its core tenets, simplified theories (from our thesis), and means/materials/methods of study—to increasingly examine the trauma of other people and ourselves. Whereas the postscript considered acknowledging the pain of others to process collective trauma, we’re now going to consider the execution of theory during oppositional praxis when acknowledging trauma ourselves in a combined pedagogy/performance; i.e., praxial synthesis towards praxial catharsis through good instruction as enacted by us when confronting Cartesian abuses that treat nature not simply as female, but monstrous-feminine food that harms Indigenous peoples, racial minorities and GNC people (so-called “incorrect” or “non-men” of the white, cis-het European sort) to varying degrees of settler-colonial genocide: by cheapening their lives, their bodies, their labor to serve the profit motive.

(artist: Skylar Shark)

Note: The following terms are all ones I devised from older words to simplify and explain my manifesto tree; i.e., in its most basic form, and the one I expect most people to encounter, experience and employ on a daily basis. —Perse, 4/9/2025

As stated during the preface, praxial synthesis executes theory by cultivating good social-sexual habits that simplify theory during oppositional praxis’ camping of the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM. This instruction happens in order to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness, preventing Cartesian war and rape through trauma writing and artwork as de facto (extracurricular) educational devices; e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM as a form of proletarian creative success, not a means of material gain performed by bad-faith actors concerned with profit and punching down instead of educating people through their work in a sex-positive way (re: Autumn Ivy). This raising of intelligence and awareness can point towards more complicated theory (e.g., postcolonialism) but the emphasis remains on the functioning of theory through a collective, second-nature cognition that cannot be strictly controlled. It must take on a life of its own within a complicated system of interrelating factors: oppositional praxis and Gothic poetics, but also good education and acting versus bad education concerning nature as regularly alienized and harvested by settler-colonial forces.

Praxial catharsis is the application of practical theory to resolve state trauma at the source: through our own connections to systemic issues, which we then express through interpersonal, intersecting pedagogies/trauma in practical ways. Doing so means taking simplified versions of Gothic-Communist goals and theories while progressively dabbling more and more in the exploration of the anything-but-simple—and indeed inherent messiness of—interpersonal and transgenerational trauma; re: Cuwu and I supplying the backbone of that idea with the manifesto postscript, which evolved into my and Bunny’s work followed by many other models and I leading back to Cuwu and pushing forwards again. We whores are like ninjas, then: whatever the distance, however long our absence, a shadow warrior can always come back for one last ride (“Ninjas are paid in wisdom!” says I Am Ninja, in 20-freaking-25; timestamp: 3:22)!

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

As such, the manifesto and postscript have carried out a mounting progression of trauma writing and artwork towards this roadmap, which was preceded by a small essay to test your theoretical fluency (and introduce the idea of the Cartesian harvesting of monstrous-feminine entities) and a quick pause after that to also consider the financial nature of successful labor exchanges exhibited using Gothic poetics. Now we arrive at the synthesis roadmap itself, which considers the cultivation of the rebellious mindset and habits needed to apply good praxis towards achieving systemic catharsis; i.e., through said poetic’s creative successes challenging Cartesian thought.

The synthesis roadmap, then, constitutes its own symposium-style chapter (similar to the symposium at the end of my thesis)—except, its interpersonal rhetoric of trauma writing and artwork doesn’t fixate on the generational abuse of police states like the manifesto and postscript did. Instead, it shifts focus towards what I consider to be the root of the larger problem, and one we can devote praxial synthesis to achieve catharsis in ways that rescue workers and nature from: Capitalist Realism as a Cartesian enterprise. Under Cartesian thought, nature is female food tied to profit in ways that alienate workers and the natural world in classically Gothic ways that lead to police states and grim harvests, but also harvests at large regardless of their outward appearance; i.e., of nature as monstrous-feminine through settler-colonial models that continue to plague workers and nature as victims of capital, female or not. The Medusa is genderqueer and whose “rape” during the dialectic of the alien must be put into quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM—on our Aegis, fuck-starting rebellion’s face during the whore’s paradox and revenge (unicorns look cute and stab things)!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Note: “Nature is monstrous-feminine” is another concept of mine (camping Beauvoir and Barbara Creed)—a tremendously important idea I would expand on heavily in Volume Two, but especially in “Rape Reprise” (and the following chapters); i.e., when discussing the whore’s revenge as something to have against profit in duality during ludo-Gothic BDSM (and its subsequent liminal expression). To it, “nature as monstrous-feminine” and “humanize the harvest” are super productive ideas, and factor into many of the post-scarcity arguments made by Sex Positivity throughout its entirety—in Volume Two, but also the second edition to Volume Zero and One (and eventually Volume Three when it releases).

Second, the best way to understand complex systems is to break them down into simplified models that—in hindsight and through application—may have complex theory applied to them, during holistic study. To it, capital is a complex system of exploitation, one whose pyramid shape conceals and reveals itself during the cryptonymy process to further abjection with chronotopes, hauntologies and Gothic poetics: virgin/whore monsters, whose heroic variants often tokenize to police nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine; re: Amazons being token cops who—formerly dainty Gothic heroines—weaponize for the state to scapegoat even-more-marginalized groups, thus gentrify and decay feminism; e.g., trans women being the scratching post for fascist feminisms playing the white Indian to punch down against society’s most vulnerable parties, the former who then have to suffer the usual bullshit on top of being token traitors (re: “Policing the Whore“; e.g., The Kavernacle’s “Conservative Women are STILL SHOCKED that Right-Wing Men HATE Them,” 2025). The manifesto’s whole point, then, is holistic study returning to older arguments after I’ve made complex theoretical models to explain them, which I then simplify/reverse engineer through their simplified forms, here; i.e., there and back again… again.

This simplification is two-fold: The “Manifesto” section returns the PhD’s complex theory back to a general state of simplicity (while bringing new ideas from Volume Zero into the fold; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM). From there, “Instruction’s” synthesis symposium simplifies things even further by considering the manifesto tree as something to synthesize through daily habits, on and offstage; i.e., through the cultivation of good daily social-sexual habits that theatrically supply the behaviors needed to synthesize praxis: praxis happens in opposition, which is to say it synthesizes in opposition towards catharsis. Praxial synthesis; oppositional synthesis towards praxial catharsis and systemic change as a matter of oppositional praxis, the bourgeoisie (and their various traitors’ persecution language) versus the proletariat (who subvert said language imperfectly during oppositional synthesis). This, in turn, comes back to our series title in praxis, mid-synthesis: sex positivity versus sex coercion regarding universal liberation undercut by the usual Judas characters and cops-and-victims Faustian bargains that immortalize them!

To that, oppositional praxis is more complex and oppositional synthesis is more basic, but both tie into the same larger struggle and—as far as I’m concerned—can be used somewhat interchangeably when discussing Gothic-Communist development and its many hurdles; i.e., there isn’t an obvious point where one begins and the other ends. That being said, the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis are essentially remediated praxis (re: parody and pastiche), which Volume Three discusses at length; i.e., oppositional synthesis initially appears, here, but explores most heavily through application during Volume Three (versus Volume Two, which concerns history and application to varying degrees); re: as something that Cuwu and I essentially pioneered in its most basic forms, “Healing from Rape” onwards. Time is a circle inside space; this book is made of space-time as the Gothic do—through the camping of monsters and sex (re: “Castles in the Flesh“)!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

In either case, the model for opposition synthesis, including the synthetic oppositional groupings (from the manifesto tree) are unpacked here; i.e., in the simplest of ways that Volume Zero could not, then explored throughout the remainder of this book series after Volume One: through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a praxial-synthetic challenge to tokenism oscillating on the same Aegis, using the same basic aesthetic! The rest of this symposium largely presents “as is”; i.e., to preserve its historical elements (and ability to stand on its own/not interfere with me citing it repeatedly in future books), this addendum predominantly the only substantial extension the synthesis symposium shall receive. —Perse, 4/8/2025

The synthesis symposium divides into a smaller primer and three fundamental pieces (followed by a conclusion): “the basics,” or synthetic oppositional groupings that occur during oppositional praxis, as well as the canonical endorsement and reifying of unironic war and rape as things to prevent vis-à-vis these basic factors when synthesized during iconoclastic/campy approaches; i.e., according to our good social-sexual habits/synthetic oppositional groupings:

• Part zero, or the pre-symposium (including this post), explains what synthesis is, as well as providing equations and trauma to prime the reader with before pressing into the symposium itself.
• Part one, “the Basics of Oppositional Synthesis“: 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.
• Part two, “a Deeper Look at War“: 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.
• Part three, “a Deeper Look at Rape“ and “finale: A Problem of Knife Dicks”: 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. Part three features Amazons, phallic women/traumatic penetration, and violence in sports; 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 during ludo-Gothic BDSM, camping our own rapes by taking control during calculated risk that minimize the chance for harm (re: the whore’s revenge against profit)! We’re avatars of the Medusa, and Medusa is the final boss of Capitalist Realism for a reason! Look on our Works, ye Mighty! Heaven in a wildflower, indeed!

(artist: Leeza)

Synthesis Roadmap, or Nature Is Food, part zero: Pre-Symposium; or, Synthesis, Equations and Cartesian Trauma (war and rape)

The magic circle is not something that comes wholly from Huizinga. To be perfectly honest, Katie and I more or less invented the concept, inheriting its use from my work with Frank, cobbling together ideas from Huizinga and Caillois, clarifying key elements that were important for our book, and reframing it in terms of semiotics and design—two disciplines that certainly lie outside the realm of Huizinga’s own scholarly work. But that is what scholarship often is—sampling and remixing ideas in order to come to a new synthesis (source).

—Eric Zimmerman, “Jerked Around by the Magic Circle” (2012)

Before we dive into the symposium proper and the basics, I want to prime you with some core devices: a more comprehensive explanation of synthesis (which the camp map finale touched on in Volume Zero) and several equations and ideas to keep in mind when processing trauma ourselves; i.e., while regarding the simplification of theory when teaching it through the expression of trauma as a Cartesian byproduct—one that alienizes and fetishes nature, turning it (and workers connected to it) into monstrous food during genocide expressed through war and rape, which ludo-Gothic BDSM can camp in a variety of ways:

(artist: Legion)

First, the idea of simple versus complex. Again, Gothic Communism relies on the simplification of complex theory to tackle complex structures (Cartesian thought and Capitalism) as simply as possible, but also in oddly relatable, even hilarious ways; i.e., by people who don’t have a total understanding of theory but can still apply it according to their shared trauma in popularized exchanges that thrive on linguo-material contradiction/abstraction according to human language (and its dark materials) as fought over but also with; e.g., Skynet as an abstraction of capital, but also the xenomorph (above) as a potent means of performance and play during Gothic psychosexual expression camping the canon with Gothic play and unequal exchange (dark desire, revenge fantasies, etc).

Whereas praxis is the practical execution of theory as reified out of a grander compiling to choose from (my thesis argument in volume form), synthesis amounts to how said theory is simplified into livable forms to achieve praxis at all. It is how praxis is cultivated and taught through play during ludo-Gothic BDSM, and good de facto education feeds synthesis with varying emphasis on theory as applied through habit; i.e., as something to practice and instruct to future generations relative to trauma using Gothic poetics in our own media. It must become, to some degree, second-nature.

In turn, the synthesis roadmap concerns oppositional synthesis, pointedly the synthesis of good social-sexual habits that contribute towards proletarian praxis mid-oppression and mid-conflict under Capitalist Realism; i.e. as de facto educational devices that make workers collectively more intelligent and aware of trauma as something to identify outside of themselves and respond to/interrogate, but also identify and negotiate with: in sex-positive Gothic dialogs shared between themselves and other workers as emergent beings (tired to nature) harvested by Cartesian agents demonizing them.

As my thesis volume argues, the extracurricular function of sex positivity amid Gothic poetics must become second-nature; i.e., through creative successes whose ludo-Gothic BDSM can be passed on and subsequently learned from in popularized forms; e.g., the inherently violent, liminal and paradoxical expressions of the operatic Gothic castle/danger disco, psychosexual rape fantasy and monster pornography/Amazonomachia kayfabe we’ve examined thus far in Volumes One and Zero as quintessential forms of trauma writing and artwork. There’s always a form of nefandous abstraction, but this is hardly “mute.” It’s just a different form of data to feed the brain with. Call it food for thought, insofar as it turns us away from Capitalism’s usual, Cartesian harvests hidden by Capitalist Realism. We can remain delicious and monstrous without being reduced to profit for the elite.

Continuing this ghoulish nourishment, I also want you to consider the fact that I am revisiting this roadmap while attempting to preserve its conversational flavor in light of my thesis volume. Similar to the symposium from Volume Zero, these changes are happening after completing my thesis argument, except the roadmap was originally devised before the thesis crystalized. This might make it seem more basic or conversational by comparison, but I think that might actually be useful when grappling with these ideas yourselves—i.e., an invitation of sorts for you to consider how you might encounter these arguments in your own simplified approaches when dealing with complex things. In your own lives, you probably won’t encounter block quotes of my theories except inside the volume itself. However, you will encounter pieces of what went into it as you go about your own lives, and can adopt a more conversational Gothic dialogic when conducting and reifying oppositional praxis yourself; i.e., synthesizing theory and trauma to achieve systemic catharsis through a raising of emotional/Gothic intelligence and warrior awareness in defense of the state’s usual victims.

The point in doing so is to demonstrate how to teach the successful execution of theory (recultivating the bourgeois Superstructure) by examining iconoclastic art as something to create in relation to healthy social-sexual habits that we not only pick up, but learn to perform in our own daily lives living under the power of state forces—not just as workers, but sex-positive de facto educators who teach the world through what we create and leave behind: the educational legacy of our sex work, artwork, and various other exhibits that routinely survive us. These aren’t instructions to harm, but prevent harm on a global scale by camping the very canonical devices that lead to harm in the same complicated shadow zone; i.e., “harm” as a theatrical, sex-positive device camping Cartesian gargoyles. Imagination and experimentation—while canonically deplored—are essential to escaping state tyranny and addressing its phantom pains by bringing them out in the open.

If you’ve read the symposium from Volume Zero (and the end of the manifesto), you’ll have an idea of what to expect, moving forward; I didn’t want to change things too much despite having written this second symposium well before my thesis. Like the thesis volume’s symposium, it represents a point when I was still figuring things out, and I think it serves as a good thought experiment insofar as it will represent a middle stage in your own thinking that will match up with this talk of mine. Its cluttered, “messy attic” quality might speak to you better as you interpret and grapple with these ideas yourselves. And if you want increasingly more complete forms of theory that spell things out as much as possible, there is always the manifesto and thesis. Compared to those, this symposium is a conversational way to close out Volume One. After the symposium primer supplies its own ideas, part one will try to illustrate them (and the basics of oppositional synthesis) through a seminar that walks you conversationally through their application; parts two, three and the finale will consider this application in relation to rape and war in canonical forms. For the entirety of the roadmap, I want you to consider the basics yourselves. I will do my best to mention them and evoke the simplified theories of the manifesto as a means of thinking about labor and art, but also generating and utilizing it ourselves in our own day-to-day relationships (which explore our own trauma).

(artist: source)

It’s true that Gothic Communism is built on systemic trauma as something to acknowledge and articulate, but its achieving of systemic catharsis happens through good praxis; i.e., as a teaching approach whose theories live and breathe through creative expression, which process and interrogate trauma in our daily lives then pass said information on using synthesized, abstracted forms (e.g., ghosts). That is, rather than cancel each other out, they fuse and corrupt into a unique form of data at home in Gothic expression: trauma as a psychosexual presence, but generally one complicated by competing class/cultural factors. For Gothic Communism, this means oppositional praxis. All the while, power and resistance share the same space, haunted by the spectre of state abuse and Marx; our retailored derelicts and their complicated paradoxes operate less as raw reductions of theory and more as pieces to a collective societal puzzle that, when assembled and holistically examined, constitute the reformulation of the Wisdom of the Ancients to achieve systemic catharsis when regarding transgenerational trauma; i.e., as a thing thoroughly trapped inside a cultural imaginary past. In it, the trauma cannot be neatly exorcised, but it can be performed in different ways that lead to its gradual healing over time through ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

Said healing happens not by killing dragons or whitewashing castles, but returning to nature (and reclaiming our labor) through the informed, steady changing of socio-material conditions that prevent systemic harm in the future. Doing so is meant to challenge complex things with simplified approaches that make up a larger solution to a grand problem: our material conditions and historical trauma, which are often abstracted into past-like, hauntological forms. The core issue, then, stems from a lack of resolution tied to the crux of my thesis argument—that Capitalism sexualizes all workers to exploit them; i.e., a heteronormative, Cartesian dimorphic whose global sexualizing of workers and nature leads to a terminal myopia of Capitalist Realism through cyclical Gothic poetics (the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection, but also Shadow of Pygmalion/Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern, etc); the solution is to reclaim these haunted poetics and reverse their class/cultural function through our six Gothic-Marxist tenets and four main Gothic theories’ creative successes.

We’ve listed these successes entirely earlier in the volume, including mutual consent, informed consumption and descriptive sexuality as things to express ourselves. Volume Three will stress all of them; Volume One’s symposium emphasizes de facto education as something to illustrate through the synthesis of subversive Gothic poetics. To that, their practical teaching element married to lived trauma is what I want to spend the remainder of the volume introducing readers to. By working as a direct, counterterrorist solidarity against the state, we aim to prevent war and rape as Cartesian byproducts by raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness towards nature as alien, food, monstrous-feminine; i.e., through the cathartic processing of personal and systemic trauma along various intersectional routes traveled by real workers and occupied/shared by them collectively. To this, other peoples’ creations—what they make and fashion out of the clay of the Gothic imagination (what Descartes would call emergent beings) for the purposes of humanizing those seen as raw materials—are just as valid as anything I could make myself:

(exhibit 20a2: Artist, top-left, bottom-mid-left/-mid-right: Chronorin; bottom-far-left: Kukuruyo Art; top-mid-left: Le Faux Creux; top-mid-right: Rivolution; top-far-right: Oujuo1; bottom-far-right: Reiq. Beings of darkness are generally made from stigmatized materials/natural resources that—when divorced from settler-colonial aims during ludo-Gothic BDSM—serve a vital iconoclastic role during rebellious morphological expression. To that, Satanic morphology uses Gothic nostalgia to bring us closer to our alienated bodies, but also their trauma as requiring psychosexual healing through an assortment of analogous materials: slime, metal, chitin; oil, rubber or latex; dead tissue, animal tissues [chimerism] and so on. There’s an animate-inanimate quality but also a seditious element that must, under canonical circumstances, be presented as abject and commodified. Satan becomes something to control through commodified “opposition.”

Keeping with the sculptor’s metaphor, monster-making produces bricks in a “primordial” series, their corrupt, monstrous-feminine wall singing the hysterical chorus of a reimagined past; the chorus becomes an enormous challenge to the status quo and what it seeks to dominate through the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection: the Earth and things associated with it/of it as hellish, dark, and forbidden, but only ostensibly under their control. As Frankenstein shows us, Victor’s Cartesian ploy fashioned a giant statue he had no hopes of controlling. Indeed, it grew to resent and rebel against his embodiment of systemic abuse by embodying a side of himself that had become alien, which he then tried to deny and abort, but also torture [an approach the Creature then adopted “to better the instruction”]. Unlike Milton, monstrous self-expression also applies to consciously rebellious sculptors and their complicated golems, except they identify with their clay as traumatized, thereby speaking what is hidden through the same base materials’ cryptonymic rebellion. As such, their self-expression, -empowerment, and -determination embody the Satanic spirit of a self-fashioned deity challenging the Almighty who claims to have authored all things by having “total power” over all forms of authorship: “God” can make devils, but devils are not allowed to play god and make their own things. This is easy enough to disprove.)

I hope the above exhibit illustrates how, while the rest of the volume draws upon jargon—and I consider such heady theoretical concepts useful to understanding my central thesis and its ideas; i.e., as things to teach through iconoclastic art made by individual artists working in concert—the roadmap’s language is still largely figurative and simplified to make it more accessible when processing trauma at interpersonal levels. As such, think of my thesis argument (and relevant language presented in the manifesto) more as a handy guideline for executing the core ideas of Gothic Communism, while also thinking about the bigger picture of systemic trauma and its confrontation using commonplace language that relates to or relays your own trauma as something to express; i.e., with a shared pedagogy against larger oppressions: what Shakespeare’s Hamlet would call a “quintessence of dust,” and Milton “darkness visible.” Make it your own, and breathe life and pedagogy into your own creations, that these golems-esque egregores—be they undead, demonic, and/or naturalized—might speak of taboo things that help the world to heal.

To that, don’t be afraid to substitute my terms with your own language as you go; and if that seems daunting at all, consider how we’ve already been doing this with various authors already. Selective reading is a conversation made with our own contributions to what already exists, making something new in the process: a roadmap towards systemic catharsis as something to exist under historical-material conditions that, among themselves, harbor unique elements that we contribute towards when developing Gothic Communism together. If the thesis volume is my theory and the manifesto simplifies it, then the roadmap is how I would go about it in the most flexible way I could think of; except I don’t see the approach as “mine,” insofar as it’s been tailor-made to transform into something new through Satanic poetics and counterterrorist thought as a mode of campy reclamation that anyone can do, provided they stay sex-positive and focused on universal liberation during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

If it’s not mine then why give a roadmap at all, you ask? Well, it’s all too easy for me to do exhibits and just talk about them as I spout theory from Volume Zero. But I don’t expect people to just “get” these things without having the same exact experiences, education and outlook that I do (which is impossible; my identical twin doesn’t have that—in fact, he and I are actually quite different despite having similar opportunities; we’re actually mirror-imaged twins with different dominant hands [I’m left and he’s right] and clashing personalities, which is why I think he’s cis-het and I’m trans).

Nor do I think it’s a good idea to just “hurl” theory at students in any scenario. Rather, I want to explain how theory can be applied to worker lives as they live them—as people first, whose praxis happens to whatever degree they curate art as an extension of emotionally/Gothically intelligent habits, which can then be connected to Gothic-Communist theories post hoc. Take my teaching approach and make it your own to process and defuse state trauma with, but also weaponize your trauma as a form of self-identity within ongoing struggles.

(exhibit 20b: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. The monsters that we make are generally extensions, if not of ourselves, then complicated aspects of the human condition that we synthesize through our own labor using our language, bodies, and body language. The idea, with Gothic Communism, is to synthesize good praxis through sex-positive Gothic poetics; i.e., to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness by cultivating healthy social-sexual habits: with ludo-Gothic BDSM in our own daily lives, including the monsters we create.

To this, the Drow as I envision them, aren’t strictly evil, but something that can embody a buried, taboo form of sex positivity that we bring to the surface and educate people with; i.e., not associated with the delivery of harm by the Drow, but their canonical receiving of harm when placed into the state of exception as evil, matriarchal spider people with purple skin who practice black magic. Luckily this deliberate collection of stigmas can not only be survived by those forced to wear them, but subverted and embodied as a form of rebellious sex-positive struggle whose cryptonymy weaponizes the basic imagery against state propaganda doubling said imagery; i.e., by humanizing the state’s chief nemesis through trauma writing and artwork, thereby constituting intentional [and seductive] reclamations of settler-colonial hatred tied to sexual trauma that is synthesized into a sex-positive, postcolonial form. The Drow and the trauma they broach become, like Milton’s infamous darkness: visible.)

I want to stress that self-identity involves connections that require praxial synthesis as part of a larger equation. That is, “sampling and remixing ideas in order to come to a new synthesis” isn’t unique to scholarship (re: Zimmerman) but applied to everyday people from all walks of life performing proletarian praxis in opposition to state forces through several equations I want to resupply you with from the thesis volume; the first involving 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 the second about 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)

Yet, (most) workers aren’t like computers that operate strictly through equations; they’re physical, biological creatures. As extensions of them, their art is often spontaneous as a result, but also often subconsciously part of given artistic movements that workers may not be actively aware of (as I wasn’t for years, despite making prolific amounts of sex-positive writing and art, slowly “waking up” as a trans detective regarding my own evolution).

Propaganda is code; workers absorb and internalize code as “human computers” do—slowly and inefficiently over time, according to competing “lines” that support or reject the status quo. Planned, coordinated resistance generally requires class-conscious or at least semi-conscious efforts that resist the propaganda of the state, but also the rape and war cultures they beget and transfer onto one’s own social-sex lives, power exchanges and labor exchanges: the socio-material markers that stochastically trigger horrifyingly violent responses from sleeping minds—at the domestic level, but also in foreign territories back and forth. Praxial synthesis includes recognizing these things and, if not outright rejecting them, whistleblower-style, then at least not openly endorsing them, either. This includes critiquing things we, as workers, are taught to endorse as central to our lives, even academically or at least in connection with academic institutions and their holistic output—e.g., popular sports at the college level (with colleges neoliberally centering diploma mills around sports teams as things to emblematize achingly Liberal platitudes; you get a “free” ride if you’re an athlete who can help “the school” [meaning its owners] make money):

(exhibit 21a1: An exhibit of “false consciousness” conducted by “sleeper agents” waiting to trigger and conduct Man-Box abuses that lead to military urbanism? Maybe, but it’s still stochastic under Capitalism as a living structure carried out by people, not robots. Then again, maybe our boys holding up the frog [toads are frogs, even hypnotoads] are actually revolutionaries in disguise! If so, they still have to hide inside the grander structure of Capitalism’s tableau; i.e., its heteronormative sphere’s crowds and sports-driven bread-and-circus. And the recipients of any social-sexual violence that results from these interconnected factors are right to be wary of those most likely to perform it: cis-het men [or those in the closet who self-hate for failing to perform as such, conflating their true selves with unironic, psychosexual harm]. Heteronormative canon and its male workers—be they star athletes, husbands, cops, soldiers, doctors and/or your goddamn mailman—historically rape women and abuse minorities; the poisonous nature of rape/war culture is how it extends into the public imagination alongside conspicuous fear and dogma that whisper of a larger terrifying reputation, a transgenerational curse. Racism, misogyny and other imbricating bigotries become both ubiquitous and endemic, like a common cold or seasonal flu evolving into more lethal forms [which, as Covid showed us, the most privileged, fearful and bigoted will opt out of inoculating themselves against regardless of the damage it does to less privileged/more vulnerable groups].)

As activists, it’s easy to point the finger at obvious examples, and not just the American secondary education system, including copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex working in concert; e.g., “Those Nazis sure were bad, weren’t they?” However, before the gas chambers, there were bullets and knives (“Holocaust by bullet”); before these, there was German propaganda; before there was German propaganda, there was American propaganda and genocide having inspired them (re: Bad Empanada’s “How the USA Inspired the Nazis – From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum,” 2022): a unified front against nature, founded on and concealing Indigenous exploitation during a continual process whose structure rapes and murders the world well before and after the Nazis have been sublimated; i.e., into a neoliberal likeness of themselves working as centrist foils during Capitalist Realism. The human emblems, above—our athletic white knights and their at-times theatrical moderacy—fill a special role within the profit motive: obscuring Nazis and other fascist groups during neoliberal kayfabe (which extends to any sport—not just dueling pairs but teams and their supporters).

War, rape and genocide exist everywhere under Capitalism, but so do the neoliberal illusions that less cover these things up and more essentialize them through deceptive refrains: “Rape cultural is a myth! Pay it no mind! Gun violence? It’s a way of life! Here, have a gun to protect yourself with!” Whether on the frontier of faraway lands or back at home, war and rape extend from capital, giving birth to neoliberal gargoyles whose flesh-and-blood equivalents internalize these lessons and spring to life once “triggered.” They become an endless glut of pleasurable, drug-seeking behaviors tied less to literal, external drugs and more to intense biochemical responses felt and pursued under the prolonged stressors of perceived duress: Gothic, canonical expressions of Cartesian violence, terror and bodily abuse/regulation through capitalist apologia; i.e., monsters “only” exist in horror stories, whose canon must nevertheless have abject monsters and torture porn with an unironic edge (to menticide workers with through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection within unequal material conditions).

As such, canonical “love” (rape) and war are merely “natural,” essentialized games—where only the strong survive and get the girl: “Might makes right, winner take all, to the victor go the spoils,” etc; which, under neoliberal Capitalism, has workers fighting more for less; e.g., Capcom’s “unprecedented” 2024 million-dollar 1st place prize for Capcom Cup X. It’s an Internet-Age “jousting” tourney where gladiators—relics of Antiquity—duke it out for scraps; i.e., relatively poor people/slaves, usually men, having extended to (usually male) weird canonical nerds/tech bros trained to be infantilizingly[1] violent through neoliberal, might-makes-right dogma in sports-like language, especially combat sports with a kayfabe element informed by Gothic poetics/psychosexuality haunted by medieval abuse[2]. Wrestling is an artform that historically pits Nazis, Communists and Americans against one another as living weapons whose pastiche projects onto various media forms; e.g., videogames. These, in turn, become regular sites of monstrous avatars (and targets of violence—bosses, lieutenants and minions) useful to the pacifying of workers through so-called “empowerment fantasies” that, in truth, master and dominate players (re: Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy) more than you might think. Informed, half-real negotiation can challenge worker subjugation and its harmful conditioning. Except you still have to recognize and critique the games themselves as praxis; i.e., insofar as kayfabe and BDSM are concerned within daily synthesis: Marisa from Street Fighter 6, below, as an icon thereof, serving to inform whatever habits we cultivate ourselves or already prescribe to.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard; original lines and background image by Reiq)

Such habits include the body-as-a-weapon, which takes on different forms in wrestling pastiche. Compare, for example, the shared operatic nature of pugilism and knife play kink (exhibit 0a1b2c, but also the Dragon’s Crown [2013] Amazon’s axe, below). In either case, you have a master/slave dialogic informed by the dimorphized aspects of kayfabe that lend themselves well to BDSM parlance.

Playing out onstage with athleticized fetish gear and performers, there’s a visual element of danger minus the actual threat of guaranteed harm (accidents still happen, of course). And the back-and-forth of this particular dance involves a partner who cannot actually harm you, but whose warrior aesthetic—specifically one personifying national war—lies adjacent to state theatrics that do promote harm through the same general performances and play: Marisa literally playing the Nazi[3] heel or black knight/destroyer role linked to Spartan-Roman hauntologies of the Zack Snyder sort (versus the babyface with virginal, angelic aesthetics “grappling” with their polar opposites during Amazonomachia). Practicing their expression is ultimately liminal, meaning the paradox of terror (and violence) arise while we interrogate past trauma; i.e., with fresh bodily forms that double state power and potential. When using our own play and performance to camp canon (and its monopolies) with the same basic (often kayfabe) language, this is when ludo-Gothic BDSM starts to take shape; i.e., as a means of camp that—like a doll—can be played with to instruct such things:

(artist: Jan-H Sculpts)

Regardless of the exact form, it’s vital to remember that the mechanisms/operations of capital affect everyone, and just as they affect everyone, they can be subverted in liminal forms of expression whose meaty kayfabe bodies and performances aren’t strictly controlled or operated by state forces looking to fatten and harvest them; i.e., “Trojan-style” disguises that convey revolutionary allegory through cryptonymic displays of Cartesian-grade violence, terror and morphology (the brutalizing of nature-as-monstrous-feminine) on and offstage:

(exhibit 21a2a: Artist, top left: Silverjow; top-middle: Jan Rockitnik; top-mid-right: elee0228; everything else: Ichan-desu. Marisa is one of many Amazons. Furthermore, the athlete is a common physical marker of war personified through the imaginary past as something to evoke in popular media at large. By extension, social-sexual notions of “warrior” and “strength” interlock and “argue” through cross purposes; e.g., the body of the Amazon, bear or twunk as ripe for political discourse within the human form as a hauntological, cryptonymic expression of power tied to combat sports and military culture. Subversions of this culture include the open fetishizing of muscular bodies with various masc/femme flavors that grapple with, or otherwise interrogate, double standards concerning the monstrous-feminine; i.e., in the paramilitary world of contact sports [which extends to the cryptonymy of “adventure” through the sublimation of war and rape]. Inside said world, it’s not uncommon to “recorrect” the feminine man by gifting the bear/polar bear with Herculean bodies whose chiseled muscles automatically translate to giant penises in the eyes of cis men [and have a pitcher and catcher with a presumed “womanly” bottom]. But it can also be reclaimed as a statuesque performer divorced from their intended role. It becomes a look/mood unto itself.

My point is, it’s not “the look” that’s the problem, but the context for how it’s viewed within said world as it presently exists [function determines function, not aesthetics]. The language of “bears” and “twunks” have had to exist in a military sports environment that, outside of the aristocracy or famous athletes, would have discouraged actual sodomy [non-PIV sex] in Western culture since the time of the Ancient Greeks: big muscles were statuesque and hypermasculine then and now through the personification of the Greek/Roman pantheon as thoroughly “Zeus-like” [the paradox of the gay superhero under Capitalism is that they are tolerated precisely because they are exceptional; i.e., the exception that proves the rule under Rainbow Capitalism: queerness is a commodity tied to war pastiche as predominantly straight, excepting tokens as the perpetual outsiders/smaller group]. Meanwhile, the non-binary approach to this morphological treatment of strength as corporal-sexual can also apply to women through gender trouble and parody as variably engaged: the Amazon as a musclebound “herbo” with the giant tits and six-pack; the skinny-thicc Barbie doll with pornstar curves and Pippi-Longstocking strength; or a cavewoman with traditionally masc qualities whose body evokes a Renaissance effect of morphological descriptors largely kept the same, but swaps genitals/sex organs in order to escape what is normally prescribed within a heteronormative binary [the “Conan with a pussy” concept, though Urbosa is basically female Zeus protecting Link by proxy]. The cis Amazon’s sodomy is less reviled in canon if only because, unlike the trans woman, she is born with a vagina, thus can be converted back to the canonically “correct” usage of that sex organ. In short, she can be tamed, rode and ostensibly bred in the appropriate hole [though not always] by her master.

To be crystal clear, this interpretative approach isn’t perfect. Marjorie Taylor Greene is basically a really mean herbo: a buff, incredibly dumb and frightened bigot/scared gym rat thriving in a culture war whose canonical praxis merges class war with the aesthetics of war in a fairly obvious way: muscles. Her Amazon disguise sucks—in part because cryptofascists rely on partial transparency but also because an anti-intellectual like her is welcomed by people like them who will exploit her position for a larger regressive movement: “Look at how loud and proud she is, but also strong like Xena!” She’s like a cheap wrestler in this respect; i.e., bad-faith but also “campy” in a thoroughly blind and bourgeois sense. It’s tragic.)

(exhibit 21a2b: Artist, right: Jason Edmiston. Nation pastiche commonly personifies war through larger-than-life cartoons of men [and token agents] who fight within geopoliticized theatre as a grand kayfabe: the simplicity of the arena as a stage to punch away your problems [and sell tickets and other merchandise within a free and glorious market]. This doesn’t just apply to male Man Box culture, but will be something to keep in mind in Volume Three, Chapter Four when we examine how TERFs perform as regressive Amazons that emulate the same heteronormative mentalities [albeit from token positions within the capitalist paradigm].)

As the above exhibits depict, combat sports under neoliberalism are war personified through national theatre stemming from more antiquated forms of the same basic hero-monsters. In times past, the whole world was watching to the extent that it could. This blood-and-sand, bread-and-circus vibe has expanded well beyond historical knights and gladiators to a variety of performers within and outside the Man Box using shared language. Clearly the tropes endure, but have become hauntologized, contested. Knights serve more of a police function (the good/white knight, bad/black knight) and gladiators more as chattel/wage slaves operating inside a bread-and-circus model (this includes tokens offering the circus-level curiosities of Amazon or Adonis as commodified within the general business scheme of a babyfaces-and-heel switch).

Regarding EVO, Capcom Cup and videogames, such ordeals generally come with live bands/music to remind you it’s a legitimate sporting event despite the relatively unathletic nature of videogame players: NASCAR levels of corporate sponsorship, phallic trophies and player kayfabe personas that move product with their digital bodies parallel to the Military Industrial Complex overseas, the two operating in unison; e.g., Wayne’s World (1992, exhibit 34c2) connecting war in videogames to geopolitical maneuvers that use war inside capital to profit as highly as possible; i.e., by moving as much money through nature as can be done, all while exploiting as many workers as possible while dodging the consequences at every turn. This isn’t terribly difficult when you have means. For instance, a million-dollar purse barely qualifies as peanuts to a billion-dollar company like Capcom.

Likewise, as the elite work within their means, collateral damage is to be expected, but also canonized, worshipped and fetishized on and offstage, at home and abroad. Under such privatized, coercive conditions, canon’s menticide belies real abuse (rape or otherwise) long before it’s “proven” in a court of law—one run by powerful male (or token) judges and biased, cherry-picked juries having a vested, monetary interest in a selectively punitive and illusory course of Justice. Chosen to benefit, if not wealthy then certainly privileged white male defendants, the status quo banks on a legal system operating not as “corrupt,” but exactly as intended; i.e., according to the real world as echoed within copagandistic portrayals that celebrate this Faustian arrangement as naturalized and immutable, hence lucrative for Pygmalions like Dick Wolf maintaining the spell to profit off of its pro-state myopia (Skip Intro’s “Law & Order‘s War on Your Rights,” 2024).

You must understand, then, that oppositional praxis—its mode of expression and execution (through workers synthesizing praxis)—are hopelessly entangled, twisting into a Gordian Knot. Untangling the mess doesn’t call for a sword to slice through everything; it takes time and effort to interrogate, and must be done as it actually operates: “an unweeded garden grown to seed.” The important distinction for workers lies in seeing Capitalism’s ownership of the figurative “seeds,” their “planters,” the “pots” and the “soil” of the public imagination. Under these stark, pre-owned conditions, workers should do whatever they can when they can to contribute to whatever degree they’re able that raises the class/cultural awareness of a larger pro-labor movement seeking liberation; i.e., one that enacts sex-positive change through iconoclastic praxis synthesized according to emotional/Gothic intelligence, the social-sexual habits of which develop over time. It’s not a sprint, but a marathon performed by a disparate union of workers and various class allies (friendly millionaires, professors, politicians, industry legends and other privileged/accommodated workers) grappling with class traitors (cops; unfriendly millionaires, professors, politicians, industry legends and other privileged/accommodated workers). All are menticided to some degree and exposed to waves of terror through the state trifectas and monopolies. What defines workers as bourgeois or proletarian is how they respond within oppositional praxis, be that passively or actively (the more active/awake the better). In short, you want workers who “gotchu” when class traitors start to fuck around, like this very pissed off (and very awesome) Boston mom (Jaclyn Smith, 2023).

Speaking in fictional terms, Star Wars: Andor gives the perfect model, I think (and extrapolate on in my own glowing response video): Maarva/Cass Andor and friends are rebellious workers/active conspirators; Axis and Mon Martha, class allies; Dedra Meero and Syirl Karn, class traitors; Karis Nemik, the twink manifesto-writer (“the brains”); Faye Marsay, muscle (“the brawn”/Amazon warrior mom); Saw Gerrera and Kino Loy, liminal workers (factionalism, but also turncoats/converted allies); and B2EMO, the cute robot mascot. Nemik’s manifesto is the theory behind the operation; Mon Martha funds the rebellion and Axis facilitates it (in admittedly cutthroat ways); Andor vs Karn or Meero vs Axis and Martha are oppositional praxis; and the combined drama and intrigue between everything, in dialectical-material terms, synthesize through social-sexual, emotionally healthy and intelligent habits that “grease the wheels” of revolution and tyranny (there’s not much overtly Gothic content in the show but retro-future is retro-future).

To emulate these working concepts as part of oppositional praxis at large, the remainder of the synthesis roadmap divides into our aforementioned four parts: the “basics,” or social-sexual habits tied to emotional/Gothic intelligence as they presently exist, followed by fleshing out these concepts more deeply as we supply further exhibits about canonical war and rape as historical-material “side effects” of Capitalism/Cartesian dualism operating as normal.

Before we proceed onto the basics in part one, consider one more time the paradoxical means of applying Sarkeesian’s adage to the human body in popular entertainment as something to embody ourselves. Traditional mechanisms of strength and power are easily alienated and fetishized through Cartesian violence/abjection, to which function determines function, not aesthetics. All the same, there is generally a great deal of overlap, so remember this when conducting dialectical-material scrutiny through your own consumption, creation and/or patronage of the arts:

(exhibit 21b: Artist, top-left and right: Jan Rockitnik; top-mid-left and top-mid-right: Luigiix; bottom-left and bottom-mid-left: Inputwo; bottom-might-right: Velladonna.

The body—especially the female body—is a highly controlled canvas [which reflects back on AMAB variants of the monstrous-feminine/corrupt, of course]. As we have discussed regarding Amazonomachia so far in the book, the embodiment of strength is generally in conflict with hauntological traditions that serve the state, or become unmoored from state mechanisms to interrogate themselves in worker-produced, semi-asexual forms of poetic catharsis [e.g., rape play and public nudism]. The aim isn’t just to empower oneself in relation to one’s own trauma, but to prevent trauma in the future by reclaiming the potential theatrical devices that normally concern or otherwise bring trauma about for all peoples. The body as a canvas, then, becomes a battlefield with which to issue a variety of warrants and commands from and towards; i.e., through body language itself as normally policed with these bodies and their expressions of power, but through Gothic-Communist performance and play lets workers negotiate their own [a]sexual destinies by corrupting the usual mechanisms of worker enslavement: material conditions and propaganda.)

Heroes are often monstrous and sexualized, and the monstrous body is a huge paradox. Orcs are clear example, as we have discussed in Volume One and Zero

“umm I hope you guys know orcs would kill you if you tried to fuck them” whaaat holy shit man orcs are typically depicted as chaotic evil savages? no waaay dude, this whole time I’ve been eroticizing the monstrous as a deliberate critique of the racist and ableist undertones in the classical orc archetype, when I should have simply realized that elements of popular fiction are objective absolutes that can’t be reexamined or remixed through the cultural lens of the ever-shifting presentttttt (source, Tumblr post: Orc Boxer)

but really it can be anything monstrous or fetishized adjacent to monstrous stereotypes, thus able to intersect with systemic trauma through parallel expression (similar body types; e.g., the PAWG, below, as luscious, fruit-like, and ready-for-harvest); i.e., as something to expose psychosexual trauma and teach good play through (a)sexual renegotiation amid the creative successes of proletarian praxis grappling with state forms (which automatically compel sexual activity through segregation and force). This evokes the language of camp and ludo-Gothic BDSM to camp canon with, on the Aegis. Keep this in mind as we proceed.

(artist: Super Busty Art)

Onto “The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] The elite, as Elon Musk terrifyingly shows us with his diaper fetish alt account (re: depsidase), are not immune to the infantilizing effects of Capitalism.

[2] The likes of which still occurs behind the scenes; i.e., men enslaved to their contracts, their bodies being destroyed while women are sex-trafficked for those men by those at the top—Vince McMahon being investigated for sex-trafficking:

In 2022, McMahon announced he was stepping down from the WWE after an internal probe that found allegations of a hush-money payment to a former employee, with McMahon allegedly paying $3 million to the then-unnamed female, a WWE paralegal, to keep their “consensual” affair private. Following the investigation, he returned to WWE in July 2023. However, in January, that woman — Janel Grant, who was hired in the specially made role of “administrator-coordinator” in WWE’s legal department — filed a lawsuit against McMahon, WWE head of talent relations John Laurinaitis, and the wrestling company outlining years of alleged sexual assaults. Among the allegations in the lawsuit, is McMahon’s demands that Grant make herself sexually available to both himself and Laurinaitis (who is also named in the suit), as well as unnamed “WWE Corporate Officers” and a “WWE Superstar.” Grant also accused McMahon of degrading her, and in one incident, said that named and Laurinaitis locked her in an office and raped her (source: Daniel Kreps’ “Vince McMahon Under Federal Investigation Amid Sexual Assault Lawsuit,” 2024).

[3] Technically she’s an Italian fascist, who—as a token Man-Box bruiser—channels the alt-right, female prime minister of Italy, Georgia Meloni. But you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise; one, all fascists defend capital, and two, the Nazis have far greater propaganda value in centrist stories—are far more revered within kayfabe at large—for their perceived strength/warrior prowess. Despite modern fascism starting in Mussolini’s Italy, no one really makes movies about cartoon Italian fascists. Much of this has to do with American myth-making after WW2, hiding American Imperialism behind the Myth of the Good War (which requires a recognizable and feared, but also game enemy to work).

This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “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.

Click here to see “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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 (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.

Gothic Communism, a sample essay: “Cornholing the Corn Lady—Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire”

Edward Said’s book Culture and Imperialism was well received in the United States, but provoked some bad-tempered responses in the United Kingdom […] The reason for the bad temper, one might suspect, was that as the imperial power principally targeted in his book’s historical discussions there remained a legacy of colonists’ guilt in Great Britain. Particular exception was taken by British commentators to Said’s chapter, “Jane Austen and Empire,” and its triumphant conclusion: “Yes, Austen belonged to a slave-owning society.”

—John Sutherland, “Where Does Sir Thomas’ Wealth Come From?” Is Heathcliff A Murderer? (1996)

Picking up where “Trauma Writing/Artwork (opening and “Healing from Rape”)” left off…

Note: I’ve left this essay exactly as I wrote it, back in 2023, but supplied some addendums to “Paid Labor” directly after it. —Perse, 4/8/2025

This Gothic-Communist essay demonstrates me as the unideal reader of neoliberal canon. It was written in the spirit of fun, using the Six Rs and Four Gs to critique the Gothic mode of Jason Reitman’s canonical expression and a debate of sorts with ghosts of different kinds (and before I had coined ludo-Gothic BDSM, focused more on camp). Classic works are one such ghost, and one that must be invoked to say whatever one wants to say. But there are also the spectres of oppression and of Marx that can be invoked in a variety of ways: in the figurative language of dialectical-material analysis and historical materialism, but also thoroughly Gothic dialogics Sex Positivity prides itself at assembling and navigating. If the zombified spirit of Ronald Reagan is “alive” in 2023, then Angela Carter’s fateful, 1974 words ring truer than ever: “We live in Gothic times.” Allow me, then, a chance to express that now—by barbequing a sacred foal begot from the neoliberal 1980s: Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

Before we do, a note about Austen and Said’s bone to pick with her (as she is someone I’ve defended already in my thesis argument). My essay is iconoclastic, its proletarian praxis speaking to speaks to an enjoyment of the critical process on par with Edward Said’s “pleasures of exile.” Such a concept is hardly new, in the sense that Said riffed on Austen, “farting in Britain’s general direction” to say something larger about that country’s colonial guilt through their hypercanonical literature mom. That was new for the time (and useful to Gothic Communism for us). My essay does something similar in opposition to Gothic canon as something that is very much alive and well, and far less “quiet” than Austen’s Mansfield Park. Said is forced into, as John Sutherland puts it, “the awkward speculation, ‘Sir Thomas’s property in the Caribbean would have had to be a sugar plantation maintained by slave labour (not abolished until the 1830s)'” and the “dead silence [that] pretty well describes Mansfield Park’s dealing with Antigua” (ibid.); the Gothic is far louder because it’s working with a kind of language whose “silence” is anything but quiet.

Even with Said debating Austen’s “ghost” minus Gothic poetics, there’s considerable merit to arguing with spectres and the unspoken (re: Castricano’s cryptomimesis, or “writing with ghosts,” which I expanded to “writing with monsters”). Indeed, doing so is a time-honored activity that largely makes up what the Gothic is. And while Said’s dialogs are certainly not without weight, they’re also nearly two centuries further along than Austen’s. To that, it’s certainly true there’s a complete lack of urgency in Austen’s novel surrounding any kind of modern importance that Said assigns to postcolonial concerns. These would have been absent in Austen’s time, with her focusing entirely on the struggles of a rising class of property that was quickly becoming a class of people in a slave-owning society through a particular novelistic convention: white women inside the novel of manners. It shouldn’t really be surprising that she kept mum on certain topics; e.g., her pointedly roundabout and indirect conversation between Eleanor Dashwood and Colonel Brandon showcasing how neither can bring themselves to utter the word “duel” in polite company. But if her stories are any clue, she was profoundly apt at navigating the expanding-if-sequestered place of white women in an incredibly material world, and not without a considerable degree of irony (“It is a truth universally acknowledged…”) and dialectical-material analysis behind a veil that all women in her time were expected to wear by tone-policing white men; furthermore, as we have already explored in Volume Zero, Austen certainly wasn’t above critiquing the open, if deliberately moderate, bigotries of Ann Radcliffe’s own Gothic Orientalism (the further east you go, the darker it gets) when writing Northanger Abbey (written in 1803, published in 1817 after Austen’s death).

We shall press these Gothic voicings to our advantage in this essay. My point about Said is that I think he—ever in a hurry to outline the very-real and ever-pressing presence of American Imperialism in the Middle East—thoroughly underestimates/discounts the ubiquity (and degree) of the powerful forces that Austen was writing under as a white woman. It would be a mistake to lump Austen in with so many of her imitators and contemporaries, in part because her Mansfield protagonist, Sutherland rightly points out, “belongs to the Clapham Sect of evangelical Christianity, which hated plays and light morality only less slightly than it loathed slavery” (ibid.). Said’s overall conclusions certainly aren’t wrong about Imperialism, but his assertions about Austen are largely words put in her mouth by his pen (kinky), which he then argues with to make his point. The problem is, he assumes her silence to be indicative of a particular kind of guilt, when Austen’s shame at writing at all became a matter of legend after her death: “How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much Labour?” (source: Zoe Louca-Richards’ “Two Inches of Ivory: A New(ish) Jane Austen Acquisition,” 2020).

(artist: Touminnn)

That’s the problem with ghosts in regards to trauma writing and illustrations: they yield a fictitious, imaginary component to unspeakable systemic abuse supplied by the critic seeking to give said abuse voice, and Said’s invention (as with many invocations of Austen) is not entirely of the woman herself but her reputation and the spirit (and shackles) of the British Empire stretching into Pax Americana following the so-called “end of history” in 1991 (Culture and Imperialism and Spectres of Marx were both written in 1993). As with all Gothic histories, though, there’s a considerable amount of truth to had through a familiarity with what is being said, unsaid, or supplied through various cryptonymies that indicate a presence of trauma.

Keep this in mind as we proceed onto Ghostbusters, picking a bone with how American neoliberalism and Hollywood abuse Gothic poetics in order to uphold the status quo in fairly standard regressions. For them, and for Radcliffe as a spirit to evoke married to global Capitalism, ghosts are things to summon, feel anxious/fearful-fascinated about (through the ghost of the counterfeit), then exorcise in defense of the status quo using the process of abjection—to cut off Medusa’s “head,” in so many words, of which invoke a manufactured imaginary past that upholds a particular place and time as sacred: the conservative 1980s as copy of itself wherein copies of the imaginary past are reduplicated now to send us spiraling backwards into the self-same myopia; i.e., the scared, commercial-minded brains of white women, but especially the vulnerable consuming public inheriting the commodified fears of said women as taken from oppressed groups (and nature), repackaged, and sold back to the middle class.

These poetics are things to reclaim through our own pedagogy, which requires dialectically-materially scrutinizing “Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire.” The film, then, offers up its own Medusa to behead, commenting as it does so on the veneration of old clichés within bourgeois praxis and Cartesian thought as parts of the larger Gothic mode: Halloween as a canonical ghost of itself that is conjured up and vanquished in the same breath. Ghostbusters: Afterlife offers up blind war pastiche to canonically requote of an older version of the same basic franchise and its ghostly Medusa. This time around, Gozer—a ghostly “corn lady” (of the harvest, Halloween)—is coercively demonized, blamed for the downfall of all things by a mad “dirt farmer” whose own selfish legacy is restored to greatness when Gozer is exposed as “real.” Made material, she must be stopped—if not at her made-up temple than in the cornfields she imbues with ghostly menace (questioning elite sovereignty by challenging middle-class essentialism regarding these fields and their assorted yields). Her subsequent summoning and slaughter is hauntological torture porn; i.e., the fascist myth of the conspiratorial Great Foe both weak and strong confirmed and validated during her ritual sacrifice by the ghost police: the Ghostbusters. They’re playing with spectres of the Medusa so they can pimp her!

(artist: Alex Milne)

Thoroughly sexist, these Enlightenment pillars of reason can so barely get past Gozer’s short, dyke-ish hair that anything else is unimaginable: “Hey, flap top!” As such, they see Gozer exclusively as an agent of chaos upending the order of American civilization reduced to a localized portraited of itself; i.e., an illegitimate terrorist threat to the Cartesian romance of the New York cityscape, but also the American Midwest and its endless farmlands acquired through genocide. To this, any sense of counterterrorist power is omitted on purpose, Capitalist Realism robbing our ghost queen of a critical voice/pedagogy of the oppressed. She isn’t a source of legitimate female rage bucking at canonical war and rape, but an unironic plague on American crops and essentialized culture covering up American atrocities. Displaced, disguised and disseminated by neoliberal, Patriarchal forces, the symptoms of Capitalism-as-a-disease in Afterlife are gaslit, gatekept and girl-bossed by the bourgeois men behind the curtain. Afterlife is their own narrative of dynastic power exchange and hereditary power rites—the master plan/grand design as a self-confirming prophecy that recruits children to war, shames non-conservative values and Gothic expression with regressive Gothic poetics, and turns scientists superstitious in canonical worship of oscillating pastiche both narrow and broad; para, meta, and diegetic; liminal expressions that are automatically colonized; etc.

If anyone thinks I’m being unfair to Reitman, he a) lives in a historical period well after Said wrote Culture and Imperialism—i.e., when the horrors of America’s business-as-usual have been covered up not once, but repeatedly through myopic Gothic nostalgia; and b) speaks quite loudly through Gothic nostalgia to accomplish bourgeois aims. Purely by design, neoliberal Capitalism relegates linguo-material play along formalized lines that colonize everything into black-and-white/us-versus-them Cartesian dualism, heteronormativity and settler colonialism; Reitman’s ghosts trumpet a pro-state Gothic dialog to speak to American conservatism as a particular invention useful to the elite through a warlike consumer base bred on Gothic canon. Its (mono)mythic structure appropriates peril through these various means, with a particular ludic, sexually dimorphic structure—indeed, a war plan straight out of the Metroidvania model: miniboss keys (the Gatekeeper and Keymaster) that lead to the Big (female) Bad. Meanwhile, the Ghostbusters work as wizard-warrior “ghost cops” (on call, like Samus Aran to vanquish pirates for the Federation). In this case, personal responsibility frames the Ghostbusters as working-class “rebels” (whitewashed fascism) that seek and destroy Gozer and her generals in order to return to a “better” time—i.e., “the Regan years when the economy was good” and moral panic was high; when the children of yesteryear were taught to fight ghosts, but also see them as something to “fight with” using toy weapons. Miniatures for real weapons, these knights-templar-in-training would have been taught to worship their order as sacred, seeing their cutesy ghost enemies as simultaneously dangerous. In other words, the enemy is both weak and strong and hooks kids on the displaced, dissociative violence of appropriated, canonical peril. They’re conditioned to worship old dead men and their ghostly simulacra, but also their warlike, Enlightenment view of endlessly bloody worship being consciously sold back to them. Don’t think; react and consume!

The cultural result is a mire of canonical Gothic doubles—recycled clichés in support of a larger commercial model’s parallel space/chronotope: dumbly abject monster battles with complicitly cryptonymic scapegoats, carceral hauntology and sex-coercive family values. So while the single, white mother is dumb as a brick and shamed for being poor and single, her child returns to the violent traditions she rejected; in love with a man she never met and a time in which she never lived, Phoebe overlooks the stigmas of these times appearing in the present: how extramarital sex is shamed and fetishized as ongoing wish fulfillment for the parent-age workers, the local nerd promised wild animal bitches and the women compliant unto these entitled dweebs. It’s the hellish ghost of Ronald Reagan in action, his Vampire-Zombie Capitalism turning the younger generation towards the very traditions the previous generation had grown jaded towards; i.e., all the bullshit and false splendor that Reagan (and men like him) promised in Gothic forms: the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster. All of this is enacted paratextually by a diegetic meta-performance that comments on the men behind the curtain, of the curtain, on the curtain, in service of the Symbolic Order as set in stone. Jason Reitman follows in his daddy’s footsteps—just like our little, ace girl boss, Phoebe, follows in her grandfathers’ footsteps—and both registers channel Reagan who serves Patriarchal Capitalism and its appropriated perils, monsters and confusion. The sum of their patchy teamwork of concentric deceptions is an age-old Gothic cliché: the lie told by pirates to scare people away so the thieves can loot and plunder in plain sight (Radcliffe’s refrain). Egon is the patriarchal lie told using their neoliberal war chest—a staggering amount of industrialized artifice and narrative guile dressed up as “movie magic” and worshipped by apathetic nerds of all sorts:

(exhibit 18b: Sorry to burst your bubbles, here, but this ain’t “movie magic”; it’s canonical bullshit. “Brought to life” is also a bit of a misnomer, though the illusion still lives on inside the minds of target consumers who worship the process. As an artist, I can respect its power, but am leery of its abuses. Regardless if these were the best or most effective techniques, make no mistake: The studio used expensive, time-consuming methods to bring an actor’s likeness back to life, using that privatized “ghost” to sell the story of what Ramis played a smaller part in—not once, but over and over within a database of wax sculptures for the Gothic theatre of canonical war. Within that grander narrative, the real horror [for me] is watching the cute and intelligent Phoebe slowly turn into a little dog of war for Grandpa “Ramis,” controlled by an ascending ladder of vertical puppeteers. It’s frankly awful stuff, on par with watching John Ford [middle bottom-middle] curl his claw-like hands around Belinda Palmer’s body. Maybe Chinatown [1974] was “all fake.” However, just like Judy Garland before her, the reality behind that scintillate rainbow [and plausible deniability of the 4th wall] remained terribly bleak: Polanski was a rapist and everything was done for profit by corporate Hollywood goons and paid actors who looked the other way.

So, think of the workers, you animals! Protect them, whoever they might be. Don’t turn them—and by extension, the audience—into heartless monsters concerned with illusions and dreams of revenge. Mckenna Grace might turn out just fine; the smaller role they play as Phoebe remains part of a larger cover-up of systemic abuses that happen inside and outside of the film industry. Moreover, Afterlife‘s grander ’80s hauntology romances the very real and very terrible things not just under Reagan’s administration, but the continued existence of the United States and its unholy union of state and corporation already spread across the entire planet.)

Canonical praxis, in this case, is Phoebe: our little Velma-to-be, a detective-warrior debutante seeking revenge (Gozer killed her surrogate dad, Grandpa Egon). Phoebe’s asexual appropriation keeps her chaste, superstitious and curiously leery of ghosts, but converted into neoliberal Capitalism’s fiercest warrior during the formulaic narrative. From skeptic to true-believer, she gradually takes up Egon’s baton and—ever the dutiful grandpa’s girl—begins to listen to the ambiguous whispers of the past. Egon is invisible for nearly the entire film; his instructions are not. Their doubling and voice-in-the-walls disembodiment work as a cryptonym for the tyrant as a rehabilitated monster—a sweet old man and not the worst of the bunch even though the movie presents him that way to “disprove” it later. This requires a naïve, child-soldier host, but also a bogeywoman—”the muffin to toast,” the Corn Queen to cornhole for threatening the kid: ol’ Gozer. Gozer is the movie’s scapegoat, its wicked old witch (which the film’s token girl of color calls “pretty woke for 3000 BC”—hauntological xenophobia layered over the present as an already-reinvented place being reinvented again and again).

In this case, Gozer is someone the new recruits must train to confront, starting with smaller cute ghosts, then the bigger terror dogs (the false rebellion of angsty teens hating their parents only to forgive them, crumbling the dogs to dust). From here, our child heroes exhibit the worrying traits of a police force in-the-making: Phoebe makes quick work of main street, she and her rag-tag team driving like a bat outta hell as they capture the ghost for destroying private property—privatizing said property through a “boundaries for me, not for thee” approach that has them locked up, then forgiven (the token black cop is never mentioned again) and rearmed to “save the world.” Reitman dresses up the wacky medieval hauntology of something as ridiculous and vile as the KKK, presenting “us versus them” in neoliberal dogma; i.e., cute kids slaying “ghosts” on par with Tolkien’s orcs: an endless manufactured enemy wherein nature is divided into good/evil, familiar/alien halves, commodified and pitted against itself—their lynching performed on both sides of a settler-colonial argument until the end of time, naturalized (e.g., “We are the only people on Earth asked to guarantee the security of our occupier. While Israel is the only country that calls for defense from its victims.” —Hanan Ashrawi). In the process, he burns the town partly to ash by inventing a bigger evil to justify his babyface team’s centrism—their moral position as simply “good.”

(artist: Vincent van Gogh)

Meanwhile, Reitman’s ghost of the counterfeit is the usual hysterics tied to nature as colonized, then rebellious: Gozer and all her abortive offshoots as hidden among the corn rows; i.e., Jim Crow but also the Archaic Mother as imported from older times and “other” places. Their rage concerns the burn-to-ash policy of Capitalism on its frontiers mirroring fabled U.S. enemies in whitewashed, homegrown domestics (themselves standing on stolen land and scorched, blood-soaked earth): the food of slaves (corn bread, oil and meal, etc) treated as fine cuisine stolen from the Indians, given to African slaves and romanced by a white, utterly privileged dialogic equipped with its own forms of imaginary bondage: the fearful reverence of such places and their hauntings (re: Jameson’s describing of the canonical Gothic [I would steelman] as a “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised”). At home, it’s all fun and games; on the front, people are dying in ways utterly alien to these New York transplants “exiled” to Oklahoma (a war camp whose “dirt farm” raises soldier children out of the soil in pursuit of the state of exception). War and rape; “lions, tigers and bears, oh my!” While the thinning of the membrane and confrontation with spirits during the fall harvest is utterly at home in the Gothic imagination, its evocation in Pax Americana‘s “Southern Gothic” becomes mired in repressed forms of settler-colonial guilt that complicate the poetics at hand: a plantation fantasy haunted by dead Indigenous peoples, rebellious workers, assorted minorities and African slaves, but also the corpses of their “ghosts.” From the predominantly white middle-class perspective, the unspoken inhabits a place where genocide never stopped, and whose dialogics about it use Gothic poetics in ways Austen only parodied. In 2021, we’re left with “There’s no place like home” for these menticided little twerps, the latter taught to worship abject war and rape sold as cute, “totally rad” and fun. It’s Reagan’s neoliberal Halloween stuck on repeat: cheap, bad candy to munch down and absorb as brain-rotting fuel.

Throughout this setting of appropriated harvest phantasms (and their endless commodifying and consumption) lingers a tangible spirit of death that never left after American (thus global) slavery supposedly “ended.” Clearly it didn’t, and Said is ultimately proven right by insisting that we move beyond the frustratingly quiet past works to finally say the quiet part firmly out loud: Austen’s “happy ending” as Sutherland calls it, was itself a ghost, and a sorry one that Austen avoided by dying in 1817. If Austen was more interested in the British class system while she was alive than openly interrogating British Imperialism (which, let’s face it, she clearly was), we are not beholden to those same limitations; and furthermore, we can hold Austen accountable because of that.

(source)

All this fantastical revenge is happening now in 202[4], after the Pandemic, the War on Terror, the Gulf War, Reagan’s Contra Affair (and James Cameron’s Aliens rescuing Vietnam’s “failure” through its own famous girl boss) and various other manufactured crises—instated behind the scenes and apologized for through canonical praxis just like Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Moral panic is a bourgeois, sequel enterprise. Under it, war and rape are canonically Gothicized as beatified horror monsters, lairs/parallel space and phobias tied to manufactured crises. As instructional material that breathes into Americanized culture and its bellicose social customs, these “gargoyles” tell you

• what to fear—the extramarital sex, foreigners, and ghosts
• who to worship and fear as a dangerous, vague, nebulous target—the Archaic Mother, Gozer the Red-Scare corn lady disassociated through canonically “quaint” Halloween rituals
• who to love and fear—the Ghostbusters, the centrists of a righteous cause, their quant melodies and moral actions being a catchy veil for fascism
• how to fight and kill (to do or die, not question why)

Combined, Reitman Jr.’s façade veils Capitalism’s continuous Promethean design, displacing routine collapse and pinning it on a female bogey person (“It’s whatever it wants to be” is a double insult having survived for nearly 40 years: Gozer is what the men want her to be, then constantly misgendered by Reitman’s neoconservative old farts). Not only does this cryptonym disguise fascism’s “return” (having never actually left); the entire production harnesses all Four Gs to silence female critics as workers exploited under Capitalism. Instead of sex workers with collective power, they become reduced to abject, queernormative scapegoats—wicked old witches who eat children, possess babes and ostensibly sacrifice either for old nameless gods in hauntological New York or Oklahoma (a site for American genocide as is); i.e., Gozer’s temple a counterfeit made by a creepy old man to revive the elite’s liminal hauntology of war.

(exhibit 19a: Various stages and actors in two productions nearly 40 years apart).

As a larger production, the sacrificial theatre benefits Patriarchal Capitalism. Workers are enslaved within a patriarchal Symbolic Order through the Gothic mode as canonized. This canonical praxis portrays them as either Gozer or the Ghostbusters (us-versus-them)—either waiting to spring forth and eclipse everything else, confounding the stupid and the faithful, whose canonical icons will not save them unless the boys get back together and save the day. That’s the canonical synthesis present in Reitman and company’s intended targets: the children of today urged to become future war orphans, brides, soldiers, victims, and other exploited parties (we will unpack all of these things during the roadmap, primer and in Volume Three, I promise).

The Numinous tableau of 1984 has become a bit more laid back in 2021, but the costumes in 2021 are far better (especially Gozer’s). Cosmetic preferences aside, Afterlife still concludes with a big battle—one that summons a seemingly invincible Gozer by a pointedly impotent, false man (Fu Manchu-meets-Colonel-Sanders, Ivo Shandor). Faced with her, the “real men” and their wonder weapons must send Gozer back to Hell. Everything happens much as Ivan did it forty years prior, except Ivan’s son directs the recuperated ghosts of the past—our soon-to-be-dead old-timers—to clear their names (and clear up the thoroughly bogus spat they had with dear-departed egghead “leader,” Egon Spengler) by vanquishing the mythical “wandering womb.” They do this by ejaculating proton “streams” (or fiery chains) all over it. It’s a veritable “séance bukkake,” an abject pissing contest that Gozer just has to sit there and take (which reactionary audiences in 2016 refused to do when an all-girl term castrated the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man). She’s their sorry Sphinx cum dumpster, their unhappy toilet and punching bag to gloriously assault as the Ghostbusters reunite the nuclear family and teach the next in line to fight as they do: like a Roman boy.

Transformed into a tomboy tin soldier, Phoebe hugs Ghost-Yoda Egon; he smiles, proud and satisfied and his zombie Jedi pals pat themselves on the back. The world is saved, personal responsibility reliably venerating the ghost of the tyrant (of the tyrant of the tyrant…) in a broader narrative of the crypt. Everything leading up to this—the trail of ambiguous-but-ultimately-appropriated clichés and fragments—are illusory intimations of a Gothic chronotope that presents the bloodline as literal and figurative: a concentric-holistic dynasty of power exchange and hereditary rites felt on the para, meta and diegetic registers intersecting messily on a singularity of converging fakery and wreckage. Phoebe’s glasses double her grandfather’s just as her actions do, seeing through “his” eyes; the proton packs are a celebration of mad science as weaponized; the vintage “hearse ambulance” a hauntological fossil that venerates American car culture for the dumb, white American teenager driving stupidly through a corn field. It’s propaganda for dumb kids tied to bigger fish to fry: Gay Communism (a cryptonym-inside-a-cryptonym, the cosmic sexpot intimating a desire to quell the combined spirits of native Indigenous peoples and diasporic African slaves haunting the same cornfield).

To that, Gozer is our prehistoric bitch come back from the dead, doomed to play the part of the composite monster bullseye. A starlet censored with burn scars and protoplasmic bubbles, she is liminally abject: a giant cock-tease and mind-fucker, hag-dragon-lady chimera (we’ll explore the chaos dragon as a Patriarchal concept more in Volume Three, Chapter One). Even so, Gozer is the Pygmalion artist’s nightmare creation, a canonical “inkblot test” where patriarchal dudes simultaneously wet their pants and get hard, uncannily aroused at the thought of war and rape towards a shapeless, endless foe:

(exhibit 19b: Artist: Paolo Giandoso‘s concept art for Ghostbusters: Afterlife. His womb state and Archaic Mother are abject, entirely devoid of criticism for the franchise. It is “blind” pastiche; mute, nefandous, and complicitly pro-war/-rape.)

For an ideal audience, “Kill it with fire!” is a lazy joke hiding another ghost of the counterfeit: scorched earth; “kill all, burn all, loot all[1].” By framing Gozer as naughty Pandora “needing” to be put back into her box, Reitman silences critics of war, rape and its etiology through displaced, cartoon shows of force (which can be enjoyed, but should not be internalized or endorsed by us—in politics or our social-sex lives). Gozer’s eyes do not see; drugged and lobotomized, she is a deaf, dumb and blind, bourgeois queen—a vampire-zombie clone on par with Raleigh Theodore Saker ‘s schizophrenic soliloquy from Sublime’s Robbin’ the Hood (1994):

We’ve got you in this fuckin’ movie to exterminate all the lunatics all at once with a filtering system of a God. We’re the psycho-semantic police. You can’t even see us. How in the fuck can you do anything about it? We’re pure intelligence, you’re not. You’re biological product of a cosmological universe. You’re molecular matter, I constructed you. Fuck you. I made you up, you didn’t make me up, you got it backwards. You know who you are? You’re fuckin’ semantic blockage. That’s what made you up. You’re a fuckin’ programmer named Christine Gontarek who fucked up. She sucked my cock, fell in love, and she was locked in. She’s gonna get her second chance to suck my cock again. If she turns me down, she’s gonna go straight to Hell, she won’t pass “Go”, she’ll never fuckin’ win. She’s the cunt that thought she was God, but that’s okay. I don’t give a shit, as long as she sucks me off when I tell her, ’cause she’s my zombie. I captured that motherfucker, and she’s my cassette (source).

Gozer is Reitman’s Gontarek, the functional Egeus from A Midsummer Night’s Dream begging the ancient privilege of “Athens.” Replacing a legitimate antiwar/-rape critic with a canonical shadow puppet, Reitman has all-in-one given us an angry sexpot to spank and a tentacle “chaos dragon” to banish to the shadow realm. The fabrication is a special-effects-driven, “plastic reality” (as Julie A. Turnock calls it, 2015) of revived ’80s neoliberalism—one presenting Gozer the Archaic Mother as little more than a seasonal slaughter of the ghost of the harvest. This shoddy double stands in for actual fascist/neoliberal harvests; i.e., happening all the time behind the veil, but also on its surface, in plain sight. It’s one’s own doubts and fears being cheaply “vanquished” with military optimism as something to wish for and worship until the end of time: the zombie myth of the “Good War” rescued yet again.

Meanwhile, the world slowly keeps dying while America colonizes itself (and everything around it) in pursuit of the neoliberal trifecta: infinite growth, efficient profit and worker/owner division. Along with the other three, and the state monopolies, the entire product is a mendacious call to war chorusing to a larger war horn, a “false flag operation” as slick and alleged as Nancy Reagan’s legendary blowjobs (which, though Samantha Cole is writing about them in 2021, hail from an unofficial bibliography nearly thirty years prior). An open secret tied to the annals of power, Afterlife‘s semantic wreckage and bad-faith doubles amount to a narrative of the crypt that belies a paradox and madness beyond what science not only can’t explain, but gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss—re: Hogle’s warning of a vanishing point, an endless “place of concealment that stands of mere ashes of something not fully present.” Speaking truth to power starts to feel unnatural, alien; it becomes forgotten, papered over, buried by canonical pastiche. Gozer could be whatever it wants and make whatever it wants, except those in power perpetually code her as a victim or a scapegoat (for female hysteria and dark, abject poetics that challenge the status quo) over and over and over. They can’t hide her rage but they can sublimate it into something useful to Capitalism: a punching bag to make male workers feel good by killing dark gods and getting the girl by taming nature as sometimes “getting out of hand” (with Cartesian forces needing to keep nature and monstrous-feminine poetics “in hand,” thus under control in lucrative, ultimately genocidal ways).

In service of this false claim and its manufactured consent, Afterlife unironically plays out like a slick military recruitment video—a horror movie sequel of the capitalist, mass-produced sort, versus the horror “one-offs” of iconoclastic praxis/counterculture addressing social-sexual unrest tied to buried trauma. To that, it’s less early George Romero and more Zack Snyder, with daddy’s-boy director Reitman telling you what to think, but also what to say, what to do and what to stand for—to fear in relation to the state’s out-of-joint enemies. It’s garden variety moral panic, resold as “fresh, hip” nostalgia by “faithful” canon post-excavation—a canonical strategy of elaborate misdirection, a “historical document.” This emotional/Gothic stupidity and privatization must be challenged by intelligent, Gothic-Communist workers. The same goes for appropriated peril and moral panic; war and rape, menticide and waves of terror; the semantic wreckage of the narrative of the crypt and its liminal prisoners, queer scapegoats, lady ghost hostages—all met with iconoclastic doubles in service of Gothic Communism as something to develop towards during oppositional praxis: our “archaeologies.”

(exhibit 19c: model and artist: Cara Day and Persephone van der Waard. Gothic canon invokes the monstrous-feminine to fetishize and annihilate it. It is within this complex space that sex-positive implementations of the same hysterical poetics [and famous monsters] must come to light. Gozer isn’t just a bad girl to spank, and Cara isn’t just a piece of ass. There’s sex-positive power in what they can subvert and express while turning a buck.)

This essay is just part of iconoclastic praxis more broadly. It was impromptu, written after watching the movie having already internalized my own manifesto. This is my magic, my voice. But my voice also includes various artwork, collages, slang and epigrams as things for me decolonize and reclaim in complex liminal ways—to synthesize with my own cultural habits and general social-sexual skills/synthetic oppositional stratagems like girl talk, community (anti-fascist) defense with a larger end goal in mind far beyond just my meager life. My iconoclastic art becomes a weapon to fight the bourgeoisie and their propaganda as Gothic Communists do: to encourage direct solidarity by sex worker propaganda in opposite to nation-states, neoliberal corporations and their complicit proponents; that uses my manifesto and its demonstration of social-sexual synthesis and Humanities education as something to teach high emotional/Gothic intelligence—all to benefit workers as co-conspirators in service to themselves, not some higher, vertical authority. That’s proletarian praxis!

Paid Labor: Summarizing Praxis as Something to Synthesize by Paying Workers (feat. Delilah Gallo, Rae of Sunshine, and Feyn Volans)

“America’s not a country, it’s just a business. Now fucking pay me.”

—Jackie Cogan, Killing Them Softly (2012)

This mini-section (six pages) offers a brief repose before we dive into the rest of the volume. While the manifesto has already covered a lot, I’d like to stress the labor value of sex work as a paid means of synthesizing praxis; i.e., when preventing state abuse through sex work a valid service that should be monetarily compensated for its labor value. This includes artwork, writing and sex work as indiscrete categories illustrating mutual consent; i.e., as a paid enterprise between two consenting workers negotiating their separate rates for a combined exchange; e.g., this book and its combination of the three, illustrating how intersectional solidarity works: together through a variety of creative practices that support one another through informed, negotiated and paid labor exchanges and, by extension, boundary-forming exercises to exhibit through the results.

Note: The second edition of Volume One contains a 2025 addendum (about eight pages); i.e., one featuring my friends Delilah Gallo, Rae of Sunshine, and Feyn Volans. I befriended these persons through the project, paying them to appear in this book series, including the pages ahead. —Perse, 4/8/2025

To it, Capitalism sexualizes everything to pimp nature as dark alien whore, antagonizing nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine (whores policing whores; re: “Policing the Whore“) while putting it cheaply to work; we alien whores must facilitate a reversal, upending tokenization through our own dialectical-material exchanges (and their assorted price charts, below):

(artist: Delilah Gallo)

Note: Developing Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism requires paid labor by design. It is a stupidly important idea—so much so that I not only would start every volume PDF with examples of illustrating mutual consent (and outline the concept in “Paratextual Documents” to be read on its own), but would also release this small essay solo, right after Volume One released on Valentine’s 2024. To it, the dialectical-material context of universal liberation during ludo-Gothic BDSM is paid labor during sex work; i.e., as something to learn about from the exhibits being displayed. I promote them and they promote me, but the models are always paid in some shape or form, and always to what both parties agree to ahead of time.

To it, the 60+ models in this series (and all of the promotion material advertising their work through my usual channels; e.g., the “Hailing Hellions” interview series) have all been paid—most with money and all with art, promotions, and various out-of-pocket expenses that come with running a non-profit series like Sex Positivity. All the work I do, then, goes towards helping other sex workers while turning the cycle of doing so into an object lesson: sex is a service, and one that deserves to be paid (and otherwise treated with respect) while having the whore’s revenge; re: by camping canon on the Aegis. To get paid and be allowed to live and speak out (re: “Survive, Solidarize and Speak Out“) is our revenge; i.e., against profit and all it causes in service to the state and itself (the elite and their cops [class, culture and race traitors recruited from working bodies] pimping us).

Furthermore, education is funded, expressed and shared anisotropically in both praxial directions; i.e., during the fascist’s bad game of dress up versus the liberator’s good (e.g., the Medusa’s revenge fantasy versus the monomyth hero’s). Given life and flesh, the larger struggle takes shapes in small; i.e., one that—once discovered through holistic study—points, like a Gothic castle, concentrically and ominously to larger things that labor-in-small attaches structurally to (re: whores versus pimps, Medusa versus “Caesar” and his ghosts of “Rome”):

(exhibit 20a2: Artist: Ziibing. From Ancient Egypt to the United States, capital is a pyramid. The same basic shape conveys across a myriad of sources that continue to evolve, mid-constant; e.g., Virginia’s “Community Solutions to Sexual and Domestic Violence” and “11th Principle: Consent.” Propaganda is propaganda in praxial opposition, synthesized through daily habits; i.e., with worker rights versus state’s rights [cops and victims] speaking in cryptomimetic echoes during the cryptonymy process [and hauntologies, chronotopes] that further or reverse abjection “on the Aegis.” The state rapes; workers challenge said rapes by making consent sexy in gentle and/or strict forms.

Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space, then, existing dualistically during liminal expression [which the Gothic conveys through oscillation]. To it, the state and its tools rape nature through the Gothic mode, but also the bourgeoisie’s intended play and bad BDSM freezing the Superstructure in place; by comparison, Gothic Communism liberates nature through the same mode recultivating the Superstructure—thereby using emergent play to camp the canon during ludo-Gothic BDSM: weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds. Whores are nerds, but nerds who aren’t whores control those who are using the same language their captives weaponize to liberate themselves.

[artist: Rae of Sunshine]

During this larger struggle on the same Aegis, iconoclastic nerds pit subversive and poetic forms of violence, terror and monstrous expression against state proponents [and their futile monopolies]! So when the Man [or his token extensions] come around, show him your Aegis! Clothed or not, power [darkness, and knowledge] take many forms [re: “From Composites and the Occult“]! It’s code, but also something to consume preferentially in Plato’s cave—what the Bible calls [and treats like] “forbidden fruit.” So “eat the fucking apple,” as Maegen McAuliffe O’Leary would say! Become the exception that bends the rule, subverting it to workers‘ collective benefit; i.e., as stewards of nature, thus ourselves, pushing steadily towards post-scarcity while enduring manufactured scarcity as we raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness! To do so, which is not a zero-sum game, we whores barter in beautiful lies mixed with truth; i.e., with those most ancient of currencies policed within the Imperium [and its plastic frontiers]: sex and force as things to perform! Castration—however poetic on its face—goes both ways, and always sits adjacent to actual harm haunting the comeliest of actors on and offstage.

Context matters, flow [of power] determining function; ours—both solo and together—pointedly illustrate mutual consent through dialectical-material scrutiny summoning the avenger in endless ironic forms thereof: Galatea’s Aegis embodied through darkness visible—both the angel and the devil seeking infernal salvation turning capital [and its mirror syndrome] on their sorry heads! Be the apple to “eat” in a polity of ways! The madness of Medusa isn’t a madwoman in the attic, lying in state and trapped helplessly there, but a danger-disco party to take, like the vampire exiting its coffin, outside itself: during the liminal hauntology of war as dualistic! As such, each of us embodies a castle to wage war from, and often to music; e.g., Perfect Blue‘s “Angel of Love” giggling as it stabs capital in the balls. “Stare and tremble!” as we whores work together minus a pimp “protecting” us, fucking to metal to mess with our enemies to our heart’s content!

[artist: Feyn Volans] 

For example, the material here between Feyn and I was negotiated, and subsequently honored through a cum tribute that I gave them; i.e., upon me offering and them accepting [watch it, here]. The Medusa, in her Numinous form, cannot be killed, imperfectly extending that immortality to her smaller offshoots who are, themselves, often quite substantial [and whose rage and joy know no bounds]! As such, Feyn, Rae and Delilah are all awesome, inside and out, thus worthy of worship! Go support them, promoting them yourselves in connection to us promoting the same notion back at you! Segregation is violent; exposure through “violence” behind buffers gives us the paradoxical means to speak out despite being kettled [the Medusa was a power bottom, dead ass]!

[models and artist: Delilah Gallo, Feyn Volans, and Rae of Sunshine; and Persephone van der Waard]  

Whatever the form, Gothic Communism has money behind it [not much, as I am unemployed (thus relatively poor), but enough to make a difference]. Likewise, tribute, for us isn’t canon that maintains the status quo; it’s Satanic apostacy Numinously altering such things through the very code classifying whores as “degenerate.” Power is infinite; as something to reclaim during ludo-Gothic BDSM, it occurs through play as infinite, thus exchanges that tender play in all its forms: as paradoxically something to afford and actualize, during calculated risk; re: putting “death” and “rape” in quotes [and, just as often, hyphenating those with food, sickness and war, etc; re: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll during ludo-Gothic BDSM relayed in modernized forms of “ancient” forebears]. In short, every temple for play [or foreplay] that seeks and summons the Medusa—as dark mother/whore to undermine capital’s abusive parentage—has its price! “O, whistle and I’ll come, my lad!” That’s what she said [or any gender a whore chooses to perform and/or identify as to make trouble with]!

[artist: Delilah Gallo]

To that, sex is a weapon on a social-sexual gradient—often public nudism to illustrate a larger [a]sexual point about trauma as something to interrogate in small while walking collectively away from Omelas; i.e., speaking as we do about ongoing struggles repressed by the state pimping us through ourselves as monstrous; e.g., sex in public as “art porn” reworking the Wisdom of the Ancients; re: a cultural understanding of the imaginary past to broker [thus achieve] universal liberation during intersectional solidarity [no scapegoats]. If you want to critique power, you must go where it is—where the state, ever and always, concerns power as something to exploit, mise-en-abyme.

The fact remains, if we didn’t have power to take, they wouldn’t frame us as aliens to harvest. We must humanize that, which requires camping our own holocausts that show the state as inhumane in response to our shenanigans; re: by putting “rape” in quotes during the dialectic of the alien [which ludo-Gothic BDSM entails]: as a paid, informed, countercultural enterprise, and one with Gothic an-Com goals, hence aims, challenging internal/external bigotries, stigmas and biases with taboo things “hugging” the alien [which Medusa is]. By extension, to develop Gothic Communism means to network, fuck and teach through art [which porn is] funded by workers for workers. They kettle us; we kick them in the delicates! To protect nature, we destroy the only thing they love: control! “Now this is happening!”

“That’s how I roll!” Yeet that fucker into the drink—a double-take simulacrum of ourselves the elite use to ravish us, sans irony! Hoist them on their own petards!

The elite are killer babies already stuck in the Man Box [which privatization relies upon]. From Teslas to a living wage for sex workers to anti-police narratives in your favorite piece of media, make them cry by taking back what they took from you; i.e., as something fun and memorable because it’s reclamatory. That being said, people [from all walks] dig the Gothic because it’s quick and dirty but also sexy and fun[ny]—a skeleton of funny bones and boners! Whatever the ghost, camp it; kill the image the state wants you to remember it as. Break Capitalist Realism on your wheel, making not just Marx, but Medusa and monsters gay!)

Capitalism is a fractally recursive pyramid scheme operating on all registers, and all sharing the same goal: exploitation and theft (which class, money and state mechanisms are, by design). We must challenge these in duality using the same language the state does; or, as I write in “Goblins, Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking,”

(artists: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás)

Silence is death[2]; for Capitalism to work, it needs a victim and a cop for which to buy silence with. To that, victims can become cops through oppressor misuse of oppression language to silence others with; re: DARVO and obscurantism; e.g., the Star of David adorning Zionist war machines and dropping bombs on Palestinians and Lebanese people, while playing the universal savior and victim, and policing anyone who might use their language incorrectly. Different voices need the ability to speak up and out for themselves and others, thus coexist, lest capital divide and disorganize us to keeping doing what it has, is and always will do: rape worlds and the world by sowing division to move money through nature (source).

As such, the ghosts of rape haunt the counterfeit furthering or reversing abjection, mid-cryptomimesis. In turn, the oldest form of exploitation is the whore, making their speaking out the oldest form of worker struggle against exploitation; re: spectres of older genocides speaking to current ones (and their hauntologies). Silence is genocide, and sex workers educate from de facto (extracurricular) positions against genocide (thus profit); i.e., through the work they do; re: as paid, said payment giving workers a voice during the whore’s paradox—to speak out while being stolen from and lied to (which money is designed to do, the American dollar effectively blood money as capital [dead labor] feeds on living labor with pieces from living labor). All messily unfurl while taking land and labor back through one’s virgin/whore labor expression—to illustrate the better treatment of nature as monstrous-feminine during the whore’s revenge; re: the Medusa hyphenating virgin-whore in small! The Gorgon, then, is a composite of moods; per the cryptonymy process, its re-education of workers happens gradually-in-opposition across a variety of cryptomimetic censors, barriers and screens, their show/conceal double operation denoting the palliative Numinous and its assorted Communist spectres camping Marx—gentle or strict, dom or sub, mommy or otherwise—in small:

(artist: Delilah Gallo)

Some whores fuck back; on the Aegis as half-real (on and offstage), whores are monsters to help through strange appetites and appeals—e.g., as witches, vampires and goblins, among so many others (undead, demonic and/or animalistic); i.e., to pay and consequently learn from, mid-exchange, while playing with demons and the dead as half-real propositions! Unionize and disseminate; disrupt through what the state cannot tame; paganize and protest what pimps prohibit, glutting themselves on our stolen worth! Medusa lives through us, the Gothic speaking commercially and poetically not just through deprivation and size difference (re: tremendous obscurity and decay), but also through Ozymandian embodiment: bad echoing puns of neo-medieval castles, “torture,” live burial, nightmares and dungeons, etc, playing with rape-as-commerce to get to the bottom of things! So often, the colonizer looks like us in bad faith, and vice versa! Use that to your advantage! —Perse, 4/8/2025

To that, “Paid Labor” briefly discusses an important refrain to solidarized labor under sex positivity: “sex work is work,” which needs to be paid, but many different kinds of work constitute sex work because Capitalism sexualizes all workers. As such, “sex work” can be summarized as collective, iconoclastic worker action against the heteronormative, settler-colonial status quo: art, porn, prostitution, writing (and intersections of these devices) when collective negotiation and expression of worker rights and boundaries happen through informed, class-, culture- and race-conscious worker solidarity enacting ludo-Gothic BDSM towards those ends. Women’s work (sex or otherwise) is historically unpaid and demonized; re: for the women/people treated as women. Take it back on the Aegis, anisotropically reversing terror/counterterror (during as[s]ymmetrical warfare, below) to serve whores, thus nature!

Note: The rest of this piece is largely as I wrote it, back in early 2024. —Perse, 4/8/2025

(artist: Fired Up Stilettos)

To that, Gothic Communists achieve proletarian praxis through an iconoclastic recultivation of a bourgeois Superstructure with ludo-Gothic BDSM: the literal teaching of emotional and Gothic intelligence (and the confronting of trauma by raising awareness) through sex-positive sex work and art; i.e., as a sheer democratization of development through worker solidarity (the state, by comparison, is not historically democratic, but serves the interests of the elite).

Now that you have access to my thesis (from Volume Zero) and the manifesto as a simplified form of my thesis arguments, I want to spend the rest of the volume supplying a teaching roadmap concerning synthesis and Volume Two giving a Humanities primer concerning monsters (our so-called “booster rockets” before we fully “take off,” in Volume Three).

However, before getting to those, let’s summarize the role of oppositional praxis in relation to our manifesto’s thesis and its execution as a fundable operation in either direction: Sex coercion happens through privatization—specifically the privatization of sexual labor (exploiting it) and emotional labor (siphoning it out of workers’ heads) in canonical forms for the state’s benefit; i.e., exploiting the emotionally unintelligent who surrender their labor and their rights, but also who try to own or control those around them in service to the state during crisis and decay. The historical-material result are scapegoats, fear and dogma that turn people against one another and who cannot tell friend from foe, but also who see everyone as a potential threat, in threatening places, with canonical threatening language: the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection’s hauntologies, chronotopes, and cryptonyms.

Meerloo once called these totalitarian tactics “menticide” and “waves of terror” in relation to thought crimes, which we briefly introduced during the manifesto but will articulate more in the roadmap (along with thought crimes/venial sins and several other germane ideas that will be useful in the navigating the primer and Volume Three). Capitalism doesn’t just alienate workers from the products of their labor and from nature; it uses canon within capital, flowing money through nature to alienize either in relation to the other as hopelessly divided, blind and lost. As a consequence, workers are divided from their labor value, including ludo-Gothic BDSM as something to fund (e.g., this book’s exhibits).

The historical-material effect is reliable: destroying the material world as incumbent on nature actually being preserved by people having some connection to it to start with. Sever that through a quick, inadequate paycheck in a scarce setting and nature is a regular casualty (followed by workers, of course). Capitalism rapes the mind by constantly terrifying it in regards to deprivatized labor and nature; sex positivity is the long road back to reunion, a wending iconoclasm that starts with sexual labor (media) as a communal, intersectional, healing process that needs payment to work.

Furthermore, there isn’t some final destination where things happen “at the end”; it develops over time in active, ongoing and incremental ways that happen through iconoclastic art, general creativity and Gothic imagination; i.e., a conjoined process of rising emotional intelligence within the larger community and their artistic output, whose sexual labor and Gothic negotiating power are adequately compensated. The elite hate unions for this very reason. Without workers constantly slaving to the grind, everything stops; the money stops insofar as infinite growth is challenged by basic human needs expressed in Gothic terms.

Capitalism frames the meeting of the latter as unthinkable through worker imaginations myopically centered around elite needs during recuperated Gothic nightmares; i.e., Mark Fisher’s hauntologies, or cancelled futures, blaming past worker actions for what capitalist greed always leads to: violent rebellion when enough is enough. Teach people they have rights and military urbanism won’t fly.

(artist: Eugène Delacroix)

We’ve discussed the framing of past revolutions through Gothic canon as “terrorist” according to state interests. But however violent those in power (or with power) will mark our emancipatory attempts to be, our “breaking of church windows” is not concerned with abstract rebellions or wanton violence, but literal human thought as materially reshaping itself and the world through iconoclastic praxis: various artists, relating back and forth across space and time, in liminal, sexy-spooky ways; i.e., Gothic counterterrorist poetics. If that is “violent,” then so be it. “In the absence of justice, there can be no peace.” Nation-states and corporations do far worse every day through their usual monopolies as bought-and-paid for but also endorsed by the regular paying public.

Not only do our combined efforts require informed engagement with the past as hopelessly complicated when reimagined in the present; the reclaiming of artistic language and labor as already-colonized must be repeatedly conveyed and funded by those born into the present. Such persons drink up information like thirsty little sponges (some thirstier than others), which poses a problem insofar as the flow of money is concerned. History is littered with the graves of really stupid kids who dug graves for others in the bargain. From the Hitler Youth to the Khmer Rouge, to clean-cut Ike-Age kids and the Jonestown disciples, children don’t discriminate in what language they acquire.

This includes the language of commerce, which the children of the future must not acquire their understanding of from canon; its authors, the elite and their proponents, only manipulate and blame us for “the dismal tide” of fascism’s arrival and subsequent “war on degeneracy and Modernity”—will only groom them to become not just “killer baby” soldiers, but idiotic heroes starring in “their own” productions; e.g., Ashley Williams from Army of Darkness (1992): “Impunity is the apex of privilege. I say this in regards to consumers whose Ash-worship is perpetually reinforced by spiritual successors” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Army of Darkness: Valorizing the Idiot Hero,” 2019).

There is, as usual, money behind canon’s routine brain drain. Together with submissive, tokenized sex slaves, such heroes and their canonical legacy destroys the material world for profit, nature included (with us being a part of nature, including our connection to our bodies, society and the ecosystems around us). We must not only not listen to the elite; we must challenge their pedagogy’s financing with our own, which they will criminalize, including our very thoughts as criminal. Otherwise, the perfect soldiers become the stuff of nightmares: automated patrol machines, walking guns and infiltrators intimated by their human-yet-dehumanized counterparts.

More to the point, they currently hold the purse strings of disposable income, which behooves us to assist those who would pay us; i.e., to help them see us as human, not as sex machines that, when paid, reliably “put out” even when that wage is throttled to unlivable extremes: wage slavery and labor theft insofar as worker desperation is preyed upon by other workers with the means and mindset to do so. They think tipping is “optional[3],” especially regarding sex work (which honestly waitressing and other thankless service professions functionally are; i.e., “women’s work” as a component of extended beings [those of nature] for Descartes’ thinking beings [white cis-het men] to exploit).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

It’s true that wealth redistribution is fundamental to developing Communism, but it still requires empathy as something to recultivate through mechanisms that have become thoroughly commodified; i.e., Gothic poetics, including implements of objectification and abuse, but also recuperated voices of rebellion such as rock ‘n roll. Yes, money keeps the revolutionary lights on, but stripping is not consent. In conjunction with that productive adage, blasting metal shouldn’t be a shortcut to sex; i.e., the expectation of automatic sex just because Rob Zombie is blaring from the stripping stage.

To that, a constant mindfulness of intersecting factors is required to enact ludo-Gothic BDSM. Faustian bargains are generally relayed through the acquisition of unequal power as something to display through wealth as given in bad faith; e.g., the supplying of collars and rings, but also blood money as something to recognize and weigh when choosing to accept it under theatrical conditions. So while taking payment from slavers who have you on the hip isn’t a bank heist, singular payments from chudwads has, to some extent, been laundered; i.e., the latter shouldn’t be discounted for what that money can go towards: something better than where it started from.

This includes turning ourselves into something during ludo-Gothic BDSM that accurately represents our struggles, not the desires of those enslaving us with an inadequate wage, or wages that are tossed about as a cruel (and cliché) means of reminding us that we and our bodies (and their morphological and cosmetic expressions through Gothic poetics) are somehow “owned” by those paying us; i.e., white knight syndrome through the “rescuing” of sex workers. Tips shouldn’t be an excuse to make these kinds of ipso facto possessive statements; when given in good faith, they will let workers express themselves for themselves through a class- and culture-conscious mindset whose rebellious expressions and room for understanding and confronting trauma includes all oppressed workers.

The idea isn’t to “rescue” sex workers at all, but make their profession safer from class traitors, not just women. So while Megan Barton-Hanson isn’t technically “wrong” when she writes

There’s a common assumption that all women are victims who need to be “rescued” from the sex industry, but that’s not true. […] People think that women in the sex industry have no other choice, which for some people is sadly the case, but for a lot of women it’s a side hustle that they do alongside uni or running a business (source: “How to Be an Ally to Sex Workers,” 2022).

there’s a glaring omission in terms of whom she’s not including in her advocation: gender-non-conforming persons, non-white-sex workers and AMAB sex workers (e.g., trans misogyny). Betrayal isn’t always done on purpose, but intent doesn’t matter if a given expression leaves someone out, which Barton-Hanson pointedly does. Survival sex work needs to be acknowledged, not pushed to the side by those who have the luxury of a side hustle while going to uni or running a business (which most people lack the ability to do). Even so, it’s equally vital to remember that those operating through necessity vs privilege still deserve a living wage through the labor value of their services; i.e., sex work that goes against the profit motive as something that normally accommodates women like Barton-Hanson to the detriment of more oppressed groups (instead of saying “sadly” and shrugging one’s shoulders through a materially and socially superior position).

Obviously it’s in our material interests to collectively reject the brutal, “blood in, blood out” of state-mandated factionalism and class traitors: cops and other such rival gangs materially incentivized by the state to make war according to money’s flowing as something to dictate, and whose chicken hawk leaders endlessly recruit children for their own greedy ends tied to war (and rape) as a business. But nevertheless, the managing of canonized funds through reliably sanitized sources (tone-policing and whitewashing sex work) goes hand-in-hand with the utilizing of said funds for proletarian means: to teach future workers through its acquisition to be antiwar, anti-rape, and anti-state (which monopolizes sexual labor through terror, violence and bodies) according to the iconoclastic artwork we leave behind; i.e., socio-material lessons whose proletarian praxis, when synthesized and widely employed over time, sees the sex workers of the world (and by extension all workers) freed from the mental, physical and fiscal shackles of Capitalism: through a continuous, proletarian re-cultivation of the Superstructure during ludo-Gothic BDSM that, when properly funded, synthesizes praxis through habits that are formed again and again through pay to play (not to win).

Whatever the form, play is work, and should be compensated; i.e., as such. Class or otherwise, then, war wages through wages; i.e., brothel espionage appearing cutesy both as a raison d’être, disguise, and calling card (the whore a commoner position married to common forms of asymmetrical warfare; e.g., ninjas and guerrillas punching up against the owner class and their harmful arguments of culture and race, during controlled opposition)!

(artist: Nori Noir)

Said synthesis is meant to compound and accelerate from mounting financial backing (sex work, when allowed and encouraged, tends to pay quickly and well; i.e., is always in demand from persons with the means to pay for it). This includes receiving financial support from, not just the down-and-out, but the middle class at large: petit-bourgeois revolutionaries putting their literal money where their mouths are (unlike cis-het workers who say all the things they’d like to do to us without actually dropping a dime towards the Cause; keep your ceaseless flattery and pay out, please) to foster empathy towards sex workers through daily habits that cultivate empathy as a mindset, but also a reciprocal skill; i.e., tipping as the backbone to ludo-Gothic BDSM (as a form of paid labor exchange under Capitalism).

To conclude, paying all workers for their services is vital to revolutionary praxis because it permits and enables activism under Capitalism. Social-sexual activism happens through a liberating creativity tied to sexualized art as a form of reclaimed labor and collective, instructional worker action that materially survives after workers die; i.e., to fund, thus pass along the ability for workers—like little detectives—to sense and illustrate the “creative successes” of Gothic Communism as a paid operation: disinterring the skeletons of whores that empire is built on.

Unlike our bodies, which decay and rot, artwork doesn’t have to worry about falling apart, but its labor needs to be compensated. Paint literal skeletons if you must, but you can leave behind something more than naked bones: someone who lived and worked towards the payment of workers within the system as a means of confronting state trauma when synthesizing praxis; i.e.,  in ways that humanize the entire system of exchange through Gothic poetics that, when examined by future workers, reminds them that these bones were human, thus a) deserving of a wage and b) able to use that wages’ artistic results to develop Communism through Gothic poetics; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM. Camp is the death of canon, radicalizing it into something that liberates workers at the cost of empire and its bad-faith pimps. Medusa calls to you, “Come to the Sabbath!”

Everyone loves the whore; if not you, we will make your enemies (other workers) love us whether you want them to or not! We will fertilize that, our rot extending as the phoenix does towards new life (during the rememory process)! Capitalism is not destiny. Forge your own, instead!

(artist: Couple of Kooks)

Onto “Synthesis Symposium: Nature Is Food (opening and part zero)“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] The Three Alls being a Japanese imperial policy when imitating the West and expanding into Manchuria.

[2] Brooklyn Museum writes,

In 1987, Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás founded the SILENCE=DEATH Project to support one another in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Inspired by the posters of the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls (both of whose work is on view nearby), they mobilized to spread the word about the epidemic and created the now-iconic Silence=Death poster featuring the pink triangle as a reference to Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people in the 1930s and 1940s. It became the central visual symbol of AIDS activism after it was adopted by the direct action advocacy group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) [source].

[3] A double standard, I should add, they would never apply to themselves; i.e., the fascist approach to rights for the white, cis-het male avenger (the middle class) scapegoating marginalized groups (often sex workers; e.g., my friend, Blxxd Bunny, getting bullied online by incels and MGTOW types) instead of attacking the system despite said system (and its owners) exploiting them. These hateful bigots see sex workers as “the real enemy” and anyone who helps them as a “simp”: a person who gives money to people who don’t deserve it (according to fascists) because their labor value is zero, thus literally doesn’t qualify as paid work; i.e., should be given to predatory men a priori while said men are venerated as the sole breadwinners. In effect, this demonization of tippers discourages public empathy towards sex workers, but also the act of financially supporting women at all (forcing them into unpaid domestic positions; e.g., the bedroom, the kitchen, or the laundry room, etc). Not only does this lead to domestic abuse by men who treat women (or people forced to identify as women) like chattel; it lowers class consciousness to the detriment of all workers, dividing the middle class and pitting them against marginalized groups.

This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “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.

Click here to see “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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 (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.

Instruction: Trauma Writing/Artwork, or Surviving and Expressing Our Trauma through Gothic Poetics

“When he was nearly 19, my son Eddie died. Of course, I was very, very sad, but I didn’t really talk about it a lot. For quite a long time, it was bottled up inside me. I was caught between two feelings. I wanted people to know that I was sad, but, at the same time, I didn’t know how to say it. So, in a funny sort of way, I didn’t want them to know, because that feels kind of weak. One day, a child said to me: What become of the Eddie in your poems? I suddenly had to say what happened to [my son]. So, in front of a big audience, I said: “Eddie died.” And the moment I said that, it gave me the courage to write the things down. And so that’s what I did—I just wrote down how I felt. I even drew a picture—a funny, squiggly picture of me grinning like this, saying “This is me looking sad.” Then, I just wrote straightaway and that turned into a book. In a funny sorta way, I felt better. I could feel good that I said that I feel bad. I know that sounds weird, but that’s how I felt. So maybe if you wrote something down about how you feel, and maybe if you showed somebody that, that way we can help each other.”

—Michael Rosen, talking about his son’s death (2017)

Picking up where “Monster Modes, Totalitarianism (menticide) and Opposing Forces: Oppositional Praxis” left off…

(artist: Less, “I Can’t Decide,” 2021)

We’ve reached the end of the manifesto, which has effectively summarized the manifesto tree from my thesis volume. As the latter constitutes the entirety of this book’s primary ideas—i.e., its theories to apply and execute during ludo-Gothic BDSM—this means my thesis volume has been somewhat light on catharsis resulting from good praxis, which I want to conclude Volume One exploring through a more simplified approach: instruction. Now that this approach has been theoretically outlined, its application through de facto education (a creative success of proletarian praxis) concerns something we’ve already hinted at inside both works: trauma writing and artwork as potent and utterly essential teaching devices, but also existing and operating in conflict in a variety of ways. As Cuwu taught me, showing your heart to others can be profoundly intense and relatable, but also needs to be mindful of a healthy outcome when shared through the usual Gothic fetishes and clichés.

Note: As stated during the volume opening, “application” is effectively synonymous with ludo-Gothic BDSM as I envisioned it; re: first as theoretical idea with “The Quest for Power” and as a prototype in the “camp map” finale with Blxxd Bunny. But also in the pages ahead; e.g., the postscript initial draft with Cuwu, which formed the basis for what I went on to return to and synthesize with Blxxd Bunny in Volume Zero, then finalize by publishing Volume One on Valentine’s 2024 (rough a year after meeting Cuwu and six months after we stopped being friends). Simply put, the work here—however simple it might seem—formed the bedrock upon which Volume Two went on to expand so much thesis work (culminating in the Demon Module’s “Rape Reprise“), and Cuwu was central in that. —Perse, 4/2/2025

(artist: Cuwu)

Simple doesn’t mean basic; it means that we’re viewing things as simply as we can, mid-conflict. We discussed psychosexuality in the paratextual documents and examined some smaller personalized trauma writings inside the thesis volume; e.g., the palliative Numinous and my relationship to Cuwu (who we’ve already discussed in this volume, too, and who the postscript is dedicated to). Because the remainder of this volume, and indeed the entire book, is dedicated to trauma writing and artwork through monstrous poetics, we’ll be considering anecdotal trauma (and oppositional praxis) much more directly from here on out:

• The postscript (included in this post) 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.
• The sample essay offers a small reprieve while we examine Ghostbusters: Afterlife through a postcolonial lens, vis-à-vis Edward Said.
• “Paid Labor“ 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.
• The synthesis roadmap is 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.

To that, the writing in these areas will be messier and heavier than it might be in purely theoretical forms (even simplified ones), because it directly attempts to speak to our experiences as conveyed in the creative output that we generate as extensions of, and dialogs about, our own survival under capital. So please take whatever precautions are required before proceeding into the pages ahead. You will see pretty things in relation to traumas that normally go unsaid, but haunt the beauty on display as inextricable from them: rape and war as foisted upon workers from all walks of life, but especially women and other minorities as synonymized with rape and war (which likewise synonymize); i.e., as their most regular victims under male/token Man-Box enforcers (who also, let it be said, also suffer under state crisis as perpetual brutalizers choosing to work for the state).

(artist: Sophie Jane)

Rape and war are two sides of the same coin; Gothic Communism seeks to prevent both (and Capitalist Realism) through worker intelligence as something to raise well beyond canonical, Cartesian standards. Trauma writing/artwork, then, are vastly important insofar as they grant workers an awesomely potent means to speak out against the state and its normally myopic dialogs on rape, war and death: Gothic poetics as a counterterrorist device, by which to regain control over portrayals of our own trauma, thus lives; i.e., by reclaiming the ability to perform and play with these things imagined for ourselves, seeing possible worlds beyond Capitalist Realism’s endless rape and war. Women (and all monstrous-feminine “non-men”) are food whose harvesting serves a Cartesian profit motive.

To that, it’s actually quite common for heroic canon to include trauma, but not to process it in any meaningful, healthy sense; i.e., of actually stopping its criminogenesis by recognizing and subverting these coercive material conditions and linguo-material factors in reclaimed language and iconoclastic, Gothic theatricalities. Even seemingly polite white moderates like Tolkien generally isolate trauma as something centered around the white cis-het male agent (or token person) as tied to state mechanisms that cast most other groups into the state of exception to varying degrees; the centrist hero’s journal of war and its usual brutalities, then, tend to concern the normalizing of state monopolies on violence, terror and morphological expression. The most effective (and final) form of genocide is silence; the best way to combat its execution is to speak out in ways that highlight our trauma in recognizable forms.

For the state, trauma is something to extend into the future as a foregone conclusion: embodied by monstrous language as something for the state to abuse, selling it back to the middle class while alienating them from nature and sex. For workers, trauma is embodied by devices that can be reclaimed from the state; e.g., monstrous language, but also sex work as a means of personifying personal, psychosexual trauma as something that haunts a given worker from moment to moment, but can also empower them with an actual humanized voice when challenging state dialogs. Rape and war become things to prevent through various praxial mechanisms during the warring class and cultural value of workers educated to varying degrees, including in Gothic poetics—our aforementioned weird nerds as canonical or iconoclastic.

(exhibit 14b: Artist, top-far-left and middle-center-left: Ohno Justino; top-mid-left: melkteeth; top-mid-right: Scarlet Love; top-far-right [cat]: Draculasswife; top-far-right: Raichiyo; middle-far-left: e.streetcar; middle: Loretta Vampz; bottom-far-left: Ota Goth; bottom-mid-left: source; bottom-mid-right: Lusty Comic; bottom-far-right: Whisp Will.

Trauma is something to live with, insofar as people embody it in some shape or form. Doing so can highlight aspects of the human body that are normally targeted for trauma in sexualized ways, but also something that can express said trauma through a reclaiming of the Gothic poetics associated with it and the natural world; i.e., to express your own unique sexualities, genders, performances [and sale of these things] through your own artwork, body or both as a complex performance that synthesizes trauma in various forms. Whether “tasteful/sophisticated,” “pornographic/vulgar,” or some combination of the two, trauma becomes a subversive way of expressing your own identity as having formed under Capitalism, either by swapping out various pieces of yourself, or by making something normally foreign to who you are [or a part of you that has become alienated from you] a fundamental part of expressing your own rebellious, outspoken position: a robotic limb or pair of horns; one’s bodyfat, hips [and other bones] and curves, but also genitals as sites of abuse/stigma as things to reclaim and/or accept as they currently are; i.e., to raise awareness about, while simultaneously achieving a newfound sense of self-worth, healing and discovery towards a sex-positive existence that has been permanently altered by trauma insofar as one’s self image is concerned. Power in the face of trauma includes turning the abuse of nature and sex back towards one’s abusers—as a survivor would.)

Regarding trauma writing and artwork at large, Sex Positivity (and Gothic Communism) offer a counternarrative to heteronormative dealings with nature as alien and traumatic—one that deliberately concerns praxis as a means of processing trauma and healing from it: through the personifying of monsters, despite knowing this will expose us as having survived state trauma, thus constituting a specific kind of threat they cannot tolerate: a witness. Partly this narrative is based autobiographically on my own abuse (as Gothic fiction often is); it’s also based on partially asexual[1] reflections of sexual abuse experienced by other workers that I feel an empathetic connection to (which queer people often do—collectively punished by the state and its moderate/reactionary defenders).

In the interests of preventing trauma for other sex workers, then, I want to be thorough (the same way Paulo Freire wanted to prevent world hunger after personally experiencing it); I want to include an illustration of praxis as something to absorb from our surroundings—not just canon, but our friends, family and fellow workers’ trauma and intimations thereof, including animals and the environment to which we give thanks and try to heal through ourselves. You should already be familiar with this idea from Volume Zero and earlier in the manifesto, and the roadmap will cover trauma-bonding at length. However, I’m highlighting it here in honor of those more oppressed than myself as something this book gives special focus to. Even though I was abused, I also have considerable privilege as a white trans woman (who only came out at 36 years of age); my experiences working with other sex workers have taught me that we can always learn from them as mutually oppressed workers—from their pedagogy of the oppressed felt in opposition to state forces: cops.

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)

“‘Kill poison with poison,’ he said. He said [that] if you make love to me, you’ll be free from poison; mine will destroy it.”

—Kagero to Jubei, Ninja Scroll

At its most basic level, rape is a violation of basic human, animal and environmental rights enacted through Cartesian power abuse; this postscript concerns the complicated process that healing from rape entails—i.e., its corrupting presence through codified trauma, wherein the surviving of police abuse becomes something to relate to others through Gothic stories that constitute radical empathy as a thing forever out-of-joint: the attempt to empathize with alien experiences to gain new perspective. Such empathy needn’t concern both parties equally and its Gothic dialogs concern intense, poetic liminalities still bearing an intense potential for disguise that is haunted by the shadow of police forces; i.e., it is where ludo-Gothic BDSM may camp trauma, doing so through cryptonymy as pushing towards what it cannot always achieve.

Note: This section reflects heavily on past experiences between Cuwu and I. I’m including a visual reference, here, but wherein the original section actually didn’t have any images of Cuwu to speak of; re: me not deciding to start featuring Cuwu and myself visually until the volume was nearly finalized (and diving into the idea, come Volume Two). —Perse, 4/7/2025

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Even so, the postscript aims to showcase such a dialog and its phenomenological complexities; i.e., one held between two or more people relating through their interpretation of various texts they are either intimately familiar with or at the very least recognize the tell-tale arrangements of power and performance through traumatic markers: heroes and monsters as a liminal proposition to find catharsis inside the oscillation of. Our featured dialog involves The Terminator and Ninja Scroll as having been relayed between Cuwu and I; my accounting of that relationship will be more conversational and messy due to its intensely traumatic and taboo nature: they experienced rape fantasies that stemmed from a history of sexual abuse, of which I—having been physically beaten and emotionally abused, but never sexually raped—could only relate to through fantastical stories about such things. But I was drawn to such stories through someone knightly who had abused me all the same: my dark Amazon, Jadis.

Before we delve into such heavy grounds, I want to prepare you with several disclaimers/reminders. One, while it might be tempting to prioritize abuse to a matter of degree, I would caution against it. Rape isn’t something to “rank” or trump others with; most people have some kind of trauma to endure, and generally this is how we relate to others, mid-oppression. Rape is a thing to heal from, which generally involves traumatic revisitations during ludo-Gothic BDSM that are themselves corrupted by awesome forces; “corruption” isn’t an immediate falsehood, in Gothic stories with heroes, villains and damsels, but semantic entropy and proliferation amid the presence of complicating factors. Facing an eventual understanding of said trauma requires facing the trauma of others by their side, which can be profoundly traumatic and disheartening unto itself—if purely because we discover (often by accident) how someone we care about was hurt in ways that are difficult to fathom. This injury can even compound should we learn just how mistaken we were about what we could and could not see.

Trauma is both shared and intensely private, something to interpret in popular stories that bridge the gap. For survivors of rape and other warlike violence, then, Gothic stories either concern trauma as something that is understandably difficult for them to share—like Kagero from Ninja Scroll despite Jubei having witnessed it firsthand—or that they were traumatized in ways we can scarce imagine even if they did share whatever we saw ourselves; i.e., sometimes, this trauma cannot be perfectly understood, even when it is told to us in thunderously intense forms: our trauma overlaps, but is simultaneously unique from both vantage points—that of the hero and his lady to rescue, except he’s also traumatized. When Sarah Conor tells Kyle Reese, for instance, “Your world is pretty terrifying!” her idea of his world is a dream, a mere shadow of what he actually survived when trying to see through his eyes (and he hers):

All the same, Kyle cannot fully process her trauma as a female domestic who, at one point, feared him as the killer gunning for her (and doubles bearing her name) being announced around the clock during a 24-hour news cycle: he looks human, but she sees a monster (failing to recognize the actual terminator in the bargain). The shared trauma, in both their cases, comes not from its strict accuracy but from the painful realization that one’s own life is simultaneously charmed and false on either side of a breakthrough, but nevertheless surrounded by trauma that impairs you through the people you meet and care about. Such confusions becomes commonplace even during vicarious, imaginary dialogs under more operatic settings that, thanks to state interference, aren’t always under our control. Indeed, they are made under conditions that inspire feelings that take us seemingly out of control (through heroic language) to process an exit strategy inside colonized spheres of entertainment: the Gothic disco as dangerous precisely because it speaks to abuses we are drawn towards in theatrical forms that are closely monitored by police agents listening in, but also walking amongst us.

To that, we’re going to examine my empathizing with Cuwu as two traumatized workers formulating a combined pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., through the sharing of The Terminator and Ninja Scroll to communicate performative arrangements of unequal power amounting to at-time-times painful conversations about trauma. The aim wasn’t to torture ourselves purely for its own sake, but to understand things outside our own realms of experience during calculated risks (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM): sometimes the damsel doesn’t want to be rescued, but “raped” (except no danger is actually present).

Shared between us, these therapeutic stages helped us achieve (a)sexual catharsis through trauma bonding in psychosexual rituals/expressions of war and rape that speak out against the state and its police agents; i.e., as frequently disguised in the very markers of abuse, resistance and power that drew us towards them to start with. It becomes something to perform and play with, sometimes literally (we’ll give an example of this briefly when we examine Doki Doki Literature Club [2015]—a videogame example of the same basic rape fantasies that The Terminator and Ninja Scroll illustrate). Cuwu was entirely clear (and incredibly outspoken) about how they felt; they hated cops but loved performing these complicated fantasies, which led me to think of the above examples when relating to them through my own trauma as something I was drawn towards with Jadis as their Gothic princess. After escaping Jadis’ “castle” (a run-down Florida duplex), Cuwu played mother (mommy dom) to me and I was, at least part of the time, their dominator and willing pet. Even so, the vector for this continuous swapping of dominant/submissive roles partly involved the same stories we shared between ourselves.

So before we delve into my admittedly complicated relationship with Cuwu through Gothic media, we’ll want to consider the nature of Gothic stories as chaotic liminal spaces; i.e., stages to share and process trauma together over time, which are themselves simultaneously occupied by corrupt, liminal markers of trauma: monsters that, when abused, half-disguise and half-advertise class betrayal. State subterfuge cannot monopolize such language, so it thrives on sowing doubt through the presence of a potential invader who simultaneously polices other members inside a seemingly besieged fortress. As something to cultivate within the theatre of such places, radical empathy can shape our own views about canon as something to reclaim, informing personal/collective boundaries and lines in the sand to draw up future agreements and conditions with. This includes questioning the canonical veneration of state paramilitary agents as undermined with what they abuse—i.e., police exceptionalism and tokenized agents of self-policing minority groups wearing revolutionary uniforms in bad faith; e.g., TERFs acting like Amazons: out from a dark and savage “past,” they return to said “past” once rescued and rape it all over again inside the present space and time:

(artist: Luigiix)

Before we proceed, let’s also briefly reconsider state violence at large, seeing how it’s largely what we’ll be focusing on through our own stabs at radical empathy through Gothic stories and heroic-monstrous language. As we’ve already explored in our thesis, but also manifesto (“Critiquing Amazons as Liminal Expression”), and will explore in Volume Three (especially in Chapter Two), cops are not your friends; they serve the state and the state is the enemy. In turn, the state and various multi-media networks and corporations churn out badass monstrous “copaganda” that justify/fetishize police “corruption” and monopolize state violence against workers and nature through monstrous-heroic canonical language. They combine against a demonized, infantilized population of reprobate victims that aren’t allowed to fight back or defend themselves (which, in reality, is the state functioning by design, not by accident or flaw). However nice your local sheriff may be, the state monopolizes and glorifies police violence (and uniforms) while treating the violence of you defending yourself as a death warrant. When threatened or feeling threatened, cops will empty their magazines into you (as their “warrior” training tells them to), then go home and hug their wife; if pressed, they’ll invoke DARVO—or cry “corruption!”

Skip Intro—re: the maker of an extensive YouTube series on copaganda—calls this relationship a Faustian bargain, one enacted between the audience and the police through copaganda. As the state is always in crisis, it always needs a victim, making bargains with it extremely dangerous (Promethean). Yet, police canon is also black-and-white, with any forays into grey area reinforcing the status quo through manufactured tensions between different worker groups. It uses fear and dogma to menticide the audience, effectively lying to them to enable the state functioning as intended: through our aforementioned bourgeois trifectas, monopolies and profit motive. Class traitors wearing increasingly fascist uniforms monopolize violence, terror and morphological expression against other workers. The degree to said betrayal is a Morton’s Fork (meaning the outcome doesn’t change): worker exploitation, generally at the hands of other workers preventing solidarity while posturing as heroes.

(source: Facebook)

State abuse/police violence is a very broad topic, and we’ll continue to cover its Gothic execution and countering throughout the rest of the book. As we do, keep this in mind as we move through the postscript and onto the synthesis roadmap: heteronormativity and the colonial binary synthesize police behaviors through canonical praxis, which uses Gothic poetics to condition dimorphic sexual violence through a Cartesian, settler-colonial mindset:

• men (or beings acting like men) become violent, taught to show force and masculine dominance—to make war and rape, then lie about it in heroic-monstrous language; to be hard, rigid, infantilized penetrators competing against civilians (and nature) in an us-versus-them game of regularized, life-and-death confrontations over everyday things.
• women (or beings treated “like women/as feminine”) serve as chattel slaves that receive systemic male abuse within a bizarre paradox: the monstrous-feminine. Women are both demons and damsels who seemingly can’t be strong or create (works of art), yet must also a) look after men who—despite their brawn—cannot care for themselves nor establish meaningful relationships outside of systemic coercion, and b) spawn and raise the male bloodline while men busy themselves making war against women/monstrous-feminine, nature-aligned agents who do challenge the settler-colonial status quo.
• Trans, intersex, non-binary and otherwise gender-non-conforming beings internalize tremendous amounts of guilt, self-hatred, and imposturous/unwelcome feelings; i.e., as corrupt and monstrous-feminine, but also something for state agents to blend in with, mimicking rebellious factions occupying the same complicated shadow zone; e.g., subjugated Amazons serving as state infiltrators to dominate nature anew.

From a canonical standpoint, these gendered categories have moderate and reactionary variants, in which moderates encourage and enable reactionary behaviors whenever canon is camped: open aggression, condescension, reactionary indignation and DARVO. In turn, these behaviors happen according to the class/cultural tensions of competing synthetic oppositional groupings during oppositional praxis’ Six Doubles and their Gothic-poetic mode of expression (the means, materials and methods of study). Regardless of the exact proponents, the dimorphic, heteronormative/Cartesian nature of canon has a profound impact on how its associate violence is viewed and carried out simultaneously within Gothic theatre. Precisely because it is liminal—and liminal expression relays through oppositional praxis—engagement with the Gothic mode must be considered as potentially compromised; i.e., vis-à-vis the potential for various betrayals.

For example, men in/through Gothic canon see women (and other monstrous-feminine) as soft and fearsome (“the enemy is both weak and strong”) but also alien (undead), animal and demonic—doubly so if they stand out, let alone refuse to comply with authority (castration/emasculation fears). Meanwhile, the presence of dislocated, counterfeit rape denotes a ghost of the counterfeit that female/feminized workers want to survive and heal from. This includes whenever they encounter a perceived threat: the state as fearsome—the police as false protectors or people associated with the police, generally as victimized subordinates—but also workers conveyed as fearsome through state propaganda; i.e., the good, the bad, and the ugly of oppositional praxis when preventing rape and war as things to tolerate or reject. Its execution becomes a liminal, messy ordeal, which means that healing from rape through Gothic expression is equally liminal and messy insofar as these stories are shared and experienced through a tenuous, and at times incredibly fragile, pedagogy of the oppressed.

We’ve discussed how power and resistance operate through Gothic poetics in the same doubled, paradoxical spaces. A kind of conversational theatre, the dialogic is disjointed but ubiquitous. Genuine rape and violence exist everywhere in America and Americanized countries; they’re also doubled in Gothic canon, made fun of in blind parodies that ultimately serve as little more than rape apologia. At the same time, the paradox of ironic rape fantasies is legitimately proletarian—i.e., affording gender trouble as a parodic, psychosexual means of subverting stereotypes, exposing enemies, and expressing our trauma, dysphoria and euphoria by putting “rape” in quotes. Under such liminal conditions, something as striking and immediate as torn stockings (and a cummy vagina) can become empowering insofar as they challenge the simple commodifying of these areas through canonical media’s targeting of them for heteronormative violence:

(artist: That Hoey Vegan)

Considered through a dialectical-material lens, such an evocative image demonstrates the complicated ability to empower oneself through forbidden expressions of sexuality that are objectifying but nonetheless aid the model in finding some measure of catharsis, thus empowerment through psychosexual exhibits of various kinds:

• “flashing” exhibitionism (exhibit 53)
• private/public nudism (exhibit 101b)
• “breeding” kinks (exhibit 87a)
• rape play/consent-non-consent (exhibit 46d; re: “Dark Shadows“)

These forms of revolutionary cryptonymy and other “ravishing” games intimate (a)sexual catharsis through Gothic boundary-setting exercises that reassure traumatized workers they are safe from social-sexual violence as an ever-present threat; i.e., sensing the constant advertisement of nonstop crisis and societal decay through “gargoyles” that, when viewed, promise compelled boundaries (segregation) and unironic power abuse sanctioned through state dialogs and executed through various proponents of tacit-to-explicit state mandates; i.e., those lurking in the working class, the media, and the paramilitary/military sectors of a given population.

The pedagogy of the oppressed is formed in opposition according to heroic language, configured under duress amid suggestions of state infiltration: oscillations between hero and villain, but also savior and rapist. Opposite the class-conscious worker and their poetic, cryptomimetic sculpting of sex-positive egregores (and their subsequent, partially-buried trauma), you have the false-conscious, bad-faith efforts of the class traitor as wearing masks (often, as we shall explore in Volume Three, of famous monster types while also posturing as activists; i.e., gobstopper masks and disguise pastiche of state impostors/parasites—exhibit 100a3). These traitors are a socio-materially diverse group that include standard-issue “weird canonical nerds” and white, heteronormative reactionaries, but also fetishized minorities (token police, including hauntological iterations like the witch cop—something we’ll examine in Volume Three, Chapter Four) and assimilated activists.

For example, TERFs adopt assimilative rape fantasies, but also facilitate them for those in power—e.g., Ghislaine Maxwell for Princess Charles (Dreading, 2023). Girl bosses also exude “phallic” (traditionally masculine and bellicose) tendencies stemming from penis “envy” and rape trauma having become weaponized by ubiquitous torture porn constantly triggering them to behave in ways useful to the state; i.e., by triangulating against state enemies (which is a stressful activity for all parties involved, leading to nothing but stress and harm) through subjugated forms of rebellion. Meanwhile, straight men have gender envy and war/rape fears, which both groups project onto their assigned bourgeois subordinates/proletarian victims: the “prison sex” mentality. Once funneled through them, pro-state propaganda becomes Marx’s aforementioned nightmare “dressed up”; re:

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 (source: “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” 1852).

“Like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” It is a sobering concept whose dangerous re-investigation requires bravery and caution: Under Capitalism, the notion that people do remarkably awful things to each other is a historical-material fact, one induced by Capitalism as a structure. Do not rely on the better angels of peoples’ natures, especially empty heroic platitudes and veiled/non-empty threats administered by reactionaries, moderates or cops (actual or figurative)!

Historical materialism is very much a vicious cycle of monopolized state violence, terror, and morphology stuck on repeat, including its nightmarish ambiguities, liminalities, egregores and deceptions. As police states oscillate between neoliberal and fascist forms, police agents go from sex pests to sex fiends in service of the state—dutifully attacking the state’s enemies by becoming soldiers, but also soldiers-in-disguise: cops, detectives, good Samaritans, etc, as undercover through monstrous-heroic costumes. On a shared stage of Gothic poetics, the state’s bad-faith contributions spill out and into a messy civil war of spies, police and infiltrators who exchange their ability to love for their ability to protect the state from its assigned enemies. DARVO becomes common, labeling labor/antifascist movements as “terrorist” organizations. In turn, this plays out in fantastical, brutal forms that intimate state abuse as lurking close by through Gothic displacements that disassociate war and rape as committed by “foreign” police agents; e.g., the black penitent, blackguard, succubus, or death knight, etc.

(artist: Ayami Kojima)

Whether to illustrate or perform, neither tactic is strictly a state instrument. Indeed, for the rest of this postscript, we’ll ping-pong between two genres of the Gothic that employ heroic misuse in ways we can reclaim by using Gothic consumption to relate to each other in stories haunted by the consequence of risk, but also inaction as something to temper with fresh courage: the dark fantasy of Ninja Scroll and the dystopian, technophobic science fiction in James Cameron’s Terminator (and assorted offshoots) as a complicated step in the right direction. Cuwu was clearly the inspiration for this postscript; i.e., according to a shared but unevenly experienced and understood sense of domestic abuse when presented by me to them in Gothic stories covering war and rape in more outlandish and intensely imaginary forms. As such, there are elements of my close-reading style present in the remainder of the postscript, but these are meant to highlight various concerns that would have been on my mind when sharing said stories with Cuwu (and people like them); i.e., those who ultimately were more traumatized than I was, and whose pedagogy of the oppressed was communicated through the trading of psychosexual, operatic stories passed back and forth. There’s a constant, hyperviligent sense of weighing in regards to what is being considered, performed, or otherwise conveyed, but also an overwhelming desire to relax and let one’s guard down (doubly so for those who disassociate facing trauma).

Victims of past trauma, then, become drawn to paradox—as trapped between performances of pure hero and pure villain, wherein “rape” makes the damsel feel more safe through calculated risk than strict black-and-white scenarios of total safety or danger do. The latter two become untrustworthy and uncomfortable, whereas ludo-Gothic BDSM becomes an effective means of managing complicated feelings; i.e., of control in the presence of uncertainty as something to put “on the hip” through active performance and play. Doing so more accurately describes how the performer feels from moment to moment in relation to the world around them as duplicitous vis-à-vis the shadow of police corruption. Being “raped” via the baton or “lance” becomes the best way to confirm. And all of this becomes the pedagogy of the oppressed as a communal form of investigative power exchange.

As we proceed, I want you to consider is how my present thinking was shaped; i.e., in relation to my sharing of these stories with other workers: as a communal healing process informed by a learned mistrust of their surroundings, but also fed on them as things to later return to and subvert while surrounded by potentially harmful copies. Or as my thesis argued, “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” (source). I cannot begin to overstate how messy and painful healing from rape/power abuse is; it and the pedagogy of the oppressed are a tremendously fragmented and at times even erratic process. And both are motivated by theatrical mechanisms of force that if not inherently harmful, certainly have the potential to lead us into dangerous spheres of influence. Not all workers take the noble route, or have good intentions; except the oscillation between friend and foe only remains, intensifying according to complied hero fantasies that interrogate power through “rape” as something to execute.

About that. Before I discuss Cuwu and my relationship with them through these stories, I first want to consider how these stories molded my own thinking when shared continuously between myself and many workers; i.e., how I think about rape and violence in Gothic media as an ongoing exchange that is hardly set or safe. My examination of these stories, post hoc, isn’t to simply consider their repacking as something to sell back to us then imitate through the ghost of the counterfeit (the falseness of state power but the lingering of its abuses through alien sensations), but to entertain how this dark reimaginating allows them to exist in popular culture at all; i.e., to ask how its tangibility grants the distribution of police trauma as something to share, discuss and reflect on, insofar as it concerns all workers living within state territories as affected in a variety of ways.

Rape and disempowerment were certainly things Cuwu and I discussed in types of theatre normally policed in relation to those who have survived what some workers (myself, in this case) can only speculate on through Gothic poetics. That is, the stories we shared weren’t so different than them having me fuck them a particular way during rape fantasies we collectively decided on; e.g., choking or sleep sex. Prior to those rituals’ deliberate negotiation and gingerly execution, sharing a moment of Gothic peril can bridge the gap through a shared audience; i.e., by inviting dialogs between them about sexual violence that Cuwu and I eventually entertained in a more participatory and playful fashion. I can say without shame that I was the instrument of Cuwu’s “rape” as informed by popular horror stories we consumed separately (Cuwu loved Lucifer, 2016)and shared together for inspiration. Some, like Ninja Scroll, were rougher than others:

(exhibit 15a: Genma from Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll—in disguise as the Lord Chamberlain, having his way with a palace concubine. As leader of a brutal gang of rogue ninjas, Genma is our recuperated Nazi. He rules from the shadows with forbidden magic using fear and dogma; his power is literally necromantic resurrection; his fascistic, thieving violence is deceptive, but also standard-issue—for the actual “warring states” period, but also its many reincarnations in late 20th/21st century popular media.)

Rough or not, such dialogs remain incredibly vital, insofar as their official discouragement (and subsequent silence) only leads to harm on a genocidal scale. Behind closed doors, for example, cops underreport their own “chattel rape” abuse towards those allegedly under their “protection”—with “to serve and protect” and similar slogans embossed on their prowler doors being constitutionally for the state, not the people (or nature). Cops can marry you, then kill you and lie about it and nothing happens; they can do this in public and get off with paid administrative leave before getting rehired somewhere else. It’s literally protocol. Meanwhile, damning data such as “40%[2] of police families experience domestic abuse” or “1 in 5 women are raped” is a gross underestimation, wherein decades-old studies hampered by or actually performed by the police use language that limits the ability to even express what violence and rape are. It’s misleading. The real numbers are far worse, but also unknown—fudged to keep the image of the state strong but also squeaky clean (a phenomenon performed by neoliberals and fascists alike).

Clearly people need to be able to interrogate their own trauma, but also negotiate with it vis-à-vis ludo-Gothic BDSM as divorced from state power. The problem is, various forms of potentially sex-positive BDSM, kink and fetishes are regularly appropriated, reducing their critical awareness/teaching potential through assimilations of rape theatre (controlled opposition). Coercively sublimated in ways that uphold the status quo through bad play’s guilty pleasures, these domination bids threaten servile emotional manipulation and internalized reactive abuse (which we’ll examine more thoroughly in Volume Three, Chapter Two). For minorities and queer people, assimilation fantasies become a deadly and embarrassing game of compromise: tokenism through class, race and culture betrayal. The game-in-question offers a magnified form of exclusive (rare) promotion, limited to the “special” slaves; i.e., any self-policing Judases working within the minority group(s) wishing to escape reactive abuse for self-preservation and comfort. Such illusions hide the reality behind a screen: that things are somehow better for everyone, when in reality they are provided to a small group of elevated slaves afforded special positions. In spite of these disparities, the system as a means of division and exploitation is still very much in place. So are the urges to interrogate trauma, albeit using imperfect forms that leave much to be desired.

In spite of these praxial complexities, such oscillating subterfuges bring us to Gothic illusions that—through tremendous romance and Gothic reinvention—still communicate inherited anxieties regarding the present. For example, Cameron’s Terminator yields a very dystopian translation of the American police. Their hyperreal, posthuman quality in the film speaks to the replacement of the human with a “human” counterfeit tied to a devastated map of empire that lacks even the rudiments of humane programming. As the Imperial Boomerang flies home, its goal is simply to deceive—a highly advanced infiltration unit hiding in plain sight in the places where people usually gather to let off steam, but also seek out forbidden, psychosexual pleasures that serve a decidedly medicinal function:

Like Cameron’s ill-fated Tech-Noir disco, popular media at large can often feel infiltrated, but also forgone—despite its necessity—to be corrupted by the presence of trauma as a paradoxical healing agent. In Ninja Scroll’s imaginary Japan, the demons are everywhere, but look oddly human. In such an uncertain and dangerous world, a woman’s lived reality is that Jubei appears (at first glance) as much a threat to Kagero as her rapist does; the same goes for Sarah and her own “love triangle.” To that, Ninja Scroll offers up a careful balance in Jubei Kibagami. Precisely the kind of hero prayed for persons who are normally subjected to state abuses, he’s Superman, but more rugged and conspicuously surrounded by a world that is far less perfect than his relatively polite warrior’s code:

In Byron’s words, though, “I want a hero” sadly becomes as much a Judas’ refrain as it does a call to rebellion when no such hero is actually present. Oppressed workers consume the stories, but they often submit to state mandates through various concessions, especially when they have been denied the ability to experiment; i.e., in ways that go beyond Jubei’s patently sexless approach. Indeed, oppressed groups don’t rush into danger so much as they aim to negotiate with theatrical doubles of “danger” through optional sexuality amid Gothic theatrics: there is often an asexual component, insofar as psychosexuality exists adjacent to harm in ways that treat sex as a performance of death, violence and, yes, rape. Ludo-Gothic BDSM camps that, too, by playing with it, which can be stressful.

This becomes yet another reality under Capitalism, one to interrogate through the opening of sexualized channels of performance common in Gothic stories; i.e., experienced as much through open forms of “rape,” “murder” and frank, intense BDSM as through run-of-the-mill damsels waiting to be rescued. Relying on the rescuer too completely can be an issue, but likewise the dungeon fantasy demands a degree of moderation, lest it become a dark romance presented as blind comfort food: shared between parties where trauma is fully repressed (e.g., Radcliffe). Because praxis and its synthesis live inside Capitalism, it behooves us to look at the structure as it lives and breathes, including anyone trapped inside its mechanisms as things to recreate in theatrical forms. When workers synthesize praxis, they cultivate the Superstructure inside Capitalism; this happens between workers and the natural-material world operating in continuum. This “sticky” relationship needs to be considered in its totality for iconoclastic praxis and worker solidarity to occur.

In other words, it’s entirely worthwhile for us to ask how different people (with their traumas) relate to Gothic stories, but especially their monsters, heroes and haunts as things to consume, create and perform ourselves. For any who have been raped, a hero (or heroine) will generally be monstrous in ways that might seem alien to those who have never experienced trauma themselves; but bonding through trauma is generally lopsided to some extent. While the Superstructure shapes material production through the Base, proletarian praxis through allows workers in uneven arrangements of trauma to shape, acquire, and learn from the world in ways that aim to stall, if not outright prevent regular abuses under Capitalism—real abuses, but also (re)imagined abuses as wrought through iconoclastic Gothic poetics of differing flavors; e.g., Jubei’s hypermasculine violence versus the Eight Devils of Kimon in defense of the ninja girl, Kagero; or Kyle Reese vs the terminator to defend Sarah Connor from a gruesome death: “He’ll wade through you, reach down her throat, and pull her fucking heart out!” Regardless of the time and place, demon lovers (and sex) in Gothic fiction classically synonymize with unironic harm—not just rape but murder and disembowelment as staged, granting a sense of relief not unlike our aforementioned danger disco. To it, ludo-Gothic BDSM and camp are often strict:

Think of it as the Western saloon. Extreme violence isn’t simply expected in such dark, erotic, musical places (many serving as brothels for settler-colonial agents); it’s entirely the point and serves a profoundly (a)sexual function: wish fulfillment and guilty pleasure; e.g., the punishing of the rapist after a rape-like performance that clearly has room for degrees of accuracy and poetic liberties. For any oppressed who historically endure rape, the hero and the villain of Gothic stories help open up cathartic channels of conversation concerning everyday perils that remain overshadowed by heterosexual enforcement amid settler-colonial guilt (usually with various other anxieties woven in).

For the state, the dehumanized cops-in-disguise work as gargoyle-esque replicas meant to scare us into submission; i.e., by either introducing an infiltrator into oppressed venues where rape is discussed, or suggesting one. Regardless, it walks among us like a mirror that reflects the state’s hidden-yet-visible workings on our vulnerable, developing minds; like Macbeth’s question to the dagger of the mind, we’re not sure if we even see a threat—i.e., if it is directed at us or if it is even real:

“Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?” (source).

Strong and brutal as he already was, Macbeth wasn’t even sure what he was looking at when going to kill King Duncan. Neither was Kyle Reese, Sarah, or us completely sure when swimming inside the shadowy back alleys of Cameron’s Los Angeles. A murky-yet-glistening dislocation of state power and artifice, The Terminator gives rise to Skynet, an invisible, legendary foe meant to surveille citizens using a camera lens disguised as a “human” face, berserk dressed up as a false animal; i.e., “metal, surrounded by living tissue” as a mass-produced product “grown for the cyborgs.”

As such, the Imperial Boomerang comes out of the future of what is now our own past (re: Jameson), colonizing its own subjects through hyperreal decay and paranoia as charted through a variety of “pasts”: mise-en-abyme relayed between fictions like Ninja Scroll and The Terminator having a similar flavor of rape fantasy despite their obvious spatio-temporal discrepancies. Both worlds are filled with violent killers and spies foisting themselves on those merely trying to survive, but especially women as historically vulnerable entities under such conditions. Whereas Ninja Scroll feudalizes Japan in an openly magical past, Cameron’s take on the Gothic Romance (and liminal hauntology of war) updates the technological singularity for a 1980s, post-nuclear world, one where the legacy of artificial intelligence and the Manhattan Project have doomed the present. Atomized and scattered, many different “possible futures” loom over those living on the other side of the Pacific—a war for survival decided in a series of nightly combats not once, but over and over again. As I write in “Gothic Content in The Terminator/T2” (2019):

Gothically, a reoccurring theme in the Terminator franchise, from 1984 onward, is survival—outliving an unavoidable “past,” in the present. A death omen, Cameron’s nightmare is Orwellian; set in 1984, L.A. (and by extension, civilization as we know it) is invaded by “one possible future” (a “past” version of itself that has yet to materialize). Cameron populates his world with standard Gothic fare: the animated miniature or statue. Centuries prior, these would have been Horace Walpole’s subjects, literally walking out of their own paintings; or, suits of armor walking around, without a human body inside. In The Terminator, the likeness of a human is grafted into a walking suit of armor […] Given eyes of their own, they look back at us—at least, we think they do. What post-human horror lurks behind that carmine sphere? (source).

Even when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s terminator is reprogrammed “for good,” the reoccurring nightmare lies in the state’s untrustworthy (and inherently violent) nature, its territory shrouded in darkness but also piercing observation lights:

Skynet isn’t a dumb-machine, but “a new order of intelligence” founded on militaristic, human ways of thinking and conquering the world: “It decided our fate in a microsecond. Extermination.” Capitalism is Skynet unabstracted in totality—the metal eye of conquest steering Cartesian thought on auto-pilot, conquering all of nature versus simply part of it. An abstraction of capital, Skynet provides smaller abstractions[3] begot from a local police state: patrol machines built in automated factories, but also paramilitary machine men with glowing-red camera eyes that spy for a secret police department during military urbanism run amok: “During the vision, everything is smoky and dark, but also a ruin of present-day L.A.; the giant machines have red-and-blue lights. Comparable to present-day police cars, their purpose is war-like, out-of-control” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Textual Elements in The Terminator,” 2019).

Vis-à-vis my thesis critiques on Botting and Jameson, it’s incredibly important not to supply special credence to a particular genre’s time and place. To that, Kawajiri’s imaginary feudal Japan (and army of psychosexual ninja demons) are also abstractions of capital; i.e., produced nearly a decade after Cameron’s world and in a decidedly antiquated approach. Yet, both he Cameron conjure up the shadow of a medieval, castle-like police state that entertains Gothic rape fantasies that serve an operatic “release valve” in times of socio-material uncertainty and collapse. Whereas Skynet kills the state’s enemies in the shadow of a former nuclear menace that mirrors America’s current war games, the Devils of Kimon posture as a fascist force that remains in Japan to this day. “They look human!” Kyle says of the 800 series; so do the Devils. In either case, the direction and location of the threat has become abstracted, oscillating inside a circular ruin shared between authors across space and time. This is done less to terrify the occupants of the present than explain their complex feelings from moment to moment, story to story; i.e., the terror once felt by victims of state abuse during Pax Americana now inflicted on everyone else to a higher degree than ever before. In a nice, postpunk twist, Cameron’s hauntology has another trick up its sleeve: disco-in-disguise; i.e., our aforementioned “danger disco” as an obviously musical place, one to go to and partake in psychosexual indulgence presented in all the usual formulas: a gun fight.

To that, I’d like to focus on Cameron’s more musical approach through the danger disco of the 1980s, then end the postscript by focusing on my relationship to Cuwu through Ninja Scroll and Doki Doki Literature Club; i.e., as more openly erotic and fetishized stories centered around sexual violence to camp, which informed the traumas in our own daily lives as we interacted back and forth during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a burgeoning idea that had yet to come to fruition.

Returning to Cameron’s excellent sleight-of-hand (and police-light pareidolia), his commentary on neoliberal hegemony is already a perilous ordeal, requiring allegory to disguise it as something other than a direct query (which would translate to worker solidarity and direct action); the subterfuge calls for a musical space for play inside that yields monstrous, nostalgic elements: the danger disco as a venue for persons seeking treatment regarding past run-ins with power abuse through liminal theatrics that provide an operatic backdrop; i.e., a place of sex and sin to consolidate and execute calculated risks in heroic-monstrous language.

Tech-Noir (and similar establishments) are where the police-in-plainclothes infiltrate as undercover shadow agents, surveilling citizens in parallel societies that try to escape the weight of an oppressive state by having fun, but also conspiring in plain sight within surveilled spaces: the café, disco, jazz club, bar/dive, church, brothel, music hall, theatre, library, etc, as heavily policed/forbidden sites of taboo entertainment, education and congregation (the closing of such places being a common colonizing tactic: the intelligencia purge). Postpunk, then, becomes a revolutionary façade within tyrannical, dishonest worlds that are already falling apart over and over inside themselves (the infernal concentric pattern). Here are some examples inspired by The Terminator or in the same vein of canceled future common in noir stories, cyberpunk dystopias, and Gothic retro-futures; i.e., of the hauntological operatic variety shared since Antiquity with various mixtures of music, theatrical combat, heroic deeds, monstrous sensations, storybook apocalypse scenarios (the fate of the world hanging in the balance of true love, mid-invasion and mid-occupation), and kayfabe tropes:

(exhibit 15b1: Camp is something to “play out” during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as half-real, onstage and off. As such, the cyberpunk/tech-noir’s slow-motion, disco-lit “danger zone” is a common, potboiler trope of the game-like risks present within daily life.

Furthermore, as something often expressed through ritualized love/death inside parallel space, these expressions of the human condition and its uneven socio-material conditions become infused with an updated hauntological spirit of darkness well known to Gothic tales [which, out from the disintegration of the John Ford Western and its brightly-lit chase scenes and saloon brawls, survived in the “noir” genre from the early 20th century before updating to a technophobic, neon-lit variant during the 1980s. Such variety codified into both the monster-rock vampire’s Neo-Gothic castle of Castlevania but also a form of cyberpunk/tech-noir pastiche stretching into the 2010s]. Their own presence indicates class war as remediated through popular story types told in praxial opposition. Infiltrators/imposters remain an essential part of the code, contributing to the uncertain feeling of vague, alien, ubiquitous danger for the oppressor/oppressed group facing off on the dance floor.

Historically the oppressed group of Gothic fiction would have been white cis-het women reading about themselves in Gothic novels, but they would have always had relative privilege for being white and cis-het. When future groups fought for their rights—and queer discourse started to emerge from the shadows in the 1970s, in particular—the mantle of oppression would extend to various minorities voicing their abuse during moral panics committed by token oppressors. Indeed, said panics would be commonly imposed by white cis-het women gatekeeping more marginalized groups; e.g., queer identities and sex workers targeted by white Christian women, but also second wave feminists during the Satanic panic of the 1980s also attacking people of color and religious minorities.

Similar to other monstrous language, “Satanic” symbolism is generally a stand-in for various out-groups that have become romanticized—by in-groups, but also by themselves using reclaimed language whose liminality extends to queer symbols like the rainbow as something to enjoy but also potentially endorse when no hard stance is diegetically present. Doing so is not uncommon, the context of queer self-preservation occupying the same discourse as a heteronormative desire for profit:

For example, TWRP’s “Starlight Brigade” [2019, above] arguably straddles the fence because its parallel music video/collab by Dan Avidan—and Knights of the Light Table [the latter’s animation inspired by Roger Dean, Hayao Miyazaki, and Moebius for all of their visual inspiration]: producer Patrick Stannard, director India Swift, and art director Michael Doig—presents a reinvented nostalgia as something to enjoy for all audiences; i.e., without saying the quiet part of queer oppression or resistance out loud. Instead, its mixed message defaults to the monomyth of a centrist, good-vs-evil tale: an anxious young man teaming up with a group of misfits to save the world from “pure evil” [of the Sauron sort]. Their combined success and miraculous destruction of vaguely fascist war [reduced to basic geometric shapes] occurs through self-belief that serves to further a kind of “wishful thinking.” Faith is rewarded with material change, the warships standing in for psychomachic sentiment; i.e., representing a figurative struggle like Star Wars does.

Whereas some iterations of Star Wars communicate how rebellions and violence go hand-in-hand [with Andor in particular showing how uprisings are historically armed with stolen weapons, ships and equipment, exhibit 21b], TWRP’s music video lacks a spoken dialog on this subject. It doesn’t even call the good guys rebels; they’re just child soldiers, ostensibly of a “paladin/good soldier” class [which Voltron deliberately called themselves, the babyfaces policing “outer space” by cleansing it of monstrous-feminine and “corrupt” forces—capped off by “punching the Nazi” to qualify their war as “good”].

But even if the makers of the video were clear about the dialectical-material status of their heroes, the “Voltron problem” would still persist: an absent material critique, one where many different creators [not just TWRP, Knights of the Light Table and Dan Avidan, a cis-het man] aim to recruit queer groups through the inclusion of a queer potential that can serve the status quo when a vocal resistance to power is not present. When non-queer creators do this, it’s queer bait; when queer authors participate, it’s assimilation. But sometimes, the desire to voice one’s oppression is told through common stories; i.e., by reclaiming the language of the oppressor class [which, yes, includes Voltron pastiche]. However, that subversion still needs to involve a process consciously driven by a desire to alter socio-material conditions: to push away from the status quo and its exploitation of workers behind the usual groups benefitting inside these stories and in real life. Queer allies, especially well-to-do ones, need to be mindful of this in regards to peace and tolerance in the face of deplorable socio-material conditions; e.g., Tom Taylor’s 2023 writeup, “Steely Dan vs John Lennon,” reporting how John Lennon’s “Imagine” [1971] came across as more than a little naïve according to Steely Dan’s “Only A Fool Would Say That”:  

Their 1972 track, “Only a Fool Would Say That” was written in response to Lennon’s parade of peace. It looks at idealism through the practical eyes of folks on the street. “You do his nine to five,” they sing, “drag yourself home half alive, and there on the screen, a man with a dream.” And with that, you get a sense of how grating and vacuous they thought that Lennon’s “Imagine” campaign had become [source].  

In other words, it can’t be vague or mixed in its messaging. For resistance-in-solidarity to work, it needs to be direct, informed and conscious [of class, gender, religion and race as intersecting forces].

Vagueness is a shared problem among children’s cartoons and Gothic fiction. Often only the basic language [of an alien aesthetic of paralysis] is present—incredibly expressive from a visual and emotional standpoint, but still having to be occupied by warring groups during class struggle as a liminal outcome. Indeed, liminal expression is a regular occurrence in Gothic discourse, existing in shared parallel spaces using the same contested language’s emotional turmoil. French New Wave’s “Darkwave” subgenre, for instance, has the potential for critical power but also critical blindness. Their mutual potential within hauntological expression threatens the present as something to examine through an at-times-unreliable critique: ghosts of the counterfeit that yield a musical signature, which—as Derrida hints at through Spectres of Marx—has become something to listen to during hauntology[4] as a Gothic revival; e.g., French New Wave music appearing in videogames that consciously imitated older forerunners: James Cameron’s take on the imperiled, “tech-noir” discotheque borrowed from ’70s technophobia and older British counterculture given a fresh coat of hauntological paint in 1984, before reappearing decades later in Drive, 2011, then Hotline Miami, in 2012; on and on.)

(exhibit 15b2: Just as Cameron was inspired by Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner spearheading a whole train of older Gothic stories into the 1980s, each outing depicted a blood-splashed opera announced using outrageous violence, gloomy visuals and dated music. Even so, the sheer ultraviolence of the 1980s became its “own” style to emulate as a dark mode of critical expression during oppositional praxis; i.e., free for auteurs to interpret differently by reinventing the allegorical mask of attractive fatal nostalgia. 

For example, Nicolas Winding Refn’s homage to Cameron cheerfully drops his own masked vigilante inside the same Hollywood setting: Los Angeles. This time, the hero is a cold, seemingly unfeeling protector of women and children; he resembles Sarah’s handsome, human protector while using similar tools for the job that Kyle Reese did: the trusty shotgun and stolen getaway vehicle, but also the mask as a metaphor for the persona as something to either discard [or wear] during criminal mayhem.

The fun lies in the cosmetic differences from older works, including the masks. Refn’s “terminator” can’t take off his mask-like face, but wears a Hollywood “crash double” mask on top of a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He’s cold and precise, calmly driving robbers to and from crimes while dodging the cops. Conversely, Cameron’s terminator wears a human mask made of actual flesh [whose bad special effects during the eye surgery scene are actually closer to Ryan Gosling’s studio-grade mask of a policer officer] meant to hide a cybernetic vigilante killer inside the Gothic ball. One commits crimes to enrich covert thieves to the state’s detriment; the other works for the state by pointedly killing women, being identified by the police as a “one-day pattern killer.” Across both stories, the disguise pastiche maintains a thoroughly Gothic flavor.

Whereas Cameron’s material critique lay in the culture of fear surrounding serial killer mania, military urbanism and Cold War anxieties, Refn keeps much of the same violence, pathos, setting and hauntological music, but comments on the “cold-blooded nature of the hero” as a killer-by-design who can still help the usual damsels-in-distress; i.e., as the College song goes, be “a real human being and a real hero.” Within this borrowed spell of nostalgia, there lurks a degree of madness that utterly revels in the opera as nostalgic through the aesthetic bloodbath, but also the music as a means of teleporting “backwards” to a chronotope where such discourse is both welcome and expected. This would be parodied a year later by Dennaton Games, treating the hero’s violent quest as a drug-fueled rampage with less-than-noble intentions. Though undeniably fun, such parodies are prone to become blind, their pastiche “stuck on repeat” while worshipping the reimagined, cryptomimetic past as a product, first and foremost. They can be enjoyed, but should not be endorsed without understanding their deeper context.)

(artist: John Cordero)

So while Cameron’s story is a Gothic fairytale centered around rape, its now-iconic, achingly musical techno-Gothic mythos was still informed by the undeniable presence of concealed, state-level nuclear abuse and decay hidden behind American neoliberalism:

Sarah’s night terrors cannot stop until Skynet is crushed. For that, both [the T-800 and T-1000] must die. Killed, they melt into harmless goo; Sarah faces the shapeless future with a sense of hope. Will Skynet return, regardless? […] I ask this ignoring Cameron’s terrible alternate ending. In it, everything is spelled out—in Utopian fashion by a much-older Sarah; [her son] John becomes a senator and advocates for peace. That’s all good and well. However, it betrays the franchise’s greatest strength: fear and doubt [as a deliberate means of raising class consciousness to combat class dormancy and class traitors]. Our current political climate should prove the future is not set, and in the hands of political agents and military men, Skynet, “a computer defense network built for SAC-NORAD by Cyberdyne Systems,” could always “return” again. The dream never ends, because the fear—of being alive in an uncertain present [within unequal, exploitative media control and material conditions]—is continuously preserved through the things we build and leave behind. That includes Cameron’s fabulous Terminator movies. Rediscovered in the present, these relics come to life, invading us from all directions (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Gothic Content in The Terminator/T2 — part three: Textual Elements in T2,” 2019).

As part of this “dark ’80s” nostalgia, Cameron’s Gothic hauntologies rely on technophobia that is both surprisingly dated, but curiously translates to current misconceptions[5] about technology as a veil for state abuses that we can still discuss in cartoonishly theatrical forms; i.e., the very sorts of theatre overshadowing the lived traumas that individual workers have survived due to systemic implementations that are too grand to easily illustrate. At times, the explanations channel through inherited confusions by which to funnel our pedagogies through. Strict accuracy isn’t the point; the point, from a theatrical stance, is the communication of intense, fearful emotions that progress towards healing from rape inside the darkness as a lived state of mind: to provide the kinds of lived realities that are, themselves, built on shady foundations grasping at hints of the truth through their adjacent falsehoods and phobias.

Despite Cameron treating computers like black magic, his own abstractions don’t serve the state; they convey a presence of unaddressed trauma that sits within confused dialogs that, try as we might, cannot be avoided. The paradoxes become part of the performance, conveying the lived experience of those living within state territories that cast very long shadows. If the Gothic offers anything of value, it’s the ability to express the human condition according to never-ending struggles within an oppressive system’s historical past. As something to reconcile with in dated, inaccurate imaginary forms, one is left juggling perceived impostors with actual persons or entities that mean us harm in connection to the state as a great factory for such deceivers: frauds and conmen, but also assassins and parasites of a more active and directly cutthroat nature. As the prey mechanisms of the heroine project onto the male agents of unknown allegiance, her own fears are informed by the combined alarm fatigue from larger and smaller struggles: inheritance anxiety and survivor’s guilt as a post-WW2 American citizen living in somewhat-distant fear of the Bomb being granted the inconveniently immediate warning of a “one-day pattern killer” broadcast about her on ’80s television: “You’re dead, honey.”

To that, Sarah is clearly a Gothic heroine of the Neo-Gothic (white) sort updated for the late 20th century—i.e., the middle-class “secret princess” with a hidden destiny delivered through a dream-come-true protector. True to form, her fear of rape is fused to then-current-yet-also-dated superstitions (of Cold-War rhetoric scapegoating AI as a rapacious metaphor for unfettered market greed[6] and the Military Industrial Complex that boils over into predatory fears about nuclear Armageddon during peacetime; e.g., GDF’s “NATO Is Risking Nuclear War for Money,” 2023) and alleviated through a psychosexual shock to the system meant to keep her (and us) going. To this, the movie might seem like a total mess borrowed from older sources, one where Cameron patently emulates the threat of nuclear war from earlier apocalyptic science fiction; e.g., The Outer Limits of the 1960s and ripping off Harlan Ellison in particular (David Brennan’s “The Harlan Ellison Dispute,” 2008), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) and Star Wars‘ legendary Death Star bombing foreign populations (as well as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man [1826] beating all these Pygmalions to the punch). Yet, such anxious homages are par for the course under shared material conditions yielding a dark channel of communication; i.e., a shared Gothic nightmare where power and resistance play out on the same disco floor in all the usual ways. Market forces are inherently unequal under Capitalism and lead to tremendous suffering and anxiety but also theatrics as a liminal sphere of expression.

Simply put, the Gothic is where we retreat to interrogate our trauma (and relative guilt, desire, anxiety and other repressed emotions) in relation to other survivors; i.e., to trauma-bond through the usual displays of music, violence and sex. However imperfect it can seem under a magnifying glass, The Terminator is as good a story as any to achieve this end: to broach radical empathy with varying degrees of privilege and oppression among like-minded persons with similar experiences that intersect and diverge. Indeed, I often shared it with others to relate to them through the characters onscreen, but also sponsor activism as something that manifests imperfectly in stories that—through the pedagogy of the oppressed—could speak to our collective troubles inside police states. This includes Cuwu as someone with whom such sharing felt natural, but who currently isn’t a part of my life anymore (their ghost is, exhibit 16b). At times, it really is like dancing with ghosts. While I have been beaten and mentally tortured, for example, I have never been sexually raped; I am AMAB and the odds are simply far lower by any conceivable metric that I would be. However, I know many workers who have been raped. Listening to them has helped radically change my systemically privileged views, but also reflect on my own lived trauma and complex emotional abuse compared to theirs.

For the remainder of the postscript, then, we’ll examine two such workers: Mavis for a quick moment, followed by our star-if-slightly-delayed (off-screen and sporadic) attraction, Cuwu.

Mavis is someone I haven’t mentioned until now, but will mention more throughout this book. They have had countless experiences with rape (dissociation makes you forget or “block out” the trauma, which makes it hard to remember). According to Mavis, rape is awful, but it’s also over quick and you can dissociate (something that plurality allows for); also, according to Mavis, they’d rather experience rape than prolonged mental abuse, the latter which can go on for years like a war of menticidal attrition—including threats of rape amid diminishing returns of genuine care after the initial “love-bombing” phase (say nothing of the historical-material variants if you’re living in someone’s family estate, or equally bad, being shamed, neglected or ignored by what Melissa McEwan calls “rape apologia” or “rape ranking” amid rape culture, 2013).

Speaking from my own experiences, it’s the kind of thing you can’t block out. Over time, this abuse can be “buried alive”—hidden in plain sight all around a “cursed” location littered with markers of power, but also illusions-of-illusions (crypt narrative) of normality that broadcast imprecise ambivalence. It’s precisely these iffy phenomenological disturbances and partial disconnections/connections that one relates to in continuum; i.e., being a part of the space-in-question, the broken home that is nevertheless one’s poisoned wellspring and haunted library of nostalgic storybooks. Trauma lives in the body but also the chronotope as something the body absorbs things from—the haunted house as returned to, feeling uncannily familiar and alien, but also already-occupied by something close-at hand during uncertain, liminal, feudalized ownership (which we’ll discuss more at length when we examine friendly [and unfriendly] ghosts in the Humanities primer, but also the King Diamond rock opera in Volume Three, Chapter One): the fear of inheritance; i.e., Walpole’s idea of a “secret sin; [an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse” from The Mysterious Mother (1768). Except incest isn’t a “pure myth” relegated to Gothic fiction, but precisely the kind of thing experienced by Mavis, Cuwu and people like them (who extrafamilial predators will mark as having survived, and try to exploit them for in the future; i.e., trauma lives inside you, but also follows you like a curse).

Note: In my opinion, the following paragraph is of the most important writing in this volume, if not the whole series. —Perse, 4/7/2025

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate. But undeath is something that can be felt through echoes of ourselves that aren’t diegetically spectral; they feel spectral through an uncanny resemblance, like standing over our own graves. This becomes something to play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM, akin to an (at-times) humorous, even trashy gallows theatre rife with dark, forbidden language: sin, vice, violent sex, all-around death, and other taboo subjects discouraged by privileged (and unimaginative) moderates who historically frame the Gothic as a puerile, good-for-nothing backwater while simultaneously suffering from conservative delusions of privilege and/or tokenism (re: Jameson). In other words, the pedagogy of the oppressed faces its classic foil: tone-policing.

Cuwu was one of my exes, and the sole one living with rape trauma of a sexual nature. As stated earlier in Volume One and in Volume Zero, our relationship was far from perfect. Even so, listening to them about their trauma still changed how I felt about older media, hence the world. When Cuwu and I watched Ninja Scroll, for instance, I knew I was sharing a movie that I had watched for years—had grown up on, in fact. However, I didn’t realize until after how limited and stuck my point of view was; with it, I had never noticed the deeper nuances of the film’s rapacious violence, which could only be seen from a different, ultimately asexual point of view. Being different but also no stranger to rape, Cuwu noticed them immediately. As we watched the movie, I gave Cuwu trigger warnings for the upcoming rape scenes (for which they thanked me). Those bothered them far more than the “manly” violence did, the rape making them “go blank” and dissociate.

After the film was over, we talked about it from Cuwu’s point of view as someone I related to in both sexual and asexual ways. Doing so frankly opened my eyes to what, for them, was an everyday experience: living with the trauma and threat of rape as something for you and others to behold, often as voyeurs, but also as BDSM practitioners fetishizing our own survived abuse in psychosexual, Gothic forms. Many of the fantasies that Cuwu and I played out reflected the sorts of unspoken abuses generally granted some kind of voice in Gothic fictions. The choking hand is, at its most basic level, meant to relieve stress from having seen something stressful that reminds you of an abuser who won’t follow your commands:

For the non- or less-abused, it generally doesn’t register that we are, in fact, watching a rapacious ceremony when we look at eroticized material; and sometimes we see what we think is rape only to be mistaken. Regardless of which, historical materialism has Cartesian dualism, the Gothic chronotope, and the colonial binary reflecting in porn as something to lament, parody or relish in paradoxical ways. “Hardcore” porn, for example, is generally emblematized by penetration as adjacent to violence—if not within the text, than the mind of someone who has survived abuse and seeks it out in some shape or form; this book considers monsters and erotica as part of a larger equation where violence is implied, including artwork and sex work where consent is a seemingly tenuous proposition.

As outlined in our paratextual documents, this book contains no illegal material—no revenge porn, child porn, snuff porn—but it does examine things generally thought of as porn that are unironically violent. It does so in ways we might fail to recognize because canonical porn has been made so normal to us, including humiliating displays and threats of capture and violence. In Gothic stories, these threats become something to play with as a psychosexual means of calculated risk; raw sex and rape fantasies are a common playground for the abused that tries to help us see what they see (and try to express) every day of their lives:

(artist: Babie Biscuittt)

As our thesis argues, this goes well beyond cinema and into videogames. Rather than point to Metroidvania, the example that mostly immediately leaps to mind for me—and one that actually matches the “hard R” approach to rape fantasies seen in The Terminator and Ninja Scroll—is Doki Doki Literature Club. In the holistic spirit of this book, I wanted to mention it quickly as it happens to match both Cuwu’s psychosexual fantasies, but also their intense desire to explore and talk about these things. Then we’ll conclude the postscript by examining my relating to Cuwu through Ninja Scroll and the various things that resulted.

Doki Doki Literature Club has a particular performative focus: the unheimlich, but specifically the ghost as relayed through a particular Gothic meta; i.e., one where sublimation fails and we look at something that isn’t diegetically consensual nor original, but replicated in ways that have become self-aware: a dating simulator that protests its own exploitation (exhibit 16a). Yet the paradox of Gothic rape is that it is “half-real”—written to convey the unspeakable as a fictional event to view voyeuristically from the outside; it also is conveyed by cosplayers, illustrators and other creators who communicate the thrilling proposition of transgressive sex as a kind of “buffer.” Made for them to express themselves with, their liminal expressions violate societal norms to convey alien forms of sex that are actually sex-positive through iconoclastic praxis. Gothic Communism can reunite us with these forms through what we create as acquired by studying older works, voyeuristically flirting with the boundaries of the real and the imagined as constantly reimagined in our favor.

(exhibit 16a: Top-left: source; top-middle: Two Bratty Cats; everything else is from Nisego’s Twitter timeline. “Fun” fact: to beat Doki Doki Literature Club, you have to go into the game’s code and delete Monika, the game’s “Satanic” protagonist; i.e., “killing” Monika in ways that go directly against the game’s “coding” of the player through normalized instruction.

This mastery of the player by the game is common in game types that disempower players for trying to master the game; e.g., horror games, but especially Metroidvania. As I write in “Our Ludic Masters”:

Game mastery is a large part of my research. However, I’m interested in players being dominated by the game, not the other way around. Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy touch on this in “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots” [2008]. 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 [13-14].

According to them, the game prompts the player. My argument is less interested in games at large, and more in the relationship between players and Metroidvania [source].

The same scrutiny and invention applies to games like Doki Doki Literature Club, which likewise treat mastery and consent as existing between a shared [and unstable] ludic contract by players and the game.)

The game’s dark, steep eroticism might seem hyperbolic, but its dating-sim unheimlich was par for the course for myself and someone I felt connected to: a haunted text that spoke to shared trauma replicated inside Gothic media we could share and talk about, but also perform. Cuwu was intensely erotic, but also politically outspoken in ways that gelled with my usual analysis of said stories; our consummation of their taboo fantasies involved someone who reminded me of my younger twenty-something self, but also was their own person: a self-declared Marxist-Leninist who seemed equally drawn to me and my traumas through stories that I consumed in an almost voyeuristic manner. My voyeurism was no secret to them, but also was informed by my upbringing as something I explained to Cuwu.

To that, I am a consensual voyeur by virtue of a rather complicated set of ingredients; i.e., I always ask for permission and seek out my fantasies through negotiated boundaries between me and those I play with. This was less taught to me and more something I picked up on my own journey through life involving a variety of educational factors loaded with their own contradictions and nuance.

For one, I was exposed to sex at a very young age. Dad would leave porno tapes in the VCR player and I saw part of one when I was four (my mother racing out of the bedroom to rip the tape out of the player when I cried, “What is she doing?” from the living room). I also was fascinated by his collection of Playboys and would sneak into my parents’ bedroom while Dad wasn’t around (which he generally wasn’t—he was off having affairs with many different women around town: basically the village man-whore being sampled by all the bored housewives). My mother didn’t want me to consume such stories until I was “of age,” but couldn’t watch me all the time, either (they did catch me looking at the Playboys once and told me to stop, but I didn’t listen).

Rather than act like a helicopter parent, Mom taught me to respect women… except her notion of “women” was informed by stories that mirrored her own lived experiences: stories like The Terminator and Ninja Scroll, where women are damsels who sometimes get raped by men; where men are rapists unless they’re the heroes like Kyle Reese or Ryan Gosling’s titular Driver (or Liam Neeson’s many doubles of himself, as we examined in Volume Zero) who use their inherent, monstrous capacity for lethal violence to save women as Gothic antiheroes famously do; and where women consequently put out to reward good men for saving them from bad men. The exchange of sex for protection was an absolute, sacred fact in Mom’s mind, and one that informed my upbringing and interrogating of said texts, myself.

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Since I was small, I always pondered about appropriated violence and rape fantasies, though I didn’t know that’s what these things were. Eventually I learned, meeting Cuwu as someone who liked to ponder about and transmute these stories into transgressively sex-positive forms. A lot of proletarian-minded workers do, male or female. But Cuwu taught me that getting “ravished” can be incredibly fun, thrilling and/or hilarious. Likewise, “ravishing” someone who’s high, asleep or both can be super fucking hot provided it’s mutually consensual in advance (someone can’t consent after they’re drunk or asleep). Cuwu taught me that. To play with sex is to play with power through sex.

Cuwu also taught me that appreciative, sex-positive rape fantasies are not actually rape (they loved the show Lucifer and would fantasize about being “taken” by the actor of that show as someone sexy and strong but also a little dangerous). I learned this while having a previous understanding that appropriative, canonical rape fantasies function as rape threats at various registers; e.g., “be a good girl and don’t have extra-/premarital sex or Jason Voorhees will cut your head off with a machete!” As it turns out, unironic and ironic rape fantasies and demon lovers are tremendously common, but so is their eliding during liminal expressions that seek healing from rape through “rape.” Such ubiquity comments on state abuse as ever-present, but denied, displaced, dissociated—abject.

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Spending time with Cuwu, I learned how to reverse this through our own stab at ludo-Gothic BDSM. We could play around with “rape” as a form of theatre, involving many of the usual cliché activities (choking [above] and sleep sex, but also BDSM commands and unequal power arrangements; e.g., Cuwu being my mommy dom): Gothic fantasies invoke the heroic person as capable of murder and rape, but choosing not to. In sex-positive iterations, the fear mechanism assists the calculated risk to heal from rape during echoes of state abuse. Perfect for the damaged damsel seeking a Gothic antihero! Yet, we weren’t always actively aware we were camping our own rapes; it was more child-like, yet driven by adult desires:

(exhibit 16b: Model and artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. The painting is a meditation on trauma; i.e., healing from abusive partners by painting them as friendlier ghosts of their former likenesses, thus capturing how I fell in love with them but omitting the abusive elements [to haunt me with a palliative spirit, not a crippling one]. It also considers how those who have been abused can teach us how to heal from trauma, while relating to them face-to-face. Generally, there is a fair amount of overlap between victim and victimizer, and Cuwu, while having been abused themselves, was also a prolific and lengthy abuser. Needless to say, they taught me a great deal about healing from trauma through consent-non-consent rituals, but also surviving from trauma perpetrated by them against me.)

Furthermore, whether autobiographical or not, traumatic artifice is informed by our immediate surroundings: what we see and consume, including stories like Ninja Scroll as a reflection on the past, but also a guide into future forms of a cultural understanding of the imaginary past (the Wisdom of the Ancients); i.e., through interactions just like the ones Cuwu and I shared, hashing out the Otranto of what became ludo-Gothic BDSM as a theoretical model built on said fumblings. As Gothic Communists, this becomes a strange relationship to the voyeuristic ritual of psychosexual violence; i.e., as cathartic in ways that allow for sex-positive wish fulfillment: of “killing” one’s rapist while also not hurting anyone, or being “raped” by someone who cannot harm the “victim.” This negotiates a future boundary—to draw in the proverbial sand, should we become threateningly triggered during our day-to-day relationships, but also enthralled.

To this, people don’t often see their abusers and just “let them in.” Like vampires, murderers come to you with smiles; they trick you based on disguises pulled from canon. It’s what Jadis did, sweeping me right off my feet as a sexy black knight. Sometimes, then, the only way to avoid abuse is to learn from those who have been abused—abuser personas and pluralities included. Often, this education is through the consumption and shared processing of trauma adopted from less unironic, bloodthirsty forms:

(exhibit 17a: Ninja girl Kagero fights the stone-skinned, fascist-coded Tessai, a brutal, seemingly-invincible monster who works for the mysterious Shogun of the Dark. After Tessai kills her crush and rapes her, Kagero “uses” the poison in her body as a passive revenge against this stupid, violent man. Post-rape, the male hero, Jubei Kibagami, distracts Tessai long enough for Jubei and Kagero to escape. Once they’re safe, she hardens; Jubei takes the hint and skedaddles, but after he’s gone, Kagero sobs. The quiet anguish she feels is denoted as animalistic, closer-to-nature like the breeding fireflies all around her. It’s not something Jubei could really understand.)

Note: Similar extended collages of Ninja Scroll are exhibited vis-à-vis ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the Gothic (specifically while dissecting Radcliffe); i.e., in the Demon Module’s “Demons and Dealing with Them“! —Perse, 4/3/2025

It was tremendously eye-opening to relate to Cuwu through Ninja Scroll adjacent to our psychosexual experiments. Despite Cuwu abusing me (and others; discussed in Volume Zero), seeing what they saw through their eyes helped me see boundaries before that I never knew existed, but also dangers; I felt differently about the violence I had grown up enjoying as a kind of voyeuristic peril—saw rape in ways that made me empathize, but also identify with, the victim through my own complex abuse: Cuwu, but also myself, with my forgotten egregore, Alyona. Without really intending to, my own pedagogy and oppression had linked with Cuwu’s. After that, I wrote a small piece about Ninja Scroll. I haven’t shared it until now, but want to in order to demonstrate how profoundly my views changed when hearing a survivor’s testimony with empathetic ears despite having done my best already to change. If this book is any proof at all, genuine ideological change takes serious fucking work.

My thoughts on Ninja Scroll, written May 10th, 2022 (written the day my Uncle Dave died, which will become relevant in the roadmap):

Erotic and violent, tremendously illustrated and animated—Ninja Scroll demands to be seen. It’s also a very much a film about looking. Specifically, at the ninja girl, Kagero. “Look how beautiful she is!” the movie seems to ask, a byproduct of its ’90s Male Gaze. The Male Gaze, in academic terms, applies to a specific point of view, one fostered by media that caters to a male status quo—sex and violence, generally. This view is often literal, the screen filled from second to second with objects, subjects and moments that inform a compulsive heteronormative stance. Think of it as “audience-coding behavior.” What is seen remains afterward inside the mind.

I’ve seen Ninja Scroll many, many times. However, it [wasn’t] until very recently that I understood a key moment in the film: the antidote scene. I never fully grasped why Jubei and Kagero hesitated. She seemed to be attracted to him; he admitted that both of them were comrades. Why hesitate to save his life in what should, at first glance, be an alluring proposition? The answer lies in context, something the movie adequately provides but never spells out: Both the young man and young woman are being forced to have sex by a government spy called Dakuan [exhibit 17b]. This lecherous old can “watch” by asking Jubei about it later. While there’s nothing wrong about watching provided it’s consensual, in the case of Jubei and Kagero, it’s not: Dakuan has poisoned Jubei (obviously without his permission) knowing full-well that only Kagero can save him.

The movie mentions several times that one kiss from Kagero’s mouth is poisonous enough to kill someone—let alone vaginal penetration, phallic or otherwise. So, coitus with Jubei isn’t actually required. It is, however, the one option that Dakuan repeatedly demands of Jubei and Kagero. “Did you make love to the ninja girl?” he asks Jubei, over and over. However, Dakuan also knows that each will be hesitant towards helping the other. Traumatized on- and offscreen, Kagero fears closeness (for men only bring her pain). Jubei understands this, respecting Kagero too much to subject her to that kind of anguish, even from a kiss.

The tragedy is that Kagero wants to help Jubei, but remains understandably conflicted. Apart from Hanza, who dies during the opening battle, Jubei seems to be the one man in Japan Kagero actually wants to sleep with. She knows the full extent of her poison as well as anyone, and she wants more from Jubei than kisses; but for Jubei, even a kiss from Kagero is asking too much. This conflict is incredibly useful to an unscrupulous man like Dakuan, who use the comrade’s growing friendship-amid-turmoil to sexually exploit them.

(exhibit 17b: After Jubei leaves Kagero, she is forced to report to the Lord Chamberlain, who—unbeknownst to her—is really Lord Genma in disguise. To add insult to injury from our point of view and Kagero’s in different ways: a) the “chamberlain” is rude to Kagero while fucking his murder victim’s concubine and b) is lying to us as non-diegetic voyeurs. Meta! Following that, we meet Dakuan, the government spy. Kagero doesn’t like him and frankly he’s a duplicitous old creep [still a backstabber but more willing to bargain with Jubei than Genma is]. Dakuan constantly leers at Kagero, watching her and Jubei grow closer. Eventually he plays “coercive matchmaker,” trying to force them to have sex so he can hear about it. Jubei, ever the gentleman, merely gives Kagero what she’s wanted from the start: a hug. Ace!)

Similar to Jadis, my relationship with Cuwu did not last, but they did teach me lasting lessons about how to perform, play with, and exchange stories of psychosexual trauma through Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM. The takeaway moral with Cuwu and Ninja Scroll (and The Terminator and similar Gothic stories) is that it’s tremendously important to learn from more disadvantaged groups when you occupy a dominant position, even if we have lived through trauma ourselves and regularly consume voyeuristic peril. For example, the critic Chris Stuckmann—despite escaping from a Jehovah’s Witness commune and having difficulty addressing his own trauma (2021)—still likes to call Ninja Scroll “blood and boobs… and more boobs—boobs, boobs, boobs.” He seems to notice the presence of boobs far more than what’s happening to the owners—that all of them are being undressed, raped and otherwise exploited by the diegetic narrative for the film’s target audience: cis-het men, but especially white American men. Stuckmann never once mentions rape in his brief review—merely that his mother wouldn’t let him watch it because the parental advisory label read “absolutely not for children or anyone under the age of eighteen” (a rape-porn paywall, essentially).

When reviewing Ninja Scroll, Stuckmann clearly understood one form of abuse, but came off incredibly tone deaf about another. However, some traumatized people can go on to clearly draw lines in the sand, whereupon they deliberately punch up and down from—swatting at low-hanging fruit while also attacking groups lower than them in willful tone-deafness (so-called “middle-aged moments”). This applies to the veneer of generosity we mentioned earlier—re: “We have done nice things; therefore, we can do no wrong.” Known atheist and ex-Mormon, Jimmy Snow, did this against Essence of Thought, tone-policing them for critiquing a fellow member of the atheist community (Rhetoric & Discourse, 2021) despite Jimmy having critiqued Mormons for doing the same exact thing. It’s a “boundaries for me, not for thee” scenario, but also pulverized solidarity/equality of convenience being weaponized against different activist groups, which the elite financially incentivize to prevent direct, collective worker action and solidarity when opposing the state.

Put a pin in that for now; we’ll return to it later. For now, just consider that when someone refuses to change once exposed, this becomes an informed compromise between negative freedom (freedom from restrictions) and positive freedoms (freedom for oppressed groups); doing so harms worker solidarity by negotiating with power towards a shrinking state of exception (which we’ll see when we examine TERFs, but also NERFs and atheists/secular reactionaries in Volume Three, Chapter Four). Ideally there should be no state of exception, vanishing the bourgeoisie and spreading power horizontally in ways that abolish privatization and nation-state monopolies through direct, intersecting worker solidarity geared towards preventing war and rape by using Gothic poetics to worker’s emotional/Gothic intelligence in their daily lives. These ideas are central to proletarian praxis, which Volume Three is entirely about, and which our synthesis roadmap will introduce beyond what the postscript could merely suggest. The artwork bellow constitutes further examples of such solidarity made in collaboration with myself and other sex workers:

(exhibit 18a: Top-left, model and artist: Venusinaries and Persephone van der Waard; top-right and bottom left/right: Scarlet Love and Persephone van der Waard. The above reference material and artwork were drawn back in 2022; i.e. before I had written most of Sex Positivity and before I was commissioning sex workers to model for me, to nearly the same extent I am, now. To it, said artwork was based off these sex worker’s publicly available material—their Twitter feeds, in both cases—and drawn as fan art.

By comparison, the models featured on the next page were commissioned this April 2025; their material was commissioned specifically to be part of this book series, thus was negotiated as such [which the addendum in “Paid Labor” will go over before we jump into the synthesis symposium]: to embody from start to finish, top to bottom, what ludo-Gothic BDSM is in practice: praxis to synthesis through negotiation as a form of paid mutual exchange!

[artists (from top-left to bottom-right): Tyler and husband, Rae of Sunshine, Rhyna Targaryen, Vera Dominus, Kaycee Bee, Moxxy Sting, Cupid Kisses, Monster Lover, Delilah Gallo and Feyn Volans]

Beyond these recent eleven, though, Sex Positivity has commission over sixty models since 2022; i.e., as a habit of offering, negotiating and paying that happening slowly over time before invigilating it, post hoc.)

Gothic Communism prevents “rape” by putting it in quotes. Doing so is built on systemic catharsis, which results from good praxis camping the canon with ludo-Gothic. Let’s take stock before we delve into the synthesis roadmap, then, which simplifies theory to synthesize praxis within a collective teaching approach that touches on ludo-Gothic BDSM as something to instruct; i.e., how to process and interrogate trauma in our daily lives. Combined with the thesis volume and glossary keywords, the manifesto and its postscript provide you with every main theoretical idea used in this book.

To it, everything that comes next concerns applying ideas taken from them, insofar as navigating and expressing trauma are concerned. Originally, there was no thesis—just the manifesto as a sketch of it, and a great many ideas I wanted to introduce after it; i.e., inside the roadmap and in Volumes Two and Three. I had also devised a “test” to see what readers would know before reading the rest of Sex Positivity and discovering these ideas: a small sample essay that utilized the sum of my books’ theoretical devices. Purely in the spirit of fun, I’ve left the essay in the book for you to test yourselves with—i.e., to see what you’ve learned after reading my thesis volume and manifesto/postscript. Provided you’ve read and processed those, this should be a piece of cake.

(artist: Rae of Sunshine)

Onto “Sample Essay and Paid Labor“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] There is a tremendous asexual facet to Gothic poetics when negotiating trauma. We will explore this at length in Volume Three.

[2] For a more recent examination of this oft-disputed statistic, consider Renegade Cut’s 2023 video, “How Many Cops Are Domestic Abusers?”

[3] Abstraction isn’t simply the reduction of detail down to basic geometric shapes and color (though Skynet, when it is visually conveyed, appears as a cybernetic pyramid, often in black and red, or silver-blue and purple); smaller iterations or offshoots of larger complicated things are also abstractions. On par with Rudolph Otto’s ghosts serving as abortive offshoots of the Numinous, they and Skynet hint at something neither can fully describe: Capitalism and Capitalist Realism.

[4] As TheScientist writes for ” RYM Ultimate Box Set > Hauntology”:

The discourse developed around Jacques Derrida‘s concept of “Hauntology” (in 1993) and its application to music in the minds of writers and bloggers like Simon Reynolds, K-Punk and Adam Harper as a philosophical and aesthetic musical idea emerged in the music world in 2006. Derrida’s original use of the phrase can be linked to a sense of “threading the present through the past,” or a ghostly re-imagining of the past defining our existence both in concept and in art. But in its musical sense, Hauntology has been used to describe a gathering of disparate artists dealing in “haunted” sonics; music resonating with the emotions and feelings of past analog, and digital ghosts (source).

[5] The technological singularity is often misunderstood as something that will eventually happen, all while scapegoating machines; i.e., by presenting them as the end of the world, rebelling against the status quo by replacing Humanity with pure non-humans (often via a transhuman buffer like the xenomorph or Frankenstein’s Creature). But the truth is less romantic: Thanks to efficient profit (and the bourgeois trifectas at large), Capitalism is generally not incentivized to build things like Skynet in a literal sense. Rather, human beings are dehumanized to behave in robotic ways, insofar as delivering or receiving state violence is concerned. This isn’t technology of an incredibly advanced sort, nor does the state require it; it’s a reflection of the human condition projected onto various dated anxieties about the rise of the police state smashed together with state-fueled phobias and stigmas in a retro-future hauntology that leads to Capitalist Realism. It’s a paradox—a liminal expression of unequal power and its abuse, insofar as technology becomes a device of state terror that contains within it all the usual means of humanizing the dehumanized through counterterror.

For the state, Skynet is a recuperative scapegoat for, and elaborate distraction of, Capitalism that once conjured up sows mistrust of technology while making threats that are anything but guided by actual non-humans; for us, the singularity is merely the waking up of those framed as inhuman by the state. Skynet is a mirage; police abuse, genocide and nuclear violence are not, but the state’s control on violence, terror and bodies are not absolute and can be reprogrammed. Generally this happens by fighting back within hauntological myopias to see state orchestrations behind so-called singularities like Skynet, but also reclaiming such hyperbole to disarm canonical technophobia in service of Gothic theatrics that assist workers: ironic technophobia and technophilia treated as monstrous in relation to computers as immensely powerful devices that can serve worker needs on and offstage in very Gothic ways. Their summoning should raise our awareness of state abuses, including its effect on our minds; i.e., what we’re afraid of as authored by state forces or otherwise in service to them (more on this in our next footnote).

[6] NATO’s fictional double—SAC-NORAD and Cameron’s technophobic genesis of the technological singularity—lends far too much credence to the idea of thinking machines being responsible for the planet’s devastation (and the end of Capitalism) through state shift. Indeed, Cameron both uses the singularity’s spontaneous rebellion to shift blame away from capitalists (essentially arguing that rebel computers nuked the planet versus climate change) and appears to misunderstand, or at least thoroughly abstract the nature of what AI is in practice. Even by current standards, AI as it is marketed by capitalists, is an algorithm within a search engine that steals data:

An AI is like a gigantic word sifter. It can structure sentences in ways that seem related to the topic at hand, which is why, if you ask it for a court case, it can generate text “[proper noun] v [proper noun]” as a formatting concept — like how Excel will see you type in $1.00 and know that further entries in the column are likely also dollar values, so it will change the formatting of that column to the dollar value type.

But the AI will not actually search for existing court cases, nor will it understand what’s in the court case — because it has no ability to understand anything, as it is not intelligent. Instead, you press a button, and the sifting machine starts spinning, and since you said, “court case,” it will output a string of text that is formatted to look like a court case (source: Doc Burford’s “Using ChatGPT and Other AI Writing Tools Makes You Unhireable,” 2023; also consider Naomi Clark’s Twitter summary).

The takeaway here is that it’s the illusion of thought capitalizing on people’s stolen information, their livelihoods (the theft of which giant companies have been doing for decades). “AI,” then, is a tremendous misnomer because it implies the device has the ability to think for itself or might suddenly “come alive” and kill everyone like a fascist maniac or furious slave. That’s… not how computers work. This isn’t T2. Human decisions are not removed from strategic “defense” and Skynet won’t begin to learn at a geometric rate. Instead, the structure is designed to profit the elite in ways they don’t need to make. It might happen anyways. However, predictions by people like Stephan Korn [a New Zealand CEO fixated on “innovation”—big ol’ red flag there, dude] are not only guessing but calling the software something it isn’t—intelligent. Yes, Capitalism could design some kind of sophisticated super-agent and overlord system to surveille its citizenry with through various ungovernable forces that lead to a theoretical boiling point:

Like it or not the power of AI will attract at least 4 distinct motivations that are hard to regulate:

• • Profit motive – companies gaining significant competitive advantage through the use of ever more advanced AI
  • Control motive – intelligence agencies / counter-terrorism units wishing to use more sophisticated versions of AI to provide a level of security for their citizens / countries
  • Power motive – any individual or group wanting to use AI to manipulate existing systems (such as democracy / governments) to gain an advantage
  • Disruption motive – criminals and terrorists using AI to further their causes

At least one of the above will be completely resistant to legislation / regulation which means there will always be someone working without governance / control on more sophisticated versions of AI systems (source: “Skynet Is About 3 Years Away,” 2023).

But the reality is, the elite already have a stranglehold on the world and operate through brute force, efficient profit and market deregulation that colonize its populations at home and abroad (name me something that’s more brute-force and clandestine than nuclear war and police states under neoliberal hegemony); “Skynet” is already here: the dehumanized elite, coldly exploiting the world to the brink of nuclear war and arguably beyond.

Despite Western prosiness of the futurist Utopia, science fiction is rooted in the Gothic critique of Cartesian thought and Western settler-colonial hegemony and has been since 1818. Cameron’s white-savior take on “tech-noir” thoroughly bastardizes Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus. People forget that Shelley had Victor make a monster he could abuse in order for her to make a postcolonial critique of men like Victor—not a testament to Victor’s creative ability or the Cartesian Revolution’s merits! Whether Cameron would want us to or not, the same idea applies to Cameron’s Terminator movies. The film isn’t meant to entertain the idea that such a machine could actually exist because those in power would never actually make it, could never actually make it; state science serves the market and the market is guided by human decisions predicated on illusions, not genuine scientific advances. It’s in their best interests to keep machines/slaves stupid—to keep us stupid and afraid of a false threat overshadowed by a very real one.

To this, Cameron’s critiquing of the elite’s desire to dominate and control coming home to roost is stowed away in popular phobias (while simultaneously profiting off the same narrative to enrich the elite by making his own white-savior fantasies come true on screen—self-aggrandizement, in other words). And, if we want to be charitable towards Cameron (who has profited considerably off these stories), we could argue that Skynet represents as much the repressed desires of the downtrodden, the wish fulfillment of the Global South guiding the nuclear missiles home towards the colonizer mother country like some kind of token police agent—a tinman who finally got a heart and destroyed its slavers. Except, the great machine has no body and there is no dialog like Frankenstein; comparatively Scott’s 2017 Alien: Covenant is more discursive and upfront about presenting David, that movie’s villain, as a Satanic rebel in opposition to state power (more on this in Volume Two; re: “Dissecting Radcliffe“).

This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “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.

Click here to see “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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 (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.

Monster Modes, Totalitarianism (menticide) and Opposing Forces: Cataloging Oppositional Praxis

“People have given us many names: ghouls, ghosts, night wanderers, vampires, werewolves, and so on. But we are all members of the same family; tormented souls who must return forever to the scenes of our lost humanity. You may hang garlic or a crucifix above your bed, prepare silver bullets to shoot us, call in holy men to exorcize us from your home, but you cannot defeat us. Our name is Legion, and we are too many for you because we are the forces of evil that reflect the evil within your own souls.”

—Michael Page, The Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were (1985)

Picking up where “Challenging the State’s Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires)” left off…

This chapter concludes the manifesto by cataloging monsters, menticide, and oppositional praxis (canon vs iconoclasm, the Six Doubles, the bourgeoisie vs the proletariat, etc); i.e., as something we’ve already discussed in Volumes One and Zero, but want to compile before moving into second half of the volume (and into Volumes Two and Three). We’ve already looked at gargoyles, Amazons, and knights as visual, menticidal reminders of state violence and terror, and vampires as vitalistic monsters of sin, seduction, vice and power exchange (with Roddy being utterly terrified of his own dark reflection as something he sadly felt he needed to stake; but that’s the ’80s for you: a time of re-closeting the queer while simultaneously comparing them to cis-het male serial killers). As we carry on, remember that all monsters are liminal; liminal expression involves pastiche and doubles in opposition, which is what monsters primarily are. This expression requires the remediated praxis of pastiche, the double’s failure of sublimation, and liminality’s conflict on the surface of the image inside the Gothic; i.e., as a culture of weird nerds fighting for or against the state: oppositional praxis and ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the canon as a structure—older queers haunted by the state’s hatred of them.

For example, vampires are beings of vice, power and appetite through the nerds consuming them; they can be reclaimed by iconoclasts, but canonically announce and express considerable fears, doubt and anticipation about the trauma and the vitalistic, feeding nature of ourselves relayed in abject forms: an expectation and eagerness to do battle with the vampire as a primarily undead force, but also something demonic; i.e., a seductive shapeshifter from which to learn forbidden things from or prove one’s worth against. Both types are summoned up and destroyed by canonical benefactors and inhabitants; or conversely are embodied as part of a non-colonial, genderqueer struggle that challenges state hegemony (and heteronormative division and assimilation) by lingering inside or near the state of exception.

Furthermore, as part of this exchange, guilt, anxiety and menticide likewise become things to deal with and act out during oppositional praxis allowing for camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Regardless of the monster type, then, oppositional praxis is tremendously chaotic, intersectional and complex; so the Humanities primer in Volume Two is entirely dedicated to covering the historical usage and evolution of our three main monster types: the undead—zombies vampires, ghosts and composite bodies—as well as demons and animalistic “totems,” chimeras, sentient animals and their associate reanimating magics, feeding mechanisms and forms of power exchange. Here, we’ll mostly be listing all of them, and going over some of their base, shared functions as part of oppositional praxis’ Gothic dialectic within weird-nerd culture.

To be as thorough as I can be, here are most of the monsters this book has already explored in Volumes Zero and One or will explore in Volumes Two and Three (with cited exhibit examples of some of their canonical critical functions being in parenthesis):

Note: Rather than go through and give links to all of the individual exhibit numbers, I’ll provide the final exhibit number per book volume; i.e., to let you know which volume to download and Crtl+F the exhibit number you’re trying to find. Volume Zero ends on exhibit 1a1c; Volume One, exhibit 33a; the Poetry Module, exhibit 34b3b3a3; the Undead Module, exhibit 43e1; and the Demon Module, exhibit 60e2. Volume Three is anything past exhibit 60e2. —Perse, 4/7/2025

• zombies (the state of exception, exhibit 34d)
• werewolves (furries; symbols of rape, madness, and primal lust; exhibit 87a)
• vampires (the aristocracy and venereal disease, exhibit 41h; the dragon lord or Archaic Mother, exhibit 1a1c)
• aliens (xenophobia, abduction; exhibit 13a, below)
• clones (assimilation, doubles; exhibit 13a, below)
• reanimations (dead bodies, statues, golems, suits of armor, etc; exhibit 40h2)
• Mother Nature (natural disasters, plagues; exhibit 35b)
• orcs, goblins and Drow (the state of exception, tokenized conflict, settler colonialism; exhibit 37e, 41b, and 94a1b)
• stigma/”plague” animals: bats, snails, snakes, wolves, bears, hounds (of the Baskervilles), Rodents of Unusual Size, killer rabbits, etc (the wilderness, vermin; exhibit 10c1)
• Amazons (subjugated or rebellious, exhibit 8b2 or exhibit 1a1a3)
• knights/cops (sanctioned rape/violence, exhibit 24a)
• black knights (fascism/centrist caricature, exhibit 1a1a1h)
• composite bodies (Frankenstein’s Creature, exhibit 44a2); but also cyborgs,
• robots and golems (exhibit 42e), including silly ones like Mr. Stay-Puft from Ghostbusters (1984)
• gargoyles (exhibit 6b4b)
• ghosts (the uncanny/unheimlich, exhibit 42d2)
• wendigos/imposters (exhibit 45d)
• mythical warriors (ninjas, knights, samurai; exhibit 39c1; Beowulf, exhibit 1a1a1f)
• mythical artists (mad musicians, painters, etc; exhibit 105a2)
• plant/pod people (clones and alien invasion, mad science, etc; exhibit 13a, below)
• chimeras (anthropomorphic, like mermaids, exhibit 54; or not—the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Cú Chulainn, Lucifer’s non-angel forms in Paradise Lost—exhibit 51a)
• demons (forbidden knowledge and power exchange, exhibit 45c1/2)
• hags (aging but also ancient power, exhibit 84a2)
• witches (vice characters, pagan/non-Christian rituals; exhibit 83a)
• headless monsters/revenants of state executions (the Medusa, the headless Buddha, fallen warriors, feudal-secular terrorist-cell violence, etc, utilizing the severed head as a dialectical-material means of condemning or venerating the execution through beheading as vividly abject and often blindly furious; exhibit 41a and exhibit 11b5)
• Archaic Mothers (ancient, abject, really pissed-off vice characters; e.g., the alien queen from Aliens or Mother Brain from Metroid, exhibit 1a1c)
• archaic babies (the spawn of the void; e.g., the xenomorph, exhibit 60d; but also Giygas “the mighty idiot” from Mother 2, 1994, exhibit 60e2)
• killer, manmade babies tied to patriarchal mad science, patrilineal descent and pre-fascist and anti-Semitic revenge stigmas (again, the xenomorph or Beowulf, 1a1a1b; but also Cell and Broly from Dragon Ball, exhibit 39c2; the Creature from Frankenstein; and Homelander from The Boys, 2019, exhibit 108b4)
• phallic women (the monstrous-feminine of the xenomorph and similar liminal performances, but also violent women “acting like men” from a traditional, canonical viewpoint—i.e., though generally in response to patriarchal structures with an air of female revenge that leads to TERF-induced rape culture; e.g., Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, 1606; Victoria de Loredani from Zofloya, 1806, exhibit 100b2; Rumi from Perfect Blue, 1997; and Ripley/Samus Aran from Aliens/Metroid, exhibit 71)
• space bugs (Communism; see: Archaic Mothers)
• hybrids (vampire-zombie witches, clown ninjas [Worthikids’ “Wire,” 2021] and Zombie-Vampire Capitalism’s Zombie-Vampire Voltron—e.g., Mega Man X, 1993, and The Ronin Warriors‘ 1995 neoliberal pastiche; exhibit 98b2a and 39c1/94c2a)

Allowed by the elite to flourish in canonical forms, monsters uphold the status quo; in iconoclastic forms, monsters work as doubled theatrical masks or costumes that can be subverted by the person wearing them for proletarian purposes during oppositional praxis (whose complex subterfuge and presence of trauma [revolutionary cryptonymy] we shall examine even more in Volume Three). In either case, these performances are literally Legion. So, I may have missed a few in my scrapbook bestiary above (on par with Prince Hamlet’s commonplace book, which compiled knowledge as he came across it and guided his revenge moving forward). However, I wanted to try and cover all the bases as best I can to give you a comprehensive picture of their canonical effects within the ghost of the counterfeit, which generally are xenophobic, horrifying and disempowering/paralytic inside a decaying scapegoat sense of inherited home invasion (re: “Demons and Dealing with Them“):

(exhibit 13a: Assorted still images from Fire in the Sky, 1993; The Blob, 1988, The Fly, 1986; and Body Snatchers, 1993. All deal with alien invasions or mad scenes of foreign, irrational space, technology and occupants foisted onto an American setting. While there’s a healthy degree of splatter, the genuine sentiment is abject horror/xenophobia within the ghost of the counterfeit’s moral panics; i.e., stranger danger, but from beyond the stars! “Watch the skies!” indeed.)

Next, I’ll list some of the infamous lairs/parallel space that monsters call (or make themselves at) home, which we’ll also explore (albeit always in relation to monsters, whose sex positivity remains our hermeneutic/praxial focus):

• castles
• churches (and other ecclesiastical structures and their Neo-Gothic forms)
• danger discos
• caves
• condemned buildings
• industrial sectors or disaster areas
• crime scenes
• alien landing sites
• giant insect burrows/animal dens
• abandoned factories, but also ghost towns and other derelict settlements (or giant vehicles; e.g., ghost ships)
• haunted houses
• graveyards (official or improvised; e.g., mass graves)
• creepy basements
• sex dungeons (rape fantasies, which intersect with other space types)
• spooky mansions
• Metroidvania and to a lesser extent, other videoludic spaces like the FPS, RTS or JRPG (for this one, refer to my aforementioned PhD research on the subject, in “Mazes and Labyrinths” as discussed as length in Volume Zero, though we will analyze Metroidvania more in Volume Two and in my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus)

Fictional monsters and their lairs/parallel space in media constitute localized phobias, stigmas, fetishes, and biases, the basic mediums of which include: movies, videogames, novels, theatre and musicals, etc. However, the basic Gothic theories (the Four Gs) can be applied to different mediums through different medium-centric schools of thought (and genres, which we’ll keep exploring as we go, but also crossovers—e.g., Samus Aran in Axiom Verge, 13b).

This requires another list, which I’ll call our Hermeneutic[1] Gothic-Communist Quadfecta (tailored after my education background, in this case; also, I didn’t want to have two lists of four called “the Four Gs”):

• Gothic theory
• ludology (game theory)
• queer theory
• Marxism

Apart from our thesis volume, Gothic theory has been outlined in “The Six Gothic-Marxist Tenets and Four Main Gothic Theories” paratext towards the start of the book, and throughout the manifesto in practical, executable forms; the latter three methods have already been outlined during the section, “Essential Terms, a priori,” in the paratextual documents.

As we’ll see when we push into the Humanities primer, my approach is thoroughly hybridized, as I think it’s more accurate to a post-scarcity world sans privatization to allow for creations that aren’t hidden behind artificial barriers. You don’t have to wait for corporations to make multiverses. All deities (and worlds and demons) resides within workers—are their tools to express themselves with:

(exhibit 13b: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. My crossover illustration of Samus Aran in Axiom Verge, purposely revisited to be more sex-positive and “Laborwave” [and which reappears in “Away with the Faeries“]. To this, the idea was less about being faithful to a previous visualization of either series and more about re-drawing it playfully in ways that give room for my arguments and theories represented through Samus herself as transformed: no longer a servant of the state [the Galactic Federation] but an errant traveler finding herself in strange, new, colorful worlds. Gender trouble aside, the parody of heteronormative standards also allows for pure ontological joy unto itself.)

In praxial terms, workers familiar with these objects and methods of study can start to think critically through whichever theories help them process media (and psychosexual trauma) in an emotionally/Gothically intelligent sense; i.e., one that also helps our Gothic-Communist goals materialize as praxis synthesized. This includes sex positivity vs sex coercion (we’ll get to the other doubles of oppositional praxis in a moment) as historically-materially generating an oft-liminal “monster pastiche,” or other kinds in connection with monsters: poster, war/nation, rape, porn, disguise, etc, which we’ll pointedly associate with monsters, lairs/parallel space and their relative phobias as things to rehabilitate and weaponize in our favor as rebellious workers. Over time, proletarian praxis leads to “friendly doubles”: de facto, sex-positive, educational forms whose means of encouraging critical thought are tied to commonplace things workers can quickly spot, recognize and think about as they express (and liberate) themselves with iconoclastic art. In doing so, they can decolonize the Gothic mode and grant it their own humanizing power as part of a larger artistic movement; its steady iconoclasm/reclamation is how sex workers liberate themselves from canonical, heteronormative bondage—often using an asexual lens to appreciate social-sexual expression beyond compelled sexual reproduction and its state-sanctioned violence, trauma, and manipulation:

(artist: Dejano23)

When starting this book, I chose to focus on Gothic theory, monsters and media because of their ubiquity under capital, but also their widespread effects. To that, canonical forms of the “fearful” Gothic imagination invite sex-coercive, social-sexual behaviors that alienate workers from nature and sex, turning them against each other to serve the profit motive; iconoclastic forms utilize the same regular fixations during proletarian praxis, thus applying them in a sex-positive fashion according to common fears (moral panics) normally exploited by those in power for their own Base ends (that was a pun):

• the unknown (death, nature; the dark, beyond, alien, other or different)
• shameful conduct, but especially fatal hubris (the ignominious death)
• the impostor, especially a betrayal by a false friend, family member, lover/spouse or authority figure (cops, priests, husbands, coaches, teachers, etc)
• the tyrant and enslavement
• incarceration and live burial
• abandonment and identity erasure; cultural amnesia, genocide
• violence; including physical, emotional and sexual abuse
• impotence; a loss of control, including of one’s mind—madness, paranoia, brainwashing and gaslighting, etc
• isolation
• emotional, mental, spiritual or physical vulnerability
• disease
• prurience, sexual deviancy and appetite
• strange combinations of these things (e.g., the Japanese kappa, anus balls and ignominious death helping compose Sekiro‘s (2019) hidden boss, the Headless[2]—a hidden, headless warrior married to the kappa, quizzically stealing the hero’s essence from their butt, but also relegated to the embarrassing-yet-terrifying forgotten grave: For a Japanese warrior to be beheaded, then left to rot, their honor and glory would be completely forfeit—utterly extinguished along with their name and identity as tied to violence. This would literally be a fate worse than death for their kind)
• cats and dogs living together
• mass hysteria

These canonical fears work as “starting points” that iconoclastic praxis can transform in highly flexible ways—first analyzed by Gothic theory to describe and critique the material world through art; then, used through future artistic generation to reeducate the societal Gothic imagination, slowly turning it into a sex-positive force; re: the Base and the Superstructure. This mounting power can then reshape the material world, all while preserving and remembering the barbaric past as it gradually turns into something new along liminal pathways.

(exhibit 13c: The cover image for Thomas Leatham’s “Identity Crisis: The Curious Connections between Perfect Blue, Persona and Black Swan,” 2022.)

In other words, Gothic Communism crystalizes harmful behaviors into a Gothic moral that doesn’t shy away from the dialectical-material complexities that emerge during oppositional praxis. Yet, our praxial focus always remains on a practical outcome informed by simplified theories we cultivate ourselves—of emotionally and Gothically intelligent, cultural-savvy workers (sex or otherwise) who have access to the entire manifesto checklist: our manifesto tree’s Gothic-Marxist tenets, main Gothic theories, Gothic mode of expression (its means, materials and methods of study), doubles of oppositional praxis/synthetic oppositional groupings and the creative successes of proletarian praxis: illustrating and imparting mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and informed consumption/informed consent through de facto social-sexual education that likewise conveys cultural appreciation through appreciative irony in countercultural forms; i.e., sex-positive fetishes, kinks, BDSM and Gothic counterculture; e.g., sex-positive (thus ironic) rape play.

From moment to moment, the mind can only hold so much. So now that we’ve catalogued the Gothic mode of expression, I want to spend the rest of the chapter (and the remainder of the manifesto) reloading yours: compiling and summarizing a variety of theoretical arguments that need to be understood holistically before we segue into the instruction half of the volume; i.e., a selection of items I think you should take with you—lifted from your own knowledge stores (as filled from my lessons) and placed into your current “basket” before we resume. These will be things the manifesto has already discussed, which I now want to holistically stress their various class/cultural functions during a preface-of-sorts to the second half of the volume’s primary topic: oppositional praxis as a “war for synthesis.” Think of it as a chance not just to reload, but reflect on what I’ll loading your basket with.

I want to start with three points: their medieval flavors in relation to capital, including vice characters; a totalitarian, menticidal function attached to dialectical-material arguments on either side; and opposing material forces with a societal element manifesting through Gothic poetics.

First, the medieval character of our liminal ploys work against the state in complicated ways. We’re not just breaking icons or swimming in the grey area for funsies (though it is fun); we’re fighting the state’s trifectas and monopolies on violence, terror and morphological expression through a variety of disguises that work as complex, oft-ambiguous code. Our revolutionary cryptonymy focuses specifically on sexual violence, as it intersects with other forms of state abuse as financially incentivized by those in power (the elite), with power (neoliberals) or seeking power (fascist) as normally afforded by capital. Capitalist Realism, then, stems from greed as a cultivated mindset—one informed by a revived, half-real medieval sitting between fiction and the rules, reality and imagination.

As previously mentioned, I’ve coined this incentivization “the problem of greed” in my own academic work, writing about Weber’s Protestant work ethic in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; the problem of greed (and its addressal) takes different forms (of vice character) depending on who’s involved:

I’ve tabled these points using things my thesis discusses at length. Some of the terms are included in the glossary but I’ve also tried (for your convenience) to cite relevant snippets from my thesis volume. Refer to it for extended sections on terms like “banality of evil” and “desk murderer” in relation to my arguments. —Perse

• For neoliberals, the problem of greed introduces the banality of evil[3]—chiefly the dragon (medieval operator) as a symbol of rarified greed—to a current-day myth: the useful billionaire, aka billionaire “philanthropy/Marxism.” Capitalism cultivates the dragon’s “hoard of gold,” which makes the “dragon” gross dividends under neoliberal Capitalism. The owner class, meanwhile, grows more and more alienated from their own wealth-as-abstracted, but also other humans (workers) and sex/nature, preying on them or turning them into predatory devices (vampires) under their thrall. Owners see workers as a means to an end: moving money through nature; to achieve this, they exploit workers, including by callously bribing them through loans, subsidies and lobbying disguised as Christian/secular generosity (which align with the Christian tradition of worshipping capital in ostensibly secular forms; e.g., Reagan’s America being an extension of virtually every American executive before and after having been a Christian in some shape or form—mostly Protestant Christians, as Aleksandra Sandstrom notes[4]; re: Weber’s Protestant work ethic being an Americanized phenomenon).

Ethically billionaires should not exist, yet neoliberal culture hero-worships them like gods—banal dragons with draconian positions, not literal piles of gold to hoard (unlike fascists). They posture as the Greater Good, often in TV shows and other forms of popular media deliberately framing the elite as exceptional and benevolent (Renegade Cut’s “An Anarchist Watches The West Wing,” 2021) in order to hide what they really are: vampires and desk-murders-in-disguise, killing more than fascists can through Americanized bureaucracy as an ongoing and disguised form of state power abuse—deregulated but enabled to accumulate as much wealth as possible for those out-of-touch ghouls at the top. Doing so, neoliberals intentionally create criminogenic conditions, all while blaming the poor, stepping up policing and pushing austerity/personal responsibility rhetoric[5] (this includes “charitable” organizations asking poor people for one dollar instead of asking billionaires for one percent of “their” money while also treating the Protestant work ethic as sacred/modest—divorced from excess and useful to the elite). While this historically-materially translates to genocide, war and rape, etc, as displaced/dissociative violence, it also extends to remediation as canonical sublimation via content creators who posture as “generous” while generally profiting off worker exploitation behind various “fronts”; e.g., Bon Jovi’s restaurant accepting donations and labor while branding itself and its products as a non-profit[6] with neoliberal taglines (e.g., “Hope Is Delicious!”); The Open Hand Charity stealing fans’ money for ten years while claiming “it’s for dementia research“ (Karl Jobst, 2023); or Mr. Beast’s “poverty tourism” miraculously helping the blind, then using this as a shield his fans levy against criticism (The Kavernacle, 2023); i.e., “he did good works, so he can do no wrong” thus should be allowed to exist free from criticism (negative freedom for the elite and their proponents).

• For fascists, the symptoms of Capitalism’s disease manifest differently. For them, the problem of greed reintroduces an older form of wealth acquisition—raw material theft through direct physical violence and conquest—the return of the Skeleton King or dragon lord roosting on the literal pile of gold (re: hoarded stolen material wealth—the piles of goods taken from the Nazi death camps) inside a castle during the liminal hauntology of war. It is the partial collapse of the state to install new leaders in the vacated/emptied offices, vying to restore them to “their former glory” during an internalized foreign plot; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich’s busy campaigns[7] at all points of his career under Nazi operations. Desk murder under fascist bureaucracy is performed through a weaker form of government centered around open piracy and medieval power abuse, with similar-if-less-effective results. Despite their badass façade, fascists perform grandiose displays of perceived strength (“I am strong, strong, strong!”) through a weakened power structure resting on a cult of the strongman. Nazi Germany, for example, was materially capable of far less harm and damage than what America has globally achieved through US hegemony worldwide. US warmongering has slowly become automated, turning into endless bombings, occupations and drone warfare driven by bourgeois human greed through neoconservative arguments (“peace through strength”). In turn, these faraway forms are further displaced, dissociated, and disseminated through neoliberal propaganda. A common bread-and-circus form is popular sports, especially the combat sport (and its centrist kayfabe) as useful in conveying the competitive, individualistic models that are so central to neoliberal propaganda. These gladiatorial, ranked rituals “prove” which male workers/exploited groups are “superior,” meaning “the best at being useful to the Faustian elite in violent ways,” like Mike Tyson for Cus D’Amato or Don King (Rummy’s Corner, 2023). Women in these arrangements are reduced to de facto prizes for poor fighting men to scrap over, normally enjoyed exclusively by the elite. “To the victor go the spoils (which, as a non-battered, cis-het/non-heteronormative AFAB is not a flattering concept—women [and gender-non-conforming people/minorities] don’t really want to be reduced to pretty baubles that cis-het dudes fight over). As you might guess, this extends to military urbanism when Imperialism comes home to empire (roosting chickens).

• For those predating neoliberalism/fascism, or working through a medieval lens that potentially critiques either ideology and its practitioners, the likes of Shakespeare and Tolkien critiqued greed through their own displaced fantasies/ghosts of the author taking on a life of their own; i.e., inventing an imaginary Venice and Middle-earth to critique their respective presents’ problems of greed in medieval language (re: “The Problem of Greed“). Similar to Blake’s “dark Satanic mills[8]” (or Kafka’s potentially bourgeois critique in his own demonic spaces compared to Charles Dickens[9], Tolkien’s “black country” was a displaced critique of the Industrial Revolution and capital (as later heard in British metal stalwarts Judas Priest surviving Thatcherism, but also in Victorian authors like Charles Dickens living under empire, etc); so was Shylock the xenophobic scapegoat of greed during mercantile Capitalism and Smaug’s rarefied greed being of the medieval, fascist (relatively small, vengeful and imaginarily “ancient”) sort directed at a post-Catholic, 20th century West. Such allegory is not so different than condemning a foreign dictator for similar abuses committed by one’s own leaders—not just elected officials, but the men behind the curtain pulling strings of various sorts (the British elite, in Tolkien’s case). You also see the same tactic employed by powerful men like George Lucas or James Cameron, whose own successes become franchised, turning them into billionaire Marxist “Pygmalions” with far less critical power as time goes on; i.e., the wider their appeal, the less potent their message insofar as it serves profit first and foremost. Of course, allegory exists for a reason, but “mainstream activism” is disempowered by the mere virtue of it being diluted for the masses. Genuine applied activism (synthesis) needs to be direct, rough, and clear—less canon like what Star Wars became after 1977 and more incendiary iconoclasm like Andor (2022, which we’ll explore in the synthesis roadmap).

Whether campy or canonical—neoliberal, fascist, or Communist—medieval expression generally requires a queer-coded[10], often-animalistic vice character who must either a) be cleansed or purified to whitewash the structure, or b) send it all crashing down (a metaphor for violent systemic transformation); i.e., the hyperreal of no white castle actually waiting behind the Gothic double—simply the castle, thus the system, as harmful and illusory by design. ACAB.

As previously discussed, we can camp the castle by doubling it ourselves, but also its queer-coded, animalized vice characters. And yet, just because someone is queer-coded doesn’t mean they are actually queer in a functionally sex-positive sense (nor are animals automatically a healthy view of nature; i.e., scapegoats). As stated during Volume Zero, fascism and Communism (as well as nature, the monstrous-feminine and corruption) generally occupy the same shadow zone until the canonical dialog requires a hard stance against the true enemies of the state: Communism (and Indigenous people) as the ultimate threat to Cartesian thought, heteronormativity, the nuclear family/colonial binary and any other “normal/natural” or “realistic” state of existence one could present the audience with (versus the false rebellion and actual defense of capital/assimilation fantasy that fascism represents). During oppositional praxis, this plays out historically-materially through fascism-as-unironic and queerness-as-ironic flavoring the same basic code.

As a result, vice characters come in all different shapes and sizes: Shakespeare’s Shylock, Monty Python’s killer rabbit (to give a nonverbal example), Tolkien’s Smaug the Stupendous, Lucas’ Darth Vader, King Diamond’s Abigail, etc—the killer, fun villain as campy or straight, but also human and inhuman to varying degrees. As such, they embody the “root for the bad guy” jester who speaks truth to power as unironic or ironic to varying degrees. Overt “clownish” examples include Kefka Palazzo from Final Fantasy VI (1994), Captain Hook from Peter Pan (1953), and Joker from Batman (exhibit 95a1b) as being stereotypically violent for the closeted gay man, but also various Disney villains literally being talking animals (e.g., Lion King‘s [1994] Scar, above, being an “evil animal” on par with Tolkien’s nefarious spiders) who often are fascist-themed/queer-coded themselves (with Ursula from The Little Mermaid [1989] being based on drag queen legend, Devine, writes Jack Coleman, 2022).

(artist: Ken Barr)

Whatever the shape, the vice character denotes a sense of the disgruntled alien, often having non-white, Orientalist/fairyland “changeling” components coming from a black planet as something to fear or return to, hence nebulous wish fulfillment for or against a white status quo: Something is not as it seems, but the audience quickly finds themselves cheering for the vice character in an ignominious and oscillating affair promising Jewish, female, queer or black revenge; i.e., the corruption, then total destruction, of the “good” family patriarch and his “noble” bloodline (with The Lion King being based on Hamlet, Scar standing in for Uncle Claudius). This doubling takes a variety of personified/animalized forms, of which we’ve already considered quite a few and will consider many more throughout the rest of the book. For the moment, we’ll swiftly examine two more: Ester from Orphan: First Kill (2022) and the killer lion from Beast (2022).

(exhibit 13d: Ester doesn’t have wings or non-white skin, but still denotes the Orientalist phobias of a “changeling” that steals one’s child and assumes their identity for material gain. To make their skin a color other than white would draw attention to the conflict as racialized, thus visible, which commonly occurs in fantasy narratives with non-human races like orcs, elves and Drow but also fairies. Ester shows us that in the absence of dark skin, other features—such as the eyes, hair and “spirit”—will be used to depreciate a scapegoat’s origins within settler-colonial models [and Cold-War anxieties, in Ester’s case]. The practice actually dates back to British settler-colonialism; e.g., Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights [1847] being the dark-haired foster child; i.e., being treated like a fairy-like outsider based on his physical appearance despite having white skin. As Beast demonstrates, the target of in-group animus doesn’t even need to look human—merely be something that stands in for institutional violence against out-groups commonly associated with nature as something to “tame” by colonial benefactors; i.e., like Idris Elba’s Americanized family man conquering the nightmare lion of Africa’s settler-colonial past in order to assimilate: by protecting his cubs.)

Orphan: First Kill (the second in a lovely horror franchise) covers transplant phobias on home soil. Ester is an adult woman with a rare medical condition that, due to a short stature and youthful appearance, lets her pass as a pre-teen girl to an American family looking to adopt… after she escapes from a mental hospital in Eastern Europe! But in this case, Ester isn’t being adopted by fresh parents; she’s passing herself off as a bereaved couple’s long-lost daughter, who went missing years prior.

Orientalism par excellence, the movie concerns xenophobic anxieties about disempowerment through interactions with “children” from beyond America’s borders; i.e., the estranged, cuckolded dad from First Kill subversively becoming “the child” of the family when he’s trapped unwittingly between two dueling false parents: our “lost child,” Ester… whose original double was secretly murdered by that girl’s femicidal mother, the husband’s own wife! Just as Gothic stories make the location of the predator difficult to predict, Ester has gone and fallen into an unexpected trap, marking her the prey!

Operating as the other parent within this murderous exchange, the mother is both wise to Ester’s tricks and smugly boasting about her own “superior” Mayflower heritage versus Ester’s inferior foreign blood; i.e., disguised colonizer pride while the dutiful wife (and her corrupt, equally treacherous son) look down on the counterfeit adoptee as less good at violence and lying than they are. Amid the delicious turmoil, a common ghost of the counterfeit is also dug up, explored and (re)buried: incest (specifically the Oedipus complex—with Ester very much a moe figure trying to seduce her new father to keep her safe from the wicked stepmother). All the while, out-of-joint trauma exists inside a picture-perfect home rife with intrafamilial discord. Also, thanks to Ester not having killed anyone at the film’s start (and having been sexually abused back in Europe), the audience is meant to side with her and dislike the white American family. It’s classic Gothic oscillation/push-pull, wherein a displaced/dissociative, personified critique plays out in highly cliché ways: misplaced faith and a failure to sublimate, wherein the unheimlich gradually subverts while we spectate “bad guy” Ester being made into a relatively sympathetic con artist; i.e., by a transgenerational curse intimated by the wicked mother of the canonical bloodline. “A murder most foul,” indeed, and lots of complicated, oppositional wish fulfillment happens here. It’s oddly fun, but also playing a classic Neo-Gothic trick: critiquing the present in dated, counterfeit forms.

Beast applies the same complex, settler-colonial trauma and wish fulfillment overseas. During the opening scene, a family of all-black poachers kill a pride of African lions, only to be wiped out by the surviving father lion; i.e., an animal metaphor for the pro-colonial wish to kill people of color who poach, despite them only doing so because of colonial territories like Africa being raped and pillaged by the West well into neocolonialism, then mythologized for it (satenmadpun’s “Pre-Colonial Africa and the Myth of a Savage Continent,” 2020). From here, Idris Elba embodies the wish fulfillment of Afronormative cops—similar to homonormativity’s emulation of traditional binary-gender roles in that a token, person-of-color father figure must defend his family as superimposed onto the white nuclear model for Elba to police. As a standard, man-versus-nature yarn, it works on par with Jurassic Park’s (1994) neoliberal sleight-of-hand: humanizing the colonizers. Whereas Beast focuses on a single lion and black dad, Spielberg’s blockbuster populates of an entire tropical island with female killer dinosaurs (the Archaic Mother trope) being exploited by the all-white family defending themselves from both a recuperated evil corporation, but also the sweet bumblings of an old white colonizer who “just wanted” to build an amusement park for rich white kids (with him calling the “blood-sucking” lawyer the opportunistic one. Pot, meet kettle).

Unlike these two examples, Gothic Communism avoids commodifying worker struggles and alienation in favor of a basic-if-valuable lesson with far-reaching results: “Embrace vice; just don’t be an emotionally stupid, uneducated sex pest or giant asshole as taught by canon/Capitalism to abuse workers and marginalized groups by animalizing or otherwise preying on them and the natural world.” Self-destruction is the end result of Capitalism, to which “Zombie-Vampire” (a concept we’ll examine more in Volume Three) describes Capitalism’s Promethean effects felt through the minds of workers within the canonical Gothic mode: vampiric, but also zombie-like (“lobotomized”) workers functioning as obedient parasites who exploit themselves and others, brainlessly consuming till the cows come home. For them, blood becomes not just the stuff in our veins, but a medieval form of expression hauntologically revived in the present to pacify workers: by raping their minds.

This brings us to our second point: totalitarianism as a menticidal device. By compiling it here, I want to stress how Capitalism is a factory of canonical simulacra whose likenesses serve as customary warnings meant to condition workers through dogmatic stigmas, monsters, lairs/parallel space, etc: “gargoyles.” As we’ve already discussed them in an earlier chapter (re: “‘Rome,’ Gargoyles, and the Bourgeois Trifectas,” exhibit 6b4b), I’m not talking about the literal stone statues on churches, but anything that can be looked upon with fear as a dogmatic source of instruction; i.e., any theatrical performance from the giant list of monsters and their lairs where the assorted phobias (and other sources of moral panic) can be instructed by them as something to behold by workers, who then sheepishly toe the line through codified instructions with power as Gothically totalized in the elite’s favor (not its interrogation of, and negotiation with, these same repurposed implements).

The aim of these statues is to have subservient, predatory workers prey parasitically upon rebellious or noncompliant workers for even bigger parasites (the elite, utterly without shame and superficially charming like canonical vampires are; e.g., James Fallon’s “pro-social” psychopath[11] within a grand parasitic system that makes everyone ruthless, cruel, and dumb according to canonical Gothic poetics. Said canon and its poetics incentivize those without remorse to thrive by commodifying basic human rights/essence (and cultivates impostor syndrome and paranoia through monsters that feed—especially the undead—in a disguised/uncanny form).

Simply put, canonical praxis leads to workers preying on each other through a menticidal scheme; i.e., weird canonical nerds; e.g., Autumn Ivy preying on me by seeing me as a threat to them. The resultant profit is horded “blood” (exploited labor, bodies, workers, etc). Those at the top feed on those beneath them as placed there by a structure that naturalizes the abuse, but also hides it in Trojan forms that paradoxically stick out; it treats poorness like a disease, a contagion the rich will despise, but also rely on to get ahead while feeding in the dark. They lengthen their lives, sipping greedily on “blood” they can no longer produce themselves behind closed doors, but nevertheless advertise their superiority through the freeness of the market, of Capitalism, of themselves as embodiments of capital and privilege: their castles, their profit, their right to do as they please. As such, their humanity is sacrificed in pursuit of a bloodthirst they—like the classic vampire—can never quench; their veins dry up and they become alien, shriveled up, divorced from nature while aping it in horrifying babylike ways (source, Tumblr post: depsidase). Like Brian Froud’s Skeksis, they resort to hideous abuses to chase off an infantile death of their own making. This souless inhumanity within the “castle” is a Gothic metaphor for harmful material conditions, making Dracula’s quoting of the Bible in Symphony of the Night an apt one: “What profit is it a man who gains the whole world, but loses his own soul?” (we’ll continue examining the ideas of sanguine and other pre-fascist vampiric textualities and hauntological medieval themes, in Volume Two).

Gothic Communism works in opposition to state artifice, confronting and transmuting the canonical “gargoyle” (and castles where these various kinds of monster statues call home) as continuously remade and executed by state authors between fiction and reality through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern; i.e., cultures already stricken by two basic totalitarian ideas lifted from Joost Meerlo’s The Rape of the Mind

• menticide, or rape of the mind
• waves of terror

I’ve already introduced and applied these concepts earlier in the manifesto; in the interests of compiling them here, I want to supply their full definitions:

menticide

The variety of human reactions under infernal circumstances taught us an ugly truth: the spirit of most men can be broken; men can be reduced to the level of animal behaviour. Both torturer and victim finally lose all dignity […] The core of the strategy of menticide is the taking away of all hope, all anticipation, all belief in a future [which aligns with Mark Fisher’s “hauntology,” or inability to imagine a future beyond past forms supplied by Capitalism; i.e., a myopia]. It destroys the very elements which keep the mind alive. The victim is entirely alone (source).

waves of terror

the use of well-planned, repeated successive waves of terror to bring the people into submission. Each wave of terrorizing cold war creates its effect more easily—after a breathing spell—than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience. Morale becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effect of each new propaganda campaign becomes stronger; it reaches a public already softened up. Every dissenter becomes more and more frightened that he may be found out. Gradually people are no longer willing to participate in any sort of political discussion or to express their opinions. Inwardly they have already surrendered to the terrorizing dictatorial forces (ibid.).

Apart from these, there is a third variable: thought crimes/venial sins (all-seeing governments or authorities in secular/religious forms; e.g., Santa Claus) that outwardly manifest as occult “markings”: gargoyles not just as dated, humanoid curios, but vanguards of the state’s monopolies and trifectas through various commodified refrains (e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s) in neoliberal media and responses to said media as something to endorse or critique, mid-enjoyment.

Gargoyles are classically installed on high places to watch over as much territory as they can: to look out for various problem topics or areas by teaching people to identify what to look out for—to become the eyes and ears of the state during endless crisis, moral panic and decay. For instance, canonical monsters often symbolize venereal disease marked to mortally sinful activities/cardinal sins worthy of capital punishment toward marginalized groups: death and reactive abuse through selective punishment. The state decides what’s innocent in the eyes of the law as emblematized by “gargoyles” as a means of seeing and establishing punishment, vis-à-vis Foucault. This amounts to thought-crime personas of vice that are depicted as being canonically against the state, thus receiving state punishment/exploitation as righteously delivered (often by token agents). Even with iconoclastic liminality there’s a thin line between pleasure and pain, virtue and sin: “It hurts so good,” indeed (and remember the BDSM mantra: “Hurt, not harm“)!

Gothic Communism is anarcho-Communist, thus meant to be generally applied to many different things; i.e., highlighting the destructive lessons that canonical art teaches through the same Gothic academic theories in reverse: iconoclastic doubles of said “gargoyles” that challenge the state’s rape of the mind and totalitarian use of waves of terror/vice personas that lead to war at home and abroad, thus rape and genocide, but also mental, imagination, and social death for workers endlessly exploited by the elite at the state-corporate level and dressed up in the same language, but appropriated to disguise the implementation of “cops and victims.” Whether said victims are depicted as harmless, as scapegoats or as murderers (which regularly appear in the state of exception against the state’s protectors), all become trapped inside Capitalist Realism; there’s nowhere for them to go except into the executioner’s arms.

For neoliberals, this amounts to the good team brutalizing the bad team, “cops and victims” relayed in humans or tokenized monsters (orcs, demons, bugs, etc) versus their unironically evil counterparts in nerd culture (especially videogames being endemic to neoliberalism as “home entertainment[12]“); for fascists, this amounts to the village scapegoat, the open and radicalized target of revenge (which we’ll explore more heavily in Volume Three, Chapter Two). In oppositional praxis, all of these things are doubled in both directions: for or against settler colonialism, worker exploitation and genocide; for or against the status quo and state abuse of workers, sex and nature. State abuse includes a gradient: open/grim fascist harvests versus more oblique/veiled, neoliberal forms of exploitation (total war versus sanctions)—i.e., good cop, bad cop represented as centrist vs fascist; e.g., Dirty Harry’s 1973 Magnum Force but also Tolkien’s village pastoral intimating the neoliberal market for the kind of good war his Bretton-Woods power trip exemplified in videogame refrains.

Neoliberalism disguises the fact that all cops serve the state, not workers. In praxial terms, cops are class traitors; they lie about their own hyperbolic, inhumane violence being performed in service to the state, turning everything around them into a functional prison they deceive citizens to preserve. In defense of the state, cops lie and conduct surveillance against anyone who isn’t a cop; they do it all the time because it’s literally their job (Renegade Cut’s “Cops Are Liars,” 2022). In short, they’re the “gargoyles” watching out for evil as codifying in state canon. Giant corporations also protect them, making it difficult to even report on their abuses; e.g., Leeja Miller’s “Why Are US Police So Bad?” where she remarks, “This video has been edited from its original form. Police in the US are so problematic that we struggled to get this video past YT’s community guidelines and limitations. In my 3 years on YT, I have never struggled this much to get a video past YT’s restrictions” (2023). The surveillance worsens according to the number of paranoid eyes, evoking Foucault’s panopticon (or Tolkien’s Cartesian eye of conquest) as sung about by Chuck Schuldiner in “1,000 Eyes” (1995):

To the left and to the right

From behind – they’re out of sight

Plunging into a newfound Age of advanced observeillance

A worldwide, foolproof cage

Privacy and intimacy as we know it

Will be a memory

Among many to be passed down

To those who never knew (source).

The same goes for Michael Parenti’s notion of fascism as a false revolution, its reactionary defenders and fortress-mind practitioners of the neoliberal/fascist “cop” and its gradient of action hero/vigilante offshoots: the “prison sex” of war orphans and their bad-faith “beards” and other heteronormative disguises—and token queers, TERFs and other marginalized subordinates—dogwhistling sublimated coercion, but also false recruitment promises that groom future killers through menticidal, Pavlovian conditioning. This “schooled predation” builds future literal/figurative prisons and “prison sex” mentalities under Capitalism: the heteronormative Man Box offering the same-old solution of so many monsters to kill. The promise, then, reads like Uncle Sam: “We want you! ‘Enrich’ your character and become the exclusive badass; i.e., the havers of sex, power, guns, intelligence, muscles, etc” (we’ll explore this deception historically when we examine zombies and demons in Volume Two, and consider its present application in Volume Three). In short, become the center of your own hero pitted against nature, promised all the white women and black slaves for simply being male and white (thus been given respect due to their station, not having to earn it; i.e., self-centered threats of violence where the partner isn’t threatened with violence, but self-harm committed by the man: “If you don’t have sex with me, I’ll kill myself!” as a very common and patriarchal guilt trip committed by male histrionics treating the man as the center of the universe):

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

This brings us to our third point to revisit, here, and one already discussed during an earlier chapter (“Operational Difficulties”): revolutionary cryptonymy and opposing forces during liminal expression and ludo-Gothic BDSM. Here—and in light of this chapter’s holistic examinations—I want you to consider these devices as things to synthesize mid-opposition to state actors. As you do, I will introduce a variety of fresh terms relevant to synthesizing praxis that we have yet to explore (and which the instruction portion of this volume will tackle for its entirety).

Disguises remain incredibly important for iconoclastic praxis—aliases, alter-egos and egregores camouflaging oneself from heteronormative reprisals by blending in using the same masks, uniforms, and positions of Gothic theatre to interrogate power but also negotiate with it according to our own trauma, knowledge and lived realities. This means that exposure happens sooner or later at a societal level; it must or we’re all just in the closet. The beard is “shaved,” the lavender marriage exposed, the Trojan outed or accused, the gay threatened with burial, the token rejected, etc. We have to take that power in order to expose and turn it against the unironic, bad-faith actors triangulating against us, doing their best to continue the Gothic commodifying of sex and sin through our exploitation. Both are effective means of personifying trauma in relation to nature, thus treated as highly controlled substances, and their regulation is strictly monitored in ways that serve the profit motive under capital:

(artist: Didi Lune Studio)

These exchanges aren’t simply where we survive, but fight back and slay with vampy abandon: reckless camp, wild sex and style. Embossed with Medusa’s severed head (or the skulls inside all our heads), our aegis must show those who seek to uncover and attack us the truth of who they are: dumbasses having surrendered their necks to capital, beheaded by the state and glaring with blind rage at anyone the state needs dead (to serve the profit motive). Holding that up at them, and in essence showing them their own doom through the same liminal pathways, can be an effective means of disarming our attackers; i.e., a shared humanity told in the theatrical language of vice, power, jealousy and death stamped on the surface of the usual human billboards: worker bodies fetishizing sex (and the animal, the alien) through Gothic theatrics.

Something to keep in mind, then, is how our interrogations require us to share the stage with bad actors, players and educators, mid-negotiation. TERFs, for example, are sublimations of state violence relayed in rebellious markers that have been recuperated to subordinate trauma under reactive abuse; i.e., the Amazon recuperated through the “prison sex” phenomenon, becoming violent or submissively co-dependent towards power (there’s always a stronger man, always a weaker woman, etc). In turn, the blank slate or tabula rasa of Capitalism is a false/bad parent; it’s all that reactionaries can understand. Through unironic, state-centric warrior and rape culture, all bourgeois-minded workers become slaves to those in power telling them how to think regarding those they must exploit, rape and kill. Once triangulated, the Amazon kills (or otherwise antagonizes) her fellow victims by becoming the state’s victimizer towards them (and nature).

Beyond TERFs, those in power or aligned with power—be they warlords, dark lords, neoliberal statesmen, or desk murderers—are “chicken hawks” making workers fight amongst themselves. This involves recruitment of soldiers at different tiers of management along the chain of command in its various parallel forms (the state, the military and the public, etc). Whatever the form, iconoclasts under Gothic Communism must resist all of them (and their disjointed, knotty goals) to be successful anarchists, generally through clever disguises and doubled Gothic language (which proletarian workers interpret and recreate in oft-liminal, subversive ways): our revolutionary cryptonymy that, like Athena’s Aegis, turns the state’s suspicious gaze (thus its theatrical violence on and offstage) back towards itself—the facing of settler-colonial guilt, inheritance anxiety and gender envy by the closeted thug. These are tremendously disempowering sensations, which we can use when arguing for our own humanity in the face of those who seek to destroy us as having sacrificed their own. They become increasingly undead, demonic and predatory for the state, transforming in defense of canon as their fortress to defend from iconoclastic agents intent on camping their vertical, coercive arrangements of power and the historical-material consequences of said arrangements when left uncamped, thus unchecked: rape, war and endless police abuse.

We’ve already defined oppositional praxis in our thesis and reexamined it at the start of the manifesto. From here on out, I want you to consider it more as you would in your day-to-day lives: in simple oppositional terms; e.g., sex positivity versus sex coercion. It’s not that you would use those exact terms yourselves, but that you probably have an unspoken understanding that is usually present outside of what is normally said or taught: abuse is wrong and should not be allowed. But to which groups of people said boundaries normally applied is arbitrated by the same forces; i.e., the enemy of empathy as something to envision according to canonical interrogations of, thus negotiations with, power as something to relay in Gothic poetics’ paradoxes and doubles: power is something to perceive through performance and play as the Gothic mode normally goes about it.

To this, canonical iterations of essentially compelled stupidity relay through Gothic dogma, which its workers see as the end-all, be-all. Vis-à-vis Capitalist Realism, there is nothing outside of this current paradigm; anything else is death to them, meaning they will fight to the death to protect their so-called “saviors,” the elite—treating the Gothic mode as an extension of the state’s will. Any enemy of the elite and the elite’s profit motive, then, becomes an enemy to them, leading class traitors to weaponize Gothic poetics against worker interests at large. Us-versus-them leads to doubling as a historical tragedy insofar as workers are demonized through various moral panics that frame them as “terrorists” in bad faith; i.e., by state agents of terror who crack down against labor movements’ counterterror during military urbanism as unironically demonizing both sides: the abused in ways that make them targets of state abuse using the same language, which state agents adorn themselves with as abusers. Paradoxes do not matter insofar as state sovereignty is (more or less) upheld, but clearly there is room to upset the balance:

(artist: Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri)

Beyond what you might normally expect, there is considerable nuance to these disturbances. But if you want the full definitions to oppositional praxis, please refer to the thesis volume, which provides them all and in full. Moving into the synthesis roadmap, we will merely be considering smaller fragments of the manifesto tree, but especially something relevant to the trauma writing and artwork we are going to unpack once the manifesto concludes in several pages: the synthesis of abuse prevention and risk reduction as challenged by state (Cartesian) forms of Gothic media designed to make workers not just apathetic, but utterly violent against nature/the monstrous-feminine cheapened in ways that increase said abuse and bad odds; i.e., weird canonical nerds policing weird iconoclastic nerds; re: Autumn Ivy and I.

Cops, at their most basic level, are class traitors who police themselves; this extends to culture war as something they meet through heteronormative, settler-colonial action: state terror relayed against those inside the state of exception, determined to monopolize terror by keeping workers submissive or afraid, but also prone to attacking each other in ways that keep them stupid, dormant, petty and short-sighted, etc. “Cops and victims,” then, becomes something to perpetuate through bad theatre, but also to challenge in no uncertain terms during iconoclastic poetics camping the canon through rebellious, even titillating forms of reanimation. The revival of dead tissue and materials is certainly nothing new, nor is it exclusive to state monopolies and Pygmalions; indeed, Galatea might resurrect suspiciously similar scenarios during her cathartic, orgasmic rituals (whose gender-non-conforming and asexual functions we shall likewise expand on throughout the book):

(artist: Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri)

I think we can all agree rape is something to prevent, but camping canon through psychosexual, psychomachic and psychopraxial dialogs isn’t actual rape because they aim to prevent harm through good education; harm is enforced through the state’s bad education, which decries camp as “degenerate,” thus to blame for the state functioning as it always does: through endless crisis and cyclical decay. Clearly my use of the word “rape,” here, extends the definition to include all manner of abuses beyond what is commonly envisioned in canonical workers: the sexual rape of women. Functionally there is no difference between the stabbing of a man with a knife versus a woman being raped with a man’s penis (or some other foreign object) insofar as both supply vulgar displays of power that maintain the status quo. Clearly we want to upend said status quo, and will do so according to where it generally takes place: through dialectical-material opposition during liminal expression while struggling to communicate our own traumas. If any of this ever seems hard to understand from a theoretical standpoint during said communication, just remember that these ideas are meant to be understood fairly loosely and their synonyms can be swapped interchangeably (e.g., canonical/blind pastiche) as long as the basic dialectical-material relationship (and its symptoms) are communicated.

Moving on, since our focus moving out of the manifesto and into the roadmap will be oppositional, it behooves us to reconsider the manifesto tree from our thesis in oppositional terms. Everything has a functional opposite to gradient degrees. While camp’s assembly and production of cultural empathy under Capitalism happen according to the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis, these are checked by the implied “successes” of canonical praxis. Either are things to materially induce and imagine though parody and pastiche according to Gothic poetics; i.e., inside the “grey area” shared by cultural appropriation and appreciation during liminal expression’s canonical/countercultural forms (the making of 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

vs

the culturally appropriative, sexually prescriptive lack of irony during Gothic canon’s abjection with sex-coercive demon BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality and the unironic ontological ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence

These are executed either by emotionally/Gothically intelligent or unintelligent workers, using canon or camp to cultivate apathy or empathy through Gothic poetics; i.e., by synthesizing Gothic Communism or Capitalism during oppositional praxis (canon vs iconoclasm) according to our manifesto terminologies and structure—in short, its various tenets and theories (the Six Rs, Four Gs) but also mode of expression. As per our gradient approach to praxis, these binary opposites contain between them a spectrum. As we have already discussed, people are not generally completely stupid or intelligent; they have blind spots, but also competing objectives that lead to various degrees of cognitive dissonance—of ideological combat through allegory and revelation.

The praxial sum, for our purposes, could be called “creative/oppositional praxis.” The Six Doubles of Oppositional Praxis (re: exhibit 1a1a1c3) and their various synthetic oppositional groupings (we’ll examine them more during the synthesis roadmap) manifest as camp’s class-, culture- and race-conscious defense from canon’s class, culture and race dormancy and betrayal; i.e., braving the moderate/reactionary class, culture and race traitor’s four basic behaviors (quoted from the thesis volume):

• 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[13]” (“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).

In historical-material terms, we have one side of the spectrum fostering universal, post-scarcity empathy and emotional/Gothic intelligence in the face of the opposite end of the spectrum: state actors operating with bad intent, neglect, and willful, taught ignorance (or some combination of these variables): “You can’t convince yesterday’s colonizer that today’s colonizer is wrong.”

(artist: Anolea)

And yet as we shall discover moving forward, these divisions—while far from cut and cry—tend to divide more discretely behind the immediate theatrics; i.e., many so-called “activists” (normally white moderates and token subordinates) are false revolutionaries weaponizing/fetishizing labor movements and their monstrous, counterterrorist language for state aims. Conversely, many who appear as open harbingers of death actively challenge these aims through a complex dialog of theatrical reclamation; i.e., revolutionary cryptonymy’s assorted masks, uniforms, bodies and weaponized props.

Again, it’s weird iconoclastic nerds vs weird canonical nerds, one reversing the canonical, unironic function of the Four Gs (through the Six Rs) and the other endorsing the process of abjection through the ghost of the counterfeit to uphold Capitalist Realism: to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to the bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil (from the manifesto tree in Volume Zero)

as a vertical, pyramid-scheme arrangement 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.

For all you closeted types, the death of the author and all their darling monomyth heroes, monsters and castles swapped out for campy gay ones during ludo-Gothic BDSM can make you want to scream, “Oh, my god!” like Grandpa Jojo. But like that show demonstrates (with campy aplomb), the life of these things lives on through paradoxical theatre and the monstrous performance of power as something to reclaim from the state during liminal expression. Short of a mass-extinction event, the Gothic imagination isn’t “going anywhere”; its praxial function merely changes in ways that raise class consciousness and empathy during class/culture war’s pedagogy of the oppressed tackling Capitalist Realism, one monster at a time.

Onto “Trauma Writing/Artwork (opening and ‘Healing from Rape’)“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Meaning “concerning interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts”; or, “a method or theory of interpretation” (source: Oxford Languages).

[2] Ewan Wilson’s “The Folklore Roots of Sekiro‘s Anus-Ball Snatching Enemies” (2019).

[3] (from the glossary): “originally a term used to describe* the fascist bureaucracy of the Third Reich during the Nuremberg trials, desk murder goes well beyond Adolf Eichmann; it is destructive greed minus all the gaudy bells and whistles: the men behind the curtain (canon).” Or as my thesis volume argues, “The ensuing chaos [of state privatization] 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)” as a tiered enterprise:

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) [source].

*”60 years later, the banality of evil has been so oft repeated, it’s been reduced to cliché” (source: Meghna Chakrabarti’s “The Eichmann Tapes and the Comforting Myth of the ‘Banality of Evil,'” 2022).

[4] “Biden Is Only the Second Catholic President, but Nearly All Have Been Christians” (2019)

[5] John the Duncan’s “Neoliberalism: Class War and Pacification” (2021).

[6] America is a tax haven for the ultra-rich (Georg Rockall-Schmidt’s “How the Super Rich Avoid Taxes (Legally),” 2021) and rely both on non-profits as go-to tax dodges (Felix Salmon’s “The Ultimate Billionaire Tax Dodge,” 2022) and PR stunts meant to sanitize billionaire reputations as “squeaky clean” (Second Thought’s “Why Billionaire Philanthropy Won’t Solve Anything,” 2022) and, hilariously enough, “of the people” (Adam Conover’s “Why There’s No Such Thing as a Good Billionaire,” 2022).

[7] “While the SS, prior to the seizure of power, mainly occupied itself with protecting the party against internal and external enemies, Himmler and Heydrich focused on all sorts of enemies of the state in the meantime, including in particular the Jews” (source: Kevin Prenger’s “Heydrich, Reinhard,” 2016).

[8] The Guardian’s “Notes and Queries: What Were William Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills?” (2012).

[9] David Spurr writes in “Demonic Spaces: Sade, Dickens, Kafka” (2012):

Kafka is close enough in spirit to Dickens, to his sense of the uncanny and to the ghostly presence of the dispersed baroque […] But the obvious difference in style is symptomatic of a more substantial difference between Dickens and Kafka concerning what might be called the ontological condition of the demonic. For if Dickens has transported elements of the premodern baroque universe into the modern industrial world, he does so in order to redefine the demonic in terms of the inhuman social conditions created by that world. There is an unbridgeable gap in Kafka between material form and doctrine, and this accounts for the sense of impenetrability that Kafka rehearses as an element of his fictional universe. In contrast to the figures that inhabit Dickens’s work, however ghostly and uncanny they may be, Kafka’s fictional universe implies a much more enigmatic relation of the demonic to the human and object worlds (source: Architecture and Modern Literature, 2012).

Spur notes how “Kafka often described his own writing in architectural terms,” concluding on a destructive mayhem that seems to have been designed to speak for itself: “The demonic in Kafka consists, finally, in its demolition of human value, perhaps in the name of a more secure edifice toward which his writing gestures but for the construction of which his strength, like ours, fails” (ibid.).

[10] Or at least foreign challenging of so-called “correct” forms of institutional, Christian marriage; i.e., “true love.”

[11] The World Science Festival’s “The Moth: Confessions of a Pro-Social Psychopath” (2015).

[12] I.e., compared to Atari home units, whose market crashed in 1983 and lacked the technology to sell its bloated library of same-looking games; or arcade smashes like Donkey Kong (1981) or Pac-Man (1980) as being public entertainment systems, comparable to a fair or carnival attraction. By comparison, the Nintendo Entertainment System (in the US, 1985) was a home entertainment device that caught on and has stayed popular (through corporate domination) to this day. As such, its dogmatic potential should not be ignored; e.g., the sexist elements of Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, Metroid or Mario, etc.

Note: For follow-through on this specific scholarship, refer to “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” (2025). —Perse, 4/7/2025

[13] “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.

This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth 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). “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.

Click here to see “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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 (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.

An Uphill Battle, 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

“Fool! Be still! No other witch in the world holds a harpy captive, and none ever will. I choose to keep her! I can turn her into wind if she escapes or snow or into seven notes of music!”

—Mommy Fortuna, The Last Unicorn (1982)

Picking up where “‘Book Sample: Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM” left off…

This subchapter examines rings within the Gothic mode as famous symbols of power and power exchange. One such example is, of course, Tolkien’s One Ring and that is what we will be focusing on, here. Something to pass from person to person, it is as much a vampiric mantle of corrupting power in its more vertically arranged forms as it is a mere giving of material goods. The former function means rings are generally devices to be feared—not for their weight in gold, but for the power they signify through their giving and wearing: problematic alliances, but also the raw function of power when arranged in vertical, capitalistic ways.

Note: We’ll quote some of my Tolkien scholarship, here. For all of it, refer to the Tolkien scholarship page on my website; e.g., “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking” from the Demon Module; i.e., which examines Tolkien in terms of the queer coding and Radcliffean elements (re: the Black Veil) but leaves various ideas for future essays that—among other things—include Tolkien’s homophobia in animalized language: the cat-like, twinkish master/apprentice seducer that Sauron and Morgoth represent, each pimping nature through Tolkien’s displaced DARVO arguments/obscurantism having regressed to Beowulf in the 20th century and passing such things down through a bad cycle of demon BDSM. —Perse, 4/6/2025

Continuing this chapter’s initial focus on animals but shifting more towards power abuse, we’ll examine power as Tolkien expressed it in relation to nature as something to conquer by proxy—an invented other. In short, Tolkien relied on the vampire legend—but also Gothic castles, BDSM language and harmful arrangements of unequal power (rings and collars)—to dominate nature and those within it. Written in defense of a divided nature in good and evil animal forms, Tolkien’s war stories view the vampire a kind of parasite praying upon the conspicuously vulnerable inside Cartesian dialogs; i.e., both in raw animal terms with Shelob the spider as part of “evil nature,” but also magical leeches like Sauron, whose ghastly projections have become wholly divorced from “good nature” inside dark, undead fortresses that harvest all good, living things from the land (whitewashing Britain’s analogs in the process). Anything else is functionally “dead” (sanctioned for state execution) by virtue of collective punishment.

In doing so, Tolkien’s BDSM isn’t playful, but dogmatic; i.e., his abjects death as a vital function of nature, but also fascism as a vital function of Capitalism in relation to nature as preyed upon by those behind his undead/animalistic scapegoats: the West. All (canonical) Castles Are Bad, insofar as the grim harvests they bring about (during Capitalism-in-decay) harm nature and those of nature. Meanwhile, death becomes alien, fetishized, badass, and cool, but also necessary within these Capitalist-Realist configurations; i.e., Aragorn (and by extension, Tolkien) needs Sauron to disguise his own tyrannical state.

Keeping this in mind, we will unpack the settler-colonial trauma Tolkien’s furtively Gothic tools and mythic animal symbols aided and abetted, but also the adjacent dialogs that worked within Tolkien’s closeted queerness to undermine his own black-and-white Pax Britannica within Bretton Woods and beyond.

First, the Ring itself as a tempting vampiric device and consolidation of unequal power that preys on nature. While Sauron’s special ring has the ability to turn persons invisible and theoretically binds those who wear it to the original maker as removed from the physical world, said maker is largely non-existent; rather, his vampiric shadow is felt through exchanges of power that bring out the worst in people who are visible within nature. The Ring, then, is exchanged from person to person like a curse, symbolizing total power as something that can never really be destroyed provided the structure it connects to remains intact.

Tolkien’s oversimplification is a neat storytelling device, but also (as we shall see) an incredibly basic way of explaining away settler colonialism in traditionally Gothic ways: a ghost or past anxiety that is conjured up and swept away during the same ritual, often stigmatizing wolves, spiders, bats and similar “evil” animals in the process. It’s a cheap parlor trick that tries to separate Capitalism from capital, displacing the system’s current atrocities not just to an older time and faraway land, but a talisman that seemingly has a will of its own. In short, he rarefies greed, minus the dragon; apparently it’s the old male[1] necromancer’s fault that the West isn’t prosperous—i.e., isn’t normal (meaning an absence of tension, not genocide)! Tolkien might as well have blamed Apep for swallowing Ra’s canoe for all the causal sense it makes. He makes up a shapeless devil, then spends three novels chasing him down. Indeed, Tolkien (not Sauron) is the necromancer filling the world with orcs (“…if you became a shogun, there’d be nothing but devils in this world!”): through his spin on the ghost of the counterfeit (made from stolen parts) furthering the process of abjection. The Ring is merely a buck to pass, often with a fair amount of guilt by those who know (“Don’t tempt me, Frodo!”).

Again, as we have noted in Volume Zero, this falls to the Eye of Sauron as seemingly described by Raj Patel and Jason Moore in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:

the Cartesian revolution was made thinkable, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination. […] Cartesian rationalism is predicated on the distinction between the inner reality of the mind and the outer reality of objects; the latter could be brought into the former only through a neutral, disembodied gazed situated outside of space and time. That gaze always belonged to the Enlightened European colonist—and the empires that backed him. Descartes’ cogito funneled vision and thought into a spectator’s view of the world, one that rendered the emerging surfaces of modernity visible and measurable and the viewer bodiless and placeless. Medieval multiple vantage points in art and literature were displaced by a single, disembodied, omniscient and panoptic eye (source).

Volume Zero described that eye through the map it looked upon; re: Tolkien’s refrain enacted by Sauron as simply a dark reflection of the men of the West (and other good races) as colonizers: “There is no life in the void, only death!”

Up to this point, we’ve discussed the problematic nature of the ghost of the counterfeit when used as a canonical device through the treasure map as a colony under attack by “outside” forces. However, the power of Gothic reinvention isn’t strictly canonical, and at its most proletarian (re: Milton, Walpole) deliberately profanes the sacred to cut through an inability to critique what is in front of us; i.e., slicing through Tolkien’s silly trick by using the same rings (or ring-like devices) to counterattack what was ultimately a centrist daydream: “melt the Ring, save the world.” This requires using rings in ways that other Gothicists wouldn’t have thought twice about, but which Tolkien generally couldn’t stomach… or could he? It’s certainly true that Tolkien’s refrain (the treasure map) gentrified war through a canonizing of Gothic poetics and allegory (from Milton to Tolkien) that only intensified over time; the more Tolkien moderated his own invented world (again, made from stolen parts), the more the Ring ultimately became a regressive device that simplified his medieval critique of capital from The Hobbit (which presented the Ring as a simple but convenient way to help Bilbo out of a bind, the real issue being the gold under the mountain). But the guilty exchanges of the Ring still offer up some fairly genderqueer BDSM interactions inside a traditional background, all while seemingly holding Gothic poetics (and women) at arm’s length.

This being said, there are several basic forms of vampirism in Tolkien’s world: the corporeal and incorporeal. His fleshy vampirism is foisted onto female and anti-Semitic entities. There is the great spider Ungoliant and her spawn, of course—female vampirism’s parasitism, phallic stinger and paralysis being animalized in relation to nature; i.e., hysteria and the womb of nature as something to fear according to an Archaic Mother goddess as androgynous. Then, there’s Gollum and the goblins/orcs. We’ll get to orcs in a second (and Drow later in the book); Gollum is effectively Tolkien’s most overt homage to Beowulf—i.e., a slimy creature of darkness living in an underground lake, through which the hero, lacking physical strength, must beat the creature at its own game: cheating. After The Hobbit, Gollum is unmoored from the Misty Mountains, seeking the Ring as his lifeblood; and it is here that Tolkien, in 1954, evokes the anti-Semitic language of the vampire legend in The Fellowship of the Ring:

The Wood-elves tracked him first, an easy task for them, for his trail was still fresh then. Through Mirkwood and back again it led them, though they never caught him. The wood was full of the rumour of him, dreadful tales even among beasts and birds. The Woodmen said that there was some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood. It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young; it slipped through windows to find cradles (source).

Both examples are tied to monstrous-feminine arrangements of power exchange: Gollum craves the Ring like a vampire thrall does its master’s blood—Gollum’s blood as absorbed into the greedy artifact as synonymous with the Dark Lord (true to legend, the vampire master is an almighty patriarch who hoards vitality within himself, offering those under him only enough to sustain themselves through their own nightly feasts).

The second form of vampirism is the incorporeal kind, and here is where Tolkien pulls a trick. Although Sauron functions like a vampire, he isn’t called one and has no body to speak of, no phallic penetrative device tied to the sexual exchanging of power and essence in animalistic metaphors. In turn his invisibility robs his vitalistic feeding of its corporeal elements, and him of a tangible, visible status as Master operating through a physical appearance but also a physical, eroticized relationship to others. He’s simply vampirism in the abstract, a telepathic eyeball, “the Dark Lord on his dark throne / In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.” Meanwhile, women—the classic targets of vampirism in Western canon—are nowhere to be found.

Instead, our thirsty ghost is largely announced by a precession of kingly wraiths (death knights) and bat-like fliers that likewise are purely black, lacking any obvious sanguine appearance. Perhaps this paring down of a cardinal-red visual owes itself to Tolkien’s Catholic background and harboring a grudge for the anti-Catholic sentiments of the Neo-Gothic period; i.e., scapegoating the Protestant’s pure black in the Catholic’s place (“I see a red door / And I want it painted black…”). But Tolkien’s Master of the Black Castle morphs Vlad the Impaler into a vague, shapeless force operating entirely through rings (sans any Freudian slips, when involving the placing of rings onto fingers) and a pure reduction of BDSM roleplay told entirely in militarized medieval language; i.e., minus much of the monstrous Gothic poetics and centering on the positions themselves in a black-and-white, good-vs-evil framework that scapegoats Nazis for corrupting nature vis-à-vis the Christian West. But the traditional framework is still there, “sexiness” being reduced to Sontag’s dehumanization of sexuality through the horned death fetish, a living weapon in service of the Dark Lord; i.e., the bad dom who takes everything for himself through these extended, somewhat abstract phallic devices.

As we’ll examine throughout this subchapter and the next, I’d say that I think a more fleshed-out darkness (and more adventuresome BDSM aesthetic) might have done Tolkien some good—if only to make his evil more nuanced and less vague in relation to human characters and their physicalities (though I was still magnetically drawn to these dark forces due to my own psychosexual responses); but I think he did so on purpose: he was an anti-Communist Oxford professor who venerated mythical variants of the British monarchy in his work. Smacked with the effects of fascism defending Capitalism, his already bigoted (sexist, homonormative[2] and racist) worldview became increasingly basic, white and regressive over time, as if nothing after Beowulf ever occurred; i.e., black-and-white, but also vanilla, losing its Marxist critique as The Lord of the Rings eclipsed The Hobbit (a far superior work, in my opinion, due to its critical bite) but fixated universally on the militarized exchanges of power between cis men on the battlefield. There’s something to be said for and with that lens, but it still remains incredibly narrow and myopic; i.e., it’d take someone like me (an anarcho-Communist trans woman) to dream up Gothic worlds that filled out the things Tolkien couldn’t help but leave out in defense of capital, himself: my own castles and rings, but also allegory and Gothic theatrics that were anything but invisible.

To that, Tolkien wasn’t just allergic to allegory and sex; he policed them greatly in service of empire. His evils are simplistic, unironically dated and vague, and he has a stubborn clumsiness when applying them to his worlds that suggests a very closed-minded way of thinking about his world and ours in BDSM terms. It’s certainly no secret that Tolkien eventually decided to place the lion’s share of the blame on people more so than material conditions or Capitalism and nation-states. He also makes the Ring and then melts it, trying to suggest that everything is somehow “solved”—that “Isildur’s Bane” is somehow to blame for the waning strength of men in the face of rarefied greed; i.e., the dragon sickness of the gold from The Hobbit having been turned into a simple dissociative trinket that weighs on “all men” to the same degree. He seems to understand how rings function as poetic devices while paradoxically lending them a bit too much credence; vertical power is a tremendously corrupting force, but you don’t have to essentialize it, nor reduce it to a shapeless male darkness that employs throwaway female demons and does away with overt BDSM language and, yes, ironic rape fantasies:

(artist: Owusyr Art)

BDSM isn’t just where power is located/stored (e.g., inside the One Ring or Sauron’s tower), but instructions for its use within assigned positions, including rape fantasies as a set of instructions given to the dom by the sub issuing various paradoxical commands: the civilized “princess” and the barbaric “invader” as roles to play with in animalistic ways (e.g., the “breeding”/captive fantasy) that expose and interrogate power as a device of negotiation towards better working conditions and healing from the deep traumas that emerge from settler-colonial violence and heteronormative enforcement. Material conditions play an important role in historical materialism, but power is largely about perception, which cannot simply be destroyed; it must change within society. The catharsis offered by iconoclastic roleplay grants appreciative irony amid Gothic counterculture as surviving under Capitalism. These forms of roleplay aren’t just completely alien to Tolkien, but policed and denied through his own incessant prescription of orcish demon lovers (and Dark Lords); i.e. bad BDSM as a harmful arrangement of power that introduces praxial inertia into the equation. While power can’t be destroyed as we just said, it can become unthinkable according to ways that challenge the usual runs of the mill. Tolkien and Radcliffe have that very much in common, making anything outside of their worldview as shapeless, dark and unthinkable: the incessant, utterly British fear of the outside felt within their own borders, castles, heroes, etc, as hopelessly forged and ever-present.

To that, Horace Walpole was absolutely right to lampoon weddings and marriage like he did, presenting incest, live burial and rape as commonplace things inside his obviously Gothic castles. He cut to the chase, as it were, playing with taboo things that he could suggest, conceal, or uncover as he pleased; i.e., in tangibly Gothic language that spawned monsters (from other authors who came after him, to be fair) that at least part of the time carried far more critical power than Tolkien’s usual replications of “pure evil” (which Ursula Le Guin, and by extension myself, would have to escape by camping Tolkien’s own problematic escapism in our own ludo-Gothic BDSM fantasies): via their ability to directly and quickly speak to reader’s lived traumas, versus the imagined/inherited anxieties of the status quo speaking “for everyone” according to an Oxford language nerd.

Tolkien’s origin myths were entirely unoriginal, exhibiting a very narrow, profoundly inadequate idea of what BDSM even was: officers and batmen; i.e., a British officer and his dutiful servant, exemplified by Tolkien’s Samwise the Brave helping his fairly clueless master time and time again out of a bind. It is BDSM, but echoes the British castle of the Imperial Core as something to carry out into the battlefield while enduring Tolkien’s (fairly vanilla) rape fantasies and childish dreams of captivity with which to (dis)empower the sub as male; e.g., Frodo being whipped and beaten in the orc slaver’s tower (the torture dungeons in Mordor conspicuously full of the British tools of torture used by the colonized reimagined; i.e., during the myth of a dark, savage continent populated by evil, violent “children”). By displacing these tools off onto a dark “other” world beyond the land of plenty and light, Tolkien is scrubbing his own and blaming the colonized in the same breath). As a male benefactor of British colonialism, he fixates on faraway war as the exclusive site of power abuse exacted upon white men, ranking their abuse above everyone else (women, genderqueer people and ethnic minorities) and everywhere else (military urbanism). For him, these other things simply don’t exist; abject copies of them do, but their sexuality is largely abandoned inside a chaste, gentlemanly medieval that forces them to address trauma as men were (and are) commonly taught: through lethal force with killing weapons designed purely for harm against state enemies.

Excluding the fact that nonharmful sex is frankly a pleasurable activity whose complete erasure feels very odd and forced, this complete lack of sexual dialog is a serious problem for a second reason: BDSM and kink are regular outlets for sexual healing from trauma as women would experience it (rape, pregnancy and shame), but also men—especially black people who are generally raped in some shape or form by white colonizers. Tolkien provides zero representation, intersection, or even basic acknowledgement of anything other than white men versus the entire rest of the world as something to rape and sacrifice (with white women given a few moments to highlight their societal domestic roles in these men’s shadows: marriage[3]).

As such, the problem becomes an incredibly simple one: kill your problems to empower yourself; or in the words of Michael Brooks (regarding Israel and Palestine, though this extends to settler colonialism at large): “It’s not a complex issue. It’s super simple. There’s one group with enormous power. It acts on another population of people with total impunity and is never held accountable for anything” (source). This is bound to create and offset tremendous amounts of trauma that Tolkien, through his British emulation of American fascism (state apologetics) simultaneously marks, mischaracterizes and buries all at once; for him, the orcs (and other monsters) are pure evil synonymized with rape that must be cleansed from the world through ritualized, self-righteous violence, but they’re also humanoid and reminiscent of things he couldn’t (despite his best efforts) explain away in any satisfactory manner. The lie is the West is somehow besieged by these “invaders” at all times, or the peace of the West requires their death. The empowerment of the West, then, is a false flag built on a total fakery that makes Aragorn the paladin and his holy company seem incapable of revenge and settler-colonial violence (retreating to their islands after losing imperial control overseas, and falling victim to Isolationist paranoia), but in truth is exactly what they’re made for.

(artist: Exodus Is Near)

It’s important to remember that “orcs,” like other color-coded monsters, aren’t a singular stigmatized group used strictly for purposes of state terror and nothing else; counterterror and sex-positive cultural appreciation (Gothic counterculture) within the orc aesthetic are totally possible, putting “rape” in quotes in light of state atrocities to communicate the “undead” sensation of state victims; i.e., those living with animalistic trauma inside or alongside the state of exception as a compelled and predatory habitat. The problem with Tolkien is that he does it exclusively through an unironic jailbreak, seeing Britain as exclusively white and straight. In the process, he constantly imagines (and has others imagine) white British captives escaping from the prisons of dark-skinned people in settler-colonial fantasies that murder and dehumanize these non-British (non-white) performers during a British (white) cis-het nerd’s inadequate, dogmatic idea of unironic BDSM, then acts like that’s “good enough.” Anything else is ignored, amounting to a strangely detached form of white knight syndrome.

Like Coleridge, Tolkien’s Gothic cathedrals are made of grace and light, except he’s granted his own an elvish reinvention to displace some of the Teutonic flavor with (and over time, his wood-elves became high elves, assimilating into the pinnacle of the Western spire and shedding from themselves their merry and silly side that Tolkien had clearly given them, pre-WW2). Tolkien whined when people compared his fantasies to the real world; e.g., self-reporting when a critic compared Sauron to Stalin. Faced with that, Tolkien just had to play British schoolmaster and slap down the interpretation as “incorrect” because it’s not what he designed: “There is no ‘perhaps’ about it. I utterly repudiate any such ‘reading,’ which angers me. The situation was conceived long before[4] the Russian revolution. Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought” (source: The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 2006). Of course it was; he was a British monarchist!

To be frank, Tolkien’s the worst sort of author in that respect: the one who acts immortal, demonstrating the most rigid, inflexible ways of thinking by someone who was utterly accommodated by the status quo in service of said status quo. By playing dumb, digging his heels in and adopting singular interpretations, Tolkien stayed bigoted and acted like God; i.e., his word was the law of a very British, settler-colonial sort. And many (white people) continue to take his side by acting like allegory (and iconoclastic interrogations of power) suck.

Indeed that’s generally how internalized guilt works; you deny it any way you can, saying “that’s not what I meant!” But intent doesn’t matter, material conditions (and consequences) do, and the fact remains that no amount of professed ignorance regarding Tolkien’s displacement and disassociation with settler-colonial violence can change the fact that his worlds are utterly populated with disposable enemies of a dark racialized “other” that carried over into remediations of the original fantasy that defend a global Western superiority. Anything that supports that is legitimate within the usual state monopolies and trifectas, and anything that resists it is relegated to the state of exception.

Dogma is the tool of empire, and Tolkien wasn’t shy about using it, his stories not just full of cops, castles and victims but acting as a steady excuse to turn off one’s brain as being over half a century old at this point; i.e., Neil Isaacs’ introductory essay to Tolkien and the Critics (1968): “since The Lord of the Rings and the domain of Middle-earth are eminently suitable for faddism and fannism, cultism and clubbism… [its special appeal] acts as a deterrent to critical activity” (source: Anderson Rearick’s “Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc,” 2004). Clearly it’s a sore spot in academia as accustomed to looking the other way (not a surprise, given how accommodated intellectuals behave), a sign of institutional guilt tied to the castle and those who live there as coming out to commit colonial horrors. The worst castles are the pearly ones; or as I said in my thesis, ACAB: All (canonical) Castles Are Bad. Indeed, the only difference between people like Tolkien and the Nazis is a matter of degree. Regarding the operations of their mythic structures, both worked in service of the status quo; e.g., Gondor is worse than Barad-dur because it will last and continue committing genocide. Again, Tolkien believed in the state, even with reduced powers, and the state is the ultimate foe.

For example, as Dr. Stephen Shapiro wrote to Reddif.com in 2003 regarding Tolkien’s racism in Jackson’s adaptations,

Put simply, Tolkien’s good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde. In the trilogy, a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against a foreign horde and this reflects long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-Europeans. This is consistent with Tolkien’s Nordicist convictions. He thinks the Northern races had a culture and it was carried in the blood. While Tolkien describes the Hobbits and Elves as amazingly white, ethnically pure clans, their antagonists, the Orcs, are a motley dark-skinned mass, akin to tribal Africans or aborigines. The recent films amplify a “fear of a black planet” and exaggerate this difference by insisting on stark white-black colour codes.

Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because he wanted to recreate a mythology for the English, which had been destroyed by foreign invasion. He felt the Normans had destroyed organic English culture. There is the notion that foreigners destroy culture and there was also a fantasy that there was a solid homogeneous English culture there to begin with, which was not the case because there were Celts and Vikings and a host of other groups. We have a pure village ideal, which is being threatened by new technologies and groups coming in. I think the film has picked up on this by colour coding the characters in very stark ways. For instance, the fellowship is portrayed as uber-Aryan, very white and there is the notion that they are a vanishing group under the advent of the other, evil ethnic groups. The Orcs are a black mass that doesn’t speak the languages and are desecrating the cathedrals. For today’s film fans, this older racial anxiety fuses with a current fear and hatred of Islam that supports a crusading war in the Middle East. The mass appeal of The Lord of the Rings, and the recent movies may well rest on racist codes (source).

Of course, Tolkien’s racism is something Tolkien himself did his best to deny in displaced vampiric terms. Apparently he wasn’t racist because his black-and-white settler colonialism isn’t planet Earth, it’s Middle-earth. Well, that’s fucking stupid, and a rather weak defense. If his stories were really so anti-racist as he claims, they a) wouldn’t be hinging entirely on intent, and b) wouldn’t populated by racist things and racist reenactments: us-versus-them scapegoats. Slaughtered during the British man’s defense of home—including said man’s love for king and country—orcs are whatever Tolkien needs them to be[5] to argue for the superiority (and continuation) of the reimagined Western monarchist hegemon; i.e., through his chiefly British refrain, including D&D and videogames, where heroic progression and empowerment is entirely incumbent on racialized slaughter on open ground with melee weapons (versus James Cameron’s Americanized refrain, with bullets inside the videogame Gothic castle; e.g., the Metroidvania). As the perceived outsiders’ blood and gore continues to pool and pile around the alter of a crumbling Victorian empire built on settler-colonial genocide, this “pest control” mentality is what haunts Tolkien’s world well into the present. Awfully telling that he pushes all of it off onto the colonized group. Very Cartesian, old boy.

(artist: Boris Nenezic)

History, as usual, has been written by the conquerors inheriting old spaces, including the games that white people need to process their own inheritance anxiety mid-genocide: orcs and similar stigmatized animal groups that you frame as undead (doomed to die), then kill and endlessly steal their shit while writing your ascendancy in their spilled blood (with Drow being a chimeric, demonic-undead hybrid of vampires, witches, spiders and orcs: subterranean cannibals, practitioners of black magic, ritual sacrifice, blood libel and so on).

As usual, the Western brutalizer is intimated through the monomythic language of displaced conquest, and its routine purging becomes fetishized in a centrist refrain taming nature into acceptable “good” forms while maintaining the cycle of war inside the monomyth as an altar of sacrifice; i.e., killing “bad” vampire animals and those associated with them, from the lowliest savage orc to supernatural, alien extremes of shadow demons who have no bodies to speak of.

Except, even when the meat on the bones is gone, ritualized death is still “sexy” (desirable) by virtue of the colonizer’s fearful-fascinated seeking of unequal power exchange relative to it; re: Sontag’s Nazi death fantasy as bad BDSM par excellence, stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding that leads to cyclical harm by the Western party towards everyone else. Tolkien’s chaste gentrification of war can’t change that; worse, his complete lack of sex just pushes rape to the margins, meaning we can’t interrogate its presence. It’s simply anathema… except this doesn’t change the fact that the West is a giant vampire that kills and rapes everything around itself; Tolkien’s monomyth is clearly meant to disguise or censor that fact, including his incessant defense of it as a silly white nerd acting like the First Mover redacting the Gothic tradition towards a pure village pastoral: make Britain Beowulf again. There’s nothing polite about genocide, no matter how posh he sounds. He’s just toeing the same-old lie of the Western lie in medieval revivals thereof, his BDSM lacking camp, thus irony.

In other words, to deal with Tolkien’s bullshit we have to try and humanize the pre-fascist, oddly vampiric monsters he created and relied upon in his post-fascist stories. This includes through sex as a terror device we transform with ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., into a counterterror device that interrogates Tolkien’s harmful configurations of unequal power exchange: to challenge the Shadow of Pygmalion (the patriarchal vision of those knowing-better “kings” of male-dominated industries) that Tolkien contributed towards. He’s dead, so fuck what he thinks; do a close-read and see what you find! Or contribute to his world by making it your own. If Tolkien didn’t have the balls to make his hobbits openly gay or the Drow sex-positive, do it for him. Let the old fucker turn in his grave while you desecrate his orderly cathedral, his island fortress’s unironic death and rape. He’s not God, so tear his corpse a new asshole. Show him just how gay his world can be using his own queer potential; i.e., grant him an ignominious death: hoisted up on his own petard as his fans give Tolkien away with their indignance and bigotry[6] boiling over on his behalf.

This is what negotiations of power-as-performance are ultimately about: knowing who you’re bargaining with and where they stand. Getting under their skin and inside their head is important, including what they think about power as existing in the blood; i.e., the surprisingly Gothic notion of pre-colonial inheritance that Tolkien relied on in his incessant worship of heroic bloodlines as something to return to; e.g., Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror, but also Aragorn of the Dunedain gifted with long life due to his special blood—a cursed bloodline, I might add, tainted by the folly of Elendil’s son, Isildur, giving into the curse of the Ring. The Ring, then, serves as a blood curse that, when destroyed, purifies the blood and the people and places associated with it. It’s not the destruction of all rings (and marriages) that is required, merely the One Ring and its false line of shadow kings tied to a wraith-like patriarch Tolkien outlines vaguely as “corruption.” Faced with the quandary of the Western vampire, he conjures up the ghost of the counterfeit to exorcise it, washing the West of its blood by scapegoating Sauron and his Ring for the crimes of the West having preyed on everywhere else.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Lydia)

The paradox of the crumbling homestead (and its spoiled bloodline) is that familial decay is announced by its own crumbling markers of sovereignty within the chronotope; e.g., “Ozymandias,” but also the chapel from Diablo 1 (1996) looming over the grim-looking and solemn-sounding Tristram: “The sanctity of this place has been fouled.” Even Tolkien had his own mad king inside Rohan, but he soundly tip-toed around the campy sort of Gothic sexuality that Horace Walpole was far more game to experiment with. Incest is terminally common, so much so that Walpole can scarcely be credited with inventing it. But his arrangement of the Gothic castle was the first of its kind that is widely recognized:

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto of 1764 is still accepted as the “father of the Gothic novel,” yet most observers of this novelette see it, with some justice, as a curiously empty and insubstantial originator of the mode it appears to have spawned. It is understandably regarded as thin in more ways than one, as a stagey manipulation of old and hollow stick-figures in which tired conventions from drama and romance are mixed in ways that emphasize their sheer antiquity and conventionality (source: Jerold Hogle’s “The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic,” 1994).

In short, he made it all up and was pretty open about that. Gothic invention, then, was a creative desire to reinvent the past, one described by Mark Madoff in “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry” (1979) as follows:

A myth of gothic ancestry did not simply mean bad history. Those who perpetuated the myth obeyed a stronger call than that of accuracy to historical evidence. The ancestry in question was a product of fantasy to serve specific political purposes. Established as popular belief, the idea of gothic ancestry offered a way of revising the features of the past in order to satisfy the imaginative needs of the present. It floured in response to current anxieties and desires, taking its mythic substance from their objects, its appeal from their urgency. By translating such powerful motives into otherworldly terms, gothic myth permitted a close approach to otherwise forbidden themes (source).

Madoff concludes, “The idea of gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” and I’m inclined to agree. Except I would extend this utility to Gothic Communism as something to fashion through the same myths of ancestry found in the usual haunts; i.e., mirroring the unspoken but still advertised material conditions of Pax Americana that Tolkien’s “empire where the sun never sets” was suspiciously covered in shadows and bathed in blood. To touch on those, you often have to go somewhere else when formulating your own critiques (the monsters, psychosexual predicaments, and lairs of various kinds). This can seem purely ahistorical, but generally the goals of any historical play (re: Shakespeare) or historical Gothic novel (re: Bakhtin’s chronotope) utilizes some degree of invention and informative chaos (re: Aguirre’s geometries of terror) amid the displacement and disassociation: crafting your own histories and bloodlines that reverse the process of abjection in a very Gothic way—through the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the fake blood of Gothic horror for sex-positive reasons made in the spirit of fun, but also interrogating trauma by camping it during ludo-Gothic BDSM

This doesn’t take an Oxford scholar. For example, my older brother once invented his own Eastern European leader for a third-grade assignment and called him “Mr. Kazakhstan” while using a picture of Stalin; despite how this would have been right around the fall of the Soviet Union, my brother’s teacher didn’t recognize the photo and gave him an A+ (angering my mother to no end). Keeping in line with the same family tradition, and informed by my mother’s bringing of Russian and Eastern European history home to us kids, I wrote my own fantasy story in the early 2000s where an incestuous tyrant called Bane (the name comes from Weaponlord, 1995, not Batman) forces his half-sister, Sigourney, and half-brothers to wear magic rings that keep them bound to the family castle. When Sigourney cuts off her finger and tries to run, her half-brother forces her to wear a collar instead. Over time, she gives birth to Bane’s rape child: an incredibly intelligent/latently powerful witch named Alyona. Alyona is kind and book-smart—with her non-rapey uncles and her pet ravens there for her as friends (and also Ileana, who trains Alyona to harness her dormant powers to escape Bane’s clutches). Eventually Alyona goes on to defeat her own father-uncle and save her family from certain destruction (with their help, as she cannot defeat him alone).

To be honest, I hadn’t thought about this character in years; I used to think she was modeled after my mother and the abuse she and my uncles experienced during their own childhoods. But then, shortly before Valentine’s Day of 2023, I realized that Alyona (and her siblings) were arguably closer to me than my mother (though functionally the psychomachy offered up a liminal combination of myself and my entire family unit to varying degrees of reality and artifice). To my current, updated knowledge, while no one in my immediate family is a literal product of incest, there is sexual abuse in my family’s history and this history clutters our current ancestral home as one that was only in our possession for a single generation: the house my grandparents eventually bought. Yet the abuses that proceeded its ownership have stubbornly plagued them well into the present, tottering on the edge of the American middle class like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables (1851): “They had taken that downright plunge which, sooner or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian” (source).

“Families are always rising and falling in America”; i.e., the myth of the American middle class is a kind of Gothic lie waiting to crumble. Hawthorne’s historical materialism arguably stems from his own cursed bloodline: the Hathornes. Donna Welles writes how Hawthorne’s ancestor, William Hathorne, was one of the judges of the Salem Witch Trials, which Nathaniel desired to escape from, but still write about. He did so by critiquing America’s own Puritanical heritage—felt on a social-sexual level through all those damn linguo-material reminders of former, fallen power, just daring to return but somehow already-here.

(artist: William A. Crafts)

Gothicists generally fear a harmful barbaric past, but especially its prophesied homecoming within the counterfeit residence as a fearsome site of tremendous lies, decay and abuse speaking to the actual doubled home as equally false. The same applied to me at nineteen during my own displaced writing concerned with power abuse as tied to the “gift-giving” of rings and collars operating as BDSM symbols of psychosexual roleplay. It might seem quaint or invented, but then again, rings don’t tend to do much on their own. It’s how they’re viewed and applied during a given iteration that matters. In short, the writing for me was therapeutic, but also transformative: nearly twenty years before I identified as a woman, my story about Bane and the rings showed me the girl inside of myself as echoed by Tolkien’s fictions. Such a shame Tolkien a) didn’t have the guts to come out of the closet regarding his own stories, and b) recognize what they said about him and his home as something he tried to erase, albeit in favor of the colonizer through a purified village aesthetic to retreat into.

This isn’t always a conscious decision at first (though Tolkien’s denial/stubborn refusal to change, honestly reflect, or leave the closet would have become more deliberate, near the end of his life); as a child, I don’t remember thinking about any of my own family’s trauma or at least consciously reifying it as castles, collars or rings. We certainly talked about these experiences often, but much of it was jokingly passed around like a hot potato (a bit like Bilbo’s ring in that no one wanted to hold onto it). The exchange became an absurd game—with my mother and two uncles joking as teenagers that our bloodline would meet the same end that Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) did: “the fall of the House of [our family name].” The predictable rise and fall of our bloodline through socio-material decay is the very stuff of Gothic cliché. It was only later I consciously learned and started to understand how badly my mother had been abused—hurt by many different persons to such an appalling degree that exact quantification is impossible. This goes for the abuse, but also the degree of shivering someone or somewhere into fractals—a phenomenon in behavioral therapy called multiplicity or plurality. But like Gollum, there is often an exchange of power relayed in some shape or form that leads to the division taking place. This needn’t be a ring or a vampire. Sometimes, it can be a contract; or in the case of Lenore’s betrayal of Hector from Castlevania (exhibit 7a), it can be a vampire ring that works like a harmful BDSM contract when worn a particular way during a particular roleplay scenario: during sex as a dangerous distraction inside a Gothic (vampire’s) castle.

For a good example of a slave contract without an obvious “ring” being visibly worn (or a vampire), consider the late ’90s (thus early-Internet) Japanese anime thriller, Perfect Blue, and its own dissociative, gaslit depictions of a mind horribly fractured by trauma, but also surrounded by it:

Madness is central, in Gothic stories. Generally manifesting through a kind of palpable affect, the monstrous is an experience felt through horror and terror. Presented to the audience, this charge is stored either inside a location or upon its imagery. Viewed, the promoted surfaces compel specific responses—either from victims trapped inside, or those who feel as such (the audience). Call it a “shared gaze,” if you will; the madness remains vicarious.

In blander terms, Perfect Blue [1997] is a psychological thriller, one that concerns shared psychosis, or folie à deux. In Gothic terms, its madness is not limited between two people, but an entire location—what I’ll call chez folie, or “mad place.” A haunted house is more than the heroine and killer, inside; it involves a great number of moving parts, all cooperating to produce a madness exhibited. Once cultivated, this insanity is channeled through a pointed, liminal gaze, often the heroine’s. Under attack, her sense of reality crumbles. Is she mad, or is the killer merely hidden, concealed within the mist? This affliction extends to the audience looking through her eyes; when the killer is near, reality starts to break down (a familiar notion for those acclimated with Silent Hill [1999] or H. P. Lovecraft) [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Gothic Themes in Perfect Blue,” 2019].

The story is over-the-top, but conveys an oft-buried truth under Capitalism: trauma can splinter the mind into pieces, leading to different outcomes in the material and natural world. All the while, the vampire hides behind the mirror inside the reflections of other people’s faces and bodies:

In my case, my poetic division, displacement and disassociation amounted to Alyona as something I materially created in a barbaric, pointedly antiquated offshoot of my family home informed by Tolkien’s imaginary one: a castle filled with psychosexual counterfeits talking about my abuse as arranged chronotopically around me; i.e., Bakhtin’s dynastic primacy and hereditary rites speaking in the usual fatal portraits, suits of armor and coats of arms, but animated by the endless legends occupying the same space through its past-and-present inhabitants. In the case of my mother (as well as my romantic partners who had histories of complex trauma), division involved aspects of their fractured personalities manifesting before my eyes inside a natural mind and body affected by the socio-material environment around it. And with all of us, the curious use of dated Gothic language was never far off. It was baked into the jokes we told ourselves, the games we played together as haunted by the ghost of the counterfeit. But it was still an effective device at speaking to the things that normally went unsaid. The paradox, here, is they were singing to us through the language of the imaginary past as something that shaped our own thought.

Historical-material trauma is utterly entropic, but built with bricks and stones that come apart and fly back together like magic. Always close at hand, it feels palpable but strangely elusive and distant—like Marx’s nightmare, but also Doctor Morbius’ from Forbidden Planet (1956): “Sly and irresistible, only waiting to be reinvoked for murder!” Whether abusers and abused, then, all of my family has been hurt by the family structure itself—all of its monsters hiding in plain sight through familial, dynastic forms: the gargoyles, fatal portraits and other chronotopic elements. For my grandparents, these became sources of shame to hide behind symbols of pride, including Tolkien’s world as an adjacent source of pride to retreat inside. My folks buried everything they could, but I always felt it emanating all around me, like Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) underneath the floorboards, but also inside Middle-earth and my copies of it (my teenage self unafraid to use Stalin and Eastern Europe as a palimpsest). In short, the trauma was buried alive within me as I existed inside my own Gothic-familial space; i.e., littered with traumatic bleeding into Gothic stories as something to messily pass down, but also pass off as not somehow connected to our own generational curse.

I’ve since become utterly detached from it all, feeling bereft of anything that might have been promised to me (including by Tolkien’s magical worlds). Per Said, I feel exiled, but on some level, pleasurably composed of my home as foreign to me. For instance, as a young girl and teenage woman, I had acquired then projected my osmotic absorptions onto a singular egregore: Alyona. Bane had bred her for war and revenge, a kind of fascist wunderkind/wunderwaffe he had predicted in the family bloodlines then imposed through his rapacious will. Alyona not only contained the awesome power of future generations; she contained a summation of my family’s combined, complex trauma existing inside her own Gothic home as having inadvertently doubled mine; i.e., carried away to distant lands and enchanted castles and (more importantly) the ability to change one’s problems in a way I never could: with rebellious magic inside my transwoman’s duplicate of the Gothic rape castle. It strikes me as both simplistic and precocious—a maturing mind bred on fantasy stock coming to her own conclusions (not Tolkien’s) inside a trans egg that finally cracked, decades later.

I was a teenager when I started writing these stories (and drawing them). Even so, my interrogation of capital was still far more frank than Tolkien’s own, his elves effectively anglicized faeries, his men of the West an imaginary pro-European Teutonic, and his vampiric Necromancer reducing the shadow of the fascist past to a dark, abstract, “pure evil” shape disconnected from sex and nature altogether (with his own impressive mythos badly echoing Paradise Lost—Satan, Beelzebub, Pandemonium—and Ursula Le Guin taking several books after A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968, to really hit her gay stride). Still, Tolkien’s own writings on the Ring of Power—and the infamous plurality of Gollum (and Gollum’s triangulation pitting Frodo against Sam)—speaks to everyone’s exploitation under the state’s heteronormative arrangement towards power long before Sauron shows up; i.e., the wearing of rings as a BDSM roleplay minus the Gothic kink, and simply being the Ring as the sole focus: “One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”

Do you honestly think the “men of the West” routinely fall for “the Ring” because they’re not tall, fancy elf-ladies or gay wizards played by Shakespeareans? No, they’re groomed to be susceptible before, during and after Sauron’s fall by the West as a corruptible bloodline—under the spell of state-sanctioned marriage and heteronormative, institutional love; i.e., amatonormativity. Unable to explain fascism, Tolkien just naturalizes and solves it… with old-fashioned monomythic (thus heteronormative) violence and marriage, but also echoes of the Gothic cathedral—Ringwraiths in his case—as tied to the Gothic presentations of blood exchange he pointedly made bloodless. Sauron’s bad play—his all-consuming vampire contract through the wearing of the energy-sapping rings—has totally withered them. Doomed to die, the traitorous kings’ fearing of death was so great it had them playing Faust, only to become death by imitating his titular deal with the devil—not as a genderqueer entity but a giver of false knowledge and power invented by Christian men to uphold the status quo:

(exhibit 10c3: Artist: Anato Finnstark. Their rendition of Weathertop assembles Tolkien’s Gothic cathedral in ways he would have been embarrassed to openly do himself. Yet there they are, standing around Frodo (a dead ringer for Bilbo) like suits of armor possessed by the Shadow of the Skeleton King: a male tyrant reduced to mere shadow and scared off by something as basic [and lazy] as torchlight. Yet Frodo swoons before them as any Gothic heroine would, enraptured by their Numinous might. One sympathizes.)

We’ve already taken Tolkien to task in Volume Zero for gentrifying war (and canonizing Milton’s Biblical critique); e.g., “Tolkien vs Milton” and “The Quest for Power“; re: in his own High Fantasy refrain regressing towards Beowulf and a pure, non-Gothic bloodline. Right now, I want you to try and consider how his inadequacies as a writer didn’t wholly prohibit critical potency of a strictly BDSM, queer-Gothic sort in his stories. In short, I want you to help me  save him from his own dumbass self.

Yes, Tolkien was a philologist (an expert in ancient written languages) and Beowulf aficionado—basically an old, dusty scholar who was well-versed in the Scandinavian legends of dragons, war and plunder. As such, he undoubtedly appeared as totally lacking in the language of women, ethnic minorities (the East is a dark place for him) and gay people. And yet similar to Milton, he had his devilish moments, and similar to my crafting of Alyona, there existed a tremendously secret, divided self waiting inside Tolkien’s own psychomachic dialogs about his own dissenting opinions; i.e., the shadowy spaces of a deeply troubled man who, as we’ve already established, was at least publicly allergic both to the Gothic and allegory as a theatrical device. Despite these disassociative (arguably posttraumatic) aversions and paucity of accurate genderqueer labels, he clearly authored his own imaginary castles but also Gothic power exchange scenarios to go along with them (the Ring is basically a portable torture device that transports the wearer, if not directly to Barad-dur, then at least to feel trapped inside the fortress dungeon; i.e., surviving the dumb, brutal goblin jailors’ whips, chains, prison bars and infernal torture devices; re: the Westerner’s paradoxical chasing of the captive fantasy in order to embody the thinking captive’s righteous indignation and escape from the brutish, unthinking[7] captor). They might seem even more far-removed than usual and that’s on Tolkien, but the usual genderqueer antics are still there provided you know what to look for and have a bit of patience (to be clear, you don’t have to rescue Tolkien’s actual reputation, just his “ghost” as something to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM).

It all goes back to rings as classical symbols of status and power exchange. Rings are given and worn; the Ringwraiths (and their rings) are smaller abstractions of the Faustian bargain manifest through the wearing of Sauron’s rings as harmful symbols of power but also power exchange as having a torturous effect on one’s ability to relate to others; e.g., of Frodo to Sam. The magic becomes a metaphor, a kind of BDSM shorthand—re: not just our hobbits, but also similar acts of gift-giving that famously involve the ring as a kind of contract that is worn, generally in a variety of roleplays (which, for Tolkien, were primarily chaste in their execution—excluding the raw, lethal force of dead orcs, of course).

Tolkien stole this idea for his counterfeit much like he did everything else (excluding his languages, but who on Earth complains about those?). We mentioned Lenore and Hector for the second time, a moment ago. Let us consider a likely inspiration for their own power games and Tolkien’s that I have already examined myself in the past[8] (and which we now return to for a second look): Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (c. 1598):

(source: Pinterest)

In a similar medievalist fashion centered around rings, bloodlines and Christian apologetics, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice seemed to ask, “who is the titular merchant by the end of Act Five?” It would seem to be Portia, as the exchange of power and wealth through the wedding rings have gained her the most social capital in a Christian sense; i.e., the argument of mercy and bargaining through displays of charity that are displayed and worn in public. On paper, her husband has acquired her manor and inheritance, but she maintains the ability to gamely negotiate and navigate these spaces far better than he. As Karen Newman writes in “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice” (1987):

The governing analogy in Portia’s speech [to Bassanio] is the Renaissance political commonplace that figures marriage and the family as a kingdom in small, a microcosm ruled over by the husband. Portia’s speech figures woman as microcosm to man’s macrocosm and as subject to his sovereignty. Portia ratifies this pre-nuptial contract with Bassanio by pledging her ring, which here represents the codified, hierarchical relation of men and women in the Elizabethan sex/gender system in which a woman’s husband is “her lord, her governor, her king.” The ring is a visual sign of her vow of love and submission to Bassanio; it is a representation of Portia’s acceptance of Elizabethan marriage which was characterized by women’s subjection, their loss of legal rights, and their status as goods or chattel. It signifies her place in a rigidly defined hierarchy of male power and privilege; and her declaration of love at first seems to exemplify her acquiescence to woman’s place in such a system.

But Portia’s declaration of love veers away in its final lines from the exchange system the preceding lines affirm. Having moved through past time to the present Portia’s pledge and gift of her ring, the speech ends in the future, with a projected loss and its aftermath, with Portia’s “vantage to exclaim on” Bassanio:

I give them with this ring,

Which when you part from, lose, or give away,

Let it presage the ruin of your love,

And be my vantage to exclaim on you.

Here Portia is the gift-giver, and it is worth remembering Mauss’s description of gift-giving in the New Guinea highlands in which an aspiring “Big Man” gives more than can be reciprocated and in so doing wins prestige and power. Portia gives more than Bassanio can ever reciprocate, first to him, then to Antonio, and finally to Venice itself in her actions in the trial which allow the city to preserve both its law and its precious Christian citizen. In giving more than can be reciprocated, Portia short-circuits the system of exchange and the male bonds it creates, winning her husband away from the arms of Antonio.

Contemporary conduct books and advice about choosing a wife illustrate the dangers of marriage to a woman of higher social status or of greater wealth. Though by law such a marriage makes the husband master of his wife and her goods, in practice contemporary sources suggest unequal marriages often resulted in domination by the wife. Some writers and Puritan divines even claimed that women purposely married younger men, men of lower rank or of less wealth, so as to rule them (source).

If Shakespeare’s game approach to labor and wealth was relayed via imaginary Italy in the proto-Gothic tradition, Tolkien certainly took his own jaunts into similar territories using queer analogs.

First, there was the initial male bachelor playing at various games to escape battle with the goblins: speaking in riddles. Indeed, Bilbo not only cheated at the riddle game; he cheated at combat, using a magic ring that he arguably stole (though it didn’t originally belong to Gollum) in order to sneak out (all while Bilbo’s manly friends had to heroically fight through tiers of goblins serving the evil master using the only language Tolkien’s Nazi-esque[9] scapegoats understood: brute force). Surviving into old age, Bilbo was followed by a second younger double, Frodo, who—when he puts on the Ring and goes (for but a moment) over to the dark side—would have been the same exact age as his spitting-image uncle when the older hobbit first found the Ring in Gollum’s cave.

If I made Alyona and my own gay-penned torture castle to interrogate a Gothic living situation through precocious ludo-Gothic BDSM theatrics (and in response to Tolkien as someone to camp), then I don’t think it’s really much of a stretch to see Tolkien doing the same with unironic demon BDSM (of the Radcliffean sort) to canonize the Gothic; i.e., his borrowed bestiary gnawing at the back of his own mind about the imperfections of the heteronormative West and its own imperfect bloodline. Except for him, the abstraction of the Ring was something to offer up during a ritualized sacrifice that, once invoked (using a volcano, no less), defeats fascism once and for all, letting things “return to normal” after the glory of Gondor’s white castle is restored through the same-old monomyth purifying the blood through a trial by fire into Hell (versus already functioning normally through the endless cycle of war and false hope under Tolkien’s brand of Capitalist Realism apologizing for nation-states). In fact, it’s hard not to see a queer-if-closeted (what Tolkien might call “Tookish” or fairy-like[10]) side of the old man, curiously mirrored on the surface of the twinkish Frodo; i.e., a little, confused and perpetual bachelor swooning before the prison-like assemblage of churchly stones, the kingly spectres and their awesome threat of hellish bondage pressing through the golden nuptial band gripping Frodo’s hand.

As I said, if you know what to look for then Tolkien’s closeted, scapegoat nature of Gothic antics (despite their typical displacement, disassociation and gaping shadow where women and good “orcs” should be) are as plain as wearing the Ring yourself: the threat of dark, vampiric bondage. It’s precisely what drew me to his work because the presence of Sauron spoke to my trauma as a queer person. The truth of things ties up in the Ring’s existence while under its power as something to paradoxically seek. The same palliative-Numinous logic applies to Sauron’s offshoots, our riders in black, as unspeakable evocations of power that can be interrogated while under their fearsome spell:

To that, the ghost of the counterfeit adumbrates settler-colonial guilt, even when pushed away through a refusal to connect it with home, instead declaring it as “pure darkness” from “elsewhere.” The wearers of the black robes aren’t women, spiders or even orcs; they’re old, white bandit kings from the West, on par with the sort of duplicitous, “Gothic” backstabbers stared at with fear and wonder by someone not accustomed to the paradoxes and doubling inside the shadow zone. Conjuring up a canonical iteration of darkness visible, Tolkien had taken the British empire’s long shadow and projected it off onto faraway castles, alien lands and exotic battlefields of unprecedented carnage, but also crumbling ruins much closer to home: the barrow wights haunting nearby funeral mounds, and dark forests of enchantment populated by evil talking spiders. Corporeal or incorporeal, Tolkien’s vampires greedily sap the lifeforce of good living people until they become just as wicked—growing unthinkingly hungry towards “good” nature like Ungoliant or Morgoth draining the twin trees of Valinor (exhibit 0c).

Tolkien wasn’t an out-and-out Gothicist because he rejected the title and the open function of actually being one (far more than even Milton did, whose accidental celebration of Satan isn’t an unpopular concept); yet Tolkien’s necromantic black mirror is still on full display here, even if he can’t really bring himself to say the quiet part out loud: Sauron cannot exist in a vacuum. There is no “Big Other” troubling the West from outside, merely the West (and Capitalism) acting as it always does; i.e., like a giant vampire reinventing its own bloodline and simultaneously conjuring up Nazi “homebrew” and banditti-grade warlords from within itself, inside/outside, but also inventing “evil” labels for its own prey and chasing after them into settler-colonial territories dressed up as “home defense.” Evil returns during the class nightmare, whose inheritance anxiety must be banished each and every time through the seeking of power and attaining of all the usual relics thereof—by entering Hell, looting its vaults and “conquering death,” Joseph-Campbell-style (again, Imperialism with more steps, and dressed up in rather preachy white-savior and white-martyr language).

Likewise, the potential to bring out a Gothic queer criticality was still very much present in Tolkien’s works, albeit from a largely male, novel-of-manners perspective. Blame Peter Jackson for toying with canon and “changing things,” if you want; but I don’t personally think Jackson really changed all that much of Tolkien’s notion of power exchange when examined through a queer Gothic lens.

Consider how the titular characters, Bilbo and Frodo, are both canonically 50-year-old bachelors in the book (they are, in fact, cousins who share the same birthday: September 22nd); both inherit a house full of nice clothes and parties but never go out and never get married or have children (with Bilbo begot from Belladonna Took, and Frodo being adopted by him after the younger hobbit’s parents were killed in a tragic boating accident). In other words, both characters echo Tolkien, whose “diary” embodies the High Fantasy pastoralization of a closeted dandy ringed by Gothic shadows and counterfeits he utterly despised: the “finding” of a historical document that legitimizes a true bloodline and outs a dark bloodline as false. It’s about as Gothic as anyone can get and I always knew the Tookish, repressed side of Tolkien wouldn’t let me down.

I don’t think Tolkien was strictly as fanciful or devilish as Walpole was, let alone Lewis, but the notion of historical reinvention with ahistorical fictions was certainly present in his village scapegoating of evil. Abjection aside, Tolkien’s fantasies helped him discuss impolite topics through Gothic allegory as a Platonic, shadows-on-the-wall device the author openly decried, but was still guilty of using. Maybe that’s why he kept quiet. Nevertheless, Molly Ostertag writes in “Queer Readings of The Lord of the Rings Are Not Accidents” (2021):

The frame story Tolkien created for The Lord of the Rings was that the tale was simply translated from a much older historical document. This is established in the book’s introduction, where the author describes how Bilbo’s private diary (i.e., The Hobbit) was preserved and expanded by Frodo (and later Sam), becoming an account of the War of the Ring. That volume, The Red Book of Westmarch, was preserved and transcribed, and passed down as ancient history—”those days […] are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed”—until it ended up in Tolkien’s hands. This frame is evident through the book in bits of old lore scattered through the story, footnotes on the quirks of translating languages like Elvish and Orcish into English, and in the extensive appendices that lay out Middle-earth’s history before and after the story.

When a book is presented as a primary source rather than a work of fiction, it’s an authorial invitation to look between the lines and search for hidden truths [oh, the irony]. The narrator becomes part of the fiction—history, after all, is recorded by specific people with their own motives—something that Tolkien, as one of the world’s foremost Beowulf scholars, would have intimately understood. It was a conscious choice on the part of “Frodo” and “Sam” to include the many moments when they express love for each other, and it reads much in the same way people from the past delicately referred to their same-sex relationships: wanting to acknowledge their truth while obeying the conventions of the time.

Heterosexual romance is sparse in the books, and discussion of sexuality between the characters is absent (the One Ring can be seen as a metaphor for lust and temptation, but that’s a whole other topic). But Tolkien was not averse to romance. In a letter to one of his sons, he wrote about chivalric romance as the height of romantic love: “It idealizes ‘love’ […] it takes in far more than physical pleasure, and enjoins if not purity, at least fidelity, and so self-denial, ‘service,’ courtesy, honor, and courage.” This is the relationship between Aragorn and his elf-love Arwen; between Eowyn and Faramir; and it is, to a T, the relationship between Sam and Frodo (source).

(artist: Molly Ostertag)

Open confessions aside, the Walpolean tradition of Gothic Romance lies in Tolkien’s story as utterly haunted by what it limits to the periphery: fascism, the monstrous-feminine and queer love as projected onto an imaginary easterly plain by a thoroughly white, cis-het, British male imagination reared at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign (thus the collapse of British settler colonialism). Contemporaries of Tolkien certainly made no bones about diving more honestly than he did into deathly shadow spaces and rapey castles; re: James Whale, an openly gay man later imitated by bisexual activist, Vincent Price, as well as 1970s camp; e.g., The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Phantom of the Paradise (1974). All were channeling a monstrous-feminine idea that reaches back before Tolkien to Oscar Wilde’s aesthete (the author of the 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray) and the “sodomic” dandies of the 19th and 18th centuries, including horror auteur, Matthew Lewis. And if the Gothic isn’t currently being helmed by gay men, then its icons certainly have been inclusive of the demonized in ways that happily don’t entirely preclude Tolkien, or at least his ghost as something to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., by shining a spotlight on the queer elements that were present in his own work.

Yes, Humphrey Carpenter wrote in 1977, “As to homosexuality, Tolkien claimed that at nineteen he did not even know the word” (source: J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 1977). And yet, as with Walpole, Lewis, or even me when I was a teenage girl, it really doesn’t matter if Tolkien lacked the words to spell out his queerness in no uncertain terms; it’s still very much there for us to comment on—and frankly as clear as day in all the Gothic scenarios he swoops in to frighten readers with, but also himself. As someone clearly bothered by the shadow of the West (and British settler colonialism in decline), Tolkien conjured up this shadow as the stories’ metatextual wizard: he’s the necromancer and the Britannic queer of the story because the titular Lord of the Rings, Ringwraiths and hobbits all come from inside him and his culture as apologizing for itself through Gothic poetics dressed up as anti-Gothic; i.e., Tolkien’s vault of treasures, but also his trademark dark forces without which his grand conflicts would be utterly meaningless (though unlike Milton, he is defending God and God’s twin trees [the Base and Superstructure] and the Christian West as things that are exceptionally good, thus above critique). All encompass the “moral geography” of his famous treasure map and its prolific, endlessly replicated xenophobia (the creation of orcs and humans a standard function of nation-states carried into videogames through Tolkien’s earnest, ubiquitous Orientalism: us-versus-them arenas and killing fields dressed up in made-up languages, their many names memorized by the faithful escaping into them to do battle with Tolkien’s various scapegoats).

(“J.R.R. Tolkien in his study, ca. 1937, black and white photograph”; source: The Morgan Library & Museum)

 

Beyond Tolkien’s ambiguously gay (male) hobbits, he nevertheless interrogated war through the classically dated, homocentric approach.

Given his dusty academic interests, the complicated/warring bigotries of Great Britain, and the Nazis’ destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institution of Sexology in 1933, we can perhaps understand if not condone Tolkien’s ignorance regarding trans, non-binary and intersex people when he started canonizing his fantasy stories. He was nearly Bilbo’s age when he wrote The Hobbit, thus unsurprisingly stuck to his white man’s gentlemanly idea of a heteronormative, “civilized” world; i.e., the usual kind of white men fighting for white women in the usual Cartesian division and violence against nature that results. Tolkien’s fabrications were moderately bigoted, but still bigoted in all the usual ways you could expect of a moderate from those times of waning British superiority under an increasingly globalized capitalist network. And yet, similar to Radcliffe or any other non-radical British person of the Gothic tradition, Tolkien used his privilege to draft a ghost of the counterfeit that was arguably far more dangerous than the open bigotries of the Third Reich (what Martin Luther King Jr. warned about in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” in 1963: the white moderate): Sauron thrived in Tolkien’s black-and-white universe, as did the imperial murder machine grinding up so many “orcs” to reclaim the lost valor of the West. Blood for blood, a truth universally acknowledged through wedding bands in the end (minus Austen’s irony).

We’re clearly not here to apologize for these persons, but to expose through our arguments with their ghosts (of the counterfeit) anything that is useful in their work towards developing a post-scarcity world that isn’t quite so fixated on biology and blood. And sitting alongside Tolkien’s painfully Anglicized lords and ladies was that curious group of “little people” who fall short of the towering men, gilded elves, and anti-Semitic dwarves of the West: hobbits.

To that, Tolkien’s Middle-earth is an imaginary theatre of medieval jingoism (re: the Cycle of Kings; i.e., the titular Return of the King during the rise and fall of fascism, restoring Capitalism to an undecayed state) serving as the usual place where forbidden love occurs: Gothic castles. Even so, it remains largely devoid of active, gender-non-conforming (and especially non-white) women and utterly chockful of nationalized imagery tied to Capitalist Realism: orcs, vampires, and bad BDSM, but also hobbits. As something Tolkien contributed towards using these queer little creatures, hobbits worked as a debatable analogy for himself and his countrymen before, during and after WW1[11]. Tolkien felt dwarfed (so to speak) by the presence of global war around him, becoming prone to homoromantic feelings that wouldn’t have strictly been allowed by his peers: Bilbo never married and neither did Frodo, but both characters were clearly cis men who loved other men. But Tolkien could never really stick the landing. He (and his son) were/are too busy refereeing Tolkien’s own stories, in effect robbing their own house to maintain the lie (the Divine Right of Kings and British sovereignty) while also doing their best to appear as boring and unassuming as possible within the American capitalist model. It’s very British.

In short, it would take someone other than a debatably closeted British man in love with his own painfully English war poems, dying empire and European legendarium to give female persons a place inside the Gothic dialogic, in effect articulating what is perhaps Tolkien’s greatest shortcoming of all (aside from his demonizing of people of color and celebration of Capitalism/the West through a blood purity narrative): his exclusion of women, especially their trauma as undead (with him being paradoxically terrified of talking to the dead in a Gothic way—cryptomimesis).

This is a giant omission, but also mischaracterization by Tolkien; i.e., his women largely operate as virgins or whores, damsels or demons. Simply put, they aren’t people so much as monsters to be killed (usually spiders), princess-like property to be fought over, or—in the case of generously neoliberal interpretations of The Silmarillion—Amazonian girl bosses[12] like Galadriel who advocate for open genocide; e.g., the “good war” rhetoric of Rings of Power (2022) being Tolkien’s chickens coming home to roost (melting that ring down didn’t do shit, dude): the endless escapism/chasing of war and orcs, goblins, and Drow, etc, as beings of darkness to subjugate, fetishize and dominate by the vampiric forces of good acting like far worse doms than Sauron (and whose stately abuses extend towards any monstrous-feminine force by state actors—more on this in Volume Three when we look at the ontological ambiguities of femboys and other chased groups). In short, Tolkien’s idea of pure evil abjects the state’s brutality onto a basic, clumsy scapegoat; it’s seemingly tame, but intensely harmful towards nature through the myopia it generates in defense of the state as preying on the natural world by redefining those in connection with it.

(artist: Kyu Yong Eom)

To that, Tolkien’s biggest problem was his pure escapism into an idealized reality versus an experienced once; it became his canon, fear and dogma to—through a particular cultural mythos—uphold the status quo, alienating himself and others from sex and nature while fetishizing settler-colonial violence in horribly vampiric ways. I’d like to spend the rest of the subchapter examining how an experienced reality—and its Gothic BDSM fantasies not being divorced from trauma—lead to an iconoclastic worldview that made me far more openly queer and sex-positive than Tolkien, but also his supporters; i.e., those who would deny voices to presumed property of the state: the rape of women or beings treated like women in some shape or form. That, as we shall see, was my ring (or cross) to bear (minus Tolkien’s sense of Christian guilt).

As our thesis argued, such stories’ reclamation generally relies on some degree of Gothic poetics, including intense emotions, music, sexuality and monsters. It bears repeating that Tolkien even preserved a lot of this through his rings, swords-with-names and battlefields, but also his Beowulf-grade poems and songs, which appear to have no idea how women actually work, let alone gay people, persons of color or Indigenous peoples. Even so, the legends really meant something to the old man; they helped him process his trauma by literally conjuring it up and fighting with it through stolen armaments. While the basic idea isn’t that different from ludo-Gothic BDSM, the arrangement of power is; my idea of the palliative Numinous is generally relayed through a feminine recipient of power inside Gothic castles (re: Metroidvania)—all to critique Capitalism and its generational trauma in ways that Tolkien’s stories largely couldn’t.

Again, for all his love of traditional and fantastical reinvention, Tolkien largely abandoned his Marxists critiques in favor of toeing the line through a centrist refrain built around heteronormative men and their pure bloodline (and token queer hobbits): the men of Numinor granted superhero powers by virtue of their noble parentage and staked claims on fancy elf princesses. A conservative treatment of sex lingers inside, but also of settler-colonial violence; i.e., not subversion, but segregation and enforcement of the usual bigotries told through a courtly romance (minus the usual medieval lust) centered around a small effeminate humanoid coded in various traditional ways; e.g., war and songs, but also knights and monsters that, through the ghost of the counterfeit, further the process of abjection through Capitalist Realism.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

As a Gothic-Communist trans woman, my stories have sought to camp Tolkien’s ghost in jokey ways: making it openly gay with ludo-Gothic BDSM. To that, my Sigourney (left) is imprisoned at her evil half-brother’s castle, but she seems to have something of a Mona-Lisa smile/approach, playfully daring the viewer, “Speak[13] ‘friend’ and enter!”—in short, to “raid” her “dungeon.” The aim with our calculated risk is to reverse Tolkien’s canonical usage (and facilitation) of war and darkness towards a more Miltonian treatment (thus corruption) of dialectical-material forces (though my stories featured giant stone pillars, not twin trees, they were still ruled over by magical women, not a singular godly patriarch).

My doing so has centered entirely around representations of things that largely went unspoken by Tolkien: women like Sigourney as actual persons with their own opinions, senses of humor and lived trauma; i.e., shackled to the dark, rapacious castles on display as a profoundly effective means of voicing their own trauma to reclaim what was taken from them by the usual abusers. Finding (a)sexual meaning in their own lives would likewise actually help anticipate Capitalism’s historical materialism leading to all the usual genocides (and their alien commodification) centered around bloodlines, war and marriage—i.e., interrogating and negotiating power in ways that go far beyond Tolkien’s limited, boys-only purview while he was alive to challenge the torchbearers of his complicated settler-colonial legacy after his death. His exclusion of women was clearly meant to gag them, but also the things these tokenized ladies would triangulate against: people of color and stigmatized elements of the natural world exploited by capital.

Compelled love regularly happens in neoliberal stories that prepare female workers for fascism’s re-entry—Beauty and the Beast (1991), for example; i.e., trad wives “fixing the abuser” and faking orgasms (the latter of which is easier for AFAB persons to do, though I can personally attest to AMAB people faking the enjoyment of sex with an abusive partner). To be fair, unequal positions and behaviors—such as having one side be the primary breadwinner or an ace person and non-ace person becoming romantically involved—can be negotiated under boundaries of mutual consent. Fascism doesn’t allow for mutual consent because it is radically heteronormative, overcorrecting the colonial binary to self-destructive extremes; by extension, centrism cannot stop fascism, making it fascism with more steps. Tolkien’s fringe homonormative undercurrent ultimately returns to the heteronormative, courtly arrangement of a white, purified Britain-by-another-name; i.e., destroying nature more slowly by leading to Sauron, but also covering up their own hand in things as “Saurons to a lesser degree.” After all, a nature preserve without Indigenous peoples is simply genocided land; the same goes for elvish woods without goblins or orcs, the latter crammed into a ghetto-like underworld like the Misty Mountains. Tolkien’s wishy-washy naturalization of a good/evil binary in the natural world is criminogenic.

Likewise, general slavery—normally veiled under neoliberalism—is more overt under fascism, but exists to varying degrees in centrist stories (whose paladins differ from death knights to a matter of degree, not function). This includes marriage between compelled heteronormative sex; i.e., women’s labor, which is historically unpaid/forced through veiled threats of destitution and harm. Under manufactured scarcity and conflict, marriage becomes a ritual of convenience-under-duress: a compelled means of financial security for those who historically have no rights, including owning property—not just cis-het women (which canonically are fought over by men vying for the widow’s gold, marriage bed and status), but queer folk who wear beards and have lavender weddings just to survive. Meanwhile, old genocidal adages from sublimations of America’s Manifest Destiny break through the façade: “Kill the Indian, save the man” becomes “kill the orc, save the princess.” Be they Indigenous peoples, persons of color or other minorities, token police scramble to save their own skins; they try to assimilate, offered a brutal and cruel “last chance” by their future slavers-once-more. Courtesy of Tolkien’s refrain, war becomes an addictive, brutal game—not just a ring to wear but a vicious, regressive cycle overshadowed by older variants of the Ring less remembered than Tolkien’s famous epic; e.g., Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876) by Richard Wagner.

(source: Legendo Games)

We’ll return to the game show as a metaphor for exploitation later in the book. Until then, consider the ways in which violence-as-a-game is, itself, a pyramid scheme: “There can only be only one!” The Highlander (1986) sloganizes this concept, evoking a violent, imaginary past that only the good Macleod—a white, male savior—can save the white women of the present from: the rapacious Kurgan. Apart from the hero, heteronormative fantasy canonized by Tolkien’s High Fantasy schtick regularly segregates intersecting groups into a colonial binary that radicalizes towards the domestic center or repels away from it during state decay and restoration. Under fascism, everyone is forced to be hyper-cis-het inside a faux-medieval, hauntological framework; black and white are radically divided and token minorities police those within the state of exception to the detriment of nature. Under Bretton Woods’ embedded liberalism, relative freedoms are “given back” to a working class threatened with fascism, provided sacrifices are made against a conveniently evil force… which neoliberalism makes into an idealized reality built on harmful, dogmatic illusions; i.e., made to conceal its own economic regressions that lead the cycle to repeating itself under Capitalist Realism.

The whole exploitative cycle between fascists and neoliberals is only derailed by two things: state shift, or the intersectional solidarity of workers fostering an experienced reality that camps Tolkien’s idealized one.

State shift is the Anthropocene/Capitalocene as thwarted by Mother Nature herself effectively kicking Tolkien in the balls. Payback’s a bitch, but it will be a terrible end—one met with slow, Promethean brutality. Genocides don’t happen overnight or with the fall of nuclear bombs, which—unlike the monopolies of violence, terror and morphological expression—are too hard to control for the elite should they be used at all (as they rely on material reminders of their power not being blown away by nuclear fire); genocides take time so the rich pigs can soak up all the blood and digest it like greedy vampires. Yet, while total annihilation is neither “instant death” nor a foregone conclusion, it also cannot be salvaged in one’s own lifetime (the burning of “Rome” takes centuries). We all have our own traumas to handle, whereupon you can do as I have done when camping Tolkien and other centrist narratives with your own darkness visible; but you have to keep your ear to the ground and try (unlike Tolkien) to view darkness as something to perceive, interrogate and negotiate with in iconoclastic ways that belong to us.

(artist: Earth Liberation Studio)

This experienced reality includes the people you meet and relate to outside of your family circle or village base. Whereas Tolkien’s social interactions were largely (for the hobbits) built around a village pastoral, escaping said pastoral myself—”pulling a Le Guin,” as it were—was vital in my subverting of Tolkien’s centrist apologetics for Capitalism. In my own family life, I directly recall an abusive father and stepfather hurting me, but I also sensed trauma everywhere. Long after I wrote and forgot about Alyona, my grandmother observed my pain and thought me odd (despite being a “grave chaser” who recruited my little brother to help her track down family tombstones); my grandfather saw my gloomy beard and thought it looked good, but unlike me seemed constantly sated by Tolkien’s bloody pastoral refrain. Indeed, the more I lived and experienced the world, the more I saw trauma in Tolkien’s chronotope—how he largely ignored the traumas of women as I experienced them, or saw them happening in my friends’ lives, or the natural world as exploited more and more under Capitalism despite “Sauron” having been vanquished—and wanted to give those things a voice. Defending them was far more important to me than preserving Tolkien’s idealized worldview.

In other words, the only dream here was Tolkien’s premature victory and I soon outgrew the artificial wilderness he yearned for. Eventually I branched out, “leaving the Shire”: I went to college a second time, fell love with several women, reading The Hobbit in between breakups and writing about it for school. Eventually I met a girl called Constance who broke my heart (more on that in Volume Three); then I went to England, met Zeuhl, fell in love again, and came back—always to the same place. Over several decades, I started to feel bound to my ancestral home, desiring to escape but feeling trapped by the same forces that rooted old Hawthorne where he was. I felt doomed, left behind by various persons, but especially Zeuhl[14] as someone who, like a ring-bearer themselves, had me wrapped ’round their little finger: something to wear then discard when the time came. Unhappy with home and past forays into the unknown, I kept trying on rings and collars, camping their canonical use as I read about it in books like The Hobbit. Escaping that closet, I grew increasingly convinced that a simpler kind of love wasn’t for me; I liked the darkness and its Numinous inequality of power as something to inhabit as the sub, but I still needed to find someone who wouldn’t fuck me over as Sauron did to his victims.

The Promethean moral, here, is fittingly subversive, but also lived. The cyclical revolutions and seemingly anchored position made me desperate to buck fate, which largely thanks to Zeuhl’s stupid bullshit—i.e., their car-crash-in-slow-motion-of-a-breakup and constant gaslighting of me—put me on the path to accidental self-destruction as a campy means of eventual catharsis and healing once I crystalized ludo-Gothic BDSM with Cuwu. I don’t want to “hand it to them” nor abdicate my own hand in things, but I never negotiated to be abused by Zeuhl or by the person who came next (and the person after that person); despite being drawn to trauma as an abuse-seeking behavior at first glance, my lived reality was that catharsis and BDSM overlap in liminal territories using a shared aesthetic. Vis-à-vis Tolkien of all people, this helped me interrogate the usual centrist distractions of the world more effectively—i.e., when I was out of the closet, I didn’t want to go back into Tolkien’s sad little cupboard. I had tasted far more delicious fruits, and his came from a poison tree having grown tremendously after his death.

To this, it’s true that former victims seek out the theatre of abuse as something they can reclaim in a panoply of ways; i.e., through canon or camp. This includes the Gothic theatre of courtship, but also Amazonomachia as a well-trod territory Tolkien was even more shy about than male-centric bondage scenarios (come to think of it, he very much liked those); e.g., Queen Taarna’s angrier (and far bloodier) parade of the monstrous-feminine than Tolkien ever dared to dream (and would have blanched at seeing—for the sex and retro-future aesthetic, not the beheaded orcs). To defend myself, others, and the natural world from Tolkien’s myopic refrain, I’ve devoted my life (and this book) to exploring the kinds of monsters and power exchange scenarios he routinely skimped on:

(exhibit 10c4: Artist, top-left: Margo Draws; top-middle and top- and bottom-right: Oxcoxa; bottom-left, source tweet: Raw Porn Moments, 2023. My study of the Amazon and BDSM has yielded a variety of truths alien to Tolkien. For one, the devil-in-disguise is often couched within crossdress and paradoxical strength as having evolved over space and time within a library of discourse. As Bay notes, “Taarna is built for the Male Gaze while simultaneously subverting its expectations”; i.e., she reverses the role of the Medusa, chopping off men’s heads as if to ask, “How does it feel, assholes?!” She also provides a complex, visually violent version of the postpunk disco/club music refrain: “How does it feel, to treat me like you do?[15]” [a query as much to someone’s guilt or position of giving as well as them on the receiving end of ironic “violence” versus actual harm]. Of course, Taarna runs the risk of chopping off workers‘ heads who are normally presented as orcs/zombies, minus the threat—i.e., labor movements and/or people of color being called “terrorists” by the state—but it’s arguably a step in the right direction provided we camp Tolkien more than Heavy Metal [1981] did.

More to the point, Taarna isn’t so far gone that you can’t reclaim her from total assimilation and decay [or demonic animalization; i.e., Tolkien’s spiders existing purely within female “chaotic evil” forms of nature as something to dominate by pure-white men upholding the profit motive within Capitalist Realism]. These kinds of Amazonian double standards and intersectional biases elide and roil on the surface of the female body as a) entirely mysterious to Tolkien, and b) a complicated billboard he never bothered with in his own stories: the variable undeath of a white-skinned Medusa as killed by men contrasted against the black-skinned Medusa as killed by men and women, both of them [and orcs] fetishized differently within the same punitive structure.

The genuine struggle—to holistically express body positivity during liberation as an ongoing event—becomes caught up in morphological double standards; i.e., the white-skinned “dark queen” either marketed as “black”—i.e., “PAWG” [“phat ass white girl,” exhibit 32b/41b; re: “A Problem of Knife Dicks” and “A Lesson in Humility“] as a “Goth” collision that elides black clothing with the “black” body as having white skin: the “big [titty/booty] Goth GF”—or kept skinny to be drawn the way that “most bodies are” [code for Vitruvian enforcement; re: Oxcoxa]. Meanwhile, black female bodies that happen to be skinny and fairer skinned [shadism] are inevitably perceived as “white” [as if most of them “chose” how they were born]: similar to queerness, skin color synonymizes with body size as a false choice, which complicates fat acceptance and liberation in the eyes of those persons seeking representation as something to escape the shared, internalized shame of white/black female bodies as queer [and male bodies in relation to them, the two hailing from the same savage, imaginary place].

In turn, the trend of the Amazon or Medusa as a powerful warrior queen or Sapphic monarch can be taken into potentially exploitative spheres, wherein the “Bowsette” crown [also Oxcoxa] famously fetishizes the white girl with an “atypical” [non-white] princess body to be desirable for the pandered-to male fans; but also articulates the descriptive sexuality of white or non-white AFABs within Nintendo’s fandom—i.e., those who are simply born with bodies outside the settler-colonial standard, and who want to be celebrated for it via a class metaphor of power and status: the girly crown, suspiciously pink [re: Tirrrb’s “The Yassification Of Masculinity“] but tinged with sexy black “corruption” as a non-harmful aesthetic/function. Within this larger dialectic, a viral trend emerges using the same imagery operating at cross purposes, resulting in various amounts of nuance or lack thereof, as well as [un]irony and cultural appropriation/appreciation when the “Yass, Queen!” crown is worn.

To this, Tolkien becomes a funny hypothetical begging “what if?” in a larger conversation the original never bothered with. When we entertain ghosts of his work through Amazonomachia speaking to a lived experience he deliberately distanced himself from, we play with, thus learn from these misfit toys. Doing so, we uncover the potential for class warriors and traitors emerging in arbitration relative to the public’s use of a largely textual/oral tradition to support popular sentiment for or against the status quo: to let one or two minorities rule in a problematic light like Tolkien’s orcs and dwarves did, or for there to be no minorities and for everyone to be kings, queens and intersex/non-binary monarchs in a post-scarcity world Tolkien [thanks to Capitalist Realism] literally couldn’t imagine. For him, there were only gay-curious hobbits standing in for absentee maidens, and the white-knight heroes protecting them from savage orcs [mythical black rapists] and their masters, the thoroughly vampiric-yet-wholly-spectral dark lords.

[artist, top-and-bottom-left, top-middle, and bottom-right: Wondra; bottom-middle: Persephone van der Waard; top-right: Red’s References]

Just as fascist and neoliberal evocations draw on the imaginary past to prevent scarcity’s termination, the possible worlds of Gothic Communism draw upon incredibly old and pervasive myths based on lived experience; i.e., whose ancient caves, Amazons and monstrous-feminine hauntologies can be recognized closer to the present, thus used to empower current labor movements through mythical solidarity as an informed and educational exhibit. This includes the voluptuous Easter, the statuesque Hippolyta, Schwarzenegger gender swaps [my loving 2016 attempt at gender parody] and other androgynous types closer to the present, but also their assorted clothing [admittedly optional; e.g., my omitting of the T-800’s “death biker” schtick]. A set sex, gender or orientation/performance isn’t even the point; rather, our aim is to merge non-heteronormative ideas of these things into semi-recognizable-yet-distinct forms of power and resistance as class-conscious. While such consciousness clearly takes many forms, “different” from a sex-positive standpoint isn’t a commodity to be branded by Rainbow Capitalism in Tolkien’s refrain; it’s decided by workers resisting routine exploitation [of themselves and nature] through subversive, even transgressive media speaking to their lived realities challenging idealized worlds built by homophobic[16] Pygmalions like Tolkien.)

 (artist: Niki Chen)

Tolkien’s idealized reality spoke to his lived experience relegating healthy psychosexual expression to the darkest of margins, including its abuse among a variety of persons and their bodies. During their hellish parade as brought into the light, a complicated worship occurs, of these and other “strict/gentle” symbols of corrupt/monstrous-feminine power and persecution; e.g., the “gentle dom” fetish aesthetic of Marina, the objectified “Medusa”/girl of color (a kind of “zombie Medusa” [above] that elides assimilation fantasies within the state of exception) as fetishized in society at large—not just by a given artist and their legion of thirsty fans—while also having femme qualities in a nun-like submission that might erupt in masculine violence. Unfortunately this subversion of the standard Promethean Quest marks the searcher as vulnerable to actual predators, who—often abused themselves—see similar trauma in others they covet for their feminine vulnerability and exploit it through suitably Faustian means; they’re drawn to them like a vampire to blood (or a Ringwraith to hobbits). And those of us seeking healing might foolishly offer our neck if our trust is betrayed by a convincing and/or hypnotic act.

Enter Jadis.

“You really do have a beautiful body” were Jadis’ first words to me (they loved my ass, in particular). They are ex number three (not including one-night stands, online relationships and FWBs, etc) proceeded by Zeuhl and Constance. However, while you gain and lose something with every partner, I lost more than usual with Jadis and learned some hard-fought lessons; i.e., like Frodo on Weathertop (except unlike Tolkien through Frodo, I learned how to process my trauma and express myself in a queer fashion). Simply put, Jadis was the most actively abusive partner I’ve ever had—a malignant narcissist who worked off my maladaptive survival response when courting me: to fawn (the other three being to fight, flee or freeze—the last one also called “oscillation” in Gothic circles). Unlike my dad or stepdad, Jadis never physically beat me; they still coercively brokered the power exchanges between us, teaching me to suffer in ways I’d only ever read about in stories like The Hobbit or The Castle of Otranto. Like Tolkien’s stripped-down, all-black vampires, Jadis literally collared[17] me and “took me to Barad-dur” and drained me of my wits; it seemed fun at first blush, but very quickly ceased to be—not due to the aesthetics, but Jadis’ strange faithfulness to Tolkien’s canon as something to act out unironically in real life: the ghoulish necromancer built on bad-faith bargains by someone as stubborn, clumsy and inflexible as he was (moderates are polite until you push them).

By taking my own risks during psychosexual experiments, I accidently became a Gothic princess in ways I didn’t negotiate (the irony of me, the desperately gay Communist/closeted trans woman, walking headfirst into a neoliberal SWERF/TERF and then falling in love with them is not lost on me; to be fair to myself, Jadis did not advertise themselves as neoliberal, and when they eventually called themselves as such, I tried very hard to explain my point of view—more on this in Volume Two). I wanted material things and the ability to play wife; but I exchanged my own power to a genuinely Faustian, psychosexual charmer who clocked my trauma and love-bombed me, then took me far away from anyone to continue torturing me (cycles of abuse that only ceased when I stopped seeing Jadis as a protector and removed their collar). But I still learned from it. As said in our thesis statement, trauma doesn’t just beget trauma; it recognizes it and preys upon it, often in nonverbal, vampiric language. It’s a very animal experience and you won’t have any idea what it’s like unless you’ve been there yourself, unless you’ve been hunted or have inherited the anxiety of being hunted as a surviving element of your culture (e.g., the animal themes in Jordan Peele films in relation to racialized violence).

For me and my survival vis-à-vis Jadis and our competing interactions with Tolkien’s work, my biggest takeaways were how the state (through Jadis as a state proponent) desires power but also disguises it in self-righteous yarns. So do narcissists, and the former enables the latter in historical-material ways, generally informed by state apologia. Jadis loved Tolkien and D&D as a kind of war pastiche their TERF-y personas could run wild inside. But this also spilled out into how we interacted during our day-to-day lives as informed by Tolkien’s worldview as something Jadis undisputedly upheld for their own reasons: the female orc warlord (what I call the war boss).

(artist: Just Some Noob)

While some narcissists provide and others receive, a provider or patient who is narcissistic will coerce and control their mark in highly manipulative ways. To this, Tolkien’s refrain pushed the dialogic forward in ways that remained closed and primed for abuse. While the angel/devil dynamic of unequal power abuse plays out in a wide variety of historical-material ways, Tolkien’s dialogic played out through legends and games that carried his limited and praxially inert exchanges into Jadis’ life, thus mine. He became something for them to flaunt and cherish, looping my neck in orcish ropes; it was literally our roleplay to bind and torture me, but in ways Jadis—like Sauron—used to deceive me with; i.e., with traditional positions and artifacts of power tied to providing from a male/female position; e.g., not just the warrior archetype Jadis and I enjoyed, but the medical[18] profession. My seeking of such trauma was a kind of theatre, but my caretaker was acting in bad faith.

To this, Jadis provided for me on paper and through a negotiated aesthetic, but abused me in practice; i.e., “Tolkien in reality.” Indeed, the negotiation seemed honest, sincere and beneficial: to be their conjugal worker—”a live-in bussy” who learned to cook, clean and do things that, as a closeted trans person, I tended to avoid. While I actually value acquiring these skills and the novelty of service (which can be fun if it isn’t abusive—e.g., cooking as a means of saving money on food labor costs, while also giving me control over how my food tastes as I prepared it for me and those I love), I quickly discovered that no one likes to be compelled and threatened by an asshole who acts like they know (and own) everything/are better than everyone else. Indeed, while Jadis was a genderfluid AFAB, they still coerced, gaslit and threatened me constantly despite playing the victim; they “knew better” than I did about Tolkien, and wanted me to keep my opinions to myself (and resented my attempt at constantly subverting the D&D racialized chart and manufactured conflicts, scarcity and consent; e.g., my attempt to make a good Drow who lived in daylight and loved others to challenge Tolkien’s bellicose worldview but also ludology).

In this regard, the best lies are built on truth: Jadis’ mother had abused them, resulting in Jadis having more sides to their personality than most people do. And while these fractals would flash across their own surface during confrontations, I couldn’t always tell them apart or verify them because Jadis was inherently dishonest and manipulative.

For example, Jadis liked to cry whenever I accused them of acting like their mother or just calling them out for “DMing” me in real life. They had described their mother well enough and certainly reminded me of them. Yet, Jadis’ reactions always made me feel guilty for “making” them cry despite what they were doing to me! It wasn’t just a pivot; eventually I started to feel crazy for standing up for myself (not “crazy” as “in love” in a sex-positive sense, but “crazy” as “gaslit” by an abuser). I slowly became reluctant to fight back, being worn down by attacks I couldn’t always see but could always feel; i.e., like the pull of the Ring ’round Frodo’s neck. I had a little crown and a pretty dress, but was still owned precisely because I was delicate, pretty and vulnerable. Like an orc queen with a little war bride, Jadis could have their way with me; and under their vampiric thrall, I became increasingly undead and started to doubt my own education and expertise, but also ability to camp fantastical stories. As they loved to say themselves, “You have heart, I’ll take that, too!” And boy did they ever!

(artist: Sabs)

We’ll examine the plurality of Jadis’ bullshit more during Volume Two, including how I bested them in the end (and went on to write this book series in spite of their efforts to police my work). For now, just remember that their “conditional” offer of financial “security” as my would-be mommy dom absolutely withered alongside their pure condescension and abuse of me; both made the joy of cooking for them, caring for them and fucking them an absolute nightmare. At first, it was like Tennyson’s poem, I their Lady of Shalott and they my Lancelot:

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,

He rode between the barley-sheaves,

The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves,

And flam’d upon the brazen greaves

Of bold Sir Lancelot.

A red-cross knight for ever kneel’d

To a lady in his shield,

That sparkled on the yellow field,

Beside remote Shalott (source).

In the end, though, a horny bitch like me couldn’t enjoy sex with Jadis because they utterly terrified me. It wasn’t impossible to cum, but I still forced; i.e., trapped inside Tennyson’s Camelot as slowly becoming an unironic Gothic castle the likes of Sauron’s fortress (except when it appeared, I was already inside it).

To say that I faked orgasms wouldn’t be entirely accurate. For one, the ejaculation wasn’t fake (it either happens or it doesn’t, for AMABs); as for my enthusiasm, it wavered, but I wanted it to be genuine in order to please Jadis despite it feeling worse and worse for me to keep trying. Regardless, I didn’t want to have sex with Jadis because they had ceased to be the dark, handsome knight I fell in love with. Once wooing me with Irish ballads like “The Devil’s Courtship” (2001) by Battlefield Band or “The Two Sisters” (2010) by Emily Portman, they became someone I wanted to get far away from: a source of torment that more or less looked the same as before.

Even now, though, I remember how their power leveled me when I was under its spell—no longer, thanks to my friends’ help and my own courage (thank you, Cuwu, Ginger and Fen; you saved me that night). I escaped, and if this book is any indication, things are going well enough without Jadis in my life. Such is the lot of someone as lucky as myself to have a place to go (a secret, safe place). Writing this book in my peaceful idylls is the least I can do to help others—to cathartically pass on what I have learned for myself and for the world and nature after I am gone. So please, learn from my adventures; avoid the emotional/Gothic stupidity that Capitalism historically-materially foisted upon me through my own cursed bloodline, and which my own camping of Tolkien’s Gothic (and his rings and collars) eventually saved me from my own harmful vampire.

To that, we’ll be taking Tolkien to task once more. Onto “Challenging the State’s Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires)“!

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Always male-centric, Tolkien primarily codifies darkness as male, his largely peripheral treatment of the monstrous-feminine relegating Ungoliant to the footnotes.

[2] There is a queer element to Tolkien’s hobbits, but they ultimately serve the British empire’s heteronormative (male-centric) view of the world. They crowned Aragorn.

[3] Arwen is married off without a fight; Eowyn, to Faramir after she kills the Witch-king.

[4] Note his invocation of the imaginary past to suit his needs; i.e., “his” view of things. This is a fascist tactic, evoking the apocryphal past to justify dogmatic arguments in the present space and time (which are generally attached to systemic abuses of various kinds).

[5] For many examples of why Tolkien thinks orcs suck, consider Jeff LaSala’s “Tolkien’s Orcs: Boldog and the Host of Tumult” (2021). The guy’s like a broken record.

[6] Read Richard Newby’s “A Racist Backlash to Rings of Power Puts Tolkien’s Legacy into Focus” (2022) to see what I mean.

[7] Re: Descartes’ disastrous notion of “extended beings” exemplified in Tolkien’s refrain. Thinking vs extended, or white Europeans versus everyone else.

[8] I.e., in Volume Zero (2023) when I inspect my own 2015 essay “Dragon-sickness: The Problem of Greed” close-reading The Hobbit, The Merchant of Venice and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904).

[9] Tolkien’s goblins occupy a centrist shadow space; i.e., filled with general corruption and monstrous-feminine theatrics of the Western kayfabe: cartoon Nazis, Communists, and racial/genderqueer minorities. They’re all things for the good guys to chase down and slay to restore the West to its former glorious state (fascism, Imperialism and genocide, except with more steps).

[10] Tolkien’s faeries aren’t changelings or dark sexual monarchs, vis-à-vis Titania and Oberon. Even when he wrote The Hobbit, the elves are merely silly and gay or wild; but they aren’t psychosexual; they lock up Thorin because he refuses to say why he and his friends are on elvish land—for suspicion of trespassing, in other words.

[11] In a letter to his son, Michael, Tolkien wrote, “From Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, the journey… including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods… is based on my adventures in Switzerland in 1911” (source: Jim Dobson’s “How a Trek Through Switzerland Inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to Create a Magical Middle-Earth, 2022). If The Hobbit was based on Tolkien’s passage through Switzerland in 1911, then it’s hardly a stretch to see The War of the Ring as based clearly on WW2 and Western Europe; i.e., being beset by the fascist, half-eastern territory of Mordor in centrist hypercanon, but also a variety of special military units on either side; e.g., the Great Eagles and the Nazgul both being death-from-above stand-ins for the rise of nationalized air forces during this conflict, and the orcs and Easterlings being seen as weaponized slaves on par with those used by the Nazi war machine during Lebensraum.

[12] I can provide a partial exception to Eowyn because, even though she says, “You stand before my lord and kin, and if you touch him I will smite you!” Yes, she says in the same breathe that she is not a man, but does act like one in defense of Tolkien’s bloodline; yet she is also someone who only ever fights a single Nazi stand-in, and to that, the king of Sauron’s generals. So, while it could be argued that she is just as bad as everyone else, we do not get to see her “pull a genocide” and argue for it like Jackson’s Eowyn or Amazon’s Galadriel. She’s not a white knight who has the chance to darken, and remains idiosyncratically subversive of the Valkyrie legend in genderqueer ways. Again, she’s not perfect, but remains one of Tolkien’s finest moments; i.e., she—not Bilbo or Frodo—inspired me on my own genderqueer adventure!

[13] A mistranslation by Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring (the actual line being “say friend and enter”), demonstrating the aging wizard’s inability to get into dark, deep holes.

[14] When Zeuhl left me, they jokingly said it was “for an old flame in England”—i.e., a person they treated like their soulmate even though they said they didn’t believe in such things. Instead of simply telling me that, they “unicorned” me, keeping a bisexual cutie in their pocket by not wanting sexual interactions between metamours while standing among us (or similar interactions happening with Zeuhl in front of other people). Simply put, they were incredibly controlling but also fooling themselves—i.e., were selectively poly until they weren’t and were again, shifting in and out of a poly headspace whenever it suited them. It made me feel taken advantage of, so much so that I broke down crying in front of Dale Townshend in his office at MMU: “I feel used,” I told him, like I was being lied to (despite Zeuhl insisting that they, like Jadis, could never tell a lie; instead, it was always my fault for making them feel crazy despite me merely trying to communicate). His response, “Nicholas, this sounds like bullshit!” regarding the way I was being treated. Bless you, Dale, for saying that; you were right.

[15] From New Order’s “Blue Monday” (1983).

[16] Yes, homophobic. Tolkien flirted with homoromantic feelings, but the raw mechanics of the story—its socio-material conventions, redistributions of wealth, and unequal power exchange—are ultimately heteronormative. Aragorn must marry Arwen and become King of the West as a straight, white place. Bilbo makes bank following the Battle of the Five Armies, but grows alienated from the Shire for not marrying (a bit like Walpole, in that respect). Eventually he and Frodo are carted off to Heaven (a bloodless variant of “bury your gays”) and Sam marries Rosie, arguably loving her but ultimately keeping up with appearances by sending his precious male master away for good. After this, hobbits more or less eventually go extinct, their magical bond/closeness to nature going with them.

[17] It was a pink leather collar with a little bell on, like a cat. I loved the collar but grew to fear and loathe the person who placed it around my neck.

[18] E.g., the nurse, doctor, psychiatrist or orderly appearing benign but acting malignant, often through needlessly corrective and harmful surgeries or procedures often, in horror stories, being treated as the stuff of nightmares: forced isolation, euthanasia, lobotomies, electro-shock, medically induced psychosis, queer conversion therapies, or genital-corrective surgeries on intersex infants (exhibit 3c), etc.