Amazons

Persephone van der Waard is a leading expert on Metroidvania; re: from her master’s, postgrad material, and PhD* in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM. This page specifically highlights her work on Amazons, Amazonomachia (“Amazon battle”) and Barbara Creed’s monstrous-feminine/the Medusa; i.e., in relation to the above areas of research (the rest of Persephone’s portfolio can be found on her About the Author page).

*Re: Volume Zero of her Sex Positivity series, the latter of which which you can read about on its one-page promo; the former has its own book promotion, “The Total Codex.”

(model and artist: Autumn Anarchy and Persephone van der Waard)

Table of Contents

• Persephone’s Love for Amazons: Explains why Amazons are so important to Persephone, personally and academically.
• Persephone’s Amazon Jargon: Provides the most essential of terms directly related to Amazons, Amazonomachia and the monstrous-feminine; i.e., that Persephone has either coined or borrowed and built on.
• Persephone’s Amazon Scholarship: A summary of Persephone’s Amazon scholarship in academic terms.
• Further Reading by Persephone (on Amazons): Essays and book chapters from Persephone’s corpus that deal directly with Amazons.

Persephone’s Love for Amazons

Amazons/the Medusa (the monstrous-feminine) are Persephone’s favorite monster type/style; i.e., as a kink (re: mommy dommes) and as a poetic vector to conceptualize arguments. They appear all over her book series—both through hundreds of separate, individual mentions and exhibits per book volume, but also as the dedicated subjects of numerous essays and book (sub)chapters; i.e., they embody her core arguments, ranging from her PhD thesis argument (re: “Capitalism sexualizes everything”) to the whore’s revenge against profit versus nature as monstrous-feminine (re: “Rape Reprise“). To it, Amazons/the Medusa both her academic and trans raison d’être; i.e., apart from her writing on them, her alter ego is an Amazon, as are various characters she has created in her original/fan art (this website originally being dedicated to Amazons and femboys):

Persephone’s Amazon Jargon

Here is the neo-jargon Persephone has written/expanded on that focuses specifically on Amazons (refer to “Paratextual Documents” for a variety of other important Gothic keywords connected to these ones; refer to “Essential Keywords” from “Audience, Art and Reading Order” for more vital non-Gothic keywords on gender studies, which overlap with Amazons as a gender-specific monster type):

monstrous-feminine (vis-à-vis Barbara Creed)

(exhibit 5d1: Artist, top-left: Gabriele Dell’Otto; artist, top-left and bottom: Persephone van der Waard and a model who wishes to remain anonymous; I’ll henceforth refer to them as Jericho. When healing from trauma, queerness is often symbolized as abjectly insect-like/uncanny as something queer people are forced into—i.e., a psychosexual, “corrupt,” medievalized ontology whose canonical role they don’t want to play but also desire to escape from using the same language: the queer/sodomite whose gender-non-conformity is synonymized with the “rape” of heteronormativity by the monstrous-feminine and whose beauty is feared by fearful-fascinated straight people conflating queerness as a universal symbol of unironic rape and madness. We do sometimes want to express our own trauma in relation to what we’re made out to be by our abusers, but ultimately we desire to be butterflies unto ourselves: free from trauma, from judgement, from harm.)

A term lifted from Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine [1993; re:

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

While Creed focuses on the desire for the cis woman not to be a victim, thus terrifying men in abject, monstrous ways (which are often then crucified by heteronormative agents, including token ones like Ellen Ripley), the fact remains that the monstrous-feminine extends to a much broader persecution network; i.e., of any “feminine” force that falls outside of what is acceptable within the Patriarchy’s heteronormative colonial binary. I have placed feminine in quotes to account for anything perceived as “feminine” thus not correctly “male”; i.e., “woman is other” expanded to trans, intersex and non-binary persons (and the animals associated with them: bunnies, butterflies, cats, dogs, foxes, etc). This can be a male twink or vampire; the cis-queer bear’s expression of tenderness and love towards another man (or whoever they’re intimate with in whatever way constitutes intimacy for them); a female Amazon that rebels against the state, whether cis, or genderqueer in binary/non-binary ways. The possibilities for heteronormative conformity are narrow and brutal inside a vast historical-material tableau of the same-old patterns; gender-non-conformity’s ironies go on endlessly.

the Shadow/effect of Pygmalion/Galatea

Another of my neologisms (from the thesis volume), the Shadow of Pygmalion or “Pygmalion effect” is the patriarchal vision and subsequent shadow of any knowing-better “kings” of empire, thus capital; i.e., of male- and token-dominated industries inside the Man Box, wherein “Pygmalion” means “from a male king’s mind,” but frankly extends to all traitors (male or not): upholding profit/the status quo raping nature for profit (and those treated by the state as “of nature” for those reasons); e.g., the evil monarchs of older tombs (abstractions of the bourgeoisie in crisis and decay) occupying the same colonial territories at home and abroad across space-time (a classic example being Hamlet’s father’s ghost, Shakespeare’s famously confusing story affording some ambiguity to the experiencing of such entities). More to the point, the gatekeepers of the elite routinely fabricate imaginary visions of the past, present and future, doing so to uphold Capitalist Realism through these ghosts; i.e., a broader pacification that includes the monomyth/Cycle of Kings, but also infernal concentric pattern and heteronormative legion(s) of monsters, invasion scenarios and escape fantasies; re: their reasoned, Cartesian treatment of nature as monstrous-feminine is heteronormative, wherein state proponents (cops) pimp and police nature out of pre-emptive revenge (and spite).

Said revenge is generational, thus taught through popular monomythic stories; i.e., whose collective abjection of nature in service to profit ostensibly spares the cop from state cannibalization: antagonize nature and put it cheaply to work through concentric tokenism; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss, but also the various modular and interchangeable statuses for blood libel, sodomy and witch hunt accusations—as an intersectional and constantly evolving Venn Diagram of persecution networks recycling dead us-versus-them language. The inverse of the Shadow of Pygmalion (and its effect) is the Shadow of Galatea; i.e., of Medusa/the Communist Numinous (as something to chase) and spectres of Marx (as something to camp) versus spectres of Caesar (the original Pygmalion, also something to camp) existing inside the same performative zones; re: exploitation and liberation share the same spaces of performance (and their fractal recursion happening through the disintegration and rediscovery of monomythic and Promethean language).

the euthanasia effect (rabid token Amazons)

A term, coined by me, to describe the canonical, assimilative qualities of the Amazonian myth (and one whose Amazonomachia has canonized, post-Wonder-Woman, in Metroidvania through Cameron’s refrain and—to a lesser extent—Tolkien’s). It is one where magical, mythical warrior women—as simultaneously virgin/whore animal people (the female* berserk)—are canonically employed to keep men (and the victims of men/token enforcers during “prison sex” police violence) paradoxically in line, mid-panopticon; i.e., a female-coded (usually white, or token non-white) centurion or stentor girlboss who, in between yawping at the men to aurally castrate them (the banshee or siren), “tops” them in hauntological, dominatrix-style fashion, elsewhere outside the bedroom (re: Foucault): “make it through this and I’ll ride you until you beg!” Death by Snu-Snu becomes the traditional hero’s monomythic reward and doom; re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference, but tokenized into a kind of virginal warrior Madonna jailor pulled from the Neo-Gothic’s former dungeons; e.g., Charlotte Dacre’s fearsome and “phallic” (stabby-stabby) Victoria (see: Sam Hirst’s 2020 “Zofloya and the Female Gothic” for a good summarizing of that dilemma):

*Canon is heteronormative, thus dimorphic (and settler-colonial/Cartesian). There can be intersex elements, but these will be treated as “phallic,” thus male/female and masc/femme during the Amazon’s struggles; i.e., as a monstrous-feminine entity the state monopolizes by gaslight-gatekeep-girlbossing it. Such things, then, canonically embody the Amazon and Gorgon’s doubled morphological conflict inside-outside itself; i.e., to simultaneously exude the psychomachy’s calm/furious or virgin/whore qualities, such “mirror syndrome” (another term of mine) punching a black reflection where state victims are housed (thus useful to profit pimping nature as alien); re: the postscript from the Poetry Module’s “Following in Medusa’s Footsteps.” Throughout BDSM and Gothic media, on and offstage, you see the euthanasia effect in Metroidvania a ton. To enhance your own ludo-Gothic BDSM (to camp subjugated Amazons with), refer to my 2025 Metroidvania Corpus for some good examples of the Promethean Quest (though my “Concerning Rape Play” compendium also raises some salient reading regarding ludo-Gothic BDSM as a whole). Apart from either of those, we’ll tackle Amazons, Medusa and the monstrous-feminine revenge argument more directly in the “Predator/Prey” subchapters, in Volume One (which explore Amazons and knights). Also consider the Demon Module’s “Amazons and Demon Mommies,” “Vampires and Claymation,” “Summoning the Whore,” “Exploring the Derelict Past,” and “Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit“; i.e., for good examples (outside Volume Zero) of the cop/victim approach in canonical Amazonomachia and how to subvert it to have the whore’s revenge against profit! I also recommend Volume Zero’s “Symposium; Aftercare” for plenty of extra lists and fun examples. 

The canonical Amazon, then, is a time traveler TERF meant to serve profit by betraying her fellow oppressed (women or not). Ripped spectacularly from the ancient pre-fascist past and expressed in “ancient” fascist forms during state crisis, Red Scare employs Amazonian fascism and Communism—during the usual kayfabe centrism and anisotropic terrorist/counterterrorist refrains pimping nature on the same stage—through a black-and-red aesthetic of power and death corrupting nature for state aims: to feed on nature by triangulating against state victims “of nature,” per Cartesian thought; i.e., to antagonize nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine, during the Capitalocene (from Walpole’s Otranto onwards—per Hans Staats’ “Mastering Nature: War Gothic and the Monstrous Anthropocene” [2016] but married, per my arguments, to Raj Patel and Jason Moore’s idea of Capitalocene).

Through these dualistic poetic devices’ assimilative function, the subjugated Amazon is a functionally “white” Indian/whore/savior cowgirl (token) cop who harvests the functionally “black” whore (criminal, alien, etc) during the abjection process (and its bad-faith revenge arguments; e.g., Orientalism). All happen while suffering the usual double standards and embarrassments such betrayals bring on (which camping through ludo-Gothic BDSM anisotropically reverses through the same aesthetic—shrinking profit while sending abjection back towards the colonizer agent/apparatus); e.g., Samus Aran (re: the Poetry Module’s “Playing with Dead Things“) but really a wide variety of such wheyfu herbo monster girls upholding Capitalist Realism: by kettling therefore blaming the whore Archaic Mother*/ghost of the counterfeit.

Furthermore, such blaming occurs ipso facto “for its own genocide” during the Promethean Quest’s infernal concentric pattern (e.g., Ayla or Savage Land Rogue; re: “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two“); i.e., an eternal warrior “of nature as hellish” sent back into Hell come to Earth—all to do battle with the verminized, insectoid-chattel, stigma-animal, diseased-and-deathly Medusa on the same Aegis (the liminal hauntology of war): as her dark, Venus-twin half (the long-lost relative, often an evil/false sister or wicked step mother)! The Amazon is a “scab” operatically punching labor as alien hysterical (the wandering womb), but pulled from their ranks to do so inside the state of exception. From Radcliffe onwards, then, the Amazon is a warrior detective who canonically remains a classic pro-state actor fabricating scapegoats; i.e., from older pre-existing legends repurposed for profit now (the settler colony a chronotope danger disco).

(artist, top: ChuckARTT; bottom-left: Arvalis; bottom-middle: Flyland; bottom-right: Pagong1)

*The male version of the Archaic Mother is something I call the Dragon Lord or Skeleton King (re: the Cycle of Kings with vampiric, draconian or otherwise patriarchal versus matriarchal elements the state can scapegoat; e.g., Sauron or Count Dracula). Offshoots of said half-real monarchs are often lesser necromancers, rogues or death knights (re: offshoots of the Numinous tied to the same danger-disco structure’s unheimlich nightmare home).

Being of the Medusa as Archaic Mother (re: the whore’s paradox, from “Rape Reprise“), Amazons endure endless punishment from on high and down below (capital’s “middle management”; e.g., Ellen Ripley); i.e., a classically female Prometheus, they are always treated as a substantial risk/desperation measure, one that must be collared just as quickly lest she “corrupt,” thus take her fellow soldiers along for the ride (and back whence she came, to hellish territories, forever). In short, the Amazon is a token scapegoat witch (vampire, goblin, etc) policing other witches, therefore whores (re: me, vis-à-vis Silvia Federici, in “Policing the Whore“), and does so through modular-but-intersecting us-versus-them, white-on-black (of any sort, not just skin color) and monstrous (undead/demonic/animalistic) abjection: someone virgin/whore who, per these imbricating persecution networks, eventually exposes through Radcliffean state arbitration (demasking the villain); i.e., shown as whore and released shamefully from service (the endless oscillation used to keep such class, culture and race traitors off-balance while conditioning them to ruthlessly punch down, inside-outside the concentric frontier ghettos they patrol, mid-relegation; i.e., “good job today, bitch—kill you, tomorrow!”); re: Ellen Ripley but also future versions of the female Rambo that came after and expressed in different kinds of neoliberal Gothic’s trademark fantasy-to-sci-fi language: a prison colony police agent serving the state as its token barbarian, all heroes are monsters but assimilation is poor stewardship!

(source)

As “A Note on Canonical Essentialism” describes it; re (from Volume Zero):

Under Capitalist Realism, Hell is a place that always appears on Earth [or an Earth-like double]—a black fortress threatening state hegemony during the inevitable decay of a colonial body. Its widening state of exception must then be entered by the hero during the liminal hauntology of war as a repeatable, monomythic excursion—a franchise to subdue during military optimism sold as a childhood exercise towards “playing war” in fantastical forms; e.g., Castlevania or Metroid. Conjure a Radcliffean menace inside the Imperial Core, then meet it with American force [military optimism] (source).

This is how the subjugated Hippolyta do (the queenly protagonist version of the regular Amazon; e.g., Wonder Woman)—a kind of token, monomyth, queen-for-a-day “fallen Pandora” (or Chaucer’s “Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf” line, from “The Miller’s Tale“), and one whose previously established map and recursive occupants/warmongering we’ll be camping more; i.e., during Volume Zero‘s “Scouting the Field” (rabies is bad for you) but also through revolutionary cryptonymy with subversive Amazons (a concept Volume One‘s “Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression” unpacks at length; re: the predator/prey dichotomy and canonical abuse of animalized language in furtherance to profit, thus genocide, rape and war).

mirror syndrome

Another term of mine, one that occurs through the euthanasia effect; i.e., the euthanizing of token agents, ignominiously attacking their own black reflections’ troubling comparison (which doubles are for). Such complicit cryptonymy happens during the abjection process/state of exception and, in effect, betraying their own interests (and those of their fellow workers and nature) for profit: Roman fools killed mid-apocalypse, during blind parody’s remediated praxis (re: boom and bust).

Amazonomachia (Amazon pastiche, subjugated/subversive)

(exhibit 1a1b [from Volume Zero‘s “Symposium: Aftercare”]: Top half’s artists, top-far-left: Michel Dinel; top-mid-left: Jiyu-Kaze; top-middle: Viviana Vixen; right: Edu Souza; bottom-middle: Nunchaku; bottom-mid-left: Edwin Huang; bottom-far-left: Frederico Escorsin. Bottom half’s artist: Mika Dawn 3D.

A kind of Galatea traditionally sculpted by Pygmalion and his imitators, Amazons and their complicated pastiche embody social-sexual conflict during oppositional praxis, hence come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are canonically war dogs of a binarized character. Most notably is the noble Athena versus the dark Medusa from the female legends of Antiquity [also, Queen Hippolyta]: the doubling of the hunter persona, a white and black wolf. Such war-boss, queen bitches canonically offer good behavior and bad behavior as our proverbial “teeth in the night” meant to serve as man’s best friend in centrist theatre [and whose true rebellion goes against the elite’s profit motive]…) 

Not a term I coined, but one I certainly expanded on (to speak on subjugated, reactionary, TERF-style forms and subversive variants, mid-duality). “Amazon battle” is an ancient form of classical, monstrous-feminine art whose pastiche was historically used to enforce the status quo; i.e., Theseus subjugating Hippolyta the Amazon Queen to police other women (making regressive/canonical Amazonomachia a form of monstrous-feminine copaganda). With the rise of queer discourse and identity starting in arguably the late 18th century, later canonical variations in the 20th century (e.g., Marsden’s Wonder Woman) would seek to move the goalpost incrementally—less of a concession, in neoliberal variants (every Blizzard heroine ever—exhibits 45a, 76, 72), and more an attempt to recruit from dissident marginalized groups. The offer is always the same: to become badass, strong and “empowered.” In truth, these regressive/subjugated Amazons become assimilated token cops; i.e., the fetishized witch cop/war boss as a “blind Medusa” who hates her own kind by seeing herself as different than them, thus acting like a white, cis-het man towards them (the “Rambo problem”): triangulating nature against nature, pimping itself for the state. In the business of violent cartoons (disguised variants of the state’s enemies), characters like Ripley or Samus become lucrative token gladiators for the elite by fighting similar to men (active, lethal violence) for male state-corporate hegemony. To that, their symbolism colonizes revolutionary variations of the Amazon, Medusa, etc, during subversive Amazonomachia within genderqueer discourse.

witch cops/war boss

A class, gender or race traitor dressed up in the heroic-victimized language of warrior variants of past victims. Their baleful gaze is diverted away from the elite, instead punching down at their fellow workers to break up their strikes, unions and riots; but also to tease disempowered women with the “carrot” of active, physical violence they’re conditioned to use against the state’s enemies. There are male/Man Box variants and token variants (the weird canonical nerd of course, exhibit 93b; the war chief, 98b1; the Afrocentrist; the centrist Amazon, exhibit 98b1/100c4; the LGBA’s bad-faith bears, otters, dykes and femmes; or the queer boss, exhibit 100c10) and the praxis allows for flexible gender roles within and outside of the heteronormative binary as long as it serves the profit motive. But subversive variants (exhibit 111b) are generally forced to work within notoriously bigoted and oppressive structures: the patriarchal world of professional, competitive sports or the porn industry as things to subvert (“make love, not war” as a hard stance, not conflating Marisa’s “love” [exhibit 98a3] with genuine, class-conscious praxis). This makes TERF amazons, Medusas, et al, Judas-level “prison guards” inside Man Box culture; they assimilate their conquerors and use their cudgels, slurs and shackles, but also their fetish/power outfits like they do—without countercultural irony during blood libel (even while trying to disguise this function through false rebellion) while being paid in blood money by the state and forced to ignominiously marry people they wouldn’t be caught dead with under non-oppressive conditions.

waifus/wheyfus

The waifu is a war bride in shonen media; i.e., the promise of sex, generally through marriage as emblematized in Japanese cultural exports that fuse with Western bigotries to make similar promises to entitled, young male consumers (and older bigots and tokens). While the “waifu,” then, is any bride you want—be she big and strong, short and stacked, skinny-thicc, tall and slender, or some other “monster girl” combination dressed up as a pin-up Hippolyta, Medusa or some other hauntological trope—the “wheyfu” is conspicuously burly and chased after by entitled fans (this relationship can get performatively complicated, but the basic difference is coercion versus mutual consent). Within oppositional praxis, then, the waifu/wheyfu becomes yet another disguise within class war for operatives on either basic side to utilize.

Archaic Mothers (and vaginal spaces)

The womb of nature. An ancient, monstrous-feminine symbol of female/matriarchal power. In Gothic stories, the Archaic Mother (and her space) is generally something for the canonically male/phallic woman to slay and rape (as per the Cartesian Revolution)—e.g., Samus being the “space” variant of a knight or Amazon, specifically a subjugated, TERF Amazon killing Mother Brain, the Dark Mother, in service of the Galactic Federation and “the Man” (the entire Red Scare’s class character dialog being displaced to outer space); for a more detailed writeup about these concepts in Metroid, consider “War Vaginas”:

To summarize those terms, a phallic woman resists sexist conventions by behaving in a masculine (often war-like) fashion in Gothic stories. An Archaic Mother is a powerful, ancient, female mythic figure tied to abject images of motherhood and/or numinous authority. Her power is womb-centric, stemming from her actual womb, or the womb-like space she uses to attack the hero with” (source).

One of the most famous Archaic Mothers is the Medusa, but she takes many similar forms: the transgenerational undead preserved as living latex, leather or clay that comes alive like a gargoyle to seek indiscriminate vengeance against the living for having been wronged by proponents of capital, Cartesian thought, patriarchs, etc.

phallic women

A monstrous-feminine archetype predicated on active, penetrative violence (or scapegoated for it; e.g., the trans woman as a “woman with a penis” trope). Canonical phallic women are female characters, villains, and monsters (often Amazons, Medusas or something comparable) who behave in a traditional masculine way—though generally in response to patriarchal structures with an air of female revenge; e.g., Lady Macbeth from Macbeth; Victoria de Loredani from Zofloya, 1806; Rumi from Perfect Blue, 1997, and Ripley/Samus Aran from Aliens/Metroid. When Dale Townshend introduced the term “phallic women” to me, he referenced Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose (source).

In non-fiction, this encompasses TERFs, who adopt violent, minority-police roles post-trauma, accepting further “prison sex” conditioning by reactionaries during moral panics. The phallic power of women is canonically treated as hysterically fleeting (e.g., Lady Galadriel’s “dark queen” moment; or Dani’s fall from grace as the dark mother of dragons, in Game of Thrones, 2009, her self-defeating hysteria supplied by the authors of the show to justify male rule during the final season). She is expected to perform, then put away her sword and wear the dress.

liminal monsters (expression)/monster girls

Monsters are generally liminal, but some more than others openly convey a partial, ambivalent, oscillating sense of conflict on the surface of their imagery. A hopelessly common example is the monster girl, as AFAB persons are generally fetishized/demonized “waifu” in canon and must be reclaimed in sex-positive forms (exhibit 5e; 23a, the Medusa; 49, phallic women; 50, furries; 62e, cavewomen, etc). The advanced degree of this trope is the monster mother, which expects the women to exist in ways that cater to men that are both loved and feared in fetishizing ways, but also sacrificed (exhibits 51b1, 87b1 and 102b, etc). Akin to a black mirror, Eve Segewick, in 1981, called this mimesis “the character in the veil [or] imagery of the surface in the Gothic novel.” The basic gist, they argue, is the sexualizing of a surfaces in Gothic media (their example being the nun’s veil); i.e., a “shallow pattern” literally on the surface of paper or a screen or glass that can evoke a deeper systemic problem that spans space and time.

(exhibit 5e2: Top-far-left: Muscarine’s “Profligates” from the Darkest Dungeon [2016] mod workshop. Top-far-left: Muscarine’s “Profligates” from the Darkest Dungeon [2016] mod workshop. Top-far-left: Muscarine’s “Profligates” from the Darkest Dungeon [2016] mod workshop. The “Great Waifu Renaissance” of The Darkest Dungeon portrays the monstrous-feminine as waifus to control and embody as much during an ontological power trip as simply being a proverbial dragon to “slay.” Often, they walk the tightrope between the cutesy and the profane, subverting stereotypes while simultaneously being chased after by weird canonical nerds: waifu/wheyfu monster-girl war brides. Procured and dressed by powerful greedy companies [e.g., Blizzard’s “thirst-trap” catalog of Amazon gradients] and given to apolitical consumers, the latter fight the culture war for the former as tied to the state through capital. And yet weird iconoclastic nerds can weaponize these self-same monstrous-feminine to our purposes.

The Tusk, for example, is a sexy cavegirl who iconoclastically stinks—i.e., with body odor being historically-materially denied to women despite their armpits smelling just as much as guys’ do, let alone their vaginas, which guys do not have and can have all sorts of smells: e.g., Zeuhl once asked me to smell their panties, saying incredulously, “Isn’t that crazy?” because their cootchie smelled rather strong [and to which my look of shock, post-smelling it, utterly betrayed me. To be fair, it was rather pungent from us simply walking around my hometown. All the same, bodies smell because they’re designed to; e.g., that same night, we had doggystyle sex and for the first time I could suddenly smell the natural “musk” from Zeuhl’s asshole: a vestigial throwback to a time when humans communicated more by smells than with words]. Apart from the Tusk, the Hood is a slutty Red Riding Hood, and the Fawn is a patchwork animal-girl ninja, etc.

Lower-top-left: nude mods for Muscarine’s Profligates, by JOMO=1. Fan mods operate as “fan fiction,” thus tend to be far hornier [see: Black Reliquary‘s (2023) many Amazon thirst traps, bottom-left] than official canon does. Generally the official art/content for the main game or “faithful” fan art tends to be less overtly sexualized, but no less canonical or sexually dimorphic; e.g., the Countess [exhibit 1a1c] as an Archaic Bug Mom slain by the bad-faith Ancestor [who is frankly a giant dick for the whole game].

Top-right: Persephone van der Waard’s illustrations of four monster girls from Castlevania (a franchise with a whole bestiary of female monsters; source: Fandom). These four are all from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night—Alraune, Succubus, Scylla and Amphisbaena.

Bottom-left: Promo art [source tweet: Reliquary Mod, 2021] for The Darkest Dungeon overhaul, The Black Reliquary].

Bottom-right: Fan art for The Darkest Dungeon by Maestro Noob, depicting what are basically heroic female monsters: the virgin/whore, but also the damsel/demon and the Amazon with a BDSM flavor.)

Persephone’s Amazon Scholarship

Apart from Metroidvania, Persephone is also an avid Amazon nerd/critic; i.e., to such a degree that it would be difficult to list all she has written, but which can be still be summed up, and discussed via Barbara Creed as someone to respond to. Two block quotes will be provided here, both from the same source that address the entirety of Persephone’s Amazon research.

First, to sum things up; re: (from Volume Zero, whose “Symposium: Aftercare” sums things up):

Nudity and monsters have always been political, but this has to occur on our time, not that of moderates (versus overt reactions) telling us how to do our activism for us; we’re not doing this for just ourselves, but fighting for a better world for all—a post-scarcity world where nudity isn’t automatically a sexual act, sin doesn’t exist, and people can be more open about their sexuality and gender without feeling vulnerable, fake, criminal and/or exposed in fear of reactionaries killing them and aloof, smug moderates turning a blind eye or prioritizing their own victim complexes. This requires imagining that world ahead of time, which requires having thoughts that will be considered sinful and anathema by the elite and their proponents. Depending on what identity is being imagined, the nature of such imagination amounts to the committing of thought crimes and heresy (secular or theistic): the imagining of rebellion as something to reach and instill in the nation’s youth by poetically reifying it within the material world.

As you can expect, confusions, concerns and disputes invariably abound (especially for all you “boomers” out there who don’t play videogames), which brings us to our second point: the “Gothic” being a common point of contention as something that historically remains difficult to define that nevertheless is plastered over everything and used off-hand for centuries according to aesthetics whose ownership is equally imperiled among different media types. In orthographic literature, for example, Chris Baldrick writes in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (2009):

The term “Gothic” has become firmly established as the name for one sinister corner of the modern Western imagination, but it seeks to work by intuitive suggestion rather than by any agreed precision of reference. There are several difficulties of usage involved in the term itself, of which the obvious today is the incompatibility between the literary and architectural senses: whereas “Gothic” in architectural contexts refers to a style of European architecture and ornament that flourished from the later twelfth to the fifteenth century, it is used in its literary and cinematic senses to describe works that appeared in an entirely different medium several hundreds of years later. A term thus applied simultaneously to the products of two such widely differing ages (to say nothing of the cultural gulf between Chartres cathedral and a sensationalist magazine story) would seem to require some qualification attached to it; and, indeed, it is the sensible practice architectural historians use to distinguish from the Gothic of the late Middle Ages the Neo-Gothic or Gothic Revival style of the nineteenth century. In a more logical world, we might have learned to adopt a clearer designation of this kind for the “Gothic” of modern literature and cinema; but of course, it is far too late to undo our inherited confusions, and even if we were able to do so, we would only run up against further difficulties that render “Neo-Gothic fiction” or some such nomenclature just as unsatisfactory” (source: my printout copy given to me by Dale Townshend at MMU, complete with grad-student notes scribbled all over it).

In videogames’ far more recent insertion into the conversation, Tanya Krzywinska determines in “The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates in Videogames” (2015):

I began this work with an intuitive sense that there are vast variations in the effective, and indeed affective, uses of Gothic in games, and as work for this study progressed, that sense has intensified. Definition is therefore no simple task, especially considering that Gothic has spanned such a breadth of mood, time and location. As Fred Botting notes “[t]he diffusion of Gothic forms and figures […] makes the definition of a homogeneous generic category very difficult” (1996, 14). In his discussion of the uncertainty in scholarly definitions of the Gothic, David Punter writes that there is a “significant resistance to canonization” (2000, ix), suggesting that there is no one text that substantiates Gothic. It is therefore largely agreed within recent scholarship on the topic that Gothic is brimful of vertiginous, acute tangents and perplexing ambiguities (source).

My own commentaries on “Gothic” per my Metroidvania work and coining of ludo-Gothic BDSM focus on camping canonical spaces (castles) and monsters; both expand on ideas neither author bothered with in their own overspecialized commentaries.

Dedications aside, Baldrick and Krzywinska (and other Gothic or ludic scholars I cite throughout the book) are predominantly white accommodated intellectuals who remain utterly unequipped to write about the inherent queer struggle of the Gothic as something to constantly reclaim from the status quo as a fascist-neoliberal entity from the late 1970s onward—i.e., through my own diverse area of studies that fused the Gothic together within videogames as an extended conversation between novels or cinema, but also beyond* what intellectuals were, are and will be still be saying about the former regarding the latter as “Gothic” among digital, Internet-Age media; e.g., Medusa or Amazons doubled within oppositional praxis, to be used by queer agents on a gradient of resistance against, and oppression by, bourgeois proponents—so-called “TERF Amazons” or “TERF Medusas**” like Victoria de Loredani (an Italian TERF—eat your heart out, Giorgia Meloni[12]) from Charlotte Dacre’s 1806 Zofloya (exhibit 100b2) or James Cameron’s Ellen Ripley (exhibit 30a): war bitches whose “rabid, feral” nature is on a shorter leash/timer (due to the euthanasia effect requiring they be put down faster once Capitalism enters decay). Including sex work, all inhabit a poetic whole within a larger subversive conflict I wish to comment on, and contribute towards, in meaningful ways that go far beyond academic flag-planting by actually educating and helping workers directly (to alter linguo-material conditions and relevant social-sexual attitudes through dialectical-material poetics). Worker solidarity is a holistic enterprise conducted by workers, first and foremost. Try to keep that in mind moving forward.

*Alluding to the title of my 2018 master’s thesis: “beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (source), which includes reinvestigating my own research years later (exhibit 1a1a1h2a3b).

**More than my thesis argument already has, we’ll return to TERF monsters and the monstrous-feminine (as regressive and subversively progressive) often. Both elide with hauntological ideas like “phallic woman” and “demon lover” (in coercive, unironic demon BDSM vs ludo-Gothic BDSM, which the Demon Module shall return to and unpack; re: “Summoning Demons“); i.e., as things to subvert, then endorse within the Gothic mode in new, harmless forms; e.g., with mommy doms, monster-fucking and consent-non-consent as married to labor[13a] vs canonical rape pastiche. There’s also assimilation fantasy vs legitimate rebellion through Amazonomachia/Amazon pastiche as symbolic of class struggle through subjugated/subversive doubles: the war mask, uniform, weapon and weapon-like, athletic (or at least capable/”built”) body as performances that, far from canceling each other out per the centrist axiom, continue in opposition for or against the state as something to wrestle out from under its iron thumb. Because the state historically personifies itself through hauntological bodies that express war, lies, death and rape in unironically fetishized forms that simultaneously perform all of the above, these variants exist to victimize the ironic monstrous-feminine during oppositional praxis. Simply put, a state fetish is a coercive device, one that frames iconoclasm not simply as “incorrect,” but jailed then abused for its sex-positive, thus anticapitalist heresy during “prison sex”/Man Box rituals. Said rituals are often performed by assimilated members of a given minority (e.g., the Medusa is not simply overtly furious and demonic, but undead—its ontologically ambiguous trauma complicated by her as a symbol often operating at cross purposes).

While progressing away from the state’s harmful apparatus and its linguo-material past is desirable, it is liminal relative to pornographic and artistic expression as historically-materially controlled by the state and its proponents (with Perseus famously using the beheaded Medusa’s “blind rage” to destroy his enemies by making them hers—i.e., triangulation). Yet the truth is, pornography and demonic/undead language won’t disappear at all under Gothic Communism; they simply won’t be couched within current disguised trauma, but rather operate as savvy means of negotiating emotional/Gothic intelligence through informed consent in the present to prevent future trauma; i.e., the state’s harmful return through regressive rhetorical devices: the regressive Amazon’s blind rage, “waifu” status, foregone demise and coercive BDSM.

As we shall explore in Volume One’s “Synthesis Symposium” discussing the Basics of opposition synthesis, constructive anger and rioting is a healthy social mechanism tied to labor movements. Conversely, canonically destructive anger—i.e., appeasing the state’s executioner just so you can send some other bastard to the guillotine or enslave a fellow worker as their “better”—is not; it is merely triangulation (turning one person against another), then clemency and reprieve to a greater calamity/seminal tragedy that cannot be avoided—not in wars, but also on a grander scale in relation to the end of the Capitalocene via Promethean cataclysm if something isn’t done now. Cops don’t prevent crime, they enforce it. So the world needs more subversive Amazons, not subjugated ones scapegoating nature as monstrous-feminine with ethnocentric dogma surging moral panic through the Protestant ethic; re: the Archaic Mother punished by witch cops to instill Red Scare, Orientalism, Black Revenge, Satanic Panic, etc, on and offstage [re: “Policing the Whore“]. Hoist them on their own petards to have the whore’s revenge against profit—on the Aegis!

(exhibit 1a1b: Artist, top-far-left: Michel Dinel; top-mid-left: Jiyu-Kaze; top-middle: Viviana Vixen; right: Edu Souza; bottom-middle: Nunchaku; bottom-mid-left: Edwin Huang; bottom-far-left: Frederico Escorsin.

A kind of Galatea traditionally sculpted by Pygmalion and his imitators, Amazons and their complicated pastiche embody social-sexual conflict during oppositional praxis, hence come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are canonically war dogs of a binarized character. Most notably is the noble Athena versus the dark Medusa from the female legends of Antiquity [also, Queen Hippolyta]: the doubling of the hunter persona, a white and black wolf. Such war-boss, queen bitches canonically offer good behavior and bad behavior as our proverbial “teeth in the night” meant to serve as man’s best friend in centrist theatre [and whose true rebellion goes against the elite’s profit motive].  

However, the lineage stretches backwards and forwards hauntologically through post-Renaissance revivals. For one, there’s the pre-fascist, Neo-Gothic “phallic women-in-black” such as Victoria de Loredani, and the Victorian “madwoman in the attic,” Bertha Mason; the post-Victorian, hatpin-stabbing suffragettes of the early 20th century [e.g., Leoti Baker]; the comic book/action hero treatment starting with William Marsden’s bondage-themed Wonder Woman in the 1940s [or Rosie the Riveter] followed by the feral, bikini-wearing sexpots of the 1960s and 1970s [Coffy], as well Ripley and similar “female Rambos” of the 1980s [a neoliberal response to the “final girl” trope of the slasher genre]; various catsuit regressions—sexy spies, detectives, doctors, and BDSM-tinged femme fatales—in the ’90s, 2000s and 2010s; then, an increasingly queer presence regarding the rise of trans, intersex, non-binary and other forms of queer discourse online. If the 20th century constitutes the continuation of first wave, second wave and third wave feminism, then fourth wave feminism’s rise has seen a regression towards the older forms using the same language in oppositional praxis: regressive Amazonomachia and post-fascist[13b] gender trouble [the “gender critical” movement] veering backward at fascist* and pre-fascist* palimpsests versus subversive Amazonomachia and transgressive gender parody. It’s less a question of stolen valor and more of older groups fighting for the equality of convenience by pitting their versions of the “Amazon-as-waifu” [a promised war bride, whose more muscular variants are called “wheyfus” for supposedly being “gym maidens” that consume whey but also can dominate the chaser sissy as a result] against genderqueer variants; i.e., a “mirror match,” in fighting game parlance.

Regarding all of these black-and-white variants, there’s the moral qualification of “good and evil.” Our concerns are dialectical-material, going beyond administering binarized value judgements to critique the underlying cause-and-effect of culture as materially coded through informed, hauntological [thus grey] aesthetics operating at cross purposes; i.e., “TERF” is synonymous with “fascist,” in this respect, as a heteronormative defender of the status quo through Man Box culture as contributing to Capitalist Realism, whereas “Light/good-looking vs Dark/evil-looking” is a universally adaptable aesthetic [exhibits 50b, 60e1, 101c2, etc] that lends itself well to fascist, neoliberal/centrist and Gothic-Communist iterations of ostensibly cis and overtly gender-non-conforming Medusas and Amazons [whose sexual/gender function and BDSM aesthetics are fluid, variable and often figurative].

 In truth, the adaptability really applies to any warring persona as the body language of wrestler’s kayfabe being the conspicuous staging of espionage-as-combat for or against the state [the stage-like arena having all eyes on it, which follow the performer-as-celebrity into the arena of everyday life; i.e., a kind of forced reality/performance within war as personified by the Amazon as a gladiatorial combatant operating inside culture war as an extension of class war within popular media as war-like]. Just as war is not, in truth, romantic but often conveyed in romantic language that sits between the fiction and the rules [re: Jesper Juul], the language of culture exists in dialectical-material opposition according to conveyors or consumers of these monstrous-feminine heroes becoming masked, costumed and/or muscular operatives to some passive or active degree: the drop-dead gorgeous, sexpot femme-fatale as a heavily codified cop, spy or prize fighter. Often, it’s all three; i.e., a resistance collaborator/spy-turned-whore/vice versa [exhibit 4a] or a fascist double agent during “brothel espionage” married to the fighting ring. Such personas function as secret identities but also alter egos on par with James Bond’s [whose Red-Scare, state-sanctioned violence represents the legitimacy of state espionage in actual or romanticized forms, versus the forever-illegitimate counterterrorist violence of rebel factions seeking to dismantle state hegemony and develop a post-scarcity world]. Like any monster during oppositional praxis, this theatricality’s jouissance sits between intended play and emergent play as decided by the play inside the meta-narrative; i.e., to play around with through pastiche [accuracy] and parody [inaccuracy, often ironic] as archetypally carried across various mediums: the Amazon and Medusa, for example, having survived out of Antiquity into plays, novels, cinema and videogames that cannot be monopolized.

[artist: Mika Dawn 3D] 

War has been rooted in tremendous theatre and deception since the time of the Caesars [whose hauntology 20th/21st century totalitarianism wishes to revive]. These deceptions have complicated under the neoliberal sphere. That is, the business of combat sports emulates the historically deceptive nature of actual war brought out of the imaginary ancient past into the modern world as a culture war fought with war-like aesthetics: the monomyth, also called the Hero’s Journey, as a kind of orderly antidote to chaos as female. To this, class war unfurls via the battle of the sexes through sports as “man’s domain,” thus something to bar women from competing in against men for reasons of “fairness”: women are hysterical beings of chaos and allowing them to compete would upset the delicate order of the universe, threatening their virtue and male egos [and profits]! This obviously effects gender-non-conforming people, going so far as to ban trans women from playing competitive chess as of 2023 [Caelan Conrad’s “Were Trans Women Banned from Chess?!”]. In turn, the anomaly becomes costumed and fetishized as exceptional; i.e., “in a league of their own,” one where the Sapphic lancer obliterates everyone in her own little cage. It’s infantilizing.

Throughout the book, we’ll revisit the monomyth and its deceptions in relation to class and culture war as “sport-like.” For the moment, merely consider how the heteronormative segregation of sports mentality brings out some rather novel regressions that simply haven’t existed before in Western politics or canon. One of these groups are TERFs, but also their disguise in the world of combat sports in the Internet Age through the waifu or wheyfu as a “girl boss/war boss” kind of puppet for the state; i.e., something to play out class betrayal and free market apologia during garden-variety war games. Whatever their form, the execution of these games treats female strength—even monstrous-feminine variants—as wrought with multiple double standards. “Strong is sexy” translates to highly particular body types within fighting parlance: “built” within a Vitruvian, hourglass bod and the Amazon as materialized through the Male Gaze; i.e., to serve men by looking and acting a particular way within the theatre of war as indiscrete, globalized and sacred.

This extends to the virginal nerd as non-athletic in a physical sense, instead challenging the perceived dominance of men through the die-hard cliché of the female detective as having a “muscular” brain: the Nancy-Drew-type lesbian/ace person stemming from older tropes of a middle-class white girl undressed by the eyes of cis-het men while she gets to the bottom of the myth of male superiority through her domain: inside thinking-based games championed as yet-another-front for male dominance in culture war. This rebellious exchange is, itself, historically flawed—i.e., having bigoted roots by the men, but also the women doing the sleuthing as exceptional white sleuths. It’s the shadow of fascism in feminism’s bigoted past, dressed up as the underdog in a battle that reduces non-white/non-cis minorities to total invisibility or token status. Simply put, it becomes the white woman’s “pick me” vibe/parade of old-school suffragettes billboarding their oppression; i.e., conveniently forgetting everyone else while being marketed not just as exceptional through manufactured [male] supremacy, scarcity and conflict, but nostalgic within the Gothic displacement of once-upon-a-time; e.g., Netflix’ much-touted second-wave feminist pastiche in The Queen’s Gambit [2020]: the hard-fought queen in the man’s game, the prodigal child or pin-up doll whose exception proves the rule by fetishizing nature as monstrous-feminine, as usual [as “woman” in second wave feminism hauntologies].

[artist, top-left: Blouson; bottom-left: Allie-Reol; bottom-right: East Sea Monster]

Regardless of their exact muscles or general look/vibe, I sometimes also call TERFs “TERF Amazons,” “TERF Medusas,” or “subjugated Hippolyta” through a poetic attempt to make the monstrous-feminine the Virgin or the Whore in service of state hegemony—i.e., the “monster mom” as fetishized during the monomyth [the succubus Slan, exhibit 51b1, or the xenomorph as a rapist ghost of the counterfeit who must die or be escaped from but also stared at and chased by bigots/privileged colonizers].

Whereas Capitalism fosters a myopia that makes it difficult, if not impossible for people to imagine anything beyond Capitalism, Gothic Communism seeks to correct this cultural blindness in favor of imagining a better world through xenophilic monsters, rape play and all-around consent-non-consent, voyeuristic peril and various other transgressive liminalities; e.g., the monster mom as something to subvert through a gradient of gender parody propositions, my favorite being “Imagine Conan with a pussy” [and someone who wasn’t a bigot]—i.e., non-binary gender trouble with a gradient of Amazon “monster moms” that are tough but nurturing while not endorsing the status quo: my OCs Ileana, Revana, Siobhan and Virago in exhibits 7d, 37f, 37g, 61a2, 84, etc; classical myths like the Medusa, 23b; and in subversive fanart like Corporal Ferro, Marisa, Chun Li and Zarya in exhibits 85, 104a2, 111b; etc.) [source].

Second, in regards to Creed; re:

(exhibit 1a1c: Artist, top: ChuckARTT; bottom-left: Arvalis; bottom-middle: Flyland; bottom-right: Pagong1.

Fascism and Communism occupy the same space as “bad omens” in centrist monomyths until crisis demands a clear distinction be made by Pygmalions that defends capital beyond a shared persecution; i.e., fascism is the lesser of two evils because its perennial dark castle routinely crumbles to reveal a shiny white castle underneath, whereas the troubling presence of Communism threatens all of normalized existence: through a dark truth that cannot be cleansed because it denotes the castle [symbolic of the West, of Cartesian thought, of Capitalism] as harmful by design, not because it is “corrupt”: ACAB. Indeed, the so-called shadow of “corruption” is common capitalist apologia, often relayed through a “vice character” scapegoat in neoliberal propaganda stemming from early-modern forms [e.g., The Merchant of Venice]. Videogames constitute a popular majority in this field, wherein the boss archetype is a fascist or Communist scapegoat in the same general aesthetic. As such, there remains plenty of room for variation and double standards, enacted and remediated by weird canonical nerds in the Shadow of Pygmalion.

For example, the canonical “phallic” woman is “like a man” in that she is dark, mysterious and penetrative with her fangs and unquenchable desire, but remains the bride of a male, “Dark Father/Dragon Lord” tyrant [an allusion to the historical figure Vlad “the Impaler” Dracul and his patrilineal Order of the Dragon out of Eastern Europe] who holds her under his boss-like thrall; the canonical myth of the female equivalent, on the other hand, is the female-Beowulf who enters Archaic Mother territory—e.g., the place where the Countess [exhibit 41h] or Alien Queen/Mother Brain breed inside a site for abject sexual reproduction: the awesome majesty of her Numinous power offset by a voracious, vagina-dentata maw [what Barbara Creed calls the murderous womb] that both angrily spawns dragons and devours its own “children” blindly who, in turn, are forced to put her down in favor of a male hegemon; i.e., the Jungian slaying of the female chaos dragon to further the male questors “individuation” [itself a myth, given the genocidal commonality of all heroes in heteronormative canon: the knight defends property and the state, often by killing someone else and taking it from a fascist double after said double takes it from labor and minorities—capitalist DARVO in other words: “You’re the gaping, always-hungry, self-cannibalizing maw, not us!”].

[artist: Mizugi Buns]

This being said, I don’t want to focus on vagina dentata or literal breeding crises in the classical, Neo-Gothic sense; my book aims to go thoroughly beyond Barbara Creed’s somewhat dated and limited, biological-/cis-centric view of the monstrous-feminine/”woman as other” [to be fair, she wrote The Monstrous-Feminine thirty years ago, so maybe she wrote something more recently[14] and I’m just late to the party]. So while it’s true that the phrase “phallic woman” traditionally denotes a war-like woman, huntress or vengeful monstrous-feminine, I want to stress how subjugated Amazons aren’t just aggressively and physically violent towards cis-het, sexist men; they’ve radicalized inside a “prison sex” mentality to become hostile towards “outsider” groups, including trans people, while seeing themselves as the universal victims that tacitly yield to their conquerors by emulating their worst habits [exhibit 41g1a2].

As such, I want to expand on how the monstrous-feminine can also non-binarize to illustrate the gender-non-conforming idea of a non-violent trans, intersex or enby person; i.e., someone who refuses to be a victim without embodying the standard-issue implements of violence and war from conventional stories [including TERF examples: the blind, indiscriminate Medusa]. Instead, they can be nymph-like and soft, their penis a reclaimed source of shame/codified rape [mine was] and their monomorphic body offering up other gender-non-conforming surprises to boot. They become a dark being of chaos to sincerely-but-ironically worship relative to how they camp current heteronormative standards that abject such beings; i.e., as would have been the case before Cartesian thought came and binarized everything: a drug-like, magic-themed “Ode to Psyche” [or Pan, Dionysus, Queen Maeb, Satan, the xenomorph, Medusa, etc] as wise in ancient, forgotten, “dark” ways; i.e., lost to Capitalism save in reimagined rebellious festivals [often with fairy-like flavors, exhibit 52a] that take black magic back as a culturally appreciative phenomenon. The “magic” stems from being different in morphological/gendered ways whose chimeric andro/gynodiversity [exhibit 9b1] would have been worshipped in ancient and non-Western cultures in absence of unironic gender trouble; e.g., the “two-spirit” person, shaman or witch, but also the satyr or fawn of the ancient Western world [exhibit 52b] or the angel or demon of the non-Vitruvian model [exhibit 45b] as thoroughly Numinous (ibid.).

Further Reading by Persephone (on Amazons)

Amazons and the Medusa appear all throughout my book series, but here are some key essays I’ve written about them in the past. While there is some overlap with my Metroidvania work, I’ve chosen examples for this listen independent of that list as much as I can; i.e., while considering those pieces for their emphasis on Amazons/the Medusa where applicable:

Pre-Sex-Positivity

• “What an Amazon Is, Standing in Athena’s Shadow“: A grad school essay concerning the 1970s Gothic Heroine as “an Amazon, but one who didn’t want to be seen as monstrous. Eventually she evolved into [a] protector, reclaiming traditionally-male creative forces and indemnifying herself as an Amazon by associating these forces through gender performance with the female body instead of the male.” Covers Ellen Ripley in the Alien franchise (and similar Final Girls Laurie Strode and Sarah Conor) vis-à-vis Freud, Kristeva and Creed, but also André Viola’s “A Black Athena in the Heart of Darkness” (2006). 
• “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid” (2021): Discusses, among other things, Heinlein’s Competent Man Trope from a tokenized Amazonian perspective.
• “War Vaginas: Phallic Women, Vaginal Spaces and Archaic Mothers in Metroid“ (2021): Discusses Metroid’s spaces and Amazonian characters vis-à-vis Barbara Creed.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Volume Zero (2023)

• “Pieces of the Camp Map“: Explores the euthanasia effect as it applies to Amazons/the Medusa specifically.
• “Overcoming Praxial Inertia: Straw Dogs and Canon’s Teeth in the Night“: Touches on the idea of Grendel’s mother and Beowulf—a monomythic idea functionally identical to Perseus and Medusa in terms of policing the whore; i.e., in service to profit.
• “Symposium: Aftercare; What Is the Gothic?“: Gives a variety of exhibitions on the monstrous-feminine, including Amazons and Archaic Mothers; i.e., as monsters to discuss through the entirety of my book series.

(model and artist: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard)

Volume One (2024)

• “The Nation-State: Remediating Modern-day ‘Rome,’ Gargoyles, and the Bourgeois Trifectas; also, critiquing Amazons as Liminal Expression“: Unpacks gargoyles in the canonical sense, then introduces and explores the trifectas of capital, but also explores tokenized coercion; i.e., as it occurs under manufactured conditions during liminal expression inside weird-nerd culture—specifically Amazons and the performance of that particular monster type as “gargoyle-esque” when personified by weird canonical nerds punching down; e.g., Autumn Ivy, a non-binary sex worker who abused me during our own labor exchanges.
• “Predators as Amazons, Knights, and Other Forms of Domesticated, Animalized Monster Violence“: Considers the state’s monopoly of violence (and terror) as told through its animalized soldiers, but also their bodies as things if not depicted in heteronormative ways, then policed as such; i.e., by the Amazon and similar monstrous-feminine entities as relayed in ways that generally “corrupt” and triangulate against/prey on other minorities.
• “Prey as Liberators by Camping Prey-like BDSM; Its Bodily Psychosexual Expression and Campy Gothic Origins Stemming from Horace Walpole onwards“: Considers those who hide like, and manifest as, animals in the shadow of unironic Gothic castles (whose initial formation and campy subversion through ludo-Gothic BDSM we will also examine, vis-à-vis Horace Walpole and Matthew Lewis).
• “Gothic Communism, a sample essay: ‘Cornholing the Corn Lady—Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Empire’“: Offers a small reprieve while we examine Ghostbusters: Afterlife through a postcolonial lens, vis-à-vis Edward Said. Considers her as vengeful nature versus the state and its cops.
• “Synthesis Symposium: Nature Is Food; a Roadmap for Forging Social-Sexual Habits, or Cultivating Gothic-Communist Praxis in Our Own Daily Lives/Instruction“: A symposium that considers trauma as a Cartesian enterprise, treating nature as food. As such, it discusses a means of synthesizing praxis, thus interrogating and processing Cartesian trauma (war and rape) in our own daily lives in opposition to state forces harvesting us. It provides a lengthier sample of synthesis than Volume Zero’s camp map finale, but still constitutes a taste of what we will discuss and propose even more thoroughly in Volume Three; i.e., when we explore proletarian praxis at length. The roadmap comes in four parts, which we’ll unpack and signpost more when we arrive. Monster-wise, though, it explores generational trauma during Gothic poetics in relation to nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., exploited by Cartesian thought to canonize, thus facilitate, unironic war and rape: Medusa, but also forbidden expressions of the Medusa through Georgia O’Keefe, H.R. Giger and more recent, less infamous auteurs. It also examines Cartesian arrangements of state violence and resistance according to Heinlein’s competent man and Kurosawa’s Western. Keeping with the Medusa, though, the roadmap will also explore Amazons, phallic women/traumatic penetration, and various abject morphologies policed under Cartesian binaries during pornographic expression; e.g., racialized tropes, but also fat people at large.

(model and artist: Nyx and Persephone van der Waard)

Volume Two, part one: The Poetry Module (2024)

• “Bushnell’s Requiem: An Ode to a Martyr“: Considers Aaron Bushnell’s martyrdom, and its symbolic act at large, vis-à-vis Barbara Creed’s Medusa.
• “Hugging the Alien”: Introduces a concept of reunion with nature as alien and fetishized, requiring us to “hug Medusa” (the monstrous-feminine) as the classic punching bag of Cartesian forces.
• “Teaching”: Focuses on the duality of monstrous language when employed in either direction, but generally in opposition, during dialectical materialism; i.e., as a means of introducing children to fear and dogma (to serve the state) or as a profoundly playful and performative means of worker liberation: getting children to learn as early as possible about their world (and the language that composes it)—to learn from the imaginary past as monstrous-feminine. In other words, “Teaching” explores how learning happens when playing with trauma, confronting and voicing it in symbolic terms whose duality must, in turn, be repeatedly puzzled over through incessant examination and application; i.e., theatrical/Gothically poetic metaphors the likes of which often involve animals-as-monstrous. “Teaching” thoroughly invokes Medusa through “the caterpillar and the wasp” refrain, but will branch out to adjacent forms of monstrous-feminine expression to explore teaching more broadly as a powerful Gothic-Communist device.
  • “‘My Quest Began with a Riddle’: the Caterpillar and the Wasp” (chapter opening—on my old blog): Introduces the chapter goal (learning from the past as monstrous-feminine to liberate it from Capitalist Realism) and outlines the poetic, educational refrain: the caterpillar and the wasp.
  • “Angry Mothers; or, Learning from Our Monstrous-Feminine Past“: Establishes the monstrous-feminine as something whose ancient past is forever in development—for the state or for workers. I consider this idea through Alien, but also my own work as inspired by Alien and the cuties that I work with. In short, it asks how I learned from Scott’s “ancient” past (and similar stories) to touch on post-scarcity in my own work.
  • “Solving Riddles; or, Following in Medusa’s Footsteps“ (subchapter opening): Considers the monstrous-feminine as something to learn from in a variety of multimedia forms; i.e., starting with a broader relationship between our bodies and minds as interconnected with themselves and media at large, then narrowing down to conflict, mothers-in-conflict, and liberation.
    • “Solving Riddles”; “Spilling Tea” and “Meeting Medusa” (included with subchapter opening): Articulates how we can encounter “Medusa” in everyday life—a touch of the extraordinary lurking in those we meet as normally policed or controlled by the state. This classically falls under a male/female binary, which I will try to hyphenate based on my own experiences and expertise (scholarly synthesis).
    • “Teaching between Media and our Bodies, and a Bit of Coaching“: Shifts focus, expanding on the monstrous-feminine as something to consider (and teach) through a) the space between multiple forms of media and our bodies, and b) is something to materialize and grasp at through coaching behaviors (of which I shall demonstrate).
    • “Conflict, Mothers-in Conflict, and Liberation“: Concludes the chapter by concentrating on themes of conflict that double as praxial struggles insofar as language hermeneutically functions; i.e., always in conflict in a variety of ways. I consider that variety unto itself, then regard it in relation to mothers (and the monstrous-feminine) as trapped, fighting for liberation.

(model and artist: Itzel and Persephone van der Waard)

• “‘Heaven in a Wild Flower’; or, Exhibiting the Monstrous-Feminine Ourselves“: Greeted in the antechamber, and given pamphlets. Supplies a gender-studies hermeneutic, regarding the monstrous-feminine in relation to everything discussed so far in the book; i.e., there is always an aspect of the Medusa (war-like, morphologically diverse, and rebellious) to any monster that isn’t—figuratively or literally, in part or all together—a white, Anglo-American, cis-het, Christian male.
• “‘In Search of the Secret Spell’: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte-Blanche (feat. Samus Aran)“: “Sets the table” by transitioning from what Volume Two, part one outlined (using Gothic poetics to make new histories/a sex-positive Wisdom of the Ancients) to focus on the imaginary historical aspect of Gothic ancestry we’re always inheriting, playing with and subsequently learning from as a self-defining exercise. Using Samus Aran “as a white Indian,” this chapter outlines the riddle of exploring said past as “half-real,” commonly as a member of the privileged group (the Anglo-American middle class) whose various privileges intersect with various axes of oppression (similarity amid difference) that allow us to play with the past and heal from its older rapes by putting “rape” in quotes; i.e., to cultivate a pedagogy of the oppressed that acknowledges power abuse (which is what rape is) dressed up as ludo-Gothic BDSM: a complicated, xenophilic, multimedia and transgenerational means of liminal expression that can serve workers or the state, but for us is a potent means of interrogating trauma to prevent it again in the future.
• “Splendide Mendax: the Rise and Fall of ‘Rome’ as Built-in(to Us)“: Considers nature vs nurture relative to Gothic poetics, insofar as this can be used to code humans to war against/rape nature; i.e., how for humans under Capitalism, nurture is currently tied to giant linguo-material structures called “capital” that weaponize the imaginary past’s splendid lies against workers and nature: Capitalist Realism dipping the hero into the river Styx to “gift” him with the aura of invulnerability as haunted by narcissistic echoes of other Roman fools having fallen on the same proverbial sword.
  • “‘Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part one (feat. Dragon Ball Z and Big Trouble in Little China; Wonder Woman—included with ‘Splendide Mendax’)” (2024): : Outlines the idea of history as toy-like through Gothic action figures: the herbo and himbo (aka the Amazon and the knight).
  • “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two (feat. Ayla, Weaponlord and Savage Land Rogue; Autumn Ivy and Claire Max)“: Explores further examples of the herbo as pro-state or pro-workers, and gives two real-life examples.
• “Back to the Necropolis: Reflections on Mastery as Backwards; i.e., When Camping Myself as More and More Gay (feat. Black Nazis and Castlevania)!“: A reflection on my growth as a person since originally writing the Monster Modules (before Volume Zero). Applies the idea of modularity and monsters to a more advanced synthesis of my work vis-à-vis Afrocentrism, token queer black Nazis in Castlevania: Nocturne (2023). Considers that shows villain and servants as monstrous-feminine; i.e., as the Medusa, but specifically the Whore of Babylon during the liminal hauntology of war.

(artist:  Persephone van der Waard)

Volume Two, part two: The Undead Module (2024)

• “‘She Fucks Back’; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics: the Man of Reason and Cartesian Hubris versus the Womb of Nature in Metroidvania“: Covers the Cartesian hero/man-of-reason and its Metroidvania offshoots: the decayed man of reason versus the Archaic Mother during movement through the hauntological castle; i.e., castle-narratives.
  • “‘Men of Reason Suck’; or, Ghosts of Freud in Forbidden Planet, and the Gendered Components of Gothic Space (and Its History of Scholarship) as Tied to Capitalism in Disguise” (included with “She Fucks Back”): Sets the table. Looks at the history of Promethean Gothic expression through people and places, looking at older theatrical works and mythic structures—i.e., about/disguising Capitalism as surviving in more modern examples like Forbidden Planet through which Metroidvania like Metroid operate—then catalogs that history of scholarship (my contributions, some of them) for you to consider and refer back to, when reading parts one and two (the close-reads).
  • “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge“: Considers people first, places (and space) second; i.e., the seemingly Freudian, Amazonomachy-style astronoetics (colonial gaze of planet Earth) and parental themes from Frankenstein and Forbidden Planet, translating nicely into the Metroidvania space, of which we’ll consider through a dialectical-material sense pointed at Thomas Happ’s 2014 one-man-show, Axiom Verge.
  • “‘Look upon my Works, ye Mighty’; or, the Infernal Concentric Pattern and Rape Play in Hollow Knight and Metroidvania at Large” (sub-subdivision opening): Considers space first, people second; i.e., explores my grad school and postgrad research into Metroidvania, but especially Bakhtin’s chronotope and Aguirre’s infernal concentric pattern in Hollow Knight as informing what eventually became ludo-Gothic BDSM: a means of rape play (whose performative, revolutionary nuances we’ll also unpack).
    • “Geometries in Terror; or, Traces of Aguirre and Bakhtin in Hollow Knight‘s Promethean Castle World” (included with “Look on My Works”): Outlines Bakhtin and Aguirre in relation to Team Cherry’s Numinous gameworld; i.e., its oddly homely and relaxing setting as something to explore and understand Gothically (through the chronotope and Promethean Quest) as both largely devoid of people while simultaneously being overridden with decay regenerating into different potential outcomes.
    • “Policing the Whore; or, Topping from Below to Rise from the Ashes (feat. The Hobbit)“: Articulates Aguirre and Bakhtin’s ideas per my evolution of ludo-Gothic BDSM after my master’s thesis and into my graduate work, then considers the Promethean Quest as something that presents the whore as normally hunted by police forces, only to escape their subjugation and imprisonment by acting out her own rape; i.e., as Hollow Knight‘s final boss, the Radiance, does when faced with tokenized state proponents (the example I give being Tolkien’s treasonous dwarves from The Hobbit and their own dubious search for homeland, mid-assimilation; re: by killing Smaug the dragon to assimilate).

• “‘The World Is a Vampire’; or, Bloodsports and Prisons from Old World to New World, Archaic Mothers and the Monomyth to Bloodthirsty Capitalists (feat. The Darkest Dungeon, Alice in Borderland, and The Matrix)“: Considers the bloodsport-and-prisons potential of vampires between The Darkest Dungeon and Alice in Borderland’s Old World and New World approaches (and bring up The Matrix and Foucault, where relevant); i.e., the Countess from The Crimson Court as a kind of Medusa to chase down and slay but also revel in.

(model and artist: Casper Clock and Persephone van der Waard)

The Demons Module (2025)

• “Forbidden Sight, Faust and the Promethean Quest: Knowledge and Power Exchange” (chapter opening): Considers forbidden power as something to see; i.e., forbidden sight. As such, it does so through the history of making/summoning demons—initially according to Gothic, Renaissance approaches and prostitution (whores) as a Faustian bargain, but then unto the Promethean Quest; i.e., Cartesian dualism meant to punish demons, or otherwise summon/pimp them through the ghost of the counterfeit to further the abjection process in service to capital raping nature-as-vengeful (and whose inheritance anxiety occurs inside the Imperial Core, continuing Capitalist Realism as a fear of the outside, of the dark, of the Earth, creativity and nature).
  • “A Rape Reprise; or, the Whore’s Paradox Having Its Revenge During Ludo-Gothic BDSM” (feat. Nyx; included with chapter opening): Considers how the state rapes nature for profit, a process of abjection that can be subverted during the whore’s paradox and its revenge vis-à-vis ludo-Gothic BDSM.
  • “Idle Hands Are the Devil’s Workshop; or, Weapons in Clay and Even More Playtime: the Monster Prostitution of Blood Libel and Its Violent, Demonic Revenge” (subchapter opening): “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” Explores the morphology of whores inside the violent, vengeful domain of blood libel, persecution/revenge and sex demons’ dark desires; i.e., psychosexual camp with traumatic baggage, examining Amazons/Medusa (demon mommies), followed by Takena’s short-but-gnarly claymation skit, “Midnight Vampire” (2024), then goblins as demon lovers exchanging poetic violence of all different kinds!
    • Idle Hands, part one: “Amazons and Demon Mommies” (sub-subchapter opening—included with subchapter opening): Considers the demonic aspects of blood libel per the Amazon as witch-like prostitute, extending to demon mommies such as Lady Hellbender as Amazonian in their own right.
      • “On Amazons, Good and Bad” (sub-sub-subchapter—included with subchapter opening): Parts one and two explores Amazons and Medusa—their history of tokenization and resistance, and how they manifest currently under state influence; i.e., as something to offer different unequal power fantasies, during the cryptonymy process; e.g., Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and James Cameron’s Aliens.
        • “Prefacing Medusa: to Bay” (included with subchapter opening): Prefaces my Medusa section with a thank you to Bay, my partner and co-writer, who helped with the final proofread.
        • “On Amazons, Good and Bad, part one: Always a Victim (feat. Medusa, Aliens—included with subchapter opening)“: Explores Medusa and her mistreatment by Amazons abusing her as monstrous-feminine during the abjection and cryptonymy processes.
        • “On Amazons, Good and Bad, part two: Reclaiming Amazons; or, Cops and Victims” (sub-sub-sub-subchapter opening): Explores how we can reclaim Amazons (e.g., postcolonial anal sex) from their historically misogynistic usage, but also their tokenization by TERFs to commit various abuses for capital.
          • “Cops and Victims, part one: the Riddle of Steel; or, Confronting Past Wrongs (feat. Amanda Nicole—included with sub-sub-sub-subchapter opening)” : Examines the past of the Amazon myth having become increasingly hostile to state enemies; i.e., through tokenized feminism vis-à-vis subjugated Amazons acting traditionally like men.
          • “Our Sweet Revenge; or, Being Ourselves While Reclaiming Anal Rape, mid-Amazonomachia (feat. Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart)“: Considers the whore’s revenge as ultimately the subversion of Amazon’s prior subjugation, doing so through the language of warriors and rape during the whore’s paradox: to camp rape while suffering from its historical effects.

(artists: Lydia and Persephone van der Waard)

• “‘I’ll See You in Hell’: Dark Faeries and Demon Mommies” (sub-sub-subchapter opening): Goes beyond the earthly realms of classic Amazons, giving these warrior-whore sex demons more of an openly hellish character (that still yields the same ludo-Gothic BDSM devices): dark faeries and demon (muscle) mommies.
  • “Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries (feat. Annabel Morningstar, Harmony Corrupted, Romantic Rose, The Witch, and more—included with sub-sub-subchapter opening)”: A collaboration between whores. Considers the labor proponents of Gothic-Communist revolution—working together and with Gothic materials, in a staged, meta sense—to demonically give rise (thus shape/voice) to dark places and people; i.e., as dark faerie rulers/regal fairylands where one can explore off-limit feelings and desires conducive to post-scarcity development; e.g., Satan from Robert Eggers’ The Witch, Lavos from Chrono Trigger, and more!
  • “Trial by Fire: Swole’ Demon Mommies (feat. Lady Hellbender and Karlach, The Shape of Water)“: A symposium. Considers the fiery, militant aspect to demon muscle mommies, specifically through the postcolonial urge of forbidden love.
• “Vampires and Claymation (feat. ‘Midnight Vampire’)“: Lays out the basic idea of demonic, whorish revenge with vampires, whose blood libel it explores in Takena’s “Midnight Vampire” (and reconsiders some ideas of tokenization per some of our thesis arguments that apply to all demon types). The character is basically an Amazon.
• “Exploring the Derelict Past: The Demonic Trifecta of Detectives, Damsels and Sex Demons; or Enjoying Yesterday’s Exquisite Torture on the Edge of the Civilized World” (sub-subchapter chapter opening): Considers the left-behind, derelict flavor of demons, and unpacks various poetic qualities to damsels, detectives and demons separately and together! Includes “detectives” of an Amazonian flavor, magical or not.
  • “Radcliffe’s Refrain” (reprise—included with sub-subchapter opening): A quick rehash of the demonic trifecta vis-à-vis Ann Radcliffe’s pioneering of it. Also talks about her history as “mother to the Gothic novel” and problematic legacy following her disappearance.
  • “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons, part zero: Derelicts, Medusa and H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph; i.e., the Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’“: Outlines the idea of “derelicts”—be they damsels, detectives or sex demons—through Medusa/Giger’s xenomorph as involving all three.
  • “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives” (feat. Out of Sight, Nina Hartley, Velma, and Zeuhl): Further explores damsels and detectives as classic Neo-Gothic devices, the oppositional praxis of which has survived well into the present; i.e., in pornographic language, like Nina Hartley, but also tamer/non-magical murder mysteries and echoes of Radcliffe (who conflated extramarital sex with rape and death) through J-Lo from Out of Sight and her violent, cop-like tendencies, but also Velma from Scooby Doo. We’ll examine the original character as a cis detective, but also my ex, Zeuhl; i.e., as someone I’m exposing: a good trans Velma demasking an evil one after surviving their abuse for years!
  • “Demons and Dealing with Them; or Abandonment, Dark Worship and Vengeful Sacrifice When Dissecting Radcliffe” (feat. Ridley Scott’s The Terror and Alien: Covenant, Ninja Scroll, The Dark Crystal, and Harmony Corrupted): Further explores demons in a similar fashion, but touches on additional ways these complicated beings needn’t be feared (through the process of abjection) but celebrated as Satanic liberators freeing our minds from Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and the settle-colonial status quo. Among his other work (namely The Terror), discusses Ridley Scott’s vengeful dissection of Radcliffe’s “spectre” in Alien: Covenant; i.e., as a dark matter of postcolonial revenge against James Cameron’s Aliens, then camps Scott by dissecting him and resurrecting Radcliffe as a dark whore of her former self (through several close-reads; e.g., with Harmony Corrupted, and about Ninja Scroll and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance)!
  • “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress” (feat. Ann Radcliffe, Sailor Moon, The Ronin Warriors, and Harmony Corrupted): “Egon, you’ve earned it.” An afterword that gives Ann Radcliffe some long-awaited praise, and talks about the important of camping demonic sex work vis-à-vis her worthwhile contributions; i.e., with Japanese anime, cosplay, fan art, and more (e.g., Sailor Moon) during sex work as a revolutionary hermeneutic and applied synthesis.

(model and artist: Keighla Night and Persephone van der Waard)

• “Dark Xenophilia; or, ‘Far Out, Dude!’ Monster-fucking and Magic Girls Helping Foster Dark Radical (Communist) Empathy During Healthy Sex Education (for Children and Young Adults into Adulthood)“: A subchapter that divides in two, each half roughly weighing the undead side of the animal monster equation (furries and furry panic) and the demonic side (drugs and acid Communism, but also children’s sex education going from young adults into adulthood; e.g., Sailor Moon, The Last Unicorn and Giger’s xenomorph); i.e., when raising dark empathy tied to the natural world as alien under capital, and reunited through Communism’s good sex education tied to dark xenophilic monsters and drug use: as a poetic, awareness- and intelligence-raising device versus fascism and capital’s polar opposite of that (re: the state is incompatible with life, thus empathy and consent, pimping nature as monstrous-feminine). Opening Length: ~22 pages.
  • “Dark Xenophilia,” part one: “Monster-Fucking and Furry Panic, from Ace to Ass” (feat. Lycans, Chimeras, and Sentient Animals; e.g., Cuwu, “Pelts,” Erika Eleniak, Sonic the Hedgehog and Pippi Longstocking): Delves further into undead qualities of natural monsters, expressing “monster-fucking” and dark xenophilia as a potentially ace-yet-pornographic form of sex-positive education through public nudism: featuring lycans, chimeras, and sentient animals to cope with trauma that is often something to live with; e.g., furry panic; e.g., Dario Argento’s “Pelts” (2006), Erika Eleniak from Under Siege (1989), Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) and Pippi Longstocking.
  • “‘Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit’; or Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism” (feat. the Monstrous-Feminine of Magic Girls, Unicorns and Xenomorphs): Applies the same dark xenophilic logic to explore sex(-positive) education (from children to adults) through demons and acid Communism; i.e., spells and drugs, featuring the transformative monstrous-feminine of magic girls, unicorns and xenomorphs; e.g., Sailor Moon, The Last Unicorn, Nimona and Alien (among others). A witch is a witch, but which witch will you be? We’ll consider this question, too, vis-à-vis GNC ideologies from an ideological and morphological standpoint; re: “the trans, intersex and non-binary mode of being” as tied to older dead cultures and andro/gynodiversity in Gothic art, before closing things out with an exploration of radical drug use and revolution per Mark Fisher’s acid Communism inside capitalist hauntologies (which then segues into the rebirth of the Communist mind in dead capitalist retro-future spaces, figuratively the shopping mall of the zombie apocalypse).

(artist:  Persephone van der Waard)

Volume Three (2025)

• “Reversing Abjection: Describing Sexuality vs Prescribing Sexual Modesty“: Discusses reversing abjection vs prescribing sexual modesty in Gothic stories; i.e., on the same half-real stages; e.g., Alien and its own 1970s rape fantasies borrowed from older times and transported into newer retro-future ones.
• 1e. “Toxic Schlock Syndrome; or, an Early Stab at Cryptonymy: the Fur(r)tive Rebellion of Amazons, Body Hair and Whistleblowers in Duality (feat. Mercedes the Muse, Mugiwara, Mercy from Overwatch, and Autumn Ivy)”: Our holistic examination of the above ideas; i.e., combining them cryptonymically through body hair and whistleblower counterculture/schlock media (re: Mercedes)—but also Amazons per the theme of toxic sugar (re: Autumn Ivy) and GNC bodies (re: Mugiwara)—to conceptualize development: as an active, playful means of critical engagement/thought and poetic expression conducive to developing Gothic Communism in praxial opposition.

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About the Author

Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[12] The current white, female prime minister of Italy known for her fascist argumentation.

[13a] The idea that Amazons don’t wed or have sex is a heteronormative/cis-gendered myth, but its subversion is often non-binary and figurative.

[13b] As I conceive it, pre-fascism is the imaginary medieval-as-tyrannical being felt within the state of affairs during the Neo-Gothic period and its future evocations while the nation-state and modern war were first forming; fascism alludes to 20th-century revivals of an imaginary Rome revived through the black knights and similar Greater Evils of capitalist kayfabe defending the status quo during total war in Europe; and post-fascism is an attempt during Bretton Woods and British/American neoliberalism to conceal the fact that fascism not only wasn’t started in Italy or Germany but continues to thrive in the neoliberal hegemon (the fascist being a popular scapegoat in centrist media, but one that teams up with the American hero against Communism codified as chaos, queer, non-white, or alien; i.e., by trying to monopolize monsters—and by extension sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll [the monopolies of violence and terror]—for those aims, and which gentrify and decay to serve them; re: “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis“).

[14] She did! The Return of the Monstrous-Feminine (2022) is a

follow-up to the classic text of The Monstrous-Feminine analyses those contemporary films which explore social justice issues such as women’s equality, violence against women, queer relationships, race and the plight of the planet and its multi-species. Examining a new movement – termed by Creed as Feminist New Wave Cinema […] Creed looks at a range of diverse films including The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Nomadland, Carol, Raw, Revenge, and the television series The Handmaid’s Tale. These films center on different forms of revolt, from inner revolt to social, supernatural and violent revolt, which appear in Feminist New Wave Cinema. These relate in the main to the emergence of a range of social protest movements that have gathered momentum in the new millennium and given voice to new theoretical and critical discourses. These include: third and fourth wave feminism, the #MeToo movement, queer theory, race theory, the critique of anthropocentrism and human animal theory (source: Routledge).

Surprise, surprise, Creed’s still focused on films and “white girl shit” (white feminism co-opted #MeToo from women of color), but she does include work from queer theory and fourth wave feminism and not just Freud! Well, that’s great ‘n all, but I still have a bone to pick with her older “classic” self and her dance partner, Freud!