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.

“Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons,” part one: Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives (feat. Out of Sight, Nina Hartley, Velma, and Zeuhl)

“…Schedoni would be the last among us so to trespass. He is one of the most pious of the brotherhood; few indeed have courage to imitate his severe example. His voluntary sufferings are sufficient for a saint. He pass the night abroad? Go, Signor, yonder is the church, you will find him there, perhaps.”

Vivaldi did not linger to reply. “The hypocrite!” said he to himself as he crossed to the church, which formed one side of the quadrangle; “but I will unmask him.”

—a lay-brother and Vivaldi, The Italian (1797)

Picking up where “Derelicts, Medusa and H. R. Giger’s Xenomorph; i.e., the Puzzle of “Antiquity”)” left off…

Whereas part zero looked at damsels, detectives and sex demons per Giger’s biomechanical xenomorph, and part two looks at magical demons in isolation while dissecting Radcliffe herself, part one shall inspect damsels and detectives, and features a wide eclectic mix of non-magical kinds; i.e., ranging from white cis-het female detectives and sex workers, to trans detectives investigating trans-on-trans deception and violence; e.g., J-Lo from Out of Sight and Nina Hartley the vintage pornstar for the first two (as detective and damsel, respectively), and Velma, but also doubles of good/evil Velma with me and my ex, Zeuhl, for the second!

I’ll explain/signpost as we go. First, though, a little thesis work: As something to play detective with, the Gothic concerns unequal, at-times-painful power fantasies through investigation of the imaginary barbaric “past”; i.e., from past cross-sections of former “rape” victims, whose derelicts include golems, like Giger’s xenomorph, as castles in small. Except, whereas state proponents fashion these abject symbols to reduce and control them in times of crisis (re: privileged, middle-class people spend to feel in control when the state manufactures crisis), we marginalized sex workers can apply the same principles of play and Gothic BDSM to speak to state abuse harming damsels and detectives being demonized: to gain a voice/foothold through the very things they’re abjecting! If they act on these simulacra, they self-report and we’re spared any actual harm (reduction and prevention).

That being said, there’s still the power fantasy as traditionally arranged, viewed and consumed; i.e., men want power to kill monsters with impunity and women want power to investigate them with impunity (and dogwhistle to their owners for treats). The two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive, except for Radcliffe they absolutely were; i.e., magic, killing and violence are what men and/or pirates do, not women, which suitably altered women of Radcliffe’s standing and persuasion to imagine demons (and their forced alien entries into the damsel and similar victims) at all: victims to blame once transformed into dark versions of rape survival (dark gifts/forbidden knowledge); i.e., gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss, blame the whore as someone for her to pimp.

Note: This writing is relatively shorter/a bit of a rehash, given it’s older than “Giger’s Xenomorph” and the Demon Module up to this point. But part one and part two do examine and apply damsels and detectives, then demons, in ways that we specifically try to reclaim. While part zero talked about these things together through Giger’s demon, parts one and two consider them on their own. —Perse

As Volume Zero shows, I am not kind towards true crime and murder mysteries; yes, I can enjoy the basic suspense they offer but utterly detest the praxial inertia they contribute towards—a praxial inertia that stems from Radcliffe having started it all (“heavy lies the crown,” sweetie); re (from Volume Zero):

the “twist,” in “true crime” is a forced reality that generally confirms the systemic scapegoat after a revelation by the nosy neighbor (“I knew it!”); i.e., the Scooby Doo villain as borrowed from the centuries-older xenophobia and state apologetics of female Neo-Gothic fiction authors like Ann Radcliffe having carved it out in equally cartoonish forms. Radcliffe lived under the power of men, to be sure, and wasn’t in a position of power like Lewis (a man) was, but the degree to which she used her immense (albeit relative) privilege as a white woman-of-letters is dubious, at best; i.e., not to help the oppressed by writing anything other than what she did, but actively choosing to use her unironically xenophobic (and frankly vanilla) rape fantasies to write moderately bigoted novels. Like Tolkien, Radcliffe’s Gothic moderacy is precisely what makes her stories dangerous to sex-positive workers, because behind their veneer of moderacy lies the same function executed by more aggressive, reactionary forms: to stoke class, race and gender suspicions; i.e., moral panic. For Radcliffe, this meant aristocratic, often elderly white folk, but also racist, jingoistic caricatures and poor, non-white people being unmasked by chaste white women (the nun-like, ostensibly ace/queer-coded private eye; e.g., Velma).

Radcliffe, then, was complicit in a larger scheme her fans would breed into and police on and on down the years. As Top Dollar once said, “the idea has become the institution”; in return, Radcliffe’s fiction has become something to unironically defend from “degenerate” outsiders, turning her books, oddly enough, into besieged fortresses that uphold the material conditions of a particular mythic structure. Her relative stupidity becomes something to not only sweep under the rug but embody through half-hearted or worse, bad-faith arguments (source).

All of this detective’s bias is worth considering because it becomes a veil behind which our attackers hide themselves and attack us from; i.e., by playing at detectives (cops) while calling us sex demons (which will become relevant in a moment, when we look at Zeuhl accusing me of their abuse). To it, the “delicate” likes of Radcliffe tended to read outrageous stories like Walpole’s Mysterious Mother[1] (a double-incest yarn written in 1768 and published posthumously in 1791) or Lewis’ The Monk (1794) before filtering everything through her rose-tinted glasses: a “confessional” per her Confessional of the Black Penitents. We’ll want to consider this canonical filtering process, to be sure, except our focus really isn’t true crime or murder mystery genres, but how various elements of those (mainly crime and murder tied to rape, BDSM and sex work) appear in popularized forms of Gothic poetics at large. This includes porn as similarly “filtered.” Deceivers, including self-deceivers, are classically exposed through the lies they weave and pitch to others and themselves as reclaimed against them; i.e., by those whose identities actualize by the end of the story and, just as well, hybridize the damsel, detective and sex demon/whore (a kind of sex bandit with queer flavors, below):

(artist: Nico Okapi)

We’ve already examined Alien and the xenomorph (and virtually every magical sex demon under the sun). To expose the likes of Radcliffe in the present space and time (so, not explicitly retro-futures[2]) as moderately deceitful (and opportunistic), we’ll examine various not-magical damsels and detectives (cis, but also trans, above) in part one, and the things they doggedly investigate—sex demons, naturally—in part two, as already state; i.e., as a purposefully campy subversion (and effective) means of our own liberation from their widespread falsehoods. Gird your loins!

We’ll go back through the list. The first third of the demonic trifecta are damsels. Though we’re specifically looking at porn as liminal expression,  here, the damsel isn’t always overtly pornographic or monstrous (outside of intense subversions, next page); they’re merely the promise of sex, supplied in relation to sex work as figuratively demonized by canon, thus linked to persecution as a veil for exploitation: getting the girl. Let’s take that premise to its logical conclusion by skipping the Gothic foreplay and just going straight to the unspoken reward at the end of the story!

As someone to investigate their own world, a woman is always a virgin and a whore. To this, the “summoning” of female/feminized sex workers becomes a tradition of disempowerment towards subjugated demons by male consumers presaged by middle-class maidens with mirror syndrome; i.e., naughty “damsels” on-and-off the Aegis offering forbidden knowledge to the cis-het, white men (the status quo) who indignantly conquer them through sexualized violence propagated vicariously by token Radcliffean Gothic heroines.

Furthermore, even if that violence is displaced, it’s presented “merely” as commerce, or “business as usual”; i.e., by advertising quite loudly who is being exploited and how (with Radcliffe playing DARVO by also centering her rape claims [and desire] around her own kind as entitled and suspicious: white straight landowners fearful of the outside/alien during the dialectic of shelter). Hence, examining porn can be especially illuminating but also exploitative in its pro-worker or pro-state arguments.

In either case, it promptly gets down to business, but highlights the foreshadowed outcomes to any Gothic tale’s “happy ending” (we’ll examine this voyeurism and exhibition’s inception, here, then how we can subvert it in Volume Three, Chapter Three and Five; i.e., the canonical voyeurism of peril as something to subvert yourselves while going about your business amongst students who are eager to watch and learn—exhibit 101c2).

(exhibit 47b1a: Nina Hartley[3] and Victoria Paris—conventionally beautiful and objectified, but capable businesswomen navigating a man’s world/adult entertainment. They are loved so long as they play dumb, familiarizing customers and critics with fabricated ideas about what constitutes a woman in familiar/foreign terms; the voyeuristic gaze of the usual torture victim as an idealized, damsel-esque but also demonized sacrifice: the succubus as virgin/whore.)

Echoes of the Medusa, a sense of ancient dereliction exists within ’80s porn, which has a polished-yet-trashy feel to its whores. Like a B-movie with a budget, its liminal sense of time is ageless and dated through its peerless starlets; they never seem to age, but grow increasingly dated in subtle, hauntological ways: the retro-future of a frozen porno world that has become the nostalgic past sold back to us in an idealized, imperfect form people from the future chase backwards for different reasons. The harmful decay lies in the appropriation itself; i.e., these women were generally framed as physically “perfect,” but also forced into wacky and physically degrading roles that required less an absence of good acting and more an intentionally bad or campy style tailored to please (white straight men/tokens) as the universal client (acting dumb). Combined with the hauntological sets and costumes that join the ’80s aesthetic as a package deal, a general air of unreality flows from these works; i.e., like staring into a movie poster of something that never-quite-was but nevertheless was inside everyone’s VCR not too long ago!

Nina was part of that, sharing her screen space with other conventional beauties like Victoria Paris, Tori Welles and Peter (don’t touch his hair) North (exhibit 47b1a). Each showed how the human body can be utterly transformed with a little pizzazz, but also how so much of what they made was prolific ephemera tied to a recognizable face and on-brand (statuesque) body and stage name. They became “hyperreal,” the perfect simulation of what never existed outside the replica; i.e., the shadow simulacrum both a damsel/demon as something to investigate performatively through their own work in a largely exploitative industry that—with a little awareness and labor action—can become friendly to sex workers (thus all workers):

(exhibit 47b1a: “Heaven in a wildflower”; i.e., several older porn collage exhibits from my book series, made into a composite collage alongside a new collage portion featuring Nina Hartley [bottom-left]. There’s so much porn in the world already that thumbnails are a classic and easy way to compile and observe them, en masse [though not always with obvious sources because porn is ephemeral; i.e., it “loses” its value [in capitalist eyes] right after it’s made, thus falls victim to instant exploitation and theft, little pimps and thieves fighting over the pimp pimp’s scraps of whore flesh].

Furthermore, being the world’s oldest profession, prostitution and porn are very ancient and animal activities that capital alienates from us/fetishizes for profit. So while industry porn is a terrible source of information to learn about sex [as Nina shall explain, next page], if it’s the only gig in town and people are starved for sex and have money in their pockets to spend on things that capital steals from them [money is, itself, a form of theft]—then, where the hell else are they gonna learn about sex? Public schools, while those are under attack by Nazis? I think not!

[artists: Nina Hartley and Robby Echo; source: “Mom Stole My Boyfriend,” 2019] 

Realism isn’t the point, but speaks to reality through artifice; e.g., Shakespeare or Jane Austen aren’t very realistic in their theatre/spoken dialogs, but still touch on plenty of dialectical-material forces at work; i.e., so does porn of even the trashiest or cheapest variety to the most expensive corporate-made! From Gothic novels [which concern almost entirely with sex through damsels, detectives and demons] to ’80s corporate sex tapes, we want to build on what these currently are to shift things in a better direction. Even if that’s just us cumming to let off steam with some allegory thrown in, better that than blue balls/clit and nothing to show for it! Workers aren’t just single-purpose, then, but can multi-task//do activism as a matter of “brothel espionage” and de facto education while also making a living and consuming porn [more on this idea during “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress”].

In my opinion—as a queer sex worker and pornographic historian/Gothicist—porn is actually a good place for sex-positive education, provided we can recognize its entertainment potential and current state of abuse, then critically analyze it; e.g., Nina and this young man [above] fuck the way they both want until she drains him of his cum: “Yeah, you gonna cum?” she croons, to which he makes stupid happy puppy sounds! That is exciting a) because of the miracle of the human body and its biology at work, and b) because the ability to exchange forbidden power and knowledge—however unequal [the mom/stepson incest theatre trope] and dark it comes across [the sub/dom expressed in pet/owner play delighting in the appearance of enslavement and bestiality at a glance, but in truth having nothing to do with such things]—can afford mutual consent as something to instruct; i.e., if not under the right initial conditions then certainly the right hermeneutic and dialectic recreating such media, ourselves [the cottage porn industry of OnlyFans and similar companies opening up a Pandora’s Box, of sorts]: the Gothic camp of porn history being encamped [so to speak] in an ongoing live performance’s exhibitionism and voyeurism!

And while its obviously a paid act [the whore being a paid actress alongside the “damsel,” above], there’s room to enjoy the performance as having a historical-material critique to it; i.e., older women do have sex with younger men, and fantasies about that likewise exist; re: which the porn industry capitalizes on, pimping the virgin/whore trying to survive under the state wage enslavement: to alienate, starve, fetishize, pimp and profit off our labor! The place to fight such barbarity sits in the same complicated venues of expression; i.e., the damsel trope reclaimed by working girls [and all whores] who make porn more educational but still fun [the two ideas are not mutually exclusive].)

There’s plenty to learn from these seemingly “empty” stories. Indeed, behind the veneer of shallow beauty and implied force are intelligent, paid (classically white middle-class) actresses who not only knew the ins and outs of the industry but had to survive within it; i.e., often out of necessity due to classic (sexist and misogynistic) divisions of labor compelled by patriarchal structures since Athens and Rome; e.g., while Paris sadly died from cancer in 2021 at 60—may she rest in power—in life she had a BA in nutrition, did mudwrestling, and got into porn by first posing for nudes, then diving in when she found it easier to get sex work than other forms of photography (an ongoing symptom of Capitalism). By comparison, Nina Hartley is still involved in porn and selling her body as an informed extension of herself that we can investigate and learn from, xenophillically! SWAG! Some Whores Are Good!

As is common in showbiz, both women have catchy stage names, with Nina’s birth name being Marie Louise Hartma and Paris’ being Sheila Young. They often play “dumb blondes,” a reflection of the industry stereotypes that continue to intersectionally present AFAB people as stupid; e.g., cis-het women with “perfect” bodies sold to an ideal audience: the sexist straight men who unironically endorse this as a canonical worldview being something to defend and learn from to everyone’s detriment. While it’s entirely possible to enjoy canonical vintage porn, endorsing it as realistic or educational towards “actual dating” is like a vampire needing blood from a “virgin’s” neck: the cheap, quick, disposable essence of something broken down for them to spend their hard-earned wages on, the beautiful girl from The Tubes’ “She’s a Beauty” (1983). That being said, there’s awesome educative potential in public nudism, all same; i.e., the lesson extending from an Aegis that goes far beyond the exhibit itself:

[artists: Nina Hartley and Robby Echo; source: “Mom Stole My Boyfriend,” 2019]

However pornographic Nina’s damsels/demons are, then, they nevertheless concern a larger extratextual search for sex (connection, protection, service and love, etc); i.e., as something to pimp/sell that dates back to Radcliffe’s own safe-unsafe sex and, more to the point, her curious and horny heroines, who—while not pornographically portrayed in any overt sense—still consider a woman’s place (specifically a white straight unmarried woman’s place) in a man’s world; i.e., as someone to perform and move through/navigate those dangerous liminal spaces; re: like Hartley and Paris themselves once did: a damsel is “naked” in the eyes of those pursuing her to ravish first from a distance, and then to presumably undress and poke said plumpness (an act that Radcliffe conflates with straight-up murder).

Comparisons between artifice and reality are not new. Nor is their conflation, which again, goes back to Radcliffe. As Hartley herself says regarding the use of “bareback” (unprotected) sex during shoots and the flack she gets from it,

People get hysterical about sex. They want pornography to do the job that they themselves are not doing, which is educating our young people how to be safer. Unless a pornography movie is advertised as educational […] it is not educational. And the fact that people are reduced to looking at an entertainment medium to find out about sex is sad. It would be less sad if it wasn’t so tragic. Watching pornography to find out about how sex works is like watching a James Bond movie to find out how spies do their job (source: “Legendary Porn Star Defends Bareback Sex And Shaved Vulvas,” 2010).

According to Nina, we shouldn’t endorse or learn from porn any more than we would watch James Bond to learn how to become a spy (or read Ann Radcliffe to find a husband, Wolff argues). I agree. However, we can still learn a tremendous amount about the material world—as well as gradients of abused/abusive damsels, detectives and demons within these gradients—by dialectically-materially studying canonical praxis (which honestly Nina offset with her outspoken feminism, but still walked the tightrope to make a living: as an ’80s actress working for a show business that remains historically unkind to women); i.e., what not to do. This points to the curious usage by consumers of porn and its starlets as de facto dating manuals, treating love like a harlequin romance (or Gothic novel); i.e., an imaginary past that is miraculously “rediscovered” in the present like a Gothic “castle” would be: by a given author’s framed narrative, but also the author’s proxy—the Gothic heroine—as simultaneously a damsel and detective exploring the reinvented past, from Radcliffe onwards: for her, murder and rape were the same, the aforementioned heroine investigating property disputes that expressed women still in that frame of mind, guarding their exposed modesty with fire!

This brings us to our second “tine” of the trifecta, detectives. However, this is a rather broad category. We’ll start with the magically “inert” tale of Out of Sight (1998) as a modern-day “Gothic” yarn, then consider a progressively supernatural variation of the detective story told through Gothic throwbacks: Velma Dinkley as a nod to Radcliffe’s explained supernatural, but also the author herself as belonging to a dialogic imagination with a limited vocabulary—i.e., its purpose to detect forbidden sights being denied by canonical illusions that fortunately can be expressed through a gradient of ordinary-to-supernatural iconoclastic expression that subverts the demonic trifecta!

From there and into part two, we’ll consider the dialectic of shelter/the alien through various degrees of privilege that allowed male authors from Matthew Lewis to Ridley Scott step in as they wished; i.e., by using an ability to transgress in ways historically denied to women seeking female revenge: in thoroughly transgressive ways that shoved polite discourse entirely aside in openly demon/psychosexual language. As Lewis shows, this might have ruffled the feathers of female authors like Radcliffe and her myriad imitators—thus likewise offending proponents of second-wave, cis-het white feminism well into the 20th and 21st centuries—but nevertheless it opened the door for queer people to develop their own voices and repressed opinions onto the xenomorph (and similar “Satanic” demons of an earthly bent, below): as a shared symbol of status in conflict during oppositional praxis; i.e., xenophilia vs xenophobia likewise having more quotidian origins; re: the home invasion and sexual bandit(!).

In the Gothic tradition of combating ignorance, the female and queer detectives each play a giant role in educating through prurient left-behinds: voyeuristic peril as a paradoxical comfort food for rape as a kind of coercive legend. We’ll start with the female detective then move onto queer transgression through male privilege, in part two; i.e., as something that “locks horns” with conventional womanhood/female peril in increasingly supernatural yarns: queerness surviving through hauntological campy matelotage and open-if-silly magical language historically-materially denied to women, but also discouraged by women; e.g., the gay sailors of seafaring narratives and monstrous-feminine superstitions that Scott would popularize in his own Gothic poetic rehash of Milton, Shelley and Lewis; re: deftly shining a light on modern exploitations in the presence of “ancient evils” to embellish upon (akin to Géricault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” exhibit 23b, foreshadowing a growing menace in a pre-fascist period laden with monstrous critiques siding in favor of exploited [to be fair] male laborers at sea, exhibit 48d2).

First, female detectives. As Wolff points out, Female Gothic models tend to be amatonormative, wedded to the literal institution of sex and childhood as a reward challenged by rapacious and mutilative demonic forces. As a Gothic trope, the “demon lover” dates back to Radcliffe and her own dubious contributions to the Gothic school, but is generally recognized in more recent iterations that revive said past; e.g., Velma from Scooby Doo and her own 1960s Flower Child variant of the Radcliffean “explained supernatural” (which normally dealt with banal material disputes dressed up; i.e., as seemingly “haunted” by would-be robbers and impostors) but also Jennifer Lopez opposite George Clooney in Out of Sight: “Take me now, George!”

If that seems weird and girls seem “freaky” it’s because capital’s raping of nature and them as part of it (on either side of the fence) gives them strange appetites; i.e., that the elite can pimp (antagonize, put to work) but that workers can interrogate inside their own meta/Gothic consumption and performance!

As a female detective dealing with her own “demons” in a very figurative sense, Lopez’ adventure—despite a lack of overt magic—isn’t as divorced from the larger Gothic conversation and its warring-if-conventional concerns regarding chattelization/demonization as you might think. Indeed, this conversation charts and outlines the course of (white, non-intersectional) feminism gentrifying and decaying under Capitalism across 200+ years.

To that, Cynthia Wolff writes on Radcliffe’s process in “The Radcliffean Gothic Model”; re:

Let us say that when an individual reads a fully realized piece of fiction, he (or she) will “identify” primarily with one character, probably the principal character, and that this character will bear the principal weight of the reader’s projected feelings. Naturally, an intelligent reader will balance this identification; to some extent there will be identification with each major character—even, perhaps, with a narrative voice. But these will be distributed appropriately throughout the fiction. Now a Gothic novel presents us with a different kind of situation. It is but a partially realized piece of fiction: it is formulaic (a moderately sophisticated reader already knows more or less exactly what to expect in its plot); it has little or no sense of particularized “place,” and it offers a heroine with whom only a very few would wish to identify [according to you, Wolff]. Its fascination lies in the predictable interaction between the heroine and the other main characters. The reader identifies (broadly and loosely) with the predicament as a totality: the ritualized conflict that takes place among the major figures of a Gothic fiction (within the significant boundaries of that “enclosed space”) represents in externalized form the conflict any single woman might experience. The reader will project her feelings into several characters, each one of whom will carry some element of her divided “self.” A woman pictures herself as trapped between the demands of two sorts of men—a “chaste” lover and a “demon” lover—each of whom is really a reflection of one portion of her own longing. Her rite of passage takes the form of (1) proclaiming her right to preside as mistress over the Gothic structure and (2) deciding which man (which form of “love”) may penetrate its recesses!

There have been two distinct waves of Radcliffean Gothic fiction: one that began in the late eighteenth century and one that began in this century between the World Wars… (source).

In other words, the revival is discursive, happening within romantic conventions whose heteronormative canon offers a queer potential if taken to certain xenophilic context/extremes (which we’ll examine with Ridley Scott as queerly transgressive when camped by us).

Barring that, the canonical point of Out of Sight, then, isn’t if it’s healthy or not, but if it sizzles in a heteronormative sense: smart, sexy monsters, criminals, television doctors and coppers (etc) doing smart, sexy (and soap opera) things when lots of violent shit has been happening but especially the voyeurism of rape (the Western conflation of violence and sex, or violence instead of harmless sex, vis-à-vis Radcliffe[4]). As such, Clooney and Lopez present as “ordinary” people, minus the supernatural veneer of a Gothic parallel space. Yet the concept is no different than porn and/or Gothic media at large; i.e., conventionally attractive people doing cliché activities tied to hyperbolic representations of fetishized power exchange hinting at ritualized BDSM torture: drama, crime, and idealized beauty in sensational, over-the-top forms. The woman is challenged by the threat of rape as typical, but also ambiguous and romantic during calculated risk:

(exhibit 47b2: Artist: Calm. Rape pastiche is liminal, like porn, but not strictly negative. For one, it’s cathartic regarding systemic issues, thus incredibly popular for being able to explore said issues. Rape is everywhere in the Gothic [and often campy “disco in disguise” to boot; it’s a party!]. Furthermore, no one really says, “I hate the Goth look!” Why? Because it’s powerful and stylish; but it is tangential to fascism as something to enjoy and/or endorse, meaning we have to consciously reclaim it from Hugo Boss in ways that go beyond Sontag’s quaint, second wave fascination; re: “the fantasy is death” regarding an unironic master/slave scenario.

In chasing and astronoetically pimping the Numinous, Scott’s movie presents the xenomorph in a very similar way to the golem from Ninja Scroll: a damsel in peril, a [functionally] white knight who tries in futility to save her from certain doom, and the black knight bushwhacking the hero; i.e., in Alien‘s case, it literally slaps Parker with its dick [next page] as if to say to the other man, “Mine’s bigger!” before braining him. A cosmic, equal-opportunity rapist, the alien makes Parker watch his own death, the assimilated worker not recognizing what he looks into before it does him in: fucking his literal brains out!

Finished with the token knight, the demon turns to the damsel; i.e., having made her watch everything only to repeat the process with a twist: it sodomizes her with its knife dick to make Ripley [the Amazon] listen, therefore us [and Ripley being unable to save them in time because she’s carrying the cat[5]]. The movie is dead serious in its Numinous evocations, it’s seven-foot-tall black man in a biomechanical gimp suit raping everyone save—and this is important—for the Final Girl as the most modest and devout [re: “If we break quarantine, we could all die!”]. But the psychomachic terror attack works from a counterterror perspective—much like the Haitian slave revolt against the French, from 1791 to 1804—because it gets Whitey to scuttle the mining vessel and get the fuck off the creature’s planet! White girls, they’ll getcha every time!

To that, and as something to perform to the audience of a given period and place, rape carries with it a deep, dualistic and liminal sense of anisotropic guilt and shame for those who experience it on different registers; i.e., as kind of dark secret that is simultaneously appropriated/sublimated to the gills in Western canon [re: Radcliffe, but also Scott].

Yet, within these broader liminalities, there can exist a paradoxical desire to be watched and shown off through the [often campy/vampy] thrill of being up to no good/out on one’s feet; i.e., stepping outside one’s comfort zone relative to restrictive canonical norms, but also wanting to talk about things in a, at times, figurative tone that will be policed: “Listen to Lambert from Alien get raped” versus “Watch me get ‘raped'” or “covet thy neighbor’s wife” or “the weird monkey suit sex scene from La Bête” [next page, 1975] and so on [the eliding of physical violence with chattelizing sex, under Capitalism]. All of these can bother/trigger rape victims who aren’t prepared to face that kind of exposition themselves [“our shields can’t repel firepower of that magnitude], but the discussion of rape through consent-non-consent remains incredibly important, nonetheless; i.e., as a ludo-Gothic [demon] BDSM mode of discourse about such things that Radcliffe basically spearheaded in tokenized ways.

For example, regarding incest [which is often a form of rape, barring awkward outliers like Byron and his half-sister] Alexie Juagdan writes in “The Cultural Taboo: Exploring Incest in Japanese Society” [2023]:

 While the prevalence of incestuous themes in Japanese media may raise eyebrows, it is important to note that these portrayals do not necessarily endorse or normalize incest. Instead, they often serve as vehicles for exploring complex human emotions, societal taboos, and moral dilemmas [source]. 

The same idea applies to rape at large, requiring not just a pressure valve, but a pedagogy of the oppressed that helps victims heal from taboo crimes they otherwise can’t discuss by investigating them as Radcliffe did [and having a further pornographer potential she largely left at the door]. If Cuwu and I could do this through Ninja Scroll [exhibit 17a/b] in ways beyond just watching a really violent movie—i.e., by having sex sleep through consent-non-consent to inform and educate boundaries [exhibit 11b2]—then it is possible and should be encouraged as an effective teaching device. This can be dangerous relative to reactionary violence for judgmental audiences, or it can inadvertently subject the performer to unwanted harm should their partner[s] be participating in bad faith.

All the same, the curiosity of exploring these fantasies [re: through castles that contain demons] often coincides with a half-real desire; i.e., to confront and heal from the regular traumas that occur under Capitalism behind closed doors [the marriage bed being a historical-material site for tremendous mental and physical abuse]. Not only will they be advertised everywhere as heteronormative guilty pleasures/wish fulfillment [exhibit 86a1] but these will potentially trigger anxieties within the viewer to want express the truth of the matter in ways that are still fun and/or humanizing to perform/witness; re: as Radcliffe did [and which Austen dragged her for].

Of course, the phenomenology of the meta is always cloudy with judgement, shame and excitement roiling to and fro, but the voyeurism of peril always has the potential to yield sex-positive education within transgressive media. To this, Griffith’s heinous betrayal of Guts in Berserk‘s “Afterglow of the Right Eye” [1996; exhibit 47b2, top-right] provides the groundwork for a hard-but-valuable lesson: that victims[6] must learn to heal using ghosts of “rape” after extreme trauma, once it happens to you and/or people you care about [rape is a terror weapon aimed not just at the immediate recipient, but their friends and family; e.g., the Rape of Nanking]; i.e., Guts losing a good friend to fascism and the woman he loved in one fell swoop. In the words of Gene Hackman: “We’ve all lost someone we love, but we don’t use it as an excuse to destroy ourselves; we press on!”

The scene straddles the fence between camp and trauma as incredibly phantasmagorical [drugged/dream-like]. Dressed up in the badass Darkness/fetish aesthetic, Griffith drops the centrist façade of babyface and turns full-on heel, becoming a dastardly lothario [really channeling Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise, 1974] who doesn’t rescue Casca; he rapes her to hurt Guts, then throws them both aside like, well, a heel! This cautionary and palliative tale has a fever dream logic that’s the very stuff not just of nightmares, but Gothic novels and harlequin romances. As such, it neatly applies to similarly revived legends such as Dracula “ravishing” Lucy, and the woman and the monster in La Bête. White women are policed for sleeping with anyone other than their white husbands; and black men are compared, and put down like, animals:

Like “Afterglow of the Right Eye,” the “rape” scene in La Bête is very campy and dream-like but lacks the overtly gory Hellraiser-meets-Alien pathos/xenophobia; i.e., the feelings of alienation survive in exploitation porn with a sex-positive element that is transgressive and important: a white girl wanting to fuck the black monster she’s heard about all her life [to hook up and communicate as people historically do under state systems]. Here, it’s Radcliffe’s damsel-detective not just hugging Montoni, but giving him some pussy to learn that he’s not that bad [the classic white girl rebelling with the non-white mate, accepting their love as fetishizing her]: darkness cock visible, and thick ropey jizz pooling on damsel dumpers backing it up! How quaint!

As a result, its xenophilia is extremely surreal, channeling the spirit of an older historical period merged with the turbulent zeitgeist of the 1970s: the privileged white woman feeling trapped between her kept surroundings and desire—like the titular Duchess of Malfi—to really get railed by a kind of “strong-thighed bargeman” that would inevitably have been demonized by the upper class as “beastly”; re [from Volume Zero]: “animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms”; i.e., the demon as animalistic [we’ll explore this idea even more in the “Call of the Wild” chapter].

Fear of the servant is as old as Imperialism and slavery are, yet speaks to more recent fears of “the help” as something to simultaneously fetishize and express power over since Radcliffe and Austen’s time; e.g., John Cleland’s 1749 Fanny Hill predating Otranto and being something Austen alluded to with Fanny Price [or “Booty Cha-Ching!” as a classmate one put it]. In La Bête‘s case, the heroine’s own confounding desires collide with these seemingly odd biases from older times, but also the chronotope of the diegetic space’s fearsome [and prurient] legends; e.g., with white and black servants also sleeping together—to embrace the white alien and black alien and bring about new, fresh discoveries of empathy and ecstasy couched in camp, below]. Austen certainly wasn’t above investigating such things, herself, with her Fanny variation hating tales of “light morals” while simultaneously being a rather unspoken abolitionist in Mansfield Park [re: Said’s Culture and Imperialism as I discuss, in Volume One’s “Cornholing the Corn Queen”].

In keeping with chronotopes, the story—through its concentric mise-en-abyme and anisotropic animal lust—our heroine in the present is doubled by a girl who was supposedly raped by the monster some time ago; i.e., a bedtime story to scare the newlywed so her covetous, doddering husband can keep her all to himself. To escape, she subverts the gaslight/role of the raped wife; i.e., by enjoying “unspeakable” sex inside her own mind as informed by the old house and its patriarchal banditry privatizing her booty for the hidden tyrant who only cares about keeping her to himself: “ravishing” zoophilic pleasures with the campiest of monster dads to a trilling harpsichord [also, a bit of an ace touch: she moans loudest when she feels his cum on her behind, taking delight at his howls of pleasure. That’s topping from the bottom for you].

The idea, as always, hinges on watching rape, but “rape” can be in quotes in a variety of ways; i.e., Scott’s is more Numinous and Borowczyk’s is, well, not, but the latter’s ironic [thus satire] is more immediacy clear and sex-positive than Scott’s, while still walking a tightrope it doesn’t always cross without some missteps; re: exploitation and liberation occupy the same space, the power there occupied and negotiated in duality during liminal expression.

[source: Persephone van der Waard’s “My Least Favorite Horror Movies?” 2020]

One of Zeuhl’s better recommendations, the movie is full-on wacky-ass schlock, and one that I absolutely love [enjoying it and Alien for different reasons about the same basic content: “rape” porn].)

In other words, the historical-material threat that faces white cis-het women (and other persons monstrous-feminized by the status quo; re: as quasi-Radcliffean whores that literally ask for monster sex, thus rape—a “greensleeves” with a quick, easy price into her “castle”) become as veiled and displaced as Radcliffe’s cryptonymic fictions (and their author); i.e., by derelict consumer goods designed to disguise the imbalance of power through the material conditions they portray as “ancient,” retold through rediscovery during the rememory process hinting at trauma as something to play with. Bred on the canonical variant, consumers pacify over time; i.e., by accepting the worship of criminalized lovers, even serial killers, as handsome (the two are not mutually exclusive). They menticide, beginning to internalize and value “canonical brainfood” more than the critical power and satire offered by proletarian praxis (and younger consumers who don’t know better being surrounded by this media since birth; e.g., myself and Metroidvania).

However, the fetishes and clichés only become a cryptomimetic opiate for the masses when consumption becomes endorsement for state control; i.e., it’s fine to consume guilty pleasures with a game-and-open mind—to critique or even enjoy them, but not to blindly endorse/parrot the canonical message being advertised when teaching others through your own work; e.g., I enjoy Radcliffe like I enjoy Austen and Ridley Scott, but there’s still plenty of room to critique and subvert both ladies and gentleman, ourselves! However “Supreme” such gentry affords its own reputation, post hoc, we can bend it to our will; i.e., doing so to speak to real-life abuses haunting Radcliffe’s refrain: “Who’s the alien, who’s the predator?” Who, indeed!

(source)

That being said, doing so is a liminal procedure. While many female detectives are domestic agents, the basic concept remains liminal during oppositional praxis as torn between porn and art; i.e., as an anisotropic means to communicate demonic ideas and symbols (of sex, violence, terror and monsters) playing back and forth during the socio-material dialectical of the alien: as something that speaks to tokenism and betray historically-material leading to such confusions at all.

In particular, Lopez’ detective from Out of Sight is a token, non-white policewomen, belonging to an assimilated class of workers; i.e., manipulated and abused by cis men/white women in the workplace, or by men who are their work (the “catch the rapist” trope). To this, Lopez embodies the target audience that Radcliffe originally introduced during a rising discourse that has expanded to token women of color approximately two centuries later!

Doing so romantically speaks to the same kinds of unequal power abuses that Alien and La Bête do, minus those movies’ Gothic magic or schlock: i.e., broken by trauma, militant detectives like J-Lo’s reify the girl boss problem by handing Radcliffe’s heroine’s a gun and a pair of handcuffs sans irony. Thusly armed, the quotidian heroic behaviors of traumatized women historically-materially default to white violence in positions of power that allow for girl bosses of tokenized flavors. Simply put, they represent the fearing of systemic abuse that women have already experienced in some shape or form—what all women experience differently depending on what rights were gradually afforded to them under Capitalism as developing into itself (with white women being allowed to write and sell their fictions long before women of color could, thus policing these fictions from minority groups at large; re: Jane Eyre).

In terms of the ghost of the counterfeit/abjection process and either being or at least presenting as white, Gothic authors also have the opportunity to shy away from bias and abuse while still wanting to explore it in moderately empowering narratives.

Excluding overtly occult/magical damsels, detectives and sex demons, then, the forgeries seen in stories like Out of Sight commonly play out in amatonormative narratives—canonical story arcs that not only center on romantic love between two warring parties, but often feature a damsel detecting an irresistible urge that she cannot fully resist; i.e., a fatal attraction broadcasting from an oft-male (or masculine/monstrous-feminine) agent, our aforementioned “demon lover” that, according to Wolff, tempts and threatens the heroine as falling into two categories, mid-drama: a lover of the good guy and the bad boy. The notion is clearly dated, but nevertheless propels into modern society through stubborn clichés that survive inside classical homages; i.e., dressed up as quotidian, day-to-day affairs, but no less larger-than-life than stories like Alien, Frankenstein or Doctor Faustus. Said homages then inform social-sexual practices by codifying them (and their mischief to make) in canonical forms updated for increasingly modernized audiences: “Behold! A wild George Clooney appears!”

One such idea is what my friend, Mavis, refers to as “game.” For them, Clooney’s smooth criminal is the pinnacle of “having game”; i.e., a handsome, “devilish” rogue who sweeps the intimidatingly attractive Lopez off her feet. Except, it’s all an act from Hollywood reenacting pickup lines in a bar. The peril, then, plays out a kind of game unto itself; i.e., one standing in for thirsty women in need of a good pounding: cliché romantic forces that inhabit the story in order for conventional audiences to maneuver emotional treachery (and its associate material conditions) through various proxies; re: the slippery Clooney using his emotional intelligence on an unwitting mark, “gaming” the female cop by toying with her emotions in a very demonic way! It’s a moderate concession met through derelict markers, the latter which not only uphold the status quo, but continue to shape its Superstructure over time through the rise and fall of such romance!

In the absence of magical rituals, doing so generally maintains through threats of physical force delivered, once upon a time, on celluloid: a figurative demonization from dimorphic stereotypes dating back to the oldest forms of popular stories (for our sake, Radcliffe).

For example, the unbridled, scarcely-contained sexual tension in Out of Sight is surprisingly violent throughout, culminating in a female victory by crippling the “demonic” male seductor. Feeling betrayed by him, Lopez eventually “Mr. Rochesters” Clooney by shooting him in leg, effectively mastering her emotions in a survival story where she proves her mettle and worth in a smaller, somewhat petty and banal way: doing her job by acting like a man, except not quite but sort of (the state is upheld, either way). Stalled fornication is orgasm denial/self-imposed blue clit (the holy idea of denying oneself sex as a troubadour does).

More to the point, the injury is satisfying insofar as it injures Clooney’s massive, swollen pride with extreme prejudice—not simply acting the courtship out but consummating it with a bullet that rapes the bandit by the detective administering hot toxic love. Think cops-and-robbers BDSM but the cop is token and the robber is white. It’s Sleepless in Seattle’s (1993) already problematic “stalk your love” narrative[7] sold to white American housewives (actual or desirous). Likewise, a joke is in there, somewhere, but one sold seriously to audiences; i.e., with the serious intent of emotionally manipulating dollars out of these women’s purses (and throwing some black humor/slapstick ultraviolence in there, for the guys). It makes white women tolerant of toxic love provided they have the gun (or some other element of control; e.g., money and cars; re: Jadis).

But despite a lack of overtly magical forces, the film’s fairytale narrative contains the same underlying Gothic mechanisms that would guide a story either penned by Radcliffe or Lewis to its explosive conclusion. There are demons, damsels and detectives, as well as rituals of violence, power and knowledge exchange based off older iterations thereof: devils in disguise, male or female, giving into our dark desires! Even so, the distinct lack of a supernatural bent remains a popular approach that is hardly original to Out of Sight, the same way that garden variety porn is seldom the stuff of overt magic but rather a special kind of “enchanted sex” told through hauntological poetics; re: Nina Hartley and Victoria Paris’ ’80s hauntology of the Golden Age of Porn from the ’60s and ’70s decaying into something new and exciting.

Keeping with Nina Hartley’s description of porn, the same lesson applies to non-magical and non-sexually pornographic mysteries like Out of Sight that nevertheless have a figuratively demonizing purpose; i.e., through at-times incredibly violent rituals of power exchange that codify and debate the usual ludic roles, doing so in pornographically violent language conspicuously synonymous with sex; i.e., as being exchanged for with violence as erotically charged by people deceiving each other (with sexual tension about sexual exchange and its anticipation through various narrative devices asking the audience to suspend their disbelief and buy into the scam): courtly love and duels for sex that never lead to sex, onscreen! There’s always another castle hiding the prince and his princely gifts penetrating the princess’ not-so-chaste love zone.

This being said, investigations that uphold the state are always conservative; Lopez shoots George to show her “love” to him, but also to deny a fulfilling ending to the audience save through the Romance of (orgasm) denial—i.e., in ways that further tokenize her that white women can “slum” vicariously themselves regarding: to be tough and sexually aggressive in ways that dehumanize non-white women (who try to assimilate by leaning into these tropes, themselves) and devalue white men (who both are and are not the criminals they’re playing onscreen), in the bargain! It’s her “Don’t, Jack! It’s Chinatown!” moment—updated in a late-’90s white America by a rising Latin American star shooting her way into white women’s hearts (and wallets): demasking the rogue by castrating him (much to Mavis’ horror. “One does not simply shoot George,” she says, adding “You can print that!”). So the oscillation and fabrication extend ever onwards!

As such, it’s effectively a tease, promise and threat (“If looks could kill, you’d be lying on the floor!” Heart, 1985), one that Radcliffe and Lewis excelled at (and one also practiced by ’80s porn, insofar as its practitioners are hidden cryptonymically behind invisible barriers/choir screens during the Sale of Indulgences, one that viewers can never cross). But in this case, the Matilda’s Immaculate Conception is Lopez, reinventing herself inside a mode of expression that, since Radcliffe, has been about women reinventing themselves to survive in a man’s world (thus Capitalism in all its forms); i.e., ogled by men despite never being naked (re: Segewick’s “Imagery of the Surface”), then baptizing her own coronation in Clooney’s blood by burying him alive (so to speak; re: Segewick’s Coherence of Gothic Fictions)!

Furthermore, each betrayal is unique; for Lopez, it’s class and race betrayal per castration fantasy as the outlet—no different than Radcliffe demasking her own villains, or Lewis tearing his apart (dialectical-material considerations aside). Despite George and Lopez probably being friends in real life (each belonging to the same class of “workers who made it”), the theatrics are half-real, and speak to warring class, culture and race tensions felt between both them, the actors and characters, but also the audience and the larger world they’re speaking to in small.

A mindfulness of these meta roles is vital, then—with Nina Hartley again describing why consumers of porn Quixotically conflate it with education towards real life; i.e., defenders of canon learn from canon, which is to say badly or lazily (they want sex to be like porn, rather than learn how to actually please their partner outside of harmful BDSM fantasies and realities). Also, they take the illusion for granted, ignoring the labor of the actors, artists, writers, et al, including themselves (to “pay rent” is simply something “women do” without complaint, Mavis argues). The same mindfulness should be applied to any Gothic derelict, regardless if its trifecta is overt or sublimated; re: Out of Sight and its own Gothic pastiche gender-swapping Romeo and Juliet (or Bonnie and Clyde, take your pick):

Another variable to consider, then, is the audience, but especially how victims of trauma include women and men as exploited dimorphically by Capitalism; i.e., as a punitive hierarchy of preferential mistreatment triangulating cops-and-victims abuse for the state (Lopez, whatever her struggles onscreen may be, is ultimately a cop on and offscreen). As a non-magical Gothic Romance, Out of Sight channels the same exploitation of workers than Radcliffe does, save from a militant female detective’s point of view versus a female detective tied to militant men and white power structures—the director pointing her sights at the “perfect man” she “can’t resist” (sexing up the policing process by fetishizing the victims of police brutality mixed criminogenically with “abusive spouse” arguments projected off onto redline territories); i.e., using near-lethal force to escape and level a playing field where concepts like “demon” and “damsel” are scarcely visible but nevertheless driving the narrative ever onwards: “Reader, I knee-capped him” being a radical assimilation of masculine violence by the Gothic heroine.

As a detective, then, Lopez “graduates” at the end, ceasing to be a chola banditti by becoming a token gringo girl boss, except she’s still a cop (Kamala Harris Syndrome). Inside a sublimated Gothic yarn, the movie effectively leaves it at that—failing to use the demonic trifecta to notably address social-sexual concerns tied to ritualized violence that cops abuse on a regular basis; i.e., what the film itself means coming from her towards other workers (which Clooney ultimately is: a worker the cop cripples for a promotion). This includes women but also any subject of police violence treating their dogma as calculated risk that “liberates” women: “I’m bringing you in because it’s my job!” Gross (let the record state that Mavis agrees with me; i.e., they’re against cops if the cops in question shoot George Clooney).

As such, Out of Sight is pure assimilation fantasy. Yet the revelation is often overshadowed by “true love”; i.e., as a dogmatic principle in amatonormative stories, regardless of their supernatural degree: slapping random pieces together much like Walpole did, decades before Radcliffe scored her first (and arguably the first) female-penned Gothic blockbuster! Walpole wrote for pleasure, Radcliffe for those sweet, sweet English pounds (the spoils of war)! But this also extends to the audience looking it having their own baggage and place in the world.

Mavis, for example, curiously views the entirely bloody situation as a person radicalized by complex trauma, themselves (a multiple rape survivor): to get vicarious revenge and their jollies by endorsing the outcome; i.e., by insisting that “Jay-Lo still loved George” (a problem we’ll return to when inspecting Killing Stalking in Volume Three). In other words, the “problematic/star-crossed lovers” trope extends beyond overtly supernatural monsters like vampires or demons from Hell, conditioning a paying (white, female/token) audience bred on canonical derelicts that reimagine the past and its process of detection; i.e., as a dogmatic tool expressed and felt through sharply codified roles that speak to Pavlovian conditioning between workers and fiction: thirsting for Hell/the alien (often white people in disguise/the white Indian) as Radcliffe and her imitators did; re: the sex pirates must be made to answer for their crimes against modesty and the nuclear home, but also the crime of said devilishly handsome men not submitting to their de facto sovereign wives!

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman without a George Clooney must be in want of a George Clooney!” and if she doesn’t get him by chance, then she will get him by lies and force (remember that Austen’s original classic phrase, from Pride and Prejudice, is largely seen as ironic—with the heroine in that story humbling superrich bad boy Mr. Darcy by topping from below… after realizing how loaded said bad boy is; i.e., not a strict endorsement of the status quo, per se, but Austen’s “truth universally acknowledged” speaking ironically to the lived realities of women “on the market”: as forced to get that bag or fucking starve to death/get raped on the street). It’s ok to ironically enjoy spy movies, Gothic Romances, and sex and violence (e.g., big dicks and monster rape, next page). The problem is, canon makes anyone sex-coercive outside of the stories they consume; i.e., be those consumers straight white people or not.

Obviously we can’t really investigate the past as something to learn from without investigating its forerunners. This includes Wolff as puzzling over Ellen Moers’s 1976 catchphrase, “Female Gothic”; i.e., as something to expand on through Gothic-Communist interpretations of famous damsels, detectives and demons that—along with their various rituals of mutilative torture and knowledge/power exchange—can be continuously updated: to include excluded groups (through tokenization) while highlighting the presence of bigotry (sexism, transphobia and racism, etc) in radical forms of discourse speaking to tokenism at work; e.g., me talking about how second wave feminism weighs in on Gothic poetics as something to not just analyze, but moderately replicate (the vitality of doing so will become much more apparent when we look at TERFs and other forms of fascist feminism, in Volume Three).

As something of a trans detective, myself, I want to highlight the purpose of continuous, imperfect detection; i.e., as something to interrogate and learn from, mid-poiesis/cryptomimesis while helping Humanity hauntologically out of the darkness (of “Rome”) moving forwards. To do so, we have to be better than Radcliffe, Lopez, and Wolff, but also any older variants of veiled pornography and their damsels, detectives and demons ironic-to-unironic rape fantasies—with Nina Hartley playing all three, on and offstage.

Except beyond Nina and her work, this also includes Velma as occupying an ontological position within class, culture and race war rhetoric; i.e., during the dialectic of shelter and the alien as something to update for our proletarian purposes to be more pornographic! First, we’ll look at Velma the cartoon character, and then we’ll look at my real-life “Velma” who stabbed me in the back—intrigue!

(exhibit 48a: Artist: Reiq. “Come on if you’re coming!” Velma, again, is a sex object, but also someone whose sexuality is intrinsically tied to her damsel’s privileged life of education; i.e., one used in the solving of ultimately material, mundane mysteries while confronting various “false” monsters through proximity threatening her sacred/profane “modesty” and “temple” with extramarital corruption[!]. Often, there is an ace/chaste component when venturing into the Gothic “anti-home” double[8]; i.e., the trope of the lesbian nun as wedded to God, which is framed as “nerdy” in secular stories like Scooby Doo. There’s also a drug-element—what with Scoobs being a talking Great Dane; re: the acid Communism of today haunted by spectres of Marx—specifically 1960s Free Love, Civil Rights, and Vietnam-War-era protests [and commodified drug use mirrored today in white gentrification of weed as a monocrop stolen from marginalized communities legalizing weed versus completely decriminalizing it[9]]—all couched within the sexual peril of a revived Radcliffean neo-conservative: sans actual firearms but bearing out plenty of heavy artillery/whores to pimp during the whore’s paradox! Velma’s built for war of all kinds!

There’s a mystery to solve, alright—why my ass is so fat and why I keep coming back for more of that fat Frankencock in my tight little nerd pussy [the panties not being a chastity belt, but a token of the slutty lady-of-the-court’s sexual desire for/from big strong black knights]! The willing and ritualistic degradation—and twitchy/toe-curling possession—is very much the point; re: Radcliffe’s exquisite “tortures” of the mind, where the orgasm and the monsters are: a place to regress to and tremble from the dreadful [and artificial] mammoth insertions!

[artist: Reiq]

It was crude in Walpole’s day and it’s crude now! But more to the point, it speaks to the paradox of rape and the whore; i.e., insofar as a virgin/ace person can be a whore performatively while never having had sex, or can desire monster sex/rape play to find some sense of control from having their mind raped if not their literal body [female or otherwise]. Again, strange appetites are a symptom of capital caused by dialectical material forces; i.e., which ludo-Gothic BDSM seeks not simply to emulate, but understand and alter the socio-material conditions of; re: during Gothic play across all mediums!)

In the classic sense, then, Velma plays the role of the damsel and the detective in a primarily nonviolent way—i.e., haunted by “violence” and “rape” as things to put in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM, the damsel taking the demon’s offerings into her sacred temple—and this can be studied. To it, the social-sexual tensions of virgin/whore are on full display with Velma; i.e., always crawling on her hands and knees whenever she conveniently “loses” her glasses; re: while unknowingly (to her) being threatened by a dark, menacing force the actress wants to “be threatened” exquisitely with, before explaining it away as Radcliffe might: that she could, at any second, be savagely “ravished!”

Except it’s all bogus (though not without baggage), giving the honkey mistress the sweet, sweet “terror” she (and the audience) hunger for in the same relationship Wolff describes; re:

The reader identifies (broadly and loosely) with the predicament as a totality: the ritualized conflict that takes place among the major figures of a Gothic fiction (within the significant boundaries of that “enclosed space”) represents in externalized form the conflict any single woman might experience. The reader will project her feelings into several characters, each one of whom will carry some element of her divided “self.” A woman pictures herself as trapped between the demands of two sorts of men—a “chaste” lover and a “demon” lover—each of whom is really a reflection of one portion of her own longing. Her rite of passage takes the form of (1) proclaiming her right to preside as mistress over the Gothic structure and (2) deciding which man (which form of “love”) may penetrate its recesses!

There have been two distinct waves of Radcliffean Gothic fiction: one that began in the late eighteenth century and one that began in this century between the World Wars… (source: “The Radcliffean Model”).

Of course, Wolff warns against less mutilative fantasies than Radcliffe’s when concerning feminine sexual desire, but I go one further to extend it beyond white straight women and second wave feminism; re: by dividing sex from gender and both from biology and canonical essentialism when making our own gender trouble through public nudism and Gothic art-porn; i.e., we can lean into camp that’s haunted by echoes of trauma in our own mimetic cryptonymy assisting our cause by affording such things a rebellious character that survives us.

Such isn’t always the case, which necessitates such playing by us to begin with. As with Out of Sight, Velma’s Gothic reinvention brings up the same, prolonged conversation; i.e., about threats of rape and female/non-monstrous-feminine heroism to canonize or camp, and which stretch backwards and forwards: towards warring schools of thought bent on solving cliché mysteries when discovering left-behind clues and leaving them behind again and again and again (not just a paper trail, but a trail of love nectar)!

To this, Velma is a curious fixture of an older cliché installed by Ann Radcliffe’s contributions to that particular war: the School of Terror and its concealed demons warring, Milton-style, against Lewis’ own gay demons and their horrifying cryptonymy reversing abjection! Faced with perceived-but-veiled evils, Velma becomes thoroughly nun-like in ways that are naughty and nice: a non-violent, chaste[10], asexual nerd and/or fetishized “closet” lesbian/whore depending on the version—with sex-positive variants reclaiming the slut (and the lesbian/non-white body type); i.e., as a sex “demon” facing the ghost of the counterfeit as a kind of endless joke losing or gaining irony overtime, meaning per hauntology/chronotope’s darkness visible (a joke we’ll reexamine in Volume Three when we consider ace, female detectives like Wednesday Adams: the art and the aesthetic/aesthete generally one-in-the-same).

(artist: Jenna Ortega)

Yet, a prodigal daughter’s return to Gothic sensibility’s irrationality and emotional intelligence lies in the coercive presence of Modernity being unreliable and dangerous; i.e., as a legitimate and ever-growing threat to workers and nature through capital; e.g., its domineering effect on either through policed media and language concerned universally with policing alien things: by unmasking them—as Velma likes to do during the liminal hauntology of war (the return of the phantom castle-in-the-flesh, mise-en-abyme)—to uphold Capitalist Realism on the Black Veil, mid-cryptonymy and cryptomimesis furthering abjection.

In short, the journey and the destination’s Great Destruction are a turn-on for her—the foreplay leading up to the climax while Velma apes Radcliffe and so many other arguably closeted-and-ace-but-thirsty white/token women; re: Carter’s Sadeian adage from 1979, “any free woman in an unfree society will be a monster” speaking retrospectively and prophetically to Velma; i.e., as the TERF-y monster girl waifu policing the alien in a policewoman’s bad BDSM chasing dragons Quixotically onwards—a semi-harmful idea authored by the OG mother of said monsters: Ann-fucking-Radcliffe (whose own looming ur-TERF spectre of the killer damsel crying wolf completely haunting Rowling’s own moldy castle, in the Scottish highlands, but also Burton’s aping of earlier Gothic satires previously having turned Radcliffe upside-down; re: John the Duncan’s “A Funhouse Mirror? The Addams Family and the Failure of Netflix’s Wednesday,” 2023).

“The Gothic is Scooby Doo,” Christine Neufeld once told me (re: in the same class we read Frankenstein in and where wrote my first serious essay about the Gothic, “Born to Fall?“). And she wasn’t wrong! The past does betray its own concealment through the same false rediscoveries; i.e., inside recursively concentric future copies of the same disguised message, itself always a little familiar and foreign during the historical-material crossfade.

This is why inspecting the past, holistically again and again, is vital to keeping the mind (and one’s faculties/organs of perception and pleasure) open (with those afraid of rape—either having survived it, or worried they’ll have to survive it, someday—usually being the ones who triangulate for the state; re: as a mechanism that polices labor through its own victims; re: Ortega’s tokenized version of a formerly campy Wednesday ultimately solving mysteries eerily similar to Harry Potter‘s own “Chamber of Secrets”: to preserve the status quo of a prep school to save, not unlike the one seen previously in 1985’s The Worse Witch[11]).

The Gothic past, then, is constantly talking about the same things because Capitalism relies on those things to manipulate and exploit workers through an elite-cultivated Superstructure’s historical-material loop; re: the infernal concentric pattern caging us but speaking through Capitalist Realism out into infinity! Everything exists in duality during liminal expression/oppositional praxis, of course. Learning to interpret the ambiguous past in emotionally intelligent/Gothically mature ways is what we want to do. Doing so doesn’t simply keep us alive (camping the canon); it can separate us from the violent, bourgeois, damsel detectives (and their inherited confusions)—i.e., who trigger when exposed to “demons” they’re supposed to shoot: not just Clooney but anyone the state wants the cop to feel threatened by (castle doctrine, Radcliffe’s maidens calling the cops on the bandits)!

Lopez—when shooting and chaining Clooney to the handrail—is an angel of mercy playing Gerald’s Game because she thinks it’s the only way to save the man she loves from the state she serves (and whose resistance, mid-arrest, she views as “automatic suicide” by cop; but Mavis still thinks that J-Lo is a bitch). It’s the tyrant’s plea in disguise: a token white-functioning savior both undercover and on-duty (or a malpracticing doctor operating on her patient without his consent; i.e., no one consents to being shot or invasively cut open—Marvis, don’t answer that)!

Mid-drama, though, it’s deceptively easy to forget how Lopez’ bullets aren’t limited to Clooney as a non-supernatural “demon” (or how Velma’s targets are old, rich white people plastered over the usual poor/non-white scapegoats of American police brutality lionized by tamer copaganda’s posturing as “anti-establishment”; i.e., like Scooby Doo, thus Radcliffe, does). Indeed, when the material function of a police officer is recognized, we need to remember they exist to defend capital as threatened by any form of activism (which Scooby Doo, per Radcliffe, dresses up as aristocratic piracy—Count Clooney fleecing the poor defenseless cop).

Whatever the form, function determines function (thus flow of power anisotropically towards or away from the state). Bourgeois female damsels (thus detectives) become coded through a rising sense of the middle class, to hunt and kill proletarian monsters, aliens and witches; i.e., by exposing those from the state of exception, the former something to conceal while unmasking said the latter and doing so for the state’s continued survival; re: outing queer people and other minorities who refuse to assimilate, punishing these groups for their iconoclastic doing of things different than they’ve been done before, and all because it threatens profit: the actions of a pimp policing the whore through a Protestant ethic absorbing a Neo-Catholic/medieval ghost of the counterfeit Numinous to quest for and lock up, Joe-Biden-style (a tough-on-crime initiative spearheaded by nerdy conservative white girls doing their part; i.e., Spider-girls whose “Spidey sense” is conditioned to tokenize in a half-real way that protects cops by abjecting systemic abuse onto Radcliffe scapegoats having expanded horribly under Capitalism).

This is liminal and dualistic—a fact we’ll look at with naughty nuns beyond ourselves, below. Then, to be holistic and really drive the point home, we’ll consider me as “Velma”; i.e., when h(a)unted and abused by a chubby, hairy and bespectacled non-binary nerd; re: Zeuhl, my Great Destroyer!

First, older examples:

(exhibit 48b1: Artist, top-left: Stephan Kopinski; top-mid: Nate Artuz; bottom-left: Simon Palmér; bottom-middle: source and Iltaek Oh [centered]. Male/female detectives and warriors have a medievalized past that is reexplored in modern archaeologies like Umberto Eco’s 1980 novel, The Name of the Rose. Male detective-wise, consider the boy/master dynamic between the protagonist and his young, tempted ward, who sleeps with a local waif in the monastery darkness.

In terms of male warrior monks, these would have historically existed in medieval Europe in ways that became romanticized later through popular legends like Robin Hood; e.g., Friar Tuck. Female warrior nuns—or “gun nuns,” by comparison—would eventually be coopted in neo-Crusader language; i.e., in a very neoliberal sense with canonical modern artwork, but also revenge stories like Abel Ferrara’s 1980 exploitation film, Ms. 45—a story about a nun who violently seeks revenge, shooting her rapist before becoming a vigilante wearing a slutty version of a nun’s uniform: her habit [a neo-conservative version of Velma “pushing back” against state targets disguised in whitewashed vice signals].

In latter-day revivals, the Gothic heroine’s candle more or less symbolizes the role of the detective, whereas the gun is generally a warrior weapon for men, but a tool of rape revenge/prevention for women activating once triggered. As such, the two can historically go hand-in-hand, granting the detective nun’s classically eroticized body a “damsel” and/or “demonic” quality that likewise intimates famous legends about nuns as not maiden-like, but closeted whores of various flavors tied to sex/power abuse relayed in architectural morphologies: a spirit of female rage surviving the victim’s initial experiences of rape, but also perfidious, girl-boss jailers who once served, but now haunt the formerly-glorious, now-abandoned institutions of men; re: Lewis’ Prioress something for future one-woman armies of prioresses-in-training to reinvestigate, effectively chasing their own tails, which they pin on state donkeys; i.e., a wild goose chase that ends in the exposure [and death] of the accused dressed up as alien impostor through tired context. It is a bit boring and exhausted, but pimped all the same!

The fear of inheritance is similarly complex, suggesting a liminal reunion with the ghost of counterfeit as a kind of demon nun to abject past Radcliffean abuses off onto before banishing, Radcliffe-style, back “to Hell”; i.e., off to “horny jail,” a repressed figure trapped between the virgin/whore dynamic that haunts the viewer [male, intersex or female] as potentially monstrous and simply not realizing it—not until they enter the closed space to confront the dreaded evil, head-on; e.g., Valek the “strict” mommy dom/torturous Reverend Mother from The Conjuring 2 2016 [exhibit 48b, right]. The real monster is the damsel; i.e., chasing older systemic legends around the haunted house/chronotope that don’t stay in said house: dynastic primacy and hereditary rites demand sacrifice, and there is always a human body and victim attached to these Radcliffean bugbears.)

(photographer, right: Fin Costello)

Of course, virgin/whore and mirror syndrome is a meta condition that goes both ways. Canon or camp, outing these imposters historically and performatively involves tracing a shared and dated lineage like Velma does—not just to learn from its mistakes, experiments, and trends (which can come from iconoclastic “missteps,” too) but to help allies learn from mistakes they’re currently making towards those they want to help by not killing their darlings (re: Radcliffe and her spectres, like Lopez and Velma). This requires subverting thus playing with the material conditions and devices (demons or otherwise) that inform any positions of privilege clouding their judgement: that cis women often define their own lived trauma in heteronormative ways; i.e., that push people forced to identify as men (or for whom cis women identify as men through trauma responses) onto “violator” archetypes; e.g., the trans man as a “false” woman, nun, crossdresser (think Rosario from The Monk, but in reverse).

Speaking of the false trans man (as in, a trans person acting in bad faith), this brings us finally to me as saving the best for last: Zeuhl, my dude, your time has finally come; i.e., trans-on-trans Gothic detecting! Here goes…

(artist, bottom: Zeuhl)

Dead ringers are the stuff of Gothic cliché—and I didn’t ponder too hard when I was with Zeuhl about any of this because Zeuhl is non-binary and hates Jane Austen/loves The Monk—but they were someone who mirrored me and gave me what I wanted while, in the same breath, harming me like Jadis did; i.e., by showing me the same forbidden and suitably dark arts of queer love done to get what they wanted, first and foremost. And I don’t want to say that they didn’t make me feel good in bed—because they were an attentive lover with an amazing sex drive and incredible body—but they certainly exploited me out of bed; re: they were my Lestat (a trans man who historically had trouble meeting female queer people on dating apps, but not trans women like me), thus are someone I never wish to see in person again so long as I live. But I can’t tell my own story without summoning them—cannot conclude my Udolpho without pulling aside its Black Veil to expose them; i.e., having pulled my strings as cruelly as they did. Now, I shall pull a giant parade float of their lifeless head through the streets (echoes of Medusa, except neoliberal-in-disguise), shouting “Come and see!” as I do…

Note: My exposing of Zeuhl is being done to the degree I feel comfortable, because they abused me but also remain a threat to me. While I have previously discussed our sexual history extensively in written form, I won’t be showing any photographs of said activities for obvious legal reasons, here (and because doing so goes against my moral code and revolutionary principles; i.e., unlike Cuwu, Zeuhl hasn’t consented to such invigilation—indeed, is vehemently opposed to it). But I still want to convey that Zeuhl was a bogus, prurient hypocrite who often used their expertise in gender studies (and sex work) as a shield from criticism; i.e., often by using those very double standards against me while getting attention, money and sex from me (which I didn’t agree to).

I can’t show any of that, here (though I have plenty of proof of it; re: sex tapes), but if you want a good idea of what they look like, in bed or out, they’re chubby and hairy like In Case’s top-right illustration (several pages down, the fantasy depicted being the sort that Zeuhl would tell me they wanted with me and other cuties at the same time, before deciding they “weren’t” poly then magically were poly again while throwing me under the bus, and not for the first time).

As for the abuse, itself, this was interspersed—like all abuse is—with moments of intense gratification; i.e., we had sex a lot, filmed it, and enjoyed each other’s company while in grad school “to the hilt” (they were just as big a whore as I was). But also, they used their body and their position as a queer authority to lie to and manipulate me (a queer neophyte in the closet) constantly in and out of our relationship. In fact, they remain my greatest abuser and someone who abused me more—if you can believe it—than Jadis did!

And yes, Jadis raped my mind and used me for sex in brute-force ways; but Zeuhl? The sheer amount of incalculable damage they wrought on me nearly drove me to suicide (and sent me careening into Jadis). I can rank my own abusers if I want, and Zeuhl is above and beyond, unquestionably hands-down, the fucking worst—a non-binary Ozymandias having hardened their heart in the desert of our wasted, not-sure-if-it-was-ever-real love. When I have nightmares and wake afraid of past abuse taking me to such hells again, it is almost always the ghost of Zeuhl who drags me there, whether I want them to or not [the sex no longer fun]! When I think of them now, I don’t get sad, I get furious [and ejaculate rage all over their ghost’s face]!

 

(exhibit 48b2: Models and photographer: Persephone van der Waard and Zeuhl, my brother Ben holding the camera at my twin’s wedding. At this point, Zeuhl was already acting weird, and shortly after this, left for England and broke up with me suddenly/without warning. They did so while simultaneously telling me that none of it was my fault/that we might get back together [that they “weren’t in a poly headspace right now“] while also continuing to ask for money from me and demanding of me not to talk about the breakup publicly or they would be furious [essentially taking away my mouth, but making me want to scream about/feel afraid and desirous of them]. A picture, then, is both worth a thousand words, but leaves much unspoken; i.e., me having no earthly idea that Zeuhl was planning on leaving me, and them smiling for the camera, yet already having their bags packed. As sad as it sounds, then, that is the full dialectical-material context/extent of their treachery.)

To be crystal clear about these proceedings, I haven’t written any of this to incite violence against Zeuhl (re: “No one kills Kakarot but me!”), and I think they have much more to lose than I do. So if anyone is getting any ideas, don’t; e.g., TERFs—and frankly anyone else who might try to learn who Zeuhl is just to harm them—can kindly fuck right the hell off and drown in a sprinkler of their own pee. Zeuhl’s already the target of that kind of harassment, and I don’t wish to add to it, but I also don’t wish to be held hostage from saying my truth regarding their abuse of me just because they have powerful enemies. Sorry, dude, but I’m not your pet—that and you could’ve prevented all of this years ago by just not acting the way that you did! And since it’s the season to unmask Gothic villains, it’s your turn, and I’m gonna say my piece until the passion flees.

That being said, I don’t want anything from Zeuhl save the ability to talk as openly as I wish about our past; i.e., I merely want to be able to tell my story as a queer detective, one having been abused by someone who once was an excellent detective themselves, but then sold-out/whined about their own accomplishments not being monetized (and which I could say what those are, but then it’d really give away Zeuhl’s identity) before vanishing off the face of the Earth; re: a “Radcliffean Interregnum” except for a non-binary version of the same familiar neo-conservative practitioner revived in the 21st century! Truth is stranger than fiction, and Zeuhl is as much my Velma demon lover as I a Velma damsel harmed by their fearsome-in-hindsight advances I then had to unpack and reify afterwards! —Perse

As detective nuns show us, such liberation and exploitation are hopelessly hauntological, thus liminal; i.e., the nun-in-question always trapped between ambivalent friend/foe queries and chronotopic positions of morality vs immorality they must chase down to draw their own conclusions built on past discussions surviving themselves; e.g., as I did, chasing the Numinous (and Radcliffe) to England, learning about her and eventually writing these books because a Velma lookalike (and Foucault and Ian Kochinski fanboy/apologist) fucked me over big time. In doing so, I effectively stutter-stopped years of research (and lost loves/old friendships; re: Zeuhl, but also Jadis and Cuwu), which bore muddled conclusions seemingly as mixed as my emotions, but in truth remain united in favor of universal liberation working against the actual Great Enchantress—by camping her ghost through my own fabrications’ darkness visible thereof, speaking to abusers who enchanted me off the page: a naughty nun’s naughty nun of a naughty nun about a naughty nun’s neo-medieval BDSM fantasies gone wrong. Nuns all the way down, bitches!

(artist: In Case)

Nuns—and their own revived cryptonymy’s investigations of tremendously obscured-and-decaying power in a male system—wield veiled-threat charms of corporal punishment, bondage and discipline exercises that, while couched in “almost holy” good- and bad-faith stage/canvas lingo, go performatively in a wide variety of directions’ canonical-to-iconoclastic forms; e.g., Matilda, a queer devil-in-disguise, invading and infiltrating an evil abbey to seduce the abuser (from his point of view) inside the church, then expose the Prioress’ many crimes.

As previously stated, The Monk was a story that Zeuhl and I both enjoyed, but also one outside Lewis where I was abandoned by Zeuhl; re: who stabbed me in the back, tried to gaslight me about it, and who then demanded my loyalty afterwards to preserve their own anonymity (a bit like Ann Radcliffe, but genderqueer in their neo-conservatism)!

Until this moment, I’ve never shown Zeuhl’s partial face before, but have shown the photo below (page 1024) with them in it; re: censored in my PhD (exhibit 1c) by a copy-and-paste of Mog from Final Fantasy (their preferred egregore). In a cryptonymic twist on Radcliffe’s own unveiling process, I’m merely showing Zeuhl’s masked face, here (above and below), to highlight their own cloaked, treacherous existence inside-outside my heart; i.e., as my abuser having abused me in the past, including making threats should I dare to openly talk about them at all. So here I am—exposing them to a comfortable (for me) degree—and all to get out from under them, but also remind people of a curious paradox: that what happened between us was real but also partially in my own head, good and bad; i.e., while still giving Zeuhl—a neurotic and self-important individual—some degree of plausible deniably!

To it, I’m a bastard but not a fucking bastard who’s going to twist the knife against my abuser (whose extended history of freaking out when discussed in any manner online I am well-versed in; i.e., having dated them, thus having spent hours upon hours listening to them talk about stalkers at work). What happened between us was real, Zeuhl, including your betraying of me in the most cliché, false and selfish of ways, then refusing to even acknowledge what you did beyond joking about it (re: “tell your family I eloped with an old flame from England[12]“) or foisting all of the blame onto me at the end.

Like Radcliffe, then, it was something almost out of a folktale or poem, revived most tellingly in a song sung by one of my mother’s favorite artists (and for which became another clue that I’d been duped by someone prone to duping others; i.e., I was not the first person that Zeuhl broke up with so suddenly):

A blacksmith courted me
Nine months and better
He fairly won my heart

Wrote me a letter

With his hammer in his hand
He looked quite clever
And if I was with my love
I’d live forever

Oh, where is my love gone
With his cheeks like roses
And his good black billycock on
Decked round with primroses?

I hope the scorching sun
Won’t shine and burn his beauty
And if I was with my love
I’d do my duty

Strange news is coming to town
Strange news is carried
Strange news flies up and down
That my love is married

I wish them both much joy
Though they can’t hear me
And may God reward him well
For the slighting of me

Don’t you remember when
You lay beside me
And you said you’d marry me
And not deny me?

[models: Zeuhl and Persephone van der Waard, taken by a wedding guest at my brother’s 2019 wedding]

If I said I’d marry you
It was only for to try you
So bring your witness, love
And I’ll not deny you

No witness have I, none
Save God Almighty
And may He reward you well
For the slighting of me (Loreena Mckennitt’s “The Blacksmith,” 1985)

Of course, I had plenty of spoiled courtship/break up songs; e.g., “Blue Monday,” “Blood Red Skies” or “Goodbye to You” (for Zeuhl, in particular); and if Jadis was my black knight to “gang alang with,” then Zeuhl was the person who wounded me badly enough to try! They were the Devil so bad that I stuck with their counterpart; i.e., the devil I thought I knew and could avoid! Fifth time’s the charm, I guess!

Well, forgive me, but I won’t go to the grave keeping that a total secret; I don’t owe you that, comrade, am not Father Schedoni’s keeper keeping a black penitent’s miniature out of sight/under wraps: the chemistry and fun we had but also the misery behind the smile (a bit like J-Lo and Clooney but gayer)! “Sickness, be gone!”

(artists: Zeuhl and Persephone van der Waard, in Manchester England, 2018)

“All these souls, and you still don’t have one of your own!” Would it surprise anyone to know that Zeuhl was actually very sweet and funny when they wanted to be? God, it was fun… until it wasn’t. To that, Zeuhl, you still abused me and furthermore, I was trans when you were harming me; you do realize that, right (all that twink torture porn went to your head, I guess)? Even so, I have all the receipts, including the co-signed document of money changing hands; i.e., the one that proves you (and another ex of yours, who shall remain anonymous) used me as your personal piggy bank: I kept the signed agreement! If that bothers you, just remember that my decision to talk about my exes’ abuses of me is my decision, not yours! And if you don’t like it, tough shit! You really should’ve acted better in the past than you actually did; i.e., it’s both possible to have sex with someone and still bully them, which you did; re: I was the bee in the bag, homeslice!

From Radcliffe to me and back to Radcliffe, then, we want to change how cis women and cis-queer people see trans, intersex and non-binary people as human; i.e., meaning just as flawed, both able to help or harm each other during class struggle. Doing so first involves helping ourselves (as queer people) learn ways to understand our own identities and struggles better than we currently do; i.e., by poetically asking questions about trans-ness as recreated in the present using reclaimed language (re: Velma pastiche) in new ways that have never broadly existed until Capitalism tried to exploit us (and generally through ourselves, as Zeuhl did to me). This happens through the half-real past as a continuously transformative experience (and includes the drug-like aspects thereof, which “Call of the Wild” shall unpack).

Keeping with Radcliffe but also my own tumultuous life-and-times (with my own deceptive charlatans existing as much outside the text, unlike Radcliffe’s), much of these center around sight as forbidden; i.e., the damsel’s looking gaze as much a “questioning act” that, thrown into doubt, allows for iconoclastic expressions to posit various creative attempts at staying “woke” towards whatever canonical dangers ail us; re: between Radcliffe and I, but also Zeuhl analyzed, post hoc, by my studies about Radcliffe involving my summoning of our relationship demonically from Hell: “Zeuhl, Zeuhl, Zeuhl!” Hidden and disguised among the midden of clichés and throwaway toys, these must be drawn out by subversively or even transgressively reclaiming Gothic language (I hated The Forbidden Zone, by way, comrade, but Danny Elfman was fun to watch, in and out of it).

To that, Gothic Communism aims to explore iconoclastic sight as a forbidden and questioning gaze (often through suspicion, doubt, concern, caution, anxiety or fatal curiosity/attraction); re: through the xenoglossic roots of the Gothic mode before suggesting ways to apply it to the present in a Communist way—i.e., to show the Capitalist world how to view queer people (and sex workers) as not-monstrous in language they can understand—and, if not as pariah or alien, then as prey or through a deeply confused/confusing communication of predator/prey emotions; re: Velma on her knees, ass out and backing it up: the deep betrayal of a false friend (one, I should add, that no one likes once they learn the truth about, Zeuhl’s secret a deep and shameful one for a reason).

To it, demons speak to dark desires and repressed harm, but also radical change and wish fulfillment when healing from harm. By playfully showing allies how to grow more in touch with these contested emotions, we can allow them the special and frankly priceless opportunity to connect with a perceived weaker, more stupid and fragile side; i.e., that of a feminine, thus traditionally disempowered detective/damsel who can at least imagine being smaller and weaker human prey who needs to rely on their wits and guts to survive a masculine, “phallic” threat.

Furthermore, this is especially salient in situations lacking material or social advantage; i.e., where one is isolated from their friends; e.g., when I first dated Zeuhl in September 2017 to late 2018 (they dumped me in September 2019, but I was back in Michigan at that point), I was overseas, thus far away from my family. In short, I was exposed, thus vulnerable to a bewitching genderqueer predator!

By contrast, a hunter who shoots fish in a barrel quickly becomes overconfident, entitled (“a slow and insidious killer”). They’ll have material advantages but won’t expect prey who knows how to think and survive using their emotional reactions intuitively as a weapon/something turned against the original abuser (similar to Jadis, I think Zeuhl was just hoping I’d keep quiet about it. Their mistake). A common modern misconception, then, is that thoughts and emotions are mutually exclusive. Far from it, survival under Capitalism will not happen without some degree of women’s intuition and looking into past harms, on and offstage; e.g., Zeuhl calling Obama “a neoliberal is disguise,” while actually being closer to Obama than they initially let on/cared to admit (re: “Understanding Vampires, part one: Leaving the Closet,” footnote).

The hunt doesn’t have to be literal, either! It can be figurative and vague, a possibility but not confirmed; e.g., “Am I being hunted? Is my lover a heartless sex demon feeding on my very soul?” I often wondered that exact question (in so many words) when I was with Zeuhl, telling Dale about it in his office; re: “I feel like I’m being used!” While plain-as-day to me now, the thought was unthinkable to me, then; i.e., that I, Nicholas the Great, was somehow being cryptonymically gaslit and abused by my partner at the time. But there I was, crying to my academic supervisor about it, anyways! How the mighty have fallen, Zeuhl, and Nicholas is dead; i.e., Persephone is awake now and you can’t hurt her anymore, nor take anything from her that you haven’t already/expose anything about her that she hasn’t already opened up to the world about! I’m literally an open book, and if you’re not careful, I’ll open you, too (as you well know, based on our last conversation, fuck face)!

And if that hurts to see, hear or otherwise learn, then too damn bad! Face the music for once in your life, you giant asshole; i.e., I’m tired of completely and utterly protecting you for your sake (and even now, am showing you mercy by not completely exposing you, years after the fact; re: “an enemy has only images behind which [they hide their] true motives…”). As your victim, this is my line in the sand. I don’t care how cross that makes you. You’re a big enby and I’m more sensitive to your bullshit in my older age; deal with the consequences of your own actions/the fact that your shit stinks like anyone else’s:

(models: Zeuhl and Persephone van der Waard, taken by a wedding guest at my brother’s 2019 wedding)

So have I decided to expose Zeuhl’s perfidy a little more, here; their face is still behind a mask, but I wanted to talk about them here (and not announce it too much in the signposts, like a secret boss) because frankly it’s been eating at me over time and I’m trying to do it in ways that protect me from them; i.e., as I did when unmasking Jadis. So now it’s your turn, comrade. I’m showing people our Aegis, shaking things up by reminding them you were the most damaging ex of all. Don’t get salty about your own shitty antics!

And that—boys, girls and enbies—is me closing the book on the mystery of the evil Velma from my own Velma’s past (another ride in Charon’s canoe)! Good riddance and good bye (for now)! The pimp tells the whore what to do; that’s what you did, Zeuhl (forever blind to the immeasurable harm you cause others because you only care about perceived wrongs committed against you) and this is my whore’s revenge escaping you, step-by-oxymoronic-step, during ludo-Gothic BDSM! “Free at last! Sweet capture and escape, Hell breaks loose!” I’m not someone you can control/force to walk on eggshells, anymore!

(artist: Genie)

More to the point, fear is relative and anisotropic; e.g., rabbits—Zeuhl’s favorite animal to identify with—haunt me after Zeuhl harmed me to no end (“Just like a churchyard shadow, a black bun keeps haunting me…”); i.e., similar to how Jordan Peele explains for him in ways useful to us, too (the following pun is not intended, but fun):

“Theres a duality to scissors — a whole made up of two parts but also they lie in this territory between the mundane and the absolutely terrifying,” Peele explains in an exclusive clip to EW.

[…] A close-up of golden shears clasped in the gloved hands of Nyong’o is a central visual in the promotional material for Us, and Peele sent similar scissors to journalists in December for the release of the new trailer. At the time, Peele told EW that using white rabbits and scissors throughout his film was deliberate: “They’re both scary things to me, and both inane things, so I love subverting and bringing out the scariness in things you wouldn’t necessarily associate with that” (source: Piya Sinha-Roy’s “Watch Jordan Peele explain the terrifying duality of scissors in movie,” 2019).

Someone like Zeuhl, then, uses such devices to aggrandize themselves/glut their raunchy appetites hypocritically behind gobstopper masks; i.e., a former sex worker who acted incredibly predatory and prudish once they got a well-paying job, yet insisted that’s not what they were doing at the time—and did so to throw me off guard/their scent while they shamelessly fleeced me by throwing tight, wet pussy in my face[13] (which alright, I admittedly enjoyed, but not because they took advantage of me and I didn’t realize it at the time; I liked it because the pussy was amazing [the best I’ve ever had, to be frank] and I thought the person who owned said pussy wasn’t trying to fuck me over—my mistake: Zeuhl routinely finds people who are mentally ill [e.g., chronic depression and bi-polar disorder in their exes and current spouse] while, in the same breath, trying like hell to marry up into visa status to go to TERF island)!

By comparison, Gothic Communism seeks to use stereotypically Gothic materials like Velma—and ambiguous social-sexual clues/red herrings and profound sensations of heightened perception—to do what is normally a traditionally Gothic role; i.e., in a pointedly dialectical-material way between fiction and non-fiction, echoing back and forth over space and time: a hyperviligent mastery of madness and monstrous-feminine that confirms an emotional uncertainty about the material world—namely that of the terrified, horny and oft-female detective and her friends… which historically were her faithful servants, but for me, a trans woman, sadly included my non-binary lover making me feel insane: “Et, tu, Brutae?”

In short, detectives are often seduced according to their relationship with an ongoing past as half-real; i.e., regarding people and places both fictional and non-fictional as an argument that is forever unfolding in the present; re: Zeuhl was the one holding the camera and fetishizing me, lest you forget (below)! However underwhelming or grandiose, so do I pull aside my own detective’s Black Veil after all these years: there’d be no Gothic Communism without you, my evil soul-sucking demon who could’ve been good, but chose not to be. “Ciao, bella ciao,” fucker!

(exhibit 48c1a: Models and photographers, top-left and top-right: Zeuhl and Persephone van der Waard taken at opposite ends of a nice British breakfast; bottom-left and -right: Zeuhl [holding the camera] and Persephone van der Waard, posing for them[14].)

Christ, enough about Zeuhl! Let’s take what I’ve discussed regarding them and Radcliffe’s damsels and detectives, and segue into sex demons and dealing with them more broadly! Before we do, a couple exhibits and a small conclusion (three pages):

In the past, Radcliffe’s anxious, damsel-y domestic sleuth would traditionally sift through literal and semantic debris to solve the mystery as seemingly or actually awesome; re: what she called “the explained supernatural,” and what Rudolph Otto called the mysterium tremendum fascinans, or the “mysterious, tremendous, fascinating” force. However, as something to learn from and evolve, both thinkers (and their associate detectives) attributed qualities of the supernatural as codified by everyday language; i.e., whose common linguo-material strategies and variations enlarge the mind to rapturous, all-seeing extremes. Made in pursuit of supernatural-tinged mysteries who dialectical-material function interacts back and forth with the emotional content being explored onstage and off, the mystery of the recreated past first need to be assembled and presented before it can be explored “blind.”

This makes the “mastery” and “madness” of the classically female damsel/detective a compound paradox: exploring a highly derivative “past,” already made up, then made up again by the author before the reader even opens the book; i.e., the perilous castle as constructed by an author-as-detective to then be vicariously explored by readers identifying with in-text variants: the heroine, but also the demon. Before the first word is read, Radcliffe the writer had already fumbled at hidden things before making the story “her own” through seemingly marginal variation (our aforementioned “poster pastiche,” but actually a visual trope that can be seen across the commercialized Gothic mode):

(exhibit 48c1b: Artist, middle: Gregory Manchess. As I write in “Mazes and Labyrinths,”

Female heroes in FPS are exceptionally rare; […] Metroidvania and survival horror heroes are often female, or have traditional feminine qualities or predicaments. The stories of such heroines are less about proving how strong they are, like their male FPS counterparts, and more about surviving a larger menace. Some non-FPS heroines, like Samus, are fairly weak from the offset but progressively grow stronger. Some, like Jill Valentine, remain slow and vulnerable throughout the entire game [source].

The survival-horror-vs-shooter spectrum of videogames is generally offset by a desire or pursuit of strength in popular ludonarratives extending out of cinema and novels, but also real life back into those things: empowerment vs disempowerment. Heteronormativity will dimorphically gender this arrangement, but it can be subverted or transgressed by iconoclasts in a variety of liminal forms; re: Zeuhl and I.

Some are more sex-positive/proletarian than others and exude an unresolved, oppositional praxis spanning centuries. For example, Victoria de Loredani’s expression of repressed anger takes on a transgressive, reactionarily regressive violence in Zofloya when she kills Lilla [exhibit 100b2]. Doing so is a potentially neoconservative, warlike act—one aped by neoconservative heroines centuries later.

By extension, Ripley’s post-1979 massacre of an imaginary Vietnam by James Cameron turns American neoconservative bullets against a queer Communist alien menace through the appropriative masculinizing of women as damsel/detective demons; i.e., in a traditional, bellicose sense; re: the subjugated, girl boss Amazon—specifically the Hippolytean queen of the Amazons acting “like a man” by overperforming her expected gender role as a woman: the fascist/neoconservative “Space Rambo” serving the interests of male power and traditional gender roles by being the ultimate mother to Newt, the orphaned colony brat. Ripley’s tiring of abuse allows the state to weaponize her against a Communist “queen bitch” whose subsequent dog-fight has Ripley running from the law for having become the female “teeth in the night,” herself. She plays by the state’s rules and is punished for it when she turns heel; i.e., by being collared, yoked and put to heel, herself, but also euthanized faster than monomythic men would be.

The same goes for any token traitor—with those closer to the margins, like Zeuhl, being emasculated for their own exiting of the closet [trans emasculation effecting enbies and trans men/trans women differently].)

 

(exhibit 48c2: Artist, left: Jed; right: Oszaj. Newt would be cryptomimetically symbolized as “Ripley’s heir” in Metroid; i.e., where Samus the colony brat survives her parents’ deaths at the hands of the space pirate leader, Ridley the dragon [who answers to Mother Brain]. This pursuit of revenge—of Samus by Ridley—is framed as making her strong and fearsome on the outside and inside; i.e., by turning her into a living weapon that, in truth, is pitted against the state’s enemies. Like the Achilles of old, then, there is no satisfying Samus’ revenge; indeed, she turns it into a job: the vigilante privateer from outer space, accepting war commissions from the Galactic Federation to kill queerness as a threat to the heteronormative order/colonial binary reaching out of the memory of [city-to-nation-]states.

To it, Samus is figuratively a virgin; i.e., the androgynous daughter of Zeus, bearing out masculine qualities of Artemis the Huntress and Athena’s Aegis as the state cracks down again latter-day “Medusa” rebellions; re: the same way Zeuhl suddenly “found religion” [the worship of money] when selling themselves out. As the state’s well-trained bitch, Samus is the damsel [virgin] warrior-detective upholding the status quo against state enemies demonized to pimp them for profit: mounting the world to fuck it [as monstrous-feminine] out of state revenge!

[model and artist: Lady Nyxx and Persephone van der Waard] 

By comparison, transgender people are often seen as monsters on the receiving end of us-versus-them police violence. This can translate to zombies or vampires, but also demons, dungeons, damsels and dragons in the same witch hunt having people act draconian towards those demonized as “dragons”; i.e., to receive such cruelty dualistically inside the state of exception/moral panic. The fact remains, we are human and deserving of basic human rights, hence dignity, respect and love the likes of which Zeuhl abandoned when going into hiding and hardening their heart—i.e., they could’ve broken up with me and done just that, even; I simply didn’t want to be gaslit by them and used afterwards the way they ultimately did use me: a person who had the talent to not “pull a Foucault/Wilde” but then did so out of pride… and me wounding their pride insofar as they won’t like what I’m saying but then again never liked anything I did say. So, who cares? Fuck ’em!

From one fag to another and a true punk versus postpunk: fuck you, Zeuhl, you sell-out poser/double-crossing cumdump decaying-into-a-traitor sex tourist of your own rebel self! You’re the fakest person I know and I’m happy to burst your stupid, privileged, time bubble façade of false rebellion. Eat shit and die, fucker! Androgyny is sexy as hell; your bigotry and abuse of me was anything but! And… curtains!)

 Apart from trans people, the classic Neo-Gothic heroine (who is cis-het) remains concerned with surviving the trauma of the past; re: through emotional mastery in the face of actual, occult demons, and the third point of Radcliffe’s demonic trifecta; e.g., a demon, dragon, and/or whore, etc, to face during the assimilation fantasy (which can be camped, left). Gothic Communism combines all of these things holistically to build a better world than has ever existed; i.e., our network of spies/workers acting as guerrilla educators and fighters outside professional circuits (re: Hartley)! Everything dies, but we can face that and emerge STRONGER THAN EVER! MEDUSA, ANOTHER BRIDE, YET LIVES!

We’ll explore this even more as something to perform and understand, next. “Let ‘Jesus’ fuck you!”

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Onwards to “Demons and Dealing with Them; or Abandonment, Dark Worship and Vengeful Sacrifice When Dissecting Radcliffe“!

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Footnotes

[1] Going so far as to cite Walpole’s incestuous tragedy in Chapter Four’s epigram: “Unfold th’ impenetrable mystery, / That sets your soul and you at endless discord.”

[2] E.g., the chronotope, but also cyberpunk (with low-tech vs high-tech existing in the same basic universe commenting on real-life settler colonial and worker/owner disparities).

[3] Hartley is a registered nurse and her father was blacklisted for his Communist beliefs. Regarding her understanding of feminism, she has said:

Based on my experience as a woman and a sexual being, and my understanding that I had the right to decide for myself what to do with my life – that’s what I understood to be feminist, to give everybody choices – I didn’t choose to be a mother but I chose this [porn] because it suits me (source: Wikipedia)

[4] Who I’m seriously starting to think was ace (what do you think, Sam Hirst?). Except, whereas ace dialogs have the potential to interrogate sexual trauma through public nudism, Radcliffe was allergic to nudity and sex work, but not—as Dennis from Always Sunny would put it—”the implications.” Her stories are absolutely full of rape anxiety (and generally concerns the rape of women by men, not female or monstrous-feminine antagonists like Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani; i.e., a dark Amazon having revenge against Radcliffe’s relatively timid and annoying wallflowers).

[5] Ripley also fails to because the crew is stranded and not all of them can survive; i.e., allusions to Moby Dick and drawing straws to see who eats who when the food runs out. The Nostromo is literally a renamed slaver vessel whose partial survival of the crew—according to the movie’s bigoted displacement rhetoric—paradoxically depends on them splitting up because the creature seemingly can’t be killed (according to the Nazi-Commie scientist, itself leaning into old ethnocentric ideas eugenically fetishizing the elder slave machine [re: robota] as the perfect organism to exploit, but also set free as a spectre of Shelley and Marx); re: like the Ninja Scroll golem, but also combined with the Medusa in ways that movie separates!

[6] Including potential victims, which women are, but which white women of privilege tend to abject their fears onto an imaginary “other” while craving protection through calculated risk; re: Laura Ng and Edward Said vis-à-vis La Femme Nikita and Culture and Imperialism, but also the paradox of rape through Radcliffe’s calculated risk: as uncurdled by the likes of Angela Carter’s stories, the latter leaning more in a Sadean direction with her castle rape fantasies; i.e., copies of Radcliffe’s women fear-fascinated with the rapey legend of the castle (the ghost of the counterfeit), which she and Carter—as Enlightened women of a Cartesian age investigating the ghost of rape—view as an explained Numinous they nonetheless fabricate and leave behind for their audience to find (and spend money on; re: Radcliffe had found that winning formula, and quit while she was ahead, whereas Carter didn’t know when to stop being a TERF.

[7] Which goes back to at least Dacre’s Zofloya—a Gothic story where a white woman takes poison from a black slave possessed by the Devil to administer repeatedly to her unknowing and unwitting paramours: first, to her future husband to weaken him to her advances, then to said husband’s brother to weaken him, except the “heroine” must also kill the man’s wife, Lila, after her own husband dies (re: Sam Hirst’s “Zofloya and the Female Gothic,” 2020). It’s campy but also kind of not.

[8] Re (from Volume Zero, and later quoted in “Meeting Medusa” from the Poetry Module regarding my work on Metroidvania):

Classically the diegetic heroine’s perfect past is doubled by the Gothic castle as an expression of power beyond just her or her sense of self and home. From Audronė Raškauskienė writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings In Radcliffe’s novels the Gothic castle is in the first place an anti-home, a nightmare version of the heroine’s perfect past, in which many of the elements of her home are exaggerated and replayed in a Gothic form. The Gothic space, which provides a scene for the most dramatic events in the novel, is totally different from the other spaces – indicating heroine’s home” (source).

I.e., home has become alien, like Jameson’s idea of the Gothic class nightmare, and one that classically is explored by damsel-like detectives becoming increasingly neo-conservative and tokenized in militant, neoliberal forms; re: the Final Girl punching down against Communist and other minorities, Aliens onwards.

[9] A lot of this I actually learned from Cuwu, a self-professed Marxist-Leninist stoner who often spoke out about such things; i.e., how capital gentrifies and decays the same business practices it redlines and steals from, time and time again:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Cuwu also traded their copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things with me, but also exposed me to consuming weed for the first time; re: I ate too many weed cookies while under their care and promptly “greened out,” but also learned that you can’t get high from previously inhaled week smoke; i.e., “shotgunning it,” as the movies often show, does it wrong—a fact Cuwu explains to me in their car (above) after a night spent making porn together in a West-Mass hotel: “You gotta hold the blunt backwards in your mouth and blow smoke from the front to the back tip into their mouth for it to actually get you high!” But that’s awkward and weird white people like to entertain their weird illusions about weed so they vacillate; i.e., during the usual ghost of the counterfeit pimping such things as guilty pleasures.

For example, Taylor Sheridan’s Tulsa King (2021) romances the rise and fall of a weed kingpin exiled to earn in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The show has similar flaws to Sheridan’s more recent venture, Landman, but it at least points out some of the hypocrisies of white-owned weed businesses (and bigoted beliefs of a one Mr. Sly Stallone, who’s friends with Trump), anyways; i.e., the sort that Cuwu themselves pointed out to me and which I only recognized after dating more stoners and watching more media about stoners, too! I never tried weed again, but fucking stoners is fun; i.e., they’re super chill and always DTF (exceptions including Cuwu’s borderline personality disorder making them regress and become sex repulsed, part of the time)!

[10] This harkens to Eve Segewick’s 1981 essay, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel,” where nuns—as chaste, pious figures—are fetishized upon the surface of their veils in a way that reflects a similar, surface-level appropriation and sexualizing of other controlled aspects in such stories.

[11] Which Rowling completely ripped off in “all ‘her’ yesterdays”; i.e., as already inspected in “A Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches),” (2024).

[12] A person—let me remind you, Zeuhl—that you thirsted after for ten years (originally getting taco-blocked by a volcano), only to run off with them the moment you had them in your clutches (and I was far away in Michigan*), and then married in secret following your return to America and denying me any chance at closure by scuttling the trip we planned for months to come see you both; re: “The Eyeball Zone; or, Relating to the Gothic as Commies Do.” As they were your ticket into England, I hope you’ve treated that person better than you have me—not for your sake, but theirs! And to that person: “God keep you safe, wherever you are!” I wouldn’t date Zeuhl again, not for all the cute boys or pale, freckled, big-titty and redheaded cuties in the world; not if I could turn magically into one myself and be that French, thicc, redheaded slut I always wanted to be!

*Again, I have the receipts for all of this, including—I should add—the hundreds of vacation and marriage photos you sent me, afterwards. Thanks!

[13] By—and I’m not kidding—pulling down their pants, smacking their fat hairy pussy and saying to me, “Isn’t that odd?” as it jiggled like flan before my eyes.

[14] “You’re never going to use these for anything!” Zeuhl insisted, handing them over to me. WELL, I GEUSS THE JOKE’S ON YOU, ZEUHL!