A Boy in Tights Is Not a Transsexual: Yet Still a Carnival of Madness Lombroso, Lunatics in Love, and the Digital Theatre of Deviance

AbstractThis paper investigates a grotesque digital romance between a “boy in tights” and a self-styled “witch-nurse” through the lenses of Cesare Lombroso’s theories on degeneracy, psychoanalytic constructions of desire, and contemporary critiques of feminized labor and atomized digital culture. The protagonists, digitally embodied through infantilized anime avatars and grayscale self-presentations, represent a contemporary pathology of loneliness, dislocation, and low-stakes deviance. This article situates their interaction within the aesthetics of post-Soviet decay, gender disintegration, and the ironic self-destruction typical of online roleplay scenes. Drawing from authors such as Foucault, Illouz, Fisher, Žižek, and Han, the paper explores how digital subjectivities in late capitalism manifest a necrotic form of intimacy — no longer structured by Eros, but by attention economies and symbolic castration.