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.

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“Predators and Prey”: Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM; Its Bodily Psychosexual Expression and Campy Gothic Origins Stemming from Horace Walpole onwards

I wanna fuck you like an animal
I wanna feel you from the inside
I wanna fuck you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed (source)

—Trent Reznor; “Closer,” on Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral (1994)

Picking up where “‘Revolutionary Cryptonymy’ opening, and ‘Predators and Prey’ part one” left off…

The desire for a parental/protector role (and settlement) is not lost during dialectical-material struggles, especially under dreamlike but also playful conditions; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM, where power is something to interrogate and reify in ways for which we are not always master (the nightmare being the classic source of inspiration for many-a-Gothic-castle). All the same, as much as one might desire a big-strong protector or warrior “parent,” the fact remains that many animals (and their warrior positions) are hunted under capital’s settler-colonial practices and structures. A common means of negotiating and one day escaping this captive reality—and one this section of the subchapter will explore—is through prey mechanisms during ludo-Gothic BDSM: a playful willingness to camp canon with game-like Gothic poetics, but especially monstrous, painful, unequal forms of power exchange (demon BDSM[1]) that check Vitruvian, European body standards, policies and (for the focus of this subchapter) animalized stigmas; re: policing nature as alien with nature as alien (e.g., subjugated Amazons), which must be reclaimed during ludo-Gothic BDSM enacting revolutionary cryptonymy—to legitimize through what is abject, therefore canonically illegitimate (while bewaring of token Amazons punching the Gorgon; re: Autumn Ivy).

Note: This section represents a point of reflection after writing my PhD, hence coining “ludo-Gothic BDSM.” I would go on to apply ludo-Gothic BDSM much more actively in Volume Two’s Poetry Module, onwards, but here in “Uphill Battle” and its various essays like “Prey as Liberators” was already starting to reflect on the idea and apply it holistically. —Perse, 4/7/2025

I coined “ludo-Gothic BDSM” in my thesis—specifically in theory during “The Quest for Power” and prototypically in practice during the “camp map” finale with Blxxd Bunny—but the idea of practicing it is not exactly new. “Demon BDSM” reflects on many torturous devices penned by Ann Radcliffe (re: “The Roots of Camp“), and heteronormative conditions at large have been camped in a very gay way since Horace Walpole’s Gothic castle (Shakespeare toyed with such ideas, but Walpole coined “Gothic” as it’s currently understood so we’re going with him). Unlike James Cameron, who canonized Gothic peril in favor of familial dimorphism, campy monsters—through nakedly exposed, neo-medieval forms—become something to get closer to through rape play/informed consent that subvert heteronormative standards by “making it gay”; i.e., through various forms of palliative-Numinous, torture-dungeon theatre that address modern-day anxieties felt living within (or near) the state: like a captive, thus hunted, animal inside a castle-like home’s fatal nostalgia and complicated social-sexual education.

To remind people where we’re headed, part two of “Predators and Prey” examines animalistic morphological expression in the shadow of state monopolies and where we can go to subvert them: by building our own Walpolean castles to challenge those built by the state—which the next subchapter will examine, vis-à-vis Tolkien’s unironic Gothic spaces, torture devices and vampires either divorced from nature or destructive to proper forms of the “natural” world; i.e., in a very Christian, manicured sense; e.g., the Garden of Eden. After that subchapter looks at Tolkien’s coercive undead (and their haunts), we’ll consider the broader stupefying effects we’ll need to take into account when dealing with workers who may or may not assist us when fashioning castle-like dialogs out of the Gothic-Communist theories we’ve handled thus far in the manifesto; i.e., dealing with vampires (or rather vampiric weird canonical nerds) who might just as quickly suck us dry for the state as help free its teeth from ’round our throats when these theories are put to practice.

Before the “Prey” section examines camping prey-like morphological expression, I want to give a brief, ten-page note about morphology as it exists inside a Gothic castle’s nostalgia and psychosexual education; i.e., as it pertains to such “game” to begin with—the hunted quarry and their cunning ability to playfully outwit the predator pursuing them. That is, such places often canonically instruct predators to target the human body as policed and forbidden, including its prey-like morphological expression in Gothic forms (monsters and “peril”); chased after and forcefully bred for being alien (and feeling alien because of it), receivers of psychosexual violence must escape while confronting aspects of themselves that are not only animalized, but forced to intersect with fears of unironic violence that—for them—may have already collided in the past. Pleasure and harm synonymize.

The canonical Gothic space, then, is a place of institutional violence, forcing its inhabitants to act as givers and receivers of state violence who receive and embody feelings of self-hatred and self-persecution from their dangerous surroundings. Like trained animals, they become conditioned to accept these harmful positions, thus must challenge them by subverting their coded, Pavlovian instructions in ways unique to humans that nevertheless look and sound animalistic. They must fetishize the sense of feeling alien/monstrous in ways that playfully reclaim their agency during calculated risks; i.e., playful maneuvers that pointedly remove the spontaneous, uncontrolled qualities (and actual harm) from “hunting” scenarios—of suddenly being attacked without warning inside one’s habitat in ways that normally happen to historically abused groups (e.g., women, or those perceived as or treated like women, are far more likely to be raped than men are)—while also teaching would-be abusers to see them as human and as beings connected to nature who are constantly defined by human customs and complex, contested linguo-material devices from moment to living moment: our holes, roles, and psychosexual predicaments as things to play with, thus camp, using Gothic poetics during liminal expression (the devil and the angel, the thinking animal, the “helpless” actor topping from the bottom, etc).

(exhibit 9b0: Artist: Puk Puk. Rape anxiety relates to female bodies as simultaneously doll-like, animalistic, and undead/demonic, but also male bodies and heteronormative expression at large as having far-reaching and long-standing effects on morphological expression tied to psychosexual rituals; i.e., those that deal with the Gothic notion of inheritance anxiety that stems from being born into a space rife with constant historical reminders of dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites [re: Bakhtin] but also imaginary examples tied to a fearful imaginary past that comments on the present; e.g., the fear of being raped or otherwise controlled in ways that chattelize oneself as prey to serve the patriarch, the household, the state; i.e., through compelled sexual labor as harming the giver and receiver of work conflated with sexual violence and a continuation of a dangerous sovereign’s bloodline: “breeding rituals” performed between predators and prey in the same unhealthy arrangement.

[artist: Puk Puk]

These become things to camp, opening up a variety of silly counter possibilities to the state’s usual bullshit. For example, not only is it possible to be “bred” without a uterus [as Bay tells me and which I know from experience with Zeuhl, who had a hysterectomy] insofar as the act is a performance, but the parties involved can box up their trauma and play with it inside safe spaces that allow for rape play to be had without fear of confusion or harm [while not fixating on physical violence; e.g., Silent Hill‘s Pyramid Head, Fear and Hunger‘s (2018) rapacious, openly phallic monsters and bodily dismemberment]. In short, we can laugh at things that would be triggering except for the campy context granting them an ironically medicinal quality—to play and relieve stress by imperfectly recreating a silly act of “misfortune.”

The paradox of reclaiming one’s power, then, lies in how it is canonically framed as disempowering inside highly traumatic dialogs where power abuse and resistance to power abuse occupy the same theatrical, and at times very silly, space. As our thesis argued, “camping the canon” by “making it gay” camps the Gothic castle as an operatic, psychosexual “‘rape’ space”—one where the language of animalistic heraldry/war and conquest intersect with class/culture war to double unironic, abusive forms; e.g., “rape,” of course, but also, the castle being “razed,” the maidens “conquered,” the boys “put to the sword,” etc, etc. Such playfulness grants both a potent means of interrogating trauma, and a sense of agency to those normally subdued by canonical threats of force: reclaiming their labor power through subversive mechanisms that allow us to question the fatal nostalgia of a traumatic, imaginary past during revolutionary cryptonomy as a daily event. In turn, state monopolies are challenged by parodic, counterterrorist forms, their ludo-Gothic BDSM designed to weaken the state’s reign of violence, terror and hellish morphological expression in ways that reeducate workers; i.e., by teaching them to be sex-positive during Gothic-Communist development: changing socio-material[2] conditions with demon BDSM, thus camping and recultivating the twin trees of Capitalism—the Base and Superstructure—during oppositional praxis, including its synthesis and catharsis.)

This liminality—and its reclamatory performances contesting state domination through revolutionary cryptonymy—is a very complicated concept we’ll only introduce here; we’ll unpack it far more extensively in Volume Two (which is devoted entirely to humanizing and reclaiming monsters). For now, just remember that state monopolies on violence and terror—and ultimately on hellish expression at large—concern morphological expression linked to the home as simultaneously one’s place of conditioning rooted in fears about animals, the medieval, nature and sexual reproduction as canonized in hauntological forms; i.e., whose bondage enforces total, harmful submission by fearing nature, versus the ability to educate playful, healing forms of psychosexual “duress” that allow for discipline and restraint as conscious, informed acts in animalistic language. We can tie each other up and respect the rights of others (and animals as a whole) while confronting generational trauma; or, likewise, can navigate animal feelings of forbidden desire (outweighing a clear head and common sense) when capital constrains us in prey-like ways. In short, we can alter the curriculum in extracurricular ways, learning to work as a team and meet each other’s needs while limiting and eventually diminishing the state’s capacity to harm us through taught behaviors; i.e., from our own iconoclastic art as a subversive, Romantic[3] means of de facto education that  reclaims Gothic poetics and liberates workers from Capitalism with the same pedagogy of the oppressed as both outrageously over-the-top and as serious as a heart attack.

(artist: Droog)

Confusion is a cycle under capital, so it behooves us to learn how to dialectically-materially navigate the lands (and bodies) of confusion, but also menace (thieves, banditti and desperados), superstition (curses and ghosts), buried trauma, forbidden knowledge (demons), dogma, disorder, complicated excitement and psychosexual pleasure, etc, as torn between ourselves (workers) and our masters (the state). Their desire to rape then prey on our minds (then our bodies) requires we act unpredictable when using the same theatrical devices[4] ourselves; i.e, as masks that paradoxically give us away and conceal/reflect our revolutionary aims in splendid ways. In other words, while the Trojan Horse was gigantic, the Trojan Bunny (from Monty Python, left) was silly and ironic in ways befitting a splendide mendax but nevertheless suspended between bourgeois and proletarian usages:

To varying degrees, we’ve already been exiled, outlawed, and shamed by the state, so it behooves us to grow accustomed to playing with chaos, fear and taboos in ways that suit us by describing our lived realities; i.e., as nightmarishly imperiled by fatal nostalgia, its haunted pastiche/endless, echoing copies (cryptomimesis) enjoyed by humans during the calculated risk of operatic parallel spaces (the danger disco) that—when retreated into—promise half-hidden threats and otherworldly delights.

(source)

These are at odds within/at home with class and culture war as waged for the state during moral panics. For the elite and their helpers, monsters and lairs are the ghost of the counterfeit—a thing to summon and explain away in unironic Gothic pleasures; for us, the imaginary past is a weapon to pit against the Imperial Core. As something that periodically “returns,” the Gothic castle is a site of animal expression, but also confusion, isolation, alienation and ambiguous danger and excitement as a natural part of the human condition within capital’s material factors.

Apart from the exhibits of morphological variety that appear in the next handful of pages, I want to spend the remainder of this subchapter stressing how performances inside the shadow zone take on a predator/prey arrangement with visibly animalized forms that cannot be avoided, only subverted and transformed when the state-in-crisis and -decay tries to weaponize our confusion and monstrous labor against us. I also want to consider how would-be places of curiosity like human genitals and their reproductive, but also erogenous functions—so-called “private parts” relegated to the bedroom (vis-à-vis Foucault)—are intensely secret, exclusive and chased after under highly uneven and coercive social-sexual arrangements; and finally I want to explore Walpole’s castle as a camping ground of the European family unit that we can learn from when challenging canonical forces ourselves. In dimorphic, familial terms, the husband (or those groomed to play such a part) would be expected to do their duty as head of the household; conversely the receiver of this unfair bargain would also have their own part to play—wifely duties, also known as “paying rent,” which in liminal territories, comes with a fair amount of fakery and performance, but also fetishized costumes and kinky roles:

(artist: Puk Puk)

That is, performance and play conduct themselves according to honest threats, but also the generation of “threats” during calculated risks that allow the aggrieved party to confront past trauma as living within and around them in the present space and time. This includes facing fears of wifely duties as animalized: “paying rent,” and being “bred,” as part of that systematically disparate equation meant to prey upon subjugated workers; i.e., bride price. Not only is there a curiosity to face the fear as something promised to one in relation to their body as animalized, but also a desire to reclaim these characteristics in ways that transform the structure’s predatory nostalgia and education to serve future worker needs (and those of nature in association with them). To alter canonical historical materialism, one’s body is explored according to a monstrous canonical role inside a fatal structure that needs to change lest unironic harm persist; and said structure will defend itself against revolutionary cryptonymy in complicit forms. All the while, camp’s morphology of monsters is a warzone fighting to describe those actors (and animals) most challenged by state counterfeits (the latter envisioned by very scared/angry[5] heteronormative people):

(exhibit 9b1: Artist: Xuu. Gyno/androdiversity includes gynodimorphism, which uses anthropomorphic biology to divorce human gender roles from strictly human bodies; i.e., to treat human genitals, gender and sexuality as highly malleable and xenophilic—fetishizing the alien in a sex-positive, non-predatory way that likewise reduces the state’s ability to criminalize, thus prey upon, such unironic variants, mid-struggle. We’ll examine the social-sexual qualities of anthropomorphism [and the drug-like, chaotic bodies of Giger-esque chimeras; i.e., monomorphism and Acid Communism; e.g., phallic women/Archaic Mothers, exhibit 1a1c; re: “Symposium: Aftercare“] much more in Volume Two.

Also, while our focus will remain on humanoid bodies with mostly symmetrical, if not expressly Vitruvian components, it’s worth noting that asymmetrical and “cluster bodies” flirt with plurality and native, physically descriptive and divergent embodiments faced with colonial struggles; e.g., Light Years‘ [1988] dark-skinned Deformed having multiple heads and limbs, but also a lack of various pieces that are nevertheless informed by a classical monster framework: akephaloi, or “the headless ones.” It also could be an Indigenous, guerrilla, acephalous challenge to the danger of a centralized, Cartesian mind fascistically praying on nature from the future; i.e., a decapitation of the European model of genocide as an endless, predatory cycle repeating itself in relation to capital/scientific exploitation. Its fatal historical materialism is built on mad science vampirically serving the profit motive as capital defends itself, scapegoating decadence and “degeneracy” in a cyclical holocaust.

[artist: Bokuman, commissioned by me to draw the hero and princess of the film]

As the ghost of the counterfeit, Light Years is essentially a Gothic nightmare about scientific overreach with fascist results: a giant, patriarchal brain-in-a-jar that eventually goes mad, builds a time machine and ruthlessly preys upon local, native populations in the past. These natives are already abused by a moderately matriarchal, Amazonian society who—faced with the armies of the brain they designed—send a white savior away from shelter and safety to overthrow the tyrant during the typical monomyth gauntlet and its rewards: animal-alien friends “relegated to the underworld,” whose reverse abjection helps prevent the genocidal cycle; but also the princess [above] whose definitive moment amounts to passively loving the hero.)

(artist: Bay)

Fantastical signatures notwithstanding, art (and especially Gothic art) frequently expresses real bodies that deviate from the Vitruvian standard; as punishment, said bodies (and their associate cultural value/attachments; e.g., Bay and his gynodiverse labia, but also consistent, palliative drug use) are controlled, eclipsed and destroyed, but also fetishized, mid-exploitation, by Cartesian forces tied to various power centers—castles and their recursive genocides’ grim harvesting of the systemically vulnerable. In Gothic terms, castles are animalistic sites of captivity and danger with a dynastic, hereditary bent (the chronotope); re: the lover, villain, parent and protector all occupy the same uncomfortable living space. The same applies to ontological spaces—one’s body as animalistic in ways that don’t endorse, thus resist, state abuse when the unironic (non-Walpolean) castle appears (and with it, the liminal hauntology of war). Heteronormative language outlaws and fetishizes sex-positive animal demons like the ones already shown. In so-called “correct” spheres, there is only white, cis-het men and women, and women exist purely to please men; indeed, sexist men “need” subservient, cis-het women in order to prove themselves (specifically their manhoods) by having PIV sex as an animal act. Men hate and desire women in this respect, seeing the answer “no” as standing in their way to individuation and success. To overcome their childish and unnecessary fears of dying a virgin, the pussy becomes something for men to “slay” according to a mythic gradient; i.e., stemming from Grendel and Grendel’s mother as beings to rape in relation to nature-as-alien, but also identify in more seemingly human forms and behaviors that retain an animalistic stamp through Gothic poetics; re: “animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms.”

In a Gothic-Communist sense, then, overriding state mechanisms to change socio-material conditions becomes a team effort—something out of an animal parable that updates easily enough to the present space and time:

(artist: Secondlina)

This concludes our preliminary examination of Gothic morphologies, relevant to our Gothic-Communist camping of them. I want to use the rest of “Prey” to consider this chattelization as camp through ludo-Gothic BDSM, and monstrous (demon) BDSM operating as a complex, paradoxical dialog of psychosexual torture exacted for different purposes during oppositional praxis. We’ll look at their role as part of a larger aesthetic (exhibit 9b2) that either fits within European, heteronormative beauty standards/myths (exhibit 10a), or camps them (exhibit 10b2, 10b2 and 10c1).

This, I will argue, comes from the style of Horace Walpole as located in fearsome, genderqueer doubles of the European castle that invite nightmarishly illuminating-if-troublesome comparisons between the two (from my thesis): “Doubling is the black mirror in action; its confused reflections invite troubling-but-useful comparisons to alien, unhomely things (unheimlich), showing less about how we’re different from the things we abject, and more how we’re similar (albeit in discomfiting ways)” (source).

The castle, for instance, shows similarities but also potential differences (transformation/death omens) regarding home and homebodies amid imposturous, otherworldly chaos, phobias, uncertainty and change; i.e., “bad,” imperfectly decayed fakeries that don’t further the process of abjection, instead updated for modern forms of Gothic politique that, while Walpole would have admittedly been lost on, still apply his concepts in a monstrous, ludo-Gothic BDSM, dreamlike fashion: “fur fags” (exhibit 10a2) portending the death of the state within disturbed thresholds and surfaces complicated by the context of struggle whose shared aesthetic feels invaded, but also occupied by ill will that cannot neatly be divided into clean, discrete categories. The phenomenology (experience) of emotional turmoil is the code not just to decipher but speak with as a message unto itself, relayed inside a parallel space capable of intense (re)education.

The Gothic castle, then, is the mind and house as intertwined and infused with sickness—an unheimlich (“unhomely”) site of inhabited destruction, superstition, phobias, taboos, medieval psychology (demonic emotions and psychomachy) and moral panic (stigmas and bias) that can not only change hands, but ownership and function in ways that demonstrably help workers who feel uncertain about their surroundings and familiar/familial elements; i.e., to unspeakable, repressed degrees that are, themselves, tied to immense locational trauma; e.g., the mother from The Babadook (2014, above) half-secretly wanting to kill her son despite her presumed protector role. Said position is invaded and shared by buried trauma tied to the home as occupied by unconfronted psychosexual forces: objects of the household overpowering the minds of the inhabitants in ways not strictly dissimilar to a demonic possession, nightmare or curse. Mother and murderer synonymize, doubling inside one person as neither one nor the other but both at the same time oscillating in a state of agitated confusion. Conflicts like these are inevitable in such places; if you don’t confront them, you’ll kill the next in line!

Like Radcliffe, such nightmares are felt while awake, becoming something to confront and confirm as being genuine or false, harmful or safe; unlike Radcliffe, we want to weaponize it against the state in ways that escape their monopolized cycle of harm (versus “punching the mirror” and effectively ourselves as scapegoated “destroyers” blamed for the “fall” of civilization). Like The Babadook, generational trauma becomes something to ultimately face, accept, and live with—to paradoxically befriend. Just as the Babadook’s red book appears like magic, followed by doubt and nightmares that weave spells of moribund uncertainty regarding our place in the world, we can call upon the animalistic, psychosexual powers of the Gothic castle to terrify our enemies with: the state doesn’t own those, and the mere fact that the home is a giant, endless graveyard needn’t disempower us. We can paint our complicated, half-real experiences, thus giving them shape/a healing[6] voice to speak out regarding our inherited confusions, injuries and insignias.

For workers, the ritualized, animalistic trauma common to BDSM becomes a historical-material offshoot of state abuse, one that involves women (or effeminate/emasculated persons). Instead of treating sex as an unpleasant task, they can cathartically reify then seek out psychosexual, xenophilic pleasure and pain, hence adjust to the fact that they were once denied control by an abusive partner (or false protector of some kind or another) chattelizing them in animal-like ways (which, like a Gothic castle, haunts them in cartoonish forms they at least partially have some control over).

The fact remains that impotency and pain unto itself can be an immensely pleasurable experience. Likewise, the ritualized aesthetics of giving and receiving pain within animalistic dialogs doesn’t demand costumes that look like actual animals, but instead function in the manner to which animals are treated under human relations of unequal power exchange: the (to paraphrase my thesis) dog as heroic and obedient, the cat as “catty” and feminine, the rabbit as pagan and fertile, and all of them being combined with various stigmatized species during anthropomorphism; i.e., as a pedagogy of the oppressed with BDSM components of sexual healing that serve as asexual forms of public nudism to confront and interrogate heteronormative, settler-colonial trauma and its usual actors embodied by fantastical cops: knights, Amazons, and the various animalistic qualities they are recognized, celebrated and feared for during Gothic nostalgia.

(artist: Junji Ito)

In the same vein, there is a campy element to reclamation per ludo-Gothic BDSM—to say one’s body and holes are one’s own, but nevertheless tied up in heterosexual enforcement trapping one inside a body-shaped prison made for you. These liminal sensations become medicinal insofar as they can be evoked as profoundly badass/awesome; re: the palliative Numinous as discussed in Volume Zero and other kinds of calculated, psychosexual risk/informed consent. Embodiments of the Numinous and psychosexuality are ubiquitous in Western culture: the sadist, the masochist, as Gothic. Such implements aren’t entirely sex-coercive/Cartesian, allowing the performers (and their bodies) to express complicated expressions of sexual power/trauma and healing wrapped up on the same surface; i.e., in the same thresholds, using the same dark aesthetics tied to an imaginary past where one’s exact position (and animal role) is not entirely certain, but is heavily commodified during liminal expression under capital as a means of survival:

(exhibit 9b2: Artist: UrEvilMommy. The aesthetics of pleasure and pain [which can be pleasurable]—but also good and evil, freedom and bondage—often elide in Gothic media as fetishizing the woman-in-black for cross purposes; i.e., a “killer rabbit” [exhibit 100a5; re: Volume Three] phenomenon that predates Sontag’s dissection of the Hugo Boss uniform but extends beyond it into sex-coercive and sex-positive discourse. Indeed, Sontag’s famous regression to pre-fascist times in “Fascinating Fascism” conspicuously intimates an unstable presence of danger and vulnerability within the recipient of abuse as reverential towards unironic, compelled flagellation and fatal damage. The outfit codifies the exchange of power/resistance and subsequent sensations as ambiguous, thus oft-misunderstood.

Instead, unequal power exchange is worshipped for its “unfair” arrangement in nostalgic language that simultaneously subverts or plays with historically incongruent ideas of mutual/informed consent; i.e., performative irony during Gothic counterculture art. Said variants look nigh-identical to unironic, coercive [demon/undead/animalized] BDSM but the contract is respected in ways that provide for the historically abused party. She becomes worshipped in her totality as a survivor of immense trauma whose plurality denotes tantalizing attractions to pleasurable pain as a forbidden outlet. Difference denotes curiosity towards the “mother” persona [which historically would be synonymous to some extent with the daughter archetype—i.e., the incest trope; below] as something to not exclusively destroy or dominate by men, but rather a volatile force to be reckoned with and enjoyed precisely because she turns the tables on the expected patriarchal dominators. The fragmented, uncertain attraction denotes an arrangement that becomes highly sought after, the dark kitten/queen expertly demanding powerful men to surrender their power [and their wealth] to her [symbolizing a pleasurable relinquishing of responsibility through fiscal means].

Animals, despite being relegated to positions of property [thus harm] in Cartesian frameworks, are prized for their magnetism in human forms; e.g., Amazons as big dumb herbos in appearance [the role is generally divided into brains or brawn] but also as beings to bend over and breed like property during plantation-esque fantasies fetishizing the slave or bride as one-in-the-same. Out of the ancient past, the female [or monstrous-feminine] ass evolved through Capitalism into something to beat, use and discard by European men [or their emulators] claiming ownership of nature as a whole—a bestial treating of sleeping with one’s slaves to dominate them in ways that aren’t discouraged/demonized because said slaves aren’t literal animals; they’re treated like them, sitting in an uncomfortable space where they belong nowhere, and—like Satan fallen from Paradise—are painfully aware of that fact. Reversing this ontological configuration and its assorted disadvantages requires an ass that “fucks back” precisely because it faces the animalized components in way that subvert, weaponize or otherwise celebrate their proletarian psychosexual potential:

[artist: MizzzVega] 

In some shape or form, then, Gothic bewitchment communicates worker resistance through Satanic poetics’ animalistic allure, affording serious, complicated nuance and degrees of torture as negotiated and unnegotiated: the thrill of “danger” vs actual danger as being up-for-grabs. For one, it sits within a reverse charm offensive against the usual suspects; i.e., in that liminal space between freedom and imprisonment that historically-materially would have been enforced by structures of power that exhausted both parties, yet made the dom older than the sub. The schoolmaster, priest, general, executive, naval officer, or fast food manager—Capitalism and its precursors would and continue to organize these divisions of labor in arrangements that force both sides to look but not touch, while also a) alienating them from their own bodies, and b) from nature and the imaginary past associated with Man-Box positions of authority that are regularly sexualized unto themselves as animalistic; e.g., being “hot for teacher” and enthralled with said teacher’s animalized persona as “ancient.” Meanwhile, when abuses against one side by the other did occur, it was always the victim’s word against the master’s—the animal’s against its owner’s—because outside of trophies, who takes pictures of their own crimes? They survive through stories that present the animal as something to hunt, and that which sometimes hunts back.

For our purposes, abuse victims are often drawn to trauma during Gothic poetics as a paradoxical, animalized means of catharsis. A ritualized reversal of trauma’s interrogation, then, can out the would-be abuser as “cucked” by the dominatrix pinning him to the bed—taking him like the stud does the mare, or more intensely still, the wolf the lamb. Something violent and out-of-place sits onstage, expressing to colonial benefactors sitting in the audience the uncomfortable reality that sex and harm synonymize within colonial structures for those treated as prey animals by predators just like them. Incredible, systemic trauma overhangs such engagements. Indeed, if the abuse is severe enough, the eliding of not just pleasure and pain, but consent and non-consent, become permanently confused inside the victim’s mind while playing out predator and prey responses. This is, on its face, an extraordinary power play couched within Gothic poetics, but it still exists with the devil’s courtship as an inescapable material reality. The sex-positive difference is, the animalized bargainer states “show me the money” while holding the devil at arm’s length: “You can hae your silken goon…“)

The kind of sex-positive, Satanic nuance featured above is entirely lost on heteronormative actors compelled to enact harmful animalistic treatments of morphological expression on others. For women, it becomes merely a culturally appropriative costume to don and submit within a compelled role: the abuser or the abused relayed, in some shape or form, through the Gothic mode and its lies favoring the status quo. For men, “woman is other”; i.e., a caretaker sex object, but also a means to an end: societal climbing and homosocial clout. The premeditation of female ownership/enslavement becomes less a way of cheating at the game and more men playing the game of Capitalism as expected. Consequently, female or monstrous-feminine pleasure, agency and intelligence are mythologized/demonized—relegated to the lands of make-believe and stigma-animalized, “furry” bodies” (exhibit 9b1) but also advertised everywhere either as outrageous (re: hysteria/the wandering womb and the creation of sexual difference) or as commodified through the Gothic mode in ways that seem “safe enough”; i.e., ostensibly tailored around men/the Male Gaze (exhibit 9b2). Medusa’s phallic pleasure becomes either death-on-sight or an embodiment of death whose function is not set, and Amazons having sex for their own reasons amounts to “death by Snu-Snu” as a kind of silly-serious joke that frames patriarchal anxieties within half-hearted, theatrical (unrealistic) “rape” scenarios.

Except, this effects not just the practitioners, but their bodies in a cultural sense; i.e., they are viewed pejoratively in the eyes of xenophobic men, women and token groups fearful of an animalistic postcolonial. Unlike the sex-positively xenophilic, heteronormative bigots consider gender-non-conforming bodies abominable but chase-worthy (the demon/the whore) during gender trouble and normal bodies (the damsel/the virgin) working as complicated sources of animalistic shame outside of highly specific circumstances: sex—like a bad joke—is harmful. It becomes monstrous in ways that regularly personify through liminal expressions of the revived medieval: dark bodies reconstructed/recoded as sites of sin, animal hedonism, lust, rage, and other intense, alienated emotions out of the medieval period and into a settler-colonial world enthralled by fatal nostalgia.

(artist: Nya Blu)

For example, while being canonically associated with sexual reproduction as things to breed, alienation from nature while sexualizing it means that non-penetrated vaginas, mouths or assholes tend to look a little alien to cis-het men (arguably excluding lipstick lesbians, but these utilize dildos, fingers and tongues that serve a phallic role). Especially “atypical” are our aforementioned non-heteronormative vaginas; i.e., external female genitalia as “animalistic” (above). “The Classification of the Anatomical Variation in Female External Genitalia” (2023) catalogues the sheer variety of external female genitals available. Despite this proliferate biodiversity being public knowledge, said knowledge is framed as forbidden, but also iconoclastic in ways that must be appropriated and sold back during controlled forms of performative “resistance”; i.e., it appears monstrous in ways that are commonly portrayed as deserving of male/tokenized retribution: the Medusa/dark Amazon as something to masturbate to and kill, often by women acting like men vis-à-vis the state’s fear-fascination with the myth of the dark, savage continent. The morphological argument is worn like an animal costume over an hourglass white body having become “colored” and wild:

(artist: Alex Pascenko)

And yet, there remains the unspoken aspects of the human body that are implied by Vitruvian performers and their wild-animal costumes. I want to move away from standardized body types, and consider those they “speak for” as having been crowded offstage during the Gothic dialogs that emerged from Horace Walpole onwards. Before we get to Walpole, we’ll consider genitals a bit more, as well as other phenotypical components in European belief systems, as well as the heteronormative attitudes to such a cryptonymy as enacted by state forces; then we’ll explore gender and queer expression through animalistic monster dialogs (furries), whose “sodomy” within public discourse emerged from performative locations first introduced by Walpole, then reexplored by Matthew Lewis and others building on Walpole’s faithless reinventions: the Gothic castle as an operatic, ghastly site of campy violence and “rape” per ludo-Gothic BDSM, but also a hunting ground of targeted actions and bodies being tacitly associated with theatrical harm as a canonical means of preparing them for state punishment. Like bodies, castles both actual and possible share the same performative zone. They are both welcome and unwelcome, friendly and hostile, male and female, etc, as oscillating back and forth in the Gothic sense.

Before we carry on, then, a quick refresher about Gothic language as a performative device: the Gothic is chaotic and shared among warring factions for or against the state. Camping the canon during ludo-Gothic BDSM, then, requires meeting unironic violence with ironic, iconoclastic forms of cryptonymy that foster revolutionary potential during liminal expression: doubling canonical, monstrous bodies, locations and power-exchange scenarios. The language is “sticky” insofar as a castle tower or knightly lance can resemble (and potentially represent) a bare, exposed penis (often as “knife-like”) or a murky dungeon or cave can stand in for a vaginal cavity (and its classically hysterical contents) in mythological, videoludic[7] forms. A classic maiden, on the other hand, senses rape through failed modesty as threatening to her virtue; i.e., by her own hand, or when dangerously reflecting on the surface of immodest, demonic persons whose troubling existence before her challenges her own sense of self as prescribed: projection onto that which she fears will destroy her because it is different than her in a way the state will demonize and attack. Its purposeful mess accounts for the organic and inherited confusions coming out of the state’s imaginary past grappling with countercultural forms inside the same performative sphere and ambivalent, medievalized theatrics. During triangulation, the curious maiden becomes a weapon, surrendering her Amazonian potential to rebel in exchange for a state paycheck: a warrior-detective solving civil disputes for the elite with impunity and extreme prejudice.

(artist: Mike Lucas)

Keeping that in mind, let’s quickly examine genitals and body diversity under European standards, as well as the at-times incredibly odd belief systems/physiological arguments that go with them when these models remain unquestioned, hence unchallenged. As far as diversity itself goes, exhibit 9b1 introduced some fairly radical forms, except “radical” needn’t pertain to overtly animalized variants. External labia, for instance, are granted pejorative labels in relation to hysteria being canonically demonized in all its forms. Abject nicknames like the “blown-out” cooter, “lazy kebab,” or “roast beef curtains” body-shame the female body in accordance with purity politics that stymie gynodiversity or the representation of female genitalia within art as abjectly “hysterical,” but also animalized as property and food. Food-as-status has been a regular source of contention for much of human history. In short, food and animals are status symbols that communicate socio-material conditions through themselves. Except there’s scant difference between animals and food under capital, and neoliberalism controls the market to better commodify animals and their expression within food consumption (tied to famous junk food brands, below): “you are what you eat” being a series of products, including humans consuming whatever the elite use to fatten them up—themselves.

(artist: Noah Verrier)

The aforementioned point of contention regarding animals and food involves morphological expression in Gothic terms; e.g., an AFAB person’s control over their own body and environment while being treated as livestock by doctors (and requiring a specialized doctor that men think they do not: a OB/GYN) but also the sexual activity and egregores poetically associated with these things: cat women (akin to werewolves, but feline in ways that women generally are sexualized as—i.e., big cats as ferocious and wild and little cats as domestic and cute—versus dogs as tied more to protective actions, but also raw “breeding” activities: doggystyle). Gynodiverse labia are mythologized in demonic, fetishized ways on par with the visible/”enlarged” clitoris as emasculating towards men and demonizing cis women against their will. However, the canonical phobias of the latter group often project territorial animosity towards intersex/trans/non-binary people and their gender-divergent bodies; e.g., the intersex qualities of the xenomorph (exhibit 51a; re: “Making Demons“), but also the increased hairiness and clit size of witches and furries (exhibits 52f and 68; re: “Furry Panic” and Volume Three), and androdiversity and gender-non-conformance (exhibit 91b2; re: Volume Three). By comparison, heteronormativity depicts the “proper” vagina as small, dainty and unformed; i.e., infantilized, but also owned, thus dominated, by men; or policed according to its “proper” roles of PIV, heteronormative sex by men, or Amazonian women like Ellen Ripley who serve the status quo by turning their female rage against queer scapegoats (exhibit 30a; re: “Synthesis Symposium”): fuck the womb of nature for the state, for the Man, through Man Box culture’s passing of “prison sex” mentalities through all the usual methods (trifectas) and monopolies, from a position of male- and-token-oriented dominance topping the monstrous-feminine (and nature/the planet), etc, during the Capitalocene.

Ignoring idiosyncratic fetishes, cis-het men don’t even tend to masturbate to non-penetrated holes (where they aren’t imagining a cock inside the hole-in-question); they tend to jerk off to four main body parts: boobs, butts, feet, and penises, only one of which is even strictly female (during natural assignment). As for penises, this can be penises inside the vagina, but also being pleased by those who “should” be pleasing it with the “appropriate parts” during the appropriate heteronormative rituals: PIV sex, veering into increasingly fetishized and non-heteronormative, thus alien forms (re: Meg-Jon Barker’s “What’s Wrong with Heteronormativity?” exhibit 3b). So, an unhealthy attraction towards hole-owners, but also trans, intersex and non-binary people, is bound to occur. So-called traps, “transsexuals” and “she-male” porn—appropriated from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)—is condemned by fascists, but also mistreated in “prison sex” rituals that assert white cis-het male dominance against the things they’re masturbating to as a guilty act of self-disgust and genuine loneliness. This void is created by Capitalist Realism under a system that very deliberately privatizes sex through the means of production; its Superstructure discourages healthy social-sexual relationships by compelling marriage, thus systemic rape, as something to sublimate, ignore and cover up through violent canon: “Reader, I married him.”

This immortal line was said by Jane Eyre after Charlotte Brontë had Anne Causeway (Jean Rys’ name for Bertha) killed “for the sake of the story” (furthering the white heroine’s amatonormative arc by killing off the black villain). To that, white women (or token assimilators) animalize non-European parties during heteronormative Gothic stories in order to prey on them through settler-colonial violence. In Jane Eyre, while Mr. Rochester is “tamed,” Bertha the demon lover is never humanized; meanwhile, the system that demonizes black people as gender-non-conforming (vis-à-vis the European model of marriage) extends to gender-non-conforming people at large during military urbanism. Gothic canon levies settler-colonial violence against all of them, albeit to different, intersecting degrees inside the state of exception; there, it conflates them (and their non-marital, sodomic love) as “rapacious” outsiders who, like Anne Causeway, must die for “Jane Eyre” to achieve “her” equality of convenience (thus bigoted, predatory influence over others). Such expansions are commonplace within Gothic canon, insofar as Frederic Jameson’s insistence of a “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” feels apt only if it doesn’t denunciate patriarchy or protest actual rape. But Jameson only envisions what I call (from the thesis volume) “a class-conscious mirage swept up in its own endless romance, patented by Radcliffe and carried forward into the ages—i.e., to keep things the same by refusing to challenge anything in a dialectical-material sense” (source). Challenging heteronormativity and Capitalism through the Gothic mode requires some sense of steady, conscious engagement—not just with taboo subjects, but visitations, reenactments or imperfect, ironic evocations of texts that many would quickly dismiss outright as exploitative and “trashy”:

(artist: Boris Petroff)

It’s hardly a secret that critics of the Gothic tend to focus on its pulpy corpus and animation of forbidden topics (rape, incest, and murder) rather than any critical power the overall mode might yield, including when interrogating said trash as symptomatic to Capitalism’s slew of commodities (and token enforcers). Even when sensationalized, rape culture can be especially telling. It’s precisely these “tells” that we need to be conscious of when subverting them in our own works.

For example, as women start learning to say no to sexual advances, thereby establishing boundaries and knowing their own worth as workers in relation to cis-het men, these same men—as the traditionally entitled, universal clientele—become disillusioned but remain beholden to the very system exploiting men by teaching them to hate what they simultaneously fear/want: women (or beings treated as women, thus “lesser” than men) as welcome relative to an all-boys club, provided they conform (as brides near but outside the club, or token enforcers inside the club who eventually become brides); but they will always be seen as a prize, nuisance, distraction, curiosity and/or threat that weakens male power and status (e.g., Sampson and Delilah). Women—and by extension, nature and anything associated with it—must be kept in check lest it awaken and “castrate” men (or outgun them, left). Except the emasculation comes from capital: No longer able rely on marriage and spousal domination being handed to them on a silver plate, cis-het men fall victim to their own lack of education by the same system branching out through Rainbow Capitalism, which funnels them into fascist groups that conveniently fear everything of nature as gay (which neoliberals do not root out because these groups are in cahoots, defending Capitalism—wherein neoliberals/the elite are increasingly less expendable than their fascist counterparts).

(artist: Wildragon)

Note: The above image is from Axiom Verge (2014), which we discuss more in the Undead Module’s “Away with the Faeries.” —Perse, 4/7/2025

Said fears and alienation from nature leads to a variety of stupid, dangerous, heteronormative myths in Gothic canon that, like a deadly poison, bleeds into binary public thinking (non-binary thinking is anathema in mainstream discourse):

• Educated women are Medusas that need to be beheaded (exhibit 23a; re: “The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis”)—less metaphor and more heteronormative code for rape, but also beatings, torture, and murder (or silence/segregation which leads to genocide).
• Men are visually stimulated; women are not/don’t like sex or porn.
• Women can’t orgasm or experience sexual pleasure/can’t cum.
• Women pee[8] out of their vaginas/butts.
• Men’s brains are totally different from women’s.

First off, feminism is scapegoated/appropriated all the time (we’ll discuss TERFs extensively in Volume Three, Chapter Four). Second, the idea that women aren’t visually stimulated is bullshit. As women acquire more power, visually-stimulating cuties—catboys, femboys, but also trans, intersex, and non-binary persons—appear by virtue of female demand. Women want us by virtue of idiosyncratic “types,” and you can bet your collective asses they get off to us visually (queer people are also more keen to sleep with those who won’t pull a Nick Fuentes and kill us, post-coitus). Third, women definitely orgasm (they tend to twitch a lot more than dudes do, which honestly looks a little demonic in a kinky sort of way). Fourth—and I did not make this one up, I swear!—but Haz Al-Ghul really does think that women only have two holes and pee from their butts (Bad Empanada, 2022). He is also friends with Nick Fuentes, avowed hater of women and “lover” of catboys (more on him and his catboy “love” in Volume Three, Chapter Three) whose Cozy.tv is a forsaken lighthouse for dudes like Al-Ghul to go and be weird LARPers together. Fifth, male and female brains are not radically different at birth according to Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Review’s “Dump the ‘Dimorphism’: Comprehensive Synthesis of Human Brain Studies Reveals Few Male-Female Differences Beyond Size” (2021). We’re not different species; men aren’t from Mars and women aren’t from Venus. Rather, Capitalism divides/alienates workers by manufacturing sexual dimorphism in heteronormative, Cartesian language, including canonical Gothic language as culturally prevalent across space and time: myths, monsters and legends, including the “super gay ones” that really shake things up and cross barriers and boundaries—like Doctor Frankenfurter (with Jim Sharman making fun of Mary Shelley’s classic Byronic xenophobia much like Mel Brooks did with that “enormous schwanzstucker” gag from a year prior)!

(exhibit 10a: Artist, left: Edmund Leighton; right: various ensemble casts for live performances of Rocky Horror.)

Capitalism and Cartesian dualism promote European beauty standards, genders and sexuality but also morphologically abjects anything that isn’t these things. “Non-European” includes anything that isn’t an hourglass figure, skinny and/or pale-skinned (exhibit 10b1); non-missionary[9] thus “incorrect” sexual positions (e.g., doggy, islander, or anything out of the Karma Sutra, etc, as ways that “uncivilized” people have sex); but also, cocks that are “too big” (non-white): the Frankencock/frank(en)furter as monstrous, giant, and made by white madmen from spare criminal parts (implying a Cartesian function, the original novel by Mary Shelley being positively rife with racial tensions and postcolonial potential. More on this in Volume Two). This evokes various racialized porn stereotypes that we’ll examine more in another chapter (exhibit 32b; re: “A Problem of ‘Knife Dicks'”). For now, we’ll quickly examine two: the BBC (big black cock) and BBW (big, beautiful woman) as canonical porn staples that become implied outside of porn (through Gothic stories, which are porn-adjacent; e.g., torture porn, exhibit -1b) while simultaneously regulating morphological expression to serve the profit motive through threats of settler-colonial violence and control during moral panics.

Gothic fiction was written by beneficiaries of slave labor (whether they wanted to benefit from slavery or not) and tended to fetishize the enslaved groups in ways that follow the underclass into their supposed “liberation.” This includes into porn and porn-adjacent dialogs presents in Gothic media, wherein colonized groups would have been fetishized to varying prey-like degrees. As such, it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that canonical porn genres are historically body-centric, predatory and bigoted. As a settler-colonial device, BBCs advertise black people as having unusually large cock sizes compared to white men. Despite also being more prone to having smaller cock sizes than white people (according to urologist James Elist), black people are violently fetishized, pointedly associated with—if not outright raping white women using said cocks—then violating their modesty during pornographic suggestion built on problematic fantasies (exhibits 32; re: “Knife Dicks”). Made popular by American Lost Cause media like The Birth of a Nation (1911), the BBC genre was authored collectively by jealous, psychosexual white men who not only want to use a cock even if it’s not theirs—i.e., a “man chooses, a slave obeys“—but also think the only sex that exists is violent penetrative sex and that “bigger means better.” The same idea applies to BBWs, except it’s often white women (and gender-non-conforming AFAB persons, left) being implied to be “non-European” by virtue of having bodies that, again, are “too big” (thus “not white”). This exclusionary concept is further complicated by superhero comics, which play around with non-human skin colors to codify stigma; e.g., purple or green (exhibit 10b2).

(artists: Autumn Anarchy and Sinead Rhiannon)

As genres of expression, “BBC” and “BBW” must be reclaimed through iconoclastic porn that raises awareness towards marginalized, thus colonized/preyed-upon groups; i.e., by valuing and enriching them at a socio-material within pornographic dialogs (also left). Unfortunately canonical renditions of either genre are useful to Capitalism, which conflates sex with war and rape with victory and domination; i.e., like riding a mare or war horse as property “owned” by a male rider serving a higher patriarchal authority. Even Tolkien’s “killer hobbit” Bullroarer Took could do that, or George R. R. Martin’s injection of the medieval imagination with deromanticized sex, frank depictions of rape, and military scenarios that lionize manly men, not feminine ones; e.g., his twink-turned-twunk, Satin, from A Storm of Swords (2000) being “too girly” to “man the ramparts” during a siege:

He was pretty as a girl with his dark eyes, soft skin, and raven’s ringlets. Half a year at Castle Black had toughened up his hands, however, and Noye said he was passable with a crossbow. Whether he had the courage to face what was coming, though… (source).

As part of the Gothic mode, such Pygmalions mandate the virtues of binary (thus heteronormative) gender during a reimagined medieval rife with cliché misinformation.

As said medieval takes many forms, reconsider the “enormous schwanzstucker” scene—when Frederick Frankenstein speaks out from both sides of his mouth to his smitten (white, blonde) servant: “He’s going to be very popular.” Like seriously, how would you know, Mr. I-Can’t-Even-Sleep-With-My-Own-Wife? I call this Ben Shapiro syndrome (The Majority Report’s “Ben Shapiro HUMILIATED By College Student During Debate,” 2022), ol’ Ben trusting his own wife (apparently a doctor according to this very creepy 2023 glow-up piece) when she tells him it’s “normal” that she doesn’t get wet during sex. I’d say she’s violating her Hippocratic Oath for that one, but she’s already being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment by having to sleep with Ben Shapiro…

Dogmatically favoring penetration and bigger tools for the job[10] are both grossly outmoded ideas when you consider that many clitoris-owners actually require penises of a specific size for hitting their g-spot with (the so-called “Goldilocks dick”) or oral/digital/dermal stimulation (for the clitoris, nipples, skin, etc) when it comes to BDSM and sexual/asexual intimacy. Worse, penis-shaming can adopt an assimilative, racialized quality—with people of color feeling inadequate for “failing” to be the one thing they are constantly marketed as: big, black thugs with BBCs that seek out the coerced pleasure of white women. This infantilizing process—historically linked to slave rebellions as things to fear and put down with extreme prejudice (re: Howard Zinn, but also In Range TV noting that “power aggregates” against potential/actual revolt[11] in Atun-Shei Film’s “Fighting for Freedom: The Weapons and Strategies of the 1811 Slave Revolt,” 2021; timestamp: 20:55)—is essentially a more extreme, Americanized version of the Gothic villain as a vessel for dark energies and foreboding gut emotions wracking the Imperial Core; e.g. Ann Radcliffe’s Father Schedoni—the titular, severe and hulking “Italian” (1796) and his knife dick (the classic male source of pride and angst dueling with other men for women, but also with women resisting their proud[12] advances) already being an Orientalist, xenophobic trope of something “not of the West.” Like a goblin (above).

Neo-Gothic stories were written while slavery was still legal in Britain; as such, they tried to skirt racist critique/expression by displacing to an older time, but the threatening nature and aesthetic still remained. So while he’s “Italian,” not black, Schedoni’s powerful, imposing body conflates with his menacing genitals by having the former advertise the enormous dark power of the latter during psychosexual tension (Gothic novels eroticize moral panics during repressed, fatal sexual urges that arise between modest heroines and indecent, frustrated pretenders). By comparison, Zofloya the moor is noted for his gigantic stature, quasi-servile demeanor and Satanic presence (all tracking with the treatment of people of color in such stories, literally demonizing them); his body is huge so the threat he poses unto the heroine via his implied cock is also huge, but inhumanly so. Or as Parker from Alien puts it: “The son of a bitch is huge! It’s like a man; it’s big!”

As for BBWs, I can’t remember them being discussed, as Neo-Gothic heroines are classically thin, modest and delicate; however, Victoria de Loredani from Zofloya (1806) was a tragic Gothic heroine, thus notable for her unusual height, strength and masculine pride—her fierté—being a flaw in the eyes of callous, appraising men; i.e., not “wife material”:

Berenza […] beheld Victoria such as she really was, unembellished, unornamented; his keen eye that perceived her beauties, discerned likewise her defects. He appreciated her character; he beheld at once her pride, her stubbornness, her violence, her fierté. “Can I,” asked himself, “be rationally happy, with a being imperfect as she now is?” (source).

The presence of all-inclusive, preceptive irony is up to debate in Neo-Gothic stories. In short, Victoria’s the woman-in-black—the “phallic” destroyer/temptress whose conspicuously intense immodesty leads to a great deal of widespread harm by straying from the snow-white path of bridal, dainty righteousness. In short, she’s the demon and the whore—a witch-like, sex-demon harpy whose animalistic qualities lead her to literally prey on the men (and women) around her while being underestimated for her female body! Meanwhile, the “black” appearance is generally captivating unto itself; i.e., implying a sense of extramarital excitement denied to Victorian audiences, of which they are swiftly “punished” for letting their guard down and evil run rampant: sexy is dangerous, but “safe” inside so-called “terrorist literature” as easily dismissed for its base cheapness and lack of sturdy moral fiber. Ludo-Gothic BDSM camps the sacred through the abjection process as something to reverse during the whore’s revenge. She’s the black knight, the Medusa, the avenger (with gentle elements as well, but oscillating between monstrous and feminine during a monstrous-feminine dialectic of the alien)!

(artist: Lera PI)

Such tropes, it must be said, were upheld by female writers as well as male ones. However, whereas women like Radcliffe or Dacre displaced critiques (or extensions) of their own bigoted society onto an enchanting “once upon a time” before settler colonialism existed (the pre-fascist 15th century or thereabouts), more recent Gothic stories imprint a racial component onto the black figure that is difficult to ignore. Darkness represents many things, of course; and yet, while the state of exception allows for a variety of minority types (religion, ethnicity and gender) to co-exist in the same shadow zone coding them as “black,” actual black people are seen as “even less human” than Eastern European or Asian people[13] are in terms of fascist dogma assigning “bad vibes” to non-white “outsiders” (to be clear, the zombie-like assignment of an underclass is limited to whatever’s available, which—in Western Europe—would have historically been Jewish people and other ethnic minorities relatively endemic to the region. For example, Holocaust Encyclopedia in 2022 explains how there were a smaller number people of color living in Germany during the Third Reich from WW1 German colonies; conversely the Israelis are genociding the Palestinians en masse, the latter having lived in that area for thousands of years before Zionism was recently bankrolled by the British and U.S. governments).

Now that we’ve examined some of the myths and body standards regarding European morphological compulsion as a form of Cartesian violence, let’s discuss challenging it through radical bodies as things to reify (or own if they already exist) and camp the unironic European standard within, then conclude the subchapter by looking at Walpole’s castles and their complicated descendants.

Gothic camp certainly applies to genitals. For our purposes, a tremendous amount of guilt and shame are funneled into the penis as a canonical symbol of violence and rape, making sex-positive penis-shaming a useful means of owning one’s member (or pussy or any other body part). General-purpose degradation and praise are both perfectly legitimate as long as it doesn’t become toxic or lead to abusive habits, post-use. A certain degree of honesty is required to acknowledge that, regardless if it’s healthy or not, many AMAB persons are anxious about their penises. Indeed, it’s not even generally because of their size, but that they are culturally infused with a predatory sense of unironic torture, making the owner fearful of what their penis represents in regards to themselves; or conversely, a vagina owner can understandably feel small around someone who is or isn’t bigger than them, but whose penis makes the AFAB person feel small and prey-like. These are all things to negotiate through art that is self-depreciating and vulnerable in a variety of campy but also liminal, animal-themed scenarios:

(exhibit 10b1: Artist, top: Jarnqk; bottom: The Happiest Cloud. Genital shaming/parody is often an expression of gender euphoria and gender-affirming care within the trans community. This extends neatly to the shapeshifting nature of animalistic/totemic demons, whose size differences involve their whole bodies. We’ll examine this concept much more in Volume Two. For now, consider the idea of size difference as alluded to in relation to power and sexuality in Gulliver’s Travels [1726] and Alice in Wonderland [1865].)

Beyond the genitals alone, the same campiness during ludo-Gothic BDSM applies to various body types, and overlap between all of these things applying appreciative, genderqueer irony to canonical standards; i.e., “making it gay” in subversive ways that challenge heteronormativity during poetic expression; e.g., the green woman as a Medusa BBW and/or a woman of actual color who is seen as “full of sin, appetite and vigor” in animalistic ways that challenge their white male superiors, but also black men as expected to keep said “phallic” women in line with their BBC (“kaiju sex” having a totemic [14] quality to it). All of these things conflict with one another according to what is expected and what actually comes about; i.e., to varying degrees of cultural appropriation/appreciation amid racial stigmas, intraracial/interracial tension and commodification of the human form versus its artistic expression during liminal presentations thereof. During camp, the cartoonish simplicity of good-vs-evil centrism is avoided in favor of theatrical complexities that include the human body in all of its shapes, sizes and colors, including abstract/abject renditions: superheroes, or “heroic” bodies commodified in popular media forms.

(exhibit 10b2: Top-right: the Venus of Willendorf; mid-right: Freakybbygirl; bottom-right: Mog, the Final Fantasy XIII-2 version; everything else, artist: bathmank. Comic books and videogames rely on Gothic poetics, which color-code stigma, but also attribute it to exaggerated elements of uncivilized cultural markers tied to physical strength, body fat, wild emotions and gross sexual appetite: curves, muscles and sheer “endowment” associated with animalistic qualities, but also the past [and current] plundering of various [neo]colonial sites: the Caribbean and Africa, but also Brazil and other areas of the Global South personified by a given starlet of the slave class; e.g. Laura from Street Fighter V [2016]:

[source: Eden] 

Some heroes are villainous; all are monstrous. Superheroes, like animals, are trapped between two worlds: the foreign and the domestic, the wild and the tame, but also the ancient and uncolonized versus civilization as a colonial ordeal. To that, their animal considerations stem from the ancient world as something to revive in the present under Capitalism, then hide these secret identities under acceptable-albeit-conspicuous personas; to that, superheroes—like the naked wrestlers of Antiquity—supply the performer with animal qualities during kayfabe theatre as a popular-if-disposable commodity [straw dogs] that includes wearing masks and other performative devices: their statuesque bodies. Some of these animals are so-called “good animals”; others are feared and stigmatized for their inhuman strength, speed or reflexes; e.g., Spiderman. There’s also the “spider woman” as an archaic, female deity of darkness in canonical fantasy stories [or one of its many offspring that carry with them their parent’s dark skin and evil nature; e.g., the Drow, exhibit 41b; re: “A Lesson in Humility“].

[artist: Jonpadraws] 

Purely on domestic soil, this disparity expresses through characters like She-Hulk wanting to assimilate, thus survive, despite being prized and feared for the qualities of a settler-colonial slave: a gentrified woman of color wearing a snazzy business suit in the courtroom, but threatening to explode in animal-like rage. Her green skin is both stigma against her and envy for those who treat her revelation as a spectacle; i.e., displays of non-white strength fetishized by white culture fascinated with their own barbaric past lingering in the present. Though assimilated into white culture, She-Hulk’s elevation is always in doubt—marked not just by her dark skin, but her entire physique. Combined, these express her heroism through a slaver’s metric; i.e., the qualities historically prized and feared by enterprising colonists, and which are held against She-Hulk during reactive abusive: her “hulking out” a form of “uppity” behavior she must hide to try and appear more civilized, more white despite her irreversible skin color—what F.D. Signifier on YouTube calls “Black Capitalism” [2023].

[artist: Bay] 

Muscles aside, a body’s basic shape also plays an important totemic role; e.g., having a round bod instead of an hourglass or even pear-shape figure—i.e., not actually a dad, thus not allowed to have a “dad bod”—is generally seen as masculine [with AMABs naturally tending to store fat in their bellies, not their hips, thighs and buttocks, like AFABs do] but also animalistic. Zeuhl once referred to their body as “roumb” like Mog or Monty Mole [from Super Mario World, 1991] and Bay similarly takes pride in his body as squishy, fat and animal-like, but also something to blend with BDSM: pup gear. While undeniably wholesome, such non-white, trans/non-binary bodies are historically-materially relegated to fantasy by Capitalism, which genocides anything that doesn’t fit the European standard: hunting “useless” specimens to extinction, then selling their pelts. When there are no more figurative or literal non-human animals left, modern man will hunt members of his own species he deems inferior to him, regarding those he considers “precious” something to “protect.” Whether to kill or control for canonical propaganda purposes, this predation is a historical-material fact.)

The complexity of these countercultural forms during ludo-Gothic BDSM helps them combat complex canonical stigmas, biases, fears and dogma that generally intersect; e.g., for plus-sized women, fat-shaming’s Enlightenment roots are steeped in racialized phobias, but also Catholic demonization by Protestants, including a little-known group of British/Dutch exiles, the fucking Puritans (who both countries disliked quite a bit because they were horribly uptight and went on to form the cultural groundwork for American Christofascism, along with various settler-colonial offshoots like the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses).

Furthermore, racialized stigmas and their signature body types are often portrayed with non-white skin colors—a kind of non-black “whitewashing” present inside fantasy narratives justifying violence against singular characters or larger societies:

• vice characters similar to Ester (exhibit 13d; re: “Monster Modes”) except they actually have green skin; e.g., goblins (exhibit 94b1; re: Volume Three) but also the Wicked Witch of the West (whose portrayal in The Wizard of Oz functions as a form of “spectral blackface” that puts a white woman in green makeup, except it needn’t be exclusively racist in its “othering”)
• hoard-based savages like orcs (exhibit 37e2; re: “Meeting Jadis“) and their darker, non-human skin colors—green, black, brown, and ash, etc

Either numeration canonically presents dark-skinned embodiments of evil as being closer to death in the natural world; i.e., as something to fear and punish, their canonical iterations sublimating an appropriated scapegoat from a bourgeois standpoint (which we shall see with Tolkien, in the next subchapter).

From a proletarian standpoint, a character of mixed ethnicity often wrestles with their animalized heritage in the face of settler-colonial violence; e.g., Nella Larsen’s Clare from Quicksand (1928): a “mulatto” in the book’s own language and struggling to deal with the guilt/shame of not quite belonging anywhere—what Thomas Happ in Axiom Verge called “Athetos” or “without place” (exhibit 40g; re: “Away with the Faeries“) echoing a Miltonic Satanic[15] having lost its rebellious character in exchange for a Cartesian, thus genocidal one. For Athetos, this lack of place meant the scientific community but such an idea can obviously apply to any feeling of pariah-ness. With orcs in fantasy works, the placement of such figures within centrist military struggles has expanded to some “good” orcs—i.e., the noble savage (a white-savior colonizer’s term). Yet, orc goodness will always be seen as “more savage and brutal” than the white-skinned, civilized men (and elves) of the West, which invariably justifies the Cartesian breaking of agreements after the Big Evil is defeated: “Boundaries for me, not for thee.” This happens because the white man is “more Enlightened,” thus destined to conquer nature and inherit the Earth by taking it away from anyone different from himself (and all for profit).

Indeed, settler colonialism unfolds due to the colonizer’s fragile disposition towards what he’s been conditioned to fear and dominate through war and rape culture as integral to Capitalism; i.e., those with non-standard body types associated with non-white cultures’ closeness to nature, thus supplied the usual lies attached to them through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. These hostilities can be challenged, but this requires reclaiming one’s body and animal self as both a campy source of pride and something associated with various monstrous entities, including animals, that are canonically exterminated by the state to varying degrees.

This holocaust manifests inside colonized parties, wherein the state installs harmful imposters: animal devices that condition the hunted prey to guiltily repress the stigma animal inside themselves, but also identify it among other members of the underclass (and its various axes of oppression), attacking them for presenting said animal out in the open. Campy versions of a given animal consciously serve a counter-political function meant to challenge Gothic canon (and its uneven process of extermination) having evolved into itself; i.e., through the exact kinds of unironic monster dialogs that—while they certainly have varied in terms of class, time and geographical location—nevertheless concerned taboos and stigmas of various kinds to voice unspeakable abuses with: accelerated predation committed by the state (and its proponents, including class traitors/token agents punching down) against genderqueer people and various other ethnic and religious minorities treated not simply as exotic pets, but sexually and societally “incorrect.”

In natural language, this amounts to the systematic extermination of animals and humans assigned a “pest” status (thus death sentence) while living under Capitalism’s profit motive—rats and other vermin, plague-type creatures for colonized peoples to relate to under a shared genocidal struggle:

(exhibit 10c1: Artist, right: Rattfood; left: Bay. Bay has a very short torso, giving them a “shortstack” appearance [“Round and square at the same time,” according to them] which they attribute [and enjoy having others attribute] to various monster types such as the goblin or their fursona [exhibit 10c2] but also various stigma animals like the rat, which represent non-heteronormative existence; i.e., lifeforms historically annihilated or relegated to the shadows under settler-colonial rule, now out for everyone to see and appreciate as a fully human monster that remains haunted by state-sanctioned xenophobia.

For Bay, the xenophilic role of fantasy is something to experience while alive—i.e., the goblin, gremlin and rat as brought forward out of the dark forest of the past to worship and play with in the present. Doing so happens in opposition to canonical forms and their established phobias’ euthanizing of these animals. Anarchist-queer furries/”fur fags” [exhibit 10c2] are antifascist in this respect, creating iconoclastic art not just to cope, but subvert the status quo in favor of a better world than currently exists; e.g., the rat as an anti-Semitic stigma that can reclaim both human and animal through ironically xenophilic iterations that take heed of Cartesian stereotypes before consciously subverting them.)

This complex heritage is vital to consider in relation to ourselves, whose own compelled divisions and alienation demand we consider Walpole and those he inspired with his castles as hopelessly divided on various societal issues; i.e., according to sex and gender as it existed back then informing our own liberation.

For one, the Gothic dialogic—especially during the 18th century—is famously divided between moderate female/feminine forms and a more outspoken male/masculine counterpoint: the Schools of Terror and Horror but also Male and Female Gothic (outmoded terms, but nevertheless what they’re known as in academic circles). Yet the paradox, here, is that some female authors were often rather conservative (re: Radcliffe, Dacre) and some were not (re: Shelley) in relation to women only having just started to take up writing as a profession, not a hobby—whereas some male authors could be surprisingly gender-non-conforming (re: Lewis) while others toed the line (re: Coleridge) despite men having written openly for thousands of years; i.e., in relation to the latter’s longstanding ability to abstain from marriage (a luxury generally not afforded to women, even wealthy ones) but also opening up these same men to risks and labels that woman arguably didn’t experience to nearly the same degree (while having their own struggles, of course: women get raped far more often than men do, but generally don’t have to experience the yolk of the sodomite label and all that comes with it [male privilege and stigma] in quite the same shapes and forms that AMAB people do). I’d like to spend a few pages unpacking the genderqueer history of male Gothic authors before considering it in relation to our own interrogations of the Gothic mode; i.e., reclaiming it for our purposes, using atypical bodies, shapes and colors to express ourselves as we are born into our collective struggles under capital.

First, these reclamations occur despite our “inherited confusions” begot from “a sinister corner of the Western imagination.” Described as such by Chris Baldrick, his introduction to the 2009 Oxford Book of Gothic Tales writes of the Gothic period being cited as a time of darkness and unproductive history following the collapse of Rome, but also something decided by the elite in opposition to those they sought to dominate centuries later through settler-colonial xenophobia:

In its earliest sense, the word is simply the adjective denoting the language and ethnic identity of the Goths; […] Long after they disappeared into the ethnic melting-pots of the Mediterranean, their fearful name was taken and used to prop up one side of that set of cultural oppositions by which the Renaissance and its heirs defined and claimed possession of European civilization: Northern versus Southern, [Dark] Ages versus the Age of Enlightenment, medieval versus modern, barbarity versus civility, superstition versus Reason. […] Accordingly, by the late eighteenth century “Gothic” was commonly used to mean “medieval, therefore barbarous,” in a largely unquestioned equation of civilization with classical standards (source).

While Baldrick also argues how the likes of Walpole use this dichotomy to both erode the presumed “superiority” of classical culture and to fear the medieval world as a dark and brutal place amid this ghost of the counterfeit, I posit that Baldrick is astoundingly incorrect in assuming that

Unlike “Romantic,” then, “Gothic” in its literary usage never becomes a positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it […] an identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages (ibid.).

Yet, this incorrectness stems from the invented, imaginary past as “medieval” in ways that potentially rewrite the conventional wisdoms regarding said past… which Baldrick conveniently ignores. Indeed, the kinds of stories Baldrick is writing about were predominantly written by white, cis-het men and women centuries ago, when queer discourse was in its infancy and racial bias was phased out of the conversation through regressions to a pre-fascist 15th century that was more interested in enjoying one’s privilege and playing silly pranks.

(source)

This brings us to Horace Walpole, the writer of the first Gothic novel and an ostensibly homosexual (or ace) man who devoted most of his relatively long life to making Gothic not just a label to describe the medieval period, but literally a specific style of campy fakery aiming at the Numinous used to embellish the present space and time through intentionally ahistorical reinvention: the castle where such oddities could be found and observed, which is a birthplace for ludo-Gothic BDSM as I would eventually envision it; re: through a palliative Numinous tied to castles in the flesh and a queer-coded “medieval.”

Camp is rooted in fakery and privilege vis-à-vis homosexual men (the classic oddities of older times—not a female whore, but not a straight man, either). As Thomas Christensen writes in the introduction to the Mercury House edition of Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales (1993):

[Horace Walpole] lived (comfortably, thanks to a variety of sinecures—his father, Robert, had been prime minister of England under King George the 1st) in a house on the banks of the Thames near Twickenham; he called the house Strawberry Hill and made it into “a little Gothic castle” decked out with fake pinnacles, battlements, ornamental facades, and gargoyles of lath and plaster and crammed to overflowing with all manner of antiquities, curiosities, and objets d’art. Toward the end of his life and for some time thereafter (at least until a famous auction of its contents in 1842), Strawberry Hill was a tourist attraction. According to his memorandum book, Walpole personally ushered some four thousand visitors through it (complaining all the while of the inconvenience). Often criticized as a cheap, slipshod sham, it has also been lauded as a “subjunctive” edifice, an “architecture of the ‘as if,'” and as a creation that overturns conventional “rigid and stately rules of architecture.” […]

He had a diabolical (and at times rather infantile) sense of humor, demonstrated in his passing off The Castle of Otranto as a translation from the Italian and in the evil comedy of one of the Hieroglyphic Tales, “The Peach in Brandy.” He once faked a letter to Jean-Jacques Rousseau that purported to be from the King of Prussia, precipitating a heated public dispute in which Rousseau, Jacob Grimm, and others participated (source).

Both a perpetual bachelor and interior decorator (two homosexual classics) living in a “castle” named after fruit and filled with sexual predators and prey-like damsels who run and hide, there’s also the campy rape play that Walpole privately plays in, quite literally in a poem written in blank verse (a la Milton’s Paradise Lost):

Besides The Castle of Otranto, the other major literary work Walpole published during his lifetime was his tragedy in blank (at first I inadvertently wrote black) verse, The Mysterious Mother. Byron admired it, calling it “a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play.” It concerns a young man who, through a series of mistaken identities and unfortunate misunderstandings (no fault of his own), ends up marrying the daughter he has fathered by his mother (a bewildering set of relationships outdoing Bill Wyman). Dorothy Stuart, always charmingly sympathetic to Walpole, remarks, “It is, indeed, a little curious that his imagination—though in The Castle of Otranto he had toyed with the theme of incest—should have been allured by a story so sombre and so revolting.” In a contemporaneous review (1797), William Taylor rhapsodized that the play “has attained an excellence nearly unimpeachable” and that it “may fitly be compared with the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles.” Few modern readers would value it quite so highly (ibid.).

Unlike Shakspeare (who was debatably queer) writing and publishing Titus Andronicus as the gay man’s parody of Gothic stereotypes and theatrical violence (cannibalism, torture, murder and rape), Walpole never published The Mysterious Mother while he was alive. In fact, he arranged for it to be published once he was dead.

(artist: Pierre Subleyras)

Given the crime of sodomy that would have overhung Walpole, it might help to consider that Walpole was the man of privilege vamping it up in his own little, ambiguously gay “rape” castle; i.e., a person of means/property (a man) who didn’t quite fit in and was reclaiming the stereotypes of past centuries to literally reinvent the cultural imaginary known as “Gothic” through his lifestyle, home, and refusal to wed:

Though Walpole had a penchant for the company of old ladies and un­marriageable or disgraced noblewomen, he evaded matrimony, remaining to his death aged 79 what used to be called a confirmed bachelor. Instead he drew about him a collection of highly cultured “dear friends”—men of sensitive taste but lesser background, who shared his obsessions. Walpole had an especially fraught and jealous relationship with Thomas Gray, of the famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” whom he met at Eton and took with him on his European tour.

Was Walpole gay? Is Strawberry Hill the manifestation of a gay aesthetic? The questions linger, even though searching for something akin to a modern homosexual identity is fruitless. Homosexual acts were criminal—sodomy was a capital offense—but virile men were known to take lovers of both sexes, while effeminate manners were seen as a Frenchified heterosexual weakness. Walpole’s biographers have often considered him effeminate and asexual, or at most passively homosexual (source: Amanda Vickery’s “Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill,” 2010).

Passively homosexual. Take note of that. It really doesn’t matter if Walpole called himself gay or not; the markers for what would be considered gay now in relation to Gothic poetics were certainly present back then: making fun of white married people through a reinvented Gothic style.

Likewise, Walpole’s upper-middle-class inheritance was the breaking of the mold; i.e., according to a counterfeit that, if not openly endorsed by him for colonial purposes, went on to be appropriated by the state’s usual operations (the process of abjection). However, the fact remains that some men of privilege[16] chose to be more openly queer in their campiness, and that’s what I want to examine next before applying that to our own Gothic-Communist poetics. For fear of colonial guilt weighing on them in the shadow of colonial horrors yet unspoken, a tremendous doom of utter retribution plagues colonizer brains; regardless of the occupation, then, invention is the means of the colonized to bleed their occupiers dry during asymmetrical warfare, converting them to our cause or sending them as Roman fools into utter panic and retreat for fear of the colonial victim’s day of reckoning (at home, abroad or both).

This includes camp. Remember from Volume Zero how we discussed camping the canon, vis-à-vis Colin Broadmoor’s examination of Matthew Lewis:

The Monk represents Lewis’s personal struggle against the sexual politics and constraints of the English literary tradition. As Michel Foucault observed in The History of Sexuality vol. I, sexuality-as-identity did not really exist as a cultural concept throughout most of the eighteenth century. However, by the time of Lewis’s birth those social and legal constructions of sexuality were shifting:

As defined by the ancient civil or Canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life… Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.

This transition at the turn of the 19th century from act-as-homosexual to person-as-homosexual was preceded by a dramatic increase in homophobic violence perpetrated by the state. In the British civil system, sex between men first became a capital offense with the promulgation of the tastefully-named Buggery Act of 1533. For 200 years, the law was rarely enforced—though, when it was, authorities staged it as a spectacle of violence for public entertainment and social control. Victims of the law were ritually humiliated and then murdered in an extravagant and merciless display of state power. Around the middle of the 18th century, the British state initiated a long-running pogrom aimed specifically against gay men that exploded during the decades of The Monk‘s original release. As Louis Compton records in Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England: “By 1806 the number of executions had risen to an average of two a year and remained there for three decades, though executions for every other capital offense decreased dramatically.” In the 1790s, when Lewis was writing The Monk, judicial anti-homosexual persecution was at its height in England. Gangs of undercover police officers from anti-homosexual task forces infiltrated queer spaces, sending scores of gay men to the gallows or pillory and creating a palpable sense of paranoia throughout England’s underground LGBT communities (source).

Whereas Walpole was born under queerness as privately aristocratic, Matthew Lewis represented a nigh-singular form of outspoken, active queerness when the dialog hadn’t really caught up. So he did what weird nerds like Shakespeare and Walpole before him did: he used the iconoclastic language of the imaginary past to communicate queerness through the Gothic mode; i.e., from his own imaginary dark castles as highly structured and deliberate forms of theatrical, psychosexual power exchange, but also through his considerable material advantage that let him devise these fantasies as sex-positive, socio-political education devices: he was a legislator and chose to stand by his work very publicly (as Coleridge will never let us forget, the straight man pouncing on the gay man to gag him).

The takeaway is that when drafted by queer creators now, the same imaginary capsules operate as something to sex-positively revive in the Internet age: through openly xenophilic, emancipatory hauntologies on par with Lewis, but updated for more current socio-political issues; i.e., a queer castle raised in intersectional, solidarized resistance to post-fascist drives towards palingenesis (the latter coercively romanticizing “a new dark age” under the same-old oscillations: the return of the Gothic castle as a xenophobic printing house). This includes our lair-like abodes, but also ourselves as monsters who identify as part of the struggle—to exist, but also to actively fight back using revolutionary cryptonymy during ludo-Gothic BDSM to camp canon’s idea of what monsters are “supposed” to represent; i.e., by detaching ourselves from the usual synonymizing of queerness with rape, incest and murder that we’re called out for by straight folk in their own canon: to, as our thesis describes, “make it gay” in ways that will terrify them anyways, often in animalistic, warlike language (thanks to Capitalist Realism, we are canonically viewed as the end of the world no matter what).

In resistance to canon, we’re taking the self-fashioning logic of Walpole and Lewis back from the Western tradition of Gothic forgeries; i.e., by literally forging our own lies in service to workers in ways those men lacked the means (or perspective) to fully grasp. Our aim in doing so is to give ourselves a campy space to live, work and thrive, but also challenge the state through increasingly iconoclastic variations of revolutionary cryptonymy that speak to our animalized traumas in playful ways that nevertheless invoke the open language of class/culture war and resistance—to turn the tables on our captors, reversing the role of hunter and hunted through predator-prey aesthetics:

(exhibit 10c2: Artist, top-left: Undead Clown; top-right: Defiant Drills, commissioned by Barnowlren; bottom-left and -right: Bay’s fursona, by Tofu Froth and Buns Like a Truck. Gothic-Communist struggle is defined in its poetic context—of whom commissioned the artist and why—as something that is challenged during paratextual dialogs concerning the pieces and what they stand for or rather, what they should stand for. For example, in posting his piece, “hit them nazi punks” in 2020, Undead Clown writes, 

largely inspired by CRASHprez’s song “Fascists Don’t Cry” which is a really great song lmao

but ya imma knock ya out if you come up to me spoutin white supremacist or transphobic shit
human rights aint up for debate 

to which this conversation ensued [if the font is too small, refer to the conversation itself on FurAffinity.net]:

The creation of art doesn’t sit within a vacuum; it is always political, caught between dialectical-material forces during oppositional praxis.)

Canonical Gothic poetics are not just encouraged, but enforced by Capitalism’s global system of exploitation through its predatory monopoly on socio-material conditions to portray animalistic violence with, but also “legitimate” Gothic fictions and terror dialogs. As we shall see moving forward, these factors must be challenged during uphill battles waged by proletarian counterterrorists who remain critical of the elite in all their forms—the state, but also proponents of the state who uphold its monopolies in bad faith; e.g., Volume Two’s examination of the history of vampirism through intellectuals like Foucault, whose own rose-tinted view of the medieval world and its bucolic pleasures enabled him to exploit his own students, thus lend queerness a bad reputation. It’s possible to be a counterterrorist without being a bigot or a sex pest, which ludo-Gothic BDSM must aspire to.

If you might have already noticed, the fascist pageantry of “European” beauty standards becomes something to advertise amid partial state collapse through a restructuring of state power towards a more “medieval” approach that hunts state enemies to extinction in service of profit dressed up in Gothic language (all non-European standards having been totally genocided or relegated to a culturally-endangered status by now). Apart from the unironic Gothic castle, this also includes legislative preparations made well ahead of time by those in power (from SCOTUS to other areas of the world accreting from global US hegemony):

• lowering the age of consent (which often coincides with a fascist/medieval presence—e.g., the age of consent in Japan is 13. However, the age of consent is 20 in South Korea, a historically fascist government under Ilminism that was challenged with the rise of the K-pop music that, despite being monopolized by the Korean government through slave contracts, works as a limited, “bougie/consumer-based” counterculture to fight fascism at the nation-state level; source: Jake Hall’s “From Kim Jong-Un to Trolling Trump: K-Pop Has Always Been Political,” 2020)

• anti-gay/anti-sodomy laws
• anti-trans legislation Anya Zoledziowski’s “Anti-Trans Bills Are Sweeping Across the US With Alarming Speed” (2023)
• prohibiting sex education and prophylactics
• revoking Roe v. Wade to reintroduce anti-abortion laws

Fascism leans towards the openly religious/occult, whereas neoliberalism tends to keep religion out-of-sight but close by—i.e., “separate or not, church and state go hand-in-hand,” Christofascism being the result. In the process, fear and dogma slowly replace good, proletarian education—with rings, for example, becoming what they historically have always been: collars of compelled bondage/sanctioned sex with fascist, even incestuous elements.

Such a castle’s nightmarish presence denotes potential mayhem tied to one’s habitat; i.e., through the liminal hauntology of war colonizing nature and those tied to nature. When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains with counterterror. Adjacent to more classic methods of colonial upheaval, the terrifying power of Gothic poetics can serve our counterterrorist ends through the Six Doubles (of which this subchapter has focused on revolutionary cryptonymy).

So before we proceed onto challenging the state, camping its canon with our own monsters and castles’ ludo-Gothic BDSM, it behooves us to further examine state-sanctioned variations of such tortured bargains; i.e., complicit cryptonymy as illustrated by unironic rings, collars and other visible BDSM implements of undead bondage relayed within the Gothic mode, even if the author tries to distance themselves from all of these things.

To that, we’ll be taking Tolkien to task once more. Onto “Concerning Rings, BDSM and Vampires“!

---

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] “Demon BDSM” is essentially what I call “BDSM with monsters” (even though “demon” is only one class of monster, their class specializes in forbidden knowledge and power exchange); “ludo-Gothic BDSM” stresses the playful, campy nature of iconoclastic BDSM when using ironic Gothic poetics and performance, including not just demons but also animal language (e.g., puppy play) and undead components; re: “rape play” but also labor exchange in half-real, cryptomimetic forms.

[2] Versus simply material conditions; society and its materials overlap in ways that need to be accounted for beyond Marx’s centuries-old theories when synthesizing praxis ourselves.

[3] Meaning “pertaining to stories of high imagination”; re: Walpole.

[4] Death by boredom is not the Gothic style, and so many things relate to BDSM through the Gothic mode as ours to reclaim. To that, here’s an extended taste of things to come, which the chapter after this one will list more completely in relation to the rest of the book: madness, hysteria and persecution mania; zombies and other walking dead, leeches and parasites (vampires); mad science, cyborgs and composite bodies; tricksters, deadly games, puzzles and fatal riddles; black knights (fascists) and false protectors, confessors, penitents, lovers and friends; ambushes, betrayals, and deadly secrets; heists and blackmail, robbery and destruction; fatal attraction and involuntary repulsion; terminal rejection, poison and assassins; riots and mayhem, rebellion and strife; haunting melodies and seductive dances; sirens, succubae, and oracles; clones and shapeshifters; rapists and reapers, brothels and whores, rogues and cavaliers; mutants and executioners, butchers and livestock; jokers and madmen; heroes, cowards, victims, and villains—monsters and maidens and things in between; black vows, forsaken oaths, dire revenge and faithless traitors; lost legends, heavy time, open sadness and secret pain; doppelgangers and fatal portraits; wild animals and talking beasts (and other beings of nature); dreams and nightmares, witchcraft and black magic; ancient monarchs, otherworldly cathedrals, Numinous forces, and lumbering terrors; blood, gore and bodily dismemberment; asylums, prisons, and barbaric surgery and medicine; psychological torture, gaslighting and mind games; cells, crypts and live burial; drugs and incapacitation, shaken spirits, shattered dreams, lost hopes and flagging courage; doom, despair and dread; decay and death, graveyards and rot; mazes and labyrinths, dungeons and traps; giant, open spaces, claustrophobic tombs, shameful closets and endless darkness; perpetual rain, lightning, wind and fog; ignominious death, “mortification of the flesh” and exquisite torture (unironic otherwise). Truly, the Gothic mode is endless in terms of its depth, degree and flavor(s) of peril. And it’s ours for the taking.

[5] I.e., “the Straights aren’t alright,” or Man Box culture from a strictly xenophobic and harmful xenophilic perspective. If you want to know the targets of the status quo, just look at a bigoted person; they’d scared of/angry at pretty much everything (re: Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the Gothic mode); e.g., Lovecraft’s xenophobia or Tolkien’s arachnophobia, etc. Revolutionary cryptonymy helps bring out those hiding in bad faith using shared, mask-like monster language that also intimates, interrogates and addresses state trauma.

[6] Take it from me, such projects—regardless of their size—can ease tremendous suffering.

[7] Videogames are endemic to (and incredibly common inside) neoliberal Capitalism as having spawned the majority of them on a franchised level; i.e., its Cartesian, monomorphic prescriptions yielding heteronormative clichés through popular iterations; e.g., Samus Aran’s missiles and Mother Brain’s caves in Metroid (see: “War Vaginas: Phallic Women, Vaginal Spaces and Archaic Mothers in Metroid,” 2021).

[8] Isolation and enforcement of medievalized divisions lead to alienation from nature, but also the human body in all its forms. For example, the monk from Matthew Lewis’ titular novel didn’t know the difference between men and women: “reported to be so strict an observer of Chastity, that He knows not in what consists the difference of Man and Woman” (source). To this, Lewis—a gay man—was effectively making fun of weird, heterosexual, virgin nerds isolated and educated by heteronormative canon to abuse those around them.

[9] Missionary is common for several reasons. Apart from colonial enforcement through literal missionary work (with the Church telling colonized populations to fuck in a male-dominant way because God [thus the state] approves of it), missionary position is also fairly easy to perform (though doggy is easier); it’s also hypercanonical, thus ubiquitous within paratextual “instruction” documents. To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with having sex in this position, any more than having standard/non-standard bodies or genders are; the issue lies in violent prescription through a settler-colonial binary that leads to genocide on every possible register/format: those different than normal are punished, including for how they fuck unlike missionaries, but also the occupying armies that accompany the Church (and invading nation-state) into colonial territories.

[10] Male masturbation is generally described by cis-het men in violent, war-like, monstrous colonizer language (with the canonical cumshot serving as a “claiming ritual,” as illustrated by this lovely 2002 Robin Williams skit). Also, don’t mistake me; sex takes work to be fun, but it should be non-violent fun, not a brutal, numbing chore! And yes, “anger sex” can be intense, but it should still be safe and controlled, with the appropriate aftercare post-fuck; otherwise, it’s toxic (speaking from experience on this one, but we’ll get to that).

[11] The aggregation of state power happens between the private interests of the ruling elite and nation-state governments (and proponents) acting in concert. The exact ways this historically unfolded—under laissez-faire Capitalism versus the World Wars, Embedded Liberalism and Bretton Woods, or the rise of neoliberalism in 1979—is largely differentiated by the elite’s ability to crackdown against rebelling parties. In the mid-20th century onwards, a popular method of quelling potential rebellion are the bourgeois trifectas: the CIA (secret agents), strategic bombing (a misleading term used to disguise the escalation and quantity of dropped ordinance) and trade sanctions, aka “soft power” (a misleading term, as soft power and economic strength historically fare better against hard power/total war than the other way around, but until recently couldn’t be waged the way the US does now through global US hegemony/Capitalist Realism). In other words, the recipient of this shared animus is a common enemy to the elite, but also their servants (official police agents and de facto cops/fascist vigilantes) defending capital: revolting slaves, but also workers in general according to Communism as echoed after the Civil Rights Movement as engaged by women and non-whites, but also the LGBTQ and religious minorities working in intersectional solidarity. There’s nothing the state fears more.

(artist: Justin Gerard)

This often conveys in fantasy canon by fearful Pygmalions. Tolkien, for example, framed the dialectical-material arrangement of what was WW1 quickly becoming WW2 in the good-vs-evil animal language he used to gentrify war on his refrain (the treasure map); i.e., the goblins, an anti-Semitic symbol merged with fascism (dubiously conflated by Tolkien) and “evil animals/corrupt nature” versus Everyone Else fighting for “good nature” in his famous Battle of the Five Armies (above). Meanwhile, Cameron’s refrain (the shooter) depicted the barbarian horde as xenomorphic “space bugs,” vis-à-vis Starship Troopers (1959), whereas The Simpsons joked, “I’m under attack by Nazi-Communists!” All of these encapsulate American centrism and babyface dialog quite well through Capitalist Realism: the fight is always an exchange between the establishment and the unruly mob turned undead, demonic, and wild; i.e., Nazis and Communists threatening the West’s symbolic domination of nature. The code for military industry and propaganda becomes ludic, neat and lucrative (videogames), but also sacred unto itself; those who challenge it will be gatekept and kettled until they change their tune.

[12] The didactic nature of Gothic stories would have, in the medieval tradition, fixated on deadly sins and emotions like pride and lust tied to sexuality as heavily gendered.

[13] For a videoludic example of gradient xenophobia in relation to zombies, consider the excellent (and lengthy) “A Thorough Look at Resident Evil” (2022) by Noah Caldwell-Gervais. The franchise’s treatment of zombies varies per setting. However, released over time, Capcom’s use of zombies reflects displaced versions of real-world, geopolitical attitudes about places demonized by Capitalism, but also exploited like chattel; e.g., Eastern Europe and Africa, in Resident Evil 4 and 5 (2005 and 2009). They and corporations like them purposefully link cultural anxieties to undead bodies that are summoned up and swiftly and shot for profit.

[14] Godzilla, in Japanese, is Gojira, which literally translates to “gorilla whale”; but also, the vast majority of kaiju are either animals or robot animals. As a sidenote, they represent state shift of a particular kind: giant titans of the repressed natural world rising up in the face of human arrogance and interference; e.g., Studio Ghibli’s enraged forest demons in Princess Mononoke (1997) or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). Versus a Christofascist spiraling towards rapture through Capitalist Realism, the presence of such monsters (and their hellishly alien, forest-like homes) invite human viewers to recognize a collective erring of humanity and neglected responsibility as stewards of the Earth, which will survive after we kill ourselves off during military optimism (fighting everything, including nature, as an abject threat to capitalist hegemony).

[15] A similar tactic to many post-Miltonian works, whose Satanic poetics/darkness becomes blind towards critiquing patriarchal institutions. For example, Hazbin Hotel (2024) doesn’t even mention God, instead treating good and evil as essential, tediously and unnecessarily reformed by a white “nepo baby” hotel (funded by a serial killer, no less). Worse, her iconoclastic parents, Satan and Lilith, have been chained to the nuclear family unit as bourgeois. The white princess’ plan does suck, so her plight—of people not liking her stupid, small-minded idea—is an entirely unsympathetic one built on privilege, not rebellion. Its real-life author’s hard-fought success is likewise a thoroughly gross compromise with a giant mega-company churning out blind, Rocky-Horror-style pastiche. Like Tolkien’s sylvan trees, the author canonizes camp, regressing towards outmoded debates and harmful caricatures (e.g., Angel Dust as the reprobate queer sex worker) while profiting off them.

[16] The queerness of someone would have been permitted insofar as they were granted an exception as a person of means; e.g., a political, general or aristocrat of some kind wouldn’t be taken to task for refusing to follow the canonical laws… provided they didn’t “pull an Oscar Wilde” and make their activities open to the public. For example, as Brent Pickett of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes on homosexuality and the ancient world (which involves the canonical codes we’re addressing in the modern world through reimagined forms), “Some persons were noted for their exclusive interests in persons of one gender. For example, Alexander the Great and the founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, were known for their exclusive interest in boys and other men. Such persons, however, are generally portrayed as the exception. […] Given that only free men had full status, women and male slaves were not problematic sexual partners. Sex between freemen, however, was problematic for status” (source, 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.

An Uphill Battle (with the Sun in Your Eyes): Operational Difficulties and Revolutionary Cryptonymy

“Only fools buck the tiger. The odds are all on the house!”

—Doc Holiday, Tombstone (1993)

Picking up where “Mission Statement and Remediating Modern-day ‘Rome’” left off…

This chapter concerns the operational difficulties that emerge during oppositional praxis from a predominantly theoretical standpoint; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm. It divides into three parts.

• Part one divides into three pieces:

• The intro (included in this post) introduces the problem of state monopolies through violence, terror and morphological expression, and how to fight back as a state victim through revolutionary cryptonymy by using animalized Gothic poetics.
• “Predators“ (included in this post) considers the state’s monopoly of violence (and terror) as told through its animalized soldiers, but also their bodies as things if not depicted in heteronormative ways, then policed as such; i.e., by the Amazon and similar monstrous-feminine entities as relayed in ways that generally “corrupt” and triangulate against/prey on other minorities.
• “Prey“ considers those who hide like, and manifest as, animals in the shadow of unironic Gothic castles (whose initial formation and campy subversion we will also examine, vis-à-vis Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis).

• Part two concerns arrangements of power that are shared and worn: namely rings and collars of the Tolkien-esque sort, and in various roleplay settings but especially the Gothic castle and vampirism as something to summon and evoke.
• Part three takes these praxial factors and considers them in relation to the state’s authored stupidities; i.e., as things to challenge through our own Gothic poetics’ creative successes when interrogating trauma ourselves.

A small (three-page) 2025 addendum: Whereas “The Nation-State” discussed the trifectas of capital, here we get into the uphill battle of monopolies; i.e., challenging profit through the whore’s revenge with ludo-Gothic BDSM during the dialectic of the alien reclaiming such things. Such abstractions are basically Communism and Capitalism in small, whose theatrical subversions will be seen/treated by cops as “violent” (terrorism) no matter how we frame them. And frame them we must, in order to survive; re: the state preys on us by pimping us, and silence is genocide!

So be on your guard, but use the Aegis to protect you and yours from bad actors infiltrating your ranks; i.e., by speaking out behind cryptonymic buffers that reflect the enemy’s bad-faith falsehoods back at them! To hug the Medusa (and her Communist palliative Numinous), we must embrace the “woke” elements that Gothic (and its modular poetics and hermeneutics) praxially entail; e.g., as John the Duncan argues in “Universalism & The Anti-Woke” (2025), “Rather than celebrate the death of woke, I say we revive and herald it” (source); re: to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness, mid-camp. “To critique power, you must go where it is” inside and outside of workers, on and offstage; re: when the Man comes around (to pimp you), show him (and his token servants) your Aegis and its holistic pedagogy of the oppressed giving such things shape: during asymmetrical warfare pushing for universal liberation that walks away from Omelas together (no appeasing the colonizer through token normativities gentrifying and decaying into themselves)!

(ibid.)

As such, Gothic push-pull (oscillation) plays with the natural “fuzziness” of human language; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: Gothic Communism is a holistic discipline that takes everything dualistically into account: mid-liminal-expression while arbitrating dialectical-material scrutiny in favor of praxial catharsis (and its pro-nature/-nature synthesis working in opposition to state doubles). Whatever we make, they will double, but in doing so must contend with our cryptonymy reversing abjection versus theirs at the same time! Monopolies are a myth!

By extension, any counterfeit the state authors—meaning whatever dark fens or temples of confusion they erect during the liminal hauntology of war and its chronotopes (re: Metroidvania and similar structures embodied by different whorish performers)—we will haunt; i.e., lurking on its half-real, spectral surfaces both inside-outside the decaying and tremendous obscurity (and consequently untapped power) of its labyrinthine thresholds (next page)! The Gothic is writ in decay and parsed through dialectical-material scrutiny (re: flow determines function, not aesthetics), and no one group can monopolize the aesthetic (and function) of the violence, terror and monsters home to such things.

This, whereas capital and its traitors (cops) alienate and sexualize everything for profit, we whores do so in praxial opposition; i.e., while undermining Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and setter colonialism: to liberate universally during intersectional solidarity using preferential code (e.g., dark gentle mommy dommes, below)—our Numinous castles in the flesh! Witness and worship what you see, but also, learn from it to recultivate the Wisdom of the Ancients by anisotropically camping the canon: abandon all hope, all ye who enter here! Then calculate whatever risks unfold to speak idiosyncratically through dualistic struggle; i.e., by healing from rape together through relative privilege and oppression, both being simultaneously foreign and familiar to both sides differently through stolen, repurposed language (we’ll unpack “similarity amid difference” and rape play more during the manifesto postscript, “Healing from Rape”)!

(model and artist: Vera Dominus and Persephone van der Waard cz)

Power lies in performance, and everyone loves the whore; per our pedagogy of the oppressed, we survivors of rape will make rapists (which cops are) fear us and our paradoxical chambers (of Mazarbul or otherwise)—i.e., in ways they already do, but which we will control to our advantage. . As the Archaic Mother haunting the state’s profit motive, then, Medusa cannot be killed; she—thus we as her little offshoots serving each other through a veneer of domination set loose upon the Earth—have evolved to divide in unity (stochastic counterterrorism versus state terror), her head still a part of the body and land/residence it’s cut from. Breaking state monopolies to splinter Capitalist Realism on our backsides, so do workers use whatever’s on hand to summon the Big Whore: to conjure up a post-scarcity world inside the chronotope in the flesh and its pre-capitalist language (our overgrown, castle-like peaches, above)! Hell is our home!

Labor back, land back; violence, terror and monsters back—and all during revolutionary cryptonymy reversing abjection (thus its monopolies): nature as monstrous-feminine sitting on capital with a colossal Ozymandian dumper! To introduce an element of play over something is to camp it; i.e., to give control over canon by playing with it, placing it in quotes; e.g., “rape” and similar avenger language surrounding the harm such play sits adjacent to. That is our apocalypse/deal with the devil, trading in the subversive power of sin—a dark, uneven, forbidden force whose Great (fungal[1] butt) Pirate Queen and her “booty” during ludo-Gothic BDSM the state and its proponents can never fully harvest and ingest, thus pimp and police: through perfidious copies turned against us and our dark poetry’s cryptomimesis (the echo of trauma as camouflage during a war of deception through the Gothic  language of sex and force playing out, on and offstage)! Her power is naked, clothed or not—a dark threat to tease out paradoxical joys and terrors (re: “Psychosexual Martyrdom“)!

(artist: Lady Melamori)

To it, oppositional praxis yields a two-way war of mirrors, and Medusa always fucks back to corrupt such implements; i.e., by punching up from Hell to turn the monomyth into a Promethean Quest that empowers the chattelized: through the usual languages of persecution that Medusa has embodied out of the Archaic Period into the West’s own self-dug graveyard! Along with reclaimed sodomy and blood libel, witch hunts will wither our enemies, but also—as this volume shall explore—the avenger dialectic of Amazons and knights in animalized predator/prey language!

An Uphill Battle, part one: “Predators and Prey,” or Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression

And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on every living creature on the earth, every bird of the air, every creature that crawls on the ground, and all the fish of the sea. They are delivered into your hand. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things.”

—Genesis 9, “The Covenant of the Rainbow” (c. 400 BC)

“If you became a shogun, there’d be nothing but devils in this world!” said Jubei Kibagami, criticizing Genma Himuro, his immortal foe in Ninja Scroll (1993) for being the worst-of-the-worst (and in the warring-states period, that’s really saying something). Jubei wasn’t a samurai, you see; he was a ronin. Freed from Japan’s class structure, ronin were bereft of materials and land—like Jesus, but more brutal. In the tradition of the Western genre, Jubei retools his formidable warrior skills to help those less privileged than himself: impoverished small clans, but also women. He’s the tyranny of evil men trying to be the shepherd, a bad motherfucker who chooses not to be a dick like Genma does. Unlike Jubei, Genma is a class traitor and lying sadist who only cares about gold as a means to an end: achieving his police state by becoming the “Shogun of the Dark,” ruling through menticidal waves of terror (re: Meerloo) and violence from the shadows. Hell is monopolized by the state and summoned anew, generally through power structures like castles.

This section explores Ninja Scroll—a film which “Healing from Rape” will return to, but also “Demons and Dealing with Them” from the Demon Module. —Perse, 4/6/2025

A fog on the brain, this darkness harbors state monopolies of violence, terror and morphological expression that apologize for police brutality in the present, regressing towards ever more antiquated[2] (and fearsome) forms amid new invasions; i.e., through a fatal nostalgia that consigns the worker mindset to all the usual (and ignominious) dooms within capital’s leveraging and structuring of power inside itself: rape, torture and death while systemic racism (and other aspects of Cartesian dualism) invade the imaginary past (having never existed in the historical medieval period at a systemic level). All sit inside a planned, apocalyptic structure to return to greatness with, one filled with the brutal enactors of state abuse built around the traditional sites of regeneration for state agents—castles and knights being classic BDSM devices expressed through the cryptonymy mechanism linked to abjection.

To that, Genma uses endless treachery and lies during the liminal hauntology of war (the summoning of the reimagined Gothic castle and its hellish abuses as things to move through) to recruits greedy warlords to him—the bourgeois devils Jubei warns about during their final duel. In the end, Jubei cannot kill Genma, so he buries him alive—trapping his savage nemesis inside a golden prison of his own design: “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” As this subchapter will establish, the medieval character of state violence and terror cannot be destroyed during morphological expression, only subverted or contained through linguo-material “traps” we put into motion during revolutionary cryptonomy as an essential means of counterterrorist liberation; i.e., by throwing the setter-colonial character of heteronormativity into dispute through a rebellious medieval, postcolonial imaginary. Taking Hell back while doubling its colonial forms.

This subchapter primarily considers the theory, revolutionary cryptonymy, through morphological[3] expression when using animalized Gothic aesthetics (with undead and demonic elements too, of course). To that, I want to quote a snippet from our thesis volume that will prove germane as we proceed:

As a kind of deathly theatre mask, something else that’s equally important to consider about demons and the undead (and which we’ll bring up throughout the entire book) is that animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms; i.e., stigma animals relayed through demonic BDSM and rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized: marked for trauma or by trauma that parallel our green and purple doubles onscreen (source: Volume Zero’s “Pieces of the Camp Map”).

So when I say “animalized” vis-à-vis Gothic aesthetics, this is predominantly what I mean and primarily what we will inspect in parts one and two of this subchapter. Before those begin, I want spend the next ten pages introducing you to some important concepts on which our investigations are founded.

As something that predictably rises during material instability and societal unrest, emotional turmoil is very much at home in the Gothic. This includes anxieties about physical bodies and their hauntological uniforms as often having a sexualized, animalistic, psychological element that overlaps with half-exposed, unburied trauma acquired generationally under state domination. This domination occurs within regressive, medievalized positions of crisis and decay that defend and uphold the status quo, but can be reclaimed by proletarian agents within weird-nerd culture; e.g., workers embodying knights to reclaim their killing/raping implements inside the state of exception with ludo-Gothic BDSM (camp), while simultaneously dealing with state infiltrators fighting to recapture the same devices back for themselves and their masters; i.e., Amazons and furries, etc, as dualistic forms of contested morphological expression that can assist or hamper gyno/androdiversity within Gothic poetics under state monopolies. To that, heroes are monsters, and monsters go hand-in-hand with animals being for or against their own abuse to varying degrees: on the same spectrum and its territories.

The resultant middle ground of this duality grants words like “demon,” “zombie,” or “animal” a double purpose for which the rest of the subchapter is divided: predator and prey. As we shall see, either classification works as an insult or compliment depending on who’s using them, where and why. The fact remains, the differences between them are not clear-cut, especially during medieval expression as something to revive during oppositional praxis. As such, we also need to remember and revisit an idea from my thesis regarding animals and the medieval: “Out of medieval discourse, domesticated animals are also gendered in a sexualized, monstrous sense; i.e., ‘The Miller’s Tale’ from The Canterbury Tales (1392).” Domestication invokes a sense of the wild that is reclaimed by state forces to serve the profit motive, which rebellious agents must challenge and reclaim while being animalized. The larger struggle involving animalization constitutes an uphill battle that obscures one’s vision in the same crowded sphere. Inside it, space and time become a violent circle, one where endless war over state nostalgia constitutes ongoing dialectical-material struggles to keep with, or break from, current historical materialisms under Capitalist Realism: state violence dressed up as dated “protection/shelter” during our aforementioned emotional turmoil (stemming from criminogenic conditions; i.e., manufactured shortages, crisis and competition tied to images of the decaying fortress and its unholy armies).

While we’ll only be introducing revolutionary cryptonymy in this subchapter, it remains an utterly vital aspect of proletarian praxis—one that challenges state monopolies through the very things they try to control: morphological expression through monstrous and heroic performance, but especially animalized, hauntological examples like the Amazon or knight, as well as the more famously operatic, feudal sites of sexual danger to which they represent and/or navigate—Gothic castles as killing grounds for a state predator’s prey-like designations. To that, this subchapter considers how revolutionary cryptonymy invokes liminal expression as a cosmetic, conspicuous means of useful disguise within state monopolies of violence, terror and in connection to those dated things, bodily expression. Together on antiquated stages, the deliberate use of dated masks, costumes, props and other performative elements hide activism’s sorties imperfectly within the trauma of canonical Gothic language and its complicated territories of expression; i.e., as a means of rebellious camouflage, useful for blending in and revealing the bad-faith nature of state proponents in shared, thus policed, spaces and dialogs. On said stage, reactionaries and moderates wear masks to hide themselves in common monstrous language; but when they respond to our Athena’s Aegis having doubled their mask, said mask slips from outrage defending state monopolies within nerd culture.

Consider the hero we just mentioned, Jubei. He’s a larger-than-life character whose heroic image appeals to our aims as something to interpret away from canonical forces. Doing so unfolds during warring interpretations of the character as a matter of discourse that is not set; i.e., one that yields revolutionary cryptonymy precisely when our enemies disagree with us about the character’s mythical applications. Although Jubei amounts to the invincible class ally as mythical in function, his larger-than-life status represents a particular kind of splendid lie: the redirection of brutal, animalistic force away from state targets, which the state will thoroughly abhor and, more to the point, complain about in some shape or form. So while Jubei is terrifyingly violent, iconoclastic interpretations of the character emphasize how soldiers must learn to turn their weapons away from the state’s monopoly of violence, precisely because state proponents will openly hate it (thus out themselves as class traitors).

Violence, terror and sexuality converge during these exchanges. Weber’s maxim states “a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (source). Combined with Asprey’s paradox of terror and Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the Gothic mode, the monopoly of violence is sacred to state defenders; i.e., Western canon maintains its monopolies in hauntological perpetuity by abjecting “terrorists” as prey to hunt and kill, which we must reverse-abject during guerrilla, asymmetrical maneuvers. We must, because the ghost of the counterfeit is the Gothic lie of state sovereignty presented as a convincing or at least consistent fake; e.g., Tolkien or Cameron’s refrain promoting or otherwise assisting fascist palingenesis to essentialize heteronormativity’s sexual-gender dimorphism assisted by centrist forces; i.e., through forceful, toxic compulsion—often physically but certainly mentally as well—relayed by polite and impolite actors. This is the sticking point where we can incense them to our benefit, doing so on and offstage.

Outing bad actors is vital. Whether reactionary or moderate, neoliberalism and fascism repeatedly attempt to monopolize terror (which Asprey notes is impossible for any one agency to achieve) and by extension Weber’s aforementioned monopoly of violence. Said monopolies automatically place state targets inside Agamben’s state of exception, bombarding them with waves of terror with a human face; i.e., calling class/culture activists “terrorists” vis-à-vis Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the canonical Gothic mode: labor is a zombie horde to shoot (more on this in Volume Two) or dark nation to bomb (exterminate, loot and enslave) through the delivery of said payloads as a business of wider horrors intimated by fantastical stories (e.g., alien invasion scenarios standing in for imperialist powers). As such, it really doesn’t matter if such totalities can be practically implemented long-term (efficient profit guarantees that colonies die young), merely that the structure utilizing their apocalyptic, rapacious rhetoric argues towards total power for the elite through the bourgeois trifectas.

As Richard Overy writes in The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004), “‘Totalitarian’ does not mean that they were ‘total’ parties, either all-inclusive or wielding complete power; it means they were concerned with the ‘totality’ of the societies in which they worked.” This goes well beyond the Nazi or Russian governments he had in mind, and applies to the elite (and any nation-state they operate from) controlling worker bodies through force. It’s literally how they organize power according to Gothic poetics: service to the profit motive through morphological expression as heteronormative. Power and materials go hand-in-hand, then, as does the propaganda associated with them as something to cryptonymically “fence” with; i.e., Gothic poetics as the pacifying and subjugating instrument of the elite and (subordinate) middle class, which we turn back at them using Athena’s Aegis: showing them our ass, thus where to “stick it.” Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

What I mean by this is, our socio-political positions are vulnerable and often associated directly with our bodies and identities as things to control through monstrous forms during Gothic theatre. The state’s various religious/secular in-groups associate entirely with exclusive ownership and universal coercion under state territories over state-assigned out-groups: to belong/to have belongings versus to be owned or used by someone or marked for systemic mistreatment, even death if you fail to be useful to them (the paradox being your death is useful to profit). Here, the state of exception provides the most basic function of capital: exploitation and genocide in service of the profit motive; i.e., the state eating its population according to heroic arrangements of theatrical power tied to bodily expression as dimorphically gendered. Cultural markers include the conspicuously/flamboyantly queer person (the token hairdresser with a lisp, the interior decorator, etc) as a sign of monitored compliance but also surveilled rebellion versus the subtle/normal-looking gay person as a kind of ordinary (homonormative) disguise to hide from power in a liminal sense: within thresholds/on the surface of monstrous imagery as conveyed by castles, knights, damsels, and demons, etc, but also the enormous trauma they frequently impart; i.e., through linguistic detachment, thus concealment, by standing in between viewers and the resultant terrors both are connected to—cryptonymy.

At the same time, this liminality also pervades other groups affected by the state during shared performance and language; e.g., women and the conspicuously slutty whore vs “the angel in the streets/devil in the sheets,” etc, as occupying the same danger zones. To avoid the state of exception, thus be preyed upon, imperiled workers cover up but also paradoxically semi-expose themselves when powerful men compel them to—enough to “play along” when one is punished for being sinful/disobedient, while simultaneously hiding one’s mark as a member of the state’s chosen underclass(es). Submission is tiered within levels of punishment and reward provided one obeys their compelled arrangement by presenting as submissive through marketed exchanges:

(artist: Wet Little Sub)

For example, beings forced to identify as women/monstrous-feminine are taught to wear skimpy clothes, thick makeup, animalized props (cat ears, tail butt plugs) and uncomfortable shoes (their revenge being to do it for themselves, of course): designed by men to be canonically diminutive, animalistic, impractical (no pockets) and cutesy/form-fitting—i.e., frilly panties, not pants (which Romeo and his companions make fun of Juliet’s older governess for not having: “A sail! A sail!”). Wearing these de facto, chattelized uniforms, marriage becomes like a prison and prisons—especially American prisons—are synonymous with rape, something to threaten those who steal things that are already owned by the elite, by patriarchal capitalists, by men, and people acting like men: women’s own bodies and identities as “dolled up” in traditionally submissive ways, but also prey-like, monstrous-feminine ways (which extend to tokenized Man Box/”prison sex” mentalities). The paradox lies in how the doll takes its coerced, animal sense of self as something to reclaim; e.g., historically battered housewives would have been expected to wear makeup, but also adopt passive, obedient body language and facial expressions—to cover up their wounds, but also tired eyes from lack of sleep/substance abuse from having to live under an oppressive husband’s roof; i.e., the keeping up of appearances for the husband’s sake, including playing dumb as a survival prey mechanism for the wife’s (a blinder as well as camouflage/a mask). They also would have been expected not to labor for themselves, but adopt Mr. Darcy’s so-called “female accomplishments”: sewing, drawing, piano-playing, sitting down and looking pretty (and being quiet), etc. In short, acting like someone’s obedient pet.

Even when doing so is forbidden, such a concept can be interrogated by re-illustrating the same-old disputes from a different heroic perspective; e.g., a girl who likes how she looks, but not how she’s controlled, decides to run away from home, retreating into the imaginary past (and its oft-animalized[4] forms) to try and find some sense of agency regarding her own body. The Wisdom of the Ancients, then, amounts to a constant, ironic interrogation of the current cultural understanding of the imaginary past; i.e., negotiations with said past through its aesthetics of trauma that guide workers towards a better state of existence by bringing what they find back with them as something to fluster the status quo with: a hellish bodily expression regained from state forces by bonding with nature in Gothic ways. The point of the iconoclastic Hero’s Journey is how the Call to Adventure doesn’t uphold the status quo upon the hero’s return; it subverts and transforms it into a post-scarcity world that isn’t beholden to the same old heteronormative devices and prey-like abuse of animalized workers. Instead, it lives and abides by a different set of tenets: our Six Rs and their underpinning of Gothic theories. They support and maintain each other as part of a larger movement branching off from the original prison. It’s a jail break, insofar as bodies can become prisons for the people inside them when their presentations are compelled, marking them for violent roles: givers or receivers, predator or prey.

Such forays into pretend worlds amount to an imaginary liberation that challenges Capitalist Realism through avatar-like vehicles; i.e., places to put ourselves and occupy for a time, to better learn how to frame our own experiences (and bodies) in a situation of make-believe. But within that invention lies the ability to think critically about our surroundings, thus interpret the stories already present within our lives that shape how we think, thus act. I want to spend the remainder of this subchapter exploring various ways that cryptonymy can rebel against state forces through animalized bodily poetics, including where these poetics originated.

We’ll get to Horace Walpole in a bit. I want start with my own fictions as inspired by an older imaginary past, one built on earlier nerdy stories arguably informed by Walpole and his predecessors’ medieval, animal-centric palimpsests: Madikken the Milkmaid.

(artist: anonymous)

Madikken belongs to a project I originally worked on for someone else, but came to inherit the character after the original author abandoned her (see: exhibit 8b1). Adventuresome and foolish, Madikken’s an eighteen-year-old girl who runs away from her wicked stepfather to find some sense of agency and belonging in a dated imaginary place; i.e., one populated with talking animals and inanimate things comparable to those from The Wizard of Oz (1939) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1605): the immortal Dorothy Gale and her Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow and Tinman; and Hermia’s supernatural, drug-fueled encounter with the forest folk: queer camp playing with the medieval, which is the essence of what I envisioned ludo-Gothic BDSM as.

(exhibit 8a: Artist, left: J-Skipper and J. Scott Campbell; top-right: Robb Vision; bottom-right: John Simmons. Fairytales classically consider a child’s confrontation with an adult world, oscillating between innocent, asexual depictions of idyllic bliss faced with troubling positions of monarchist authority and force: the parental figure, often portrayed as saintly or wicked while compelling the child’s coming-of-age to fulfill a sexually reproductive role within a crumbling homestead[5] [their stern or lax demeanor accounting for a patriarchal slant, of course]. Even so, the same child-like relaxation is afforded to regal agents, enjoying luxurious lives while consuming all manner of mind-altering substances; and party to their tempting celebration are artists taught to capture and appreciate the human form as forever overlapping and partying with adjacent animal forms during antiquated festivals.)

Magic—as a colorfully potent, if trippy means of communicating with forbidden things cut off to us by the modern world—runs rampant in both stories, and served to inspire me in mine when exploring my own closeted self through Madikken. It wasn’t literal drugs, but themes of drugs (what Stuart Mills calls “Acid Communism“; re: “Dark Xenophilia“) dating back to an imaginary antiquity that yield fresh knowledge about one’s place in the world as uncertain. Whereas Baum’s poppy fields famously imply drug use experienced by the Young-at-Heart, Titania’s servants dutifully drug people like Nick Bottom into a sleep-like, suggestible, BDSM state(!)—one housed inside a dark, magical forest filled with animal familiars and inanimate things that get up and move around. It emerged through Shakespeare’s Renaissance-era work as inspired by the likes of Ovid, and carried on towards Walpole, towards Baum, towards us. As such, the animal-Dionysian aesthetic and potential for chaotic change endured, carried into the present as something that grew old when viewed backwards by us as trapped in its own configuration of the imaginary past.

In other words, the past and its animals are not set, but can change profoundly per resurrection as something to reflect upon when reviving them ourselves. Each affords new important lessons about similar policed subjects using Gothic poetics; e.g., sexuality and gender expression conveyed through animalistic, fairytale language. The language is the door to things that, in daily life, often go unsaid. So, just as I learned from and transformed Shakespeare away from the unironic rape scenario (marriage or death[6]), I propose we learn from Madikken’s curious descent into Hell—not as punishment (as being turned into an ass might denote), but a place of forbidden, animalistic pleasure and knowledge we carry back with us; i.e., into our black-and-white lives under state hegemony. I’m not evoking Dorothy or Hermia through Madikken to endorse a futile surrender to that black-and-white life (one where our magical friends stop talking and become ordinary once more). Rather, I want to alter the canonical promise of eventual submission through my own take on the female runaway as transforming home into a more colorful (thus less oppressive) place; i.e., through the Gothic’s animal, transformative potential found in fairytale language as musical, urgent, transportive and fleeting[7] but somehow “timeless” and captured in a special, precious moment:

(exhibit 8b1: Bottom-left and top-right, artist: Persephone van der Waard; top-left and bottom left: photos of the 2016 graphic novel I originally translated, co-edited and helped design front-to-back—with thanks from the original author/illustrator. After a disagreement, they and I reached a private written agreement signing the character rights over to me, as well as the full rights to any future project featuring Madikken provided I do the artwork and writing myself.

The drawings included here have been updated from their 2020 versions, which I originally designed as proof-of-concept exhibits within the original legal document: Revana [my alter ego, top-right] and Vallen, two characters from my unfinished fantasy series, The Cat in the Adage. I did not design the original concept for Madikken [top-left] but always enjoyed her for her pastoral, “summer flirt” setting and attitude, but also her prominently beaky nose, lolita maid design and magical-animal friends. Coming up with my own look for Madikken [and fabricating matching designs for Revana and Vallen] while preserving these fairytale qualities about Madikken was a fun challenge. Likewise, she’s a symbol of sex-positive expression who literally runs away from her creepy surrogate father in pursuit of her own sexual empowerment—on par with Hermia running away from Egeus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As my website reads: “Inspired by stories like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), my novel follows Madikken, a young milkmaid, who becomes lost in an enchanted forest. There, she meets all manner of strange characters; she also begins to explore her deepest, darkest desires. Woefully inexperienced and starved for love, Madikken throws caution to the wind and tries to make her wildest dreams come true…”)

(model and artist: Angel Witch and Persephone van der Waard)

For me, Madikken was someone I wanted to fuck, but also perform as/identify with according to closeted aspects of myself. The more I put myself in Madikken’s shoes, the more I discovered the two concepts overlapped. I wanted to be like someone I thought was strong in ways that toyed around with strength as something to embody in gender-non-conforming ways; i.e., beyond traditional notions of predatory force and its cliché delivery through go-to anomalies; e.g., your standard-issue, cis-het tomboys running the monomythic gamut. Madikken was certainly girly and Gothic, but her rousing and happy escape from an abusive home life (the home as alien) still happened; i.e., by updating the imaginary past away from masculine violence and avoiding Radcliffean bigotries. As such, her iconoclastic, prey-animal forays into Hell preserved the original, adventuresome spirit of Gothic expression, while simultaneously updating it for a wider and more inclusive audience.

Keeping with the spirit of inclusion, then, I want to use part one of this subchapter to project such a freeing mentality back at the things Madikken’s tale omitted—towards more warlike, predatory and Amazonian heroics, as well as knightly presentations with some animal characteristics, before part two concludes the subchapter by humanizing the increasingly animal, prey-like morphologies shared amongst all iconoclastic forces victimized by the state during its hellish monopolies. The overall procedure requires understanding where both arguably hail from in Western fiction, which part two will explore: Horace Walpole and the queer tradition of the Gothic as something that informs current-day revolutions through cryptonymic expression; i.e., the Gothic castle not simply as a hauntological burial ground, but a reliable site of queer, faux-medieval “rape” whose implements of campy trauma and otherworldly occupants (undead, demons, and anthromorphs) survive well into the present, where they double, hence challenge, state monopolies during ludo-Gothic BDSM: playing with the half-real, partially imaginary past.

(artist: Richard Corben; source: Bill McCool’s “In Praise of Meat Loaf’s Ridiculously Awesome Bat Out of Hell Album Covers,” 2022)

“Predators and Prey”: Predators as Amazons, Knights, and Other Forms of Domesticated, Animalized Monster Violence (feat. James Cameron)

As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source).

—Laura Ng, “‘The Most Powerful Weapon You Have’: Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita” (2003)

Continuing our theoretical examination of state monopolies, we arrive at predators, a class of monster often celebrated within contests of strength.

For example, when Bonnie Tyler sings, “I need a hero,” she specifically mentions Hercules. Except, heroism isn’t strictly about size or strength, and its mythical qualities denote animalistic displays of predator and prey that are frequently associated with classic animal archetypes; e.g., Hercules and the Nemean lion, but also Madikken and her talking lamb, Casper. As prized possessions useful to patriarchal institutions, heroes are monsters whose Gothic poetics animalize in competing dialogs during oppositional praxis. Doubles of antiquated, warrior-class arrangements of status and power appear within settler-colonial models, to which animals become reliably subjugated status symbols emblematic of state force and its conspicuous givers and receivers inside state land: cops and victims. Both fulfill their animal potential as class/culture/race character arranged in different physical forms, and whose vivid, poetic nature reliably triggers animal responses indicating broader socio-material struggles: fight or flight, but also hunting and sex, captivity and release.

The state cannot fully regulate these applications, so it grants their dated symbols positions of weakness and strength; i.e., linked to material factors like shelter and protection whose animalistic qualities—like a dog with a bone—are fought over in terms of what they represent, and more to the point, for whom they ultimately serve: workers or the elite.

Part one, “Predators,” will consider two popular arrangements—Amazons and knights—as “sexy beasts” whose conspicuous animal strength either serves worker needs by protecting them during state crisis, or pits them against each other to enrich the elite as usual. First, we’ll consider their basic, classic forms, then explore how the Gothic works of James Cameron continuously interact with more fantastical (and cosmetic) iterations regarding modern-day police abuse (which part two, “Prey,” will subvert).

Before we proceed, a note about cops; or rather, a quote from our thesis volume concerning Amazons in relation to cops that also applies to knights:

regarding activist hindsight as cultivated by workers, consider the Amazon. While Amazons are a classic Greek monster and the word Amazonomachia literally means “Amazon battle,” Gothic Communism applies it to any monster in heroic discourse where competing notions about sexuality and gender are “duking it out.” This includes the heroes themselves as enforcing or resisting the hierarchy of power in heteronormative theatre (there is no functional difference between a hero and villain insofar as canonical heroes are concerned; all canonical heroes function like cops and “All Cops Are Bad,” not just the ones that look “evil,” because they universally victimize everyone else for the state). All heroes are monsters, thus liminal expressions that are sexualized and gendered (source).

As such, Amazons are monstrous and can be cops, especially in monomythic stories that rely heavily on black-and-white kayfabe language; the same goes for knights, whose domesticated, animalized monster violence becomes something to subvert during ludo-Gothic BDSM or endorse in regards to a state’s monopolies and trifectas (the pimps of the state).

Our thesis talks extensively about cops in relation to Amazons and knights in general, and Volume One has so far already discussed the trifectas; here, we want to focus on the monopolized violence, terror and morphological expressions that occur during worker struggles, insofar as animalized Gothic aesthetics factor in. Keeping that in mind, we’ll start with Amazons’ animalistic qualities, weighing them against Cameron’s work before considering various things about knights relevant to oppositional praxis: as an uphill, predator-vs-prey battle for rebellious workers employing revolutionary cryptonymy to protect themselves with and attack the state’s mimetic means to destroy them through shared, contested language.

(artist: Emery EXP)

First, Amazons. Coming out of ancient, oral, animal-themed traditions promoting or contesting state fears, Amazons remain a complicated mythological figure. Far be it from me to discount the value of a strong sword arm in service of workers, but I generally consider workers to be threatened by state-sanctioned variants of such persons; e.g., the girl-boss Amazon cracking down on dissidents, then spouting neoconservative platitudes about equality for her kind (usually white, cis-het women): achieved through feats of territorial strength against an invented, dogmatic enemy that tokenizes the monstrous-feminine versus camping it. The same goes for knights, wherein class-traitor versions of either monster posture as cop-like “protectors”; i.e., who predatorily defend property by policing people the state already treats like prey/property (abusing their Gothic aesthetics to do so in modern times).

Police functions aside, I absolutely adore a subversive Amazon/strong mommy dom, but after further experimentation discovered I really like inhabiting the idea of subby power as juxtaposed against dominant forms with their own animalized signature. Over time, my prey-like preference became something to foster within a liminal space also occupied by Amazons to camp with ludo-Gothic BDSM: bravely reshaping the world while standing in the presence of a hunter-like strength by showing others how I want to exist, and be treated, in spite of the animalized differential; i.e., like Madikken in her fetishized milkmaid outfit (and accompanied by her talking lamb sidekick) bumping anxiously into Revana as a far bigger (and stronger) “cavewoman” who probably enjoys eating lamb (and pussy); re: death by Snu-Snu!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Relating to capital through nature-themed language is an important means of survival, except its exercise (and real-world counterparts) are increasingly endangered and replaced by harmful copies that blend in with our camouflage against theirs. As such, I deliberately portray Madikken traipsing about a dark forest (one filled with figurative lions, tigers and bears) while presenting like an animal of a particular kind: a lamb. Ripe for “slaughter” within the ancient pastoral framework, I’ve updated both to account for modern struggles. While Madikken is a sexy girl in a pretty dress, she feels entirely vulnerable if only because modern society is conditioned through animal metaphors to own and dress her up for themselves—in short, to unironically prey on her once the costume is in place. And yet, she’s someone who can bear it all by acting slutty but not be automatically killed for it; i.e., by teaching Amazons like Revana to handle power in animalistic ways that don’t serve the profit motive while retaining the exciting predator-prey dynamic during theatrical, BDSM tensions (which ludo-Gothic BDSM interrogates through play): service to the sub as someone to treat well, not actually prey upon, thus harm. Putting “predation” in quotes like this demands discipline and restraint, but also trust and boundaries; building these takes time, because you generally have to subvert what’s already present through a different kind of Gothic counterfeit—one that fosters empathy towards historically preyed-upon groups.

That’s ultimately what Madikken became; while the original author treated her as a guilty pleasure to trot out, then discard, I took Madikken and treated her as a subversive, Aesopian agent—a fabled white rabbit to follow into the future of the imaginary past as geared towards Communism. It might all be a fantastical lie, but can still transform the world by breaking from tradition in subtler ways that a) don’t segregate us from the awesome power of Gothic poetics (which was Frederic Jameson’s big mistake, of course); and b) don’t get us chucked off a cliff like poor Aesop. Powerful people, or those aligned with them, tend to do that when they feel threatened—not as a question of morals tied to human rights as things to practice, uphold and fairly defend, but according to unfair positions of material advantage the elite want to protect from workers; i.e., within a medieval, barbaric system built to exploit most of the planet for the betterment of a very select (and cruel) group of persons:

(source: Dr. Lauren Ware’s “Why We Punish“)

Appreciative, iconoclastic forms of Gothic stories (friendly magical animals, exhibit 8a) come from appropriative forms, but also liminal, salvageable forms (rebels, exhibit 8b2) to reclaim during socio-political debates whose poetics weigh the upholding of structures against human, animal and environmental rights. So while neoliberals, for example, famously discourage the welfare state[8], they’re constantly exploiting all workers under normalized, invisible (meaning “undisputed, ubiquitous”) conditions that have a similar myopic effect on the perception of the exploitation taking place. In short, everything becomes veiled by neoliberal canon, which conceals its own function as bourgeois propaganda but also projects said propaganda everywhere in animalistic dogma. Animals (and their subsequent terror and violence during morphological expression) are monopolized by the state in “polite” forms of the Amazon as a police agent—not just a dog to guard, watch, and hunt with, but a steady, war-like harvester who preys on chattelized, vulnerable workers herded[9] together for easy access within the state’s self-sanctioned food chain (with the elite at the top, cops in the middle, and everyone else at the bottom).

Such doomsdays might seem to verge on hopelessly cliché, thus can be discounted in the Radcliffean sense as a nightmare to summon and dismiss just as quickly. During Gothic times, however, the harvest becomes grim and visible, an order of operations for which orderly extermination becomes its chief goal: “The disposal units ran night and day.” This fascist return-to-conquest/tradition (and shivering of the state into barely-contained fragments ran by joint-chiefs/warlords) outlines a convenient map that already exists: the state itself as a new territory of colonization over an old crime scene, one ripe for raw plunder (and animal slaughter) as Imperialism comes home to empire. Ruthlessly exacted by the police agents currently inside, state watchdogs prey on its citizenry as freshly undead targets during new episodes of an ongoing genocide. The state victims and enemies become one in the same.

In other words, the state cannibalizes itself, but also defends the elite through heroic narratives bent on debriding the castle of its current “corruption.” During this culling of the herd (and its black sheep), cops still defend capital; but this time they roll in with tanks, burning “infected” and uninfected alike. Crushed under armored vehicles and knightly bodies, all are rendered obsolete in the face of those killers best able to preserve power and capital as threatened: the arm of the state as radicalized, covered in trauma as something to behold through a medievalized regression; i.e., inside monopolies of violence and terror as rotting the bodies (and minds) of workers, sadly soldiering for skeletal kings come back to haunt the world of the living. The Amazon decays, as do the sheep she pounces on; like Cú Chulainn, she “begins to attack both friend and foe because [she] loses the ability to distinguish between them,” except its very much by design. Healthy relations to nature with animal aesthetics and anthropomorphism are traded for pro-state, weaponized variants, their humane potential impounded in favor of territorial forms of aggression.

(artist: Bruh the Sinner)

Such radicalization is normally relegated to the distant frontiers of faraway lands (a crusade). Except when Capitalism enters decay as a matter of routine, state-sanctioned violence becomes an open cycle of glorious revenge in the domestic sphere; i.e., military urbanism triangulating class traitors and “rabid” token assimilators against the usual victims of state violence. Pitted against the pulverized working class, the police force of the imperial homeland treat said land like Cameron’s refrain: an automated grounds for loot, rape and genocide; it becomes a dead garden of stolen, inedible goods (the pirate’s curse: men cannot eat gold; only lie, cheat and steal it, except this shortcoming spills over into every aspect of their lives; e.g., sex and love. They can swallow it, but not digest).

In the same death-rattle, the us-versus-them mentality becomes something to promote in wholly Gothic forms; i.e., to “save the world” from a dark menace, which unfolds in Promethean, self-destructive ways. Already a watchdog put to heel, subjugated Hippolyta becomes a complicit, braindead zombie, but also the Medusa: a girl boss counterpart baring her own fangs (and furious gaze) at false promotions of former abuse; e.g., trans people. From Victoria de Loredani to Ellen Ripley or Samus Aran, reactive abuse (and its moderation) push TERF-y, Man Box violence onto much more recent (and populous) iterations. In turn, the state teaches future Amazons to attack its enemies for it, seeking power at the cost of their own humanity.

(artist: Virgo Vain)

I need to stress a state-vs-worker function, here, because Amazons don’t exclusively belong to the state; they are recruited by the state to police their own members within state monopolies. Canonical Amazons, then, are a token monster group that, once subjugated, can be scapegoated (through the euthanasia effect) when they frantically lash out against state targets, chasing them down and brutalizing them through fetishized violence. This traitorous, self-loathing behavior is Pavlovian—conditioned and executed through a medievalized position where subjugated Amazons serve a hauntologized police role: a knight whose pure, “white” status becomes wracked with “black” generational trauma and guilt, but also instructed apathy in the face of prophesized adversity. Black or white, the police function remains constant when fealty to the state is sworn; but it decays during crisis towards increasingly violent forms.

In the Pavlovian sense, canonical Amazons function as cops or victims; subjugated Amazons are cops who trigger to respond to state crisis through bourgeois implementations of force. Per the trifectas, this vicious cycle has manmade components, intimated by neoliberalism profiting off manufactured disasters (Second Thought’s “How Capitalism Exploits Natural Disasters,” 2022); e.g., FEDRA from The Last of Us (the 2023 version, which we will return to throughout this book) being an eco-fascist metaphor for Blackwater and other mercenary groups since WW2’s frogmen and Vietnam’s “advisors” from the Phoenix program. These watchdogs of American Imperialism obey the elite, violating international laws on command; i.e., through dog whistles. When those are “blown” through historical-material factors, subjugated Amazons execute on par with pre-Enlightenment mercenaries defending king and kingdom; i.e., through a re-privatization of war that exists entirely outside the democratic process: war as commodified through corporate seizures of direct power on the global stage, superseding state mechanisms altogether (Bad Empanada’s “Johnny Harris: Shameless Propagandist Debunked,” 2023) with older forms of neoliberalism having relied on the abuse of state power as something to conceal through neoliberal illusions: superheroes like Amazons exhibiting the theatrical, performative strength and qualities of animals, not people; i.e., dog soldiers.

While rebellion and its recuperation are animalized, pitting “tame/semi-tame” state defenders against “wild” rebels and labor movements, there is a familial, Gothic consequence to this settler-colonial arrangement beyond classic iterations. Faced with these privatized brutalizers or even shadows of them in the appropriative peril of canonical, pre-apocalypse “daydreams,” women or other victims of state abuse (who are closer to nature) cozy up to anyone stronger than them in order to survive or feel safe with during Gothic times. Such protectors include ostensibly good-but-actually-bourgeois variants like Ellen Ripley (the James Cameron version), but also bonafide rebels who reject the state in totality as out-and-out, dyed-in-the-wool Communists; e.g., Jubei, but also real-life characters like Che Guevara that billionaire Marxists like George Lucas and James Cameron would mime in their own questionably rebellious[10] work:

(exhibit 8b2: The moderate “anarchist, Amazon warrior moms” of James Cameron are paper tigers. Their anger against the state is all flash, no substance insofar as universal equality is concerned; i.e., they’re predominantly white, Rambo-style Amazons, with varying degrees of class character married to more dubious aspects; e.g., Ellen Ripley is a TERF punching the Archaic Mother and exterminating her brood for being an intersex bogeywoman of settler-colonial guilt, trauma and bias. To that, Cameron’s refrain is a ghost of the counterfeit that demonizes colonized territories and anti-capitalist resistance movements/guerrilla forces in favor of white saviors from the Imperial Core protecting the usual wards of the state: white children. Sarah Connor’s son, John, is yet another example of that, except his plight addresses military urbanism on home soil instead of Red Scare overseas. There, the warrior mother furiously protects her white child from the LAPD as a famously corrupt, and well-documented police force[11] while simultaneously terrorizing the [admittedly wealthy] family of Miles Dyson, a tokenized black man, before letting him brutally die. The class character is fascinatingly murky but the stereotypical racial tensions remain, nonetheless.

In doing so, Cameron acknowledges the inherently racialized and incredibly violent function of American police present since their inception, but in a worrying trend carried over from Aliens, choses to focus on the violence against, and survival of, white maternal victims for the film’s duration [effectively pitting white and black mothers against each other]. Cameron does this while also showing that Amazons like Sarah are not exempt from racial tensions and class betrayal—Sarah hysterically treating her white child as more valuable than Dyson’s. As a whole, holistic solidarity is not Cameron’s strong suit. Quite the contrary, he foments worker division, pitting different marginalized groups against each other [white women and people of color] while prioritizing white agents during said exchanges wherever they occur.

Even so, Cameron’s caricatures are founded on real-world heroes. For instance, Che Guevara’s constructive anger toward legitimate material change has been appreciated by real-world revolutionaries and appropriated by state proponents, including moderate ones like Cameron. In pursuit of profit and status, Pygmalions like Cameron de-fang Che’s revolutionary potential by turning him into “just” a t-shirt [similar to MLK]: an inert, sloganized version of the former folk legend through the Amazon [monstrous-feminine guerilla] as a sloganized brand. This dialectical-material tension can be felt during settler-colonial disputes, comparing human actions to animals as an emblematic, theatrical device; e.g., “crafty like a fox” denoting animalized oral traditions tied to native peoples and their land as simultaneously occupied by an invader force that remembers them as foxlike in opposition to the state: being hunted, but eluding the self-assigned [white] trapper as a systemic, colonial force.

Cameron’s Amazons appropriate said tension—either applying useful predatory and prey-like qualities exclusively to white women reversing the role of hunter and hunted while avoiding captivity and abuse, or applying them to women of color embodying Afrocentrist qualities within other racialized groups; e.g., Bailey Bass, a biracial black actress, playing Indigenous women like Tsireya [from The Shape of Water] who are then fetishized for their exotic, non-white, “huntress” qualities being promised to white men “going native” within the savior fantasy as a predatory means of sleeping with the colonized princess—sex tourism dressed up as “activism.” Whatever transgressive bite they have becomes toothless, but also oddly chaste insofar as nudity in horror is framed as an invitation for open violence; i.e., utterly incapable of open, honest, adult forms of interrogating generational, psychosexual trauma that likewise let trans, intersex and non-binary forms of morphological expression exist under [thus navigate] settler-colonial duress; e.g., the woman of color or female Indigenous person having abject androgynous qualities that can be reverse-abjected during captor/captive fantasies that speak to living in captivity as a hunted, animalized group: facsimiles of rape and cop/victim fears explored through the middle class [or those inside the Imperial Core versus outside it] interrogating “fuck the alien” fantasies through iconoclastic art. The Gothic is a great resource for such things, if only to camp the West’s rape fears more than the usual Pygmalions bother to try!

[artist: Glacial Clear]

Such stances are closed off through complicated psychological positions of fear-fascination from both sides—the colonizer class and colonized classes, but also various intersections insofar as sex, gender, race and religion are concerned—and must be encroached upon through liminal re-engagements with the animal; i.e., as something that is not an actual threat despite feeling threatening in a multitude of ways: that one is a monster and/or monstrous for wanting to sleep with those the state and its proponents either collar and pit against you; or label as monstrous in animalistic ways to likewise make you afraid, thus desire protection from by appealing to the collared, subjugated variants. In turn, these wicked fantasies mustn’t get hung up on the ghost of the counterfeit, but instead be used to bring systemic socio-material change by critiquing praxially inert forms merely by existing: white women sleeping with people of color.)

The animalized rebel, as a genuine proletarian agent, is a regular casualty of centrist stories like Cameron’s. Pandering to white, cis-het people/token personalities who have been conditioned to enjoy their starring role (much to the chagrin of minority groups), his “billionaire Marxism” plays both sides: reverse-engineering the wagon chase, John-Ford-style, to centralize Sarah Connor as a white, female avenger of settler-colonial, “slasher-style[12]” trauma directed at North Americans, not the Global South (not to mention appealing to conservative values will reliably sell more tickets by widening your consumer base). Meanwhile, Ellen Ripley’s original form as a neoliberal foil (courtesy of Ridley Scott) becomes its fiercest, girl-boss protector in Cameron’s Rambo-esque, Vietnam revenge fantasy against the Reds (displaced as killer space bugs and capped off with the dissociative, white-mom-vs-black-mom “catfight”). It’s pretty shitty of Cameron in hindsight, appealing to the psychosexual fears (and similar pent-up emotions) of domestic state victims—women and children—by pitting them against classic state scapegoats to achieve praxial inertia, not momentum, during cliché situations[13] against cliché targets: nominal Communists, and assorted “corrupt” and/or monstrous-feminine entities existing in the same shadow zone as cartoon Nazis. At first glance, they’re hard to tell apart, but like a dominatrix wearing fetish gear starts to distinguish herself through inferred function; i.e., through dialectical-material scrutiny according to an informed audience capable of critical thought, hence class/culture/race analysis.

Some of these monsters (and their animalistic qualities) intimate our proverbial spectres of Marx and ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the camped imagery of state-sanctioned doppelgangers yielding Communist potential during ironic analysis and application. Of course, many more reduce to bourgeois caricatures of anything resembling actual Communism (which, to be clear, Stalin stiffly veered away from during his own cult of personality after Lenin’s death and later during WW2 and the Eastern Front; but those labor plans [and their various successes and failures: their defeating of the Nazis at Stalingrad, but also the Holodomor famine[14]] were begot from reactive abuse/constant interference from Western parties, including Hilter as the United States’ intended destroyer of the Bolshevist spirit). Purely on the Russian side, these Soviet cartoons—from Lenin, to Stalin, Gorbachev to Putin—have become increasingly boiled down, condensed by neoliberal hegemons into a vague, constantly threatening punching bag well into the present: the boogeyman of “Communism” waiting outside the myopia of Capitalist Realism.

These invasions are canonically marketed as coming “from beyond,” wherein current-day reinventions of the Gothic past disrobe inside intensely xenophobic nostalgia; e.g., seasons two-through-four of Stranger Things (2016) churning out their own variants of an evil banditti tied to moral panic: Red Scare at home. To that, the show’s interdimensional aliens and serial-killer general, Vecna (as well as the Russian goons worshipping the Demogorgon), serve as a giant, messy Red-Scare metaphor threatening Pax Americana for… yet-another-doubling of Ann Radcliffe’s Scooby Doo gang facing off against the indominable Nothing through nostalgia on top of nostalgia as the “antidote” to Capitalist Realism (an increasingly neoliberalized commodifying of Michael Ende’s 1979 novel, Die unendliche Geschichte). Eleven is that show’s Amazon—a crisis actor isolated and abused, hence conditioned, to bite very the cartoon shadows authored by the state during regular moral panics; i.e., Netflix reviving the fatal, lucrative nostalgia of Satanic panic to prime the current youth for an upcoming struggle.

Any way you slice it, Eleven is a child soldier (note the Stormtrooper vest and Kubrick-esque panopticon) who grows into a violent monster who can only justify her actions if Vecna is real; he’s not, but his triggers are, as are their harmful, historical-material effects embodied by formerly preyed-upon girls just like Eleven becoming predatory (she’s a stand-in for state recruits that only allow for proletarian forms if we consciously critique her canonical function).

Note: We’ll return to the Zionist and Red Scare elements of Stranger Things more in Volume Two; e.g., the Poetry Module’s “A Song Written in Decay.” —Perse, 4/6/2025

Of course, there’s room to enjoy all of these things, but neoliberal pastiche lionizing second wave feminism (and its fascist qualities) shouldn’t be endorsed and consumed without thought; it should be transmuted through iconoclastic praxis into appreciatively ironic, “perceptive” forms when confronting and concealing oneself with symbols of state abuse: through what artists cultivate (synthesize) themselves using productive, accessible intricacies (not endless detective-story mysteries or the sports-like competitions that, while intricate, do nothing to meaningfully challenge the state; e.g., Cameron’s Amazonian kayfabe). These elaborate distractions invoke something already noted in my thesis (and earlier in this subsection); re: “Out of medieval discourse, domesticated animals are also gendered in a sexualized, monstrous sense.” New forms of discourse that invoke Gothic poetics allow us to convey more than rebellious slogans like Cameron’s, but socio-material foils to state-animalized hero-monsters and victims: as strong as a horse or bull, but as sleek and randy as a rabbit or mink. The theatrical potential is all at once incredibly old, and waiting to be tapped (so to speak) during fresh morphological queries that interrogate animalized stigmas and trauma applied unevenly to workers under settler-colonial systems:

(artist: Akira Raikou)

So while it’s perfectly legitimate for nerds (or those who otherwise indulge in nerd culture) to desire protection from anyone who gives off “big daddy/mommy” energy as tied to an animalistic, dream-like aura—or even wanting to fuck these incredible, otherworldly persons—it’s equally important to remember that Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conor (and similar Amazons; e.g., Urbosa, left) are not your actual parents[15]. So, whereas state nostalgia drifts towards a coercive, social-sexual arrangement of these things, sex-positive scenarios administer the potential for regressively therapeutic rituals: unequal power exchange scenarios brokered between an iconoclast’s artistic exhibit and those taking part as the expected audience; i.e., between mutually-consenting adults whose iconoclastic, socio-material arrangements and depictions of predator and prey pointedly challenge the nuclear family structure as unironically medieval beneath the rot (which Cameron does not do).

By extension, subversive Amazons undermine compelled marriage as leading to manufactured consent, conflict and scarcity (which includes systematic war and women/child abuse among those inside the state of exception). As such, sex-positive regression—and the oft-subconscious selection of a “Big” to safeguard someone who feels “little,” in age play terms—is conditional; i.e., informed consent. Conversely the historical materialism of the state (and its own myopic regressions) are conservative in nature, meaning they are canonically unconditional, forcing the socio-material arrangements that exist between violent enforcers doubling as parental figures in conspicuously neo-medieval structures (exhibit 8b3) fostered during state collapse. Haunted by the older Neo-Gothic period’s pre-fascist occupation of the late 1700s, such heroes return to a medieval (and Gothic) that has never quite existed but predicates on older fascist forms that bleed into new post-fascist ones: flirting with power imbalance and size difference (cops and robbers roleplay) taken outside the bedroom (re: Foucault).

(artist: Glacier Clear)

Abuse victims often regress or disassociate, clamoring for protection in complicated, theatrically “dangerous” forms (the calculated risk). Indeed, to shrink in the face of ambiguous power and harm is understandable, as is pursuing healthier variants that still feel dangerous; i.e., capable of protecting us from trauma by helping us paradoxically regain a sense agency while feeling out of control when confronting trauma as something that lives in and around us, but—as we have seen—can also, like a gargoyle, come alive and attack us. People who feel victimized (or otherwise faced with uncertain destruction) generally desire a return to one’s childhood as “better” in connection to a heroic force—a good parent that rewrites what, for many children, is a time of shattered innocence. For better or worse, it’s also normal to feel attraction towards psychosexual power and violence (more on this in part two), and to trauma-bond when you feel frightened, hence infantilized. Indeed, a common regressive fantasy is the myth of the white knight; i.e., a psychosexual force that returns from the hauntological past to save the current world as threatened by ancient monsters during the vicious cycle of Capitalism: the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern, etc. All operate as cryptonymic forms of calculated risk and reward, their canonical heroic instruments apologizing for the state by offering up a noble-yet-sexy parental sacrifice: the paladin. In turn, neoliberalism uses the false hope of the white savior to achieve future Faustian bargains, preserving Capitalist Realism for as long as humanly possible. Nothing else matters.

If you want to critique the state and stop the cycle, go where its heroic power is centered: nostalgic spaces. In these spaces, the ending of genocidal nostalgia requires retraining any soldier of Capitalism and dislocating them from the structure itself, as Jubei is. While some knights are good/bad in entirely centrist terms, he was not. Except, this revolutionary cryptonymy can be dressed up in ways besides the Amazon or Jubei—knights.

In canonical terms, knights are often marketed as protectors, but actually defend property for the state. Reversing this function is not straightforward, and takes many different forms depending on the genre. Posthuman stories, for example, literally reprogram knights from the imaginary retro-future as something to revisit in sequel, franchised outings; e.g., the Terminator movies (and their various paratexts). Here, there may seem to be no animals in the future, but the idea of the Gothic berserk—a warrior dressed in animal skins—is not lost on Cameron. While the original Terminator (1984) inverts the classic knight’s metal exoskeleton for an endoskeleton that serves the same purpose (concealed force), the sequel reverses the class function of the same disguise while still having humans be the animal whose skins are worn(!). So whereas the first dad, Kyle Reese, was a skittish, white, prey-like survivor of automated genocide coming home to roost, Arnold is a Germanic lone wolf—a cybernetic predator reprogrammed by rebel forces to protect the children of the future by ultimately sacrificing himself. Doing so lets the Amazon, Sarah, finally lay down her arms and get to mothering John. The familial element (and its dimorphism) are preserved.

The parental themes seem noble enough, but also inventive insofar as Cameron’s Pygmalion fantasy deftly reverses the binary gender of the statuesque protector/sex object multiple times. Except Cameron pointedly ties the Amazon and knight’s shared quest to a Roman, thus problematic, concept: the nuclear family as something to defend within capital by martyring its statuesque, surrogate-father figure through childlike platitudes divorced from state critiques: “You can’t just go around killing people!” John says. To which the terminator asks, “Why?” Cameron can’t connect the moral to anything resembling material conditions, so he demonstrates it through something of a dog-training session: stand on one foot. Obey.

This basic, rigid argument sums up Cameron’s “revolutionary” character. Not only is it incredibly moderate (thus passive), but the nuclear unit’s harmful relationship with the Gothic, zombie-like West makes Cameron’s vision a compromise with undying conservative values: the state as something to protect through the family unit. Despite its infamous price tag and anti-police persona, T2 merely offers a half-measure dressed up in Hollywood glitz. All the same, Cameron isn’t stupid. He understands how a stable household appeals to the victim in all of us. T2 certainly resonated with me as a little girl, wishing my father was around instead of cheating on my mother and beating me. As a child bred on Gothic fiction, Cameron’s fantasies became something of a haunted house to me: something to retreat inside in order to find better copies of my actual parents (or representatives of them, in my mother’s case—love you, Mom). The same idea—of wanting monsters to make me feel safe in my own unsafe household—extends laterally to parallel structures Cameron is less likely to attack.

Like I said, it’s complicated; despite my open endorsement of cool monster parents, I’m still leery of Cameron’s expensive compromise (and skilled emotional/psychological manipulation) depicting the Western cycle of marriage as something to salvage through a cliché, and horribly dated, advertisement: parental, centrist automation. His “good parent vs bad parent” doubling shtick and “cyborg dads of the retro-future!” gag collectively endorse current political structures by refusing to take them to task, instead putting the blame on everyone: “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.” In the same breath, he replaces “the would-be-fathers who come and go” with a perfect robot dad who never gets tired, never gets drunk and hits John, thus can learn how to “not go around killing people.” The lesson inexplicably motivates John to build a better future for his own kids… by joining the suitably brutal and robotic institution, Congress.

This alternate, final ending is a huge red flag and both why I hate the director’s cut and distrust Cameron’s dubious vision of the imaginary future; it was his cut, thus his decision to endorse the magical rehabilitation of establishment politics. Except a single politician acting like a good parent historically doesn’t work, either because the person is killed, replaced, or made to conform to the usual antics of such a place. I call bullshit, but Cameron likes the idea so much he’s resold the movie (and his cut) time and time again. If it wasn’t how he felt, he wouldn’t sell it; more to the point, his intent doesn’t matter if endless war is what the movie ultimately promotes through bad decision-making. As part of the Military Industrial Complex, Congress makes war on purpose; it’s a business for them and always has been. To that, Cameron’s abuse of rebellious language conceals state predation, his white-savior antics meant to restore the public’s faith in the system being redeemable “as is”; i.e., something that can miraculously change through established procedures that serve the elite first and foremost. By whitewashing Congress, Cameron smugly implores viewers to imagine a world where the nation-state doesn’t exist to capitalize on genocide. Please! If John Connor tried to stop that, he’d simply get outvoted or shot like JFK.

The fact remains, while the rehabilitation of state killers is a pleasant-enough fiction, Gothic stories like Cameron’s scapegoat crooked, false cops (the T-1000 as a serial killer) and marry workers to monstrous parental force (Sarah and the T-800) in defense of the state as a heteronormative, thus settler-colonial, structure. No matter how much adventure and pure, psychosexual mayhem occur in dreamland, there’s no place like home as it currently exists.

Likewise, the problem merely compounds when you consider actual parents through compelled marital roles that play out in light of Cameron’s figurative ones. Compelled marriage generally sucks major ass, especially if the human is a cop (a trained killer and class traitor). At best, it’s a procedure of convenience. Even so, it effectively sublimates rape and child abuse—a coerced bargain/forced negotiation whose quid pro quo is dressed up as “love” with accidental children had by parents far-too-early paying the price. Often, the reality aligns with the female side regressively seeking material advantage by adopting femme, vulnerable performances (the damsel or the princess) and submitting to the male “protector” side chasing possessive, courtly love; i.e., homosocial tourneys had by knights, cowboys, et al dueling in jousting fashion, with kids (and wives) being caught in the middle (often incestuously abused by their fathers/male role models as false fathers, protectors, friends, etc). It’s standard-issue Man Box culture, which means you can’t just tap your shoes and sloganize good parentage; you have to synthesize it in ways that change the system, hence prevent genocide as a symptom of Capitalism.

Gothic poetics paradoxically grant a voice to discuss unspeakable trauma with, doing so through taboo subject matter (rape, murder, torture and incest, etc), while simultaneously existing in contested, doubled theatrical spaces. In Gothic stories, the lover, villain, parent and protector all occupy the same uncomfortable living space (the castle) in animalized forms: predator and prey as confused symbols and mechanisms from moment to perilous moment. Something to remember about Arnold in this reversal is he serves the role of parent, lover and protector in the perfect sense for a battered single mom: the asexual machine. Conversely the T-1000 is a villain through a great duplicator status that intends familial destruction through homicidal cryptonymy—the stolen identity of past serialized rape victims, including John’s foster parents, Sarah’s guards, and even Sarah herself (the same mimicking of a parental figure the original terminator did to get close to its victim as a “one-day pattern killer”). “He” and “his” rapacious falsehoods are a facet of state corruption, of the evil within as part of an internal plot invaded by those already inside (a confusion of inside/outside, correct-incorrect, etc) that expands in all directions when the shadow of medieval abuse covers the land.

The rebel’s gambit is to send a friendly predator to protect Sarah’s son, one who looks like a former abuser of Sarah’s and attempted killer of John; indeed, he’s the same model, therefore physically identical to the 1984 assassin. While the 1991 terminator is also an assassin, his class function alters insofar as he fights to preserve the family unit through hypermasculine violence; i.e., the good parent, lover and protector versus the bad. Cameron’s rehabilitative goal is one of complete reprogramming—of a past state soldier to serve a rebel cause attached to the family model. Indeed, they are inextricable, and haunted by the kinds of violence that the T-1000 (and other versions of the T-800) represent: of violent murder and rape through phallic devices, namely bullets, brute strength, and “knives and stabbing weapons” delivered by a perfidious, male, and physically imposing slasher agent serving an ultra-radicalized police state chasing and hunting its usual benefactors: white straight women and children (the nuclear model in crisis).

(artist: John Cordero)

In other words, Cameron locks the morphology and familial roles firmly in place, as well as the roles of predator and prey in centrist ordeals. They exist on good teams and bad revolving around the heteronormative family unit and its legendary defenders, destructors, and methods of domesticated, animalized monster violence, terror and morphological expression. For Cameron, all of these things tellingly manifest as white men who help or harm white (or functionally white) women and children in the domestic sphere. He sticks to his guns despite being all too familiar with the Gothic flexibility of Amazons and knights, but also cops as dishonest, dehumanized, shapeshifting (demonic) agents recuperating those symbols through acts of rape that double for the putting on of stolen appearances (for us, cryptonymy is a disguise of “rape” designed to prevent its unironic forms). As Rebecca Keegan writes in The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron (2010):

a central theme in both of the Terminator movies [is] how people, especially those in violent jobs, like soldiers and cops, can become barbarized. “The Terminator films are not really about the human race getting killed off by future machines. They’re about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other,” he says. “Cops think all non-cops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job” (source).

And yet despite his own less-than-stellar view of the force, Cameron can’t bring himself to think outside the box. His fantastical nightmare is trapped in the Shadow of Pygmalion’s myopia—stuck inside a very limited, male, criminogenic view of the world even though he understands “to serve and protect” is a lie the state regularly tells. More to the point, the language of anger is gendered in ways that enable singular police agents and groups of them (versus similar numbers of state targets: herds of prey versus packs of hunting animals), but also in official and unofficial capacities[16] to enact systemic violence through predatory familial likenesses and their relations: the infiltrators disguise themselves as family members during rape.

It’s important, then, to remember the Gothic mode contains contested language; i.e., the campy revival of medieval dichotomies that remains tremendously useful to navigating the enormous emotional pressures present under unequal material conditions; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM. But with that, we must also say quiet, unspoken things from just as loud a critical standpoint, versus things that sound loud but are critically inert, like Cameron does (e.g., his standard-issue slasher/rape scenarios). The intense feelings of predator and prey are useless unless they can raise awareness towards the socio-material conditions that bring them about, not enact a routine breaking down of civilization towards barbarism. Land and home are both treated as separate and overlapping in conflict, resulting in foreign vs domestic, wild vs civilized, etc. Animals, then, are used in times of state crisis and decay to crack down against workers with workers using animalized language as a delivery method for administering the abuse required to pacify workers with; i.e., out from pictures of home as corrupt, medieval: the liminal hauntology of war.

To that, the Gothic is a return of the fearsome imaginary past, often as a literal castle composed of old dreadful legends and unspeakable deeds. In Gothic-Communist terms, it is the state decaying towards a new imaginary past through the castle as something to summon. Out of it, many monsters may emerge besides just terminators (“they were the newest and the worst”); each swiftly becomes antiquated while attached to the unspeakable horrors it abstracts, shuffled and drawn anew during future revelations. To see the castle is to visit one’s mortality as consigned to a grander doom: an ignominious death tied to a space and time that travels without moving (a hyperobject, remember) and appears seemingly without warning or resistance.

(artist: Don Ivan Punchatz)

The ghost of the counterfeit nurtures the anxiously privileged through nightmares to summon and banish again in relation to their colonial inheritance: our ancestors were conquerors, but so were our “parents.” Except, these fears (and their associate material conditions) aren’t unfounded. Whatever form it takes—a European castle, an Egyptian-style pyramid, or a basic, corporatized logo composed of the building materials of such things—the castle is both a concentration of decaying state power and a fortress-minded condition of waiting for the Imperial Boomerang to swing back ’round, doubly maddening for a nation that hasn’t faced a land invasion in over two centuries, and has never been bombed (nuclear or otherwise) from a foreign power. In short, it is like trying to imagine genocide from those who have never been on the receiving end in modern times, shielded by the Imperial Core as slowly disintegrating around them. Its grim historical materialism invokes the Leveler as a future testament to Capitalism’s past, present and ongoing potential for self-destruction: the medieval brutality of the West having not gone anywhere, while its grim harvests demand fresh blood on a scale impossible to imagine. Sooner or later, monsters will spill out of the structure, preying upon everyone through a war of extermination, “not just those on the other side.”

Beyond Cameron’s quaintly heteronormative, “mom ‘n pops” yarn and financially predatory fixations in Gothic rape scenarios, the fallen home as intimating cataclysmic medieval characteristics is commonplace. By extension, canonical fantasy stories more broadly consider the normalization of class immobility as something to endorse through enforced morphological expression being central to the family unit, thus the state, represented by castles as implacable; i.e., the moderate stance that changing one’s material conditions is already framed as otherworldly and Quixotic, especially insofar as it deters morphological arguments that enable systemic change through gender-non-conforming bodies and identities as somehow “excessive.” Without any transformative bodily aspects, then, the hidden princess threading the Gothic castle’s hyperbolic nightmare (e.g., Sarah, inside a ghostly Los Angeles) is an already-alien proposal for moderate audiences, her harrowing story of survival filled with apophenic reminders of tremendous sexual danger tied to a fantastic place and time threatening a conservative bodily expression and social-sexual arrangement: cis-het girlfriends/wives (“better than mortal man deserves”) and marriage, bridling the savage Amazon as warrior woman and nature as monstrous-feminine (female or not, white-skinned or not).

Note: Abduction and rape—i.e., by a “vengeful dark queen” during ludo-Gothic BDSM—is a concept we’ll return to in the Demon Module’s “I’ll See You in Hell” (which looks at dark faeries and demon mommies during forbidden love fantasy scenarios). —Perse, 4/6/2025

(artist: Just Some Noob)

Meanwhile, anything that remotely challenges that body and gender expression—e.g., the pirate or demon searching for stolen gold or a lost homeland—is treated as an animalistic rogue, owing to their alien body and identity as foreign, often acquiring wealth or status through theft, trickery and conquest, but also non-marital sex.

Our Gothic-Communist critiques, then, seek to change systemic material conditions through subversive fantasy stories, which criticize the inherent, systemic violence that reactionary and moderate Pygmalions threaten when controlling bodily and gender expression; i.e., as an autonomous means of communicating non-heteronormative struggles in weird-nerd culture when marginalized groups are actually allowed to perform and express themselves, mid-trauma and in honest, unmuzzled animalistic language. Except, these feral alternatives and their pedagogy of the oppressed are often muscled out of the grander market equation by more standardized, cis-het, human-looking forms of Gothic morphological expression; i.e., those echoed by men like James Cameron, enforcing harmful industry standards around the world through heroic-monstrous cultural exports: the cold man of steel and the warrior woman with maternal, erotically subservient aspects (a wheyfu, biomechanical warrior bride/girl boss for the obedient state sissy [sub] to collar per the Pygmalion fantasy)!!

(exhibit 8b3: Artist, top-left: Flying Pen; top-right and bottom-left: Kook; bottom-right: Yoracrab. Neoliberal pastiche in Japanese media typically yields male knights who are effeminate but nevertheless armored, whereas female knights often tend to be at least partially nude and presented as dominant and subservient; i.e, beholden to a sexualized, animalistic, maternal role that, in some shape or form, serves child-like effeminate men [whose incestuous aspects endemic to Japanese culture we shall revisit in Volume Three]. As Cameron argues through his work, and lifestyle[17] in connection to his work, women [and AFAB persons at large] must always return to the heteronormative mother role: a sexualized nurturer who can fight when she needs to, but only to protect her children from alien forces. It’s fan service to weird canonical nerds, but also an instruction guide [vis-à-vis the Gothic Romance] for how girls should behave and present themselves in Cameron’s eyes.)

Heteronormative enforcement champions protectors whose bodies (and killing methods) are morphologically standardized: male knights, or female knights (which Amazons basically are) acting like men in Man Box culture or otherwise submitting to male needs; for them, the imaginary past becomes something to love and defend as a heteronormative stomping ground; i.e., by men like Cameron robbing the Gothic mode of its perceptively campy elements through all the usual canonical violence towards the usual victims of state abuse; e.g., Tolkien’s Beater and Biter directed at “goblins,” or Beowulf’s wrath tearing Grendel apart in similar base, animal-grade humiliations[18] mean to demean an already downed, prey-like foe: “Men like you thought it up.”

To that, I want to conclude part one by looking at another element common to the knight and Amazon as a fixture of Gothic poetics, regardless of the performance or genre: torture and psychosexual harm. Due to Amazonomachia being a dialectical-material phenomenon, we’ll introduce its canonical function, here, then devote part two to subverting it through our own uphill expressions of settler-colonial trauma in animalistic language. The canonical knight is commonly “phallic” insofar as he, she, they or it are armed with a penetrative implement of violence standing to, in, and for patriarchal enforcement as something to recognize by the harm it teases synonymizing with sex through romanticized rituals: the duel over the damsel or the child as both over her/them and about the two men measuring and crossing swords. In the heteronormative scheme of courtship through violence, size definitely matters insofar as its shows off more at first glance (swords, unlike penises, do not tend to “grow”; they unsheathe and seek out new bodies to serve as improvised “scabbards,” but the Gothic hyphenates such things in neo-medieval forms):

(artist: Kentaro Miura)

So whether good or bad in centrist stories, armored/weaponized male/tokenized duelists operate through “insect politics,” enacting “traumatic penetration” against their targets and/or collateral damage (J.B.S. Haldane once quipped that if a god or divine being had created all living organisms on Earth, then that creator must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.” However, if there is a loving god, then why-oh-why is Gwen Pearson’s “stabby cock dagger” a thing? Cosmic-nihilism-in-action). In terms of wives or girlfriends, but also sexual reproduction as symbolized by knights in connection to real life, PIV sex is the standard, canonical point-of-entry for our “overprotective” (rapacious) predators. Failure to uphold it results in psychosexual violence. Not only will the knight (or more to the point, the person emulating the knight) historically-materially “stab a bitch” if she eyeballs them wrong (or if she’s trans), but they—the most powerful and loved-feared family member (usually the father or boyfriend, but also police agents)—will exploit her and the children as routinely vulnerable by design. That’s what the state does and wants.

Centrist kayfabe portrays various good/evil teams using lances or bullets as “phallic” implements of rape that universally threaten obedient cis women as beings to corral and hysterical women, racial and ethnic minorities, queer people and/or children (e.g., queer children, who tend to have neurodivergent qualities that present comorbidly through abuse targeting them as children, queer and neurodivergent) as corrupt/monstrous-feminine things to execute/retire for not being useful to those in power—i.e., not useful to the fathers, but also the state for whom they serve. Of course, there is utility insofar as genocide serves the profit motive, but it achieves this through a limiting of what is morphologically correct and an expanding of what is incorrect. Cis-het men are violent and canon teaches them (and tokenized agents) to be violent in abject, morphologically standardized ways that chase, attack, and sexually dominate non-standard forms on and offstage: the “useless eater” as a useless animal hogging resources, but also an alien to fetishize[19] while persecuting it.

This is hardly the first time I’ve acknowledged this. In “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” I write,

The majority of violent murders, rapes, and murder-suicides are committed by cis-het men; the majority of their victims are women; and less than one percent of the total United States population openly identifies as trans/non-binary. Roughly 1.4 million adults in the United States openly identify as trans. Out of a population of 328.2 million, that’s less than half of one percent. The actual number is undoubtedly higher, but obscured by fear. Not everyone comes out because of potential abuse: murder, wrongful termination from employment, homelessness, and so on. Women are pushed into the periphery by sexist men, and trans people don’t exist at all; if they do, they are generally demonized, even killed, their murderers protected by sexist, transphobic laws, aka the gay panic defense (source).

Under this spotlight, queer people hide their identities because they can. Setting aside the extramarital violence committed against them, other marginalized groups—people of color and AFABs—are disproportionately targeted for what they can’t hide: their skin color, genitals and bodily functions as animalized. Under Cartesian dualism, they are automatically sighted[20] and targeted as “of nature” and treated as chattel to varying degrees; i.e., as bodies of discourse that are monitored and controlled to acceptable levels of resistance.

Yet, the oppressed also speak out about morphological standards that convey their oppression as something to reclaim through the usual devices of torture and extermination being used more boldly than Cameron dares. Unlike him, we must haunt the state’s territories—both out of the land they seek to dominate, but also through the policed heroic-monstrous agents as more and more alien, but also unkillable regarding their rebellious usage. Historically bombs and bullets don’t work, and the state’s demand for an aura of invincibility when exploiting an occupied territory compounds to such a costliness as to sink them after a handful of deaths. These break the spell, and open the floodgates of counterterror. Once-proud state proponents ignominiously humor mortality and defeat; taunted by us, they envision themselves as conquered, growing sick with the threat of their own abuses promised by the smallest of failures, including a crisis of masculinity that gives into forbidden, genderqueer pleasures doubling as disguises that perform Athena’s Aegis. Tasting of that, their spirit and their nerves break and they become afraid of shadows “coming to get them,” but also the state to punish them for their “moment of weakness” by sleeping with “chattel” (whose animalization is associated with appropriated cultural markers; e.g., the Pride rainbow):

(artist: Torture Chan)

The problem lies in white, cis-het Pygmalions like Cameron moderating rebellion through antiquated language as something to emulate, thus conceal, state abuse through vivid descriptors of predatory agents. Except similar situations to queer existence are felt through an adjacency to systemic abuse that overlaps with one’s own morphology as policed by and large. Alongside queer people, then, sits the combined struggles of other groups whose identities and bodies are controlled through the same state monopolies—violence and terror as a means of enforcing particular forms of morphological expression using Gothic poetics. Native Americans were largely displaced, segregated and killed (even those who tried to assimilate) through colonial methods presenting them as monstrous wild animals, while people of color and other ethnic minorities have likewise been exploited for centuries through similar industrialized maneuvers (today being disproportionately imprisoned by the American judicial system enslaving them for petty offenses according to Ashley Nellis’ “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons,” 2021); e.g., drug wars being an old, borrowed tactic that preys upon chattelized groups using predatory maneuvers learned from past settler-colonial abusers (and embodied within capital by privileged groups; i.e., generally white cis-het men like Tyler Oliveira[21] grifting against vulnerable groups including homeless people, who often use drugs to survive under systemic criminogenic conditions).

To that, more recent American executives borrowed the War on Drugs from older bourgeoisie and their preying on the Imperial Core’s spectrum of ethnic minorities and dissidents trapped inside the state of exception; i.e. coming out of the Opium Wars (source: Extra History, 2016) into Nixon’s abusive campaigns against his own population; re: as John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, declared in 1994:

You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. […] We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did (source: Vera’s Drug War Confessional”).

Unlike strictly demonized groups, white women who aren’t Amazonian are also preyed upon, except their predation complicates due to their vertiginous treatment as liminal victims; i.e., both a precious property promised to settler-colonist men and killed and raped by them under their so-called “protection” inside spaces of sin comparable to Madikken’s own medieval forest refuge (a concept we’ll explore throughout this entire book, but especially in Volume Three, Chapter Two): those perceived both as feminine and weak, but also wild, hysterical and dangerous—witches reduced to safe/dangerous chattel, thus deserving to be hunted down and preyed upon through preemptive DARVO abuse by patriarchal forces defending heteronormativity through hauntological forms of the settler-colonial model.

(exhibit 9a: Frazetta’s “Castle of Sin” [1986]. Commissioned by Playboy magazine, Frazetta depicts our unsuspecting “hero” being led to his doom by three sexy witches [the same number as the Gorgons, aka the Fates]. In other words, the knight and his armored chastity are being absolved and the fleshy women are being cast as Original Sin capturing him; i.e., they [and their bodies] are entirely to blame for everything that happens to the “poor, defenseless[22]” knight inside the castle as an operatic place of “almost certain temptation.” Never mind that he’s armed for bear and armored from head to toe: the unironically fetishized executioner of the state whose medieval abuses and deathly persona are constantly emulated by state police acting as “good cop, bad cop,” but also “white knight, black knight” against their own citizens; i.e., as beings to reinvade through an assigned, entertaining site of crisis within state grounds: the danger disco.

As we explored in Volume Zero, Frazetta’s hauntologies generally objectify women and glorify men; i.e., operating through fetishized power imbalances that nearly always have the woman being offered up as a naked, idealized prize to powerful [usually white] men, and presenting people of color as violent rapists or powerful, eunuchized harem guards. I love Frazetta’s technical prowess, but his products were definitely “of their time,” channeling the same kinds of unsubtle bigotry as Robert E. Howard, but also the magazine that published him: Weird Tales [which also published H.P. Lovecraft]. Both men worked in a racist vein of the Gothic mode, their pulpy stories overflowing with occult flavors that obsessed constantly about a return of calamity as something to counter by heroic, hypermasculine/Cartesian forces: the brains and the brawn. Frazetta illustrated both heroics in a very Pygmalion way that serves state monopolies in all the usual territories: wild, open land, but also castles as dreamlike sites of violence and rape perpetrated by cops afraid of demonic, otherworldly influences that might undermine the purity of their status and position.)

Faced with crisis, state heroes routinely fail to measure up. The most privileged (and craven) group are cis-het, white Christian men. Scared of anything different/of nature (e.g., The Great Outdoors, left: our two Quixotic heroes afraid of a squirrel in their rental cabin) while simultaneously fetishizing it (the way Beowulf’s Spear-Danes would have feared Grendel’s vengeful mother while pegged her for a woman), they become infatuated, possessive and lusty as they fight over often-literal maidens (teenagers); i.e., as child-like, defenseless property that one man shall not covet if it is already owned (with “problematic lovers” often chased into the state of exception using racist/transphobic sodomy tropes; e.g., the rapacious black man and the killer “false” woman-in-disguise, aka the “trap”). That didn’t/doesn’t stop property duels from being enshrined in romantic canon, however (nor does it prevent tokenism through the existence of TERFs acting like cis-het white men, internalizing their bigotry as self-hating dykes, unicorns and tomboys: the monstrous-feminine as something to imprison, abuse and weaponize against various groups even when no threat is posed or conveyed; e.g., twinks).

Erstwhile, the legends themselves become conspicuously homosocial—at times homosexual, even pedophilically homosexual (a knight’s squire, exhibit 92b; rape culture as something to subvert but also endorse, including by the LGBA, exhibit 100c2c—both in Volume Three). All of a sudden, there are far more men fighting over unwilling women than women (cis or queer) who actually want to sleep with the men involved, leading to pedophilia and chattel rape (neither my father nor stepfather sexually abused me; however, while both beat me, my stepfather once hit me in the head so hard with a plastic phone receiver I thought he wanted to kill me). Already covertly genocidal, neoliberalism is a gateway to fascism, which in turn is a gateway to all of these things in the domestic sphere: “prison sex”/Man Box mentalities where cis-het men tend to masturbate to penises going where they ought; i.e., into the vagina, but also the unwilling bodies of those deemed weaker than they are as animals to chattelize.

In other words, any show of monstrous hypermasculine force becomes unironically masturbatory when conducted against state enemies whose morphological arguments “rock the boat”; i.e., undead, demonic and/or animalistic poetics that challenge the usual utility and ubiquity of the penis/phallic object. This means anything that is androdiverse, gynodiverse and/or anthropomorphic constitutes a threat that must be checked in all the usual ways; but just as often, these diversities are erased by heteronormative agents like Cameron canonizing camp, or chased after by them within coercive, reactionary arrangements of power that enable the chaser to extort coerced pleasure from their victims to assuage their own unhappy existences. Through the profit motive, the enforcer is alienated from pleasure, and generally envy the pleasurable closeness to nature and the human condition (sex and gender) that gender-non-conforming practitioners exhibit and communicate through all aspects of themselves; i.e., monstrous expression as a profoundly non-Cartesian/non-Vitruvian morphological statement with profound implications of rebellious gender identity expression, mid-struggle (animals, it must be said, are farmed and devoured[23] under Capitalism): genitals and the prey-like animalized bodies they’re attached to as coming out of the same Walpolean, Gothic imaginary that parental, sometimes-predatory Amazons and knights do.

We’ll explore these in part two, next. Onto “Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM“!

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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] Gothic beings embody power and death as cryptomimetic instruments of great change—generally by overlapping different kingdom taxon of life and death: plants/animals of life, and fungi of death, hybridizing the two as demonic and/or undead (which Volume Two will unpack; e.g., xenomorphs; re: “The Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’“).

[2] Because the state cannot conceal its medieval regressions, it monopolizes its usual violence and terror through Gothic romances; in turn, these incarcerate worker minds in crypt-like hauntologies of endless, brutal suffering (e.g., the infernal concentric pattern, Cycle of Kings, Shadow of Pygmalion, Torment Nexus, etc).

[3] I’m specifically focusing on morphological expression, here, because state forces will try to control it in relation to other variables; i.e., in monopolized opposition to workers’ manifestations of monstrous bodies during countercultural dialogs that stand up for their basic human rights (and that of animals and the environment). While we obviously want to separate human biology from sexual and gender expression (and allow sex to divide from gender during said expression), it nevertheless remains tied to them during morphological expression as part of overall worker struggles; i.e., to liberate themselves from capital in morphological language that challenges the heteronormative standards normally proliferated in canonical Gothic stories.

[4] Animal masks in theatre are some of the oldest in the world; i.e., totems (a topic we’ll introduce here, and expand on greatly in Volume Two when we examine lycans, chimeras and sentient animals).

[5] The chronotope yields a fearsome character of inherited decay tied to a doomed bloodline; e.g., The Darkest Dungeon‘s (2017) opening query to the player: “Do you remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor?”

[6] Hermia is owned by her father, Egeus, and must either marry his chosen suitor or be destroyed vis-à-vis the “ancient rites” of an imaginary Athens: “As she is mine, I may dispose of her” (source) like chattel. This submission is challenged by Hermia running away like an animal into an imaginary space—a rebellion that is quelled at the end of the story by Shakespeare having Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, marry her male conqueror, Theseus. As usual, evocations of an unruly female past are teased through the same language used to quell it; i.e., Picasso’s destruction of the painted woman: “Each time I leave a woman, I should burn her. Destroy the woman, destroy the past she represents” (source: Marta’s “The Women of Picasso,” 2023). Queerness, then, is hauntological and seditious, and whose Gothic, animal poetics become something to monopolize by the same-old state forces.

[7] E.g., the female singer’s lines from Meatloaf’s “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” (1993):

Will you raise me up? Will you help me down?
Will you get me right out of this godforsaken town?
Can you make it all a little less cold?

Will you hold me sacred? Will you hold me tight?
Can you colourise my life, I’m so sick of black and white?
Can you make it all a little less old?

Will you make me some magic with your own two hands?
Can you build an emerald city with these grains of sand?
Can you give me something I can take home?

Will you cater to every fantasy I got?
Will you hose me down with holy water, if I get too hot?
Will you take me places I’ve never known?

Meatloaf, likewise, is no stranger to horror and camp; e.g., Rocky Horror (1975) but also “Pelts” (2007) from Masters of Horror (re: “Furry Panic“), as well as his various music videos; re: the one for “I Would Do Anything for Love.” To it, monsters and music go together like sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (a campy tradition out of Shakespeare’s medieval revivals revived, themselves, in the present space and time; e.g., my interviewing of modern-day Shakespearean horror directors, Kailey and Sam Spear, in my “Alien: Ore” series: “On Shakespeare“)! In keeping with cryptonymy process, the fun is the danger disco in disguise!

[8] The Welfare Mom is a racist trope that scapegoats women of color for manufactured scarcity’s generating of criminogenic conditions for those in and outside the state of exception; i.e., divide and conquer for the state.

[9] A common segregative metaphor is the sheepdog—a canine guardian that controls chattel, bloodlessly keeping them in place by obeying but also doubling the shepherd; i.e., guarding his flock. Whereas these cryptonyms conceal the state abuse normally taking place under such segregation (domestic abuse), a black dog symbolizes death, but also works as an attack animal to a higher degree than their fair-furred, babyface counterpart. Both are capable of state violence and indeed are bred for that purpose.

[10] Lucas explained how Star Wars famously took anti-totalitarian/anti-American ideas and communicated them to an American audience (source: AMC+’s “George Lucas on Star Wars Being Anti-Authoritarian,” 2018). In turn, Lucas inspired Cameron with the Star Wars movies to make The Terminator films, and later, the Avatar franchise. Except the allegory of resistance, per the billionaire-Marxist approach, is regularly obscured by the pursuit of profit (franchising the struggle) and telling it from an exclusively white, American, Pygmalion (male king’s) imaginary perspective; e.g., Lucas famously telling Carrie Fisher “there is no underwear in space” (Hamish Kilburn’s “George Lucas Made Carrie Fisher Act in No Underwear in Star Wars,” 2016) and Cameron capitalizing on rebellious activities by relegating guerilla warfare to humanoid space bugs in Aliens, or to white saviors who, according to him, do the job better than Indigenous populations (Kshitij Mohan Rawat’s “Native Americans Boycott James Cameron,” 2022).

Furthermore these Pygmalion tendencies would be counteracted by Lucas’ then-wife, Marcia Lucas, editing the original trilogy (source: Elisa Guimaraes’ “George Lucas Created Star Wars, But This Person Gave It Heart,” 2023). A similar Galatea effect also occurred with Mad Max: Fury Road (2014), as Rhiannon Thomas writes: “The success of Mad Max: Fury Road wasn’t just because Margaret Sixel was a female editor. It’s because of the magical combination of her female perspective, and her non-action-movie perspective, and her unique world perspective, and her immense talent and hard work and dedication” (source: “Mad Max and The Female Editor,” 2023).

This being said, such stories are still written by white women, hence make their saviors and Indians white, too (re: the “Rambo/Star Wars problem” and, by extension, the whole monomyth’s military optimism and cartographic ethnocentric refrains). Most videogames are separate from actual physical space (versus phone games; e.g., Pokémon Go); anytime a game attaches to the real world and/or profit motive, it becomes not just limited by real-world space, but defined by it: as dogma that introduces an ability for the player to die by either playing the game simulation (re: Pokémon Go) or taking the simulation into the real world (re: Doom and Vietnam-style revenge, post-Aliens, at home and overseas, during the Imperial Boomerang and its various nightmare scenarios on and offstage; see: the Undead Module’s “Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang” and “A Vampire History Primer“).

[11] The LAPD’s abuse stretches back over seventy years, as discussed in Max Felker-Kantor’s Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (2018):

When the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department (source).

Such abuse had already been going on for decades (source: Rocio Lopez’ “LA Police’s History of Brutality” 2020), thriving in the shadow of Jim Crow and the orchestrated failure of Reconstruction following the American Civil War (which sowed the seeds of neo-slavery and neo-colonialism within the US).

[12] The terminator is an infiltrator-style killer that, in the ’80s, fits snugly in with the serial killer “slasher” craze, but also police brutality with a friendly human face carried into the early ’90s (during the L.A. riots). In the slasher genre, cultural anxieties personify scapegoats regarding the dimorphic qualities of heteronormative society. Men are always big and strong and dangerous; women are always vulnerable damsels, in danger to men, surviving them and eventually surrendering their power to them in the end. In the school of Ann Radcliffe, the danger of a “slasher” story is always sexy and vice versa, stirring up giant feelings of being stalked, hunted, trapped, captured, raped, tortured, and killed by a shadowy, ever-present menace (“like an animal” under such conditions); Cameron links the same fatal dimorphism to the family unit as something to uphold in unison with these destabilizing “homewrecker” threats: “bad home, bad family” versus “good home, good family” with monsters in between (the classical dilemma being one of genuine fidelity and of good faith, versus acting in bad faith). The imagery of home is present, but faded, treacherous, wrong.

[13] E.g., the damsel-in-distress; i.e., fight or flight, of feeling prey-like in relation to predators: constantly being hunted, naked and exposed, on the run, kept from thinking about or otherwise doing things that might change our material conditions when confronting state trauma in Gothic forms that, in canonical terms, keep people afraid of the socio-material arrangements, versus changing them.

[14] I say “famine” because the event is not generally considered a deliberate genocide by modern history scholars in opposition to Cold War standards; e.g., Robert Davies and Steven Wheatcroft, who write in The Years of Hunger (2009):

Our study of the famine has led us to very different conclusions from Dr Conquest’s. He holds that Stalin “wanted a famine,” that “the Soviets did not want the famine to be coped with successfully,” and that the Ukrainian famine was “deliberately inflicted for its own sake.” This leads him to the sweeping conclusion: “The main lesson seems to be that the Communist ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children.”

We do not at all absolve Stalin from responsibility for the famine. His policies towards the peasants were ruthless and brutal. But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable. The background to the famine is not simply that Soviet agricultural policies were derived from Bolshevik ideology, though ideology played its part. They were also shaped by the Russian pre-revolutionary past, the experiences of the civil war, the international situation, the intransigent circumstances of geography and the weather, and the modus operandi of the Soviet system as it was established under Stalin. They were formulated by men with little formal education and limited knowledge of agriculture. Above all, they were a consequence of the decision to industrialize this peasant country at breakneck speed (source).

For more examples (and the conflicts that emerge between them online), consider Bad Empanada’s “The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You” (2023).

[15] This being said, grooming an heir and incestuously rearing the next-in-line from one’s sire by said heir is a common fear/fascination inside the ghost of the counterfeit—of one’s liege having forged, yet enforced, parental qualities suggested by the decaying scenic fabric and faded decorations of the medieval homestead as harmful and false. Such disintegration echoes state variants through more advanced forms of capital that feudalism would evolve (and regress back) into: fascism and the defense of an imaginary feudalistic manor amounting to a marriage towards the fearsome, regal likeness of one’s parents.

[16] I.e., vigilante-style “deputies” during acts of pro-state stochastic terrorism (a concept we will explore thoroughly in Volume Three); e.g., incels.

[17] Cameron married and divorced Linda Hamilton as a perceived double of Sarah that didn’t measure up to his Pygmalion fantasy as he envisioned it:

“I think what happened there is that he really fell in love with Sarah Connor,” Hamilton said. “And I did, too.” Cameron didn’t object, telling the Times, “I fell in love with her initially because I thought she was a little closer to Sarah than she actually is, but that doesn’t mean that much once you get to know somebody” (source: Alexia Fernández’s “Linda Hamilton Says She and Ex-Husband James Cameron Were ‘Terribly Mismatched,'” 2019).

[18] I.e., bodily dismemberment and bodily functions as the barbaric fulfillment of inhumane threats by inhumane force; e.g., “I’m gonna rip your head off and shit down your neck!”

[19] State proponents chase after those they dehumanize—a complicated reality illustrated by another telling Cameron movie quote (this section is full of them): “She thought they said, ‘illegal alien’ and signed up!” “Fuck you, man!” “Anytime, anywhere!”

[20] Police and police adjacent factors identify reductively by sight to put you inside one of two basic categories: “a male” or “a female,” but also predator or prey.

[21] Thought Slime’s “I Investigated the Biggest Scumbag on YouTube” (2024).

[22] Knights ride down their prey and violate them through an amalgam of metaphors and actualities: actual rape versus “rape,” and animal metaphors for these things; i.e., through their steed, their lance, their armor as a part of their entirety insofar as it paradoxically threatens and excites their would-be victims.

[23] The butcher’s paradox amounts to an animal that is cute, but calmly slain and sliced up by the handler’s knife. As much as possible is done to ensure a minimization of pain, but death and pain are nonetheless unavoidable; e.g., Chef Wang Gang’s “Stir-fry Bullfrog” video (2023) graphically demonstrating the upfront butchering and preparing of cute bullfrogs. There is a frankness to the confronting of such slaughter to meet a basic, biological need, but also an endorsement of it as a business by a wider culture (Asia) having already suffered greatly at the hands of American Imperialism. In the presence of great trauma (and food shortages), life becomes cheap and delicious, but the fragility lingers in uneasy dialogs (Google-translated YouTube comments from Wang’s video): “Such a cute frog tastes so delicious” and “How cruel it looks from the front is how delicious it looks from the back,” etc. Such statements acknowledge the turning away of the victim and its inevitable killing from behind to make a meal, while nevertheless adopting a kind of executioner’s pride heaped on the chef as a proud master of his craft. The animal quickly becomes an easy casualty in us-versus-them rhetoric, one that slides easily into animal abuse through a system that, for all intents and purposes, rapes nature and its unlucky inhabitants to fill owner and worker bellies with.

Try to imagine and apply this same mentality (and brutal outcome) vis-à-vis animalized workers and their egregores; then try to understand their collective, humanized plight to survive inside a system that prioritizes worker butchery for profit through the heteronormative language (and its negotiation) of animalized monsters: to be bred for slaughter—farmed for meat and sex as grossly conflated under abusive socio-material arrangements; e.g., “thicc” prized by the sex pest who feels entitled to regular “meals,” which he carves up with his dick not as a euphemism for modesty’s sake, but a cryptonymic means of concealing rape. Said entitlement isn’t to fulfill an attempt to bond with others, but to dehumanize and consume them for his own status and insecurities within the profit motive. Through Capitalist Realism, the prison-sex mentality extends into a myopic and inescapable slaughterhouse that, through the ghost of the counterfeit, becomes something to eat through the process of abjection: the delicious suffering of others mid-chattelization. Such “erotic butchery” is endemic to capital, which shapes our experiences; i.e how we inhabit, but also see and understand the world. All of this must be fought and resisted during iconoclastic expression that continues to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that humans are animals who not only kill to survive, but enjoy and savor their food as oft-sexualized inside a larger system exploiting these overlapping mechanisms for profit.

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.

Manifesto: Simplifying Theory

“One night during my accustomed visit to the neighbouring wood where I collected my own food and brought home firing for my protectors, I found on the ground a leathern portmanteau containing several articles of dress and some books. I eagerly seized the prize and returned with it to my hovel. Fortunately the books were written in the language, the elements of which I had acquired at the cottage; they consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter. The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations.

—the Creature, Frankenstein (1818)

Picking up where “Volume One, opening and preface” left off…

Dearest Reader,

This is our revolution’s manifesto. I originally wrote it before the thesis volume, making it more relaxed in its argumentation. So while it’s more academically formalized than Volumes Two and Three, my manifesto supplies a thoroughly simplified approach to my core theories. In doing so, its actionable curriculum aims to apply the grander ideas of my thesis to one’s own teaching approach as flexible; i.e., to learn from the trauma of oppressed groups when dealing with our own abuse. All happen while synthesizing praxis and overcoming systemic harm together, using a variety of monstrous expressions to cultivate sex-positive habits to teach others with. These habits generate through Gothic dialogs, whose monstrous theatre constitutes a pedagogy of the oppressed that, when synthesized during ludo-Gothic BDSM, aids in the development of Gothic Communism for all. As its name suggests, the manifesto unfurls the manifesto tree of oppositional praxis; understanding this tree is required for when we discuss synthesizing theory and confronting interpersonal trauma through Gothic instruction in the second half of this volume. So learn it well, but take your time. Rome wasn’t burned in a day and healing from its vast crimes takes not simply one lifetime, but many in endless succession; i.e., while past abuse lives within and around us and generational trauma is slowly dismantled on a systemic level through Gothic paradox.

Love,

—Your “Commie Mommy,” Persephone

For centuries, Gothic stories (and more-recent-but-dated psychoanalytical models in Gothic academia) have warned of vast, indistinct dangers seemingly removed from everyday life yet at the same time frighteningly relatable and close. I argue this myopic division stems from Capitalism, whose elusive, illusory exploitation of sex workers (and sexualized workers) happens through Capitalist Realism; said Realism damages the cultural mind, but also its artistic output as something to relate with and respond to in Gothic terms. In turn, this has had a wide range of far-reaching effects in the material world felt through the Gothic imagination: “Something is rotten in Denmark!” This manifesto formulates an active, practical, countercultural process; informed by a collection of assembled theories and research, said process articulates sex-positive activism and education in a series of vital, interconnected things: the mission of Gothic Communism; its goals, theories, and mode of expression (the means and materials of production: monsters, lairs/parallel space, hermeneutics—the means of study—phobias, and mediums); and creative expression through praxial synthesis.

At its inception, our manifesto began essentially as one chapter divided into six subchapters. After it gives our mission statement, it lists the majority of operational coordinates that occur during oppositional praxis: our aforementioned manifesto tree. The goal in listing them, here after we’ve already discussed them much more deeply during my thesis argument, isn’t to provide their complete order exactly as it was examined in Volume Zero; it’s to provide them in a simplified form that can be applied through a taught, semi-anecdotal approach. The content is essentially the same, albeit more basic and conversational, thus accessible:

• “The Gist“ (included in this post) gives our mission statement, then outlines the entire manifesto (the manifesto tree of oppositional praxis) list by list.
• “The Nation-State“ (included in this post) and “An Uphill Battle” part one, part two and part three outline the many pressures and forces existing during the struggle to synthesize praxis and unify workers using monstrous poetics; the three monsters (and their trauma style) we focus on are gargoyles, Amazons and vampires.
• “Monster Modes, Totalitarianism and Opposing Forces“ revisits oppositional praxis, lists all the monsters, lairs and phobias we will explore in Volume Two and Three, and outlines menticide, a form of brainwashing that the synthesis roadmap explores more thoroughly.

Similar to my thesis volume, there is some mention of trauma writing/artwork in the manifesto itself. While interrogating trauma isn’t the main focus of the manifesto at first, it gradually becomes more and more prevalent until the manifesto postscript kicks off the second half of the volume. From there, “Healing from Rape“ constitutes the initiation of catharsis through learned instruction as informed by traumatic anecdote; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM expressed through lived experience and emotional content. It addresses police “corruption,” DARVO and general abuse with the pedagogy of the oppressed as a means of preventing trauma, but also healing from it by listening to those already traumatized on a daily basis: sex workers and workers sexualized by capital as people who can teach us through their own catharsis to be better instructors through the same mode.

Following the postscript, the synthesis roadmap discusses how to synthesize praxis directly within our daily lives, thus prevent war and rape as a Cartesian byproduct; i.e., by forging social-sexual habits of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness through what we express, create or otherwise personify and leave behind for others to discover and learn from: our collective, intersectional trauma as previously informed by the trauma of others, including the shadow of state abuses against nature felt across time and space. The complex, difficult emotions that result (fear, doubt, insecurity, superstition, paranoia, psychosexual attraction/repulsion, etc) become things to negotiate with through our poetics having a lasting Gothic footprint that challenges state dogma.

(exhibit 6b3: Artist, top-left, top-mid, and bottom-mid: Blxxd Bunny; bottom-left: Juice of Yellow; right: Leeza. Their squishy bodies serve as a powerful, Gothic means of educating others about confronting trauma and healing from it, but also preventing successive abuses against such bodies in the future.)

The manifesto is modular and holistic, having many moving parts that work on their own and in unison, often intersecting in some shape or form. Point in fact, they’re meant to be studied, approached and applied intersectionally insofar as expressing trauma goes. However, I’ve tried to write them in such a way that you can get the gist of certain points before I get around to explaining them (which, to be frank, I’ve done far more exhaustively in Volume Zero). So regardless if you’ve only skimmed Volume Zero, all of these devices are central to iconoclasm during oppositional praxis; we absolutely need to cover them in some shape or form before we can delve into Gothic poetics as something to historically understand and learn from in Volume Two, then apply through our own work in Volume Three—i.e., when we “play god” and self-fashion/self-determine in Gothic-Communist terms.

The Gist: Our Gothic-Communist Mission Statement and List of Oppositional Praxial Coordinates, Including Our Tenets and Main Gothic Theories

“But Louis B. Meyer wouldn’t be Goebbels’ proper opposite number. I believe Goebbels sees himself as David O. Selznick.”

“…Brief him!”

—Lt. Archie Hicox and Winston Churchill, Inglourious Basterds (2009)

First and foremost, our mission statement is, “As Gothic Communists, our mission is to protect you!—to expose Capitalism’s perfidious design as a structure, thereby protecting all workers (sex or otherwise) from Capitalism by teaching them to liberate themselves through iconoclastic art!”

Note: This is where the title of the book series comes from. As time passed, though, I would start to express universal liberation per ludo-Gothic BDSM having the whore’s revenge; i.e., by subverting monsters through revolutionary cryptonymy to reverse abjection, thus profit. Even so, these aren’t discrete categories, sharing the same Aegis. Here, though, my emphasis was less holistic/focused around the dialectic of the alien (re: “Some Prep When Hugging the Alien“)—through the whore signifier/signified (sex work being the root of all abuse under capital abusing Medusa)—and more a broad, pick-and-choose argument; re: oppositional praxis stressing different qualities in a more singular-and-atomized fashion (which frankly is easier to write); e.g., saying “heteronormative canon” versus “canon is heteronormative, Cartesian, and settler-colonial” (which Volume Zero would do, but again, I wrote it after the manifesto).

(artist: Kaycee Bee)

Frankly the entire volume is written like this—with Volume Two growing more focused on universal liberation through holistic liminal expression that, all the same, focuses on the whore’s side of things during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., generalized but also specialized to achieve liberation through preferential code; re: focusing less on the primality of the Medusa/Aegis “alien” argument and more on its dialectical-material continuation through ongoing struggles when sexualized by capital; e.g., with Kaycee Bee and I working together more recently in ways I wouldn’t have, when this manifesto first came to be (for I was still working out the process). Other forms of poetry and labor are equally valid, of course; they’re just not the focus, here, because “here” is meant to be as broad and unbiased as possible while sticking to sex work and its poetic extensions. This makes sense, given this is a manifesto, one speaking introductorily to all forms of poetry and labor having infinite value, thus infinite shape: to exploit or liberate during oppositional praxis.

To it, the volume’s theories started simpler (manifesto first draft), grew complex (PhD), simplified again (final manifesto), and applied themselves historically and poetically during Volume Two leading into Volume Three’s making new history. You’ll see the manifesto tree, here (from Volume Zero), but it will make a return once Volume Three arrives. —Perse, 4/4/2025

Capitalism conceals its own Promethean (self-destructive) nature through heteronormative canon. To critique its abuse of workers through Capitalist Realism, I want to focus on Gothic poetics; i.e., using them in a sex-positive, Marxist way that intersects with other schools of thought. These intersections obviously help us address the many ways that Capitalism sexualizes workers; but given Marx’ admittedly dry (and straight) nature, we also want to spice things up: camping canon/”making it gay” by synthesizing communal (anarcho-Communist) emotional/Gothic intelligence as a sex-positive alternative to canonical, thus bourgeois, teaching methods. This reversal during ludo-Gothic BDSM requires our manifesto tree from my thesis statement; i.e., an assortment of goals, Gothic academic theories, Gothic mode of expression (monsters, hermeneutics, phobias) and praxial effects, whose lists I will now give in the order I have chosen:

Note: I am stressing a certain priority in what comes first, but the exact order given doesn’t really matter as everything is modular and holistic. None should be neglected, and all are integral to achieving Gothic Communism. This being said, there are several smaller subfactors from the manifesto tree that aren’t listed here (though we will touch on them later in the book). For the most comprehensive and in-depth look at all of the manifesto tree ideas, refer to Volume Zero. —Perse, back in 2024

• the six Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism (the Six Rs)
• the four main Gothic theories (the Four Gs)
• monsters*
• lairs/parallel space*
• the Hermeneutic Gothic-Communist Quadfecta* (Gothic, game, queer and Marxist theory)
• phobias*
• the Six Doubles of Oppositional Praxis

*the Gothic mode of expression (its means, materials and methods of study)

Of the Six Doubles, these divide into two lists of three: the “Three Canonical Doubles” of Capitalism and bourgeois praxis versus the “Three Iconoclastic Doubles” of Gothic Communism and proletarian praxis (all shown in descending order):

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

and their various synthetic oppositional groupings

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

I’ll get to each of these in turn, starting at the top and steadily working my way to the bottom across this manifesto’s six sections. This means we won’t cover the Six Doubles until nearly the end of the manifesto; we’ll introduce the synthetic oppositional groupings during the manifesto, but explore them more during the synthesis roadmap (several essays between Manifesto and Instruction will also analyze the BDSM elements of “Gothic” per ludo-Gothic BDSM’s modular elements). Certain related factors, such as the canonical reactions to camped canon

• open aggression
• condescension
• reactionary indignation
• DARVO (“Deny Accuser Reverse Victim/Offender”)

will be unpacked more, as well. These will either be summarized or abridged quotes from the thesis volume, and I will be resupplying them piecemeal as we go.

Since the Six Doubles of Oppositional Praxis are last on our manifesto list, I’ll give a little extra information about them up front; re (from Volume Zero):

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

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

(exhibit 1a1a1c3 [re: “Pieces of the Camp Map“]: D&D “homebrew” is a way of escaping the palimpsestuous racial profiling of Tolkien’s High Fantastical gentrification enacted by Wizards of the Coast trying to enforce the racial [thus class and gender] binary—e.g., “mind flayers” always being lawful evil, or Drow always being chaotic evil/”pure evil” inside the state of exception [exhibit 41b; re: “A Lesson in Humility“] to fill the gap made by the humanized [yet still fetishized] “good” orcs [exhibit 37e2; re: “Meeting Jadis“]: the exceptional “not bad for an orc” pariah. Tolkien made orcs to be beaten and bitten by swords with fancy-sounding names illustrating the function as simultaneously dressed up and denuded [from The Hobbit]: 

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Ecchi Oni)

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

Code-switching intuition, then, becomes something to develop, like a sixth sense (source: “Pieces of the ‘Camp Map’“).

To summarize, bourgeois and proletarian praxis function in opposition, working for or against the state and its heteronormative propaganda; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm through sex positivity versus sex coercion (and nerds for one or the other during the battle for universal liberation). Proletarian praxis recultivates the Superstructure and reclaims the Base in ways that redistribute power and wealth in iconoclastic language; i.e., in horizontal arrangements that encourage degrowth in favor of stability and worker rights, while also doing away with vertical authorities outright: an anarcho-Communist challenging of the state in ways that Marxist-Leninism historically did not; re: with the Gothic mode and queer theory.

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)

The basic concept revolves around the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis during oppositional praxis, synthesized into proletarian forms by workers operating within their own daily lives; e.g., Bunny and I, over the years (above); i.e., not just as workers, but de facto social-sex educators detached from state mechanisms—indeed, in opposition to them (never forget: the state isn’t just the proverbial enemy but the great destroyer of the planet). The Gothic, then, yields class character amid a warring culture of weird nerds: weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds. The two clash regarding the sexualized abuse—and liberation of—our bodies, identities and performances under capital; i.e., produced by our labor with taboo, stigmatized language as something to endorse or reclaim, and with it, the revelation of various comical truths: nerds are both weird as fuck and like to fuck in ways that are certifiably weird; e.g., public nudism as an ace mechanism that interrogates canonical sexuality as harmful.

“Weird” means vastly different things depending on one’s class/cultural position. The praxial goal, for weird iconoclastic nerds, is to teach good play during ludo-Gothic BDSM in sex-positive art, chiefly the interrogation of power/trauma and its negotiation in theatrical, paradoxical forms. Proletarian praxis, then, revolves around camping canon, which goes something like this; re (abridged, from the thesis volume’s manifesto tree as cited in “Shining a Light on Things“):

Note: The “camp map” finale aims to camp canon through ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: per Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains, while making monsters ourselves/putting the pussy on the chainwax as outlined and discussed through the prior elements of said map mapping out my thesis argument; i.e., as something to argue through our own labor versus labor theft; e.g., AI (source tweet, Shad M. Brooks: March 28, 2025). Challenging profit’s monopolization and abuse of monsters is what Blxxd Bunny and I will—by disrobing the Medusa to whatever degree we decide (a Numinous strip tease, below)—effectively be demonstrating in the finale with our ludo-Gothic BDSM, so keep these ideas handy (and refer to all the Paratextual Documents if you feel the need to)!

—Perse, 3/29/2025

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

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

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

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

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

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

• • reverse abjection
  • the emancipatory hauntology and Communist-chronotope operating as a parallel society—i.e., a parallel space (or language) that works off the anti-totalitarian notion of “parallel societies[1]“: “A [society] not dependent on official channels of communications, or on the hierarchy of values of the establishment.”
  • the Gothic Communist’s good-faith, revolutionary cryptonymy

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

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

through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis. They endorse

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

to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to a variety of bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil; its vertical, pyramid-scheme arrangements of power and subsequent tiers and punitive exchanges thereof

• • top, middle, bottom
  • lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts
  • corporate, militarized and paramilitarized 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 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, who are taught to see the underclass as lacking basic human rights during moral panics.

In summation, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism ensures that empathy/apathy and class character (unconscious/conscious) occur in oppositional praxis as a dialectical-material exchange. For workers, the empathy accrued is established during these creative successes, whose solidarized and active, intelligent poetics (a manifestation of reclaimed labor and working-class sentiment/counterterror) cultivate the Superstructure in ways useful to proletarian praxis: helping all workers by reversing the process of abjection and its canonical historical materialism (the narrative of the crypt, or echo of ruins). This happens by camping the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the barbaric lie of the West told through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern that drive the process of abjection currently used to exploit workers, resulting in myopic exploitation and genocide under Capitalist Realism while the elite’s endlessly engineered crises enter into, and out of, decayed states of emergency and exception. Rewrite how people respond to elite propaganda and you can rewrite how people think, thus rewrite history by changing its well-trod, profitable (for the elite) and bloody (for us) historical-material track; in short you can take the state’s propaganda apart, ending Capitalist Realism as you start to develop towards a post-scarcity world (the kind that is wholly antithetical to modern nation-states and their vertical arrangements of power).

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

So, now that we have our various big-but-basic lists, keep ’em handy and I’ll use the rest of the manifesto to conversationally walk you through them one at a time, doing my best to connect them with explanations in between.

Before we start, though, I want to give a couple of small reminders that you should keep in mind:

• One, I want to reassure readers that this manifesto is more academically granular in its flavor and structure than Volumes Two and Three, if only so I’m clear and comprehensive in following and responding to my overall thesis argument (which is the most academically granular text in our book). After this, I swear things loosen up a bit (except for the sample essay, which chucks you into the deep end head-first).
• Two, while the word “praxis” is common but has many synonyms/adjectives (creative, oppositional, bourgeois, proletarian), I also don’t see the need to exclusively call something “praxis,” since all four volumes ultimately concern praxis and something being praxis is arguably why I’m mentioning it to begin with.
• Three, despite covering sexual expression and working with sex workers, this book isn’t really structured around giving dating advice (though it does include bits of advice/personal anecdotes scattered throughout); it’s a labor guide that teaches workers not to be dicks to their friends, who they might be able to sleep with if everyone’s DTF (down to fuck). However, if you wanted to apply its concepts to your own sex life, I can assure you, these are tried and true methods. Trust me, I learned from the nymphs (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM and Cuwu)!

(source: “Be Not Afraid!” 2010)

Also, while we’ve had a chance so far (during the preface) to discuss the ways in which Gothic Communism’s anarcho-Communist design works in opposition to state mechanisms (which includes Marxist-Leninism, though it’s obviously preferable to Western models of capital, but nevertheless remains prone to its own abuses), there’s actually a social, therapeutic component to Gothic Communism that relates to our Gothic-Marxist tenets and four main Gothic theories; i.e., as things to interrogate and negotiate in our own lives.

The idea actually comes from dialectical behavioral therapy models introduced to me by a former friend (Cuwu, who we introduced in Volume Zero; more on them during the “Uphill Battle, part three” and “Healing from Rape” subchapters). DBT is designed specifically to prevent self-destructive behavior at a societal level; Gothic Communism as I’ve conceived it applies this to sex workers, preventing destructive behaviors against them from other workers who are loyal to the state. It achieves this by combining dialectical-material analysis of Gothic stories with four Gothic literary theories (the Gothic being largely concerned with sex in popular monstrous media) to achieve a Gothic hybrid of traditionally Marxist goals—all in service of furthering sex positivity through well-educated, emotionally and Gothically intelligent sex workers who can “live deliciously” as a form of proletarian praxis from moment to moment. No Promethean junk food for us! Only the best, but we must learn to make things taste delicious again while subsisting on canonical, plastic garbage that we dialectically-materially scrutinize. Dialectical-material analysis, then, is something to embody in our own lives, specifically through our consumption habits, labor and poetics as extensions of our bodies, sexualities and gender expression having been reclaimed by us.

Reclamation operates through our manifesto coordinates. Starting at the top (as listed here), we begin with the Six Rs and Four Gs. We’ve already discussed these a great deal in the thesis volume (and will discuss them a great deal more as we continue). For now, I just want to list the tenets and theories and to briefly explain their relationship to each other and to oppositional praxis; i.e., as something for workers to enact during Gothic Communism’s camping of canonical forces. As stated during our abstract, our tenets’

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

Because they are provided in full at the start of every volume (and are explored at length in the thesis volume), I will only list the six tenets:

• Re-claim/-cultivate
• Re-union/-discover/-turn
• Re-empower/-negotiate
• Re-open/-educate
• Re-play
• Re-produce/-lease

I call these tenets the Six Rs, or six things to reclaim from Capitalism through the Gothic imagination. Underpinning these tenets are four central Gothic theories, the Four Gs (outlined in their entirety during the start of every volume; re: “Paratextual Documents“):

• abjection (from Julia Kristeva’s process of abjection, vis-à-vis Jerrold Hogle’s “ghost of the counterfeit”)
• chronotope/parallel Gothic space (from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Gothic chronotope”)
• hauntology (from Jacques Derrida’s “spectres of Marx” and Mark Fisher’s “canceled futures,” vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis):
• cryptonymy (from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, vis-à-vis Jerrold Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis)

Unlike the Gothic mode—which tells of legendary things (undead/demonic and anthropomorphic monsters or places) with, as or within Gothic media as things to perform, create, or imagine/reimagine, wear, inhabit, occupy or pass through (we’ll explore all of these variants in this volume)—Gothic theory explains the process behind all of this as it’s going on, has gone on, will go on.

(artist: Kaycee Bee)

Guided by these theories, then, the re-education of sex worker emotions achieves the Six Rs through instructed critical analysis of sexualized art; be it their own, someone else’s, or something to become, its sex-positive lessons are designed to teach emotional intelligence through a Gothic mode whose cultural imagination, when used in an iconoclastic sense, becomes a vulgar display of counterterrorist power in defiance of the state’s own terrorist/menticidal antics (re: Meerloo’s “waves of terror” and Robert Asprey’s “paradox of terror[2]” versus Max Weber’s monopoly of violence and Joseph Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the canonical Gothic mode).

Once materialized, iconoclastic displays can reopen worker minds that, once open, fluently drink up good information like a thirsty sponge and leave bad information out while nevertheless remaining aware of it (a bit like Drake). This results in creative, proletarian-praxial displays—and those who prepare and make them—that offset their bourgeois counterparts to engender emotional/Gothic intelligence in regards to canonical monsters as already being historical-material outcomes in this sense. Our aim as Gothic Communists is to engender proletarian antics/iconoclasm through praxial synthesis; i.e., the daily and informed, intuitive cultivation of

• sex-positive monster porn (monsters are generally dimorphically sexualized in canon, which spreads the complicated, awful lie that porn is paradoxically forbidden and available—peddled furtively to people like a bad drug whose “pushers” promise this is the only place you can get it from instead of, you know, making it yourselves)
• safe, trusting spaces
• reasonable forgiveness, preventative justice, and a pedagogy of the oppressed as delivered through a reclaimed language of the oppressor class that normally shames the proletariat’s reimagined past

The prime directive of Gothic Communism, then, is to reverse-abject the re-remembered past away from the Western tradition. Though ostensibly “superior,” the West is actually Promethean—not simply exploitative, but historically doomed to fail and repeat its Icarian mistakes to the continued detriment of workers everywhere. Eventually the owner class will die, too; it just takes longer. As they burn everyone around them like fuel, the Earth is reduced to a sprawling necropolis of ashes and bones—all to glut the bourgeoisie, who prey on our imaginations like mind-flayer vampires; i.e., by weaponizing manufactured fears of cartoon fascism, general “corruption,” xenophobia (the monstrous-feminine) and nominal Communism against workers in cryptomimetic forms. Fuck that. We can make our own subversive ghosts/spectres of Marx, our own parallel Superstructure kings and queens, hammers and sickles, cyberpunks, and Vaporwave/Laborwave corporate mood (exhibit 42d1; re: “Seeing Dead People“) that challenge and dissipate the skeleton king of Zombie Rome, the Shadow of Pygmalion, and the boogeyman tyrant of nominal Communism (all of them being endlessly evoked by the state to pacify us).

(artist: Thomas Cole)

Fear not the Fall of Rome; look forward to its ideological transformation. Canonical Rome absolutely sucks ass/is not to be trusted. For one, Rome is, by modern standards, hauntologized (utterly fake; re: the ghost of the counterfeit). The original lasted for centuries in various forms, but was effectively a city-state; nation-states, by comparison, emerged during the Renaissance formation of national identities, followed by the Enlightenment’s settler colonialism appealing to the pre-fascist (Neo-Gothic) hauntology of “Rome” as unified post-fascism—one nation, one army under “God,” or some other vertical bourgeois authority (secular or religious) that endures after the “defeat of the Nazi” (the details of their death have been greatly exaggerated; Nazis were copying American fascism, which is alive and well). Nation-states normalize Imperialism, thus genocide, rape, war and worker exploitation through canonical Gothic praxis. They compel sexual reproduction through heteronormative, amatonormative, Afronormative, and queernormative lenses, etc—are built on a settler-colonial binary that yields an imperial, dimorphic flavor in everyday language: good vs evil, black vs white, us vs them, “the creation of sexual difference” by Luce Irigaray, and so on.

For our purposes, this binary is canonically remediated within the Gothic mode to communicate Western glory as something to synthesize through pro-state propaganda as coercion personified: the fetishization of war, deception, rape and death linked to the hauntology of the state apparatus as a lionized conveyor of traditional Western virtues. Within the Western hegemon, all of these virtues are unironic and coercive; like gargoyles[3] perched on church spires, their monstrous cultural affect is seen and felt everywhere—in pastiche but also the real world as informed by said pastiche and vice versa (a war happens and someone makes a novel, movie or videogame to capitalize off it in a series of palimpsests; i.e., Tolkien or Cameron’s refrain; e.g., Starship Troopers, Aliens, Metroid or Doom). As such, they yield a “trident” of bourgeois trifectas

• manufacture
• subterfuge/deception
• coercion

with a neoliberal “handle”: the profit motive; i.e., infinite growth, efficient profit (meaning value through exploitation, regardless if it is ethical or materially stable) and worker/owner division as disseminated through the three tines.

(artist: Rae of Sunshine)

Note: These trifectas (and the monopolies and qualities attached to them—of violence, terror and morphological expression/monsters, and Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative) are tremendously important/foundational to my thesis work before/after Volume Zero; i.e., they are the very tools the state uses to police, thus antagonize, nature as monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of the alien; re: through all the usual revenge arguments state proponents make to move money through nature as cheaply as possible (raping the world to sustain itself at nature and workers’ expense): nature—female and white-skinned or not—is a whore to rape, which we must subvert “on the Aegis”; i.e., as a backdoor into Hell as something to remake on Earth; e.g., Rae of Sunshine, above, having the whore’s revenge against profit within and upon their cake and pie. I would go on to solidify and crystalize these arguments when finalizing the manifesto in late 2023, and they became so influential afterwards that I would readily quote-and-promote wide sections of “The Nation-State” and “Revolutionary Cryptonymy” in my later books, but also paratexts promoting said books. I used the latter to provide the most succinct and distilled summarizing of what these tools are; i.e., to people unfamiliar with my work; re: “The State: Its Key Tools; re: the Monopolies, Trifectas and Qualities of Capital,” which is a paratextual document per volume PDF but also a separate subsection in my Paratextual (Gothic) Documents webpage that readers can access independently, online. —Perse, 4/3/2025

Understanding these mechanisms is fundamental to navigating state abuse through our own praxial synthesis camping the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM; said BDSM aside (and the camp process for which it and its instruction are synonymous with), we’ll introduce the mechanisms (and their gargoyles) next.

(artist: Jacques-Louis David)

The Nation-State: Remediating Modern-day “Rome,” Gargoyles, and the Bourgeois Trifectas; also, Critiquing Amazons as Liminal Expression (feat. Autumn Ivy)

“I have seen much of the rest of the world; it is cruel, brutal and dark! Rome is the light!”

“And yet you have never been there! You have not seen what it has become!”

—Maximus Decimus Meridius and Marcus Aurelius, Gladiator (2000)

Rome and its many ghosts are built on conquest—on war, death, rape, and lies, but also profit as fetishized expressions of authenticated power in medieval language (aesthetics) and devices (function): the forged performance of sovereignty through gargoyle-esque installations. We’ll unpack gargoyles for a bit, then introduce and explore the trifectas themselves for the remainder of the chapter. This chapter also discusses how subterfuge encourages tokenized coercion under manufactured conditions during liminal expression inside weird-nerd culture; i.e., Amazons, and the praxial synthesis of that particular monster type as “gargoyle-esque” when personified by weird nerds. The example we’ll explore occurred between me and called Autumn Ivy, a non-binary sex worker who abused me during our own labor exchanges: as weird nerds working in praxial opposition, them a whore policing me—another whore—using the same language of the underworld (which Gothic poetics essentially are). We camp it, Autumn does not, but aesthetic is the same (the key difference being dialectical-material context and scrutiny parsing duality during liminal expression—with Amazons being classic “two-world” entities, with one foot in heaven and Hell).

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Note: The following piece with Autumn is one which I would cite repeatedly in Volume Two; e.g., the Poetry Module’s “Death by Snu-Snu!” I likewise consider my work with Autumn tremendously formative even though they treated me poorly. —Perse 4/2/2025

Before we proceed into canonical “Rome” and its genocidal remediation through these gargoyles, be forewarned (from my thesis statement):

Capitalism is a hyperobject, a structure so big that you can’t directly observe it, and whose descriptions through ultimately simplistic metaphors are abstracting at best (for more information on hyperobjects, consider Timothy Morton’s 2013 book on the subject). You can only talk about Capitalism in pieces, from a particular point of view about something you yourself disinterred and reassembled over space and time. Needless to say, the point of Gothic-Communist abstraction isn’t abject confusion, nor is it to pull something out of thin air. Rather, it’s meant to achieve altered perspective for enhanced appreciation of truths concealed by capital; e.g., abstract art that isn’t tied to having an obvious point, purpose, or monetary value/function under Capitalism.

Unlike iconoclasm and ludo-Gothic BDSM, canon is financially incentivized to naturalize itself through Capitalist Realism and bad demon BDSM; i.e., to “vanish” by virtue of workers’ “ordinary” perspectives unable to imagine anything else: what they are meant to see (and endorse) by those in power showing it to them through the usual means of production and heteronormative/settler-colonial propaganda enforcing the profit motive through canonical fear and dogma; re: Amazons as the oldest tokenized traitors of the West and its labor struggles.

To this, canonical gargoyles are cops, thereby serving as installations of terror to instruct the public with and reflect it endlessly back at them; re: Autumn, who often presents themselves, a non-binary person, as a monster mom/Amazon of sorts. In keeping with my whore’s paradox argument, they didn’t have the whore’s revenge against capital/profit, but became a whore policing whores—to pimp them for profit, essentially! Betrayal is betrayal, a whore becoming an angel/devil pimp (madame) of the worst sort: a witch cop. In short, monsters are—in a theatrical, therefore half-real (on and offstage) sense—a performative, thus instructional means of argument for or against the state; i.e., in a dualistic sense during liminal expression, which determines through function as flowing power in different directions. No matter how “oppressed” someone seems, then, to flow power up towards the state is to tokenize one’s position. A demon is a fetish and to fetishize something is to give power or take it, mid-cryptomimesis (re: the Demon Module’s “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“). A Judas is a Judas, ipso facto; i.e., functionally pacifying its audience through controlled-opposition bread and circus (re: the white savior and white Indian problem; re: Autumn in “Death by Snu-Snu” and Samus Aran in “Search of the Secret Spell“).

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

We’ll get to Autumn. For now, let’s consider the poetic devices at work. Regardless of their physical form, such outlets routinely celebrate and codify coercive arrangements of power vis-à-vis sexuality, gender identity and performance; i.e., the clichés and fetishes of the state machine operating as normalized, thus invisible regardless of the open decay exacted upon people, places and the environment (e.g., cyberpunks). Challenging these bourgeois illusions and their legitimized violence and terror is less about saying random “magic words” (and hoping for the best) and more about combining or crafting the correct word(s) to achieve the desired counterterror effect through oft-abstracting means. Our emphasis will be on Gothic poetics, of course, but it can be likewise be attained through abstract art in general, of which cartoons generally are—e.g., like Bill Watterson deliberately does in exhibit 6b4a, below (a far less commercially-minded but more thought-provoking man than Jim Davis, let’s be frank; though, as I point out in my own writeup, Garfield is definitely Gothic):

(exhibit 6b4a: Artist, left: Bill Watterson’s 1985 Calvin and Hobbes; right: Jim Davis and his immortal, inoffensive cat. I read both as a little girl and loved each for different reasons. The joke of “07/27/1978” [lasagnacat, 2017] lies in how Garfield is blank parody; it’s normally empty of critical thought and requires someone else to do the work, but even then, the results are generally a farce. Intentional or not, both authors—when their works are dialectically-materially examined—offer something about our material world that we, as Gothic Communists, can learn from and pass along to the next generation. Farce isn’t useless towards Gothic Communism, provided it assists in its development.)

You’re also aiming at a moving target when critiquing capital; like a gargoyle, Capitalism seems stationary but is actually alive and evolving on many different registers—a hopelessly complex assemblage of material and natural objects, whose dialogs convey competing schools of thought in statuesque “silence.” Further joined by living agents informed by the gargoyle’s fear and dogma, this includes the bourgeoisie and proletariat, as well as the many allies and traitors to class and culture warfare enacted through a working class joined with/pitted against neoliberals, fascists and gradients of these things. All of them interact back and forth in real time over space and time more broadly—inside a cryptomimetic marketplace of recycled ideas that communicate furtive morphological prescriptions that can be challenged, but also engaged with through fiscal exchanges channeled through gargoyles as installations of terror/counterterror that become instructional fixtures in the public imagination once installed; i.e., as mouthpieces and selling points to heavily implied, but nevertheless vivid arguments regarding hidden trauma, power and knowledge vis-à-vis workers as colluding with the state or warring back and forth with it to stymie profit, hence exploitation:

(exhibit 6b4b: Artist, top-mid-left: Otto Marr; top-right: ikerellatab; center-right: Deuza-art; bottom-mid-right: Funboy; far-mid right: Heartz MD; everything else: Lera PI.

Stemming from medieval thought, gargoyles are classically a type of “golem” that constitutes bodily values through a symbolic order as overseen and protected by them; i.e., as things to prescribe and sell, but also challenge through liminal expressions attached to Numinous architectural space: threatening immodest morphological freedom as a privileged ability to enjoy forbidden things, express trauma, or survive/enact state-mandated abuse through actionable offenses; e.g., sodomy represented through the clay as something to dress up and treat as “flesh” depicted by non-flesh and vice versa: stone, clay or metal, etc. To this, gargoyles represent socio-material standards of acceptable trespass within fetishized models of sin and indulgence, which can be subverted through an iconoclastic queering of medieval expression during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

[artist: Lera PI]

Meanwhile, the material, inanimate stuff can be shaped into whatever outfit, position, or bodily arrangement one so desires/imagines; given horns, wings, tails, claws, halos, ears, feathers, or scales, and dressed in leather or lace as part of the usual damsel/demon [or virgin/whore] dynamic; can seemingly be summoned by magic or otherwise assembled to provide “otherworldly” desires that are normally denied to workers. Through canon, workers and representations of pleasurable activities and power dynamics become alienated from each other, the latter barred from ordinary existence and intentionally hidden behind paywalls that must be invoked during oppositional praxis; i.e., if not to endorse unironic cash transactions for one’s pound of flesh, then to survive under capital’s synonymizing of pleasure with harm, while trying to subvert state language during liminal expression as oft-being pornographic, torturous and monstrous: the identity and relative struggle as commodified, and at least partially transformed through venues of commodification within countercultural channels. Imagination is normally constrained by Capitalist Realism, thus must be regained through reclaimed engines of monstrous production, psychosexual eroticism, and equally complex morphological/gender expression and tension.

[artist, top-left, bottom-left and top-right: draken4o; top-mid-left and bottom-left: Taran Fiddler; bottom-mid-left: Omuk; bottom-right: Lera PI; top-mid-right: Atom Cyber]

At the same time, gargoyles also constitute complicated [liminal] positions/threats of violence—i.e., as beings to fear, hunt and/or summon/make dealings with in regards to institutional, corporal punishment and flagellation known to dated[4] places famous for such dealings [churches as regelations and assignments of guilt and release]—when proletarian liberation is suggested; e.g., the triangulation of angelized/demonized minorities against each other when one side “rocks the boat” and becomes uncontrollable, thus must be put down during canonical Amazonomachia: Hippolyta beheading “Medusa” for her unseemly hysteria. This systemic violence is often felt or suggested through bodies that are rendered as animalistic and prey-like/chattelized (or collared/tame; e.g., the euthanasia effect), or otherwise helpless-looking through fetishized Gothic outfits that either paint them as executioners of the state’s will, or present them as targets, thus limit their speed, status [as property for men/Man Box proponents to own and use] and/or movement. Sometimes, the bodies are dimorphically sexualized as heteronormative enforcers relayed through a Gothic aesthetic/pastiche tinged with more recent nostalgias; e.g., Gargoyles[5] [1994]. The commodified legends of today stamp the imaginary past as eternalized backwards and forwards under capital as blinding consumers to the potential of anything beyond the text currently being retreated into. The regression and its values are presented through the gargoyle as both at home in the structure, and foreign to it—a guardian and invader simultaneously fearful and fascinating amid the ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection: correct-incorrect, inside/outside, authentic/forged, etc. This can be packaged and sold to pacify workers; or it can embody worker struggles for those trying to dispel, thus escape, Capitalist Realism using Gothic poetics.)

In other words, the state relies on fetishized material reminders of terror and violence to get its point across, sanction itself, and maintain Capitalist Realism—which is then conveyed through menticidal perspectives that—through waves of terror endlessly exhausting worker minds during state monopolies—frame the material world as a displaced, Gothic commentary on the present: as informed by an imaginary past (“Rome”) that leads into itself, over and over. It normalizes crisis and decay, incarcerating workers inside their own imaginations as informed by state dogma. Liminality during opposition complicates an already formidable and busy equation, and in such a garden of the forking paths, there’s no way to cover everything. Instead, I will do my best to field the constant factors whose incessant remediation fosters an ocean of plethoras: artistic creations with a Gothic flavor using Marx’s notion of dialectical materiality inside historical materialism as something to shift in a better direction. Specifically defined by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter (2010) “as economic structures and exchanges that lead to many other events” (source), I contend historical materiality involves workers’ constant relations to inanimate things between the natural and material world as “come alive” through praxial synthesis as artistic expression: the gargoyle (synonymous, for our purposes, with the egregore/simulacrum) as a dialectical-material force.

Seeing as we’re talking about Gothic doubles, the sensation “it’s like this, but different” will occur regularly throughout this book. Identify these constants as part of a larger system whose fragmented, oscillating variables indicate glacial systemic change within the whole over time—i.e., for or against the status quo as it presently exists. As mentioned during the heads-up, I’ve done my best to connect the dots in a plethora of interconnecting synonyms, but it would be foolish (and completely impossible) to try and connect them all. That’s not the point. Rather, take this manifesto—and indeed, the entire book—as a manual of completed and half-completed sex-positive thoughts. Pursue what I have pursued to your own sex-positive conclusions, authoring derelict archaeologies, oppressed pedagogies, queer camp, and Satanic poetics that transform the world. —Perse, back in 2024

For our purposes, a gargoyle is a statue that sees and is seen—a watcher/sentinel made to symbolize a particular value not just through fear and dogma, but witnessing propaganda as a living document; i.e., according to workers’ cultural understanding of the imaginary past as something to view looking back at them: the Wisdom of the Ancients given form out of the past as literally set in stone (regardless of that stone’s actual age; age is perceived and performed just like power is). State propaganda is historically violent and continues to be, but the process of fashioning such things is not limited to their poetics; like the chain, whip, slur or fetish outfit, we can reclaim the torturous golems, vampires, and Amazons, etc, for ourselves. We’ll cover these pesky gargoyles’ synthetic role during the synthesis roadmap (and its complicated poetic history in Volume Two). For now, we merely want to address how canonical media is gargoyle-esque through the bourgeois trifectas and profit motive. In short, how do nation-states and corporations use gargoyles to abuse workers with—their bad instruction, coercive likeness and myopic vigilance serving the profit motive; i.e., there are good knights and bad knights (cops) who serve the state, and other monsters that—whether they want to or not—also serve the state: as things to scapegoat, kettle and sacrifice, justifying state arrangements of power and language.

(artist: Waifu Tactical)

To do this, we first need to recognize how the state uses linguo-material implements (with language being a natural feature of humans that distinguishes them socially from other species through the material world) that are inherently deceptive. While this strongly indicates cryptonymy as a feature of concealment regarding state trauma, that feature of language is not exclusive to state operations. So we’ll focus more on cryptonymy in a bit.

In a more immediate sense of coercion, consider how state language sublimates violence through canonical praxis, leading to a fatal cycle of historical materialism; i.e., one tied to a Promethean oscillation between neoliberalism (a return to market freedom through state power, personal responsibility rhetoric and austerity politics as a means of coerced reformation) and fascism (a fracturing of the state bureaucracy—but not its elimination—during Capitalism-in-crisis/decay through brutal strangleholds on information, power, and human rights) working hand-in-hand. These twin fractals are not democracy manifest (to once again borrow Jack Karlson’s famous phrase); they’re Capitalism as an inherently unstable structure built around vertical power, whose construction leads to global instabilities within itself and among its splintered bodies. This regenerates an imperial cycle where power remains at the top, trapped inside the Imperial Core while workers are exhausted, exploited and exterminated at slower or faster speeds depending on where/what they are; i.e., on which side of the fence, and how the state assigns violence to them as a role: giver or receiver.

The operation of Capitalism through the state-corporate apparatus, then, requires varying degrees of bourgeois manufacture, subterfuge and coercion; i.e., commodified extensions of our aforementioned trifectas: canonical “junk food” that children acquire (from Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories of the LAD—the language acquisition device—and universal grammar) and infantilized adults must unlearn—by consuming new things, but also critiquing what they consume through consumption as a means of retailoring itself. Gargoyles, then, constitute personified extensions of a given structure, of which canon is adopted by people who watch; in turn, they view statuesque performers watching back, tied theatrically to a belief system that bounces between both. Each fearsomely feels unalive during state crisis and decay yet somehow can move and instruct through that paradox; i.e., as something to see and adopt as part of a seasonal operation: sex and violence under regular conditions of state control, held in place by blind pastiche and praxial inertia.

(artist: Waifu Tactical)

Except, anyone—not just the state—can make a god (or god-like statue) and instruct with it. For our purposes, it’s better to get ’em while they’re young. Children see and adopt what is notable in their surroundings, then remember and reenact these sensations when approaching adulthood. Regardless of their age, workers make art in response to art (mimesis). Given the proper push, they shape and maintain the linguo-material order as something to change into something else; i.e., a post-scarcity world, versus keeping it the same in terms of its current, albeit ever-widening disparities. Regardless of its exact measurements, a gulf is still a gulf. To that, our stated aim as Gothic Communists is to iconoclastically rewire the Superstructure’s bourgeois coding with Gothic poetics: to resynthesize what the state feeds workers, changing its diet (art and other forms of information) into something that isn’t harmful; re: camping the canon (from our thesis argument) using monstrous instruments made from stone (or similar materials). Stone and its symbols deliver meaning according to how they are viewed, thus understood, so that is where class and culture war must take place.

Of course, the elite own the means of production, thus can corner the market of fear and dogma as something to cultivate through imperfect monopolies on terror and violence—their supply and demand, but also people as the product (and the recipients of said product) that go on, in some shape or form, to reproduce it and the material conditions that routinely bring it (and profit) about: the good (centrists), the bad (fascists) and the ugly (states of exception) within the orderly operation that is neoliberal Capitalism (which recuperates genocide). Their control isn’t total, but is enough to bring seminal tragedies about, which themselves become immortalized by new generations singing about older abuses they never lived to see but still feel the effects of: generational trauma.

To sublimate Imperialism as Capitalism’s highest order of operation, the elite (vis-à-vis Raj Patel and Jason Moore) have made Capitalism as cheap as humanly possible—have made “Rome’s” remediation/pastiche cheap. In bourgeois terms, if something is cheap or even “free,” we’re the product/propaganda. However, this coding calls for a particular kind of propaganda: heteronormative canon—a “junk food” made by state-corporate bodies, but also tied to a “trident” of trifectas driven by the profit motive (the handle): linguo-material strategies used by the bourgeoisie; i.e., the men behind the curtain standing “behind” us, less pulling our strings like a banal wendigo and more distracting us with fearsome gargoyles arranged in all manner of didactic terror scenarios (think Ferdinand from The Duchess of Malfi, commissioning “dead” wax sculptures of his sister’s family to frighten her with). Their canon becomes what we predominantly experience all around us; i.e., our consumption, hence education. We consume, thus embody what we see, eat, fuck and fear, etc, through an elaborate orchestration of manufacture, subterfuge and coercion that leads to Capitalist Realism. Given time, we turn to stone, playing the part in highly repetitive (thus predictable) ways.

The first bourgeois trifecta is the manufacture trifecta:

• Manufactured scarcity. Not enough resources, space, sex, etc; cultivates a fake sense of supply/demand, but also fear of missing out (FOMO) through exploitative business maneuvers that, in turn, engender fragile, deregulated markets; e.g., games—micro transactions, live-service models, phone games; manufactured obsolescence (Hakim’s “Planning Failure,” 2023), hidden fees, privatization—i.e., pay more for less quality and/or quantity and so on.
• Manufactured consent. From Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent (1988); cultivates a compliant consumer base, but also workforce confusion, obedience and ignorance. Chomsky’s theory is that advertisers are beholden to their shareholders, aiming consumers towards a position of mass tolerance—tacitly accepting “negative freedom” as exclusively enjoyed by the elite exploiting them: “Boundaries for me, not for thee.” In Marxist terms, this amounts to the privatization of the media (and its associate labor) as part of the means of production. They shape and maintain each other.
• Manufactured conflict/competition. Endless war and violence—e.g., the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the Jewish Question, assorted moral panics, etc; cultivates apathy and cruelty through canonical wish fulfillment: “the satisfying of unconscious desires in dreams or fantasies” with a bourgeois flavor. To this, nation pastiche and other blind forms encourage us-versus-them worker division, class sabotage and false consciousness/mobile class dormancy (“somnambulism”), not collective labor action against the state by using counterterrorist media to rehumanize the state of exception.

Through the manufacture trifecta, neoliberals appropriate peril using economically  “correct” forms, socializing blame and privatizing profit, accolades, and education as things to normalize the way that neoliberals decide; it’s about control—specifically thought control—through the Base as something to leverage against workers through bourgeois propaganda: “War and rape are common, essential parts of our world; post-scarcity (and sex-positive monsters, BDSM, kink, etc) is a myth!” Fascists de-sublimate peril in incorrect forms, going “mask-off” yet still running interference for the state; i.e., in defense of the status quo until their true radical nature becomes normalized: the black knight.

Eternal crisis and cyclical decay are built into Capitalism and the nation-state model; the state is inherently unstable and leads to war and rape on a wide scale, but also politically correct/incorrect language selecting state victims for the usual sacrifices that profit demands: the grim harvest. These are dressed up through a particular kind of cryptonym: the euphemism. For the state, political language becomes synonymous with whitewashing or otherwise downplaying the usual operations of the state with inoffensive, sleep-inducing phrases; e.g., “extreme prejudice” and “military incidents” (false flag operations) as directed at the state’s usual victims. The state, but also pro-state defenders and class traitors, reliably use these and other linguistic manipulation tactics (e.g., obscurantism) to routinely make war and profit from it; i.e., by raping or otherwise exploiting workers like chattel.

(artist: Seb McKinnon)

As a site of tremendous cryptonymy (trauma and linguistic concealment), the Gothic castle symbolizes the function of the state doing what the state always does: lie, conceal and destroy. A swirling accretion disk of husk-like chaff orbits ominously around an awesome, concentric illusion: an illusion of an illusion, a fakery of a fakery whereupon the closer to the center one gets, the more entropic the perspective. Like a spaghetti noodle, one is stretched out (and ripped apart) by how perfidious and unstable every step is; the floor becomes eggshells, a flotilla of chronotopic trash surrounded by danger and oblivion, gravity and shadows, but also gargoyles whose exact function remains to be seen.

This presence of tremendous obscurity inside the infernal concentric pattern/narrative of the crypt’s mise-en-abyme brings us to our second bourgeois trifecta: the subterfuge/deception trifecta

• Displacement. Conceal or dislocate the problem.
• Disassociation. Hide/detach from the problem.
• Dissemination. Spread these bourgeois practices through heteronormative canon.

through which neoliberals maintain the status quo by concealing war as a covert enterprise that has expanded exponentially since Vietnam into the 21st century’s own wars and lateral media (copaganda). Whereas that war failed by virtue of showing American citizens too much, war has increasingly become a fog through which those in power control the narrative by outright killing journalists, but also “failing” to report where their mercenaries operate (GDF’s “How the US Military Censors Your News,” 2023). In other words, neoliberal illusions involve outright skullduggery and lies to keep their hegemony intact. Much like the lords of old, they rule from the shadows, but have more material power and control than those former monarchs could dream of; i.e., a mythologized existence hinted at by the displace-and-dissociate stratagem of neoliberal copaganda; e.g., Lethal Weapon‘s 1987 “Shadow Company” reflecting on the very-real Phoenix Program and so-called “advisory” role of the CIA: “We killed everybody.”

By reflecting on the recent military abuses of the state during Vietnam, Lethal Weapon presents police corruption as a late-’80s cartoon. Mercenaries of privatized war have conveniently distanced themselves from both the CIA (which the film makes little effort to mention) but also the American system’s “true function”; i.e., something bad happened once, but only because weaker men “gave into” the alleged temptations of war abroad: the drug trade. In doing so, these cutthroats have defiled the very thing that the good cops at home normally represent: a perfect society that has—through the routine failing of greedy, unscrupulous men—fallen from grace. Apparently they’re to blame for the American atrocities at home and abroad, not the state or its arm.

Like pieces on a board, these gargoyles dance to tell a particular story useful to state aims; i.e., as hollow suits of armor inside a castle that chills the viewer in place, but also whose forged sovereignty is in decline. As such, the structure merely becomes a house to clean, to purge of dark forces using benevolent enforcers that resemble the fallen (think Milton’s warring angels and demons, minus its rebellious class character but nevertheless utilizing the same powerful principles of animation). But this, too, is a lie, a ghost of the counterfeit whose inheritance anxieties about the Imperial Core can be explained away through outrageous theatre forging the solution; i.e., vigilante state violence with—in this case—the badge as a false flag operation levied against invented scapegoats: ghosts of the imperial past whose actions are, themselves, exorcised through the run of the mill.

In true Gothic fashion, the entire operation adopts an explained-supernatural guise, which it then uses to explain away the current militarizing of the police force at home. Riggs and Murtaugh “need” those guns to shield us from the bad cops (who all look like Wall Street yuppies, apparently). This is police state apologia 101, and the very school of Gothic moderacy used to justify a continuation of normal state operations: apologizing for its own actions through Radcliffean spectres—a timeless Eurotrash banditti conjured into the 20th century by Richard Donner (equally fearsome is Mel Gibson, whose own violence supersedes theirs. Simply put, he’s a killing machine).

When the state’s manufacturing of theatrical deceptions cannot be concealed in relation to imperial abuse (wherever it occurs), the name of the game is sublimation through state terror as normalized; genocide, rape and war essentialize through fascists as theatrical heels, appropriating war/nation pastiche as useful to the elite: “Get strong and fight the enemy” like a soldier would do, training all their life for that one moment to “actually overcome adversity” (not to be confused with fairness, which atheists like Rationality Rules use when attacking trans athletes; Xevaris, 2019).

The statuesque advertisement, then, is a ghostly call to service, not a haunting of generational trauma; i.e., crafted by the elite for workers to fear and obey without question, but also adore and worship: to be the best in a quixotic sense, imitating recreations of the imaginary past as “strong” and obedient, but also a blinder to the kinds of traumatic visions intimated by spectres of Marx. Through this manicured self-delusion, a defender of the homeland (and its liege) participates in ranked contests of martial, sports-like strength modeled after conspicuously chiseled gargoyles that, at times, lack the overtly metallic armor of the medieval knight, but whose stone-like bodies denote a physical regression whose “body armor” serves as more literal and antiquated sort; e.g., the Z Fighters from DBZ (or its frankly jaw-dropping[6] fan animations) or He-Man, Lion-O, and their respective friends’ struggles within the combat arena as extended to the entirety of the globe: “all the world’s a stage.”

Here, Shakespeare’s passage describes a battleground to lose oneself—in combat but also worship of godly actors fulfilling a special bourgeois role when set loose: the celebration of dated organizations of power in neoliberal hauntologies[7]; e.g., the Japanese cultural fascination with, and imitation of, Western kayfabe and hegemony post-WW2 as something that survives into recycled variations of itself:

The above image is tellingly summarized by the maker’s own synopsis:

Given diplomatic orders by the Grand Council, Vegeta, now king of the Saiyans, sets out on an interstellar assassination mission. TARGET LOCATION: PLANET EARTH / OBJECTIVE NO.1: ERADICATION / OBJECTIVE NO.2: PACKAGE RETRIEVAL / For his life, all his training has led to this. Now, Son Goku will learn the true meaning of the title, “LEGEND” (source).

In short, Vegeta’s status as a conspicuous (and braggadocious) monarch falls into place under a globalized world order that places him beneath the elite; he’s their lapdog and put to heel, obeys their commands through a common method of instruction: “sic’ em!”

Keeping with the kayfabe arrangement, he feels threatened by Goku and wants to be “top dog” while both men work together to defang Broly: a demonic hound on par with Cú Chulainn’s fearsome ríastrad; re (cited in “Overcoming Praxial Inertia“):

When distorted, Cú Chulainn undergoes a spectacular bodily metamorphosis [the ríastrad] and begins to attack both friend and foe because he loses the ability to distinguish between them. At these times, he consequently poses a threat “to order on both an individual and a social level” (Lowe, Kicking 199) and shifts from stabilizing his social network (by defending his province and his people) to threatening it from within[8] (source: Sarah Enri’s “‘Inside Out… and Upside Down’: Cú Chulainn and His Ríastrad,” 2013).

The thing that bears repeating is that all the Saiyans are monstrous dog soldiers, albeit to varying degrees that serve state aims. The state cannot exist without the good cop, bad cop, and scapegoat as dog-like (the exact nature of Broly varies, but he is effectively the invader mechanism whose corrupt/monstrous-feminine elements demand a euthanizing call to violence against him). In turn, their dogfight becomes something to watch and imitate as left-behind: monsters from “another planet” that curiously evoke a human imaginary past on a local, earthly stage.

It bears repeating that said past is sewn with conflict and confusion—not because it is old, but because its ownership is challenged. Its monsters—and the various instructions they supply as gargoyles—are generally at war with themselves, mid-lesson; i.e., psychopraxis, psychosexuality, psychomachia, and Amazonomachia through doubles and paradox amid liminal expression as things to view in ways that remain ambiguous. As my thesis argued, “Doubles invite comparison to encourage unique, troubling perspectives that “shake things up” and break through bourgeois illusions.” Gargoyles, like all monsters, double people and their conflicted sense of humanity but also supply them with various inhuman qualities that likewise exist within dialectical-material opposition. During oppositional praxis, then, they effectively “go to war.” Praxial stances also double through gargoyles, and grow increasingly ambivalent during the maelstrom. It’s a war of optics, but also of perception linked to one’s state of mind as thrown worryingly into question near positions/statements of power and trauma. Said statements seem both concrete and oddly fluid.

Even so, oppositional praxis allows for a proletarian function to gargoyles, which we’ll get to; and the general aesthetic can obviously vary a great deal between variants. However, the canonical function (for the elite and their proponents) remains constant: to pacify and police workers under Capitalist Realism—to stare and tremble at what are, for all intents and purposes, killers for the state; i.e., knights and gladiators, but also cops penned up in castles whose owners trot them out for the viewing public to cower before or worse, emulate (re: ACAB—canonical cops and castles). Subversions of these stony replicas are liminal, thus complicated (we’ll explore this more as we increasingly delve into trauma as something to write about and illustrate). Through the profit motive, however, these simulacra amount to corporatized war clones, offering up good war and sacrifice as valorized through the veneer of freedom, equality and justice; i.e., the façade of American Liberalism and its endless platitudes/canonical praxis as formulaic to an automated degree.

(artist: Deuza-art)

The degree of automation varies. For example, the AI boom and its recent proliferation of so-called “art” (theft through search-engine algorithms) highlights the same aesthetic’s blind approach enacted through its usual benefactors: white, cis-het men. Automation abuse makes bourgeois-minded workers stupid, but also expendable in regards to labor as something to cheaply replicate and consume; or as Sean Collins tweets on January 30th, 2023:

The heart of AI is contempt—contempt for artists, for writers, for sex workers. The user wants to get what they get out of art/writing/porn but they can’t stand feeling like they owe anyone anything for their enjoyment, so the artist/writer/sex worker has got to go (source).

The horror of the hyperreal is that there are no humans behind the digitized simulacrum; they’re simply gone. The lived reality is far more bleak, with middle-class consumers being entirely divorced from creative labor as a critical-thinking skill while actively advocating for enslavement, neglect and genocide; i.e., behind the image as a desert of the real, where real humans are still alive but won’t be for much longer.

Automation can be tailored towards Gothic Communism and its development, but the means of production must still be geared towards horizontal arrangements of power and wealth that don’t automatically reduce everything to soulless privatization. Divorced from nature, empathy and workers-as-people, the paradox of automated art is that it quickly becomes worthless—even to capitalists—if viewed in bulk; there needs to be a human worker to manipulate and appeal to by other humans in ways that don’t flood the market with inhuman, hopelessly cheap fakeries. The unchecked flood gives Capitalism away (what the kids call “self-reporting”). Work, in artistic terms, is human labor, which gives art its value for Communists to defend and for capitalists to exploit (the labor theory of value versus the monetary theory of value). “Tech bros,” however, defend Capitalism by seeing value in exploitation (efficient profit), not labor as valuable through its human relationship to the natural-material world. According to Arfu, they see themselves as “free” and other workers as “paintpigs” or “drawslaves,” having bought into the illusion that—by turning their thinking over to machines—tech bros/weird canonical nerds have successfully liberated themselves from the working class (the illusion of the middle class). Quite the opposite; those who tech bros worship as gods (the bourgeoisie, billionaires) have trained them to police other workers around them, but especially the rebellious ones.

All at once, pacification becomes active subjugation via the triangulation of assimilated workers against labor at large; i.e., local colonization performed by people who look like you do, and misuse the awesome class-conscious potential of Gothic counterculture poetics for continued state hegemony as merely a commodity to package and sell. Sex and lethal force overlap with state politics, until the decay is not only impossible to ignore; it’s an essential part of the image and paradox: unironic death and murder become sexy unto themselves—gargoyles that kill for the state’s endless (and bloody) resurrection.

(artist: Darek Zabrocki)

Whereas the elite and their moderate supporters, liberals/neoliberals, only care about profit and capitalistic hegemony (a public mindset that decays into nightmares of itself; e.g., AI Lost Media’s “Pizza Nuggets Ad 1993,” 2023), fascists do their part by playing a dirtier version of the same game. Through open xenophobia, slashed throats, and medieval, rapacious calls for “pure,” open violence, they preemptively administer draconian countermeasures relayed through state propaganda.

Both they and neoliberals play “bad games” for the bourgeoisie; so do TERFs/girl bosses, queer bosses and other token offshoots whose Man Box/”prison sex” forms of bad play really don’t take geniuses to function—just fear, lies and cruelty to varying degrees that are taught through canonical propaganda and consumption. All further bad faith, bad acting and bad play as a criminogenic cycle stuck on loop. To survive, revolutionary workers must change the system that repeats the cycle; to change the system, they must become game and clever in ways that scare the bourgeoisie and their proponents; i.e., by subversively altering bourgeois propaganda, thus the education, iconography and bad play[9] that stem from its various entry points; e.g., “thirst traps” (exhibit 7a-8c, next page, but also the furry “mom bod,” exhibit 65—from Volume Three): subjugated Hippolyta as a bad-bitch girl boss (the virgin and the whore, but also the demon) as a reliable selling point and educational fulcrum within these larger dialogs—the monstrous-feminine.

For the next few pages, I want to exhibit the monstrous-feminine, then use it to explore how subterfuge segues into coercion; i.e., as something to enforce through tokenized agents turning themselves to stone. Adopting hard, rigid functions in defense of capital, these performers often posture as “protectors” of the gargoyle sort: medievalized cops roped into roles that are poisonous to them, insofar as they act like class traitors/rabid dogs who will eventually be closeted, put down, and/or married/carted off. “I am woman, hear me roar!” isn’t good praxis by itself, because praxis isn’t defined by rebellious posturing and “think-positive” attitudes, alone; it’s defined by liberation through an altering of socio-material conditions inside nerd culture while at war with itself: weird canonical nerds and their iconoclastic counterparts.

One of the most famous monstrous-feminine (from the Western perspective) is the Amazon; i.e., a “thirst-trap” girl boss canonically sold for sex, but also touted as warrior muscle that executes the state’s will while acting the rebel. All the while, subjugated Amazons simultaneously caution against mommy doms who fail to meet these muscular-servile standards, but nevertheless cow men into equally submissive positions. Said positions are temporary and staged—meant only to incur status-quo wrath and punishment against the monstrous-feminine; i.e., as something that, regardless of its presentation, is eventually exposed as hypocritical or untame, then dealt with accordingly by heteronormative forces:

Note: This brings us to Autumn Ivy. First, a disclaimer about my criticisms of Autumn; i.e., from working with them in the past; re (from “Death by Snu-Snu”):

A note about Autumn Ivy: They are a public figure who markets an image of themselves as “Amazonian,” which I am critiquing as having run-ins/worked with them in the past; as such, they’re a big enby and should be able to handle whatever criticism I throw at them, especially since their abuse of me in the past is true—is something I stand by and can back up. That being said… this isn’t me condoning violence or calls for violence against them. Unless they accelerate their trans misogyny (or any other fascist tendencies) in public—i.e., use their platform to spread active hate, Nazi-style—kindly leave them alone to figure things out on their own (source).

This is more a precaution from me, in case Autumn feels vindictive. Then again, Volume One has been up since Valentine’s 2024 and the Poetry Module (which “Death by Snu-Snu” is from) since May 1st, 2024. Still, I want to be crystal clear about how I feel; i.e., that Autumn is a scummy person, practice-wise, but this is by no means a greenlight to go and harass them; re: short of them being an active TERF and SWERF on their platform who openly furthers genocidal rhetoric, don’t antagonize them. So while Autumn exhibits SWERF-y vibes, they also are selective about these vibes and still do sex work of a particular kind, themselves; i.e., they’re no longer on OnlyFans (though many of their ads are still up, below)

but do have a personalized Fleshlight online, for example:

So even without the sex toys branded after them, Autumn is still a sex worker because they make money through modeling (a kind of sex work), but especially “spicy Amazon thirst traps” (above). Regarding this push into non-nude content, they’re still an underwear model who—at least until very recently—took money to take their clothes off (and even if they kept them on, underwear models are still sex workers. Also, their “voice acting” credit historically includes doing JOI material; e.g., the “Strange Bedfellows” erotica I wrote for them to record, on 1/28/2021). As we’ll see, Autumn absolutely hates being called a sex worker, yet very much remains concerned with what others think they do;

(source)

i.e., as “not” being sex work, effectively pinkwashing the trade (re: Autumn is non-binary) while punching down at GNC hardcore sex workers (re: me).

Not all that glitters is gold, then, and Autumn very much wants to have their cake and eat it, too; i.e., to look like a superhero warrior and enjoy the sex appeal of a prostitute (which superheroes classically do), while still punching down at sex workers, SWERF-style (re: me). In short, they’re a sell-out and a cop, in that respect (very much like She-Hulk herself is, below)

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

and their abuse of me shall be shown in the following pages through my usual “fuck with me, get made into an object lesson” approach: a victim’s testimony of their mistreatment of me. A bigotry one is a bigotry for all, and Autumn patrols Omelas for the Man.

As we proceed into my critique of Autumn, then, my thesis argument regarding them—re: as a gargoyle whore policing whores—comes from first-hand experience, and boils down to: “Autumn Ivy is a token, subjugated Amazon and acts like one, on and offstage.” To it, Amazons are muscled sex workers who tokenize and decay under capital (re: “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis“); i.e., into subjugated, cop-like forms that essentially punch down during mirror syndrome through Amazonomachia assimilation fantasies. Said fantasies have the pimp’s revenge in bad faith—i.e., until those token parties performing them are ignominiously collared by the elite/relegated to the state of exception once more through the euthanasia effect—and which we must challenge on and offstage on the same Aegis: during the dialectic of the alien through subversive Amazons having the whore’s revenge against token traitors taking state pay! Furthermore, the above keywords are being provided here, on this online version, whereas the PDF version supplies them in its own self-contained paratextual documents (re: “Rage over a Lost Penny”). That being said, these terms and others relating to them (e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain) can also be found in “Paratextual Documents.” —Perse, 4/4/2025

the euthanasia effect (rabid token Amazons)

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

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

The canonical Amazon, then, is a time traveler TERF meant to serve profit by betraying her fellow oppressed (women or not). Ripped spectacularly from the ancient pre-fascist past and expressed in “ancient” fascist forms during state crisis, Red Scare employs Amazonian fascism and Communism—during the usual kayfabe centrism and anisotropic terrorist/counterterrorist refrains pimping nature on the same stage—through a black-and-red aesthetic of power and death corrupting nature for state aims: to feed on nature by triangulating against state victims “of nature,” per Cartesian thought; i.e., to antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine, during the Capitalocene (from Walpole’s Otranto onwards—per Hans Staats’ “Mastering Nature: War Gothic and the Monstrous Anthropocene” [2016] but married, per my arguments, to Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s idea of Capitalocene).

Through these dualistic poetic devices’ assimilative function, the subjugated Amazon is a functionally “white” Indian/whore/savior cowgirl (token) cop who harvests the functionally “black” whore (criminal, alien, etc) during the abjection process (and its bad-faith revenge arguments; e.g., Orientalism). All happen while suffering the usual double standards and embarrassments such betrayals bring on (which camping through ludo-Gothic BDSM anisotropically reverses through the same aesthetic—shrinking profit while sending abjection back towards the colonizer agent/apparatus); e.g., Samus Aran (re: the Poetry Module’s “Playing with Dead Things“) but really a wide variety of such wheyfu herbo monster girls upholding Capitalist Realism: by kettling therefore blaming the whore Archaic Mother*/ghost of the counterfeit. S

Furthermore, such blaming occurs ipso facto “for its own genocide” during the Promethean Quest’s infernal concentric pattern (e.g., Ayla or Savage Land Rogue; re: “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two“); i.e., an eternal warrior “of nature as hellish” sent back into Hell come to Earth—all to do battle with the verminized, insectoid-chattel, stigma-animal, diseased-and-deathly Medusa on the same Aegis (the liminal hauntology of war): as her dark, Venus-twin half (the long-lost relative, often an evil/false sister or wicked step mother)! The Amazon is a “scab” operatically punching labor as alien hysterical (the wandering womb), but pulled from their ranks to do so inside the state of exception. From Radcliffe onwards, then, the Amazon is a warrior detective who canonically remains a classic pro-state actor fabricating scapegoats; i.e., from older pre-existing legends repurposed for profit now (the settler colony a chronotope danger disco).

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

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

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

(source)

As “A Note on Canonical Essentialism” describes it; re (from Volume Zero):

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth-like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force [military optimism] (source).

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

mirror syndrome

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

Amazonomachia (Amazon pastiche, subjugated/subversive)

(exhibit 1a1b [from Volume Zero‘s “Symposium: Aftercare”]: Top half’s artists, top-far-left: Michel Dinel; top-mid-left: Jiyu-Kaze; top-middle: Viviana Vixen; right: Edu Souza; bottom-middle: Nunchaku; bottom-mid-left: Edwin Huang; bottom-far-left: Frederico Escorsin. Bottom half’s artist: Mika Dawn 3D.

A kind of Galatea traditionally sculpted by Pygmalion and his imitators, Amazons and their complicated pastiche embody social-sexual conflict during oppositional praxis, hence come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are canonically war dogs of a binarized character. Most notably is the noble Athena versus the dark Medusa from the female legends of Antiquity [also, Queen Hippolyta]: the doubling of the hunter persona, a white and black wolf. Such war-boss, queen bitches canonically offer good behavior and bad behavior as our proverbial “teeth in the night” meant to serve as man’s best friend in centrist theatre [and whose true rebellion goes against the elite’s profit motive]…) 

Not a term I coined, but one I certainly expanded on (to speak on subjugated, reactionary, TERF-style forms and subversive variants, mid-duality). “Amazon battle” is an ancient form of classical, monstrous-feminine art whose pastiche was historically used to enforce the status quo; i.e., Theseus subjugating Hippolyta the Amazon Queen to police other women (making regressive/canonical Amazonomachia a form of monstrous-feminine copaganda). With the rise of queer discourse and identity starting in arguably the late 18th century, later canonical variations in the 20th century (e.g., Marsden’s Wonder Woman) would seek to move the goalpost incrementally—less of a concession, in neoliberal variants (every Blizzard heroine ever—exhibits 45a, 76, 72, from “Making Demons” and Volume Three), and more an attempt to recruit from dissident marginalized groups. The offer is always the same: to become badass, strong and “empowered.” In truth, these regressive/subjugated Amazons become assimilated token cops; i.e., the fetishized witch cop/war boss as a “blind Medusa” who hates her own kind by seeing herself as different than them, thus acting like a white, cis-het man towards them (the “Rambo problem”): triangulating nature against nature, pimping itself for the state. In the business of violent cartoons (disguised variants of the state’s enemies), characters like Ripley or Samus become lucrative token gladiators for the elite by fighting similar to men (active, lethal violence) for male state-corporate hegemony. To that, their symbolism colonizes revolutionary variations of the Amazon, Medusa, etc, during subversive Amazonomachia within genderqueer discourse.

(exhibit 7a: Left: Evil Lyn from He-Man: Revelations [2021] or Carmilla from Netflix’s Castlevania [2017]; middle, artist: Persephone van der Waard of Autumn Ivy as Striga [the strongest, most fascist-appearing vampire sister from Castlevania]; bottom-right: Autumn Ivy; bottom-left and bottom-far-right: Katie Brumbach and Laverie Vallee. This exhibit will unpack each in turn.

First, as explored at length in the thesis volume, the Amazon is monstrous-feminine, a type of liminal expression that is often pornographic, but also heavily conflicted and contested within market forces. Castlevania season three, for example, is basically pure queer bait, but had they actually continued with the mommy-dom setup, it’s a tremendously devilish love letter to queer acts of sodomy that speak to that “freak on a leash” in all of us: “You have only to lose your chains [unless you want to wear a dog color for sex-positive reasons.]” I loved season three’s Gothic sex dungeon as an operatic, classically sinful place to submit to guilty pleasures supplied by powerful women [even if they are framed as inherently duplicitous; i.e., the deceptive faggot [cryptonomy] that is trotted out of and back into the closet over two seasons—real original, Netflix]. As I write in my review of season three [2020]: 

So much of Camilla’s conquest is logistic in nature. This might sound dull, but every decision plays out through wonderful dialogue, abetted by the simple fact that each sister has a unique personality and position: the genius, warrior, analyst, and diplomat. Two of them are even lovers. Still, they talk as family members do, knowing full well what games the others get up to (or don’t). Their realness comes not from a checklist of outrageous traits, but how these play out realistically inside the fairytale castle.

Smack dab in the middle is Hector, the gullible forgemaster. Once bitten, twice shy, he must be convinced to make [monsters] for Camilla’s army. No easy task. This falls to Lenore, the sexy diplomat. The fun lies in her attitude. She’s not doing it because she’s told; she’s having fun, and plays her part superbly. The battles between her and Hector are generally fought with wit and words; they still hold their own against the scrappier melees had by Trevor and Sypha, or Isaac. The style of each makes it distinct, and adds to the show’s overall variety.

When they first meet, Hector mistrusts Lenore, and rightly so; by comparison, Lenore is disarmingly soft—a fact she coldly reminds him of after beating him to a pulp. Her job is to make Hector (and us) forget what she is by being herself. She lies to Hector with bits of truth, giving him what he’s always wanted. It speaks to her talents that she isn’t wrong in this respect. Hector’s second deception belies an underlying desire: to be told what to do. It’s arguably why he served Dracula to begin with. Lenore simply uses it to her advantage.

This does involve a bit of sex. When Lenore uses her body to distract Hector, though, he’s already bought into the scheme. But so has the audience—at least in the sense that they’ve been groomed for a narrative climax. Consider what’s happening elsewhere: Trevor and Sypha storm the church; Isaac rides into Barad-dur v2.0; and Alucard is molested by his new, horny friends, Taka and Tsumi. All comprise a collective build-up reaching its promised conclusion. Not all promises are kept, but herein lies a lateral pleasure, the chagrin of coitus interruptus offset by something comparably delicious to an orgasm: schadenfreude.

 

There’s definitely a strict element to the show’s mommy doms, and making Hector the “little bitch” [a small, effeminate dog on a leash] is one way to do the Amazon scenario. Aside from genderqueer BDSM apologia, though, the Amazon is essentially a freakshow circus act that has become appropriative in regressive, current-day forms; i.e., whose Pavlovian variant of “I am woman, hear me roar!” obeys state mandates through canonical, regressive Amazonomachia. Failure to comply during state decay leads to draconian punishment, including the euthanasia effect’s double standard: either the tomboy is shoved into a [cis-het] wedding gown and married off, or she is put down like a rabid dog for refusing to conform [unlike “rabid” men, who are generally prized for their violent outbursts]. Collared by the state, the “queen bitch” is a war boss who ultimately fetishizes the state’s will, including its historical-material effects: the ubiquitous celebration and female personification of statuesque war, death, lies and rape in a fascinating but ultimately “lesser” form: a lady cop, gladiator and/or reaper in tokenized spaces.

[source]

This appropriation took time, starting with a literal circus persona that fixated on the strongwoman as a dated curios tied to an imaginary past not ruled by men; e.g., late-1800s strongwoman Katie Brumbach. Similar to rockstars, pornstars and various other “stage bunnies” of the 20th/21st centuries, she had a stage name: Sandwina, but also “Lady Hercules.” People tend to forget that heroes are monsters. Hercules was a monster that Sandwina combined with the woman as a classical monster type: the monstrous-feminine by virtue of having manly strength and female attributes. Her naturally strong female body dwarfed the men around her [thus threatening the heteronormative order and literally personifying the suffragette movement]. As such, people like Sandwina were regarded in their time as oddities but also potential threats; or, as Betsy Golden Kellem writes in “The ‘Trapeze Disrobing Act'” (2022):

for a long time, unusually strong women were regarded as aberrant curiosities, described with wonder in the same breath as bearded ladies and living skeletons.” They were literally circus acts—magnetic ones that, Kellem continues, “not only destabilized the white-male basis of physical culture, it challenged popular ideas about female ability, all while showing a discomfiting amount of skin and startling muscle mass (source).

Meanwhile, the likes of Eugen Sandow [future icon of the Mr. Olympia organization] would represent an “imaginary antiquity” that suspiciously came with the statuesque, rippling muscles of a patriarchal hauntological past—a historically sexist tradition carried forward by “Pygmalions” like Conan author, Robert E. Howard, and famous Conan illustrator, Frank Frazetta. Famously Frazetta started his career in 1944, a time when readily-available synthetic steroids did not exist. Women, at this point, had been largely excluded from professional sports [for beating men]; the subsequent 20th century domination of weightlifting and bodybuilding through the weaponization of science against women [and later, against trans people by gentrifying cis women against them; re: Rationality Rules vs trans athletes] occurred specifically through the systemic and escalating abuse of steroids in these sports [Natty Life, 2023] while pointedly excluding marginalized groups from participating. These drugs became not just connected, but essential to the hypermasculine overperformance needed to argue for male superiority[10] in the heteronormative sports world, and by extension, any embodiments of patriarchal strength on- and off-stage.
Another way to look at this cultural regression towards sexual dimorphism, then, was the enforcement of a specific, idealized body image perpetrated through an abuse of technology—specifically medicine—to maintain the status quo/profit motive and Capitalist Realism through body imagery under global Capitalism as “set in stone.” Steroids were originally devised to assist the elderly and the injured, whereas puberty blockers were originally designed for cis children. Eventually the queer community coopted blockers to assist themselves, whereas the Patriarchy fought this measure by demonizing them; the same establishment also coopted hormones to keep cis-het, white men in the most lucrative positions, while also reinforcing those positions under Capitalism to benefit the elite through a homogenized, hauntological male image of strength; i.e., a return to the reimagined past through the cultivation of “beasts” whose war-dog bodies are pumped full of drugs to try and embody the canonical personification of strength to satisfy the profit motive. This double standard extends to tokenized groups; e.g., the “wheyfu” as a warlike, “queen bitch” gargoyle who is simultaneously worshipped and feared for being “not a man” and “acting like a man.”)

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

Now that we’ve revisited the monstrous-feminine, I want to illustrate such an exchange through anecdotes that communicate interpersonal and systemic trauma (a theme that will be become increasingly relevant as we push into the second half of the volume). Before we get to the third-and-final bourgeois trifecta, then, I want to give an anecdote about “thirst traps” and “girl bosses” through my own artistic dialogs; i.e., collaborating with artists playing the part. Thirst traps are canonically scapegoated—punished categorically for being “bad girls”; e.g., Carmilla and Striga (exhibit 7a). Both characters’ shows queer-bait some actually-interesting (non-heteronormative) “mommy dom” archetypes—the Gothic Amazon mom and vampire dominatrix—before putting Pandora back in her box. Netflix forces Carmilla to commit suicide (a bury-your-gays sendoff with lots of fireworks) and shames Evil Lyn for her own “insane” desire to move past the universe as founded on really-boring centrist muscle-dudes duking it out for eternity in Eternia: nation pastiche dressed up as displaced good-vs-evil fantasy narratives, personified by white, cis-het male wrestlers hogging the stage. All the same, subverting these kayfabe narratives by interrogating them within themselves obviously requires working within colonized material and factionalized workers. This process doesn’t always “work out,” resulting in predictable disputes between marginalized groups, which the elite rely on to remain in power (divide and conquer).

For example, I once drew Autumn Ivy as Striga from Castlevania (exhibit 7a, bottom-right) in order to reclaim said character’s monstrous-feminine qualities for sex-positive reasons: the strict-looking dominatrix wearing medievalized fetish gear extending to their naked body as weaponized. This is a complicated process for two reasons: one, purely from a theatrical/ideological standpoint; but also because it involves representations of two artists that aren’t automatically in harmony. Indeed, their relationship to the state (as something to support or resist through nerd culture) may cause them to fight about the Gothic as something to express; i.e., weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds.

We’ll get to that when I describe working with Autumn in just a moment. First, though, the theatrics and Gothic poetics of such a dialog are incredibly liminal. Striga is actually a pretty fascist character in the show’s canon—a black knight carving up “livestock” with her stupidly giant sword (exhibit 1a1a1d; re: “Pieces of the ‘Camp Map’“) as a member of the ruling elite, but also the delegitimate ruler of a hauntologically reimagined Eastern Europe; i.e., the classical domain of men being threatened by crazy vampire moms from an older made-up empire threatening the entire West as white, male and eternal: Nazi vampire she-wolves! All-in-all, Striga is thoroughly colonized—a fascist scapegoat made to ideologically defend Patriarchal Capitalism inside a neoliberal production: “Feminists are age-old hypocrites.” It bears repeating that token concessions with power are always made under duress to some extent; but also that iconoclastic negotiations away from these concessions require certain theatrical paradoxes: a strip tease using fetish gear and athletic, soldierly bodies as weaponized alongside their actual guns, swords, shields, and spears, etc.

(model and artist, left: Autumn Ivy and Persephone van der Waard; right: Sleep Depravity)

Iconoclastic homages to the Dark Amazon, then, aren’t blind masturbation but dialogs of unequal power exchange reversed through codified stigmas and behaviors that subvert the thirst trap’s usual dogmatic instructions; i.e., sex-positive variations that are patently designed to humanize the insect-like brood warrior as a sex-positive thirst trap instead of merely advocating for her unironic, female-coded destroyer persona. Doing so grapples with canon’s ordinary utility/function of the war-boss monster girl; i.e., continuously reducing the female variant of a “boss” character to a fearsome “cum sponge” and call to war that triangulates the same-old reactionary violence towards the usual groups inside the state of exception. These harmful (and ignominious) outcomes can be challenged, but this requires resisting the profit motive, which token agents will do not do; instead, they punch down, attacking members of their own group from “besieged,” self-deceiving pedestals given to them by older state proponents. In-fighting is taught and enforced by people who, if not initially rigid, become inflexible inside a prison-like structure; i.e., to sell out and sacrifice others in the bargain, while acting like the sole, exclusive victim that other minorities are somehow “against.” The worker assimilates, whitewashing the church while serving as an appropriated member of its phalanx of returning gargoyles when Capitalism decays.

For instance, white women/AFAB persons famously facilitate genocide as a protected class along a cis-to-queer gradient, the state granting them diminishing concessions by virtue of their faithfulness to, or breaking from, gender forms. This class betrayal’s Faustian bargain certainly includes cis TERFs, inspired by the delicate female novelists of yore penning kernel-of-truth anxieties of an incredibly bigoted, xenophobic nature that calls for outright police violence against queer people in the future; e.g., echoes of Ann Radcliffe spouted by J.K. Rowling (and others) shaping Britain into a 21st century police state: the unironic Gothic castle but also the equally unironic female knights inside triangulating against state targets. Beyond cis women, queer people can also play cop and cops make for excellent thirst-trap mommy doms. As we shall see with Autumn, intersections of generational abuse and comprise lead to tokenism, thus praxial inertia; i.e., through minority police needlessly complicating labor exchanges and worker action by bullying other workers to enrich themselves within state hegemony.

Despite these grander miscarriages enacting the Amazon as a harmful monstrous-feminine symbol, I want to stress that the idea of the female knight (white or black) can be reclaimed by subverting it away from its canonical, unironically brutalizer function (the militarized fetish). Indeed, it’s incredibly sexy to abjure Capitalism’s regressive Amazon as a police weapon of state terror and violence/power abuse while keeping “the look,” precisely because counterterrorist rebellion uses torturer aesthetics to liberate workers from the same old canonical legends of control through non-harmful sex; i.e., those that present “uppity bitches” as unruly monsters deserving of punishment, going from before William Marsden wrote Wonder Woman, into future interrogations of the sort he prompted regarding the canonical Amazon as something to negotiate, thus transform, into an increasingly sex-positive force: through iconoclastic[11] means that maintain the fearsome aesthetic amid changing class/cultural functions during ludo-Gothic BDSM. But these ongoing negotiations still happen between two (or more) people who are often of two minds about the very symbols being used; forget the aesthetics, the people utilizing them might disagree and even fight over their correct usage if one side has been conditioned to (whether consciously or not) serve the state!

This brings us to our second challenge: worker solidarity and intersectional unity/education threatened by competing labor dialogs mid-exchange; i.e., theatrical disputes centered around material and ideological disagreements tied to our own bodies, gender identities/performances and trauma during liminal expression—embodying monsters inside nerd culture as a form of socio-political discourse. To usher Marsden into the present-day struggle of Gothic-Communist development, I based Striga off one of Autumn Ivy’s publicly available shoot images (left). Personally I thought they were perfect for the role (they certainly looked the part), but didn’t fully realize or address our incompatibilities as artistic collaborators—that our shared generational trauma could divide us due to competing and oppositional aims within capital. Despite me being a trans woman/anarcho-Communist and Autumn a non-binary sex worker and both of us living with trauma under capital, we didn’t exactly “get along.” Point in fact, our voicing of trauma using and regarding the same Amazon aesthetics generally clashed during Gothic liminal expression and I’d like to explain why.

Before I start, though, I want to say that I don’t advertise any of this about Autumn out of sheer spite; nor do I want to apologize for their harmful actions towards me while telling the truth about them as an abusive nerd. As such, I want to achieve praxial catharsis by confronting their abuse of me to accomplish two intersecting aims: a) to make a point about the bourgeois trifectas, and b) acknowledge that they abused me as a client of theirs both looking for a mommy dom and someone who, as a fellow artist/sex worker, aimed to venerate thirst traps by working with Autumn. Given that exposing abuse is a key function of this book, I want to educate readers for the purposes of artistic critique that aims to highlight the factionalized complexities of these kinds of uneven working arrangements that happen “in the wild.” What happened between Autumn and I fits that to a tee: generational trauma begetting interpersonal trauma owing to capital as the divisive element through Gothic poetics. To critique power is to go where power is, and Autumn embodies that well, albeit as someone who abused me during our various exchanges.

First and foremost, Autumn is a headstrong and controlling person; i.e., their desire to be in control tended to overlook my considerations within our business arrangements. Even when trying to uphold their requests, they tended to walk (and talk) over me while making it seem normal. And yet, despite how their requests seemed fair at face value, they tended to be a one-sided ordeal insofar as my thoughts, feelings or rights were concerned. Autumn always acted like the boss, even when they had no grounds for it: a queer boss dressed like an Amazon, but also acting like one of a particular kind; i.e., a SWERF and a moderate strongarm/war boss pushing me around while shoving their own sloganized, superhero merchandise through the market. All the while, our trauma and its means of communicating through mommy-dom/thirst-trap Amazonomachia were competing against each other through monstrous language as something to negotiate: Autumn’s needs and wants trumping mine by virtue of their advertised superiority inside the same oppressed community discussing nerd culture.

For instance, Autumn strongly disliked the label “sex worker” being applied to them publicly because it could hurt their bottom line. It didn’t matter that they had an OnlyFans full of thirst-trap materials that very clearly constituted sex work; any mention of Autumn being a sex worker (calling it like it is) was something they were very forcefully against. And while this might sound okay unto itself, they were also a) only too happy to take my patronage for sex work, while b) stressing their own professional status and using that to tell me exactly how to advertise them in my own galleries and writing (which concerns sex worker rights). It honestly felt pretty bossy of them, but also dense; i.e., invalidating of me as a genderqueer artist/sex worker while constantly advertising themselves as a strong-looking enby who honestly was having their cake and eating it, too: showing less skin (no “ham sandwich,” in their words) and putting themselves on a pedestal above other sex workers while doing the same kind of work: talking dirty and showing off to make people cum; i.e., voice work first, with nudity as a pay-walled afterthought.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

The problem here, isn’t selling sex, but that Autumn’s approach became prescriptive and self-important; i.e., a weird canonical nerd smiling their Hollywood smile, getting fake tits to emphasize their female attributes within the Amazon persona, and treating false modesty like a lucrative virtue exclusive to them and their brand: the bogus and incredibly harmful argument that partially-clothed bodies and implied nudity are somehow “worth more” than fully naked ones are. It wasn’t explicitly stated, but nevertheless showed in how Autumn treated me over time: they were always the victim, and I could never be one. Regardless of intent, their trauma, their rights, and their business—all trumped my voice in defense of capital (re: intent doesn’t matter, actions do, and function determines function). Thus, instead of overcoming systemic adversity within monstrous language, Autumn actively contributed to it through a coercive heroic-monstrous persona: a moderate Amazon “gym mom” selling strength as a motivational[12] idea—a “feel-good” pill to buy from them while they sought to dominate the market (and its manufactured crises, contests and shortages) through queernormative kayfabe poetics; i.e., monsters that shut down proletarian praxis by being “the best.”

Abusive parties will generally sell themselves as paragons, something to aspire to while exploiting others around them. To be blunt, Autumn’s exploitation stems from commodifying rebellion, recuperating it with Gothic poetics as something to regard with fear and dogmatic worship (violence and terror). They value “positivity” over liberation, a toxic mindset that reliably yielded material and societal effects between us linked to stigmatic language: an expensive price tag (their photoshoots weren’t cheap) and an abusive working relationship regardless of my oppressed status while competing over marginalized, nerdy language. There’s certainly nothing wrong with charging whatever you want for your work, or deciding how much skin you want to show while doing it; but it was the manner to how Autumn controlled me as an erotic artist that rubbed me the wrong way. Anonymity and aliases are one thing but they wanted to be in the public spotlight, clearly doing sex work while telling me exactly what to write about them as the Amazon/victim; i.e., telling people they weren’t a sex worker while capitalizing on a profound double standard that left me feeling cheated, but also threatened. I’m sorry but that’s absurd and unprofessional. “Professional” means more than making money, hand-over-fist; it means treating your clients/co-workers with respect (the two are not mutually exclusive). Not only did Autumn not do this, they treated me solely like a client; i.e., I wasn’t a sex worker but an artist—in short, to “stay in my lane.”

To continue being blunt, Autumn was prioritizing themselves with a self-imposed monopoly informed by pre-existing heteronormative market trends: to, like a gargoyle, be seen and feared through visual instruction, but also open intimidation as a weird canonical nerd. So while there’s certainly nothing wrong with looking Amazonian as a part of your own public image and using that image to fight for the rights of enbies worldwide, Autumn was a rigid negotiator who prioritized themselves in pursuit of their own livelihood. This reflected not just in their treatment of me through veiled threats, but also their framing of the Amazon as a brand image—not as something to teach workers to liberate themselves with, but something for Autumn to treat as a reliable paycheck while marketing themselves as “queer enough.” Their open moderacy bled into their private, professional conduct in ways that frankly felt rude and unprofessional towards me as an artist and genderqueer person invested in sex worker rights; i.e., their business image trumped my own socio-political voice as a weird iconoclastic nerd, who they constantly treated as a threat to them. In short, their socio-material struggles took priority over mine, to the point that it made working with them oddly stressful.

For example, after Autumn had agreed to pay me for a short story that I had written for them to perform, we ran into some basic logistic issues; i.e., they were initially unable to pay me for the services being rendered. This shouldn’t have been cause for great concern. However, when I merely wanted to know what was going on, they begrudgingly said they had lost their PayPal account, but went on to insist I was being unprofessional for asking them to begin with; i.e., trying to secure a means of payment before I submitted the story in question. Per their usual approach, the whole thing felt one-sided—with me being the unreasonable party for asking basic questions and them being well within their rights to take whatever measures they saw fit to protect themselves and their business interests; e.g., their overall business conduct, but also their automated, no-nonsense business contracts when vending their costly sex-work photoshoots. To say they ran a tight ship would be an understatement; that fucker was hermetically sealed.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

While I certainly get Autumn’s frustration at losing their PayPal account, it still wasn’t an excuse for them to lash out at me; i.e., by acting like a subjugated version of the Amazon they were constantly touting themselves as. And frankly I wouldn’t have cared had their rough treatment of me not habitually coincided with their discrediting of what I was about as a sex worker and erotic artist (we all lash out; it shouldn’t be a regular occurrence tied to one’s brand, however). So while I can certainly understand not wanting to be called a sex worker because sex workers are discriminated against, Autumn’s overcontrolling and inconsiderate treatment of me veered at times into SWERF territory dressed up in rebellious symbolism; i.e., me being pushed around by another marginalized sexual worker in the LGBTQ community who not only does sex work by my book (fucking literally in this case), but also isn’t exactly hurting financially (owns horses and uses them to sell their own merchandise, above) and is thirst-trapping to gym bros with “Amazon/gym mom” gun[13] porn (see the eroticized loading of the “love gun”; exhibit 7b, below). Like, you do you, boo, but maybe respect me a little more as a fellow oppressed worker and weird nerd? Except weird canonical nerds don’t do that; they police and attack iconoclasts, seeing them as threats to the canonical order people like Autumn hardwire to through the profit motive. Despite posturing as rebellious, their performance becomes a pretense eclipsed by the structure controlling their income as expressed through Gothic poetics, which Autumn polices through subterfuge and coercion.

(exhibit 7b: Artist: Autumn Ivy. Despite the presence of masculine strength and Autumn identifying as non-binary in a subversive Amazonian gesture, there remains a thoroughly regressive, cowgirl component that leans into the raw business side of things. In other words, their precious brand recognition and dissemination is hardly subversive enough. Nothing about Autumn’s aesthetic indicates a hard leftist/anti-fascist/anti-corporate stance; indeed, many elements indicate a centrist position appropriating countercultural forms [the tarot and monster tatts] for a police/settler-colonial function with Man Box applications: acting and looking like a tokenized cop in service to patriarchal structures and status-quo clients [cis-het men thirsting after queer-coded cowgirls] while prioritizing themselves as an AFAB sex worker [itself a form of transphobia towards AMAB sex workers].)

My point, here, is that the unresolved and uneven class tensions between us eventually reached a breaking point. This means that when things finally did fall apart, it was actually over something seemingly stupid and small: I had been supporting Autumn fairly regularly—and trying to be a good patron and respect their wishes [e.g. asking permission to show them my cock]—when suddenly I received an impersonal-sounding message from them while I was in a bad place: “I can’t respond right now. Please respect my time.” It sounded prerecorded (and in hindsight, it was), but I was already frustrated with them and going through some heavy shit on my end: a messy rebound right after a tremendously abusive relationship, the temporary banning of my OnlyFans account after sharing artwork on there, and my uncle being hospitalized overnight from a sudden, acute heart attack (the second one in less than a week). In short, I was going through the same kinds of problems that many sex workers go through. Sensing an air of exceptionalism, I spoke my mind and said that I thought Autumn’s message sounded rude.

God forbid, right? Needless to say, the ensuing conversation was not a productive or pleasant one. I thought Autumn was rude, they thought I was rude, and despite the two of us agreeing that it was a giant miscommunication (tied to an automated message, no less), there were some pretty bad vibes present between us. I tried to apologize about being in a bad place but Autumn just had to get their licks in because I’d called them unprofessional; they acted like they looked: loud and assertive, sending some choice words over two short video recordings telling me to basically go fuck myself (“I could tell you TO GO FUCK YOURSELF but I’m not going to!”). It was a very offended performance, one where they could do no wrong and I was a dick for daring to suggest that their conduct or place in the universe was somehow in dispute. Clearly I’d hit a nerve, but it only illustrated how things normally were, albeit to a more incensed degree: their way or the highway spoken from both sides of their mouth. In short, it was queer-boss behavior and I wasn’t really in a state of mind to turn the other cheek. Autumn was right and I was wrong and their picture-perfect smile spoke for itself. Except its message suddenly felt incredibly fake and harmful to me.

 (artist: Autumn Ivy)

I’m mentioning all of this because our dispute was informed by a brand image they were acting out; i.e., as something to protect through tough-guy posturing that generally informed how they treated me as a fellow artist and sex worker when things “were good.” Obviously there’s no clear divide between theatre and real life, but Autumn made no bones about having an image (and livelihood) to protect from my conduct. I think their conduct and my response represents just how messily these miscommunications can get when they happen between workers; i.e., how their resultant hang-ups and ripostes are generally informed by various socio-material factors not entirely or even partially known to both parties. So I mean it when I say there’s no hard feelings between us. But there is a sex-positive lesson to be taught about worker rights during artistic solidarity and expression, and one that concerns Autumn’s abusive conduct as part of their selling point: the gun-toting, inspirational gym mom, enby aesthete throwing their weight around pretty fucking hard the moment a little femboy artist like me (still in the closet at the time) inconvenienced them, or talked about her rights or opinions for a change; i.e., trans misogyny.

To be honest, I had wanted to say more during our falling out to clear things up but Autumn was pissed and so was I. The fact remains, I didn’t mention my uncle to them because I didn’t know he was dead at the time; my abusive surviving uncle didn’t want me attending the hospital visit, so I was at home waiting to hear about the results of the incoming brain scan. I didn’t know it, but he was legally dead by the time Autumn and I had our fight. And perhaps it’s unfair of me to hold that against Autumn, so I technically won’t. I’ll just say that their video messages largely concerned them hurling the most thinly veiled insults imaginable at me (and not in a professional manner), informing me in no uncertain terms just how unreasonable I had been to voice my true feelings at all.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Perhaps there was no place for them in Autumn’s mind. Except that’s not how humans (or labor exchanges) work. My uncle was probably dead, I was losing my best friend, and still reeling from my last ex’s abuses. But Autumn? They just couldn’t be bothered to put up with me because their horse had been difficult that morning! Far be it from me to compare a temperamental horse to a dead uncle, or to expect Autumn to have known about Dave; but the fact remains that they were entirely concerned with themselves and I (and my trauma) were a nuisance. It became something to mute, treating me like a no-good AMAB dickhead while lionizing themselves and encouraging me to keep mum (something that all abusers do; e.g., Zeuhl and Cuwu).

Given the terrible timing of things and me admittedly nursing some bruised co-worker/client resentment (for Autumn’s unprofessional, one-sided conduct) on top of what I was going through, it was a perfect storm of self-centeredness from them and denied expectations from me. Shit happens, but there’s a still sex-positive lesson to be learned, here. Specifically I want us to reflect on what transpired between Autumn and I in relation to capital and Amazon aesthetics at large; i.e., as a countercultural means of interrogating trauma during the potential for labor and cultural disputes. The handling of the Amazon/mommy dom aesthetic becomes something to improve upon during complex labor exchanges/negotiations while understanding what made Autumn so attractive to me and my work: their brand of Amazon aesthetics as something to reclaim from its owner’s bourgeois antics, and indeed valuing what Autumn has to offer while healing from their parasocial abuse. Per Sarkeesian’s adage, I can enjoy their powerful body and critique their abusive behavior as something to both recognize as part of their person and a thing to separate from the aesthetic: Despite how Autumn absolutely looks the part, they do not play it in ways that help workers at large; we can do that for them by analyzing and learning from what Autumn puts into the world.

Writing this section has been stressful, and appreciating Autumn’s creative output and striking presentation helps me relax in ways that grants me agency having survived to speak on their abuse: fetishizing and enjoying the ghost of my abuser as something that can prioritize healing from trauma through a likeness that isn’t the original (a tactic that will come up repeatedly from here on out; e.g., Cuwu, exhibit 16b). The takeaway isn’t so much that Autumn was an apathetic, high-control diva who was actually pretty awful to work with (they were, to be clear); they and I eventually fought about it and haven’t engaged with one another since. Instead, I want you to consider their pulverized solidarity and idiosyncratic stupidity (meaning in the Marxist sense of privatized labor stupefying workers) as connected to their complicated brand image leading to praxial inertia during liminal expression: the weird canonical nerd/enby girl boss (a queer boss acting cis to serve the profit motive) defending their thirst-trap image in blunt-force, centrist, dog-eat-dog ways; i.e., “I am strong and right, you are not” embodying class dormancy in favor of the status quo. It’s punching down by an enby emulating those who normally punch down: white, cis-het men. By acting like one, enbies like Autumn perform and present as cops, often while wearing a mask-like smile as part of their public image.

The moment I introduced even a modicum of tension in defense of myself and my rights, Autumn ditched any sense of manners and doubled down on their usual performance as a veiled means of attack: defending their home and uniform as besieged by little ol’ me. That’s generally how moderates work, you see; they’re polite until they’re not. It was like arguing with someone who had fallen in love not just with themselves, but specifically their own sculpted image as a centrist comic book hero. It was, in a sense, a self-deception on both ends (despite my trauma, I could have spoken up sooner), but one whose complicated subterfuge led Autumn to coerce me in service of the profit motive; i.e., they didn’t give a toss, as long as they got paid and looked good doing it, upholding the current linguo-material order of genderqueer language under capital by acting like a canonical gargoyle. To that, I was supposed to keep quiet, but I won’t and it feels cathartic to speak out.

Now that we’ve gone over Autumn as a kind of “queer boss” in the wild, keep them in mind; we’ll explore similar dialectical-material tensions in regards to other workers and their own complicated praxis/trauma throughout the manifesto and remainder of the book. For the moment, let’s move onto the third bourgeois trifecta—the coercion trifecta that results from these kinds of manufacture and subterfuge:

• Gaslight. A means of making abuse victims doubt the veracity of their own abuse (and their claims of abuse).
• Gatekeep. A tactic more generally employed by those with formal power, denying various groups gainful employment (thus actual material advantage) or working platforms that allow them to effectively communicate systemic injustices perpetrated against them.
• Girl-boss. Tokenism, generally through triangulation: of white, cis-het or at least cis women towards other minorities.

This trifecta is used more liberally by neoliberals (or centrists, vis-à-vis Autumn), as fascists tend to default to brute force. However, deception and lies—namely fear and dogma—are commonplace under fascism, as are token minorities (though these will swiftly disappear as rot sets in).

As Gothic Communists, our aim is deprivatization and degrowth—not to abolish everything outright, but move consumption habits gradually away from the neoliberal “Holy Trinity” within Capitalism’s fiscal end goals

• Infinite growth. Pushing for more and more profit.
• Efficient profit. Profit at any cost.
• Worker/owner division. A widening of the class divide.

as disseminated through the three bourgeois trifectas. Rejecting all of these, Capitalism becomes something to transmute, proceeding into Socialism and finally anarcho-Communism through Gothic poetics. This isn’t possible unless sex work becomes an open discussion, not a private means of enrichment and control. As Autumn demonstrates, said enrichment and control are things to embody and live by according to a brand image; i.e., an aesthetic with a bourgeois function tied to individual workers punching down with zero empathy inside a dog-eat-dog structure. It’s precisely that kind of thing that monstrous aesthetics need to challenge, not support as Autumn does (while encouraging them to charge through “constructive criticism” guided by sound theory).

(artist: Nat the Lich)

To stand against the bourgeoisie and capital is to resist their trifectas and financial end goals, thus stand against “Rome’s” self-imposed, endlessly remediated glory as inherently doomed to burn by design (the strongman’s toxic stoicism a mask behind which madness historically reigns; and elsewhere, the elite under American hegemony sit far away from the flames). However, like Rome itself, even that activity of resistance by us is far more complicated than it initially appears. The basic concept involves our “creative successes” that occur during oppositional praxis, synthesized into proletarian forms within our daily lives as workers; i.e., according to how we treat each other as weird nerds who can come to blows over the confrontation of trauma, but also its interpretation through Gothic poetics, mid-exchange. Rebellion isn’t simply refusing to obey the state; it’s being kind to each other as a means of monstrous instruction that camps canonical renditions of sex work as monstrous. Doing so liberates workers from systems of socio-material control by first allowing people to imagine the changing of these structures, then implementing said changes in highly inventive ways that are respected and upheld during intersectional solidarity.

(artist: M Leth)

While such poetic strategies double within the liminal expression of oppositional praxis (the Six Doubles), they are canonically denied to labor movements or otherwise recuperated from them to serve state interests. Often, “resistance” is heroically performed—limited to half-real, simulative spaces of containment regarding worker ingenuity as controlled forms of monomythic opposition; i.e., descending into Hell with a militarized avatar whose warlike gestures embody state aims vis-à-vis Cartesian dualism: nature (and the Global South) as something to conquer through hauntologized force under neoliberal Capitalism. To that, Cameron’s refrain (shooters) limits monsters to “scored points” achieved through projectile-based combat against an endless army of zombies, demons and/or anthromorphs inside an obstacle course/shooting range through military optimism: holocaust by bullet. These overtures of state violence manifest in a variety of videoludic exchanges, be that an FPS, TPS (run ‘n gun, Metroidvania, platformer) or RTS with shooter elements, and so on. There are no shortage of enemies to educate players (often young men, but also blindly parodic Man-Box proponents that appeal to these men; e.g., waifus/war-bride avatars, above) to kill unthinkingly for the state, regardless of where the Imperial Boomerang and states of exception are (e.g., Doom II: Hell on Earth, 1994).

Note: This section is very important to my ludology scholarship, and would go onto be cited in all of my book volume’s afterward, as well as “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” in my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. —Perse, 4/4/2025

Power is a performance that upholds through the perception of impossible things like total control, endless enemies, ultimate strength or absolute victory through kayfabe reversals. The same goes for containment, whose paradox of total imprisonment our thesis discussed in relation to videogames as breakable; i.e., how speedrunning and spoilsport gaming attitudes normally contain tremendous invention that canonically restrict the development and execution of emergent puzzle-solving to single texts in gaming culture[14], versus applying that mentality to reconfigure larger extratextual structures; e.g., Coincident’s “Doom Strategy Guide – Okuplok’s Mancubus Cliff” (2023, below) treating player invention more as a hobby on par with a Rubik’s cube—or hell, a human beating Tetris (1985) for the first time in its 38-year existence (aGameScout’s “After 34 Years, Someone Finally Beat Tetris,” 2024)—versus escaping Capitalist Realism by playing videogames (and other such experiments) in ways that resist the profit motive within the neoliberal era (with organized speedrunning arguably having started in 1990[15], just before the fall of the Soviet Union). The puzzle is ostensibly impressive, but the much-touted “progress” of solving it becomes an empty gesture insofar as liberating worker minds is concerned. Doing so has no effect on the external world unless the attitude for solving complicated puzzles through emergent gameplay is deliberately taken outside of the text. Otherwise, the hauntology (and its canceled future) are entirely self-contained:

In truth, the degree of conscious unity against grander historical-material problems can be applied to capital through rebellious worker action and ludo-Gothic-BDSM poetics across all mediums and labor forms; e.g., speedrunning, which can work (from my thesis volume) “as a communal effect for solving complex puzzles and telling Gothic ludonarratives in highly inventive ways. As we’ll see moving forward, this strategy isn’t just limited to videogames, but applies to any poetic endeavor during oppositional praxis”; i.e., intersectional, multi-layered strategies of resistance and misdirection that strive to demonstrate there is no outside of the text, applying the imagination and effort needed to transform the world around us by any and all means necessary. To that, I think the grassroots culture and non-profit approach to speedrunning allows larger groups of people to solve immensely difficult problems collectively outside of established business practices: thwarting Capitalist Realism by weaponizing the collective ingenuity and incredible puzzle-solving power of speedrunning against the elite.

If popular videogames franchised under neoliberal Capitalism, and organized speedrunning began to form right before the end of the Cold War in 1990, then its proletarian utility (and other such revolutionary strategies overlapping within nerd culture) must do so after the end of history’s cultural myopia began to thicken. Doing so requires inventiveness in the face of tremendous confusion (worker menticide) and state-sponsored adversity (many speedrunners just want to run their games and ignore the problems of the real word; e.g., Caleb Hart, who we shall examine in Volume Three, Chapter Four). The bourgeoisie might seem to hold all the cards, here, but they cannot kill all workers who resist, nor do they possess the means to completely monopolize violence and terror against rebellious forces; likewise, they cannot hope to alienate us from our own labor as a weapon to levy against them unless we surrender its power and poetics exclusively to them. Subjugation means total surrender as something of a choice when presented with the facts: submitting to Capitalist Realism in those respects, staying inside Plato’s cave. This book’s praxial focus, then, is to enrich propaganda and sex workers by making them (and the world around them) progressively more and more proletarian through Gothic poetics as something to fearlessly apply anywhere, regardless of who complains or fights back. As part of nerd culture as something to reclaim, we become “awakened,” hence emotionally/Gothically intelligent weird nerds aware of class/cultural struggles in relation to each other in continuum. The rewards of gradual, uphill emancipation outweigh the risk of state violence committed by class traitors like Autumn playing it safe inside nerd culture (segregation doesn’t prevent genocide; it enables it).

We must not only avoid such incidents, thereby rescuing the Gothic aesthetic from a menticidal function that maintains the status quo; we must interrogate and confront our own trauma through similar incidents that occur regularly between workers when interrogating power using Gothic paradox. To that, we must gradually become our own dark agents, including killer-rabbit, “Trojan” bunnies who tell splendid, very-gay lies (exhibit 7c and 7d in a figurative sense; 100a4 [from Volume Three] in a more literal sense) and—as sex workers with subversive fetish props, kink and BDSM—weave our own elaborate strategies of misdirection, thread-by-thread, into the praxial fabric of “acceptable” sin, rebellion and vice, but also power, prestige and strength personified: Hell as something to rule over collectively by reclaiming the monstrous language that Capitalism uses to commodify our struggles authored by the system. The state markets and sells Gothic poetics all the time. We just have to deprivatize their canonical transactions and framing during our own creative actions; i.e., in Gothic-Communist ways that champion monstrous worker solidarity as fundamental to the development process, deconstructing harmful binaries while encouraging anti-heteronormative Gothic expression through iconoclastic monsters, locations and rituals of unequal power exchange.

(artist: In Case)

So put aside the elite’s cheap, coercive garbage and work for something better to consume that we make for ourselves. If “you are what you eat,” then become something darkly delicious whose consumption actually makes the world a better place; i.e, by openly talking about trauma through Gothic poetics, whose frankly paradoxical performances and play become utilized in spite of the risks to constitute something that moderates like Autumn (and other weird canonical nerds) cannot stand: a pedagogy of the oppressed that alters societal and material conditions. Its engagement occurs between complex, liminal expressions of power in submissive and dominant forms—but also undead, demonic and animalistic avatars—that provide a potent, playful means of voicing things that embody or otherwise speak out about systemic trauma; i.e., as something to express in monstrous, paradoxical language, normally receiving it from similar-looking entities that ultimately serve the state.

To it, we must subvert them  during ludo-Gothic BDSM—meaning in far more openly transgressive/dissident language than Autumn dares to (they’re a cop); we must “make it gay” by rebelling in revolutionarily meaningful ways, thus achieve liberatory catharsis and release during praxial synthesis—camping the canon through our own identities, labor and bodies, whose Gothic poetics consciously challenge heteronormative (and tokenized, queernormative) standards. It becomes joyous and orgasmic, but also a form of asexual public nudism whose statuesque presentations make our canonical foils sweat:

(exhibit 7c: Artists I have worked with or commissioned, or whose creations have inspired me when making my own sex-positive work. Top-right-to-mid-left: Filmation’s 1987 The Emperor of the Night; top-far-left: Natharlotep; mid-top-left: Nya Blu; low-mid-left: Songyuxin Hitomi; bottom-left: Bokuman; bottom-middle: Zayzay; bottom-right: Luna Seduces; upper-far-middle-right: Ronin Dude; middle: Playful Maev. All embody something rebellious in the Satanic sense; i.e., through Gothic poetics, stressing a morphological personal expression that is outside the Cartesian, heteronormative standard. For example, Playful Maev was gynodiverse in terms of the labia she drew in her work; indeed, I specifically commissioned her to draw my OC, Ileana, for that reason!)

(exhibit 7d: Top-left artist: Persephone van der Waard; top-middle: Miss Misery; top-and-bottom-right: Tatsuya Yoshikawa; bottom-left, artist: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right, artist: Persephone van der Waard. Queens of hell are things to fashion; i.e., great and fearsome witches and demons. The top-left is Miss Misery drawn as a great ruler of Hell; the bottom-left is Ileana, my sex-positive witch queen who uses her tremendous magic powers [and chonk] to fight against evil kings for the rights of all witches; my OC Pickle [bottom-left] was envisioned as a kind of queenly demon in her own right; and Yoshikawa clearly loves their oni and spirits. All embody the sort of queenly entities that patriarchal men demonize and fear but also sing about and commodify in rock ‘n roll forms; e.g., Carmilla and Striga, but also Witchtrap’s 2012 “Queen of Hell” being the “queen of her kind!” opposite Helstar’s rendition of Dracula/Orlock declaring, “I am the king of my kind!” in their 1989 guitar showcase, “Perseverance and Desperation.” You gotta take that entire process and turn it on its head: “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.”)

While making monsters yourself (thus being a weird nerd), remember how class and culture warfare start with imagination as something previously informed by state-corporate propaganda and its Faustian pacification: “Better to serve in Heaven than reign in Hell” amounting to a kind of “false service” where they eat you (a bit like the old Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man,” 1962). All the while, the elite want us to forget how all deities reside in our breast, that we are the devils of the world and the Gothic imagination is our workshop. The world, then, can become one where non-privatized dreams and nightmares come true—that have the collective power to liberate sex workers from bourgeois tyranny and avoid the repeating of older historical materialisms currently unfolding during Capitalist Realism as it presently exists: weird canonical nerds like Autumn, who maintain these structures as they currently function—scaring people through Hell as a monopolized threat of state violence, not creative empowerment. We can all be kings, queens and intersex/non-binary monarchs under a New Order where vertical power arrangements become an awful legend of the tyrannical past; i.e., on par with Richard Matheson’s Commie Zombie-Vampires finally(?) laying Cartesian dualism to rest in I am Legend, 1954 (according to Debora Christie, anyways; source: “A Dead New World: Richard Matheson and the Modern Zombie,” 2011).

Essentially the above exhibit is where I coined the idea of “the monopoly of monsters/morphological expression” vis-à-vis Weber’s monopoly of violence and Asprey’s monopoly of terror (re: “The State: Its Key Tools” from “Paratextual Documents“). —Perse, 4/4/2025

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

So, while “Rome” and its proponents of the Protestant ethic pimping nature (re: Autumn) absolutely gargle non-consenting balls, it’s completely inadequate for Gothic Communists to say that “‘Rome’ sucks and so do Capitalism, neoliberalism and fascism.” That won’t work. Not only is it stating the obvious, but far too many workers defend marriage, war and the state itself as sacred—its ritualized sacrifices in all of these fields; i.e., “People die, abuses happen, wives get raped, but the state is sacrosanct, sovereign, above judgement.” Instead, the hauntological and abject nature of canonical, heteronormative devilry must be critiqued in relation to what pro-state proponents already dominate: the ghost of the counterfeit as an ongoing lie that serves the elite through the process of abjection. As Autumn demonstrates, said process turns potentially unruly workers into stupid backstabbers whose concept of ownership isn’t just raw utility for the state, but sublimated exploitation in alienizing/alienating ways. This completely-fucked situation calls for subversive transformation and black magic during liminal expression; it calls for successful proletarian praxis through our creative successes and dark forces—our darkness visible achieving praxial synthesis in opposition to the bourgeois trifectas (and proponent gargoyles like Autumn using them to keep dissidents in line; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss)!

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Volume Zero thoroughly discusses power as a paradoxical performance, which denotes both nuance and difficulty in its execution as a liminal proposition: on the surface of and inside thresholds that remediate praxis. Like wrestling or boxing, Gothic-Communist development is an uphill game of gradual pressure and inches from both sides cultivating the Superstructure. But rebellious decisions have to collective, second-nature and informed, or they ultimately serve the state. For the next two chapters, then, I want to outline the operational difficulties present within oppositional praxis when challenging the state; then go over the Gothic mode (and its many lists) in detail, accompanied by my original examination of the nuance present during oppositional praxis (and its various lists).

Onto “‘Revolutionary Cryptonymy’ opening, and ‘Predators and Prey’ part one“!

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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] Source: Academy of Ideas’ “The Parallel Society vs Totalitarianism | How to Create a Free World,” (2022).

[2] From War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History (1994): “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.”

[3] I.e., “egregores/monsters” as codified in visible, emblematic forms whose function (not aesthetic; e.g., golems) is to communicate heteronormative dogma when viewed. My emphasis on “gargoyle” as a state tool of menticide was more of a conversational focus in this upcoming chapter when I first wrote it. I’ve since decided to preserve that rhetoric, even though it doesn’t appear too much elsewhere in the book (again, the term is more or less synonymous with monsters, simulacra and egregores).

[4] “Dated” being a paradox, insofar as the abjection of systemic abuse puts it in perceived ideas of the past as in “not now, not here”; e.g., saying corporal punishment happened “back then” before applying that exception globally throughout the entire empire except for certain areas dedicated to colonized or otherwise oppressed groups: prisons and ghettos as reliable sites of torture committed by the corrupt, the monstrous, the other. Even outside the state of exception, material reminders of the historical past are all around us in Gothic forms, which condition or otherwise encourage unironic versions of these painful behaviors in present evocations of canonical barbarism; i.e., whose counterfeits synonymize pain with harm instead of granting calculated risks that actually reestablish control for all workers (and not just those in the Imperial Core fearful of abuse from their assigned destroyers and “protectors”; e.g., white, cis-het women).

[5] The series is not without its own fan-made porn; e.g., this animation by Hammy Toy of Brooklyn fingering his own asshole.

[6] Fan animations, unlike canonical works, tend to reject efficient profit. For that, compare this 2022 DBZ fan project by Studio Stray Dog to the animation and art in Dragon Ball Super (2017). Night-and-day difference!

[7] The gargoyle is a hauntological figure insofar as it becomes a humanoid being to relate to out of the past while still belong it.

[8] I.e., the internalization of the foreign plot in fascist thinking.

[9] A small note about “good/bad” in ludo-Gothic BDSM language: To be dialectical-material throughout this book, I will be consciously referring to bad/good monsters, witches, education, food, parentage et al as bourgeois/proletarian (or canonical/iconoclastic). This being said, while the qualifier “good/bad” can become incredibly obfuscating during oppositional praxis, “bourgeois play” also sounds incredibly funny and terrifying to me in BDSM parlance. To preserve my sanity I’ll stick to good/bad play whenever broaching that subject, as it frankly rolls off the tongue better (and fits with the BDSM idea of shame and praise—e.g., “good girl, bad girl!” etc). Praise and intimacy don’t have to be sexual at all; heteronormative canon automatically and coercively sexualizes everything in sexually dimorphic, incredibly abusive/sublimated ways. Despite the binarized roles in BDSM, iconoclastic praise reduces stress for both sides (e.g., me saying “good girl!” to my computer when it doesn’t crash as I write this book).

[10] This superiority is a harmful body image that is sold to younger and younger people, taught to visualize and connect said physiques as linked to commercial gain under capital at the sacrifice of longevity and physical health (Dr. Chris Raynor’s “Sam Sulek: Recipe For Disaster?” 2023); or as Gen Kanayama and Harrison G. Pope Jr write in “History and Epidemiology of Anabolic Androgens in Athletes and Non-athletes” (2017):

The use of androgens, frequently referred to as anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), has grown into a worldwide substance abuse problem over the last several decades. Testosterone was isolated in the 1930s, and numerous synthetic androgens were quickly developed thereafter. Athletes soon discovered the dramatic anabolic effects of these hormones, and AAS spread rapidly through elite athletics and bodybuilding from the 1950s through the 1970s. However it was not until the 1980s that widespread AAS use emerged from the elite athletic world and into the general population. Today, the great majority of AAS users are not competitive athletes, but instead are typically young to middle-aged men who use these drugs primarily for personal appearance (source).

[11] I.e., an iconoclastic concept I’ve explored in my own graduate/postgraduate work; e.g., “What an Amazon Is, Standing in Athena’s Shadow” (2017) written when I was still in the closet, followed by my subversive train of Amazon artwork throughout the following years: exhibit 7a, but also subversions of Frazetta’s artwork with exhibit 0a2c and exhibit 102a1; as well as my OCs Ileana, Revana, Siobhan and Virago in exhibits 7d, 37f, 37g, 61a2, 84, etc; classical myths like the Medusa, 23b; and in subversive movie/videogame fanart like Corporal Ferro, Marisa, Chun Li and Zarya in exhibits 85, 104a2, 111b; etc.

[12] A huge part of Autumn’s market is motivational speaking/positive thinking with T&A during workout sessions. Think Richard Simmons, but sexier (no offense).

[13] Settler colonialism, whether American or not, goes hand-in-hand with romanticized, but also fetishized weapons as displays of terror (the fascist cult of machismo/weapons). For a melee variant, consider the straight-up TERF queen/war boss, Odessa Stone from Overwatch (2016), which we’ll explore in Volume Three, Chapter Four.

[14] I.e., “gamer culture,” which, as we’ve established in our thesis volume, is predominantly white, cis-het, and male. Moreover, many “metas” exist within manufactured competition to serve the profit motive; e.g., fighting games and professional teams of the FGC as a globalized operation across multiple countries. If you don’t complete, you don’t exist.

[15] As Eric Koziel writes in Speedrun Science: A Long Guide to Short Playthroughs (2019):

In March of 1990, Nintendo of America staged an event in Dallas, Texas […] called the “Nintendo World Championships.” While this was mainly a marketing event to capture and further motivate the explosive success of the NES, it grew into a full-on circuit. While the event itself was built around total score, the Nintendo World Championships have a place in history as one of the earliest instances of organized speedrunning (source).

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.

Volume One: Manifesto and Instruction

Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.

—Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do (1975)

Picking up where “A 2025 Foreword” left off…

(exhibit 6b1: Artist: Autumn Anarchy and Persephone van der Waard. Gothic Communism is a group effort. Glenn the Goblin and Revana Mireille are two mascots for Gothic Communism; I commissioned Autumn to draw them specifically for this volume, then applied a background and painted additional details.)

Up until now, the thesis volume and paratextual documents have discussed sex positivity and Gothic Communism on a mostly theoretical level; Volume One is concerned with manifesto—or the simplifying of theory—and its subsequent instruction through application and poiesis: praxis and synthesis. The preface serves as the bridge between Volumes Zero and One; it will extrapolate further on the anarcho-Communist devices present within Gothic-Communist application during ludo-Gothic BDSM, then articulate on the synthesis of said application; i.e., the cultivation of the daily social-sexual habits needed to achieve praxis through Gothic poetics. From there, the manifesto gradually segues into the synthesis roadmap, focusing more and more on trauma writing and artwork (and eventually targeting Cartesian abuses of workers and nature); i.e., as forms of synthesis that rely on simplified theory as intuitively understood between worker collectives achieving praxis through shared poetic activities.

Returning to Volume One, Two Years Later (give or take) after Five Books; or, Cuwu’s Hand in Forming Ludo-Gothic BDSM

“You just keep getting better and better!”

—Cuwu, to me, upon first meeting each other (January 2022)

 

As someone I met in January 2022—until and after our parting as friends in June 2023—Cuwu remains someone tremendously important regarding what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM. I wanted to address that, here; i.e., with a small addendum kicking Volume One’s second edition off; re: one similar to Volume Zero’s “Two Years Later (give or take): Returning to My Thesis Argument after Five Books.”

(artist: Cuwu)

First, Cuwu was my friend and abuser—specifically an abusive sub demanding I care for them. Furthermore, they have borderline personality disorder and are in therapy/on medication for that (e.g., weed and Klonopin). Any mention of these things isn’t to fetishize them for its own sake, nor to shame them, but to talk about Cuwu’s relationship to me, part-in-parcel. Their education, mental illness, sexuality and gender-non-conformity all went hand-in-hand, so I will discuss them hand-in-hand; i.e., according to the development of Gothic Communism as it formed into itself through Cuwu’s help (regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM) onto other people I met after them who they accidently helped prepare me for. So whereas Zeuhl led me to Jadis (my rapist) and Cuwu helped me escape Jadis, Cuwu went on to prepare me for what came next: to meet Blxxd Bunny, Nyx, Bay and countless others while leaving Zeuhl behind; i.e., Cuwu set a far better example than Zeuhl or Jadis did, yet displayed similar paradoxes in their own actions that hindered me, too:

(exhibit 6b2a1: My exes and I: Zeuhl [top] and Jadis [bottom]. I’ve written about both extensively in this book series, but each has their own respective exposé: “Non-Magical Detectives” and “Showing Jadis’ Face.” As explained in those pieces, Zeuhl’s face continues to be mildly censored because they’re more neurotic, vindictive and marginalized than Jadis. Both harmed me greatly but through said harm inspired me; i.e., to write and illustrate Sex Positivity to heal from said harm, thus ultimately meet Cuwu [and those who came after Cuwu]. For every useful idiot, you have accidental allies!)

Second—and to be absolutely clear about this—any mention of Cuwu in the pages ahead, but also the entire series, is informed by an agreement between us; i.e., I have written permission to share the porn we made separately and together provided I leave their real name out of it. In regards to the exact nature of the details, consider this conversation between myself and a curious reader… who I suspect may have been a bot. Even so, the question—however nosy it comes across—is a valid one, and I will cite our conversation here; i.e., to be as thorough and transparent as I feel comfortable:

Hippymccrankface: You state that Cuwu abused you and that you have separated yourself from them, but also there are numerous images of them nude and having sex with you. Are they aware of the use of their images in this book which has been published since separating?

Me: I have Cuwu’s express written permission to use these images for different purposes, including on OnlyFans and for different creative purposes (their NSFW sex work is still available online, as is our material together, though I generally don’t advertise it). The only thing Cuwu ever asked of me was to leave their actual, real-life name out of things, which I’ve done in accordance to their wishes.

As for my writings about the abuse I experienced from them, they are not involved with that/supervising it, no. The material is part of a portfolio we generated together as sex workers, which I am using independently to write about my experiences with them, good and bad (source Tumblr post, vanderWaardart: December 18, 2024).

That’s the gist of things between us. Cuwu’s still online and, while on hiatus (the last time I checked, anyways), so is their sex work. Said work is arbitrated as much post hoc as not—meaning that like eating a Reese’s, saying “Splunge!” or putting the pussy on the chainwax, there’s endless ways to develop Gothic Communism through monstrous-feminine language in duality; re: by having the whore’s revenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM camping past attempts; i.e., the whore as a poetic device to camp and camp with. This is how Cuwu and I did it, back then.

Third, the 2025 second edition to Volume Zero took the term, “ludo-Gothic BDSM”—which the 2023 first edition introduced with my coining of it—and expanded the involvement of it in that manuscript retrospectively. By comparison, I would actually write the manuscript for my manifesto back in early 2023, whereupon I would write Volume Zero in late 2023 and introduce ludo-Gothic BDSM as a term—only to return to, and finalize, Volume One on Valentine’s 2024 after injecting ludo-Gothic BDSM into its pages (~40, versus Volume Zero’s original 30). Now after releasing Volume Zero‘s second edition, I find myself returning to Volume One to do the same, and inevitably mention ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Cuwu’s involvement) more in its manuscript than I did previously. For the historically curious, all of these changes are cataloged in my full series changelog, which you can find on my website’s one-page promo.

(artist: Cuwu—one of the first images they sent me, before I left Florida)

The fact remains, the idea was roughly conceived in 2021 (re: “Our Ludic Masters“); i.e., before I met Cuwu in early 2022 (re: the epigram). From there, our meeting and separation led to me eventually writing “Healing from Rape” (which Cuwu—a person with borderline personality disorder who relied on DBT to survive—helped me do, regarding Jadis abusing me; re: “Leaving Jadis; or, Running Up that Hill“); i.e., in mid-2023. By late 2023, I was crystalizing ludo-Gothic BDSM vis-à-vis Metroidvania for future use; re: “The Quest for Power” in theory, and the “camp map” finale with Blxxd Bunny in practice. Two years later, in 2025, I would release a corpus for Metroidvania and another for ludo-Gothic BDSM, then commemorate Blxxd Bunny’s hand in things; re: with the second edition of Volume Zero.

Regardless, Cuwu still remains the precursor to Bunny and someone who, while we weren’t dating in title, had agreed to be friends with benefits from the offset—in function having tons of sex, making plenty of porn, and caring for each other in numerous ways that went beyond the initially-agreed-upon FWBs status we supposed shared (many of which this volume and Volume Two will explore). In short, we were comrades (what Cuwu called “cumrag comrades” or “cummy Commies”): a cum dumpster to my cum dumper yet trading in both directions!

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Some of those ways informed what, in my opinion, is some of my best work in this series, including what ludo-Gothic BDSM became in widespread practice after Volume Zero had essentially coined it—ostensibly with Bunny’s help, but also Cuwu’s before Bunny and I had actually met! Now that Volume Zero’s second edition has credited Bunny for their hand in things, I shall be revisiting Cuwu’s; i.e., I couldn’t have written Sex Positivity as it exists without their help! Showing how here isn’t revenge; it’s an act of continual love from me towards Cuwu—a sign of respect from one sex worker towards another! You changed my life, kid, and only for the better!

That being said, I won’t be expounding on Cuwu too much, here, as one, this volume is already cited heavily in my later books but especially its manifesto postscript, “Healing from Rape” (which, I think, is one of my book series’ finest accomplishments).

Furthermore, Cuwu likewise already makes numerous cameos in my later volumes, being cited dozens of times; e.g., in the Poetry Module’s “Castles in the Flesh,” “Red Scare,” and “My Experiences,” as well as “Healing through ‘Rape’” in the Undead Module and “Making Demons” in the Demon Module (the latter which I would dedicated to Cuwu). Frankly there’s plenty more specific examples I can’t easily list, here; e.g., exhibit 37b1a[1] from “Healing“; i.e., I don’t always announce Cuwu’s presence before a (sub)chapter starts, and have lost count regarding the exact number of exhibits featuring them—be that solo or with me alongside them. Even Volume One flirted with showing Cuwu off, exhibiting their photobashed body in exhibit 16 (wearing a mask—one the Poetry Module would remove, followed by having Cuwu’s face being entirely uncensored[2]).

Regarding Cuwu and ludo-Gothic BDSM, I will merely try to keep things short and let this volume segue into ludo-Gothic BDSM (and Cuwu); i.e., as a liminal space, transitioning from Volume Zero into Volume Two. I’ll signpost “ludo-Gothic BDSM” a little, here; i.e., which I would inject into the manuscript, back in 2024, with “Predators and Prey” and “Concerning Rings,” as well reformatting the volume to divide in two; re: Manifesto and Instruction. The former is effectively taking the manifesto tree from Volume Zero and further synthesizing and simplifying it (along with producing several essays), while the latter leans into “application”; i.e., regarding the universal liberation of workers and nature as monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of the alien, hence, ludo-Gothic BDSM, and being for all intents and purposes synonymous with ludo-Gothic BDSM. Synthesis is development, which requires ludo-Gothic BDSM through the cultivation of good daily social-sexual habits that, once synthesized, apply theory between people making content.

In short, we embody Gothic Communism during ludo-Gothic BDSM, which we also represent (with our cakes, below); re: labor back is land back, and “From labor to land back, that is our whore’s revenge; i.e., by reclaiming violence, terror and monsters where they are normally used to harm us, subverting them with ludo-Gothic BDSM ‘when in Rome’ to make empire stateless, classless, moneyless and raceless!” (source: “A 2025 Foreword: On Volume Zero’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM”).

We’ll get to that. When we do, though, I won’t always stress the interchangeability between application, camp and ludo-Gothic BDSM having the whore’s revenge against profit (re: humanizing the harvest, therefore nature as monstrous-feminine). Even so, I still want you to keep it in mind, increasing the word’s usage from the original ~40 to roughly 200 (similar to Volume Zero’s second edition); i.e., Volume One is simpler in part because I wrote much of it before my PhD. And while I would return to it afterwards to inject ludo-Gothic BDSM into it (doing so to clarify the subject matter that was already present), these injections were originally somewhat “doughy” and few-and-far-between. I have since tried to rectify that with the second edition, here; i.e., by consciously acknowledging ludo-Gothic BDSM as a vital means of camp whose process started closer to Cuwu than not, and still had a ways to go “in the oven” after Cuwu exited my life; re: before I would really start to take advantage of it in Volume Two.

Note: The increase for “ludo-Gothic BDSM” in the manifesto is largely for comparative purposes—i.e., the count in the manifesto is technically “more” than the Poetry Module and similar to the Undead Module’s first editions (180 and 293), but also isn’t steelmanned, this time around; it’s more tacked-on/annotative. The feel, then, is more checkered, and not synthesized more thoroughly. Instead, it’s to remind you of a point of comparison; i.e., one to make between granular terms like “oppositional praxis,” “playful Gothic” and “demon BDSM” versus me simply synthesizing them with “ludo-Gothic BDSM”; re: from Volume Zero’s prototype after Volume One’s first draft back into Volume One’s final draft leading into Volume Two synthesizing everything post hoc, during holistic study. My not doing so here, with Volume One’s second edition, is to preserve the manifesto’s historical and simplified nature, and to allow you a unique chance to see ludo-Gothic BDSM “unspooled” and discussed in a manner you might actually encounter outside these books. 

Think of it, then, as a de-evolution viewed backwards, one used to morphologically expressed—in circuitous, non-linear and ergodic terms—the path I took to get here; i.e., a castle inside a castle, or as I write in “Meeting Rebels” (from the Poetry Module):

An echoing dislocation—nay, an echolocation of dislocated castles, of ruins (the narrative of the crypt)—their string of ghost towns write with/written in disintegration (death, vis-à-vis cryptomimesis) as roads only ostensibly to nowhere; i.e., building sand castles standing in for Communism as the elusive “princess in another castle” but also Capitalism as the intimidating dragon holding her prisoner (or the white woman collaring the dragon, but I digress) as a synthetic (thesis-to-antithesis) plurality of conflict that yields different forms and functions in the same sand: a “collective something-something” that, no matter how far we run, walks (shambles) faster than we do: the return of the living dead as speaking for itself regarding the colossal wreck before, during and after its decay (source).

Exploitation and liberation share the same space, on and offstage; the way out of the labyrinth is inside it, regardless of when and where you find yourself: camping the canon in duality during ludo-Gothic BDSM through a reclaimed language of the underworld to reverse abjection, thus profit, during the whore’s revenge; i.e., through the human body (and its monomorphic gender expression) as alien to capital vindictively pimping it (re: “Concerning Rape Play“). So can we, through theatre of such things, externalize what is normally unseen, or draw attention to what is outside ourselves according to our internal trauma externalized (e.g., “Escaping Jadis“).

—Perse, 4/3/2025

Nevertheless, ludo-Gothic BDSM will come into play much more often, here (and in less doughy forms), and especially later in the book series—from Volume Two into Volume Three (which is even older than the manifesto, hence doesn’t have the term in it at all). People communicate through sex (and gender) to heal from trauma; i.e., doing so ways that build cumulatively towards what—for Gothic Communism—is a holistic enterprise. It’s what Cuwu and I did, working on a system of camp that neither of us realized would go on to become Sex Positivity‘s praxial bedrock: of my work’s applied theory and into our pedagogy of the oppressed (and subsequent gender trouble and parody—terms to explore in Volume Three). In the interim, here’s a face to go with the name; i.e., whose ur-camp (and bangin’ PAWG-level bod) fueled what ludo-Gothic BDSM became in my and Bunny’s later prototype—Cuwu’s vital clay (and dark hungry energies) that helped give Galatea shape, thus a voice to liberate Medusa with! Not once, but over and over and over again, passion is a refrain to repeatedly embark on when pursuing universal liberation;  i.e., the Communist Numinous trapped inside a little four-eyed, snow-white baddie with a tight hairy pussy and fat succulent ass (the Medusa takes many forms)!

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Miss ya, kid; stay safe out there!

Love,

—Persephone

(exhibit 6b2a2: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard—with Cuwu blowing Persephone in her sleep without express permission [to be fair I absolutely didn’t mind, in hindsight, and Cuwu confessed it seemed like a safe bet, at the time; it was].

That being said, the sleep sex Cuwu and I would have later on was fully negotiated; i.e., without any assumptions; re:

[model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; source: “Dark Shadows”] 

Ideally, illustrating mutual consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM should always be fully and clearly negotiated; i.e., because that’s what goes into any dialectical-material context that people can glean from our artwork [and its lessons]! To it, nothing is discrete in Gothic; learn from our mistakes, but also our creative successes putting the pussy on the chainwax! Love is a battlefield and revolution is a place for love to bloom. Learn from us while making love to help revolution take root in peoples’ hearts and minds, but also their bodies’ various holes [a hyphenation of technology and tissue]! As such, take risks that calculate more safely afterward, but be as safe as you can while doing so at the time! Fortune favors the bold, but consent above all else [a balancing act between caution and courage].

[artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Whatever happens, make something that lasts. Even if that’s only in your memories—and be those in the flesh or passed on through media into flesh, there and back again—we will be waiting for you future rebels; i.e., when you go looking through castles, onstage and off, for spectres to dance with! 

[artist: Sabs]

“We are all animals, my lady.” And like animals, we survive after death through what we leave behind; i.e., genes, but also camp (the technological versions of genes). You wanna camp something? Make it gay [of any sex/gender] and remove the abject, us-versus-them [cop/victim] panic attached to it! In turn, time is a circle, and “what we do in life echoes in eternity!” Come be gay with us!)

Manifesto/Instruction Volume Outline

“DEMON, ATHETOS SAY, KILL.”

—Athetos’ variants, Axiom Verge (2014)

Volume One is functionally divided in two: our manifesto, and the exploration of trauma as a powerful means of instruction during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the application of power through the campy aesthetics of inequality and death during calculated risk: camping bread and circus inside the circus through our baked goods (cake or otherwise). To that, it contains my original preface, manifesto, sample essay and synthesis roadmap, which we shall now outline in this brief section.

Before we do, I quickly (over the next one-and-a-half pages) want to consider the nature of the exhibit style of this volume compared to my thesis. More so than Volume Zero, Volume One invites the reader to consider investigating power and trauma through theory and praxis as things to synthesize and express; i.e., through active, informed, collective participation; e.g., through shared exhibits like the one below. Said exhibit was created between Roxie Rusalka and myself, with Roxie being informed of my project ahead of time and agreeing to take part. It was deliberate/planned, and took time, money and work to pull off, but also mutual/informed consent:

Note: This exhibit is cited in “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Metroidvania” in the Undead Module; go there to see me expand on its ideas. —Perse, 4/2/2025

(exhibit 6b2b: Model and artist: Roxie Rusalka and Persephone van der Waard. Instruction occurs through the interrogation of trauma, wherein power is perceived and performed; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM/general Gothic poetics and simplified theories that incorporate a fair amount of former worker history pushing towards liberation. Said history is typically “lost” under state operations and must be repeatedly reclaimed through a liminal pedagogy—the act of reimagining systemic abuse received by workers from state forces. This reclamation very much includes monsters that are historically regarded as treacherous to status-quo agents, but especially regarding men under the Cartesian model; e.g., the nymph or siren as a regular emasculator of traditional stations of male agency and authority. To that, Roxie’s handle, “Rusalka,” refers to a type of Slavic water siren, which Roxie suggested I use as inspiration for depicting her in my book. Seeing as I already recognized the mythology from Thomas Happ’s 2014 Metroidvania, I drew Roxie as a Rusalki from Axiom Verge to instruct viewers with.

My and Roxie’s pedagogy of the oppressed, then, constitutes something that you might recognize from elsewhere; i.e., as having threatened male figures and institutions from earlier hauntologies: the Rusalki from Axiom Verge serving as titanic war machines who—in the style of a framed narrative ripped from Frankenstein—instruct and dominate Trace as an avatar/unwitting extension of the game’s chief male antagonist, Athetos. None of this is strictly “new” insofar as it has already appeared in fiction in some shape or form, but its present resurrection constitutes unique elements amid ongoing struggles.

The game’s narrative installs a psychomachic, psychosexual dialog between all parties, established through play and felt through various positions of ignorance, knowledge and power imbalance. The women of the game are its primary instructors, and teach Trace from a place of darkness: the hellish wellspring of oblivion imparting fatal wisdom and traumatic rememory as much through pain, unequal power exchange and outright lies/subterfuge as they do through open communication. The takeaway isn’t that Amazonian women are inherently treacherous, but survivors of immense trauma working with potential allies who, at times, have no idea who they’re serving: Trace embodies Athetos, whose desire to conquer space/the universe through the colonial gaze of planet Earth [astronoetics] is initiated, embodied and explored through a position of ignorance; i.e., one that thrives through ergodic, monomythic motion and the shadow of Pygmalion/the Cycle of Kings as something to routinely bring about at the cost of all things.

[artist: Wildragon]

Within this overarching structure, canon classically challenges the ancient female as an Archaic Mother to behead; to reverse this is to foster a counterfeit of Athena’s Aegis that freezes state potential in its tracks: female power as something to behold and learn from through the death of an internalized bigotry and desire to conquer that is often, at first blush, framed as “self-defense,” “progress,” and “empowerment.”)

The entirety of the volume contains dozens of exhibits like the one above, arranged inside the preface, sample essay and two volume halves:

• The preface (included in this post) explains how Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism differs from older Gothic and Marxist academia/praxis that I wish to modify and borrow from (Marxist-Leninism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis) in order to proceed beyond the myopia of Capitalist Realism using a unique synthesis of Gothic theories, Marxist concepts, and various other factors presented with commonplace language as freighted, liminal and already-colonized, but also potentially freeing when used by workers to open up their minds in dated, pulpy ways: the proletarian Gothic imagination.
• “Manifesto” simplifies the complex theory of our thesis volume by providing our manifesto in full; the manifesto gives our mission statement, as well as a variety of signposts and core ideas I’ve coined/retooled from older thinkers: the six Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism (the Six Rs), four main Gothic academic theories (the Four Gs); its essays/essay groups (“The Nation-State,” “An Uphill Battle,” and “Monster Modes“) also explore the topics of the Gothic mode we’ll continue to cover through the rest of the book—its monsters, lairs/parallel space, Hermeneutic Gothic-Communist Quadfecta, and phobias—as well as the Six Doubles of Creative/Oppositional Praxis and their synthetic oppositional groupings through which to synthesize, thus interrogate state abuses using trauma writing and artwork.
• “Instruction“ focuses on instructing theory once simplified by using trauma writing and artwork as a synthetic, educational means of Gothic poetic expression (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM). The manifesto postscript tackles generational trauma and police abuse by seeing it in others through their pedagogy of the oppressed; the sample essay uses every key idea in my book to analyze a primary text at full speed; “Paid Labor“ stresses the value of paying workers when synthesizing praxis; and the synthesis symposium covers how to use the synthetic oppositional groupings to synthesize our general terms and academic ideas, processing them (and our trauma) into idiosyncratic, emotionally and Gothically intelligent social-sexual habits within our own lives; it covers more at length what we illustrated during the camp map finale in Volume Zero, focusing on Cartesian trauma and how its profit motive unironically treats nature as food: (rape and war that harvest nature through monstrous-feminine dialogs).

(artist: Roxie Rusalka)

Preface: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; or, Synthesizing Emotional/Gothic Intelligence through a Sex-Positive Gothic Mode

“You know nothing, Jon Snow.” 

—Ygritte, A Storm of Swords (2000)

Synthesis is vital to good praxis. For our purposes, synthesis can be adequately summarized as “the cultivation of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural/racial awareness; i.e., the deliberate utilization of Gothic poetics during the practical application of simplified theory had between activist workers: formulating healthy social-sexual habits to deal with state trauma.” But there’s still plenty of theory that goes into these habits and their collective instruction/de facto education during ludo-Gothic BDSM. To that, Gothic Communism is “picky” in terms of what it incorporates. I want to run these habits down during the preface, then conclude said preface by touching on praxial synthesis (and catharsis) before moving into the manifesto proper!

First, a few things Gothic Communism tends to avoid, theory-wise. Gothic Communism strongly dislikes pure poststructuralist/psychoanalytical (e.g., Freud, Jung and Lacan) and Marxist-Leninist models (though it employs many of their ideas in an-Com ways); i.e., not only do these models tend to be dated, vaguely abstracting and sexist/queerphobic (as Stalin and Freud both were, above), but they are far more common in Gothic academia than I would like (especially Freud in remnants of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, when second wave feminism and post-Freudian analysis were all the rage, and which I would critique in my own work; re: “A Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love“).

Instead, I wrote Sex Positivity to marry Gothic/queer theory with Marxist, dialectical-material analysis/oppositional praxis, a process I have decided to call Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism. While both sides of it (and ludo-Gothic BDSM, to a lesser extent) will be thoroughly explained in the Manifesto and Instruction portions of this volume, let’s quickly run down this book’s Communist and Gothic aims to summarize what Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is according to me and why.

Note: I wrote the manifesto before my PhD, and this preface attempts to—among other things—explain why Gothic Communism is anarcho-Communist is scope versus Marxist-Leninist (which Cuwu was, oddly enough; i.e., Gothic Communism was the accidental byproduct of a copulating an-Com and self-described “Marxist-Leninist”—the latter inspired by Castro, if memory serves).

To be as thorough as I can, then, here is my definition for “Marxist-Leninism” alongside the abridged definition of “Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism)” and “anarcho-Communism”:

Marxist-Leninism/”tankies”

An embryonic form of Socialism that, past and present, favors state models and nostalgia; i.e., one that hybridizes Marx and Engels with 20th century thinkers and leaders—most notably Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, but also Mao, Castro and other state leaders/schools going into the 21st: through “tankie” apologia whitewashing the crimes of said leaders and their states as beings to worship and compromise with (Bad Mouse’s “On Hakim’s Nuance,” 2025).

anarcho-Communism

The gradual disillusion and transmutation of Capitalism into Socialism and finally Communism through direct worker solidarity and collective action versus through state mechanism and argument; i.e., whereupon power is horizontally restructured away from state models and Marxism Leninism (and state power/state-regulated Capitalism).

Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism (abridged, full definition in “The Terms I Coined”)

the titular term of my book series, so I’ll quote the whole thing, here—expanded and updated substantially since 2023, in 2025, to account for my writing of four books after Volume Zero): Coined by me, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is the deliberate, pointed critique of capital/Capitalism and the state using a unique marriage of Gothic/queer/game theory and semi-Marxist (an-Com) ideas synthesized campily by sex-positive workers during proletarian praxis: developing systemic catharsis, mid-liminal expression during praxial opposition, using ludo-Gothic BDSM and palliative-Numinous dialogs (e.g., Metroidvania).

(source)

Beyond my understanding of the term, “Marxist-Leninist” was actually coined by Stalin around or after Lenin died, in the 1920s (from Wikipedia): “Marxism–Leninism was developed from Bolshevism by Joseph Stalin in the 1920s based on his understanding and synthesis of classical Marxism and Leninism. Marxism–Leninism holds that a two-stage communist revolution is needed to replace capitalism” (source). And Stalin, let’s not forget, was a total-and-massive cunt who—among many other things, besides—enabled pedophilia in his own inner circle (re: Behind the Bastards’ “Beria: Stalin’s Pedophile Cop & the Soviet Oppenheimer”), made homosexuality illegal[3] in 1933 (the same year Hilter burned down Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institution of Sexology) and, all in all, killed/displaced a shitload of people (millions) to reinforce his own cult of personality (e.g., Stalingrad—arguably the biggest battle in modern or medieval history—was strategically worthless to the Russians or the Germans; i.e., Stalin wanted the city defended and Hilter to conquer it [costing over a million soldiers on both sides] because it had “Stalin” in the name. If that’s not vanity then I don’t know what is). These men were not gods, nor should we treat them as such; they were the ruling class, and one whose state Capitalism [on Stalin’s side] was largely nominal in its historical execution of Communism (and yes, the West undercut it, but Stalin and the Politburo that survived him still held the stickle during the harvest).

This being said, Stalinist Bolshevism isn’t identical to Hilter’s National Socialism, but both men were dictators, nonetheless (as was Mao, and by extension, American presidents, British Monarchs, and so on). In doing ludo-Gothic BDSM to develop Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, we’re not here to worship these darlings, but kill their legacies by camping their ghosts (and that of their offshoots; e.g., Creed, Kristeva, Butler, Foucault, Bad Empanada, etc); re: “the state is straight” and ASAB (from the Undead Module’s “Understanding Vampires”):

To it, Bad Empanada is a Marxist-Leninist, valuing the material element to Marxist analysis, but also state mechanisms; i.e., he doesn’t condone or support anarcho-Communism, treating its practitioners like hopeless hedonists and (as I shall explain) sex pests to lump in with genuine predators. Except, the state is straight, historically the ultimate and constant enemy selling out and wearing down to abuse its own people; i.e., as expressed by Bad Empanada himself towards me and others like me, the state—whether it calls itself Socialist or capitalist—always prioritizes us fags and sex workers when the state of exception narrows (consider this sentence the Gothic, queer and thoroughly anarchistic thesis argument for “Understanding Vampires”). We can’t afford to be strictly material in our investigations of capital, because much of praxis (and its synthesis in our daily lives) comes from the social component of media; i.e., that is produced as much by workers as corporations (ibid.).

Furthermore, when camping Marx‘ ghost (and his followers’ compelled stupidity/willful ignorance), we can still borrow from Marx (the “broken clock” mantra/Sarkeesian’s adage); i.e., blood in, blood out:

The whole point of abjection is to popularize and normalize open violence in society (foreign and domestic) and popular media against target groups, and that’s exactly what happened to queer people in the 1980s. They came out of the closet in force and the state invented a shadow army to attach to them and blame for/capitalize on imperial decline through militarized violence. Any nation-state could recognize and attack them, thus shame, rape, mutilate and kill them; society became sick in ways never before seen. Nowhere was safe for either side, Cartesian thought radicalized in service to profit under the neoliberal hegemon; i.e., through tokenized police violence against queerness during us-versus them copaganda. Already reprobate, we became grist for the mill—a new destiny to manifest by enterprising (and paranoid, avenging) young boys and girls of all colors and creeds (white Indians), lest they catch and transmit what we were carrying: Black-Death vermin to trap, cage and exterminate, but also sexual and yeast/fungal/viral (code-like, secretive) infections to cure told in retro-future revivals neither here nor there (a Foucauldian moral panic policing sex by treating us as an alien health crisis; i.e., as Communism, but especially gay Communism, as AIDS incarnate).

Out of nowhere, the future was abruptly and utterly canceled, and it was suddenly all us fags’ fault, what with our gay anarchist’s “Commie,” alien, abject biology and gender suddenly being everywhere; i.e., waiting insidiously and perilously to hatch and make the Earth queer and gay from outer space—all despite older proponents of Communism historically wanting little if anything to do with us; re: the state is straight and our survival is both antithetical to its own and something it needs to prey upon and extirpate to carry on—like a vampire, in other words. To quote Marx (who loved monstrous language; re: Castricano), specifically from Kapital, “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor.” Our vampirism must camp canonical iterations, the state most of all, including all its heteronormative, cryptomimetic bid for power’s rape and death fantasies: our death and rape at their hands. This can be theft of power to cause harm, but also labor and wages, even bodies and blood itself (e.g., John Dooley and Emily Gallagher’s “Blood Money: Selling Plasma to Avoid High-Interest Loans,” 2024); and all existent in a half-real sense between history as alive and dead, material and social, imaginary and substantial, etc (ibid.).

In short, where knowledge gaps exist, fill them with whatever proves dialectically-materially and socially-sexually useful towards universal liberation; i.e., one that routinely has the whore’s revenge against profit during ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the canon. Leave the rest; its garbage. —Perse, 4/2/2025

(exhibit 6b2c: Model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard—from “My Logo for Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism!” I designed the logo on August 26th, 2025; i.e., right around when I began writing my PhD in earnest [which released on October 8th]. After Cuwu, Bunny was central in helping me prototype ludo-Gothic BDSM as the vector for develop Gothic Communism; re: “The Quest for Power” in theory, and the “camp map” finale in application.)

The Communist aims of this Gothic book series (and its ludo-Gothic BDSM) are anarcho-Communist in scope—a combination of Communism and anarchism (there are other combinations, but these are either excluded [anarcho-Capitalism] or fall under anarcho-Communism in my opinion; e.g., queer/feminist Communism). So, not only does Sex Positivity seek to abolish private property in pursuit of post-scarcity beyond Capitalism; its chief desire is to end the worker exploitations that reliably happen through privatization—occurring through the nation-state as the chief monopolizer of violence and terror in ways that neoliberal corporations spearhead as their partners-in-crime (neoliberalism being a return to the “freeing” of the market, consolidating wealth in the pockets of the bourgeoisie through state-corporate abuses of power and personal responsibility rhetoric disseminated by centrist media; neoliberals also disguise, aid and abet fascism, a concept we will explore much more thoroughly in Volume Three).

Everything I propose operates in service of deprivatization and dismantling the nation-state, corporations included. The vertical consolidation of materials and power in state-corporate echelons is horribly alienating and destructive. Both must be gradually replaced by anarcho-syndicalist communes as horizontal arrangements thereof. Doing so amounts to Gothic Communism’s chief aim: a Gothic (monstrous) mode of expression that is productive, constructive and creatively sex-positive, liberating workers by utilizing the democratization of sexualized labor as something found and fostered among class- and culture-conscious workers, not the state (which historically privatizes labor [and Gothic poetics] for the elite in fundamentally undemocratic ways, including Marxist-Leninism’s various missteps; i.e., a “kettling” of state powers by capitalist forces into headspaces of paranoia and ultimately the settling of old scores).

(source: Julia Kenny’s “Stalin’s Cult of Personality: Its Origin and Progression,” 2015)

In other words, there’s to be no cults of personality nominally declaring themselves “Communists” or “National Socialists” in Gothic Communism, nor genocidal great leaders nor pyramid schemes; no Pol Pot, Chairman Mao, nor Stalin as Marxist-Leninist heads of state; no neoliberal, corporate-born billionaires like Bill Gates or their establishment-politician/corporate-Americanized executives quietly assisting the billionaire class as the great destroyers of the planet (these various heads to the state of affairs are synonymous with “the state/the elite” insofar as I use those terms); no popes nor cult leaders; no venerate, accommodated copycats of various “fathers of [insert academic field, here]” like Jacques Derrida and his god-awful prose (ditch said dreck, but keep his genuinely productive and useful Deconstructionist ideas; e.g., “There is no transcendental signified” [obviously paraphrased, because Derrida couldn’t write a straightforward sentence to save his life] from his 1966 essay, “Structure, Sign and Play“) nor the post-Freudians who followed in Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung’s footsteps only to have their psychoanalytical models updated by the likes of Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson alike, either man presented as annoyingly sacred and lame (to be fair, Zizek can be a lot fun when picking low-hanging fruit, but he’s still not Marxist, anarcho-Communist or queer enough for my taste; e.g., his defending of a two-state solution[4] vis-à-vis the Palestinian genocide).

The idea of Gothic Communism is to avoid the Foucauldian “torture loop” of a hauntologized, abject disgust mill; i.e., the expectation of medieval, rapey violence post-deconstruction, but also the chickenshit, exploitative power imbalances in academic circles; e.g., Simone Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre working as a team to routinely “deflower” a (much) younger third. As Andy Martin writes in “The Persistence of the ‘Lolita Syndrome'” (2013):

It has to be said that Beauvoir’s interest in these matters was not purely theoretical (in fact, it is hard to conceive of any philosopher’s thoughts being purely theoretical). As a diligent investigator, I am obliged to say that she was dismissed from her teaching job in 1943 for “behavior leading to the corruption of a minor.” The minor in question was one of her pupils at a Paris lycée. It is well established that she and Jean-Paul Sartre developed a pattern, which they called the “trio,” in which Beauvoir would seduce her students and then pass them on to Sartre. (See, for example, “A Disgraceful Affair,” by Bianca Lamblin, in which she recalls being infatuated with Beauvoir, but romanced systematically by Sartre, who cheerfully remarks, on the way to a consummation, that “the hotel chambermaid will be really surprised, because she caught me taking another girl’s virginity only yesterday.”)

Beauvoir’s “Lolita Syndrome” (her personal favorite, she said, among her essays) offers an evangelical defence of the sexual emancipation of the young (source).

Double standards aside, both intellectuals shamelessly exploited the unequal power structures of academia, but enjoyed a constant postmortem, reverential emblematizing as the intellectuals with the final say on feminist matters. Equally gross, in hindsight, is Michel Foucault’s 1993 interview with Edmund White, whereupon he delivers a self-confessed and seemingly innocent admission to the chasing of cute boys his entire academic career (echoing Dennis Cooper’s twink-in-peril schtick, but in real life minus the ironic/liberatory meta):

I wasn’t always smart; I was actually very stupid in school [T]here was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him – and that’s how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I’ve been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys (source).

Zeuhl said they “ride and die” with Foucault (not having much to say in reply when I mentioned he was a pedophile, learning that about him several years after Zeuhl and I broke up). More to the point, the above quote is something Zeuhl would use to seduce me with (re: “Leaving the Closet“). —Perse, 4/2/2025

All seemingly innocent until you learn about his predatory sex tourism (Bad Empanada 2, 2022), desire to abolish age of consent laws in France (The Living Philosophy’s “Why French Postmodernists were Pro-Paedophilia in the 1970s,” 2021), and what James Miller in The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993) called an addiction to self-destruction and sadomasochist sex (the coercive sort). Likewise, Elliot Swain in 2021 remarks in utter frustration how Foucault tended to avoid Marxist language altogether. Foucault wasn’t just accommodated, you see; he was enabled and desired intellectual fame similar to what Sartre had achieved before him. It’s gross, queer-normative, TERF levels of nasty and needs to be abolished. Good play and sex-positive BDSM are all entirely possible (and something we’ll explore more in Volume Three, Chapters Two and Three). However, creepy Gay Uncle Fester ain’t it.

Rather, in a reconstructed, post-scarcity world, there is no systemic war and rape. To this, Gothic Communism is also not a regression back into the freed market like Gorbachev did to the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, but instead a collective push towards universal degrowth (that means no “as good as it gets” moderates, too). Instead, this is to be an entirely different mode of undertaking development under Capitalism towards anarcho-Communism away from Capitalist Realism, but the basic ideas are still the same—re: Socialism’s “From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] work” to Communism’s “to each according to [their] need.” Anarcho-Communism simply means class solidarity and collective action performed directly by informed, intelligent workers of various sorts, aided by bourgeois and petit-bourgeois (middle) class allies—not by establishment politicians, academics and state-corporate agents, whose politics/praxis are bourgeois in nature; they serve the state, not workers.

For us and Gothic Communism, worker safety is sacred and supersedes any icon who came before and iconoclasts absolutely shouldn’t hesitate to tear down/camp their harmful reputations. To give some further examples:

• Milton was patriarchal (Lapham’s Quarterly’s “Misspent Youth”)
• Tolkien was racist (Anderson Rearick’s “Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc,” 2004).
• Marx wasn’t overtly a Gothicist (certainly not by current, iconoclastic standards, anyways; he loved ghosts, but these had to be “unpacked” by people like Derrida, Castricano and other Gothic theorists whose work emerged nearly [and after] a century after Marx’ death); also, he was anti-Semitic (“Karl Marx in the Ludwig Rosenberger Library of Judaica,” 2006) and homophobic (see “Making Marx Gay“).
• Oscar Wilde was anti-Semitic (Christopher Nassar’s “The Problem of the Jewish Manager in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” 2005).
• Simone Beauvoir was not only a rapist, but cis-centric (“woman is other”).
• Pablo Picasso was a rapist and misogynist (Marta’s “The Women of Picasso,” 2023), as was Roman Polanski (Dreading’s “The Case of Roman Polanski,” 2022).
• Lovecraft was mega-racist: “China Miéville says, ‘There is nothing epiphenomenal about racism in Lovecraft.’ Put differently, Lovecraft’s race thinking cannot be separated from his body of work” (Brown University’s “The Racial Imaginaries of H. P. Lovecraft”).
• Coleridge was an apologist for the state, scapegoating Matthew Lewis as “terrorist[5]” from a white, straight man’s cis-supremacist, classist and racist position; i.e., “equality of convenience” dressed up as a conspicuous boner for the West using the flowery (and sober, at this point) language of a Poet Laureate:

The Romans slowly conquered the more southerly portion of their tribes, and succeeded only by their superior arts, their policy, and better discipline. After a time, when the Goths, ­to use the name of the noblest and most historical of the Teutonic tribes, ­had acquired some knowledge of these arts from mixing with their conquerors, they invaded the Roman territories. The hardy habits, the steady perseverance, the better faith of the enduring Goth rendered him too formidable an enemy for the corrupt Roman, who was more inclined to purchase the subjection of his enemy, than to go through the suffering necessary to secure it. The conquest of the Romans gave to the Goths the Christian religion as it was then existing in Italy; and the light and graceful building of Grecian, or Roman-Greek order, became singularly combined with the massy architecture of the Goths, as wild and varied as the forest vegetation which it resembled. The Greek art is beautiful (source: “General Character in the Gothic Literature and Art”).

• (from my thesis volume): Fred Botting and Frederic Jameson were/are apologists of science fiction as somehow “not Gothic” (re: Botting’s silly arguments of “Gothic redundancy” as I tackle them [exhibit 1a1a1h2a3; re: “Origins and Lineage“] and Jameson’s very-dumb 1991 declaration in Postmodernism, calling the Gothic “that boring and exhausted paradigm[6]“).
• George Orwell was anti-Communist (despite knowing virtually nothing about Russia and the USSR) and a fascist apologist (re: Hakim, 2023).
• Renowned geneticist Richard Dawkins is a eugenics (Gaia Vince’s “Eugenics Would Not Work in Humans,” 2020) and rape apologist (Melissia McEwan’s “Dawkins Defends Himself with More Rape Apologia,” 2013) and Islamophobe, extending his anti-intellectual, bought-and-paid for bigotry to trans people (Essence of Thought’s “Richard Dawkins Promotes Creationism in Anti-Trans Crusade,” 2023).
• Bill Gates is a soulless vampire who—along with those who support his utterly draconian privatization of the computer market and gutting of public education, as well as his bogus, parasitic and thoroughly disingenuous “philanthropy” (source: Another Slice’s “Bill Gates: King Of Neoliberalism,” 2020)—has ties to child sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein (Behind the Bastards’ “Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates,” 2023). Billionaires not only personify the elite; they’re a complete and utter scourge on the planet and should not exist—i.e., they’re not useful to developing Communism; they’re lying parasites begot from the Second Gilded Age courtesy of neoliberal hegemony and systemic lies, surveillance, privatization, and genocide dressed up as the banality of evil. Fuck the lot of ’em.
• Noam Chomsky had ties to then-outed pedophile and sex trafficker, Jeffery Epstein (“Epstein’s Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names,” 2023).

We not only have to be better than the West; we have to be better than all these persons and avoid what my friend Sandy Norton lovingly calls the “Imperialism of Theory” (coined when she was sparring with a fellow academic about William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1848 novel, Vanity Fair):

At its best, theory offers us models that encourage speculative thinking. Many critics assume, however, that the application of theoretical discourses to literature necessarily entails a particular, and limited, set of interpretive practices: reference to a theorist’s ideas, for instance, may too easily be taken to mean that a critic subscribes to all the tenets of that theorist’s position as well as to those of the better-known practitioners of the theory. This constraining movement unnecessarily forecloses speculative thought and seeks, in a way that mirrors imperialist discourses, to conserve the authority and power of those who have accumulated intellectual and academic capital through association with a theory.

This sort of theoretical imperialism is also methodological: the repeated application of a theory in a particular way quickly comes to constitute an authority which dictates that it should only be applied in that way. Although he may not do so intentionally, Perkin employs theory as a constraining force when he takes me to task for using Foucault’s work but failing to adopt a strictly New Historicist methodology: “Foucault leads one to New Historicism, which requires that one read a text as part of a world of discourses, whereas Norton’s article is really a close reading of some strands of a single text” (165; my emphasis). The semantic slippage in this sentence is telling, I think. It is, on an overt level, “New Historicism” or presumably its practitioners that “require” the use of this method. But because “Foucault leads one to New Historicism,” the implication of the sentence is that Foucauldian theory itself “require[s]” this method. This I would deny. Although his work provides a model for some of the methods of New Historicism, neither Foucault nor any New Historicist would claim that his work which is used across a broad range of disciplines may only be appropriately applied using those methods.

I do not believe that I am required to demonstrate “a need to invoke Foucault” (and the diction here is interesting precisely why does Perkin use the word “invoke”?). Like Marx or Freud, Foucault is himself an example of what he calls in the essay, “What Is an Author?,” “founders of discursivity,” figures who have “established an endless possibility of discourse” (154). “To expand a type of discursivity,” he proposes, is precisely “to open it up to a certain number of possible applications” (156). Rather than “needing to invoke” Foucault, I choose to apply Foucault because of the speculative richness such application offers (source: “The Imperialism of Theory: A Response to J. Russell Perkin,” 1994).

Simply put, singular and enforced interpretations are dangerous, and we need to be choosy in ways that prolifically and flexibly enrich our arguments, not simply dot them with the fancy patriarchal ornaments of accommodated intellectuals. Meanwhile, our ruffling of their collective feathers needs to hit a collective nerve: their sell-out, privileged status; i.e., sitting in their ivory towers and basically talking amongst themselves in a highly privatized sense. This requires a certain sense of detachment from positions of comfort that historically are used to divide and conquer workers. As Said writes in “Reflections on Exile” (1984):

Because exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. They generally do not have armies or states, although they are often in search of them. Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people. […] Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.

Regard experiences as if they were about to disappear. What is it that anchors them in reality? What would you save of them? What would you give up? Only someone who has achieved independence and detachment, someone whose homeland is “sweet” but whose circumstances makes it impossible to recapture that sweetness, can answer those questions. (Such a person would also find it impossible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma.)

This may seem like a prescription for an unrelieved grimness of outlook and, with it, a permanently sullen disapproval of all enthusiasm or buoyancy of spirit. Not necessarily. While it perhaps seems peculiar to speak of the pleasures of exile, there are some positive things to be said for a few of its conditions. Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal.

For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally. There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish orthodox judgement and elevate appreciative sympathy. There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be (source).

Exiting Plato’s cave can feel brutal, insofar as its new-felt unheimlich is irreversible. From our own “pleasures of exile,” though, home is something to cultivate through alienation as a forced consequence under Capitalism. It, like trauma in general, becomes something to live with, often through rituals of theatrical distress:

(artist: Coey Kuhn)

Liberation from the illusions of capital means our prescribed homeland becomes foreign in ways that allow for startling new appreciations; i.e., in terms of how we identify using Gothic language during fresh struggles under old, systemic problems: as monsters. Doing so helps us better voice the chaos inherent to our daily lives under capital, once the game is up. Yes, we can be “ostracized” by people who frankly care little for our well-being at an institutional level (accommodated intellectuals); but as their cool dismissal of us exposes the apathy and bigotry behind their “soft” arguments, their hard, inflexible stances can be denuded by Gothic Communism’s chief weapon: poetics. Canon’s combined, “sacred” memories—of powerful men, women and token minorities—need to be expunged[7] and criticized, preserving the exhibits of what was while utilizing what is as useful towards development towards a better world than has ever existed; i.e., to be indebted, but not enslaved, towards an imaginary past: the Wisdom of the Ancients as a living document to learn from, but also rewrite as needed.

Said document—and by extension the public imagination/understanding associated with it—is something that workers can actively contribute towards for their own betterment. As such, these borrowed concepts’ flexible application works well beyond their original, intended prescription while we make our own monsters (thus historical materialism). Time is of the essence, though; we need to critique power dialectically-materially yesterday and now in the kinds of language that the vast majority of workers actively recognize and consume voraciously—monsters, but also sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll as “Gothic.” Capitalism commodifies worker struggles through Gothic language as popular but policed, something that we must reclaim from state forces styling themselves (and canon) as genuine and exclusive, but also “safe.” Intended readers for the ghost of the counterfeit are habitually its greatest abusers through the process of abjection; i.e., inside a heteronormative, setter-colonial system that has, since its very inception, been designed to exploit, demonize and control others for profit—to rape them through an elaborate series of mind games and lies that have them fearful of, and fascinated with, the imaginary past as a dependable tool of menticide. To this, rape is more than physical/sexual violence; it’s the flagrant abuse of power that leads to worker exploitation on physical, mental, sexual and/or emotional levels over time: the mind as something to rape according to stations and stances within Capitalism that reflect harmful positions of unfair status, privilege and authority.

Our Gothic-Communist emphasis, then, is the class and cultural solidarity of Gothicized sex work in worker hearts and minds—its monstrous artistic output constituting collective labor action as a liberatory teaching device; i.e., proletarian praxis operating through internalized class/culture consciousness, emotional/Gothic intelligence, and trauma awareness and expression; and whose subsequent appreciative irony—of xenophilic camp through praxial catharsis—opposes bourgeois praxis and state propaganda’s heteronormative canon. “Monsters are real” becomes a labor dispute, insofar as they express through theatrical means how all workers, but especially gender-non-conforming workers, have the right to exist and not be exploited by capital; i.e., the same right deserving to all humans, animals, and the Earth: the satisfaction of our basic material needs and the ability to pursue our own happiness within these material systems under post-scarcity.

(artist: La Patte)

Said praxis, when synthesized, aims to “rewire” a fundamentally bourgeois Superstructure: by transforming said canon, affecting the Base through daily habits that, when cultivated, express a rebellious class and cultural character (re: camping the twin trees of Capitalism). While the Base and Superstructure originate from Marx’s own work, the Superstructure interests us because—as stated during the thesis volume—it normally “grows out of the Base and reflects the ruling class’ interests” (re: Rana Indrajit Singh). As sex-positive workers, we want to denormalize worker abuse and alienation by shifting away from generational trauma as a systemic effect; i.e., by transforming the state’s capacity to deliver such things, attacking worker minds with sex-coercive canon and unironic, harmful xenophobia and xenophilia. We must directly challenge said education and synthesis according to our own sex-positive, hence iconoclastic, Gothic poetics: recultivating the twin trees by supplying our own in their place. Our liberation is meant to be gradual, occurring through a proletarian Gothic imagination that is grown over time, and whose careful cultivation stems from a collective intelligence/awareness that is explicitly developed to function as anarcho-Communist, not Marxist-Leninist (or other socio-political and -economic arrangements that remain prone to the historical abuses of state power as a vertical, thus harmful, configuration).

Though proletarian, Sex Positivity comes out of an abject past fraught with compromise, the “state Socialism” of Marxist-Leninism becoming increasingly nominal (and abusive) under Capitalism; obviously we want to avoid that as much as we can while developing Communism outside of establishment politics; i.e., through ludo-Gothic BDSM according to our central tenets; e.g., through ironic Amazonomachia, emancipatory castle-narrative and the palliative Numinous, etc.

(original artist: William Kurelek)

The state and oppositional praxis have many moving parts that complicate the latter’s execution, especially since its working often generates friction amid praxial inertia. We’ll consider performing proletarian praxis under live, total conditions in Volume Three (first adumbrating its complicated Gothic histories in Volume Two). For Volume One, just understand that that my manifesto tenets, Gothic academic theories, mode of expression, oppositional-praxial model and synthesis roadmap (explained in that order) are all designed to function through Gothic-Communist iconoclasts re-cultivating a bourgeois Superstructure, which is what praxial synthesis ultimately is: thesis vs antithesis, canon vs iconoclasm; i.e., iconoclastic poiesis as a dark poetics/pedagogy of the oppressed intended to make workers more emotionally/Gothically intelligent, sex-positive and capable in terms of recognizing but also interrogating/negotiating power and trauma while instructing good play vs bad play during their own lives. This liminal, ongoing procedure occurs through their own creative output, which helps prevent future abuses by changing the socio-material conditions that lead to systemic harm; i.e., by telling beautiful lies that speak truth to power in “Satanic” ways, but also formulate and embody an active and unified front against state powers (and their monstrous, fetishized media, often with pornographic qualities) abusing all workers: sex-positive monsters that express worker identities attached to ongoing struggles, unresolved under capital and pinned by the boot of state enforcers. In short, we learn from the voiced oppression and lived trauma of others.

This abuse happens to varying degrees, but our monstrous empowerment demands intersectional, solidarized resistance; i.e., praxial synthesis amounts to the cultivated intuition that executes practical theory out of daily habits. Through what we make ourselves between ourselves, we achieve praxial catharsis through monstrous theatre as second-nature. Guided by sound theory as an instructional path leading away from systemic oppression, it’s something discussed less in Volume Zero because Volume Zero was primarily theory (though the camp map finale gave a brief example of camping canon between Blxxd Bunny and myself regarding systemic trauma; re: the ludo-Gothic BDSM prototype). Volume One aims to reduce said theories to a practical degree, upon which the synthesis roadmap will thoroughly consider trauma writing and artwork as things to synthesize through our bodies as monstrous-feminine (flesh is semantically loaded with fearful-dogmatic qualities that we can instruct workers away from using said bodies in a sex-positive manner). We’ll work towards praxial synthesis as we thread the manifesto, after which the volume’s second half considers its instruction towards catharsis); i.e., how praxial synthesis executes practical theory by cultivating good social-sexual habits that simplify and execute theory during oppositional praxis.

This extracurricular instruction/de facto education generally requires a “dance partner” to move with in harmonized theory before systemic catharsis can be realistically attained: while wearing costumes that express what we have in mind. The goblin is one such example, with sex-positive versions reclaiming anti-Semitic tropes and stigmatic language through complex social-sexual labor exchanges: between my partner Bay and I during our own attempts at praxial synthesis/catharsis with ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(exhibit 6b3: Model and artist: Bay and Persephone van der Waard. Bay is my partner and we make art together to express and interrogate trauma, rendering it visible during ludo-Gothic BDSM according to how we identify and self-determine. The goblin, then, is both my mascot monster for Gothic Communism, and the way that Bay identifies with as a monstrous entity that serves their pedagogy of the oppressed: the means to voice their trauma and their power with. Everything occupies the same space, including resistance and power but also class/cultural character in the presence of state abuse’s generational trauma; i.e., as something to overcome through mutual, informed consent and instructional love.)

Oppositional praxis during development reliably leads to liminal conflict and transition—especially in Gothic stories when oscillation and ludo-Gothic BDSM are expected. Part of the cliché is how a monster or parallel space’s praxial role in Gothic fiction becomes ontologically ambiguous during oppositional praxis; e.g., class allies/traitors and bourgeois/proletarian monsters, witches, zombies, etc. As Gothic Communists, we’ll have to learn to tell ’em all apart, but also relate to them from moment to living moment. While historical materialism remains a common introduction for separating traitors and co-conspirators—i.e., the dialectical-material study of monsters across the Gothic mode over space and time—these warring factors cannot and should not be separate from their social-sexual elements. To that, monstrous language remains utterly essential as we synthesize praxis within our own friendships.

This often has a Satanic function. As the “Notes on Power” essay from Volume Zero argues, the Satanic rebel speaks truth to power by telling beautiful, paradoxical and doubled lies that resist state control; re: to be “of the devil’s party” like Milton was (according to William Blake) but consciously so; i.e., conducting what the elite would consider thought crimes through dark poetics that are often more interesting (and fun/gender parodic) than blindly submitting to pre-existing authorities: facing one’s undead sensations and animalistic hunger while demonically shifting one’s shape, effectively offering up forbidden knowledge (of pleasure and trauma) when confronting one’s true self as anathema to the status quo under Capitalism. Utilized in this sense, Gothic poetics teach workers how to self-fashion and self-determine through subversive/dissident identities that, far from being controlled opposition, furtively educate audiences on how to question authority whilst forming out of oppressive, gender-troubled struggles against them; i.e., through trauma writing and artwork as a mode of survival and reclamation of one’s power through darkness visible reminding prudes that “Medusa lives!”

As my thesis also argues, “Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode” (re: “The Quest for Power“). Bay embodies that as someone I love and want to depict the way that makes them feel most authentic, but also heard and seen relative to how they feel from day to day as an oppressed person who lives a highly Satanic life. A neurodivergent, non-binary and Indigenous cutie, they treat the term “shapeshifter” as something a paradox—less of something to turn into what never was, and more a revelation of their true self waiting to be shown to others who normally don’t have the eyes for it: a possible self tied to a possible world that loves and worships them as a god. “Playing god” includes playing with gods, and Bay is my god to worship, appreciate and love as equals in a highly plastic world. We constantly learn from each other while having fun together, our shared performance and play operating through Gothic poetics as an (a)sexual voice; delight and appreciation amid (for us) profound erotic euphoria. Doing so during ludo-Gothic BDSM constitutes an effective means of interrogating trauma mid-synthesis, but also negotiating with it; i.e., to teach workers confidence by using their bodies to learn with, but also demonize and play with inside immensely cathartic thresholds. They’re someone to dive into and enjoy while synthesizing praxis towards a better world one step (and delicious fuck) at a time.

(artist: Bay)

Onto “Mission Statement and Remediating Modern-day ‘Rome’“!

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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] Originally Sex Positivity was a single volume, thus would cite its own exhibits in parenthesis. As the books grew, however, exhibits were dispersed into different separate volumes, thereby making said system moot. Now that most of my book series is online, though, I can effectively cite an exhibit and its accompanying post; e.g., “(exhibit 43e2c1 from ‘Always a Victim‘).” This is a brand-new trend, and not one that will happen in my later books until I get around to their second additions.

[2] The agreement between Cuwu and I, which we struck in mid-2022, was that I could exhibit our material on my OnlyFans*—and by extension, promote it online and make money off it—provided I kept their real name out of it. To this day, I have honored our agreement, choosing to call them by their alias, “Cuwu,” instead (a nickname I gave them).

*I only ever posted one video of Cuwu on my OnlyFans, and generally don’t advertise it, but here’s a screencap:

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

[3] A reactionary element haunting Marxism since Marx and Engels; re (from “Making Marx Gay”):

Fascists tend to say, “make something great again,” arguing as they do for a return to greatness that is inextricably tied to a conservative imaginary past. Conversely, Marx and his ilk tended to look to the future to escape the ghosts of the past, except their banishment under Capitalist Realism has led them—as Derrida pointed out—to haunt language through spectres of the man himself: his nebulous, shapeshifting reputation. It is this version of Marx that we must contend with, because it is the one that we can transform out of the actual man himself as a complicated fixture of history.

To that, this brief reminder stresses something that my thesis discusses repeatedly and should likewise be kept in mind throughout the entire book: Marx wasn’t gay in the functional sense; he was to some degree homophobic, and bigoted in ways his epistolary correspondence with Engels reveals. And while I think it’s entirely worth noting that homosexuality and its formative history merit valid criticism insofar as men with power have often sexually abused children (which Foucault dubiously called “everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality [and] inconsequential bucolic pleasures,” notably lamenting their ending of, following the rise of the bourgeoisie), we must also remember that until the late 1800s gender-non-conformity was entirely synonymous with criminal activity (for men, because women and slaves weren’t legally considered people at this point) (source).

To it, Marx’ signature homophobia and anti-queer tendencies haven’t gone anywhere; they continue to haunt liberatory discourse among Marxist-Leninists punching down queerphobically against people—i.e., those who know more about these matters than they do; re: Bad Empanada making Stalinist arguments against me and my kind because of Marxist-Leninist nostalgia:

Originally from a community post Bad Empanada made, saying “People who talk about sex constantly and openly like it’s their main interest must be dealt with. Make it taboo again,” followed by him responding to me, saying “BDSM doctors aren’t real” when I called myself one (which, I am); i.e., I—a BDSM doctor and trans woman—am not real (thus neither are sex therapists and paid/unpaid researchers, apparently).

It goes to show that people who are often right about a lot of things, just as often, are really fucking wrong when they are wrong. “Doctors,” for instance, didn’t originate from universities in the 20th-century style; for our purposes, they started off as clerics and scholars in monasteries during the Middle Ages—e.g., Leonardo da Vinci didn’t have a university degree and worked with media and materials, hand-in-hand (and was charged with sodomy* by a local town); i.e., his contributions aren’t something you can merely dismiss for him doing so (including the sodomy charge) (source: “Understanding Vampires) (source).

While pre-capitalist ideas do occupy Gothic-Communist pushes towards a post-scarcity world (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients recultivating the Superstructure), nostalgia towards said half-real past should never trump human rights, thus undercut development during ludo-Gothic BDSM; it should assist in development by undercutting the power of the state and its proponents—anisotropically reversing abjection during a revolutionary cryptonymy!

[4] When Zizek writes, “We can and should unconditionally support Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorist attacks” (source: “The Real Dividing Line in Israel-Palestine,” 2023), he’s essentially apologizing for the state model and its time-tested monopolies on terror and violence; specifically by endorsing Israel, he’s defending a fundamentally settler-colonial project, akin to supporting the Nazi regime’s right to exist while invading Poland but updated through modern-day proxy-war maneuvers (though the WW2-era US certainly expected Nazi Germany to abolish the elite’s enemies in Russia). The two-state solution is untenable because Israel is built on infinite military conquest; they decide who the “terrorists” are, then destroy them with extreme prejudice and impunity (thanks to American geopolitical support); e.g., GDF’s “It’s Official” (2023): “We are essentially seeing one of the worst bombing campaigns in human history. This is the crime of the century” and it’s being committed by the Israeli state and supported by privileged, puffed-up dickwads like Zizek (and politicians like Bernie Sanders or content creators like Natalie Wynn, aka Contrapoints [Bad Empanada’s “He Just Can’t Help Himself” and “Why Liberals Claim to Be Leftists“]).

[5] “Nor must it be forgotten that the author is a man of rank and fortune. Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble” (source: Pressbooks’ “Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s review of The Monk“).

[6] The quote is ubiquitous, but consider the opening page for Alex Link’s “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots” (2009) for a summary of it:

In the midst, of its definitive arguments, Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) pauses to consider the Gothic just long enough to single it out as a hopelessly “boring and exhausted paradigm.” The Gothic, he declares, is a mere “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” and it should not be mistaken for a “protofeminist denunciation of patriarchy” nor “a protopolitical protest against rape.” Although surprising at first, this condemnation is strategic in that it establishes the Gothic as Jameson’s critical other; the Gothic becomes an object of ritual sacrifice, imbued with those qualities in Jameson’s argument which are most discomfiting. […] If one regards Postmodernism as telling a story about postmodernity, its plot, taken as a whole, is curiously Radcliffean, in that it routinely presents the reader with postmodern objects meant to inspire anxiety before explaining them away. Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic, in other words, resembles nothing so much as his own description of the Gothic, in “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” (1979), as a means of raising and exorcising an object of anxiety (source).

In other words, Jameson writes like Coleridge does—like a scared white boy but even more allergic to the Gothic mode, oddly emulating one of its most famous (and white) female authors (we’ll return to critiquing Jameson [and Coleridge] in the Demon Module’s “The Future Is a Dead Mall“).

[7] When I tried taking Lovecraft to task (“Method in His Madness: Lovecraft, the Rock and Roll Iconoclast and Buoyant Lead Balloon,” 2017), renowned Lovecraft scholar T.S. Joshi had a fit/refused to publish my work in his annual Lovecraft journal. Joshi seemed to dislike the mere suggestion that Lovecraft wasn’t somehow perfect as is—conveniently equipped to do what he did (according to Joshi) for his target audience, and that we pesky kids of today are just ignorant of his sublime genius. Puh-lease! If Lovecraft was “perfect,” you wouldn’t have New Weird/Next Weird authors like Thomas Ligotti, Jeff Vandermeer and China Miéville; producers like Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions and Lovecraft Country (2020); or developers like Red Hook Studios chewing Lovecraft up and routinely spitting out his racist, useless bones. Take what’s useful and leave the rest (without forgetting it).

This blog post (not a joke, even though it’s April Fool’s) is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

Picking up where “Thesis Conclusion, Symposium and Segue” left off…

Written to mark the completion of “The Total Codex” promotion and release of Volume Zero’s 2025 re-release: with a second edition, this new foreword detailing my thought process editing version 2.0—i.e., tying ludo-Gothic BDSM to my entire book series starting with Volume Zero having coined the phrase—as well as listing many of the changes inside. —Perse

 

A 2025 Foreword: On Volume Zero’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM

Note: The opening to this forward (the first four pages) concerns my thought process for ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as inserting it into both Volume Zero and Volume One; the second half of the forward is tailor-made per volume to discuss changes unique to said volume exclusively. —Perse. 4/9/2025

Marx argued that Capitalism alienates everything (and sometimes invoked the language of monsters); I argue it sexualizes everything as alien through the language of monsters. Per Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit, the elite use capital to further the abjection process; i.e., to further profit through the constant Gothic fakery as haunted by a ghost of the counterfeit to attack: spectres of genocide, thus cop/victim. From the original into Pax Americana, “Rome” is full of dead whores and their pimps. Pushed off onto state victims “of nature” by so-called “thinking beings,” the usual benefactors enjoy their status quo’s heteronormative, Cartesian, and settler-colonial paradigm while capital persecutes whores like vermin chattel in and out of fiction, on and offstage; i.e., in between it and non-fiction, during liminal expression. On its surfaces and inside its thresholds, Medusa is always a victim under capital.

(artist: Romantic Rose)

The Earth, then, is a peach for the elite to carve, beat, mark and claim until the end of time, but every Numinous forebear yields smaller offshoots; i.e., a Medusa “in small” who personifies the abuser of the larger suffered by the smaller (and vice versa); re: a castle in the flesh to enact, be it body-like castles the size of moons or castle-like bodies mooning to gain a similar hypnotic effect. The Gothic, through castles, speaks using body language anisotropically and in duality during liminal expression; i.e., to meet different goals, including profit: as a cold and calculating matter of exploiting labor simply for being “of nature,” hence existing as something monstrous-feminine to arbitrate, then pimp (which goes beyond “female,” alone, to include anything not a white cis-het Christian European man to modular and intersectional degrees).

The oldest form of labor is prostitution, making the oldest labor struggle that of the whore versus the pimp as a theatrical exercise (with white straight women selling out during the Neo-Gothic period, from Radcliffe onwards): power is performed on the Aegis, including its paradoxes! And yet, monsters aren’t automatically good or bad; their function—of whether they serve workers or the state—determines by the flow of power (and similar variables) towards or away from workers. This, in turn, results in a dichotomy during oppositional praxis: as a dialectical-material exchange, one where canon versus iconoclasm/camp (or sex positivity versus sex coercion) routinely sees monsters existing inside-outside a given venue. From performance to half-real performance, and per the Protestant ethic, a whore is a monster and all heroes are monsters; the whore’s paradox is to have revenge against profit, achieving universal liberation (no Omelas) while the state pimps them as virgin/whore using varying degrees of monstrous language (the whore being the monomyth hero’s classic foe; re: the Medusa, but also her spawn, female or otherwise).

(artist: Nyx)

In short—be it a witch, vampire, goblin, or some other kind of monster attached to imbricating and arbitrary persecution networks (re: blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts)—the state’s moral panics (and their pogroms) canonically move money through nature, glutting the elite at nature’s expense by whoring it out during the Capitalocene; re: “Antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine and put it cheaply to work through bad-faith revenge arguments (reactionary or moderate).”

In turn, workers living in the Imperial Core’s shadow garner strange appetites (re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“): weird attracts weird and trauma begets trauma in monomythic recursion; re: the Cycle of Kings and Shadow of Pygmalion pimping Galatea until she either pimps herself (on a spectrum of preferential mistreatment and tokenized betrayals chasing different normativities), or must suffer those who take state pay to do state work (the Judas silver and ensuing crucifixions); i.e., divide and conquer nature with nature. Traitors are stupid, but they also look and sound like us: alien, albeit as undercover cops recruited from the home country more often than not!

Deception is a powerful tool, as are fear and dogma making “Roman” fools fall on their swords; i.e., including token examples; e.g., black skin, white masks. This includes inmates acting as guards! As such, assimilation is historically poor stewardship, and pushing into post-scarcity with pre-capitalist language requires recultivating a second-nature, society-wide degree of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients); i.e., to have the whore’s revenge against profit with ludo-Gothic BDSM through ancient forms of theatre (masks, shadows, and costumes, often of animals) revived in “ancient” doubles, thereby reversing abjection as a dialectical-material process with plastic social-sexual elements (re: the Base and the Superstructure)!

(artist: Pokkuti)

To it, these aforementioned appetites aren’t strictly a weakness, insofar as critiquing and shaping popular media (the vector for de facto [re]education) goes. Despite how trauma lives inside the body and all around us—and despite the Medusa canonically being a dark whore to punish by subjugating labor into state proponents during Amazonomachia till the cows come home (e.g., stories like Metroid, above, featuring the Amazon as the West’s oldest class traitor)—liberation and exploitation occupy the same space; i.e., a zone of darkness and play where canon can paradoxically be camped by subverting it through the self-same monster language: as not belonging to any one group. This is ludo-Gothic BDSM as I describe it (and the whore’s revenge; re: “Rape Reprise“), whose informed labor exchanges—from Frankenstein to Alien to Metroid to this book series and beyond—illustrate mutual consent by camping canon’s rapacious language to varying degrees; i.e., doing so consciously to develop Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism with! When defenders of capital look upon us, they look upon the desert of their own Ozymandian grave waiting to swallow them whole! From labor to land back, that is our whore’s revenge; i.e., by reclaiming violence, terror and monsters where they are normally used to harm us, subverting them with ludo-Gothic BDSM “when in Rome” to make empire stateless, classless, moneyless and raceless!

(artist: Bernie Wrightson)

On the Aegis, then, said devices become something to take away from state monopolies trying to exclusively extort nature upon said Aegis and its concentric veneers. They cannot (at least not forever), which means we can take what the middle class (and other state actors) project off onto their victims during abjection; i.e., an alien, fetishized “other” status (the dark criminal scapegoat; re: the Medusa) giving us power because they fear us and our bodies’ labor (sexuality or otherwise). To that, this volume writes, “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.”

Such is development; it’s ergodic, meaning Gothic Communism takes constant careful work (“non-trivial effort,” according to Aarseth) amid confusion to succeed—i.e., by synthesizing catharsis with various creative successes warping scapegoats into useful bogey(wo)men: to cultivate good daily habits, mid-praxis, that liberate sex workers (thereby all workers) under Capitalism through iconoclastic art (re: Gothic poetics)! We master theatre to recultivate what the elite can never fully control: the language of mastery and darkness, itself!

In turn, the Gothic is historically obsessed with fatal returns and dark reflection—not once, even, but endlessly and through disintegration and torturous effort (the rapturous, psychosexual embodiment of power and confusion, mise-en-abyme, to navigate): “to interrogate power, you must go where it is.” That is what the new edition for this thesis volume is trying to accomplish! By following its arguments into my newer books—and beyond them, into real life connected to said books—workers can humanize what the state tries to harvest in perpetuity without consequence: exposing the elite’s inhumane treatment of us through their shameless proxies; e.g., us demasking TERFs versus them demasking us; i.e., by reversing abjection through the revolutionary cryptonymy process (and friendlier hauntologies and chronotopes) during an endless chain of such things; re: the narrative of the crypt and cryptomimesis as much being rebels in disguise—playing with monsters to anisotropically liberate themselves in duality—as it is cops acting in bad faith to punch down with against those they demonize. Cops stab us; we “stab” ourselves in ways that showcase our own liberation putting “rape” in quotes (all the better to punch up against cop with, topping from below): “That all you got, little man?”

(artist: Nyx)

“When the Man comes around, show him your Aegis!” I envision this reversal as a matter of developing Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; re: camping the canon through ludo-Gothic BDSM, which I introduce here alongside my extensive Metroidvania work but not limited to said work; re: it has its own body of work to consider alongside my usual playgrounds (which Metroidvania and Amazons/mommy dommes are).

As such, and in accordance with my 2025 rollout of a new promo series for Volume Zero (called “The Total Codex“), I’ve gone over Volume Zero from top to bottom; i.e., to inject numerous mentions and addendums regarding not just ludo-Gothic BDSM (expanding from 30 to nearly 200 mentions), but many other changes besides! Several of these addendums are substantial, including

• “Concerning Keywords/the Volume’s Age“
• “Two Years Later (give or take): Returning to My Thesis Argument after Five Books“
• “Concerning Rape Play: a 2025 Note on My Development of Ludo-Gothic BDSM“
• “Rage Over a Lost Penny” (aka the glossary of terms I coined for Sex Positivity as I wrote it; re: copied from “Paratextual Documents“)

Apart from those, however, I’ve also updated the series abstract and rear glossary. Besides those, various other changes have been made to Volume Zero’s entire manuscript—far too many to list here (totaling ~20,000 extra words and ~200 extra images), but often being mentioned and dated whenever and wherever they occur so you can observe them, nonetheless (e.g., a ton of changes/additions being made to the “camp map” finale, thanking Blxxd Bunny for their help).

And for anything I cannot mention in this book volume, I cite inside it pointing to my later volumes, instead. Each one has its own promotion series

• “The Total Codex“: The book promotion for Volume Zero/my thesis volume, which contains my series’ thesis argument (re: “Capitalism sexualizes everything”) and introduces/unpacks its complex theory.
• “Make It Real“: The book promotion for Volume One/my manifesto, which takes Volume Zero’s complex theory and simplifies it; i.e., as something to synthesize and instruct among ourselves.
• “Brace for Impact“: The book promotion for Volume Two, part one, aka the Poetry Module, which concerns the poetic application of monsters (with some historical elements).
• “Searching for Secrets“: The book promotion for Volume Two, part two/the Monster Module’s Undead Module, which concerns the poetic history of undead monsters (with some applicative elements).
• “Deal with the Devil“: The book promotion for Volume Two, part two/the Monster Module’s Demon Module, which concerns the poetic history of demonic/natural monsters (with some applicative elements).
• “All the World” (to be released): The book promotion for Volume Three, aka the Praxis Volume, which combines Volume Zero’s complex theory, Volume One’s simplified theory/synthetic model, and Volume Two’s monster history and application; i.e., as something foster our own creative successes of proletarian praxis with versus the state, which boils down to sex positivity (and liberation) versus sex coercion while developing Gothic Communism (with a huge focus on resisting tokenization; e.g., TERFs).

making citing them (and their individual book segments) a piece of cake! Online, they also exist on a separate Book Promotions page that includes: model interviews (re: “Hailing Hellions“) and all of the purple-and-green posters for my book series’ promo poster program! Here’s one example:

(artist: Angel Witch)

That being said, the full-size PDFs will remain on my website’s one-page promo for Sex Positivity (which includes a wide variety of promotional elements I have heavily expanded on and branched off from, since October 2023); the PDFs don’t update nearly as often, but still remain a good way to possess the bulk of my published material in one spot (and which you can easily navigate with Adobe’s bookmark system).

All this being said, I hope you enjoy this new second edition of Volume Zero; like Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, it was satisfying to return to, take apart and put back together after several years!

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone van der Waard, 4/1/2025

P.S., Yes, I know I released the new edition for Volume Zero on April Fool’s! To be honest, I tried to release it yesterday but midnight came and went (that and I think having it debut on April Fool’s is kinda fun)!

Onto Volume One’s promo series, “Make It Real“!

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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!

This blog post is part of “The Total Codex,” a fourth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “The Total Codex” shall do the same, but with Volume Zero/the thesis volume (versus “Make It Real” promoting Volume One/the manifesto, which I will release after “The Total Context” completes). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “The Total Codex’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

Follow the Sign: Thesis Conclusion, or “Death by Snu-Snu”

Inside his castle
There was a glorious feast
But inside his mind
Hides a secret beast
Is he mad? The King seems to laugh
And the bard still sings
And plays his harp (source)

— Daniel Heiman; “The Mad King,” Warrior Path’s The Mad King (2021)

(source)

Picking up where “‘Camp Map,’ the Finale” left off…

The Vikings of legend really liked to get drunk and fuck shit up (as do their ghosts of the counterfeit, now), especially when their king has his reign and then dies: blame the monstrous-feminine as “corrupt” and degenerate, then bury your gays (and other minorities). Our feted second half of oppositional praxis, iconoclastic/proletarian praxis (which is sex-positive) is the unacceptable rebellion’s uncontrollable opposition disguised as controlled opposition: the neatness of theatrical, thus scripted foils—the “jester” in the king’s court (which straight folk wear and trumpet like bad vaudeville). We’re the queer agent among you, but also the gay zombie rising from the grave (making everything just a little more fun)!

Like canonical praxis, iconoclasm uses the same aesthetics, bodies, linguistic tricks[1] (cryptonyms) and color codes, but interrogates power and negotiates its reclamation through irony and subversion, not brute force as the automatic approach (though rioting is “the language of the unheard[2]” and remains vital to developing Communism): collective labor action/worker solidarity but also gender parody as a powerful, oft-oral (thus difficult-to-suppress) means of using our bodies, labor and creativity to subvert the harmful gender norms prescribed against those who openly rebel; i.e., ironic action narratives that perpetually push back against canon’s unironic calls to violence, rape and war by transforming the bullseye into something the class traitor doesn’t want to shoot when rioting and other collective labor movements begin to solidarize and occur (making the cop no longer a cop, hence a class, culture and race ally): the figurative zombie apocalypse (more on this in the Undead Module’s “Bad Dreams; or, Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse“).

To this, Gothic Communists use their labor, creativity and bodies to create monstrous music, dance, play and sex that covertly and openly fight for basic human rights (and that of nature); i.e., oral and written contracts that weaponize Gothic counterculture to foster emergent gameplay/good play (descriptive and de-facto-educated abuse-prevention patterns). To summarize the “camp map,” we reverse the process of abjection and camp the ghost of the counterfeit, altering it into copies of hidden truths, not falsehoods, visible on the demonized surface of themselves: our lost histories and culture as previously destroyed by the state and its male action heroes/subordinates’ copaganda and material conditions working in concert to commodify our expression through porn and rock ‘n roll.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Note: Thought “death by Snu-Snu” is mentioned here in passing, we’ll talk about it more pointedly vis-à-vis Amazons in Volume One and Two (e.g., “Predators as Amazons” and “From Herbos to Himbos, part two“). There will also be more terms we introduce here, which we will unpack or talk about later in the book series across multiple modules and (sub)volumes; e.g., panopticon (which I discuss, on and off, in “Understanding Vampires“). —Perse, 3/31/2025

As our “camp map” also showed, our subversive Amazonomachia is “death by Snu-Snu” as camp, thus amounts to an emotionally/Gothically intelligent and active pedagogy of the oppressed often told through jokes to start movements (re: “a thing” such as “pussy on the chainwax”). It’s serious-yet-silly and that’s the point, but the point of the rainbows and glitter is proletarian praxis insofar as we function during oppositional praxis: to make the canonical language of war silly in a very gay way of interrogating pre-existing power and negotiating new variants during liminal expression; i.e., playing with power as a performative scenario to reinvent for various purposes:

“The straight castle was conquered by the fearsome gay warriors and everyone inside was made gay and had super butt sex. —the end!”

The above statement implies that murder, general mayhem and rape are functioning in ironic, playful forms instead of their presumed unironic-thus-literal ones: the rape of the princess, the burying of the gay (and other actual dead bodies—often “innocent, pure good” civilians and “guilty, pure evil” orcs on either side), and sacked castles razed to the ground, heads on spikes, cruel-and-unusual punishment, carceral violence, tilting at windmills, etc:

The townspeople had little hope
They were not ready for war
Fireballs make everybody die
And buildings collapse to the floor

The beautiful princess was raped
And taken to prison with cry
Angus McFife swears a mighty oath
“I will make Zargothrax die!” (source: Gloryhammer’s “The Unicorn Invasion of Dundee,” 2013)

There’s power in the “joke’s” ability to release tension. Except our praxis can’t be “blind” parody like Gloryhammer is (whose proud stupidity is a white, cis-het male privilege) because the marginalized are going to be in danger regardless if they are actively segregated or not (Jim Crow segregation vs Redlining[3]). Gothic Communism must endorse sex positivity at a systemic level, which requires making things as gay as possible within ironic gender trouble/parody and “perceptive” pastiche; i.e., the intersection of class-conscious character with genderqueer theatrics that rescue canonical bombast from the Straights colonizing us (thus themselves). This includes allegory and apocalypse within Gothic poetics.

One subverts canon with rainbow-themed “sound and fury” (above) as evocative perceptive pastiche/parody that is tremendously memorable and fun (who doesn’t remember “Time Warp” or Tim Curry from Rocky Horror?). It’s not just dialectical-material brawn, either (though it can be muscular) but the awakened and liberated Galatea dancing in the ruins of a decidedly “rockin'” castle of darkness (re: the danger disco) and whose rebellious re-seizing of the means of monstrous production amounts to stigmatized identities that evoke various proletarian ideals and tactics; i.e., our aforementioned Four Gs, or four main Gothic theories in their proletarian forms (which are essentially iconoclastic reversals to the same nouns during canonical/bourgeois praxis); as well the gender trouble and gender parody produced during “perceptive” camp (not “true camp,” which is blind) using genderqueer, often non-binarized (a)sexual orientation and gender identity/performance (-as-identity). All happen during our likewise aforementioned “creative successes” of proletarian praxis, specifically their subversive/transgressive liminal expressions’ Gothic-Marxist tenets.

From art to porn, all collectively demonstrate how Gothic Communism, when correctly performed, cultivates empathy under Capitalism as something to develop towards a better system; i.e, through and towards our “creative successes” and their proletarian outcomes (which the manifesto shall explore, but also Volume Three’s entirety). All become things to materially imagine as Satan or Galatea making their own sex-positive, culturally appreciative creations during Gothic counterculture. As spectres of Marx, these shadows of Galatea and their cryptomimesis cannot fully be ignored or destroyed by the state; nor can it be recuperated to serve capital and nothing else because counterterror is the power of the dark gods that resides within all our breasts, but especially the neurodivergent, disabled, and marginalized the elite forever want to exploit.

Nobody wants to be enslaved; you have to compel that through force, by raping the mind over time and en masse. For that to happen, the elite need apathetic/complicit soldiers, which the underclass can disarm by cultivating empathy towards the oppressed in the eyes of their would-be, often middle-class oppressors; i.e., as splendide mendax telling beautiful lies for proletarian purposes from our pandemonium reclaiming the monstrously canonical, monomythic language of stigma, bias, control, fear and hate, operating through cathartic power exchange and resistance to the status quo’s current harmful norms; e.g., black people reclaiming the n-word; women, the word “woman,” but also “bitch,” “whore” and many other sexist slurs; and queer people the word “faggot,” etc. Reclaimed, they can be expunged of harm as a prescriptive device, used instead to rewrite the “dead futures” of Capitalist Realism with “archaeologies of the future.” In turn, these “elaborate strategies of misdirection” help us escape the closet and create a collective rememory whose Wisdom of the Ancients aims to terrify crueler and less wise proponents of the canonical imaginary past. What monopolies they fabricate, we upset; i.e., by rising from the grave, dystopia, dark forest, sex dungeon, operating table, wiccan pentacle, torture chamber, conquered land, ghetto, flames of hell, corpse pile/offal, or infinite void.

A few closing points before we dive into the symposium: We will invariably discuss cis-het, male proponents (exhibit 63b) of the status quo throughout the book, but our transformative interest really lies more so in TERFs and other heteronormative cross-sections within tokenized canon; i.e., the class traitor’s assimilation fantasy that maintains the colonial binary by emulating white supremacy and toxic masculinity through internalized bigotry and self-hatred as a discipline-and-punish panopticon[4], one that perpetuates the status quo of dominating the monstrous-feminine—i.e., the rebellious slave or barbarian, effeminate meathead or thinking/feeling soldier, worker, athlete or statue essentially being property-come-alive and thinking for itself—through the rape culture of “prison sex”: acting like a man as something to perpetually watch over everyone else within and remind them of it. Not only are the terms “prison sex” and “Man Box” synonymous in this book; they’re performed by token minorities, including women but really anything that “isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian man” wanting to assimilate, thus occupy the guard tower. All functionally become a double minority relative to the power of their voice for the status quo, but also against the status quo in proletarian discourse.

White cis-het men are often, then, the Silent Majority precisely because the system does not require them to speak in order to give them relative privilege while also fucking them over. Meanwhile, cis women, gender-conforming queer people and other minorities are often duped into conflating colonial violence with “being heard” thus “doing an activism”; i.e., acting like white, cis-het, Christian men by lying to or otherwise misleading and brutalizing the underclass (making cis-queer people potential allies to gender-non-conforming persons when personifying war but just as likely their jailors).

This fascist ruse dupes potential allies into betraying thus alienating themselves from their comrades, then turning into monstrous impostors that blend back into the prison population to be able to kill for the state as needed (union breakers/strikebreakers); meanwhile their victims feel like impostors themselves for not fitting in/receiving violence from actual or de facto, patriarchal authority figures (traditionally fathers, husbands, grandparents, siblings, boyfriends and coaches, teachers, cops, war heroes, movie stars, rockstars, etc; but female/token abusers historically harm others after having been harmed themselves to prevent future abuse—e.g., the patriarchal matriarch or Uncle Tom, exhibit 38b2). The basic outcome is impostor syndrome, which gender-non-conforming persons pointedly call gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia—i.e., the guilt, shame or self-hatred of feeling like an alien, impostor or unironic monster according to one’s heteronormatively assigned body and gender and naturally assigned biology and skin color as stigmatized things to reclaim from fascists/neoliberals as deliberate obfuscators who, themselves, operate through bad-faith mimicry and systemic privilege, thus abuse.

(artist: Crow Perch)

Clearly these things must be challenged during oppositional praxis, and we’ll try and do so through engagement with the binary of class war and its parent dichotomies as simultaneously black-and-white (for didactic purposes, simplification) and gradient/grey-area (for nuance). However, because this book focuses on the pedagogy of the oppressed, I’ll be focusing far more on trans, intersex, non-binary and drag queen/king (crossdress) forms of subversion and regression (and their intersections with other forms of marginalization; e.g., people of color, Indigenous Peoples, religious minorities, the disabled, and ace/neurodivergent persons, etc) than cis/neurotypical allies or class traitors.

Furthermore, our nuanced and complicated subversions during ludo-Gothic BDSM aren’t something I expect to go down without a fight; indeed, we’re often blamed for taking the loudspeaker away from the “real biological women” of first wave and second wave feminist movements (which have fascist/centrist ties), Afrocentrists, or the LGBA‘s “real queers”; i.e., the steadfast treat nuance as apocryphal, as Bay puts it, having an almost knee-jerk response to new information that threatens the way they’ve been taught to see the world. But fools should not be suffered because doing so is segregation, which leads to their destruction and ours. If only it were so simple as waiting for fascists to self-destruct by following the leader into their own graves, harming no one else in the process; i.e., the fascist approach to herd mentality marching themselves off a cliff like scapegoats while the idea behind sheep “herding” is, according to Bay (who loves behavioral ecology), evolution from a natural-social process, not a capitalist one; i.e., meant as safety-through-solidarity by putting the young and vulnerable in the middle.

Like Matthew Lewis’ cottage of bandits-in-disguise, this isn’t a waiting game against polite opponents; it’s one of life and death, pitting us against the ruthless skullduggery and cloak-and-dagger fog of war produced by a cruel and perfidious foe—one who would like nothing better than destroy us all for self-promotion and personal gain driven by cold, hard economics. Catharsis demands systemic change, not the scapegoating of the bandits and their overlords (or the individual authors of these things). This being said, they should absolutely be outed at every possible opportunity lest they become normalized, thus free to kill us with impunity behind rainbows (which we must grab back, below): “An enemy has only images behind which he hides his true motives; destroy the image and you break the enemy.”

This concludes my thesis argument and argumentation through camping canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM. The last fifty-or-so pages of the volume are more conversational, meant to unpack and provide additional explanations and/or definitions I wasn’t able to include or fully unpack in the thesis proper/”camp map.” I’m doing so because, while they aren’t in the companion glossary (or the preface or manifesto from Volume One), I still feel these remain incredibly important to examine, but it shall be more laid back; i.e., not essential reading but still worth your time. —Perse, back in 2023

(artist: Ken Kelly)

Symposium: Aftercare; What Is the Gothic?

“I am the lizard king. I can do anything” (source).

—Jim Morrison; “Celebration of the Lizard: Not to Touch the Earth,” on The Door’s Waiting for the Sun (1968)

Note: I originally wrote this symposium to be an extension of a much-smaller thesis statement (which now constitutes the lion’s share of the volume). I have left the writing largely as-is, and it may seem redundant; but this tracks with the symposium as I originally envisioned it: to unpack and embellish complex ideas that I wasn’t able to fully explore in my thesis statement (essentially marking the start of what we will be doing throughout the rest of the book), except now there’s even more of a cooldown period. Put simply, there’s more to recover from and reflect upon as we ornament and extrapolate. I had thought about leaving the symposium out, but I honestly think including it will be a fun experiment. While its ideas have since been hashed out more concretely in the thesis argument, here, they will be more scattered and fanciful; this should allow you to apply my thesis argument to their “soupier” conversational format: to visit the symposium after having read the volume based on its more dialogic argumentation (which is a good test for the kinds of brushes with praxis you’ll experience “in the wild”).

In essence, putting the symposium at the end is a reversal of the usual approach—”write symposium, then book,” instead being “read book, then symposium.” As you recover yourselves, I suggest trying to reflect on the idea of power as paradox and performance, wherein said performance’s games, rules and play remain incredibly potent ways of interrogating and negotiating power yourselves; i.e., through liminal expression’s doubles thereof, existing inside the Gothic mode’s shadow zone: its monsters, castles and BDSM. Power and resistance occupy the same space during oppositional praxis. Use them to question what is present and recreate the world through your own identities and struggles to be free from Capitalism, Capitalist Realism, and its numerous proponents and enforcers (and remember that words and images carry power. If they didn’t, the elite [and class traitors] wouldn’t police and abuse them like they do). —Perse, back in 2023

With my thesis proper and “camp map” concluded, the hardest labors are done, and I hope the various “holes” of your psyche aren’t too sore. Now we can let our hair down like Medusa and play in the gayest of fashions: with our cocks and clams out. Time for some aftercare! What is Gothic (consider this food-for-thought as we proceed into the next volume)?

As such, this symposium is a series of seminars (about five if you divide the ~17,500 words into ~20-minute parts: or 150 words/minute). As a disorganized tangent, it will be unpacking various ideas further than my thesis argument could—e.g., “What is Gothic beyond just the making of monsters?” (we’ll get to that when we discuss Chris Baldrick and Tanya Krzywinska). The rest of the volume, then, is dirty and cluttered like an attic, so I can’t really explain its progression as I usually would in this book’s chapters and subchapters. Instead, I will simply try to prioritize things that feel most relevant or important that also happen to exist between my thesis argument and the preface/manifesto from Volume One. So let’s reexamine something vital to its execution that also strikes my fancy: poetics.

(artist: Jean-Baptiste Regnault)

To be clear, as I am a ludologist, Gothicist, anarcho-Communist, and genderqueer trans woman, poiesis wasn’t simply a structure for my pedagogic narrative, like Mikhail Nabokov thought of Jane Austen’s novel, Mansfield Park (1814), in Lectures on Literature (1980):

all talk of marriage is artistically interlinked with the game of cards they are playing, Speculation, and Miss Crawford, as she bids, speculates whether or not she should marry […] This re-echoing of the game by her thoughts recalls the same interplay between fiction and reality […] Card games form a very pretty pattern in the novel.

Nor was it echopraxis (“the involuntary mirroring of an observed action”) according to the kind of “blind” pastiche[5] that plagues canonical thought and proponents of capital; i.e., an empty kind of “just playing” sans parody that stems from what Joyce Gloggin in “Play and Games in Fiction and Theory” (2020) calls “a ‘traditional’ understanding of mimesis” (which we repeatedly eluded to earlier when we mentioned Plato’s cave/shadow play during the thesis argument):

Mimesis or imitation therefore, as one form of play, is an essential element of poiesis, or the “making” of art, which in turn is instrumental in creating what some now refer to as possible or imaginary worlds, that is, fiction.

This traditional understanding of mimesis as an essential element of poiesis places mimetic play at a more distant remove from reality than even the shadows in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave from book VII of The Republic. Related in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, book VII allegorizes the human perception of reality, likening our reality to shadows projected on a cave wall. These shadows are perceived by human subjects, shackled around the ankles and neck and unable to turn their heads to see the puppeteers who cast shadows on the cave wall before them, which they mistake for reality. In other words, what mortals see and know is merely shadow, and this is what mimesis mimics — not reality.

Importantly, this version of mimesis and reality has long informed the marginalization or trivialization of mimetic arts as “mere play,” “just games,” or insignificant ludic imitations of reality. Likewise, the marginalization of play and its rejection as a serious object of study are motivated by the suspicion that play and ludic cultural forms are treacherous and capable of rendering us the dupe (source).

My own mimesis challenged these traditions. As I consumed and learned from older artists/thinkers (and their odes and homages), my own Galatean creations started to change, as did my way of thinking about the process of making them; my countless allusions and allegory became a far less traditional and far more subversively and transgressively playful mode of engagement with others—not just my family in the world of the living but also those long gone, echoing their arguments from beyond the grave: cryptomimesis, or the playing with the dead through perceptive pastiche and reclaimed monstrous language that is then used in place of the original context; e.g., queer people calling everything “gay” (space Communism) or black people using the n-word for everything versus white people wanting to do the same thing in an ignorant or hateful context.

The same basic idea applies to monstrous language and materials as things to reclaim from their original carceral/persecutory monomythic functions (which we will thoroughly examine in Volume Two) or from covert/dishonest regression towards this old medieval sense of compelled BDSM and lack of consent/trust; e.g., witches as traditional scapegoats (exhibit 83a) versus regressive “cop-like” variants (exhibit 98a3) that iconoclasts subvert through various sex-positive BDSM rituals, ironic peril and Gothic counterculture (exhibit 98a1a); i.e., as a general practice that turns the death fetish or state officer/thug into something other than a fascist-in-disguise through transformative context (e.g., subversions of Shelly Bombshell or Zarya, exhibits 100c2b and 111b). This Gothic-Communist paradigm shift reclaims the unironic imagery at all levels of itself—of actual, non-consenting and uninformed enslavement, torture and rape through their associate handcuffs, leather uniforms, whips or collars; but also insignias and color codes: green and purple as the colors of envy and stigma (exhibits 41b, 94a3) but also black-and-red as pre-fascist (the Roman master/slave dynamic), anti-Catholic dogma (exhibit 11b5) eventually applied to 20th century fascists and Communists during and after WW2 in videogames (exhibit 41i/j) and other neoliberal propaganda (Vecna’s D&D Red Scare schtick: exhibit 39a2). All exist together in the Internet Age along with their assigned roles—as subverted in liminal, transgressive, formerly exploitative ways (exhibits 9b2, 101c2) that often yield a campy (exhibits 10a) or schlocky flavor married to whatever unironic forms they’re lampooning (exhibit 47b2). This exists in duality and opposition as a rhetorical device—a conversation, but also an argument.

For example, you’ve probably noticed said duality in how I alternate between labels or play around or within them when it suits me (which is often). The reason is to accommodate their natural-material functions. Language is fluid in its natural, uncoerced state; there is no “natural order” of the state’s design, no “transcendental signified” that “just happens” to favor the profit motive. That is installed and enforced through a particular belief system and portioning of codified space and behaviors useful to the elite. Instead things flow in and out of each other quite organically.

Regarding this organic relationship, I’ve made a little heads-up guide. It includes a few useful reading-comprehension pointers when exploring my work, which I’ll also include in Volumes One, Two and Three (indented for clarity):

We’ll be code-switching a lot throughout this volume when talking about some very chaotic things. So try to remember that function determines function, not aesthetics. Also remember your parent dichotomies—bourgeois/canon/sex-coercive vs proletariat/iconoclasm/sex-positive—as well as your various synonyms/antonyms, orbiting factors and related terminologies that follow in and out of each other during oppositional praxis; i.e., the productive idea of power as paradox and performance, wherein said performance’s games, rules and play remain incredibly potent ways of interrogating and negotiating power yourselves; i.e., through liminal expression’s doubles thereof, existing inside the Gothic mode’s shadow zone: (sequenced here in no particular order):

the essentialized connecting of biology (sex organs and skin color) to gender and both of these things to the mythic structure as heteronormative/dimorphic, thus alienizing (to weird canonical nerds and everyone else) in service of the state/profit motive > a lack of dialectical-material analysis > willful ignorance/”rose-tinted glasses” to achieve class dormancy through blind “darkness visible” > Capitalism’s monomyth/good war > Beowulf, Rambo > the infernal concentric pattern/Cycle of Kings and Shadow of Pygmalion > carceral hauntology/dystopia (myopic chronotopes/Capitalist Realism) > good cop, bad cop or cops and victims > assimilation > class traitor/weird canonical nerd > Man Box/rape culture > state espionage and surveillance/complicit cryptonomy > babyface/heel kayfabe > war hauntology > subjugated Amazon/mythical copaganda (female Beowulf, Rambo) > TERF > unironic ghosts of the counterfeit and the process of abjection’s symbols of harm > profit, rinse and repeat

versus

the separation of gender and sexuality from each other and both of these things from the heteronormative mythic structure; i.e., Gothic Communism’s monomorphic subversion of all of the things listed above through class war as enacted by our own weird iconoclastic nerds > spectres of Marx > deliberately active, class-conscious/campy “darkness visible” and dialectical-material scrutiny > shadow of Galatea > pro-labor espionage, revolutionary cryptonomy, emancipatory hauntology/parallel societies and chronotopes > reverse abjection > the pedagogy of the oppressed > reclaimed symbols of harm > post-scarcity

As a point of principle, I’ve left out some stuff and these lists in the heads-up are asymmetrical; also, I’m not going to try and include or string everything into a grand necklace/dichotomy that I then trot out each and every time a given topic comes up; i.e., the oppositional praxis of canon vs iconoclasm (as explored during the body of the thesis volume). Instead, I’m using them from a position of internalized intuition that I expect readers to learn, including relating them to parallel parent dichotomies like sex-positive vs sex-coercive, canon vs iconoclasm, bourgeois vs proletarian, as well as their orbiting factors—e.g., iconoclasm emphasizing mutual consent, informed consumption, de facto education, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation as things to materially imagine (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) in subversive/transgressive Gothic poetics that challenge their canonical doubles during oppositional praxis.

If you can’t parse all of this intuitively then I suggest you familiarize yourself with the thesis proper and “camp map” from the thesis volume (which is available on my website; click here to access my website’s 1-page promo, which contains all relevant download links/information regarding my book).

The above heads-up guide should be useful, I think, as the organic nature of existence and human society and language is aptly symbolized and demonstrated by chaos. It also, in Gothic circles, elides the organic and inorganic in ways that confound the Cartesian Revolution’s chief aim: divide and conquer, map and plunder the land and its inhabits, all while quaking at the witch as an object of revenge (in both directions) or the pumpkin rotting after the harvest as intimations of Capitalism’s own superstitious mortality. The occupying army is both weak and strong.

(exhibit 1a1a2b: Artist: Karl Kopinski. “Insect politics” isn’t just society treating people like bugs to optimistically squash in favor of the state. However, this is something I write about in “Military Optimism” so I wanted to share it, here:

“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). Heinlein canonized the power suit in 1959 with Starship Troopers, which Cameron required his actors to read when filming Aliens. By doing so, Cameron was emulating the US military, which had already added the book to their reading list. Hardly surprising considering Heinlein’s novel preached military values as essentialized, spearheading them through the mind of competent soldier narrator, Juan Rico. 

In this future, there is no room for messy human politics. Just “insect politics.” While so-called “actual” bugs are demonized as something to attack, the desire to openly emulate them is societal. Occasionally this desire rises to the surface. In Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), Gregor Samsa turns into a “monstrous vermin” only because his family and friends are primed to scapegoat him. Society has already made them insects. Likewise, Heinlein’s Mobile Infantry is a giant military machine, operated smoothly by competent men who can’t think for themselves. All according to plan.

And yet, while competency is a headspace, the suit makes the soldier. Otherwise, they wouldn’t use it. Cameron illustrated both points—competency and weaponry—by having Ripley use her power loader as an improvised weapon to defeat the Alien Queen. The irony of Aliens is that Ripley and the marines are just as bug-like, from a military standpoint, as the xenomorphs. But Cameron’s military optimism—injecting Heinlein into Ridley Scott’s Promethean, astronoetic[6] universe—is a kind of cognitive dissonance that ignores the comparison. Undeniably attractive, this myth of the realized individual is used by the state to trick the next generation: You can succeed where others have failed. In truth, these recruits are expendable assets serving the will of the state—a state whose eventual collapse is inevitable.

In the meantime, Ripley will do anything to survive. She puts on the suit and evolves, becoming a bug to fight a bug. But she was already a “bug,” attacking the xenomorphs with unparalleled hostility. It’s worth noting that she wasn’t a soldier (“I’m not a soldier”); she’s a civilian whose hawkish attitudes mirror the desire for revenge fostered by Americans under Reagan’s rule (source). 

Hollow Knight takes an even more heretical position than Ripley [or Samus] do; re: as Competent Women versus Competent Men, in the monomyth [supercops]. Pax Americana is half-real, in this respect; i.e., whitewashing genocide on and offstage through centrist pearl-clutching claiming self-righteousness, itself occurring through the usual white Indian and white savior arguments within the Shadow of Pygmalion’s Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern punching Medusa during mirror syndrome [which translate into the Rambo and Star Wars problems’ inability to solve Capitalism’s inherent, built-in flaws by scapegoating them; e.g., “Policing the Whore].

The state is not automatically good during Metroidvania, then; if anything, its touted “superiority” is checked by madness and decay during the return to a natural order following the king’s death: the hideous flagellation and bondage of the king’s greatest knight when faced with the wrath of the secret Medusa, the Radiance operating as the Madwoman in the Attic; i.e., of the patriarch’s mind, but also the kingdom as an extension of their mind having decayed and spilling out of itself in smaller offshoots[7]: the spirit of revenge inside a rotting corpse proliferating the necrobiome in smaller fragmentations of itself—i.e., the kingly insects disperse and are invaded by the queenly fungus viewed as unwelcome, deathly and parasitoid [the Archaic Mother treatment not dissimilar to the Alien Queen or Ungoliant]. Like a glowing mushroom, her deathly blossoms spill out everywhere in profound, eerie splendor that the king’s gambit seeks to contain and deny like the lepers from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish—i.e., the tower of the watcher hammering into the earth like a spike, encapsulating the queenly infection as a kind of female disease/wandering womb: “Girls have cooties!” Again, it’s honestly rather fun being Athena’s Aegis, seeing men lose their minds over something as regular and trivial as death.)

Escape from abuse goes hand-in-hand with transformation, but follows a kind of mythic structure in oral traditions carried over into written and/or theatrical forms. For example, in classical Greek myth Apollo pursuits Daphne to rape her and she, to escape his rude courtship, turns into a tree. Escape, for the Gothic Communist, is to transform less into a stupid tree (which can be chopped down) and more into something that terrifies our foes beyond the capacity for rational thought, thus losing the capacity for enslavement (of themselves and us to the same system); to “make things gay” is to follow a basic function of language in the natural-material world, one that spreads an idea through chaos and symbols of chaos: death, decay and continuation that together represent “transformation” mid-senescence and postmortem.

As a necrobiome full of decomposers, metamorphs and state-supplied stigma, our goal is to make others like us, who embody, practice and represent what we stand/fight for—i.e., to turn other people into monsters sympathetic to/emblematic of our plight and lost/imperiled humanity through context first and foremost, not raw aesthetics. “Become one with the mushroom and the insect,” my dudes. It’s all from a sample of one; we’re all workers from the same clade; i.e., “butterflies and crustaceans with a common ancestor grouping us in the same clade, pancrustacea” (Clint’s Reptiles’ “Butterflies Are Crustaceans, But It Gets Worse…” 2023). As usual, the dividing factor is class/culture war. Cartesian stigma, phobia and bias are meant to demonize one side to feed the profit motive, but the nightmare for Communists can take on a joyous function divorced from said motive: the “death” of metamorphosis, of changing shape into something new relative to our oppression challenging, thus incentivizing us to do so. In turn, when divorced from overt, functional morality and value judgements, organisms enter a stage of constant evolution—of change from one thing into something else. To this, general-place protagonism vs antagonism codifies (for humans) in all the usual canonical visual language (black and white) of violent theatre.

However, in the hands of Gothic Communism, the same theatre enters a different realm than one of prescribed morality onstage; i.e., subverting state-mandated action—of force and might-makes-right—through theatrical appeals toward equality that undermine their perceived sovereignty. Nothing is superior unto itself over anything else. While the question invokes longevity and the health of an overall ecosystem, environment or society that connects us to each other and the rest of the natural-material world, the deciding factor is still violence, but of a particular kind: class war and struggle. Here, the pen can be as mighty if not mightier than the sword in this respect. In turn, the duality of nightmare offers up a counterterrorist antagonism of nightmare and protagonism to either side of a dialectical-material struggle: workers pushing back against us-versus-them simply by existing and expressing ourselves as an identity defined and shaped by state interference and its imposed failure on workers’ manufactured inability to understand how things work as a unit in opposition to state forms. This entire dialog operates at cross purposes with the state, who opposes our mere existence to satisfy the superorganism’s profit motive; the structure and division aren’t simply prioritized, but valorized.

Whether through general language, monstrous gender identities/performances, slurs, BDSM, fetishes, and kink, sex positivity is defined through informed, mutually consenting power exchange/informed consent, appreciative irony and liminal struggle within systemic abuse—i.e., to combat alienation/imposter syndrome by reclaiming the hammer and chisel from the patriarchal sculptor, but also the emblems of state abuse conveyed through various Gothicized poetics: chains, hate labels, put-downs; batons, knives and other killing/subjugating implements; and unequal positions of power from our “heroic” conquerors through negotiated, informed consent; but also to protect us from regressive torturers in disguise: the badass, “strict” death fetish or mommy dom (strict or gentle; “good” or “bad”; black or white in roleplay language) presenting as a safe liberator but really just a centrist, thus fascist TERF (service to capital is fascism, which centrism regresses to in crisis) wearing a mask on a mask on a mask through the same language/aesthetics used by us.

The dialectical-material context is different, but not self-explanatory. It must be taught and this happens through revived oral traditions, music, dance and other performance art (which are historically far harder to control than written documents) indicating a “lost time” or culture that “used to exist”—the paradox being this culture, if it did exist is long gone and being revived into something not-quite-the-same, and towards a new state of existence that has yet to exist on this Earth: Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism. It won’t be a perfect world, but it will be one without systemic violence: no sin, dysphoria/dysmorphia, or scapegoats, no harmful Jedi or Sith thus no dead younglings, just monsters (Nietzsche was wrong—when fighting monsters, you must become one yourself: a gay-anarcho Commie double of the state monster). We’ll all be queens making our own monsters and media in ways that won’t lead to systemic harm (unlike the state, which harms everything by design); i.e., acclimated to chaos and revived, sex-positive medieval language as things to skillfully swim around inside, being well-adjusted towards doing so through taught behaviors that recognize just how Gothic Capitalism is (in a sex-coercive, concealed-genocide sense) and how Gothic queer revolution can be in (a sex-positive) response. The language is there because the medieval power and struggle never left; this includes camp as an effective foil then and now. We have always been here and we aren’t going anywhere without a fight.

(exhibit 1a1a2b: Artist: Xenokun. Heteronormative war and rape are everywhere in monomythic canon, whose canonical xenophobia/xenophilia is useful to the state; i.e., through the creation of a perpetual enemy to slay in the drive for profit through power fantasies geared towards the soldier class [cis-het men]. The classic scapegoat of the West is monstrous-feminine in some shape or form, meaning Beauvoir’s “woman is other” can easily be non-binarized and applied to AMAB [assigned male at birth] persons through the Pygmalion effect [the chain-like creating of a colonial binary through canonical art]. If this sounds weird and nerdy, it is, but weird canonical nerds will defend their canon nonetheless; in turn, weird iconoclastic nerds must defend our own devilish creations that invariably challenge the status quo through irony as a creative chain: the Galatea effect—i.e., of a rebellious genderqueer queen embodied through Gothic counterculture. Such an idea is death to canon, meaning “death as something to execute” against what is different from the heteronormative standard’s chase of profit by funneling endless war, rape, and genocide through nature [money is privatized theft].

Simply put, the vice character is queer-coded[8] and the riddle of the Sphinx is implacable death; i.e., there is always a womanly [non-manly thus fearsome and ignominious] death waiting at the end of the patriarch’s road. An inability to cheat/conquer death becomes spiteful, with the king’s vengeance marking the monstrous-feminine as the ultimate ancient enemy that must be hunted, trapped and killed. Meanwhile, Capitalism sexualizes everything to harmful, dimorphic extremes. Those known to do sex work [or sexualized work] are chained to it like Prometheus his rock, defined by sexual labor as a marker of difference, of classical punishment in this sense. They are not men, but non-men that potentially embody Medusa’s vengeance; i.e., as dream-like, drugged, and nocturnal/chthonic symbols of death, chaos, and confusion that threaten the status quo of powerful men who haunt the hypermasculine after death as fatherless failures whipping themselves inside the guard tower [e.g., the hollow knight]. These monstrous-feminine spectres must not only be contained, but dealt with—normally through genocide dressed up in moral panics, rape epidemics and drug wars [except leave it to male thinkers to either code the beyond as awesomely male, like Edmund Burke and Lovecraft tend to do with the Sublime and cosmic nihilism; or as female, thus warranting death from male forces. Either fantasy is male-centric].

Medusa was Barbara Creed’s chosen source of female fear in The Monstrous-Feminine. Catalyzed by Freud’s essay “Medusa’s Head” [1922] writing about the Patriarchal bogeywoman, the Archaic Mother is Creed’s characterization of Medusa as post-Freudian, seeking to comment on women beyond their universal portrayal as victims in Western canon: their monstrous, ancient function. Obviously we want to comment on queer liberation and Communist development during our own poetic Amazonomachia. So while sodomy and the monstrous-feminine are to be surveilled, fought and assimilated/killed, they each come with a variety of double standards regarding these treatments that we can subvert in campy ways. For example, whereas the female Amazon or Medusa can be “beheaded,” tamed and bred/made to feminize war in ways useful to the state, the beheading of the male sodomite is seen as “instant death” [a very cliché male fear] under Capitalism: the societal death of the eunuchized slave as someone who has less-and-less rights under Cartesian dominance. Male “breeders” are expendable, but also overt threats that inseminate the woman with “evil babies” that must be euthanized through the male parent as someone to duel. While the vagina dentata can always be beheaded/defanged then fucked, there is nothing to be done with the male sodomite except cross swords with them.

Yet the monstrous-feminine also lends itself well to camp, supplying performers with the means to generate a cutesy-creepy uncanny in ways that make it far less torturous/stigmatic and far more fun, even strangely sexy [the proverbial “weirdest boner”]:

[artist: top-left, bottom-left, top-right and bottom-right: Jessica Nigri; top-middle: Johannes Sadeler; bottom-middle: Salem Hysteria]

Camp can yield gender trouble and gender parody in equal measure—camp, in the case of the guy watching Pyramid Head ride four-eyes like an ass [mimicking the “power of women” topos vis-à-vis Phyllis and Aristotle] and parody for her and her performer friend making trouble/having fun; e.g., camping the canonical-if-at-times-tangential “Nazi” of the occult, psychosexual BDSM aesthetic [with bonafide Nazi camp being its own musical/comedy hit[9] that never seems to age]. Likewise, Pyramid Head echoes the hauntological medieval as darkly torturous in a cryptomimetic, “Catholic miracle” sense, which can rescue pain from a variety of falsehoods: the false dichotomy of “pleasure and pain,” the false equivalency of “pain as sexual” but also non-pleasurable, the false stigma that pain is automatically harmful, thus has no cathartic potential. Trauma begets trauma and the chase of the Numinous can be medicinal in relation to lived trauma. Even so, it can just as easily be a burlesque show as kawaii vs kowai [cute vs scary] for genuine play and delight in an asexual sense with psychosexual overtones [the color swap] instead of internalized ones. Simply put, these aren’t pointless novelties or exclusive “hard kink medicine” for legit mental scarring, but also deeply fun [and subversive] exercises in the genderqueer creative spirit. Given the destructive nature of capital, all overlap through the same symbols and theatre as something to reclaim from the bourgeois monopoly on these things.)

A world without sin realized through Gothic poetics might seem novel or sui generis to many (and to an extent it is, in relation to what the elite encourage us to engage with) but Jodey Castricano’s Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing is decades old (2001), Derrida’s Spectres of Marx even older (1993) and Marx’s eponymous writings on spectres predating them by over a hundred years: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (1852). And the allegory of the Gothic as a class of beautiful lies whose “archaeologies”/elaborate strategies of misdirection are not simply decades older than Marx; when Horace Walpole anonymously wrote the first Gothic novel during the start of the Neo-Gothic period (1764), his deliberate combination of the Ancient Romance and the novel as a story of everyday experience are, themselves, inspired by the paradox of allegory through Milton’s “darkness visible” (nearly another century back in time, to 1667), while the broader idea of allegory and the hidden truths behind shadowy illusions dates back to Plato (375 BCE).

To that, the recent telling of the Gothic lie—one that adumbrates a hidden, tenebrous truth beyond the illusions of the cave—has an important lesson that is equally old (e.g., Ridley Scott, whose own lies we’ll cover in Volume Two, exhibit 51a): those within the cave, thus chained to its illusions, will attack and kill outsiders for being disruptors to a perceived order of things. This shadow of fascism, Pygmalion, and patriarchal tyranny is monomythic, the skeleton king exclusively competing with the noble king by pitting their combined soldiers against Communism inside a destructive, deceptive loop my thesis argument calls “the Cycle of Kings*/monomyth (again, the two operate in tandem, promising younger men/tomboys the chance to not just assimilate but become kings themselves through violent conquest). This aggregate hostility behooves the Satanic rebel of the Miltonian tradition, then, to possess a cunning and “game” ability to weave beautiful, xenophilic lies (disguise pastiche) that can be seen as “just games,” pulp fiction/rock ‘n roll** or “mere play” by one’s potential murderers (much of which constitutes Gothic media as an emerging countercultural force/spirit contained inside a widely consumed mode since its inception under Capitalism as a rising force on the global stage); i.e., with demonic poetics as ostensibly “empty” or “neutral” to avoid not just being criticized, but attacked on sight and executed for actually being in opposition to the state’s xenophobic status quo and tendency to aggregate against symbolic shows of solidarity from labor forces perceived as monstrous-feminine; e.g., the hysterical woman, the black male rapist, the back-stabbing Jew and man-in-a-dress as infantilized offshoots of a dark non-patriarch: the spawn not just of Satan as a feminine chaos resisting Heaven’s sovereign, but Lilith as the demonic broodmother whose literal or figurative womb exemplifies the classical double standard, “woman is other.”

(source: Stephen Coles’ “‘U.S.A. Surpasses All The Genocide Records!’ Poster and Fact Sheet,” 2016)

*Some added notes on the Cycle of Kings: While this pertains to Western canon and dogma at large, I should hope that the parallels to America’s establishment politics are obvious; i.e., good versus evil framed as Democrats versus Republicans—with fascists, centrists and neoliberals conveniently united against the big bad: Communism (conveniently forgetting their ally “Uncle Joe” from WW2, aka Stalin and his cutthroat brand of Marxist-Leninism; since the formation of the CIA in 1947, working with Communists on the global stage has been anathema because it goes directly against elite interests; re: William Blum’s Killing Hope.

We’ll look into Gothic-Communist methods for combatting their aims and how both sides have evolved during the Internet Age (e.g., David Michael Smith’s Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire, 2023—which we’ll examine in Volume One). For an exhaustive look into this anti-Communist hegemony from Bretton Woods to early neoliberalism in the pre-Internet Age, though, please consider Blum’s book, which covers the history of CIA interventions from 1945 to 1994! Something else to keep in mind is that, while the Cold War was sold to Americans as ongoing and relatively bloodless, this was a lie (GDF’s “There Was No ‘Cold’ War,” 2023); “cold war,” then, became a theatre into neoliberal Pax Americana that hid the brutalization of the Global South through America-vs-the-world kayfabe, displacing violence to personifications of war that disassociated the entire bloodletting behind a series of exchanges between cartoonishly archaic pugilists (all for profit on every conceivable register, of course)—an arms race whose sanitization of monomythic war is all that most (white, cis-het) Americans know. The so-called “real thing” becomes its own kind of myth that they cannot see, yet is glorified as “real” nonetheless (whereas Communism is a myth that could never be).

Meanwhile, the whistleblower’s “effeminate” pushing away from war (and infinite military expansion) often starts as a military figure themselves: Edward Snowden, George Lee Butler, Howard Zinn, etc. Weapons of state terror like the nuclear bomb, spies and other methods of controlled strikes and coercion against an American target is historically complicated by weapons of terror used at cross purposes; i.e., for the elite to break up, thus prepare target areas for invasion, occupation and exploitation, and for the oppressed to hit back with stolen ordinance, but also their own theatrical agents of counterterror. Behind the romance and the perfect portrait of the white, hopeful and loving family—the American flag as a pearly castle—is, in truth, an irredeemable site of state power and exploitation, around which are littered the endless fields of outsider corpses and blood. Consider how, in one war alone, post-WW2 America outpaced the Nazis at “their own game” during Vietnam (above) when in fact, the Nazis were inspired by the Americans doing it, if not first (e.g., Great Britain’s Irish experiment leading into the revival of Rome being a continuous project since its oft-marketed but greatly exaggerated “fall,” the horrors of the modern nation-state being foreshadowed by Neo-Gothic fiction displaced by the British author to the imaginary 15th century) then at least far better at past settler colonialists at maintaining a genocidal system: one where money flows through nature. This American outpacing of past imperial powers has only continued to be the case; i.e., with shadow war/total war exploding under the neoliberal state-of-affairs to cannibalize much of the planet for the elite.

In truth, the American and European Enlightenment shared ideas and practices, including Cartesian thought as the genocidal domination of nature as something to kill, cut up and name after capitalizing on it: mad science. The Founding Fathers genocided the Indigenous Americans and documented everything about them through a white perspective, then celebrated themselves as gods to be worshipped by white Americans moving forward; Napoleon invaded Egypt, after which he founded the Institute of Egyptology… and murdered everyone for France, but more importantly, for Napoleon as de facto god-king. Either case was a project of vanity that Mary Shelley lampooned with her “Modern Prometheus,” Frankenstein. It was a rare and vital voice from the oppressor group as not aggrandizing the cause of genocidal “progress.” For example, Christopher Nolan’s masturbatory Oppenheimer (2023) continues the embarrassing trend of apologizing for the Great Men of Science (a trope illustrated by Heinlein’s Competent Man trope); and TERFs are just feminists acting “like men” in respect to that patriarchal system; etc.

**Some more notes on the pulpy, rock ‘n roll nature of the Gothic: Gothic counterculture is generally “buried alive” inside the ghost of the counterfeit (again, the false copy of the imaginary barbaric past; something Dale Townshend insisted to me that Jerrold Hogle should have written a whole book about but never did, so I guess I’ll be doing it for him) as something to reclaim through the Westerner’s attraction to it despite its abject framework (which presents sex as not just unironically violent, but combative, torturous and married [the war bride] to the fascist aesthetic of death; i.e., through uncanny depictions of sexualized battle with a monstrous-feminine “other”: the Amazonomachia as I have previously defined and shall expound upon further, exhibit 1a1b). Try to keep this in mind whenever we discuss popular modes of “devilish” media like rock ‘n roll/heavy metal, but also myths and legends retold in Gothic novels, pulp magazines and “cheap” pleasures obsessed with “Satanic” cartoons/monsters as the embodiment of moral panic (e.g., goblins as little mischief-makers that are often paradoxically celebrated and fetishized for their musical mayhem); all are tied to the Cycle of Kings/Shadow of Pygmalion as a fight to keep the public’s Gothic imagination both asleep and dumbly consuming the same old dreck.

By intoxicating said public with potent mixtures of abject xenophobia and xenophilia that serve the elite, the state dupes workers into fearing Pygmalion’s foil, Galatea, as monstrous-feminine chaos that must die purely because it threatens the authority and hegemony of the “king” (and his agents) as an essentialized ruling body. The trick isn’t to abstain from these linguo-material devices at all, but to use their incredibly commonplace paradoxes and theatrical depictions to make new connections that assist in our gradual emancipation and continued liberation by copying old proletarian context; i.e., the slave rebellions of a former time. This happens by staying awake and alert through our rock ‘n roll/monsters et al as “perceptive” in ways that, while certainly not new, are applied in new situations that echo old ones within an ongoing system (the LGBTQ+ movement in the Internet Age under neoliberal Capitalism vs the slave rebellions of previous centuries before the Internet). Doing so will always be perceived as monstrous-feminine “terrorism” because it is not with the Man and the West (which is manly and “enteral”); it is against them and all they stand for and must be destroyed: beheaded, but also assimilated, thus genocided against through segregative triangulation arguments and procedures (divide and conquer).

 

(exhibit 1a1a3: Artist: Smz-69. “Well ain’t that cute—but it’s wrong!” Traditional female strength, even in hauntologized forms, is generally sexualized in ways “correct” male iterations are not: the genitals and sex organs are stressed in a pin-up style that, when irony is not present, becomes yet another endorsement of the status quo: “Beings who identify as women must appear strong in a particular way—as soldiers for the status quo who appeal to the Male Gaze in semi-correct forms: the poster girl of war who either looks soft and feminine, but carries a gun, sword or heavenly mandate; or looks, thus acts like a man against the state’s enemies; i.e., the she-Rambo as a fulfillment of nerd sex.” This concession weaponizes the incorrectly masculine, “butch” body as something that, if it doesn’t look like a woman, can at least do a man’s job to protect women who actually fit the damsel appearance; but Amazons within the 20th and 21st centuries often do look partially like damsels—i.e., the partially feminized broodmare/pretty princess. In heteronormative circles, this “pornstar” schtick is commonly ephebophilic, or constitutes a kind “courtly love” law of attraction towards the teenage body that is sexually nubile but emotionally immature, thus exploitable [though pedophilic examples of forced maidenhood are compelled by fascist regression—something to consider when we example moe, ahegao and incest in Volume Three, Chapter Five].

Likewise, even if her personality doesn’t match the “Barbie doll”/cheerleader look that her body conveys, it’s still traditionally cultivated to serve men who demand the woman play dumb as the sexy Valkyrie [with the doll look meant to convey but also encourage passivity and, at times, literal immobility and vapidity]. Within irony and gender parody such concepts can be subverted, but quickly moves away from gender-conformity and cisness is general. Sex positivity is also defined by mutual consent as not being visually immediate nine times out of ten. The context of any monstrous-feminine image, then, must be interrogated through dialectical-material scrutiny. This goes for cis allies, be they straight or queer themselves [cis-queer “bears,” exhibit 21a2a], but also our own content as gender-non-conforming persons [non-binarized femboys, exhibit 91c].

[artist: Top-left, middle-left-side and top-right: Nat the Lich; top-mid-left and far-bottom-left: Didi Lune Studio; mid-bottom-left: Lewdlings; mid-bottom-right: The Unclean; Lucid-01. “Death” is popular code for the female servant as “asleep”—both dead to the world but also fetishized with an aesthetic of death, the medieval and the inanimate as a potent means of subverting a coerced “virgin/whore” position into a cathartic one.]

To be crystal clear, the pornstar/”doll” look isn’t automatically a bad thing. Indeed, enjoying the look or subverting its harmful history through ironic BDSM is perfectly serviceable among iconoclasts: deliberately performing like a doll, puppet or sleeping/unthinking “victim” in figurative or literal ways, exhibit 41g2; puppy play as doll-like, exhibit 51d3; creating consent-non-consent in our own art, exhibit 98a1a; or otherwise emulating the “swooning” function of vampirism in ways that aren’t immediately harmful, exhibit 87d; or exhibiting the Goth doll look, mood or vibe [exhibit 9b2] through thematic rape play performed by couples wearing masks and outfits of a particular look that evoke death and rape as things to subvert, exhibit 101c2 [we Gay Communists like sex, including the guilty pleasures, fetishes and clichés that make up the Gothic mode]. However, if it doesn’t express mutual consent in a visually obvious manner, then it’s ontologically “ambiguous” in that respect. Keep this in mind as we explore liminal expression throughout the book.)

While we do spend a great deal of time reclaiming psychosexual things in this book, the reclamation of “torturer” linguo-material devices is somewhat arbitrary. For example, I could theoretically try to reclaim “Pygmalion” as an embodiment of cis allyship. That’s technically what I’m doing but the label is still a flagship device that should, in my humble opinion, put its chief aim/persona front and center. Mine is the liberation of the monstrous-feminine from its TERF retooling as an instrument of settler-colonial self-hatred—my self-hatred. As something to reclaim, it’s a battle standard within class war that prioritizes what I think is most valuable: humanizing the abject, the wretched, the female/feminine and their sex-positive potential from a strictly reprobate, subservient existence. So while I could treat “the Shadow of Pygmalion” as maybe someday yielding that hypothetical good king that Aragorn and Luke Skywalker never lived up to, this is a centrist trap I’d prefer to avoid.

Also, while we do discuss genuine allies that critique Man Box culture, I’m not terribly concerned with rescuing the image of the Patriarchy from its own colonializing history. I would not do so any more than I would trumpet my status as an atheist, Marxist-Leninist and feminist to whitewash those movement’s failures. Even though I am an atheist and feminist in function, I’d rather be called a Satanist/Gothic-Communist because one, it sounds way cooler and two, it falls on the side of those who are routinely persecuted by the righteous: the monstrous-feminine as a rebellious Galatean Hippolyta, Athena and Medusa, etc (atheism is historically moderate, thus bigoted against minority groups and feminism has fascist roots, etc).

In doing so, I’ve taken a hard stance, not a half-measure; there’s no whitewashing or apologia to be given towards older forms of activism that, to be frank, tend to “play ball” with state power, thus invariably regress back towards them (“Ever do you desire to appear noble, like the kings of old.”). This being said, the assimilated sit within the monstrous-feminine as enslaved, thus forced to adopt a Patriarchal worldview of themselves. I’m far more interested in dismantling their doubling of the Man, de-assimilating the monstrous-feminine as “brainwashed” before setting it once more on its proper course: towards Communism, albeit through the Gothic mode as a democratic, grassroots movement (with help from the middle class and unlikely allies. Tip your sex workers, my dudes; stripping is not consent and fuck the frat-boy/chudwad adage, “No means yes, yes means anal”; i.e., the only yes to exist is “yes” from both sides). —Perse, back in 2023

In other words, no matter how vague they seem, our spectres of Marx utilize viral, monstrous-feminine aesthetics during remediated praxis to offer a subversive, even transgressive hauntology and cryptonymy that reconciles with the status quo’s illusory past and tumultuous gradient of coded stigmas

• the outright “sex is dirty” argument
• “some sex is dirty [e.g., ‘church tongue’ vs ‘porno tongue’]”
• “the image of dark sex is used to exploit workers”
• “the dark sex object/death fetish can be reclaimed, subverting canonical dogma about sex”

that produces our nightmare whose rememory of all the lost dead generations weighs on the brains of the living. The state cannot tolerate this, will aggregate with whomever they can to prevent slave rebellion wherever it occurs; pound-for-pound, the solidarity of a given labor movement is always met with hyperbolic violence, state solidarity and draconian countermeasures.

This can be outright police violence, but also assimilation through age-old compromises in the shadow of police violence (thus rape as something to heal from; re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape”); i.e., that make champions of the cause turn heel or lose heart in the face of overwhelming adversity and division: the exorcism of the spirit of rebellion in favor of a Capitalist possession achieving class subjugation, fatal (fascist) compromise and centrist perpetuations of never-ending conflict. It’s the satisfaction of appropriative tension as a useful theatrical device the elite can use to disarm the appreciative tension of slave and labor revolts fighting for equality within their pedagogy of the oppressed: reaching spectrally out of the ancient past into “ancient” forms (from Medusa, onwards) that are constantly “rediscovered” per Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit to further or reverse abjection (thus profit vs nature as monstrous-feminine). “Caesar” vs Medusa, Mary Shelley and Marx, it’s a real ghost battle (re: Amazonomachia but also cryptomimesis—fighting with the dead and, by extension, all monster types)! Silence is genocide and sometimes the only voice (and violence) we have to send back at our enemies is the one we leave behind in their wake. Haunt them!

(artist: Chin Likhui)

Beyond ghosts and other monsters, Sex Positivity was also written and illustrated based on many lengthy—and dare I say perennial—arguments and discussions between friends, family and enemies. Indeed, their collaboration (whether intentional or not) was essential to many of this book’s ideas. Teamwork, mindful consumption and reclamation is very much the point of good proletarian praxis. Through Gothic Communism, we workers can be mothers to the world that raise good boys and girls; trans, intersex and enby persons—our little class/culture warriors who bring the struggle and the fight to the streets of Gothic imagination: an ongoing creative process that uses xenophilic artistic expression to critique (thus restructure) capital during linguo-material labor exchanges between workers operating in conscious solidarity against state xenophobia.

There are four points I wish to make about this last sentence, as they pertain to phrases that will come up repeatedly throughout Sex Positivity‘s remaining three volumes. First point: while the word “Gothic” requires some clarification, I will not attempt to reduce it to a singular type (this book is holistic, remember). We’ll elucidate “Gothic” in our second point, but first I want to discuss iconoclastic monstrous invigilation as subversive or transgressive. Like “Gothic,” the words “art/porn” are something that—while difficult to define in clear, uncertain terms—nevertheless have a tenacious brand image attached to them that is often Gothicized: you’ll know it when you see it (so familiar am I with both that I completely forgot my own idiosyncratic expertise, choosing near the very-end of this book’s generation to actually define them for other people); the same goes for monsters and what people like/dislike as a challenging means of “inkblot interpretations”—i.e., regarding sexuality and gender as policed but also challenged within competing dialogs about power and resistance, but also pleasure and pain (a false dichotomy given pain can be pleasurable unto itself, but also victims rewired to experience physical pain—even outright abuse—as “pleasurable”; e.g., the rape victim’s orgasm), dominance and submission, as liminal forms of dialectical-material monster art/porn.

As such, vague and confusing labels like “good monster” and “bad monster” pop up everywhere, occurring relative to the “demon lover” as an ambiguous performative threat—i.e., of rape play according to the idea of “acceptable forms of discourse” as also being in conflict, happening in relation to oppositional forces that either uphold the status quo as xenophobic or attempt to alter it by xenophilic means (humanizing the scapegoat). Arguments, then, about what is acceptable to show in one’s own exhibit invariably come into conflict with the artist’s desire to express their own message and heal from their own trauma. Doing so does not disrespect or otherwise disregard the trauma of others provided the gallery is curated and labeled; i.e., “There be dragons” or some such disclaimer/trigger warning.

For example, Baldur’s Gate 3 actually has “vulva options[10]” in its character creation screen (an idea borrowed from Cyberpunk: 2077 the videogame [2022] and its Rainbow Capitalist approach, which borrowed it from Skyrim mods [2011, exhibit 84b] which borrowed it from Second Life [2003] which borrowed it from Shadowrun, Mage: the Ascension and Cyberpunk: 2077 and other cyberpunk-themed TTRPGs, and so on…). The idea is marketed, thus patently sold both as adult and divisive, suggesting a line drawn between videogames, sex education and conservative values as challenged by “pretty orcs” (which goes against the Tolkien power fantasy of a racialized other for heroes to destroy on their settler-colonial quests disguised as fulfillment, power tripping and all-around escapism). As Jon Ramuz notes, the debate is nothing new relative to videogames as an ongoing exhibit for monstrous, anthropomorphic bodies that a divided public is constantly expected to curate, but also enjoy/endorse in different ways:

If your interest in Baldur’s Gate 3 derives from a general interest in fantasy RPGs then you might be surprised at how adult the game is […] But if you’re coming to this game as a player of Dungeons & Dragons, who wants a digital simulation of their favorite TTRPG, then it will be completely unsurprising to you that the game features adult themes (source: “Baldur’s Gate 3 Genital Options,” 2023).

In response to people asking questions/framing the studio’s approach as “liberal” (ibid.), the developers replied to Kotaku:

You can choose between a penis or a vagina, as well as pubic hair options. According to Dubrovina, the decision to add this option didn’t stem from the inclusion of sex scenes in romance subplots, but rather because the team decided to make underwear a piece of equipment you would obtain throughout the game, customize, and wear. She explained that underwear is an extension of the character customization as a form of in-universe expression.

“The question arose, ‘what happens when you take it off?'” she said. “At first we were like, ‘you know, maybe nothing’s gonna happen. Maybe we’re gonna have another underwear mesh under it. Who cares? But then I started thinking about it, talking about it, and we realized that for some players, it’s just another way to represent their identity” (source: Kenneth Shepherd’s “Baldur’s Gate 3 Aims For RPG Fans’ Ultimate Character Creator,” 2023).

(Meanwhile, the game’s bear sex scene is, I guess, the unspoken “elephant in the room”; it’s not zoophilia—the “bear” is actually a druid—but the cheeky animism in-game does brush up against an uncomfortable current reality: the word “zoophile” has the added social definition as defined by real-world criminal behaviors against non-shapeshifting bears and other equally non-sentient creatures that zoophiles abuse. The joke in Baldur’s Gate 3 is not an endorsement of that, but poking fun at the whole ludic-paramour system …and possibly being an obscure allusion to the Canadian bear-sex novel, The Bear—Marian Engel’s 1976 controversial capitalization on Canadian-Indigenous animism involving ritualistic [and highly figurative] sex with bear-shaped gods; this idea can be seen around the world and comes up in Gothic fiction from a Western perspective: Tuunbaq from The Terror [2018] as a xenophobic, mish-mash embodiment [exhibit 48d2] regarding misunderstood, but also lost Indigenous perspectives—i.e., relating to animals and nature in a sexual way without the settler-colonial shame, guilt and cultural baggage of Cartesian thought. To be clear, the Indigenous approach wasn’t prescribing actual sex with bears, but illustrating a human tendency to compare animals and their partially humanized virtues to human-animalistic behaviors: “You fuck like a bear!” [exhibit 52]. This idea of the animal and human as interlinked isn’t even exclusive to the West’s colonies; even Chaucer’s Miller did this in The Canterbury Tales [whereas centuries later Super Troopers (2001) made fun of the idea of bear-fucking quite thoroughly].)

(source: Maijin Obama’s “The Doogie Fight Club – SF6 Avatar Battles,” 2023)

Furthermore, the developers wanted their bodies to look attractive (in a pin-up sense), or at least semi-natural (a paradox, I know):

“My personal experience with most [slider-based character creators] is you kind of customize it, it takes you a lot of time and effort, and then a lot of times it kind of looks the same in the end,” she said. “So we wanted to avoid that. And if we would make sliders, we needed to make it into something that would be truly unique and wouldn’t look the same.”

According to Dubrovina, Larian isn’t married to taking this approach for all of its games, but they felt the approach worked well for Baldur’s Gate 3 and, she said, it kept custom characters from looking “mediocre.” / That crafted look for each race, hairstyle, and accessory means that there aren’t really “ugly” custom characters. This isn’t Street Fighter 6 where players are making a bunch of weirdos. And indeed, even as Dubrovina repeatedly clicked the randomize option in the character creator, each hero with different accessories, colors, and other options looked believable (ibid.).

There’s something to be said about “realism” enforcing a settler-colonial standard (history is written by the conquerors) that engenders body dysmorphia/gender dysphoria as a kind of “impostor syndrome” for the oppressed and oppressors alike (re: white women and eating disorders); but also gender parody as non-Vitruvian (re: Street Fighter 6, 2023), which then dovetails into broader conversations about gynodiversity (exhibits 52f and 68), androdiversity (exhibit 91b2) and intersexuality (the xenomorph, exhibit 51a); but the fact remains that the public’s beauty standards exist within avatar creations that are tooled by developer expectations (which are informed by their own ideas about beauty as supplied by the natural-material world around them).

Even so, this doesn’t stop sex-repulsed people from responding with a gratingly sex-negative question: “Why, though?” So, I’ll call that like it is: standard-issue gender trouble and (often) white fragility. This begs the Socratic response, “Why not?” as a means of establishing gender trouble and parody as legitimate activist stratagems (not an invitation to be force-drunk hemlock[11]). As this supposed hypothetical is, in truth, based on a real exchange that I had about the game, I decided to not treat it as rhetorical, but in true neurodivergent fashion wanted to give it an honest answer (with my partner Bay’s help; thank you, muffin):

(source: Kotaku’s “11 Minutes with Baldur’s Gate 3‘s Character Creator,” 2023)

To be clear, it’s fine if the exposed vagina in art/porn isn’t someone’s cup of tea, but videogames—especially those in the Internet Age—are a public space, a forum/galley to some extent. This means the rules of such places also apply to videogames (and other mediums); i.e., they’re an exhibit that isn’t curated to cater to a single group’s vision. If someone is sex-repulsed, that’s a valid consideration, but it should always be raised in ways that aren’t sex-negative. To that, sex-positive galleries shouldn’t have to compromise their sex-positive, xenophilic vision to meet a smaller group’s needs if the exhibit is about showcasing naked monster bodies in a sex-positive way.

Furthermore, putting the vagina in the closet when male genitalia are plastered all over everything is a modesty argument, often used by moderate individuals conflating their own sex repulsion as transcendental; they feel vulnerable when they see someone else’s vagina, but are probably acclimated to the cock as everywhere or the breasts as a commonly adjustable feature of avatar cosmetics. To include one but not the other is arbitrary and harmful, especially when the precedent of the game invokes sexual and gender expression to begin with. To exclude a particular morphological identity from the game is segregation, which generally will have a cis bias; players should be able to represent themselves however they want: Big Titty Goth GFs or Big Booty Goth GF with a girl cock! So I ask people who would want to prevent that, “Why do you care if that’s in-game?”

Applying this concept to Baldur’s Gate, if someone doesn’t want to use the genitals option in-game, that’s perfectly fine, but discouraging its inclusion as an option altogether—just because Baldur’s Gate is a popular game that plays around with private parts ontology despite them being a highly regulated site of trauma for many ace people—is frankly regressive (and also ignores the sexual nature of the Baldur’s Gate series since its inception; e.g., paramour options). Yes, sex-repulsed people being triggered by exposed genitals is understandable; but their feelings about their own genitals doesn’t extend to other players within a shared world any more than it does in real life (the relationship, here, is half-real). This isn’t John Lajoie’s “Show Me You Genitals” (2008, below—the vicious historical-material cycle of tragedy and farce oscillating in public discourse at large); gender expression through the human body isn’t even automatically sexual. So no, people having the option to express themselves in a nudist sense with their Baldur’s Gate 3 avatars isn’t you being forced to also “play doctor” or look upon someone who wants to have sex with you.

Put differently and in regards to Sex Positivity as a whole, it’s not up to the invigilator to manage their gallery to meet regressive, sex-negative standards; if the game-in-question provides inclusive options that represent a change in the paradigm shift troubling to creepy reactionaries fantasizing power abuse

Beat a woman to death with a mace so I could steal her valuables. Used a revive scroll and them gaslit her into thinking I was the hero who saved her life so now she is indebted to me… (source: Reddit, “The Steam Reviews for this Game Are Something Else,” 2023).

or even ace people, frankly that’s their problem (the option towards being ace, or at least not having genitals in videogames, is certainly nothing new); it’s not being done to offend others and even ace people need—and I promise this is coming from a place of love, my ace comrades—to manage their expectations while realizing that monster identities, especially genderqueer ones often are sexual and conveyed through nudism. Love it or hate it, them’s the breaks (although this book is largely about sex-positive Gothic expression, this doesn’t preclude asexuality at all. We will thoroughly explore ace options in Gothic media, too). Nudity and monsters have always been political, but this has to occur on our time, not that of moderates (versus overt reactions) telling us how to do our activism for us; we’re not doing this for just ourselves, but fighting for a better world for all—a post-scarcity world where nudity isn’t automatically a sexual act, sin doesn’t exist, and people can be more open about their sexuality and gender without feeling vulnerable, fake, criminal and/or exposed in fear of reactionaries killing them and aloof, smug moderates turning a blind eye or prioritizing their own victim complexes. This requires imagining that world ahead of time, which requires having thoughts that will be considered sinful and anathema by the elite and their proponents. Depending on what identity is being imagined, the nature of such imagination amounts to the committing of thought crimes and heresy (secular or theistic): the imagining of rebellion as something to reach and instill in the nation’s youth by poetically reifying it within the material world.

As you can expect, confusions, concerns and disputes invariably abound (especially for all you “boomers” out there who don’t play videogames), which brings us to our second point: the “Gothic” being a common point of contention as something that historically remains difficult to define that nevertheless is plastered over everything and used off-hand for centuries according to aesthetics whose ownership is equally imperiled among different media types. In orthographic literature, for example, Chris Baldrick writes in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (2009):

The term “Gothic” has become firmly established as the name for one sinister corner of the modern Western imagination, but it seeks to work by intuitive suggestion rather than by any agreed precision of reference. There are several difficulties of usage involved in the term itself, of which the obvious today is the incompatibility between the literary and architectural senses: whereas “Gothic” in architectural contexts refers to a style of European architecture and ornament that flourished from the later twelfth to the fifteenth century, it is used in its literary and cinematic senses to describe works that appeared in an entirely different medium several hundreds of years later. A term thus applied simultaneously to the products of two such widely differing ages (to say nothing of the cultural gulf between Chartres cathedral and a sensationalist magazine story) would seem to require some qualification attached to it; and, indeed, it is the sensible practice architectural historians use to distinguish from the Gothic of the late Middle Ages the Neo-Gothic or Gothic Revival style of the nineteenth century. In a more logical world, we might have learned to adopt a clearer designation of this kind for the “Gothic” of modern literature and cinema; but of course, it is far too late to undo our inherited confusions, and even if we were able to do so, we would only run up against further difficulties that render “Neo-Gothic fiction” or some such nomenclature just as unsatisfactory” (source: my printout copy given to me by Dale Townshend at MMU, complete with grad-student notes scribbled all over it).

In videogames’ far more recent insertion into the conversation, Tanya Krzywinska determines in “The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates in Videogames” (2015):

I began this work with an intuitive sense that there are vast variations in the effective, and indeed affective, uses of Gothic in games, and as work for this study progressed, that sense has intensified. Definition is therefore no simple task, especially considering that Gothic has spanned such a breadth of mood, time and location. As Fred Botting notes “[t]he diffusion of Gothic forms and figures […] makes the definition of a homogeneous generic category very difficult” (1996, 14). In his discussion of the uncertainty in scholarly definitions of the Gothic, David Punter writes that there is a “significant resistance to canonization” (2000, ix), suggesting that there is no one text that substantiates Gothic. It is therefore largely agreed within recent scholarship on the topic that Gothic is brimful of vertiginous, acute tangents and perplexing ambiguities (source).

My own commentaries on “Gothic” per my Metroidvania work and coining of ludo-Gothic BDSM focus on camping canonical spaces (castles) and monsters; both expand on ideas neither author bothered with in their own overspecialized commentaries.

Dedications aside, Baldrick and Krzywinska (and other Gothic or ludic scholars I cite throughout the book) are predominantly white accommodated intellectuals who remain utterly unequipped to write about the inherent queer struggle of the Gothic as something to constantly reclaim from the status quo as a fascist-neoliberal entity from the late 1970s onward—i.e., through my own diverse area of studies that fused the Gothic together within videogames as an extended conversation between novels or cinema, but also beyond* what intellectuals were, are and will be still be saying about the former regarding the latter as “Gothic” among digital, Internet-Age media; e.g., Medusa or Amazons doubled within oppositional praxis, to be used by queer agents on a gradient of resistance against, and oppression by, bourgeois proponents—so-called “TERF Amazons” or “TERF Medusas**” like Victoria de Loredani (an Italian TERF—eat your heart out, Giorgia Meloni[12]) from Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 Zofloya (exhibit 100b2) or James Cameron’s Ellen Ripley (exhibit 30a): war bitches whose “rabid, feral” nature is on a shorter leash/timer (due to the euthanasia effect requiring they be put down faster once Capitalism enters decay). Including sex work, all inhabit a poetic whole within a larger subversive conflict I wish to comment on, and contribute towards, in meaningful ways that go far beyond academic flag-planting by actually educating and helping workers directly (to alter linguo-material conditions and relevant social-sexual attitudes through dialectical-material poetics). Worker solidarity is a holistic enterprise conducted by workers, first and foremost. Try to keep that in mind moving forward.

*Alluding to the title of my 2018 master’s thesis: “beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (source), which includes reinvestigating my own research years later (exhibit 1a1a1h2a3b).

**More than my thesis argument already has, we’ll return to TERF monsters and the monstrous-feminine (as regressive and subversively progressive) often. Both elide with hauntological ideas like “phallic woman” and “demon lover” (in coercive, unironic demon BDSM vs ludo-Gothic BDSM, which the Demon Module shall return to and unpack; re: “Summoning Demons“); i.e., as things to subvert, then endorse within the Gothic mode in new, harmless forms; e.g., with mommy doms, monster-fucking and consent-non-consent as married to labor[13a] vs canonical rape pastiche. There’s also assimilation fantasy vs legitimate rebellion through Amazonomachia/Amazon pastiche as symbolic of class struggle through subjugated/subversive doubles: the war mask, uniform, weapon and weapon-like, athletic (or at least capable/”built”) body as performances that, far from canceling each other out per the centrist axiom, continue in opposition for or against the state as something to wrestle out from under its iron thumb. Because the state historically personifies itself through hauntological bodies that express war, lies, death and rape in unironically fetishized forms that simultaneously perform all of the above, these variants exist to victimize the ironic monstrous-feminine during oppositional praxis. Simply put, a state fetish is a coercive device, one that frames iconoclasm not simply as “incorrect,” but jailed then abused for its sex-positive, thus anticapitalist heresy during “prison sex”/Man Box rituals. Said rituals are often performed by assimilated members of a given minority (e.g., the Medusa is not simply overtly furious and demonic, but undead—its ontologically ambiguous trauma complicated by her as a symbol often operating at cross purposes).

While progressing away from the state’s harmful apparatus and its linguo-material past is desirable, it is liminal relative to pornographic and artistic expression as historically-materially controlled by the state and its proponents (with Perseus famously using the beheaded Medusa’s “blind rage” to destroy his enemies by making them hers—i.e., triangulation). Yet the truth is, pornography and demonic/undead language won’t disappear at all under Gothic Communism; they simply won’t be couched within current disguised trauma, but rather operate as savvy means of negotiating emotional/Gothic intelligence through informed consent in the present to prevent future trauma; i.e., the state’s harmful return through regressive rhetorical devices: the regressive Amazon’s blind rage, “waifu” status, foregone demise and coercive BDSM.

As we shall explore in Volume One’s “Synthesis Symposium” discussing the Basics of opposition synthesis, constructive anger and rioting is a healthy social mechanism tied to labor movements. Conversely, canonically destructive anger—i.e., appeasing the state’s executioner just so you can send some other bastard to the guillotine or enslave a fellow worker as their “better”—is not; it is merely triangulation (turning one person against another), then clemency and reprieve to a greater calamity/seminal tragedy that cannot be avoided—not in wars, but also on a grander scale in relation to the end of the Capitalocene via Promethean cataclysm if something isn’t done now. Cops don’t prevent crime, they enforce it. So the world needs more subversive Amazons, not subjugated ones scapegoating nature as monstrous-feminine with ethnocentric dogma surging moral panic through the Protestant ethic; re: the Archaic Mother punished by witch cops to instill Red Scare, Orientalism, Black Revenge, Satanic Panic, etc, on and offstage [re: “Policing the Whore“]. Hoist them on their own petards to have the whore’s revenge against profit—on the Aegis!

(exhibit 1a1b: Artist, top-far-left: Michel Dinel; top-mid-left: Jiyu-Kaze; top-middle: Viviana Vixen; right: Edu Souza; bottom-middle: Nunchaku; bottom-mid-left: Edwin Huang; bottom-far-left: Frederico Escorsin.

A kind of Galatea traditionally sculpted by Pygmalion and his imitators, Amazons and their complicated pastiche embody social-sexual conflict during oppositional praxis, hence come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are canonically war dogs of a binarized character. Most notably is the noble Athena versus the dark Medusa from the female legends of Antiquity [also, Queen Hippolyta]: the doubling of the hunter persona, a white and black wolf. Such war-boss, queen bitches canonically offer good behavior and bad behavior as our proverbial “teeth in the night” meant to serve as man’s best friend in centrist theatre [and whose true rebellion goes against the elite’s profit motive].  

However, the lineage stretches backwards and forwards hauntologically through post-Renaissance revivals. For one, there’s the pre-fascist, Neo-Gothic “phallic women-in-black” such as Victoria de Loredani, and the Victorian “madwoman in the attic,” Bertha Mason; the post-Victorian, hatpin-stabbing suffragettes of the early 20th century [e.g., Leoti Baker]; the comic book/action hero treatment starting with William Marsden’s bondage-themed Wonder Woman in the 1940s [or Rosie the Riveter] followed by the feral, bikini-wearing sexpots of the 1960s and 1970s [Coffy], as well Ripley and similar “female Rambos” of the 1980s [a neoliberal response to the “final girl” trope of the slasher genre]; various catsuit regressions—sexy spies, detectives, doctors, and BDSM-tinged femme fatales—in the ’90s, 2000s and 2010s; then, an increasingly queer presence regarding the rise of trans, intersex, non-binary and other forms of queer discourse online. If the 20th century constitutes the continuation of first wave, second wave and third wave feminism, then fourth wave feminism’s rise has seen a regression towards the older forms using the same language in oppositional praxis: regressive Amazonomachia and post-fascist[13b] gender trouble [the “gender critical” movement] veering backward at fascist* and pre-fascist* palimpsests versus subversive Amazonomachia and transgressive gender parody. It’s less a question of stolen valor and more of older groups fighting for the equality of convenience by pitting their versions of the “Amazon-as-waifu” [a promised war bride, whose more muscular variants are called “wheyfus” for supposedly being “gym maidens” that consume whey but also can dominate the chaser sissy as a result] against genderqueer variants; i.e., a “mirror match,” in fighting game parlance.

Regarding all of these black-and-white variants, there’s the moral qualification of “good and evil.” Our concerns are dialectical-material, going beyond administering binarized value judgements to critique the underlying cause-and-effect of culture as materially coded through informed, hauntological [thus grey] aesthetics operating at cross purposes; i.e., “TERF” is synonymous with “fascist,” in this respect, as a heteronormative defender of the status quo through Man Box culture as contributing to Capitalist Realism, whereas “Light/good-looking vs Dark/evil-looking” is a universally adaptable aesthetic [exhibits 50b, 60e1, 101c2, etc] that lends itself well to fascist, neoliberal/centrist and Gothic-Communist iterations of ostensibly cis and overtly gender-non-conforming Medusas and Amazons [whose sexual/gender function and BDSM aesthetics are fluid, variable and often figurative].

 In truth, the adaptability really applies to any warring persona as the body language of wrestler’s kayfabe being the conspicuous staging of espionage-as-combat for or against the state [the stage-like arena having all eyes on it, which follow the performer-as-celebrity into the arena of everyday life; i.e., a kind of forced reality/performance within war as personified by the Amazon as a gladiatorial combatant operating inside culture war as an extension of class war within popular media as war-like]. Just as war is not, in truth, romantic but often conveyed in romantic language that sits between the fiction and the rules [re: Jesper Juul], the language of culture exists in dialectical-material opposition according to conveyors or consumers of these monstrous-feminine heroes becoming masked, costumed and/or muscular operatives to some passive or active degree: the drop-dead gorgeous, sexpot femme-fatale as a heavily codified cop, spy or prize fighter. Often, it’s all three; i.e., a resistance collaborator/spy-turned-whore/vice versa [exhibit 4a] or a fascist double agent during “brothel espionage” married to the fighting ring. Such personas function as secret identities but also alter egos on par with James Bond’s [whose Red-Scare, state-sanctioned violence represents the legitimacy of state espionage in actual or romanticized forms, versus the forever-illegitimate counterterrorist violence of rebel factions seeking to dismantle state hegemony and develop a post-scarcity world]. Like any monster during oppositional praxis, this theatricality’s jouissance sits between intended play and emergent play as decided by the play inside the meta-narrative; i.e., to play around with through pastiche [accuracy] and parody [inaccuracy, often ironic] as archetypally carried across various mediums: the Amazon and Medusa, for example, having survived out of Antiquity into plays, novels, cinema and videogames that cannot be monopolized.

[artist: Mika Dawn 3D] 

War has been rooted in tremendous theatre and deception since the time of the Caesars [whose hauntology 20th/21st century totalitarianism wishes to revive]. These deceptions have complicated under the neoliberal sphere. That is, the business of combat sports emulates the historically deceptive nature of actual war brought out of the imaginary ancient past into the modern world as a culture war fought with war-like aesthetics: the monomyth, also called the Hero’s Journey, as a kind of orderly antidote to chaos as female. To this, class war unfurls via the battle of the sexes through sports as “man’s domain,” thus something to bar women from competing in against men for reasons of “fairness”: women are hysterical beings of chaos and allowing them to compete would upset the delicate order of the universe, threatening their virtue and male egos [and profits]! This obviously effects gender-non-conforming people, going so far as to ban trans women from playing competitive chess as of 2023 [Caelan Conrad’s “Were Trans Women Banned from Chess?!”]. In turn, the anomaly becomes costumed and fetishized as exceptional; i.e., “in a league of their own,” one where the Sapphic lancer obliterates everyone in her own little cage. It’s infantilizing.

Throughout the book, we’ll revisit the monomyth and its deceptions in relation to class and culture war as “sport-like.” For the moment, merely consider how the heteronormative segregation of sports mentality brings out some rather novel regressions that simply haven’t existed before in Western politics or canon. One of these groups are TERFs, but also their disguise in the world of combat sports in the Internet Age through the waifu or wheyfu as a “girl boss/war boss” kind of puppet for the state; i.e., something to play out class betrayal and free market apologia during garden-variety war games. Whatever their form, the execution of these games treats female strength—even monstrous-feminine variants—as wrought with multiple double standards. “Strong is sexy” translates to highly particular body types within fighting parlance: “built” within a Vitruvian, hourglass bod and the Amazon as materialized through the Male Gaze; i.e., to serve men by looking and acting a particular way within the theatre of war as indiscrete, globalized and sacred.

This extends to the virginal nerd as non-athletic in a physical sense, instead challenging the perceived dominance of men through the die-hard cliché of the female detective as having a “muscular” brain: the Nancy-Drew-type lesbian/ace person stemming from older tropes of a middle-class white girl undressed by the eyes of cis-het men while she gets to the bottom of the myth of male superiority through her domain: inside thinking-based games championed as yet-another-front for male dominance in culture war. This rebellious exchange is, itself, historically flawed—i.e., having bigoted roots by the men, but also the women doing the sleuthing as exceptional white sleuths. It’s the shadow of fascism in feminism’s bigoted past, dressed up as the underdog in a battle that reduces non-white/non-cis minorities to total invisibility or token status. Simply put, it becomes the white woman’s “pick me” vibe/parade of old-school suffragettes billboarding their oppression; i.e., conveniently forgetting everyone else while being marketed not just as exceptional through manufactured [male] supremacy, scarcity and conflict, but nostalgic within the Gothic displacement of once-upon-a-time; e.g., Netflix’ much-touted second-wave feminist pastiche in The Queen’s Gambit [2020]: the hard-fought queen in the man’s game, the prodigal child or pin-up doll whose exception proves the rule by fetishizing nature as monstrous-feminine, as usual [as “woman” in second wave feminism hauntologies].

[artist, top-left: Blouson; bottom-left: Allie-Reol; bottom-right: East Sea Monster]

Regardless of their exact muscles or general look/vibe, I sometimes also call TERFs “TERF Amazons,” “TERF Medusas,” or “subjugated Hippolyta” through a poetic attempt to make the monstrous-feminine the Virgin or the Whore in service of state hegemony—i.e., the “monster mom” as fetishized during the monomyth [the succubus Slan, exhibit 51b1, or the xenomorph as a rapist ghost of the counterfeit who must die or be escaped from but also stared at and chased by bigots/privileged colonizers].

Whereas Capitalism fosters a myopia that makes it difficult, if not impossible for people to imagine anything beyond Capitalism, Gothic Communism seeks to correct this cultural blindness in favor of imagining a better world through xenophilic monsters, rape play and all-around consent-non-consent, voyeuristic peril and various other transgressive liminalities; e.g., the monster mom as something to subvert through a gradient of gender parody propositions, my favorite being “Imagine Conan with a pussy” [and someone who wasn’t a bigot]—i.e., non-binary gender trouble with a gradient of Amazon “monster moms” that are tough but nurturing while not endorsing the status quo: my OCs Ileana, Revana, Siobhan and Virago in exhibits 7d, 37f, 37g, 61a2, 84, etc; classical myths like the Medusa, 23b; and in subversive fanart like Corporal Ferro, Marisa, Chun Li and Zarya in exhibits 85, 104a2, 111b; etc.)

Also, beyond the duality of oppositional praxis/workers-versus-the state is plurality when you dive into the gradient between the two larger points. For us, “Gothic” is defined as oppositional praxis; i.e., during (anarcho-gay) Communist struggles against the state within a proletarian Gothic imagination, one whose liminal expressions consistently push and argue for equal human rights (and the rights of animals and the environment) for all workers expressed in any media type: gay Communist monsters (e.g., “fur fags,” exhibit 10c2).

Third point: whenever I say “the state” in this book, I am referring to the state as both a current mechanism for capital, but also the status quo more broadly—a state of affairs that has evolved into its current form (including the Gothic castle as a hauntological advertisement for state hegemonic displacement and dissociation): nation-states, whose sense of national identity in relation to capital had to evolve into itself from the Cartesian Revolution onwards (bringing with them modern war and globalization as they currently exist). In the here and now, the status quo involves corporations and religious institutions that operate with the state, the elite uniting them to serve their material interests. “The state” is an umbrella term, then, one that highlights a relationship between all of these factors. In the past, the status quo would have been the Church, or church-and-state as undivided—i.e., feudal enterprises and city states prior to the rise of nation-states that raised wealth through tithes or conquest (the Crusades). Conversely, the state as a traditional vector of exploitation by neoliberal agents/corporate bodies (taxes and commodities) can also be entirely bypassed by them—i.e., anarcho Capitalism and the accumulation of wealth through the creation and sale of privatized commodities (military and domestic) controlled entirely by corporations.

While these distinctions are important when explaining the past as it once existed or what the future could ultimately become, the elite have progressively sought to utilize everything in their power to achieve their goal: profit and global hegemony for profit, above all else. The foundational barbarism that post-fascism regresses towards (exploitation, genocide, fascist mercenaries, constant surveillance, torture, rape, drug abuse, lies, bribes, murder and pedophilia) is still there; it’s just veiled, dressed up as “the market” in ways that glorify corporations and remove their accountability (which must be met with labor action, including unions; e.g., Unscripted Casting Advocacy Network, 2023). Polities, corporations and churches—these factors are always working in concert to achieve profit; i.e., in some combination of state, corporation and church. Be this hybrid increasingly corporate/technocratic, fascist (a partial regression towards feudalism in defense of capital), theocratic, or some other bourgeois flavor, the outcome is always the same towards workers: exploitation, because that is what Capitalism is designed to do. Crisis and decay are both the functional gears of profit and part of the larger theatrical tableau.

As part of this masquerade, the black-and-blood-red ghost of fascism is constantly revived in pre-/current/post- flavors to combat the spectres of Marx within the psyches of the privileged; i.e., centrist media commonly reviving the Nazi as something to “protect” Americans and their emulators from—e.g., Skeletor (exhibit 40a1a/112a), Zombie Caesar (exhibit 39c) or Count Dracula (exhibit 41j) as a pre-/post-fascist, dark master emblem—while also keeping the same citizenry safe from the ghosts of Communism as a mutual enemy within the state at large. Indeed, fascists are either commonly summoned and scapegoated or dressed up in the antiquated, pre-fascist “vampy” aesthetic (“vamp” meaning “wielding the qualities of a confident, monstrous-feminine seductress”) whose signifiers are to be blasted apart by monomythical, status-quo heroes, thus saving the world from the Greater of Two Evils: fascist “corruption” as conflated with Marxist-Leninists and anarcho-Communists in the same breath, but differentiated when it suits the elite, inviting fascists to defend capital from agents of post-scarcity (making the false rebellion of fascists a useful brand of idiocy for the state):

(exhibit 1a1c: Artist, top: ChuckARTT; bottom-left: Arvalis; bottom-middle: Flyland; bottom-right: Pagong1.

Fascism and Communism occupy the same space as “bad omens” in centrist monomyths until crisis demands a clear distinction be made by Pygmalions that defends capital beyond a shared persecution; i.e., fascism is the lesser of two evils because its perennial dark castle routinely crumbles to reveal a shiny white castle underneath, whereas the troubling presence of Communism threatens all of normalized existence: through a dark truth that cannot be cleansed because it denotes the castle [symbolic of the West, of Cartesian thought, of Capitalism] as harmful by design, not because it is “corrupt”: ACAB. Indeed, the so-called shadow of “corruption” is common capitalist apologia, often relayed through a “vice character” scapegoat in neoliberal propaganda stemming from early-modern forms [e.g., The Merchant of Venice]. Videogames constitute a popular majority in this field, wherein the boss archetype is a fascist or Communist scapegoat in the same general aesthetic. As such, there remains plenty of room for variation and double standards, enacted and remediated by weird canonical nerds in the Shadow of Pygmalion.

For example, the canonical “phallic” woman is “like a man” in that she is dark, mysterious and penetrative with her fangs and unquenchable desire, but remains the bride of a male, “Dark Father/Dragon Lord” tyrant [an allusion to the historical figure Vlad “the Impaler” Dracul and his patrilineal Order of the Dragon out of Eastern Europe] who holds her under his boss-like thrall; the canonical myth of the female equivalent, on the other hand, is the female-Beowulf who enters Archaic Mother territory—e.g., the place where the Countess [exhibit 41h] or Alien Queen/Mother Brain breed inside a site for abject sexual reproduction: the awesome majesty of her Numinous power offset by a voracious, vagina-dentata maw [what Barbara Creed calls the murderous womb] that both angrily spawns dragons and devours its own “children” blindly who, in turn, are forced to put her down in favor of a male hegemon; i.e., the Jungian slaying of the female chaos dragon to further the male questors “individuation” [itself a myth, given the genocidal commonality of all heroes in heteronormative canon: the knight defends property and the state, often by killing someone else and taking it from a fascist double after said double takes it from labor and minorities—capitalist DARVO in other words: “You’re the gaping, always-hungry, self-cannibalizing maw, not us!”].

[artist: Mizugi Buns]

This being said, I don’t want to focus on vagina dentata or literal breeding crises in the classical, Neo-Gothic sense; 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[14] 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]. Instead, they can be nymph-like and soft, their penis a reclaimed source of shame/codified rape [mine was] and their monomorphic body offering up other gender-non-conforming surprises to boot. They become a dark being of chaos to sincerely-but-ironically worship relative to how they camp current heteronormative standards that abject such beings; i.e., as would have been the case before Cartesian thought came and binarized everything: a drug-like, magic-themed “Ode to Psyche” [or Pan, Dionysus, Queen Maeb, Satan, the xenomorph, Medusa, etc] as wise in ancient, forgotten, “dark” ways; i.e., lost to Capitalism save in reimagined rebellious festivals [often with fairy-like flavors, exhibit 52a] that take black magic back as a culturally appreciative phenomenon. The “magic” stems from being different in morphological/gendered ways whose chimeric andro/gynodiversity [exhibit 9b1] would have been worshipped in ancient and non-Western cultures in absence of unironic gender trouble; e.g., the “two-spirit” person, shaman or witch, but also the satyr or fawn of the ancient Western world [exhibit 52b] or the angel or demon of the non-Vitruvian model [exhibit 45b] as thoroughly Numinous.

Even so, contemporary examples of “magic” also include the “sorcery” of gender-affirming care [from synthetic hormones to nail polish, ring lights and queer-coded hair dye] and its gynodiversity/androdiversity as heretical under the heteronormative/queernormative status quo, which merges with the celebration of the ancient, pagan and Sapphic [exhibit 41g1a1] as hauntologized in a sex-positive sense; i.e, to spread acceptance of, and adoration towards, the intersex as marginalized, as well as trans, non-binary and cross-dressing individuals. The penis becomes something to allow to exist alongside the vulva, labia and vagina, but also the breasts and other biological markers as decorated with various forms of demonic/undead/animalized code that camp the penis as a canonical symbol of rape: xenophilic genitals like the dragon dong [exhibit 37c] or zombie monster cock/”BBC” [exhibit 37b] but the wielder also decked out in various clothing and makeup whose general look/vibes actually fight queer panic/male stigma and show off the monstrous-feminine cock as both erect and often massive [exhibit 89b2b, 91b2] but also not toxically masculine/invasive:

 

[artist: Galaad]

Regardless of the size or usage—or even if the person is naked or not [exhibits 89b2a/2b]—the ludic-Gothic-BDSM goal stays the same: a chance between two [or more] parties to theatrically interrogate and negotiate, thus regain stolen worship and love that has been denied by Cartesian thought/scientists and their radicalized victims-turned-bad-faith activists; e.g., TERFs having been abused by a cis-het man and repeatedly conflating their former rapist with a trans woman through dogmatic propaganda they help write—i.e., destabilizing gossip/punching down. In response, punching up is generally done against a “Cotton Ceiling” [from Drew DeVeaux; source: Cassie Brighter’s “The Often Misunderstood Premise of the Cotton Ceiling” 2019]. And such rioting absolutely should be allowed; calling it a “stone in a glass house” is to put property before people. The penis is generally associated with war-like brutality [“Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps…”] and advertised as monuments that are much larger than actual erect penises that promote violence [“…And fix’d his head upon our battlements”]. Pornographic depictions of penises [as erect] are generally censored because they are indecent, but also because they expose the man’s penis as a source of shame for failing to be “big enough.”

As such, they are canonically presented as threatening and violent, transferring male stigma from person to person through the penis as implying the entire body and person as dangerous in criminal-hauntological forms; i.e., the serial killer’s dagger penis [which we discuss in Volume One‘s “A Problem of ‘Knife Dicks,’ or Humanizing the Harvest”] but also the “incorrect” man as a cross-dressing killer advertised during Satanic panic; re: Matthew Lewis camping said panic in The Monk [1796] by having the male devil shapeshift into a female witch called Matilda, then crossdress as a nun crossdressing as a monk named Rosario before tempting Ambrosio with her “Satanic” body—all to place the false “woman” in the place of “biological” women’s “real imprisonment” and fuck over the rapey priest. The class character residing in Lewis’ queer voice, however nascent his 21-year-old self may have been, wasn’t “just psychological” but campy par excellence in order to critique the resultant stigmas begot from material conditions; e.g., satire comparable to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus or George Romero’s zombie films! Comparatively his cis-het, WASP female “fencing partner,” Ann Radcliffe, wrote The Italian having the heroine locked up in a convent with other AFAB nuns. Nary a demon faggot in sight:

[artist: Cute Femboy Faye]

The point being, apart from Radcliffe’s cloistered, naïve sexualizing of the surface of images [usually clothes; e.g., the nun’s veil or the priest’s robes] as she usually would, the sighting of male balls [above] is a dead giveaway—i.e., a gendered “wrongness” with the picture, which strangely echoes in Matthew Lewis’ hilarious description of Ambrosio apparently seeing a boob for the first time: 

“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].

Taken a step further, the exposed “bodkin” would have been unthinkable for the Neo-Gothic period [and in some ways still very much is]. Lewis calls Ambrosio’s boner “the full vigor of manhood” owned by a knife-wielding incel. Like a such dagger, then, the penis becomes something to hide not just out of shame, but in presumed bad faith while conflating sex with harm, leading many queer AMAB owners to a) guiltily conflate their penis with a weapon they cannot easily or safely remove [as I have felt] while b) also thinking their “bussy” is simply a hole filled with shit [as I have felt].

Conversely, the AFAB vagina-owners they encounter often live with their own psychosexual trauma or are otherwise taught to “clam up” to protect their modesty/virtue when they see a masculine threat: “no touch kitty!” To this, the female party might see Faye’s balls [above] and envision penetration by the implied gender-non-conforming penis as automatically harmful and non-consensual, but also “false” in ways the dark lothario is not; his black garb, mask and rapier is absurdly viewed as more honest and safe. In other words, it is “correctly” dangerous in ways advertised through queernormative fiction, Gothic romances and “true crime/murder mysteries”; e.g., Ann Rice’s Interview with the Vampire [1976] as the Female Gaze offering up the disposable queer man as a dark, sexy treat that either could rip your head off but doesn’t or does rip “your” head off, albeit vicariously [which isn’t automatically problematic, I should add; the paradox of Gothic fiction is that it allows for cartoonish, Mortal-Kombat levels of camp. But queer people need to be treated as more than abject toys by straight women writing about queer people as commodities; i.e., mutilation needs to be handled with irony and care, lest it fall into Radcliffe’s trap of automatic, unironic mutilation for/of a xenophobic “demon”].)

If this categorical approach to “the state” (and its theatre) sounds too liquid, try to understand how single terms not only have multiple definitions; these definitions co-exist mid-discussion, when words are being contested—i.e., by colonizers forcing singular definitions on others despite enjoying multiple definitions when it suits them (“boundaries for me, not for thee”) and reclaimers working with multiple definitions and code-switching to suit their revolutionary needs. A certain degree of intuition and good faith is vital if you want to make it through this book, which focuses on various ways to subvert and reclaim canon—especially canonical monster language—in defense of workers exploited by the state.

As we proceed into the later volumes (and modules), some ideas will be mentioned far more than others. Some, like abjection or chronotope (and the rest of the Four Gs), will come up a lot; some, like cryptomimesis will have specialized chapters, but be less frequent overall; some, like “magic circle” or “ludic contract” are mentioned more “for flavor” and whose adjacent suggestions are meant to invite you, the reader, to form your own connections/constellations beyond the ones I decide to focus on. This book is full of stars, so make your own shapes in the sky using the tools and keywords I supply. As long as the journey and outcome are sex-positive within a broad ergodic sphere, the exact routes you take to get there don’t really matter. So chart your own sequences.

To that, revolution needs to be more than holistic; it needs to be internalized in its practitioners by exposing them to radical ideas and praxis as soon as possible, thus at as young an age as can be allowed (rest assured that fascists and centrists are doing the same thing). Whatever monopoly the state tries to enforce to uphold profit with, we rebellious whores can punch up in cryptonymic duality against these pimps (token or not); i.e., to anisotropically reverse the usual flowings of power and material (more on this in Volume One‘s “An Uphill Battle (with the Sun in Your Eyes): Operational Difficulties”).

Medusa cannot be killed, only ever being an idea to cross over into our own identities; i.e., one to terrify the state through us—into submission, thereby liberating all workers (and nature) from them and theirs Judas agents: re (from “Bushnell’s Requiem”):

Ellen Ripley once said, “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.” The words of a true madwoman, isn’t that what America has been doing for over seventy years now? Military optimism, as I envisioned it (“The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” 2021), is the idea that you can kill your problems, somehow “slaying Medusa.” But you can’t kill Medusa because her life-after-death persona represents things that aren’t people, alone; they’re structures and the genocide they cause seen in the final moments of the damned. Theirs isn’t a question of blind faith towards a self-righteous cause, but conscious conviction towards a cause that is just (source).

Fourth point: I say “linguo-material” (or socio-material when stressing the social, interactive components) because language is a natural feature of humans that distinguishes them socially-sexually from other species through complicated, Gothic expressions that manifest inside the material world; i.e., the creation of egregores, but also their sublimation and subversion during oppositional praxis under Capitalism. In other words, this process is liminal, again meaning re:

both “a threshold to move through,” in spatial terms, and “a conflict on the surface of the image of,” in linguistic/ontological terms (the word can also denote to being “in between,” insofar as a monster is canonical versus iconoclastic—with a particular spatial/personalized expression moving towards one pole or the other from its de facto starting point).

Our propaganda is iconoclastic sex work that develops Gothic Communism as the next stage of human development; our sex work is proletarian praxis, teamworking in opposition to Patriarchal Capitalism as the historical-material harbinger of death, slavery, war and rape in whatever form its canon may take—including bad-faith/moderate forms like tokenism, weird canonical nerds and/or TERFs, but also liminal gradients on a grand sliding scale of interrelated pairs during dialectical-material analysis: sex positivity vs sex coercion, the proletariat (workers) vs the bourgeoisie (the elite), iconoclasm vs canon, good play vs bad play, and manufactured us-versus-them vs collective worker action/slave cooperation against a common master, etc.

Though often presented as “discrete” by those in or siding with power, these categories generally intersect. To it, the rest of this book series holistically explores these oscillating intersections in the Gothic mode; i.e., as a living thing (Capitalism) that can develop into gay-anarcho Communism through monsters reclaiming sex work and sex workers commonly do—with legions of iconic monsters, castles and perilous scenarios that must be collectively altered into Communism by direct worker action and solidarity through iconoclastic art. Playfully geared towards that aim, it’s a dicey proposition and not without risk; i.e., fascists kill activists, but so does the state and its proponents more broadly. And yet, silence is segregation, which will not do; to stand by and do nothing is too keep silent, and silence is genocide. To survive genocide by reversing abjection, we have to speak out against it; i.e., doing so through revolutionary cryptonymy’s usual buffers and barriers showing and hiding us simultaneously (we’ll unpack revolutionary cryptonymy more in Volume One‘s “Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy”)!

So when the Man comes around, show him your Aegis… loudly and proudly into a gay new world! Make it a tempting proposition, combining old and new exhibits—a legion of derrières/wagons “in heat” the elite can never encircle:

(artists [top-left to bottom-right]: Vera Dominus, Monster Lover, Moxxy Sting and Cuwu)

Apart from the sex work I do with other sex workers to raise awareness (over sixty at this point), I also: interview my models (through the Q&A series, “Hailing Hellions“) and promote their material through my book series’ purple-and-green promo poster program. Refer to my Book Promotions page for everything paratextual that Sex Positivity offers! —Perse, 3/31/2025

In Closing: A Gay New World

It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
I don’t wanna be a boy, I don’t wanna be a girl
Breaking the rules as I sway and swirl
Shining like a diamond in glitter and pearl
So let’s go out on the town (yeah)
Light a fire, burn it down (source)

—Orion Simprini and Linda Horwatt; “All Dolled Up” on The Orion Experience’s Fever Dream (2021)

(artist: Pear)

This conclusion was originally written as a segue/introduction to my manifesto in Volume One. Seeing as that volume now has its own preface, I decided to move its former introduction here, to serve as my thesis volume’s closing thoughts. —Perse, back in 2023

There is also a genderqueer paradox of sorts we’ll need to acknowledge before we proceed into Volume One. Heteronormativity divides us from nature and ourselves, exploiting us in the process by forcing the human body, sexual orientation, and gender identity/performance together—i.e., canonizing worker division and sex-gender homogeny as biologically essentialized and sexually dimorphic. Conversely, Gothic Communism uses 4th wave feminism, genderqueer theory, ludic studies and Marxist thought to dismantle the heteronormative standards of the state—i.e., to bring workers closer to nature through the material world as something to subvert by iconoclastic means. Our aim in doing so is to demonstrate that the assorted factors mentioned above are actually distinct and separate categories that can, but do not necessarily, hold undue influence over the others. For example, if someone is AFAB (assigned female at birth), they can gender-non-conform and present/perform as femme regardless if they have a natal penis or a girl-cock (which can still be a natal penis depending on how you look at it). Taken a step further, if someone is AFAB and femme and presents as a vampire, their gender role within society is not exclusively to be punished provided we subvert the canonical role of the vampire during oppositional praxis. To humanize traditionally persecuted monsters (on the receiving end of state violence) is to allow queer people to exist outside of the heteronormative binary.

We’ll get to all of that. Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, Or Gothic Communism is not a short book (this thesis volume just by itself is ~785 pages). Funnily enough, it was originally intended as a chapter within my now-discontinued book, Neoliberal and Fascist Propaganda in Yesterday’s Heroes (which explored notions of “heroic” body representation in popular American media; the first-now-only chapter was the aforementioned “Military Optimism” blogpost I’ve repeatedly cited so far). Over time, Sex Positivity’s length ballooned, leading me to treat it as a book unto itself. Alongside its written content, I have also revisited old pieces of my own artwork to feature within, as well as collaborate with various sex worker and model friends to create brand-new artworks for this project. Combined with publicly available sources, this book contains over 1,000 different worker-produced images (1,086 as of publishing this volume) to make its pro-worker arguments, hundreds of which are “exhibit-style” (often two or more images/collages meant to be viewed together to make a larger argument; or one “visual aid” image that I break down in relation to the arguments around it).

Beyond the thesis argument and its symposium, Sex Positivity takes its time—gradually launching into its complex (ergodic) arguments through concentric, staged roadmaps. Imagine a rocket launch into space: This requires multiple stages and “boosters,” meaning there’s always time to abort the launch if things get hairy. This book, then, has been divided into four volumes, including this one. Their combined content aims to revive past revolutionaries whose rage was anathema, thus buried; now coming to light through us—the current generation—their own forbidden praxis can be imbibed and repurposed by future generations in improvised, informed succession.

(artist: Elisabetta Sirani)

However, while my emphasis is on artistic expression through the Gothic mode, there remains elements of dialectical-material verisimilitude that I want to convey through this book’s academically discouraged content; i.e., “how people actually talk” as a means of combatting cognitive estrangement—not just using movie quotes, YouTube videos, music lyrics, bad jokes, whakataukī/proverbs, four letter Germanic swearwords (and their lengthier conjugations/gerunds), and (one or two) meme images (a literal, popularized form of mimesis), but also touches of me as a trans person and former “professional student” with an extensive Humanities education centered around the Gothic as something I (and many others) have consumed since childhood.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

This education includes my formal (read: financially exploited by neoliberal institutions) education: a BA in “English: Language, Literature and Writing” from Eastern Michigan University in 2016 and an MA in “English Studies (the Gothic)” from Manchester Metropolitan University in 2018. However, it also includes my informal education and touches of me: personal anecdotes, “weird sexual metaphors” (re: Christine Neufeld, regarding my undergrad work), trans epiphanies, British Romantic poems, epigrams (a staple of Neo-Gothic novels), sexual/gender preferences (with my “type” leaning more towards the femme side of things [for boys] and allowing for a lot more total variety with female/intersex cuties) and just all-around nods to myself and my life’s work/(a)sexual-gender exploration in art. Moving forward, all of this is delivered in a seminar-like style meant to convey ideas (and people) as works-in-progress relating back and forth over space and time.

In other words, Sex Positivity is my “total codex.” Like a medieval scriptorium or Renaissance commonplace book (e.g., Prince Hamlet’s), it

• monastically and extensively compiles the Humanities as I know them through the work I’ve done with other people, my comrades and how I wish to cite ideas to them or from them to future comrades without too much academic de rigueur or straight-up torture porn (this being said, I signposted the absolute shit out of this fucker, organizing it into volumes, sections, chapters, and sub-chapters, but also providing as many bookmarks and exhibit markers as I could; you should be able to lose yourself in its arguments without feeling lost). As an international MA who tried her best to combine two different schools of thought into her own unique ideas, I find the notion of academic citation (and dealing with image copyright issues through official publishers) frankly traumatic. Having had four or five different citation methods foisted onto me in grad school (and being fairly certain MLA will mean absolutely nothing to a non-academic audience), I’ve decided to drop formal citations and an annotated bibliography and instead rely more on hyperlinks/footnotes inside an ordinary book that contains extraordinary ideas; a broad, holistic understanding of the Gothic and its modular components (no offense to you specialists out there, but I prefer to hybridize my monsters; that’s how natural language and the material world do it, but also what I think works best as a teaching device—a flexible “monster mode”). Also: pictures, lots of those—with as many links to the artists as I can supply (barring the odd example when an original source remains elusive, which I will comment on).
• invokes things that I have grappled with for many years. Monsters, Satanism, Romantic poetry and sex/gender fluidity have interested me since childhood (my lullaby as a child was Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn,” 1816); Marxism has since undergrad; chronotopes, hauntology and cryptonymy have since grad school. None are easy to understand; despite acknowledging my lifelong fascination with “Sex, Metal, and Videogames” in 2021, I’ve continued to write about them over and over precisely because I want to try and understand how they coexist inside a material world. Now, this book—as an extension of my general approach to life—is shining a holistic, liminal flashlight on old things that evolve to survive Capitalism operating as intended, defending itself through neoliberalism/fascism; war, rape, national subterfuge, etc. Trans/non-binary people are not new, nor are our struggles; nor are the struggles of cis women, people of color, and other ethnic minorities, and the struggles of all workers intersecting and interacting back and forth under Capitalism. We have always been people (Step Back, 2023) and Capitalism has always exploited us according to how it deems us useful/not useful, thus superior/inferior inside the colonial binary and its heteronormative rubric/moderately normative offshoots.
• illustrates this complex reality through what I’ve learned, reassembling it for you as a kind of monster compilation to play around with. As you play, experiment and learn, think about your own modes of monstrous self-expression and what you put back into the world: your poiesis and creative successes. In the end, we’re all defined by what we leave behind. Wherever this book finds you, know it contains our stories as left for you to discover and learn from: our struggles to self-express through art that gives our traumas and oppression a voice. Life is short, so don’t be afraid to take chances with sex, love and companionship. Yes, they’re inherently risky but also modular activities that intersect with class warfare as a powerful, playful means of changing luck through altered material conditions. Emergent playfulness is a sign of intelligence, of being able to learn through creativity, language and games that challenge unironic abuse and enslavement (this book being predicated on equal parts disaster and serendipity through its inception).

So give it a shot! You’ll never know what you might learn about yourself in the process, or who you might befriend along the way: 

(exhibit 1c: Top left: Mike Jittlov—an animation pioneer, special effects wizard and very creative person. I—like other artists have in the past—once had the pleasure of speaking to Mike. Not only is his classic film The Wizard of Speed and Time [1988] available on YouTube for free; it once dared to critique Hollywood only to be buried by the producer after a delayed production and laughably small distribution [made from 1983-1986, it was only ever released on VHS and Laserdisc]. Still, it lives on inside those of us who continue to critique the system in our own iconoclastic work [as does Mike’s original, very-’90s-looking website]!

Top right: Amouranth—a sex worker abused by her own boyfriend, who coerced her into making privatized content for him. Now she is finally free of his awful influence while using her face and her voice to talk about hidden, ubiquitous exploitation present within the sex worker industry.

[update, 3/31/2025: Despite posturing as being pro-sex-work, Amouranth is actually a TERF Nazi girlboss token whore [cop] punching down against trans people affected by climate change (source: Connor Reid’s “Amouranth’s Controversial Statement: She Wishes LA’s LGBT Community Had Burned in the Fires,” 2025). She has also become the poster girl for Kick, a platform known for giving pedophile streamers asylum (Hasan Abi’s “Kick Is Falling Apart,” 2024). A bigotry for one is a bigotry for all, and she’s as bad-faith as one gets!]

Bottom: Persephone van der Waard in grad school with a Mancunian cutie called Zeuhl [their alias]—once lovers and friends, but now just a bittersweet, censored memory of me standing next to an emotionally abusive ex; i.e., someone who—after the slow breakup in 2019 followed by disillusion of our post-breakup friendship, in 2023—decided rather abruptly that they wanted nothing to do with me or this book in any official, unmasked capacity. It’s the cliché of them asking me to tear up the polaroid. So, yeah, fuck them [I eventually go on to expose Zeuhl a bit more, in the Demon Module’s “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives“].)

This concludes the thesis volume. The other volumes—the full manifesto, Humanities primer and volume on proletarian praxis—have slowly released over the remainder of 2023 and all of 2024 and 2025. I have released them one at a time, announcing each when it becomes available on my website. —Perse, 3/31/2025

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

Onto Volume One’s promo series, “A 2025 Foreword: On Volume Zero’s New Edition Focusing on Ludo-Gothic BDSM“!

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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] Transparency is fine in good faith, but when dealing with persons who are acting in bad faith, we do not owe them honest or “fair” behaviors; in short, we can lie, cheat and steal whatever and whenever we need to (“all’s fair in love and war”) as long as our asymmetrical guerrilla war is universally ethical/conducive to developing Communism while upholding basic human rights (and the health of nature) to the best of our ability for all class, culture and race allies as oppressed workers (which fascists and neoliberals do not do, thus should not be respected as people until they atone in good faith; i.e., they are chicken hawks, murderers, liars and war criminals/profiteers, and we don’t owe them shit). We have beards, friends of Dorothy and lavender weddings for a reason; they will copy them to blend in and attack us through token betrayals/normativities (e.g., Afronormativity, homo/queernormativity, etc). So we shouldn’t just dance in front of them and martyr ourselves, but outplay them using the same basic code (an idea we will unpack at length in Volume Three, Chapter Five).

[2] Source: Peter Weber’s “‘A riot is the language of the unheard,’ Martin Luther King Jr. Explained 53 Years Ago” (2020).

[3] Gentrification through liberal-executed banking maneuvers, deliberately denying loans and mortgages to force non-white people into poor neighborhoods (these maneuvers can be openly denied, but the maps speak for themselves—literally through the red lines that can be drawn across them highlighting the very-real and sanctioned divides). To this, gentrification has its roots in basic material disputes sanctioned within white power structures:

gentrification

The process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, typically displacing current inhabitants in the process; from a social standpoint, gentrification is the process of making someone or something more refined, polite, or respectable; e.g., Jane Eyre and Adèle (exhibit 21c1). For example, housing crises are instigated by gentrification as the “invention” of exploitable housing arrangements between owners and workers: apartments. The larger socio-material process generally intersects racial tensions in impoverished, redlined neighborhoods shared between intraracial in-fighting (Boyz n the Hood, 1991); or between different racial groups encouraged to divide by the elite through fascist/moderate, good cop/bad cop “peacekeepers” (Lonestar, 1996): the disillusionment of police culture as being functionally no different than highway bandits, accidental incest (stolen generations), and a border romance (it’s practically a Gothic novel, minus the aesthetic).

Stamped centuries ago by Radcliffe’s moderate approach to the Gothic, the mode at large is no stranger to material arbitration; its own disputes play out in Gothic dialogs that appropriate or appreciate the struggles felt within the ghost of the counterfeit—e.g., Candyman‘s 1992 breaking of standard-issue (white) conventions to interrogate the liminal spaces of an actual location, Cabrini-Green (Cold Crash Pictures’ “Candyman: Breaking all the Rules of Horror,” 2019), itself haunted by an old boogeyman who frightens the endemic population (and white visitors) as equally unwelcome-if-functionally-lopsided trespassers: the dismembered black corpse with a hook for a hand and a body filled with bees (a crude allusion to the sugar trade having dismembered so many slaves, and now which has become the cheap “slave food” for middle-class workers policing their underclass brethren: white terrorism).

Similar to Alien and Aliens‘ white Gothicizing of the savage continent myth, the Candyman is a vengeful embodiment of settler-colonial trauma envisioned by a white author. Candyman was based off Clive Barker’s short fiction, specifically “The Forbidden” from the collection Books of Blood (1985); Barker’s ghost of the counterfeit tells the legend “of the ‘Candyman,’ the ghost of an artist and son of a slave who was murdered in the late 19th century” (source: Wikipedia). Written by white/white-adjacent authors, such dialogs’ rebellious sentiment can quickly be recuperated, expressing feelings of assimilation fantasy that lead to aspiring members of the black community to feel alienated from their own trauma when trying to play the white man’s game; i.e., a dialog that plays out through a return to the settler-colonizer’s rules and conventions that have become so familiar as to turn into our aforementioned guess-the-cliché; e.g., Scream, season three (2019) as adapting to a game of survival inside of itself by adopting the clichés during a fatal masque (which Wes Craven helped popularize in his own franchise built around the idea; and certainly was no stranger to cultural appropriation of the postcolonial voice: his white-savior schtick in The Serpent and the Rainbow [1988] lionizing white-boy Bill Pullman to beat up an evil witch doctor and exorcise the colonial territory of a black scapegoat).

[4] From Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975):

The panopticon induces a sense of permanent visibility that ensures the functioning of power [… It] represents the way in which discipline and punishment work in modern society [and] is a diagram of power in action because by looking at a plan of the panopticon, one realizes how the processes of observation and examination operate.

Foucault applies the panopticon to prisons, specifically medieval ones as a tower-like, prison-guard metaphor for the society in which he wrote; but it can be applied to any form of state surveillance; e.g., the Eye of Sauron.

[5] Pastiche is simply remediated praxis (the application of theory) during oppositional forms. This book covers many different kinds of pastiche types under the Gothic umbrella as canonical or iconoclastic: Gothic pastiche, of course, but also blind and perceptive forms of war pastiche, rape pastiche, poster pastiche, monster pastiche, disguise pastiche, Amazon pastiche, and nation pastiche, etc.

[6] From Michael Uhall, whose concept of “astronoetics” is a celestial, intelligible presence [“Astronoetic Cinema,” 2019]. Lovecraft would liken it to cosmic nihilism, or the cosmos’ disinterest in the settler-colonial gaze of planet Earth/the human conquest of space according to aspiring capitalists tied to scientific communities; e.g., Trace and Athetos from Axiom Verge. As I write in Volume Two, exhibit 40c: “Unlike Samus, who is a tall, strong girl boss in a suit of space armor, Trace is a callow, physically awkward nerd. Moreover, he is continuously dwarfed by his alien surroundings—much like the Romantic facing the fog of the increasingly alien world beyond civilization, except it’s a patently human cruelty projected into outer space” (source: “She Fucks Back”).

[7] Think Fabien Vehlmann and Kerascoët’s Beautiful Darkness (2014): A young girl dies in a forest, and out of her brain spill little homunculi. In the Gothic tradition, it’s very much an anti-fairytale or heroic quest. The girl dies at the start, and all her little selves are subsequently consumed by nature in an utterly brutal marriage between Lord of the Flies (1954) and Alice in Wonderland (1865). It’s super fucked up, but for visual samples, consider Chris Gavaler’s “It’s Rare to Find Horror Executed so Perfectly in Graphic Fiction,” 2019).

[8] With queer coding, there are expectations and implications far more than explicit statements. Keep this in mind when we examine vice characters, but also scapegoats at large, including the monster as a boss character in videogames (exhibit 1a1c).

[9] Which can be used for the state; e.g., Victoria Allison’s examination of Evita (1979) and Nazi theatrics in “White Evil: Peronist Argentina in US Popular Imagination Since 1955” (2004). We will examine this more in the Undead Module’s “Capitalism as a Great Zombie(-Vampire).”

[10] In hindsight, these are merely “bald” or “pubic hair,” which is not the vulva.

[11] The famous fate of Socrates after telling the Sophists they were not wise, but practitioners of sophistry: “In short, the difference between Socrates and his sophistic contemporaries, as Xenophon suggests, is the difference between a lover and a prostitute. The sophists, for Xenophon’s Socrates, are prostitutes of wisdom because they sell their wares to anyone with the capacity to pay” (source: George Duke’s “The Sophists (Ancient Greek)” in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). I should add that Xenophon is being incredibly unfair to prostitutes, as they would have been “pimped out,” thus forced to sell their wares, by men controlling their bodies.

[12] The current white, female prime minister of Italy known for her fascist argumentation.

[13a] The idea that Amazons don’t wed or have sex is a heteronormative/cis-gendered myth, but its subversion is often non-binary and figurative.

[13b] As I conceive it, pre-fascism is the imaginary medieval-as-tyrannical being felt within the state of affairs during the Neo-Gothic period and its future evocations while the nation-state and modern war were first forming; fascism alludes to 20th-century revivals of an imaginary Rome revived through the black knights and similar Greater Evils of capitalist kayfabe defending the status quo during total war in Europe; and post-fascism is an attempt during Bretton Woods and British/American neoliberalism to conceal the fact that fascism not only wasn’t started in Italy or Germany but continues to thrive in the neoliberal hegemon (the fascist being a popular scapegoat in centrist media, but one that teams up with the American hero against Communism codified as chaos, queer, non-white, or alien; i.e., by trying to monopolize monsters—and by extension sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll [the monopolies of violence and terror]—for those aims, and which gentrify and decay to serve them; re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“).

[14] She did! The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine (2022) is a

follow-up to the classic text of The Monstrous-Feminine analyses those contemporary films which explore social justice issues such as women’s equality, violence against women, queer relationships, race and the plight of the planet and its multi-species. Examining a new movement – termed by Creed as Feminist New Wave Cinema […] Creed looks at a range of diverse films including The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Nomadland, Carol, Raw, Revenge, and the television series The Handmaid’s Tale. These films center on different forms of revolt, from inner revolt to social, supernatural and violent revolt, which appear in Feminist New Wave Cinema. These relate in the main to the emergence of a range of social protest movements that have gathered momentum in the new millennium and given voice to new theoretical and critical discourses. These include: third and fourth wave feminism, the #MeToo movement, queer theory, race theory, the critique of anthropocentrism and human animal theory (source: Routledge).

Surprise, surprise, Creed’s still focused on films and “white girl shit” (white feminism co-opted #MeToo from women of color), but she does include work from queer theory and fourth wave feminism and not just Freud! Well, that’s great ‘n all, but I still have a bone to pick with her older “classic” self and her dance partner, Freud!