This blog post is part of “All the World,” a sixth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil” (2024), as well as “Make It Real” for Volume One and “The Total Codex” for Volume Zero. Those promotions sought to promote and provide their respective volume’s individual pieces for easy public viewing in single-post form; re: for the Poetry Module, Undead Module and Demon Module, followed by my PhD and manifesto. “All the World,” by comparison, caps off my book series with a promotion for Volume Three; re: my Praxis Volume. As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “All the World’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)
Volume Three: Proletarian Praxis, part one: Sex Positivity and Sex Coercion
Haha, well now
We call this the act of mating
But there are several other very important differences
Between human beings and animals that you should know about (source)
—James M. Franks, “The Bad Touch,” on Bloodhound Gang’s Hooray for Boobies (1999)
(model and artist: Nyx and Persephone van der Waard)
Picking up where “Regarding Tokenism” left off…
Volume Three covers praxis, specifically the informed, continuous application of successful proletarian praxis as we interpret the Gothic past moving forward. Part one lays out sex positivity, sex coercion and the liminality between them in three chapters; part two will articulate the creative successes of proletarian praxis versus state praxis, mid-combat. Consider this prep before the fighting starts.
Foreplay: Praxis Volume Outline, part one
There’s nothing critically “redundant” about the Gothic in its more dated-looking forms […] ignoring the paradox of the retro-future’s own hopelessly outdated anachronisms, the wizard, knight, demon or damsel, etc, well as their various stages of performance: their castles, spaceships, graveyards, cathedrals, laboratories of mad science, and other cultural sites of phobias, stigmas and urban legends […] can all yield creative successes (of proletarian praxis) through dialectical-material roles as determined by function (the aesthetics is just the allure and appeal of power/playing with dead things); in short, they can all be gay as fuck if done in good faith, thus sex-positive/iconoclastic by camping canon with seemingly wizardly power (source).
—Persephone van der Waard, “Author’s Foreword: ‘On Giving Birth,’ the Wisdom of the Ancients, and Afterbirth” from Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (2023)
(artist: Anato Finnstark)
Oppositional praxis concerns our creative success versus the states. Before we can consider that push-pull, we need to outline the dialectical-material nature of creative success, and creative success itself for or against the state inside liminal territories:
- “With Harmony’s Help: Addressing Volume Three’s Grand Emptiness and Ambitions through a Good Friend” (feat. Harmony Corrupted—included with this post): A 2025 addendum that acknowledges the state of Volume Three—i.e., after returning to it, three years after starting it, and making various small changes to it, but mostly keeping it the same—and, at the same time, paying homage to Harmony Corrupted, my greatest muse and one of Sex Positivity‘s biggest inspirations after it began.
- “Introduction: Dialectical Materialism (with Monsters—included with this post)” Takes Volume Zero’s theory, Volume One’s synthesis and Volume Two’s past lessons on Gothic poetics (history and application) to outline the objectives by which to apply our project’s central Gothic theories; i.e., in a dialectical-material way using updated, posthumanist models (expanded beyond Cartesian thought) to better achieve Gothic Communism one step at a time.
- “Before the Plunge: A Dialectical-Material Summation of Gothic Communism’s Execution (in Opposition—included with this post)“: Outlines the dialectical-material execution through which proletarian praxis becomes possible, mid-opposition.
- Chapter One focuses on sex positivity and the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis—how Gothic Communism, when correctly performed, cultivates empathy under Capitalism through mutual consent, informed consumption/consent, de facto education and descriptive sexuality as things to materially imagine (often through ironic parody and “perceptive” pastiche) through Gothic poetics.
- Chapter Two explores the proletariat’s dialectical foil—sex coercion, whereupon Capitalism “zombifies” consumers into “lobotomizing” themselves and others, resulting in abject, fetishizing witch hunts, toxic love and criminal sexuality as historical-material outcomes that seek to control sex and thoughts/cultural attitudes about sex, as well as the sexist, obfuscating ambivalence of Gothic canon’s coercive BDSM, fetishes and kink.
- Chapter Three enters the “grey area” of cultural appreciation, examining: the culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive irony of Gothic counterculture’s reverse abjection with sex-positive BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality, queer-/homonormative gatekeeping and the ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence, but also their assorted discriminations begot from weird canonical nerds and the canonical media that turns them into harmful bigots.
With Harmony’s Help: Addressing Volume Three’s Grand Emptiness and Ambitions through a Good Friend (feat. Harmony Corrupted)
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto of 1764 is still accepted as the “father of the Gothic novel,” yet most observers of this novelette see it, with some justice, as a curiously empty and insubstantial originator of the mode it appears to have spawned (source).
—Jerrold Hogle, “The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic” (1994)
This is a 2025 addendum briefly (two pages) considers Volume Three has having big ideas it could never explore fully but which I was able to later with the help of friends; e.g., Harmony Corrupted, whose shoot material I commissioned them for throughout 2024 and 2025 will be used to fill the gaps in; i.e., on top of them being featured on this volume’s outer/inner and chapter cover sleeves: to give Volume Three—which written mostly on Blogger originally—a bit more hardcore nudity! Said material will be censored to hide Harmony’s eyes, as per a regular boundary between them and myself:
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
First, I’ll be featuring images of Harmony here or there: a fixture of great power and endless pride that I love to exhibit, and who fills in whenever I need them to. They’re a castle in the flesh, whose special bricks I have laid scattered through this older cathedral’s deepest dungeons. I’ve worked with many awesome sex workers in my time, but Harmony is above and beyond the best (re: having inspired the entirety of my Poetry Module[3], as well as dozens of exhibits in the Monster Modules, and being my cover model three times); i.e., they work hard, are stupidly gorgeous, and produce impeccable results: few asses come close, Harmony’s an offshoot of the Gorgon’s own!
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Second, the piece directly after is called “Before the Plunge,” but even when diving in, we’ll basically be doing “just the tip.” If that sounds confusing then I invite you consider the chapter summaries per chapter section (each with feature Harmony multiple times). You’ll notice there’s far fewer subdivisions (thus close-reads) than the rest of my series, and few if any of them dedicated to specific texts or individuals.
In short, I was thinking of things in dialectical-material language, albeit at its most basic; re: sex positivity versus sex coercion—with more of an emphasis on praxial opposition than liberation. The thesis arguments that would lead towards liberation—i.e., as something to push towards while developing Gothic Communism—would emerge when writing my manifesto and PhD after this manuscript was largely completed. I say “completed,” insofar as it had introduced a wide variety of talking points (to be holistic), many of which would be introduced here and only here; e.g., twinks and femboys. Meanwhile, other terms—especially ones I specifically coined, including “the liminal hauntology of war,” “revolutionary cryptonymy” and “the Shadow of Pygmalion”—would go on to make a variety of returns throughout the rest of my book series[4].
Here, though I was merely setting up shop, and consequently found myself going all over said shop. And while ignorance is no defense, here it’s merely a statement of fact; i.e., I installed the first stars of a very dark sky and then used that constellation to go where I wanted, picking up steam along the way. I could taste the palpable presence of mighty things, but only by grasping at them in ways that didn’t always bear fruit. But I never stopped playing with them through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (and various taboo subjects; re: rape play and murder fantasies), learning more and mastering ideas (re: “Back to Necropolis”) to eventually summon the Medusa to have the whore’s revenge. Furthermore, doing so happened as much through friends like Harmony as by myself—with Harmony and I in particular frequently doing rape play (re: “Healing through ‘Rape’” and the convulsionnaires, but also “Psychosexual Martyrdom“) to hammer out what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM at its most thesis-driven. Said revenge isn’t mine alone, then, but ours together as part of something bigger: the liberation of all whores, past and present, while empowering them in the graveyards of “Rome.”
The key to power is playing with past forms of it that are left behind; i.e., that survive us, and help workers remember individually what they can contribute collectively towards: what society has forgotten, but which through the Gothic mode is scattered cryptonymically all around us in ways we can recollect, reassemble and reeducate with. The more I played, the more I learned from the past while investigating it; i.e., as something to master while it mastered me. The state historically-materially generates tremendous confusion; we dialectically-materially reverse said confusion (thus abjection) inside the labyrinth and its infernal concentric pattern.
To it, the more the state rapes us without irony as monstrous-feminine dolls, the more we can rediscover and play with such things during ludo-Gothic BDSM: putting “rape” in quotes to break the myopia’s awful spell (fighting fire with fire, shadows with shadows, gorgons with gorgons, etc). Capital saddles us with strange appetites and toys to play with; learn from those who harm you if harm you they do, and then find others who don’t—i.e., to play with and leave better lessons behind, using the same whorish monster hero toys that everyone plays with for different reasons. Double them and what they use to control you, taking said control away from them through play on and off the same stages that liberation and exploitation occupy! The refrain is concentric, anisotropic, and ergodic in its fractal recursion, so there’s bound to be contradiction when doubling the past by returning to through calculated risk. But that is where power lies! Seek it out and play with it, leading to more emotionally/Gothically intelligent and class, culture and racially conscious workers! Normativity dies by straying into abject zones we reify. Development is a war of mirrors, so fight fire with Promethean fire! Kill your darlings, teetering between privilege and oppression!
(model and artist: Persephone van der Waard)
To it, Volume Three and its subsequent plunging into darkness faithfully serves as my Castle of Otranto—a modern-day Lady of Shallot’s murky suggestion of great things, yet strangely full and empty while seemingly covering much and little at the same time (re: Hogle, epigram). In the same way that Walpole’s castle did, Gothic Communism began as an incomplete shadow, and one I steadily built upon by constantly returning to it; re: including its rudimentary and insubstantial core. My PhD and manifesto would build on Volume Three’s grand survey—notably haunted by older authors—to steadily evolve into what, at least in my mind, I consider to be my finest work: my Monster Volume, summoning the Big Whore to have Medusa’s revenge; i.e., similar to Radcliffe and Lewis dabbling in Numinous energies that charged upon the same hellish fabric, I was blazing a trail with inadequate light while chasing ghosts, heading from Otranto to Udolpho and The Monk to The Italian through my own mastery of the Gothic mode, and subsequent meeting of great friends like Harmony Corrupted. Our bond filled the gaps between this volume and the others, but also patched up its own empty places with wonderful things to look at. “Stare and tremble!” indeed.
However truncated an afterthought that Volume Three ultimately is/feels like, then, Harmony is anything but; i.e., they’re not just my best model and muse among a pantheon of excellent cuties thanks to their numerous contributions, but an excellent and important thinker in actively shaping what Gothic Communism critically evolved into (versus Cuwu’s more passive and lateral inclusions, for instance). Not just hugging the alien, but fucking it mid-dialectic, they normalized the more radical, taboo aspects of play that ludo-Gothic BDSM evolved into; i.e., out of Volume Three’s inconstant flirting with demon BDSM, they supplied the distinction by already doing it themselves!
Love you, comrade!
—Persephone, 4/20/2025
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Introduction: Dialectical Materialism (with Monsters)
While much has been made of its gory and oppressive history, one fact is often overlooked: capitalism has thrived not because it is violent and destructive (it is) but because it is productive in a particular way. Capitalism thrives not by destroying natures but by putting natures to work—as cheaply as possible (source).
—Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things
(model and artist: Soon2Bsalty and Persephone van der Waard)
Capitalism is the banality of evil dressed up in centrist, neoliberal aesthetics, which regress and decay towards seminal tragedies through the state doing what the state always does: lie to and utterly exploit people for profit. Volume Three is focused on proletarian praxis as a dialectical-material process working in opposition with the state. Before we dive into its chapters, I briefly want to summarize dialectical materialism (in this introduction) and oppositional praxis (in the summary, next) based on what we’ve covered in Volumes Zero, One and Two.
As outlined by my PhD arguments in Volume Zero and the manifesto portion from Volume One, Gothic imagination is a constant socio-material process—the byproduct of, and response to, structures already in place under Capitalism. Volume Two took these theories and did two basic things: one, explored the Gothic’s complex, extensive history as having evolved side-by-side with Capitalism into its current, late-stage (more destructive and exploitative) form; and two, treated that poetic, cryptomimetic history as something to learn from when humanizing monsters in the present—i.e., of taking what has already been made in ghostlike forms and making it again, but more “awake” and ready to fight during the war of culture vs counterculture conducted through aesthetics for or against the state: its rights versus workers.
Now in Volume Three, we reach my book series primary aim returned to: applying what we’ve learned to our own struggles, thereby emphasizing the central importance that Gothic imagination plays during proletarian praxis; i.e., in liberating sex workers from Plato’s cave as proliferated under Capitalism, doing so seizing the means of production through one’s sexual labor as synthesized through iconoclastic art, thus becoming a ghostly, Numinous expression of our daily habits and emotional/Gothic intelligence, ability to gossip safely (to prevent rape and other forms of abuse) and express constructive anger/ subversively “quote” false likenesses that actually transmute Capitalism through its own stolen symbols and language: the Amazon and Medusa, orc and vampire, zombie and cyborg as regressive copycats that need to be recopied for our purposes—our “darkness visible” and its rebellious sound and fur(r)y exposing the propaganda of the state as harmful.
As we proceed, then, it’s vital to remember how these creative successes are made in a continuum; i.e., within cultural development as part of an ongoing uphill struggle during oppositional praxis under neoliberal Capitalism. Ergo, its rules need to be considered as part of a structure that has become considerably more developed as a means of exploiting workers in the Internet Age. As an artist and sex worker myself, my proposed starting point is the Superstructure; i.e., what we consume. Reshaping it and, by extension the socio-material things it affects, amounts to proletarian praxis that alters workers’ abilities to imagine a world beyond Capitalism in a sex-positive way.
For example, counterculture hauntology doesn’t disappear once created; it becomes a part of the material world, allowing for various lessons to be taught by revolutionaries, but also by those in power resisting change. The oppositional presence of counterculture utterly demands status-quo reprisals, which this volume explores in detail: appropriation, recuperation, neglect, genocide, etc. The state lies and kills, all while shoving its canonical, menticidal junk food down our throats: their ghost of the tyrant and nominal, false spectres of “Communism,” frozen in time (unable to improve beyond Marxist-Leninism’s actual and fabricated failures/missteps).
The rewards of disobedience far outweigh the risks, but especially the knowledge to enrich the world. Paul-Henri Thiry once wrote, “If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.” Centuries later, the same idea applies to late-stage Capitalism and its deities—knowledge of Capitalism as a structure, namely American gods personified by neoliberal and fascist virtues that treat the human body as something owned by the elite, including its sexual labor and coerced divisions of worker bodies, emotions and minds—the menticide of workers. Although a bourgeois chokehold on this labor and its symbolic representation is currently present, the Blakean maxim “all deities reside within the human breast” allows for a variety of oppositional forces to materialize. Once present, they may start the long task of reforming Capitalism as a historio-material cycle into Socialism, then Communism.
Marx called Communism “the end of history” as normally produced under Capitalism—scarcity, class struggle, war, racism, worker exploitation, genocide, etc; but also the various neoliberal commodities that conceal or romanticize these symptoms (re: Fisher’s “hauntologies” mentioned during the preface: critically-bankrupt, canonical renditions of an idealized time and place, re: Bakhtin’s “chronotopes”). For us, this means Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; i.e., as a something to develop during dialectical materialism that camps Marx through ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: to achieve intersectional solidarity during holistic study and liminal expression to camp the canon, hence achieve universal liberation in praxial-synthetic duality.
Those are concepts we won’t unpack here (as the previous volumes already do that). The struggle against Capitalism to develop Gothic Communism, then, starts with “archaeologies” that can disinter, thus recognize and retool these issues’ covert, mythologized influence on the public imagination. Such feats are achieved through critical analysis, not passive consumption, which this volume will now attempt to instruct in regards to sex work through proletarian praxis under Capitalism: a collective workers’ challenge to the end of history as defined by billionaires (or those optimistically defending them, like Francis Fukuyama’s obtuse veneration of “liberal democracy” following the end of the Cold War—”The End of History and the Last Man,” 1992) coldly selling bogus, uncritical monsters that make people stupid, then violent, then dead. Iconoclastic media absolutely loves to comment on historical-material’s vicious cycle in acceptable, packaged forms—Star Wars, for example, but also metal (and other forms of iconoclastic media we have yet to explore in this book):
Gothic-Communist development and its tenets (the Six Rs) starts with recognizing the working parts—literally the pieces that perform sexual labor or instruct people to imagine it under Capitalism. Human beings are complicated, possessing bodies and identities with ambiguously gendered and sexual components. Under neoliberal Capitalism, these variables are privatized in ways that keep people ignorant of ownership models beyond the one that currently exists. “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it […] in short, when it is used by us,” writes Marx. This operates in relation to the current material arrangement of things, wherein the elite own the means of production, forcing everyone else to purchase the products of their own exploited labor—not as simple commodities, but artistic icons that compel widespread ignorance and emotional unintelligence in a xenophobic way, but especially a carceral fear of the imaginary past that pushes the world towards atypical ways of thinking that critique the cryptonymic treachery of the state. This emotional vacuum/Gothic ignorance and its various socio-political outcomes, along with the material structures that produce them, are so historically predictable that they merit their own phrase—re: historical materialism, or that history is predicated on the material conditions that routinely bring them about; re: Marx’s nightmare.
Our historical-material focus, then, is xenophilic reunion: an end to the abject sexualization of labor from the 20th century to the modern day under neoliberal Capitalism. Capitalism sexualizes all workers to some degree; neoliberal canon, as a fairly recent phenomenon, compels sex work through a self-perpetuating illusion based on old legends, a historical-material effect authored by a linguo-material chain that disguises its obfuscating role in Capitalism’s historio-material function: the harmonized, coerced bondage of producers, products and consumers by the owner class manipulating the working class, pitting them against themselves (canonical praxis). While its material byproduct can be sex-positive, sexual expression under Capitalism has long been colonized. Sold back to an increasingly exploited working class in oft-hauntological ways, this process must be challenged through material counterparts that liberate sex workers by first affecting how people think about sex in a countercultural sense. This includes taking the Gothic mode and imagination back from the bourgeois and using it for revolutionary ends: to free the cuties and other sex workers of the world, who in turn can assist in freeing all workers from Capitalism’s zombie-vampire like grip, the canonical praxis of its army of zombie-vampires constituting that grip.
Not only can a Superstructure cultivated by the elite be resisted through reclaimed sexual labor, but the labor of artistic sexual expression can reopen worker minds, teaching them to think critically about sexualized media as something the elite try to monopolize/exploit. In the words of Frank Herbert, “He who controls the spice controls the universe!” which extends to sex, gender and conversations or media about sex and gender disseminated through the abjection, chronotopes, hauntology, and cryptonymy of a bourgeois-cultivated Superstructure, a crypt to be led out of with similar devices used in opposition: reverse abjection, Communist chronotopes, emancipatory hauntology and revolutionary cryptonyms.
For the elite, total control is impossible, can only be incrementally pursued with semi-potent praxis. For us sexy Communists, the sexual bondage of workers can be abjured in pursuit of a better world that still has Gothic media post-scarcity (the real barbaric past). This starts with decolonizing canonical illusions, which in our hands serve as proletarian “archaeologies” to be freshly remade or whose current functions can be retooled to our needs. For example, complicit cryptonyms can be repurposed to “mask” revolutionaries, hiding them from power—a bit like the flying monkey outfits stolen by the heroes the fortress of the Wicked Witch of the West, but for our purposes level against the “Wonderful” Wizard of Oz and his own weaponized, bourgeois doubles and generational illusions (which survive after he is dead and gone)—beards and various other “creative successes” outlined during my PhD’s manifesto tree (rephrased “Twin Trees“):
depicting mutual consent, descriptive* sexuality and cultural appreciation through informed consumption and ironic performance, including sex-positive fetishes, kinks, BDSM and Gothic sensations as revolutionarily cryptonymic (fragmented disguises endemic to a larger hidden barbarity that can be used to help investigators expose the issue, but also preserve in the message in a human, or at least humane, ghostly form—a friendly ghost).
*While descriptive sexuality includes asexual persons, the focus for Chapters One and Two will be on sexual orientation; Chapter Three will explore asexual orientation in detail.
These are the root of iconoclastic praxis as something to synthesize by transmuting canonical forms of sexualized labor. Canon sexualizes all workers, but does so dimorphically (“boys will be boys, girls will be mothers”).
The elite have their own masks, beards and grooming methods meant to condition workers into a generational state of xenophobic myopia, including fascists and centrists as undercover enforcers. Gustav Le Bon once wrote, “Whoever can supply [the masses] with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” Le Bon wrote this in 1895, at the beginning of America’s geopolitical rise under Capitalism; but in the shadow of the most recent symptoms of Capitalism-in-decline, his words still carry weight in mirrored sentiments. The neoliberal is a master of illusion, hiding their worst atrocities behind a veil of all-encompassing media. These myopic illusions consolidate their own power in ways that break imagination. In 1956, Meerloo called it menticide, a rape of the mind; Hogle, a crypt of the mind.
In 2023, today’s neoliberals commit atrocities like Reagan and Thatcher once did, using similar media control to present themselves in the best possible light—again, imposters. Not just themselves, but the neoliberal values they remediate through bourgeois canon—its “junk food” abjection, hauntology and disguises, etc, as “neutral.” As I wrote in the 2021 introduction for my discontinued book, Neoliberalism in Yesterday’s Heroes:
This includes overt propaganda, but also popular media that functions subversively as propaganda disguised as “neutral” entertainment. For example, the president of Tripwire writes, “As an entertainer, I don’t get political often.” But neutrality and nostalgia are hardly apolitical, and more overt political statements are backed by neutral media as default. Naturalizing/neutralizing war is a conservative or orderly stance that discourages the critique of war as a futile, doomed position (nations are inherently self-destructive). In that sense, this book ponders war and its heroes in a summarily insane manner. That is, I readily accept from the outset that pro-state/-capitalism defenders
-
- view words like Communism, Marxism, and Socialism as having single, prescribed definitions
- describe their intellectual variants (and their practitioners) as utopian, delusional, or seditious
- revise intellectuals in ways beneficial to the state
For example, in 1949’s “Why Socialism?” Albert Einstein wrote, “under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information.” Almost two decades later, Martin Luther King Jr. was framed as a Communist radical by the FBI, only to be revised by liberals and conservative postmortem—reduced to a single, infamous speech that seemingly encapsulated the entire civil rights movement while simultaneously robbing it of its inherently “criminal” elements.
The same logic applies to Sex Positivity‘s goals regarding sexuality and monsters as things to humanize/reclaim from the elite in xenophilic iconoclasm.
As a process of countercultural critical thought, dialectical-materialism recognizes how these opposing forces meet inside a material world that is anything but neutral: canon versus iconoclasm. Gothic Communism frames this within oppositional praxis, recognizing how bourgeois propaganda transforms the world into a Promethean crypt using canon, which turns sexual language (specifically the language of sex, bodies and gender) into compelled sex work that exclusively produces sex-coercive icons—i.e., bourgeois gods and castles to defend by the working class, who become monsters in defense of it. Within this larger process, sexism works on a complicated gradient. For every open sexist, there exist groups who fight them tooth and nail; for every worker protest, there is a counterprotest—for or against the status quo. Fascists and moderates historically offer false “revolutions” that uphold the status quo. This prompts the formation of groups that confusingly and complicitly uphold the status quo and its cryptonymic structures while posing as feminist liberators: TERFs, SWERFs and NERFs and their canonical-praxis-in-disguise.
“If you scratch a transphobe, a fascist bleeds.” This volume concerns TERFs within oppositional praxis—how they are neoliberal and fascist branches of feminism that ultimately assist in the continued exploitation of workers. As the companion glossary further outlines,
TERFs are Trans Exclusionary Radical 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.
Either group upholds the status quo, defending canon and its sex-coercive nature by rejecting sex-positivity not simply as a universal negative, but as a prime destroying force the elite can scapegoat by proxy. Using canon, the elite portray the crypt as a home, its inhabitants institutionalized to prevent its reconstruction into anything that might free them from its enchanting grip. The elite compel attacks by the defenders against deliberately marginalized groups, which they proceed to exploit: women, trans people, intersex persons, drag queens; non-Christians or non-Americans; people of color and other ethnic minorities, neurodivergent/ace persons, people with disabilities, and their various intersections.
(artist: Aurora Prieto)
This volume abjures the entire practice, fighting for sex worker rights by using Gothic-Communist dialectical materialism to expose Gothic canon’s sex-coercive nature as neoliberal/fascist propaganda:
- a copious visual rhetoric that ideologically reinforces the status quo on a systemic-material level
- something to defend from iconoclasts, precisely because those individuals are seeking equal treatment from the powers that be—i.e., their basic human rights as executed through actual material change, not high-minded ideas that never come to fruition
That is, Volume Three argues for a sex-positive solution using oppositional praxis to achieve the Six Rs: worker/Gothic reeducation through iconoclasm as a form of collective worker action. Achieved through social-sexual activism, iconoclasm humanizes workers by freeing their minds, re-empowering them with renewed ability to renegotiate as sex workers. It does so by treating sexual liberation as a basic human right, not a crime. This deconstruction—of canon’s automatic criminalization of descriptive, sex-positive sexuality—reunites workers with alienized concepts, but especially a reclaimed agency through bodily autonomy and self-identification as a creative means of resisting compelled labor through compelled gender roles, sex work, and icons; re: canonical praxis. Iconoclastic art becomes a critical-thinking tool—a sense of re-play with the past, whose reimagined “archaeological” means of common workers (and their allies) can be reproduced and released, dismantling elite hegemony at the nation-state level before replacing it (and the nation-state) with parallel societies structured around horizontal power and reclaimed language.
Development is the process by which Gothic Communism comes about. This demands oppositional praxis: retooled language and iconoclastic symbols operating in strict opposition to the nation-state and bourgeoisie interests, where “working people [confront] the capitalist state [by building] their own organs of political and social power” (source: John Merrick’s “The Separation of the ‘Economic’ and the ‘Political’ under Capitalism,” 2016). These organs include the iconoclastic artistic expression of the human body as an extension of our sexualities, genders, emotions and oft-exploited labor tied to a continuously reimagined past, one whose methodologies have been cleverly reworked to allow people to imagine a reassembled world beyond Capitalism’s “perfect” past. “Decaying” in the present, the deceitful hauntologically of Capitalism has no future beyond endless persecution, war and genocide. While these are cryptonymically pushed to the frontiers, the domestic space is canonically sold as already-decaying and under attack. Eventually the state’s decay becomes hyperreal, a critical buildup of toxins eating through the counterfeit to corrupt the organism at a domestic level—from brain to eyeballs, head to toe. All will be devoured and devour in turn anything the state wishes it to—until the damage is too severe and the state, like a diseased corpse, falls apart.
To avoid this Promethean catastrophe, restoration of the proletariat away from Capitalism demands intersectional activism. Intersectionality requires two key steps:
- deliberately acknowledging the relative privileges and abuses of various groups. Atomized by the elite, these groups must learn to reassemble against a common master— to “form Voltron,” if you will (minus the canonical trappings, whose Zombie-Vampire forms we’ll examine in Chapter Four)
- combining various schools of thought to work harmoniously towards this union: Gothic Communism’s 4th wave, intersectional feminism; Marxism, ethnic studies, queer studies, Gothic studies, etc.
Keeping this mind, I want to dialectically summarize many of the main points from the companion glossary and Volumes One and Two—to summarize their larger argument about proletarian praxis as something to synthesize/transmute canon with during oppositional praxis by learning from the monsters of the past, effectively standing on their shoulders when making our own. Then we’ll move onto Chapter One.
Before the Plunge: A Dialectical-Material Summation of Gothic Communism’s Execution (in Opposition)
Now, I’d pause here in the story for a moment to underscore the importance of making proper choices. I was hungry. When you’re hungry, you should eat food. Food is defined as “a nutritious substance that people consume to maintain life.” This is what food is. These days, the definition of the word “food” has been bastardized and the meaning has been broadened to include veritably any material that can be digested, or rather, chewed and swallowed without causing death or severe illness. “Haribo Sugar-Free Gummy Bears” are not food. They aren’t even from this planet. I imagine their origins being conceived in a boardroom in hell by a top team of Creative Pain Administers, with senior-level Demons rubbing their hands together in ghoulish delight as Hell’s Chief Chemist slowly lifts the veil on their new creation.
—excerpt from an Amazon review, cited in illuminaughtii[1]‘s “The Sugar Free Gummy Bear Review That Will Change Your Life” (2020)
(artist: Xinaelle)
Whereas my past work has focused on neoliberal/fascist propaganda within heroic media, this book focuses on a specific kind of propaganda—i.e., heteronormative canon, and how the bourgeoisie produce it as a kind of revered, sex-coercive media that ideologically weakens worker control over their own bodies, genders and sexualities when consumed. This occurs through oppositional praxis, which has two sides that we’ll summarize from the manifesto before diving into Volume Three proper.
These sides are bourgeois praxis and proletarian praxis and we’ll re-examine them each in turn.
The first half of oppositional praxis, bourgeois praxis, is xenophobic; it employs the Three Cs (or Doubles) of Canon: sex coercion, carceral hauntology and complicit cryptonymy—prescriptive, commodified appeals that deprioritize, devalue and discourage worker agency in relation to canonical nostalgia as a kind of mental “crypt” that atrophies “active art” as a socio-material continuum of critical thought.
Indicative of the Superstructure, the elite can’t own the public imagination any more than they can regulate all activity performed under Capitalism. They can privatize the Base, financially incentivizing carceral media, complicit remediation, and bourgeois conduits of material exchange concomitant on exploiting workers for their labor through a myopic Gothic imagination. While this includes forcing asexual people to perform sex work, Capitalism sexualizes all workers to some extent, enforcing the colonial binary of a toxic status quo whose iconic simulacra not only divide AMABs and AFABs into men and women, but hideous monsters and doll-like novelties. Canon alienates us from ourselves, our labor, our bodies by controlling how we think and behave through what we consume. It’s (cheap, coercive) junk food that turns workers into heteronormative proponents: centrists, Nazis, TERFs et al, but also unironic/ironic victims (fascists are victimized and exploited by Capitalism).
Something to bear in mind as we proceed into Volume Three: In heteronormative propaganda, home is nostalgic, meaning nostalgia becomes something to defend from outsider forces pegged as disguised alien insiders by declared insiders. Gothic liminality is where iconoclasm thrives, working with a fear of inheritance to help de facto educators foster perceptive pastiche in trojan forms; i.e., sow a dissident line of questioning with revolutionary cryptonymy directed at the status quo through their own conflicted sense of self/identity as something for perceived strongmen to attack in assigned scapegoats by. Meanwhile, the elite and their proponents will try to normalize the conflict as something not to question, thus ensure Capitalist Realism amid decay as nostalgic. Queer survivability hinges on shapeshifting within the very chaos they engender (so to speak), whereas fascist “survival” defends the kingdom from imposters enemies-of-the-state; i.e., the Promethean quest of a closed, liminal space to colonize parallel societies with using the Imperial Boomerang and its liminal hauntology of war. —Perse, back in 2023
(exhibit 61a1: Artist: Ariel Zucker-Brull. The heteronormative exhibit and its criminal hauntologies deliberately portrayed the decayed future as sexually dimorphic, generally with a complete absence of trans people or their total demonization in dark, inhuman forms. More common is the fantasy of the curvy white damsel threatened by technophobic variants of the dark Frankenstein’s monster—their mighty bodies and tools of rape designed by mad science and out of control centuries after the originators have “died.” It’s criminogenic apologia, generally with a Satanic panic flavor [which serves to demonize queer people as thoroughly abstracted/associated with occult symbols co-opted by the elite and their proponents].)
As canonical junk food, these monsters announce the established order in sexually dimorphic bodies surrounded by carceral hauntologies, including standardized, “slum-like” spaces with complicitly cryptonymic, linguo-material effects; i.e., supplied by willing supporters of Capitalism who are financially interested or motivated to not imagine something beyond it, thus conceal it on purpose (exhibit 61a2). Though frequently haunted by Gothic sensations/spectres of Marx, canonical variants of these feelings are coercive, produced inside “fear factories” patently designed to disempower consumers and keep them callow—too afraid to expose the decay’s source or look beyond into forbidden sites of potentially better things beyond Capitalism; too weak-willed to challenge authority’s lies in the interim. Pacified and obedient in increasingly horrifying ways, they uncritically buy everything up like zombies, cushioned by personal property whose infantilizing nostalgia promote the idealized home as something to constantly rebuild in a perfectly decayed form: the once-upon-a-time of a decaying fortress that can be restored to greatness (with the caveat that this “greatest” cannot proceed beyond Capitalism). In times of crisis, they will rise to defend it, necromantically summoned by the authors of their altered states-of-mind (who only increase the dosage or alter the body and the mind by linguo-materially means, transforming the already-loyal to bigger and better killers—the stuff of nightmares).
(exhibit 61a2: Various pieces by Dcoda or myself, updated for the book. These include my commissions of their work as originally modified by me. Generally I would supply my own drawings of my own characters for them to draw [bottom-middle: Penny Montague, dragon priestess; top-middle: Siobhan, also featured in exhibit 101a1 with Revana; middle-right: Virago, also featured in exhibit 37f; re “Meeting Jadis“] as well pose instructions/models for reference [the top-left drawing of Revana was inspired by Kristen Stewart’s diving suit from Underwater, 2021]. Once completed, Dcoda would supply the sketches and/or line art, basic shading and flat colors; I would complete the backgrounds and render the final shading. The commissions represent a shared vision/collaboration of my characters as sex-positive embodiments of proletarian praxis, including the negotiation behind funding and reifying them. Similar to tipping on OnlyFans, commissioning artists isn’t just vital to proletarian praxis as an idea; it helps support the workers who synthesize this theory in their day-to-day lives; for examples of me being commissioned, consider Odie‘s many and generous commissions over the years, exhibit 101a1.)
By comparison, our second half of oppositional praxis, proletarian praxis, is synthesized by sex-positive artists working in concerted, xenophilic solidarity (exhibit 61a2, above): the Three Iconoclastic Doubles of Gothic Communism (the other pair of the Six Doubles, which opposes the Capitalist pair in relation to workers, the material world, and nature). This creative foil generates sexualized artwork in iconoclastic ways—to achieve social-sexual activism that unites all laborers, including sex workers, through radical empathy and imagination. In the hands of revolutionaries, this intensively creative mode deconstructs the status quo piece-by-piece by de-privatizing creativity (what Mr. Darcy might have smugly once called “female accomplishments”) in ways crucial to solving problems that Capitalism not only doesn’t want to solve; it creates them to maintain a Symbolic Order over workers it ruthlessly exploits for profit. Gothic Communism is an active process; activism is detection, stopping this exploitation by detecting its existence through linguo-material reminders of trauma.
As “The Six Gothic-Marxist Tenets and Four Main Gothic Theories” established, iconoclastic artists are emotionally/Gothic intelligent activists who use their honed senses—and close ties with their bodies, sexualities, genders, labor and nature in connection with the material world—to not just act like domestic-proletarian detectives and savvy gossips/code-switchers, but emancipatory “archaeologists” that help society reimagine the future through perceptive pastiche; i.e., the reclaimed monsters whose reclaimed poiesis we explored in Volume Two. Through this kind of proletarian transmutation, iconoclasts lead workers away from corporate monopolies on the hauntological past. To do this, they build elaborate strategies of misdirection through art over generations, which helps workers become more emotionally intelligent, actively absorbent and sex-positive, often through Gothic language as a liminal teaching device: how not to be duplicitous and violent for the state while keeping the BDSM ritual and its kinky monsters—its ceremonial victims as something to warn of state abuse while subverting it in frank, open ways. We have to acknowledge historical-material dangers as we teach people to not only value trust, but see it as incredibly sexy and hot.
As introduced in Volume One, this can have a “flashing” feel to it (re: “Healing from Rape” alluding to exhibit 53a from “Furry Panic,” exhibit 34a1b2b2a1a2 from “What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why” and exhibit 34b3b2 from “My Experiences,” exhibits 89 and 101a, here, etc)—exposing ourselves to reactionary outrage/moderate condescension (see, below: exhibit 61b) and genocide as we try to teach better ways that convey the unspeakable in healthy forms; i.e., good monster sex, healthy rape fantasies and other extreme forms of traumatic healing that accrete sublimated forms (exhibit 84a) that can still critique the status quo’s heteronormative defenders/nuclear family structure and shame/guilt control language that comes with it. This transmutation into proletarian monster porn or other revolutionary forms can be incredibly stressful and perilous. Likewise, red light/green light exist for a reason, so only do what you can handle!
(exhibit 61b: Top, artist: Yeero; left-middle: Auxtasy; right-middle: unknown; bottom-left: unknown, uncredited in source; bottom-middle: Bewyx; bottom-right: Cian Yo. Videogame art is not only prone to replication; it’s rife with sexism and general theft that dehumanizes all sex workers, including artists [more examples of this “Barbie Doll effect” in Blizzard’s canon, consider exhibit 73b]. Horny dudes share the art, but refuse or “forget” to credit the artist. Videogames generally feature women as composite monster-entities, where multiple artists follow an older tradition marketing to a heteronormative male audience [Jessica Rabbit/Gozer, exhibit 95]. While the team often slaves to a single “perfect” woman out of recycled parts, the artists are conspicuously credited as a larger corporate brand nine times out of ten [short of industry “names” like Drew Struzan, of course]. If many professional artists don’t stand a chance at being recognized and respected, what do you think happens to the little fish, especially the iconoclastic ones?)
As also explored in Volume Two, monsters and porn are liminal propositions—denoting a presence of conflict and transition, but especially rape fantasies, which denote the presence of actual rape/worker exploitation happening somewhere in the industry and larger world. Pastiche, likewise, is the “exhaust” of oppositional praxis. Our goal, as iconoclastic sex workers, is to decolonize lot of them by celebrating mutual consent through liminal rituals that grant historical victims paradoxical agency in the natural-material world. Said performative agency grant victims of past trauma catharsis, but also check traumatizing gargoyles by playfully fashioning their own within negotiated boundaries: to warn of what isn’t mutually consensual through the same basic ritual of peril. The deciding factor is appropriative vs appreciative peril—how sex workers are made into monsters as targets of state violence.
Sex work denotes a degree of risk that appreciative peril can minimize. Regardless of what people might think at first glance, sex workers are still demonized even if they behave within heteronormative boundaries. Cis-het white women, for example, are simultaneously objectified to alienizing extremes under Capitalism, then demanded to perform these coerced roles in canonical media: the damsel-in-distress, the princess pussy at the end of the hero’s journey (which is always further and further delayed until after the mission—i.e., the warrior’s death). But iconoclastic, slutty tomboys, cowgirls and space Amazons et al can absolutely express mutual consent in the same basic ritual. We queer folk love Zelda ‘n shit. However, we also materialize slutty Zelda or Brigitte as iconoclastic educators do: to create, exhibit and interpret art through our own synthesized praxis under duress. As a result, we will either be criticized, craved or condemned by class traitors (men as the universal client, women as the universal chattel, and various forms of tokenism)—all forms of coercive consumption under Capitalism. Maybe we don’t want to be chewed up and spit out?
Consider D.va from exhibit 61b, above (who definitely has a moe look to her). Provided she’s showing her pussy to a mutually consenting audience, there’s no abuse taking place when she flashes us. However, here is a “slut bias,” with men generally seen as “wanting it” by aggressive girls not taking the hint (as this clip with Elvis demonstrates, the girl definitely not asking for permission before trying to suck Elvis’ face off; source: Vali Greceanu, “Elvis Impact at Girls,” 2021). But this gender-swap is far less common than cis-het men abusing any AFAB or perceived-female person regardless of what “she’s” wearing. They could be in a G-string bikini, a nun’s habit or a burka and segregation or integration is no defense from rape culture and heteronormative men as “victimized” by those “heart-breaking bitches.” Can a woman “dig” for gold? Can queer people? Sure! Is it something they want to do because that’s “how ‘women’ naturally are?” No, it’s criminogenic/compelled, then reactively punished against—shamed, chattel-raped, killed (despite men historically being prospectors for gold under settler colonialism, the hypocrites). As victims to reclaim, this includes the ritual sacrifices as fetishes that still represent a likeness of exploited workers: School girls can be sluts and want to play naughty games—want to be “ravished,” even. They just don’t want to be actually attacked or raped for it.
The same goes for any sex worker/sexualized worker carrying/cultivating an industry brand. Cosplayers, for instance, are really just worker uniforms projected onto consumers—who synthesize various worker roles in service of or against the state treatment of the image being worn: the working woman vs the scapegoated whore. Power stems from showing off descriptively without being blamed for it, which feels good but also empowering through boundaries and trust being respected on multiple registers. This can be taught in opposition to canon; i.e., state-corporate monopolies on violence that compel forced boundaries (segregation) and boundary violations (rape and dominance).
Indeed, the whole point of iconoclastic praxis is to establish boundaries that must be respected, not compelled through brute force (anyone who argues otherwise is a figurative or literal cop/class traitor). Drawing these lines in the sand is something that can happen in person, but also in sex worker/social-sexual situations with workers going from point A to point B. We’ll touch upon this more in the “Recognizing Empathy” section in Chapter One; all the same, I want to do a quick compare-and-contrast. Sex work nowadays is generally done in ways that could protect workers regardless if its intended by those in power (who do not care). However, neoliberal corporations like OnlyFans still exploit workers doing work for them on a regular basis. Regardless, it is far, far safer to do sex work online, with a buffer between you and the dangerous client as you “flash” them than it is turning tricks in a dingy flophouse paid for in cash face-to-face (stingy Johns can quickly turn sex workers into Jane Does, if you follow me; or they can fleece you of your labor Tangerine-style, 2015, as my 2019 review for the film explores). Exploitation is uneven, but also imperfect, allowing for unique opportunities to arrive that grant sex workers “lucky shields” by which to conduct iconoclastic praxis.
(source: Daily Mail’s “Christie Brinkley, 65, shows off her age-defying looks as she reprises role […] 36 years after iconic National Lampoon Vacation role,” 2019)
My friend Mavis, for example, once flashed a truck driver driving next to here all the way to Chicago in the 1980s. They were on the same trucking interstate feeding into the city atrium; the trucker could see her but couldn’t he touch her. An ace person, Mavis delights at the attention of sexually interested men without having to have sex with them, especially the blue collar male worker as someone to fantasize about; i.e., the liminal privilege of elevated (often) white, cis-het women afforded rape fantasies in popular fiction that allow them to actually broach catharsis and playfully establish boundaries against persons who feel like they’re owed sex (the biggest nightmare/hurdle for sexist men being the encounter of women who tease or play with them, but don’t actually want to have sex). Likewise, if older industry women abused by sex work can give a voice to their normally “voiceless,” critically-blind heroines—i.e., Nina Hartley (exhibit 47b1a, “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives“)—then iconoclastic artists can improvise, using whatever “windscreens” come along to keep themselves safe as they draw their own creative lines in the sand. Protecting oneself during oppositional praxis is the essence of proletarian synthesis.
For genuine activists, development towards Communism more broadly requires its “creative successes” to happen during iconoclastic praxis (which I’ll list one more time for emphasis): depicting mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation through informed consumption and ironic performance, including sex-positive fetishes, kinks, BDSM and Gothic sensations as revolutionarily cryptonymic iconoclastic ways that subject them to danger. Unlike sex-positive activists, however, moderates and reactionaries perform these “successes” in bad faith, upholding the status quo on an ideological and material level by pointedly attacking marginalized groups, but also social-sexual activists (the focus of this book being trans people, sex workers and iconoclasts). Such impostors include TERFs and SWERFs, who, despite calling themselves feminists, are sex-coercive, not sex-positive; this includes their cryptonymic regalia, adorned as moderate activism but indicating the same overarching crisis that revolutionized cryptonyms would (the difference between them is dialectal-material context, a recurring theme in this book).
Though unethical and inhumane, TERFs function as a smaller symptom inside a bigger disease: Capitalism. While Marxism encourages group and self-potentiation through emancipated labor, Capitalism exploits the labor of others to empower the elite; neoliberal Capitalism uses “counterfeit” nostalgia to keep workers ignorant of the obfuscating role and historio-material outcome emanating from pro-bourgeois illusions. The elite privately own the means of production—from the banks that process transactions, to the platforms on which sex workers work, to the bodies and images associated with them (or vice versa). In doing so, they seek to own that which they have neither right or ability to actually possess (at least not forever): people and their imaginations, as framed through a Symbolic Order whose canonical, carceral, cryptonymic-hauntological propaganda advertises the whole practice as “correct,” until one day manufactured consent is achieved. Drugged and zombified, hell is a prison without shackles or walls; it is the language of creative freedom turned in on itself and disarmed, the image of witch something to wear while unlucky parties are lined up and shot.
As my PhD determines
Correctness is tricky. As stated during the “Regarding Hard Kinks” disclaimer, correctness can mean “what is right, or universally ethical—i.e., pertaining to basic human rights (and the health of the planet’s ecosystems and the humane treatment of animals)”; or it can mean “socially acceptable— i.e., correct according to the ethical beliefs of a specific group,” which under Capitalism systemically favors the in-group historically-materially exploiting the out-group for the profit motive. This means that as long as profit occurs, fucking the monster (xenophilia) or killing it (xenophobia) is acceptable under Capitalism in harmful, sex-coercive forms (aka efficient profit) (source: “Thesis Body “).
As we shall see, correctness dialogically amounts to interpretations of media made by consumers towards producers, be those individual authors or giant corporations. These interpretations are not fixed and can easily change given the proper push. For these reasons, those in power continuously manipulate the eyes of the public in ways that favor them (their image, or optics, but also their material conditions). By using canon to valorize billionaires (owners) and dehumanize/stupefy workers, neoliberals stress negative freedom for the elite; they advertise sex-positive ideas—including Gothic “false alarms” or “fake solutions”—in bad faith, using girl bosses and other deceptively appropriative tactics to sell war, thus maintain the status quo.
At the elite level, the status quo can be summarized as the roomful of suits. Their “neutral” appearance belies an inherently destructive nature far more extreme (through its longevity) than any dark lord: Neoliberals reliably outlast and outproduce fascists (whose tenure is generally short-lived). As the companion glossary notes, this concept is generally referred to as the banality[2] of evil—re: “destructive greed minus all the gaudy bells and whistles: the men (suits) behind the curtain (canon)” operating as neoliberal desk murderers.
Capitalism is always in crisis, policing itself through periods of routine decay that weaponize manufactured insecurities, enemies and divisions against the out-group by the in-group. Relative to those in power are those who seek power. Whereas neoliberals worship Capitalism as benign by hiding its material function over a long period of time, fascists seek short-lived, hierarchical power through equally unethical, media-driven means. Alternatively, sex-positive individuals are social activists who seek to replace the current world order by punching up. By discouraging the worship of vertical power through reverse abjection, social-sexual activists denormalize mass exploitation and genocide, shifting society away from nation-states and towards egalitarian, horizontal power (aka development, in Marxist terms). Called Anarchism, this new arrangement of power promotes basic human rights through improved material conditions for all people (not just the elite)—a permanent paradigm shift away from Capitalism.
This strategy is dialectical-material, creative praxis recoding the Superstructure through material iconoclasm as an oppositional force. The rights of sex workers become something to invoke, those exploited by Capitalism presenting themselves as exploited humans through reverse abjection as an emancipatory-hauntological force that breaks the generational curse. Laid down by those in power and carried about by those subservient to them, the curse must be addressed through relative means: by illustrating their basic human rights as something to empathize with in sex-positive, emancipatory-hauntological, revolutionarily-cryptonymic ways. In doing so, sex-positive artists are iconoclasts who seek to
- undermine neoliberal and fascist stigmas against sex workers, including sexism and transphobia as things to subvert using xenophilia
- help sex workers gain relative ownership over their own labor, emotions and education, thus improve their own material conditions through horizontal arrangements of materials and power
Artists often represent themselves as sex workers, doing this work voluntarily or compelled to by the elite. Not only does sex worker labor stem from their literal bodies, which also act as conspicuous extensions of their personal identities tied to images of a romanticized, reimagined past; capitalists exploit these identities through canon by claiming private ownership over the artistic output of sex workers. This is only something to cultivate, not literally own the same way one owns a factory. However, canonical praxis monopolizes the Gothic mode as oppressive, in turn making popular media sex-coercive, which alienates workers from nature and alienizes them inside the material world: as monstrous-feminine whores to pimp during the dialectic of the alien.
(artist: H.R. Giger)
Resisting the dehumanizing illusions of state-corporate privatization is a group effort, combating the alienation of sex workers as both a casual factor (workers are alienated from their labor during compelled sex work) and deliberate marketing tactic: Capitalists intentionally alienate workers who seek to reclaim their labor by using abjection to present them in progressively alienating ways (often quite literally as monsters, including surreal ones, above):
- One, sex workers are viewed as advertisements for corporations to sell and consumers to purchase; i.e., human billboards that advertise profitable commodities, not human rights.
- Two, this exploitation is downplayed, while its profitability is celebrated.
- Three, the exploited are generally dehumanized, abjected as demonic sex objects or criminals—to consume without regard for their human rights, deserving only of ridicule, derision and shame.
- Four, it demonizes critics by framing them as standing in the way of American (thus global) consumerism—specifically social activists that seek to upset the current arrangement of power by arguing for basic human rights, including body ownership as an important step towards material equality and post-scarcity.
The result is many middle-class people who consume canon voraciously and think (or at least posture) themselves as not being sexist; but in truth, remain hostile towards seeing sex workers as human. Their hostility extends to genuine and ethical, social-sexual activism as something to express in iconoclastic visual language by those who actively punch up—activism as merely a means thought sex work of gaining control over one’s own life through sex work as a validating and often asexually cathartic, pro-labor [thus genderqueer] sentiment: “By helping us reach parts of our sexuality, our trauma, our kinks, and our joy that so many of us cannot touch in any other way, sex workers’ work goes far beyond mere physical intimacy” (source: Raksha Muthukumar’s “How Queer Sex Workers Can Help Us Learn to Love Ourselves, 2022).
Passive or active, anyone who resists the system will be attacked, but especially those who rally in defense of their human rights:
The modular nature of the free market spawns a complicated legion of moderates and reactionaries. However, as stated in the “camp map,” from Volume Zero, hostility towards sex workers generally manifests in four basic ways under canonical praxis; re (from “On Twin Trees” and “Scouting the Field“):
- open aggression
- condescension
- reactionary indignation
- DARVO (“Deny Accuser Reverse Victim/Offender”)
We’ll get to these throughout the rest of the volume (and return to them in Volume Zero). For now, though, we’ll start with sex positivity challenging that paradigm.
Onto “Chapter One: Sex Positivity (opening and “Illustrating Mutual Consent”)“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] A recommendation of Zeuhl’s. In keeping with Zeuhl’s reputation aging like milk, so too did this recommendation. As of 2023, illuminaughtii—or Blair Zoń, outside of YouTube—was exposed for being an abuser, including financially dominating business/relationship partners working for her (not unlike Jadis abusing me by literally holding a roof over my head to gaslight me with; re: “Escaping Jadis”). There’s a gazillion videos on YouTube covering it; e.g., Internet Anarchist’s “The Deserved End of iilluminaughtii…” (2025). She’s also an extensive plagiarist and hypocrite.
[2] As previously mentioned, Disney explores this concept surprisingly well in Andor (The Canvas, 2023). Star Wars is generally known for binarizing morality—albeit from a rebel perspective, with an American Imperial allegory hidden behind Nazi visual tropes. However, Andor drops much of the good-versus-evil space operatics to treat the fascist regime of the empire in Marxist terms: through dialectical material language. Suddenly the storm troopers can’t miss, becoming capable of the brutal genocide Episode 4 hinted at by executing Luke’s aunt and uncle on Tatooine (conversely James Cameron’s canon is far more neoliberal, despite being inspired by Star Wars—a concept we’ll return to in Chapters Four and Five).
[3] Re: “Haunting the Chapel: A Cum Tribute to Harmony Corrupted” and “‘That Ass Is a Higher Truth’: Leaving the Castle; or, Bookending Harmony Corrupted” (2024).
[4] This volume will repeatedly and retrospectively elude to said returns; i.e., with block quotes and parenthetical exhibit numbers, which I have updated accordingly for its 2025 debut (I’ve also replaced the asterisks with footnotes). Any exhibit from exhibit 61a1 onwards is in Volume Three; any exhibit before that number is in another book volume and will include the source title with the exhibit being referenced. This volume was originally written before I devised the exhibit system, but I have since added some exhibits and allude to many more, besides. Hopefully if there’s a topic here that you feel isn’t explored enough, there will be routes provided to where I’ve done it to death! Also refer to my compendiums on ludo-Gothic BDSM and Metroidvania for some handy reference guides!
