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 two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves (opening and part zero)” left off…
The Rememory of Personal Trauma, part one: Meeting Jadis; or, Playing with Dolls
“You really do have a beautiful body…”
—Jadis, complimenting me on Fetlife (2019)
Whereas part zero of “Personal Trauma” considered ludo-Gothic BDSM’s base mechanics—what it is, the process of exchange it achieves using Gothic poetics, and finally its dialectical-material qualities bucking the “pure psychoanalytic” side of Gothic scholarship (sorry, Barbara Creed, but Freud sucks)—part one shall now consider my meeting Jadis, but also how they liked to play with dolls as much as I did; i.e., as something to inspect and continue learning from, after the fact. I’ve had to divide it in two again because of its size, but will give the entire list, here, before we start.
Keeping with the sorts of devices this chapter has introduced so far into itself—zombies, apocalypses, trauma and rememory—we’ll explore various things about dolls and how to play with them.
Part one of “Meeting Jadis” (included in this post) will explore how dolls
- are often infused with trauma as taken and assembled from different players but also points in time
- poetically engaged with through modular elements ranging not just from undead, but demonic, animalistic and beyond(!)
Part two will consider
- the Gothic (monstrous) relationship between dolls, space-time and foreign-to-familiar evocations of either regarding undead sentiment as a coercive or liberatory device (feat. Alien and The Night House)
- the balancing of a paradox of cuteness that can be used to help or hinder workers depending on who’s using them and how
- the means to subvert a canonical absence of irony, mid-play (taking the opportunity to look at various cartoons with doll-like themes in them; e.g., Steven Universe, 2013 and Scott Pilgrim, 2010)
From stories like Hellraiser to The Night House, dolls classically evoke an out-of-the-closet sense of manipulation and control (Clive Barker being a gay man writing in the ’80s) tied to state abuse as undead; e.g., the lament configuration, above; i.e., enacted at an individual level between players of a given contract. The potential to camp is there, but it always sits next to genocide as a Faustian/Promethean matter of profit. That is, capital predicates on rape as a means of profit to deceive and destroy workers, generally through themselves. To that, doll-like disempowerment is a historically common sensation among women, or things otherwise treated as monstrous-feminine, thus harvested by capital in-between history as real and fabricated; i.e., like the heroine in The Night House, or really any Gothic story. The problem lies in those who, once abused, often go on to abuse others while acting abused themselves long after abuse unto them has become a thing of the past.
Furthermore, as we’ve already explored, you can’t really camp a holocaust as a matter of fact; it happened and it’s no laughing matter. All the same, holocausts are a matter of the past coming back around, which in a hauntological sense we are never fully beholden to or free of. As such, we camp our own survival (thus rape) within these structures and their historical-material loop, which is where dolls, rape play (and yes, Jadis) ultimately come in: as a matter of playing with and performing trauma as something to reify and interrogate on all the usual operatic stages coming out of the Gothic past; re: from Shakespeare to Lewis to us and our own idiosyncratic approaches!
So while we’re talking about rape, here, we’re doing so as much to camp how such things are normally handled. Things will get serious, to be sure, but all the same dolls are fun to play with—silly at times, but also an effective demonstration of what it takes, labor-wise, to exercise rememory through them:
(exhibit 37e1: Model: Harmony Corrupted; artists: Lydia, Persephone van der Waard and Jim32. Rebellion is quite literally a craft, one that involves dolls—or likenesses of people, which dolls essentially are—in some shape or form; e.g., action figures/athletes, but also sex dolls [or things akin to either expressed through sex work]. Whatever the exact type, dolls are homunculi; i.e., generally a smaller instance of a larger reference. More to the point, they take work to realize: planning and drafts, a model, and one or more artists working together to accomplish a shared vision’s theatrical production. The main idea is mine, in this case, but it’s still accomplished through teamwork that contributes to the primary demonstration of said idea and goal; i.e., universal worker liberation through iconoclastic art using Gothic media; re: illustrating mutual consent through informed labor exchanges that challenge Capitalist Realism.
To that, Revana is very much my character by design [as is Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism, whose symbol I designed, next page]. She’s someone I can have stand in for myself, given that I cannot afford gender-affirming surgeries. Even so, she has been drawn by many different artists over the years. In this case, my usual paper doll approach became something to instruct others with; e.g., my friend, Lydia, illustrating a Drow character I later completed on my own and borrowed its wardrobe to dress Revana, Macbeth-style, in borrowed robes [above]. This isn’t someone forced to wear clothes made to objectify her against her will [re: “Borrowed Robes“]; she’s an extension of me, and Lydia helped with that. So did Jim32 and Harmony. All the world’s a stage and we, upon it, had and continue to have a part to play [from Volume Two, part one]:
I’ve often been accused by trans misogynists of devising this book as a wicked scheme: to “just” get laid. First off, while I love getting laid, surely there are far easier ways to have sex than writing a four-volume book series based on ten-plus years of research! Such persons seriously miss the point, then; i.e., my revisiting of old strategies of reflection to bond with new cuties I can teach important lessons (and they me) while we relate back and forth (which making art and having sex both consist of and combine).
The point in doing so is to build on something that liberates all parties, targeting the Superstructure with Gothic poetics mastered by a community of awakened workers building in perpetuity (always out of breath with more to say). This requires trust in good faith, not deception (which my critics seemed to have projected onto me regarding their own humanistic shortcomings): the valuing of that which Capitalism normally cheapens in pursuit of profit.
To this, a director is precisely fuck-all without a muse to blow up, and a model often needs a platform to work their magic. As such, Sex Positivity was and always will be a group effort, its total collective statement on/with artwork and sex work entirely impossible if not for all my muses, models, partners (currently friendly or antagonistic) and friends (sexual or platonic) working in concert. Nor is ours the first. Like the patchwork group of (mostly cis-het male) art nerds who made Alien, celebrating the monstrous-feminine in Gothic panache, my cuties and I don’t own each other while raising temples to our own dark gods. Instead, we’ve worked together to contribute to a diverse, inclusive labor of love that we can all feel proud of; i.e., a dark progeny begot from enthusiastic, heartfelt teamwork [source].
As we shall see, rebellions are fought by whores in the streets—the misfits of society that society normally exploits, in hauntological forms; re, Marx’ “Eighteenth Brumaire”: “And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language” [source]. Revana, then, was very much founded on older historical events and people—specifically the French Revolution and Joan of Arc—to weaponize these ghosts’ cryptomimesis in service to a possible world galvanized by their imperfect resurrections; i.e., unto labor and nature as normally enslaved by capital and Capitalist Realism canonizing these bugbears [so fearsome, rawr]:
[model and artist: Romantic Rose and Persephone van der Waard]
Any information commonly spreads through the vector of sex; i.e., as something captivating to perform, hence occur at least partially through asexual, Gothic treatments of sexuality [force]: as a means of play but also code. A given cryptonymy shows and hides, but can be counted on as reliably magnetic to most audiences [even ace people]. To that, the elite are ok with rebellion as long as it stays in the past as something they can control; i.e., as dead, dogmatic, inert. But we, through our own games and BDSM-style performances, can smuggle the revolutionary past back into the present for workers; i.e., as doll-like undead; e.g., Harmony and I fomenting rebellion inside her pussy as a stand-in for the Romanovs’ doomed palace during a consent-non-consent ritual harboring a general attitude about figures like the Romanovs.
Even so, there remains a child-like element of fun and games to our wild playtime, saying “Off with their heads!” as I creampie Harmony to consummate an imaginary execution; or as Harmony puts it, “Humor makes for the best sex!” The trick, I think, is combining humor with genuine rebellious sentiment as a matter of grim historical violence; re: Matthew Lewis’ camping of canon in The Monk. As such, Gothic-Communist liberation is always made by camping old dead things/symbols that continue to live on trapped between the past and the present; e.g., mascots and political cartoons; i.e., so-called “graffiti-style” activism using the human body as a literal billboard. For workers—who are sexualized to varying degrees under capital, not just prostitutes—the camping process requires rememory to work; i.e., by including things normally left out that have to be tracked down and included after their initial omission.
More to the point, such voices come in handy when dealing with living abusers posing as friends; e.g., Jadis. As such, these abusers also have an accidental role in capital’s transformation away from itself; i.e., when their victims escape to camp whatever needs camping to help develop Gothic Communism. Indeed, Jadis’ abuse of me was instrumental in demonstrating what not to do when performing BDSM in good faith.)
To that, trauma is like a doll and its clothes: something to reassemble per rememory out of smaller zombie fragments to a larger undead whole that, often enough, operate modularly (on their own) as a matter of varying amounts of intersection. Dolls store trauma and pain, but also express it in a variety of ways that, as I shall demonstrate, articulate BDSM’s usual power exchanges through handy abstractions.
More on that, in a moment. For now, the reassembly is often as toys, but also toy collectors. My own preference—of exploring Gothicized trauma within my artistic output and daily life—both led Jadis to me, then helped me escape them through such means. In short, just as their room in Florida was full of colorful and alien sex toys (next page), I was to be the finest addition to their collection. Jadis was a proud neoliberal—the token witch over the rainbow seeing profit as holy and, by extension, rape and various endorsements of it through Gothic media inside the neoliberal period; e.g., Tool as rather rapey and yet, all the same, a starting point to my journey I can revisit to understand what I survived, postmortem: “This may hurt a little, but it’s something you’ll get used to.”
(artist: Adam Jones)
“Stinkfist” might sound esoteric and disturbing (and that’s the point). Then again, paradoxes allow for two (or more) things to be true at once, and frankly Tool wrote a baller song about something bad that I can enjoy and critique (re: “Facing Death” from Volume Two, part one, 2024). Furthermore, you gotta start somewhere, and Jadis gave out plenty of object lessons to weave into better things; i.e., by me, using my Aegis to subvert their poisonous worldview, hopefully inspiring other victims of rape to come forward regarding Capitalism’s usual monopolies, trifectas and ever-present Realism.
That being said, my rememory and subversion of Jadis initially required escaping their doll-like hold on me to begin with, which we shall now articulate as a historical matter—one of deep personal trauma enmeshed with my scholarship built on said trauma: the starting point of ludo-Gothic BDSM as eventually growing into itself. Turns out, escaping Jadis (and their raping of me) also means escaping the ghost of them as worryingly haunting me, afterwards; i.e., making me feel like a zombie, doll, what-have-you as still under their power long after I returned home—both as a larger house but also the smaller dollhouse whose earlier approach I calibrated from older pioneered forms and their speculative richness (re: Metroidvania, Gothic novels, the Labyrinth of Crete, etc).
We’ll discuss my escape from Jadis in part two of this subchapter. “Meeting Jadis” will predominantly talk about how I met them while going over some different qualities to dolls; i.e., how the two of us, as BDSM practitioners, used such devices to relate to each other during rape play as a complicated means of psychosexual healing.
However bad this play ultimately was (Jadis monopolized it to sate themselves by abusing me, removing the healing element in favor of mere predation), it would—like Cuwu after Jadis—still help to form the basis for what ludo-Gothic BDSM eventually turned into: dos and don’ts. Jadis and their toys predominantly consisted of the latter type, but they still weren’t completely stupid insofar as pleasure went:
I can help you change
Tired moments into pleasure
Say the word and we’ll be
Well upon our way (source: Genius).
There was something alien and powerful about them—a genuine terror they couldn’t fake by virtue of what they had survived. It colored the sex, intimating something awful that threatened to break loose at all times. True enough, it reflected in their masochistic, visually-intimidating sex toys:
(artist: Jadis)
“Meeting Jadis,” part one: Some General Points about Dolls and Playing with Them
[Cuwu] liked to be fucked in their sleep, a rather common form of consent-non-consent that is regularly discussed between even your more vanilla sex partners; i.e., “Sure you can fuck me before work. Just no anal and don’t cum in my hair!” The idea, as usual, is a test of trust and established boundaries where one proves one’s loyalty and trustworthiness by obeying the sub when no commands can actively be given. It’s worth noting that such behaviors are often popularized in vampire narratives, but also sex dolls and other motionless, “as dead” doll entities fetishized as naked and helpless, usually female sacrifices—during sex-positive scenarios, of course, but also in unironic demon sex scenarios enacted by fearful-fascinated white people enthralled during the ghost of the counterfeit […] In sex-positive cases, the reclamation of control during calculated-risk experiments is generally conducted by lying still and inviting someone to inflict pleasurable pain, tickling and/or erogenous sensations on you while in a traditional feminine, passive/theatrical compromising position (source).
—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (2023)
There are many parts to dolls insofar as they represent us and how to play with ourselves and our trauma as undead—so many I’ve had to divide “Meeting Jadis” in two. To reiterate, part one of “Meeting Jadis” will explore how dolls
- are often infused with trauma as taken and assembled from different players but also points in time
- poetically engaged with through modular elements ranging not just from undead, but demonic, animalistic and beyond(!)
Dolls generally invoke a sense of nudity and paralysis; i.e., Gothic stories and live burial as a metaphor for psychosexual abuse but also liberation through the same devices. Prior to actually meeting Jadis and being teleported to their lair for later use (a seventeen-hour car ride, more like), I had been roleplaying Gothic scenarios on Fetlife to cope with Zeuhl leaving me (after using me for money and sex). Having already gone through numerous stints online, I felt thrilled but wanted more. I stayed “on the market,” happy to share myself with the world. “Put yourself out there,” my sister-in-law said. So I did, advertising Gothic roleplays on Fetlife, Kik and Reddit (taking Zeuhl’s advice, for better or worse).
Through sheer chance, Jadis found my advertisement on Fetlife in April 2019; they liked what they saw—savoring my roleplays but my naked body more. We were both weird, too, drawn by each other’s trauma in ways that manifested in the media we played with—in short, our pedagogy of the oppressed as toy-like, taboo, and nocturnal: “The sun can be fun, but I live to see those rays slip away!” This mutual attraction quickly led to Jadis confessing to me about how they saw me: “This guy’s weird as hell—I like it!” (to be honest, they were, too—eventually saying they wanted to give me their skeleton after they died, so I could put the bones into a sex doll and fuck it).
I was flattered, honestly. We were both trying something new, seeking a fresh start (and in the middle of Covid, no less). Right from said start, they wanted my sweet femboy ass (I was in the closet, at the time); I wanted their delicious orc cunt. So perhaps it wasn’t the newest approach, but it certainly clicked fast enough!
“Orc,” in this case, wasn’t even so much a figure of speech as it was a theatrical preference we both already had. The word, as popularized by Tolkien’s stories, originates from Beowulf, but also from the Old English word for demon: orc. Since Lord of the Rings, the orc has become synonymous with a kind of physically powerful, dark-skinned aggressor (a merger between the anti-Semitic goblin of medieval Europe and the racist flavor of the American zombie) to scare children (and adults) with. Jadis liked to present themselves as monstrous in this sense, but sexed up in ways that orcs (especially female orcs) often are in American kayfabe/monomythical stories under neoliberalism—videogames, but also tabletop games at large (which Tolkien helped inspire per his cartographic refrains; re: Volume Zero):
(exhibit 37e2: Artist: Bayard Wu. Wu’s art showcases the kinds of tough, savagely capable orc women that Jadis preferred. A maxim of theirs was that “heroic” women weren’t allowed to be ugly, so Jadis especially enjoyed seeing female characters that were either too tall, wide and/or brutish to meet conventional beauty standards; i.e., women of color outside of the West, closer to nature, the jungle, rape and death [the “voodoo” of the pre-colonial “zombie”]. “Strength,” for Jadis, was meted out through appropriative perceptions of tomboy force delivered by capable-looking female bodies of given races [an idea we’ll return to later in the book, when we talk about TERFs and popular media, in Volume Three]: monster girls who spat, farted, fucked and took spoils of war as sexual prizes [re: Jadis used to fart when they came during sex, which is cuter than it sounds]. In terms of our bedroom games, the consent-non-consent that Jadis and I engaged in frequently had me playing the femboy “war bride,” taken prisoner by the strong and capable war chief through captive/captor-style rape fantasies. “I’m keepin’ this one!” Jadis would playfully grunt while I topped them.
And honestly? We had a blast in that department; the abuse occurred when the captive fantasy became reality and I lost the ability to consent to it inside or outside the bedroom. Both of us became undead, in my eyes, albeit with them as the abuser and me as their disempowered, doll-like victim: the master and the slave.)
Jadis loved such things, extending the aesthetic to themselves; they frequently enhanced their wide, sturdy frame with tight black corsets and topped their crown with plastic demon horns. They also had jutting front teeth that looked somewhat tusk-like (their “orc teeth,” they called them). I loved this about them, which undoubtedly influenced my ability to give them the benefit of the doubt early on. It’d be incredibly easy to blame the disaster that followed on lust—”love is blind” and all that—but I certainly didn’t think so at the time. I felt prepared, ready to enjoy a non-abusive relationship for once. In truth, it’d be more accurate to say I was half-prepared—eyes open and educated, but still prone to manipulation by a skilled abuser who had their own baggage from childhood weighing on them.
First, I trusted Jadis not to actively deceive me, the two of us negotiating a BDSM agreement in advance: they would work and take care of me; I would cook, clean and fuck their brains out. We were very clear about that. Granted, it wasn’t foolproof, but no plan is. Furthermore, while there’s risk to any relationship, I certainly never consented to being abused (the two activities are mutually exclusive; i.e., you can’t consent to rape unless you camp it)!
Regardless, their breaking of our agreement didn’t make sense to me, as it would require me falling in love with someone who meant me harm. I admit, a part of me turned a blind eye when Jadis showed early warning signs; they talked the talk, but occasionally got a little too angry about small disagreements (reminding me of their abusive mother[1], insofar as their own survival mechanisms had become not just maladaptive, but predatory). These foreshadowed bigger fights in the days ahead—and the raping of me that would accompany these—but I wanted it to work so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I did so assuming that Jadis would meet my conviction with equal effort: as a team. And why not? We had an agreement and that, at least to me, was sacred.
(artist: Ezokz)
Second, I felt like someone who had learned from my own abusive past. I was already a veteran of traumatic events when Jadis and I met. Not only had I studied romanticized variants of trauma for my master’s degree (re: Metroidvania and the Gothic castle as calculated risk); I created them as an aspiring artist using erotic visual elements inspired from the kinds of artists and media I enjoyed (e.g., Mass Effect, above): pieces that help us, like dolls, reconnect to lost, forbidden things—often erotic pleasure, but also pain as indistinguishable from pleasure that verges on the harmful[2] in BDSM scenarios. Jadis liked this about me; i.e., that I was an erotic artist but also open-minded. It felt especially flattering because, apart from Zeuhl, I wasn’t used to compliments about myself and my curiosity towards taboo subjects like fetishes/sex dolls and torture. This was especially true regarding my artwork, which I always struggled with. The ego boost—especially from someone so powerful-looking and BDSM-inclined (the black knight)—well-and-truly hypnotized me.
All the same, this particular coping mechanism stemmed from an abusive past before Jadis entered the picture. I had survived a great number of difficult experiences besides my stepfather (who admittedly was the worst of the bunch): the abuses of a second uncle (more on him in a moment), grad school, Zeuhl leaving me for their future husband, and my brothers (who once duct-taped me to a flagpole during a thunderstorm, stuffed a sock in my mouth, and left me there for my mother to come and rescue). I was also bullied by other children, primarily neighborhood boys who quickly recognized my being different from them: femme, highly imaginative, prone to writing and keen to avoid violence if I could help it (though I did get into fights in the seventh grade; i.e., acting out while my stepfather was abusing me).
Regardless, Gothic stories—and their ambiguous, liminal ways of presenting traumatic experiences in highly sexual ways—have always resonated quite strongly with my own complex abuse. Art, for me, was the best way of expressing that abuse—something the following pages will try to illustrate in relation to Jadis and myself through dolls; i.e., they and their trauma as kept-in-check through BDSM, which lulled me into a false sense of security. I thought they used their artwork, toys and rape play as a means of recovery from past harm—quite the opposite; they used it to prey on me, but all the same, my escape from them required the same devices reclaimed by me (an ongoing process)!
Again, we’ll get to that, in part two. Following the forecast of escape, though, let’s articulate my own artwork and survived abuse as a) intertwined in ways that I would eventually rely upon to liberate myself; i.e., not a foreclosure, but a release from torment while still, even now, happening inside the dollhouse as a matter of acclimating to trauma: as something we can never fully escape from. This methodology and its acceptance took time to evolve, and as always, tends to point back to childhood; i.e., as something to return to and understand by reifying healthier forms.
In other words, dolls—similar to heroes—don’t just store cultural values or taboos (re: Volume Two, part one); they store trauma as something to interrogate, mid-play. We’ve set the table to unpack the idea; let’s do so now, then consider some modular qualities to dolls that often come into play when investigating trauma during calculated risk.
Although I was a sexually precocious child, my art hasn’t always been sexual or monstrous. Rather, it was a place for me to go when things got bad, but even this was inconsistent. Despite being abusive, for example, Dad was never really around when I was small; it was his family who abused me the most. Not only did they gaslight me and neglect my version of things; they blamed my mother for seeking divorce, calling her a “homewrecker” despite her refusal to cheat on a notoriously unfaithful husband (who slept with just about wife in town). Equally traumatic, the judge of the custody battle had mandated supervised visitations with my father that I thoroughly detested. They only made me a captive audience to my father’s side, who tried incessantly to convince me that Dad “was still my father” despite omitting his abuse of me during these talks.
To cope with my father and the subsequent divorce, I drew comics inspired by Bill Waterson and Jim Davis. These strips weren’t monstrous, nor did they accurately reflect my lived experiences; their style was basic and childlike. By the time my stepfather appeared, however, my creations had become far more detailed, erotic and subversive. I loved witches and Amazons and started making powerful, sexy characters like Glenn, Ileana or Revana (exhibit 37g1, below).
Originally inspired by Tolkien, Robert Howard and Lovecraft, but far more genderqueer than any of those men, these trans expressions of my trauma have only expanded over time—within my own work and when collaborating with other artists. Moreover, they were a monstrous-feminine, Amazonian extension of myself as having survived trauma that was also Amazonian; i.e., becoming transformed by the ordeal as zombie-like, but acquiring agency while acknowledging my trauma in doll-like ways. The more I reflected on Jadis and my other abusers, the more I changed through my artwork’s future dolls concerned with healing from past events:
(exhibit 37f: Artist, left: Sensaux; right: Persephone van der Waard. Virago the cyborg. Gothic stories—and their ambiguous, liminal ways of presenting experience—resonated quite strongly with my own complex abuse, but also my manner of processing said abuse through Gothic poetics; i.e., dolls.. I’ve always loved cyberpunk and its left-leaning queer elements for these purposes, effectively a retro-future stage filled with all manner of posthuman monsters and decaying things; i.e., in relation to the material world as controlled by the undefeatable powerful, but also the xenophilic ability to rebel against these powers by harnessing that creative potential for ourselves. That’s what Virago, for me, is all about. She’s someone I’d happily play as or with! Also, unlike Samus, she always saves the animals!)
(exhibit 37g1: Artist, top-left, bottom-left and bottom-middle: drawings of Revana, by Persephone van der Waard; top-middle: a collab of Revana, lines and base colors by Dcoda and background/final render by Persephone van der Waard; top-left: a collab of Revana, lines and colors by Adagadegelo and background/final render by Persephone van der Waard; bottom-right: Persephone van der Waard. All of these revisited drawings feature older characters from my teenage years, made visibly more colorful, queer and iconoclastic than they already were. Revana is my avatar [essentially a kind of doll, especially in videogames], specifically an expression of the person I’ve always to be: French, red-haired and shapely. The identity and its expression have evolved over time, of course, but this evolution has moved increasingly in a trans/gender-non-conforming [thus xenophilic] direction since my coming out of the closet. It’s what feels correct to me now and in hindsight, because it helps me process my own “undead” trauma. She’s literally a sex doll to embody all of that, but also play with it.)
My art was one of the first things Jadis noticed about me, their enjoyment of my portrayal of strong women making me a target to their sexual advances and later their abusing of me as their unwilling sex doll. Yet, these same, toy-like qualities had inadvertently “inoculated” me from Jadis. I did not know it, but I had slowly acquired the uncanny ability to understand Gothic media through my own life, whose stories and complicated, monstrous symbols I not only felt attracted to, but would be facing again, in future Gothic forms.
So when Jadis set their sights upon me, I wasn’t completely powerless, but I did (and do) handle trauma and abuse a particular way that makes me something of “an open book.” Simply put, I fawned, a people pleaser who—faced with unaddressed trauma in someone else—defaulted to appeasing my latest in a series of idols: through sex as a means of relating to such things as never truly closed-off.
For example, just as I admired and sided with Ripley hiding from the monster in Alien, a part of me loved the monster and found it strangely beautiful. Loaded with a holistic appreciation for two kinds of victims, I always thought of the company as the true villain: the one exploiting Ripley and the monster at the same time. This being said, it took me a very long time to articulate the dialectical-material framework regarding the corporate exploitation of workers, and even then was only able to by first identifying with the monster in a liminal, humanizing manner (which we will explore deeper in the primer when we look at demons).
This underlying desire speaks to Gothic Communism’s larger goal as I have increasingly envisioned it: wanting workers to reclaim our power by a) mastering our emotions through Gothic poetics, and b) surviving Capitalism in ways that can teach the world to escape and survive through the same outlets; i.e., our trauma as something to historically-materially examine, but also recreate in highly subversive ways that reduce alienation and exploitation through campy doubles thereof: dolls, which reclaim trauma by camping it (often rape) as a matter of ludo-Gothic BDSM.
As such, any desire I felt to reshape the material world—while living with Jadis during Covid—was already shaped by past abuse I had suffered at the hands of family members living in the same world. In fact, much of the abuse wasn’t even rooted in my father’s side; it actually came from my mother’s.
We’ve discussed some of this in Volume One, but there’s an element I have yet to mention. Mom was the eldest of three siblings, Dave being the youngest and the middle child—Mom’s other brother (who I’ll call Iago)—being the source of a great deal of trauma after I was an adult. In the 2010s, Iago bankrupted the family business and blamed it entirely on all of us. I didn’t know it at the time, but Iago’s abuse had slowly turned me Communist (a process that materialized through my second bid at university and my graduate/postgraduate work). Though I am always painfully honest with new partners, I didn’t mention Iago’s abuse to Jadis when we met. Partly I was still figuring it out; frankly I also thought worker rights were a universal concern and Jadis would simply “get it,” should the conversation ever come up. Alas, they did not share my sympathies (though the extent to which they and I disagreed only became clear after I was living in Florida for many months).
(exhibit 37g2a: Artists: Leo and Diane Dillion. Queen Jadis is C.S. Lewis’ strict mommy dom from The Magician’s Nephew [1955]. She’s, in her own sense, like a killer doll [and cautionary pre-fascist tale against matriarchal authority by Lewis]. Relegated to the desolate city of Charn after the Deplorable Word is spoken, our giantess queen is frozen in her seat. Completely by accident, the children heroes of the story bring her back to life, where—once again animate and mobile—Jadis immediately begins to move around and make trouble. Fun fact: Jadis is the name I gave both to my ex in Florida, but also the golden orbweaver spider living outside our home [to which I realize that I have compared my ex, Jadis, to a spider more than once].)
Truth be told, Jadis was a self-confessed neoliberal who actually worshipped the likes of J. K. Rowling or Bill Gates; i.e., to such a point that critiquing either person led to Jadis resenting me more and more (with them liking to pull rank, reminding me that they knew more about such things than I did—not because they studied them more, but because they had money and wanted me to automatically agree with them “or else”).
Granted, this didn’t seem to matter as much at first or even announce itself. Indeed, when Jadis and I crossed paths, they had access to all of me, thus all of my trauma and all of my interests (doll-like or not). We didn’t talk about politics; we talked about sex, often through toys. Jadis knew I was an erotic artist and patroned me for my work; I was intrigued by their BDSM know-how and extensive sex toy collection, which seemed so monstrous yet so colorful. Most important to me was how Jadis seemed to appreciate that I was into them and they very much wanted to fuck, but I wasn’t careful enough before agreeing to their insidious offers of “protection.” Simply put, I rebounded, to such a perilous degree that I ignored several red flags while being their slutty girlfriend:
(exhibit 37g2b:artist: EXGA. Our roles of power exchange included Jadis topping me from the bottom and me bottoming them from the top. They prized me for my big soft princess butt, and I prized them for their big soft orc body. There was a shared sense of whose turn it was to be the object of pursuit, the dominator and the “victim.” And by God, it was fun!)
It’s not so mysterious; I was poor and Jadis had means, but I had a big booty they liked in ways that let me gender conform less. Anyone acting like these aren’t potent (and common) means of negotiation is alienated from such means, methods and opportunities: “rape” and monstrous, doll-like sex (above) as a profound, monstrous-feminine dialog to work things out using what we got, and Jadis and I had plenty that fit together well/temporarily held our undivided attention: the orc chiefess and her (at the time) twink war bride.
At first, it melted into a sweet puddle, then an illusion that kept me trapped, but the feelings of genuine harmful imprisonment (and complaints) came later. Not only did I desperately want adventure by going to Florida as my mother once did; my grandparents gave me away to Jadis trusting Jadis to care for their grandchild as one would a bride. I had gotten my wish and was off see to a new world! Alas, once I was living under Jadis’ roof, things quickly changed. My imaginative responses—so useful to interpreting my own trauma—only blushed at Jadis’ numerous threats, making me an easy target for lengthier unironic tortures.
All the same, these tortures occurred through toy-like aspects of zombies that we shall now reclaim in hindsight, per ludo-Gothic BDSM. That is, the presence of cathartic play and ironic “tortures” can yield a variety of sex-positive rememories. These include the dildo, but also the doll of two basic kinds: the doll-like immobile persona (the Kafka-esque “Odradek”) and the golem-esque mobile variant (the performer of/with the animated-inanimate); as well as the undead/demonic flavor of such a being—e.g., Victor’s Creature from Frankenstein. Such examples are often tied to hypercanonical fiction like the Wizard of Oz under Pax Americana, so I’ve provided an example of each for your consideration: the monster cock/doll piece, the undead/demonic doll as a performance, and the blank object as sex-doll fetish being something to take apart as a victim might their own troubled condition; i.e., doing so to find release through disassembly and annihilation as not always having irony but certainly allowing for it.
We’ll explore these now, then move onto the anisotropic qualities, cuteness and ludic complexity of such devices, in part two. However, before these exhibits even unfold, please bear in mind several things:
First, that the doll evokes the language of “death’s counterfeit,” such as a drugged or magical sleep but also sleep sex (exhibit 11b2) as something to ply with using mixed metaphors that have a vampiric vibe if not outright coding: the feeding on the “victim’s” essence—including their sexual energies but also their sanity and health—by “traumatizing” them as they literally sleep (or pretend to; i.e., to avoid getting harmed or—in ironic cases—to play along during “somno”; re: Cuwu). Rape play is complicated, and generally concerns catharsis and trauma occupying the same spaces of play as a rememory-style means of return in order to heal versus escaping through predation dressed up as “healing.”
Second, as Jadis was doll-like and loved toys—especially toys of an undead/monstrous variety like we previously alluded to—they were largely what caught my interest and they mine, thus are things we must reclaim from their abuse of me in hindsight; i.e., in future doll-like, undead houses and excursions that piqued their interest (and taste buds) to begin with:
(exhibit 38a: Artist, top-left: SXXY; top-right: unknown, source; bottom-left: Real Sex Love Doll; bottom-right: unknown. First, the dildo/monster cock as undead/demonic but also fabricated like a doll’s would be. Xenophilic cocks take many different forms, generally as anthropomorphic cocks that humanize the owner but also present them as sexual potent to unequal degrees; i.e., stronger than the person they’re topping and fearsome in their appearance. It’s rape play, which can play out in sex-coercive or sex-positive forms [we’ll unpack these even more in Volume Three, when we discuss subverting Demon BDSM and bad play in countercultural Gothic performance art].)
(exhibit 38b1: Model and artist: Venusinaries and Persephone van der Waard. Second, the immobile/mobile effigy wherein the performer acts as an undead doll; i.e., that which was alive, then dead, then alive again [or somewhere in between].
Rape is like a bad dream imparting awful instruction and exchange. Whereas canonical zombies personify the state of exception, mid-harvest, as decayed by still abusing the monstrous-feminine inside contested territories thereof, iconoclastic iterations can humanize the zombie; i.e., as doll-like to varying sex-positive degrees: a feeling of rotten flesh/trauma-in-flesh whose “necrophilic/necrophagic” roleplay works as giver or receiver [the zombie, vampire, and/or ghost as Destroyer or “victim” to varying degrees of cannibalistic topping and catching that can subvert traditional delivery routes and destinations of power]! It has a tremendously popular [and populous] theatrical history to it; i.e., camping the Nazi; e.g., Kain’s barb from Blood Omen: “But I am dead!” which he gives out before beheading his enemy and declaring him dead [source: Game Cinematics’ “Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen – Story (All Cutscenes),” 2017; timestamp: 16:10]. Checkmate, as they say.
[source, right: ibid.; left, bottom: Capsule Computers]
More to the point, such rapacious, psychosexual theatre exposes privileged workers with their own expendability during state crisis; i.e., in ways that, just as often, yield funny internalized debates; e.g., Team Four Stars’ Piccolo deciding whether he should block Nappa’s attack or pick Gohan up and throw him out of the way or not, until our resident green alien pays the price for his silly hesitation [“Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Episode 9,” 2009; timestamp: 3:59]. Conversely there are benefits to not dodging should one choose and provided the context is right for it; i.e., someone feeling undead in ways that seek out a healthy form of ludo-Gothic BDSM/psychosexual kayfabe: when someone “throws it” at you.
In short and in truth, death and rape are extremely funny if you camp them through rememory as something you’ve actually survived [and death, rape and monsters go together with theatre like pussies and cocks, swords and sheaths, etc]! Furthermore, “rape” can be healing as well—can paradoxically feel good with the right demon lover taking you to that extra special edge, mid-calculated risk. To that, though, beware anyone monopolizing it for the state! Whatever the arrangement of the undead dynamic of giving/receiving pain and eating essence, they help us confront our own mortality as something to fearfully embrace the human side of trauma; i.e., that workers are made out of flesh and blood, organs that can be harvested and weaponized, mid-apocalypse.
Cops and victims. As I demonstrate following my own rape, rebellious zombies start to seek out rape with varying degrees of irony as something to camp canon with, versus Man Box agents classically doing it to rape women sans irony and calling it “art”:
The “sweet spot,” I think, is to maintain a steady resistance towards the state’s coercions without defanging the critical power of the zombie, itself [or any doll, for that matter]. However, liminalities can intersect, swinging the performance away from straight-up exploitation and more towards a kind of playful “slut reclamation,” carefully projected onto the zombie persona as a mutually consensual “necrophilia”; i.e., with bodies that aren’t dead, but perceived as dead to express their present struggles under the status quo; e.g., Rosemary’s Baby [above]. There’s a presence of rape that speaks to the usual abusers against the usual victims having appetites that, in times of heightened control, become confused but also monstrous as a matter of duality-in-action.
As such, iconoclastic “necrophilia” [sex with “dolls”] pointedly reverses the process of abjection in defense of workers reclaiming their ability to express mutual consent through Gothic language: surviving rape; i.e., the inanimate as reanimated to convey the performer’s pedagogy of the oppressed through undead, made-up markers of trauma [or class envy/revenge from the bigoted, conservative mindset] staining the surface of their doll-like persona green [or some-such color]. Dolls, like actors, can be painted, to which “greenface” sits adjacent to blackface as a racial symbol [vaudeville] but one allows for different forms of “black” [as in, “non-white” vis-à-vis the colony binary] during apocalyptic discourse. Although race is generally involved under settler-colonialism, these go beyond race alone; i.e., stigma, bias, envy and so on; e.g., non-English, low-class, foreign, unmarried, homosexual, and stigma animal [the Drow, exhibit 41b]. Painted and clothed, dolls store trauma as a means of expressing its usual giving and receiving during state crisis, decay and moral panic: a witch hunt, which is basically what The Wizard of Oz is, below.)
(exhibit 38b2: Artist, bottom-left: Cherry-Gig; right: J. Scott Campbell. Third, the immobile/mobile effigy whereupon the performer is a demonic doll; i.e., one whose existence is thrown into question by virtue of having never been alive on the earthly plane [Kafka’s “Odradek” from “The Cares of a Family Man,” 1914, being a famous/generative example] but instead animated or summoned by magic, or made by mad science.
However, there is crossover with certain kinds of undead; i.e., the ghost in its most viral, inhuman forms and the composite as a kind of reanimated golem made from inanimate things, including human tissue, animal parts, and various inorganic or at least non-animal things [straw, above]. Unlike dolls in general, sex dolls play with notions of dehumanization and control in sexualized spheres: the thing you can dress, manipulate, destroy or fuck.
For example, Ti West’s 2022 Pearl portrays a phallic woman at least partially conditioned to seek coercive control with an immobile partner—i.e., as an Elektra-esque virago railing against her patriarchal mother [a matriarch acting like a man in the absence of the heroine’s paralyzed father]. Conditioned thus, Pearl rapes a double of her own comatose father in a cornfield [evocations of the strawman effigy of the Pagan harvest]. Yet, the sex doll in ritualistic terms represents a submitting of one’s agency within a negotiated inequality between one human by themselves, or two in cahoots; i.e., the sub was never alive, thus cannot be harmed, or is alive but trusts the other party to not harm them while both are seeking catharsis through the fetishized embodiment, or wearing of, various shells. These can be the virgin/whore or damsel/demon as things to wear, thus interrogate the feeling of ontological “claustrophobia” while being trapped inside and forced to act a particular way for one’s ritualized captor. The critique becomes a meta commentary performed in real-time, between the fiction and the rules of a theatrical magic circle: where the “rape” game takes place.
[artist: Blxxd Bunny]
Keeping this flexible theatricality in mind, Bunny’s “scarecrow” sex doll is aesthetically and performatively similar to Pearl’s dance partner as never-having-been-alive, minus the abject harm and xenophobia Pearl the puppeteer intimates [evoking the miracle of Christ’s resurrection and Milton’s narcissistic Eve kissing her own reflection]. The general process, then—while potentially connected to real-life trauma [rape while the victim is asleep, a common historical occurrence for women]—isn’t an automatic extension of it as a premeditation towards harming others in the future; for Bunny it’s a healing ritual, in which they can explore the mechanisms of control within a single-person, consent-non-consent ritual: the sleeping “boyfriend” being toyed with by a curious “doll,” both of them “Barbie-like” in different ways.
In other words, the immobile doll was never alive like a corpse was or a taxidermized animal, thus has not been reduced to a permanent lobotomized state by the dominant; it’s no different than a dildo in that respect. Bunny’s particular theatre of nudism invokes such a persona within a stuffed “scarecrow” for them—a doll-like cutie, themselves [their body sculpted and lovely like a doll’s]—to play within, applying voyeuristic peril and giddy exhibitionism as floating around inside the general meta of the screen: the nerdy debutante converging with the whore/demon archetype as “letting her hair down” for the viewer of the exchange to look upon with curiosity and delight.
Simply put, it’s a peep show but it needn’t be divorced from actual jouissance for the performer! Bunny is ace, but absolutely loves their work [and plays with more than just literal dolls].)
(exhibit 38b3: Fourth, the actual sex doll object, divorced from undeath/demonic magic but used to convey the aesthetics of either type. Whether immobile or mobile, the theatrical exhibition of doll theatre takes physical work, but also “lights, camera, action!” It’s hard work to direct a body physically and without harm, but also to manipulate a literal, never-alive doll physically [or to act like one under the hot camera lights; e.g., the Technicolor stage lights for The Wizard of Oz or Peeping Tom, etc]. Personally I always liked the idea of exhibiting these things in a similar sense to those movies, but also my friend Bunny’s adventures. Although my expertise lies more in directing a model long-distance, the vampire cloak draped over my sex doll [Jessamine, above] has been worn by real people that I’ve fucked and filmed: Cuwu and Jadis, in particular.
For me, control as a “service top” is the optimal approach; i.e., to subvert the idea of the dominator as forceful, proving myself as thoroughly unlike my abusive father or exes while still enjoying the volunteer “sacrifice” offering all of themselves to me—for a moment, not forever!
Unlike the cliché sacrifice, then, no harm is taking place. This can apply to literal sex dolls designed for sex [with stuffed pillows or replicas meant for companionship] but also sexual partners whose surface image is sexualized to serve a doll-like function inside an ironic BDSM scheme; i.e., meant to heal one-or-both parties through a complicated, informed “dance.” Within this dance as ludo-Gothic BDSM, the image of the Pagan/witch priestess [and other aspects of prestige, power and vulnerability, etc] can be worn upon the body of the doll or the naked, exposed, dollish likeness of a person: the magical “scarecrow” coming alive and dancing with the girl in the cornfield [again, evoking the Pagan harvest and older magics as not intrinsically harmful, but certainly coded as “evil” under state influence].)
At first, Jadis and I vibed through dolls, and all seemed fine; I accepted them for their toys and they accepted me for mine (eagerly asking me to fuck my own sex doll as they used their own toys on themselves). However, the longer I lived with Jadis, the more unironically monstrous (and doll-like)we both felt in my esteem—they the master and I their pathetic slave. Jadis’ torturous abuses not only became harder to ignore; they occurred inside a liminal position wrought with fetishized violence—i.e., they were my first experience with emotional violence of a sexualized flavor in my own life: rape. It felt weirdly uncanny—familiar but alien in ways I easily recognized from second-hand accounts or popular stories, but also second-guessed at every turn: “Am I being raped?”
Faced with that abominable question, I started to feel undead in relation to what I conceived the undead to be, albeit in confused ways: dissected and studied, fascinating odd sensations of division and confrontation expressed in some of my favorite childhood stories. It was the only thing I had to compare my abuse to.
This stresses another key aspect to dolls: feeling undead as a nostalgic means of playing with personal trauma through the rememory process; i.e., in ways that abusers manipulate, but which we can reclaim through our own arguments, using ludo-Gothic BDSM (egregores, simulacra, homunculi, etc, of course being poetic lenses, but play constituting its own argumentation for or against workers facing trauma: as something to play with). I’d like to unpack these undead feelings and practices, next, then proceed through the rest of our list about dolls and their undead ludic qualities; re: playing with dolls something I employed to eventually escape Jadis’ physical clutches.
Footnotes
[1] To deflect my observations, Jadis would always cry if I mentioned their mother but especially if I compared Jadis to their mother. Their tears always had the desired effect, too: back off, change the subject. They would cry and I would lose heart.
[2] Under such conditions, “power” can very quickly find itself in quotes; i.e., false power as either a matter of predation on obedience by a predatory actor (with BDSM classically inverted to send power away from workers, which ludo-Gothic BDSM aims to reverse through the same elements of play and poetic devices being anisotropically played with; re: reversing abjection).