Persephone's (Gothic) Insights

This essay, "Joy Under Fascism," was written to find joy under fascism; i.e., while responding to a scholar whose book I found in a used book shop after a health scare: Jill Suzanne Smith’s  Berlin Coquette  (2013), on sex work. Also applies to Amazons and  my Metroidvania work . It remains part of my Sex Positivity series , albeit coming from outside the books, themselves; i.e., belonging to a disparate body of essays and interviews that fall under the same basic umbrella, but often will engage with more than the usual suspects: someone who vocally disagrees with us in times of state, even planetary crisis, and with whom various members of the Sex Positivity project make themselves heard. Note: This essay is actually part of my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus —specifically thinking about whores and violence and their depiction in and out of media; e.g., my acquisition of old books at used bookstores, and synthesizing them years later in light of crisis, health scares, and fr...