This post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second book sample series originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact“ (2024). That series was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two’s assorted chapters and its twin modules, the Undead and Demons. As usual, this promo series (and all its posts) are written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out now (5/1/2024)! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets'” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer at the bottom of the page.
Picking up from where “‘The Roots of Trauma, part two: Healing through ‘Rape’“! left off…
Bad Dreams, part two: Transforming Our Zombie Selves (and Our War-like, Rapacious Toys) by Reflecting on the Wider World through the Rememory of Personal Trauma (feat. Jadis)
My room is full of toys and things
But filled with nothing new
Just me and Clare alone in this
Enchanted, placid room
—Coburn Pharr; “Never, Never Land,” on Annihilator’s Never, Never Land (1990)
(artist: Harmony Corrupted)
As we concluded at the end of part one, the zombie isn’t merely a braindead, rotting corpse or literal infection; it’s an undead presence that rises from the grave to traumatically feed inside an expanded state of exception within the home (the Imperial Core): during rape play as something to camp profit with (catharsis always being a matter of return to painful things). While this process is anisotropic, it canonically denotes continuous state violence (often sanctioned theft, rape and murder but also division; e.g., the Middle-Passage diaspora and Jim Crow segregation) towards or from particular groups over time: animals, people of color, and Pagans, versus qualities of these groups fed into fearful colonizer attitudes that are guilty of, or feeling guilty about, former colonial acts, but also current xenophobic abuse happening regularly under the same-old system—what LukHash might call, in the spirit of “Ozymandias,” a “Museum of Failed Efforts” (2019); i.e., a dollhouse to play around inside. As we shall see with Jadis (who this subchapter is entirely dedicated to), such places are made from old abusive symbols; i.e., of personal trauma, which ludo-Gothic BDSM camps through rememory in order to subvert their historical freight as normally being dogmatic, thus menticidal.
From Volume Two, part one, I write, “Capital relies on dogma as something to internalize and serve profit on all registers—on and offstage, at home and abroad, by white male predators” (source). This extends to token agents (women acting like men, fags acting like straight people, etc), which is precisely what Jadis is and how they acted towards me. Moreover, harmful mentalities like theirs are informed by popular media such as videogames, which victims escape into only to be bombarded with the very ideas that drive their abusers at home and abroad. The effect is often one of recruitment (cops or victims). I continue,
Regarding videogames as a neoliberal form of dogma, from the early ’80s to the end of the Cold War and beyond, you went from public entertainment devices (arcades) that had a bunch of mostly young male clients cycling through them like a pimped-out sex worker… to the 1983 Atari Crash and subsequent 1985 smash-hit success of Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. encouraging the widespread sale of videogames in the Gothic’s usual haunt: among the middle class. Except this time, the elite wanted in through ways that didn’t exist during the Neo-Gothic revival: televisions as personal property that could funnel in their burgeoning ideology through the disguise of (expensive and highly recursive) games.
From the early days of Space Invaders (1978), Pac-Man (1980) or Donkey Kong (1981) to Mario, then (about seven years—twelve, if you start from 1973 when the elite began their first experiments with neoliberalism in South America), the usual place of neoliberal business and indoctrination transitioned from single arcade machines to larger amounts of money (from quarters to hundreds of dollars) per customer in each household (where there is more money to be had, and seasonally at that); i.e., a Stepford Wife, purchased for paychecks, not pocket change, and ready to implement the business model into the first generation of what would become the New World Order under neoliberal Capitalism: a world of us-versus-them enforced by neoliberal, monomythic copaganda’s harmful simulations of Amazonomachia to maintain the status quo at a socio-material level; re: the shadows of a new republic’s man-cave walls.
In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual (ibid.).
Whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies, falsehoods, and double standards; e.g., speedrunning as white, male and cis-het extending to streaming platform Kick’s Nazi pedophile problem, but also streamers like Dr. Disrespect[1] protected by the system like black penitents in an Ann Radcliffe novel (more on streamers when we look at weird canonical nerds like Caleb Hart, Ian Kochinski and Man Box culture, in Volume Three). Due to the euthanasia effect, token agents enjoy similar-if-temporary protections for as long as capital holds up to the degree that they will be permitted; e.g., J.K. Rowling or Hilary Clinton; i.e., two TERF Jadis respected for being powerful women in a man’s world, yet utterly refused to criticize them for their transphobic beliefs and hawkish attitudes (all tokens are closeted to some degree). In doing so, Jadis became the first TERF (and SWERF) I experienced, first-hand.
When you’re playing with rape, then (as we shall be doing with Jadis, post hoc), you must remember you’re playing with power as something to revisit and alter for workers’ benefits, aggregating on their behalf while facing the system aggregating self-righteously against you; i.e., the state employing DARVO and obfuscation in defense of profit, but also literally killing the whistleblower (e.g., Boeing; Second Thought’s “We All Know It’s Happening,” 2024) while saying “thinking of the women and children.” Token enforcers like Jadis will literally do such things in small; re: on people like me, who they segregation and brutalize through bad BDSM.
Simply put, profit defends itself, thus rape, through violence and lies, but also masks, costumes, performative roles, etc; i.e., per my PhD’s thesis statement, Capitalism sexualizes everything—doing so by tokenizing outwards through a rightwards radicalization that polices and harvests labor through nature-as-monstrous-feminine. In turn, those touched by trauma tend to advertise it (that “goth” look) as something to play with. This includes playing with our abusers through our own cryptonymy—our masks and costumes, boundaries and barriers, our ludo-Gothic BDSM!
Volume Three shall discuss the praxis of this—of the appreciative irony of Gothic counterculture during demon BDSM (which, in hindsight, is more-or-less synonymous with ludo-Gothic forms). Part two of “Bad Dreams” will now consider returning nakedly to such sites of exchange relative to childhood abuse chasing us into the future; i.e., to achieve a paradoxical state of undead healing and rememory through ourselves as toy-like, and our toys as like us: oscillating between alive and unalive in ways that only humans and ludo-Gothic BDSM can. Eventually we can reach a post-scarcity world, but in the interim, trauma will remain; keeping with paradoxes, we must evoke the threat during liminal expression, or the healing process generally won’t work (what Gothic poetics like to refer to as “facing one’s past”). For me, that means evoking Jadis as someone who genuinely excited me:
(artist: Jadis)
Note: This section will be rather intense, insofar as it explores some of the most painful moments of my adult life. But such honesty is important; it’s just not easy to recollect without echoes of pain, of trauma—a frisson, if you will. It also, in this case, involves someone very real and with means (daddy’s “fuck you” money).
To that, I’m choosing to out my abuser to the degree that I’m currently comfortable. I don’t want to show their face any more than I have (re: their portrait, painted by me). The above photo merely demonstrates their being a real person; i.e., someone who raped me in the past per my generalized, expanded definition of the word (re: someone who disempowered me with the specific intent to cause extensive and prolonged emotional, psychosexual harm). I would ask my readers to leave Jadis alone—not for their sake, but mine; litigation is the luxury of those with money, which I do not have, and while what I saw is true, much of it would be difficult-if-not-impossible to prove in a court of law (as rape generally is). Instead, I will let this book speak for me, chronicling what I survived as the Gothic does: as a castle-narrative to explore as composed of space and time (re: the chronotope). —Perse
(exhibit 37c1a: Source; a Fetlife conversation between Jadis and I, when we first met. It merely establishes our similar taste in media—that we met shortly after I put up a forum post looking for Gothic roleplayers on the site. It was during the middle of the Pandemic, and they were going through a divorce [which they only finalized after we were living together—more on that in a bit]. Intrigued by my advertisement, they responded. We didn’t end up roleplaying much. Instead, we sexted for five weeks straight, after which I moved in with them. Shortly after that, they started abusing me for sex, but also cooking, cleaning and general housework; i.e., women’s work as a means of all of the above.)
The opening to this subchapter—part zero, “Jadis’ Dollhouse” (included in this post)—covers some basic points about personal trauma and rememory as a liminal, radicalizing process. After that, we two further subdivisions concern myself as the test subject for what ultimately crystalized into ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., my further radicalization while surviving Jadis (who, traumatized themselves, certainly advertised their penchant for doll-like fictions, above):
- Part one, “Meeting Jadis“: Explores how Jadis and I met—indeed, were attracted by our mutual weirdness and trauma—and related to each other through toys that were equally sexy and weird. Divides in two halves, which explore further ludo-Gothic qualities to dolls useful during BDSM, which I had to reclaim from Jadis to eventually escape them and write this book with/about.
- Part two, “Escaping Jadis“: Articulates my escape from my abuser, detailing the tremendous feelings I felt at the time (and which shaped my scholarly and artistic work afterwards, including ludo-Gothic BDSM).
In short, ludo-Gothic BDSM happened through painful reflection regarding my childhood, but also its consequences relaid in Gothic language, theory and experience; i.e., writing these portions about Jadis and I, thinking about them, then writing the three books that came after but which I published before the Jadis elements, which I’m returning to now (as a Gothic heroine would: starting with letters that lead me back to a site of decayed abuse inside my mind, my dreams, my work as haunted by Jadis).
All this being said, I couldn’t have formulated my arguments without trying to find love, getting hurt, and struggling to heal afterwards by assembling and weighing everything as a profound and complicated object lesson. Things come home to roost as ghosts of themselves, and generally overlap with redoublings thereof; i.e., Harmony’s “castle” vs Jadis’ as facing off when I go back to a shared chronotope: writing the Jadis pages before meeting Harmony to then mutually act out these scenes again to regain power for us both. As such, these specific passages (and much of the rest of the Monster Modules) will seem somewhat dated compared to the opening chapter and everything we’ve previously examined having come afterwards.
Except, that’s precisely the point: a revival, for which I return to older passages to better understand how I conceived ideas I might otherwise take for granted. We’re literally conducting rememory by looking at my recollections of/reflections on the past as aged, undead; i.e., of a previous zombie moment in time to dig up and play with again through holistic expression: as a matter of recursive revisitation and regeneration, always falling apart and out-of-point but coming together by virtue of transformation into something better. Said moments aren’t something I want to change, here, but stick to; i.e., as things to play out by letting you (as much as me) play with it yourselves, relatively unaltered: the ghost of my past abuse, whispering of Jadis’ abuse of me, post-seduction (with songs like Emily Portman’s 2010 “Two Sisters,” below):
And yonder sits my sister the queen
Oleander yolling
She drownèd me in the cold, cold stream
Down in the waters rolling (source: Genius).
Changing them too much, and in effect their tune, kind of defeats the point, I would think. There will be revisions and at times playful, even cheeky editions to make things more bearable than they might be completely unfiltered, just not substantial ones that transform/camp anything to an unrecognizable degree. This is my rape we’re talking about and I don’t want to disguise that. Instead, I’ll let the things that befell me haunt you amid my usual academic architecture and earthly variables reenacting older dooms than mine tied to the same system. That smaller princess Jadis tortured under the guise of martyred virtue? Like all the dead, she’s still there in the dark, waiting for you…
Before we get to Jadis and my ghost inside the dollhouse, though, let’s go over some of these broad-but-important ideas I mentioned that make up said house (and its dolls)…
The Rememory of Personal Trauma, part zero: Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse, the Birthplace of Ludo-Gothic BDSM; Some Points about Dolls
“Welcome home, Michael!”
—Laurie Strode, to Michael Myers, Halloween (2018)
I met Jadis in April 2019, several years into my postgraduate work. While their abuse certainly catalyzed my creating of ludo-Gothic BDSM, the process was admittedly already underway by the time we crossed paths. Yes, the word first appeared after our separation—in Volume Zero, October 8th, 2023—but I had already been flirting with the idea for nearly several years[2] before meeting Jadis (my grad work started in 2017 and I published my master’s thesis, December 2018); not to mention, I had conceptualized the giving of rings and collars as a kind of fantastical BDSM in my own fiction writing as early as high school, which was influenced by Tolkien (from Volume One):
- Madoff concludes, “The idea of gothic ancestry endured because it was useful,” and I’m inclined to agree. Except I would extend this utility to Gothic Communism as something to fashion through the same myths of ancestry found in the usual haunts; i.e., mirroring the unspoken but still advertised material conditions of Pax Americana that Tolkien’s “empire where the sun never sets” was suspiciously covered in shadows and bathed in blood. To touch on those, you often have to go somewhere else when formulating your own critiques (the monsters, psychosexual predicaments, and lairs of various kinds). This can seem purely ahistorical, but generally the goals of any historical play (re: Shakespeare) or historical Gothic novel (re: Bakhtin’s chronotope) utilizes some degree of invention and informative chaos (re: Aguirre’s geometries of terror) amid the displacement and disassociation: crafting your own histories and bloodlines that reverse the process of abjection in a very Gothic way—through the ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., the fake blood of Gothic horror for sex-positive reasons made in the spirit of fun, but also interrogating trauma by camping it. / This doesn’t take an Oxford scholar. For example, my older brother once invented his own Eastern European leader for a third-grade assignment and called him “Mr. Kazakhstan” while using a picture of Stalin; despite how this would have been right around the fall of the Soviet Union, my brother’s teacher didn’t recognize the photo and gave him an A+ (angering my mother to no end). Keeping in line with the same family tradition, and informed by my mother’s bringing of Russian and Eastern European history home to us kids, I wrote my own fantasy story in the early 2000s where an incestuous tyrant called Bane (the name comes from Weaponlord, 1995, not Batman) forces his half-sister, Sigourney, and half-brothers to wear magic rings that keep them bound to the family castle. When Sigourney cuts off her finger and tries to run, her half-brother forces her to wear a collar instead [below]. Over time, she gives birth to Bane’s rape child: an incredibly intelligent/latently powerful witch named Alyona. Alyona is kind and book-smart— with her non-rapey uncles and her pet ravens there for her as friends (and also Ileana, who trains Alyona to harness her dormant powers to escape Bane’s clutches). Eventually Alyona goes on to defeat her own father-uncle and save her family from certain destruction (with their help, as she cannot defeat him alone) [source, pg. 273-274].
(artist: Persephone van der Waard)
- In my case, my poetic division, displacement and disassociation amounted to Alyona as something I materially created in a barbaric, pointedly antiquated offshoot of my family home informed by Tolkien’s imaginary one: a castle filled with psychosexual counterfeits talking about my abuse as arranged chronotopically around me; i.e., Bakhtin’s dynastic primacy and hereditary rites speaking in the usual fatal portraits, suits of armor and coats of arms, but animated by the endless legends occupying the same space through its past-and-present inhabitants [ibid., pg. 276].
- Yes, Tolkien was a philologist (an expert in ancient written languages) and Beowulf aficionado—basically an old, dusty scholar who was well-versed in the Scandinavian legends of dragons, war and plunder. As such, he undoubtedly appeared as totally lacking in the language of women, ethnic minorities (the East is a dark place for him) and gay people. And yet similar to Milton, he had his devilish moments, and similar to my crafting of Alyona, there existed a tremendously secret, divided self waiting inside Tolkien’s own psychomachic dialogs about his own dissenting opinions; i.e., the shadowy spaces of a deeply troubled man who, as we’ve already established, was at least publicly allergic both to the Gothic and allegory as a theatrical device […] as classical symbols of status and power exchange. Rings are given and worn; the Ringwraiths (and their rings) are smaller abstractions of the Faustian bargain manifest through the wearing of Sauron’s rings as harmful symbols of power but also power exchange as having a torturous effect on one’s ability to relate to others; e.g., of Frodo to Sam. The magic becomes a metaphor, a kind of BDSM shorthand—re: not just our hobbits, but also similar acts of gift-giving that famously involve the ring as a kind of contract that is worn, generally in a variety of roleplays (which, for Tolkien, were primarily chaste in their execution—excluding the raw, lethal force of dead orcs, of course) [ibid., pg. 279].
- If I made Alyona and my own gay-penned torture castle to interrogate a Gothic living situation through BDSM theatrics (and in response to Tolkien as someone to camp), then I don’t think it’s really much of a stretch to see Tolkien doing the same to canonize the Gothic; i.e., his borrowed bestiary gnawing at the back of his own mind about the imperfections of the heteronormative West and its own imperfect bloodline. Except for him, the abstraction of the Ring was something to offer up during a ritualized sacrifice that, once invoked (using a volcano, no less), defeats fascism once and for all, letting things “return to normal” after the glory of Gondor’s white castle is restored through the same-old monomyth purifying the blood through a trial by fire into Hell (versus already functioning normally through the endless cycle of war and false hope under Tolkien’s brand of Capitalist Realism apologizing for nation-states) [ibid., pg.282].
Given their proficiency in BDSM, though, I doubt the idea would have come to fruition as it did without Jadis’ “help.”
Given that time is a circle and not a straight line, though, I want to add that isolating any first-mover is kind of arbitrary. Beyond my childhood/formative years, Zeuhl put me on a collision course with Jadis, and Jadis sent me towards Cuwu, Bay and Harmony (among others), bringing us to this exact moment in time. Instead of pinning it all on Jadis, then, the entire subchapter seeks to considers Jadis’ site of abuse as something to raise and rebuild in small; i.e., during the rememory process concerned my personal abuse as something to resurrect and play with by returning home to face the music again: as a matter of playtime.
To that, part zero of “Personal Trauma” outlines Jadis as someone to summon during liminal expression, specifically ludo-Gothic BDSM as coming home to its own origins. To that, the ensuing dollhouse has been made to safely invigilate my unironic Great Destroyer and learn from what they did to me; i.e., their harm as emblematic of capital’s business-as-usual, its seasonal rapes of nature through past victims commercialized in various ways (re: Pagans and Halloween). All become a kind of cultural zombie to transform away from systemic harm by reflecting on my personal trauma. As something to join with a broader pedagogy of the oppressed, doing so challenges rape as a matter of profit under capital. Rape equals profit through Capitalism, and Jadis raped me to profit in all the usual ways that capital does—playing with my emotions like a doll they could slowly break.
(source: Ray Morse’s “Blumhouse Surprises CinemaCon with Terrifying Halloween Trailer, 2018)
Whatever the register and scale, the trick to subverting rape and its trauma during ludo-Gothic BDSM is, of course, irony. We summon the destroyer less as Michael Myers (and his killer’s doll-like mask) and any legitimate capacity to inflict harm, but instead as something that could never actually destroy us. In doing so, the summoning speaks to the Imperial Boomerang’s proverbial “chickens” coming home to roost; i.e., the grim harvest reifying through a toothless destroyer persona felt during calculated risk, a death ritual. Imagine, for fun, a Mr. Stay Puft, that unlike Ghostbusters, actually speaks to the sorts of abuses Michael’s fatal nostalgia intimates—a remake, to use the industry term, of a reckoning tied to the monstrous-feminine coming to collect.
Amongst all of that complicated forgery are two basic things: the ghost of the counterfeit as something to either abject/alienate or dance with, thus humanize and understand, but also the awesome means to break Capitalist Realism; i.e., Hamlet’s play to “catch the conscience of the king!”
Child or not, ask someone to remember past abuse, and they will invariably create a home with a monster inside; i.e., something unheimlich (alien) that, despite its foreign element, actually belongs there: as a matter of unaddressed abuse on a systemic level bleeding into the rememory of daily life under said system relaid through personal experience. While this includes the miniature, Volume Zero already examined the kind of anti-Semitic counterfeits on display in stories like Hereditary as aping older and older ones in defense, to some extent, of capital (re: Rosemary’s Baby but also much further back, to Hammer of Witches).
Per our castle-narrative’s usual mise-en-abyme, then, we’re left with the dollhouse as a particular kind of Gothic poiesis I want to utilize and stress when bringing Jadis back to life: a location, but specifically a recursive, anisotropic, concentric ordeal tied to a likeness of the home as cryptomimetically invaded by its own history that can, per the Gothic, get up and move around, but also be reinvented, mid-loop. It’s zombie-like, to be sure, but also ghostly and vampiric as well; i.e., an undead recreation of Capitalism-in-small as hopelessly imbricated with us and our own fragmented, painful memories: embroiled in the chronotope’s messy assemblage bouncing back and forth on the same hellish mirror’s black glass. Simply put, rememory’s a bitch, but it and its doll-like devices aren’t monopolized by anyone.
As previously stated, part zero of this subchapter covers some basic points about personal trauma and rememory as a radicalizing process using dolls; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as my attempts to not only heal myself-as-undead from Jadis’ abuse, but heal, thus transform the world from those like Jadis and the criminogenic factors that give rise to such tragedies past, present and future; i.e., normally dressed up as “play” in bad faith. To kill Jadis’ power and by extension capital’s, though, we’ll have to summon them home to such places, using dolls and BDSM: to kill their potential to rise inside/outside ourselves and bring rise to abuse that oscillates, in a half-real sense, between the imaginary and the real, the person and the place.
Sp why dolls and BDSM? In terms of a thesis argument, dolls are central to the rememory process as undead, which involves feeding and BDSM. And as we’ve established (from my modular thesis):
Poetically there’s not much difference functionally-speaking between feeding and transformation. As a kind of power/knowledge exchange, each has a rich, unique history woven into itself; i.e., as someone’s or some society’s older preference serving as monstrous code to proudly shape into cryptonymic cultural forms with their own double operations: showing and concealing or vice versa regarding the Gothic’s usual erotic medieval paradoxes.
In turn, rememory uses Gothic poetics that, when played with in irony forms, summon up old memories tried to games of power and exchange that we can use after the fact; i.e., to reclaim our power as taken from us through state-sanctioned forms and byproducts (which domestic abuse fundamentally is: the policing of property through copaganda [and other criminogenic conditions/dogma] to maintain the nuclear family as part of a settler colony project).
For example, when Jadis and I first roleplayed online, we played over text to see if we were even sexually compatible before doing roleplays. The scenario was a simple hook up, me coming to them. I knocked and they answered; they asked what I’d like to drink. Playing along, I replied, “A root beer!” After they “got” me one from the imaginary fridge, we made small talk and then had sex (sexting and exchanging photos). Turns out, we were very compatible (we sexted for five weeks straight, after which they came to collect me). However, as a token of their appreciation of the original opening scene, Jadis also brought an actual bottle of root beer with them to Michigan when they came to take me to Florida.
To be honest, it’s frankly a cute memory and one I had forgotten until tonight when taking notes for these revisions. Unfortunately Jadis tacitly rescinded the agreements they had with me, but only after I was in Florida (all of my immediate family live in Michigan); i.e., abusing the doll-like mechanics of Gothic poetics and BDSM by treating me like a doll they could abuse by virtue of the unequal side of our relationship: the material factors. But those sorry details don’t make the root beer memory any less touching to me; it was before the rapes took place, and frankly provides a cute, bittersweet reminder of what lowered my defenses to start with. Surviving all of the above (with anecdotes to spare), I’ll be recollecting such events for the rest of the subchapter, but want to comment on various oddities for those who survive as I did.
To that, sex workers post-survival are generally left feeling alienated by their labor as something they want to repurpose to their advantage; i.e., wanting to get down to business (a special set of skills) but not get jerked around by future partners, FWBs, fuck buddies, what-have-you: to be good at handling “joysticks” but using them to steer the owner (and us holding them) towards something we both want. In terms of that, sex workers generally have to be our own pimps, requiring some inventiveness to achieve liberation while working out in the world, trying to survive; i.e., making up the rules of what is exchanged for what, tit for proverbial tat; e.g., cheeseburgers for sex, or cuddles for slow walks on the beach. It really doesn’t matter what, provided the rules are clearly expressed and help deviate the proceedings away from the usual historical outcomes the state is built to achieve: rape.
Or so it would seem. As we’ll see with Jadis, rapists come to you with smiles, but often betray themselves by always feeling a bit off (red flags): punishers presenting as benevolent, but in masks/costumes that quickly slip to show their true colors.
To that, another player can still harm you despite seeming to be compatible and down to fuck, but also after establishing a social-(a)sexual agreement that isn’t a marriage contract: “I work, you fuck me.” That’s basically what Jadis and I agreed to, which seemed fair on its face (we’ll get to the particulars between Jadis and I, in part one of the subchapter). Indeed, a sex worker relies on such agreements because those, combined with their trade (of sex exchanged for different things), are a common skill we rely on as sacred; i.e., tantamount to our survival as sex workers.
The whole thing sounds simple enough in theory—to fuck someone every day provided the person plays by the rules we both establish and doesn’t harm us in the bargain—but we’re also doing it knowing such contracts are built on trust in the face of regular historical abuses; i.e., performed by bad actors doing what capital always does: profit as a matter of rape per settler-colonial (Cartesian, heteronormative) models of power exchange. The two go hand-in-hand under capital, Capitalism being the dominant socio-economic force on planet Earth. As we go back into the world with the post-abuse skills we’ve gained to forge new destinies, post-abuse, it can feel a bit like Sarah Connor’s “dark highway at night; to be in uncharted territory making up history as we go along.” We want to liberate ourselves using what we got, but as the old saying goes, “Once bitten, twice shy!” It becomes a prison, a holding cell, one shared with ghosts of old lovers, dead and gone:
The name of the game, then, is determining compatibility alongside intent while establishing the rules between individual players seeking to encourage the valuing of nature and basic human rights across all aspects of society (until they become second-nature, recultivating the Superstructure). This ultimately takes someone (or multiple people[2a]) for us to work with; i.e., as a matter of playing house/with dolls through BDSM, but also experimentation and ultimately rememory through them for the interrogation and negotiation of power and trauma as undead. Arbitrating a product (sex and other labor types) that has infinite value, we play to remember the fun bits (re: Jadis’ root beer) and the painful ones (re: Jadis being happier raping me than respecting our agreements). These, in turn, occur within calculated risk as a safe space/dialog on things that are funny and fucked up, yielding Austenian ironies (“a truth universally acknowledged”); i.e., we’re told how things should be, then learn that they actually can be whatever we want them to be, mid-play.
For example, my friend Mavis discovered this, one night, when dealing with an obscene phone caller named Marty back in the day. One night in the ’80s, the landline ringing woke Mavis up (there was no Internet or cell phones back then, except car phones for rich people). They got up and answered it. “What are you wearing?” the voice on the other end asked. “Oh, I’m naked!” Mavis replied. The caller paused, clearly surprised. “Really?” they asked, to which Mavis replied, “Yup!” It was a completely random event, but one that Mavis—a sex worker earlier in their life but now involved with an unfaithful, abusive man—was able to regain some feeling of agency doing (and combating boredom): acting like a “doll”; i.e., a hot piece of ass someone couldn’t control unless Mavis wanted them to. The telephone call was something of a buffer, in that respect (similar to “flashing” on the Internet, per revolutionary cryptonymy’s acts of showing and hiding things to assist in worker liberation).
(source: Wikimedia)
Before we proceed onto my personal trauma with Jadis as something I reclaimed through dolls as an undead rememory device, I want to give a broad, generalized note about dolls as a matter of practice (ourselves as doll-like); i.e., one that that applies to the rest of the subchapter and its place in the Undead Module (indented for emphasis):
The interrogation of trauma is often regressive, especially with hindsight and know-how to better highlight that fact. For example, the transformation of my undead self through the rememory of personal trauma with Jadis concerns dolls; i.e., how they factored into ludo-Gothic BDSM as evolving into itself. Except, there’s a catch: dolls aren’t explicitly undead. In fact, they aren’t explicitly anything. A doll is a “blank monster,” insofar as it can be, undead, demonic, and/or animalistic/anthropomorphic.
Furthermore, while our focus here will be interrogating and negotiating trauma, this occurs through BDSM, which is primarily a demonic characteristic; likewise, my relationship to Jadis was one of dolls that were often undead, demonic and nature-themed to varying degrees. Simply put, they had trauma, liked BDSM, and were an entomologist who worked in pest control. So I was exposed to all of the things that went into what eventually became Gothic Communism, its modules and, by extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM!
Even so, the emphasis of this subchapter is still the rememory of personal trauma (an undead characteristic) through BDSM, which the undead can still do, albeit by feeding in a vitalistic sense; i.e., passing knowledge and/or power through the metaphorical exchange of various kinds of essence. In other words, they tend to exchange knowledge and/or power through feeding and instinctual behaviors that tie/contribute to trauma versus bartering in any kind of way that seems outwardly intelligent or divorced from unthinking appetites.
Of course, there is the nature of the Faustian bargain, which generally has a predatory component to it that could be considered feeding with a bit of poetic leeway (to feast on one’s soul, versus owning it). But these kinds of poetic distinctions won’t really matter in the following subchapter—save to clarify that I’m mostly talking about dolls, which again can be assigned any monstrous quality you want. I merely want to mention some of these exceptions now to account for the incongruous elements this subchapter will invariably yield when parsed; i.e., regarding the holistic nature of its examination into my history with Jadis and our combined monstrous poetics informing liberation as a poetic ordeal, thus coming equipped with poetic exceptions; e.g., The Night House being concerned with trauma and ghosts, only to gradually shift focus away from the undead towards a sex demon[2b] obsessed with psychosexual domination.
Despite these incongruities, I will try to emphasize all of my examples in this subchapter through an undead lens; i.e., even when they are predominantly demonic according to my definitions. This can go either way with dolls (and especially with BDSM through dolls). Keeping with the Undead Module, though, we’ll still be considering their undead potential, first and foremost. There will doubtless also be lingering issues and questions we won’t be able to answer here about demons, and this subchapter is holistic and idiosyncratic enough (re: proto-ludo-Gothic BDSM and dolls) that it probably deserves its own module (or a spot somewhere in the Poetry Module). Except, I’ve since organized it as a deliberate segue between “The Imperial Boomerang” and “The Monomyth” subchapters; it’s not going anywhere.
Given the subchapter’s taking down roots, then, I’ll be focusing on formative trauma while keeping the doll subchapter in the Undead Module. Rest assured, demons will get their time in the sun, later in the volume!
Another way to look at dolls is they’re fun. Simply put, I like them; fetishes are generally doll-like, reducing things to an abstract means of play that nonetheless concerns the ritualistic summoning of trauma, like a voodoo doll, into something ultimately unable to cause harm: “Show us on the doll, where they touched you.” Simply put, dolls are useful when telling things that might otherwise be too difficult (or dangerous) to say or act out.
More to the point, dolls are fun play with—to dress up and fuck/otherwise engage with less by literal means, alone, and more in relation to other people as a kind of theatre that invokes objectification as an ontological statement one occupies and moves through. In doing so, these various Russian dolls speak to the human condition as alienized under capital as a settler-colonial structure over space-time; re: Harmony and I engaging among such spirits like a kind of interactive data bouncing between us and our various devices, mid-castle-narrative; i.e., me fucking of my doll as we do consent-non-consent, but also while thinking about stories that would seem to theatrically point to hidden realities for us to wonder and laugh about versus feeling fearful towards:
Let’s proceed. Before we get to Jadis in parts one and two, I want to go over ludo-Gothic BDSM—what it is, followed by its process of exchange using Gothic poetics, and finally its dialectical-material qualities bucking the Gothic’s psychoanalytic side of things.
First, a reiteration of the concept at large, based on what we’ve covered so far and will continue to explore (indented for emphasis):
Capital is as old as zombies, and zombies, acting, shelter and prostitution (“dolls”) are far older still. But under capital and its powerful illusions, they allow us to regress and play with power to release anxiety and dispel abjection; i.e., through castled clichés during calculated risk; e.g., fucking the queen, the mistress, the sire’s daughter and, in effect, “doing one’s duty” as a matter of Gothic innuendo/euphemism (which generally combine food, death, war and rape into mixed metaphors; e.g., “to cook one’s goose” or “butter one’s biscuit”) and cutesy anachronisms regarding the hushed medieval reality of incestuous procreation.
This “ludo-Gothic BDSM” plays with rape by encapsulating its lived realities in general; e.g., with a wife who can’t consent, the servant put to heel, the vengeful or covetous man, etc, as a historical-material means of living in the castle/storming it as a theatrical, fourth-dimensional, half-real matter of apocalypse. However in-between, though, such liminalities are always informed by earlier forms of rape and warfare evoked during fascism in the present space and time; i.e., to a hauntological time period I’ve called “pre-fascism,” or essentially the medieval period as a matter of discourse that loops in on itself, mise-en-abyme, as “ancient.” Despite the quotes, though, this discourse is as old as our aforementioned zombies, rape, acting and prostitution, including a Quixotic effect Plato would describe as being “in the cave.”
That’s essentially what abjection is, you see, what zombies are as a matter thereof—only incomprehensible horrors by virtue of emotional/Gothic unintelligence, immaturity and deflated class/cultural awareness (which include racial factors) becoming a mind prison, a menticide that serves profit through unironic violence. When the voices of the dead return, said prison leads those trammeled by state illusions (canonical Gothic Romances) to cut off Medusa’s head: to silence her and nature as monstrous-feminine, then keep harvesting them. Sex—though specifically sex with monsters through general kink activities that practice boundary-forming and consent as an asexual exchange—is the best place to start as far as reversing abjection goes (along with the other main Gothic theories per our iconoclastic doubles, synthetic oppositional groupings and creative successes achieving the basics: anger/gossip, monsters and camp); it’s what ludo-Gothic BDSM is all about!
Per the Wisdom of the Ancients, or cultural understanding of the imaginary past, we summon said “past” as counterfeit (apocalypse) to better understand it, but also transform it to suit our needs; i.e., playing with it to dispel its canonical power in favor worker power that humanizes the zombie as person, house, toy and childhood, but also rape and war as “dead,” in quotes!
In exploring ludo-Gothic BDSM through Jadis, we’ll be starting with my zombie-like childhood, toys and relationships as doll-like. As this subchapter segues into the next, though, we’ll be moving onto older forms of undead that, like history itself, are constantly being played with through the monomyth, hence dragged forward out from a hauntological shadow zone felt during these kinds of performative games: the Cycle of Kings per various tyrants and imposing old guys; i.e., great men of history expressed as spectres of “Caesar” (or Marx) to attain a Numinous effect.
More on that after we’ve dealt with Jadis. After all, they taught me how to abuse BDSM, which I have since tried very hard to subvert. But I must abstract their return to do so; i.e., as a demonic, doll-like place to acquire forbidden knowledge, but also an undead place to feed and recover from trauma as forever a part of me: to go to and die inside, but also bring back the dead as fascist or anti-fascist to varying degrees. Something is always given and received. In turn, this might raise some purely philosophical questions, such as, “Can a doll be dead if it was never truly alive?”
While admittedly fun to think about, I want to encourage you to play with these things as a matter of theatrical application; i.e., that make you more emotionally and Gothically intelligent, thus sex positive, mid-synthesis. As you apply yourselves to play through ludo-Gothic BDSM, it should become second-nature; i.e., a if-not-simple-then-at-least-practical means of cultivating good social-sexual habits that contribute to daily activism: as a lingual, societal and material means of engagement between workers and the world, including its half-real past.
To that, while part two of “Personal Trauma” specifically investigates the reclaiming of dolls and doll-like zombie pieces (exhibit 38a-38b4), a dollhouse is really no different in practice than a Gothic castle (or some such place; re: the danger disco). Such revivals are ultimately necessary if we are to learn from the past, thus escape its routine, historical-material abuse under state myopias. This rememory happens in more ways than one—to literally be buried inside, but also to confront wild, reclaimed-by-nature, overcome-with-decay aspects about it that are less rosy than we care to admit upon reinspection as adults.
Bear in mind, doing so isn’t meant to trap us in stasis, but to invoke live burial, hence undeath, as a feeling that puts us in touch with the world around us supplying the clues; i.e., as between a living and dead position that best reflects our lived trauma as something a) we survived, and b) that survives the dead. Live burial, then, is a kind of forward-facing regression, one whose death therapy grants an apocalypse unto itself. As such, Jadis’ dollhouse is an undead structure I made of their likeness; i.e., as a kind of rape play to yield better future outcomes according to a cannibalistic[3] legacy that yields routine Gothic confusions and demises, but also rebirths, resurrections, returns.
Inside the following pages, these effects play out in deliciously recursive, painfully erotic forms: entombed through hubris as something to theatrically deal “death” unto ourselves and those who would harm us. Once inside the dollhouse (or Metroidvania, below), schadenfreude (and other complex sensations linked to generational trauma) reliably emerge to—given the right amount of attention and care—become suitably palliative during rape play as cathartic; i.e., a safe space to avoid actual harm inside as having happened during past attempts having already gone back to a given childhood home haunted by past invasions coming back, back, back; e.g., the Terminator to 1984, Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin into different fatal portraits (specially from Portrait of Ruin, left), and the heroine from Smile (2022). Each time, it’s the corpse of empire displaced into a legendary ruin populated with imaginary monsters, imposters, damsels, knights, etc, as collectively speaking to real atrocities; i.e., that secret spell we’ve been chasing.
(source Tumblr post, Castlevania Gallery: May 22nd, 2016)
Per the process of abjection, the canonical goal is always to kill the past as undead, hence save the future for different in-groups afraid of zombies. But they can’t monopolize the procedure (or its violence) inside the state of exception. Whether for witches, witch hunters, or one disguised as the other (undercover cops/rebels), it’s like a washing machine stuck on spin cycle; i.e., always spinning with us inside it, trying to get clean in the same soapy water as haunted by various inescapable ghosts (of the counterfeit, of Caesar or Marx). Well past a healthy saturation point, there’s simply no avoiding the ambiguity that comes from prolonged contact with such things as alien, and censorship is pointless/conducive to genocide; we can only play with such things transparently to try and achieve a better outcome: by going in circles to achieve transformation.
These are clearly complicated feelings with complicated histories of play occurring over time using Gothic poetics. So it’s important to release them into society as a matter of de facto education, not profit for the sake of making the middle class horny and anxious without concern for the consequences (the white director/vice character problem). Whatever you create or grapple with yourselves, do so responsibly and in ways that invigilate your id-like extensions to an informed, prepared audience.
To that, I’ll just give just our earlier rule of thumb: residence or resident, “whatever a monster’s shape (size difference) or modular class (undead, demonic, animalistic), if it challenges the profit motive, it’s probably sex-positive; i.e., doesn’t instruct through unironic sexual coercion and rape” when evoking the master/slave (the heel and babyface, in kayfabe[4] circles), destroyer/sacrifice or abusive parent/child (the narcissistic mother or rapacious father): the dos and don’ts of toxic love, essentially! It can be a real treat to do “one’s duty” not as a dreaded task, at all, but an act of mutually consensual fun; i.e., one had between, for all intents and purposes, equals by matter of exchange during ludo-Gothic BDSM: between two consent parties playing the zombie and the summoner (to varying degrees, double standards, fetishes and clichés, etc)!
(artist: Evul)
Now that we’ve outlined ludo-Gothic BDSM as a historical-material process, let’s unpack its ability to exchange; i.e., as part of the ludo-Gothic process, whose toys and play are a BDSM means of exchange concerning trauma (and power) as something to confront during calculated risk.
There’s sex-positive and sex-coercive instances of this, hence good and bad play/acting/education during BDSM. For sex-coercive forms, the vector needn’t be strictly “rotten” in its appearance, though—just repressed through transgenerational violence that makes one feel undead, thus raped; i.e., belonging to the abused group and its devastated history directly or sitting adjacent to them from a fearful vantage point, a point of entry into the vector of exchange as traumatic; e.g., white women made to fear non-white men (especially African American men) as universal rapists “eating” them, but really any type of destroyer that can be fetishized to worship the dragon as something adopted to favor white men as the preferred dominator (e.g., serial killers and feudal lords, but also dragon masters, below). Through ludo-Gothic BDSM as an ironic process, then, “rape” becomes something to play with in ways that don’t assist/defend the nuclear family model; i.e., despite classically being used as guilty pleasure by conservative agents capitalizing on the ghost of the counterfeit.
In this respect, randomly threatening Princess Peach with Bowser’s monster cock (exhibit 37c1b, below) can easily make our point, provided its apocalyptic revelation comments on state trauma as repressed in zombie-like fashion; i.e., lobotomized, but also enforced during nightmarish, hauntological conditions of us-versus-them peril. Faced with the king’s “scepter,” a recoiling Peach can feel the creeping return of a barbaric, tyrannical past that never really left; i.e., the constant rape of white, Western women by their husbands as repressed, but also evoked per rememory by observing and performing xenophiles alike through a particularly nostalgic performance of unequal power exchange set to traditional markers thereof: the medieval despot as a kind of undead daddy dom, a reaper that doesn’t take the harvest for all its worth.
Except, this only becomes ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus cathartic, through revolutionary cryptonymy as visually fearsome, but coded paradoxically and ironically for maximum safety by players: to generate nerves that calm us, in spaces that actually allow for it. “Yeah, baby! Butter my biscuit! And I ain’t talkin’ ’bout love! Mommy wants to fuck and she got it bad!”
(exhibit 37c1b: Artist, left: Toxxy Kiss; right: unknown. The devil is in the details; the dragon as a kind of demon lover is, from a classical standpoint, a medieval, masculine rarefaction of greed, cruelty and evil: the fierce dominant, death-dealing performer famously associated with feudal tyrants of an especially legendary cruelty—i.e., the now-vampiric personas associated with the order of the dragon, namely Dracula, the Impaler [and older “draconian” leaders not explicitly tied to the dragon symbol; e.g., Genghis Khan] but also the Nazi as something to camp in oft-ambiguous ways: pointing hauntologically to such grim histories.
To that, the phrase “monster cock” promises several things all at once: a dick of unusual size, used by its fearsome, “undead” owner to commit performative acts of psychosexual violence [the bloodthirsty invader] associated with a barbaric past revived in the present. All become repressed under Capitalism, demanding reunion through various sex-positive BDSM rituals whose rememory struggles to forget and remember what has become lost; e.g., Peach—despite being small, dainty and fair—discovering that she enjoys the ritualized “peril” of the Koopa King’s “arsenal,” his huge zombie-king cock spreading her open; i.e., his Numinous boner running a train on her temple. Beyond the ghost of the counterfeit trapping the damsel between abject terror and rapt fascination, her sticky reunion with Bowser as a perceived “master” should strive to push beyond mere teasing and use good-faith xenophilia to transmute the heteronormative order [the spiked cock ring subverting the master’s collar as a servile hound’s anti-predation variant].
After all, the zombie, for persons of privilege, is a ravenous symbol of guilt that climbs out of a buried past—either a tyrant of the status quo or victims of said tyrant’s genocide. To proceed onto better times, the privileged must use ludo-Gothic BDSM to face the half-hidden violence that continues against oppressed groups; i.e., by subverting the repressed horrors of Capitalism once uncovered in sex-positive-albeit-transgressive subversions; e.g., Peach’s “rape.”)
While time is always moving forwards, its historical-material elements come back around again. Memory is finite under the best of circumstances, then (with current beneficiaries under Capitalism unable to remember the abuses of their forefathers); the closer to death and trauma one is (which one always is under capital’s socio-material conditions), the less reliable memory is (e.g., the failing memory of slaves, but also that of tyrants and Western histories under fascism, which we’ll explore in “Bad Dreams,” part three). Under repressed, invented conditions like these, the state’s constant bloodletting occurs through a plethora of playful devices that imperil memory with undead intimations of trauma, most notably weapons as both historical commentaries and eye-catching onstage since ancient times (sword are shiny and reflect light, but they’re also sharp and promote danger and excitement in traditionally “phallic” ways).
Per the dialectic of the alien (and the harvest, for that matter), guns and knives (and other devices to police sex and force with) abstract and dislocate state violence as fetishized, applying it directly to zombie targets by zombie attackers of various kinds; i.e., people as the crop, pareidolically rendering themselves unto profit as something felt across different aspects of itself, mid-reaping:
Sex toys, on the other hand, can fetishize the targets themselves, primarily their genitals as xenophilic instruments of performative “violence” that resemble such abuse (often as sports-like; i.e., what queer parlance refers to as “pitchers” and “catchers”). Attributed to fearsome bodies, the zombie dildo or sleeve can present as traditionally masculine and feminine, but also dark, savage and animalistic. Often an indication of gross, indecent, even vengeful appetite from beyond the grave, it can just as easily be a living likeness of things that are so commonly farmed under capital for their labor value; i.e., as something to exploit in ways that cheapen whatever’s “on tap”—flesh, but also symbolic, theatrical elements that express such things in animalistic forms: a monopoly on monsters milked, thus drained of their worth for the elite, and which we must reclaim together using what we got!
Regardless of the exact form taken, xenophilic examples subvert canonical doubles and their monopolies, which pointedly demonize the exchange as xenophobic; i.e., by inviting fascist reprisals that dehumanize the so-called “walking dead” through provocations of unironic, fear-inducing violence: “the enemy is both weak and strong” according to whatever fetishized harm they inflict or endure. The point of xenophobic necrophilia isn’t to heal, but harm in highly rapacious ways (e.g., the myth of the black male rapist, exhibit 52e). Subverting that requires either humanizing the thing being exploited, or otherwise featuring it as something to treat humanely!
For example, Bovine Harlot (next page) exemplifies humanizing the harvest through a common device: anthropomorphism (something the “Call of the Wild” chapter will explore at length, during the Demon Module). As a theatrical matter of the human and the cow anthropomorphically intertwined, these are “ancient” myths insofar as their original historical function (from a Western standpoint) is effectively being camped through a modern identity (of the minotaur) through sex-and-gender conversing on such things; i.e., during the playful, theatrical struggle for liberation from heteronormativity under state paradigms (e.g., the nuclear family unit). Liberators like Bovine pointedly employ these hybrids for the benefit of workers and nature: as normally preyed upon by the elite (who put meat on the table to feed their enforcers and slaves with, thus continue the process as a matter of dogma)!
(exhibit 37c2: Model and artist: Bovine Harlot and Persephone van der Waard. Beasts of burden are commodified as chattel animals whose bodies are eugenically controlled and offered up to rape in order to serve profit; e.g., steers are injected with steroids to increase their body mass, thus meat production, while dairy cows are accommodated within an industry built around farming them for their milk. Sex workers are no different, insofar as the industries around them seek to control their bodies as things to exploit and fetishize per all the usual methods. Poetry is a part of that, but especially Gothic forms that merge the human and the animal to express genocide as a cross-species ordeal, but also a morphologically dogmatic one; i.e., per the settler-colonial treatment of anything deemed “too big” to be white within the binary.
Simply put, fat bodies—especially female bodies [the BBW]—are both shamed and chased for their value as descriptively deviating away from traditional, European beauty standards. This regular exploitation of corporal variation reflects in parallel media, becoming something to abject and pimp, but also half-jokingly hunt down, mid-rebellion, for those very reasons; e.g., Diablo 2‘s secret cow level, Earth Worm Jim‘s own parody of the animal, and Monthy Python’s cow catapult method [the last example echoing historical approaches to castle defense; i.e., by using your dead livestock as a desperate means of anti-predation]: when the cows come home [a natural-paganized reckoning on par with Michael Myers and the holiday for which he belongs, but also the Blob or Godzilla]!
Like any monster under capital, reclamation of the cow occurs through owning such things ourselves; i.e., as a GNC act that challenges profit to liberate fat bodies [female or otherwise] through monstrous-feminine acts of self-expression that humanize the harvest; e.g., as Bovine Harlot and I do, operating in conjunction towards universal liberation as a common goal with a common foe, the latter of which monopolizes each of us differently.
As things to challenge, such monopolies extend to the mythological side of things, or has a mythological, essentializing function, insofar as the entire process becomes essentialized once installed; i.e., something to worship according to how it is ordered to serve profit through a particular Cartesian arrangement of man and animal that has evolved into a neoliberal form—the monomyth—and which reflects the usual harvesting of nature as monstrous-feminine dating back to Antiquity into the present; e.g., King Minos’ and his labyrinth occupied by the Minotaur as a reflection of people treated like animals, but also animalistic beings [human or not] being treated inhumanely by patriarchal forces having evolved to serve capital. Within capital, they become our Aegis to reclaim and do with as we wish! To take back our milk and jokingly but lovingly share it among all [“Aw, yeah! Gimme that thick, creamy ‘milk!’]: to save ourselves not for marriage, but our friends extramaritally to challenge the nuclear family unit [and all that entails].
In short, wherever and whenever a cow is present, we can take and weaponize it against profit during rape play/ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., as a direct challenge to all the things that normally result when profit goes unchallenged [so-called “peace,” generally conveyed as “law and order” by executed by cops and vigilantes defending state property as a structure]. The challenge lies in reclaiming the cow’s symbolic power and labor value through the media we encounter and consume. In doing so, we [and the cow] can serve an iconoclastic purpose; i.e., illustrating mutual consent during ludo-Gothic BDSM, which occurs through an informed, negotiated labor exchange: one that works within the very things the elite, as unironic butchers, cannot exclusively control and weaponize against us; e.g., the leather shield and shield rod from Symphony of the Night buffering Alucard to help him through the castle under the protection of the humble cow.
Except, the same half-real idea also applies to us synthesizing praxis through things akin to the Metroidvania—its mazes and labyrinths, but also its monsters and randy in-jokes, which cows, for whatever reason, often are; i.e., so-called “barnyard humor” echoing Chaucer’s randy and down-to-earth Miller from his infamously crass story of the same name, “The Miller’s Tale” [c. 1386]:
[artist: Jodie Troutman]
Troutman writes,
Absalom, Alison’s stalker, shows up in the dead of night while she and Nick are making whoopee. It’s so dark outside that Absalom can’t see a thing, which makes you wonder how he made it to their house in the first place. Anyway, he rolls up to Alison’s window and proclaims that he’s there on a mission of love.
Naturally, Alison tells him to stick it. More specifically, she tells him to run like hell, ’cause if he hangs around much longer, she’s gonna stone him. One imagines that in the days before restraining orders, women just kept buckets of rocks next to their window in case of emergencies like this. Absalom says that he’s not going anywhere until he gets a goodbye kiss, so Alison decides to play a bit of a joke on her would-be suitor.
While the poor sap puckers up in the darkness, Alison sticks her naked ass out the window instead of her lips. More specifically, Chaucer notes that “at the wyndow out she putte hir hole,” which is funnier than anything I could ever write myself. One thing leads to another and Absalom smooches her arse – and not just one of the bare cheeks, mind you. Chaucer notes that Absalom knew something was amiss, “for wel he wiste a womman hath no berd. He felte a thyng al rough and long yherd.” Loosely translated, when Absalom when in for the kiss, he felt quite a lot of hair. Yeee-ep.
And while you might think that making out with a woman’s ass crack is about as far as this story is willing to go, you’re sadly mistaken – things only get stranger from here [source].
[artist: Jodie Troutman]
I’ll admit, this hasn’t been the classiest week in Lit Brick history. But you know what? It’s not my fault. It’s Chaucer’s fault. If someone published something like “The Miller’s Tale” today, even in context with the rest of The Canterbury Tales, it’d be dismissed as garbage. It’s ridiculously filthy and makes almost no sense. That said, I adore it for those very reasons. Seriously, this story is filled with words you still can’t say on network television, yet it was published over six hundred years ago. Ah, the things our society chooses to care about.
Anyway, the rest of the story: after kissing Alison’s ass, Absalom is out for revenge, so he visits a smithy and borrows a hot iron. He promptly returns to the house, where Nick is taking a leak. Deciding that it’d be even more hilarious if he could get Absalom to kiss his ass, Nick spreads ’em out the window. Sadly, instead of a kiss, he gets a hot iron in the butt. This shock apparently triggers a fart so mighty that it sounds like thunder. Talk about your killer gas. The foul stench knocks Absalom out, and all this ruckus finally wakes up the Carpenter, still hiding in the trees.
The Carpenter, assuming that the thunder-clap of Nick’s ass was the sound of the Almighty raining down doom, cuts his tub free from the tree… and promptly plunges several feet to the ground, knocking his lights out. Shortly thereafter, the townsfolk show up and decide that the Carpenter is clearly mad (and honestly, that might be the first sane decision anyone has made this entire story). Thus, with her husband committed, her stalker poisoned, and her lover screaming bloody murder about his burning bum, Alison is – to translate Chaucer into Modern English – f**ked.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the most revered works of literature in the English language. There are some days I love humanity [source].
[source, Facebook post, Heavy Metal Magazine: September 12th, 2020]
Indeed, it’s almost like people with Humanities educations either inside or at least closer to the medieval world [or of the same mentality nowadays, left] inherited its crude, honest attitudes about nature, sex, death, and bodily functions! Whatever the exact venue, then, ludo-Gothic BDSM isn’t just about literal cows, but places where cows [or beings treated like cows—AFAB people] both actual and magical can be found; i.e., at a castle with equally legendary and earthly components; re: something akin to Geoffery’s Chaucer’s infamously wacky story as carried forwards into the equally wacky Neo-Gothic several centuries down the road; e.g., Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver putting out the Lilliputian fire by peeing on it, or Walpole’s Lord Manfred seeing his son get crushed by a giant falling helmet only to try and marry the bride at the altar! Medievalists tend to be pornographic, hence are not really known for their tact.)
Through dogma’s habitual predation, collective repression is illustrated by the devastation of a given calamity present within the physical world; e.g., the cow as a victim of capital; i.e., cryptonymy and the narrative of the crypt denoting trauma attached to such seemingly innocent symbols. While societal memory is a regular casualty to the powers that be, surviving markers of trauma assist in the clawing of a collective, intersectional suffering back towards the surface.
Despite being white, pure and obedient, for example, Peach from earlier (or any Gothic heroine, really) is on the receiving end of a very monstrous-looking cock; the commonplace nature of this kind of domination fantasy denotes a larger relationship at work, but also a specific imbalance of power exchange disseminated throughout the material world. Thanks to globalization and U.S. hegemony across the globe, the repressed abuses such predicaments intimate occur behind the closed doors of powerful men who own the means of production; sometimes, all you can do is tell your story in between the lines of a financially incentivized performance, subverting the established aims through covert, imaginary means (revolutionary cryptonymy being a tactic we’ll explore throughout the remainder of the book).
Before we continue onto my traumas with Jadis, though, I want to quickly (re)stress Gothic Communism’s dialectical-material aspects through ludo-Gothic BDSM as bucking pure psychoanalysis. Our approach relies far less on psychological models that claim to reliably measure and predict abuse in the socio-material world (which they really don’t) and more how memories of trauma are stored in linguo-material things that people respond to socially in predictably fearful ways; i.e., not according to some vague collective unconscious, but collective biases, fight-or-flight mechanisms, and the subversion of (or submission to) canonical norms that exist as part of the socio-material world (the Base and Superstructure).
To change its material conditions, though, you first must change how zombies are perceived (which includes who’s actually[5] doing the eating and who’s being eaten, above) through your own experiences: social conditions that shape and maintain material ones (re: Marx) and vice versa as things to camp (re: me). Coded as sites of trauma through linguo-material instruction, this includes a zombie’s genitals, as well as any intersecting memories of personal and collective traumas expressed in various BDSM rituals we can reclaim to transform the zombie piecemeal.
Furthermore, completed with erotic or at least fetishized zombie components, black and white bodies are hybridized (often with non-human colors, such as green) to express colonial fears in Cartesian language, but also decay resulting from its enactment over space and time. Cartesian dualism, then, not only treats nature as alien; it erases the collective memories of the exploited by fabricating its own undead enforcers to assail state victims with. Under these lived conditions, safety amid perceived danger becomes the audience’s number-one concern (exhibit 37d, next page).
In Gothic stories, a desire to explore childhood trauma through conspicuously adult sex and graveyards is annoyingly linked to psychoanalytical models (which tend to be outdated in sexually dimorphic ways); re, our companion glossary definition for Eve Segewick’s notion of live burial:
The Gothic master-trope, live burial—as marked by Eve Segewick in her introduction to The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986)—is expressed in the language of live burial as an endless metaphor for the buried libido within concentric structures as something to punish “digging into” (which includes investigating the false family’s incestuous/abjectly monstrous bloodline; source). To move beyond psychoanalytic models and into dialectical-material territories, I would describe live burial as incentivized by power structures in ways that threaten abuse (often death, incarceration or rape) to those who go looking into hereditary and dynastic power structures, especially their psychosexual abuse and worker exploitation: the fate of the horny detective, but also the whistleblower.
Yet, divorcing a BDSM ritual from academic psychoanalysis doesn’t change the fact that many people experience sexual trauma as something that survives the initial event. Enduring through displaced material reminders, individual trauma as Gothicized can damage memory but also repair it.
The same is true of collective trauma. When trauma is collectively repressed on a societal level, the systemic eradication of slave/worker histories are survived by different cryptonyms—corpses but also their fragments as a kind of code tied to repressed trauma. Just as the zombie is an erased history that fails to disappear entirely because the bodies always remain, the struggle is two-fold: remembering those who were destroyed and what made them become forgotten afterward, while also healing from trauma through ludo-Gothic BDSM by subverting the canonical zombie as a call to violence against the oppressed during a given apocalypse and its painful revelation.
(exhibit 37d: Model and artist: Persephone van der Waard [the model abused me during this transmisogyny incident[6], so won’t be credited, here]. When the dead already walk the earth, you can supply the graveyard ritual with whatever forms best communicate the state’s necro-erotic abuses as a lived experience. Not only can this vary per individual; a common concern for all workers is proximity to, and protection from, harm. In the absence of reliable, stable histories, safety amid danger becomes paramount; i.e., to relax the worried viewer but also to highlight any potential threats when seeking out comfort as a form of rememory that confronts the zombie-like horrors of the ongoing past always returning in Gothicized narratives: ludo-Gothic BDSM as, like Chaucer centuries, of an often-animalized, transformative variety.)
When humanized, the zombie’s rememory becomes one to consider favorably in the absence of canonical bias. That is, it becomes a dogged survivor whose rebellion—of open communication about trauma—helps them reassemble state abuses that seek to erase memory as a collective history before Capitalism came into existence. By openly embodying these abuses, the zombie organizes a transformation through pieces of itself; i.e., xenophilic action organized against the state. As such, the rememory of total trauma becomes eclectic, undead and incongruous, populating the graveyard with whatever “zombies” (dolls) are needed to make their point and achieve catharsis through transformation.
By returning to a replicate site of trauma, then, a dollmaker is also an architecture—one who can playfully assemble and conduct a cathartic BDSM ritual that playfully addresses trauma where it lives: within the body as effected by trigger mechanisms supplied by a dialectical-material struggle the world over. Executed under more favorable, ethical conditions, these xenophilic rituals can supply the recipient of pain with the ability to consent, gaining agency under gestures of theatrical peril (“rape”) with allies and assistants that help them process trauma in past, present and future forms.
Despite Gothic Communism’s playful, xenophilic nature, confronting the zombie is always traumatic to some extent. Not only can the triggering nature of rememory not be avoided; the social-sexual interactions that occur before, during and after these rituals aren’t completely risk-free (the idea being risk reduction under capital’s risk-adverse conditions).
For one, blind spots can make the consumer biased, but also primed for further abuse. Consider the cliché of the well-read horror fan—the suburban teenager who studiously reads about monsters all their life, only to be fooled by a “real” example. The deception occurs not from an inability to recognize the symbols, but from a social component delivered by an active deceiver presenting them in bad faith. The idea, during ludo-Gothic BDSM, is to have them appear within boundaries of play that help survivors process their trauma while restoring a sense of agency under negotiated peril. This isn’t “looking for trouble,” but it does call for a dance partner that fits the bill.
As we’ll see with Jadis and myself (which the above paragraph was essentially talking about), auditions are an imperfect process, opening the door for further abuse if one is careless, unlucky or both (e.g., like the Takashi Miike movie, its spider-like avenger[7] catching an unhappy abuser in her web). Yet, just as trauma and its symbols can “brand” a former victim to become habitually preyed upon in spider-like fashion, the same psychosexual language and rituals can mercifully be inverted, helping survivors escape future abusers by reflecting on past trauma in present forms; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as a means of transforming the zombie. Again, I want to explore said practice as I coined it—through lived trauma as something to reflect on, reassemble and play with, after the fact, inside Jadis’ dollhouse.
Speaking of which, now that we’ve gone over ludo-Gothic BDSM—it’s base mechanics of exchange, but also its historical-material and dialectical-material elements—a I think we can finally enter the house-in-question. We’ll do so in two further subdivisions that will—like Stoker’s famous novel—feel more epistolary than some parts of my book do: journal entries chronicling my meeting and escaping of Jadis. They were someone who fed and clothed me, but also who held me prisoner and tortured me every day for nearly two years: “to disempower someone or somewhere—a person, culture, or place—in order to harm them,’ generally through fetishizing and alienizing acts or circumstances/socio-material conditions that target the mind, body and/or spirit.” In short, they raped me—something I have hesitated to say for the effect that it has on me, when leaving my lips:
(artists: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard)
In facing this sad truth, Jadis’ abuse becomes like the doll: something to play with in order to regain control over a historically disempowering force, but also a BDSM device that speaks through said play as harder to deny than through mere words alone (written or otherwise). Jadis abused me emotionally in ways I’ve struggled to express since escaping them—in part because when I am stressed, I can still hear their creepy doll-like voice whispering to me from the safety of the shadows: “You’re a bad person. You’re so wrong! It’s all your fault!” I loved Jadis for their pain, for I had pain, too; but much to my chagrin, they used it to trap me and, like a fat patient spider, calmly and coldly prey on my frozen body.
To heal from Jadis, I shall now make them into something that I can control—not to bend the truth, but to tell my side of things as completely as I can, and per the medieval-adjacent ideas like ludo-Gothic BDSM that I’ve developed in light of what my abuser did to me. They raped me and let me go, insisting they were good and I was not. Abusers either kill their victims (usually the male approach), or use literal or figurative poison to kill any part of them that might speak out (the proverbial “woman’s weapon”). I think Jadis was counting on the latter to silence me, so it’s only fitting if my testimony makes them anxious once it comes out! While something of an attempt to forgive them (though more of an attempt to take their power over me and weaponize it against the state by transforming my zombie state into something instruction for others to learn from), I won’t lose sleep if my ghastly accounts haunt them; a rapist, but especially an impenitent one (remorse was never your strong suit. Jadis), should never know peace. So reap the whirlwind, honey!
(artist: Carlos Agraz)
Note: The paradox of pain is it makes us feel alive; i.e., per the ancient graveyard function of women and monstrous-feminine entities (e.g., oracles, witchdoctors, priestesses, etc) taking the dead into themselves to pass along. For that reason, I have dreaded returning to these sections, which are meant to be painful to capture the truth of what I experienced, but also per my arguments feel Numinous to me; i.e., sitting with the saint, as I generally do during the grieving process—in this case, myself. It becomes pushed-and-pulled between the desire to know and forget, to hurt and heal, as confused between pleasure and pain, safety and harm, per survival mechanisms, but also responses that are profoundly psychosexual/cathartic. Like graves slashed into the earth, it becomes a marker for trauma as healed into a kind of beautiful scar—of flowers blooming ‘neath the headstones. —Perse
Onto “Meeting Jadis (opening and part one)“!
Footnotes
[1] Hasan Abi’s “Kick Is Falling Apart” (2024) and “Why Dr. Disrespect Was Banned,” (2023).
[2] I.e., my first writings of it appeared in “Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space” (2021):
Remember what I said about consent? In this manner, the Metroidvania players consent to the game by adopting a submissive position. Most people sexualize BDSM, but power is exchanged in any scenario, sexual or otherwise. This being said, Gothic power exchanges are often sexualized. Samus is vulnerable when denuded, her naked body exposed to the hostile alien menace (re: the end scene from Alien). Metroidvania conjure dominance and submission through a player that winds up “on the hip” (an old expression that means “to be at a disadvantage”). Another way to think of it is, the player is the bottom, and they’re being topped by the game (source).
Scott Sharkey loved the idea:
[2a] E.g., Tim, Jadis’ ex, living with us under the same roof. I suggested the idea to Jadis while the three of us went out for pizza. After they signed the paperwork, annulling their marriage (after me pestering them to do so for over a year), we went back to Tim’s mother’s, walking past her to Tim’s bedroom (each of us waving hello before shutting the door). Once inside, I suggested we fool around, as we had planned. Soon, I had Jadis on their back, spreading their legs and fucking their pussy while Tim watched. As I got close to orgasm, both of them had to tell me to keep it down and not fuck Jadis quite so hard because—in the heat of the moment (Jadis’ pussy felt really tight and I loved doing it front of their ex)—I’d completely forgotten that Tim’s mom was in the living room! Opps.
[2b] Comparable with Barker’s Cenobites, which themselves have undead components; i.e., on par with medieval flagellants who, mortifying their flesh, also sold their souls. This, suitably enough, adheres to body transformation as torturous in ways that yield an undead aesthetic. The same goes for Vecna and the xenomorph as following a similar undead flagellant motif (and Giger’s monster having postcolonial, monstrous-feminine and chimeric elements). To that, monsters in general both a) tend to function as a matter of poetic expression/continuous evolution, whereupon definitions tend to come later (if at all); and b) tend to have interchangeable uses amid the modular components. It’s all about how you look at it and apply it as a matter of poetics, consumption and criticism (re: monsters are poetics lens that can humanize those inside the state of exception).
[3] Re: The People under the Stairs, which literally involves a cannibal Nazi BDSM “family” that, for all intents and purposes, extends to the house as ravenous—a people and a place that kidnaps and eats children (white or non-white) in a once-gentrified neighborhood that has now decayed to alienate them as Dracula is from his imaginary homeland. While Nazis and Communists generally occupy the same performative shadow zone, here the film feels anti-fascist due to its positive inclusive message about race; i.e., of finding ways to expose predators and heal from generational trauma as linked to a specific site of neighborhood abuse—an urban legend!
[4] Which classically concerns overcoming manufactured adversity tied to profit, versus expressing equality as the so-called “fair fight.” Capital doesn’t fight fair (e.g., videogames: canonical metas serve profit in a half-real sense; i.e., speedrunners and competitive fighters [especially white/tokenized examples] don’t bite the hand that feeds, thus are historically poor activists)!
[5] Such dated, monstrous stereotypes are used, as DARVO always is, to defend predators with the privilege to point the finger at their victims while enjoying the state’s protection: white people! This double standard applies to witch hunters of actual witches, but also zombies, vampires and other undead serving the same basic function during moral panics. A family like the one from Wes Craven’s aforementioned People under the Stairs, above, represent a stranded form of American fascism critiquing the nuclear family as such; i.e., one that lingers in a redlined neighborhood that, mid-economic crisis, is both facing neoliberal collapse (this was the ’90s) while also trying to heal from white people having always had a cannibalistic streak: eating slaves (which extends to anyone they think is beneath them). They’re an open secret, an urban legend akin to Dracula having traveled without moving to reveal themselves as painfully out-of-touch (and joint) with the present space and time: butchers.
In short, while Craven runs a bit hot/cold, it’s a bit wackier and campier than the abjected, far-off racism of The Serpent in the Rainbow (1988) or the straight-up torture porn of The Last House on the Left (a 1972 echo of the Sharon Tate murders, no doubt: fear of poor people at large as a murderous cult, which the middle-class family in the movie kills out of revenge—with a chainsaw).
[6] Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight, Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2022.”
[7] In case you’re wondering, Jadis loved the villain from the film—loved spiders and humanoid forms of insectoid/arachnid predation as a metaphor, as far as I could tell (based on my own experience) for toxic love (they also loved Tim Curry’s musical number from Fern Gully [1992] by that very name). Intent matters less than their conflations with vice character and abuse happened onstage and off: as effectively no different, insofar they loved themselves and punched down at me to aggrandize themselves, sans irony.