This promo post—the fifth part of “The Medieval; or, Monsters, Magic and Myth“—belongs to a larger book sample and module called “Brace for Impact” (2024), the latter a) inspired by Harmony Corrupted and b) having been designed to promote my upcoming monster volume—aka Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series. The module divides into over thirteen posts, whose total chapters/subchapters compile a taste of the larger volume (which has three modules total, to give you an idea).
Click here to read about the entire Sex Positivity book project.
Click here to see “Brace for Impact’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
“Monsters, Magic and Myth”: ‘Heaven in a Wild Flower’; or, Exhibiting the Monstrous-Feminine Ourselves
In the past, I have stressed the Aegis as a counterterrorist weapon with revolutionary potential as a kind of “spectre of Marx”; i.e., when removed entirely from its state function, but also haunting it vengefully from the inside during all manner of inheritance anxieties; e.g., the Radiance from Hollow Knight[1] [operating] as an ancient queen, haunting the mind-like tombs of mere mortal men and eventually being banished back to Hell once hunted down and exposed by a male hunter inside his fallen master’s ruinous crypt (source).
—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume One (2024)
Picking up up from where “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” left off…
This subchapter was written and invigilated this morning—specifically the morning after a night with Harmony Corrupted, the two of us playing together but also talking shop as comrades. To that, it’s something of a postscript to the previous subchapter. “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” was a series of Marxist signposts and exhibits, first and foremost; “Heaven in a Wild Flower” focuses more on the gender studies hermeneutic; i.e., regarding the monstrous-feminine in relation to everything discussed so far vis-à-vis the broad strokes of Volumes One and Zero:
(artist: Jody Muir)
In short, there is always a war-like, rebellious aspect of the Medusa to any monster that isn’t—in part or in whole, figuratively or literally—a white, Anglo-American (“Western,” of the Global North, “Occidental,” etc) cis-het, Christian male; i.e., the monstrous-feminine as non-white, non-Western/non-Occidental, queer and non-Christian, therefore an emergent being under Cartesian hegemony and thought, thus something to commodify and harvest under its gentrifying refrains/neoliberal franchisement; e.g., female vampires or orcs, the dark figure as of color (male or female); i.e., an ink blot to project inherited colonial anxieties and confusions onto, then scapegoat and ultimately enslave and mistreat in unironic forms. Through our “girl talk” (anger and gossip), monsters and camp, the abuse becomes ironic: something to denude and appreciate as a revolutionarily cryptonymic process unto itself (whose engagement with state forces is equally fascinating to watch).
There is an intersecting gradient-of-gradients among various axes of oppression, of similarity amid difference concerning the dialectic of the alien: as something to murder and dissect through unironic sex and force according to what Lenin called the highest stage of Capitalism, Imperialism (source: Marxists.org); i.e., as appearing in between media and real life as half-real, monopolized, and cheapened to serve profit, not workers, nature and the environment. There is always a harvest under capital and it always becomes grim during the liminal hauntology of war as alien to the middle class; i.e., a wandering castle that moves without motion and appears without warning to engender mor(t)al panic and attack labor and nature as “other” during unironic us-versus-them—all to shape, maintain and serve the profit motive through hybrids of industry and dogma.
Luckily these can be challenged—an act I shall now exhibit, ipso facto:
(exhibit 34a1b1b1: [artist, top-far-left: Reiq; top-mid-left: goblinDepre; top-mid-right: Lady Red; top-far-right: e.streetcar; middle-left: Just Some Noob; center: H.R., Giger; in-center: Lera PI; middle-right: Lilian; bottom-right: Roxie Rusalka]. The monstrous-feminine is very broad and dualistic. It would be impossible to cover all aspects of it here, because there are an infinite number between overlapping/intersecting gradients. In gender-studies fashion, I’ve isolated three gradients for your consideration: biology/sexuality, gender performance, and performance-as-identity. Though I could devote a book [or series of books] to each, I will merely supply one exhibit per gradient for you to keep in mind as we progress. As we do, remember that canon both divides and essentializes nature as discrete and fused; e.g., biology is essential under capital, and sex and gender are both discrete in terms of critical analysis and dogmatically fused insofar as canon treats them like one-in-the-same and chained to human biology serving the state [the challenging of which Judith Butler calls “gender trouble”].
First, biology and sexuality [above], which illustrate through art how sex and force compel the viewer [through compelling arguments] using calculated risk; i.e., as the medieval presentation of a personified, staged dialogic to invigilate and express in a Renaissance form: monsters as things to entertain, meaning natural harmony within change as an imperiled proposition. Gothic Communism camps canon by “making it gay” in ways that account for the language of “sex” and “war” as put into quotes, thus “rape” and the warlike monsters involved as theatrical devices that subvert canonical norms on the same complicated stage: a war of words, with words, over words and other forms of expression whose mise-en-abyme is conducive to rebellion in opposition to the state; e.g., monster girls like the African princess superhero, redhead, orc girl, xenomorph, Amazon, witch, et al; but also male and intersex monstrous-feminine and people of color and Orientalism [the jinn] as coalescing to invade the home expressed on a shared stage, on and off itself [and which swaps out invaders during moral panics of a given type to focus on]. “ You are not immune to thick witches,” Roxie Rusalka says [source tweet, 2024]. The same cogent irresistibility applies to the ghost of the counterfeit as something to reverse the process of abjection with, mid-consumption [the doggy pill hidden in the doggy treat, doggystyle].
[artist, top-and-bottom-left/mid-right: My Emetophobia; top-right: Pancake Pornography; bottom right: Paladin Pleasure Sculptors]
Second, gender as performance [cosmetics]: clothes, but also material expressions of toy-like genitals with chimeric qualities—of undead and demonic elements, but also animal qualities that would, under natural conditions, be impossible. Except, they aren’t just unequal, taboo fantasies to reify by naughty agents; they’re literally artistic products that can move data [regardless of type] along a given track. Consider Volume Zero’s critical refrain, “Animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms,” and how this generally has a predator/prey mechanic to hyphenate; i.e., function determines the flow of power and information insofar as morphological expression—to craft the Medusa-in-the-flesh—is often literally plastic [silicone, vinyl, whatever]. The textualities are literally textured in ways to invite comparison between materials that, unto themselves, have their own communities and cultural values; i.e., in those communities and their various artistic-pornographic extensions exported outward. Medieval paradoxes abound, insofar as these creations aren’t harmful but appear as such during calculated risk as a revolutionary voice. Caught between pleasure and harm like Giger’s xenomorph is, but also its biomechanical medievalism, such playful gender expression very much yields a colorful, food-like quality that, while it can certainly be tasted, cannot be safely digested by humans in a literal, prandial sense; i.e., sex toys aren’t food, but food-for-thought. For genderqueer folk, it speaks to who we are ipso facto—unto itself as action made material.
[artist, top-far-left: Dirty Ero; top-mid-left: Paolo Eleuteri Serpieri; top-mid-upper-right: Caravaggio; top-far-right: Benvenuto Cellini; bottom-far-left: Femboy Kai; bottom-mid-left: Moon; bottom-middle: unknown; bottom-right: Belle Delphine]
Third, performance-as-identity: No matter how ornamental or crude, Medusa is both the classical victim and abusive reactive response to patriarchal forces. Under capital, this happens to extant feminine elements within workers and nature. Be it a pussy or a penis, then, the human body’s genitals are vulnerable sites of state force as something to give and receive upon themselves. There is generally something engorged [the Medusa’s power indicated by crop-like size (often a produce/poultry metaphor) as much as intensity or some other value]. The maiden/wallflower is the delicate little thing to dominate because she automatically submits; the Medusa, on the other hand, must be conquered through battle: Amazonomachia.
As such, performance of the Medusa is synonymous with rage, beauty and harm, insofar as “harm” may be put into quotes [or not]—i.e., as a rebellious identity whose struggle is expressed through the facial mood-board, mid-“rape”: the AMAB, AFAB or intersex cutie finding agency, mid exploitation, and to varying degrees of irony—of the historical colonizer’s power commonly expressed in phallic terms castrated by the monstrous-feminine as having vaginal and phallic energies that challenge settler-colonial horrors; i.e., witch hunts [the beheaded Medusa] and rape [the ahegao genre] as legion by virtue of pastiche remediating praxis to serve profit but also challenge it. Within canon, such prolificity remains incumbent on profit through criminogenic conditions expressed cryptomimetically for or against the state, thus profit as canonically reduced to awkward-sounding genres like “grimdark” or Metroidvania, etc. The iconoclast disrupts these categorical divisions by crossing boundaries, transgressing to fashion new ones through performance as identity under paradoxical duress: guarding our virtue through theatrical exposure and vulnerability to make a larger point. Sluts rock, the state does not—cannot tame or control us as the revolutionary Medusa [not the TERF version]. What matters is the attempt, the passion, as something that makes an impression, striking a chord to echo worker aims into the future.)
All these collage’s thumbnails have been selected at random, and from readily available sources, to make my point. They’re everywhere, their codified rape and war ensconced in myth that comments on material reality as lived and breathed through Gothic poetics, and can be used for workers or the state—the biology and sexuality as something to showcase, the clothing or flesh-as-“clothing” to depict in a variety of forms, the performance—of the ahegao Medusa saying “get fucked, nerds” to capital while refusing to submit/die under its routine wars of extermination extirpating her kind—as all connected within liminal expression. To synthesize these points, I’ll do so in one paragraph, to keep things brief:
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Nature, as something to harvest, is treated as “unsafe” around the nuclear structure unless collared and choked into fetishized commodities that cannot hide the ghost of the counterfeit, only showcase it; e.g., Jordan Peele’s 2019 Us; i.e., made tame and sold into slavery as housed in dungeon-like kennels, uniforms, and conditioned behavior matrices. The bypass—of this regular gentrification pointing towards the state devouring anything and everything around it—requires reversing the polarity of such language. In turn, Gothic language is—like all human expression—fundamentally dualistic, kayfabe and costume-/mask-like: an us-versus-them exchange of ostensible corruption and dogma becoming the data unto itself as something to subvert ipso facto, meaning by changing the context, not the code-like aesthetic; i.e., hugging the alien as monstrous feminine; e.g., the cryptonymy of the vampire as a blindfolded, cum-guzzling slut invoking the vitalistic (thus alien) aspect of nature: to humanize the harvest during a shared, seminal ordeal. The elite and their proponents will always try to pacify the rebellious nature of Gothic poetics as Medusa-esque, but maintain the shadow zone they routinely appear inside as a colonizing device. The state doubles ours and we double theirs. There is no escaping this praxial reality. Instead, we must embrace it and fight back using monstrous-feminine expression as our silver bullet, one wrought with ironic xenophilia challenging state harm/xenophobia, making their fear-fascination with the other dyspeptic to the point of dispelling the dire illusions it normally supplies.
In short, the elite don’t own our future, however they might try to suggest that. Make it your own—a pandemonium felt, seen, smelled, heard and tasted (and other senses yet to be expressed in some shape or form) by what we produce and spread out into the world at large. To break Capitalist Realism, though, we must remember Sarkeesian’s adage and critique canon as something to enjoy if we must, but not endorse its unironic (thus imperialist) treatment of sex and force. Our pedagogy of the oppressed (and its praxial doubles) must reverse this universal process of abjection (of alienation, fetishization, exploitation) through the ghost of the counterfeit, the other three of the Four Gs, the Six Rs, our iconoclastic doubles, as humanizing the harvest—to camp canon, thus the twin trees, thus synthesize praxis while confronting trauma during the calculated risk of ludo-Gothic BDSM: to reverse the flow of power and information (namely trauma), shifting form and function’s utility towards workers, not the state.
To be sure, we can individually focus on particular interpretations of the monstrous-feminine; i.e., to achieve universal liberation for all marginalized groups, but must do so as a collective united intersectionally against capital, the state, its proponents, et al, as preying on us during the state’s cycles of recovery and decay—its monopolies, trifectas and dualistic, dialectical-material opposites to our own creative successes. For every goal we have—e.g., good sex education to prevent rape, thus harm—they had a polar opposite that, even in moderate forms, ultimately concedes power to the state by not only refusing to challenge the status quo, but police anything that even remotely does to maintain the current holistic arrangement. Historical materialism denoting state shift becomes yet another thing to scapegoat, and bury and otherwise abject during oppositional praxis against workers; only profit matters, only canon (and any synonym you could associate with state defense, including tokenism) matters. Anything else must be held down and beat into submission; so we must “better the instruction” in ways that, per counterterror and asymmetrical warfare, reject the colonizer on all colonial territories and fronts.
This very much includes home soil and its commercialized venues as holy in a secular-to-religious gradient: commerce synonymous with greed, with bastardized religious symbols, as holy through a bourgeois context meant to acclimate workers, from the youngest age possible, to capital, its Protestant work ethic, and Capitalist Realism.
We must… disabuse them of this folly. By any and all means at our disposal, we must hit them where it hurts, using our mutual action’s raw labor and propaganda, but also exhibits of mutual consent uniting against state minorities, copaganda and proponents as always having the potential to police us: as monstrous-feminine behind their disguises mirroring ours (fascism is a game of inches behind obscurantism; liberation is a game of anisotropic reversal [of terror and counterterror] meant to terrify state forces into perpetual hiding). In response, some people push back; i.e., we do, shouting “This one’s for Brodie!” as we descend, witch-like, from the skies to deliver righteous (and hilarious) guerrilla violence before cackling and gliding away again. A fly-by fucking of your brains.
(exhibit 34a1b1b2: “Bye, bye, Easter Bunny!” The death of an icon, whereupon the childish defenders race to avenge their fallen hero: to dispatch our two blackguards with ruthless efficiency!
I jest, but also, I don’t. Anyone who says this scene is “just” a silly prank isn’t paying attention and/or not using their brain on purpose. Silliness aside, we must remember, here, that children will rush to defend their heroes as things to love and preserve, the ensuing melee a rush to defend a given example with whatever’s on hand. While the “beating” of our dynamic duo with harmless fluffy toys [compared to the absolute drubbing they administer to the man in the suit] is ultimately harmless. Except, children grow up and will defend their icons in a similar-but-lethal fashion; i.e., with the araments of the chronotope as something to put the likes of Jay and Silent Bob down for good—all to preverse the sanctity of the icon as something whose nostalgia must be upheld no matter the cost of human or animal life.
So don’t be afraid “to kill your darlings,” to think of the children as yours to defend from bad parents, teachers, guardians, etc—not to ensnare through a wicked scheme tied to profit, but a iconoclastic means of liberation that acclimates them to calculated risk; i.e., as a deft, playful means of handling their own trauma as something to play with [as children so often do; e.g., drawing their abusers]. Make yourself their heroes to see in themselves and defend from capital, and let nature do the rest.)
Faced with state Trojans, we must employ our own splendide mendax to kick them right in the “eggs” (of the guy in the suit, but also the ideological power of the icon he’s wearing). Anything less is settler-colonial endorsement and cannot be tolerated; i.e., actions have consequences, the blind consumption of canonical media leading to a septic bowel that will spread like a virus, killing not just the worker or the image, but the community and the environment, the state and the world. So the icon has got to go, along with the bourgeoisie behind it as poisoning the nation’s youth against all other forms of life. This includes the worker-turned-moral-crusader (for the state) as always correct-incorrect (the only “correct” thing under capital is the elite, which workers are not; they always have the capacity and potential to rebel, thus require constant policing by class traitors, which the elite cannot survive without: “Trust, but verify.”).
Thought guides violence as informed by material conditions. War isn’t just fought with guns and bullets on physical battlefields, then, but thought (pun intended) on mental ones that are just as real; i.e., inside a half-real space performed by class and culture warriors breaking state illusions by unplugging workers from the machine controlling them: Plato’s cave (the Torment Nexus) as surrounded by what slowly is becoming an inhospitable desert in a very real sense. The world is dying and the illusions of empire—its cartographic refrains and hauntological, hyperreal, infernal concentric patterns—won’t be able to hide that fact forever. No matter how it escalates conflict or seems to dial its waves of terror back, the state is the enemy. So are its cops, castles, and canon—its doves and hawks. It must be completely dismantled, which takes tremendous time, effort, and reversals during an uphill exchange (what Volume One calls “An Uphill Battle with the Sun in Your Eyes”).
Think of it as a dark ritual. The problem is, our chanting (which is often musical for various reasons) is met with bad-faith refrains—akin to them (the state and its proponents) clapping their hands over their ears and babbling[2] to avoid the reality of state shift. These often occur amid snooping inside privileged white neighborhoods threatened by dark Satanic forces; i.e., as much something to poke fun at as embody ourselves; e.g., Joe Dante’s sublime and hilarious The ‘Burbs (1989), above. Unironic forms are meant to fill the air with chaff, meant drown ours out as we say in response: “We are here and cannot be ignored. Not today or tomorrow, but eventually and not too far off, your age is over! Some say in ice, some say in fire. The choice is yours: ignominious death by your own hand, or helping us build a world better than the ones routinely made for Cartesian conquest and hegemony put to practice.”
This corporatized procedure is untenable in the long run, assuming (as Jason Moore and Raj Patel argue) infinite growth in a finite web of life. For Gothic Communism, the whole idea is to take away the state’s ability to fight through its labor force and propaganda as interconnected with each other and rebellious factions; i.e., through the Gothic imagination (and its imaginary past, present and future) as our domain as much as theirs, and whose media circuitry can be overloaded and subverted by dark Satanic forces hell-bent on doing the job right: “It’s Hunting season!” / “Applesauce, bitch!”
Said forces humanize labor and nature through the Medusa as a spectre of Marx during historical materialism (and, per Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire, Chapter I,” invoke and involve all the language/war-like fronts of sex and force intertwined by two basic sides working in fundamental opposition: workers vs the state, capital vs commune, cops vs victims, Medusa as doubled into pro-state vs pro-worker forms; i.e., of costumes and masks to wear and discard [often on top of each other—re: concentric veneers] as needed, etc). Physical violence isn’t just limited to a single area, of course (terror campaigns and hate crimes/deputized stochastic violence), but an idea can spread throughout an entire population to cripple or liberate it through paradoxical enrichment and release; i.e., through the ability to install canonical gargoyles that afflict menticidal torment onto pacified workers, versus replacing said statues with iconoclastic doubles: those that appear to function the same during liminal expression, but point-in-fact engender critical thought amid Gothic poetic expression rarefied during worker relations with each other and media.
Like any good friendship, then, it becomes something to return to—to try, try again in echoes of the original attempt; i.e., the crossdresser wearing Mother’s clothes, the latter having a warlike potential that must “wake up” during complicated thought/ontological experiments performed to summon the Medusa as something to “slay” on a comely heartthrob’s youthful flesh and blood. All occur while expressing deeper truths on the surface of things as veiled when nude and nude when veiled (re: Segewick vis-à-vis Hogle).
To that, consider Harmony and me, playing together for multiple reasons—to have fun, and to think about said fun as capable of arriving at fresh discourse. The canvas is the body as covered in clothes that exude sexual energies, but also the cum involved as broadcasting a given “slaying” of the cutie (“Fatality!”); i.e., as a formidable “adversary” (from a dialogic standpoint) in a given kayfabe “argument’s” psychosexual exchange: “scrappy” cummies and clothes, and a mommy-dom body that begs for fresh tributes, cross-continent, mouth open and expectant, waiting dutiful and demanding for another hot sticky load. Harmony wants it to splash all over her as “conquered,” but also as helping both parties find release inside a special paradox: the palliative Numinous existing between the Great Destroyer and the mother nurturer in ways that abjure heteronormative interpretations on and offstage. As such, the entire call-and-response is why we’re there. Harmony is the dark mommy dom, her bare, exposed skin—stripped of its dark, fearsome garb, all the way down to the soft dermis underneath—anticipating tribute to give her satisfaction; i.e., amid an oscillation of dominance and submission where the receiver of force holds all the cards during mutual consent: as the dominant topping from below that, all the same, submits to the physical top (me) mounting them (in spirit, given the distance between us) while wanting subby feelings, mid-roleplay.
It’s the ol’ switcheroo for both of us, and we love it.
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
We love it because it’s fun, but also because there’s a larger lesson to leave behind. Similar to the Medusa, Harmony appears when called (with me being respectful of the schedule she keeps, of course); i.e., like the fabled Great Destroyer per Gothic aesthetics, but per ludo-Gothic BDSM travels like the dreaded flying castle, landing on my doorstep and waiting to be let in; but also, like greased lightning across a likeness of one thing or another between a vast gulf of space-time: Harmony’s real body and the doll I fuck under me as indicative of our shared bond, mid-exchange; Harmony’s fat purple dildo (next page) a tell-tale likeness of their SO’s equally big cock (so-called “dildo verisimilitude” being where an owner picks a given toy to match their partner’s cock in shape and size), but also my cock as I think about stuffing Harmony’s tight little mommy cunt while thinking about their SO doing the same (my headspace is a busy one). Per Foucault, it escapes the bedroom, bringing the mountain to Muhammad in all directions. And that is a group effort between Harmony and myself; i.e., the mommy dom and the trans woman being her good little girl. I love learning and fucking but also combining the two with a like-minded cutie.
To that, Harmony is a wonderful dance partner (consider supporting her work; she’s worth every cent), helping me achieve new synthesis as our worlds collide into something special. Sex is like therapy in that you get what you put into it. Playing with Harmony is like fucking a meteor falling to earth, a mighty cake that pounds back (an equal and opposite reaction) as you give as good as you get—it’s sublime, a slice of Heaven and Hell married to discover new wisdom in their union: sex-positive expression in sex work as an ancient volatile industry made even crueler by capital. The way to change that is through our bodies and labor reclaimed by us.
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Our collective bargain’s dotted, electric current channels and harnesses the power of creation with a female slant that extends to all monstrous-feminine (which, as trans, I definitely am): the versatile, populous and rebellious womb of creation, the sex organs, of one’s sexuality and gender expression (to parody and raise trouble) as gendered organs of thought incentivized and encapsulated by pleasure as physical exertion and fluid exchange both in a given step of exchange, but also a running gag (the vampire); i.e., as often painful/asexual amid eroticized aesthetics, fetish, and kink as appreciatively ironic Gothic counterculture. To break Original Sin as part of Capitalist Realism, ludo-Gothic BDSM is precisely the delicious, maternal prison whose dark mommy doms (and their castle-like booties and other tasty fruit) set us free once tasted with an open mind.
To that, take it from me, cuties: you can’t just taste it once, but need to sample it again and again and again (“just in case”)—to revel in the minutiae of a given position. It might look familiar and done to death, but in truth is just slightly different in ways that yield endless potential! Or as Blake puts it in “Auguries of Innocence” (1803):
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour (source).
Except as Harmony illustrates during their own interactions with me, this ain’t no idle verse, homeboys; it’s the awesome means of escaping the jail by transforming it from within (and not resorting purely to lame-ass academic forms without spice to help them go down our parched throats, thirsty for cum): “We have a microphone and you don’t, SO YOU WILL LISTEN TO EVERY WORD WE HAVE TO SAY!—made with real trauma!”
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
So try and keep these wide and seemingly disparate factors in mind. We’ll conclude the first half of Volume Two (after this chapter) as being a more poetic implementation of historical-material Gothic poetics (the predication of history on socio-material conditions, of which the Gothic is the social factor infused into material forms), and consider a more historical reading of the Humanities with part two of the Volume (“more” being the operative word, here, as we won’t reduce Volume Two, part two to a purely historical device).
So steady on, girls! We’re past the antechamber and have our premise-supplied pamphlets. Onto the palace proper! Onto “Medieval Expression, part one“!
Your Commie Mommy,
—Persephone
Footnotes
[1] Or some such monarch—Jody Muir’s creation, above.
[2] “I’m not going to listen to this…” (over and over) to “Ray, you’re chanting! Unconscious chanting: ‘I want to kill everyone. Satan is good, Satan is our pal!'”