The seventh book in my Sex Positivity series is live: the Practice (and Preservation) Volume! Check it out, here (its promo page is age-gated; this skeet gives further SFW and NSFW screencaps and summaries).
Note (to anyone who cares): Like the other volumes, I do appear in this book volume as a sex worker doing sex work. Fair warning! —Perse
To keep this post SFW, here's a SFW promo poster of the cover model (similar to the book covers): the lovely Maddie Minx!
As for the volume, it's over twenty essays and fourteen interviews of sex workers. Here's the volume summary:
Volume Four, or the Practice Volume, combines Volume Zero's complex theory, Volume One's simplified theory/synthetic model, Volume Two's monster history and application and Volume's Three's praxial outline; i.e., as something to achieve ourselves, making Marx gay (and hot) through the work we do every day.
In other words, if Volume Three covers the informed, intersectionally continuous application of successful proletarian praxis—meaning as we reinterpret the Gothic past pushing for universal liberation—then Volume Four puts that to practice, preserving our work (and public nudism) in practice. It does so through a variety of essays and interviews concerned with current events and workers on the ground + informed material exchanges illustrating mutual consent, but also research compendiums that "dial in" my research focus through practice; re: state vampirism, where cryptonymy and abjection work hand-in-hand for workers or the state, in praxial/dialectical-material opposition. Its chief aim is to archive and invigilate GNC and/or sex workers' collective efforts versus fascism and other state powers: to demonstrate a systemic devaluing of unpaid labor as a whole during state vampirism; i.e., prostituted by bad actors, whose predation on unpaid labor (and the latter's reversing abjection) the essays and interviews document and discuss (re: the whore's revenge, prostitution being the oldest profession and labor struggle tied to Medusa, one of the oldest monsters; see: "Rape Reprise," 2024). In cis binary terms, men (or warriors) are classically expendable, and women and women's work indispensable ("too important"). The non-binary reality is that class war is ass war—a holistic, dualistic, intersectional exchange demonstrating several adages of Sun Szu: that all war predicates on deception, and any army regardless of size must be well-fed (food being a form of payment but also fuel to motivation action with). Female or not, any monstrous-feminine is both the unglamorous side of revolution, and the undervalued-yet-essential—the creator and the destroyer as one-in-the-same, meaning the virgin and the whore/the angel of death and mercy in ways that show rebellion, seemingly shallow, as paradoxically quotidian/adventuresome; i.e., merely "doing the dishes" and, all the same, capable of slaying and becoming dragons (alter-egos) on a stage shared by our enemies (the state and its servants): the same half-real bodies and language, exploitation and liberation divided mise-en-abyme by dialectical-material context/the flow of power up or down, cryptonymy-and-abjection. The idea is to seek honesty in ways that expose our enemies hypocrisy—to not just "put the pussy on the chainwax" when camping the canon (re: "Shining a Light on Things," 2023), but to out our would-be colonizers as suitably full of shit (e.g., Key & Peele's "If Civil War Reenactments Were Honest," 2020).
To conclude, these essays and interviews synthesize praxis, making them a full-fledged demonstration of Gothic Communism's potential; i.e., while referencing and preserving everything else I've ever written, cataloging struggle: showing sex workers as human while humanizing them in reclaimed language (reversing abjection). Practice preserves praxis for future generations to study and learn from.
approximate volume length ("): ~529,000 words/1,706 pages[1] and ~1,558 unique images[2] (under construction, many images borrowed from older workers)
[1] Minus the original paratext material, not including new paratexts for Volume Four, specifically.
[2] With various repeating images for the essays and interviews (which self-reference).
Note: Every volume contains the same paratextual materials: "Paratextual (Gothic) Documents" and "Audience, Art, and Reading Order" (as well as the full series acknowledgements, glossary and disclaimer). Much of the unique paratextual materials for Volumes One, Two and Three, and for Volume Four, are contained in their own paratext compendiums: "Appetizers" and "Leftover Rice," respectively. —Perse, 4/21/2026
Book details: My name is Persephone van der Waard and I am currently writing and illustrating a non-profit book series on sex positivity and the Gothic. Sex Positivity is composed of four volumes: Volume Zero, One, Two and Three (arranged numerically as "volume [1, 2, 3, or 4] of 4, from 0 to 3" on their text-only title pages). Each has a proper title and ordinary noun(s) with which it is referred to; e.g., Volume One is also called "the manifesto," and Volume Two is also referred to as "the Humanities primer," etc. As of 5/9/2025, my entire book series is live, with each volume accessible for free through my website's 1-page promo. While you're there, you can also learn about the other yet-to-release volumes/modules, project history and logo design. I also wrote a series send-off on 6/1/2025, after which Sex Positivity continues in small-form content; e.g., essays on and interviews with other sex workers.
