This blog post is part of “Make It Real,” a fifth promotion originally inspired by the three I did in 2024 with Harmony Corrupted and Romantic Rose: “Brace for Impact,” “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil.” The first promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Make It Real” shall do the same, but with Volume One/the manifesto (versus “The Total Codex” promoting Volume Zero/the thesis volume). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “Make It Real’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume One is already written/was released on Valentine’s 2024! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
Nature Is Food, part one: The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis; or Outlining Girl Talk, Menticide, the Liminal Expression of Subversive Revolution and “Perceptive” Pastiche in the Face of Cartesian Trauma (feat. Medusa, Stigma Animals and Georgia O’Keefe)
“Gossip is instructive. It tells which way the wind is blowing.”
—Oz, the Great and Terrible, Wicked (1995)
Picking up where “Synthesis Symposium: Nature Is Food (opening and part zero)” left off…
We arrive at part one of the roadmap, which again is a symposium-style examination/illustration of “the basics,” or pure reductions of our synthetic oppositional groupings. It explores our pedagogic emphasis during oppositional praxis as something to synthesize and instruct to others; i.e., oppositional synthesis with a proletarian agenda that is cultivated—to prevent war and rape against nature, specifically Cartesian treatments of nature as food: nature as female/monstrous-feminine food tied to the profit motive, which alienates workers from nature by fetishizing and commodifying them as extended beings ripe for the harvest. Ending the harvest demands raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and, by extension, a class/cultural awareness that leads to systemic catharsis through trauma writing and artwork as something to express and teach through a basic, de facto educational approach. Our instructional focus during ludo-Gothic BDSM is something I call “girl talk,” or open, preventative communication versus state menticide and bad communication; i.e., our challenging of the state’s bad education through liminal, monstrous expression that encourages subversion and perception useful to proletarian aims confronting trauma by suggesting it (aka revolutionary cryptonymy). In the interests of issuing healthy girl talk, we’ll also have to discuss Medusa and stigma animals, but also people like Georgia O’Keefe who attempt to express themselves in relation to nature-as-abject (re: the whore to harvest, and for us to camp).
We’ll get to them. First, the basics, themselves.
For the proletariat, the goal of synthesizing praxis is to prevent universal war and rape (of workers and nature) by processing systemic (Cartesian) trauma and dogma through creative successes that invoke monstrous language; i.e., by establishing social-sexual connections through basic behaviors useful to the development of a post-scarcity (non-capitalist) world versus hopeless alienation and blind revenge; e.g., the abject, furious slaughtering of the Romanovs or the beheading of Louis XVI.
In terms of making social-sexual connections, our Gothic-Communist aim is to teach workers to holistically “put two-and-two together,” thus reconnect with nature and the material world in ways that Capitalism abjects: nature as alienated from workers and workers from it, including workers as natural beings—our labor, bodies, sexualities, genders and emotions, pastiche, genitals, etc. Though all are valuable to think about, with, or through, our emotions are especially useful as a critical-thinking device that likewise learns from the past through the Gothic mode; i.e., a return to irrationality or pre-Enlightenment expression, minus the Cartesian stigma of pointless madness or disempowering hysteria (often presenting in literal bodily forms; e.g., “immodest” fat bodies presented in a “dark” aesthetic, below) as grappling with “correct” and “incorrect forms” through the basics of oppositional praxis. Keeping with the spirit of instruction, part one will introduce and outline these basics in a symposium-like style.
(artist: Tana the Puppy)
The “basics” constitute something that we’ve touched upon so far in the book, but now which I thoroughly want to stress: instruction of good praxis through basic-yet-essential social-sexual behaviors. While our thesis was pure theory, which the manifesto focused on simplifying—i.e., through intimate and interpersonal expressions of trauma—doing so has led up to the cultivation of rudimentary social-sexual habits that make up good praxis as something to instruct; Volume One’s second (shorter) half concerns instruction through said habits inside an anti-Cartesian, non-binarized way of life. Good praxis, then, is demonstrably achieved when theory becomes productively synthesized to challenge Cartesian dualism; i.e., can be simplified to common behaviors that amount to collective worker action solidarized against the state. The basics boil down from the synthetic oppositional groupings that the Six Doubles manifest through:
- destructive vs constructive anger—i.e., possessive or bad-faith, destructive anger’s defense of the state vs constructive anger as a legitimate defense from state abuses; e.g., police abuse and DARVO tactics.
- destabilizing vs stabilizing gossip—i.e., co-dependent, “prison sex” mentalities and rape culture vs interdependent girl talk (e.g., #MeToo) and rape prevention.
- “blind” vs “perceptive” pastiche/quoting—i.e., unironic pastiche and quoting (dogma) vs subversive, ironic quoting (camp).
- unironic vs ironic gender trouble/parody (camp)—i.e., a performative means of cryptofascism vs demasking the fascist-in-disguise, making these imposters self-report by figuratively gagging or crapping their pants (with gender parody being a means of combatting the impostor syndrome of gender dysphoria with gender euphoria and reclaimed xenophobic labels/implements of torture: Asprey’s counterterror in a theatrical sense)
- bad-faith vs good-faith egregores, including xenophilic/xenophobic monsters both as products of worker labor as well as worker identities, occupations, and rankings, which use similar language regardless if they’re bourgeois or proletarian—e.g., the bourgeois Amazon detective (canonical Samus Aran) vs the proletarian zombie-vampire-unicorn pillow princess.
Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, they reduce from these groups according how workers communicate in simplified forms; i.e., according to cultivated social-sexual habits: anger, gossip, parody/pastiche (subversion) and monsters—aka, the “basics,” except we can simplify even them further!
We’ll do so in just a second. First a note about opposition. The basics are my attempt at formulating a simplified teaching approach that I feel makes up how people actually operate on a daily level; i.e., according to common social-sexual devices that connect to complex theories that are often in conflict. In turn, these basic habits constitute actions that can be cultivated through Gothic poetics, which can gradually and collectively camp canon, reclaiming the Base and recultivating the Superstructure in a sex-positive sense; i.e., by making them (and their violent, rapacious theatre) gay. Doing so can alter historical materialism (and undo Capitalist Realism) through dialectical-material opposition to state forces, including menticide as something to counteract. A raped mind is a stupid, fearful mind unaware of structural manipulation as malleable. Keeping those forces in mind, it’s also important to remember that my attempts at theoretical reduction also include reductions of what we’re up against—that sex positivity, emancipation and rebellion (the Three Iconoclastic Doubles) involve proletarian synthetic groupings that are routinely met with varying degrees of open aggression, condescension, canonical indignation and DARVO towards camp in defense of canon (and that these have only accelerated according to a growing profit motive on the global stage). So while the preface already explained that synthesis is vital to good praxis, this praxis can be challenged by bad instruction working in opposition to the pro-worker habits that we cultivate in their most basic forms, often piece by piece:
(artist: Zuru Ota)
As the preface also stated, synthesis can be adequately summarized as the cultivation of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness; i.e., the deliberate utilization of Gothic poetics during the practical application of simplified theory between activist workers formulating healthy social-sexual habits. The state will try to undermine this everywhere it can, including through its own forms of instruction transforming these basic patterns to oppose ours; i.e., during oppositional praxis using ludo-Gothic BDSM to synthesize:
- destructive vs constructive anger
- destabilizing vs stabilizing gossip (and abuse encouragement/prevention patterns)
- “blind” vs “perceptive” pastiche (class/culture blindness versus consciousness)
- unironic vs ironic gender trouble/parody (canon vs camp)
- bad-faith vs good-faith egregores (monsters/doubles)
Again, the idea is to think in terms of opposition and what both sides represent as they engage back and forth through battles of instruction; i.e., psychopraxis, including good education versus bad education (a concept we’ll touch upon here, and reexplore more thoroughly in Volume Three when considering weird canonical nerds as bad educators). The creative successes of proletarian praxis encourage their own results, but so does bourgeois praxis; e.g., mutual consent is challenged by manufactured consent according to someone who—through varying degrees of passivity and action—seeks to encourage abuse and risk-production behaviors that emerge through a lack of intelligence, awareness and empathy, hence constructive anger, stabilizing gossip, perceptive pastiche, ironic quoting and gender trouble/parody, and good-faith egregores.
For the purposes of this symposium, then, I want to acclimate you towards chaos as a state of existence that Gothic poetics capture well (something my thesis discussed in relation to paradox and play through Milton’s “darkness visible”). I want us to consider the above groups in the simplest, most conversational language:
- girl talk (anger/gossip): People talk, often with excitement and anger but also theory through their own de facto forms of instruction.
- monsters (doubles and liminal expression): People self-express through extensions of trauma that reclaim state language, generally as a means of identity.
- camp (“perceptive” pastiche/ironic parody): People perform, but also subvert canon, often through gender trouble and parody using identity and instruction to achieve praxial catharsis at a structural level; i.e., by redistributing power and its understanding and application/interrogating through a healthier Wisdom of the Ancients.
All of these go hand-in-hand; reclamation happens through gossip and gossip can be campy and monstrous, etc. Moreover, these are the very basics to successful praxis, which the rest of part one will explore in order using the most rudimentary of terms. Doing so should hopefully reflect how the instruction of synthesis (and de facto education of said habits) work at an intuitive, everyday level.
First up, girl talk preforms through various thresholds that protect the mind from rape and war (thus menticide) while discouraging either in the future as having learned from the past as something to repeatedly conjure up and tinker with. To avoid automatic, traumatizing violence, rape prevention (war through Imperialism is rape on a mass scale) demands subversion/liminal expression and “perceptive” pastiche in the face of powerful enemies who lack the nuance needed to root us out. Through gender trouble and parody (camp), we can expose them by making them self-report before their positions in society become normalized again (crisis never stops and decay repeats); we can furiously gossip and remediate praxis through parody and pastiche, preventing war and rape via Gothic poetics, using said poetics to humanize us and expose our abusers as coercive and ghoulish by breaking their concentric veneers down, one layer at a time. In short, we’ll examine how their menticided status can be opposed, mid-conflict[1].
I want to start with an older historical example of canonization, before poking and prodding into more recent iterations that have cropped up during the 20th and 21st centuries. We’re going to look at the history of Gothic poetics extensively in Volume Two, and a much, much more fleshed out examination of praxis in Volume Three. For now, this is merely grease for the wheels. As such, we’ll consider a brief example of slavery from Britain’s Victorian period, then touch on the basics as you might encounter them in your own day-to-day existence; i.e., as a means of reflecting on various forms of abuse that amount to slavery under capital and through which you can relate to according to an imaginary past (and its conspicuous darkness) as a dialog unto itself: the darkness (and its emergent corruption) are the data and work as potent, if-at-times paradoxical, leverage towards a better world, not simply a whitewashed castle to hide the spilled blood and open fields of exhausted laborers. To do that, you have to humanize not just alien that is fetishized, but their fat and meat as belonging to them while representing who they are through morphological expression as a liberatory device; e.g., fat liberation becoming a postcolonial critique of settler-colonial forces, working with various tissues to give rise to new levels of appreciation and resistance.
(artist: Dani Is Online)
The 18th and 19th centuries were a place and time of tremendous mid-war/post-revolutionary sentiment, wherein sex positivity (and its various praxial relatives) would have been utterly vilified by Ann Radcliffe as “useless sorrow” or Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha, the “madwoman in the attic” that colonizer Rochester had no idea how to treat: his first, literal slave wife. By extension, it could be argued that neither did Charlotte. We’ve already blown Radcliffe to bits in Volume Zero; here, I want to use an exhibit to extrapolate on Charlotte Brontë’s bigotries to make my point. Bear in mind, you can stretch out these arguments with anyone you critique during your own sacred-cow barbeques (often while also offering up your own variations [above] to worship without harm):
(exhibit 21c1: Source. British female hypercanon is white and cis-het, thus super problematic. Edward Said once described Austen as belonging to “a slave-owning society” [and stuffy Brits gave him hell for it]. Before him, Jean Rys highlighted Charlotte Brontë’s internalized racism with her own 1966 postcolonial critique, Wide Sargasso Sea. Even in 1847, though, Charlotte’s repressed bigotries spilled out inside a recently emancipated Britain having preyed on its colonies for centuries: a displaced, disassociated patriarchal critique projected onto a demonic, racialized other—Antoinette Cosway by another name. Charlotte’s framing of female virtue, then, is rather sexist/cis-gendered, but also xenophobic and racist—i.e., the white woman’s “wildness” as needing to be tamed or regulated to tolerable levels while also punching down at various non-white groups with fleshier bodies.
To this, Charlotte would treat Bertha’s body as alien, describing her—a woman of color—as a vampire and a goblin whose nightly wanderings Jane would look on at in fascination and horror [and who Rys would humanize over a century later]. Jane’s bildungsroman [coming-of-age story] frames her, the child, as wild and uncouth, eventually evolving into a firm, measured governess [who isn’t “as wild” as her and Rochester’s technically unadopted French bastard, Adèle; at the end of the novel, Jane tries to Anglicize Adèle, gentrifying her by making the girl “less French”]. Similar problematic themes [and highly dysfunctional love-as-a-stalkery-trap written by women about men who can’t handle rejection from women can be found in Victorian forebears[2] like Austen, whose Eleanor and Marianne Dashwood respectively represent the titular Sense and Sensibility [reason and passion]: Marianne loves the uncommitted Willoughby too much and is consequently married off to Colonel Brandon [Austen allows no unmarried heroines at the end of her novels; despite her ironies needling the institution but also the profession of writing about marriage, the narrative ultimately demands for it from her each and every time. Not without irony, Austen still obliges the formula].
However art also imitates life in that Charlotte’s sister, Emily [and her fiction; e.g., Wuthering Heights] were considerably wilder and more passionate [and fun, in my opinion] than her sister’s fictions. Yet, without Charlotte’s patience and dedication to cultivate Emily’s poetry after she died, the younger, more reclusive sister would have remained largely unknown. As I write in “Beneath the Church-Isle Stone: Posthumous Liberties” [2015]:
“One day, in the autumn of 1845, I accidentally lighted on a [manuscript] volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting. Of course, I was not surprised, knowing that she could and did write verse…” (“Bibliographical Notice” v). Charlotte Brontë already knew that her sister was a poet, but here, found proof that Emily was a good, productive one. It would not do to hide this work from the world, she thought—not when the three sisters needed to start supporting themselves. Determined, Charlotte swore to get published, and after much persuading was able to convince Emily to participate in a collective project where the three sisters, including Anne, each contributed poems to a single volume. This volume, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, was published in 1846 and sold only two copies. Undaunted by this underwhelming reception into the literary market, each sister continued to write, and in 1847 published a single novel apiece: Jane Eyre, Agnes Grey and Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre was published last, but enjoyed the most success, becoming something of a Victorian “best-seller.” The other two novels were subject to relatively harsh criticism, polarizing Victorian readers. Emily and Anne ‘s reputations as writers were tarnished, and shortly after their novels were published, both died. In an attempt “to rescue [them] from the notoriety surrounding the novels, [Charlotte Brontë reconstituted] their battered reputations around their verse” (Bauman 32). To do this, she waited until her sisters were dead before introducing never-before-published poems, notably altering and changing them to acclimate Emily and Anne’s works to a fussy Victorian audience unused to the writing style of either woman [source].)
(exhibit 21c2: Model and artist: Charlotte Brontë and George Richmond. While there exist two portraits of Emily painted by her brother, Branwell, she is often mistaken for a portrait of her sister, Charlotte. Mistaken identity is a common theme in Gothic fiction, one that plays out quite literally in Radcliffe’s 1796 The Italian when Father Schedoni sees “his” daughter in a miniature portrait around her neck; or as I write in “Gothic Themes in Perfect Blue“:
In [The Italian] Father Schedoni, a master manipulator, is deceived by appearances. Preparing to plunge his dagger into Ellena Rosalba’s breast, Schedoni freezes, having seen a pendant whose miniature “resembled” him. In truth, while it did, the picture was actually of Schedoni’s brother, the Countess di Bruno. Killed by Schedoni years earlier, the Countess’ likeness is similar enough to Schedoni’s stolen role that he thought he saw himself. In a cruel twist, he grows convinced that Ellena bears his likeness, is actually his long-lost daughter. While Schedoni had sired a child through his brother’s wife, it had died while he was abroad. In truth, he is actually Ellena’s uncle, and her father was Schedoni’s murdered brother, the Countess. Unable to safely murder Ellena, Schedoni forces her to travel with him through the Italian countryside. There, both spend the better part of the novel in a state of mutual confusion [source].
Dead ringers and wacky murder plots aside, portraits and miniatures were incredibly expensive, and most families would have been hard-pressed to afford even one. “Emily” Brontë’s portrait was painted in 1850, two years after she died—a testament to her fame competing with Charlotte’s [whose money following Jane Eyre‘s success helped her afford the privilege] but also owing to the simple fact that multiple women weren’t allowed to be famous. For this reason, Charlotte had elected to publish their pennames as “neutral,” meaning agendered: Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell.)
Our point in examining older women like Radcliffe, Austen and Charlotte Brontë before we dive into the symposium proper is to consider how their emotional/Gothic intelligence—especially regarding slavery and critiquing the Patriarchy’s amatonormative focus to achieve heteronormative models of exploitation—was and is outmoded and underdeveloped (versus Mary Shelley’s precocious, “Satanic” science-fiction, whose iconoclastic, queer-adjacent and anonymously published desire “to be the witch” [unlike Margaret Hamilton] we’ll unpack in Volume Two): their Gothic novel, novel-of-manners and bildungsroman operating as imperfect tools of menticide, meaning they can be reclaimed and repurposed to heal the mind from rape. By relying on our intelligent and informed emotions/Gothic imagination as things to learn from a collective, dialogic past, we can improve on what came before through our own contributions (with pen names also being a trans strategy of publication—e.g., Grace Lavery’s Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques, 2023); by improving on ways of Gothically imagining the world, other stratagems—our basics reduced to nouns and simple, executable verbs—reliably emerge that are equally vital to iconoclastic praxis, but also our own survival while performing it as teachers that cultivate rudimentary behaviors that, while ubiquitous in day-to-day life, are also punished during daily moral panics.
With all of this unpacking done, and a brief nip into the past as it once was imagined, let’s press on into the symposium’s consideration of Gothic media in the present space and time: our own means, materials and methods of instruction.
The Gothic, as we’ve established, addresses sex worker trauma through liminal expression, often tied to an imaginary past derived from older texts. Special emphasis, then, should be given to phenomenological expression (the study or expression of experience) and markers of abuse; i.e., the cultural gargoyles we mentioned earlier in the manifesto; e.g., Charlotte’s Bertha as a historical-material relic of 1840s Britain. Whereas iconoclasm seeks to dismantle the social-sexual stigma assigned to these symbols by state-sanctioned laws, religion and violence, Gothic canon codifies canonical stigmas. In turn, the stigmas themselves serve as cultural “cement” in regards to how workers are treated or viewed, including by themselves in relation to psychosexual trauma as already-materialized: rape as the ever-present threat of power abuse and poorly concealed harm; if Imperialism comes home to empire, the usual recipients of state abuse will feel it the worst, but the minds of all will be subject to powerful forces that induce harmful social-sexual habits through menticide.
As we have already discussed, Meerloo describes “waves of terror” that traumatize people in ways useful to the state: “the use of well-planned, repeated successive waves of terror to bring the people into submission” vis-à-vis “the core of the strategy of menticide is the taking away of all hope, all anticipation, all belief in a future.” In 2023, the workers of today see these waves constantly reverberating across the real world through fictional and non-fictional variants imitating each other in continuum: rape and war culture, but also the material, personifying articulation of thought crimes—e.g., sin. Meerloo calls the outcome of this abusive continuum “menticide,” a rape of the mind—something we’ll continue examining through the state’s proliferation of Gothic canon and how said canon whittles down the working class’ emotional reserves and Gothic imagination; i.e., to foster Capitalist Realism through a Gothic myopia. That is, arrayed conspicuously around the viewer at various registers, bourgeois monsters serve to constantly terrify workers in ways useful to the state through bad instruction: threats of violence and rape carried out over not just single moments, but a victim’s entire life span through transgenerational trauma; it becomes a curse, one afforded by egregores-made-material.
These days, canonical gargoyles don’t just sit on literal churches; they pertain to ever-present likenesses existing everywhere in the material world, spat out in mass-produced forms. As the manifesto argued, they are “anything that can be looked upon with fear as a dogmatic source of instruction.” In purely cis-het circles, simply look around and you’ll see: macho men acting like canonical monsters towards women, while faithfully quoting their favorite sexist literature or persona (e.g., Andrew Tate); and battered women responding in ways that either submit to toxic-masculine abuse or fight back in ways that ostracize women from society—with society tending to blame the historical-material victim(s): women and minorities (who often victimize themselves as they internalize bigotry and attempt to assimilate).
Our holistic goal with iconoclastic praxis and ludo-Gothic BDSM, then, is teaching emotional and Gothic intelligence through the acquisition of stabilizing behaviors that enjoy the flexibility of play (and language to play with). Girl talk, liminal subversion and transformative quoting/perceptive pastiche, then, are reductions of theory into useful actions that alleviate state-manufactured crises and push towards praxial catharsis. These require emotional/Gothic intelligence—i.e., an active desire to avoid politically “passive” competition under a punitive hierarchy that occurs through various measuring “contests”: dick-measuring, female asset-measuring and the gauging of tokenistic assimilation (e.g., whiteness, but also class, religious and cultural values at large). These behaviors develop in relation to the historical-material world as something to subvert and “quote” in liminal, transformative ways. In turn, idiosyncratic[3] love language, but also fear language, become things to vocalize and double in our own subversive artwork—extensions of our own lives as teaching devices of societally beneficial stratagems:
- trauma/rape awareness-and-prevention tactics and terms (“reactive abuse,” “love-bombing,” “hovering” “isolation,” “red flags” and other sadly-but-deliberately extracurricular things under Capitalism)
- emotional health terms that describe how we actually feel
- a heightened awareness towards traditionally female/feminine predicaments: experiencing rape or threats of rape; being gaslit, gatekept or assimilated (with a queer, all-inclusive flavor of course: abused workers include more than cis-het white women acting as girl bosses; i.e., queer bosses; e.g., Natalie Wynn, who we’ll examine in Volume Three, Chapter Four)
Such basic goals are instructional, but also vocal; i.e., a kind of “tea spilling” unto itself—one whose bold, playful investigating of repressed or policed social-sexual factors are designed to help workers get “in touch” with their older, emotional selves, nature, and trauma through gossip, but also society’s emotional self and trauma as normally being monopolized historically-materially by the elite (who alienate workers from nature and sex, but also their emotions [anger] and ability to think critically by camping canon in Gothic ways). In turn, said gossip talks about how canonical “gargoyles” repress worker willpower and resistance by attacking workers’ ability to imagine anything else. Gossip isn’t just useful, but paramount to our very survival when the elite divide and pit us against each other.
Once combined and put to proletarian praxis, revolutionary workers can generate sex-positive lessons in ludo-Gothic BDSM and other elements of sex positivity that assist in putting Capitalism (and its menticidal abuses) behind us. This requires subversion, which happens by making canonical praxis—including its bourgeois monsters, worker atrocities and ruthless tyrants/soldiers—a dated paraphernalia we continue to examine and learn from during our own means of subversive instruction; i.e., our girl talk, monsters and camp. All enable us to survive while mastering an iconoclastic doubling of social-sexual expression that evolves away from Capitalism and into Gothic Communism: Ann Radcliffe’s happy ending without the dancing peasants celebrating the new princess’ felicitous, exclusive inauguration (we’re all princesses under Communism, my sweets).
Conscious rebellion also includes the Gothic mastering of madness and monsters present in the evolution of the female detective/damsel-in-distress into holistic, inclusive forms, merging into increasingly liminal/queer iterations (the imperiled twink) that transform themselves, and the material world around them, as things to “quote” imperfectly on purpose; i.e., to invoke gender trouble (whose progression and praxial friction we’ll examine throughout this roadmap, but also in Volumes Two and Three; e.g., the “Conan with a pussy [except not bigoted]” concept seen in exhibits 84a and 112). As something to expound upon ad infinitum, our Gothic-Communist making of gender trouble is two-fold, then: to one, synthesize old terms with our individual/collective artistic output and exhibits; and two, invent new terms and codes (this book is full of such things) that likewise “do the trick.” Development towards Gothic Communism will constantly put us in uncharted territory that requires updating the lexicon as needed—i.e., by pulling out old classics, but also making new ones to adjust to the social-sexual, linguo-material “growing pains.” All of the synthetic terminology outlined thus far should be a clue. All the same, it generally comes from older language that was (and is) used to maintain the status quo.
Take, for example, C.S. Lewis’ four outmoded words for love (the guy straight up treats eros as synonymous with romantic love). There should also be different words for fear that describe worker submission under Capitalism—not just fear of death, but fear of a world without Capitalism, thus without “protection” as synonymous with the symptoms of capital: the ghost of the counterfeit, Shadow of Pygmalion, Cycle of Kings, monomyth, infernal concentric pattern (and its endless semantic wreckage) and any and all reliable historical materialisms that result from business-as-usual under the elite. Our expanded language through our own instruction attacks a Symbolic Order whose language and fear-mongering are used by reactionaries and moderates alike (and that Fisher’s hauntology touches upon): bourgeois phobias and stigmas tied to cultural gargoyles that can be synthesized; i.e., transmuted according oppositional praxis and expressed through our successful, iconoclastic forms over space and time. Gay gargoyles, monsters, wizards, slutty detectives (exhibit 22)—through such darkness visible, we can make whatever’s needed to get our point across: Capitalism sucks and can be improved upon through the same devices reclaimed by us.
Keeping with our examination of the past as brought into the present—and previous stabs at Radcliffe—consider Velma again (and not for the last time; re: “Non-Magical Detectives“):
(exhibit 22: Artist, top-left: unknown; top-right: unknown, but links to a Velma cosplay subreddit; bottom right: Steven Stahlberg; bottom-left: Valentina Kryp. Especially popular or remediated characters tend to get virally shared. Such sharing can be hard to regulate or track. In this case, we not only have detective pastiche, but Velma pastiche. Seriously, this foxy nerd is legion, but also a regular practitioner of the “explained supernatural” trope originally formalized by Ann Radcliffe. Defrauding the “supernatural” through spooky piracy is a common theme in Radcliffe’s works, or embattled marriages, false relatives and various ordinary things taken to performative extremes; e.g., the mother being sent to live in a nunnery for the rest of her days. To this, Radcliffe was following suit with Walpole, injecting the supernatural into ordinary events, getting at the truth of things through outrageous narratives that still, in the end, feel cliché and homely.
As for Velma, her subversive liminality is complex—empowering for performative nerds who want to let it all hang out, but also solve mysteries of a highly conventional sort using subverted conventions: a surrender of corporal modesty and surviving the danger ahead by becoming closer to nature and one’s shapely body while still being smart as a whip. Velma is a character whose tasty “slut reclamation” dares to ask, “Why not both?” Sure, it’s arguably appropriative from a commercial standpoint—i.e., tailor-made JO material for weird male nerds and their ravenous, horny gaze—but the iconoclastic exhibit has multiple functions. One of them is to keep the revolutionary lights on, and cis-het dudes got money to pay out with in support of sex work, allowing for purely asexual or nonheteronormative reasons amid the usual sexual ones: charity without the expectation of sex. In development’s increasingly better world, however, such codependent transactions will become less and less necessary. Re: Socialism’s “From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] work” to Communism’s “to each according to [their] need.”)
Regardless of what (or who) we retailor towards rebellion, Gothic Communism is easier said than done. Revolutions occur over time, and as we discussed before the symposium must constantly be funded, organized, and taught through collective worker action/activism as something that evolves the Superstructure in a proletarian direction. Simply put, revolution requires constant awareness, application and discipline at a societal, collective level: one of and towards people and language as they function in (dis)harmony as a presently divided working class learning over time to heal; and two, how Capitalism slowly wears down our defense mechanisms using reactive abuse over generations that shape natural and material language, binding them (and our responses to them) to the elite’s will. This includes how we communicate “on and off the clock”; i.e., when we’re actively working or just shooting the shit. Gossip and anger.
For example, the bourgeoisie can easily infect the way women, as motherly educators, gossip about rape and war—at parties, general social gatherings, or over the phone, etc.
Indeed, I noticed something recently while my mother and grandmother were talking on the phone. They had been chatting about a friend’s suspicious mother not wanting her undercover policeman husband going near their children because he looked like a “criminal/underworld person” (a “hobbit,” according to my grandmother). Both women seemed to be innocently gossiping about broad, nebulous markers of violence, yet both were associating things of the underworld as inherently dangerous; i.e., Gothic markers, monsters. My family was taught to think this way by the state, but also state proponents like Tolkien (re: hobbits) passing their teachings along compromised social practices: outmoded, harmful gossip through the lessons they leave behind; e.g., The Lord of the Rings. In this manner, communication can quickly become a kind of “stranger danger” that spreads moral panics like a virus across oral language informed by recorded language; i.e., according to how language naturally tends to work and how we tend to acquire it through socio-material means: osmotic transference through reified stigmas and fears that stochastic terrorism further exacerbates. Before you know it, monsters aren’t things to consume, but scapegoat state enemies and victims with, blaming them for the state’s regular “failings” (worker, animal and environmental exploitation).
However “random” and “disconnected” such terrorism might seem, it nevertheless remains a manmade consequence to the bourgeois machinations of the state (whose spontaneous gun violence, for example, enters the American hydra of cycling reactive abuse, much like Jack the Ripper once did in Britain over a century ago; the criminal hauntology of either myth continues to be enshrined in popular media, which we’ll explore more deeply in Volume Three, Chapter Two). To turn a phrase, generational violence and the people who commit it are “cut from the same tree”—of the natural and material world interacting back and forth during oppositional praxis.
To that, Gothic Communism happens from moment to moment, using variable counterterrorism to slowly reclaim these natural-material functions for workers’ universal benefit. Over generations, it slowly liberates them and the larger Gothic mode from the bourgeoisie by making said mode amenable to worker rights. Bit by bit, stochastic terrorism (and its associate monsters and fears; e.g., getting raped and murdered by false boyfriends) can gradually disappear at home, and settler-colonialism abroad. However, the abolishment of state violence at all levels can only happen while consciously moving forward into the future; i.e., as emotionally/Gothically intelligent workers who grow increasingly aware of the wars taking place on all fronts. Establishment politicians only serve each other and the state; we must diminish the influence they have over worker minds insofar as monsters take part. Except, our focus needs to on ourselves replacing the elite, subverting their monstrous tools of menticide and, in effect, weakening the elite’s grip on us as normally enacted by unironic variants.
In light of established monopolies, then, we must reclaim Gothic poetics (and the required emotional labor) from state forces in the present moment. Doing so happens through individual means of camping canon that, once combined, make up a dialogic Gothic imagination. Comprised of social-sexual “girl talk” that subverts heteronormative conventions with “perceptive” pastiche, this social network—and its cultural synthesis of iconoclastic praxis in Gothic language—defends the exploited with a holistic checklist that no one educator, student or lesson could hope to impart single-handedly (this book will try to encapsulate everything but doubtless will miss something): fostering “friendly monsters” (and monstrous sex toys) whose camp reverses abjection and uses the natural complexity of human language as navigated easily by fluent practitioners of the Gothic mode; i.e., building sex-positive parallel societies with Communist chronotopes, achieving mental emancipation with hauntology and revolution with cryptonymy to liberate all workers and, by extension, the nature world from Capitalism.
For the rest of part one, I want to focus on synthesizing the basics through one famous monster type, the Medusa and Athena’s Aegis, before talking about the history of female expression (through Georgia O’Keefe, exhibit 24c1) and increasingly gender-non-conforming variations enacted by us (myself and Eldritch Babe, exhibit 24d2) in defense of nature-at-large as classically exploited by Cartesian (settler-colonial, heteronormative) forces.
First, Medusa and her tricky concept of “double mirroring” (re: mirror syndrome during subjugated Amazonomachia):
(exhibit 23a: Artist, top left: Yneddt; bottom-right: unknown; middle: Drawingfreak77. Medusa is an ancient, “phallic” [androgynous] form of the monstrous-feminine, one that that needs to remain conscious lest older waves of feminism triangulate her against new inclusive movements trying to camp the canon during ludo-Gothic BDSM; or as my thesis writes of Barbara Creed [whose 1993 book, The Monstrous-Feminine, focuses on refusing to be a victim vis-à-vis Freudian models and Julia Kristeva, while simultaneously omitting the rights and experiences of gender-non-conforming groups that cis women historically attack]:
my book aims to go thoroughly beyond Barbara Creed’s somewhat dated and limited, biological-/cis-centric view of the monstrous-feminine/”woman as other” [to be fair, she wrote The Monstrous-Feminine thirty years ago, so maybe she wrote something more recently[4] and I’m just late to the party]. So while it’s true that the phrase “phallic woman” traditionally denotes a war-like woman, huntress or vengeful monstrous-feminine, I want to stress how subjugated Amazons aren’t just aggressively and physically violent towards cis-het, sexist men; they’ve radicalized inside a “prison sex” mentality to become hostile towards “outsider” groups, including trans people, while seeing themselves as the universal victims that tacitly yield to their conquerors by emulating their worst habits [exhibit 41g1a2].
As such, I want to expand on how the monstrous-feminine can also non-binarize to illustrate the gender-non-conforming idea of a non-violent trans, intersex or enby person; i.e., someone who refuses to be a victim without embodying the standard-issue implements of violence and war from conventional stories [including TERF examples: the blind, indiscriminate Medusa] [source: “Symposium: Aftercare”].
Small note, but giant female monsters are generally shot in the boobs or other sexualized parts of the body—castration/bullet rape by “civilized,” technologically “advanced,” male attackers.)
Medusa (above) shows us how gossip, monsters, and camp are powerful, fetishized weapons. In terms of reclamation, let’s consider abjection at large; i.e., monsters as things to gossip with/about and reclaim through camp using Athena’s Aegis ourselves. Monsters tend to conflate with systemic harm as adjacent to them, expressing shared qualities of generational trauma/stigma that are animalized (from our thesis statement):
To this, monsters have more in common than they do differences (and these differences generally are hard to pin down). In short, demons offer forbidden knowledge or power and can shapeshift; the undead were formally alive (or appear to have been) and generally feed in relation to trauma (concepts we’ll unpack at great length in Volume Two). 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 through 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. […]
Predator-wise, the war dog can present as male or female, thus muzzled in ways that are correct, thus normal according to the status quo: the female war boss as correct-incorrect, but still a useful gatekeeper for the elite (a TERF, in other words). In this sense, you get paradoxes like the chimera as both a snake and a dog—with Medusa both a phallic woman and maneater who turns men to stone, and a specific kind of bitch that works for the state as a weaponized victim that is compared to multiple animals at the same time; she is both a snake-bitch, but manly in the theatrical sense due to her penetrative attacks, piercing stare and direct, aggressive behaviors. On some level, the Pavlovian ideal is conditioning for hunting behaviors that misuse congenital or maladaptive prey responses: the hunter becoming the hunted (or vice versa). This can be cis-het men seeking to abuse others to make their trauma stop thus feel safe, or women and token groups (source).
To this, Medusa is classically binarized, the “dark mother” with a good and bad side (exhibit 23a, above). The “Athenian” side produces a more human-looking Amazon that represents life; the wild side—an unmasked, “feral dog” Medusa—overtly associates with death, but also the ocean and the (often gross, alien) mysteries of the womb as hysterical: “rabid” female rage established by the female body’s natural reproductive functions being hounded and coerced by state forces; i.e., her “wandering” womb as venomous, but also a rebellious form of girl talk. I liken this to “back talk,” wherein the classic recipient of patriarchal abuse, the Medusa, angrily reflects her endless trauma and alienation back at state proponents using Athena’s Aegis. In short, she takes it back:
When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not—as commonly thought—put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her shield with the Medusa’s head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa’s own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena’s aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend—the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa (source: The Monstrous-Feminine).
(artist: JL Seagull the Best)
In the past, I have stressed the Aegis as a counterterrorist weapon with revolutionary potential as a kind of “spectre of Marx”; i.e., when removed entirely from its state function, but also haunting it vengefully from the inside during all manner of inheritance anxieties; e.g., the Radiance from Hollow Knight (left) operating as an ancient queen, haunting the mind-like tombs of mere mortal men and eventually being banished back to Hell once hunted down and exposed by a male hunter inside his fallen master’s ruinous crypt (the entire game is effectively a prolonged, Gothic-style witch hunt meant to reclaim patriarchal territories: find the bared exposed power of the matriarch and stab her for exposing herself in immodest ways—in her melon-like tits as something they both freeze at and lack the language to effectively describe[5] while wanting to cut up and eat). Please keep this in mind as we continue through part one; i.e., the whore is something to police through mercenary force ludo-Gothic BDSM is known for camping (re: “Policing the Whore,” which returns to the Radiance and Hollow Knight, camping the witch hunt by testifying to the rape of the jailed Numinous).
Also remember that, aside from the Medusa, many ancient, Chthonic deities (meaning “of the underworld”) were inspired by the ocean as a vast place of mystery and death feared by superstitious men—especially lonely European sailors, who, while they probably wanted to fuck a mermaid or something similar, generally settled for each other or unlucky Indigenous peoples once the Americas were discovered. Indigenous rape occurs in relation to nature as something to dominate by proxy. To that, human rape historically happens far more than animal rape in a literal, zoophilic sense; in a figurative sense, the raping of nature is total. And if this distinction seems bizarre, it owes itself to the function of empire as brutal and all-consuming on both sides of the Imperial Core. So while demonologist Kevin Meares asserts Christopher Columbus once mistook a manatee for a mermaid (source: Quora), Columbus was a well-documented rapist, establishing sex-trafficking on an unprecedented, settler-colonial scale (source: Bad Empanada’s “The Truth About Columbus – Knowing Better Refuted,” 2020).
Columbus was arguably the father of settler colonialism, but America has since carried and continues to carry its genocides out to a much more successful degree. David Michael Smith writes in his introduction to Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire (2023) how the extent to this degree is something that evolved into itself through a system built for exploitation from the start (excuse the three-page quote, but it’s vital writing so I want to include it):
That the United States is a colonialist and imperialist country—an empire—can hardly be questioned. The conquest and near-extermination of several hundred Indigenous nations by European and U.S. settlers provided the land on which the contiguous United States was built, and Native peoples continue to live in colonial conditions, deprived of sovereignty and self-determination. The United States also colonized Liberia, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the eastern Samoan Islands, the Philippines, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. Panama, which Washington carved out of Colombia to build a transoceanic canal, and Cuba were U.S. protectorates for decades. The United States recognized the independence of Liberia in 1847 and the Philippines in 1946 and admitted Alaska and Hawaii as states in 1959 but refused to relinquish the Panama Canal Zone until 1999 and still occupies forty-five square miles of land and water at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. […]
In addition to its long history of conquest and colonization, the United States has always energetically exploited other peoples’ resources, markets, and labor. The enslaved labor of people of African descent fueled early U.S. economic development and the Industrial Revolution. By the 1820s, U.S. merchants were shipping opium from Turkey to China so they could sustain imports of tea, spices, porcelain, and nankeen. As Greg Grandin has noted, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 “announced to European empires that Latin America fell under Washington’s exclusive sphere of influence.” In the mid-nineteenth century, the mounting need to export surplus products led the U.S. Empire to threaten and use violence against China, Japan, and Korea. In the last quarter of the century, intensifying industrial development and agricultural production contributed to unprecedented economic growth. By the 1890s, U.S. businesses were shipping steel, iron, oil, and agricultural machinery to foreign markets, and the export of capital had begun. During that decade, the United States replaced Britain as the world’s largest economy. In 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney, referring to South America, claimed that “the United States is sovereign on this continent.” In stark contrast, after acquiring most of Spain’s colonies in 1898, the United States demanded an “Open Door” for U.S. trade and investment in China and did not even consult its government.
The U.S. Empire’s imperatives of expansion and accumulation have dramatically grown in the era of modern imperialism, and so has its exploitation of the resources, markets, and labor of people in other countries. As Grandin has explained, in the early decades of the twentieth century “American corporations and financial houses came to dominate the economies of Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, as well as large parts of South America.” To protect its investments and promote its interests, the empire militarily intervened in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and invaded and occupied Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. / Industry, agriculture, and trade grew significantly when the United States funded and armed, and then joined the Entente Powers during the First World War. Afterward, the United States invaded Soviet Russia, supported the Guomindang regime in China, and welcomed European fascism as a bulwark against communism—entering the Second World War only because the Axis powers threatened its own imperialist interests. By 1945, the United States had become the wealthiest and most powerful empire in the world. Since then, the imperium has vigorously sought to obtain the oil, strategic materials, and other resources it requires and to keep, in the words of Harry Magdoff, “as much as possible of the world open for trade and investment by the giant multinational corporations.”
[photograph insertion, mine; source: The Digital Collections of WWII Museum’s “Mushroom Cloud over Nagasaki, Japan, 9 August 1945”]
These imperatives led to unrelenting confrontation with the Soviet Union and other socialist states—at horrific human expense. The later collapse of most of these states, which occurred partly because of U.S. actions over the decades, made the world a more dangerous place as the empire found itself to be the sole superpower and moved to establish its presence in those and other lands. Since 1945, the United States has fought devastating large-scale wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq (twice), and Afghanistan. It has launched proxy wars on four continents, routinely attacked countries, overthrown and installed governments, destroyed popular movements, assassinated foreign leaders, engaged in economic sabotage, and supported its allies’ violent domestic repression and acts of war against other nations. The only country to ever use atomic bombs, the United States has deployed nuclear weapons around the world, developed ominous plans “to win a nuclear war,” and brought humanity to the brink of nuclear holocaust on several occasions. Today, the empire has a network of client states encompassing about 40 percent of the world’s countries, about eight hundred foreign military bases, and more than 200,000 military personnel and contractors deployed in about 140 countries. But the rise of China, the return of Russia, and the mounting economic, social, and political crises [e.g., foreign plots and crises of masculinity, below] at home make clear that the United States’ “unipolar moment” is already fading (source).
(artist: Stacy Cay)
All systems die, changing into others. Communism allows for this change and prepares for it in non-heteronormative ways—i.e., that reflect on alienation and genocide through mirrors of what the state normally abjects and what queer communities celebrate; Capitalism tries to prevent this, forcing gender-non-conforming persons to the margins (or assimilating them); and both sides utilize the basics through workers to achieve oppositional goals. Said opposition is palpable, for instance, when masculinity and Capitalism are in crisis by perceived “abominations” and progressions away from the colonial binary towards a postcolonial outcome (above), as well as campy dialogs that push back against state abuse; i.e., pitting ludo-Gothic BDSM against harmful notions of sexuality and gender (e.g., this hilariously Austenian 2023 [source tweet] conversation between Professor Grace Lavery and a bigot potentially confusing Lavery with the author for Detransition Baby, 2021). Though not exclusively female, nature-as-female is a common monomyth scapegoat, including its mythological forms parsed by outdated psychoanalytical models; re: Creed vis-à-vis Freud, and Kristeva. Outdated or not, the Medusa remains Creed’s chosen source of cis female rage and patriarchal fear in The Monstrous-Feminine.
To her credit—initially catalyzed by Freud’s essay “Medusa’s Head” (1922) and the patriarchal bogeywoman, the Archaic Mother—Creed’s characterization of Medusa is post-Freudian to some extent. Again, Creed stresses the weapon-like power of the Aegis as a means of paralyzing men, but leaves much room for improvement (re: my thesis quote, exhibit 23a) insofar as Marxist, intersectional solidarity is concerned; i.e., seeking to explore cis women beyond their universal portrayal as victims in Western canon: their monstrous, “ancient” function standing in during Amazonomachia, or brushes with Amazon pastiche, to mask Communism as a rising way of life during the beginnings of Capitalism’s decline a mere century after the US rose to geopolitical prominence in 1890. Creed appears to make up for it in her follow-up book, The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine, but only seems to have done so thirty years later. It’s a bit tardy (typical of cis women who aren’t feeling the pressure [and pain] of state abuses to the same degree as gender-non-conforming people).
In canonical terms, this sexist hauntology has endured well into the present, with women being the chaos dragon that “needs” to be slain according to Jung’s mythic structure (a model still upheld by Jordan Peterson today and many other “great” men besides). In terms of Cala Maria from Cuphead (exhibit 23a, 2017), Maria embodies the outer “beautiful form” until provoked. Then she unfurls her penis-like snakes, presenting them to the hero to petrify them (the game’s original protagonists being coded as male). Her genderqueer transformation—as with other examples of the Medusa like Giger’s xenomorph or Géricault’s raft (exhibit 23b, below)—invoke the Archaic Mother as a recursive, gender-non-conforming nightmare borne out of the pre-Civilized, pre-enlightened, primordial past as female, feminine, and furious at Capitalism and fascism having resulted from Cartesian hegemony long after Athens fucked off (though, like Rome, it never fully left). To prove their own dominance, lest they turn to stone like scared little children, heteronormative heroes must either kill Medusa, putting her down like a disobedient bitch; or weaponize her gaze against[6] enemies of the state. But Medusa still wins in the end because her killers invariably go mad and eventually die, turning to stone themselves (state shift being the last laugh of Mother Nature).
(exhibit 23b: Artist: Théodore Géricault; model and artist: Mischievous Kat and Persephone van der Waard. Again, though not exclusively female, nature-as-female [or at least monstrous-feminine] has women and feminized minorities treated like food under Cartesian models. Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa” [1818] was a commentary on real-world atrocities tied to industrial norms and covered up by the elite, which his painting vividly depicts while also breaking racialized boundaries through camp of a serious sort. In the process, he showcases the solidarity-in-struggle of a diverse group of survivors, trying to be heard amid bourgeois attempts from the French Monarchy to silence workers and save face [while struggling to maintain settler-colonialism’s harvesting of nature].
In keeping with ludo-Gothic BDSM as simply the act of playing with power in Gothic language to punch up with, mid-camp, the concept of worker isolation and solidarity under harsh, capitalized conditions is, indeed, a common Marxist fixture; i.e., under capitalist oppression—one which my own drawing deliberately marries to transgressive sexuality and queer subversion, framing the Medusa: as a fat, intensely awesome GNC creature of the vast depths, not a ship. As she and her animalistic [chimeric] trauma rise to the surface through erotic pleasure and monstrous, genderqueer expression during ludo-Gothic BDSM, my instructional aim is to venerate everything through the combined, sex-positive labor of workers unified against the abuses of Capitalism then and now.
Much like Géricault’s original piece, there’s a debatable presence of anger and unheard frustration amid the basic visual pattern and its playtime, but also rebellion as a constructive rage against the machine; i.e., rebellious subterfuge and perceptive pastiche as a transgressive, pre-fascist [Gothic] means of proletarian praxis whereupon resistance and power exchange “share the floor.” Time is a circle and the bugbears of yesterday haunt everyone during the debate. As they should; cryptomimesis comments on fascism as something to expose through Gothic displacement; i.e., pre-fascist ghosts of the counterfeit that whisper its continuation in the present space and time.)
Beyond Medusa, abjection more broadly is a form of settler-colonial menticide codified into a linguo-material status quo—i.e., what its canonical gargoyles stand for and how heteronormative society conversely stands for them in response: manufactured consent. Historically, Patriarchal Capitalism makes white cis-het men the most privileged worker class, those most prone to class betrayal and lying (and the most afraid of death): universal “heroes” or “protectors.” Everything else is alienated or abused, either a victim or persecuted monster to varying degrees (usually on a hierarchy of descending privilege—with white women closer to “the top/civilization” [and Simone Beauvoir claiming “other” for cis-het white women] but still closer to nature than men are, and intersections of queer people, people of color, disabled people and/or the mentally ill closer to the bottom, along with non-human animals and nature).
To this, canonical praxis treats iconic monsters like Medusa as challenges to overcome in defense of the state—literal dragons to slay or things to keep hidden, locked up like a secret peril or damsel in a tower (with the ones that dare to try and escape compared to dragons, shamed as sluts, or blamed for their own murders—re: the madwoman in the attic, exhibit 21c1); iconoclastic praxis treats monsters as language to reclaim, exposing the systemic, settler-colonial trauma committed by assigned “heroes” behaving like sex-coercive monsters against their coercively demonized and abused victims—e.g., “monstrous” witches being burned at the stake by the creepy, self-righteous and utterly horrible Puritans. Once reclaimed, iconoclastic monsters become problems for Capitalism to “solve”—an abusive system that nevertheless employs the same poetic language to try and hide its own exploitation of workers, demonizing them while robbing them of their rights, wages and literal time as laborers. This becomes the thing to gossip about/with, through monsters as canonical or campy forms of theatre that play and perform power as a means of interrogating trauma—often in relation to trauma as lived, but also generationally inherited; i.e., through class nightmares that are, for those trapped inside the state of exception, just another day that escapes notice for those outside of these brutal zones; e.g., the Kashmiris of the Kashmir Valley who, Tariq Ali et al write in Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011), “the valley of Kashmir now hosts the biggest, bloodiest, and most obscure military occupation in the world” (cited and summarized in GDF’s “How Kashmiris Got So Good At Smoking Indian Soldiers,” 2024).
In terms of raising class/culture awareness and intelligence through the Gothic mode and ludo-Gothic BDSM liberating the whore to have their revenge against profit , Medusa is an incredibly ubiquitous example; one that speaks to trauma in our own lives, she readily comments on commonplace struggles of AFAB workers, but also those perceived as monstrous-feminine at large (which extends to “incorrect” AMAB persons and intersex people). Throughout the rest of the book, then, we’ll of course consider gender trouble in relation to historically ironic (from the Western heteronormative perspective) biological factors; e.g., trans women being seen as “false women” for a distinct lack of female sex organs, but also as “non-men” who fail to perform with their male sex organs and gender roles as essentially indiscrete; i.e., in the ways expected of them by the state (which essentializes human biology insofar as sex and gender are, for them, one-in-the-same).
For the moment, though, I want to examine an aspect of misogyny that classically female monsters like Medusa historically represent in Western culture: biological reproduction and animalization.
Whether cis or not, all workers are sexualized and of nature. However, AFABs are closer to nature in the sense that they have bodily functions they cannot avoid and which the state wants to control and chattelize by having them bear children and identify around this fact. To this, AFAB people are forced, to some extent, to identify as women—the identity generally being tied to their reproductive functions as systemically exploited and viewed as abject by patriarchal forces. By this same token, sexist cis-het men are simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by the vagina and what comes out of it (except their own semen, which they love): babies, period blood of various consistencies, and yeast infections. Pee (and female ejaculate) don’t actually exit the vagina but many men think both do; men also incorrectly call the woman’s pussy her “vagina,” denying her sexual pleasure outright by ignoring the clitoris, labia, and vulva while emphasizing her reproductive functions as compelled for the state’s continued existence—i.e., a broodmare thereof, kept stupid, powerless and dumb (as well as her children, implying a cycle of feudalized rape to keep the patrilineal bloodline “strong”).
The simple fact is that patriarchal men fear women—but also AFABs in general alongside male and intersex monstrous-feminine during ludo-Gothic BDSM—because heteronormative canon frames female bodies, periods and PMS as mythically terrifying to men fearful of past revenge hinted at by camp: something that must be contained or else. The UK’s Royal College of Nursing states that “Women have long been seen as at the mercy of their biology”—with doctors having called “hysteria” (female madness) “wandering womb” for millennia (2021). However, hysteria was also a convenient excuse to kick modern women out of the American workplace, post-WW2 (exhibit 3a1). This goes well beyond factory work, with computers being a socialized, female field until it was colonized by men—culminating with neoliberal dickheads like Bill Gates privatizing operating system softwares that were largely open-source for decades (Another Slice’s “King Of Neoliberalism,” 2020); forgetting computers, the entire STEM field currently is systemically sexist[7] according to the Society for Women Engineers (2021) and has been since the Enlightenment/Cartesian Revolution.
Relegated to the realms of women’s work, female workers often see life and death in ways male workers do not: as intertwined, but also integral to female bodies in ways that are generally controlled uniquely to women as workers. Yet it’s something that Capitalism can’t alienate entirely from women, but can frame as monstrous by dehumanizing the whole reproductive process and making all aspects of female labor somehow tied to reproduction and female biology (which, again, ties into gender-non-conformity and trans, non-binary and intersex peoples): women are monsters who must be dominated to preserve the species’ current arrangement.
Enslaved to childbirth as a privatized system of compelled labor that reduces mothers to breeding vats, AFABs experience death in stages generally ignored by cis-het men, because cis-het men will not experience these things directly in relation to themselves (versus GNC persons, who regardless of their biology can be labeled as monstrous-feminine). Indeed, bourgeois-inclined men only care about those children most “useful” to the state: the cherished son as a would-be father, husband, soldier, doctor, philosopher, patriarch, politician, Caesar, etc; the daughter as a wife, bride, or aforementioned broodmare (a much more narrow role). To cater to men in this respect, women must face more than simply period blood and menstrual cramps, but miscarriages, stillborn babies, postpartum depression and various other things that make them feel possessed by their own bodies and sex organs as hijacked by the state. They become animalized, but also goaded into abusive dialogs that pit them against other women in marginalized circles; e.g., “I am woman, hear me roar” at trans people, not the state.
We’ve discussed animalization throughout our thesis argument in Volume Zero, which we’ve cited here as well. Animalization isn’t strictly a negative insofar as class and culture war are concerned. On the state side of things, though, sexual reproduction becomes systemically compelled, but also mirrored by horror canon shouting, “childbirth is abject!” from American rooftops for decades. It becomes its own form of gossip that harbors a great deal of genuine anger, monsters, and camp on both sides of oppositional praxis. But on the state side of things, the aesthetics of rebel culture become subordinate, thus complicit in state aims—with furious Medusa archetypes and subjugated Hippolytas triangulating against state enemies; e.g., GNC women as bad animals and cis-queer women (and cis-het feminists) being “good bitches” for the state; i.e., TERFs. While this abjecting of animalized workers is common in female human workers, and while people who menstruate/give birth are generally treated like chattel for their reproductive capabilities, our own gossip, monsters and camp also need to consider the needs (and ironies) of non-human animals as well and how we relate back and forth.
Before we move onto George O’Keefe as someone who expressed her own rebellion relayed in natural forms, let’s quickly consider the plights of animals and nature as something to acknowledge.
The paradox of the pedagogy of the oppressed is that animals cannot talk, so we must listen to them through our own performances of them as a means of identifying with their oft-silent struggles; we must speak for them by identifying with them. For these reasons, the struggle of animals might not always seem obvious at first glance. Capitalism, for example, is marginally kinder to dogs and cats and other non-human, “pet”-type animals (especially chonkers and lomgbois), and (as my thesis argument explored at length) tends to valorize these qualities when applying them to humans who serve the state. The same goes for various hunting animals, beasts of burden or chattel; i.e., valuable, lucrative property that you’re not supposed to have sex with (though if patriarchal men could have babies with animals, they undoubtedly would). However, excluding specialists speaking out for their favorite critter (entomologists stanning for bees or mantids, for example), a collective push should be made to see all animals in a more positive light, not just the cute ones; i.e., how Capitalism exploits the natural world by citing non-human animals as useful or not according to the bourgeoisie and what they “own” through structural, positional, and material advantage. It’s important, because it affects humans, too, insofar as we’re compared to animals all the time.
As YouTube creators like Ze Frank or Casual Geographic demonstrate, humor and slang serve these humanizing aims, code-switching between science, comedy and myth to reclaim stigma animals (and their associate human pariahs by proxy); i.e., in the minds of a casual audience bred on theatrical clichés (while still, both of them, essentially being white moderates/token liberals who refuse to critique Capitalism on their large channels). Anti-animal sentiment overlaps with human stigmas; e.g., anti-dog sentiment in Isle of Dogs (2018) being a canine cryptonym for “rabid” Japanese eco-fascism (which we’ll briefly touch on here before returning to in Volume Three) and Imperial outrage: segregation, immiseration, persecution, and genocide adjacent to real-world assassinations like that of Inejiro Asanuma by right-wing ultranationalist, Otoya Yamaguchi:
(photographer: Yasushi Nagao)
Gothic Communism is holistic and its means of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM must include “stigma animals” (and the marginalized peoples associated with them; e.g., Medusa and snakes; Drow and spiders) as symbols to rescue (which “Call of the Wild” shall do, in the Demon Module):
- wasps, “monster bugs” that actually pollinate flowers (Cerruti R. Hooks and Anahí Espíndola’s “Wasps, Surprisingly Cool Pollinators,” 2020).
- snakes, “danger noodles” that are largely harmless towards people, but stigmatized to Hell and back: “Just a quarter of snake species are venomous, and most snakes aren’t a threat to humans or pets. Yet snakes inspire fear in many people, whose overblown reactions often result in snakes being unnecessarily killed or removed from their habitats” (the Human Society’s “Snakes Have a Bad Reputation that Doesn’t Match Their Behavior, 2023).
- bats, “sky puppers” that eat tons of insects but also fertilize/pollinate plants (the USDA’s “Bat Pollination”) but are also constantly endangered (the Bat Conservation International, 2023).
- spiders, “spooters” that also eat tons of insects
- frogs and toads, “hoppy bois” that remain incredibly sensitive to the changing of the world climate due to human intervention, thus useful to determining the health of a given environment (Candace Thomson’s “Nature Center Notes: “How Toxic Is Your Environment? Frogs Will Tell You,” 2019); also, they look super cute when fighting each other
- sharks, “stuffed animals” disarmed ignominiously underwater by flipping them on their noses, yet still are demonized as “supreme killer machines” by aspiring Hollywood directors; e.g., Spielberg and his many imitators)
- shrikes, which despite being “headbanging, prey-impaling death-birds” (Hannah Waters’ “Shrikes Have an Absolutely Brutal Way of Killing Large Prey, 2018) are still songbirds.
- parasitoids (which help combat overpopulation and starvation—i.e., in a natural way not tied to the profit motive and genocide).
Even some dogs and cats[8] are stigmatized, or rabbits, for being stupid and weak (a concept we’ve already discussed and will look more into at the end of Chapter Four/start of Chapter Five in Volume Three, exhibit 100a5). For example, so-called “bad dogs” overlap with the deliberate weaponizing of real/robot dogs tied to national fervor and anti-intellectual, xenophobic behaviors; e.g., Isle of Dogs‘ complex blending of Japanese media with anti-vaxxing and isolationism (exhibit 24a, below).
In the film, these happen in spite of an existing vaccine in order to perpetuate fear and dogma versus the fallibility of the state despite its widespread abuses, general skullduggery and master/slave, dynastic-familial posturing through propaganda as righteous and “invincible”: “Brains have been washed, wheels have been greased, fear has been mongered.” Amid this, the narrative makes room for humanized narratives with animal personas: the lady and the tramp, but also a boy and his dog tied to larger geopolitics parodied as “cat-and-dog” hysteria. So-called “dogs of war,” then, historically take on a literally meaning through warrior pups that have since become lost to history as nightmarish, Baskerville-style hell hounds trained to do Capitalism’s dirty work (Unknown5’s “The Man-Eating Spanish War Dogs That Crushed the Aztecs,” 2023).
Such anthropomorphic stories can be useful to bridging gaps within geopolitical divides and radically different political stances during oppositional praxis. For instance, while Jadis was inarguably a stone-cold biznatch, they absolutely adored stigma animals. Indeed, it was their most endearing quality and something I very much enjoyed about them; it was also how they identified, worshipping the wasp and performing as “wasp” through BDSM analogs. The same idea applies to cats and dogs, but also the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate. Dogs can be disposed of, and ghost or zombie dogs can bridge the gap between the colony and colonized, sacred and profane, trickster and tricked, etc, during liminal expressions that—through ludo-Gothic BDSM—often have deep ties to nature as a profoundly alien experience that must be reclaimed:
(exhibit 24a: Artist, top-left: Persephone van der Waard; top-middle: Tommypocket; top-right: Neal D. Anderson; bottom-left: source, modeled after Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”; bottom-right: Gobifrip. Eco-friendly art is predicated on artists, including poets, being in touch with nature by identifying with it through animals; e.g., the “inhumanist” poet, Robinson Jeffers. Often there’s a pastoral element, connected with fishing or tourism in medieval/pre-Capitalist depictions of peacetime and demilitarization.)
(exhibit 24b: Artist, far-top-left: George Roux; top-middle-left: unknown; top-middle-right: Escape Pearly; top-far-right: Georgia O’Keefe; bottom-far-left: unknown; bottom-middle-right: Takato Yamamoto; bottom-far-right: H. R. Giger.)
Reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM is a liminal proposition, and compounds through intersecting liminalities amid an animalized Gothic. As the manifesto explored, this applies to Capitalism’s continuation as a menticidal system towards workers, which can be reversed through remediated praxis; i.e., pastiche, whose campy monsters can potentially introduce “perceptive” parody, ironic gender trouble and constructive anger, etc, in opposition to DARVO and other state tactics of control. Vis-à-vis the paradox of violence, terror and hellish bodily expression, the potential for resistance to state abuse is always present, but must be realized through de facto good education that raises awareness, intelligence, empathy and understanding through the Gothic mode. This requires gossip, monsters and camp, which require the other interrelating devices (our creative successes, the Six Rs, etc). Round and round.
This symposium has already touched on liminality in one form of pastiche (re: Velma pastiche, exhibit 22); Capitalism more broadly results in a series of paradoxes and conflicts captured in Gothic pastiche at large, often through poetic thresholds. Their crossing includes not just monstrous surfaces, but their lairs’ parallel space as liminal-by-design; i.e., built to be moved through. Said motion encapsulates a crossing of social (often taboo) barriers through occupation and movement inside; re: Bakhtin’s chronotopes (with Gothic chronotopes being especially “heavy” in terms of historical-material time, thus trauma, as felt concentrically within the scenic decay of a given space-time narrative: its historical, but also hauntological [nostalgic] signature). Once ventured, these “routes” can be retaken for entirely different reasons depending on how one leans socio-politically as continuously informed and challenged by the material world and vice versa; i.e., ergodic motion, whereupon these same routes have already been taken (and remade) time again and time again. What Luis Borges called “The Circular Ruin” (1940) or “Garden of the Forking Paths” (1941) also applies to the cultural attitudes assigned to chronotopes’ occupants, familiars, creators, and homes.
(artist: Jamie Lee Curtis)
Women, for example, become alien as a status and location whose time and place are complicated by societal bias during uneven mistreatment and estrangement in professional roles; e.g., within acting as something whose pedagogy of the oppressed becomes regularly denied to anyone whose mother isn’t cinematic royalty (which Jamie Lee Curtis’ mother was). Alienated within or removed from society (“‘woman is other’ symbolizing chaos and darkness, a priori” vs “society others women and relegates them to darkness”) or otherwise concealed from in-groups, the result is constant female displacement and dissociation; i.e., through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection, which throws women off of and away from society’s half-real, imaginary forms that, in turn, bleed back into daily life. She becomes alien, as does nature and her in relation to it; e.g., Samus Aran, but really any heroine, insofar as Gothic treatments of women are difficult to escape in popular media/real life. The point of ludo-Gothic BDSM is to conceptualize this through play as going beyond what we might think “women” even means; i.e., as something to abject, including by tokenized agents policing nature as monstrous-feminine, thus not automatically female.
At times, a setting and its inhabitants synonymize to some degree. For example, Georgia O’Keefe was a “monster” (a gay[9] woman) painting “flowers” (vaginas, 24b) in ways that allowed her to express herself as freely as she felt comfortable in her time period, but whose resultant tableau implied the artist behind the canvas through non-humanoid, nature-themed abstractions—flowers. Giger likewise straddled the fence between the living and the dead (exhibit 24b)—the sacred and the profane—to subversively convey the symbolic body as erotically “biomechanical,” a retro-future “vice character” recreating old medieval ideas “discovered” by his surreal portfolio, then shown to Ridley Scott by Dan O’Bannon, who facilitated the ideas through Alien, which FOX distributed, selling the entire thing to 1979 America and eventually the rest of the world in various figurative and literal copycats. Like Medusa, the flower-as-feminine or xenomorph as monstrous-feminine frame nature as alien, insofar as we no longer recognize our connection to it, but also abject (displace and disassociate) settler-colonial abuse elsewhere, onto an “other” being in an “other” place: some combination of women, plant life, stigma animals, Indigenous life, and queerness in a spatial arrangement that conveys and houses them. This is the framework that ludo-Gothic BDSM eventually seeks to camp at all, requiring the objects of camp be bottled, first: an invigilation to work within.
(artist: Rocky Schenck)
To that, Giger might seem more overtly monstrous than O’Keefe, but the paradoxes of power and play were on full display in both their galleries’ liminal expressions. In turn, these expressed shared ideas about the surreal and the feminine as something to portray in relation to nature as a battleground of Gothic ideas, of which the human body is but one. The feminine/female form as monstrous-feminine could be readily be expressed by Giger’s drug-addled gimp suit as oversaturated with overt, corrupt expressions of psychosexual trauma; but O’Keefe’s own body was—bare and exposed—equally inhuman and forbidden in the eyes of those who might see her younger, openly queer self as something to stare at while thinking of things associated with darkness, nature, sin and vice, etc: Grendel’s mother but also her lake, and the flowers surrounding it that “weaker” individuals associate with soft feminine things, which the “strong” insist are hiding untold terrors; i.e., the kiss of death; e.g., the “blossom” blooming boldly between O’Keefe’s legs:
(exhibit 24c1: Nude photos of O’Keefe taken by Alfred Stieglitz—all but one, of Ellen Morton that male art critic, Alex Waterhouse-Hayward, mistook for O’Keefe because of Stieglitz’ conditional patronage of O’Keefe and its legacy of “controlled vice” that O’Keefe would challenge for the rest of her life; likewise, Hayward would be burdened with a hermeneutic “blind spot,” tending to favor men and male interpretations of things; i.e., exhibit 24d1.)
In other words, Gothic abstractions intersect in highly dreamlike and chimeric ways, which—in the absence of emergent play during ludo-Gothic—become stuck, dogmatic (which the abjection process is). Already male-dominated, the entire struggle of a nature-oriented, sexually descriptive dialectic was hardly ground-breaking by 1979 (when O’Keefe’s flowers were old news). As a Pygmalion chain of visual facilitation—from Giger to O’Bannon to Scott to FOX—the sequence had a love-hate treatment of female nudity as monstrous, occurring through liminal expression during oppositional praxis. Whereas Giger’s xenomorph (exhibit 24b/50b/51/60c and many more) is a liminal being tied to Gothic hysteria and the necrotic, murderous “womb space” as an unstable, escaped slave, the viewing of the creature’s Numinous power brought home to empire from a perceived “elsewhere” extends to male art critics stupidly conditioned to think of women as monstrous in sex-coercive ways (exhibit 24d1, Hayward). O’Keefe’s own nudity was liminal in the same respect, and generally in relation to “ancient” spaces, which Giger’s Gothic-surreal poetics conveyed: caves, lakes, darkness and the underground (exhibit 24d1).
Through informed, dialectical-material study, their doubled condition highlights functional similarities amid cosmetic differences. Brought to light, both are exposed to Cartesian assaults. However, O’Keefe was “vulnerable” (as this 2023 article by Ayanna Dozier puts it) because society made her so in relation to heteronormativity and its enforcers’ constant policing of nature-as-alien: women as beings of nature, hence alien themselves minus Giger’s male privilege, but also his bizarre creation’s animalistic, Amazonian defenses (teeth, claws, armored skin, a phallic ovipositor and “concentrated acid for blood”). However, O’Keefe—like the xenomorph—was also incredibly subversive, brave and free to experiment and try new things within financial constraints. The same applies to anyone perceived as monstrous-feminine, including other women experimenting with nude photography during O’Keefe’s lifetime; e.g., Ergy Landau (source: Rob Baker’s “The Nudes of Hungarian Photographer, Ergy Landau,” 2023):
(exhibit 24c2: Photographer and model: Ergy Landau. Her fascination with nude women gathered around water feels similar to Milton’s “narcissistic Eve[10]” loving her own reflection instead of her God-ordained husband, Adam. This, unto itself, is ludo-Gothic BDSM: playing with mirrors and one’s place in a predetermined order beyond what said order dictates unto an unruly extended being.)
From Pygmalion into the present, such Galatean bodies (female or not) are incredibly controlled, even amid perceived liberation. O’Keefe’s husband, Stieglitz, was not only 24 years older than O’Keefe; he also provided financial support, arranging for a residence and place for her to paint in New York in 1918. During their marriage, Stieglitz took hundreds of nude photos of O’Keefe when she was young. O’Keefe lived to be nearly a hundred. In 1978, eight years before her death, O’Keefe remarked, “When I look over the photographs Stieglitz took of me—some of them more than sixty years ago—I wonder who that person is. It is as if in my one life I have lived many lives” (source: Hilton Kramer’s “Stieglitz’s ‘Portrait Of O’Keeffe’ at Met”). Furthermore, Stieglitz’ provisions had strings that have to be reflected on—reflections on reflections of reflections (calm yourself, Borges).
For example, as male art critic Alex Waterhouse-Hayward himself remarks in “Ellen Morton, Georgia O’Keefe & Anne Brigman” (2018):
In 1987 on my first trip to New York, I saw a photograph [of Ellen Morton] at MOMA that impressed me and which I have not forgotten. Other variations of the above photograph say Stieglitz’s subject was Georgia O’Keeffe.
It came to mind on Saturday night when I was reading the Sunday New York Times […] I read a fine essay on almost-forgotten American photographer Ann Brigman written by Rebecca Kleinman.
What took me back to that photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe taken by Alfred Stieglitz was this quote:
She never really fit in [with] Stieglitz’s salon and city, seeking a breath of fresh air in Maine. He brought the theories of Havelock Ellis, the founder of modern sexology, that linked artists’ works and their sexuality, particularly concerning female artists. But eroticizing nudes wasn’t [Brigman’s] thing. Brigman went back to the West Coast for good, and Stieglitz eventually fulfilled his Pygmalion fantasy with the more compliant O’Keefe (source).
Regardless, O’Keefe’s infamous depictions by Stieglitz not only effaced other women and their own self-made attempts at nudity at the time—re: Landau and Morton; they were something she had to escape through her own “monstrous” work, but also reflect on later in life by quoting for interviewers about her own body of work as alien (or works taken with her as the subject to be captured by men). This wasn’t always immediately transformative, but it did happen as a means of play that—through workers after O’Keefe—would draw inspiration from someone working within the confines of their own present. Camp is relative, ergo ludo-Gothic BDSM as a means of camp.
For example, early in her life—post-marriage but for the rest of their lives together—the relationship between Stieglitz and O’Keefe, writes O’Keefe biographer Benita Eisler in O’Keeffe And Stieglitz: An American Romance (1993), was “a collusion […] a system of deals and trade-offs, tacitly agreed to and carried out, for the most part, without the exchange of a word. Preferring avoidance to confrontation on most issues, O’Keeffe was the principal agent of collusion in their union” (source). She “topped from the bottom,” in other words.
Moreover, this occurred as much through abstractions of herself—her flowers, but also things associated with parallel dialogs focused on shared abstractions that might seem totally different and yet concern a Gothic dialogic’s Wisdom of the Ancients. Coded and recoded through a shared aesthetics but also psychopraxis, the appearance of things belonging to this Wisdom is far less important than what they signify in relation to marginalized elements of nature applied to workers: the female and the feminine as monstrous and fetishized in ways historically unkind to anyone who isn’t a cist-het (and later white, Christian) man. The evocation of the cave becomes an affront to canon, but also a violent, fetishistic opera whose spaces of darkness, terror and rape allow the historically marginalized to reclaim their voice through the self-same tools of terror, bodies and violence. Trauma and power becomes things to associate with, and communicate through, nature as feral, hungry and feminine:
(exhibit 24d1: Photographer/model: Ann Brigman‘s “Cleft of the Rock” [c. 1907]. Photographer, bottom-middle: John McNairn [2021]; right: Jeff Dunas [1954]. Women and caves/rocky structures remain a tremendous fixture of classical art that has survived out of the oldest English written works—Grendel’s mother’s underwater cave in Beowulf—into photography and beyond [“Women getting stuck to rocks is the top-two greatest hobby of all time!” says Hannah Gadsby of male-authored classical art]. Regarding “The Cleft of the Rock,” Hayward writes, “There are some that believe that Brigman’s photograph above represents a vulva in the same way that O’Keeffe’s paintings of flowers do. I am not so sure.” Yeah, right; says the guy with dick-colored glasses, who mistook Ellen Morton for O’Keefe. More to the point, iconoclastic art extends to iconoclastic interpretations of art as something to teach to sexist men like Hayward. He’s right on the cusp; you gotta drive that point home, right into the brain—to [and this is a Plato pun] decolonize the female “cave” and lead him out of the allegorical [man-brain] cave. However, this takes practice, and often intermingles between men and women working together in unfair systems to say something unsaid; e.g., Neil Marshall’s 2005, “I am woman, hear me roar!” feminism of The Descent devoting much of its screen time to alienating and killing everything in sight.
The taming of the female cave as “the womb of nature” is something we’ll return to in Volume Two, when we look at Francis Bacon’s spearheading of the Cartesian Revolution as responsible for gendering nature as something to conquer by men and tokenized women; i.e., to rape.)
Such education requires an awareness from the student imbibing the lesson. Despite O’Keefe “holding the reins,” for example, she still negotiated (wordlessly by the sound of things) from a position of material disadvantage. Likewise, the existence of canonical gargoyles’ and their ubiquitous presence (the egregore and the chronotope) is gaslit then-and-now by those who keep the power of such things for themselves in favor of state arrangements: “monsters aren’t real” remaining a frustratingly common, if generally supercilious, expression of so-called “guy talk.”
For one, it relegates descriptively sexual/gendered bodies to the void of total image death, but also abjects the idea that sex workers can even negotiate with their bodies to begin with; i.e., to reshape how they are viewed through art in ways that decolonize the Superstructure, re-visualizing bourgeois egregores as sexually descriptive according to humanizing narratives; e.g., the undead/demonic egregore as animalized in ways that treat them as the stuff of dreams, but also the natural world (and feral, primal sex) as increasingly legendary (and rare) under a Capitalist-Realist mindset: the unicorn.
(artist: Zuru Ota)
We’re not talking about equine, horn-headed things, here, but an availability of sex known to a closer bond with nature as freed from Cartesian, heteronormative bondage. Over time, iconoclastic depictions of unicorns become valuable to Gothic Communists through their humanized, unexploited labor enjoyed by all those participating. As something to synthesize in socio-material terms, their representees can become autonomous, helping them escape chattelization by horny men; i.e., those who crave a willing and compartmentalized third—often a bisexual woman, but in reality extending to any effeminate receiver regardless of their sex (e.g., twinks)—to sleep with him and his complicit wife (or vice versa). This isn’t a fluke, but canonically advertised and sold incessantly to heteronormative couples all the time.
Cis bias remains. While Emile Lavinia of Cosmopolitan writes on “how to survive [unicorn season]” (2022),
A unicorn, quite simply, is a person who hooks up with couples – the key component of a threesome. Unicorns might be looking for a one off or something regular. […] A unicorn can be a person of any orientation or gender and there’s no right way to have a threesome or be a unicorn (source).
she focuses on bisexual women who unicorn:
Some women love to unicorn and others find it frustrating and frankly disrespectful having to field proposals from couples looking for a third throughout the colder months. Bisexual women have a long history of being fetishized and viewed as sex objects by heterosexuals (ibid.)
As the remainder of part one shall stress, Lavinia’s fixation on the bisexual female experience can be expanded on by trans, intersex and non-binary artists like Eldritch Babe and myself (exhibit 24d2) through iconoclastic Gothic poetics (which Volume Three shall likewise focus on; e.g., exhibits 87a and 101b). To this, O’Keefe was far less overt than Giger was, but plenty of artists portray the fetishization of the human feminine in far more open terms that point back to her vaginal, gently alien flowers. This doesn’t preclude sex positivity at all, provided the poetic context—and the instructional means of interrogating and negotiating trauma and power through paradox and play—are actively present. A “rose” by any other name can still function as a rose towards liberatory aims, especially when its viewed as monstrous, magical, and out-of-this-world (re: “Red Scare“):
(artist: Sasha Khmel)
Gothic Communism, then, seeks to highlight the dangers of “monsters aren’t real” as apophenic conspiracy—one that that smugly calls iconoclastic art and interpretations of it as “totally random” (apophenia meaning to see “patterns” in random data). Proponents of capital will discredit us, but also use and abuse us to enrich themselves through bad play. Such bad-faith instruction becomes something to beware, including how Capitalism commodifies our own trauma and pedagogy through ludo-Gothic BDSM as shackled to profit (and Capitalist Realism). This, on its own, is already a complicit cryptonym that conceals the Capitalist atrocities that sex-positive artists are desperately trying to suggest when they create seemingly random bonds using ostentatious Gothic language (or other artists taking what they see and riffing off it, or other artists like me making a collage of art, of art, of art). Not only does calling it “random” take away artist voices by making their work seem “fake”; but doing so utterly misses the forest for the trees connecting all of us in grander statements across space and time. It doesn’t matter whether anything “real” (an actual, literal vampire) is connected to them or not; material depictions of monsters (or things historically framed as monsters) very much do exist and furthermore, have deep-seated social-sexual anxieties and trauma attached to workers exploited under Capitalism.
The pedagogy of the oppressed relies on monsters to gossip about, thus prevent rape by placing it in quotes; i.e., camping its usual aliens. To avoid an abject, Foucauldian torture loop, iconoclastic monsters must be more than art, but emotionally/Gothically intelligent artists that reverse-abject the entire structural blueprint back into domesticated spheres, flaunting dark flowers, Satanic unicorns, and biomechanical demigods for the purposes of communicating trauma and preventing its actualization in the future. Meanwhile, “undead/demonic” workers with the mythical booties, thick thighs, buxom breasts, and tight li’l pussies—they’re the zombie unicorns who fuck to metal and possess a mythical, uncanny ability to shrewdly negotiate with those things in order to sleep with whomever they damn-well choose; i.e., to tame the rapacious tendencies in sexist Man-Box consumers through appreciative, mutually consensual peril: “Fuck me like this, in this outfit, the way I want as we agreed upon (we’ll explore BDSM negotiation much more in Volume Three, Chapter Three). By extension, these autonomous, BDSM-savvy workers permit whoever they want to draw them or photograph them as based on emotionally/Gothically intelligent boundaries (what Gamma Ray inadvertently calls “The Heart of the Unicorn,” 2001); i.e., illustrating mutual consent through negotiated labor exchanges that also, as it turns out, interrogate trauma as something to reduce through calculated risk while camping canon.
This largely concludes part one of the roadmap. However, a few assurances before we proceed onto part two.
First, after this roadmap is concluded, we’ll continue to refer to abjection throughout the entirety of the Humanities primer and Volume Three. We’ll also discuss hauntology, chronotopes and cryptonyms. For now, simply understand that all are academic terms that comment on commonplace symptoms under Capitalism. To be sex-positive, I must critique them in connection to capital and how they at times support and resist it, oscillating back and forth but not changing all that much visually or orthographically through popular, haunting depictions of monsters or sexuality in recursively wending stories (the endless, revisiting nightmare again being the mythical, cliché source of many-a-Gothic yarn). This will require the social-sexual habits of our currently unfurling roadmap as guided by interdependent girl talk from younger people, but also aimed in good-faith at older people initially stumped by these mysterious concepts—whose minds probably feel ” fucked” right now by what I’m trying to say.
(artist: Chris Bourassa)
Second, per Chris Baldrick, confusions are inherited, generally by those who sense the presence of trauma in Gothic situations shared between uneven victims of state abuse. Chaos, then, becomes something to acclimate towards during psychopraxis, psychomachia, Amazonomachia and psychosexual displays; i.e., as state education battles rebellious workers’ de facto education through the same basic poetics and synthetic oppositional groupings, mid-opposition. It’s never as simple as it seems because language is always in conflict (though generally for historical-material reasons that concern the state). So try not to fret too much about understanding things perfectly! Stay loose!
However, before we move onto part two, the idea here is to be loose enough within chaotic, interconnecting positions. My teaching style tends to be very fluid, organic and spontaneous; i.e., covering the likes of Medusa, George O’Keefe, H.R. Giger and Neil Marshall, but also far less famous gender-non-conforming persons in order to make my larger point. I would encourage my readers to try the same, and with friends who share you views:
(exhibit 24d2: Model and artist: Eldritch Babe and Persephone van der Waard, portraying an animal-themed BDSM scenario celebrating the subversion of Gothic canon through a dark breeding ritual [the background photobash is based partially on Franck Sauer’s BG art for the old Amiga shoot-’em-up, Agony, 1992].
As my thesis argues, monsters have a tremendous genderqueer potential to be Satanic rebels; i.e., queerness as simultaneously antithetical to state aims but nonetheless required by the state to be sacrificed in animal-like ways. As Eldritch Babe and I demonstrate, this butchery can be camped, and generally with a fair amount of psychosexual fun overshadowed by canonical trauma as something to camp through gender trouble; i.e., by putting “rape” and “death” in quotes, but also dissolving the line drawn between sex and gender and their state-sanctioned connection to biology set easily to rock ‘n roll as a theatrical assist:
“We eat the night, we drink the time
Make our dreams come true
And hungry eyes are passing by
On streets we call the zoo” [The Scorpion’s “The Zoo,” 1980].
Demons, the undead and animalized egregores, then, are not things to summon strictly from “somewhere else,” but are evoked through a liminal sensation closer to home; i.e., of another world that speaks to generational, systemic trauma in our own lives. All the same, there are profound levels of jouissance onstage; i.e., exquisite torture and ironic peril/rape play and xenophilia. To that end, the aim of the ritual isn’t to summon outright destruction, but cultivate a sense of catharsis through communion with psychosexual, palliative-Numinous forces during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s unequal exchanges of power and knowledge as things to negotiate time and time again. A demon or ghost might not appear each time, or it may—as a creature of chaos—appropriately take different forms; e.g., Eldritch Babe and I cultivated an especially animalistic ritual during one particular exchange, but it could have easily manifested a different way. What matters is the attempt and its goals during oppositional praxis; i.e., as a means of creative success through de facto education towards sex-positive instruction of future social-sexual habits, thus praxial synthesis. Function determines function, not aesthetics.)
Third, for those of you referring to these ideas yourself, also try and remember that the Six Rs, Four Gs, Gothic-Communist mode of expression, Six Doubles of Oppositional Praxis and synthetic oppositional groupings are simply things to keep in mind as general teaching objectives, means and techniques while testing them out in various holistic ways. You certainly won’t need to invoke all of to them in a given moment in order to achieve proletarian praxis, but merely should keep the basics in mind during your creative successes: gossip, monsters and camp. All demonstrate praxial synthesis as an attempt made many times over leading to praxial catharsis. More important than hammering any of them into peoples’ heads, then, is mirroring them in sex-positive ways that people can intuit at their own speeds; i.e., cultivating them during their own reflections on capitalistic trauma inside a hall of mirrors: our revolutionary goals and creative successes being things to repeatedly “shoot for” per performance as echoed across all. Each is instructional, constituting good education (camp) versus bad (canon) as occupying the same space during an ongoing and highly plastic Gothic dialog.
(artist: Vetyr)
When you’ve been through Hell, it becomes something to bring back with you and express in opposition to what put you through it to start with (the state). Above all else, the cultivating of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness remains paramount—to help workers and society liberate itself (and nature) from Capitalism, thus assist in the renewed development of Gothic Communism through sex-positive (art)work. As things to cultivate, emotional and Gothic intelligence are synonymous with social-sexual activism begot from our own diving into the imaginary past. So please, swim around and play—with language, yourselves, and figurative and literal BDSM games that renegotiate labor and unequal power exchange in sex-positive ways. Mix, match, and blend; inject or insert (so to speak). Whatever it takes to do the job in some shape or form; i.e., to recultivate the Wisdom of the Ancients, thus achieve a Gothic-Communist outcome. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” If it works, it works! The signs of praxial success lies in how your students, viewers and customers respond to your own checklists and their idiosyncratic constellations, but also what you put into the world around you: through your own basic approaches that can be extrapolated on through theoretical analysis if need be, but also by and large speak for themselves.
When liberating workers (all of whom Capitalism sexualizes) through iconoclasm, remember that, as iconoclasts, you will generally be compared to vice characters along the way (exhibit 13d). Be mindful of reactionaries, moderates and class traitors more broadly. They are undercover cops who, at any moment, might disrobe, transform and attack you, but just as likely will retain their outward appearance while seeking to cause harm in bad faith. The more openly ironic gender parody and trouble are displayed, the more likely someone is wedded to the Cause; but even so, context is key in telling good actors from bad, and must be scrutinized through dialectical-material analysis each and every time. Eventually it becomes second nature—a means of reading the room:
(artist: Eris Allure)
This concludes the basic synthesis roadmap and its exhibits—to cultivating good social-sexual habits through our teaching methods/synthetic oppositional groupings, thus achieving proletarian praxis through what we create to camp canon with, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as Galateas, not Pygmalions. With it concluded, as well as my current assurances in place, we can further demonstrate how the basics operate according to oppositional praxis through my teaching style. Before we finally delve into the Humanities primer and the various “poetic histories” within the Gothic mode that each section examines, let’s conduct a deeper look at war and rape as things to be mindful of in our own social-sex lives while synthesizing praxis. We’ll do so one at a time, starting with war as something to camp, thus prevent its unironic harm when canon goes unchallenged.
Onto “A Deeper Look at Cartesian Trauma in War Culture“!
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] Though we won’t stress these terms here, this includes conflicting theories (psychopraxis), monsters (Amazonomachia), mentalities or identities (psychomachy) and sexualities (psychosexuality).
[2] Toxic love bleeds into modern pop culture, too; e.g., Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 album, Rumours, which was written while the entire band was cheating on each other and presumably knew about it. Lorna Gray writes:
Forty-five years ago, Fleetwood Mac released their 11th studio album, Rumours—widely considered one of the best albums ever made. But while Fleetwood Mac’s music has inspired, comforted and captivated people for almost five decades, it’s easy to forget the tumultuous and downright crazy sh*t that was going on behind the scenes. Namely, the fact they spent a heck of a lot of time on cocaine, and they’ve all been embroiled in some sort of scandalous love affair, usually with each other. The somewhat incestuous affairs of the band members were at their peak when they spent 11 months recording Rumours. Mick Fleetwood has admitted recording the album “almost killed us” (source: “Inside the Affairs that Nearly Destroyed Fleetwood Mac,” 2023).
[3] I’ll never forget when Zeuhl called me “cutie” for the first time; the word sounded alien to me, but was something I very much wanted to hear more of as time went on. Every partner I’ve had has used their own special terms of endearment to refer to me as.
[4] (original footnote abridged): “She did! See Routledge’s The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine (2022).”
[5] I.e., Matthew Lewis having Ambrosio freeze at the sudden sight of Matilda’s exposed boob—i.e., “her tits were there” (source tweet: Patti Harrison, 2019)—while likewise describing it in a highly unnatural, statuesque fashion (effectively camping/reverse-engineering Genesis in the process):
As She uttered these last words, She lifted her arm, and made a motion as if to stab herself. The Friar’s eyes followed with dread the course of the dagger. She had torn open her habit, and her bosom was half exposed. The weapon’s point rested upon her left breast: And Oh! that was such a breast! The Moonbeams darting full upon it enabled the Monk to observe its dazzling whiteness. His eye dwelt with insatiable avidity upon the beauteous Orb. A sensation till then unknown filled his heart with a mixture of anxiety and delight: A raging fire shot through every limb; The blood boiled in his veins, and a thousand wild wishes bewildered his imagination (source).
[6] A sadly apt metaphor for TERFs if ever there was one—like a battered housewife, the abuser pits the second wave feminists’ Amazonian female rage against trans people (and minorities) instead of men: a Dark Medusa or Hippolyta like Victoria from Zofloya (exhibit 100b2) or Ellen Ripley (exhibit 30a) told in badass wrestler’s, action-hero kayfabe, thus allowing centrist gradients like muscle mom Marisa “Glory Seeker” (98a1), queer boss Natalie Wynn (100c10) or queen bitch Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West (exhibit 98a4) to emerge (which synonymize “badass” with defense of the nation through “waifu bait”: the promise of war brides to male consumers). At the same time, these “TERF Amazons and Medusas” can be dutifully met by various subversions produced by iconoclasts like myself—e.g., Nyx posing as an Amazon warrior mommy (exhibit 102a4), but also various franchised simulacra: Odessa Stone (exhibit 100c4), Marisa (exhibit 104a2), Elphaba (exhibit 112c) and Zarya (exhibit 111b). We’ll examine all of these oppositional variables in Volume Three, Chapters Four and Five.
[7] It is also queerphobic, insofar as my ex, Jadis, would “stealth” as a woman (“girlmoding”) to avoid trans misandry by cis male and female scientists (re: “Showing Jadis’ Face“).
[8] Orange cats are often seen as more stupid than other cats, and black cats as witches’ familiars. It might seem “harmless,” but leads to the actual harming of animals based on their phenotypical presentations: the color of their skin and their fur coats (similar to humans). The apathetic divide generally stems from them being seen as animals to begin with, except their relation to us is one between two (or more) animal groups—with humans preying upon non-humans in ways unique to our species: Capitalism.
[9] Used in the loose sense, “gay.” However, to be more accurate and clear, O’Keefe was a bisexual, polyamorous woman who slept with married and unmarried people and their (often-artist) partners in normative and non-normative inclinations. As such, she—and her paintings and my language to describe her—are “more than meets the eye” transformers that shapeshift when needing to disguise the vulnerable workers associated with them. The rebellious subterfuge becomes a revolutionary cryptonymy that shields iconoclastic workers like O’Keefe from heteronormative power and its centrist/reactionary enforcers: things that appear like ordinary flowers but speak on forbidden subjects like female agency.
Likewise, to try and say O’Keefe was “just” bisexual and not queer in the broader sense is to colonize interpretations of the artist, post hoc. It was a different world, a different time, but she was still queer in ways that defy singular, Cartesian definitions of commonplace terms.
[10] From James W. Earl’s “Eve’s Narcissism” (1985), though I don’t see Eve’s seduction by Satan as a bad thing like Earl does: “Eve’s problem, though, is that she invests only some of her narcissistic libido in Adam. It is the fate of what remains that concerns us—because by means of her residual narcissism she is seduced by Satan” (source). Or maybe Adam sucks?
