by Steve Finbow
Fragments on Flesh, Language, and the Sacred Profane in Susan Fox’s The Scatological Sons and Cocks & the Apocalypse
A punk photographer, performance-artist and writer, Susan Fox works within and beyond the transgressive, the digressive, and the congressive—detonating boundaries of flesh, form, and taboo in literature and politics. With the diaristic fury of Kathy Acker and the ecstatic somatics of Hélène Cixous, Fox wields cunt as oracle and rupture—an anti-dic(k)tion from the primal void where sex, death, and language evolve, convulve, and dissolve. Her poetic philosophy engages Julia Kristeva’s abjection and Luce Irigaray’s mimetic insurgency, invoking the body not as signifier, but as screaming text. Fox births the aesthetics of “cuntography” —a brutalist femininity inscribed in blood, masturbation, and ecstatic solitude. An earlier work—The Exorcism of Susan Fox—maps 108 myofascial releases across the pandemic-era psyche—a Kristevan catharsis, a Wittig-esque annihilation of normative anatomy. Dream diaries become procedure; the esoteric, a discourse of unbinding. Through warlike reverie, Fox writes as seer, hysteric, and bloodletting visionary—resurrecting the soul through an erotic mechanics of spiritual breakdown.
Fox writes with the meat rare. The cunt speaks spasmodically. The diary leaks ink and semen. Blood is a syntax and a solace. Breath is theory and theocracy. Death is the editor and the idiot. Her body writes her writing her body writing her. She is the rift. Acker’s ghost eats her pen—is the penis—is the Kathy (Cathy) of withering highs: “Kathy, do come. Oh, do—once more! Oh! my heart’s darling! Hear me, this time, Karen, at last!” Kristeva hisses—abject, object—and Fox replies in mucus. Wittig un-bodies her. Fox produces rupture and suture, rite and sutra. The voice—the hole—the hymnal. Him ’n’ all. She masturbates with metaphor, with simile, with smiles, with slime. She exorcises with vowels, with vortexes, with velocity. Words unhook the soul from fascia. Lockdown. Meltdown. Dream-state. Automatic oracles/orifices. Dark-minded dialogues. Art is wet. Wound is archive. Photography as stigmata. Cixous writes in milk. Fox writes in scar tissue. Fox sees. Fox howls. Fox knows. Irigaray repeats her back to herself—and she breaks apart, again: agon, agony. She does not speak. She leaks. Fox skins herself in public—mapping the shame, naming the seizure, unveiling the consecrated stink beneath polished trauma. The page screams. The scream is sacred/scared. The sacramental is scat. Everything is matter. Everything is witness. The cunt saw it first. Of course it did.
The Scatological Sons stems from the gutters of authorship and the ghosts of patriarchy—a fierce, unflinching excavation of the male psyche. Intimate and irreverent, Fox delivers a lyrical reckoning: a work of lyrical theory/fury and memoir/memeoir—part literary dissection, part anatomical haunting. This channelled text, a darkly erotic and excretory epistle to the broken gods of masculinity, bathes in Rimbaud’s shadow, the poètes maudits, guiding Fox through a visceral descent into the bowels of myth, sex, ceremony, and shame. Wading through the sacred filth of inscriptions, the grotesque becomes holy, and the male figure—so long a site of aggression and projection—is rendered tender, tragic, and absurd. What begins as a meditation on the debased becomes an imagistic anatomy of sons, lovers, poets, predators, prophets, father-ghosts, and filthy martyrs: The Man With the Gun, The Tin Man, The Soldier Boy, The Bus Driver—all evolving/devolving from The First Love. Fox charts their excretions and excesses, their need to soil the world, their inability to clean themselves of history—her-story. Through experimental prose observance, she raises the question: What might a feminist exorcism of masculinity look like? What remains of the sacred once the cock has been dethroned?
Raucous, sacred, and grotesquely beautiful, The Scatological Sons is a book of devotions for the post-apocalyptic age—part hymn, part howl, part psychoanalytic autopsy. It belongs on the altar of every artist, witch, mother, and wounded son trying to make sense of what it means to have inherited this ruin and this apocalyptic earth. It is a list, a liturgy/litany, an autopsy of masculine detritus—less a book than a psycho-linguistic exorcism, a scorched conjuring where filth is sacrament, and language is lesion. A dissection with a literary blade honed by generations of inherited trauma, it roars from the trenches of the symbolic order with a voice so raw it bypasses reason and lodges somewhere beneath the diaphragm, where grief and rage coagulate.
It is Fox’s Artaudian “theatre of cruelty” in textual form—words not to represent but to assault, possess, ignite. One finds oneself lashed with tongues and tortured with tongs. The poetic sequences stitch their way through the phallogocentric cosmos with scatological fervour and Bataillean blasphemy. Here, cock is not eroticized but mythologized—and then dismantled: ouch!—reduced to a relic, an errant god, a pustule of delusion. It is King Kong, King Dong, clown, tyrant, tormentor. The phallus ([p]ric{k}tus) as nuclear sun: giving, irradiating, and ultimately obliterating. But unlike Bataille, who found in the solar principle an ambivalent divinity, Fox’s solar tyranny is unrelenting—without pity. She writes not to reconcile eros and thanatos, but to mock them and call it feminist gospel. Each line spasms into the next—an ecstatic diagnostic. Fox’s prose does not soothe; it seethes. “Don’t be filled with God,” she warns. “Become an atheist.” And here, we feel Acker’s punk snarl under the syllables—a textual striptease with a razor in hand. Think Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović. The flesh is overwritten, violated, re-inscribed. Like Acker, Fox weaponizes pastiche and collage; her poems and prose are not linear expressions but anatomical spectres. She cross-fades ritual with pornography, elegy with epistle, satire with scripture.
Think Rimbaud’s derangement of the senses, Bataille’s eroticism of rupture, Artaud’s sickness of representation, Acker’s anti-narrative angst. And yet, The Scatological Sons refuses to collapse into homage. Instead, it becomes something more urgent and unclean—a rotting palimpsest. Fox doesn’t just “channel” influence; she claws through it, smashes it, rubs menstrual blood and lyrical bile across it until only a spectral echo remains. Through auto-schematics and ritualized grotesquerie, Fox dissolves the neat border between the symbolic and the somatic. The body is everywhere and nowhere—decaying, weeping, prolapsing.
The prose is bleak: a slapstick of limp genitalia and emotional inertia, which sits in symbiotic opposition to the unrelenting solar warfare of the poetry. The Scatological Sons incants a broader cosmological and carnal trauma. Fox’s vision is eschatological—the death of the phallic world-system and the potential emergence of the inviolable in its wake. The book is part treatise, part tone/bone poem, part vulgar scripture—where Latin is replaced by cunnilingus. It is Fox re-writing myth and memory with blood and bile, finding in revulsion a new kind of reverence. She writes like someone who has not only seen behind the veil, but has torn it down, stitched it into a makeshift dress, bled through it, burned it, then whispered liturgies into its ashes.
These two books—dramas of defilement—are sacred in their refusal to be clean. But if Acker wields cut-up as defiance, Fox smears it like shit across the walls of stylistic convention. Her rhythms stutter and lurch, like Artaud’s glossolalic rants—syllables foaming from the throat rather than the brain. There is madness in the architecture, but it is a precise, liturgical madness. Each phallus described is a relic of a failed god: inert, mewling, stupid with power. In these lines, male sexuality becomes a farce struggling to retain control—a weapon gone soft. We are in the territory of theatrical immolation—words as flame licking at inherited myth. As Martin Amis once observed: “This is why they’re called hard-ons … They’re not easy. They’re very difficult.” Fox’s post-apocalyptic epistemology excavates masculinity not just as failed ideology but as spoiled lineage. In her hands, “sons” become a caste of broken idols—poets, predators, prophets, and perverts—each dragging the entrails of their forefathers behind them. This isn’t gender critique as sterile paradigms—it is guttural, sweating, reeking. She scrawls her verses across the corpus of patriarchy like graffiti on a collapsing altar. Her feminism is neither hopeful nor reconciliatory—it is necromantic and unrepentant.
Cocks & the Apocalypse is an exercise in exorcism—through fictional fracture, cybernetic erotics, and occulted trauma. What emerges is less a book than a wound with search functionality: smeared with archived chat logs, spectral intimacies, and disintegrating avatars of masculinity rendered in fonts of necrotic sincerity. Hers is a text composed not of chapters but of quarterly psychic event-horizons. In Fox’s digital fever dream, the apocalypse is not a firestorm but a slow unzipping of the soul across bandwidth. MySpace threads open like psychic lesions; MSN chats stretch into Dantesque dialogues of the libidinal and the ludicrous. The men she engages with—paramilitary saviour, failed poet-prophet, online sad-boy mystic—aren’t characters; they are archetypes and avatars of post-industrial collapse made flesh and hyperlink. They exist both as phantoms and parasites: haunting the female subject while consuming her attention, erotic energy, and epistemic space. Imagine a castrated Derrida looking for a pun on ontology and coming up—ooh, missus!—with cuntology.
This is theory via toxic fibre-optics. The interiority Fox exposes is unguarded, alive, and volatile, as if the screen were a scrying mirror through which one views the collapse of distinction between me and message, between mess and age. What Barthes called the “death of the author” here becomes a livestreamed séance. She doesn’t romanticise alienation—she vivisects it. “These communications aren’t deep,” she writes, “they are merely thin-worn-out-skater’s-ice-ready-to-crack…” It’s prose as diagnostic—clinical, vulnerable, a she-hyena’s grunts and groans and growls.
Yet this fragility is also weaponised. Fox evokes a near-Acker approach to intimacy: shapeshifting through persona, polemic, and pornographic flourish, the body becomes a text with which to rewrite, redact, and resist. Her sensual reflections—on masturbation, desire, the psychic wear of sexual attention—reside in that Bataillean interstice where taboo is less spectacle and more schema. If Acker carved anatomical experiments into cut-up collage, Fox implants voice into glitch—orgasmic, anxious, and apostatic, a-prostatic.
The shatter here isn’t aesthetic affectation, it’s ontological necessity—Derrida under the blankets, fixated on Pornhub loops: Sasha Grey, Gina Gerson, Crystal Greenvelle. This book reads like gonzo gramma-fucking-tology. The linguistic tone roves wildly and weirdly: from diary-like vulnerability to prophetic detachment, from lyric warmth to punk scorn. Fox does not pretend to consistency. She confesses, revolts, theorises, rages. The voice is multivalent because the world it responds to is incoherent and contaminated. Against a chorus of institutional failures—academia, male authority, ideological purity—she asserts survival not through discipline, but through disruption. The refusal to cohere becomes its own epistemology—e-Pistol-mology.
There’s a specific unease threading the posthuman edges of the book: when Fox reflects on mediated relationships, one detects a hauntological frequency—Mark Fisher’s “melancholia of lost futures” flickering behind early-web intimacy, that golden era of strange metaphysical proximity. She writes not just about people, but platforms as psyches: MySpace as tantric netherworld, MSN Messenger as confessional shamanism. There’s something Lovecraftian here too—if Cthulhu were a user profile seen “last online 9 days ago” and never again.
Elsewhere, Fox’s disdain for academia produces its own avant-garde ecosystem: post-campus declamations as Barthesian “explosions of meaning.” These fragments—scathing, cruel, ecstatic—read like the reverse-speech of failed institutions. Where the university trades in the currency of the derivative, Fox counter-trades in unpublishable affect. Her rage is not stylistic excess; it’s what remains when nothing else works. She doesn’t perform credibility—she nuclearizes it.
And then come the glimmers—those uncanny shifts into maternal tenderness, spiritual reflection, or transcendent exhaustion. In one diary moment, she sees her daughter at the bus stop and realises the apocalypse isn’t incoming—it’s internal. These rare glimpses of self outside sex or systems of power feel almost transgressive in their sincerity. They’re the book’s tectonic shifts. If so much of the narrative is consumed by ruinous longing and self-exposure, these flashes are counter-liturgies: love as withdrawal, not eruption. In this sense, Cocks & the Apocalypse is best understood as an emotional topography of deterritorialisation: sex without climax, dialogue without reciprocity, agency without resolution. It is a practice of language that exposes the failure of language. It refuses closure the way the body refuses to forget.
If Fox seems reckless to some, it’s because she’s deploying the only lexicon left after coherence fails. Her text isn’t obscene—it’s feral. The real obscenity, she suggests, is the performance of sanity in a culture that rewards dissociation. She offers instead the aesthetics of the raw: not vulnerability as branding, but as defiance. This is writing in the shadow of the devouring sun. The solar anus puckers up and then smiles. The screen flickers. We log off, less cleansed than clairvoyant. These are not books to be read, they are books to be survived.
About the author:
Steve Finbow’s latest nonfiction—The Disorder Diaries: Neurology and the Arts—will be published by Iff Books in 2026.
