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“!

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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?

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.

Synthesis Symposium: Nature Is Food; a Roadmap for Forging Social-Sexual Habits, or Cultivating Gothic-Communist Praxis in Our Own Daily Lives/Instruction

“People don’t really connect, you know?” “What?” “Like those dots simulating humans. We all live totally separately. That’s how it seems to me.”

—Harue Karasawa and Ryosuke Kawashima, Kairo (2001) 

Picking up where “Sample Essay and Paid Labor” left off…

Approaching the end of Volume One, we have moved beyond outlining our manifesto’s stated goals—its core tenets, simplified theories (from our thesis), and means/materials/methods of study—to increasingly examine the trauma of other people and ourselves. Whereas the postscript considered acknowledging the pain of others to process collective trauma, we’re now going to consider the execution of theory during oppositional praxis when acknowledging trauma ourselves in a combined pedagogy/performance; i.e., praxial synthesis towards praxial catharsis through good instruction as enacted by us when confronting Cartesian abuses that treat nature not simply as female, but monstrous-feminine food that harms Indigenous peoples, racial minorities and GNC people (so-called “incorrect” or “non-men” of the white, cis-het European sort) to varying degrees of settler-colonial genocide: by cheapening their lives, their bodies, their labor to serve the profit motive.

(artist: Skylar Shark)

Note: The following terms are all ones I devised from older words to simplify and explain my manifesto tree; i.e., in its most basic form, and the one I expect most people to encounter, experience and employ on a daily basis. —Perse, 4/9/2025

As stated during the preface, praxial synthesis executes theory by cultivating good social-sexual habits that simplify theory during oppositional praxis’ camping of the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM. This instruction happens in order to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness, preventing Cartesian war and rape through trauma writing and artwork as de facto (extracurricular) educational devices; e.g., ludo-Gothic BDSM as a form of proletarian creative success, not a means of material gain performed by bad-faith actors concerned with profit and punching down instead of educating people through their work in a sex-positive way (re: Autumn Ivy). This raising of intelligence and awareness can point towards more complicated theory (e.g., postcolonialism) but the emphasis remains on the functioning of theory through a collective, second-nature cognition that cannot be strictly controlled. It must take on a life of its own within a complicated system of interrelating factors: oppositional praxis and Gothic poetics, but also good education and acting versus bad education concerning nature as regularly alienized and harvested by settler-colonial forces.

Praxial catharsis is the application of practical theory to resolve state trauma at the source: through our own connections to systemic issues, which we then express through interpersonal, intersecting pedagogies/trauma in practical ways. Doing so means taking simplified versions of Gothic-Communist goals and theories while progressively dabbling more and more in the exploration of the anything-but-simple—and indeed inherent messiness of—interpersonal and transgenerational trauma; re: Cuwu and I supplying the backbone of that idea with the manifesto postscript, which evolved into my and Bunny’s work followed by many other models and I leading back to Cuwu and pushing forwards again. We whores are like ninjas, then: whatever the distance, however long our absence, a shadow warrior can always come back for one last ride (“Ninjas are paid in wisdom!” says I Am Ninja, in 20-freaking-25; timestamp: 3:22)!

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

As such, the manifesto and postscript have carried out a mounting progression of trauma writing and artwork towards this roadmap, which was preceded by a small essay to test your theoretical fluency (and introduce the idea of the Cartesian harvesting of monstrous-feminine entities) and a quick pause after that to also consider the financial nature of successful labor exchanges exhibited using Gothic poetics. Now we arrive at the synthesis roadmap itself, which considers the cultivation of the rebellious mindset and habits needed to apply good praxis towards achieving systemic catharsis; i.e., through said poetic’s creative successes challenging Cartesian thought.

The synthesis roadmap, then, constitutes its own symposium-style chapter (similar to the symposium at the end of my thesis)—except, its interpersonal rhetoric of trauma writing and artwork doesn’t fixate on the generational abuse of police states like the manifesto and postscript did. Instead, it shifts focus towards what I consider to be the root of the larger problem, and one we can devote praxial synthesis to achieve catharsis in ways that rescue workers and nature from: Capitalist Realism as a Cartesian enterprise. Under Cartesian thought, nature is female food tied to profit in ways that alienate workers and the natural world in classically Gothic ways that lead to police states and grim harvests, but also harvests at large regardless of their outward appearance; i.e., of nature as monstrous-feminine through settler-colonial models that continue to plague workers and nature as victims of capital, female or not. The Medusa is genderqueer and whose “rape” during the dialectic of the alien must be put into quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM—on our Aegis, fuck-starting rebellion’s face during the whore’s paradox and revenge (unicorns look cute and stab things)!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Note: “Nature is monstrous-feminine” is another concept of mine (camping Beauvoir and Barbara Creed)—a tremendously important idea I would expand on heavily in Volume Two, but especially in “Rape Reprise” (and the following chapters); i.e., when discussing the whore’s revenge as something to have against profit in duality during ludo-Gothic BDSM (and its subsequent liminal expression). To it, “nature as monstrous-feminine” and “humanize the harvest” are super productive ideas, and factor into many of the post-scarcity arguments made by Sex Positivity throughout its entirety—in Volume Two, but also the second edition to Volume Zero and One (and eventually Volume Three when it releases).

Second, the best way to understand complex systems is to break them down into simplified models that—in hindsight and through application—may have complex theory applied to them, during holistic study. To it, capital is a complex system of exploitation, one whose pyramid shape conceals and reveals itself during the cryptonymy process to further abjection with chronotopes, hauntologies and Gothic poetics: virgin/whore monsters, whose heroic variants often tokenize to police nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine; re: Amazons being token cops who—formerly dainty Gothic heroines—weaponize for the state to scapegoat even-more-marginalized groups, thus gentrify and decay feminism; e.g., trans women being the scratching post for fascist feminisms playing the white Indian to punch down against society’s most vulnerable parties, the former who then have to suffer the usual bullshit on top of being token traitors (re: “Policing the Whore“; e.g., The Kavernacle’s “Conservative Women are STILL SHOCKED that Right-Wing Men HATE Them,” 2025). The manifesto’s whole point, then, is holistic study returning to older arguments after I’ve made complex theoretical models to explain them, which I then simplify/reverse engineer through their simplified forms, here; i.e., there and back again… again.

This simplification is two-fold: The “Manifesto” section returns the PhD’s complex theory back to a general state of simplicity (while bringing new ideas from Volume Zero into the fold; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM). From there, “Instruction’s” synthesis symposium simplifies things even further by considering the manifesto tree as something to synthesize through daily habits, on and offstage; i.e., through the cultivation of good daily social-sexual habits that theatrically supply the behaviors needed to synthesize praxis: praxis happens in opposition, which is to say it synthesizes in opposition towards catharsis. Praxial synthesis; oppositional synthesis towards praxial catharsis and systemic change as a matter of oppositional praxis, the bourgeoisie (and their various traitors’ persecution language) versus the proletariat (who subvert said language imperfectly during oppositional synthesis). This, in turn, comes back to our series title in praxis, mid-synthesis: sex positivity versus sex coercion regarding universal liberation undercut by the usual Judas characters and cops-and-victims Faustian bargains that immortalize them!

To that, oppositional praxis is more complex and oppositional synthesis is more basic, but both tie into the same larger struggle and—as far as I’m concerned—can be used somewhat interchangeably when discussing Gothic-Communist development and its many hurdles; i.e., there isn’t an obvious point where one begins and the other ends. That being said, the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis are essentially remediated praxis (re: parody and pastiche), which Volume Three discusses at length; i.e., oppositional synthesis initially appears, here, but explores most heavily through application during Volume Three (versus Volume Two, which concerns history and application to varying degrees); re: as something that Cuwu and I essentially pioneered in its most basic forms, “Healing from Rape” onwards. Time is a circle inside space; this book is made of space-time as the Gothic do—through the camping of monsters and sex (re: “Castles in the Flesh“)!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

In either case, the model for opposition synthesis, including the synthetic oppositional groupings (from the manifesto tree) are unpacked here; i.e., in the simplest of ways that Volume Zero could not, then explored throughout the remainder of this book series after Volume One: through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a praxial-synthetic challenge to tokenism oscillating on the same Aegis, using the same basic aesthetic! The rest of this symposium largely presents “as is”; i.e., to preserve its historical elements (and ability to stand on its own/not interfere with me citing it repeatedly in future books), this addendum predominantly the only substantial extension the synthesis symposium shall receive. —Perse, 4/8/2025

The synthesis symposium divides into a smaller primer and three fundamental pieces (followed by a conclusion): “the basics,” or synthetic oppositional groupings that occur during oppositional praxis, as well as the canonical endorsement and reifying of unironic war and rape as things to prevent vis-à-vis these basic factors when synthesized during iconoclastic/campy approaches; i.e., according to our good social-sexual habits/synthetic oppositional groupings:

• Part zero, or the pre-symposium (including this post), explains what synthesis is, as well as providing equations and trauma to prime the reader with before pressing into the symposium itself.
• Part one, “the Basics of Oppositional Synthesis“: An examination of the basics, or pure reductions, of our synthetic oppositional groupings; i.e., how our pedagogic emphasis involves oppositional praxis as something to synthesize according oppositional synthesis with a proletarian agenda: to prevent war and the rape of workers/the natural world by raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and, by extension, a class/cultural awareness that leads to systemic catharsis; i.e., through trauma writing and artwork as things to express and teach through a basic educational approach. Features Medusa and stigma animals, but also Georgia O’Keefe, H.R. Giger and more recent auteurs.
• Part two, “a Deeper Look at War“: An iconoclastic consideration of war culture and how it can be interrogated and synthesized in our own creative responses to canonical forms; i.e., how to recognize said canon and express our trauma in relation to it during class/culture war as a means of challenging Cartesian arrangements of power and outcomes. Features Robert Heinlein and Akira Kurosawa.
• Part three, “a Deeper Look at Rape“ and “finale: A Problem of Knife Dicks”: An iconoclastic consideration of rape culture and how it can be interrogated and synthesized in our own creative responses to canonical forms; i.e., how to recognize said canon and express our trauma in relation to it during class/culture war as a means of challenging Cartesian arrangements of power and outcomes. Part three features Amazons, phallic women/traumatic penetration, and violence in sports; the finale examines morphologies policed under such binaries during pornographic expression; e.g., racialized tropes, but also fat people at large and human (often female) bodies targeted for having “fat, immodest” qualities, which are then alienated by capital, before being fetishized and harvested like crops. We have to humanize the harvest during ludo-Gothic BDSM, camping our own rapes by taking control during calculated risk that minimize the chance for harm (re: the whore’s revenge against profit)! We’re avatars of the Medusa, and Medusa is the final boss of Capitalist Realism for a reason! Look on our Works, ye Mighty! Heaven in a wildflower, indeed!

(artist: Leeza)

Synthesis Roadmap, or Nature Is Food, part zero: Pre-Symposium; or, Synthesis, Equations and Cartesian Trauma (war and rape)

The magic circle is not something that comes wholly from Huizinga. To be perfectly honest, Katie and I more or less invented the concept, inheriting its use from my work with Frank, cobbling together ideas from Huizinga and Caillois, clarifying key elements that were important for our book, and reframing it in terms of semiotics and design—two disciplines that certainly lie outside the realm of Huizinga’s own scholarly work. But that is what scholarship often is—sampling and remixing ideas in order to come to a new synthesis (source).

—Eric Zimmerman, “Jerked Around by the Magic Circle” (2012)

Before we dive into the symposium proper and the basics, I want to prime you with some core devices: a more comprehensive explanation of synthesis (which the camp map finale touched on in Volume Zero) and several equations and ideas to keep in mind when processing trauma ourselves; i.e., while regarding the simplification of theory when teaching it through the expression of trauma as a Cartesian byproduct—one that alienizes and fetishes nature, turning it (and workers connected to it) into monstrous food during genocide expressed through war and rape, which ludo-Gothic BDSM can camp in a variety of ways:

(artist: Legion)

First, the idea of simple versus complex. Again, Gothic Communism relies on the simplification of complex theory to tackle complex structures (Cartesian thought and Capitalism) as simply as possible, but also in oddly relatable, even hilarious ways; i.e., by people who don’t have a total understanding of theory but can still apply it according to their shared trauma in popularized exchanges that thrive on linguo-material contradiction/abstraction according to human language (and its dark materials) as fought over but also with; e.g., Skynet as an abstraction of capital, but also the xenomorph (above) as a potent means of performance and play during Gothic psychosexual expression camping the canon with Gothic play and unequal exchange (dark desire, revenge fantasies, etc).

Whereas praxis is the practical execution of theory as reified out of a grander compiling to choose from (my thesis argument in volume form), synthesis amounts to how said theory is simplified into livable forms to achieve praxis at all. It is how praxis is cultivated and taught through play during ludo-Gothic BDSM, and good de facto education feeds synthesis with varying emphasis on theory as applied through habit; i.e., as something to practice and instruct to future generations relative to trauma using Gothic poetics in our own media. It must become, to some degree, second-nature.

In turn, the synthesis roadmap concerns oppositional synthesis, pointedly the synthesis of good social-sexual habits that contribute towards proletarian praxis mid-oppression and mid-conflict under Capitalist Realism; i.e. as de facto educational devices that make workers collectively more intelligent and aware of trauma as something to identify outside of themselves and respond to/interrogate, but also identify and negotiate with: in sex-positive Gothic dialogs shared between themselves and other workers as emergent beings (tired to nature) harvested by Cartesian agents demonizing them.

As my thesis volume argues, the extracurricular function of sex positivity amid Gothic poetics must become second-nature; i.e., through creative successes whose ludo-Gothic BDSM can be passed on and subsequently learned from in popularized forms; e.g., the inherently violent, liminal and paradoxical expressions of the operatic Gothic castle/danger disco, psychosexual rape fantasy and monster pornography/Amazonomachia kayfabe we’ve examined thus far in Volumes One and Zero as quintessential forms of trauma writing and artwork. There’s always a form of nefandous abstraction, but this is hardly “mute.” It’s just a different form of data to feed the brain with. Call it food for thought, insofar as it turns us away from Capitalism’s usual, Cartesian harvests hidden by Capitalist Realism. We can remain delicious and monstrous without being reduced to profit for the elite.

Continuing this ghoulish nourishment, I also want you to consider the fact that I am revisiting this roadmap while attempting to preserve its conversational flavor in light of my thesis volume. Similar to the symposium from Volume Zero, these changes are happening after completing my thesis argument, except the roadmap was originally devised before the thesis crystalized. This might make it seem more basic or conversational by comparison, but I think that might actually be useful when grappling with these ideas yourselves—i.e., an invitation of sorts for you to consider how you might encounter these arguments in your own simplified approaches when dealing with complex things. In your own lives, you probably won’t encounter block quotes of my theories except inside the volume itself. However, you will encounter pieces of what went into it as you go about your own lives, and can adopt a more conversational Gothic dialogic when conducting and reifying oppositional praxis yourself; i.e., synthesizing theory and trauma to achieve systemic catharsis through a raising of emotional/Gothic intelligence and warrior awareness in defense of the state’s usual victims.

The point in doing so is to demonstrate how to teach the successful execution of theory (recultivating the bourgeois Superstructure) by examining iconoclastic art as something to create in relation to healthy social-sexual habits that we not only pick up, but learn to perform in our own daily lives living under the power of state forces—not just as workers, but sex-positive de facto educators who teach the world through what we create and leave behind: the educational legacy of our sex work, artwork, and various other exhibits that routinely survive us. These aren’t instructions to harm, but prevent harm on a global scale by camping the very canonical devices that lead to harm in the same complicated shadow zone; i.e., “harm” as a theatrical, sex-positive device camping Cartesian gargoyles. Imagination and experimentation—while canonically deplored—are essential to escaping state tyranny and addressing its phantom pains by bringing them out in the open.

If you’ve read the symposium from Volume Zero (and the end of the manifesto), you’ll have an idea of what to expect, moving forward; I didn’t want to change things too much despite having written this second symposium well before my thesis. Like the thesis volume’s symposium, it represents a point when I was still figuring things out, and I think it serves as a good thought experiment insofar as it will represent a middle stage in your own thinking that will match up with this talk of mine. Its cluttered, “messy attic” quality might speak to you better as you interpret and grapple with these ideas yourselves. And if you want increasingly more complete forms of theory that spell things out as much as possible, there is always the manifesto and thesis. Compared to those, this symposium is a conversational way to close out Volume One. After the symposium primer supplies its own ideas, part one will try to illustrate them (and the basics of oppositional synthesis) through a seminar that walks you conversationally through their application; parts two, three and the finale will consider this application in relation to rape and war in canonical forms. For the entirety of the roadmap, I want you to consider the basics yourselves. I will do my best to mention them and evoke the simplified theories of the manifesto as a means of thinking about labor and art, but also generating and utilizing it ourselves in our own day-to-day relationships (which explore our own trauma).

(artist: source)

It’s true that Gothic Communism is built on systemic trauma as something to acknowledge and articulate, but its achieving of systemic catharsis happens through good praxis; i.e., as a teaching approach whose theories live and breathe through creative expression, which process and interrogate trauma in our daily lives then pass said information on using synthesized, abstracted forms (e.g., ghosts). That is, rather than cancel each other out, they fuse and corrupt into a unique form of data at home in Gothic expression: trauma as a psychosexual presence, but generally one complicated by competing class/cultural factors. For Gothic Communism, this means oppositional praxis. All the while, power and resistance share the same space, haunted by the spectre of state abuse and Marx; our retailored derelicts and their complicated paradoxes operate less as raw reductions of theory and more as pieces to a collective societal puzzle that, when assembled and holistically examined, constitute the reformulation of the Wisdom of the Ancients to achieve systemic catharsis when regarding transgenerational trauma; i.e., as a thing thoroughly trapped inside a cultural imaginary past. In it, the trauma cannot be neatly exorcised, but it can be performed in different ways that lead to its gradual healing over time through ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

Said healing happens not by killing dragons or whitewashing castles, but returning to nature (and reclaiming our labor) through the informed, steady changing of socio-material conditions that prevent systemic harm in the future. Doing so is meant to challenge complex things with simplified approaches that make up a larger solution to a grand problem: our material conditions and historical trauma, which are often abstracted into past-like, hauntological forms. The core issue, then, stems from a lack of resolution tied to the crux of my thesis argument—that Capitalism sexualizes all workers to exploit them; i.e., a heteronormative, Cartesian dimorphic whose global sexualizing of workers and nature leads to a terminal myopia of Capitalist Realism through cyclical Gothic poetics (the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection, but also Shadow of Pygmalion/Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern, etc); the solution is to reclaim these haunted poetics and reverse their class/cultural function through our six Gothic-Marxist tenets and four main Gothic theories’ creative successes.

We’ve listed these successes entirely earlier in the volume, including mutual consent, informed consumption and descriptive sexuality as things to express ourselves. Volume Three will stress all of them; Volume One’s symposium emphasizes de facto education as something to illustrate through the synthesis of subversive Gothic poetics. To that, their practical teaching element married to lived trauma is what I want to spend the remainder of the volume introducing readers to. By working as a direct, counterterrorist solidarity against the state, we aim to prevent war and rape as Cartesian byproducts by raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness towards nature as alien, food, monstrous-feminine; i.e., through the cathartic processing of personal and systemic trauma along various intersectional routes traveled by real workers and occupied/shared by them collectively. To this, other peoples’ creations—what they make and fashion out of the clay of the Gothic imagination (what Descartes would call emergent beings) for the purposes of humanizing those seen as raw materials—are just as valid as anything I could make myself:

(exhibit 20a2: Artist, top-left, bottom-mid-left/-mid-right: Chronorin; bottom-far-left: Kukuruyo Art; top-mid-left: Le Faux Creux; top-mid-right: Rivolution; top-far-right: Oujuo1; bottom-far-right: Reiq. Beings of darkness are generally made from stigmatized materials/natural resources that—when divorced from settler-colonial aims during ludo-Gothic BDSM—serve a vital iconoclastic role during rebellious morphological expression. To that, Satanic morphology uses Gothic nostalgia to bring us closer to our alienated bodies, but also their trauma as requiring psychosexual healing through an assortment of analogous materials: slime, metal, chitin; oil, rubber or latex; dead tissue, animal tissues [chimerism] and so on. There’s an animate-inanimate quality but also a seditious element that must, under canonical circumstances, be presented as abject and commodified. Satan becomes something to control through commodified “opposition.”

Keeping with the sculptor’s metaphor, monster-making produces bricks in a “primordial” series, their corrupt, monstrous-feminine wall singing the hysterical chorus of a reimagined past; the chorus becomes an enormous challenge to the status quo and what it seeks to dominate through the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection: the Earth and things associated with it/of it as hellish, dark, and forbidden, but only ostensibly under their control. As Frankenstein shows us, Victor’s Cartesian ploy fashioned a giant statue he had no hopes of controlling. Indeed, it grew to resent and rebel against his embodiment of systemic abuse by embodying a side of himself that had become alien, which he then tried to deny and abort, but also torture [an approach the Creature then adopted “to better the instruction”]. Unlike Milton, monstrous self-expression also applies to consciously rebellious sculptors and their complicated golems, except they identify with their clay as traumatized, thereby speaking what is hidden through the same base materials’ cryptonymic rebellion. As such, their self-expression, -empowerment, and -determination embody the Satanic spirit of a self-fashioned deity challenging the Almighty who claims to have authored all things by having “total power” over all forms of authorship: “God” can make devils, but devils are not allowed to play god and make their own things. This is easy enough to disprove.)

I hope the above exhibit illustrates how, while the rest of the volume draws upon jargon—and I consider such heady theoretical concepts useful to understanding my central thesis and its ideas; i.e., as things to teach through iconoclastic art made by individual artists working in concert—the roadmap’s language is still largely figurative and simplified to make it more accessible when processing trauma at interpersonal levels. As such, think of my thesis argument (and relevant language presented in the manifesto) more as a handy guideline for executing the core ideas of Gothic Communism, while also thinking about the bigger picture of systemic trauma and its confrontation using commonplace language that relates to or relays your own trauma as something to express; i.e., with a shared pedagogy against larger oppressions: what Shakespeare’s Hamlet would call a “quintessence of dust,” and Milton “darkness visible.” Make it your own, and breathe life and pedagogy into your own creations, that these golems-esque egregores—be they undead, demonic, and/or naturalized—might speak of taboo things that help the world to heal.

To that, don’t be afraid to substitute my terms with your own language as you go; and if that seems daunting at all, consider how we’ve already been doing this with various authors already. Selective reading is a conversation made with our own contributions to what already exists, making something new in the process: a roadmap towards systemic catharsis as something to exist under historical-material conditions that, among themselves, harbor unique elements that we contribute towards when developing Gothic Communism together. If the thesis volume is my theory and the manifesto simplifies it, then the roadmap is how I would go about it in the most flexible way I could think of; except I don’t see the approach as “mine,” insofar as it’s been tailor-made to transform into something new through Satanic poetics and counterterrorist thought as a mode of campy reclamation that anyone can do, provided they stay sex-positive and focused on universal liberation during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

If it’s not mine then why give a roadmap at all, you ask? Well, it’s all too easy for me to do exhibits and just talk about them as I spout theory from Volume Zero. But I don’t expect people to just “get” these things without having the same exact experiences, education and outlook that I do (which is impossible; my identical twin doesn’t have that—in fact, he and I are actually quite different despite having similar opportunities; we’re actually mirror-imaged twins with different dominant hands [I’m left and he’s right] and clashing personalities, which is why I think he’s cis-het and I’m trans).

Nor do I think it’s a good idea to just “hurl” theory at students in any scenario. Rather, I want to explain how theory can be applied to worker lives as they live them—as people first, whose praxis happens to whatever degree they curate art as an extension of emotionally/Gothically intelligent habits, which can then be connected to Gothic-Communist theories post hoc. Take my teaching approach and make it your own to process and defuse state trauma with, but also weaponize your trauma as a form of self-identity within ongoing struggles.

(exhibit 20b: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. The monsters that we make are generally extensions, if not of ourselves, then complicated aspects of the human condition that we synthesize through our own labor using our language, bodies, and body language. The idea, with Gothic Communism, is to synthesize good praxis through sex-positive Gothic poetics; i.e., to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness by cultivating healthy social-sexual habits: with ludo-Gothic BDSM in our own daily lives, including the monsters we create.

To this, the Drow as I envision them, aren’t strictly evil, but something that can embody a buried, taboo form of sex positivity that we bring to the surface and educate people with; i.e., not associated with the delivery of harm by the Drow, but their canonical receiving of harm when placed into the state of exception as evil, matriarchal spider people with purple skin who practice black magic. Luckily this deliberate collection of stigmas can not only be survived by those forced to wear them, but subverted and embodied as a form of rebellious sex-positive struggle whose cryptonymy weaponizes the basic imagery against state propaganda doubling said imagery; i.e., by humanizing the state’s chief nemesis through trauma writing and artwork, thereby constituting intentional [and seductive] reclamations of settler-colonial hatred tied to sexual trauma that is synthesized into a sex-positive, postcolonial form. The Drow and the trauma they broach become, like Milton’s infamous darkness: visible.)

I want to stress that self-identity involves connections that require praxial synthesis as part of a larger equation. That is, “sampling and remixing ideas in order to come to a new synthesis” isn’t unique to scholarship (re: Zimmerman) but applied to everyday people from all walks of life performing proletarian praxis in opposition to state forces through several equations I want to resupply you with from the thesis volume; the first involving oppositional praxis:

Sex positivity happens during oppositional praxis’ class/culture war (class traitors/weird canonical nerds’ class dormancy and betrayal vs weird iconoclastic nerds’ class [thus race and gender] consciousness); i.e., sex positivity vs sex coercion to recultivate canon/the bourgeois Superstructure, thus reclaim the Base (means of production) according to our proletarian tree of Gothic-Marxist tenets and other factors.

and the second about proletarian praxis:

Successful Proletarian Praxis (recultivation of the bourgeois Superstructure through iconoclastic art creation, critique, or endorsement; the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis) = Thesis Statement + Praxial Coordinates (manifesto tree) + Synthesis (social-sexual habits, emotional/Gothic intelligence, and financial support during worker’s daily lives; i.e., the camp map from the thesis volume and the synthesis roadmap from Volume One) + Poiesis History (the Humanities primer)

Yet, (most) workers aren’t like computers that operate strictly through equations; they’re physical, biological creatures. As extensions of them, their art is often spontaneous as a result, but also often subconsciously part of given artistic movements that workers may not be actively aware of (as I wasn’t for years, despite making prolific amounts of sex-positive writing and art, slowly “waking up” as a trans detective regarding my own evolution).

Propaganda is code; workers absorb and internalize code as “human computers” do—slowly and inefficiently over time, according to competing “lines” that support or reject the status quo. Planned, coordinated resistance generally requires class-conscious or at least semi-conscious efforts that resist the propaganda of the state, but also the rape and war cultures they beget and transfer onto one’s own social-sex lives, power exchanges and labor exchanges: the socio-material markers that stochastically trigger horrifyingly violent responses from sleeping minds—at the domestic level, but also in foreign territories back and forth. Praxial synthesis includes recognizing these things and, if not outright rejecting them, whistleblower-style, then at least not openly endorsing them, either. This includes critiquing things we, as workers, are taught to endorse as central to our lives, even academically or at least in connection with academic institutions and their holistic output—e.g., popular sports at the college level (with colleges neoliberally centering diploma mills around sports teams as things to emblematize achingly Liberal platitudes; you get a “free” ride if you’re an athlete who can help “the school” [meaning its owners] make money):

(exhibit 21a1: An exhibit of “false consciousness” conducted by “sleeper agents” waiting to trigger and conduct Man-Box abuses that lead to military urbanism? Maybe, but it’s still stochastic under Capitalism as a living structure carried out by people, not robots. Then again, maybe our boys holding up the frog [toads are frogs, even hypnotoads] are actually revolutionaries in disguise! If so, they still have to hide inside the grander structure of Capitalism’s tableau; i.e., its heteronormative sphere’s crowds and sports-driven bread-and-circus. And the recipients of any social-sexual violence that results from these interconnected factors are right to be wary of those most likely to perform it: cis-het men [or those in the closet who self-hate for failing to perform as such, conflating their true selves with unironic, psychosexual harm]. Heteronormative canon and its male workers—be they star athletes, husbands, cops, soldiers, doctors and/or your goddamn mailman—historically rape women and abuse minorities; the poisonous nature of rape/war culture is how it extends into the public imagination alongside conspicuous fear and dogma that whisper of a larger terrifying reputation, a transgenerational curse. Racism, misogyny and other imbricating bigotries become both ubiquitous and endemic, like a common cold or seasonal flu evolving into more lethal forms [which, as Covid showed us, the most privileged, fearful and bigoted will opt out of inoculating themselves against regardless of the damage it does to less privileged/more vulnerable groups].)

As activists, it’s easy to point the finger at obvious examples, and not just the American secondary education system, including copaganda and the Military Industrial Complex working in concert; e.g., “Those Nazis sure were bad, weren’t they?” However, before the gas chambers, there were bullets and knives (“Holocaust by bullet”); before these, there was German propaganda; before there was German propaganda, there was American propaganda and genocide having inspired them (re: Bad Empanada’s “How the USA Inspired the Nazis – From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum,” 2022): a unified front against nature, founded on and concealing Indigenous exploitation during a continual process whose structure rapes and murders the world well before and after the Nazis have been sublimated; i.e., into a neoliberal likeness of themselves working as centrist foils during Capitalist Realism. The human emblems, above—our athletic white knights and their at-times theatrical moderacy—fill a special role within the profit motive: obscuring Nazis and other fascist groups during neoliberal kayfabe (which extends to any sport—not just dueling pairs but teams and their supporters).

War, rape and genocide exist everywhere under Capitalism, but so do the neoliberal illusions that less cover these things up and more essentialize them through deceptive refrains: “Rape cultural is a myth! Pay it no mind! Gun violence? It’s a way of life! Here, have a gun to protect yourself with!” Whether on the frontier of faraway lands or back at home, war and rape extend from capital, giving birth to neoliberal gargoyles whose flesh-and-blood equivalents internalize these lessons and spring to life once “triggered.” They become an endless glut of pleasurable, drug-seeking behaviors tied less to literal, external drugs and more to intense biochemical responses felt and pursued under the prolonged stressors of perceived duress: Gothic, canonical expressions of Cartesian violence, terror and bodily abuse/regulation through capitalist apologia; i.e., monsters “only” exist in horror stories, whose canon must nevertheless have abject monsters and torture porn with an unironic edge (to menticide workers with through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection within unequal material conditions).

As such, canonical “love” (rape) and war are merely “natural,” essentialized games—where only the strong survive and get the girl: “Might makes right, winner take all, to the victor go the spoils,” etc; which, under neoliberal Capitalism, has workers fighting more for less; e.g., Capcom’s “unprecedented” 2024 million-dollar 1st place prize for Capcom Cup X. It’s an Internet-Age “jousting” tourney where gladiators—relics of Antiquity—duke it out for scraps; i.e., relatively poor people/slaves, usually men, having extended to (usually male) weird canonical nerds/tech bros trained to be infantilizingly[1] violent through neoliberal, might-makes-right dogma in sports-like language, especially combat sports with a kayfabe element informed by Gothic poetics/psychosexuality haunted by medieval abuse[2]. Wrestling is an artform that historically pits Nazis, Communists and Americans against one another as living weapons whose pastiche projects onto various media forms; e.g., videogames. These, in turn, become regular sites of monstrous avatars (and targets of violence—bosses, lieutenants and minions) useful to the pacifying of workers through so-called “empowerment fantasies” that, in truth, master and dominate players (re: Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy) more than you might think. Informed, half-real negotiation can challenge worker subjugation and its harmful conditioning. Except you still have to recognize and critique the games themselves as praxis; i.e., insofar as kayfabe and BDSM are concerned within daily synthesis: Marisa from Street Fighter 6, below, as an icon thereof, serving to inform whatever habits we cultivate ourselves or already prescribe to.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard; original lines and background image by Reiq)

Such habits include the body-as-a-weapon, which takes on different forms in wrestling pastiche. Compare, for example, the shared operatic nature of pugilism and knife play kink (exhibit 0a1b2c, but also the Dragon’s Crown [2013] Amazon’s axe, below). In either case, you have a master/slave dialogic informed by the dimorphized aspects of kayfabe that lend themselves well to BDSM parlance.

Playing out onstage with athleticized fetish gear and performers, there’s a visual element of danger minus the actual threat of guaranteed harm (accidents still happen, of course). And the back-and-forth of this particular dance involves a partner who cannot actually harm you, but whose warrior aesthetic—specifically one personifying national war—lies adjacent to state theatrics that do promote harm through the same general performances and play: Marisa literally playing the Nazi[3] heel or black knight/destroyer role linked to Spartan-Roman hauntologies of the Zack Snyder sort (versus the babyface with virginal, angelic aesthetics “grappling” with their polar opposites during Amazonomachia). Practicing their expression is ultimately liminal, meaning the paradox of terror (and violence) arise while we interrogate past trauma; i.e., with fresh bodily forms that double state power and potential. When using our own play and performance to camp canon (and its monopolies) with the same basic (often kayfabe) language, this is when ludo-Gothic BDSM starts to take shape; i.e., as a means of camp that—like a doll—can be played with to instruct such things:

(artist: Jan-H Sculpts)

Regardless of the exact form, it’s vital to remember that the mechanisms/operations of capital affect everyone, and just as they affect everyone, they can be subverted in liminal forms of expression whose meaty kayfabe bodies and performances aren’t strictly controlled or operated by state forces looking to fatten and harvest them; i.e., “Trojan-style” disguises that convey revolutionary allegory through cryptonymic displays of Cartesian-grade violence, terror and morphology (the brutalizing of nature-as-monstrous-feminine) on and offstage:

(exhibit 21a2a: Artist, top left: Silverjow; top-middle: Jan Rockitnik; top-mid-right: elee0228; everything else: Ichan-desu. Marisa is one of many Amazons. Furthermore, the athlete is a common physical marker of war personified through the imaginary past as something to evoke in popular media at large. By extension, social-sexual notions of “warrior” and “strength” interlock and “argue” through cross purposes; e.g., the body of the Amazon, bear or twunk as ripe for political discourse within the human form as a hauntological, cryptonymic expression of power tied to combat sports and military culture. Subversions of this culture include the open fetishizing of muscular bodies with various masc/femme flavors that grapple with, or otherwise interrogate, double standards concerning the monstrous-feminine; i.e., in the paramilitary world of contact sports [which extends to the cryptonymy of “adventure” through the sublimation of war and rape]. Inside said world, it’s not uncommon to “recorrect” the feminine man by gifting the bear/polar bear with Herculean bodies whose chiseled muscles automatically translate to giant penises in the eyes of cis men [and have a pitcher and catcher with a presumed “womanly” bottom]. But it can also be reclaimed as a statuesque performer divorced from their intended role. It becomes a look/mood unto itself.

My point is, it’s not “the look” that’s the problem, but the context for how it’s viewed within said world as it presently exists [function determines function, not aesthetics]. The language of “bears” and “twunks” have had to exist in a military sports environment that, outside of the aristocracy or famous athletes, would have discouraged actual sodomy [non-PIV sex] in Western culture since the time of the Ancient Greeks: big muscles were statuesque and hypermasculine then and now through the personification of the Greek/Roman pantheon as thoroughly “Zeus-like” [the paradox of the gay superhero under Capitalism is that they are tolerated precisely because they are exceptional; i.e., the exception that proves the rule under Rainbow Capitalism: queerness is a commodity tied to war pastiche as predominantly straight, excepting tokens as the perpetual outsiders/smaller group]. Meanwhile, the non-binary approach to this morphological treatment of strength as corporal-sexual can also apply to women through gender trouble and parody as variably engaged: the Amazon as a musclebound “herbo” with the giant tits and six-pack; the skinny-thicc Barbie doll with pornstar curves and Pippi-Longstocking strength; or a cavewoman with traditionally masc qualities whose body evokes a Renaissance effect of morphological descriptors largely kept the same, but swaps genitals/sex organs in order to escape what is normally prescribed within a heteronormative binary [the “Conan with a pussy” concept, though Urbosa is basically female Zeus protecting Link by proxy]. The cis Amazon’s sodomy is less reviled in canon if only because, unlike the trans woman, she is born with a vagina, thus can be converted back to the canonically “correct” usage of that sex organ. In short, she can be tamed, rode and ostensibly bred in the appropriate hole [though not always] by her master.

To be crystal clear, this interpretative approach isn’t perfect. Marjorie Taylor Greene is basically a really mean herbo: a buff, incredibly dumb and frightened bigot/scared gym rat thriving in a culture war whose canonical praxis merges class war with the aesthetics of war in a fairly obvious way: muscles. Her Amazon disguise sucks—in part because cryptofascists rely on partial transparency but also because an anti-intellectual like her is welcomed by people like them who will exploit her position for a larger regressive movement: “Look at how loud and proud she is, but also strong like Xena!” She’s like a cheap wrestler in this respect; i.e., bad-faith but also “campy” in a thoroughly blind and bourgeois sense. It’s tragic.)

(exhibit 21a2b: Artist, right: Jason Edmiston. Nation pastiche commonly personifies war through larger-than-life cartoons of men [and token agents] who fight within geopoliticized theatre as a grand kayfabe: the simplicity of the arena as a stage to punch away your problems [and sell tickets and other merchandise within a free and glorious market]. This doesn’t just apply to male Man Box culture, but will be something to keep in mind in Volume Three, Chapter Four when we examine how TERFs perform as regressive Amazons that emulate the same heteronormative mentalities [albeit from token positions within the capitalist paradigm].)

As the above exhibits depict, combat sports under neoliberalism are war personified through national theatre stemming from more antiquated forms of the same basic hero-monsters. In times past, the whole world was watching to the extent that it could. This blood-and-sand, bread-and-circus vibe has expanded well beyond historical knights and gladiators to a variety of performers within and outside the Man Box using shared language. Clearly the tropes endure, but have become hauntologized, contested. Knights serve more of a police function (the good/white knight, bad/black knight) and gladiators more as chattel/wage slaves operating inside a bread-and-circus model (this includes tokens offering the circus-level curiosities of Amazon or Adonis as commodified within the general business scheme of a babyfaces-and-heel switch).

Regarding EVO, Capcom Cup and videogames, such ordeals generally come with live bands/music to remind you it’s a legitimate sporting event despite the relatively unathletic nature of videogame players: NASCAR levels of corporate sponsorship, phallic trophies and player kayfabe personas that move product with their digital bodies parallel to the Military Industrial Complex overseas, the two operating in unison; e.g., Wayne’s World (1992, exhibit 34c2) connecting war in videogames to geopolitical maneuvers that use war inside capital to profit as highly as possible; i.e., by moving as much money through nature as can be done, all while exploiting as many workers as possible while dodging the consequences at every turn. This isn’t terribly difficult when you have means. For instance, a million-dollar purse barely qualifies as peanuts to a billion-dollar company like Capcom.

Likewise, as the elite work within their means, collateral damage is to be expected, but also canonized, worshipped and fetishized on and offstage, at home and abroad. Under such privatized, coercive conditions, canon’s menticide belies real abuse (rape or otherwise) long before it’s “proven” in a court of law—one run by powerful male (or token) judges and biased, cherry-picked juries having a vested, monetary interest in a selectively punitive and illusory course of Justice. Chosen to benefit, if not wealthy then certainly privileged white male defendants, the status quo banks on a legal system operating not as “corrupt,” but exactly as intended; i.e., according to the real world as echoed within copagandistic portrayals that celebrate this Faustian arrangement as naturalized and immutable, hence lucrative for Pygmalions like Dick Wolf maintaining the spell to profit off of its pro-state myopia (Skip Intro’s “Law & Order‘s War on Your Rights,” 2024).

You must understand, then, that oppositional praxis—its mode of expression and execution (through workers synthesizing praxis)—are hopelessly entangled, twisting into a Gordian Knot. Untangling the mess doesn’t call for a sword to slice through everything; it takes time and effort to interrogate, and must be done as it actually operates: “an unweeded garden grown to seed.” The important distinction for workers lies in seeing Capitalism’s ownership of the figurative “seeds,” their “planters,” the “pots” and the “soil” of the public imagination. Under these stark, pre-owned conditions, workers should do whatever they can when they can to contribute to whatever degree they’re able that raises the class/cultural awareness of a larger pro-labor movement seeking liberation; i.e., one that enacts sex-positive change through iconoclastic praxis synthesized according to emotional/Gothic intelligence, the social-sexual habits of which develop over time. It’s not a sprint, but a marathon performed by a disparate union of workers and various class allies (friendly millionaires, professors, politicians, industry legends and other privileged/accommodated workers) grappling with class traitors (cops; unfriendly millionaires, professors, politicians, industry legends and other privileged/accommodated workers). All are menticided to some degree and exposed to waves of terror through the state trifectas and monopolies. What defines workers as bourgeois or proletarian is how they respond within oppositional praxis, be that passively or actively (the more active/awake the better). In short, you want workers who “gotchu” when class traitors start to fuck around, like this very pissed off (and very awesome) Boston mom (Jaclyn Smith, 2023).

Speaking in fictional terms, Star Wars: Andor gives the perfect model, I think (and extrapolate on in my own glowing response video): Maarva/Cass Andor and friends are rebellious workers/active conspirators; Axis and Mon Martha, class allies; Dedra Meero and Syirl Karn, class traitors; Karis Nemik, the twink manifesto-writer (“the brains”); Faye Marsay, muscle (“the brawn”/Amazon warrior mom); Saw Gerrera and Kino Loy, liminal workers (factionalism, but also turncoats/converted allies); and B2EMO, the cute robot mascot. Nemik’s manifesto is the theory behind the operation; Mon Martha funds the rebellion and Axis facilitates it (in admittedly cutthroat ways); Andor vs Karn or Meero vs Axis and Martha are oppositional praxis; and the combined drama and intrigue between everything, in dialectical-material terms, synthesize through social-sexual, emotionally healthy and intelligent habits that “grease the wheels” of revolution and tyranny (there’s not much overtly Gothic content in the show but retro-future is retro-future).

To emulate these working concepts as part of oppositional praxis at large, the remainder of the synthesis roadmap divides into our aforementioned four parts: the “basics,” or social-sexual habits tied to emotional/Gothic intelligence as they presently exist, followed by fleshing out these concepts more deeply as we supply further exhibits about canonical war and rape as historical-material “side effects” of Capitalism/Cartesian dualism operating as normal.

Before we proceed onto the basics in part one, consider one more time the paradoxical means of applying Sarkeesian’s adage to the human body in popular entertainment as something to embody ourselves. Traditional mechanisms of strength and power are easily alienated and fetishized through Cartesian violence/abjection, to which function determines function, not aesthetics. All the same, there is generally a great deal of overlap, so remember this when conducting dialectical-material scrutiny through your own consumption, creation and/or patronage of the arts:

(exhibit 21b: Artist, top-left and right: Jan Rockitnik; top-mid-left and top-mid-right: Luigiix; bottom-left and bottom-mid-left: Inputwo; bottom-might-right: Velladonna.

The body—especially the female body—is a highly controlled canvas [which reflects back on AMAB variants of the monstrous-feminine/corrupt, of course]. As we have discussed regarding Amazonomachia so far in the book, the embodiment of strength is generally in conflict with hauntological traditions that serve the state, or become unmoored from state mechanisms to interrogate themselves in worker-produced, semi-asexual forms of poetic catharsis [e.g., rape play and public nudism]. The aim isn’t just to empower oneself in relation to one’s own trauma, but to prevent trauma in the future by reclaiming the potential theatrical devices that normally concern or otherwise bring trauma about for all peoples. The body as a canvas, then, becomes a battlefield with which to issue a variety of warrants and commands from and towards; i.e., through body language itself as normally policed with these bodies and their expressions of power, but through Gothic-Communist performance and play lets workers negotiate their own [a]sexual destinies by corrupting the usual mechanisms of worker enslavement: material conditions and propaganda.)

Heroes are often monstrous and sexualized, and the monstrous body is a huge paradox. Orcs are clear example, as we have discussed in Volume One and Zero

“umm I hope you guys know orcs would kill you if you tried to fuck them” whaaat holy shit man orcs are typically depicted as chaotic evil savages? no waaay dude, this whole time I’ve been eroticizing the monstrous as a deliberate critique of the racist and ableist undertones in the classical orc archetype, when I should have simply realized that elements of popular fiction are objective absolutes that can’t be reexamined or remixed through the cultural lens of the ever-shifting presentttttt (source, Tumblr post: Orc Boxer)

but really it can be anything monstrous or fetishized adjacent to monstrous stereotypes, thus able to intersect with systemic trauma through parallel expression (similar body types; e.g., the PAWG, below, as luscious, fruit-like, and ready-for-harvest); i.e., as something to expose psychosexual trauma and teach good play through (a)sexual renegotiation amid the creative successes of proletarian praxis grappling with state forms (which automatically compel sexual activity through segregation and force). This evokes the language of camp and ludo-Gothic BDSM to camp canon with, on the Aegis. Keep this in mind as we proceed.

(artist: Super Busty Art)

Onto “The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis“!

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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] The elite, as Elon Musk terrifyingly shows us with his diaper fetish alt account (re: depsidase), are not immune to the infantilizing effects of Capitalism.

[2] The likes of which still occurs behind the scenes; i.e., men enslaved to their contracts, their bodies being destroyed while women are sex-trafficked for those men by those at the top—Vince McMahon being investigated for sex-trafficking:

In 2022, McMahon announced he was stepping down from the WWE after an internal probe that found allegations of a hush-money payment to a former employee, with McMahon allegedly paying $3 million to the then-unnamed female, a WWE paralegal, to keep their “consensual” affair private. Following the investigation, he returned to WWE in July 2023. However, in January, that woman — Janel Grant, who was hired in the specially made role of “administrator-coordinator” in WWE’s legal department — filed a lawsuit against McMahon, WWE head of talent relations John Laurinaitis, and the wrestling company outlining years of alleged sexual assaults. Among the allegations in the lawsuit, is McMahon’s demands that Grant make herself sexually available to both himself and Laurinaitis (who is also named in the suit), as well as unnamed “WWE Corporate Officers” and a “WWE Superstar.” Grant also accused McMahon of degrading her, and in one incident, said that named and Laurinaitis locked her in an office and raped her (source: Daniel Kreps’ “Vince McMahon Under Federal Investigation Amid Sexual Assault Lawsuit,” 2024).

[3] Technically she’s an Italian fascist, who—as a token Man-Box bruiser—channels the alt-right, female prime minister of Italy, Georgia Meloni. But you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise; one, all fascists defend capital, and two, the Nazis have far greater propaganda value in centrist stories—are far more revered within kayfabe at large—for their perceived strength/warrior prowess. Despite modern fascism starting in Mussolini’s Italy, no one really makes movies about cartoon Italian fascists. Much of this has to do with American myth-making after WW2, hiding American Imperialism behind the Myth of the Good War (which requires a recognizable and feared, but also game enemy to work).

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.

Gothic Communism, a sample essay: “Cornholing the Corn Lady—Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire”

Edward Said’s book Culture and Imperialism was well received in the United States, but provoked some bad-tempered responses in the United Kingdom […] The reason for the bad temper, one might suspect, was that as the imperial power principally targeted in his book’s historical discussions there remained a legacy of colonists’ guilt in Great Britain. Particular exception was taken by British commentators to Said’s chapter, “Jane Austen and Empire,” and its triumphant conclusion: “Yes, Austen belonged to a slave-owning society.”

—John Sutherland, “Where Does Sir Thomas’ Wealth Come From?” Is Heathcliff A Murderer? (1996)

Picking up where “Trauma Writing/Artwork (opening and “Healing from Rape”)” left off…

Note: I’ve left this essay exactly as I wrote it, back in 2023, but supplied some addendums to “Paid Labor” directly after it. —Perse, 4/8/2025

This Gothic-Communist essay demonstrates me as the unideal reader of neoliberal canon. It was written in the spirit of fun, using the Six Rs and Four Gs to critique the Gothic mode of Jason Reitman’s canonical expression and a debate of sorts with ghosts of different kinds (and before I had coined ludo-Gothic BDSM, focused more on camp). Classic works are one such ghost, and one that must be invoked to say whatever one wants to say. But there are also the spectres of oppression and of Marx that can be invoked in a variety of ways: in the figurative language of dialectical-material analysis and historical materialism, but also thoroughly Gothic dialogics Sex Positivity prides itself at assembling and navigating. If the zombified spirit of Ronald Reagan is “alive” in 2023, then Angela Carter’s fateful, 1974 words ring truer than ever: “We live in Gothic times.” Allow me, then, a chance to express that now—by barbequing a sacred foal begot from the neoliberal 1980s: Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021).

Before we do, a note about Austen and Said’s bone to pick with her (as she is someone I’ve defended already in my thesis argument). My essay is iconoclastic, its proletarian praxis speaking to speaks to an enjoyment of the critical process on par with Edward Said’s “pleasures of exile.” Such a concept is hardly new, in the sense that Said riffed on Austen, “farting in Britain’s general direction” to say something larger about that country’s colonial guilt through their hypercanonical literature mom. That was new for the time (and useful to Gothic Communism for us). My essay does something similar in opposition to Gothic canon as something that is very much alive and well, and far less “quiet” than Austen’s Mansfield Park. Said is forced into, as John Sutherland puts it, “the awkward speculation, ‘Sir Thomas’s property in the Caribbean would have had to be a sugar plantation maintained by slave labour (not abolished until the 1830s)'” and the “dead silence [that] pretty well describes Mansfield Park’s dealing with Antigua” (ibid.); the Gothic is far louder because it’s working with a kind of language whose “silence” is anything but quiet.

Even with Said debating Austen’s “ghost” minus Gothic poetics, there’s considerable merit to arguing with spectres and the unspoken (re: Castricano’s cryptomimesis, or “writing with ghosts,” which I expanded to “writing with monsters”). Indeed, doing so is a time-honored activity that largely makes up what the Gothic is. And while Said’s dialogs are certainly not without weight, they’re also nearly two centuries further along than Austen’s. To that, it’s certainly true there’s a complete lack of urgency in Austen’s novel surrounding any kind of modern importance that Said assigns to postcolonial concerns. These would have been absent in Austen’s time, with her focusing entirely on the struggles of a rising class of property that was quickly becoming a class of people in a slave-owning society through a particular novelistic convention: white women inside the novel of manners. It shouldn’t really be surprising that she kept mum on certain topics; e.g., her pointedly roundabout and indirect conversation between Eleanor Dashwood and Colonel Brandon showcasing how neither can bring themselves to utter the word “duel” in polite company. But if her stories are any clue, she was profoundly apt at navigating the expanding-if-sequestered place of white women in an incredibly material world, and not without a considerable degree of irony (“It is a truth universally acknowledged…”) and dialectical-material analysis behind a veil that all women in her time were expected to wear by tone-policing white men; furthermore, as we have already explored in Volume Zero, Austen certainly wasn’t above critiquing the open, if deliberately moderate, bigotries of Ann Radcliffe’s own Gothic Orientalism (the further east you go, the darker it gets) when writing Northanger Abbey (written in 1803, published in 1817 after Austen’s death).

We shall press these Gothic voicings to our advantage in this essay. My point about Said is that I think he—ever in a hurry to outline the very-real and ever-pressing presence of American Imperialism in the Middle East—thoroughly underestimates/discounts the ubiquity (and degree) of the powerful forces that Austen was writing under as a white woman. It would be a mistake to lump Austen in with so many of her imitators and contemporaries, in part because her Mansfield protagonist, Sutherland rightly points out, “belongs to the Clapham Sect of evangelical Christianity, which hated plays and light morality only less slightly than it loathed slavery” (ibid.). Said’s overall conclusions certainly aren’t wrong about Imperialism, but his assertions about Austen are largely words put in her mouth by his pen (kinky), which he then argues with to make his point. The problem is, he assumes her silence to be indicative of a particular kind of guilt, when Austen’s shame at writing at all became a matter of legend after her death: “How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much Labour?” (source: Zoe Louca-Richards’ “Two Inches of Ivory: A New(ish) Jane Austen Acquisition,” 2020).

(artist: Touminnn)

That’s the problem with ghosts in regards to trauma writing and illustrations: they yield a fictitious, imaginary component to unspeakable systemic abuse supplied by the critic seeking to give said abuse voice, and Said’s invention (as with many invocations of Austen) is not entirely of the woman herself but her reputation and the spirit (and shackles) of the British Empire stretching into Pax Americana following the so-called “end of history” in 1991 (Culture and Imperialism and Spectres of Marx were both written in 1993). As with all Gothic histories, though, there’s a considerable amount of truth to had through a familiarity with what is being said, unsaid, or supplied through various cryptonymies that indicate a presence of trauma.

Keep this in mind as we proceed onto Ghostbusters, picking a bone with how American neoliberalism and Hollywood abuse Gothic poetics in order to uphold the status quo in fairly standard regressions. For them, and for Radcliffe as a spirit to evoke married to global Capitalism, ghosts are things to summon, feel anxious/fearful-fascinated about (through the ghost of the counterfeit), then exorcise in defense of the status quo using the process of abjection—to cut off Medusa’s “head,” in so many words, of which invoke a manufactured imaginary past that upholds a particular place and time as sacred: the conservative 1980s as copy of itself wherein copies of the imaginary past are reduplicated now to send us spiraling backwards into the self-same myopia; i.e., the scared, commercial-minded brains of white women, but especially the vulnerable consuming public inheriting the commodified fears of said women as taken from oppressed groups (and nature), repackaged, and sold back to the middle class.

These poetics are things to reclaim through our own pedagogy, which requires dialectically-materially scrutinizing “Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire.” The film, then, offers up its own Medusa to behead, commenting as it does so on the veneration of old clichés within bourgeois praxis and Cartesian thought as parts of the larger Gothic mode: Halloween as a canonical ghost of itself that is conjured up and vanquished in the same breath. Ghostbusters: Afterlife offers up blind war pastiche to canonically requote of an older version of the same basic franchise and its ghostly Medusa. This time around, Gozer—a ghostly “corn lady” (of the harvest, Halloween)—is coercively demonized, blamed for the downfall of all things by a mad “dirt farmer” whose own selfish legacy is restored to greatness when Gozer is exposed as “real.” Made material, she must be stopped—if not at her made-up temple than in the cornfields she imbues with ghostly menace (questioning elite sovereignty by challenging middle-class essentialism regarding these fields and their assorted yields). Her subsequent summoning and slaughter is hauntological torture porn; i.e., the fascist myth of the conspiratorial Great Foe both weak and strong confirmed and validated during her ritual sacrifice by the ghost police: the Ghostbusters. They’re playing with spectres of the Medusa so they can pimp her!

(artist: Alex Milne)

Thoroughly sexist, these Enlightenment pillars of reason can so barely get past Gozer’s short, dyke-ish hair that anything else is unimaginable: “Hey, flap top!” As such, they see Gozer exclusively as an agent of chaos upending the order of American civilization reduced to a localized portraited of itself; i.e., an illegitimate terrorist threat to the Cartesian romance of the New York cityscape, but also the American Midwest and its endless farmlands acquired through genocide. To this, any sense of counterterrorist power is omitted on purpose, Capitalist Realism robbing our ghost queen of a critical voice/pedagogy of the oppressed. She isn’t a source of legitimate female rage bucking at canonical war and rape, but an unironic plague on American crops and essentialized culture covering up American atrocities. Displaced, disguised and disseminated by neoliberal, Patriarchal forces, the symptoms of Capitalism-as-a-disease in Afterlife are gaslit, gatekept and girl-bossed by the bourgeois men behind the curtain. Afterlife is their own narrative of dynastic power exchange and hereditary power rites—the master plan/grand design as a self-confirming prophecy that recruits children to war, shames non-conservative values and Gothic expression with regressive Gothic poetics, and turns scientists superstitious in canonical worship of oscillating pastiche both narrow and broad; para, meta, and diegetic; liminal expressions that are automatically colonized; etc.

If anyone thinks I’m being unfair to Reitman, he a) lives in a historical period well after Said wrote Culture and Imperialism—i.e., when the horrors of America’s business-as-usual have been covered up not once, but repeatedly through myopic Gothic nostalgia; and b) speaks quite loudly through Gothic nostalgia to accomplish bourgeois aims. Purely by design, neoliberal Capitalism relegates linguo-material play along formalized lines that colonize everything into black-and-white/us-versus-them Cartesian dualism, heteronormativity and settler colonialism; Reitman’s ghosts trumpet a pro-state Gothic dialog to speak to American conservatism as a particular invention useful to the elite through a warlike consumer base bred on Gothic canon. Its (mono)mythic structure appropriates peril through these various means, with a particular ludic, sexually dimorphic structure—indeed, a war plan straight out of the Metroidvania model: miniboss keys (the Gatekeeper and Keymaster) that lead to the Big (female) Bad. Meanwhile, the Ghostbusters work as wizard-warrior “ghost cops” (on call, like Samus Aran to vanquish pirates for the Federation). In this case, personal responsibility frames the Ghostbusters as working-class “rebels” (whitewashed fascism) that seek and destroy Gozer and her generals in order to return to a “better” time—i.e., “the Regan years when the economy was good” and moral panic was high; when the children of yesteryear were taught to fight ghosts, but also see them as something to “fight with” using toy weapons. Miniatures for real weapons, these knights-templar-in-training would have been taught to worship their order as sacred, seeing their cutesy ghost enemies as simultaneously dangerous. In other words, the enemy is both weak and strong and hooks kids on the displaced, dissociative violence of appropriated, canonical peril. They’re conditioned to worship old dead men and their ghostly simulacra, but also their warlike, Enlightenment view of endlessly bloody worship being consciously sold back to them. Don’t think; react and consume!

The cultural result is a mire of canonical Gothic doubles—recycled clichés in support of a larger commercial model’s parallel space/chronotope: dumbly abject monster battles with complicitly cryptonymic scapegoats, carceral hauntology and sex-coercive family values. So while the single, white mother is dumb as a brick and shamed for being poor and single, her child returns to the violent traditions she rejected; in love with a man she never met and a time in which she never lived, Phoebe overlooks the stigmas of these times appearing in the present: how extramarital sex is shamed and fetishized as ongoing wish fulfillment for the parent-age workers, the local nerd promised wild animal bitches and the women compliant unto these entitled dweebs. It’s the hellish ghost of Ronald Reagan in action, his Vampire-Zombie Capitalism turning the younger generation towards the very traditions the previous generation had grown jaded towards; i.e., all the bullshit and false splendor that Reagan (and men like him) promised in Gothic forms: the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster. All of this is enacted paratextually by a diegetic meta-performance that comments on the men behind the curtain, of the curtain, on the curtain, in service of the Symbolic Order as set in stone. Jason Reitman follows in his daddy’s footsteps—just like our little, ace girl boss, Phoebe, follows in her grandfathers’ footsteps—and both registers channel Reagan who serves Patriarchal Capitalism and its appropriated perils, monsters and confusion. The sum of their patchy teamwork of concentric deceptions is an age-old Gothic cliché: the lie told by pirates to scare people away so the thieves can loot and plunder in plain sight (Radcliffe’s refrain). Egon is the patriarchal lie told using their neoliberal war chest—a staggering amount of industrialized artifice and narrative guile dressed up as “movie magic” and worshipped by apathetic nerds of all sorts:

(exhibit 18b: Sorry to burst your bubbles, here, but this ain’t “movie magic”; it’s canonical bullshit. “Brought to life” is also a bit of a misnomer, though the illusion still lives on inside the minds of target consumers who worship the process. As an artist, I can respect its power, but am leery of its abuses. Regardless if these were the best or most effective techniques, make no mistake: The studio used expensive, time-consuming methods to bring an actor’s likeness back to life, using that privatized “ghost” to sell the story of what Ramis played a smaller part in—not once, but over and over within a database of wax sculptures for the Gothic theatre of canonical war. Within that grander narrative, the real horror [for me] is watching the cute and intelligent Phoebe slowly turn into a little dog of war for Grandpa “Ramis,” controlled by an ascending ladder of vertical puppeteers. It’s frankly awful stuff, on par with watching John Ford [middle bottom-middle] curl his claw-like hands around Belinda Palmer’s body. Maybe Chinatown [1974] was “all fake.” However, just like Judy Garland before her, the reality behind that scintillate rainbow [and plausible deniability of the 4th wall] remained terribly bleak: Polanski was a rapist and everything was done for profit by corporate Hollywood goons and paid actors who looked the other way.

So, think of the workers, you animals! Protect them, whoever they might be. Don’t turn them—and by extension, the audience—into heartless monsters concerned with illusions and dreams of revenge. Mckenna Grace might turn out just fine; the smaller role they play as Phoebe remains part of a larger cover-up of systemic abuses that happen inside and outside of the film industry. Moreover, Afterlife‘s grander ’80s hauntology romances the very real and very terrible things not just under Reagan’s administration, but the continued existence of the United States and its unholy union of state and corporation already spread across the entire planet.)

Canonical praxis, in this case, is Phoebe: our little Velma-to-be, a detective-warrior debutante seeking revenge (Gozer killed her surrogate dad, Grandpa Egon). Phoebe’s asexual appropriation keeps her chaste, superstitious and curiously leery of ghosts, but converted into neoliberal Capitalism’s fiercest warrior during the formulaic narrative. From skeptic to true-believer, she gradually takes up Egon’s baton and—ever the dutiful grandpa’s girl—begins to listen to the ambiguous whispers of the past. Egon is invisible for nearly the entire film; his instructions are not. Their doubling and voice-in-the-walls disembodiment work as a cryptonym for the tyrant as a rehabilitated monster—a sweet old man and not the worst of the bunch even though the movie presents him that way to “disprove” it later. This requires a naïve, child-soldier host, but also a bogeywoman—”the muffin to toast,” the Corn Queen to cornhole for threatening the kid: ol’ Gozer. Gozer is the movie’s scapegoat, its wicked old witch (which the film’s token girl of color calls “pretty woke for 3000 BC”—hauntological xenophobia layered over the present as an already-reinvented place being reinvented again and again).

In this case, Gozer is someone the new recruits must train to confront, starting with smaller cute ghosts, then the bigger terror dogs (the false rebellion of angsty teens hating their parents only to forgive them, crumbling the dogs to dust). From here, our child heroes exhibit the worrying traits of a police force in-the-making: Phoebe makes quick work of main street, she and her rag-tag team driving like a bat outta hell as they capture the ghost for destroying private property—privatizing said property through a “boundaries for me, not for thee” approach that has them locked up, then forgiven (the token black cop is never mentioned again) and rearmed to “save the world.” Reitman dresses up the wacky medieval hauntology of something as ridiculous and vile as the KKK, presenting “us versus them” in neoliberal dogma; i.e., cute kids slaying “ghosts” on par with Tolkien’s orcs: an endless manufactured enemy wherein nature is divided into good/evil, familiar/alien halves, commodified and pitted against itself—their lynching performed on both sides of a settler-colonial argument until the end of time, naturalized (e.g., “We are the only people on Earth asked to guarantee the security of our occupier. While Israel is the only country that calls for defense from its victims.” —Hanan Ashrawi). In the process, he burns the town partly to ash by inventing a bigger evil to justify his babyface team’s centrism—their moral position as simply “good.”

(artist: Vincent van Gogh)

Meanwhile, Reitman’s ghost of the counterfeit is the usual hysterics tied to nature as colonized, then rebellious: Gozer and all her abortive offshoots as hidden among the corn rows; i.e., Jim Crow but also the Archaic Mother as imported from older times and “other” places. Their rage concerns the burn-to-ash policy of Capitalism on its frontiers mirroring fabled U.S. enemies in whitewashed, homegrown domestics (themselves standing on stolen land and scorched, blood-soaked earth): the food of slaves (corn bread, oil and meal, etc) treated as fine cuisine stolen from the Indians, given to African slaves and romanced by a white, utterly privileged dialogic equipped with its own forms of imaginary bondage: the fearful reverence of such places and their hauntings (re: Jameson’s describing of the canonical Gothic [I would steelman] as a “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised”). At home, it’s all fun and games; on the front, people are dying in ways utterly alien to these New York transplants “exiled” to Oklahoma (a war camp whose “dirt farm” raises soldier children out of the soil in pursuit of the state of exception). War and rape; “lions, tigers and bears, oh my!” While the thinning of the membrane and confrontation with spirits during the fall harvest is utterly at home in the Gothic imagination, its evocation in Pax Americana‘s “Southern Gothic” becomes mired in repressed forms of settler-colonial guilt that complicate the poetics at hand: a plantation fantasy haunted by dead Indigenous peoples, rebellious workers, assorted minorities and African slaves, but also the corpses of their “ghosts.” From the predominantly white middle-class perspective, the unspoken inhabits a place where genocide never stopped, and whose dialogics about it use Gothic poetics in ways Austen only parodied. In 2021, we’re left with “There’s no place like home” for these menticided little twerps, the latter taught to worship abject war and rape sold as cute, “totally rad” and fun. It’s Reagan’s neoliberal Halloween stuck on repeat: cheap, bad candy to munch down and absorb as brain-rotting fuel.

Throughout this setting of appropriated harvest phantasms (and their endless commodifying and consumption) lingers a tangible spirit of death that never left after American (thus global) slavery supposedly “ended.” Clearly it didn’t, and Said is ultimately proven right by insisting that we move beyond the frustratingly quiet past works to finally say the quiet part firmly out loud: Austen’s “happy ending” as Sutherland calls it, was itself a ghost, and a sorry one that Austen avoided by dying in 1817. If Austen was more interested in the British class system while she was alive than openly interrogating British Imperialism (which, let’s face it, she clearly was), we are not beholden to those same limitations; and furthermore, we can hold Austen accountable because of that.

(source)

All this fantastical revenge is happening now in 202[4], after the Pandemic, the War on Terror, the Gulf War, Reagan’s Contra Affair (and James Cameron’s Aliens rescuing Vietnam’s “failure” through its own famous girl boss) and various other manufactured crises—instated behind the scenes and apologized for through canonical praxis just like Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Moral panic is a bourgeois, sequel enterprise. Under it, war and rape are canonically Gothicized as beatified horror monsters, lairs/parallel space and phobias tied to manufactured crises. As instructional material that breathes into Americanized culture and its bellicose social customs, these “gargoyles” tell you

• what to fear—the extramarital sex, foreigners, and ghosts
• who to worship and fear as a dangerous, vague, nebulous target—the Archaic Mother, Gozer the Red-Scare corn lady disassociated through canonically “quaint” Halloween rituals
• who to love and fear—the Ghostbusters, the centrists of a righteous cause, their quant melodies and moral actions being a catchy veil for fascism
• how to fight and kill (to do or die, not question why)

Combined, Reitman Jr.’s façade veils Capitalism’s continuous Promethean design, displacing routine collapse and pinning it on a female bogey person (“It’s whatever it wants to be” is a double insult having survived for nearly 40 years: Gozer is what the men want her to be, then constantly misgendered by Reitman’s neoconservative old farts). Not only does this cryptonym disguise fascism’s “return” (having never actually left); the entire production harnesses all Four Gs to silence female critics as workers exploited under Capitalism. Instead of sex workers with collective power, they become reduced to abject, queernormative scapegoats—wicked old witches who eat children, possess babes and ostensibly sacrifice either for old nameless gods in hauntological New York or Oklahoma (a site for American genocide as is); i.e., Gozer’s temple a counterfeit made by a creepy old man to revive the elite’s liminal hauntology of war.

(exhibit 19a: Various stages and actors in two productions nearly 40 years apart).

As a larger production, the sacrificial theatre benefits Patriarchal Capitalism. Workers are enslaved within a patriarchal Symbolic Order through the Gothic mode as canonized. This canonical praxis portrays them as either Gozer or the Ghostbusters (us-versus-them)—either waiting to spring forth and eclipse everything else, confounding the stupid and the faithful, whose canonical icons will not save them unless the boys get back together and save the day. That’s the canonical synthesis present in Reitman and company’s intended targets: the children of today urged to become future war orphans, brides, soldiers, victims, and other exploited parties (we will unpack all of these things during the roadmap, primer and in Volume Three, I promise).

The Numinous tableau of 1984 has become a bit more laid back in 2021, but the costumes in 2021 are far better (especially Gozer’s). Cosmetic preferences aside, Afterlife still concludes with a big battle—one that summons a seemingly invincible Gozer by a pointedly impotent, false man (Fu Manchu-meets-Colonel-Sanders, Ivo Shandor). Faced with her, the “real men” and their wonder weapons must send Gozer back to Hell. Everything happens much as Ivan did it forty years prior, except Ivan’s son directs the recuperated ghosts of the past—our soon-to-be-dead old-timers—to clear their names (and clear up the thoroughly bogus spat they had with dear-departed egghead “leader,” Egon Spengler) by vanquishing the mythical “wandering womb.” They do this by ejaculating proton “streams” (or fiery chains) all over it. It’s a veritable “séance bukkake,” an abject pissing contest that Gozer just has to sit there and take (which reactionary audiences in 2016 refused to do when an all-girl term castrated the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man). She’s their sorry Sphinx cum dumpster, their unhappy toilet and punching bag to gloriously assault as the Ghostbusters reunite the nuclear family and teach the next in line to fight as they do: like a Roman boy.

Transformed into a tomboy tin soldier, Phoebe hugs Ghost-Yoda Egon; he smiles, proud and satisfied and his zombie Jedi pals pat themselves on the back. The world is saved, personal responsibility reliably venerating the ghost of the tyrant (of the tyrant of the tyrant…) in a broader narrative of the crypt. Everything leading up to this—the trail of ambiguous-but-ultimately-appropriated clichés and fragments—are illusory intimations of a Gothic chronotope that presents the bloodline as literal and figurative: a concentric-holistic dynasty of power exchange and hereditary rites felt on the para, meta and diegetic registers intersecting messily on a singularity of converging fakery and wreckage. Phoebe’s glasses double her grandfather’s just as her actions do, seeing through “his” eyes; the proton packs are a celebration of mad science as weaponized; the vintage “hearse ambulance” a hauntological fossil that venerates American car culture for the dumb, white American teenager driving stupidly through a corn field. It’s propaganda for dumb kids tied to bigger fish to fry: Gay Communism (a cryptonym-inside-a-cryptonym, the cosmic sexpot intimating a desire to quell the combined spirits of native Indigenous peoples and diasporic African slaves haunting the same cornfield).

To that, Gozer is our prehistoric bitch come back from the dead, doomed to play the part of the composite monster bullseye. A starlet censored with burn scars and protoplasmic bubbles, she is liminally abject: a giant cock-tease and mind-fucker, hag-dragon-lady chimera (we’ll explore the chaos dragon as a Patriarchal concept more in Volume Three, Chapter One). Even so, Gozer is the Pygmalion artist’s nightmare creation, a canonical “inkblot test” where patriarchal dudes simultaneously wet their pants and get hard, uncannily aroused at the thought of war and rape towards a shapeless, endless foe:

(exhibit 19b: Artist: Paolo Giandoso‘s concept art for Ghostbusters: Afterlife. His womb state and Archaic Mother are abject, entirely devoid of criticism for the franchise. It is “blind” pastiche; mute, nefandous, and complicitly pro-war/-rape.)

For an ideal audience, “Kill it with fire!” is a lazy joke hiding another ghost of the counterfeit: scorched earth; “kill all, burn all, loot all[1].” By framing Gozer as naughty Pandora “needing” to be put back into her box, Reitman silences critics of war, rape and its etiology through displaced, cartoon shows of force (which can be enjoyed, but should not be internalized or endorsed by us—in politics or our social-sex lives). Gozer’s eyes do not see; drugged and lobotomized, she is a deaf, dumb and blind, bourgeois queen—a vampire-zombie clone on par with Raleigh Theodore Saker ‘s schizophrenic soliloquy from Sublime’s Robbin’ the Hood (1994):

We’ve got you in this fuckin’ movie to exterminate all the lunatics all at once with a filtering system of a God. We’re the psycho-semantic police. You can’t even see us. How in the fuck can you do anything about it? We’re pure intelligence, you’re not. You’re biological product of a cosmological universe. You’re molecular matter, I constructed you. Fuck you. I made you up, you didn’t make me up, you got it backwards. You know who you are? You’re fuckin’ semantic blockage. That’s what made you up. You’re a fuckin’ programmer named Christine Gontarek who fucked up. She sucked my cock, fell in love, and she was locked in. She’s gonna get her second chance to suck my cock again. If she turns me down, she’s gonna go straight to Hell, she won’t pass “Go”, she’ll never fuckin’ win. She’s the cunt that thought she was God, but that’s okay. I don’t give a shit, as long as she sucks me off when I tell her, ’cause she’s my zombie. I captured that motherfucker, and she’s my cassette (source).

Gozer is Reitman’s Gontarek, the functional Egeus from A Midsummer Night’s Dream begging the ancient privilege of “Athens.” Replacing a legitimate antiwar/-rape critic with a canonical shadow puppet, Reitman has all-in-one given us an angry sexpot to spank and a tentacle “chaos dragon” to banish to the shadow realm. The fabrication is a special-effects-driven, “plastic reality” (as Julie A. Turnock calls it, 2015) of revived ’80s neoliberalism—one presenting Gozer the Archaic Mother as little more than a seasonal slaughter of the ghost of the harvest. This shoddy double stands in for actual fascist/neoliberal harvests; i.e., happening all the time behind the veil, but also on its surface, in plain sight. It’s one’s own doubts and fears being cheaply “vanquished” with military optimism as something to wish for and worship until the end of time: the zombie myth of the “Good War” rescued yet again.

Meanwhile, the world slowly keeps dying while America colonizes itself (and everything around it) in pursuit of the neoliberal trifecta: infinite growth, efficient profit and worker/owner division. Along with the other three, and the state monopolies, the entire product is a mendacious call to war chorusing to a larger war horn, a “false flag operation” as slick and alleged as Nancy Reagan’s legendary blowjobs (which, though Samantha Cole is writing about them in 2021, hail from an unofficial bibliography nearly thirty years prior). An open secret tied to the annals of power, Afterlife‘s semantic wreckage and bad-faith doubles amount to a narrative of the crypt that belies a paradox and madness beyond what science not only can’t explain, but gaslight, gatekeep, girl-boss—re: Hogle’s warning of a vanishing point, an endless “place of concealment that stands of mere ashes of something not fully present.” Speaking truth to power starts to feel unnatural, alien; it becomes forgotten, papered over, buried by canonical pastiche. Gozer could be whatever it wants and make whatever it wants, except those in power perpetually code her as a victim or a scapegoat (for female hysteria and dark, abject poetics that challenge the status quo) over and over and over. They can’t hide her rage but they can sublimate it into something useful to Capitalism: a punching bag to make male workers feel good by killing dark gods and getting the girl by taming nature as sometimes “getting out of hand” (with Cartesian forces needing to keep nature and monstrous-feminine poetics “in hand,” thus under control in lucrative, ultimately genocidal ways).

In service of this false claim and its manufactured consent, Afterlife unironically plays out like a slick military recruitment video—a horror movie sequel of the capitalist, mass-produced sort, versus the horror “one-offs” of iconoclastic praxis/counterculture addressing social-sexual unrest tied to buried trauma. To that, it’s less early George Romero and more Zack Snyder, with daddy’s-boy director Reitman telling you what to think, but also what to say, what to do and what to stand for—to fear in relation to the state’s out-of-joint enemies. It’s garden variety moral panic, resold as “fresh, hip” nostalgia by “faithful” canon post-excavation—a canonical strategy of elaborate misdirection, a “historical document.” This emotional/Gothic stupidity and privatization must be challenged by intelligent, Gothic-Communist workers. The same goes for appropriated peril and moral panic; war and rape, menticide and waves of terror; the semantic wreckage of the narrative of the crypt and its liminal prisoners, queer scapegoats, lady ghost hostages—all met with iconoclastic doubles in service of Gothic Communism as something to develop towards during oppositional praxis: our “archaeologies.”

(exhibit 19c: model and artist: Cara Day and Persephone van der Waard. Gothic canon invokes the monstrous-feminine to fetishize and annihilate it. It is within this complex space that sex-positive implementations of the same hysterical poetics [and famous monsters] must come to light. Gozer isn’t just a bad girl to spank, and Cara isn’t just a piece of ass. There’s sex-positive power in what they can subvert and express while turning a buck.)

This essay is just part of iconoclastic praxis more broadly. It was impromptu, written after watching the movie having already internalized my own manifesto. This is my magic, my voice. But my voice also includes various artwork, collages, slang and epigrams as things for me decolonize and reclaim in complex liminal ways—to synthesize with my own cultural habits and general social-sexual skills/synthetic oppositional stratagems like girl talk, community (anti-fascist) defense with a larger end goal in mind far beyond just my meager life. My iconoclastic art becomes a weapon to fight the bourgeoisie and their propaganda as Gothic Communists do: to encourage direct solidarity by sex worker propaganda in opposite to nation-states, neoliberal corporations and their complicit proponents; that uses my manifesto and its demonstration of social-sexual synthesis and Humanities education as something to teach high emotional/Gothic intelligence—all to benefit workers as co-conspirators in service to themselves, not some higher, vertical authority. That’s proletarian praxis!

Paid Labor: Summarizing Praxis as Something to Synthesize by Paying Workers (feat. Delilah Gallo, Rae of Sunshine, and Feyn Volans)

“America’s not a country, it’s just a business. Now fucking pay me.”

—Jackie Cogan, Killing Them Softly (2012)

This mini-section (six pages) offers a brief repose before we dive into the rest of the volume. While the manifesto has already covered a lot, I’d like to stress the labor value of sex work as a paid means of synthesizing praxis; i.e., when preventing state abuse through sex work a valid service that should be monetarily compensated for its labor value. This includes artwork, writing and sex work as indiscrete categories illustrating mutual consent; i.e., as a paid enterprise between two consenting workers negotiating their separate rates for a combined exchange; e.g., this book and its combination of the three, illustrating how intersectional solidarity works: together through a variety of creative practices that support one another through informed, negotiated and paid labor exchanges and, by extension, boundary-forming exercises to exhibit through the results.

Note: The second edition of Volume One contains a 2025 addendum (about eight pages); i.e., one featuring my friends Delilah Gallo, Rae of Sunshine, and Feyn Volans. I befriended these persons through the project, paying them to appear in this book series, including the pages ahead. —Perse, 4/8/2025

To it, Capitalism sexualizes everything to pimp nature as dark alien whore, antagonizing nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine (whores policing whores; re: “Policing the Whore“) while putting it cheaply to work; we alien whores must facilitate a reversal, upending tokenization through our own dialectical-material exchanges (and their assorted price charts, below):

(artist: Delilah Gallo)

Note: Developing Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism requires paid labor by design. It is a stupidly important idea—so much so that I not only would start every volume PDF with examples of illustrating mutual consent (and outline the concept in “Paratextual Documents” to be read on its own), but would also release this small essay solo, right after Volume One released on Valentine’s 2024. To it, the dialectical-material context of universal liberation during ludo-Gothic BDSM is paid labor during sex work; i.e., as something to learn about from the exhibits being displayed. I promote them and they promote me, but the models are always paid in some shape or form, and always to what both parties agree to ahead of time.

To it, the 60+ models in this series (and all of the promotion material advertising their work through my usual channels; e.g., the “Hailing Hellions” interview series) have all been paid—most with money and all with art, promotions, and various out-of-pocket expenses that come with running a non-profit series like Sex Positivity. All the work I do, then, goes towards helping other sex workers while turning the cycle of doing so into an object lesson: sex is a service, and one that deserves to be paid (and otherwise treated with respect) while having the whore’s revenge; re: by camping canon on the Aegis. To get paid and be allowed to live and speak out (re: “Survive, Solidarize and Speak Out“) is our revenge; i.e., against profit and all it causes in service to the state and itself (the elite and their cops [class, culture and race traitors recruited from working bodies] pimping us).

Furthermore, education is funded, expressed and shared anisotropically in both praxial directions; i.e., during the fascist’s bad game of dress up versus the liberator’s good (e.g., the Medusa’s revenge fantasy versus the monomyth hero’s). Given life and flesh, the larger struggle takes shapes in small; i.e., one that—once discovered through holistic study—points, like a Gothic castle, concentrically and ominously to larger things that labor-in-small attaches structurally to (re: whores versus pimps, Medusa versus “Caesar” and his ghosts of “Rome”):

(exhibit 20a2: Artist: Ziibing. From Ancient Egypt to the United States, capital is a pyramid. The same basic shape conveys across a myriad of sources that continue to evolve, mid-constant; e.g., Virginia’s “Community Solutions to Sexual and Domestic Violence” and “11th Principle: Consent.” Propaganda is propaganda in praxial opposition, synthesized through daily habits; i.e., with worker rights versus state’s rights [cops and victims] speaking in cryptomimetic echoes during the cryptonymy process [and hauntologies, chronotopes] that further or reverse abjection “on the Aegis.” The state rapes; workers challenge said rapes by making consent sexy in gentle and/or strict forms.

Exploitation and liberation occupy the same space, then, existing dualistically during liminal expression [which the Gothic conveys through oscillation]. To it, the state and its tools rape nature through the Gothic mode, but also the bourgeoisie’s intended play and bad BDSM freezing the Superstructure in place; by comparison, Gothic Communism liberates nature through the same mode recultivating the Superstructure—thereby using emergent play to camp the canon during ludo-Gothic BDSM: weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds. Whores are nerds, but nerds who aren’t whores control those who are using the same language their captives weaponize to liberate themselves.

[artist: Rae of Sunshine]

During this larger struggle on the same Aegis, iconoclastic nerds pit subversive and poetic forms of violence, terror and monstrous expression against state proponents [and their futile monopolies]! So when the Man [or his token extensions] come around, show him your Aegis! Clothed or not, power [darkness, and knowledge] take many forms [re: “From Composites and the Occult“]! It’s code, but also something to consume preferentially in Plato’s cave—what the Bible calls [and treats like] “forbidden fruit.” So “eat the fucking apple,” as Maegen McAuliffe O’Leary would say! Become the exception that bends the rule, subverting it to workers‘ collective benefit; i.e., as stewards of nature, thus ourselves, pushing steadily towards post-scarcity while enduring manufactured scarcity as we raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness! To do so, which is not a zero-sum game, we whores barter in beautiful lies mixed with truth; i.e., with those most ancient of currencies policed within the Imperium [and its plastic frontiers]: sex and force as things to perform! Castration—however poetic on its face—goes both ways, and always sits adjacent to actual harm haunting the comeliest of actors on and offstage.

Context matters, flow [of power] determining function; ours—both solo and together—pointedly illustrate mutual consent through dialectical-material scrutiny summoning the avenger in endless ironic forms thereof: Galatea’s Aegis embodied through darkness visible—both the angel and the devil seeking infernal salvation turning capital [and its mirror syndrome] on their sorry heads! Be the apple to “eat” in a polity of ways! The madness of Medusa isn’t a madwoman in the attic, lying in state and trapped helplessly there, but a danger-disco party to take, like the vampire exiting its coffin, outside itself: during the liminal hauntology of war as dualistic! As such, each of us embodies a castle to wage war from, and often to music; e.g., Perfect Blue‘s “Angel of Love” giggling as it stabs capital in the balls. “Stare and tremble!” as we whores work together minus a pimp “protecting” us, fucking to metal to mess with our enemies to our heart’s content!

[artist: Feyn Volans] 

For example, the material here between Feyn and I was negotiated, and subsequently honored through a cum tribute that I gave them; i.e., upon me offering and them accepting [watch it, here]. The Medusa, in her Numinous form, cannot be killed, imperfectly extending that immortality to her smaller offshoots who are, themselves, often quite substantial [and whose rage and joy know no bounds]! As such, Feyn, Rae and Delilah are all awesome, inside and out, thus worthy of worship! Go support them, promoting them yourselves in connection to us promoting the same notion back at you! Segregation is violent; exposure through “violence” behind buffers gives us the paradoxical means to speak out despite being kettled [the Medusa was a power bottom, dead ass]!

[models and artist: Delilah Gallo, Feyn Volans, and Rae of Sunshine; and Persephone van der Waard]  

Whatever the form, Gothic Communism has money behind it [not much, as I am unemployed (thus relatively poor), but enough to make a difference]. Likewise, tribute, for us isn’t canon that maintains the status quo; it’s Satanic apostacy Numinously altering such things through the very code classifying whores as “degenerate.” Power is infinite; as something to reclaim during ludo-Gothic BDSM, it occurs through play as infinite, thus exchanges that tender play in all its forms: as paradoxically something to afford and actualize, during calculated risk; re: putting “death” and “rape” in quotes [and, just as often, hyphenating those with food, sickness and war, etc; re: sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll during ludo-Gothic BDSM relayed in modernized forms of “ancient” forebears]. In short, every temple for play [or foreplay] that seeks and summons the Medusa—as dark mother/whore to undermine capital’s abusive parentage—has its price! “O, whistle and I’ll come, my lad!” That’s what she said [or any gender a whore chooses to perform and/or identify as to make trouble with]!

[artist: Delilah Gallo]

To that, sex is a weapon on a social-sexual gradient—often public nudism to illustrate a larger [a]sexual point about trauma as something to interrogate in small while walking collectively away from Omelas; i.e., speaking as we do about ongoing struggles repressed by the state pimping us through ourselves as monstrous; e.g., sex in public as “art porn” reworking the Wisdom of the Ancients; re: a cultural understanding of the imaginary past to broker [thus achieve] universal liberation during intersectional solidarity [no scapegoats]. If you want to critique power, you must go where it is—where the state, ever and always, concerns power as something to exploit, mise-en-abyme.

The fact remains, if we didn’t have power to take, they wouldn’t frame us as aliens to harvest. We must humanize that, which requires camping our own holocausts that show the state as inhumane in response to our shenanigans; re: by putting “rape” in quotes during the dialectic of the alien [which ludo-Gothic BDSM entails]: as a paid, informed, countercultural enterprise, and one with Gothic an-Com goals, hence aims, challenging internal/external bigotries, stigmas and biases with taboo things “hugging” the alien [which Medusa is]. By extension, to develop Gothic Communism means to network, fuck and teach through art [which porn is] funded by workers for workers. They kettle us; we kick them in the delicates! To protect nature, we destroy the only thing they love: control! “Now this is happening!”

“That’s how I roll!” Yeet that fucker into the drink—a double-take simulacrum of ourselves the elite use to ravish us, sans irony! Hoist them on their own petards!

The elite are killer babies already stuck in the Man Box [which privatization relies upon]. From Teslas to a living wage for sex workers to anti-police narratives in your favorite piece of media, make them cry by taking back what they took from you; i.e., as something fun and memorable because it’s reclamatory. That being said, people [from all walks] dig the Gothic because it’s quick and dirty but also sexy and fun[ny]—a skeleton of funny bones and boners! Whatever the ghost, camp it; kill the image the state wants you to remember it as. Break Capitalist Realism on your wheel, making not just Marx, but Medusa and monsters gay!)

Capitalism is a fractally recursive pyramid scheme operating on all registers, and all sharing the same goal: exploitation and theft (which class, money and state mechanisms are, by design). We must challenge these in duality using the same language the state does; or, as I write in “Goblins, Anti-Semitism, and Monster-Fucking,”

(artists: Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás)

Silence is death[2]; for Capitalism to work, it needs a victim and a cop for which to buy silence with. To that, victims can become cops through oppressor misuse of oppression language to silence others with; re: DARVO and obscurantism; e.g., the Star of David adorning Zionist war machines and dropping bombs on Palestinians and Lebanese people, while playing the universal savior and victim, and policing anyone who might use their language incorrectly. Different voices need the ability to speak up and out for themselves and others, thus coexist, lest capital divide and disorganize us to keeping doing what it has, is and always will do: rape worlds and the world by sowing division to move money through nature (source).

As such, the ghosts of rape haunt the counterfeit furthering or reversing abjection, mid-cryptomimesis. In turn, the oldest form of exploitation is the whore, making their speaking out the oldest form of worker struggle against exploitation; re: spectres of older genocides speaking to current ones (and their hauntologies). Silence is genocide, and sex workers educate from de facto (extracurricular) positions against genocide (thus profit); i.e., through the work they do; re: as paid, said payment giving workers a voice during the whore’s paradox—to speak out while being stolen from and lied to (which money is designed to do, the American dollar effectively blood money as capital [dead labor] feeds on living labor with pieces from living labor). All messily unfurl while taking land and labor back through one’s virgin/whore labor expression—to illustrate the better treatment of nature as monstrous-feminine during the whore’s revenge; re: the Medusa hyphenating virgin-whore in small! The Gorgon, then, is a composite of moods; per the cryptonymy process, its re-education of workers happens gradually-in-opposition across a variety of cryptomimetic censors, barriers and screens, their show/conceal double operation denoting the palliative Numinous and its assorted Communist spectres camping Marx—gentle or strict, dom or sub, mommy or otherwise—in small:

(artist: Delilah Gallo)

Some whores fuck back; on the Aegis as half-real (on and offstage), whores are monsters to help through strange appetites and appeals—e.g., as witches, vampires and goblins, among so many others (undead, demonic and/or animalistic); i.e., to pay and consequently learn from, mid-exchange, while playing with demons and the dead as half-real propositions! Unionize and disseminate; disrupt through what the state cannot tame; paganize and protest what pimps prohibit, glutting themselves on our stolen worth! Medusa lives through us, the Gothic speaking commercially and poetically not just through deprivation and size difference (re: tremendous obscurity and decay), but also through Ozymandian embodiment: bad echoing puns of neo-medieval castles, “torture,” live burial, nightmares and dungeons, etc, playing with rape-as-commerce to get to the bottom of things! So often, the colonizer looks like us in bad faith, and vice versa! Use that to your advantage! —Perse, 4/8/2025

To that, “Paid Labor” briefly discusses an important refrain to solidarized labor under sex positivity: “sex work is work,” which needs to be paid, but many different kinds of work constitute sex work because Capitalism sexualizes all workers. As such, “sex work” can be summarized as collective, iconoclastic worker action against the heteronormative, settler-colonial status quo: art, porn, prostitution, writing (and intersections of these devices) when collective negotiation and expression of worker rights and boundaries happen through informed, class-, culture- and race-conscious worker solidarity enacting ludo-Gothic BDSM towards those ends. Women’s work (sex or otherwise) is historically unpaid and demonized; re: for the women/people treated as women. Take it back on the Aegis, anisotropically reversing terror/counterterror (during as[s]ymmetrical warfare, below) to serve whores, thus nature!

Note: The rest of this piece is largely as I wrote it, back in early 2024. —Perse, 4/8/2025

(artist: Fired Up Stilettos)

To that, Gothic Communists achieve proletarian praxis through an iconoclastic recultivation of a bourgeois Superstructure with ludo-Gothic BDSM: the literal teaching of emotional and Gothic intelligence (and the confronting of trauma by raising awareness) through sex-positive sex work and art; i.e., as a sheer democratization of development through worker solidarity (the state, by comparison, is not historically democratic, but serves the interests of the elite).

Now that you have access to my thesis (from Volume Zero) and the manifesto as a simplified form of my thesis arguments, I want to spend the rest of the volume supplying a teaching roadmap concerning synthesis and Volume Two giving a Humanities primer concerning monsters (our so-called “booster rockets” before we fully “take off,” in Volume Three).

However, before getting to those, let’s summarize the role of oppositional praxis in relation to our manifesto’s thesis and its execution as a fundable operation in either direction: Sex coercion happens through privatization—specifically the privatization of sexual labor (exploiting it) and emotional labor (siphoning it out of workers’ heads) in canonical forms for the state’s benefit; i.e., exploiting the emotionally unintelligent who surrender their labor and their rights, but also who try to own or control those around them in service to the state during crisis and decay. The historical-material result are scapegoats, fear and dogma that turn people against one another and who cannot tell friend from foe, but also who see everyone as a potential threat, in threatening places, with canonical threatening language: the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection’s hauntologies, chronotopes, and cryptonyms.

Meerloo once called these totalitarian tactics “menticide” and “waves of terror” in relation to thought crimes, which we briefly introduced during the manifesto but will articulate more in the roadmap (along with thought crimes/venial sins and several other germane ideas that will be useful in the navigating the primer and Volume Three). Capitalism doesn’t just alienate workers from the products of their labor and from nature; it uses canon within capital, flowing money through nature to alienize either in relation to the other as hopelessly divided, blind and lost. As a consequence, workers are divided from their labor value, including ludo-Gothic BDSM as something to fund (e.g., this book’s exhibits).

The historical-material effect is reliable: destroying the material world as incumbent on nature actually being preserved by people having some connection to it to start with. Sever that through a quick, inadequate paycheck in a scarce setting and nature is a regular casualty (followed by workers, of course). Capitalism rapes the mind by constantly terrifying it in regards to deprivatized labor and nature; sex positivity is the long road back to reunion, a wending iconoclasm that starts with sexual labor (media) as a communal, intersectional, healing process that needs payment to work.

Furthermore, there isn’t some final destination where things happen “at the end”; it develops over time in active, ongoing and incremental ways that happen through iconoclastic art, general creativity and Gothic imagination; i.e., a conjoined process of rising emotional intelligence within the larger community and their artistic output, whose sexual labor and Gothic negotiating power are adequately compensated. The elite hate unions for this very reason. Without workers constantly slaving to the grind, everything stops; the money stops insofar as infinite growth is challenged by basic human needs expressed in Gothic terms.

Capitalism frames the meeting of the latter as unthinkable through worker imaginations myopically centered around elite needs during recuperated Gothic nightmares; i.e., Mark Fisher’s hauntologies, or cancelled futures, blaming past worker actions for what capitalist greed always leads to: violent rebellion when enough is enough. Teach people they have rights and military urbanism won’t fly.

(artist: Eugène Delacroix)

We’ve discussed the framing of past revolutions through Gothic canon as “terrorist” according to state interests. But however violent those in power (or with power) will mark our emancipatory attempts to be, our “breaking of church windows” is not concerned with abstract rebellions or wanton violence, but literal human thought as materially reshaping itself and the world through iconoclastic praxis: various artists, relating back and forth across space and time, in liminal, sexy-spooky ways; i.e., Gothic counterterrorist poetics. If that is “violent,” then so be it. “In the absence of justice, there can be no peace.” Nation-states and corporations do far worse every day through their usual monopolies as bought-and-paid for but also endorsed by the regular paying public.

Not only do our combined efforts require informed engagement with the past as hopelessly complicated when reimagined in the present; the reclaiming of artistic language and labor as already-colonized must be repeatedly conveyed and funded by those born into the present. Such persons drink up information like thirsty little sponges (some thirstier than others), which poses a problem insofar as the flow of money is concerned. History is littered with the graves of really stupid kids who dug graves for others in the bargain. From the Hitler Youth to the Khmer Rouge, to clean-cut Ike-Age kids and the Jonestown disciples, children don’t discriminate in what language they acquire.

This includes the language of commerce, which the children of the future must not acquire their understanding of from canon; its authors, the elite and their proponents, only manipulate and blame us for “the dismal tide” of fascism’s arrival and subsequent “war on degeneracy and Modernity”—will only groom them to become not just “killer baby” soldiers, but idiotic heroes starring in “their own” productions; e.g., Ashley Williams from Army of Darkness (1992): “Impunity is the apex of privilege. I say this in regards to consumers whose Ash-worship is perpetually reinforced by spiritual successors” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Army of Darkness: Valorizing the Idiot Hero,” 2019).

There is, as usual, money behind canon’s routine brain drain. Together with submissive, tokenized sex slaves, such heroes and their canonical legacy destroys the material world for profit, nature included (with us being a part of nature, including our connection to our bodies, society and the ecosystems around us). We must not only not listen to the elite; we must challenge their pedagogy’s financing with our own, which they will criminalize, including our very thoughts as criminal. Otherwise, the perfect soldiers become the stuff of nightmares: automated patrol machines, walking guns and infiltrators intimated by their human-yet-dehumanized counterparts.

More to the point, they currently hold the purse strings of disposable income, which behooves us to assist those who would pay us; i.e., to help them see us as human, not as sex machines that, when paid, reliably “put out” even when that wage is throttled to unlivable extremes: wage slavery and labor theft insofar as worker desperation is preyed upon by other workers with the means and mindset to do so. They think tipping is “optional[3],” especially regarding sex work (which honestly waitressing and other thankless service professions functionally are; i.e., “women’s work” as a component of extended beings [those of nature] for Descartes’ thinking beings [white cis-het men] to exploit).

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

It’s true that wealth redistribution is fundamental to developing Communism, but it still requires empathy as something to recultivate through mechanisms that have become thoroughly commodified; i.e., Gothic poetics, including implements of objectification and abuse, but also recuperated voices of rebellion such as rock ‘n roll. Yes, money keeps the revolutionary lights on, but stripping is not consent. In conjunction with that productive adage, blasting metal shouldn’t be a shortcut to sex; i.e., the expectation of automatic sex just because Rob Zombie is blaring from the stripping stage.

To that, a constant mindfulness of intersecting factors is required to enact ludo-Gothic BDSM. Faustian bargains are generally relayed through the acquisition of unequal power as something to display through wealth as given in bad faith; e.g., the supplying of collars and rings, but also blood money as something to recognize and weigh when choosing to accept it under theatrical conditions. So while taking payment from slavers who have you on the hip isn’t a bank heist, singular payments from chudwads has, to some extent, been laundered; i.e., the latter shouldn’t be discounted for what that money can go towards: something better than where it started from.

This includes turning ourselves into something during ludo-Gothic BDSM that accurately represents our struggles, not the desires of those enslaving us with an inadequate wage, or wages that are tossed about as a cruel (and cliché) means of reminding us that we and our bodies (and their morphological and cosmetic expressions through Gothic poetics) are somehow “owned” by those paying us; i.e., white knight syndrome through the “rescuing” of sex workers. Tips shouldn’t be an excuse to make these kinds of ipso facto possessive statements; when given in good faith, they will let workers express themselves for themselves through a class- and culture-conscious mindset whose rebellious expressions and room for understanding and confronting trauma includes all oppressed workers.

The idea isn’t to “rescue” sex workers at all, but make their profession safer from class traitors, not just women. So while Megan Barton-Hanson isn’t technically “wrong” when she writes

There’s a common assumption that all women are victims who need to be “rescued” from the sex industry, but that’s not true. […] People think that women in the sex industry have no other choice, which for some people is sadly the case, but for a lot of women it’s a side hustle that they do alongside uni or running a business (source: “How to Be an Ally to Sex Workers,” 2022).

there’s a glaring omission in terms of whom she’s not including in her advocation: gender-non-conforming persons, non-white-sex workers and AMAB sex workers (e.g., trans misogyny). Betrayal isn’t always done on purpose, but intent doesn’t matter if a given expression leaves someone out, which Barton-Hanson pointedly does. Survival sex work needs to be acknowledged, not pushed to the side by those who have the luxury of a side hustle while going to uni or running a business (which most people lack the ability to do). Even so, it’s equally vital to remember that those operating through necessity vs privilege still deserve a living wage through the labor value of their services; i.e., sex work that goes against the profit motive as something that normally accommodates women like Barton-Hanson to the detriment of more oppressed groups (instead of saying “sadly” and shrugging one’s shoulders through a materially and socially superior position).

Obviously it’s in our material interests to collectively reject the brutal, “blood in, blood out” of state-mandated factionalism and class traitors: cops and other such rival gangs materially incentivized by the state to make war according to money’s flowing as something to dictate, and whose chicken hawk leaders endlessly recruit children for their own greedy ends tied to war (and rape) as a business. But nevertheless, the managing of canonized funds through reliably sanitized sources (tone-policing and whitewashing sex work) goes hand-in-hand with the utilizing of said funds for proletarian means: to teach future workers through its acquisition to be antiwar, anti-rape, and anti-state (which monopolizes sexual labor through terror, violence and bodies) according to the iconoclastic artwork we leave behind; i.e., socio-material lessons whose proletarian praxis, when synthesized and widely employed over time, sees the sex workers of the world (and by extension all workers) freed from the mental, physical and fiscal shackles of Capitalism: through a continuous, proletarian re-cultivation of the Superstructure during ludo-Gothic BDSM that, when properly funded, synthesizes praxis through habits that are formed again and again through pay to play (not to win).

Whatever the form, play is work, and should be compensated; i.e., as such. Class or otherwise, then, war wages through wages; i.e., brothel espionage appearing cutesy both as a raison d’être, disguise, and calling card (the whore a commoner position married to common forms of asymmetrical warfare; e.g., ninjas and guerrillas punching up against the owner class and their harmful arguments of culture and race, during controlled opposition)!

(artist: Nori Noir)

Said synthesis is meant to compound and accelerate from mounting financial backing (sex work, when allowed and encouraged, tends to pay quickly and well; i.e., is always in demand from persons with the means to pay for it). This includes receiving financial support from, not just the down-and-out, but the middle class at large: petit-bourgeois revolutionaries putting their literal money where their mouths are (unlike cis-het workers who say all the things they’d like to do to us without actually dropping a dime towards the Cause; keep your ceaseless flattery and pay out, please) to foster empathy towards sex workers through daily habits that cultivate empathy as a mindset, but also a reciprocal skill; i.e., tipping as the backbone to ludo-Gothic BDSM (as a form of paid labor exchange under Capitalism).

To conclude, paying all workers for their services is vital to revolutionary praxis because it permits and enables activism under Capitalism. Social-sexual activism happens through a liberating creativity tied to sexualized art as a form of reclaimed labor and collective, instructional worker action that materially survives after workers die; i.e., to fund, thus pass along the ability for workers—like little detectives—to sense and illustrate the “creative successes” of Gothic Communism as a paid operation: disinterring the skeletons of whores that empire is built on.

Unlike our bodies, which decay and rot, artwork doesn’t have to worry about falling apart, but its labor needs to be compensated. Paint literal skeletons if you must, but you can leave behind something more than naked bones: someone who lived and worked towards the payment of workers within the system as a means of confronting state trauma when synthesizing praxis; i.e.,  in ways that humanize the entire system of exchange through Gothic poetics that, when examined by future workers, reminds them that these bones were human, thus a) deserving of a wage and b) able to use that wages’ artistic results to develop Communism through Gothic poetics; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM. Camp is the death of canon, radicalizing it into something that liberates workers at the cost of empire and its bad-faith pimps. Medusa calls to you, “Come to the Sabbath!”

Everyone loves the whore; if not you, we will make your enemies (other workers) love us whether you want them to or not! We will fertilize that, our rot extending as the phoenix does towards new life (during the rememory process)! Capitalism is not destiny. Forge your own, instead!

(artist: Couple of Kooks)

Onto “Synthesis Symposium: Nature Is Food (opening and part zero)“!

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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] The Three Alls being a Japanese imperial policy when imitating the West and expanding into Manchuria.

[2] Brooklyn Museum writes,

In 1987, Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás founded the SILENCE=DEATH Project to support one another in the midst of the AIDS crisis. Inspired by the posters of the Art Workers Coalition and the Guerrilla Girls (both of whose work is on view nearby), they mobilized to spread the word about the epidemic and created the now-iconic Silence=Death poster featuring the pink triangle as a reference to Nazi persecution of LGBTQ people in the 1930s and 1940s. It became the central visual symbol of AIDS activism after it was adopted by the direct action advocacy group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) [source].

[3] A double standard, I should add, they would never apply to themselves; i.e., the fascist approach to rights for the white, cis-het male avenger (the middle class) scapegoating marginalized groups (often sex workers; e.g., my friend, Blxxd Bunny, getting bullied online by incels and MGTOW types) instead of attacking the system despite said system (and its owners) exploiting them. These hateful bigots see sex workers as “the real enemy” and anyone who helps them as a “simp”: a person who gives money to people who don’t deserve it (according to fascists) because their labor value is zero, thus literally doesn’t qualify as paid work; i.e., should be given to predatory men a priori while said men are venerated as the sole breadwinners. In effect, this demonization of tippers discourages public empathy towards sex workers, but also the act of financially supporting women at all (forcing them into unpaid domestic positions; e.g., the bedroom, the kitchen, or the laundry room, etc). Not only does this lead to domestic abuse by men who treat women (or people forced to identify as women) like chattel; it lowers class consciousness to the detriment of all workers, dividing the middle class and pitting them against marginalized groups.

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.

Instruction: Trauma Writing/Artwork, or Surviving and Expressing Our Trauma through Gothic Poetics

“When he was nearly 19, my son Eddie died. Of course, I was very, very sad, but I didn’t really talk about it a lot. For quite a long time, it was bottled up inside me. I was caught between two feelings. I wanted people to know that I was sad, but, at the same time, I didn’t know how to say it. So, in a funny sort of way, I didn’t want them to know, because that feels kind of weak. One day, a child said to me: What become of the Eddie in your poems? I suddenly had to say what happened to [my son]. So, in front of a big audience, I said: “Eddie died.” And the moment I said that, it gave me the courage to write the things down. And so that’s what I did—I just wrote down how I felt. I even drew a picture—a funny, squiggly picture of me grinning like this, saying “This is me looking sad.” Then, I just wrote straightaway and that turned into a book. In a funny sorta way, I felt better. I could feel good that I said that I feel bad. I know that sounds weird, but that’s how I felt. So maybe if you wrote something down about how you feel, and maybe if you showed somebody that, that way we can help each other.”

—Michael Rosen, talking about his son’s death (2017)

Picking up where “Monster Modes, Totalitarianism (menticide) and Opposing Forces: Oppositional Praxis” left off…

(artist: Less, “I Can’t Decide,” 2021)

We’ve reached the end of the manifesto, which has effectively summarized the manifesto tree from my thesis volume. As the latter constitutes the entirety of this book’s primary ideas—i.e., its theories to apply and execute during ludo-Gothic BDSM—this means my thesis volume has been somewhat light on catharsis resulting from good praxis, which I want to conclude Volume One exploring through a more simplified approach: instruction. Now that this approach has been theoretically outlined, its application through de facto education (a creative success of proletarian praxis) concerns something we’ve already hinted at inside both works: trauma writing and artwork as potent and utterly essential teaching devices, but also existing and operating in conflict in a variety of ways. As Cuwu taught me, showing your heart to others can be profoundly intense and relatable, but also needs to be mindful of a healthy outcome when shared through the usual Gothic fetishes and clichés.

Note: As stated during the volume opening, “application” is effectively synonymous with ludo-Gothic BDSM as I envisioned it; re: first as theoretical idea with “The Quest for Power” and as a prototype in the “camp map” finale with Blxxd Bunny. But also in the pages ahead; e.g., the postscript initial draft with Cuwu, which formed the basis for what I went on to return to and synthesize with Blxxd Bunny in Volume Zero, then finalize by publishing Volume One on Valentine’s 2024 (rough a year after meeting Cuwu and six months after we stopped being friends). Simply put, the work here—however simple it might seem—formed the bedrock upon which Volume Two went on to expand so much thesis work (culminating in the Demon Module’s “Rape Reprise“), and Cuwu was central in that. —Perse, 4/2/2025

(artist: Cuwu)

Simple doesn’t mean basic; it means that we’re viewing things as simply as we can, mid-conflict. We discussed psychosexuality in the paratextual documents and examined some smaller personalized trauma writings inside the thesis volume; e.g., the palliative Numinous and my relationship to Cuwu (who we’ve already discussed in this volume, too, and who the postscript is dedicated to). Because the remainder of this volume, and indeed the entire book, is dedicated to trauma writing and artwork through monstrous poetics, we’ll be considering anecdotal trauma (and oppositional praxis) much more directly from here on out:

• The postscript (included in this post) discusses learning about the trauma of others to help someone process their own in lieu of state abuses (through the police and their deputized terror tactics in stochastic forms): with heroes and monsters.
• The sample essay offers a small reprieve while we examine Ghostbusters: Afterlife through a postcolonial lens, vis-à-vis Edward Said.
• “Paid Labor“ briefly discusses an important refrain to solidarized labor under sex positivity: sex work is work, which needs to be paid. Furthermore, it explores how many different kinds of work constitute sex work, insofar as Capitalism dimorphically sexualizes all workers, and that intersections of art, porn, prostitution, and writing must collectively negotiate and express worker rights and boundaries through intersectional solidarity.
• The synthesis roadmap is a symposium that considers trauma as a Cartesian enterprise, treating nature as food. As such, it discusses a means of synthesizing praxis, thus interrogating and processing Cartesian trauma (war and rape) in our own daily lives in opposition to state forces harvesting us. It provides a lengthier sample of synthesis than Volume Zero’s camp map finale, but still constitutes a taste of what we will discuss and propose even more thoroughly in Volume Three; i.e., when we explore proletarian praxis at length. The roadmap comes in four parts, which we’ll unpack and signpost more when we arrive. Monster-wise, though, it explores generational trauma during Gothic poetics in relation to nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., exploited by Cartesian thought to canonize, thus facilitate, unironic war and rape: Medusa, but also forbidden expressions of the Medusa through Georgia O’Keefe, H.R. Giger and more recent, less infamous auteurs. It also examines Cartesian arrangements of state violence and resistance according to Heinlein’s competent man and Kurosawa’s Western. Keeping with the Medusa, though, the roadmap will also explore Amazons, phallic women/traumatic penetration, and various abject morphologies policed under Cartesian binaries during pornographic expression; e.g., racialized tropes, but also fat people at large.

To that, the writing in these areas will be messier and heavier than it might be in purely theoretical forms (even simplified ones), because it directly attempts to speak to our experiences as conveyed in the creative output that we generate as extensions of, and dialogs about, our own survival under capital. So please take whatever precautions are required before proceeding into the pages ahead. You will see pretty things in relation to traumas that normally go unsaid, but haunt the beauty on display as inextricable from them: rape and war as foisted upon workers from all walks of life, but especially women and other minorities as synonymized with rape and war (which likewise synonymize); i.e., as their most regular victims under male/token Man-Box enforcers (who also, let it be said, also suffer under state crisis as perpetual brutalizers choosing to work for the state).

(artist: Sophie Jane)

Rape and war are two sides of the same coin; Gothic Communism seeks to prevent both (and Capitalist Realism) through worker intelligence as something to raise well beyond canonical, Cartesian standards. Trauma writing/artwork, then, are vastly important insofar as they grant workers an awesomely potent means to speak out against the state and its normally myopic dialogs on rape, war and death: Gothic poetics as a counterterrorist device, by which to regain control over portrayals of our own trauma, thus lives; i.e., by reclaiming the ability to perform and play with these things imagined for ourselves, seeing possible worlds beyond Capitalist Realism’s endless rape and war. Women (and all monstrous-feminine “non-men”) are food whose harvesting serves a Cartesian profit motive.

To that, it’s actually quite common for heroic canon to include trauma, but not to process it in any meaningful, healthy sense; i.e., of actually stopping its criminogenesis by recognizing and subverting these coercive material conditions and linguo-material factors in reclaimed language and iconoclastic, Gothic theatricalities. Even seemingly polite white moderates like Tolkien generally isolate trauma as something centered around the white cis-het male agent (or token person) as tied to state mechanisms that cast most other groups into the state of exception to varying degrees; the centrist hero’s journal of war and its usual brutalities, then, tend to concern the normalizing of state monopolies on violence, terror and morphological expression. The most effective (and final) form of genocide is silence; the best way to combat its execution is to speak out in ways that highlight our trauma in recognizable forms.

For the state, trauma is something to extend into the future as a foregone conclusion: embodied by monstrous language as something for the state to abuse, selling it back to the middle class while alienating them from nature and sex. For workers, trauma is embodied by devices that can be reclaimed from the state; e.g., monstrous language, but also sex work as a means of personifying personal, psychosexual trauma as something that haunts a given worker from moment to moment, but can also empower them with an actual humanized voice when challenging state dialogs. Rape and war become things to prevent through various praxial mechanisms during the warring class and cultural value of workers educated to varying degrees, including in Gothic poetics—our aforementioned weird nerds as canonical or iconoclastic.

(exhibit 14b: Artist, top-far-left and middle-center-left: Ohno Justino; top-mid-left: melkteeth; top-mid-right: Scarlet Love; top-far-right [cat]: Draculasswife; top-far-right: Raichiyo; middle-far-left: e.streetcar; middle: Loretta Vampz; bottom-far-left: Ota Goth; bottom-mid-left: source; bottom-mid-right: Lusty Comic; bottom-far-right: Whisp Will.

Trauma is something to live with, insofar as people embody it in some shape or form. Doing so can highlight aspects of the human body that are normally targeted for trauma in sexualized ways, but also something that can express said trauma through a reclaiming of the Gothic poetics associated with it and the natural world; i.e., to express your own unique sexualities, genders, performances [and sale of these things] through your own artwork, body or both as a complex performance that synthesizes trauma in various forms. Whether “tasteful/sophisticated,” “pornographic/vulgar,” or some combination of the two, trauma becomes a subversive way of expressing your own identity as having formed under Capitalism, either by swapping out various pieces of yourself, or by making something normally foreign to who you are [or a part of you that has become alienated from you] a fundamental part of expressing your own rebellious, outspoken position: a robotic limb or pair of horns; one’s bodyfat, hips [and other bones] and curves, but also genitals as sites of abuse/stigma as things to reclaim and/or accept as they currently are; i.e., to raise awareness about, while simultaneously achieving a newfound sense of self-worth, healing and discovery towards a sex-positive existence that has been permanently altered by trauma insofar as one’s self image is concerned. Power in the face of trauma includes turning the abuse of nature and sex back towards one’s abusers—as a survivor would.)

Regarding trauma writing and artwork at large, Sex Positivity (and Gothic Communism) offer a counternarrative to heteronormative dealings with nature as alien and traumatic—one that deliberately concerns praxis as a means of processing trauma and healing from it: through the personifying of monsters, despite knowing this will expose us as having survived state trauma, thus constituting a specific kind of threat they cannot tolerate: a witness. Partly this narrative is based autobiographically on my own abuse (as Gothic fiction often is); it’s also based on partially asexual[1] reflections of sexual abuse experienced by other workers that I feel an empathetic connection to (which queer people often do—collectively punished by the state and its moderate/reactionary defenders).

In the interests of preventing trauma for other sex workers, then, I want to be thorough (the same way Paulo Freire wanted to prevent world hunger after personally experiencing it); I want to include an illustration of praxis as something to absorb from our surroundings—not just canon, but our friends, family and fellow workers’ trauma and intimations thereof, including animals and the environment to which we give thanks and try to heal through ourselves. You should already be familiar with this idea from Volume Zero and earlier in the manifesto, and the roadmap will cover trauma-bonding at length. However, I’m highlighting it here in honor of those more oppressed than myself as something this book gives special focus to. Even though I was abused, I also have considerable privilege as a white trans woman (who only came out at 36 years of age); my experiences working with other sex workers have taught me that we can always learn from them as mutually oppressed workers—from their pedagogy of the oppressed felt in opposition to state forces: cops.

Manifesto Postscript: “Healing from Rape”—Addressing “Corruption,” DARVO and Police Abuse with the Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Ninja Scroll and The Terminator (feat. Cuwu)

“‘Kill poison with poison,’ he said. He said [that] if you make love to me, you’ll be free from poison; mine will destroy it.”

—Kagero to Jubei, Ninja Scroll

At its most basic level, rape is a violation of basic human, animal and environmental rights enacted through Cartesian power abuse; this postscript concerns the complicated process that healing from rape entails—i.e., its corrupting presence through codified trauma, wherein the surviving of police abuse becomes something to relate to others through Gothic stories that constitute radical empathy as a thing forever out-of-joint: the attempt to empathize with alien experiences to gain new perspective. Such empathy needn’t concern both parties equally and its Gothic dialogs concern intense, poetic liminalities still bearing an intense potential for disguise that is haunted by the shadow of police forces; i.e., it is where ludo-Gothic BDSM may camp trauma, doing so through cryptonymy as pushing towards what it cannot always achieve.

Note: This section reflects heavily on past experiences between Cuwu and I. I’m including a visual reference, here, but wherein the original section actually didn’t have any images of Cuwu to speak of; re: me not deciding to start featuring Cuwu and myself visually until the volume was nearly finalized (and diving into the idea, come Volume Two). —Perse, 4/7/2025

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Even so, the postscript aims to showcase such a dialog and its phenomenological complexities; i.e., one held between two or more people relating through their interpretation of various texts they are either intimately familiar with or at the very least recognize the tell-tale arrangements of power and performance through traumatic markers: heroes and monsters as a liminal proposition to find catharsis inside the oscillation of. Our featured dialog involves The Terminator and Ninja Scroll as having been relayed between Cuwu and I; my accounting of that relationship will be more conversational and messy due to its intensely traumatic and taboo nature: they experienced rape fantasies that stemmed from a history of sexual abuse, of which I—having been physically beaten and emotionally abused, but never sexually raped—could only relate to through fantastical stories about such things. But I was drawn to such stories through someone knightly who had abused me all the same: my dark Amazon, Jadis.

Before we delve into such heavy grounds, I want to prepare you with several disclaimers/reminders. One, while it might be tempting to prioritize abuse to a matter of degree, I would caution against it. Rape isn’t something to “rank” or trump others with; most people have some kind of trauma to endure, and generally this is how we relate to others, mid-oppression. Rape is a thing to heal from, which generally involves traumatic revisitations during ludo-Gothic BDSM that are themselves corrupted by awesome forces; “corruption” isn’t an immediate falsehood, in Gothic stories with heroes, villains and damsels, but semantic entropy and proliferation amid the presence of complicating factors. Facing an eventual understanding of said trauma requires facing the trauma of others by their side, which can be profoundly traumatic and disheartening unto itself—if purely because we discover (often by accident) how someone we care about was hurt in ways that are difficult to fathom. This injury can even compound should we learn just how mistaken we were about what we could and could not see.

Trauma is both shared and intensely private, something to interpret in popular stories that bridge the gap. For survivors of rape and other warlike violence, then, Gothic stories either concern trauma as something that is understandably difficult for them to share—like Kagero from Ninja Scroll despite Jubei having witnessed it firsthand—or that they were traumatized in ways we can scarce imagine even if they did share whatever we saw ourselves; i.e., sometimes, this trauma cannot be perfectly understood, even when it is told to us in thunderously intense forms: our trauma overlaps, but is simultaneously unique from both vantage points—that of the hero and his lady to rescue, except he’s also traumatized. When Sarah Conor tells Kyle Reese, for instance, “Your world is pretty terrifying!” her idea of his world is a dream, a mere shadow of what he actually survived when trying to see through his eyes (and he hers):

All the same, Kyle cannot fully process her trauma as a female domestic who, at one point, feared him as the killer gunning for her (and doubles bearing her name) being announced around the clock during a 24-hour news cycle: he looks human, but she sees a monster (failing to recognize the actual terminator in the bargain). The shared trauma, in both their cases, comes not from its strict accuracy but from the painful realization that one’s own life is simultaneously charmed and false on either side of a breakthrough, but nevertheless surrounded by trauma that impairs you through the people you meet and care about. Such confusions becomes commonplace even during vicarious, imaginary dialogs under more operatic settings that, thanks to state interference, aren’t always under our control. Indeed, they are made under conditions that inspire feelings that take us seemingly out of control (through heroic language) to process an exit strategy inside colonized spheres of entertainment: the Gothic disco as dangerous precisely because it speaks to abuses we are drawn towards in theatrical forms that are closely monitored by police agents listening in, but also walking amongst us.

To that, we’re going to examine my empathizing with Cuwu as two traumatized workers formulating a combined pedagogy of the oppressed; i.e., through the sharing of The Terminator and Ninja Scroll to communicate performative arrangements of unequal power amounting to at-time-times painful conversations about trauma. The aim wasn’t to torture ourselves purely for its own sake, but to understand things outside our own realms of experience during calculated risks (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM): sometimes the damsel doesn’t want to be rescued, but “raped” (except no danger is actually present).

Shared between us, these therapeutic stages helped us achieve (a)sexual catharsis through trauma bonding in psychosexual rituals/expressions of war and rape that speak out against the state and its police agents; i.e., as frequently disguised in the very markers of abuse, resistance and power that drew us towards them to start with. It becomes something to perform and play with, sometimes literally (we’ll give an example of this briefly when we examine Doki Doki Literature Club [2015]—a videogame example of the same basic rape fantasies that The Terminator and Ninja Scroll illustrate). Cuwu was entirely clear (and incredibly outspoken) about how they felt; they hated cops but loved performing these complicated fantasies, which led me to think of the above examples when relating to them through my own trauma as something I was drawn towards with Jadis as their Gothic princess. After escaping Jadis’ “castle” (a run-down Florida duplex), Cuwu played mother (mommy dom) to me and I was, at least part of the time, their dominator and willing pet. Even so, the vector for this continuous swapping of dominant/submissive roles partly involved the same stories we shared between ourselves.

So before we delve into my admittedly complicated relationship with Cuwu through Gothic media, we’ll want to consider the nature of Gothic stories as chaotic liminal spaces; i.e., stages to share and process trauma together over time, which are themselves simultaneously occupied by corrupt, liminal markers of trauma: monsters that, when abused, half-disguise and half-advertise class betrayal. State subterfuge cannot monopolize such language, so it thrives on sowing doubt through the presence of a potential invader who simultaneously polices other members inside a seemingly besieged fortress. As something to cultivate within the theatre of such places, radical empathy can shape our own views about canon as something to reclaim, informing personal/collective boundaries and lines in the sand to draw up future agreements and conditions with. This includes questioning the canonical veneration of state paramilitary agents as undermined with what they abuse—i.e., police exceptionalism and tokenized agents of self-policing minority groups wearing revolutionary uniforms in bad faith; e.g., TERFs acting like Amazons: out from a dark and savage “past,” they return to said “past” once rescued and rape it all over again inside the present space and time:

(artist: Luigiix)

Before we proceed, let’s also briefly reconsider state violence at large, seeing how it’s largely what we’ll be focusing on through our own stabs at radical empathy through Gothic stories and heroic-monstrous language. As we’ve already explored in our thesis, but also manifesto (“Critiquing Amazons as Liminal Expression”), and will explore in Volume Three (especially in Chapter Two), cops are not your friends; they serve the state and the state is the enemy. In turn, the state and various multi-media networks and corporations churn out badass monstrous “copaganda” that justify/fetishize police “corruption” and monopolize state violence against workers and nature through monstrous-heroic canonical language. They combine against a demonized, infantilized population of reprobate victims that aren’t allowed to fight back or defend themselves (which, in reality, is the state functioning by design, not by accident or flaw). However nice your local sheriff may be, the state monopolizes and glorifies police violence (and uniforms) while treating the violence of you defending yourself as a death warrant. When threatened or feeling threatened, cops will empty their magazines into you (as their “warrior” training tells them to), then go home and hug their wife; if pressed, they’ll invoke DARVO—or cry “corruption!”

Skip Intro—re: the maker of an extensive YouTube series on copaganda—calls this relationship a Faustian bargain, one enacted between the audience and the police through copaganda. As the state is always in crisis, it always needs a victim, making bargains with it extremely dangerous (Promethean). Yet, police canon is also black-and-white, with any forays into grey area reinforcing the status quo through manufactured tensions between different worker groups. It uses fear and dogma to menticide the audience, effectively lying to them to enable the state functioning as intended: through our aforementioned bourgeois trifectas, monopolies and profit motive. Class traitors wearing increasingly fascist uniforms monopolize violence, terror and morphological expression against other workers. The degree to said betrayal is a Morton’s Fork (meaning the outcome doesn’t change): worker exploitation, generally at the hands of other workers preventing solidarity while posturing as heroes.

(source: Facebook)

State abuse/police violence is a very broad topic, and we’ll continue to cover its Gothic execution and countering throughout the rest of the book. As we do, keep this in mind as we move through the postscript and onto the synthesis roadmap: heteronormativity and the colonial binary synthesize police behaviors through canonical praxis, which uses Gothic poetics to condition dimorphic sexual violence through a Cartesian, settler-colonial mindset:

• men (or beings acting like men) become violent, taught to show force and masculine dominance—to make war and rape, then lie about it in heroic-monstrous language; to be hard, rigid, infantilized penetrators competing against civilians (and nature) in an us-versus-them game of regularized, life-and-death confrontations over everyday things.
• women (or beings treated “like women/as feminine”) serve as chattel slaves that receive systemic male abuse within a bizarre paradox: the monstrous-feminine. Women are both demons and damsels who seemingly can’t be strong or create (works of art), yet must also a) look after men who—despite their brawn—cannot care for themselves nor establish meaningful relationships outside of systemic coercion, and b) spawn and raise the male bloodline while men busy themselves making war against women/monstrous-feminine, nature-aligned agents who do challenge the settler-colonial status quo.
• Trans, intersex, non-binary and otherwise gender-non-conforming beings internalize tremendous amounts of guilt, self-hatred, and imposturous/unwelcome feelings; i.e., as corrupt and monstrous-feminine, but also something for state agents to blend in with, mimicking rebellious factions occupying the same complicated shadow zone; e.g., subjugated Amazons serving as state infiltrators to dominate nature anew.

From a canonical standpoint, these gendered categories have moderate and reactionary variants, in which moderates encourage and enable reactionary behaviors whenever canon is camped: open aggression, condescension, reactionary indignation and DARVO. In turn, these behaviors happen according to the class/cultural tensions of competing synthetic oppositional groupings during oppositional praxis’ Six Doubles and their Gothic-poetic mode of expression (the means, materials and methods of study). Regardless of the exact proponents, the dimorphic, heteronormative/Cartesian nature of canon has a profound impact on how its associate violence is viewed and carried out simultaneously within Gothic theatre. Precisely because it is liminal—and liminal expression relays through oppositional praxis—engagement with the Gothic mode must be considered as potentially compromised; i.e., vis-à-vis the potential for various betrayals.

For example, men in/through Gothic canon see women (and other monstrous-feminine) as soft and fearsome (“the enemy is both weak and strong”) but also alien (undead), animal and demonic—doubly so if they stand out, let alone refuse to comply with authority (castration/emasculation fears). Meanwhile, the presence of dislocated, counterfeit rape denotes a ghost of the counterfeit that female/feminized workers want to survive and heal from. This includes whenever they encounter a perceived threat: the state as fearsome—the police as false protectors or people associated with the police, generally as victimized subordinates—but also workers conveyed as fearsome through state propaganda; i.e., the good, the bad, and the ugly of oppositional praxis when preventing rape and war as things to tolerate or reject. Its execution becomes a liminal, messy ordeal, which means that healing from rape through Gothic expression is equally liminal and messy insofar as these stories are shared and experienced through a tenuous, and at times incredibly fragile, pedagogy of the oppressed.

We’ve discussed how power and resistance operate through Gothic poetics in the same doubled, paradoxical spaces. A kind of conversational theatre, the dialogic is disjointed but ubiquitous. Genuine rape and violence exist everywhere in America and Americanized countries; they’re also doubled in Gothic canon, made fun of in blind parodies that ultimately serve as little more than rape apologia. At the same time, the paradox of ironic rape fantasies is legitimately proletarian—i.e., affording gender trouble as a parodic, psychosexual means of subverting stereotypes, exposing enemies, and expressing our trauma, dysphoria and euphoria by putting “rape” in quotes. Under such liminal conditions, something as striking and immediate as torn stockings (and a cummy vagina) can become empowering insofar as they challenge the simple commodifying of these areas through canonical media’s targeting of them for heteronormative violence:

(artist: That Hoey Vegan)

Considered through a dialectical-material lens, such an evocative image demonstrates the complicated ability to empower oneself through forbidden expressions of sexuality that are objectifying but nonetheless aid the model in finding some measure of catharsis, thus empowerment through psychosexual exhibits of various kinds:

• “flashing” exhibitionism (exhibit 53)
• private/public nudism (exhibit 101b)
• “breeding” kinks (exhibit 87a)
• rape play/consent-non-consent (exhibit 46d; re: “Dark Shadows“)

These forms of revolutionary cryptonymy and other “ravishing” games intimate (a)sexual catharsis through Gothic boundary-setting exercises that reassure traumatized workers they are safe from social-sexual violence as an ever-present threat; i.e., sensing the constant advertisement of nonstop crisis and societal decay through “gargoyles” that, when viewed, promise compelled boundaries (segregation) and unironic power abuse sanctioned through state dialogs and executed through various proponents of tacit-to-explicit state mandates; i.e., those lurking in the working class, the media, and the paramilitary/military sectors of a given population.

The pedagogy of the oppressed is formed in opposition according to heroic language, configured under duress amid suggestions of state infiltration: oscillations between hero and villain, but also savior and rapist. Opposite the class-conscious worker and their poetic, cryptomimetic sculpting of sex-positive egregores (and their subsequent, partially-buried trauma), you have the false-conscious, bad-faith efforts of the class traitor as wearing masks (often, as we shall explore in Volume Three, of famous monster types while also posturing as activists; i.e., gobstopper masks and disguise pastiche of state impostors/parasites—exhibit 100a3). These traitors are a socio-materially diverse group that include standard-issue “weird canonical nerds” and white, heteronormative reactionaries, but also fetishized minorities (token police, including hauntological iterations like the witch cop—something we’ll examine in Volume Three, Chapter Four) and assimilated activists.

For example, TERFs adopt assimilative rape fantasies, but also facilitate them for those in power—e.g., Ghislaine Maxwell for Princess Charles (Dreading, 2023). Girl bosses also exude “phallic” (traditionally masculine and bellicose) tendencies stemming from penis “envy” and rape trauma having become weaponized by ubiquitous torture porn constantly triggering them to behave in ways useful to the state; i.e., by triangulating against state enemies (which is a stressful activity for all parties involved, leading to nothing but stress and harm) through subjugated forms of rebellion. Meanwhile, straight men have gender envy and war/rape fears, which both groups project onto their assigned bourgeois subordinates/proletarian victims: the “prison sex” mentality. Once funneled through them, pro-state propaganda becomes Marx’s aforementioned nightmare “dressed up”; re:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language (source: “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” 1852).

“Like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” It is a sobering concept whose dangerous re-investigation requires bravery and caution: Under Capitalism, the notion that people do remarkably awful things to each other is a historical-material fact, one induced by Capitalism as a structure. Do not rely on the better angels of peoples’ natures, especially empty heroic platitudes and veiled/non-empty threats administered by reactionaries, moderates or cops (actual or figurative)!

Historical materialism is very much a vicious cycle of monopolized state violence, terror, and morphology stuck on repeat, including its nightmarish ambiguities, liminalities, egregores and deceptions. As police states oscillate between neoliberal and fascist forms, police agents go from sex pests to sex fiends in service of the state—dutifully attacking the state’s enemies by becoming soldiers, but also soldiers-in-disguise: cops, detectives, good Samaritans, etc, as undercover through monstrous-heroic costumes. On a shared stage of Gothic poetics, the state’s bad-faith contributions spill out and into a messy civil war of spies, police and infiltrators who exchange their ability to love for their ability to protect the state from its assigned enemies. DARVO becomes common, labeling labor/antifascist movements as “terrorist” organizations. In turn, this plays out in fantastical, brutal forms that intimate state abuse as lurking close by through Gothic displacements that disassociate war and rape as committed by “foreign” police agents; e.g., the black penitent, blackguard, succubus, or death knight, etc.

(artist: Ayami Kojima)

Whether to illustrate or perform, neither tactic is strictly a state instrument. Indeed, for the rest of this postscript, we’ll ping-pong between two genres of the Gothic that employ heroic misuse in ways we can reclaim by using Gothic consumption to relate to each other in stories haunted by the consequence of risk, but also inaction as something to temper with fresh courage: the dark fantasy of Ninja Scroll and the dystopian, technophobic science fiction in James Cameron’s Terminator (and assorted offshoots) as a complicated step in the right direction. Cuwu was clearly the inspiration for this postscript; i.e., according to a shared but unevenly experienced and understood sense of domestic abuse when presented by me to them in Gothic stories covering war and rape in more outlandish and intensely imaginary forms. As such, there are elements of my close-reading style present in the remainder of the postscript, but these are meant to highlight various concerns that would have been on my mind when sharing said stories with Cuwu (and people like them); i.e., those who ultimately were more traumatized than I was, and whose pedagogy of the oppressed was communicated through the trading of psychosexual, operatic stories passed back and forth. There’s a constant, hyperviligent sense of weighing in regards to what is being considered, performed, or otherwise conveyed, but also an overwhelming desire to relax and let one’s guard down (doubly so for those who disassociate facing trauma).

Victims of past trauma, then, become drawn to paradox—as trapped between performances of pure hero and pure villain, wherein “rape” makes the damsel feel more safe through calculated risk than strict black-and-white scenarios of total safety or danger do. The latter two become untrustworthy and uncomfortable, whereas ludo-Gothic BDSM becomes an effective means of managing complicated feelings; i.e., of control in the presence of uncertainty as something to put “on the hip” through active performance and play. Doing so more accurately describes how the performer feels from moment to moment in relation to the world around them as duplicitous vis-à-vis the shadow of police corruption. Being “raped” via the baton or “lance” becomes the best way to confirm. And all of this becomes the pedagogy of the oppressed as a communal form of investigative power exchange.

As we proceed, I want you to consider is how my present thinking was shaped; i.e., in relation to my sharing of these stories with other workers: as a communal healing process informed by a learned mistrust of their surroundings, but also fed on them as things to later return to and subvert while surrounded by potentially harmful copies. Or as my thesis argued, “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about” (source). I cannot begin to overstate how messy and painful healing from rape/power abuse is; it and the pedagogy of the oppressed are a tremendously fragmented and at times even erratic process. And both are motivated by theatrical mechanisms of force that if not inherently harmful, certainly have the potential to lead us into dangerous spheres of influence. Not all workers take the noble route, or have good intentions; except the oscillation between friend and foe only remains, intensifying according to complied hero fantasies that interrogate power through “rape” as something to execute.

About that. Before I discuss Cuwu and my relationship with them through these stories, I first want to consider how these stories molded my own thinking when shared continuously between myself and many workers; i.e., how I think about rape and violence in Gothic media as an ongoing exchange that is hardly set or safe. My examination of these stories, post hoc, isn’t to simply consider their repacking as something to sell back to us then imitate through the ghost of the counterfeit (the falseness of state power but the lingering of its abuses through alien sensations), but to entertain how this dark reimaginating allows them to exist in popular culture at all; i.e., to ask how its tangibility grants the distribution of police trauma as something to share, discuss and reflect on, insofar as it concerns all workers living within state territories as affected in a variety of ways.

Rape and disempowerment were certainly things Cuwu and I discussed in types of theatre normally policed in relation to those who have survived what some workers (myself, in this case) can only speculate on through Gothic poetics. That is, the stories we shared weren’t so different than them having me fuck them a particular way during rape fantasies we collectively decided on; e.g., choking or sleep sex. Prior to those rituals’ deliberate negotiation and gingerly execution, sharing a moment of Gothic peril can bridge the gap through a shared audience; i.e., by inviting dialogs between them about sexual violence that Cuwu and I eventually entertained in a more participatory and playful fashion. I can say without shame that I was the instrument of Cuwu’s “rape” as informed by popular horror stories we consumed separately (Cuwu loved Lucifer, 2016)and shared together for inspiration. Some, like Ninja Scroll, were rougher than others:

(exhibit 15a: Genma from Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll—in disguise as the Lord Chamberlain, having his way with a palace concubine. As leader of a brutal gang of rogue ninjas, Genma is our recuperated Nazi. He rules from the shadows with forbidden magic using fear and dogma; his power is literally necromantic resurrection; his fascistic, thieving violence is deceptive, but also standard-issue—for the actual “warring states” period, but also its many reincarnations in late 20th/21st century popular media.)

Rough or not, such dialogs remain incredibly vital, insofar as their official discouragement (and subsequent silence) only leads to harm on a genocidal scale. Behind closed doors, for example, cops underreport their own “chattel rape” abuse towards those allegedly under their “protection”—with “to serve and protect” and similar slogans embossed on their prowler doors being constitutionally for the state, not the people (or nature). Cops can marry you, then kill you and lie about it and nothing happens; they can do this in public and get off with paid administrative leave before getting rehired somewhere else. It’s literally protocol. Meanwhile, damning data such as “40%[2] of police families experience domestic abuse” or “1 in 5 women are raped” is a gross underestimation, wherein decades-old studies hampered by or actually performed by the police use language that limits the ability to even express what violence and rape are. It’s misleading. The real numbers are far worse, but also unknown—fudged to keep the image of the state strong but also squeaky clean (a phenomenon performed by neoliberals and fascists alike).

Clearly people need to be able to interrogate their own trauma, but also negotiate with it vis-à-vis ludo-Gothic BDSM as divorced from state power. The problem is, various forms of potentially sex-positive BDSM, kink and fetishes are regularly appropriated, reducing their critical awareness/teaching potential through assimilations of rape theatre (controlled opposition). Coercively sublimated in ways that uphold the status quo through bad play’s guilty pleasures, these domination bids threaten servile emotional manipulation and internalized reactive abuse (which we’ll examine more thoroughly in Volume Three, Chapter Two). For minorities and queer people, assimilation fantasies become a deadly and embarrassing game of compromise: tokenism through class, race and culture betrayal. The game-in-question offers a magnified form of exclusive (rare) promotion, limited to the “special” slaves; i.e., any self-policing Judases working within the minority group(s) wishing to escape reactive abuse for self-preservation and comfort. Such illusions hide the reality behind a screen: that things are somehow better for everyone, when in reality they are provided to a small group of elevated slaves afforded special positions. In spite of these disparities, the system as a means of division and exploitation is still very much in place. So are the urges to interrogate trauma, albeit using imperfect forms that leave much to be desired.

In spite of these praxial complexities, such oscillating subterfuges bring us to Gothic illusions that—through tremendous romance and Gothic reinvention—still communicate inherited anxieties regarding the present. For example, Cameron’s Terminator yields a very dystopian translation of the American police. Their hyperreal, posthuman quality in the film speaks to the replacement of the human with a “human” counterfeit tied to a devastated map of empire that lacks even the rudiments of humane programming. As the Imperial Boomerang flies home, its goal is simply to deceive—a highly advanced infiltration unit hiding in plain sight in the places where people usually gather to let off steam, but also seek out forbidden, psychosexual pleasures that serve a decidedly medicinal function:

Like Cameron’s ill-fated Tech-Noir disco, popular media at large can often feel infiltrated, but also forgone—despite its necessity—to be corrupted by the presence of trauma as a paradoxical healing agent. In Ninja Scroll’s imaginary Japan, the demons are everywhere, but look oddly human. In such an uncertain and dangerous world, a woman’s lived reality is that Jubei appears (at first glance) as much a threat to Kagero as her rapist does; the same goes for Sarah and her own “love triangle.” To that, Ninja Scroll offers up a careful balance in Jubei Kibagami. Precisely the kind of hero prayed for persons who are normally subjected to state abuses, he’s Superman, but more rugged and conspicuously surrounded by a world that is far less perfect than his relatively polite warrior’s code:

In Byron’s words, though, “I want a hero” sadly becomes as much a Judas’ refrain as it does a call to rebellion when no such hero is actually present. Oppressed workers consume the stories, but they often submit to state mandates through various concessions, especially when they have been denied the ability to experiment; i.e., in ways that go beyond Jubei’s patently sexless approach. Indeed, oppressed groups don’t rush into danger so much as they aim to negotiate with theatrical doubles of “danger” through optional sexuality amid Gothic theatrics: there is often an asexual component, insofar as psychosexuality exists adjacent to harm in ways that treat sex as a performance of death, violence and, yes, rape. Ludo-Gothic BDSM camps that, too, by playing with it, which can be stressful.

This becomes yet another reality under Capitalism, one to interrogate through the opening of sexualized channels of performance common in Gothic stories; i.e., experienced as much through open forms of “rape,” “murder” and frank, intense BDSM as through run-of-the-mill damsels waiting to be rescued. Relying on the rescuer too completely can be an issue, but likewise the dungeon fantasy demands a degree of moderation, lest it become a dark romance presented as blind comfort food: shared between parties where trauma is fully repressed (e.g., Radcliffe). Because praxis and its synthesis live inside Capitalism, it behooves us to look at the structure as it lives and breathes, including anyone trapped inside its mechanisms as things to recreate in theatrical forms. When workers synthesize praxis, they cultivate the Superstructure inside Capitalism; this happens between workers and the natural-material world operating in continuum. This “sticky” relationship needs to be considered in its totality for iconoclastic praxis and worker solidarity to occur.

In other words, it’s entirely worthwhile for us to ask how different people (with their traumas) relate to Gothic stories, but especially their monsters, heroes and haunts as things to consume, create and perform ourselves. For any who have been raped, a hero (or heroine) will generally be monstrous in ways that might seem alien to those who have never experienced trauma themselves; but bonding through trauma is generally lopsided to some extent. While the Superstructure shapes material production through the Base, proletarian praxis through allows workers in uneven arrangements of trauma to shape, acquire, and learn from the world in ways that aim to stall, if not outright prevent regular abuses under Capitalism—real abuses, but also (re)imagined abuses as wrought through iconoclastic Gothic poetics of differing flavors; e.g., Jubei’s hypermasculine violence versus the Eight Devils of Kimon in defense of the ninja girl, Kagero; or Kyle Reese vs the terminator to defend Sarah Connor from a gruesome death: “He’ll wade through you, reach down her throat, and pull her fucking heart out!” Regardless of the time and place, demon lovers (and sex) in Gothic fiction classically synonymize with unironic harm—not just rape but murder and disembowelment as staged, granting a sense of relief not unlike our aforementioned danger disco. To it, ludo-Gothic BDSM and camp are often strict:

Think of it as the Western saloon. Extreme violence isn’t simply expected in such dark, erotic, musical places (many serving as brothels for settler-colonial agents); it’s entirely the point and serves a profoundly (a)sexual function: wish fulfillment and guilty pleasure; e.g., the punishing of the rapist after a rape-like performance that clearly has room for degrees of accuracy and poetic liberties. For any oppressed who historically endure rape, the hero and the villain of Gothic stories help open up cathartic channels of conversation concerning everyday perils that remain overshadowed by heterosexual enforcement amid settler-colonial guilt (usually with various other anxieties woven in).

For the state, the dehumanized cops-in-disguise work as gargoyle-esque replicas meant to scare us into submission; i.e., by either introducing an infiltrator into oppressed venues where rape is discussed, or suggesting one. Regardless, it walks among us like a mirror that reflects the state’s hidden-yet-visible workings on our vulnerable, developing minds; like Macbeth’s question to the dagger of the mind, we’re not sure if we even see a threat—i.e., if it is directed at us or if it is even real:

“Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?” (source).

Strong and brutal as he already was, Macbeth wasn’t even sure what he was looking at when going to kill King Duncan. Neither was Kyle Reese, Sarah, or us completely sure when swimming inside the shadowy back alleys of Cameron’s Los Angeles. A murky-yet-glistening dislocation of state power and artifice, The Terminator gives rise to Skynet, an invisible, legendary foe meant to surveille citizens using a camera lens disguised as a “human” face, berserk dressed up as a false animal; i.e., “metal, surrounded by living tissue” as a mass-produced product “grown for the cyborgs.”

As such, the Imperial Boomerang comes out of the future of what is now our own past (re: Jameson), colonizing its own subjects through hyperreal decay and paranoia as charted through a variety of “pasts”: mise-en-abyme relayed between fictions like Ninja Scroll and The Terminator having a similar flavor of rape fantasy despite their obvious spatio-temporal discrepancies. Both worlds are filled with violent killers and spies foisting themselves on those merely trying to survive, but especially women as historically vulnerable entities under such conditions. Whereas Ninja Scroll feudalizes Japan in an openly magical past, Cameron’s take on the Gothic Romance (and liminal hauntology of war) updates the technological singularity for a 1980s, post-nuclear world, one where the legacy of artificial intelligence and the Manhattan Project have doomed the present. Atomized and scattered, many different “possible futures” loom over those living on the other side of the Pacific—a war for survival decided in a series of nightly combats not once, but over and over again. As I write in “Gothic Content in The Terminator/T2” (2019):

Gothically, a reoccurring theme in the Terminator franchise, from 1984 onward, is survival—outliving an unavoidable “past,” in the present. A death omen, Cameron’s nightmare is Orwellian; set in 1984, L.A. (and by extension, civilization as we know it) is invaded by “one possible future” (a “past” version of itself that has yet to materialize). Cameron populates his world with standard Gothic fare: the animated miniature or statue. Centuries prior, these would have been Horace Walpole’s subjects, literally walking out of their own paintings; or, suits of armor walking around, without a human body inside. In The Terminator, the likeness of a human is grafted into a walking suit of armor […] Given eyes of their own, they look back at us—at least, we think they do. What post-human horror lurks behind that carmine sphere? (source).

Even when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s terminator is reprogrammed “for good,” the reoccurring nightmare lies in the state’s untrustworthy (and inherently violent) nature, its territory shrouded in darkness but also piercing observation lights:

Skynet isn’t a dumb-machine, but “a new order of intelligence” founded on militaristic, human ways of thinking and conquering the world: “It decided our fate in a microsecond. Extermination.” Capitalism is Skynet unabstracted in totality—the metal eye of conquest steering Cartesian thought on auto-pilot, conquering all of nature versus simply part of it. An abstraction of capital, Skynet provides smaller abstractions[3] begot from a local police state: patrol machines built in automated factories, but also paramilitary machine men with glowing-red camera eyes that spy for a secret police department during military urbanism run amok: “During the vision, everything is smoky and dark, but also a ruin of present-day L.A.; the giant machines have red-and-blue lights. Comparable to present-day police cars, their purpose is war-like, out-of-control” (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Textual Elements in The Terminator,” 2019).

Vis-à-vis my thesis critiques on Botting and Jameson, it’s incredibly important not to supply special credence to a particular genre’s time and place. To that, Kawajiri’s imaginary feudal Japan (and army of psychosexual ninja demons) are also abstractions of capital; i.e., produced nearly a decade after Cameron’s world and in a decidedly antiquated approach. Yet, both he Cameron conjure up the shadow of a medieval, castle-like police state that entertains Gothic rape fantasies that serve an operatic “release valve” in times of socio-material uncertainty and collapse. Whereas Skynet kills the state’s enemies in the shadow of a former nuclear menace that mirrors America’s current war games, the Devils of Kimon posture as a fascist force that remains in Japan to this day. “They look human!” Kyle says of the 800 series; so do the Devils. In either case, the direction and location of the threat has become abstracted, oscillating inside a circular ruin shared between authors across space and time. This is done less to terrify the occupants of the present than explain their complex feelings from moment to moment, story to story; i.e., the terror once felt by victims of state abuse during Pax Americana now inflicted on everyone else to a higher degree than ever before. In a nice, postpunk twist, Cameron’s hauntology has another trick up its sleeve: disco-in-disguise; i.e., our aforementioned “danger disco” as an obviously musical place, one to go to and partake in psychosexual indulgence presented in all the usual formulas: a gun fight.

To that, I’d like to focus on Cameron’s more musical approach through the danger disco of the 1980s, then end the postscript by focusing on my relationship to Cuwu through Ninja Scroll and Doki Doki Literature Club; i.e., as more openly erotic and fetishized stories centered around sexual violence to camp, which informed the traumas in our own daily lives as we interacted back and forth during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a burgeoning idea that had yet to come to fruition.

Returning to Cameron’s excellent sleight-of-hand (and police-light pareidolia), his commentary on neoliberal hegemony is already a perilous ordeal, requiring allegory to disguise it as something other than a direct query (which would translate to worker solidarity and direct action); the subterfuge calls for a musical space for play inside that yields monstrous, nostalgic elements: the danger disco as a venue for persons seeking treatment regarding past run-ins with power abuse through liminal theatrics that provide an operatic backdrop; i.e., a place of sex and sin to consolidate and execute calculated risks in heroic-monstrous language.

Tech-Noir (and similar establishments) are where the police-in-plainclothes infiltrate as undercover shadow agents, surveilling citizens in parallel societies that try to escape the weight of an oppressive state by having fun, but also conspiring in plain sight within surveilled spaces: the café, disco, jazz club, bar/dive, church, brothel, music hall, theatre, library, etc, as heavily policed/forbidden sites of taboo entertainment, education and congregation (the closing of such places being a common colonizing tactic: the intelligencia purge). Postpunk, then, becomes a revolutionary façade within tyrannical, dishonest worlds that are already falling apart over and over inside themselves (the infernal concentric pattern). Here are some examples inspired by The Terminator or in the same vein of canceled future common in noir stories, cyberpunk dystopias, and Gothic retro-futures; i.e., of the hauntological operatic variety shared since Antiquity with various mixtures of music, theatrical combat, heroic deeds, monstrous sensations, storybook apocalypse scenarios (the fate of the world hanging in the balance of true love, mid-invasion and mid-occupation), and kayfabe tropes:

(exhibit 15b1: Camp is something to “play out” during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as half-real, onstage and off. As such, the cyberpunk/tech-noir’s slow-motion, disco-lit “danger zone” is a common, potboiler trope of the game-like risks present within daily life.

Furthermore, as something often expressed through ritualized love/death inside parallel space, these expressions of the human condition and its uneven socio-material conditions become infused with an updated hauntological spirit of darkness well known to Gothic tales [which, out from the disintegration of the John Ford Western and its brightly-lit chase scenes and saloon brawls, survived in the “noir” genre from the early 20th century before updating to a technophobic, neon-lit variant during the 1980s. Such variety codified into both the monster-rock vampire’s Neo-Gothic castle of Castlevania but also a form of cyberpunk/tech-noir pastiche stretching into the 2010s]. Their own presence indicates class war as remediated through popular story types told in praxial opposition. Infiltrators/imposters remain an essential part of the code, contributing to the uncertain feeling of vague, alien, ubiquitous danger for the oppressor/oppressed group facing off on the dance floor.

Historically the oppressed group of Gothic fiction would have been white cis-het women reading about themselves in Gothic novels, but they would have always had relative privilege for being white and cis-het. When future groups fought for their rights—and queer discourse started to emerge from the shadows in the 1970s, in particular—the mantle of oppression would extend to various minorities voicing their abuse during moral panics committed by token oppressors. Indeed, said panics would be commonly imposed by white cis-het women gatekeeping more marginalized groups; e.g., queer identities and sex workers targeted by white Christian women, but also second wave feminists during the Satanic panic of the 1980s also attacking people of color and religious minorities.

Similar to other monstrous language, “Satanic” symbolism is generally a stand-in for various out-groups that have become romanticized—by in-groups, but also by themselves using reclaimed language whose liminality extends to queer symbols like the rainbow as something to enjoy but also potentially endorse when no hard stance is diegetically present. Doing so is not uncommon, the context of queer self-preservation occupying the same discourse as a heteronormative desire for profit:

For example, TWRP’s “Starlight Brigade” [2019, above] arguably straddles the fence because its parallel music video/collab by Dan Avidan—and Knights of the Light Table [the latter’s animation inspired by Roger Dean, Hayao Miyazaki, and Moebius for all of their visual inspiration]: producer Patrick Stannard, director India Swift, and art director Michael Doig—presents a reinvented nostalgia as something to enjoy for all audiences; i.e., without saying the quiet part of queer oppression or resistance out loud. Instead, its mixed message defaults to the monomyth of a centrist, good-vs-evil tale: an anxious young man teaming up with a group of misfits to save the world from “pure evil” [of the Sauron sort]. Their combined success and miraculous destruction of vaguely fascist war [reduced to basic geometric shapes] occurs through self-belief that serves to further a kind of “wishful thinking.” Faith is rewarded with material change, the warships standing in for psychomachic sentiment; i.e., representing a figurative struggle like Star Wars does.

Whereas some iterations of Star Wars communicate how rebellions and violence go hand-in-hand [with Andor in particular showing how uprisings are historically armed with stolen weapons, ships and equipment, exhibit 21b], TWRP’s music video lacks a spoken dialog on this subject. It doesn’t even call the good guys rebels; they’re just child soldiers, ostensibly of a “paladin/good soldier” class [which Voltron deliberately called themselves, the babyfaces policing “outer space” by cleansing it of monstrous-feminine and “corrupt” forces—capped off by “punching the Nazi” to qualify their war as “good”].

But even if the makers of the video were clear about the dialectical-material status of their heroes, the “Voltron problem” would still persist: an absent material critique, one where many different creators [not just TWRP, Knights of the Light Table and Dan Avidan, a cis-het man] aim to recruit queer groups through the inclusion of a queer potential that can serve the status quo when a vocal resistance to power is not present. When non-queer creators do this, it’s queer bait; when queer authors participate, it’s assimilation. But sometimes, the desire to voice one’s oppression is told through common stories; i.e., by reclaiming the language of the oppressor class [which, yes, includes Voltron pastiche]. However, that subversion still needs to involve a process consciously driven by a desire to alter socio-material conditions: to push away from the status quo and its exploitation of workers behind the usual groups benefitting inside these stories and in real life. Queer allies, especially well-to-do ones, need to be mindful of this in regards to peace and tolerance in the face of deplorable socio-material conditions; e.g., Tom Taylor’s 2023 writeup, “Steely Dan vs John Lennon,” reporting how John Lennon’s “Imagine” [1971] came across as more than a little naïve according to Steely Dan’s “Only A Fool Would Say That”:  

Their 1972 track, “Only a Fool Would Say That” was written in response to Lennon’s parade of peace. It looks at idealism through the practical eyes of folks on the street. “You do his nine to five,” they sing, “drag yourself home half alive, and there on the screen, a man with a dream.” And with that, you get a sense of how grating and vacuous they thought that Lennon’s “Imagine” campaign had become [source].  

In other words, it can’t be vague or mixed in its messaging. For resistance-in-solidarity to work, it needs to be direct, informed and conscious [of class, gender, religion and race as intersecting forces].

Vagueness is a shared problem among children’s cartoons and Gothic fiction. Often only the basic language [of an alien aesthetic of paralysis] is present—incredibly expressive from a visual and emotional standpoint, but still having to be occupied by warring groups during class struggle as a liminal outcome. Indeed, liminal expression is a regular occurrence in Gothic discourse, existing in shared parallel spaces using the same contested language’s emotional turmoil. French New Wave’s “Darkwave” subgenre, for instance, has the potential for critical power but also critical blindness. Their mutual potential within hauntological expression threatens the present as something to examine through an at-times-unreliable critique: ghosts of the counterfeit that yield a musical signature, which—as Derrida hints at through Spectres of Marx—has become something to listen to during hauntology[4] as a Gothic revival; e.g., French New Wave music appearing in videogames that consciously imitated older forerunners: James Cameron’s take on the imperiled, “tech-noir” discotheque borrowed from ’70s technophobia and older British counterculture given a fresh coat of hauntological paint in 1984, before reappearing decades later in Drive, 2011, then Hotline Miami, in 2012; on and on.)

(exhibit 15b2: Just as Cameron was inspired by Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner spearheading a whole train of older Gothic stories into the 1980s, each outing depicted a blood-splashed opera announced using outrageous violence, gloomy visuals and dated music. Even so, the sheer ultraviolence of the 1980s became its “own” style to emulate as a dark mode of critical expression during oppositional praxis; i.e., free for auteurs to interpret differently by reinventing the allegorical mask of attractive fatal nostalgia. 

For example, Nicolas Winding Refn’s homage to Cameron cheerfully drops his own masked vigilante inside the same Hollywood setting: Los Angeles. This time, the hero is a cold, seemingly unfeeling protector of women and children; he resembles Sarah’s handsome, human protector while using similar tools for the job that Kyle Reese did: the trusty shotgun and stolen getaway vehicle, but also the mask as a metaphor for the persona as something to either discard [or wear] during criminal mayhem.

The fun lies in the cosmetic differences from older works, including the masks. Refn’s “terminator” can’t take off his mask-like face, but wears a Hollywood “crash double” mask on top of a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He’s cold and precise, calmly driving robbers to and from crimes while dodging the cops. Conversely, Cameron’s terminator wears a human mask made of actual flesh [whose bad special effects during the eye surgery scene are actually closer to Ryan Gosling’s studio-grade mask of a policer officer] meant to hide a cybernetic vigilante killer inside the Gothic ball. One commits crimes to enrich covert thieves to the state’s detriment; the other works for the state by pointedly killing women, being identified by the police as a “one-day pattern killer.” Across both stories, the disguise pastiche maintains a thoroughly Gothic flavor.

Whereas Cameron’s material critique lay in the culture of fear surrounding serial killer mania, military urbanism and Cold War anxieties, Refn keeps much of the same violence, pathos, setting and hauntological music, but comments on the “cold-blooded nature of the hero” as a killer-by-design who can still help the usual damsels-in-distress; i.e., as the College song goes, be “a real human being and a real hero.” Within this borrowed spell of nostalgia, there lurks a degree of madness that utterly revels in the opera as nostalgic through the aesthetic bloodbath, but also the music as a means of teleporting “backwards” to a chronotope where such discourse is both welcome and expected. This would be parodied a year later by Dennaton Games, treating the hero’s violent quest as a drug-fueled rampage with less-than-noble intentions. Though undeniably fun, such parodies are prone to become blind, their pastiche “stuck on repeat” while worshipping the reimagined, cryptomimetic past as a product, first and foremost. They can be enjoyed, but should not be endorsed without understanding their deeper context.)

(artist: John Cordero)

So while Cameron’s story is a Gothic fairytale centered around rape, its now-iconic, achingly musical techno-Gothic mythos was still informed by the undeniable presence of concealed, state-level nuclear abuse and decay hidden behind American neoliberalism:

Sarah’s night terrors cannot stop until Skynet is crushed. For that, both [the T-800 and T-1000] must die. Killed, they melt into harmless goo; Sarah faces the shapeless future with a sense of hope. Will Skynet return, regardless? […] I ask this ignoring Cameron’s terrible alternate ending. In it, everything is spelled out—in Utopian fashion by a much-older Sarah; [her son] John becomes a senator and advocates for peace. That’s all good and well. However, it betrays the franchise’s greatest strength: fear and doubt [as a deliberate means of raising class consciousness to combat class dormancy and class traitors]. Our current political climate should prove the future is not set, and in the hands of political agents and military men, Skynet, “a computer defense network built for SAC-NORAD by Cyberdyne Systems,” could always “return” again. The dream never ends, because the fear—of being alive in an uncertain present [within unequal, exploitative media control and material conditions]—is continuously preserved through the things we build and leave behind. That includes Cameron’s fabulous Terminator movies. Rediscovered in the present, these relics come to life, invading us from all directions (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Gothic Content in The Terminator/T2 — part three: Textual Elements in T2,” 2019).

As part of this “dark ’80s” nostalgia, Cameron’s Gothic hauntologies rely on technophobia that is both surprisingly dated, but curiously translates to current misconceptions[5] about technology as a veil for state abuses that we can still discuss in cartoonishly theatrical forms; i.e., the very sorts of theatre overshadowing the lived traumas that individual workers have survived due to systemic implementations that are too grand to easily illustrate. At times, the explanations channel through inherited confusions by which to funnel our pedagogies through. Strict accuracy isn’t the point; the point, from a theatrical stance, is the communication of intense, fearful emotions that progress towards healing from rape inside the darkness as a lived state of mind: to provide the kinds of lived realities that are, themselves, built on shady foundations grasping at hints of the truth through their adjacent falsehoods and phobias.

Despite Cameron treating computers like black magic, his own abstractions don’t serve the state; they convey a presence of unaddressed trauma that sits within confused dialogs that, try as we might, cannot be avoided. The paradoxes become part of the performance, conveying the lived experience of those living within state territories that cast very long shadows. If the Gothic offers anything of value, it’s the ability to express the human condition according to never-ending struggles within an oppressive system’s historical past. As something to reconcile with in dated, inaccurate imaginary forms, one is left juggling perceived impostors with actual persons or entities that mean us harm in connection to the state as a great factory for such deceivers: frauds and conmen, but also assassins and parasites of a more active and directly cutthroat nature. As the prey mechanisms of the heroine project onto the male agents of unknown allegiance, her own fears are informed by the combined alarm fatigue from larger and smaller struggles: inheritance anxiety and survivor’s guilt as a post-WW2 American citizen living in somewhat-distant fear of the Bomb being granted the inconveniently immediate warning of a “one-day pattern killer” broadcast about her on ’80s television: “You’re dead, honey.”

To that, Sarah is clearly a Gothic heroine of the Neo-Gothic (white) sort updated for the late 20th century—i.e., the middle-class “secret princess” with a hidden destiny delivered through a dream-come-true protector. True to form, her fear of rape is fused to then-current-yet-also-dated superstitions (of Cold-War rhetoric scapegoating AI as a rapacious metaphor for unfettered market greed[6] and the Military Industrial Complex that boils over into predatory fears about nuclear Armageddon during peacetime; e.g., GDF’s “NATO Is Risking Nuclear War for Money,” 2023) and alleviated through a psychosexual shock to the system meant to keep her (and us) going. To this, the movie might seem like a total mess borrowed from older sources, one where Cameron patently emulates the threat of nuclear war from earlier apocalyptic science fiction; e.g., The Outer Limits of the 1960s and ripping off Harlan Ellison in particular (David Brennan’s “The Harlan Ellison Dispute,” 2008), Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970) and Star Wars‘ legendary Death Star bombing foreign populations (as well as Mary Shelley’s The Last Man [1826] beating all these Pygmalions to the punch). Yet, such anxious homages are par for the course under shared material conditions yielding a dark channel of communication; i.e., a shared Gothic nightmare where power and resistance play out on the same disco floor in all the usual ways. Market forces are inherently unequal under Capitalism and lead to tremendous suffering and anxiety but also theatrics as a liminal sphere of expression.

Simply put, the Gothic is where we retreat to interrogate our trauma (and relative guilt, desire, anxiety and other repressed emotions) in relation to other survivors; i.e., to trauma-bond through the usual displays of music, violence and sex. However imperfect it can seem under a magnifying glass, The Terminator is as good a story as any to achieve this end: to broach radical empathy with varying degrees of privilege and oppression among like-minded persons with similar experiences that intersect and diverge. Indeed, I often shared it with others to relate to them through the characters onscreen, but also sponsor activism as something that manifests imperfectly in stories that—through the pedagogy of the oppressed—could speak to our collective troubles inside police states. This includes Cuwu as someone with whom such sharing felt natural, but who currently isn’t a part of my life anymore (their ghost is, exhibit 16b). At times, it really is like dancing with ghosts. While I have been beaten and mentally tortured, for example, I have never been sexually raped; I am AMAB and the odds are simply far lower by any conceivable metric that I would be. However, I know many workers who have been raped. Listening to them has helped radically change my systemically privileged views, but also reflect on my own lived trauma and complex emotional abuse compared to theirs.

For the remainder of the postscript, then, we’ll examine two such workers: Mavis for a quick moment, followed by our star-if-slightly-delayed (off-screen and sporadic) attraction, Cuwu.

Mavis is someone I haven’t mentioned until now, but will mention more throughout this book. They have had countless experiences with rape (dissociation makes you forget or “block out” the trauma, which makes it hard to remember). According to Mavis, rape is awful, but it’s also over quick and you can dissociate (something that plurality allows for); also, according to Mavis, they’d rather experience rape than prolonged mental abuse, the latter which can go on for years like a war of menticidal attrition—including threats of rape amid diminishing returns of genuine care after the initial “love-bombing” phase (say nothing of the historical-material variants if you’re living in someone’s family estate, or equally bad, being shamed, neglected or ignored by what Melissa McEwan calls “rape apologia” or “rape ranking” amid rape culture, 2013).

Speaking from my own experiences, it’s the kind of thing you can’t block out. Over time, this abuse can be “buried alive”—hidden in plain sight all around a “cursed” location littered with markers of power, but also illusions-of-illusions (crypt narrative) of normality that broadcast imprecise ambivalence. It’s precisely these iffy phenomenological disturbances and partial disconnections/connections that one relates to in continuum; i.e., being a part of the space-in-question, the broken home that is nevertheless one’s poisoned wellspring and haunted library of nostalgic storybooks. Trauma lives in the body but also the chronotope as something the body absorbs things from—the haunted house as returned to, feeling uncannily familiar and alien, but also already-occupied by something close-at hand during uncertain, liminal, feudalized ownership (which we’ll discuss more at length when we examine friendly [and unfriendly] ghosts in the Humanities primer, but also the King Diamond rock opera in Volume Three, Chapter One): the fear of inheritance; i.e., Walpole’s idea of a “secret sin; [an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse” from The Mysterious Mother (1768). Except incest isn’t a “pure myth” relegated to Gothic fiction, but precisely the kind of thing experienced by Mavis, Cuwu and people like them (who extrafamilial predators will mark as having survived, and try to exploit them for in the future; i.e., trauma lives inside you, but also follows you like a curse).

Note: In my opinion, the following paragraph is of the most important writing in this volume, if not the whole series. —Perse, 4/7/2025

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate. But undeath is something that can be felt through echoes of ourselves that aren’t diegetically spectral; they feel spectral through an uncanny resemblance, like standing over our own graves. This becomes something to play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM, akin to an (at-times) humorous, even trashy gallows theatre rife with dark, forbidden language: sin, vice, violent sex, all-around death, and other taboo subjects discouraged by privileged (and unimaginative) moderates who historically frame the Gothic as a puerile, good-for-nothing backwater while simultaneously suffering from conservative delusions of privilege and/or tokenism (re: Jameson). In other words, the pedagogy of the oppressed faces its classic foil: tone-policing.

Cuwu was one of my exes, and the sole one living with rape trauma of a sexual nature. As stated earlier in Volume One and in Volume Zero, our relationship was far from perfect. Even so, listening to them about their trauma still changed how I felt about older media, hence the world. When Cuwu and I watched Ninja Scroll, for instance, I knew I was sharing a movie that I had watched for years—had grown up on, in fact. However, I didn’t realize until after how limited and stuck my point of view was; with it, I had never noticed the deeper nuances of the film’s rapacious violence, which could only be seen from a different, ultimately asexual point of view. Being different but also no stranger to rape, Cuwu noticed them immediately. As we watched the movie, I gave Cuwu trigger warnings for the upcoming rape scenes (for which they thanked me). Those bothered them far more than the “manly” violence did, the rape making them “go blank” and dissociate.

After the film was over, we talked about it from Cuwu’s point of view as someone I related to in both sexual and asexual ways. Doing so frankly opened my eyes to what, for them, was an everyday experience: living with the trauma and threat of rape as something for you and others to behold, often as voyeurs, but also as BDSM practitioners fetishizing our own survived abuse in psychosexual, Gothic forms. Many of the fantasies that Cuwu and I played out reflected the sorts of unspoken abuses generally granted some kind of voice in Gothic fictions. The choking hand is, at its most basic level, meant to relieve stress from having seen something stressful that reminds you of an abuser who won’t follow your commands:

For the non- or less-abused, it generally doesn’t register that we are, in fact, watching a rapacious ceremony when we look at eroticized material; and sometimes we see what we think is rape only to be mistaken. Regardless of which, historical materialism has Cartesian dualism, the Gothic chronotope, and the colonial binary reflecting in porn as something to lament, parody or relish in paradoxical ways. “Hardcore” porn, for example, is generally emblematized by penetration as adjacent to violence—if not within the text, than the mind of someone who has survived abuse and seeks it out in some shape or form; this book considers monsters and erotica as part of a larger equation where violence is implied, including artwork and sex work where consent is a seemingly tenuous proposition.

As outlined in our paratextual documents, this book contains no illegal material—no revenge porn, child porn, snuff porn—but it does examine things generally thought of as porn that are unironically violent. It does so in ways we might fail to recognize because canonical porn has been made so normal to us, including humiliating displays and threats of capture and violence. In Gothic stories, these threats become something to play with as a psychosexual means of calculated risk; raw sex and rape fantasies are a common playground for the abused that tries to help us see what they see (and try to express) every day of their lives:

(artist: Babie Biscuittt)

As our thesis argues, this goes well beyond cinema and into videogames. Rather than point to Metroidvania, the example that mostly immediately leaps to mind for me—and one that actually matches the “hard R” approach to rape fantasies seen in The Terminator and Ninja Scroll—is Doki Doki Literature Club. In the holistic spirit of this book, I wanted to mention it quickly as it happens to match both Cuwu’s psychosexual fantasies, but also their intense desire to explore and talk about these things. Then we’ll conclude the postscript by examining my relating to Cuwu through Ninja Scroll and the various things that resulted.

Doki Doki Literature Club has a particular performative focus: the unheimlich, but specifically the ghost as relayed through a particular Gothic meta; i.e., one where sublimation fails and we look at something that isn’t diegetically consensual nor original, but replicated in ways that have become self-aware: a dating simulator that protests its own exploitation (exhibit 16a). Yet the paradox of Gothic rape is that it is “half-real”—written to convey the unspeakable as a fictional event to view voyeuristically from the outside; it also is conveyed by cosplayers, illustrators and other creators who communicate the thrilling proposition of transgressive sex as a kind of “buffer.” Made for them to express themselves with, their liminal expressions violate societal norms to convey alien forms of sex that are actually sex-positive through iconoclastic praxis. Gothic Communism can reunite us with these forms through what we create as acquired by studying older works, voyeuristically flirting with the boundaries of the real and the imagined as constantly reimagined in our favor.

(exhibit 16a: Top-left: source; top-middle: Two Bratty Cats; everything else is from Nisego’s Twitter timeline. “Fun” fact: to beat Doki Doki Literature Club, you have to go into the game’s code and delete Monika, the game’s “Satanic” protagonist; i.e., “killing” Monika in ways that go directly against the game’s “coding” of the player through normalized instruction.

This mastery of the player by the game is common in game types that disempower players for trying to master the game; e.g., horror games, but especially Metroidvania. As I write in “Our Ludic Masters”:

Game mastery is a large part of my research. However, I’m interested in players being dominated by the game, not the other way around. Seth Giddings and Helen Kennedy touch on this in “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots” [2008]. They write:

conventional assumptions that players learn the game system to achieve mastery over it—and that this mastery is the source of the prime pleasure of gameplay—is in fact an inversion of the dynamics and pleasures of videogame play. Games configure their players, allowing progression through the game only if the players recognize what they are being prompted to do, and comply with these coded instructions [13-14].

According to them, the game prompts the player. My argument is less interested in games at large, and more in the relationship between players and Metroidvania [source].

The same scrutiny and invention applies to games like Doki Doki Literature Club, which likewise treat mastery and consent as existing between a shared [and unstable] ludic contract by players and the game.)

The game’s dark, steep eroticism might seem hyperbolic, but its dating-sim unheimlich was par for the course for myself and someone I felt connected to: a haunted text that spoke to shared trauma replicated inside Gothic media we could share and talk about, but also perform. Cuwu was intensely erotic, but also politically outspoken in ways that gelled with my usual analysis of said stories; our consummation of their taboo fantasies involved someone who reminded me of my younger twenty-something self, but also was their own person: a self-declared Marxist-Leninist who seemed equally drawn to me and my traumas through stories that I consumed in an almost voyeuristic manner. My voyeurism was no secret to them, but also was informed by my upbringing as something I explained to Cuwu.

To that, I am a consensual voyeur by virtue of a rather complicated set of ingredients; i.e., I always ask for permission and seek out my fantasies through negotiated boundaries between me and those I play with. This was less taught to me and more something I picked up on my own journey through life involving a variety of educational factors loaded with their own contradictions and nuance.

For one, I was exposed to sex at a very young age. Dad would leave porno tapes in the VCR player and I saw part of one when I was four (my mother racing out of the bedroom to rip the tape out of the player when I cried, “What is she doing?” from the living room). I also was fascinated by his collection of Playboys and would sneak into my parents’ bedroom while Dad wasn’t around (which he generally wasn’t—he was off having affairs with many different women around town: basically the village man-whore being sampled by all the bored housewives). My mother didn’t want me to consume such stories until I was “of age,” but couldn’t watch me all the time, either (they did catch me looking at the Playboys once and told me to stop, but I didn’t listen).

Rather than act like a helicopter parent, Mom taught me to respect women… except her notion of “women” was informed by stories that mirrored her own lived experiences: stories like The Terminator and Ninja Scroll, where women are damsels who sometimes get raped by men; where men are rapists unless they’re the heroes like Kyle Reese or Ryan Gosling’s titular Driver (or Liam Neeson’s many doubles of himself, as we examined in Volume Zero) who use their inherent, monstrous capacity for lethal violence to save women as Gothic antiheroes famously do; and where women consequently put out to reward good men for saving them from bad men. The exchange of sex for protection was an absolute, sacred fact in Mom’s mind, and one that informed my upbringing and interrogating of said texts, myself.

(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Since I was small, I always pondered about appropriated violence and rape fantasies, though I didn’t know that’s what these things were. Eventually I learned, meeting Cuwu as someone who liked to ponder about and transmute these stories into transgressively sex-positive forms. A lot of proletarian-minded workers do, male or female. But Cuwu taught me that getting “ravished” can be incredibly fun, thrilling and/or hilarious. Likewise, “ravishing” someone who’s high, asleep or both can be super fucking hot provided it’s mutually consensual in advance (someone can’t consent after they’re drunk or asleep). Cuwu taught me that. To play with sex is to play with power through sex.

Cuwu also taught me that appreciative, sex-positive rape fantasies are not actually rape (they loved the show Lucifer and would fantasize about being “taken” by the actor of that show as someone sexy and strong but also a little dangerous). I learned this while having a previous understanding that appropriative, canonical rape fantasies function as rape threats at various registers; e.g., “be a good girl and don’t have extra-/premarital sex or Jason Voorhees will cut your head off with a machete!” As it turns out, unironic and ironic rape fantasies and demon lovers are tremendously common, but so is their eliding during liminal expressions that seek healing from rape through “rape.” Such ubiquity comments on state abuse as ever-present, but denied, displaced, dissociated—abject.

(artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

Spending time with Cuwu, I learned how to reverse this through our own stab at ludo-Gothic BDSM. We could play around with “rape” as a form of theatre, involving many of the usual cliché activities (choking [above] and sleep sex, but also BDSM commands and unequal power arrangements; e.g., Cuwu being my mommy dom): Gothic fantasies invoke the heroic person as capable of murder and rape, but choosing not to. In sex-positive iterations, the fear mechanism assists the calculated risk to heal from rape during echoes of state abuse. Perfect for the damaged damsel seeking a Gothic antihero! Yet, we weren’t always actively aware we were camping our own rapes; it was more child-like, yet driven by adult desires:

(exhibit 16b: Model and artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. The painting is a meditation on trauma; i.e., healing from abusive partners by painting them as friendlier ghosts of their former likenesses, thus capturing how I fell in love with them but omitting the abusive elements [to haunt me with a palliative spirit, not a crippling one]. It also considers how those who have been abused can teach us how to heal from trauma, while relating to them face-to-face. Generally, there is a fair amount of overlap between victim and victimizer, and Cuwu, while having been abused themselves, was also a prolific and lengthy abuser. Needless to say, they taught me a great deal about healing from trauma through consent-non-consent rituals, but also surviving from trauma perpetrated by them against me.)

Furthermore, whether autobiographical or not, traumatic artifice is informed by our immediate surroundings: what we see and consume, including stories like Ninja Scroll as a reflection on the past, but also a guide into future forms of a cultural understanding of the imaginary past (the Wisdom of the Ancients); i.e., through interactions just like the ones Cuwu and I shared, hashing out the Otranto of what became ludo-Gothic BDSM as a theoretical model built on said fumblings. As Gothic Communists, this becomes a strange relationship to the voyeuristic ritual of psychosexual violence; i.e., as cathartic in ways that allow for sex-positive wish fulfillment: of “killing” one’s rapist while also not hurting anyone, or being “raped” by someone who cannot harm the “victim.” This negotiates a future boundary—to draw in the proverbial sand, should we become threateningly triggered during our day-to-day relationships, but also enthralled.

To this, people don’t often see their abusers and just “let them in.” Like vampires, murderers come to you with smiles; they trick you based on disguises pulled from canon. It’s what Jadis did, sweeping me right off my feet as a sexy black knight. Sometimes, then, the only way to avoid abuse is to learn from those who have been abused—abuser personas and pluralities included. Often, this education is through the consumption and shared processing of trauma adopted from less unironic, bloodthirsty forms:

(exhibit 17a: Ninja girl Kagero fights the stone-skinned, fascist-coded Tessai, a brutal, seemingly-invincible monster who works for the mysterious Shogun of the Dark. After Tessai kills her crush and rapes her, Kagero “uses” the poison in her body as a passive revenge against this stupid, violent man. Post-rape, the male hero, Jubei Kibagami, distracts Tessai long enough for Jubei and Kagero to escape. Once they’re safe, she hardens; Jubei takes the hint and skedaddles, but after he’s gone, Kagero sobs. The quiet anguish she feels is denoted as animalistic, closer-to-nature like the breeding fireflies all around her. It’s not something Jubei could really understand.)

Note: Similar extended collages of Ninja Scroll are exhibited vis-à-vis ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the Gothic (specifically while dissecting Radcliffe); i.e., in the Demon Module’s “Demons and Dealing with Them“! —Perse, 4/3/2025

It was tremendously eye-opening to relate to Cuwu through Ninja Scroll adjacent to our psychosexual experiments. Despite Cuwu abusing me (and others; discussed in Volume Zero), seeing what they saw through their eyes helped me see boundaries before that I never knew existed, but also dangers; I felt differently about the violence I had grown up enjoying as a kind of voyeuristic peril—saw rape in ways that made me empathize, but also identify with, the victim through my own complex abuse: Cuwu, but also myself, with my forgotten egregore, Alyona. Without really intending to, my own pedagogy and oppression had linked with Cuwu’s. After that, I wrote a small piece about Ninja Scroll. I haven’t shared it until now, but want to in order to demonstrate how profoundly my views changed when hearing a survivor’s testimony with empathetic ears despite having done my best already to change. If this book is any proof at all, genuine ideological change takes serious fucking work.

My thoughts on Ninja Scroll, written May 10th, 2022 (written the day my Uncle Dave died, which will become relevant in the roadmap):

Erotic and violent, tremendously illustrated and animated—Ninja Scroll demands to be seen. It’s also a very much a film about looking. Specifically, at the ninja girl, Kagero. “Look how beautiful she is!” the movie seems to ask, a byproduct of its ’90s Male Gaze. The Male Gaze, in academic terms, applies to a specific point of view, one fostered by media that caters to a male status quo—sex and violence, generally. This view is often literal, the screen filled from second to second with objects, subjects and moments that inform a compulsive heteronormative stance. Think of it as “audience-coding behavior.” What is seen remains afterward inside the mind.

I’ve seen Ninja Scroll many, many times. However, it [wasn’t] until very recently that I understood a key moment in the film: the antidote scene. I never fully grasped why Jubei and Kagero hesitated. She seemed to be attracted to him; he admitted that both of them were comrades. Why hesitate to save his life in what should, at first glance, be an alluring proposition? The answer lies in context, something the movie adequately provides but never spells out: Both the young man and young woman are being forced to have sex by a government spy called Dakuan [exhibit 17b]. This lecherous old can “watch” by asking Jubei about it later. While there’s nothing wrong about watching provided it’s consensual, in the case of Jubei and Kagero, it’s not: Dakuan has poisoned Jubei (obviously without his permission) knowing full-well that only Kagero can save him.

The movie mentions several times that one kiss from Kagero’s mouth is poisonous enough to kill someone—let alone vaginal penetration, phallic or otherwise. So, coitus with Jubei isn’t actually required. It is, however, the one option that Dakuan repeatedly demands of Jubei and Kagero. “Did you make love to the ninja girl?” he asks Jubei, over and over. However, Dakuan also knows that each will be hesitant towards helping the other. Traumatized on- and offscreen, Kagero fears closeness (for men only bring her pain). Jubei understands this, respecting Kagero too much to subject her to that kind of anguish, even from a kiss.

The tragedy is that Kagero wants to help Jubei, but remains understandably conflicted. Apart from Hanza, who dies during the opening battle, Jubei seems to be the one man in Japan Kagero actually wants to sleep with. She knows the full extent of her poison as well as anyone, and she wants more from Jubei than kisses; but for Jubei, even a kiss from Kagero is asking too much. This conflict is incredibly useful to an unscrupulous man like Dakuan, who use the comrade’s growing friendship-amid-turmoil to sexually exploit them.

(exhibit 17b: After Jubei leaves Kagero, she is forced to report to the Lord Chamberlain, who—unbeknownst to her—is really Lord Genma in disguise. To add insult to injury from our point of view and Kagero’s in different ways: a) the “chamberlain” is rude to Kagero while fucking his murder victim’s concubine and b) is lying to us as non-diegetic voyeurs. Meta! Following that, we meet Dakuan, the government spy. Kagero doesn’t like him and frankly he’s a duplicitous old creep [still a backstabber but more willing to bargain with Jubei than Genma is]. Dakuan constantly leers at Kagero, watching her and Jubei grow closer. Eventually he plays “coercive matchmaker,” trying to force them to have sex so he can hear about it. Jubei, ever the gentleman, merely gives Kagero what she’s wanted from the start: a hug. Ace!)

Similar to Jadis, my relationship with Cuwu did not last, but they did teach me lasting lessons about how to perform, play with, and exchange stories of psychosexual trauma through Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM. The takeaway moral with Cuwu and Ninja Scroll (and The Terminator and similar Gothic stories) is that it’s tremendously important to learn from more disadvantaged groups when you occupy a dominant position, even if we have lived through trauma ourselves and regularly consume voyeuristic peril. For example, the critic Chris Stuckmann—despite escaping from a Jehovah’s Witness commune and having difficulty addressing his own trauma (2021)—still likes to call Ninja Scroll “blood and boobs… and more boobs—boobs, boobs, boobs.” He seems to notice the presence of boobs far more than what’s happening to the owners—that all of them are being undressed, raped and otherwise exploited by the diegetic narrative for the film’s target audience: cis-het men, but especially white American men. Stuckmann never once mentions rape in his brief review—merely that his mother wouldn’t let him watch it because the parental advisory label read “absolutely not for children or anyone under the age of eighteen” (a rape-porn paywall, essentially).

When reviewing Ninja Scroll, Stuckmann clearly understood one form of abuse, but came off incredibly tone deaf about another. However, some traumatized people can go on to clearly draw lines in the sand, whereupon they deliberately punch up and down from—swatting at low-hanging fruit while also attacking groups lower than them in willful tone-deafness (so-called “middle-aged moments”). This applies to the veneer of generosity we mentioned earlier—re: “We have done nice things; therefore, we can do no wrong.” Known atheist and ex-Mormon, Jimmy Snow, did this against Essence of Thought, tone-policing them for critiquing a fellow member of the atheist community (Rhetoric & Discourse, 2021) despite Jimmy having critiqued Mormons for doing the same exact thing. It’s a “boundaries for me, not for thee” scenario, but also pulverized solidarity/equality of convenience being weaponized against different activist groups, which the elite financially incentivize to prevent direct, collective worker action and solidarity when opposing the state.

Put a pin in that for now; we’ll return to it later. For now, just consider that when someone refuses to change once exposed, this becomes an informed compromise between negative freedom (freedom from restrictions) and positive freedoms (freedom for oppressed groups); doing so harms worker solidarity by negotiating with power towards a shrinking state of exception (which we’ll see when we examine TERFs, but also NERFs and atheists/secular reactionaries in Volume Three, Chapter Four). Ideally there should be no state of exception, vanishing the bourgeoisie and spreading power horizontally in ways that abolish privatization and nation-state monopolies through direct, intersecting worker solidarity geared towards preventing war and rape by using Gothic poetics to worker’s emotional/Gothic intelligence in their daily lives. These ideas are central to proletarian praxis, which Volume Three is entirely about, and which our synthesis roadmap will introduce beyond what the postscript could merely suggest. The artwork bellow constitutes further examples of such solidarity made in collaboration with myself and other sex workers:

(exhibit 18a: Top-left, model and artist: Venusinaries and Persephone van der Waard; top-right and bottom left/right: Scarlet Love and Persephone van der Waard. The above reference material and artwork were drawn back in 2022; i.e. before I had written most of Sex Positivity and before I was commissioning sex workers to model for me, to nearly the same extent I am, now. To it, said artwork was based off these sex worker’s publicly available material—their Twitter feeds, in both cases—and drawn as fan art.

By comparison, the models featured on the next page were commissioned this April 2025; their material was commissioned specifically to be part of this book series, thus was negotiated as such [which the addendum in “Paid Labor” will go over before we jump into the synthesis symposium]: to embody from start to finish, top to bottom, what ludo-Gothic BDSM is in practice: praxis to synthesis through negotiation as a form of paid mutual exchange!

[artists (from top-left to bottom-right): Tyler and husband, Rae of Sunshine, Rhyna Targaryen, Vera Dominus, Kaycee Bee, Moxxy Sting, Cupid Kisses, Monster Lover, Delilah Gallo and Feyn Volans]

Beyond these recent eleven, though, Sex Positivity has commission over sixty models since 2022; i.e., as a habit of offering, negotiating and paying that happening slowly over time before invigilating it, post hoc.)

Gothic Communism prevents “rape” by putting it in quotes. Doing so is built on systemic catharsis, which results from good praxis camping the canon with ludo-Gothic. Let’s take stock before we delve into the synthesis roadmap, then, which simplifies theory to synthesize praxis within a collective teaching approach that touches on ludo-Gothic BDSM as something to instruct; i.e., how to process and interrogate trauma in our daily lives. Combined with the thesis volume and glossary keywords, the manifesto and its postscript provide you with every main theoretical idea used in this book.

To it, everything that comes next concerns applying ideas taken from them, insofar as navigating and expressing trauma are concerned. Originally, there was no thesis—just the manifesto as a sketch of it, and a great many ideas I wanted to introduce after it; i.e., inside the roadmap and in Volumes Two and Three. I had also devised a “test” to see what readers would know before reading the rest of Sex Positivity and discovering these ideas: a small sample essay that utilized the sum of my books’ theoretical devices. Purely in the spirit of fun, I’ve left the essay in the book for you to test yourselves with—i.e., to see what you’ve learned after reading my thesis volume and manifesto/postscript. Provided you’ve read and processed those, this should be a piece of cake.

(artist: Rae of Sunshine)

Onto “Sample Essay and Paid Labor“!

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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] There is a tremendous asexual facet to Gothic poetics when negotiating trauma. We will explore this at length in Volume Three.

[2] For a more recent examination of this oft-disputed statistic, consider Renegade Cut’s 2023 video, “How Many Cops Are Domestic Abusers?”

[3] Abstraction isn’t simply the reduction of detail down to basic geometric shapes and color (though Skynet, when it is visually conveyed, appears as a cybernetic pyramid, often in black and red, or silver-blue and purple); smaller iterations or offshoots of larger complicated things are also abstractions. On par with Rudolph Otto’s ghosts serving as abortive offshoots of the Numinous, they and Skynet hint at something neither can fully describe: Capitalism and Capitalist Realism.

[4] As TheScientist writes for ” RYM Ultimate Box Set > Hauntology”:

The discourse developed around Jacques Derrida‘s concept of “Hauntology” (in 1993) and its application to music in the minds of writers and bloggers like Simon Reynolds, K-Punk and Adam Harper as a philosophical and aesthetic musical idea emerged in the music world in 2006. Derrida’s original use of the phrase can be linked to a sense of “threading the present through the past,” or a ghostly re-imagining of the past defining our existence both in concept and in art. But in its musical sense, Hauntology has been used to describe a gathering of disparate artists dealing in “haunted” sonics; music resonating with the emotions and feelings of past analog, and digital ghosts (source).

[5] The technological singularity is often misunderstood as something that will eventually happen, all while scapegoating machines; i.e., by presenting them as the end of the world, rebelling against the status quo by replacing Humanity with pure non-humans (often via a transhuman buffer like the xenomorph or Frankenstein’s Creature). But the truth is less romantic: Thanks to efficient profit (and the bourgeois trifectas at large), Capitalism is generally not incentivized to build things like Skynet in a literal sense. Rather, human beings are dehumanized to behave in robotic ways, insofar as delivering or receiving state violence is concerned. This isn’t technology of an incredibly advanced sort, nor does the state require it; it’s a reflection of the human condition projected onto various dated anxieties about the rise of the police state smashed together with state-fueled phobias and stigmas in a retro-future hauntology that leads to Capitalist Realism. It’s a paradox—a liminal expression of unequal power and its abuse, insofar as technology becomes a device of state terror that contains within it all the usual means of humanizing the dehumanized through counterterror.

For the state, Skynet is a recuperative scapegoat for, and elaborate distraction of, Capitalism that once conjured up sows mistrust of technology while making threats that are anything but guided by actual non-humans; for us, the singularity is merely the waking up of those framed as inhuman by the state. Skynet is a mirage; police abuse, genocide and nuclear violence are not, but the state’s control on violence, terror and bodies are not absolute and can be reprogrammed. Generally this happens by fighting back within hauntological myopias to see state orchestrations behind so-called singularities like Skynet, but also reclaiming such hyperbole to disarm canonical technophobia in service of Gothic theatrics that assist workers: ironic technophobia and technophilia treated as monstrous in relation to computers as immensely powerful devices that can serve worker needs on and offstage in very Gothic ways. Their summoning should raise our awareness of state abuses, including its effect on our minds; i.e., what we’re afraid of as authored by state forces or otherwise in service to them (more on this in our next footnote).

[6] NATO’s fictional double—SAC-NORAD and Cameron’s technophobic genesis of the technological singularity—lends far too much credence to the idea of thinking machines being responsible for the planet’s devastation (and the end of Capitalism) through state shift. Indeed, Cameron both uses the singularity’s spontaneous rebellion to shift blame away from capitalists (essentially arguing that rebel computers nuked the planet versus climate change) and appears to misunderstand, or at least thoroughly abstract the nature of what AI is in practice. Even by current standards, AI as it is marketed by capitalists, is an algorithm within a search engine that steals data:

An AI is like a gigantic word sifter. It can structure sentences in ways that seem related to the topic at hand, which is why, if you ask it for a court case, it can generate text “[proper noun] v [proper noun]” as a formatting concept — like how Excel will see you type in $1.00 and know that further entries in the column are likely also dollar values, so it will change the formatting of that column to the dollar value type.

But the AI will not actually search for existing court cases, nor will it understand what’s in the court case — because it has no ability to understand anything, as it is not intelligent. Instead, you press a button, and the sifting machine starts spinning, and since you said, “court case,” it will output a string of text that is formatted to look like a court case (source: Doc Burford’s “Using ChatGPT and Other AI Writing Tools Makes You Unhireable,” 2023; also consider Naomi Clark’s Twitter summary).

The takeaway here is that it’s the illusion of thought capitalizing on people’s stolen information, their livelihoods (the theft of which giant companies have been doing for decades). “AI,” then, is a tremendous misnomer because it implies the device has the ability to think for itself or might suddenly “come alive” and kill everyone like a fascist maniac or furious slave. That’s… not how computers work. This isn’t T2. Human decisions are not removed from strategic “defense” and Skynet won’t begin to learn at a geometric rate. Instead, the structure is designed to profit the elite in ways they don’t need to make. It might happen anyways. However, predictions by people like Stephan Korn [a New Zealand CEO fixated on “innovation”—big ol’ red flag there, dude] are not only guessing but calling the software something it isn’t—intelligent. Yes, Capitalism could design some kind of sophisticated super-agent and overlord system to surveille its citizenry with through various ungovernable forces that lead to a theoretical boiling point:

Like it or not the power of AI will attract at least 4 distinct motivations that are hard to regulate:

• • Profit motive – companies gaining significant competitive advantage through the use of ever more advanced AI
  • Control motive – intelligence agencies / counter-terrorism units wishing to use more sophisticated versions of AI to provide a level of security for their citizens / countries
  • Power motive – any individual or group wanting to use AI to manipulate existing systems (such as democracy / governments) to gain an advantage
  • Disruption motive – criminals and terrorists using AI to further their causes

At least one of the above will be completely resistant to legislation / regulation which means there will always be someone working without governance / control on more sophisticated versions of AI systems (source: “Skynet Is About 3 Years Away,” 2023).

But the reality is, the elite already have a stranglehold on the world and operate through brute force, efficient profit and market deregulation that colonize its populations at home and abroad (name me something that’s more brute-force and clandestine than nuclear war and police states under neoliberal hegemony); “Skynet” is already here: the dehumanized elite, coldly exploiting the world to the brink of nuclear war and arguably beyond.

Despite Western prosiness of the futurist Utopia, science fiction is rooted in the Gothic critique of Cartesian thought and Western settler-colonial hegemony and has been since 1818. Cameron’s white-savior take on “tech-noir” thoroughly bastardizes Mary Shelley’s Modern Prometheus. People forget that Shelley had Victor make a monster he could abuse in order for her to make a postcolonial critique of men like Victor—not a testament to Victor’s creative ability or the Cartesian Revolution’s merits! Whether Cameron would want us to or not, the same idea applies to Cameron’s Terminator movies. The film isn’t meant to entertain the idea that such a machine could actually exist because those in power would never actually make it, could never actually make it; state science serves the market and the market is guided by human decisions predicated on illusions, not genuine scientific advances. It’s in their best interests to keep machines/slaves stupid—to keep us stupid and afraid of a false threat overshadowed by a very real one.

To this, Cameron’s critiquing of the elite’s desire to dominate and control coming home to roost is stowed away in popular phobias (while simultaneously profiting off the same narrative to enrich the elite by making his own white-savior fantasies come true on screen—self-aggrandizement, in other words). And, if we want to be charitable towards Cameron (who has profited considerably off these stories), we could argue that Skynet represents as much the repressed desires of the downtrodden, the wish fulfillment of the Global South guiding the nuclear missiles home towards the colonizer mother country like some kind of token police agent—a tinman who finally got a heart and destroyed its slavers. Except, the great machine has no body and there is no dialog like Frankenstein; comparatively Scott’s 2017 Alien: Covenant is more discursive and upfront about presenting David, that movie’s villain, as a Satanic rebel in opposition to state power (more on this in Volume Two; re: “Dissecting Radcliffe“).

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.

Monster Modes, Totalitarianism (menticide) and Opposing Forces: Cataloging Oppositional Praxis

“People have given us many names: ghouls, ghosts, night wanderers, vampires, werewolves, and so on. But we are all members of the same family; tormented souls who must return forever to the scenes of our lost humanity. You may hang garlic or a crucifix above your bed, prepare silver bullets to shoot us, call in holy men to exorcize us from your home, but you cannot defeat us. Our name is Legion, and we are too many for you because we are the forces of evil that reflect the evil within your own souls.”

—Michael Page, The Encyclopedia of Things That Never Were (1985)

Picking up where “Challenging the State’s Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires)” left off…

This chapter concludes the manifesto by cataloging monsters, menticide, and oppositional praxis (canon vs iconoclasm, the Six Doubles, the bourgeoisie vs the proletariat, etc); i.e., as something we’ve already discussed in Volumes One and Zero, but want to compile before moving into second half of the volume (and into Volumes Two and Three). We’ve already looked at gargoyles, Amazons, and knights as visual, menticidal reminders of state violence and terror, and vampires as vitalistic monsters of sin, seduction, vice and power exchange (with Roddy being utterly terrified of his own dark reflection as something he sadly felt he needed to stake; but that’s the ’80s for you: a time of re-closeting the queer while simultaneously comparing them to cis-het male serial killers). As we carry on, remember that all monsters are liminal; liminal expression involves pastiche and doubles in opposition, which is what monsters primarily are. This expression requires the remediated praxis of pastiche, the double’s failure of sublimation, and liminality’s conflict on the surface of the image inside the Gothic; i.e., as a culture of weird nerds fighting for or against the state: oppositional praxis and ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the canon as a structure—older queers haunted by the state’s hatred of them.

For example, vampires are beings of vice, power and appetite through the nerds consuming them; they can be reclaimed by iconoclasts, but canonically announce and express considerable fears, doubt and anticipation about the trauma and the vitalistic, feeding nature of ourselves relayed in abject forms: an expectation and eagerness to do battle with the vampire as a primarily undead force, but also something demonic; i.e., a seductive shapeshifter from which to learn forbidden things from or prove one’s worth against. Both types are summoned up and destroyed by canonical benefactors and inhabitants; or conversely are embodied as part of a non-colonial, genderqueer struggle that challenges state hegemony (and heteronormative division and assimilation) by lingering inside or near the state of exception.

Furthermore, as part of this exchange, guilt, anxiety and menticide likewise become things to deal with and act out during oppositional praxis allowing for camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Regardless of the monster type, then, oppositional praxis is tremendously chaotic, intersectional and complex; so the Humanities primer in Volume Two is entirely dedicated to covering the historical usage and evolution of our three main monster types: the undead—zombies vampires, ghosts and composite bodies—as well as demons and animalistic “totems,” chimeras, sentient animals and their associate reanimating magics, feeding mechanisms and forms of power exchange. Here, we’ll mostly be listing all of them, and going over some of their base, shared functions as part of oppositional praxis’ Gothic dialectic within weird-nerd culture.

To be as thorough as I can be, here are most of the monsters this book has already explored in Volumes Zero and One or will explore in Volumes Two and Three (with cited exhibit examples of some of their canonical critical functions being in parenthesis):

Note: Rather than go through and give links to all of the individual exhibit numbers, I’ll provide the final exhibit number per book volume; i.e., to let you know which volume to download and Crtl+F the exhibit number you’re trying to find. Volume Zero ends on exhibit 1a1c; Volume One, exhibit 33a; the Poetry Module, exhibit 34b3b3a3; the Undead Module, exhibit 43e1; and the Demon Module, exhibit 60e2. Volume Three is anything past exhibit 60e2. —Perse, 4/7/2025

• zombies (the state of exception, exhibit 34d)
• werewolves (furries; symbols of rape, madness, and primal lust; exhibit 87a)
• vampires (the aristocracy and venereal disease, exhibit 41h; the dragon lord or Archaic Mother, exhibit 1a1c)
• aliens (xenophobia, abduction; exhibit 13a, below)
• clones (assimilation, doubles; exhibit 13a, below)
• reanimations (dead bodies, statues, golems, suits of armor, etc; exhibit 40h2)
• Mother Nature (natural disasters, plagues; exhibit 35b)
• orcs, goblins and Drow (the state of exception, tokenized conflict, settler colonialism; exhibit 37e, 41b, and 94a1b)
• stigma/”plague” animals: bats, snails, snakes, wolves, bears, hounds (of the Baskervilles), Rodents of Unusual Size, killer rabbits, etc (the wilderness, vermin; exhibit 10c1)
• Amazons (subjugated or rebellious, exhibit 8b2 or exhibit 1a1a3)
• knights/cops (sanctioned rape/violence, exhibit 24a)
• black knights (fascism/centrist caricature, exhibit 1a1a1h)
• composite bodies (Frankenstein’s Creature, exhibit 44a2); but also cyborgs,
• robots and golems (exhibit 42e), including silly ones like Mr. Stay-Puft from Ghostbusters (1984)
• gargoyles (exhibit 6b4b)
• ghosts (the uncanny/unheimlich, exhibit 42d2)
• wendigos/imposters (exhibit 45d)
• mythical warriors (ninjas, knights, samurai; exhibit 39c1; Beowulf, exhibit 1a1a1f)
• mythical artists (mad musicians, painters, etc; exhibit 105a2)
• plant/pod people (clones and alien invasion, mad science, etc; exhibit 13a, below)
• chimeras (anthropomorphic, like mermaids, exhibit 54; or not—the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Cú Chulainn, Lucifer’s non-angel forms in Paradise Lost—exhibit 51a)
• demons (forbidden knowledge and power exchange, exhibit 45c1/2)
• hags (aging but also ancient power, exhibit 84a2)
• witches (vice characters, pagan/non-Christian rituals; exhibit 83a)
• headless monsters/revenants of state executions (the Medusa, the headless Buddha, fallen warriors, feudal-secular terrorist-cell violence, etc, utilizing the severed head as a dialectical-material means of condemning or venerating the execution through beheading as vividly abject and often blindly furious; exhibit 41a and exhibit 11b5)
• Archaic Mothers (ancient, abject, really pissed-off vice characters; e.g., the alien queen from Aliens or Mother Brain from Metroid, exhibit 1a1c)
• archaic babies (the spawn of the void; e.g., the xenomorph, exhibit 60d; but also Giygas “the mighty idiot” from Mother 2, 1994, exhibit 60e2)
• killer, manmade babies tied to patriarchal mad science, patrilineal descent and pre-fascist and anti-Semitic revenge stigmas (again, the xenomorph or Beowulf, 1a1a1b; but also Cell and Broly from Dragon Ball, exhibit 39c2; the Creature from Frankenstein; and Homelander from The Boys, 2019, exhibit 108b4)
• phallic women (the monstrous-feminine of the xenomorph and similar liminal performances, but also violent women “acting like men” from a traditional, canonical viewpoint—i.e., though generally in response to patriarchal structures with an air of female revenge that leads to TERF-induced rape culture; e.g., Lady Macbeth from Macbeth, 1606; Victoria de Loredani from Zofloya, 1806, exhibit 100b2; Rumi from Perfect Blue, 1997; and Ripley/Samus Aran from Aliens/Metroid, exhibit 71)
• space bugs (Communism; see: Archaic Mothers)
• hybrids (vampire-zombie witches, clown ninjas [Worthikids’ “Wire,” 2021] and Zombie-Vampire Capitalism’s Zombie-Vampire Voltron—e.g., Mega Man X, 1993, and The Ronin Warriors‘ 1995 neoliberal pastiche; exhibit 98b2a and 39c1/94c2a)

Allowed by the elite to flourish in canonical forms, monsters uphold the status quo; in iconoclastic forms, monsters work as doubled theatrical masks or costumes that can be subverted by the person wearing them for proletarian purposes during oppositional praxis (whose complex subterfuge and presence of trauma [revolutionary cryptonymy] we shall examine even more in Volume Three). In either case, these performances are literally Legion. So, I may have missed a few in my scrapbook bestiary above (on par with Prince Hamlet’s commonplace book, which compiled knowledge as he came across it and guided his revenge moving forward). However, I wanted to try and cover all the bases as best I can to give you a comprehensive picture of their canonical effects within the ghost of the counterfeit, which generally are xenophobic, horrifying and disempowering/paralytic inside a decaying scapegoat sense of inherited home invasion (re: “Demons and Dealing with Them“):

(exhibit 13a: Assorted still images from Fire in the Sky, 1993; The Blob, 1988, The Fly, 1986; and Body Snatchers, 1993. All deal with alien invasions or mad scenes of foreign, irrational space, technology and occupants foisted onto an American setting. While there’s a healthy degree of splatter, the genuine sentiment is abject horror/xenophobia within the ghost of the counterfeit’s moral panics; i.e., stranger danger, but from beyond the stars! “Watch the skies!” indeed.)

Next, I’ll list some of the infamous lairs/parallel space that monsters call (or make themselves at) home, which we’ll also explore (albeit always in relation to monsters, whose sex positivity remains our hermeneutic/praxial focus):

• castles
• churches (and other ecclesiastical structures and their Neo-Gothic forms)
• danger discos
• caves
• condemned buildings
• industrial sectors or disaster areas
• crime scenes
• alien landing sites
• giant insect burrows/animal dens
• abandoned factories, but also ghost towns and other derelict settlements (or giant vehicles; e.g., ghost ships)
• haunted houses
• graveyards (official or improvised; e.g., mass graves)
• creepy basements
• sex dungeons (rape fantasies, which intersect with other space types)
• spooky mansions
• Metroidvania and to a lesser extent, other videoludic spaces like the FPS, RTS or JRPG (for this one, refer to my aforementioned PhD research on the subject, in “Mazes and Labyrinths” as discussed as length in Volume Zero, though we will analyze Metroidvania more in Volume Two and in my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus)

Fictional monsters and their lairs/parallel space in media constitute localized phobias, stigmas, fetishes, and biases, the basic mediums of which include: movies, videogames, novels, theatre and musicals, etc. However, the basic Gothic theories (the Four Gs) can be applied to different mediums through different medium-centric schools of thought (and genres, which we’ll keep exploring as we go, but also crossovers—e.g., Samus Aran in Axiom Verge, 13b).

This requires another list, which I’ll call our Hermeneutic[1] Gothic-Communist Quadfecta (tailored after my education background, in this case; also, I didn’t want to have two lists of four called “the Four Gs”):

• Gothic theory
• ludology (game theory)
• queer theory
• Marxism

Apart from our thesis volume, Gothic theory has been outlined in “The Six Gothic-Marxist Tenets and Four Main Gothic Theories” paratext towards the start of the book, and throughout the manifesto in practical, executable forms; the latter three methods have already been outlined during the section, “Essential Terms, a priori,” in the paratextual documents.

As we’ll see when we push into the Humanities primer, my approach is thoroughly hybridized, as I think it’s more accurate to a post-scarcity world sans privatization to allow for creations that aren’t hidden behind artificial barriers. You don’t have to wait for corporations to make multiverses. All deities (and worlds and demons) resides within workers—are their tools to express themselves with:

(exhibit 13b: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. My crossover illustration of Samus Aran in Axiom Verge, purposely revisited to be more sex-positive and “Laborwave” [and which reappears in “Away with the Faeries“]. To this, the idea was less about being faithful to a previous visualization of either series and more about re-drawing it playfully in ways that give room for my arguments and theories represented through Samus herself as transformed: no longer a servant of the state [the Galactic Federation] but an errant traveler finding herself in strange, new, colorful worlds. Gender trouble aside, the parody of heteronormative standards also allows for pure ontological joy unto itself.)

In praxial terms, workers familiar with these objects and methods of study can start to think critically through whichever theories help them process media (and psychosexual trauma) in an emotionally/Gothically intelligent sense; i.e., one that also helps our Gothic-Communist goals materialize as praxis synthesized. This includes sex positivity vs sex coercion (we’ll get to the other doubles of oppositional praxis in a moment) as historically-materially generating an oft-liminal “monster pastiche,” or other kinds in connection with monsters: poster, war/nation, rape, porn, disguise, etc, which we’ll pointedly associate with monsters, lairs/parallel space and their relative phobias as things to rehabilitate and weaponize in our favor as rebellious workers. Over time, proletarian praxis leads to “friendly doubles”: de facto, sex-positive, educational forms whose means of encouraging critical thought are tied to commonplace things workers can quickly spot, recognize and think about as they express (and liberate) themselves with iconoclastic art. In doing so, they can decolonize the Gothic mode and grant it their own humanizing power as part of a larger artistic movement; its steady iconoclasm/reclamation is how sex workers liberate themselves from canonical, heteronormative bondage—often using an asexual lens to appreciate social-sexual expression beyond compelled sexual reproduction and its state-sanctioned violence, trauma, and manipulation:

(artist: Dejano23)

When starting this book, I chose to focus on Gothic theory, monsters and media because of their ubiquity under capital, but also their widespread effects. To that, canonical forms of the “fearful” Gothic imagination invite sex-coercive, social-sexual behaviors that alienate workers from nature and sex, turning them against each other to serve the profit motive; iconoclastic forms utilize the same regular fixations during proletarian praxis, thus applying them in a sex-positive fashion according to common fears (moral panics) normally exploited by those in power for their own Base ends (that was a pun):

• the unknown (death, nature; the dark, beyond, alien, other or different)
• shameful conduct, but especially fatal hubris (the ignominious death)
• the impostor, especially a betrayal by a false friend, family member, lover/spouse or authority figure (cops, priests, husbands, coaches, teachers, etc)
• the tyrant and enslavement
• incarceration and live burial
• abandonment and identity erasure; cultural amnesia, genocide
• violence; including physical, emotional and sexual abuse
• impotence; a loss of control, including of one’s mind—madness, paranoia, brainwashing and gaslighting, etc
• isolation
• emotional, mental, spiritual or physical vulnerability
• disease
• prurience, sexual deviancy and appetite
• strange combinations of these things (e.g., the Japanese kappa, anus balls and ignominious death helping compose Sekiro‘s (2019) hidden boss, the Headless[2]—a hidden, headless warrior married to the kappa, quizzically stealing the hero’s essence from their butt, but also relegated to the embarrassing-yet-terrifying forgotten grave: For a Japanese warrior to be beheaded, then left to rot, their honor and glory would be completely forfeit—utterly extinguished along with their name and identity as tied to violence. This would literally be a fate worse than death for their kind)
• cats and dogs living together
• mass hysteria

These canonical fears work as “starting points” that iconoclastic praxis can transform in highly flexible ways—first analyzed by Gothic theory to describe and critique the material world through art; then, used through future artistic generation to reeducate the societal Gothic imagination, slowly turning it into a sex-positive force; re: the Base and the Superstructure. This mounting power can then reshape the material world, all while preserving and remembering the barbaric past as it gradually turns into something new along liminal pathways.

(exhibit 13c: The cover image for Thomas Leatham’s “Identity Crisis: The Curious Connections between Perfect Blue, Persona and Black Swan,” 2022.)

In other words, Gothic Communism crystalizes harmful behaviors into a Gothic moral that doesn’t shy away from the dialectical-material complexities that emerge during oppositional praxis. Yet, our praxial focus always remains on a practical outcome informed by simplified theories we cultivate ourselves—of emotionally and Gothically intelligent, cultural-savvy workers (sex or otherwise) who have access to the entire manifesto checklist: our manifesto tree’s Gothic-Marxist tenets, main Gothic theories, Gothic mode of expression (its means, materials and methods of study), doubles of oppositional praxis/synthetic oppositional groupings and the creative successes of proletarian praxis: illustrating and imparting mutual consent, descriptive sexuality and informed consumption/informed consent through de facto social-sexual education that likewise conveys cultural appreciation through appreciative irony in countercultural forms; i.e., sex-positive fetishes, kinks, BDSM and Gothic counterculture; e.g., sex-positive (thus ironic) rape play.

From moment to moment, the mind can only hold so much. So now that we’ve catalogued the Gothic mode of expression, I want to spend the rest of the chapter (and the remainder of the manifesto) reloading yours: compiling and summarizing a variety of theoretical arguments that need to be understood holistically before we segue into the instruction half of the volume; i.e., a selection of items I think you should take with you—lifted from your own knowledge stores (as filled from my lessons) and placed into your current “basket” before we resume. These will be things the manifesto has already discussed, which I now want to holistically stress their various class/cultural functions during a preface-of-sorts to the second half of the volume’s primary topic: oppositional praxis as a “war for synthesis.” Think of it as a chance not just to reload, but reflect on what I’ll loading your basket with.

I want to start with three points: their medieval flavors in relation to capital, including vice characters; a totalitarian, menticidal function attached to dialectical-material arguments on either side; and opposing material forces with a societal element manifesting through Gothic poetics.

First, the medieval character of our liminal ploys work against the state in complicated ways. We’re not just breaking icons or swimming in the grey area for funsies (though it is fun); we’re fighting the state’s trifectas and monopolies on violence, terror and morphological expression through a variety of disguises that work as complex, oft-ambiguous code. Our revolutionary cryptonymy focuses specifically on sexual violence, as it intersects with other forms of state abuse as financially incentivized by those in power (the elite), with power (neoliberals) or seeking power (fascist) as normally afforded by capital. Capitalist Realism, then, stems from greed as a cultivated mindset—one informed by a revived, half-real medieval sitting between fiction and the rules, reality and imagination.

As previously mentioned, I’ve coined this incentivization “the problem of greed” in my own academic work, writing about Weber’s Protestant work ethic in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice; the problem of greed (and its addressal) takes different forms (of vice character) depending on who’s involved:

I’ve tabled these points using things my thesis discusses at length. Some of the terms are included in the glossary but I’ve also tried (for your convenience) to cite relevant snippets from my thesis volume. Refer to it for extended sections on terms like “banality of evil” and “desk murderer” in relation to my arguments. —Perse

• For neoliberals, the problem of greed introduces the banality of evil[3]—chiefly the dragon (medieval operator) as a symbol of rarified greed—to a current-day myth: the useful billionaire, aka billionaire “philanthropy/Marxism.” Capitalism cultivates the dragon’s “hoard of gold,” which makes the “dragon” gross dividends under neoliberal Capitalism. The owner class, meanwhile, grows more and more alienated from their own wealth-as-abstracted, but also other humans (workers) and sex/nature, preying on them or turning them into predatory devices (vampires) under their thrall. Owners see workers as a means to an end: moving money through nature; to achieve this, they exploit workers, including by callously bribing them through loans, subsidies and lobbying disguised as Christian/secular generosity (which align with the Christian tradition of worshipping capital in ostensibly secular forms; e.g., Reagan’s America being an extension of virtually every American executive before and after having been a Christian in some shape or form—mostly Protestant Christians, as Aleksandra Sandstrom notes[4]; re: Weber’s Protestant work ethic being an Americanized phenomenon).

Ethically billionaires should not exist, yet neoliberal culture hero-worships them like gods—banal dragons with draconian positions, not literal piles of gold to hoard (unlike fascists). They posture as the Greater Good, often in TV shows and other forms of popular media deliberately framing the elite as exceptional and benevolent (Renegade Cut’s “An Anarchist Watches The West Wing,” 2021) in order to hide what they really are: vampires and desk-murders-in-disguise, killing more than fascists can through Americanized bureaucracy as an ongoing and disguised form of state power abuse—deregulated but enabled to accumulate as much wealth as possible for those out-of-touch ghouls at the top. Doing so, neoliberals intentionally create criminogenic conditions, all while blaming the poor, stepping up policing and pushing austerity/personal responsibility rhetoric[5] (this includes “charitable” organizations asking poor people for one dollar instead of asking billionaires for one percent of “their” money while also treating the Protestant work ethic as sacred/modest—divorced from excess and useful to the elite). While this historically-materially translates to genocide, war and rape, etc, as displaced/dissociative violence, it also extends to remediation as canonical sublimation via content creators who posture as “generous” while generally profiting off worker exploitation behind various “fronts”; e.g., Bon Jovi’s restaurant accepting donations and labor while branding itself and its products as a non-profit[6] with neoliberal taglines (e.g., “Hope Is Delicious!”); The Open Hand Charity stealing fans’ money for ten years while claiming “it’s for dementia research“ (Karl Jobst, 2023); or Mr. Beast’s “poverty tourism” miraculously helping the blind, then using this as a shield his fans levy against criticism (The Kavernacle, 2023); i.e., “he did good works, so he can do no wrong” thus should be allowed to exist free from criticism (negative freedom for the elite and their proponents).

• For fascists, the symptoms of Capitalism’s disease manifest differently. For them, the problem of greed reintroduces an older form of wealth acquisition—raw material theft through direct physical violence and conquest—the return of the Skeleton King or dragon lord roosting on the literal pile of gold (re: hoarded stolen material wealth—the piles of goods taken from the Nazi death camps) inside a castle during the liminal hauntology of war. It is the partial collapse of the state to install new leaders in the vacated/emptied offices, vying to restore them to “their former glory” during an internalized foreign plot; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich’s busy campaigns[7] at all points of his career under Nazi operations. Desk murder under fascist bureaucracy is performed through a weaker form of government centered around open piracy and medieval power abuse, with similar-if-less-effective results. Despite their badass façade, fascists perform grandiose displays of perceived strength (“I am strong, strong, strong!”) through a weakened power structure resting on a cult of the strongman. Nazi Germany, for example, was materially capable of far less harm and damage than what America has globally achieved through US hegemony worldwide. US warmongering has slowly become automated, turning into endless bombings, occupations and drone warfare driven by bourgeois human greed through neoconservative arguments (“peace through strength”). In turn, these faraway forms are further displaced, dissociated, and disseminated through neoliberal propaganda. A common bread-and-circus form is popular sports, especially the combat sport (and its centrist kayfabe) as useful in conveying the competitive, individualistic models that are so central to neoliberal propaganda. These gladiatorial, ranked rituals “prove” which male workers/exploited groups are “superior,” meaning “the best at being useful to the Faustian elite in violent ways,” like Mike Tyson for Cus D’Amato or Don King (Rummy’s Corner, 2023). Women in these arrangements are reduced to de facto prizes for poor fighting men to scrap over, normally enjoyed exclusively by the elite. “To the victor go the spoils (which, as a non-battered, cis-het/non-heteronormative AFAB is not a flattering concept—women [and gender-non-conforming people/minorities] don’t really want to be reduced to pretty baubles that cis-het dudes fight over). As you might guess, this extends to military urbanism when Imperialism comes home to empire (roosting chickens).

• For those predating neoliberalism/fascism, or working through a medieval lens that potentially critiques either ideology and its practitioners, the likes of Shakespeare and Tolkien critiqued greed through their own displaced fantasies/ghosts of the author taking on a life of their own; i.e., inventing an imaginary Venice and Middle-earth to critique their respective presents’ problems of greed in medieval language (re: “The Problem of Greed“). Similar to Blake’s “dark Satanic mills[8]” (or Kafka’s potentially bourgeois critique in his own demonic spaces compared to Charles Dickens[9], Tolkien’s “black country” was a displaced critique of the Industrial Revolution and capital (as later heard in British metal stalwarts Judas Priest surviving Thatcherism, but also in Victorian authors like Charles Dickens living under empire, etc); so was Shylock the xenophobic scapegoat of greed during mercantile Capitalism and Smaug’s rarefied greed being of the medieval, fascist (relatively small, vengeful and imaginarily “ancient”) sort directed at a post-Catholic, 20th century West. Such allegory is not so different than condemning a foreign dictator for similar abuses committed by one’s own leaders—not just elected officials, but the men behind the curtain pulling strings of various sorts (the British elite, in Tolkien’s case). You also see the same tactic employed by powerful men like George Lucas or James Cameron, whose own successes become franchised, turning them into billionaire Marxist “Pygmalions” with far less critical power as time goes on; i.e., the wider their appeal, the less potent their message insofar as it serves profit first and foremost. Of course, allegory exists for a reason, but “mainstream activism” is disempowered by the mere virtue of it being diluted for the masses. Genuine applied activism (synthesis) needs to be direct, rough, and clear—less canon like what Star Wars became after 1977 and more incendiary iconoclasm like Andor (2022, which we’ll explore in the synthesis roadmap).

Whether campy or canonical—neoliberal, fascist, or Communist—medieval expression generally requires a queer-coded[10], often-animalistic vice character who must either a) be cleansed or purified to whitewash the structure, or b) send it all crashing down (a metaphor for violent systemic transformation); i.e., the hyperreal of no white castle actually waiting behind the Gothic double—simply the castle, thus the system, as harmful and illusory by design. ACAB.

As previously discussed, we can camp the castle by doubling it ourselves, but also its queer-coded, animalized vice characters. And yet, just because someone is queer-coded doesn’t mean they are actually queer in a functionally sex-positive sense (nor are animals automatically a healthy view of nature; i.e., scapegoats). As stated during Volume Zero, fascism and Communism (as well as nature, the monstrous-feminine and corruption) generally occupy the same shadow zone until the canonical dialog requires a hard stance against the true enemies of the state: Communism (and Indigenous people) as the ultimate threat to Cartesian thought, heteronormativity, the nuclear family/colonial binary and any other “normal/natural” or “realistic” state of existence one could present the audience with (versus the false rebellion and actual defense of capital/assimilation fantasy that fascism represents). During oppositional praxis, this plays out historically-materially through fascism-as-unironic and queerness-as-ironic flavoring the same basic code.

As a result, vice characters come in all different shapes and sizes: Shakespeare’s Shylock, Monty Python’s killer rabbit (to give a nonverbal example), Tolkien’s Smaug the Stupendous, Lucas’ Darth Vader, King Diamond’s Abigail, etc—the killer, fun villain as campy or straight, but also human and inhuman to varying degrees. As such, they embody the “root for the bad guy” jester who speaks truth to power as unironic or ironic to varying degrees. Overt “clownish” examples include Kefka Palazzo from Final Fantasy VI (1994), Captain Hook from Peter Pan (1953), and Joker from Batman (exhibit 95a1b) as being stereotypically violent for the closeted gay man, but also various Disney villains literally being talking animals (e.g., Lion King‘s [1994] Scar, above, being an “evil animal” on par with Tolkien’s nefarious spiders) who often are fascist-themed/queer-coded themselves (with Ursula from The Little Mermaid [1989] being based on drag queen legend, Devine, writes Jack Coleman, 2022).

(artist: Ken Barr)

Whatever the shape, the vice character denotes a sense of the disgruntled alien, often having non-white, Orientalist/fairyland “changeling” components coming from a black planet as something to fear or return to, hence nebulous wish fulfillment for or against a white status quo: Something is not as it seems, but the audience quickly finds themselves cheering for the vice character in an ignominious and oscillating affair promising Jewish, female, queer or black revenge; i.e., the corruption, then total destruction, of the “good” family patriarch and his “noble” bloodline (with The Lion King being based on Hamlet, Scar standing in for Uncle Claudius). This doubling takes a variety of personified/animalized forms, of which we’ve already considered quite a few and will consider many more throughout the rest of the book. For the moment, we’ll swiftly examine two more: Ester from Orphan: First Kill (2022) and the killer lion from Beast (2022).

(exhibit 13d: Ester doesn’t have wings or non-white skin, but still denotes the Orientalist phobias of a “changeling” that steals one’s child and assumes their identity for material gain. To make their skin a color other than white would draw attention to the conflict as racialized, thus visible, which commonly occurs in fantasy narratives with non-human races like orcs, elves and Drow but also fairies. Ester shows us that in the absence of dark skin, other features—such as the eyes, hair and “spirit”—will be used to depreciate a scapegoat’s origins within settler-colonial models [and Cold-War anxieties, in Ester’s case]. The practice actually dates back to British settler-colonialism; e.g., Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights [1847] being the dark-haired foster child; i.e., being treated like a fairy-like outsider based on his physical appearance despite having white skin. As Beast demonstrates, the target of in-group animus doesn’t even need to look human—merely be something that stands in for institutional violence against out-groups commonly associated with nature as something to “tame” by colonial benefactors; i.e., like Idris Elba’s Americanized family man conquering the nightmare lion of Africa’s settler-colonial past in order to assimilate: by protecting his cubs.)

Orphan: First Kill (the second in a lovely horror franchise) covers transplant phobias on home soil. Ester is an adult woman with a rare medical condition that, due to a short stature and youthful appearance, lets her pass as a pre-teen girl to an American family looking to adopt… after she escapes from a mental hospital in Eastern Europe! But in this case, Ester isn’t being adopted by fresh parents; she’s passing herself off as a bereaved couple’s long-lost daughter, who went missing years prior.

Orientalism par excellence, the movie concerns xenophobic anxieties about disempowerment through interactions with “children” from beyond America’s borders; i.e., the estranged, cuckolded dad from First Kill subversively becoming “the child” of the family when he’s trapped unwittingly between two dueling false parents: our “lost child,” Ester… whose original double was secretly murdered by that girl’s femicidal mother, the husband’s own wife! Just as Gothic stories make the location of the predator difficult to predict, Ester has gone and fallen into an unexpected trap, marking her the prey!

Operating as the other parent within this murderous exchange, the mother is both wise to Ester’s tricks and smugly boasting about her own “superior” Mayflower heritage versus Ester’s inferior foreign blood; i.e., disguised colonizer pride while the dutiful wife (and her corrupt, equally treacherous son) look down on the counterfeit adoptee as less good at violence and lying than they are. Amid the delicious turmoil, a common ghost of the counterfeit is also dug up, explored and (re)buried: incest (specifically the Oedipus complex—with Ester very much a moe figure trying to seduce her new father to keep her safe from the wicked stepmother). All the while, out-of-joint trauma exists inside a picture-perfect home rife with intrafamilial discord. Also, thanks to Ester not having killed anyone at the film’s start (and having been sexually abused back in Europe), the audience is meant to side with her and dislike the white American family. It’s classic Gothic oscillation/push-pull, wherein a displaced/dissociative, personified critique plays out in highly cliché ways: misplaced faith and a failure to sublimate, wherein the unheimlich gradually subverts while we spectate “bad guy” Ester being made into a relatively sympathetic con artist; i.e., by a transgenerational curse intimated by the wicked mother of the canonical bloodline. “A murder most foul,” indeed, and lots of complicated, oppositional wish fulfillment happens here. It’s oddly fun, but also playing a classic Neo-Gothic trick: critiquing the present in dated, counterfeit forms.

Beast applies the same complex, settler-colonial trauma and wish fulfillment overseas. During the opening scene, a family of all-black poachers kill a pride of African lions, only to be wiped out by the surviving father lion; i.e., an animal metaphor for the pro-colonial wish to kill people of color who poach, despite them only doing so because of colonial territories like Africa being raped and pillaged by the West well into neocolonialism, then mythologized for it (satenmadpun’s “Pre-Colonial Africa and the Myth of a Savage Continent,” 2020). From here, Idris Elba embodies the wish fulfillment of Afronormative cops—similar to homonormativity’s emulation of traditional binary-gender roles in that a token, person-of-color father figure must defend his family as superimposed onto the white nuclear model for Elba to police. As a standard, man-versus-nature yarn, it works on par with Jurassic Park’s (1994) neoliberal sleight-of-hand: humanizing the colonizers. Whereas Beast focuses on a single lion and black dad, Spielberg’s blockbuster populates of an entire tropical island with female killer dinosaurs (the Archaic Mother trope) being exploited by the all-white family defending themselves from both a recuperated evil corporation, but also the sweet bumblings of an old white colonizer who “just wanted” to build an amusement park for rich white kids (with him calling the “blood-sucking” lawyer the opportunistic one. Pot, meet kettle).

Unlike these two examples, Gothic Communism avoids commodifying worker struggles and alienation in favor of a basic-if-valuable lesson with far-reaching results: “Embrace vice; just don’t be an emotionally stupid, uneducated sex pest or giant asshole as taught by canon/Capitalism to abuse workers and marginalized groups by animalizing or otherwise preying on them and the natural world.” Self-destruction is the end result of Capitalism, to which “Zombie-Vampire” (a concept we’ll examine more in Volume Three) describes Capitalism’s Promethean effects felt through the minds of workers within the canonical Gothic mode: vampiric, but also zombie-like (“lobotomized”) workers functioning as obedient parasites who exploit themselves and others, brainlessly consuming till the cows come home. For them, blood becomes not just the stuff in our veins, but a medieval form of expression hauntologically revived in the present to pacify workers: by raping their minds.

This brings us to our second point: totalitarianism as a menticidal device. By compiling it here, I want to stress how Capitalism is a factory of canonical simulacra whose likenesses serve as customary warnings meant to condition workers through dogmatic stigmas, monsters, lairs/parallel space, etc: “gargoyles.” As we’ve already discussed them in an earlier chapter (re: “‘Rome,’ Gargoyles, and the Bourgeois Trifectas,” exhibit 6b4b), I’m not talking about the literal stone statues on churches, but anything that can be looked upon with fear as a dogmatic source of instruction; i.e., any theatrical performance from the giant list of monsters and their lairs where the assorted phobias (and other sources of moral panic) can be instructed by them as something to behold by workers, who then sheepishly toe the line through codified instructions with power as Gothically totalized in the elite’s favor (not its interrogation of, and negotiation with, these same repurposed implements).

The aim of these statues is to have subservient, predatory workers prey parasitically upon rebellious or noncompliant workers for even bigger parasites (the elite, utterly without shame and superficially charming like canonical vampires are; e.g., James Fallon’s “pro-social” psychopath[11] within a grand parasitic system that makes everyone ruthless, cruel, and dumb according to canonical Gothic poetics. Said canon and its poetics incentivize those without remorse to thrive by commodifying basic human rights/essence (and cultivates impostor syndrome and paranoia through monsters that feed—especially the undead—in a disguised/uncanny form).

Simply put, canonical praxis leads to workers preying on each other through a menticidal scheme; i.e., weird canonical nerds; e.g., Autumn Ivy preying on me by seeing me as a threat to them. The resultant profit is horded “blood” (exploited labor, bodies, workers, etc). Those at the top feed on those beneath them as placed there by a structure that naturalizes the abuse, but also hides it in Trojan forms that paradoxically stick out; it treats poorness like a disease, a contagion the rich will despise, but also rely on to get ahead while feeding in the dark. They lengthen their lives, sipping greedily on “blood” they can no longer produce themselves behind closed doors, but nevertheless advertise their superiority through the freeness of the market, of Capitalism, of themselves as embodiments of capital and privilege: their castles, their profit, their right to do as they please. As such, their humanity is sacrificed in pursuit of a bloodthirst they—like the classic vampire—can never quench; their veins dry up and they become alien, shriveled up, divorced from nature while aping it in horrifying babylike ways (source, Tumblr post: depsidase). Like Brian Froud’s Skeksis, they resort to hideous abuses to chase off an infantile death of their own making. This souless inhumanity within the “castle” is a Gothic metaphor for harmful material conditions, making Dracula’s quoting of the Bible in Symphony of the Night an apt one: “What profit is it a man who gains the whole world, but loses his own soul?” (we’ll continue examining the ideas of sanguine and other pre-fascist vampiric textualities and hauntological medieval themes, in Volume Two).

Gothic Communism works in opposition to state artifice, confronting and transmuting the canonical “gargoyle” (and castles where these various kinds of monster statues call home) as continuously remade and executed by state authors between fiction and reality through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern; i.e., cultures already stricken by two basic totalitarian ideas lifted from Joost Meerlo’s The Rape of the Mind

• menticide, or rape of the mind
• waves of terror

I’ve already introduced and applied these concepts earlier in the manifesto; in the interests of compiling them here, I want to supply their full definitions:

menticide

The variety of human reactions under infernal circumstances taught us an ugly truth: the spirit of most men can be broken; men can be reduced to the level of animal behaviour. Both torturer and victim finally lose all dignity […] The core of the strategy of menticide is the taking away of all hope, all anticipation, all belief in a future [which aligns with Mark Fisher’s “hauntology,” or inability to imagine a future beyond past forms supplied by Capitalism; i.e., a myopia]. It destroys the very elements which keep the mind alive. The victim is entirely alone (source).

waves of terror

the use of well-planned, repeated successive waves of terror to bring the people into submission. Each wave of terrorizing cold war creates its effect more easily—after a breathing spell—than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience. Morale becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effect of each new propaganda campaign becomes stronger; it reaches a public already softened up. Every dissenter becomes more and more frightened that he may be found out. Gradually people are no longer willing to participate in any sort of political discussion or to express their opinions. Inwardly they have already surrendered to the terrorizing dictatorial forces (ibid.).

Apart from these, there is a third variable: thought crimes/venial sins (all-seeing governments or authorities in secular/religious forms; e.g., Santa Claus) that outwardly manifest as occult “markings”: gargoyles not just as dated, humanoid curios, but vanguards of the state’s monopolies and trifectas through various commodified refrains (e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s) in neoliberal media and responses to said media as something to endorse or critique, mid-enjoyment.

Gargoyles are classically installed on high places to watch over as much territory as they can: to look out for various problem topics or areas by teaching people to identify what to look out for—to become the eyes and ears of the state during endless crisis, moral panic and decay. For instance, canonical monsters often symbolize venereal disease marked to mortally sinful activities/cardinal sins worthy of capital punishment toward marginalized groups: death and reactive abuse through selective punishment. The state decides what’s innocent in the eyes of the law as emblematized by “gargoyles” as a means of seeing and establishing punishment, vis-à-vis Foucault. This amounts to thought-crime personas of vice that are depicted as being canonically against the state, thus receiving state punishment/exploitation as righteously delivered (often by token agents). Even with iconoclastic liminality there’s a thin line between pleasure and pain, virtue and sin: “It hurts so good,” indeed (and remember the BDSM mantra: “Hurt, not harm“)!

Gothic Communism is anarcho-Communist, thus meant to be generally applied to many different things; i.e., highlighting the destructive lessons that canonical art teaches through the same Gothic academic theories in reverse: iconoclastic doubles of said “gargoyles” that challenge the state’s rape of the mind and totalitarian use of waves of terror/vice personas that lead to war at home and abroad, thus rape and genocide, but also mental, imagination, and social death for workers endlessly exploited by the elite at the state-corporate level and dressed up in the same language, but appropriated to disguise the implementation of “cops and victims.” Whether said victims are depicted as harmless, as scapegoats or as murderers (which regularly appear in the state of exception against the state’s protectors), all become trapped inside Capitalist Realism; there’s nowhere for them to go except into the executioner’s arms.

For neoliberals, this amounts to the good team brutalizing the bad team, “cops and victims” relayed in humans or tokenized monsters (orcs, demons, bugs, etc) versus their unironically evil counterparts in nerd culture (especially videogames being endemic to neoliberalism as “home entertainment[12]“); for fascists, this amounts to the village scapegoat, the open and radicalized target of revenge (which we’ll explore more heavily in Volume Three, Chapter Two). In oppositional praxis, all of these things are doubled in both directions: for or against settler colonialism, worker exploitation and genocide; for or against the status quo and state abuse of workers, sex and nature. State abuse includes a gradient: open/grim fascist harvests versus more oblique/veiled, neoliberal forms of exploitation (total war versus sanctions)—i.e., good cop, bad cop represented as centrist vs fascist; e.g., Dirty Harry’s 1973 Magnum Force but also Tolkien’s village pastoral intimating the neoliberal market for the kind of good war his Bretton-Woods power trip exemplified in videogame refrains.

Neoliberalism disguises the fact that all cops serve the state, not workers. In praxial terms, cops are class traitors; they lie about their own hyperbolic, inhumane violence being performed in service to the state, turning everything around them into a functional prison they deceive citizens to preserve. In defense of the state, cops lie and conduct surveillance against anyone who isn’t a cop; they do it all the time because it’s literally their job (Renegade Cut’s “Cops Are Liars,” 2022). In short, they’re the “gargoyles” watching out for evil as codifying in state canon. Giant corporations also protect them, making it difficult to even report on their abuses; e.g., Leeja Miller’s “Why Are US Police So Bad?” where she remarks, “This video has been edited from its original form. Police in the US are so problematic that we struggled to get this video past YT’s community guidelines and limitations. In my 3 years on YT, I have never struggled this much to get a video past YT’s restrictions” (2023). The surveillance worsens according to the number of paranoid eyes, evoking Foucault’s panopticon (or Tolkien’s Cartesian eye of conquest) as sung about by Chuck Schuldiner in “1,000 Eyes” (1995):

To the left and to the right

From behind – they’re out of sight

Plunging into a newfound Age of advanced observeillance

A worldwide, foolproof cage

Privacy and intimacy as we know it

Will be a memory

Among many to be passed down

To those who never knew (source).

The same goes for Michael Parenti’s notion of fascism as a false revolution, its reactionary defenders and fortress-mind practitioners of the neoliberal/fascist “cop” and its gradient of action hero/vigilante offshoots: the “prison sex” of war orphans and their bad-faith “beards” and other heteronormative disguises—and token queers, TERFs and other marginalized subordinates—dogwhistling sublimated coercion, but also false recruitment promises that groom future killers through menticidal, Pavlovian conditioning. This “schooled predation” builds future literal/figurative prisons and “prison sex” mentalities under Capitalism: the heteronormative Man Box offering the same-old solution of so many monsters to kill. The promise, then, reads like Uncle Sam: “We want you! ‘Enrich’ your character and become the exclusive badass; i.e., the havers of sex, power, guns, intelligence, muscles, etc” (we’ll explore this deception historically when we examine zombies and demons in Volume Two, and consider its present application in Volume Three). In short, become the center of your own hero pitted against nature, promised all the white women and black slaves for simply being male and white (thus been given respect due to their station, not having to earn it; i.e., self-centered threats of violence where the partner isn’t threatened with violence, but self-harm committed by the man: “If you don’t have sex with me, I’ll kill myself!” as a very common and patriarchal guilt trip committed by male histrionics treating the man as the center of the universe):

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

This brings us to our third point to revisit, here, and one already discussed during an earlier chapter (“Operational Difficulties”): revolutionary cryptonymy and opposing forces during liminal expression and ludo-Gothic BDSM. Here—and in light of this chapter’s holistic examinations—I want you to consider these devices as things to synthesize mid-opposition to state actors. As you do, I will introduce a variety of fresh terms relevant to synthesizing praxis that we have yet to explore (and which the instruction portion of this volume will tackle for its entirety).

Disguises remain incredibly important for iconoclastic praxis—aliases, alter-egos and egregores camouflaging oneself from heteronormative reprisals by blending in using the same masks, uniforms, and positions of Gothic theatre to interrogate power but also negotiate with it according to our own trauma, knowledge and lived realities. This means that exposure happens sooner or later at a societal level; it must or we’re all just in the closet. The beard is “shaved,” the lavender marriage exposed, the Trojan outed or accused, the gay threatened with burial, the token rejected, etc. We have to take that power in order to expose and turn it against the unironic, bad-faith actors triangulating against us, doing their best to continue the Gothic commodifying of sex and sin through our exploitation. Both are effective means of personifying trauma in relation to nature, thus treated as highly controlled substances, and their regulation is strictly monitored in ways that serve the profit motive under capital:

(artist: Didi Lune Studio)

These exchanges aren’t simply where we survive, but fight back and slay with vampy abandon: reckless camp, wild sex and style. Embossed with Medusa’s severed head (or the skulls inside all our heads), our aegis must show those who seek to uncover and attack us the truth of who they are: dumbasses having surrendered their necks to capital, beheaded by the state and glaring with blind rage at anyone the state needs dead (to serve the profit motive). Holding that up at them, and in essence showing them their own doom through the same liminal pathways, can be an effective means of disarming our attackers; i.e., a shared humanity told in the theatrical language of vice, power, jealousy and death stamped on the surface of the usual human billboards: worker bodies fetishizing sex (and the animal, the alien) through Gothic theatrics.

Something to keep in mind, then, is how our interrogations require us to share the stage with bad actors, players and educators, mid-negotiation. TERFs, for example, are sublimations of state violence relayed in rebellious markers that have been recuperated to subordinate trauma under reactive abuse; i.e., the Amazon recuperated through the “prison sex” phenomenon, becoming violent or submissively co-dependent towards power (there’s always a stronger man, always a weaker woman, etc). In turn, the blank slate or tabula rasa of Capitalism is a false/bad parent; it’s all that reactionaries can understand. Through unironic, state-centric warrior and rape culture, all bourgeois-minded workers become slaves to those in power telling them how to think regarding those they must exploit, rape and kill. Once triangulated, the Amazon kills (or otherwise antagonizes) her fellow victims by becoming the state’s victimizer towards them (and nature).

Beyond TERFs, those in power or aligned with power—be they warlords, dark lords, neoliberal statesmen, or desk murderers—are “chicken hawks” making workers fight amongst themselves. This involves recruitment of soldiers at different tiers of management along the chain of command in its various parallel forms (the state, the military and the public, etc). Whatever the form, iconoclasts under Gothic Communism must resist all of them (and their disjointed, knotty goals) to be successful anarchists, generally through clever disguises and doubled Gothic language (which proletarian workers interpret and recreate in oft-liminal, subversive ways): our revolutionary cryptonymy that, like Athena’s Aegis, turns the state’s suspicious gaze (thus its theatrical violence on and offstage) back towards itself—the facing of settler-colonial guilt, inheritance anxiety and gender envy by the closeted thug. These are tremendously disempowering sensations, which we can use when arguing for our own humanity in the face of those who seek to destroy us as having sacrificed their own. They become increasingly undead, demonic and predatory for the state, transforming in defense of canon as their fortress to defend from iconoclastic agents intent on camping their vertical, coercive arrangements of power and the historical-material consequences of said arrangements when left uncamped, thus unchecked: rape, war and endless police abuse.

We’ve already defined oppositional praxis in our thesis and reexamined it at the start of the manifesto. From here on out, I want you to consider it more as you would in your day-to-day lives: in simple oppositional terms; e.g., sex positivity versus sex coercion. It’s not that you would use those exact terms yourselves, but that you probably have an unspoken understanding that is usually present outside of what is normally said or taught: abuse is wrong and should not be allowed. But to which groups of people said boundaries normally applied is arbitrated by the same forces; i.e., the enemy of empathy as something to envision according to canonical interrogations of, thus negotiations with, power as something to relay in Gothic poetics’ paradoxes and doubles: power is something to perceive through performance and play as the Gothic mode normally goes about it.

To this, canonical iterations of essentially compelled stupidity relay through Gothic dogma, which its workers see as the end-all, be-all. Vis-à-vis Capitalist Realism, there is nothing outside of this current paradigm; anything else is death to them, meaning they will fight to the death to protect their so-called “saviors,” the elite—treating the Gothic mode as an extension of the state’s will. Any enemy of the elite and the elite’s profit motive, then, becomes an enemy to them, leading class traitors to weaponize Gothic poetics against worker interests at large. Us-versus-them leads to doubling as a historical tragedy insofar as workers are demonized through various moral panics that frame them as “terrorists” in bad faith; i.e., by state agents of terror who crack down against labor movements’ counterterror during military urbanism as unironically demonizing both sides: the abused in ways that make them targets of state abuse using the same language, which state agents adorn themselves with as abusers. Paradoxes do not matter insofar as state sovereignty is (more or less) upheld, but clearly there is room to upset the balance:

(artist: Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri)

Beyond what you might normally expect, there is considerable nuance to these disturbances. But if you want the full definitions to oppositional praxis, please refer to the thesis volume, which provides them all and in full. Moving into the synthesis roadmap, we will merely be considering smaller fragments of the manifesto tree, but especially something relevant to the trauma writing and artwork we are going to unpack once the manifesto concludes in several pages: the synthesis of abuse prevention and risk reduction as challenged by state (Cartesian) forms of Gothic media designed to make workers not just apathetic, but utterly violent against nature/the monstrous-feminine cheapened in ways that increase said abuse and bad odds; i.e., weird canonical nerds policing weird iconoclastic nerds; re: Autumn Ivy and I.

Cops, at their most basic level, are class traitors who police themselves; this extends to culture war as something they meet through heteronormative, settler-colonial action: state terror relayed against those inside the state of exception, determined to monopolize terror by keeping workers submissive or afraid, but also prone to attacking each other in ways that keep them stupid, dormant, petty and short-sighted, etc. “Cops and victims,” then, becomes something to perpetuate through bad theatre, but also to challenge in no uncertain terms during iconoclastic poetics camping the canon through rebellious, even titillating forms of reanimation. The revival of dead tissue and materials is certainly nothing new, nor is it exclusive to state monopolies and Pygmalions; indeed, Galatea might resurrect suspiciously similar scenarios during her cathartic, orgasmic rituals (whose gender-non-conforming and asexual functions we shall likewise expand on throughout the book):

(artist: Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri)

I think we can all agree rape is something to prevent, but camping canon through psychosexual, psychomachic and psychopraxial dialogs isn’t actual rape because they aim to prevent harm through good education; harm is enforced through the state’s bad education, which decries camp as “degenerate,” thus to blame for the state functioning as it always does: through endless crisis and cyclical decay. Clearly my use of the word “rape,” here, extends the definition to include all manner of abuses beyond what is commonly envisioned in canonical workers: the sexual rape of women. Functionally there is no difference between the stabbing of a man with a knife versus a woman being raped with a man’s penis (or some other foreign object) insofar as both supply vulgar displays of power that maintain the status quo. Clearly we want to upend said status quo, and will do so according to where it generally takes place: through dialectical-material opposition during liminal expression while struggling to communicate our own traumas. If any of this ever seems hard to understand from a theoretical standpoint during said communication, just remember that these ideas are meant to be understood fairly loosely and their synonyms can be swapped interchangeably (e.g., canonical/blind pastiche) as long as the basic dialectical-material relationship (and its symptoms) are communicated.

Moving on, since our focus moving out of the manifesto and into the roadmap will be oppositional, it behooves us to reconsider the manifesto tree from our thesis in oppositional terms. Everything has a functional opposite to gradient degrees. While camp’s assembly and production of cultural empathy under Capitalism happen according to the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis, these are checked by the implied “successes” of canonical praxis. Either are things to materially induce and imagine though parody and pastiche according to Gothic poetics; i.e., inside the “grey area” shared by cultural appropriation and appreciation during liminal expression’s canonical/countercultural forms (the making of monsters):

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

vs

the culturally appropriative, sexually prescriptive lack of irony during Gothic canon’s abjection with sex-coercive demon BDSM, kink and fetishization; as well as asexuality and the unironic ontological ambiguities of trans, non-binary, intersex, and drag existence

These are executed either by emotionally/Gothically intelligent or unintelligent workers, using canon or camp to cultivate apathy or empathy through Gothic poetics; i.e., by synthesizing Gothic Communism or Capitalism during oppositional praxis (canon vs iconoclasm) according to our manifesto terminologies and structure—in short, its various tenets and theories (the Six Rs, Four Gs) but also mode of expression. As per our gradient approach to praxis, these binary opposites contain between them a spectrum. As we have already discussed, people are not generally completely stupid or intelligent; they have blind spots, but also competing objectives that lead to various degrees of cognitive dissonance—of ideological combat through allegory and revelation.

The praxial sum, for our purposes, could be called “creative/oppositional praxis.” The Six Doubles of Oppositional Praxis (re: exhibit 1a1a1c3) and their various synthetic oppositional groupings (we’ll examine them more during the synthesis roadmap) manifest as camp’s class-, culture- and race-conscious defense from canon’s class, culture and race dormancy and betrayal; i.e., braving the moderate/reactionary class, culture and race traitor’s four basic behaviors (quoted from the thesis volume):

• open aggression, expressing gender trouble as a means of open, aggressive attack (disguised as “self-defense” reactive abuse): “We’re upset and punching down is free speech[13]” (“free speech” being code for “negative freedom for bigots who want to say bigoted things” to defend the elite’s profit motive).
• condescension, expressing a moderate, centrist position that smarmily perpetuates the current status quo as immutable, but also optimal: “This is as good as it gets” but also which can never decay.
• reactionary indignation, using sex-coercive symbols (argumentation) to defend their unethical positions: “They’re out to destroy your heroes, your fun, all you hold dear (code for ‘the current power structure’).”
• DARVO (“Deny, Accuse, Reverse, Victim, Offender”), defending the status quo by defending the people who enslave them (the elite) by going after the elite’s enemies, thereby defending Capitalism during decay. When it decays, these “gamers” see “their” games in decay and will defend those, seeing human rights as an affordable compromise in the bargain. They see themselves (and the elite) as “victims,” and class warriors as monsters “ruining everything” (like Satan).

In historical-material terms, we have one side of the spectrum fostering universal, post-scarcity empathy and emotional/Gothic intelligence in the face of the opposite end of the spectrum: state actors operating with bad intent, neglect, and willful, taught ignorance (or some combination of these variables): “You can’t convince yesterday’s colonizer that today’s colonizer is wrong.”

(artist: Anolea)

And yet as we shall discover moving forward, these divisions—while far from cut and cry—tend to divide more discretely behind the immediate theatrics; i.e., many so-called “activists” (normally white moderates and token subordinates) are false revolutionaries weaponizing/fetishizing labor movements and their monstrous, counterterrorist language for state aims. Conversely, many who appear as open harbingers of death actively challenge these aims through a complex dialog of theatrical reclamation; i.e., revolutionary cryptonymy’s assorted masks, uniforms, bodies and weaponized props.

Again, it’s weird iconoclastic nerds vs weird canonical nerds, one reversing the canonical, unironic function of the Four Gs (through the Six Rs) and the other endorsing the process of abjection through the ghost of the counterfeit to uphold Capitalist Realism: to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to the bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil (from the manifesto tree in Volume Zero)

as a vertical, pyramid-scheme arrangement of power and subsequent tiers and punitive exchanges thereof

• top, middle, bottom
• lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts
• corporate, militarized and paramilitarized bureaucratic flavors

arranged in neoliberal forms inside and outside of the text

• bosses, mini-bosses, and minions
• executives, middle management/content creators, customers/consumers
• waves of terror and unironic vice characters (menticide)

which leads to a surrender of total power during states of emergency that are always in crisis and decay. Empathy is the casualty of the middle class, whose weird canonical nerds are taught to see the underclass as lacking basic human rights during moral panics. In the presence of crisis and decay, people forget then deify whatever’s in front of them that looks powerful. They don’t take the time to ascertain if the giant trees are canonical or campy—in short, whether the swap has been made and the current falsehood is designed to liberate or exploit them. During the bait-and-switch, they’ll follow the leader to scapegoat the usual suspects under Capitalism unless canon can be camped.

For all you closeted types, the death of the author and all their darling monomyth heroes, monsters and castles swapped out for campy gay ones during ludo-Gothic BDSM can make you want to scream, “Oh, my god!” like Grandpa Jojo. But like that show demonstrates (with campy aplomb), the life of these things lives on through paradoxical theatre and the monstrous performance of power as something to reclaim from the state during liminal expression. Short of a mass-extinction event, the Gothic imagination isn’t “going anywhere”; its praxial function merely changes in ways that raise class consciousness and empathy during class/culture war’s pedagogy of the oppressed tackling Capitalist Realism, one monster at a time.

Onto “Trauma Writing/Artwork (opening and ‘Healing from Rape’)“!

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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] Meaning “concerning interpretation, especially of the Bible or literary texts”; or, “a method or theory of interpretation” (source: Oxford Languages).

[2] Ewan Wilson’s “The Folklore Roots of Sekiro‘s Anus-Ball Snatching Enemies” (2019).

[3] (from the glossary): “originally a term used to describe* the fascist bureaucracy of the Third Reich during the Nuremberg trials, desk murder goes well beyond Adolf Eichmann; it is destructive greed minus all the gaudy bells and whistles: the men behind the curtain (canon).” Or as my thesis volume argues, “The ensuing chaos [of state privatization] is the paradox of efficient profit: the state eating itself as the ouroboros does its tail, caught between an endless police state of regeneration and cannibalization (desk murder)” as a tiered enterprise:

Management of exploitation under Capitalism is tiered, pyramid-style—i.e., the top, middle and bottom; or lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts according to corporate, militarized, and paramilitarized flavors (which often intersect through aesthetics and social-sexual clout). This “pecking order” translates remarkably well in neoliberal copaganda, whose bosses, mini-bosses, and minions deftly illustrate Zombie-Vampire Capitalism in action; e.g., Reinhardt Heydrich or Ian Kochinski/Caleb Hart (the latter two who we’ll discuss in Volume Three’s Chapter Three and Four) [source].

*”60 years later, the banality of evil has been so oft repeated, it’s been reduced to cliché” (source: Meghna Chakrabarti’s “The Eichmann Tapes and the Comforting Myth of the ‘Banality of Evil,'” 2022).

[4] “Biden Is Only the Second Catholic President, but Nearly All Have Been Christians” (2019)

[5] John the Duncan’s “Neoliberalism: Class War and Pacification” (2021).

[6] America is a tax haven for the ultra-rich (Georg Rockall-Schmidt’s “How the Super Rich Avoid Taxes (Legally),” 2021) and rely both on non-profits as go-to tax dodges (Felix Salmon’s “The Ultimate Billionaire Tax Dodge,” 2022) and PR stunts meant to sanitize billionaire reputations as “squeaky clean” (Second Thought’s “Why Billionaire Philanthropy Won’t Solve Anything,” 2022) and, hilariously enough, “of the people” (Adam Conover’s “Why There’s No Such Thing as a Good Billionaire,” 2022).

[7] “While the SS, prior to the seizure of power, mainly occupied itself with protecting the party against internal and external enemies, Himmler and Heydrich focused on all sorts of enemies of the state in the meantime, including in particular the Jews” (source: Kevin Prenger’s “Heydrich, Reinhard,” 2016).

[8] The Guardian’s “Notes and Queries: What Were William Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills?” (2012).

[9] David Spurr writes in “Demonic Spaces: Sade, Dickens, Kafka” (2012):

Kafka is close enough in spirit to Dickens, to his sense of the uncanny and to the ghostly presence of the dispersed baroque […] But the obvious difference in style is symptomatic of a more substantial difference between Dickens and Kafka concerning what might be called the ontological condition of the demonic. For if Dickens has transported elements of the premodern baroque universe into the modern industrial world, he does so in order to redefine the demonic in terms of the inhuman social conditions created by that world. There is an unbridgeable gap in Kafka between material form and doctrine, and this accounts for the sense of impenetrability that Kafka rehearses as an element of his fictional universe. In contrast to the figures that inhabit Dickens’s work, however ghostly and uncanny they may be, Kafka’s fictional universe implies a much more enigmatic relation of the demonic to the human and object worlds (source: Architecture and Modern Literature, 2012).

Spur notes how “Kafka often described his own writing in architectural terms,” concluding on a destructive mayhem that seems to have been designed to speak for itself: “The demonic in Kafka consists, finally, in its demolition of human value, perhaps in the name of a more secure edifice toward which his writing gestures but for the construction of which his strength, like ours, fails” (ibid.).

[10] Or at least foreign challenging of so-called “correct” forms of institutional, Christian marriage; i.e., “true love.”

[11] The World Science Festival’s “The Moth: Confessions of a Pro-Social Psychopath” (2015).

[12] I.e., compared to Atari home units, whose market crashed in 1983 and lacked the technology to sell its bloated library of same-looking games; or arcade smashes like Donkey Kong (1981) or Pac-Man (1980) as being public entertainment systems, comparable to a fair or carnival attraction. By comparison, the Nintendo Entertainment System (in the US, 1985) was a home entertainment device that caught on and has stayed popular (through corporate domination) to this day. As such, its dogmatic potential should not be ignored; e.g., the sexist elements of Zelda, Mega Man, Castlevania, Metroid or Mario, etc.

Note: For follow-through on this specific scholarship, refer to “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” (2025). —Perse, 4/7/2025

[13] “Free speech” is a common “apolitical” DARVO strategy used by bigots who argue for negative-freedom boundaries that apply to them, but not for others; e.g., “I want to be able to say slurs or profit off manufactured controversies by politically advocating for issues that will never affect me; i.e., punching down at minorities while acting like a victim, myself.” Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences.

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.

An Uphill Battle, part two: Concerning Rings, BDSM and Vampires; or the State’s False Gifts, Power Exchange, and Crumbling Homesteads Told through Tolkien’s Nature-Themed Stories

“Fool! Be still! No other witch in the world holds a harpy captive, and none ever will. I choose to keep her! I can turn her into wind if she escapes or snow or into seven notes of music!”

—Mommy Fortuna, The Last Unicorn (1982)

Picking up where “‘Book Sample: Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM” left off…

This subchapter examines rings within the Gothic mode as famous symbols of power and power exchange. One such example is, of course, Tolkien’s One Ring and that is what we will be focusing on, here. Something to pass from person to person, it is as much a vampiric mantle of corrupting power in its more vertically arranged forms as it is a mere giving of material goods. The former function means rings are generally devices to be feared—not for their weight in gold, but for the power they signify through their giving and wearing: problematic alliances, but also the raw function of power when arranged in vertical, capitalistic ways.

Note: We’ll quote some of my Tolkien scholarship, here. For all of it, refer to the Tolkien scholarship page on my website; e.g., “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking” from the Demon Module; i.e., which examines Tolkien in terms of the queer coding and Radcliffean elements (re: the Black Veil) but leaves various ideas for future essays that—among other things—include Tolkien’s homophobia in animalized language: the cat-like, twinkish master/apprentice seducer that Sauron and Morgoth represent, each pimping nature through Tolkien’s displaced DARVO arguments/obscurantism having regressed to Beowulf in the 20th century and passing such things down through a bad cycle of demon BDSM. —Perse, 4/6/2025

Continuing this chapter’s initial focus on animals but shifting more towards power abuse, we’ll examine power as Tolkien expressed it in relation to nature as something to conquer by proxy—an invented other. In short, Tolkien relied on the vampire legend—but also Gothic castles, BDSM language and harmful arrangements of unequal power (rings and collars)—to dominate nature and those within it. Written in defense of a divided nature in good and evil animal forms, Tolkien’s war stories view the vampire a kind of parasite praying upon the conspicuously vulnerable inside Cartesian dialogs; i.e., both in raw animal terms with Shelob the spider as part of “evil nature,” but also magical leeches like Sauron, whose ghastly projections have become wholly divorced from “good nature” inside dark, undead fortresses that harvest all good, living things from the land (whitewashing Britain’s analogs in the process). Anything else is functionally “dead” (sanctioned for state execution) by virtue of collective punishment.

In doing so, Tolkien’s BDSM isn’t playful, but dogmatic; i.e., his abjects death as a vital function of nature, but also fascism as a vital function of Capitalism in relation to nature as preyed upon by those behind his undead/animalistic scapegoats: the West. All (canonical) Castles Are Bad, insofar as the grim harvests they bring about (during Capitalism-in-decay) harm nature and those of nature. Meanwhile, death becomes alien, fetishized, badass, and cool, but also necessary within these Capitalist-Realist configurations; i.e., Aragorn (and by extension, Tolkien) needs Sauron to disguise his own tyrannical state.

Keeping this in mind, we will unpack the settler-colonial trauma Tolkien’s furtively Gothic tools and mythic animal symbols aided and abetted, but also the adjacent dialogs that worked within Tolkien’s closeted queerness to undermine his own black-and-white Pax Britannica within Bretton Woods and beyond.

First, the Ring itself as a tempting vampiric device and consolidation of unequal power that preys on nature. While Sauron’s special ring has the ability to turn persons invisible and theoretically binds those who wear it to the original maker as removed from the physical world, said maker is largely non-existent; rather, his vampiric shadow is felt through exchanges of power that bring out the worst in people who are visible within nature. The Ring, then, is exchanged from person to person like a curse, symbolizing total power as something that can never really be destroyed provided the structure it connects to remains intact.

Tolkien’s oversimplification is a neat storytelling device, but also (as we shall see) an incredibly basic way of explaining away settler colonialism in traditionally Gothic ways: a ghost or past anxiety that is conjured up and swept away during the same ritual, often stigmatizing wolves, spiders, bats and similar “evil” animals in the process. It’s a cheap parlor trick that tries to separate Capitalism from capital, displacing the system’s current atrocities not just to an older time and faraway land, but a talisman that seemingly has a will of its own. In short, he rarefies greed, minus the dragon; apparently it’s the old male[1] necromancer’s fault that the West isn’t prosperous—i.e., isn’t normal (meaning an absence of tension, not genocide)! Tolkien might as well have blamed Apep for swallowing Ra’s canoe for all the causal sense it makes. He makes up a shapeless devil, then spends three novels chasing him down. Indeed, Tolkien (not Sauron) is the necromancer filling the world with orcs (“…if you became a shogun, there’d be nothing but devils in this world!”): through his spin on the ghost of the counterfeit (made from stolen parts) furthering the process of abjection. The Ring is merely a buck to pass, often with a fair amount of guilt by those who know (“Don’t tempt me, Frodo!”).

Again, as we have noted in Volume Zero, this falls to the Eye of Sauron as seemingly described by Raj Patel and Jason Moore in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:

the Cartesian revolution was made thinkable, and doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination. […] Cartesian rationalism is predicated on the distinction between the inner reality of the mind and the outer reality of objects; the latter could be brought into the former only through a neutral, disembodied gazed situated outside of space and time. That gaze always belonged to the Enlightened European colonist—and the empires that backed him. Descartes’ cogito funneled vision and thought into a spectator’s view of the world, one that rendered the emerging surfaces of modernity visible and measurable and the viewer bodiless and placeless. Medieval multiple vantage points in art and literature were displaced by a single, disembodied, omniscient and panoptic eye (source).

Volume Zero described that eye through the map it looked upon; re: Tolkien’s refrain enacted by Sauron as simply a dark reflection of the men of the West (and other good races) as colonizers: “There is no life in the void, only death!”

Up to this point, we’ve discussed the problematic nature of the ghost of the counterfeit when used as a canonical device through the treasure map as a colony under attack by “outside” forces. However, the power of Gothic reinvention isn’t strictly canonical, and at its most proletarian (re: Milton, Walpole) deliberately profanes the sacred to cut through an inability to critique what is in front of us; i.e., slicing through Tolkien’s silly trick by using the same rings (or ring-like devices) to counterattack what was ultimately a centrist daydream: “melt the Ring, save the world.” This requires using rings in ways that other Gothicists wouldn’t have thought twice about, but which Tolkien generally couldn’t stomach… or could he? It’s certainly true that Tolkien’s refrain (the treasure map) gentrified war through a canonizing of Gothic poetics and allegory (from Milton to Tolkien) that only intensified over time; the more Tolkien moderated his own invented world (again, made from stolen parts), the more the Ring ultimately became a regressive device that simplified his medieval critique of capital from The Hobbit (which presented the Ring as a simple but convenient way to help Bilbo out of a bind, the real issue being the gold under the mountain). But the guilty exchanges of the Ring still offer up some fairly genderqueer BDSM interactions inside a traditional background, all while seemingly holding Gothic poetics (and women) at arm’s length.

This being said, there are several basic forms of vampirism in Tolkien’s world: the corporeal and incorporeal. His fleshy vampirism is foisted onto female and anti-Semitic entities. There is the great spider Ungoliant and her spawn, of course—female vampirism’s parasitism, phallic stinger and paralysis being animalized in relation to nature; i.e., hysteria and the womb of nature as something to fear according to an Archaic Mother goddess as androgynous. Then, there’s Gollum and the goblins/orcs. We’ll get to orcs in a second (and Drow later in the book); Gollum is effectively Tolkien’s most overt homage to Beowulf—i.e., a slimy creature of darkness living in an underground lake, through which the hero, lacking physical strength, must beat the creature at its own game: cheating. After The Hobbit, Gollum is unmoored from the Misty Mountains, seeking the Ring as his lifeblood; and it is here that Tolkien, in 1954, evokes the anti-Semitic language of the vampire legend in The Fellowship of the Ring:

The Wood-elves tracked him first, an easy task for them, for his trail was still fresh then. Through Mirkwood and back again it led them, though they never caught him. The wood was full of the rumour of him, dreadful tales even among beasts and birds. The Woodmen said that there was some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood. It climbed trees to find nests; it crept into holes to find the young; it slipped through windows to find cradles (source).

Both examples are tied to monstrous-feminine arrangements of power exchange: Gollum craves the Ring like a vampire thrall does its master’s blood—Gollum’s blood as absorbed into the greedy artifact as synonymous with the Dark Lord (true to legend, the vampire master is an almighty patriarch who hoards vitality within himself, offering those under him only enough to sustain themselves through their own nightly feasts).

The second form of vampirism is the incorporeal kind, and here is where Tolkien pulls a trick. Although Sauron functions like a vampire, he isn’t called one and has no body to speak of, no phallic penetrative device tied to the sexual exchanging of power and essence in animalistic metaphors. In turn his invisibility robs his vitalistic feeding of its corporeal elements, and him of a tangible, visible status as Master operating through a physical appearance but also a physical, eroticized relationship to others. He’s simply vampirism in the abstract, a telepathic eyeball, “the Dark Lord on his dark throne / In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.” Meanwhile, women—the classic targets of vampirism in Western canon—are nowhere to be found.

Instead, our thirsty ghost is largely announced by a precession of kingly wraiths (death knights) and bat-like fliers that likewise are purely black, lacking any obvious sanguine appearance. Perhaps this paring down of a cardinal-red visual owes itself to Tolkien’s Catholic background and harboring a grudge for the anti-Catholic sentiments of the Neo-Gothic period; i.e., scapegoating the Protestant’s pure black in the Catholic’s place (“I see a red door / And I want it painted black…”). But Tolkien’s Master of the Black Castle morphs Vlad the Impaler into a vague, shapeless force operating entirely through rings (sans any Freudian slips, when involving the placing of rings onto fingers) and a pure reduction of BDSM roleplay told entirely in militarized medieval language; i.e., minus much of the monstrous Gothic poetics and centering on the positions themselves in a black-and-white, good-vs-evil framework that scapegoats Nazis for corrupting nature vis-à-vis the Christian West. But the traditional framework is still there, “sexiness” being reduced to Sontag’s dehumanization of sexuality through the horned death fetish, a living weapon in service of the Dark Lord; i.e., the bad dom who takes everything for himself through these extended, somewhat abstract phallic devices.

As we’ll examine throughout this subchapter and the next, I’d say that I think a more fleshed-out darkness (and more adventuresome BDSM aesthetic) might have done Tolkien some good—if only to make his evil more nuanced and less vague in relation to human characters and their physicalities (though I was still magnetically drawn to these dark forces due to my own psychosexual responses); but I think he did so on purpose: he was an anti-Communist Oxford professor who venerated mythical variants of the British monarchy in his work. Smacked with the effects of fascism defending Capitalism, his already bigoted (sexist, homonormative[2] and racist) worldview became increasingly basic, white and regressive over time, as if nothing after Beowulf ever occurred; i.e., black-and-white, but also vanilla, losing its Marxist critique as The Lord of the Rings eclipsed The Hobbit (a far superior work, in my opinion, due to its critical bite) but fixated universally on the militarized exchanges of power between cis men on the battlefield. There’s something to be said for and with that lens, but it still remains incredibly narrow and myopic; i.e., it’d take someone like me (an anarcho-Communist trans woman) to dream up Gothic worlds that filled out the things Tolkien couldn’t help but leave out in defense of capital, himself: my own castles and rings, but also allegory and Gothic theatrics that were anything but invisible.

To that, Tolkien wasn’t just allergic to allegory and sex; he policed them greatly in service of empire. His evils are simplistic, unironically dated and vague, and he has a stubborn clumsiness when applying them to his worlds that suggests a very closed-minded way of thinking about his world and ours in BDSM terms. It’s certainly no secret that Tolkien eventually decided to place the lion’s share of the blame on people more so than material conditions or Capitalism and nation-states. He also makes the Ring and then melts it, trying to suggest that everything is somehow “solved”—that “Isildur’s Bane” is somehow to blame for the waning strength of men in the face of rarefied greed; i.e., the dragon sickness of the gold from The Hobbit having been turned into a simple dissociative trinket that weighs on “all men” to the same degree. He seems to understand how rings function as poetic devices while paradoxically lending them a bit too much credence; vertical power is a tremendously corrupting force, but you don’t have to essentialize it, nor reduce it to a shapeless male darkness that employs throwaway female demons and does away with overt BDSM language and, yes, ironic rape fantasies:

(artist: Owusyr Art)

BDSM isn’t just where power is located/stored (e.g., inside the One Ring or Sauron’s tower), but instructions for its use within assigned positions, including rape fantasies as a set of instructions given to the dom by the sub issuing various paradoxical commands: the civilized “princess” and the barbaric “invader” as roles to play with in animalistic ways (e.g., the “breeding”/captive fantasy) that expose and interrogate power as a device of negotiation towards better working conditions and healing from the deep traumas that emerge from settler-colonial violence and heteronormative enforcement. Material conditions play an important role in historical materialism, but power is largely about perception, which cannot simply be destroyed; it must change within society. The catharsis offered by iconoclastic roleplay grants appreciative irony amid Gothic counterculture as surviving under Capitalism. These forms of roleplay aren’t just completely alien to Tolkien, but policed and denied through his own incessant prescription of orcish demon lovers (and Dark Lords); i.e. bad BDSM as a harmful arrangement of power that introduces praxial inertia into the equation. While power can’t be destroyed as we just said, it can become unthinkable according to ways that challenge the usual runs of the mill. Tolkien and Radcliffe have that very much in common, making anything outside of their worldview as shapeless, dark and unthinkable: the incessant, utterly British fear of the outside felt within their own borders, castles, heroes, etc, as hopelessly forged and ever-present.

To that, Horace Walpole was absolutely right to lampoon weddings and marriage like he did, presenting incest, live burial and rape as commonplace things inside his obviously Gothic castles. He cut to the chase, as it were, playing with taboo things that he could suggest, conceal, or uncover as he pleased; i.e., in tangibly Gothic language that spawned monsters (from other authors who came after him, to be fair) that at least part of the time carried far more critical power than Tolkien’s usual replications of “pure evil” (which Ursula Le Guin, and by extension myself, would have to escape by camping Tolkien’s own problematic escapism in our own ludo-Gothic BDSM fantasies): via their ability to directly and quickly speak to reader’s lived traumas, versus the imagined/inherited anxieties of the status quo speaking “for everyone” according to an Oxford language nerd.

Tolkien’s origin myths were entirely unoriginal, exhibiting a very narrow, profoundly inadequate idea of what BDSM even was: officers and batmen; i.e., a British officer and his dutiful servant, exemplified by Tolkien’s Samwise the Brave helping his fairly clueless master time and time again out of a bind. It is BDSM, but echoes the British castle of the Imperial Core as something to carry out into the battlefield while enduring Tolkien’s (fairly vanilla) rape fantasies and childish dreams of captivity with which to (dis)empower the sub as male; e.g., Frodo being whipped and beaten in the orc slaver’s tower (the torture dungeons in Mordor conspicuously full of the British tools of torture used by the colonized reimagined; i.e., during the myth of a dark, savage continent populated by evil, violent “children”). By displacing these tools off onto a dark “other” world beyond the land of plenty and light, Tolkien is scrubbing his own and blaming the colonized in the same breath). As a male benefactor of British colonialism, he fixates on faraway war as the exclusive site of power abuse exacted upon white men, ranking their abuse above everyone else (women, genderqueer people and ethnic minorities) and everywhere else (military urbanism). For him, these other things simply don’t exist; abject copies of them do, but their sexuality is largely abandoned inside a chaste, gentlemanly medieval that forces them to address trauma as men were (and are) commonly taught: through lethal force with killing weapons designed purely for harm against state enemies.

Excluding the fact that nonharmful sex is frankly a pleasurable activity whose complete erasure feels very odd and forced, this complete lack of sexual dialog is a serious problem for a second reason: BDSM and kink are regular outlets for sexual healing from trauma as women would experience it (rape, pregnancy and shame), but also men—especially black people who are generally raped in some shape or form by white colonizers. Tolkien provides zero representation, intersection, or even basic acknowledgement of anything other than white men versus the entire rest of the world as something to rape and sacrifice (with white women given a few moments to highlight their societal domestic roles in these men’s shadows: marriage[3]).

As such, the problem becomes an incredibly simple one: kill your problems to empower yourself; or in the words of Michael Brooks (regarding Israel and Palestine, though this extends to settler colonialism at large): “It’s not a complex issue. It’s super simple. There’s one group with enormous power. It acts on another population of people with total impunity and is never held accountable for anything” (source). This is bound to create and offset tremendous amounts of trauma that Tolkien, through his British emulation of American fascism (state apologetics) simultaneously marks, mischaracterizes and buries all at once; for him, the orcs (and other monsters) are pure evil synonymized with rape that must be cleansed from the world through ritualized, self-righteous violence, but they’re also humanoid and reminiscent of things he couldn’t (despite his best efforts) explain away in any satisfactory manner. The lie is the West is somehow besieged by these “invaders” at all times, or the peace of the West requires their death. The empowerment of the West, then, is a false flag built on a total fakery that makes Aragorn the paladin and his holy company seem incapable of revenge and settler-colonial violence (retreating to their islands after losing imperial control overseas, and falling victim to Isolationist paranoia), but in truth is exactly what they’re made for.

(artist: Exodus Is Near)

It’s important to remember that “orcs,” like other color-coded monsters, aren’t a singular stigmatized group used strictly for purposes of state terror and nothing else; counterterror and sex-positive cultural appreciation (Gothic counterculture) within the orc aesthetic are totally possible, putting “rape” in quotes in light of state atrocities to communicate the “undead” sensation of state victims; i.e., those living with animalistic trauma inside or alongside the state of exception as a compelled and predatory habitat. The problem with Tolkien is that he does it exclusively through an unironic jailbreak, seeing Britain as exclusively white and straight. In the process, he constantly imagines (and has others imagine) white British captives escaping from the prisons of dark-skinned people in settler-colonial fantasies that murder and dehumanize these non-British (non-white) performers during a British (white) cis-het nerd’s inadequate, dogmatic idea of unironic BDSM, then acts like that’s “good enough.” Anything else is ignored, amounting to a strangely detached form of white knight syndrome.

Like Coleridge, Tolkien’s Gothic cathedrals are made of grace and light, except he’s granted his own an elvish reinvention to displace some of the Teutonic flavor with (and over time, his wood-elves became high elves, assimilating into the pinnacle of the Western spire and shedding from themselves their merry and silly side that Tolkien had clearly given them, pre-WW2). Tolkien whined when people compared his fantasies to the real world; e.g., self-reporting when a critic compared Sauron to Stalin. Faced with that, Tolkien just had to play British schoolmaster and slap down the interpretation as “incorrect” because it’s not what he designed: “There is no ‘perhaps’ about it. I utterly repudiate any such ‘reading,’ which angers me. The situation was conceived long before[4] the Russian revolution. Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought” (source: The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, 2006). Of course it was; he was a British monarchist!

To be frank, Tolkien’s the worst sort of author in that respect: the one who acts immortal, demonstrating the most rigid, inflexible ways of thinking by someone who was utterly accommodated by the status quo in service of said status quo. By playing dumb, digging his heels in and adopting singular interpretations, Tolkien stayed bigoted and acted like God; i.e., his word was the law of a very British, settler-colonial sort. And many (white people) continue to take his side by acting like allegory (and iconoclastic interrogations of power) suck.

Indeed that’s generally how internalized guilt works; you deny it any way you can, saying “that’s not what I meant!” But intent doesn’t matter, material conditions (and consequences) do, and the fact remains that no amount of professed ignorance regarding Tolkien’s displacement and disassociation with settler-colonial violence can change the fact that his worlds are utterly populated with disposable enemies of a dark racialized “other” that carried over into remediations of the original fantasy that defend a global Western superiority. Anything that supports that is legitimate within the usual state monopolies and trifectas, and anything that resists it is relegated to the state of exception.

Dogma is the tool of empire, and Tolkien wasn’t shy about using it, his stories not just full of cops, castles and victims but acting as a steady excuse to turn off one’s brain as being over half a century old at this point; i.e., Neil Isaacs’ introductory essay to Tolkien and the Critics (1968): “since The Lord of the Rings and the domain of Middle-earth are eminently suitable for faddism and fannism, cultism and clubbism… [its special appeal] acts as a deterrent to critical activity” (source: Anderson Rearick’s “Why Is the Only Good Orc a Dead Orc,” 2004). Clearly it’s a sore spot in academia as accustomed to looking the other way (not a surprise, given how accommodated intellectuals behave), a sign of institutional guilt tied to the castle and those who live there as coming out to commit colonial horrors. The worst castles are the pearly ones; or as I said in my thesis, ACAB: All (canonical) Castles Are Bad. Indeed, the only difference between people like Tolkien and the Nazis is a matter of degree. Regarding the operations of their mythic structures, both worked in service of the status quo; e.g., Gondor is worse than Barad-dur because it will last and continue committing genocide. Again, Tolkien believed in the state, even with reduced powers, and the state is the ultimate foe.

For example, as Dr. Stephen Shapiro wrote to Reddif.com in 2003 regarding Tolkien’s racism in Jackson’s adaptations,

Put simply, Tolkien’s good guys are white and the bad guys are black, slant-eyed, unattractive, inarticulate and a psychologically undeveloped horde. In the trilogy, a small group, the fellowship, is pitted against a foreign horde and this reflects long-standing Anglo-European anxieties about being overwhelmed by non-Europeans. This is consistent with Tolkien’s Nordicist convictions. He thinks the Northern races had a culture and it was carried in the blood. While Tolkien describes the Hobbits and Elves as amazingly white, ethnically pure clans, their antagonists, the Orcs, are a motley dark-skinned mass, akin to tribal Africans or aborigines. The recent films amplify a “fear of a black planet” and exaggerate this difference by insisting on stark white-black colour codes.

Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings because he wanted to recreate a mythology for the English, which had been destroyed by foreign invasion. He felt the Normans had destroyed organic English culture. There is the notion that foreigners destroy culture and there was also a fantasy that there was a solid homogeneous English culture there to begin with, which was not the case because there were Celts and Vikings and a host of other groups. We have a pure village ideal, which is being threatened by new technologies and groups coming in. I think the film has picked up on this by colour coding the characters in very stark ways. For instance, the fellowship is portrayed as uber-Aryan, very white and there is the notion that they are a vanishing group under the advent of the other, evil ethnic groups. The Orcs are a black mass that doesn’t speak the languages and are desecrating the cathedrals. For today’s film fans, this older racial anxiety fuses with a current fear and hatred of Islam that supports a crusading war in the Middle East. The mass appeal of The Lord of the Rings, and the recent movies may well rest on racist codes (source).

Of course, Tolkien’s racism is something Tolkien himself did his best to deny in displaced vampiric terms. Apparently he wasn’t racist because his black-and-white settler colonialism isn’t planet Earth, it’s Middle-earth. Well, that’s fucking stupid, and a rather weak defense. If his stories were really so anti-racist as he claims, they a) wouldn’t be hinging entirely on intent, and b) wouldn’t populated by racist things and racist reenactments: us-versus-them scapegoats. Slaughtered during the British man’s defense of home—including said man’s love for king and country—orcs are whatever Tolkien needs them to be[5] to argue for the superiority (and continuation) of the reimagined Western monarchist hegemon; i.e., through his chiefly British refrain, including D&D and videogames, where heroic progression and empowerment is entirely incumbent on racialized slaughter on open ground with melee weapons (versus James Cameron’s Americanized refrain, with bullets inside the videogame Gothic castle; e.g., the Metroidvania). As the perceived outsiders’ blood and gore continues to pool and pile around the alter of a crumbling Victorian empire built on settler-colonial genocide, this “pest control” mentality is what haunts Tolkien’s world well into the present. Awfully telling that he pushes all of it off onto the colonized group. Very Cartesian, old boy.

(artist: Boris Nenezic)

History, as usual, has been written by the conquerors inheriting old spaces, including the games that white people need to process their own inheritance anxiety mid-genocide: orcs and similar stigmatized animal groups that you frame as undead (doomed to die), then kill and endlessly steal their shit while writing your ascendancy in their spilled blood (with Drow being a chimeric, demonic-undead hybrid of vampires, witches, spiders and orcs: subterranean cannibals, practitioners of black magic, ritual sacrifice, blood libel and so on).

As usual, the Western brutalizer is intimated through the monomythic language of displaced conquest, and its routine purging becomes fetishized in a centrist refrain taming nature into acceptable “good” forms while maintaining the cycle of war inside the monomyth as an altar of sacrifice; i.e., killing “bad” vampire animals and those associated with them, from the lowliest savage orc to supernatural, alien extremes of shadow demons who have no bodies to speak of.

Except, even when the meat on the bones is gone, ritualized death is still “sexy” (desirable) by virtue of the colonizer’s fearful-fascinated seeking of unequal power exchange relative to it; re: Sontag’s Nazi death fantasy as bad BDSM par excellence, stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding that leads to cyclical harm by the Western party towards everyone else. Tolkien’s chaste gentrification of war can’t change that; worse, his complete lack of sex just pushes rape to the margins, meaning we can’t interrogate its presence. It’s simply anathema… except this doesn’t change the fact that the West is a giant vampire that kills and rapes everything around itself; Tolkien’s monomyth is clearly meant to disguise or censor that fact, including his incessant defense of it as a silly white nerd acting like the First Mover redacting the Gothic tradition towards a pure village pastoral: make Britain Beowulf again. There’s nothing polite about genocide, no matter how posh he sounds. He’s just toeing the same-old lie of the Western lie in medieval revivals thereof, his BDSM lacking camp, thus irony.

In other words, to deal with Tolkien’s bullshit we have to try and humanize the pre-fascist, oddly vampiric monsters he created and relied upon in his post-fascist stories. This includes through sex as a terror device we transform with ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., into a counterterror device that interrogates Tolkien’s harmful configurations of unequal power exchange: to challenge the Shadow of Pygmalion (the patriarchal vision of those knowing-better “kings” of male-dominated industries) that Tolkien contributed towards. He’s dead, so fuck what he thinks; do a close-read and see what you find! Or contribute to his world by making it your own. If Tolkien didn’t have the balls to make his hobbits openly gay or the Drow sex-positive, do it for him. Let the old fucker turn in his grave while you desecrate his orderly cathedral, his island fortress’s unironic death and rape. He’s not God, so tear his corpse a new asshole. Show him just how gay his world can be using his own queer potential; i.e., grant him an ignominious death: hoisted up on his own petard as his fans give Tolkien away with their indignance and bigotry[6] boiling over on his behalf.

This is what negotiations of power-as-performance are ultimately about: knowing who you’re bargaining with and where they stand. Getting under their skin and inside their head is important, including what they think about power as existing in the blood; i.e., the surprisingly Gothic notion of pre-colonial inheritance that Tolkien relied on in his incessant worship of heroic bloodlines as something to return to; e.g., Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror, but also Aragorn of the Dunedain gifted with long life due to his special blood—a cursed bloodline, I might add, tainted by the folly of Elendil’s son, Isildur, giving into the curse of the Ring. The Ring, then, serves as a blood curse that, when destroyed, purifies the blood and the people and places associated with it. It’s not the destruction of all rings (and marriages) that is required, merely the One Ring and its false line of shadow kings tied to a wraith-like patriarch Tolkien outlines vaguely as “corruption.” Faced with the quandary of the Western vampire, he conjures up the ghost of the counterfeit to exorcise it, washing the West of its blood by scapegoating Sauron and his Ring for the crimes of the West having preyed on everywhere else.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Lydia)

The paradox of the crumbling homestead (and its spoiled bloodline) is that familial decay is announced by its own crumbling markers of sovereignty within the chronotope; e.g., “Ozymandias,” but also the chapel from Diablo 1 (1996) looming over the grim-looking and solemn-sounding Tristram: “The sanctity of this place has been fouled.” Even Tolkien had his own mad king inside Rohan, but he soundly tip-toed around the campy sort of Gothic sexuality that Horace Walpole was far more game to experiment with. Incest is terminally common, so much so that Walpole can scarcely be credited with inventing it. But his arrangement of the Gothic castle was the first of its kind that is widely recognized:

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto of 1764 is still accepted as the “father of the Gothic novel,” yet most observers of this novelette see it, with some justice, as a curiously empty and insubstantial originator of the mode it appears to have spawned. It is understandably regarded as thin in more ways than one, as a stagey manipulation of old and hollow stick-figures in which tired conventions from drama and romance are mixed in ways that emphasize their sheer antiquity and conventionality (source: Jerold Hogle’s “The Ghost of the Counterfeit in the Genesis of the Gothic,” 1994).

In short, he made it all up and was pretty open about that. Gothic invention, then, was a creative desire to reinvent the past, one described by Mark Madoff in “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry” (1979) as follows:

A myth of gothic ancestry did not simply mean bad history. Those who perpetuated the myth obeyed a stronger call than that of accuracy to historical evidence. The ancestry in question was a product of fantasy to serve specific political purposes. Established as popular belief, the idea of gothic ancestry offered a way of revising the features of the past in order to satisfy the imaginative needs of the present. It floured in response to current anxieties and desires, taking its mythic substance from their objects, its appeal from their urgency. By translating such powerful motives into otherworldly terms, gothic myth permitted a close approach to otherwise forbidden themes (source).

Madoff concludes, “The idea of gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” and I’m inclined to agree. Except I would extend this utility to Gothic Communism as something to fashion through the same myths of ancestry found in the usual haunts; i.e., mirroring the unspoken but still advertised material conditions of Pax Americana that Tolkien’s “empire where the sun never sets” was suspiciously covered in shadows and bathed in blood. To touch on those, you often have to go somewhere else when formulating your own critiques (the monsters, psychosexual predicaments, and lairs of various kinds). This can seem purely ahistorical, but generally the goals of any historical play (re: Shakespeare) or historical Gothic novel (re: Bakhtin’s chronotope) utilizes some degree of invention and informative chaos (re: Aguirre’s geometries of terror) amid the displacement and disassociation: crafting your own histories and bloodlines that reverse the process of abjection in a very Gothic way—through the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the fake blood of Gothic horror for sex-positive reasons made in the spirit of fun, but also interrogating trauma by camping it during ludo-Gothic BDSM

This doesn’t take an Oxford scholar. For example, my older brother once invented his own Eastern European leader for a third-grade assignment and called him “Mr. Kazakhstan” while using a picture of Stalin; despite how this would have been right around the fall of the Soviet Union, my brother’s teacher didn’t recognize the photo and gave him an A+ (angering my mother to no end). Keeping in line with the same family tradition, and informed by my mother’s bringing of Russian and Eastern European history home to us kids, I wrote my own fantasy story in the early 2000s where an incestuous tyrant called Bane (the name comes from Weaponlord, 1995, not Batman) forces his half-sister, Sigourney, and half-brothers to wear magic rings that keep them bound to the family castle. When Sigourney cuts off her finger and tries to run, her half-brother forces her to wear a collar instead. Over time, she gives birth to Bane’s rape child: an incredibly intelligent/latently powerful witch named Alyona. Alyona is kind and book-smart—with her non-rapey uncles and her pet ravens there for her as friends (and also Ileana, who trains Alyona to harness her dormant powers to escape Bane’s clutches). Eventually Alyona goes on to defeat her own father-uncle and save her family from certain destruction (with their help, as she cannot defeat him alone).

To be honest, I hadn’t thought about this character in years; I used to think she was modeled after my mother and the abuse she and my uncles experienced during their own childhoods. But then, shortly before Valentine’s Day of 2023, I realized that Alyona (and her siblings) were arguably closer to me than my mother (though functionally the psychomachy offered up a liminal combination of myself and my entire family unit to varying degrees of reality and artifice). To my current, updated knowledge, while no one in my immediate family is a literal product of incest, there is sexual abuse in my family’s history and this history clutters our current ancestral home as one that was only in our possession for a single generation: the house my grandparents eventually bought. Yet the abuses that proceeded its ownership have stubbornly plagued them well into the present, tottering on the edge of the American middle class like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables (1851): “They had taken that downright plunge which, sooner or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebeian” (source).

“Families are always rising and falling in America”; i.e., the myth of the American middle class is a kind of Gothic lie waiting to crumble. Hawthorne’s historical materialism arguably stems from his own cursed bloodline: the Hathornes. Donna Welles writes how Hawthorne’s ancestor, William Hathorne, was one of the judges of the Salem Witch Trials, which Nathaniel desired to escape from, but still write about. He did so by critiquing America’s own Puritanical heritage—felt on a social-sexual level through all those damn linguo-material reminders of former, fallen power, just daring to return but somehow already-here.

(artist: William A. Crafts)

Gothicists generally fear a harmful barbaric past, but especially its prophesied homecoming within the counterfeit residence as a fearsome site of tremendous lies, decay and abuse speaking to the actual doubled home as equally false. The same applied to me at nineteen during my own displaced writing concerned with power abuse as tied to the “gift-giving” of rings and collars operating as BDSM symbols of psychosexual roleplay. It might seem quaint or invented, but then again, rings don’t tend to do much on their own. It’s how they’re viewed and applied during a given iteration that matters. In short, the writing for me was therapeutic, but also transformative: nearly twenty years before I identified as a woman, my story about Bane and the rings showed me the girl inside of myself as echoed by Tolkien’s fictions. Such a shame Tolkien a) didn’t have the guts to come out of the closet regarding his own stories, and b) recognize what they said about him and his home as something he tried to erase, albeit in favor of the colonizer through a purified village aesthetic to retreat into.

This isn’t always a conscious decision at first (though Tolkien’s denial/stubborn refusal to change, honestly reflect, or leave the closet would have become more deliberate, near the end of his life); as a child, I don’t remember thinking about any of my own family’s trauma or at least consciously reifying it as castles, collars or rings. We certainly talked about these experiences often, but much of it was jokingly passed around like a hot potato (a bit like Bilbo’s ring in that no one wanted to hold onto it). The exchange became an absurd game—with my mother and two uncles joking as teenagers that our bloodline would meet the same end that Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) did: “the fall of the House of [our family name].” The predictable rise and fall of our bloodline through socio-material decay is the very stuff of Gothic cliché. It was only later I consciously learned and started to understand how badly my mother had been abused—hurt by many different persons to such an appalling degree that exact quantification is impossible. This goes for the abuse, but also the degree of shivering someone or somewhere into fractals—a phenomenon in behavioral therapy called multiplicity or plurality. But like Gollum, there is often an exchange of power relayed in some shape or form that leads to the division taking place. This needn’t be a ring or a vampire. Sometimes, it can be a contract; or in the case of Lenore’s betrayal of Hector from Castlevania (exhibit 7a), it can be a vampire ring that works like a harmful BDSM contract when worn a particular way during a particular roleplay scenario: during sex as a dangerous distraction inside a Gothic (vampire’s) castle.

For a good example of a slave contract without an obvious “ring” being visibly worn (or a vampire), consider the late ’90s (thus early-Internet) Japanese anime thriller, Perfect Blue, and its own dissociative, gaslit depictions of a mind horribly fractured by trauma, but also surrounded by it:

Madness is central, in Gothic stories. Generally manifesting through a kind of palpable affect, the monstrous is an experience felt through horror and terror. Presented to the audience, this charge is stored either inside a location or upon its imagery. Viewed, the promoted surfaces compel specific responses—either from victims trapped inside, or those who feel as such (the audience). Call it a “shared gaze,” if you will; the madness remains vicarious.

In blander terms, Perfect Blue [1997] is a psychological thriller, one that concerns shared psychosis, or folie à deux. In Gothic terms, its madness is not limited between two people, but an entire location—what I’ll call chez folie, or “mad place.” A haunted house is more than the heroine and killer, inside; it involves a great number of moving parts, all cooperating to produce a madness exhibited. Once cultivated, this insanity is channeled through a pointed, liminal gaze, often the heroine’s. Under attack, her sense of reality crumbles. Is she mad, or is the killer merely hidden, concealed within the mist? This affliction extends to the audience looking through her eyes; when the killer is near, reality starts to break down (a familiar notion for those acclimated with Silent Hill [1999] or H. P. Lovecraft) [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Gothic Themes in Perfect Blue,” 2019].

The story is over-the-top, but conveys an oft-buried truth under Capitalism: trauma can splinter the mind into pieces, leading to different outcomes in the material and natural world. All the while, the vampire hides behind the mirror inside the reflections of other people’s faces and bodies:

In my case, my poetic division, displacement and disassociation amounted to Alyona as something I materially created in a barbaric, pointedly antiquated offshoot of my family home informed by Tolkien’s imaginary one: a castle filled with psychosexual counterfeits talking about my abuse as arranged chronotopically around me; i.e., Bakhtin’s dynastic primacy and hereditary rites speaking in the usual fatal portraits, suits of armor and coats of arms, but animated by the endless legends occupying the same space through its past-and-present inhabitants. In the case of my mother (as well as my romantic partners who had histories of complex trauma), division involved aspects of their fractured personalities manifesting before my eyes inside a natural mind and body affected by the socio-material environment around it. And with all of us, the curious use of dated Gothic language was never far off. It was baked into the jokes we told ourselves, the games we played together as haunted by the ghost of the counterfeit. But it was still an effective device at speaking to the things that normally went unsaid. The paradox, here, is they were singing to us through the language of the imaginary past as something that shaped our own thought.

Historical-material trauma is utterly entropic, but built with bricks and stones that come apart and fly back together like magic. Always close at hand, it feels palpable but strangely elusive and distant—like Marx’s nightmare, but also Doctor Morbius’ from Forbidden Planet (1956): “Sly and irresistible, only waiting to be reinvoked for murder!” Whether abusers and abused, then, all of my family has been hurt by the family structure itself—all of its monsters hiding in plain sight through familial, dynastic forms: the gargoyles, fatal portraits and other chronotopic elements. For my grandparents, these became sources of shame to hide behind symbols of pride, including Tolkien’s world as an adjacent source of pride to retreat inside. My folks buried everything they could, but I always felt it emanating all around me, like Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” (1843) underneath the floorboards, but also inside Middle-earth and my copies of it (my teenage self unafraid to use Stalin and Eastern Europe as a palimpsest). In short, the trauma was buried alive within me as I existed inside my own Gothic-familial space; i.e., littered with traumatic bleeding into Gothic stories as something to messily pass down, but also pass off as not somehow connected to our own generational curse.

I’ve since become utterly detached from it all, feeling bereft of anything that might have been promised to me (including by Tolkien’s magical worlds). Per Said, I feel exiled, but on some level, pleasurably composed of my home as foreign to me. For instance, as a young girl and teenage woman, I had acquired then projected my osmotic absorptions onto a singular egregore: Alyona. Bane had bred her for war and revenge, a kind of fascist wunderkind/wunderwaffe he had predicted in the family bloodlines then imposed through his rapacious will. Alyona not only contained the awesome power of future generations; she contained a summation of my family’s combined, complex trauma existing inside her own Gothic home as having inadvertently doubled mine; i.e., carried away to distant lands and enchanted castles and (more importantly) the ability to change one’s problems in a way I never could: with rebellious magic inside my transwoman’s duplicate of the Gothic rape castle. It strikes me as both simplistic and precocious—a maturing mind bred on fantasy stock coming to her own conclusions (not Tolkien’s) inside a trans egg that finally cracked, decades later.

I was a teenager when I started writing these stories (and drawing them). Even so, my interrogation of capital was still far more frank than Tolkien’s own, his elves effectively anglicized faeries, his men of the West an imaginary pro-European Teutonic, and his vampiric Necromancer reducing the shadow of the fascist past to a dark, abstract, “pure evil” shape disconnected from sex and nature altogether (with his own impressive mythos badly echoing Paradise Lost—Satan, Beelzebub, Pandemonium—and Ursula Le Guin taking several books after A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968, to really hit her gay stride). Still, Tolkien’s own writings on the Ring of Power—and the infamous plurality of Gollum (and Gollum’s triangulation pitting Frodo against Sam)—speaks to everyone’s exploitation under the state’s heteronormative arrangement towards power long before Sauron shows up; i.e., the wearing of rings as a BDSM roleplay minus the Gothic kink, and simply being the Ring as the sole focus: “One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.”

Do you honestly think the “men of the West” routinely fall for “the Ring” because they’re not tall, fancy elf-ladies or gay wizards played by Shakespeareans? No, they’re groomed to be susceptible before, during and after Sauron’s fall by the West as a corruptible bloodline—under the spell of state-sanctioned marriage and heteronormative, institutional love; i.e., amatonormativity. Unable to explain fascism, Tolkien just naturalizes and solves it… with old-fashioned monomythic (thus heteronormative) violence and marriage, but also echoes of the Gothic cathedral—Ringwraiths in his case—as tied to the Gothic presentations of blood exchange he pointedly made bloodless. Sauron’s bad play—his all-consuming vampire contract through the wearing of the energy-sapping rings—has totally withered them. Doomed to die, the traitorous kings’ fearing of death was so great it had them playing Faust, only to become death by imitating his titular deal with the devil—not as a genderqueer entity but a giver of false knowledge and power invented by Christian men to uphold the status quo:

(exhibit 10c3: Artist: Anato Finnstark. Their rendition of Weathertop assembles Tolkien’s Gothic cathedral in ways he would have been embarrassed to openly do himself. Yet there they are, standing around Frodo (a dead ringer for Bilbo) like suits of armor possessed by the Shadow of the Skeleton King: a male tyrant reduced to mere shadow and scared off by something as basic [and lazy] as torchlight. Yet Frodo swoons before them as any Gothic heroine would, enraptured by their Numinous might. One sympathizes.)

We’ve already taken Tolkien to task in Volume Zero for gentrifying war (and canonizing Milton’s Biblical critique); e.g., “Tolkien vs Milton” and “The Quest for Power“; re: in his own High Fantasy refrain regressing towards Beowulf and a pure, non-Gothic bloodline. Right now, I want you to try and consider how his inadequacies as a writer didn’t wholly prohibit critical potency of a strictly BDSM, queer-Gothic sort in his stories. In short, I want you to help me  save him from his own dumbass self.

Yes, Tolkien was a philologist (an expert in ancient written languages) and Beowulf aficionado—basically an old, dusty scholar who was well-versed in the Scandinavian legends of dragons, war and plunder. As such, he undoubtedly appeared as totally lacking in the language of women, ethnic minorities (the East is a dark place for him) and gay people. And yet similar to Milton, he had his devilish moments, and similar to my crafting of Alyona, there existed a tremendously secret, divided self waiting inside Tolkien’s own psychomachic dialogs about his own dissenting opinions; i.e., the shadowy spaces of a deeply troubled man who, as we’ve already established, was at least publicly allergic both to the Gothic and allegory as a theatrical device. Despite these disassociative (arguably posttraumatic) aversions and paucity of accurate genderqueer labels, he clearly authored his own imaginary castles but also Gothic power exchange scenarios to go along with them (the Ring is basically a portable torture device that transports the wearer, if not directly to Barad-dur, then at least to feel trapped inside the fortress dungeon; i.e., surviving the dumb, brutal goblin jailors’ whips, chains, prison bars and infernal torture devices; re: the Westerner’s paradoxical chasing of the captive fantasy in order to embody the thinking captive’s righteous indignation and escape from the brutish, unthinking[7] captor). They might seem even more far-removed than usual and that’s on Tolkien, but the usual genderqueer antics are still there provided you know what to look for and have a bit of patience (to be clear, you don’t have to rescue Tolkien’s actual reputation, just his “ghost” as something to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM).

It all goes back to rings as classical symbols of status and power exchange. Rings are given and worn; the Ringwraiths (and their rings) are smaller abstractions of the Faustian bargain manifest through the wearing of Sauron’s rings as harmful symbols of power but also power exchange as having a torturous effect on one’s ability to relate to others; e.g., of Frodo to Sam. The magic becomes a metaphor, a kind of BDSM shorthand—re: not just our hobbits, but also similar acts of gift-giving that famously involve the ring as a kind of contract that is worn, generally in a variety of roleplays (which, for Tolkien, were primarily chaste in their execution—excluding the raw, lethal force of dead orcs, of course).

Tolkien stole this idea for his counterfeit much like he did everything else (excluding his languages, but who on Earth complains about those?). We mentioned Lenore and Hector for the second time, a moment ago. Let us consider a likely inspiration for their own power games and Tolkien’s that I have already examined myself in the past[8] (and which we now return to for a second look): Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (c. 1598):

(source: Pinterest)

In a similar medievalist fashion centered around rings, bloodlines and Christian apologetics, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice seemed to ask, “who is the titular merchant by the end of Act Five?” It would seem to be Portia, as the exchange of power and wealth through the wedding rings have gained her the most social capital in a Christian sense; i.e., the argument of mercy and bargaining through displays of charity that are displayed and worn in public. On paper, her husband has acquired her manor and inheritance, but she maintains the ability to gamely negotiate and navigate these spaces far better than he. As Karen Newman writes in “Portia’s Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice” (1987):

The governing analogy in Portia’s speech [to Bassanio] is the Renaissance political commonplace that figures marriage and the family as a kingdom in small, a microcosm ruled over by the husband. Portia’s speech figures woman as microcosm to man’s macrocosm and as subject to his sovereignty. Portia ratifies this pre-nuptial contract with Bassanio by pledging her ring, which here represents the codified, hierarchical relation of men and women in the Elizabethan sex/gender system in which a woman’s husband is “her lord, her governor, her king.” The ring is a visual sign of her vow of love and submission to Bassanio; it is a representation of Portia’s acceptance of Elizabethan marriage which was characterized by women’s subjection, their loss of legal rights, and their status as goods or chattel. It signifies her place in a rigidly defined hierarchy of male power and privilege; and her declaration of love at first seems to exemplify her acquiescence to woman’s place in such a system.

But Portia’s declaration of love veers away in its final lines from the exchange system the preceding lines affirm. Having moved through past time to the present Portia’s pledge and gift of her ring, the speech ends in the future, with a projected loss and its aftermath, with Portia’s “vantage to exclaim on” Bassanio:

I give them with this ring,

Which when you part from, lose, or give away,

Let it presage the ruin of your love,

And be my vantage to exclaim on you.

Here Portia is the gift-giver, and it is worth remembering Mauss’s description of gift-giving in the New Guinea highlands in which an aspiring “Big Man” gives more than can be reciprocated and in so doing wins prestige and power. Portia gives more than Bassanio can ever reciprocate, first to him, then to Antonio, and finally to Venice itself in her actions in the trial which allow the city to preserve both its law and its precious Christian citizen. In giving more than can be reciprocated, Portia short-circuits the system of exchange and the male bonds it creates, winning her husband away from the arms of Antonio.

Contemporary conduct books and advice about choosing a wife illustrate the dangers of marriage to a woman of higher social status or of greater wealth. Though by law such a marriage makes the husband master of his wife and her goods, in practice contemporary sources suggest unequal marriages often resulted in domination by the wife. Some writers and Puritan divines even claimed that women purposely married younger men, men of lower rank or of less wealth, so as to rule them (source).

If Shakespeare’s game approach to labor and wealth was relayed via imaginary Italy in the proto-Gothic tradition, Tolkien certainly took his own jaunts into similar territories using queer analogs.

First, there was the initial male bachelor playing at various games to escape battle with the goblins: speaking in riddles. Indeed, Bilbo not only cheated at the riddle game; he cheated at combat, using a magic ring that he arguably stole (though it didn’t originally belong to Gollum) in order to sneak out (all while Bilbo’s manly friends had to heroically fight through tiers of goblins serving the evil master using the only language Tolkien’s Nazi-esque[9] scapegoats understood: brute force). Surviving into old age, Bilbo was followed by a second younger double, Frodo, who—when he puts on the Ring and goes (for but a moment) over to the dark side—would have been the same exact age as his spitting-image uncle when the older hobbit first found the Ring in Gollum’s cave.

If I made Alyona and my own gay-penned torture castle to interrogate a Gothic living situation through precocious ludo-Gothic BDSM theatrics (and in response to Tolkien as someone to camp), then I don’t think it’s really much of a stretch to see Tolkien doing the same with unironic demon BDSM (of the Radcliffean sort) to canonize the Gothic; i.e., his borrowed bestiary gnawing at the back of his own mind about the imperfections of the heteronormative West and its own imperfect bloodline. Except for him, the abstraction of the Ring was something to offer up during a ritualized sacrifice that, once invoked (using a volcano, no less), defeats fascism once and for all, letting things “return to normal” after the glory of Gondor’s white castle is restored through the same-old monomyth purifying the blood through a trial by fire into Hell (versus already functioning normally through the endless cycle of war and false hope under Tolkien’s brand of Capitalist Realism apologizing for nation-states). In fact, it’s hard not to see a queer-if-closeted (what Tolkien might call “Tookish” or fairy-like[10]) side of the old man, curiously mirrored on the surface of the twinkish Frodo; i.e., a little, confused and perpetual bachelor swooning before the prison-like assemblage of churchly stones, the kingly spectres and their awesome threat of hellish bondage pressing through the golden nuptial band gripping Frodo’s hand.

As I said, if you know what to look for then Tolkien’s closeted, scapegoat nature of Gothic antics (despite their typical displacement, disassociation and gaping shadow where women and good “orcs” should be) are as plain as wearing the Ring yourself: the threat of dark, vampiric bondage. It’s precisely what drew me to his work because the presence of Sauron spoke to my trauma as a queer person. The truth of things ties up in the Ring’s existence while under its power as something to paradoxically seek. The same palliative-Numinous logic applies to Sauron’s offshoots, our riders in black, as unspeakable evocations of power that can be interrogated while under their fearsome spell:

To that, the ghost of the counterfeit adumbrates settler-colonial guilt, even when pushed away through a refusal to connect it with home, instead declaring it as “pure darkness” from “elsewhere.” The wearers of the black robes aren’t women, spiders or even orcs; they’re old, white bandit kings from the West, on par with the sort of duplicitous, “Gothic” backstabbers stared at with fear and wonder by someone not accustomed to the paradoxes and doubling inside the shadow zone. Conjuring up a canonical iteration of darkness visible, Tolkien had taken the British empire’s long shadow and projected it off onto faraway castles, alien lands and exotic battlefields of unprecedented carnage, but also crumbling ruins much closer to home: the barrow wights haunting nearby funeral mounds, and dark forests of enchantment populated by evil talking spiders. Corporeal or incorporeal, Tolkien’s vampires greedily sap the lifeforce of good living people until they become just as wicked—growing unthinkingly hungry towards “good” nature like Ungoliant or Morgoth draining the twin trees of Valinor (exhibit 0c).

Tolkien wasn’t an out-and-out Gothicist because he rejected the title and the open function of actually being one (far more than even Milton did, whose accidental celebration of Satan isn’t an unpopular concept); yet Tolkien’s necromantic black mirror is still on full display here, even if he can’t really bring himself to say the quiet part out loud: Sauron cannot exist in a vacuum. There is no “Big Other” troubling the West from outside, merely the West (and Capitalism) acting as it always does; i.e., like a giant vampire reinventing its own bloodline and simultaneously conjuring up Nazi “homebrew” and banditti-grade warlords from within itself, inside/outside, but also inventing “evil” labels for its own prey and chasing after them into settler-colonial territories dressed up as “home defense.” Evil returns during the class nightmare, whose inheritance anxiety must be banished each and every time through the seeking of power and attaining of all the usual relics thereof—by entering Hell, looting its vaults and “conquering death,” Joseph-Campbell-style (again, Imperialism with more steps, and dressed up in rather preachy white-savior and white-martyr language).

Likewise, the potential to bring out a Gothic queer criticality was still very much present in Tolkien’s works, albeit from a largely male, novel-of-manners perspective. Blame Peter Jackson for toying with canon and “changing things,” if you want; but I don’t personally think Jackson really changed all that much of Tolkien’s notion of power exchange when examined through a queer Gothic lens.

Consider how the titular characters, Bilbo and Frodo, are both canonically 50-year-old bachelors in the book (they are, in fact, cousins who share the same birthday: September 22nd); both inherit a house full of nice clothes and parties but never go out and never get married or have children (with Bilbo begot from Belladonna Took, and Frodo being adopted by him after the younger hobbit’s parents were killed in a tragic boating accident). In other words, both characters echo Tolkien, whose “diary” embodies the High Fantasy pastoralization of a closeted dandy ringed by Gothic shadows and counterfeits he utterly despised: the “finding” of a historical document that legitimizes a true bloodline and outs a dark bloodline as false. It’s about as Gothic as anyone can get and I always knew the Tookish, repressed side of Tolkien wouldn’t let me down.

I don’t think Tolkien was strictly as fanciful or devilish as Walpole was, let alone Lewis, but the notion of historical reinvention with ahistorical fictions was certainly present in his village scapegoating of evil. Abjection aside, Tolkien’s fantasies helped him discuss impolite topics through Gothic allegory as a Platonic, shadows-on-the-wall device the author openly decried, but was still guilty of using. Maybe that’s why he kept quiet. Nevertheless, Molly Ostertag writes in “Queer Readings of The Lord of the Rings Are Not Accidents” (2021):

The frame story Tolkien created for The Lord of the Rings was that the tale was simply translated from a much older historical document. This is established in the book’s introduction, where the author describes how Bilbo’s private diary (i.e., The Hobbit) was preserved and expanded by Frodo (and later Sam), becoming an account of the War of the Ring. That volume, The Red Book of Westmarch, was preserved and transcribed, and passed down as ancient history—”those days […] are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed”—until it ended up in Tolkien’s hands. This frame is evident through the book in bits of old lore scattered through the story, footnotes on the quirks of translating languages like Elvish and Orcish into English, and in the extensive appendices that lay out Middle-earth’s history before and after the story.

When a book is presented as a primary source rather than a work of fiction, it’s an authorial invitation to look between the lines and search for hidden truths [oh, the irony]. The narrator becomes part of the fiction—history, after all, is recorded by specific people with their own motives—something that Tolkien, as one of the world’s foremost Beowulf scholars, would have intimately understood. It was a conscious choice on the part of “Frodo” and “Sam” to include the many moments when they express love for each other, and it reads much in the same way people from the past delicately referred to their same-sex relationships: wanting to acknowledge their truth while obeying the conventions of the time.

Heterosexual romance is sparse in the books, and discussion of sexuality between the characters is absent (the One Ring can be seen as a metaphor for lust and temptation, but that’s a whole other topic). But Tolkien was not averse to romance. In a letter to one of his sons, he wrote about chivalric romance as the height of romantic love: “It idealizes ‘love’ […] it takes in far more than physical pleasure, and enjoins if not purity, at least fidelity, and so self-denial, ‘service,’ courtesy, honor, and courage.” This is the relationship between Aragorn and his elf-love Arwen; between Eowyn and Faramir; and it is, to a T, the relationship between Sam and Frodo (source).

(artist: Molly Ostertag)

Open confessions aside, the Walpolean tradition of Gothic Romance lies in Tolkien’s story as utterly haunted by what it limits to the periphery: fascism, the monstrous-feminine and queer love as projected onto an imaginary easterly plain by a thoroughly white, cis-het, British male imagination reared at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign (thus the collapse of British settler colonialism). Contemporaries of Tolkien certainly made no bones about diving more honestly than he did into deathly shadow spaces and rapey castles; re: James Whale, an openly gay man later imitated by bisexual activist, Vincent Price, as well as 1970s camp; e.g., The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Phantom of the Paradise (1974). All were channeling a monstrous-feminine idea that reaches back before Tolkien to Oscar Wilde’s aesthete (the author of the 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray) and the “sodomic” dandies of the 19th and 18th centuries, including horror auteur, Matthew Lewis. And if the Gothic isn’t currently being helmed by gay men, then its icons certainly have been inclusive of the demonized in ways that happily don’t entirely preclude Tolkien, or at least his ghost as something to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., by shining a spotlight on the queer elements that were present in his own work.

Yes, Humphrey Carpenter wrote in 1977, “As to homosexuality, Tolkien claimed that at nineteen he did not even know the word” (source: J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, 1977). And yet, as with Walpole, Lewis, or even me when I was a teenage girl, it really doesn’t matter if Tolkien lacked the words to spell out his queerness in no uncertain terms; it’s still very much there for us to comment on—and frankly as clear as day in all the Gothic scenarios he swoops in to frighten readers with, but also himself. As someone clearly bothered by the shadow of the West (and British settler colonialism in decline), Tolkien conjured up this shadow as the stories’ metatextual wizard: he’s the necromancer and the Britannic queer of the story because the titular Lord of the Rings, Ringwraiths and hobbits all come from inside him and his culture as apologizing for itself through Gothic poetics dressed up as anti-Gothic; i.e., Tolkien’s vault of treasures, but also his trademark dark forces without which his grand conflicts would be utterly meaningless (though unlike Milton, he is defending God and God’s twin trees [the Base and Superstructure] and the Christian West as things that are exceptionally good, thus above critique). All encompass the “moral geography” of his famous treasure map and its prolific, endlessly replicated xenophobia (the creation of orcs and humans a standard function of nation-states carried into videogames through Tolkien’s earnest, ubiquitous Orientalism: us-versus-them arenas and killing fields dressed up in made-up languages, their many names memorized by the faithful escaping into them to do battle with Tolkien’s various scapegoats).

(“J.R.R. Tolkien in his study, ca. 1937, black and white photograph”; source: The Morgan Library & Museum)

 

Beyond Tolkien’s ambiguously gay (male) hobbits, he nevertheless interrogated war through the classically dated, homocentric approach.

Given his dusty academic interests, the complicated/warring bigotries of Great Britain, and the Nazis’ destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institution of Sexology in 1933, we can perhaps understand if not condone Tolkien’s ignorance regarding trans, non-binary and intersex people when he started canonizing his fantasy stories. He was nearly Bilbo’s age when he wrote The Hobbit, thus unsurprisingly stuck to his white man’s gentlemanly idea of a heteronormative, “civilized” world; i.e., the usual kind of white men fighting for white women in the usual Cartesian division and violence against nature that results. Tolkien’s fabrications were moderately bigoted, but still bigoted in all the usual ways you could expect of a moderate from those times of waning British superiority under an increasingly globalized capitalist network. And yet, similar to Radcliffe or any other non-radical British person of the Gothic tradition, Tolkien used his privilege to draft a ghost of the counterfeit that was arguably far more dangerous than the open bigotries of the Third Reich (what Martin Luther King Jr. warned about in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” in 1963: the white moderate): Sauron thrived in Tolkien’s black-and-white universe, as did the imperial murder machine grinding up so many “orcs” to reclaim the lost valor of the West. Blood for blood, a truth universally acknowledged through wedding bands in the end (minus Austen’s irony).

We’re clearly not here to apologize for these persons, but to expose through our arguments with their ghosts (of the counterfeit) anything that is useful in their work towards developing a post-scarcity world that isn’t quite so fixated on biology and blood. And sitting alongside Tolkien’s painfully Anglicized lords and ladies was that curious group of “little people” who fall short of the towering men, gilded elves, and anti-Semitic dwarves of the West: hobbits.

To that, Tolkien’s Middle-earth is an imaginary theatre of medieval jingoism (re: the Cycle of Kings; i.e., the titular Return of the King during the rise and fall of fascism, restoring Capitalism to an undecayed state) serving as the usual place where forbidden love occurs: Gothic castles. Even so, it remains largely devoid of active, gender-non-conforming (and especially non-white) women and utterly chockful of nationalized imagery tied to Capitalist Realism: orcs, vampires, and bad BDSM, but also hobbits. As something Tolkien contributed towards using these queer little creatures, hobbits worked as a debatable analogy for himself and his countrymen before, during and after WW1[11]. Tolkien felt dwarfed (so to speak) by the presence of global war around him, becoming prone to homoromantic feelings that wouldn’t have strictly been allowed by his peers: Bilbo never married and neither did Frodo, but both characters were clearly cis men who loved other men. But Tolkien could never really stick the landing. He (and his son) were/are too busy refereeing Tolkien’s own stories, in effect robbing their own house to maintain the lie (the Divine Right of Kings and British sovereignty) while also doing their best to appear as boring and unassuming as possible within the American capitalist model. It’s very British.

In short, it would take someone other than a debatably closeted British man in love with his own painfully English war poems, dying empire and European legendarium to give female persons a place inside the Gothic dialogic, in effect articulating what is perhaps Tolkien’s greatest shortcoming of all (aside from his demonizing of people of color and celebration of Capitalism/the West through a blood purity narrative): his exclusion of women, especially their trauma as undead (with him being paradoxically terrified of talking to the dead in a Gothic way—cryptomimesis).

This is a giant omission, but also mischaracterization by Tolkien; i.e., his women largely operate as virgins or whores, damsels or demons. Simply put, they aren’t people so much as monsters to be killed (usually spiders), princess-like property to be fought over, or—in the case of generously neoliberal interpretations of The Silmarillion—Amazonian girl bosses[12] like Galadriel who advocate for open genocide; e.g., the “good war” rhetoric of Rings of Power (2022) being Tolkien’s chickens coming home to roost (melting that ring down didn’t do shit, dude): the endless escapism/chasing of war and orcs, goblins, and Drow, etc, as beings of darkness to subjugate, fetishize and dominate by the vampiric forces of good acting like far worse doms than Sauron (and whose stately abuses extend towards any monstrous-feminine force by state actors—more on this in Volume Three when we look at the ontological ambiguities of femboys and other chased groups). In short, Tolkien’s idea of pure evil abjects the state’s brutality onto a basic, clumsy scapegoat; it’s seemingly tame, but intensely harmful towards nature through the myopia it generates in defense of the state as preying on the natural world by redefining those in connection with it.

(artist: Kyu Yong Eom)

To that, Tolkien’s biggest problem was his pure escapism into an idealized reality versus an experienced once; it became his canon, fear and dogma to—through a particular cultural mythos—uphold the status quo, alienating himself and others from sex and nature while fetishizing settler-colonial violence in horribly vampiric ways. I’d like to spend the rest of the subchapter examining how an experienced reality—and its Gothic BDSM fantasies not being divorced from trauma—lead to an iconoclastic worldview that made me far more openly queer and sex-positive than Tolkien, but also his supporters; i.e., those who would deny voices to presumed property of the state: the rape of women or beings treated like women in some shape or form. That, as we shall see, was my ring (or cross) to bear (minus Tolkien’s sense of Christian guilt).

As our thesis argued, such stories’ reclamation generally relies on some degree of Gothic poetics, including intense emotions, music, sexuality and monsters. It bears repeating that Tolkien even preserved a lot of this through his rings, swords-with-names and battlefields, but also his Beowulf-grade poems and songs, which appear to have no idea how women actually work, let alone gay people, persons of color or Indigenous peoples. Even so, the legends really meant something to the old man; they helped him process his trauma by literally conjuring it up and fighting with it through stolen armaments. While the basic idea isn’t that different from ludo-Gothic BDSM, the arrangement of power is; my idea of the palliative Numinous is generally relayed through a feminine recipient of power inside Gothic castles (re: Metroidvania)—all to critique Capitalism and its generational trauma in ways that Tolkien’s stories largely couldn’t.

Again, for all his love of traditional and fantastical reinvention, Tolkien largely abandoned his Marxists critiques in favor of toeing the line through a centrist refrain built around heteronormative men and their pure bloodline (and token queer hobbits): the men of Numinor granted superhero powers by virtue of their noble parentage and staked claims on fancy elf princesses. A conservative treatment of sex lingers inside, but also of settler-colonial violence; i.e., not subversion, but segregation and enforcement of the usual bigotries told through a courtly romance (minus the usual medieval lust) centered around a small effeminate humanoid coded in various traditional ways; e.g., war and songs, but also knights and monsters that, through the ghost of the counterfeit, further the process of abjection through Capitalist Realism.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

As a Gothic-Communist trans woman, my stories have sought to camp Tolkien’s ghost in jokey ways: making it openly gay with ludo-Gothic BDSM. To that, my Sigourney (left) is imprisoned at her evil half-brother’s castle, but she seems to have something of a Mona-Lisa smile/approach, playfully daring the viewer, “Speak[13] ‘friend’ and enter!”—in short, to “raid” her “dungeon.” The aim with our calculated risk is to reverse Tolkien’s canonical usage (and facilitation) of war and darkness towards a more Miltonian treatment (thus corruption) of dialectical-material forces (though my stories featured giant stone pillars, not twin trees, they were still ruled over by magical women, not a singular godly patriarch).

My doing so has centered entirely around representations of things that largely went unspoken by Tolkien: women like Sigourney as actual persons with their own opinions, senses of humor and lived trauma; i.e., shackled to the dark, rapacious castles on display as a profoundly effective means of voicing their own trauma to reclaim what was taken from them by the usual abusers. Finding (a)sexual meaning in their own lives would likewise actually help anticipate Capitalism’s historical materialism leading to all the usual genocides (and their alien commodification) centered around bloodlines, war and marriage—i.e., interrogating and negotiating power in ways that go far beyond Tolkien’s limited, boys-only purview while he was alive to challenge the torchbearers of his complicated settler-colonial legacy after his death. His exclusion of women was clearly meant to gag them, but also the things these tokenized ladies would triangulate against: people of color and stigmatized elements of the natural world exploited by capital.

Compelled love regularly happens in neoliberal stories that prepare female workers for fascism’s re-entry—Beauty and the Beast (1991), for example; i.e., trad wives “fixing the abuser” and faking orgasms (the latter of which is easier for AFAB persons to do, though I can personally attest to AMAB people faking the enjoyment of sex with an abusive partner). To be fair, unequal positions and behaviors—such as having one side be the primary breadwinner or an ace person and non-ace person becoming romantically involved—can be negotiated under boundaries of mutual consent. Fascism doesn’t allow for mutual consent because it is radically heteronormative, overcorrecting the colonial binary to self-destructive extremes; by extension, centrism cannot stop fascism, making it fascism with more steps. Tolkien’s fringe homonormative undercurrent ultimately returns to the heteronormative, courtly arrangement of a white, purified Britain-by-another-name; i.e., destroying nature more slowly by leading to Sauron, but also covering up their own hand in things as “Saurons to a lesser degree.” After all, a nature preserve without Indigenous peoples is simply genocided land; the same goes for elvish woods without goblins or orcs, the latter crammed into a ghetto-like underworld like the Misty Mountains. Tolkien’s wishy-washy naturalization of a good/evil binary in the natural world is criminogenic.

Likewise, general slavery—normally veiled under neoliberalism—is more overt under fascism, but exists to varying degrees in centrist stories (whose paladins differ from death knights to a matter of degree, not function). This includes marriage between compelled heteronormative sex; i.e., women’s labor, which is historically unpaid/forced through veiled threats of destitution and harm. Under manufactured scarcity and conflict, marriage becomes a ritual of convenience-under-duress: a compelled means of financial security for those who historically have no rights, including owning property—not just cis-het women (which canonically are fought over by men vying for the widow’s gold, marriage bed and status), but queer folk who wear beards and have lavender weddings just to survive. Meanwhile, old genocidal adages from sublimations of America’s Manifest Destiny break through the façade: “Kill the Indian, save the man” becomes “kill the orc, save the princess.” Be they Indigenous peoples, persons of color or other minorities, token police scramble to save their own skins; they try to assimilate, offered a brutal and cruel “last chance” by their future slavers-once-more. Courtesy of Tolkien’s refrain, war becomes an addictive, brutal game—not just a ring to wear but a vicious, regressive cycle overshadowed by older variants of the Ring less remembered than Tolkien’s famous epic; e.g., Der Ring des Nibelungen (1876) by Richard Wagner.

(source: Legendo Games)

We’ll return to the game show as a metaphor for exploitation later in the book. Until then, consider the ways in which violence-as-a-game is, itself, a pyramid scheme: “There can only be only one!” The Highlander (1986) sloganizes this concept, evoking a violent, imaginary past that only the good Macleod—a white, male savior—can save the white women of the present from: the rapacious Kurgan. Apart from the hero, heteronormative fantasy canonized by Tolkien’s High Fantasy schtick regularly segregates intersecting groups into a colonial binary that radicalizes towards the domestic center or repels away from it during state decay and restoration. Under fascism, everyone is forced to be hyper-cis-het inside a faux-medieval, hauntological framework; black and white are radically divided and token minorities police those within the state of exception to the detriment of nature. Under Bretton Woods’ embedded liberalism, relative freedoms are “given back” to a working class threatened with fascism, provided sacrifices are made against a conveniently evil force… which neoliberalism makes into an idealized reality built on harmful, dogmatic illusions; i.e., made to conceal its own economic regressions that lead the cycle to repeating itself under Capitalist Realism.

The whole exploitative cycle between fascists and neoliberals is only derailed by two things: state shift, or the intersectional solidarity of workers fostering an experienced reality that camps Tolkien’s idealized one.

State shift is the Anthropocene/Capitalocene as thwarted by Mother Nature herself effectively kicking Tolkien in the balls. Payback’s a bitch, but it will be a terrible end—one met with slow, Promethean brutality. Genocides don’t happen overnight or with the fall of nuclear bombs, which—unlike the monopolies of violence, terror and morphological expression—are too hard to control for the elite should they be used at all (as they rely on material reminders of their power not being blown away by nuclear fire); genocides take time so the rich pigs can soak up all the blood and digest it like greedy vampires. Yet, while total annihilation is neither “instant death” nor a foregone conclusion, it also cannot be salvaged in one’s own lifetime (the burning of “Rome” takes centuries). We all have our own traumas to handle, whereupon you can do as I have done when camping Tolkien and other centrist narratives with your own darkness visible; but you have to keep your ear to the ground and try (unlike Tolkien) to view darkness as something to perceive, interrogate and negotiate with in iconoclastic ways that belong to us.

(artist: Earth Liberation Studio)

This experienced reality includes the people you meet and relate to outside of your family circle or village base. Whereas Tolkien’s social interactions were largely (for the hobbits) built around a village pastoral, escaping said pastoral myself—”pulling a Le Guin,” as it were—was vital in my subverting of Tolkien’s centrist apologetics for Capitalism. In my own family life, I directly recall an abusive father and stepfather hurting me, but I also sensed trauma everywhere. Long after I wrote and forgot about Alyona, my grandmother observed my pain and thought me odd (despite being a “grave chaser” who recruited my little brother to help her track down family tombstones); my grandfather saw my gloomy beard and thought it looked good, but unlike me seemed constantly sated by Tolkien’s bloody pastoral refrain. Indeed, the more I lived and experienced the world, the more I saw trauma in Tolkien’s chronotope—how he largely ignored the traumas of women as I experienced them, or saw them happening in my friends’ lives, or the natural world as exploited more and more under Capitalism despite “Sauron” having been vanquished—and wanted to give those things a voice. Defending them was far more important to me than preserving Tolkien’s idealized worldview.

In other words, the only dream here was Tolkien’s premature victory and I soon outgrew the artificial wilderness he yearned for. Eventually I branched out, “leaving the Shire”: I went to college a second time, fell love with several women, reading The Hobbit in between breakups and writing about it for school. Eventually I met a girl called Constance who broke my heart (more on that in Volume Three); then I went to England, met Zeuhl, fell in love again, and came back—always to the same place. Over several decades, I started to feel bound to my ancestral home, desiring to escape but feeling trapped by the same forces that rooted old Hawthorne where he was. I felt doomed, left behind by various persons, but especially Zeuhl[14] as someone who, like a ring-bearer themselves, had me wrapped ’round their little finger: something to wear then discard when the time came. Unhappy with home and past forays into the unknown, I kept trying on rings and collars, camping their canonical use as I read about it in books like The Hobbit. Escaping that closet, I grew increasingly convinced that a simpler kind of love wasn’t for me; I liked the darkness and its Numinous inequality of power as something to inhabit as the sub, but I still needed to find someone who wouldn’t fuck me over as Sauron did to his victims.

The Promethean moral, here, is fittingly subversive, but also lived. The cyclical revolutions and seemingly anchored position made me desperate to buck fate, which largely thanks to Zeuhl’s stupid bullshit—i.e., their car-crash-in-slow-motion-of-a-breakup and constant gaslighting of me—put me on the path to accidental self-destruction as a campy means of eventual catharsis and healing once I crystalized ludo-Gothic BDSM with Cuwu. I don’t want to “hand it to them” nor abdicate my own hand in things, but I never negotiated to be abused by Zeuhl or by the person who came next (and the person after that person); despite being drawn to trauma as an abuse-seeking behavior at first glance, my lived reality was that catharsis and BDSM overlap in liminal territories using a shared aesthetic. Vis-à-vis Tolkien of all people, this helped me interrogate the usual centrist distractions of the world more effectively—i.e., when I was out of the closet, I didn’t want to go back into Tolkien’s sad little cupboard. I had tasted far more delicious fruits, and his came from a poison tree having grown tremendously after his death.

To this, it’s true that former victims seek out the theatre of abuse as something they can reclaim in a panoply of ways; i.e., through canon or camp. This includes the Gothic theatre of courtship, but also Amazonomachia as a well-trod territory Tolkien was even more shy about than male-centric bondage scenarios (come to think of it, he very much liked those); e.g., Queen Taarna’s angrier (and far bloodier) parade of the monstrous-feminine than Tolkien ever dared to dream (and would have blanched at seeing—for the sex and retro-future aesthetic, not the beheaded orcs). To defend myself, others, and the natural world from Tolkien’s myopic refrain, I’ve devoted my life (and this book) to exploring the kinds of monsters and power exchange scenarios he routinely skimped on:

(exhibit 10c4: Artist, top-left: Margo Draws; top-middle and top- and bottom-right: Oxcoxa; bottom-left, source tweet: Raw Porn Moments, 2023. My study of the Amazon and BDSM has yielded a variety of truths alien to Tolkien. For one, the devil-in-disguise is often couched within crossdress and paradoxical strength as having evolved over space and time within a library of discourse. As Bay notes, “Taarna is built for the Male Gaze while simultaneously subverting its expectations”; i.e., she reverses the role of the Medusa, chopping off men’s heads as if to ask, “How does it feel, assholes?!” She also provides a complex, visually violent version of the postpunk disco/club music refrain: “How does it feel, to treat me like you do?[15]” [a query as much to someone’s guilt or position of giving as well as them on the receiving end of ironic “violence” versus actual harm]. Of course, Taarna runs the risk of chopping off workers‘ heads who are normally presented as orcs/zombies, minus the threat—i.e., labor movements and/or people of color being called “terrorists” by the state—but it’s arguably a step in the right direction provided we camp Tolkien more than Heavy Metal [1981] did.

More to the point, Taarna isn’t so far gone that you can’t reclaim her from total assimilation and decay [or demonic animalization; i.e., Tolkien’s spiders existing purely within female “chaotic evil” forms of nature as something to dominate by pure-white men upholding the profit motive within Capitalist Realism]. These kinds of Amazonian double standards and intersectional biases elide and roil on the surface of the female body as a) entirely mysterious to Tolkien, and b) a complicated billboard he never bothered with in his own stories: the variable undeath of a white-skinned Medusa as killed by men contrasted against the black-skinned Medusa as killed by men and women, both of them [and orcs] fetishized differently within the same punitive structure.

The genuine struggle—to holistically express body positivity during liberation as an ongoing event—becomes caught up in morphological double standards; i.e., the white-skinned “dark queen” either marketed as “black”—i.e., “PAWG” [“phat ass white girl,” exhibit 32b/41b; re: “A Problem of Knife Dicks” and “A Lesson in Humility“] as a “Goth” collision that elides black clothing with the “black” body as having white skin: the “big [titty/booty] Goth GF”—or kept skinny to be drawn the way that “most bodies are” [code for Vitruvian enforcement; re: Oxcoxa]. Meanwhile, black female bodies that happen to be skinny and fairer skinned [shadism] are inevitably perceived as “white” [as if most of them “chose” how they were born]: similar to queerness, skin color synonymizes with body size as a false choice, which complicates fat acceptance and liberation in the eyes of those persons seeking representation as something to escape the shared, internalized shame of white/black female bodies as queer [and male bodies in relation to them, the two hailing from the same savage, imaginary place].

In turn, the trend of the Amazon or Medusa as a powerful warrior queen or Sapphic monarch can be taken into potentially exploitative spheres, wherein the “Bowsette” crown [also Oxcoxa] famously fetishizes the white girl with an “atypical” [non-white] princess body to be desirable for the pandered-to male fans; but also articulates the descriptive sexuality of white or non-white AFABs within Nintendo’s fandom—i.e., those who are simply born with bodies outside the settler-colonial standard, and who want to be celebrated for it via a class metaphor of power and status: the girly crown, suspiciously pink [re: Tirrrb’s “The Yassification Of Masculinity“] but tinged with sexy black “corruption” as a non-harmful aesthetic/function. Within this larger dialectic, a viral trend emerges using the same imagery operating at cross purposes, resulting in various amounts of nuance or lack thereof, as well as [un]irony and cultural appropriation/appreciation when the “Yass, Queen!” crown is worn.

To this, Tolkien becomes a funny hypothetical begging “what if?” in a larger conversation the original never bothered with. When we entertain ghosts of his work through Amazonomachia speaking to a lived experience he deliberately distanced himself from, we play with, thus learn from these misfit toys. Doing so, we uncover the potential for class warriors and traitors emerging in arbitration relative to the public’s use of a largely textual/oral tradition to support popular sentiment for or against the status quo: to let one or two minorities rule in a problematic light like Tolkien’s orcs and dwarves did, or for there to be no minorities and for everyone to be kings, queens and intersex/non-binary monarchs in a post-scarcity world Tolkien [thanks to Capitalist Realism] literally couldn’t imagine. For him, there were only gay-curious hobbits standing in for absentee maidens, and the white-knight heroes protecting them from savage orcs [mythical black rapists] and their masters, the thoroughly vampiric-yet-wholly-spectral dark lords.

[artist, top-and-bottom-left, top-middle, and bottom-right: Wondra; bottom-middle: Persephone van der Waard; top-right: Red’s References]

Just as fascist and neoliberal evocations draw on the imaginary past to prevent scarcity’s termination, the possible worlds of Gothic Communism draw upon incredibly old and pervasive myths based on lived experience; i.e., whose ancient caves, Amazons and monstrous-feminine hauntologies can be recognized closer to the present, thus used to empower current labor movements through mythical solidarity as an informed and educational exhibit. This includes the voluptuous Easter, the statuesque Hippolyta, Schwarzenegger gender swaps [my loving 2016 attempt at gender parody] and other androgynous types closer to the present, but also their assorted clothing [admittedly optional; e.g., my omitting of the T-800’s “death biker” schtick]. A set sex, gender or orientation/performance isn’t even the point; rather, our aim is to merge non-heteronormative ideas of these things into semi-recognizable-yet-distinct forms of power and resistance as class-conscious. While such consciousness clearly takes many forms, “different” from a sex-positive standpoint isn’t a commodity to be branded by Rainbow Capitalism in Tolkien’s refrain; it’s decided by workers resisting routine exploitation [of themselves and nature] through subversive, even transgressive media speaking to their lived realities challenging idealized worlds built by homophobic[16] Pygmalions like Tolkien.)

 (artist: Niki Chen)

Tolkien’s idealized reality spoke to his lived experience relegating healthy psychosexual expression to the darkest of margins, including its abuse among a variety of persons and their bodies. During their hellish parade as brought into the light, a complicated worship occurs, of these and other “strict/gentle” symbols of corrupt/monstrous-feminine power and persecution; e.g., the “gentle dom” fetish aesthetic of Marina, the objectified “Medusa”/girl of color (a kind of “zombie Medusa” [above] that elides assimilation fantasies within the state of exception) as fetishized in society at large—not just by a given artist and their legion of thirsty fans—while also having femme qualities in a nun-like submission that might erupt in masculine violence. Unfortunately this subversion of the standard Promethean Quest marks the searcher as vulnerable to actual predators, who—often abused themselves—see similar trauma in others they covet for their feminine vulnerability and exploit it through suitably Faustian means; they’re drawn to them like a vampire to blood (or a Ringwraith to hobbits). And those of us seeking healing might foolishly offer our neck if our trust is betrayed by a convincing and/or hypnotic act.

Enter Jadis.

“You really do have a beautiful body” were Jadis’ first words to me (they loved my ass, in particular). They are ex number three (not including one-night stands, online relationships and FWBs, etc) proceeded by Zeuhl and Constance. However, while you gain and lose something with every partner, I lost more than usual with Jadis and learned some hard-fought lessons; i.e., like Frodo on Weathertop (except unlike Tolkien through Frodo, I learned how to process my trauma and express myself in a queer fashion). Simply put, Jadis was the most actively abusive partner I’ve ever had—a malignant narcissist who worked off my maladaptive survival response when courting me: to fawn (the other three being to fight, flee or freeze—the last one also called “oscillation” in Gothic circles). Unlike my dad or stepdad, Jadis never physically beat me; they still coercively brokered the power exchanges between us, teaching me to suffer in ways I’d only ever read about in stories like The Hobbit or The Castle of Otranto. Like Tolkien’s stripped-down, all-black vampires, Jadis literally collared[17] me and “took me to Barad-dur” and drained me of my wits; it seemed fun at first blush, but very quickly ceased to be—not due to the aesthetics, but Jadis’ strange faithfulness to Tolkien’s canon as something to act out unironically in real life: the ghoulish necromancer built on bad-faith bargains by someone as stubborn, clumsy and inflexible as he was (moderates are polite until you push them).

By taking my own risks during psychosexual experiments, I accidently became a Gothic princess in ways I didn’t negotiate (the irony of me, the desperately gay Communist/closeted trans woman, walking headfirst into a neoliberal SWERF/TERF and then falling in love with them is not lost on me; to be fair to myself, Jadis did not advertise themselves as neoliberal, and when they eventually called themselves as such, I tried very hard to explain my point of view—more on this in Volume Two). I wanted material things and the ability to play wife; but I exchanged my own power to a genuinely Faustian, psychosexual charmer who clocked my trauma and love-bombed me, then took me far away from anyone to continue torturing me (cycles of abuse that only ceased when I stopped seeing Jadis as a protector and removed their collar). But I still learned from it. As said in our thesis statement, trauma doesn’t just beget trauma; it recognizes it and preys upon it, often in nonverbal, vampiric language. It’s a very animal experience and you won’t have any idea what it’s like unless you’ve been there yourself, unless you’ve been hunted or have inherited the anxiety of being hunted as a surviving element of your culture (e.g., the animal themes in Jordan Peele films in relation to racialized violence).

For me and my survival vis-à-vis Jadis and our competing interactions with Tolkien’s work, my biggest takeaways were how the state (through Jadis as a state proponent) desires power but also disguises it in self-righteous yarns. So do narcissists, and the former enables the latter in historical-material ways, generally informed by state apologia. Jadis loved Tolkien and D&D as a kind of war pastiche their TERF-y personas could run wild inside. But this also spilled out into how we interacted during our day-to-day lives as informed by Tolkien’s worldview as something Jadis undisputedly upheld for their own reasons: the female orc warlord (what I call the war boss).

(artist: Just Some Noob)

While some narcissists provide and others receive, a provider or patient who is narcissistic will coerce and control their mark in highly manipulative ways. To this, Tolkien’s refrain pushed the dialogic forward in ways that remained closed and primed for abuse. While the angel/devil dynamic of unequal power abuse plays out in a wide variety of historical-material ways, Tolkien’s dialogic played out through legends and games that carried his limited and praxially inert exchanges into Jadis’ life, thus mine. He became something for them to flaunt and cherish, looping my neck in orcish ropes; it was literally our roleplay to bind and torture me, but in ways Jadis—like Sauron—used to deceive me with; i.e., with traditional positions and artifacts of power tied to providing from a male/female position; e.g., not just the warrior archetype Jadis and I enjoyed, but the medical[18] profession. My seeking of such trauma was a kind of theatre, but my caretaker was acting in bad faith.

To this, Jadis provided for me on paper and through a negotiated aesthetic, but abused me in practice; i.e., “Tolkien in reality.” Indeed, the negotiation seemed honest, sincere and beneficial: to be their conjugal worker—”a live-in bussy” who learned to cook, clean and do things that, as a closeted trans person, I tended to avoid. While I actually value acquiring these skills and the novelty of service (which can be fun if it isn’t abusive—e.g., cooking as a means of saving money on food labor costs, while also giving me control over how my food tastes as I prepared it for me and those I love), I quickly discovered that no one likes to be compelled and threatened by an asshole who acts like they know (and own) everything/are better than everyone else. Indeed, while Jadis was a genderfluid AFAB, they still coerced, gaslit and threatened me constantly despite playing the victim; they “knew better” than I did about Tolkien, and wanted me to keep my opinions to myself (and resented my attempt at constantly subverting the D&D racialized chart and manufactured conflicts, scarcity and consent; e.g., my attempt to make a good Drow who lived in daylight and loved others to challenge Tolkien’s bellicose worldview but also ludology).

In this regard, the best lies are built on truth: Jadis’ mother had abused them, resulting in Jadis having more sides to their personality than most people do. And while these fractals would flash across their own surface during confrontations, I couldn’t always tell them apart or verify them because Jadis was inherently dishonest and manipulative.

For example, Jadis liked to cry whenever I accused them of acting like their mother or just calling them out for “DMing” me in real life. They had described their mother well enough and certainly reminded me of them. Yet, Jadis’ reactions always made me feel guilty for “making” them cry despite what they were doing to me! It wasn’t just a pivot; eventually I started to feel crazy for standing up for myself (not “crazy” as “in love” in a sex-positive sense, but “crazy” as “gaslit” by an abuser). I slowly became reluctant to fight back, being worn down by attacks I couldn’t always see but could always feel; i.e., like the pull of the Ring ’round Frodo’s neck. I had a little crown and a pretty dress, but was still owned precisely because I was delicate, pretty and vulnerable. Like an orc queen with a little war bride, Jadis could have their way with me; and under their vampiric thrall, I became increasingly undead and started to doubt my own education and expertise, but also ability to camp fantastical stories. As they loved to say themselves, “You have heart, I’ll take that, too!” And boy did they ever!

(artist: Sabs)

We’ll examine the plurality of Jadis’ bullshit more during Volume Two, including how I bested them in the end (and went on to write this book series in spite of their efforts to police my work). For now, just remember that their “conditional” offer of financial “security” as my would-be mommy dom absolutely withered alongside their pure condescension and abuse of me; both made the joy of cooking for them, caring for them and fucking them an absolute nightmare. At first, it was like Tennyson’s poem, I their Lady of Shalott and they my Lancelot:

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,

He rode between the barley-sheaves,

The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves,

And flam’d upon the brazen greaves

Of bold Sir Lancelot.

A red-cross knight for ever kneel’d

To a lady in his shield,

That sparkled on the yellow field,

Beside remote Shalott (source).

In the end, though, a horny bitch like me couldn’t enjoy sex with Jadis because they utterly terrified me. It wasn’t impossible to cum, but I still forced; i.e., trapped inside Tennyson’s Camelot as slowly becoming an unironic Gothic castle the likes of Sauron’s fortress (except when it appeared, I was already inside it).

To say that I faked orgasms wouldn’t be entirely accurate. For one, the ejaculation wasn’t fake (it either happens or it doesn’t, for AMABs); as for my enthusiasm, it wavered, but I wanted it to be genuine in order to please Jadis despite it feeling worse and worse for me to keep trying. Regardless, I didn’t want to have sex with Jadis because they had ceased to be the dark, handsome knight I fell in love with. Once wooing me with Irish ballads like “The Devil’s Courtship” (2001) by Battlefield Band or “The Two Sisters” (2010) by Emily Portman, they became someone I wanted to get far away from: a source of torment that more or less looked the same as before.

Even now, though, I remember how their power leveled me when I was under its spell—no longer, thanks to my friends’ help and my own courage (thank you, Cuwu, Ginger and Fen; you saved me that night). I escaped, and if this book is any indication, things are going well enough without Jadis in my life. Such is the lot of someone as lucky as myself to have a place to go (a secret, safe place). Writing this book in my peaceful idylls is the least I can do to help others—to cathartically pass on what I have learned for myself and for the world and nature after I am gone. So please, learn from my adventures; avoid the emotional/Gothic stupidity that Capitalism historically-materially foisted upon me through my own cursed bloodline, and which my own camping of Tolkien’s Gothic (and his rings and collars) eventually saved me from my own harmful vampire.

To that, we’ll be taking Tolkien to task once more. Onto “Challenging the State’s Manufactured Consent and Stupidity (with Vampires)“!

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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] Always male-centric, Tolkien primarily codifies darkness as male, his largely peripheral treatment of the monstrous-feminine relegating Ungoliant to the footnotes.

[2] There is a queer element to Tolkien’s hobbits, but they ultimately serve the British empire’s heteronormative (male-centric) view of the world. They crowned Aragorn.

[3] Arwen is married off without a fight; Eowyn, to Faramir after she kills the Witch-king.

[4] Note his invocation of the imaginary past to suit his needs; i.e., “his” view of things. This is a fascist tactic, evoking the apocryphal past to justify dogmatic arguments in the present space and time (which are generally attached to systemic abuses of various kinds).

[5] For many examples of why Tolkien thinks orcs suck, consider Jeff LaSala’s “Tolkien’s Orcs: Boldog and the Host of Tumult” (2021). The guy’s like a broken record.

[6] Read Richard Newby’s “A Racist Backlash to Rings of Power Puts Tolkien’s Legacy into Focus” (2022) to see what I mean.

[7] Re: Descartes’ disastrous notion of “extended beings” exemplified in Tolkien’s refrain. Thinking vs extended, or white Europeans versus everyone else.

[8] I.e., in Volume Zero (2023) when I inspect my own 2015 essay “Dragon-sickness: The Problem of Greed” close-reading The Hobbit, The Merchant of Venice and Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904).

[9] Tolkien’s goblins occupy a centrist shadow space; i.e., filled with general corruption and monstrous-feminine theatrics of the Western kayfabe: cartoon Nazis, Communists, and racial/genderqueer minorities. They’re all things for the good guys to chase down and slay to restore the West to its former glorious state (fascism, Imperialism and genocide, except with more steps).

[10] Tolkien’s faeries aren’t changelings or dark sexual monarchs, vis-à-vis Titania and Oberon. Even when he wrote The Hobbit, the elves are merely silly and gay or wild; but they aren’t psychosexual; they lock up Thorin because he refuses to say why he and his friends are on elvish land—for suspicion of trespassing, in other words.

[11] In a letter to his son, Michael, Tolkien wrote, “From Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, the journey… including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods… is based on my adventures in Switzerland in 1911” (source: Jim Dobson’s “How a Trek Through Switzerland Inspired J.R.R. Tolkien to Create a Magical Middle-Earth, 2022). If The Hobbit was based on Tolkien’s passage through Switzerland in 1911, then it’s hardly a stretch to see The War of the Ring as based clearly on WW2 and Western Europe; i.e., being beset by the fascist, half-eastern territory of Mordor in centrist hypercanon, but also a variety of special military units on either side; e.g., the Great Eagles and the Nazgul both being death-from-above stand-ins for the rise of nationalized air forces during this conflict, and the orcs and Easterlings being seen as weaponized slaves on par with those used by the Nazi war machine during Lebensraum.

[12] I can provide a partial exception to Eowyn because, even though she says, “You stand before my lord and kin, and if you touch him I will smite you!” Yes, she says in the same breathe that she is not a man, but does act like one in defense of Tolkien’s bloodline; yet she is also someone who only ever fights a single Nazi stand-in, and to that, the king of Sauron’s generals. So, while it could be argued that she is just as bad as everyone else, we do not get to see her “pull a genocide” and argue for it like Jackson’s Eowyn or Amazon’s Galadriel. She’s not a white knight who has the chance to darken, and remains idiosyncratically subversive of the Valkyrie legend in genderqueer ways. Again, she’s not perfect, but remains one of Tolkien’s finest moments; i.e., she—not Bilbo or Frodo—inspired me on my own genderqueer adventure!

[13] A mistranslation by Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring (the actual line being “say friend and enter”), demonstrating the aging wizard’s inability to get into dark, deep holes.

[14] When Zeuhl left me, they jokingly said it was “for an old flame in England”—i.e., a person they treated like their soulmate even though they said they didn’t believe in such things. Instead of simply telling me that, they “unicorned” me, keeping a bisexual cutie in their pocket by not wanting sexual interactions between metamours while standing among us (or similar interactions happening with Zeuhl in front of other people). Simply put, they were incredibly controlling but also fooling themselves—i.e., were selectively poly until they weren’t and were again, shifting in and out of a poly headspace whenever it suited them. It made me feel taken advantage of, so much so that I broke down crying in front of Dale Townshend in his office at MMU: “I feel used,” I told him, like I was being lied to (despite Zeuhl insisting that they, like Jadis, could never tell a lie; instead, it was always my fault for making them feel crazy despite me merely trying to communicate). His response, “Nicholas, this sounds like bullshit!” regarding the way I was being treated. Bless you, Dale, for saying that; you were right.

[15] From New Order’s “Blue Monday” (1983).

[16] Yes, homophobic. Tolkien flirted with homoromantic feelings, but the raw mechanics of the story—its socio-material conventions, redistributions of wealth, and unequal power exchange—are ultimately heteronormative. Aragorn must marry Arwen and become King of the West as a straight, white place. Bilbo makes bank following the Battle of the Five Armies, but grows alienated from the Shire for not marrying (a bit like Walpole, in that respect). Eventually he and Frodo are carted off to Heaven (a bloodless variant of “bury your gays”) and Sam marries Rosie, arguably loving her but ultimately keeping up with appearances by sending his precious male master away for good. After this, hobbits more or less eventually go extinct, their magical bond/closeness to nature going with them.

[17] It was a pink leather collar with a little bell on, like a cat. I loved the collar but grew to fear and loathe the person who placed it around my neck.

[18] E.g., the nurse, doctor, psychiatrist or orderly appearing benign but acting malignant, often through needlessly corrective and harmful surgeries or procedures often, in horror stories, being treated as the stuff of nightmares: forced isolation, euthanasia, lobotomies, electro-shock, medically induced psychosis, queer conversion therapies, or genital-corrective surgeries on intersex infants (exhibit 3c), etc.

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.

“Predators and Prey”: Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM; Its Bodily Psychosexual Expression and Campy Gothic Origins Stemming from Horace Walpole onwards

I wanna fuck you like an animal
I wanna feel you from the inside
I wanna fuck you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed (source)

—Trent Reznor; “Closer,” on Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral (1994)

Picking up where “‘Revolutionary Cryptonymy’ opening, and ‘Predators and Prey’ part one” left off…

The desire for a parental/protector role (and settlement) is not lost during dialectical-material struggles, especially under dreamlike but also playful conditions; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM, where power is something to interrogate and reify in ways for which we are not always master (the nightmare being the classic source of inspiration for many-a-Gothic-castle). All the same, as much as one might desire a big-strong protector or warrior “parent,” the fact remains that many animals (and their warrior positions) are hunted under capital’s settler-colonial practices and structures. A common means of negotiating and one day escaping this captive reality—and one this section of the subchapter will explore—is through prey mechanisms during ludo-Gothic BDSM: a playful willingness to camp canon with game-like Gothic poetics, but especially monstrous, painful, unequal forms of power exchange (demon BDSM[1]) that check Vitruvian, European body standards, policies and (for the focus of this subchapter) animalized stigmas; re: policing nature as alien with nature as alien (e.g., subjugated Amazons), which must be reclaimed during ludo-Gothic BDSM enacting revolutionary cryptonymy—to legitimize through what is abject, therefore canonically illegitimate (while bewaring of token Amazons punching the Gorgon; re: Autumn Ivy).

Note: This section represents a point of reflection after writing my PhD, hence coining “ludo-Gothic BDSM.” I would go on to apply ludo-Gothic BDSM much more actively in Volume Two’s Poetry Module, onwards, but here in “Uphill Battle” and its various essays like “Prey as Liberators” was already starting to reflect on the idea and apply it holistically. —Perse, 4/7/2025

I coined “ludo-Gothic BDSM” in my thesis—specifically in theory during “The Quest for Power” and prototypically in practice during the “camp map” finale with Blxxd Bunny—but the idea of practicing it is not exactly new. “Demon BDSM” reflects on many torturous devices penned by Ann Radcliffe (re: “The Roots of Camp“), and heteronormative conditions at large have been camped in a very gay way since Horace Walpole’s Gothic castle (Shakespeare toyed with such ideas, but Walpole coined “Gothic” as it’s currently understood so we’re going with him). Unlike James Cameron, who canonized Gothic peril in favor of familial dimorphism, campy monsters—through nakedly exposed, neo-medieval forms—become something to get closer to through rape play/informed consent that subvert heteronormative standards by “making it gay”; i.e., through various forms of palliative-Numinous, torture-dungeon theatre that address modern-day anxieties felt living within (or near) the state: like a captive, thus hunted, animal inside a castle-like home’s fatal nostalgia and complicated social-sexual education.

To remind people where we’re headed, part two of “Predators and Prey” examines animalistic morphological expression in the shadow of state monopolies and where we can go to subvert them: by building our own Walpolean castles to challenge those built by the state—which the next subchapter will examine, vis-à-vis Tolkien’s unironic Gothic spaces, torture devices and vampires either divorced from nature or destructive to proper forms of the “natural” world; i.e., in a very Christian, manicured sense; e.g., the Garden of Eden. After that subchapter looks at Tolkien’s coercive undead (and their haunts), we’ll consider the broader stupefying effects we’ll need to take into account when dealing with workers who may or may not assist us when fashioning castle-like dialogs out of the Gothic-Communist theories we’ve handled thus far in the manifesto; i.e., dealing with vampires (or rather vampiric weird canonical nerds) who might just as quickly suck us dry for the state as help free its teeth from ’round our throats when these theories are put to practice.

Before the “Prey” section examines camping prey-like morphological expression, I want to give a brief, ten-page note about morphology as it exists inside a Gothic castle’s nostalgia and psychosexual education; i.e., as it pertains to such “game” to begin with—the hunted quarry and their cunning ability to playfully outwit the predator pursuing them. That is, such places often canonically instruct predators to target the human body as policed and forbidden, including its prey-like morphological expression in Gothic forms (monsters and “peril”); chased after and forcefully bred for being alien (and feeling alien because of it), receivers of psychosexual violence must escape while confronting aspects of themselves that are not only animalized, but forced to intersect with fears of unironic violence that—for them—may have already collided in the past. Pleasure and harm synonymize.

The canonical Gothic space, then, is a place of institutional violence, forcing its inhabitants to act as givers and receivers of state violence who receive and embody feelings of self-hatred and self-persecution from their dangerous surroundings. Like trained animals, they become conditioned to accept these harmful positions, thus must challenge them by subverting their coded, Pavlovian instructions in ways unique to humans that nevertheless look and sound animalistic. They must fetishize the sense of feeling alien/monstrous in ways that playfully reclaim their agency during calculated risks; i.e., playful maneuvers that pointedly remove the spontaneous, uncontrolled qualities (and actual harm) from “hunting” scenarios—of suddenly being attacked without warning inside one’s habitat in ways that normally happen to historically abused groups (e.g., women, or those perceived as or treated like women, are far more likely to be raped than men are)—while also teaching would-be abusers to see them as human and as beings connected to nature who are constantly defined by human customs and complex, contested linguo-material devices from moment to living moment: our holes, roles, and psychosexual predicaments as things to play with, thus camp, using Gothic poetics during liminal expression (the devil and the angel, the thinking animal, the “helpless” actor topping from the bottom, etc).

(exhibit 9b0: Artist: Puk Puk. Rape anxiety relates to female bodies as simultaneously doll-like, animalistic, and undead/demonic, but also male bodies and heteronormative expression at large as having far-reaching and long-standing effects on morphological expression tied to psychosexual rituals; i.e., those that deal with the Gothic notion of inheritance anxiety that stems from being born into a space rife with constant historical reminders of dynastic power exchange and hereditary rites [re: Bakhtin] but also imaginary examples tied to a fearful imaginary past that comments on the present; e.g., the fear of being raped or otherwise controlled in ways that chattelize oneself as prey to serve the patriarch, the household, the state; i.e., through compelled sexual labor as harming the giver and receiver of work conflated with sexual violence and a continuation of a dangerous sovereign’s bloodline: “breeding rituals” performed between predators and prey in the same unhealthy arrangement.

[artist: Puk Puk]

These become things to camp, opening up a variety of silly counter possibilities to the state’s usual bullshit. For example, not only is it possible to be “bred” without a uterus [as Bay tells me and which I know from experience with Zeuhl, who had a hysterectomy] insofar as the act is a performance, but the parties involved can box up their trauma and play with it inside safe spaces that allow for rape play to be had without fear of confusion or harm [while not fixating on physical violence; e.g., Silent Hill‘s Pyramid Head, Fear and Hunger‘s (2018) rapacious, openly phallic monsters and bodily dismemberment]. In short, we can laugh at things that would be triggering except for the campy context granting them an ironically medicinal quality—to play and relieve stress by imperfectly recreating a silly act of “misfortune.”

The paradox of reclaiming one’s power, then, lies in how it is canonically framed as disempowering inside highly traumatic dialogs where power abuse and resistance to power abuse occupy the same theatrical, and at times very silly, space. As our thesis argued, “camping the canon” by “making it gay” camps the Gothic castle as an operatic, psychosexual “‘rape’ space”—one where the language of animalistic heraldry/war and conquest intersect with class/culture war to double unironic, abusive forms; e.g., “rape,” of course, but also, the castle being “razed,” the maidens “conquered,” the boys “put to the sword,” etc, etc. Such playfulness grants both a potent means of interrogating trauma, and a sense of agency to those normally subdued by canonical threats of force: reclaiming their labor power through subversive mechanisms that allow us to question the fatal nostalgia of a traumatic, imaginary past during revolutionary cryptonomy as a daily event. In turn, state monopolies are challenged by parodic, counterterrorist forms, their ludo-Gothic BDSM designed to weaken the state’s reign of violence, terror and hellish morphological expression in ways that reeducate workers; i.e., by teaching them to be sex-positive during Gothic-Communist development: changing socio-material[2] conditions with demon BDSM, thus camping and recultivating the twin trees of Capitalism—the Base and Superstructure—during oppositional praxis, including its synthesis and catharsis.)

This liminality—and its reclamatory performances contesting state domination through revolutionary cryptonymy—is a very complicated concept we’ll only introduce here; we’ll unpack it far more extensively in Volume Two (which is devoted entirely to humanizing and reclaiming monsters). For now, just remember that state monopolies on violence and terror—and ultimately on hellish expression at large—concern morphological expression linked to the home as simultaneously one’s place of conditioning rooted in fears about animals, the medieval, nature and sexual reproduction as canonized in hauntological forms; i.e., whose bondage enforces total, harmful submission by fearing nature, versus the ability to educate playful, healing forms of psychosexual “duress” that allow for discipline and restraint as conscious, informed acts in animalistic language. We can tie each other up and respect the rights of others (and animals as a whole) while confronting generational trauma; or, likewise, can navigate animal feelings of forbidden desire (outweighing a clear head and common sense) when capital constrains us in prey-like ways. In short, we can alter the curriculum in extracurricular ways, learning to work as a team and meet each other’s needs while limiting and eventually diminishing the state’s capacity to harm us through taught behaviors; i.e., from our own iconoclastic art as a subversive, Romantic[3] means of de facto education that  reclaims Gothic poetics and liberates workers from Capitalism with the same pedagogy of the oppressed as both outrageously over-the-top and as serious as a heart attack.

(artist: Droog)

Confusion is a cycle under capital, so it behooves us to learn how to dialectically-materially navigate the lands (and bodies) of confusion, but also menace (thieves, banditti and desperados), superstition (curses and ghosts), buried trauma, forbidden knowledge (demons), dogma, disorder, complicated excitement and psychosexual pleasure, etc, as torn between ourselves (workers) and our masters (the state). Their desire to rape then prey on our minds (then our bodies) requires we act unpredictable when using the same theatrical devices[4] ourselves; i.e, as masks that paradoxically give us away and conceal/reflect our revolutionary aims in splendid ways. In other words, while the Trojan Horse was gigantic, the Trojan Bunny (from Monty Python, left) was silly and ironic in ways befitting a splendide mendax but nevertheless suspended between bourgeois and proletarian usages:

To varying degrees, we’ve already been exiled, outlawed, and shamed by the state, so it behooves us to grow accustomed to playing with chaos, fear and taboos in ways that suit us by describing our lived realities; i.e., as nightmarishly imperiled by fatal nostalgia, its haunted pastiche/endless, echoing copies (cryptomimesis) enjoyed by humans during the calculated risk of operatic parallel spaces (the danger disco) that—when retreated into—promise half-hidden threats and otherworldly delights.

(source)

These are at odds within/at home with class and culture war as waged for the state during moral panics. For the elite and their helpers, monsters and lairs are the ghost of the counterfeit—a thing to summon and explain away in unironic Gothic pleasures; for us, the imaginary past is a weapon to pit against the Imperial Core. As something that periodically “returns,” the Gothic castle is a site of animal expression, but also confusion, isolation, alienation and ambiguous danger and excitement as a natural part of the human condition within capital’s material factors.

Apart from the exhibits of morphological variety that appear in the next handful of pages, I want to spend the remainder of this subchapter stressing how performances inside the shadow zone take on a predator/prey arrangement with visibly animalized forms that cannot be avoided, only subverted and transformed when the state-in-crisis and -decay tries to weaponize our confusion and monstrous labor against us. I also want to consider how would-be places of curiosity like human genitals and their reproductive, but also erogenous functions—so-called “private parts” relegated to the bedroom (vis-à-vis Foucault)—are intensely secret, exclusive and chased after under highly uneven and coercive social-sexual arrangements; and finally I want to explore Walpole’s castle as a camping ground of the European family unit that we can learn from when challenging canonical forces ourselves. In dimorphic, familial terms, the husband (or those groomed to play such a part) would be expected to do their duty as head of the household; conversely the receiver of this unfair bargain would also have their own part to play—wifely duties, also known as “paying rent,” which in liminal territories, comes with a fair amount of fakery and performance, but also fetishized costumes and kinky roles:

(artist: Puk Puk)

That is, performance and play conduct themselves according to honest threats, but also the generation of “threats” during calculated risks that allow the aggrieved party to confront past trauma as living within and around them in the present space and time. This includes facing fears of wifely duties as animalized: “paying rent,” and being “bred,” as part of that systematically disparate equation meant to prey upon subjugated workers; i.e., bride price. Not only is there a curiosity to face the fear as something promised to one in relation to their body as animalized, but also a desire to reclaim these characteristics in ways that transform the structure’s predatory nostalgia and education to serve future worker needs (and those of nature in association with them). To alter canonical historical materialism, one’s body is explored according to a monstrous canonical role inside a fatal structure that needs to change lest unironic harm persist; and said structure will defend itself against revolutionary cryptonymy in complicit forms. All the while, camp’s morphology of monsters is a warzone fighting to describe those actors (and animals) most challenged by state counterfeits (the latter envisioned by very scared/angry[5] heteronormative people):

(exhibit 9b1: Artist: Xuu. Gyno/androdiversity includes gynodimorphism, which uses anthropomorphic biology to divorce human gender roles from strictly human bodies; i.e., to treat human genitals, gender and sexuality as highly malleable and xenophilic—fetishizing the alien in a sex-positive, non-predatory way that likewise reduces the state’s ability to criminalize, thus prey upon, such unironic variants, mid-struggle. We’ll examine the social-sexual qualities of anthropomorphism [and the drug-like, chaotic bodies of Giger-esque chimeras; i.e., monomorphism and Acid Communism; e.g., phallic women/Archaic Mothers, exhibit 1a1c; re: “Symposium: Aftercare“] much more in Volume Two.

Also, while our focus will remain on humanoid bodies with mostly symmetrical, if not expressly Vitruvian components, it’s worth noting that asymmetrical and “cluster bodies” flirt with plurality and native, physically descriptive and divergent embodiments faced with colonial struggles; e.g., Light Years‘ [1988] dark-skinned Deformed having multiple heads and limbs, but also a lack of various pieces that are nevertheless informed by a classical monster framework: akephaloi, or “the headless ones.” It also could be an Indigenous, guerrilla, acephalous challenge to the danger of a centralized, Cartesian mind fascistically praying on nature from the future; i.e., a decapitation of the European model of genocide as an endless, predatory cycle repeating itself in relation to capital/scientific exploitation. Its fatal historical materialism is built on mad science vampirically serving the profit motive as capital defends itself, scapegoating decadence and “degeneracy” in a cyclical holocaust.

[artist: Bokuman, commissioned by me to draw the hero and princess of the film]

As the ghost of the counterfeit, Light Years is essentially a Gothic nightmare about scientific overreach with fascist results: a giant, patriarchal brain-in-a-jar that eventually goes mad, builds a time machine and ruthlessly preys upon local, native populations in the past. These natives are already abused by a moderately matriarchal, Amazonian society who—faced with the armies of the brain they designed—send a white savior away from shelter and safety to overthrow the tyrant during the typical monomyth gauntlet and its rewards: animal-alien friends “relegated to the underworld,” whose reverse abjection helps prevent the genocidal cycle; but also the princess [above] whose definitive moment amounts to passively loving the hero.)

(artist: Bay)

Fantastical signatures notwithstanding, art (and especially Gothic art) frequently expresses real bodies that deviate from the Vitruvian standard; as punishment, said bodies (and their associate cultural value/attachments; e.g., Bay and his gynodiverse labia, but also consistent, palliative drug use) are controlled, eclipsed and destroyed, but also fetishized, mid-exploitation, by Cartesian forces tied to various power centers—castles and their recursive genocides’ grim harvesting of the systemically vulnerable. In Gothic terms, castles are animalistic sites of captivity and danger with a dynastic, hereditary bent (the chronotope); re: the lover, villain, parent and protector all occupy the same uncomfortable living space. The same applies to ontological spaces—one’s body as animalistic in ways that don’t endorse, thus resist, state abuse when the unironic (non-Walpolean) castle appears (and with it, the liminal hauntology of war). Heteronormative language outlaws and fetishizes sex-positive animal demons like the ones already shown. In so-called “correct” spheres, there is only white, cis-het men and women, and women exist purely to please men; indeed, sexist men “need” subservient, cis-het women in order to prove themselves (specifically their manhoods) by having PIV sex as an animal act. Men hate and desire women in this respect, seeing the answer “no” as standing in their way to individuation and success. To overcome their childish and unnecessary fears of dying a virgin, the pussy becomes something for men to “slay” according to a mythic gradient; i.e., stemming from Grendel and Grendel’s mother as beings to rape in relation to nature-as-alien, but also identify in more seemingly human forms and behaviors that retain an animalistic stamp through Gothic poetics; re: “animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms.”

In a Gothic-Communist sense, then, overriding state mechanisms to change socio-material conditions becomes a team effort—something out of an animal parable that updates easily enough to the present space and time:

(artist: Secondlina)

This concludes our preliminary examination of Gothic morphologies, relevant to our Gothic-Communist camping of them. I want to use the rest of “Prey” to consider this chattelization as camp through ludo-Gothic BDSM, and monstrous (demon) BDSM operating as a complex, paradoxical dialog of psychosexual torture exacted for different purposes during oppositional praxis. We’ll look at their role as part of a larger aesthetic (exhibit 9b2) that either fits within European, heteronormative beauty standards/myths (exhibit 10a), or camps them (exhibit 10b2, 10b2 and 10c1).

This, I will argue, comes from the style of Horace Walpole as located in fearsome, genderqueer doubles of the European castle that invite nightmarishly illuminating-if-troublesome comparisons between the two (from my thesis): “Doubling is the black mirror in action; its confused reflections invite troubling-but-useful comparisons to alien, unhomely things (unheimlich), showing less about how we’re different from the things we abject, and more how we’re similar (albeit in discomfiting ways)” (source).

The castle, for instance, shows similarities but also potential differences (transformation/death omens) regarding home and homebodies amid imposturous, otherworldly chaos, phobias, uncertainty and change; i.e., “bad,” imperfectly decayed fakeries that don’t further the process of abjection, instead updated for modern forms of Gothic politique that, while Walpole would have admittedly been lost on, still apply his concepts in a monstrous, ludo-Gothic BDSM, dreamlike fashion: “fur fags” (exhibit 10a2) portending the death of the state within disturbed thresholds and surfaces complicated by the context of struggle whose shared aesthetic feels invaded, but also occupied by ill will that cannot neatly be divided into clean, discrete categories. The phenomenology (experience) of emotional turmoil is the code not just to decipher but speak with as a message unto itself, relayed inside a parallel space capable of intense (re)education.

The Gothic castle, then, is the mind and house as intertwined and infused with sickness—an unheimlich (“unhomely”) site of inhabited destruction, superstition, phobias, taboos, medieval psychology (demonic emotions and psychomachy) and moral panic (stigmas and bias) that can not only change hands, but ownership and function in ways that demonstrably help workers who feel uncertain about their surroundings and familiar/familial elements; i.e., to unspeakable, repressed degrees that are, themselves, tied to immense locational trauma; e.g., the mother from The Babadook (2014, above) half-secretly wanting to kill her son despite her presumed protector role. Said position is invaded and shared by buried trauma tied to the home as occupied by unconfronted psychosexual forces: objects of the household overpowering the minds of the inhabitants in ways not strictly dissimilar to a demonic possession, nightmare or curse. Mother and murderer synonymize, doubling inside one person as neither one nor the other but both at the same time oscillating in a state of agitated confusion. Conflicts like these are inevitable in such places; if you don’t confront them, you’ll kill the next in line!

Like Radcliffe, such nightmares are felt while awake, becoming something to confront and confirm as being genuine or false, harmful or safe; unlike Radcliffe, we want to weaponize it against the state in ways that escape their monopolized cycle of harm (versus “punching the mirror” and effectively ourselves as scapegoated “destroyers” blamed for the “fall” of civilization). Like The Babadook, generational trauma becomes something to ultimately face, accept, and live with—to paradoxically befriend. Just as the Babadook’s red book appears like magic, followed by doubt and nightmares that weave spells of moribund uncertainty regarding our place in the world, we can call upon the animalistic, psychosexual powers of the Gothic castle to terrify our enemies with: the state doesn’t own those, and the mere fact that the home is a giant, endless graveyard needn’t disempower us. We can paint our complicated, half-real experiences, thus giving them shape/a healing[6] voice to speak out regarding our inherited confusions, injuries and insignias.

For workers, the ritualized, animalistic trauma common to BDSM becomes a historical-material offshoot of state abuse, one that involves women (or effeminate/emasculated persons). Instead of treating sex as an unpleasant task, they can cathartically reify then seek out psychosexual, xenophilic pleasure and pain, hence adjust to the fact that they were once denied control by an abusive partner (or false protector of some kind or another) chattelizing them in animal-like ways (which, like a Gothic castle, haunts them in cartoonish forms they at least partially have some control over).

The fact remains that impotency and pain unto itself can be an immensely pleasurable experience. Likewise, the ritualized aesthetics of giving and receiving pain within animalistic dialogs doesn’t demand costumes that look like actual animals, but instead function in the manner to which animals are treated under human relations of unequal power exchange: the (to paraphrase my thesis) dog as heroic and obedient, the cat as “catty” and feminine, the rabbit as pagan and fertile, and all of them being combined with various stigmatized species during anthropomorphism; i.e., as a pedagogy of the oppressed with BDSM components of sexual healing that serve as asexual forms of public nudism to confront and interrogate heteronormative, settler-colonial trauma and its usual actors embodied by fantastical cops: knights, Amazons, and the various animalistic qualities they are recognized, celebrated and feared for during Gothic nostalgia.

(artist: Junji Ito)

In the same vein, there is a campy element to reclamation per ludo-Gothic BDSM—to say one’s body and holes are one’s own, but nevertheless tied up in heterosexual enforcement trapping one inside a body-shaped prison made for you. These liminal sensations become medicinal insofar as they can be evoked as profoundly badass/awesome; re: the palliative Numinous as discussed in Volume Zero and other kinds of calculated, psychosexual risk/informed consent. Embodiments of the Numinous and psychosexuality are ubiquitous in Western culture: the sadist, the masochist, as Gothic. Such implements aren’t entirely sex-coercive/Cartesian, allowing the performers (and their bodies) to express complicated expressions of sexual power/trauma and healing wrapped up on the same surface; i.e., in the same thresholds, using the same dark aesthetics tied to an imaginary past where one’s exact position (and animal role) is not entirely certain, but is heavily commodified during liminal expression under capital as a means of survival:

(exhibit 9b2: Artist: UrEvilMommy. The aesthetics of pleasure and pain [which can be pleasurable]—but also good and evil, freedom and bondage—often elide in Gothic media as fetishizing the woman-in-black for cross purposes; i.e., a “killer rabbit” [exhibit 100a5; re: Volume Three] phenomenon that predates Sontag’s dissection of the Hugo Boss uniform but extends beyond it into sex-coercive and sex-positive discourse. Indeed, Sontag’s famous regression to pre-fascist times in “Fascinating Fascism” conspicuously intimates an unstable presence of danger and vulnerability within the recipient of abuse as reverential towards unironic, compelled flagellation and fatal damage. The outfit codifies the exchange of power/resistance and subsequent sensations as ambiguous, thus oft-misunderstood.

Instead, unequal power exchange is worshipped for its “unfair” arrangement in nostalgic language that simultaneously subverts or plays with historically incongruent ideas of mutual/informed consent; i.e., performative irony during Gothic counterculture art. Said variants look nigh-identical to unironic, coercive [demon/undead/animalized] BDSM but the contract is respected in ways that provide for the historically abused party. She becomes worshipped in her totality as a survivor of immense trauma whose plurality denotes tantalizing attractions to pleasurable pain as a forbidden outlet. Difference denotes curiosity towards the “mother” persona [which historically would be synonymous to some extent with the daughter archetype—i.e., the incest trope; below] as something to not exclusively destroy or dominate by men, but rather a volatile force to be reckoned with and enjoyed precisely because she turns the tables on the expected patriarchal dominators. The fragmented, uncertain attraction denotes an arrangement that becomes highly sought after, the dark kitten/queen expertly demanding powerful men to surrender their power [and their wealth] to her [symbolizing a pleasurable relinquishing of responsibility through fiscal means].

Animals, despite being relegated to positions of property [thus harm] in Cartesian frameworks, are prized for their magnetism in human forms; e.g., Amazons as big dumb herbos in appearance [the role is generally divided into brains or brawn] but also as beings to bend over and breed like property during plantation-esque fantasies fetishizing the slave or bride as one-in-the-same. Out of the ancient past, the female [or monstrous-feminine] ass evolved through Capitalism into something to beat, use and discard by European men [or their emulators] claiming ownership of nature as a whole—a bestial treating of sleeping with one’s slaves to dominate them in ways that aren’t discouraged/demonized because said slaves aren’t literal animals; they’re treated like them, sitting in an uncomfortable space where they belong nowhere, and—like Satan fallen from Paradise—are painfully aware of that fact. Reversing this ontological configuration and its assorted disadvantages requires an ass that “fucks back” precisely because it faces the animalized components in way that subvert, weaponize or otherwise celebrate their proletarian psychosexual potential:

[artist: MizzzVega] 

In some shape or form, then, Gothic bewitchment communicates worker resistance through Satanic poetics’ animalistic allure, affording serious, complicated nuance and degrees of torture as negotiated and unnegotiated: the thrill of “danger” vs actual danger as being up-for-grabs. For one, it sits within a reverse charm offensive against the usual suspects; i.e., in that liminal space between freedom and imprisonment that historically-materially would have been enforced by structures of power that exhausted both parties, yet made the dom older than the sub. The schoolmaster, priest, general, executive, naval officer, or fast food manager—Capitalism and its precursors would and continue to organize these divisions of labor in arrangements that force both sides to look but not touch, while also a) alienating them from their own bodies, and b) from nature and the imaginary past associated with Man-Box positions of authority that are regularly sexualized unto themselves as animalistic; e.g., being “hot for teacher” and enthralled with said teacher’s animalized persona as “ancient.” Meanwhile, when abuses against one side by the other did occur, it was always the victim’s word against the master’s—the animal’s against its owner’s—because outside of trophies, who takes pictures of their own crimes? They survive through stories that present the animal as something to hunt, and that which sometimes hunts back.

For our purposes, abuse victims are often drawn to trauma during Gothic poetics as a paradoxical, animalized means of catharsis. A ritualized reversal of trauma’s interrogation, then, can out the would-be abuser as “cucked” by the dominatrix pinning him to the bed—taking him like the stud does the mare, or more intensely still, the wolf the lamb. Something violent and out-of-place sits onstage, expressing to colonial benefactors sitting in the audience the uncomfortable reality that sex and harm synonymize within colonial structures for those treated as prey animals by predators just like them. Incredible, systemic trauma overhangs such engagements. Indeed, if the abuse is severe enough, the eliding of not just pleasure and pain, but consent and non-consent, become permanently confused inside the victim’s mind while playing out predator and prey responses. This is, on its face, an extraordinary power play couched within Gothic poetics, but it still exists with the devil’s courtship as an inescapable material reality. The sex-positive difference is, the animalized bargainer states “show me the money” while holding the devil at arm’s length: “You can hae your silken goon…“)

The kind of sex-positive, Satanic nuance featured above is entirely lost on heteronormative actors compelled to enact harmful animalistic treatments of morphological expression on others. For women, it becomes merely a culturally appropriative costume to don and submit within a compelled role: the abuser or the abused relayed, in some shape or form, through the Gothic mode and its lies favoring the status quo. For men, “woman is other”; i.e., a caretaker sex object, but also a means to an end: societal climbing and homosocial clout. The premeditation of female ownership/enslavement becomes less a way of cheating at the game and more men playing the game of Capitalism as expected. Consequently, female or monstrous-feminine pleasure, agency and intelligence are mythologized/demonized—relegated to the lands of make-believe and stigma-animalized, “furry” bodies” (exhibit 9b1) but also advertised everywhere either as outrageous (re: hysteria/the wandering womb and the creation of sexual difference) or as commodified through the Gothic mode in ways that seem “safe enough”; i.e., ostensibly tailored around men/the Male Gaze (exhibit 9b2). Medusa’s phallic pleasure becomes either death-on-sight or an embodiment of death whose function is not set, and Amazons having sex for their own reasons amounts to “death by Snu-Snu” as a kind of silly-serious joke that frames patriarchal anxieties within half-hearted, theatrical (unrealistic) “rape” scenarios.

Except, this effects not just the practitioners, but their bodies in a cultural sense; i.e., they are viewed pejoratively in the eyes of xenophobic men, women and token groups fearful of an animalistic postcolonial. Unlike the sex-positively xenophilic, heteronormative bigots consider gender-non-conforming bodies abominable but chase-worthy (the demon/the whore) during gender trouble and normal bodies (the damsel/the virgin) working as complicated sources of animalistic shame outside of highly specific circumstances: sex—like a bad joke—is harmful. It becomes monstrous in ways that regularly personify through liminal expressions of the revived medieval: dark bodies reconstructed/recoded as sites of sin, animal hedonism, lust, rage, and other intense, alienated emotions out of the medieval period and into a settler-colonial world enthralled by fatal nostalgia.

(artist: Nya Blu)

For example, while being canonically associated with sexual reproduction as things to breed, alienation from nature while sexualizing it means that non-penetrated vaginas, mouths or assholes tend to look a little alien to cis-het men (arguably excluding lipstick lesbians, but these utilize dildos, fingers and tongues that serve a phallic role). Especially “atypical” are our aforementioned non-heteronormative vaginas; i.e., external female genitalia as “animalistic” (above). “The Classification of the Anatomical Variation in Female External Genitalia” (2023) catalogues the sheer variety of external female genitals available. Despite this proliferate biodiversity being public knowledge, said knowledge is framed as forbidden, but also iconoclastic in ways that must be appropriated and sold back during controlled forms of performative “resistance”; i.e., it appears monstrous in ways that are commonly portrayed as deserving of male/tokenized retribution: the Medusa/dark Amazon as something to masturbate to and kill, often by women acting like men vis-à-vis the state’s fear-fascination with the myth of the dark, savage continent. The morphological argument is worn like an animal costume over an hourglass white body having become “colored” and wild:

(artist: Alex Pascenko)

And yet, there remains the unspoken aspects of the human body that are implied by Vitruvian performers and their wild-animal costumes. I want to move away from standardized body types, and consider those they “speak for” as having been crowded offstage during the Gothic dialogs that emerged from Horace Walpole onwards. Before we get to Walpole, we’ll consider genitals a bit more, as well as other phenotypical components in European belief systems, as well as the heteronormative attitudes to such a cryptonymy as enacted by state forces; then we’ll explore gender and queer expression through animalistic monster dialogs (furries), whose “sodomy” within public discourse emerged from performative locations first introduced by Walpole, then reexplored by Matthew Lewis and others building on Walpole’s faithless reinventions: the Gothic castle as an operatic, ghastly site of campy violence and “rape” per ludo-Gothic BDSM, but also a hunting ground of targeted actions and bodies being tacitly associated with theatrical harm as a canonical means of preparing them for state punishment. Like bodies, castles both actual and possible share the same performative zone. They are both welcome and unwelcome, friendly and hostile, male and female, etc, as oscillating back and forth in the Gothic sense.

Before we carry on, then, a quick refresher about Gothic language as a performative device: the Gothic is chaotic and shared among warring factions for or against the state. Camping the canon during ludo-Gothic BDSM, then, requires meeting unironic violence with ironic, iconoclastic forms of cryptonymy that foster revolutionary potential during liminal expression: doubling canonical, monstrous bodies, locations and power-exchange scenarios. The language is “sticky” insofar as a castle tower or knightly lance can resemble (and potentially represent) a bare, exposed penis (often as “knife-like”) or a murky dungeon or cave can stand in for a vaginal cavity (and its classically hysterical contents) in mythological, videoludic[7] forms. A classic maiden, on the other hand, senses rape through failed modesty as threatening to her virtue; i.e., by her own hand, or when dangerously reflecting on the surface of immodest, demonic persons whose troubling existence before her challenges her own sense of self as prescribed: projection onto that which she fears will destroy her because it is different than her in a way the state will demonize and attack. Its purposeful mess accounts for the organic and inherited confusions coming out of the state’s imaginary past grappling with countercultural forms inside the same performative sphere and ambivalent, medievalized theatrics. During triangulation, the curious maiden becomes a weapon, surrendering her Amazonian potential to rebel in exchange for a state paycheck: a warrior-detective solving civil disputes for the elite with impunity and extreme prejudice.

(artist: Mike Lucas)

Keeping that in mind, let’s quickly examine genitals and body diversity under European standards, as well as the at-times incredibly odd belief systems/physiological arguments that go with them when these models remain unquestioned, hence unchallenged. As far as diversity itself goes, exhibit 9b1 introduced some fairly radical forms, except “radical” needn’t pertain to overtly animalized variants. External labia, for instance, are granted pejorative labels in relation to hysteria being canonically demonized in all its forms. Abject nicknames like the “blown-out” cooter, “lazy kebab,” or “roast beef curtains” body-shame the female body in accordance with purity politics that stymie gynodiversity or the representation of female genitalia within art as abjectly “hysterical,” but also animalized as property and food. Food-as-status has been a regular source of contention for much of human history. In short, food and animals are status symbols that communicate socio-material conditions through themselves. Except there’s scant difference between animals and food under capital, and neoliberalism controls the market to better commodify animals and their expression within food consumption (tied to famous junk food brands, below): “you are what you eat” being a series of products, including humans consuming whatever the elite use to fatten them up—themselves.

(artist: Noah Verrier)

The aforementioned point of contention regarding animals and food involves morphological expression in Gothic terms; e.g., an AFAB person’s control over their own body and environment while being treated as livestock by doctors (and requiring a specialized doctor that men think they do not: a OB/GYN) but also the sexual activity and egregores poetically associated with these things: cat women (akin to werewolves, but feline in ways that women generally are sexualized as—i.e., big cats as ferocious and wild and little cats as domestic and cute—versus dogs as tied more to protective actions, but also raw “breeding” activities: doggystyle). Gynodiverse labia are mythologized in demonic, fetishized ways on par with the visible/”enlarged” clitoris as emasculating towards men and demonizing cis women against their will. However, the canonical phobias of the latter group often project territorial animosity towards intersex/trans/non-binary people and their gender-divergent bodies; e.g., the intersex qualities of the xenomorph (exhibit 51a; re: “Making Demons“), but also the increased hairiness and clit size of witches and furries (exhibits 52f and 68; re: “Furry Panic” and Volume Three), and androdiversity and gender-non-conformance (exhibit 91b2; re: Volume Three). By comparison, heteronormativity depicts the “proper” vagina as small, dainty and unformed; i.e., infantilized, but also owned, thus dominated, by men; or policed according to its “proper” roles of PIV, heteronormative sex by men, or Amazonian women like Ellen Ripley who serve the status quo by turning their female rage against queer scapegoats (exhibit 30a; re: “Synthesis Symposium”): fuck the womb of nature for the state, for the Man, through Man Box culture’s passing of “prison sex” mentalities through all the usual methods (trifectas) and monopolies, from a position of male- and-token-oriented dominance topping the monstrous-feminine (and nature/the planet), etc, during the Capitalocene.

Ignoring idiosyncratic fetishes, cis-het men don’t even tend to masturbate to non-penetrated holes (where they aren’t imagining a cock inside the hole-in-question); they tend to jerk off to four main body parts: boobs, butts, feet, and penises, only one of which is even strictly female (during natural assignment). As for penises, this can be penises inside the vagina, but also being pleased by those who “should” be pleasing it with the “appropriate parts” during the appropriate heteronormative rituals: PIV sex, veering into increasingly fetishized and non-heteronormative, thus alien forms (re: Meg-Jon Barker’s “What’s Wrong with Heteronormativity?” exhibit 3b). So, an unhealthy attraction towards hole-owners, but also trans, intersex and non-binary people, is bound to occur. So-called traps, “transsexuals” and “she-male” porn—appropriated from The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)—is condemned by fascists, but also mistreated in “prison sex” rituals that assert white cis-het male dominance against the things they’re masturbating to as a guilty act of self-disgust and genuine loneliness. This void is created by Capitalist Realism under a system that very deliberately privatizes sex through the means of production; its Superstructure discourages healthy social-sexual relationships by compelling marriage, thus systemic rape, as something to sublimate, ignore and cover up through violent canon: “Reader, I married him.”

This immortal line was said by Jane Eyre after Charlotte Brontë had Anne Causeway (Jean Rys’ name for Bertha) killed “for the sake of the story” (furthering the white heroine’s amatonormative arc by killing off the black villain). To that, white women (or token assimilators) animalize non-European parties during heteronormative Gothic stories in order to prey on them through settler-colonial violence. In Jane Eyre, while Mr. Rochester is “tamed,” Bertha the demon lover is never humanized; meanwhile, the system that demonizes black people as gender-non-conforming (vis-à-vis the European model of marriage) extends to gender-non-conforming people at large during military urbanism. Gothic canon levies settler-colonial violence against all of them, albeit to different, intersecting degrees inside the state of exception; there, it conflates them (and their non-marital, sodomic love) as “rapacious” outsiders who, like Anne Causeway, must die for “Jane Eyre” to achieve “her” equality of convenience (thus bigoted, predatory influence over others). Such expansions are commonplace within Gothic canon, insofar as Frederic Jameson’s insistence of a “class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of privilege and shelter is exercised” feels apt only if it doesn’t denunciate patriarchy or protest actual rape. But Jameson only envisions what I call (from the thesis volume) “a class-conscious mirage swept up in its own endless romance, patented by Radcliffe and carried forward into the ages—i.e., to keep things the same by refusing to challenge anything in a dialectical-material sense” (source). Challenging heteronormativity and Capitalism through the Gothic mode requires some sense of steady, conscious engagement—not just with taboo subjects, but visitations, reenactments or imperfect, ironic evocations of texts that many would quickly dismiss outright as exploitative and “trashy”:

(artist: Boris Petroff)

It’s hardly a secret that critics of the Gothic tend to focus on its pulpy corpus and animation of forbidden topics (rape, incest, and murder) rather than any critical power the overall mode might yield, including when interrogating said trash as symptomatic to Capitalism’s slew of commodities (and token enforcers). Even when sensationalized, rape culture can be especially telling. It’s precisely these “tells” that we need to be conscious of when subverting them in our own works.

For example, as women start learning to say no to sexual advances, thereby establishing boundaries and knowing their own worth as workers in relation to cis-het men, these same men—as the traditionally entitled, universal clientele—become disillusioned but remain beholden to the very system exploiting men by teaching them to hate what they simultaneously fear/want: women (or beings treated as women, thus “lesser” than men) as welcome relative to an all-boys club, provided they conform (as brides near but outside the club, or token enforcers inside the club who eventually become brides); but they will always be seen as a prize, nuisance, distraction, curiosity and/or threat that weakens male power and status (e.g., Sampson and Delilah). Women—and by extension, nature and anything associated with it—must be kept in check lest it awaken and “castrate” men (or outgun them, left). Except the emasculation comes from capital: No longer able rely on marriage and spousal domination being handed to them on a silver plate, cis-het men fall victim to their own lack of education by the same system branching out through Rainbow Capitalism, which funnels them into fascist groups that conveniently fear everything of nature as gay (which neoliberals do not root out because these groups are in cahoots, defending Capitalism—wherein neoliberals/the elite are increasingly less expendable than their fascist counterparts).

(artist: Wildragon)

Note: The above image is from Axiom Verge (2014), which we discuss more in the Undead Module’s “Away with the Faeries.” —Perse, 4/7/2025

Said fears and alienation from nature leads to a variety of stupid, dangerous, heteronormative myths in Gothic canon that, like a deadly poison, bleeds into binary public thinking (non-binary thinking is anathema in mainstream discourse):

• Educated women are Medusas that need to be beheaded (exhibit 23a; re: “The Basics of Oppositional Synthesis”)—less metaphor and more heteronormative code for rape, but also beatings, torture, and murder (or silence/segregation which leads to genocide).
• Men are visually stimulated; women are not/don’t like sex or porn.
• Women can’t orgasm or experience sexual pleasure/can’t cum.
• Women pee[8] out of their vaginas/butts.
• Men’s brains are totally different from women’s.

First off, feminism is scapegoated/appropriated all the time (we’ll discuss TERFs extensively in Volume Three, Chapter Four). Second, the idea that women aren’t visually stimulated is bullshit. As women acquire more power, visually-stimulating cuties—catboys, femboys, but also trans, intersex, and non-binary persons—appear by virtue of female demand. Women want us by virtue of idiosyncratic “types,” and you can bet your collective asses they get off to us visually (queer people are also more keen to sleep with those who won’t pull a Nick Fuentes and kill us, post-coitus). Third, women definitely orgasm (they tend to twitch a lot more than dudes do, which honestly looks a little demonic in a kinky sort of way). Fourth—and I did not make this one up, I swear!—but Haz Al-Ghul really does think that women only have two holes and pee from their butts (Bad Empanada, 2022). He is also friends with Nick Fuentes, avowed hater of women and “lover” of catboys (more on him and his catboy “love” in Volume Three, Chapter Three) whose Cozy.tv is a forsaken lighthouse for dudes like Al-Ghul to go and be weird LARPers together. Fifth, male and female brains are not radically different at birth according to Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Review’s “Dump the ‘Dimorphism’: Comprehensive Synthesis of Human Brain Studies Reveals Few Male-Female Differences Beyond Size” (2021). We’re not different species; men aren’t from Mars and women aren’t from Venus. Rather, Capitalism divides/alienates workers by manufacturing sexual dimorphism in heteronormative, Cartesian language, including canonical Gothic language as culturally prevalent across space and time: myths, monsters and legends, including the “super gay ones” that really shake things up and cross barriers and boundaries—like Doctor Frankenfurter (with Jim Sharman making fun of Mary Shelley’s classic Byronic xenophobia much like Mel Brooks did with that “enormous schwanzstucker” gag from a year prior)!

(exhibit 10a: Artist, left: Edmund Leighton; right: various ensemble casts for live performances of Rocky Horror.)

Capitalism and Cartesian dualism promote European beauty standards, genders and sexuality but also morphologically abjects anything that isn’t these things. “Non-European” includes anything that isn’t an hourglass figure, skinny and/or pale-skinned (exhibit 10b1); non-missionary[9] thus “incorrect” sexual positions (e.g., doggy, islander, or anything out of the Karma Sutra, etc, as ways that “uncivilized” people have sex); but also, cocks that are “too big” (non-white): the Frankencock/frank(en)furter as monstrous, giant, and made by white madmen from spare criminal parts (implying a Cartesian function, the original novel by Mary Shelley being positively rife with racial tensions and postcolonial potential. More on this in Volume Two). This evokes various racialized porn stereotypes that we’ll examine more in another chapter (exhibit 32b; re: “A Problem of ‘Knife Dicks'”). For now, we’ll quickly examine two: the BBC (big black cock) and BBW (big, beautiful woman) as canonical porn staples that become implied outside of porn (through Gothic stories, which are porn-adjacent; e.g., torture porn, exhibit -1b) while simultaneously regulating morphological expression to serve the profit motive through threats of settler-colonial violence and control during moral panics.

Gothic fiction was written by beneficiaries of slave labor (whether they wanted to benefit from slavery or not) and tended to fetishize the enslaved groups in ways that follow the underclass into their supposed “liberation.” This includes into porn and porn-adjacent dialogs presents in Gothic media, wherein colonized groups would have been fetishized to varying prey-like degrees. As such, it really shouldn’t surprise anyone that canonical porn genres are historically body-centric, predatory and bigoted. As a settler-colonial device, BBCs advertise black people as having unusually large cock sizes compared to white men. Despite also being more prone to having smaller cock sizes than white people (according to urologist James Elist), black people are violently fetishized, pointedly associated with—if not outright raping white women using said cocks—then violating their modesty during pornographic suggestion built on problematic fantasies (exhibits 32; re: “Knife Dicks”). Made popular by American Lost Cause media like The Birth of a Nation (1911), the BBC genre was authored collectively by jealous, psychosexual white men who not only want to use a cock even if it’s not theirs—i.e., a “man chooses, a slave obeys“—but also think the only sex that exists is violent penetrative sex and that “bigger means better.” The same idea applies to BBWs, except it’s often white women (and gender-non-conforming AFAB persons, left) being implied to be “non-European” by virtue of having bodies that, again, are “too big” (thus “not white”). This exclusionary concept is further complicated by superhero comics, which play around with non-human skin colors to codify stigma; e.g., purple or green (exhibit 10b2).

(artists: Autumn Anarchy and Sinead Rhiannon)

As genres of expression, “BBC” and “BBW” must be reclaimed through iconoclastic porn that raises awareness towards marginalized, thus colonized/preyed-upon groups; i.e., by valuing and enriching them at a socio-material within pornographic dialogs (also left). Unfortunately canonical renditions of either genre are useful to Capitalism, which conflates sex with war and rape with victory and domination; i.e., like riding a mare or war horse as property “owned” by a male rider serving a higher patriarchal authority. Even Tolkien’s “killer hobbit” Bullroarer Took could do that, or George R. R. Martin’s injection of the medieval imagination with deromanticized sex, frank depictions of rape, and military scenarios that lionize manly men, not feminine ones; e.g., his twink-turned-twunk, Satin, from A Storm of Swords (2000) being “too girly” to “man the ramparts” during a siege:

He was pretty as a girl with his dark eyes, soft skin, and raven’s ringlets. Half a year at Castle Black had toughened up his hands, however, and Noye said he was passable with a crossbow. Whether he had the courage to face what was coming, though… (source).

As part of the Gothic mode, such Pygmalions mandate the virtues of binary (thus heteronormative) gender during a reimagined medieval rife with cliché misinformation.

As said medieval takes many forms, reconsider the “enormous schwanzstucker” scene—when Frederick Frankenstein speaks out from both sides of his mouth to his smitten (white, blonde) servant: “He’s going to be very popular.” Like seriously, how would you know, Mr. I-Can’t-Even-Sleep-With-My-Own-Wife? I call this Ben Shapiro syndrome (The Majority Report’s “Ben Shapiro HUMILIATED By College Student During Debate,” 2022), ol’ Ben trusting his own wife (apparently a doctor according to this very creepy 2023 glow-up piece) when she tells him it’s “normal” that she doesn’t get wet during sex. I’d say she’s violating her Hippocratic Oath for that one, but she’s already being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment by having to sleep with Ben Shapiro…

Dogmatically favoring penetration and bigger tools for the job[10] are both grossly outmoded ideas when you consider that many clitoris-owners actually require penises of a specific size for hitting their g-spot with (the so-called “Goldilocks dick”) or oral/digital/dermal stimulation (for the clitoris, nipples, skin, etc) when it comes to BDSM and sexual/asexual intimacy. Worse, penis-shaming can adopt an assimilative, racialized quality—with people of color feeling inadequate for “failing” to be the one thing they are constantly marketed as: big, black thugs with BBCs that seek out the coerced pleasure of white women. This infantilizing process—historically linked to slave rebellions as things to fear and put down with extreme prejudice (re: Howard Zinn, but also In Range TV noting that “power aggregates” against potential/actual revolt[11] in Atun-Shei Film’s “Fighting for Freedom: The Weapons and Strategies of the 1811 Slave Revolt,” 2021; timestamp: 20:55)—is essentially a more extreme, Americanized version of the Gothic villain as a vessel for dark energies and foreboding gut emotions wracking the Imperial Core; e.g. Ann Radcliffe’s Father Schedoni—the titular, severe and hulking “Italian” (1796) and his knife dick (the classic male source of pride and angst dueling with other men for women, but also with women resisting their proud[12] advances) already being an Orientalist, xenophobic trope of something “not of the West.” Like a goblin (above).

Neo-Gothic stories were written while slavery was still legal in Britain; as such, they tried to skirt racist critique/expression by displacing to an older time, but the threatening nature and aesthetic still remained. So while he’s “Italian,” not black, Schedoni’s powerful, imposing body conflates with his menacing genitals by having the former advertise the enormous dark power of the latter during psychosexual tension (Gothic novels eroticize moral panics during repressed, fatal sexual urges that arise between modest heroines and indecent, frustrated pretenders). By comparison, Zofloya the moor is noted for his gigantic stature, quasi-servile demeanor and Satanic presence (all tracking with the treatment of people of color in such stories, literally demonizing them); his body is huge so the threat he poses unto the heroine via his implied cock is also huge, but inhumanly so. Or as Parker from Alien puts it: “The son of a bitch is huge! It’s like a man; it’s big!”

As for BBWs, I can’t remember them being discussed, as Neo-Gothic heroines are classically thin, modest and delicate; however, Victoria de Loredani from Zofloya (1806) was a tragic Gothic heroine, thus notable for her unusual height, strength and masculine pride—her fierté—being a flaw in the eyes of callous, appraising men; i.e., not “wife material”:

Berenza […] beheld Victoria such as she really was, unembellished, unornamented; his keen eye that perceived her beauties, discerned likewise her defects. He appreciated her character; he beheld at once her pride, her stubbornness, her violence, her fierté. “Can I,” asked himself, “be rationally happy, with a being imperfect as she now is?” (source).

The presence of all-inclusive, preceptive irony is up to debate in Neo-Gothic stories. In short, Victoria’s the woman-in-black—the “phallic” destroyer/temptress whose conspicuously intense immodesty leads to a great deal of widespread harm by straying from the snow-white path of bridal, dainty righteousness. In short, she’s the demon and the whore—a witch-like, sex-demon harpy whose animalistic qualities lead her to literally prey on the men (and women) around her while being underestimated for her female body! Meanwhile, the “black” appearance is generally captivating unto itself; i.e., implying a sense of extramarital excitement denied to Victorian audiences, of which they are swiftly “punished” for letting their guard down and evil run rampant: sexy is dangerous, but “safe” inside so-called “terrorist literature” as easily dismissed for its base cheapness and lack of sturdy moral fiber. Ludo-Gothic BDSM camps the sacred through the abjection process as something to reverse during the whore’s revenge. She’s the black knight, the Medusa, the avenger (with gentle elements as well, but oscillating between monstrous and feminine during a monstrous-feminine dialectic of the alien)!

(artist: Lera PI)

Such tropes, it must be said, were upheld by female writers as well as male ones. However, whereas women like Radcliffe or Dacre displaced critiques (or extensions) of their own bigoted society onto an enchanting “once upon a time” before settler colonialism existed (the pre-fascist 15th century or thereabouts), more recent Gothic stories imprint a racial component onto the black figure that is difficult to ignore. Darkness represents many things, of course; and yet, while the state of exception allows for a variety of minority types (religion, ethnicity and gender) to co-exist in the same shadow zone coding them as “black,” actual black people are seen as “even less human” than Eastern European or Asian people[13] are in terms of fascist dogma assigning “bad vibes” to non-white “outsiders” (to be clear, the zombie-like assignment of an underclass is limited to whatever’s available, which—in Western Europe—would have historically been Jewish people and other ethnic minorities relatively endemic to the region. For example, Holocaust Encyclopedia in 2022 explains how there were a smaller number people of color living in Germany during the Third Reich from WW1 German colonies; conversely the Israelis are genociding the Palestinians en masse, the latter having lived in that area for thousands of years before Zionism was recently bankrolled by the British and U.S. governments).

Now that we’ve examined some of the myths and body standards regarding European morphological compulsion as a form of Cartesian violence, let’s discuss challenging it through radical bodies as things to reify (or own if they already exist) and camp the unironic European standard within, then conclude the subchapter by looking at Walpole’s castles and their complicated descendants.

Gothic camp certainly applies to genitals. For our purposes, a tremendous amount of guilt and shame are funneled into the penis as a canonical symbol of violence and rape, making sex-positive penis-shaming a useful means of owning one’s member (or pussy or any other body part). General-purpose degradation and praise are both perfectly legitimate as long as it doesn’t become toxic or lead to abusive habits, post-use. A certain degree of honesty is required to acknowledge that, regardless if it’s healthy or not, many AMAB persons are anxious about their penises. Indeed, it’s not even generally because of their size, but that they are culturally infused with a predatory sense of unironic torture, making the owner fearful of what their penis represents in regards to themselves; or conversely, a vagina owner can understandably feel small around someone who is or isn’t bigger than them, but whose penis makes the AFAB person feel small and prey-like. These are all things to negotiate through art that is self-depreciating and vulnerable in a variety of campy but also liminal, animal-themed scenarios:

(exhibit 10b1: Artist, top: Jarnqk; bottom: The Happiest Cloud. Genital shaming/parody is often an expression of gender euphoria and gender-affirming care within the trans community. This extends neatly to the shapeshifting nature of animalistic/totemic demons, whose size differences involve their whole bodies. We’ll examine this concept much more in Volume Two. For now, consider the idea of size difference as alluded to in relation to power and sexuality in Gulliver’s Travels [1726] and Alice in Wonderland [1865].)

Beyond the genitals alone, the same campiness during ludo-Gothic BDSM applies to various body types, and overlap between all of these things applying appreciative, genderqueer irony to canonical standards; i.e., “making it gay” in subversive ways that challenge heteronormativity during poetic expression; e.g., the green woman as a Medusa BBW and/or a woman of actual color who is seen as “full of sin, appetite and vigor” in animalistic ways that challenge their white male superiors, but also black men as expected to keep said “phallic” women in line with their BBC (“kaiju sex” having a totemic [14] quality to it). All of these things conflict with one another according to what is expected and what actually comes about; i.e., to varying degrees of cultural appropriation/appreciation amid racial stigmas, intraracial/interracial tension and commodification of the human form versus its artistic expression during liminal presentations thereof. During camp, the cartoonish simplicity of good-vs-evil centrism is avoided in favor of theatrical complexities that include the human body in all of its shapes, sizes and colors, including abstract/abject renditions: superheroes, or “heroic” bodies commodified in popular media forms.

(exhibit 10b2: Top-right: the Venus of Willendorf; mid-right: Freakybbygirl; bottom-right: Mog, the Final Fantasy XIII-2 version; everything else, artist: bathmank. Comic books and videogames rely on Gothic poetics, which color-code stigma, but also attribute it to exaggerated elements of uncivilized cultural markers tied to physical strength, body fat, wild emotions and gross sexual appetite: curves, muscles and sheer “endowment” associated with animalistic qualities, but also the past [and current] plundering of various [neo]colonial sites: the Caribbean and Africa, but also Brazil and other areas of the Global South personified by a given starlet of the slave class; e.g. Laura from Street Fighter V [2016]:

[source: Eden] 

Some heroes are villainous; all are monstrous. Superheroes, like animals, are trapped between two worlds: the foreign and the domestic, the wild and the tame, but also the ancient and uncolonized versus civilization as a colonial ordeal. To that, their animal considerations stem from the ancient world as something to revive in the present under Capitalism, then hide these secret identities under acceptable-albeit-conspicuous personas; to that, superheroes—like the naked wrestlers of Antiquity—supply the performer with animal qualities during kayfabe theatre as a popular-if-disposable commodity [straw dogs] that includes wearing masks and other performative devices: their statuesque bodies. Some of these animals are so-called “good animals”; others are feared and stigmatized for their inhuman strength, speed or reflexes; e.g., Spiderman. There’s also the “spider woman” as an archaic, female deity of darkness in canonical fantasy stories [or one of its many offspring that carry with them their parent’s dark skin and evil nature; e.g., the Drow, exhibit 41b; re: “A Lesson in Humility“].

[artist: Jonpadraws] 

Purely on domestic soil, this disparity expresses through characters like She-Hulk wanting to assimilate, thus survive, despite being prized and feared for the qualities of a settler-colonial slave: a gentrified woman of color wearing a snazzy business suit in the courtroom, but threatening to explode in animal-like rage. Her green skin is both stigma against her and envy for those who treat her revelation as a spectacle; i.e., displays of non-white strength fetishized by white culture fascinated with their own barbaric past lingering in the present. Though assimilated into white culture, She-Hulk’s elevation is always in doubt—marked not just by her dark skin, but her entire physique. Combined, these express her heroism through a slaver’s metric; i.e., the qualities historically prized and feared by enterprising colonists, and which are held against She-Hulk during reactive abusive: her “hulking out” a form of “uppity” behavior she must hide to try and appear more civilized, more white despite her irreversible skin color—what F.D. Signifier on YouTube calls “Black Capitalism” [2023].

[artist: Bay] 

Muscles aside, a body’s basic shape also plays an important totemic role; e.g., having a round bod instead of an hourglass or even pear-shape figure—i.e., not actually a dad, thus not allowed to have a “dad bod”—is generally seen as masculine [with AMABs naturally tending to store fat in their bellies, not their hips, thighs and buttocks, like AFABs do] but also animalistic. Zeuhl once referred to their body as “roumb” like Mog or Monty Mole [from Super Mario World, 1991] and Bay similarly takes pride in his body as squishy, fat and animal-like, but also something to blend with BDSM: pup gear. While undeniably wholesome, such non-white, trans/non-binary bodies are historically-materially relegated to fantasy by Capitalism, which genocides anything that doesn’t fit the European standard: hunting “useless” specimens to extinction, then selling their pelts. When there are no more figurative or literal non-human animals left, modern man will hunt members of his own species he deems inferior to him, regarding those he considers “precious” something to “protect.” Whether to kill or control for canonical propaganda purposes, this predation is a historical-material fact.)

The complexity of these countercultural forms during ludo-Gothic BDSM helps them combat complex canonical stigmas, biases, fears and dogma that generally intersect; e.g., for plus-sized women, fat-shaming’s Enlightenment roots are steeped in racialized phobias, but also Catholic demonization by Protestants, including a little-known group of British/Dutch exiles, the fucking Puritans (who both countries disliked quite a bit because they were horribly uptight and went on to form the cultural groundwork for American Christofascism, along with various settler-colonial offshoots like the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses).

Furthermore, racialized stigmas and their signature body types are often portrayed with non-white skin colors—a kind of non-black “whitewashing” present inside fantasy narratives justifying violence against singular characters or larger societies:

• vice characters similar to Ester (exhibit 13d; re: “Monster Modes”) except they actually have green skin; e.g., goblins (exhibit 94b1; re: Volume Three) but also the Wicked Witch of the West (whose portrayal in The Wizard of Oz functions as a form of “spectral blackface” that puts a white woman in green makeup, except it needn’t be exclusively racist in its “othering”)
• hoard-based savages like orcs (exhibit 37e2; re: “Meeting Jadis“) and their darker, non-human skin colors—green, black, brown, and ash, etc

Either numeration canonically presents dark-skinned embodiments of evil as being closer to death in the natural world; i.e., as something to fear and punish, their canonical iterations sublimating an appropriated scapegoat from a bourgeois standpoint (which we shall see with Tolkien, in the next subchapter).

From a proletarian standpoint, a character of mixed ethnicity often wrestles with their animalized heritage in the face of settler-colonial violence; e.g., Nella Larsen’s Clare from Quicksand (1928): a “mulatto” in the book’s own language and struggling to deal with the guilt/shame of not quite belonging anywhere—what Thomas Happ in Axiom Verge called “Athetos” or “without place” (exhibit 40g; re: “Away with the Faeries“) echoing a Miltonic Satanic[15] having lost its rebellious character in exchange for a Cartesian, thus genocidal one. For Athetos, this lack of place meant the scientific community but such an idea can obviously apply to any feeling of pariah-ness. With orcs in fantasy works, the placement of such figures within centrist military struggles has expanded to some “good” orcs—i.e., the noble savage (a white-savior colonizer’s term). Yet, orc goodness will always be seen as “more savage and brutal” than the white-skinned, civilized men (and elves) of the West, which invariably justifies the Cartesian breaking of agreements after the Big Evil is defeated: “Boundaries for me, not for thee.” This happens because the white man is “more Enlightened,” thus destined to conquer nature and inherit the Earth by taking it away from anyone different from himself (and all for profit).

Indeed, settler colonialism unfolds due to the colonizer’s fragile disposition towards what he’s been conditioned to fear and dominate through war and rape culture as integral to Capitalism; i.e., those with non-standard body types associated with non-white cultures’ closeness to nature, thus supplied the usual lies attached to them through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. These hostilities can be challenged, but this requires reclaiming one’s body and animal self as both a campy source of pride and something associated with various monstrous entities, including animals, that are canonically exterminated by the state to varying degrees.

This holocaust manifests inside colonized parties, wherein the state installs harmful imposters: animal devices that condition the hunted prey to guiltily repress the stigma animal inside themselves, but also identify it among other members of the underclass (and its various axes of oppression), attacking them for presenting said animal out in the open. Campy versions of a given animal consciously serve a counter-political function meant to challenge Gothic canon (and its uneven process of extermination) having evolved into itself; i.e., through the exact kinds of unironic monster dialogs that—while they certainly have varied in terms of class, time and geographical location—nevertheless concerned taboos and stigmas of various kinds to voice unspeakable abuses with: accelerated predation committed by the state (and its proponents, including class traitors/token agents punching down) against genderqueer people and various other ethnic and religious minorities treated not simply as exotic pets, but sexually and societally “incorrect.”

In natural language, this amounts to the systematic extermination of animals and humans assigned a “pest” status (thus death sentence) while living under Capitalism’s profit motive—rats and other vermin, plague-type creatures for colonized peoples to relate to under a shared genocidal struggle:

(exhibit 10c1: Artist, right: Rattfood; left: Bay. Bay has a very short torso, giving them a “shortstack” appearance [“Round and square at the same time,” according to them] which they attribute [and enjoy having others attribute] to various monster types such as the goblin or their fursona [exhibit 10c2] but also various stigma animals like the rat, which represent non-heteronormative existence; i.e., lifeforms historically annihilated or relegated to the shadows under settler-colonial rule, now out for everyone to see and appreciate as a fully human monster that remains haunted by state-sanctioned xenophobia.

For Bay, the xenophilic role of fantasy is something to experience while alive—i.e., the goblin, gremlin and rat as brought forward out of the dark forest of the past to worship and play with in the present. Doing so happens in opposition to canonical forms and their established phobias’ euthanizing of these animals. Anarchist-queer furries/”fur fags” [exhibit 10c2] are antifascist in this respect, creating iconoclastic art not just to cope, but subvert the status quo in favor of a better world than currently exists; e.g., the rat as an anti-Semitic stigma that can reclaim both human and animal through ironically xenophilic iterations that take heed of Cartesian stereotypes before consciously subverting them.)

This complex heritage is vital to consider in relation to ourselves, whose own compelled divisions and alienation demand we consider Walpole and those he inspired with his castles as hopelessly divided on various societal issues; i.e., according to sex and gender as it existed back then informing our own liberation.

For one, the Gothic dialogic—especially during the 18th century—is famously divided between moderate female/feminine forms and a more outspoken male/masculine counterpoint: the Schools of Terror and Horror but also Male and Female Gothic (outmoded terms, but nevertheless what they’re known as in academic circles). Yet the paradox, here, is that some female authors were often rather conservative (re: Radcliffe, Dacre) and some were not (re: Shelley) in relation to women only having just started to take up writing as a profession, not a hobby—whereas some male authors could be surprisingly gender-non-conforming (re: Lewis) while others toed the line (re: Coleridge) despite men having written openly for thousands of years; i.e., in relation to the latter’s longstanding ability to abstain from marriage (a luxury generally not afforded to women, even wealthy ones) but also opening up these same men to risks and labels that woman arguably didn’t experience to nearly the same degree (while having their own struggles, of course: women get raped far more often than men do, but generally don’t have to experience the yolk of the sodomite label and all that comes with it [male privilege and stigma] in quite the same shapes and forms that AMAB people do). I’d like to spend a few pages unpacking the genderqueer history of male Gothic authors before considering it in relation to our own interrogations of the Gothic mode; i.e., reclaiming it for our purposes, using atypical bodies, shapes and colors to express ourselves as we are born into our collective struggles under capital.

First, these reclamations occur despite our “inherited confusions” begot from “a sinister corner of the Western imagination.” Described as such by Chris Baldrick, his introduction to the 2009 Oxford Book of Gothic Tales writes of the Gothic period being cited as a time of darkness and unproductive history following the collapse of Rome, but also something decided by the elite in opposition to those they sought to dominate centuries later through settler-colonial xenophobia:

In its earliest sense, the word is simply the adjective denoting the language and ethnic identity of the Goths; […] Long after they disappeared into the ethnic melting-pots of the Mediterranean, their fearful name was taken and used to prop up one side of that set of cultural oppositions by which the Renaissance and its heirs defined and claimed possession of European civilization: Northern versus Southern, [Dark] Ages versus the Age of Enlightenment, medieval versus modern, barbarity versus civility, superstition versus Reason. […] Accordingly, by the late eighteenth century “Gothic” was commonly used to mean “medieval, therefore barbarous,” in a largely unquestioned equation of civilization with classical standards (source).

While Baldrick also argues how the likes of Walpole use this dichotomy to both erode the presumed “superiority” of classical culture and to fear the medieval world as a dark and brutal place amid this ghost of the counterfeit, I posit that Baldrick is astoundingly incorrect in assuming that

Unlike “Romantic,” then, “Gothic” in its literary usage never becomes a positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it […] an identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages (ibid.).

Yet, this incorrectness stems from the invented, imaginary past as “medieval” in ways that potentially rewrite the conventional wisdoms regarding said past… which Baldrick conveniently ignores. Indeed, the kinds of stories Baldrick is writing about were predominantly written by white, cis-het men and women centuries ago, when queer discourse was in its infancy and racial bias was phased out of the conversation through regressions to a pre-fascist 15th century that was more interested in enjoying one’s privilege and playing silly pranks.

(source)

This brings us to Horace Walpole, the writer of the first Gothic novel and an ostensibly homosexual (or ace) man who devoted most of his relatively long life to making Gothic not just a label to describe the medieval period, but literally a specific style of campy fakery aiming at the Numinous used to embellish the present space and time through intentionally ahistorical reinvention: the castle where such oddities could be found and observed, which is a birthplace for ludo-Gothic BDSM as I would eventually envision it; re: through a palliative Numinous tied to castles in the flesh and a queer-coded “medieval.”

Camp is rooted in fakery and privilege vis-à-vis homosexual men (the classic oddities of older times—not a female whore, but not a straight man, either). As Thomas Christensen writes in the introduction to the Mercury House edition of Walpole’s Hieroglyphic Tales (1993):

[Horace Walpole] lived (comfortably, thanks to a variety of sinecures—his father, Robert, had been prime minister of England under King George the 1st) in a house on the banks of the Thames near Twickenham; he called the house Strawberry Hill and made it into “a little Gothic castle” decked out with fake pinnacles, battlements, ornamental facades, and gargoyles of lath and plaster and crammed to overflowing with all manner of antiquities, curiosities, and objets d’art. Toward the end of his life and for some time thereafter (at least until a famous auction of its contents in 1842), Strawberry Hill was a tourist attraction. According to his memorandum book, Walpole personally ushered some four thousand visitors through it (complaining all the while of the inconvenience). Often criticized as a cheap, slipshod sham, it has also been lauded as a “subjunctive” edifice, an “architecture of the ‘as if,'” and as a creation that overturns conventional “rigid and stately rules of architecture.” […]

He had a diabolical (and at times rather infantile) sense of humor, demonstrated in his passing off The Castle of Otranto as a translation from the Italian and in the evil comedy of one of the Hieroglyphic Tales, “The Peach in Brandy.” He once faked a letter to Jean-Jacques Rousseau that purported to be from the King of Prussia, precipitating a heated public dispute in which Rousseau, Jacob Grimm, and others participated (source).

Both a perpetual bachelor and interior decorator (two homosexual classics) living in a “castle” named after fruit and filled with sexual predators and prey-like damsels who run and hide, there’s also the campy rape play that Walpole privately plays in, quite literally in a poem written in blank verse (a la Milton’s Paradise Lost):

Besides The Castle of Otranto, the other major literary work Walpole published during his lifetime was his tragedy in blank (at first I inadvertently wrote black) verse, The Mysterious Mother. Byron admired it, calling it “a tragedy of the highest order, and not a puling love-play.” It concerns a young man who, through a series of mistaken identities and unfortunate misunderstandings (no fault of his own), ends up marrying the daughter he has fathered by his mother (a bewildering set of relationships outdoing Bill Wyman). Dorothy Stuart, always charmingly sympathetic to Walpole, remarks, “It is, indeed, a little curious that his imagination—though in The Castle of Otranto he had toyed with the theme of incest—should have been allured by a story so sombre and so revolting.” In a contemporaneous review (1797), William Taylor rhapsodized that the play “has attained an excellence nearly unimpeachable” and that it “may fitly be compared with the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles.” Few modern readers would value it quite so highly (ibid.).

Unlike Shakspeare (who was debatably queer) writing and publishing Titus Andronicus as the gay man’s parody of Gothic stereotypes and theatrical violence (cannibalism, torture, murder and rape), Walpole never published The Mysterious Mother while he was alive. In fact, he arranged for it to be published once he was dead.

(artist: Pierre Subleyras)

Given the crime of sodomy that would have overhung Walpole, it might help to consider that Walpole was the man of privilege vamping it up in his own little, ambiguously gay “rape” castle; i.e., a person of means/property (a man) who didn’t quite fit in and was reclaiming the stereotypes of past centuries to literally reinvent the cultural imaginary known as “Gothic” through his lifestyle, home, and refusal to wed:

Though Walpole had a penchant for the company of old ladies and un­marriageable or disgraced noblewomen, he evaded matrimony, remaining to his death aged 79 what used to be called a confirmed bachelor. Instead he drew about him a collection of highly cultured “dear friends”—men of sensitive taste but lesser background, who shared his obsessions. Walpole had an especially fraught and jealous relationship with Thomas Gray, of the famous “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” whom he met at Eton and took with him on his European tour.

Was Walpole gay? Is Strawberry Hill the manifestation of a gay aesthetic? The questions linger, even though searching for something akin to a modern homosexual identity is fruitless. Homosexual acts were criminal—sodomy was a capital offense—but virile men were known to take lovers of both sexes, while effeminate manners were seen as a Frenchified heterosexual weakness. Walpole’s biographers have often considered him effeminate and asexual, or at most passively homosexual (source: Amanda Vickery’s “Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill,” 2010).

Passively homosexual. Take note of that. It really doesn’t matter if Walpole called himself gay or not; the markers for what would be considered gay now in relation to Gothic poetics were certainly present back then: making fun of white married people through a reinvented Gothic style.

Likewise, Walpole’s upper-middle-class inheritance was the breaking of the mold; i.e., according to a counterfeit that, if not openly endorsed by him for colonial purposes, went on to be appropriated by the state’s usual operations (the process of abjection). However, the fact remains that some men of privilege[16] chose to be more openly queer in their campiness, and that’s what I want to examine next before applying that to our own Gothic-Communist poetics. For fear of colonial guilt weighing on them in the shadow of colonial horrors yet unspoken, a tremendous doom of utter retribution plagues colonizer brains; regardless of the occupation, then, invention is the means of the colonized to bleed their occupiers dry during asymmetrical warfare, converting them to our cause or sending them as Roman fools into utter panic and retreat for fear of the colonial victim’s day of reckoning (at home, abroad or both).

This includes camp. Remember from Volume Zero how we discussed camping the canon, vis-à-vis Colin Broadmoor’s examination of Matthew Lewis:

The Monk represents Lewis’s personal struggle against the sexual politics and constraints of the English literary tradition. As Michel Foucault observed in The History of Sexuality vol. I, sexuality-as-identity did not really exist as a cultural concept throughout most of the eighteenth century. However, by the time of Lewis’s birth those social and legal constructions of sexuality were shifting:

As defined by the ancient civil or Canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life… Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.

This transition at the turn of the 19th century from act-as-homosexual to person-as-homosexual was preceded by a dramatic increase in homophobic violence perpetrated by the state. In the British civil system, sex between men first became a capital offense with the promulgation of the tastefully-named Buggery Act of 1533. For 200 years, the law was rarely enforced—though, when it was, authorities staged it as a spectacle of violence for public entertainment and social control. Victims of the law were ritually humiliated and then murdered in an extravagant and merciless display of state power. Around the middle of the 18th century, the British state initiated a long-running pogrom aimed specifically against gay men that exploded during the decades of The Monk‘s original release. As Louis Compton records in Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England: “By 1806 the number of executions had risen to an average of two a year and remained there for three decades, though executions for every other capital offense decreased dramatically.” In the 1790s, when Lewis was writing The Monk, judicial anti-homosexual persecution was at its height in England. Gangs of undercover police officers from anti-homosexual task forces infiltrated queer spaces, sending scores of gay men to the gallows or pillory and creating a palpable sense of paranoia throughout England’s underground LGBT communities (source).

Whereas Walpole was born under queerness as privately aristocratic, Matthew Lewis represented a nigh-singular form of outspoken, active queerness when the dialog hadn’t really caught up. So he did what weird nerds like Shakespeare and Walpole before him did: he used the iconoclastic language of the imaginary past to communicate queerness through the Gothic mode; i.e., from his own imaginary dark castles as highly structured and deliberate forms of theatrical, psychosexual power exchange, but also through his considerable material advantage that let him devise these fantasies as sex-positive, socio-political education devices: he was a legislator and chose to stand by his work very publicly (as Coleridge will never let us forget, the straight man pouncing on the gay man to gag him).

The takeaway is that when drafted by queer creators now, the same imaginary capsules operate as something to sex-positively revive in the Internet age: through openly xenophilic, emancipatory hauntologies on par with Lewis, but updated for more current socio-political issues; i.e., a queer castle raised in intersectional, solidarized resistance to post-fascist drives towards palingenesis (the latter coercively romanticizing “a new dark age” under the same-old oscillations: the return of the Gothic castle as a xenophobic printing house). This includes our lair-like abodes, but also ourselves as monsters who identify as part of the struggle—to exist, but also to actively fight back using revolutionary cryptonymy during ludo-Gothic BDSM to camp canon’s idea of what monsters are “supposed” to represent; i.e., by detaching ourselves from the usual synonymizing of queerness with rape, incest and murder that we’re called out for by straight folk in their own canon: to, as our thesis describes, “make it gay” in ways that will terrify them anyways, often in animalistic, warlike language (thanks to Capitalist Realism, we are canonically viewed as the end of the world no matter what).

In resistance to canon, we’re taking the self-fashioning logic of Walpole and Lewis back from the Western tradition of Gothic forgeries; i.e., by literally forging our own lies in service to workers in ways those men lacked the means (or perspective) to fully grasp. Our aim in doing so is to give ourselves a campy space to live, work and thrive, but also challenge the state through increasingly iconoclastic variations of revolutionary cryptonymy that speak to our animalized traumas in playful ways that nevertheless invoke the open language of class/culture war and resistance—to turn the tables on our captors, reversing the role of hunter and hunted through predator-prey aesthetics:

(exhibit 10c2: Artist, top-left: Undead Clown; top-right: Defiant Drills, commissioned by Barnowlren; bottom-left and -right: Bay’s fursona, by Tofu Froth and Buns Like a Truck. Gothic-Communist struggle is defined in its poetic context—of whom commissioned the artist and why—as something that is challenged during paratextual dialogs concerning the pieces and what they stand for or rather, what they should stand for. For example, in posting his piece, “hit them nazi punks” in 2020, Undead Clown writes, 

largely inspired by CRASHprez’s song “Fascists Don’t Cry” which is a really great song lmao

but ya imma knock ya out if you come up to me spoutin white supremacist or transphobic shit
human rights aint up for debate 

to which this conversation ensued [if the font is too small, refer to the conversation itself on FurAffinity.net]:

The creation of art doesn’t sit within a vacuum; it is always political, caught between dialectical-material forces during oppositional praxis.)

Canonical Gothic poetics are not just encouraged, but enforced by Capitalism’s global system of exploitation through its predatory monopoly on socio-material conditions to portray animalistic violence with, but also “legitimate” Gothic fictions and terror dialogs. As we shall see moving forward, these factors must be challenged during uphill battles waged by proletarian counterterrorists who remain critical of the elite in all their forms—the state, but also proponents of the state who uphold its monopolies in bad faith; e.g., Volume Two’s examination of the history of vampirism through intellectuals like Foucault, whose own rose-tinted view of the medieval world and its bucolic pleasures enabled him to exploit his own students, thus lend queerness a bad reputation. It’s possible to be a counterterrorist without being a bigot or a sex pest, which ludo-Gothic BDSM must aspire to.

If you might have already noticed, the fascist pageantry of “European” beauty standards becomes something to advertise amid partial state collapse through a restructuring of state power towards a more “medieval” approach that hunts state enemies to extinction in service of profit dressed up in Gothic language (all non-European standards having been totally genocided or relegated to a culturally-endangered status by now). Apart from the unironic Gothic castle, this also includes legislative preparations made well ahead of time by those in power (from SCOTUS to other areas of the world accreting from global US hegemony):

• lowering the age of consent (which often coincides with a fascist/medieval presence—e.g., the age of consent in Japan is 13. However, the age of consent is 20 in South Korea, a historically fascist government under Ilminism that was challenged with the rise of the K-pop music that, despite being monopolized by the Korean government through slave contracts, works as a limited, “bougie/consumer-based” counterculture to fight fascism at the nation-state level; source: Jake Hall’s “From Kim Jong-Un to Trolling Trump: K-Pop Has Always Been Political,” 2020)

• anti-gay/anti-sodomy laws
• anti-trans legislation Anya Zoledziowski’s “Anti-Trans Bills Are Sweeping Across the US With Alarming Speed” (2023)
• prohibiting sex education and prophylactics
• revoking Roe v. Wade to reintroduce anti-abortion laws

Fascism leans towards the openly religious/occult, whereas neoliberalism tends to keep religion out-of-sight but close by—i.e., “separate or not, church and state go hand-in-hand,” Christofascism being the result. In the process, fear and dogma slowly replace good, proletarian education—with rings, for example, becoming what they historically have always been: collars of compelled bondage/sanctioned sex with fascist, even incestuous elements.

Such a castle’s nightmarish presence denotes potential mayhem tied to one’s habitat; i.e., through the liminal hauntology of war colonizing nature and those tied to nature. When such a castle appears, it is time to be afraid; the colonial harvest is at hand. Yet, precisely because the state does not hold a monopoly over violence, terror and morphological expression, a demon or castle needn’t spell our end; it can represent our sole means of attack, reclaiming said poetics’ endless inventiveness to turn colonizer fears back into their hopelessly scared brains with counterterror. Adjacent to more classic methods of colonial upheaval, the terrifying power of Gothic poetics can serve our counterterrorist ends through the Six Doubles (of which this subchapter has focused on revolutionary cryptonymy).

So before we proceed onto challenging the state, camping its canon with our own monsters and castles’ ludo-Gothic BDSM, it behooves us to further examine state-sanctioned variations of such tortured bargains; i.e., complicit cryptonymy as illustrated by unironic rings, collars and other visible BDSM implements of undead bondage relayed within the Gothic mode, even if the author tries to distance themselves from all of these things.

To that, we’ll be taking Tolkien to task once more. Onto “Concerning Rings, BDSM and Vampires“!

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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] “Demon BDSM” is essentially what I call “BDSM with monsters” (even though “demon” is only one class of monster, their class specializes in forbidden knowledge and power exchange); “ludo-Gothic BDSM” stresses the playful, campy nature of iconoclastic BDSM when using ironic Gothic poetics and performance, including not just demons but also animal language (e.g., puppy play) and undead components; re: “rape play” but also labor exchange in half-real, cryptomimetic forms.

[2] Versus simply material conditions; society and its materials overlap in ways that need to be accounted for beyond Marx’s centuries-old theories when synthesizing praxis ourselves.

[3] Meaning “pertaining to stories of high imagination”; re: Walpole.

[4] Death by boredom is not the Gothic style, and so many things relate to BDSM through the Gothic mode as ours to reclaim. To that, here’s an extended taste of things to come, which the chapter after this one will list more completely in relation to the rest of the book: madness, hysteria and persecution mania; zombies and other walking dead, leeches and parasites (vampires); mad science, cyborgs and composite bodies; tricksters, deadly games, puzzles and fatal riddles; black knights (fascists) and false protectors, confessors, penitents, lovers and friends; ambushes, betrayals, and deadly secrets; heists and blackmail, robbery and destruction; fatal attraction and involuntary repulsion; terminal rejection, poison and assassins; riots and mayhem, rebellion and strife; haunting melodies and seductive dances; sirens, succubae, and oracles; clones and shapeshifters; rapists and reapers, brothels and whores, rogues and cavaliers; mutants and executioners, butchers and livestock; jokers and madmen; heroes, cowards, victims, and villains—monsters and maidens and things in between; black vows, forsaken oaths, dire revenge and faithless traitors; lost legends, heavy time, open sadness and secret pain; doppelgangers and fatal portraits; wild animals and talking beasts (and other beings of nature); dreams and nightmares, witchcraft and black magic; ancient monarchs, otherworldly cathedrals, Numinous forces, and lumbering terrors; blood, gore and bodily dismemberment; asylums, prisons, and barbaric surgery and medicine; psychological torture, gaslighting and mind games; cells, crypts and live burial; drugs and incapacitation, shaken spirits, shattered dreams, lost hopes and flagging courage; doom, despair and dread; decay and death, graveyards and rot; mazes and labyrinths, dungeons and traps; giant, open spaces, claustrophobic tombs, shameful closets and endless darkness; perpetual rain, lightning, wind and fog; ignominious death, “mortification of the flesh” and exquisite torture (unironic otherwise). Truly, the Gothic mode is endless in terms of its depth, degree and flavor(s) of peril. And it’s ours for the taking.

[5] I.e., “the Straights aren’t alright,” or Man Box culture from a strictly xenophobic and harmful xenophilic perspective. If you want to know the targets of the status quo, just look at a bigoted person; they’d scared of/angry at pretty much everything (re: Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the Gothic mode); e.g., Lovecraft’s xenophobia or Tolkien’s arachnophobia, etc. Revolutionary cryptonymy helps bring out those hiding in bad faith using shared, mask-like monster language that also intimates, interrogates and addresses state trauma.

[6] Take it from me, such projects—regardless of their size—can ease tremendous suffering.

[7] Videogames are endemic to (and incredibly common inside) neoliberal Capitalism as having spawned the majority of them on a franchised level; i.e., its Cartesian, monomorphic prescriptions yielding heteronormative clichés through popular iterations; e.g., Samus Aran’s missiles and Mother Brain’s caves in Metroid (see: “War Vaginas: Phallic Women, Vaginal Spaces and Archaic Mothers in Metroid,” 2021).

[8] Isolation and enforcement of medievalized divisions lead to alienation from nature, but also the human body in all its forms. For example, the monk from Matthew Lewis’ titular novel didn’t know the difference between men and women: “reported to be so strict an observer of Chastity, that He knows not in what consists the difference of Man and Woman” (source). To this, Lewis—a gay man—was effectively making fun of weird, heterosexual, virgin nerds isolated and educated by heteronormative canon to abuse those around them.

[9] Missionary is common for several reasons. Apart from colonial enforcement through literal missionary work (with the Church telling colonized populations to fuck in a male-dominant way because God [thus the state] approves of it), missionary position is also fairly easy to perform (though doggy is easier); it’s also hypercanonical, thus ubiquitous within paratextual “instruction” documents. To be fair, there’s nothing wrong with having sex in this position, any more than having standard/non-standard bodies or genders are; the issue lies in violent prescription through a settler-colonial binary that leads to genocide on every possible register/format: those different than normal are punished, including for how they fuck unlike missionaries, but also the occupying armies that accompany the Church (and invading nation-state) into colonial territories.

[10] Male masturbation is generally described by cis-het men in violent, war-like, monstrous colonizer language (with the canonical cumshot serving as a “claiming ritual,” as illustrated by this lovely 2002 Robin Williams skit). Also, don’t mistake me; sex takes work to be fun, but it should be non-violent fun, not a brutal, numbing chore! And yes, “anger sex” can be intense, but it should still be safe and controlled, with the appropriate aftercare post-fuck; otherwise, it’s toxic (speaking from experience on this one, but we’ll get to that).

[11] The aggregation of state power happens between the private interests of the ruling elite and nation-state governments (and proponents) acting in concert. The exact ways this historically unfolded—under laissez-faire Capitalism versus the World Wars, Embedded Liberalism and Bretton Woods, or the rise of neoliberalism in 1979—is largely differentiated by the elite’s ability to crackdown against rebelling parties. In the mid-20th century onwards, a popular method of quelling potential rebellion are the bourgeois trifectas: the CIA (secret agents), strategic bombing (a misleading term used to disguise the escalation and quantity of dropped ordinance) and trade sanctions, aka “soft power” (a misleading term, as soft power and economic strength historically fare better against hard power/total war than the other way around, but until recently couldn’t be waged the way the US does now through global US hegemony/Capitalist Realism). In other words, the recipient of this shared animus is a common enemy to the elite, but also their servants (official police agents and de facto cops/fascist vigilantes) defending capital: revolting slaves, but also workers in general according to Communism as echoed after the Civil Rights Movement as engaged by women and non-whites, but also the LGBTQ and religious minorities working in intersectional solidarity. There’s nothing the state fears more.

(artist: Justin Gerard)

This often conveys in fantasy canon by fearful Pygmalions. Tolkien, for example, framed the dialectical-material arrangement of what was WW1 quickly becoming WW2 in the good-vs-evil animal language he used to gentrify war on his refrain (the treasure map); i.e., the goblins, an anti-Semitic symbol merged with fascism (dubiously conflated by Tolkien) and “evil animals/corrupt nature” versus Everyone Else fighting for “good nature” in his famous Battle of the Five Armies (above). Meanwhile, Cameron’s refrain (the shooter) depicted the barbarian horde as xenomorphic “space bugs,” vis-à-vis Starship Troopers (1959), whereas The Simpsons joked, “I’m under attack by Nazi-Communists!” All of these encapsulate American centrism and babyface dialog quite well through Capitalist Realism: the fight is always an exchange between the establishment and the unruly mob turned undead, demonic, and wild; i.e., Nazis and Communists threatening the West’s symbolic domination of nature. The code for military industry and propaganda becomes ludic, neat and lucrative (videogames), but also sacred unto itself; those who challenge it will be gatekept and kettled until they change their tune.

[12] The didactic nature of Gothic stories would have, in the medieval tradition, fixated on deadly sins and emotions like pride and lust tied to sexuality as heavily gendered.

[13] For a videoludic example of gradient xenophobia in relation to zombies, consider the excellent (and lengthy) “A Thorough Look at Resident Evil” (2022) by Noah Caldwell-Gervais. The franchise’s treatment of zombies varies per setting. However, released over time, Capcom’s use of zombies reflects displaced versions of real-world, geopolitical attitudes about places demonized by Capitalism, but also exploited like chattel; e.g., Eastern Europe and Africa, in Resident Evil 4 and 5 (2005 and 2009). They and corporations like them purposefully link cultural anxieties to undead bodies that are summoned up and swiftly and shot for profit.

[14] Godzilla, in Japanese, is Gojira, which literally translates to “gorilla whale”; but also, the vast majority of kaiju are either animals or robot animals. As a sidenote, they represent state shift of a particular kind: giant titans of the repressed natural world rising up in the face of human arrogance and interference; e.g., Studio Ghibli’s enraged forest demons in Princess Mononoke (1997) or Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). Versus a Christofascist spiraling towards rapture through Capitalist Realism, the presence of such monsters (and their hellishly alien, forest-like homes) invite human viewers to recognize a collective erring of humanity and neglected responsibility as stewards of the Earth, which will survive after we kill ourselves off during military optimism (fighting everything, including nature, as an abject threat to capitalist hegemony).

[15] A similar tactic to many post-Miltonian works, whose Satanic poetics/darkness becomes blind towards critiquing patriarchal institutions. For example, Hazbin Hotel (2024) doesn’t even mention God, instead treating good and evil as essential, tediously and unnecessarily reformed by a white “nepo baby” hotel (funded by a serial killer, no less). Worse, her iconoclastic parents, Satan and Lilith, have been chained to the nuclear family unit as bourgeois. The white princess’ plan does suck, so her plight—of people not liking her stupid, small-minded idea—is an entirely unsympathetic one built on privilege, not rebellion. Its real-life author’s hard-fought success is likewise a thoroughly gross compromise with a giant mega-company churning out blind, Rocky-Horror-style pastiche. Like Tolkien’s sylvan trees, the author canonizes camp, regressing towards outmoded debates and harmful caricatures (e.g., Angel Dust as the reprobate queer sex worker) while profiting off them.

[16] The queerness of someone would have been permitted insofar as they were granted an exception as a person of means; e.g., a political, general or aristocrat of some kind wouldn’t be taken to task for refusing to follow the canonical laws… provided they didn’t “pull an Oscar Wilde” and make their activities open to the public. For example, as Brent Pickett of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy writes on homosexuality and the ancient world (which involves the canonical codes we’re addressing in the modern world through reimagined forms), “Some persons were noted for their exclusive interests in persons of one gender. For example, Alexander the Great and the founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium, were known for their exclusive interest in boys and other men. Such persons, however, are generally portrayed as the exception. […] Given that only free men had full status, women and male slaves were not problematic sexual partners. Sex between freemen, however, was problematic for status” (source, 2020).

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.

An Uphill Battle (with the Sun in Your Eyes): Operational Difficulties and Revolutionary Cryptonymy

“Only fools buck the tiger. The odds are all on the house!”

—Doc Holiday, Tombstone (1993)

Picking up where “Mission Statement and Remediating Modern-day ‘Rome’” left off…

This chapter concerns the operational difficulties that emerge during oppositional praxis from a predominantly theoretical standpoint; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm. It divides into three parts.

• Part one divides into three pieces:

• The intro (included in this post) introduces the problem of state monopolies through violence, terror and morphological expression, and how to fight back as a state victim through revolutionary cryptonymy by using animalized Gothic poetics.
• “Predators“ (included in this post) considers the state’s monopoly of violence (and terror) as told through its animalized soldiers, but also their bodies as things if not depicted in heteronormative ways, then policed as such; i.e., by the Amazon and similar monstrous-feminine entities as relayed in ways that generally “corrupt” and triangulate against/prey on other minorities.
• “Prey“ considers those who hide like, and manifest as, animals in the shadow of unironic Gothic castles (whose initial formation and campy subversion we will also examine, vis-à-vis Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis).

• Part two concerns arrangements of power that are shared and worn: namely rings and collars of the Tolkien-esque sort, and in various roleplay settings but especially the Gothic castle and vampirism as something to summon and evoke.
• Part three takes these praxial factors and considers them in relation to the state’s authored stupidities; i.e., as things to challenge through our own Gothic poetics’ creative successes when interrogating trauma ourselves.

A small (three-page) 2025 addendum: Whereas “The Nation-State” discussed the trifectas of capital, here we get into the uphill battle of monopolies; i.e., challenging profit through the whore’s revenge with ludo-Gothic BDSM during the dialectic of the alien reclaiming such things. Such abstractions are basically Communism and Capitalism in small, whose theatrical subversions will be seen/treated by cops as “violent” (terrorism) no matter how we frame them. And frame them we must, in order to survive; re: the state preys on us by pimping us, and silence is genocide!

So be on your guard, but use the Aegis to protect you and yours from bad actors infiltrating your ranks; i.e., by speaking out behind cryptonymic buffers that reflect the enemy’s bad-faith falsehoods back at them! To hug the Medusa (and her Communist palliative Numinous), we must embrace the “woke” elements that Gothic (and its modular poetics and hermeneutics) praxially entail; e.g., as John the Duncan argues in “Universalism & The Anti-Woke” (2025), “Rather than celebrate the death of woke, I say we revive and herald it” (source); re: to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness, mid-camp. “To critique power, you must go where it is” inside and outside of workers, on and offstage; re: when the Man comes around (to pimp you), show him (and his token servants) your Aegis and its holistic pedagogy of the oppressed giving such things shape: during asymmetrical warfare pushing for universal liberation that walks away from Omelas together (no appeasing the colonizer through token normativities gentrifying and decaying into themselves)!

(ibid.)

As such, Gothic push-pull (oscillation) plays with the natural “fuzziness” of human language; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: Gothic Communism is a holistic discipline that takes everything dualistically into account: mid-liminal-expression while arbitrating dialectical-material scrutiny in favor of praxial catharsis (and its pro-nature/-nature synthesis working in opposition to state doubles). Whatever we make, they will double, but in doing so must contend with our cryptonymy reversing abjection versus theirs at the same time! Monopolies are a myth!

By extension, any counterfeit the state authors—meaning whatever dark fens or temples of confusion they erect during the liminal hauntology of war and its chronotopes (re: Metroidvania and similar structures embodied by different whorish performers)—we will haunt; i.e., lurking on its half-real, spectral surfaces both inside-outside the decaying and tremendous obscurity (and consequently untapped power) of its labyrinthine thresholds (next page)! The Gothic is writ in decay and parsed through dialectical-material scrutiny (re: flow determines function, not aesthetics), and no one group can monopolize the aesthetic (and function) of the violence, terror and monsters home to such things.

This, whereas capital and its traitors (cops) alienate and sexualize everything for profit, we whores do so in praxial opposition; i.e., while undermining Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and setter colonialism: to liberate universally during intersectional solidarity using preferential code (e.g., dark gentle mommy dommes, below)—our Numinous castles in the flesh! Witness and worship what you see, but also, learn from it to recultivate the Wisdom of the Ancients by anisotropically camping the canon: abandon all hope, all ye who enter here! Then calculate whatever risks unfold to speak idiosyncratically through dualistic struggle; i.e., by healing from rape together through relative privilege and oppression, both being simultaneously foreign and familiar to both sides differently through stolen, repurposed language (we’ll unpack “similarity amid difference” and rape play more during the manifesto postscript, “Healing from Rape”)!

(model and artist: Vera Dominus and Persephone van der Waard)

Power lies in performance, and everyone loves the whore; per our pedagogy of the oppressed, we survivors of rape will make rapists (which cops are) fear us and our paradoxical chambers (of Mazarbul or otherwise)—i.e., in ways they already do, but which we will control to our advantage. . As the Archaic Mother haunting the state’s profit motive, then, Medusa cannot be killed; she—thus we as her little offshoots serving each other through a veneer of domination set loose upon the Earth—have evolved to divide in unity (stochastic counterterrorism versus state terror), her head still a part of the body and land/residence it’s cut from. Breaking state monopolies to splinter Capitalist Realism on our backsides, so do workers use whatever’s on hand to summon the Big Whore: to conjure up a post-scarcity world inside the chronotope in the flesh and its pre-capitalist language (our overgrown, castle-like peaches, above)! Hell is our home!

Labor back, land back; violence, terror and monsters back—and all during revolutionary cryptonymy reversing abjection (thus its monopolies): nature as monstrous-feminine sitting on capital with a colossal Ozymandian dumper! To introduce an element of play over something is to camp it; i.e., to give control over canon by playing with it, placing it in quotes; e.g., “rape” and similar avenger language surrounding the harm such play sits adjacent to. That is our apocalypse/deal with the devil, trading in the subversive power of sin—a dark, uneven, forbidden force whose Great (fungal[1] butt) Pirate Queen and her “booty” during ludo-Gothic BDSM the state and its proponents can never fully harvest and ingest, thus pimp and police: through perfidious copies turned against us and our dark poetry’s cryptomimesis (the echo of trauma as camouflage during a war of deception through the Gothic  language of sex and force playing out, on and offstage)! Her power is naked, clothed or not—a dark threat to tease out paradoxical joys and terrors (re: “Psychosexual Martyrdom“)!

(artist: Lady Melamori)

To it, oppositional praxis yields a two-way war of mirrors, and Medusa always fucks back to corrupt such implements; i.e., by punching up from Hell to turn the monomyth into a Promethean Quest that empowers the chattelized: through the usual languages of persecution that Medusa has embodied out of the Archaic Period into the West’s own self-dug graveyard! Along with reclaimed sodomy and blood libel, witch hunts will wither our enemies, but also—as this volume shall explore—the avenger dialectic of Amazons and knights in animalized predator/prey language!

An Uphill Battle, part one: “Predators and Prey,” or Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression

And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on every living creature on the earth, every bird of the air, every creature that crawls on the ground, and all the fish of the sea. They are delivered into your hand. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things.”

—Genesis 9, “The Covenant of the Rainbow” (c. 400 BC)

“If you became a shogun, there’d be nothing but devils in this world!” said Jubei Kibagami, criticizing Genma Himuro, his immortal foe in Ninja Scroll (1993) for being the worst-of-the-worst (and in the warring-states period, that’s really saying something). Jubei wasn’t a samurai, you see; he was a ronin. Freed from Japan’s class structure, ronin were bereft of materials and land—like Jesus, but more brutal. In the tradition of the Western genre, Jubei retools his formidable warrior skills to help those less privileged than himself: impoverished small clans, but also women. He’s the tyranny of evil men trying to be the shepherd, a bad motherfucker who chooses not to be a dick like Genma does. Unlike Jubei, Genma is a class traitor and lying sadist who only cares about gold as a means to an end: achieving his police state by becoming the “Shogun of the Dark,” ruling through menticidal waves of terror (re: Meerloo) and violence from the shadows. Hell is monopolized by the state and summoned anew, generally through power structures like castles.

This section explores Ninja Scroll—a film which “Healing from Rape” will return to, but also “Demons and Dealing with Them” from the Demon Module. —Perse, 4/6/2025

A fog on the brain, this darkness harbors state monopolies of violence, terror and morphological expression that apologize for police brutality in the present, regressing towards ever more antiquated[2] (and fearsome) forms amid new invasions; i.e., through a fatal nostalgia that consigns the worker mindset to all the usual (and ignominious) dooms within capital’s leveraging and structuring of power inside itself: rape, torture and death while systemic racism (and other aspects of Cartesian dualism) invade the imaginary past (having never existed in the historical medieval period at a systemic level). All sit inside a planned, apocalyptic structure to return to greatness with, one filled with the brutal enactors of state abuse built around the traditional sites of regeneration for state agents—castles and knights being classic BDSM devices expressed through the cryptonymy mechanism linked to abjection.

To that, Genma uses endless treachery and lies during the liminal hauntology of war (the summoning of the reimagined Gothic castle and its hellish abuses as things to move through) to recruits greedy warlords to him—the bourgeois devils Jubei warns about during their final duel. In the end, Jubei cannot kill Genma, so he buries him alive—trapping his savage nemesis inside a golden prison of his own design: “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” As this subchapter will establish, the medieval character of state violence and terror cannot be destroyed during morphological expression, only subverted or contained through linguo-material “traps” we put into motion during revolutionary cryptonomy as an essential means of counterterrorist liberation; i.e., by throwing the setter-colonial character of heteronormativity into dispute through a rebellious medieval, postcolonial imaginary. Taking Hell back while doubling its colonial forms.

This subchapter primarily considers the theory, revolutionary cryptonymy, through morphological[3] expression when using animalized Gothic aesthetics (with undead and demonic elements too, of course). To that, I want to quote a snippet from our thesis volume that will prove germane as we proceed:

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

So when I say “animalized” vis-à-vis Gothic aesthetics, this is predominantly what I mean and primarily what we will inspect in parts one and two of this subchapter. Before those begin, I want spend the next ten pages introducing you to some important concepts on which our investigations are founded.

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

The resultant middle ground of this duality grants words like “demon,” “zombie,” or “animal” a double purpose for which the rest of the subchapter is divided: predator and prey. As we shall see, either classification works as an insult or compliment depending on who’s using them, where and why. The fact remains, the differences between them are not clear-cut, especially during medieval expression as something to revive during oppositional praxis. As such, we also need to remember and revisit an idea from my thesis regarding animals and the medieval: “Out of medieval discourse, domesticated animals are also gendered in a sexualized, monstrous sense; i.e., ‘The Miller’s Tale’ from The Canterbury Tales (1392).” Domestication invokes a sense of the wild that is reclaimed by state forces to serve the profit motive, which rebellious agents must challenge and reclaim while being animalized. The larger struggle involving animalization constitutes an uphill battle that obscures one’s vision in the same crowded sphere. Inside it, space and time become a violent circle, one where endless war over state nostalgia constitutes ongoing dialectical-material struggles to keep with, or break from, current historical materialisms under Capitalist Realism: state violence dressed up as dated “protection/shelter” during our aforementioned emotional turmoil (stemming from criminogenic conditions; i.e., manufactured shortages, crisis and competition tied to images of the decaying fortress and its unholy armies).

While we’ll only be introducing revolutionary cryptonymy in this subchapter, it remains an utterly vital aspect of proletarian praxis—one that challenges state monopolies through the very things they try to control: morphological expression through monstrous and heroic performance, but especially animalized, hauntological examples like the Amazon or knight, as well as the more famously operatic, feudal sites of sexual danger to which they represent and/or navigate—Gothic castles as killing grounds for a state predator’s prey-like designations. To that, this subchapter considers how revolutionary cryptonymy invokes liminal expression as a cosmetic, conspicuous means of useful disguise within state monopolies of violence, terror and in connection to those dated things, bodily expression. Together on antiquated stages, the deliberate use of dated masks, costumes, props and other performative elements hide activism’s sorties imperfectly within the trauma of canonical Gothic language and its complicated territories of expression; i.e., as a means of rebellious camouflage, useful for blending in and revealing the bad-faith nature of state proponents in shared, thus policed, spaces and dialogs. On said stage, reactionaries and moderates wear masks to hide themselves in common monstrous language; but when they respond to our Athena’s Aegis having doubled their mask, said mask slips from outrage defending state monopolies within nerd culture.

Consider the hero we just mentioned, Jubei. He’s a larger-than-life character whose heroic image appeals to our aims as something to interpret away from canonical forces. Doing so unfolds during warring interpretations of the character as a matter of discourse that is not set; i.e., one that yields revolutionary cryptonymy precisely when our enemies disagree with us about the character’s mythical applications. Although Jubei amounts to the invincible class ally as mythical in function, his larger-than-life status represents a particular kind of splendid lie: the redirection of brutal, animalistic force away from state targets, which the state will thoroughly abhor and, more to the point, complain about in some shape or form. So while Jubei is terrifyingly violent, iconoclastic interpretations of the character emphasize how soldiers must learn to turn their weapons away from the state’s monopoly of violence, precisely because state proponents will openly hate it (thus out themselves as class traitors).

Violence, terror and sexuality converge during these exchanges. Weber’s maxim states “a state holds a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence within its territory, meaning that violence perpetrated by other actors is illegitimate” (source). Combined with Asprey’s paradox of terror and Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the Gothic mode, the monopoly of violence is sacred to state defenders; i.e., Western canon maintains its monopolies in hauntological perpetuity by abjecting “terrorists” as prey to hunt and kill, which we must reverse-abject during guerrilla, asymmetrical maneuvers. We must, because the ghost of the counterfeit is the Gothic lie of state sovereignty presented as a convincing or at least consistent fake; e.g., Tolkien or Cameron’s refrain promoting or otherwise assisting fascist palingenesis to essentialize heteronormativity’s sexual-gender dimorphism assisted by centrist forces; i.e., through forceful, toxic compulsion—often physically but certainly mentally as well—relayed by polite and impolite actors. This is the sticking point where we can incense them to our benefit, doing so on and offstage.

Outing bad actors is vital. Whether reactionary or moderate, neoliberalism and fascism repeatedly attempt to monopolize terror (which Asprey notes is impossible for any one agency to achieve) and by extension Weber’s aforementioned monopoly of violence. Said monopolies automatically place state targets inside Agamben’s state of exception, bombarding them with waves of terror with a human face; i.e., calling class/culture activists “terrorists” vis-à-vis Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the canonical Gothic mode: labor is a zombie horde to shoot (more on this in Volume Two) or dark nation to bomb (exterminate, loot and enslave) through the delivery of said payloads as a business of wider horrors intimated by fantastical stories (e.g., alien invasion scenarios standing in for imperialist powers). As such, it really doesn’t matter if such totalities can be practically implemented long-term (efficient profit guarantees that colonies die young), merely that the structure utilizing their apocalyptic, rapacious rhetoric argues towards total power for the elite through the bourgeois trifectas.

As Richard Overy writes in The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia (2004), “‘Totalitarian’ does not mean that they were ‘total’ parties, either all-inclusive or wielding complete power; it means they were concerned with the ‘totality’ of the societies in which they worked.” This goes well beyond the Nazi or Russian governments he had in mind, and applies to the elite (and any nation-state they operate from) controlling worker bodies through force. It’s literally how they organize power according to Gothic poetics: service to the profit motive through morphological expression as heteronormative. Power and materials go hand-in-hand, then, as does the propaganda associated with them as something to cryptonymically “fence” with; i.e., Gothic poetics as the pacifying and subjugating instrument of the elite and (subordinate) middle class, which we turn back at them using Athena’s Aegis: showing them our ass, thus where to “stick it.” Such is ludo-Gothic BDSM.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

What I mean by this is, our socio-political positions are vulnerable and often associated directly with our bodies and identities as things to control through monstrous forms during Gothic theatre. The state’s various religious/secular in-groups associate entirely with exclusive ownership and universal coercion under state territories over state-assigned out-groups: to belong/to have belongings versus to be owned or used by someone or marked for systemic mistreatment, even death if you fail to be useful to them (the paradox being your death is useful to profit). Here, the state of exception provides the most basic function of capital: exploitation and genocide in service of the profit motive; i.e., the state eating its population according to heroic arrangements of theatrical power tied to bodily expression as dimorphically gendered. Cultural markers include the conspicuously/flamboyantly queer person (the token hairdresser with a lisp, the interior decorator, etc) as a sign of monitored compliance but also surveilled rebellion versus the subtle/normal-looking gay person as a kind of ordinary (homonormative) disguise to hide from power in a liminal sense: within thresholds/on the surface of monstrous imagery as conveyed by castles, knights, damsels, and demons, etc, but also the enormous trauma they frequently impart; i.e., through linguistic detachment, thus concealment, by standing in between viewers and the resultant terrors both are connected to—cryptonymy.

At the same time, this liminality also pervades other groups affected by the state during shared performance and language; e.g., women and the conspicuously slutty whore vs “the angel in the streets/devil in the sheets,” etc, as occupying the same danger zones. To avoid the state of exception, thus be preyed upon, imperiled workers cover up but also paradoxically semi-expose themselves when powerful men compel them to—enough to “play along” when one is punished for being sinful/disobedient, while simultaneously hiding one’s mark as a member of the state’s chosen underclass(es). Submission is tiered within levels of punishment and reward provided one obeys their compelled arrangement by presenting as submissive through marketed exchanges:

(artist: Wet Little Sub)

For example, beings forced to identify as women/monstrous-feminine are taught to wear skimpy clothes, thick makeup, animalized props (cat ears, tail butt plugs) and uncomfortable shoes (their revenge being to do it for themselves, of course): designed by men to be canonically diminutive, animalistic, impractical (no pockets) and cutesy/form-fitting—i.e., frilly panties, not pants (which Romeo and his companions make fun of Juliet’s older governess for not having: “A sail! A sail!”). Wearing these de facto, chattelized uniforms, marriage becomes like a prison and prisons—especially American prisons—are synonymous with rape, something to threaten those who steal things that are already owned by the elite, by patriarchal capitalists, by men, and people acting like men: women’s own bodies and identities as “dolled up” in traditionally submissive ways, but also prey-like, monstrous-feminine ways (which extend to tokenized Man Box/”prison sex” mentalities). The paradox lies in how the doll takes its coerced, animal sense of self as something to reclaim; e.g., historically battered housewives would have been expected to wear makeup, but also adopt passive, obedient body language and facial expressions—to cover up their wounds, but also tired eyes from lack of sleep/substance abuse from having to live under an oppressive husband’s roof; i.e., the keeping up of appearances for the husband’s sake, including playing dumb as a survival prey mechanism for the wife’s (a blinder as well as camouflage/a mask). They also would have been expected not to labor for themselves, but adopt Mr. Darcy’s so-called “female accomplishments”: sewing, drawing, piano-playing, sitting down and looking pretty (and being quiet), etc. In short, acting like someone’s obedient pet.

Even when doing so is forbidden, such a concept can be interrogated by re-illustrating the same-old disputes from a different heroic perspective; e.g., a girl who likes how she looks, but not how she’s controlled, decides to run away from home, retreating into the imaginary past (and its oft-animalized[4] forms) to try and find some sense of agency regarding her own body. The Wisdom of the Ancients, then, amounts to a constant, ironic interrogation of the current cultural understanding of the imaginary past; i.e., negotiations with said past through its aesthetics of trauma that guide workers towards a better state of existence by bringing what they find back with them as something to fluster the status quo with: a hellish bodily expression regained from state forces by bonding with nature in Gothic ways. The point of the iconoclastic Hero’s Journey is how the Call to Adventure doesn’t uphold the status quo upon the hero’s return; it subverts and transforms it into a post-scarcity world that isn’t beholden to the same old heteronormative devices and prey-like abuse of animalized workers. Instead, it lives and abides by a different set of tenets: our Six Rs and their underpinning of Gothic theories. They support and maintain each other as part of a larger movement branching off from the original prison. It’s a jail break, insofar as bodies can become prisons for the people inside them when their presentations are compelled, marking them for violent roles: givers or receivers, predator or prey.

Such forays into pretend worlds amount to an imaginary liberation that challenges Capitalist Realism through avatar-like vehicles; i.e., places to put ourselves and occupy for a time, to better learn how to frame our own experiences (and bodies) in a situation of make-believe. But within that invention lies the ability to think critically about our surroundings, thus interpret the stories already present within our lives that shape how we think, thus act. I want to spend the remainder of this subchapter exploring various ways that cryptonymy can rebel against state forces through animalized bodily poetics, including where these poetics originated.

We’ll get to Horace Walpole in a bit. I want start with my own fictions as inspired by an older imaginary past, one built on earlier nerdy stories arguably informed by Walpole and his predecessors’ medieval, animal-centric palimpsests: Madikken the Milkmaid.

(artist: anonymous)

Madikken belongs to a project I originally worked on for someone else, but came to inherit the character after the original author abandoned her (see: exhibit 8b1). Adventuresome and foolish, Madikken’s an eighteen-year-old girl who runs away from her wicked stepfather to find some sense of agency and belonging in a dated imaginary place; i.e., one populated with talking animals and inanimate things comparable to those from The Wizard of Oz (1939) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1605): the immortal Dorothy Gale and her Cowardly Lion, Scarecrow and Tinman; and Hermia’s supernatural, drug-fueled encounter with the forest folk: queer camp playing with the medieval, which is the essence of what I envisioned ludo-Gothic BDSM as.

(exhibit 8a: Artist, left: J-Skipper and J. Scott Campbell; top-right: Robb Vision; bottom-right: John Simmons. Fairytales classically consider a child’s confrontation with an adult world, oscillating between innocent, asexual depictions of idyllic bliss faced with troubling positions of monarchist authority and force: the parental figure, often portrayed as saintly or wicked while compelling the child’s coming-of-age to fulfill a sexually reproductive role within a crumbling homestead[5] [their stern or lax demeanor accounting for a patriarchal slant, of course]. Even so, the same child-like relaxation is afforded to regal agents, enjoying luxurious lives while consuming all manner of mind-altering substances; and party to their tempting celebration are artists taught to capture and appreciate the human form as forever overlapping and partying with adjacent animal forms during antiquated festivals.)

Magic—as a colorfully potent, if trippy means of communicating with forbidden things cut off to us by the modern world—runs rampant in both stories, and served to inspire me in mine when exploring my own closeted self through Madikken. It wasn’t literal drugs, but themes of drugs (what Stuart Mills calls “Acid Communism“; re: “Dark Xenophilia“) dating back to an imaginary antiquity that yield fresh knowledge about one’s place in the world as uncertain. Whereas Baum’s poppy fields famously imply drug use experienced by the Young-at-Heart, Titania’s servants dutifully drug people like Nick Bottom into a sleep-like, suggestible, BDSM state(!)—one housed inside a dark, magical forest filled with animal familiars and inanimate things that get up and move around. It emerged through Shakespeare’s Renaissance-era work as inspired by the likes of Ovid, and carried on towards Walpole, towards Baum, towards us. As such, the animal-Dionysian aesthetic and potential for chaotic change endured, carried into the present as something that grew old when viewed backwards by us as trapped in its own configuration of the imaginary past.

In other words, the past and its animals are not set, but can change profoundly per resurrection as something to reflect upon when reviving them ourselves. Each affords new important lessons about similar policed subjects using Gothic poetics; e.g., sexuality and gender expression conveyed through animalistic, fairytale language. The language is the door to things that, in daily life, often go unsaid. So, just as I learned from and transformed Shakespeare away from the unironic rape scenario (marriage or death[6]), I propose we learn from Madikken’s curious descent into Hell—not as punishment (as being turned into an ass might denote), but a place of forbidden, animalistic pleasure and knowledge we carry back with us; i.e., into our black-and-white lives under state hegemony. I’m not evoking Dorothy or Hermia through Madikken to endorse a futile surrender to that black-and-white life (one where our magical friends stop talking and become ordinary once more). Rather, I want to alter the canonical promise of eventual submission through my own take on the female runaway as transforming home into a more colorful (thus less oppressive) place; i.e., through the Gothic’s animal, transformative potential found in fairytale language as musical, urgent, transportive and fleeting[7] but somehow “timeless” and captured in a special, precious moment:

(exhibit 8b1: Bottom-left and top-right, artist: Persephone van der Waard; top-left and bottom left: photos of the 2016 graphic novel I originally translated, co-edited and helped design front-to-back—with thanks from the original author/illustrator. After a disagreement, they and I reached a private written agreement signing the character rights over to me, as well as the full rights to any future project featuring Madikken provided I do the artwork and writing myself.

The drawings included here have been updated from their 2020 versions, which I originally designed as proof-of-concept exhibits within the original legal document: Revana [my alter ego, top-right] and Vallen, two characters from my unfinished fantasy series, The Cat in the Adage. I did not design the original concept for Madikken [top-left] but always enjoyed her for her pastoral, “summer flirt” setting and attitude, but also her prominently beaky nose, lolita maid design and magical-animal friends. Coming up with my own look for Madikken [and fabricating matching designs for Revana and Vallen] while preserving these fairytale qualities about Madikken was a fun challenge. Likewise, she’s a symbol of sex-positive expression who literally runs away from her creepy surrogate father in pursuit of her own sexual empowerment—on par with Hermia running away from Egeus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As my website reads: “Inspired by stories like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), my novel follows Madikken, a young milkmaid, who becomes lost in an enchanted forest. There, she meets all manner of strange characters; she also begins to explore her deepest, darkest desires. Woefully inexperienced and starved for love, Madikken throws caution to the wind and tries to make her wildest dreams come true…”)

(model and artist: Angel Witch and Persephone van der Waard)

For me, Madikken was someone I wanted to fuck, but also perform as/identify with according to closeted aspects of myself. The more I put myself in Madikken’s shoes, the more I discovered the two concepts overlapped. I wanted to be like someone I thought was strong in ways that toyed around with strength as something to embody in gender-non-conforming ways; i.e., beyond traditional notions of predatory force and its cliché delivery through go-to anomalies; e.g., your standard-issue, cis-het tomboys running the monomythic gamut. Madikken was certainly girly and Gothic, but her rousing and happy escape from an abusive home life (the home as alien) still happened; i.e., by updating the imaginary past away from masculine violence and avoiding Radcliffean bigotries. As such, her iconoclastic, prey-animal forays into Hell preserved the original, adventuresome spirit of Gothic expression, while simultaneously updating it for a wider and more inclusive audience.

Keeping with the spirit of inclusion, then, I want to use part one of this subchapter to project such a freeing mentality back at the things Madikken’s tale omitted—towards more warlike, predatory and Amazonian heroics, as well as knightly presentations with some animal characteristics, before part two concludes the subchapter by humanizing the increasingly animal, prey-like morphologies shared amongst all iconoclastic forces victimized by the state during its hellish monopolies. The overall procedure requires understanding where both arguably hail from in Western fiction, which part two will explore: Horace Walpole and the queer tradition of the Gothic as something that informs current-day revolutions through cryptonymic expression; i.e., the Gothic castle not simply as a hauntological burial ground, but a reliable site of queer, faux-medieval “rape” whose implements of campy trauma and otherworldly occupants (undead, demons, and anthromorphs) survive well into the present, where they double, hence challenge, state monopolies during ludo-Gothic BDSM: playing with the half-real, partially imaginary past.

(artist: Richard Corben; source: Bill McCool’s “In Praise of Meat Loaf’s Ridiculously Awesome Bat Out of Hell Album Covers,” 2022)

“Predators and Prey”: Predators as Amazons, Knights, and Other Forms of Domesticated, Animalized Monster Violence (feat. James Cameron)

As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source).

—Laura Ng, “‘The Most Powerful Weapon You Have’: Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita” (2003)

Continuing our theoretical examination of state monopolies, we arrive at predators, a class of monster often celebrated within contests of strength.

For example, when Bonnie Tyler sings, “I need a hero,” she specifically mentions Hercules. Except, heroism isn’t strictly about size or strength, and its mythical qualities denote animalistic displays of predator and prey that are frequently associated with classic animal archetypes; e.g., Hercules and the Nemean lion, but also Madikken and her talking lamb, Casper. As prized possessions useful to patriarchal institutions, heroes are monsters whose Gothic poetics animalize in competing dialogs during oppositional praxis. Doubles of antiquated, warrior-class arrangements of status and power appear within settler-colonial models, to which animals become reliably subjugated status symbols emblematic of state force and its conspicuous givers and receivers inside state land: cops and victims. Both fulfill their animal potential as class/culture/race character arranged in different physical forms, and whose vivid, poetic nature reliably triggers animal responses indicating broader socio-material struggles: fight or flight, but also hunting and sex, captivity and release.

The state cannot fully regulate these applications, so it grants their dated symbols positions of weakness and strength; i.e., linked to material factors like shelter and protection whose animalistic qualities—like a dog with a bone—are fought over in terms of what they represent, and more to the point, for whom they ultimately serve: workers or the elite.

Part one, “Predators,” will consider two popular arrangements—Amazons and knights—as “sexy beasts” whose conspicuous animal strength either serves worker needs by protecting them during state crisis, or pits them against each other to enrich the elite as usual. First, we’ll consider their basic, classic forms, then explore how the Gothic works of James Cameron continuously interact with more fantastical (and cosmetic) iterations regarding modern-day police abuse (which part two, “Prey,” will subvert).

Before we proceed, a note about cops; or rather, a quote from our thesis volume concerning Amazons in relation to cops that also applies to knights:

regarding activist hindsight as cultivated by workers, consider the Amazon. While Amazons are a classic Greek monster and the word Amazonomachia literally means “Amazon battle,” Gothic Communism applies it to any monster in heroic discourse where competing notions about sexuality and gender are “duking it out.” This includes the heroes themselves as enforcing or resisting the hierarchy of power in heteronormative theatre (there is no functional difference between a hero and villain insofar as canonical heroes are concerned; all canonical heroes function like cops and “All Cops Are Bad,” not just the ones that look “evil,” because they universally victimize everyone else for the state). All heroes are monsters, thus liminal expressions that are sexualized and gendered (source).

As such, Amazons are monstrous and can be cops, especially in monomythic stories that rely heavily on black-and-white kayfabe language; the same goes for knights, whose domesticated, animalized monster violence becomes something to subvert during ludo-Gothic BDSM or endorse in regards to a state’s monopolies and trifectas (the pimps of the state).

Our thesis talks extensively about cops in relation to Amazons and knights in general, and Volume One has so far already discussed the trifectas; here, we want to focus on the monopolized violence, terror and morphological expressions that occur during worker struggles, insofar as animalized Gothic aesthetics factor in. Keeping that in mind, we’ll start with Amazons’ animalistic qualities, weighing them against Cameron’s work before considering various things about knights relevant to oppositional praxis: as an uphill, predator-vs-prey battle for rebellious workers employing revolutionary cryptonymy to protect themselves with and attack the state’s mimetic means to destroy them through shared, contested language.

(artist: Emery EXP)

First, Amazons. Coming out of ancient, oral, animal-themed traditions promoting or contesting state fears, Amazons remain a complicated mythological figure. Far be it from me to discount the value of a strong sword arm in service of workers, but I generally consider workers to be threatened by state-sanctioned variants of such persons; e.g., the girl-boss Amazon cracking down on dissidents, then spouting neoconservative platitudes about equality for her kind (usually white, cis-het women): achieved through feats of territorial strength against an invented, dogmatic enemy that tokenizes the monstrous-feminine versus camping it. The same goes for knights, wherein class-traitor versions of either monster posture as cop-like “protectors”; i.e., who predatorily defend property by policing people the state already treats like prey/property (abusing their Gothic aesthetics to do so in modern times).

Police functions aside, I absolutely adore a subversive Amazon/strong mommy dom, but after further experimentation discovered I really like inhabiting the idea of subby power as juxtaposed against dominant forms with their own animalized signature. Over time, my prey-like preference became something to foster within a liminal space also occupied by Amazons to camp with ludo-Gothic BDSM: bravely reshaping the world while standing in the presence of a hunter-like strength by showing others how I want to exist, and be treated, in spite of the animalized differential; i.e., like Madikken in her fetishized milkmaid outfit (and accompanied by her talking lamb sidekick) bumping anxiously into Revana as a far bigger (and stronger) “cavewoman” who probably enjoys eating lamb (and pussy); re: death by Snu-Snu!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Relating to capital through nature-themed language is an important means of survival, except its exercise (and real-world counterparts) are increasingly endangered and replaced by harmful copies that blend in with our camouflage against theirs. As such, I deliberately portray Madikken traipsing about a dark forest (one filled with figurative lions, tigers and bears) while presenting like an animal of a particular kind: a lamb. Ripe for “slaughter” within the ancient pastoral framework, I’ve updated both to account for modern struggles. While Madikken is a sexy girl in a pretty dress, she feels entirely vulnerable if only because modern society is conditioned through animal metaphors to own and dress her up for themselves—in short, to unironically prey on her once the costume is in place. And yet, she’s someone who can bear it all by acting slutty but not be automatically killed for it; i.e., by teaching Amazons like Revana to handle power in animalistic ways that don’t serve the profit motive while retaining the exciting predator-prey dynamic during theatrical, BDSM tensions (which ludo-Gothic BDSM interrogates through play): service to the sub as someone to treat well, not actually prey upon, thus harm. Putting “predation” in quotes like this demands discipline and restraint, but also trust and boundaries; building these takes time, because you generally have to subvert what’s already present through a different kind of Gothic counterfeit—one that fosters empathy towards historically preyed-upon groups.

That’s ultimately what Madikken became; while the original author treated her as a guilty pleasure to trot out, then discard, I took Madikken and treated her as a subversive, Aesopian agent—a fabled white rabbit to follow into the future of the imaginary past as geared towards Communism. It might all be a fantastical lie, but can still transform the world by breaking from tradition in subtler ways that a) don’t segregate us from the awesome power of Gothic poetics (which was Frederic Jameson’s big mistake, of course); and b) don’t get us chucked off a cliff like poor Aesop. Powerful people, or those aligned with them, tend to do that when they feel threatened—not as a question of morals tied to human rights as things to practice, uphold and fairly defend, but according to unfair positions of material advantage the elite want to protect from workers; i.e., within a medieval, barbaric system built to exploit most of the planet for the betterment of a very select (and cruel) group of persons:

(source: Dr. Lauren Ware’s “Why We Punish“)

Appreciative, iconoclastic forms of Gothic stories (friendly magical animals, exhibit 8a) come from appropriative forms, but also liminal, salvageable forms (rebels, exhibit 8b2) to reclaim during socio-political debates whose poetics weigh the upholding of structures against human, animal and environmental rights. So while neoliberals, for example, famously discourage the welfare state[8], they’re constantly exploiting all workers under normalized, invisible (meaning “undisputed, ubiquitous”) conditions that have a similar myopic effect on the perception of the exploitation taking place. In short, everything becomes veiled by neoliberal canon, which conceals its own function as bourgeois propaganda but also projects said propaganda everywhere in animalistic dogma. Animals (and their subsequent terror and violence during morphological expression) are monopolized by the state in “polite” forms of the Amazon as a police agent—not just a dog to guard, watch, and hunt with, but a steady, war-like harvester who preys on chattelized, vulnerable workers herded[9] together for easy access within the state’s self-sanctioned food chain (with the elite at the top, cops in the middle, and everyone else at the bottom).

Such doomsdays might seem to verge on hopelessly cliché, thus can be discounted in the Radcliffean sense as a nightmare to summon and dismiss just as quickly. During Gothic times, however, the harvest becomes grim and visible, an order of operations for which orderly extermination becomes its chief goal: “The disposal units ran night and day.” This fascist return-to-conquest/tradition (and shivering of the state into barely-contained fragments ran by joint-chiefs/warlords) outlines a convenient map that already exists: the state itself as a new territory of colonization over an old crime scene, one ripe for raw plunder (and animal slaughter) as Imperialism comes home to empire. Ruthlessly exacted by the police agents currently inside, state watchdogs prey on its citizenry as freshly undead targets during new episodes of an ongoing genocide. The state victims and enemies become one in the same.

In other words, the state cannibalizes itself, but also defends the elite through heroic narratives bent on debriding the castle of its current “corruption.” During this culling of the herd (and its black sheep), cops still defend capital; but this time they roll in with tanks, burning “infected” and uninfected alike. Crushed under armored vehicles and knightly bodies, all are rendered obsolete in the face of those killers best able to preserve power and capital as threatened: the arm of the state as radicalized, covered in trauma as something to behold through a medievalized regression; i.e., inside monopolies of violence and terror as rotting the bodies (and minds) of workers, sadly soldiering for skeletal kings come back to haunt the world of the living. The Amazon decays, as do the sheep she pounces on; like Cú Chulainn, she “begins to attack both friend and foe because [she] loses the ability to distinguish between them,” except its very much by design. Healthy relations to nature with animal aesthetics and anthropomorphism are traded for pro-state, weaponized variants, their humane potential impounded in favor of territorial forms of aggression.

(artist: Bruh the Sinner)

Such radicalization is normally relegated to the distant frontiers of faraway lands (a crusade). Except when Capitalism enters decay as a matter of routine, state-sanctioned violence becomes an open cycle of glorious revenge in the domestic sphere; i.e., military urbanism triangulating class traitors and “rabid” token assimilators against the usual victims of state violence. Pitted against the pulverized working class, the police force of the imperial homeland treat said land like Cameron’s refrain: an automated grounds for loot, rape and genocide; it becomes a dead garden of stolen, inedible goods (the pirate’s curse: men cannot eat gold; only lie, cheat and steal it, except this shortcoming spills over into every aspect of their lives; e.g., sex and love. They can swallow it, but not digest).

In the same death-rattle, the us-versus-them mentality becomes something to promote in wholly Gothic forms; i.e., to “save the world” from a dark menace, which unfolds in Promethean, self-destructive ways. Already a watchdog put to heel, subjugated Hippolyta becomes a complicit, braindead zombie, but also the Medusa: a girl boss counterpart baring her own fangs (and furious gaze) at false promotions of former abuse; e.g., trans people. From Victoria de Loredani to Ellen Ripley or Samus Aran, reactive abuse (and its moderation) push TERF-y, Man Box violence onto much more recent (and populous) iterations. In turn, the state teaches future Amazons to attack its enemies for it, seeking power at the cost of their own humanity.

(artist: Virgo Vain)

I need to stress a state-vs-worker function, here, because Amazons don’t exclusively belong to the state; they are recruited by the state to police their own members within state monopolies. Canonical Amazons, then, are a token monster group that, once subjugated, can be scapegoated (through the euthanasia effect) when they frantically lash out against state targets, chasing them down and brutalizing them through fetishized violence. This traitorous, self-loathing behavior is Pavlovian—conditioned and executed through a medievalized position where subjugated Amazons serve a hauntologized police role: a knight whose pure, “white” status becomes wracked with “black” generational trauma and guilt, but also instructed apathy in the face of prophesized adversity. Black or white, the police function remains constant when fealty to the state is sworn; but it decays during crisis towards increasingly violent forms.

In the Pavlovian sense, canonical Amazons function as cops or victims; subjugated Amazons are cops who trigger to respond to state crisis through bourgeois implementations of force. Per the trifectas, this vicious cycle has manmade components, intimated by neoliberalism profiting off manufactured disasters (Second Thought’s “How Capitalism Exploits Natural Disasters,” 2022); e.g., FEDRA from The Last of Us (the 2023 version, which we will return to throughout this book) being an eco-fascist metaphor for Blackwater and other mercenary groups since WW2’s frogmen and Vietnam’s “advisors” from the Phoenix program. These watchdogs of American Imperialism obey the elite, violating international laws on command; i.e., through dog whistles. When those are “blown” through historical-material factors, subjugated Amazons execute on par with pre-Enlightenment mercenaries defending king and kingdom; i.e., through a re-privatization of war that exists entirely outside the democratic process: war as commodified through corporate seizures of direct power on the global stage, superseding state mechanisms altogether (Bad Empanada’s “Johnny Harris: Shameless Propagandist Debunked,” 2023) with older forms of neoliberalism having relied on the abuse of state power as something to conceal through neoliberal illusions: superheroes like Amazons exhibiting the theatrical, performative strength and qualities of animals, not people; i.e., dog soldiers.

While rebellion and its recuperation are animalized, pitting “tame/semi-tame” state defenders against “wild” rebels and labor movements, there is a familial, Gothic consequence to this settler-colonial arrangement beyond classic iterations. Faced with these privatized brutalizers or even shadows of them in the appropriative peril of canonical, pre-apocalypse “daydreams,” women or other victims of state abuse (who are closer to nature) cozy up to anyone stronger than them in order to survive or feel safe with during Gothic times. Such protectors include ostensibly good-but-actually-bourgeois variants like Ellen Ripley (the James Cameron version), but also bonafide rebels who reject the state in totality as out-and-out, dyed-in-the-wool Communists; e.g., Jubei, but also real-life characters like Che Guevara that billionaire Marxists like George Lucas and James Cameron would mime in their own questionably rebellious[10] work:

(exhibit 8b2: The moderate “anarchist, Amazon warrior moms” of James Cameron are paper tigers. Their anger against the state is all flash, no substance insofar as universal equality is concerned; i.e., they’re predominantly white, Rambo-style Amazons, with varying degrees of class character married to more dubious aspects; e.g., Ellen Ripley is a TERF punching the Archaic Mother and exterminating her brood for being an intersex bogeywoman of settler-colonial guilt, trauma and bias. To that, Cameron’s refrain is a ghost of the counterfeit that demonizes colonized territories and anti-capitalist resistance movements/guerrilla forces in favor of white saviors from the Imperial Core protecting the usual wards of the state: white children. Sarah Connor’s son, John, is yet another example of that, except his plight addresses military urbanism on home soil instead of Red Scare overseas. There, the warrior mother furiously protects her white child from the LAPD as a famously corrupt, and well-documented police force[11] while simultaneously terrorizing the [admittedly wealthy] family of Miles Dyson, a tokenized black man, before letting him brutally die. The class character is fascinatingly murky but the stereotypical racial tensions remain, nonetheless.

In doing so, Cameron acknowledges the inherently racialized and incredibly violent function of American police present since their inception, but in a worrying trend carried over from Aliens, choses to focus on the violence against, and survival of, white maternal victims for the film’s duration [effectively pitting white and black mothers against each other]. Cameron does this while also showing that Amazons like Sarah are not exempt from racial tensions and class betrayal—Sarah hysterically treating her white child as more valuable than Dyson’s. As a whole, holistic solidarity is not Cameron’s strong suit. Quite the contrary, he foments worker division, pitting different marginalized groups against each other [white women and people of color] while prioritizing white agents during said exchanges wherever they occur.

Even so, Cameron’s caricatures are founded on real-world heroes. For instance, Che Guevara’s constructive anger toward legitimate material change has been appreciated by real-world revolutionaries and appropriated by state proponents, including moderate ones like Cameron. In pursuit of profit and status, Pygmalions like Cameron de-fang Che’s revolutionary potential by turning him into “just” a t-shirt [similar to MLK]: an inert, sloganized version of the former folk legend through the Amazon [monstrous-feminine guerilla] as a sloganized brand. This dialectical-material tension can be felt during settler-colonial disputes, comparing human actions to animals as an emblematic, theatrical device; e.g., “crafty like a fox” denoting animalized oral traditions tied to native peoples and their land as simultaneously occupied by an invader force that remembers them as foxlike in opposition to the state: being hunted, but eluding the self-assigned [white] trapper as a systemic, colonial force.

Cameron’s Amazons appropriate said tension—either applying useful predatory and prey-like qualities exclusively to white women reversing the role of hunter and hunted while avoiding captivity and abuse, or applying them to women of color embodying Afrocentrist qualities within other racialized groups; e.g., Bailey Bass, a biracial black actress, playing Indigenous women like Tsireya [from The Shape of Water] who are then fetishized for their exotic, non-white, “huntress” qualities being promised to white men “going native” within the savior fantasy as a predatory means of sleeping with the colonized princess—sex tourism dressed up as “activism.” Whatever transgressive bite they have becomes toothless, but also oddly chaste insofar as nudity in horror is framed as an invitation for open violence; i.e., utterly incapable of open, honest, adult forms of interrogating generational, psychosexual trauma that likewise let trans, intersex and non-binary forms of morphological expression exist under [thus navigate] settler-colonial duress; e.g., the woman of color or female Indigenous person having abject androgynous qualities that can be reverse-abjected during captor/captive fantasies that speak to living in captivity as a hunted, animalized group: facsimiles of rape and cop/victim fears explored through the middle class [or those inside the Imperial Core versus outside it] interrogating “fuck the alien” fantasies through iconoclastic art. The Gothic is a great resource for such things, if only to camp the West’s rape fears more than the usual Pygmalions bother to try!

[artist: Glacial Clear]

Such stances are closed off through complicated psychological positions of fear-fascination from both sides—the colonizer class and colonized classes, but also various intersections insofar as sex, gender, race and religion are concerned—and must be encroached upon through liminal re-engagements with the animal; i.e., as something that is not an actual threat despite feeling threatening in a multitude of ways: that one is a monster and/or monstrous for wanting to sleep with those the state and its proponents either collar and pit against you; or label as monstrous in animalistic ways to likewise make you afraid, thus desire protection from by appealing to the collared, subjugated variants. In turn, these wicked fantasies mustn’t get hung up on the ghost of the counterfeit, but instead be used to bring systemic socio-material change by critiquing praxially inert forms merely by existing: white women sleeping with people of color.)

The animalized rebel, as a genuine proletarian agent, is a regular casualty of centrist stories like Cameron’s. Pandering to white, cis-het people/token personalities who have been conditioned to enjoy their starring role (much to the chagrin of minority groups), his “billionaire Marxism” plays both sides: reverse-engineering the wagon chase, John-Ford-style, to centralize Sarah Connor as a white, female avenger of settler-colonial, “slasher-style[12]” trauma directed at North Americans, not the Global South (not to mention appealing to conservative values will reliably sell more tickets by widening your consumer base). Meanwhile, Ellen Ripley’s original form as a neoliberal foil (courtesy of Ridley Scott) becomes its fiercest, girl-boss protector in Cameron’s Rambo-esque, Vietnam revenge fantasy against the Reds (displaced as killer space bugs and capped off with the dissociative, white-mom-vs-black-mom “catfight”). It’s pretty shitty of Cameron in hindsight, appealing to the psychosexual fears (and similar pent-up emotions) of domestic state victims—women and children—by pitting them against classic state scapegoats to achieve praxial inertia, not momentum, during cliché situations[13] against cliché targets: nominal Communists, and assorted “corrupt” and/or monstrous-feminine entities existing in the same shadow zone as cartoon Nazis. At first glance, they’re hard to tell apart, but like a dominatrix wearing fetish gear starts to distinguish herself through inferred function; i.e., through dialectical-material scrutiny according to an informed audience capable of critical thought, hence class/culture/race analysis.

Some of these monsters (and their animalistic qualities) intimate our proverbial spectres of Marx and ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the camped imagery of state-sanctioned doppelgangers yielding Communist potential during ironic analysis and application. Of course, many more reduce to bourgeois caricatures of anything resembling actual Communism (which, to be clear, Stalin stiffly veered away from during his own cult of personality after Lenin’s death and later during WW2 and the Eastern Front; but those labor plans [and their various successes and failures: their defeating of the Nazis at Stalingrad, but also the Holodomor famine[14]] were begot from reactive abuse/constant interference from Western parties, including Hilter as the United States’ intended destroyer of the Bolshevist spirit). Purely on the Russian side, these Soviet cartoons—from Lenin, to Stalin, Gorbachev to Putin—have become increasingly boiled down, condensed by neoliberal hegemons into a vague, constantly threatening punching bag well into the present: the boogeyman of “Communism” waiting outside the myopia of Capitalist Realism.

These invasions are canonically marketed as coming “from beyond,” wherein current-day reinventions of the Gothic past disrobe inside intensely xenophobic nostalgia; e.g., seasons two-through-four of Stranger Things (2016) churning out their own variants of an evil banditti tied to moral panic: Red Scare at home. To that, the show’s interdimensional aliens and serial-killer general, Vecna (as well as the Russian goons worshipping the Demogorgon), serve as a giant, messy Red-Scare metaphor threatening Pax Americana for… yet-another-doubling of Ann Radcliffe’s Scooby Doo gang facing off against the indominable Nothing through nostalgia on top of nostalgia as the “antidote” to Capitalist Realism (an increasingly neoliberalized commodifying of Michael Ende’s 1979 novel, Die unendliche Geschichte). Eleven is that show’s Amazon—a crisis actor isolated and abused, hence conditioned, to bite very the cartoon shadows authored by the state during regular moral panics; i.e., Netflix reviving the fatal, lucrative nostalgia of Satanic panic to prime the current youth for an upcoming struggle.

Any way you slice it, Eleven is a child soldier (note the Stormtrooper vest and Kubrick-esque panopticon) who grows into a violent monster who can only justify her actions if Vecna is real; he’s not, but his triggers are, as are their harmful, historical-material effects embodied by formerly preyed-upon girls just like Eleven becoming predatory (she’s a stand-in for state recruits that only allow for proletarian forms if we consciously critique her canonical function).

Note: We’ll return to the Zionist and Red Scare elements of Stranger Things more in Volume Two; e.g., the Poetry Module’s “A Song Written in Decay.” —Perse, 4/6/2025

Of course, there’s room to enjoy all of these things, but neoliberal pastiche lionizing second wave feminism (and its fascist qualities) shouldn’t be endorsed and consumed without thought; it should be transmuted through iconoclastic praxis into appreciatively ironic, “perceptive” forms when confronting and concealing oneself with symbols of state abuse: through what artists cultivate (synthesize) themselves using productive, accessible intricacies (not endless detective-story mysteries or the sports-like competitions that, while intricate, do nothing to meaningfully challenge the state; e.g., Cameron’s Amazonian kayfabe). These elaborate distractions invoke something already noted in my thesis (and earlier in this subsection); re: “Out of medieval discourse, domesticated animals are also gendered in a sexualized, monstrous sense.” New forms of discourse that invoke Gothic poetics allow us to convey more than rebellious slogans like Cameron’s, but socio-material foils to state-animalized hero-monsters and victims: as strong as a horse or bull, but as sleek and randy as a rabbit or mink. The theatrical potential is all at once incredibly old, and waiting to be tapped (so to speak) during fresh morphological queries that interrogate animalized stigmas and trauma applied unevenly to workers under settler-colonial systems:

(artist: Akira Raikou)

So while it’s perfectly legitimate for nerds (or those who otherwise indulge in nerd culture) to desire protection from anyone who gives off “big daddy/mommy” energy as tied to an animalistic, dream-like aura—or even wanting to fuck these incredible, otherworldly persons—it’s equally important to remember that Ellen Ripley and Sarah Conor (and similar Amazons; e.g., Urbosa, left) are not your actual parents[15]. So, whereas state nostalgia drifts towards a coercive, social-sexual arrangement of these things, sex-positive scenarios administer the potential for regressively therapeutic rituals: unequal power exchange scenarios brokered between an iconoclast’s artistic exhibit and those taking part as the expected audience; i.e., between mutually-consenting adults whose iconoclastic, socio-material arrangements and depictions of predator and prey pointedly challenge the nuclear family structure as unironically medieval beneath the rot (which Cameron does not do).

By extension, subversive Amazons undermine compelled marriage as leading to manufactured consent, conflict and scarcity (which includes systematic war and women/child abuse among those inside the state of exception). As such, sex-positive regression—and the oft-subconscious selection of a “Big” to safeguard someone who feels “little,” in age play terms—is conditional; i.e., informed consent. Conversely the historical materialism of the state (and its own myopic regressions) are conservative in nature, meaning they are canonically unconditional, forcing the socio-material arrangements that exist between violent enforcers doubling as parental figures in conspicuously neo-medieval structures (exhibit 8b3) fostered during state collapse. Haunted by the older Neo-Gothic period’s pre-fascist occupation of the late 1700s, such heroes return to a medieval (and Gothic) that has never quite existed but predicates on older fascist forms that bleed into new post-fascist ones: flirting with power imbalance and size difference (cops and robbers roleplay) taken outside the bedroom (re: Foucault).

(artist: Glacier Clear)

Abuse victims often regress or disassociate, clamoring for protection in complicated, theatrically “dangerous” forms (the calculated risk). Indeed, to shrink in the face of ambiguous power and harm is understandable, as is pursuing healthier variants that still feel dangerous; i.e., capable of protecting us from trauma by helping us paradoxically regain a sense agency while feeling out of control when confronting trauma as something that lives in and around us, but—as we have seen—can also, like a gargoyle, come alive and attack us. People who feel victimized (or otherwise faced with uncertain destruction) generally desire a return to one’s childhood as “better” in connection to a heroic force—a good parent that rewrites what, for many children, is a time of shattered innocence. For better or worse, it’s also normal to feel attraction towards psychosexual power and violence (more on this in part two), and to trauma-bond when you feel frightened, hence infantilized. Indeed, a common regressive fantasy is the myth of the white knight; i.e., a psychosexual force that returns from the hauntological past to save the current world as threatened by ancient monsters during the vicious cycle of Capitalism: the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern, etc. All operate as cryptonymic forms of calculated risk and reward, their canonical heroic instruments apologizing for the state by offering up a noble-yet-sexy parental sacrifice: the paladin. In turn, neoliberalism uses the false hope of the white savior to achieve future Faustian bargains, preserving Capitalist Realism for as long as humanly possible. Nothing else matters.

If you want to critique the state and stop the cycle, go where its heroic power is centered: nostalgic spaces. In these spaces, the ending of genocidal nostalgia requires retraining any soldier of Capitalism and dislocating them from the structure itself, as Jubei is. While some knights are good/bad in entirely centrist terms, he was not. Except, this revolutionary cryptonymy can be dressed up in ways besides the Amazon or Jubei—knights.

In canonical terms, knights are often marketed as protectors, but actually defend property for the state. Reversing this function is not straightforward, and takes many different forms depending on the genre. Posthuman stories, for example, literally reprogram knights from the imaginary retro-future as something to revisit in sequel, franchised outings; e.g., the Terminator movies (and their various paratexts). Here, there may seem to be no animals in the future, but the idea of the Gothic berserk—a warrior dressed in animal skins—is not lost on Cameron. While the original Terminator (1984) inverts the classic knight’s metal exoskeleton for an endoskeleton that serves the same purpose (concealed force), the sequel reverses the class function of the same disguise while still having humans be the animal whose skins are worn(!). So whereas the first dad, Kyle Reese, was a skittish, white, prey-like survivor of automated genocide coming home to roost, Arnold is a Germanic lone wolf—a cybernetic predator reprogrammed by rebel forces to protect the children of the future by ultimately sacrificing himself. Doing so lets the Amazon, Sarah, finally lay down her arms and get to mothering John. The familial element (and its dimorphism) are preserved.

The parental themes seem noble enough, but also inventive insofar as Cameron’s Pygmalion fantasy deftly reverses the binary gender of the statuesque protector/sex object multiple times. Except Cameron pointedly ties the Amazon and knight’s shared quest to a Roman, thus problematic, concept: the nuclear family as something to defend within capital by martyring its statuesque, surrogate-father figure through childlike platitudes divorced from state critiques: “You can’t just go around killing people!” John says. To which the terminator asks, “Why?” Cameron can’t connect the moral to anything resembling material conditions, so he demonstrates it through something of a dog-training session: stand on one foot. Obey.

This basic, rigid argument sums up Cameron’s “revolutionary” character. Not only is it incredibly moderate (thus passive), but the nuclear unit’s harmful relationship with the Gothic, zombie-like West makes Cameron’s vision a compromise with undying conservative values: the state as something to protect through the family unit. Despite its infamous price tag and anti-police persona, T2 merely offers a half-measure dressed up in Hollywood glitz. All the same, Cameron isn’t stupid. He understands how a stable household appeals to the victim in all of us. T2 certainly resonated with me as a little girl, wishing my father was around instead of cheating on my mother and beating me. As a child bred on Gothic fiction, Cameron’s fantasies became something of a haunted house to me: something to retreat inside in order to find better copies of my actual parents (or representatives of them, in my mother’s case—love you, Mom). The same idea—of wanting monsters to make me feel safe in my own unsafe household—extends laterally to parallel structures Cameron is less likely to attack.

Like I said, it’s complicated; despite my open endorsement of cool monster parents, I’m still leery of Cameron’s expensive compromise (and skilled emotional/psychological manipulation) depicting the Western cycle of marriage as something to salvage through a cliché, and horribly dated, advertisement: parental, centrist automation. His “good parent vs bad parent” doubling shtick and “cyborg dads of the retro-future!” gag collectively endorse current political structures by refusing to take them to task, instead putting the blame on everyone: “It’s in your nature to destroy yourselves.” In the same breath, he replaces “the would-be-fathers who come and go” with a perfect robot dad who never gets tired, never gets drunk and hits John, thus can learn how to “not go around killing people.” The lesson inexplicably motivates John to build a better future for his own kids… by joining the suitably brutal and robotic institution, Congress.

This alternate, final ending is a huge red flag and both why I hate the director’s cut and distrust Cameron’s dubious vision of the imaginary future; it was his cut, thus his decision to endorse the magical rehabilitation of establishment politics. Except a single politician acting like a good parent historically doesn’t work, either because the person is killed, replaced, or made to conform to the usual antics of such a place. I call bullshit, but Cameron likes the idea so much he’s resold the movie (and his cut) time and time again. If it wasn’t how he felt, he wouldn’t sell it; more to the point, his intent doesn’t matter if endless war is what the movie ultimately promotes through bad decision-making. As part of the Military Industrial Complex, Congress makes war on purpose; it’s a business for them and always has been. To that, Cameron’s abuse of rebellious language conceals state predation, his white-savior antics meant to restore the public’s faith in the system being redeemable “as is”; i.e., something that can miraculously change through established procedures that serve the elite first and foremost. By whitewashing Congress, Cameron smugly implores viewers to imagine a world where the nation-state doesn’t exist to capitalize on genocide. Please! If John Connor tried to stop that, he’d simply get outvoted or shot like JFK.

The fact remains, while the rehabilitation of state killers is a pleasant-enough fiction, Gothic stories like Cameron’s scapegoat crooked, false cops (the T-1000 as a serial killer) and marry workers to monstrous parental force (Sarah and the T-800) in defense of the state as a heteronormative, thus settler-colonial, structure. No matter how much adventure and pure, psychosexual mayhem occur in dreamland, there’s no place like home as it currently exists.

Likewise, the problem merely compounds when you consider actual parents through compelled marital roles that play out in light of Cameron’s figurative ones. Compelled marriage generally sucks major ass, especially if the human is a cop (a trained killer and class traitor). At best, it’s a procedure of convenience. Even so, it effectively sublimates rape and child abuse—a coerced bargain/forced negotiation whose quid pro quo is dressed up as “love” with accidental children had by parents far-too-early paying the price. Often, the reality aligns with the female side regressively seeking material advantage by adopting femme, vulnerable performances (the damsel or the princess) and submitting to the male “protector” side chasing possessive, courtly love; i.e., homosocial tourneys had by knights, cowboys, et al dueling in jousting fashion, with kids (and wives) being caught in the middle (often incestuously abused by their fathers/male role models as false fathers, protectors, friends, etc). It’s standard-issue Man Box culture, which means you can’t just tap your shoes and sloganize good parentage; you have to synthesize it in ways that change the system, hence prevent genocide as a symptom of Capitalism.

Gothic poetics paradoxically grant a voice to discuss unspeakable trauma with, doing so through taboo subject matter (rape, murder, torture and incest, etc), while simultaneously existing in contested, doubled theatrical spaces. In Gothic stories, the lover, villain, parent and protector all occupy the same uncomfortable living space (the castle) in animalized forms: predator and prey as confused symbols and mechanisms from moment to perilous moment. Something to remember about Arnold in this reversal is he serves the role of parent, lover and protector in the perfect sense for a battered single mom: the asexual machine. Conversely the T-1000 is a villain through a great duplicator status that intends familial destruction through homicidal cryptonymy—the stolen identity of past serialized rape victims, including John’s foster parents, Sarah’s guards, and even Sarah herself (the same mimicking of a parental figure the original terminator did to get close to its victim as a “one-day pattern killer”). “He” and “his” rapacious falsehoods are a facet of state corruption, of the evil within as part of an internal plot invaded by those already inside (a confusion of inside/outside, correct-incorrect, etc) that expands in all directions when the shadow of medieval abuse covers the land.

The rebel’s gambit is to send a friendly predator to protect Sarah’s son, one who looks like a former abuser of Sarah’s and attempted killer of John; indeed, he’s the same model, therefore physically identical to the 1984 assassin. While the 1991 terminator is also an assassin, his class function alters insofar as he fights to preserve the family unit through hypermasculine violence; i.e., the good parent, lover and protector versus the bad. Cameron’s rehabilitative goal is one of complete reprogramming—of a past state soldier to serve a rebel cause attached to the family model. Indeed, they are inextricable, and haunted by the kinds of violence that the T-1000 (and other versions of the T-800) represent: of violent murder and rape through phallic devices, namely bullets, brute strength, and “knives and stabbing weapons” delivered by a perfidious, male, and physically imposing slasher agent serving an ultra-radicalized police state chasing and hunting its usual benefactors: white straight women and children (the nuclear model in crisis).

(artist: John Cordero)

In other words, Cameron locks the morphology and familial roles firmly in place, as well as the roles of predator and prey in centrist ordeals. They exist on good teams and bad revolving around the heteronormative family unit and its legendary defenders, destructors, and methods of domesticated, animalized monster violence, terror and morphological expression. For Cameron, all of these things tellingly manifest as white men who help or harm white (or functionally white) women and children in the domestic sphere. He sticks to his guns despite being all too familiar with the Gothic flexibility of Amazons and knights, but also cops as dishonest, dehumanized, shapeshifting (demonic) agents recuperating those symbols through acts of rape that double for the putting on of stolen appearances (for us, cryptonymy is a disguise of “rape” designed to prevent its unironic forms). As Rebecca Keegan writes in The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron (2010):

a central theme in both of the Terminator movies [is] how people, especially those in violent jobs, like soldiers and cops, can become barbarized. “The Terminator films are not really about the human race getting killed off by future machines. They’re about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other,” he says. “Cops think all non-cops as less than they are, stupid, weak, and evil. They dehumanize the people they are sworn to protect and desensitize themselves in order to do that job” (source).

And yet despite his own less-than-stellar view of the force, Cameron can’t bring himself to think outside the box. His fantastical nightmare is trapped in the Shadow of Pygmalion’s myopia—stuck inside a very limited, male, criminogenic view of the world even though he understands “to serve and protect” is a lie the state regularly tells. More to the point, the language of anger is gendered in ways that enable singular police agents and groups of them (versus similar numbers of state targets: herds of prey versus packs of hunting animals), but also in official and unofficial capacities[16] to enact systemic violence through predatory familial likenesses and their relations: the infiltrators disguise themselves as family members during rape.

It’s important, then, to remember the Gothic mode contains contested language; i.e., the campy revival of medieval dichotomies that remains tremendously useful to navigating the enormous emotional pressures present under unequal material conditions; re: during ludo-Gothic BDSM. But with that, we must also say quiet, unspoken things from just as loud a critical standpoint, versus things that sound loud but are critically inert, like Cameron does (e.g., his standard-issue slasher/rape scenarios). The intense feelings of predator and prey are useless unless they can raise awareness towards the socio-material conditions that bring them about, not enact a routine breaking down of civilization towards barbarism. Land and home are both treated as separate and overlapping in conflict, resulting in foreign vs domestic, wild vs civilized, etc. Animals, then, are used in times of state crisis and decay to crack down against workers with workers using animalized language as a delivery method for administering the abuse required to pacify workers with; i.e., out from pictures of home as corrupt, medieval: the liminal hauntology of war.

To that, the Gothic is a return of the fearsome imaginary past, often as a literal castle composed of old dreadful legends and unspeakable deeds. In Gothic-Communist terms, it is the state decaying towards a new imaginary past through the castle as something to summon. Out of it, many monsters may emerge besides just terminators (“they were the newest and the worst”); each swiftly becomes antiquated while attached to the unspeakable horrors it abstracts, shuffled and drawn anew during future revelations. To see the castle is to visit one’s mortality as consigned to a grander doom: an ignominious death tied to a space and time that travels without moving (a hyperobject, remember) and appears seemingly without warning or resistance.

(artist: Don Ivan Punchatz)

The ghost of the counterfeit nurtures the anxiously privileged through nightmares to summon and banish again in relation to their colonial inheritance: our ancestors were conquerors, but so were our “parents.” Except, these fears (and their associate material conditions) aren’t unfounded. Whatever form it takes—a European castle, an Egyptian-style pyramid, or a basic, corporatized logo composed of the building materials of such things—the castle is both a concentration of decaying state power and a fortress-minded condition of waiting for the Imperial Boomerang to swing back ’round, doubly maddening for a nation that hasn’t faced a land invasion in over two centuries, and has never been bombed (nuclear or otherwise) from a foreign power. In short, it is like trying to imagine genocide from those who have never been on the receiving end in modern times, shielded by the Imperial Core as slowly disintegrating around them. Its grim historical materialism invokes the Leveler as a future testament to Capitalism’s past, present and ongoing potential for self-destruction: the medieval brutality of the West having not gone anywhere, while its grim harvests demand fresh blood on a scale impossible to imagine. Sooner or later, monsters will spill out of the structure, preying upon everyone through a war of extermination, “not just those on the other side.”

Beyond Cameron’s quaintly heteronormative, “mom ‘n pops” yarn and financially predatory fixations in Gothic rape scenarios, the fallen home as intimating cataclysmic medieval characteristics is commonplace. By extension, canonical fantasy stories more broadly consider the normalization of class immobility as something to endorse through enforced morphological expression being central to the family unit, thus the state, represented by castles as implacable; i.e., the moderate stance that changing one’s material conditions is already framed as otherworldly and Quixotic, especially insofar as it deters morphological arguments that enable systemic change through gender-non-conforming bodies and identities as somehow “excessive.” Without any transformative bodily aspects, then, the hidden princess threading the Gothic castle’s hyperbolic nightmare (e.g., Sarah, inside a ghostly Los Angeles) is an already-alien proposal for moderate audiences, her harrowing story of survival filled with apophenic reminders of tremendous sexual danger tied to a fantastic place and time threatening a conservative bodily expression and social-sexual arrangement: cis-het girlfriends/wives (“better than mortal man deserves”) and marriage, bridling the savage Amazon as warrior woman and nature as monstrous-feminine (female or not, white-skinned or not).

Note: Abduction and rape—i.e., by a “vengeful dark queen” during ludo-Gothic BDSM—is a concept we’ll return to in the Demon Module’s “I’ll See You in Hell” (which looks at dark faeries and demon mommies during forbidden love fantasy scenarios). —Perse, 4/6/2025

(artist: Just Some Noob)

Meanwhile, anything that remotely challenges that body and gender expression—e.g., the pirate or demon searching for stolen gold or a lost homeland—is treated as an animalistic rogue, owing to their alien body and identity as foreign, often acquiring wealth or status through theft, trickery and conquest, but also non-marital sex.

Our Gothic-Communist critiques, then, seek to change systemic material conditions through subversive fantasy stories, which criticize the inherent, systemic violence that reactionary and moderate Pygmalions threaten when controlling bodily and gender expression; i.e., as an autonomous means of communicating non-heteronormative struggles in weird-nerd culture when marginalized groups are actually allowed to perform and express themselves, mid-trauma and in honest, unmuzzled animalistic language. Except, these feral alternatives and their pedagogy of the oppressed are often muscled out of the grander market equation by more standardized, cis-het, human-looking forms of Gothic morphological expression; i.e., those echoed by men like James Cameron, enforcing harmful industry standards around the world through heroic-monstrous cultural exports: the cold man of steel and the warrior woman with maternal, erotically subservient aspects (a wheyfu, biomechanical warrior bride/girl boss for the obedient state sissy [sub] to collar per the Pygmalion fantasy)!!

(exhibit 8b3: Artist, top-left: Flying Pen; top-right and bottom-left: Kook; bottom-right: Yoracrab. Neoliberal pastiche in Japanese media typically yields male knights who are effeminate but nevertheless armored, whereas female knights often tend to be at least partially nude and presented as dominant and subservient; i.e, beholden to a sexualized, animalistic, maternal role that, in some shape or form, serves child-like effeminate men [whose incestuous aspects endemic to Japanese culture we shall revisit in Volume Three]. As Cameron argues through his work, and lifestyle[17] in connection to his work, women [and AFAB persons at large] must always return to the heteronormative mother role: a sexualized nurturer who can fight when she needs to, but only to protect her children from alien forces. It’s fan service to weird canonical nerds, but also an instruction guide [vis-à-vis the Gothic Romance] for how girls should behave and present themselves in Cameron’s eyes.)

Heteronormative enforcement champions protectors whose bodies (and killing methods) are morphologically standardized: male knights, or female knights (which Amazons basically are) acting like men in Man Box culture or otherwise submitting to male needs; for them, the imaginary past becomes something to love and defend as a heteronormative stomping ground; i.e., by men like Cameron robbing the Gothic mode of its perceptively campy elements through all the usual canonical violence towards the usual victims of state abuse; e.g., Tolkien’s Beater and Biter directed at “goblins,” or Beowulf’s wrath tearing Grendel apart in similar base, animal-grade humiliations[18] mean to demean an already downed, prey-like foe: “Men like you thought it up.”

To that, I want to conclude part one by looking at another element common to the knight and Amazon as a fixture of Gothic poetics, regardless of the performance or genre: torture and psychosexual harm. Due to Amazonomachia being a dialectical-material phenomenon, we’ll introduce its canonical function, here, then devote part two to subverting it through our own uphill expressions of settler-colonial trauma in animalistic language. The canonical knight is commonly “phallic” insofar as he, she, they or it are armed with a penetrative implement of violence standing to, in, and for patriarchal enforcement as something to recognize by the harm it teases synonymizing with sex through romanticized rituals: the duel over the damsel or the child as both over her/them and about the two men measuring and crossing swords. In the heteronormative scheme of courtship through violence, size definitely matters insofar as its shows off more at first glance (swords, unlike penises, do not tend to “grow”; they unsheathe and seek out new bodies to serve as improvised “scabbards,” but the Gothic hyphenates such things in neo-medieval forms):

(artist: Kentaro Miura)

So whether good or bad in centrist stories, armored/weaponized male/tokenized duelists operate through “insect politics,” enacting “traumatic penetration” against their targets and/or collateral damage (J.B.S. Haldane once quipped that if a god or divine being had created all living organisms on Earth, then that creator must have an “inordinate fondness for beetles.” However, if there is a loving god, then why-oh-why is Gwen Pearson’s “stabby cock dagger” a thing? Cosmic-nihilism-in-action). In terms of wives or girlfriends, but also sexual reproduction as symbolized by knights in connection to real life, PIV sex is the standard, canonical point-of-entry for our “overprotective” (rapacious) predators. Failure to uphold it results in psychosexual violence. Not only will the knight (or more to the point, the person emulating the knight) historically-materially “stab a bitch” if she eyeballs them wrong (or if she’s trans), but they—the most powerful and loved-feared family member (usually the father or boyfriend, but also police agents)—will exploit her and the children as routinely vulnerable by design. That’s what the state does and wants.

Centrist kayfabe portrays various good/evil teams using lances or bullets as “phallic” implements of rape that universally threaten obedient cis women as beings to corral and hysterical women, racial and ethnic minorities, queer people and/or children (e.g., queer children, who tend to have neurodivergent qualities that present comorbidly through abuse targeting them as children, queer and neurodivergent) as corrupt/monstrous-feminine things to execute/retire for not being useful to those in power—i.e., not useful to the fathers, but also the state for whom they serve. Of course, there is utility insofar as genocide serves the profit motive, but it achieves this through a limiting of what is morphologically correct and an expanding of what is incorrect. Cis-het men are violent and canon teaches them (and tokenized agents) to be violent in abject, morphologically standardized ways that chase, attack, and sexually dominate non-standard forms on and offstage: the “useless eater” as a useless animal hogging resources, but also an alien to fetishize[19] while persecuting it.

This is hardly the first time I’ve acknowledged this. In “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” I write,

The majority of violent murders, rapes, and murder-suicides are committed by cis-het men; the majority of their victims are women; and less than one percent of the total United States population openly identifies as trans/non-binary. Roughly 1.4 million adults in the United States openly identify as trans. Out of a population of 328.2 million, that’s less than half of one percent. The actual number is undoubtedly higher, but obscured by fear. Not everyone comes out because of potential abuse: murder, wrongful termination from employment, homelessness, and so on. Women are pushed into the periphery by sexist men, and trans people don’t exist at all; if they do, they are generally demonized, even killed, their murderers protected by sexist, transphobic laws, aka the gay panic defense (source).

Under this spotlight, queer people hide their identities because they can. Setting aside the extramarital violence committed against them, other marginalized groups—people of color and AFABs—are disproportionately targeted for what they can’t hide: their skin color, genitals and bodily functions as animalized. Under Cartesian dualism, they are automatically sighted[20] and targeted as “of nature” and treated as chattel to varying degrees; i.e., as bodies of discourse that are monitored and controlled to acceptable levels of resistance.

Yet, the oppressed also speak out about morphological standards that convey their oppression as something to reclaim through the usual devices of torture and extermination being used more boldly than Cameron dares. Unlike him, we must haunt the state’s territories—both out of the land they seek to dominate, but also through the policed heroic-monstrous agents as more and more alien, but also unkillable regarding their rebellious usage. Historically bombs and bullets don’t work, and the state’s demand for an aura of invincibility when exploiting an occupied territory compounds to such a costliness as to sink them after a handful of deaths. These break the spell, and open the floodgates of counterterror. Once-proud state proponents ignominiously humor mortality and defeat; taunted by us, they envision themselves as conquered, growing sick with the threat of their own abuses promised by the smallest of failures, including a crisis of masculinity that gives into forbidden, genderqueer pleasures doubling as disguises that perform Athena’s Aegis. Tasting of that, their spirit and their nerves break and they become afraid of shadows “coming to get them,” but also the state to punish them for their “moment of weakness” by sleeping with “chattel” (whose animalization is associated with appropriated cultural markers; e.g., the Pride rainbow):

(artist: Torture Chan)

The problem lies in white, cis-het Pygmalions like Cameron moderating rebellion through antiquated language as something to emulate, thus conceal, state abuse through vivid descriptors of predatory agents. Except similar situations to queer existence are felt through an adjacency to systemic abuse that overlaps with one’s own morphology as policed by and large. Alongside queer people, then, sits the combined struggles of other groups whose identities and bodies are controlled through the same state monopolies—violence and terror as a means of enforcing particular forms of morphological expression using Gothic poetics. Native Americans were largely displaced, segregated and killed (even those who tried to assimilate) through colonial methods presenting them as monstrous wild animals, while people of color and other ethnic minorities have likewise been exploited for centuries through similar industrialized maneuvers (today being disproportionately imprisoned by the American judicial system enslaving them for petty offenses according to Ashley Nellis’ “The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons,” 2021); e.g., drug wars being an old, borrowed tactic that preys upon chattelized groups using predatory maneuvers learned from past settler-colonial abusers (and embodied within capital by privileged groups; i.e., generally white cis-het men like Tyler Oliveira[21] grifting against vulnerable groups including homeless people, who often use drugs to survive under systemic criminogenic conditions).

To that, more recent American executives borrowed the War on Drugs from older bourgeoisie and their preying on the Imperial Core’s spectrum of ethnic minorities and dissidents trapped inside the state of exception; i.e. coming out of the Opium Wars (source: Extra History, 2016) into Nixon’s abusive campaigns against his own population; re: as John Ehrlichman, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, declared in 1994:

You want to know what this [war on drugs] was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. […] We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did (source: Vera’s Drug War Confessional”).

Unlike strictly demonized groups, white women who aren’t Amazonian are also preyed upon, except their predation complicates due to their vertiginous treatment as liminal victims; i.e., both a precious property promised to settler-colonist men and killed and raped by them under their so-called “protection” inside spaces of sin comparable to Madikken’s own medieval forest refuge (a concept we’ll explore throughout this entire book, but especially in Volume Three, Chapter Two): those perceived both as feminine and weak, but also wild, hysterical and dangerous—witches reduced to safe/dangerous chattel, thus deserving to be hunted down and preyed upon through preemptive DARVO abuse by patriarchal forces defending heteronormativity through hauntological forms of the settler-colonial model.

(exhibit 9a: Frazetta’s “Castle of Sin” [1986]. Commissioned by Playboy magazine, Frazetta depicts our unsuspecting “hero” being led to his doom by three sexy witches [the same number as the Gorgons, aka the Fates]. In other words, the knight and his armored chastity are being absolved and the fleshy women are being cast as Original Sin capturing him; i.e., they [and their bodies] are entirely to blame for everything that happens to the “poor, defenseless[22]” knight inside the castle as an operatic place of “almost certain temptation.” Never mind that he’s armed for bear and armored from head to toe: the unironically fetishized executioner of the state whose medieval abuses and deathly persona are constantly emulated by state police acting as “good cop, bad cop,” but also “white knight, black knight” against their own citizens; i.e., as beings to reinvade through an assigned, entertaining site of crisis within state grounds: the danger disco.

As we explored in Volume Zero, Frazetta’s hauntologies generally objectify women and glorify men; i.e., operating through fetishized power imbalances that nearly always have the woman being offered up as a naked, idealized prize to powerful [usually white] men, and presenting people of color as violent rapists or powerful, eunuchized harem guards. I love Frazetta’s technical prowess, but his products were definitely “of their time,” channeling the same kinds of unsubtle bigotry as Robert E. Howard, but also the magazine that published him: Weird Tales [which also published H.P. Lovecraft]. Both men worked in a racist vein of the Gothic mode, their pulpy stories overflowing with occult flavors that obsessed constantly about a return of calamity as something to counter by heroic, hypermasculine/Cartesian forces: the brains and the brawn. Frazetta illustrated both heroics in a very Pygmalion way that serves state monopolies in all the usual territories: wild, open land, but also castles as dreamlike sites of violence and rape perpetrated by cops afraid of demonic, otherworldly influences that might undermine the purity of their status and position.)

Faced with crisis, state heroes routinely fail to measure up. The most privileged (and craven) group are cis-het, white Christian men. Scared of anything different/of nature (e.g., The Great Outdoors, left: our two Quixotic heroes afraid of a squirrel in their rental cabin) while simultaneously fetishizing it (the way Beowulf’s Spear-Danes would have feared Grendel’s vengeful mother while pegged her for a woman), they become infatuated, possessive and lusty as they fight over often-literal maidens (teenagers); i.e., as child-like, defenseless property that one man shall not covet if it is already owned (with “problematic lovers” often chased into the state of exception using racist/transphobic sodomy tropes; e.g., the rapacious black man and the killer “false” woman-in-disguise, aka the “trap”). That didn’t/doesn’t stop property duels from being enshrined in romantic canon, however (nor does it prevent tokenism through the existence of TERFs acting like cis-het white men, internalizing their bigotry as self-hating dykes, unicorns and tomboys: the monstrous-feminine as something to imprison, abuse and weaponize against various groups even when no threat is posed or conveyed; e.g., twinks).

Erstwhile, the legends themselves become conspicuously homosocial—at times homosexual, even pedophilically homosexual (a knight’s squire, exhibit 92b; rape culture as something to subvert but also endorse, including by the LGBA, exhibit 100c2c—both in Volume Three). All of a sudden, there are far more men fighting over unwilling women than women (cis or queer) who actually want to sleep with the men involved, leading to pedophilia and chattel rape (neither my father nor stepfather sexually abused me; however, while both beat me, my stepfather once hit me in the head so hard with a plastic phone receiver I thought he wanted to kill me). Already covertly genocidal, neoliberalism is a gateway to fascism, which in turn is a gateway to all of these things in the domestic sphere: “prison sex”/Man Box mentalities where cis-het men tend to masturbate to penises going where they ought; i.e., into the vagina, but also the unwilling bodies of those deemed weaker than they are as animals to chattelize.

In other words, any show of monstrous hypermasculine force becomes unironically masturbatory when conducted against state enemies whose morphological arguments “rock the boat”; i.e., undead, demonic and/or animalistic poetics that challenge the usual utility and ubiquity of the penis/phallic object. This means anything that is androdiverse, gynodiverse and/or anthropomorphic constitutes a threat that must be checked in all the usual ways; but just as often, these diversities are erased by heteronormative agents like Cameron canonizing camp, or chased after by them within coercive, reactionary arrangements of power that enable the chaser to extort coerced pleasure from their victims to assuage their own unhappy existences. Through the profit motive, the enforcer is alienated from pleasure, and generally envy the pleasurable closeness to nature and the human condition (sex and gender) that gender-non-conforming practitioners exhibit and communicate through all aspects of themselves; i.e., monstrous expression as a profoundly non-Cartesian/non-Vitruvian morphological statement with profound implications of rebellious gender identity expression, mid-struggle (animals, it must be said, are farmed and devoured[23] under Capitalism): genitals and the prey-like animalized bodies they’re attached to as coming out of the same Walpolean, Gothic imaginary that parental, sometimes-predatory Amazons and knights do.

We’ll explore these in part two, next. Onto “Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM“!

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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] Gothic beings embody power and death as cryptomimetic instruments of great change—generally by overlapping different kingdom taxon of life and death: plants/animals of life, and fungi of death, hybridizing the two as demonic and/or undead (which Volume Two will unpack; e.g., xenomorphs; re: “The Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’“).

[2] Because the state cannot conceal its medieval regressions, it monopolizes its usual violence and terror through Gothic romances; in turn, these incarcerate worker minds in crypt-like hauntologies of endless, brutal suffering (e.g., the infernal concentric pattern, Cycle of Kings, Shadow of Pygmalion, Torment Nexus, etc).

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

[4] Animal masks in theatre are some of the oldest in the world; i.e., totems (a topic we’ll introduce here, and expand on greatly in Volume Two when we examine lycans, chimeras and sentient animals).

[5] The chronotope yields a fearsome character of inherited decay tied to a doomed bloodline; e.g., The Darkest Dungeon‘s (2017) opening query to the player: “Do you remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor?”

[6] Hermia is owned by her father, Egeus, and must either marry his chosen suitor or be destroyed vis-à-vis the “ancient rites” of an imaginary Athens: “As she is mine, I may dispose of her” (source) like chattel. This submission is challenged by Hermia running away like an animal into an imaginary space—a rebellion that is quelled at the end of the story by Shakespeare having Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, marry her male conqueror, Theseus. As usual, evocations of an unruly female past are teased through the same language used to quell it; i.e., Picasso’s destruction of the painted woman: “Each time I leave a woman, I should burn her. Destroy the woman, destroy the past she represents” (source: Marta’s “The Women of Picasso,” 2023). Queerness, then, is hauntological and seditious, and whose Gothic, animal poetics become something to monopolize by the same-old state forces.

[7] E.g., the female singer’s lines from Meatloaf’s “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” (1993):

Will you raise me up? Will you help me down?
Will you get me right out of this godforsaken town?
Can you make it all a little less cold?

Will you hold me sacred? Will you hold me tight?
Can you colourise my life, I’m so sick of black and white?
Can you make it all a little less old?

Will you make me some magic with your own two hands?
Can you build an emerald city with these grains of sand?
Can you give me something I can take home?

Will you cater to every fantasy I got?
Will you hose me down with holy water, if I get too hot?
Will you take me places I’ve never known?

Meatloaf, likewise, is no stranger to horror and camp; e.g., Rocky Horror (1975) but also “Pelts” (2007) from Masters of Horror (re: “Furry Panic“), as well as his various music videos; re: the one for “I Would Do Anything for Love.” To it, monsters and music go together like sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (a campy tradition out of Shakespeare’s medieval revivals revived, themselves, in the present space and time; e.g., my interviewing of modern-day Shakespearean horror directors, Kailey and Sam Spear, in my “Alien: Ore” series: “On Shakespeare“)! In keeping with cryptonymy process, the fun is the danger disco in disguise!

[8] The Welfare Mom is a racist trope that scapegoats women of color for manufactured scarcity’s generating of criminogenic conditions for those in and outside the state of exception; i.e., divide and conquer for the state.

[9] A common segregative metaphor is the sheepdog—a canine guardian that controls chattel, bloodlessly keeping them in place by obeying but also doubling the shepherd; i.e., guarding his flock. Whereas these cryptonyms conceal the state abuse normally taking place under such segregation (domestic abuse), a black dog symbolizes death, but also works as an attack animal to a higher degree than their fair-furred, babyface counterpart. Both are capable of state violence and indeed are bred for that purpose.

[10] Lucas explained how Star Wars famously took anti-totalitarian/anti-American ideas and communicated them to an American audience (source: AMC+’s “George Lucas on Star Wars Being Anti-Authoritarian,” 2018). In turn, Lucas inspired Cameron with the Star Wars movies to make The Terminator films, and later, the Avatar franchise. Except the allegory of resistance, per the billionaire-Marxist approach, is regularly obscured by the pursuit of profit (franchising the struggle) and telling it from an exclusively white, American, Pygmalion (male king’s) imaginary perspective; e.g., Lucas famously telling Carrie Fisher “there is no underwear in space” (Hamish Kilburn’s “George Lucas Made Carrie Fisher Act in No Underwear in Star Wars,” 2016) and Cameron capitalizing on rebellious activities by relegating guerilla warfare to humanoid space bugs in Aliens, or to white saviors who, according to him, do the job better than Indigenous populations (Kshitij Mohan Rawat’s “Native Americans Boycott James Cameron,” 2022).

Furthermore these Pygmalion tendencies would be counteracted by Lucas’ then-wife, Marcia Lucas, editing the original trilogy (source: Elisa Guimaraes’ “George Lucas Created Star Wars, But This Person Gave It Heart,” 2023). A similar Galatea effect also occurred with Mad Max: Fury Road (2014), as Rhiannon Thomas writes: “The success of Mad Max: Fury Road wasn’t just because Margaret Sixel was a female editor. It’s because of the magical combination of her female perspective, and her non-action-movie perspective, and her unique world perspective, and her immense talent and hard work and dedication” (source: “Mad Max and The Female Editor,” 2023).

This being said, such stories are still written by white women, hence make their saviors and Indians white, too (re: the “Rambo/Star Wars problem” and, by extension, the whole monomyth’s military optimism and cartographic ethnocentric refrains). Most videogames are separate from actual physical space (versus phone games; e.g., Pokémon Go); anytime a game attaches to the real world and/or profit motive, it becomes not just limited by real-world space, but defined by it: as dogma that introduces an ability for the player to die by either playing the game simulation (re: Pokémon Go) or taking the simulation into the real world (re: Doom and Vietnam-style revenge, post-Aliens, at home and overseas, during the Imperial Boomerang and its various nightmare scenarios on and offstage; see: the Undead Module’s “Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang” and “A Vampire History Primer“).

[11] The LAPD’s abuse stretches back over seventy years, as discussed in Max Felker-Kantor’s Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (2018):

When the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department (source).

Such abuse had already been going on for decades (source: Rocio Lopez’ “LA Police’s History of Brutality” 2020), thriving in the shadow of Jim Crow and the orchestrated failure of Reconstruction following the American Civil War (which sowed the seeds of neo-slavery and neo-colonialism within the US).

[12] The terminator is an infiltrator-style killer that, in the ’80s, fits snugly in with the serial killer “slasher” craze, but also police brutality with a friendly human face carried into the early ’90s (during the L.A. riots). In the slasher genre, cultural anxieties personify scapegoats regarding the dimorphic qualities of heteronormative society. Men are always big and strong and dangerous; women are always vulnerable damsels, in danger to men, surviving them and eventually surrendering their power to them in the end. In the school of Ann Radcliffe, the danger of a “slasher” story is always sexy and vice versa, stirring up giant feelings of being stalked, hunted, trapped, captured, raped, tortured, and killed by a shadowy, ever-present menace (“like an animal” under such conditions); Cameron links the same fatal dimorphism to the family unit as something to uphold in unison with these destabilizing “homewrecker” threats: “bad home, bad family” versus “good home, good family” with monsters in between (the classical dilemma being one of genuine fidelity and of good faith, versus acting in bad faith). The imagery of home is present, but faded, treacherous, wrong.

[13] E.g., the damsel-in-distress; i.e., fight or flight, of feeling prey-like in relation to predators: constantly being hunted, naked and exposed, on the run, kept from thinking about or otherwise doing things that might change our material conditions when confronting state trauma in Gothic forms that, in canonical terms, keep people afraid of the socio-material arrangements, versus changing them.

[14] I say “famine” because the event is not generally considered a deliberate genocide by modern history scholars in opposition to Cold War standards; e.g., Robert Davies and Steven Wheatcroft, who write in The Years of Hunger (2009):

Our study of the famine has led us to very different conclusions from Dr Conquest’s. He holds that Stalin “wanted a famine,” that “the Soviets did not want the famine to be coped with successfully,” and that the Ukrainian famine was “deliberately inflicted for its own sake.” This leads him to the sweeping conclusion: “The main lesson seems to be that the Communist ideology provided the motivation for an unprecedented massacre of men, women and children.”

We do not at all absolve Stalin from responsibility for the famine. His policies towards the peasants were ruthless and brutal. But the story which has emerged in this book is of a Soviet leadership which was struggling with a famine crisis which had been caused partly by their wrongheaded policies, but was unexpected and undesirable. The background to the famine is not simply that Soviet agricultural policies were derived from Bolshevik ideology, though ideology played its part. They were also shaped by the Russian pre-revolutionary past, the experiences of the civil war, the international situation, the intransigent circumstances of geography and the weather, and the modus operandi of the Soviet system as it was established under Stalin. They were formulated by men with little formal education and limited knowledge of agriculture. Above all, they were a consequence of the decision to industrialize this peasant country at breakneck speed (source).

For more examples (and the conflicts that emerge between them online), consider Bad Empanada’s “The Holodomor Genocide Question: How Wikipedia Lies to You” (2023).

[15] This being said, grooming an heir and incestuously rearing the next-in-line from one’s sire by said heir is a common fear/fascination inside the ghost of the counterfeit—of one’s liege having forged, yet enforced, parental qualities suggested by the decaying scenic fabric and faded decorations of the medieval homestead as harmful and false. Such disintegration echoes state variants through more advanced forms of capital that feudalism would evolve (and regress back) into: fascism and the defense of an imaginary feudalistic manor amounting to a marriage towards the fearsome, regal likeness of one’s parents.

[16] I.e., vigilante-style “deputies” during acts of pro-state stochastic terrorism (a concept we will explore thoroughly in Volume Three); e.g., incels.

[17] Cameron married and divorced Linda Hamilton as a perceived double of Sarah that didn’t measure up to his Pygmalion fantasy as he envisioned it:

“I think what happened there is that he really fell in love with Sarah Connor,” Hamilton said. “And I did, too.” Cameron didn’t object, telling the Times, “I fell in love with her initially because I thought she was a little closer to Sarah than she actually is, but that doesn’t mean that much once you get to know somebody” (source: Alexia Fernández’s “Linda Hamilton Says She and Ex-Husband James Cameron Were ‘Terribly Mismatched,'” 2019).

[18] I.e., bodily dismemberment and bodily functions as the barbaric fulfillment of inhumane threats by inhumane force; e.g., “I’m gonna rip your head off and shit down your neck!”

[19] State proponents chase after those they dehumanize—a complicated reality illustrated by another telling Cameron movie quote (this section is full of them): “She thought they said, ‘illegal alien’ and signed up!” “Fuck you, man!” “Anytime, anywhere!”

[20] Police and police adjacent factors identify reductively by sight to put you inside one of two basic categories: “a male” or “a female,” but also predator or prey.

[21] Thought Slime’s “I Investigated the Biggest Scumbag on YouTube” (2024).

[22] Knights ride down their prey and violate them through an amalgam of metaphors and actualities: actual rape versus “rape,” and animal metaphors for these things; i.e., through their steed, their lance, their armor as a part of their entirety insofar as it paradoxically threatens and excites their would-be victims.

[23] The butcher’s paradox amounts to an animal that is cute, but calmly slain and sliced up by the handler’s knife. As much as possible is done to ensure a minimization of pain, but death and pain are nonetheless unavoidable; e.g., Chef Wang Gang’s “Stir-fry Bullfrog” video (2023) graphically demonstrating the upfront butchering and preparing of cute bullfrogs. There is a frankness to the confronting of such slaughter to meet a basic, biological need, but also an endorsement of it as a business by a wider culture (Asia) having already suffered greatly at the hands of American Imperialism. In the presence of great trauma (and food shortages), life becomes cheap and delicious, but the fragility lingers in uneasy dialogs (Google-translated YouTube comments from Wang’s video): “Such a cute frog tastes so delicious” and “How cruel it looks from the front is how delicious it looks from the back,” etc. Such statements acknowledge the turning away of the victim and its inevitable killing from behind to make a meal, while nevertheless adopting a kind of executioner’s pride heaped on the chef as a proud master of his craft. The animal quickly becomes an easy casualty in us-versus-them rhetoric, one that slides easily into animal abuse through a system that, for all intents and purposes, rapes nature and its unlucky inhabitants to fill owner and worker bellies with.

Try to imagine and apply this same mentality (and brutal outcome) vis-à-vis animalized workers and their egregores; then try to understand their collective, humanized plight to survive inside a system that prioritizes worker butchery for profit through the heteronormative language (and its negotiation) of animalized monsters: to be bred for slaughter—farmed for meat and sex as grossly conflated under abusive socio-material arrangements; e.g., “thicc” prized by the sex pest who feels entitled to regular “meals,” which he carves up with his dick not as a euphemism for modesty’s sake, but a cryptonymic means of concealing rape. Said entitlement isn’t to fulfill an attempt to bond with others, but to dehumanize and consume them for his own status and insecurities within the profit motive. Through Capitalist Realism, the prison-sex mentality extends into a myopic and inescapable slaughterhouse that, through the ghost of the counterfeit, becomes something to eat through the process of abjection: the delicious suffering of others mid-chattelization. Such “erotic butchery” is endemic to capital, which shapes our experiences; i.e how we inhabit, but also see and understand the world. All of this must be fought and resisted during iconoclastic expression that continues to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that humans are animals who not only kill to survive, but enjoy and savor their food as oft-sexualized inside a larger system exploiting these overlapping mechanisms for profit.

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.

Manifesto: Simplifying Theory

“One night during my accustomed visit to the neighbouring wood where I collected my own food and brought home firing for my protectors, I found on the ground a leathern portmanteau containing several articles of dress and some books. I eagerly seized the prize and returned with it to my hovel. Fortunately the books were written in the language, the elements of which I had acquired at the cottage; they consisted of Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and the Sorrows of Werter. The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations.

—the Creature, Frankenstein (1818)

Picking up where “Volume One, opening and preface” left off…

Dearest Reader,

This is our revolution’s manifesto. I originally wrote it before the thesis volume, making it more relaxed in its argumentation. So while it’s more academically formalized than Volumes Two and Three, my manifesto supplies a thoroughly simplified approach to my core theories. In doing so, its actionable curriculum aims to apply the grander ideas of my thesis to one’s own teaching approach as flexible; i.e., to learn from the trauma of oppressed groups when dealing with our own abuse. All happen while synthesizing praxis and overcoming systemic harm together, using a variety of monstrous expressions to cultivate sex-positive habits to teach others with. These habits generate through Gothic dialogs, whose monstrous theatre constitutes a pedagogy of the oppressed that, when synthesized during ludo-Gothic BDSM, aids in the development of Gothic Communism for all. As its name suggests, the manifesto unfurls the manifesto tree of oppositional praxis; understanding this tree is required for when we discuss synthesizing theory and confronting interpersonal trauma through Gothic instruction in the second half of this volume. So learn it well, but take your time. Rome wasn’t burned in a day and healing from its vast crimes takes not simply one lifetime, but many in endless succession; i.e., while past abuse lives within and around us and generational trauma is slowly dismantled on a systemic level through Gothic paradox.

Love,

—Your “Commie Mommy,” Persephone

For centuries, Gothic stories (and more-recent-but-dated psychoanalytical models in Gothic academia) have warned of vast, indistinct dangers seemingly removed from everyday life yet at the same time frighteningly relatable and close. I argue this myopic division stems from Capitalism, whose elusive, illusory exploitation of sex workers (and sexualized workers) happens through Capitalist Realism; said Realism damages the cultural mind, but also its artistic output as something to relate with and respond to in Gothic terms. In turn, this has had a wide range of far-reaching effects in the material world felt through the Gothic imagination: “Something is rotten in Denmark!” This manifesto formulates an active, practical, countercultural process; informed by a collection of assembled theories and research, said process articulates sex-positive activism and education in a series of vital, interconnected things: the mission of Gothic Communism; its goals, theories, and mode of expression (the means and materials of production: monsters, lairs/parallel space, hermeneutics—the means of study—phobias, and mediums); and creative expression through praxial synthesis.

At its inception, our manifesto began essentially as one chapter divided into six subchapters. After it gives our mission statement, it lists the majority of operational coordinates that occur during oppositional praxis: our aforementioned manifesto tree. The goal in listing them, here after we’ve already discussed them much more deeply during my thesis argument, isn’t to provide their complete order exactly as it was examined in Volume Zero; it’s to provide them in a simplified form that can be applied through a taught, semi-anecdotal approach. The content is essentially the same, albeit more basic and conversational, thus accessible:

• “The Gist“ (included in this post) gives our mission statement, then outlines the entire manifesto (the manifesto tree of oppositional praxis) list by list.
• “The Nation-State“ (included in this post) and “An Uphill Battle” part one, part two and part three outline the many pressures and forces existing during the struggle to synthesize praxis and unify workers using monstrous poetics; the three monsters (and their trauma style) we focus on are gargoyles, Amazons and vampires.
• “Monster Modes, Totalitarianism and Opposing Forces“ revisits oppositional praxis, lists all the monsters, lairs and phobias we will explore in Volume Two and Three, and outlines menticide, a form of brainwashing that the synthesis roadmap explores more thoroughly.

Similar to my thesis volume, there is some mention of trauma writing/artwork in the manifesto itself. While interrogating trauma isn’t the main focus of the manifesto at first, it gradually becomes more and more prevalent until the manifesto postscript kicks off the second half of the volume. From there, “Healing from Rape“ constitutes the initiation of catharsis through learned instruction as informed by traumatic anecdote; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM expressed through lived experience and emotional content. It addresses police “corruption,” DARVO and general abuse with the pedagogy of the oppressed as a means of preventing trauma, but also healing from it by listening to those already traumatized on a daily basis: sex workers and workers sexualized by capital as people who can teach us through their own catharsis to be better instructors through the same mode.

Following the postscript, the synthesis roadmap discusses how to synthesize praxis directly within our daily lives, thus prevent war and rape as a Cartesian byproduct; i.e., by forging social-sexual habits of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness through what we express, create or otherwise personify and leave behind for others to discover and learn from: our collective, intersectional trauma as previously informed by the trauma of others, including the shadow of state abuses against nature felt across time and space. The complex, difficult emotions that result (fear, doubt, insecurity, superstition, paranoia, psychosexual attraction/repulsion, etc) become things to negotiate with through our poetics having a lasting Gothic footprint that challenges state dogma.

(exhibit 6b3: Artist, top-left, top-mid, and bottom-mid: Blxxd Bunny; bottom-left: Juice of Yellow; right: Leeza. Their squishy bodies serve as a powerful, Gothic means of educating others about confronting trauma and healing from it, but also preventing successive abuses against such bodies in the future.)

The manifesto is modular and holistic, having many moving parts that work on their own and in unison, often intersecting in some shape or form. Point in fact, they’re meant to be studied, approached and applied intersectionally insofar as expressing trauma goes. However, I’ve tried to write them in such a way that you can get the gist of certain points before I get around to explaining them (which, to be frank, I’ve done far more exhaustively in Volume Zero). So regardless if you’ve only skimmed Volume Zero, all of these devices are central to iconoclasm during oppositional praxis; we absolutely need to cover them in some shape or form before we can delve into Gothic poetics as something to historically understand and learn from in Volume Two, then apply through our own work in Volume Three—i.e., when we “play god” and self-fashion/self-determine in Gothic-Communist terms.

The Gist: Our Gothic-Communist Mission Statement and List of Oppositional Praxial Coordinates, Including Our Tenets and Main Gothic Theories

“But Louis B. Meyer wouldn’t be Goebbels’ proper opposite number. I believe Goebbels sees himself as David O. Selznick.”

“…Brief him!”

—Lt. Archie Hicox and Winston Churchill, Inglourious Basterds (2009)

First and foremost, our mission statement is, “As Gothic Communists, our mission is to protect you!—to expose Capitalism’s perfidious design as a structure, thereby protecting all workers (sex or otherwise) from Capitalism by teaching them to liberate themselves through iconoclastic art!”

Note: This is where the title of the book series comes from. As time passed, though, I would start to express universal liberation per ludo-Gothic BDSM having the whore’s revenge; i.e., by subverting monsters through revolutionary cryptonymy to reverse abjection, thus profit. Even so, these aren’t discrete categories, sharing the same Aegis. Here, though, my emphasis was less holistic/focused around the dialectic of the alien (re: “Some Prep When Hugging the Alien“)—through the whore signifier/signified (sex work being the root of all abuse under capital abusing Medusa)—and more a broad, pick-and-choose argument; re: oppositional praxis stressing different qualities in a more singular-and-atomized fashion (which frankly is easier to write); e.g., saying “heteronormative canon” versus “canon is heteronormative, Cartesian, and settler-colonial” (which Volume Zero would do, but again, I wrote it after the manifesto).

(artist: Kaycee Bee)

Frankly the entire volume is written like this—with Volume Two growing more focused on universal liberation through holistic liminal expression that, all the same, focuses on the whore’s side of things during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., generalized but also specialized to achieve liberation through preferential code; re: focusing less on the primality of the Medusa/Aegis “alien” argument and more on its dialectical-material continuation through ongoing struggles when sexualized by capital; e.g., with Kaycee Bee and I working together more recently in ways I wouldn’t have, when this manifesto first came to be (for I was still working out the process). Other forms of poetry and labor are equally valid, of course; they’re just not the focus, here, because “here” is meant to be as broad and unbiased as possible while sticking to sex work and its poetic extensions. This makes sense, given this is a manifesto, one speaking introductorily to all forms of poetry and labor having infinite value, thus infinite shape: to exploit or liberate during oppositional praxis.

To it, the volume’s theories started simpler (manifesto first draft), grew complex (PhD), simplified again (final manifesto), and applied themselves historically and poetically during Volume Two leading into Volume Three’s making new history. You’ll see the manifesto tree, here (from Volume Zero), but it will make a return once Volume Three arrives. —Perse, 4/4/2025

Capitalism conceals its own Promethean (self-destructive) nature through heteronormative canon. To critique its abuse of workers through Capitalist Realism, I want to focus on Gothic poetics; i.e., using them in a sex-positive, Marxist way that intersects with other schools of thought. These intersections obviously help us address the many ways that Capitalism sexualizes workers; but given Marx’ admittedly dry (and straight) nature, we also want to spice things up: camping canon/”making it gay” by synthesizing communal (anarcho-Communist) emotional/Gothic intelligence as a sex-positive alternative to canonical, thus bourgeois, teaching methods. This reversal during ludo-Gothic BDSM requires our manifesto tree from my thesis statement; i.e., an assortment of goals, Gothic academic theories, Gothic mode of expression (monsters, hermeneutics, phobias) and praxial effects, whose lists I will now give in the order I have chosen:

Note: I am stressing a certain priority in what comes first, but the exact order given doesn’t really matter as everything is modular and holistic. None should be neglected, and all are integral to achieving Gothic Communism. This being said, there are several smaller subfactors from the manifesto tree that aren’t listed here (though we will touch on them later in the book). For the most comprehensive and in-depth look at all of the manifesto tree ideas, refer to Volume Zero. —Perse, back in 2024

• the six Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism (the Six Rs)
• the four main Gothic theories (the Four Gs)
• monsters*
• lairs/parallel space*
• the Hermeneutic Gothic-Communist Quadfecta* (Gothic, game, queer and Marxist theory)
• phobias*
• the Six Doubles of Oppositional Praxis

*the Gothic mode of expression (its means, materials and methods of study)

Of the Six Doubles, these divide into two lists of three: the “Three Canonical Doubles” of Capitalism and bourgeois praxis versus the “Three Iconoclastic Doubles” of Gothic Communism and proletarian praxis (all shown in descending order):

• sex coercion vs sex positivity
• carcerality vs emancipation
• complicity vs revolution

and their various synthetic oppositional groupings

• 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)

I’ll get to each of these in turn, starting at the top and steadily working my way to the bottom across this manifesto’s six sections. This means we won’t cover the Six Doubles until nearly the end of the manifesto; we’ll introduce the synthetic oppositional groupings during the manifesto, but explore them more during the synthesis roadmap (several essays between Manifesto and Instruction will also analyze the BDSM elements of “Gothic” per ludo-Gothic BDSM’s modular elements). Certain related factors, such as the canonical reactions to camped canon

• open aggression
• condescension
• reactionary indignation
• DARVO (“Deny Accuser Reverse Victim/Offender”)

will be unpacked more, as well. These will either be summarized or abridged quotes from the thesis volume, and I will be resupplying them piecemeal as we go.

Since the Six Doubles of Oppositional Praxis are last on our manifesto list, I’ll give a little extra information about them up front; re (from Volume Zero):

While we will consider these manifesto-tree ideas, here, we will return to them during the synthesis roadmap in Volume One when we delve more into trauma writing and artwork as a means of synthesizing praxis; as well as during the Humanities primer in Volume Two, and in Chapters Four and Five in Volume Three (the latter two which explore the execution of disguise pastiche in the Internet Age). Until then, please don’t fret; they are meant to be understood fairly loosely and their synonyms can be swapped interchangeably (canonical/blind pastiche) as long as the basic dialectical-material relationship (and its symptoms) are communicated.

“Cops and victims,” for example, often becomes hauntologized, presenting in fantastical forms that mirror real-life examples. A “girl boss” witch or “medusa” can angrily serve the state by being the heroine or the villain in ways that uphold the status quo, making her role functionally bourgeois; a real-life cop serves the state, often LARPing as a death knight while they brutalize their state-assigned, hauntologically abject victims during witch hunts. The same conversion applies to proletarian representations and representatives. To that, egregores personify oppositional praxis, making them fundamentally liminal. This means they’ll invoke power at different registers according to various titles, rankings and positions of status and privilege: e.g., a witch queen, princess, courtier or peasant as a status symbol often expressed in BDSM language or demonic-undead, animalized/animate-inanimate simulacra. Despite her label, a witch queen isn’t automatically bourgeois, any more than making her a zombie and/or demon would. Function (not aesthetics) determines one’s role in oppositional praxis, which must be ascertained through dialectical-material analysis of any aspect of the natural-material world. We’ll do so now through D&D pastiche (orcs and humans), but also canceled futures (the cyberpunk) as something to transmute through our own “creative successes” in response to Capitalism’s usual shenanigans.

(exhibit 1a1a1c3 [re: “Pieces of the Camp Map“]: D&D “homebrew” is a way of escaping the palimpsestuous racial profiling of Tolkien’s High Fantastical gentrification enacted by Wizards of the Coast trying to enforce the racial [thus class and gender] binary—e.g., “mind flayers” always being lawful evil, or Drow always being chaotic evil/”pure evil” inside the state of exception [exhibit 41b; re: “A Lesson in Humility“] to fill the gap made by the humanized [yet still fetishized] “good” orcs [exhibit 37e2; re: “Meeting Jadis“]: the exceptional “not bad for an orc” pariah. Tolkien made orcs to be beaten and bitten by swords with fancy-sounding names illustrating the function as simultaneously dressed up and denuded [from The Hobbit]: 

He took out his sword again, and again it flashed in the dark by itself. It burned with a rage that made it gleam if goblins were about; now it was bright as blue flame for delight in the killing of the great lord of the cave. It made no trouble whatever of cutting through the goblin-chains and setting all the prisoners free as quickly as possible. This sword’s name was Glamdring the Foe-hammer, if you remember. The goblins just called it Beater, and hated it worse than Biter if possible. Orcrist, too, had been saved; for Gandalf had brought it along as well […]

At this point Gandalf fell behind, and Thorin with him. They turned a sharp corner. “About turn!” he shouted. “Draw your sword Thorin!”

There was nothing else to be done; and the goblins did not like it. They came scurrying round the corner in full cry, and found Goblin-cleaver and Foe-hammer shining cold and bright right in their astonished eyes. The ones in front dropped their torches and gave one yell before they were killed. The ones behind yelled still more, and leaped back knocking over those that were running after them. “Biter and Beater!” they shrieked; and soon they were all in confusion…” (source).

This function can be reversed, but must occur within the mode of expression; e.g., sexy orc roleplay in Skyrim mods, exhibit 84b [re: Volume Three]; i.e., inside material conditions to avoid praxial invisibility. You have to be able to give it shape inside camp and communicate it to others afterward.)

To this, oppositional praxis during Gothic Communism is less like the discrete, nine-squared D&D Alignment Chart (above) and more like a Venn Diagram of the same components doubled and super-imposed over each other. Hence, why revolutionary acronyms like ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) are handy but also why you still have to distinguish between who’s genuine/good-faith and who isn’t/bad-faith during oppositional praxis; i.e., through dialectical-material scrutiny as performed by gay space wizards through whatever “poison” you pick and serve up:

(artist: Ecchi Oni)

For example, an ironic, “strict” mommy dom (and her “dark sodomy castle of gloom and doom”—when executed in good faith—is not a class traitor even if she’s wearing a police uniform or (some other) fetish outfit; aesthetics do not determine function, function does, but obviously first impressions are important. Private exhibits of triggering symbols like swastikas or desecrated American flags (the Thin Blue Line) are far different than public ones, and if you use them in your art during your public exhibit, you have to be prepared to explain why—i.e., as a de facto educator of sex positivity through liminal expression using Gothic poetics. On the flipside, fascists operate through bad-faith concealment; i.e., attacking like undercover cops who awaken and bushwack their foes when they feel threatened (they also join arms with centrists, aggregating with formal power to defend capital against labor).

Code-switching intuition, then, becomes something to develop, like a sixth sense (source: “Pieces of the ‘Camp Map’“).

To summarize, bourgeois and proletarian praxis function in opposition, working for or against the state and its heteronormative propaganda; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm through sex positivity versus sex coercion (and nerds for one or the other during the battle for universal liberation). Proletarian praxis recultivates the Superstructure and reclaims the Base in ways that redistribute power and wealth in iconoclastic language; i.e., in horizontal arrangements that encourage degrowth in favor of stability and worker rights, while also doing away with vertical authorities outright: an anarcho-Communist challenging of the state in ways that Marxist-Leninism historically did not; re: with the Gothic mode and queer theory.

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

The basic concept revolves around the “creative successes” of proletarian praxis during oppositional praxis, synthesized into proletarian forms by workers operating within their own daily lives; e.g., Bunny and I, over the years (above); i.e., not just as workers, but de facto social-sex educators detached from state mechanisms—indeed, in opposition to them (never forget: the state isn’t just the proverbial enemy but the great destroyer of the planet). The Gothic, then, yields class character amid a warring culture of weird nerds: weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds. The two clash regarding the sexualized abuse—and liberation of—our bodies, identities and performances under capital; i.e., produced by our labor with taboo, stigmatized language as something to endorse or reclaim, and with it, the revelation of various comical truths: nerds are both weird as fuck and like to fuck in ways that are certifiably weird; e.g., public nudism as an ace mechanism that interrogates canonical sexuality as harmful.

“Weird” means vastly different things depending on one’s class/cultural position. The praxial goal, for weird iconoclastic nerds, is to teach good play during ludo-Gothic BDSM in sex-positive art, chiefly the interrogation of power/trauma and its negotiation in theatrical, paradoxical forms. Proletarian praxis, then, revolves around camping canon, which goes something like this; re (abridged, from the thesis volume’s manifesto tree as cited in “Shining a Light on Things“):

Note: The “camp map” finale aims to camp canon through ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: per Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains, while making monsters ourselves/putting the pussy on the chainwax as outlined and discussed through the prior elements of said map mapping out my thesis argument; i.e., as something to argue through our own labor versus labor theft; e.g., AI (source tweet, Shad M. Brooks: March 28, 2025). Challenging profit’s monopolization and abuse of monsters is what Blxxd Bunny and I will—by disrobing the Medusa to whatever degree we decide (a Numinous strip tease, below)—effectively be demonstrating in the finale with our ludo-Gothic BDSM, so keep these ideas handy (and refer to all the Paratextual Documents if you feel the need to)!

—Perse, 3/29/2025

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

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

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

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

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

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

• • reverse abjection
  • the emancipatory hauntology and Communist-chronotope operating as a parallel society—i.e., a parallel space (or language) that works off the anti-totalitarian notion of “parallel societies[1]“: “A [society] not dependent on official channels of communications, or on the hierarchy of values of the establishment.”
  • the Gothic Communist’s good-faith, revolutionary cryptonymy

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

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

through their own synthetic toolkits during oppositional praxis. They endorse

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

to further Capitalism’s crises-by-design, hence its expected decay, according to a variety of bourgeois trifectas that lead to the banality of evil; its vertical, pyramid-scheme arrangements of power and subsequent tiers and punitive exchanges thereof

• • top, middle, bottom
  • lords, generals/lieutenants, and grunts
  • corporate, militarized and paramilitarized flavors

arranged in neoliberal forms inside and outside of the text

• • bosses, mini-bosses, and minions
  • executives, middle management/content creators, customers/consumers
  • waves of terror and vice characters (menticide)

which leads to a surrender of total power during states of emergency that are always in crisis and decay. Empathy is the casualty of the middle class, who are taught to see the underclass as lacking basic human rights during moral panics.

In summation, Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism ensures that empathy/apathy and class character (unconscious/conscious) occur in oppositional praxis as a dialectical-material exchange. For workers, the empathy accrued is established during these creative successes, whose solidarized and active, intelligent poetics (a manifestation of reclaimed labor and working-class sentiment/counterterror) cultivate the Superstructure in ways useful to proletarian praxis: helping all workers by reversing the process of abjection and its canonical historical materialism (the narrative of the crypt, or echo of ruins). This happens by camping the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the barbaric lie of the West told through the monomyth, Cycle of Kings and infernal concentric pattern that drive the process of abjection currently used to exploit workers, resulting in myopic exploitation and genocide under Capitalist Realism while the elite’s endlessly engineered crises enter into, and out of, decayed states of emergency and exception. Rewrite how people respond to elite propaganda and you can rewrite how people think, thus rewrite history by changing its well-trod, profitable (for the elite) and bloody (for us) historical-material track; in short you can take the state’s propaganda apart, ending Capitalist Realism as you start to develop towards a post-scarcity world (the kind that is wholly antithetical to modern nation-states and their vertical arrangements of power).

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

So, now that we have our various big-but-basic lists, keep ’em handy and I’ll use the rest of the manifesto to conversationally walk you through them one at a time, doing my best to connect them with explanations in between.

Before we start, though, I want to give a couple of small reminders that you should keep in mind:

• One, I want to reassure readers that this manifesto is more academically granular in its flavor and structure than Volumes Two and Three, if only so I’m clear and comprehensive in following and responding to my overall thesis argument (which is the most academically granular text in our book). After this, I swear things loosen up a bit (except for the sample essay, which chucks you into the deep end head-first).
• Two, while the word “praxis” is common but has many synonyms/adjectives (creative, oppositional, bourgeois, proletarian), I also don’t see the need to exclusively call something “praxis,” since all four volumes ultimately concern praxis and something being praxis is arguably why I’m mentioning it to begin with.
• Three, despite covering sexual expression and working with sex workers, this book isn’t really structured around giving dating advice (though it does include bits of advice/personal anecdotes scattered throughout); it’s a labor guide that teaches workers not to be dicks to their friends, who they might be able to sleep with if everyone’s DTF (down to fuck). However, if you wanted to apply its concepts to your own sex life, I can assure you, these are tried and true methods. Trust me, I learned from the nymphs (re: ludo-Gothic BDSM and Cuwu)!

(source: “Be Not Afraid!” 2010)

Also, while we’ve had a chance so far (during the preface) to discuss the ways in which Gothic Communism’s anarcho-Communist design works in opposition to state mechanisms (which includes Marxist-Leninism, though it’s obviously preferable to Western models of capital, but nevertheless remains prone to its own abuses), there’s actually a social, therapeutic component to Gothic Communism that relates to our Gothic-Marxist tenets and four main Gothic theories; i.e., as things to interrogate and negotiate in our own lives.

The idea actually comes from dialectical behavioral therapy models introduced to me by a former friend (Cuwu, who we introduced in Volume Zero; more on them during the “Uphill Battle, part three” and “Healing from Rape” subchapters). DBT is designed specifically to prevent self-destructive behavior at a societal level; Gothic Communism as I’ve conceived it applies this to sex workers, preventing destructive behaviors against them from other workers who are loyal to the state. It achieves this by combining dialectical-material analysis of Gothic stories with four Gothic literary theories (the Gothic being largely concerned with sex in popular monstrous media) to achieve a Gothic hybrid of traditionally Marxist goals—all in service of furthering sex positivity through well-educated, emotionally and Gothically intelligent sex workers who can “live deliciously” as a form of proletarian praxis from moment to moment. No Promethean junk food for us! Only the best, but we must learn to make things taste delicious again while subsisting on canonical, plastic garbage that we dialectically-materially scrutinize. Dialectical-material analysis, then, is something to embody in our own lives, specifically through our consumption habits, labor and poetics as extensions of our bodies, sexualities and gender expression having been reclaimed by us.

Reclamation operates through our manifesto coordinates. Starting at the top (as listed here), we begin with the Six Rs and Four Gs. We’ve already discussed these a great deal in the thesis volume (and will discuss them a great deal more as we continue). For now, I just want to list the tenets and theories and to briefly explain their relationship to each other and to oppositional praxis; i.e., as something for workers to enact during Gothic Communism’s camping of canonical forces. As stated during our abstract, our tenets’

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

Because they are provided in full at the start of every volume (and are explored at length in the thesis volume), I will only list the six tenets:

• Re-claim/-cultivate
• Re-union/-discover/-turn
• Re-empower/-negotiate
• Re-open/-educate
• Re-play
• Re-produce/-lease

I call these tenets the Six Rs, or six things to reclaim from Capitalism through the Gothic imagination. Underpinning these tenets are four central Gothic theories, the Four Gs (outlined in their entirety during the start of every volume; re: “Paratextual Documents“):

• abjection (from Julia Kristeva’s process of abjection, vis-à-vis Jerrold Hogle’s “ghost of the counterfeit”)
• chronotope/parallel Gothic space (from Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Gothic chronotope”)
• hauntology (from Jacques Derrida’s “spectres of Marx” and Mark Fisher’s “canceled futures,” vis-à-vis Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis):
• cryptonymy (from Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, vis-à-vis Jerrold Hogle’s “narrative of the crypt” and Jodey Castricano’s cryptomimesis)

Unlike the Gothic mode—which tells of legendary things (undead/demonic and anthropomorphic monsters or places) with, as or within Gothic media as things to perform, create, or imagine/reimagine, wear, inhabit, occupy or pass through (we’ll explore all of these variants in this volume)—Gothic theory explains the process behind all of this as it’s going on, has gone on, will go on.

(artist: Kaycee Bee)

Guided by these theories, then, the re-education of sex worker emotions achieves the Six Rs through instructed critical analysis of sexualized art; be it their own, someone else’s, or something to become, its sex-positive lessons are designed to teach emotional intelligence through a Gothic mode whose cultural imagination, when used in an iconoclastic sense, becomes a vulgar display of counterterrorist power in defiance of the state’s own terrorist/menticidal antics (re: Meerloo’s “waves of terror” and Robert Asprey’s “paradox of terror[2]” versus Max Weber’s monopoly of violence and Joseph Crawford’s invention of terrorism through the canonical Gothic mode).

Once materialized, iconoclastic displays can reopen worker minds that, once open, fluently drink up good information like a thirsty sponge and leave bad information out while nevertheless remaining aware of it (a bit like Drake). This results in creative, proletarian-praxial displays—and those who prepare and make them—that offset their bourgeois counterparts to engender emotional/Gothic intelligence in regards to canonical monsters as already being historical-material outcomes in this sense. Our aim as Gothic Communists is to engender proletarian antics/iconoclasm through praxial synthesis; i.e., the daily and informed, intuitive cultivation of

• sex-positive monster porn (monsters are generally dimorphically sexualized in canon, which spreads the complicated, awful lie that porn is paradoxically forbidden and available—peddled furtively to people like a bad drug whose “pushers” promise this is the only place you can get it from instead of, you know, making it yourselves)
• safe, trusting spaces
• reasonable forgiveness, preventative justice, and a pedagogy of the oppressed as delivered through a reclaimed language of the oppressor class that normally shames the proletariat’s reimagined past

The prime directive of Gothic Communism, then, is to reverse-abject the re-remembered past away from the Western tradition. Though ostensibly “superior,” the West is actually Promethean—not simply exploitative, but historically doomed to fail and repeat its Icarian mistakes to the continued detriment of workers everywhere. Eventually the owner class will die, too; it just takes longer. As they burn everyone around them like fuel, the Earth is reduced to a sprawling necropolis of ashes and bones—all to glut the bourgeoisie, who prey on our imaginations like mind-flayer vampires; i.e., by weaponizing manufactured fears of cartoon fascism, general “corruption,” xenophobia (the monstrous-feminine) and nominal Communism against workers in cryptomimetic forms. Fuck that. We can make our own subversive ghosts/spectres of Marx, our own parallel Superstructure kings and queens, hammers and sickles, cyberpunks, and Vaporwave/Laborwave corporate mood (exhibit 42d1; re: “Seeing Dead People“) that challenge and dissipate the skeleton king of Zombie Rome, the Shadow of Pygmalion, and the boogeyman tyrant of nominal Communism (all of them being endlessly evoked by the state to pacify us).

(artist: Thomas Cole)

Fear not the Fall of Rome; look forward to its ideological transformation. Canonical Rome absolutely sucks ass/is not to be trusted. For one, Rome is, by modern standards, hauntologized (utterly fake; re: the ghost of the counterfeit). The original lasted for centuries in various forms, but was effectively a city-state; nation-states, by comparison, emerged during the Renaissance formation of national identities, followed by the Enlightenment’s settler colonialism appealing to the pre-fascist (Neo-Gothic) hauntology of “Rome” as unified post-fascism—one nation, one army under “God,” or some other vertical bourgeois authority (secular or religious) that endures after the “defeat of the Nazi” (the details of their death have been greatly exaggerated; Nazis were copying American fascism, which is alive and well). Nation-states normalize Imperialism, thus genocide, rape, war and worker exploitation through canonical Gothic praxis. They compel sexual reproduction through heteronormative, amatonormative, Afronormative, and queernormative lenses, etc—are built on a settler-colonial binary that yields an imperial, dimorphic flavor in everyday language: good vs evil, black vs white, us vs them, “the creation of sexual difference” by Luce Irigaray, and so on.

For our purposes, this binary is canonically remediated within the Gothic mode to communicate Western glory as something to synthesize through pro-state propaganda as coercion personified: the fetishization of war, deception, rape and death linked to the hauntology of the state apparatus as a lionized conveyor of traditional Western virtues. Within the Western hegemon, all of these virtues are unironic and coercive; like gargoyles[3] perched on church spires, their monstrous cultural affect is seen and felt everywhere—in pastiche but also the real world as informed by said pastiche and vice versa (a war happens and someone makes a novel, movie or videogame to capitalize off it in a series of palimpsests; i.e., Tolkien or Cameron’s refrain; e.g., Starship Troopers, Aliens, Metroid or Doom). As such, they yield a “trident” of bourgeois trifectas

• manufacture
• subterfuge/deception
• coercion

with a neoliberal “handle”: the profit motive; i.e., infinite growth, efficient profit (meaning value through exploitation, regardless if it is ethical or materially stable) and worker/owner division as disseminated through the three tines.

(artist: Rae of Sunshine)

Note: These trifectas (and the monopolies and qualities attached to them—of violence, terror and morphological expression/monsters, and Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative) are tremendously important/foundational to my thesis work before/after Volume Zero; i.e., they are the very tools the state uses to police, thus antagonize, nature as monstrous-feminine during the dialectic of the alien; re: through all the usual revenge arguments state proponents make to move money through nature as cheaply as possible (raping the world to sustain itself at nature and workers’ expense): nature—female and white-skinned or not—is a whore to rape, which we must subvert “on the Aegis”; i.e., as a backdoor into Hell as something to remake on Earth; e.g., Rae of Sunshine, above, having the whore’s revenge against profit within and upon their cake and pie. I would go on to solidify and crystalize these arguments when finalizing the manifesto in late 2023, and they became so influential afterwards that I would readily quote-and-promote wide sections of “The Nation-State” and “Revolutionary Cryptonymy” in my later books, but also paratexts promoting said books. I used the latter to provide the most succinct and distilled summarizing of what these tools are; i.e., to people unfamiliar with my work; re: “The State: Its Key Tools; re: the Monopolies, Trifectas and Qualities of Capital,” which is a paratextual document per volume PDF but also a separate subsection in my Paratextual (Gothic) Documents webpage that readers can access independently, online. —Perse, 4/3/2025

Understanding these mechanisms is fundamental to navigating state abuse through our own praxial synthesis camping the canon with ludo-Gothic BDSM; said BDSM aside (and the camp process for which it and its instruction are synonymous with), we’ll introduce the mechanisms (and their gargoyles) next.

(artist: Jacques-Louis David)

The Nation-State: Remediating Modern-day “Rome,” Gargoyles, and the Bourgeois Trifectas; also, Critiquing Amazons as Liminal Expression (feat. Autumn Ivy)

“I have seen much of the rest of the world; it is cruel, brutal and dark! Rome is the light!”

“And yet you have never been there! You have not seen what it has become!”

—Maximus Decimus Meridius and Marcus Aurelius, Gladiator (2000)

Rome and its many ghosts are built on conquest—on war, death, rape, and lies, but also profit as fetishized expressions of authenticated power in medieval language (aesthetics) and devices (function): the forged performance of sovereignty through gargoyle-esque installations. We’ll unpack gargoyles for a bit, then introduce and explore the trifectas themselves for the remainder of the chapter. This chapter also discusses how subterfuge encourages tokenized coercion under manufactured conditions during liminal expression inside weird-nerd culture; i.e., Amazons, and the praxial synthesis of that particular monster type as “gargoyle-esque” when personified by weird nerds. The example we’ll explore occurred between me and called Autumn Ivy, a non-binary sex worker who abused me during our own labor exchanges: as weird nerds working in praxial opposition, them a whore policing me—another whore—using the same language of the underworld (which Gothic poetics essentially are). We camp it, Autumn does not, but aesthetic is the same (the key difference being dialectical-material context and scrutiny parsing duality during liminal expression—with Amazons being classic “two-world” entities, with one foot in heaven and Hell).

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Note: The following piece with Autumn is one which I would cite repeatedly in Volume Two; e.g., the Poetry Module’s “Death by Snu-Snu!” I likewise consider my work with Autumn tremendously formative even though they treated me poorly. —Perse 4/2/2025

Before we proceed into canonical “Rome” and its genocidal remediation through these gargoyles, be forewarned (from my thesis statement):

Capitalism is a hyperobject, a structure so big that you can’t directly observe it, and whose descriptions through ultimately simplistic metaphors are abstracting at best (for more information on hyperobjects, consider Timothy Morton’s 2013 book on the subject). You can only talk about Capitalism in pieces, from a particular point of view about something you yourself disinterred and reassembled over space and time. Needless to say, the point of Gothic-Communist abstraction isn’t abject confusion, nor is it to pull something out of thin air. Rather, it’s meant to achieve altered perspective for enhanced appreciation of truths concealed by capital; e.g., abstract art that isn’t tied to having an obvious point, purpose, or monetary value/function under Capitalism (source: “Author’s Foreword”).

Unlike iconoclasm and ludo-Gothic BDSM, canon is financially incentivized to naturalize itself through Capitalist Realism and bad demon BDSM; i.e., to “vanish” by virtue of workers’ “ordinary” perspectives unable to imagine anything else: what they are meant to see (and endorse) by those in power showing it to them through the usual means of production and heteronormative/settler-colonial propaganda enforcing the profit motive through canonical fear and dogma; re: Amazons as the oldest tokenized traitors of the West and its labor struggles.

To this, canonical gargoyles are cops, thereby serving as installations of terror to instruct the public with and reflect it endlessly back at them; re: Autumn, who often presents themselves, a non-binary person, as a monster mom/Amazon of sorts. In keeping with my whore’s paradox argument, they didn’t have the whore’s revenge against capital/profit, but became a whore policing whores—to pimp them for profit, essentially! Betrayal is betrayal, a whore becoming an angel/devil pimp (madame) of the worst sort: a witch cop. In short, monsters are—in a theatrical, therefore half-real (on and offstage) sense—a performative, thus instructional means of argument for or against the state; i.e., in a dualistic sense during liminal expression, which determines through function as flowing power in different directions. No matter how “oppressed” someone seems, then, to flow power up towards the state is to tokenize one’s position. A demon is a fetish and to fetishize something is to give power or take it, mid-cryptomimesis (re: the Demon Module’s “Of Darkness and the Forbidden“). A Judas is a Judas, ipso facto; i.e., functionally pacifying its audience through controlled-opposition bread and circus (re: the white savior and white Indian problem; re: Autumn in “Death by Snu-Snu” and Samus Aran in “Search of the Secret Spell“).

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

We’ll get to Autumn. For now, let’s consider the poetic devices at work. Regardless of their physical form, such outlets routinely celebrate and codify coercive arrangements of power vis-à-vis sexuality, gender identity and performance; i.e., the clichés and fetishes of the state machine operating as normalized, thus invisible regardless of the open decay exacted upon people, places and the environment (e.g., cyberpunks). Challenging these bourgeois illusions and their legitimized violence and terror is less about saying random “magic words” (and hoping for the best) and more about combining or crafting the correct word(s) to achieve the desired counterterror effect through oft-abstracting means. Our emphasis will be on Gothic poetics, of course, but it can be likewise be attained through abstract art in general, of which cartoons generally are—e.g., like Bill Watterson deliberately does in exhibit 6b4a, below (a far less commercially-minded but more thought-provoking man than Jim Davis, let’s be frank; though, as I point out in my own writeup, Garfield is definitely Gothic):

(exhibit 6b4a: Artist, left: Bill Watterson’s 1985 Calvin and Hobbes; right: Jim Davis and his immortal, inoffensive cat. I read both as a little girl and loved each for different reasons. The joke of “07/27/1978” [lasagnacat, 2017] lies in how Garfield is blank parody; it’s normally empty of critical thought and requires someone else to do the work, but even then, the results are generally a farce. Intentional or not, both authors—when their works are dialectically-materially examined—offer something about our material world that we, as Gothic Communists, can learn from and pass along to the next generation. Farce isn’t useless towards Gothic Communism, provided it assists in its development.)

You’re also aiming at a moving target when critiquing capital; like a gargoyle, Capitalism seems stationary but is actually alive and evolving on many different registers—a hopelessly complex assemblage of material and natural objects, whose dialogs convey competing schools of thought in statuesque “silence.” Further joined by living agents informed by the gargoyle’s fear and dogma, this includes the bourgeoisie and proletariat, as well as the many allies and traitors to class and culture warfare enacted through a working class joined with/pitted against neoliberals, fascists and gradients of these things. All of them interact back and forth in real time over space and time more broadly—inside a cryptomimetic marketplace of recycled ideas that communicate furtive morphological prescriptions that can be challenged, but also engaged with through fiscal exchanges channeled through gargoyles as installations of terror/counterterror that become instructional fixtures in the public imagination once installed; i.e., as mouthpieces and selling points to heavily implied, but nevertheless vivid arguments regarding hidden trauma, power and knowledge vis-à-vis workers as colluding with the state or warring back and forth with it to stymie profit, hence exploitation:

(exhibit 6b4b: Artist, top-mid-left: Otto Marr; top-right: ikerellatab; center-right: Deuza-art; bottom-mid-right: Funboy; far-mid right: Heartz MD; everything else: Lera PI.

Stemming from medieval thought, gargoyles are classically a type of “golem” that constitutes bodily values through a symbolic order as overseen and protected by them; i.e., as things to prescribe and sell, but also challenge through liminal expressions attached to Numinous architectural space: threatening immodest morphological freedom as a privileged ability to enjoy forbidden things, express trauma, or survive/enact state-mandated abuse through actionable offenses; e.g., sodomy represented through the clay as something to dress up and treat as “flesh” depicted by non-flesh and vice versa: stone, clay or metal, etc. To this, gargoyles represent socio-material standards of acceptable trespass within fetishized models of sin and indulgence, which can be subverted through an iconoclastic queering of medieval expression during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

[artist: Lera PI]

Meanwhile, the material, inanimate stuff can be shaped into whatever outfit, position, or bodily arrangement one so desires/imagines; given horns, wings, tails, claws, halos, ears, feathers, or scales, and dressed in leather or lace as part of the usual damsel/demon [or virgin/whore] dynamic; can seemingly be summoned by magic or otherwise assembled to provide “otherworldly” desires that are normally denied to workers. Through canon, workers and representations of pleasurable activities and power dynamics become alienated from each other, the latter barred from ordinary existence and intentionally hidden behind paywalls that must be invoked during oppositional praxis; i.e., if not to endorse unironic cash transactions for one’s pound of flesh, then to survive under capital’s synonymizing of pleasure with harm, while trying to subvert state language during liminal expression as oft-being pornographic, torturous and monstrous: the identity and relative struggle as commodified, and at least partially transformed through venues of commodification within countercultural channels. Imagination is normally constrained by Capitalist Realism, thus must be regained through reclaimed engines of monstrous production, psychosexual eroticism, and equally complex morphological/gender expression and tension.

[artist, top-left, bottom-left and top-right: draken4o; top-mid-left and bottom-left: Taran Fiddler; bottom-mid-left: Omuk; bottom-right: Lera PI; top-mid-right: Atom Cyber]

At the same time, gargoyles also constitute complicated [liminal] positions/threats of violence—i.e., as beings to fear, hunt and/or summon/make dealings with in regards to institutional, corporal punishment and flagellation known to dated[4] places famous for such dealings [churches as regelations and assignments of guilt and release]—when proletarian liberation is suggested; e.g., the triangulation of angelized/demonized minorities against each other when one side “rocks the boat” and becomes uncontrollable, thus must be put down during canonical Amazonomachia: Hippolyta beheading “Medusa” for her unseemly hysteria. This systemic violence is often felt or suggested through bodies that are rendered as animalistic and prey-like/chattelized (or collared/tame; e.g., the euthanasia effect), or otherwise helpless-looking through fetishized Gothic outfits that either paint them as executioners of the state’s will, or present them as targets, thus limit their speed, status [as property for men/Man Box proponents to own and use] and/or movement. Sometimes, the bodies are dimorphically sexualized as heteronormative enforcers relayed through a Gothic aesthetic/pastiche tinged with more recent nostalgias; e.g., Gargoyles[5] [1994]. The commodified legends of today stamp the imaginary past as eternalized backwards and forwards under capital as blinding consumers to the potential of anything beyond the text currently being retreated into. The regression and its values are presented through the gargoyle as both at home in the structure, and foreign to it—a guardian and invader simultaneously fearful and fascinating amid the ghost of the counterfeit/process of abjection: correct-incorrect, inside/outside, authentic/forged, etc. This can be packaged and sold to pacify workers; or it can embody worker struggles for those trying to dispel, thus escape, Capitalist Realism using Gothic poetics.)

In other words, the state relies on fetishized material reminders of terror and violence to get its point across, sanction itself, and maintain Capitalist Realism—which is then conveyed through menticidal perspectives that—through waves of terror endlessly exhausting worker minds during state monopolies—frame the material world as a displaced, Gothic commentary on the present: as informed by an imaginary past (“Rome”) that leads into itself, over and over. It normalizes crisis and decay, incarcerating workers inside their own imaginations as informed by state dogma. Liminality during opposition complicates an already formidable and busy equation, and in such a garden of the forking paths, there’s no way to cover everything. Instead, I will do my best to field the constant factors whose incessant remediation fosters an ocean of plethoras: artistic creations with a Gothic flavor using Marx’s notion of dialectical materiality inside historical materialism as something to shift in a better direction. Specifically defined by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter (2010) “as economic structures and exchanges that lead to many other events” (source), I contend historical materiality involves workers’ constant relations to inanimate things between the natural and material world as “come alive” through praxial synthesis as artistic expression: the gargoyle (synonymous, for our purposes, with the egregore/simulacrum) as a dialectical-material force.

Seeing as we’re talking about Gothic doubles, the sensation “it’s like this, but different” will occur regularly throughout this book. Identify these constants as part of a larger system whose fragmented, oscillating variables indicate glacial systemic change within the whole over time—i.e., for or against the status quo as it presently exists. As mentioned during the heads-up, I’ve done my best to connect the dots in a plethora of interconnecting synonyms, but it would be foolish (and completely impossible) to try and connect them all. That’s not the point. Rather, take this manifesto—and indeed, the entire book—as a manual of completed and half-completed sex-positive thoughts. Pursue what I have pursued to your own sex-positive conclusions, authoring derelict archaeologies, oppressed pedagogies, queer camp, and Satanic poetics that transform the world. —Perse, back in 2024

For our purposes, a gargoyle is a statue that sees and is seen—a watcher/sentinel made to symbolize a particular value not just through fear and dogma, but witnessing propaganda as a living document; i.e., according to workers’ cultural understanding of the imaginary past as something to view looking back at them: the Wisdom of the Ancients given form out of the past as literally set in stone (regardless of that stone’s actual age; age is perceived and performed just like power is). State propaganda is historically violent and continues to be, but the process of fashioning such things is not limited to their poetics; like the chain, whip, slur or fetish outfit, we can reclaim the torturous golems, vampires, and Amazons, etc, for ourselves. We’ll cover these pesky gargoyles’ synthetic role during the synthesis roadmap (and its complicated poetic history in Volume Two). For now, we merely want to address how canonical media is gargoyle-esque through the bourgeois trifectas and profit motive. In short, how do nation-states and corporations use gargoyles to abuse workers with—their bad instruction, coercive likeness and myopic vigilance serving the profit motive; i.e., there are good knights and bad knights (cops) who serve the state, and other monsters that—whether they want to or not—also serve the state: as things to scapegoat, kettle and sacrifice, justifying state arrangements of power and language.

(artist: Waifu Tactical)

To do this, we first need to recognize how the state uses linguo-material implements (with language being a natural feature of humans that distinguishes them socially from other species through the material world) that are inherently deceptive. While this strongly indicates cryptonymy as a feature of concealment regarding state trauma, that feature of language is not exclusive to state operations. So we’ll focus more on cryptonymy in a bit.

In a more immediate sense of coercion, consider how state language sublimates violence through canonical praxis, leading to a fatal cycle of historical materialism; i.e., one tied to a Promethean oscillation between neoliberalism (a return to market freedom through state power, personal responsibility rhetoric and austerity politics as a means of coerced reformation) and fascism (a fracturing of the state bureaucracy—but not its elimination—during Capitalism-in-crisis/decay through brutal strangleholds on information, power, and human rights) working hand-in-hand. These twin fractals are not democracy manifest (to once again borrow Jack Karlson’s famous phrase); they’re Capitalism as an inherently unstable structure built around vertical power, whose construction leads to global instabilities within itself and among its splintered bodies. This regenerates an imperial cycle where power remains at the top, trapped inside the Imperial Core while workers are exhausted, exploited and exterminated at slower or faster speeds depending on where/what they are; i.e., on which side of the fence, and how the state assigns violence to them as a role: giver or receiver.

The operation of Capitalism through the state-corporate apparatus, then, requires varying degrees of bourgeois manufacture, subterfuge and coercion; i.e., commodified extensions of our aforementioned trifectas: canonical “junk food” that children acquire (from Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories of the LAD—the language acquisition device—and universal grammar) and infantilized adults must unlearn—by consuming new things, but also critiquing what they consume through consumption as a means of retailoring itself. Gargoyles, then, constitute personified extensions of a given structure, of which canon is adopted by people who watch; in turn, they view statuesque performers watching back, tied theatrically to a belief system that bounces between both. Each fearsomely feels unalive during state crisis and decay yet somehow can move and instruct through that paradox; i.e., as something to see and adopt as part of a seasonal operation: sex and violence under regular conditions of state control, held in place by blind pastiche and praxial inertia.

(artist: Waifu Tactical)

Except, anyone—not just the state—can make a god (or god-like statue) and instruct with it. For our purposes, it’s better to get ’em while they’re young. Children see and adopt what is notable in their surroundings, then remember and reenact these sensations when approaching adulthood. Regardless of their age, workers make art in response to art (mimesis). Given the proper push, they shape and maintain the linguo-material order as something to change into something else; i.e., a post-scarcity world, versus keeping it the same in terms of its current, albeit ever-widening disparities. Regardless of its exact measurements, a gulf is still a gulf. To that, our stated aim as Gothic Communists is to iconoclastically rewire the Superstructure’s bourgeois coding with Gothic poetics: to resynthesize what the state feeds workers, changing its diet (art and other forms of information) into something that isn’t harmful; re: camping the canon (from our thesis argument) using monstrous instruments made from stone (or similar materials). Stone and its symbols deliver meaning according to how they are viewed, thus understood, so that is where class and culture war must take place.

Of course, the elite own the means of production, thus can corner the market of fear and dogma as something to cultivate through imperfect monopolies on terror and violence—their supply and demand, but also people as the product (and the recipients of said product) that go on, in some shape or form, to reproduce it and the material conditions that routinely bring it (and profit) about: the good (centrists), the bad (fascists) and the ugly (states of exception) within the orderly operation that is neoliberal Capitalism (which recuperates genocide). Their control isn’t total, but is enough to bring seminal tragedies about, which themselves become immortalized by new generations singing about older abuses they never lived to see but still feel the effects of: generational trauma.

To sublimate Imperialism as Capitalism’s highest order of operation, the elite (vis-à-vis Raj Patel and Jason Moore) have made Capitalism as cheap as humanly possible—have made “Rome’s” remediation/pastiche cheap. In bourgeois terms, if something is cheap or even “free,” we’re the product/propaganda. However, this coding calls for a particular kind of propaganda: heteronormative canon—a “junk food” made by state-corporate bodies, but also tied to a “trident” of trifectas driven by the profit motive (the handle): linguo-material strategies used by the bourgeoisie; i.e., the men behind the curtain standing “behind” us, less pulling our strings like a banal wendigo and more distracting us with fearsome gargoyles arranged in all manner of didactic terror scenarios (think Ferdinand from The Duchess of Malfi, commissioning “dead” wax sculptures of his sister’s family to frighten her with). Their canon becomes what we predominantly experience all around us; i.e., our consumption, hence education. We consume, thus embody what we see, eat, fuck and fear, etc, through an elaborate orchestration of manufacture, subterfuge and coercion that leads to Capitalist Realism. Given time, we turn to stone, playing the part in highly repetitive (thus predictable) ways.

The first bourgeois trifecta is the manufacture trifecta:

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

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

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

(artist: Seb McKinnon)

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

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

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

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

By reflecting on the recent military abuses of the state during Vietnam, Lethal Weapon presents police corruption as a late-’80s cartoon. Mercenaries of privatized war have conveniently distanced themselves from both the CIA (which the film makes little effort to mention) but also the American system’s “true function”; i.e., something bad happened once, but only because weaker men “gave into” the alleged temptations of war abroad: the drug trade. In doing so, these cutthroats have defiled the very thing that the good cops at home normally represent: a perfect society that has—through the routine failing of greedy, unscrupulous men—fallen from grace. Apparently they’re to blame for the American atrocities at home and abroad, not the state or its arm.

Like pieces on a board, these gargoyles dance to tell a particular story useful to state aims; i.e., as hollow suits of armor inside a castle that chills the viewer in place, but also whose forged sovereignty is in decline. As such, the structure merely becomes a house to clean, to purge of dark forces using benevolent enforcers that resemble the fallen (think Milton’s warring angels and demons, minus its rebellious class character but nevertheless utilizing the same powerful principles of animation). But this, too, is a lie, a ghost of the counterfeit whose inheritance anxieties about the Imperial Core can be explained away through outrageous theatre forging the solution; i.e., vigilante state violence with—in this case—the badge as a false flag operation levied against invented scapegoats: ghosts of the imperial past whose actions are, themselves, exorcised through the run of the mill.

In true Gothic fashion, the entire operation adopts an explained-supernatural guise, which it then uses to explain away the current militarizing of the police force at home. Riggs and Murtaugh “need” those guns to shield us from the bad cops (who all look like Wall Street yuppies, apparently). This is police state apologia 101, and the very school of Gothic moderacy used to justify a continuation of normal state operations: apologizing for its own actions through Radcliffean spectres—a timeless Eurotrash banditti conjured into the 20th century by Richard Donner (equally fearsome is Mel Gibson, whose own violence supersedes theirs. Simply put, he’s a killing machine).

When the state’s manufacturing of theatrical deceptions cannot be concealed in relation to imperial abuse (wherever it occurs), the name of the game is sublimation through state terror as normalized; genocide, rape and war essentialize through fascists as theatrical heels, appropriating war/nation pastiche as useful to the elite: “Get strong and fight the enemy” like a soldier would do, training all their life for that one moment to “actually overcome adversity” (not to be confused with fairness, which atheists like Rationality Rules use when attacking trans athletes; Xevaris, 2019).

The statuesque advertisement, then, is a ghostly call to service, not a haunting of generational trauma; i.e., crafted by the elite for workers to fear and obey without question, but also adore and worship: to be the best in a quixotic sense, imitating recreations of the imaginary past as “strong” and obedient, but also a blinder to the kinds of traumatic visions intimated by spectres of Marx. Through this manicured self-delusion, a defender of the homeland (and its liege) participates in ranked contests of martial, sports-like strength modeled after conspicuously chiseled gargoyles that, at times, lack the overtly metallic armor of the medieval knight, but whose stone-like bodies denote a physical regression whose “body armor” serves as more literal and antiquated sort; e.g., the Z Fighters from DBZ (or its frankly jaw-dropping[6] fan animations) or He-Man, Lion-O, and their respective friends’ struggles within the combat arena as extended to the entirety of the globe: “all the world’s a stage.”

Here, Shakespeare’s passage describes a battleground to lose oneself—in combat but also worship of godly actors fulfilling a special bourgeois role when set loose: the celebration of dated organizations of power in neoliberal hauntologies[7]; e.g., the Japanese cultural fascination with, and imitation of, Western kayfabe and hegemony post-WW2 as something that survives into recycled variations of itself:

The above image is tellingly summarized by the maker’s own synopsis:

Given diplomatic orders by the Grand Council, Vegeta, now king of the Saiyans, sets out on an interstellar assassination mission. TARGET LOCATION: PLANET EARTH / OBJECTIVE NO.1: ERADICATION / OBJECTIVE NO.2: PACKAGE RETRIEVAL / For his life, all his training has led to this. Now, Son Goku will learn the true meaning of the title, “LEGEND” (source).

In short, Vegeta’s status as a conspicuous (and braggadocious) monarch falls into place under a globalized world order that places him beneath the elite; he’s their lapdog and put to heel, obeys their commands through a common method of instruction: “sic’ em!”

Keeping with the kayfabe arrangement, he feels threatened by Goku and wants to be “top dog” while both men work together to defang Broly: a demonic hound on par with Cú Chulainn’s fearsome ríastrad; re (cited in “Overcoming Praxial Inertia“):

When distorted, Cú Chulainn undergoes a spectacular bodily metamorphosis [the ríastrad] and begins to attack both friend and foe because he loses the ability to distinguish between them. At these times, he consequently poses a threat “to order on both an individual and a social level” (Lowe, Kicking 199) and shifts from stabilizing his social network (by defending his province and his people) to threatening it from within[8] (source: Sarah Enri’s “‘Inside Out… and Upside Down’: Cú Chulainn and His Ríastrad,” 2013).

The thing that bears repeating is that all the Saiyans are monstrous dog soldiers, albeit to varying degrees that serve state aims. The state cannot exist without the good cop, bad cop, and scapegoat as dog-like (the exact nature of Broly varies, but he is effectively the invader mechanism whose corrupt/monstrous-feminine elements demand a euthanizing call to violence against him). In turn, their dogfight becomes something to watch and imitate as left-behind: monsters from “another planet” that curiously evoke a human imaginary past on a local, earthly stage.

It bears repeating that said past is sewn with conflict and confusion—not because it is old, but because its ownership is challenged. Its monsters—and the various instructions they supply as gargoyles—are generally at war with themselves, mid-lesson; i.e., psychopraxis, psychosexuality, psychomachia, and Amazonomachia through doubles and paradox amid liminal expression as things to view in ways that remain ambiguous. As my thesis argued, “Doubles invite comparison to encourage unique, troubling perspectives that “shake things up” and break through bourgeois illusions.” Gargoyles, like all monsters, double people and their conflicted sense of humanity but also supply them with various inhuman qualities that likewise exist within dialectical-material opposition. During oppositional praxis, then, they effectively “go to war.” Praxial stances also double through gargoyles, and grow increasingly ambivalent during the maelstrom. It’s a war of optics, but also of perception linked to one’s state of mind as thrown worryingly into question near positions/statements of power and trauma. Said statements seem both concrete and oddly fluid.

Even so, oppositional praxis allows for a proletarian function to gargoyles, which we’ll get to; and the general aesthetic can obviously vary a great deal between variants. However, the canonical function (for the elite and their proponents) remains constant: to pacify and police workers under Capitalist Realism—to stare and tremble at what are, for all intents and purposes, killers for the state; i.e., knights and gladiators, but also cops penned up in castles whose owners trot them out for the viewing public to cower before or worse, emulate (re: ACAB—canonical cops and castles). Subversions of these stony replicas are liminal, thus complicated (we’ll explore this more as we increasingly delve into trauma as something to write about and illustrate). Through the profit motive, however, these simulacra amount to corporatized war clones, offering up good war and sacrifice as valorized through the veneer of freedom, equality and justice; i.e., the façade of American Liberalism and its endless platitudes/canonical praxis as formulaic to an automated degree.

(artist: Deuza-art)

The degree of automation varies. For example, the AI boom and its recent proliferation of so-called “art” (theft through search-engine algorithms) highlights the same aesthetic’s blind approach enacted through its usual benefactors: white, cis-het men. Automation abuse makes bourgeois-minded workers stupid, but also expendable in regards to labor as something to cheaply replicate and consume; or as Sean Collins tweets on January 30th, 2023:

The heart of AI is contempt—contempt for artists, for writers, for sex workers. The user wants to get what they get out of art/writing/porn but they can’t stand feeling like they owe anyone anything for their enjoyment, so the artist/writer/sex worker has got to go (source).

The horror of the hyperreal is that there are no humans behind the digitized simulacrum; they’re simply gone. The lived reality is far more bleak, with middle-class consumers being entirely divorced from creative labor as a critical-thinking skill while actively advocating for enslavement, neglect and genocide; i.e., behind the image as a desert of the real, where real humans are still alive but won’t be for much longer.

Automation can be tailored towards Gothic Communism and its development, but the means of production must still be geared towards horizontal arrangements of power and wealth that don’t automatically reduce everything to soulless privatization. Divorced from nature, empathy and workers-as-people, the paradox of automated art is that it quickly becomes worthless—even to capitalists—if viewed in bulk; there needs to be a human worker to manipulate and appeal to by other humans in ways that don’t flood the market with inhuman, hopelessly cheap fakeries. The unchecked flood gives Capitalism away (what the kids call “self-reporting”). Work, in artistic terms, is human labor, which gives art its value for Communists to defend and for capitalists to exploit (the labor theory of value versus the monetary theory of value). “Tech bros,” however, defend Capitalism by seeing value in exploitation (efficient profit), not labor as valuable through its human relationship to the natural-material world. According to Arfu, they see themselves as “free” and other workers as “paintpigs” or “drawslaves,” having bought into the illusion that—by turning their thinking over to machines—tech bros/weird canonical nerds have successfully liberated themselves from the working class (the illusion of the middle class). Quite the opposite; those who tech bros worship as gods (the bourgeoisie, billionaires) have trained them to police other workers around them, but especially the rebellious ones.

All at once, pacification becomes active subjugation via the triangulation of assimilated workers against labor at large; i.e., local colonization performed by people who look like you do, and misuse the awesome class-conscious potential of Gothic counterculture poetics for continued state hegemony as merely a commodity to package and sell. Sex and lethal force overlap with state politics, until the decay is not only impossible to ignore; it’s an essential part of the image and paradox: unironic death and murder become sexy unto themselves—gargoyles that kill for the state’s endless (and bloody) resurrection.

(artist: Darek Zabrocki)

Whereas the elite and their moderate supporters, liberals/neoliberals, only care about profit and capitalistic hegemony (a public mindset that decays into nightmares of itself; e.g., AI Lost Media’s “Pizza Nuggets Ad 1993,” 2023), fascists do their part by playing a dirtier version of the same game. Through open xenophobia, slashed throats, and medieval, rapacious calls for “pure,” open violence, they preemptively administer draconian countermeasures relayed through state propaganda.

Both they and neoliberals play “bad games” for the bourgeoisie; so do TERFs/girl bosses, queer bosses and other token offshoots whose Man Box/”prison sex” forms of bad play really don’t take geniuses to function—just fear, lies and cruelty to varying degrees that are taught through canonical propaganda and consumption. All further bad faith, bad acting and bad play as a criminogenic cycle stuck on loop. To survive, revolutionary workers must change the system that repeats the cycle; to change the system, they must become game and clever in ways that scare the bourgeoisie and their proponents; i.e., by subversively altering bourgeois propaganda, thus the education, iconography and bad play[9] that stem from its various entry points; e.g., “thirst traps” (exhibit 7a-8c, next page, but also the furry “mom bod,” exhibit 65—from Volume Three): subjugated Hippolyta as a bad-bitch girl boss (the virgin and the whore, but also the demon) as a reliable selling point and educational fulcrum within these larger dialogs—the monstrous-feminine.

For the next few pages, I want to exhibit the monstrous-feminine, then use it to explore how subterfuge segues into coercion; i.e., as something to enforce through tokenized agents turning themselves to stone. Adopting hard, rigid functions in defense of capital, these performers often posture as “protectors” of the gargoyle sort: medievalized cops roped into roles that are poisonous to them, insofar as they act like class traitors/rabid dogs who will eventually be closeted, put down, and/or married/carted off. “I am woman, hear me roar!” isn’t good praxis by itself, because praxis isn’t defined by rebellious posturing and “think-positive” attitudes, alone; it’s defined by liberation through an altering of socio-material conditions inside nerd culture while at war with itself: weird canonical nerds and their iconoclastic counterparts.

One of the most famous monstrous-feminine (from the Western perspective) is the Amazon; i.e., a “thirst-trap” girl boss canonically sold for sex, but also touted as warrior muscle that executes the state’s will while acting the rebel. All the while, subjugated Amazons simultaneously caution against mommy doms who fail to meet these muscular-servile standards, but nevertheless cow men into equally submissive positions. Said positions are temporary and staged—meant only to incur status-quo wrath and punishment against the monstrous-feminine; i.e., as something that, regardless of its presentation, is eventually exposed as hypocritical or untame, then dealt with accordingly by heteronormative forces:

Note: This brings us to Autumn Ivy. First, a disclaimer about my criticisms of Autumn; i.e., from working with them in the past; re (from “Death by Snu-Snu”):

A note about Autumn Ivy: They are a public figure who markets an image of themselves as “Amazonian,” which I am critiquing as having run-ins/worked with them in the past; as such, they’re a big enby and should be able to handle whatever criticism I throw at them, especially since their abuse of me in the past is true—is something I stand by and can back up. That being said… this isn’t me condoning violence or calls for violence against them. Unless they accelerate their trans misogyny (or any other fascist tendencies) in public—i.e., use their platform to spread active hate, Nazi-style—kindly leave them alone to figure things out on their own (source).

This is more a precaution from me, in case Autumn feels vindictive. Then again, Volume One has been up since Valentine’s 2024 and the Poetry Module (which “Death by Snu-Snu” is from) since May 1st, 2024. Still, I want to be crystal clear about how I feel; i.e., that Autumn is a scummy person, practice-wise, but this is by no means a greenlight to go and harass them; re: short of them being an active TERF and SWERF on their platform who openly furthers genocidal rhetoric, don’t antagonize them. So while Autumn exhibits SWERF-y vibes, they also are selective about these vibes and still do sex work of a particular kind, themselves; i.e., they’re no longer on OnlyFans (though many of their ads are still up, below)

but do have a personalized Fleshlight online, for example:

So even without the sex toys branded after them, Autumn is still a sex worker because they make money through modeling (a kind of sex work), but especially “spicy Amazon thirst traps” (above). Regarding this push into non-nude content, they’re still an underwear model who—at least until very recently—took money to take their clothes off (and even if they kept them on, underwear models are still sex workers. Also, their “voice acting” credit historically includes doing JOI material; e.g., the “Strange Bedfellows” erotica I wrote for them to record, on 1/28/2021). As we’ll see, Autumn absolutely hates being called a sex worker, yet very much remains concerned with what others think they do;

(source)

i.e., as “not” being sex work, effectively pinkwashing the trade (re: Autumn is non-binary) while punching down at GNC hardcore sex workers (re: me). They also have an alt account they use to advertise their sex work: Wolfhead at Night, their furry alter-ego where they openly and hypocritically advertise doing sex work/selling sex toys (even linking it to their Twitter main, but not vice versa):

(source)

Not all that glitters is gold, then, and Autumn very much wants to have their cake and eat it, too; i.e., to look like a superhero warrior and enjoy the sex appeal of a prostitute (which superheroes classically do), while still punching down at sex workers, SWERF-style (re: me). In short, they’re a sell-out and a cop, in that respect (very much like She-Hulk herself is, below)

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

and their abuse of me shall be shown in the following pages through my usual “fuck with me, get made into an object lesson” approach: a victim’s testimony of their mistreatment of me. A bigotry one is a bigotry for all, and Autumn patrols Omelas for the Man.

As we proceed into my critique of Autumn, then, my thesis argument regarding them—re: as a gargoyle whore policing whores—comes from first-hand experience, and boils down to: “Autumn Ivy is a token, subjugated Amazon and acts like one, on and offstage.” To it, Amazons are muscled sex workers who tokenize and decay under capital (re: “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis“); i.e., into subjugated, cop-like forms that essentially punch down during mirror syndrome through Amazonomachia assimilation fantasies. Said fantasies have the pimp’s revenge in bad faith—i.e., until those token parties performing them are ignominiously collared by the elite/relegated to the state of exception once more through the euthanasia effect—and which we must challenge on and offstage on the same Aegis: during the dialectic of the alien through subversive Amazons having the whore’s revenge against token traitors taking state pay! Furthermore, the above keywords are being provided here, on this online version, whereas the PDF version supplies them in its own self-contained paratextual documents (re: “Rage over a Lost Penny”). That being said, these terms and others relating to them (e.g., Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain) can also be found in “Paratextual Documents.” —Perse, 4/4/2025

the euthanasia effect (rabid token Amazons)

A term, coined by me, to describe the canonical, assimilative qualities of the Amazonian myth (and one whose Amazonomachia has canonized, post-Wonder-Woman, in Metroidvania through Cameron’s refrain and—to a lesser extent—Tolkien’s). It is one where magical, mythical warrior women—as simultaneously virgin/whore animal people (the female* berserk)—are canonically employed to keep men (and the victims of men/token enforcers during “prison sex” police violence) paradoxically in line, mid-panopticon; i.e., a female-coded (usually white, or token non-white) centurion or stentor girlboss who, in between yawping at the men to aurally castrate them (the banshee or siren), “tops” them in hauntological, dominatrix-style fashion, elsewhere outside the bedroom (re: Foucault): “make it through this and I’ll ride you until you beg!” Death by Snu-Snu becomes the traditional hero’s monomythic reward and doom; re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference, but tokenized into a kind of virginal warrior Madonna jailor pulled from the Neo-Gothic’s former dungeons; e.g., Charlotte Dacre’s fearsome and “phallic” (stabby-stabby) Victoria (see: Sam Hirst’s 2020 “Zofloya and the Female Gothic” for a good summarizing of that dilemma):

*Canon is heteronormative, thus dimorphic (and settler-colonial/Cartesian). There can be intersex elements, but these will be treated as “phallic,” thus male/female and masc/femme during the Amazon’s struggles; i.e., as a monstrous-feminine entity the state monopolizes by gaslight-gatekeep-girlbossing it. Such things, then, canonically embody the Amazon and Gorgon’s doubled morphological conflict inside-outside itself; i.e., to simultaneously exude the psychomachy’s calm/furious or virgin/whore qualities, such “mirror syndrome” (another term of mine) punching a black reflection where state victims are housed (thus useful to profit pimping nature as alien); re: the postscript from the Poetry Module’s “Following in Medusa’s Footsteps.” Throughout BDSM and Gothic media, on and offstage, you see the euthanasia effect in Metroidvania a ton. To enhance your own ludo-Gothic BDSM (to camp subjugated Amazons with), refer to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus for some good examples of the Promethean Quest (though my “Concerning Rape Play” compendium also raises some salient reading regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM as a whole). Apart from either of those, we’ll tackle Amazons, Medusa and the monstrous-feminine revenge argument more directly in the “Predator/Prey” subchapters, in Volume One (which explore Amazons and knights). Also consider the Demon Module’s “Amazons and Demon Mommies,” “Vampires and Claymation,” “Summoning the Whore,” “Exploring the Derelict Past,” and “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“; i.e., for good examples (outside Volume Zero) of the cop/victim approach in canonical Amazonomachia and how to subvert it to have the whore’s revenge against profit! I also recommend Volume Zero’s “Symposium; Aftercare” for plenty of extra lists and fun examples. 

The canonical Amazon, then, is a time traveler TERF meant to serve profit by betraying her fellow oppressed (women or not). Ripped spectacularly from the ancient pre-fascist past and expressed in “ancient” fascist forms during state crisis, Red Scare employs Amazonian fascism and Communism—during the usual kayfabe centrism and anisotropic terrorist/counterterrorist refrains pimping nature on the same stage—through a black-and-red aesthetic of power and death corrupting nature for state aims: to feed on nature by triangulating against state victims “of nature,” per Cartesian thought; i.e., to antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine, during the Capitalocene (from Walpole’s Otranto onwards—per Hans Staats’ “Mastering Nature: War Gothic and the Monstrous Anthropocene” [2016] but married, per my arguments, to Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s idea of Capitalocene).

Through these dualistic poetic devices’ assimilative function, the subjugated Amazon is a functionally “white” Indian/whore/savior cowgirl (token) cop who harvests the functionally “black” whore (criminal, alien, etc) during the abjection process (and its bad-faith revenge arguments; e.g., Orientalism). All happen while suffering the usual double standards and embarrassments such betrayals bring on (which camping through ludo-Gothic BDSM anisotropically reverses through the same aesthetic—shrinking profit while sending abjection back towards the colonizer agent/apparatus); e.g., Samus Aran (re: the Poetry Module’s “Playing with Dead Things“) but really a wide variety of such wheyfu herbo monster girls upholding Capitalist Realism: by kettling therefore blaming the whore Archaic Mother*/ghost of the counterfeit. S

Furthermore, such blaming occurs ipso facto “for its own genocide” during the Promethean Quest’s infernal concentric pattern (e.g., Ayla or Savage Land Rogue; re: “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two“); i.e., an eternal warrior “of nature as hellish” sent back into Hell come to Earth—all to do battle with the verminized, insectoid-chattel, stigma-animal, diseased-and-deathly Medusa on the same Aegis (the liminal hauntology of war): as her dark, Venus-twin half (the long-lost relative, often an evil/false sister or wicked step mother)! The Amazon is a “scab” operatically punching labor as alien hysterical (the wandering womb), but pulled from their ranks to do so inside the state of exception. From Radcliffe onwards, then, the Amazon is a warrior detective who canonically remains a classic pro-state actor fabricating scapegoats; i.e., from older pre-existing legends repurposed for profit now (the settler colony a chronotope danger disco).

(artist, top: ChuckARTT; bottom-left: Arvalis; bottom-middle: Flyland; bottom-right: Pagong1)

*The male version of the Archaic Mother is something I call the Dragon Lord or Skeleton King (re: the Cycle of Kings with vampiric, draconian or otherwise patriarchal versus matriarchal elements the state can scapegoat; e.g., Sauron or Count Dracula). Offshoots of said half-real monarchs are often lesser necromancers, rogues or death knights (re: offshoots of the Numinous tied to the same danger-disco structure’s unheimlich nightmare home).

Being of the Medusa as Archaic Mother (re: the whore’s paradox, from “Rape Reprise“), Amazons endure endless punishment from on high and down below (capital’s “middle management”; e.g., Ellen Ripley); i.e., a classically female Prometheus, they are always treated as a substantial risk/desperation measure, one that must be collared just as quickly lest she “corrupt,” thus take her fellow soldiers along for the ride (and back whence she came, to hellish territories, forever). In short, the Amazon is a token scapegoat witch (vampire, goblin, etc) policing other witches, therefore whores (re: me, vis-à-vis Silvia Federici, in “Policing the Whore“), and does so through modular-but-intersecting us-versus-them, white-on-black (of any sort, not just skin color) and monstrous (undead/demonic/animalistic) abjection: someone virgin/whore who, per these imbricating persecution networks, eventually exposes through Radcliffean state arbitration (demasking the villain); i.e., shown as whore and released shamefully from service (the endless oscillation used to keep such class, culture and race traitors off-balance while conditioning them to ruthlessly punch down, inside-outside the concentric frontier ghettos they patrol, mid-relegation; i.e., “good job today, bitch—kill you, tomorrow!”); re: Ellen Ripley but also future versions of the female Rambo that came after and expressed in different kinds of neoliberal Gothic’s trademark fantasy-to-sci-fi language: a prison colony police agent serving the state as its token barbarian, all heroes are monsters but assimilation is poor stewardship!

(source)

As “A Note on Canonical Essentialism” describes it; re (from Volume Zero):

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth-like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force [military optimism] (source).

This is how the subjugated Hippolyta do (the queenly protagonist version of the regular Amazon; e.g., Wonder Woman)—a kind of token, monomyth, queen-for-a-day “fallen Pandora” (or Chaucer’s “Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf” line, from “The Miller’s Tale“), and one whose previously established map and recursive occupants/warmongering we’ll be camping more; i.e., during Volume Zero‘s “Scouting the Field” (rabies is bad for you) but also through revolutionary cryptonymy with subversive Amazons (a concept Volume One‘s “Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression” unpacks at length; re: the predator/prey dichotomy and canonical abuse of animalized language in furtherance to profit, thus genocide, rape and war).

mirror syndrome

Another term of mine, one that occurs through the euthanasia effect; i.e., the euthanizing of token agents, ignominiously attacking their own black reflections’ troubling comparison (which doubles are for). Such complicit cryptonymy happens during the abjection process/state of exception and, in effect, betraying their own interests (and those of their fellow workers and nature) for profit: Roman fools killed mid-apocalypse, during blind parody’s remediated praxis (re: boom and bust).

Amazonomachia (Amazon pastiche, subjugated/subversive)

(exhibit 1a1b [from Volume Zero‘s “Symposium: Aftercare”]: Top half’s artists, top-far-left: Michel Dinel; top-mid-left: Jiyu-Kaze; top-middle: Viviana Vixen; right: Edu Souza; bottom-middle: Nunchaku; bottom-mid-left: Edwin Huang; bottom-far-left: Frederico Escorsin. Bottom half’s artist: Mika Dawn 3D.

A kind of Galatea traditionally sculpted by Pygmalion and his imitators, Amazons and their complicated pastiche embody social-sexual conflict during oppositional praxis, hence come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are canonically war dogs of a binarized character. Most notably is the noble Athena versus the dark Medusa from the female legends of Antiquity [also, Queen Hippolyta]: the doubling of the hunter persona, a white and black wolf. Such war-boss, queen bitches canonically offer good behavior and bad behavior as our proverbial “teeth in the night” meant to serve as man’s best friend in centrist theatre [and whose true rebellion goes against the elite’s profit motive]…) 

Not a term I coined, but one I certainly expanded on (to speak on subjugated, reactionary, TERF-style forms and subversive variants, mid-duality). “Amazon battle” is an ancient form of classical, monstrous-feminine art whose pastiche was historically used to enforce the status quo; i.e., Theseus subjugating Hippolyta the Amazon Queen to police other women (making regressive/canonical Amazonomachia a form of monstrous-feminine copaganda). With the rise of queer discourse and identity starting in arguably the late 18th century, later canonical variations in the 20th century (e.g., Marsden’s Wonder Woman) would seek to move the goalpost incrementally—less of a concession, in neoliberal variants (every Blizzard heroine ever—exhibits 45a, 76, 72, from “Making Demons” and Volume Three), and more an attempt to recruit from dissident marginalized groups. The offer is always the same: to become badass, strong and “empowered.” In truth, these regressive/subjugated Amazons become assimilated token cops; i.e., the fetishized witch cop/war boss as a “blind Medusa” who hates her own kind by seeing herself as different than them, thus acting like a white, cis-het man towards them (the “Rambo problem”): triangulating nature against nature, pimping itself for the state. In the business of violent cartoons (disguised variants of the state’s enemies), characters like Ripley or Samus become lucrative token gladiators for the elite by fighting similar to men (active, lethal violence) for male state-corporate hegemony. To that, their symbolism colonizes revolutionary variations of the Amazon, Medusa, etc, during subversive Amazonomachia within genderqueer discourse.

(exhibit 7a: Left: Evil Lyn from He-Man: Revelations [2021] or Carmilla from Netflix’s Castlevania [2017]; middle, artist: Persephone van der Waard of Autumn Ivy as Striga [the strongest, most fascist-appearing vampire sister from Castlevania]; bottom-right: Autumn Ivy; bottom-left and bottom-far-right: Katie Brumbach and Laverie Vallee. This exhibit will unpack each in turn.

First, as explored at length in the thesis volume, the Amazon is monstrous-feminine, a type of liminal expression that is often pornographic, but also heavily conflicted and contested within market forces. Castlevania season three, for example, is basically pure queer bait, but had they actually continued with the mommy-dom setup, it’s a tremendously devilish love letter to queer acts of sodomy that speak to that “freak on a leash” in all of us: “You have only to lose your chains [unless you want to wear a dog color for sex-positive reasons.]” I loved season three’s Gothic sex dungeon as an operatic, classically sinful place to submit to guilty pleasures supplied by powerful women [even if they are framed as inherently duplicitous; i.e., the deceptive faggot [cryptonomy] that is trotted out of and back into the closet over two seasons—real original, Netflix]. As I write in my review of season three [2020]: 

So much of Camilla’s conquest is logistic in nature. This might sound dull, but every decision plays out through wonderful dialogue, abetted by the simple fact that each sister has a unique personality and position: the genius, warrior, analyst, and diplomat. Two of them are even lovers. Still, they talk as family members do, knowing full well what games the others get up to (or don’t). Their realness comes not from a checklist of outrageous traits, but how these play out realistically inside the fairytale castle.

Smack dab in the middle is Hector, the gullible forgemaster. Once bitten, twice shy, he must be convinced to make [monsters] for Camilla’s army. No easy task. This falls to Lenore, the sexy diplomat. The fun lies in her attitude. She’s not doing it because she’s told; she’s having fun, and plays her part superbly. The battles between her and Hector are generally fought with wit and words; they still hold their own against the scrappier melees had by Trevor and Sypha, or Isaac. The style of each makes it distinct, and adds to the show’s overall variety.

When they first meet, Hector mistrusts Lenore, and rightly so; by comparison, Lenore is disarmingly soft—a fact she coldly reminds him of after beating him to a pulp. Her job is to make Hector (and us) forget what she is by being herself. She lies to Hector with bits of truth, giving him what he’s always wanted. It speaks to her talents that she isn’t wrong in this respect. Hector’s second deception belies an underlying desire: to be told what to do. It’s arguably why he served Dracula to begin with. Lenore simply uses it to her advantage.

This does involve a bit of sex. When Lenore uses her body to distract Hector, though, he’s already bought into the scheme. But so has the audience—at least in the sense that they’ve been groomed for a narrative climax. Consider what’s happening elsewhere: Trevor and Sypha storm the church; Isaac rides into Barad-dur v2.0; and Alucard is molested by his new, horny friends, Taka and Tsumi. All comprise a collective build-up reaching its promised conclusion. Not all promises are kept, but herein lies a lateral pleasure, the chagrin of coitus interruptus offset by something comparably delicious to an orgasm: schadenfreude.

 

There’s definitely a strict element to the show’s mommy doms, and making Hector the “little bitch” [a small, effeminate dog on a leash] is one way to do the Amazon scenario. Aside from genderqueer BDSM apologia, though, the Amazon is essentially a freakshow circus act that has become appropriative in regressive, current-day forms; i.e., whose Pavlovian variant of “I am woman, hear me roar!” obeys state mandates through canonical, regressive Amazonomachia. Failure to comply during state decay leads to draconian punishment, including the euthanasia effect’s double standard: either the tomboy is shoved into a [cis-het] wedding gown and married off, or she is put down like a rabid dog for refusing to conform [unlike “rabid” men, who are generally prized for their violent outbursts]. Collared by the state, the “queen bitch” is a war boss who ultimately fetishizes the state’s will, including its historical-material effects: the ubiquitous celebration and female personification of statuesque war, death, lies and rape in a fascinating but ultimately “lesser” form: a lady cop, gladiator and/or reaper in tokenized spaces.

[source]

This appropriation took time, starting with a literal circus persona that fixated on the strongwoman as a dated curios tied to an imaginary past not ruled by men; e.g., late-1800s strongwoman Katie Brumbach. Similar to rockstars, pornstars and various other “stage bunnies” of the 20th/21st centuries, she had a stage name: Sandwina, but also “Lady Hercules.” People tend to forget that heroes are monsters. Hercules was a monster that Sandwina combined with the woman as a classical monster type: the monstrous-feminine by virtue of having manly strength and female attributes. Her naturally strong female body dwarfed the men around her [thus threatening the heteronormative order and literally personifying the suffragette movement]. As such, people like Sandwina were regarded in their time as oddities but also potential threats; or, as Betsy Golden Kellem writes in “The ‘Trapeze Disrobing Act'” (2022):

for a long time, unusually strong women were regarded as aberrant curiosities, described with wonder in the same breath as bearded ladies and living skeletons.” They were literally circus acts—magnetic ones that, Kellem continues, “not only destabilized the white-male basis of physical culture, it challenged popular ideas about female ability, all while showing a discomfiting amount of skin and startling muscle mass (source).

Meanwhile, the likes of Eugen Sandow [future icon of the Mr. Olympia organization] would represent an “imaginary antiquity” that suspiciously came with the statuesque, rippling muscles of a patriarchal hauntological past—a historically sexist tradition carried forward by “Pygmalions” like Conan author, Robert E. Howard, and famous Conan illustrator, Frank Frazetta. Famously Frazetta started his career in 1944, a time when readily-available synthetic steroids did not exist. Women, at this point, had been largely excluded from professional sports [for beating men]; the subsequent 20th century domination of weightlifting and bodybuilding through the weaponization of science against women [and later, against trans people by gentrifying cis women against them; re: Rationality Rules vs trans athletes] occurred specifically through the systemic and escalating abuse of steroids in these sports [Natty Life, 2023] while pointedly excluding marginalized groups from participating. These drugs became not just connected, but essential to the hypermasculine overperformance needed to argue for male superiority[10] in the heteronormative sports world, and by extension, any embodiments of patriarchal strength on- and off-stage.
Another way to look at this cultural regression towards sexual dimorphism, then, was the enforcement of a specific, idealized body image perpetrated through an abuse of technology—specifically medicine—to maintain the status quo/profit motive and Capitalist Realism through body imagery under global Capitalism as “set in stone.” Steroids were originally devised to assist the elderly and the injured, whereas puberty blockers were originally designed for cis children. Eventually the queer community coopted blockers to assist themselves, whereas the Patriarchy fought this measure by demonizing them; the same establishment also coopted hormones to keep cis-het, white men in the most lucrative positions, while also reinforcing those positions under Capitalism to benefit the elite through a homogenized, hauntological male image of strength; i.e., a return to the reimagined past through the cultivation of “beasts” whose war-dog bodies are pumped full of drugs to try and embody the canonical personification of strength to satisfy the profit motive. This double standard extends to tokenized groups; e.g., the “wheyfu” as a warlike, “queen bitch” gargoyle who is simultaneously worshipped and feared for being “not a man” and “acting like a man.”)

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

Now that we’ve revisited the monstrous-feminine, I want to illustrate such an exchange through anecdotes that communicate interpersonal and systemic trauma (a theme that will be become increasingly relevant as we push into the second half of the volume). Before we get to the third-and-final bourgeois trifecta, then, I want to give an anecdote about “thirst traps” and “girl bosses” through my own artistic dialogs; i.e., collaborating with artists playing the part. Thirst traps are canonically scapegoated—punished categorically for being “bad girls”; e.g., Carmilla and Striga (exhibit 7a). Both characters’ shows queer-bait some actually-interesting (non-heteronormative) “mommy dom” archetypes—the Gothic Amazon mom and vampire dominatrix—before putting Pandora back in her box. Netflix forces Carmilla to commit suicide (a bury-your-gays sendoff with lots of fireworks) and shames Evil Lyn for her own “insane” desire to move past the universe as founded on really-boring centrist muscle-dudes duking it out for eternity in Eternia: nation pastiche dressed up as displaced good-vs-evil fantasy narratives, personified by white, cis-het male wrestlers hogging the stage. All the same, subverting these kayfabe narratives by interrogating them within themselves obviously requires working within colonized material and factionalized workers. This process doesn’t always “work out,” resulting in predictable disputes between marginalized groups, which the elite rely on to remain in power (divide and conquer).

For example, I once drew Autumn Ivy as Striga from Castlevania (exhibit 7a, bottom-right) in order to reclaim said character’s monstrous-feminine qualities for sex-positive reasons: the strict-looking dominatrix wearing medievalized fetish gear extending to their naked body as weaponized. This is a complicated process for two reasons: one, purely from a theatrical/ideological standpoint; but also because it involves representations of two artists that aren’t automatically in harmony. Indeed, their relationship to the state (as something to support or resist through nerd culture) may cause them to fight about the Gothic as something to express; i.e., weird canonical nerds vs weird iconoclastic nerds.

We’ll get to that when I describe working with Autumn in just a moment. First, though, the theatrics and Gothic poetics of such a dialog are incredibly liminal. Striga is actually a pretty fascist character in the show’s canon—a black knight carving up “livestock” with her stupidly giant sword (exhibit 1a1a1d; re: “Pieces of the ‘Camp Map’“) as a member of the ruling elite, but also the delegitimate ruler of a hauntologically reimagined Eastern Europe; i.e., the classical domain of men being threatened by crazy vampire moms from an older made-up empire threatening the entire West as white, male and eternal: Nazi vampire she-wolves! All-in-all, Striga is thoroughly colonized—a fascist scapegoat made to ideologically defend Patriarchal Capitalism inside a neoliberal production: “Feminists are age-old hypocrites.” It bears repeating that token concessions with power are always made under duress to some extent; but also that iconoclastic negotiations away from these concessions require certain theatrical paradoxes: a strip tease using fetish gear and athletic, soldierly bodies as weaponized alongside their actual guns, swords, shields, and spears, etc.

(model and artist, left: Autumn Ivy and Persephone van der Waard; right: Sleep Depravity)

Iconoclastic homages to the Dark Amazon, then, aren’t blind masturbation but dialogs of unequal power exchange reversed through codified stigmas and behaviors that subvert the thirst trap’s usual dogmatic instructions; i.e., sex-positive variations that are patently designed to humanize the insect-like brood warrior as a sex-positive thirst trap instead of merely advocating for her unironic, female-coded destroyer persona. Doing so grapples with canon’s ordinary utility/function of the war-boss monster girl; i.e., continuously reducing the female variant of a “boss” character to a fearsome “cum sponge” and call to war that triangulates the same-old reactionary violence towards the usual groups inside the state of exception. These harmful (and ignominious) outcomes can be challenged, but this requires resisting the profit motive, which token agents will do not do; instead, they punch down, attacking members of their own group from “besieged,” self-deceiving pedestals given to them by older state proponents. In-fighting is taught and enforced by people who, if not initially rigid, become inflexible inside a prison-like structure; i.e., to sell out and sacrifice others in the bargain, while acting like the sole, exclusive victim that other minorities are somehow “against.” The worker assimilates, whitewashing the church while serving as an appropriated member of its phalanx of returning gargoyles when Capitalism decays.

For instance, white women/AFAB persons famously facilitate genocide as a protected class along a cis-to-queer gradient, the state granting them diminishing concessions by virtue of their faithfulness to, or breaking from, gender forms. This class betrayal’s Faustian bargain certainly includes cis TERFs, inspired by the delicate female novelists of yore penning kernel-of-truth anxieties of an incredibly bigoted, xenophobic nature that calls for outright police violence against queer people in the future; e.g., echoes of Ann Radcliffe spouted by J.K. Rowling (and others) shaping Britain into a 21st century police state: the unironic Gothic castle but also the equally unironic female knights inside triangulating against state targets. Beyond cis women, queer people can also play cop and cops make for excellent thirst-trap mommy doms. As we shall see with Autumn, intersections of generational abuse and comprise lead to tokenism, thus praxial inertia; i.e., through minority police needlessly complicating labor exchanges and worker action by bullying other workers to enrich themselves within state hegemony.

Despite these grander miscarriages enacting the Amazon as a harmful monstrous-feminine symbol, I want to stress that the idea of the female knight (white or black) can be reclaimed by subverting it away from its canonical, unironically brutalizer function (the militarized fetish). Indeed, it’s incredibly sexy to abjure Capitalism’s regressive Amazon as a police weapon of state terror and violence/power abuse while keeping “the look,” precisely because counterterrorist rebellion uses torturer aesthetics to liberate workers from the same old canonical legends of control through non-harmful sex; i.e., those that present “uppity bitches” as unruly monsters deserving of punishment, going from before William Marsden wrote Wonder Woman, into future interrogations of the sort he prompted regarding the canonical Amazon as something to negotiate, thus transform, into an increasingly sex-positive force: through iconoclastic[11] means that maintain the fearsome aesthetic amid changing class/cultural functions during ludo-Gothic BDSM. But these ongoing negotiations still happen between two (or more) people who are often of two minds about the very symbols being used; forget the aesthetics, the people utilizing them might disagree and even fight over their correct usage if one side has been conditioned to (whether consciously or not) serve the state!

This brings us to our second challenge: worker solidarity and intersectional unity/education threatened by competing labor dialogs mid-exchange; i.e., theatrical disputes centered around material and ideological disagreements tied to our own bodies, gender identities/performances and trauma during liminal expression—embodying monsters inside nerd culture as a form of socio-political discourse. To usher Marsden into the present-day struggle of Gothic-Communist development, I based Striga off one of Autumn Ivy’s publicly available shoot images (left). Personally I thought they were perfect for the role (they certainly looked the part), but didn’t fully realize or address our incompatibilities as artistic collaborators—that our shared generational trauma could divide us due to competing and oppositional aims within capital. Despite me being a trans woman/anarcho-Communist and Autumn a non-binary sex worker and both of us living with trauma under capital, we didn’t exactly “get along.” Point in fact, our voicing of trauma using and regarding the same Amazon aesthetics generally clashed during Gothic liminal expression and I’d like to explain why.

Before I start, though, I want to say that I don’t advertise any of this about Autumn out of sheer spite; nor do I want to apologize for their harmful actions towards me while telling the truth about them as an abusive nerd. As such, I want to achieve praxial catharsis by confronting their abuse of me to accomplish two intersecting aims: a) to make a point about the bourgeois trifectas, and b) acknowledge that they abused me as a client of theirs both looking for a mommy dom and someone who, as a fellow artist/sex worker, aimed to venerate thirst traps by working with Autumn. Given that exposing abuse is a key function of this book, I want to educate readers for the purposes of artistic critique that aims to highlight the factionalized complexities of these kinds of uneven working arrangements that happen “in the wild.” What happened between Autumn and I fits that to a tee: generational trauma begetting interpersonal trauma owing to capital as the divisive element through Gothic poetics. To critique power is to go where power is, and Autumn embodies that well, albeit as someone who abused me during our various exchanges.

First and foremost, Autumn is a headstrong and controlling person; i.e., their desire to be in control tended to overlook my considerations within our business arrangements. Even when trying to uphold their requests, they tended to walk (and talk) over me while making it seem normal. And yet, despite how their requests seemed fair at face value, they tended to be a one-sided ordeal insofar as my thoughts, feelings or rights were concerned. Autumn always acted like the boss, even when they had no grounds for it: a queer boss dressed like an Amazon, but also acting like one of a particular kind; i.e., a SWERF and a moderate strongarm/war boss pushing me around while shoving their own sloganized, superhero merchandise through the market. All the while, our trauma and its means of communicating through mommy-dom/thirst-trap Amazonomachia were competing against each other through monstrous language as something to negotiate: Autumn’s needs and wants trumping mine by virtue of their advertised superiority inside the same oppressed community discussing nerd culture.

For instance, Autumn strongly disliked the label “sex worker” being applied to them publicly because it could hurt their bottom line. It didn’t matter that they had an OnlyFans full of thirst-trap materials that very clearly constituted sex work; any mention of Autumn being a sex worker (calling it like it is) was something they were very forcefully against. And while this might sound okay unto itself, they were also a) only too happy to take my patronage for sex work, while b) stressing their own professional status and using that to tell me exactly how to advertise them in my own galleries and writing (which concerns sex worker rights). It honestly felt pretty bossy of them, but also dense; i.e., invalidating of me as a genderqueer artist/sex worker while constantly advertising themselves as a strong-looking enby who honestly was having their cake and eating it, too: showing less skin (no “ham sandwich,” in their words) and putting themselves on a pedestal above other sex workers while doing the same kind of work: talking dirty and showing off to make people cum; i.e., voice work first, with nudity as a pay-walled afterthought.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

The problem here, isn’t selling sex, but that Autumn’s approach became prescriptive and self-important; i.e., a weird canonical nerd smiling their Hollywood smile, getting fake tits to emphasize their female attributes within the Amazon persona, and treating false modesty like a lucrative virtue exclusive to them and their brand: the bogus and incredibly harmful argument that partially-clothed bodies and implied nudity are somehow “worth more” than fully naked ones are. It wasn’t explicitly stated, but nevertheless showed in how Autumn treated me over time: they were always the victim, and I could never be one. Regardless of intent, their trauma, their rights, and their business—all trumped my voice in defense of capital (re: intent doesn’t matter, actions do, and function determines function). Thus, instead of overcoming systemic adversity within monstrous language, Autumn actively contributed to it through a coercive heroic-monstrous persona: a moderate Amazon “gym mom” selling strength as a motivational[12] idea—a “feel-good” pill to buy from them while they sought to dominate the market (and its manufactured crises, contests and shortages) through queernormative kayfabe poetics; i.e., monsters that shut down proletarian praxis by being “the best.”

Abusive parties will generally sell themselves as paragons, something to aspire to while exploiting others around them. To be blunt, Autumn’s exploitation stems from commodifying rebellion, recuperating it with Gothic poetics as something to regard with fear and dogmatic worship (violence and terror). They value “positivity” over liberation, a toxic mindset that reliably yielded material and societal effects between us linked to stigmatic language: an expensive price tag (their photoshoots weren’t cheap) and an abusive working relationship regardless of my oppressed status while competing over marginalized, nerdy language. There’s certainly nothing wrong with charging whatever you want for your work, or deciding how much skin you want to show while doing it; but it was the manner to how Autumn controlled me as an erotic artist that rubbed me the wrong way. Anonymity and aliases are one thing but they wanted to be in the public spotlight, clearly doing sex work while telling me exactly what to write about them as the Amazon/victim; i.e., telling people they weren’t a sex worker while capitalizing on a profound double standard that left me feeling cheated, but also threatened. I’m sorry but that’s absurd and unprofessional. “Professional” means more than making money, hand-over-fist; it means treating your clients/co-workers with respect (the two are not mutually exclusive). Not only did Autumn not do this, they treated me solely like a client; i.e., I wasn’t a sex worker but an artist—in short, to “stay in my lane.”

To continue being blunt, Autumn was prioritizing themselves with a self-imposed monopoly informed by pre-existing heteronormative market trends: to, like a gargoyle, be seen and feared through visual instruction, but also open intimidation as a weird canonical nerd. So while there’s certainly nothing wrong with looking Amazonian as a part of your own public image and using that image to fight for the rights of enbies worldwide, Autumn was a rigid negotiator who prioritized themselves in pursuit of their own livelihood. This reflected not just in their treatment of me through veiled threats, but also their framing of the Amazon as a brand image—not as something to teach workers to liberate themselves with, but something for Autumn to treat as a reliable paycheck while marketing themselves as “queer enough.” Their open moderacy bled into their private, professional conduct in ways that frankly felt rude and unprofessional towards me as an artist and genderqueer person invested in sex worker rights; i.e., their business image trumped my own socio-political voice as a weird iconoclastic nerd, who they constantly treated as a threat to them. In short, their socio-material struggles took priority over mine, to the point that it made working with them oddly stressful.

For example, after Autumn had agreed to pay me for a short story that I had written for them to perform, we ran into some basic logistic issues; i.e., they were initially unable to pay me for the services being rendered. This shouldn’t have been cause for great concern. However, when I merely wanted to know what was going on, they begrudgingly said they had lost their PayPal account, but went on to insist I was being unprofessional for asking them to begin with; i.e., trying to secure a means of payment before I submitted the story in question. Per their usual approach, the whole thing felt one-sided—with me being the unreasonable party for asking basic questions and them being well within their rights to take whatever measures they saw fit to protect themselves and their business interests; e.g., their overall business conduct, but also their automated, no-nonsense business contracts when vending their costly sex-work photoshoots. To say they ran a tight ship would be an understatement; that fucker was hermetically sealed.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

While I certainly get Autumn’s frustration at losing their PayPal account, it still wasn’t an excuse for them to lash out at me; i.e., by acting like a subjugated version of the Amazon they were constantly touting themselves as. And frankly I wouldn’t have cared had their rough treatment of me not habitually coincided with their discrediting of what I was about as a sex worker and erotic artist (we all lash out; it shouldn’t be a regular occurrence tied to one’s brand, however). So while I can certainly understand not wanting to be called a sex worker because sex workers are discriminated against, Autumn’s overcontrolling and inconsiderate treatment of me veered at times into SWERF territory dressed up in rebellious symbolism; i.e., me being pushed around by another marginalized sexual worker in the LGBTQ community who not only does sex work by my book (fucking literally in this case), but also isn’t exactly hurting financially (owns horses and uses them to sell their own merchandise, above) and is thirst-trapping to gym bros with “Amazon/gym mom” gun[13] porn (see the eroticized loading of the “love gun”; exhibit 7b, below). Like, you do you, boo, but maybe respect me a little more as a fellow oppressed worker and weird nerd? Except weird canonical nerds don’t do that; they police and attack iconoclasts, seeing them as threats to the canonical order people like Autumn hardwire to through the profit motive. Despite posturing as rebellious, their performance becomes a pretense eclipsed by the structure controlling their income as expressed through Gothic poetics, which Autumn polices through subterfuge and coercion.

(exhibit 7b: Artist: Autumn Ivy. Despite the presence of masculine strength and Autumn identifying as non-binary in a subversive Amazonian gesture, there remains a thoroughly regressive, cowgirl component that leans into the raw business side of things. In other words, their precious brand recognition and dissemination is hardly subversive enough. Nothing about Autumn’s aesthetic indicates a hard leftist/anti-fascist/anti-corporate stance; indeed, many elements indicate a centrist position appropriating countercultural forms [the tarot and monster tatts] for a police/settler-colonial function with Man Box applications: acting and looking like a tokenized cop in service to patriarchal structures and status-quo clients [cis-het men thirsting after queer-coded cowgirls] while prioritizing themselves as an AFAB sex worker [itself a form of transphobia towards AMAB sex workers].)

My point, here, is that the unresolved and uneven class tensions between us eventually reached a breaking point. This means that when things finally did fall apart, it was actually over something seemingly stupid and small: I had been supporting Autumn fairly regularly—and trying to be a good patron and respect their wishes [e.g. asking permission to show them my cock]—when suddenly I received an impersonal-sounding message from them while I was in a bad place: “I can’t respond right now. Please respect my time.” It sounded prerecorded (and in hindsight, it was), but I was already frustrated with them and going through some heavy shit on my end: a messy rebound right after a tremendously abusive relationship, the temporary banning of my OnlyFans account after sharing artwork on there, and my uncle being hospitalized overnight from a sudden, acute heart attack (the second one in less than a week). In short, I was going through the same kinds of problems that many sex workers go through. Sensing an air of exceptionalism, I spoke my mind and said that I thought Autumn’s message sounded rude.

God forbid, right? Needless to say, the ensuing conversation was not a productive or pleasant one. I thought Autumn was rude, they thought I was rude, and despite the two of us agreeing that it was a giant miscommunication (tied to an automated message, no less), there were some pretty bad vibes present between us. I tried to apologize about being in a bad place but Autumn just had to get their licks in because I’d called them unprofessional; they acted like they looked: loud and assertive, sending some choice words over two short video recordings telling me to basically go fuck myself (“I could tell you TO GO FUCK YOURSELF but I’m not going to!”). It was a very offended performance, one where they could do no wrong and I was a dick for daring to suggest that their conduct or place in the universe was somehow in dispute. Clearly I’d hit a nerve, but it only illustrated how things normally were, albeit to a more incensed degree: their way or the highway spoken from both sides of their mouth. In short, it was queer-boss behavior and I wasn’t really in a state of mind to turn the other cheek. Autumn was right and I was wrong and their picture-perfect smile spoke for itself. Except its message suddenly felt incredibly fake and harmful to me.

 (artist: Autumn Ivy)

I’m mentioning all of this because our dispute was informed by a brand image they were acting out; i.e., as something to protect through tough-guy posturing that generally informed how they treated me as a fellow artist and sex worker when things “were good.” Obviously there’s no clear divide between theatre and real life, but Autumn made no bones about having an image (and livelihood) to protect from my conduct. I think their conduct and my response represents just how messily these miscommunications can get when they happen between workers; i.e., how their resultant hang-ups and ripostes are generally informed by various socio-material factors not entirely or even partially known to both parties. So I mean it when I say there’s no hard feelings between us. But there is a sex-positive lesson to be taught about worker rights during artistic solidarity and expression, and one that concerns Autumn’s abusive conduct as part of their selling point: the gun-toting, inspirational gym mom, enby aesthete throwing their weight around pretty fucking hard the moment a little femboy artist like me (still in the closet at the time) inconvenienced them, or talked about her rights or opinions for a change; i.e., trans misogyny.

To be honest, I had wanted to say more during our falling out to clear things up but Autumn was pissed and so was I. The fact remains, I didn’t mention my uncle to them because I didn’t know he was dead at the time; my abusive surviving uncle didn’t want me attending the hospital visit, so I was at home waiting to hear about the results of the incoming brain scan. I didn’t know it, but he was legally dead by the time Autumn and I had our fight. And perhaps it’s unfair of me to hold that against Autumn, so I technically won’t. I’ll just say that their video messages largely concerned them hurling the most thinly veiled insults imaginable at me (and not in a professional manner), informing me in no uncertain terms just how unreasonable I had been to voice my true feelings at all.

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Perhaps there was no place for them in Autumn’s mind. Except that’s not how humans (or labor exchanges) work. My uncle was probably dead, I was losing my best friend, and still reeling from my last ex’s abuses. But Autumn? They just couldn’t be bothered to put up with me because their horse had been difficult that morning! Far be it from me to compare a temperamental horse to a dead uncle, or to expect Autumn to have known about Dave; but the fact remains that they were entirely concerned with themselves and I (and my trauma) were a nuisance. It became something to mute, treating me like a no-good AMAB dickhead while lionizing themselves and encouraging me to keep mum (something that all abusers do; e.g., Zeuhl and Cuwu).

Given the terrible timing of things and me admittedly nursing some bruised co-worker/client resentment (for Autumn’s unprofessional, one-sided conduct) on top of what I was going through, it was a perfect storm of self-centeredness from them and denied expectations from me. Shit happens, but there’s a still sex-positive lesson to be learned, here. Specifically I want us to reflect on what transpired between Autumn and I in relation to capital and Amazon aesthetics at large; i.e., as a countercultural means of interrogating trauma during the potential for labor and cultural disputes. The handling of the Amazon/mommy dom aesthetic becomes something to improve upon during complex labor exchanges/negotiations while understanding what made Autumn so attractive to me and my work: their brand of Amazon aesthetics as something to reclaim from its owner’s bourgeois antics, and indeed valuing what Autumn has to offer while healing from their parasocial abuse. Per Sarkeesian’s adage, I can enjoy their powerful body and critique their abusive behavior as something to both recognize as part of their person and a thing to separate from the aesthetic: Despite how Autumn absolutely looks the part, they do not play it in ways that help workers at large; we can do that for them by analyzing and learning from what Autumn puts into the world.

Writing this section has been stressful, and appreciating Autumn’s creative output and striking presentation helps me relax in ways that grants me agency having survived to speak on their abuse: fetishizing and enjoying the ghost of my abuser as something that can prioritize healing from trauma through a likeness that isn’t the original (a tactic that will come up repeatedly from here on out; e.g., Cuwu, exhibit 16b). The takeaway isn’t so much that Autumn was an apathetic, high-control diva who was actually pretty awful to work with (they were, to be clear); they and I eventually fought about it and haven’t engaged with one another since. Instead, I want you to consider their pulverized solidarity and idiosyncratic stupidity (meaning in the Marxist sense of privatized labor stupefying workers) as connected to their complicated brand image leading to praxial inertia during liminal expression: the weird canonical nerd/enby girl boss (a queer boss acting cis to serve the profit motive) defending their thirst-trap image in blunt-force, centrist, dog-eat-dog ways; i.e., “I am strong and right, you are not” embodying class dormancy in favor of the status quo. It’s punching down by an enby emulating those who normally punch down: white, cis-het men. By acting like one, enbies like Autumn perform and present as cops, often while wearing a mask-like smile as part of their public image.

The moment I introduced even a modicum of tension in defense of myself and my rights, Autumn ditched any sense of manners and doubled down on their usual performance as a veiled means of attack: defending their home and uniform as besieged by little ol’ me. That’s generally how moderates work, you see; they’re polite until they’re not. It was like arguing with someone who had fallen in love not just with themselves, but specifically their own sculpted image as a centrist comic book hero. It was, in a sense, a self-deception on both ends (despite my trauma, I could have spoken up sooner), but one whose complicated subterfuge led Autumn to coerce me in service of the profit motive; i.e., they didn’t give a toss, as long as they got paid and looked good doing it, upholding the current linguo-material order of genderqueer language under capital by acting like a canonical gargoyle. To that, I was supposed to keep quiet, but I won’t and it feels cathartic to speak out.

Now that we’ve gone over Autumn as a kind of “queer boss” in the wild, keep them in mind; we’ll explore similar dialectical-material tensions in regards to other workers and their own complicated praxis/trauma throughout the manifesto and remainder of the book. For the moment, let’s move onto the third bourgeois trifecta—the coercion trifecta that results from these kinds of manufacture and subterfuge:

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Nat the Lich)

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

(artist: M Leth)

While such poetic strategies double within the liminal expression of oppositional praxis (the Six Doubles), they are canonically denied to labor movements or otherwise recuperated from them to serve state interests. Often, “resistance” is heroically performed—limited to half-real, simulative spaces of containment regarding worker ingenuity as controlled forms of monomythic opposition; i.e., descending into Hell with a militarized avatar whose warlike gestures embody state aims vis-à-vis Cartesian dualism: nature (and the Global South) as something to conquer through hauntologized force under neoliberal Capitalism. To that, Cameron’s refrain (shooters) limits monsters to “scored points” achieved through projectile-based combat against an endless army of zombies, demons and/or anthromorphs inside an obstacle course/shooting range through military optimism: holocaust by bullet. These overtures of state violence manifest in a variety of videoludic exchanges, be that an FPS, TPS (run ‘n gun, Metroidvania, platformer) or RTS with shooter elements, and so on. There are no shortage of enemies to educate players (often young men, but also blindly parodic Man-Box proponents that appeal to these men; e.g., waifus/war-bride avatars, above) to kill unthinkingly for the state, regardless of where the Imperial Boomerang and states of exception are (e.g., Doom II: Hell on Earth, 1994).

Note: This section is very important to my ludology scholarship, and would go onto be cited in all of my book volume’s afterward, as well as “Those Who Walk Away from Speedrunning” in my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus. —Perse, 4/4/2025

Power is a performance that upholds through the perception of impossible things like total control, endless enemies, ultimate strength or absolute victory through kayfabe reversals. The same goes for containment, whose paradox of total imprisonment our thesis discussed in relation to videogames as breakable; i.e., how speedrunning and spoilsport gaming attitudes normally contain tremendous invention that canonically restrict the development and execution of emergent puzzle-solving to single texts in gaming culture[14], versus applying that mentality to reconfigure larger extratextual structures; e.g., Coincident’s “Doom Strategy Guide – Okuplok’s Mancubus Cliff” (2023, below) treating player invention more as a hobby on par with a Rubik’s cube—or hell, a human beating Tetris (1985) for the first time in its 38-year existence (aGameScout’s “After 34 Years, Someone Finally Beat Tetris,” 2024)—versus escaping Capitalist Realism by playing videogames (and other such experiments) in ways that resist the profit motive within the neoliberal era (with organized speedrunning arguably having started in 1990[15], just before the fall of the Soviet Union). The puzzle is ostensibly impressive, but the much-touted “progress” of solving it becomes an empty gesture insofar as liberating worker minds is concerned. Doing so has no effect on the external world unless the attitude for solving complicated puzzles through emergent gameplay is deliberately taken outside of the text. Otherwise, the hauntology (and its canceled future) are entirely self-contained:

In truth, the degree of conscious unity against grander historical-material problems can be applied to capital through rebellious worker action and ludo-Gothic-BDSM poetics across all mediums and labor forms; e.g., speedrunning, which can work (from my thesis volume) “as a communal effect for solving complex puzzles and telling Gothic ludonarratives in highly inventive ways. As we’ll see moving forward, this strategy isn’t just limited to videogames, but applies to any poetic endeavor during oppositional praxis”; i.e., intersectional, multi-layered strategies of resistance and misdirection that strive to demonstrate there is no outside of the text, applying the imagination and effort needed to transform the world around us by any and all means necessary. To that, I think the grassroots culture and non-profit approach to speedrunning allows larger groups of people to solve immensely difficult problems collectively outside of established business practices: thwarting Capitalist Realism by weaponizing the collective ingenuity and incredible puzzle-solving power of speedrunning against the elite.

If popular videogames franchised under neoliberal Capitalism, and organized speedrunning began to form right before the end of the Cold War in 1990, then its proletarian utility (and other such revolutionary strategies overlapping within nerd culture) must do so after the end of history’s cultural myopia began to thicken. Doing so requires inventiveness in the face of tremendous confusion (worker menticide) and state-sponsored adversity (many speedrunners just want to run their games and ignore the problems of the real word; e.g., Caleb Hart, who we shall examine in Volume Three, Chapter Four). The bourgeoisie might seem to hold all the cards, here, but they cannot kill all workers who resist, nor do they possess the means to completely monopolize violence and terror against rebellious forces; likewise, they cannot hope to alienate us from our own labor as a weapon to levy against them unless we surrender its power and poetics exclusively to them. Subjugation means total surrender as something of a choice when presented with the facts: submitting to Capitalist Realism in those respects, staying inside Plato’s cave. This book’s praxial focus, then, is to enrich propaganda and sex workers by making them (and the world around them) progressively more and more proletarian through Gothic poetics as something to fearlessly apply anywhere, regardless of who complains or fights back. As part of nerd culture as something to reclaim, we become “awakened,” hence emotionally/Gothically intelligent weird nerds aware of class/cultural struggles in relation to each other in continuum. The rewards of gradual, uphill emancipation outweigh the risk of state violence committed by class traitors like Autumn playing it safe inside nerd culture (segregation doesn’t prevent genocide; it enables it).

We must not only avoid such incidents, thereby rescuing the Gothic aesthetic from a menticidal function that maintains the status quo; we must interrogate and confront our own trauma through similar incidents that occur regularly between workers when interrogating power using Gothic paradox. To that, we must gradually become our own dark agents, including killer-rabbit, “Trojan” bunnies who tell splendid, very-gay lies (exhibit 7c and 7d in a figurative sense; 100a4 [from Volume Three] in a more literal sense) and—as sex workers with subversive fetish props, kink and BDSM—weave our own elaborate strategies of misdirection, thread-by-thread, into the praxial fabric of “acceptable” sin, rebellion and vice, but also power, prestige and strength personified: Hell as something to rule over collectively by reclaiming the monstrous language that Capitalism uses to commodify our struggles authored by the system. The state markets and sells Gothic poetics all the time. We just have to deprivatize their canonical transactions and framing during our own creative actions; i.e., in Gothic-Communist ways that champion monstrous worker solidarity as fundamental to the development process, deconstructing harmful binaries while encouraging anti-heteronormative Gothic expression through iconoclastic monsters, locations and rituals of unequal power exchange.

(artist: In Case)

So put aside the elite’s cheap, coercive garbage and work for something better to consume that we make for ourselves. If “you are what you eat,” then become something darkly delicious whose consumption actually makes the world a better place; i.e, by openly talking about trauma through Gothic poetics, whose frankly paradoxical performances and play become utilized in spite of the risks to constitute something that moderates like Autumn (and other weird canonical nerds) cannot stand: a pedagogy of the oppressed that alters societal and material conditions. Its engagement occurs between complex, liminal expressions of power in submissive and dominant forms—but also undead, demonic and animalistic avatars—that provide a potent, playful means of voicing things that embody or otherwise speak out about systemic trauma; i.e., as something to express in monstrous, paradoxical language, normally receiving it from similar-looking entities that ultimately serve the state.

To it, we must subvert them  during ludo-Gothic BDSM—meaning in far more openly transgressive/dissident language than Autumn dares to (they’re a cop); we must “make it gay” by rebelling in revolutionarily meaningful ways, thus achieve liberatory catharsis and release during praxial synthesis—camping the canon through our own identities, labor and bodies, whose Gothic poetics consciously challenge heteronormative (and tokenized, queernormative) standards. It becomes joyous and orgasmic, but also a form of asexual public nudism whose statuesque presentations make our canonical foils sweat:

(exhibit 7c: Artists I have worked with or commissioned, or whose creations have inspired me when making my own sex-positive work. Top-right-to-mid-left: Filmation’s 1987 The Emperor of the Night; top-far-left: Natharlotep; mid-top-left: Nya Blu; low-mid-left: Songyuxin Hitomi; bottom-left: Bokuman; bottom-middle: Zayzay; bottom-right: Luna Seduces; upper-far-middle-right: Ronin Dude; middle: Playful Maev. All embody something rebellious in the Satanic sense; i.e., through Gothic poetics, stressing a morphological personal expression that is outside the Cartesian, heteronormative standard. For example, Playful Maev was gynodiverse in terms of the labia she drew in her work; indeed, I specifically commissioned her to draw my OC, Ileana, for that reason!)

(exhibit 7d: Top-left artist: Persephone van der Waard; top-middle: Miss Misery; top-and-bottom-right: Tatsuya Yoshikawa; bottom-left, artist: Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right, artist: Persephone van der Waard. Queens of hell are things to fashion; i.e., great and fearsome witches and demons. The top-left is Miss Misery drawn as a great ruler of Hell; the bottom-left is Ileana, my sex-positive witch queen who uses her tremendous magic powers [and chonk] to fight against evil kings for the rights of all witches; my OC Pickle [bottom-left] was envisioned as a kind of queenly demon in her own right; and Yoshikawa clearly loves their oni and spirits. All embody the sort of queenly entities that patriarchal men demonize and fear but also sing about and commodify in rock ‘n roll forms; e.g., Carmilla and Striga, but also Witchtrap’s 2012 “Queen of Hell” being the “queen of her kind!” opposite Helstar’s rendition of Dracula/Orlock declaring, “I am the king of my kind!” in their 1989 guitar showcase, “Perseverance and Desperation.” You gotta take that entire process and turn it on its head: “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.”)

While making monsters yourself (thus being a weird nerd), remember how class and culture warfare start with imagination as something previously informed by state-corporate propaganda and its Faustian pacification: “Better to serve in Heaven than reign in Hell” amounting to a kind of “false service” where they eat you (a bit like the old Twilight Zone episode, “To Serve Man,” 1962). All the while, the elite want us to forget how all deities reside in our breast, that we are the devils of the world and the Gothic imagination is our workshop. The world, then, can become one where non-privatized dreams and nightmares come true—that have the collective power to liberate sex workers from bourgeois tyranny and avoid the repeating of older historical materialisms currently unfolding during Capitalist Realism as it presently exists: weird canonical nerds like Autumn, who maintain these structures as they currently function—scaring people through Hell as a monopolized threat of state violence, not creative empowerment. We can all be kings, queens and intersex/non-binary monarchs under a New Order where vertical power arrangements become an awful legend of the tyrannical past; i.e., on par with Richard Matheson’s Commie Zombie-Vampires finally(?) laying Cartesian dualism to rest in I am Legend, 1954 (according to Debora Christie, anyways; source: “A Dead New World: Richard Matheson and the Modern Zombie,” 2011).

Essentially the above exhibit is where I coined the idea of “the monopoly of monsters/morphological expression” vis-à-vis Weber’s monopoly of violence and Asprey’s monopoly of terror (re: “The State: Its Key Tools” from “Paratextual Documents“). —Perse, 4/4/2025

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

So, while “Rome” and its proponents of the Protestant ethic pimping nature (re: Autumn) absolutely gargle non-consenting balls, it’s completely inadequate for Gothic Communists to say that “‘Rome’ sucks and so do Capitalism, neoliberalism and fascism.” That won’t work. Not only is it stating the obvious, but far too many workers defend marriage, war and the state itself as sacred—its ritualized sacrifices in all of these fields; i.e., “People die, abuses happen, wives get raped, but the state is sacrosanct, sovereign, above judgement.” Instead, the hauntological and abject nature of canonical, heteronormative devilry must be critiqued in relation to what pro-state proponents already dominate: the ghost of the counterfeit as an ongoing lie that serves the elite through the process of abjection. As Autumn demonstrates, said process turns potentially unruly workers into stupid backstabbers whose concept of ownership isn’t just raw utility for the state, but sublimated exploitation in alienizing/alienating ways. This completely-fucked situation calls for subversive transformation and black magic during liminal expression; it calls for successful proletarian praxis through our creative successes and dark forces—our darkness visible achieving praxial synthesis in opposition to the bourgeois trifectas (and proponent gargoyles like Autumn using them to keep dissidents in line; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss)!

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Volume Zero thoroughly discusses power as a paradoxical performance, which denotes both nuance and difficulty in its execution as a liminal proposition: on the surface of and inside thresholds that remediate praxis. Like wrestling or boxing, Gothic-Communist development is an uphill game of gradual pressure and inches from both sides cultivating the Superstructure. But rebellious decisions have to collective, second-nature and informed, or they ultimately serve the state. For the next two chapters, then, I want to outline the operational difficulties present within oppositional praxis when challenging the state; then go over the Gothic mode (and its many lists) in detail, accompanied by my original examination of the nuance present during oppositional praxis (and its various lists).

Onto “‘Revolutionary Cryptonymy’ opening, and ‘Predators and Prey’ part one“!

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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] Source: Academy of Ideas’ “The Parallel Society vs Totalitarianism | How to Create a Free World,” (2022).

[2] From War in the Shadows: the Guerrilla in History (1994): “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.”

[3] I.e., “egregores/monsters” as codified in visible, emblematic forms whose function (not aesthetic; e.g., golems) is to communicate heteronormative dogma when viewed. My emphasis on “gargoyle” as a state tool of menticide was more of a conversational focus in this upcoming chapter when I first wrote it. I’ve since decided to preserve that rhetoric, even though it doesn’t appear too much elsewhere in the book (again, the term is more or less synonymous with monsters, simulacra and egregores).

[4] “Dated” being a paradox, insofar as the abjection of systemic abuse puts it in perceived ideas of the past as in “not now, not here”; e.g., saying corporal punishment happened “back then” before applying that exception globally throughout the entire empire except for certain areas dedicated to colonized or otherwise oppressed groups: prisons and ghettos as reliable sites of torture committed by the corrupt, the monstrous, the other. Even outside the state of exception, material reminders of the historical past are all around us in Gothic forms, which condition or otherwise encourage unironic versions of these painful behaviors in present evocations of canonical barbarism; i.e., whose counterfeits synonymize pain with harm instead of granting calculated risks that actually reestablish control for all workers (and not just those in the Imperial Core fearful of abuse from their assigned destroyers and “protectors”; e.g., white, cis-het women).

[5] The series is not without its own fan-made porn; e.g., this animation by Hammy Toy of Brooklyn fingering his own asshole.

[6] Fan animations, unlike canonical works, tend to reject efficient profit. For that, compare this 2022 DBZ fan project by Studio Stray Dog to the animation and art in Dragon Ball Super (2017). Night-and-day difference!

[7] The gargoyle is a hauntological figure insofar as it becomes a humanoid being to relate to out of the past while still belong it.

[8] I.e., the internalization of the foreign plot in fascist thinking.

[9] A small note about “good/bad” in ludo-Gothic BDSM language: To be dialectical-material throughout this book, I will be consciously referring to bad/good monsters, witches, education, food, parentage et al as bourgeois/proletarian (or canonical/iconoclastic). This being said, while the qualifier “good/bad” can become incredibly obfuscating during oppositional praxis, “bourgeois play” also sounds incredibly funny and terrifying to me in BDSM parlance. To preserve my sanity I’ll stick to good/bad play whenever broaching that subject, as it frankly rolls off the tongue better (and fits with the BDSM idea of shame and praise—e.g., “good girl, bad girl!” etc). Praise and intimacy don’t have to be sexual at all; heteronormative canon automatically and coercively sexualizes everything in sexually dimorphic, incredibly abusive/sublimated ways. Despite the binarized roles in BDSM, iconoclastic praise reduces stress for both sides (e.g., me saying “good girl!” to my computer when it doesn’t crash as I write this book).

[10] This superiority is a harmful body image that is sold to younger and younger people, taught to visualize and connect said physiques as linked to commercial gain under capital at the sacrifice of longevity and physical health (Dr. Chris Raynor’s “Sam Sulek: Recipe For Disaster?” 2023); or as Gen Kanayama and Harrison G. Pope Jr write in “History and Epidemiology of Anabolic Androgens in Athletes and Non-athletes” (2017):

The use of androgens, frequently referred to as anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), has grown into a worldwide substance abuse problem over the last several decades. Testosterone was isolated in the 1930s, and numerous synthetic androgens were quickly developed thereafter. Athletes soon discovered the dramatic anabolic effects of these hormones, and AAS spread rapidly through elite athletics and bodybuilding from the 1950s through the 1970s. However it was not until the 1980s that widespread AAS use emerged from the elite athletic world and into the general population. Today, the great majority of AAS users are not competitive athletes, but instead are typically young to middle-aged men who use these drugs primarily for personal appearance (source).

[11] I.e., an iconoclastic concept I’ve explored in my own graduate/postgraduate work; e.g., “What an Amazon Is, Standing in Athena’s Shadow” (2017) written when I was still in the closet, followed by my subversive train of Amazon artwork throughout the following years: exhibit 7a, but also subversions of Frazetta’s artwork with exhibit 0a2c and exhibit 102a1; as well as my OCs Ileana, Revana, Siobhan and Virago in exhibits 7d, 37f, 37g, 61a2, 84, etc; classical myths like the Medusa, 23b; and in subversive movie/videogame fanart like Corporal Ferro, Marisa, Chun Li and Zarya in exhibits 85, 104a2, 111b; etc.

[12] A huge part of Autumn’s market is motivational speaking/positive thinking with T&A during workout sessions. Think Richard Simmons, but sexier (no offense).

[13] Settler colonialism, whether American or not, goes hand-in-hand with romanticized, but also fetishized weapons as displays of terror (the fascist cult of machismo/weapons). For a melee variant, consider the straight-up TERF queen/war boss, Odessa Stone from Overwatch (2016), which we’ll explore in Volume Three, Chapter Four.

[14] I.e., “gamer culture,” which, as we’ve established in our thesis volume, is predominantly white, cis-het, and male. Moreover, many “metas” exist within manufactured competition to serve the profit motive; e.g., fighting games and professional teams of the FGC as a globalized operation across multiple countries. If you don’t complete, you don’t exist.

[15] As Eric Koziel writes in Speedrun Science: A Long Guide to Short Playthroughs (2019):

In March of 1990, Nintendo of America staged an event in Dallas, Texas […] called the “Nintendo World Championships.” While this was mainly a marketing event to capture and further motivate the explosive success of the NES, it grew into a full-on circuit. While the event itself was built around total score, the Nintendo World Championships have a place in history as one of the earliest instances of organized speedrunning (source).