Whereas the “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents” page contains the most vital of the Gothic paratextual documents for my ongoing book series, Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism (the one-page promo is where readers can learn about the entire book project; i.e., the abstract and summaries per volume, cover illustrations, project history and logo design), this page pointedly concerns my intended audience, art, reading order and abbreviations for key non-Gothic glossary terms (Marxist and gender studies).

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 owner(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer attached to each series of my blog-style book promotion; i.e., for my upcoming volumes; e.g., “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets,” and “Deal with the Devil.”

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).

Concerning My Audience, My Art, the Reading Order and Glossary

What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of variety and Glow? – How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much Labour?

—Jane Austen, in a letter[1] to her “favorite” nephew, James Edward Austen.

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

Note: I originally wrote this paratext in October 2023; i.e., to release with my then-first book, Volume Zero. I have since included it in all of my book volumes. Furthermore, it divides in two basic parts: “My Audience, My Art, [and] the Reading Order” followed by “Essential Non-Gothic Keywords, a priori.” Said keywords are abbreviated, here, for the sake of quick reading but you can access their full definitions in the book series’ full glossary. Furthermore, click here for a list of essential Gothic terms and paratextual elements. —Perse

For most of recorded human history, women (or beings perceived either as women, or simply “incorrect”; i.e., “not white, cis-het Christian men”; e.g., eastern cultures, people of color or Indigenous Persons, genderqueer entities, etc) have been reduced to sex objects, sources of fear and/or (especially in the case of white women) accomplished pieces of property that could do little tricks, like sew or play the piano (what Mr. Darcy, in Pride and Prejudice [1813], smugly calls “female accomplishments”). Generally women were prized possessions, not people, and this reflected in how they were shaped in media as it became more and more widely available (in short, when Europe transitioned from an oral society to a written one): through the gaze of men, or according to women who—in some shape or form—served men by acting like/for them under Capitalism as a developing enterprise. The colonial standard, then, has certainly complicated itself in recent times, but the apples don’t fall far from the tree; i.e., allowing the feminisms of older times—the first and second waves—to fight for their (white, cis-supremacist rights) while throwing everyone else under the proverbial bus (or stagecoach, in those days). The equality of convenience during older historical periods became a defense of the status quo enacted upon by women-of-letters, which continues into the present: Britain’s “TERF island” is a mirror into the imaginary past, one whose fear and dogma continually uphold its tyrannical historical materialism, thus mass exploitation and genocide; i.e., “Yes, Austen belonged to a slave-owning society[2].”

If the above paragraph is any indication, books are generally written (and illustrated) with an intended audience in mind; apart from that, there’s the ideal audience (who simply “gets” or understands the material) and the actual audience (whoever actually reads the book, regardless of what they know beforehand). Sex Positivity was intentionally written for a holistic audience, with an emphasis on non-academia/non-accommodated intellectuals (as per Edward Said’s notion of the “accommodated intellectual” from Representations of an Intellectual, 1993); it doesn’t expect you to know everything and provides as much secondary material as it can to help you along. However, because of its size, I’ve had to cut the book into four volumes, the thesis volume being the volume that actually unpacks the companion glossary’s terms (though all four volumes contain the glossary in their rear pages). Even when it was shorter, though, I had written and organized Sex Positivity to be read in order—as in, from top to bottom for first-time readers. This fact remains constant. The entire book (all four volumes) is meant to be read as: Volume Zero, Volume One, Volume Two, and Volume Three, head to toe. From there, if you want to jump around, the volumes have been structured and organized to make doing so as easy as possible. Go wild, my little angels.

If you choose to jump around, I’ll assume that you’ve read my thesis volume (or at least browsed its unpacking of the keyword glossary terms). Apart from Volume One, whose full manifesto outlines my book’s central thesis on sex-positive, social-sexual activism, Volume Two acts a kind of “prelude” to Volume Three, providing a “Humanities primer” that adjusts you to a more open-minded way of thinking that is useful to our thesis argument: “Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes everything under a heteronormative, settler-colonial scheme, one whose myopic Capitalist Realism must be escaped from; i.e., via a deliberate iconoclasm that liberates sex workers (or sexualized workers) under Capitalism through sex-positive art.” The primer does so through numerous “monster art” exhibits that show how to think (and how past people thought) openly during oppositional praxis, using specific terms, theories, and formatting devices which apply to various topics broached later in the book when proletarian praxis (and its synthesis) is articulated chapter-by-chapter (and art exhibits are slightly less frequent, at least in the first edition).

However, as any artistic exhibit (not just mine) is idiosyncratic, this book is indulgently “me” to make that point abundantly clear. This includes iconoclastic porn as something that I’ve often explored and cultivated in my own body of work—with me actually preferring to cultivate erotic, sex-positive art displays during my own creations. As I write in “My Art Website Is Now Live” (2020):

In my work, I don’t like to treat sex separate from everyday life. Instead, I emphasize sexuality and intimacy as being part of the same experience. Not only do you have the intense, raw close-ups during sex one might encounter in a VHS porno; there’s also the tender, little details: the smiles, excitement, and other factors that make up everyday sex for people in relationships. I try to communicate all of this in a fantasy or sci-fi setting populated by my favorite videogame characters. It might be a regression of the quotidian into the Romantic, but being a Gothicist I’m not against liminal forms of expression. My work is erotic, forming a balance of the raunchy and tender inside a videogame milieu. These characters aren’t fighting dragons; they’re having sex, but there’s so many different ways this can go about, and I have my own special blend I like to try and capture in my art (source).

In other words, my campy artistic creations invite you to imagine ordinary behaviors from extraordinary-looking people—e.g., Link and Nabooru less as representations of the status quo, and more as a highly flexible performance that can interrogate and subvert, thus negotiate, power using the same-old aesthetics on and off the usual stages where these performances take place. Imagine as I would, then, that Link and Nabooru “save” Hyrule, then talk about laundry and what’s for dinner while having sex in a half-real, incredibly playful scenario. Except in our case, there never actually was a war to be fought (thus no genocide)—just a roleplay had and costumes worn by two workers who, for all intents and purposes, really look the part but whose function has subtly (or not so subtly) shifted away from the heteronormative scheme to undermine, thus weaken, the state’s grip on the Superstructure:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Bear in mind, these portfolio samples come from 2020, when I was still in the closet and trying to uncover/understand my own identity and struggle as a trans woman. But they still contain a certain iconoclastic playfulness that I’ve since built upon after coming out as trans (as the rest of my exhibits will hopefully demonstrate); i.e., in the dialectical-material context, subverting what’s expected in favor of delineating away from traditional heroic activities (such as genocide): make love, not war (except class/culture war). While my focus is often on videogames (the dominant canonical medium under neoliberal Capitalism), the same idea goes for any heroic-monstrous character borrowed from a particular franchised narrative: Midna and the Great Fairy from different Zelda games (a crossover); Link and Midna from Twilight Princess (2006); Squall and Quistis from Final Fantasy 8 (1999), and so on:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

If this basic thought experiment feels too difficult to visualize or understand, it will get no easier from here on out (we’ll focus primarily on non-heteronormative/non-tokenized and gender-non-conforming media). Likewise, if you’re unfamiliar with the Gothic, ludic/queer theory and/or Marxist thought (and the glossary keywords), chances are the rest of this book (after Volume Zero; i.e., from Volumes One, Two and Three onwards) will seem incredibly alien and confusing to you; all are either lost and forgotten concepts in relation to Capitalism, reduced by capital to pulpy canon this book does nothing but dissect, or swim around in the grey areas of (which Capitalism and its heteronormative colonial binary discourage). For first-time readers, then, this book really is meant to be read in order.

That being said, the thesis volume (as per the heads-up refresher) is more academic, thus inaccessible. If you haven’t read it yet or found it too difficult, Volume One’s more conversational/instructional approach unpacks the same basic ideas in a less dense, but also less developed dialog concerning the manifesto tree ideas (the scaffold of oppositional praxis). If you feel lost when reading my thesis, the manifesto (and its additional chapters on instruction and praxial synthesis) may be a better place to start. Try reading it first, familiarizing yourself with the manifesto’s iconoclastic ideas, visual aids and various guides, signposts and roadmaps. Then, consider returning to the thesis volume, which unpacks these ideas far more intensely and completely. Once you comprehensively understand what Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism is, try moving onto Volume Two, which explores the historical development of the Gothic imagination and its complicated past—of flawed, conflicting poetic expression as something to learn from moving forward. From there, Volume Three outlines the goals and objectives of Gothic Communism as a means of attacking Capitalism and its ideologies directly through solidarized worker poiesis.

The goal of Volume One is to outline a general teaching method that explains complex things in commonplace ways, which Volume Two expands on through the poetic history of monsters as a dehumanizing tool that must be reclaimed. Everything tied to proletarian praxis is re-summarized after the introduction in Volume Three: in the summation section before Chapter One of that volume. You will need what the manifesto contains when you read the synthesis roadmap in Volume One; you will need what both (and the thesis volume) contain when you read the primer from Volume Two; and you will need the introduction, summation and Chapter One from Volume Three when you Chapters Two through Five of that volume, etc. Last but not least, familiarize yourself with my “artistic exhibit style.” First shown during the second disclaimer during exhibit 3a1, 2, and 3 (and exhibits -1a and -1b); and during exhibit 0a1a during the foreword, my exhibit style is utilized throughout entire the book in over 200 similar exhibits covering a broad range of artistic subjects (and monsters).

Last but not least, you do not need to read the entire glossary up front, simply because I wrote the thesis volume to introduce keywords to you, step by step. There’s a lot of them, but it explains the most vital one at a time and in (I feel) the most logical order demanded by my arguments. Even so, my book has still had to alter or simplify academic language, terms and theories by combining them with everyday language. It also deals with groups (fascists and centrists) who frequently employ obscurantism—often through general/Gothic cryptonyms (words that hide), used in bad-faith to control others through sexualized and gendered language that isolate the mind (with isolation being a predator’s tactic). So while most of these terms are defined in some shape or form inside my thesis statement, word count (and flow) remains an issue. I could only recite the most important in full, and summarize the rest in the thesis volume itself. Therefore, I want to provide all of their full definitions (modified and expanded on/narrowed by me) in the companion glossary, which you can access in the back of whichever volume you’re currently reading.

(artist: Mikki Storm)

The keywords are divided into separate sections and you can access individual terms via the bookmarks located on side of your PDF. While the most central are quoted in part or in full within the thesis proper, I recommend familiarizing yourself with all of them before moving onto Volumes One, Two and Three (which again, shall henceforth continue being referred to as such; the thesis volume was written last and I don’t feel like changing the names. Instead, think of it as four volumes: One, Two and Three, with the thesis volume as Volume Zero). Do not assume you know what they mean. A good few are less central but still useful when grappling with these larger topics.

In conclusion, while the keywords are all important to know and understand, there aren’t too many that need to be understood a priori—as in before reading my thesis statement (and the rest of the book). This being said, there are a few I won’t be able to unpack in the thesis proper—the simple reason being the unpacking of my Gothic, ludology and genderqueer terms was written with a presumption that you have a modicum of understanding regarding basic queer and Marxist theory. So before we proceed, please peruse the below list to make sure you’re familiar with the more essential terms from the “Marxism and Politics” and “Sex, Gender and Race” sections of the glossary.

Essential Keywords, a priori

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

—Hamlet, Hamlet (c. 1599)

(source: Clyde Mandelin’s “How Symphony of the Night‘s ‘Miserable Pile of Secrets’ Scene Works in Japanese,” 2013)

Through its motley crew of assorted keywords, Gothic Communism aims to describe sexuality and gender within Marxist, Gothic and game theories. Sexuality and gender are not complicated, then; it’s just not a binary like heteronormativity expresses, insofar as a gradient is simply a different (and more accurate) arrangement to what sexuality and gender actually are. In the presence of state power and its defenders, thoroughly stupid questions get asked, kettling the oppressed into an asinine, deadly game; e.g., “What is a woman?” in Matt Walsh’s “documentary” of the same name (it’s fascist propaganda, my dudes). Well, I certainly can humor fascists with my own definition

a woman

That depends (“Beware the elves for they will say both yea and nay”). Keeping the [below] terms in mind, a woman is multiple things at once. On the bourgeois side, she’s anything a man isn’t—i.e., a cis-het sex slave/employee/girl boss, etc (note the gradient of euphemisms to disguise the deliberate marital role of unpaid women’s work under Capitalism); on the proletariat side, she’s however someone identifies in relation to the state[3] as a worker—for or against it to various, liminal degrees (this includes personas, alter-egos, egregores and various other disguises). To reduce it to “an adult, human female” is super gross, Nazi-level shit (and while I want to seriously feel sorry for Matt Walsh’s probably-battered housewife, assuming she’s entirely ignorant of her husband’s abuse would assume that she actually puts in the work; however, if she does, it would take total isolation of anything not supplied to her in advance by her “big, strong, powerful, caretaker” husband. That’s quite sad and pathetic). I hate Nazis, Matt Walsh; my grandfather fought them during WW2 after they raped and destroyed his homeland and killed most of his friends and family. They prey on fear yet instantly run away like Brave Ser Robin when they’re outed as perfidiously and ignominiously stupid. You’re cut from the same cloth, you giant, callow man-child.

but that’s not really the point of them asking, is it? Their doing so is an invitation for moderates to belittle gender-non-conforming persons, then look the other way while fascists normalize vigilante violence against minorities (which translates to state/police violence when Imperialism comes home to roost). In short, Hamlet—when viewed as the male action hero—is a real “piece of work,” alright. He’s an absolute, unironic monster[4]; i.e., mad with grief over the death of his father until he becomes the anti-hero[5] who must be unironically sacrificed (along with everyone else) at the end of the play. In modern language, it’s a murder-suicide committed by the usual suspect: the entitled “man of the house” acting like a total incel who kills his mother, sister and best friend (Shakespeare is hardly perfect, but absolutely satirizes heteronormativity—i.e., similar to Romeo and Juliet, 1597, or Titus Andronicus).

The keywords in this list, then, are skeleton keywords I’ve tailor-made based on preexisting definitions I’ve either narrowed and/or expanded on to suit my own holistic arguments; i.e., utterly essential to following my arguments on Gothic Communism, except I won’t have time during the thesis volume to unpack them to the degree that I do the Gothic material (which is hard enough to unpack on its own). In other words, the book assumes you’ve already read the glossary definitions (at least these terms) ahead of time, or otherwise know them a priori. While all of the glossary keywords are useful to some extent, absolutely make sure you have these ones down pat (which I’ve abbreviated in case you can’t be arsed to actually look at the glossary. You should because many of these shorthand definitions are inadequate; simply click here to be taken to their full definitions):

Marx tended to focus on material conditions and change (the Base); Gothic Communism extends this to social-sexual conditions tied to material ones: stressing the Superstructure as something to recultivate through iconoclastic art. Anything expressed here as “material,” then, can be easily interpreted as “socio-material” with an emphasis on sexuality and gender identity/performance. —Perse

Marxism: Schools of thought stemming from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, trying historically to achieve Communism through the state first (Marxist-Leninism) instead of direct worker solidarity and action operating in opposition to the state and establishment politics (anarcho-Communism).
material conditions: The factors that determine quality of life from a material standpoint.
historical materialism: The normalized, vicious cycle that history is predicated on the material conditions that routinely bring it about.
dialectical materialism: Classically the study of oppositional material forces in relation to each other—i.e., the bourgeoisie vs the proletariat. Gothic Communism extends this to various social-sexual elements; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm, sex positivity vs sex coercion.
the means of production: Marx’ Base, owned by the elite; the ability to (mass)produce material goods within capital/a living market.

(source: “Base and Superstructure Theory,” 2013)

propaganda: Marx’s Superstructure, or anything that cultivates the Superstructure; for Gothic Communists, this means in a sex-positive direction.
private property: Property that is privately owned, generally by the elite through privatization via state-corporate mechanisms; i.e., capital.
privatization: The process that enables private ownership at a systemic, bourgeois level.
functional Communism: The eventual (centuries from now) abolishment of privatization/private property (a classless, stateless, moneyless society). This process is called development, or Socialism.
nominal Communism: Canonical depictions of Communism—i.e., Communism in name alone, sold to workers through canonical propaganda to scare them into upholding the bourgeois status quo.
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 (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). Exploitation and liberation exist and occur in the same half-real shadow zone, on and offstage. Designed to transform neoliberal Capitalism’s centrist monomyth refrains (thus fascism and Marxist Leninism also abusing nature as monstrous-feminine), our ironic performances (of staged “exploitation” in quotes) happen by camping the canon, and do so to playfully and flexibly liberate workers and nature; i.e., through emotionally/Gothically intelligent and class, culturally and racially aware sex-positive labor (and monsters). Reclaiming these dualistic poetic devices happens in pursuit of universal liberation (no Omelas); i.e., during holistic, intersectional solidarity as punching up poetically at the state and its standard/token proponents. In turn, rebellion synthesizes daily at a dialectical-material, social-sexual and horizontal level—one unfolding anisotropically to empower all workers during calculated risk (reversing abjection, thus the terrorist/counterterrorist binary in the shadow of state force and police action); i.e., not just by sex workers in an overt sense, but all work as sexualized and alienized by capital (re: my PhD). All seek to cultivate a second-nature mentality whose gradual shifting of socio-material conditions help raise Gothic Communism from the ground up over space-time! From cops to capital to canon to states to presidents and police, then—ACAB! ASAB! ATAB! APAB (and so on)!Furthermore, development is a fundamentally genderqueer exercise; i.e., versus the state as straight, the latter enforcing straightness (not just heteronormativity but Cartesian thought and settler colonialism) per the profit motive using the state’s usual tools (re: its monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital, listed in “Paratextual (Gothic) Documents“): to rape nature as monstrous-feminine (meaning anything not white, straight, male, Western European and/or Christian to varying modular degrees of privilege and oppression) for profit! To it, hybridity is strength through informed diversity overcoming state antagonism and betrayal, fighting fire with poetic fire; the latter extends to ghosts of capital and worker concessions haunting the process (which Derrida called “spectres of Marx” in his eponymous book on hauntology as a Communist “ghost” that cryptomimetically haunts language [re: Castricano] after the so-called “end of history”). Gothic-Communist development ultimately happens, then, by critiquing Marxist Leninism as much as mask-off Capitalism; i.e., to cryptonymically go after token police elements and false rebellion, which both extend to ostensibly left-leaning dogmas abusing the many but also the marginalized to empower the few at the top (and their middle-class gatekeepers). Marxism gentrifies and decays like anything else, so we must camp and make it (thus Marx) gay to survive (re: “Making Marx Gay“). In short, we must make Marxism (thus Communism) sexier and less dry/more fun than Marx (and his followers) historically bothered! Though sex and force are the ancient languages of imperium and state, nothing is more policed than worker sex through state force; i.e., during an evolving state’s Venn diagram of modular-yet-intersecting persecution networks. For every whore yearning to be free, there is a pimp clutching their pearls (re: the bourgeoisie and their servants privatizing nature).

(artist: Cupid Kisses)

Like the Medusa and her Aegis, then, the Gothic Communist ideology survives by endlessly mutating with past media to recultivate the Superstructure (favoring the social-sexual elements of grassroots revolution versus purely material or class reductionist ones); e.g., Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (and other useful ideas and works orbiting Marx’s female forebear) per the Wisdom of the Ancients as a continuous cultural understanding of the imaginary past writ in opposition to the state as straight. Time is a circle; effectively haunting capital after different rebellious components are shattered by state forces (cops), these traitors—whether official or stochastic—help divide nature and labor with nature and labor (assimilation) to conquer (thus rape) everything for profit: the pimp versus the prostitute (and all Medusa’s spectres) through various facets of abjection (us-versus-them), its broader process achieved by state-corporate models of domination (which is all that profit ultimately is). Reversing abjection effectively makes us (and our anisotropic pedagogies of the oppressed healing from rape) “Communism in small”; i.e., regardless of the traditional ways that capital and the state (a form of capital, thus police violence) try to divide and conquer us: the state cares about property and profit, not people or nature, and will privatize, exploit and destroy the latter through Man-Box thinking and “prison sex” mentalities that, however banal, uphold the status quo. In doing so, they chase the Numinous to pimp it; i.e., spectres of Caesar and the Shadow of Pygmalion pimping Galatea.

However modular and gradient, then, tokenism pursues assimilation at its core, and tokenism—precisely because it adheres to capital as a fundamentally rapacious system—is poor stewardship (which Gothic Communism challenges; i.e., having been devised to originally challenge TERFs, but consequently any form of tokenism you can shake a stick at). This conquering historically self-inflicts, including through any normativity you could think of or point towards raping labor and nature; e.g., Afronormativity but also Marxist Leninism as a kind of “Marxist normativity” that survives beyond its heyday into its graveyard shell: as an aborted “what if?” that cannot evolve or change.

So do tankies grow brittle, disingenuous and cruel—in short, acting like Capitalism yet dressed up in different clothes pimping nature (thus workers) as nonetheless monstrous-feminine; i.e., there must always be a whore for the state to pimp and blame—one its own shallow, bad-faith practitioners can vengefully feed on to better help the state survive: as slaves to party nostalgia, exclusionism, outmoded theory and ultimately betrayal. They’ll eat themselves (and blame other facets of capital during the hot potato tossing match), but not before they eat us; i.e., the better we can camp canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM and the palliative Numinous, the more we can humanize the harvest as human in the eyes of our would-be abusers (who dutifully antagonize nature and those of nature as monstrous-feminine, putting them cheaply to work). The more we do this, the better our odds of survival become while exposing their (and the state’s) inhumane treatment of us while comporting ourselves as sluts; re: “to critique power, you must go where it is” and subvert what the state is trying to control using what we got, on and offstage—our bodies, identities, performances, et al. Everyone likes the whore, but for different reasons; we have the whore’s revenge against the state during Gothic Communism, thwarting profit as stewards of nature (see: the Demon Module’s “A Rape Reprise; or, the Whore’s Paradox Having Its Revenge During Ludo-Gothic BDSM,” 2024).

The following terms are ludo-Gothic but synthesize holistically with Gothic Communism’s Marxist elements. So I’m including them, here. —Perse

ludo-Gothic BDSM: My 2023 combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (theatre and rules). Commonly gleaned through Metroidvania as I envision it, but frankly performed with any kind of Gothic poetics, ludo-Gothic BDSM playfully attains what I call “the palliative Numinous,” or the Gothic quest for self-destructive power as something to camp (the Numinous, per Rudolph Otto, being a divine force or numen tied less to the natural world [the Sublime] and more to civilization as derelict, dead and alien; re: the mysterium tremendum): a Communist Numinous/the Medusa per Barbara Creed, but not tokenized (re: the Amazon) while dancing with Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit to reverse abjection (thus profit) and shrink the state!
the palliative Numinous: A term I designed to describe the pain-/stress-relieving effect achieved from, and relayed through, intense Gothic poetics and theatrics of various kinds (my preference being Metroidvania castle-narrative vis-à-vis Bakhtin’s chronotope applied to videogames out from novels and cinema and into Metroidvania).
Metroidvania (my definition, abridged): Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys, backtracking and variable gating mechanics (bosses, items, doors); and requires movement powerups in some shape or form, though these can be supplied through RPG elements as an optional alternative.

*Exploration pertains to the deliberate navigation of space beyond that of obvious, linear routes—to search for objects, objectives or secrets off the beaten path (source: “Mazes and Labyrinths,” 2019; refer to the “Metroidvania” page on my website for everything that I’ve written on Metroidvania).

neoliberal Capitalism: The dominant strain of Capitalism operating in the world today—i.e., Capitalism employed by neoliberal canon, centrism, moderacy and personal responsibility rhetoric to achieve the greatest possible division between the owner/worker classes (a re-liberalization of the market through the abuse of state power), as well as infinite growth and efficient profit (more on these during the manifesto proper). Neoliberal Capitalism is founded on a vertical arrangement of power through national-state-corporate leaders operating against worker interests by exploiting them to the fullest using capital.
capital/Capitalism (a super-important term and often incredibly misunderstood, so I’m giving the full definition, here; it’s the longest in this entire list): A system of exploiting workers, nature and the world, whose resultant genocide and vampiric devastation is synonymous with profit for capitalists/the elite. The elite parasitize everyone/thing else to generate profit through Capitalism; or to quote directly from Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2017):

Money isn’t capital. Capital is journalism’s shorthand for money or, worse, a stock of something that can be transformed into something else. If you’ve ever heard or used the terms natural capital or social capital, you’ve been part of a grand obfuscation. Capital isn’t the dead stock of uncut trees or unused skill. For Marx and for us, capital happens only in the live transformation of money into commodities and back again. Money tucked under a mattress is as dead to capitalism as the mattress is itself. It is through the live circulation of this money, and in the relations around it, that capitalism happens.

The process of exchange and circulation turn money into capital. At the heart of Marx’s Capital is a simple, powerful model: in production and exchange, capitalists combine labor power, machines and raw material. The resulting commodities are then sold for money. If all goes well, there is a profit, which needs then to be reinvested into yet more labor power, machines and raw materials. Neither commodities nor money is capital. This circuit becomes capital when money is sunk into commodity production in an ever-expanding cycle. Capitalism is a process in which money flows through nature. The trouble here is that capital supposes infinite expansion [growth] within a finite web of life (source).

For our purposes, this “web of life” concerns the privatized, social-sexual exploitation of workers in monstrous language—something to be unironically defended by class traitors preserving Capitalism, thus the state as a means of maximizing capital for the elite (infinite growth); i.e., to serve and protect capital, not people, through the means of production/propaganda’s current bourgeois hegemony under neoliberal Capitalism’s personal responsibility rhetoric—to regulate the market and empower the state through concealed abuses that accrete out from the center in all directions. As anarcho-Communists, we much critique this canonizing process’ profit motive through our own iconoclastic material.

capitalists: Those who own capital, the bourgeoisie (the owner class).
Rainbow Capitalism: Capitalism appropriating queerness, generally through surface-level, inauthentic representation and queer-baiting.
recuperation/controlled opposition: The process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective.
sublimation: The process by which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior. Normalization.

prescriptive sexuality (and gender): Sexuality and gender as prescribed according to various explicit or tacit mandates; i.e., sex, orientation and gender performance/identity are not separate and exist within a cis-gendered, heteronormative colonial binary.
descriptive sexuality (and gender): Sexuality and gender as describing actual persons, be they sexual and/or asexual. This includes their bodies, orientations and identities, etc, as things to appreciate, not appropriate (thus exploit).
praxis: The practical execution of theory.
appreciative irony: A descriptive sexuality (or gender) that culturally appreciates the irony of queer existence (and other minorities) in various forms.
asexuality: A gradient of expressions that includes demisexual/grey ace and aromantic persons, asexuality displays orientations and performances or gender identities that diverge from sexual attraction, generally in favor of romantic, spiritual and emotional connections; i.e., a neurodivergent condition, not a disease that needs to be repressed, shamed or attacked.
neurodivergence: A spectrum of atypical brain conditions that diverge from neurotypical persons and brains. Neurodivergent people canonically tend to be demonized, but also shamed as disabled, insane or mendacious.
sex-repulsed: Not to be confused with sex-negative/reactionary politics, sex-repulsed is the quality through which persons—whether through nature or nurture; i.e., hereditary or environmental trauma factors (these tend to overlap)—are repulsed by sex. This can be partial—can amount to gradient indifference or outright trauma/triggering status depending on its severity. Important: Sex-repulsion is not strictly a symptom, but a neurodivergent condition with congenital/comorbid factors operating within the brain as neuroplastic.
comorbid/congenital: The simultaneous presence of two or more diseases or medical/psychological conditions in a patient—congenital meaning “present at birth,” inherited.
LGBTQ+: Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, and various other non-gender-conforming groups.
queer: A general, all-purpose label reclaimed from its colonizer origins. For example, I identify as queer/am a queer person. While terms like trans, queer, gay and so on most certainly have specific definitions, in everyday queer parlance they tend to be used interchangeably(with idiosyncratic boundaries being drawn up when the need arises); forced conformity/division is to “make things weird” (though marginalized gatekeeping/sectarianism is definitely a thing).
genderqueer: Challenging gender norms; also called “questioning” or “gender non-conforming.”
monogamy/-ous: The performance of a singular, happy relationship, canonically structured around marriage, reproductive sex and the nuclear family structure. In Gothic canon, this structure is often threatened by a Gothic villain—e.g., Count Ardolph from Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806).
poly(amour-ous): Non-normative family/open relationship structures that break with the heteronormative structure/cycle of compelled marriage. Historically conflated with swinging or serial monogamy (which are really their own heteronormative practices; i.e., “We’re not poly, we’re serially monogamous!”). Note how poly relationships tend to be framed as polyamorous, not polygamous.
beards: A relationship of convenience to appear straight, heteronormative, monogamous, nuclear, “Roman,” etc. The nuptial variant of a beard is the lavender marriage.
heteronormativity (a big one; I will provide its full definition with the thesis paragraph): The idea that heterosexuality and its relative gender norms are prescribed/enforced to normalized extremes by those in power—i.e., the Patriarchy.
gender trouble: Coined by Judith Butler, gender trouble is the social tension and reactions that result when the heteronormative, binary view of sexuality and gender is disrupted. This trouble can happen through the parody of social-sexual norms through ironic or appreciative (counterculture) media.
girl-cock (exhibit 7c) or boy pussy (exhibit 52c)/gender parody: Genitals or genitalia-like artifacts (and various other modes of performance) that fulfill an ironic/gender parody cultural role that interrogates heteronormative gender assignment, performance or identity, as well as sexual orientation.
natural assignment: Accident of birth—i.e., the natural assignment of one’s biological sex (and conditions to form one’s gender identity around, whether through conformity or struggle); one’s birth sex/genitals: male, female, and intersex.
AFAMs/AMABs: Assigned-Female/Male-at-Birth—i.e., one’s birth sex. Can be used as a noun or adjective; e.g., “AFABs dislike this” or “an AFAB person,” etc. Intersex people are their own category.

(from the glossary, exhibit 3c1: source)

intersex: The existence on a biological gradient between the qualifiers male and female, amounting to a variable “third sex” that presents mixed features of either sex to varying degrees; except, the umbrella term doesn’t represent one particular manifestation as a strict third, but all of them together on a vast, complicated spectrum of genotypical and phenotypical elements. They are often depicted as angels or demons in the classically androgynous sense, or stigmatized/fetishized in porn as “shemales,” “he-shes” and other canonically pejorative labels; a common, non-insulting label is “androgyne” (though this can apply to trans people and mixed gender performance, too). A common intersex example in Gothic media is the phallic woman or Archaic Mother—e.g., the xenomorph.
non-binary: “An adjective describing a person who does not identify exclusively as a man or a woman. Non-binary people may identify as being both a man and a woman, somewhere in between, or as falling completely outside these categories. While many also identify as transgender, not all non-binary people do. Non-binary can also be used as an umbrella term encompassing identities such as agender, bigender, genderqueer or gender-fluid” (source: Human Rights Campaign’s “Glossary of Terms,” 2023).
sexual/asexual orientation: How people orient (a)sexually/”float their boats” in relation to gender identity and performance. A double helix of two gradients, each having two theoretical “poles,” wherein both ribbons descriptively intertwine/intersect within the socio-material world (more on this in Volume Three, Chapter Three).
heterosexuality[6]: Orienting towards the opposite Classically called “opposite-sex attraction,” gender-non-conformity (GNC) treats heterosexuality as orienting towards the gender opposite to oneself. This being said, pure opposites do not generally exist outside of heteronormative enforcement (which compels binaries in service of the profit motive/process of abjection) so heterosexual people also tend to be cis; i.e., cis-het, or “straight.”
homosexuality: Orienting towards the same Classically called “same-sex attraction,” gender-non-conformity treats homosexuality as orienting towards the same gender as oneself. No binary is required, and the term is generally synonymous with “gay” or “lesbian.”
bisexuality: Orienting towards two or more Classically called “both-sex attraction” (or something along those lines), gender-non-conformity treats bisexuality as orienting towards the gender opposite to and the same as oneself.
pansexuality: Orienting towards someone else regardless of their gender. However, this does not preclude exceptions and the phrase is generally used interchangeably with bisexuality in everyday parlance.
heteronormative assignment (gender roles): Accident of birth in relation to one’s “birth gender” as socially constructed by the state in relation to one’s genitals.
transgender reassignment (transgender identity): Being trans is gender identity wherein one feels, and hopefully one day decides to recognize, that one isn’t cis.
gender identity: One’s conforming or nonconforming gender identity as a (sub)conscious act; i.e., how one identifies, be that passively or actively.
gender performance: Gender performance is coded in relation to oneself, their identity/orientation, and to society’s in-groups and out-groups, aka formal/informal gender roles. Whether one’s gender identity is assigned to them at birth, or is self-assigned through various non-gender-conforming types—e.g., trans man/woman, non-binary, femboy, agender, etc—their gender performance amounts to a coded set of social behaviors (and corresponding materials and language) that adhere to performative rules meant to reinforces one’s gender as either self-assigned, or assigned heteronormatively by the state. To that, these concepts do not exist in a vacuum, but intersect and often conflict (which leads to iconoclastic gender parody[7] and gender trouble during subversive exercises).

(artist, left: Mark Bryan; right: Cursed Arachnid)

gender performance-as-identity: Some identities involve broader gender performances to identify around or as; e.g., drag queens or femboys.
the (settler-)colonial^[8] binary: Nadi Tofighian writes in Blurring the Colonial Binary (2013) that, having evolved beyond Rome’s master/slave dynamic, colonialism and Imperialism “separated people into different classes of people, ruler and ruled, white and non-white, thereby creating and widening a colonial binary” (source). To this, the cis-het, white European/Christian male is superior to all other workers. This binary extends to token marginalizations and infiltrated and assimilated/normalized activist groups, thought/political leaders or public intellectuals, who serve as class traitors, but also functional police for their respective domains.
poiesis/poetics: “To bring into being that which did not exist before.” Art. A commonplace example is “poetry,” which historically has granted impoverished, exploited people idiosyncratic voices/parallel societies in times of struggle; i.e., making monsters that voice our trauma and concerns.
canon (dogma): Marx’s Superstructure as normally cultivated by the elite through official/unofficial, state-corporate icons and materials designed to control how people think, behave and feel: heteronormative propaganda/dogma.
iconoclast/-clasm (camp): Marx’s Superstructure, counter-cultivated by an agent or image that attacks established variants, generally with the intent of transforming them in a deconstructive, sex-positive manner. Such a manner is treated as heretical by the elite, but also workers sympathetic to bourgeois hegemony.
centrism: The theatrical creation of good vs evil as existing within politically “neutral” media—a dangerous preservation of orderly justice whose “moderate,” white (or token) voice-of-reason/cloaked racism and discrimination pointedly maintain the status quo: Capitalism.
war pastiche: The canonical remediation of war as something to sell to the audience (for our purposes) as canon, generally in centrist forms (which we then subvert through performative irony of various kinds).
nation pastiche: Any kind of pastiche that ties war and combat to national identities; e.g., Street Fighter.
heels/babyfaces: The centrist heroes and villains of staged, professional wrestling and American contact/combat sports—i.e., war personified—but commonly employed through combat e-sports like the Street Fighter Heels normally wear black, fight dirty and talk trash; babyfaces (often called “faces” for short) tend to wear white, fight fair and refuse to talk trash.
kayfabe: The portrayal of staged events within the industry as “real” or “true,” specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged.
neocons(ervatism): Neoconservatives are liberal hawks who, exposed to menticidal propaganda over time, despise war protestors and promote peace through strength, including neocolonialism and proxy war. It’s the centrist, oscillating phenomena of so-called Liberalism turned bloody, routinely demanding its blood sacrifice on the so-called “altar of freedom.”
menticide/waves of terror: From Joost Meerloo’s The Rape of the Mind (1956), menticide is the animal, “Pavlovian” conditioning through various forms of torture, namely “waves of terror” to achieve an ideal subject just not complacent with state abuse, but complicit. Of menticide, Meerloo writes (abridged),

The core of the strategy of menticide is the taking away of all hope, all anticipation, all belief in a future [which aligns with Mark Fischer’s “hauntology,” or inability to imagine a future beyond past forms supplied by Capitalism; i.e., a myopia]. It destroys the very elements which keep the mind alive. The victim is entirely alone (source).

Meerloo describes waves of terror as

the use of well-planned, repeated successive waves of terror to bring the people into submission. Each wave of terrorizing cold war creates its effect more easily—after a breathing spell—than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience (ibid.).

Liberalism: Not to be confused with neoliberalism (though the two generally go hand-in-hand), Liberalism is the disingenuous language of the Enlightenment becoming Americanized, then used alongside Cartesian dualism to obscure genocide under settler colonialism.
neoliberalism: The ideology of American exceptionalism (which extends to allies of America like Great Britain) that enforces global US hegemony through deregulated/”re-liberalized” Capitalism as a structural means of dishonest wealth accumulation for the elite. Laterally enforced by state/corporate power abuse through a public conditioned by these groups to worship the free market, neoliberalism seeks to foster a centrist attitude.
fascism: Capitalism-in-decay aka “zombie Capitalism.” When Capitalism starts to “fail” (which it does by design), it creates power vacuums whose medievalist regressions reintroduce scapegoat mentalities on a state level; i.e., the Imperial Boomerang, or “Imperialism come home to empire.”
pre-/post-fascism: Pre-fascism is the Gothic imagination that historically was obsessed with the inheritance of a decaying system prior to the rise of fascism in the 18th and 19th centuries, which in turn has become post-fascism: the fear of fascism and systemic decay entertained through popular discourse and Gothic poetics in the 20th and 21st centuries, post-WW2.
eco-fascism: The turn towards fascist rhetoric, stowed away inside nature conservatist rhetoric.

Also, familiarize yourselves with Umberto Eco’s 14 Points of Fascism (from “Ur-Fascism,” 1995). It’s a really handy guide for spotting fascism, which tends to conceal itself or idiosyncratically manifest within centrist/neoliberal media. We don’t go over all fourteen points in this book to nearly the same degree, but there are a few that I like to focus on; e.g., “The enemy is always weak and strong,” the obsession with a foreign/internal plot, and the cult of machismo, etc.

Regarding the rest of the keywords not included in these paratextual documents: It would be very difficult and in fact counterproductive to list and define all of them at once. There’s simply too many to realistically do this. Instead, I have provided the broadest and most germane/productive before this point—a trend I will now continue. As we proceed into the rest of the volume, the keywords I provide have been given first and foremost to stress their priority while also trying to keep the volume as short as possible. Some that aren’t defined in the thesis proper will be defined during the “camp map” and symposium, but please refer to our Four Gs, manifesto tree, and the book’s companion glossary for all of their complete definitions (and for a few smaller terms that I’ve probably missed or left out for the sake of time).

I’ve tried to include all of the keywords for Sex Positivity in this volume, and it might seem like both not enough and too much information, but I promise we’ll unpack all of these ideas as gradually as we can, and expand on them in the rest of the book (which aims for holistic, recursive nuance over singular brevity). I’ve done my best to avoid wholesale repetition, but admit and embrace that intersectionality demands a bit of cross-examination; i.e., regarding previously examined ideas from different points of view and theoretical stances that are applied practically and personally in our own lives through Gothic social-sexual expression; e.g., monsters, BDSM and artwork. If that proves to be poor consolation ahead of time, then I’ll simply say what Zeuhl told me while we were at MMU: “Embrace chaos.” Indeed, it’s a process to be enjoyed and explored from a variety of angles, intensities and positions. —Perse

(artist: IRN)

Footnotes

[1] source: Zoe Louca-Richards’ “Two Inches of Ivory: A New(ish) Jane Austen Acquisition” (2020)

[2] From Edward Said’s “Jane Austen and Empire”; Culture and Imperialism (1993).

[3] (from the symposium): 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).

[4] “Hamlet begins the play as a possible tragic hero, but as he interacts with corrupt characters, his traits become increasingly tainted until his potential for heroism disintegrates completely. Although Hamlet is depicted at first as a seemingly normal, depressed man, he is influenced by his relationships with Claudius, the ghost, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern until his old virtues are no longer recognizable. His evil actions, whether with Polonius, Gertrude, or Ophelia, further ingrain his corruption. Horatio’s steady, honorable personality emphasizes the demoralization of Hamlet’s character. By the end of the play, Hamlet no longer has any traits of a hero but seems more of a villain, full of immoral, evil thoughts and devoid of his former inner goodness” (source: Reverie Marie’s “Hamlet Is Not a Tragic Hero,” 2016).

[5] “Anti-hero” can mean different things; it can mean “tragic hero,” in the sense of state apologetics; e.g., Oedipus Rex’s “feel sorry for me even though I killed my dad and boned my mom” schtick. It can also mean “tragic rebel”; i.e., Satan from Paradise Lost (1667) as the rebel devil-in-disguise fighting against the Christian idea of heroism, thus being revered under British Romanticism for being revolutionarily heroic against the villainy of state tyranny.

[6] Traditional orientation terminology is classically binarized, which GNC usage complicates by introducing non-binary potential. Traditional usage ties a specific orientation to sexuality—e.g., heterosexual—but descriptive orientation can just as much involve an emotional and/or romantic attraction and generally includes gender and biology as interrelating back and forth while not being essentially connected. So whereas heteronormativity forces sex and gender together and ties both to human biology as the ultimate deciding factor regarding one’s gender and orientation, sex-positive usage is far more flexible; orientation isn’t strictly sexual or rooted in biology at all. Those variables are present, but neither is the end-all, be-all because sexuality and gender are things to self-determine versus things the state determines for us (to exploit workers through binarized stratagems; e.g., “women’s work”). To compensate for this flexibility inside GNC circles, orientation labels are generally shorted to “hetero,” “bi,” or “pan” (homosexual is commonly referred to as “gay” or “[a] lesbian”), allowing for asexual implications. Even so, classically binary terms like “hetero” and “homo” tend to be used more sparingly and are often swapped out for more specific identities or umbrella terms; e.g., “I’m queer/gay” or “I’m bi” as something to understand with some degree of intuition, which can later be explored in future conversations if the parties in question are interested in pursuing it. This pursuit is not automatic, though, so neither is the language denoting what can be pursued; instead, sexuality is an option, not a given.

[7] Classic, canonical gender parody would include cross-dressing in Shakespearean theatre, whereupon (arguably) cis-het men would have played both men and women, the latter often by teenagers/prepubescent boys wearing various costumes and makeup. All the same, Shakespeare was debatably not straight (see: all the gay shit in his work), and the theatre remains a classic site for gender-non-conforming fulfillment and expression.

[8] Since Alexander the Great’s famous conquests or those of the Roman Empire (a safe starting point, let’s call it), so-called “Western colonialism”/Imperialism (the highest stage of Capitalism, vis-à-vis Lenin) has existed on the global stage; since the Enlightenment, it has—starting with Ireland* and spreading elsewhere around the world—adopted a racialized settler-colonial flavor whose latter-day fantasies’ hauntologies help perpetuate (e.g., Aliens, 1986). For our purposes, heteronormativity is settler-colonial, insofar as there is always a settler-colonial bias within Capitalism as it currently exists through nation-states; but that bias also executes differently depending on where and who you are as the story’s intended/tokenized audience: the Global North’s military urbanism/Imperial Boomerang versus settler colonialism conducted abroad. I confess the words “colonial,” “imperial/Imperialism” and “settler-colonial” will be used synonymously and that the word “(settler-)colonial binary” is more or less functionally synonymous/synergetic with “heteronormativity.” I will do my best to give nuanced examples throughout the book, but freely admit that settler-colonialism is not its chief-and-only focus.

*”The British Empire began developing its colonialization tactics in Ireland and Canada, before exporting them throughout the world. / From the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, Britain developed an empire on which the ‘sun never set,’ subjugating local peoples from North America to East Africa to Australia. But as three University of Manitoba scholars, Aziz Rahman, Mary Anne Clarke and Sean Byrne, wrote in 2017, it developed many of the methods it used in its colonization much closer to home: in Ireland. […] Unlike previous invaders, the authors write, these British Protestants regarded the Catholic Irish as racially inferior. The newcomers rarely intermarried with the locals. In 1649, when Oliver Cromwell’s forces arrived in Ireland, the result was a brutal genocidal campaign” (source: Livia Gershon’s “Britain’s Blueprint for Colonialism: Made in Ireland,” 2022).