Thread by @RiotLinguist

CW: CSE references
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It is important to understand that QAnoners consume QAnon AS pornography. it is NOT about "protecting children," it's about the consumption of children's bodies as sites of highly sexualized boundary violation, the "violated innocence" fantasy

QAnon mobilizes simultaneous affects of desire, arousal, and disgust. This is not new! as a personal example, when christian men used to explain to me what kind of rape they consider "real rape" versus "she brought it on herself," they went into graphic detail about what

happened to the hypothetical victim's body, including the fantasy of "ideal victimhood" which included describing what the victim of "real rape" feels internally--feeling helpless, humiliated, violated, etc. (real world rape victims often react in complex & contradictory ways)

think of the way TERFs and fascists think and talk about trans and queer people--evoking extremely strong affects of disgust & contempt, but also with a strong highly sexualized fixation on genitalia, exaggerated focus on sexualizing markers of the body

in patriarchy, domination and control are inextricably bound to sexuality. Sex is constructed as a Subject/Object relationship, as fundamentally an enunciation of cis male authority and to some degree as inherently degrading to the body upon which that authority is practiced.

patriarchal ways of constructing sex are bound up with the prerogative of some bodies to consolidate power through the fragmentation of other bodies. the spectacle of violation, the spectacle of the "violated virgin," is an affirmation of the power of the spectator's gaze.

(as always, it should be noted that patriarchal ways of constructing sex are not synonymous with the lived reality of sexuality, especially on patriarchy's margins, and analysis of partriarchy's blending of sex & power should not be taken as reflecting "kink" or BDSM--

patriarchy's construction of sex as a practice of domination, as control, contempt, disgust, authority, and desire, etc is *normative,* naturalized, and unreflective. In general, far more acts of rape look like "vanilla sex" than like bondage games. I don't want to derail too

much, and kink/BDSM and their messy relationship to patriarchy, feminism, and desire is a complicated topic that deserves its own discussion, but it's important to be clear.)

ANYWAY. back on track: it's not a coincidence that QAnoners keep getting caught with CSE.

This same infamous video is the one Josh Duggar was caught with a few years back (and for which Duggar's family has continued to insist god forgives him for.)

Whether Dom obtained it himself, or had it passed to him by someone else, the fact is: it circulates among Qanoners.

Qanon traffics in extreme, graphic narratives of "innocence violated," often accompanied by descriptions or purported images of extreme acts of destructive violence visited on children's bodies. while leftist critiques of "innocence" often focus on the impetus to "protect,"

they fail to interrogate how this construction of children as synonymous with "sexualized innocence" is not only an impetus to protect, but also to violate. Rousseau, the guy often pegged as a central figure in the "invention of childhood innocence," once bought an 11yo girl,

with the explicit intention of grooming and abusing her. (he claims in "Confessions" that he did not go through with it.) Making children so synonymous with "sexual purity/innocence" is a bit like saying "don't think about pink elephants": it invokes the potentiality of violation

as functionally the DEFINITION of "child" as a concept.

when you combine the idea of "sex as enunciation of cis male power," (i.e., as subjugating, controlling, fragmenting the bodily boundaries of the Other) + the adult/child relationship of power + the position of children as

the archetypal objects of legitimate authority, with a way of conceptualizing them that so profoundly links them to their own imagined violation, it is unmistakable how heavily eroticized and symbolically potent the *abuse* of children is in the fascist imagination.

fucking Qanon *STARTED* on 8chan, which was infamous for being packed to the gills with CSE!

when fascists talk about "groomers" and "saving the children," they are not actually talking about a principled or moral terror of violence against children.

the power of the spectator's gaze is important here (read John Berger). conspicuous display of the sexually vulnerable body conveys power on the spectator, who may possess & consume the image (& thus the body in it), for whose benefit the spectacle exists

https://twitter.com/RiotLinguist/status/1684359317330472961?s=20

QAnon's spectacle of highly sexualized boundary violation exists for the benefit of the fascist gaze; even when these spectacles are not literally visual (e.g., graphic narratives of "cannibalism" & "mutilation" & rape), they exist to be consumed. Even though the imagined acts

of violence are enacted by a demonized "Other," it is the spectator's gaze whose power to violate--to see into secret spaces & witness private suffering, to penetrate & the physical boundaries of the body (e.g., in "face-removal/adrenochrome" fantasies)--is affirmed.

FINALLY: attributing that violation to the invasive and perverse Other performs several functions. First, acts of sexual violence that are carried out under the auspices of legitimate sexual authority are only ambiguously conceptualized as "violation." On the one hand, they

patriarchy conceptualizes sex as to some degree *inherently* violating to its "Object," and that's where it gets its capacity to enact relationships of embodied power. but on the other hand, enacting that sexual authority through coercion often does not violate a legitimate,

recognized boundary, (the authority makes it permissible) and thus do not carry the same affective "taboo." The body that is most "rapable" (i.e., permissible to practice sexual authority over) is paradoxically the most "unrapable" (those practices do not constitute violations.)

so projecting the act of violence onto an Other that is heavily affectively loaded with disgust (especially in contrast with the "pure" body of the "virgin/child") produces the semiotics of corruption, contamination, etc.

Second, it allows the spectator to disavow their investment in the spectacle. Third and finally, it's the grounds for "rescue/reclamation" fantasies in which the "proper" patriarchal authority takes back what is his, his violated property, and thus reasserts his own power.

Sorry for the long thread. tl;dr--Qanon is l0lic0n.

an important element that I alluded to but forgot to explicate:

"innocence" (both legal and sexual) is ideologically confined to "whiteness." Black children, like Black women, are excluded from both legal & sexual "innocence" & marked as both "criminal" and "hypersexual"

Black people's bodies are also marked as inherently "violable," as lacking boundary integrity to begin with. Hence, Black children are treated as simultaneously "rapable" (permissible to abuse) and thus, paradoxically, "unrapable" (no act constitutes a "violation")

(legal innocence, in the sense of "innocent until proven guilty" is even further confined to white cis men, as women and children are considered inherently corruptible, suggestible, deceitful, lacking self-control, & thus liars until proven legally innocent)

@RedEviction @ExquisiteRebelN also what you just said amounts to "don't do feminist analysis of sexual power," so frankly, no. perhaps you can afford to be incurious & dismissive about structures that oppress me, but I can't.