Persephone's (Gothic) Insights

This twelve-page piece is dedicated to Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old Airman who burned himself to death on February 25th, 2024. In doing so, he martyred himself through extreme protest of the Palestinian genocide currently being conducted by Israel and its Western allies.  "We should not live in a world that requires human sacrifice to make an important political statement on the value of human life." — Bay Ryan Note: This piece was inspired by someone I respect, but whose apathy and myopia I wish to respond to: Bad Empanada and his video,  " Americans Demand I Praise US Soldier Who Self-Immolated to Protest Gaza Genocide " (2024 ). I respond to it in his second channel's community section : "I thought your refusal to say anything about Aaron Bushnell's martyrdom at all, only to comment on American jingoism and all-importance is, I feel, incredibly myopic and apathetic; e.g., "I don't care" (which you've said as much); i.e., to overl

This nine-page piece is dedicated to the memory of Nex Benedict (pronouns he/him or they/them), a 16-year-old transmasc non-binary student who was killed in the girls bathroom of Owasso, Oklahoma on February 7th, 2024. I say "killed" because the actions taken there led swiftly to their murder (they died of their injuries a day later, delaying their actual death to February 8th)—one that the local community has tried to sweep under the rug. I will do no such thing: Nex was the victim of a modern-day witch-hunt, one led by the usual suspects enabled and defended by moderate politics. Edit #2: This piece discusses Nex' death, including its causes and consequences. However, my partner recommended  this twitter thread by  Theo Hendrie   to me, which celebrates Nex' life and who he was as a person: " This thread isn't about how he died, it's about HIM. It's the memories his friends and family have shared because he was so much more than what happened to him

I wanted to post a small-but-vital, seven-page excerpt from my latest volume, Manifesto and Instruction, onto my blog. The sample-in-question critiques a core function of Capitalist Realism and its endless service to the profit motive: the creation of an enemy within a cartographic territory of crisis (a map of conquest) that must be heroically reconquered ad infinitum —cops and victims, essentially. By extension, the sample addresses my thesis argument that neoliberalism franchised and commodified various videoludic refrains vital to state operations after the Cold War ended; i.e., the videogame map and monsters playing out in reliably dogmatic ways that keep Capitalist Realism firmly in place. Note: If you like this sample, it will be included inside a new edition of Volume One, sometime later today. Both sample and volume belong to a non-profit book series on sex positivity and the Gothic. Made in collaboration with other sex workers, the project is a four-volume set called Sex Posi

Today, I decided to write a brief essay on making Marx gay  vis-à-vis the notion of "camping canon" from my thesis volume. It concerns the entire book, and I'll be including it inside new editions of Volumes Zero and One on my website today (and the other volumes when they release); but given its vital nature to my overall arguments, I also wanted to post it on my blog for historical purposes: Making Marx Gay "Why camp canon?" you ask? Because we have to! Canon is heteronormative, thus foundational to our persecution as built into capital out of antiquity's Drama and Comedy into more recent inventions of the staged gimmick; i.e., of the back-and-forth wrestling match versus the Greek play's chorus and musical numbers, but also the opera and castle as an operatic site of forbidden, extreme desire, guilty pleasure and possessive love. Capitalism needs enemies to fight who are different from the status quo and we fit the bill. In short, we fags "make