This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (5/1/2024)! 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 the original blog posts will not have)!
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” 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 at the bottom of the page.
Picking up from where “‘Bad Dreams, part three: Rememory, or the Roots of Trauma’ (opening and ‘Roots’ part one)“! left off…
The Roots of Trauma, part two: Healing through “Rape,” or the Origins of Ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Matter of Rememory (feat. Harmony Corrupted and Cuwu)
There’s actually a social, therapeutic component to Gothic Communism that relates to our Gothic-Marxist tenets and four main Gothic theories; i.e., as things to interrogate and negotiate in our own lives. / The idea actually comes from dialectical behavioral therapy models introduced to me by [Cuwu]. DBT is designed specifically to prevent self-destructive behavior at a societal level; Gothic Communism as I’ve conceived it applies this to sex workers, preventing destructive behaviors against them from other workers who are loyal to the state. It achieves this by combining dialectical-material analysis of Gothic stories with four Gothic literary theories (the Gothic being largely concerned with sex in popular monstrous media) to achieve a Gothic hybrid of traditionally Marxist goals—all in service of furthering sex positivity through well-educated, emotionally and Gothically intelligent sex workers who can “live deliciously” as a form of proletarian praxis from moment to moment (source).
—Persephone van der Waard’s “Healing from Rape,” from Sex Positivity, Volume One (2024)
(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)
Now that we’ve covered the mythic groundwork of rememory (and its complex history of tokenization and resistance among different minority groups), I want to conclude the first subchapter of “Bad Dreams,” “Survival,” by applying it to myself as having lived the rememory process at different stages; i.e., through my dreams and consumption of media about abject things homing in on what has become buried, thus something to reassemble using rememory dug up as such: rape as painful, including the facing of it as a memory that is, to some degree, imaginary/real and asleep/awake. Hyphenating these as the Gothic does presents a uniquely therapeutic, BDSM-style opportunity to learn from the past as an artifact thereof we can dissect and subvert during rape play putting “rape” in quotes; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM, as I eventually envisioned the term, being something that continues to affect us and our friends even once they’ve left our lives, but remain as zombie-like ghosts of themselves; e.g., Cuwu, next page, but also us, above. Come and gone, their own survival on canvas testifies tragically-yet-beautifully to someone comely that, all the same, both lived with profound trauma and passed it along to me in various shapes and forms.
Before we get to Cuwu, rape play and ludo-Gothic BDSM, here’s a trigger warning and some useful definitions (from “A Note about Rape/Rape Play,” 2024):
Trigger-warning! This [section] discusses ironic and unironic rape fantasies extensively! This isn’t to condone unironic violence through Gothic poetics, but prevent it through sex-positive education, entertainment, transformation and critique; i.e., the term “rape,” in this case, has been broadened to mean “taking away power to cause harm,” which ludo-Gothic BDSM camps in cathartic, Gothic-Communist forms of Gothic poetics. —Perse
Since this subchapter discusses rape, I want to define it as something broadened beyond its narrow definition, “penetrative sex meant to cause harm by removing consent from the equation.” To that, there is a broad, generalized definition I devised in “Psychosexual Martyrdom” (2024), which will come in useful where we examine unironic forms of rape, but also “rape” as something put into quotes; i.e., during consent-non-consent as a vital means of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM:
martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,” generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit) [emphasis, me]: finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).
Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale, either type committed by a Great Destroyer (a Gothic trope of abuse of the worse, unimaginable sort, rarefying as a person, onstage) of some kind or another as abstracting unspeakable abuse. It’s a translation, which I now want to interrogate with the chapters ahead. So we must give examples that are anything but ironic before adding the irony afterward as a theatrical means of medicine; i.e., rape play challenging profit through the usual Gothic articulations in service to workers and nature at large.
Simply put, to be raped is to be deprived of agency facing something you cannot defeat through force alone (rape victims are often brutalized for trying to fight back)—capital and its enforcers, pointedly raping nature and things of nature-as-monstrous-feminine by harvesting them during us-versus-them arguments according to Cartesian thought; terror is a vital part of the counterterrorist reversal humanizing Medusa during activism as a psychosexual act of martyrdom. There is always damage, even if you survive, but there is a theatrical element that lets you show your scars; i.e., during consent-non-consent as an artistic, psychosexual form of protest through ludo-Gothic BDSM: having been on the receiving end of state abuse as something to demonstrate and play with for educational, activist purposes—generally with a fair degree of revolutionary cryptonymy (showing and hiding ourselves and our trauma).
By comparison the state uses masks, music (and other things) as a coercive, complicit means of cryptonymically threatening us with great illusions. These rape our minds without irony in service to profit. Such proponents are generally people in our own lives who don the mask/persona of the Great Destroyer to frighten us into submission; i.e., by threatening us with total annihilation as a force of unreality that feels shapeless and overwhelming yet humanoid. This is no laughing matter, nor is subverting it during rape play, both of which the rest of this volume (and Volume Three after that) will explore at length (source).
I won’t have time to unpack the above ideas again, so please just try to keep them in mind as we proceed.
(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Returning to the matter at hand, Cuwu was entirely instrumental in shaping my current understanding of rape play and developing ludo-Gothic BDSM. More on them in a bit, when we conclude the subchapter with several examples of rape play performed between me and my friends as the bedrock for ludo-Gothic BDSM. In the interim, consider how the committing of rape is rightly criminalized but hardly anathema in the ways it proliferates; likewise, consider how having open, earnest discussions about rape—including theatrical ones—are also shameful and taboo in ways that are repressed through more outlandish fictions built on historical abuse (from Volume One): “The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them” (source). That being said, these still grant warning signs pointing to a maintenance of the status quo by commonly marginalized groups; e.g., white women and the standard post hoc canonizing of Original Sin, through a single character like Linda Fiorentino in The Last Seduction (1994) saying “rape me” to that story’s male patsy while trying to get him to murder her ex-boyfriend (who she stole from).
The reality is, “rape” as something to put into quotes involves invocations of rape during rememories that are overt; e.g., Harmony saying, “rape me” to me during consent-non-consent rituals (exhibit 37b1a) in order to have fun together while living with the trauma of past abuse minus the capacity to cause harm; i.e., “hurt, not harm” (a common BDSM mantra) being a regular simulation of actual harm during calculated risk to introduce paradoxical, exquisitely “torturous” feelings of the Numinous in good faith: clarity in controlled confusion, recontextualizing trauma in a safe space that feels dangerous. It’s the Gothic in a nutshell, but one that from Radcliffe to me, took a very long time to evolve into itself.
Even so, these subversions still occur using a shared, dialectical-material aesthetic of power and death (which we’ll see with convulsionnaires, has a history of theatrical, Christ-like mutilation—of martyrdom; exhibit 37a2b). As such, exploitation and liberation exist inside the same shadowy theatrical spaces, which generally combine messy elements of performance and play that interrogate power as a means of negotiate; i.e., amid thresholds and on surfaces, using Gothic doubles during liminal expression across different media to achieve praxial synthesis and catharsis.
To that, we’ll be returning to trauma as a process of psychosexual investigation that veers away from harm as normally buried; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as I coined it, which generally includes rape play as something I hammered out while personally relying on the help of friends: to teach me ways to heal from lateral instances of police abuse by developing a shared pedagogy of the oppressed. We’ve already written about this (re: Cuwu, in Volume One), so shall proceed by considering a broader traumatic lineage in my life, but also the larger-than-life stories of undead figures haunting me; i.e., my various abusers, including Jadis and Cuwu, but also monomythic echoes of those abusers that, to some degree color the experience: as both informed and describing the seminal, recursive tragedies and farce (re: Marx) whose enslavement and liberation unfold in ghostly forms echoing across space and time in ways that, unlike ghosts, pointedly refer to trauma using actual human bodies (and their abuse)—in short, like zombies do.
(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
Trauma breeds strange fruit, strange appetites. For the moment (and into the next subchapter), we’ll quickly consider this paradox through ludo-Gothic BDSM as enacted through my life (and again, segue into grander stories when we consider the monomyth, after that); i.e., as intertwined with that of others come and gone/dreamt up, but also my real-life friends and our mutual attempts to return to the home as sick: the dead as lonely and furious, being heard through how they feed, but also ourselves relating to them as currently surviving the burden of such things felt at all times. As such, we’ll consider the trauma of rape/power abuse as something returned to and healed from by facing such decay in joyous, campy ways; e.g., Harmony and I, but also Cuwu and I before that (which segues into Jadis and I as something I’m still learning to face and live with, thus heal from; i.e., the subject of the next subchapter and where the process of rememory using ludo-Gothic BDSM shall well-and-truly be put to the test: as something of the prototypical example reached through a backwards dissection of my former self remembered again).
For me, the rememory of the state’s rape and war through unironic police violence is winding and complex, as is healing from it. This includes my paternal grandfather’s frank and unromantic, yet-still-somehow-cheeky stories about the Nazi occupation in Holland, but also my high-school fascination with infamously brutal war atrocities like Cambodia, the Rape of Nanking or Vietnam; i.e., any that belie the treacherously mendacious nature of American exceptionalism during more recent, or at least repressed conflicts in the Middle East (with Zionism predating all of these as a 19th century relic, one built on Biblical/Crusade-style falsehoods well into the present day’s current reenactment of: through Gaza and its neighboring lands policed by Christo-fascist forces and token Jews).
In turn, these artifacts further combined inside my mind with my stepfather’s abuse of me in relation to The Last of Us, the latter being something I ultimately wrote extensively about after a wild dream haunted by actual war abuse. The entire assemblage—at least for me—formed a complex, messy mixture of trauma and legend; i.e., like a Gothic castle, something to bravely and playfully navigate and reflect upon regarding the undead as historical-material, in nature (for a vintage, diegetic example, consider the novel Frankenstein, which opens with a chimeric fever dream that torments the privileged Victor as a matter of foreshadowing his own doom); like a bad dream, you’re not sure if they’re real, but feel utterly convinced they’re coming from somewhere.
Marking a domestic curse, zombies of any kind are less from a faraway place of entirely invented dreams, ex nihilo, and emerge more through apt comparisons to Imperialism occurring at home in partially fabricated ways; i.e., like a dream, haunting the mind through the ghastly figure inserting itself cryptomimetically where it shouldn’t belong but does: the Gothic castle (the chronotope) aesthetically pointing to trauma at home as tied to old power structures lurking there still.
(artist: Kelly Jean)
While the unwelcome nightmare is the infamous composer of many-a-Gothic-novel, Gothic dreams aren’t wholly paralyzed or lucid; they always pertain to a fleeting idea of not being entirely in control of how trauma manifests, which it does through socio-material reminders of abuse wherever it occurs or lies adjacent to. Because abuse is more than the immediate violence taking place (re: criminogenic conditions), the suggestion of it through “zombies” becomes a potential extension of violence—i.e., a mental assault that promises vague, all-encompassing punishment to a captive audience. This includes the zombie within the dream as a kind of imperfect revelation—a rememory of something already repressed but struggling to express itself through the same haunted venue/tired symbols stitched together. In the case of hauntings, the primary difference between a zombie and a ghost is one being alive but treated as dead; the other may have never lived at all (although, this goes both ways; e.g., Frankenstein being made up, but still pointing to setter-colonial atrocities experienced in dream-like, conversational forms: the novel of letters).
Such dreams are never made from whole cloth. In this case, Gothic Communism treats partial agency differently than canon; its ludo-Gothic BDSM fosters sex positivity within a proletarian Gothic imagination that consciously subverts the bourgeois forces normally attacking workers with and within their own dreams as experienced while awake. Counteracting the elite’s xenophobic offensive requires highlighting the disabling effect a person’s mind can have on the owner by tracing the material origins of the dream back to the prime, covert orchestrator. As zombie-like threats of violence are repeated but simultaneously denied by the defendant, they start to come across as eerily unreal—like you’re dreaming while you’re awake, unsure of what’s real or who you can trust. Including your friends but also yourself, your perception of reality becomes doubtful, but also dangerous. You start to fear everyone, feeling undead as a matter of zombification, of trepanation attacking the brain.
Except, liberation also involves the same feelings inverted to achieve a sex-positive outcome; i.e., loving yourself as undead to win a xenophilic means of escape: wearing your trauma on your sleeve—nakedly.
(artist: Lit Silium)
Bear in mind, it’s not a nostalgic past to retreat into and pour salt on old wounds, but one whose limited challenging of the states of yore (thus now) grows into a maelstrom; i.e., building a better tomorrow with a reclaimed Wisdom of the Ancients as an anti-predation device. This requires confronting damage in our own lives’ childhoods tied to past devastation, ever backwards and forwards: “Suffer the little children unto me!” as a performance to collect and reassemble like the bones of a composite skeleton; i.e., from a valley of dry bones to pick and choose from.
For example, when I was a teenager, my stepfather—who was always killing[1] small animals around our home—once threatened to beat me. Deciding to hold off “for fear of child abuse” (whatever that meant), he sent me to bed and told me to wait for when he would come, later in the night. He never did and I fell asleep, plagued with terror dreams. When I woke, I was more afraid of him than ever, my heightened imagination running wild. Though I didn’t realize it, my mind had been turned against me. However, once I started to imagine escaping my stepfather, my dreams became lucid; I felt less “trapped” and more in control, motivated by said fear to get the hell out. Slowly but surely I made plans to escape, eventually leaving my stepfather’s home.
That was over twenty years ago and I only now realize what was really going on: my imagination had set me free, but had also been turned against me by an abuser who recognized my highly imaginative personality. Sadly they would not be the last. While Jadis also had a penchant for it, both abusers had been working within the grounds of a fertile mind sown with foundational fears: childhood as abject in a coming-of-age yarn—to be of age is to be exposed to the reality (and fiction) of rape and its various repressed desires, feelings of paranoia and other extreme emotions, fulfilled wishes, intimations of death, captivity and revenge, etc! To escape, we must acclimate ourselves to them as a BDSM means of Gothic play that, often enough, has a dream-like nature to it:
(exhibit 37a1: Artist: Matthew Peak, whose masculine, male rapist invades the mind of the dreaming young woman, reaching for her ostensible virginity with rapacious “knife dildo” fingers. These hyperbolic, psychosexual threats of actual rape are the 1980s version of the Radcliffean demon lover clutching the woman to trap her in a bad fantasy that puts actual rape somewhere in the venue. Rape is about power abuse and social-sexual control; i.e., including one’s body, emotions and labor but also one’s intelligence regarding these things and of state power [and xenophobia] as something to resist. To escape, one must become lucid enough to fight back; to help others do the same, the lesson of survival must be conveyed in poetic, xenophilic language that people can relate to and understand over time—carefully explained to them in exhibits like this one prepared and presented by emotionally and Gothically intelligent worker-artists. Through the state, fearing sex is normal by virtue of its fearsome reputation, but this, too, must be reclaimed. We are not chattel to rape, be that our minds, emotions, or bodies; we might be undead, but we deserve love. If that includes administering pain then so be it, but it should never be depicted at queer people’s expense in the fearful eyes of cis women seeing us as “rapist” [or other token groups triangulating against whomever].)
Though trauma makes up the weighty base of our existence, nightmares can also help the mind process trauma; i.e., by returning to childhood forms and their fatal nostalgia as always, in some sense, dead. Be it real, imagined, or reimagined, trauma’s investigation generally happens inside a familial space littered with undead pieces; re: the Gothic castle. This ghoulish pastiche depicts a sneaking sense of conflict during cryptomimesis (the imitation and echo of trauma) through ludo-Gothic BDSM rituals; i.e., bondage, domination, sadism and masochism as a psychosexual means of calculated risk meant to assist in the rememory process to avoid fascism, tokenism and betrayal-as-usual (class, race and culture).
To that, feeling undead and trapped needn’t be a strict negative while simultaneously addressing the global and generational traumas of the present world’s complicated space and time; i.e., a place to occupy and perform within as the archetypal damsel in a castle might, but also the whore and demon playing detective, mid-peril: during a staged, palliative ordeal about the same whispered terms on the same shared surfaces at odds with themselves. Like a murdered soul rising to Heaven (or a corpse breaking fresh ground), things get heavy and light.
(exhibit 37a2a: Model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard. Monsters speak to trauma as something to confront since and from childhood; or again, from Volume Zero:
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 [source].
As such, my own contributions overlap with Harmony’s, the two of us working in harmony through a Gothic poetry 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; i.e., not her unironic mutilative sex fantasies, but an asexual investigation of sex adjacent to harm that explores said harm during outrageous fantasies, operatic performances, and castle-like spaces of moribund sex linked to lost childhood innocence: Harmony as under attack, but having anti-predation qualities that present her as fearsomely undead in ways not exclusive to zombies [e.g., snakes baring their fangs as to discourage stepping on them]. For now, we’ll quickly sample that here, then explore it at the end of the subchapter [and deeper in the module].
To that, I chose to depict Harmony as a vampire, not a zombie, but the basic ideas of giving/receiving pain and feeding on essence are shared between either type as for or against the state; i.e., Harmony baring her fangs in a pareidolic threat/anti-predation display when chased to her home and attacked there [zombies effectively doing the same]. Inside history as ever writing itself on and offstage, sexually active “scarlet” women undoubtedly would have been hectored and harassed during witch hunts blaming them as “homewreckers”; i.e., as something to mark with an incongruous symbol while apologizing for male abusers conforming to the heteronormative model [nuclear families, church structures, and so on]. Whereas someone like Hawthorne used a scarlet letter to mark Hester Prynne, I use period blood and the mating press [as well as an implied spreader bar] but also a cute pink paw print on the usual site of fixation per the Male Gaze as something to fuck with: the panties.
[model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard]
As such, any scapegoat outlier must canonically be staked by knife-dicks mistreating them as demon lovers in a demon-lover fashion: rape the whore—her pre-existing holes, but also potential new ones during traumatic penetration. A common mating strategy in the insect world—re: Gwen Pearson’s “stabby cock dagger“—but also religion and Catholic martyrdom expressed in decayed sites of older religious superstitions amid new prostitutions thereof, we’re subsequently teased with “rape” of a particular kind while fielding capital’s usual insect politics: sacred torture; i.e., a kind of Spanish-Inquisition-style torture camp/rapturous expression of pleasurable pain amid “torture” as something to tease in iconoclastic artwork.
This very much includes sex work that camps crucifixion, ossuaries and the like [shoving the stake in things other than the ankles and wrists, in effect turning the coffin nail into a dildo while retaining a punitive, vampiric aesthetic speaking to state rape]. In such places/moments, we see the beautiful, doll-like “corpse” impossibly able to feel pain per the usual tortures normally reserved for living beings [through forced penitence or kneeling on stone, but also impalement and prolonged incarceration] made into a very-odd jouissance reversing “from beyond the grave” into the usual talking skulls [“boners”] held in the hands of certified-freak weirdos: “Alas, poor Yorick, I fucked him, Horatio!”
The vampirism, here, is—like the zombie—a pointed camping of Christian dogma as undead, but also rapaciously prurient in ways we can vibe with, when camped: “Rock me, sexy Jesus!” See the stabbed pussy slick with slippery blood? Is it menses? Maybe! Like Juliet sweating in the sepulcher after waking from the apothecary’s potion, it’s deliberately cliché, thrilling and serious-silly all at once; i.e., when she fucks herself with her lover’s knife dick, suitably commenting on the feelings of those forced to “come of age” too soon [with Juliet’s official age being fourteen—too young by Shakespeare’s standards[2]]:
Yea, noise? Then I’ll be brief. O, happy dagger,
This is thy sheath. There rust, and let me die [source].
Romeo and Juliet is literally a tomb romance, both a stress valve and pun-heavy joke about emo virgins told with a straight face by a gay man. In short, the Bard expects the audience to get the gist and subsequently play along! The same iconoclastic idea extends to the infamous monsters [and their BDSM activities] that evolved based on it, including zombies and vampires as dialogic matters of grave robbing and defilement made with a nod and a wink to the audience [and later, the camera]. In a sense, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM borrows backwards to move towards post-scarcity as something Shakespeare would have possibly viewed, per Thomas Moore, as “utopian.” Then again, per his own wild fantasies, perhaps not.
Nowadays, though, the usual medieval paradoxes and abject fear-fascinations abound in order to explain decay not just behind but inside state illusions. Mouths and penises hyphenate, as do fascists and Communists, male-female, safe-dangerous, predator-prey, invasive-indigenous, cowboy-Indian, ally-alien, love-lust, protect-kill, mother-fucker, homely-unhomely, and so on. Specifically Nazi predator and Jewish blood libel [the rodent-like, enlarged teeth and nose; e.g., Max Shrek’s Count Orlock from Nosferatu, 1922] combine weirdly through outright Zionism versus Nazi camp as a) being cryptonymy for or against the state, and b) integrating through psychosexual theatre as undead; i.e., haunting the red and the black with various conflicting and competing histories: the eating-raping of women and babies in equally weird, sodomic-pedophilic ways. It’s canonically very xenophobic and gentrified, but decays along the usual routes that can be reclaimed by both sides [workers or the state] trying to survive as Capitalism decays like usual: in the proverbial “graveyard” as a place to have sex as a manner of medieval hyphenation that combines such activities with death, food, war and rape, etc; i.e., to relieve stress by recovering and reproducing as the undead do. Capitalism reproduces through rape; so do we, albeit in quotes.
The same idea, then, of course applies to a fascist cartoon baring its fangs when hunted down, which speaks to tokenization as a kind of barbarism to put down [re: the euthanasia effect]. For example, feminism-in-decay always runs the risk of regressing into state forms of the same basic scapegoat that are then used and discarded as needed; re: TERFs. Even so, there is no monopoly on penetrative, undead violence, the female/queer vampire meeting state “fangs” [stakes] with her own teeth to bite and drain her enemies with: Harmony’s, given bite and shaped by me [the master and apprentice something to reverse at times]. Exploitation and liberation, then, not only exist in the same place on the same surfaces, but use the same “straws” to transfer power in different directions: towards workers or the state through either’s representatives as vampiric! It’s a combination of sex/death face, but also funny face and the face as mask-like; e.g., animal and/or death masks worn and removed as needed! The rub lies in how such things cannot be so easily removed [as a mask presumably is] when the state begins to die and feed on itself. Yet, survival very much involves doing so.)
Per the liminal hauntology of war, we’ve already examined the familial, chronotopic elements of state trauma during the manifesto (and touched upon lost childhood, here, when looking at zombie apocalypses and vampires, above); the Gothic imagination more broadly processes trauma both hidden and visible as reimagined by workers living in a historical-material world: as inherited from childhood forwards. All the while, the Gothic production of emancipatory nightmares has been hidden, privatized and sold back to us in coercive forms by the state.
Inside the zombie apocalypse as a canonical fever dream, the elite’s bad BDSM tells us how to think, but also how to feel afraid of, and react towards, zombies and war as fetishized, heteronormative and commonplace among the undead in general (re: the vampire, above, having more in common with the zombie than not, when push comes to shove). Manufactured nightmares like The Last of Us, then, work suspiciously like my stepfather’s cycle of abuse loading my nightmares with the potential to submit or rebel; i.e., with canonical threats of punishment from those in power, who control the flow of information (thus power) with escalating waves of violence leveled against historically privileged, but also infantilized groups: “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”
To some extent, this includes me (a white trans woman) as needing to subvert these outcomes to serve labor as GNC; i.e., with ludo-Gothic BDSM camping the undead as entities openly raped by the state to begin with (which they then deny to our faces). All the while, I cannot stress enough how having our nightmares constantly produced for us by the state’s BDSM (zombies or otherwise) has alienated workers from our own minds and how they work; i.e., relative to the socio-material world as something we can shape through the same rapacious archetypes. Meanwhile, the elite devise and abuse canon to plant systemic fears into the Gothic imagination from an early age, observing patiently while canon shapes the world (and its socio-material conditions through Gothic poetics) as they desire; i.e., through childhood indoctrination built on false hope/power as monomythic: a hero to rape the undead when Hell comes home to empire.
We’ll unpack that dark return more in the monomyth subchapter. For now, though, just remember that monsters like zombies and vampires commonly signify childhood as a place of elite authorship, one made to imprison labor with; i.e., inside pacified workers’ terrified brains, the former conditioning the latter to see and identify undead things they should attack, not embrace as human by virtue of systemic abuse they experience from childhood onwards. Forever looming over them in displaced, faraway forms, these emerge from the imaginary past as echoing on and offstage in the present space and time; i.e., like a spaceship, but also a traveling Gothic castle occupied with some kind of Great Destroyer that reflects colonial atrocities back onto the middle class: to scare them stupid all over again when the nightmare “returns.”
Except, it never really left. For example, Chrono Trigger‘s Lavos is an ostensibly celestial reaper being hounded by the usual middling kids to the center of the usual black onions; i.e., the castle grounds, layers of the fortress, suit of armor and body inside as all being concentric, anisotropic, and more to the point, recursive ontological statements of the same basic being/process at different moments of exploration: the castle-like body or body-like castle tied to a canonical mise-en-abyme abjecting Capitalism’s cannibalistic device, profit, onto a traveling nightmare that, once assembled through a canonical rememory of the imaginary past, must be invaded and killed for the state. Except, it’s a bread-and-circus ruse, one whose regular bait-and-switch swaps profit for the usual spectres of Marx as haunting space and time more broadly!
(source: Casey Foot’s “Chrono Trigger: What Is Lavos?” 2022)
Such Red Scare nonsense is the elite “getting them while they’re young”; i.e., as cradle snatchers and graverobbers executing a de facto bad parentage. From cradle to grave, they want us to forget our ability to control our own nightmares and their transformative power onstage and off: during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s palliative-Numinous rape play as a proletarian venture made to reclaim monsters from the usual neoliberal illusions! As a matter of gargoyles and menticide (re: Volume One), the elite (and their Superstructure) achieve poetic dominance by making us perpetually scared during the liminal hauntology of war and its apocalypse: the return of the home as undead, meaning bodies and house through a stupefying grim harvest—consume, obey and destroy!
On some level, Big Bads like Lavos reflect Imperialism-as-undead: something workers inherit and contend with—canonically by striking the mirror held up to us by the elite, the middle class punching the ghost of the counterfeit per the process of abjection. It’s up to us to challenge said destiny with our own Aegis; i.e., to dance with the ghost of the counterfeit and interrogate its Russian doll, not to blindly consume or retreat into so-called “better times” that, however simple and tempting they might seem, reflect a profound ignorance towards the suffering of others: an escapist counterfeit unto itself that becomes something the meek will mobilize in defense of from subversive agents.
In turn, once shattered (as innocence generally does under Capitalism), purposeful regressions towards it, the counterfeit and process of abjection amount to willful ignorance in defense of Capitalist Realism. Except, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle (the ghost of the counterfeit) without turning a blind eye to the kinds of predation your own consumption (and class) belongs; i.e., informed consumption (a topic we’ll unpack in Volume Three at length) versus the problem of an alien zombie that, however displaced, nevertheless reflects middle-class anxieties about their own hand in genocide (so much convolution merely to pass the buck, in Chrono Trigger‘s case)!
(artist: Mk-5)
Hopelessly dependent on a bourgeois, socio-material arrangement, canon drains workers of any ability they might otherwise have to imagine a better world through monsters as human. It’s always on the cusp of annihilation, whereupon our minds become a trap buying into neoliberal illusions the likes of which videogames, movies, and other kinds of mass media (which generally respond to each other) constitute a prolific breeding ground; i.e., reinforced by the external world as a dogmatic byproduct of older traumatized minds, of minds, of minds: our own past as shared with that of others across former centuries, having common burial grounds for discontent; e.g., the convulsionnaires (next page), but also Harmony and I as constantly relating to them by already having something worringly in common: our having survived the horrors of a canonical past that extends into the present. Face with it, we seek refuge inside the imagery as a hauntological matter of communion with liberatory agents conjured up—spectres of Marx that, unlike Lavos (whose outer shell is covered in unhuggable quills like a porcupine and whose inner shelf is a womb-like space), demand to be hugged!
Per the dialectic of the alien, iconoclasm defends Medusa from state forces/Cartesian arguments’ canon (re: nature-as-monstrous-feminine); i.e., a creative process whose subsequent rape play demands our inspecting of the imaginary past as hauntological, thus not completely fictional but certainly walking a fine line: martyrdom! As a matter of prolonged struggle against the state, resistance historically associates with rebellious forms of atheism. Except, there’s also non-secular bodies like the convulsionnaires as being zombie-like, too—literally the trauma of state abuse prompting a return to an imaginary past that never existed back then whose paradoxical return now is equally invoked under the present state of affairs pushed by a shared desire: liberation through torment as half-real.
(exhibit 37a2b: Model and artist: Harmony Corrupted. Confronting trauma takes many forms/rituals invoking spectres of Marx; e.g., Harmony’s Fansly exhibit on convulsionnaires:
Convulsionnaires helped lay the foundation for the French Revolution by being in direct and fierce opposition to the hierarchical system of religious clergy, and thus, also absolutism. Their extreme behavior inspired lots of public discourse, moving people to question the “ancien régime” and the supposed piety of the monarch. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that the convulsionnaire phenomenon was a direct result of the people’s frustration with societal inequity, compounded by the feelings of being increasingly alienated from God. […] The majority (60%) of the convulsionnaires movement was comprised of women who were actively challenging the established ideas of a Christian woman’s role and expected behavior in society. […] The individuals experiencing convulsions were “treated” in oftentimes brutal masochistic sessions (sometimes resulting in crucifixions), which were meant to be cathartic for their suffering and a symbol for persecution and their proximity to Christ.
Later on, the movement was made to leave the cemetery grounds by the police and moved to private meetings, where they continued practicing the sadomasochistic sessions and developing apocalyptic visions [source].
[artist: Harmony Corrupted]
In short, there’s an oft-musical, historical element to the socio-material factors teasing but not executing actual mutilation and rape. Such spectres haunt the viewer during current ludo-Gothic BDSM practices being informed by in-touch contemporaries’ own understandings of older, more violent forms: actual harm as a matter of suicidal protest haunting non-harmful copies. To that, Harmony’s performance is notably inspired by Trevor Dunn’s avant-garde jazz outfit, Trio Convulsant and their new album, Séances [2022]. Such an operatic, “rapacious”-rapturous mixture has been a part of the Gothic as a transcontinental and transgenerational mode, insofar as such spectres constitute a work-in-process we have already touched upon; i.e., a Communist Numinous; e.g., from Horace Walpole’s rape castle, Otranto, to Matthew Lewis’ poetic inclusions and “Gypsy Dance” from The Monk to Blue Öyster Cult’s own music [next page] to Castlevania to Trio Convulsant to my short essay, “Psychosexual Martyrdom,” and so on…)
Whatever the spectre’s form, the keys to escape through Marxism-as-undead are performative, occurring via Gothic-Communist development during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., by playfully recognizing the myriad ways in which complex trauma is manufactured by state forces to serve profit, then slowly envisioning a way out of the same, prison-like myopia while inside it. If one’s mind is pacified by dogmatic elements—specifically by the canonical zombie as a kind of violent, Pavlovian threat to menticide the viewer with—then such instances must be transformed in cathartic ways by playing with zombies. Zombies, after all, aren’t strictly rotting corpses, but merely those occupying the state of exception that treats them as undead; i.e., damned, thus unable to easily enjoy social-sexual engagements because they collectively elide with historical-material experiences of state-compelled trauma; e.g., the child-like Creature from Frankenstein trying to befriend little girls only to be shot for it.
As such, the zombie’s tragic, forgotten histories must be bravely reimagined through rememory during ludo-Gothic BDSM if workers are to liberate the Gothic imagination (and Wisdom of the Ancients) from capital. The next subchapter will explore this through sexualized toys and artwork that speak to trauma as something to navigate in ghoulish ways. For the rest of this section, I want to outline a) the basic idea, and b) how it is performed by people with each other during rape plays of various kinds.
As I do, I’ll be stressing the sex-positive quality to such examples despite the historical presence of state abuse haunting them; i.e., through the past as written by people who, themselves, often sucked quite a bit, and for whom we have do to better than; e.g., Roman Polanski as someone who, when engaging with the works of, often feels like us making a deal with the devil in more ways than one, but for which there’s much to be gleaned and learned from the affair as a holistic ordeal the so-called “director” is still only a piece of:
…let’s all acknowledge that Roman Polanski, who adapted the screenplay and directed Rosemary’s Baby, was a total dirtbag who had sex with a thirteen-year-old girl, pleaded guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor,” and fled to France the day before his sentencing. He wasn’t exactly a shining example of goodness before he engaged in pedophilia either. Rosemary’s Baby is a masterpiece, but Polanski’s exacting vision and his reckless and abusive methods to achieve it caused a lot of drama with a lot of people on and off set. […] Ironically, given that Polanski is such a dirtbag, both the film and Ira Levin’s novel on which it’s based, invite feminist interpretations (source: Meg Sipos and Eric Botts’ “Satanic Capitalists in Rosemary’s Baby,” 2023).
Whatever the forms or faults at work, rape play is loaded with dead things, but especially Gothic markers that, per liminal expression, are less completely true or false and more in the awkward delicious middle inviting troubling-but-fun comparisons to act out.
In terms of the basic idea of rape play as something to act out as a defense mechanism from profit and state forces, think of my arguments per anger/gossip, monsters and camp (re: the basics of oppositional synthesis). These—I would argue—are collectively done to write with the dead in cryptomimetic fashion, but also dance, eat, war or fornicate with during sex-positive, xenophilic rituals. Such ventures aim to subvert the undead’s rape trauma and feeding mechanisms by detaching them from profit to critique it; e.g., the zombie’s dark, massive animal cock (exhibit 37b) but also the dragon’s Impaler-like variety (exhibit 37c1) as both featured in trademark Gothic locales granting trademark Gothic vibes; i.e., a deathly jouissance/mood of proudly identifying with “death” in quotes: as a potent source of imagination, creativity and vitality
When I die
I don’t want to rest in peace
I want to dance in joy
I want to dance in the graveyards, the graveyards
And while I’m alive I don’t want to be alone
Mourning the ones who came before
I want to dance with them some more
Let’s dance in the graveyards (Delta Rae’s “Dance in the Graveyards,” 2012).
but also a foregone conclusion through these same intimations of mortality as gloriously unclean and faked:
It doesn’t matter if we turn to dust;
Turn and turn and turn we must!
I guess I’ll see you dancin’ in the ruins tonight!
Dancin’ in the ruins!
Guess I’ll see you dancin’ in the ruins tonight!
There’s laughter where I used to see your tears
It’s all done with mirrors, have no fears
There’s nothing pure or sacred in our time
The nights we spend together are no crime (Blue Öyster Cult’s “Dancin’ in the Ruins,” 1985).
Faced within the hyperreality of Capitalist Realism—a thing that is both so very false, but nevertheless making up the reality of our lives—rape play suddenly isn’t so odd.
“Death,” then, is a poetic, campy means of escape onto something better by letting go of current problematic arrangements; re: the above music, but really any projection of any postpunk resistance unto spaces of escape whose at-times ambiguous, necrophilic, operatic hedonism (any kind of extramarital affair) become their own kind of zombie dance within the danger disco of the black castle as conjured up by us: a “danse macabre” reveling in the sensations of existence and non-existence intertwined, but also the echoes of the dead having a profound sense of joy within the theatrical tradition of rape as divorced from state abjection; i.e., while fear can come easy insofar as wanting to respect the diffuse, fragmented memories of the dead goes, playing with imaginary forms and critiquing their pernicious elements (re: canon and tokenism) provides something of a buffer during rape play.
Said play takes many forms. For one, the home-as-dead is a common homecoming to terrify the middle class with: the house as both containing the zombie and representing some aspect of a larger cannibalistic process returning home; i.e., through a moving vessel that, being hypermassive, travels seemingly without moving at all: across time through the usual dimensions of space. It’s precisely this recursive motion through a fourth dimension (time) that canonically keeps power where it normally is; i.e., by cannibalizing the victim as doomed to return to it, thus be eaten. Except, anisotropically reversing this flow ourselves is, itself, foreshadowed by a sweet, delicious doom we can send back at the usual rapists of the mind; i.e., our own awesome power laughing in the face of those who would seek to possess and ruin us for their own fickle gain. Terrified of death and draining the blood of everyone around them by preying on nature, they seek to make us dance for them; i.e., as abusive recruits that, once touched by death, fear it as a matter of going on to prey on others, mid-calculated risk.
This concerns an ongoing relationship shared between the audience and the text as likewise inherited; e.g., Mad Father (above, 2012), but also those who see such nostalgia offered by similar games as something to unironically defend: Jadis, towards me, falling in love with their father’s ghost and possessed with their mother’s (the next subchapter is dedicated entirely to them). They loved Mad Father for those very reasons, smiling as they took advantage of me while invoking that game as they did, time and time again.
Lucky for us, we can resist these bourgeois spells (and their practitioners) through a joy regarding liminal expression as purposefully in-between, not by accident; i.e., death-as-alive, knowing that life is but a walking shadow and death merely the pause in its dancing before it rises once more from the grave. Per the Gothic, this describes a psychosexual, erotic-traumatic force with intensely cathartic potential in queer an-Com hands; i.e., a lullaby into a waltz, a dance with the dead in the same spaces of childhood, but also a coming-of-age ritual whose constructive criticism extends the confrontation to a more (a)sexual sort: bedroom activities turned inside-out relative to the home as the place of zombies, of graveyards, to embrace and find playful, non-harmful joy inside (above). To, as Eddie Money and Ronnie Spector sing it but with a twist, “take us home, tonight!”
I’m talking about sex, of course, but more to the point, ludo-Gothic BDSM as a matter of nudism and rape play (which certainly doesn’t preclude sex):
(exhibit 37b1: Artist, left: Indicadominant; bottom-middle-and-right: Blxxd Bunny. When spaces become liminal, anywhere can be a bedroom, a grave, a kitchen, a dungeon [commonly for women treated as virgins and whores]. Literal dancing with the dead is more a novel-of-manners approach, one that gentrifies “necrophilic” sexual expression by avoiding, at least initially, the more eroticized components: the undead sword and scabbard, the monster “Franken” cock, including the swollen zombie cock as huge, dark, “rabid” and threatening[3]; re: “animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms”; i.e., the zombie as animalistic, feral and hugely carnivorous during wild animal lust [akin to the xenomorph or a werewolf, etc].
Such liminalities evolved out of a British social tradition, one whose abject xenophobia Ridley Scott would explore repeatedly in the 20th and 21st centuries using Gothic fantasy and science fiction. As a recipient of targeted violence towards embodiments of undead trauma, the zombie cock can adopt a fearsome, punisher role: the zombie pussy demands a “beating.” The broader theatrical idea, in sex-positive art, is to humanize the monster genitals as potentially slated for giving or receiving abuse as a kind of reclaimed zombie ritual, while retaining their outward, monstrous appearance; i.e., monster-fucking during ludo-Gothic BDSM as patently undead in ways that face and befriend death as normally alien, under capital: “We are all animals, my lady!” [what John Webster would consider lycanthropy as: raw animal lust].
Arguments about rape are made with monsters. Amounting to a synthesis of xenophilia during liminal expression, zombie genitals [and the perverse courtship rituals attached to them] can a) move towards survived trauma as something to express, and b) seek to alter the Superstructure’s canonical shaping of xenophobic cultural values; i.e., that lead to unequal, criminogenic, socio-material conditions. In short, the “rabid, stabby cock dagger” must be camped, and inside the usual grave-like areas as returned to minus the rose-tinted glasses of youth. It becomes a form of play that makes death, food, war and rape front-and-center by literally setting the table with them [above].)
Rememory strives for reunion, especially with lost memories (the ghost of the counterfeit) that have become divided from the physical body over time, or with the body separated from a larger cultural identity that has since been erased by hollow, braindead copies (the counterfeit as abject). Recollecting the zombie’s traumatic past, then, is always imaginary to some extent; the revived or the reviver always bringing something back into the living world—a buried, “souvenir” aspect of reimagined trauma that is perilous to confront. Barring extreme forms of isolation (denial being the final step of genocide, according to the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust), personal trauma is never fully separate from societal trauma. By investigating the rememory of my own personal trauma in relation to the material world, part two of the “Bad Dreams” chapter pointedly confronts the humanization of zombies through sex toys and BDSM rituals: as flagrant, vulgar displays of phallic, toy-like “violence.” When playing with these eroticized, modular pieces, iconoclasts are working with trauma as recovered from, but also stored between, individual performers, social groups and the material world.
That more or less covers the basics of rape play’s context. Let’s conclude the subchapter by looking at some sex-positive examples from my own life (which will work backwards towards my own lived abuse, in part two of “Bad Dreams”).
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Before we proceed unto the examples, though, I want to give several quick, holistic, symposium-style reminders (three pages); i.e., about the context of rape as something to perform. Consent-non-consent is informed consent, so better safe than sorry!
First and foremost, personal and collective traumas can either assist or undermine the humanization of zombies belonging to the same process of abjection; i.e., as something to canonize or camp (thus reverse). It’s up to the individual to determine which way this goes, but always through the larger capitalist world as something to conform with or rebel against through the help of one’s allies. Even then, state proponents and class traitors must be considered, including the ways in which they sabotage class struggle and consciousness; i.e., through the coercion trifecta weighing on the experience of abused children who grow into abusers, themselves. These, in turn, poison the nightmare as a bourgeois instrument that must become gay and campy in service to workers (and their trauma) once more!
For part two of “Bad Dreams,” I shall demonstrate how by inspecting the evolution of my own creative process within these broader parameters; i.e., from my own traumatic childhood and into adulthood, becoming increasingly genderqueer over time despite the presence of systemic, necromantic traumas seeking to closet and silence me… inside a coffin but also above ground: where the undead entity is exposed, vulnerable, and ripe for fatal, pro-state penetration. Through such dogmatic tortures ruthlessly exacted upon the young (or young-at-heart) as “young, dumb and full of cum,” capital punishment reduces state victims to a vegetative mindset the elite can reliably harvest (or use to harvest others with) as needed: per Radcliffean exorcism and monomythic calls to violence tied to formulaic romance as heroically unrealistic by virtue of it not mattering either way[4]: the perception of strength and danger to mobilize police violence against the usual undead victims by the usual braindead cops.
By comparison, the remainder of this subchapter concerns a more enlightened, sex-positive approach as already having occurred based on that history as something I survived my own rape regarding: universal worker liberation (from alienation and fetish-grade sexualization), which occurs within the feeling of one being watched as a matter of performing “rape” in quotes; i.e., the zombie’s ambiguously “alive” (and queer) gaze haunting the performance, mid-ludo-Gothic-BDSM, but also one’s body as bare and exposed: her tits were there, along with everywhere else lying in wait… to gobble up state enforcers, taking their power!
As we’ll see in the following exhibits, power is both a ritual, then, and something to perceive as going different ways. Sexist men, for example, classically fear the Medusa, but also are drawn to her precisely because capital has alienated them from their basic needs and enrichment. Spend enough time with (and inside) her and you might start to realize you’re the state’s arm, attacking and maiming those monstrous-feminine components of nature and labor the elite require you to in order for them to profit. It’s simple and brutal, but remains an effective trap that continues to work into the new millennium: a book or some-such instrument of the dead to—like Jim Henson’s titular Dark Crystal—take power for the elite through those who all the same struggle to control it.
Except while canon operates through the eyes as the mechanism that is most widely used to enslave workers (a quick path to the brain), this aforementioned monopoly isn’t absolute. Furthermore, the difference between canon and something akin to Henson’s Crystal (and similar works—again our rape-play exhibits, next) is effectively an anisotropic, children’s-story critique of such things; i.e., one that dares to suggest it could go both ways.
By comparison, the likes of weird canonical nerds like Sam Raimi (who we’ll explore more in the Demon Module) and other unironic, Pygmalion-style practitioners of abjection through Orientalism (re: Blizzard, Naughty Dog and so many others) will always serve profit by pushing genocide to the margins of Western civilization. In doing so, they effectively scapegoat older (usually non-white) empires and victims; re: the process of abjection, per the ghost of the counterfeit, which “displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell” (re: David Punter). Aa always, this kind of jungle fever sends a Christ-like figure (the middle class, playing Jesus) into rapture; i.e., martyring themselves and the usual victims of state abuse through a spurious guilt trip, a lie presented as “truth.” Perception becomes reality to such persons.
In short, this abjection can be reversed through various splendid lies (e.g., kayfabe), but our focus shall be the rape exhibit at its most naked and extreme.
Even with less extreme forms/performers, though (re: Henson), there remains unto both a dark undercurrent: liberation occurring within rememory as playing with the same funerary incantations, demonic resurrection passages, and Gothic exchanges used by all—a sort of “church curtain” raised by groups of people with a shared goal against the state; i.e., using the various danse macabre to camp exploitation as always being haunted by ghosts of the real thing (and its moral panics) behind canon’s typical obfuscations (disempowerment, death, rape, mutilation, etc). Any manipulation canonically serves profit; any successful camp does not, preventing rape by playing with “rape” as something to speak to past abuses actually suffered—to show the audience one’s rape, normally unspeakable, as something to act out, mid-enjoyment on a reclaimed stage (churchly or not). But this takes practice—of being careful and thorough to avoid harming others; re: through calculated risks, not unnecessary or unplanned ones (a history of Gothic-coded bad decisions we’ll examine in the Demon Module, once more dragging Radcliffe, before pushing away from such gaffs in Volume Three).
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
Last but not least, rape—as something to play with—is always a risk under capital, is always something that returns in zombie-like fashion (an “epidemic,” in political language). To prevent actual harm, workers must return to the site of older trauma (the grave) as threatening to come back, post-anniversary (returning from the grave, again and again and again…); i.e., to learn from it, but also use it to establish new boundaries with. To that, there is always a partially imaginary and playful, campy element to rape play—of going back in time to move forward in a circle; e.g., from Percy Shelley’s timeless “Ozymandias” to Charles Dickens’ ghostly tryptic A Christmas Carol to Rocky Horror‘s “Let’s do the time warp!” to the Muppets, and onwards to these current examples I’m about to show you, now.
As I do, remember that from kawaii-to-kowai, big power and trauma often lurk on the surface of gentler-looking (and smaller) bodies, their double operations showing and revealing different things useful to state or proletarian agency through Gothic reenactments of paradise lost; i.e., of shattered innocence, of childhood devastation confusing pleasure and harm through conflations of psychosexual pleasure-and-pain responses inviting the audience to consider an uneven pedagogy of the oppressed: look on those of us affected by rape and see how we cope with the trauma it forces us to live with. Just as often, our attempts to express ourselves are policed; i.e., through the discourse itself as something whose own imperialism of theory (re: Sandy Norton) is a matter of choice normally serving the state, one our own revolutionary forms of sex-positive expression rail against to invite speculative thought about receiving state abuse: from the zombie’s perspective.
To these performances I’m going to be showing you, then, surviving rape is only the beginning for those made undead as a matter of consequence. Doing so leaves a massive hole inside victims that only the Numinous—however brief or fabricated (re: Dennis Cooper’s Frisk, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, etc)—can truly fill. It can seem odd, then, to watch people submit to “rape” as a theatrical means of transgressive exhibitionism that is so obviously bogus and verging on the real deal. Except—and this is very important to remember—it’s not actually rape unless irony (and mutual consent) are absent from the act-in-question.
This brings us to the consent-non-consent exhibit. Wanting to do the process justice, I’ve felt driven to include as much as I possibly can. As such, we’ll be demonstrating rape play both as an act and testament to lived abuse (nothing is deadlier or more conducive to rape/genocide than the silence surrounding it). That being said, the following has extended into a messy soup of various examples; i.e., one that features rape play between myself and either Harmony Corrupted or Cuwu, while also going over the theatrical-historical mechanics and half-real, therapeutic elements which present and regard the complex emotional state of rape survivors. Myself included, we’re commenting on ludo-Gothic BDSM through a testimony that, per an attempt to illustrate the fun and games being had, suitably feels “off the cuff,” whimsical, and fragmented.
Rest assured, while that might sound ominous at first blush, and while these images certainly look extreme at a glance, they’re still just that—half-real acts of rememory for the viewer to study and consider the undead paradoxes at work. Often at war with themselves and their surroundings’ imaginary past as caught historically-materially between the two, everything strives to communicate displaced abuse in language that readily imparts the source and result of undeath: the trauma of rape. Here, I will try to explore and preserve the intimacy of me and my friends’ healing from it with a degree of poignancy, color and love.
(exhibit 37b1a: Artist: Zuru Ota. As a matter of profit, rape serves settler-colonial systems by dividing its recipients into different groups as a matter of genocide; i.e., it makes people feel undead through botched love as instructional, but especially historical recipients of such abuse under patriarchal systems that have grown more predatory over time: women—but especially white cis-het women—being made to fear rape as something the state uses to triangulate them against its other victims through legitimized violence. To break the curse, these living-dead girls must learn exactly what they want as being fundamentally at odds with the structures they haunt having divided them inside and outside of themselves. Their exhibits of “rape” must speak cryptonymically to the consequences of rape normally harvesting them and nature at large; e.g., reducing the party-in-question to something of a toilet, a cum dump for useless semen either divorced from sexual reproduction, or in competition over the same entity as something to dominate in activities that have little if anything to do with actually reproducing. It’s about power as something to communicate in order to subvert or enforce its usual lopsidedness.
Recall that legitimacy under current Western models is to conform to one’s position of disadvantage under profit as administered by white European men and their allies; e.g., women being performatively subservient as virgins and targeted for police violence anyways; i.e., as whores, whereupon the two elide on the same performer less as one or the other and more as both to varying degrees at once: “I can be your angel or devil,” your Athena or Medusa, your Hippolyta, etc. They are often at war with each other in ways we’ve already discussed in this series, and which you should keep in mind, here; re [from Volume One]:
It bears repeating that [the imaginary] past is sewn with conflict and confusion—not because it is old, but because its ownership is challenged. Its monsters—and the various instructions they supply as gargoyles—are generally at war with themselves, mid-lesson; i.e., psychopraxis, psychosexuality, psychomachia, and Amazonomachia through doubles and paradox amid liminal expression as things to view in ways that remain ambiguous. As my thesis argued, “Doubles invite comparison to encourage unique, troubling perspectives that ‘shake things up’ and break through bourgeois illusions.” Gargoyles, like all monsters, double people and their conflicted sense of humanity but also supply them with various inhuman qualities that likewise exist within dialectical-material opposition. During oppositional praxis, then, they effectively “go to war.” Praxial stances also double through gargoyles, and grow increasingly ambivalent during the maelstrom. It’s a war of optics, but also of perception linked to one’s state of mind as thrown worryingly into question near positions/statements of power and trauma. Said statements seem both concrete and oddly fluid [source].
“Gargoyles,” as the quote [and volume] use it, refers to police agents as something to view as a matter of coding the audience through what they see as instructional. The same fear-and-dogma principles are essentially at war with the whore, who is both expected to police their venue while conforming to its heteronormative elements [and tokenized extensions]. They are expected not simply to identify as women, but dirty vermin/chaste, nun-like property that performs readily as either when called upon by a white, cis-het male master as literally or ipso facto owning them. In turn, this unfair position presents nature as monstrous-feminine through devices like the whore or virgin as made to serve profit; i.e., as currently abusing the language of the half-real, chronotopic past to conceal its own atrocities at a systemic level: rape shows and hides itself through cryptonyms.
Psychomachy aside, the virgin performance is coveted and owned, the whore performance chased for quick, dirty thrills that, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, subversively translate to the whore reclaiming their power through the usual modes of Gothic poetic expression; e.g., sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, heavy metal, videogames, penny dreadfuls, etc; i.e., camping “rape” to establish boundaries the usual benefactors of capital cannot cross without outing themselves as harvesting nature as usual: raping it. Historical abuse is always at least adjacent to psychosexual expression, but it [and its exploitation] is not automatic insofar as exhibiting and exploring sexual violence through art is a matter of performance: spousal rape, but also gang rape by mythical rapacious forces; e.g., “zombies” being code for black men, but also non-white agents of any gender or color against straight white women, period. Such things canonize per a particular kind of double standard/oscillating rhetoric: “The monstrous-feminine is always weak and strong as a matter of acting slutty and chaste, ordinary and demonic, undead and pure,” etc.
Keeping this in mind, would it really surprise you to know that such acts are generally loaded with their own internalized elements to embody and overcome? Classically the whore is something to attack and kill as imposturous, alien; i.e., othered by virtue of the presumed maiden’s own shame, guilt, and self-hatred that, per the process of abjection, projects onto a dark, non-Western, oft-Communist reflection. Just as often, though, someone identifies with the whore for precisely those very reasons and must find value in humanizing said struggle by exposing the police element, mid-performance, as a capitalist one; i.e., in token Amazons, whores, what-have-you. Again, they’re a) visually identical, and b) constitute the battle extending to one’s self as torn between policing the whore and playing with whore-like tropes to subvert their usual police violence; i.e., as yet-another-battle on and offstage, inside and outside oneself: fucking monsters to metal during ritualized forms of “rape” whose outcomes always threaten actual abuse in cartoonishly silly forms.
[artist: Zuru Ota]
That is, canon enforces binaries that thrive on fetishization and alienation to serve capital as patriarchal by design; i.e., as something for the dutiful whore to internalize and the rebellious one to camp pursuant to the same zombie-like enormities [cocks, bodies, power imbalances, etc]. The iconoclastic power of the Gothic comes from working inside hellish dialogs of exploitation, which dissolve binaries through cryptonymy as a means of exposing trauma and feeding in reverse; i.e., paralyzing police agents, mid-observation, by presenting the whore’s “rape” as something to camp and haunt with its own actual violation: the original rape and its advertisement as felt within camp’s reclamation of it. The threat display becomes a playful declaration/pun, “Over my dead body!”
That is, the guilty parties are forced to observe a form of undead play they cannot participate in, one that makes rape impossible by virtue of mutual consent as something to illustrate during calculated risk; i.e., not as dogma, but de facto good sex education through the same aesthetics of power and death the Gothic thrives on. If you camp the threat, it loses much of its dogmatic power but retains its paradoxically treat-like ability to please the usual recipients of the threat. Escape becomes a matter of performance that is commonly sought out of consequence, pushing our luck behind Aegis-like buffers to flash our abusers with: in and out of a dark shadow space, akin to Hell as our river Styx to dive into while seeking power of a particular kind. It’s a paradox we feel compelled to return to when triggered by reminders of our own deconstruction—our rape—as having made us undead to begin with.
For performers seeking paradoxical empowerment, then, actual rape often has one of two prominent side effects that color these artistic displays: asexuality or nymphomania. In keeping with psychomachia, both occur with a fair degree of performative overlap; i.e., sex, for those who survive its purely harmful forms, generally exude a frank degree of vulnerability onstage when seeking Hell; i.e., through various acts or bartering mechanisms that use things they are desensitized towards, but especially the rape symbols they camp, onstage. In doing so, the performance becomes simultaneously detached and indulgent as a matter of negotiation and play towards actual empowerment under capital as designed to rob us blind; i.e., as something to liberate ourselves through these performances as educational by virtue of their theatrical qualities challenging canon: establishing and testing boundaries, including the audiences’ own comfort levels!
In turn, these generally boil down to projection onto a performer regarding the usual vulnerable elements simply being exposed at all; e.g., the genitals as a kind of offering to the viewer torn between different feelings about rape as a generally spontaneous and legendary crime the performance flaunts the historical victim’s vulnerability in defiance of. It’s not a fear of the reaper but a teasing of them with the usual harvested goods; i.e., tempting fate.
[model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]
Except “rape,” unlike rape, actually takes practice; you have to learn how to communicate and recognize the boundaries [and Gothic codes] at play that are likewise constantly being [re]established on a daily basis, while also knowing what kind to establish—in short, how to play “rape” out in quotes, using the various symbols of power and death that overcrowd the venue. There’s both a) some general rules you can bring to any play session, and b) a high degree of idiosyncrasy keeping said rules in mind while you build towards the “rape” as echoing actual rape, once-upon-a-time: “hurt, not harm” and “learn what they like.” Both occur by openly communicating and asking questions, mid-playtime; i.e., learning what someone likes/dislikes, ahead of time—their BDSM preferences, hard/soft kinks and limits, etc—which, in turn, usually involve some very straightforward questions when putting them to practice, in bed [or wherever the play session is taking place]: “Is this ok?” “Does this feel good?” “Harder? Faster?” and so on.
It’s extremely important to remember that rape play is a hard kink/form of calculated risk that, like all sex-positive examples, wants to avoid harm while playing with the same-old symbols, games, and histories as interwoven. Achieving this aim takes two basic things: a thorough, well-rounded and experienced sense of BDSM, and a play partner who understands [and respects] all of the above before you even start! Learn what you want and don’t want, then operate within the mechanisms of capital as something to alter by your own example: raising awareness through artistic expression doubling as the actual thing while simultaneously not being harmful as a matter of practical exchange. The half-real nature of calculated risk evokes danger as zombie-like; i.e., sitting between history and invention, but also punishment and pleasure as ultimately falling on the latter side of things, provided the zombie is humanized:
[artist: In Case]
If undeath is a consequence, so is the feeding on unequal power as essential to combating one’s zombie-like state. For survivors of rape, “rape” as a matter of theatrical power exchange—e.g., fucking to Slayer nice and hard, your lover’s cock deep in your ass and their hands wrapped carefully around your throat to seem threatening—simply feels good. This healer’s plight, the paradox of pain, speaks to a complicated truth within capital: trauma shapes our weird appetites while living under abusive systems. In turn, these same systems trigger us; except, to survive and thrive as emotionally and Gothically intelligent people, we must learn to seek oblivion/spifflication as a sensation, not an actuality!
For instance, not everyone wants “true love” by virtue of prescription; some people, having survived abuse, just want sex, cuddles, pain, or whatever else you might call “the simpler things in life.” For me, that’s the Numinous, which I present as palliative to my psychosexual urges, triggers, and maladaptive survival mechanisms resulting from genuine abuse. Like me, others learn what they want as an equally puzzling means of chasing the dragon, then having to learn how to ask for the medicine from the dragon without actually getting choked to death [most cis-het men have a very literal interpretation of domination, squeezing the neck like they’re trying to break it]: to dress up different invitations of “danger” and “rape” as a carefully prepared matter of calculated risk that many virgins to trauma won’t understand, thus cannot be trusted to execute safely.
Except, the privileged must learn if we are to heal as a society from rape; i.e., by subverting capital and its usual instructors thereof! Volume One’s “Healing from Rape” establishes the basic idea; re: through Cuwu and I learning about rape as something to relate to each other from opposite ends of, thus heal from according to my listening to them about rape appearing in media indicative of the abuse they suffered. As something to dance with, trauma becomes a demonstration in hindsight; i.e., an undead, uncanny ability to summon and dismiss, mid-contest, by virtue of one’s appearance sexily beckoning the destroyer out of the past, to then reify your supremacy as stronger having survived it before. You chuck that fucker into the stratosphere, looking graceful and delicate as you do, but also like Cuwu did: “Strong, strong, strong!”
[artist: Hamza Touijri]
For one, such implements aren’t so odd. As I write in Volume One; re:
The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. […] Simply put, the Gothic is where we retreat to interrogate our trauma (and relative guilt, desire, anxiety and other repressed emotions) in relation to other survivors; i.e., to trauma-bond through the usual displays of music, violence and sex [source].
Whatever the form or paradox, then, one’s lived experiences commonly reify inside Gothic media as rather oxymoronic. Without a pedagogy of the oppressed poetically tailored to help us find similarity amid difference, though, this can feel incredibly alienating for both parties: one damaged to push-pull towards and from echoes of said damage, the other suitably concerned, guilty and confused for having not living through those kinds of events the same way.
For example, when relating to Cuwu, I thought I hadn’t been raped because it wasn’t sexual [from Volume One] like their abuse was:
While I have been beaten and mentally tortured, for example, I have never been sexually raped […] However, I know many workers who have been raped. Listening to them has helped radically change my systemically privileged views, but also reflect on my own lived trauma and complex emotional abuse compared to theirs [ibid.].
My thoughts on that have changed, insofar as I currently feel like I was raped differently than Cuwu—emotionally versus sexually. But we were still a part of the same conversation; i.e., one had between us about such stories as things to relate to and perform ourselves:
After the film was over, we talked about it from Cuwu’s point of view as someone I related to in both sexual and asexual ways. Doing so frankly opened my eyes to what, for them, was an everyday experience: living with the trauma and threat of rape as something for you and others to behold, often as voyeurs, but also as BDSM practitioners fetishizing our own survived abuse in psychosexual, Gothic forms. Many of the fantasies that Cuwu and I played out reflected the sorts of unspoken abuses generally granted some kind of voice in Gothic fictions. The choking hand is, at its most basic level, meant to relieve stress from having seen something stressful that reminds you of an abuser who won’t follow your commands [ibid.].
To that, the idea of any long-lasting friendship is stability. To achieve that as a matter of good praxis, abuse victims need to learn how to acknowledge each other’s survival as different according to power affecting us differently. Indeed, it was Cuwu’s inability to ultimately respect my boundaries and survival story that led to our friendship breaking apart like it did; they didn’t heed my instructions, falling victim to their own condition as aping Maynard James Keenan’s “Stinkfist” [1996] chorus:
Just not enough, I need more
Nothing seems to satisfy
I said, I don’t want it, I just need it
To breathe, to feel, to know I’m alive [source: Genius].
A certain amount of regressive vanity is required to control a scenario as matter of submissive roleplay. In Cuwu’s case, their own survival mechanism was maladaptive to predatory extremes; i.e., it operated through being seen by someone they could control through their bodily displays: controlling the entire room through their vanity as borderline, their personality disorder coming to life through their fractured, undead sense of self. This ceaseless, draconian vampirism started through our disagreements spilling into our play time, our conversations, and ultimately our time apart.
[artist: Cuwu]
All of these borderline attractions to destructive, psychosexual power and back-and-forth arguments between actors/players probably seem rather odd to the uninitiated. In truth, it only really makes sense if you’ve been there yourself, touched by death as something to spend the rest of your life camping to best strike that precarious balance [from Volume Two, part one]:
The greatest irony of Jadis harming me […] is they accidentally gifted me with the appreciation of calculated risk. Scoured with invisible knives, I don’t view my scars as a “weakness” at all; I relish the feeling of proximity to the ghost of total power—of knowing that motherfucker took me to the edge but didn’t take everything from me: I escaped them and lived to do my greatest work in spite of their treachery! Like the halls of a cathedral, my lived torments and joys color this castled work, ornamenting its various passages with the power of a full life. I’ve known such terror that makes the various joys I experience now all the more sweet and delicious. I am visited by ghosts of my rapturous design, the empress of my fate, the queen of a universe shared with seraphs the likes of which I can hardly describe; “no coward soul is mine” [source].
From Jadis to Cuwu to myself, the undead generally feed as a matter of seeking an old trauma to fill themselves out with, undoing the hollowed-out shell after their initial wounding.
Addictive and undead paradoxes aside, there’s always something that somebody wants, for which others can provide that as a matter of exchange that cannot, unto itself, be monopolized. Such barter occurs through a matter of play that is, to some degree, coded; i.e., by virtue of one euphemism [or physical object] swapped in and out for whatever you can think of: cupcakes for popcorn, or “cupcakes” for “popcorn.” It’s less about avoiding the playing of games altogether and more about recognizing who you’re playing with, how and where; i.e., determining intent through a matter of good play/acting versus bad play/acting through ludo-Gothic BDSM while establishing fresh boundaries to increase success as a matter of preventing rape [risk reduction]: the thrill of the danger haunting the venue without causing the harm normally associated with it.
[artist: Cuwu]
This paradox occurs within a given venue whose rules during interpersonal exchange [versus, say, a bar or dance club] are not writ in stone to nearly the same extent, but for which the players are contributing to something larger [a proletarian Superstructure] that is challenged by state dictates and operatives! From there, you establish trust and work towards the moment at hand, which serves another important function: challenging the ways in which power is normally presented and performed in canonical media [a deliberate lack of clear boundaries or consent]. Putting “rape” in quotes is camping its normal performances as a matter of acting and actually committing said behaviors; i.e., in a half-real sense, on and offstage as a liminal activity that graduates to more advanced forms. Rape can happen anywhere; it can likewise be camped as such, provided people are taught how.
The Gothic classically has a historical element to its fabrications marrying fact with fiction, as well as the abject and obscene to the ordinary by what are effectively weird art nerds. Such education, then, stems from recreations of the imaginary past as “rapacious”; e.g., Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” constituting a curious British trend at the time: possessing but also replicating said urns to convey a particular message to interpret the past from a modern perspective romanticizing the ancient past in, at times, highly inventive ways[5]; i.e., the draw of fatal power as ultimately displaced, far-off and imaginary, thus paradoxically safe per a calculated risk as something to make sex-positive through iconoclastic interpretations, mid-execution. Whether it’s whorish Medusas, Amazons, daddy’s little girl, or some combination of these things, systemic trauma leads to monstrous-feminine that canon will always try to police/rape; and camp, to reclaim.
Say what you will about the undead’s fractured, complex emotions; it’s less complicated from a dialectical-material standpoint and more through how the state complicates our attempts to humanize ourselves through “rape” fantasies. The reoccurring issue is, canonical stories generally rely on “confidence” as a matter of men [and token agents] acting first, “making a move” based on what amounts to telepathy and dogma through Man Box entitlement; i.e., the kind that treats sex like a heteronormative reward that serves profit: relations—be they sex and/or love—presenting as “taking” and always more, more, more!
In short, white cis-het men are owed sex as a matter of fact; they chase whores and marry Madonnas, but likewise carry these trends out in monomythic refrains that parallel domestic and foreign abuse as a means of harvesting nature-as-monstrous-feminine: per all the usual police violence internalized/externalized as what I have previously called “prison sex” mentality. While Cuwu became predatory as a submissive agent, dominant agents—generally men and tokenized Man Box proponents—generally become police agents through the same system; e.g., TERFs, but also media that seeks control in ways that discourage the kind of introspection I mentioned as previously occurring between Cuwu and I. Either shows how media and people share the same spaces. Keeping that in mind, we can go easily enough from Cuwu’s controlling the room, to something quaint and seemingly innocent as the formulaic vigilantism in ’90s kids cartoons; i.e., anything that can be consumed, thus absorbed and passed along.
For instance, despite a random show like Swat Kats [1994] having admittedly awesome music[6] to rock out to well past its show date, the production yields the same underlying problem as TMNT and other neoliberal media we’ve already examined: a complicit cryptonymy per open-secret police identities. Through such devices, police agents historically project their insecurities onto their victims as a matter of dogma; i.e., are expected to police their wives and anything else that qualifies as property from/of nature for them to litigate by force: raping nature as something “wild” to tame. Except, its subsequent rape, harvesting and undeath all become, like Cuwu, a kind walking contradiction present in both parties: a little zombie/dark mother to befriend by camping the whole ordeal as well as we both could!
[artist: Cuwu]
To that, camp’s surreal nature remains haunted by mighty ghosts that come alive through us and our games’ semi-secret identities yielding a dominator flavor to their visual code: the monstrous-feminine class of destroyer as a theatrical device loaded with all the usual historicized fetishes and clichés made for or against the state on different registers. Due to their own age and damage, Cuwu couldn’t handle it, flying apart at the seams [the photo is strictly period blood, mind you]: preying on me while offering themselves up behind closed doors, per an escalating decay of our usual bedroom dialogs.
By comparison, Harmony can take on these kinds of fantasies, treating them as fun and healing for both of us in a very toy-like fashion:
[artist: Harmony Corrupted]
As she demonstrates, it’s all a matter of stability as something to work on; i.e., through the games we play together contributing towards this book: healing from rape through an informed process. By comparison, hawks/police agents are often victims of the state who, radicalized to its service, will take any theoretical or cosmetic aspect to praxis, synthesis and aesthetics they then us to embody the state’s trifectas and monopolies.
In regards to them, there’s no room for anything else—the monstrous-feminine at large—to negotiate, unless these boundaries [and associate trust] are tested and ultimately reestablished by the likes of myself, Harmony and, yes, Cuwu; i.e., as a messy and complicated means of confronting the usual arbiters of sex, terror and force: as something to overcome by humanizing their usual victims on the same stages of lost childhood. So many weirdos want to regress to childhood as a means of raping others for real [e.g., “when men were men and women cis-gendered and submissive“]; we want to camp it to expose such nonsense, dissecting the past as, like the Creature by Shelley was, kept alive for its beauty amid pain. Like a rainbow in the sky, it touches us before it fades, staying with us in ways that we never want to end: “In your sleep, I hear you say, ‘Don’t let the morning take him'” [Judas Priest’s “Before the Dawn,” 1979]. Moreover, it becomes a very hellish way to see the world:
To that, Cuwu and I knew each other long enough to become familiar with what the other liked and enjoyed, and communicated constantly in terms of these things whenever we played. The same now goes for Harmony and me, but as something more mature and stable, less spiraling and draining of me [quite the opposite, in fact]. All of it goes into the book, including our own instances of consent-non-consent for your consideration—as a matter of pride, something we want to show off so you can learn by our example. It should become second-nature first in bed, and then on a cultural level that transforms the societal treatment of such things; i.e., as a constant relationship between real life and media as half-real, but also plastic:
[artists: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard]
In short, no matter how massive a hyperobject like Capitalism seems, it can be transformed through smaller, simpler abstractions of itself and its abuse. Liberation is gained through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a showcase thereof: escaping inside the places that normally imprison us to receive/deliver unironic harm like zombies. The showcase is the apocalypse and we are the zombies, our “violent” performance adjacent to real-world harm in the same kinds of exploitative spaces and aesthetics. It’s nice meeting someone with baggage who knows how to work through that with you to synthesize catharsis as a means of good praxis, not unironically dominating the Madonna or the whore [as survival sex work forces the monstrous-feminine to be]. It’s often absurd, silly and, yes, fun: a stress button to push not once, but over and over!
To that, Harmony is an excellent friend and comrade, and I love surrendering my power to them, but likewise love being the dutiful, loving service top who can ravish them or even—with their trust and permission—”rape” them per all the usual cryptonymies, buffers and codes we use to get our point across [with soothing pep talks often coming into play to coax someone into coming (the little death) when they’re close and trying to cum[7]; e.g., “You’re working so hard! Do you need to come? Yeah, that’s it… Come for me, baby… Just let it all out for me… Good girl…”]! This includes imperatives like “rape me” as something to follow through in ways that don’t cause harm—quite the opposite, actually! More to the point, it’s a service that not only goes both ways, but gives back to those normally without; i.e., through evocations of the dead per our orgasms, vaso vagal responses, and disassociative performances having an element of truth to them[8], but also a performative, intersecting history that gleefully invokes the devil as someone to summon in jest while earnestly exposing taboo things; e.g., Nicolo Paganini famously rolling his eyes back into his skull[9] to evoke elements of rapture, of possession, by a devilish agent aping a Godly force that normally prohibits power and knowledge exchange: showing off.
Such “dumb suppers” actually tend to be rather loud; i.e., involve us freezing on command through the contest of “rape” as camp, only to give back to the workers of the world: showing them how to become better stewards of nature and ourselves in our own exquisite “torture” dungeons. It’s not so different than playing a fighting game and quoting the vice character domming you or vice versa; e.g., Shang Tsung saying “Your soul is mine!” from Mortal Kombat or any such recreation of what really is a very old theatre trope: the baddie, the vampire, the Destroyer as a kind of “necro dom” [daddy or otherwise]. It’s an act, a paradoxical form of comfort [and to which Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa is actually rather sleek and soft spoken compared to his deep-throated menace, onscreen[10]]: the sort you love to hate, but also camp.
[source: r/MortalKombat]
We pick up these tricks from all over the place. Childhood aside, I actually picked the basic idea up from school and Jadis, who was drawn to my weirdness and they mine; i.e., as a matter of lived trauma/stolen childhood something we both returned to in popular media to reclaim our stolen power from; re: Mortal Kombat as something we both liked, including the recursive, endlessly self-referential memes breaking the fourth wall. It’s essentially Matthew Lewis’ bad echo as camping rape, murder and undead violence; i.e., as a kind of memento mori that stretches backwards and forwards to be used for different aims [we fags love memes].
More to the point, it was something we could do together whenever we wanted; e.g., “murder dick” [during period sex] and “war bride scenarios” [when Jadis was domming me and I submitting to them: “I’m keeping this one!”]. Jadis, of course, was too damaged to not avoid abusing me, favoring the kind of unequal, coercive BDSM that inspired me to invent something better based on older works [more on that in just a moment]. But lucky me, I escaped and went on to pass a healthier message along through future recreation—with Cuwu and then Harmony!
The paradox of rape is the desire to feel safe while “in danger.” It might seem corrupted and jumbled from passage to passage, then, except the corruption is the data. Capital makes us reliably feel out of control, which we must play with to regain control through intimations not just of our abuse, but older forms that fascinate us; i.e., the means, materials and methods of placing “rape” in quotes through ludo-Gothic BDSM as needing some element of vice to camp. It’s often rather silly onstage and off [re: Mortal Kombat, above].
However, it’s also incredibly hot when you get the balance right, and important, too, insofar as capital marks us for trauma; i.e., as zombies looking to recreate our own abuse in non-harmful forms! In short, we seek to feed to sate our odd appetites without harming anyone [versus police violence/DARVO arguments tied to these same spaces as “non-lethal,” but in truth designed to disperse and control us by any means necessary to achieve false power and rebellion; i.e., weird canonical nerds breaking their toys but also hogging them through false preaching and penitence—a staunch refusal to change versus trying to despite past sins]. More to the point, this becomes a vital means of altering the sexist paradigm under capital, not predatorily enforcing the monomyth [ordinary people in a fantastic place] as it presently exists by abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit as it so commonly manifests: a zombie, an undead sex doll, a slave—a victim!)
Despite the above examples’ consensual nature, I strongly suspect they and their subject matter are taboo (from a bourgeois standpoint) because they lead to liberation in sex-positive forms that challenge profit; i.e., how not to rape people by “raping” them during rememory. When rape is impossible, the sub has the upper hand, but no one wants to be a doormat (as we’ll see with me and Jadis, in the next subchapter); it helps if the dom is good at playing with “dolls” (dressing them up or hosing them down, below). This gives us plenty of room to play on/toy with the zombie-like trauma present within us—sometimes quite literally!
For example, Cuwu and I would sometimes do consent-non-consent through “somno,” aka sleep sex, as a kind of zombie-like exchange (the body rather limp and doll-like when asleep):
(exhibit 37b1b: Artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard after a consent-non-consent “somno” ritual. Our relationship, though brief, yielded some good examples of what I now call ludo-Gothic BDSM. For added context, these before-and-after photos of Cuwu and I show them, asleep, having taken sleeping medication so I could fuck them while they slept. They were really into the idea—liked being my little doll/cumdump! They wanted quite vocally to be visited in the night and ravished [to which I obliged while thinking of Eddie Money’s Dracula spoof, “I Think I’m in Love!” 1982].
Death, as it generally is in the Gothic since Lewis and Radcliffe, wasn’t an ending of anything at all, but a swelling of paradoxical life among the deathly imagery as undead, erotic, intensely seeking to give and deliver what is normally lacking in our lives onstage, and generally to [white, middle-class] women as haunted by trauma; i.e., as something for them to play with to escape abuse: graveyard sex. Or as Gladys Hall writes in “The Feminine Love of Horror” [1931]:
LUGOSI sat in a deep chair in my library. (One does not go to his house!) A single light burned above him, making his pallid face more pallid, obliterating all but the red lights burning ceaselessly in his too-pale blue eyes. The windows were opened and there came the mournful sound of the wind in the tall boughs of the eucalyptus…Was it only the wind playing in the boughs of the trees…or was it…? No answer. No answer. Better not ask. His voice came, remote and far away, dying down, rising to a penetrating.
He said, “When I was playing Dracula on the stage, my audiences were women. Women. There were men, too. Escorts the women had brought with them. For reasons only their dark subconscious knew. In order to establish a subtle sex intimacy. Contact. In order to cling and to feel the sensuous thrill of protection. Men did not come of their own volition. Women did. Came – and knew an ecstasy dragged from the depths of unspeakable things. Came – and then came back again. And again” (Was there gloating in his voice? Or was it my chilled imagination playing me tricks, feverish and fantastical?).
“Women wrote me letters. Ah, what letters women wrote me! Young girls, women from seventeen to thirty. Letters of a horrible hunger. Asking me if I cared only for maiden’s blood. Asking me if I had done the play because I was in reality that sort of Thing. And through these letters, crouched in terms of shuddering, transparent fear, there ran the hideous note of – hope. They hoped that I was Dracula. They hoped that my love was the love of Dracula. They gloated over the Thing they dared not understand. It gave them something as potent as poison, as separate from their lives as death is separate from life.
“It was the embrace of Death their subconscious was yearning for. Death, the final, triumphant lover. It made me know that the women of America are unsatisfied, famished, craving sensation, even though it be the sensation of death draining the red blood of life. Women gloat over Death. Avidly. Morbidly. They will spend hours discussing the details of death. Over and over again. Wives will spend hours of frightful joy, telling of their husbands’ or their lovers’ last words. They will describe with macabre minutiae the death agonies, the death rattle, the awful ceremony of the mortician, the rites of the cemetery. Have you ever watched a woman talking about death? DON’T. It is women who crowd cemeteries, using anniversaries, the veil of sentiment, the legitimacy of grief. It is women who crouch over graves, loving them, covering them with flowers and tears. Women feed the cemeteries. Without women, the shattered vases that were our bodies would be reduced to decent ash and the ghoulish appetites of the world would be apart of folklore [source: Vampire Over London: September 11th, 2011].
Simply put, vampires slay because they go beyond the nuclear model as something to suggest; i.e., in death-like states of playful, lucid sleep that have a sacred boundary that many will happily enter to violate their martial vows: a graveyard. Rather than recoil from the love that dare not speak its name, they practice it as a matter of good praxis and fun; e.g., the Count shows up and the lady is lying in wait—to chomp on him, Carmilla-style, as much as the other way around:
As Eddie Money [above] shows us, while such things were both incredibly cliché by the time Lugosi played the Count, they certainly were afterwards; and all the same they collectively account for an evolution of genderqueer discourse that, parallel to queer sexuality as a criminal condition, had been given a new evolving voice; i.e., through the sorts of horrors middle-class ladies were starting to realize were better at pleasing them than their boring [and abusive] state-sanctioned grooms! Such things often were/are predatory in ways that generally leach off the queer as objectified by said women, but it’s not always the case.
[artist: Zuru Ota]
Just as often, “danger” excites these women relative to what they’re told is dangerous but isn’t. Their pussies get wet [and their emotions high, their fangs coming out] because they know they can’t get hurt, thus have some sense of control in camping things the way that Gothicists generally do: hyphenating sex [especially the orgasm and vasovagal response] and camping harm through the theatrical language of food, war and death [there’s also an element of graveyard culture and paid mourners/troubadours romancing loss, but I digress]; i.e., “Take me, I’m yours!” Translation: “Stake this fat ass, stab that pussy! Fuck me like you mean it! Yes, yes, yes!!!” [sex, when done right, looks/sounds like your recipient is dying—especially female, but also prostate orgasms].
[artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu]
Like a graveyard’s tombstones, these provide a memento mori to regard as keepsake; e.g., Cuwu repeatedly asking me for proof of such things—hence the photos of their doll-like, seemingly lifeless body evoking historically compromising positions, which we enacted in future play sessions where they were more awake[11]; i.e., seemingly harmful but in truth safely negotiated as a means of sexual healing and good, naughty fun. However, while such puzzles—of it being difficult to illustrate mutual consent through similar photos—became the premise for Sex Positivity as it currently exists, Cuwu sadly went on to drain me not just of my cum, but my wits: from them being an abusive sub, a “phallic woman” but with GNC elements [from their being trans]. But, like Eddie and the lady from the music video, I still learned a valuable lesson from their shitty treatment of me: that knowledge—like the “blood” in John Donne’s 1633 “Flea” poem—is passed along through the same straws and cups; i.e., through literal fluid, but also a fluid-like, playful exchange as patently undead and hungry for, as Cuwu would put it, “more, more, more!”
[artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]
Simply put, ludo-Gothic BDSM could not exist without Cuwu’s harming of me, but also the sheer fun we had mixed up in all that Gothic sublimity-made-flesh: wanting to fuck, plain and simple. A little vampy fae cloaked in red and pink, Cuwu was someone with many different sides to them, as far as that went. I want to show some of those here—not out of spite, but as a matter of respect and love; i.e., what they helped contribute towards, in the end, as a product of said feelings, thoughts, and praxis as playing with fire, Prometheus-style. This exhibit’s for you, Cuwu!)
I could continue the exhibit and want to, but we must press on. Hopefully I’ve at least conveyed that trauma is both the lighting that strikes you dead, and the thunder that charges your emotions and scrambles your brains. Once it visits you, you never really forget it; you become undead. As such, it leaves a tremendous scar but also a memory you’ll to want to revisit under elements of control that evoke its power as felt, but ultimately harmless; i.e., the return of the castle space to subvert its seasonal tortures: capital’s historical-material zombies and apocalypses. “Rape” becomes the opposite of rape and profit, then; i.e., as something to challenge Capitalist Realism’s usual illusions, albeit with theatrical tensions informed by the latter to grant the former its bizarre undead healing properties: regeneration by sluttily eating what the zombie can’t digest and the vampire always needs more of.
(artist: Cuwu)
Playing with rape by camping changes how you think, thus see the world as an illusory space that workers can liberate themselves with. To that, old Plato had it wrong: there’s no leaving the cave, “no outside” (as Derrida would put it); there is only subverting its canonical implementations through rape play.
As a matter of rape fantasy being half-real, “rape” becomes incredibly transformative and fun, appreciating humanized instances of such language reclaimed from their rapacious canonical usage (which commercializes such suffering into merchandise to buy during a gold-rush-style FOMO grift): a veteran cutie’s strong ceiling/zombie-like tolerance for pleasurable pain[12] amid nerve-wracking conditions made into theatrical “peril” (combined with the architecture of their body/genitals—their floor, roof, wall, etc); i.e., to mess with their various prey to survive bad-faith parties and enrich good-faith parties through the same appetites, the same thirst.
“Captured,” then, such a being becomes suitably untouchable, entering a playful, sarcastic-yet-endearing state of devilish grace that siphons power out of traditional disempowering scenarios (of being shown who the boss is). It’s not a put-down, but a position of power reclaiming itself as such—by summoning the succubus, the slut, the destroyer as monstrous-feminine, motherly and secure in her liberatory goals. Medusa might be the undead whore, the sex demon, but she’s nobody’s bitch: stacked, loud, and not to be fucked with.
(artist: Amber Mimsy)
This might sound like the usual topos of power of women, except its Gothic-Communist, thus GNC. Camped for maximum effect/expressiveness, these allow for the zombie’s continued survival as a subversive, playful means of winking at the audience, mid-“rape”; i.e., as potentially having abusers in it to provoke through camp that leads to systemic change by exposing them and raising effective boundaries during ludo-Gothic BDSM: “I’m totally being raped right now!” Such cryptonymy is a powerful revolutionary device, insofar as it puts capital’s usual watchdogs in a precarious position where their brute, dumb force and repulsive mindset towards the monstrous-feminine aren’t to their usual advantage.
Like all monsters, then, zombies are made during their formative years as apocalyptic, revealing future abuse as built on past forms of theatre home to such things (quotes or not). While homemaking trauma through more skillful rape play (thus better communication) is the idea, such subversive, cryptonymic reclamations—of so-called “hysteria” killing our darlings by camping them with the same stigmatic, at-times-anecdotal symbols and taboo theatrical devices—can still be very intense, when challenging profit: silly and serious as sex and bodily functions normally are (farts, ejaculations, blurted dirty talk, zombie-like O faces, etc), but especially Gothic castle-like spaces and bodies’ “rape” scenarios extending into life as something to bravely face: our past as something to return to during rememory without the rose-tinted glasses of youth (“There is no place like home!”), nor its perceived “safety” or compelled binaries; e.g., the perils of a woman (especially a young woman) without a man in a man’s world extending to the monstrous-feminine subverting that myth for the monster’s benefit: “A man? Who needs one of those? Gimme the castle!”
From there, we might actively and ironically play with those decayed exaggerated spaces and beings in an involved, emergent, empathetic (culturally appreciative) sense; i.e., to take chances and have adventures in hauntological spaces of death that respect the victims of past police abuse while preventing future ones, mid-enjoyment: a tomb, an arena, and/or bedroom, but also body parts that have a certain size and shape endemic to such scenarios, etc!
(artist: Sakimi Chan)
As we’ll very quickly see, camping “predation” requires putting it in quotes that aren’t automatic—indeed, must be revisited from a time when they weren’t present; re: Jadis raping me versus Harmony and I “raping” each other to help me find peace while now reexploring Jadis’ hellish curse (a kind of threat looming over my head; i.e., sometimes a person-like castle or vice versa)! Catharsis generally stems from returns to trauma, which we’re not immune to. So please remember your safewords and aftercare when ridiculing rape mid-calculated-risk, lovelies! The rememory of dreams are one thing. But also, actual dolls can express “murder” and dismemberment far more literally as memento-mori than humans can (and profit will defend itself by tearing you apart, Tommy-Wiseau-style)!
We’ll explore all of this even more through our undead, toy-like bodies (and body-like toys), next! Onto Jadis, or “Bad Dreams, part two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves (opening and part zero)“!
Footnotes
[1] He once loosed an arrow from my brother’s second-story window and pinned a squirrel to the ground; my brother stomped it to death, and I sadly buried it in the garden. Men teach men to kill animals not for food, but for sport, for profit, for domination—for shows of force against other humans or beings otherwise deserving of humane treatment by humans suddenly deprived of it.
[2] The argument for younger brides is a fascist regression that curiously didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s day (fascism is Capitalism in decay, not feudalism). As J. Karl Franson writes in “‘Too soon marr’d’: Juliet’s Age as Symbol in Romeo and Juliet,” (1996):
William Shakespeare made references to Juliet’s young age in Romeo and Juliet to show that love between boys and girls and early marriage can be treacherous. Shakespeare emphasizes the numbers 13 and 14 in several parts of the play. Romeo refers to Juliet Capulet’s name 14 times in the play, with major events occurring every 14 hours. Juliet’s age is turned into a vehicle that moves the play through its scenes toward the tragic ending. Shakespeare himself was influenced by an unhappy marriage at age 18 (source).
Such stories become nostalgic unto themselves, but contain hidden lessons that speak to our own systemic abuse; i.e., shown and hidden by such playwrights carried and performed into the present.
[3] I.e., the BBC trope, but also the pent-up, animalistic coupling of this with that to find harmony amid forbidden interracial (re)unions healing from Big Rape by putting “rape” in quotes as only Gothic theatre can!
[4] The Quixotic sentiment certainly matters; i.e., convincing the audience that they are somehow as incredible, righteous and invincible as their in-text heroic counterparts, but also paradoxically threatened by an invincible enemy that can only be killed by virtue of their own side of the same dogmatic rubric. It’s less that it’s all bullshit, and more that said bullshit serves a particular purpose: profit, thus genocide.
[5] As Michael Vickers writes in “Value and Simplicity: Eighteenth-Century Taste and the Study of Greek Vases” (1987),
There are two themes which run through the scholarly literature relating to Greek painted pottery over the past two hundred years or more: (1) the view that such pottery was an especially valuable commodity in antiquity, and (2) the idea that pots with simple decoration are somehow more worthy than those which are ornate. The fact that most scholars in the field of classical archaeology today take these ideas for granted should not obscure the reality that they are concepts of relatively recent date and that they have little to do with the values or aesthetic judgments of antiquity (source).
The same idea applies to any concept of “ancient” revisited in modern times, constituting an interpretive but also poetic argument towards the past as either a spurious means of consolidating power towards the usual in-groups and/or delivering the means of policing this power against the usual out-groups; i.e., relaying power through the question of aesthetics as having a quaint, dusty approach to such things dipping in and out of fiction; e.g., Ridley Scott’s “vases” from Prometheus (2012) and Amazonian elements, in overt, 1970s Gothic fiction with a historical element to its inventions, but also outside of such British theatrics: a similar degree of playfulness when academics whitewash Roman marble personas
“Imagine you’ve got an intact lower body of a nude male statue lying there on the depot floor, covered in dust,” Abbe said. “You look at it up close, and you realize the whole thing is covered in bits of gold leaf. Oh, my God! The visual appearance of these things was just totally different from what I’d seen in the standard textbooks—which had only black-and-white plates, in any case.” For Abbe, who is now a professor of ancient art at the University of Georgia, the idea that the ancients disdained bright color “is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art.” It is, he said, “a lie we all hold dear” (source: Margaret Talbot’s “The Myth of Whiteness in classical sculpture,” 2018).
to subsequently view the Roman empire as somehow homogenous and entirely of a single, white presentation useful to settler-colonial projects (and rape) now.
Consider similar arguments, then, relative to Amazonomachia as an ancient artform with heavily modernized interpretations:
Unfortunately, there’s confusion as to just what the Amazonomachy was. Some associate it with the ninth labour of Heracles, others with the battle between the Greeks and Amazon forces led by Penthesilea during the Trojan War, and others with the Attic War resulting in Theseus abducting Hippolyta as his wife. I’ll consider those in tomorrow’s article, but today look at a more general war resulting in the deaths of many Amazons when they were defeated by a substantial Greek army, possibly long before the war against Troy. A reasonably popular theme in painting, even to the present, its most practiced exponent was Peter Paul Rubens, who is attributed two paintings on this theme (source: “Amazons at War,” 2023).
Arguments about the “ancient” world are often false or inventive to serve modern power structures. Unto them and their disparate, jumbled hauntologies, then, there is a total lack of constancy save for European, Cartesian supremacy and its decay (fascism) raping the monstrous-feminine in classically monstrous forms; i.e., police violence against the usual victims in hauntological language serving porfit. As we shall continue to see throughout this volume, this fragmentation and follow-through also applies hauntologically to zombies, vampires and other undead, as well as demons, the natural world and intersections of all of these modular components to make the same basic, us-versus-them arguments during the dialectic of the alien.
[6] That being said, 331Erock’s “SWAT Kats Meets Metal” (2024) is the usual marriage of great music to regressive policies. In this case, his invocation of said policies were originally employed during the Clinton administration by weaponizing the usual blue-collar cops-in-disguise; i.e., to serve the state during neoliberal decay following the 1980s, stringing such scapegoats up like an abject piñata, then shooting them Godzilla-style with militarized cop gear (except, in this case, they appear to win): a literal fighter jet (source: Warner Bros. Classics’ “Intro | SWAT Kats: Radical Squadron | Warner Archive,” 2015) conducting settler colonialism at home as, yet again, something to regress into and grow up with. Such fatal nostalgia is always meant to cozen the kids up to undercover cops presenting as lower-class vigilantes, thus acclimate these audiences to military urbanism when foreign policy becomes domestic policy not once, but again and again under false pretenses, flags, pasts and mythologies that, however imaginary they are, still serve a very real purpose: settler colonialism, thus profit, through genocide.
Faced with such hauntological charm offensives, Sarkeesian’s adage remains vital. For example, I always liked Kats, but readily acknowledge how problematic it all feels in hindsight; i.e., the tendency for American audiences to want regress into childhood fantasy’s as already-decayed (the canceled future)—all to fight (thus abject) cartoon enemies standing in for genocide anxiety felt at home: empire in decay, the proverbial enemy at the gates! The war horn/alarm becomes a fascist lullaby to win future generations to a bellicose nursery preparing them for war felt across different registers; i.e., from children’s cartoons, but also stories like the Bible; e.g., Israel and the book of Joshua as a matter of grim instruction paralleled by Pax Americana like Kats: kill your enemies as cartoon-like zombies in function, not just appearance (GDF’s “Debunking the State of Israel,” 2024)!
[7] Zeuhl would enter an almost fugue-like state when rubbing their clit super-fast, to which me whispering encouragement to them would send them spiraling into an orgasm (the same idea would happen in reverse, Zeuhl gently telling me, “You can fuck me as hard as you want!” when I was close [and sweating like a pig from topping their fat pussy]. It always did the trick).
[8] The fronting of an oblivious shell to protect the mind from rape, but also to help those, post-rape, find closure the only way one generally can: by living with trauma as something to play with and recontextualize through elements of control that give the victim power. For our purposes, this happens while also discouraging power abuse, thus rape, per ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as something that makes us feel whole through catharsis during a palliative Numinous, thus a Communist one that leads to post-scarcity by humanizing the very mechanisms that normally lead to genocide; e.g., Harmony makes me feel whole in ways that address my trauma have emptied me, us playing together filling that void with bad campy echoes of trauma: “rape.”
[9] As Georg Predota writes in, “At the Center of the Music Universe” (2017):
Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) almost single-handedly established a new brand of performing musician, the touring virtuoso. In a brilliant strategy of self-promotion, he even circulated the rumor that he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his uncanny technical abilities. Contemporary eyewitnesses report that during performance “his eyes would roll into the back of his head while playing, revealing the whites. He played so intensely that women would faint and men would break out weeping” (source).
Such rumor-like tall tales continue into the present, whispering of career musicians who sold their souls to get good at their instruments, thus get all manner of shiny rewards; e.g., Crossroads‘ Steve Vai getting the girls, or Charlie Daniels’ “The Devil Went Down To Georgia” (1979) offering up a fiddle of solid gold.
[10] From “Mortal Kombat: The Movie – A Journey Behind The Scenes” (timestamp: 3:41; 1995).
[11] Even during the consent-non-consent sleep sessions, the medication generally wasn’t strong enough to fully knock them out. Sometimes, as I fucked them, Cuwu would smile in their sleep, their rather large vampire mouth more than a little knowing as to what was about to befall them.
(model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)
[12] E.g., the vasovagal response, sub drop and frankly just really good orgasms and full-body workouts, mid-coitus. Sex should rock your world, making you feel temporarily dead to your surroundings; i.e., as a matter of being allowed to lose control and let down your guard (versus the usual hypervigilance of rape victims).