This promo post is the epilogue/preface to Volume Two, part one, aka the Poetry Module. By extension, said announcement belongs to the promo series for said module called “Brace for Impact“ (2024). Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—“Brace for Impact” went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted and divides into over thirteen posts, whose collective chapters/subchapters compile one half of the larger total volume; i.e., Volume Two has three modules—one bigger module for part one (re: the Poetry Module), and two slightly smaller modules (the Monster Modules) for part two—for which the volume halves are roughly equal in size (subject to change).
Update, 5/4/2024: I’m starting a similar book sample series for Volume Two, part two: “Searching for Secrets“ (2024)!
Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!
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).
The Poetry Module Is Out! A Preface Written Afterwards
I’m thought and rememory! Full of trauma, appetite and rage, my spells are orgasms! My hexes reek of power that can peel paint, strip peaches of their skin—to send your toenails growing inward, you mess with me! I shapeshift and impart fatal knowledge! I am Ileana, hear me roar! I am Revana, strong and brave! I am Persephone, daughter of Melody, granddaughter of Ellen, great-granddaughter of Mildred, the teeth in the night, the Queen of the Night, Titania and Tamora, and you do not scare me!
—Persephone van der Waard, Volume Two, part one (2024)
(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)
First and foremost, the Poetry Module is out, babes! It is part one of Volume Two (with part two being the Monster Modules) and extensively features my muse and friend, Harmony Corrupted.
Second, in my usual style, I wrote the preface last and put it first (and it won’t be included in the volume PDF until after I update v1.0). As a whole, the Poetry Module concerns the poetic usage of Gothic poetics during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., nature-as-monstrous-feminine being something to humanize (for workers) during ludo-Gothic BDSM, or to harvest harmfully during the same oppositional praxis except for profit (for the state): during the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection as a historical-material loop, a Torment Nexus. I wanted to comment on that mirrored concentrism by writing an impromptu preface the morning of the Poetry Module’s debut. However, this piece also contains a thank you to Harmony Corrupted and an About the Author tidbit (regarding me) at the very end.
Preface: Inside the Hall of Mirrors (feat. Jordan Peele’s Us and Natalie Wynn)
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction (source).
—Shylock, The Merchant of Venice (1605)
Our struggle—to hug the Medusa as something to teach, to reclaim our bodies (our asses) as Aegis-like and disguise-worthy—sits inside a dangerous hall of mirrors. The state isn’t just a war machine, you see, but a war factory (of factories) whose own spinning room of kaleidoscopic reflections stretches in all directions, remediates during fractal recursion into/onto all media: a dividing of the natural-material world into linguo-material false binaries and boundaries the state’s servants can acquire, internalize from childhood, and raise then police into the future. To critique power as an illusion, you must go where its illusions—its masks, disguises and performers—collectively inhabit and interact in curious, veiled hostility. We’ll refer repeatedly to Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), but also similar media we’ve talked about before (e.g., Tolkien’s refrain, Alex Garland’s Annihilation, 2018) to explore both sides of the cryptonymic exchange (revolutionary and cryptonymic) and people I’ve written about in volumes I have yet to publish: Natalie Wynn, aka Contrapoints.
We’ll get to Wynn (a queernormative defender of the state posing as “progressive”) after we talk about Peele’s Us. But first, a note about the state before we enter the hall of mirrors! The state are master manipulators and pride themselves in various trifectas and monopolies centered around profit according to centrist dogma as sheer dumb force by those with their hands on the levels of illusion, thus power as something to fake. As such, it’s all fun and games until the white worker’s family and friends start dying. But the state can turn that right back around and pin it on “the Reds”: “‘Stalin’ did it.” It’s the same idea works with token groups as well (above), triangulating them against different elements of labor fighting for liberation from capital at home and abroad; i.e., using disguises they both share to scare and communicate back and forth during the same fracas.
This reifies in material code as “corrupted” with ghosts of the counterfeit during the abjection process. From Imperialism without systemic racism to settler-colonial forms that crystalized Cartesian rhetoric unto Capitalism as we currently know it (neoliberalism), there has always a barbarian horde to rout, a dragon to slay, a slave to lynch, a virgin to own and whore to rape, a city (of victims) to conquer while calling them “enemy,” “terrorist” or some-such nonsense. It obscures the usual function (exploitation and genocide) behind all the recycled glories, tragedies and farce that, per Marx (re: “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 1852), repeat over and over (as I argue) in wider imaginary histories; i.e., whose recurrent syndromes (mirror, compartment, virgin/whore, white knight, etc) parallel their non-fictional variants in the same half-real space’s liminal expression. Like videogames, the entirety of the exchange—its culture and materials—become something to colonize at greater and greater speeds, moving money through nature by raping nature as monstrous-feminine, and by extension, anything that isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian male.
Except, this always mirrors the struggle. In turn, this becomes a framed narrative, a story inside of a story I shall equally encapsulate by making the body of the preface an exhibit in my usual italicized, center-aligned, parenthetical format. Step inside and look around… if you dare!
(exhibit, post: “Does the line stretch onto the crack of doom?” The spectre of Zombie Caesar [the Shadow of Pygmalion] haunts the image and its cryptomimesis, a Cycle of Kings to an infernal concentric pattern that rots on its image, hiding the corpse of empire when Capitalism decays by design. Eventually, though, state shift will spiral out of their control, becoming something the entire theatre of good cop, bad cop [white knight, black knight] and their canonical castles [ACAB] cannot gentrify and commercialize anymore; it will fall apart and stay that way, the elite having dug their own grave [and ours]!
Until then, the mise-en-abyme [and its narrative of the crypt] yawns on and on, a trail of semiotic, ouroborotic wreckage that always leads to a localized and dispersed vanishing point [through Hogle’s double operation; re: “The Restless Labyrinth,” 1980] as something I encourage you to play with and reverse [to “start a thing, to put the pussy on the chainwax“]: show to reveal and vice versa as revolutionary cryptonymy needs you to—to survive and haunt our enemies until they lose the will [and bloodlust] required to rape us for the umpteenth time. The proof is in the “pudding” [the ass] as something to make war over and with. There is always another castle to storm, map to fill in, maiden to rout[e] and deflower, hag to behead, Amazon to bridle, barbarian horde to quell, treasure hoard to steal [through force] and so on. Conversely there is always a double of that same castle, Medusa, throng or damsel that is saved, converted, and restored in capitalist monomyths. But there and back again, said refrains oscillate through profit synthesizing the thesis and antithesis of capital to achieve profit through inequality, lies and death always being required: the holy unto the raped, alien, reprobate and doomed, and vice versa. Like a double helix, then, our own doubles challenge state centrism through theories at work “on the glass,” in small: revolutionary cryptonymies, emancipatory hauntologies, and Communist parallel societies [chronotopes] that reverse the process of abjection inside the mirror hall. But these, in turn, occupy the same liminal sphere, shadow zone, historical-material scroll written and writing through the spilling of dialectical-material blood. On its fractal recursions, you can see echoes of the Medusa grappling with Perseus, but also Hippolyta as subjugated [a class traitor I call “witch cop”]—of Galatea and with Pygmalion, of Capitalism with Communism’s hypermassive imprints felt on lesser ghosts pushing and pointing towards greater Numinous degrees: “Stare and tremble!”
From Coleridge and Lewis, to more recent foils, this is a cyclical dialog at war with itself on the surface and its palimpsests; i.e., as for or against the state during liminal expression; e.g., Coleridge cries like an absolute, pearl-clutching bitch at Lewis’ book: “Nor must it be forgotten that the author is a man of rank and fortune. Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble” [source: Pressbooks’ “Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s review of The Monk“] and we become the thing that he—ever the moderate playing the rebel and stabilizer for the status quo [scratch a moderate and a fascist bleeds]—fears most: a Gothic he cannot gentrify through the looking glass. Fuck Coleridge! Make him squirm like the little worm he is! By showing him his own abject, stupid reflection. That man is dead, but we can camp the ghost of him on the same surface to chagrin the jackasses sucking his memory off by imitating it in bad faith [“imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”].
Firmly with workers in this respect, I’m nothing if not consistent in my threads [weaving them not to lead you out of the labyrinth, but transform it from within by befriending the minotaur [and all monstrous-feminine] as someone I lead you straight towards], but have had different things to say as I write these books. As I’ve said before and will say again, “If you want to critique power, you must go where it is”—must do so through performance and play as a potent, paradoxical means of camp [from Volume Zero]
Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios); a polity of proletarian poets can negotiate future interrogations of unequal power within the Gothic imagination as connected to our material conditions: one shapes and maintains the other and vice versa. As such, my own contributions to the Gothic are very much about making it sexual again, but also sex-positive in ways that Radcliffe (and her own venerated castle’s praxial inertia) were not [source].
per my conceptualization of ludo-Gothic BDSM [also from Volume Zero]
My combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of fairly negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (which we’ll unpack during the “camp map” in our thesis volume) [source].
to the pedagogy of oppressed that ludo-Gothic BDSM entails [from Volume One]
As its most basic level, rape is a violation of basic human, animal and environmental rights enacted through Cartesian power abuse; this postscript concerns the complicated process that healing from rape entails— i.e., its corrupting presence through codified trauma, wherein the surviving of police abuse becomes something to relate to others through Gothic stories that constitute radical empathy as a thing forever out-of-joint: the attempt to empathize with alien experiences to gain new perspective. Such empathy needn’t concern both parties equally and its Gothic dialogs concern intense, poetic liminalities still bearing an intense potential for disguise that is haunted by the shadow of police forces. Even so, the postscript aims to showcase such a dialog and its phenomenological complexities; i.e., one held between two or more people relating through their interpretation of various texts they are either intimately familiar with or at the very least recognize the tell-tale arrangements of power and performance through traumatic markers [source].
onto Volume Two’s observations
As such, ludo-Gothic BDSM is a potent means of interrogating trauma by which to heal one’s home as sick with Capitalism. For me and my voyeurism, for instance, I love to observe the sexual gratification of others; i.e., mutually consensual voyeurism agreed between me and the people letting me watch them. I love being put in that headspace, that altered state of mind: someone else’s shoes; i.e., one where that person feels good. It feels good to occupy a role attached to a real person feeling good in ways that I want to feel, too. I think that speaks to what my book is really about. Healing through social-sexual exchanges like these, but also slipping into different roles to face difficult traumas [source].
and so on. The lot of it is just part of a grander castle-narrative in a bigger hall of mirrors—ours, staring back at you!
[artist: Asu Rocks]
“Gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss.” The state always sends its worst assassins first, including those that gentrify struggle and whitewash empire and rebellion as “already won” [the white castles are the worst, the moderate the biggest Judas]. Except something is always given up during the exchange; no matter how hard a state agent tries to conceal or divide through bald-faced lies, self-serving skullduggery and impudent displays of ostensible self-righteousness and sovereignty, they are Prospero during “The Masque of the Red Death” [1842] as much as Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” [1835]. In turn, they echo the fate and behavior of powerful historical figures; e.g., are both Abraham Lincoln the martyr and tyrant; i.e., the emperor both sitting in the opera chair taking a bullet to the back of the head by the backstabber muttering “sic semper tyrannis,” and the American executive ordering other men around him to die in wave-upon-wave as total war [and later, frontier Capitalism] always demands. Such persons purport themselves as the “real saviors of the world, the nation, the worker, the job,” etc; they profess to love but coerce through patriarchal domination and guile dressed up as “feminine,” “black,” “queer” and/or other such benevolence as a narcissistic mask for their true purpose—i.e., Goldilocks Imperialism being the literal worst because it disguises transgressions in plain sight, claims that activism is over and done with [e.g., second wave feminism] and hoarding the war chest of such equality of convenience for tokenized members of the same oppressor group, the white cis-het Christian European’s outer female margins infringing on marginalized groups further divorced from the standard to tokenize as well—to normalize them as mimicking their colonizers [re: Fanon].
We’ll examine this much more in Volume Three. For now, just remember that “white people disease” extends to “white woman disease” to “white black people disease”: a disguise the state approaches its enemies [us] with in bad faith. We need to recognize that and move past the tired hollow victories of Radcliffe, Dacre, and Brontë, as well as the incremental and imperfect observations of Carter and Creed, while also observing Rowling and other such TERFs exist among a polity that is, at all times, already infiltrated/TERF-adjacent [thus fascist]. They mirror us and we respond through disguises that, through human language as dualistic, operates mid-opposition in ways they will try to treat as yet another thing to gentrify.
So we must always remember that and bear in mind; i.e., that while Capitalism sexualizes, fetishizes and alienates everything, there is still a direction that violence and power always flow towards: nature as terrorist, the state as good. We will always be alien in their eyes, and they will always be alien in ours. Except nature isn’t white, female and feminist; it’s monstrous-feminine, Indigenous, non-white, and non-Christian [often Pagan], first and foremost. Privileged groups that join serve as members of groups with intersecting privilige and oppression, whereupon they have more influence in middle-class circles, but also more potential as the middle class historically does; i.e., to harm as having been achieved time and time again inside unironic veins of the Gothic mode: the process of abjection to shackle, rape and behead their own kind as yet-another-Judas wearing concentric veneers. Often, they dress similar to historical figures they impersonate to silence rebellion in bad faith; e.g., MLK as evoked by Black Lives Matter once it became infiltrated and gentrified according to the same old false rebels [fascists] serving the same old-moneyed interests [re: Parenti] through masks on top of masks [me]: “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” Even this is a paradox, the mirror full of motion and likenesses we must differentiate or die.
Such lying dickwads give cunts like us [avatars of a rebellious Medusa] a bad name. We’re not “sick,” “not imagining things”; they’re full of shit but resemble us and we them. It gets messy but can be navigated with the right degree of skill and invention. Per us, you might call it “poetry in motion,” a masked ball of class warriors versus class traitors using the same old masks’ aesthetics of power and death [of red and black, of rebellion and enslavement] given new context and meaning as something to disguise both our motives. Like Bruce Lee in the Mirror Room, we shall weaponize it to upstage such impostors: “An enemy has only images behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you break the enemy.”
So thanks to capital’s endless influence over the trees and fruit of the proverbial orchard, we have to quality control for such bad apples presenting as wholesome. To that, I carry on with my muses and friends as rebellious sex workers should—united in a playful, counterterrorist reversal: ergodic motion, mid-castle-narrative, inside the text as going outward in all directions/on all registers; i.e., of challenging the usual ordering of violence and language [the state’s binary of terror vs counterterror] through our upside-down castle-narrative’s alternate histories remediating praxis as collectively [and on the surface of/through thresholds] threatening liberation by realizing how mendacious, menticidal and downright cruel the state’s “empowering” fantasies are; e.g., Red-Scare-in-disguise, fascism-in-disguise. Through play, we learn to see their monopolies, trifectas, and agents for what they are, no matter the disguise type [or number] they have on, their own stink of alienation and Man-Box cruelty always betraying them; i.e., once our Aegis gl[ass] reliably unmasks them as cruel fraudsters, hopeless dorks, weird canonical nerds thirsting for Medusa as something to conquer throughout space-time. In turn, they’ll appeal to your ego as a pick-up scheme [which Karl Jobst once did more openly] to sell capitalistic dogma to you; e.g., “Hello, you absolute legends!”; i.e., in their own image as the half-real portrait of empire, of American Gothic, of assimilation and tokenization made nepotistic, polite, a bad joke [re: Jobst calling his son “Maximus Wong” as being an insult to both his own kid, but also an entire polity of disparate groups routinely colonized by the West: garden-variety Orientalism]. Combined, their dismal, hazardous effects are serious and widespread, but also hung like a fatal, serialized portrait on the castle walls [source: Doris Jobst]: the nuclear family haunted by the ghost of “Rome’s” genocides—by us!
The state always responds to worker demands with violence and lies. For every action, then, there is an equal-and-opposite reaction reclaiming the same aesthetics of power and death during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., they will literally kill ten of us and we figuratively one of them, but in the end, they will tire first during the optics’ tug-o’-war [the top generally does, especially when topped by the bottom]. We will break them of these old, savage and sinister habits by showing them that our asses belong to us, meaning “human, unafraid, ready to fight back until the end of time”: our “crack of doom,” the Medusa a likeness of itself whose “fat-bottomed girls [and boys, enbies, etc] make the rockin’ world go ’round!” So many asses, big and small, drawn and photographed, during artistic nudism [asexual expression] and sexual relations being a complex, negotiated illustration of mutual consent in opposition to the state; i.e., against the usual slavers of worker asses, said asses fucking back against the bourgeoisie aping them. Making art with ourselves/among ourselves, we take the booty back in all its forms: on what Segewick calls “the imagery of the surface”—on the glass or miniature as a photograph or illustration, but also a conversation, a livestream that isn’t strictly parasocial: “When you gaze into the booty, the booty gazes into you” as potentially pro-worker or pro-state.
As such, the ass is a class-war symbol of Medusa that, unto itself remains ambiguous, hence must be invigilated by context as something to glean on itself. As per my usual style, I can explain such consent after the fact as sex-positive: made by a variety of friends taking back our asses, but also the surfaces they appear on; i.e., to war against the state through reclaimed disguises, markers of trauma, of flesh and the power it holds. The only way to survive is to hold onto each other’s asses for dear life, lest the fascist pigs rip us away one by one for “reeducation” purposes. That can snowball, so we must become not just like stained glass windows, concentrically framed, but rabid widows to an indomitable church; i.e., “hydrophobic” to fascists like water off a duck’s ass [“slippery when wet,” as Bon Jovi put it]:
“Baby got back.” And not just me invigilating the booty as xenomorphic/xenophilic—but rather all of the booties announcing ironically as one against the state: enriched and masterful, emblematic of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness; i.e., raising Hell as our pandemonium to maliciously erect such monuments, thumbing capital in the myopic/panoptic eye [of conquest] with our own pink and brown eyes’ paradoxical surveillance. We haunt the wider cathedral in cathedral-esque bodies that contribute to a parallel chain of eye-like structures: a monstrous-feminine gaze with uncanny “eyes” freezing you, but also feeding on you, teaching you, as the undead do: back and forth, through more than one colon [that was a pun, haha]. Such fertilization and dissemination starts with our bodies, our gender identities/performances as trouble to make by camping canon using what we got: “We master their asses and ocular ass games by taking our asses [and their awesome perceptive power] back!” This inverted, reflexively performative concept of “Rectus Dominus” [as Trey Parker and Matt Stone put it] oscillates between parody and pastiche, canon and camp as increasingly blind or perceptive on the same sliding gradient’s glass-like surface. But it becomes a hollow joke we can don like a disguise in the mirror hall, thus make perceptive based on things brought to our attention by people who cannot police our use of it, after the fact. We hide like chameleons using “their” camouflage!
For example, Jadis once introduced me to Sora The Troll, whose video “When Japanese Voice Actor Pronounces ‘The Earth’” [2022] sums up our own revolutionary sentiment well; i.e., through the informed camping of Japanese “true camp” [re: Sontag’s “seriousness that fails”] of American kayfabe gone wondrously wrong [subtitles, theirs; context: a Japanese man playing a Japanese executive telling a Japanese person (also him) who doesn’t speak English that they sound like they speak English, then making them play an English-speaking person despite the “actor” at first trying to insist they don’t speak English, then going with it and doing his best to read the English script neither one of them knows how to accurately pronounce]: “Ass braster! … Yuu aare… mai enemy!!! I wiru… kiru yuu!! Wizu arru my powah!!! Ass is whera I berongu to. I won’t gibu yuu ze ass!”
The spectre of racism is there [so much so that it feels wrong to cite it, let alone read it aloud, badly imitating a bad imitation of a bad imitation]. But more to the point, it can become a post-colonial joke utilized by different groups to encourage speculative richness as something to reference and perform time and time again in spite of past abusers acting like they own everything they give to us, including our own inspiration and thoughts. There is no spoon, Jadis—no Dana, only Zeuhl! We must make the capitalist vampire afraid of their invisible reflection; i.e., the glass they haunt through their dutiful, more-visible servants, but also the eye-like bodies [asses or otherwise] they treat as equally mirror-like. Just as Harmony haunts the Poetry Module as my cathedral-in-a-cathedral, so does Bay, Crow and all my muses and friends. We get in their head through their eyes, living there rent-free as Imperialism comes home to empire, to discourse, to monsters in daily life; i.e., as things to embody in mirror-like ways that destroy the image of the enemy! We break them by exposing them inside a haunted hall of mirrors.)
Leaving the proverbial mirror hall (for now), you might feel like it follows you wherever you go. Keeping that in mind, I want to invite you to consider Shylock’s soliloquy from Peele’s perspective; i.e., consider “Hath not a Jew eyes?” relative to an imaginary double of the American world that someone like Shylock (an outcast) would call home, except it equally applies to an assimilation fantasy that is haunted by those who cannot escape the reality of American life as two-fold and out of joint; i.e., divided in multiple respects that Peele lovingly throws into hellish relief: a settler-colony run by white folk, and one where most of the underclass are relegated to the shadow world Red inhabits, one she describes to her above-ground double, “Adelaide Wilson” to remind her that none of them are really “free”: an escaped slave is still tethered, on some level, to a freed/escaped one. Their shadows standing on the Wilson’s lawn like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys (the former having had his own shadow duel in front of Wendy) is a clever inversion of the KKK reprisals of the Civil Rights Movement. Red and her own family “burn a cross” by simply existing—i.e., as a guilty reminder of middle-class black people crossing the white banker’s redlining to uphold the ghetto. Despite seemingly having escaped, the token cops remain chained to the colony they now police ipso facto: by acting white at all times in response! It’s a threat mechanism enacted in both directions through instilled division as a dogmatic show of force to behold and take into a revolutionary Aegis (re: the Darkening).
Once upon a time there was a girl and a shadow. They were connected…tethered together. When the girl ate, her food was given to her… warm and tasty. But when they shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit… raw and bloody. On Christmas, the girl received wonderful toys…soft and cushy. When the shadow’s toys was so sharp and gold (or cold) [that] it sliced through her fingers when she tried to play with them. The girl met a handsome prince and fell in love. But the shadow at that same time met Abraham. It didn’t matter if she loved him or not, he was a tethered to the girl’s prince after all. Then the girl had her first child—a beautiful baby girl But the shadow…she gave birth to a little monster. Umbrae, was born laughing. The girl had her second child—a boy this time. They had to cut her open and take him from her belly. The shadow had to do it all… by herself She named him Pluto. He was born to the fire. So you see the shadow hated the girl so much for so long. Until one day the shadow realized she was being tested by God! [from their “first” meeting].
In turn, anyone still “in the cave” (and faced with such shadowy, mirror-like confrontations as alien to Plato’s cave) will see the reflection as, like all mirrors, an unequal one; i.e., an oculus that shows the light side the dark and vice versa. Those in “Heaven” (a lie) look to Hell (also a lie) for answers—for social relief, generally—and Hell look to Heaven for material relief. Per the liar’s paradox, they are true and false at the same time; for our purposes (Communist development), they must marry to end the confusion, making such pro-state and pro-worker abjections and counterfeits eventually disappear—in short, to develop Communism as a Gothic poiesis, my dears. Except, those “who made” it will classically tokenize in ways that extend to any assimilated group as allergic to the idea, save as a narcissistic strawman they can use to deny the truth of class and culture warfare to the masses: dogma.
For example, Natalie Wynn aka Contrapoints’ “Envy” (2022) describes Peele’s nightmare as class envy to uphold the status quo, ignoring the reason why such a warring shadow dialog exists to begin with—not for someone like Nietzsche[1] making an unironic case for resentissment as helping to the elite; i.e., Wynn—a white, gentrified trans woman—projecting onto the Wilson family seeking revenge by proxy on their white straight neighbors. It’s “turtles all the way down,” the diegetic and metatextual pairs working a la Robert Reveille, except the class and race character are of an assimilated fantasy that both doesn’t fit in and punches down at members of their own kind who appear where they aren’t welcome.
For Wynn, the unwelcome group are enbies and their dialogs bothering the bougie bitch (Essence of Thoughts “Let’s Discuss ContraPoints’ Open Worship of Domestic Abuser, Buck Angel,” 2021). For the Wilsons, their gatekeeping also works for the middle class; i.e., by adopting a white, gentrified position between the elite and those they dominate and control: black skin, white masks. Back and forth, this is likewise felt on Wynn as a reflection/projection of class-dormant sentiments gleaned through her interpretation of the other group in Peele’s story—i.e., the hermeneutics of a given performance as speaking about other texts that, combined, make a meta statement. They’re both class traitors, but appear as rebels, as people who should know better. Such collisions challenge whatever copy that results—a fact felt as much in-text as ostensibly outside of itself (there is no outside of the text, but I digress); e.g., the true Adelaide—the one with humanity actually being Red, with the ravaged vocal chords—and the one that appears normal is the imposter having thrown her double under the bus to steal a tokenized family that wasn’t hers! She did it as a little girl, and later as an adult defending what’s “hers.”
Except shadows are inkblots that don’t yield singular interpretations. Dogma tries to force those; iconoclasm acknowledges revolutionary forms of cryptonymy amid complicit ones that a) exist on a gradient, and b) provide people like Wynn “gobstopper masks” (our aforementioned “concentric veneers”) to lure you with theatrical sweetness. We must expose it not just as a “caramel onion,” but a glass one to double and play with when beheading Baroness Von Bon Bon as queen of Candyland (1949): a sugary bad imitation of Monopoly becoming unironic in Wynn’s case. It’s bad drag! Bad(-faith) acting! Bad education. We have to challenge that “in kind”: as de facto sex-positive educators standing in intersectional solidarity as a function of power reversed towards workers, ipso facto. No gods or masters under Communism; no queens of a neoliberal, queer-boss, NERF[2] sort (we’ll unpack this all in Volume Three, I promise):
This duality and conflict amid fourth dimensional doubles (the chronotope as a meta castle to wander through), yields confusion across the mise-en-abyme at any part of it, about any part of it. As such, it could just as easily be argued that the inverse is also true—that Red and Adelaide are less discrete halves and more two sides of the same coin that, per a mirror, jump between subject and reflect during class war as a failed “mirror test” (re: Lacan): the inability to tell friend from foe in relation to one’s position as tested by factors that complicate through the existence of doubles; i.e., anything that invites troubling comparison amid agitated confusion that endures after the mirror is broken or seemingly put away/exited. As such, the presence of rebellion is complicated by religious indoctrination and class envy (a middle-class strawman) that muddies the waters during the mirror operation as a double operation doubled (on and on).
It gets messy and understandably confusing amid all the masks, costumes, and mirrors, et al. It also “tethers” (as Peele calls it) in ways that link us not just to one form of abject baggage, but palimpsests that fade and return; e.g., the Skeksis and the Mystics speaking to a divided whole whose dreadful synthesis is seen as literally Jim Henson’s version of the end of the world, his take on Capitalist Realism during the early ’80s that would survive him and briefly revive in 2019 (the show being Netflix’s queer puppetry one-off, camping the monomyth through Rainbow Capitalism as something to briefly free, then gag its good-faith jesters with):
(exhibit 33b2a1b2a: The fascist returns from death confident the hunt will never end; he speaks to a crowd of fearful onlookers, the strongman forcefully blinding the one among them who will protest/challenge his fearful dogma. And elsewhere, someone across space-time upstages him through scandal as something to see through shared eyes: “Now we will see what lies at the dream’s end.” In an act of ritualistic suicide, the Archer looses his Black Arrow against the dragon, piercing his “heart” through his eye to bypass any and all armors to show him his fate: the rapidly approaching Earth coming up to swallow him!
In that seminal moment, the divisions are made whole, transforming back into the androgynous steward of nature: the three-eyed Fate, the Medusa—Augra! Her eyes are no longer blinded by the false gifts of the splendid Skeksis, and she returns from a long holiday to have survived their draining of her powers to a) surpass them, and b) stand among the rebellious throng!
The idea, here, is cryptonymy regarding the trauma of capital being plain for all to see, mid-performance—its puppet-like divisions being merged in a double operation that pushes away from “the hunt” [profit] and towards unity and post-scarcity. This is ocular, mirrored, a mask or costume or some-such simulacrum to theatrically externalize and suggest through shadows of Communism; i.e., developing in spite of Capitalism forcing itself onto the spectre to quell it—to rape and kill Medusa time and time again!)
Such a splintered, symbiotic refrain probably seems absurd, insofar as people are not quite so tightly connected as Jeremy Irons playing twins in Dead Ringers (1988): to see one side of oneself dead is to die of fright. But (and I’m speaking as a) a critic and avid consumer of The Dark Crystal whose older work [e.g., “The Dark Crystal: AoR – Sexuality, Women, and Queer Identity,” 2019] has clearly evolved, and b) an identical twin with a straight double), there is an element of truth to such fantasy insofar as workers are conditioned to abject other members of their own class; i.e., amid racial, gendered, and/or religious intersecting tensions, etc, that lead to feelings of self-destruction, mid-apocalypse (the word meaning “to uncover”). As Deborah Christie writes, in “A Dead New World” (2011), this is the intended and unintended consequence of Cartesian dualism—a feeling of alienation relative to the other that, per the process of abjection, must hug Medusa as a zombie made partially putrid from capitalist abuse: fear and dogma taken into the flesh, the mind, the soul as something that stares back (re, Marx: “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”).
This idea is not without its police agents; i.e., not just Adelaide or Natalie Wynn, but others I have written about who take Shylock’s soliloquy as an unironic, unnuanced instrument of blunt force—an eye for an eye (from Volume One):
the elite want us to forget how all deities reside in our breast, that we are the devils of the world and the Gothic imagination is our workshop. The world, then, can become one where non-privatized dreams and nightmares come true— that have the collective power to liberate sex workers from bourgeois tyranny and avoid the repeating of older historical materialisms currently unfolding during Capitalist Realism as it presently exists: weird canonical nerds like Autumn, who maintain these structures as they currently function—scaring people through Hell as a monopolized threat of state violence, not creative empowerment. We can all be kings, queens and intersex/non-binary monarchs under a New Order where vertical power arrangements become an awful legend of the tyrannical past; i.e., on par with Richard Matheson’s Commie Zombie-Vampires finally(?) laying Cartesian dualism to rest in I am Legend, 1954 (according to Debora Christie, anyways; source: “A Dead New World: Richard Matheson and the Modern Zombie,” 2011).
In short, the idea isn’t “just” a duel with the sun in our eyes, turning us into warring shadows; it is like a virus insofar as it becomes a madness that isn’t restricted to one person or location, but a folie-a-deux and chez folie that can haunt those why try to assimilate with the reality that they will never be free from these haunting sensations unless Capitalism (the ultimate mirror) is broken and passed through into Communism. We gotta slug it out amongst that myopia and mise-en-abyme.
The problem (and one not aided by sell-outs like Wynn playing a queernormative Marie Antoinette) is that the existence of the zombie is seen as a threat to the status quo in all the usual ways; i.e., black and red seen as a vengeful devourer escaped from the slave camps that doubles as a government conspiracy to “clone” its own population to make them paranoid/complicit (an act of bourgeois zombification I call “lobotomy”). The paranoia is real; the cloning aspect is a metaphor that describes us-versus-them by virtue of the zombie paradigm: the giving and receiving of state violence being as much on the mind, a priori, as it in or on the body ipso facto/post hoc.
Think of it this way. Zombies aren’t “real”; their state of mind and dialectical-material tension is half-real. In turn, the Hands Across America initiative from Peele’s movie becomes a cruel joke in practice, but also a mirror speaking to how zombies are people who eat each in service to the elite or workers. Peele is critiquing a real event in a double that Wynn doubles through praxis as hermeneutic and performative, staged. This was a real event that happened, and which Peele and Wynn have written about in response to older forms. Wynn is playing the critic by misconstrues Peele’s arguments as someone with her own trauma and training (despite being the elite’s flying monkey “witch cop,” it would be a mistake to underestimate Wynn, if only because people see her as the queer Wizard of Oz, at this point). “We don’t have anything here; this is our summer home,” Mr. Wilson stammers. Like the Wilsons and their doubles, then, Wynn and Peele clearly have different ideas about what “nothing” is, but exist in a meta dialog (a concentric mirror hall inside-outside a mirror hall, relying class character and fascist sentiment); i.e., one that I can talk about regarding other people who have also talked about Peele’s work as an imaginary historical commentary on actual events.
(exhibit 33b2a1b2b: Such commentaries dip in and out of fiction as half-real, and Wynn and I aren’t the only ones who took notice and participated; i.e., with Peele in a larger dialog about the Gothic’s ongoing dialogic of the alien that Us put to praxis. As Tyler Coates writes,
While Red doesn’t explicitly reference Hands Across America in her third-act monologue, it’s clear that imagery from the event made a big impression on her in 1986 (which makes me think, at least, that the 1986 scenes take place after Memorial Day weekend—meaning that Adelaide/Red definitely saw and/or participated in Hands Across America). Red admits that her plan to bring the Tethered to the surface included a big symbolic act, which is how Us ends: with a long, haunting image of thousands of red-outfitted members of the Tethered holding hands across a mountain range. It brings new symbolism to Hands Across America, an event originally intended to raise awareness about homelessness and hunger across the world; in the final shot of Us, Jordan Peele reframes the awareness campaign to show that Americans often turn a blind eye to the social ills that exists—quite literally—just below our country’s surface [source: “Why Hands Across America Is So Vital to Jordan Peele’s Us,” 2019].
The same idea applies to all false acts of solidarity delivered by gentrified organizers [white or not] leeching off marginalized groups. Such likenesses don’t change how they factually materialize in reality as “half-real”; i.e., between fictional meta commentaries about them and meta commentaries about those meta commentaries, on and on. The common thread is, “beware of false friends during class and culture war as having multiple goals.” The people-in-question might even believe what they are doing is right, but intent matters not; function does, and function determines function: form follows function insofar as flow is anisotropic—i.e., power flows towards workers or the state, mid-performance.
Keeping that in mind, we can observe all of these rememories and redoublings in any part of the Russian-doll-like hall of mirrors to isolate and expose the capitalist divider as, commonly enough, a token agent defending the Judas-style “privilege” of the middle class: to be a token cop, a witch cop. Wynn demonstrates this with aplomb—a fact I take great pleasure in ironically beheading our false Medusa to harvest her useful elements towards liberation. Oddly enough, this includes her lies and confused ontology as object lessons we can learn to recognize and avoid in the future during our own cryptonymy. She’s a sex demon, alright—one serving capital as their useful idiot. It’s paradox, given her academic background as something I can challenge readily and gladly with my own: “Bitch, the proof is in the pudding. You spent you education, post-graduation, making fans to leech off of and spout harmful dogma amid useful lessons. You punched up at Rowling and down at enbies.
From one failed trans-woman academic of a similar age and demographic, then, but one who surpassed you as a real rebel: “bitch, you suck.” I could go on, but we’ll have to put a pin in that for later. To quote Ashley Williams, “I’ll get back to you!”)
The mirror can break and still function, or seem broken by showing us things we cannot normally see. For Adelaide and Red, it becomes something to punch in both directions (as Wynn does), but also something indicative of the Jewish Revenge as having extended to a racialized settler-colonial paradigm, post-Enlightenment (what academics would call a “postmodern” condition):
How it must have been to grow up with the sky. To feel the sun, the wind, the trees. But your people took it for granted We’re human too, you know Eyes; Feet; Hands; Blood…Exactly like you. And yet, it was humans… that built this place. I believe they figured out how to make a copy of the body, but not the soul. The soul remains one shared by two. They created a tether so they can use them to control the ones up above…like puppets. But they failed and they abandoned the tethered. For generation, the tethered continued without direction. They all went mad down here And then there was us. You remember…. We were born special God brought us together that night. I never stopped thinking about you…how things could have been…how you could’ve taken me with you. Years after we met…the miracle happened. That’s when I saw God and he showed me my path. You felt it too. The end of our dance, the tethered saw that I was different…that I would deliver them from this misery. I’ve found my faith and I began to prepare. It took years to plan. Everything had to be perfect I didn’t just need to kill you, I needed to make a statement that the whole world will see. It’s our time now…Our time up there. And to think, if it weren’t for you…I never would’ve danced at all [from their “final” duel].
(exhibit 33b2a1b2c: Note the various confused phenomenologies at work, here—at play! The white-wearing Adelaide sneaks up on the escaped slave [simply “Red,” in a prison-like outfit] to backstab her, but the other is waiting—has been waiting all her life [and all her yesterdays] for something that, like Borges’ “Circular Ruin” or “Garden of the Forking Paths” [the Argentinian author loved labyrinths and mirrors], speaks to the cyclical nature of history circling in on itself; i.e., as something to view like a mirror on its own materials serving as a gargoyle-like extension of ourselves divided by Cartesian thought: “Why can I not see myself in your eyes!”
Red has been waiting and, like the vampire with her concealed weapon, she wounds the “other” woman who appears normal and defending herself as actually defending capital. And Red, like Omadon the Red Wizard, infests the spirit of the class traitor to destroy herself and take her place: the Communist spy infiltrating through the duel as something to watch; i.e., the psychomachy, the Amazonomachy. Something is always given and exchanged. Adelaide’s white clothes turn red from loss of blood, injected with the essence of Red through the fang-like scissors [Shylock: “Thou called’est me a dog before thou had a cause / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs”]. She turns black in the shadows as Red also does, while the shadows of the dead look on from the space where they exist and do not exist [note the jump cuts that express this].
The two are scuffling when, somewhere in the tussle, they swap clothes but also identities in ways that “pass” post-duel as fatal to the copied party and the copycat: “Typically the subject being copied is terminated.” This particular “Merchant of Venice” is a parasitoid, a wasp eating the caterpillar while mimicking it. The trick, here, is Adelaide is “dead” by virtue of waking up something inside of herself as much as it being anything truly separate/external. She becomes a corpse that doesn’t know it is dead, an impregnated spirit of the dead—their unknowing vessel eaten from within of all Adelaide’s submissive elements. Whether or not this is the case doesn’t matter, either. All we can say for certain is that Medusa lives on inside the mirror of the person driving the family into a post-apocalyptic world.
Such a brutal “insect politics” [note the barb like “ovipositor” confusing who has who on the hip, above] goes both ways, of course. Just as Adelaide and Red duel and confuse during class war as gleaned from older clashes in similar liminal spaces, Natalie Wynn and I do. Except I know much more about liminal spaces and liminal performance [re: Metroidvania and ludo-Gothic BDSM] than Wynn does. Even so, I seriously doubt she is aware of me, and I very much don’t resemble her to the same degree as Peele’s doppelganger does Adelaide. To that, Peele is commenting on the historical-material confusions that do arise during class war of a racialized neoliberal character. I, on the other hand, am already “dead” like Matteson’s Commie Zombie-Vampires. I don’t pretend to be something I’m not; Wynn is “legend,” in that respect: the fabled “Merchant of Venice” something to assimilate and imitate capital while playing the rebel. Sometimes, her mask slips; others, its “slippage” is literally her costume: someone “from management” clearly got to Wynn along the way, souring her rebellious façade into a joke of itself.
By flaunting her wealth and playing the victim, Wynn is blurring the line between herself and her character as part of her brand: Natalie Wynn, Marie Antoinette, Contrapoints. She’s having her cake and eating it, too—is pinkwashing class war to claim herself the token trans victim; i.e., speaking about her own class betrayal through Peele’s story as something to weaponize against impolite rebels [you know, us actual Communists and not whatever the fuck she’s calling herself these days]. She thinks she’s the Merchant of Venice—the Portia to castrate men, mid-exchange. Bitch, please—your victory is antiquated and overshadowed by my trans rebellion actually having teeth for capital as the ones to bite.
In true rebel fashion, I don’t need fancy equipment to upstage you, charlatan—just puppets, cut-outs, my body and my words. With them, I eclipse your joke of a “liberation” to expose your enbyphobia [more on this in Volume Three, part two] and token aspirations. You’re still in chains, Wynn; I escape mine by reclaiming them, making them sex-positive through ludo-Gothic BDSM as good scholarship and praxis [unlike you, I actually wrote my PhD, by the way].)
Be it Adelaide and Red or Wynn and I, the conclusions of these unsatisfying face offs (a face-like mask behind the mask) speaks to the continued uncertainty that such a duel entertains, post hoc. Are those in black and red fascist or Communist (the usual shadow-zone conflations that capital and its proponents [Contrapoints] excel at)? Wouldn’t you know it, Wynn, I’ve written about that, too (from Volume Zero):
Our revenge, as a simulacrum, only resembles that of those who wrong us and counterfeit our campy legends for their canonical gain (Tolkien’s refrain); our aesthetic is shared but our function is altogether different: class consciousness as uncontrollable opposition relayed in terrifying medieval language that is thoroughly more wise through hindsight; i.e., not just according to Robert Asprey’s paradox of terror (which we’ll consider in relation to state forces decrying labor as terrorists) but the hauntological paradox of “the Wisdom of the Ancients,” whereupon old forms of monstrous expression have been updated for the modern world and its challenges to accommodate our needs as workers being exploited by Capitalism and its propaganda. That is our revenge—slowly camping the canon, thus the Superstructure, and reclaiming the Base through our monstrous, ghostly theatre as something that once turned on, can never be shut down or destroyed; it can only be repressed in forms that always come back because the elite cannot kill all its workers (not on purpose, anyways).
Shadow theatre and its mythic structure are nothing new. It dates back to Plato’s infamous allegory of the cave and its mimesis as paradoxically haunted by the shadows of class struggle (the spectres of Marx, which in theory did not technically exist when Plato was alive, and yet whose struggles for emancipation include these older slaves that Marx alluded to in “The Eighteenth Brumaire”). Camus may have noted in The Myth of Sisyphus that canonical shadow theatre repeats to an absurd degree; i.e., Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill as punishment by the gods. To escape it, we can’t just smile at the gods like he proposed, but steal “their” fire on our own Promethean Quest! This means camping the canon, which requires repeated forays into Hell and putting the wrong things right at the source: our “darkness visible” and gods as stolen out from inside our breasts and put on the cave wall of Plato’s cave! Tolkien’s refrain/gentrification of war through High Fantasy is darkly echoed in stories just like The Flight of Dragons (which is especially treacherous because it argues moderately—i.e., as the voice of reason from a position of perceived disadvantage). We purposefully must camp the canonical nebula by camping the map as a source of class education through dialectical-material play (which we’ll elaborate on during the thesis statement and “camp map”): oppositional praxis as playing on in shadowy forms dancing on the same cave wall, our darkness deliberate fencing back and forth with the state’s blind canonical doubles like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood dueling Basil Rathbone’s Guy of Gisbourne: (source).
Beyond yourself and I, this shadow duel applies to all kayfabe as dualistic; i.e., a doubled cryptonymy for workers dueling the state with shadow-like mirrors, masks and costumes as praxially synonymous and antagonistic on multiple registers. To be honest, I liked Wynn when Zeuhl first introduced me to them; I disliked them once Essence of Thought exposed Wynn’s enbyphobia; Zeuhl, an enby, tried to apologize for it and eventually stopped being my friend (“Red Bun,” indeed!); I went onto to speak truth to power anyways, undeterred by the cowardice of either—doing so in ways that remain, high in my counterfeit of Merlin’s Tower, me as the “Lady of Shallot—entirely unconcerned with making powerful enemies (“You have you sword, I have my tricks!”). As class warriors, we already have powerful enemies—the bourgeoisie. Exposing them—the vampire hiding invisible on the glass—starts with denuding their visible-yet-masked, lesser slaves recruited from our populace. To that, I don’t “owe” Wynn or Zeuhl shit. Get fucked, traitors! We have to threaten them like this to some extent, because they will see us as body snatchers devoid of irony themselves: “Where you gonna go, where you gonna hide? Because there’s no one like you left!” Okay! If that’s how you wanna play it, let’s dance, bitches! I’ve danced on this stage, before, and you don’t frighten me (I work fast, Zeuhl once remarked, but last long in bed; i.e., as a danger disco they ultimately bowed out from. Their loss)!
In other words, we can’t just prolong the duel, Star-Wars-style, but have to be less veiled than Peele (echoing Milton a bit) and less bad-faith than Wynn in our own redoubling: Oh, Wynn, “Much to learn you still have!” You’re Morgana crudely playing with things you don’t understand (I’m being generous in that assertion), the real Medusa (not Merlin) returning to show you what’s what. Me. Didn’t I already kick your ass? Sell-out bitch, poser! I’ll eat you like a cupcake (going “om nom nom” on “Baroness Von Bon Bon”) and fertilize my own book with what’s left! Anyways, “your spells don’t scare me; I have some incantations of my own!” / “Behold, the power of [my] Darkening!” Cryptonymy is a double operation with an anisotropic function, mid-duality. There will always be likeness and imitation of the sexualized alien fetish, under capital; we have to reverse the flow of power towards workers in a meaningful sense—to camp the twin trees of capital and replace them with our own parasitoids that destroy the nation-state and replace it (and its self-serving token cops/perfidious “representatives/gurus”) with something beautiful they could never kill (or really replace)! Medusa!
Though currently attached to profit, such a mirror mechanism is called “divide and conquer” and it’s a very old imperial tactic updated for soft-power and assimilation methods inside the Imperial Core now (a global, corporatized market returning to deregulation, thus eclipsing nation-states through corporate dominance on and across the same sphere of influence). The state was made for this purpose, and while admittedly blunt-force, it historically works rather well—too well, in fact. The bourgeoisie (and their proponents) are not constrained by morality but driven by profit. In a way, they and the xenomorph have this in common: the perfect enemies, doubling each other as pure survivors, “unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Except, this applies to all of us differently during class and culture war as mirrored, which is why intersectional solidarity is so important when camping canon ourselves. The elite generate monomythic copaganda (from Radcliffe’s novels to Nintendo’s videogames) to defend “lost” ideas of childhood (fatal nostalgia); i.e., from Communism during Capitalist Realism upholding the status quo. In response, we reverse that with ludo-Gothic BDSM during our own ergodic motion’s castle-narrative, the humanizing Medusa moving through the Gothic castle (the Metroidvania, or otherwise) as half-real during the liminal hauntology of war on all registers and media forms. Back and forth and in all directions, on all levels, we break the mirror to haunt its unbroken panes:
Doing so doesn’t have to make “perfect sense” provided we dazzle and expose our enemies while getting our own humanity across. To that, the Poetry Module teaches you to think (thus create) like a Gothic poet regarding the Wisdom of the Ancients (the cultural understanding of the imaginary past); i.e., as a historical-material process tied to class and culture warfare—of interrogating the ambiguous and recursive reflections of state trauma and power inside the mirror hall, thus reclaim our own poetics from older histories, regaining as we do our power in the process. In turn, the Monster Modules will reverse the emphasis, examining the history of said poetics to better understand what we’re up against: the poetic past as something to learn from when making new histories while synthesizing praxis to achieve systemic catharsis, camp canon, and reclaim the Base and recultivate the Superstructure, etc.
This volume, more than the others, couldn’t have been written without some risk on my part. That being said, it’s all in the butt, lovies—the power of the babe pushing capital out of all its holes and off its mirror-like surfaces!
Your Commie Mommy,
—Persephone van der Waard
About Harmony Corrupted
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
If any of this sounds fun, you can download the full module for free on my website’s one-page promo, and access the other available volumes, promo images, project history and more! Access individual samples of the module on my website’s blog (which has divided most of the module into separate posts). And please, please consider supporting Harmony’s work (on Fansly and Ko-Fi; follow her @harmonycorrupted@noods.fun on Mastodon); this module could not have been written without her inspiration, and she does awesome sex work while raising awareness for sex worker rights on Mastodon (see her whole portfolio, a review of her work, ways you can support her and more on her special promo page on my website)!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). She is a MtF trans woman, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster with two partners. Including her multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her thirteen muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. First and foremost, she is a sex work activist, fighting for sex worker liberation through iconoclastic/sex-positive artwork. To that, she is an anarcho-Communist writer, illustrator, BDSM educator, sex worker, genderqueer/environmental activist and Gothic ludologist—with her (independent) PhD having been written on Metroidvania combined with the above variables; i.e., to coin and articulate ludo-Gothic BDSM as a sex-positive poetic device. She sometimes writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog; or does continual independent research on Metroidvania and speedrunning every now and again. If you’re interested in her work or curious about illustrated or written commissions, please refer to her commissions page for more information.
Click here to see a condensed example of Persephone’s wide portfolio.
Footnotes
[1] Which, in this case, is Wynn prescribing dogma as something she, on some level, sees the world through; i.e., “green-eyed” herself, regardless if her meta dialog would seem to deny it, ipso facto.
[2] Non-binary Exclusionary Radical Feminist; i.e., what I called Contrapoints back in 2022, vis-à-vis their “Envy” video. This was a video of theirs I originally critiqued back in 2022 after watching Essence of Thought’s video, “Let’s Discuss ContraPoints’ Open Worship of Domestic Abuser, Buck Angel” (2022). I had written it while looking for TERFs to critique, then came across what I decided to call “NERF” per Contrapoint’s enbyphobic behaviors. Except, I eventually removed said critique from my original 2022 blogpost, which stays up as “Sex Positivity versus Sex Coercion, or Gothic Communism: Manifesto” but doesn’t include the section about Wynn anymore. I didn’t remove my critique of her because I changed my mind; I took that section down and converted it into a book manuscript, which wound up having a lot of stuff go in front of the Wynn critique: my PhD (Volume Zero), manifesto (Volume One) and Humanities primer (Volume Two, parts one and two). As such, the piece critiquing Wynn is actually towards the end of Sex Positivity as it presently exists: in Volume Three, part two, which I won’t be releasing until closer to the end of the year (though probably early 2025, if I’m being honest). Until then, it’s nice to include something of the Wynn polemic in a volume of Sex Positivity that is currently online (maybe I’ll release Wynn’s critique in a separate blogpost sometime soon).