Paratextual Documents

This page contains the most vital of the paratextual documents for my ongoing book series, Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism (the one-page promo is where readers can learn about the entire book project; i.e.,  the abstract and summaries per volume, cover illustrations, project history and logo design).

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). 

Paratextual Documents

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)

This page doesn’t contain all of Sex Positivity‘s paratextual documents; i.e., those contained in single volumes. Instead, it contains my most vital arguments and repeated elements:

  • What I Will and Won’t Exhibit (abridged): Summarizes what I will exhibit (campy monster porn and Gothic poetics married to sex work), but also what I won’t (e.g., abject violence, [some] hard kinks, unironic torture porn, etc).
  • Illustrating Mutual Consent: Summarizes mutual consent as central to the Sex Positivity book project—namely the illustrating of mutual consent through informed, negotiated labor exchange and dialectical-material context.
  • The Six Gothic-Marxist Tenets and Four Main Gothic Theories: An outline for the six central tenets of Gothic Communism (the Six Rs), and the four main Gothic theories that Sex Positivity commonly promotes in its pages (the Four Gs). Also includes Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and “ghost of the counterfeit,” Jody Castricano’s cryptomimesis, Derrida’s “spectres of Marx,” and Mark Fisher’s “canceled futures.”
  • The State: Its Key Tools; re: the Monopolies, Trifectas and Qualities of Capital: Curates the state’s primary tools; i.e., its monopolies/trifectas and qualities of capital, which all come up in Sex Positivity constantly .
  • Abridged Manifesto Tree (of Oppositional Praxis): A “tree” of oppositional concepts that play out in dialectical-material tension. Serves as a map for my own arguments and ideas working in opposition to state doubles; i.e., during oppositional praxis.

Here are several short paratextual documents that—while they aren’t quoted, here, because they’re already included elsewhere—are recommended because they remain essential in articulating and understanding my works’ core ideas:

  • “Making Marx Gay“: Discusses the importance in camping Marx’ ghost (and Marxist-Leninism); i.e., to make his ideas more applicable towards universal liberation.
  • “A Note on Canonical Essentialism“: Summarizes how canon is sexually dimorphic in relation to Cartesian thought; i.e., heteronormativity and maps as they routinely manifest under Capitalist Realism: power fantasies whose assorted, us-versus-them cartographic refrains (especially videogames; re: Tolkien and Cameron) divide, then fetishize, alienize and ultimately rape nature (and workers) as monster-feminine—all to serve profit as something to map out and repeatedly enact (often through revenge, though we won’t discuss that specifically here).

What I Will and Won’t Exhibit (abridged)

This book views pornography as art, and it contains lots and lots of it; i.e., thousands of ironic, campy monsters, kink, BDSM and Gothic themes in the porn it exhibits (often made by myself and others*; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM; e.g., me commissioning Lilmisspuff, below, to pose for me).

*The project contains over sixty models, seventeen of which are muses (who have a larger role/often appearing in multiple exhibits and on book covers). To see all of Sex Positivity‘s models, refer to the Acknowledgments page.

(model and artist: Lilmisspuff and Persephone van der Waard)

While pushing boundaries is a vital component of “Gothic” when broaching unironic violence, there are some rules to expect insofar as what I won’t push:

This book constitutes the cathartic exploration of trauma through Gothic Communism; i.e., through iconoclastic, pornographic art made by workers in exhibitionistic-voyeuristic collaboration: exhibits that feature and highlight the context of negotiation, for the monstrous-poetic expression of our rights and pedagogy of the oppressed (this book features a small number images to critique data theft under the AI boom, but otherwise consists entirely of artwork made by actual humans, not generated by unthinking machines). Even so, while I feel thoroughly uncomfortable exhibiting canonical art as a source, endorsement or perpetuation of unnegotiated trauma,

    • animal exploitation or abuse (my stepfather forced me to watch as he killed our pet rabbits in front of my brothers and I, then cooked and ate them) but also frank depictions of animal butchery under Capitalism (e.g., Our Daily Bread, 2005, and its unflinching examination of an ordinary abattoir)
    • abuse, exploitation and fetishization of children and/or persons with physical or mental disabilities
    • unironic torture porn in general (e.g., A Serbian Film, 2010; Martyrs, 2008; Funny Games, 1997; Kidnapped, 2010)
    • necrophilia exploitation films (e.g., Nekromantik, 1988)
    • the grotesque; e.g., the “geek show” gross-out exhibit from William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 novel, Nightmare Alley, or Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love (1989)

I do discuss things like chattel/canonical rape, public shame/self-hatred, murder and unironic psychosexual violence […] in writing throughout the book; and there’s certainly a place for all of these things in iconoclastic art (trauma needs to be communicated in as many ways as it can); i.e., the digging up of dead things when we feel—in the classic Gothic sense—”buried alive” according to the enforced relationship between sexuality and gender as Gothicized in canonical works: […] This poetic disinterment and its paradoxical examination of ourselves as abjectly undead is critically valid; it’s just not the kind of necromancy I care to communicate through, first and foremost. As the kids say, it “gives me the yuck.”

[…]

Whether sex-positive or not, monsters are liminal, but their iconoclastic reclamation coincides with ironic rape fantasies and complicated symbols of recovery (fetishes) that reverse-abject state-sanctioned, social-sexual violence through transformative, even pornographic Gothic embellishment. Abject sexuality and exploitation exist squarely outside my invigilator and creator comfort zones, hence won’t be featured in this book. That being said, I will have plenty of monsters that approach these subjects comfortably for me; i.e., to a healing degree, not a “geek show” insofar as the exhibiting and voyeurism of peril are concerned. To that, camp and shlock allow for “rape” to exist in quotes using fetish aesthetics—often with a fair amount of Gothic nostalgia and expertise. Weird nerds tend to know their stuff, and can push into abject spaces in ways that still account for the boundaries of others:

(exhibit -1a: Artist: Mercedes the Muse. They aren’t just a stone-cold fox; they’re an incredibly passionate and knowledgeable filmmaker and performer when it comes to schlock and camp! Both genres are equally worthy of study and consideration as things to recreate and learn from.)

Of course, I am discussing the Gothic mode in a sex-positive light; there are some liminal/grey-area exceptions I’ll need to make, exhibit-wise. For example, I repeatedly discuss Mercedes’s awesomely schlocky creations (and other campy monster artists reclaiming heteronormative stigmas), featuring her “tromette” performances in our book’s first exhibit, as well as exhibits 67 and 78, among others; despite having some gross-out qualities, her content is something I’m comfortable recreating in my own work/exhibiting in this book with her permission (she’s also incredibly sex-positive, which makes working with her a snap).

So while this book displays and analyzes “vanilla” porn (exhibits 32a or 32b), it tries quite hard to examine dozens of cases of sex-positive monster porn (too many to easily list, but Mercedes’ previous exhibit counts, as does exhibit 1a1a1h3a2). I also exhibit several contentious subjects: one, several drawings of naked, pre-pubescent children/teenagers from Robie Harris and Michael Emberley’s 1994 sex-education book for children ten-and-up, It’s Perfectly Normal (exhibits 55 and 90a); two, the problematic moe art style (meaning either a child-like appearance, or sexualized children/teenagers in non-erotic media) featured in neoliberal, American-aligned media like Dragon Ball and Street Fighter 6 (1986 and 2023, exhibit 104b) but also canonical porn (exhibit 104c)—albeit as something to be wary of; three, ahegao or “rape face,” which is also examined in the same section, in exhibit 104d towards the end of the book; and four, one example of straight-up murder and torture performed by the Male Gaze of an evil superman called Homelander (exhibit 1a1a1h3a1a1) and several examples where unironic rape scenes are discussed, but not shown. Excluding the Homelander collage, unironic rape and violence aren’t openly displayed in this book’s imagery (and even then, it’s featured to make a point about Man Box culture).

This book series contains hundreds of collages, some of which include liminal, complicated examples of sexualized media that ultimately have something to salvage or transmute away from canonical, sex-coercive forms mid-resistance; e.g., ironic psychosexuality (exhibit 0a1b2b) and catharsis (exhibit 0a1b2a1). For our book’s second exhibit (exhibit -1b), here’s an example to give you an idea of what you should largely not expect moving forward:

    • abject, gross-out gore—either as an exploitative dissection of the human form, or as eroticized, psychosexual variants (e.g., Phedon Papamichael’s excellent, but hard-to-watch exploitation film, Inside [2008]—a movie about a Gothic impostor forcing her husband’s killer to have a C-section during an utterly gross scene which makes Alien‘s “birth scene” look positively ordinary by comparison).
    • any bathroom hijinks and overt, aggressive rape scenarios involving animals, disabled people, dead bodies, or “non-consenting” persons (excepting moe and ahegao and some appreciative rape scenarios; i.e., consent-non-consent).

[Refer to the full, in-book version for discussions of hard kink and what I will/won’t exhibit as far as that goes; e.g., rape play having some ironic, “martyred” examples that are okay in my mind, versus unironic examples that generally aren’t.]

(exhibit -1b: Various scenes of gore from classic horror movies, as well as abject merchandise and gory props, aka memento mori: “remember that you [have to] die.” Most are shots of the 2018 Halloween [from “The Horrors of Halloween“] or screencaps from Alien, 1979, middle strip; however, the far-mid-left shot of Reagan from The Exorcist, 1973, is from EllimacsSFX. Such Gothic craftsmanship tends to form a tradition of recreating death and disgusting things, but also female vulnerability through the Male Gaze—with the bathroom not simply being a place of abject activities like taking a shit, but also a place of profound vulnerability where one’s pants/panties are literally down: easy pickings/the sitting duck. These grotesque exhibits have been canonized by male Pygmalions like Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, who both made their lengthy careers by needlessly terrifying/torturing women—so much so that after 180+ takes on The Shining [1981] Shelley Duval became a decades-long recluse, only returning to break the silence in the 2020s[13a] [the same “tortured saint” effect happened to Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio being tortured on the set of The Abyss[13b], 1989; but also Maria Falconetti being forced to kneel for hours on stone during The Passion of Joan of Arc[13c], 1928; and taken to awful diegetic extremes with the aforementioned Martyrs]. These Pygmalions also tended to take the mastery of suspense away from earlier female examples—e.g., suspense girl-wizard, Ann Radcliffe, who admittedly had her own problems—but also any notion of informed consent regarding their own workers’ basic human rights.)

There are plenty of specialized terms in here that I will explain more during the essential keywords paratext, and many more still during the thesis volume (all are defined in the full keyword glossary per volume) but for a quick, handy idea about Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, refer to the next two sections: “The Six Gothic-Marxist Tenets and Four Main Gothic Theories” and “About the Logo.”

Illustrating Mutual Consent

Sex Positivity was founded on informed consent through negotiated labor exchanges. By extension, the book’s entire premise is to illustrate mutual consent (and other sex-positive devices) through dialectical-material analysis; i.e., something to learn from when regarding the products of said labor whose iconoclastic lessons nevertheless cannot be adequately supplied by singular images (or collages) alone, but must instead be relayed through subtext in an educational environment where these things are being displayed: a gallery. In other words, sex positivity becomes something to exhibit and explain during dialectal-material analysis of sex-positive works prepared in advance by mutually-consenting parties.

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

Every volume for this book is full of exhibits like the one above; every exhibit that features artwork made in active collaboration amounts to a conscious attempt between myself and others to negotiate our respective boundaries in open cooperation, and each was made while interrogating personal and systemic trauma as something to mark and negotiate with using monstrous language. Regardless of the exact poetics used, a large part of any exhibit made in collaboration is the deeper context for its construction: that the sex work and artwork being displayed remain just that—work, which requires payment in ways that both parties agree is fair from fairly argued and fairly implemented positions.

In keeping with the anarchist spirit of things, nothing was arranged from positions of unfair advantage on my end; everything was spelled out up front. In turn, the various permissions that other workers granted me were executed by those who had total say over the material being used/featured: in essence, they controlled how I represented their labor, bodies, and identities. From the cropping of the images and monster design choices per illustration, to the aliases being used and the services being plugged, every personalized exhibit has been devised according to how the models-in-question decided while navigating these exchanges. To that, each transaction goes well beyond commercial goods traded for money and includes whatever we bartered, insofar as labor for labor amounts to a great many things: photographs for art, sex for sex, sex for photographs, art for sex, and acts of friendship and displays of shared humanity and kindness that we discovered along the way.

To all of the people involved, I give thanks; this book could not exist without you. For a comprehensive thanksgiving to all the sex workers involved in this project, please refer to the Acknowledgements section at the back of the volume.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

The Six Gothic-Marxist Tenets and Four Main Gothic Theories

Gothic Communism has six Gothic-Marxist tenets (the Six Rs) and four main Gothic theories (the Four Gs). They operate in conjunction, and their collective idea is (to borrow from/rephrase our abstract)

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

(artists: Lydia and Persephone van der Waard)

I’ve written the Gothic-Marxist tenets to keep in mind, not cite each and every time. In short, they provide general teaching objectives that sit between theory and application, and their interpretation and scope is meant to be fairly broad and conversational regardless of your exact approach. They are as follows:

  • Re-claim/-cultivate. Seize Gothic art as the means of emotional (monstrous) production, tied to cultural symbols of stigma, trauma and fear that abject workers or otherwise emotionally manipulate them to surrender the means of production—their labor, their intelligence and control—unto canonical productions that normally make workers ignorant towards the means of reclaiming these things: the ability to produce, appreciate and cultivate a pro-labor, post-scarcity Gothic imagination, including theatrical implements of torture; i.e., shackles, collars, whips and chains, but also undead, demonic and/or animalized egregores in service of Gothic Communism. As part of their complex, warring praxis, minds, monsters, history and sexualities, workers must hone their own reclaimed voices—a dark poetics, pedagogy of the oppressed, splendid lies, etc—to challenge the status quo (and its war and rape cultures) by attaining structural catharsis during oppositional praxis, thus limit the systemic, generational harm committed by capitalist structures (abuse prevention/risk reduction behaviors).
  • Re-unite/-discover/-turn. Reunite people with their alienated, alienizing bodies, language, labor, sexualities, genders, trauma, pasts and emotions in sex-positive, re-humanizing (xenophilic) ways; an active attempt to detect and marry oneself to what was lost at the emotional, Gothic, linguistic and materially intelligent level: a return of the living dead and the creation/summoning of demons and their respective trauma and forbidden knowledge. This poetic coalition should operate as a sex-positive force that speaks out against Cartesian division, unironic xenophobia and state abuse, while advancing workers towards the development of Gothic-Communism.
  • Re-empower/-negotiate. Grant workers control over their own sexual labor through their emotions and, by extension things (most often language, symbols or art) that stem from, and relate to, their sexual labor as historically abjected and privatizing under Capitalism; to allow them to renegotiate their boundaries in regards to their trauma through their sexual labor as their own, including their bodies and emotions as a potent form of power interrogation, re-negotiation and re-exchange amid chaotic and unequal circumstances (worker-positive BDSM and Satanic rebellion, in other words) that fight for conditional love and informed, set boundaries during social-sexual exchanges that heal from complex, generational trauma: the “good play” of conditional offers and mutually agreed-upon deals—not unconditional, coercive love compelled by pro-state abusers; i.e., “bad play” and “prison sex” within rape culture. This doesn’t just apply to deals with institutions (e.g., where I had to make conditional/unconditional offers set by a [money-making] university—linked arm-in-arm with financial [money-lending] institutions exiting as a part of the same student-exploiting business); it applies to our own lives as sexualized workers, synthesizing our principles with those we work/set boundaries with in relation to our labor, bodies, emotional bonds, etc. Setting individual and collective boundaries is important towards protecting yourself and others during activist behaviors, which automatically pose some degree of risk under capital; don’t be afraid to impose your own limits to minimize risk of abuse, even if that means “losing” someone in the process. If they’re holding that over your head, they weren’t really your friend to begin with.
  • Re-open/-educate. To expose the privatization of emotions and denial of sex-positive sex/gender education to individual workers, helping them reopen their minds and their eyes, thus see, understand and feel how private property makes people emotionally and Gothically stupid; Marx’s adage, “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.” This applies to de facto education as a means of facing systemic trauma and dismantling it through Gothic paradox and play teaching workers to be better on a grand intuitive scale.
  • Re-play. Establish a new kind of game attitude and playfulness during development towards Communism, one that dismantles the bourgeoisie’s intended play of manufactured scarcity, consent, and conflict in favor of a post-scarcity world filled with “game” workers who can learn and respond creatively to the natural and person-made problems of language and the material world with unique solutions: emergent play, or player-developed approaches in games (e.g., including Communist videogames like Dwarf Fortress, 2006) but also game-like environments (our focus is Gothic poetics and BDSM theatrics); i.e., to be willing to try negotiating for themselves through playful forms during social-sexual scenarios of all kinds; to reclaim, rediscover, and relearn, but also teach lost things using iconoclastic monsters that critique the status quo in controlled/chaotic settings; to enjoy but not blindly enjoy, thus endorse cheap canonical “junk food” by re-inspecting them with a readiness to critique and reinvent. As Anita Sarkeesian explains, “It’s both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects” (source: Facebook[13d]). The idea in doing so is to understand, mid-enjoyment and critique, that development is not a zero-sum game, but as Jesper Juul puts it in his eponymous book, is “a half-real zone between the fiction and the rules” that allows for emergent, at times transgressive forms of good play (me) as a transformative device (source). To borrow and mutate three more ludic terms, then, the “ludic contract” is whatever the player negotiates for themselves inside the natural-material world, acting like a “spoilsport” by redefining the terms of the contact within and outside of itself[14]; i.e., as a half-real, “magic-circle” space where, as Eric Zimmerman explains, the game takes place in ways that aren’t wholly separate from real life[15]—except for us, games occur along Gothic, liminal routes, wherein workers playfully articulate their natural rights in linguo-material ways between reality and fabrication that go beyond games as commodities but are nevertheless informed by them as something to rewrite; i.e., through play as a general exercise that involves a great many things: a reached agreement of power and play in Gothic terms, whose luck/odds are defined not through canon, but iconoclastic poiesis that can be expanded far beyond the restrictive, colonial binary and heteronormative ruleset of the elite’s intended exploitation of workers to challenge the profit motive and all of its harmful effects in the bargain; e.g., genocide, heteronormativity and Max Box culture. The sum of these concepts in praxis could be called “ludo-Gothic BDSM[16].”
  • Re-produce/-lease. To disseminate these tenets through worker-made sex-positive lessons that we leave behind; i.e., egregores, “archaeologies” and other Gothic-Communist “derelicts.” As the oppressed, our pedagogy should be centered around the continued production of communal emotional intelligence as a Gothically instructional means of transforming the material world and, by extension, the socio-natural world for the better—by healing from generational trauma by interrogating its structural causes together.

I call these tenets the Six Rs because they constitute six things to reclaim from Capitalism through the Gothic imagination; i.e., vis-à-vis our own bodies and labor as things to weaponize against capital during praxial synthesis: through our creative successes, whatever they may be.

(artist: Crow)

Underpinning our six tenets are four central Gothic theories, the Four Gs:

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

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

In [the 2012 essay] “The Gothic Ghost of the Counterfeit and the Process of Abjection,” Jerrold E. Hogle argues that the eighteenth-century Gothic emergence from fake imitation of fake work is the foundation of what is defined as modern Gothic today. He maintains that Horace Walpole’s 1765[17] The Castle of Otranto, which is considered as the groundwork of the modern Gothic story, is built on a false proclamation that the novel was an Italian manuscript written by a priest. […] Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery. [In turn,] Hogle’s observation of the history of The Castle of Otranto forms the basis for understanding the concept of counterfeit as a result of the abjection process.

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

(artist: John Fox)

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

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

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

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

(artist: George Roux)

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

A basic linguistic state between the past and the present—described by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1993) as being Marxism itself. Smothered by Capitalism, Marxism is an older idea from Capitalism’s past that haunts Capitalism—doing so through “ghosts” in Capitalism’s language that haunt future generations under the present order of material existence. In Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing, Jodey Castricano writes how Marx, though not a Gothicist, was obsessed with the language of spectres and ghosts—less as concrete symbols sold for profit in the modern sense and more as a consequence of coerced human language expressing a return of the past and of the dead as a repressed force; she also calls this process cryptomimesis, or “writing with ghosts,” as a tradition carried on by Derrida and his own desire to express haunting as a feeling experienced inside Capitalism and its language. The concept would be articulated further by Mark Fisher as Capitalist Realism (2009); i.e., a myopia, or total inability to imagine the future beyond past versions of the future that have become decayed, dead, and forsaken: “canceled futures” (which Stuart Mills discusses how to escape in his 2019 writeup on Fisher’s hauntology of culture, Capitalism, and acid Communism, “What is Acid Communism?”). While all workers are haunted by the dead, as Marx states, this especially applies to its proponents—cops and other class traitors, scapegoats, etc—as overwhelmed by a return of the dead (and their past) through Gothic language/affect in the socio-material sphere. For those less disturbed by the notion, however, this can be something to welcome and learn from—to write with; i.e., in the presence of the dead coming home as a welcome force in whatever forms they take: not just ghosts, but also vampires, zombies, or composites, the latter extending to demons and anthromorphs as summoned or made; but also all of these categories being modular insofar as they allow for a hybridized expression of trauma through undead-demonic-animalistic compounds. As Castricano writes of cryptomimesis

Although some critics continue to disavow the Gothic as being subliterary and appealing only to the puerile imagination—Fredric Jameson refers to the Gothic as “that boring and exhausted paradigm” [what a dork]—others, such as Anne Williams, claim that the genre not only remains very much alive but is especially vital in its evocation of the “undead,” an ontologically ambiguous figure which has been the focus of so much critical attention that another critic, Slavoj Zizek, felt compelled to call the return of the living dead “the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture”‘ (source).

in regards to ghosts, I would argue the same notion applies to all undead, demons and animalistic egregores; i.e., writing with both as complicated theatrical expressions of the human condition under Capitalism.

(artist: Zdzisław Beksiński)

  • cryptonymy (from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, vis-à-vis Jerrold Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis)

In Cynthia Sugars’ entry on “Cryptonymy” for David Punter’s The Encyclopedia of the Gothic (2012), Sugars writes, “Cryptonymy, as it is used in psychoanalytic theory and adapted to Gothic studies, refers to a term coined by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok [which] receives extended consideration in their book The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (1986).” Sugars goes on to summarize Abraham and Torok’s usage, which highlights a tendency for language to hide a traumatic or unspeakable word with seemingly unrelated words, which compound under coercive, unnatural conditions (the inherent deceit of the nation-state and its monopolies). For Sugars and for us, Gothic studies highlight these conditions as survived by a narrative of the crypt, its outward entropy—the symptoms and wreckage—intimating a deeper etiological trauma sublimated into socially more acceptable forms (usually monsters, lairs/parallel space, phobias, etc; you can invade, kill and “cure” those. In my 2021 writeup, “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid,” I call this false optimism the “puncher’s chance” afforded to pro-Capitalist soldiers and de facto killers for the state; the odds suck and are either disguised or romanticized through heroic stories/monomyths). Described by Jerrold Hogle in “The Restless Labyrinth” as the only thing that survives, the narrative of the crypt is a narrative of a narrative of a narrative to a hidden curse/doom announced by things displaced from the former cause: Gothic cryptonyms; illusions, deceptions, mirages, etc. Sugars determines, the closer one gets to the problem, the more the space itself abruptly announces a vanishing point, a procession of fragmented illusions tied to a transgenerational curse: “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present,” Hogle writes of Otranto (the first “gothic” castle, reassembled for Horace Walpole’s 1764 “archaeology”). In regards to the mimetic quality of the crypt, this general process of cryptomimesis draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words tied to Gothic theatrical conventions and linguistic functions, but also patently ludic narratives that can change one’s luck within a pre-conceived and enforced set of rules; i.e., rewriting our odds of survival, thus fate, inside exploitative ludic schemes by pointedly redictating the material conditions (through ludo-Gothic BDSM) that represent “luck” as a variable the elite strive to manipulate for profit under Capitalism.

Unlike the Gothic mode—which tells of legendary things (undead, demonic and/or animalized monsters or places) with, as or within Gothic media as things to perform, create, or imagine/reimagine, wear, inhabit, occupy or pass through (we’ll explore all of these variants throughout the book)—Gothic theory explains the process behind all of this while it’s going on, has gone on, will go on. Guided by these theories, the re-education of sex worker emotions achieves the Six Rs through instructed critical analysis of sexualized art, but also praxial synthesis of good social-sexual habits; be it their own, someone else’s, or something to cultivate together, these collective sex-positive lessons are designed to teach emotional intelligence through a Gothic mode whose cultural imagination, when used in an iconoclastic sense, becomes a vulgar display of power in defiance of the state: it raises class, cultural, and racial awareness, mid-struggle.

(artist: Casper Clock)

The State: Its Key Tools; re: the Monopolies, Trifectas and Qualities of Capital

In service to the profit motive, the state requires the ability to defend itself through absolute means; i.e., us-versus-them dogma, cops-and-victims propaganda (re: copaganda), and terrorist/counterterrorist arrangements of privilege, authority and status/class flowing power towards the state. This basically happens by antagonizing nature as monstrous-feminine and putting it to work as cheaply as possible; i.e., to move money through nature, thus reify and maintain capital until the end of time. Often, this movement is guided by revenge in dualistic opposition; i.e., the whore has their revenge by thwarting profit through their bodies, artwork and labor anisotropically moving power, money and information away from the state and towards workers (by reversing terror/counterterror, thus abjection). The state, by comparison, accomplishes the movement known as “capital” using three basic things: the state trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital policing nature as monstrous-feminine.

(artist: jazminskyyy)

These ideas first introduce in Volumes Zero and One (and expand in Volume Two; e.g., “the whore’s revenge” coming from the Demon Module), but are so ubiquitous that I feel you should have access to their basic definitions regardless of which book volume you’re reading. I’ll list, then define them:

  • the monopolies: of violence, terror and morphological expression.
  • the trifectas: manufacture, subterfuge/deception, coercion—with a neoliberal “handle”: the profit motive; i.e., infinite growth, efficient profit(meaning value through exploitation, regardless if it is ethical or materially stable) and worker/owner division as disseminated through the three tines.
  • the qualities of capital: heteronormative, Cartesian, and setter-colonial (refer to the glossary definitions for these terms)

If, at any point, I say “the monopolies, trifectas [and/or] qualities of capital” moving forwards, these are what I’m referring to; i.e., the control of worker bodies and the violence, terror and morphological poetics orbiting them.

Defining them, let’s start with the monopolies:

  • of violence; re: Weber’s maxim, “a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (source).
  • of terror; re: Asprey’s paradox, from War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History (1994): “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it” (source). Even so, the state will try to monopolize it. Anyone who uses violence against them is a “terrorist” and anyone who uses violence in service to state aims is either a “counterterrorist” or at least not a terrorist.
  • of morphological expression; re: of my arguments regarding the state control of Gothic dialogs during the other two monopolies, animalizing workers in harmful predator/prey relationships (from Volume One):

the medieval character of state violence and terror cannot be destroyed during morphological expression, only subverted or contained through linguo-material “traps” we put into motion during revolutionary cryptonomy as an essential means of counterterrorist liberation; i.e., by throwing the setter-colonial character of heteronormativity into dispute through a rebellious medieval, postcolonial imaginary. Taking Hell back while doubling its colonial [forms; i.e., through] morphological[18] expression when using animalized Gothic aesthetics (with undead and demonic elements too, of course). To that, I want to quote a snippet from our thesis volume that will prove germane as we proceed:

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

So when I say “animalized” vis-à-vis Gothic aesthetics, this is predominantly what I mean […]

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

The resultant middle ground of this duality grants words like “demon,” “zombie,” or “animal” a double purpose for which the rest of the subchapter is divided: predator and prey. […] Domestication invokes a sense of the wild that is reclaimed by state forces to serve the profit motive, which rebellious agents must challenge and reclaim while being animalized. The larger struggle involving animalization constitutes an uphill battle that obscures one’s vision in the same crowded sphere. Inside it, space and time become a violent circle, one where endless war over state nostalgia constitutes ongoing dialectical-material struggles to keep with, or break from, current historical materialisms under Capitalist Realism: state violence dressed up as dated “protection/shelter” during our aforementioned emotional turmoil (stemming from criminogenic conditions; i.e., manufactured shortages, crisis and competition tied to images of the decaying fortress and its unholy armies) [source].

Second, the trifectas (also from Volume One):

The first bourgeois trifecta is the manufacture trifecta:

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

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

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

(artist: Seb McKinnon)

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

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

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

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

[…]

the third bourgeois trifecta—the coercion trifecta that results from these kinds of manufacture and subterfuge:

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Nat the Lich)

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

Again, all of these come into play during capital; i.e., as the state alienates, sexualizes and gentrifies/decays everything in service to profit, doing so through us-versus-them police violence, terror and morphological expression legitimized by state forces in state territories against state enemies/targets (anything the state needs them to be).

Abridged Manifesto Tree (of Oppositional Praxis)

Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa.

—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (2023)

Note: This “tree” is a kind of map concerning canon vs camp during oppositional praxis. It is first introduced and discussed extensively in Volume Zero, and referenced throughout my entire book series, in some shape or form. Less in Volumes One and Two, and more in Volume Three, its essential function is to articulate the flow of power and information during praxial synthesis. Think of it as a thought guide of sorts, one that informs you of the flow of my own arguments relative to various ideas orbiting and occupying them. The words in pink are keywords, which are defined and unpacked in Volume Zero (most are in the series glossary). —Perse

Proletarian praxis revolves around camping canon, which goes something like this (abridged, from Volume Zero’s manifesto tree):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis. They endorse

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

to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to a variety of bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil [through state arrangements of power relayed through the usual neoliberal stores: books and movies, but also videogames.]

There is also the basics of oppositional synthesis from our synthesis symposium in Volume One: girl talk (anger/gossip), monsters, camp. Refer to said symposium if needed; and “On Twin Trees” from Volume Zero, which talks about the manifesto tree more at length.

[source: “Base and Superstructure Theory,” 2013]

In a nutshell, Gothic Communism is “camping and recultivating the twin trees of Capitalism—the Base and Superstructure—during oppositional praxis, including its synthesis and catharsis [regarding the confrontation of generational trauma]” (source: Volume One). These are ideas that will appear more in Volume Three, aka the Praxis Volume; but it doesn’t hurt to have an in-text copy within Volume Two’s modules!

Footnotes

[13a] Cody Hamman’s “The Forest Hills Star, Shelley Duvall, Sits Down for an Interview with Grimm Life Collective” (2023).

[13b] Brandi Yetzer’s “Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio Never Worked With James Cameron Again After Filming a Torturous Scene” (2022).

[13c] Chadwick Jenkins’ “Suffering the Inscrutable: The Ethics of the Face in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc” (2018).

[13d] Original source: The Guardian, 2015—which has since been removed (undoubtedly to appease “Gamergate” misogynists because The Guardian are moderates at heart; i.e., they don’t take hard stances against capital, thus can’t push back against fascists).

[14] (from the glossary): The ludic contract is 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).

[15] (abridged, from the glossary): The magic circle is 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… (source).

[16] (from the glossary, abridged): My combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of fairly negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (which we’ll unpack during the “camp map” in our thesis volume).

[17] Walpole actually published the original manuscript in 1764 under a pseudonym without the qualifier “a Gothic tale” (which he added a year later after people pitched a fit that he—the son of the first British prime minster—had effectively forged a historical document and passed it off as genuine). The story was based off his architectural reconstruction (thus reimagining) of medieval history, Strawberry Hill House (a cross-medium tradition carried on by Gothic contemporaries/spiritual successors—e.g., William Beckford’s Vathek, 1786, and subsequent “folly,” Fonthill Abbey, in 1796—but also videogame spaces inspired by the cinematic and novelized forms previously build on real-life “haunted” houses: the Metroidvania).

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