This is the glossary 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 project has been ongoing since July 2022 and, from its inception, has seen me develop a lot of special definitions. While each volume PDF contains the glossary in their rear pages, I’ve decided to provide it here, as well.

Note: These definitions are organized in relation to one another, not alphabetically. There’s also triple-figure keywords, and you have to scroll to traverse them. So while the glossary is provided here for convenience, the quickest way to cycle through it is by using the footnote system in one of my volume PDFs (accessible from my one-page promo). Do so lets you access the entire list and click on which definition you want to read. To that, I strongly recommend downloading my PhD/thesis volume, which not only contains all of these terms, but explores them theoretically per my specialized arguments of them; i.e., in my dissertation work. Volume Zero, then, is the most comprehensive and thorough approach towards understanding all of these terms holistically as I use them (whereas Volume One simplifies a lot of the theory into more accessible shorthand/thesis arguments, Volume Two considers all of this per the application and history of Gothic poetics, and Volume Three doubles down on oppositional praxis). I also recommend reading the paratextual documents that come with every volume PDF, but especially the section, “Concerning My Audience, My Art, the Reading Order and Glossary.” Many of the more germane keywords are gathered and summarized, there. —Perse

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). 

Keyword Glossary

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” 

—Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride (1987)

(source: “The 430 Books in Marilyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?” 2014)

The companion glossary is dedicated to terms found in the thesis volume that nevertheless appear throughout all four volumes. It is divided into four sections:

• Marxism and Politics: Contains any terms that deals with Marxist theories or socio-political concepts.
• Sex, Gender and Race: Language, Theory and Politics: Covers the majority of gender theory used in this book.
• Miscellaneous Terms, Game Theory: Holds anything useful that isn’t in the other sorting categories.
• The Gothic, Kink, and BDSM: Catalogues the various ideas/theories on the Gothic, kink and BDSM that, while used throughout this book, aren’t listed in the manifesto.

Marxism and Politics

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). As an anarcho-Communist, I borrow ideas from Marx, but shy away from calling myself a Marxist (any more than I’d call myself a postmodernist/deconstructionist despite borrowing from Derrida); throughout the book, I prefer to use the noun/adjective phrase “dialectical(-) material” in place of “Marxist.” The reason being is that Gothic Communism, as we shall define it, deviates away from Marxist-Leninism (state Socialism) towards a democratized class consciousness/proletarian xenophilia that combats the historical-material abuses of the state in any configuration (fascist, neoliberal, Marxist-Leninist, etc).

material conditions

The factors that determine quality of life from a material standpoint; i.e., not an ethical/moral argument (“this is right/wrong”), but one that deals with access to various material conditions that reliably improve one’s living conditions: housing, food, electricity, clothing, water, education, employment, loans/credit, transportation, internet, etc. The status quo reliably constricts material conditions to benefit the elite; this occurs within a societal hierarchy that structurally privileges marginalized groups from least- to most-marginalized along systemically coercive and phobic lines. Indeed, this arrangement is so concrete that future history can be readily predicted through the arrangement of material conditions already displayed in canonical works: historical materialism.

historical materialism

The normalized, vicious cycle that history is predicated on the material conditions that routinely bring them about. These conditions make genocide and sex worker exploitation a historical-material fact, something that weighs on the living through what Capitalism leaves behind—the endlessly doubled histories of the dead according to Karl Marx in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852):

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. […] Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language (source).

dialectical materialism

The dialectical progress is the study of oppositional forces in relation to each other. For Marx, this involves the study of dialectical-material forces—i.e., the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in opposition, not harmony. “Harmony” is canonical pacification, which leads to genocide and endless exploitation of workers by the elite.

the means of production

Marx’ Base, owned by the elite; the ability to (mass)produce material goods within capital/a living market. This operates on a mass-manufactured scale, but also through work performed at the individual level—labor. Workers seize the means of production by attempting to own the value of their own labor. Conversely, capitalists exploit workers by stealing worker labor, often through wage theft (wages under Capitalism being the creation of jobs, or revenue streams for the elite to structuralize then steal from, which they then credit themselves as giving back to people; i.e., “I created these jobs!” Translation: “I created a means of exploiting people through their labor during manufactured scarcity). Billionaires privatize labor through unethical means, “earning” their billions through wage theft/slavery as “owned” by them, meaning used by them specifically as exploited labor (which alienates workers from the products of their own labor).

(artist: Adolf Menzel)

private property

Not to be confused with personal property, private property is property that is privately owned, generally by the elite through privatization via state-corporate mechanisms. As Marx puts it in 1844, “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital” (source).

privatization

If private property is property that is privately owned, privatization is the process that enables private ownership at a systemic, bourgeois level. Under Capitalism, the elite own means of production by encouraging negative freedom to “liberalize” (deregulate) the market. They do so by removing restrictions, allowing the owner class to privatize their assets. In class warfare, capitalists disguise this fact by deliberately conflating bourgeois ownership with “bougie” (middle-class) ownership:

• Owners, in the academic, bourgeois sense, own the means of mass production, thus individual production within capital. They privatize factories, territory, industrial sectors, the military, paramilitary (cops), and the means to print money. As a consequence, they also own workers, albeit by proxy (wage slavery).
• Middle-class ownership is merely an exchange of wages—direct purchases or taxes—for material goods aka personal property. These goods become something to defend, resulting in a great deal of punching down (reactionary/moderate politics).

functional Communism

The eventual (centuries from now) abolishment of privatization/private property. This process is called development, or Socialism; Socialism’s historical-material “failure” to move beyond planned economies stems from foreign, bourgeois interference and internal strife begot from privatized interests—all related to Capitalism preserving itself as a structure.

nominal Communism

Nominal communism—i.e., Communism in name alone, sold to workers through canonical propaganda to scare them into upholding the bourgeois status quo.

Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism

Coined by me, Gothic Communism is the deliberate, pointed critique of capital/Capitalism using a unique marriage of Gothic/queer/game theory and Marxist ideas synthesized by sex-positive workers during proletarian praxis. Meant to end neoliberal/fascist Capitalism in order to bring about anarcho-Communism, this liberation occurs through sex-positive labor (and monsters) reclaimed by sex workers (which Derrida called “spectres of Marx” in his eponymous book on hauntology as a Communist “ghost” that haunted language after the so-called “end of history”).

anarcho-Communism

The gradual disillusion and transmutation of Capitalism into Socialism and finally Communism through direct worker solidarity and collective action, whereupon power is horizontally restructured—slowly rearranged into anarcho-syndicalist communes (which are historically more stable than Capitalism is, but also under attack/sabotaged by the elite every chance they can get—e.g., Cuba and U.S. sanctions for the past 70 years whitewashed by Red-Scare propaganda). To achieve this, class warfare must be conducted against official/de facto agents of the state-corporate union devised by capitalists/neoliberal hegemons.

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, 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 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. However, capital/Capitalism as a process actually alienates capitalists from their own wealth; there is seldom money “on hand”—largely positions within a structure operating in continuum in pursuit of neoliberal Capitalism’s main objectives (very different from the dragon sitting on a pile of gold, which is closer to the fascist strongman stealing wealth by hijacking the mechanisms of the state).

An idiosyncrasy in terms of my writing: This book treats Capitalism and Communism as proper nouns; other words, like “state,” “capitalist,” “neoliberal,” and “fascist” are not capitalized. The reasons are arbitrary but I’ve at least tried to be consistent. —Perse

Anthropocene/Capitalocene

The Anthropocene is unit of time used to describe the period in which human existence and interaction with the natural world has started to impact it negatively in terms of ecosystem proliferation and health, general climate operations, and various other factors that intersect and relate to the survival of all life on the planet—including humans—as threatened by human contributions to climate change. The Capitalocene (as used by Patel and Moore) applies this logic to Capitalism:

Regardless of what humans decide to do, the twenty-first century will be a time of “abrupt and irreversible” changes in the web of life. Earth system scientists have a rather dry term for such a fundamental turning point in the life of a biospheric system: state shift. Unfortunately, the ecology from which this geological change has emerged has also produced humans who are ill-equipped to receive news of this state shift. Nietzsche’s madman announcing the death of god was met in a similar fashion: although industrial Europe had reduced divine influence to the semicompulsory Sunday-morning church attendance, nineteenth-century society couldn’t image a world without god. The twenty-first century has an analogue: it’s easier for most people to imagine the end of the planet than to imagine the end of capitalism. […] Today’s human activity isn’t exterminating mammoths through centuries of overhunting. Some humans are currently killing everything, from megafauna to microbiota, at speeds one hundred times higher than the background rate. We argue what changed is capitalism, that modern history has, since the 1400s, unfolded in what is better termed the Capitalocene [than the Anthropocene] (source).

anthropocentrism/posthumanism

In Posthuman Life (2015), David Roden writes, “A humanist philosophy is anthropocentric if it accords humans a superlative status that all or most non-humans lack” (source). Posthumanism goes beyond traditional notions of Cartesian humanism to afford basic rights to humans, animals and the natural-material world as something not to exploit by Capitalism.

transhumanism

From Roden’s Posthuman Life,

Self-fashioning through culture and education is to be supplemented by technology. For this reason, transhumanists believe that we should add morphological freedom—the freedom of physical and mental form—to the traditional liberal rights of freedom of movement and freedom of expression […] to discover new forms of embodiment in order to improve on the results on traditional humanism [and according to the World Transhumanist Association, 1999] “to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives” (source).

accretion

Dissemination out from the center of a socio-material structure (similar to how planets form); i.e., the Symbolic Order, the mythic structure, etc; e.g., accretions of the Medusa as someone to kill or avoid, as “untamable” by men as the arm of the state and the law. To escape men, she turns to stone (or a tree)—a defense mechanism from those who unironically defend the structure in official/unofficial capacities.

the Superstructure

(exhibit 2)

Propaganda; that which, Rana Indrajit Singh writes in the International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Invention, normally “grows out of the base and the ruling class’ interests. As such, the superstructure justifies how the base operates and defends the power of the elite” (source: “Base and Superstructure Theory,” 2013)—normally being the operative word, here. This book isn’t a fan of what’s normal because normal is the status quo and the status quo is bourgeois.

splendide mendax

The teller of splendid lies; e.g., Jonathan Swift and Gulliver’s Travels (1726); also applies to self-aware weavers of various genres of fiction, from Oscar Wilde to Luis Borges, but also non-white/American authors who have to reinvent their own cultures’ lost histories—e.g., Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise (1993) and Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage (1998), etc. Furthermore, concerning bourgeois lies vs proletarian splendid lies, Gothic stories are concerned with recycled clichés in either case.

“archaeologies” of the future

Fredric Jameson’s titular 2005 idea, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, of an elaborate strategy of misdirection (an idea originally from his 1982 essay “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?“) that breaks through the future of one moment that is now our own past, often through the fantasy and science fiction genres (the Gothic variant of this strategy as we shall discuss it is the Gothic castle/chronotope, discussed in the thesis proper). Canonical “archaeologies” sell this dead future back to workers to pacify them; iconoclastic variations devise ways of seeing beyond canonical illusions by “re-excavating” them, using what’s left behind again to liberate worker bodies and minds in the process.

propaganda

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, propaganda

is the more or less systematic effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions by means of symbols (words, gestures, banners, monuments, music, clothing, insignia, hairstyles, designs on coins and postage stamps, and so forth). Deliberateness and a relatively heavy emphasis on manipulation distinguish propaganda from casual conversation or the free and easy exchange of ideas. Propagandists have a specified goal or set of goals. To achieve these, they deliberately select facts, arguments, and displays of symbols and present them in ways they think will have the most effect. To maximize effect, they may omit or distort pertinent facts or simply lie, and they may try to divert the attention of the reactors (the people they are trying to sway) from everything but their own propaganda (source).

For us, propaganda is anything that cultivates the Superstructure, including splendid lies and elaborate strategies of misdirection. However, anything that goes against the interests of the state will be perceived of as terrorist lies by the state, making its abolishment by workers all the more pressing. However, state propaganda also self-replicates—with Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edwards Bernays, famously applying the principles of political propaganda to marketing in his 1928 capitalist apologia, Propaganda. The book argues for a rebranding of propaganda called “public relations,” one where “invisible” people create knowledge and propaganda to rule over the masses, with a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and citizen responses; that “engineering consent” of the masses would be vital for the survival of democracy. In Bernays’ own words, he explains:

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

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

praxis

The practical execution of theory. This can be achieved through different modes; e.g., ours is iconoclastic poiesis, or artwork tied to worker emancipation as something to creatively express, but also build upon as a collective, cultural understanding unified against the state. In other words, canon and iconoclasm are synonymous with praxis, but also poiesis.

poiesis/poetics

“To bring into being that which did not exist before.” A commonplace example is “poetry,” which historically has granted impoverished, exploited people idiosyncratic voices/parallel societies in times of struggle. Poiesis is not just pithy scribblings, in other words; it’s a means of understanding the world and sharing that with others to cultivate countercultural movements in opposition to the state; i.e., by “playing god.” For our purposes, canon and iconoclasm—as means of cultivating the Superstructure through creative artistic expression and sex work—are both forms of poiesis, but exist in dialectical-material opposition. One is a pedagogy of the oppressed; one is a pedagogy of the oppressor.

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. Financially incentivized by the elite including billionaires, these mass-produced, privatized variants are generally accepted as genuine, legitimate and sacred by workers and typically produced by anyone who upholds the status quo. This includes corporations, but also financially-incentivized, bourgeois (often white, cis-het) authors and their beliefs/praxis furthered by pre-2000s, Internet-era media: the TERF/neoliberal politics of Harry Potter creator J. K. Rowling (Shaun’s “Harry Potter,” 2022), decades-long racism and all-around horrible weirdness of Dilbert creator Scott Adams towards anyone different from himself (Behind the Bastards’ “How The Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind,” 2023), Earth Worm Jim Creator Doug TenNapel’s own conservative praxis when interacting with awful chaser/soon-to-be-divorced dudes like Steven Crowder (“Surviving the Leftist Mob,” 2021) or Matt Groening’s proud, middle-of-the-road, smug-as-fuck centrism (David Scheff’s “Matt Groening,” 2007) having already sold out, his unabashed playing of both sides against each other leading to Zombie Simpsons and a toleration of fascists/total inability to critique Capitalism (cashing in after doing the bare minimum with the first seven seasons completely undoes any activism those episodes achieved in their heyday):

Playboy: When you spread a liberal message by way of Fox, do you feel subversive?

Groening: It’s fun anytime you can piss off a right-wing lunatic, but it’s also fun to piss off a left-wing lunatic. In fact everybody on the show is concerned about not being preachy or heavy-handed. We try to mix it up.

American consumerism generally frames canon as “neutral,” despite complicitly hiding sexist attitudes and ideologies in plain sight (usually through cheap, mass-produced, privatized likenesses/intellectual properties).

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. Deconstruction, aka Postmodernism—when harnessed by Marxists—seeks to move beyond Modernism; i.e., the Enlightenment, whose high-minded principles are really just excuses to enslave and control people through negative freedom for the elite. Generally, this happens by presenting things harmful, segregating binaries like civilization/nature, white/black, man/woman, mind/body, art/porn, etc.

hypercanon/-ical

Something so famous that it becomes recognizable by sight across generations; e.g., The Wizard of Oz (1939). However, a popular example is the cyberpunk of the hauntological retrofuture. Popularized by movies like Blade Runner (1982), Ghost in the Shell (1996) and The Matrix (1999), the cyberpunk comments on the future as dead (a concept we’ll explore more in the Humanities Primer) as a means of providing a hypernormal, hyperreal illusion.

hyperreal/-ity

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

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

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

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

hypernormal/-ity

A term that, according to Adam Curtis’ HyperNormalization (2016), was originally used to describe the “whiplash” feelings of Soviet citizens during the 1980s—faced with the terrifying onset of societal collapse despite Soviet national propaganda having adopted neoliberal shock therapy while insisting that things were fine. The same idea can be applied to the uncanny sensation that things are not fine or even real despite how normal, foundational and concrete they seem; i.e., how they “pass” as normal despite a disquieting sense of decay (worker exploitation, for our purposes).

centrism

“There are no moral actions, only moral teams” (re: Shaun’s “Harry Potter“). Centrism is 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. To this, centrism displaces and cloaks two things:

• genocide as conducted by neoliberals/fascists on foreign/domestic lands.
• the neoliberal’s codifying of Nazis as an essential part of Capitalism—where the state’s bureaucracy fragments through the emergence of an ultranationalist strongman.

This return of the medieval—of the Imperium and Empire, Zombie Caesar, etc—is both “blind” nation pastiche, but also a cartoonish bourgeois parody that makes the Nazi and pastiche thereof tremendously useful to Capitalism and the elite’s survival through genocide’s continuation behind the veil.

war pastiche

The remediation of war as something to sell to the audience (for our purposes) as canon, generally in centrist forms. Whereas nation pastiche tends to denote a national character (e.g., James Cameron’s colonial marines, but also the wholesale, staple choreography of Asian-to-American martial arts movies like Ip Man 4: The Finale, 2019), war pastiche simply communicates violent conflict as something to personify in various dramatic/comedic theatrical forms; e.g., Blizzard’s Warcraft pastiche (orcs vs humans).

nation pastiche

Any kind of pastiche that ties war and combat to national identities, a common modern example being the Street Fighter franchise’s nation pastiche and FGC (fighting game community). Said community employs a variety of stock characters tied to a signature nation-state, draped in a national flag and gifted with a statuesque (sexually dimorphic) physique, snappy costume and set of trademark special moves/super moves. Gamer apathy mirrors the apathy of wrestling fans, whose tentpole company regularly capitalizes off the global stage through geopolitical (nationalistic) dialogs performed using sanctioned, bread-and-circus violence; e.g., the WWE and its lucrative contract with Saudi Arabia (Renegade Cut’s “WWE and the Saudi Royal Family,” 2019).

(source)

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 FGC. 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. A common narrative between the two is good overcoming the bullying of evil by deus ex machina “rallies,” where upon the underdog babyface is able to prevail by the end of a particular war. The tragedy in doing so is the babyface always converts to a heel position. The theater and its evolution through modern sports parallel geopolitics in ways that deregulate the process of worker exploitation through sports contracts and ringleaders working adjacent, through their own distractions, to military contractors and arms manufacturers/dealers in the Military Industrial Complex; neoliberalism, in other words, promotes fascist as an essential part of centrist theater through post-fascist, Cold War stereotypical heels—the Nazi, Muslim or the Communist—versus the traditional babyface: the American crusader or “good” vigilante/exacter of righteous justice. The public’s endorsement, tolerance or unironic worship—of what is generally become recognized as a highly scripted affair—is called “kayfabe.”

kayfabe

The Wikipedia entry for “kayfabe” reads:

the portrayal of staged events within the industry as “real” or “true,” specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not staged. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this “reality” within the direct or indirect presence of the general public. Kayfabe, in the United States, is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera. Since wrestling is performed in front of a live audience, whose interaction with the show is crucial to its success, kayfabe can be compared to the fourth wall in acting, since hardly any conventional fourth wall exists to begin with. Because of this lack of conventional fourth wall, wrestlers were once expected to maintain their characters even out of the ring, and in other aspects of their lives that could be made public (source).

For a good introduction to the concept and its history in modern professional wrestling and popular media, consider Behind the Bastards’ podcast episode, “Part One: Vince McMahon, History’s Greatest Monster” (2023). The concept applies not just to wrestling but includes any professional sports—e.g., e-sports but also vigilante sports/action hero narratives with athletic crusaders such as the heteronormative avatars from Streets of Rage and TMNT or Street Fighter as something to endorse through their police violence of state-oriented criminals, potential subversives, revolutionaries and so-called “terrorists” threatening the existence of “correct” action heroes as something to perform (exhibit 34c2, 98a1, or 104a1); or to subvert these false revolutionaries in a variety of ways (exhibit 102a4, 111b).

moderacy

Famously outlined by Martin Luther King’s 1963 “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” excoriating the white moderate as more dangerous than the overt racist. Moderacy would evolve into the American neoliberal and its worldly doubles (1980s Soviet Russia or Great Britain) as willing to break bread/debate with fascists in the “free marketplace of ideas.” To this, moderacy equals veiled white-cis-het-Western supremacy—generally upheld by centrist canon.

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,

The variety of human reactions under infernal circumstances taught us an ugly truth: the spirit of most men can be broken; men can be reduced to the level of animal behaviour. Both torturer and victim finally lose all dignity […] The core of the strategy of menticide is the taking away of all hope, all anticipation, all belief in a future [which aligns with Mark 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. Morale becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effect of each new propaganda campaign becomes stronger; it reaches a public already softened up. Every dissenter becomes more and more frightened that he may be found out. Gradually people are no longer willing to participate in any sort of political discussion or to express their opinions. Inwardly they have already surrendered to the terrorizing dictatorial forces (ibid.).

the pedagogy of the oppressed

Radical empathy. Coined by Paulo Freire in his 1968 book of the same name, the text is a warning to closeted (and active) moderates to stop talking down to people who know their own trauma far better than moderates do.

the banality of evil/desk murderers

Originally used to describe the fascist bureaucracy of the Third Reich during the Nuremberg trials, desk murder goes well beyond Adolf Eichmann; it is destructive greed minus all the gaudy bells and whistles: the men behind the curtain (canon). Whether fascist or neoliberal, those at the top abject (denormalize) truth, shaming dialectical-material analysis while venerating the uncritical consumption of canon. In doing so, they hide, thus normalize, their owner status; the elite own everything through vertically-arranged power structures, deliberately constructed to exploit everyone else—not just by owning the means of production, but using said means at a corporate-national register to parade and venerate conspicuous shows of god-like wealth and endless consumerism.

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 (as Howard Zinn notes about the formation of the Americas during the American Revolution).

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. In his A People’s History of the United States (1980), Howard Zinn catalogs the various fears of the upper “master class”—of Native Americans and slaves rebelling together but also white indentured servants and African slaves as something to discourage using Liberalism:

“What made Bacon’s Rebellion especially fearsome for the rulers of Virginia was that black slaves and white servants joined forces […] Those upper classes, to rule, needed to make concessions to the middle class, without damage to their own wealth or power, at the expense of slaves, Indians, and poor whites. This bought loyalty. And to bind that loyalty with something more powerful even than material advantage, the ruling group found, in the 1760s and 1770s, a wonderfully useful device. That device was the language of liberty and equality, which could unite just enough whites to fight a Revolution against England, without ending either slavery or inequality” (source).

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. By preaching the lie of false hope* through an us-versus-them mentality and personal responsibility rhetoric, neoliberalism maintains the status quo by demonizing nominal Communism (Monty Python’s “International Communism,” 1969) and disguising the inner workings of Capitalism—how Capitalism is inherently unethical and unstable, and how it exploits nearly everyone (workers) to benefit the few (the elite). This framework, and the pervasive illusions that prop it up, eventually decay and lead to societal collapse. In the interim, common side effects of neoliberalism include: the gutting of unions, destruction of the welfare state, reinforcement of the prison system and strengthening of the police state.

*For a quick-and-dirty example of vintage American neoliberalism, consider the opening to Double Dribble (1987) for the NES: palm trees and skyscrapers in the background, a bare concrete lot and tight, manicured lawns in the foreground—where hordes of consumers flock to a giant stadium to “the Star Spangled Banner” while a Konami blimp emblazoned with an American flag soars overheard. This kind of canonical nostalgia traps workers inside a world they never experience because its constantly sold to them as an idealized past to escape into from their current environment; as Capitalism fails, they can’t imagine anything beyond it, just whatever was shown to them as children: something to retreat into fondly like a lost childhood.

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 village sacrifice of a manufactured outsider taken to national extremes during palingenesis (“national birth”), which ushers in a perceived former glory tied to a former imaginary past: a liminal hauntology of war against anyone different than the status quo; e.g., a witch/pagan, vampire (queer person) or similar target of state violence during moral panics stoked by fascist ringleaders. A radicalizing of the status quo, then,  allow populist strongmen to foster unusual sympathies within the (white, cis-het) working class: the installation of a dogmatic (sexist, racist, transphobic, etc) hierarchy that intentionally abuses a designated underclass (the out-group), promising societal and material elevation for those following the leader (the in-group).  Or as Michael Parenti wrote in Blackshirts and Reds (1997):

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

Simply put, fascists are violent LARPers (live-action role-players) living in a death cult, reducing themselves and those around them to expendable, fetishized, zombie-like fodder. The in-group operates through fear, dogma and violence—cultivating the perception of strength through a coercive, revered worldview that leads to delusional overconfidence and ignominious death in service of the state through its same-old language (e.g., Monty Python’s “Black Knight” skit, 1975).

pre-/post-fascism

Fascism is the generation of, regression back towards medieval, pre-civilized hauntologies that attempt to revive the glory of former times (usually the ghost of Rome) through the creation of, on various levels, a fearsome destroyer persona: the pagan Goth, but also the zombie tyrant (the Romans killed Christ). 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. It’s the ghost of tyranny—the skeleton king tapping his palm with his cudgel-like scepter. Because fascism defends Capitalism (an inherently unstable system) the fear, then, becomes fear of sacrifice by the state to preserve the whole from an imaginary menace with historical-material validation for its own desire of revenge (the specters of Marx; i.e., a ghost battle between capitalist, thus fascist hauntology and Communist hauntology).

eco-fascism

The turn towards fascist rhetoric, stowed away inside nature conservatist rhetoric. When Capitalism fails, (some) humans become the virus inside the state of exception, their destruction pitched as “saving the planet” for the uninfected. This scapegoat is always Indigenous peoples (the go-to recipients of state exploitation) but can and will expand towards the center of American privilege (stopping short of the elite, of course) when things geopolitically and ecologically begin to worsen.

zombification/Zombie Capitalism+

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

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

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

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

the Wisdom of the Ancients

A cultural understanding of the imaginary past. The past is always imaginary to some extent, but through less wise forms reliably leads to genocide and tremendous suffering (Marx’ prophesied tragedy and farce) according to structures of power that preserve themselves through blind pastiche, parody and canonical art. These essentialize Capitalism’s vicious cycle and cataclysmic arrangements of the imaginary past as something that is simultaneously Malthusian, but also paradoxically “as good as it gets” and threatened by the doomsday myopia of nominal Communism that Capitalism Realism affords. As their sense of agency and certitude collapse with the world around them, workers—but especially the middle class—are left feeling cheated or lied to, and either blame the system or scapegoats. Scapegoats are historically easier because you can shoot or kill them, implying the solution is a simple, straightforward one. It’s the “tried-and-true” “wisdom” of the Roman fool, falling on their own sword while Rome burns not once, but over and over. Such “wisdom” is not wise, but a false power, which Gothic Communists seek to reclaim through our own doubling of the imaginary past—its monsters, castles and battles—as a kind of “living document” that can reclaim the Gothic imagination, thus our ability to think; i.e., through lost forms of knowledge retailored for the complexities of the modern world—its warring mentalities, sexualities, monsters (codified beliefs and actions) and praxis during class and culture war.

the Imperial Boomerang

“The thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens” (source: Wikipedia). In Foucault’s own words during his lecture at “Il faut défendre la société” in 1975:

[W]hile colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself (source: “Foucault’s Boomerang: the New Military Urbanism,” 2013).

Described by Stephen Graham as “military urbanism,” this phenomenon accounts for the legion of dead futures popularized in American canon and its expanded, retro-future states of exception—hauntological narratives that present the future as dead and Capitalism as retro-futuristically decayed; i.e., Zombie Capitalism and zombie police states.

the state of exception

The state-of-emergency applied to recipients of state violence; or as Giorgio Agamben writes in State of Exception (2005),

“A special condition in which the juridical order is actually suspended due to an emergency or a serious crisis threatening the state. In such a situation, the sovereign, i.e. the executive power, prevails over the others and the basic laws and norms can be violated by the state while facing the crisis” (source).

the state’s monopoly of violence

Max Weber’s maxim that “a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (source; originally from “Politics as a Vocation,” 1919). This applies to state-sanctioned witch hunts and scapegoating markers, which we’ll examine much more thoroughly in Volume Three, Chapter Two.

the Protestant (work) ethic

From Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905). In it, “Weber asserted that Protestant ethics and values, along with the Calvinist doctrines of asceticism and predestination, enabled the rise and spread of capitalism” (source: Wikipedia)—a concept I’ve explored in my own Tolkien scholarship, for example; e.g., ‘“Dragon Sickness”: The Problem of Greed,’ (2015).

Umberto Eco’s 14 Points of Fascism (from “Ur-Fascism,” 1995)+

A handy guide for spotting fascism, which tends to conceal itself or idiosyncratically manifest. We won’t go over all of them in this book, but there are a few that I like to focus on.

Sex, Gender and Race: Language, Theory and Politics

sexualized media

Media that contains sexual and gendered components—of cis-het men and women, but also queer persons/other marginalized groups for or against the state. However, the treatment of sexuality and gender—how it is sexualized by “the Media” or in media more broadly—depends on if it is sex-positive or sex-coercive (some examples, below):

(exhibit 3a1: Artist, top-left: Frank Frazetta; top-middle-to-right: Sveta Shubina; bottom-left: J. Howard Miller; bottom-middle: Norman Rockwell; bottom-right: Michelangelo.

Artistic mimicry through homage is a common phenomenon of art, with women being illustrated historically by men for various purposes. A common reason for doing so was to illustrate their place in a man’s world; e.g., as wives, mistresses [the Virgin or the Whore] but also as workers. Whereas open fascism historically relegates women to traditional modes of women’s work, American propaganda temporarily made various concessions during WW2. These occurred to support the overall war effort and the material interests of the elite. After the war ended, women’s rights were quickly rescinded in favor of a return to the status quo, female workers being demonized by the same male employers and patrons who formerly promoted them [and fetishized by the likes of Frazetta, who started his career during a regression towards female re-enslavement after the war].

Mimesis is a back-and-forth process, borrowing images and symbols for new purposes during oppositional praxis. In Rosie the Riveter’s case, promotions of female “equality” were themselves guided by an American sense of righteousness that went on to be co-opted for social movements long after the original pieces aired. Indeed, Rosie only became a cultural icon of feminism in the 1970s—i.e., as a symbol of female empowerment that eclipsed Rockwell’s Christianized mimesis of Michelangelo’s Isaiah. On Rockwell, Christina Branham writes in “Rosie the Riveter” (2016),

The pose she strikes seems a bit awkward, but it too conveys a message: it was inspired by Michelangelo’s portrayal of the prophet Isaiah on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Why? As stated during a Sotheby’s 2002 sale of the original art, “Righteousness is described throughout Isaiah’s prophecy as God’s strong right arm.” Rockwell’s Rosie is certainly sporting some strong man-arms, but I would say the bigger message is that America was on the side of righteousness [source]. 

After Rockwell’s upstaging by Miller’s latter-day revival, the image of Rosie took on a life of its own. The image itself went on to convey the nostalgia of a reimagined past: the rights of cis-het white women [which second wave feminism primarily represented through its arguments]. In the works of future artists, nostalgia becomes something to reclaim, but also regress towards depending on the context and political leanings of the creator.)

(exhibit 3a2: Assorted pieces by Milo Manara and Luis Royo; middle-right: Olsen; far-top-right: Morry Evans. Hauntology presses women into different forms of transgressive servitude—i.e., more about titillating the cis-het male gaze within risky positions of appropriative peril and high imagination/adventure that women are expected not just to perform, but compete for under male Pygmalions. Indeed, white, cis-het women assimilate and promote these roles, focusing on the unironic torture of a highly specific and prescriptive industry body type, versus catharsis for women forced to do certain forms of coercively humiliating labor regardless of the genre. Reduced to blind pastiche, these can perpetuate various harmful stereotypes within transgressive media as a means of submitting to formal power rather than resisting and reclaiming it through the same rituals as subverted; e.g., Morry Evan’s work of a servile giant for the counterfeit of a nun; or Sveta Shubina’s Bowser and Peach, below. We’ll examine more iconoclastic subversions throughout the book; e.g., the aforementioned size difference as something to appreciate in different monster types, such as the Amazon/mommy dom, exhibit 51d2.)

(exhibit 3a3: Artist, left: Sveta Shubina; right: Don Bluth. The desire to separate the art from the artist and aesthetics from ideology is understandable/possible, but it remains important to remember that when emulating a given style, said style in the past was associated with a problematic belief system and its symbolism; e.g., Don Bluth’s damsel-in-distress, Princess Daphne, “needing” to be rescued from the dragon by a man who is still draconian themselves [the knight and the dragon being dichotomized variations of the “walking castle”/human tank]. Shubina is clearly emulating Bluth’s visual style but subverts the relationship between the princess and the dragon—i.e., like King Kong but seemingly negotiated through the topos of the power of women [to attract men] as something to toy with. This context, of course, is difficult to glean from the base drawing itself, all but requiring a bit of imagination from us to reinterpret the same old clichés. But even if these stereotypes are subverted, their own work will remain haunted by the sexism of past idols that people unironically love in the present.

The woman as “emasculator” ties to the ironic cuckolder of men, having them figuratively “by the balls”: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” This historically unenviable position becomes canonically enviable among women forced to compete for limited husbands with wealth, being judged by men as “gold diggers” and judged by other women jealously fighting over the same heteronormative prize. Conventionally pretty women become viewed through various double standards: the treacherous beauty as a user of everyone around her to get what she wants; i.e., sex as a weapon. While the narrative reduces the woman to a singular role and personality type, it’s one where their intelligence is treated like a concealed weapon behind their sexuality as front-and-center. They’re forced into uncomfortable clothes and pitted against other women wearing the same princess-style uniform; i.e., the historical-material reality of women competing for the same bloodline: to be the king’s prized broodmare.

This includes Bowser in BDSM circles, a prime candidate for the “daddy dom” or queer “Bear” stereotype [artist, above: Taran Fiddler]. The paradox of the spiked collar is canonized as the master’s sigil that simultaneously is an anti-predation device for a large, powerful pet in iconoclastic circles.)

sex work

Any work centered around sexuality and gender roles, including artwork. More commonly thought of as “prostitution,” patriarchal sexism under Capitalism extends sex work to the broader division of sexualized labor within a colonial gender binary: men’s work versus women’s work. While the former focuses on war, violence and promotion through socio-material dominance, the latter involves submissive, traditionalized modes of sexual-reproductive labor towards a male authority figure—often a boss, parent or husband. So, while many sex workers perform strictly eroticized acts in this manner, many more are secretarial or marital in nature, performed inside traditional sites of women’s work like kitchens, bedrooms, or laundromats, but also banks or hospitals. In the creative world, sexist employers compel female creators (musicians, models, illustrators and writers, etc) to promote prescriptive notions of coercive sexuality and gender tied to heteronormative beauty standards, fashion and music. Regardless of the work, sex-positive workers will resist sex coercion through their own labor.

sex positivity

Sexual/asexual expression that enables individual self-expression (thus self-empowerment) by relatively ethical means—the right to do sex work or partake in sexual activity if one so desires. In other words, it is a positive freedom; i.e., freedom for people to do what they want, specifically “the possession of the power and resources (material conditions) to act in the context of the structural limitations of the broader society which impacts a person’s ability to act.” Apart from being morally good and materially beneficial, sex positivity empowers marginalized communities (who, amongst other things, are generally exploited for sex as a form of labor); it does so by arguing for mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation using historically regulated language: bodies and biology, gender identity/performance and (a)sexual orientation.

sex coercion

Sexist, heteronormative argumentation, work and artistry that compels and upholds sexual and gendered norms by abolishing others through various unethical means. This includes corporations downplaying their harmful actions as benign, or fascists framing their openly harmful actions as justified. This freedom to act is a negative freedom; i.e., freedom from external restraint on one’s actions. It is generally repressive towards marginalized communities, the elite exploiting them on a material level while also denying them their basic human rights.

Small idiosyncrasy in terms of my writing: When using “sex positivity” or “sex coercion” (nouns) as adjectives, they will be hyphenated; e.g., “The sex-positive fog crept in on little sex-coercive feet.” This is completely arbitrary but my aim is to be consistent. —Perse

basic/civil human rights

The Communist idea that all human/animal workers deserve fair and equal treatment, which nation-states and corporations historically do not give (they are bourgeois and exploit workers). In Marxist terms, these rights are administered through Communism not according to profit, but “From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] needs.” According to LeiLani Dowell at the Worker’s World Forum in 2012, this existence is planned and achieved through the development phase, aka Socialism: “…to each according to their work.”

ethics, ethical, ethicality

This book treats universal ethicality not as canonical societal norms (what is prescriptively “correct” or “morally right” according to canon), but that humans, animals and the environment have basic, unalienable rights. The universality of these rights is what is correct. Anyone’s hypothetical ability to systemically “question” or undermine these rights—including the bourgeoisie—is fundamentally incorrect/unethical (what moderates call “compromise”).

(artist: Kasia Babis)

-phobia/-philia

In Gothic-Communist terms, a phobia isn’t raw, animal fear—e.g., fear of death or the unknown—but an actionable, social-sexual stigma, bias or taboo assigned to a particular out-group or historical-material victim under the status quo/inside the state of exception: xenophobia, pedophilia, necrophilia, etc. This extends to various moral panics—e.g., Satanic panic, Red Scares, or the fascist revenge phobia of the backstabbing Jew, etc. Phobias are canonically fetishized. Philias are often deliberate/accidental misnomers insofar as abuse euphemisms are concerned (again, necrophilia, pedophilia, zoophilia); i.e., used to describe acts of abuse wherein the abuser is acting on a sexual attraction or otherwise abusive compulsion but is acting it out on a party that cannot actually consent (the dead, children, or animals; slaves, wives and other humans legally regarded as property in some shape or form).

purity arguments

A type of reactionary, fascist argumentation tied to manufactured scarcity, consent and conflict as radicalized during moral panics under police states/ethnostates. Think “boundaries for me, not for thee,” but attached to limited-time waivers for those who best fit whatever soldiers those in fascist seats of power are looking for (with Himmler anything but “Nordic”). This tends to historically-materially manifest in racial-purity pseudoscience and aggressive recruitment tactics, defending the “purity” of a nation (and its children and women) through racialized supermen, generally with the descriptor “ethnic” attached to them—e.g., ethnic Germans (in Nazi Germany) or Jews (in Israel).

moral panic, morals, and morality

This book views personal morals as being shaped by broader social codes—folkways, mores and taboos that determine “good from bad” or “right from wrong” at a societal level. For conservatives, this involves reactionary politics administered through bad-faith, “moral panic” arguments; for neoliberals, there are no moral actions, only moral teams (re: “centrism,” a concept we’ll explore much more deeply in Volume Three, Chapter Four). Calling others immoral in either sense is actually immoral/unethical* relative to people’s basic human rights.

*I would consider the difference between ethical and moral to be a matter of scope and scale. As Cydney Grannan writes in “What’s the Difference Between Morality and Ethics?” for Encyclopedia Britannica (2023), the terms are often used interchangeably even in academic circles. 

Please note, dialectical-materialism focuses on ethics through material relations—hence why I prefer to describe things not as “good or bad,” but as bourgeois or proletarian (exceptions will be observed as they arise). —Perse 

the Pygmalion effect

The patriarchal vision of those knowing-better “kings” of male-dominated industries, wherein “Pygmalion” means “from a male king’s mind.” Male “kings” author imaginary visions of the past, present and future, including the monomyth/Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern and its heteronormative legion of monsters, invasion scenarios and escape fantasies; their reasoned, Cartesian treatment of women is heteronormative, thus abjectly hysterical.

hysteria/the wandering womb

Hysteria is a form of moderate condescension/reactionary control tied to Cartesian dualism, but also the gaslight, gatekeep and girl-boss trifecta that argues women are “less rational” than men; it tends to diagnose them with bizarre, completely absurd medical conditions to keep them inactive and scared, but also under men’s power (e.g., bicycle face is one [source: Joseph Stromberg’s “‘Bicycle face’: A 19th-Century Health Problem Made Up to Scare Women away from Biking,” 2021] but here’s a whole list of odd disorders/female causes of ignominious death invented by male “Pygmalions,” including “night brain” and “drawing-room anguish”; source tweet: Dr. Daniel Cook, 2021). However, it also tends to frame women as mythical monsters/mothers that need to be killed for men to “progress”: Medusas, Archaic Mothers, Amazons, etc.

the creation of sexual difference

Popularized by Luce Irigaray, her flagship concept is summarized by Sarah K. Donovan as follows,

In other words, while women are not considered full subjects, society itself could not function without their contributions. Irigaray ultimately states that Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through her.

Based on this analysis, Irigaray says that sexual difference does not exist. True sexual difference would require that men and women are equally able to achieve subjectivity. As is, Irigaray believes that men are subjects (e.g., self-conscious, self-same entities) and women are “the other” of these subjects (e.g., the non-subjective, supporting matter). Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

the Male Gaze (appropriative voyeurism/exhibitionism)

Popularized by Laura Mulvey in her 1973 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the Male Gaze goes well beyond cinema; according to Sarah Vanbuskirk in “What Is the Male Gaze?” (2022), it deals with female objectification under Capitalism:

The male gaze describes a way of portraying and looking at women that empowers men while sexualizing and diminishing women. […] first popularized in relation to the depiction of female characters in film as inactive, often overtly sexualized objects of male desire. However, the influence of the male gaze is not limited to how women and girls are featured in the movies. Rather, it extends to the experience of being seen in this way, both for the female figures on screen, the viewers, and by extension, to all girls and women at large. Naturally, the influence of the male gaze seeps into female self-perception and self-esteem. It’s as much about the impact of seeing other women relegated to these supporting roles as it is about the way women are conditioned to fill them in real life. The pressure to conform to this patriarchal view (or to simply accept or humor it) and endure being seen in this way shapes how women think about their own bodies, capabilities, and place in the world—and that of other women.

In essence, the male gaze discourages female empowerment and self-advocacy while encouraging self-objectification and deference to men and the patriarchy at large (source).

Appropriative performances of voyeurism/exhibitionism (watching or showing sexual activities) that cater to this Gaze uphold the status quo. Those that do not are appreciative (thus sex-positive) in nature, but generally remain liminal and ambivalent.

exhibitionism/voyeurism

A desire to show off or to look, generally tied to kink and BDSM (which we’ll define in the Gothic section of terms). As with those, these activities can be sex-positive or -coercive; i.e., rebellious/furious flashing (exhibit 53, 62c, 89a, 101a1, etc) vs cat-calling/scopophilia from a totally unwanted audience (Norman Bates and Marion Crane) vs the liminal, half-invited Peeping Tom (Jimmy Stuart and Miss Torso from Rear Window, 1954; George McFly and Loraine Bates from Back to the Future, 1985; or these two tennis guys [above] and an anonymous female streaker—source tweet: Peach Crush, 2023) vs the transphobic flasher (exhibit 62c) vs fully consensual voyeurism/exhibitionism (exhibit 101c2).

(artist: Moika)

cultural appropriation (verb: “to appropriate”/adjective: “appropriative”):

Taking one (or more) aspect(s) of a culture, identity or group that is not your own and using it for your own personal interests. Although this can occur individually for reasons unrelated to profit, Capitalism deliberately appropriates workers/marginalized groups for profit; the act of these groups playing along is called assimilation.

cultural appreciation (verb: “to appreciate”/adjective: “appreciative”):

Attempting to understand and learn about another culture in an effort to broaden one’s perspective and connect with others cross-culturally. The Gothic-Communism aim is to humanized these groups and prevent their exploitation through one’s own work.

lip service

Empty endorsements, generally performed by establishment politicians; a moderate tactic of playing both sides (always to the detriment of workers).

queer-baiting/pacification/in-fighting

Empty commercial appeals/”representation” that are generally cliché, stigmatized, or dubiously underwritten/funeral—the “bury your gays” trope (defined and explored by Haley Hulan’s 2017 “Bury Your Gays: History, Usage, and Context”) except employed by neoliberal corporations who expect marginalized groups to be grateful for scraps, but also fight over/about them: “They’re fighting/killing each other” is music to the elite’s ears regarding all marginalized groups (class sabotage).

“bury your gays”

The heteronormative sublimation, violence and moral-panic scapegoating of anything that doesn’t fit the colonial binary model. Historically this would have been homosexual men (with queer cis women appropriated by cis-het men as exotic sex toys existing purely for male pleasure); however, it extends to trans/non-binary people or gender non-conforming persons more broadly (with various minorities being assigned heteronormatively atypically gendered qualities, like women of color being seen as more masculine and sexual voracious/aggressive than white women, for example).

Rainbow Capitalism

Capitalism appropriating queerness, generally through surface-level, inauthentic representation and queer-baiting. Marketing-wise, this involves slapping a fucking rainbow on every product in sight during Pride Month, diluting its cultural significance as a sign of solidarity and rebellion in the process.

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. More broadly, it may refer to the cultural appropriation of any subversive symbols or ideas by mainstream culture” (source: Wikipedia). Perhaps the most common example is “corruption” (the evil cop, company or executive, etc) and the “defanging” of oppositional forces (rap, punk rock, antiwar protests, Black Lives Matter and other activists groups, etc as commodified by Rainbow Capitalism; more on this concept in Volume Three, Chapter One) but also “demonization” (e.g., the rebellion of the xenomorph or zombies turned into mindless rage that marines can shoot at with impunity).

sublimation

The process by which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior. Unlike Nietzsche or Freud, I explore sublimation as something that can either be bourgeois or proletarian. For either man, sublimation was a mature, “healthy” defense mechanism by which the modern individual could turn a blind eye, thus function in assimilative ways. I disagree about the “healthy” part, thinking this kind of repressing is to conceal Capitalism as an expressly tyrannical and exploitative system towards workers—”healthy” meaning “working as intended for the elite.” Sublimation has to go beyond exploitation if workers are to liberate themselves in ways Nietzsche generally called “envious.” It is not envy that drives people to rebel, but a desire to not be exploited like chattel. To this, the recuperation of the activist—into a killer demon or zombie that cannot speak and must instead be shot—is generally seen as a good thing to do; it sublimates them into something that can be logically dealt with; i.e, through violence.

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. This can come from corporations or groups that produce media on a geopolitical scale, or from individual artists/thinkers who uphold the status quo (TERFs, for example). Generally illustrated through propaganda that appropriates marginalized groups.

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). For queer people, their existence is generally ironic to canonical, historical-material norms because they do not confirm to these norms or their prescriptions. Doing so requires genderqueer expression during oppositional praxis through appreciative irony as a kind of gender trouble/parody under heteronormative conditions (exhibit 3b).

appreciative irony

Simply put, a descriptive sexuality that culturally appreciates the irony of queer existence in various forms: trans people, non-binary persons, homosexuals, pansexuals, bisexuals, intersex persons, femboys, catgirls, etc. Often, portrayed through countercultural performance art, including sex-positive BDSM in iconoclastic forms of Gothic media.

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 quality of brain conditions that diverge from neurotypical persons and brains. Neurodivergent people tend to be demonized, but also shamed as disabled, insane or mendacious. However, NeuroClastic’s Autistic Science Person writes in “Autistic People Care Too Much, Research Says” (2020) that autistic people on average tend to be more selfless and open-minded than neurotypical persons. This isn’t an automatic endorsement of us (I am neurodivergent) nor carte blanche, but it does help explain the ways in which Capitalism devalues people who don’t toe the line (e.g., the C.S. Lewis trilemma: lunatic, liar, lord; source: Essence of Thought, 2022): Neurodivergent people tend to be anti-work knowing that many jobs and forms of consumption are incredibly unethical; while there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism, we recognize that some forms of consumption actively contribute to an economy of genocide; e.g., purchasing sugar in slavery-era Great Britain before 1833, or playing Hogwarts Legacy in 2023 despite knowing J.K. Rowling is a TERF and her brand is anti-trans (Renegade Cut’s “Don’t Play Hogwarts Legacy,” 2023).

plurality/multiplicity

Generally demonized in Gothic canon, “Plurality or multiplicity is the psychological phenomenon in which a body can feature multiple distinct or overlapping consciousnesses, each with their own degree of individuality. This phenomenon can feature in identity disturbance, dissociative identity disorder, and other specified dissociative disorders. Some individuals describe their experience of plurality as a form of neurodiversity, rather than something that demands a diagnosis” (source). It’s not automatically an ailment or begot from trauma, though it will canonically be presented as such (the same goes for asexual/neurodivergent peoples).

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 (for 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 (concepts we’ll explore in depth in Volume Three, Chapter Three).

comorbid/congenital

The simultaneous presence of two or more diseases or medical conditions in a patient—congenital meaning “present at birth,” inherited. In gendered terms, this can present in people who are non-conforming or neurotypical; in Marxist terms, this extends into the material world as an extension of the human mind—i.e., the Gothic imagination as comorbid.

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. When Ardolph cuckolds the husband with said husband’s unfaithful, susceptible-to-vice wife (the Original Sin argument), our unhappy husband—thoroughly chagrined—literally dies of shame. It’s heteronormative and white supremacist, foisting societal fears onto a foreign, not-quite-West, not-quite-East scapegoat: those god-damn Italians! This form of xenophobic displacement would be revisited in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein—with her Germanic, asexual scapegoat, Victor, not only cock-blocking his own kid as a proponent of the Enlightenment’s version of unnatural reproduction (“I will be with you on your wedding night!”), but mad science being historically-materially Germanized in canonical fictional and non-fictional forms (e.g., Operation Paperclip and the American privatization/weaponization of mad science from irrational, hauntologized lands like Nazi Germany)!

poly(amory/-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 (unless you’re a Mormon or cult leader, although certain traditions in non-Western societies allowed for polygamy as well—though not many were exclusively matriarchal in function). Polyamory can include marriage, though the basic idea is any (a)sexual relationship with multiple partners. Pairs within this arrangement are called couples (thruple being a popular term even in mainstream fiction, though canon reduces it to a destructive/”bury your gays” love triangle/square, etc); the entire social-sexual structure of a given poly arrangement is called a polycule.

Note: As part of the “bury your gays trope,” poly couples are often viewed as “homewreckers,” conflated with wanton societal destruction of the familial household (re: Count Ardolph from Zofloya); heteronormativity demands that they die—e.g., Shari and Cary (a pun for “sharing and caring,” if I had to guess) from You (2018) being ritualistically sacrificed by the writers of the show, who have them murdered by the codependent, horribly selfish, duplicitous and perfidious compulsive liars/pattern-killers, Joe Goldberg and Love Quinn. —Perse

“friends of Dorothy”

Historically a method of queer concealment in the 1980s but also appropriated under Rainbow Capitalism; can be appreciated under Gothic Communism, as well.

beards

A relationship of convenience to appear straight, heteronormative, monogamous, nuclear, “Roman,” etc. The nuptial variant of a beard is the lavender marriage.

heteronormativity

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

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

queernormativity/homonormativity

Normative queerness centers queerness in sexualized spheres (erasing ace people) centered around the nuclear family unit/sexual reproduction. Homonormativity takes the same idea and applies it to cis-gendered homosexual men/women (the “two dads/two moms” appropriative trope as queer-baiting/lip service).

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) reverse-abjection, whose reactionary abjection occurs by an increasingly unstable status quo as it impedes or threatens disintegration (moral panics under Capitalism’s intended cycles of decay and restoration). Such threatening is generally of the heteronormative side reacting negatively towards the very things it abjects, which can be as simple as boys wearing pink instead of blue(!). Such a binary and similar socio-material schemes have only recently solidified under neoliberal Capitalism; e.g., now, pink is very much canonically treated as feminine/female in cis-coded, heteronormative ways (for an extensive, funny chronicling of this entire tragedy as it historically-materially unfolds, refer to Tirrrb’s 2023 video: “The Yassification Of Masculinity“).

girl-cock (exhibit 7c) or boy pussy (exhibit 52c)/gender parody

Genitals or genitalia-like artifacts that fulfill an ironic/gender parody cultural role that interrogates heteronormative gender assignment, performance or identity, as well as sexual orientation. They can be informed by one’s biological sex in coercive ways (exhibit 30/31). However, no one in non-normative/proletarian circles wants to be “defined” by biological sex—i.e., forced conformity. This leads to the creation of various sex toys (exhibits 38a) and aliases useful to our existence, as well as actively operating as sex-positive workers (this being said, sex-positive workers are active by default—attacked for being different from what the state prescribes, but also allowed to exist by the elite because we’re the fuel that Capitalism needs to operate).

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.

AFAB/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.

intersex

(exhibit 3c1: source)

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

From the Human Rights Campaign’s “Glossary of Terms” (2023):

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).

Non-binary can mean a lot of different things. A femboy can be a cis femboy AMAB who feels femme but still identifies as a man; or someone who identifies through the femboy gender role as a performance that constitutes their identity label (similar to drag queens); or someone whose AFAB who non-binarizes the femboy label. To non-binarize is to remove the binary component of something but generally preserve the aesthetic and power structure within the arrangement (e.g., cis-gendered catgirls and femboys as things to non-binarize: exhibits 91a1 and 91c).

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

Orienting towards the opposite gender. 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 gender. 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 genders. 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 (cis gender roles)

Accident of birth in relation to one’s “birth gender” as socially constructed by the state in relation to one’s genitals. For example, if you’re reading this on planet Earth, you’re both literate and fluent in English. This means your birth gender is heteronormatively connected to/essentialized with your birth sex by reactionaries and moderates alike, who will collectively die on the hill of assigning you a social-sexual/worker role based entirely on your genitals (“It is against free speech to stop us from fixating on the genitals,” writes the Onion in their 2023 article, “It is Journalism’s Sacred Duty to Endanger the Lives of as Many Trans People as Possible“). Commonly seen as “cis-het,” it can also be cis-queer (e.g., a homosexual or bisexual cis-gendered man or woman). Not all cis-queer people are moderates/reactionaries, though class conflict turns potential trans allies into class traitors working for the elite. Likewise, heteronormativity is binarized, thus connecting gender to sex in order to create sexually dimorphic gender roles for “both” worker sexes (all while ignoring intersex people).

transgender reassignment (transgender identity)

Simply put, Being trans is gender identity wherein one feels, and hopefully one day decides to recognize, that one isn’t cis. For example, I have always been trans, but felt closeted about it; for a long time, I identified as genderfluid/as a femboy before deciding that I aligned best within the idea of being a binary trans woman. However, words like “gay,” “trans,” and “non-binary” can also be used interchangeable to some extent in basic conversation—in short, because the definitions overlap. A non-binary person isn’t cis, so calling them “trans” isn’t wrong. However, there is a preference with which labels they’ll use in basic conversation and which one’s they’ll wave a flag to (i.e., I am an atheist and a feminist, but would rather call myself a gay space Communist/Satanist any day of the week).

gender identity

One’s conforming or nonconforming gender identity as a (sub)conscious act; i.e., how one identifies, be that passively or actively. This act of identifying intersect with their birth sex/gender, their orientation, while also competing dialectically-materially for or against the state during various performances. This can be passive/active, but remains a socio-political position that changes over time (sex, gender and politics, etc, are fluid). In the past, people were more likely to be “true neutral,” unaware of things as the state oppressed information outright. Now, misinformation and factionalism are the bourgeois name of the game—gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss; so is denial (for those who don’t want to get involved in active politic affairs; aka state-sponsored apathy) and overt genocide (when moderacy fails, doing so by design and allowing fascists to get their hands bloody so the elite can deny involvement): neglect, ignorance and abuse, respectively.

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 gender parody and gender trouble during subversive exercises). The higher you go in vertical power structures, the more patriarchal someone behaves. This varies per socio-material register. The elite will push buttons to calmly genocide entire peoples for profit (for them, it’s business-as-usual, conducted over time inside a structure built to accommodate them); those whose positions are more fragile (fascists) will behave more extremely as they defend the nation-state (with moderacy trying to conceal/downplay this). E.g., Bill Gates is a total dweeb who hangs out with pedophiles but dresses like your creepy uncle; Matt Walsh and Hitler both have to overperform to keep up with their fragile, hypermasculine gender roles, thus maintain their veneer of invincibility.

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

gender performance as identity

Some identities involve broader gender performances to identify around or as. Common sex-coercive examples include the Einsatzgruppen (death squads) of Nazi Germany’s SS-Totenkopfverbände (the Death’s Head units); despite being a paramilitary group in a fascist (thus heteronormative) regime, the appearance of these groups was literally tailored by Hugo Boss around fetishistic (then and now) Nazi aesthetics; i.e., as examined by Leftist Youtuber, Yugopnik, in “Aesthetics of Evil – The Fascist Uniform” (2021): Nazis uniforms were patently designed to evoke the heroic spirit of palingenetic ultranationalism inside a cult of death, one whose dimorphic gender roles were deliberately affixed to fear and dogma (whose sex-coercive stamp on canonical BDSM we’ll examine in Volume Three). Sex-positive examples include drag queens or femboys. To that, someone doesn’t have to identify as either of these terms. And yet, while drag queens are predominantly cis men, they also belong to a cultural movement that is so large and specific in its as to justify identify as someone who belongs to such a group. It takes on a life of its own. Similarly, femboys belong to a group of people who identify according to the word “femboy” as something to live by through its canonical subversion by iconoclastic method; i.e., appreciative irony as a means of reclaiming the word and making it sex-positive through latter-day examples of the word (which we’ll examine in Volume Three, Chapter Three).

a woman

That depends (“Beware the elves for they will say both yea and nay”). Keeping the above 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 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.

To be good-faith and holistic, I’ve tried to include the most fundamental and basic queer language as comprehensively as I can for all readers (this anticipates cryptofascists like Matt Walsh, who only asks “What is a Woman?” in bad faith to reactionarily maintain the status quo—the feckless backstabber). Other terms that we haven’t mentioned here will come up during the book as we build off our main arguments. —Perse

the (settler-)colonial 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.

Cartesian dualism/the Cartesian Revolution

The rising of a dividing system of thought by René Descartes that led to settler colonialism. As Raj Patel and Jason Moore write in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:

The inventors of Nature were philosophers as well as conquerors and profiteers. In 1641, Descartes offered what would become the first two laws of capitalist ecology. The first is seemingly innocent. Descartes distinguished between mind and body, using the Latin res cogitans and res extensa to refer to them. Reality, in this view, is composed of discrete “thinking things” and “extended things.” Humans (but not all humans) were thinking things; Nature was full of extended things. The era’s ruling classes saw most human beings—women, peoples of color, Indigenous Peoples—as extended, not thinking, beings. This means that Descartes’ philosophical abstractions were practical instruments of domination: they were real abstractions with tremendous material force. And this leads us to Descartes’ second law of capitalist ecology: European civilization (or “we,” in Descartes’ word) must become “the masters and possessors of nature.” Society and Nature were not just existentially separate; Nature was something to be controlled and dominated by Society. The Cartesian outlook, in other words, shaped modern logics of power as well as thought.

[…] The invention of Nature and Society was gendered at every turn. The binaries of Man and Woman, Nature and Society, drank from the same cup. Nature, and its boundary with Society, was “gyn/ecological” from the outset. Through this radically new mode of organizing life and thought, Nature became not a thing but a strategy that allowed for the ethical and economic cheapening of life. Cartesian dualism was and remains far more than a descriptive statement: it is a normative statement of how to best organize power and hierarchy, Humanity and Nature, Man and Woman, Colonizer and Colonized. Although the credit (and blame) is shared by many, it makes sense to call this a Cartesian revolution. Here was an intellectual movement that shaped not only ways of thinking but also ways of conquering, commodifying and living [… that] made thinking, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination.

Finally, the Cartesian revolution was made thinkable, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination. […] Cartesian rationalism is predicated on the distinction between the inner reality of the mind and the outer reality of objects; the latter could be brought into the former only through a neutral, disembodied gazed situated outside of space and time. That gaze always belonged to the Enlightened European colonist—and the empires that backed him. Descartes’ cogito funneled vision and thought into a spectator’s view of the world, one that rendered the emerging surfaces of modernity visible and measurable and the viewer bodiless and placeless. Medieval multiple vantage points in art and literature were displaced by a single, disembodied, omniscient and panoptic eye. In geometry, Renaissance painting, and especially cartography, the new thinking represented reality as if one were standing outside of it. As the social critic Lewis Mumford noted, the Renaissance perspective “turned the symbolic relation of objects into a visual relation: the visual in turn became a quantitative relation. In the new picture of the world, size meant not human or divine importance, but distance.” And that distance could be measured, catalogued, mapped, and owned.

The modern map did not merely describe the world; it was a technology of conquest (source).

(artist: Allan Ramsay)

patrilineal descent

In medieval terms, patrilineal descent is generally expressed as Divine Right (what Mikhail Bakhtin comments on through the Gothic chronotope as dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites—the time of the historical past); i.e., the bloodline of kings. Under Capitalism, this applies to socio-material privileges accreting outwards from the nation-state/corporations through state-corporate propaganda (canon) in monomythic terms—a Symbolic Order that workers submit to once pacified.

the mythic structure

The Symbolic Order of Western canon: “Oh, look, it’s a king or a god! Guess I’ll bend the knee and turn off my brain!” Originally disrupted by the “mythic method” as coined by T.S. Eliot, who “Jerry” from GLR Archive writes in “Eliot and the Mythic Method” (2004),

defines what he exemplifies in The Waste Land [1922] – i.e., the “mythic method” – in his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” [1923]. The mythic method looked to the past to glean meaning and understanding for what has been lost or destroyed in the present. This method emphasizes the underlying commonality of ostensibly disparate times and locations by employing a comparative mythology to transcend the temporal narrative. By stressing the mythical, anthropological, historical, and the literary, this method becomes at once (1) satirical by showing how much the present has fallen; (2) comparative to highlight similarities structurally; (3) historically neutral to escape the present to a revived future; (4) confused in its fusion of the realistic and the phantasmagoric; (5) ordering in its approach to morality and imaginative passion. The mythic method does not offer an escape to a better past, but an entry to a confusing present (source).

Eliot’s 20th century modernist shenanigans (not to be confused with Modernism, aka the Enlightenment) fly directly in the face of James Campbell’s “monomyth.” Canonized as “the hero’s journey” in popular Western fiction and formative to new fictions, the monomyth is central to state hegemony through worker pacification. Perhaps not entirely aware of this, Eliot still chose not to retreat into a “better” past in search of individuation (to borrow from Carl Jung); he addressed the present as a modern confusion that needs to be faced. In socio-political terms, this can be spaces that house abject/reverse things (with proletarian/reverse-abject variants, of course): the parallel space.

the monomyth (shortened, from the thesis volume)

Also called the Hero’s Journey, the monomyth is a rite of passage wherein a (traditionally male) child finds himself offered the “rare” opportunity to elevate through the seemingly divine provision of a sword or some such masterful weapon. There’s many steps and moving parts following the Call to Adventure (often categorized between twelve and seventeen), but the basic gist is: offer adventure, refuse, change mind, get sword, cross boundaries, overcome trials and ordeals, kill the (corrupt, monstrous-feminine) monster, return in some shape or form changed by the quest, get the girl. Joseph Campbell is more prescriptive and optimistic, writing in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949):

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

Personally, I find this whole notion incredibly dubious; i.e., harmful wish fulfillment/guilty pleasure that is generally trapped within a space for which there is no escape and which the fear of colonial inheritance runs deep in Neo-Gothic fiction. Through this questioning of the heroic quest, we can spot disempowering patterns beyond that of canonical empowerment tied to material conditions and dogma: the Cycle of Kings as a Promethean ordeal the state exploits to recruit soldiers to either send abroad and commit genocide, or to (re)colonize the homefront (the Imperial Boomerang, from Foucault) in the name of the father and one’s bloodline through patrilineal descent.

the Cycle of Kings (shortened, from the thesis volume)

The centrist monomyth; i.e., the good and bad kings and all the kings’ white cis-het Christian men or those acting like these men, thus warrior-minded good cops and bad cops in hauntological (from Derrida, trapped between the past and present; anachronistic with an emphasis on the imaginary past/retro-future) copaganda apologizing for state genocide—i.e., TERFs and other token groups. In turn, the calamity of war-as-an-apologetic-business—of canonically whitewashing culture, war and class war/culture war personified in theatrical war, as well as total war and shadow/proxy war on the global stage (or its return home via the Imperial Boomerang/military urbanism)—reeks from Capitalism like a Promethean “exhaust” during an infernal concentric pattern. 

infernal concentric pattern (from the thesis volume)

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

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

i.e., the infernal concentric pattern is the smoke of the ignominious dead used as a myopic screen of Capitalist Realism, one that hides the obvious function of the free market and exploitation as a man-made, but brutal Cartesian model: profit, by any means necessary.

totalitarian(ism)

A state condition towards the total consolidation of power at one point. For example, in respect to Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, Richard Overy writes in The Dictators (2004), “‘Totalitarian’ does not mean that they were ‘total’ parties, either all-inclusive or wielding complete power; it means they were concerned with the ‘totality’ of the societies in which they worked.”

parallel space

Parallel space (or language) works off the anti-totalitarian notion of “parallel societies” (Academy of Idea’s “The Parallel Society vs Totalitarianism,” 2022): “A [society] not dependent on official channels of communications, or on the hierarchy of values of the establishment.” For our purposes, though, parallel space can be either canonical or iconoclastic, operating through bourgeois/proletarian means; i.e., to dissociate/displace socio-material critiques for or against the state, and usually to a faraway “Gothic” place: e.g., a castle in a mythical, semi-earthly land of madness like Ann Radcliffe’s fictionalized Italy or the 1980s, neoliberal “danger disco” of James Cameron’s Terminator (exhibit 15b2). The role of such Gothic examples is, again, the infernal concentric pattern as inescapable/uncanny.

class warfare

Class war for/against the state-corporate hegemony and its collective bourgeois interests. Proletarian solidarity and collective action fight an uphill battle against fractured/pulverized variants—i.e., worker division and in-fighting through tokenism, assimilation (gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss) and token normativity as a means of generating class traitors to stall/prevent/regress rebellion and maintain Capitalism.

class traitors/cops

Workers who betray the working class in defense of capital, namely the state as capital, often the military or paramilitary (cops) but also those who take on the same bourgeois function by dividing workers in defense of capital, thus the state. Traitors and exploitation takes many, many forms because all workers are exploited to varying degrees and qualities—e.g., Justin Eric King lying/downplaying about his active role in exploiting foreign/migrant workers (Bad Empanada 2, 2023) smuggled into the U.S. and exploited like basement chattel slaves, only to be given a slap on the wrist by the state. Regardless of whom, the structure defends itself through manufacture, subterfuge and coercion in defense of capital from whistleblowers and activists as fundamental/de facto enemies of the state. “Those with power will be there.”

Military Industrial Complex

(from Wikipedia): the relationship between a country’s military and the defense industry that supplies it, seen together as a vested interest which influences public policy. A driving factor behind the relationship between the military and the defense-minded corporations is that both sides benefit—one side from obtaining war weapons, and the other from being paid to supply them. The term is most often used in reference to the system behind the armed forces of the United States, where the relationship is most prevalent due to close links among defense contractors, the Pentagon, and politicians. The expression gained popularity after a warning of the relationship’s detrimental effects, in the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961.

In the context of the United States, the appellation is sometimes extended to military–industrial–congressional complex (MICC), adding the US Congress to form a three-sided relationship termed an “iron triangle.” Its three legs include political contributions, political approval for military spending, lobbying to support bureaucracies, and oversight of the industry; or more broadly, the entire network of contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as corporations and institutions of the defense contractors, private military contractors, the Pentagon, Congress, and the executive branch.

(source: Matthew Byrne’s “Police Departments Attempt a Charm Offensive Amid Uprisings,” 2020)

copaganda

Any form of canonical media that defends state abuse through official or functional police agents, but especially their monopoly of violence against those living in the state of exception under crisis as meant to recognize and worship/submit to them like gods. The state is always, to some degree, in crisis, leading to the generation of myriad monomyth stories that express this fact—i.e., as a dividing line between the police and everyone else. Skip Intro, a YouTuber with an extensive series on copaganda, explores how this phenomenon goes well beyond planet Earth, going so far as to call it a Faustian bargain. This bargain manifesting in many different kinds of fiction genres that endorse the status quo. For example, the “witch cops” and vice characters of fantasy narratives (war chiefs, Amazon war bosses; white and black “wolves”) either attack orcs, Drow or some other enemy of the state during oppositional praxis, or they rally them in doomed rebellions and futile/misunderstood attacks of revenge. One assimilates, the other is destroyed and vilified.

weird canonical nerds

A toxic subset of nerd culture. Whereas nerd culture is for those who present an increased intellectual interest in a given topic—often in literature, but popular media more broadly as something to consume, critique, or create—weird canonical nerds are those who substitute intellectualism for consumerism and negative freedom for the elite as something to blindly enjoy/endorse through faithful, uncritical consumption; i.e., the monomyth and Cycle of Kings as “good war”; e.g., Gamergate, 2014, but also TERFs and their emergence in the late 2010s. Not only is this group is very wide—encompassing white, cis-het male consumers, but also women, and assimilated, “minority police,” token class traitors [cops are class traitors who betray the class interests of the working class/proletariat for the owner class/bourgeoisie]; but it unironically leads to fascism as the infernal concentric pattern (with Gamergate endorsed by weird canonical nerds into the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and neoliberal-fascist sentiments through coercive economics and “blind” pastiche/parody consumption outside of American establishment politics). Weird canonical nerds are systemically bigoted, pertaining to Man Box culture as something to openly endorse, or “resist” in ways that do nothing to change the status quo/avoid the infernal concentric pattern/Cycle of Kings; e.g., TERF Amazons, but also proudly “apolitical” non-feminist nerds who embody a particular status within the nerd pantheon of canonical heroes: Mega Man as a go-to centrist male hero, but also Eren Yeager as the “incel fascist” with mommy issues, or Samus Aran as the Galactic Federation’s singular girl boss, etc. All become something to endorse within critically blind portions of nerd culture that ape their prescriptive, colonial heroes within culture war dressed up as “apolitical” (the fascist ideology being secondary to the pursuit and claiming of personal power by changing one’s shape and language to fit those aims; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich as a fascist war pig [to combine Umberto Eco with Black Sabbath] who would say whatever he could to justify his own iron grip on the minds of the populace: the foreign plot inside the house, once and forever). To this, the Gothic and its various intersections, contradictions and conflicts are embroiled within oppositional praxis for or against weird canonical nerds and their depictions/endorsements of different monster types (that, in the white, cis-het male tradition of privilege, routinely “fail up”—as success, like women or a nice house, is something they are taught to believe is owed to them; which extends to token minorities allowed a slice of the pie, but also must surrender their pie when the time comes [for which the real “Indian givers” are the settler colonist bearing false gifts: the Trojan Horse, aka the Faustian bargain, in Gothic circles]).

incels

An extreme form of rape culture, “involuntarily celibate” persons are those whose false victimization blames women instead of the system that alienates them by design. The term was originally coined by a lonely woman in the ’90s, but has since gone on to be used almost exclusively by the alt-right; i.e., stemming from grifters like Andrew Tate who market “self-help” snake oil to them, and authors like Hajime Isayama who make incel heroes tied to palingenetic ultranationalism dressed up as standard-issue war/national pastiche: “weeb” food.

weeaboo

Often shorted to “weeb,” the term “weeaboo” is used in anime and manga communities to stereotype fans who show a set of extreme and obnoxious characteristics, generally tied to alt-right circles and belief systems. This includes eco-fascism and “waifus” (the videogame equivalent of a culture war bride promised to men or token proponents of the status quo), but also moe, ahegao and incest.

class character

The idea of making critical appeals/arguments that have “class character”/are class conscious. Though this notion is modular, it intersects with race, gender and religion, etc (the deliberate attempt to segregate/prioritize them called reductionism; e.g., “race/class reductionism”).

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).

tokenism/assimilation fantasy/minority police

Assimilated/appropriated forms of “emancipation” that turn minorities into race/class traitors aka “minority cops” (and/or renders them myopic towards the suffering of other groups through Afrocentrism). A common example is Frantz Fanon’s “black skin, white masks,” whose Afronormativity to various forms of the assimilated token servant desires to escape genocide by emulating their oppressors’ genocidal/carceral qualities. This just doesn’t apply to people of color, but any minority desiring to assimilate the in-group by selling out the rest of their out-group for clemency (which is always a brief reprieve). Tokenism is also intersectional, leading to preferential mistreatment—meaning “less punishment,” not zero punishment the closer you are to the in-group colonial standard/status quo: the cis-het, white European/Christian male. In doing so, the status quo infiltrates activists groups, sublimating/assimilating them into the colonial binary along a gradient of gatekept barriers.

gaslight, gatekeep…

Two common parts of socio-economic oppression employed by fascists and neoliberals. Gaslighting is a means of making abuse victims doubt the veracity of their own abuse (and their claims of abuse). Gatekeeping is 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)

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

war brides (submissive class traitors/collaborators)

Persons, usually women, who historically slept/fraternized with the enemy to survive (Reddit, 2015). However, it’s hardly that simple. More actively bourgeois “brides” would collaborate with their conquerors against the conquered (exhibit 2); proletarian “brides” would kill their “husbands” for the Cause. This includes the Dutch moffenmeiden (women from Holland who slept with Nazis during the WW2 occupation, exhibit 2) and gastarbeiters (foreign exchange laborers forced to uproot and work in West Germany during early post-Stalin years). In class warfare, unironic “sleeping with the enemy” amounts to “breaking bread” with them; i.e., accepting their material gifts and financial backing in exchange for political compromise. Proletarian warriors should never compromise in this manner, as it leads to continued exploitation; i.e., “kicking the can down the road.”

(exhibit 4a: Top left: a French woman, publicly humiliated after France’s liberation, source; top right: Truus Oversteegen, a Dutch Resistance fighter known for killing Nazi officials; bottom: photos of Carice van Houten, show in Black Book [2006] as the fictional Rachel Stein—a Dutch-Jewish singer-turned-spy who eludes capture, kills Nazis, and foils Dutch double-agents in the process [the movie was based off real-life accounts of Dutch resistance members, however. Point in fact, my own grandfather, Henri van der Waard II, was one such person].)

TERFs/SWERFs/NERFs

TERFs are Trans Exclusionary Radical (fascist) Feminists; SWERFs and NERFs exclude sex workers and non-binary people, policing them but also members of their own “in”-groups (fandoms). It’s true that older feminist movements were/are racist, exclusionary and cis-supremacist, etc; so I don’t like to call TERFs “non-feminists” (though I can understand the temptation). To make the distinction between these older groups and feminism in solidarity with other oppressed groups, I call TERFs fascist “feminists.” To be fair, they can be neoliberal, operating through national/corporate exceptionalism obscured by a moderate veneer (centrist media). However, neoliberals still lead to Capitalism-in-crisis, aka fascism, which adopts racist/sexist dogma and rape culture/”prison sex” mentalities in more overtly hierarchical ways. Not all TERFs are SWERFs/NERFs (or vice versa) but there’s generally overlap. All compromise in ways harmful to worker solidarity and emancipation.

punching down

Reactionary political action, generally acts of passive or active aggression against a lower class by a higher class. For our purposes, middle-class people are afforded less total oppression through better material conditions (wages, but also healthcare, promotions, etc) by the elite—a divide-and-conquer strategy that renders them dependent on the status quo. This dependency allows the elite to demonize the poor in the eyes of the middle class. The elite antagonize the poor because the poor have the most incentive to punch up. This reliably engenders prejudice against them as a target, often to violent extremes. This is especially true in neoliberal canon:

(source)

punching up

Emancipatory politics. Whereas punching down aligns with systemic power, punching up moves against these structures and their proponents through de facto roles. This owes itself to how Capitalism works: The system exploits workers and targets of genocide for the elite, requiring them to demonize potential threats, not just active ones. Asking for basic human rights might not be a conscious act of rebellion; it automatically becomes one in the eyes of the elite (who discourage human rights). The louder these voices grow, the harder they punch up. This forces the elite to “correct the market” with extreme prejudice, which they disguise through various bad-faith measures (and political “neutral language).

reactive abuse

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

white (cis-het, Christian male) fragility

A reactionary tendency for state proponents to become easily frightened, angry and violent when exposed to activist criticism; i.e., criticisms that concern the socio-material realities of systemic racism, heteronormative and other institutional bigotries and biases. These factors (and their material conditions) reliably lead to widespread mistreatment against targeted minorities that white and/or cis-het Christian men/people are normally excluded from; i.e., their privilege affords them preferential mistreatment—less exploitation, making them historically more prone to side with power in defense of the status quo (which is white, cis-het, patriarchal and Christian). Power aggregates against slave rebellions, financially incentivizing a middle class of variable size (and inclusion) to exclude and attack minorities that are simply fighting for their basic human rights. White and/or cis-het fragility, then, is a useful way to weaponize a violent, defensive mentality against activism as a whole; it is applied differently cross different groups, intersecting within race, class and gender as things to either enforce by white, cis-het agents in Christian and secular circles, or assimilate by tokenized subordinates; e.g., girl bosses, black capitalists, and other sell-outs/class traitors.

DARVO

A common abuser tactic at any register, DARVO stands for “Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender.” It is meant to be used in bad faith, generally by punching down against activists at a socio-political level.

bad(-)faith

The act of concealing one’s true intentions, presenting a false willingness (the opposite of good faith) to discuss ideas openly while deliberately seeking to cause harm to the opposite party. This performance can be fascist “defensive maneuvers” or neoliberal dogma; it can also be beards and various queer/Afronormative masks appropriated by TERFs and other assimilated groups.

virtue-signaling/white-knighting

False solidarity or alliances geared towards “clout” or personal brownie-point-farming. Think “brown-nosing” or “ass-kissing” but towards marginalized groups and their leaders with a desire to de-fang them: “Join us.”

tone-policing

Speech- and thought-regulation of activist groups—often through admonishment/open condescension by moderates.

dogwhistles

Coded language, generally presented as innocuous or unrelated to those using it, meant to disguise the user’s true ideology or political identity. A popular tactic amongst cryptofascists, but also TERFS. For example, Rational Wiki lists dozens of TERF dogwhistles, including the colors purple, white, green in square emoji for:

Another emoji-based dog whistle used by TERFS on social media. Used primarily by UK-based TERFs, it seems to have emerged in the first half of 2021, and has largely replaced the chequered flag and red square. The colour scheme is based on the historical tri-color used by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), an organization that campaigned for women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom from 1903 to 1918. This is yet another example of TERFs trying to cast themselves as the political successors of suffragettes. It also co-opts the colour scheme used in the genderqueer pride flag designed by Marilyn Roxie in 2010 (source: Rational Wiki’s “TERF Glossary,” 2023).

Nazis use their own dogwhistles as well, meant to be seen by fellow club members to identify each other while hiding in plain sight. Many of these symbols are only used by the alt-right, at this stage, but in case there is overlap, the context of the subterfuge and its hauntologies can flush fascists out into the open:

(exhibit 4b: original source, unknown)

cryptofascists

Fascists by any other name or code. These fascists deliberately mislabel themselves and employ obscurantism to avoid the all-purpose “Nazis” label, thus preserve their negative freedom by normalizing themselves. This includes white nationalists, Western Chauvinists, and pro-Europeans; it also includes TERFs like Meghan Murphy spuriously decrying the “TERF” label as “hate speech” in 2017 (a flashpoint for TERF politics). I write “spurious” because hate speech is committed by groups in power, or sanctioned by those in power, against systemically marginalized targets. Please note: TERFs claiming self-persecution in bad faith (a standard fascist tactic) does not make them a legitimate target for systemic violence beyond what their relative privilege affords; it just makes them dishonest.

obscurantism

The act of deliberately concealing one’s true self (usually an ideology or political stance) through deliberately deceptive ambiguity. The classic, 20th century example are the Nazis, who called themselves “national-socialists” by intentionally disguising their true motives behind stolen, deliberately inaccurate language; e.g., The Holocaust Encyclopedia’s 2017 exhibit on the inverted swastika as a current-day religious symbol thousands of years old that has been co-opted and profaned by a fascist state (similar to the Star of David being co-opted by the enthostate of Israel in their state-sanctioned, American-backed genocide of the Palestinians). However, any sex-coercive group constantly employs concealment as a means of negative freedom: freedom from social justice. Neoliberal corporations routinely frame themselves as “neutral” and exceptional in the same breath, lying and denying the historio-material consequences of their own propaganda every chance they get; fascists celebrate dogwhistles (sans admitting to them as bad-faith) but condemn whistle-blowing as “censorship.” TERFs can be neoliberal or fascist, but as Katelyn Burns notes in 2019, still call themselves “gender-critical” in either case (similar to white supremacists calling themselves “race realists”). Despite whitewashing themselves, TERFs function as sporadically moderate bigots, dodging legitimate, sex-positive criticism. They generally accomplish this through DARVO obscurantism, a strategy of playing the victim while blaming actual victims by gaslighting them.

For more examples of cryptofascism and obscurantism, consider watching Renegade Cut’s “What Is (and Is Not) Anti-Fascism?” (2022). This will come in handy when we examine fascism and TERFs in Volume Three—Perse

(exhibit 5a: Source, “Cancel culture: the road to obscurantism” [2021]; note: the author, Stefano Braghiroli of New Europe, actually blames iconoclasts for viciously condemning the Greats of Western Civilization to oblivion, itself a form of DARVO obscurantism: The West is built on settler colonialism, Imperialism, and genocide.)

Miscellaneous Terms, Game Theory

accommodated intellectuals

Inspired by Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual (1993), an accommodated intellectual is—by my measure—a public-speaker, intellectual or thinker socio-materially accommodated by a formal institution of power. Though often corporatized (e.g., the think tank), this traditionally extends to tenured professors, who—even when their ideas are useful to Communism—tend to become far more concerned with cataloguing these ideas than spreading them to a wider public (so-called “academic paywalls” and general gatekeeping behaviors). Such individuals are, as I like to call them, giant chickenshits.

cognitive estrangement

The consequence of overspecialized language alienating anyone but a hyperspecific target audience, or an audience being so specialized that they cannot easily understand anything outside of their wheelhouse (a common fatality among academics or specialized researchers).

cognitive dissonance

A “psychomachic” conflict between one’s feelings and thoughts, often stemming from an ideology that practices harm against particular groups that another aspect of the person is unable to face, practice or otherwise acknowledge.

anisotropic

The alteration of meaning depending on the flow of exchange—e.g., the white savior vs the black criminal (despite both being violent) vs the white oppressor vs the black victim. For our purposes, this means “for or against capital/canon,” etc—i.e., bourgeois heroic action is benevolent in one direction (from the hero’s point of view) and terrifying from the victim’s point of view, the assigned scapegoat made to suffer as the state’s chosen target of sanctioned violence inside the state of exception (more on this in the manifesto). Likewise, this remains a common phenomenon during the Promethean hero’s journey inside the closed/parallel space.

concentric

“The Russian doll effect,” an endless procession of mirrors, foes, doors, etc—i.e., the Promethean Quest never ends; the war, carnage and rape never cease; the confusion and utter destitution, etc.

intersectionality

When multiple bourgeois/proletarian codifiers align within a particular social group; e.g., cis-het white women or trans women of color, etc. Intersectionality tends to be canonically abjected or gaslit, gatekept, girl-bossed, fetishized, etc. This book thoroughly examines intersectionality under Capitalism as either bourgeois or proletarian.

liminality

A linguo-material position of conflict or transition, liminality is ontologically a state of being “in between,” usually through failed sublimation/uncanniness; it invokes a “grey area” generally demonized in Western canon as “chaos.” In truth, semantic disorder can be used to escape the perpetual exploitation and decay caused all around us by Capitalism and its giant lies (a concept we’ll explore throughout this book). Liminality also occurs when working with highly canonical/colonized material, like the Western, European fantasy or highly exploitative material like canonical porn (with the word “pornography” being criminalized, thus something iconoclasts must reclaim). Gothic examples include monsters and parallel spaces, which tend to oscillate in liminal fashion.

anachronistic

Spatio-temporally incongruous; for our purposes, this applies to hauntology (a linguo-material sensation between the past and the present, but also a total inability to imagine a future beyond past forms of the future—two concepts we’ll unpack during the manifesto at length).

blank/blind parody

(source: the Vaporwave Aesthetic)

In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Frederic Jameson writes,

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

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

Vaporwave/Laborwave and cyberpunk

Hauntological cryptomimesis that has the subversive potential to challenge established, status-quo nostalgias through the decay of corporate hegemony as expressed through “corporate mood.” This encapsulates a gradient of aesthetics through countercultural music, art and the Gothic mode: Star Wars, Blade Runner, Alien, Mad Max, Children of Man, etc (which Capitalism will try to recuperate through by canonizing these stories, thus robbing them of their revolutionary potential; i.e., controlled opposition through Capitalist Realism).

Capitalist Realism

Fisher’s adage, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism,” which comments on a profound, widespread inability to imagine a world beyond Capitalism. This often presents the end-of-the-world as the end-all, be-all; i.e., a kind of vanishing point under Hogle’s narrative of the crypt: not a door to pass imaginarily through but a black gate whose inaccessible threshold cannot be surpassed by corporate design. The elite don’t want people to cross it, focusing instead on canonical doubles of neoliberal entropy as part of the illusion: violence, death and decay as an “empowering” distraction from the global exploitation and destruction neoliberalism is committing against the Earth and its inhabitants. In ludic terms, engagement with this space requires occupying a space between reality and fiction, and of choosing to break the rules without our own “magic circles.”

half-real

From Jesper Juul’s 2005 book of the same name; i.e., “A half-real zone between the fiction and the rules” that allows for emergent forms of transformative play. This can apply to sexual artwork (exhibit 93), Gothic liminalities like ghosts (exhibit 43c), live performances like a ball or masque (exhibit 75a), or Jesper’s typical ludonarrative (videogames, exhibit 64c), etc.

ludic contract (spoilsports)

An agreement between the player and the game to be played; or as Chris Pratt writes in “In Praise of Spoil Sports” (2010): “the more traditional definition of the ludic contract [is] an agreement on the part of players that they will forgo some of their agency in order to experience an activity that they enjoy.” Yet, inventive players like speedrunners (which Pratt calls “spoilsports”) converge upon intended gameplay with unintended, emergent forms. In other words, the ludic contract is less a formal, rigid contract and more a negotiated compromise occurring between the two; i.e., where players have some sense of agency in deciding how they want to play the game even while adhering to its rules and, in effect, being mastered by it (see: Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy’s “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots,” 2008, exhibit 0a2c).

the magic circle

The space where a game takes place, be that a social game, a sport, a dialog or gender performance onstage, and videogames, etc. The founder of the idea, Eric Zimmerman, writes in “Jerked Around by the Magic Circle” (2012):

The “magic circle” is not a particularly prominent phrase in Homo Ludens, and although Huizinga certainly advocates the idea that games can be understood as separate from everyday life, he never takes the full-blown magic circle point of view that games are ultimately separate from everything else in life or that rules are the sole fundamental unit of games. In fact, Huizinga’s thesis is much more ambivalent on these issues and he actually closes his seminal book with a passionate argument against a strict separation between life and games. The magic circle is not something that comes wholly from Huizinga. To be perfectly honest, Katie and I more or less invented the concept, inheriting its use from my work with Frank, cobbling together ideas from Huizinga and Caillois, clarifying key elements that were important for our book, and reframing it in terms of semiotics and design – two disciplines that certainly lie outside the realm of Huizinga’s own scholarly work. But that is what scholarship often is – sampling and remixing ideas in order to come to a new synthesis.

emergent play

Unintended gameplay discovered and utilized by players that wasn’t intended by developers; optimal variants are called “metaplay” or simply “the meta.”

intended play

Gameplay intended by the developers; in Marxist terms, this can be considered the bourgeoisie or their proponents.

framed (concentric) narratives

A story-within-a-story (aka mise-en-abyme in artistic circles, whose translation “placement in abyss” takes on more spooky liminalities in Gothic circles), generally a perspective contained within an unreliable narrator’s point-of-view. A famous example is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which tells the story from the shipmaster’s perspective, who learns everything about Victor and the Creature from Victor. Victor is a giant, colonial douchebag who lies constantly and does his very patriarchal best to whitewash everything. The Creature, meanwhile, is reactively abused constantly and forced to defend his position after Victor has dragged his name through the mud for most of the novel.

unreliable narratives/narrators/spaces (monsters)

A narrator or narrative that is untrustworthy or epistemologically/phenomenologically dubious; in Gothic stories, these rely on ambiguous, historically-contested/-conflicting spaces with liminal markers.

(exhibit 5b: Artist, top-left: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-left: Michelangelo; right side: Hirohiko Araki, his Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure manga/anime [1987/2012] inspired by a variety of real-life musicians and clothing brands.)

palimpsest

“A manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain”—common in Gothic stories, which amount to a cycle of lies; i.e., historical materialism: bourgeois history is unreliable, treacherous, like a Gothic lover or a concentric chest/midden of unreliable materials (cryptonyms). It can apply to a variety of media or formats: sculpture, music, clothes, videogames, etc (exhibit 5b, 43a/43b).

universal adaptability

A concept borrowed from Slavoj Zizek’s A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012), which outlines the ways in which a piece of media (in his case, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”) can be utilized universally by different groups to promote their own ideologies—all in spite of the original source material, including the author’s socio-political stance.

The Gothic, BDSM and Kink

Gothic narrators/narratives

For its hero, narrators, spaces and speakers, a Gothic tale regularly involves unreliable/conflicting artificers and imposters, but also the patriarchal bloodline or castle as invented; i.e., as a series of concentric, sedimentary palimpsests. In the canonical sense, everything is fetishized, valorized and disseminated, then spread far and wide to cover up the ghost of the counterfeit (the circular lie of the West) with more ghosts that further the lie. Iconoclastic variants challenge this myopia with their own counterfeits’ opposing class character inside a shared, contested midden.

Gothic doubling

The black mirror of historical materialism’s all our yesterdays. It is the fated, ominous premonition of endless circuituity—that everything has already occurred before, or things that have already occurred will occur again from the same materials that occur out of what has already occurred; i.e., for everything that exists, there must (somewhere in the universe) be a dialectical-material “shadow” whose coinciding status as former-or-future counterfeit is actually historical materialism’s circular approach to space and time felt in the current moment: everything that has ever existed will exist again or things that will exist have already existed in ways that offer up a prior version’s dialectical-material opposition to it—a castle or soldier as “evil” twin, uncanny and undead, replicated like an echo, a virus, a shade; the civil war of black infinity. There is no automatic moral character, merely the presence of infinite possibility amid crushing gravity and decay.

the Gothic heroine

(exhibit 5e1: Left: an old drawing of Samus Aran from Metroid Dread, 2021, by Persephone van der Waard; right: a more recent version of the same drawing— made to be more gay and less colonial.

Note: Many of the drawings in this book are actually modified versions from my own portfolio—updated using collage/airbrushing techniques that I’ve been using for years. —Perse)

The oft-female (or at least feminine) protagonist of Gothic stories. Classically a passive sex object/detective/damsel-in-distress, which became increasingly masculine, active and warlike in the 20th century onwards (though Charlotte Dacre beat everyone to the punch in 1806 when she wrote Zofloya, having the masculine-yet-trammeled Victoria de Loredani stab Lilla, the archetypal Gothic heroine, to death). Unlike their male counterparts, who tend to default to soldiers or scientists (violent/mentally fragile men of war and reason with—at least in America—closeted ties to Nazi Germany and parallel conservative movements wearing a liberal guise), women within the colonial binary are relegated to spheres of domesticated ignorance; i.e., “Something is wacky about my residence, my guest, my wardrobe, etc. Guess I’ll go investigate (exhibit 48a)!” Ann Radcliffe treated the protecting of female virtue as an “armoring” (exhibit 30c) process that commonly worked through a swooning mechanism; though somewhat problematic on its face due to its pro-European origins, the idea of armoring one’s virtue still presents the notion of feminine flexibility as facing monstrous-feminine things that male, or at least “phallic,” heroes cannot rationalize or stab/shoot to death; i.e., the paradox of terror as something to reclaim through counterterror devices that, yes, include a fair bit of rape, taboo sex, and murderous stereotypes. In other words, it’s entirely possible to have the Great Destroyer persona without being bigoted, but you have to camp it, first.

xenophobia

Monster-slaying. A fear of the unknown as something to exude or endure, which may take sex-positive or sex-coercive forms. Inside Gothic circles, theatrical xenophobia sits between fear of and fascination towards “the other” as a social-sexual construct; i.e., inherited either by privileged workers acting out unironic gender trouble, or minorities surviving it through their own ironic variation of gender trouble and gender parody in monstrous forms. As such, harmful xenophobia fearfully dogmatizes outsider groups, presenting them as beings to hate, abject and kill, but also fetishize: monstrous-feminine women (“woman is other”) but also witches, Amazons, queer/feminine people (trans, intersex and non-binary) and various sodomic ritual metaphors (vampirism, exhibit 41g3; crossdress, exhibit 55b; and lycanthropy/werewolves, exhibit 87a; etc) for non-heteronormative/gender-non-conforming sexual orientations, performances, and identities as deserving of violence by assimilated minorities/token police (e.g., TERFs). Because of the sexual nature of stigma and bias, harmful xenophobia crosses over into harmful xenophilia, and their combined liminal expression elides with cathartic variants of either approach in the same theatrical territories.

monstrous-feminine

(exhibit 5d1: Artist, top-left: Gabriele Dell’Otto; artist, top-left and bottom: Persephone van der Waard and a model who wishes to remain anonymous; I’ll henceforth refer to them as Jericho. When healing from trauma, queerness is often symbolized as abjectly insect-like/uncanny as something queer people are forced into—i.e., a psychosexual, “corrupt,” medievalized ontology whose canonical role they don’t want to play but also desire to escape from using the same language: the queer/sodomite whose gender-non-conformity is synonymized with the “rape” of heteronormativity by the monstrous-feminine and whose beauty is feared by fearful-fascinated straight people conflating queerness as a universal symbol of unironic rape and madness. We do sometimes want to express our own trauma in relation to what we’re made out to be by our abusers, but ultimately we desire to be butterflies unto ourselves: free from trauma, from judgement, from harm.)

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

xenophilia

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

psychosexuality (“battle sex”)

The adjacent placement of pleasurable pain and other euphoric sensations next to unironic harm; i.e., rape fantasy or theatre. Just as canon and camp exist in the same shadow zone, performative irony and its absence are equally liminal using the same shared aesthetics of power and resistance, death and rape, heroic (monstrous) violence: the colors of stigma, vice, power and sin. Canonical psychosexuality conflates pleasure with genuine harm, including bigoted stereotypes that further this pathology. These result in widespread misconceptions about healthy BDSM as a result of sex-coercive BDSM (through unironic “demon BDSM” examples, including criminal hauntology news cycles or “true crime” in other mediums besides television), and genuine pluralities that seek out dangerous sex (hard kink) due to confused pleasure responses resulting from extreme prey mechanisms/posttraumatic stress disorder that compel victims to unironically spifflicate; i.e., “to be self-destroyed or disposed of by violence” in an unironic sense. As something to unironically or ironically seek out on and offstage, abuse manifests differently per person relative to congenital and environmental factors which are often accident-of-birth. But general psychosexuality manifests through the Destroyer persona and their utterly devastated victim as part of the same social-sexual equation; i.e., a cultural pathology or ironic, informed interrogation regarding the proliferation of this extremism in normalized, canonical depictions of heroic sexuality as embattled: as sex-coercive, hence unironically violent and rapacious through warring factions thereof (and against camp in the larger meta conversation).

calculated risk/risk reduction exercise

A calculated risk minimizes harm but mimics the feeling of being out of control; e.g., consent-non-consent/informed consent.

fetishization

A fetish, or the act of making something into a fetish, is “a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, or part of the body.” Generally, fetishes are pre-existing social-sexual trends that people either embrace or reject. They aren’t explicitly sexist (e.g., mutually consenting to show feet), but become sexist when used in exploitative ways (e.g., sex workers forced to show their feet to generate profit for someone else).

rape culture and “prison sex” mentalities

Learned power abuses taught by state-corporate propaganda and power relations through “Pavlovian/Pygmalion” conditioning that breaks the recipient’s mind, bending them towards automatic, violent behaviors towards state targets during moral panics. This response can be men mistreating women, but also women mistreating each other or their fellow exploited workers: TERFs abusing trans people and ethnic minorities. When executed and learned on a societal level, these sex-coercive practices become codified as “bad play” in canonical BDSM narratives.

Man Box/”prison sex” culture

What I call “the prison sex phenomena,” Mark Greene—in his 2023 podcast, Remaking Manhood: The Healthy Masculinity Podcast—refers to “Man Box culture” as:

For generations, men have been conditioned to compete for status, forever struggling to rise to the top of a vast Darwinian pyramid framed by a simple but ruthless set of rules. But the men who compete to win in our dominant culture of manhood are collectively doomed to fail, because the game itself is rigged against us. We’re wasting our lives chasing a fake rabbit around a track, all the while convinced there’s meat to be had. There is no meat. We are the meat. Our dominant culture of manhood is often referred to as the man box, a phrase coined by Tony Porter of A Call to Men based on Paul Kivel’s work, The Act Like a Man Box, which Kivel and others at the Oakland Men’s Project first conceptualized over forty years ago.

The man box refers to the brutal enforcement of a narrowly defined set of traditional rules for being a man. These rules are enforced through shaming and bullying, as well as promises of rewards, the purpose of which is to force conformity to our dominant culture of masculinity. The number one rule of the man box? Don’t show your emotions. Accordingly, boys three and four years old begin suppressing their own naturally occurring capacities for emotional acuity and relational connection, thus setting them on the path to a lifetime of social isolation (Chu, 2014). The damage is done before we are even old enough to understand what is happening.

Man box culture also suppresses empathy. The suppression of boys’ and men’s empathy is no accident. It is the suppression of empathy that makes a culture of ruthless competition, bullying and codified inequality possible. It is in the absence of empathy that men fail to see women’s equality and many other social issues for what they are: simple and easily enacted moral imperatives. Instead, our sons buy into bullying and abuse as central mechanisms for forming and expressing male status and identity (source: Mark Greene’s “How the Man Box Poisons Our Sons,” 2019).

“Prison sex” is the same idea as Man Box culture, except it chooses to focus less on men and more on the unequal power dynamics that occur between dimorphized workers trained not just to rape and kill one another in literal terms, but also theatrical language; i.e., any form of expression that ties into the bigoted, colonial-binary of a divided class of male and female labor within entertainment (sports and porn), the household, the workplace, and Gothic iterations of any of these things. Any cis-het man that fails to live up to the heteronormative standard of manliness (which is an impossible feat to begin with), must be weak but also strong in a manner threatening towards the status quo—i.e., womanly/monstrous-feminine.

good play vs bad play

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

chaser/bait

Trans women are often seen as “bait” within a “prison sex” mentality—i.e., forbidden, monstrous-feminine fruit for reactionaries (including regressive feminists) to publicly condemn and privately “chase.” A “chaser” is someone a person who outwardly rejects the pursuit of “sodomy” (non-reproductive, monstrous-feminine sex, in the medieval sense) but secretly pursues it in private in relation to various out-group types associated with it: the twink, femboy or ladyboy, or trans women more broadly (or the remainder of classic gay man’s lexicon of animalized/body hair terms: hunk, twunk, otter, bear or polar bear. Queer sexuality tends to be much more adjective-based then straight orientation descriptors, “I’m a straight” being about it). “Baiting” can be inverted, with trans women and similar groups also being policed in the sex worker community by AFAB workers who, likewise, brand or otherwise treat us as “false women” who aren’t monstrous like they are, thus become worthy of attack to earn clemency from men amid their own self-hatred; i.e., we’re “luring” their customers away from them like cis-male sex workers do and should be regarded with suspicion and contempt (to be clear, neither we nor cis-male sex workers should be treated this way but our treatment—as non-gender-conforming AMAB persons by AFAB sex workers—is transphobic).

(exhibit 5d2: Artist, top: Olivia Robin; bottom-left: Kyu Yong Eom; bottom-right: Claire Max. The feminine cock as something to show and hide becomes a dangerous game of undress for many traps; the masculine-feminine becomes an advertisement of “incorrect,” monstrous-feminine masculinity on the surface of female-appearing bodies before the clothes come off [although such bodies are habitually undressed by the Male Gaze; said gaze can be emulated by TERFs policing male and female bodies]. Either liminality is dangerous for gender-non-conforming AMAB/AFAB sex workers, but also workers in general seeking to express themselves as different from, thus in resistance to, the canonical standard and its Symbolic Order/mythic structure.

trap/twink-in-peril/bait

A slur directed at homosexual men/non-gender-conforming AMABs, who are fetishized/coercively demonized by cis-het men during gender trouble when the nation-state cannot provide them heteronormative sex (“war brides”). Often, queer fiction comments on this exploitative side of the “bury your gays” trope through an abject, queer damsel-in-distress: the twink-in-peril, perhaps articulated mostly nakedly (with raw exploitation, but also exceptional nuance) in Dennis Cooper’s Frisk (1991) or Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation (1995). Gentler, less-brutalized versions of this monstrous-feminine can be found sprinkled all throughout popular fiction, including Cloud-in-a-dress from Final Fantasy 7 (1997) and “Gerudo Link” from the Zelda series (which we’ll explore more in Volume Three, Chapter Three, exhibit 93). “Traps” in quotes is something that could be supplied to AFAB workers, whose appearance beyond heteronormative standards leads them to becoming demonized as a queer “bait,” or trick (no pun intended) that leads chases down queerer and queerer rabbit holes.

bears, otters, hunks/twunks/twinks; lesbians and femmes

The traditionally homosexual male/female language of the 1970s, ’80s and 90s. It doesn’t exclusively apply to homosexuality and can be non-binarized in order to describe body preferences, orientations and performances (e.g., Link is a twink/twunk depending on the game or scenario); all the same, it has been historically utilized by cis queer people as a movement that ostensibly predates the trans, nonbinary and intersex movements of the Internet Age (with these groups having existed for just as long—i.e., before Western Civilization). Furthermore, some words, like “twink,” “dyke,” and obviously “faggot” have a pejorative, monstrous-feminine flavor within their own communities, being reclaimed throughout the ’90s into the new millennium. There is also cis bias against gender-non-conforming usage of these words, seeing it as “colonization” of the monstrous-feminine from an incorrect variant (a thought pattern of self-hatred that, once internalized, is used to divided and conquer minority groups by having them police themselves).

femboys, ladyboys, catboys; catgirls, [anything] girls

The application of something “femme” next to “boy” historically has an emasculating quality towards men who, in cis-conforming circles (straight or gay/bi), are expected to dominate the feminine, thus weaker party. Obviously this has been slowly reclaimed since the ’90s, but cis-queer assimilation still leads to Man Box culture within homosexual and bisexual men and women, but also tokens (a “butch,” female, cis/token domme can abuse her smaller “femme” partner in a queernormative sense; or internalized bigotry can lead trans, intersex or non-binary parties to emulate these behaviors as the giver or receiver). In heteronormative circles, adding the suffix, “girl,” to the end of a word sexualizes or feminizes them in a dimorphic way—i.e., a catgirl is (from a cis standpoint) a girl, thus coded as such (“cat” curiously being a “femme” entity for precisely this collocation, leading catboys to being seen as femme gay men; e.g., “neko” meaning a male “bottom” in Japanese slang). These terms are often qualified with various other descriptors in public discourse at large, including sex work; e.g., a “pastel goth non-binary catgirl brat”: aesthetic descriptors + gender + gender performance + BDSM type. The soft or cuddly is still feminine, thus a monster that must be dominated to preserve patrilineal descent, authority and conquest against a prescribed enemy.

moe

Described by Mateusz Urbanowicz as an infantilized art style of women popular in Japan, generally to make them look physically and emotionally younger—historically a form of female exploitation by male artists.

ahegao

A facial expression tied to hentai (“perversion”) Japanese culture and the abject sexual objectification of women; i.e., the “little death” of the so-called “O face” made during orgasm, especially achieved by rough sex and rape play. While its “death face” is historically attached to rape culture and unironic rape porn, latter-day variants have become blind parodies (exhibit 104d) to the buried historical trauma (appreciative forms can also be enjoyed in private/public exhibitions, however).

live burial

The Gothic master-trope, live burial—as marked by Eve Segewick in her introduction to The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986)—is expressed in the language of live burial as an endless metaphor for the buried libido within concentric structures as something to punish “digging into” (which includes investigating the false family’s incestuous/abjectly monstrous bloodline; source). To move beyond psychoanalytical models and into Marxist territories, I would describe live burial as incentivized by power structures in ways that threaten abuse (often death, incarceration or rape) to those who go looking into hereditary and dynastic power structures, especially their psychosexual abuse and worker exploitation: the fate of the horny detective, but also the whistleblower.

kink

Nontraditional forms of sexual activity that don’t necessarily involve forms of power exchange between partners (unequal or otherwise).

roleplay

The playing of roles in social-sexual situations, usually with a dominant/submissive element (as many come from classic stories which tend to be heteronormative; but even iconoclastic stories transmute BDSM, fetishes and kinks to be sex-positive within dominant/submissive models).

cuckolding

In sex-positive roleplay terms, cuckolding is watching someone fuck your SO (significant other) or having someone watch will you fuck their SO; i.e., a mutually consensual, negotiated activity.

negotiation

The drawing up of power levels, exchange limits, boundaries and comfort levels (soft and hard limits) before social-sexual BDSM activities.

safe word(s)

Permission/boundary words used (often by a submissive but not always) to stall/stop whatever BDSM activities are unfolding. A common example is the traffic light system; i.e., “Green light, yellow light, red light.”

consent-non-consent

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

(demon) BDSM

Bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochism—seemingly nontraditional forms of sexual activity that involve unequal power exchange that has actually been canonized and must be camped in doubled forms. Both involve power, but non-consensual (sex-coercive) variants canonically involve power abuse—generally of women and other marginalized workers by white, cis-het men/arguably token queers in romanticized tales thereof (e.g., Stoker’s vampire, Barker’s Cenobite) that often, according to Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” (1974), invoke not just the “master scenario” whose purely sexual experience is “severed from personhood, from relationships, from love,” but also the fascist language of death: “The color is black [and red], the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death” (source). In a sex-positive sense, such rituals regularly invoke demons as a Gothicized means of catharsis, but also practicing impulse and power control during non-harmful euphoria whose painful, physical, emotional, and/or sexual activities occur between good-faith participants; i.e., ironic variants of Radcliffe’s classically xenophobic and dubiously “consensual” Black Veil (hiding the threat badly), demon lover (the xenophobic/xenophilic threat of unironic mutilation and rape), and exquisite “torture” (rape play).

dom(inator/-inatrix)

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

sub(missive)

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

“strict/gentle”

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

topping/a top vs “bottoming”/a bottom

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

regression

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

rape fantasies

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

aftercare

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

the ghost of the counterfeit

Coined by Jerrold Hogle, this abject reality or hidden barbarity is a hauntological process of abjection that, according to David Punter in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980), “displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell” (source). I would add that it is a privileged, liminal position that endears a sheltered consumer to the barbaric past as reinvented as consumable.

the narrative of the crypt

According to Cynthia Sugars’ entry for David Punter’s the Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012), this narrative is described by Jerrold Hogle as the only thing that survives—a narrative of a narrative to a hidden curse announced by things displaced from the former cause. Sugars determines, the closer one gets to the problem, the more the space itself abruptly announces a vanishing point, a procession of fragmented illusions tied to a transgenerational curse: “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present,” Hogle writes of Otranto (the first “gothic” castle, reassembled for Horace Walpole’s 1764 “archaeology”).

cryptomimesis

Defined by Jodey Castricano in Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing as,

A writing practice that, like certain Gothic conventions [e.g., Segewick’s commentary on live burial as a timeless fixture of Gothic literature] generates its uncanny effects through the production of what Nicholas Rand might call a “contradictory ‘topography of inside-outside'” [from Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word …] Moreover, the term cryptomimesis draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words (source).

Castricano further describes this process as “writing with ghosts,” referring to their nature as linguistic devices that adhere the sense of being haunted in domestic spaces: the house as inside, familiar and inherited by the living from the dead.

rememory

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

ghosts

Ghosts are ontologically complicated, thus can be a variety of things all at once: a sentient ghost of something or someone, a ghostly memory or their own unique entity that resembles the original as a historical-material coincidence (the chronotope), a friendly/unfriendly disguise, or creative egregore. E.g., Hamlet’s dad, Hamlet’s memory of his dad as triggered by the space around him; or someone painting Hamlet’s dad as its own thing that isn’t Shakespeare’s version despite the likeness. This applies to other famous ghosts in media—e.g., King Boo from Mario, the monster from It Follows, 2014; or my own friendly ghost of Jadis from exhibit 43c—i.e., Derrida’s Marxist spectres.

the Promethean Quest/awesome mystery

Gothic stories enjoy a sense of awesome power tied to the chronotope or awesome ruin (what Percy Shelley calls “the colossal Wreck,” exhibit 5e, 64c, etc). In the wake of a great calamity is the presence of intimations of power that must be uncovered in pursuit of the truth—i.e., the Promethean (self-destructive) Quest. We’ll examine several in the Humanities primer, including Edmund Burke’s Sublime, Mary Shelley’s “playing god,” Rudolph Otto’s Numinous/mysterium tremendum, and Lovecraft’s cosmic nihilism, etc. All indicate the Gothic pursuit of a big power that blasts the finder to bits; or, in Radcliffe’s case, is explained away during the conclusion of an explained supernatural/rationalized event; i.e., the explained supernatural (exhibit 22, Scooby Doo and Velma).

“playing god”

In iconoclastic terms, “playing god” is the ability to self-fashion (aka “self-determination” in geopolitics). It is generally resented by the status quo, or demonized for being too dangerous; e.g., Satan from Paradise Lost as a self-fashioning devil moving away from God’s heteronormative, colonial-binarized image.

(exhibit 5c: Two examples of the Promethean Quest/awesome mystery—from Event Horizon [top and bottom, 1997] and Alien [middle, 1979].)

the Black Veil

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

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

demon lover

To that, Cynthia Wolff writes on Radcliffe’s process in “The Radcliffean Gothic Model”:

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

There have been two distinct waves of Radcliffean Gothic fiction: one that began in the late eighteenth century and one that began in this century between the World Wars… (source).

exquisite “torture”

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

Two hundred years ago Ann Radcliffe introduced Gothic conventions into the mainstream of English fiction. For the first time the process of feminine sexual initiation found respectable, secular expression. Yet the terms of this expression were ultimately limiting. It is important to recognize and acknowledge the heritage of Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic tradition; it is even more important now to move on and invent other, less mutilating conventions for the rendering of feminine sexual desire (source).

the explained supernatural

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

ludo-Gothic BDSM

My combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (theatre and rules). Commonly gleaned through Metroidvania as I envision it, but frankly performed in any kind of Gothic poetics—i.e., to playfully attain what I call “the palliative Numinous,” or the Gothic quest for self-destructive power as something to camp.

ludic-Gothic

Gothic videogames. “The ludic-gothic is created when the Gothic is transformed by the video game medium, and is a kindred genre to survival horror” (source: Laurie Taylor’s “Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming,” 2009).

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; re: my master’s thesis).

the closed space

A self-contained, claustrophobic, Gothic parallel space—generally a site of seemingly awesome power, age and danger (usually occupied by something sinister, if only the viewer’s piqued curiosity/imperiled imagination): churches, abbeys, monasteries, castles, mad laboratories, (war/urban crime scenes), insane asylums, etc.

The term is reworked from Cynthia Griffin Wolff’s concept of “enclosed space” from her 1979 essay, “The Radcliffean Gothic Model: A Form for Feminine Sexuality”

Now a Gothic novel presents us with a different kind of situation. It is but a partially realized piece of fiction: it is formulaic (a moderately sophisticated reader already knows more or less exactly what to expect in its plot); it has little or no sense of particularized “place,” and it offers a heroine with whom only a very few would wish to identify. Its fascination lies in the predictable interaction between the heroine and the other main characters. The reader identifies (broadly and loosely) with the predicament as a totality: the ritualized conflict that takes place among the major figures of a Gothic fiction (within the significant boundaries of that “enclosed space”) represents in externalized form the conflict any single woman might experience (source).

in that I’ve extended it beyond the purely psychological models (and psyches) of a traditional Gothic readership (white, cis-het women) and now-outmoded school of thought (the Female Gothic of the 1970s). I do so in connection to how the Gothic mode generally employs deeply confusing and overwhelming time-spaces (chronotopes)—what Manuel Aguirre, in 2008, referred to as “Geometries of Terror” (exhibit 64b/64c)—that, along with their ambiguous, perplexing inhabitants (exhibit 64a), phenomenologically disrupt the monomyth in pointedly deconstructive, hauntological ways: the Promethean (self-destructive) hero’s quest as something that undermines patrilineal descent and dynastic power exchange/hereditary rites in a never-ending cycle of war crimes, lies and blood sacrifice (a fearful critique of medieval feudalism).

Metroidvania as closed space

In the past, my academic/postgraduate work has thoroughly examined the Metroidvania ludonarrative (including speedruns) as a closed/parallel ergodic space; while my critical voice has changed considerably since 2018, I want to show the evolution of my work/gender identity leading into Sex Positivity‘s genesis by listing my entire Metroidvania corpus (not including my entire book volumes, but citing some salient essays from those books):

• my master’s thesis, which studies the ways in which speedrunners create castle-narrative through recursive motion inside the Metroidvania as a Gothic chronotope: “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (2018)
• a YouTube video summarizing Metroidvania and its spatial qualities (sort of a precursor to the 2021 “Mazes and Labyrinths” abstract): “Metroidvania Series #2: Mazes and Labyrinths” (accompanied by its original script, on Google Docs; both 2019)
• a BDSM reflection on ludo-Gothic themes in Metroid: “Revisiting My Masters’ Thesis on Metroidvania—Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space” (2021)
• a deeper follow-up to “Our Ludic Masters”: “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” (2021)
• a study of abjection and traditional gender theory vis-à-vis Barbara Creed in Metroidvania: “War Vaginas: Phallic Women, Vaginal Spaces and Archaic Mothers in Metroid” (2021)
• a Q&A interview series that interviews Metroid speedrunners about Metroidvania for my postgrad work: the abstract for “Mazes and Labyrinths: Disempowerment in Metroidvania and Survival Horror” (2021)
• a chapter I wrote about Metroid for an unfinished book: “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid [exhibit 5e]” (2021)
• a chapter on Metroidvania from my PhD, aka Volume Zero of Sex Positivity (2023), which details extensively my history with Metroidvania from childhood to my graduate and postgraduate work: “‘Make it gay,’ part two: Camping Tolkien’s Refrain using Metroidvania, or the Map is a Lie: the Quest for Power inside Cameron’s Closed Space (and other shooters)” (2023)
• an essay from Volume Two, part one, which conceptualizes the middle class’ constant inheritance and exploring of the imaginary past through a privileged “savior” position, but one that can develop ludo-Gothic BDSM as a sex positive force; features Samus Aran as a “white Indian”: “‘In Search of the Secret Spell’: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte-Blanche (feat. Samus Aran)” (2024)
• an essay from Volume Two, part one, which critiques Jeremy Parish as a Metroidvania research inspiration of mine: “Monsters, Magic and Myth”: Modularity and Class (feat. Jeremy Parish and Sorcha Ní Fhlainn)” (2024)
• an essay from Volume Two, part one, which reflects on how the Gothic is queer as realized through my Metroidvania work and beyond: “Facing Death: What I Learned Mastering Metroidvania, thus the Abject ’90s” (2024)
• a three-part book chapter* on Metroidvania from Volume Two, part two, which covers Frankenstein (aka The Modern Prometheus) and talks extensively about the Promethean Quest as it appears in popular media after Shelley’s novel—Metroidvania, of course (with close-reads of Hollow Knight and Axiom Verge), but also movies like Forbidden Planet and Alien: “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics: the Man of Reason and Cartesian Hubris versus the Womb of Nature in Metroidvania” (2024).

*Said chapter combines my PhD research after writing my PhD, making “She Fucks Back” a culmination of my life’s work on the subject; I’m very proud of it!

Last but not least, I wanted to share my favorite essay about Metroidvania. Already the culmination of my life’s work, I wanted to cap off my magnum opus [re: “She Fucks Back”] with a fun little announcement, letting you all know the last part of that chapter is now on my website: “Sleeping Beauties: Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes” (2024)!

(source: Materia Collective)

Normally it’d just be another post in my book sample series for Volume Two, part two, “Searching for Secrets” (2024). However, “Sleeping Beauties” is extra special because it’s the capstone to my Metroidvania work after my PhD and what I esteem to be my crowning achievement; i.e., I write about rape play a great deal, talking about it outside of Metroidvania all the time (e.g., “Into the Toy Chest, part zero: A Note about Rape/Rape Play; or, Facing the Great Destroyer,” 2024), but “Beauties” complements that work by marrying it to one of my favorite games, Hollow Knight, and its secret final boss, the Radiance! There’s just so much fun academic stuff to unpack (e.g., Manuel Aguirre, Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin, to name a few)—with me doing so in a way that’s hopefully more accessible, sexy and fun than those authors to read!

To summarize the piece, itself, my website describes it as, “Articulates Aguirre and Bakhtin’s ideas per my evolution of ludo-Gothic BDSM after my master’s thesis and into my graduate work, then considers the Promethean Quest as something that presents the whore as normally hunted by police forces, only to escape their subjugation and imprisonment by acting out her own rape; i.e., as Hollow Knight‘s final boss, the Radiance, does” (source). In short, girl’s a freak, but camps her abuse at the hero’s hands to say something not just about the Pale King, but Capitalism, too, and why it sucks. Maybe in reading “Beauties,” you’ll change how you view not just the game and its approach to sexual violence in Gothic forms, but also the world at large…

In any event, it’s a huge relief to have “Beauties” out there, and I’m very proud of it. Give it a look and let me know what you think!

Though imperfect, these older pieces try to show how the poststructuralist method—when taken beyond its somewhat limited 1960s/70s praxial scope (the ’70s being the emergence of academic Gothic thought)—can be critically empowered in dialectical-material ways; i.e., to actually critique capital through iconoclastic monsters, BDSM/power exchange and spaces in Metroidvania, but also immensely creative interpretations/responses to those variables as already existing for me to rediscover in my own work: speedrunning 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. —Perse

Metroidvania

A type of Gothic videogame, one involving the exploration of castles and other closed spaces in an ergodic framework; i.e., the struggle of investigating past trauma as expressed through the Gothic castle and its monstrous caverns (which is the author poetically hinting at systemic abuses in real life). Scott Sharkey insists he coined the term (source tweet: evilsharkey, 2023) —ostensibly in the early 2000s while working with Jeremy Parish for 1-Ups.com:

However, the term was probably being used before that in the late ’90s to casually describe the 1997 PSOne game, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; records of it being used can be found as early as 2001 (this Circle of the Moon Amazon review is from 2003). By 2006, though, Jeremy Parish had a personalized definition on his own blog, “GameSpite | Compendium of Old and Useless Information” (2012):

“Metroidvania” is a stupid word for a wonderful thing. It’s basically a really terrible neologism that describes a videogame genre which combines 2D side-scrolling action with free-roaming exploration and progressive skill and item collection to enable further, uh, progress. As in Metroid and Koji Igarashi-developed Castlevania games. Thus the name (source).

My own postgrad research (“Mazes and Labyrinths”) has expanded/narrowed the definition quite a bit:

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 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).

Also from “Mazes and Labyrinths”:

Mazes and Labyrinths: I treat space as essential when defining Metroidvania. Mazes and labyrinths are closed space; their contents exist within a closed structure, either a maze or a labyrinth. A classical labyrinth is a linear system with one set, unicursal path towards an end point; a maze is a non-linear system with multiple paths to an end point [classical texts often treated the words as interchangeable].

Metroidvania, etymology: As its most basic interpretation, Metroidvania is a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania, specifically “Metroid” + “-vania.” However, the term has no singular, universally-agreed-upon definition. Because I focus on space, my definitions—of the individual portmanteau components—are as follows:

“Metroid” =/= the franchise, Metroid; “Metroid” = that franchise’s unique treatment of closed space—the maze.

“-vania” =/= the franchise, Castlevania; “castlevania” equals that franchise’s unique treatment of closed space—the labyrinth.

At the same time, “Metroid,” or “metro” + “-oid” means “android city.” “Castlevania” or “castle” + “-vania” means “other castle,” “demon castle,” or “castle Dracula.” The portmanteau, “Metroidvania” ≈ “android city” + “demon castle” + “maze” + “labyrinth.”

Further Distinctions: There are further ways to identify if a Metroidvania space is a maze or not. As I explain in my 2019 YouTube video, “Metroidvania Series #2: Mazes and Labyrinths“:

What ultimately determines a Metroidvania’s maze-ness are three sequences: the start, the middle, and the end. The start is what I consider to be the collection of essential items—power-ups you’ll need to use for the entire game. Mid-game is the meat of the experience. The end sequence makes the win condition available to the player.

I mention item collection relative to these sequences because they are a core element of Metroidvania play, hence determine what kind of space the player is dealing with. In Metroid, for example, the Morph Ball, Bomb and Missiles are essential, and the player can acquire all of them rather quickly. Apart from those, however, there are few items you actually need to complete the game. One of them is Ice Beam, which is required to kill metroids, thus gain access to Mother Brain (the game’s end condition). Large portions of the game can be played without it, though. Like many Metroid power-ups, it is a mid-game collectible.

Item collection allows the player to leave the start and enter the middle. This section, I argue, determines whether or not a Metroidvania is a maze. If the majority of the game allows for sequence breaks, RBO (reverse boss order) and low-percent, then it is a maze; if not, it is a labyrinth. A Metroidvania can be either (source: the original script on Google Docs).

In terms of appearance, a Metroidvania’s audiovisual presentation can range from retro-future sci-fi to Neo-Gothic fantasy. Nevertheless, their spaces typically function as Gothic castles; replete with hauntological monsters, demons, and ghosts, they guide whatever action the hero must perform when navigating the world and dealing with its threats (ibid.)

ergodic

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

liminal space

Liminal spaces, in architectural terms, are spaces designed to be moved through; in Gothic terms, these amount to Bakhtin’s chronotopes as museum-like times spaces that, when moved through, help past legends come alive, animating in literal and figuratively Gothic/medieval ways. Classically these include the animated portrait, miniature, gargoyle, (often giant) suit of armor, effigy and double, etc; more modern variants include Tool’s early music videos (exhibit 43a), Trent Reznor’s 1994 music video for “Closer” (exhibit 43b) and Mario 64’s own liminal spaces as outlined by Marilyn Roxie’s “Marilyn Roxie presents … The Inescapable Weirdness of Super Mario 64” (2020).

(source)

liminal monsters (expression)/monster girls

Monsters are generally liminal, but some more than others openly convey a partial, ambivalent, oscillating sense of conflict on the surface of their imagery. A hopelessly common example is the monster girl, as AFAB persons are generally fetishized/demonized “waifu” in canon and must be reclaimed in sex-positive forms (exhibit 5e; 23a, the Medusa; 49, phallic women; 50, furries; 62e, cavewomen, etc). The advanced degree of this trope is the monster mother, which expects the women to exist in ways that cater to men that are both loved and feared in fetishizing ways, but also sacrificed (exhibits 51b1, 87b1 and 102b, etc). Akin to a black mirror, Eve Segewick, in 1981, called this mimesis “the character in the veil [or] imagery of the surface in the Gothic novel.” The basic gist, they argue, is the sexualizing of a surfaces in Gothic media (their example being the nun’s veil); i.e., a “shallow pattern” literally on the surface of paper or a screen or glass that can evoke a deeper systemic problem that spans space and time.

(exhibit 5e2: Top-far-left: Muscarine’s “Profligates” from the Darkest Dungeon [2016] mod workshop. Top-far-left: Muscarine’s “Profligates” from the Darkest Dungeon [2016] mod workshop. Top-far-left: Muscarine’s “Profligates” from the Darkest Dungeon [2016] mod workshop. The “Great Waifu Renaissance” of The Darkest Dungeon portrays the monstrous-feminine as waifus to control and embody as much during an ontological power trip as simply being a proverbial dragon to “slay.” Often, they walk the tightrope between the cutesy and the profane, subverting stereotypes while simultaneously being chased after by weird canonical nerds: waifu/wheyfu monster-girl war brides. Procured and dressed by powerful greedy companies [e.g., Blizzard’s “thirst-trap” catalog of Amazon gradients] and given to apolitical consumers, the latter fight the culture war for the former as tied to the state through capital. And yet weird iconoclastic nerds can weaponize these self-same monstrous-feminine to our purposes.

The Tusk, for example, is a sexy cavegirl who iconoclastically stinks—i.e., with body odor being historically-materially denied to women despite their armpits smelling just as much as guys’ do, let alone their vaginas, which guys do not have and can have all sorts of smells: e.g., Zeuhl once asked me to smell their panties, saying incredulously, “Isn’t that crazy?” because their cootchie smelled rather strong [and to which my look of shock, post-smelling it, utterly betrayed me. To be fair, it was rather pungent from us simply walking around my hometown. All the same, bodies smell because they’re designed to; e.g., that same night, we had doggystyle sex and for the first time I could suddenly smell the natural “musk” from Zeuhl’s asshole: a vestigial throwback to a time when humans communicated more by smells than with words]. Apart from the Tusk, the Hood is a slutty Red Riding Hood, and the Fawn is a patchwork animal-girl ninja, etc.

Lower-top-left: nude mods for Muscarine’s Profligates, by JOMO=1. Fan mods operate as “fan fiction,” thus tend to be far hornier [see: Black Reliquary‘s (2023) many Amazon thirst traps, bottom-left] than official canon does. Generally the official art/content for the main game or “faithful” fan art tends to be less overtly sexualized, but no less canonical or sexually dimorphic; e.g., the Countess [exhibit 1a1c] as an Archaic Bug Mom slain by the bad-faith Ancestor [who is frankly a giant dick for the whole game].

Top-right: Persephone van der Waard’s illustrations of four monster girls from Castlevania (a franchise with a whole bestiary of female monsters; source: Fandom). These four are all from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night—Alraune, Succubus, Scylla and Amphisbaena.

Bottom-left: Promo art [source tweet: Reliquary Mod, 2021] for The Darkest Dungeon overhaul, The Black Reliquary].

Bottom-right: Fan art for The Darkest Dungeon by Maestro Noob, depicting what are basically heroic female monsters: the virgin/whore, but also the damsel/demon and the Amazon with a BDSM flavor.)

 

chimeras/furries:

(exhibit 5f: Artist, left: William Mai; artist, right: Blush Brush. Examples of furries. “Furry” is an incredibly diverse art style. For more examples, consider Volume Two’s “Call of the Wild” chapter, as well as exhibits 65 or 68 from Volume Three.)

A chimera isn’t simply the Greek monster, but any kind of composite body or entity, often with elements of multiplicity or plurality (e.g., the Gerasene demon]. Conversely, furries are humanoid [commonly called “anthro”) personas that tend to have humanoid bodies, but semi-animalistic limbs and intersex components tied to ancient rituals of fertility but also gender expression relating to/identifying with nature. While Greek myths are commonly more animalistic, the (mainstream) furries of today are often closer to the Ancient Egyptian variety: an animal “headdress” or mask over a mostly-human body. There’s plenty of morphological gradients, of course—with “feral” or “bestial” variants being more and more animalistic; and the “Giger variety” being more xenomorphic and Gothically surreal (the xenomorph [exhibit 51a/60c] being one of the most famous, if contested, chimeras in modern times). A general rule of thumb, however, is the genitals tend to be human; however, “monster-fucker” variants very quickly move away from humanoid bodies (and/or genitals) altogether, often with abject, stigma animals like the insect, leech, reptile, or worm. Likewise, while “fursonas” (furry personas) tend to be sexualized, they aren’t always; in fact, they primarily function as alter-egos with many different functions: the political (see: alt-right furries as well as “furry panic“), the dramatic (Fredrik Knudsen, 2019), the horror genre (see: pretty much anything by Junji Ito, but also Five Nights at Freddy’s, 2014; or its various wacky clones, source: Space Ice, 2023) and also for general fandom purposes; i.e., furries are not automatically fetishes (Vice, 2018) but are criminalized similar to Bronies (though any popular fandom that has a large underage audience is going to attract sexual predators and outsider bias; see: Turkey Tom’s 2023 [admittedly problematic] “Degenerate” series on Bronies or Five Nights at Freddy’s; or Lily Orchard’s pedophile escapades, hidden behind sexualized Brony fan fiction—Essence of Thought, 2021).

monster-fucking

The mutually consensual act of fucking monsters; i.e., sex-positive, Gothicized kink. However, as this tends to involve inhuman, animal-esque creatures beyond just werewolves, Frankensteinian creatures, or vampires, make sure to refer to the Harkness test (exhibit 38c) to avoid conducting/depicting bestiality or pedophilia!

Note: While sexual abuse does happen in furry communities, these communities are ultimately quite small and those behaviors are not the norm within any more than in the LGBTQ community at large. However, in the tradition of moral panics, this won’t stop reactionary groups from scapegoating furries and similar out-groups, the persecutors hypocritically overlooking widespread systemic abuse by paramilitaries and communities leaders in the bargain. —Perse 

Satanism

(exhibit 5h: The Satanic Temple website. I never joined, but they seem like an alright bunch—especially compared to the anti-feminist moderacy of the YouTube Skeptics/atheist Community [source: The Kavernacle, 2021]. To that, “skepticism” often dogwhistles a common moderate/reactionary tactic; i.e., to “just ask questions.” This maneuver is bad-faith more often than not, as seen in the “gender critical” community [a TERF cryptonym meant to conceal the fascist nature of regressive “activism,” Amazonomachia and cryptomimesis] or the so-called race “realists,” but also the transphobia of cis-skeptics defending the “fairness” of professional sports by excluding trans people; source: Essence of Thought, 2019.)

Like furries, Satanism is generally treated as a regular scapegoat during moral panic (with “Satanic” historically being used to scapegoat members of the LGBTQ community as “groomers” during the 1980s into the present; source: Caelan Conrad, 2022). However, Satan is a complex figure and can personify different forms of persecution and rebellion. For example, I have explored Satanism before—in my own past time (“Dreadful Discourse, ep. 7: Satan“) as well as my own living experiences: “I, Satanist; Atheist: A Gothicist’s Thoughts on Atheism, Religion, and Sex” (2021). Satanic churches aren’t ecclesiastical in the traditional sense, but their implementation in Western culture isn’t always implemented well. Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan is a bit overly hedonistic and dated, sounding painfully cliché and sexist. The Satanic Temple, on the other hand, is far more accessible, while refusing to compromise on the humanitarian issues they seek to confront in society as structured on organized religion (America wasn’t simply founded by the Puritans, but founded on their awful principles, too).

uncanny

From Freud’s unheimlich, meaning “unhomely,” the uncanny actually has many different academic applications. One of the most famous (and canonically outmoded) is the liminal/parallel space (the “danger disco/cyberpunk,” exhibit 15b2; the haunted music video, 43a; the Nostromo from Alien, 64c). Another common example is the uncanny valley, which—while generally applied to animation techniques—can also apply to ghosts, egregores and other Gothic imitations (the unfriendly disguise/pastiche, exhibit 43b; the friendly, iconoclastic variant 43c) or humanoid likenesses that fail to “pass the test” (for a diegetic example of this concept, refer to the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner, 1982). In the Gothic sense, the animate-inanimate presents the subject as now-alive but once-not, but also faced within bad copies they cannot safely distinguish themselves from; e.g., the knight from Hollow Knight (exhibit 40h1) but also the xenomorph (exhibit 60d) and living latex, leather and death fetishes (exhibits exhibit 9b2, 50b, 60e1, 101c2), or golems/succubae (exhibits 38c1b/51b1), etc, as one subtype of animated miniature whose ghost of the counterfeit is historically-materially abject. The intimation is one of death in proximity with sensations that we are merely clay simulacra within the Gothic spell and that, at any moment, the spell could end and our dancing in the ruins suddenly stop as we cease to be once more; motionless we become, as Monty Python puts it, “ex-parrots.”

terror and horror

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

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

phallic women

The cock of the state. A monstrous-feminine archetype predicated on active, penetrative violence (or scapegoated for it; e.g., the trans woman as a “woman with a penis” trope). Canonical phallic women are female characters, villains, and monsters (often Amazons, Medusas or something comparable) who behave in a traditional masculine way—though generally in response to patriarchal structures with an air of female revenge; e.g., Lady Macbeth from Macbeth; Victoria de Loredani from Zofloya, 1806; Rumi from Perfect Blue, 1997, and Ripley/Samus Aran from Aliens/Metroid. When Dale Townshend introduced the term “phallic women” to me, he referenced Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose (source).

In non-fiction, this encompasses TERFs, who adopt violent, minority-police roles post-trauma, accepting further “prison sex” conditioning by reactionaries during moral panics. The phallic power of women is canonically treated as hysterically fleeting (e.g., Lady Galadriel’s “dark queen” moment; or Dani’s fall from grace as the dark mother of dragons, in Game of Thrones, 2009, her self-defeating hysteria supplied by the authors of the show to justify male rule during the final season). She is expected to perform, then put away her sword and wear the dress.

Archaic Mothers (and vaginal spaces)

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

To summarize those terms, a phallic woman resists sexist conventions by behaving in a masculine (often war-like) fashion in Gothic stories. An Archaic Mother is a powerful, ancient, female mythic figure tied to abject images of motherhood and/or numinous authority. Her power is womb-centric, stemming from her actual womb, or the womb-like space she uses to attack the hero with” (source).

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

(artist: Patrick Brown)

Amazonomachia (Amazon pastiche)

“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., Marston’s Wonder Woman) would seek to move the goalpost incrementally—less of a concession, in neoliberal variants (every Blizzard heroine ever—exhibits 45a, 76, 72), and more an attempt to recruit from dissident marginalized groups. The offer is always the same: to become badass, strong and “empowered.” In truth, these regressive 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”). 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.

witch cops/war boss

A class, gender or race traitor dressed up in the heroic-victimized language of warrior variants of past victims. Their baleful gaze is diverted away from the elite, instead punching down at their fellow workers to break up their strikes, unions and riots; but also to tease disempowered women with the “carrot” of active, physical violence they’re conditioned to use against the state’s enemies. There are male/Man Box variants and token variants (the weird canonical nerd of course, exhibit 93b; the war chief, 98b1; the Afrocentrist; the centrist Amazon, exhibit 98b1/100c4; the LGBA’s bad-faith bears, otters, dykes and femmes; or the queer boss, exhibit 100c10) and the praxis allows for flexible gender roles within and outside of the heteronormative binary as long as it serves the profit motive. But subversive variants (exhibit 111b) are generally forced to work within notoriously bigoted and oppressive structures: the patriarchal world of professional, competitive sports or the porn industry as things to subvert (“make love, not war” as a hard stance, not conflating Marisa’s “love” [exhibit 98a3] with genuine, class-conscious praxis). This makes TERF amazons, Medusas, et al, Judas-level “prison guards” inside Man Box culture; they assimilate their conquerors and use their cudgels, slurs and shackles, but also their fetish/power outfits like they do—without countercultural irony during blood libel (even while trying to disguise this function through false rebellion) while being paid in blood money by the state and forced to ignominiously marry people they wouldn’t be caught dead with under non-oppressive conditions.

waifus/wheyfus

The waifu is a war bride in shonen media; i.e., the promise of sex, generally through marriage as emblematized in Japanese cultural exports that fuse with Western bigotries to make similar promises to entitled, young male consumers (and older bigots and tokens). While the “waifu,” then, is any bride you want—be she big and strong, short and stacked, skinny-thicc, tall and slender, or some other “monster girl” combination dressed up as a pin-up Hippolyta, Medusa or some other hauntological trope—the “wheyfu” is conspicuously burly and chased after by entitled fans (this relationship can get performatively complicated, but the basic difference is coercion versus mutual consent). Within oppositional praxis, then, the waifu/wheyfu becomes yet another disguise within class war for operatives on either basic side to utilize.

the Male/Female Gothic

Stemming from earlier periods of Gothic academic (1970s), the Male and Female Gothic are gendered ideas of the Gothic school or work connected to older, Neo-Gothic schools: Ann Radcliffe’s de facto School of Terror and Matthew Lewis’ School of Horror (outlined as such in Devendra Varma’s The Gothic Flame, 1923; though perhaps articulated earlier than that). Radcliffe’s school focused on terror concealing the “dreaded evil,” the explained supernatural and raising the imagination through carefully maintained suspense. Lewis’s contributions to the so-called Male Gothic focused more on the living dead, overtly supernatural rituals, black magic, and sex with demons, murder, and so on. Frankly Male Gothic is a bit outmoded, with Colin Broadmoor in 2021 making a strong argument for Lewis’ Gothic camp being far more queer than strictly “male” in The Monk despite the lack of sexuality and gender functioning as identity when he wrote it (similar to Tolkien or Milton, despite their own intentions).

egregore/tulpa (simulacrum)

(exhibit 5i: Artist: Mole and Thomas.)

An occult or monstrous concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people (what Plato and other philosophers have called the simulacrum through various hair-splittings; e.g., “identical copies of that which never existed” being touched upon by Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality). The distinction between egregore and tulpa is largely etymological, with “egregore” stemming from French and Greek and “tulpa” being a Tibetan idea:

Since the 1970s, tulpas have been a feature of Western paranormal lore. In contemporary paranormal discourse, a tulpa is a being that begins in the imagination but acquires a tangible reality and sentience. Tulpas are created either through a deliberate act of individual will or unintentionally from the thoughts of numerous people. The tulpa was first described by Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) in Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929) and is still regarded as a Tibetan concept. However, the idea of the tulpa is more indebted to Theosophy than to Tibetan Buddhism [source: Natasha L. Mikles and Joseph P. Laycock’s “Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the “Tibetan” Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea,” 2015].

The shared idea, here, is that monsters tend to represent social ideas begot from a public imagination according to fearful biases that are not always controlled or conscious in their cryptogenesis/-mimesis. In Gothic-Communist terms, this invokes historical-material warnings of codified power or trauma—including totems, effigies, fatal portraits, suits of armor, or gargoyles—projected back onto superstitious workers through ambiguous, cryptonymic illusions. For our purposes, these illusions are primarily fascist/neoliberal, as Capitalism encompasses the material world. It must be parsed/transmuted.

ghosts/Yokai

An ontologically complex category of either a former dead person, an artifact/reminder of them (their legend as an effigy or “statue” of themselves; e.g., a suit of armor or fatal portrait) or a discrete, wholly unique entity that shares only the resemblance but not the context of a former person or their legend. If hamlet’s father is a famous Western example of this idea, then Yokai are the Eastern variant of this notion.

For a holistic example of many of these Gothic ideas in action, check out The Babadook (2014); it combine crypt narrative, Black Veils, Gothic heroines, chronotopes, liminal space/monsters et al into a singular narrative in a fairly iconoclastic (queer) way (it’s also one of my favorite films and I love to analyze it; e.g., “Close-reading Gothic Theory in The Babadook,” 2019)! —Perse