This blog post is part of “Deal with the Devil,” a third promotion originally inspired by the first and second ones I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” and “Searching for Secrets” (2024). The first promotion 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). “Deal with the Devil” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, Demons (the “Searching for Secrets” promotion covered the Undead Module, which is now live). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Deal with the Devil’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.

Forbidden Sight, part one: Idle Hands Are the Devil’s Workshop; or, Weapons in Clay and Even More Playtime: the Monstrous Prostitution of Blood Libel and Its Violent, Demonic Revenge

One, two! One, two! And through and through

      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

      He went galumphing back (source).

—Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky” (1871)

Picking up where “Forbidden Sight and the Promethean Quest: Knowledge and Power Exchange (opening and part zero: a Rape Reprise)” left off…

Part two and three of “Forbidden Sight” shall pointedly consider the processes of making and summoning demons vis-à-vis the Promethean Quest and Faustian Bargain. For part one—and to further examine the nebulous spirit of demons—I’m devoting even more time to the idea of playing with them (thus rape) in different vengeful forms; i.e., attached to blood libel as morphologically whore-like during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: the state antagonizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine to put it to work as cheaply as possible, pimping that which we avenge: by reclaiming ourselves as whore-like weapons-in-clay from state monopolies raping us, throwing the doors of perception wide!

The larger poetic theme for part one is blood libel/sodomy conceived not as undead, but demonic; i.e., Amazons (witches), vampires and goblins expressed, and subsequently analyzed, in ways that speak to their demonic abilities: to exchange and transform, be that for the state or against it. Said state historically uses blood libel to demonize, prostitute and police nature-as-alien with nature-as-alien; i.e., the tokenized poetic language of punishment and revenge (witch hunts) within overlapping persecution networks, said devices chattelizing marginalized groups as dark, animal, and inhuman, but also terrorist, criminal and vermin aliens on the homefront (the enemy within). All serve to pointedly divide-and-conquer a population with a population: demons policing demons, whores policing whores.

Such scapegoat devices (and their medieval-style, hack-and-slash revenge) are soupy and plastic, meaning playing with instruments of them (dolls) is the quickest and simplest way to articulate their dialectical-material complexities (of sex and force). Jest or threat, one scene should hint at all underlying themes and potential for other forms that yield the same inequalities and drive towards liberation: the potential for morphological variety (e.g., horns, snake eyes, red skin, and cloven-hoof feet) but also that of violence and terror ontologically breaking Capitalist Realism.

To synthesize praxial, thus systemic catharsis means prioritizing the ability to play with rape; i.e., any and all pieces that assemble to our benefit each and every time. We feel unequal and play it out, but establish equal rights through such playtime. Once installed, your launchpad can use whatever “rocket” you and your idle hands can fabricate. Power and knowledge operate through perception, to which there is truly no limit to how they convey upon the Aegis and inside its devilish, hauntological discotheques.

To be holistic and flexible, then, I’m devoting even more playtime with demons from said launchpad. Except, whereas part zero focused on the revenge of nature accounting for its own demonized existence, part one shall focus on the violent quality of said revenge under unequal conditions; i.e., demons and non-demons as black and white (which unto itself suggests a broad inequality to both sides, black the opposite of white and vice versa) that settles through poetic lens and debate; re: exchange and transformation as vengeful and psychosexual, but also desired by those alienated from it.

Simply put, everyone loves the whore, and we can enjoy her violent fantasies without a) harming anyone (re: “hurt, not harm”), and b) synthesizing praxis to cultivate a better cultural understanding of the imaginary past during ongoing revolutionary struggles—to reclaim the Base and recultivate the Superstructure.

To it, demons are whores, and whores are vice characters, including Amazons, vampires and goblins. They communicate dualistically during liminal expression, but so do people in general (which demons stand in for). This includes revenge, be it canonical or campy under the whore’s paradox; re: the finding of “power/agency through theatrical reenactments of unequal, unfair or otherwise rapacious treatment and conditions […] demons are maidens and maidens are demons, but both are virgins and whores, and each finds power (and knowledge) according to how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyway.”

Doing so veers into monster fucking as a poetic device; i.e, the broader GNC elements of demons—one embedded inside a postcolonial examination that rehashes older points about Amazons from my older books, vis-à-vis Lady Hellbender and similar monstrous-feminine, “dark warrior queen[1]” demons—which this section will then explore through vampires in Takena’s weaponized claymation skit, followed by demons at large (featuring my older work on Tolkien; re: goblins).

Per this module’s tangential symposium style, I’ve divided “Idle Hands” into three subdivisions on blood libel you can trace and jump to as needed:

• part one: “Amazons and Demon Mommies” (included partially in this post): Considers the demonic aspects of blood libel per the Amazon/Medusa as witch-like prostitute, extending to demon mommies such as Lady Hellbender (above) as Amazonian in their own right.
• part two: “Vampires and Claymation”: Lays out the basic idea of demonic, whorish revenge with vampires, whose blood libel it explores in Takena’s “Midnight Vampire” (and reconsiders some ideas of tokenization per some of our thesis arguments that apply to all demon types).
• part three: “Goblins and Anti-Semitism”: Examines the vengeful, monstrous-feminine qualities of blood libel per goblins; i.e., their being “of nature” in ways that can be policed or avenged by theatrical agents waxing demonic poetic. Explores these dualities first in Tolkien, followed by our own work, before weighing in on some transitional arguments that segue into “Forbidden Sight,” part two (which discusses the making of demons, vis-à-vis Shelley’s Frankenstein).

(artist: Personal Ami)

To alienize something is to make it alien; i.e., through exotic fetishes and clichés as much through alienating the colonized subject from others through forced relocation (a war crime/act of genocide). In turn, this often has a weaponized quality useful to either police terror tactics or worker counterterror devices opposing said cops through demonic poetic expression; i.e., of violence, terror and morphology. Whores, then, are often spies, assassins and warriors, and as such, take on a variety of monstrous and masculine/feminine forms, including Amazons and/or goblins. They look cute in ways that cause others to underestimate them, but also collared in freak shows that help the audience let down their guard; e.g., King Kong in New York City (a colonial hub, Wall Street originally being a slaver’s market). Sex is a weapon, and it conceals and reveals per the cryptonymy process as complicit or revolutionary!

I’ve presented these ideas and subchapter subdivisions in a somewhat logical-if-arbitrary order and try to mention as many germane ideas as I can. Mentioning all of them is impossible. Instead, there’s enough selective reading to get my larger message across: play with “rape,” hence the descriptive, lived reality of women (or those chattelized like women/slaves to Cartesian men; e.g., men of color); i.e., workers living in the half-real shadow of rape without quotes vis-à-vis state influence, geopolitics and militarized illusions, onstage and off. I’m still working through this material myself—marrying the academic to the worldly and prurient—and I expect each and every one of you to do the same!

Onto Amazons!

Idle Hands, part one: Amazons and Demon Mommies

Any free woman in a free society will be a monster.

—Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman (1979)

“Idle Hands,” part one considers a popular aspect to the monstrous-feminine, revived from Antiquity into modern mythical forms: the female warrior side as witch-like. We’ll quickly[2] consider this with Amazons—not strictly as “female,” but placing the female biological marker onto a larger monomorphic gradient—then move onto more fiery and hellish postcolonial/GNC iterations.

• “On Amazons, Good and Bad”: Parts one (included in this post) and two explores Amazons and Medusa—their history of tokenization and resistance, and how they manifest currently under state influence; i.e., as something to offer different unequal power fantasies, during the cryptonymy process; e.g., Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and James Cameron’s Aliens.

• “A Paucity of Time: Addressing the Rest of the Demon Module’s Relative Brevity“: Explains why the rest of the Demon Module will have more of a conversational, symposium style; also covers some points of holistic study and mutual informed labor exchange (collaboration), which the rest of the module will continue focusing on.

• “I’ll See You in Hell”: Goes beyond the earthly realms of classic Amazons, giving these warrior-whore sex demons more of an openly hellish character (that still yields the same ludo-Gothic BDSM devices): dark faeries and demon (muscle) mommies.

Both are monstrous-feminine beings “of nature,” thus endemic to capital alienating and fetishizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine for profit; i.e., kettling it and capitalizing on its revenge by triangulating against different marginalized groups inside the larger persecution networks’ series of preferential treatment during reactive abuse. As we proceed, I invite you to think of each having a shared cause: liberation under duress effecting all marginalized peoples, and bravery and courage (of an Amazonian or demonic mommy sort) each take myriad forms!

(artist: Aria Rain)

Prefacing Medusa: to Bay

A quick note about the Medusa section: It was written based on my PhD work, but also with my partner’s help, in supervising the final drafts/proofreads. Just as Bay co-wrote small portions of my PhD but haunts the entire document, their presence is felt here as well; i.e., as a non-binary Indigenous bio-diversity ecologist with an interest in ancient legends, including Medusa. Despite coming from the ancient world, Medusa isn’t really a woman, but nature itself as monstrous-feminine; i.e., struggling to be free from capital, from Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and settler colonialism as things presently stand. She involves vague, broad, and ultimately interchangeable-yet-highly-visible poetic ideas that give me difficulty from time-to-time, which Bays lends sparkling clarity regarding:

(artist: Bay Ryan)

On Amazons, Good and Bad, part one: Always a Victim (feat. Medusa)

Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity.

—Silvia Federici (cited from “Hot Allostatic Load,” 2015).

(artist: The_1Medusa)

The Gothic (in)famously concerns itself with abject (us-versus-them) division, doubles, broken boundaries, homes and ontological grey area, nature alienated by capital to monstrous vengeful extremes during liminal expression, cryptonymy and similar poetic devices furthering abjection through Gothic fakery (the ghost of the counterfeit). As such, this section is less about thesis—beyond how state forces alienate, fetishize, and exploit nature as monstrous-feminine—and more a survey of Amazons and Medusa “in the wild,” vis-à-vis demonic language; re: pertaining to unequal, forbidden exchange and transformation, either factor speaking dialectically-materially to revenge as a matter of desire, which demon lovers ultimately are. Medusa is our Numinous queen—a dark source of ancient power for the state to siphon from, and us to revive in “ancient” forms of unequal size (our queen’s booty fruitful and massive, above); she turns capital on its head. She isn’t any one thing, but all oppressed yearning to be free.

Capital rapes to profit; profit motive is the rape motive of nature-as-monstrous-feminine through police violence defending private property in bad faith (all cops rape; some, like Kamala Harris [or those unironically supporting them[3]], do so under the “law and order” argument). In practice, “monstrous-feminine” means anything that isn’t a white cis-het Christian European man (or things emulating that idea, through Man Box), moving money through nature during the abjection process and its revenge arguments: “Medusa is alien, thus evil,” albeit in ways that preface her mere existence as reprobate, damned—one that rapes the West merely by existing inside a prison environment under crisis (the state of exception) expanded to the world at large (and shrinking during state decay).

Inside said prison, Medusa is a whore, but also a witch, goblin and vampire of the blood libel argument as tailored into a neoliberal settler refrain, and both cannot be suffered to live but must always exist to suffer in some shape or form. Medusa must always be a victim and a scapegoat, but also a demonic (rapacious, shapeshifting) threat that can be killed by token agents gaslighting, gatekeeping, girlbossing nature; re: Amazons. The latter adopt a “prison sex” mentality inside concentric prisons/persecution networks: blame the whore, assigning shame, guilt and similar debilitating emotions to them as a biology but also an identity to attack. This arbitration paradoxically includes assigning value; i.e., something to harvest despite its hellish guise, which cops then enforce in centrist refrains.

In response, the state treats nature as monstrous-feminine strawman/false flag, raping it out of revenge during a pre-emptive strike, kettling the whore; i.e., through its token police, Amazons pimping nature, turning nature into a perpetual victim per Medusa triggering revenge by simply being the thing the state wants to attack (a zombie). As demons, all Amazons give rape (violence and terror during unequal exchange) as half-alien and Medusa receives it as wholly alien from Amazons playing at cop/acting like men (military servants for the state, upholding patriarchal structures; i.e., as Perseus did, killing Medusa in her sleep, except Amazons are classically uprooted from their own culture and forced to assimilate, gelded post-diaspora). But the state reverses all of this on its face through DARVO; i.e., dressed up as “rapist,” Medusa becomes a peach, pumpkin (or some such crop/merchandise) to harvest through rape by the state claiming “self-defense”; i.e., rape in disguise, expressed in dualistic, revenge-fantasy settler arguments (often torture, captivity and death). It’s obscurantism, blaming the whore to assert control over her and all she represents: “She’s the rapist! ‘Get’ (rape) her!” “Woman is other” extends to “nature is other.”

In demonic terms, this comes from flesh expressed with flesh, but also stand-ins for flesh speaking to flesh demonized (and vice versa): an alien invader in both directions, reifying to nature-as-queer through blood libel and sodomy.

(artist, left: Leeza; right: Grand-Sage)

I’ll oblige (a makeshift Amazon thesis built on older[4] thesis arguments; indented for emphasis):

Profit requires victims; capital alienates and sexualizes everything to move money through nature-as-whore, “whore” being a combination of alien and monstrous-feminine pimping by cops playing the victim; re: us-versus-them, antagonizing nature and putting it to work as cheaply as possible. As actual victim, nature has her revenge by thwarting profit through the whore’s paradox—in short, enacting Gothic Communism by being a whore (thus alien and monstrous-feminine) in ways the elite cannot fully tokenize/monopolize. For the state, sex is highly regulated through force during abjection as a kind of mirror argument, its mirror syndrome projecting rape onto symbols of colonization doubling as colonial victims; i.e., Medusa is both a hauntological, cryptonymic, abject symbol for imperial abuse pushed by cops onto state victims right now.

To it, capital rapes nature as monstrous-feminine, inciting rape against the victim dressed up as eternal profligate scapegoat; i.e., Medusa classically receives rape from state forces, including Amazons who give rape to Medusa as a form of tokenized revenge exchange under a police umbrella; re: against nature-as-monstrous-feminine (queer) per the abjection process.

In response, Medusa reverses abjection to have her own revenge on the Aegis, but again, does so per the whore’s paradox; i.e., as dualistic—meaning she is both what cops want her to be (an enemy of good nature/the state that fights back against them, hence threatens “rape” in ways they can brutalize for profit), and by being what they want her to be, is always illegitimate in ways that serve state interests. By seemingly crossing them when she’s actually just minding her own business (under criminogenic conditions, mind you), her resisting of their rape accusations (and disingenuous labels) become part of the same inescapable death warrant. The state grants their scapegoat some latitude (wiggle room), releasing their grip provided money flows through nature to uphold state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital—which means tightening it just as quickly (to pump their grip). Medusa wants out; those with power will be there, expanding what they wish to cut up into pieces time and time again: a pig fattened for the slaughter only to be carved up by police forces.

For our purposes, this praxis poetically expresses in a dualistic, doubled form of Gothic poetry called Amazonomachia (which I generalize as “monster battle”). Subjugated Amazons assist in avenging the state against Medusa to maintain capital. Medusa (manufactured disorder) makes the middle class pearl-clutch, tokenize and punch down at state victims, betraying their fellow workers while acting oppressed, themselves; i.e., fascism and moderacy per a centrist, neoliberal refrain. They seek revenge against nature by giving rape to Medusa, who receives rape as something that threatens revenge in the eyes of the middle class enacting gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss.

Subversive Amazons accomplish their revenge through a physically violent, demonic kind of rape-revenge symbolism: reversing state forms with the same language—one tied to a sisterly sense of stewardship over the land while likewise belonging to it as raped by settler-colonizers blaming the victim/scapegoat; i.e., emasculation/captive fantasies, aka “death by Snu-Snu” (often likened to “castration” in psychoanalysis, but not always literal any more than Medusa’s “decapitation” is). In short, their justice is poetic, using ludo-Gothic BDSM to anisotropically reverse the common flow of violence, deftly reclaiming themselves and their homes as alien rebels hoisting empire on its own petard. Such delicious (and grim) reversals double/deliver with all the usual euphemistic, mix-and-match plays on words known to medieval and quasi-medieval (Gothic) theatre[5].

(artist: In Case)

Amazons and Medusa are my jam (with me writing “Medusa” last and sharing her first, in my usual backwards style). The rest of this subdivision divides in two, then. This section, part one, talks about the cops-and-victims relationship between Amazons and Medusa, and how these roles have transformed from the mid-20th century onwards (unfolding like origami, or a multi-stage rocket). Part two, will talk about reclaiming them. The emphasis throughout is critical-thinking skills, less so than documenting specific historical events.

Continuing into part one, though, I want to consider some history and poetics before looking at how token Amazons police Medusa; re: raping her per state DARVO arguments. First, we’ll look at their mutual aesthetic, followed by their poetic history, tokenistic concerns and dialectical-material tensions—i.e., as they evolved into dogma/counterculture discussions about rape—then move onto how these exist under neoliberal Capitalism vis-à-vis Cameron’s refrain (re: Aliens, Metroidvania, shooters). After that, I’ll give my personal thoughts on Medusa (as someone evoked constantly in this project), and consider different, additional forms of her Numinous architecture; re: “She’s a brick house!”

• The Basics/Aesthetics
• Poetic History
• Tokenization
• Dialectical-Material Tension (mirror syndrome reprise)
• Amazons under Neoliberal Capitalism (re: Cameron’s refrain)
• Medusa, My Thoughts Personally
• Second Breakfast: Further Forms of the Medusa
• Facing Death: the Aegis Opens!

The Basics/Aesthetics

Note: Neither Amazons nor Medusa are strictly female; i.e., the monstrous-feminine can be any sex and gender it wants/needs to be. I’ll be sticking to “female/woman” in part because it’s the classic model, but also because I identify with these monsters as a trans woman! Even so, Medusa isn’t merely the opposite end of a heteronormative binary pimping nature to enslave it, but an inclusive spectrum reminding the Patriarchy how false, illusory and impotent their binary actually is; i.e., “[nature] is ours only when we have it, when it is owned by us” (re: Marx, modified by me to camp him for not being gay enough). Nature is queer/alien in ways we must reclaim, hugging the alien, thus Medusa as queer under straight state models (which historically abuse nature and queerness). —Perse

Though Amazons and Medusa currently exist under a GNC monstrous-feminine umbrella that isn’t exclusively female, they remain historically female beings of Antiquity per the ancient canonical laws. This comes with a particular look that, while certainly hauntological (re: “ancient”), is pretty consistent in its classical forms. Any genderqueer forms that emerge will subvert canon, their combined aesthetics speaking to what is classically pleasing to the eye, but also terrifying!

Before we proceed, then, let me plant a picture in your mind, a seed to grow into something that—for us in the present world, attracted to the imaginary past in “ancient” forms—has crystalized into something workers (genderqueer or not) often take for granted: Amazons are phallic women—big, strong female givers of violence (usually described as captivity and rape); they’re here to kickass and chew bubblegum, and they’re all outta bubblegum. Medusa is the Archaic Mother—a mean demon/dragon lady personifying hysteria/wandering womb with snakes for hair and a petrifying gaze (or acid for blood, spikes and other defense/anti-predation mechanisms doubling as forms of attack during rape arguments), who, by so much as looking at you, turns you to stone (for fear of death/rape); placed on Athena’s Aegis, she’s known as much for being a severed head as a monster or symbol of female rage/monstrous-feminine resistance: a weapon of revenge.

We’ll unpack all of this, but that’s basically what they look like. Amazons consistently appear more human than Medusa. Furthermore, Amazons are androgynous through gender performance, first and foremost; Medusa’s biology is arguably intersex, but speaks to andro/gynodiversity at large, which TERFs love to police: biology through sex work, connecting biology to sex and gender, and both of those things to themselves during false rebellion.

 

Expounding on that, Amazons are ancient, statuesque symbols; i.e., of rebellion and assimilation doubling as feminist revolt in the 20th century that, in tokenized forms, bend the knee and uphold colonial violence by raping Medusa (re: Man Box, triangulation, acting like a man). As phallic strongwomen, their powerful demonic bodies can threaten men with unequal exchange, but they cannot transform/change shape (normally—they’re still expected to defeat Medusa by becoming Medusa, giving Amazons a cursed status worthy of exile or execution; re: the euthanasia effect). Furthermore, they were defeated in battle by men and married to their kings/put to work by men. Their rebellion is generally one of white middle-class people and cis-het/cis-queer feminism expressed since Marston’s sleeper 1940s BDSM revival into the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and beyond. But by the ’80s, neoliberalism happened and its cartographic refrains recruited said married prisoners into neoconservative, Heinlein-style Cold Warriors; i.e., policing not only the central nucleus from invasion, but the outermost forts on the rim of empire—at the frontier during colonial proxy war protecting private property from rape by the barbarian side (a personified DARVO argument, made by capital towards its victims): unironic givers of revenge rape to nature-as-monstrous-feminine, a pre-emptive strike.

To some degree, then, Amazonian violence became legitimate because it served capital/was committed ostensibly by white married women (and token normativities)—married to the job if not to actual men; re: warrior princesses, knights, and bounty hunters. They became TERFs of the first and second wave, recuperating resistance to serve the elite by attacking “evil” nature; re: subjugated Amazons being controlled-opposition witch cops, refusing to be victims by triangulating against state enemies/uncontrolled opposition, thereby giving rape back to the already-raped refusing to bend the knee: because Amazons fear rape themselves, they kiss up and punch down. As inheritors of the Imperial Core’s middle class (cooked in the womb), they are “good” witches, seeing Medusa not just on black people, but queer ones and other marginalized communities sharing the same, shadowy surfaces: “good” and “evil’ as much value markers to incite merciless witch-hunt violence upon as descriptors of material conditions (and their social-psychosexual elements).

(artist: Winton Kidd)

To that, Medusa is even more of an inkblot; i.e., the older, primal voice of the raped whore/unmarried woman in a dimorphic, binary-gender sense, but also an androgynous alien of civilized grounds that was there all along! The ghost of the counterfeit, she embodies death itself (for the state to fear and abject onto its victims, only for them to give all this anisotropically back)—a Numinous being not defined purely for her trademark snakes-for-hair or intimidating stone gaze, but by her dark, feral, wild status as monstrous-feminine; i.e., what her assorted embodiments stand for when they emerge from the shadows: the black mirror reflecting her victimization by state forces, shattering their self-righteous veneer on the Aegis! Yet, the duality remains; i.e., she equals jungle fever or queer chasing with irony as much without, a mirror argument we can steal on the Aegis (for our joy and mischief—breaking Capitalist Realism above), but said Aegis is still shared during the abjection and cryptonymy processes.

In other words, Medusa—as the perpetual victim/scapegoat—can threaten rape in any form, mid-exchange, but generally does so by merely existing; i.e., as something that was raped having transformed the victim into a scapegoat, which settler colonialism dogmatizes into its cops during mirror syndrome: “The colonized will seek revenge!” She not only has a good side and a bad side to administer unequal exchange during demon BDSM, but can transform suddenly from calm nature into wild, cute/ugly or happy/furious; re: kawaii vs kowai, warring forever inside/outside herself (and in ways that stunt one’s growth; i.e., often inverting appearance and emotion, the Destroyer small and unassuming little girl/princess and the victim big and imposing herbo). This psychomachy reflects not just her internal/external trauma or her status as uncontrolled opposition, but her transition from object to subject to human woman (often by giving her a “glow up,” below, or otherwise softening her features/making her easier to be around/witness), which we’ll unpack more in a moment when we examine Elizabeth Hadley.

That’s the gist. Given her complexity compared to Amazons, though, I’d like to unpack Medusa’s analog potential a bit more, in aesthetic terms (seven pages).

(artist: Pinala Flame)

For the rest of the aesthetics portion, we’re going to play a little game: “Medusa is.” I’m doing so (and breaking the academic Golden Rule of not wasting valuable page space) because, while Persephone is my namesake, Medusa is my goddess. I love her and I want to indulge—specifically in her avatars’ “uppity” elements defending the planet by reversing abjection. Medusa isn’t modest; she’s an immodest symbol of persecution—a big, bad or otherwise dirty girl who loves anal and fucks on the first date, and is someone to punish by the state (the fun police) through modesty arguments (of virtue/vice). She’s a whore, a slut, a witch with big hair and a big heart; she’s also an androgynous, motherly shadow symbol of power (the dominatrix) to reclaim from the state hunting and farming her as immodest, dark, alien, etc, for themselves: an ancient, paradoxically taboo-yet-ubiquitous death goddess/vice character to “set free” or “wake up,” pointing as she does to a better retro-future world (re: pre capitalist ideas helping reify post-scarcity in our imaginations, thus daily lives, unchained from Capitalist Realism). To revive Medusa is to develop Gothic Communism; like sex, you want to communicate well, but also take your time having fun (while having your eye on the clock, as whores do).

(artist: mustblove)

Note: For me, Medusa is a hyperobject—a de facto mascot for Gothic Communism, workers/nature and the state as always in conflict. Essentially Mother Nature, while she abstracts and references things both titanic and diminutive (the planet and its inhabitants), we won’t explore that size difference here, nor special cases (e.g., the kawaii/kowai inversion), save that smaller forms generally allude to the larger whole. —Perse

In short, while “it ain’t easy bein’ green,” Medusa reflects our innermost human desire: of wanting to be loved, seen, craved, heard, believed, witnessed and defended as a subject, despite being treated as inhuman (for her devilish prurience)—usually. There are exceptions, but we’ll get to those! When interacting with Medusa, the sex-positive (thus iconoclastic) idea is to surrender power versus dominating her through police force and repeat rape, lest the world end; i.e., at the hands of a vengeful, old deity coming home to roost after having been woken up (and raped) too many times: Medusa’s “coming” while expose home as false, predatory (coming for your nuts); e.g., Macbeth’s Dunsinane forest or the kodama from Princess Mononoke, the land taking itself and its monstrous-feminine sovereignty back: land back vs land preservation. Time is a circle; to gaze into the past is to see the future in different possible forms. Except, we’re not assimilating Medusa; we’re going down to where she is to hear her out!

(artist: Queen Medusa)

To it, Medusa is the out-and-out whore—something that reliably cuts loose, a whistleblower testimony going wild to expose the rapes of the West unto her in ways they and theirs cannot forgive; i.e., not just the whore to bushwack, but the Oracle/Cassandra to foresee disaster beyond Capitalism, which they martyr and closet: during Capitalist Realism, using nuns who were former whores, themselves. Amazons are warrior nuns, saying “Don’t you dare!” before getting a guilty wish in while executing their victims; i.e., raping the whore—plundering her land and turning her into a spice, a song, a sex object—before putting the genie back in its bottle, Pandora back in her box. Medusa is a holistic egregore, ontologically broad and outwardly tortured; i.e., meaning she has infinite forms and interpretations, whose rape and revenge either serve profit or don’t. To limit her to one and one alone is reductive, harmful.

While nebulous, Medusa is still a demon, and demons, like all monsters, embody positions within a given argument; they reify different vices (or virtues, but usually criminality or sin, expressed as forbidden knowledge) and emotions at war for one side (the state) or the other (workers seeking liberation), as much through comedy and drama kayfabe (wrestler’s theatre, on and offstage) as parody and pastiche. She’s a corpse for traitors to dig up and attack/rape when she speaks the truth about profit and the state, thus its loyal servants.

For the state, then, Medusa embodies hysteria, which token Amazons are expected to stoically resist/quell during necrophilic rape revenge. She’s a pox, a demonic infestation—a criminal, Satanic, trickster, dragon, terrorist, vice character, vermin-zombie[6] thing to purge and exterminate; i.e., made to answer for imaginary crimes while being forced to turn into whatever the state needs to best demonize/prosecute Medusa, thus make profit happen (dipping the Amazon into Styx, like Achilles). It requires division, but paradoxically cannot entirely alienate workers from nature; instead, it must alienate (divide) then bring them back together during us-versus-them police violence as an oscillating form of praxial tension—one versus the other to put nature (and its dialectical-material tensions) cheaply to work. In turn, these tensions must happen for profit to work, hence the need for heroes, but also hostages and villain/victim/scapegoat; i.e., deserving and undeserving victims. It becomes a question of “state’s rights” versus worker rights, the state having a right to defend its profits/property (the damsel-in-distress), thus itself, from workers using police brutality (worker rights being to defend themselves from the state and its violence). The continuous, push-pull antagonization is what moves money through nature; i.e., something the state does repeatedly through Promethean and Faustian narratives, both which inevitably involve Amazons vs the Medusa. They have become inseparable, and cannot be extricated.

For us (and Gothic Communism as a holistic discipline), Medusa is the human condition/ghost of the counterfeit, hence thoroughly immodest according to any aspect of life (and labor) the state would seek to control through police force and unironic demon BDSM during the dialectic of shelter/the alien; i.e., the fat-and-sassy posthuman/postmodern whore writhing in agony and pleasure, a dark counterculture/conduit thereof defying state medicalization and pathologization of so-called “hysteria,” wandering womb, female/queer/non-white, etc, orgasms, public nudism and sex work (or sexualized work; e.g., women’s work) as “mythical” and “criminal,” thus needing to be contained in various ways that highlight the aforementioned tension; e.g., through humiliation kink, viewers repulsed by the whore on the toilet having spicy taco shits, yet seeking to police that in ways it can commodify and sell back to its constituents. Girls shit, which states alienize and profit off, by design. Antagonize nature-as-whore, then pimp her out as cheaply as possible—discipline and punish sans irony to quell sex positivity in favor of profit[7].

(artist: Quinn)

Medusa isn’t all bark, no bite/all filler, no killer (though Quinn’s booty [or mouth] is certainly full, left). Hers (thus ours, Quinn’s) nudity (actual or projected onto the surface of clothes/clothes and skin; re, Segewick: the imagery of the surface) is a Numinous weapon we can reclaim, especially as it speaks to what the state will try to rape and control in ways we can subvert and blend in/speak out with during revolutionary cryptonymy and ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: as silly-serious, part-comic, part-drama-/drag-queen. Medusa is a Great Destroyer/death goddess, thus evokes the Numinous, insofar as life and death entwine; for us, this means the palliative Numinous when developing Gothic Communism to escape Capitalist Realism’s tenuous control over life to try and cheat death (for the bourgeoisie): Mother Nature as giver/taker of either but growing increasingly incensed by capital, Cartesian men raping Medusa and pushing her towards state shift while trying to extend state life by raping nature. She echoes state mortality, which its rulers cannot stand. They either think themselves immortal, or don’t care if they die, so long as they’re on top for as long as possible. Born full, always hungry for more. America’s a hustle, preying on the dispossessed.

Activating her trap cards, Medusa is a power bottom, playfully-yet-forcefully topping from below—is like the Gothic, very Meatloaf-style rock opera to hit those much-needed highs and lows; i.e., life fucks and then you die:

I am the way
I am the light
I am the dark inside the night
I hear your hopes
I feel your dreams
And in the dark, I hear your screams (Savatage’s “Believe,” 1991).

In the Gothic-Communist aesthetic, Medusa is rape play/consent-non-consent challenging unironic forms (and their Cartesian dualism); she puts “rape” in quotes to speak to rape without quotes—i.e., relieving stress during ludo-Gothic BDSM, camping the canon and heteronormativity in neo-medieval forms of eustress: “storming her castle” because she wants it stormed, making it gay! Paradox! Catharsis! Building trust by tearing down old boundaries and raising new better ones! It’s not rocket science, but it does require Gothic reinvention to work in our favor! The state, after all, fears death and farms Medusa to cheat the reaper (re: the Promethean Quest).

Under normal conditions, we’re the whores of Omelas, pushing for universal liberation. As such, the aesthete Medusa squats between castle and occupant’s mise-en-abyme (aka the belly of the beast); re: the dance hall’s beastly masquerade handing out silk scarves (tied to bed posts) and gags (to stifle the screams of “dying” pleasure); i.e., a chronotope of castles-in-the-flesh, morphologically caught betwixt building and effigy speaking to the same dark, monstrous-feminine force—its live burial/graveyard sex aura as “ancient,” dug up and reimagined through Gothic fakery tailored to a 21st century world: Bakhtin’s dynastic primacy and hereditary rites (of sacrifice and passage). To it, Medusa’s libido and license—all curves, wet and wild, rowdy like a Mozart nocturne, vulgar and urbane, yet dumb and fun (the paradox prone to pun and oxymoron alike).

Like a Neo-Gothic cathedral, there’s always more to say and add; i.e., movement through her “almost holy” halls (ergodic motion) the name of the game: a place to lose control, but also win it back during calculated risk‘s castle-narrative. Things normally “set in stone” suddenly become plastic; i.e., in ways that can challenge state dogma/canonical essentialism during class, culture and race war breaking Capitalist Realism. The same liminalities go for statues; re: castle-like bodies and body-like castles both forbidden yet open-for-business, letting alien forces go in either direction: “Put us to the sword, baby!”

(artist: Magic Moonarts)

The Gothic, and Medusa by extension, is weaponized poetry in a neo-medieval age, one speaking to a half-real, none-too-distant, and questionably make-believe past that never really left (which many pretend didn’t or couldn’t happen back then or now): “We live in Gothic times.”

To it, metaphors compare two unlike things, which demons very much do by personifying what is demonized (re: darkness visible): alienated forms of nature to reunite with and humanize once more; re: hugging the alien, Medusa, during the dialectic of the alien’s pedagogy of the oppressed, instead of sedating us with her heady (get it?) charms to rape both of us with! The idea isn’t to rape rank, but to intersectionally solidarize, making profit/privatization (thus rape) untenable on all registers by finding similarity amid difference. Except, if we “look the part” yet cannot be held in place, the state cannot closet (thus censor/silence) us, and that is where our revenge (camping the canon) takes place: humanize the harvest to expose the state (and its profit motive) as inhumane, thus incompatible with life (and consent) because it must rape life to profit. There must always be a cop defending itself (and the state) from nature, but also rescuing nature from its wicked other self (the princess from the whore, always threatening to possess for nature instead of the state). Silence is genocide, so make some fucking noise! Laugh, cum, bleed, get mad! Take your land/peach (and its power) back, girls (and boys, enbies, etc)! ACAB (All Castles Are Bad)! ASAB, the state is straight! Their “protection” is pure dogshit, everyone expendable but the elite; i.e., normalizing genocide, making society sick; e.g., PTSD for combatants who, far from defeating nature, become prisoners of its ghost.

Per the whore’s paradox, the Amazon classically takes the yolk (re: Hippolyta marrying Theseus), whereas Medusa is the unbowed rape victim “of nature” by the state; i.e., meaning she’s forever radioactive, thus hostile, towards the West and its nuclear model seeking to dominate her without irony! This terror mechanism extends morphologically to her lived violence morphologized—meaning her green[8]/non-white skin, snakes for hair (which men love to project their penises onto), and petrifying gaze having “started it,” per Original Sin, but also her unnatural reproductive life cycle assigned to state vermin; i.e., when the Pegasus sprang from her neck after she was killed, itself a cesarean, “somno” rape baby.

During the liminal hauntology of war‘s diaphanous membrane/grim harvest, all of these non-white/non-straight qualities translate to equally abject, prickly elements reclaimed by GNC forces from TERFs and other cops; e.g., a PAWG fire-breathing dragon or the xenomorph’s acid for blood, its parasitoid eggs laid inside our unsuspecting hosts. Yes, cops impersonate their victims and infiltrate their lived/theatrical spaces (the danger disco, Gothic rape castle, etc), but this goes both ways, and doubles invite for troubling comparison. So back off, chuds, or we’ll give you space rabies, turning your nuclear home into an ambiguously gay orgy[9]/polycule! Death to America; cum on Medusa’s big, beautiful tits!

(artist: Magic Moonarts)

O, the horror and mixed feelings of Gothic-Communist rape-and-death therapy! Less about camping holocaust and more to camp our profound survival, mid-aftercare, its trauma lives in the body and all around us as things to unevenly police per embedded state persecution networks; i.e., as black-to-white livestock, reclaiming the Base and recultivating the Superstructure through sex controlled by force. As that curiously alien fire of the gods, it’s ambrosia normally paywalled and cloaked in masculine/feminine division and mystique, but also monstrous-feminine symbols of strength and yielding to said strength (again and again, because we’re sluts); e.g., Gothic novels promoting sex at the start, middle and end, but also showing and hiding it per the cryptonymy process: “Oh, yeah! That’s it! Fuck that pussy! That all you got?” Medusa goads you, gripping the headboard as you ravish her just the way she likes. “Watch these titties bounce! My thighs, booty and tum! Jiggly flan! So tasty!” The world is Gothic, whereupon rape and sex (quotes or no quotes) lurk everywhere, on the surface of and inside. It is what it is.

Amongst other things, then, Medusa is a goddess of nature; i.e., depicting the ways that beings of nature want to be loved and feared, but also savored and worshipped more generally as givers of “death” in small. Our liberatory appetites, then, are always couched within the state exploiting us, and us liberating ourselves as Medusa, responding to older industry forms’ guilty and privileged fantasies: where Medusa traditionally “belongs.”

(artist: Victoria Paris)

It’s a peep show of the whore’s bedroom eyes, exposed merchandise, and fucking outside the bedroom: her hungry hand guiding you inside, those lips-that-grip keeping you there; grabbing the bedrails while getting railed, hyphenating the language of sex and force, war and food, decay and death, etc. Sex is a weapon, one for which Medusa’s animalistic camping of rape (rawr) needs to become second-nature; i.e., mirroring our abuse to prevent its unironic continuation. Our cryptonymy must camp the state’s, including its Sales of Indulgence unfolding right before our very eyes; i.e., while it happens in front of and behind the whore standing in for the theatre curtain’s Black Veil (exposing its double standards and killing our darlings to rescue them; e.g., the predatory treatment of white girls vs non-white girls, but also white girls having non-white qualities: Victoria, above)! Otherwise, the state will segregate us.

Instead of being rightly seen as defense mechanisms against rape, though, the state makes Medusa’s aesthetic abject, her rape and rage uncontrolled/turned into a dark reflection hanging over Amazonian heads, thus capital’s: a revelation/reckoning uncovering the state’s true purpose. She becomes wild, kaiju-style, as much by looking at things pointing to past versions of herself, thus returned to normal by monomythical force “preventing the apocalypse.” Everything plays out on the Aegis, in the shadow zone, as contested; re: “In place of a dark lord, you would have a queen!” Fucking oath!

Through capital, then, rape is rape as something to give or receive through predictable police models, but whose busy and confusing historical-materialism took time to evolve into itself—from object to subject, yes, but also colonized subjects being pitted against objectified recipients of selective police violence; i.e., in unequal ways that historically sell out by attacking themselves, ranking rape; re: “Haven’t I suffered enough?”; e.g., Afrocentrism rightly mistrusting white feminism, but abjecting all feminism/white people in the process. Instead of a united front against the elite, we arrive at competing voices speaking out against empire while also being internally at odds—those who had gentrified and decayed, versus those they denied the chance to evolve, relegating their political enemies to the dark shadow zone of Capitalist Realism. One side is always controlled opposition, the other always uncontrolled to a matter of degree—one collared with a longer leash, the length of said leash made to justify these kinds of us-versus-them conflicts/unproductive “perfect victim” arguments; their divisions are manufactured, as are their violent arbitrations and token, marginalized hair-splitting.

Tokenism doesn’t preclude reclamation. However, such canon and camp had to evolve into where they are, including discussions about rape as a taboo subject that, all the same, must occur under capital for profit to happen (and which we must challenge to liberate ourselves with). Before we give neoliberalism a deeper look, then, let’s further consider the poetic history, tokenistic considerations and dialectical-material tensions of Amazons and Medusa, including how I approach them as a Gothic-Communist scholar, sex worker and activist.

Poetic History

Whores aren’t inherently bad; the state makes them bad in ways it can police. While Medusa is alive and well under Capitalism—is arguably the most famous monster stemming from the ancient world, abbreviating nature as raped—it’s important to remember she embodies death unto the victims “of nature” by civilization. She’s the madwoman in the attic, smiling at the gods and their absurdity (sex work not for the faint of heart)!

Even so, this man-vs-nature dialog also evolved over time, insofar as Medusa is an incredibly old legend (made from clay and other demonic materials of the ancient world; e.g., marble, above, fashioning shadowy dollish likenesses to our Numinous, magnetic nightmares); i.e., one about poetic discussions of rape that Barbara Creed sought to tie into third wave feminism using Freudian psychoanalysis (especially the Archaic Mother concept, from “Medusa’s Head,” 1929), Kristeva’s process of abjection and film studies, which I expanded in my PhD beyond “just (white, cis-het) women” (and films) to anything “othered” under Western multimedia domination; re (from Volume Zero):

Canon is classically framed as immutable, eternal—literally “outside of time”—but it isn’t. It can be altered, changing history through the wider interpretation and genesis of popular legends, but also the material conditions that respond to them and vice versa (the Base and the Superstructure). Capital historically-materially alienates owners from workers and workers from each other and themselves through Cartesian dualism (with owners being collectively afraid of the poor and siding with “their own kind” as the persons they are born growing up with; i.e., other rich people they identify with and see as friends): an entire system of thought as built around the essential binding of sex and gender to each other and human biology (skin color and sex organs), which is coded to have various “correct” qualities (such as “Christian” or “cis-het”) when utilized in the “correct” fashion: towards the profit motive. There is an ostensible “other” who is murdered instead of the state defender killing them, but in truth, the soldier is completely expendable. Everything sits within a cycle of imaginary history that plays out through an endless, genocidal mirroring that must, if it is to cease, be met with mirrors:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

These particular mirrors (and their reflections’ visions) become a way of seeing the world that isn’t Promethean; i.e., they upend the infamous hubris of the Patriarchy without joining canon’s process of abjection:

When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not—as commonly thought—put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her shield with the Medusa’s head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa’s own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena’s aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend—the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa (source: Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine, 1993).

Gothic Communism goes further than Julia Kristeva or Barbara Creed. Our “Medusa” doesn’t play into the elite’s scheme of weaponized trauma; i.e, the TERF surrendering her neck and, once beheaded, staring blindly and furiously at the underclass (dressed up to shock the formerly abused with a disingenuous threat of rape, of the shame of unwanted pregnancies projected onto a racialized, genderqueer “other”: the man-in-a-dress, or their murderous, womb-like haunt). Nor does she segregate and “play ball” through compelled modesty/invisibility and tokenism of various doubled kinds.

Instead, our complicated monster heroine uses dialectical-material scrutiny to parse which is which, combining the awesome power of her reclaimed body and its labor to actively petrify the profit motive while blending in with it  […] In doing so, she utilizes the bizarre, recycled conventions (anyone who says, “truth is stranger than fiction” has never read a Gothic novel before) to actively encourage/incite degrowth—i.e., a so-called “Jewish revenge” against fascism and the state by borking its profit motive, in this life or the next: through a sex-positive counterterrorism that exposes the state’s usual terror weapons and fictions […] All the while, our Medusa has some semblance of safety because she will be viewed as human behind the looking glass (which serves as a buffer between her and the audience), being seen as something her would-be-killers will not sacrifice because they love her (source).

To it, “striking terror” means many different things, and these merge with different qualities of the monstrous-feminine that are repulsive and attractive regarding rape as something to perform (the Medusa being a giant Numinous whole expressed by various offshoots). Amazons generally give rape as heroic warriors refusing to be victims by punching down, and Medusa gives it back, punching up on the same Aegis while being tortured/having survived older holocausts; either can forward or reverse abjection, but the polarity of such exchanges depends entirely on how.

As we’ve said, the Medusa legend itself is quite old, stemming from the Ancient Greeks to the Romans inheriting their stories, and for which Medusa herself underwent a long transformation from weapon to monster to human-appearing monster woman talking about rape. As Elizabeth Hadley writes in “More than a Monster: Medusa Misunderstood” (2024):

(artist: Sam Milnes)

You might know her from Caravaggio’s famous Medusa, the face of Versace, the book, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, or some other adaptation of the ancient myth. Medusa is ubiquitous, appearing in Greek and Roman literature (from Hesiod’s Theogony to Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and in architecture, metalwork, vases, sculptures, and paintings throughout history. Yet the most well-known portrayals of her all predictably converge upon one brief moment from her life’s story: her beheading and the use of her decapitated head by a man to petrify others. Medusa then becomes an apotropaic symbol warding off evil, similar to the evil eye. She is imagined more often as an object or a monster than as a human. Even though Classical and Hellenistic depictions presented Medusa as more human than in the previous Archaic period, the popular conception of Medusa today still upholds her “otherness,” her monstrosity. Modern-day artists have embraced Medusa as an emblem of female power, a beautiful monster, and used her story in the service of social movements; for example, Luciano Garbati’s Medusa with the Head of Perseus went viral in 2020 in connection with the #MeToo movement (source).

In turn, Hadley highlights the evolution of Medusa in three distinct cases:

CASE 1: MEDUSA AS YOU KNOW: Medusa’s more typical depictions feature her on a shield or as a decapitated head with snakes for hair.  This first case highlights the Medusa you most likely know and learned in school or from a mythology book: Medusa as a monster, an object, a weapon. A head, a symbol, never a woman. Terrifying, never beautiful.

CASE 2: THE TRANSITION OF MEDUSA: This case highlights the spectrum of Medusas, starting with the Greek version of the myth in which she is nothing more than a monster and moving towards a more human and feminine portrayal. These works of art highlight the nuance that is buried in Medusa’s myth, and the numerous ways in which artists have chosen to render Medusa.

CASE 3: MEDUSA AND RAPE: MORE WOMAN THAN MONSTER: Most audiences today who are familiar with the traditional character of Medusa don’t know anything at all about her past or have misconceptions of the origins of her curse. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the reason Medusa is metamorphosized into a Gorgon is because Neptune rapes her in Athena’s temple. Instead of blaming Neptune, Athena punishes the beautiful Medusa for the violation of her temple, and curses her by transforming her from a maiden into a monster. Although Ovid is the first author to truly humanize Medusa by telling this story, he only does so within the context of the myth of Perseus and Andromeda. In that tale, Ovid emphasizes Perseus as the heroic male protagonist who retells Medusa’s origin story after he’s used her severed head as a weapon to save the endangered Andromeda.

Only one book in all of Rauner’s many editions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses contains the actual scene of Neptune raping Medusa, a microcosm for the reception of her story in art and literature. Whereas acts of rape in many other Greek myths are well-known and central to an understanding of their narratives, Medusa’s is historically hidden and underrepresented. Instead, she is known for her beheading by heroic Perseus and for the people and monsters she petrifies both before and after her death. She is known for the terror she elicits and not her beauty or womanhood. As the books in this case demonstrate, even when Medusa’s rape is illustrated, it is minimized, especially when compared to other representations of rape from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, particularly at the level of body language (ibid.).

In other words, the idea that a whore could even be raped evolved into itself (from a monstrous force of nature/undead weapon to monstrous-feminine human victim), as did the awful reality that whores could rape each other in service to the Man—let alone talk about it to challenge capital with (re: the whore’s paradox/revenge)! But in the Gothic tradition, repression goes hand-in-hand with liminality insofar as something is both buried, and cryptonymically exposed, by making it something that cannot divide terror or violence from nature (woman or otherwise); i.e., as a demonic giver and receiver of such terrorist/counterterrorist treatment: Medusa both punished and protected by Athena as Medusa-in-duality (a mutual, ouroborotic embodiment of the status quo and Archaic Mother), and whose shield is likewise abused by TERFs long after Medusa’s original demise.

Embodied by Medusa, the imaginary past is loaded with contradiction and baggage alike, allowing us to change/recreate the myth to suit our purposes without effacing the actual historical abuse (and value) it poetically speaks to. Medusa isn’t just female or white; her alien fetishized qualities speak to all manner of opposed peoples—i.e., abused per the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection committed by subjugated Amazons (and cops at large) against GNC, Pagan, non-white offshoots of the Medusa; re (from Volume Zero, exhibit 1a1c):

(…I don’t want to focus on vagina dentata or literal breeding crises in the classical, Neo-Gothic sense; my book aims to go thoroughly beyond Barbara Creed’s somewhat dated and limited, biological-/cis-centric view of the monstrous-feminine/”woman as other” […] So while it’s true that the phrase “phallic woman” traditionally denotes a war-like woman, huntress or vengeful monstrous-feminine, I want to stress how subjugated Amazons aren’t just aggressively and physically violent towards cis-het, sexist men; they’ve radicalized inside a “prison sex” mentality to become hostile towards “outsider” groups, including trans people, while seeing themselves as the universal victims that tacitly yield to their conquerors by emulating their worst habits [exhibit 41g1a2].

(artist: Mizugi Buns)

As such, I want to expand on how the monstrous-feminine can also non-binarize to illustrate the gender-non-conforming idea of a non-violent trans, intersex or enby person; i.e., someone who refuses to be a victim without embodying the standard-issue implements of violence and war from conventional stories [including TERF examples: the blind, indiscriminate Medusa]. Instead, they can be nymph-like and soft, their penis a reclaimed source of shame/codified rape [mine was] and their monomorphic body offering up other gender-non-conforming surprises to boot. They become a dark being of chaos to sincerely-but-ironically worship relative to how they camp current heteronormative standards that abject such beings; i.e., as would have been the case before Cartesian thought came and binarized everything [source].)

We want to expand Medusa’s transformation story—of being raped, then raped and murdered while pregnant in her sleep for being a whore—beyond state forces weaponizing rape in reactionary-to-moderate forms during controlled opposition; re: through the Amazonian myth whitewashing the monstrous-feminine while treating Medusa as the eternal punching bag thereof, hence abusing the overall shock value of violence against nature in the Shadow of Pygmalion: into a state terror weapon directed at women/female parties to tokenize them, pitting Galatea against herself. It’s canonically bad medicine for a problem caused by the plaguedoctors; i.e., a threat of rape injected into white women’s menticided brains: false power through military optimism, neoliberal canon portraying Medusa as a gay Communist bug fetish that reproduces through ovipositor rape/traumatic penetration (the Queen “checking” Bishop, left, being the Promethean destruction of servile technology similar to Scott’s Prometheus):

All in all, it’s a presumption of guilt by those TERF-y she-chuds raping Medusa and treating her as inhuman, biomechanical insect (devaluing both species). Ripley the blue-collar worker batters the scapegoat heel in vaso vagal fetish gear (with Nazis and Communists occupying the same shadow space). The whole cycle not only repeats, but operates through steady ignorance and bad history as a regressive worldview to foist onto others; e.g., “What are birds? We just don’t know!“; i.e., Ripley is a killing machine armed to the teeth and fighting an imaginary evil: Domino Theory (a metaphor for CIA activity in U.S. satellite regions). What happens abroad also happens at home.

For us, rape isn’t something to see and attack by dehumanizing rape victims (which Communists generally are); we must listen and humanize those who have been raped, while also recognizing their subhuman, taboo, demonized statuses. If capital abjects rape to extend profit by blaming its own victims, mid-harvest, then we must expose that, too. Equality must be universal, including the equal ability to weaponize demonic counterterror (and rape revenge) against state doubles; i.e., playing at Omelas rockstars colonizing genocide dressed up as sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll (themselves stolen from colonial spaces and turned on marginalized groups). We camp canon because we must—lest capital decay and do unto each of us what happened to the Medusas of yore, of the here-and-now under various double standards.

Think of it like Halloween, except it’s not tied to the holiday—at least not exclusively. Rather, nature is something to rape under a system that goes boom-or-bust on a routine, accelerating pendulum. In turn, the Imperial Boomerang sails home, bringing Imperialism home to empire, aka fascism. The liminal hauntology of war is a castle that moves in place; i.e., wherein the membrane of Capitalist Realism grows thin, showing the horrors of settler colonialism to the inheritors of empire embodying those concepts. They see them as Medusa on the Aegis, and like Halloween’s thinning of the veil releasing evil spirits between the world of the living and the land of the dead, coopt said things to incite moral panic. Capital decays to defend itself from its own victims, seeking revenge against nature as vengeful; i.e., a whore’s revenge, which means to incite growth or degrowth in practice. This happens through the language of monsters, for or against capital.

As we’ve established, the historical elements (and all-around campy side) of Amazons and Medusa became more and more human in appearance, less biomechanical and inhuman. Even so, said process remains dualistic. For the state, Amazons were turned into cops by capital decaying feminism to serve its interests, while abjecting Medusa and her black revenge onto the imaginary past said Amazons could attack; i.e., the revenge of white women by colonial abuses (e.g., tokophobia or spousal abuse) projected during mirror syndrome onto black subjects with a racialized, non-Christian, and GNC Communist flavor! The effect is very much to see what you think is an old abuser and freeze, but also fight!

In short, the Amazon assimilated—was suddenly able to speak to her rape in ways that wouldn’t go feral without a leash, leading people to demonize and attack her by first seeing her attack something “even worse”; re: Medusa. In blood-libel terms, this ironically “poisoned the well,” turning feminists into unironic Nazis the state could shame and exhibit as demon BDSM; i.e., to conveniently bench, banish or recollar after the grim harvest was over (war brides with a warrior character). They would always be “on call,” though. Anticipating Medusa’s inexorable return, characters like Ellen Ripley became a modern mantle to pass from one debutante to the next (e.g., Amanda Ripley, in Alien: Isolation, 2014): cutting the giantess down to size, from laborer to land seen as one-in-the-same from the colonizer’s perspective!

Doing so happens not to intersectionally solidarize different oppressed groups (which to some degree, white women are), but pit those with more privilege against those with less during the dialectic of shelter and[10] the alien; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss; i.e., to divide workers, weakening labor through rape-ranking litigation that tokenizes out of desperation, fear and convenience: to help protect the state’s next-in-line as part of a legitimate bloodline’s Immaculate Conception.

During this nativity story, the white queen (the Madonna) saves one good white child (Jesus, presented here as a blonde female army brat[11]) by first killing hundreds of evil, non-white children: Grendel, the son of Cain, followed by Grendel’s mother as having spawned said children out of dead American colonists (whose fatal metamorphosis into Communism is seen as a 1:1 irreversible trade; i.e., the former killing and corrupting the latter through vengeful “reeducation” versus reproducing normally [as humans do] outside parasitoid symbiosis). It’s “Alien for men,” except Rambo is a woman acting like a man against imperial doppelgangers: female Beowulf, taking names for God and country under a Protestant ethic upholding Christian motherhood (and general family values) through neoliberal force. She’s aborting non-white children on the simulation of real-world battlefields (“How many drops is this for you, lieutenant?”).

The Gothic classically embeds and elides bodies and buildings in war-game language; i.e., chess, but concentric. For example, Newt—as sole survivor—is elevated to princess status, mid-rebellion. The film’s damsel-in-distress, she’s a doll inside a dollhouse (each having a hidden military function that returns under martial law) who, similar to Jesus (the sacrificial lamb), is “killed in the sequel”; to rescue Newt during Aliens‘ Beowulf-style impunity and momentum-shift rebounds, Ripley the Amazon self-righteously kills droves of dark aliens (which Cameron presents as faceless invaders on their own land—monolithic, imitative offshoots of a dark original [which the colonizers imitate] who “doesn’t value human life the same way”). Doing so isn’t to save Newt from instant or even eventual death, but from rape and parasitoid transformation being a fate worse than death assigned to her by state forces; i.e., by switching sides from white to black, turning the nuclear order upside down: to be trapped in Hell, sitting by the West’s abjection of their own crimes onto a dark, female, deserving victim of state force—the Medusa. She’s a black, castle-like body inside a body-like castle, mise-en-abyme, but also a liminal space in the architectural sense: something to move through and sterilize, but also spread her evil-coded likeness across the colonial universe.

Medusa is androgynous, phallic, disobedient—by and large unafraid of the West and its poisonous (and militant) ideas of motherhood, thus happy to saber-rattle and dick-measure with white opposites (dueling moms)! In turn, Ripley ain’t no queer space Commie, and is gonna prove it by burying the gay (and, by extension, the state’s atrocities): scuttling colony (and slave revolt) in a cloud of nuclear hellfire!

(source: Monster Legacy’s “The Alien Queen,” 2015)

As usual, Cameron’s doomsday (and royal apocalyptic language, left) is nothing new. The Gothic is, since Radcliffe, “terrorist literature” (re: Groom) that concerns the creation of a terrorist identity from the French Revolution, onwards (re: Crawford). Like so many others, then, Cameron shows a Communist Numinous (a female T-Rex with an African tribal mask) grappling with state spectres of competing motherhood; i.e., two hyperobjects cosmically at odds. Framed as two queens (and all the queens’ men) killing each other’s babies, it’s Divine Right/Manifest Destiny taken to hyperbolic extremes—a Great Chain of Being relayed through anti-Communist war film. To check Medusa, Hadley’s Hope becomes a half-real colonial territory to both reclaim, but also deny its victims repossession of after America’s defeat; i.e., to mark for death and blow to kingdom come, mid-Red-Scare—all to valorize Pax Americana denying its colonial victims land back, onstage and off!

We’ll examine Aliens more, in just a moment. The fact remains, every superhero has a supervillain doubling them. The same goes for their associate structures, mid-kayfabe; i.e., Capitalism vs Communism. Doing so is merely another divide-and-conquer strategy recuperating and devaluing feminist language as not only hysterical, but the actual rapists under the Scooby Doo mask, not the elite. It’s a bait-and-switch—not simply framing someone else for capital’s destabilizing of the world, mid-apocalypse, but making them complicit in settler colonialism to erode any goodwill towards rebellious action (re: Federici, the epigram); i.e., to encourage submission towards capital as it presently is, returning things to normal by poetically keeping them normal in half-real, hierarchical terms. Man rapes woman; woman rapes nature. Nobody likes TERFs, but capital needs them to exist.

(artist: SLBtweety)

To it, white women are bridled once more. Whittled into obedient sex dolls/action figures, then conjured up as shameless lapdogs, they bite other marginalized groups as needed; i.e., cutting their heads off during female circumcision/all-around gender trouble. In doing so, their mutual-if-lopsided hysteria (“they’re killing each other”) conflates with sexual aggression, hydrophobia (rabies), bitches in heat, and enlarged female genitals outsizing male ones (common in different animal species, like the hyena), or male ones acting feminine to not serve profit as a settler-colonial structure. Gender and biology are a spectrum, not a binary, but states endure by enforcing false binaries; i.e., to yolk/repress andro/gynodiversity and liberatory gender parody/monster bodies, morphological expression and biodiversity at large (above): how bodies appear liminally inside/outside media, produced by the spirit of Medusa (a hag-to-harpy-style virago, but also a slut and younger beautiful woman). Whatever the form, our very existence is ironic, thus criminal per state models/monopolies telling us, more or less, to eat shit and die: “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.” Nothing ever measures up, save that we deserve what we get.

Profit is, at its ghoulish heart, patriarchal, and defines treason through ontological equivocations of military insurrection around a bigoted core; i.e., capital is built on Imperialism and feudalism, including their own bigotries/ethnocentric tools of demonic domination. Under global Capitalism, such systems overlap smaller persecution networks inside larger ones that hauntologically uphold the usual divisions; i.e., routine rapes of nature pursuant to profit, thus genocide as a matter of infinite growth and military expansion during frontier conquest (and witch hunts during military urbanism—when the state of exception shrinks said circumference into the Imperial Core). This selective punishment during reactive abuse tends to target sex workers, poor/non-white people and the homeless (which queer/disabled people often are, doing sex work as much to survive as communicate their humanity and basic human rights; e.g., Bay and Maybel, below). Such tokenized exclusion from SWERFs and TERFs (which are synonymous) further the abjection process through the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., amounting to the middle class ruthlessly excising/exorcising nature through fear/fascination arguments with the colonized; re: equal rights for all, therefore land back, demonized by state proponents seeing those things as “rape” (of the bourgeoisie, their masters) under Capitalist Realism!

(artist, left: Maybel Syrup; right: Bay Ryan)

In short, anything immodest that threatens profit is charged, DARVO-style, as “rape” by the elite and their traitors selling rebellion out (thus pimping it out to its usual benefactors, be they white men/women, or token parties looking to assimilate by leading witch hunts against other witches; i.e., during the moral panics of settler argumentation). Capital is always harvesting nature; Medusa appears during fascism attacking Communism (the grim harvest), and is sacrificed to return things to back to normal—to make her children (workers) less rowdy, swollen, haunted, whatever.

But the same cryptonymy (and Freudian mumbo-jumbo) can be reclaimed by us from complicit forms; i.e., by using the Amazon or Medusa to exact her whore’s revenge by breaking the profit motive (thus Capitalist Realism), humanizing the harvest quite literally! Amazons have their revolutionary whore’s revenge by refusing to tokenize and attack Medusa; Medusa has hers by humanizing her monster-mom anger in ways that expose the men behind the curtain: inciting reactionary abuse between different oppressed peoples, and what they give birth to. Pimps can’t police whores for the state on their own, but require them to police themselves, historically-materially. This includes their poetry.

Keeping with our examination—of Medusa’s evolving poetic history—she is a dark mother goddess having adapted to speak out in modern times against state inequalities (concerning life and death as things to give); i.e., to her continued demonic exploitation overlapping with a new voice, one that speaks out Numinously against rape for all oppressed parties (not just white women). In doing so, her pedagogy of the oppressed devises monsters that challenge state monopolies while being chained, Prometheus-style, to their harvesting device, capital; i.e., the duality of switches, their mood swings flaring up during the state’s nefandous extraction, which dissidents camp during calculated risk, on and offstage.

For example, a mommy dom made to submit can still have power while appearing fierce-yet-defeated; i.e., topping from below provided her aesthetic evokes a demonstrable end to profit and police violence during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s liminal expression: the rogue whore, fag and escaped slave, etc, giving birth to rebellion in demonic poetry of the flesh! We can become/present as anything we want; i.e., whatever the state cannot control, thus fears, which is everything! Our carrion flower becomes the foul stench of a lovely rose to send them packing!

During Medusa’s incredibly transformative potential as normally policed, “girl” and “boy” become things to define in opposition similar to “white” and “black”; i.e., against the elite, their supporter’s colonial binary viewing genderqueer emergence as “feminist erasure” (while likewise treating the planet as a mandala/tabula rasa on loop). Like Medusa, we transform our bodies (and their poetic offshoots) to trigger state fervor during the cryptonymy process, thus expose them trying to capture, rape and terrorize us; i.e., as Chthonic entities/evocations predating patriarchal notions of power (then and now): Earth as female/feminine (e.g., Gaia, Medusa) versus the male gods of the sky (e.g., Apollo and Zeus) abjecting serpents, afraid of them and mortal like any man is. Coming second, the Father of Light colonizes the Mother of Dark.

Out of Greece and Rome into capital (“Rome”), history is written by the conquerors, treating death as something to fear and enslave versus embracing it during guerrilla warfare. Giants are things to behead, their eyes retaining their power (of clarity through confusion) long after the body is gone. Medusa is “ancient chaos” and Athena is “statuesque order” but really they’re two sides of the same abridged coin, and live/exist in duality written by men punishing women for the “crime” of being raped, and everyone else either supporting or denying that claim: rape guilt engrained into Western culture, the latter repressing the former to serve empire. A masochist, Medusa takes the pain to reverse abjection, exposing their mortality and hypocrisy on the Aegis: as the terrorists calling her one. “The Gothic castle is the ultimate dom,” as I put it; as castle-like body or body-like castle, Medusa’s ability to give and receive pain—her ludo-Gothic BDSM playing with rape—is the ultimate counterterror weapon: to regain control (we’ll return to this, in part two).

Concluding the historical evolution of Amazons and Medusa by discussing rape as poetic devices, let’s now consider their tokenization and dialectical-material tensions a little more, and whose tangents we’ll tie into profit (as a structure) when we examine capital raping Medusa in neoliberal forms (re: Aliens).

Tokenization

Before we lay out Amazons and Medusa in material opposition, though, I want to spend a few more pages setting additional boundaries regarding tokenism (a specialty of mine; my book series started while researching TERFs). Being holistic but strapped for time, we won’t be able to cover all related variables here (the Four Gs or Six Rs; state monopolies, trifectas, and qualities of capital; hermeneutic Gothic-Communist quadfecta, etc), but what I say of/with them about tokenism (and resisting it) applies as much to goblins, vampires, and witches as it does to Amazons or the Medusa (and her memento mori, breadcrumb trail of Russian dolls), and likewise applies to all undead, demonic and/or animalistic beings. Sex is a joke, in Gothic, as is rape (a killing joke); i.e., insofar as we need that ability—to discuss it in popular modes of discourse—to best camp it: “Ask not for whom the bell fucks, it fucks for thee!”

(artist: Dreamy Skullz)

Such is Gothic maturity—a paradox of seemingly juvenile humor speaking cryptonymically to the state operating as normal (through Gothic immaturity furthering abjection); i.e., violating basic human rights for all workers, but doing so through the unequal and relative language of phobias and stigma. By comparison, tokenism is a matter of desperation and convenience, for which white cis-het women (the classic second wave feminist/female Gothic author) fall closer towards convenience.

Beyond any one group, though, any sense of superiority is generally in relation to another marginalized group the former is expected to police for being lesser than the status-quo, hierarchical places of each, but also various liminalities; i.e., someone is treated “white” if they act and/or appear white; e.g., white-skinned women are treated “white” so long as they seem, more or less, straight and modest—meaning quiet (about their abuse), skinny and not dressed like a punk, fag and/or slut (excepting uncover token cops, of course). Though additional latitude is given towards them for the color of their skin, this can be challenged by them being poor (white trash) and female, but also their political activity and flavors thereof. Class trumps sex and race, insofar as money talks, and the system protects men, but especially male celebrities, first; i.e., those who are lucrative; e.g., O.J. Simpson, a black man, killed his wife, a rich white woman, only to have the state shield him using his male privilege, wealth, and token, star-athlete status. If the superiority of men is ever thrown into question on a patriarchal level, women always pay the price. That’s what the courts are for!

To further complicate things, though (as Gothic Communism is a holistic discipline), there’s a second set of double standards to go with the first: straight > queer—with this having a third relative double standard; e.g., if a white woman is perceived as queer versus a black trans man. The complexities build and exchange between different axes of privilege and oppression in service to the bourgeoise or against them; re: cops and victims. I’ve often called this “descending rungs of preferential mistreatment” per Man Box thinking and weird nerd culture, but it’s less two basic sides and more like an intersecting lattice of many different variables. This further includes a theatrical variability that, itself, doubles during oppositional praxis[12] being how people communicate; i.e., through the Gothic mode being simply the poetic language of monsters to describe people during state operations (ruler and subject). Truth through fakery (of the imaginary past) operates according to labor as a multicultural polity both divided and homogenous, clumped into different warring groups controlled by the same owner class; i.e., speaking dualistically through the same mirror dialogs while—doing as the West does—testifying to state atrocities by fabricating them (which Medusa embodies in giant, animalized ways). Often this happens through fatal nostalgia, mixing good with bad; e.g., remember the ’80s, remember AIDS? Terror language marries to language of home, creating a kind of gargoyle; re: the home as familiar/foreign.

Yet, while it’s easy to highlight how things like men/male, masculinity and white skin are canonically superior to women/female, femininity and black skin (and how the latter will historically assimilate to act like its colonizer double), this sits on a spectrum of non-whiteness/monstrous-feminine affording a great deal of poetic and functional latitude; i.e., in terms of who is punished and who isn’t, but also how. The state classically controls nature through victims of nature being treated as “other” (for not being straight white men/straight men/men, followed by straight white women/straight women/women, etc); power is a performance to perceive, which means it is rife with paradox and concentric division tying people in knots (the Gothic loves its puns): false and true, Medusa and her snakes feeling pent up!

(artist: akiraeviI)

For example, a white girl has white skin, yes, but if she is fat, she suddenly takes on an “immodest, non-white” quality per the settler argument, making her “less white” as a matter of performance or perspective than someone who isn’t fat. This can swap and/or compound; e.g., with a queer girl being treated differently depending on her orientation, biology and gender, but also her religion and class. Except, it’s not only incredibly hard to “actually” reduce things purely to class, race or culture (religion and gender), but an exceptionally bad idea even if one could. Instead, it’s how these modular qualities intersect and react holistically that matters; i.e., in ways that dialectically-materially serve or disobey profit. Someone who is functionally white, then, will either have double standards that let them do things regardless, or is someone who acts “modest” in order to avoid seeming “non-white” (again, per the settler argument).

(artist: Sinead)

Challenging those is a balancing act unto itself; i.e., people who might otherwise be able to blend in or lean into a particular identity to monopolize and police it under capital can likewise abstain from such temptations; e.g., Sinead is AFAB and fat, but not a woman (above); fae identify as fae, pushing towards fat liberation while also smoking weed and using artistic expression to make faer selves heard. So these things have to be acknowledged through faer own struggles; i.e., challenging the ways in which the porn industry will normally classify Sinead: as a BBW. Capital will exude forces onto faer to make faer feel like a woman, among other things; it will treat faer as Medusa according to its vision of the monster, not faers—a butt pirate to poach, purify or put down. There is always a double—a criminal to kettle, closet and cage; a cop to betray them “for the badge” (the myth of immunity from state force provided they punch down).

In short, capital arbitrates power through us-versus-them arguments that are, to some degree, entirely random. The structure is there, but it isn’t determined by a metaphysical force, like a god or some other cosmic argument; there is no transcendental signified, but rather binaries that arbitrate through force (controlling sex and nature) by the colonizer against the colonized. These dichotomies classically emerge as black and white, but again determine by function over appearance within the various aesthetics; i.e., in a world of wealth through conquest. There’s an element of dysfunction at play.

Appearance obviously matters, but isn’t the end-all, be-all of arbitration. It’s about who you serve and how you function under capital, which explains why you can have token Amazons to begin with—afforded their own double standards similar to any other liminal category that defies conventional boundaries; i.e., tokens, period; e.g., the token black family from Jordan Peele’s Us (below, 2019). They’ll never let you forget you’re black, fat, female, queer, Jewish or anything else. When it comes time to blame someone, it will always be your fault when the chickens come home to roost (for example, no one blames school shooters for being white Christian wackjobs; they’re simply taking the colonial model to its logical conclusion, from Columbine to the hundreds of shootings after it): the poor nuclear household and its women and children (Jordan Peele, a token black man/Zionist, learned nothing from Kubrick, below—abjecting Israel’s war crimes, but also America’s)!

Furthermore, the abuse isn’t just chattelizing or infantilizing but verminizing. No self-respecting person does this, but plenty lack the respect or morals to uphold them when tempted by power under duress (or inheriting it; i.e., straight white chudwads; re: white [cis-het] people disease) to placate their conquers versus killing their darlings. It becomes a shameless, incessant pillbox game, pushing the button inside a prison (of the mind; re: Plato’s cave). Eventually conditioning wins out, making cops or victims, victims coming from cops. While it’s a hard cycle to break, it generally happens through resistance to police arguments while embracing nature as a monstrous-feminine aesthetic; i.e., Medusa isn’t just a BDSM rape slut, but a furry on the road to activism. We not only have to subvert police-agent weapons (“to reclaim our chains,” Marx), but humanize what they target with them.

Generally this is very conversational, fluid; i.e., spoken through commerce, poetry and art (re: labor exchange and mutual action). Capital has many moving parts and dualities that are difficult to encapsulate, but all the same, my approach (and that of the people I work with) tries just that. We use monstrous-feminine poetry during Gothic Communism to synthesize (make) new versions of older things that speak to our ongoing struggles. Elitism excludes, which we’re not about.

Monsters aren’t just commodities, then, but poetic arguments and lenses. In turn, the Gothic is imperial home dressed up as alien, which helps us change not just our own shape but that of our colonizers to speak to otherwise taboo things in acceptable forms of trespass. It’s incredibly useful, but also scrutinized and occupied by people for or against Capitalism. To it, power and its articulation go both ways; e.g., aliens aren’t bad, but become bad when they disguise settler arguments to assist colonial invaders (and their motherships). The same goes for any monster, including Amazons and Medusa, as articulated by different people seeing different things regarding sex and force (and orbiting factors like wealth, food and other forms of security and status). None have set definitions or shapes (the Medusa is especially plastic), but the imaginary past they collectively and hauntologically evoke tends to concern similar things across space and time.

Freud’s interpretations, for example, concern police force as something that psychosexually shapes and upholds the nuclear model. And while I think Freud was largely dogmatic in his assertions (as cops generally are), he’s not entirely off-base when it comes to violence and the unheimlich. There’s a morphological character to the Medusa, but also one of violence and terror working together to describe a variety of things about the monstrous-feminine, all at once; re: Medusa is a crude, inkblot metaphor for sexual arousal and castration, but also a human subject for which those things are demonized as; e.g., a walking cock or clit that is queer-coded, black-coded, and/or female-coded, etc, and speaks to the dated fears/appetites of the audience that, sure enough, haven’t gone anywhere. BDSM is still very much demonized, as are things like asexuality and public nudism, fake/denied orgasms, or really any kink described in Gothic!

To it, the transphobic, Orientalist, blood-libel, and black rape fears of white second wave feminists are very much alive and well; but so are those resisting them and their misogynistic gangsters and capital (with the cover to Barbara Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine having a sideways “mouth,” denoting a biology that isn’t strictly the property of “rebellious” TERFs, but really sex workers of all sorts; e.g., next page). Ownership is action that is seen; e.g., speaking with release words/triggers like “thick,” “hard,” “throbbing” to excite as much as terrify (or terrify because one is excited by things the state labels “terrorist”; re: Crawford).

In Gothic, these manifest as excessive, goes-up-to-eleven overreactions; i.e., Medusa, speaking to rape as an abuse of power against criminalized bodies and portrayals of said bodies. “Slow and steady wins the race,” or so the saying goes, but Medusa is anything but nice and easy! She’s Numinous, Godzilla, making her enemies eat her ass. She’s wild, criminal, highly suspect and off-the-rails—a force of nature, keeping it on cooldown, crushing your head with operatic, hysterical, vice-like kegels! Police forces alienize and fear holes (female space), but also phallic devices they cannot own; we play with their expectations to tease and excite rebellion: why settle for ordinary when you can be mysterium tremendum/the Great Destroyer? Forbidden sight is to see what is forbidden; i.e., the chattelized exhibiting them and theirs as normally a highly controlled substance (sex work) they transgressively reclaim through iconoclastic art: Medusa’s dildo-like snakes, but also her “eye of confusion” on the Aegis!

(artist: Digital Play Toy)

Whatever the form or stigma, exploitation and liberation exist in shared spaces. To alienize and alienate through fetishes during settler arguments, then, generally boils down to the pimping of nature-as-alien/monstrous-feminine by the colonizer imitating the colonized through revenge. Violence, terror and morphological expression are totally allowed for one side (the state, who can do no wrong/are always right), and completely unallowed for the other (nature) save as nature’s behavior achieves profit by damaging itself as monstrous-feminine. Those given carte blanche/divine right always default to crusader/witch-hunter violence (might-makes-right), because any resistance automatically exposes their absolute positions (of god and state) as fallible, thus impotent. It only takes one, so they hide their violence among us, silencing us in bad faith (which tokenism, to some degree, always is). Ergo, to show and conceal intent during cryptonymy (and holistic, dialectical-material analysis) is far more important than raw physical appearance. As whores, we expose our rapists during the cryptonymy process, reversing abjection to castrate them: a half-real demonstration of their perfidiousness.

Furthermore, because monsters are dualistic, any critique concerning one can—with some critical thought, invention and flair—apply to any other, in this respect. Medusa, in particular, is chimeric; re: as much a witch/whore, vampire and goblin. Equally undead, demonic, and animalistic, she can be applied to a black person treated as “other,” or a trans woman, Arab, or some combination. Holistic analysis helps us change not merely our own shape or a cop’s, but also the critical lens’ usage per oppressed/oppressor element concerning whores and their revenge as police or victim. We are not defined by fetishes and clichés, but often rely on them to say what we need to say during genocide—through preference and code, but also the inherent linguo-material flexibility of those things. Change their shape and function, change how we think through the language of violence, monsters and camp; give us a lever long enough, and we can move the Earth!

When starting this series, I chose to reduce these matters to sex positivity vs sex coercion because one is inherently against the profit motive and one isn’t; i.e., canon vs iconoclasm, in this respect. Fascists and moderates/classical liberals under American Liberalism defend market freedoms that code/otherwise inform these arguments, which is why Nazis are always allowed, whereas activists who actually challenge capital are always punished—i.e., the former for their carceral, complicit and abject behaviors, versus those who are emancipatory, revolutionary and reverse-abject. White or black doesn’t determine by appearance alone, but how power moves involving appearance as the performance of many moving parts; e.g., immodest/non-white actions being too big, loud, or dark when they challenge profit and the status quo. Such things are perfectly fine for functionally white groups—including token parties, but also men in blackface/taking “problematic lovers” or white women playing witch cop against “bad” witches the state wants dead.

To that, if you’re visibly white, male, straight and rich, you can largely do whatever you want under capital, including crimes (or whatever’s going on, above); if you insert different marginalized qualities, this license narrows, doing so differently per token element: telling the desperate or opportunistic what they want to hear dressed up as “resistance,” but in truth, is a Faustian bargain in disguise; re: us-versus-them coded instructions of violence.

In terms of crisis, then, the state will crackdown on dissidents differently than you might expect. When the membrane thins and colonial mechanisms are exposed through class awareness (tremors of Medusa), those who punch down to stymie said awareness through class betrayal (re: police action) are rewarded. This can be official police, but also vigilantes per stochastic terrorism. It is likewise a half-real proposition, occurring on and offstage, in and out of media, between fiction and nonfiction, on the magic mirror (where the game, activism, takes place). Those who attack activists in times of activism, in other words, are awarded more generously by the state than they might be otherwise; e.g., pink washing genocide, or black tokenism likewise speaking in favor of Israel. Tokens suddenly become exotic, highly useful strawdogs.

(artist: Hellavender)

When empire is weak, its rulers paradoxically appeal to fringe betrayals more often. Whatever the betrayer’s form, there must always be a cop and a victim to serve profit; i.e., a formidable and subservient token agent doubling something that isn’t tokenized; e.g., Ms. Bellum’s mommy milkers and ginger afro hiding her virgin/whore eyes (above) doubled by Medusa, in the same show, as antithetical to state rule. Both encapsulate Athena, who isn’t just a big-titty Goth girlfriend, but also, who’s a big-titty Goth girlfriend (the Male Gaze)! Nature and nurture, destroyer and defender (the Golem of Prague classically a protector device made with Jewish black magic), lust and love—she’s all of these things at once, divided into dueling sides: Hippolyta and Medusa.

Per psychomachy and Amazonomachia, Medusa is engorged, gross and black, Hippolyta sexy-but-white (the Goldilocks whore/virginal Amazon, similar to Ripley or Samus). As these personified arguments duke things out, cop-vs-scapegoat, we see a black-and-white mirroring of kawaii and kowai, hard and soft, aroused and unaroused, pleasure and pain, predator and prey existing in kayfabe duality but also in confusion, liminality—to move through and look upon to show others their inadequacies/non-manly needs/dependencies; i.e., Mr. Mayor (the status quo) a geriatric man baby that his steely Athenian confidante defends from her abject half during state crisis. Everything relays in monstrous-feminine language to make a pro-state argument; i.e., sex policing sex as a matter of revenge—a token, Marston-style matriarchy!

To it, state copaganda proves there must always be a scapegoat, under Capitalism, but also a servant—a victim/whore to pimp under capital (moving money through nature) according to settler arguments of token superiority and revenge. It’s a property dispute over women, children and land; i.e., territory and mates, thus boils down to mirror syndrome: token Amazons vs Medusa.

By extension, America is a settler colony that expands its prison-like territory beyond the initially conquered lands, meaning the entire world (on and offstage) becomes the elite’s to conquer/make into a prison territory (re: Alexander the Great). America becomes a staging ground, its shadowy likenesses falling to ruin and policed by recruits from the original prison space; i.e., to either turn back into a prison for kenneled, token good whores and bad, or deny to the enemy (us) having its revenge by reclaiming them (thereby denying the elite their much-desired profit). One side canonically “goes feral,” kettling the other like good little white girls, Indians, savages, animals, whores, etc, against bad, black/non-white, anti-capital, etc, as always feral: Medusa eating the state’s young per Orientalism, sodomy and blood libel. Her fat, evil ass is pretty hot and tempting but deserving of police violence by a good, equally PHAT double; dualistically nature is always “in heat,” eager to receive punishment (unequal exchange) and give forbidden knowledge, which we use to transform into our best selves, mid-poetic engagement: camping the canon.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Subjugated Amazons are Frankenstein’s perfect children; their victims, including Medusa, are the Creature for the Amazon to brutalize, insofar as these arguments are constructed. To it, tokenism yields some fairly standard and familiar dialectical-material tensions, but also doesn’t preclude reclamation; i.e., of devices that originally had a rebellious flavor that has become increasingly patriarchal over time: in opposition to rising calls for liberation by those classified as Medusa and Amazon, alike. Liberation is a mirror game fought with reflections; i.e., inside a hall of mirrors (which capital is), where language is already dualistic and tokens imitate us (and our heroes) in bad-faith.

Let’s further unpack that, then consider how these track with neoliberalism abusing rape arguments to incite police violent upholding profit as a structure.

dialectical-material tension (mirror syndrome reprise)

As previously stated, dialectical-material scrutiny helps distinguish the visibly identical. Now that we’ve looked at the basic aesthetic of Amazons and Medusa, Medusa’s poetic history, and considered some additional points about tokenism, I want to consider how Amazons have the uncanny ability to subjugate (as cops) and subvert (as rebels); i.e., within the same aesthetic, either to help or hinder Medusa out of revenge. I want to look at a quick example of critiquing Amazons that seemingly look and act the same: Gal Gadot (and Wonder Woman).

Mirror syndrome isn’t just attacking a black reflection on the Aegis; it involves copies of the same monsters embodying liberation and assimilation. These two historically appear the same. Indeed, keeping with blood libel, Amazons are classically witches and whores of a female warrior sort, their mere existence threatening the nuclear model since Ancient Athens (to some degree reimagined by modern state defenders): a darkly chaotic shadow (the Medusa) looming over the Western resident and residence, said West seeking to control (thus colonize) nature-as unruly using assimilation (token Amazons punching Medusa during us versus them). The state’s revenge is to monopolize Amazons on the Aegis; i.e., turning them into witch hunters, thus defanging their rebellious energies and dooming most of them (and nature) to genocide (which is bad for colonizers, too; e.g., Nazi Germany’s holocaust weakened the state to keep up the lie).

While the monstrous-feminine isn’t strictly female (or white), canon dialectically-materially prioritizes Amazons being white female Indians it can demonize and replicate for the state’s benefit: demon lovers who lustily rape smaller “lovers” (the phrase “lover” conflated with “warrior” in the ancient world; e.g., Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” denoting the urn as not only spelling such cases out, but made from clay like demons are). This includes men who aren’t big and strong enough to fend off their larger adversaries’ sexually aggressive and uncharacteristically violent advances (with classic Amazonomachia both projecting male abuses onto evil imaginary jungle women that kill or brainwash men and women alike, mid-kayfabe, while still making Amazons weaker than the strongest men; re, Eco: “the enemy is both weak and strong”).

Not to be confused with Medusa, Amazons are tall and formidable warrior women who classically threaten, thus overwhelm, the current patriarchal order by promoting matriarchal replacement through popular BDSM fantasies—said fantasies linked to an ancient-alien martial culture conspicuously opposing current Western values, laws and order (re: Marston and Wonder Woman, the latter basically Superman with BDSM thrown in): death, capture and rape fantasies informed by pre-existing biases, stigmas and phobias that, unto themselves, can be reclaimed with liminal expression and ludo-Gothic BDSM/calculated risk from Orientalism and white/male replacement arguments (often through humor—re: death by Snu-Snu); i.e., the latter describing Amazons as alien invaders and saviors (“alien” synonymous with “monstrous-feminine,” meaning the native [or marginalized/abused person otherwise having legitimate grievances inside a colony space] being treated as “alien” in their own home).

In canonical terms, Amazons assimilate, embodying “kill the Indian, save the woman” during mirror syndrome, but again, occurs with devices that can be reclaimed from bad play by iconoclastic agents mirroring them—half-aliens that exchange power but again, can’t normally change shape like Medusa can. Their duality lies in their equipment and their unchanging bodies.

The Lasso of Truth, for example, isn’t purely a torture device (though Marston did invent the polygraph machine, a device he later disowned), but a highly playful mode of allegory (exquisite “torture”) sold to a wider audience minus de Sade’s particular mil spec uniforms (the Amazon has her own style, in this respect): release from illusion through feminist bondage! It’s the whore’s paradox in action, both a cop and a victim, a hero and villain on the same Aegis.

The problem is, feminism, BDSM and Amazons gentrify and decay under capital like all heroes (thus monsters) do. To it, Amazons paradoxically portray a herbo maternal side they try to assimilate with (or otherwise humanize through); i.e., as demonic whores/witches coming from a vengeful, mythical warrior half of nature the state can use to tokenize Amazons into Spartan-esque (rapacious) police agents; re: prostitutes and herbos becoming a particular kind of witch cop during blood libel (the grim harvest): whores policing whores on a spectrum of preferential mistreatment that took time to install, as did its mirrors; e.g., Gal Gadot (above) being a member of the IDF before she played Wonder Woman, basically making her “Nazi” by another name (a white, female, non-Christian champion from a latter-day rogue state styling itself as “rebel faction,” Gadot’s disguise pastiche whitewashing apartheid through token feminism: a “defensive” war). She’s a TERF and subjugated Amazon—a monster girl/girl boss/wheyfu playing cryptofascist “rebel”; i.e., a token Amazon who assimilates, targeting dark aspects of herself that have become alien on the Aegis, which she abjects during the cryptonymy process/mirror medusa: Medusa.

Shown back to her by the state (on Athena’s Aegis, to trigger a fight response), Gadot becomes the Medusa (a furious object of indiscriminate revenge, often a rape victim to warriors like the Amazon, below) to strawman and scapegoat her evil twin (the two hopelessly bound to one another); re: mirror syndrome—the menticided slave seeing herself of/from “good” nature. Faced with “bad” nature, dark aspects to nature suddenly appear and challenge Gadot (which she has distanced herself from to avoid summary execution; i.e., eventually going “rabid,” thus requiring her exile and/or death per the euthanasia effect/black knight syndrome). Seeing those on Medusa, Gadot petrifies (white fragility in action) and punches down, a gargoyle for state churches (thus territory at large) earning herself a brief reprieve/stay of execution provided she kills state enemies out of revenge (normally as their white knight); re: it’s DARVO by proxy and inside the Man Box’ “prison sex” mentality—gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss. The killer of Medusa is classically a rapist, Wonder Woman acting like a man behind the mirror shield: killing capital’s bogeywoman for the millionth time, posturing as underdog but acting the state’s champion under their sponsorship (and all the accolades that entails).

(artist: Greg Rucka)

In short, a subjugated Amazon submits the moment she starts aping the colonizer against her own kind (and allies); i.e., punching down by embodying Western values and division putting her not quite at the top, but somewhere in the middle (class): a token monomyth cop attacking imaginary monarchs of the underworld, our female Rambo a latter-day Beowulf (soldier of fortune) abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit inside the latter’s operatic, black-uterine lairs (often castles). Security is a lie upheld through force, policing nature (and sex) as monstrous-feminine per all the usual crises and decay but also concessions. Nature grows wild, hysterical; the sex police swoop in, circumcising her “for her own good” (and having a girl do it for good measure).

Keeping with the cryptonymy process (and its double operations), Gadot’s justice becomes blind, yet shows the world exactly what’s going on—she’s a traitor that, like any token cop, avoids jail time by abusing the aesthetics of rebels: demon BDSM to defend property over people, killing vice-character whistleblowers (re: “bury your gays”) and facilitating genocide (thus rape); i.e., by becoming the phallic woman to slay the Archaic Mother with. Generally this happens “in style,” with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll disguising genocide; i.e., by becoming a symbol of recuperation and reward—a danger disco where you get to look cool and kick monster ass while acting as false rebel/actual rapist yourself (re: Parenti/me). The reasons are arbitrary, the motive is profit. Always.

To it, the state abjects the ghost of the counterfeit during the dialectic of the alien. As nature becomes alien under capital, the state uses the emerging cryptonymies to pimp nature out of revenge: Medusa appears, restless and wild; Amazons rape her incognito/sub rosa to restore law and order on the Aegis—by selling controlled opposition as commodities that cops mirror-mask with during cryptonymy and abjection. All happen according to state monopolies (violence, terror and morphological expression) upholding the qualities of capital (Cartesian, settler-colonial, heteronormative) through revenge.

Gadot’s no longer a steward of nature, then, but a go-to rapist of nature having sold out to the Man: a white-moderate former-whore alienated from nature—poached from the streets to police an unruly black whore inside the state of exception’s recuperated rock ‘n roll (“black,” here, extending beyond skin color to anything that isn’t a white, European, cis-het, Christian man; re: “monstrous-feminine[13]“). Her heroism is a ruse, one defined by shared context, on and offstage. Gadot is a Nazi, in real life; anything she attacks as Wonder Woman onstage equals Medusa onstage and off: something to rape, or to hide said rape with. There are no moral actions, only moral teams, and betrayal is betrayal through function, not appearance.

It’s not just Gadot, then, but the women directing her who also sell out, in this respect; re: by acting like status-quo men. It’s assimilative, muddying the waters by whitewashing the colonizers; e.g., Lexi Alexander—a Palestinian-German female director—doing just that despite critiquing Petty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 (2020):

The much-anticipated Christmas Day release of Wonder Woman: 1984 was met with immediate controversy over its depiction of Arabs and the Middle East. Much of the online criticism of the film centers around its depictions of an Egyptian Emir and an Arab terrorist trying to obtain nuclear weapons, as well as scenes that many viewers felt shared jarring resonances with the violence Palestinians face under Israeli occupation. One scene drew particular ire: Wonder Woman lassoes a rocket to protect four Arab children playing soccer, which many felt was reminiscent of the high-profile killing of four boys from the same family who were playing soccer on a beach during the 2014 Israeli bombing of Gaza [whitewashing history with a good colonizer]. This was all the more loaded given previous controversies over Wonder Woman star and co-producer Gal Gadot’s role as an IDF training officer during the 2006 Lebanon War, and a Facebook post she made in support of the IDF during the war in which the boys were killed.

Palestinian German filmmaker Lexi Alexander was quick to use her platform to signal boost the wave of online critiques of the film from young viewers of color. A seasoned director who has closely studied, and worked to challenge, the depictions of Arabs and Palestinians in Hollywood films, Alexander immediately recognized the tropes being described. The Punisher: Warzone, Green Street Hooligans, and Supergirl director was the first woman to helm a Marvel film adaptation, and has built her career in Hollywood while facing harsh retribution for her efforts to resist the industry’s exclusionary, and frequently racist, status quo. For Alexander, the problems with Wonder Woman are representative of an industry that considers itself progressive while consistently excluding marginalized voices and punishing those who fight back, and of a culture that still actively resists any attempt to portray Arabs, especially Palestinians, in a humanizing light. I recently spoke to Alexander about the Wonder Woman controversy, her personal experiences of racism behind the camera, and the stakes of accurately portraying marginalized communities on screen (source: Rebbeca Pierce’s “White Savior Cinema,” 2021).

It’s all good and well to point that out, but taking Hollywood paychecks becomes its own betrayal. You have to challenge all of them, thus profit, or you wind up becoming tokenized to deliver a given form of systemic bigotry to the masses:

You can’t go into this business and be the woman who loves to make chick flicks or peace movies. Kathryn Bigelow knew that making movies like the guys is the way in. […] Why do people think I did that? I did that to show that I’m the least “woman” you can imagine. I’m so Guy Ritchie, I’m so Quentin Tarantino. I knew that was the only way in. And to this day, I still only get offered stuff in that arena. […] Sometimes, you just need a paycheck. I think a lot of my Black activist friends look at me sideways, like, “Why are you saying you are against police violence but you make these cop shows?” How can I blame them for saying that? I even made a movie in which I played an Arab woman who fell on the ground after being shot. It was a small moment, but don’t think I wasn’t aware. I was even kind of jokingly praying, “Okay, God, forgive me for this” (ibid.).

God is an excuse for your greed, and class betrayal is still betrayal. Bigotry for one is bigotry for all. Equal rights must be equal for all, lest the raping of nature—of extended beings by thinking beings (re: Descartes)—continues unabated.

Complicit cryptonymy points to state revenge on a dark scapegoat. If Amazons tend to give rape, then Medusa receives and returns it on the Aegis. Keeping with the Shadow of Pygmalion/Cycle of Kings, nature becomes equated with “death” as something to defeat for the Amazon’s patriarchal overlords. This kills her potential to actually do good (uphold basic human, animal and environmental rights), swapping genuine rebellion for a policewoman double; i.e., suffering rape but also doling it out inside the usual hierarchies: raping the whore by acting the man, thus the cop, against nature-as-alien.

Cops don’t prevent crime, they guarantee it; i.e., through privatization as criminogenic, but also cryptomimetic. Privatization is a myth, but one that makes Medusa what state wants her to be: a whore to blame, control, and pimp—a furious goddess with primordial power over life and death, which capital chains to acquire said power for the elite. Dressed up as “peace and prosperity for the free world,” cops bridle Medusa to power the West like a Promethean lightbulb; i.e., seeing that which gives and takes and dominating it; e.g., metroids and “peace in space,” the latter powered by alien extermination—workers becoming metroids, meaning both as givers and receivers of state force.

In turn, the elite want us divided and fighting amongst ourselves, seeking to control what has become alien, promiscuous, and profligate for us, too. Per Capitalist Realism, worker liberation equals state shift: something to abject with mirror syndrome, because the freeing of the whore is tantamount to apocalypse. It applies to Gal Gadot, but also women directing them like Patty Jenkins and so-called “critics” like Levi Alexander taking state money to uphold state arguments in some shape or form; i.e., black violence as “immoral” in favor of white “moral” violence (the IDF calling itself “the most moral army in the world,” which Alexander condemns while making American copaganda). So do Gadot, Jenkins and Alexander comply with men’s ideas of Amazons, abjecting Medusa vis-à-vis mirror syndrome.

This brings us back to Cameron, but especially his desire to appear strong against nature-as-alien in Aliens, whose Amazonian refrain we’ll explore a bit more, next. In doing so, I want to consider how Amazon and Medusa exist now as being informed by neoliberal capitalism; i.e., tokenizing Amazons against Medusa in ways that inform latter-day tokenization.

Amazons under Neoliberal Capitalism (re: Cameron’s refrain)

I know what you’re thinking. “Didn’t we just talk about this?” Yes, but as my PhD asserts, “Returning and reflecting upon old points after assembling them is a powerful way to understand larger structures and patterns (especially if they’re designed to conceal themselves through subterfuge, valor and force). It’s what holistic study (the foundation of this book) is all about.” So, once more unto the breach, dear friends!

This being said, we’ve already discussed how Amazons and Medusa are both of nature-as-monstrous-feminine seeking revenge, but where one canonically subjugates under duress and the other does not; re: subjugated Amazons are controlled opposition, which the state pits against uncontrolled through the complicit, cryptonymic veneer of rebellion: treating actual slave revolt as illegitimate, seditious, illicit, vile, worthy of capital punishment.

We’ve also examined, from a dialectical-material standpoint, how Amazonomachia display and perform various poetic, doubled tensions during oppositional praxis; re: how subjugated Amazons like Gal Gadot are fairly constant in their shape, size and actions when subjugated or not, but Medusa—an abject dumpsite—is far more shadowy on the Aegis. A psychosexual bête noire/nature as gyn-ecological (within Cartesian dualism), she’s darkness visible—can be whatever enemy “of nature” the state desires/needs/creates per Orientalism, sodomy and blood libel, and which we subvert from a formerly dehumanized position receiving police violence through mirror syndrome attacking danger/personified vaso vagal: the projecting of state atrocities onto their victims and having token victims (now cops) attack said shadows; i.e., duping the cop to torture the conquered into a feral-to-fetal position within reactive abuse. It’s a matador scheme, riling up the bull for the crowd’s gladiatorial bread-and-circus.

We’re looking at Aliens to parse the remediation of this idea. It’s something we’ve discussed at length in Volume Zero, so we’ll merely be rehashing the concept, here; re: Cameron’s refrain, the shooter/Metroidvania.

Cameron’s biggest “achievement” (moneymaker) was whitewashing genocide through assimilation; i.e., the second wave feminism of token Amazonomachia, in Aliens. His refrain uses the common internal/external psychomachy to mirror older ethnocentric arguments: to reject one’s victims on the Aegis. It’s game of tug-of-war unfolds on the surface of images/within their cryptonymic thresholds—a black mirror to look upon and see one’s traitorous, furious “other”: a before/after simulacrum projected onto your assigned victims to abject. That’s what Cameron’s refrain (the shooter) is all about. Alienate nature, then rape it to whitewash the crimes of empire. To it, Cameron uses the death and decay of a settler colony in Aliens, where Ripley is recruited by the company to face and destroy her evil double, the Alien Queen: white queen versus black, per the settler colony argument. Like we said.

Canonical heroes aren’t just monsters, then, but cowards reconciling their actions during mirror syndrome. Everything grows out-of-joint, confused and hostile—the process of abjection haunting pop culture through cryptonymy showing and concealing it: darkness as much a worrisome indicator of where violence is supposed to go as it is the loss of someone’s humanity inside the same space. Language, at its dialectical-material core, becomes confused—with clear identification becoming impossible, be that friend from foe or ally from alien, and the general meaning of black and white within binaries dissolves into grey soup, mid-struggle.

(artist, left: Nunchaku; right: Andreas Marschall)

To it, the state’s entire system postures as good and mature, yet is anything but those things; it’s mortal, doomed, cruel. Yet, historically-materially these cycles of violence keep playing out because they hold a great degree of material and societal power through such myths pursuant to profit. From their vantage point, these myths stunt and wreck worker growth in Faustian ways: class betrayal by police forces.

Colonies always die, meaning they always need to avenge themselves; they seek this revenge against nature having its revenge against the profit motive; i.e., by always coming back, which capital must re-abject; e.g., the Alien Queen, below, and her whorish body’s incestuous reproduction (chronotopic echoes of state rape) challenging Ripley’s good body and non-incestuous reproduction, for which the other seeks neoconservative revenge against: during hauntological mirror arguments—from rape epidemics to “This time, it’s war!”; re: Heinlein’s revived, Starship-Troopers-style, fascist “othering” of state enemies into weak/strong victim, touting “the only good bug is a dead bug!” It’s a witch hunt, witches fighting witches, except the actual villain isn’t the Queen (somehow interstellar menace and indigenous population); it’s Ripley and the nuclear family unit’s monomythic formula, facing off against a black monolith and saying to it, “You raped me.”

(source: Monster Legacy’s “The Alien Queen,” 2015)

Among the dialectic of shelter and the alien, Cameron had capitalized on a very old idea (re: Amazonomachia/the monstrous-feminine) to sell Pax Americana to future children; re: the Bay of Pigs (and similar CIA interventions) smuggled into a promising new millennium where war never ends; e.g., Doom copying Aliens just as Aliens copied Starship Troopers. There can only be one hero, but everyone gets to be Samus, Ripley, Doomguy or the Power Rangers, etc; i.e., the stormtrooper unironically enacting American revenge against Medusa when she gets out (e.g., Rita Repulsa), on loop, faster and faster (as speedrunners do); re: “specialization is for insects.” Ripley is a Swiss army knife (an avatar of war), and Medusa a tremendous mystery (a god of death) waiting at the center of the dying colony maze having tried to capture and contain her power for itself (and collapsing because the state is incompatible with life); i.e., one to solve through force; re (from Volume Zero):

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth-like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion (source).

Medusa, as such, is caged and raped by the colonizer until the colony dies by design; its owners then blame her for the colony dying—for nature reclaiming itself from the colonizer—saying the world “will end” if Medusa gets free, while simultaneously evoking the Promethean moral, demonizing her without end.

To it, Cameron’s refrain perfectly embodies Red Scare and Capitalist Realism: the ghost of the counterfeit as abject spectre-of-Marx pointing to classic ethnocentrism. Per state DARVO and obscurantism, capital traps, beats and rapes Medusa not once, but on a never-ending cycle of police revenge, during Cameron’s refrain: a) for “exposing” the elite’s mortality as they chain and drain[14] her, and b) for “causing” the world to grow unstable. In doing so, capital divides nature, treating Medusa’s wild side as “evil,” illegitimate and immodest, and her obedient side as “good,” legitimate, modest; re: virgin/whore syndrome, but on a grand scale that repeats during Cameron’s refrain and its unfolding mirror syndrome.

It goes something like this: nature gives lip, trying to defend herself through various anti-predation measures (re: snakes for hair, stone gaze, acid for blood, etc); nature gets bitch-slapped by the pimp because “she asked for it,” but also because she’s unnatural/needs to smile more. Prostitution isn’t the world’s oldest profession, under capital, inside Cameron’s refrain; rape is, increasingly dressed up as “sexy” and demonic revenge by Cartesian forces to hide the banality of evil (aka desk murder). Medusa is something to capture and punch when she resists, which the Promethean Quest iconoclastically challenges; re (from the Undead Module): “the Promethean Quest effectively encapsulates and discourages [attacking Medusa as terrorist], Medusa fucking back [as counterterrorist] to reverse the flow of power and information the monomyth normally supplies in outright parental language, but also monomythic media exposed to middle-class children at a young age” (source: “She Fucks Back”). Cameron’s refrain—but specifically its military optimism (re: Persephone van der Waard, 2021)—challenges said discouragement.

Cameron’s refrain is videogames, selling subjugated Amazons to the American public: death appears, punch her to restore imperial greatness. They are effectively Capitalism in small; i.e., primarily sold and marketed to young men taught to grow into conquerors forever seeking new worlds to conqueror in old places. Per virgin/whore syndrome, there will always be another princess in another castle, modest nature something to rescue from her more exciting shadow self. Such men will always be chasing whores, bored with their pastoral trad wives, unable to keep it in their pants. Amazons are their vehicle for doing so, which they pilot on the mirror to attack capital’s crimes—their crimes projected onto state victims during mirror syndrome; re: white (cis-het) people disease.

Such avatars aren’t just one-time, but serial abusers. That’s what capital instructs them to be and protects them so long as they’re lucrative; e.g., Black Penitents and assassins; i.e., Rambo’s only purpose was to invade other lands and disrupt any semblance of order inside them, until faced with the horrifying prospect of the alien within—a foreign inside/outside plot as capital decays and extinction paranoia sky rockets. Eventually the Imperial Boomerang sails home, internalized by people who think they can do no wrong because its literally their job, inside media and out; re: strawdogs, scapegoated for “going too far.” Until then, these Icarian Quixotes fail up, enjoying boundaries for themselves to use against their victims; i.e., Perseus raping Medusa in her sleep, then using her severed head for his own base ends (weaponized rape). Such people become holier-than-thou by design; they rape by design, because that’s what profit is. That’s all it is.

The same goes for Amazons tokenized in Cameron’s refrain to ape Rambo. The fantasy has always been about complete dominion because such technology was founded on military installments and operations bleeding into urbanism and optimism in the face of imperial decay. It will defend and revive itself forever, always through the ostensible element of (usually white, middle-class) assimilation; i.e., through rapid military advancement under a bourgeois paradigm (the Napoleon fantasy). In truth, it happens to the determent of all workers alienated and fetishized for profit into givers and receivers of state force; i.e., against nature through endless hauntological revenge arguments; re: to acclimate future children towards half-real wars thereof, chasing Medusa to the ends of the Earth (and astronoetically into outer space). Under capital, she’s always the perpetual alien, whore, victim, which canon scapegoats with impunity.

In Marxist language, nature is privatized; in Gothic-Communist language, she is pimped—a virgin/whore per the whore’s paradox, one which capital has the right to defend itself from its victims, as such; i.e., to defend profit during mirror syndrome’s revenge arguments; e.g., recruiting Ripley from second wave feminism to anticipate the rise of increasingly diverse and unhappy activist voices it could squash elsewhere, and eventually at home, under neoliberal Capitalism: as the new world order/at the so-called “End of History” and the installation of Capitalist Realism in full. Such women were (and are) trapped inside the Man Box, exuding “prison sex” mentality just like their male counterparts: whores pimping whores for the Man, “achieving” peace through strength as subjugated, neoconservative Amazonomachia.

(source: Inked Artistry)

As with any double, there is always a counterexample (a shade and a hero). With the rise of neoliberalism and its fictions, the complicit cryptonymy of subjugated Amazons became a façade, one to challenge through our own revolutionary forms; i.e., when reversing abjection—in media but also on our bodies, our labor exchanges depicting mutual consent using the same exact symbols: hysteria an alarm-bell haunted house (and minotaur) of mist and spinning lights, a Gothic castle spouting shadow and flame embodied by its uncanny center mass. It’s the very sort of orgasmic, hellish pain data that all demons communicate/trade in (through unequal power and psychosexual transformation); i.e., using them to express the massive colonial forces at work against Mother Nature (and her spiritual children) as monstrous-feminine, and Medusa’s confused pleasure/pain responses, vaso vagal aesthetic and predator/prey mechanisms being centered around survival and communication towards those ends. She’s not just an invader but a live wire, a rioting castle-in-the-flesh working as the Gothic does: through pure unadulterated mood. What Hogle calls “restless,” at her dark heart lies a secret and that secret is rape—a weapon for the state, but also for liberators projecting it demonically back at their attackers on the same Aegis. It’s a mirror game, going where power is.

It’s also an uphill battle; re: Cameron abused the arcade transitioning into American households to deliver state dogma/police legitimacy right into middle-class kids’ brains. His refrain (the shooter/Metroidvania[15]) ripped Heinlein off to foster military optimism among chaste, SWERF-y second wave feminists happy to reenact racist, sexist, and otherwise ethnocentric/canonically essential throwbacks given a new coat of paint: a vice character (the Queen), if not to root for by the audience, then drop to your knees and worship! She’s a Numinous dominatrix, wearing a bio-mechanical strap-on with a knife. And while she and those like her can camp their own rapes simply by owning it onstage in the most memorable of ways (re: “Policing the Whore“), there’s an element of coveted prestige for the title in unironic forms: the dark queen[16] of the danger disco, the big badass “cool one” destined to be summoned, dismantled and destroyed again, Radcliffe-style; i.e., a Medusa to behead when her snake-like dome grows too big. It’s conversion therapy for Amazons, exquisite “torture” sans irony abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit during the cryptonymy process (serialized comfort food; i.e., this keeps happening and occurs numerically among vague, if not innocent then innocuous-sounding nouns; e.g., Halloween 4, 1988).

Cameron’s cryptonymy is of guns and bombs, but also their female-coded straight givers and queer receivers. In essence, Cameron transformed the normally hush-hush realm of women’s violence (rape, murder and childbirth) into a man’s-man box office smash: a hyperbolic, kayfabe-grade battle of the sexes, their emotions, values, vices; i.e., one fought by two Galatea—one side led by a good, de facto Amazonian cop (and her brave-if-bumbling heroes), the other an army of entirely disposable fodder (the converted hive of gay Communism, needing to be nuked from orbit) headed by the entirely bad terrorist, Medusa-by-another-name. By framing the story as he did, Cameron was intentionally demonizing an Indigenous, non-American population, his Vietnam revenge fantasy written to cater to American hawks, incense imperial xenophobia, and regain a lost sense of American dominance on the world stage that would grow over time to fight Medusa offstage again.

Forged by a (white, cis-het) Pygmalion auteur who repackaged settler colonialism to get rich off the ticket sales/royalties, Cameron’s war was pure copaganda[17] paying homage to past greats with tired ideas (chatty soldiers and banter during downtime, a child in peril, and shooting gallery sets full of evil barbarians) revitalized by Gothic hauntology to feel fresh again, but, like Radcliffe, makes old, incredibly harmful arguments in current time capsules; i.e., a haunted-house encapsulation of various fetishes and clichés pilfered from older variants, all to lead a zombie-grade extermination war waged cryptonymically between “white” women monarchs and soldiers (armed with guns) against “black/non-white” women monarchs and soldiers (armed with the land and with melee weapons). Inside the infernal concentric pattern’s collective punishment/reactive abuse, the imperial side is entirely humanized (within preferential mistreatment, of course), the Communist side queer-coded/chattelized as abject insectoid, saddled with imperial crimes, and entirely dehumanized in demonic language abjecting land back.

In turn, everything happens per the Modern Prometheus, Shelley’s Frankenstein originally made to critique a tech bro who—unable to exploit and rule over nature as a god abusing “ancient” technology (the fire of the gods)—abjects technological abuses onto nature rising up against him. Nature and technology become indistinguishable, projected through the ghost of the counterfeit onto a dark relic comparable to a lost alien civilization and/or mothership (the city of the Old Ones and the Monolith, from At the Mountains of Madness and 2001: A Space Odyssey—more on them deeper in the chapter): demons to build, reject and attack.

(artist: Aylin Saier)

Demons are darkness visible, allegories hidden in clay (or similar substances). In turn, the Gothic—since its stage-play forebears and neo-medieval emergence (re: Shakespeare and Walpole)—has been queer-coded and thoroughly transgressive from the start; i.e., a forsaken place of phobias and taboos, one where things like rape, incest, live burial, corporal punishment, mortification of the flesh (torture) and murder give voice to what is normally unspeakable in lieu of inheritance anxiety and the buried crimes of the West (the endless rape of nature being chief among them, including actual incest/compelled marriage): to talk about things as if they’re of the past or otherwise far away/from somewhere else.

Think of the Gothic castle as a padded cell to work out one’s hang-ups and frustrations about those things—a place of shadowy menace to feel paradoxically “in danger[18]” while when no actual danger is present (more on this in part two, when we look at Orientalism), and where playing with monsters like Amazons and Medusa helps workers hopefully gain new understandings about these things and what they represent/how they interact. For us, Medusa—be her presentation the Alien Queen or some other design (e.g., Mother Brain)—isn’t entropic as a vanishing point that censors colonial uproar and unrest, but wild to help release these things in ways that can be camped and channeled unto good praxis/catharsis; i.e., as a kind of code that’s easy enough to read, provided you know how.

Unfortunately Cameron isn’t about that. His arenas remain entirely about American jingoism, white hypocrisy and good old-fashioned heteronormative exploitation of the Global South, Communism, feminism and Indigenous peoples by people like him: a straight white asshole aping the billionaire Marxism (a nominal practice) of George Lucas’ Star Wars problem. The policy of such Amazonomachia isn’t to solve poverty, world hunger or war, but prolong them in centrist refrains.

Lucas loved Jedi, and Cameron his latter-day Wonder Women and Medusa, but I digress: there’s nothing wrong with weaponizing the so-called “sub-literary” or puerile against the state. The problem is, Cameron’s story is written by a tech bro to alienate and fetishize nature as black, giving it not a postcolonial flavor (as Shelley did, in 1818), but a settler-colonial flavor in 1986. To it, he’s no better than Columbus and the Divine Right of Kings, except in Cameron’s case, he turned the rape of nature into a money-making product inside an already-existing machine; i.e., one that Columbus had already pioneered and which Cameron contributed towards: fashioning neoliberal apologia while leaning into Lovecraft and Kubrick’s own colonial xenophobia (versus embracing Ridley Scott’s Gothic neoliberal critique, giving such pulp its own vessel: the Nostromo commandeered and jury-rigged from Conrad’s own racist fearmongering concerning the West; e.g., The N*gger of the Narcissus, Nostromo, and Heart of Darkness, 1897, 1899, and 1904).

Under Capitalism, then, Amazons and Medusa coincide with white views on nature not just as alien, but demonic little whores stemming from an original Big Whore: the Numinous/ghost of the counterfeit haunting middle class remediation. I won’t belabor that point too much more, here. Just, that I’ve written repeatedly in the past on how men like Wes Craven, Cameron, Clive Barker and Conrad all kind of suck (re: Volume Zero), similar to how Poe sucks, and really any white boy turning a buck to further the abjection process by abusing demonic language.

But as my PhD argues, Cameron and Tolkien’s refrains especially suck—as do both men’s mutual misuse of the Amazonian myth to police Medusa—because they catered to and helped popularize the concept; i.e., their revenge against Medusa gentrifying monster war as something that decayed into endless retro-futures (from Tolkien’s painterly outdoors to Cameron’s dead colonies). In doing so, they took and translated settler-colonial violence into mass media accessible from a young illiterate age; i.e., games and videogames’ fodder-style police narratives—their blood libel (witches, orcs and goblins) adopted by illiterate, “apolitical” people, well-versed in us-versus-them dogma/racial conflict and Satanic panic. Through both authors’ legacies adding to settler colonialism as an ongoing practice, such arguments and their resolutions (though Amazonian police force) are sold pretty much everywhere under neoliberal Capitalism: through symbols of power and prestige that state proponents can play with and faithfully remake.

Returning to Aliens‘ settler argument/mirror-style abjection’s abuse of asymmetrical warfare (with Ripley one-upping the natives, in Cameron’s fantasy), we’re essentially left with a binarized catfight between two queens—one of the West and police violence, and the other not of the West, beholden to all the white/black usual devices present in settler arguments; e.g., “think of the [white] women and children” borrowed from earlier centuries and dressed up as sci-fi spectacle; re (from Volume Zero, exhibit 1a1a1h2a2):

(…Cameron’s xenomorph’s take the alien’s acid blood [a Medusa-style defense mechanism] from the first film, and applies it to a creature called a xenomorph that demonizes the Communist stand-ins entirely and presents the marines as the fully-humanized military relief on par with Douglas Hickox’ racist settler-colonial apologia, Zulu Dawn [1979]:

We set out to make a different type of film, not just retell the same story in a different way. The Aliens are terrifying in their overwhelming force of numbers. The dramatic situations emerging from characters under stress can work just as well in an Alamo or Zulu Dawn as they can in a Friday the 13th, with its antagonist [source: Aliens Collection’s transcription of “James Cameron’s responses to Aliens critics” from Starlog Magazine, Issue #184, November 1992].)

Except again, “white” and “black” don’t refer to skin color alone. They are binarized to function for the state at all times, thus allow for tokenization (re: black skin, white masks) speaking to anything that can be coded as “dark”; i.e., including blood libel arguments being “black” in the medieval, “Gothic” sense of the word, when settler colonialism either did not exist, or was in its infancy and viewed backwards by Neo-Gothic authors (e.g., Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya; or, The Moor: A Romance of the Fifteenth Century[19], 1806). The same backwards reinvention serves Cameron rewriting the history of the Vietnam War with Aliens and its many offshoots, themselves extending into retro-future wars continuing Imperialism at home and abroad; i.e., fascism being Imperialism come home to empire, white Indians colonizing home in bad faith, just as they once colonized foreign lands in bad faith: the infernal concentric pattern extending from hauntology to cryptonymy and rattling furiously (“like a piece of angry candy,” as E. E. Cummings put it).

From then on, the world was always in crisis, “peace” always overshadowed by sequel wars: capital not just pimping Medusa, but running a train on her zombie ass during Cameron’s refrain! In doing so, his Amazons (white guerrillas) demonstrate Capitalism’s sole purpose: raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine during revenge arguments—of the colonizer against the colonized—which it makes cheaply and well. It does so to maintain bourgeois supremacy until state shift, when it can no longer continue dominating nature because nature becomes so unstable as to be uninhabitable. Until that moment, it will always create a whore to destroy and it will cede territory to that whore until the planet cooks for good. The point isn’t to progress towards post-scarcity and harmony with nature, but for a small, select gang of unfeeling psychopaths to hold onto power for as long as they can. That’s it. The outcome isn’t victory and peace, but total, mutually-assured destruction by those who cannot imagine anything else. Sunlight becomes a cloak for nocturnal activities done in broad daylight; i.e., police violence, terror and monstrous legal tender backed up by state authority. As usual, it’s a harvest—of nature by the state aping nature.

Amazons are central to this system, as is Medusa; i.e., the black mirror to expose and hide such abuse (and state weakness) during the cryptonymy process. Weapons evolved alongside Medusa as state terror devices that became increasingly destructive, but also loud, bright, and disruptive; i.e., diurnal, Promethean, nuclear-grade defenses of the nuclear home as increasingly mortal/under attack, censoring outliers, dissidents and victims with tokenized police exacting state revenge against nature. Guns and bombs mete out such disorder against DARVO targets, leaving the middle class confused and surrounded by guns, thus eager to police sex through force to make said alarms stop; i.e., white cis-het women, first and foremost (which Ripley very much embodies). Fatigue sets in, and profit accelerates, thus the rape of nature. Something “of nature” must always exist to rape, generally multiple things at once; i.e., an orgy around the world, thereof; e.g., the Palestinians or Congolese, abroad, and black Americans and/or queer folk, poly persons/sex workers and homeless people at home.

Capital must always be raping nature to survive; it needs not just to avenge Medusa’s wrongs through DARVO arguments and obscurantism, but exterminate her repeatedly within capital in order to extend profit. Virgin/whore syndrome cozies up to white/black knight and mirror syndrome rescinding worker rights within a fluctuating state of exception, projecting feelings of shame, guilt and hatred onto standard-to-marginalized groups having internalized these “prison sex” attitudes; i.e., Cartesian dualism dividing nature into something alien that could be shamed and attacked in service to profit during the abjection process; e.g., sluts and/or fat people by those claiming not to be, compelling all manner of deadly disorders, but especially eating disorders and conversely, bigorexia. Amazon bodies become alien through imposter syndrome, projected onto people they can scapegoat for their own dysphoria and dysmorphia (and comparable feelings of alienation): Medusa as any target of state violence subjugated Amazons can and will historically police, the temerity of such bigots countered by telling them to look in a mirror at themselves.

During Cameron’s refrain, maidens become whores on the Aegis; whores, plagues; disabled people, useless eaters; queer people and furries, degenerates; foreigners and black people, vermin; etc. Pax Americana breeds fascism, going hand-in-hand with classical Liberalism/white moderacy (and tokenism) to ensure that capital (thus rape and genocide through abject police violence) never, ever stops: monomyth stories’ stochastic state terrorism/menticide threatening the end of the world, under Capitalist Realism, with spectres of Marx like Medusa. It whores them out as virgin/whore, angel/devil, cop/victim, husband/wife, making mutual consent an alien, hollow fetish of itself: a mining camp pastoral that decays and abandons itself, from one black (sick) castle/ghost town to the next!

(artist: Mighty Han)

Such likenesses speak to tokenism as an ongoing betrayal attacking these mirrors, but also lusting after them as weaklings to dominate (and people turning a blind eye to this abuse, generally abused themselves; e.g., battered housewives). Any way you slice it, the state is straight, white and male, but recruits from various marginalized groups to uphold this hierarchy through temporary concessions; re: inside concentric prisons/persecution networks, swapping out different qualities as needed. Cameron chose Amazons, but also prison conscripts; e.g., Vasquez, recruited from a barrio to go and fight other aliens.

In short, capital is the refrain, which requires tokens to expand and police its territories, which are full of many different peoples; it cannot do this alone/without help, recruiting from prisons within prisons within prisons, those closer to the in-group diametrically given more space and privileges that those closer to the out-group, swapping out externalized and internalized bigotries. The entire concept hinges on modesty and purity arguments, which affect every aspect of a prisoner’s life—from what they wear to how they speak to what they do—based entirely on accident of birth; i.e., it determines based on class, but also race—with culture determined by those two things: the money you’re born into and what you look like (though we’re born as queer, it’s something we can chose to hide).

That being said, queerness and sodomy are often ascribed to people with darker skin, and redlining forces old money other than white to largely not exist except in select circumstances (e.g., the Saudis and their oil fields). Moral territories and religions come into effect, regardless—with colonized peoples reputed to be savage, thus told to be more modest and subservient by cops (token or not) working on a hierarchy of values, preferential mistreatment and selective-to-collective punishment; e.g., Jews are canonically “worth more” than Arabs, Asians than black people, and straight/gender-conforming versions of these things than queer/GNC versions. Us versus them is fractally recursive.

These, in turn, uphold a curious bias with its own double standards; e.g., token white women are treated more favorably than token black women, for instance; i.e., white women will have relative privilege when policing their own and black people, whereas black people can only police black people (or their other racial enemies under white installations) to whatever degree the state expects. Such intersectional degrees of privilege and oppression are merely tools for the state to abuse workers with, leading them to abuse themselves while still posturing as heroic, white, strong and statuesque; i.e., cops as Amazonian; re: Autumn Ivy abusing me (refer to Volume One for examples of this, or the Poetry Module; e.g., “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part 2,” 2024): aping one’s colonizers in the Man Box, which subjugated Amazons do. They rape others, insofar as rape is an abuse of power meant to cause harm. It becomes a part of their brand, which all Amazons represent; i.e., stripped bare but made to attack black/non-white/queer rapists threatening them; e.g., Ripley in Alien having her revenge in Aliens, the Medusa a convulsionnaire sending rape data back at her colonizers by camping her own rape/crooning to it in psychosexual ecstasy! Rape this, assholes!

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

Now that we’ve looked at token Amazons policing Medusa under neoliberal Capitalism during Cameron’s refrain, we’ll consider reclaiming Amazons more, in part two. For the rest of part one, let’s linger on Medusa and my usage of her as a poetic device vis-à-vis Amazons and their mutual, at times competing revenge: the perpetual victim/scapegoat who seeks revenge per the whore’s paradox, as the state kettles and pimps her for profit.

If Medusa is an inkblot, she can mean different things and still be a symbol of whorish resistance having her revenge. As someone who’s written about her a lot, I’d like to talk about my own thoughts on the character a bit more; i.e., as she appears in art, sex work, and various other media at large speaking to human rights through what’s essentially poetry and labor exchanges, made and remade, over and over. Consider this portion, however extraneous, an ode.

Medusa, My Thoughts Personally

As a trans woman relating to Medusa, I see her like Gozer—”It’s whatever it wants to be.” She’s the Whore and subject to its paradoxes and tensions, its abject hauntology cryptonymically showing and hiding the rape of nature by capital; i.e., an eye of confusion seeing with more than just eyes, policing nature through replicas both true and false demonically demonstrating the giving and receiving of police violence under state rule. Not a person, she’s the ghost of the counterfeit, a gutter of oppressed things treated as monolithic trash and jewel-of-the-crown—a cluttered sodomy assemblage to coat in cum and delight in the mess made there, yet revile-revel in because such things are simultaneously dirty and sinful, “almost holy” but wholly profane. If it’s bog-standard, she’s queen of the bog! Rape the whore; she has her revenge putting “rape” in quotes! She does it for fun, for herself as something to solicit and camp! To hold onto and remember like a keepsake; e.g., a naughty photo, or a pair of panties; i.e., camping such things as heavily controlled in ways we use to demonically reverse abjection, thus the flow of power through unequal exchange and transformation: painting herself as whores do, but in cum as makeup.

(artist: Sienna Milano)

Any sex worker looking to decriminalize their profession is a terrorist. Per the grim harvest, Medusa isn’t just a peach, but a Great Pumpkin exploited by America’s settler-colonial, heteronormative, Cartesian net. Her angry side swells, only able to be returned to normal by cutting her head off; re: trimmed through female circumcision by tokenized assassins, jailors, and conversion therapists. Anything “too big” or “non-white” is collared and/or cut down to size, the swelling of labor-as-alien made “of nature” by the Cartesian model, thus crushed for doing so. It’s built into capital.

Medusa’s not just a gorehound/glutton for punishment, then, but a being ontologically beholden to its settler-colonial, us-versus-them divisions and fetishized, alien consumption built on top of genocide, including as the membrane weakens and a big-ass light shines on imperial consumption; i.e., per bastardized Pagan rituals of the harvest (re: Halloween) that highlight the boom-or-bust nature of capital both tied to natural cycles of the weather and astral bodies, all above (and below) linked to Puritanical recuperations of native spirits, superstition and ghosts in the settler colony’s year-after-year rotation of various “crops.” She’s a Great Witch, or anything else to blow up; i.e., to monstrous size and point soldiers at during Satanic Panic (and other moral disputes)—the ancient mother goddess policed by token offshoots, mollifying theirs (and the general public’s) inheritance anxiety through endless scapegoating blood spatter spilled onto the labyrinthine maize; she’s the curious moon in the sky looking down, aped by police torches (the panopticon) defending house and home from blood libel’s false flag: baby-eating, blood-drinking, gold-hording, anal-practicing witches, vampires and goblins! All the while, the state gorges itself on her stolen land, labor and people—their gender and sexuality chewed down to the bone because they’re bad to the bone.

(artist: SGTMADNESS)

Expanding priapically until it decays (re: manufactured famines, the elite unable to exist as-is without abjection’s tremendous division, violence and waste), the state wastes little time exploiting nature-as-whore, using this camouflage on its tokenized/fascist police forces (re: the black knight/witch cop). In turn, reclamation and exploitation share the same stage, ludo-Gothic BDSM sarcastically-yet-earnestly playing with the same fake/make-believe poetic materials and scenarios to liberate workers with during liminal expression: its perplexing-yet-intuitive dualities something to see and, like an animal, get hungry like the wolf for a tongue-in-cheek bite!

Whores are crude, natural, nasty and fun, in this respect, but also poached in ways we must anti-predate, graduating to sex-positive forms among our own pornographic art/appreciative irony during Gothic counterculture: an absolute baddie haunting the harvest with the ghost of the counterfeit reversing abjection (and its candied dreck’s trick-or-treat-style us-versus-them—cops beautified into final girls; i.e., offshoots of the Numinous). Littered with assorted euphemisms/garish puns (“carve my pumpkin,” wink-wink), these generally recode death and violence under capital through fresh context: superheroes, sluts, and witches—Medusa-in-small, tomb-raiding Her Majesty’s pilfered womb (regressions to older forms of conquest)!

(artist: SGTMADNESS)

Medusa is a master of cryptonymy/mirrors, thus camouflaged resistance disguising rape to speak to it. She can denote vaso vagal with castration, but also rape as conquest theatre reclaiming itself. Per the cryptonymy process, to show candy is to show the fruits of endless conquest coated by it (with Pax Americana‘s riches being sex and force under its thumb, extending literally to guns; e.g., Lara Croft and similar classy gun bimbos). In turn, there’s so many ways to pimp nature out and camp the harvest (some grosser than others[20]), and reclaim said pimping by the prostitute! Context matters, of course, and relieving stress as she does, Medusa walks the line between genuine/phony disgust and delight (disgust is a disguise, feigning repugnance to scare off unwanted mates). And yet, while dialectical-material scrutiny affords likenesses a sex-positive or sex-coercive quality that otherwise isn’t visually obvious, unironic rape remains a widespread problem; i.e., because capital rapes everything unironically pursuant to profit, then dresses it up as sex-monster whore and white-knight modernity. Hiding among this pornographic foliage isn’t always glamorous, but remains a vital-if-lateral means of guerrilla warfare that revolutionary cryptonymy constantly relies upon to function: hiding in plain sight (the snakes asleep, the claws hidden).

(artist: mustblove)

Save pure glory for those drunk on themselves and their infinite conquest of the natural world; our gallantry is surviving and making it look good while, just as often, expressing the unattractive elements—the proverbial “dark side of the moon” during our pedagogy of the oppressed doubling state forms: the home, the nuclear model, turned on its head and shaken to see what horrors fall out!

Such duality remains a concern. For me, Medusa is a being to worship and savor tied to unsavory things. She embodies morphological diversity and the violence and terror expressed through said diversity seeking liberation per the whore’s paradox; i.e., by reclaiming pedagogic tools of oppression in defiance to state monopolies, the latter sodomizing[21] her peach pursuant to the same old grim harvest and its infernal territories cutting nature up: “dark” bodies simply being anything and everything that is monstrous-feminine in ways the state will alienize but also reframe as controlled opposition, recuperation; e.g., thicc, ethnically white bodies (next page) having an anisotropic character versus ethnically non-white bodies. There’s a sense of imitation in bad faith, of appropriation vs appreciation and descriptive sexuality vs prescriptive, the colonizer imitating the colonized and vice versa, under the profit motive; re: “Damn, girl, you shit with that ass?” a hollow misogynistic appraisal to Medusa’s colossal dumper versus a genuine cultural statement with any redeeming value. The profit motive is the problem, here, as is Capitalist Realism.

For every dominated worker of the world, then, there is a token traitor making hay during genocide; for every copy of the original, there is a cryptomimetic fabrication that struggles to say something different; Medusa is both a PAWG, PHAT and BBW conceived under various oppressive conditions, but likewise is trans, intersex and non-binary in ways a given piece can’t begin to express: fitting in and standing out! “Baby got back” is a Gothic found document, a lie presented as truth through its obvious fabrication (and competing emotions).

(exhibit 43e2c1: Artist: Greg Lansky. The paradox of demonizing non-white bodies by white bodies couches within feminism as having a predatory past against non-white groups; i.e., American Liberalism and white women being the villain posturing as white savior appropriating non-white culture and morphology to kiss up and punch down, virtue-signaling into a bad copy of what ultimately amounts to vaudeville. But this is, unto itself, a kind of demonic expression—of desiring to exchange this for that in caged markets of unequal power exercised by one oppressed group over an even more caged and downtrodden group. This can lead to sweeping generalizations that are themselves, speaking for everyone when they shouldn’t, while simultaneously devaluing the power of technology and art:

I created this work reflecting on the relationship between pain and feeling loved in a world driven by AI algorithms. There is no mirror for her selfie because humanity is the mirror. We are all the mirror. “Algorithmic Beauty” has no beauty filters. The marks from plastic surgeries are displayed with grace and dignity like the battle scars of an endless war no one can win.

I wanted to offer a continuation of the Venus de Milo, a sculpture made over 2000 years ago that portrays an immortal Goddess beyond the reach of humans. Today, it’s AI’s algorithms that have God-like power over humanity. They influence beauty standards with the irresistible promise that those who follow will be rewarded by digital engagement disguised as love. And in the pursuit of that promise people will go through immense physical pain. This made me feel that maybe plastic surgery could be seen as an act of love and commitment to participate in a world of lies we are all part of.

I also chose the Venus de Milo because it is the personification of our “Fake it till you make it era.” When it was discovered in 1820 the Louvre museum actually broke a piece off the sculpture to pretend it was made by a more prestigious artist and time period. By the time people found out it was already the most famous sculpture in the world, and no one cared. Maybe the Venus de Milo is the best metaphor for our social media era; a fictional Goddess hyped with marketing and lies but that we all want to take a picture with [source: Greg Lansky’s “Algorithmic Beauty,” 2022].

Of course, some cynicism is merited; museum exhibits in the Western world hoard looted property from conquered/dead cultures. Yet, the wholly descriptive reality is that bodies aren’t naturally white or non-white, but rather hammered disastrously into these binaries by capitalist, thus Cartesian, heteronormative, settler-colonial, white-/cis-supremacist forces. Liberation occurs within imprisonment using the same devices: the bodies of workers, including PAWG white girls making sex-positive body statements during sex work! Our bodies don’t define us; how we use them under state rule does!

[artist: Brittny Blaine] 

This being said, AI is a powerful technology that, under the profit motive, is only being used to steal from workers; i.e., empire colonizing itself on yet another register attached to the ones mentioned above; e.g., tech bros stealing body likenesses and millions upon millions of images of women’s bodies, before passing it off as their own. Consumption isn’t bad; overconsumption is, and how such materials are acquired and spent.

In short, usage is what matters; i.e., Medusa standing in for various other things, which can gentrify and decay but also regenerate; e.g., a nuclear bomb is a weapon versus a nuclear plant hammering such “swords” into ploughshares [which the state will try to weaponize again, or regress to a farming of the territories per settler colonialism anew]. Whatever the form—of product and consumption of said product—profit is always chasing its own tail, conquering itself to enrich the elite above all else. We should not emulate that, even while toiling under capital to survive.)

In bodily (statuesque) terms, Medusa has been ceaselessly erased and recreated per the ghost of the counterfeit and abjection process; i.e., the truth and falsehood of such things exist among the entire collage simultaneously (above)—a non-white body to sell to aspiring middle-class women with surgical addiction, while likewise speaking to those whores by force under Orientalism: those who must endure the double existence of total alien and tasty monster that a) men chase when they tire of their wives, and b) that women attack or appropriate when such things become cool again. In turn, the underclass can paradoxically reclaim such things for themselves, but these remain forever haunted by the shadows described above; i.e., statements about statements about statements, the mise-en-abyme concentric, ergodic, anisotropic and recursive. All occupy the same stages, during liminal expression’s contradictions; e.g., “There is nothing inherently wrong with surgery” juxtaposed with the class interests of a select group making it toxic in deference to profit and its colonial motive/acquisition.

Beyond statues, there’s also buildings tied to the statuesque in ways I’ve described as “castles-in-the-flesh”; re: anti-homes; i.e., castle-like bodies or vice versa that denote some sense of monstrous-feminine power under capital: pointing towards an imaginary past (and its forbidden agency and pleasures) that goes beyond Capitalist Realism; i.e., a Promethean space of the gods considering what capital denies to us expressed in the language of the imaginary past, a “love shack” or tunnel to Paradise, evoking Coleridge’s “stately pleasure dome” from “Xanadu” (1816); e.g., Marian Wawrzeniecki’s “Holy Entrance to the Slavic Mystery Place” (1920):

So often, “woman is other” denotes the Numinous, which I’ve expanded to “nature is monstrous-feminine,” harvested by capital pimping it, and reclaimed by workers developing Gothic Communism to liberate sex work through iconoclastic art (re: the whore’s paradox). Art is very much about what pleases the artist, who is always, to some degree, their own audience.

In the past, then, I’ve regularly used Medusa as a symbol of wild, feral Mother Nature—specifically nature-as-monstrous-feminine having her revenge against the Capitalocene through state shift; i.e., as ancient death god giving life and death as two sides of the same coin, something that exists in defiance of state hegemony and Enlightenment “supremacy.” Terms like “shadow” and “Numinous” get thrown around when describing “Gothic,” a term itself that has seen a great number of people saying quite a bit about it as “sinister” or “tremendous” in relation to the West and its ongoing imaginary battles, especially with buildings:

The ingredient of fear creeps in only as a by-product of the union of Gothic with gloom, giving Terror a close association with Gothic architecture, which in its turn became the characteristic atmosphere of the Gothic novel which contains elements directly associated with Gothic architecture: castles, convents, subterranean vaults, grated dungeons and ruined piles. Inspired by this Gothic world of art, it found sinister properties in the natural world.

Later Gothic machinery developed logically as an intensification of the earlier variety. For the whole paraphernalia of a terror novel is designed to continually quicken the imagination with weird apprehensions. Soon the castle and the convent were joined by the cavern; the Gothic tyrant by banditti; the vaults and galleries by dark forests at midnight; and the scene of languorous amours became the haunt of howling spectres. Gothic villains pursued heroines outside the walls of the castle into the surrounding forest, whose gloom was deepened by the shades of night, and where lurked the banditti. Thunder and lightning hurled their terrors against the affrighted heroine’s soul. The banditti frequented gloomy caverns with dank walls, secret exits and entrances. To all this were added devils and black magic, evil monks, the tribunal of the Inquisition, secret societies, enchanted wands, magic mirrors, and phosphorescent glow. Thus with the Schauer-Romantiks terrors became more dynamic, animated with the one purpose of giving a succession of nervous shocks. They specialized in the ghastly effects of horrid crimes and death embraces (source: Devendra Varma’s The Gothic Flame, 1957).

Leave it to the West to colonize itself, again and again. Gay men like Lewis creating The Monk only to have Coleridge clutch his pearls before trying to reclaim the idea of Gothic literature (and cathedrals) from the fags. But Varma writes of something that I wholly-heartedly agree with (despites his cis-het male-centric gendering of things):

The rise of the Gothic novel may be connected with depravity, and a decline of religion. […] In particular, these novels indicate a new, tentative apprehension of the Divine. Monastic life was no longer believed in, but at least it recalled the Ages of Faith and the alluring mystery of their discipline. The ghosts and demons, the grotesque manifestations of the supernatural, aroused the emotions by which man had first discovered his soul and realized the presence of a Being greater far than he, one who created and destroyed at will. Man’s first stirring of religious instinct was his acute horror of this powerful Deity—and it was to such primitive emotion that he reverted, emancipated from reason, but once again ignorant of God, his spiritual world in chaos.

Primarily the Gothic novels arose out of a quest for the numinous [emphasis, me]. They are characterized by an awestruck apprehension of Divine immanence penetrating diurnal reality. This sense of the numinous is an almost archetypal impulse inherited from primitive magic. The Gothic quest was not merely after horror—a simple succession of ghastly incidents could have satisfied that yearning—but after otherworldly gratification. These novelists were seeking a “frisson nouveau,” a “frisson” of the supernatural. They were moving away from the arid glare of rationalism towards the beckoning shadows of a more intimate and mystical interpretation of life, and this they encountered in the profound sense of the numinous stamped upon the architecture, paintings, and fable of the Middle Ages. The consequent “renaissance of wonder” created a world of imaginative conjurings in which the Divine was not a theorem but a mystery filled with dread. The phantoms that prowl along the corridors of the haunted castle would have no more power to awe than the rats behind fluttering tapestries, did they not bear token of a realm that is revealed only to man’s mystical apperception, his source of all absolute spiritual values (ibid.).

As far as I see it, the Gothic isn’t solely empty escapism, but tries to imagine things beyond Capitalist Realism using the Numinous language of the imaginary past (through bad replication): to evoke powerful sensations that penetrate state deceptions; i.e., a retro-future that envisions possible futures good and bad through the reclaimed language of the past as it once was reimagined, not the future (as Fischer’s hauntologies, the cyberpunk, speak to/with). Like Milton’s Satan, it is defined by its ability to create things that go against pre-conceived ideas of the West, haunted instead by Western atrocities and failings. The future is gay and hellish, set free to express reality in Gothic maturity.

(artist: Auguste Clésinger)

Again, there is always a duality to any being of literature, including Satan, but also Medusa as a Galatean undercurrent made and overshadowed by masturbatory Pygmalions (nothing being wrong with masturbation, save its corruption by profit into something harmful per the settler colonial argument). She’s impactful-yet-broad, hard to pin down: a castle to backtrack.

For me, Medusa is the Numinous to quest for/the ideal mascot for Gothic Communism; i.e., she encompasses that unequal exchange and transformation of fatal power and forbidden knowledge leading to great outcomes repressed by capital cloaking them in mystery/misery.

These include Gothic Communism as the ideal ending of our collective story—a sweaty and shapely spectre of Marx and of Gothic Communism leading to a post-scarcity world informed by pre-capitalist ideas and dictated by wanton, sex-positive impulses. Her taut, fat peach (age gap and size difference) cannot be contained—is as vague and tremendous as a shadow at night, a castle imagined after one quickly sits up, half-awake, and stares deep into the howling darkness out-of-doors: “Is that a booty I see before me?” The Gothic is classically the creation of nightmares we’re not supposed to have (or make) but do so anyways, life imitating art and vice versa: to hang between reality and dreams, captured in a moment, our bodies responding whether we want them to or not. There’s an element of control the whore wields over the person inside her—a faked orgasm having a similar effect to an actual one (acting is fun, and informed-consent performances are still a form of acting between couples); reclaiming the whore works through those devices. “Fat- bottomed girls, you make the rockin’ world go ’round!” Medusa is queen of such things; re: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll to police and rebel through revenge.

(artist: Leeza)

Nature, that which has become alien, must be embraced as friend for its demonized status—not to put aside our differences, but solidarize through similarity amid difference during our pedagogy of the oppressed! Don’t gentrify and decay the white rabbit; follow her down the rabbit hole (the tunnel is Medusa’s deep, dark, hellishly tight asshole) to recognize our relative privilege and oppression, but also our white/non-white qualities under the settler argument—doing so in ways that have our whore’s revenge universally for all whores, not the pimp or whores playing at pimps: challenging profit towards degrowth (of profit, not our junk). TERFs are SWERFs!

That concerns Medusa’s broader function as I see and utilize, but what of the forms that go alongside said function? What about second breakfast? Medusa shows you her ass again and spouts, “Looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys!” Indulge in the galloping ass cheeks clapping back to metal!

Second Breakfast: Forms of the Medusa

Whores are ancient, as are demons; Medusa is arguably the most famous monster out of the ancient world in that respect, if not of all time. Though doubling them, she is less an Amazon and more someone whore-like who has become aggressively vengeful against the state because of rape; i.e., in furious, openly hostile and demonic ways; e.g., a dragon lady for cops to slay in cryptomimetic forms (her queer eggs to scramble; i.e., “So long, Gay Bowser!”). She isn’t so much a big and strong warrior woman, then, but someone “of nature” visibly corrupted/darkly affected by rape to seek open, seemingly indiscriminate, “rabid” revenge and pregnancy through death (the Pegasus was born when Medusa died, fathered by the man who raped her and freed by the man who killed her from her severed neck). Demons are hunted; Medusa’s a scapegoat to summon and banish again, Radcliffe-style—the monomyth instruction manual’s Big Bad force of nature to slay by heroic muscular forces’ swords (and other phallic, police devices[22]), but especially Amazons, who bear more of a likeness to her than men classically do: good witches punishing bad, during mirror syndrome.

Medusa isn’t just phallic or androgynous, in that respect (re: snakes for hair), but a shadowy abject embodiment of chaos darkly doubling Hippolyta—a pissed-off, queenly rape-monster touched by rape in ways Amazons generally aren’t. She’s divided, having a good and bad side to return to normal once incensed—nature something for the West to divide and conquer, including its own population composed of different oppressed groups. It changes how she sees the world, making her a bit temperamental, curt. Can you blame her (many do)? Rape is a source of stigma, shame and hated delivered towards women (or those forced to identify as/treated like women); they it carry inside themselves, more often than not—a tradition to pass down, but also generational trauma, rage and angst speaking to the lived reality of so many raped parties denied a regular outlet/stress valve to release their abuse with—i.e., rape being taboo, hence its testimonies being told to smile more: like the xenomorph, Medusa had to gestate inside living hosts afraid of her “ghastly” appearance and acid for blood.

Instead, they opt for guerilla-style creativity through the Aegis, bouncing rape back at the guilty acting innocent: a born-again demon, alien, chimera, biomechanical freak to exterminate/trophy-kill, pointing to her own rape in repressed, rising-to-the-surface nightmares (the OG xenomorph). She’s something so hypercanonical, we often take her for granted and put up with in equal measure (with me having evoked her plenty throughout my books, and in likenesses of the original, but never really close-examining the Medusa herself at length); i.e., nature both monstrous-feminine in ways we recoil from, but draw closer towards during Gothic push-pull; re: the wandering womb, hysteria, the Archaic Mother!

Medusa is nature-as-alien, as abject, as monstrous-feminine pathologized. Her fatal gaze hauntologically evokes the ancient world’s elemental primality and deep primordial caves (anything dark and wet, often hot and cold to uncomfortable degrees), but also hot animal passion tapping into a repressed mindset of revenge against those who wronged her—what Freud called the Id and Jung the Shadow but which I ascribe to social-psychosexual feelings attached to material conditions burying them, as capital rapes nature, treating life as cheap. She’s paradoxical, oxymoronic, Numinous—an unweeded garden grown to seed, nature taking herself and hers back during ludo-Gothic BDSM and its ritualistic, unequal power exchange scenarios/role reversals! Per liminal expression, this happens on the surface image as much as inside the threshold, attaching the neo-medieval to the ancient alien.

Transformed into an unironic monster of rape, then, Medusa paralyzes her victims, visiting rape upon them through an angry victim’s view mimicking but not perfectly imitating her onlookers (states love false equivalencies; they think these give them free reign, open season). Her revenge is anisotropic, sending patriarchal “vengeance” out from a matriarchal source doubling its abuser(s); she becomes her own thing: a voice for rape no longer unspeakable, having become darkness visible on the Aegis (a shade, as the Greeks would call it)—the ageless victim of police violence that, like a zombie, resembles her killers, but like a hag without wrinkles, shouts “rape!” with her eyes, her vocal chords, her body as weaponized to stall rape, but also cryptonymically exude it in animalized language (re: the Cassandra complex). She’s a fortress and a lightning rod—a chimera both undead, demonic, and animalistic offering the viewer forbidden sight during the dialectic of shelter and the alien: nostalgia fatal to the colonizer group, revealing their artificial supremacy through gut instinct metabolizing rebellion! Pain and humiliation are just different ways a whore communicates—the paradox of art being it can’t harm you on its own. It sets you free by informing you of what things like nudity, sex and rape are.

(artist: Martian Zombie)

Keeping with forbidden fruit, though, there’s bound to be some indigestion (the distended gut bulging with pulpy gore, Gaia eating her children). Like a demon’s hellish cathedral-in-the-flesh/mise-en-abyme, then, Medusa gives that fatal knowledge back as uncorked shame, guilt and hatred unto the colonizer! Don’t turn a blind eye when the abyss stares back; stare and tremble in return, learning what you’re made of! She’s Fate climbing from the well, shaking her gory locks to and fro! It feels good, but her wires are crossed. Her gift-curse condition compels us to look into her hair, at her green skin, regarding her bad attitude.

“Riots don’t develop out of thin air,” said MLK, Neither doe Medusa’s fury. It’s systemic, Sisyphean—forcing her to pay an arbitrary and cruel price, capital blaming the whore for her own rape. In turn, revenge for rape is often a desire to strike one’s rapist dead; i.e., “If looks could kill” because she’s not allowed any other weapons. Such is the case with whores.

This unusual ferocity includes unbridled emotions, but also her biology as abject, suspect—purged DARVO-style by state forces demonizing nature as rapist, not them; i.e., a whorish broodmother that actively gives painful cesarean or otherwise traumatic, unnatural, sodomy-style birth to monsters when slain, and whose avenger behaviors commonly confer to positions of colonized revenge surrounding her own death at the hands of men (and their servants, including subjugated Amazons) having theirs: through devices normally used to alienate and disempower them, but also where power is stored.

For example, sodomy (anything not heteronormative PIV sex) and its liberation and normalization is a sex-positive activity and counterterror device versus not; re: Red Scare radicalizing Amazons during moral panics to punch down against Communists (and other marginalized groups) chattelized inside the same shadow zone, using the same black-and-red aesthetics of power and death that Nazis do. Medusa’s death becomes sacred in the imperial ordering of things, canon staging her anger as rudely misplaced (and mythologizing rape victims as rapacious versus passive, DARVO calling for endless revenge against them; i.e., by token, middle-class feminists with chips on their shoulders and axes to grind for underclass necks). Her status is incorrect, her death welcomed, then puzzled about; i.e., as to why she was sick to begin with. “What’s her deal?” is asked ceremonially inside the status-quo ordering of nature-as-alien; it becomes performative in ways that can only break on the canvas, bridged through linguo-material exchange and its various installations’ selective filters or lack thereof: punching up from the squalid nadirs they relegate us to (reclaiming the ghetto’s shitty sewer water to weaponize it during poetic-political, psychosexual dress up)!

(exhibit 43e2c2: Artist: Artemisia Gentileschi; source: Kathleen Gilje’s “Susanna and the Elders, Restored—X-Ray” [1998]. Medusa is a palimpsest haunted by the things that have painted over her—rape as covered up: 

Artemisia Gentileschi is considered an icon of feminist art, both because of her personal travails and the themes of her artwork. Gilje’s installation (at the National Museum of Women in the Arts) comprises a meticulous copy of Gentileschi’s 1610 painting “Susanna and The Elders” alongside an x-ray of the underpainting, a common practice in Gentileschi’s time of painting over sections of the canvas to make changes. Gilje created her underpainting to highlight how closely Gentileschi’s own story mirrors that of her chosen subject. Both the biblical character and the artist were subjected to unwanted attention from older men.

“Susanna and The Elders” was painted near the time that a charge of rape was brought to court by Gentileschi’s father, also a painter, on her behalf. The seven-month trial produced evidence of sexual harassment and rape of the 19-year-old artist by her teacher, Agostino Tassi, a member of her father’s artistic circle. Similarly, in the bible story, Susanna declines the sexual advances of two elder men in her community. Shamed by her refusal, they determine to ruin her reputation rather than their own. In the end, conflicting court testimony by the men proves her innocence.

Gentileschi’s “Susanna and the Elders” is an unusually sympathetic portrayal of a young woman defensive before her aggressors. It contrasts with treatments of the subject by male artists of the time, who most often portrayed Susanna as voluptuous and participating in the elders’ desire. What the x-ray reveals in Gilje’s “Susanna and The Elders, Restored” is an anguished but defiant Susanna, wielding a knife against her assailants. The knife, Gentileschi’s court-reported weapon of self-defense, transforms Susanna from victim to avenger. Gilje’s additions to the underpainting, motivated by biographical and historical information, seek the psychological reality behind the work [ibid.].

Gilje’s transgressive version simmers just beneath the surface—not buried, like the bones of Lewis’ Bleeding Nun, but waiting to be dug up and presented in their true, final form. Yet, the reality of such disinterment is harsh: rape as covered up, yes, but speaking cryptonymically to rape policed, just as often, by women in service to men in some shape or form. So often, women less principled than Gentileschi betray their own cause, or—like Artemis cursing Medusa—attack themselves and others who have been raped. It becomes a disastrous game of selective punishment, equality of convenience for deserving victims vs undeserving victims, hence the application of revenge by the relatively powerful against those less so; re: “prison sex” mentality seeing rape victims police each other in service to capital and empire. Such triangulation redirects rebellious sentiment away from the state, dividing it among the oppressed to tokenize and conquer themselves with.)

Rape (a form of torture) does that to you. Medusa’s not sick in a congenital sense, or a female infantilization of “the id” or some such nonsense; her plural, furious condition is comorbid, exacted upon her by token dickwads celebrating her demise. Medusa, then, could be adequately described as an Amazon who has, in some shape or form, been kettled/raped by other Amazons as much by men during reactive abuse, and seeks blind, venomous revenge for it in openly demonic ways; re: preventing rape through paralysis; i.e., being able to change shape in a plural mode of existence that, once awakened, actively gives hell back to anyone she looks at. By changing shape, she communicates in ways that speak to her inhuman animal body treated as lesser by Amazonian sell-outs, the latter acting “superior” to Medusa despite their collars humbling them. They’re obedient, still somewhat alien but of a non-chaotic morphology blessed by the gods versus cursed: of the three Gorgons, Medusa was the only mortal sister and the one marked for death after being raped.

Subjugated Amazons are rock ‘n roll without the critical bite, but all of the venom directed at the elite’s political enemies—themselves! As such, they also lie to themselves, saying they aren’t raped because they’re as strong as they are/posture herbo-style strength through a dominant aesthetic that looks rape-proof/gives rape out to weaklings, yet overlooks their own slave status to a sovereign power raping them non-penetratively. Rising to state challenges, they’re stuck in the Man Box/are neoconservative in their approach to strength; i.e., as a rape-prevention device only for themselves in service to empire during the battle of the sexes; re: acting like men as TERFs very much do. The animus isn’t founded on shared respect, but hierarchical supremacy disguised as liberation, benevolent whiteness, and the noble savage conquering nature with nature. A whore is a whore, even enby ones posturing as gym moms while insisting they aren’t sex workers (re: Autumn Ivy): cops with a human-alien appearance. It’s the oldest trick in the book!

Scratch a SWERF and a TERF bleeds. Eh tu, Brutae? They embody not just a miscarriage of justice, but an abortion, self-surgery to neuter themselves. They lose all irony and stab their fellow whores on and offstage during bad BDSM enacted in bad faith. They’re stupid from a class-warrior standpoint, but know what they’re doing. It’s literally their job! This includes whoring themselves out as dominatrixes, but also marrying up; i.e., the bridle becoming bridal when capital reins them in (or puts them down when they go “feral,” a rabid whore to squash like Medusa under their owners’ bootheels): the monomythic reward for men when all’s said and done. They’re so dead, they don’t know it; are pigs, they don’t even know how much of a pig they are (ripe for the slaughter). “Four legs good, two legs better!” (all the more fitting considering Orwell was an imperial cop). It’s folly because Medusa can’t be killed; she is Death itself, thus can only be faced on the Aegis—either respected and spared her wrath, or belittled only to be devoured by She Who Devours: “I’m the god of death; what are you?”

Facing Death: the Aegis Opens!

(artist: Abigail Larson)

Athena’s Aegis is a two-way mirror—one that brings Hell home to Earth. On it, Medusa—the giver and taker of life—smiles because she sees men’s mortality staring them in the face! When capital decays, then, the Numinous is something workers invariably return to; re: Devendra Varma, but on a more informed, Communist variant of the same basic quest (re: me, the palliative Numinous). As a death god, Medusa’s revenge is generally showing people, on her surfaces and inside her thresholds, what they don’t want to face but paradoxically are drawn towards; re: Radcliffe’s Black Veil: a fatal homing that turns the West (and its sins) to ash. Such is nature exceeding man’s grasp.

For example, all women—not just Amazons and Medusa (though they embody cops and victims the best)—are demons, thus whores, under capital. When push comes to shove, women (or those treated like women; re: anything “lesser” than white, cis-het, Christian men) are always expected to submit to men and uphold their authority. Except, the whole point with Medusa is she don’t give a fuck—is the Aegis to face; i.e., having been shamed with an ignominious death, thus becoming something for the state to reject because she “let” herself not only “get raped” (famously killed in her sleep like a whore), but “chose” to sacrifice her body for something monstrous, unlovable (according to them, anyways). One, she is a threat, because she exposes rape coming from inside the house; re: her testimony is dangerous to the husband, which the Amazons protects, guaranteeing there always is a scapegoat.

To that, canon’s Medusa is paradoxically weak, as are her expendable-vermin insect children, thus deserve scorn, mockery and hate as “lesser” beings that eat flesh, spread disease (as whores were blamed for doing instead of the men having sex with them) and procreate through infanticide, sodomy, cannibalism, fungus and torture (re: blood libel shaming the witch per ethnocentric models serving profit); Amazons and their “superior” babies are Spartan-esque, “immune” to rape by denying it/abjecting onto her as impure, abomination unheimlich compared to their nuclear assimilation (whoring themselves out while excluding her). It’s DARVO blaming the victim for the nuclear family’s downfall, thus fascistic and queerphobic, our scornful givers of rape worshipping strength in bad faith (and grooming children/exhibiting their genitals to root out fags; re: TERFs; e.g., the LGB Alliance—”alliance” denoting a supergroup of self-righteous “good” witches standing against an evil cabal of so-called “bad” witches) while likening non-reproductive sex—but also the receiving of non-consenting sex—as “sodomy” per the colonial binary argument.

In fact, Medusa is constantly being raped and sodomized (with anal sex, but also just rape and neglect) for profit; i.e., under a structure that uses token police violence to punch down and dominate with as guilty pleasure. In turn, her revenge—as something of a black, Jewish, genderqueer whore, atomic punk butt wizard—is to reclaim such things from colonial orderings and usage demonizing her animal side as inferior to Cartesian devices built on older imperial models: “rape” in quotes serving as a campy, ironic weapon for liberation versus a canonical, unironic device for enslavement. Rape cannot be monopolized any more than infiltration can, nor monomyth stories like Castlevania (and its various artifacts; e.g., swords, shields, Amazons, princesses[23], succubae, and twinks-in-peril, etc), heavy metal music, or literally anything else from weird nerd culture. This isn’t a handicap, but our greatest strength; re (from Volume Zero):

(artist: Bokuman)

State proponents are straw dogs (throwaway effigies)/sacrificial roosters, believing themselves immune to the elite’s gain while the owner slits the faithful worker’s throat sooner or later. Their “greatest strength” is actually what dooms them to an ignominious death: complete alienation driven by a dimorphic connecting of everything to biological sex, skin color and their canonical-monstrous connotations in service of the profit motive but refusing to scrutinize things at a dialectical-material level (willful ignorance/”rose-tinted glasses”). Conversely our greatest strength as class-/culture-conscious class warriors is our “darkness visible” doubling theirs through the Wisdom of the Ancients as something to cultivate relative to the modern world; i.e., our deliberate, cultivated ability to critique capital and its agents/trifectas through dialectical-material scrutiny and iconoclastic, campy behaviors that synthesize the Superstructure to our purposes (rehumanizing ourselves by separating from the colonial binary in monomorphic fashion) all while suffering the fools of canonical tragedy and farce within canonical historical materialism. Our aim is to “make it gay” by reclaiming the Base through our Four Gs: abjection, hauntology, chronotopes and cryptonymy—but also our Six Rs, or Gothic-Marxist tenets of Gothic Communism during oppositional praxis as something to synthesize (source).

In this, our imagination and poetic flexibility is our greatest weapon against their Achilles’ Heel. Any form the Medusa takes—be that killer stick figures (remember Stick Death, anyone?) or gay queens from outer space—we camp on the Aegis; same for the Amazons raping her or their otherwise warlike behaviors: “Terror is a weapon and a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.” Cryptonymy is a skill with a high ceiling. Medusa is the fat lady singing to hit the ceiling and bring it down—a queen of the cosmic dance, reminding us all that death is both nothing to fear and that singing and wiggling feel good (to thrash, convulse, and vibe in rock ‘n roll, psychosexual martyrdom/quasi-medieval camp: to be wet with salvation)!

(artist: Tassy Is Here)

Capital rapes everything, including the subjugated Amazons that rape/abject Medusa for showing her furious ass (the reward as much as the princess is). We can reverse abjection, reclaiming Amazons from their fascist, vain, police-giver-of-rape function, and humanize Medusa in the bargain (while making her a bit more fun, amid the venom). But it behooves us to consider these devices—both Amazons, good and bad, as well as Medusa’s calm and furious forms—as they function dualistically and dialectically-materially in the liminal wild. Let there be no Imperialism of theory in the pages ahead; kill your Amazonian darlings and give Medusa a hug. Disentangle them from their state variants, doing so through the Gothic-Communist drive towards liberation during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s exquisite “torture”; i.e., negotiating our own rights (and navigating our own trauma) on the Aegis versus having the state do it for “us” (for profit). We must or else.

It will happen in time; i.e., when sex positivity becomes second nature through praxial synthesis, Medusa in all her forms allowed to come out and be treated as human, but also as monstrous-feminine stewards of nature: having our cake and eating it, too, our forbidden sight not just intimating Medusa, but showing our arches and buttresses off (offshoots of mightier divinities, mise-en-abyme)! In challenging profit, we clap back, having our sweet revenge! Why do what you’re told when it’s much more fun to misbehave! Power over our flesh, our hauntological pleasure and pain/our revolutionary cryptonymy reverses abjection on the Aegis as we embody it! Screw promises of salvation in the afterlife! Fuck those who act like they have power over life and death now!

Medusa cannot die; she is a death god, which life is a part of—a palliative Numinous, “almost holy” reminder of our own mortality and humanity the state has long since forgotten. We reclaim our asses (and their holes, as mythical sites of violation/forbidden pleasure), right now! We cum on each other to claim our friends in good faith (not for profit), right now! We endure genocide—the seminal tragedy of merely being born different—and feel Medusa spread her wings to give life and death to all, intimations of mortality fir king and pauper alike; but to us, she comforts, letting us know the state can never exterminate us. And in trying to, we haunt their days on Earth till said Earth claims them. Our beautiful wickedness, our beauteous orbs! Holy St. Francis!

The state is an unnatural cycle of abuse that tries to cheat death. It relies on monopolies of violence, terror and morphological expression to control sex through force; i.e., through actions that, under state purview, have set definitions: missionary for reproduction and anal rape/sodomy thus guilty pleasure, etc. We might be toys under capital, but can decide how we’re played with in ways that slowly change the paradigm, from land to worker as part-in-parcel: land back, bodies back, the whole shebang; fuck around, find out when Medusa—a holistic deity of nature with manmade and summoned anthropomorphic, but not anthropocentric qualities—comes back to take the arrogant West (and its false essentialism) apart.

Medusa, then, is the dumb supper of capital’s endless dead. As such, she paints it black, her cosmic twerking reminding us that sex positivity isn’t to extend life and improve it for a select few by preying on others, but to improve the quality of life for all; i.e., by using technology to extend life and quality of life while facing death as a total history and natural consequence laden with flagrant power abuse by state forces: to look on Omelas and remember the wretched the holier-than-thou deemed worthy of sacrifice. There must always be a victim for them to sup on. Never let them forget their own hypocrisy as Medusa pegs them (out)!

Hurt, not harm is a human idea, and Medusa is as much force of nature as human stand-in. In Numinous terms, Medusa isn’t human/cannot die, but her avatars very much are/can (women or not); they’ll feel her revenge when state shift happens, so we can’t just “pull a Radcliffe,” summon another scapegoat (another princess, another castle) and use it to deny what’s coming. We have to face what the state has done. That being said, our whore’s revenge can mitigate total destruction by transitioning away from capital and profit before it’s too late; re: by making our Wisdom of the Ancients wiser to Medusa’s growing rage. Because a world without control is unimaginable to state defenders, the Aegis showing them their own death as a loss of control, humanizing the harvest: state shift, wrought by Medusa becoming that Great Destroyer capital can never defeat, the witch it could never burn, queer it could never bury but the dark mother who tucks them into bed, six feet underground! The end is nigh; let’s listen to it, before she (and her murderous womb) enrage and “take us with her” as the Gothic does: exposing the West as fallen, before taking us home for good (the black queen becoming the unironic, passionate slasher)!

(artist: pixmilk)

To it, there are planetary forces at work, unfolding on this pale blue dot that is Medusa’s domain. In a half-real sense, liberation and exploitation occupy the same space/mirror game, camping demons and the undead in animalized, predatory/prey language. Keeping with the Numinous, some worship and duality is expected, during liminal expression; but liberation through said worship is the point—not submitting to the elite until the world ends by blaming the Whore of Babylon.

On the Aegis, then, we’re not trapped in here with you Cartesian dickwads (who love to think they conquer nature); you’re trapped in with us! We’ll make you motherfuckers squirm (trapped between pleasure and awe, formerly state disgust and delight evoking a Numinous torpor that sets Medusa free from capital’s Torment Nexus)! The Aegis opens; gaze into its forbidden sight and see the world for both what it is, but also what it could become! Our death or salvation sit on the same mirror. Medusa doesn’t care which, so demolish state illusions and set yourselves free, seizing post-scarcity from the jaws of defeat; haunted by spectres of Marx and a Communist Numinous giving unequal, forbidden exchange to help us transform—not to die for nothing but bring Gothic Communism to life: as bad girls setting Medusa free. What better way to expose the state as false than that?

This concludes our examination of the Medusa. She and Amazons have been pitted against each other by neoliberal Capitalism, Amazons forever tokenized and Medusa always a victim/scapegoat demon whore. We’ve examined her revenge, but what about subversive Amazons refusing to rape Medusa? Tokenism doesn’t preclude reclamation, and Rome wasn’t burned in a day. In part two, we’ll consider less how these devices are constantly and forever “at war” under Capitalism, and more how to reconcile and deal with those consequences to push towards Gothic Communism; i.e., taking Amazons back while reconciling their tokenistic elements and criminogenic conditions that inform them; e.g., anal sex (commonly a metaphor for rape) becoming a postcolonial device (the whore’s revenge). That and more, next!

Onto “Reclaiming Amazons; or, Cops and Victims (opening and part one: the Riddle of Steel)“!

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Footnotes

[1] This by itself is a huge area of research; i.e., nature-as-monstrous-feminine through monomythic stories made to endlessly announce the sudden arrival of dark mothers (of an unruly hysterical sort); i.e., as scapegoats slain repeatedly by state forces, but especially tokenized subjugated Amazons revived and whored out under neoliberal tenure/Capitalist Realism. To peruse this specific topic, refer to the list of hyperlinks under Metroidvania as closed space, in the glossary. Furthermore, while I write about Amazons extensively in Volume Zero, they likewise appear in all of my books.

[2] I say “quickly” because given my extended interest in Amazons, you should recognize many of the intersecting refrains inside referring to arguments and ideas from older books in this series; this is merely a taste—barely even a survey on all I’ve written about them. I love strong women/monstrous-feminine at large!

[3] E.g., Legal Eagle (“The Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes,” 2024); i.e., the Omelas refrain.

[4] The entire “Idle Hands” subdivision borrows from my PhD’s arguments, and its style of color-coding and emboldening its keywords.

[5] E.g., Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597):

Sampson: ‘Tis all one. I will show myself a tyrant.

When I have fought with the men,

I will be civil with the maids; I will cut off their heads.

Gregory: The heads of the maids?

Sampson: Ay, the heads of the maids, or their maidenheads.

Take it in what sense thou wilt (source).

[6] Unlike Amazons, Medusa is chimeric; i.e., she’s undead, animalistic and demonic. Like a zombie, she’s not just cursed with death, but forced to come back from the grave; in similar terms, a demon doesn’t stay dead/in Hell but returns from Hell to pester state forces (or is chased monomythically to Hell by said forces), either to move profit along or choke it in predator/prey language. Like Prometheus, Medusa cannot be killed (state shift being when she devours the Capitalocene), and like Mephistopheles, is always tempting Faust. She is anisotropically terrorist/counterterrorist, canonizing this binary by forwarding abjection or flipping it when reversing abjection (thus power towards or away from the state) during asymmetrical warfare.

[7] By comparison, my commission of Quinn (above) allowed his partner to come out of her cock cage to perform in a sex tape for this project: to illustrate mutual consent during our labor exchange’s sexually descriptive informed consent, raising emotional/Gothic intelligence when reimagining the Wisdom of the Ancients to achieve praxial catharsis, mid-synthesis—of different ideas, cultivating good social-sexual daily habits in the process. Genuine rebellion isn’t a daily event, but a horizontal counter structure resisting state forms; i.e., pandemonium.

[8] Re: the color of stigma; e.g., the Wicked Witch of the West.

[9] Something can appeal to the Male Gaze, be PIV and have white skin, and still be genderqueer towards universal liberation; re, Sarkeesian’s adage: enjoy the pleasurable qualities to problematic media, but do not endorse their harmful qualities; camp them!

[10] A Gothic specialty, aka the haunted house narrative; i.e., my neighbor is an alien/my house is an alien—the land as alien from colonizer/occupying army’s perspective, black reclaiming white, mid-hauntology. The boundaries between cop/criminal start to fissure and dissolve, the violence escalating. Capital moves money through nature, which becomes a land of madness, a tone poem/German Expressionism, a nebulous crime expressed through quantum excitement and dread. Through holistic expression, we return to the scene to get to the bottom of things; homes, in Gothic, are people and, like people, have something to hide and reveal per the cryptonymy process (we’ll look into the detective aspects—of Aliens and the Gothic heroine—in another subchapter).

[11] The blueprint for Samus’ origin story, released years after Metroid came out.

[12] Re (from Volume Zero):

oppositional praxis during Gothic Communism is less like the discrete, nine-squared D&D Alignment Chart (above) and more like a Venn Diagram of the same components doubled and super-imposed over each other. Hence, why revolutionary acronyms like ACAB (“All Cops Are Bad”) are handy but also why you still have to distinguish between who’s genuine/good-faith and who isn’t/bad-faith during oppositional praxis; i.e., through dialectical-material scrutiny as performed by gay space wizards through whatever “poison” you pick and serve up (source).

Workers are not homogenous. Different people are historically-materially demonized in different ways using the same language, which involves monsters as always being—to some extent—theatrical, thus half-real. These express in/as paradoxical positions of power and status that likewise carry their own double standards; i.e., depending on who’s playing them, with irony or without; re (from Volume One):

By this same token, Pygmalion’s opposite, Galatea, offers up classically female/genderqueer “monarchs” and non-abusive groups/communities with which to belong during oppositional praxis; e.g., Elvira (exhibit 12, a proletarian queen) and Ripley (a liminal, sometimes-proletarian “space trucker” queen/sometimes-bourgeois “TERF queen,” exhibit 8b) or your run-of-the-mill sex workers rebelling and conforming to varying degrees: existing on the “rungs” of power as queens, but also figurative/literal princesses, lieutenants, captains, soldiers, etc. Either praxial type is distinguished by their good-faith or bad-faith façade; i.e., what is the queen-in-question angry about and what are they fighting for behind the persona—be they a witch, werewolf, zombie, vampire or some hybrid thereof, with all these canonical monsters personifying venereal disease but also bourgeois metaphors for homosexual men as the problematic practitioners [historically] of monstrous-feminine sex (source).

Any evocation of the monstrous-feminine, then, must navigate (thus critique) trauma by performing and playing with power according to these inequalities and relativities: where they are; i.e., as things to consolidate in demonic language.

[13] Medusa is classically a Western myth, centered around white cis-het women as the go-to victims of said myth. Similar to Afrocentrism, we want to decentralize it and solidarize intersectionally among all oppressed peoples; i.e., that we might unite under a common goal despite uneven privilege and oppression, but also the pointed origins of such devices.

[14] I.e., as dark energy and matter. Medusa is the fire of the gods/of Gaia and the ancient world expressed as “high voltage.” Such divinities are dark, wrathful—with Medusa laying snakes/dropping deuces, her children abortive offshoots conflated with anal sex; re: Grendel’s mother/the mother of dragons. From mother to child, they carry nature’s revenge forwards out of the past.

[15] Starting with Metroid, a maze-style TPS, released alongside Aliens in 1986 (August 6th vs July 14th). Not only did this galvanize the entire shooter umbrella genre, but Aliens inspired Doom, which took Wolfenstein 3D‘s initial 1992 success and ran with it as a 1993 Aliens reskin (Super Metroid would release a year later on the SNES).

[16] This queen of queens voiced by Cameron himself—a role he would more or less reprise when voicing the death scene for T2‘s own non-biological shoggoth, the T-1000. It’s gibberish uttered from a white man’s idea of xenoglossia, shivering at Archaic Mothers and technological singularities.

[17] Eventually playing both sides with his Avatar series, using said war chest to aggrandize himself and make even more and more war films, dressed up as white-savior-style Indigenous resistance.

[18] E.g., Edmund Burke’s terror of the Sublime, itself comparable to the Weird, the Absurd, cosmic nihilism, or the Numinous, etc.

[19] Re: a story about a tall, powerful woman who poisons the men she’s with (to get with his brother), and stabs a smaller weaker woman to death in very Amazonian fashion.

[20] E.g., Garfield saying to John when he gets home,  “Finally! I need my lasagna sack milked!” Click on the link, if you want, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

[21] To frame her as “sodomy” in ways the elite control through alien fetishization.

[22] Missiles and later bombs, the latter disrupting areas to rob more for capital and themselves.

[23] The modest-presenting (and property-owning) sexual rewards; e.g., Zelda and Peach are a sexual treat for completing the monomyth (after killing the dragon lord, versus Medusa, like in Kid Icarus, 1986; Samus is too cool for school, not dating anyone onscreen). She’s an excuse to fuck the whore.