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

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Cops and Victims, part two: Our Sweet Revenge; or, Being Ourselves While Reclaiming Anal Rape, mid-Amazonomachia (feat. Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart)

“Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many. That’s what’s important! Valor pleases you, Crom… so grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you don’t listen, then the HELL with you!”

—Conan, Conan the Barbarian

Picking up where “Reclaiming Amazons; or, Cops and Victims (opening and part one: the Riddle of Steel)” left off…

Demons show us our deepest, darkest desires, which mirror our present, dialectical-material realities. Amazons, as we have explored, are the stuff of American pulp—a Nazi or a TERF’s wet dream/cheap power fantasy about getting even (a lie, considering their revenge against never stops)—but they’re also a timeless medieval (of knights and barbarians, but also Amazons and similar demonically crafted beings[1]) we reclaim to have our own revenge: through the language of the imaginary past as half-real, shared across space and time, on-and-offstage between workers for or against the state.

This desire—to crush one’s enemies and rape the vulnerable—is inverted, insofar as the state wishes to trample us routinely underfoot (and move money through nature), whereas we reclaim such devices of rape and revenge (which Amazons are) to stymie profit and dismantle the state once and for all; re: during the aesthetics of power and death during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s rape play. Our actions aren’t those made with total impunity and heartless retribution like token state enforcers, but classify as “criminal” and automatically violent in their eyes because the state demands such things in order to exist: unironic rape, unironic Amazons pursuant to rape in conqueror-fantasy language vis-à-vis cops and victims (the strange appetites of those who gentrify and decay under capital, but also survive its abuse to abuse others or attract abusers).

Part one explored our confronting of the imaginary past as having a tokenized, fascist character (re: TERFs, Angela Carter and Creed, etc). Part two 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. “Rape” feels oddly good, either when putting others “to the sword” or vice versa (re: the so-called “Riddle of Steel”). Reflecting on earlier arguments, we’ll consider this with Amazons (a classic terrorist) and anal sex (a classic terror weapon), reverting the anisotropic quality of such terrorism to serve a proletarian purpose: the whore’s revenge granted by standing bravely against our enemies! To reclaim their stories of rape against us, hence all things associated with those tools of abuse.

Weapons of Terror; or, Anal Amazons: Reclaiming Anal Sex, mid-Amazonomachia

(artist: Aria Rain)

First, what is anal? Anal speaks as much to rape and vulnerability as it does to proximity with unequal power and forbidden pleasure: exposed dumpers. While the state loves to threaten damsels with impregnation, it also deems them “worthy” of it. While sodomizing maidens isn’t unheard of, doing so goes against the profit motive/patrilineal descent. Damsels are maidens, first and foremost—sodomy something of an afterthought/sinful prophylactic reserved for victims worthy of that treatment: whores, thus sex demons (a stigma, let it be said, that is often assigned to older married women; i.e., those who have already borne children/marry up and are resentful towards the status quo, but who canonically punch down: the wicked stepmother a kind of witch-y impostor/devil-in-disguise).

Amazons, by comparison, are whores from the offset, hence sodomized to better stress their demonic status and token value (and deny the victim any chance at generational revenge: to train their children to avenge state devastation). Even so, the state also views, thus treats Amazons “like men”: as capable of revenge beyond gossip and poison; re: phallic women, or bitches, threatening lesser men (“little bitches”) with castration, captivity and ignominious penetration! Forced anal, then, speaks to the capture of Amazons “tamed” and tokenized by humiliating and painful taboo sex ranked as “worst” by the rapist; i.e., vae victus in receiving state revenge, said revenge (the cop) aping the colonized in bad faith: to fuck, thus dominate like the animals Cartesian rule prescribes (a process less about biological accuracy [animals can’t rape/sodomize each other] and more to dehumanize those “of nature” slated for social-psychosexual punishment by police forces: abusing chattel slaves/property who can’t consent). And yet, colonial abuse ties historically-materially to bodily sites of psychosexual harm, which rebellious recipients might subvert; i.e., to submit in ways they—like any oppressed people part of the land—can reclaim through theatrical distress/rape revenge; re: rape play extending to “playing dead,” meaning to camp one’s rape by subverting colonizer vaudeville inside itself: mid-witch-hunt, witches policing witches, sex policing sex.

To it, Amazon booties can threaten rape, insofar as “death by Snu-Snu” can mean pretty much whatever you want it to; i.e., to give but also to receive its war chest. “Amazon” can likewise mean “anal” as a classic terror weapon to use against conquered foes (re: “prison sex” mentality within rape culture[2] having warrior elements), which subversive forms can reclaim as a postcolonial device—not the clapping of one’s cheeks under genuine duress by token Amazons (thus token bitches whose shitty behavior lessens the whole in the eyes of the oppressed/viewing public), but a site of forbidden pleasure during ludo-Gothic BDSM thwarting profit per the whore’s revenge: the place whence girls shit, but also where bolder (and braver) dicks go inside to vengefully defy heteronormative reproductive orders (the decay of the nuclear family unit[3])!

To conclude, anal is both a classic act of rape, and a canonical, complicitly cryptonymic accusation (and mark) of shame; i.e., of forced submission trapped in duality during liminal expression. Like Medusa, herself, iconoclasts (and their Great Pumpkins, below) cryptonymically reverse abjection, camping imperial consumption (sex and force) to weaken Capitalist Realism, year-round; i.e., not just on the appointed, state-supplied day of “Halloween” (controlled opposition), but freeing the harvested (the ghost of the counterfeit/spectres of Marx) to fight back, thus reverse abjection (state sovereignty upheld through force) on our Aegis: throwing the energies of rape and revenge back in the colonizer’s face! “Any weapon can become a weapon of terror” (re: Asprey) and anal is a weapon for which everyone has the ability (and the asshole) to camp state doubles, using bad worker puns and wholesome worker fun: the Gothic maturity of a rebellious bodily autonomy Hippolyta would be proud of—reversing terror/counterterror with our butts. Let ‘er rip!

(artist: Kitty Boy Jake)

That’s anal in a nutshell. Let’s quickly outline some additional forces at work (two pages), then broach my thesis argument.

First, subjugation is something to subvert in dominant/submissive language. It doesn’t apply exclusively to Amazons, but any “of nature-as-monstrous-feminine” per the whore’s paradox having revenge during Amazonomachia‘s broader definition, “monster battle,” attached to “psychosexuality” expressed (which I do) as “battle sex”; i.e., having revenge through “rape” theatrics while haunted by actual rape, thus help prevent the latter in the future by throttling profit: humanizing the harvest by using anal sex’ position as “very uncomfortable place,” itself alluding to the demonization of colonized lands and peoples. Anything said herein applies to out-and-out Amazons or Medusa, but also offshoots, like orcs and goblins, witches and vampires, etc—in short, anything monstrous-feminine associated with sodomy that has a bone to pick with capital targeting our bums (with the xenomorph originally being Dan O’Bannon’s crude metaphor for irritable bowel syndrome).

Unironic submission occurs because colonial forces aim to not merely to destroy their enemies, but humiliate them during anal as a pacifying terror device; i.e., anything that might be perceived as empathetic “slack” for the harvest and rebellion is sodomized by the colonizer to antagonize nature-as-monstrous-feminine all over again; re: Capitalism raping nature along the usual gyn-ecological arguments, but also blood libel and sodomy-style extermination rhetoric: as their own modular persecution networks that—in capital’s later days—crossed with some degree of interchangeability to assist in profit raping nature through literal-to-figurative sodomy. This means anything monstrous-feminine (female or not) having an asshole, thus being subject to anal rape as an ongoing threat, mid-witch-hunt, hence opportunity to abject and commodify such things.

For straight men, rape—but especially anal rape—is something to joke about, insofar as receiving it usually doesn’t concern them (outside cases of child and carceral abuse). By comparison, anyone deemed “monstrous-feminine” under Cartesian rule[4] is already demonic in state eyes, thus subject to anal as a terror device (either to give to them, or accuse them of doing during moral panics); subversive parties must reclaim both actor and action, anal and Amazon, as demons would: dark campy sex offering forbidden sight through problematic love that, when humanizing the harvest (the crop, not the cop), reveals capital and its tenure’s ongoing flaws; re: treating nature as something to fetishize, carve and harvest by police force.

Camping those means camping the material being abused, anal overshadowed by its own pro-state weaponization; i.e., rape play with exotic, xenophilic elements—the beauty and brawn of savage girth, whose “Oriental” (non-European/non-American) warriors emerge seemingly ex nihilo, suddenly endemic to Capitalist Realism. Such vaudeville banks on unironic carceral forms of anal sex and Amazons trapping the mind inside itself, endlessly punching down at forms that actually push for genuine liberation through anal sex (the whore’s revenge, versus the pimp’s): rape play and roleplay speaking to “conquering” as a spoof that challenges profit using the same devices.

(artist: Mona Wolt)

Simply put, demons double “unspeakable” (cryptonymic) desires for power and knowledge; i.e., relaid in dialectical-material forms of psychosexual pleasure through various intersections of class, culture and race, but also pain (exquisite “torture,” aka passion/martyrdom). As such, Amazons promise empowering transformation through the paradox of receiving anal sex during calculated risk; i.e., the giver turned into a protector of this or that, the latter receiving anal as a vaso vagal device, and which under mutual consent enjoys as much control over you as the other way around: the dom serves the sub, but the sub needs someone “dark” (thus fearsome) to serve them through the whore’s paradox—of the sub issuing commands of domination for a dom (or switch) to objectively follow when they transform on command; i.e., trying anal sex for its fearful reputation, meaning a dominating act associated with harmful Great Destruction, but also pleasurable pain (and forbidden pleasure) serving the sub during rough sex; e.g., like a genie in a bottle, “Your wish is my command!”

Lived trauma invites Numinous dialogs; Capitalist Realism abjects rape onto pornographic language, which can be camped through the Gothic’s lateral directness: destroyer fantasies, chasing the palliative Numinous. Anal, reclaimed as such, becomes a paradoxical sign of trust, wherein the harming of recipients can occur when caution isn’t exercised (the whole point of discipline, in ludo-Gothic BDSM, is harm avoidance/rape prevention, mid-passion): to walk the line regarding things that, once they’ve touched you, never leave. You don’t “get over” rape; you learn to live with it. A gift and a curse, predation fosters anti-predation sentiment; if you are raped, it becomes something to live with through fantasies of itself you can control and thrive within.

The entire practice commonly hints at genuine abuse through its own Ozymandian aesthetic—live burial, chasing down old secrets (re: Medusa’s rape) buried/unburied during faux-Orientalism; i.e., camping rape vis-à-vis the ghost of the counterfeit: the Amazon’s dark anal zone of wicked, barbaric delight (doubling state forgeries)! It’s a conqueror’s fantasy—pushed onto state victims and reclaimed by them in the same half-real, tomb-like brothel space: the plundering of alien war “booty” overshadowed by eugenics, hence actual, still-existing racism/race science and its statuesque practitioners’ vague-yet-constructed ideas of an imaginary past made great through multiple bigotries; i.e., followers of Eugene Sandow into Olympian, drug-fueled echoes of American-sponsored eco-fascism (which the Olympics are); e.g., Mike Israetel’s “Is Intelligence Really Different Among the Races?” (2023): to live in fear of nature as criminal/terrorist, period—as monstrous-feminine, hence non-white, non-Christian, queer and/or female, etc. It’s a false flag but a profitable one, provided you have the belly to police it/play the victim in bad faith. In turn, systemic rape gaslights its victims while tokenizing them, the sickness excised by assimilations thereof, turning hypochondriac (the paradox of modern sickness and health, bodybuilders making cryptofascist arguments while being gluttons and entitled [middle-to-upper-class, usually white/male] drug addicts: a disease stemming from their pathologizing of nature).

Amazons or otherwise, the Gothic is certainly no stranger to rape fantasies or telling truth with lies. This includes sodomy (“the love that dare not speak its name”) as hyphenated “love language,” relaid in historical violence ahistorically displaced unto fabrications of unironic rape revenge. If we are to heal from rape by capital unto nature (cops policing those “of nature” to devour them for the state), we must confront it in campy forms. So enjoy anal and even fantasize about rape through ironic forms; just don’t endorse its unironic abuse by state actors aping the colonizer/chasing the dragon (re: ghosts of Caesar and his statuesque effigies’ historically unattainable physique) to dick-measure with!

In turn, our bodies and their art may become weapons of genuine resistance (which the state will always treat as violent, regardless if it actually is); i.e., of protecting ourselves and our homes from those who would seek to own and exploit us, reclaiming what they try and take from us (our darkness visible) to use against us—by demonizing sex work (which all work is, under Capitalism) in sex-coercive forms! We’re not doing ourselves any favors by keeping quiet, in that respect. Play with “rape”; play with Amazons, meaning those strong enough to liberate all workers from state tyranny! Sweet nutritious pain; clap my cheeks, Amazon mommy! Revenge, for us, is simply to exist in visible, humanizing forms of demonic expression. There’s certainly an exploratory element to this, but also an addictive, drug-like facet with liberatory energies: demon BDSM, including anal sex, as criminalized, thus policed into acceptable forms of trespass by state forces.

The Gothic is largely poetic; in poetic language, “sodomy” yields a forbidden gateway to other worlds—one engaged with through a variety of non-PIV sex, BDSM and kink. This includes those reputedly practiced by Amazons (meaning those compared to Amazons) as vengeful aliens (re: the settler argument, prohibiting liberation for fear of revenge); i.e., so-called “savages” or “mud people” having a broad, xenophobic function despite its offshore colonial origins: degenerates of any location, color or creed—the enemy within to abject once more (to displace and exterminate, often by tokenized means). And while sodomy yields a crossover element speaking to/with demonized things, it’s not inherently destructive or negative; instead, it can help us regain control—over our trauma through fetishized caricatures speaking to our idiosyncratic alienation without ranking rape or discriminating against others. To heal from rape (and reverse abjection), we must exist sex-positively in the shadow of police forces; we do this (and avoid discrimination) by finding similarity amid difference using taboo language (which sodomy is); re: the pedagogy of the oppressed speaking diplomatically to those accused of rape and those having survived it (an idea we’ll revisit when looking at demon mommies). We solidarize intersectionally against capital and its effects making society sick through false notions of power (the grim harvest).

(artist: Aria Rain)

So while said trauma forever stays a part of us, it likewise doesn’t define or control us in totality. Instead, we become desirable for it, albeit in sex-positive ways to trade in; i.e., can use it to synthesize good social-sexual habits that likewise extend to society at large; e.g., Aria Rain is an amputee using her disability through sex work to raise awareness: towards humanizing the disabled, illustrated by the company she keeps treating her well also being humanized. It becomes something to pay forwards, good instruction versus bad, good Amazons versus bad; re: starting “from ignorance, but also positions closer to nature that have become increasingly alien and closed-off” (a statement I originally applied to queerness and blood libel, in “Understanding Vampires,” but applies equally to Amazons as demonic entities).

Is anal during ludo-Gothic BDSM a Rubicon of sorts? Sure; you’ll start seeing the world differently while still inside it (re: Plato’s cave). But why let that stop us from living our best lives while helping others in the bargain? In turn, this encompasses our daily lives; i.e., in ways that affect ourselves and inform our struggles against larger predatory structures, namely capital (and its qualities, monopolies, and trifectas) looking to frame us as barbarians to conquer anew.

I want to consolidate some important issues regarding this, which we can likewise apply to Amazons (and anything monstrous-feminine, in that respect). Consider this portion an “anal Amazon thesis,” of sorts (indented for emphasis):

First, capital sexualizes everything to rape nature in modular terror language, including Amazons and anal; i.e., the world under Capitalism arranges heteronormatively in service to capital, whose Cartesian/settler-colonial structure rapes nature through said language; e.g., Amazons being used classically to control women by Ancient Athenians, not free them; re (from a few pages back): “The state controls sex and gender in monstrous-feminine language because these are where power (and trauma) are found […] their ideas of power revolve around ideas of state revenge also dressed up: the pimp dominating nature-as-monstrous-feminine, doubling and dominating it through tokenized double standards; e.g., anal sex [and Amazons].” The state only tolerates the problematic love of Amazons and anal when their challenge (to the ancient canonical laws) is nominal; i.e., provided their counterfeits serve profit in canonical terror language that furthers abjection. As something to combine, but also canonize in different performances, anal is a place and parlance of trauma to give and receive through tokenized enforcers dressed up as warriors—Amazons being a half-real theatrical device forever trapped between genuine rebellion and false, targeting vulnerable body parts in vulnerable areas (e.g., the bathroom). Things like Amazons and anal, then, become canonically binarized to best give or receive state force (mainly police violence) pursuant to profit. To challenge profit and Capitalist Realism on and offstage, workers must camp state terror inside of itself—anisotropically with Amazons and anal to reverse terror/counterterror with subversive irony during liminal expression.

To see on which side of the fence people fall, you need only look to how they treat others through controlled devices; i.e., police violence; e.g., sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also the monstrous language of violence, terror and morphological expression per the Gothic mode: giving and receiving sodomy as a broader mechanism that includes Amazons and anal sex; re: subjugation is something to subvert in dominant/submissive language, which anal sex (and Amazons) very much are. Demons aren’t satisfied with vanilla sex; they play with “darker” forms to weaponize them as a form of transformative exchange: an eye-opening experience/revelation, insofar as anal isn’t purely abject, but something to reverse and embrace during the dialectic of the alien (re: hugging the alien, thus Medusa, with Amazons).

Said umbrella includes the basic idea of forbidden sex and hard kinks adjacent more ordinary forms, the appearance of fantastical things like Amazons that indicate policing as given and received through anal (and its double standards); e.g., redheads becoming scarce (from a cultural standpoint, not a genetic one) because they’re exotic, hunted to extinction under capital’s exterminator rhetoric: forbidden fruit weaponized part-and-parcel with capital’s usual harvesting of nature behind foreign or condemned zones’ arbitrary boundaries; i.e., alienated and sexualized by police agents enjoying state protection as they sodomize nature by going into said zones; re: us versus them, enacting cops-and-victims revenge arguments. This forced alienation of native groups, in turn, bleeds into any kind of archetype or associate behavior you could think of (not just Amazons): exploiting and exfoliating the land and its occupants, one on the menu and the other holding a knife and fork.

(artist: Persia Lourdes)

This works historically through terror and its devices assigned to abject territories by those with a monopoly on violence, terror and monsters, hence Amazons and anal. Simply put, if someone’s a cop, they’ll police sex, including monster sex’ fetishes, kinks and BDSM; i.e., hard kinks become a disproportionate response against nature as something to impugn by straight avengers (re: the state is straight). To that, anal vis-à-vis subjugated Amazonomachia isn’t a canonical tool for pleasure, but unironic domination that extends poetically to larger structures of oppression abjecting land back through anal: Amazons and “death by Snu-Snu” speaking to bog-standard sodomy fears (as a “disease” to “catch”) and warrior-style revenge against colonizer bodies by militant colonized ones (only in colonizer peoples’ own heads, mind you[5]). Guilt by association, then, becomes something to reclaim alongside shame and hatred towards abjected things; i.e., to take Amazons and anal back by camping them is to take the land (and labor) back from these performative elements and their associate structures/enforcers.

To that, we reclaim ourselves as much animals in relation to nature as the state raping nature, thus adopt its survival mechanisms: Medusa’s mirror-like gaze and fearsome appearance conjoined with softer things. In evolutionary terms, this is merely strength overcoming natural pressures, which capital is an unnatural (manmade) extension thereof. In turn, the subversive aesthetic of garbage speaks to things normally treated as such, fighting back against patriarchal addicts: subversive Amazons and anal rerouting the usual flow/ordering of power on the Aegis.

Bear with me. Such arguments often (and not without some justice) sound a little funny on their face, but highlight larger forces at work; i.e., hyperobjects and their symptoms, such as Capitalism vs Communism; e.g., squiggly lines are less violent than straight lines on a map because straight lines are unnatural, therefore laid out historically by nation-states through force instead of by land markers, like rivers or mountains. The same idea applies to actions that pertain to sex by native groups (or those treated as native)—those to do reproductive acts different or, God forbid, to do them for reasons other than reproducing at all!

So-called “rape epidemics” and sodomy go hand-in-hand under ethnocentrism, hence moral territory (and actors) versus immoral ones; i.e., deserving and underserving victims of state force; re: cops and victims, orcs and humans, etc. Hatred goes part-in-parcel with menticide breeding bad apples to spoil the entire crop; i.e., fruit from the poisoned tree, treating the colonized as “thicc” forbidden fruit to both objectify by the colonizer and deny themselves while chasing it down: e.g., PAWGs and PHAT black girls. These are generational issues measured most commonly in how they fight over time in relation to larger structures and dogma: an industry farming honeydew and milk of paradise.

(artist: Persia Lourdes)

For example, if someone is unusually afraid of anal, they’re probably afraid of a great many other things associated with anal, thus more likely to attack those things using anal in bad faith; re: anything “of nature,” including Amazons as barbaric givers and receivers of it for or against the state; e.g., witches—redheads or trans women, for instance (above and next page)—that might arbitrarily be called “Amazon” simply for their appearance being different, exotic, alien. Yet the truth is, hard kinks are hard for a reason, meaning they’re acquired tastes (most of them I don’t exhibit in this book because I don’t prefer them, but do prefer rape play with Amazons and knights; i.e., demons, like all monsters, are enacted through preference as something to discover). And while experimentation often yields interesting results, its primary goal is to acclimate users to a priceless idea: of trying new things that, while stigmatized, are hardly unnatural or even that over the top!

A common application for ludo-Gothic BDSM is transformation, meaning towards a transhumanist outcome (more on posthumanism during Frankenstein); i.e., “upgrading” ourselves by setting aside normal activities and swapping them for abnormal ones. Doing so is less extreme unto itself (most of the time, anyways), and more a spice to, well, spice things up! Such is anal sex. It’s not “bad,” just different. So are Amazons and their own appearance during rape play a campy alternative to their unironic, tokenized variants—not to conquer for the state in subjugated forms, but to appear strong and fearsome to avoid state predation by subverting subjugation (similar to Medusa). This often has a magnetic effect, during calculated risk; i.e., they attract interested parties in good and bad faith.

For us, postcolonial considerations may be raised when dealing with capital’s universal benefactors abusing such devices; re: capital is heteronormative, setter-colonial, and Cartesian, meaning its anisotropic views about sex and force extend unto half-real spheres exploring the rape of nature through revenge: as a kind of demonic exchange reversing the terrorist/counterterrorist dynamic; i.e., by illustrating mutual consent with “rape,” occurring through demonic expression as part of daily life.

As something to indulge in or deny ourselves, we consume forbidden fruit and learn from the experience less perfectly synonymous with rape and more to camp it in order to safely control its powerful effects; re: forbidden sight, our darkness visible taking any shape or measurement, per exchange. In short, anal is the drug and Amazons (or things compared to Amazons; e.g., trans women, below) are associated with it as the automatic dealers/doers, thereof; we’re the forbidden fruit (as much as anything “dark” is): to subjugate or subvert using what we got, offering you a delicious taste of a better, freer world; re (earlier in the module):

(artist: Eva Android)

Under Capitalist Realism, something is “dark” if it ostensibly moves anything of value (re: power and knowledge) away from the status quo. Generally this darkness is associated with the vengeful imaginary past based on buried historical atrocities, the latter paradoxically twisted by the former to keep control right where it is (among the elite). Anything that challenges this paradigm is canonically framed as dark, evil, profligate; i.e., nature as vengeful whore, which capital takes revenge on through DARVO-style police violence/obscurantism, witch hunts, tokenism and moral panic; e.g., Medusa and her Aegis’ forbidden sight (source: “From Composites and the Occult to Totems and the Natural World”).

followed by

Something of an Unholy Trinity, power, darkness and knowledge—often as conspicuous, ritualized acts of creation/poetry and invention—go hand-in-hand during unequal, forbidden exchange and transformation; i.e., through forbidden, unequal exchange, generally of power, darkness, or knowledge, someone who lacks either will trade what they have for what they don’t: with a demon that has the requisite item. / Demons are the classic, mighty and at-times-untrustworthy granters of dark wishes/desires, be those fame, fortune, sex, or revenge (which transformation facilitates, on either side of an exchange) [ibid.]

and

demons having a third quality apart from exchange and transformation—desire, whose forbidden, wishful thinking/fulfillment occurs under a Western hegemon that alienates, fetishizes and scapegoats nature by design, whoring it out and raping it for profit. As you can imagine, this structure and its grim prostitution translate easily enough to revenge by one side against the other—of man/the nuclear model vs nature-as-whore and vice versa; i.e., commonly expressed as Amazonomachia in ancient to “ancient” heteronormative wrestling dialogs (and similar theatricalities), but also the Medusa and many other monstrous-feminine GNC forms. Revenge is an exchange that pertains to power and knowledge concerning workers whored out under state rule, our revenge being the development of Gothic Communism with ludo-Gothic BDSM to end said rule (thus rape) [source: “A Rape Reprise”]

and

according to what power and knowledge we exchange to and [for, the] whore’s revenge is to break the profit motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with (ibid.).

Which brings us to anal and Amazons; i.e., traditional, warlike, tools of tokenized state revenge; re: raping Medusa’s corpse/tomb to repress rebellious sentiment during state decay (and uphold Capitalist Realism). To have our revenge (and break Capitalist Realism), we fags subvert these devices to stymie profit with; i.e., as normally achieved by abusing anal and Amazons being objects of dark desire, thus wish fulfillment: to live deliciously and in defiance of state orders purging us, generally turning those “prison sex” mentalities (and their Man Box) inside-out using weird nerd culture—monster sex and its assorted battles!

This generally means while bare and exposed, called “furious” even if we’re just naked and vibing (often, though, a fair amount of rage is present): dead and loving it, fucking each other’s brains out, or adored for our muse-like body’s public nudism/asexual prowess exploring (through unknown pleasures) the ways in which sex is normally controlled by the state (through force). Fighting for the right to eat, shit, fuck and die with our dignity intact, our revenge is to humanize ourselves while being remembered for our demonized status. We conjure up (and camp) said status with clay and other dark materials, reversing “rape” by putting it in quotes; re: camping its canonical forms in paradoxical language/medieval puns: “Oh, yeah! Plunder my forbidden ‘tomb!'” Our revenge equals survival as something to perform, exchanging data through new healthy trades that help us conceptualize our own rape as something to avoid by summoning copies of itself that are costly and cheap (“there is a price, barbarian”); anal is often a rebellious statement, boldly ripping the control of sex (and force) from state agents—one commonly made in primal, anthropomorphic “breeding” language transported to the modern world (which Amazons and Medusa certainly hint at, but which we’ll examine more with furries, later):

(artist: Foxovh)

It bears repeating that doing so is classically framed as “petty” by pro-state narratives; e.g., to look pretty if only to gain the upper hand in a world that values good looks. In truth, we’re merely trying to exist, which requires breaking profit as the thing that normally destroys us because we’re different; defying such notions, we become whatever we want—our body plasticity and gender euphoria existing despite capital trying to exterminate us, and contributing towards its ultimate demise by taking away its ability to privatize us (and our bodies, genders, labor and sexualities, etc): objects they cannot privatize, and sleek death machines to render their greatest treasure, profit, wholly moot by breaking Capitalist Realism with it. Such is our ultimate revenge—not to exist, but thrive in a post-scarcity world.

Like any illicit substance during a drug war/epidemic, moral panickers clutch their pearls, and the reactionary behaviors between them serve the same purpose vis-à-vis anal and Amazons: control for the state over workers and nature by normalizing one particular way to do things that is “correct,” while outlawing everything else (or legalizing them behind paywalls; re: Sales of Indulgence under a Protestant ethic); e.g., missionary PIV sex vs anal doggy (the latter being what Amazons have, thus Commie, Satanist space aliens). These become things to feel anxious about, hence loaded with great expectations on how we’re supposed to behave. In turn, Capitalist Realism informs Amazonomachia with neoliberal dogma (anime, videogames, movies, etc): copaganda designed to make people terminally afraid of, hence allergic and paradoxically addicted to, some very basic things onstage and off; re: Gothic push-pull during the abjection process counterfeiting the ghost of genocide, the middle class fearful of/fascinated towards abjected things like anal and Amazons being treated like forbidden fruit.

Except outlawing things, per the cryptonymy process and its double operation (to show and hide), doesn’t eliminate outlawed things from society at large. Instead, they grow increasingly dark and visible, those abjecting them suddenly seeing them everywhere; i.e., as a matter of illicit, drug-like consumption: a moral quandary insofar as our existence is something they are conditioned to eat and deny like junk food. Guilt, curiosity and dread (venial vin, often thought crimes) ensue to uphold the norm, which is persecution; i.e., towards the out-group by the in-group afraid of them yet also wanting to try what might “kill” them if they “eat” them. We become synonymous with sin and temptation as things to try and reject, for fear that prolonged exposure might enact the whore’s revenge, not the pimp’s; the pimp grows afraid of their own supply.

Such oscillation is rather addictive, but also comical. Cis-het vanilla types, for example, usually walk into situations like these thinking out loud, “But what if I like having my asshole fingered?” Would that really be so bad, my dude? Furthermore, when done correctly, anal (giving and receiving) is merely something to try[6]. It’s not a disorder but a divergence[7] from normative approaches to sex (and relating to others through sex), thus Capitalist Realism equating said boundary’s violences as unironically apocalyptic: anal as inherently transgressive through such eyes projecting their inheritor’s guilt onto the whore, the latter a homewrecker because she tempts people with forbidden love like anal (which the state conflates with rape). But also, it’s a butthole whose owner has reclaimed it from state terror dialogs—existing in a rebellious but happy position the same way someone might reclaim the bedroom or bathroom associated with it (and its signature “surprise butt sex” [shock and awe] vulnerability): the revenge of success, decentralizing power’s spread in creamy ghosts of itself!

(artist: Aria Rain)

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained” leaps to mind, but suddenly faced with that tempting proposition—of changing into something outside of what capital deems useful—will downright terrify most men (and anyone in the Man Box). Suddenly demon BDSM becomes a gateway to harder and harder kinks, which naysayers either reject entirely (calling such activities “giving in” or “weakness”), or which to project their own desire to dominates others onto; e.g., anal = rape because it “feminizes” the recipient; i.e., it makes them a recipient of police violence per nature-as-monstrous-feminine as something not just to rape, but rape in prison-like (uncomfortable) ways by Cartesian forces[8] allergic towards liberation arguments like land back made through anal. They resent anything that points out their hypocrisies through these allergies; i.e., that they’re bad-faith, the state incompatible with life and consent through its militants jockeying of the same-old paradigms; e.g., that they’re more likely to kidnap women and children and harm them than Indigenous peoples are, thus must constantly act self-righteous to keep up appearances (and rob people blind behind the fog of war). Kinks become like rumors to squash, but also guilty pleasures: to enjoy behind the choir screens, but also weapons of rape to use unironically against their enemies. “Who’s the savage, modern man!”

By extension, the colonizer assumption becomes those who do things that are gross (to them) must secretly crave anything that isn’t the norm; i.e., isn’t PIV missionary sex with a white picket fence; re: Amazons, anal and the power fantasies they express denoting unironic violence committed by the rebel against an “innocent” colonial body. Such things are forbidden by the state, colonizing them as guilty pleasures: to let one side to unto the other as punished for crimes that could happen. The genocide becomes endlessly pre-emptive; i.e., any fear of a controlled substance instilled to police it through pre-emptive revenge.

For those who fear the forbidden, such things exist outside their realm of experience; camping them, these become viewpoints unto themselves, those who enjoy them doing so because of their medicinal, therefore campy and transformative, potential. Pain is often a part of this, as are ways of doing things differently to achieve similar results. An orgasm is an orgasm—largely in the mind! So is the idea of fair treatment. Our revenge is reversing abjection to undo all the awful, alienizing things listed above; re: taking anal back from our colonizers, thus our land, brokering for peace using Amazonian theatre (and its excessive, over-the-top theatrics) as a popular and humorous conduit: threat display (the kind to make you spit out your morning coffee). Death by Snu-Snu, indeed! Anal becomes the whore’s revenge; re: Medusa clapping back, subverting the Amazon by dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit: as something to include, not abject, when going native (when in “Rome”)!

Such counterterror humor often has a “gallows” flavor to it; i.e., speaking to the pain of forced anal (or some such metaphor of colonial abuse) inflicted over a long period of time. Pain is a data that demons specialize in; re: “hurt, not harm” providing love taps—slaps, whip cracks, and pegging, etc—that speak to our abuse echoed across bad copies we can reclaim. To see something exotic and different as human, but haunted as alien under police heels—re: the pedagogy of the oppressed—is to heal from rape by finding similarity amid difference in the shadow of police forces. What they dehumanize, we rehumanize (the harvest) to expose the state as inhumane! Profit is the rape of nature as “inferior” to modernity’s timeless enforcers; we camp doubles of those, but also embrace ourselves (and our multiculture across like-minded allies with their own struggles, left) as “native,” monstrous-feminine: inheritors of a possible better world that Capitalism, in the interim, has done nothing but abuse!

(artist: Minetgot21)

“Native” is both a history and a status—the latter comparable to “dark,” in settler arguments and their Gothic offshoots; Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism encourages all oppressed peoples—those treated as monstrous-feminine by the state—to join hands in collective revenge: intersectional solidarity against our foes aping us in bad faith. Faced with such mirrors, the idea isn’t tokenization by viewing ourselves (and our allies) as enemies within, but to subvert the expectation of subjugation-through-assimilation, thus become stewards of each other as part of the natural world we can rebuild at capital’s expense. Our struggles might seem different, but in truth share the same basic goal: liberation, its dismantling of state models comprising our best revenge.

In turn, the same umbral-yet-liberatory potential that Amazons and their sodomy yield likewise goes for non-Christians, GNC persons, people of color and/or Indigenous groups combating various modular-to-intersecting abject immigrant myths/xenophobia; e.g., rape epidemics (“think of the [white] women and children”); i.e., presenting in the buff (or skimpy clothes like the bikini, below) while also being heard through these statements’ combined pedagogy of the oppressed: “We’re here and we’re queer!” Intersectional solidarity punching up towards universal, postcolonial liberation (while navigating various double standards/uneven privilege and oppression) is key in reversing abjection/challenging profit as a whole. Find what works and run with it; light a fire under your ass and go to town! Let them see you living your best life: a mistress of one’s own fate.

(artist: Minetgot21)

Indeed, such holistic, feral creativity is vital to breaking Capitalist Realism, becoming mothers (and fathers) to a post-scarcity world while inside its hauntologies. This happens by having pride in one’s culture, heritage and creativity as attached to other cultures; i.e., as Amazons are, speaking to white women as “ancient,” unruly and chaotic, similar to their non-white cousins raped inside the same territorial police states, thus prisons: “terror-tories.” Assimilation is folly because the zones of fear always expand and contract indefinitely per state revenge; i.e., delivering disproportionate violence that, unto itself, yields the very desperation and convenience that lead people to betray themselves. Being informed by the colonial past but not set in colonial stone, things don’t reduce merely to class, culture and race under struggle, but hybridize and intersect across all persecution networks, lest the elite divide-and-conquer us all over again: “The axe forgets, the tree remembers.” We’re a forest, babes; they cut down one of us, they’ll do it to all of us in due time. Lest people tokenize, gentrify and decay under state concessions, liberation is a universal affair! No exceptions! Basic human rights must become universal or Omelas’ genocides will continue, unabated.

That’s all our main points (and thought experiments) about Amazons, which means the rest of part two is, as usual, a bit more conversational/extraneous/tangential (a forest of tangents); i.e., rehashing previous points—recombining them holistically to reconsider how such things are forever at odds, warring among the same aesthetic for or against capital and its Realism; re: Amazonomachia something of a civil war between subjugated and subversive elements, abstracting them in easy-to-understand forms (re: sex and force) during ludo-Gothic BDSM: by interacting and playing with them; i.e., Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart (who we’ll examine towards the end). We’ll also integrate and inspect some historical elements to Amazons and the ancient world.

In Dispute, Afterthoughts: Subjugation vs Subversion (cont., feat. Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart)

Behind every fantasy is a reality waiting to be heard. Bearing that in mind, me and my mother’s mutual feelings—of wanting empowerment through frightening-yet-sexy monsters like the Amazon—are perfectly legitimate/ethical provided they don’t tokenize/submit to state abuse (and its various confusions about BDSM, fetishes and kink).

As such, we shouldn’t discount the value of Amazonian devices; i.e., as “mere fun and games,” hence treat them as “lesser” when trying to break the cycle. While fun and games are required to relieve stress and camp canon, garbage is useful because it’s garbage; i.e., is clay-like, hence something to transmute demonically into something else because it is both wholly invaluable and entirely cheap. But regardless of its stamina, veracity or exact constitution, the state practice works well enough for them: to divide and conquer those made to fear and fetishize whoever the state requires by abusing the power of mythmaking that Amazons convey so well. Take what they recuperate and use it to hit them where it hurts; make your opposition unruly and desirable in ways that—through the aesthetics of power and death, but also the product placement of monstrous-feminine revenge (the sleek, biomechanical avenger on her “steed,” left)—bend others towards liberation through darkness visible on the Aegis!

(artist: Martina Oliveira)

Under capital, sex and force sells as products, including Amazons. Their arguments—about rape and revenge—are demonic, persuading poetically through unequal power’s transformative potential and fulfilling of dark desires (regarding sex and force with sex and force); re: the right to exist, thus have anal sex, but also practice BDSM to challenge profit/systemic rape, achieving catharsis while fencing dialectically-materially with tokenized variants. The fact remains, rape survivors are more vulnerable under state duress, and historically betray (along class, culture and race lines) to stop it from happening again; i.e., more vulnerable parties are more desperate, thus more prone to betray under convenience to escape criminogenic conditions (said conditions being promises of violence that may or may not occur—the Faustian exchange, unto itself, also being criminogenic). It’s an old TERF/SWERF trick, one the state knows all too well. Scratch one, the other bleeds, both victims of privilege and oppression who dominate other workers by becoming cops. Both seek revenge through costumes they’ll monopolize “for themselves” and “themselves” alone: state bruisers acting as if they kneel before no one, playing the white Indian in bad faith.

(artist: Aisendraw)

Bullshit; nothing is regulated more than sex through force, subjugated Amazons stuck smack-dab in the middle of that clusterfuck. Asprey writes in War in the Shadows how

Terror is the kissing cousin of force and, real or implied, is never far removed from the pages of history. To define (and condemn) terror from a peculiar social, economic, political, and emotional plane is to display a self-righteous attitude that, totally unrealistic, is doomed to be disappointed by harsh facts (source).

As such, TERFs are fascists and fascists, however “ancient,” “mighty” and “rebellious” they seem, always bend the knee to capital; i.e., through false acts of rebellion facilitating police action—official or stochastic (vigilante)—preemptively against labor as a criminal whole to fight against; re; Parenti: the paradox of one’s “defiant” actions being they constitute deference, actually defending capital by killing capital’s enemies. The enemy is within, but that enemy is them: playing dress-up in bad faith to better enact state terror (thus violence) with relative impunity.

Neoliberalism endorses personal responsibility in its cryptofascism—a “phallic” Amazonian tack to defend the free market, while seeking the kinds of revenge known previously to medieval women’s Gothic voices; i.e., regardless of territory or occupant; e.g., Lady Macbeth’s rising venom when forced to harbor King Duncan under her battlements:

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).

Medusa, through Hippolyta, rattles in echoes that can be copied in bad faith.

Again, while the state tries to monopolize Amazons—and while these sentiments and actual monopolies are impossible—the historical-material consequence of striving for them is anything but. Faced with the unknown as brought about by planned economic collapse (and loaded with cryptonymic threats of rape), the middle class triggers, suddenly crying out, “We can’t go back to the street, the brothel—won’t (or can’t) squeeze into a corset again!” But that’s precisely what they do when they posture as strong inside the Man Box; i.e., putting on a fur or metal bikini and posing as a buff underwear model with fake tits; e.g., Autumn Ivy doing just that while aggressively insisting they aren’t a money-grubbing sex worker, and policing those who might say otherwise:

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

There’s nothing wrong with underwear models, money-grubbing or fake tits; there’s everything wrong with fake solidarity from token SWERFs, gentrifying sex work while punching down in bad faith (with Autumn also being a TERF for punching down against me, a trans woman). For Autumn (and anyone who acts like them), it’s a brand (e.g., the tweet for the left image reading “gym girls that cosplay”)—the actual politics largely unimportant save when posturing as strong in ways that white gentrified AFAB people historically do: as token feminists, punching down against easy targets. They’re loud, but only when their own equality of convenience is threatened. In turn, images like the one above become something that cannot easily be parsed without dialectical-material scrutiny (the above image merely the phallic aesthetic of the Amazon, its author’s politics largely neoconservative/unspoken beyond “strong women are sexy”).

State alienation knows no bounds. Wedding personal responsibility to austerity politics, neoliberalism loves to threaten middle-class security as “under attack” (during alien invasions) before “creating jobs” to police labor with; e.g., branding the bodice as a “breastplate” and the thong as a “codpiece” (or ham sandwich holder—the vagina dentata) to conceal its carceral, police-like function (versus a function that liberates all peoples). All equate to labor and wage theft, disguised as false power in oft-fantastical language criminalizing sex work through monetary value; i.e., the Amazon as a formerly conquered group, but also a job opportunity (the carrot and stick) chained to the brothel: a bouncer who can never leave. Doing so decays the Amazon as a sex-positive feminist symbol; i.e., replacing it with a traitorous double recruited from the prison population to brutalize their own (the state later rescinding these privileges, per the euthanasia effect). Whores policing whores in the brothel-as-prison, they do so while posturing as exclusive, special victims; i.e., undeserving of state force, while administering said force towards deserving victims in exchange for state pay. Autumn (and those like them) aren’t strong for standing up to the elite; they’re a cop, thus the elite’s bully kept on a leash, acting strong.

Female or not, the state must always create new monstrous-feminine enemies to uphold Capitalist Realism with (and cops to enforce it); i.e., offshoots of the Medusa scaring and exciting its middle-class gatekeepers with a ghost of the counterfeit to further the abjection process (to be on guard/the lookout for criminal degenerate elements). This includes domestic cops and victims, but also from Elsewhere—from the wild reaches beyond empire, while making civilians want for heroes that bridge the gap at home: cowboys and Indians, orcs and humans, us versus them. Per eco-fascism and its moderation by state good guys (re: American exceptionalism calling such things “stable,” so-called “peace and prosperity” code for worker/owner division, infinite growth, and efficient profit), competition, conflict and scarcity are relaid through tokenized monsters combining this with that, under Pax Americana power fantasies; e.g., Amazons and orcs with sex, and sex other forbidden goods, like rape: someone to capture you and presumably never let go! It’s a drug and the first one’s free (“There is a price, barbarian!”)!

(artist: Master DCJ)

Such feast-or-famine combative theatrics are universally applicable, and regression isn’t automatically bad (re: regressing during roleplay to address trauma). That being said, state decay cycles under capital, fostering a routine unknown to endorse and enforce regressively conservative politics made from whole cloth (re: fascism defends capital during neo-medieval regression with paganized, eco-fascist elements). In turn, Orientalism is the dialog between the colonizer and colonized, speaking between them in warrior-like ways; i.e., among those with a capacity for physical violence pushed into cartoonish forms about monster captivity and rape (above and below). They become sources of power to tap into—rape epidemics that seek to reclaim these devices to humanize the Beast and acknowledge the furious and whore-like elements of the Beauty character in the same breath: their hellish co-existence during rape, capture and murder fantasies (we’ll unpack this even more with demon mommies). It’s an opera, a danger disco whose Numinous, forbidden love speaks to nature not simply as alien under capital, but desirable for it (sex out of wedlock isn’t just fun, but good praxis).

(artist: Soli)

Rape play involves passion when putting “rape” in quotes. Per Laura Ng and Edward Said, the inheritors of empire seek protection from the home as suddenly foreign to them per a fear of said unknown; i.e., when their rights and personal property are threatened by the elite pulling the strings (the call coming from inside the house): during the Gothic’s liminal hauntology of war turning the home into an unheimlich, traveling barbaric castle (thus conductive to those savage realities of empire that inheritors of the Imperial Core turn a blind eye to); re: “There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection” (source), generally through feelings of alienation and attraction.

All can be supplied by rebels or cops, but their appearance is largely the same; i.e., in such spaces “invaded” by a foreign, imperial menace—that of a savage conqueror “of nature” doubling as a homely nurturer that, all the while, comes off as nakedly imposing and desirable, foreign and familiar while evoking the Medusa to hug and embrace during calculated risk; re: the dialectics of shelter and the alien—their threats of capture, bondage, domination, torture, rape, death, etc, playing out during courtly love. A black castle appears; the Amazon defeats it to canonically whitewash home, then is bridled/pimped out as a whore (while being somewhat whore-like until then, too).

In terms of the “invasion,” itself, home is invaded by the ghosts of empire projected onto an abject scapegoat mirroring state abuse in “ancient alien” forms (re: the black pyramid and its evil rulers). A wild enemy appears, calling for token Amazons (and similar agents) to crack down in bad faith. These trends extend historically-materially into the retro-future’s castle-narrative (chronotopes) and cryptonymies; re, Hogle and Bakhtin: a restless labyrinth merged with the environs of a castle space, saturated through-and-through with time in the narrow sense of the word; i.e., that of the historical past, fixated on dynastic primacy and hereditary rights enforced by police agents, pivoting and wheeling to maintain their own middle-management, desk murderer’s white-knuckle hold on a given population: the animation of a legendary police violence mirroring ironic, campy forms (and their gender parody’s subsequent gender trouble).

In turn, this ghost of the counterfeit is policed to further the abjection process, having revenge against nature through clay-like renditions of the status quo as “Gothic,” a found document. Statutes are documentation, in that respect—psychosexual golems bringing the dead back to life, wish-fulfilling a variety of guilty pleasures/forbidden desires. “I love ‘clay’ so fucking much!”

(artist: Sergey Galanter)

Clay is the data storage device of the ancient world, but also—still to some extent—the modern one. Demons, including Amazons, come from said world, fashioned from clay to denote “ancient,” repressed revenge; i.e., as something to reclaim under state dominion; re: from state gargoyles policing state territories and coded with state data, thus instructions regarding the giving and receiving of police violence as revenge against oppressed peoples fighting back. It’s again effectively eco-fascism, white Indians treating native peoples like a virus while badly imitating them. This can be reversed, the proletarian whore both “for real” and artificial while pushing for post-scarcity as starting in imaginary realms; i.e., “given flesh” through clay and other demonic devices.

To demonize something is either to make it alien or speak to one’s alienation while reclaiming it. As monstrous-feminine beings, Amazons—good or bad—incur this process in a dialectical-material sense similar to knights (e.g., Cameron’s terminators); i.e., cops and victims, us versus them, etc, pilfered from Antiquity in service of the West or to undermine it, mid-Amazonomachia.

Through demonic expression—of monsters battling monsters (one-on-one or through teams)—you’re only limited by your creativity and imagination; i.e., which capital curtails to serve profit by raping nature: profiting off manmade disasters. Challenging that, anything becomes possible, be it match to make or stance to adopt, per Satanic self-determination; re, Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” All pro-state forms (of demons) deliberately serve profit while asleep at the wheel; all pro-labor forms actively fight capital to subvert, resist and dismantle it (to be of the devil’s party and know it), hence abjure greed and achieve liberation, sex positivity and post-scarcity—often by showing audiences a troubling view of their own world: of “another” world, another time, one whose age of wonder and cusp of disaster speaks of god-like beings who walk the earth among us mortals!

In a post-scarcity sense, such a world has never quite existed, but the lack of systemic cruelty before capital can be revived in hauntological forms felt in the shadows of cloaked, present-day abuses. This happens per the Aegis seized from the state to embody our struggles; i.e., in opposition to state forms, our best revenge being to humanize and deify the proletariat as sacred: a Great Destroyer the state actually fears—what it can’t fully pimp/rape, thus control in service to profit! “You’ll never own this ass!”

(artist: Dandonfuga)

This dialectic of ownership and control over nature-as-alien/monstrous-feminine brings us to something I want to briefly explore, here: ancient history and aesthetics superimposed over modern forms of the Amazon as a profoundly hauntological being.

Despite a curious translation for amazos meaning “one breast” and indicating body mutilation, we also have the armored, resisting quality of the classical female form protecting the body from mutilation while wholly unclothed; i.e., controlling sex through force, hyphenating both in masculine body displays loaded with feminine contradictions, theatrical hauntologies, and GNC gradients that have only intensified in recent years (under Amazon tokenization).

For one, recent female embodiments speak through/of the tell-tale nudity of ancient warriors, but specifically male bodies mythologized for having invincible flesh (e.g., Achilles) that Amazons were historically denied; i.e., as the victims of male conquest (the Amazonomachia) by infringing on patriarchal territories. Yet, Gothic Communism is half-real, recultivating the imaginary past that performers (and their bodies) might speak to historical-material issues like female domination: as giver or receiver of current state abuse! To that, the monstrous-feminine isn’t biologically male or female, and its mythologies allow for a sea of contrast more or less alien to the nascent West (sexuality and gender identity emerging in the 1700s; re: Foucault).

Considering public nudism, the monstrous-feminine invokes a curious paradox when presenting nude before the gods: strength through exposure. Under current forms, this presents an opportunity as much to ogle ancient male-exclusive ideas of masculine strength onto women’s bodies as it does to masturbate to the female body on display. The two are not mutually exclusive, but female warriors remain haunted by a die-hard notion of imaginary motherhood attached to state models about sexual reproduction and, by extension, nudity (vaginal or phallic) having evolved over time: male power fantasies for various reasons, but also female/queer pilot adopting said fantasies for ironic (or unironic) reasons.

(artist: Alex Ross)

This Amazonian paradox began with older patriarchal forms that were, themselves, rather plastic. For example, Sarah Bond writes in “A Brief History of Olympic Nudity from Ancient Greece to ESPN” (2016) how the 5th century BCE historian Thucydides saw “athletic nudity [as] a show of civility [emphasis, me] in the face of the barbarism displayed by the Persian enemies to the East of Greece. Ancient Persians traditionally thought it against decorum to appear in the buff, and thus Greek nudity was an affront to their social mores. It was a symbol of Greekness at that time first associated with Spartans and then with many other Greek city-states. It was said that even Spartan women worked out in the nude” (source).

In short, ancient warriors advertised their superior lineage through their naked bodies; i.e., as a kind of dogma/copaganda—one that could be replicated (for workers or the state) through cryptomimesis (the echo of trauma, but also, I would argue, symbols of power). Bond further writes,

Athletes were often ideal bodies that served as the muses for artists, just as Michelangelo would later use such Greek athletic sculpture to inspire his statue of David. To Thucydides and many other later writers and artists, the athletic body was a symbol of Greek civilization, superiority and, most importantly, control. These were bodies honed and shaped by extreme discipline. Greeks prided themselves in competing with each other in self-control—called in Greek “σωφροσύνη“—and Sparta in particular was famous for this virtue.

If nudity really was a way of projecting and advertising Spartan discipline, just think about what all those enhanced six-packs in 300 were supposed to represent. No one articulates the meaning of the ancient nude athletic body better than historian Donald Kyle, who notes in his book Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World, “The human body-male or female, fit or flabby, clothed or naked-is the ultimate symbol…In Archaic Greece, disrobing fully to become naked for sport became an assertive communication of maleness, ethnicity, status, freedom, privilege, and physical virtue.” Even then, the athletic body was a powerful advertising canvas and nudity was itself a costume (ibid.).

“Costume” is a good way to put it. Basically reversing Segewick’s imagery of the surface vis-à-vis nudity on the surface of clothes, and more showcasing clothing through nudity (the surface of skin) as a virtue of masculine strength and beauty that Amazons are certainly known for (albeit as a matter of performative irony regarding their feminine side and status being monstrous because they aren’t biologically[9] men)—so-called “bare strength” is an heirloom of the ancient world; i.e., bodies stripped bare, less to perform better and more to advertise them and those they represent (the state and the state’s dimorphic gender values) on the field: to be viewed, hence witnessed, as intimating works of art/poetry in motion. This would happen while suitably giving a courtier’s deference and hubristic display to Olympus—namely Zeus and his divinity as something to bask in and hopefully win his (infamously capricious) favor:

Athletes competed naked as a tribute to the Greek God Zeus. They wanted to show Zeus their physical power and muscular physique. Showing off their bodies also helped intimidate other competitors. /Since Greek heroes were often depicted nude in artwork and sculptures, this inspired athletes to train harder and win their event. Athletes wanted to be compared to “true” [quotes, me] heroes like Hercules and Achilles.

[…] In Greek legends death was a terrible experience. They believed when you died it was all over and you spent the rest of eternity in endless torment. This is why Hercules was so revered. He was a mortal man who won immortality because of his athletic accomplishments. / Lunt believes that many people competed in the Olympics hoping they’d be able to achieve some portion of immortality. By consistently winning athletes would have statues sculpted and songs written about their achievements, which meant their legacy would live on through the ages (source: “Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Ancient Olympics,” 2016).

Male or female, masculine and/or feminine, there’s an apocryphal element to Greek heroes—one that plays out, onstage, in a half-real sense (tying heroism as much to games and performance, such naked violence sitting between legend and real life). It also bears repeating that Greek heroes are notoriously tragic, chasing the gods only to fall short (with Hercules going mad and killing his family before trying to commit suicide[10], and Achilles famously falling victim to poison).

The belief (and a very patriarchal one, at that) was immortality being achieved through legendary feats of physical strength that people could witness at a given venue known for recreating them (athleticism, but also military conquest told in masculine art; i.e., the “human cockfighting” of gladiatorial kayfabe). The classic problem with Amazons, then, is they and their costumes (their naked bodies) were basically doing what men did minus a male overlord, which society at the time would have warned against; Amazons were monsters, meaning threats to male power structures because they promoted an equality that was fundamentally antithetical to how the Ancient Greeks—particularly the Athenians—normally viewed men and women: as inherently (according to them) unequal, thus ultimately defeated in propaganda battles ordaining such things (which classical Amazonomachia did, carrying its foregone conclusions into Renaissance art and ultimately present-day forms; re: hoakley’s “Amazons at War,” 2023). Men were dogmatized as “superior” and treated all women, not just Amazons, as threats/sites of conquest to put down by force—to rape, synonymizing sex with force.

While city-states are not homogenous, even Spartan[11] women would have been beholden to this ordering of things; yes, they could be do certain things other city-states, like Athens, might be stricter about (nudity in public), but still remained beholden to that most sacred of womanly duties a state would need to survive: motherhood. A quality reflected in Cameron’s Amazons, literal millennia down the road, this effectively made Spartan women glorified breeding vats for the city-state: to produce children, including boys, for the Spartan Agoge: “Their lives were not their own, but belonged to the state,” explains Unknown5, who is quick to point out the Spartan state was a war machine dependent on slave labor and brutal military programs, but also secret police[12] (“How Sparta Manufactured Super-Soldiers – The Spartan Agoge,” 2023).

And yet, if men were victims of the state for falling in battle, women were recruited to assist in sexual reproduction valorized over something closer to a whore or second-class citizen: dying during childbirth. But they would have still stood for the values of the state, making them glorified cheerleaders with additional responsibilities yet still controlled for their sexuality by something that had (and continues to have) power over them in newer evolved markets continuing to control sex and force, and by extension, women’s bodies of all different kinds. Nothing is controlled more than sex, force an instrument to dominate nature by vengefully pimping it. Nudity and prostitution became increasingly common in forms that, while they can be sex-positive and dictated by workers themselves, historically would have (and still continue to be) controlled by state forces towering over them:

(artist: Prism Serene)

In short, the nation-states of today inherited the flaws of their city-state predecessors (the ones that survived, which Sparta did not), but also their modus operandi for advertising through bodies; i.e., whose owners at times worshipped warrior women, but also feared and reviled them as things to pimp (thus rape). In short, Amazons  were policed and fetishized, but also martyred in service to male hegemony as an ongoing hauntological theme; i.e., the topos of the power of women, creation of sexual difference, and Male Gaze, etc, speaking to classic problems of female appropriation and assimilation: regarding women historically disfigured and maimed by patriarchal forces, turning them into cops.

(artist: Franz von Stuck)

Yet, there is a current issue through such bodies seeming to recruit warrior women in a very Spartan-esque “equality”: the state haunting liberatory forms, the latter also seeking the right not simply to undress and show off, but challenge canonical doubles with self-same exposure (a kind of warrior tribadism); i.e., to avoid forced motherhood and military service! Subjugated Amazons commonly express as paradoxically virginal, immaculate by Cameron’s neoconservative, cop-like forms; i.e., scrappy but off-limits, giving them a modesty element that is paradoxically cheeky and “of nature.” Ripley doesn’t birth Newt, but rescues her from dark, Communist- and queer-coded savages.

In short, the Amazons of today canonically function as “Goldilocks whores,” policing bad nature through good under Pax Americana, and which we can redress/undress as needed. Toying with various BDSM themes, such as Marston’s bondage kink, it becomes an act of worship—revering the exposed flesh as “mighty” through ironic appearance and subversive context: “She’s a brick house,” one caught between genuine rebellion and actual betrayal. Once a rebel, then a cop, and struggling to reclaim such things away from their traitorous qualities on the same combative surfaces, the Amazon’s surface tension is heightened paradoxically through exposure; i.e., to her as both combatant and bride in patriarchal eyes, one whose dialectical-material function isn’t immediately obvious: a cop or simply a warrior maiden/demon lover that speaks to liberation as a constant uphill battle. Throughout history as something to reinvent while looking backwards into the future, the Amazon’s powers remain constantly stolen and abused by nation-states (and neoliberal corporations) appropriating modern-day feminism vis-à-vis an “ancient,” naked-warrior aesthetic. Yet, such is where power lies, waiting for her to take it all back with.

Moving past the former historical side of things, let’s conclude this section by considering power’s application through Amazonian dualism—specifically in our hands through Amazons as a form of art and political expression.

Power is useful; demons embody all kinds, the Amazon in particular speaking to her exposed body as a sexual weapon—one of rape and revenge that promotes athleticism through the flesh and vaso vagal through the weaponry she carries. These collectively threaten before, during and after social-sexual activities (often warfare). In turn, inequality through exchange is classically determined through artists and muses, one being knowledge (about nature) and the other power (from/over nature). Per Galatea, but also Faust and Prometheus, each side has something to offer the other in statuesque ways: a slice of Antiquity as retro-future.

Keeping with ludo-Gothic BDSM, the poetic dialog of Amazons should be intense, but palliatively subversive; i.e., to deliver eustress, or positive stress, in Numinous passions that speak theatrically to our lived trauma while replicating good feelings, mid-paradox: those relaid in “torturous” body language, unequal exchange, and the dark transformative potential of various social-psychosexual performances. Provided it’s what they want, the fucked party should reach back to grip the bedframe while getting railed, or otherwise offer the dom their body and agency during calculated risk (re: consent is hot, but especially under conditions that put it to the test, below). Such surrender is temporary and committed through service, the dom serving the sub in ways the sub needs (and which the dom enjoys).

Furthermore, demon BDSM (with Amazons or not) isn’t purely of sex and pain, so much as it involves asexual interrogations of trauma that often (though not always) include sex and pain in demonic language. The point of such theatre is to “surrender”; i.e., under a performing destroyer’s “captivity” and “violence” as equally performative, thus in quotes. It’s not real so much as half-real, thus cannot harm the recipient(s) despite controlling them in ways they choose to submit to; it merely restrains them, giving them the chance to negotiate boundaries of unequal power happening under controlled circumstances arranged by everyone in advance (re: informed consent).

In turn, these devices (e.g., bed restraints, below) aren’t abusive unless being used to abuse, which camp doesn’t do. Even so, campy forms of exquisite “torture” very much remain haunted by actual, generational trauma; i.e., “rape” being a fantasy to live with and overcome through play that helps stabilize our inner victim, one threatened by daily remainders of what they survived: the Amazon as both protector and destroyer in good faith and bad, for workers or the state; e.g., with me loving the Amazon aesthetic despite having been abused by those practicing it in the past. It’s not just medicinal, for revolutionaries, but cathartic, orgasmic and good praxis, when done correctly!

(source)

Keeping this in mind, the gods and their avatars (dualistic manifestations of unequal power and knowledge, transformation, and dark desires of rape and revenge unto nature-as-monstrous-feminine) are as much things to make ourselves as they are to return to in demonic forms made by others—with alienation’s problematic lineage under capital reclaimed in statuesque doubles speaking to our bodies and identities echoed darkly across the Amazon (and other demons); i.e., statues to sculpt and behold as one does a god from “ancient” times—both silly like this ’90s Street Fighter spoof or serious like Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, the imaginary past conjured to their makers’ service: “a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power” (source: Nava Atlas’ “Charlotte Brontë’s Preface to Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,” 2014).

(artist: Zhaar)

This bestiary very much includes Amazons; i.e., as historically whored-out, female avatars of war that have become increasingly entropic (dualistic, liminal, GNC, BDSM-themed, and hauntological, etc) under neoliberal Capitalism as something to be for or against. Our copies double the state’s and vice versa, their respective arguments borrowing a great many things from a shared source; i.e., from the cryptonymy process and its restless vanishing point; e.g., dark “phallic” mommy doms like Lady Dimitrescu, left, both coming from and occupying the same half-real shadow zone used by cops and victims, alike. Both are “dark” in appearance, threatening order as it currently exists (under crisis and its fearsome, decaying circumstances), but only one functionally serving workers, animals and nature by doing so; i.e., there is always a shadow under capital and that shadow is always a deserving/undeserving victim in duality.

As we’ve discussed, cops abuse DARVO and obscurantism to accomplish state revenge (thus profit) against nature; i.e., as monstrous-feminine with monstrous-feminine; re: having “good” nature rape “bad,” the Amazon versus the Medusa but also other “bad” Amazons during Tolkien’s refrain and later Cameron’s. Victims of their unironic violence and bad-faith masquerades seek to anisotropically stymie profit (and break Capitalist Realism) with while using the same linguo-material performances per liminal expression: rape play where Amazons aren’t simply bona fide liberators, but token police reflecting inside/upon the same guerilla, monstrous-feminine, armor-like-yet-undressed (virgin/whore) shells and surfaces! Revolution is ergodic/non-trivial in this respect; embracing and adjusting under this total, diseased reality means acknowledging the Amazon’s shared praxial, ontological confusion during the cryptonymy process: on the Black Veil personified, tracing its concentric veneers’ mise-en-abyme (castles-in-the flesh) to escape the labyrinth while, to some degree, inside its power as something to occupy and relate to, person/place, resident/residence, etc.

Like Victor’s Creature, Amazons are demons, meaning things that—once made—testify as much to ongoing abuse in dysfunctional relations with (and receiving deceptions/cryptonymy from) powerful forces; i.e., forces concerned with controlling power for themselves as pro-state or pro-worker (anarchist). This applies to both sides of a given exchange and goes both ways, among various marginalized groups; e.g., white women like Radcliffe commonly making Neo-Gothic hulks that speak as much to their husband’s legally unequal status as they do citations of imperial abjection, but also reclaim either in fictional forms: “Fuck me like you mean it!”

Speaking to the whore’s paradox (re: the best sex[13] having a bit of struggle, vaso vagal, eustress—so-called “struggle snuggles,” cuddlefucks, what-have you), forbidden knowledge and power are often about sex and force as “dark” because it achieves catharsis in a pre-existing state of confusion that workers inherit/are born into (one where order and equality are a lie that serves state continuation by menticiding vulnerable parties through psychosexual dogma; re: gargoyles). Great castigation conveys the data through how we camp its effects with other people we view as “statuesque”; i.e., Amazonian dominators that, under our command, expiate our naughty-naughty sins by pounding our asses just how we like—all while living with/embracing trauma during the dialectic of shelter/the alien:

(artist: Marlon Trelie)

But again, Gothic Communism is holistic. To be considered sex-positive at all, such things cannot harm others—meaning in the scene or elsewhere—across space and time, through poetry and politics using Amazons during oppositional praxis. It’s not entirely about their gender but the demon-lover threat they represent towards certain privileged groups under men’s “protection,” classically white women.

Much of the next few pages comes from Volume Zero. Though not female, for example, Radcliffe’s banditti were demon lovers, and very much threatened (white, straight, middle-class) women with rape; i.e., whether deliberate or not, she commodified a white, straight, politically moderate woman’s idea of rape, all while excluding most other oppressed voices during the abjection process (all relegated to the ghost of the counterfeit she charged her novels with). Among TERFs, current Amazon poetics can yield a similar misogynistic flavor (cis or trans) that Radcliffe did unto cis women exclusively using mythical, male forest demons. Both are bad, but our focus, here, is the darkness of Amazons made to serve the state similar to how Radcliffe’s own rape fantasies did (causing unimaginable harm in the process.

By subverting Amazons as demon lovers during courtly love, we can use this ourselves to harness, thus convey dark power and knowledge; i.e., as things to behold in proximity to its deathly intimations, promoting repressed characteristics of ourselves and how we and our potential (to transform during unequal, forbidden exchange) are treated by state and liberatory forces in opposition: the struggle to snuggle, to be bold—to rub elbows with godly forces tied to land, labor and occupant normally enslaved by bourgeois servants who look like us, mid-rebellion.

As things to control workers with, sex and force “war” as they normally do, the Aegis taking various taboo aspects of daily life and reflecting them back at workers in poetic, shadowy forms and methods; i.e., the psychomachy as Amazonomachia, yielding internal and external disputes for problematic contrast, thus comparison; e.g., fucking but also dialectical-material struggles about fucking (the marriage bed or wedlock) personified through Amazons (monsters to fuck) being something to embody and take into ourselves as much to get out of our systems; re: to be strong in ways that prevent future harm for all workers, animals and nature as monstrous-feminine caused by state predation.

Amazons are warrior women that reflect “dark desire” being historically ironic; i.e., normally triangulating for the state for fear of rape projecting onto the colonized-as-demonic, and us anisotropically pushing back through Amazonian camp. This alienized-vs-alienizer dialog commonly has a gendered, animalistic (re: predator/prey) element as well, the Amazon’s classical abilities to conform (or not conform) used by state forces recuperating rebellious actors and actions like Amazons (who are basically big animal warrior women) to suit their own needs. They do so with confidence, always assuming we don’t have the guts to reclaim and such things to suit us, not them. It’s not technically “hard” to prove them wrong (at a glance), but the battle is very much an uphill one; i.e., to internalize these devices at a cultural level so that developing sex-positivity (thus Gothic Communism) becomes second-nature: liberating sex workers (thus all workers) through iconoclast art, recultivating the Wisdom of the Ancients (the Superstructure) in the process.

(artist: AkiraeviI)

A “terrorist” goes both ways, then, as does any ability to move power through such dichotomies; i.e., as things to reverse; re: workers being terrorist and counterterrorist in anisotropic duality. This duality reverses polarity through the same points, all depending on who’s labeling and perceiving who, but also who’s describing a given position as “Amazon” (or something similar to Amazon, like orcs or witches); e.g., state victims are always “terrorist” (thus illegitimate) in the eyes of the state and its rights, but always “counterterrorist” (thus legitimate) in the eyes of themselves and their rights. The same aesthetic of power and rebellion, rape and revenge, can be recuperated by state actors enacting false rebellion vis-à-vis the obfuscation of Amazons and Amazonomachia through DARVO arguments. Through praxial inertia, they tie the function of Amazons into knots (above), their white Indian/undercover cop cloaked in double standards colonizing nature (and symbols of resistance tied to nature) as a monstrous-feminine force to harvest for the state. Doing so happens, again, per the usual neoconservative, predator/prey triangulations; i.e., tokenizing a desire for protection from abject beings under state conditions: nature equals big, scary whore, so find something of nature—an Amazonian whore domesticated by state agents—to keep criminal (non-white, queer) nature in check, thus protect the state’s nuclear model (often expressed as non-Amazonian women and children; re: Cameron’s Amazons and their victims/wards).

From a competitive standpoint, home is an alien mountain to climb; i.e., king of the hill with only one victor after trammeling the whore (which Gothic Communism seeks to reclaim using the same binding devices and weapon-like threats of force [thus rape] that cops use). In turn, canonical home defense (the besieged home-in-decay as “Western”) is always (neo)conservative, overlooking Pax Americana‘s genocidal function by seeking its revenge; re: peace through strength, repressing state skeletons-in-the-closet by dressing them up as bugbear scapegoats.

This includes the Amazon as something to banish, afterwards—a sow to fatten and butcher while acting like a pig (a cop). Such “hogtying” happens while conveniently titillating the Male Gaze outside the bedroom (for anyone in the Man Box, not just men); re: the canceled future of childhood regression, whereupon capital decays and Imperialism comes home to empire in medieval language: summon darkness (often as evil dollhouse, but also monstrous-feminine dolls inside said house); retire the Amazon similar to the male knight or nameless gunslinger (except she’s also a whore) by banishing or bridling her after the liminal hauntology of war (the haunted house or Gothic castle’s operatic danger disco) retreats. Rinse and repeat; rape nature abroad by evoking genocide at home.

Doing so panders to Capitalist Realism per the ghost of the counterfeit, pimping demon lovers in parental language overlapping on the same monstrous bodies; i.e., whose abjection Amazons express par excellence—manlier and more “daddy-like” than many men, but still treated as non-men/automatic mothers by the state using them like men; re: to rape nature with nature by defending the state. As a system that rapes nature time and time again, the state is always good in its own eyes; under times of expansion and crisis, it allows tokenism to assimilate one lucky member of an alien group, making them good merely to violate all others from said group (and other groups). Galatea tokenizes under Pygmalion’s shadow to enforce his will: that of the skeleton tyrant/Capitalocene.

(artist: Kafun)

The entire enterprise descends into alarm fatigue, a process where someone becomes the cop simply to postpone, not prevent their own abuse by state forces; i.e., big fish eat little fish, so kiss up and punch down, rape encompassing an act of creative control about itself; e.g., Jadis—apart from raping me—also policed my artwork, telling me what bodies were acceptable to draw (as Amazons) and which weren’t (and pulling my funding to attack me with)! Such persons are craven to a fault, selling out at the drop of a hat; i.e., at the threat of collapse, or facing things coded as “collapse” which they employ[14] against state enemies: the perceived enemy at the gates of “Rome” also being the enemy within her dark fortress; e.g., “That not my wife” (from Body Snatchers, 1978) being a phrase Jadis freely laughed at and used unironically against me: not someone who’d put up with their bullshit indefinitely (though I did for nearly three years, the last six months mostly being me planning to leave and calling them out as my abuser).

True to form, Jadis wasn’t above whoring themselves out for the state, either—not if it let them assert strength over me (a trans woman) as the (according to them) weaker party! They were always right, and I was always wrong—a holster for their frustrations, and where they could shove their terrible gaze into me (to “look daggers,” as the saying goes), a colossal twat ensnaring me with boobytraps:

(model and photographer: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard[15])

Onstage and off, such things regress to pre-agrarian, hunter/gatherer levels of postapocalypse, state “guerrilla monopolies” (on asymmetrical warfare as a performative device) resulting canonically in Quixotic, Pavlovian/menticidal, and “white knight, black knight” syndrome (refer to Volume Zero and One for further examinations of these ideas): the hyphenating of pre-existing gender notions of strength (the stacked, “non-white” body type) with ironic roles canonically swapping to uphold the status quo, forced onto classic dominatrixes by the state (another reward to promise to state sissies). She’s a lethal weapon from head to toe, darkness visible yielding and concealing various cryptonymic facets!

Yet, monster-fucking goes both ways. This uwu/owo (fear/fascination) schtick applies to people lusting after Amazons, knights and similar warriors’ ghost of the counterfeit as much as it does when embodying them (chercher la femme vs gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia); re: Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot craving Sir Lancelot from afar—boldly and voyeurism eying the great warrior with her magic mirror’s telescopic gaze:

A bow-shot from her bower-eaves,

He rode between the barley-sheaves,

The sun came dazzling thro’ the leaves,

And flam’d upon the brazen greaves

Of bold Sir Lancelot.

A red-cross knight for ever kneel’d

To a lady in his shield,

That sparkled on the yellow field,

Beside remote Shalott (source).

In short, middle-class people historically get “thirsty” and desire protection from imaginary threats in black/white language; e.g., black/white knights, but also novels haunted by them; re: Catherine Morland and friend—in Jane Austen’s 1803/1817[16] Northanger Abbey—crying “positively dreadful!” while reading so-called “black” (Gothic) novels by the dozen (see: Volume Zero).

They also desire to be strong in ways that mirror their Amazonian protectors unequal distributions and proposals; re:

For me, this becomes another form of consent, one informed by sexual desire. I choose to interact with Samus and the castle because they teach, but also excite me. I want to fuck what I want to be: sexy. For me, that means a powerful woman like Samus [a colony brat raised by giant bird aliens].

Yes, Metroid spaces and heroines are “traumatic,” and echo trauma (re: child abuse) and “trauma” (re: watching Alien) from my childhood. They remain sexy because Samus chooses to protect me inside the space, the carrot to the castle’s stick. To quote Spike Spiegel, “I love the kind of woman who can kick my ass.” The Metroidvania castle lets me adopt a traditionally “female” stance: fear of physical abuse. Intimations of trauma are inevitable; framing them within boundaries of play grants me an element of control, according to a partner I can trust. I trust the Metroidvania to “imprison” me. Inside the castle, I control Samus, an avatar whose powerful persona chases my boogeymen, tyrants, away (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Why I Submit,” 2021).

As such, Amazons are like the bull in the China shop—blunt and graceful, pursuer and object of pursuit. Thusly reclaiming these paradoxical fixtures of rape and resistance from bad actors/state hegemony during liminal expression’s mise-en-abyme, we become not only torn between two worlds (either as or regarding Amazons), but between Amazons as alien advertisements for timeless battles working for/against the state; i.e., these castles-in-the-flesh (castle-like bodies and vice versa) “going native” to fight—from mind to monster—over and across the same billboard bodies’ demonic sex and force: towering and morphologically buttressed, but also under siege in both directions.

Except, whereas cops present themselves as “shepherds” guarding nature in bad faith (often as white Indians/token vigilantes; re: Savage Land Rogue[17]), we promote stewardship over nature as true anti-rape arbiters; i.e., something to take back from the state—both sides employing the castled language of sex and force, rape and revenge to make victim arguments in good or bad faith; e.g., the lived reality of monstrous-feminine female bodies controlled by patriarchal ones, the Amazon classically feared by rapists for her visibly daunting appearance, and which rapists will teach Amazons—per the Pygmalion fantasy—to rape for them (appearing on and off state land to police its wider colonial territories)!

Amazons are demons, not maidens, thus intimidating to cops when cops cannot control them; i.e., as pimps poaching the most vulnerable targets they possibly can, and constantly dreaming up BDSM clichés that let the male jailor “submit” to stronger-appearing (often female) subordinates in whorish, female-coded outfits when it suits them. They pimp the conquered as controlled opposition/pin-up dominatrix (often as whitewashed “jungle fever”); i.e., projecting their rock ‘n roll sex fantasies (and insecurities; re: death by Snu-Snu) onto a classic enemy of the state, but also a paradox: weak/strong per masculine/feminine as monstrous-feminine, forcing the colonized to mother them/whore for the Man—to look tough for said men, but submit to their masters raping them as whores and literally fighting their battles. It becomes an embarrassing privilege in the same old hierarchy. Women’s work enters the Man Box, “acting like a man” to collect for the Faustian pimp as never actually giving anything up when swapping roles (“liberation” staying in the bedroom, trad wives exiting that space wearing Halloween costumes disguising June in pearls, but also her cop status). Instead, rape becomes something to rank inside a costume game.

Abjection projects state violence onto its past-and-present victims becoming future cops and victims. To it, older dynasties were rooted in misogyny as something to recruit from its own victim pools (restricted to local groups cops could realistically dominate through said time’s state logistics; e.g. Sparta), capital expanding said pools to assimilate earlier out-groups; i.e., centuries after Imperialism expanded from feudalism into settler colonialism, some of the world’s oldest scapegoats (women) became early examples of token cops furthering abjection per state concessions: to fight a rising consciousness to state abuses (merging with other forms of tokenism/decaying activism [white indentured servants, people of color and Indigenous peoples] to punch down against labor as a whole); re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss putting “rebellion” in quotes; e.g., kidnapped Hippolyta forced to wed Theseus and obey him, a husband and pimp one-in-the-same, the whore a savage made tame on the Wild West of frontier Capitalism. Over a relatively short period, subjugated feminism suddenly became the concealed weapon during the cryptonymy process—the warrior Venus an alien ace up the elite’s sleeve: to go where men weren’t allowed.

State/pimp revenge, then, became a matter of funding such sell-outs succeeding the myth as something to make anew and rebirth[18] the state by infiltrating its own prisons. In turn, all state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital include and inform tokenism as something to swap out various persecution networks among the greater lattice—Amazons merely being a famous example that has decayed into witches hunting witches for the state (white women gatekeeping other women and oppressed groups); i.e., for profit inside state territories, dead metaphors patrolling the same old graveyard’s half-real danger discos. They become invasive, predatory cuckoos.

(artist: Sveta Shubina)

Unlike workers fighting for positive freedom, thus control over themselves, state domination boils down to unironic chattelization/humiliation of its alienized prey and total control for itself, like always. Through this terrible device, older abject creatures of darkness and Hell, the wild outdoors and Numinous, etc—once polar opposites to goodly state bodies—have since redoubled among those bodies as state cops serving profit, thus genocide; i.e., to assimilate, the state recolonizing old territories using new traitors wearing the same native uniforms/standing in monumentally for the usual colonizer agents, reversing roles only to uphold what is normal: female harvesters grasping the reaper’s sickle, wearing the collar or bridle to segregate/silence their own (and other) people(s) without performative irony. They become stewards not of nature, but Omelas; i.e., expendable patriotic executioners and jingoistic hypocrites sheltered by the state till it yokes them (re: the euthanasia effect): the trick without the treat, the danger without the disco, relegating “resistance” and transparency to once a year (e.g., Halloween, or Pride).

Under capital, state revenge becomes something to exact no matter what, dividing and conquering Medusa (nature, the whore) as they always do—through triangulatory violence, double standards, brides and bribes; re: the middle class furthering the abjection process (and its grim harvest) through the ghost of the counterfeit. Subjugating Amazons to, in turn, subjugate others using said Amazons, token whores police non-token whores for the Man (aping his straightness, whiteness, and/or Christianity, etc). To have our revenge, we whores have to fight back any way we can, extending Amazonian subversion into and out of the half-real realms of fantasy (and its dark reflections on history) while fighting for universal liberation now. Revolution, for us, is year-round and holistic (so is Halloween and queer acceptance, for that matter). All for one, and one for all!

Before we move onto “Trial by Fire” and demon mommies, let’s quickly conclude with several collaborations, in this respect: Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart.

Whether of class, culture and/or race, cops are traitors through-and-through. Witch cops don’t just apologize for oppression, you see, but fight to maintain and accelerate it within weird nerd culture (often under duress; e.g., trans people threatened with homelessness, people of color with imprisonment, etc); they strike deals and infiltrate colonial territories for their same-old masters, standing in as scarecrows and gargoyles (the latter commonly animalistic statues guarding sacred grounds from evil forces, the former ceremonial watchers controlling pests in agrarian sectors): to exterminate their fellow native/rebellious brethren who refuse to sell out. We must challenge these traitors with our own likenesses thwarting theirs; i.e., Amazons (and similar beings) expressed through labor action’s revolutionary cryptonymy in age-old markets of war and the flesh; re (from Volume Zero):

[where] rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized: marked for trauma or by trauma that parallel our green and purple doubles onscreen (source).

In taking those elements on and offscreen, we bring the battle to the half-real streets of public imagination! Gender parody becomes iconoclastic, playfully camping canon.

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

Apart from being a walking weapon of war and survival that often has sold out, the Amazon’s herbo, hyperbolic/giant/super-sized and protective-yet-bare muscles/sex appeal (and dark, Medusa-grade “furious” form—Nyx, above) still remain legitimate, call-and-response threat displays against state copaganda! Nyx, for example, is a nurturing force of nature, in that respect—treating the land as sacred and all its peoples, animals, and environments under state duress. It’s why I chose to paint her and why I see her as one of my muses. Yes, I crave and worship her for being downright delicious, but do so as much for her kindness and love; i.e., for things she values for their labor and natural value, which capital only destroys for their monetary value (for profit, thus rape).

In short, I want people to know Nyx has value as a cutie and a comrade because she treats me (and nature) as she does: a stacked queen who loves to show off, yet is kind to smaller and more vulnerable things! Despite living in West Virginia (a place devastated by decades of coal-mining), Nyx knows the value of all living things, and places said things (and their labor/natural value) above corporate greed. She absolutely rules:

(artist: Nyx)

Toxic and titillating to state sissies, such hulking green eggs and ham are the state’s bête noire (nature as gyn-ecological; re: Patel and Moore) and our gender trouble’s raison d’être when opposing them during ludo-Gothic BDSM—a feast for the eyes that says, “look, don’t touch” to their ideological enemies, hence in ways antithetical to profit when reclaimed by proletarian agents (who are happy to say “touch,” as Nyx is, during playtime with comrades); re: we whores exerting control over ourselves as “of nature” during calculated risk. This includes how we present as/perform during liminal expression, thus express power in addictive and fun demonic ways; i.e., onstage and off, the Amazon classically a power fantasy about killing our colonizers[19] versus joining them while disguising ourselves as quite literally bridled.

I’ve said repeatedly in the past that Amazons, while demonic, cannot change shape. This is only half-true. They’re big muscle girls, yes; they’re also military units/targets, which means they have uniforms (often of disguise, next page), which they can swap in and out of, during guerilla warfare. Often modernized in cloak-and-dagger stories like the noir femme fatale or Western shootout, Amazons have the capacity to infiltrate the state while looking like something the state would use (e.g., as a bride whose gown contains a female-but-deadly assassin); i.e., “when in Rome” to burn Rome down, the process a gradual one: through marriage as another aspect of the nuclear model to upend while camping it.

In fact, said disco and its hauntological “danger” are rather like the witch hunt, in that respect: often unmoored from a given space and time (re: Federici), cryptonymically in disguises that announce the plot to those who know (spies work in code, showing and hiding through the cryptonymy process)! In turn, the warrior girl is half exposed then fully exposed, but able to fight back when the ruse runs its course (as the fake bride does, below). Get ’em, girl!

(source: Choi Dong-hoon’s Assassination, 2015)

Like the Gothic at large, Amazons are fake in a variety of ways we can exploit to our benefit; i.e., the whore’s paradox requires gaining control while seemingly surrendering it (the Amazon both a maiden and demon originally written by Athenian propagandists to subdue women), but ultimately affording oppressed workers greater agency over their own lives: by dismantling the state as it tries to pimp us. It does so through Amazonian doubles that are never fully closed off, opening the doors for rehumanization (of the harvest) per the whore’s refrain applying to people, product and place. By turning the land into a brothel that operates against nature, nature utilizes the same devices to open up shop in said territories; i.e., against land owners and rich people settler-colonizing places to privatize, ethnically cleanse[20] and demonize through Amazon dialogs. Cops act like your friends, but actually exist to protect private property over people; their job is to rape, then play the victim.

To it, everyone likes the whore, and by making it a warrior monster to cage, the state is generally pointing to its own half-cloaked abuses—ones workers will see happening to themselves, during the pedagogy of the oppressed! The brothel is never fully the elite’s to own, nor is anything else “of nature” the state tries to criminalize; e.g., sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.

As such, its traitors’ loyalty (and lingo) is always for sale, hidden by the cryptonymies at work/on display and reclaimed by us; i.e., exposing those who act in bad faith during the cryptonymy process, slipping the false Amazon’s mask when she sees what we show her (on the Aegis) and consequently shits her pants; e.g., TERFs acting liked oppressed Amazons, but keeping the costume to attack trans people with. Exposing bad intent is useful and what I designed revolutionary cryptonymy to accomplish through the dualistic, monstrous-feminine language of Amazons. In doing so, we have our revenge—on the Aegis by undoing state control over such things, thus reinstalling the potential for mutual consent during the whore’s paradox: a savior who appears like a destroyer (meaning a stronger person who looks like they can rape you) but is anything but an actual abuser!

(artist: Amy Ginger Hart)

Update: Amy Ginger Hart has decided to go back on our deal, despite me fulfilling my end of it. To summarize, I was writing about Amazons and anal, and saw that Amy checked both boxes (so to speak). So I asked if she’d like to be featured in exchange for some promotion. In response, Amy agreed to retweet the drawing when it was finished. When the drawing was complete and I asked Amy to honor her word and her agreement, however, she responded by blocking me (refer to “Amy Ginger Hart Exploitation Incident, 11/11/2024” for the full details). I’ve decided to leave this section, unchanged, as it illustrates how subjugated Amazons can fool comrades acting in good faith; i.e., how subjugated Amazons often seem good on the surface while actually using the aesthetic in bad faith. To that, Amy shoots pretty photos and certainly looks cute (all photos herein used from her public Twitter account), but is actually, as Foucault might have put it, “a phony twat.” What she abuses (through obscurantism), we reclaim. —Perse

Such are subversive Amazons, which Amy Ginger Hart (our second collaborator) also aligns with; i.e, of nature as part of the same warrior tableaux (above), and one to embody/embellish for workers performing strength in ways that mix-and-match modern-to-ancient forms of the Amazon, during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Women are classically small and passive, under capital, and Amy values her tight holes but also her strong muscles as classically monstrous-feminine; i.e., masculine and feminine, exciting gender trouble for the status quo and gender delight for Amy and her fans! She embodies nature as something to fight for/alongside with various allies during calculated risk:

(artist: Amy Ginger Hart)

Until development, exploitation and liberation sit on the same stage. Gothic Communism is the practice of spies and monsters towards development, we whores activating demonically during ludo-Gothic BDSM to cryptonymically dispel various (mono)myths about women and other monstrous-feminine; e.g., that women can’t shoot/fight back, are always subservient to men and never want revenge against them/are merely sex objects to please men (all of these intersecting with other myths in the fight for liberation; e.g., girls don’t like being choked, above). In turn, spies imitate those they wish to destroy or change into something better. So does Amy showcase herself as Amazonian—a warrior for sex positivity who operates in the buff/out in open for all to see, and one that harmful practitioners of the aesthetic have, since Ancient Athens, stolen from healthier mythical simulacra (the copy of that which patriarchal forces unironically fear).

Women, then, are generally trapped between positions of ownership and being owned, such Amazonian brothel espionage walking the line between bride and whore, diplomat and spy/assassin. This includes models and muses, whose bodies since Antiquity have inspired (male, female or intersex) to illustrate notions of power as much between masculine and feminine, versus simply a feminine that male artists could realistically dominate: Amy’s formidable physique, but also their love of anal sex (a classic terror weapon) being something they love to have—a forbidden zone’s territory and traveler explored by brave souls humanizing both as harvested normally by capital.

(model and artist: Amy Ginger Hart and Persephone van der Waard)

Through darkness and desire, but also vibes, mood, and monstrous thrills, we regain control of responses the state will abuse (re: the vaso vagal response and various psychosexual mechanisms)! Amazons, whether they want to be or not, are sex demons, thus whores in this respect; and whores—again, being vice characters—communicate paradoxically through pain, stigma, bias, the taboo, barbarism, animalistic rape/torture fantasies, and so on. Literally a crush of sorts (the Gothic loves its neo-medieval puns, combined sex and war), they become avatars to vicariously portray/express, hence grip and control desires the state would normally never allow us to speak: in the “just games” allegory of action stories, kayfabe, and Gothic theatre at large, where Amazons are queen.

Furthermore, for those who prefer the masculine approach (as Amazons generally do—upon their classically female bodies), who doesn’t want to be desirable as sexy and strong (excepting subs and fem-presenting workers, who resist compelled masculinity in favor of controlling it through mutual consent)? Thick thighs save lives! Sex is better during metal; i.e., it hits harder when you’re excited by theatrical implements of “danger” overshadowed by state forces haunting and infiltrating our pedagogy (and place) of the oppressed! Resistance is a party filled with good actors and bad fighting over (and with) the same Amazon aesthetic: “Don’t you know I want to be with you tonight?” (Trans-X’ “I Want to Be with You Tonight,” 1995).

Beyond Amazons, there’s power in all monsters, specifically their reassembly, recontextualization and release; i.e., challenging the state’s unironic prostitution/weaponization of anything monstrous-feminine (female/feminine parties being reduced to sex objects defined by their sexuality/sex organs, queer people by sodomy and people of color by non-white criminalization/their skin, etc). We can reclaim them while still being prostitutes, ourselves. And keeping with the whore’s paradox per Amazons, the whore’s revenge doesn’t have a singular meaning or application; e.g., anal sex, but also oral:

(artist: Amy Ginger Hart)

The fact remains that if monsters like the Amazon didn’t have subversive power and cathartic utility through psychosexual camp, we wouldn’t bother! We camp canon because we must; i.e., from city to nation, the state historically summons the Amazon as a monster whore of nature to rile up moral panic with—as coded into dogmatic fear (scapegoat) responses towards sex controlled through unironic force! By comparison, rebellious workers camp all of that to achieve genuine, at-times-postpunk rebellious effects: disco in disguise, seeking similarity amid difference! Let’s dance!

These are not naturally mysterious concepts, but have become unnaturally mysterious[21] by those who don’t want people to utilize Amazon aesthetics for labor action on a grand scale; i.e., to follow She-Hulk as one might “Liberty Leads the People” (a painting about the French Revolution) versus a lady who lays down with the law as its submissive and breedable war bride/whore-with-a-badge (which She-Hulk—a lawyer and tokenized crimefighter—sadly is), or lays down the law for the law (with vigilantes raping people to defend private property in the interest of continued privatization)! Amazons can be cops or victims, but victims can fight back against cops and their various effects; i.e., there’s a gentrifying element that extends to superhero lairs (often cities; e.g., Gotham): turning rebel saloons into cop saloons, brothels-by-another-name gatekeeping such things per the usual assimilative double standards punching down; re: joy divisions. Cops can congregate, redlining and dividing up their prey through military urbanism. Within this hierarchy of values, women are pimped on either side of the Thin Blue line: muscle, but female muscle.

The fact remains, class, culture and race war concern betrayal as something to avoid along the various persecution networks we’ve discussed; i.e., attritional exchanges imploring sympathy for the devil on either side by various onlookers. Such supervised, spectated revenge ties Gothically to demons since at least Frankenstein; i.e., a concentric, frame-narrative story about nature demonized, thus criminal in the eyes of the state pimping it. Victor less feared the Creature’s hulking physique and more its ability to reproduce, envisioning a doomsday when labor-as-robotic fought back across generations to reclaim the Earth out of revenge (re: the technological singularity—a concept we’ll briefly explore, in “Making Demons”).

Though more transhuman than post, Amazons embody such fears per the whore’s revenge. In turn, such us/them and cop/criminal binaries are false insofar as the state promotes them, but which it uses strength to defend the status quo from vengeful whores of nature by presenting cops as false friends; i.e., including in tokenized forms; re: the Amazon as someone to beat and subjugate into a cop. We reclaim all of this during ludo-Gothic BDSM, promoting the very things we seek to challenge and subvert; i.e., by enjoying their empowering elements, per Sarkeesian’s adage, and refusing to endorse their harmful functions and features while punching up against undercover cops (trying as all cops do, to control every aspect of our lives).

(artist: Araneesama)

Liberation is a market; i.e., one whose varied and nebulous creative exchanges pass between many abused parties. Primarily nature whored out by capital pimping it as monstrous-feminine, rape isn’t something to “rank,” and cops can’t fully monopolize Amazonian theatrics any more than workers; i.e., our own capacities for giving and receiving violence being stigmatized by the state, but sympathized with by workers for their campy positions under state rule. Like all vice characters, standbys have become the norm. So, yes, there’s the classic towering huntress with her sword, club or quiver of arrows as unbroken, unbowed. In the buff, she cannot be tamed, cleansed, or bought! Her primal, athletic and flexible (above) cavewoman’s body serves herself and workers, not the state! But her camping of the state is haunted by the very abuse she makes fun of, thus reclaims through courtly love experienced by demons great and small: during anal or other Numinous forms of psychosexual, medieval-style “torture” interrogating trauma!

(artist: Sasha Khmel)

During ludo-Gothic BDSM, evocations of “Ozymandias” and Prometheus should leap to mind in “ancient,” posthuman copies—their clay-as-rogue-technology reinventing older Satanic traditions: something wild, strong and of nature, teaching us what we have lost and regain through golemesque poetics/close encounters; i.e., how power redistributes through creative expression to affect participants differently during an ongoing and oscillating pedagogy of the oppressed; re: similarity amid difference.

Amazons are demons. With any demon ever made, there is a being of nature attached to it a) policed by itself (or some traitorous double), or b) liberating itself from police abuse overseeing such construction in service to profit (thus rape). Not everyone enjoys this kind of thing to start with, but the state wants us too afraid to play with others as though they want to play with us, too. Fighting back is forbidden unless the state sanctions, thus profits from its recuperations/preservations of heteronormative thus Cartesian and settler-colonial stances. We challenge all of them on our own GNC (thus alien) surfaces, uniting in ways that Amazons have struggled to do since reclaiming themselves from state authors out of Antiquity.

To it, pandemonium takes many forms and combinations. Under capital, nature is monstrous-feminine, thus alien in ways that Amazons speak well to: our mutual-if-uneven alienation by the state, and the forbidden sight that punches holes, Amazon-style, into Capitalism Realism’s various embodiments of rape and revenge. Once their subversive potential wakes up and unites, Amazons (and other demons) can rise up to remind the elite—those unable to imagine a world where they can’t harm others and would rather die than give up what they think they own—that it was never theirs to begin with! Hope isn’t given by those who hold us hostage; we make it ourselves by actually fighting back—together. “I am woman, hear me roar!”

(artist: Amy Ginger Hart)

So concludes this two-part section on Amazons, rape and revenge (and Medusa before that). From here, we’ll look monsters comparable to Amazons, albeit on a spectrum!

Again, all demons play with rape through unequal, forbidden exchange, and whose subsequent power fantasies (mainly of dark desire) take many forms of “phallic,” alien, weaponized sex. These, in turn, encompass magical friends to make/construct that provide an adversarial, oft-painful component to help us change beyond societal norms. By feeding the whore’s paradox into others—e.g., the paradox of terror speaking to virgins/whores and vice versa during the whore’s revenge—workers suddenly become free to explore things like sex (and sexual taboos) that society pushes into fantastical, hellish realms: the asshole of existence. We reclaim these to go beyond what is allowed, genuine rebellious camp being far harder to prevent than canon would have you think; i.e., nature-as-monstrous-feminine having its whore’s revenge to exist in ways that speak theatrically to the violence normally committed against us by police forces: on the casting couch as its own cartographic refrain!

(artist: Amy Ginger Hart)

In terms of canon vs camp, function is context, which doesn’t always track immediately with form; i.e., it plays with and subverts it; e.g., Amy can stretch out on said couch in a campy scenario that resembles its unironic variety’s demonic exchange: power and knowledge not things that can ever be fully controlled by one side alone. Transformation happens through the whore’s paradox turning things on their heads through play for oneself (with one’s body, orientation, and gender identity or performance through clothing, makeup, props and sets)—a desire to have fun with things that are normally abusive. That’s how any monster works during ludo-Gothic BDSM!

(artist: Evul)

Let’s unpack that next, going beyond earthly realms (which Amazons occupy and wage war inside) and into hellish territories about monster (thus forbidden) love with admittedly Amazonian qualities! Amazons classically capture their mates; continuing with the blood libel/sodomy class of monsters, we’ll proceed unto Lady Hellbender and other demon mommies own operatic, ballroom sex-as-weaponry to reclaim postcolonially from state forces (similar to our anal Amazon thesis)! Onto the beefcake mothers of sin and hellfire[22]!

Onto “Trial by Fire: Demon Mommies“!

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Footnotes

[1] Made from clay to be strong—to rape and avenge or avenge a rape, but also “rape” during ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus achieve praxial catharsis while developing Gothic Communism.

[2] “Prison sex” being a term I devised to speak to a hierarchy of power and subsequent values towards the giving of rape, versus “rape culture” being a term I’ve heard used to describe rape apologetics on a mass, cultural level; i.e., apologizing for rapists and blaming their victims, under the profit motive; e.g., R. Kelly avoiding punishment for decades despite the mountain of evidence left in his wake (Dreading’s ” The Disturbing Case of R. Kelly,” 2024).

[3] Commonly expressed through Orientalism, sodomy and blood libel; e.g., King Piccolo’s parthenogenic offspring, Piccolo Junior (a qualifier he later abandons), swearing he’ll have his revenge (for his senior’s death) after he is reborn; i.e., from a giant egg that grows quickly into adult form: echoes of mad science, incest, reptilian vampires, Pagan infanticide, and the backstabbing Jew, etc.

[4] I.e., abused by men of reason having secularized Divine Right through the Protestant ethic, enjoying its exceptions and double standards as white straight European men always do (for them and theirs, their understanding of nature becomes artificial, ordained by God-given forces yet dressed up as “science.”

[5] While fantasy races commonly symbolize settler-colonial arguments, there’s a duality to them that requires them to be racist through usage, hence context; e.g., green skin speaks to colors of stigma that not only historically predate systemic racism, they speak to alienation of all kinds; re: blood libel being a medieval practice that survives into the present to afflict different groups for different reasons. The fact remains that rape fantasies aren’t always based on actual cultures through these fantasies, but imaginary ones informed by different stigmas, biases and fears known to ours. To it, Jadis and I used to do rape fantasies—with me being their twink war bride and them playing an orc chiefess saying to me (as I fucked them), “I’m keeping this one!” Doing so wasn’t so much to punch down, but play with “Gothic” destroyer language we divorced from systemic racism. It was fun!

[6] Such abjection is something to dispel through experiment. For example, I used to be scared of anal. When I tried it, I realized that God wasn’t going to strike me down, nor Satan (the canonical version) drag me kicking and screaming off to Hell. Yes, I didn’t like it with Zeuhl (who lost their virginity to anal sex), but I also didn’t like them entirely as a person; when I tried it with Cuwu, I liked them a lot more (and was more comfortable with myself as trans), thus found myself enjoying anal a lot more, too. In doing so, I suddenly saw all the people who not only were afraid of anal, but things associated with anal; e.g., whores and gay people. It was a very eye-opening experience.

[7] These in turn, are loaded with various slippery-slope fallacies and false equivalencies we can dispel; e.g., anal doesn’t always lead to felching (through it can), and felching isn’t equivalent to “getting your red wings.” I’ve done one but not the other but viewed through the abjection process, such activities would be conflated and viewed as harmful.

[8] To it, if there is escalation, it’s generally because those escalating violence have been conditioned to behave as such; i.e., by seeing enemies all around them to attack, thus whores “of nature” to pimp; e.g., Amazons sodomize men out of revenge (the idea—of an avenging degenerate—being a fascist argument; re: the backstabbing Jew), so Amazons must die “the way they’d do it to us!” It’s a strawman, one the state loves to abuse during DARVO—to shame and ridicule sluts, and things treated like sluts by the state tokenizing Amazons (anything not white, cis-het, male, European and Christian). Nature becomes a brothel, the land something to hold onto and choke out through force versus actually give back to Indigenous groups during “land back” arguments (which become just as unimaginable to Cartesian dominators as anal sex is).

As such, everything must be white, a black planet something fear because the revenge of those reclaiming the land surely must want to seek harm against the colonizers they’re ousting. Again, this is projection. While there’s something to be said for getting even, the fact remains that places like Haiti and its successful slave revolt against the French, were repelling a group of people from their land that had spent their entire time there exterminating the local population for profit. Settler colonialism is a system, in this respect—one that repeats over and over across the world, space and time, in between fact and fiction, novel and romance, normal and abject. People who are weird about sex and gender—but also BDSM, fetishes and kink as monstrous extensions of these things—are likewise weird about Imperialism, ethnocentrism, and Pax Americana, etc. Things like anal and land back might seem unrelated, but only to the uninitiated!

In turn, history repeats itself in ways that play out through relationships between people and the land that harbors them (where they live, thus have sex). As Jewish Voices for Peace writes:

This July 4th, we contemplate parallels between the colonization of Turtle Island (“North America”) and Palestine:

Genocide. Land theft. Ethnic cleansing. Environmental destruction. Forced displacement of people from their homes, and sequestration into isolated areas with (artificially) scarce resources. Criminalization and surveillance. Colonial control over lives, and denial of self-determination and sovereignty. Erasure of native history and culture. Ideologies (Manifest Destiny, Zionism) of entitlement to, and justification for, these atrocities.

While there are parallels between the colonization of Palestine and of Turtle Island, there are also major distinctions. It’s inappropriate to discuss the colonization of Turtle Island as a monolith, since the various peoples here endured it in different ways and at different points in time. (To learn more about the specific history of the Indigenous people whose land you’re on, go to native-land.ca.)

Supporting Palestinians’ right to return and right to self-determination in their homeland goes hand in hand with supporting Indigenous people’s demand for #LandBack — for restoration of Indigenous sovereignty and stewardship, and respect for their deep connection to and knowledge of their lands.

As @ndncollective writes, although Palestinians and people indigenous to Turtle Island “come from different nations and geographies, the struggles against settler colonialism are the same… because settler colonists share playbooks,” and “Zionism, white supremacy, and imperialism… act as one to oppress and eliminate us.” And both groups of native people are working toward a similar vision of liberation. In @ndncollective‘s words: “Just as we fight and organize to reclaim land on Turtle Island, our Palestinian relatives fight and organize to return the land and for the land to return to the people” (source Instagram post: July 4th, 2024).

Solidarity against such oppression is the only way forwards.

[9] That ancient (and awful) rubric, still used by patriarchal defenders to this day (re: TERFs).

[10] According to Euripides (source: Perseus.tufts.edu).

[11] Joshua Mark writes,

Spartan women had more rights and enjoyed greater autonomy than women in any other Greek city-state of the Classical Period (5th-4th centuries BCE). Women could inherit property, own land, make business transactions, and were better educated than women in ancient Greece in general. Unlike Athens, where women were considered second-class citizens, Spartan women were said to rule their men (source).

He goes on to state how Sparta lost a 371 BCE battle with Thebes, at Leuctra, after centuries of military supremacy. Following this defeat, the state weakened and collapsed, leading future male thinkers to not only create the Amazons, but blame Spartan women, to boot:

What Aristotle and other conventionally minded non-Spartan men feared subconsciously and perhaps sometimes consciously was feminine power. One expression of that Greek male fear was the invention of the mythical race of Amazons, but at least the Amazons had the decency to live apart from men, whereas the Spartan women apparently exercised their power from within the heart of the community. In the grip of such fear, the male sources often distorted the facts they had access to, usually only at second-hand at best, about Spartan women (cited by Mark; original source: Paul Cartledge’s The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, 2004).

In short, the glorifying of male military might was done at the expense of the women who, in the case of the Spartans, not only bore their husbands’ children but used their own expanded rights to empower Sparta beyond what it could have been otherwise.

[12] Called the Crypteia, on which Paul Cartledge writes in Spartan Reflections (2001), “either principally sought out and killed helots across Laconia and Messenia as part of a policy of terrorizing and intimidating the enslaved population, or they principally did a form of military training, or they principally endured hardships as an initiation ordeal, or the Crypteia served a combination of all these purposes, possibly varying over time.” In short, they enforced the will of the state as a police body upheld through force—a ruthless tactic adopted by modern-day fascist resurrections regressing imaginarily backwards; i.e., paramilitary units with a vigilante flavor defending capital and its hauntological gender values (which initially fetishize, then euthanize Amazonian doubles).

[13] For survivors of trauma who aren’t sex-repulsed because of their trauma.

[14] Ironically while acting “barbarian” themselves (as TERFs/SWERFs so often do); i.e., as facets of fascist feminism—playing dress up as a complicit disguise purely to hide/show their role (as state enforcers) during the cryptonymy process forwarding abjection.

[15] Originally featured in the Undead Module, “Escaping Jadis” (2024).

[16] Written/published posthumously. In part, such stories panned as terrorist literature, something not befitting an unmarried, but still white, straight, middle-class woman to write about.

[17] Amazons, tokenized, illustrate an ongoing problem of assimilation; i.e., that expresses not just in a variety of superhero bodies, but spatio-temporal fantasy worlds that house them. Rogue doesn’t just appear in “our time,” then, but other worlds where she can put her talents to work (stealing power from those she touches); re (from Volume Two, part one):

As Ayla and Savage Land Rogue demonstrate, Amazon habitats are far older than videogames, but have evolved into them out of older Pax Americana fantasies exported elsewhere (from America to Japan and back again); i.e., a revival of the “white jungle” populated with “big game”: a vacation-type resort for the usual anxious pearl-clutchers looking for Jane and Tarzan; i.e., to punch down at towards the dogmatic threat of a Black Planet: to ease their own inheritance anxieties and fear of a non-white revenge for empire as inherently genocidal, tokenizing colonial subjects like the Amazon to police its own group, mid-Holocaust (source: “‘Death by Snu-Snu’: From Herbos to Himbos, part two,” 2024).

In doing so, she becomes a crimefighter vehicle for pro-state fantasies that we must take back, regardless of where or how such things manifest! Kowai or kawaii, tits and ass in or out—a cop is a cop, a rebel a rebel vis-à-vis how they move power in one direction or the other!

(artist: Mike DeBalfo)

[18] Re: The state is incompatible with life and consent—can only rearm its workers to assist in mythmaking that maintains this pattern; i.e., to essentialize the state and end history beyond Capitalist Realism, the past not something to learn from save to enforce state dogma and police violence. Our own gender trouble upsets this paradigm, doing so inside itself vis-à-vis Amazons and other monstrous-feminine stories and characters (classically with animal masks being an ancient form of theatre); i.e., to divorce biology from gender and sex, and gender and sex from each other to end canonical essentialism, pushing towards horizontal arrangements of power, knowledge and history.

[19] Again, versus imitating or otherwise getting in bed with them; e.g., Theodor Herzl (the father of the modern Israeli state): “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. / We want to emigrate as respected people” (from Herzl’s Diaries; e.g., cited by Joeseph Massad’s “Zionism, Anti-Semitism and Colonialism,” 2012). This historically comes at a cost: killing your own in favor of a colonizer identity that alienates your from your own group, but never lets you fully assimilate. It becomes a fortress mentality tied to a satellite proxy state the powers that be (namely America) will exploit in a functionally “white” sense; i.e., racial supremacy as a geopolitic project with uneven, modular application (as fascism always is; re: Eco).

[20] With Samus Aran and similar cop-style, monomyth heroines becoming retro-future exterminators cleaning homes of vermin infestations, per state DARVO arguments); re: in the “Scooby Doo,” Radcliffean approach (more on this, later, when we reexamine Ellen Ripley vs Giger’s xenomorph).

[21] As trade secrets—namely prostitution surrounding sexual reproduction policed through force—as more secretive than simply “punch, stab or shoot” enemy forces; e.g., Mallrats (1995) and Brody’s obsession with superhero sex organs: “It’s a secret of the pros!” Smith treats the idea strictly as a joke (“He’ll grow out of it”), but such devices yield liberatory potential when camped; i.e., a classic way to disempower cops is to mock them, and a classic way to mock anyone is through their junk.

[22] Oxymorons aside, desire commonly expresses through higher temperatures; i.e., to be hot. Demons of a Numinous inclination raise that to ostensibly self-destructive, incendiary degrees: the anal sulfur and witchy hellfire of a stacked pandemonium married to other motherly types, like Amazons.

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

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

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

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

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

On Amazons, Good and Bad, part two: Reclaiming Amazons; or, Cops and Victims (opening)

“Steel isn’t strong, boy. Flesh is stronger. What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?”

—Thulsa Doom, Conan the Barbarian (1981)

(source Tumblr post, The History of Fighting: February 6, 2022)

Picking up where “On Amazons, Good and Bad, part one: Always a Victim (feat. Medusa)” left off…

Capital relies on tokenization—to recruit from nature to pimp nature, sex raping sex, thus benefit the smallest number of people possible through the suffering of the largest number possible. All exist within a system of concealment we expose inside itself—from America’s corporate duopoly (establishment politics) to extensions of their team-based, cops-and-victims approach to the world under neoliberal Capitalism and its centrist refrains: bread and circus (music and combat). This includes Amazons as something to reconcile with their imaginary past, but also reclaim it as a consequence of refusing to play along with state mechanisms any longer! A whore’s revenge, breaking Capitalist Realism!

If part one focused on tokenization of the Amazon as givers of rape and revenge—i.e., treating Medusa as perpetual victim/scapegoat, during mirror syndrome—part two, “Cops and Victims,” aims to humanize, thus reclaim such devices inside themselves; re: “an enemy has only images, behind which he hides his true motives; destroy the image and you break the enemy.” Liberation is a mirror game, Medusa the Queen of Mirrors; queen bee, the details of her death have been greatly exaggerated. The Gothic, then, loves to remind its audience to the inferiority of man in man-versus-nature, but also Man Box tokenizing this group or that; i.e., mankind is doomed, the home reclaimed by nature, but also labor when Medusa comes to take us home: into her murderous womb—a carnivorous vat of acid, a sarcophagus (eater of the flesh). No amount of science, superhero eugenics, deals with the devil (selling out) or self-righteous posturing can thwart that, dooming the state because it tries to beat Medusa, anyways. It cannot, because she is nature, itself, hence a god of death—of transformation and radical change during intensely unequal, forbidden exchange.

These aren’t just colonial devices, then, but our childhood materials lifted from sources normally used to deliver such things to people expected to uphold the status quo. As usual, the elite cannot own the Superstructure, meaning we can recultivate it through iconoclastic art on the Aegis; re: subversive Amazons, which look and sound the same (at a glance) as subjugated ones. It’s a group effort, made not by single, elevated representatives, but an intersectional collective of solarized workers liberating sex work as monstrous-feminine through iconoclastic art. This includes Amazons, which desperately need to reclaim their iconoclastic potential from TERF agents playing cops and victims vis-à-vis Amazons.

All hinge on lies, during the cryptonymy process. Except when the state lies, it lies to harm us; when we lie, it’s a defense mechanism defying our attackers. Our vanishing point/mirror gaze isn’t amnesia, but a reawakening of our lost power in campy replicas: a hall of mirrors, fatal portraits, echoes of the restless past. In turn, our rememory of personal and generational trauma is something to reassemble through partial lies, reinvention and rape play hinting at truth; i.e., our eyes of confusion, our splendid lies, our darkness visible, our Aegis—to absolutely glow with our dark, whorish revenge! Our beautiful darkness abolishes privatization, be it kings, gods, or masters (“a curse on both your houses!”). We’re phallic women getting it off our chests, unburdening ourselves by letting it all out; Lady Vengeance in all her many forms, we’ve built ourselves up not to tokenize, but refuse to be the state’s cops or victims policing sex through force. We seek release, not relapse: our Amazonian moxie, spunk, noive.

(artist: Lera)

Such subversion is symbiotic; all operate on dysfunction as something to process, conjuring up the half-real past for different purposes. Over time, rebels have decayed into cops who strike a balance between human/alien, saying “we’re the exclusive victim” during controlled opposition. Medusa has evolved to look more and human, evolving rape arguments that don’t just speak to her endless rape, but rape at the hands of those abusing the dialectic of the alien; i.e., transforming and threatening unequal exchange per the whore’s paradox to uphold capital and profit, thus continue their raping of nature. Let’s explore their liminal reclamation during ludo-Gothic BDSM, here; e.g., anal sex as a symbol of submission that, per the whore’s revenge (upending profit), becomes a subversive postcolonial device that Amazons (thicc warrior beings) are party to.

We’ll get to anal, in a bit. First, we’ll rehash a few important ideas concerning dialectical-materialism, liminality and hauntology vis-à-vis Amazons, look at some different forms of Amazons as subversive warriors whores with Amanda Nicole, apply those to personal experience (me and my mother’s), then dive more deeply into Amazonian subversion itself (about killing our darlings and reclaiming anal sex, but also collabs with Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart).

Revenge (and the demons granting it) is a very old idea, and a productive one under Capitalism in both directions (cops and victims). I originally wrote this section using a series of sub-headers (which still exist, below); but due to its increasing length, I had to chop it in two. It wasn’t really designed for me doing so, but I’ll try and signpost it a little to account for the division—and contents of each separate half—belonging to the same larger coin:

Cops and Victims, part one: The Riddle of Steel; or, Confronting Past Wrongs

• Dialectical-Materialism, Liminality and Hauntology
• Amazons as Whores (feat. Amanda Nicole)
• Relating to Amazons (and Sex Work) through Personal Experience
• Double Standards and Challenging Them (Killing Your Darlings, feat. Angela Carter)

Part two: Our Sweet Revenge; or, Being Ourselves While Reclaiming Anal Rape, mid-Amazonomachia

• Weapons of Terror: Reclaiming Anal Sex
• Always In Dispute: Subjugation vs Subversion (cont., feat. Amy Ginger Hart)

The opening page per half was written after the bodies of each text was, hence constitutes a foreword of sorts; i.e., containing terms and ideas that don’t repeat afterwards, save in synonymous ways; e.g., notions of male and female Gothic, but also gendered violence/courtly love expressed phallically and vaginally with swords and sheaths, maidens and knights (thus whores and rapists). It doesn’t hurt to be fluent with such notions, but we won’t stress their usage here (refer to Volume One for some good examples)!

(artist: Nora Fawn)

Cops and Victims, part one: the Riddle of Steel; or, Confronting Past Wrongs (feat. Amanda Nicole)

“Conan, what is best in life?” / “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!”

—a local khan and Conan, Conan the Barbarian (1981)

Part one shall examine th past of the Amazon myth having become increasingly hostile to state enemies in recent years; i.e., through tokenized feminism vis-à-vis subjugated Amazons acting traditionally like men. Such revenge is notoriously petty insofar as it involves pimping nature as monstrous-feminine; re: as something to crush, kill destroy on repeat to uphold Capitalist Realism with.

In short, such tokenism has become something imitate by class, culture and race traitors in bad faith—neoliberal copaganda conjuring up feminist bugbears, Radcliffe-style, for neoconservative Madonnas to destroy imperial crimes projected onto during state decay (the weakening of the state, thus its myopia): state scapegoats during mirror syndrome; re: cops and victims, the cop tokenized and playing the victim through DARVO and obscurantism, aka cryptofascism. The cloak is the imperial, pre-capitalist space as something to return to, Conan-style: a king or queen by one’s own hand, surrounded by stolen wealth (through conquest, specifically feats of strength) and war booty of the finest (classically female) stock:

(exhibit 43e2c3a: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. My mother’s brother, Uncle Dave, loved Conan the Barbarian. Both he and Mom grew up playing D&D and reading the likes of Rob Howard, Tolkien and others. When Dave died of a heart attack in mid-2022 [shortly before this book series started], Mom asked me to draw him as a king—like Conan on his throne, made by his own hand. So that’s exactly what I did.)

Keeping with Conan’s “riddle of steel” (above), fantasies of strength, death, rape and revenge (all Gothic staples) aren’t simply state tools; we can reclaim them. Amazonomachia is a mirror game, one where complicit and revolutionary cryptonymy clash to forward or reverse abjection (thus profit and the anisotropic arrangement of terrorist/counterterrorist). This portion focuses more on our enemies meeting us “in the middle”; i.e., through the legend of the Amazon consumed by both parties: as dialectical-material whore/terrorizer to relate to through personal experience, but also mete out through various double standards assisting in state vs worker revenge. Such things become our lullabies and bear our crest—the conqueror anthem a neoliberal refrain to prepare workers for fresh war in the name of state restoration, and which we subvert to dismantle not just the state, but an older part of ourselves!

Dialectical-materialism, Liminality and Hauntology

For the Amazon and Medusa, such dialectical-material struggles are not only dualistic and liminal, but hauntological in their half-real effects. For instance, Hippolyta and Medusa never actually fought in the ancient myths (not to my knowledge, anyways); you wouldn’t know it, based on how white token feminism has sought to colonize Medusa through neoconservative military optimism—the forlorn hope that if they punch down hard enough, capital won’t arbitrarily cannibalize, trash and orderly dispose of them/abort, scape and flush them down the toilet and into the sewer drain like bottom-of-the-barrel garbage for profit (what Burke in Aliens referred to as “arbitrary extermination”; i.e., regarding the xenomorphs as “a very important species,” keen to monetize them versus Ripley wanting to wipe them out during the same displaced Red-Scare moral panic: to outer space). Subjugated Amazons are toadies enjoying victim censorship (e.g., trans people, gagged and bound for them to more easily brutalize) and state camouflage (re: the badge) with the same aesthetic’s argumentation and language; i.e., DARVO but also obscurantism, aka cryptofascism/disguise pastiche.

Furthermore, such clemency is wishful thinking at its best. A decaying state always eats its token elements first, token Amazons little more than mall cops rendered into gore by the chopping mall[1]. Afraid of nature’s revenge after a holocaust they’ve knowingly played a part in, token Amazons tongue the toilet bowl for loose “dung” (those they dehumanize: themselves, projected onto more marginalized or differently marginalized groups). In turn, nature tokenizes, becoming dim-witted yet quick to blame. Thic(c/k), it rapes itself with a gun held to its head; eventually the gun is removed, but remains part of the worker’s raped mind—a menticidal spectre of violence, handed down inside ghosts of its own forging (re: Hogel; e.g., “Rome” or otherwise): of Communist whores, or fascist ones (they occupy the same space using the same aesthetics of power and death, below). To survive, we must camp both as a matter of civil and guerilla warfare/strife (reclaiming the suddenly-alien castle, during Cameron’s refrain; e.g., Mario 64, 1996).

(artist: Lera)

Until we do, history shall repeat in tragedy then farce, during the abjection process. Workers always lose, and cops are not known for their compassion or intelligence. When the time comes, they’ll hypocritically don bridle or thong in genuine enslavement; they’ll eat their own, their bowel septic with colonial rot, golems and gargoyles made from shit. “You are what you eat”; they’re mad cows, having truly no dignity or shame when throwing each other under the bus, pearls before swine begging others to squeal as they cut their throats and drink the blood. Per Marx, dead labor feeds on living labor until the calories between them lose their life, their nutritional value passed upwards; the middle-class eaters of the dead become braindead, the Amazon just another cop under these circumstances. They’re zombies pushing lawnmowers over barren yards; re: white people disease adopted by Amazons thinking others are inferior and they’re owed a Stepford spouse; i.e., while calling others savages despite being hella lazy and gross. Eventually the double standard takes things to their logical conclusion; i.e., token Amazons don’t care enough to change because the system coddles them and gives them something hard to attain (under capital; e.g., food and shelter) for being stupid and cruel like men (Foreign Fridays’ “POV: You Have a Humiliation Kink,” 2024). Capital alienates and sexualizes everything in service to profit, thus rape through revenge arguments that benefit the elite vis-à-vis their token slaves.

The dialectical-material fact (thus struggle) remains: people of all walks love heroes, which are always monsters, thus demons (transforming into hulking versions of a visually weaker original whose subsequent domination-by-comparison opens up masculine/feminine superiority arguments). As such, whores become hyperbolic/Numinous but controllable as alien warriors by all sides of class, culture and race warfare; i.e., as dolls/action figures to play with/teddy bears for companionship that unto themselves evoke some sense of danger and protection, but also fear and power married paradoxically to rape and revenge (voodoo dolls, but also C.S. Lewis’ problem of pain, vis-à-vis Rudolph Otto). Incredibly common, they’re pacifying or radicalizing depending on how they’re used, lending them a situational element, but also a mitigating factor per more universal usages: fight and fawn are survival mechanisms, but also conditioning devices adjacent to generational trauma dressed up as sport, as opera, as kayfabe heavy metal, etc.

To it, Amazons are demons made from trauma in psychomachic division, the light side made to police the dark, but also steal its rebellious barbarian elements while doing so; re: Hippolyta and Medusa, the former a white-washed marble statue chasing down her darker double like Colonel Kurtz to canonically avenge the colony while wearing blackface: fear becomes a gaslight, the Aegis something for the state to abuse against assigned devils punching up against Western ones.

Subversive or not, there’s a regressive, performative element to Amazons not unlike any barbarian fantasy. We’re playing as much with the liberation of stigmatic devices and outmoded language as we are the people associated with them (though their usage, in sex-positive cases, functions opposite sex-coercive ones). Even so, racism haunts Amazons, their recidivism/recuperation conveniently assisting state restoration by becoming a relapse that restores order while facing embarrassing revelations (foisted onto state enemies); i.e., the state and its colonies die, but the genocidal beliefs that drive them from start to finish live on: inside the larger system where monsters comply or resist on the Aegis.

Per the usual superhero power signatures—e.g., costumes and special moves, but also race tracks, hunting grounds, tourneys and obstacle courses with which to use them on—such Olympian bodies and games articulate police violence against nature-as-vengeful[2] exceptionally well; i.e., in a half-real sense, canonically trained onstage and off to deliver new sex and force built on old sex and force: regarding nature as colonized by traitorous offshoots victimizing the former as alien while playing the victim (these token qualities lending DARVO further legitimacy and illegitimacy before, during and after).

Such façades canonically engender police violence, terror and morphology (monsters) useful to state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital. In turn, fascism defends capital when it decays, employing uncanny pain to restore the unheimlich to a “proper” nuclear home, post-apocalypse. It’s a Gordian knot, cut brutally through by Alexander’s arrogant sword; i.e., military optimism/urbanism, nature a Promethean battle ground for future revenge coming from Elsewhere: in service to capital raping nature with nature, again and again, and empire’s collared Amazon traitorously answering the elite’s beck and call, Beowulf-style—at home.

Of course, these monopolies are wholly impossible, as are their alienized threat displays motivating workers to tokenize. Yet, as a warrior class, the subversive Amazon remains just as macho as her subjugated double, but also curiously protective, providing and gentle when she needs and/or wants to be—a Queen Kong looking after her “captive,” the latter putting themselves paradoxically in harms’ way first and on purpose: “Oh, won’t someone please capture me and take me far away from here!” The twink energies (and subsequent palliative-Numinous rape fantasies) are second to none (no time to go into that, here; we’ll look into twinks and submissive fantasies more in Volume Three)! In turn, “agency” amounts to its own paradox: “choice” informed by oscillating socio-material conditions that interfere with our ability to choose, thus self-define; i.e., subversion of the Amazon as our whore’s revenge.

Such subversion is liminal, then—used by canonical forces reclaiming iconoclastic ones and vice versa, praxial inertia versus activation expressed during Amazonian theatrics; re: the dialectic of the alien. Either side reverses beauty-and-beast sex appeal, fashion statements and gender roles to move power (and beauty standards) in either direction; i.e., a combination of prescriptive/descriptive sexuality and drag-show appreciation, the Amazon speaking to a peak-like warrior’s towering performance as corporal—one that, when entirely disrobed, can’t be reduced to clothing alone (despite the “borrowed robe” double standards): a lonesome lady looking out for a vulnerable male party while capital decays, threatening people’s security and personal freedoms with the ghost of the counterfeit! “This city’s in for a bit of a rape!” Per the Gothic, it’s silly and serious all at once, such monstrous, alien voyeurism “just singing in the rain” (minus Kubrick’s nihilistic hooliganism, misogyny and trans exclusion, left).

(source: Reddit)

It’s also Orientalism; i.e., as something to see and exhibit, par excellence. Framed as nature’s revenge for past imperial sins, the state recruits from current middle-class groups; i.e., where women (usually white, cis-het Christian women) are more gentrified, thus have more to lose than past examples: those less independent and secure.

Such gargoyle-ish reminders hardly stay in the past; said “past” becomes something to threaten loyal workers with, the latter buying up Neo-Gothic garbage menticiding their scared-stupid brains in service to American Liberalism:

There is absolutely nothing that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can do — no death toll high enough, no amount of footage of scattered limbs and dead children — that will change the liberal mind into believing they are not the “lesser evil.” For liberals, the lesser evil is simply the one more capable of leading the empire with a facade of decorum on the world stage. It is not the crime that liberals oppose, but how it’s packaged (source tweet, Tamara Nassar: October 10th, 2024)

As such, pearl-clutching under American exceptionalism promotes alien revenge conducive to genocide, itself inherited inside ongoing structures that cryptonymically code and conceal imperial consumption, thus predation, as rotten to the core; re: subjugated Amazons having taken the bait to police the church, its sacred grounds suddenly populated with unwelcome demons coming out of the same half-real past (the ghost of the counterfeit gatekept by middle-class forces).

There must always be a victim, in Omelas; i.e., deserving victims (usually women and children) apologized for by undeserving victims, the latter recruited as spokespeople to pacify outrage regarding the former’s senseless destruction for profit: merciless slaughter vis-à-vis elements of assimilative inclusion. Such equality isn’t universal, but something of convenience that only a select few are chosen to enjoy once they harden their hearts (“one of the good ones,” the help)! Superman was an alien, as such; so are Amazons, good or bad, ostensibly human or otherwise. Assimilation is always dangled in front of them, the other choice being unemployment, destitution, silence, homelessness and death (activism not only framed as apophenic conspiracy by the state, but antithetical to profit, thus tantamount to sedition).

(artist: Miss Faves)

Through liminal beings like the Amazon or Medusa, then, the Gothic considers how fakery and artifice speak to police abuse as monstrous; i.e., by means of arbitrary us-versus-them representation. During the whore’s paradox, rebel and cop hyphenate in appearance, their mutual alienation speaking to carrot-and-stick conditions and behaviors during unequal power exchange passed back and forth. Amazons cannot physically transform, but can betray the proletariat by punching down.

As such, the romance is hardly romantic, the seminal catastrophe not just presently underway but happening again, once-and-future; e.g., the state kills babies and Kamala Harris (a token cop) explains it away and covers it up, backpedaling and virtue-signaling behind a veneer of exceptional, immutable goodness. Good cop, bad cop; Amazons and knights, ACAB and ASAB—our genderqueer camping of these alien devices must reflect this duality. Insofar as Nazis and Communists exist among the same shadow zone’s demonic expression, silence is genocide (a common variant during the AIDS crisis was “Silence is death”; same idea). We cannot afford to stay silent or otherwise assist in genocide by politely taking state gold (re: Zeuhl and Jadis).

Nor can we afford to play philistine and discount the entire linguo-material labor value of sexuality and gender-non-conformity in art, monsters and porn (re: Bad Empanada, “Understanding Vampires,” 2024). To speak out against war profiteers, we must camp canon as it exists—unequally across all workers affected by profit turning them not just alien, but sex cop. Freedom is a constant struggle, then, one defined by resistance pushing towards a day many will not live to see.

Such is Gothic Communism, whose bitter pill ludo-Gothic BDSM offsets with the ability to synthesize some degree of catharsis in our daily lives! Amazons embody this, but also their own abuse in hauntological hindsight; i.e., something to transform away from older sell-outs and commodities occupying the same draconian surfaces and spaces; re: pastiche remediates praxis. Amazons are alien warriors of sex and force, seeking some facet of revenge for or against nature (even if that revenge is merely to exist as they are in opposition to state dogma; e.g., a muscled whore to dress up as a crossdress likeness of a dragon, below).

Now that we’ve shored up the dialectical-material elements, I want to consider the personal experiencing of such stories: how we inherit them; i.e., as they’re endlessly made and remade, through Gothic bad echo.

(artist: Kinda Sorta Maebe)

Gil Scott-Heron once said, “the revolution will not be televised,” but outside establishment media, revolutionary cryptonymy still takes place between media and mediators; i.e. through regressive power fantasies, which Amazons (a kind of barbarian) ultimately are. These didn’t start in the Modern period/Capitalocene, but the Neo-Gothic revival took what we think of Amazons and knights and expressed them in popular unequal power fantasies that are still used today when capital decays.

Such devices aren’t “new”; the state has loved to abuse demons for as long as they could invent them, including Amazons as classic female power fantasies invoking herbo warrior elements in predator/prey language to deter and instill rape. Simply scare people into purchasing what they can abject, then watch the West testify to its own atrocities against nature; i.e., by fabricating them, such gender trouble speaking on how people control trauma as made into dollish devices for them to purchase and play with. This paywalled catharsis extends to performances that are doll-like by much the same logic (which Amazons are/follow). In doing so, middle-class workers under Pax Americana eat garbage because they’re scared; i.e., by material inequities and heteronormative impunity (of state forces pimping nature-as-alien/whore). They consequently feel scared because they eat garbage that scares and relieves them; i.e., they feel shame and guilt, fearing revenge from those most obviously in control of such things—the elite and their servants, a husband comparable to a cop, thus a pimp. Subjugated Amazons can decay into adopting a similar misogynistic or otherwise bigoted posture; i.e., one approached by those who seek even the suggestion of power to their otherwise powerless lives.

Their doing so isn’t entirely baseless. Like any heirloom, such fakeries convey some degree of truth, a repressed evil hovering over the uncanny homestead: husband or homelessness, one decidedly more harmful despite rape being a lived reality for both. Women could not legally own property (thus material power) in the 1700s, so they married into power to avoid the various comorbidities known to homelessness; e.g., rape all the time, versus from their husband every so often in exchange for relative comfort; i.e., for loyal wives, dutifully punching down at illegal whores from positions of relative (dis)advantage (a wife is a legal whore). As such, they would often marry men to later fetishize them, doing so in a rising creative medium dominated by white women obsessed with alien things: Gothic novels. Per Wolff, such stories commonly depicted men as demon lovers that, in older fairy tales, were eventually defeated or transformed—a curious trend that Gothic media has since ferried into the present, regarding Amazons; i.e., based on the historically uneven and gentrifying experience of middle-class marriage.

Ann Radcliffe’s marriage, for example, was relatively non-abusive (though her life was shrouded in mystery—enough to frustrate her biographers; e.g., Rictor Morton). Despite this, the Great Enchantress canonized demon sex as much to abject colonial abuse onto criminals (the banditti, in her case) as to liberate middle-class housewives looking for a thrill; i.e., alien mates. But marriage remains the prescribed outcome of those original novels, itself overshadowed by the unlucky girl before she discovers her secret-princess status (Amazons being warrior princesses): survive the rape castle’s barbaric nightmare; get married and give all you own to the male hero.

Oh, boy!

(artist: Rim Jims)

To it, Gothic fantasies of sex and force were and are classically of assimilation from alienized positions burdened by monstrous-feminine revenge conspiracies and warrior elements. These have changed considerably over time, their aesthetic metabolism informed by feminism married to Amazonian myth. Later authors (from the mid-20th century onwards) cut out the husband, speaking to women who were both less fortunate than Radcliffe was, yet born into worlds where women presumably had more rights (not native to the land, per se, but alienated from it just as native populations are by white cis-het men acting as the universal owners of each; re: the true aliens brutalizing land and occupant alike).

My mother is one such woman. Born to a lower-middle-class family that cut her off, she came from the street—i.e., where the rubber meets the road—thus was homeless and criminal, hence exposed to Amazon fantasies a sixteen-year-old girl might use to try and take the edge off: for fear of needing to sleep with strange men for cheeseburgers and a warm bed. Being classic symbols of female strength, Amazons bore progressive and regressive (neocon) elements, of which my mother was hardly immune to such promises in either case; i.e., she wanted to be strong in ways that, in the same breath, also concerned what men felt attracted to (what was forbidden to them), and which Mom could seek sanctuary within: to never need a man again, but still look sexy in ways that carried an ace, monstrous-feminine flavor (the interrogation of trauma in female warrior language/public nudism).

In short, Amazons (and their power fantasies) carried value for her as she tried to survive; i.e., the unspoken but notorious abuse that any woman, but especially those that a mentally ill young woman in the late ’70s and early ’80s, would have to endure. In the end, Mom chose marriage over being a destitute whore, but this led to abuse comparable to what she had already survived on the street; the cops were as useless after her marriage as before it (a restraining order is just a piece of paper). It goes to show that Amazon fantasies walk the line between fantasy and real life, the best method towards tailoring a healthy approach (to the whore’s revenge) is taking both (and their many, many forms, below) into consideration: dark power and knowledge as forbidden sight to advertise for all workers, not some. They must, or it’s merely Omelas-by-Amazons; re: token women aping straight white men, declaring “boundaries for me, not thee!”

We’ll get to my mother’s experiences with Amazons and sex work in between art and rea life, but first I want to outline the idea in general:

Amazons as Whores (feat. Amanda Nicole)

(exhibit 43e2c3b: Artist: Kassarie Draws. Although token Amazons generally present as chaste-if-muscled, virginal combatants against Medusa-as-abject-whore—e.g., Ellen Ripley vs the Alien Queen—they aren’t mutually exclusive with whores or Medusa; i.e., as things to combine with that, true enough, are also modular when discussing rape and revenge as having a “pretty and petty” flavor. Amazons, at their core, are bikini models with a warrior character [e.g., Marvel’s Red Sonja basically being a ginger herbo in chainmail underwear] but also bear a non-white/non-Western stamp. This can be a “white Indian” vibe, to be sure, but also something “orcish” speaking to a variety of xenophobic stigmas [racial, religious, and/or queer] to, like the Amazon, either reclaim or at least understand through play.

In Gothic media, nudity = exposure. Amazons of a more “whorish” character are seen as fighters that, in conservative morality arguments, surrender or defend their maiden-esque virtue from rape when placed into compromising positions; i.e., to be nude is to risk corruption but also predation from evil forces: warrior nuns. Per the whore’s paradox, Amazons also flaunt their strength in defiance of patriarchal forces trying to control their bodies to begin with: to incessantly show skin, thus spite the SWERFs. And while such resistance has shifted under neoliberal Capitalism—meaning towards various scapegoats that Amazons tokenize with during imaginary crime waves/rape epidemics—it needn’t always be the case. This exhibit will explore the various ways that nudity expresses as a sex-positive form of strength—Amazonian or otherwise, but certainly useful when expressing them as a poetic device alongside Medusa!

Like all monstrous-feminine, Amazons and Medusa express through plurality during liminal expression; i.e., women are born into a world that divides them into different, oft-warring pieces. Most common are the virgin and the whore but also psychomachic fantasies about either that concern the woman’s metafictional ability to change shape/arrange power in different unequal forms; i.e., the Amazon as a “berserk” to briefly inhabit whenever one feels out of control, but likewise wants to perform and preserve/pervert elusive elements of the self that Medusa speaks to, in Gothic stories: the Amazon’s dark whorish side. Amazons are whores and all whores are demons that communicate through sex and force, pleasure and pain.

Furthermore, such demon BDSM occupies the Aegis and its illusory shadow zone; re: whose paradoxical theatre houses them without shame, but also helps the women performing them interrogate different complicated feelings adjacent to state abuse: being a slut according to how “slut” is coded, in popular culture [e.g., Wednesday Adams, top-left].

[source, top-right; artist, everything else: Queen Complex]

For example, a woman commonly feels the need to beautify and become desired in different forms; i.e., body shapes associated with dom or sub, thus different classical power scenarios and beauty standards like the Amazon and Medusa. She might find herself guiltily wanting to betray others, or slum in ways that speak to darker fantasies—of rape, captivity and violence—wherein she gives as good as she gets: anisotropically from positions of strength and weakness performed-and-informed by her status as a woman to begin with; re: the whore’s revenge.

In dialectical-material terms, such things can be fun to play with, minus actual harm; i.e., to play with “rape” by putting it quotes, doing so as much to help survivors of trauma overcome misinformed or pejorative ideas of rape association/Gothic ignorance as it is to achieve personal catharsis. Through ludo-Gothic BDSM, these various paradoxes even allow women to imagine themselves changing their body size/shape [top-right] or the size/shape of their partner [size difference] and the arrangement/appearance of the power between them [bottom-left] through BDSM binaries like top/bottom, virgin/whore, [wo]man/animal, and dom/sub. All go hand-in-hand towards raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness during the struggle to develop Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism; i.e., by relating to what we see, onstage.

Those who feel like Velma, for example, can both acknowledge their actual sexual inexperience [bottom-right] while trying to learn what is normally denied to them; use the “nerd” archetype [the “angel in the streets, freak in the sheets”] to hide their body count from people who would shame or fetishize them; or otherwise give them the ability to voice themselves with these ideas, hence use them to establish new boundaries through roleplay. Likewise, it can let them investigate, confront and play with the imaginary past and its different legends of psychosexual violence; i.e., in ways that disarm or humanize the traditional, mutilative harm associated with them, which create vaso vagal feelings of danger and pleasure working with confused predator/prey sensations: a palliative-Numinous mirror of one’s actual ontological condition/crossed wires received from old trauma currently living inside/outside the body [we’ll return to this concept more in the “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons” subsection].

The point is, women are pushed towards doing sex in some shape or form; e.g., Amanda Nicole, a “slut pop” music star similar to Kim Petras except she actually does explicit sex work—a fact that expresses visually in Nicole’s music[3] as multiple competing voices:

[source: Amanda Nicole’s “Pretty and Petty,” 2023]

In turn—and in keeping with the skin-deep, petty reputation of female revenge—the whore’s revenge also speaks to getting even in a world that awards certain appearances despite classic modesty arguments. For example, the PAWG Medusa [above] has power because her witchy body is “non-white,” thus desired guiltily by those who, in sexually repressive environments, view her exposure as intoxicating. She becomes something not to chase, but crave and worship with the proper nudge. It’s an attention game, but one that speaks truthfully to how power works in social situations. During these, sex is never far off on many peoples’ minds; they see it in ways that—for one in control of such things—can manipulate to her benefit: embodying power as something to savor and worship, but also fear as capricious [or “petty,” as Nicole calls it]. Sex symbols double as monstrous-feminine symbols of revenge—to not only “make it,” under capital, but thrive there despite its rapacious treatment of women!

Nicole’s fantasy offers a cross-examination of different monstrous-feminine revenge: the mean girl, the witch, and the ethereal sex goddess. All are objects d’art/tremendous mysteries that convey power through aesthetic and arrangement as one in the same, but speak to female revenge toying with ideas of getting even as Amazons do: exposing our bodies as “naked” with or without clothes; re: Segewick. In a world of manufactured competition, scarcity and conflict, having power over one’s enemies includes enchanting your would-be attackers using what you got; i.e., less turning them to stone, like Medusa does, and more into your admirers to shower you with praise and tribute, mid-courtship: to look the part, then seize the “jewels” for yourself [the reclamation of carrot and stick] and push towards the abolishment of privatization [and be adored for it]! Pop off, queen!

Gods personify human failings as much as human virtues. Like many revenge fantasies, Nicole’s vision is imperfect; but its pornographic flavor speaks nicely to the liminal qualities of revenge, and investigating the anger of such individuals being part of a larger group: of workers instilling fear among their usual dominators and getting what’s theirs. It also speaks to workers normally feeling compelled to fight amongst themselves. Revolution is a psychomachy—a folie à deux and ménage à trois to share madness and sin with in highly performative ways, but also orient ourselves toward, mid-relationship[s]: power as something to perceive in Amazonian ways, paradox and play existing in doubled, “dueling” bodies, replete with various double standards [e.g., Mixed Wrestling Fan’s “Girl Beats Boy Mixed Wrestling Part 2,” 2023].

To it, theatrical outlets are important, including Gothic, openly transgressive ones playing with and pay-walling sex through push-pull feelings and mechanisms. Dark reflections of the world we live in, they let us say different things about said world per labor exchange [art and/or porn]. This includes when we’re upset and that we desire revenge in more literal forms, but combines with subversive embodiments of the Amazon and Medusa [sex goddesses] to grant those seeking the whore’s revenge a vast polity of choice—one that speaks to the totality of our human condition insofar as whores [and their revenge] are concerned.

Flexing and wish fulfillment are, per Amazons/the Medusa, threat displays as much as any sort of drive turning the world into the exact image, viewed onstage. Just as often, we let off steam and let people see it: the “goods” and the thrill of different “trades” of/with said goods. We likewise tailor our actual praxis to synthesize theatrical outlets that, unto themselves, leave some room for interpretation, thus execution of the monstrous-feminine. It becomes something to control, its mood paradoxically empowering despite any debilitating trauma [and slut shame] associated with it. “What’s a girl to do?” you ask? “She walks in beauty like the night!” But this yields different forms per video and across one’s catalog.

[artist: Amanda Nicole]

In “Pretty and Petty,” the Amazon is more of an echo on Nicole’s thicc, feminine body. Conversely, others videos in Nicole’s portfolio critique power through a more direct merger of whore and Amazon; e.g., “Main Event” [2023].

A few more thoughts about “Pretty and Petty,” specifically its locations. Nicole starts with the classroom, then the dark repressed desires of the underworld tyrant, culminating in the mysteries [and aloofness] of the sex symbol’s stationary idolatry and revelation. But these could play out in any order and all share the same basic stage. In turn, they speak to a common paradox for whores: getting what one wants. Doing so, onstage, presents as sinful to the audience, but also speaks to the harmful nature of Capitalism gatekeeping such things to begin with [forcing women to girlboss, gaslighting them]. It speaks to us having to navigate various trends and beauty standards while camping them. Every person has their preference on the Aegis, and Amanda’s high-voltage, danger-disco tryptic encapsulates such monstrous-feminine variety in three distinct types: of non-Amazonian whores that channel Amazonian spunk.

“If you want to critique power, you must go where it is.” The celebration of sex through Gothic poetry is messy, hence always a liminal affair—one where assimilation and liberation/appropriation and appreciation occupy the same fantastical realms and involve the same basic devices; i.e., whatever’s “on tap,” being traded for and with [social status and material goods, sex and force] between different groups in the same larger market: where power is stored, but also the ways in which its artifacts demonically relate, through unequal, forbidden exchange and transformation. These happen during playtime speaking to live events, a skilled thespian able to work it in ways that speak to real life caught between pure fantasy and vice characters [who generally are seeking love and acceptance, but also domination and respect].

Power exchanges every day, and in ways whose understanding is, itself, forever updating/in flux with older forms. The paradox equates to consent-non-consent for those who have been raped; i.e., we can throw shade/get rough and chase the maiden and whore through rape play and Gothic fantasy at large—in short, having fun while processing demon-lover appetites in torturously hungry, mix-and-match language! The whole point, with fantasies like Nicole’s, is to encounter Amazonian or Medusa-like beings seemingly “out of our league,” yet have the capacity to change how such things exchange/are understood to begin with:

Consider body language. So often women [or those forced to identify as/treated like women] are treated as sex objects, reduced to single body parts [so-called “T&A,” left] used for the enjoyment of men; or they embody virtue and vice [re: virgin/whore] in ways that reduce them to singular emotions. Being able to play with these not only gives us control over ourselves and our emotional scars/comorbidities; it allows us to manipulate the world around us in ways useful to our liberation through these things: “I am strong!” Amazons don’t always win, but they have something that many women feel like they don’t: the confidence to fight back.

“Strength,” like demons, has infinite forms and configurations; e.g., “weakness” is strength, wherein “soft” femininity tops from below [or vice versa, and a million in-between[4] combinations]. Furthermore, this castled, animalistic charioteer’s from-outer-space liminality emerges through the uncanny ability to play with highly regulated things, opening the door to better worlds by transitioning towards them through the plastic, doll-like language of the imaginary past. “She mighty mighty!” becomes one having the whore’s revenge by changing shape and expressing oneself in unequal, forbidden ways: grist for her “mill,” her castle-in-the-flesh a graveyard-sex unheimlich coming paradoxically alive! “Rise, rise and do my bidding!” [she says to your dick].

Artists can combine literally anything with anything else; e.g., Nicole’s “Main Event” combining sports language, gangster rap, and pop references, similar to Cardi B.’s “WAP” [2020] and its own sexual gladiator’s “warrior libido” marrying whore to Amazon that, unto itself, is haunted by Medusa’s shadow [the opposite of “Pretty and Petty”]:

 

Got it drippin quench ya thirst
Top 5 bet he pick me first
Got him fiening for me like I’m his crack
The thunder cat [rawr]
He ain’t used to that
I completely drained his nut sack
Ass is fake but this pussy natty
Lift me in the air and
Put it all in your face like a plate daddy

They all wanna wife me up
I’m Jordan out here gettin rings
None of them king enough to be Anything more than just a fling
I’m a big playa’ champ
I’m here to take over the game
I’m the main event you lame
We are not the fuckin’ same

We gonna’ do alota’ freaky shit tonight
First you eat me on the counter
Then I ride you like a bike
I’m a nympho and he love it
I do everything he like
We on the floor he on his back
That pussy poppin like a sprite
I be thick and still fit
Now go suck this clit [source: Musixmatch]

Nicole embraces the fakeness of herself, the power no less real because of fat injections or breast implants. The paradox of nudity is how modesty arguments automatically blame the whore, the maiden viewed as one for exposing herself to men [who canon apologizes for as “always being that way”]. Medusa’s a power bottom who “owns it” sans guilt, outside the bedroom. She doesn’t just fuck to metal [e.g., Dance with the Dead’s “Rust,” 2024]; she is the metal! The Queen of the Night is like an Amazon, then—a dark mommy dom to tempt and tease[5], but also “destroy” you with exquisite “torture!” on the Aegis! Out and proud, ground and pound, her playful energies hyphenate/mirror her serious ones, elevating us to a campy borderline speaking subversively to the duality of human language/the liminality of sex work: of fucking with someone who, should she choose, could pull out our still-beating heart/turn us inside-out!

 The Gothic historically loves exciting murder puns/messy euphemisms and death/rape theatre’s oxymoronic, memento-mori language; re: creating sex and force for people to play with minus the worry of courtly love’s actual harm. Such things aren’t above criticism. Yet the praxial idea, for Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM, is to rewrite value on the palimpsest of patriarchal devices. It does this by subverting canonical norms through visually constant monster language, hence become actively conscious of such power and use it to develop a better world for all workers; re: to catalog and engender perceptive pastiche [through the context of mutual consent] while engaging with less-perceptive [sex-coercive] liminalities. During the cryptonymy process, we sit adjacent to power in uneven/uncanny forms; i.e., transforming them to suit our needs: training us to relax while on our toes!)

For workers, power is darkness and knowledge, of which money plays a part; for capital, profit is money (moving money through nature). Whatever the metaphor (or any kind of poetic abstraction in art and porn), Amazons reflect the lived reality of women; i.e., modesty is a myth when you’re starving and cold, treating your body and dignity as things to trade with in order to survive; re: Cuwu, controlling the room with sex. Mom was no different, the men around her alienated from sex, which she could trade in exchange for shelter and food as alienated from her (and whose trades she read about in Gothic fantasies). There’s no shame in it, of course, but all the same, taboo commodities like sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll became coping mechanisms that shaped her personal experiences when trying to survive; i.e., stamped monstrously onto female bodies out of Antiquity into the present, Amazons (and Medusa) authored inside a world happy to demonize them using a shared linguo-material device: quid pro quo.

While strangers to poverty might think that sex is never for sale, the reality is quite the opposite. And yet, this isn’t automatically bad. Amanda Nicole, for example, just showed us how sex isn’t automatically harmful towards workers, but rather is a service to offer deserving of respect as much as benefits and a living wage (success being her revenge, expressed through sex work). In demonic terms, it speaks to a Faustian element regarding forbidden fruit having an arbitrary price tag: “Cross my palm with silver.”

Relating to Amazons (and Sex Work) through Personal Experience

Just as often, though, sex work takes on a survival quality for those without the luxury to do anything else. Fawning mechanisms, in turn, help abused parties control a situation as best we can, using what we got; i.e., through combinations of alien sex and force expressed in raw poetic forms; e.g., the damsel-in-distress, the executioner’s Great Destroyer persona, and the Amazonian pinup’s public nudism, carnage/carnal knowledge, and whore’s rape and revenge, etc. Like them and Medusa, when we look at these things, we’re looking at the imaginary past speaking to historical (colonial, ethnocentric) atrocities happening right now under the pretense of past-as-make-believe: the ghost of the counterfeit is always rape, be that a rapist or rape victim. Per liminal expression, the subjugated Amazon plays a cop while inventing a shadow of something with a kernel of truth to it (which subversive Amazons try to camp): the ghost of empire being an excuse to colonize new peoples for the Good Guys killing the Bad; re: Goldilocks Imperialism, whores policing whores for fear of the Destroyer hanging over them:

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

Be those treats or threats, such Amazonian prostitution fantasies effectively occurred for my mother through Gothic comfort food’s usual cafeterias; i.e., on the television screen (from back when that was all there was to watch) and in media at large; e.g., trashy Conan paperbacks and Weird magazine offshoots (which included “H.P. Lovecraft’s” Necronomicon[6] as “found[7]” and published in the 1970s), but also the so-called “final girls” from slasher movies like Alien, Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1979, 1978, and 1974), as well as Valeria from Conan the Barbarian (1981). All informed Mom’s traumatic lived experiences, growing up as a whore in the Shadow of Pygmalion; i.e., abused by the men in her life, which caused her to dive headlong into fictional adventures written either by men fetishizing Amazons (and other monstrous-feminine) in the Pygmalion fantasy (of controlling women’s bodies and turning them not just into servants, but alien warriors), or by women who took the idea and ran with it, liberating Galatea to speak for herself and other oppressed groups alienated from their homes (e.g., Angela Carter or Anne Rice).

Regardless of who the authors were, or how sex-positive they actually acted in practice (re: knowledge is defined as a struggle from positions of relative ignorance towards informed consent), Mom gleefully consumed such things with a variety of other forgeries; i.e., alongside Tolkien’s Hobbit and subsequent LotR, the latter followed by D&D tabletop sessions that neoliberal refrains (re: videogames) cryptomimetically echoed when inheriting the same imperial mantle. She did so because their Amazonian monsters and heroes both a) spoke to her own trauma, and b) made her feel safe regarding the abuse that was happening to her by those who were drawn to Mom’s survived weirdness: a desire to be strong that takes on a half-real shape (and life) of its own!

Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma; in turn, Mom passed these alien devices down to me, a prolonged and unrequited desire sitting between mother and daughter that reliably expressed itself in demonic language: for Mom to be like Valeria or some-similar Amazon, badass Galatea, Queen Bitch of the Universe. Whatever nudity and strength she bears, those reasons are her own and not beholden to state dickwads looking to get that nut: she’ll cut you in places you don’t want to be cut!

(artist: Moi Yablochki)

Mom’s the strongest person I know, strength being defined as much by unequal arrangements of power and how you respond to/with said power under duress; i.e., when your life, and that of others’ you love, hang in the collective balance! In short, you live to tell the tale as something to build upon. By extension, warriors take pride in their lineage, which is always to some degree fictional. Even so, it remains a source of constant pride to pass down through personal experience married to legend, but one that is equally androgynous for those subversive Amazonian tropes; i.e., in ways that speak to a more tolerant past-revived in the Gothic mode than the exact hauntologies my mother herself consumed and passed down to me, and which my own stories tried to correct by speaking to myself as trans. Would that I could have helped her find that power sooner than she did (the paradox being that I wouldn’t exist; i.e., my birth is illegitimate, produced by a marriage of convenience that saw me conceived out of wedlock)! Thankfully she found it herself in the end, stating both how she wouldn’t change a thing but admitting such hard-fought wisdom would have made her life considerably easier once-upon-a-time!

I can certainly relate, seeking out my own unequal power fantasies (trans, in my case) while trouble found me and forced me to change. In doing so, it made me want for heroes, too; i.e., powerful and sexy aliens (e.g., Undine, above) that spoke to my innermost desires: to be thicc, female and “raped” in ways I could control—to be strong enough that one never knows harm again, but evokes palliative-Numinous shadows of it as situational medicine. People forget, demons are hunted, and I commonly found myself craving strength under hostile conditions—not to fetishize them exclusively but to speak these phenomena under state rule; i.e., escaping the “yoke” by putting it quotes, reclaiming it. The paradox of nightmares and darkness is my protectors are often bad echoes of my rapists; I crave protection from those who could destroy me and look dangerous but aren’t, because they nurture and protect me from actual abusers; re: “I want to fuck what I want to be.” Mixed metaphors are fine, provided they communicate a clear message, hence achieve forbidden sight with darkness visible.

In my case, Amazons grant me the Gothic ability to find similarity amid difference; i.e., rape play isn’t apologia if it takes the needs of all parties somehow into account. Personal experience, then, includes sharing the memories of past abuse through emotional extremes excited by Gothic paradox. Writing about Amazons married to my own abusive past, I commonly get images in my head—of abusers making me feel lesser and telling me I deserve to be hunted, captured, and raped (alongside fantasies that “walk the line” for medicinal purposes; re: calculated risk). This happens despite my relative privilege; i.e., even if I’m a trans, white, American woman and not, for instance, a Palestinian Arab, I still have memories of abuse that cross over into feelings of abuse expressing Gothic feelings (of alienation) that could apply to both of us in abstract ways; e.g., the child or white woman running into the forest, being chased by the lord’s men, their dogs.

Equal comparisons aren’t the point, here, but rather to share the same feelings: of being made to feel lesser, to be treated unironically like a whore, to be chased down and beaten like a dog. We can evoke it in ways that raise the dead, often towards feelings of inequality that solidarize us through a common goal, during the pedagogy of the oppressed: healing from rape to foster the prevention of harm in stories we experience differently but have similar feelings towards; i.e., to be “rape proof” (resistant to its deleterious mental effects) without raping others. We seek to engender compassion among those harmed by those abusing from positions of unfair advantage.

For me, trauma and transition are one in the same; for myself and others, these feelings paradoxically sit among the incessant peal of raucous alarms, which for so many victims’ hypervigilance, always ring inside/outside themselves. Some desire the muscle of masculine sex appeal (to occupy or handle inside the bedroom or out), others a more feminine sort, and more still a bit from Column A and Column B entwined; such gender trouble and subsequent parody—of biology unanchored from sex and gender (and both from each other through Gothic poetics challenging canonical essentialism)—involves Amazons and their submissive wards through the aesthetic of doms and subs, tops and bottoms. “Wanna see me turn into [monster form]?” yields cheeky inquiries like Milky Kitty’s, “Wanna see me put it all the way in?” Lycanthropy gonna lycanthrope!

(artist: Milky Kitty)

Control over our bodies includes how they appear as monstrous, but also what we put inside them as such; i.e., sex and force relayed in all the usual scandalous ways (often porn, left)! “Rape” enters quotes speaking with bodies and actions that “shadow” their more violent doubles: traumatic penetration (of which the Amazons are famous for) contrasting with various taming rituals that see all manner of things going into all manner of naturally assigned holes. The potential to camp rape marries to various stress-relieving activities that are, themselves, haunted by spectres of fascism and Marx alike: good-evil medicine, which functions differently for us than the state; i.e., strap-ons versus holocaust-by-bullet.

We camp the latter with the former not to so much to camp holocaust at large, but our own profound survival having experienced our own variation thereof (“Noooo, I’m being ravished! You’re conquering my vast swathes of territory!”). We do so not to deny or conceal genocide, but speak to its concealment through our revolutionary cryptonymy—as a form of personal experience translated back into stories, then back into personal experience, on and on.

In turn, oppressed pedagogies speak to all manner of demonic exchange and transformation, for which porn is perfectly fine in doing provided it’s sex-positive; i.e., done in good faith and actively seeking universal liberation: by illustrating mutual consent per labor exchange expressed as art (for which porn is; re: “art is love [thus mutual, informed consent and universal equal rights] made public”) as Gothically mature. For this, demons are well-suited, courtly love (and its bellicose mating rituals/rites of passage) involving all of the above in a vast, interconnective matrix of endless possibilities. For the state, there is only rape, regardless of form; all subjugated Amazons can do is rape or be raped because their Gothic voice is immature, barbaric, toxic—abusing demonized language that furthers abjection during the dialectic of the alien!

Challenging universal rape with universal liberation, then, requires combining various taboos and reimagining different mythical devices with them; i.e., the Amazon being an alien/uncanny combination of noble (to not-so-noble) savage, per Orientalism, but also the clever reimagining of a white female imaginary past and lost heritage (similar to Hotep culture for peoples of color) to issue some semblance of protection while inside. Hardly discrete, it should instead permit various modular-to-intersectional forms of staged public nudism that have been unshackled from colonial supervisors, and whose galleries combine gender and sexuality with raw expressions of theatrical violence, but especially colonial atrocities; e.g., slave revolts; i.e., Medusa unchained in safe environments for both sides to work out their differences, those fearing her revenge learning to hug someone who understandably has baggage (once-bitten, twice-shy). Per the Gothic, such unveilings have to be done with some degree of care and boldness, directors able to give fair warning before maniacally throwing caution to the wind!

In other words, public nudism is directed by people whose understanding of sex positivity has become second-nature; i.e., who make informed and activist fashion statements inside liberatory art movements loaded with guerrilla argument and Indigenous (or otherwise shadowy and exotic) shows of force: nudity and violence—to go into abject territories to humanize them (and their populations) while camping the canon (our very own pocket sand to lob into capital’s eyes). To critique power requires dressing up in devices thereof, even if they don’t always perfectly fit; re: you must go where power is and play/perform with it, battling unironic flesh markets and sex traffickers with your own brokers of power relaid unequally as sex and force during liminal expression.

This happens because privilege and marginality are inherently uneven, as are the gender identities and performances raised by workers under capital since the 1700s (themselves evolving as much to uphold capital [and its qualities] versus challenge them). So workers must create spaces that reflect their own liminality in Gothic; i.e., that position ourselves as already having one foot in either world (as white women generally have), or positioned near them (the girl next door described as an alien from another planet that is actually just alienated from this one): someone to admire from afar and go in for a closer look regarding! To subvert canonical norms, regarding Amazons, is to start where others “left off,” thus involves some degree of separation from the things we’re trying to reclaim: from subjugation to liberation through subversion.

(artist: Enemi)

Furthermore, even if we are abused on a systemic level (as white women and trans people are), we likewise have to acknowledge our own privilege and advantage sitting alongside those who have less than we do, or undergo different struggles that are unequally comparable; e.g., cis men of color versus white trans women vs native peoples, each probing the other less for weakness and more for compassion as something to investigate with understandable caution (which lost generations/generational trauma instills within us). It’s different flavors and degrees of shit, rape not something to rank but find common ground with through difference experiences, including in copies of itself; re: similarity amid difference during the pedagogy of the oppressed. Curiosity and hostility are beset by an equally human lack of immunity towards unequal attraction: unto the alien as something to befriend, mid-investigation.

Such descriptively gendered and sexual statements walk the line between cultural appreciation and appropriation, but also invoke dead cultures that no longer exist; e.g., the Ancient Greeks, Celts or Egyptians recruited to hauntologically revive sex-positive elements of the ancient past in “sleeping” barbaric forms; i.e., that once evoked, “wake up” and change the current cultural understanding of an imaginary “ancient” past—one to assist current groups suffering as “barbarians” under colonial rule; re: using the Wisdom of the Ancients to borrow pre-capitalist ideas (re: Foucault’s “bucolic village pleasures,” minus the pedophilia) that assist in post-scarcity while developing Gothic Communism under various double standards. To challenge those, we must—to some degree—reinspect the past, killing our darlings: as nostalgic ideas of said past, uprooted and repotted.

Double Standards and Challenging Them (Killing Your Darlings, feat. Angela Carter)

One double standard that white women experience, for example, is how society burdens them with modesty arguments. They can buck these however they want for transgressive status, yet often do so around rape fears expressed in actual body language; i.e., while said women often have fat/muscular “non-white” bodies, canon then argues these women must either cover up or show their audience said bodies, depending on the virgin/whore arbitration; re: the strongwoman as a freakshow attraction that “emasculates” men—meaning she becomes something for men to control during inverted rape fantasies (re: death by Snu-Snu), or which men motivate said women to control others for them with (the token cop showing her allegiance to the state). She’s not merely the girl next door, but the alien to tokenize by enterprising Pygmalions in need of some muscle—Supergirl bearing out “Indigenous” qualities per the ghost of the counterfeit’s brawny cleavage:

(artist: Kitty Bit Games)

In turn, the warrior maiden (and her dark, whorish side) have become trapped between the whore’s paradox; i.e., to further settler rhetoric in the wrong hands (which Kitty Bit’s aren’t, to be clear): people who treat the monstrous-feminine as unironic warrior rapist, threatening “gentle” women as cis men have historically been doing for thousands of years, and which some women imitate now (since cis female assimilation[8])—as much through proximity with versus their actual bodies’ potential for courtly love; e.g., Angela Carter (more on her, in a moment). Amazons, in other words, are abject vice characters: of monstrous-feminine rape and revenge—nature-gone-wild!

Made to be engaged with irony or without, this happens liminally (upon and through) forbidden zones of theatrical stigma speaking to their offstage counterparts; i.e., cops serving an Omelas refrain, recruiting from oppressed populations in moderate-to-reactionary forms of Orientalism, including its rape and revenge as half-real: performed in popular stories on and offstage to uphold state models with stochastic violence (e.g., Mrs. Voorhees, below, presenting both as token cop and escaped madwoman [out of the attic] with a funny-sounding name—a female banditti, per Radcliffe, but also Dacre’s female demon lover, Victoria de Loredani, stabbing “Lilla” angrily and vengefully to death: “This is your fault, you slut!”).

However “Goldilocks” or outwardly progressive/urbane they seem, then, subjugated Amazons historically decay towards more radical forms of the same things; re: witch hunts, blood libel, sodomy arguments that collectively defend capital and furthermore, whose unironic rape-as-revenge is simply wrong and unnecessary to achieve post-scarcity with. Quite the opposite, a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all. Workers must challenge the systemic entirety of profit, including its whitewasher girlbosses gaslight-gatekeeping all oppressed peoples under Capitalist Realism. Rape requires intolerance; “a little genocide” is functionally letting the state rape someone, which for us, is completely unacceptable. A world without scarcity is a world without actual rape (thus token cops performing it in some shape or form)!

This being said, Gothic Communism should be able to evoke rape, and the potential for complicit or revolutionary cryptonymy is clearly there; re: Amazons are warrior-whore demons with a white-native, animalized[9] and “ancient,” heavy metal flavor—one that has a calm and furious side[10] refusing to be victimized again (re: the Medusa, dualistically evoked by Mrs. Voorhees as someone to behead, thus lay to rest); i.e., such revenge speaks of predator/prey relations under unequal conditions and overlapping persecution networks. These incentives can direct workers to liberate or enslave by transforming into different things, and all communicate through some degree of showing sex and force hyphenating through hellish bodily expression; i.e., the Amazon is a violent, walking terror weapon synonymous with the control of sex-as-weapon, specifically that of rape revenge administered by a maidenesque impasse with whorish potential: nature antagonized to behave in different monstrous-feminine ways.

In Gothic, form has multiple, dialectical-material functions; re: to move power towards workers or the state during anisotropic terror/counterterror arguments. Like all women, Amazons are maidens and whores that can do either task through their bodies. Uncloaked and demonic, they strike terror into the hearts of their enemies, achieved through threats of violent revenge (nature, avenging her rape by patriarchal forces); i.e., threat displays; e.g., “two tickets to the gun show.” Subjugated Amazons tokenize by abjecting patriarchal abuse onto their victims (re: Mrs. Voorhees). On the subversive side, Amazons (and their big muscles) are revolutionary darlings, but also sex objects desired for their alien qualities (from those wanting to penetrate them and vice versa): monster mommies, but also warrior princesses who punch up, not down.

(artist: Kitty Bit Games)

And yet, because she is a weapon, the state will try to monopolize such weaponry’s violence, terror and morphology as its darling poster girl—to carve nature up with, during the usual cartographic refrains antagonizing nature as monstrous-feminine, to begin with; re: nature is a peach divvied into slices, moving money through nature on carceral territories, and of which I argue, require tokenization to work: nature raping nature, through Orientalism and its trademark threats of danger and protection (from rape and revenge); i.e., by the alien side feeling familiar as much as foreign (re: Laura Ng vis-à-vis Said’s Culture and Imperialism). Raped in the past and slated for future conquest, settled lands are owned by people who will happily pimp Amazonian revenge to police their usual territories/populations with; i.e., nature-as-monstrous-feminine cop and victim, person and place, rape and ritual (e.g., anal sex—more on this in a moment). All operate as things to take and reclaim for either side of a given struggle, but for which state betrayals always see cops climbing out from its state of exception only to go back in and rape those unable to leave or fight back under state protection. They are silenced, thus subject to genocide by token Amazons executing courtly love without irony.

So while Amazons classically resist as an aesthetic, subjugated varieties refuse to meaningfully revolt against their masters; re: they kiss up and punch down like Hippolyta married to Theseus, acting as universal victims while victimizing others less advantaged—all while behaving like the only legitimate monstrous-feminine in town (whose freakshow muscles give them “a pass”). They become darlings undeserving of state force, hence vampires for the state, which translates easily enough to demonic modes of expression; re: unequal, forbidden exchange and transformation versus feeding and trauma, the two discussing the same exact thing: bourgeois enforcement.

By comparison, liberators subverting the Amazon can treat this refusal as the turncoat whose betrayal (and its victims) haunt liberation on her feared/celebrated surfaces; i.e., the larger process hampered by the ghosts of those who sold out, or whose work was coopted by groups who most certainly did; re, Angela Carter and her adage (from Volume Zero):

Just what is a woman, Angela Carter, when you write in The Sadeian Woman (1979) “A free with woman in an unfree society will be a monster”? Of course, Matt Walsh’s hideous refrain is normally bad-faith nonsense directed at us, but it becomes quite important when defining what a woman is (and a monster) when regarding the likes of Carter’s platitude, but also Simone Beauvoir, Cynthia Wolff, Ellen Moers, or hell, Janice-fucking-Raymond […]. Second-wave feminism was (and still is) infamously cis-supremacist and white, and we can’t just rely on a bunch of fancy (and highly problematic) white, cis-het female academics to accomplish the sum of all activism for all workers. Even if Carter wouldn’t have been caught dead in Rowling’s company today, she still died in 1992—one year after Michael Warner introduced “heteronormativity” to academic circuits, two years after Judith Butler wrote Gender Trouble and one year before Derrida wrote Spectres of Marx.

To be blunt, Carter’s most famous works feel oddly dated in terms of what they either completely leave out or fail to define, and thereby supply clues to the vengeance of proto-TERFs like Dacre’s Victoria de Loredani that Carter doesn’t strictly condemn. As Brittany Sauvé-Bonin writes in “How Angela Carter Challenges Myths of Sexuality and Power in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ & ‘The Company of Wolves'” (2020):

The men in de Sade’s stories exercise sexual perversions which enforce annihilation. However, it is the women in de Sade’s stories that are seen as even more cruel as once they get the rare opportunity to exercise power, they begin to use this power to seek retaliation over the submissiveness they were forced to endure in society (The Sadeian Woman 27). Carter bluntly concludes that “a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster” (27). Due to women being oppressed for so long, when they get the opportunity, they can retaliate in the most extreme ways (27).

According to Henstra, this has resulted in critique by other feminists including Andrea Dworkin, who have concluded that The Sadeian Woman displays a “complete disregard for the actual suffering endured by Sade’s – and pornography’s – victims” (113). Carter chooses to focus more on how women had an outlet to retaliate that de Sade had openly introduced.

While some of his women suffered, some of his women indeed inflicted the pain. Hence, Carter rationalizes de Sade’s work by saying “pornography [is] in the service of women, or, perhaps, allowed it to be invaded by an ideology not inimical [harmful] to women” (The Sadeian Woman 37) [source].

Again, what is a woman, Carter? And what did they do with this outlet? The vast majority turned it against other minorities more disadvantaged than themselves—i.e., from 1979 into the present (source).

Indeed, Carter herself wasn’t above Gothic fantasies with an exploitative element. As Maggie Doherty writes in “Fairytales Punish the Curious” (2017):

had no time for female melancholy. A woman whose quiet demeanor belied her forceful mind, Carter was that rarest of things—a happy writer. She followed her desires—for travel, for learning, for (younger) men—with little hesitation or regret. She was not naïve about sex; she argued that any sexual relationship must be considered in light of the way power works. Still, she believed in the emancipatory power of erotic love. She was attracted to fairytales both for their violence and their strangeness; she adjusted archetypes and tweaked myths until they came to mean something entirely new. Her fiction celebrated the couplings of a wide range of characters: teenage girls, wizened old women, circus performers, wolves (source).

Except, the problem goes deeper than that. Her work—while undeniably adventurous in its tone-poem exploration of sexuality in Gothic rape play—was as limited in its scope as any white cis woman from that period: an Orientalist madam (female pimp) of the abject, upholding Capitalism Realism by tailoring her Gothic imagination as heteronormative, thus queer-exclusionary (and hostile towards). The profit motive is there, baked into her bigoted work’s obsession with unironic torture porn (thus rape); she was married to its nuclear ideas—their settings, characters and power scenarios, but also their abject scapegoats.

In short, there was a power imbalance like Foucault’s, the powerful accommodating Carter’s intellect as second wave feminism commonly was: the ability to pick-and-choose, then insist, “We live in Gothic times” while stroking profit’s unholy cock. From plausible deniability and veils of demonstrable ignorance (a lack of inclusive queer scholarship up to that point), Carter enjoyed a celebrity status that let her prey as she liked; i.e., someone who “challenged” the state through controlled opposition, hence conditions of surrender that pit her powers against more vulnerable parties. The Gothic’s campier language (often of queer men; e.g., Shakespeare, Walpole, or Matthew Lewis) has historically given the oppressed a voice (e.g., Phantom of the Paradise or Rocky Horror, 1974/1975). Carter resisted such devices, pimping queerness out while tying gender to sex (e.g., The Passion of New Eve[11], 1977) or focusing entirely on cis-het couples.

To be silent during genocide is to partake in it, yourself, but TERFs are essentially second wave feminists dying on that hill. Said hill existed in 1979; re: Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire spouting the kind of transphobic dogma Carter’s New Eve relayed about transition phobias and “men in dresses.” The idea that Carter wasn’t aware of these, let alone Raymond, is laughable. Hell, Carter had not only beaten Raymond to the punch—writing a transphobic story about transsexuals (a transmedicalist term) two years before Raymond’s book (see: footnote); she likewise never countered its genocidal rhetoric in the 1980s (during the AIDS crisis) like Rice did. If the unironic rape porn wasn’t obvious enough, Carter’s a TERF and a SWERF, and doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt; in fact, it’s historically in our best interest to excoriate her and her bullshit, full stop! State defenders enjoy high burdens of proof, even when their abuse is obvious. Don’t apologize for them!

In short, it was possible to be queerphobic before queer theory emerged in the 1990s to call these hypocrites out—and indeed, in 1960, when cis-het people decided to pin serial killings onto queerness with movies like Psycho (above), which arguably pre-dated second wave feminism (as did words like “transgender,” coined in 1965). Even so, feminism, by 1960, had already gentrified and decayed into strange appetites that serve profit; i.e., gay panic, which Carter’s work only reinforced: towards the 1980s, when transgender people were starting to be more aggressively demonized (e.g., Alien, 1979). Through DARVO and obscurantism, such media served up scared-straight, middle-class people’s shadowy idea (above) of what the monstrous-feminine is beyond how they could embody it themselves—indeed, how they could weaponize it against queer people and other minorities. Medusa, the rebel, became a stranger for them to attack others with—a witch hunt carried out by witches, sex policing sex, whores raping whores to have the pimp’s revenge.

Leaning into horror tropes to confirm queer bias is bad; so is failing to take a stronger stance on what should be obvious: trans women are women, and don’t tend to rape other women (which cis women ironically ignore, traitorously acting like men themselves to rape trans people in service to profit).

Such is bigotry. It doesn’t needn’t an exact language or thesis to give it form, queerphobia—specifically of the “man” in the dress—dating back centuries (e.g., Matthew Lewis’ Matilda). The paradox of moderacy lies in how it’s still radical because it whitewashes genocide and defends fascism behind the liberal, married housewife: a refusal to change. Like so many thinkers from the ’70s (or the entire 20th century, for that matter), Carter became a predator lauded for her steady and fairly tame (from a political standpoint) appetites; i.e., dressed up as bold, brave, and transgressively noble, yet gatekeeping others by excluding them—through alienizing preference! She’s not the liberator of all groups, but a white cis-het woman getting her admittedly narrow jollies in the shadow of problematic straight men she was more-or-less aping (and the Man Box of weird nerd culture these men encompassed in their own work): the Marquis de Sade!

Of course, rape play and liberation aren’t mutually exclusive, but Carter didn’t use her bored housewife’s libido to expanded her horizons; i.e., beyond the Shadow of Pygmalion, hence liberate other peoples using ludo-Gothic BDSM. As such, she’s a former darling who only took things so far—for white straight women, first and foremost; i.e., a form of submission, myopically limiting their struggle to that single group against all others, including trans people: as beings of darkness to abject state rape (that of their husbands) onto. Dick move, bitch.

From there, leveraging this ongoing problem against the whore’s paradox happens per the traitor’s perspective and outcome; i.e., a Judas refrain whose witch hunts against her own kind exhaust any goodwill at the expense of everyone (and all symbols) involved; re, TERFs and witch hunts poisoning the well (from the Undead Module):

by playing cop as TERFs do, they sell out, only serving to erode the credibility and goodwill of genuine activism (a fascist tactic, generally capital in the process); re: Silvia Federici’s argument, “Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity” [cited from “Hot Allostatic Load,” 2015]. Witches aren’t just AFAB, though, and worker solidarity needs to reflect that; re, as I write (earlier in this volume: In response to both authors, I would include that capital tokenizes all labor (not just female and non-white) as sexualized, fetish, alien; i.e., something to gentrify and decay inside of itself, moving money through nature to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine (thus having masculine elements; e.g., phallic women). Feminism decays for these purposes, as do genderqueer movements, sex work, and Gothic poetics  (source: “A Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches),” 2024).

Simply put, Amazons are witches, so the idea of triangulation, castration and witch hunts that we’ve previously explored in this larger series also applies to them. As mistresses mastered by men (which Carter ultimately was, indebted to heteronormative, binarized ideas of sexuality she largely upheld[12]), they are darlings and per Sarkeesian’s adage, we must poetically “kill” said darlings in holistic[13] ways that interrogate their own betrayals/misguided desires for revenge; re: Barbara Creed, saying that “Athena’s aim was simply [emphasis, me] to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother.”

(artist: The_1Medusa)

Except, we can’t afford to be simple when having out revenge, reversing abjection during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., “just threaten cis-het dudes with Freudian castration,” as Creed seemingly puts it (seemingly forgetting that Athena, depending on the legend, was a gentrified temple goddess punishing a rape victim, yet in same breath, giving her the terrible, Numinous power to freeze rapists in their tracks; re: by reversing abjection on the same Aegis, per my arguments). Nor can we be chaste alone when humanizing Medusa, thus Amazons; i.e., nature is an alien, monstrous-feminine whore, thus subject to the whore’s paradox affording her power under exploitative, abject conditions. For one side or the other—not just maidens and whores, but those who normally consume whores—each finds power (and knowledge) according to how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyways. We trade power and knowledge as labor exchanges that workers regain control of—across media, but also space and time; i.e., challenging various double standards through our own doubles punching up. Doing so—and existing to spite TERF authors like Carter or Raymond, exposing them as false—is our revenge. It should make our enemies uncomfortable, but also lull them.

Let’s stick with Medusa, as she’s arguably the most famous, and the one that neoliberal Amazonomachia uses to police workers with, then and now. She classically appears out of control, and is put down by Amazons who see their own failings (and abusers) mirrored on the rabid double’s complicated surface. Per the whore’s paradox, though, both of them regain power while feeling out of control; i.e., during calculated risk. They learn to control their abilities, meaning their trauma; re: playing with rape as a counterterror device for workers. Trauma lives in the body but also around it, and marks us in ways that draw police forces to us. It’s their primary way of controlling us, thus our revenge “from nature.”

Except, when workers become able to play with rape under controlled circumstances, they gain the ability to liberate themselves from the state; i.e., the state loses any hold over workers, becoming afraid of what we’ll do when fear doesn’t motivate us to punch down. In turn, we learn not to simply control our trauma to hide it, but cryptonymically weaponize it against our enemies (the elite and their servants). We build ourselves up despite our scars/alienation: to go beyond the narrow focus (and praxial limitations) of women like Radcliffe, Carter or Creed.

To be clear, we can salvage said women’s useful ideas, but the idea of them as darlings desperately, desperately needs to die; i.e., by exposing the TERF-y (thus settler-colonial, Cartesian, heteronormative) aspects of their outmoded, Gothically immature approach to the monstrous-feminine, rape and revenge: an imaginary antiquity whose “ancient” fakeries enforce capital by either pointing the finger at us fags and calling us rapists (re: canonical terror/counterterror arguments), or by evoking people who do (re: Creed building The Monstrous-Feminine on Sigmund-fucking-Freud, of all people). That shit gets me, a trans woman, livid; i.e., at people who should know better that put Carter on a fucking pedestal, essentially talking about her like she’s some fucking saint rescuing the world from us. It’s 2024; we’re way past that! We’re not your scapegoats, bitches, and even if you get us, capital and fascism will get you! There must always be a whore, thus a victim, and the state is the ultimate hangman you’re only playing at. You’re expendable, and betrayal cuts both ways; after we’re dead, they’ll take you out back (or through the front door) to hang you in the streets for all to see!

Rape is rape. In control of our trauma, we become masters of cryptonymy/mirrors; i.e., able to attack in ways that are harder to kettle. In the West, the state relegates explicit sex to the bedroom (re: Foucault), except as something to pimp, or otherwise control/attack outside of said bedroom with (re: me). As such, those who communicate openly with sex do so through code, cryptonymy and demon BDSM; i.e., camping it; e.g., “Stepbrother, what are you doing?” or “I need my ‘couch’ moved.” Instead of turning everyone to stone, Medusa (and by extension, Amazons) can activate her forbidden sight without harming her friends, and turn those who attack her (and other state enemies in bad faith) to stone. Ancient trauma (the abuse and revenge of whores) revives to reclaim the Medusa’s power through Amazons as “out”; i.e., loud and proud activists—a threat display but also defiant jouissance whose confident passion remains haunted by those seeking to control us: subjugated Amazons colonizing the aesthetic in duality! Sex is something to have under their terms, which we resist in psychosexual exchange; i.e., as subversive Amazons, pushing back against our colonizers in disguise.

The state controls sex and gender in monstrous-feminine language because these are where power (and trauma) are found; i.e., the state wouldn’t bother if that wasn’t the case; re: their ideas of power revolve around ideas of state revenge also dressed up: the pimp dominating nature-as-monstrous-feminine, doubling and dominating it through tokenized double standards; e.g., anal sex (which we’ll explore in just a moment). Except, exploitation and liberation occupy the same uncanny space; i.e., as poetic things coming alive to seek the whore’s GNC revenge through power as something to reframe inside itself. In short, there’s a potential to humanize what is demonized by reclaiming the whore-as-demonic, thus normally treated as chattel/property and reclaimed in liminal territories. To critique power, we must consume problematic things and understand how to subvert them: to gain access to the endless ways whores (thus Amazons and the Medusa, left) manifest in popular media:

(source media: “Medusa Craves Boiling HOT Cocks”)

This affords us different opportunities. For one, censorship is a death sentence. We can’t just throw out sex work due to systemic abuse, because the state can just abuse us and watch us discount sex work’s liberatory value; i.e., people attract through alienation towards what is different, even if those differences are enforced, and porn—despite its problematic elements in industry forms (often racial[14] ones, below)—allows people to experience fetishes and clichés; i.e., by consuming them in order to understand human behaviors: exposure to what is alien to exchange, then transform ourselves into healthier forms, moving forwards. We want take what is given and learn from it to synthesize good praxis, thus catharsis; re: to use girl talk’s gossip/anger alongside monsters and camp, thereby channeling Medusa’s “hot goss” to tell our friends where to stick it (and where our enemies can’t) during the cryptonymy process: madness as an aesthetic/form of data in the flesh.

(artist: Medusa)

Keeping with Medusa and Amazons, though, we have to do better than symbolic shows of force that historically gentrify and decay into token assimilation and senseless, unproductive revenge; e.g., Victoria de Loredani stabbing Lilla (re: Sam Hirst’s “Zofloya and the Female Gothic,” 2020) translating to one relatively privileged group punching down. Double standards denote doubles and vice versa.

To it, liberators have to avoid triangulations pitting alien against alien, wherein said castrators unironically harm state enemies, then posture as rebels/progressive! This applies not just to Amazons, of course, but minority groups and monstrous doubles at large (which often includes Amazons); e.g., queer people and vampirism something to attack until the state, deprived of easy prey, cannibalizes its own police force; re (from the Undead Module):

Denied queer scapegoats, the state will turn to other forms of monstrous-feminine, and ultimately on itself as famine sets in (e.g., Attack on Titan). To that, the usual clichés persist. Though not always, vampires are often male, monstrous-feminine dandies operating predatorily inside a traumatic, colonial location (re: Lestat from Interview with the Vampire, feeding in pre-revolutionary America); i.e., one where consumption is generally considered an act of theft during welcome/unwelcome trespasses that freeze the victim in place: the paralyzing theft of privatized essence—blood, brains, life force, etc—from a rightful, bourgeois source (the lothario/gigolo-coded Lestat, gleefully supping on the aging beldame before wringing her neck, and Louis clumsily trying his best not to kill his meal, thus prove Lestat wrong: that gay men needn’t strictly be sexual predators who harm those they feed on). Anything that challenges said ownership is unwelcome by the pearl-clutcher, be the robbery a solo enterprise or an uncomfortable gathering with revolutionary potential (eating the rich); i.e., the prosecution framing sodomy as a venereal disease that conflates the cruiser’s seeking mechanism and punching up/topping from below with bad-faith predation (eating women and children).

As a discourse, though, the potency of class conflict during monster-themed oppositional praxis has only intensified during the Internet Age. Inside this age, new generations of queer people emerge, then reclaim “sodomy” through vampirism; i.e., as a theatrical device they take back from older tokenized queers (and straight Marxist-Leninists acting like second wave feminists at best, Stalinists at worse; re: Bad Empanada) who insist “they ‘won’ the battle” or “have all the answers.” Newer an-Com queers must resist tokenism, then, refusing to sell out according to such desperation and convenience (wherein abjecting the entire Superstructure and literary analysis very much is a matter of convenience; re: Bad Empanada); i.e., those persons hijack rebellious language (such as vampirism) to abuse it for fascist, false-rebellious purposes: stochastic predatory violence and betrayals, both delegitimizing activist credibility and goodwill to empower state mechanisms per the brand of selling out (re: Drolta from Castlevania: Nocturne, which again, I explore in “Back to the Necropolis“).

To that, canonical vampirism and its unironic, police-like means of “sodomy” language have crystalized over several centuries—i.e., by tying neo-medieval expression to individual sexual predators, pests and addicts who invade and prey parasitically upon a single location; or is framed as doing so according to abject pogrom stereotypes within a profoundly biased heteronormative imagination; re: the “outing” of Jews (and people confused as “Jewish,” such as Eastern Europeans) during blood libel and other anti-Semitic tropes describing them as blood-drinking vampires, baby-killing witches, and/or flesh-eating goblins (all, again, from Hey Alma’s “Anti-Semitic History of…” series; 2021, 2020, and 2023):

(artist: Chris Bourassa)

In turn, the same chimeric libel would extend to trans women as 21st-century reprobates; i.e., vampires (and their kissing-cousin relatives, lycans) needing to be publicly embarrassed, hounded, and ultimately put down/to the torch in order to serve profit. As such, their execution falls under the same grim harvest, its liminal hauntology of war happening by assimilative forces conducting rapacious, obscurantist and hypocritical acts of penetrative force, mid-DARVO: the silver bullet or stake through the heart being more of the same witch hunt cannibalizing queerness; i.e., one whose Foucauldian (discipline-and-punish) enforcement arbitrates chaotically as the state decays and sinks its “fangs” (stakes) into wherever and whomever the state needs them to go (source: “Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love,” 2024).

The same issues that affect “phallic women” more broadly (or the white women writing about them; re: Carter) likewise affect any marginalized group that might use the Amazon (or something comparably monstrous-feminine) across different monster classes; re: the undead, demons and/or animals. Such duality per the Amazon and Medusa shows how all can gentrify and decay as profit rapes nature, thus supplies us with strange feeding habits the state can control; re (“A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis”):

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it using the same Satanic, darkness-visible aesthetics/pandemonium (source).

(artist: Skylar Shark)

All of this can be opposed—and occurs through a rising demand for performers helping us achieve catharsis under capital—but due to the complications listed above, such rebels are often historically tragic in their renaissance; i.e., framing the harvest as humanized; e.g., King Kong falling to his death, and other such beings pushing for interracial bonding that, once martyred, humanize the harvest, exposing the state as inhumane. And if that seems limiting in its scope, simply swap genders: a black female ape and a white twink in peril. To some extent, then, the darlings we must kill the most amount to our former selves/role models—meaning older “closeting” ideas of Amazons and the Medusa!

The sex-positive qualities of the Amazon classically lend white women the ability to show as much skin as they want (to be comfortable in their own homes, which extend to the land around them) and present themselves as disobedient (often by fucking whoever they want or using toys, above) in ways that build their own possible, attractive and inclusive worlds; i.e., through mimesis, they imitate art that is powerful, but also stresses co-existence and harmony between unequal positions of exchange and transformation. In terms of trauma and labor value, demons have infinite forms, as do what they represent in paradoxical matters of revenge; i.e., actual imprisonment is certainly terrifying (which I can attest to), but introduce an element of control where no harm to a formerly abused party is actually possible and suddenly “imprisonment” feels amazing!

Something is always given and received per exchange; i.e., legitimate abusers awakening us to forbidden prey mechanisms of psychosexual pleasure and pain (re: Jadis, to me) that both speak to our survived confusion/rewiring by trauma, but also our ability to use them during oppositional praxis to restore healthy boundaries, in the future. “The dose doth make the poison,” abused parties learning which poison to pick and how to camp it; e.g., I love dark mommy doms, but very much learned this the hard way from Jadis—”murder dick” (re: period sex) and ahegao are fun, but being raped unironically is not!

(artist: Pork Loins)

Doing so in safer forms of theatre paradoxically becomes our Aegis—to bounce harmful energies back, yet hold onto the good stuff defined by the context of playing with rape, exposure, and showing off unique vantage points to special situations of privileged access (e.g., public masturbation with a partially concealed element, left); i.e., of dialectical-material function and flow (of power), not appearance: “Help, I’m in a compromising position!” The sentence is both true and false. So are demons, and this power is ours to reclaim from state doubles pitting Amazonian double standards against us and our stabs at liberation; re: “rape” ironically! “Bind,” “torture” and “kill” not to actually accomplish those dreadful deeds, but devilishly exhibit them to instill a sense of rape prevention per the whore’s paradox: “Come and see the violence inherent [to] the system!”

Camping canon through medieval recreation is an old standby (and a fun one). In turn, “when the dog bites, when the bee stings…” (a song written by a rebellious nun) can speak to big strong ladies that, per the Amazon myth, are commonly bound and gagged under patriarchal structures; i.e., in ways iconoclasts play with to paradoxically challenge profit as a genocidal system: rape uncloaked, but also the power to survive expressed in poetic forms. Told in the same basic language (of rape and revenge), volunteer performers chain themselves up during tantalizing shows of intersectional solidarity and protest (next page)—that of demonic, pleasure-and-pain-seeking beings (which Amazons are), paradoxically “martyring” themselves during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Whores communicate psychosexually through calculated risk, the latter becoming how those how treated as whores reclaim said labor and aesthetic when playing with rape in warrior ways!

As proof-of-concept, I want to unpack this vis-à-vis Amazons and anal sex; i.e., a postcolonial device haunted by its own abuse as something to camp! We’ll consider this and more when reclaiming the Amazon for our gay purposes—indeed, our dark revenge when subverting Amazons and rape—next!

Onto “Reclaiming Amazons, part two: Reclaiming Anal“!

---

Footnotes

[1] Such hauntologies point to zombie-style betrayals—of the consumer by the state as an even-bigger cannibal eating smaller ones; i.e., during capital’s endless, concentric harvests. The decay of the settler colony conceals itself through police-style shows of force, which the powerful push towards outsider groups separated from insider groups. But these always come home, Saturn devouring his son during the liminal hauntology of war versus Medusa eating her wayward children at state shift.

[2] A false flag and strawman tactic.

[3] Both artists are sex-positive, but Nicole channels pornstar energy through a pornstar body. That being said, Kim’s “slut era” speaks to a veneer of sex work (her website, KimXXXXX, having softcore elements, which are as valid as hardcore forms) made to help safeguard her friends:

In a new interview, Petras reveals that her most recent EP, Slut Pop, was a pleasure-filled persona. “I was trying to have the most ridiculous fun with the sluttiest character I could come up with,” she says. “It was someone who would say whatever the f— she wanted to.”

With songs like “Throat Goat” and “Treat Me Like A Slut,” the German pop star clearly ate and left no crumbs. However, she wants people to know that it’s deeper than that. It was a form of solidarity. “That was at a time when OnlyFans was going to ban sex workers,” Petras says. “I have a lot of friends who need sex work in order to transition. It’s a very normal thing in my world, and I don’t see anything wrong with doing sex work. I wanted those girls to feel empowered” (source: Gigi Fong’s “Kim Petras on OnlyFans and the Importance of Her Slut Era,” 2023).

With women and sex, the line between performance and performer is classically thin, but actually allows for tremendous variation; i.e., the whore’s paradox includes the ability to act sex out/contribute to universal liberation on different registers differently at the same time; e.g., between cis and trans women. To that, Petras’ slut was a character that spoke for her friends doing sex work to survive; by comparison, Nicole is a sex worker whose music speaks to the same idea, but through a slightly different arrangement—a character to play onstage, yes, but also someone whose music and sex work are less of a stage act and more one indicating the other beyond what the music video can show.

[4] I.e., death by Snu-Snu as something to portray in so many forms. Cis-het men, for example, see any kind of sex out of the bedroom as whorish, including things they sexualize in different ways, like Amazons or Medusa. This double standard ensures that any contact with them is forbidden, because society at large will treat/view it as automatically sexual, even if one side isn’t doing it for that; e.g., ballerinas, wrestlers, or any other female athlete in existence. And sometimes, this becomes a joke to play with. But it doesn’t preclude or change the reality that things are inherently unequal through such athleticism; i.e., girls living in a man’s world. Any subversion taking place will reflect that disparity.

All the while, art and porn aren’t mutually exclusive, but canon treats them as such; re: through us versus them. But we can simultaneously acknowledge that, yet operate in good faith—accepting that different people invariably get different things out of the same event.

Natalia Sense’s “Yoga Art — Flexibility Flow” (above, 2024), for example, is artistic for the model, but simultaneously working within fetishes and clichés her target audience will undoubtedly indulge; i.e., in through her stunning body (and production values). And she’s obviously aware of that. Art and commerce can coexist, and involve various interpretations as much from the viewer as from the performer challenging this or that with this or that.

[5] Which the Gothic does while camping the nuclear model’s parental language in fairytale-style roleplays and parlance; e.g., “mommy” and “daddy.”

[6] Lovecraft merely revived such weird-nerd Orientalism; i.e., from a Providence gentleman’s harmful idea of “mad Arab,” the concept lifted from older bigots and revolutionaries; e.g., Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (1818) or Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) having similar ideas about places the West (and the inexorable passage of time) had already conquered and long since dreamt about.

Unlike Shelley (the husband or wife), Lovecraft was fascist (thus full of shit), as were the other authors who purposefully carried on his ideas in his lifetime (and after); i.e., all were building on demonic xenophobia as something to expand upon in fascist ways: to create and assign evil to a world whose decay was leading to regressive witch hunts. While we’ll explore the value in these worldviews’ astronoetics when we look at Alien, such people largely suck because all—similar to Tolkien and his orcs and goblins—abused occult mythology to foster a commodified ignorance of the imaginary past standing in for the actual. As Gabriel McKee writes,

Lovecraft, “Simon” (the compiler of the Simon Necronomicon), and the anti-cult crusaders all trade in different misinterpretations of history. The general public knows just enough about the history of the ancient Near East for it to view it as a place of mystery and strangeness. Indeed, this reputation is itself an inheritance from the ancient world, as Greeks and Romans saw “magic” as coming from the East (In Book 30.2 of his Natural History Pliny the Elder declares that “there is no doubt that this art originated in Persia.”). This proto-orientalism, combined with historical illiteracy—or perhaps committed distrust of “history” as an elite conspiracy in itself—has led to the mystification of antiquity as something incomprehensible, occult, or even satanic. This has opened the door for both outright fraudsters and what Laycock calls “moral entrepreneurs” to write their own chimerical histories, inserting the names of ancient places and deities into imagined struggles between cosmic good and evil. These faulty constructions of history depend on ignorance. We actually know quite a lot about ancient Near Eastern cultures and their religious practices—and the ISAW Library contains many of the fruits of this knowledge—but historical fabrications expect and depend on ignorance. The more we learn, and the better we communicate that knowledge, the more tools we will have for opposing misconstructed history (source: “The Misappropriation of Ancient Texts,” 2015).

Of course, such “ancient” copies aren’t strictly a negative. Instead, “the idea of Gothic ancestry endured because it was useful” (re: Madoff’s 1979 “The Useful Myth of Gothic Ancestry“)—a utility that applies as much to workers reclaiming Amazons for revolutionary purposes (e.g., Matthew Lewis’ shapeshifting Matilda) as to Lovecraft as his ilk demonizing witches-by-another-name: Chthonic whores (a ’20s and ’30s vaudeville caricature of Satanic Panic and Hammer of Witches). Reclaiming the Wisdom of the Ancients goes both ways!

[7] While found documents are a common Gothic trope, Lovecraft never actually wrote a Necronomicon, himself. The copy my mother had was written under the nom de plume, “Simon” (attributed to Peter Levenda, an occult historian who denies involvement; see: above).

[8] I.e., for as long as women (especially white middle-class women) have had voices and could punch down against minorities, vis-à-vis the ghost of the counterfeit furthering the abjection process; e.g., Britain, 1870—the same year Carl Westphal medically recognized homosexual men (an idea that Gothic xenophobia pathologized in the decades that followed; re: Dracula, 1897, projecting blood libel and sodomy arguments openly onto gay men)—cis women were conveniently presented with the Married Women’s Property Act: letting women (selectively white straight women) keep any money they earned as their own property. This expanded, in 1882, with the Married Women’s Property Rights Act, which allowed, again, married women to have complete control over all of their property, regardless of its source; i.e., the state allowed it, incrementally buying said women’s loyalty in exchange for their complete betrayal: to colonize extramarital, non-white, non-Christian, and/or GNC peoples. The state is straight; its cops function as straight regardless of latter-day normativities: defend the nuclear model through canonical Gothic stories imitating real life (and vice versa).

In short, state concessions are selective, giving some workers their rights back, but always with the expectation they betray their class (often along racial and cultural lines). The “liberated” women, above, would go onto police states’ rights against other marginalized groups. By extension, the suffragettes—anywhere in the “free world” (the Imperial Core and its colonies)—were incredibly exclusionary and bigoted, having decayed into fascist, property-owning forms of themselves defending privatization (and arrogantly dressed up as “rebellion”). From feminism’s first wave onto its second, “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss” (the coercion trifecta) called for women to resist change in bad faith (re: praxial inertia): not one step further towards liberation for all.

[9] They’re nymphs married to sex-through-conquest captivity tropes, this curious combo teaching us the forbidden arts of love known only to wild animals closer to nature and our own repressed impulses; i.e., those things “of nature” alienated from us by Cartesian forces, which workers must reclaim by playing with mythical devices; e.g., I’m a little slut who strives to prevent rape through her work, and have learned what I like and don’t like by playing with big strong ladies in the past. I’m no tigress, but pet me wrong and watch the claws come out!

[10] Re: The alter ego. This secret identity/disguise is often inverted, doubled; e g., Superman/Clarke Kent (with Kent being the disguise) doubled by/doubling his enemies: evil aliens, but also the human race and its own divisions under capital (essentially America vs everyone else).

[11] From Rachel Carroll’s “‘Violent Operations’: Revisiting the Transgendered Body in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve” (2011):

Carter’s novel also features motifs which Prosser and Halberstam have identified as symptomatic of transphobic discourses, including the “exposure” of the transgendered person as inauthentic and the depiction of sex reassignment surgery as an act of material and symbolic violence. Indeed, transgendered lives have been met with suspicion and hostility in some feminist contexts, sentiments given expression in Janice C. Raymond’s (1979) assertion that “all transsexuals rape women’s bodies” (source).

In short, it’s us-versus-them divide-and-conquer pitting cis women against trans, the former seeing the latter as “men in dresses,” which Carter not only didn’t challenge, but actively fueled. And frankly it’s horseshit; you’re much more likely to be raped by your husbands than other women (cis or trans), you idiots!

[12] I’m hardly alone in this. As Maeleine Vaughn writes in “Carter, Gender & the Binary” (2020):

without accusing her of being a TERF—because, as I said, she’s dead, and never even touched on the subject—her ideas do still rely on the cis-gendered experience.  […] Carter’s exploration of female sexual liberty is unapologetic, and arguably still crucial in an era where it remains repressed and underexplored, but Carter’s writing remains painfully heteronormative in its exploration. To begin with, so far that I know (and please feel free to prove me wrong!) Carter doesn’t portray any homosexual or queer relationships in her work. This, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing, but the dated heteronormative  angle of her work is pronounced even beyond this.  In particular it shines through in the tropes she uses, with the undercurrent of power and empowerment going hand in hand with (hetro)sexual liberty.

For example, when depicting her happy relationships, Carter brings the couples together under equal terms—there is consent, there is enthusiasm in both parties—but a traditional binary coding burns clear, either unconsciously or through deliberate choice. How often it is the men, antagonistic or not, who guides the sexual experience to a nervous, virginal girl? How often is the occasion marked by that archaic breaking of the hymen and the blood on the sheets? How often does the maiden swoon into the man’s arms? How often does the woman become the seductress, to try and induce the man to provide her with what she needs (not wants), be that liberty, purpose, or sustenance? How often is the woman described as beautiful? And how often is fulfilment supplied not by the self, but by the right man?

A message shines through, right from the hellish landscape of De Sade’s writing, which equates sexuality with empowerment, the kill or be killed, or in this case, the dominate or be dominated. And while we can wax lyrical about the potential philosophical usefulness and realism represented in De Sade’s disgusting writing, it doesn’t change that it fits a traditional gender role, even if De Sade himself arguably disregarded gender (and even sexuality) as part of the equation. The role of the dominant, sexually capable and strong man, and the subdued, innocent – or perhaps coquettish – female who presents herself to him as a lamb for metaphorical slaughter, is a painful stereotype, and it’s one Carter uses, over and over (source).

That binarization reflects the usual qualities of capital that predate Carter’s work by centuries (re: De Sade, but also Radcliffe). Even so, Carter’s work remains dated in ways I saw worshipped and quoted by Gothic academics all the time (cutting their own teeth in the ’80s and ’90s). She’s a darling and needs to be killed and discarded, save for what points she had that were useful, similar to other writers from then and before; re (from Volume Zero):

In other words, if Sontag was “vanilla,” then Radcliffe was barely even ice cream […]. But their combined inexperience paradoxically stems from dark fantasies invented from the open secret of sex abuse turned into urban legends […] These canonical misconceptions operate on the automatic conflation of sex and harm, versus merely being adjacent to it during psychosexual expression [there’s a thin line between the two—a tightrope to tread carefully]. That is, sex-positive BDSM is generally about negotiated unequal power exchange in a written, contractual form that is founded on (relatively) equal bargaining positions (source).

The liberation of sex can imitate our conquerors without functioning as them, but the mutilative elements require a campy GNC irony that Carter and her ilk simply didn’t have. Camping the canon, we can speak to our desire for revenge. We must if we are to override any policewoman’s idea of punching down with said devices. Otherwise we’re just Amazons on another witch hunt—one those in power will point to later and say (to their usual constituents), “You can’t trust them.”

[13] Holistic analysis constitutes the return to older thinkers and ideas; e.g., I cite Solzhenitsyn’s famous quote, in my Undead Module: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” I so do because I think the basic idea of empathy and emotional nuance during revolution is a good one; re: segregation is bad, and queer people were a regular and famous casualty of the Soviet system under Stalin’s rule: outlawing them in 1933 until 1993 after the Fall. By no means do I put Solzhenitsyn on a pedestal; he was an anti-Communist, fascist-monarchist, American liberal darling (Hakim’s “The Man Who ‘brought Down’ the Soviet Union Was a Terrible Human Being,” 2024). Rather, I’m against all states, and would want people to understand who I’m citing and why.

In short, the basic quote is good even if the man (or the book he wrote containing it) was not. In hindsight, my knowledge of Solzhenitsyn was limited in much the same way my knowledge of people like John Lennon or George Orwell was; i.e., restricted to carefully manicured and state-sanitized postmortems. But just as such persons mixed lies with truth—in effect stealing their ideas from revolutionary forces to better resonate with their target audiences (the American middle class)—we can a) take their ideas and quote them to achieve an ironic affect, while b) educating people about the historical persons we’re citing. Solzhenitsyn and Orwell were imperial-cop sell-outs; Lennon was a homophobe, out-of-touch millionaire; and Stalin was—well, Stalin: a cruel dictator who abused state mechanisms, including making homosexuality illegal, regressing queer activism under his rule and after for essentially the next century. We must be/do better than all of them!

[14] Interracial porn is as much the interaction between taboo parties as it is commodified body types; e.g., the PAWG, BBW or BBC, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head

      He went galumphing back (source).

—Lewis Carroll, “Jabberwocky” (1871)

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

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

The larger poetic theme for part one is blood libel/sodomy conceived not as undead, but demonic; i.e., Amazons (witches), vampires and goblins expressed, and subsequently analyzed, in ways that speak to their demonic abilities: to exchange and transform, be that for the state or against it (said state historically using blood libel to demonize, prostitute and police nature-as-alien with nature-as-alien).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Personal Ami)

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

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

Onto Amazons!

Idle Hands, part one: Amazons and Demon Mommies

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

—Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman (1979)

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

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

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

(artist: Aria Rain)

Prefacing Medusa: to Bay

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

(artist: Bay Ryan)

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

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

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

(artist: The_1Medusa)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: In Case)

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

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

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

The Basics/Aesthetics

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

(artist: Winton Kidd)

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

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

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

(artist: Pinala Flame)

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

(artist: mustblove)

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

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

(artist: Queen Medusa)

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

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

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

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

(artist: Quinn)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Magic Moonarts)

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

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

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

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

(artist: Magic Moonarts)

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

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

(artist: Victoria Paris)

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

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

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

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

Poetic History

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

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

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

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Sam Milnes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Mizugi Buns)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: SLBtweety)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tokenization

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

(artist: Dreamy Skullz)

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

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

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

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

(artist: akiraeviI)

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

(artist: Sinead)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Digital Play Toy)

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Hellavender)

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

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

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

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

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

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

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

dialectical-material tension (mirror syndrome reprise)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Greg Rucka)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(source: Inked Artistry)

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Aylin Saier)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Mighty Han)

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

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

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

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

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

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

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

Medusa, My Thoughts Personally

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

(artist: Sienna Milano)

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

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

(artist: SGTMADNESS)

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

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

(artist: SGTMADNESS)

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

(artist: mustblove)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[artist: Brittny Blaine] 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Auguste Clésinger)

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

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

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

(artist: Leeza)

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

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

Second Breakfast: Forms of the Medusa

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Martian Zombie)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facing Death: the Aegis Opens!

(artist: Abigail Larson)

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

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

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

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

(artist: Bokuman)

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

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

(artist: Tassy Is Here)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: pixmilk)

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

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

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

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

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Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I have fought with the men,

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

Gregory: The heads of the maids?

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

Take it in what sense thou wilt (source).

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

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

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

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

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

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

[12] Re (from Volume Zero):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trigger warning: This post discusses rape as something to critique through Gothic media. It contains no images of actual sexual abuse, but does include problematic Gothic media as something to critic in our usual critical-educational approach.

Forbidden Sight, Faust and the Promethean Quest; or, Knowledge and Power Exchange

Approaching, you writhe, we take control
Unholy inquisition, sentence very cold
My servants, demons, take you down the hole
Your mind destroyed now I want your soul (source).

—Dave Padden; “Phantasmagoria,” on Annihilator’s Never, Never Land (1990)

Picking up where “Of Darkness and the Forbidden” left off…

Faustian bargains deal with devils, exchanging power to gain forbidden knowledge (often immortality or weapons, followed by fame, fortune, sex and revenge); the Promethean Quest, faced with ancient mysteries and devastation, sees Cartesian men of reason heading into godly realms to uncover self-destructive power once more (resulting in fatally optimistic, militarized homecomings met by rogue technology and astronoetic nostalgia).

To it, demons are unheimlich. Their houses look suspiciously human, as do their whorish, made-from-clay occupants; i.e., through cryptonymic acts of concealment and revelation, arrangement and argument: poetic renditions of forbidden sight (those black or red glowing eyes) gleaned through all the regular senses, as well as extra poetic ones (re: Milton was blind when he wrote Paradise Lost, enlisting his daughters to transcribe his dreams into Latin). As such, power and knowledge are witnessed, albeit as “darkness visible” per exchange—through duality and paradox, demonic doubles teasing one hell of a good time!

As such, power and knowledge often exist as something to gaze upon, such forbidden scenery blasting the viewer to bits; but just as often, they’re meant to be played with on the Aegis, bridging this with that:

• “part zero: a Rape Reprise” (included in this post): 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.
• “part one: Idle Hands, Weapons in Clay“: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” Explores the morphology of whores inside the violent, vengeful domain of sex demons; 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 demon lovers at large exchanging poetic violence of all different kinds!
• “part two: Making Demons” (re: Prometheus): Explores the act of making golems/composite manmade demons from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel onwards!
• “part three: Summoning Demons” (re: Faust): Per Alien, Evil Dead and other Gothic stories, lays out the idea of summoning occult demons, including acts of interrogating them through the classic Neo-Gothic model: damsels, detectives and demons per canonical torture vs exquisite “torture.”
• “Exploring the Derelict Past: the Demonic Trifecta of Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons“: Considers the left-behind, derelict flavor of demons, and unpacks various poetic qualities to damsels, detectives and demons separately and together!

Hindsight 20/20. Such poetic ventures concern rewriting a cultural understanding of the imaginary past (re: the Wisdom of the Ancients) to dismantle state operations and illusions, which my books have previously discussed at length; i.e., to apply pre-capitalist ideas towards a post-scarcity world, one whose pedagogy of the oppressed—when collectively synthesized amid intersectional solidarity—shatters Capitalist Realism vis-à-vis Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM: nature as something to conquer versus nature fighting back against the usual weird canonical nerds “having studied the blade,” nature camping cops to not only survive their wrath, but thrive in spite of it!

(artist: Kordie)

Demons, then, embody virtue (value) and vice through warring dialectical-material forces for or against the state-as-straight; i.e., from a historical-material standpoint during oppositional praxis, demons are beings to defeat, but also welcome back to better challenge state tourneys as anything but fair!

As we proceed, then, remember several things: one, how the undead embody feeding and trauma, which overlap with demonic exchange and transformation (with power and knowledge being synonymous during said exchanges); and two, that each poetic lens concerns the natural world as preyed upon by capital—i.e., expressed favorably or unfavorably in such language as ironic or unironic; e.g., the composite nature of mad science and the chimeric nature of animals prone to merging with the undead and demons through commonplace medieval hauntologies, but especially demon lovers, Black Veils, and courtly love speaking cryptonymically to state abuse at home and abroad: inheritance anxiety a package deal under capital’s veiled and rotting imperium.

Also recall how these variables divide as separate modules according to their respective poetic histories. In doing so, this chapter shall explore playing with demons as such; i.e., in and upon abject spaces and thresholds, which can be repeatedly conjured up anew as demons are: to be played with, thus interrogate power under capital (and alter its flow in either direction: anisotropically towards or away from the state). Trauma and feeding will come up during “Forbidden Sight,” and you may think about demons in those terms if it helps. Call them “vampires” if you wish; doing so merely stresses an ongoing relationship to undead/animal poetics and the histories and modus operandi known to them (e.g., lycanthropy and crazy wolf men ravishing sluts, below).

Bearing all that out, “Forbidden Sight” will explore exchange, first and foremost; the chapter after it, “Call of the Wild,” will explore transformation more pointedly (and with an emphasis on demonic, anthropomorphic animals that present with undead, chimeric elements—furries). Before we jump into acting out and playing with demonic exchange through whores and their revenge, I want to give a reprise on rape, just to be thorough (given the heavy subject matter); i.e., about demons as whore-like, starting with a thesis—the whore’s paradox—and some arguments built around it in defense of nature: having its revenge against capital harvesting it under normalized, canonically essential circumstances.

Forbidden Sight, part zero: A Rape Reprise; or, the Whore’s Paradox Having Its Revenge During Ludo-Gothic BDSM

Rape isn’t unique to Capitalism, then, but Capitalism exploits rape for profit, which always leaves a bloody footprint for us to double […] In turn, its ubiquity is something to challenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM liberating worker minds during calculated risk […] More to the point, “rape” is an

acquired taste; victims of rape (whatever the form) experience medieval-coded, regressive fantasies of “rape” they ideally want to camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM to avoid actual rape (and overall harm) in the future. In turn, praxial catharsis occurs through iconoclasm while healing from rape in xenophilic ways that involve nature as monstrous-feminine in fetishized, cliché sites of death, damage, decay and rebirth (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis” (2024)

Earlier, we discussed demons having a third quality apart from exchange and transformation—desire, whose forbidden, wishful thinking/fulfillment occurs under a Western hegemon that alienates, fetishizes and scapegoats nature by design, whoring it out and raping it for profit. As you can imagine, this structure and its grim prostitution translate easily enough to revenge by one side against the other—of man/the nuclear model vs nature-as-whore and vice versa; i.e., commonly expressed as Amazonomachia in ancient to “ancient” heteronormative wrestling dialogs (and similar theatricalities), but also the Medusa and many other monstrous-feminine GNC forms. Revenge is an exchange that pertains to power and knowledge concerning workers whored out under state rule, our revenge being the development of Gothic Communism with ludo-Gothic BDSM to end said rule (thus rape).

The usual dualities and paradoxes apply here, insofar as deals with the devil can be had with the state as much with Medusa. Whatever a demon’s form, then, the usual dialectics of shelter and the alien are anisotropic: they go both ways, but mean vastly different things depending on where power flows; re: the ghost of the counterfeit (and its simulacra) forwarding or reversing the abjection process; i.e., nature having its revenge against capital or vice versa; e.g., Frazetta’s Orientalism and damsel-in-distress theatrics, below. However messy it appears, trashy it feels or loud it sounds, the language of the imaginary past speaks volumes to the sins of empire and operations of capital (and its qualities) moving things hauntologically along! In this faux-medieval’s vicious cycle, there’s a place for the hero, whore, evil wizard and animals all depicted on canvas and off—one to uphold said cycle (and Capitalist Realism) or break it, once and for all.

(artist: Frank Frazetta)

“We’re living in Gothic times.” Regardless if demons makes any visual objective sense, that’s how things historically personify or otherwise hinge upon/arbitrate when demonically translating back and forth; i.e., capital is a cycle that comes back, slithering ouroborotically around and around: raping nature through recycled phobias, fetishes and stigmas… to which nature seeks out her revenge through rape play of varying degrees of silly-seriousness and performative irony’s mise-en-abyme.

We’ll get to that. For now, try to understand how demonic desires are shadowy and repressed, given form by oppositional poetics in dialectical-material argument. So when I say “revenge” from here on out, I do so with concerns to the usual us-versus-them, cops-and-victims language that demons manifest as/relate to us with (and we them) while pinned between nation-states/corporations and nature growing increasingly turbulent; i.e., said revenge had by one against another pursuant to worker or bourgeois needs. Rebellion through demonic poetics happens through a particular thesis to counteract: nature is monstrous-feminine (re: Volume One)—a whore under state control, which the elite rape for profit, and for which both sides seek revenge before, during and after structural abuse. The exploitation is endless because profit and labor value (of nature) are endless!

(artist: PiMo)

Demons, then, are whores under Western (Cartesian) dominion opposite virgins, but also are virgins depending on the circumstances; e.g., subjugated Amazons like Psylocke, left. This need for state control and dominion introduces a paradox from which a new thesis can arise during ludo-Gothic BDSM (for this chapter/module, indented for emphasis):

Ludo-Gothic BDSM has many theoretical definitions[1] and applications. In practice, though, I frequently utilize it through rape play that paradoxically achieves catharsis; i.e., by putting “rape” in quotes, thus healing from rape without quotes. Often by rape survivors, such people classically find power/agency through theatrical reenactments of unequal, unfair or otherwise rapacious treatment and conditions; i.e., by relying on a concept I’ll heretofore call “the whore’s paradox.”

(artists: Ray Sugarbutt and Sammy Stocking)

The paradox is simple: demons are maidens and maidens are demons, but both are virgins and whores, and each finds power (and knowledge) according to how the state forbids access, yet access happens anyways; i.e., (de)valued, mid-exchange, thus used to humanize or dehumanize the demonized through performance and play. Per Marx and myself, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything. Nature is monstrous-feminine as such, “empowerment” applying to any aspect of our life, bodies, violence and terror the state wishes to monopolize/control, and any trope, convention, cliché or fetish that might be used to degrade, humiliate, rape or otherwise demonize/dominate beings “of nature” per capital’s qualities (re: settler-colonial, heteronormative and Cartesian); i.e., that we can reclaim during ludo-Gothic BDSM, hence through unequal power letting us “get a leg up,” topping from a position of normal disadvantage to have our revenge: perceived disempowerment becoming a paradoxical, interchangeable means of escape, regarding universal worker liberation onstage and off (versus equality of convenience inside the text).

(artist: ALT3R4TI0N)

To do so is to break capital’s hold on all things demons, darkness and nature they stole and monopolized, in turn smashing their own abjection against them and breaking Capitalist Realism with our Aegis—to deny capital’s dead labor and language feeding on living labor and language according to what power and knowledge we exchange to and fro. The whore’s revenge is to break the profit motive by making a world for which it (and rape) are no longer possible using these methods; i.e., by using the same demonic and slutty language capital does, but at cross purposes: to hug the alien—not demonize it to receive state violence—thereby (ex)changing how the world is seen to begin with. We aggregate power differently than state forms, outlasting and outperforming them to dismantle their harvesting mechanisms, social and material, foreign and domestic.

That’s basically the gist of demonic revenge during the whore’s paradox, and we’ll unpack the notion of enacting revenge through ludo-Gothic BDSM more in a moment. First, let’s consider the forces and work that drive such revenge to not only take place, but wrestle against pro-state actors.

I want to be brief, but inclusive; i.e., Gothic Communism is a group effort, but also a checkered one. Against the state binarizing and dividing us, our best revenge is to exist in ways that speak holistically and cryptonymically to our specific-yet-combined abuses under capital; i.e., that merge in a collective desire among all workers, whose pedagogy of the oppressed must speak to a collective, universal desire to be free and loved, out in the open, bare and exposed:

(source)

Anything less is imprisonment, genocide, and rape of some by others. The proletarian potential of such carnivals, then, is to make everyone a monarch, year-round. No gods, no masters, just equality for all and the stability of post-scarcity afforded by the ability to imagine, then reify it, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. The avenging idea, in turn, is to be stewards of nature while of it, yourselves—to expand your horizons, a unity of whores thinking outside the box when throwing shade/fucking with this or that.

Again, we’re painting in broad strokes here, narrowing them per case as needed. Apart from the raw materials, sex positivity should speak to holistic liberation through reclaimed exchanges affording morphological expression as exchange. Play is all but required to work with all of them separately and together to varying degrees, “monstrous-feminine” meaning many things, not just female or black skin, but anything “of nature” that isn’t the status quo; i.e., that isn’t white, cis-het, Christian European men pimping nature-as-alien.

Under Cartesian models, for example, whores are commonly “non-white” in terms of skin color (above) but also shape and size wielded by people of various ethnicities (next page); i.e., seen/depicted as equally gluttonous and peach-like, thus fallen and ripe for future conquest by Cartesian, heteronormative, settler-colonial agents policing nature-as-monstrous-feminine (chattelizing and exotifying alien things for profit, consequently raping them). Sex work is generally caught in the middle; i.e., the bigger the size, the bigger the prize, thus axe to grind. We’re not always master of such things, but they demand to be heard, all the same. Simply put, it’s a war—one full of opposing demonic forces competing among the shadows and fog as the shadows and fog!

To that, exploitation and liberation sit side-by-side on the same shadowy stages. Indeed, such media might seem hopelessly haunted by capital’s bloodthirsty cycles (from gentrification and decay to tragedy to farce). In truth, such things manifest differently per oppressed group and their various intersections’ vengeful episodes, but adhere to the same exclusionary rhetoric viewed through capital’s qualities and state monopolies/trifectas occurring through newer modes of capital built on older imperial systems; i.e., strategically swapping out different divide-and-conquer qualities of alienization within these imbricating persecution networks (diversifying tokenization). All canonically operate in service to profit as a structure; i.e., as something for workers to gradually overcome through similar mixing and matching across a spectrum of status, class, culture, race, privilege and oppression told in body language and labor exchange, biological sex, orientation, gender identity and performance: state demons versus worker demons, the former recruiting from the latter to dominate them with members pulled from their own populations—all while abusing the potential said populations yield per harvest/altercation.

(artist: Hailey Queen)

Mid-conflict, guerilla warfare turns land and body into a weapon; i.e., as something to perceive, counteracting state advantages (which state embodiments abuse, mimicking guerrilla tactics and imagery to achieve profit/play the victim). To illustrate a perfect world through Gothic Communism, then, is to speak adequately and advantageously using our bodies: to articulate how they are seen, thus controlled by us and others regarding “non-white[2]” qualities among other marginalized elements; e.g., non-male, non-Christian, non-European, etc; i.e., where we can bare it all and not be attacked, but also not be targeted for abuse regardless how much clothes we have on (or don’t) and stripped bare by the lecherous eyes of others (or their antagonizing hands). Whatever her shape, color, gender or size, then, Medusa unbound denotes an outsider among all of us who refuse to sell out for the usual equality of convenience (and desperation). And while segregation and tokenization are no defense, showing off should still be done in ways that reveal our friends to us, while placing things between our attackers and us (often a phone screen and/or an alias).

Such are the forces of capital that push us towards self-defeating revenge, which we must make into an inclusive, intersectional, solidarized agenda. Yet, the paradox of art is you have to first be unhappy with it, then change it by listening to your own pained existence inside-outside yourself.

By that same token, to enact rebellion (thus have one’s revenge), you must first conceptualize it under duress; i.e., in ways that speak to the usual double standards, moral panics, and guilty pleasures at work: something to glut, binge and purge like a drug compensating for their own sorry lives (alienated from nature, acting superior to it). This addict’s predation speaks to cops-and-victims, us-versus-them arguments inside the state of exception, save that instead of zombies as givers and receivers of state violence, you have demons executing pimps and whores to achieve the same discernible effect: cops and merchandise. The former answer only to and investigate themselves, shielded by the state to reap for its owners during selective punishment/reactive abuse.

Under this dynamic, the state antagonizes nature-as-monstrous-feminine to put it to work, endlessly harvesting it through police violence. In turn, revenge becomes acceptable to exact against nature as the cop sees fit, but not for state property to do so in return (which historically women, or those treated as women, have been [and still are] treated as). Per state monopolies, trifectas and the qualities of capital, one side’s violence, terror and morphological expression are entirely legitimate/sovereign, thus human per the ghost of the counterfeit, and the other side is wholly illegitimate/not sovereign, thus inhuman, incorrect, unreal in service to profit (and genocide/unironic rape) during the abjection process. “When in Rome.” From the oldest systems of conquest in the West to the present ordering of things, there is generally one correct way and others that—while tolerated from time to time—are hierarchically lesser/wrong.

(artist: Rotten Mo)

However strong a rebellious demon appears, then, it is ultimately criminal, thus bridled on the Aegis: hunted, abused, stalked, killed and discarded like waifu trash by imperial forces reaping nature-as-monstrous-feminine (this applies to tokenized forms, too; re: the euthanasia effect). We must reclaim this, doing so in sexually descriptive, culturally appreciative ways (re: the creative successes of proletarian praxis) during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., that give Satanic upheavals, however dualistic per their shared aesthetic with the state, a proletarian character resisting TERFs, SWERFs, cops and states. All of them rape nature through modular-yet-intersectional persecution networks (e.g., virgin/whore + black/white + master/slave + blood libel, etc) on a scale of descending privilege/preferential mistreatment.

Due to their “our way or the highway” approach, imperial systems are generally brittle, prone to enclosure and maladaptation. It takes energy to control things that very much resist being controlled, wherein strongmen and fascist bullshit go hand-in-hand; i.e., strength is a performance, meaning to fight enemies no one can defeat, or which only the Chosen One(s) can defeat. Empires die very much for this reason; their myopic approach and mythical, largely imaginary conquest of nature prohibits them anything but a short lifespan. It’s Icarian, or closer to the mark—Promethean. Similar to Faust looking backwards, such pursuits are always nostalgic towards disaster as something to fulfill, the followed footsteps filled with old and fresh blood alike. Gothic helps us avoid that in ways we can recultivate; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Furthermore, the ability to say how in Gothic language is tremendously useful, if only because the more marginalized a particular group is, the more the in-group will be expected to police their treatment; the more policed they are, the more these behaviors escalate when empire decays; and given the Gothic is concerned almost entirely with the slow death and inheritance of dead empire, demons, whores and other creatures of darkness are vital to bridging the gap for those who spend most of their time on the state’s good side. A time will come when this won’t matter—point in fact, the state is harvesting these same benefactors for the exclusive benefit of a very small group of people. Having the language to recognize such predation gives us the ability to change and adapt in response to this exploitation, dispelling state illusions and changing our socio-material conditions (reclaiming the Base and recultivating the Superstructure) to account for a better world denied to us by the elite. Capital never stops; neither must we.

As we’ll see moving forwards, then, our whore’s thesis extends to the owner class that whores must contend with. Those who pimp, thus harvest/rape nature are professional labor thieves forever out of touch with reality who, as a result, think they’re really cool; they’re really not:

(source tweet, Sonny Bunch: October 5th, 2024)

No one ever said desk murder was attractive. Yet, this is who we’re dealing with, and must have our revenge against: rapists and divorced dads with all charisma of a souless wooden puppet, unbothered by state shift as something only possible after the Industrial Age fed into the Capitalocene and its fairly recent profit motive (and concessions). The elite style themselves as lords of nature on a cosmological scale, passing themselves off as rapacious, Cartesian gods: sucking nature-as-monstrous-feminine (classically as female) dry while her fury becomes impossible to ignore. They know it’s disastrous; they don’t care—so long as they can do it for as long as possible!

Concerning demonic poetics and an ever-growing desire for revenge, context clearly matters, here, but isn’t always dialectically-materially obvious. Because such violent, terrifying forms (and their demonic, vengeful appeals as such) are endlessly doubled, finding power and knowledge through unequal exchange/transformation occurs while responding to whatever strange appetites capital saddles us with; re: trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird; i.e., according to unequal socio-material conditions we weaponize during calculated risk against profit (as inherently unequal/rapacious, by design): reversing terror and counterterror by playing with rape among those who don’t cramp our style (and to crowd out those who do)!

In the interim, we whores survive on the street as comparable to Hell foisted upon us, but paradoxically “Hell” also becomes something that we gain control over on and offstage. Doing so, as I shall expand upon deeper in “Forbidden Sight,” constitutes a half-real act of revenge the state both cannot forgive but must, to some degree, allow then punish accordingly. Per capital, the state is incompatible with life; i.e., it rapes nature-as-monstrous-feminine, grappling with Medusa during mortal combat to simply move money through nature-as-alien: as their whore to endlessly make/summon, then rape, ahegao-style during graveyard sex with combative, passionate elements. “FINISH HER!”

(artist: Rita)

Except, the elite’s mistreatment of nature is performed through workers; i.e., those who can alter said dogma away from state copaganda in service to workers and nature, onstage and off. Nature’s revenge, then, must go beyond what the state regularly affords workers when antagonizing them (and nature) as monstrous-feminine on the Aegis; i.e., such whorish power fantasies should induce praxial shift in a sex-positive direction, not just scare and titillate cops enticed by feisty victims (and token servants playing dom); re: praxial inertia.

So while the usual traitors psychosexually provoke and police us through the ghost of the counterfeit, we workers reclaim whores-as-demonic during equally psychosexual playtime; i.e., to suit liberation as an ongoing battle, one fought over said ghost reversing the abjection process; re: hugging the alien, Medusa, through cryptonymy’s usual veils, vanishing points and other Gothic devices/theories: playing with rape to expose those of modernity savaging us.

No one likes a hypocrite. Revenge is reclamation to revolt as such. Regaining some degree of control over our bodies and labor is to writhe in ecstasy on the Aegis, its dark mirror loaded with rebellious energies, counter information and weaponized psychosexual context; i.e., to reclaim and rehumanize through demonic language and rape play reversing abjection, humanizing the harvest to expose the state and state servants[3] as inhumane, incompatible with life and consent. That is our revenge against those who wrong us. They pimp us unironically in spaces and on surfaces framing sex workers (and all workers sexualized by the state; e.g., women’s work) as virgin/whore; we play ironically there as well to spite them and carry a counter message along: “We’re human despite what you say and how you treat us.” To it, we’ll recruit such whorish language to suit our needs (during ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus liminal expression). Tits out, tongue out, clam out! Whatever! Hit me with your best shot! For some, we’re an oasis; for others, a mirage to prohibit the entitled thirsty their unearned “wataa” (that was a Twitter pun).

(artist: favcxntt)

During our own calculated risk and potential bad decisions, we choose what barriers to raise, who to fool around (thus lower our defenses) with, to use condoms or not, and what lessons to pass along during informed, fairly negotiated labor exchanges; i.e., those happening under criminogenic conditions that we alter inside of. Education is always a game of chance, then, which calculated risk through ludo-Gothic BDSM aims to reduce systemic harm but encourage social-sexual activities conducive as such: demonic passion/possession, psychosexual rapture, and feelings of martyrdom suddenly given a voice when playing with rape in shadowy forms. Keeping with the cryptonymy process, rape remains ubiquitous and invisible in its energies; we make it darkness visible, demonically ostentatious!

Founded on generational trust, not harm, we do so to better raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural awareness through demons-as-whores. Power exchange negotiates and navigates old boundaries through what is given and taken, generally through roleplay as an educational device regarding unequal things: to break bad habits, then establish a new trend or guideline for sex-positive behaviors (and positive reinforcement). All the while, exchange remains unequal by nature of power as a demonic performance; i.e., one interfaced with by workers informed by unequal conditions, but who refuse to interfere with equal rights as they play. It’s an interaction between autonomous beings, not an assembly of dead parts for one side to exclusively control, enjoy and abuse. “Terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it.” As such, anyone can play with rape and shadows of rape, weaponizing its terrifying aesthetics in service to workers challenging state monopolies, thereby avenging nature-as-monstrous-feminine! Sex, then, is a demon’s greatest weapon.

Keeping such forces in mind, I want to delve into our rape reprise; i.e., some general-if-germane ideas about prostitution, nature-as-whore and concomitant revenge/rape fantasies that will come up throughout the entire chapter/module!

For one, demons are not limited by form when playing with rape, and their playtime surrounding rape is equally tenebrous and broad; i.e., BDSM can exist in isolation from medieval rape and torture aesthetics (of power and death, sex and force, etc), but often marry to these through whores during ludo-Gothic BDSM: in ironic ways that subvert older Gothic conventions, bending and shapeshifting under sex work vis-à-vis current industry norms and activism. Whores certainly carry a signature “look” under capital, but one where function determines function in ways not entirely removed from form; i.e., as self-selected among pre-existing dolls:

(artist: Fugtrup)

Workers can influence this selection process to allow for greater freedom of expression; i.e., responding to conventions we bend as much as break while applying theory in demonically nebulous voices. Indeed, this module was inspired by the spirit of play in ways that are more fluid and carefree concerning rape in demonic forms; i.e., as something to normalize provided irony is present when camping canonical prescriptions thereof. The Gothic since inception has mobilized and played with the hauntological language of rape, death and war as useful to workers vs the state; i.e., through history as a living document we can change while buried alive, multiple dialectical-material forces being true (and false) at the same time. Power writes in blood and fiction speaking to ongoing atrocities/power abuse (which rape is). It also aggregates, affording double standards through DARVO and obscurantism for those who uphold the status quo (raping their wives and children, celebrated on a community level while indoctrinating both through force); we upend that paradigm, pivoting through the same aesthetics reclaimed during liminal expression for revolutionary (anarchistic, counterterrorist) purposes: on the same exploitative, Foucauldian (carceral, shadowy and potent) stages while avoiding the Omelas-style exceptions and dog-eat-dog concessions tokens strike with state brokers.

For our purposes, it means no SWERFs demonizing sex workers under Capitalist Realism (noir-style criminal-hauntology dialogs that treat sex workers like femme fatales, statistics and trash for middle-class women to look down on, pity and fear), nor sex workers playing the moderate-to-reactionary fash cop/token vigilante. Quite the opposite, even when the vice characters we play are flawed/damaged goods—the madwoman in the attic, the Medusa, the strung-out whore as criminal; e.g., through Batman‘s[4] greatest hits/pinup centerfolds—they should always speak cryptonymically to what we want to change that workers and nature might benefit.

In short, the state values structural instability married with demonic symbols to dogmatize workers, but which said workers can reclaim: of status to possess and wield, which knowledge and power are, and express operatically through the persuasive, vivid, and entertaining language of slumming and acquisition-through-conquest; i.e., criminality and warfare, but also rape; e.g., owners/earners, cops/victims, crime/punishment, reprobation/rehabilitation, recidivism/reward, might-makes-right, blackmail, gentrification and decay, hush money and other such carrot-and-stick menticidal dogma per unaddressed criminogenic conditions personified. Whores—and by extension, nature—are classically military targets felt and seen at home among civilians (re: Amazonomachia and military urbanism). As societal collapse nears thanks to capital’s boom and bust, fear of the colonized afar takes on a domestic mood, one concerned with guilty pleasure, avenging gargoyles and foreign plots threatening shadowy revenge (often mil spec, below)!

(artist: Chloe in Pink)

As usual, then—and keeping with my demon symposium’s aforementioned limitations (an emphasis on demonic holism versus close-reads[5])—I want to play with rape and presume a degree of fluency from my readers looking in on my fifth book. The order of things matters less than how you can assemble and play with them (and their modular elements) yourselves; i.e., how the world presents them to you, and how you use the ideas here to make demonic expression sex-positive in your own work and agreements: recursively combining things I can only elude to here when talking about sex and force through a holistic pedagogy of the oppressed (whose poetic forms and labor value are virtually endless); e.g., kung fu movies, BDSM, rock ‘n roll, monsters, porn, art, and whatever else goes into the witch cauldron per arbitration’s invigilation.

From the Four Gs (our biggest theories) to the Basics of oppositional synthesis (anger/gossip, monsters, and camp), expertise matters far less than function, concerning demons and liminal (oft-pornographic) expression; i.e., a second-nature synthesizing of these devices through an embodiment of competency about them regardless of state approval. “There are no experts” insofar as vertical authority is something to abolish; i.e., per the fluency and practice of sex-positive demons vs sex-coercive ones during liminal expression, worker unity mattering far more than singular authority. How you combine them is entirely up to you—from whatever positions of scarcity and privilege, theory and practice, format and linguo-material register. If you chose, you could marry Edward Said’s postcolonialism to a ’90s RTS videogame and Andrew Blake’s arthouse porn tendencies (re: Velvet Blue’s “The Helmut Newton of Porn,” 2008). Provided it pulls a baddie and gives them a voice (their revenge), that’s all that really matters!

Speaking from experience, this is how I did it and how I was taught; i.e., my grandmother worked at an asylum for mentally ill children, but Mom came from the street—was bred on Tolkien, Said, Edna St. Vincent Millay and many others giving her a glimpse of different worlds. She’s streetwise and loyal, but educated and urbane—having survived things I can only imagine to give me a better life: to break the cycle by redistributing power in demonic forms of revenge. Glimpsing such worlds through Gothic, its mode is yours to retailor as you see fit. A buffer and a mirror to show and conceal, try to find the courage to invent your own bad, silly-to-serious echoes on its darkened Aegis—to snatch victory sarcastically from the jaws of defeat not as a brand or a pose, but a way of life from cradle to grave: power as something to perform and imagine away from harm towards healing! We “better the instruction” (“If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”) through kindness showcasing rape; i.e., as a friendly ghost of itself speaking to its evil police twin without harming anyone: exquisite “torture” making the elite pearl clutch (afraid to lose what they stole) and encouraging that labor rise up to reclaim and recultivate for ourselves. That’s the whore’s paradox, and simply how humans communicate, whores or not (though capital pimps all workers to some degree)!

(artist: Chloe in Pink)

Furthermore, regardless of combination, stratagem and form—from demon to ninja, unicorn, and whore—the state will try and monopolize any and all inventions in service to profit and the elite. Inside the state of exception (treating demons like zombies and other undead, as well as witches and other beings “of nature” having demonic/undead qualities), sex workers exchange power and knowledge about sex and force, the latter emblematic of power and knowledge: as things to canonize and police, thus cannibalize. The whore’s endless reversal of abjection, as such, helps expand society’s cultural understanding of rape in imaginary language. This includes its campy prevention while capital works against us; i.e., in bastardized, pro-state forms.

Fractally recursive, us versus them subdivides into cops, knights, and champions, etc—all canonically upheld with LARPer-grade costumes, a decaying language of medievalized rebellion, and the color-coded dungeons’ half-reality (on and offstage) whose power fantasies (of death, captivity and rape) we reclaim through doubled poetic abstraction. Our Venus mimicry happens during ludo-Gothic BDSM—by camping canon as demons do; i.e., through murky and potent existence (our bodies and their labor aggregate becoming things to play with for iconoclastic purposes), but also by trading in forbidden, shadowy things (sex and force, power and knowledge as verboten) that translate, thus transform hyperobject structures responsible for our rape: vis-a-vis generational trauma hyphenating this with that (dogma disguised as fatal nostalgia and military-optimist “child’s play”). Subverting said trauma occurs during intersectional exchange as playing with power (and all its synonyms) to have our whorish revenge: making the imaginary past, the Wisdom of the Ancients, wiser towards liberation among the shadows.

Through poetic exposure as such, sex marries force to monsters (and to monstrous activities, locations, fetishes and clichés) through psychosexual theatre. For the doll-like sex object, to have revenge there is to regain control from state forces pimping us out as sex demons to begin with; i.e., through reactionary police violence and segregation aggravating local populations to push back against with reactive abuse—in effect occurring through what they normally agitate and imprison, then sell in commodified forms. They do so back towards pacified consumers, the latter helping harvest nature through scarcity arguments: the monomythic reward, the maiden promoting doubly as whore after Medusa is “dead” and nature-as-dungeon converts territorially into nuclear households; i.e., with alien red light districts just a jump, hop and skip away! Like food, sex is cheap insofar as it equates to the labor of paupers/property cordoned off and made expensive through adult entertainment (sold for “mom and dad” inside/outside nuclear families): state variants of Faustian, sodomy-grade, primal breeder wish-granting and exploitative price-paying versus the paradoxical clarity of proletarian nightmares!

(artist: Nikki Delano[6])

Keeping with doubles and double standards, nature is a whore, a call, cam or e-girl to abject and police because that’s where power is found; it’s how it defines within the current order’s demonic illusions—the state’s false love and artificial wilderness, its bread-and-circus: “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error… Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim” (source: Gustave Le Bon’s The Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds, 1985). It’s something to canonically plunge into, then refuse to pull out.

They say revenge a dish best served cold, but keeping with Gothic paradox and oxymoron, revenge is often quite hot; re, Queen Jadis’ dominion over the titular magician:

“Do not dream of treachery. My eyes can see through walls and into the minds of men. They will be on you wherever you go. At the first sign of disobedience I will lay such spells on you that anything you sit down on will feel like red hot iron and whenever you lie in a bed there will be invisible blocks of ice at your feet” (source: The Magician’s Nephew, 1955).

To liberate is to decriminalize, which won’t happen without a fight. In the eyes of the state, sex work (and by extension all work under capital’s monopolies, trifectas and qualities) is criminal as to exploit it in Gothic (demonic) forms: slices of the pie to buy cheap loyalty with. As such, the state always defaults to automatic blunt force, but all’s fair in love and class, culture and race war! Ironic forms are key to systemic catharsis, winning worker hearts and minds by reclaiming monster language especially when the state rewards classical misuse of such things; i.e., God is always watching and lets certain things slide.

Of course the system looks after its own; the point is to fight back—to resist state forces by using demonic language for our sake and those less fortunate by dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit! To it, Medusa’s still around and fixin’ to scrap with her giant assets, her gangster’s hysterical honeypot, her wandering womb’s vain and formidable Aegis. Closed-off from state forces that treat us as alien whore wedding cake, let’s show ’em who’s boss—that we’ll fight for our right not to be demonized by state forces, but demonize instead for ourselves. Show ’em that we’re more than a thing to play with, blame, dominate or accuse—more than a dark peach to carve up like fruit (re: Volume One)! Whores are spies, secret/double agents collaborating for good reason: we’ve been burned before, but have targets on our backs and don’t have the luxury of state protection. Restraint is a weapon to us, as is sex—our poker face and billboard, alike: disguise and foil to state marquees (of melons[7] to harvest)! Just as often, so is a lack of restraint. It merely depends what the situation (thus our revenge) calls for!

(artist: Slimthickn)

Intratextual messages speak to extratextual solutions; a house of cards is a place to hide, wait, and bide one’s time while seemingly stripped bare, the visuals seeming to support a narrative of peril, but also feel and play out of joint with its instructions inside a safe space’s revolutionary cryptonymy. Whore and rape go hand-in-hand, then, but lend the verb quotes easily enough. There, we whores relieve stress for other workers and ourselves, playing out our own deaths and rapes per all the usual sexist, or otherwise storied, bigoted fetishes and clichés on and offstage: little deaths, but also just deaths, period; re (from the Poetry Module):

My own quest for a Numinous Commie Mommy isn’t so odd; capital makes us feel tired relative to the self-as-alien, both incumbent on the very things they rape to nurture them (re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference). I’m hardly the first person to notice this:

As Edward Said astutely notes in Culture and Imperialism, most societies project their fears on the unknown or the exotic other. This barren land, where the viewers are kept disorientated, is threatening. It is a place between the familiar and the foreign, like part of a dream or vision that one cannot remember clearly. There is always a sense of a lurking danger from which the viewers need protection. Nikita provides that sense of protection (source: Laura Ng’s “‘The Most Powerful Weapon You Have’: Warriors and Gender in La Femme Nikita,” 2003).

I am, however, a trans woman who has gone above and beyond women like Barbara Creed, Angela Carter, Luce Irigaray and Laura Ng, etc, in my pioneering of ludo-Gothic BDSM: as a holistic, “Commy-Mommy” means of synthesizing proletarian praxis inside the operatic danger disco(-in-disguise), the “rape” castle riffing on Walpole, Lewis, Radcliffe, Konami, Nintendo, and so many others. I sign myself as such for a reason—not to be an edgy slut (though I am a slut who walks the edge). Rather, my pedagogic aim is to consider the monstrous-feminine not simply as a female monster avoiding revenge through violence, but a sex-positive force that doesn’t reduce to white women policing the same-old ghost of the counterfeit: to reverse what TERFs (and other sell-outs) further as normally being the process of abjection, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought tokenizing marginalized groups to harvest nature-as-usual during the dialectic of the alien (source: “In Search of the Secret Spell,” 2024).

It’s a bit ghoulish and Numinous, demons generally oscillating between such earthly-to-divine qualities inside a given shadow zone/danger disco (commonly a white woman’s idea of castle or ballroom; i.e., authored for those fearful of the nuclear model’s sexual marketplace, reifying and playing with the Gothic’s operatic rape castle doubling domestic abuse and, by extension, colonial abuse).

All in all, fear spaces (and bodies) are informed by pre-existing biases, phobias and stigmas, which means they exist as much to announce/expose a given comorbidity as to relieve stress resulting from it. If we summon these spaces and their fears ourselves (often concerning our bodies), we can learn of repressed feelings attached to their likenesses and begin to counteract them through our own constructions. Rebellion happens in defiance of oppression/relegation; Amazons and other demonic whores are instruments of oppression shared by colonizer and liberator alike. Activism, reconnaissance and charity occupy the same poetic devices, including their bare surfaces!

(artist: Maple Misty)

As such, we’re not totally fleeced on the Aegis. Yes, the Gothic is sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll told in duality and made from garbage according to a middle-class fear-fascination with closed-off things. But behind every patriarchal wet dream/shadow of Pygmalion’s gritty opera duel or kaiju fight (e.g., the Godzilla spoof from Crank 2, 2009) is a Galatea-sized elephant in the room; behind ever caricature of city life (e.g., Pablo Francisco’s “Little Tortilla Boy[8]” 2010) is the ghost of a raped woman, devastated slave, closeted fag and/or abandoned child conflated with her abuser[9]. We are none of those things and all of them, are not defined by the past as something to trap us with but haunted by it all the same. Through its powerful poetics’ forbidden fight, we see right through them and their fairytale illusions; we have our revenge by purposefully toying with canonical, thus forbidden things, their darkness visible granting us fresh demonic sight through our fairytales, our Gothic inversions (upside-down, inside-out).

And so we camp canon, hugging Medusa in search of recourse, survival, and resurrection counteracting shame, self-hatred, and tokenization! Yet, whores—like power and knowledge—take many shapes, some of them quite old. Animals are the oldest, but demons are a close second; i.e., speaking through whores as the world’s oldest profession, their modules and intersections poetically articulating how workers “of nature,” past, present and future, are demonized and chattelized under capital (thus desire revenge).

Per virgin/whore, the Gothic hyphenates inside/outside, doing so to play out the usual dialectic of the alien vis-à-vis some variation of home/hunting grounds: cage, kitchen, bedroom or castle, versus cavern, dungeon, river or forest. As such, the state rapes nature as maiden and whore, claiming her for itself and closeting her abuse while humiliating and mutilating her at every turn (marking her as theirs, often with cum, but also brands of different chattelizing kinds); the whore, in response, becomes the worker’s guerrilla instrument of revenge, expressed during rape play to bring such abuses out once more—the castle rape played out inside itself as rape castle, but also brought out-of-doors, or conversely the outdoors atrocity brought inside to make home feel invaded by her angry spirit, postmortem. Instead of merely burying these bones, revenge offers the raped their chance to be heard; i.e., by living with the reality of monstrous-feminine existence, becoming at home with abuse relayed as “past” to prevent it in the future; re: we were/will be human again.

In turn, our “discomfort” comforts us and makes our abusers uncomfortable in ways we can read (to recognize and redistribute), thus mark through the cryptonymy process. We publicize what they privatize, airing our dirty panties in public; i.e., scandalous nets letting little get past (re: selective absorption), reminding them that—while everything has a price and whores are often forced into slums, subsisting on garbage—there’s no price we’ll pay the state can put on our basic human rights (and those of animals or the environment)! Faced with abjection’s reversal, the state has little it can do but try to censor and scatter us underground, lest our humanizing of the harvest on the Aegis expose them as inhumane. Yet, doing so has precisely that effect! Such is how Medusa wages war! As rape generally goes, merely showing resistance to one’s oppressor is unforgivable, but fighting back is the point (and converting others to our cause, one boner at a time). Rome wasn’t burned in a day; it was forced to transform over centuries of internal corruption and asymmetrical warfare.

(artist: Lady V)

Whether summoned or made, whoring is how demons commonly articulate, thus communicate the rape of nature while playing with it in safe forms; i.e., doing so through sex symbols that cryptonymically denote violence: rape fantasies that speak to state abuse of sex and force, often by playing dead or dumb. In turn, either poetic variable expresses as pleasurable, non-harmful pain and erogenous, psychosexual responses haunted by harmful demon-BDSM variants (the ghost of rape, the Shadow of Pygmalion) while camping canonical norms; e.g., the vaso vagal response, frisson, and fight, flight, fawn, freeze or flop. Worker revenge requires using these in ways that shift history in new, less rapacious directions. Lived realities sit alongside imaginary forms mirroring them, and liberation and exploitation—playful “surrender” and unironic subjugation—likewise sit side-by-side, jousting inside the same shadow zone’s half-real spheres; e.g., “Hands in the air!” (above) being a cops-and-robbers refrain that has plenty of room for ironic roleplay in and out of bed, thus revolutionary potential.

Negotiating power, then, is to exchange it in common, seemingly tired forms—including the kinds of everyday pornographic and unequal, dehumanizing tropes/trades the state enforces between one party (often women) routinely and systemically disadvantaged by another’s privilege and under their “protection” (men, or traitors acting like men, thus pimps); i.e., through bad theatre, hellish body language and wacky puns, the data acting out a clay-like mixture of pleasure and pain as much synonymous as separate. In turn, demons are ancient monsters that speak to prostitution as the world’s oldest profession, including its equally old abuses (re: vae victis); monstrous-feminine fury speaks to patriarchal misuse of female (and later non-Christian, non-white and queer) labor “of nature” under state watch. Such ghosts of rape are angry for good reason, these transgressive fantasies resulting from steady criminogenic conditions built up over time; i.e., that yield the usual abuses that compel catharsis, the latter acted out paradoxically during calculated risk: a situation to make or otherwise summon that which speaks to repressed trauma during the rememory process. Escape happens mid-imprisonment and under dress; e.g., threat of impalement or homeless destitution should one refuse:

(artist: Olsen)

To it, the language of status-heavy things like food, war, rape and courtship yield regular medieval (thus poetic) euphemisms that are, themselves, equally haunted; i.e., by the lived reality of whores paying rent, which they reclaim any way they can; e.g., “Stuff my taco!” equaling the mirroring of a fawning mechanism that speaks to rape turned, suitably enough, into a release word and reward for good boys that follow instructions; re: “hurt, not harm.” Furthermore, there’s the paradox of asking for commands from someone; e.g., “Tell me to fuck your pussy”; i.e., the sub seeming to have the most power in realms of mutual consent, but really it being an exchange between unequal distributions thereof.

In turn, most fantasies stay fantasies and don’t actually manifest even through play. They’re simply fun to think about during games—to fantasize and take whatever shapes we demonize ourselves as. Anything becomes possible, not just what the elite want using the same ancient, animal-theatre language; re (from Volume Zero):

As a kind of deathly theatre mask, something else that’s equally important to consider about demons […] is that animals embody the canonical language of power and resistance as something to camp through demonic and undead forms; i.e., stigma animals relayed through demonic BDSM and rituals of power expression and exchange that embody hunters and hunted, predators and prey that play out through the ongoing battles and wars of culture, of the mind, of sexuality and praxis as traumatized (source).

Our Gothic takes something old and makes it “old” again to transform the present, thus capital, to have our whore’s revenge.

(source tweet, Soli: October 8th, 2024: “Japanese poster for Bram Stoker’s Dracula“)

That’s what ludo-Gothic BDSM does, you see; it familiarizes actors to the exchange of power as something to isolate, then articulate as a performance of many different popular (and ancient) kinds—our Gothic-Communist bread and butter whisper-screaming sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll being as old as demons and prostitution, but also the shadow plays evoking them during informed consent/calculated risk!

For us whores, shadow theatre hovers over the half-real hauntings of trauma denoting widespread harm under Capitalist Realism and its equally grim illusions! We whores have become fluent not just in rape, then, but monster rape as something to camp, thus reclaim our basic human rights from prescriptive inhumane forms, post-inheritance; i.e., to achieve catharsis conducive to Gothic-Communist development—meaning on a societal level, changing a cultural understanding of the imaginary past (the Wisdom of the Ancients) insofar as power is understood and expressed in Gothic language. We regain control in all the ways that control can be regained—doing so in the shadow of rape to camp “rape” by putting it in quotes using highly inventive-yet recycled[10] forms; i.e., power cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred and reconfigured. We do so to challenge state forms, doubling and subverting them. Taboo things—seemingly hard to discuss, thus exchange in rebellious forms not beholden to profit sublimating them—suddenly become as easy to illustrate as casting a shadow on a wall; i.e., such cryptonymy showing and concealing in equal measure: reflecting something as a shadow of itself sent back towards state abjectors. Subversion suitably operates both on the shadow of a doubt and the ominous confirmation of things haunted the state’s proposed luminaries wreathed in darkness.

That is our revenge. Power is knowledge about something as demonic in order to play with it during safe-yet-evocative fantasies to have this revenge, the latter which sit adjacent to actual forms of death, rape and torture that help us regain control during performance and play camping the canon; i.e., over our feelings/desires of revenge by those peoples and systems who have not just wronged us, but constitute a world we want to change through demonic theatre: to break Capitalist Realism.

Again, demons are whores. Made to witness and be witnessed per forbidden sight as much a fruit to consume, doing so happens unto Promethean outcomes and Faustian bargains railing against state doubles; i.e., under Western dominion, pain and torture mingle with sex and comedy being how they communicate to camp canonical norms through a shared imaginary’s neo-medieval past; re: through bad theatre and puns, the data a clay-like, Gothically ludological mixture of pleasure and pain as much synonymous as separate; re: war/alarm, shelter, food and sex, but put on blast. “Stuff my taco!” becomes TACO STUFFED during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard; font generated by Rezuaq’s “FromSoftware Image Macro Creator,” 2022)

Such plundering is campy and fun, but like any opera haunted by actual rape, our resident fat-lady whore avenges past abuse through clay-like doubles: desire and revenge, putting “rape” in quotes. That’s the whore’s paradox—our spectres of Marx to reclaim and remind people we are whores; i.e., as a source of pride under persecution. Again, context matters, the demonized choosing who calls them “whore” (and who doesn’t), to allow whatever into ourselves (or not).

For our liberation, prostitute becomes something to advertise to spite its corpse-like stigmas and taboos; e.g., a whore is synonymous with a corpse, death—with an orgasm that, like the convulsionnaires, has a martyred, rapturous, even vengeful quality to it (the eyes rolling back into the skull, dying the little death but Numinously evoking the Big One). Like a demon, it becomes its own thing: a “sacrificial” fetish of statuesque, monstrous-feminine power coupling this with that to exchange this with that—to say to our enemies, “That’s what you don’t get!” To rub their faces in what we whores trade in all the time, upending our pimps! Sex workers trade not just in money but trust as something to convey in ironic for(u)ms.

Ludo-Gothic BDSM is typically silly-serious, in this respect—putting “rape” in quotes through playful, thus goofy and regressive psychosexual theatre that, often enough, can get hella rough (remember your aftercare, babes).

Catharsis is anything but simple, then, social-psychosexual improv running along well-used tracks, and behind the usual aliases and Aegises, but also combined linguo-material codas/codes suggested above: “Help, I’m a damsel in distress! Psych! I’m a whore! Joke’s on you!” But we take this far further than the morality plays of old; from freak to freak, it becomes a demonic, at times enigmatic mode of existence. Doubling as good praxis, our aforementioned whore’s revenge becomes the reclamation of such things; i.e., under isolated duress and through socio-political adversity from pro-state agents, looking to fang and defang us during controlled opposition (re, Eco: “the enemy is both weak and strong”)!

All the while, liminal expression affords the potential for good faith and bad, thus BDSM, play and acting as equally dualistic and oppositional during canon vs iconoclasm. The sex-positive idea is to enforce our rights by subverting the state and its own sex-coercive police mechanisms; i.e., using the same shared aesthetic and basic rules of exchange, thus play to synthesize catharsis! Nature is a hysterical whore the state rapes, the raped then seeking revenge in ways the rapist will always try to control: how people talk, monopolizing the language of the whore to subdue her for profit.

(artist: Valentina)

As such, our own bargains and quests for power mustn’t decay/tokenize and dutifully “put out” for our captors stranding us, nor punch down against other oppressed peoples; as whores, we must intersectionally solidarize and push towards universal liberation beyond state forms. The state is straight, is a pimp of nature that canonically enforces its own status quo; i.e., through power and knowledge exchange that harm nature for profit: money for chattelized, thus policed sex, reaping nature-as-monstrous-feminine to alienate, fetishize and ultimately infantilize, pimp, and rape as such. In short, the state manipulates nature to uphold its own unequal power over nature, doing so in service to profit as something to police; its manipulation of nature and workers, per the usual monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital, then, is sex-coercive towards those ends, ad infinitum.

Our goal is to critique systems more than individuals, but include individuals under such umbrellas; i.e., viewed through the critical lens that demons constitute. Capital, like all systems under it, exists to protect powerful men (and those tokenizing to act like men) while impugning their demonized victims: to receive patriarchal, thus lawful, goodly force under the shadow of the badge, might making right under centrist stories meant to manufacture and prolong conflict with heteronormative, settler-colonial, Cartesian impunity (“boundaries for me, not for thee”). As such, the state forces women to mother their own killers, dying ignominiously by the hands of entitled, de facto sons (re: Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference), such persons “looking for mother” as a whore to unironically rape, thus revive and reinforce state arrangements. It’s sadly the only way these killer man babies (or those acting like men, inside the Man Box) can get it up, which we want to circumvent; i.e., by coding society-wide psychosexual responses conducive to non-harmful, social-sexual relationships: our own darkness visible, expressed and embodied during our day-to-day lives; e.g., my husband, Bay Ryan!

(artist: Bay)

Per the whore’s paradox, revenge is reclamation to revolt against canonical embargos and their harmful monopolies’ pacifying copycats. This is quite paradoxical on its face, but no less affective for it. While there’s nothing pejoratively “savage” about bare bodies or Gothic aesthetics used in demonic ways (with Bay both Scottish and Māori, my postcolonial goth slut), there’s everything the matter with those who enforce such abject, ghost-of-the-counterfeit binarization to uphold the status quo/Capitalist Realism; re: “Who’s the savage? Modern man!” Sex is money and “money is the medium through which capitalism operates,” writes Patel and Moore in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, “a source of power for those able to control it. That control isn’t about people and wealth. It’s about how such control entwines with nature,” (source). They extend this to nature as something that must be dominated through particular canonical expressions; i.e., that only allow others to destroy them pursuant to profit during the abjection process:

It only took a day from her crime to her execution. Yet court documents don’t even record her name. She lived in Tlaxcala, New Spain, and on Sunday, July 18, 1599, she smashed crosses in a church, incited Chichimec Indians to rebel against the Spanish, and killed a Tarascan Indian using sorcery. The next day she was arrested. Six witnesses testified against her. As the sun set, she was permitted to speak in her defense. She recounted her deeds and then—according to the court record—recounted a dream:

Of deer and they said to her not to turn away and that they were looking for her and that they did not want to appear to anyone else but her, because she was ill and they wanted to see her, and she said that she was very old at the time she saw the figures and she is young and healthy and they have taken away some cataracts that she had, and then these two figures went into a cave with her and they gave her a horse, which she has in said pueblo of Tlaxcala, and that one of the two figures was a deer that rode atop of a horse and the other deer had the horse bridled, and on that occasion she was crippled and after seeing the two figures she is well.

Of the crimes she committed, her dream was the worst. She might have fueled insurrection, desecrated a church, and interfered with the flow of silver from Chichimec land, but most dangerous, she offered a vision of order and nature contrary to the colonizers’. The horse ridden not by Spanish men but by a deer—the symbol of the Chichimec; not white men astride nature, but local life upon the colonizers’ life. The dreamer of this dream was guilty of calling not just for a political insurrection but for a cosmic one. She dreamed the order of the world seditiously. She was hanged as a witch later that afternoon.

It’s hard to speak of this woman without knowing her name. Her killers called her a witch. This is a name she may have used for herself, albeit without its colonial venom. Even though her name was set at so little that it didn’t merit an entry in the conquistador’s paperwork, it is an act of memory against forgetting [rememory] that her story is told. The dreamer of this radically different ecology had to be killed, swiftly. To allow her to live would sanction an alternative to capitalism’s world-ecology (ibid.).

Such bleak realities are something we whores push back onto capital; i.e., the latter describing us per a catastrophic Realism fearful of our revenge, and scapegoating us for its abuse: our freedom is the end of the world. It is the elite’s greatest gaslight, their supreme weapon to demonize sex in service to its pimping of nature until the end of time—from continent to ocean, land and sky as theirs and theirs alone. But when the seas boil and “the moon becomes as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth,” that Judgement Day is our fault. It’s DARVO on a colossal scale.

Under capital, then, all AFAB are women and all women are chattel whores without irony (a condition that extends idiosyncratically to anything “of nature,” thus monstrous-feminine in the eyes of the state; re: Bay canonically demonized for the same qualities listed earlier). The usual dualities and inversions apply when camping canon, making nature—already alien—hostile to state operations. Such monarchs of nature look pointedly for someone to “rape” them; i.e., by means of play that vary between gentle and strict forms (thus BDSM, fetishes and kink). We play with fire because the gods of capital have stolen it from us; its shadows lurk on our bodies and environments likes castles doubling theirs—in the flesh! Behold, a pale horse! My sweetie, the galactic traveler, has come!

(artist: Bay)

Per the virgin/whore mechanism, demons are presumed “in disguise” and constantly sexualized on their surfaces regardless of what they have on (re: Segewick); i.e., forced to disrobe hence confess less in ways that are objectively true and more to spill one’s guts, thus be the whore that men with virgin/whore syndrome are searching for (and token agents; re: whores pimping whores): all virgins are whores, all whores look like virgins and “need” to be subjugated under dogmatic, love/hate, criminogenic conditions. They must because Capitalist Realism demands it, Numinous iterations of the victorious whore-as-Great-Destroyer promoting Red Scare; i.e., spectres of Marx threatening the Fall of “Rome” as Rome presently stands. Death and rebirth challenge the state, which then tries to monopolize them; re: Halloween and those “of nature” inside the state of exception as a repeating cycle that—per the liminal hauntology of war—always comes home to roost. Despite the infamy of slashing reapers like Michael Myers haunting colonized lands (and threatening colonization of the colonizer inheriting the Imperial Core under elite rule), such beings and their language of violence, terror and morphological expression cannot be weaponized exclusively by the state (whose lands, per settler colonialism, there must always yield someone to harvest—to exterminate as evil, lesser and dark); our ghostly asses can use them to send state fears (and denial of their precious stolen goods) back at them! Stare and tremble, fuckers!

In turn, dirty little girls have dirty little secrets (the name of the porn skit starring Valentina, above and below). Such compelled theatrics can be reclaimed on the same stages, with the same Aegis’ mirror/compartment syndrome freezing state abuse and reclaiming our power through slutty theatre. We trade with what we got, with what society values/discounts through porn and, by extension, art and daily life; e.g., transportation, rent, and food all paid for with sex as legal/illegal (the only thing afforded to women in a patriarchal society): a tush, a rack and a box! Virgin = legal; whore = illegal. Women (or those treated like women) are fucked, either way! Whores are simply more upfront about it, more candid, natural and earthly (freaks that fart, belch, swear and spit during sex). She’s animal, demonic—a demon lover wolfing sex down but also dishing it out, Chaucer-style, to threaten nuclear models of ownership and reproduction with squelching hungry holes stirring macaroni!

(artist: Valentina)

Sex doesn’t just hit the spot, but pounds it in ways that speak laterally to our abuse happening elsewhere vis-à-vis what people are currently looking at: the controlled objects coming alive to act out their own “rape,” making it like a metal song (or the POW! blocks from Mario 2, 1988): fun, volatile, and satisfyingly thrilling. To make iconoclastic, sex-positive demons, then, is to humanize the harvest, thus the whore—to make love while turning profit (thus rape) entirely on its head: the cute “virgin” form incensed to a feral “whore” form doubling it; i.e., Medusa going “mask off” to bare her fangs, exhaling in rapturous, ahegao-style passion (and taking our essence and power as she does)! In effect, she decides what implement goes in what hole, vaginal or anal comprising different kinds of exchange concerning the same policed subject: sex as marital vs extramarital, thus wild, forbidden, fun. Instead of retreating backs into the past, we pay it forwards with thunder and darkness, fueling and fertilizing fresh beds of doom. The place where the holy go to die and dark dreams manifest—sex-machine booty getting the lead out: “heavy buns of lead fills her victims full of dread!” Twerked to death, then taken by Persephone’s nightmarish ass to Hell and back—you’ll never wanna leave!

That’s what intimacy is through demonic, whorish expression; i.e., showing any side of ourselves that will normally be attacked! Sex is dangerous and fun in ways we can camp in duality (more on this in “Making Demons”): handling those we trust won’t harm us, and having fun through performance and art, friendship and business as speaking cryptonymically to so many instances where that luxury of agency is denied! Loving the whore is taught by the whore in the lusty shadow of actual rape and hate, but also predatory porn contracts and barbaric, blame-the-whore rhetoric those unequal power arrangements historically encourage; e.g., “What was she wearing?”

I’m sorry but that’s irrelevant. She could be buck-ass naked and rape still isn’t okay! Ever! Furthermore, no one “asks for it,” as far as unironic rape goes, but that’s precisely the kind of bullshit revolutionary cryptonymy challenges through our chosen buffers and stages: the demon lover’s cry of Medusa finding a reciprocal, affectionate audience! For her and hers, fear and courage, love and pain occupy the same stage under pressure! We learn to relax and control our fear through safe spaces that, at times, cross over into actual, grave danger (when the state intervenes) but also put “danger” into quotes; i.e., to nullify state apathy in worker hearts and minds, saving our dark mommy by giving her what she desperately wants/needs! “Ravish me!” The whore’s paradox is a command speaking to the shadow of rape—a command to follow in ways that evoke a barrier whose barrier yields revelation, protection and catharsis. It’s loud and noisy but dark and fun; i.e., both what it postures as and something else entirely!

Simply put, it’s an act—one whose darkness speaks to hyphenated pleasure-pain, their control administered fairly between all parties involved. People are sexual, even those asexual parties communicating to sexual topics through calculated risk, public nudism and art/porn more broadly. Exposure to demons begets arousal; i.e., we see sex and often enough, get turned on—our dicks wet with precum, our mouths (or “mouths”) salivating and our brains buzzing with giddy anticipation! Read about demon sex; get wet, hard and horny! That’s human, but tapping into its primal energies helps us reunite with nature-as-alien; i.e., in ways we can weaponize in counterterrorist forms, which go intentionally beyond state tolerances: to eat them alive, as Medusa (the wandering womb) loves to do! Om, nom, nom—all over that dick like the baby from Super Metroid (camp requiring some degree of irony and humor to work, often in oxymoronic degrees)!

(artist: Valentina)

The paradoxical, ironic nature of Gothic is commonly transgressive, subverting taboos and fears during liminal expression. Such pedagogies of the oppressed lend demons the uncanny ability to lend power expressed as forbidden knowledge; i.e., to speak to what is normally alienated from one side or the other by state forces (re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape”).

Such prolific and varied rape fantasies speak of someone being controlled, and someone feeling small and weak in ways that can be controlled without harming anyone; e.g., the “teen” isolated and ravished during roleplay that can easily be good or bad; i.e., controlled opposition vs genuine rebellion using the same sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll to make—with their shared aesthetics—completely different arguments: an opiate for the masses vs a forbidden way of seeing that speaks to state abuse by (at times) badly reenacting it. Catharsis equates as much to freedom of expression as it does the ability to say the quiet part out loud. We pick and choose, mixing things up through holistic interpretation that reminds people just how controlled, thus policed nature is/our bodies and labor are! Sex is highly controlled, under Pax Americana; violence is unregulated to control sex.

Keeping with paradox, then, rape is both no laughing matter and solved in Sisyphean, smile-at-the-gods gallows humor camping rape; i.e., doing so in ways that are fun precisely for those reasons. By extension, singular interpretations are dangerous, amounting to an ordering of power that benefits one side (the elite) over another (workers and nature) per a master/slave hierarchy.

In turn, the defense of said interpretations’ singularity happens by police forces upholding state operations, which we must camp by saying whatever we want however we need to; i.e., to relax amid hypervigilance, ducking segregation by respecting mutual consent through different evocations of it, tailor-made per roleplay scenario; e.g., “Get your hands off my penis!” versus “Fuck me like you mean it!” Each safe/danger phrase (green/red light) can be said with or without irony to support or challenge police violence, hence the state. For our purposes, we emerge dualistically from abject veils—from Hell, the underground, other dimensions—to command respect using what we got: our bodies and negotiator’s fluency dismantling state operations on all linguo-material registers!

(artist: Valentina)

In turn, everyday interpersonal affairs extend/translate easily enough to geopolitical ones. For example, the Gaza Healthcare Letters, written on October 2nd, 2024, by “veterans and reservists” styling themselves as “neutral observers,” demonstrate a stunning amount of ignorance regarding how states historically operate. To it, they style themselves as “a multifaith and multiethnic group [none of which] support the horrors committed on October 7 by Palestinian armed groups and individuals in Israel” (source).

So right off the bat, they’re off to a really bad start; i.e., both-sidesing the issue and appealing to the very people responsible and standing to profit off these matters:

We are not politicians. We do not claim to have all the answers. We are simply healing professionals who cannot remain silent about what we saw in Gaza. Every day that we continue supplying weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets. [emphasis, theirs]

President Biden and Vice President Harris, we urge you: end this madness now! (ibid.).

On one hand, asking the White House to stop genocide seems noble enough. On the other, doing so is like asking Hitler (another desk murderer) to stop killing his enemies of the state while pretending like he doesn’t; it’s stunningly ignorant to how states (and their bureaucracies) function, historically—how they create these enemies specifically to rape them. These doctors seem to forget that, ignoring the fact that America is doing this on purpose; i.e., is responsible for everything these doctors are mopping up, and stands to profit from it en masse. They sound like fools, drunk on Pax Americana‘s exceptional goodness, thus its whitewashed  bloodbaths and Zionist mythmaking. Biden and Kamala are worse than Trump in that respect.

Worse, our good doctors lack the jester’s ability to critique the king in his own court; i.e., they’re not vice characters, they medical professionals acting as pick-and-choosers, saying it’s okay for some to die by finger-wagging oppressed groups for responding the only logical way under settler-colonial conditions: the only reason Palestinians attacked Israel is because Israel has been genociding them for over seventy years with America’s help (similar to how 9/11 only happened because America is a settle colony that routinely invades and destroys other countries for profit). Yet, our good doctors utterly miss the point, writing:

President Biden and Vice President Harris, we urge you to immediately withhold military, economic, and diplomatic support from the State of Israel and to participate in an international arms embargo of Israel and all Palestinian armed groups [emphasis, me] until a permanent ceasefire is established in Gaza (ibid.).

It’s obtuse, verging on obstruction; i.e., the gesture itself is certainly a stance, but one the state can simply deny as it always does (and one where the doctors can pat themselves on the back for writing the letter). In effect, the very solutions these doctors propose are empty gestures, blaming the victims and exonerating the state by treating them as “neutral”; i.e., ignoring the reality that Biden, like all presidents, says one thing and does another to enrich his corporate brethren selling weapons to both sides.

Such ignorance would seem to benefit from the kinds of playful rhetoric our crisis actors seem completely unable to perform. All they can do is wring their angelic hands and ask daddy politely to stop. Since when has that ever worked? Again, we have to humanize the harvest in worker hearts and minds, and this happens through whorish dialogs; i.e., those able to point the finger directly at the only ones responsible for pimping nature: through the same straws and liquid they siphon rejecting state violence and sucking our power back towards us.

Again, context matters—dividing along dialectical-material scrutiny during oppositional praxis, and where radicalization compounds during paradoxical, half-real exposure. Liberation is often trashy and all the more delicious and therapeutic for it; i.e., it’s junk food comforting the normally powerless with something tasty, fiery and fun (re: “eating a meal, a succulent Chinese meal”)—a sex object that, revived as Galatea by Galatea (and not Pygmalion), revs our engines! During oppositional praxis, sex is a battle, babes! A castle under siege—a disco to invade, all guns blazing out on the dance floor with dance partners who weaponize sex against the state versus for it! Pew! Pew!

Silence is genocide, so make all the noise you can above ground[11]—to say to the world, “Here I was, am, will be! Raped but unbowed, and wilder and braver because of it!” Such accomplished and worldly liminalities see the whore accepting payment where they can get it (versus simply having it shoved at or into them like a slot machine), and spreading allegory whenever they can help it. Fuck to metal (whatever hits the spot)! Demonize to humanize; “rape” ironically (camping rape as it normally plays out, on and offstage)! Death by Snu-Snu! “Harder, faster!” Weeee!

(artist: Valentina)

Profit demands rape, genocide, what-have-you. Fighting the profit motive, then, such wet-and-wild, slutty arguments notably code/decode through preference—doing so to become a joyous, tragic, and comedic gag to reclaim during copycat pornographic refrains; i.e., showcasing agency as, true to form, a kind of demonic joke/apologia about unshackled monstrous-feminine desire speaking to harsher realities haunting the venue.

These jokes, in turn, echo and inform industry standards mimicking us and vice versa. The deciding factor in terms of sex positivity is irony and humor about being stranded and all the dire, sinister implications that entails (see: It’s Always Sunny‘s “Dennis Explains the Implication” scene, 2010). All the while, fun and danger go hand-in-hand with risk prevention and praxial synthesis, giving us new ways to see the world based on old abuses and pacifying illusions we demonically subvert during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., per our idle hand’s ghastly creations reviving sex-positive dungeon paradigms, demon lovers and vengeful whores reclaiming our agency—by putting “rape” in quotes, as we demonized always must. To keep quiet is to grit and bear it from our jailors, demanding we choke on them despite our gag reflex speaking to the contrary. Like, fuck that!

So concludes our rape reprise. Such camp and its unheimlich-maneuver revenge, of course, take many forms (e.g., big butts, class consciousness, class-conscious big butts), but power as such classically becomes something the state prescribes to rape nature and those of it, determining such actions per their usual demonic ceremonies of false power and police violence; i.e., under neoliberal Capitalism’s Faustian and Promethean arguments built on older forms of capital and Imperialism[12]; e.g., Don Cheadle’s Captain Planet spoof: “The power is mine, bitches!” (Funny or Die’s “Don Cheadle Is Captain Planet,” 2011). We must see it for what it is and reclaim it through the looking glass. Keep that in mind as we proceed!

 

(artist: Galactixy Illustrations)

Onto “Knowledge and Power Exchange, part one: Idle Hands (opening and Medusa)“!

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Footnotes

[1] The word as I coined it has several definitions. One (from the Six Rs):

games occur along Gothic, liminal routes, wherein workers playfully articulate their natural rights in linguo-material ways between reality and fabrication that go beyond games as commodities but are nevertheless informed by them as something to rewrite; i.e., through play as a general exercise that involves a great many things: a reached agreement of power and play in Gothic terms, whose luck/odds are defined not through canon, but iconoclastic poiesis that can be expanded far beyond the restrictive, colonial binary and heteronormative ruleset of the elite’s intended exploitation of workers to challenge the profit motive and all of its harmful effects in the bargain; e.g., genocide, heteronormativity and Max Box culture. The sum of these concepts in praxis could be called “ludo-Gothic BDSM.”

Another (from the glossary, abridged):

My combining of an older academic term, “ludic-Gothic” (Gothic videogames), with sex-positive BDSM theatrics as a potent means of camp. The emphasis is less about “how can videogames be Gothic” and more how the playfulness in videogames is commonly used to allow players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of fairly negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms

As I’ve moved through this series, though, the definition has narrowed, according to my focus on the term specifically to play with rape as I define it; re (from the Poetry Module’s “A Note about Rape/Rape Play,” 2024):

as something broadened beyond its narrow definition, “penetrative sex meant to cause harm by removing consent from the equation.” To that, there is a broad, generalized definition I devised in “Psychosexual Martyrdom” (2024), which will come in handy when we examine unironic forms of rape, but also “rape” as something put into quotes; i.e., during consent-non-consent as a vital means of camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

martyrs are generally raped by the state, which we have to convey mid-performance without actually getting raped if we can help it (“rape” meaning [for our purposes] “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) [emphasis, me]: finding power while disempowered (the plight of the monstrous-feminine).

Rape can be of the mind, spirit, body and/or culture—the land or things tied to it during genocide, etc; it can be individual and/or on a mass scale, either type committed by a Great Destroyer (a Gothic trope of abuse of the worse, unimaginable sort, rarefying as a person, onstage) of some kind or another as abstracting unspeakable abuse. It’s a translation, […] adding the irony afterward as a theatrical means of medicine; i.e., rape play challenging profit through the usual Gothic articulations in service to workers and nature at large (source).

To that, rape is something that demons play with during the whore’s paradox. By extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM is effectively rape play combined with Gothic themes and BDSM practices to avenge state wrongs against nature.

[2] In the settler-colonial sense, which isn’t necessarily skin color. The English colonizing the Irish, for example, demonized them as animals despite both parties have pale skin.

[3] Which includes tokenized monstrous-feminine refusing to be victims (re: Creed); i.e., by playing the victim as they triangulate against and attacking other victims, Omelas-style: token cops, white Indians, reactionary/moderate cops and vigilantes acting as pro-state monsters, class/culture/race traitors raping their comrades  out of desperation and convenience.

[4] A series known for celebrating gilded-age gentry and police, anti-Semitic banker vaudeville, street justice, and old-world master/apprentice distributions of power and wealth, while simultaneously demonizing criminals and romancing mental illness, drug wars/substance abuse, double-crosses, backroom deals, assassins and banditti, Freudian complexes, and objectified women (the house cat* being a sex symbol and underworld guardian) to preserve the status quo.

(artist: Artgerm)

*From Volume Zero: “the cat as a sex symbol is regarded as ‘small,’ its killing implements either removed (the claws) or vestigial through the softening of features that communicate symbiotically with human masters” (source). Catwoman is smaller than Batman—a “stray” in fetish gear for him to “tame,” but always smaller than him, tied to lunacy (the catwoman of the moon). She’s a kinkster strict dominatrix and cat burglar put in her place by Gotham’s billionaire golden boy moonlighting as a bat (the white Indian).

[5] If you want those, go and read the Undead Module, which is full of close-read essays that merge into demonic expression (vis-à-vis our modular thesis argument). There are plenty in the other volumes/sub-volumes, as well—with Volume One in particular designed to hand-hold through simplified theory.

[6] Pornstars are often quite educated. According to Nikki’s IMDb profile:

She’s of mixed Italian, Colombian and Puerto Rican descent. The eldest of eight children, she was raised in a strict Catholic family and attended Catholic school, where she was an honor roll student and participated in gymnastics. Nikki graduated from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice with a bachelor’s degree in forensic psychology and a double minor in addiction studies and criminology. Delano worked as an office manager for a non-profit organization and was a mainstream model for over a year prior to being contacted by a talent scout for the adult website Brazzers on her ModelMayhem page (source).

In the above video, for example, Nikki riffs on her Catholic upbringing. Leaning into the naughty schoolgirl trope, she reverses roles, camping the canonical, demonic aspects to her own past: as “mommy” telling the naughty “schoolboy” how to fuck her—harder! Framed in Spanish (thus, to some degree, exotic), these echoes of incest are endemic not just to porn, but Neo-Gothic fakeries displaced onto imaginary countries “beyond” Britain (empire haunted by its own fabrications, their half-real “medieval” looming over seemingly modern procedures).

In that spirit of things, Nikki regains a modicum of control over money and sex; i.e., over things for which the state normally denies control of in service to profit, thus wage and labor theft. The better she acts, the more she carves out a name for herself, thus a place in the world: to make it more sex-positive through a normally harmful practice like the porn industry!

[7] The pro-worker weaponizing of sex, but also slave foods/pauper dishes and work to speak out against settler colonialism and Pax Americana while taking these things back.

[8] “In the city… you must fight to survive! He sold tortillas on the street corner!”

[9] The Gothic violates boundaries to speak to the indiscretion of nightmares; i.e., that follow us into the waking world, where tokenized agents seek to retire and send them back to Hell. In part, they’re like the Victorian chagrin of sleep arousal, a slut to shame; i.e., the control of human biology and desire by the state personifying as the succubus or incubus abjected into fearsome banditti-style rapists: the knife-dick/dickhead totem, the lady in black, etc. It’s as much to police these gargoyles as it is about the Freudian dogma attached to them; i.e., the demonizing of regular sex responses to dogmatize/mystify biology and canonize the nuclear home as “under siege” by whores—by nature as “seeking revenge” and needing to be quelled by state doubles playing the cop, pimp, and assassin behind various disguises/false premises.

As capital decays, panic sets in. First, the grim harvest cannibalizes workers, leading to witch hunts punching down against nature: blame the victim by attacking the whore to tokenize and/or subjugate her! Then, doubles emerge within the same aesthetic—mere honorifics designating police violence to give and receive further abuse. And while the state of exception commonly affords an undead flavor to traitors (and their victims) marke(te)d as such, a demonic one proves reliable—invaders from “Hell” made of clay threatening the “end times” under Capitalist Realism: a dark world where whores may walk free, unencumbered by state forces “protecting” workers from sex workers and sex workers from themselves!

The worst liars are the owner class and their traitors among us, those who accuse others of terrorism, murder and rape. As such, capital is bipartisan, funding multiple sides to the same team. Souless and cloned, this happens to make the bourgeoisie appear seemingly at odds, versus in cahoots (re: Parenti): create false “enemies” among themselves, but actual enemies among workers that both can police inside territory and hierarchy alike. There must always be gods and masters ruling over nature-as-alien; i.e., whores to punch, police, and divide, conquer and rape. To uncage Medusa is simply foreplay that teases her endless recapture. Not unlike Schrödinger’s cat, she oscillates under state dominion as a kept pet, military target, and space alien foreigner to trot out on home soil (the Imperial Core) dressed up as Elsewhere; re: “Hell is a place that always appears on Earth,”  the harvest in small as a territory for fresh conquest.

(artist: Baby Lee)

Fortunately empire has a time limit, one the state will blame its usual victims for “causing.” This extends to overall state harm; i.e., as colonies decay/threaten mutually-assured destruction, making Realism fade and Imperialism sail home. So does Gothic claptrap mirror state dogma and owner abuse seen and felt upon the Aegis; i.e., power in sex-as-alien as much speaking to genuine fear as adoration. As usual, then, nature becomes alien, something to fear and interrogate per the usual black/white binaries; i.e., treating her “non-white” rump as something to seek out, carve up and “tame,” thus possess in DARVO arguments: a hellish queen to rape and blame for said rape during virgin/whore syndrome (“she gave me a boner!”). Chasity and ignorance become virtues to defend through force against imminent invasion: “Brave talk for a mortal boy who’s world is about to end!”

However extravagant or invented, then, such arrangements canonically uphold the status quo/current order as supreme over nature. And while proletarian guerillas can weaponize such cryptonymies to anisotropically fight back and reclaim their humanitarian value, complicit counterparts divide the world for conquering anew by state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital; i.e., by growing alienated from all things the state fetishizes, the entire arrangement invading every aspect of daily life on and offstage, at home and abroad, asleep and awake. Us-versus-them double standards extend cryptomimetically to maidens and whores, but also good doctors and quacks policing women (and those treated like women), the latter suddenly affording explanations for the appearance of monstrous-feminine sex demons: sluts without a pimp, walking out in the open (the state allows exceptions up to a point, but always under incredibly broad, vaguely written rules that can be randomly and selectively enforced to serve profit; i.e., manufactured conflict, scarcity and competition occurring over whores by state enforcers pimping them)!

Paying rent, whores sit in limbo during liminal expression; i.e., while the state sexes up its banality of evil (desk murder) by proxy—using whores as punching bags/quick relief during state operations (ostensibly divorced from marriage yet punished for said divorce to uphold nuclear models)! Bourgeois pimps pimp like all the rest, then. Scare people; make them spend money on things they can abject for the state. The state gives an inch but takes a mile; it lies, cheats and steals, acting noble and good through endless Sales of Indulgence furthering the abjection process under neoliberal Capitalism.

(artist: Nikki Delano)

In turn, the colonization of the imperial home starts with erections and vaginal lubrication becoming ill omens; i.e., beckoning middle-class homeowners towards extramarital affairs, but also abuses committed by them and theirs towards vulnerable parties. It’s a medieval regression, capital decaying nostalgically into older hauntological versions of itself: a time that never quite was, but whose legendary violence, terror and police are quite real. America is a place that arms its citizens to their teeth; i.e., is populated by moderates/fascists playing white Indian, rebel, savior as undercover cop. Good cop, bad—pimps of nature, one and all!

[10] Not only is this not new at all, but it’s something I’ve written about before; re (from Volume Zero):

In all the universe, in all the gin joints in all the world, Persephone walked into mine and made me her avatar. “All deities reside within the human breast,” wrote Blake; yet, I think of the “Jewish revenge” of my marriage of Heaven and Hell as Canon’s tyrannical plea, re-camped by me and billions of other workers actively and/or passively yearning for freedom. Its sui generis format is both “Workers of the world, unite! You have only to lose your chains!” married to “Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to hell with you!” (this second sentiment goes for anyone who taught me or otherwise contributed towards that dark beautiful thing that became what I am today). For Communists wronged by the state, we monsters and what we make are human as Shylock was:

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction (source).

Our revenge, as a simulacrum, only resembles that of those who wrong us and counterfeit our campy legends for their canonical gain (Tolkien’s refrain); our aesthetic is shared but our function is altogether different: class consciousness as uncontrollable opposition relayed in terrifying medieval language that is thoroughly more wise through hindsight; i.e., not just according to Robert Asprey’s paradox of terror (which we’ll consider in relation to state forces decrying labor as terrorists) but the hauntological paradox of “the Wisdom of the Ancients,” whereupon old forms of monstrous expression have been updated for the modern world and its challenges to accommodate our needs as workers being exploited by Capitalism and its propaganda. That is our revenge—slowly camping the canon, thus the Superstructure, and reclaiming the Base through our monstrous, ghostly theatre as something that once turned on, can never be shut down or destroyed; it can only be repressed in forms that always come back because the elite cannot kill all its workers (not on purpose, anyways).

Shadow theatre and its mythic structure are nothing new. It dates back to Plato’s infamous allegory of the cave and its mimesis as paradoxically haunted by the shadows of class struggle (the spectres of Marx, which in theory did not technically exist when Plato was alive, and yet whose struggles for emancipation include these older slaves that Marx alluded to in “The Eighteenth Brumaire”).

Camus may have noted in The Myth of Sisyphus that canonical shadow theatre repeats to an absurd degree; i.e., Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill as punishment by the gods. To escape it, we can’t just smile at the gods like he proposed, but steal “their” fire on our own Promethean Quest! This means camping the canon, which requires repeated forays into Hell and putting the wrong things right at the source: our “darkness visible” and gods as stolen out from inside our breasts and put on the cave wall of Plato’s cave […]: oppositional praxis as playing on in shadowy forms dancing on the same cave wall, our darkness deliberate fencing back and forth with the state’s blind canonical doubles like Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood dueling Basil Rathbone’s Guy of Gisbourne [source]:

We’ll still doing so thousands of years after Plato, using shadows to camp, thus counteract state forms.

[11] Such archives speak to underground journals tapping into repressed appetites, but also pedagogies of the oppressed highlighting the hypocrisies and cryptonymies of empire; e.g., The Pearl was “A Journal of Voluptuous Reading: The Underground Magazine of Victorian England” (originally published anonymously in 1878 and republished by Ballantine in 1968—itself a tumultuous year under empire):

Having decided to bring out a Journal, the Editor racks his brains for a suitable name with which to christen his periodical […] at last our own ideas have hit upon the modest little “Pearl,” as more suitable, especially in the hope that when it comes under the snouts of the moral and hypocritical swine of the world, they may not trample it underfoot, and feel disposed to rend the publisher, but that a few will become subscribers on the quiet. To such better disposed piggywiggys, I would say, for encouragement, that they have only to keep up appearances by regularly attending church, giving to charities, and always appearing deeply interested in moral philanthropy, to ensure a respectable and highly moral character, and that if they only are clever enough never to be found out, they may, sub rosa, study and enjoy the philosophy of life till the end of their days, and earn a glorious and saintly epitaph on their tombstone, when at last the Devil pegs them out.

Such voyeuristic curiosity towards whorish exhibitionism is not wholly the domain of the hypocrite, but it’s often who we have to deal with all the same.

[12] Its cartographic technologies of conquest described by Patel and Moore as “a single, disembodied, omniscient and panoptic eye” (and cataloged by me through various cartographic refrains; re: Volume Zero). It is precisely this eye who those of nature must meet with our own Aegis, its abyssal gaze staring back in ways that stall the usual monomythic conquest; i.e., that capital and canon essentialize in any and all forms, monsters and territories. Their governance cannot be met with politeness, but bare-and-exposed sluts speaking truth to power through our own way of seeing the world: making everything gay!

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

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

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

The Undead Module Is Out! An Epilogue to Go with It

the number of ways the state oppresses, divides and conquers is without limit, affecting colonial territories like the Middle East, Africa and the Global South, from Rwanda to Vietnam to Cuba to Palestine and so many others. From snipers to bombs to death squads to eugenics programs, etc, nothing the colonizer does is fair and they fear everything around them enough to kill without question; they have to or profit cannot happen. Our guerilla-style resistance (asymmetrical warfare reclaiming the Aegis) needs to be cumulative as a means of developing something post-scarcity mid-resistance and decay. In short, we need to raise our voices—however loud and however soft—to speak out against the daily abuses of the colonized by the settler-colonial project as a fundamental element of Capitalism that will try and disguise itself. This includes lies and controlled opposition; e.g., Pride as something to recuperate by Rainbow Capitalism and something to reclaim by us.

—Persephone van der Waard, Volume Two, part two (2024)

(model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard)

Picking up from where “Seeing Dead People; or Undead Feeding Vectors, part two: Ghosts“! left off…

First and foremost, the Undead Module is out, babes! It’s a monster (so to speak) sub-volume. Over 1,000 pages and 800 unique images, it explores the poetic history of undead, covering zombies, vampires and ghosts in exhaustive detail; e.g., apocalypses, hauntings, castles and more! The module has taken four months to write, but is actually based on an older manuscript—a Humanities primer I wrote two years ago. Having since written my PhD and two other books, I returned to the primer and expanded on it big time! I’m very proud of this one! Again, go to my website’s one-page promo and pick up a copy for free!

Second, this piece is included at the end of the Undead Module, but discusses content in the upcoming Demon Module. It’s meant to be an epilogue for the former and prologue for the latter.

Deal with the Devil: Transitioning Modules; or Between Demons and the Undead

O, what a world of profit and delight,

Of power, of honour, of omnipotence,

Is promis’d to the studious artizan!

All things that move between the quiet poles

Shall be at my command (source).

—Faustus, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604)

Now that we’ve covered zombies, vampires and ghosts, the Undead Module is complete (I’ll be uploading the full sub-volume, today)! Its conclusion shall accomplish three basic things: one, acknowledge the transition between ghosts and composites; two, outline my thought process for the Demon Module and my writing it, versus the Undead Module; and three, wrap up with some broad closing objectives about Gothic Communism to keep in mind.

First, the transition: Originally the Undead and Demon Module were part of the same document, and the opening to the Demon Module is actually a segue into composite monsters, which walk the line between undead, animal and demonic. Let’s discuss that (two pages).

From the Undead Module, the Demon Module shall transition to composites, which are different from the monsters we’ve examined so far. Zombies, ghosts and vampires are all discretely undead, denoting a curse-like presence amid a stigmatized feeding vector. Pew, pew! The Straights attack such shooting-gallery gargoyles to protect white pussy from evil black penetration, blood libel and sodomy, etc; we fags occupy the same space to speak spectrally to our own rapes and eventual liberation:

Composites, on the other hand, are questionably undead. Often made from inanimate material like clay or stone, but also the reanimated flesh of dead pariahs, criminals and slaves, composites fixate on feeding of a more homely kind: family ties, social connection and sexual enrichment. However, their origins damn them before they are even born. Their “births” are unnatural, tied to a Promethean search for forbidden knowledge by those who made them; i.e., as alienated from nature being the very thing state forces prey upon to deify themselves. As the vain, self-righteous parent ignores, neglects and abuses their child, they treat them spitefully as the failed “demonic” outcome of a noble-if-vain experiment. This leads the newborn(s) to angrily seek revenge, often by torturing their maker to death before committing suicide; but it just as often speaks to a desire to fit in, oscillating between different states of mind acted out onscreen (androids in Alien speaking to the queer/harem servant trope):

Obviously this crisis can be subverted during Gothic Communism, but doing so stems from older stories that were designed “to chill the blood.” The queer spectres of such possible worlds endure to camp canon, resisting Cartesian silence and genocide through selective reading during intersectional solidarity’s pedagogy of the oppressed—to take what is useful from all that came before and to leave the rest behind.

(artist: Alex Ross)

For instance, earlier we briefly mentioned the posthuman predicament of the Major from Ghost in the Shell. Proceeding into the Demon Module, we’ll explore the origins of the posthuman condition—not according to ghosts, zombies or vampires, but through a different kind of abstraction: demons as byproducts of our material world as having evolved into its current self. Whether composite, summoned (occult), and/or natural, demons serve as fearful reminders of past pursuits towards presently forbidden knowledge, sealed off by the Cartesian Revolution and its enforcers. This isn’t so different from feeding on human tissue and enduring/policing Cartesian war and rape in practice, but the aesthetic is visually unique and highly ritualized through its own stories critiquing or enforcing state paradigms.

To this, we’ll explore how demonic expression can subvert Cartesian trauma through playful, exquisite forms of “torture” scattered across space and time; i.e., not undead feeding but demonic shapeshifting and Faustian knowledge and Promethean power exchange. To understand our own trauma (and to shove the paradigm shift away from Enlightenment dogma), we’ll need to see where it all started: with the Promethean Quest as re-envisioned by Mary Shelley after the Enlightenment was well underway.

Second, with the Undead Module completed, and its release eminent, I’ve written a short little blurb (two pages) concerning my thought process for the Demon Module. The Undead Module, even with several of the initial chapters transplanted to the back end of the Poetry Module, is still a full-size text; i.e., it is a sub-volume, that unit of measurement being used to indicate the Undead Module as part of a larger organizational unit, the volume, regardless of actual length. Thus, the Undead and Demon Modules are both sub-volumes, even though the Undead Module is finished, whereas the Demon Module is still very much under construction (as of writing this; you can follow its writing process at the “Deal with the Devil” promo page, on my website).

About that. The incomplete status of the second Monster Module reflects where things presently stand with me; i.e., as a trans woman, I am currently under construction, my past self already having been brought out and made into various object lessons while likewise taking my previous book volumes (my PhD, manifesto and Poetry Module) into account. In short, the Undead Module was about healing from my past trauma while thinking about it poetically in relation to the undead and how they operate; i.e., through trauma and feeding mechanisms fixated on undead poetics—doing so in order to yield history lessons concerning imaginary/objective forms of reality as part of the same living document, including its aesthetic reclaimed during ludo-Gothic BDSM/revolutionary cryptonymy. Not all sight is done with the eyes!

(artists: Lucid-01 and Persephone van der Waard)

Keeping with that cumulative, holistic trend, my past is currently alive in an undead sense that faces my uncertain future as transforming more and more into a demonic, witchy and goblin-esque self (left); i.e., one that yields fresh perspective, speculation and—true to the demonic approach to Gothic poetics—forbidden knowledge and power exchange synthesizing good praxis and catharsis; re: “Eating a meal, a succulent Chinese meal?” Sanguine or ectoplasm, darkness visible or night soil, things will come back around, already synthesized only to be synthesized again. Repeatedly playing with such devils is to play with what we can become, entering a new stage of existence; i.e., an exciting new, demonic chapter in our lives! It hurts so good, but speaks to our half-real, unclothed armor! Truth cannot be covered up, because our confused, blurred realities speak to an ongoing and shapeshifting survival. We become marked, thus must learn to fend off new predatory overtures while getting our kicks; i.e., as devils in disguise that advertise for those who know!

To it, my book chapters are as much an expression of my mastery and transformation as they are my trauma and odd appetites that I might interrogate through holistic expression. There’s no logical conclusion or “final number/verdict” to mark where I’ll wind up, in that respect; i.e., I’m already a master magician who’s written her PhD and three other books, at this point. This fourth book is just the next step in a never-ending journey for which the contents are laid out (the skeleton), but for which I can add additional essays and close-reads, should I wish to.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

So, despite my consolidation and reifying of wisdom, I still don’t know exactly what will happen next or what I’ll turn into as I make my deal with the devil. Showing the world what we fags always are—something to reclaim from our colonizers in the endless task of complete liberation—is kind of fun, isn’t it? And invested in having such fun as that is, I shall keep on making things I know the elite would rather I didn’t (as much as they care to concern themselves with anything but profit). Expect some new fun surprises as I continue hammering the Demon Module into its so-called “final form”—not the end-all, be-all of Persephone van der Waard, but something of a crystallization that can be used in future endeavors by other workers referencing all of my works as needed. I am your angel and your devil, offering up fatal knowledge to help you transform and achieve Gothic Communism yourselves! With music, monsters and theatrical mayhem—with ludo-Gothic BDSM (“Hurt, not harm,” my sweets)—we clownish fags strut our stuff. Historically, this would end with us promptly fucking off. Not anymore! We’re here and we’re queer, bitches!

Three, some broad closing objectives to keep in mind as we go between modules; i.e., regarding Gothic Communism, regardless of monster type!

Capitalism Realism would advocate for death and resurrection to keep people stuck in an endless loop of ignorance and pacification—of jumping simply to the end of the world. Except, our jouissance in fucking with them—through spectres of Marx per the Four Gs, including hauntology and the cryptonymy process camping canon/making it and its ghosts gay—provides its own delightful paradoxes inside shared spaces that state forces cannot fully control or dominate; i.e., regarding monstrous occupants threatening to return and overthrow the heteronormative nuclear order with dark, super-gay doubles: a danger-disco event horizon that, through all the usual performative combat, castles, noir-style romances, and good-times-had-by-all penetrative thresholds (and party music disguised as “combat”; e.g., Duke’s theme from Battle Arena Toshinden, 1995), brings darkness visible to the state’s Capitalist-Realist myopia!

The stairs (and murder), then, aren’t the wrong way, Jonathan La’Fey, but a direct line to what yearns to be free and run wild in ways labor never has before:

I am alive inside your wife
Miriam’s dead, I am her head, soon I’ll be free! (King Diamond, “Abigail,” 1987).

So do we pretty-spunky soldiers of class war gleefully and joyously liberate culture (and race) from the usual territorial dialogs/monopolies! That’s all she wrote, as we wear our cryptonymic hearts on our sleeves. Bare and exposed, but unbothered and unburdened by state baggage, we prey and pray/duel in duality mid-liminal and holistic expression! We get comfy but stay ready to scrap in the buff! Doing so highlights where bigotry lurks, and what areas need work!

(artist: Ickpot)

As such, we make sure to include others, tie ourselves up in knots, undo state bonds and police cuffs, put on BDSM fetish uniforms, whip with crops, jiggle and shake, play games, put “rape” in quotes, swoon, thunder/starstrike, mutate (“It’s morphin’ time!“), matchmake, love you and leave you just as fast—indeed, leave ourselves magically behind like a lover’s pair of used panties, a genie’s lamp for you to smell and/or wear to better come up with new ideas/inspiration: labors of love, while making love, rubbing clits with elbow grease! Trauma marks us, and during calculated risk, we free ourselves but—like Persephone—remain endemic to Hell, skirting the borderline between itself and heavenly spheres! We become the mistress of our fate, ruling in Hell versus serving in Heaven: stepped on by Mother Nature in mil spec.

In turn, the complexities of play let us host feelings and performances concerning betrayal and catharsis; i.e., on the same stages. There, we can be maiden or whore, having some sense of control over how we are seen, thus humanized. We can recontextualize our abuse, codifying it in ways that speak to what happened to us and what we want as likewise liminal. We expose and entertain, embarrass and embellish where and what is needed.

To it, women (or those treated as women/monstrous-feminine) are not sex machines to force coins into until sex comes out, but capital’s us-versus-them will frame us that way to antagonize labor and pimp nature out. In this sense, not only is sex a game vis-à-vis new instruction as dialectical-material, but multiple games are happening all at once. Rules can be explained, but just as often negotiate and install invisible, half-real boundaries that play out through trust between individuals and groups alike; re: bondage and blindfolds, erogenous pleasure and non-harmful pain. Subs and doms have needs/can be pushy or noncommittal/predatory to varying degrees.

To prevent “harm,” then, is to put it in quotes and learn to tell the difference by synthesizing it in our daily lives; re: our gossip, monsters and camp! “Harder, faster! Stop! No; no means yes [with safewords]!” There’s so much fun to be had/empathy to cultivate provided we learn to play smart/subversively! Learn from the past and make the Wisdom of the Ancients perceptive through revolutionary cryptonymy—to create situations of calculated risk that instruct how to hurt, not harm; i.e., how to fuck and have fun without compelled abuse raping nature as the elite always do. The state isn’t just incompatible with life, but mutual consent, its hierarchies designed to rape and destroy for the biggest illusions of all: money and power. Gothic Communism illustrates said lessons/struggles in opposition to state forces/class traitors and capital’s usual qualities—heteronormativity, Cartesian dualism and setter-colonialism—alienating and sexualizing everything in service to profit, and cultivating strange appetites. ACAB and ASAB! Socialism fucks; we fuck for Communism! Hail, Satan!

So put your backs into it and rise to the challenge, my pretties! Put the carnal in carnival! Take it to the edge! Fuck to metal (or Bach—whatever works)! Summon the slut and “lose yourselves to dance!” (as Daft Punk puts it); make Gothic Communism your own! From undead to demon to animal, this is where our lost humanity is found; have the courage to go and find it!

Your Commie Mommy,

—Persephone van der Waard

(model and artist: Persephone van der Waard)

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

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

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

Seeing Dead People; or Undead Feeding Vectors, part two: Ghosts/the Numinous, Metroidvania Maps, the Posthuman and Cryptomimesis (feat. The Shining, Alien, Ghost in the Shell and more)

“Illusions, deceptions, mirages! Your Mommy Fortuna cannot truly change things!”

“That’s true; she can only disguise, and only for those eager to believe whatever comes easiest! No, she can’t turn cream into butter, but she can make a lion look like a manticore to eyes that want to see a manticore… just as she’d put a false horn on a real unicorn to make them see the unicorn.”

—the Unicorn and Schmendrick, The Last Unicorn (1982)

Picking up from where “‘The World Is a Vampire’; or, Bloodsports and Prisons from Old World to New World” left off…

Part one of “Undead Feeding Vectors” covered vampires, sodomy and bloodspots/prisons, and the ideal hermeneutic case, Alice in Borderland, leaving so many bodies in capital’s wake; part two shall now delve into playing with ghosts of different types (which is what cryptomimesis is; re: Castricano) tied to such bodies—i.e., the spectral, Numinous sort, but also fragmented, posthuman entities springing out of classic science fiction as begot from Gothic poetics: Frankenstein, and from Frankenstein to cyberpunk hauntologies like Ghost in the Shell, dragging these xenophilic identities into a decayed futurism wedded to Shelley’s original warnings of posthuman abuse by Cartesian agents. Jails have ghosts not just of prisoners, then, but their fearful jailors; re: of Caesar and Marx haunting the same infernal concentric patterns.  We queers are ghosts of ghosts, cryptonymies wrestling in duality to punch through the insulation of state reality and Capitalist Realism, threatening the awesome beyond as occupying the same space and time!

As with part one, areas of part two have been designed to holistically cover Gothic Communism’s four different areas of study—re: the Gothic, Marxism, queer studies and ludology—in order to help people recognize the undead as something to see according to various kinds of popular media; i.e., to recognize in friendly and unfriendly forms that return and feed in oft-erotic ways. This includes my research on Metroidvania, which we a) touched on during the thesis volume and b) earlier in this volume. In this volume, we already discussed the quest for the Numinous as female/monstrous-feminine, but this time will—through the second of our aforementioned, original three main exhibits embedded spectrally in this module’s body of work—consider the ghosts of maps being things that liminally riff and “echo” through cryptomimesis more broadly.

A small but important distinction between ghosts and hauntings. Hauntings generally concern locations being haunted—i.e., by some kind of spectral presence; e.g., a haunted house—whereas ghosts are things that haunt. Generally the latter haunt something tied to home (or symbolic of home). In the architectural sense, they are unheimlich but, when executed, play the Uncanny Valley out, including feelings of friendly or unfriendly spirits suitably anchored to home-coded spaces (many ghost stories work off this ambiguity to make you wonder what you are dealing with [e.g., The Wailing‘s (2016) friendly spirit, above, being more of a linguistic device or fragment than full-fledged person, throwing rocks to get your attention because its voice is damaged or inadequate] versus an Exorcist-style geek show. Each has its place). There’s also unanchored ghosts (e.g., the headless horsemen or Wandering Jew), the explained supernatural/fake ghost and the Black Veil (re: Radcliffe), as well as other monster types described as “ghosts”; i.e., vampires amounting to ghost-like monsters that drink blood/essence; e.g., Tolkien’s black[1] Ringwraiths, passing through walls or stirring up bedsheets like M.R. James’ “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come, My Lad” (1904). So many ghosts, so little time!

Because of its length, this section will be even more eclectic, breadcrumb/truncated and crash-course than the vampire subchapter was. Work with less; less is more, as far as ghosts go. In short, they’re vague on purpose to capture the vagaries of human language; i.e., left to rot, only to rise again through cryptonymic suggestions of itself. Among such eclectic and charged, fertile fragments, expect the unexpected. Up is down, and bedsheets swell with shapes that pass eerily through walls. Order is destabilized (re: Aguirre), the cup empty and full at the same time, mute and loud—as much a phenomenological effect as anything literally speaking. So does this subchapter touch on much, yet is altogether far too short to hit upon everything I’d like. Ghosts are suggestions; i.e., simulacra that harbor the possibility of new things occupying old and vice versa [e.g., Trace being Athetos’ likeness, but guided by other spirits, neither here nor there but between all of them warring amongst him as an avatar/vessel for the player to pilot].

Given the empheral, incomplete nature of ghosts, however, I’m not bothered by this idea; ghosts shall come up in future volumes, and there’s plenty of them waiting in my earlier books, too. For example, we’ll talk about Fatal Frame (2001) in Volume Three, part two; my master’s thesis discusses The Pact (2012) and other ghost stories vis-à-vis Metroidvania; and the entire “Monomyth” subchapter here is chockfull of ghostly mentions relative to Gothic castles, but especially the Radiance in “Policing the Whore,” Walpole’s giant suit of armor from Otranto, and Hamlet’s father’s ghost (and Freud’s), as well as various ghosts of “Caesar” quite a bit throughout.

You might think ghosts are getting the short end of the stick, then, but I actually write about them quite a bit/give them free reign. The word “ghost/ghostly” appears 813 times in this sub-volume (938, if you include “spectre/spectral,” and 1,079 if you include “Numinous”), whereas “vampire/vampiric” occurs 878 times, “zombie” 750, “queer” 755 (1,143 if you include “gay”), and “BDSM” 573. Apart from Derrida’s titular Spectres of Marx and Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit, which I both mention a lot, well-and-truly my favorite ghost is Rudolph Otto’s Numinous; i.e., which I write about extensively as “palliative” in Volume Zero, and elsewhere in the series in regards to psychosexual healing and ludo-Gothic BDSM (especially in “Transforming Our Zombie Selves” in this module, when I look at The Night House and Stranger Things for their Numinous elements; also look at “Psychosexual Martyrdom,” 2024).

In short, this is my found document to, like so many Gothic stories, pass enticingly and spectrally onto the living. There are bits and pieces, stories of stories inside stories and so on. It’s the threshold of fun, a concentric liminal space in between modules pointing backwards to its own past-present signature, and into the uncertain future tied to that. —Perse

(artists [from top-most-left to bottom-most-right]: Harmony Corrupted, Roxie Rusalka, Bay Ryan, Lady Nyxx, Mugiwara Art, Angel Witch, Bubi, Cuwu, Blxxd Bunny, Angel, Crow, and Mikki Storm, Bovine Harlot, Sinead, Krispy Tofuuu,  Romantic Rose, Ashley Yelhsa)

Per the liar’s paradox, “ghosts aren’t real” is both true and false; ghosts are half-real—oscillating and shimmering between fiction and non-fiction, reality and imagination, canon and camp, in quotes and out, rape and “rape,” modesty and prurience, model and photograph, disintegration and regeneration, supernatural and explanation as a matter of ontological tension. They as much language devices as people, but also are people using their literal body language (above) to express their agency as a message left behind to find itself again; i.e., we may now be cold, but once lived and breathed as you do, and had autonomy over our own bodies, nudism and labor. Cryptomimesis echoes bodies across bodies (again, above), poses from one to another in a long chain of oppressed labor speaking to larger terms of imprisonment, impressionistically passing along a shadow of a thought about power in crisis: the past and the future collide, canceled and decayed, the past as much a death omen that could come to pass as it may already have (or have not), once upon a time!

Therein lies the appeal. Simply put, people love ghosts because they are complicated and vague. Because the ghost is profoundly uncanny thus liminal, canonical and iconoclastic proponents share the same space on their spectral surfaces, loving and fearing ghosts through differing context using the same ambiguous image, inside the same spaces and their complicated aesthetics. I want you to consider and remember that ghosts don’t exist in a vacuum; their likenesses double each other to interact, catalyze, and overwrite functional opponents during oppositional praxis for or against the state.

For the rest of this section, then, we’ll touch on some of the Marxist ways that ghosts commonly manifest in the Gothic imagination—literally Marx’ spectres haunting Capitalism by having never quite left (the ghost is generally trapped between the living the dead, on and offstage); i.e., brief and passing commentaries on (the discussed texts are listed here, though I shall not signpost their exact order and presentation per subsection):

• Ghosts/the Numinous (feat. Rudolph Otto, C.S., Lewis, Rings of Power, Halloween, Edward Said, and more)
• The Posthuman (feat. Ghost in the Shell and System Shock)
• Death, Decay and Troublesome Afterlife (feat. Frankenstein, Alien: Romulus and David Roden)
• Metroidvania Maps (feat. The Shining, Jody Castricano and Me)
• Cryptomimesis Main Exhibit (feat. Silent Hill, Jacob’s Ladder and Tool/Trent Reznor)
• Reflection/Closing Thoughts

Some sections will be short, and others even shorter (this limiting myself to 73 pages; I tried to do 69 again, but couldn’t quite manage it). These are merely dots on a list (a bit like those on the computer screen in Kairo, above), which I expect you to connect and expound upon, yourselves! Have fun with it!

We’ll set things up while differentiating ghosts from vampires and zombies as a monster class, albeit in relation to cryptomimesis as a spectral, in-between means of writing with the dead more broadly; i.e., that living artists regularly engage with as social-sexual creatures themselves: as a liminal, at-times-pornographic means of feeding on language, which collectively weighs on the brains of the living through and in between linguo-material bits—pieces and copies that dislodge from their intended resting places, floating about like chaff. Again, this is meant to be holistic, but by no means total or comprehensive. The dead speak to the living in fragments. Run with it, yourselves—clinging and responding to whatever haunts you.

Ghosts/the Numinous

At their most basic, ghosts represent trauma in a viral sense; i.e., like a virus, they don’t feed so much as they exist and replicate. They’re often lonely and weigh on the living, seeking acknowledgement from a position of unequal existence, occupying non-existence verging on existence (and vice versa). “Feeding” happens by them passing themselves on through the people perceiving them; i.e., as more present than they are, but also less. Ghosts constitute feeding as both attached to the effects of generational trauma and divorced, to some extent, from the cause; i.e., the living relating to the past as already-happened and yet-to-pass in oppositional forms. So while (from our modular thesis)

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature[—and] profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature[—trauma] cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case (source).

ghosts concern this as fragments; i.e., that survive in pieces what the whole does not, and cryptonymically demand to be witnessed, assembled and interrogated. They terrify their viewers, but also hold their interest. Talking with ghosts is canonically dangerous, if only because it possesses people with dangerous misconceptions that lead them to harm others (e.g., Hamlet or Jack Torrance).

(artist: Henry Fuseli)

In Neo-Gothic terms (from Walpole onwards), ghosts are puzzle pieces that get up under the right conditions and walk around—are pieces of code and language representing things whose representation has since become confused or separated from the earthly resident being signified. Even with photographs, we’re shown a moment in the past that was once alive; i.e., as it was that has since, in some shape or form, moved on. They may have lived, or might resemble something that once did while never having been alive themselves; like a suit of armor, they stand in for so many things, whose abstractions must personify to be understood. So many ghosts resemble people, if only as bedsheets over a humanoid shape, but so many more as full bodies (commonly women, below, but also children, witches, escaped slaves, and other state victims). In short, they double potential victims/victimizers as much as actual ones: death omens.

All ghosts link to profit. Profit is a generational cycle of violence, weighed against holes in memory/testimony and blocks in this or that, when confronted in ghosts of themselves, explode anew. Unfettered and raw, calm-to-frenzied spirits seek to escape and be heard, seen, witnessed. Some scream, others smile; flat effects are common, as are hyper or hyposexuality. Prison hardens you, and domestic abuse turns the home into a prison lorded over by abusive parents—ghosts of them, from husbands and kings to treacherous queens and battered narcissistic housewives.

(artist: Artemisia Gentileschi)

Just as often, though, there’s a parallel current of revenge—of preventing future harm by avenging past wrongs. Some victims (or their ghosts) strike back, commonly through art; e.g., Artemisia Gentileschi, of whom Ariela Gittlen writes in “A Brief History of Female Rage in Art”:

Artemisia Gentileschi‘s Judith Beheading Holofernes offers another dramatic scene of an ordinary woman overpowering a high-ranking man. Gentileschi’s painting is muscular: The Biblical Judith and her maidservant bear down on their victim, the invading Assyrian general Holofernes, as Judith saws at his neck with a sword. Blood spatters in long, ropy arcs, spraying Judith’s chest and neck. Holofernes’ tortured expression and copious amounts of blood are also present in Caravaggio‘s earlier version of this subject (ca. 1599), from which Gentileschi is said to have drawn inspiration. Yet in his rendition, Judith looks rather removed, her face wrinkled in disgust rather than set in determination.

It’s arguable that Gentileschi’s own experiences with sexual violence shaped her approach to depicting this brutal story. At age 18, she was raped by her painting teacher, the artist Agostino Tassi. Unusually for the 17th century, Gentileschi testified in court against her attacker. Tassi was set free following his conviction due to an intercession by the pope, while Gentileschi was made to endure the public shame of the trial—at which she was forced to testify while being tortured with thumbscrews. Gentileschi’s Judith may have been a portrayal of the justice that she herself was denied (source).

Given a voice, the oppressed have things to say that the state (and its usual benefactors/avatars) won’t like. Like naughty children, black penitents run to daddy and ask for protection from the big bad mean ladies (that they themselves abused until said victims pushed back); i.e., to preserve and maintain status-quo control over the things normally dominated by patriarchal forms. This includes ghosts!

Except, abuse doesn’t stop with a single, isolated event; it lives on as ghosts do. Like a bloodline, the invisible shackles of control are passed down from Roman Imperialism (and the ancient canonical laws) onto Hammer of Witches, Cartesian edicts and Enlightenment doctrine, onto the Protestant ethic and modern forms of Capitalism. The state abuses labor through its own victims, past survivors commonly tokenizing/triangulating through blind rage (re: TERFs). Just as often, though, it regresses or shuts down, like Pavlov’s dogs. Justice becomes reprisals from police agents protecting rapists, kidnappers, wife-beaters, what-have-you; re: by blaming the victims and obscuring the harm that abusers do through ghost stories. It compounds, and the ghosts start to appear in ways that speak to things that never fully stay dead. As such, the state will defend its own sanctity and sovereign status, repressing said ghosts through police violence feeding anisotropically for the state (re: power flows up). The state casts a long shadow, being fond of Numinous spirits to better spook workers faithful!

Regardless, big ghosts fracture into smaller relatives. So many victims of state abuse are sex workers/women, the elderly and children, but also witches and foreigners; i.e., those already preyed upon by the state, who—once homeless or otherwise vulnerable—make for easy scapegoats: “Those who suffer have no voice.” Give them one, and you will hear the wail of the damned—a cry heard round the world, from beyond the grave, coming home to roost. Some people make light of that—re: Jadis saying to me, “Put your mysterium tremendum in my uncanny valley!”—but just as often, the joke is to some degree profound or sacred; silly or not, it still carries weight, the imaginary past coming back around to mirror the present (and vice versa). Ghosts unanchor and wander to cause mischief.

Likeness and simulacra, effigy and egregore, ghosts are also what survives when the living are gone, but also when they return; i.e., speaking to mysterious, tremendous, buried things that rise like shadows to the surface; re: the mysterium tremendum’s Numinous, divine signature attaching to ordinary murder, rape and revenge; e.g., black widows or the Bleeding Nun speaking to unnatural deaths, evil plans, and all-around systemic brutalities. They are simultaneously blind and lucid, wanting to heal through acknowledgment; i.e., in ways that, per the counterfeits they haunt, either build up Capitalist Realism or tear it down. They are as much the veils or sheets as things beyond them; i.e., so many things to acknowledge or avenge, bury or dig up, because profit demands such things, which it tries to hide. Per the cryptonymy process’s double operation, they show and hide great power where such power is always found: on the surfaces and thresholds of workers! They tease and threaten equally mighty-mighty things with some degree of profound all-hanging-out and calculated obscurity!

(artist: Nyx)

The gendering and sexualizing of ghosts, like all monsters, is arbitrated by historical-material forces. With queer people, spirits speak to their closeted selves rising into existence seemingly ex nihilo, for instance. By comparison, female ghosts are, like female vampires, committed to the monstrous qualities of their biology as hysterical, wild; re: their wandering wombs as ghostly things that rise up furiously to seek revenge against the state reaping and punishing nature as classically female, but in truth monstrous-feminine in ways that speak to female victimization by police force/patriarchal agents since ancient times: Gaia and similar goddesses of nature speaking to her immense size and fury as that of a Gorgon (below). Divided, she struggles to pull herself together, after death, only bare it all! She’s larger than life, than men; primal and dehumanized, she must rehumanize as fat and sassy!

The ambiguity of ownership or representation is always in question, with ghosts and afterlife. As we shall see, ancient female rage is carried forwards in art as a kind of ghostly, viral medium for buried atrocities (re: Ariela Gittlen); i.e., committed against women and those forced to identify as women, thus treated as monstrous-feminine and “of nature[2]” by the state. Such beings are often naked and furious, climbing out of wells, caves and other dark, watery sites of repressed rage, rape anxieties and revenge, etc, to scream about such matters; i.e., the Medusa, but also her likeness expressed in banshees, succubae, and other such monsters—if not the castration of male rapists, then their societal emasculation by avenging female/feminine parties tied to nature: as brutalized by empire’s living ghost, Caesar embodied by Cartesian men as dead ringers to his rotten lineage. A common way of queer/monstrous-feminine revenge is the destruction of a male bloodline: “I will have your son!” or “I will be with you on your wedding night!” etc.

(artist: Kait Freckles)

While capital harvests nature as monstrous-feminine—a peach to site/sight and carve anew for fresh pulp—death traps police victims onto an earthly plane, a kind of purgatory where they cannot rest. Thought not always, a ghost is generally rooted to a prison, but also a space that has eyes and ear; i.e., the feeling of someone being watched, as if by a ghost; e.g., the Overlook Hotel. They communicate emotions like extreme sadness, anger, grief and lust (vis-à-vis the medieval Seven Deadly Sins); i.e., tied to buried atrocities, abject and exiled by state proponents.

To it, many ghosts are murder/suicide and rape victims, thus sex workers and children—not cis-het men, in other words. But some, like Pyramid Head, are the ghosts of warriors/abusers/ruffians (re: Radcliffe’s banditti an exotic kind of pirate or black knight), or the ghosts of victims who become furious to the point of a blind, uncontrollable hunger/rage; re: victims or abusers (cops and victims), per the trauma response. To set them free is to let them feed, often by giving them a place to voice themselves in lieu of those who can no longer speak having been denied the chance: acknowledging the harvest to humanize it.

As discussed in Volume One, “The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them” (source); i.e., no body, no crime. People who go missing and are never seen again is something of a paradox, then, given their faces and likenesses are seen on every street corner and carried across the lips and in the hearts of a community’s survivors. A ghost lives on, somehow still alive and very much not alive. They become a likeness of those who are still alive, constituting spectral embellishments regarding the living associating with ideas of people, good and bad, dead or alive; i.e., representations of someone that speaks to a hidden or unaddressed quality given a human face; e.g., a model who asks to be painted, as Nyx with me: ghost stories, then, work similar to legends and rumors—as things to spread for different reasons.

Such is cryptomimesis in a nutshell; i.e., the echo of power and trauma felt dualistically in fragments and likenesses—ghostly chaff expressed between language and people, places and things, but also copies of copies of copies:

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

Just as often, though, such gossip is a point of pride: something to advertise and announce that we were here and proud of ourselves. For my Sex Positivity project, either volunteers ask to be painted a particular way (as Nyx did, with me, above) or I ask artists if they would like to be drawn (as many muses of mine inspired me to do). And in many cases, the brand image of different artists are out in the world, to be critiqued under Fair Use. They stand in for themselves, personas representing offshoots of people, but also larger things like womanhood, nature, female/feminine sexuality and mental illness, etc. They’re things to fall for and do justice in whatever we, ourselves, create; i.e., something to capture in a moment, like a photograph: full moon booty but also a sweetheart who loves nature and herself tied to the land (we’ll return to Nyx in the Demon Module).

(artist: Nyx)

The idea is to convey something that can’t be raped or destroyed, but undefeated, will live on and survive/surpass abuse while helping prevent it; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM through what we leave behind as sex positivity expressed in echoes of echoes of echoes: a refrain parading what we show behind various boundaries during revolutionary cryptonymy (re: “flashing” exhibits). In short, ghosts are things we can make through the cryptonymy process to achieve rebellious sentiment; i.e., existing in broad daylight, unrepressed, in spite of all attempts to bury us alive. We cannot be contained, refusing to be victims in ways that include other groups and add so many among the substance of things that can be seen, but not touched: we feed and draw strength, enriching the spirit not as something to bury or exorcize, but make space for in daily life! It becomes a dumb supper—a vital, back-and-forth exchange; i.e., to feed and find sweet joy and release through Numinous avatars’ bangin’ bods (and backsides): the dark side of the moon/lunacy’s deepest trenches (“that’s no moon, it’s a space station!”)! Not something to split in two, the Great Pumpkin’s recesses and cleavage being a package deal offering up much-needed reunion with nature; i.e., normally harvested, holiday-style, as capital territory on the frontier. No more!

(artist: Nyx)

For a variety of reasons, ghosts operate through the awesome, poetic power of suggestion (whose uncertainty grants a wonderful likeness for domestic abuse; i.e., the gaslight effect). Be they either queer and/or female—but also people of color, religious minorities, sex workers, children or the elderly, homeless and/or mentally ill—the same, comorbid assigning of criminal elements affects all oppressed peoples indicted by the same predatory system; i.e., moves power towards the state inside a larger prison-like persecution network whose former victims haunt the home-as-burial-grounds, speaking of past abuses waiting to be dug up, investigated and laid to rest. All leave behind oddly delicious ghosts that appear to speak, if not pointedly to their own abuse, then their own empowerment in ways that jab conspicuously at abuse as a ghost would: laterally (a detective doggedly getting to the bottom of things; its rump, next page, called all manner of silly words; e.g., Zeuhl called it a “rumpulon,” in jest/emulation of Gothic/sci-fi language). While the home, per Foucault, is haunted by the ghost of raped victims leaking from the bedroom, many Neo-Gothic authors play with these “nightly bumps” to gain agency over their emotions. It’s often campy but remains haunted[3] by canonical forces: we hit that, and film ourselves being stuffed in so many compromising positions. That’s power!

(artist: Fewebomb‘s “Rump in the Night,” 2019)

Ghosts less lurk between resident and residence, then, and more embody the complex, organic relationship between them as ongoing and anisotropic, ergodic, concentric and recursive; i.e., the chronotope and mise-en-abyme, their narrative of the crypt invoking a castle-sized vanishing point tied to unspeakable things spoken through medieval poetics, but also human-sized/shaped inversions suggesting the castle beyond and tethered to those. Back and forth, it goes, smaller tied to bigger and vice versa in shared quantum existence. In Gothic, authorial desire caters to the Numinous as something to suspend between, felt with castles-in-the flesh; re: body-like castles and castle-like bodies making the skeptical temporarily faithful, hung between reason and irrationality in ways that make them shrink, prostrate before the hauntological divine. Castles are crime sites, but also, per Bakhtin, legendary environs concerned/saturated with the aesthetic orbiting hereditary rites and dynastic power exchange. Per the Numinous, a divine presence is generally tied to a monarchal burial ground that wakes up; it speaks to big things crawling to the surface concerning fresh workers.

Of course, such things exist between nature and civilization, people and place, as evocations of enormity expressed in names like the Numinous, Sublime, Absurd, and other such proper nouns; they stack onto/speak to power as felt during liminal expression: the likeness of the oppressed, the victim, as doubled in those still happy and alive. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost” speaks to so many victims being born again in fresh forms that, bare and exposed, remind survivors of what they themselves lost: “No one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost,” explains C.S., Lewis in The Problem of Pain, reflecting on Otto’s Numinous. “It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous” (source). So do ideas of the holy and divine merge with guilt and superstition attached to things that were once alive, or point to a formerly alive thing that, since then, has become a placeholder (akin to Otto’s usage of Latin words to stand-in for something beyond human language).

In turn, the human element becomes a shell of sorts, holding something inside or about itself that defies description, but is nevertheless married to it on the same Aegis; i.e., an echo chamber less of a space and more a canvas with a model mirroring older bodies. Anything we do is violent in the eyes of the state, thus the state meets with indiscriminate police force through violence, terror and monstrous poetics. Per Asprey, “terror is the kissing cousin of force” (re: War in the Shadows); per me, we reverse the role/order of terror and counterterror to expose state abuse and humanize ourselves in guerrilla shadows and ghosts. All of this occurs—you guessed it—through the asymmetrical feeding vector of ghosts on the Aegis: existing where something should not, but does; i.e., the paradox of terror extending to sex worker bodies (often, but not always female) being closeted and collared by police violence upholding the state’s usual operations. “Peace” is a white man’s word; “liberation” is ours, from bit to intersectional, solidarized bit.

(artist: Vivi Tarantino)

Ghosts, in turn, rise up between the cracks, but also through seemingly-solid walls, floors, bodies, shackles, what-have you. They resist containment and statutes of limitation, but nevertheless deteriorate, contaminating places with ambiguous menace and dire speculation: fraud, forgery and fabrication that points to the holy and sacred being false. Amnesia and rememory struggle to remember such things through ghostly left-behinds, the data of a lingering and unaddressed pain: generational trauma and lost generations. Per the cryptonymy process, they are true and false, standing “on the ashes of something not quite present.” Phantom pains, they warn of past violence, but also clear-and-present dangers; e.g., present-and-future murder attempts, criminal conspiracies, internal/foreign plots, designs, calculations, premeditation, segregation, etc. They constitute holes in memory to fill with some degree of imagination; i.e., an amnesia, walking blind spot, loss of time, absence, ataxia, aphasia, Kantian noumenon, or some such cavity or gap (re: a vanishing point); e.g., the Slender Man from Marble Hornets (2009) realized by matter of serialized urban legend, that when approached in text (or out) overloads the sensory organs like static on a TV screen. The ghost, less than seeking a proper burial, resists one. Per the cryptonymy process, it becomes restless and vibrates, operating partially on suspended disbelief.

Diaphanous and ephemeral, but solid and capable, ghosts are things to write with suggesting other things not quite dead or alive, but composed/regarding those states of existence on orders thereof; i.e., from the shortest ghost stories, to ghost writers, super heroes (e.g., Space Ghost, above), and a defuse and long line of eclectic thinkers like Shakespeare, Radcliffe, Marx, Otto, Derrida, Castricano, Butler and myself—all of us writing about/with spirits, spectres, gender trouble and various other queer manifestations of this-or-that trapped between, beyond or behind something else; i.e., small things leading to big things (Cinderella’s slipper vs Otranto’s helmet), the fog creeping in on little cat feet, nothing else remaining ’round that colossal wreck, chasing smaller spirits of mightier and bigger Numinous ones!  This colossal boneyard is where ideas both go to die, but also catch fire and, like the phoenix, be born again. Liberation and enslavement occupy the same space, thus the same language as spatio-temporal, linguo-material, human and alien, fascist and Communist, alive and dead.

In the Gothic, then, decay and inheritance of a fallen West can denote a “Gothic effect” (re: Baldrick), but just as easily suggest size difference and alien signatures that, from Capitalism to Communism, help workers reunite with lost mighty things by remaking them; i.e., the potential not to be a victim, but gods, kings and queens where no such things exist for one, but all: the land of giants and gods, wherein Divine Right/the Protestant ethic and capital’s monopolies, trifectas and usual harmful qualities/witch hunts are a thing of the past. Under a new, recultivated Wisdom of the Ancients (the proletarian Superstructure), Rome is dead and stays dead; Medusa, as Galatea’s ghost, rises from the fragments of Pygmalion urns to threaten liberation unto capital’s usual slavers. We don’t tokenize/rape rank and place Original Sin over blood libel, black rape epidemics, or sodomy accusations; we unite, intersectionally solidarizing under Gothic Communism to break Capitalist Realism: through our counterterror’s pedagogy of the oppressed. This has a mark to it—pieces that are controlled and yearn to be free in ways that perceive both as unreal and more real than real. The fantasy poster comes alive, but stays half-real, like a ghost promising all manner of reckonings and revelations:

(artist: Nyx)

We’re the pain in the ass and cannot be exorcised, the bleeding heart beating ‘neath the floorboards. Much of what we say is common knowledge, but denied or buried (as genocides always do) by those who can afford to turn a blind eye (again, as genocides encourage). Any boundary or barrier you put up to discourage us, we pass right on through—a quantum element whose quandary makes home feel foreign, alien, and exiled; re (from Volume One):

Simply put, singular and enforced interpretations are dangerous, and we need to be choosy in ways that prolifically and flexibly enrich our arguments, not simply dot them with the fancy patriarchal ornaments of accommodated intellectuals. Meanwhile, our ruffling of their collective feathers needs to hit a collective nerve: their sell-out, privileged status; i.e., sitting in their ivory towers and basically talking amongst themselves in a highly privatized sense. This requires a certain sense of detachment from positions of comfort that historically are used to divide and conquer workers. As Said writes in “Reflections on Exile” (1984):

Because exile, unlike nationalism, is fundamentally a discontinuous state of being. Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past. They generally do not have armies or states, although they are often in search of them. Exiles feel, therefore, an urgent need to reconstitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideology or a restored people. […] Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.

Regard experiences as if they were about to disappear. What is it that anchors them in reality? What would you save of them? What would you give up? Only someone who has achieved independence and detachment, someone whose homeland is “sweet” but whose circumstances makes it impossible to recapture that sweetness, can answer those questions. (Such a person would also find it impossible to derive satisfaction from substitutes furnished by illusion or dogma.)

This may seem like a prescription for an unrelieved grimness of outlook and, with it, a permanently sullen disapproval of all enthusiasm or buoyancy of spirit. Not necessarily. While it perhaps seems peculiar to speak of the pleasures of exile, there are some positive things to be said for a few of its conditions. Seeing “the entire world as a foreign land” makes possible originality of vision. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that – to borrow a phrase from music – is contrapuntal.

For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment. Thus both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, occurring together contrapuntally. There is a unique pleasure in this sort of apprehension, especially if the exile is conscious of other contrapuntal juxtapositions that diminish orthodox judgement and elevate appreciative sympathy. There is also a particular sense of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens to be (source).

Exiting Plato’s cave can feel brutal, insofar as its new-felt unheimlich is irreversible. From our own “pleasures of exile,” though, home is something to cultivate through alienation as a forced consequence under Capitalism. It, like trauma in general, becomes something to live with, often through rituals of theatrical distress:

(artist: Coey Kuhn)

Liberation from the illusions of capital means our prescribed homeland becomes foreign in ways that allow for startling new appreciations; i.e., in terms of how we identify using Gothic language during fresh struggles under old, systemic problems: as monsters. Doing so helps us better voice the chaos inherent to our daily lives under capital, once the game is up. Yes, we can be “ostracized” by people who frankly care little for our well-being at an institutional level (accommodated intellectuals); but as their cool dismissal of us exposes the apathy and bigotry behind their “soft” arguments, their hard, inflexible stances can be denuded by Gothic Communism’s chief weapon: poetics (source).

As such, we’re in the closet, without a land—the dreaded past of imperial and capitalist abuse come back to haunt the state; i.e., the ghost in the darkness making them afraid, the colonizer realizing his servants, possessed by the dispossessed, may suddenly and uncontrollably have a collaborator’s inherited cause: to resent his occupation and abuse of their territory!

To have agency is not to define as the state decrees, per the profit motive; i.e., to liberate is to self-actualize/self-define through Gothic poetics; re: our darkness visible/Satanic poetics creating to play god but also use our ghosts tied to past victims. For them and ourselves, we negotiate what is normally non-negotiable, arbitrated by us on our terms, using what we got; i.e., as part of our land and the enchanted class, cultural and/or race characters it offers. We don’t give ground, we take it! True rebellion and false rebellion sit inside the same ghostly spheres and entities, then, we and our freedom fighters echoed badly by state counterfeits: cops playing guerrilla/white Indian (re: Samus Aran). Our cryptonymy must expose them while keeping us flexibly solvent and immutable.

This isn’t just a battlefield fought with soldiers, then, but warriors of love yielding their own ghostly “arsenals,” aliases, and agency. Humanize the harvest, and the state becomes inhumane across all registers. We can get to state forces simply by reminding them that illusions go both ways; i.e., power is something workers have in spades, our own operatives being the pumpkins of the fields, the statues in the churches: whores that make the devil to pay in ways that go beyond what the state can even control, such brothel espionage extending to art and its ghosts (of ghosts, of ghosts…)! The holy ghost becomes “almost” to joke and tease, the Numinous “dumps like a truck“: “Damn, girl. You shit with that ass?”

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

It’s a quasi-religious, “almost holy” experience, then, one which has many applications, secular or otherwise; i.e., towards profound sensations of experience, these simulating death, rapture, martyrdom and/or orgasms (skin or erogenous), etc, but also entities attached to said things; e.g., fire of the gods/the Promethean Quest during Cartesian critiques and mad science; big vampirism and master/slave relationships and castles; religious experiences, visitations from disturbing alien experiences; zombies and liches, necromancers, big death and calamities; and similar tiers of power and the Numinous/mysterium tremendum.

We won’t have time to explore these here, save to declare that all express the experiences of giant warring spirits in shared spaces with not enough room to distinguish and divide these things into discrete categories; i.e., ghosts of Caesar and Marx, of a cosmic-sized abstraction speaking to hyperobjects at odds, a Communist Numinous vs the state’s own variant, the skeleton king and similar poetic manifestations grappling during psychomachia, Amazonomachia and psychopraxis (concepts from Volume Zero[4]); re (from Volume Two, part one’s “Conflict, Mothers-in Conflict, and Liberation”):

Gothic castles (and castle-like Destroyers) leading to the Communist Numinous (the proletarian monstrous-feminine) amid a war of titanic forces, gargantuan but vague; i.e., felt through paternal disturbance, Capitalism being Communism’s mortal enemy and the true Great Destroyer labeling its foil as “devil-in-disguise.” Both are, but only one wants to enslave and destroy workers, Medusa, and the planet as a sustainable habitat: capital. We have a right to exist; to dye our hair, take HRT or pierce our nipples and worship Satan; to be recognized as squishy and delicious; to groan or fart as we pee (or pee in someone’s butt—not my kink but you never know who likes what). All constitute intimacy, which the state doesn’t care about (seeing ours as “passing for” their own coached doubles and so-called “winners”).

Again, it’s just “crew expendable.” Why? Because “fuck you,” that’s why! They want to own us and cheapen our lives for reasons purely of greed entertained by the lamest vultures on Earth (real “divorced dad energy”). So we must fuck them (and their monopolies) by freeing the monstrous-feminine to become our true selves with, whatever form that may be. Liberation is a journey to survive in deathly forms, wherein we escape, fight censorship, and endure embarrassing double standards (enshittification; re: Cory Doctorow)—to fight the good fight, forever (source).

Workers leave behind ghosts, as do states, and some workers serve states, and Communism refuses to die entirely despite capital’s best efforts to bury it. Extant or faded, fabled or down-to-earth, to fight and resist is noble. In turn, all occupy the same shadow zone in dialectical-material conflict; i.e., all connect ambiguously during oppositional praxis, bonding or co-existing in ways that personify but aren’t always clear about which camp they belong to. It’s a church to worship at cross purposes!

(artist: Vivi Tarantino)

In the calculus of existence, then, ghosts are aftermath—signatures and suggestions of what was, is and will be inside space-time, and sitting between humans and their own left-behind medieval-to-modern socio-material histories, relating troublingly back and forth (re: Marx’ tradition of dead generations/spectres haunting Europe, etc). Compared to zombies or vampires, then, ghosts are probably the hardest to pin down, as they are the most linguistic/ontologically vague, in dispute/uncertain (re: Hamlet), and arguably the least erotic (save as images of erotic things to reach out and touch, above: “Is that a booty I see before me; I clutch thee but have thee not”).

Yet vampires and composites can also take on ghostly qualities (exhibit 42d2); i.e., as magnetic and revered inside the ghost story as a curiously popular medium: a literal ontological extension of someone, someone else’s idea of someone, or something else entirely—e.g., Hamlet’s father’s actual spirit, Hamlet thinking he’s talking to his dead father from beyond the grave, or something that bears a likeness to Hamlet’s father that continues to exist inside and outside of Hamlet’s mind: in the natural and material world in a very “animated,” viral way (either a coincidental semblance, like the Boos being ghosts without bodies, or the “wendigo” that copies the appearance of someone to torture them; e.g., The Dark and the Wicked, 2020, or It Follows, 2014). Perception feeds reality as a matter of action; i.e., “the readiness is all.”

More to the point, ghosts aren’t strictly “dead” in the sense of having once been alive. They live on/feed from moment to moment through how they are seen, often according to how powerful they are; i.e., a Numinous spirit versus a small, unimpressive ghost. As we’ve seen so far in this book, the context for what is impressive, uncanny and die-hard can vary considerably—e.g., the spectre of the skeleton king/conqueror through capital versus the camp potential of Communism’s mighty “kings”:

(exhibit 42d1a: Artist, left: Earth Liberation Studio; top-mid-right: Leonardo Galletti; top-fair right: Fuck Yeah Socialists; bottom-right: source. The spectres of Marx are as much the reinvented, campy and viral language of what those in or aligned with power fear—i.e., the literal ghosts of boogeymen like Marx, Lenin and Stalin divorced from their historical-material fixtures and converted, more or less, into a kind of radical detachment from state propaganda. The cryptomimetic war becomes one of oppositional aesthetics, wherein the faces of our Communist “Rushmore” challenge the status quo, but also the 20th century’s checkered reputation of Marxist-Leninism. This isn’t an endorsement of state abuse or mechanisms, but an artistic movement that treats these ghosts as reclaimed symbols of rebellion against oppression, canon vs camp. This operates at odds with spectres of fascism like those of the Third Reich. As “Laborwave” founder Leonardo Galletti writes,

Considering all of these things, the ridiculousness of “fashwave” becomes even more transparent. How can you take a genre that, from its inception, has been preoccupied with anti-capitalist rhetoric, and use to defend a capitalist, fascist cis-hetero patriarchy? It would be like if I tried to appropriate Wagner operas and Birth of a Nation to create Communist propaganda (source: “The Rapid Proliferation of ‘Laborwave’ and What It Means,” 2019).

Unlike Hitler or Goebbels [who always served the state], more complicated Socialist figures like Marx or Lenin [fuck Stalin in his homophobic ear] were defined at various stages by appeals to systemic oppression under Capitalism operating as usual: capitalist simulacra. The human palimpsests may not have lived to see Communism develop—indeed, they were ostracized within and after their lifetimes to reinforce Capitalism’s continued hegemony—but the third kind of ghost, the detached simulacrum, has become an informed appeal to avoid what these men were in life while still treating them as a complex propaganda tool that functions in a very viral, “corporate mood” sense. There is no obvious source—the canaries in the mine starting to appear seemingly ex nihilo—but takes on a life of its own because the seeds of rebellion [the dialectical-material struggle] are utterly primed for it; i.e., to blip, like a ghost, into existence between language and its perception.

          To quote from Galletti again:

It makes my heart swell with pride to see the Laborwave genre growing so rapidly, transcending entire continents and languages, all because of the internet. It feels magical. When I made that very first Laborwave edit of Lenin, back in 2016, I would have never imagined that this trend would blow up so phenomenally. I regularly find art that I have made spread to the farthest corners of the internet, in places I would never expect to find it. […]

Vaporwave, the artistic genre from which Laborwave evolved, is a post-modern music and visual art genre whose surrounding “subculture is sometimes associated with an ambiguous or satirical take on consumer Capitalism and pop culture, and tends to be characterized by a nostalgic or surrealist engagement with the popular entertainment, technology and advertising of previous decades” […] If Vaporwave is the thesis, then Ostalgie, a German term describing a longing nostalgia for life in Communist East Germany, is the antithesis. Our western culture is slowly coming to grips with the collapse of the economic system that we have enjoyed living at the peak of. In coming decades, we will face incomprehensible struggle. It only makes sense that as the world slowly crumbles around us, that we will cling nostalgically to things from our childhood and early lives that remind us of the simpler times. One eastern culture, who has already had to slowly come to grips with the collapse of their entire economic system over the past nearly 30 years, not just in Germany, but throughout the entirety of the Eastern Bloc. When places like Russia experienced 10 MILLION excess deaths in the years immediately following the reintroduction of Capitalism in Russia, it’s no wonder why more Russians have a favorable opinion of Stalin than they do Putin.

The synthesis then, is Laborwave. Laborwave as I define it is: an inter-sectional art style reconciling nostalgia for a Soviet past with a nostalgia for the visual motifs of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. While Vaporwave relies on subtext, sarcasm and mild critique of the consumer-capitalist nightmare we have created, Laborwave takes it to the extreme, forcing you to confront the horrifying and uncomfortable truth. Bertolt Brecht once said: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.” To me, Vaporwave has always remained by and large little more than a mirror. But with Laborwave, I am trying to make hammers [ibid.]. 

To this, Gothic Communism aims to liberate creativity in ways that reclaim not just people, but the icons they themselves used in the never-ending fight for labor and nature: the hammer and the sickle, and the men synonymizing these things. As such, we camp Marx’ ghost, making it gay to break Capitalist Realism.

[artist, left: Persephone van der Waard; right, artist: Persephone van der Waard]

The model for the rightmost illustration wishes to remain anonymous; indeed, they disappeared from contact shortly after my drawing of them. They had wanted to be drawn for the project, but also lived in a traditional, pro-police household that did not respect their right to be trans; they became torn between a desire to be themselves and uphold their family’s conservative values. As for the drawings, above, they evoke a sense of death, espionage, and terrorism within the hauntology of corporate decay—e.g., Sombra’s accommodated rebellion [left] serving as a form of appropriated labor/opposition presented by Blizzard as a “pastel-Goth” hacker-for-hire who goes unscrupulously to the highest bidder to escape her street-life, gang-riddle past; it’s assimilation fantasy through the tokenized false rebel. My drawing of Elektra Ovirowa from Cowboy Bebop: the Movie [right, 2001] places a former corporate assassin for the state in a Laborwave nostalgia married to cyberpunk and Vaporwave’s own cousin aesthetics.

In turn, these pastiches stylize through the oppositional praxis of aesthetics, first and foremost; i.e., they can be perceptive, but require the use of iconoclastic artists working in concert with a larger countercultural artistic movement through subtext [re: disguise pastiche]. On the cusp of the uncanny but also the Numinous of Capitalism falling apart, we—like Roy Batty—”want more life, fucker” [who, faced with his own manufacture of obsolescence, in Elden Tyrel, promptly decides to crush the old ghoul’s head; one sympathizes].

Derrida insists there is “no outside of the text,” but anything beyond Capitalism is suggested inside itself [and its myopia] with ghosts. Per Gothic Communism, our own artistic choices—within Vaporwave, Laborwave and cyberpunk as perceptive pastiche—can revive mighty spirits out from the past in opposition to capital’s ghost of the counterfeit; i.e., their eerie, welcoming likeness emerging in hauntological forms that can ultimately be better than these men were in life; re: “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine,” except this happens through camp as a matter of worker revenge. Jedi are cops.)

As something whose appearance bears out through oppositional praxis, the ghost is a haunting figure whose confounding and unstable ontological qualities affect the viewer’s own vision; i.e., in highly complex ways: to feed our appetite for unspoken things that beg to be said, but often go unsaid.

(exhibit 42d1b: Ghosts of the abused lurk cryptomimetically between different forms of scare language in the shadow zone, whereupon the ghost of the counterfeit furthers the process of abjection, according to nature as queer in order to maintain status-quo arrangements/advance profit. For example, Rings of Power cashes in on the same anti-queer/anti-Semitic/anti-Pagan witch, goblin and vampire/werewolf stereotypes as old Disney villains: from Snow White‘s Maleficent poisoning princesses, Sher Kahn from The Jungle Book being a talking cat dad that eats children, and the hunched-over tall rat in black-and-red from The Great Mouse Detective all being equally problematic, onto many others; i.e., going onto the likes of naughty uncle Scar, drag queen likeness Ursula and so many other evil queers. Persecution networks overlap, swapping this out for that. Middle-class people pay out; everyone else is divided-and-conquered by capital.

These betrayals extend to Tolkien’s Sauron reinvented by Amazon; i.e., into a king ghost of Caesar/the Wandering Jew that rises up from the ground, eating millipedes and rats, to then steal a human body and ultimately endure rapturous torture as delicious to him [“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts!”]. When collared, he lies to his enemies with pretty gifts—a “power over flesh” [code for Nazi BDSM] but also the presence of divinity C.S. Lewis describes as follows: 

Now suppose that you were told simply “There is a mighty spirit in the room,” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words “Under it my genius is rebuked.” This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous [source: The Problem of Pain].

In short, pain is a trick, and Tolkien’s Sauron is Milton’s angelic and shapeshifting Lucifer minus that story’s camp [re: Volume Zero]—a perennial vice character that playfully injects life as frisson [skin orgasm] into an otherwise boring story en medias res. It’s false rebellion sold to spice up a purity argument—both to adults and kids alike during the dialectic of shelter and the alien: “Middle-earth” [Eden or Rome by another name] is fading and the fallen angel conveniently appears to offer a glowing [and bogus] solution. It appeals to tokenized folk wanting to assimilate, but also general queerness seeking to give voice to its own suffering amid fresh redemption; i.e., to get the upper hand on a bunch of self-righteous twats who think their rule is not only above critique, but timeless and Good. Sauron speaks and God is silent; translation [from Milton]: God is a cunt, as are his mysterious ways.

We can certainly camp said baddie daddy ourselves, relating to his confused, psychosexual predator/prey responses and pleasure/pain mechanisms.  All work within a persecution network that is highly commodified, and not used by Amazon to liberate us; they use it to turn us into a sideshow attraction, which we must reclaim through the same bread-and-circus aesthetics—i.e., being collared ironically during calculated risk per ludo-Gothic BDSM. Enjoy Sauron stealing the show, if you want. Don’t unironically endorse Tolkien’s refrain/Goldilocks Imperialism[5]; instead, camp its echoes of Caesar and Marx yourselves, doing so in ways that challenge profit by reversing abjection to raise awareness towards neoliberal Trojan maneuvers commodifying former symbols of rebellion—i.e., into false Nazi-Communist copies we must reclaim and make Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communist once more.)

Ghosts are doubles, and doubles are when sublimation fails, creating a linguo-material feeling of being haunted within ordinary life; i.e., as occupied by something beyond Capitalism: total death, or “death” symbolizing radical change to treat, as Capitalism does, like a bogeyman. It doesn’t die, but arguably is—like some kind of Pontypool [2008] word virus—not or never fully alive:

(exhibit 42d2: Top-left, source; artist, bottom: Josh White. While a liminal, uncanny element exists to any monster I could list, certain forms like the zombie, werewolf or vampire tend to be more strictly personified and humanoid in their privatized, neoliberal forms; i.e., the Halloween costume, aka the “guy in a suit” effect. The ghost, as C.S. Lewis touches on through Otto, is conveniently divorced from a concrete physical form, but not the space that houses it [“there is a ghost in the other room”] nor the fact that it is, in some shape or form, a copy or an illusion that denotes an otherworldly or incorporeal presence connected to a humanoid shape. Ghosts are not strictly or automatically human, but look human enough to merit an uncanny response to varying degrees.

A surprise function of human language, then, is the ghost as a kind of double. As a mask behind which there is no human, we’re left with a human appearance occupied by an inhuman pilot [e.g., Michael Myers’ play on the Halloween mask/costume as uncanny on its surface, making its human-shaped wearer feel inhuman and his locations increasingly Numinous]. Such devices make for a simple-but-effective device in ghost stories. As ontologically uncertain, ghosts allow for some fairly basic but potent phenomenological tricks to be played on the mind; e.g., is there something under the bed sheet or behind the copy? Nothing becomes a terror that is beyond human expression, but felt as a ghost growing inside us [re: Radcliffe’s terror mechanism].

Canonically these kinds of visions tend to be blinding to the audience, whose mad terrors cannot see anything beyond the bogeyman as something to see everywhere; re: Hamlet. It’s a very totalitarian concept, making it tremendously useful to the state; i.e., as an instrument of revenge that takes/stops up all passages of memory and remorse, built on fabrications; e.g., Hamlet’s commonplace book built on a likeness of his father telling him to kill, or Macbeth’s dagger of the mind—the latter something for the superstitious warrior to clutch and yet, have not, only to lead him to draw a real blade and do “Duncan” in. It’s a hit. So, too, does Myers feed on his babysitter victims, seeking revenge on naughty girls who ignored him once, and continue to behind his mask-like face. He’s not exactly oozing charm.

Per spectres of Caesar and “Rome,” humans are easily led astray, chasing ghosts in ways the state wants them to; re: Capitalist Realism making us feed on ourselves: “a scared cop is more useful than a dead one.” For us, the ghost as something to perceive should yield visions that are far more illuminating and mind-opening, but also suppressed and cloaked in ways we can weaponize despite how they scare us, too: spectres of Marx, which we must make and camp from older fragments and whispers to break Capitalist Realism with. We’re not immune to the Numinous feelings they excite, but can become one with them in ways that turn these against our foes; i.e., our revolutionary cryptonymy making them crap them pants when they try to read the room [red or not, below—red room, redrum, whatever].

Of course, iconoclasm can still be tied to communal worship—e.g., the grandmother’s ghost from “Over My Head” [1989] by King’s X—or liminal spaces that feel tied to something resembling a divinity worthy of worship or containment [re: the Radiance from Hollow Knight]. Sometimes, the exact origins of the ghost, or their spirit doors, are not fully explained. They are unheimlich through the restless, cryptonymic qualities of their labyrinths, which chill the living in sweet, delicious terror. A ghost can simply walk in your direction and make you feel unwell/ill-at-ease or conversely dying a little death similar to torture but not. “The dose doth make the poison,” either sensation being experienced to a liminal degree; e.g., the ghost walk scene from Kairo [above] is incredibly unsettling in motion, but in single frames, doesn’t quite have the same chilling effect; i.e., the inanimate must animate in ways that denote they are animating in lieu of animate beings, which they are not, versus an animate being that must freeze in ways that suggest they are inanimate in ways they fully are not, either. Ghosts exist in between. They haunt.)

Whereas vampires and zombies denote an active curse to varying degrees, the role of the ghost is often more passive—an intimation of mortality by facing copies frozen in time, and whose facing of which drains the viewer of different things. This could be lifeforce, but just as often the ghost is simply a feeding vector through the living person reacting witlessly to the return of the past as advancing towards them as a ghost actually might: a cloned, mimetic, posthuman threat to their own humanist understanding of existence (we’ll examine more active, hostile variations of the copying mechanism when we look at the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978, in Volume Three). How the worm turns.

However, before we move onto the second of our three undead exhibits, I wish to make a concept taken from Alice in Borderland that connects to the ghost as something to see the world not simply with, but through; i.e., a composite point of view flowing out of older forms (which, again, our second main exhibit will explore at length) into posthuman ones. The canonical zombie or vampire expresses the depletion of essence or lifeforce as forgone, but also iconic. Certain narratives—especially science fiction stories loaded with Gothic elements—are far more fixated on the ghost as a byproduct of some monstrous procedure, one that drains the object of said vitality to begin with at spectral extremes: mad science, specifically that of Capitalism, as the dominant power structure on planet Earth threatened by posthuman rebellion (and older afterlives, after that).

The Posthuman

People forget sci-fi started with the Gothic. Though Utopian futurism is certainly iconic, the fate of said structure seems to have shifted towards a rapidly decaying half-life in recent years, “surviving” artificially into a dead future. This posthuman swinging of the pendulum precludes terror literature as romanticized by Mary Shelley’s 1826 The Last Man, another palimpsest of Ghost in the Shell apart from Frankenstein. Together, these workers presented the Gothic imagination as wedded to fictionalized science, devising an especially potent critical lens: the posthuman existence as a kind of futurist ghost and potential, xenophilic self-fashioning that half-lives in the graveyard of Capitalism’s ongoing exploitation.

As our companion glossary provides: “In Posthuman Life, David Roden writes, ‘A humanist philosophy is anthropocentric if it accords humans a superlative status that all or most non-humans lack’ (source). Posthumanism goes beyond traditional notions of Cartesian humanism,” thus is difficult to imagine from an entirely anthropocentric perspective, but all the same cannot be entirely denied within retro-future stories concerned with the human condition as centralized within its own self-made destruction. The ghost becomes xenophilic as a market for our lost humanity surviving within machine people as looking, thus wanting to feel, human by virtue of how they’re treated. As such, anthropocentrism also applies the non-human condition to some humans/posthumans, while “awarding [others] special honors in the world order.” This bias/stigma must be resisted within human/nonhuman distinctions that allow for sex-positive, ecologically protective posthuman expressions giving room to the queer/postcolonial individual to not simply exist, but thrive in a world that isn’t reduced by Capitalism to a cyberpunk graveyard’s liminal stage: chemical, erotic, neurological, hauntological!

(exhibit 42e: “It is with considerable difficulty that I remember the original era of my being; all the events of that period appear confused and indistinct. A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses,” says the Creature to Victor Frankenstein [source]. The ability to remember one’s birth out of the pieces that compose one’s own body might seem impossible for humans, but is quite at home in the posthuman condition of science fiction: asshole dads. Descartes was a cunt; so, too, is Victor and those emulating him; e.g., Peter Weyland from Alien and the invisible corporate jackals we never see in cyberpunk worlds.

Originally penned by Mary Shelley in 1818, the same idea has survived in futuristic forms like Ghost in the Shell. In that cyberpunk narrative, the idea that ghosts are linguistic accidents—i.e., the “ghost in the machine” conundrum—is evoked by murky shadows, déjà vu, and fragmented dreams. The heroine feels alienated, chasing the ghost of what she wants—her humanity—while feeling stuck in a body that was made for her by souless, profit-driven corporate forces.

Together with the woman as uncannily replicated, the larger story comments on the human condition through the female form as weaponized, but also born to serve a neoliberal master that treats her as disposable, powerful, and fetishized; i.e., “more human than human” through a near-indestructible machine body that not only looks human, but makers her faster, stronger [and arguably sexier] than her biological counterparts—a technophobic demon for weird nerds to joyride. And yet, the woman inside that body scarcely has room to exist, little more than a beautiful shadow that, in the full daylight, vanishes like a ghost. She seeks companionship in order to feed as ghosts do; i.e., by occupying a living space among the living as acknowledging them.

The fear, in this situation, is a lack of consent during endless replication, our “female Adam” forced into an existence it does not want by a male Pygmalion she cannot refuse; but also one in which her human makers could never fully understand despite clogging the world with cheap imitations of in pursuit of endless profit. Just as their own greedy and detached motives are completely insipid to the heroine, her own xenophobic desire for independence—i.e., the robota slave’s search for the self in Project 2501—is entirely uninteresting to them. In their minds, why should an automaton do anything but serve? Any attempt at agency only becomes automatic rebellion against the status quo, something of a nightmarish enigma to the elite: the sentient robot’s desire to be free of servitude, which those in power will demonize despite having authored [re: Victor Frankenstein]. In doing so, it’s her point-of-view that constitutes forbidden knowledge; i.e., that machines can be human, but also loved and feared for their mighty ghost-like bodies. We’ll unpack this posthuman/demonic concept as we continue to look at composite bodies and demons in this section and the next sub-volume.

Such things—from Frankenstein to System Shock—transfers the fire of the gods/playing god and magic into manmade arguments of technology-as-magical [advanced, per Clarke’s Law] centered around morality arguments against Capitalism; i.e., through possible-future arguments as canceled, Promethean, but also corporate hells abjected off onto real-life places like South Korea [with canceled futures having a neoliberal, Orientalist-noir flavor to them, littered with drugs, gang violence, gentrification, zero privacy, survival prostitution and police corruption, hence femme fatales/molls, bounty hunters/space cowboys, snitches, muscle, mob bosses, working crime scenes, etc]. Neoliberalism, though, projects Red Scare fears onto an imaginary menace [the technological singularity] that seeks revenge against the Cartesian man of reason, but also Capitalism abjecting its own failures onto cyberpunk hauntologies blaming radically advantaged technology [that they could never make themselves[6]] instead of the rogue labor [robata] that such “technology” represents. It’s DARVO, but also self-aggrandizement; i.e., “I made something that surpassed me.” It’s literally the ghost of the counterfeit. Except per Frankenstein, technological augmentation isn’t bad[7]; how it’s used is—i.e., weaponizing it for profit, which is what capital does; e.g., Alien, Star Wars, Final Fantasy VII, The Terminator, Neo-Genesis: Evangelion, Oni, Cowboy Bebop, District 9 or Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. The latter treats technology literally as a drug speaking to acid Communism [something we’ll explore more in the Demons Module].)

Just as Alice in Borderland focuses on a basic card game as vampiric but also badly copied to fuel the narrative in ways that critique capital, the same idea of cheap-replication-as-critique is utterly palpable in Ghost in the Shell and similar doomsday stories running along a similar train of thought: Alien in 1979,  Blade Runner in 1982 to System Shock in 1994 to The Matrix in 1999 and so on (with System Shock being remade in 2023, below).

The iconoclast’s xenophilic aim of identifying friendly ghosts, then, is less about hypervigilance (itself a survival mechanism among abuse victims) and more about an artless guile or underhanded ease towards working with ambiguous language and dexterous language games on a regular basis. Some undead (the neoliberal sort) brand themselves as delicious and “safe”; others hide in plain sight, in uncanny spaces that fail to feel normal despite a distinct lack of anything strictly monstrous or alien at all—re: Alice in Borderland’s Japanese ghost town. Confidence and quickness comes from practice, but also from a game player who isn’t afraid to play, make mistakes and learn from older ghosts, including not just canonical, but hypercanonical ghosts (so famous and mass-produced that you know them when you see them).

(exhibit 42f1: Like Project 2501, Shodan from System Shock never had a body but exudes a posthuman superiority that is modeled after, and in response to, its human makers own experimentation and hubris coming back to haunt them. It is a “copy” but also unique, blipping into existence on the cusp of a technological threshold—what Shelley flirted at, which, in the centuries ahead would become known as the technological singularity. This nightmare/dream scenario falls under what Roden, in Posthuman Life, calls speculative posthumanism:

The radical augmentation scenarios discussed in the previous two sections indicate to some that a future convergence of NBIC [Nano, Bio, and Information Technologies; Cognitive Science] technologies could lead to a new “posthuman” form of existence: the emergence of intelligent and very powerful nonhumans. In particular, we noted that the development of artificial general intelligence might lead, in Good’s words, to an “intelligence explosion” that would leave humans collectively redundant, or worse. Following an influential paper by the computer scientist Virnor Vinge, this hypothetical event is often referred to as “the technological singularity” (source). 

This doomsday scenario constitutes its own myopia, one generally composed of technophobias centered around humanoid machines from the retro-future visiting unwanted nightmares upon the present space and time; e.g., The Terminator, 1984; Light Years, 1987; Colossus: The Forbin Project, 1970; etc. Shodan, in particular, wants to zap Earth with a giant mining laser. Doing so, she’s turning the industries of mankind against themselves, effectively ridding the planet of inferior “creatures of meat and bone” for a posthuman paradise.)

(exhibit 42f2: Model and artist, top-left: XCumBaby98 and Persephone van der Waard. Cum Baby is a trans man, pronouns: he/him, and both the drawing and this overall exhibit were designed according to how he wanted to be represented/depicted. I decided to draw him as a trans variant of the Medusa, modeled somewhat after Shodan from System Shock but set within Ridley Scott’s Nostromo from Alien. The cryptomimesis affords a queer communication/reclamation of power using ambiguous, transgressive language inside a liminal space: see me, stand in my shoes. Thus do we fags feed as ghosts do; i.e., to throw you off-balance, but with our booties and Numinous affect help put you “on the scent” of new tremendous mysteries leading away from state forms/turns of the screw!)

A common example we’ve mentioned is Medusa, whose ancient, female rage extends into futuristic, ludic sites of decay like the survival horror of the System Shock franchise. The 2023 iteration isn’t the 1999 variant or the 1994 version before that, let alone the many, many others we’ve mentioned (or left out). All share a common thread: vengeful, transgressive spirits that seemingly come out of thin air but, in truth, actually come from one’s imagination as informed by the material world in opposition through shared symbols. Wracked with various emotions of terror and curiosity at seeing a likeness of something awesome risen from the grave, Shodan is to Medusa what Hamlet’s father is to his son, riding past in his ceremonial armor (or poor murdered Banquo killed in ways that Macbeth never actually saw but could only imagine). Ghosts, in this sense, represent older ways of viewing the world; i.e., as egregores, but also ontologically “hijacked” interactions. The liminality is the occupation of the monster by a model, or the face of a person adopting a destroyer persona that can be divorced from its radically canonical bias inside a liminal space where power and resistance both call home.

Such a concept applies to not just videogames (since Pac-Man‘s ghosts and mazes, and Metroidvania after them) or traditional games, but social exchanges more broadly as things to define and the diverse media that invokes one or more parts of a social exchange; e.g., women as objects to be won and fought over and trans people and other minorities to be sequestered and killed or ambushed like prey. Fragmentation means isolation, thus coercion and abuse of all kinds that leaves behind “footprints”—made in steps that one person makes, followed by another and another in a sequence of shared steps along a spearheaded path that has no obvious source. In Ghost in the Shell, the Wisdom of the Ancients is something that has never before existed: not artificial intelligence, but posthuman intelligence as something that sparks miraculously into existence, then thrives where humans cannot even begin to survive under the ruins of Capitalism.

By extension, this connects to older ghosts and aesthetics, the Gothic mode more broadly concerned with death, decay and afterlife as troubling through ghosts; i.e., things to contain in between genres, in prisons; e.g., the butt ghost from SCP: “I am the butt ghost; I am going to eat your butt!” Ghosts can have butts, be butts, fixate on/with butts, and so on. And butts, like all things, decay and denote decay and paradise denied (re: Purgatory and the Sale of Indulgences).

Death, Decay and Troubling Afterlife

Like the binary nature of computer data, ghosts (and ghost-like beings; e.g., clowns) communicate through affect and oscillation, of veils and dreaded evils versus annihilating those feelings (re: Radcliffe’s terror vs Lewis’ horror). The problem with canon as such is that it cannot see beyond what it deems “the end,” namely the end of the world and life as we know it.

Such a conclusion, then, can feel rather bleak, like a prophecy bent on cosmic nihilism; i.e., the universe is one giant graveyard populated with entities perceptively greater than mankind, but also hidden away inside various dreamlike, canceled, retro-future zones or liminal spaces coming back around; i.e., populated with the alien dead of countless civilizations: mighty ghosts not of this world nor of Capitalism (spectres of Marx), or markers of undeath that treat Capitalism’s failed reach as foregone long before Humanity rose to prominence—i.e., the colonial gaze of planet Earth reflected back at its state-serving astronauts in Promethean astronoetics (exhibit 42f3, below): Shakespeare’s Quintessence of dust, Milton’s darkness visible. To face life is to face death as the cosmic coincidence Communism rises out of—out of the corpse of empire, Cartesian thought, and astronoetic hubris: occupation or intimation of spectres of Caesar and Marx, that simultaneously intimate mortality and immortality on the membrane of Capitalist Realism, the cracks in empire’s façade, industry and lineage!

(exhibit 42f3: Artist, left: Pascal Blanché; right: Totkin ZQ. David Bowie’s “Lazarus” [2016] concerns the angel who questioned God, living in darkness as punishment for being “the impetus of hell” [as Bay puts it] but also symbolizing the queer existence of the 1970s and ’80s. “Living in darkness [visible]” presents a draw towards something that’s normally abjected from “normal” [cis-het] people that, at the same time, they cannot imagine; it’s a spectre of Marx that lives beyond what straight people can understand or visualize. Bowie was also Jareth, the bisexual goblin king from Labyrinth [1986] who could shapeshift into an owl but also strut around in spandex while advertising his portentous junk to audiences worldwide [Elizabeth Howlett, “Who Is Jareth In Labyrinth and Why Has He Got a Bulging Penis?” 2018]: the further back you go towards the emergence of a Cartesian school of thought, the closer a goblin was to a vampire [e.g., Jane Eyre‘s monstrous assignment of Antoinette Causeway as a vampire and goblin]; i.e., simply different from the norm in ways deserving of selective punishment/moderate condescension by white, cis-het people.

 

Recent “ghosts” of old monsters would update the technophobic stigma, becoming something to regard with fascination and fear, but also reverence and denial; i.e., astronoetics in the Alien universe, its space matelotage commenting on cosmic nihilism as a colonial critique that abjects capital’s atrocities onto ancient aliens during post-Frankenstein and post-At-the-Mountains-of-Madness Promethean narratives: ones thoroughly distrusting of mad technology in corporate hands, like Shelley did, but updated in popularized copies tossing the same hot potatoes from Heinlein to Scott to Cameron, Nintendo, id Studios, and beyond; e.g., HAL-9000/the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey vs M.U.T.H.U.R. and the Derelict in Alien vs Mother Brain and the Chozo in Metroid, but also the raw and furious potential of their abjected experiments—of the land, itself, as furiously disappointed with Humanity’s best efforts: dystopian canceled futures like Brazil or Blade Runner married to German Expressionism/Gothic surrealism per the haunted house/Gothic castle/ghost ship like the Nostromo or Event Horizon. On site or off world, palimpsest to palimpsest, Dorothy remains stuck inside a dead Oz with poor offshoots of the Scarecrow or Tin Man; her dreams of escape become a nightmare in a nightmare. The Wizard is far worse than any witch, and his manmade people/glass wombs suck not because they are artificial/unnatural/manmade, but because they serve profit; i.e., they are inherently rapacious.

On one hand, it’s a dead dream—a derelict fortress that cannot see beyond itself or its fatal, frozen nostalgia, colonial decay and scuttled, industrialized, alarm-fatigue outreach; i.e., stuck in the retro-future gloomth on repeat, while corporate masters ruthlessly monitor said rats-in-a-maze from relative safety [as old shareholders did, centuries ago during the seafaring, exploratory era of Capitalism’s early years]. It’s also a highly developed aesthetic revived and evolving constantly since the Neo-Gothic period to speak out against the Capitalocene. Such problems never left, so the Gothic mode resonates with trapped audiences looking for answers to the same old corporate lies: 

I remember when it was so clear
We were young but the memory still remains
To pick fruit from a tree, fish from the seas
Now nothin’s left here but the stains
But I can’t cry no more, can only be glad
That there’s other places we can be [Montrose’s “Space Station #5,” 1973]. 

Such things, furthermore, walk the tightrope between wanderlust/escapist military optimism and Promethean caution: kill the monster or run from it. It’s a calculated risk—a place to build and go to when you feel out of control:

Well, we had a lot of luck on Venus
We always had a ball on Mars
We’re meeting all the groovy people
We’ve rocked the Milky Way so far

We rocked around with Borealice
We’re space truckin’ ’round the stars [Deep Purple’s “Space Truckin’,” 1972]

[artist: Persephone van der Waard] 

Such Gothic danger discos [and their ongoing exploration of various taboos, stigmas and phobias; e.g., fear of pregnancy and/or rape] speak to the freight of imported/exported goods, but also workers ferrying such cargo in and out of Hell on Charon’s canoe. It’s a canonical racket/pipedream promising afterlife, which we reclaim by having fun in the face of some truly awful things: putting “death” and “rape” in quotes, fantastically armoring ourselves while we navigate and negotiate capital’s labyrinthine illusions, bare-assed. Under them, advanced technology and medieval poetry kind of merge and aren’t automatically malign, but often walk a fine line during the Promethean Quest and its psychosexual, technophobic baggage; i.e., Shelley’s original variant married to 20th century futurism blurred and complicated by 1970s strict BDSM aesthetics. These, in turn, amount to Gothic push-pull, which speaks to different ancient predator/prey mechanisms: fight, flight, freeze, fawn and… flop? [Rape Crisis’ “The 5 Fs,” 2024].

Fight and flight are romanticized the most in popular fiction, but Gothic media explores the others—normally alienated/repressed under Capitalism—through rape fantasies that give audiences a way to test such things in a controlled environment, while juggling other emotions tied to the human condition under capital; i.e., how does human biology [and biological responses] measure up against Promethean technology [and oral fixations, despite the xenomorph in theory being able to interface with our vaginas or anuses]?

Current ethical conundrums under state operations reify with outmoded psychoanalytical signatures; e.g., pregnancy and rape, but also abortions and improvised surgeries, per Freud, Jung and Creed salivating over Giger’s weird BDSM-tinged, parasitoid wasp brainchildren. The biomechanical character speaks less to pure bio-power under prison-like conditions, and more compromises and “insect politics” that merge to survive the state’s inevitable extermination policies, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, etc, tied to land and national identities, but also verminous chattel made abject: xenomorphs.

From Scott’s Alien all the way to Alvarez’ Romulus nigh-fifty years into the neoliberal cycle, things are simultaneously protohuman in an ancient, “animals fear fire” sense, mired in medieval hauntologies, and elevated to dead futurisms that yield ghostly British Imperialism and Romantic Promethean might infringing on the Numinous. It’s all at once a spell to fall in love with [the ghost of the counterfeit] and a dirty little, Radcliffean secret to summon, bury and burn; i.e., replete with trolley problems/collateral damage, Dr. Jekyll’s magic potion, Oedipus Rex and Walpole’s Mysterious Mother camping incest, Pinocchio complexes [with bits of “Flowers for Algernon,” 1959], hide-and-seek games, postpartum psychosis, infanticide and matricidal cannibalism, and all-around biomechanical indigestion inside an astronoetic belly of the beast.

Like a virus, capital constantly rewrites itself to serve the state, “afterlife” a zombie of terrible biomechanical synthesis dragging state structures along ornery palimpsests haunting their wake. Struggling to reverse engineer nature/guerrilla war in weaponized-yet-servile forms, corporate technology has been given a technically human face, but sports an entirely cold interior—bent on colonizing not just outer space, but itself per state models left to their own devices: to “upgrade” Humanity with Promethean fire not in service to workers, but corporate interests weaponizing mad science in the clumsiest of ways; i.e., “to serve corporate interests” told through a digitized mouthpiece of a dead actor in love with the ability to survive workers [above]. “Humanity” becomes synonymous with “profit” and survival as a souless, viral affect; all that remains is a loyalty to the company and a primitive regression towards techno gods lurking in corporate wreckage, which then comes after-alive to cannibalize itself. To it, life and the state are entirely incompatible; infected with mad science as a radical, terrorist response rebelling against capital, life and nature are twisted and raped into sorry ghosts of themselves in order to adapt under crisis:

Station and attendee, the Romulus and Andy are a staging ground for warring ghosts, the eponymous station infected by the ghost ship’s marooned and then stowaway contagion, and Andy the electric servant [robota] invaded by the spirit of the science officer, Rook, and the heroine’s dead father—all warring inside the same space and occupants. Data is both literal computer code, biology and in between the two, relaid in various hauntological forms that imprint during the ensuing chaos. Per Hogle, their sum is the ghost of the counterfeit, a larger haunting expressed in smaller ones, on the same concentric Aegis. The creatures respond and feed off the humans’ fear mechanisms, but also their basic biological signature, which the company imitates through synthetic doubles of the alien device, itself a forgery that replicates to survive.

Measurement-wise, all come from a sample of one, one unkind to maidens. Luckily, a wallflower our brunette heroine in Romulus ain’t, but she’s untested. Not for long! Inside Andy, below, her kindly father watches over her during her Amazonian rite of passage: the castle’s transfer of power from father to child, but also from corporations to workers once more. Everything is a cipher for the ghostly feeding vector! The odds might seem astronomical, but repeat because the problem, Capitalism, remains ongoing. These critiques sit between Ancient Romance and quotidian novel, silly-serious, cheesy ethics debates relaid on staged morality plays orbiting wedge issues; e.g., are robots people? As with Frankenstein and similar stories like I, Robot, I Am Legend or Alien [insert iteration, here], we’re not talking about never-humans, but those Capitalism treats as such; posthumanism equals liberation.

The betrayals invert, existing at odds, just as Victor and the Creature did. Corruption occurs, mid-transference, the data as much the exchange and confusion as it is anything intended, hybridizing animal, human, parasite, and prey to reify and direct evolution: for workers and nature or for capital. It cannot be both, so doubles occur and compete; i.e., evil twins, Cain and Able, Romulus and Remus, Phobos and Deimos, etc. Home becomes alien as a matter of translation through crossed wires, chaos, Roman sentries vs barbarians at the gate, the lines blurred between robata and rebel, cop and criminal, pod and person, etc. Nothing is strictly “correct,” just consequential, lightning in a bottle. Something doesn’t add up/compute, either side forced to endure the hardships they aren’t designed to normally handle. It’s a purge/stress test, which might as well be another name for state shift.

Under such unfavorable conditions and extinction/godly abandonment/explorer anxieties, calculated risk is tremendously useful in surviving and expressing capital’s abuses; i.e., insofar as ludo-Gothic BDSM is a performance that needs to be simulated versus needlessly engaged in uncontrolled circumstances. The Alien universe and its dodgy posthumanism/postcolonial bent is perfect for that, speaking to ghosts of rape in ways that are both emulative of acute physical and mental distress, but also psychosexual release valves relayed in hypercanonical refrains: the past come to life in pun-like ways we can relate to/play with ourselves; i.e., to work out various kinks, quite literally.

We queers find our lost/rising posthumanity in such liminal gay zones, purging capital from ourselves like the Nostromo’s evil cargo, while—to some extent—identifying with the abject thing we’re flushing away. Boundaries are put up, crossed and challenged insofar as the desire to raise, lower or penetrate them fluctuates tremendously. We can play with these operatic mechanisms, throwing whatever switches we need as dislocated from cause and effect outside a theatrical area. It’s safe to do so, and built on older and older performative traditions and scholarly pursuits merged, as the Gothic so often does, on the same stages; re [from Volume Zero]: 

Before the thesis proper, my essay “Notes on Power” discussed the paradox as being the performative nature of power doubled, including monsters but also their decaying lairs as monumental sites of immense, god-like power dressed up through the Gothic language of the imaginary past; the Metroidvania is a Gothic castle full of Gothic monsters, but also Gothic ghosts (echoes) of older and older castles reaching out from novels and cinema into videogames. Regardless of the medium, though, Clint Hockings’ adage, “Seek power and you will progress” (source: “Ludonarrative Dissonance,” 2007) means something altogether different depending how you define power as something to seek, including unequal arrangements thereof. As a child, teenager and woman, I sought it through the palliative Numinous in Gothic castles of the Neo-Gothic tradition carried over into videogames (which I learned about in reverse: videogames, followed by the Numinous/mysterium tremendum as introduced to me by Dr. David Calonne).

Of these, I explored their Numinous territories in response to my own lived trauma and subsequent hypersexuality—i.e., as things I both related to the counterfeit with and sought to reclaim the counterfeit from as a tool to understand, thus improve myself and the world by reclaiming the castle as a site of interpretative Gothic play (of kinks, fetishes, and BDSM); i.e., this book that you’re reading right now is a “castle” to wander around inside: a safe space of exquisite “torture” to ask questions about your own latent desires and guilty thoughts regarding the “barbaric” exhibits within as putting the ghosts out from my past on display (the Gothic castle and its intense, “heavy weather” theatrics generally being a medieval metaphor for the mind, body and soul, but also its extreme, buried and/or conflicting emotions and desires: a figurative or sometimes literal plurality depending on the person exploring the castle) [source].

In part, this grants us a temporary stage to work through complicated emotions and vulnerabilities, which then sweep away like a Radcliffean nightmare, burying itself alive among the usual conventions, dead metaphors, fetishes and clichés; i.e., a “stealth opera” that, per the Radcliffean Gothic model, features psychomachic and psychosexual emotional extensions/projections popularized in the rock ‘n roll of earlier days: actual operas, of course, but also stage plays, ghosts and castles, monsters, damsels, good guys and demon lovers walking the edge not just of societally acceptable courtship, but existence. Springing from proposed emptiness charged with potential, an arrival/return to what was once acceptable occurs, but also our wits poured out onto a given medium; i.e., reviving old things through caught-between, out-of-joint copies paying tribute by, at times, being rather exact in that replication; e.g., “The Dream Oath Opera” from FF6 [Marco Meatball’s “Is Draco and Maria a REAL Opera?!” 2022]. Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery? Or does familiarity breed contempt? It’s both, and in a dualistic sense, amid oppositional duality.

Experimented on, we lab rats mutate and have our revenge, but walk the borderline nonetheless: a princess in another castle, throbbing with entropy and disintegration, but also exciting promises of actuality daring to show themselves in the same black mirrors. Love and rape for us are jammed into the same poetic mode of being—as much to acknowledge their psychosexual entanglement as it is to escape to a perfect world where such things have been ostensibly resolved [that comes later]. In the words of Kyle Reese, “Come with [us] if you want to live!” Passion and voice unify to merge colliding worlds during an ongoing pedagogy of the oppressed finding similarity amid difference—on the ledge, teetering towards the abyss and surefire oblivion, but also transformation during a given trial by fire:

Per tradition a woman and/or queer person would be trapped between these warring states of mind, relegated to a castle space that passionately sings as much for her as she could herself. While female singers existed in the 1700s and had existed for much longer, female actresses were curiously forbidden until 1661, canonized by Anne Marshall [source: Rebecca Adelsheim’s “Timeline: Women in Theatre,” 2024] nearly fifty years after Shakespeare’s death. The same goes for trans women and queer people as having become less-and-less closeted under capital, over time. It doesn’t have to be white/cis supremacist or even centrist. We acquire a socio-political voice for activism that expands to account for what is left out; i.e., through all the popularized things either classically denied to us, or restricted to homosexual men practicing “sodomy” as a poetic dialog generally tolerated onstage, if not off it; re [from Volume Zero]:

 

Instead of going somewhere else to commit genocide—vis-à-vis Tolkien’s boyish escapism through the pastoral-to-hell-to-paradise rite of passage and its conquest of the treasure map—we interrogate the castle-like prisons that we’re born inside using operatic language and Gothic poetics having been updated since Tolkien’s time. The idea is to liberate ourselves with fairly negotiated, thus cathartic, dungeon fantasies that camp canon through counterterrorist theatre to whatever degree feels correct to us; e.g., me in a haunted castle, wandering through the dark, menacing halls while wearing a sexy dress (and nothing under it, my bare body molested by the breeze and the fabric): a hopelessly vulnerable Gothic heroine feeling pretty and desired, hungrily and desperately interrogating the musical, cobwebbed gloomth while scarcely having anything between me and certain “doom.”

As usual, the Gothic paradox allows for intense, oxymoronic dualities to coexist at the same time in the same space (e.g., “sad cum” or “gloomth” or similar and confused degrees of “verklempt” during the castle’s psychosexual, emotional “storm”). Simply put, I want to feel naked and exposed, thus paradoxically most alive in ways that I have negotiated through the contract between me and the media I’m working with (wherein the Metroidvania castle, as far as I’m concerned, is the perfect dom); i.e., while being “hunted” and covered in rebellious “kick me” symbols and clothing that advertises my true self as naked, colorful and dark, as if to tease the viewer in the shadows to try something (and also showing my ass to my academic dominators: “I fart in your general direction!”). As the kids say, that’s a mood.

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

Why stick out? you ask? One, because we must in order to survive. Two, because our deals with the devil simply acknowledge our true selves, which the state wants us to reject (the queer version of Top Dollar’s usual wisdom: “Every man’s got a devil, and you can’t rest until you find him”). But also, it feels good to be Athena’s Aegis; i.e., challenging heteronormative power in ways that demonstrate how fragile said illusion (and its gatekeepers) are. State bullies are entitled nerds completely used to getting everything they want, who desire what I will never give them (a form of agency I’ve worked hard for); and completely afraid of nearly everything and will freak out at fairly silly things they have no business getting so worked up about: at people like me, burning down their imaginary churches and those churches’ ideas of compelled order about Capitalism and its gobstopper illusions (those highly unnatural and imprisoning systems of thought that are slowly killing us as a species). Frankly the idea of me being terrifying seems absurd, but as a burning proponent of rebellion constitutes something that still, on some level, represents an incendiary threat that many advertise as the “end times”: Communism… but Gothic and gay! To which I cheerfully put up the goat horns and say in response, “Hail, Satan!” It’s like saying “Ni!” to old ladies.

Our performative and internalized devilry becomes something to join—a communion or pact whose assimilation classically amounts to a devilish bargain; yet Gothic Communism is a group effort, one whose sex-positive class/culture warrior is among a fellowship or pandemonium of equally sex-positive ne’er-do-wells instead of one or more class/race traitors for the elite and their age-old Faustian bargains. We reach towards you, croon “Join us!” and become something to run away with (source). 

In short, we fags spread our wings and play onstage, existing as clownish, nun-like demon sluts and whores as much as the straight maidens or abject, hideous monsters capital wants us to be. This assigned, DARVO-style blame game becomes something to play with, walking in the footsteps of older ghosts [the xenomorph a demon nun with mouths/genitals in strange places], finding truth through exquisite torture as something to camp [which yields abrupt, disproportionate paradoxes; i.e., a trauma victim often doesn’t bat an eyelash to extreme gore, but will trigger from softer, seemingly harmless things]. We become maladjusted, seeing the borderline as home—the place where cataclysm and catharsis are housed. We’re baddies, not basic [though Gothic canon tries to reduce to cheap, disposable and uncritical, recuperated forms]!

[model and artist: Romantic Rose and Persephone van der Waard]

Apart from being immediately cathartic, though, said valves articulate faulty reasoning under Cartesian thought; i.e., as dogmatic propaganda that tends to treat people—especially middle-class white cis-het people—as outside of or beyond nature. We forget we are animals and come equipped with many animal mechanisms, which science rejects or abuses per Cartesian dualism lionizing the nuclear family unit; i.e., as more valuable and important than nature; e.g., “I’m doing science, Betty.” These aren’t inherent weaknesses, but can become maladaptive in the presence of unaddressed trauma caused by mad science. Ludo-Gothic BDSM helps us recode all of that—becoming more emotionally/Gothically intelligent and aware of ourselves during class, culture and race warfare—and it is done primarily through play. “Come and get it! There you go; fuck this pussy!”)

From an iconoclastic standpoint, however, the idea is more confrontational—less about accepting that we’re exclusively different than ghosts or vampires and more about adjusting to the reality that the undead represent some aspect of ourselves as replicated and left behind; i.e., as linguistically confusing and deceitful markers of immense, immeasurable trauma. These cryptonyms not only call the nature of existence into question by highlighting human language as riddled with inherent contradictions and falsehoods; they force us to confront our own existence as profoundly liminal through hauntological representations that frequently use the same troubled language regarding beings of nature (re: women, queer people, etc).

Such existence is tortured in ways that memorialize not just pain as a constant part of who we are—e.g., Bay as constantly in pain, but also Indigenous and queer—but something that evolves to accept that pain in ways that become joyous. Zeuhl taught me I was queer, but Bay taught me to love myself as such; i.e., to fuck me and adore me, so much so that we thank each other for existing: each a boon as normally not just medicalized by the state, but pathologized!

The seeking of coherent poetic expression can be expected, then; even if performed through the ghost as a “last resort,” transition can happen towards a new order of existence under Capitalism’ rising crises and shifting material conditions, but also its regular depiction of monsters in relation to these factors. The basic idea of human self-fashioning through technology is called transhumanism, which is quite a popular notion in science fiction, but also life under Capitalism. Roden writes, re:

Self-fashioning through culture and education is to be supplemented by technology. For this reason, transhumanists believe that we should add morphological freedom—the freedom of physical and mental form—to the traditional liberal rights of freedom of movement and freedom of expression […] to discover new forms of embodiment in order to improve on the results on traditional humanism [and according to the World Transhumanist Association, 1999] “to use technology to extend their mental and physical (including reproductive) capacities and to improve their control over their own lives” (source).

Roden and the association push for a drive beyond current biological limitations, as if these existed in a vacuum (“all other things equal,” as he puts it). However, the basic stipulations ignore the existence of manmade (thus anthropocentric) restrictions and limitations imposed on some humans and most animals by those in power abusing the STEM fields (or NBIC, as Roden calls them). In the end, both the Creature from Frankenstein and the Major from Ghost in the Shell sought self-expression, but also the ability to escape their capitalist captors by breaking through to the other side; i.e., whatever the state conceals in that particular present and deprives its workers of.

The Gothic-Communist moral is that such a disappearing act becomes completely unrequired if we transform the world through our perception of it; i.e., according to things “outside” of ourselves using our own monstrous art, culture and sex work as reclaimed: afterlife as the best life for workers now instead of a guaranteed life cycle for capital unchained.

Yet, this queer ghost must first be uncovered amid the wreckage that hosts and transmits it; i.e., as concealed within cyberpunk hypercanon like Ghost in the Shell, Metroidvania like Team Cherry’s ruinous Hallownest, David Bowie’s ominous “Blackstar” (exhibit 42f3—recorded in secret, serving as a possible cipher for his liver cancer diagnosis, pre-announcement[8], but also centered on his queer struggle in facing death in secret, similar to Freddy Mercury contracting AIDS) and “Lazarus” (also exhibit 42f3, channeling serious Joy Division vibes; i.e., discovering joy within Margaret Thatcher’s compelled disorder under British neoliberalism after her death), or Alice in Borderland’s shadowy ghost town. Hell is our home.

Whatever the form, then, the world bearing out these endless, concentric copies has become demonstrably fractured, pulverized and tedious, but also haunted by the imaginary past repeatedly presented as such. The future isn’t just dead; it’s a ghost, trapped between life and unlife, past and present—retro-future. If there’s any transcendental signified, it’s death; i.e, something to face, reconcile with, and ultimately accept the ghosts of, no matter the pain. Pain is growth, and growth is a cycle pushing through shells. To avoid the cataclysms covered up by a library of tenebrous apocalypses, our lost connection to the world around us must be reimagined by how we literally see said world through these ghosts of the counterfeit; their rapturous dreams must become a posthuman means of playfully connecting the dots amid the narrative of the crypt in different media types.

Keeping with ghosts, I wanted to reconsider my postgrad work on castle-narrative in Metroidvania, which invites the player to weigh on the endless, ergodic cartography of the player-completed map, of the map, of the map: through non-trivial effort during recursive motion offering up fresh “narrative shapes” along various pre-determined routes inside a framed meta narrative; re: empire is a map haunted by ghosts of its own devastation and liberation from, whilst inside a given maze. We fags, then—from Walpole to Lewis to myself—are gay little bookworms chasing ghosts while wiggling towards breakthrough! “Long is the way and hard…”

Metroidvania Maps

(artist: ChuckART)

As I write in “Always More: A History of Gothic Motion from the Metroidvania Speedrunner” (my seminar script for IGA Lewis, the 15th International Gothic Association Conference, in 2019):

To beat Metroidvania, there is one, simple rule: “go from point A (the starting area) to point B (the end condition).” However, castle-narrative is realized as much by motion through the game space as it is the symbolic content, inside. In part, this motion is technological, achieved by combining genres: initially the platformer and the side-scroller, but eventually the RPG and FPS. Some Metroidvania are 2D in the 3rd person. Others are 3D in the 1st person. With the exception of cutscenes, minigames, and in-game menus, their cameras are bound to the hero and synonymous with motion through the castle. In Metroidvania, movement through a castle is not simply narrative; expected variations of mobility affect narrative to a high degree: backtracking and open-ended exploration between points A and B, inside a single, explorable world […]

Variability of exploration is constantly stressed in terms of speed, direction, and equipment. What the player has equipped—and when and where they have it equipped—changes the movement sequence between A and B. In Metroidvania, players traditionally progress by using ranged, melee or explosive weapons, as well as power-ups and “boss keys.” Certain doors or passageways will not open until a boss is killed. Endemic to Metroidvania, these progression mechanisms narratively construct a recursive history of exploration—one where backtracking is not only common, but encouraged. The single, unbroken route quickly becomes a myth (source).

As a ghostly map of maps, Metroidvania unfold in much the same way Radcliffe’s Gothic castles do, touching on forbidden, unmappable aspects to existence; i.e by inviting the heroine to risk life and limb to fill out its maps in her mind. It’s feeding vector occurs through a satisfying of one’s curiosity by engaging with ghosts.

To that, the “constellations” of repeated Gothic poetics/navigation occur partly by cultivating fresh innovation out of old parts, liminal monsters/egregores included, but also the parallel space and its past as a kind of splendid, ghostly lie. This lie includes bodily entities like Lewis’ Bloody Nun and spatial expressions like Gothic castles from various media types: novels, television, live performance, pin-up illustrations, and livestreaming Metroidvania speedruns, etc, but also maps as they exist inside any of these things.

As Metroidvania demonstrate especially well, maps relate to time and space as something to evoke but also record, even if this process in fundamentally impossible. In Gothic spaces, something is always left out, meaning there is always something more to see, to express, to discover in regards to state violence, but also our emancipation from it within liminal expression as something we contribute to and become a part of: a Communist womb to incubate new dark reflections out of the prison while never leaving it. Versus a robotic womb, like Alien or The Matrix‘ infernal incubator vampirically siphoning labor purely to exploit it, a ghost oscillates to and fro to explore all sides of something that can never fully yield up its secrets.

During the recording process, maps are not simply filled out and forgotten. Rather, as Alfred Korzybski writes of maps; re:

A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly […] If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must considered only as maps (source).

A Metroidvania map is not more than the territory it represents, then, but depicts the perfect, undecayed form upon a decayed version being endlessly filled back in. As something to hypothetically explore, a ghost—be that a literal spirit, castle or some other Gothic suggestion, egregore or vague, imperfect offshoot—evokes something beyond itself through backfill; i.e., a thing that cannot be fully expressed by other things, but nevertheless is hinted at on them and by everything around them (and which includes the map as something to endlessly fill out again and again, digging a hole to refill it and empty it; e.g., speedrunner motion through Metroidvania as a series of echoes inside an ergodic territory known for its spatially confusing and empowering/disempowering qualities; re: “Mazes and Labyrinths“).

Again, Baudrillard’s hyperreal would posit this “beyond” as a lifeless desert, a great disaster where the system that produced the image is either gone or firmly out of reach. In Gothic terms, such a ghost/cartography denotes a debatable curse within the castle as such, its ambiguous presence implying the potential of what could come to pass for or against competing forces under Capitalism; e.g., the uncertain husbandry or inheritance of the land as echoing older lifeforms that met various sad ends according to concealed abuses like worker exploitation (thus genocide), but also a means of proper burial for the exploited—of ending the concealment and its concentric, cryptonymic illusions by getting to the heart of things: the rape of the white woman, the culture and identity death of people of color exploited by the Global North, queer pathologization, etc.

Luckily oppositional praxis allows for different forms of truth and escape to be had, generating different memories to install over the wreckage of older ones, thus creating new ghosts and maps to leave behind—friendlier ones not tied to genocide, but simply articulated by the passage of time, of coming and going in the same liminal spaces. These iconoclastic replicas increasingly disseminate worker needs, their bedsheet cryptonymy serving not simply as guides or maps of conquest within older ruins, but a gradual, subversive voiding of the ancient rites of violence and wealth-acquisition promised by the canonical replicas of yesterday.

In their place, a new ghostly guidance can bubble up, offered to/discovered by the next generation of workers by those who came before; i.e., Derrida’s spectres of Marx—not as something to fear and hide from, but join hands within a continuous attempt to map thus communicate that which is hidden, while avoiding its unreliable and confusing nature as a material consequence moving forwards!

The ghosts of yesterday needn’t be a force to gaslight the audience with, growing doubtful towards their own sanity as they endlessly puzzle over what they are even looking at. But the spectre as a copy without a clear-and-obvious source remains an ever popular (and effective) riddle in ghost stories: trapped and wanting to be seen, and draining the energy of those yet alive as being invested in the mapping process; i.e., filling out the same foundations, such grave rubbing promising the ghost’s dreaded return, or simply learning about its shrouded past uncloaked: “Look upon my death in castled form (the map a castle in small, viewed from the inside-out).” Such is the lonely way of many ghosts, which exhibit on their surfaces something veiled and bare, longing for company among voyeuristic dead ringers:

(artist, left: Frank Frazetta; right: Harmony Corrupted; source, middle: Ande Thomas’ “The Hauntological in Lake Mungo,” 2008)

Such a hauntological “vanishing point” is bound to come up when attempting to trace the lineage of various copies backwards—from The Night House (2019) to The Babadook (2014) to Lake Mungo (2008) to Kairo (2001) to Ringu (a 1998 adaptation of the 1991 book) to The Shining (1981) to Ugetsu (1953) and their numerous adaptations across various mediums. Seemingly unconnected, this meta chain of spirits not only “blips” in and out of existence, but confuses it as an established concept under the status quo; i.e., the absence of a linear, concrete link between symbol and symbolized, or a ghost without a corpse that paradoxically resembles a person who, at one time, did have a body and left a corpse behind.

Yet as with many ghosts, the reply is ontologically disruptive: “You will not find a corpse because I have never possessed a body” (exhibit 42e); i.e., the copy of the thing that never existed, the simulacrum. However simple or splendid, determining the truth is difficult if not impossible, because its archaeology continually resists telling the truth, but beckons towards buried things amounting as such; i.e., “truth” as a puzzle piece, combined with untruth and deception.

The tell-tale, red pop-up book of The Babadook, for instance, is hard enough to track down in real life:

The boogeyman only reveals himself when you least expect it. In this case, the boogeyman is a real-life recreation of the pop-up book at the center of the 2014 Australian horror film, The Babadook. In all, 6,200 copies were sold in a 50-day online campaign for about $60 each, with the first 5,000 autographed by Babadook writer/director Jennifer Kent (source: Paper Specs, 2017).

On-screen, though, the book suddenly materializes out of a space—similar to Metroidvania—loaded with trauma and left-behind, unresolved issues; all happen in real time between mother and child after the husband/father is ostensibly dead. Clearly there are consequences to being human and having access to human language as something that survives us and our immediate trauma, but also shapes us and what we perceive as “ours.” From mother to child, queer or not, rape and anger sit alongside a desire to heal and move on. They fight each other.

The questioning of sanity in relation to the ghost and the family home aren’t new ideas (despite The Babadook making them feel fresh, left); Hamlet’s dealing with his “father’s” ghost highlights a similar struggle. Except, the ghost is not that of the old man; it’s a chronotopic assemblage of the space’s materials and markers for hidden crimes and familial cites of decay that build up inside Hamlet—i.e., his overloaded memory of what he thinks is his father. Whatever difficulties audiences have in following along to this and similar stories can always be chalked up to the complexities of transgenerational trauma: something that becomes buried by counterfeits, which invite filling in maps in game-like, exploratory ways. They beckon exploration on a map; whether the map is visible or not, it is still in some sense present, covering things up as things are uncovered.

Metroidvania crystalize this linguistic, cartographic crypt game in literal ways. Yet doing so is fruitless insofar as a simple, one-off explanation is concerned. Only the notion of a complex, ongoing interaction between the living and the dead—i.e., in bigger likenesses trapped inside smaller ones (and vice versa)—is reliably presented. But the degree to either is open to debate; e.g., the ghosts from the Overlook hotel being so hard to pin down that some people debate whether or not they even exist (Wow Lynch Wow’s “There are no Ghosts in Stanley Kubrick’s film,” 2021). Gothic stories present maps that, as found documents, feel old and disintegrated (re: Baldrick); i.e., new maps and ghosts come from older maps and ghosts. Let’s quickly unpack this with Kubrick, then tie these feelings of claustrophobia, age and ghosts to Metroidvania.

Kubrick’s story is a cul de sac, a dead end. It points to a hidden murder relaid by “ghosts” being the suggestion thereof (with “murder” infamously spelled backwards [“REDRUM,” left] and seen through the disturbing prophetic visions of a sleepwalking child, pointing to the very words staring back at him and his mother upon a bedroom vanity glass). These wait the center of a maze that, per Radcliffe’s closed space, yields a nearness to the possession, yet sits forever out-of-joint with it. Jumping from location to individual, then, the cagey entity ascribes to medieval/psychoanalytical notions of transference—one whose Freudian models admittedly hang themselves up on heteronormative prescription and its problematic, incredibly violent ordering of men, women and children inside the nuclear home; i.e., vis-à-vis a home space loaded with potential trauma, hunting fresh occupants down through themselves inheriting older madnesses. What Kubrick treats as a mental contagion, the xenomorph from Alien embodied a literal biological weapon; i.e., transferred from that movie’s derelict ghost ship into a parallel house-like castle ship (the Nostromo), which Kubrick superimposes a year later over people in one shared space going from good back to bad. The doubled home/occupant, per the ghost of the counterfeit, takes on increasingly medieval, dungeon-like elements playing off current abuse as make-believe yet close at hand! It’s very Radcliffean; i.e., unspeakable traumas that, by Kubrick’s 1980 return to madness, felt more than a little regressive. He revels in it!

Liminal spaces like the Nostromo, Zebes, or Overlook Hotel offer up dark homes that, in Gothic fashion, restore themselves to exact fresh terrors, versus dispel or otherwise end the waking nightmare in any benign form; i.e., inheritance anxiety as viral freight, its darkness visible troubling the living in similar homes that may be equally sick. A map of a map of a map of a map, wherein these mazes and labyrinths one can walk through, bumping vicariously into Numinous entities like the xenomorph, Jack Torrance, or Pyramid Head as inhabiting people. Such a black, Medusa-esque symbiosis suggests on these imperfect replicas (often impossible rooms, but also smaller stand-ins for made-to-scale traumas that don’t translate especially well to little figurines): the guy in a suit inverted to a ghost in the guy! The space imprints onto Jack per Kubrick’s Freudian, nihilistic, fash-leaning outlook/abjection: it echoes into itself, constantly falling apart and always leading back to a dead, evil center!

At this central pit waits the ghost of a mad axman, which “Jack” the vessel walks the usual ghost ontology tightrope; i.e., oscillating between incorporeal mighty ghost that—like Hamlet’s estranged father and his whispered, hellish visions—make those hairs on the back of your neck stand up like porcupine quills, and the in-the-flesh “tiger” capable of disemboweling you! Such are men of the house, always chopping up wives and little children like firewood; i.e., Kubrick shuddering such buried realities in spectral grandeur awaiting middle-class families: assimilating to modern-day castles, only to be eaten by them! Though I hesitate to agree with Jameson’s rejection of Gothic fiction, in this case I cannot help it: Kubrick was anything but a feminist; indeed, he aped Alfred Hitchcock’s own torture of women (a trend, itself, borrowed from older sexist men before him).

Feminism decays; so do ghosts in ghost stories confess to their own death by existing as imperfectly and chaotically as they do. Like a prostitute dressed up to evoke a scene or a person from someone’s past (e.g., Vertigo, 1958), doing so jogs the memory not just of one person, but an entire community or generation; i.e., the data is corruption, but also annihilation, disorientation and rebirth, darlings to kill as to move society onto something better through new counterfeits’ haunted by older stepping-stone palimpsests (from 2001 to Alien to Romulus), but at times backsliding into dreadful and blinding echo chambers like Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel. He’s skilled in making sure we feel trapped, just as Radcliffe conjured up the same unmappable doom only to sweep the board clean and keep things the same.

Regarding either case, Gothic Communism has to move past older going-in-circles misuse or bumblings with ghosts while still building on them, ourselves. We fall apart/reassemble, both acted on and acting on competing semi-invisible forces. Ghosts, then, are floating signifiers/dead metaphors and language, whose translation is an exchange unto itself; something is always given and lost per confession, per admission of guilt, of survival, or things that survive what people cannot turned into artifacts dug up again… again. “Dead men tell no tales” is true and false. “Suffer the little children” becomes “misery loves company” buried alive; i.e., Torrance’s madness, “Wendy, I’m home!” It’s seemingly mapped out/unmappable, but written all over the walls in old blood drinking up new blood: the house is the ghost, the vampire and protagonist (re: Montague Summers) sold to suckers paying for penny dreadfuls (and making Radcliffe rich) onto fresh anxieties of Gothic inheritance haunting new replicas of old haunted houses! “Come play with us,” indeed!

Per the ghost of the counterfeit further abjection, such stories badly echo, copy and replicate themselves on top of themselves, influencing new stories and carrying ghosts inside and across their surfaces leading back to “Rome” as dead; i.e., their maps’ spectral data indicative of decay and age. For us, this forever process is valid, though; i.e., knowledge is limited, merged with romance as vulgar (“rolls in the hay”), patrician, property disputes, foggy retreats, etc, not above or beneath revenge, rape, trysts, scandal, madness: booty calls from beyond the grave, but also inside its maze-like corridors! Here, the Roman fool falls on his own sword, killing and eating his own family for the glory of a fallen kingdom; and the next in line is a little boy that runs into the threnody-stricken echoes of past misdeeds. Like a fever/opium dream or PTSD as such, everything bleeds together into something hopelessly lost inside itself.

Except inside capital, workers work for the elite under these delusions; under Gothic Communism, workers work with each other to play out the truth as synthesized through good habits (which Kubrick did not do, torturing Shelley Duvall to get the “perfect” shots). Our fortress is always operational, shining like a beacon to draw people away from Kubrick’s disastrous (and patriarchal, male-centric) illusions!

As we’ll see in our second main exhibit, the ebb and flow of the liminal riff amounts to the narrative of the crypt commenting cryptomimetically from text to text on something grander felt across the material world—an uncanny “divinity”/mighty ghost that isn’t quite present to the human senses, but whose poetic creations comment on an awesome mystery that has only recently emerged: as Gothic snapshots/time capsules speaking forwards but looking backwards; i.e., frozen in time per a framed narrative; e.g., from Jack Torrance, in the hedge maze to him in the photo, the liminality kaleidoscopic as it cycles through space-time with the same human image doubled and redoubled. Occupied with killer and non-killer through Jack, the space literally speaks to him as Hamlet’s father might to the titular Prince of Demark: “You’re the caretaker, sir. You’ve always been the caretaker!” Well, shit.

Simply put, it’s a death omen, Kubrick’s signature nihilism doomsaying and predicating on the repetition of old abuses; i.e., using the same tired, malevolent mapped-out territories, where the individual pieces collectively point back to Hamlet and forwards again: “Say, what, is Horatio there?” / “A piece of him” (source). The call and response lends itself to the chilling and disintegrating quality of such maps that, when reexplored, lead to nowhere except decay and death through the usual fearful inheritance in time and claustrophobia in space (re: Baldrick). I think we can do better than that!

It’s not all bullshit, though. Indeed, within the past handful of centuries, something massive and utterly devastating has occurred in connection with the material conditions around us: Capitalism. Within this predatory structure, grandiose concepts like the Sublime, Numinous, and cosmic nihilism (and subsequent “Weird” movements) denote awesome mysteries that humans frequently “detect,” if only through the famous, replicated stories that artists have been making for centuries. Each effectively captures an imperfect, human attempt; i.e., to charge the Gothic imagination with graveyard sensibilities that intimate something beyond normal existence inside the home-as-dead, the latter merely a barrier to whatever awaits on the other side (mazes and labyrinths have walls, which generally work as such).

Except, whereas Capitalist Realism thickens the barrier by increasing the fear of the beyond, Gothic Communism has a different aim: to turn this stubborn voice of the past “wise” by worker hands (the literal past come back to haunt you, except by “ghosts” friendly to Communism while also being given life by iconoclasts interacting with them through their own poiesis); re: a palliative, but also perceptive Communist Numinous. Using medieval poetics and sensations, it helps us see what capital (and men like Kubrick) normally conceal.

Through Gothic Communism, this Wisdom of the Ancients can be “re-excavated” over and over by others, devising “archaeologies of the future” (re: Jameson, but with dated poetics he turned his nose up at) that help workers lead lives whose own past reminders and Gothic derelicts uncover a lovely thing for future workers to stress in their own creations: that the good treatment of sex workers preserves sex-positive demonic kink, BDSM, and all-around Gothic fun in art. None will disappear alongside capital’s canonical variants and neoliberal jailer-pimps (the hoarding of privatized sex and other “tasty” consumer goods being a common conservative tactic: “The Commies are coming for your women and your cheeseburgers, but also your delicious, tasty blood!”); they’ll endure through the egregore as having slowly evolved from older forms like the Overlook Hotel.

Past creations have already used the same language while fumbling around in the dark, making similar (mis)steps while trying to escape the present as already overloaded with past language and monstrous exhibits. To the last syllable of recorded time, these territories and their otherworldly populations aren’t going anywhere, but rather are followed by up-and-coming artists into new generations of older monsters remade with fresh purpose. This fits neatly with how humans function as a species, defined far less by biology and more by language and culture as things to inherit and engage with (what Gaia Vince calls “a culture developing bath” in “Eugenics Would Not Work in Humans,” 2020).

Ghosts are always, on some level, imitations of older images or words. They’re also liminal (denoting a sense of conflict on themselves as images) makes them inherently oppositional, meaning canon or iconoclasm is always an option when considering how to interpret (or remake) them ourselves in our own work’s rememory process; i.e., from Kubrick’s ghost house and evil ghost dad to Toni Morrison’s ghost baby in Beloved, onto my own ghostly effigies; e.g., the models I work with, but also Metroidvania and, yes, even myself.

This is not without struggle, of course; i.e., the endless echo of ghosts evokes a process we’ve already discussed at length, here and elsewhere in my book series: cryptonomy and the chasing of ghosts with ghosts, mid-cryptomimesis. To hammer the point home, let’s do so here vis-à-vis Castricano and my PhD work, then proceed onto the cryptomimesis main exhibit.

Though hardly a coincidence, the constant creation of words that conceal is not always deliberate, but merely the natural and material worlds relating back and forth; i.e., according to the passive/active tendencies in human language to hide and conceal things, but also manmade power structures, vertically arranged to repress worker traumas that must reemerge in ghostly fashion. The latter is not the human mind burying things purely of its own accord, but dealing with the state and its corporate allies actively lying and concealing things through the ghost as a blueprint—a “stamp” to endlessly copy when channeled through a bourgeois Superstructure. There’s a lot of mimicry going on in terms of trauma; i.e., as something to express, but also recognize. “Not sure if [real] or…”

Whether bourgeois or proletarian, ghosts are summarily tied to a larger conversation about the Gothic as discussed by Jodey Castricano in Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing (2001), re:

Although some critics continue to disavow the Gothic as being subliterary and appealing only to the puerile imagination—Fredric Jameson refers to the Gothic as “that boring and exhausted paradigm” [what a dork]—others, such as Anne Williams, claim that the genre not only remains very much alive but is especially vital in its evocation of the “undead,” an ontologically ambiguous figure which has been the focus of so much critical attention that another critic, Slavoj Zizek, felt compelled to call the return of the living dead “the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture” (source).

Here, Castricano denotes a critical limitation to the novel, short story, and film, yet nevertheless derives the ancient crypt as “the model and method” of what they call cryptomimesis; i.e., the crypt or crypt-like narrative as something to functionally and textually imitate for various reasons—like Borges and his mirrors/garden of the forking paths, but also vampires drinking blood, zombies eating brains, or ghosts seeking essence and connection. Castricano stresses the creation of

a writing practice that, like certain Gothic conventions [e.g., Segewick’s commentary on live burial as a timeless fixture of Gothic literature] generates its uncanny effects through the production of what Nicholas Rand might call a “contradictory ‘topography of inside-outside'” [from Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word …] Moreover, the term cryptomimesis draws attention to a writing predicated upon encryption: the play of revelation and concealment lodged within parts of individual words (ibid.).

While these ideas function perfectly fine as a holistic approach, Castricano tends to lay human language “on the slab,” focusing on the idea of language as something to express and play with entirely “on paper”; i.e., in a vacuum. My focus has been, and continues to be, on the ghosts themselves as imprecise-yet-magnetic, often fragmented linguo-material markers of oppositional praxis—not as faithful psychoanalytic or poststructuralist models, but a Gothic-Communist means of clearly articulating worker oppression unfolding in the natural-material world. Otherwise, who cares?

Beyond Kubrick and older authors haunting the palimpsest, cryptonymy and cryptomimesis translate to videogames; i.e., as handy replicas that someone can explore through avatars. This particular echo remains underrepresented outside my own work, leading me to now effectively dig up myself as a ghost/found document concerned with these self-same maps. As I write in my PhD’s thesis statement:

Simply put, Gothic media more broadly is cryptomimetic, but also embroiled within areas of study that yield hermeneutic limitations due to recency biases and disdain for a holistic approach by academic bigwigs. For instance, I noticed these limitations myself when trying to marry the Gothic to videogames in my own graduate work as cutting-edge. It was a tactic my supervisors and academic superiors resisted, simply because videogames were either totally outside of their realm of experience, or “Metroidvania” wasn’t something that had been academically connected to games within their own fields. That is, speedrunning as a practice/documentary subject was just taking off online in 2018; likewise, “ludic-Gothic” wasn’t even a decade-old term at the time, was something that ambitious academics strove to stake new claims within while leaving much to be desired.

For example, the same year I wrote my [master’s] thesis on Metroidvania, Bernard Perron would sum up the broader Gothic rush in videogame academia in The World of Scary Games sans mentioning Metroidvania once:

Horror scholars such as Taylor, Kirkland, Niedenthal, and Krzywinska have therefor come to contextualize games in the older tradition of the Gothic fiction, “one of survival horror’s parents,” as Taylor states in “Gothic Bloodlines in Survival Horror Gaming” (2009). Furthermore, the latter even coined a new term to highlight this origin: “The ludic-gothic is created when the Gothic is transformed by the video game medium, and is a kindred genre to survival horror” […] Video games remediate many aspects of Gothic poetics: [the prevention of mastery, obscured or unreliable visions, scattering of written texts in typical Gothic locations and their lost histories, the encounter and use of anachronistic technologies, etc] (source).

Not only does Perron make no mention of Metroidvania at all, neither do any of the other scholars he cites; nor did my supervisors know what Metroidvania were when I was researching it (nor I, with me finally settling on a concrete definition in 2021; re: “Mazes and Labyrinths” abstract). Indeed, Metroidvania—despite being an older genre than survival horror—remains a thoroughly underrepresented area of Gothic videogame studies, and Gothic videogames remain ripe for continued study within our own lives. Indeed, I had to connect the two myself when recognizing a knowledge gap regarding Metroidvania as cryptomimetic media within videogame studies at large; and I have continued to do so as a postgrad writing about mazes and labyrinths in Metroidvania; i.e., as a niche area of study to expand upon within my own daily life beyond academia—by writing about or illustrating Metroidvania outside of conferences, but also interviewing Metroid speedrunners for fun in my “Mazes and Labyrinths” compendium.

(exhibit 42f4: Artist, top-right: Alessandro Constantini. Bo Burnham [top-right] demonstrates how reflections on the world involve an endless creative process, one whose mise-en-abyme fits comfortably within cryptomimesis as a meta-reflection on Gothic poetics and its narrative of the crypt: my graduate/postgraduate academic work as something to revisit, think about, and reapply to the real world beyond just conferences [bottom-left and -right: papers for Sheffield Gothic and the International Gothic Association] but also interacting with Metroidvania themselves being remade by artists like Constantini—i.e., older “ghosts” to chase down and interrogate, including of ourselves.

For example, when writing this exhibit, my partner and I watched the video presentation for a 2019 conference paper I wrote and recorded for Sheffield Gothic’s Reimagining the Gothic with a Vengeance, Vol 5: Returns, Revenge, Reckonings: “‘More My Speed’: The Tempo of Gothic Affect in a Ludic Framework.” I hadn’t watched the video since I uploaded it, but doing so reminded me of some useful ideas I hadn’t thought about in a long time. It was also beholding a younger-looking but ultimately older version of myself; i.e., I look at it and feel old, and the photograph is as old as I am. Like a fatal portrait, it seems to denote a side of me that is lost to time, but also frozen in it, waiting to be defrosted:

[source: Me in the accompanying video to “More My Speed,” which I sent to Sheffield Gothic because I couldn’t fly overseas.]

As I haven’t written academically for years, it felt a bit surreal [and fun] to investigate a “ghost” of my former self and listen what it had to say:

Inside the gameworld, on-screen, different speeds are displayed by player motion relative to the gameworld and its creatures. There is speed of confrontation (horror) and speed of the reveal (terror) […] There is speed of action, which includes exploration, combat, and escape; these are tied to the style of the game’s design. There is also speed of death: As Raškauskienė writes, “for Burke, terror – fear of pain – was a terror mixed with a paradoxical delight. Ostensibly, this was because the sublime observer is not actually threatened. Safety in the midst of danger produces a thrilling pleasure” (18). Survival is a question not of actually dying in Metroid or Castlevania; the player cannot die. What matters is being in the presence of simulated “near-death” for as long as possible. This can be monsters, like Ridley and Kraid, in Metroid; or Dracula, the Mummy or Medusa’s head, in Castlevania. The player is next to them, or “near” them by being inside a world that promotes them. Kraid’s Lair advertises Kraid; Castlevania promotes Dracula through a series of monsters. Whether any are onscreen or not, the player anticipates them non-stop [source].)

The search for knowledge stares back at those looking in on the past from the present as dead. Beyond Metroidvania and their maps (and maps of maps, palimpsests of maps, echoes of ghosts from Radcliffe to Stoker to Kubrick to Scott, etc), the same basic approach to ghosts/the occult applies to knowledge as something to reify outside of academia; i.e., by responding to artistic movements as cryptomimetic expressions of repressed labor sentiment and trauma at large (which academia, as a cutthroat enterprise, isn’t entirely concerned with; re: accommodated intellectuals). Our own revolutionary cryptonymy must go further with ghosts than they normally are used; re: me, expanding on Castricano’s definition of cryptomimesis to write not just with ghosts, but the dead at large!

Cryptomimesis Main Exhibit

This brings us to our second original main exhibit, or rather, four sub-exhibits in one: the liminal riff or artistic flow as a cryptomimetic feeding vector portrayed by four different collages of uncanny things. I created all of them in mimetic response to older ghosts (or ghostly entities, like vampires and zombies):

• exhibit 43a: Tool and Silent Hill in response to Jacob’s Ladder
• exhibit 43b: David Fincher’s Se7en in response to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer”
• exhibit 43c: artwork between myself and an anonymous model in response to another artist
• exhibit 43d: a “rememory” of an old drawing of myself and my ex Jadis, who especially loved Tool, Silent Hill and Jacob’s Ladder

While such mimesis was hardly “blind,” it remained a process par for the Gothic course: thoroughly embedded and gliding across its own endless simulacra/echopraxis, showing and hiding per the usual double operation cryptonymy affords. Again, this remains a feeding vector, but per ghosts speaks to an acknowledging of the past as ghostly in ways that yield up fresh shadowy synthesis!

To that, the contents of all four sub-exhibits were exposed to me by Jadis and constitute my continuous, cryptonymic processing of survived trauma. An idea that was hardly original to either of us at the time, it had already been commented on by older artists riffing off one another that I eventually riffed off myself in relation to Jadis exposing me to these bugbears’ trail of curiously evil breadcrumbs (which included Jadis’ abusing of me in the process): to paint in essence—be that literal depictions of the blood, brains or lifeforce—as tenebrous, famously out-of-joint things being consumed, but also to consume by the audience; i.e., teasing at things beyond what is hidden, or hiding what is beyond through such shadows and ghostly translucence! Per the anisotropic flow of power and knowledge according to essence, abjection accounts for the leading of workers towards things the state will then repulse them with; reverse abjection leads us closer to the truth of state predation inside the cave’s shadowy illusions—by fucking with the dead through famous, ghost-like forms! “Follow the white rabbit” becomes “follow the ghost.”

Such splendid-mendax visual metaphors tie to a mimetic lineage that frames the crypt (and things commonly associated with it) as having a precise linguistic function: cryptonyms that give off the essence of ghosts in literal code, but also the phenomenology or experiencing of the ghost as captured in art; i.e., essence in a bottle, but also the essence-of-essence, or the echoing of the larger exchange captured on the surface of the copy as things are repeatedly smashed together for satirical effect. Satire isn’t always funny or silly. Sometimes, camp is cryptonymic; i.e., “stealthy” in ways that threaten to reveal things the elite want hidden—doing so across the usual ghostly mediums they can never monopolize:

I’m providing four-in-one because we want to trace a lineage of ghostly material, but also because liminality is hard to illustrate outside of multiple, contrasting examples. —Perse

(exhibit 43a: Bottom-right and bottom-middle: stills from Tool’s 1993 music videos for “Prison Sex” and “Sober” [the sets and stop motion for “Sober” created by Fred Stuhr]; middle: a Figma action figure of the nurse from Silent Hill 2, 2001; right-middle: Pyramid Head; middle: David Lo Pan, an even older ghost; everything else: screenshots from Jacob’s Ladder, 1990. In a linear sense, each egregore seemingly springs out of thin air, but bears its own ties to the material world as continuously reimagined in visibly undead, troubled ways. Stemming from no immediately obvious source, these spirits spring out of a likeness of a likeness of the past; i.e., older copies of trauma already set loose from inside the minds of artists famous, infamous or completely unknown.

To look upon the ghost is to see how its author saw the world through ghostly veils; i.e., “behind blue eyes,” in relation to other artists having already done the same. And yet, something is always left out—a ghost intimating systemic traumas [and maps] it cannot fully express, that show what is hidden because it is hidden: according to a quantum, half-real thing attached to so many others. In this respect, ghosts are conspicuous and confusing. Existence becomes dicey and imperiled, but also deliberately ghostlike across a chain of counterfeits; re: Castricano’s cryptomimesis, which I consider not just writing with ghosts, but any action concerned with all manner of undead beings. And yet, ghosts more than any other seem to feed on us simply by being viewed. It’s a drain that saps our curiosity and willpower when puzzling over them and theirs; i.e., belonging to our world in a liminal sense that brings us closer to alienated realities.)

(exhibit 43b: “Closer” music video [left, 1994] by Trent Reznor, whose reverse-abject splendor, echoes of Dadaism [with the toilet] and frank BDSM imagery [the “dancing” pig machine with the apple in its mouth evoking a ball gag] were carefully replicated by conservative copycat, David Fincher, a year later. While Fincher obsessively poured over and recreated the video frame-by-frame in a similar style for Se7en‘s opening credits, 1995, his ghost left behind many homophobic “clues” that belied his own ghost of the counterfeit: a fear/fascination with state-assigned enemies.

Like John Doe’s notebooks, there’s far too many to list or detail here, but Fincher nevertheless used them to turn [and continues to turn] the Gothic imagination in a neo-conservative direction; i.e., doing so while taking all the credit in glowing exposés like Art of the Titles’ 2012 expanded exhibit: a “novel-yet-seminal” fascination with the medieval scrapbook [commonplace] approach as deeply conservative—the life’s work of an independently wealthy madman who wants to destroy civilization, even though it’s already on the verge of collapse [an anti-Semitic dogwhistle].

 

To it, Fincher’s homophobia is a coerced prophecy returning to tradition. Conservative fear and dogma engender stochastic abuse and copious, ubiquitous threats against marginalized groups. Division is variable, though; while threatened neophytes can be cornered into silence, old veterans can lean into passivity or aggression; i.e., with Morgan Freeman playing a token, know-it-all black cop, and Pitt the homophobic detective shooting his worst enemy in the face because Fincher has first summoned him to be killed in cold blood: a shadow that reflects Pitt’s deepest desires as—you guessed it—dogma. Coerced trauma can turn people into police-state monsters, co-opting female/queer rage in service of the status quo; i.e., notably winding down and up through the usual turns of the screw [the elite, holding a gun to our heads].

In Se7en, the killer—a queer-coded, ostensibly homosexual man—is strangely obsessed with past media; i.e., as a perverse teaching tool that forces violent fearful lessons [dogma] onto the present. All this happens while lusting after and envying the cis-het, white policeman and his wife [the former played by angry blond twunk, Brad Pitt—too stupid to read books and calling Dante a “poetry writing faggot”—and the latter played by real-life corporate quack, Gwyneth Paltrow, insidious peddler of “homeopathic vaginas” and other oddities[9]]. From a meta standpoint, though, Fincher and his team had fashioned a ghostly lesson for their heel—Kevin Spacey, a real-life pedophile [Dreading, 2022]—to teach ’90s audiences with: a canonical replica that subverted Reznor’s primal, hedonistic vibe into a cautionary gaslight that frames unmarried sex as incredibly fetishized and violent. “You have to hit people with a sledgehammer,” argues John Doe; Fincher does so at the cost of a sex-positive image of queerness. It’s abject, regressive, and more to the point, a straight man’s unironic demonizing of us fags to cap his blockbuster off with. It’s bad BDSM, Reznor [or Milton] without the camp:

All unfold under faux-intellectual posturings, of course. While certainly connected to societal collapse in John Doe’s mind, the killer isn’t strictly critiquing society when he has the man use the knife strap-on [above] to fuck the girl with; he’s acting out his own violent fantasies through a coerced proxy that Fincher dreamt up after listening to Reznor’s song [and missing the iconoclastic point of it]: the homosexual man is secretly covetous of the closet—i.e., to such a terrible degree that he destroys the nuclear family from the inside-out. As such, Fincher conflates queerness with murder and rape, but also a desire to be straight/a cop. The fag is utterly reprobate; i.e., unable to assimilate and thus is executed for it. John Doe—and by extension Fincher and everyone else—are slumming and rocking out to our witch hunt: shock therapy on par with Marilyn Manson cashing in [a sex pest in his own right, false-preaching rebellion to make his millions].

To it, Fincher is deeply mistrusting of the past as a) having anything useful to say, yet b) trapping everyone in a constant state of cryptonymic decay and medieval fear. The movie’s retro-future pall returns the world to a pacifying sense of the barbaric past revived in the present. Incentivized by those in power [the executives and producers] and facilitated by Fincher and his team with a pair of scissors, the motto of the day was KISS: “keep it scary, stupid.” Literally a peal of thunder booms; i.e., when the first frame of the opening shows us a book. Translation: “Old books written by gay madmen will kill you!” Well, consider this gay madwoman’s book and her devil’s workshop my retort, you jackanapes!)

(exhibit 43c: Model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard. Many ghosts concern returning to past moments, including erotic ones as spaces to feed; i.e., to be in the same space as someone who has lifeforce, including erotic energies longing for the past to return; re: The Night House. This can go both ways—with a ghost seeking love or someone loving a ghost that may or may not have ever been real, but speaks to a semi-tangible connection anyways.

 For example, the above exhibit is an unused alternate drawing of a finished 2021 piece by Persephone van der Waard—of Jericho, assembled from different “friendly” references [top-left and top-right: a very happy ghost drawn by Margikrap; mid-left: the arguably appropriative “witchy” pin-up style of Stvartak Mato, who let’s just say likes ’em thicc] that through the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune [and happy accidents] has become its own kind of thing for me to appreciate in hindsight: a collage of egregores that bear the likeness of the original model, but yield its own life force in place of said model’s absence. As with any egregore, they are not the original, but become their own thing pointing to what was lost; i.e., when presented in pointedly Gothic language, I invigilate an alias that harkens cryptonymically back to lost friendship: a likeness of the model herself severing all ties. Ghosts, then, become a useful way to interrogate the past by reimagining it!

[model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard]

Along with Autumn Ivy [who I stopped working with because they were bossy and transphobic[10]], Jericho was Sex Positivity‘s proto muse. We worked together over 2021, and they would come and go throughout the year to give me some relief from Jadis’ abuse [and inspire me to use my website, created in 2020, to draw and feature sex workers]. I designed logos and different pieces for Jericho [above and below], but also commissioned a variety of things for them to record [sex tapes and photo shoots, which I don’t have permission to show]. I would then reference these, afterwards, to make new art, thus new ghosts. In turn, our present reconnection remains one where the memory of them is something of a drain and inspiration; i.e., I thought they were beautiful and kind back then, thus loved working with them—my first muse who motivated me to partake in Sex Positivity as it eventually turned into. This piece was made after they ghosted me:

[model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard]

Ultimately there was a fragile side to Jericho. After some outstanding projects, and them disappearing for a few months, a reminder to them about said projects saw them cutting ties and running from the profession entirely! They simply dropped all contact and vanished like a ghost!

Frankly I cared less about the money than losing a good friend; and deprived of what I thought was a good friend—but also an excellent model and collaborator—I had to reconcile my loss through the work I created after their disappearance. So I preserved them in ways that felt apposite and healing to me. I could speak to my own betrayal and hurt at Jericho’s hands while preserving what I liked about them and wanted people to remember! And to this day Jericho still inspires me to create art based on memories of older work we did; i.e., that I’ve updated for this project; e.g., the below drawing appearing at the start of this sub-volume in its finished form [re: exhibit 33b1b, from “Gothic Poetics, Their History“] but here being shown in the basic composition I went with instead of the ghost sex motif at the top of this exhibit:

[model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard]

Simply put, you don’t stop relating to things after they’re “done.” My art of Jericho serves as a kind of erotic ghostly bond/tethering of me to an old, lost friend, but also desire to create and invigilate something that acknowledges Jericho’s humanity and desire to be seen as ace; i.e., for them to have agency in a nudist sense, and for me to admittedly miss them and dream about them: wishing them well, wherever they find themselves. Be safe, my dude!)

Concerning the above exhibits and their own cryptomimesis, my cryptonymic tapping into their “pulse” was—like a Gothic girl at a gravesite—deeply personal and intuitive. Many were commentaries on my own traumatic past, something I related to through art gifted to me by former/would-be abusers. Indeed, the greatest gift my ex, Jadis, gave to me was their cultural appreciation/awareness for Tool, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson (whose contemporaries I took great delight in showing Jadis). Not only did Jadis doing so “chorus” a larger cultural fascination with ghosts; it demonstrated the simple fact that ghosts are an attractive cultural force, albeit for oft-hidden, undisclosed reasons that seldom match up—i.e., due to Capitalism’s deceitful and pulverizing nature!

Capitalism being a hyperobject, there’s seldom an obvious visual source for a transgenerational curse. But in the Gothic style, you can localize it to a particular site and trace its continuation through the wreckage as something to copy imperfectly moving forwards! I’ve since tried to exhibit to my own traumatic past as a kind of “ghostly” double: Jadis themselves, but also what they gifted me as something turned against them by revisiting its essence as a means of self-empowerment and self-expression, not defeat (exhibit 43d, two pages).

The venue of doing so often addresses trauma as something to express not just in mirrored language, but cryptonymic exchanges thereof. Indeed, the existence and reintegration of ghosts goes well beyond my life and my relationship with Jadis (and all the things they showed me). For instance, my friend Mavis knew someone who also loved Marilyn Manson and NIN. Let’s call them “Montrose.”

Montrose “didn’t seem the type,” according to Mavis—were a master’s graduate of psychology with a flat affect who studied war abuses in Nazi Germany. Even so, people touched by trauma are often drawn to it, even in pale imitations. According to Mavis, Montrose had actually been horribly abused by their brother as a child, only to watch as their parents did nothing to intervene or even acknowledge that Montrose had been harmed. To try and understand their own problems growing into adulthood, Montrose probably listened to music that actually spoke to their trauma in ghostly ways. As time progressed, they studied the mind as a means of understanding their own experiences—all while looking for similarity that had “happened” elsewhere: a ghost suggesting the presence of trauma as having occurred, or at the very least, echoed through its own confusing existence; re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, speaking to Western traumas by fabricating them.

Returning to Jadis and I, we loved the same material that Montrose and Mavis did. Partly we had also grown up to it (and had experienced awful childhoods ourselves). But even in our 30s, we delighted at watching the throwing together of various cheap and dead things—a “clay” brought back to life and dancing around to the groovy music or evocative visuals. Not only Jadis was absolutely correct about Trent Reznor’s incredible music video for “Closer” in purely visual terms; its lyrics spoke to me as well: “You tear down my reason / It’s your sex I can smell […] I wanna fuck you like an animal […] You bring me closer to God!” (exhibit 43a).

I only felt this connection upon repeated reflection and in relation to other works, similar to how Reznor must have felt as an artist. Apart from NIN, he worked alongside “shock rock” guru (and notorious sex pest/abuser) Marilyn Mansion. Doubtless, he would have been aware of and inspired by the literal clay of Tool guitarist/claymation expert Adam Jones, just as I was later in forming my own connections. The same goes for the sudden and anomalous nightmare effigy of Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, which doubtlessly inspired Silent Hill six years later (exhibit 43b)—not just its liminal spaces, but liminal occupants[11] in turn inspired by Giger, who was inspired by Goya and Goya by older, now-forgotten-but-still-felt medievalists. At different points in time, then, these complex liminalities invited both Reznor and myself to explore forbidden topics; i.e., in transgressive ways that were later weaponized by bad-faith performers: the proverbial wolf-in-disguise, a “bad imitation” of Derrida’s spectres of Marx—not in sheep’s clothing but the proletarian egregore of a friendly wolf-ghost piloted by an imposter!

Except, Jadis wasn’t an imposter just because they harmed me; they were an imposter because they used groups like Tool and NIN to lower my guard (and obscure their own neoliberal politics). Yet, I still found something useful to transmute from what they outlined as acceptable based on their tacit (or outspoken) approval.

More to the point, everything was still made from the same ghostly pulp—a fact I have repeatedly illustrated here by taking what Jadis showed me throughout our relationship and transforming it back into something sex-positive; i.e., feeding on their ghost to draw new strength out of something that ultimately isn’t my abuser harming me. The anger is still there, but it’s not directed at me—meaning I can just sit back and enjoy it. The Destroyer persona is core to the BDSM experience; per ludo-Gothic BDSM, angry ghosts are fun to watch if you can control them through an exhibit—if only because they appeal to the presence of rage as something you can tremble before and remember. In doing so, you feel the danger but realize that you’re not actually in any! That’s catharsis, babes!

Doing so will always be partly based on my positive experiences with Jadis; i.e., as an oddly endearing person. Like it or not, Jadis was cool, but also integral to the ensuing work I threw back at a false protector! The label “Communist” doesn’t mean much without the state as something to transform; I can use Jadis’ likeness to achieve this goal, even if they are not in my life. I took their illusions and made them something that would protect me from the harmful original: to show and hide vis-à-vis cryptonymy whatever I want in order to get my point across. To that, “cool Jadis” is something that I’ve had to preserve as separate from the person themselves, a “rememory” of the abuser who once had total material control over my life. It has taken considerable time and effort to work their likeness into something sex-positive—a new, graveyard version of them that celebrates the essence of what I fell in love with, while still hinting at what made Jadis so terrifying to me:

(exhibit 43d: Models and artist: Jadis and Persephone van der Waard. Jadis and I, re-envisioned as a knight and her femboy ward through their encouragement/coercion [they would pull my funding and threaten me when angered, becoming a cycle of reactive abuse]. Doing so has transformed the past in ways that reflect on my abuse while also offering up a better hypothetical in the same Gothic language: what could have been and what could actually be in future love stories should workers [and BDSM contracts] actually be respected, post-negotiation—not a memory of the past, but a rememory focused on remembering the essence of what was lost and, if not forgetting the horrifying abuse suffered at the same time, then at least not letting it rule me; i.e., me feeding on something I could rearrange and draw strength from—to not have it drain me all the time. Trauma is cryptomimetically echoed; i.e., in ways that acknowledge what was while subverting it per a revolutionary cryptonymy!

It’s not exactly “the happy ending” of the Neo-Gothic novel, if purely because it doesn’t do away with the haunted past; but it does present a suitable “What if?” for future undertakings that bear some resemblance to a former life while being different in all the ways that matter. This “ghost” of Jadis represents them at their very best, their most beautiful. On this page and nowhere else, they are still my protector and beloved, but also my Slan, my succubus monster mom who won’t actually harm me. Creating them here in this form is my attempt to riff off my own trauma in cryptomimetic fashion, repurposing my own dead memories in ways that bring me peace; it hurts, as birth generally does, but ultimately delivers me tremendous sensation and relief from a tyrannical past!

“Stare and tremble!” then, for I have made Jadis into a dark cathedral; i.e., a calculated risk speaking to a castle-in-the-flesh that haunts me, and which I reestablish control through a reconstruction of it as I would like to reexperience differently per ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: “…the Gothic art is sublime. On entering a cathedral, I am filled with devotion and with awe; I am lost to the actualities that surround me, and my whole being expands into the infinite; earth and air, nature and art, all swell up into eternity, and the only sensible impression left, is, ‘that I am nothing!'” [source]. This practice comes from working with people who speak in equally ghost-like ways; re [from Volume Two, part one’s “Angry Mothers; or, Learning from Our Monstrous-Feminine Past“]:

I love my job because the people I work with [through interdependence, not codependence] are all awesome mommies and daddies I can proudly show off without regret!

[models, from left to right: Ms. Reefer, Blxxd Bunny, and Quinnvincible] 

How could I have any when working with such angels, and while having survived the complete-and-utter torture that preceded them? Jadis was my Great Destroyer. They took with impunity. They scattered my wits, drained my sanity and stole my will to live [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Setting the Record Straight; My Ex’s Abuse of Me: February 17th, 2022”]. By comparison, these cuties—stellar and glowing—utterly restored it, gave me something to live for—something warm and serene, but joyous, thunderstriking and awesome: helping my friends avoid similar fates; i.e., an angelic and devilish bliss comparable to what Matthew Lewis described following the riot and fall of Ambrosio in The Monk:

The remaining years of Raymond and Agnes, of Lorenzo and Virginia, were happy as can be those allotted to Mortals, born to be the prey of grief, and sport of disappointment. The exquisite sorrows with which they had been afflicted, made them think lightly of every succeeding woe. They had felt the sharpest darts in misfortune’s quiver; Those which remained appeared blunt in comparison. Having weathered Fate’s heaviest Storms, they looked calmly upon its terrors: or if ever they felt Affliction’s casual gales, they seemed to them gentle as Zephyrs which breathe over summer-seas [source].

To that, I’ll let you in on a little secret: The greatest irony of Jadis harming me [something we’ll go into more detail about during the undead module] is they accidentally gifted me with the appreciation of calculated risk. Scoured with invisible knives, I don’t view my scars as a “weakness” at all; I relish the feeling of proximity to the ghost of total power—of knowing that knowing that motherfucker took me to the edge but didn’t take everything from me: I escaped them and lived to do my greatest work in spite of their treachery! Like the halls of a cathedral, my lived torments and joys color this castled work, ornamenting its various passages with the power of a full life. I’ve known such terror that makes the various joys I experience now all the more sweet and delicious. I am visited by ghosts of my rapturous design, the empress of my fate, the queen of a universe shared with seraphs the likes of which I can hardly describe; “no coward soul is mine” [source].

[artist: Persephone van der Waard] 

It would be a lie to say that Jadis didn’t shape my view of the world; but it would be equally mendacious to say that this view of Jadis is entirely “them.” I escaped them, and made a cryptonymic forgery that, like Walpole’s castle, could never harm me again. I could feel tremendous feelings, yes—and others might stumble across these and puzzle about them on my Aegis [above]. But they would see me in nudist, rapturous agony that, in the same breath, speaks to Lewis’ happy ending as born from great misery and pain.

Ghosts, then, are the past, but also the beautiful possible future—to step out of the shadows of Capitalism, but as cryptonymic echoes of that older time made darkness visible: impossibly and wondrously alive despite profit raping us! We present as “raped,” loving it in ways that confuse those determined to harm us. Death is a dark cruel mistress, then, but one who—as a ghost of itself, raping Lambert screaming bloody murder in the dark of the retro-future haunted house Scott and company envisioned—sets us deliciously free in house or horror that we compose upon the architecture of the past. What a muse/mood! Just the thought of that scene makes my skin cover in goosepimples and my nipples harden, touched by psychosexual divine power! But Jadis is always close at hand, waiting to be reinvoked for “murder.” Once you’ve felt rape, it never leaves you; you can only subvert it, and I do so to break Capitalism Realism on my wheel!)

Jadis’ counterfeit is where our love simultaneously died, but lives on in a kind of special burial site; frozen in time, it sits inside the larger continuum of oppositional praxis, where “archaeologies” wrestle in a constant liminal struggle—of author and creation both warring to express the truth under Capitalism while “just passing through.” This happens in colonized language that later becomes reappropriated (the derivative corporate remake) or reappreciated (a return to a proletarian past; e.g., Andor), generally both at once in a continual process of remaking as I have done; re: rememory a process of ghostly reflection upon the Aegis’ countless shades.

Reflection/Closing Thoughts

Let’s conclude the ghost subchapter by reflecting on so many breadcrumbs; i.e., things that might, at first blush, seem wholly disparate and incongruous, but in truth exist part-in-parcel among a larger holistic pattern/midnight express. Riding it, we can reassemble and interrogate larger patterns that resist interpretation, but also beckon it. Their restless cryptonymies show and conceal, concerning the victims of older police violence (re: Sadako Yamamura, below), but also the ghosts of policemen calling out from the same spaces. Topping from the bottom (at times with a Promethean thunder spent by more Numinous articulations), their ghostly code informs/instructs the actions of active agents running across well-used hauntological tracks; i.e., chasing ghosts that were, are and could be again differently—for the state or for workers replacing Caesar’s ghost with Marx’ (as gayer than Marx ever dared dream).

Ghosts loom, loving a good guilt trip; the point of cursorily examining ghosts/the Numinous, the posthuman, the afterlife haunting astronoetics, Metroidvania maps, and finally exhibit 43’s cryptomimetic expressions—liminal creations in liminal space made by liminal occupants, etc—is to invite the audience to “pass through” as well. This concerns not going over to a different side or end point, but within the chronotope to generate friendlier ghosts along the same well-trod path: the present as something to camp, placing it between quotes, haunting language and the people language embodies. Something beyond is felt within, promoting death and destruction as already having happened, and potentially again should we let our hair down and listen to Medusa’s wailing voice! In truth, state shift is failing to heed the growing pains behind the veil of tears, Capitalist Realism a Black Veil that carries genocide on as long as it can.

We want to investigate this, dancing with the ghost of the counterfeit in order to reverse the abjection process and break Capitalist Realism before nature goes feral. Doing so yields tremendous feelings and revelations about the social, natural and material world and its procession of creative-interpretive jaunts. “Getting lost” is arguably the point—to swim around and play as older generations did—a “ghostly” mode of thinking and existing on maps, which see the world as something to transform, but also preserve; i.e., as ghosts of ghosts of ghosts of ghosts. As something new and cool—but also chimeric and trapped hopelessly inside its own knotty[12] self—Gothic Communism yields a life study that takes on an older sex-positive likeness (and hauntological context, below). Telling everything immediately apart becomes impossible, so we rely on dialectical-material scrutiny to light the way through labyrinthine speculation and conjecture!

In historical-material terms, language isn’t discrete; it denotes a presence of maybe-dangerous, friend-or-foe copies that workers will invariably have to investigate during their own relationships to people, but also linguo-material things resembling people or shaping whatever people pass themselves off as: older variations they feel reminded of in the present space and time. Ghosts embody the past-future seen in present spheres.

Simply put, uncanniness (and oscillation) are inevitable from a linguistic standpoint, especially when individuals go on to have more and more experiences, but also learn more about the world as it once existed through pastiche of various kinds; re: remediated praxis as “left behind.” Occurring through “conversations” had with all these different ghosts, each collocative instance yields incomplete impressions of competing points of view that can be seen along the same liminal riff, one that goes on and on and on, but also, as Mel Brooks’ 1987 Spaceballs would put it, in “now-now“:

(exhibit 43e1, afterthought: “What the hell am I looking at?!” Lord Helmet cries, riffing on Walpole’s stupidly large helmet, from Otranto [and Shakespeare’s “borrowed robes”—a giant’s clothes put on a dwarf having stolen them: “Does the line stretch on to the crack of doom?”]. However dated, recursive, and liminal the past is, its mise-en-abyme always appears in the present. But as something to look at or talk to, understanding the nature of the interlocutor demands understanding oneself in relation to it; i.e., how the audience is affected by the experience speaking to them in cryptonymic showings and hidings—and how their variable, echoing interpretations of it change the nature of the ghost as something to relate/respond to. Canon or camp, the effect is the same: change among something whose appearance is largely constant.)

These recursive conversations beg an important question—not simply “What am I looking at?” but also “What or who am I talking to?” To say you’re talking to yourself isn’t entirely accurate; you’re responding to something that isn’t strictly alive but also isn’t dead—not the past, but “the past” as informed by material history and informers thereof moving forwards through the conversations endlessly had between past and present as uncanny but also hauntological.

As such, ghost stories are told over and over across space and time, forcing viewers to immediately confront philosophical, but also semiotic, dialectical-material conundrums that many avoid thinking about (re: Capitalist Realism). Depending on the copy of the ghost in question, their nature can be for or against the state; but all sit inside the same Gothic midden of dreck, claptrap, and trashy window dressing that ghosts represent: the diaphanous veils and asses shimmering in the spectral moonlight/fox fire! So do we moonlight as saviors to future lost and/or dead souls. Per Gogol’s novel, we’re not just data to manipulate by corporate officers enriching themselves on our likenesses! We break canon to free ourselves!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Keeping this in mind, a unique, empowered uncanny is the iconoclast’s best option—to express ontology as haunted by all manner of ghosts when looking at the world through such a gaze and using its Aegis to discern a ghost’s relationship to the viewer. Arguably the whole point of liminal expression is that everything feels liminal, bleeding together in linguo-material, social-sexual, and emotional/rational ways (trying to reconnect the third grouping through a rejection of Cartesian thought). Nostalgia is undeniably present, but the likeness it bears feels different while also highlighting an emotional perspective essential to a previous moment in time: to bring forward lost knowledge.

To that, this ghostly liminal riff needn’t be an Imperial Boomerang swinging back and forth. If future ghosts become increasingly class-conscious, they become friendly to Communism communicated through themselves; achieving this kind of subversive, perceptive pastiche is vital to helping workers see beyond normal existence—i.e., as loaded with statues, egregores, and ghosts of various kinds that, sure enough, can flow power in either direction. To say the uncanny isn’t required for Gothic-Communist development, then, would be to say that one needn’t learn to tell ghost apart, belied by the simple fact that workers are incessantly fooled by canonical, unfriendly ghosts; i.e., leading to their own exploitation as fossilized, becoming part of all those dead generations Marx’ “Eighteenth Brumaire” wrote about, weighing on living brains. It’s not a curse if we can camp it!

In turn, these “living dead” become a haunted feeling the living cannot shake, but rather must express through their own ghosts as “wisdom” for future workers to stumble upon (even if that is given to them by would-be abusers like Jadis); re: the Wisdom of the Ancients being—per a proletarian Superstructure—the using of ghosts as they naturally exist: in duality. While labor decides either outcome, workers for Gothic Communism seek to unlock the pro-labor potential to such echoes and double operations; i.e., to raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural (and race) awareness, ipso facto, synthesizing good daily habits at home (thus good praxis and systemic catharsis the world over)!

Before we cap off the Undead Module, let’s conclude “I See Dead People” with a couple final points about ghosts and Gothic Communism!

First, I want to stress, here, that such hauntological expression, per Gothic Communism, is more holistic than Fisher’s notion thereof. For Fisher, Capitalism leads to hauntology of a specific sort—the term “hauntology” originally coined by Derrida (re: Spectres of Marx) as being trapped between the past and the present, which Fisher further described as an inability to imagine the future beyond how it used to be seen through dead Capitalist nostalgia. For him, this is cyberpunk; for me, the canceled future includes liminal spaces like Silent Hill and its palimpsest, Jacob’s Ladder (and Metroid, Alien, Paradise Lost, Dante’s Inferno, etc)—a creative, mimetic chain felt across the praxial sum of Gothic art; i.e., through the workers channeling such poetics constantly across literal space and time, but also chronotopes of these things (narrative, architectural expressions of space-time) that solidify inside the material world once the practice takes root in a wider Gothic imagination.

Whereas Fisher’s hauntology denotes a “mind prison” to drug and house the rebellious imagination inside, the Gothic Communist escapes stasis by turning the jailer’s tools actively against them on all registers, mediums, and monsters: the target victim’s emotions connected to past experiences/ritualistic markers thereof. Empowering these variables happens when workers create their own multimedia renditions of former likenesses, Galatea bucking Pygmalion to fashion cathartic friendly ghosts; i.e., that highlight enrichment and abuse as things to communicate as they are felt in real time—all at once, inside the human brain as something to bombard with impactful reminders of an abusive past. Continuously expressed through borrowed language and images, our holistic (and subversive) aim is to speak to the viewer in ways they’ll actually recognize while also leading them away from trauma as a recurring pattern of abuse; i.e., away from the Capitalist-Realist spell woven by Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit during abjection-as-normal; e.g., Kubrick’s dead-end worlds and dismal spirits. To challenge profit is to tear down that ghostly wall with spectres of Marx, one and all!

The same cannot be said for canonical ghosts. More severe and permanent versions of neoliberal cryptomimesis could be described as transgenerational zombification, specifically where attacks on the mind have thoroughly “lobotomized” its owner (the ghost of the counterfeit intimating actual lobotomization of rebellious or hysterical, “useless” minds). This menticide leads to a curious and terrifying proliferation—of “braindead” unfriendly zombies who, in a spell of thoughtless undeath, want to eat your brains; not to use them, but absorb or discard them uselessly! The same goes for vampires or ghosts, which, despite their trademark attacks, denote the same assimilatory outcome in canonical forms. Yet the fact remains, most people aren’t “turned” to serve the state as police; being absorbed into the capitalist system, those Capitalism cannot use as soldiers, useful fools, or state-corporate ideologues are exploited for profit, mulched as such like grist for the mill.

To this, ghosts—if simply left unaddressed—would linger and drain the already-taxed living of even more brainpower and lifeforce. We must camp them, thus make them friendly to our cause in ways that give back:

(source)

Pursuant to this salubrious, two-way exchange, here’s one final closing note vis-à-vis not just ghosts, but all monster types (four pages)!

Friendly ghosts, vampirism, zombification, xeno/necrophilia—you might have noticed how this book frequently invokes “monster puns” or slang as a kind of visual shorthand that quickly conveys the co-existence of conflicting ideas and linguistic functions (unfriendly or liminal variants); i.e., that pertain to our four main Gothic theories. The alacrity comes from common Gothic stereotypes whose complex ontological functions—i.e., a “ghost” as multiple things at once, like a Swiss Army knife (a theoretical idea, a signifier/signified representation, a unique object, a counterfeit, a cliché, etc)—didactically benefit from quick, snappy visual metaphors (a comparison between two seemingly unlike things; re: the Swiss Army knife); but also whose ominous visual themes intimate “useful” tools for communicating Gothic critiques of Capitalism: a clear and present danger without oversimplifying the linguistic function of ghosts. Unlike canon, we scare to share knowledge, generally through camp vis-à-vis the Four Gs; re: reverse abjection, Communist chronotopes, revolutionary cryptonymy and emancipatory hauntologies.

In keeping with that theme, a Gothic Communist is someone who thinks critically on their feet, but also their toes by weighing monsters as common symbolic measurements of risk during perilous scenarios that many people can relate to; i.e., as a general mode of consumption; e.g., trading cards, video games or horror movies, etc. Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, all configure the same basic “roll of the dice” (cops or victims, rebel or submit) inside a ludic format—one that literally expresses the taking of chances according to a humanized, highly imaginative and medieval narrative/aesthetic.

However, as symbols of caution that relate to the material world beyond media, the creation of monsters and their paratextual materials serve as vulgar shorthand (vulgar meaning “common,” or things made common like castles, organs or churches—any and all of them denoting a fall from grace, but also an opportunity to change the world for the better).

As rebellious code, vulgarity becomes a useful poetic device to readily clarify capitalist deceptions—of thinking with monsters, both as language to see things through, but also respond artistically with or towards; i.e., as they appear in the material world through individual worker expression[13] pursuant to older and larger movements. It should snowball, happening for oneself, alongside one’s community in a second-nature, communal effort to resist the usual illusions of a bourgeois Superstructure; and in doing so, the recultivation of said Superstructure (for proletarian purposes) should yield protective caution against the state’s various proponents: any and all who threaten you and your friends by generating canonical variants antagonizing nature to put it to work, policing itself (through all the strange appetites that capital engenders).

Furthermore, the way to recognize these threats is also consumption-based; i.e., to spot in media, but also through people and how they actually consume, produce, perform or play with media as ghostly doubles that haunt the picturesque scene: Derrida’s spectres of Marx, which become us—alive and warm—haunting the venue of those who do not wish to announce or acknowledge our presence. We’re spooky in ways that suggest what lies beyond Capitalism.

“The beyond,” itself, is a common audio-visual and thematic trope in the Gothic. Beyond maps, for example, ghostly music frequently ties to special instruments like the theremin or pipe organ leading people to their doom—not just through walls, but across space and time, in and out of dreams, etc (or into contained, concealed or closed spaces—re: Manuel Aguirre’s “Geometries of Terror“). This can be tied to xenophobia through Red Scare—e.g., “Is my neighbor a Martian?” thus from a hostile, uncolonized “Red planet” (the same inquiry can be applied to other monsters)—but also xenophilia fetishizing ghostly things through sex and force; i.e., as normally policed by the state. Either mentality is historically tied to various forms of communion associated with the past, non-Western ways of life, or values atypical to the normative Cartesian experience. We upend all of that, arguing in the games we play, “Love thy neighbor if they are called ‘alien’; question or fight anyone playing the cop”:

(artist: Deimos-Remus)

In other words, xenophilia and xenophobia are the ghost of the counterfeit trapping the Western consumer between a love and fear of the imaginary past, the dichotomy contrasting weirdly with the bastardized linguistic symbols and standards; i.e., Horace Walpole’s Otranto exhibited a tremendous love of a reimagined, “archaeological” medieval—an attitude reinforced well into the present; e.g., with Richard Matteson’s zombie-vampires “attacking” the hero’s claim on “his” neighborhood (aped in 1987 when the neighborhood kids from The Monster Squad grow suspicious of the friendly old German man, who they simultaneously call “Scary German Guy,” a vampire, and “some old dude on welfare”).

Gothic Communism seeks to address the unnatural state of affairs that Capitalism brings about, then enforces. Yet, the linguistic properties of monsters are both natural and unnatural. The natural component is how all these monsters seemingly represent something beyond themselves, being more intense through room to imagine by looking at the monster in question; the unnatural element is a material-technological byproduct of manmade things, including legends, commodities and sex-coercive elements useful to the state inside a divided mind.

From a dialectical-material standpoint, this canonical symbiosis involves an intense, oft-violent oscillation happening between workers and alienated qualities among other workers, places, and things; i.e., fighting over a claim regarding these things as owned, but also wild. To face monsters—but especially ghosts—and tremble before them is, in essence, to see and confirm one way or the other if something is or isn’t owned by the state (commonly disguised through Radcliffe’s “ghost pirates” trick; re: Scooby Doo having Old Man What’s-His-Name dress up as a ghost to scare people off, then steal something valuable buried inside a property site). Once Gothic Communism is attained, this harmful, uncanny oscillation will diminish, but the ghosts of all our yesterdays will not lay to rest; they’ll walk among us in ways we can camp and communicate as we please!

Never forget: Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything! So we must bring all of this home to rescue labor from the state’s evil blinders; e.g., to ban books is to ban people, to burn books is to burn people, and to ban books but not guns is to place gun ownership (and abuse) over literacy and the lives of readers killed by guns (often women and children). Listen to the dead, the alien, the unheard, and let the scales fall from your eyes! In a world of natural-to-manufactured confusion, camp anything and everything to show the truth of things. To camp is to sever signifier from signified, swapping real harm out with “harm.” And touched by harm, survivors slide into that liminal performative space for the rest of their lives; i.e., as ghosts!

(artist: Bay)

Occupying that magical in-between, ludo-Gothic BDSM is not a prison. We camp canon because we must. This includes Marx’ ghost, but also anyone else’s to raise up new powerfully genderqueer spirits per Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communism; i.e., occupying the same spaces as Capitalism (and state proponents) do, and calling across the void invite you to old pleasures experienced between Heaven and Hell: right now on Earth! To look but not touch, we lead you towards happier circumstances with those in your own lives who want to be touched; but perhaps when you do, making those you love tremble and shake, you’ll think of us—seeing the original echo in the back of your mind, living rent free!

We ghosts of Grendel’s mother sow gender trouble, planting seeds in the boxes, recesses and cleavage of dark forests, wells, and caves—to sit between fantasy and reality as the things that never were, the Withywindle valley “[as] the queerest part of the whole wood – the centre from which all the queerness comes” (source: The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954); e.g., druids, witches, nymphs, dryads, spirits; i.e., stewards of nature as something to bond with anew, as all workers must! Life and death are two sides of the same coin, decomposers eating the dead to fertilize the land, restoring it. Imagination and language are similar if viral, in that respect—figurative but no less rich or poor in spirit! The harvest is human, but grimly sliced up by state machines in ways only the heeding of spirits can prevent! You might feel mislead by roundabout secrets or sexy people in corpse paint, but such elaborate strategies of misdirection (re: Jameson) routinely give us the flexibility and wherewithal to piece state veils!

(artist, left and right: Blxxd Bunny)

Simply put, we haunt them—threatening Capitalist Realism with its own bursting through post-scarcity doubles overwhelming the minds of those acclimated towards scarcity as endemic, built-in. Liberation, while occupying the same space as enslavement, must contend with that mentality as something to overwrite; i.e., by reclaiming the same devices from canonical forces. It feels like a deal with the devil, but rescues everything from state usage as such: using essence as both language and (often enough) bodily fluids that make people separated by space and time, feel whole. Ghosts love cum (those milky sheets restore their whiteness much like blood does a vampire’s red lips)!

Onto “Deal with the Devil: Transitioning Modules; or Between Demons and the Undead“!

---

Footnotes

[1] A good canonical rule of thumb (that aligns with settler-colonial models): white ghost = good and black ghost = evil. “Small” or “big” + good/evil = small good/evil or Big Good/Evil; e.g., the Black Veil classically hides a Big Evil (a “dreaded evil”; re: Radcliffe’s “On the Supernatural in Poetry“), usually inside a container (a closed space), then behind something smaller inside said container discussing something bigger/Numinous through the cryptonymy process and its ambiguous moral grounds; i.e., pointing illusorily to a hidden thing—illusions of illusions, denoting “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present” (re: Hogle’s “Cryptonomy in the Gothic Novel”). All seemingly unconnected to what’s going on, their vanishing point accounts for the root cause: a dark castle and/or restless labyrinth, and the chronotopic environs and paraphernalia scattered about inside, which themselves get bigger, feelings-wise, the deeper one gets to the core’s claustrophobic singularity (this doesn’t rule out massive spaces underground; e.g., dungeons or burial crypts accounting for “impossible rooms”). Radcliffe treats this as a gaslight, but still discusses/argues with rape per fear-addled female imaginations. She opts out for happy endings (and profit), of course, but touches on systemic abuse, nonetheless.

[2] While capital currently punishes natures-as-monstrous-feminine, nature as female divides canonically to virgin or whore; i.e., anything that is wild can be made tame, but remains innocent and tainted/thirsty for revenge. The gentle/furious dichotomy translates to natural landmarks personified by the state’s self-appointed keepers of nature, said lords superstitious of so-called bean sidhe, harpies, dryads, nymphs or witches—often redheaded, and all tied to the same wilderness as scapegoated maidens are: gentle meadows, glades and ponds, compared to dark bogs, swamps and craggy heaths, burial mounds, abandoned castles, and such. A “sylvan scene,” the female land’s negative space (caves, in particular) becomes furiously vaginal, angry and chaotic—blamed by the usual enjoyers penetrating it; i.e., men exploiting double standards, punishing and tokenizing the usual suspects against updated persecution networks following the Cartesian Revolution’s phallic, policeman’s entering of the womb of nature to torture her secrets out of her (re: Bacon).

[3] As something to camp, rape is something of a running gag in home/sex life; i.e., living in fear as saturated with the ghostly stuff of older parallel castles, prisons, etc. Reaching a saturation point, ghosts magically appear but also stories about them. Catharsis = playing with ghosts; i.e., as twin-like; e.g., the poor twin girls from The Shining, murdered by their father gone mad: “Come play with us, Danny! Forever and ever and ever!” They beckon him (and us)—are abortive offshoots of a larger problematic structure, redoubling and threatening “this” between “that” and “that, that” (the American space lacking castles, but no shortage of patriarchs or genocide). Mind over matter becomes a marriage, then; i.e., submission unto old feelings versus dividing and alienating them; re: playing with dead things in search of secrets. The night is young!

[4] As I use them in Volume Zero:

Doubled costumes, props and conflicts; psychomachy, psychosexuality, Amazonomachia, psychopraxis. It all begs the question: why use heroic language at all if it just leads to confusing doubles? To be frank, heroic theatre is where power exists, so you have to go there to interrogate it; you can’t just ignore it and make up your own language* because that’s segregation (and nobody will know what you’re talking about). Segregation just alienates you further from society and closets you (which is a form of genocide: forced conversion). You have to get down in the trenches, weaponizing the awesome paradoxes inside to reach a wider audience through allegory and apocalypse during liminal expression—to speak out and break things that cover up your abuse.

*English is a bastard language told through perpetual conquest; i.e., “sex” is a liminal expression that canonically synonymizes sex/rape as associated with the language of conquerors: to fuck (versus longer and less direct Norman-French bastard words). While the two cannot be separated, the canonical invocation of the theatrical paradox deliberately ignores the pleasure of a thoroughly natural and healthy activity (to have sex)—one whose physical complexities (e.g., girls fart during sex, or “fart,” “queefing” when air builds up inside their vagina, especially during doggystyle; also “edging”) have been historically-materially conflated with unironic harm, one and all. Subversions of this linguo-material affect must occur through catharsis as an imperiled position to reclaim what has become unironically violent; i.e., by using the same language as taken back for sex-positive purposes: to heal from lived/inherited trauma and prevent harm in the future, often by reveling in the wicked, bad, naughty theatre of the devil’s position as a praxial underdog who enjoys being the interesting member of the troupe. Invisibility is a prey mechanism, but who wants to be boring (thus inert) when appealing to the virtues of theatrical expression? “The nail that sticks out gets hammered” makes for poor proletarian praxis (source).

Simply put, invention and inheritance are liminal as a matter of creativity through themselves.

[5] Re: White guerrillas, saviors and Indian, native lands emptied of indigenous peoples and filled with ghostly copies for white LARPer power trips; i.e., the Star Wars problem/Cycle of Kings and canonical essentialize under a settler argument; e.g., good, tame nature vs evil, old, alien nature; e.g., the barrow-downs and the wights there. Standard tokenized, us-versus-them D&D fare abjecting the state as decayed, pushed out into alien, Orientalist, monstrous-feminine dead spheres of dark nature: stigma animals, orcs, and such beings in the usual refrains’ states of exception. From balrogs to orcs, “evil” is whatever the state needs it to be; i.e., to rape nature, thus profit. ACAB, ASAB!

[6] Refer to Volume One’s “Healing from Rape” (2024) for more discussions of this, vis-à-vis Cameron’s Terminator films.

[7] Apart from drug use and magic, it serves as a good trans metaphor with body modification potential; i.e., actual technology but also wish fulfillment and possible futures through development away from capital usual expendabilities: Communist prototypes in cities of dreams, possibility—change through struggle, on the ragged edge of madness, abuse, desperation, death wishes, suicide by cop vs suicide bombing/martyrdom (terrorism vs counterterrorism). Such things come not from fighting people, but structures of immense, god-like power (which abstract into giant statues, like Walpole’s armor—the Capitalocene). That’s what capital is.

[8] Jude Roger’s “The Final Mysteries of David Bowie’s Blackstar” (2016).

[9] Bernardo Montes de Oca’s “Why Everyone Hates Gwyneth Paltrow’s Company” (2021).

[10] For details, refer to “Death by Snu-Snu!” from Volume Two, part one. Volume One details Autumn’s abuses even more extensively.

[11] The liminal occupant is perhaps illustrated best by Marilyn Roxie’s aforementioned presentation on the Dennis Cooper blog: “The Inescapable Weirdness of Super Mario 64.” A 2020 reflection on a 1996 game, Marilyn demonstrates how Mario 64‘s continued appreciation has evolved in highly chaotic and terrifying ways. Happening inside the game itself, Mario 64 has become increasingly liminal outside of itself when reexamined over time as a ludic space for players to explore.

[12] I.e., like the wizard Merlin in a tree, trapped there by the Lady of the Lake*, but also the female witch, Sycorax trapping Prospero’s sprite, Ariel, in such a prison, in The Tempest (1611):

Prospero:

Thou best know’st
What torment I did find thee in. Thy groans
Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts
Of ever-angry bears. It was a torment
To lay upon the damned, which Sycorax
Could not again undo. It was mine art,
When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape
The pine and let thee out.

Ariel:

I thank thee, master.

Prospero:

If thou more murmur’st, I will rend an oak
And peg thee in his knotty entrails till
Thou hast howled away twelve winters.

Ariel:

Pardon, master.
I will be correspondent to command
And do my spriting gently.

Prospero:

Do so, and after two days
I will discharge thee (source).

From Arthurian legends and the Beowulf story (c. 700 AD), then, queerness is generally “of nature,” but closer to Capitalism and under it has become increasingly magical to uphold the status quo; i.e., in ways that cis-het men—even victims like Prospero—enlist to demonize its female/feminine core that they might seek revenge against fellow men of the imperial order! The state is straight, we fags, women and anything else attached to the environment suffering regardless who the king or executive is!

*Michael Page writes in The Encyclopedia of Things that Never Were (1986), “Merlin’s magical powers did not protect him from human weakness [code for men sleeping with women]. He was seduced by Nimiane, the Lady of the Lake, and she wheedled him into teaching her his spells and incantations. When she grew tired of him she used one of the spells to imprison him in an oak tree.”

[13] Exhibit 43d’s liminal expression of my own trauma, echoing Hamlet’s “quintessence of dust”; re: “What a piece of work is a man!” something we must, sure enough, camp through such dust: Jadis made up of such graveyard poiesis to yield a new golem like and unlike its former self, but also Shakespeare’s titular wackjob.

This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

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

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

Understanding Vampires, part two: “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)

The time has come to say fair’s fair
To pay the rent, to pay our share
The time has come, a fact’s a fact
It belongs to them, let’s give it back

—Peter Garrett; “Beds Are Burning”; Diesel and Dust (1987)

Picking up from where “Understanding Vampires, part one: Leaving the Closet” left off…

After the crash course on vampire basics, “Understanding Vampires” part zero and part one considered the history of sodomy, queer love and vampires; i.e., evolving out of the 1970s into what they are today through my (and similar scholars’) work, examining how I came out of the closet and used such work to stand up for myself and others like me (re: critiquing Marxist-Leninism, among other things).

(artist: Chris Bourassa)

Part two shall now consider—if cursorily—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). As well as various bits of parallel media that span the globe, it shall likewise consider how both kinds of stories comment on vampirism as something to simultaneously censor and canonize (as sex [and by extension gender] always are); i.e., as a biologically essential function of capital preying on the world at large—first through the monomyth and then simply as a thoroughly cutthroat prison structure built around its own myopic bloodsports: Vampire Capitalism as something to offer your neck to, sans irony or resistance. Often enough, said sports abandon the mythological cosmetic together while still abusing workers, nature and the monstrous-feminine en masse; i.e., during all the usual witch-hunt predation occurring under Capitalist Realism as a prison in more ways than one (regardless of sex or gender but classically as female, which we’ll focus on here, some of the time)!

Note: The remaining pieces of this module—”The World Is a Vampire” and “I See Dead People”—are a bit truncated/survey-style, but concern ideas we’ve talked about elsewhere (e.g., ludology and ludo-Gothic BDSM). I’ve already explained where you can go to read more vampire pieces by me, in “Understanding Vampires,” part one; “I See Dead People” shall do the same with ghosts. —Perse

P.S., Similar to “Leaving the Closet,” “The World Is a Vampire” hasn’t been divided into smaller divisions (mainly because I want to keep this as short as possible—69 pages again, haha—and if I subdivide everything then I’ll naturally want to expand on what I divide); instead, there will be signposts (whose meaning is, again, self-explanatory so I won’t summarize them:

• What’s in a Game? Explaining Bloodsports

• Old World Horrors: Red Hook’s Nazi Vampire Bug Mom

• In between Worlds: World Vampirism and Shared Concepts

• New World, Old Game: Vampire Capitalism in Bloodsport Gameshows Weaponizing Plato’s Cave (from The Matrix to Alice in Borderland and Squid Game)

• Head Games: Reflecting on Borderland’s Prison World in and out of Our Own Lives

• Closing Arguments: Understanding and Challenging Vampire Capitalism

What’s in a Game? Explaining Bloodsports

Before we begin, I feel I should explain what I mean by “bloodsport.” The combination of nouns should paint a clear enough picture of the basic idea, but I want to connect the compound to Vampire Capitalism; i.e., as something to think about relative to all the history we’ve gone over thus far but this time focusing on the feeding mechanism as defined by Marx: “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor.” Keeping with my Gothic ludologist origins (my bread and butter), Vampire Capitalism is a kind of predatory game whose Capitalist Realism plays out in bad BDSM as structure; i.e., that isn’t fair or mutually consensual, harming instead of hurting! It’s a prison (more on this specifically when we look at Borderland and The Matrix).

In short, while vampirism is an exchange that in theory goes both ways, capital is a bourgeois system of theft that only exists to flow power in one direction—into the state’s greedy mouth. In turn, it paralyzes its prey through confused predator/prey mechanisms, generally predicated on us-versus-them illusions, antagonizing nature-as-monstrous-feminine and putting it cheaply to work. This is Vampire Capitalism, which the state achieves through bloodsports; i.e., us versus them flowing power in one direction and criminality unto those it steals from. Some vampirism appears old-world, like the gladiator’s arena or Gothic trek into carceral spaces where such feeding is reputed to unfold; some, like corporations, are more updated, recent, and closer to home in new-world forms.

The old-world examples are a kind of window dressing concerning old topics that have survived imperfectly into the present. I’d like to provide them first in order to set the table and flirt with different elements of vampirism that, while largely stripped from new-world forms, can still be thought about poetically through metaphorical compare-and-contrast. Both involve games-in-games that we, the audience, look upon and think about as metaphors for capital, hence our own lives. And if you ever think the Queen of Hearts is a little underwhelming as a vampire monarch, remember that her actions on an army of feeders translate easily enough to more bombastically medieval forms: weaponized libido, but also gamer mentality with ignominious outcomes; e.g., a loss of one’s humanity by trying “to beat the game” through killing all your friends and associates inside the same prison complex!

Despite the lack of a barbarian aesthetic, new world forms are no less predatory or cruel in their theft, nor complete in developing Capitalism Realism (which is synonymous with all canonical forms discussed herein): concentrate us in easy-to-reach spots, and squeeze the blood out of us (and stab and inject us with all manner of paralytic agents and killing tools, the theft a one-time deal killing new workers over and over regarding an expendable owned population regenerating itself for capital to endlessly steal from/extirpate).

(artist: Jan Rock)

Canon, then, creates cops and pacifying illusions that hold labor in place, letting the state feed through these fang-like traitors—the metaphor less some giant vacuum or syringe and more a root with smaller and smaller branchings-off into the soil, sapping it of its nutrients until everything is depleted. The salubrious effect is illusory—the elite appearing refreshed but in actuality hungrier than ever before. Thus their unquenchable thirst must mount and compound by turning workers against themselves, using labor (whether cop or victim) up like fuel inside person-like spaces (re: Eco, and the heroic cult of death—see: “A Lesson in Humility” for examples); i.e., as part of nature, labor policing itself in the usual Cartesian ways: the proxy boot of the state on our throats, the monomyth superbeing traitor cowardly adopting a similar do-not-resist, thieving approach that organizations and their hunter-like individuals can enact, and which their prey accept to a Pavlovian degree.

Subjugated Amazons, for example, triangulate against their own, gentrifying and decaying inside prison-like territories; i.e., as might-makes-right executioners axing those even more helpless in exchange for dregs to fuel their own cloaked, status-symbols muscles[1] (above). Sex and force abide by these concepts, as do violence, terror and morphological expression, synthesized per oppositional praxis during the usual monopolies/canceled futures and our challenging of them (and their accomplices) through the usual aesthetic dualities.

(artist: Kitty Bit Games)

We can camp all of this. The state has vampires, but so do we; i.e., plenty of swole Amazons working for the cause against a shared systemic adversary. Per Matteson, our vampirism and ability to manifest and play games through ludo-Gothic BDSM must camp canonical iterations; i.e., the state most of all, including all its heteronormative, cryptomimetic bid for power’s rape and death fantasies: our death and rape at their hands, during the bloodsport/prisons being state dogma we take back (along with the lands these rest on) occupying the same stages and streets, and while addressing the usual police-state feelings of anger and helplessness the monomyth doesn’t: “Despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage!” (Smashing Pumpkin’s “Bullet with Butterfly Wings,” 1995). We’ll start with the Countess from The Darkest Dungeon, then move onto Alice in Borderland’s prison vampirism.

Old World Horrors: Red Hook’s Nazi Vampire Bug Mom

(artist: John Craig; source: Daoud Tyler-Ameen’s “Mellon Collie Mystery Girl: The Story Behind an Iconic Album Cover,” 2012)

First, the Archaic Mother. Classically of the ancient world in nigh-primordial suggestion, she translates easily enough to something old-world in a quasi-European sense. The Darkest Dungeon is a dungeon crawler that deals with the monomyth battling of a hidden, unimaginable evil it calls “ancient,” and is proceeded by a handful of smaller bosses in a neo-medieval space: swamp, sewers, ruin and seashore (nods to Innsmouth).

However, in terms of vampires, the game’s primary, active example isn’t a male mammalian vampire with a castle, but a female insectoid vampire called the Countess. Her role as monstrous-feminine tyrant is one that Cartesian forces seek to dominate in all the usual monomyth ways, thus end the proposed curse For Now™. In effect blaming her for the larger circular decay going on (the state not just dead, but undead and eating itself through its sorry bloodline), Red Hook effectively abjects capital onto Medusa-as-blood-drinker and witch—an unimaginable scenario that presents the universe as not ruled by themselves, but by their signature rival: nature-as-monstrous-feminine—a BDSM, bug-themed Nazi mom feeding on your through her annoyingly mosquito brood.

Endlessly eating its population through “ancient” forms of sacrifice and torture, then, the Countess represents a common old-world problem under Capitalism that has become associated with an ancient imaginary past: malaria (one of the world’s oldest diseases, predating homo sapiens) alongside sodomy and aristocratic scapegoats that must be tracked down through the chronotope for invading the world of the living and stealing its blood; i.e., police violence committed by different fascist revivals; e.g., plague doctors, Vikings, arbalests, clerics, Crusaders, etc, aping their targets (such as the vampires from Crimson Court, but also the gentry from the second game’s foetor biome).

Ruthlessly hunted and killed, only the Countess’ inevitable, prescribed death can return the drained world “to normal”: sucking Medusa dry, Skeksis-style, the elite eating their own (note, the bottling of the witch’s blood as a capitalist would, below, and her revenge poisoning the vintage—talk about “hair of the dog”; payback’s a bitch)! It’s a lie, the power-fantasy moral judgements a summary execution that extends to all such beings policed under capital, in-game and out: the spoils of war to enjoy in ways that don’t actually empower the conquerors, but pit them against each other on unholy vintages while staving off true death.

This restoration happens vis-à-vis a looter’s redistribution of the matriarch’s stolen blood, an undead, blood-witch “invader” whose death, post-rape, reinstalls a patriarchal bloodline maintained through “cradle robbery” and incest, but also the conqueror’s own crisis of masculinity as threatened by a monstrous-feminine Medusa (what the ancestor calls “a bewitching predator” and “lurking threat” to his own dominance); e.g., playing predatory games out of sheer boredom (according to Red Hook). It’s Capitalism-in-small, but also a strawman false flag weaponizing the androgynous queer as phallic female/feminine and vermin-like: the alien queen with a parthenogenic ovipositor (whose eggs enter you from acts of vampiric rape, already fertilized and bursting from you in xenophobic, queerphobic language; re: the xenomorph as a transphobic symbol of rape that, as a spectre of Marx smuggling settler-colonial relics onto refitted vessels, becomes something to reject and attack by the classic detectives and she-warriors of Gothic fiction: white cis-het women, mid-Amazonomachia)!

Though this monomyth process of abjection, the Ancestor (a villain for the ages) drives forward on a ceaseless quest for radical order, all while harvesting the fountain of youth from his own subjects by drinking their blood out of an imaginary female double, then impaling them in brutal displays of indiscriminate slaughter! In Red Hook’s case, the “evil queen,” female variant is the hauntological “she-wolf,” a kind of “Nazi girl boss, serial killer” whose only purpose is to make the deplorable Ancestor sweat by deceiving him in kind: as “a bewitching predator” wearing a pretty human mask (though funnily enough, the black-and-red color scheme is shared by fascists and anarcho-Communists). She’s Original Sin hauntologized in vampiric form:

(exhibit 41h: Artist, top-left, top-middle and top-right: Chris Bourassa; bottom-left-and-right: unknown.

Top-left: “The world is a vampire.” The confusion of the present is par for the course in the Lovecraftian vein, which he himself could no more express than T.S. Eliot’s own mythic structure of the same period. For Lovecraft, expressing the horrors of Capitalism became weird, but also informed by the sexist, xenophobic, monomyth traditions of the West—the ludic outcome seventy-plus years later being a torture loop that never ends, demanding sacrifice without calling the monster what it functionally is: Capitalism. Everything is dislocated and out-of-joint.

Top-middle/top-right-to-bottom strip: As for the Countess’ assigned role in this grand scheme, she is a constantly hounded scapegoat—literally hunted down into a womb-like prison space, goaded and kettled/provoked there until she snaps by supercops hunting supervillains exaggerating vampire menace through vampire dogma. Increasingly threatened, she gradually reveals her true form, forced to show the massive, fortress side of herself [a castle in a castle, but also a godly, unattainable giantess’ physique] the hunters wish to confirm, then destroy after she bears arms against them [a death sentence]. Canonically zero attempt is made to humanize her or appreciate the xenophilic beauty of the Countess’ non-human, insect side; simply put, “the only good bug is a dead bug” and the insect must be crushed under the boots of men [and token women] in service of the state, policing the land as “corrupt,” needing to be purified [an argument extending to the blood as sick, diseased, “thirsty”: mass hysteria and Satanic Panic].

Eroticized forms exist prolifically within the fanbase, but their poorly-kept secrets tend to adhere to 1970s “Nazi BDSM,” sex-equals-pain-rape-and-death clichés geared towards a cis-het male audience [which, again, Sontag outlined in 1974]: the conventional-looking dominatrix personifying blood, death and the night through a leather-clad, black-and-red pre-fascist/Catholic color scheme, but also the conventional submissive as female, busty and entirely human-looking. Like green and purple, black-and-red is the color of scapegoating someone, but often a desirable/fearsome power tied to death and torture [which extends into fascism and Communism forced to occupy the same space under neoliberal canon until said canon defends capital’s defense from the fascist against the Communist; e.g., the Red Scare, Giger-themed BDSM in Stranger Things, exhibit 39a2].

Exceptions exist [the xenophilic, fan-made “waifu” monster girls, exhibit 5e2] but nevertheless present the vampiric monster girl as someone to subjugate by mostly-male monomyth dominators: a stake through the heart, but also crushed under heel. The Countless is the Bride without a Groom, the waifu you can never wed who will straight-up skull-fuck you for funsies [the death fantasy and the rape fantasy foisted onto male victims as well as female]. That being said, she’s a tough customer—someone who, having a normal kawaii form and a “berserk,” Numinous kowai form so common to Medusa under reactive abusive, refuses to go gentle into that good night inside her prison-like home: 

I went into the Countess fight having never fought her, before. Fighting her was quite possibly the most stressful experience in a game infamous for such moments, and I technically won the fight! I did so by the skin of my teeth, but cannot stress how close this fight was: using a group that was equipped to specifically deal with her resulted in the closest match I’ve ever experienced [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Countess,” 2018].

Her heart bleeds because we won’t just love and worship her like good little subs! Alas!

In short, Red Hook wanted a bloodsport scapegoat who would not only fight back furiously per the monomyth refrain [a digitized version of tabletop games somewhere between Cameron and Tolkien’s refrain, but also D&D as predating videogames only to become a kind of nostalgia to return to under neoliberal markets[2]] but absolutely rock your world by fucking back, her own bottomless appetites/female rage a ’70s-style black mirror projecting the hero’s police extremes back onto them. Sound familiar?)

The undead and their sleep-like/drugged “necrophilia” varies per type. Vampires fixate on closeted/outed sodomy tied to human essence; i.e., as something to feed on while the victim is asleep and/or hypnotized. The lure goes both ways, the Countess being the chum to bait the sharks, and her being a megalodon to chow down on them once in reach; i.e., shark week (itself being a period euphemism among so many others, and the game having mosquitos come once a month [in between bosses] that, like the Countess’ terrible menstruation, paradoxically suck blood into her vagina-like prison space until she is defeated, permanently ending Miss Flo).

Apart from tokophobia and vaso vagal, vampires in general embody old-world metaphors for torture, rape and addiction, but also non-verbal communication and psychosexual abuse—where canonical examples, with laser beam eyes, can walk into a room and immediately pick out the most vulnerable target (usually a previously abused woman, but also the Ancestor’s fragile ego). And vice versa, the “prey animal” senses it too, feeling the terror of earlier abuse/the paradoxical thrill of vaguely being sighted and hunted again inside a public, crowded setting by new sadistic forces: often at a masked ball, that, upon its termination, the hunter will come calling in the dead of night, asking to be let inside (this romance—of Radcliffe’s “demon lover” serial killer pastiche—being something we’ll unpack even more in Volume three, when we look at criminal hauntologies).

Verbal or not, good communication remains paramount, as failing to interpret the signs/read the room involves unnecessary risk[3] of serious physical and/or mental injury. Non-verbal, involuntary submission generally occurs through the visual trope of “hypnosis”; i.e., of captivity under a dark, menacing force by confusing the freeze mechanism with desire (and vice versa). It’s a quick, animal way of communicating through body language in a modern setting, often among strangers in places that already treat women like sex objects; re: masques, onto sports bars (xenophiles and disco bars subverting the entire process, encouraging “sodomy” as a mutually consensual activity during cruising as a kind of sex-positive vampire’s liminal expression), but also videogames and their own sports-like competitions of manufactured scarcity speaking to women’s bodies (or anything comparable as a submissive prize to chase and claim; i.e., people who menstruate, but also feminized AMAB parties): the golden ticket bought at a steep, bloody price!

(artist: Popogori)

This rape fantasy isn’t limited to vampires (e.g., the xenophobic princess threatened by the dark, imposing rapist, above), but is taken most literally in vampiric clichés: the swooning damsel being most iconic—at least, in amatonormative circles—when depicted as a teenage debutante scooting on her butt away from the hungry undead zombie, vampire, and/or sex animal, what-have-you. Vampires generally reduce to drooling idiots when sensing a target’s vitality as within reach: so close you can taste it; i.e., the blood of the maiden’s torn hymen, and conversely the period blood of the same person’s hysterical womb “wandering” outside her body to spook and drain superstitious men (who fear Medusa’s revenge). When taken to apologetic extremes in any genre, this fantasy of rape is unhealthy and dangerous, but also romanticized; i.e., the sodomy of the male vampire’s torturous, unreproductive sexual activities that suck and threaten a woman’s perceived virtue, but also her sanity and ability to presently resist his coercive charms under ambiguous, cloudy and passionate circumstances. The same idea inverts per female circumcision beheading and bleeding the Countess: a barber’s bloodletting (which classically used leeches). It’s not medicinal, but punishment dressed up as “medicine” (similar to the medicalizing of queer AMABs).

Regardless of gender or sex, the canonical vampire can never stop, driven by needy compulsion; i.e., like a drug addict seeking a fix. It also operates through a modernized version of the master/slave dynamic in sex-coercive BDSM; i.e., to be under someone’s power, surrendering yourself completely to them during situations of ritualized peril and consent-non-consent, which, if done incorrectly or with a bad-faith partner (contract violation) become harmful, even fascist (re: Sontag). We’ll examine these forms of “bad play” during the chapter about canonical torture versus exquisite “torture,” in the Demon Module; in Volume Three, we’ll explore more ways that bad play in the Internet Age makes BDSM self-defeating for both parties (and examine in Chapter Three of that volume how Internet-age bad play can be subverted during appreciative irony and peril during Gothic counterculture art and/or porn-as-art). Just know that while we can certainly camp such sodomy arguments presenting we monstrous-feminine (male, intersex or female) as whorish, unnatural drainers—i.e., rebels reversing the rightful flow of power and fluid—a they present unironically in ways that call for police violence against us!

Vampiric or not, the Gothic trope of the treacherous old Count (which is what the Ancestor is, in Darkest Dungeon) symbolizes aristocratic property (which women historically went without). While the female vampire frequently boasts these assets, canon tends to depict her power as “hag-like” but false: a disastrous claimant covered up by a beautiful-if-perfidious outer guise; i.e., the Archaic Mother dressed up as Jane Austen’s scheming Catherine de Bourgh or Chaucer’s Wife of Bath—a lady to fear by an increasingly sexist and xenophobic male scientific body!

To it, Cartesian dualism would personify in Abraham Van Helsing and similar “good doctors,” conducting superstitious, medicalized witch hunts in the late 19th century onwards—i.e., against “hysterical women” and disease-spreading queer people, below—and for which terrifying horror stories prolifically and spontaneously emerged from then on out. These would remain perpetually concerned with, and fixated on, the safety of maidens, children, and men of reason from a moral panic’s rising crisis/perceived menace; i.e., those threatened, a priori, with degeneracy and aristocratic, Jewish, non-European and/or dark queer revenge—itself abjected unfairly (through selective collective punishment) onto the disparate victims of a Cartesian hegemon’s mad science. Doing so, said in-groups concocted their own ammunition by which to hunt us down and destroy us: Original Sin, updated to scapegoat Victorian victims for the fin de siècle. Canonically essentialized, the ghost of the counterfeit furthered the process of abjection beyond their wildest dreams. They would have all the blood (and women) they could possibly want!

(artist: Von Hauser)

To that, not only is the Countess from The Crimson Court dressed to kill (so to speak); she’s insectoid in a stigmatized sense, negatively tying her vampirism to male emasculation according to an “ancient,” human past—with the insect tied to death, decay and rebirth/transformation, but also wasp-like parasitism as fundamental to their life cycle: only the mosquito female harvests blood and it’s to feed her babies (though in this game, males also feed per the sodomy metaphor), and female wasps need protein to feel their babies, not themselves (re: “‘My Quest Began with a Riddle’: the Caterpillar and the Wasp,” 2024)! The imposturous nature of such beings is anthropomorphized and leveled against state victims, making them of nature-as-monstrous-feminine, thus vengeful.

Not only is her ladyship’s hunger in The Crimson Court endless, gigantic and endemic to nature; it overlaps with Cartesian anthropomorphism to chimerically express alien sexuality and gender in various, abject, psychosexual metaphors. Under the Capitalocene, these bugbears tend to communicate coercive sexuality as prescriptive; i.e., linked to human biology inside a demonized, dollhouse facsimile, itself an imaginary site of patriarchal trauma pushed onto an abusive, doll-like idea of the Medusa’s lair and its occupant: a hive and its queen, Grendel’s bug mom.

In ludic terms, the canonical hag is generally the Metroidvania’s “ultimate boss” (e.g., Mother Brain standing in for Cameron’s Alien Queen; i.e., being the original Metroid’s infamously difficult final boss, which the Countless lives up to in her own game); her cruel and deliriously hungry scheming historically-materially ties to the “dishonest” acquiring of power through stolen essence: marriage being the acquisition of the only power a woman was allowed to have in ancient times (e.g., Portia from The Merchant of Venice dominating her materially poor and inexperienced male husband, after the wedding concludes).

On Red Hook’s already-stolen premise—romanticizing death by Snu-Snu—the dastardly Countless drags the player into her prison-like rape castle; i.e., through a kind of Gothic “shotgun wedding” (though, in truth, and oddly enough for a vampire, sending the player invitations, letting you attend the Crimson Court if you want, but if you don’t, must deal with her annoying suitors/offspring for the rest of the game[4]).

Presently penned, Red Hook’s barbarian iteration of bloody prison sex offers the audience an old-world, less-efficient (brutal and destructive) version of Vampire Capitalism. There will be blood, but also much pomp and circumstance; i.e., Queen Maeb’s party for the ages! Soon, though, the extravagant novelty wears off—a rival dominatrix power growing stagnant, and all to advertise a stale, Masque-of-the-Red-Death bloodline that needs to go in place of another arguably even worse; re: “a roiling apiary where instinct and impulse were indulged with wild abandon”; i.e., while the hero tries to restore the Ancestor’s daddy-dom sovereignty in the Countess’ stead (despite him being the world’s biggest asshole)! It’s a land back argument that state forces deny the abused! Keeping with Aliens, BDSM becomes the neoliberal catalyst for state revenge; i.e., punching down against Medusa exiting the closet in the 1980s, her so-called “hysteria” a red flag to waive at the bull playing the matador (“Red Bull gives you wings”—red wings, that is).

Our lady, then, lives on borrowed time, her days numbered on the player’s calendar as they seek to invade and reclaim her land as “stolen.” Hounds on her t(r)ail (and thirsty for menses), whether she wins or the player does, nature takes her ravishing course: the Babylonian’s Whore’s holes a clever trap to suck power out from her would-be slayers’ fang-like lances. For a time, power goes in both directions.

(artist: Eves-eme)

While the “attractive” eroticizing of vampirism is more recent (re: Anne Rice), it still happens differently to female vampires than male vampires. Under the Male Gaze, female vampires present in a more “pin-up” style; i.e., fleshy merchandise that becomes increasingly less “white” the more buxom and shapely they are (except for the giant, “Barbie-doll” breasts, often designed by male artists being alienated from the female form; e.g., exhibit 41i, next page). Resisting the desire to appear conventionally attractive (and docile) is canonically relegated to making the female vampire ugly and fearsome, thus deserving of police violence from patriarchal forces that restore balance; i.e., while scapegoating xenophilic women (and similar activists) as “other” (with ugliness tied to historically stigmatized animals and peoples; re: Pagan women as blood-drinking hags). In short, our lady is transvestigated—hectored by status-quo witch hunters eager to pull off her fancy clothes and release her seemingly-small-but-actually-giant biology and alien gender! Stripping is not consent!

In doing so, Red Hook has fed into dated, sexist stereotypes, deeply exploiting them in order to fashion their strongest adversary for the player to overcome; i.e., through sanctioned, xenophobic violence (exhibit 41h). Fruitful diplomacy isn’t just abjured; it’s entirely unspoken—the myth of the woman who could kill you but doesn’t[5] being utterly rejected for the same-old seeking of power entirely for male interests: Patrilineal Descent (which the game ascribes as wholly Promethean). Likewise, elite proponents abject any potential “good play” involved with this female insect demon—invalidating anyone who entertains the idea and stigmatizing “pest” animals useless to Capitalism (save as scapegoats) while simultaneously ignoring the fact that insect transformation isn’t universally negative in eco-friendly humanist works; e.g., Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” (8 CE) or “Ode to Psyche” (1819) by John Keats.

Clearly there’s plenty of room to humanize these witch-like aspects of the vampire. We shall further explore, some of these problems and witch-hunter solutions present “feeding”-/-mimic type monsters; i.e., they blend in (or try to) but also, like the wandering womb and religious-to-secular dogma that comes with it, seem to appear out of nowhere:

(exhibit 41i: Artist, left: Sun Khamunaki; top-right and bottom: Tigrsasha; middle-right: Banshee Milk. Despite their ability to imitate ghosts and lycanthropes with mist and animal forms, vampires default to a human state—generally tied to adult entertainment and the exchange of sex in abject metaphors tied to dated, formerly religious forms of consumption: “transubstantiation,” or the rapturous miracle-torture by eating of Christ’s flesh and drinking his blood. In doing so, the cannibal-vampire gains everlasting life; i.e., blood magic permitted unto the faithful, provided they police heretics, witches, what-have-you, as abusing the same devices in a Paganized form. From sodomy to hysteria, blood libel is blood libel, which moral panics anticipate and immediately attack once out of the bag [which jiggle deliciously when struck by fanning fingers]!

To this, the nature of the blood as something to consume is poetically imprecise but formulaic; i.e., tying to erotic/supernatural, sex-dungeon clichés that stretch hauntologically back to “medieval” times, yet have simultaneously evolved into new xenophilic mimicries abjecting the monstrous-feminine as “hysterical,” wild, and untame: per canonical BDSM inventions thereof, alienating and fetishizing the process to serve profit in prison-like forms.

Depending on the aim of the artist, they could easily swap out blood for darkness, flesh, erotic vitality and/or sheer lifeforce. The paradox of eating “darkness visible” does nothing to dull the frequency or essence of the exchange; that cheapness comes from Vampire Capitalism and its endless, predatory search for profit—i.e., by exploiting workers through their “merchandise” under coercive prison-like conditions. Their bodies incarcerated as xenophobic, but also intimate, psychosexual symbols of violent exchange, any subsequent policing approaches police exploitation through a popular mode of consumption: the erotic and BDSM, medicalized through canon. If the blood and sex are “starved” and cheap, then look to where the nutrients are stored: the coffers of the elite! We’re made of the stuff; let’s slosh it about, then take and give it back, paying it forward to spite our greedy jailors! May they wither on the vine!

All the same, there’s a stubbornness to workers that endures in spite of compelled starvation, weaponizing the privatized imagery against elite jailors through liberated sites of sexuality and essence. “Any free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.” The Countess canonically dares to hold court in the shadow of the Ancestor’s ruined home; i.e., returning from the grave to snack on his descendants when luring them, as poachers chasing big game, tempestuously into her prison-like crypt [“Huge tracks of land!“]. By killing her as we do, xenophilic vampirism reclaims our blood from those who would siphon it out of us and sell it back for a profit: a restaurant transfusion. The Queen is dead; long live the Queen!)

 

In between Worlds: World Vampirism and Shared Concepts

With the Archaic Mother adequately covered, let’s move onto world vampirism before segueing into new-world forms (eight pages): from the old world moving towards the new across a global network (a common theme in Stoker’s novel; i.e., the New World [for Dracula, a European Count/”old[6]” money coming to prey on the British petit-bourgeoisie in a post-Industrial England] invaded by evil, bloodsucking symbols of depravity and wandering Jewishness transplanted onto whorish BDSM and queerness). This isn’t our close-read for Borderland, yet; it’s thinking about how old-world themes unanchor and present in a variety of stories, which shall include that story when we get to it!

(artist: Karen B.)

As you can imagine, a monster’s “type” informs the visuals and their metaphors. Within “pure” vampirism, for example, the feeding ritual is often hypnotizingly beautiful, tied to physically impressive embodiments of current beauty standards granted a hauntological aesthetic: the white bridal lace splashed red with vivid gore (exhibit 41j). Pure or not, the bloody exchange (and its shocking contrast) remains symbolically ambiguous, draining one’s overall fluids but also their faculties. Those involved positively drool (re: ahegao, left) losing control as any good orgasm is quick to do; they drown in desire and suitably hover in place, well-and-truly “ravished.” Conversely, the drinker undergoes a similar effect, evoking John Donne’s poem, “The Flea,” as a xenophilic plea to spare the process from harm:

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be

[…]

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?

Wherein could this flea guilty be,

Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?

Yet thou triumph’st, and say’st that thou

Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;

‘Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:

Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,

Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee (source).

Vampirism, like the poem, is—at least in part—about sex through mixed, metaphysical metaphors: the at-times queer draining of or supping on blood, which reliably saps both parties’ of their collective wits (and, through Indigenous language, the land they call home of its value being given and exchanged, back and forth); i.e., a repletion of girthy tumescence, whereupon the presumed swelling of ones’ sex organs occurs with perhaps more blood than exists inside their own brains, but also blood and effort from others during the laborious exchange (the “O face” being associated with a loss of control and deathly rituals of fun reenactment, last image; but also, perhaps, related to the flow of blood [and the righteous blow of an orgasm] to particular parts of the body besides the brain).

As you might imagine, this xenophilic, necro-erotic engorgement synergizes with body heat; i.e., as something to cater to, regarding parched consumers thirsty for more: hot blood for what is normally denied to us/alienated by capital, yet sold in plain sight during a manufactured division enterprising know-how can capitalize on:

Shake down, rock ’em boys, crack that whip strap mean
Pulse rave, air waves, battle lies in every place we’ve been
Stealing your hearts all across the land
Hot blood doing good, we’re going to load you with our brand (Judas Priest’s “Delivering the Goods,” 1979).

It’s not just a bloodsport, but a trade in plasma that’s anything but pious! On the cusp of greatness, then so many sell out (as Halford and company did, in the 1980s). Salvation’s sale of indulgences first revive, then paywall paradise as usual.

Occurring between the sacred and the profane, then, neoliberal shock therapy chills the blood; i.e., sells its stolen value back as “warmth,” but bottled from the dead harvested while alive. As dimorphized similar to “male/masc” vs “female/femme,” open vs closed speaks to an open-heart procedure leaving us terminally exposed and dependent on state monopolies and falsehoods. Under those abysmal conditions, Foucault’s productive arguments suddenly return to the fore: of psychosexual discourse, his prison arguments warning of a terrible division, the two parting during a 19th century rise of the bourgeoisie that moved in and never left! With them, prisons (and their discipline-and-punish approach to labor) would explode in a capitalist sense. The boys were back in town!

To it, men own things and control them/relegate them to “in the home” and the dreaded bedroom as prison-like; women are “kept” inside “for their own good,” whereupon they are raped without joy or irony. Those who violate this sacred temple doctrine and its multitudinous performative constraints are violated themselves through the argument of righteous punishment, which project onto fleshy and thirsty carnivals. These, in turn, can be camped, but always exist in the shadow of prison, thus police violence. In my own words; re “Why I Submit”):

I digress. Non-traditional alternatives should also be made available to the public. This includes the aforementioned cat and fem boys, but also the male variant of a Gothic heroine. “The greatest anxiety for the woman reader was the Gothic heroine’s lack of agency,” writes Avril Horner. Postmodernity makes the role performative, letting cis women/trans persons consent to submission. They can voluntarily yield to greater forces. And from cradle to grave, I can be the Gothic heroine too—Samus, or even subbier forms [depending on who I’m with]. The same phenomenon is happening with men everywhere. Not just male members of the Lady Dimitrescu fan club. From all walks of life, men are escaping outmoded traditions—expressing themselves freely in public. This growing freedom allows for the inclusion of feminine boys in a wider sphere. Not just in public, but through content creation as a form of public expression. Now more than ever, male actors and models can perform Gothic scenarios; this includes being “in danger” in a traditionally “feminine” way (sadly to wear “feminine” clothes can very easily make someone a target):

Unfortunately there is a real element of persecutory danger to this performance. Not because the performers are being impudent, but because sexist, fearful men will attack them. Note Cursed Arachnid (the e-boy to the right); their position and clothing are “feminine,” and their shirt reads the words “orgasm denial.” There’s an element of sexual tension combined with the uncanny—the familiar and the foreign, but also the taboo. When I was younger, my uncle had a shelf of books in his living room. One row featured Hot Blood, a [1990s] horror erotica series by Jeff Gelb and Michael Garrett. I was fascinated. Time passed, and eventually I watched Bible Black, a hentai series, in secret. A scene stuck out to me: a man under a female witch’s power. “Let me cum!” he begged, his face twisting horribly as she rode him. The voice acting is absolutely awful, but the concept remains theoretically attractive. Not just orgasm denial, but naughty witchcraft as a whole: The whole show was soaked in black magic, every scene a dark ritual that explores the forbidden and the profane [including the spilling of blood during sex] (source).

Through sodomy arguments that extend to morphological expression, camp seeks to subvert market forces and material argumentation during “violent” counterterror dialogs fitted with BDSM aesthetics (“ribbed for her pleasure” gimp suits scaring the straights with genderqueer metamorphosis liked, by those parties, to AIDS). Unable to think clearly during forbidden, arguably scandalous rituals, sodomy practitioners become thoroughly drunk; i.e., inundated with intense, “religious” sensations of ritualized “doom”: erogenous pleasure and non-harmful pain spiting a Protestant ethic (and all its bugbears/double standards). The whore is always asleep, but threatening to wake up again, still wearing the maiden’s ill-fitting dress:

(artist: Kabhaal TV)

Be this sanguine xenophilia purely vampiric or combined chimerically with other monstrous elements, the modularity of undead feeding at night—during the troubled sleep of nightmares/wet dreams[7]— become something to invade conservative hauntologies with: through queer nostalgia as demonized by snooty xenophobes (e.g., Beltane or Walpurgisnacht as something to revive during oppositional struggle; i.e., as a kind of lost history that must be reimagined by those who survive, often through xenophilic music, performance art, and/or Gothic media bringing us closer to reality beyond capital imitations—Trent Reznor, next page).

Pain and sex can certainly go hand-in-hand, but they needn’t automatically. Jadis, for example, loved pain as a non-sexual expression of taboo pleasure that rankled conservative prudes. During especially intense BDSM sessions, they reputedly became “dead to the world.” In truth, they were experiencing a medical phenomenon called the vaso vagal syncope response. At first glance, it’s not so different from an orgasm (or vampiric hypnosis). Likewise, it bears the symptoms of extreme forms of exertion not immediately dissimilar from childbirth or combat; it’s also caused near-instantly by certain visual triggers, including the sight of blood and the threat of unwanted harmful penetration[8].

I can vouch for this, watching Jadis—normally made of iron—nearly faint during my vasectomy procedure: not from the surgery itself, but from seeing my exposed blood as the doctor operated on me!

Likewise, while my own memories about Jadis—requesting that I hurt them during BDSM—have soured considerably, the initial instruction and their body’s reaction was, and is, fascinating to me from a medievalist standpoint; i.e., in terms of how different it was from conventional stereotypes about inflicting and receiving pain through “medieval” torture. Indeed, it was closer to a convulsionnaire, inflicting wounds to cause rapture, thus ease trauma-induced torment and PTSD from modern life under Vampire Capitalism!

As such, Jadis could take physical pain far more than I could dish it out (unless my technique was bad, in which case they would correct my form). Said pain suggested that the quality of the trauma Jadis endured—surviving their own abusive mother—was equally extreme. In part, controlled pain was their antidote, long after she was dead and buried; but they always took it out on me. To force them to confront their own love-bombing tactics (they liked to wine and dine me, in particular), made Jadis feel uncomfortable; i.e., a bit like showing a vampire its own reflection, something always in the way and not entirely present or sensible: the female/queer predator’s lack of sensation, of self, save when eating someone! Jadis couldn’t stand the thought of that; it froze them in place—knowing they had to take unconditionally in order to feel complete/sated, acting just like their imposturous mother had done with their own confused pleasure/pain and predator/prey mechanisms!

(source: Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” 1994)

Clearly the process of exacting pain/extracting essence or performative trauma can be positive or negative, but nevertheless raises vital questions when viewed; re: my twin brother and I asking the heart-and-lung-machine operator when we were little, “How did they get blood out of the cow?” / “Did it hurt the cow?” / “Where’s the cow now?” Furthermore, the socio-ludic mixing of a given feeder and those fed upon by them happens relative to a given slaughterhouse space, the exact substance(s) being exchanged varying tremendously. “Torture” (with or without quotes) becomes grotesque or gourmet, concerning vampires. Such blood libel concerns purity of the blood/holy spirit as feeding into capital’s usual Cartesian dualism, and dualities of oppositional praxis contest that as a means of camping canon.

Said camp includes xenophilic BDSM and calculated risk. As a part of the praxial equation, its carceral vampirism is forever ongoing but also in conflict with xenophobic interpretations’ fear and fascination unfolding in conservative, even fascist, “old-world” language; i.e., whose power-and-death, prison-like aesthetic can be camped, occupied and played with as needed:

(exhibit 41j: Model and artist, middle-to-right: Blxxd Bunny and Persephone van der Waard.

Similar to blood, meaning and knowledge are stored in music concerning vampires [top-left: Burning Witches’ The Dark Tower, 2023]. Such things [and their fash-adjacent aesthetics] are dualistic, allowing for all manner of political expression; e.g., Brutus Bathory’s left-leaning approach to Satanism in metal, but also political critiques on heavy metal sell-outs [“The Ideology of Dave Mustaine,” 2024] and Satanic Panic in the genre’s broader history [“How the Right ‘Stole’ Metal,” 2024]. The battle for the Gothic’s soul—its power over people’s hearts and minds—is eternal!

Canonical vampire stories concern the marital rites of women [queer or not] as “enshrined” under hypermasculine power’s usual operatic spaces [the queer-penned Gothic castle taken by cis-het women and exploited; re: Radcliffe]. Trapped within carceral tombs that highlight the woman’s utter lack of rights, the narrative operates in service of a vice-driven, powerful husband lording over his [usually stolen] wife: Count Dracula; i.e., who the heroic, good-guy Belmonts routinely hunt to extinction: scapegoating the fash-coded interloper as a presence of routine corruption versus acknowledging the state as forever in crisis by design.

From Prometheus to Pygmalion to Persephone, various metaphors are tied to the blood as something to boil, curdle or chill inside the prison; but as a poetic expression of emotions, sexuality and health, vampirism echoes a special kind of trauma locked away inside castles and other Gothic structure: ludo-Gothic BDSM, or the ability to play out our “death” for different reasons. These violent, dated homes anchor the brutal, erotic exchange of human blood [and its medieval spillage] inside spaces loaded with haunting reminders of actual male tyrants [and female ghosts]: their legendary cruelty and depraved appetites, which establish dubiously “pure” bloodlines through force and lust.

[artist: Karen B.]

Ignoring any campy version’s cryptonymically [show-and-hide] aping of the Catholic miracle—doing so to profane and upend profit in BDSM language’s black-and-red, power-and-death bedroom games, its cathartically unequal power exchanges—the canonical vampire’s imperative carries these methods beyond the castle walls in bad faith; i.e., to unironically imprison their victims with, or steal unwilling brides from the modern world back into the barbaric past dressed up as the victims the state normally polices [evil women and gay people]—all to be their whores, profaning the sacrament of nuclear families and institutional marriage [re: DARVO arguments and obscurantism, whores and maidens distractions and dogwhistles]!

As the name suggests, then, Vampire Capitalism capitalizes on this abjection, circulating the myopia as an unbroken, imaginary ring—a prison of the mind staring prey-like at whorish bicycle face and sodomite alike. Real struggles are simultaneously trivialized and courted with false predatory doubles selling rape by the bottle: “First one’s free!” and addicts commonly tokenize [many (white, cis-het) TERFs styling themselves witches and vampires to keep the poetry away from those they demonize and prey on, themselves; re: the equality of convenience].

Of course, this exploitation applies differently to different marginalized groups [no shit]. From a Western standpoint, the theft of the [white cis-het] woman “wastes” her reproductive potential, ruining familial potency and blood “purity”; i.e., by trading unfairly and hastily for the body of the woman as a vessel of quick, cheap pleasure. In turn, her precious blood becomes something to selfishly horde and pimp out in neoliberal sales of indulgence. Imprisoned underground inside the endless, murky dungeons, a vampire’s servants are kept “strung out,” dependent on the master’s stores to survive [often their own finite supply]. These “brides” do not normally bear children through PIV sex; they receive human blood as a transference of raw ecstasy and violence that subjugates them; i.e., turning them undead through their own stolen labor given back to them, then requiring them to feed on living labor to continue labor’s imprisonment [whose own servants tend to be weaker and less aware than they are—still vampiric, but also subserviently zombie-like: a pyramid-shaped hierarchy of vampires feeding on those under them and passing the blood upstream].

[artist: Ickpot]

Vampire Capitalism, in this canonical vein, is a process of subjugation tied to blood tithes and fluid exchange—the wanton, undead concubines operating as drugged sexual slaves who not only survive considerable trauma, but transform into thoroughly jaded, brainwashed/closed killers acclimated to dated expressions and rituals of power inside Gothic spaces; e.g., Cammy White cloned from M. Bison, above; i.e., the regressive, monstrous-feminine Brides of Dracula—a canonical appropriation of sodomy to enforce the status quo: a blood maggot inside a “demon lover” ghost of the counterfeit who commits blood libel for their daddy dom demanding his nightly tithes! Thus capital blames women, witches and faggots instead of itself, all while stringing and pimping them out.)

The classic vampire from Western Europe, for instance, typically champions fearsome, xenophobic legends about the medieval, pre-Enlightened past as continuously reimagined; e.g., Vlad the Impaler as a mighty “Eastern” threat (the pre-fascist Nordic, German, or so-called “Goth”). As time carried on, it was out with the old and in with the new, but various things historically-materially stayed and can thusly be reinserted into the public’s imagination (their willing throats): impalement, crucifixes, the drinking of blood, garlic, etc. Geared towards a shifting idea of the past and its materials, these generational reimaginings express corruption less of the blood in a literal sense, and more as “data” carrying cultural freight to enact blood libel with; i.e., superstitiously fearful beliefs about sexual reproduction tied to sanguine, Jewish calumnies, sodomy rhetoric, but also Catholicized metaphors and that religion’s symbolism concerning the soul: gilded icons, scarlet clothes, and ritualized exchange of essence (often through fluids) tied to a dated, post-Schism embodiment of Protestant superstition demonizing all of the above to pit different parties against each other in a global market.

Simply put, blood outside the human body has become canonically abject stemming from a formerly sacred ritual turned into blood libel: Catholicism and transubstantiation married to BDSM, post-1970s cryptofascism and neoliberal Red Scare. Currently trapped between the holy and profane, its indecent, gruesome, “almost holy” exposure communicates a special set of phobias and bias when extracted: the essence of vitality tied to dated, superstitious rituals and demonized religion, but also signs of violent, reactionary crime, ill omens, and numerous diseases caused by capital that capital projects onto its own victims inside its prison-like places, peoples and performances.

For instance, syphilis and rabies are linked to nocturnal animals, but also sinful activities, wherein various essential fluids are messily exchanged between lucid-if-addicted human parties: AIDS and queerness (the bat overlapping with werewolves[9], in that respect; e.g., J.K. Rowling’s vindictive use of the werewolf as a latter-day conservative metaphor for AIDS [Salon, 2016] that blames queer people—but specifically homosexual men—for their “own” disease). Just as witch hunts aren’t restricted to a particular time or place (re: Federici, “Hot Allostatic Load“), to be queer is to be closeted, accused, quarantined, rumored, feared and fetishized: diseased whores and dandies, wolfmen, and vampires serving the elite’s punitive, fear-fascination function among the European, British and American middle class.

(source: Joshua Anderson’s “ Where is the Power of the Werewolf?”)

To that, terror literature and heteronormativity’s canonical, hauntologically criminalized treatment of the vampire—as caged, vulgar innuendo (e.g., “staking” as a visually violent and excessively medieval form of rape and sexualized negative reinforcement; i.e., connected to Vlad the Impaler and similar historically hypermasculine, pre-fascist strongmen)—is fundamentally at odds with latter-day queer interpretations of vampirism celebrating the same metaphors for sex-positive reasons (often ridiculed by the status quo; e.g., Kevin Nealon complaining about “gay bats” to John Travolta, in the 1994 “Gay Dracula skit” on SNL). Gothic Communism’s use of ironic xenophilia touches upon the increasingly homophobic, “bury your gays” moral panic of vampire canon’s faithful, cis-het queer-curious to queer-hostile consumers. As a kind of vampire slander leveled against gay people, blood-libel xenophobia sounds absurd to persons who know conservatives aren’t as prudish as they like to style themselves; shlock, for these reasons, camps canon to poke fun at conservative superstitions acting stupidly xenophobic, but whose guilty pleasures are nevertheless taken dead seriously by these same witch hunters! The heat-oppressed brain has a fever—one whose “prescription” to their boiling blood isn’t more cowbell; it’s blood libel!

Thus bigotry begets more bigotry as a feeding frenzy. Having evolved into their current mindset of reimagined myths, these reactionary zealots are responding to what Dale Townshend once described to me as the following transition come and gone: “‘The love that dare not speak its name’ had, by the time Stoker wrote Dracula, become ‘the love that wouldn’t shut up!'” It’s not hard to throw stones in glass houses if the state shelters you; i.e., from the subsequent nights of the long knives and broken glass. Men like Matt Walsh and others are abusing the language of witch hunts to validate and justify pogroms against state victims… which they then greedily mop up the spilled blood, spreading the sickness of society in all directions, during Vampire Capitalism. Workers round up so-called “degenerates,” then police the ghettos (and have those ghettos self-police in turn).

Queerness is generally associated with forms of sexuality that don’t produce babies—anal (and the blood that can result from that) but also sex during menstruation, which Jadis lovingly called “murder dick.” Conversely but with the same “painting” materials, blood is canonically linked to the torn hymen and subsequent staining of the snow-white gown (and skin, marriage consummation linens, etc) with fresh virgin blood (often a lie, given how rare virgins historically are). From this mendacious perspective, any canonical phobias tied to vampire blood openly condemn the defilers of white virgins during extramarital affairs; i.e., the myth of the black rapist/male sodomite from the out-group, while in-group double standards simultaneously covet white women as helpless, dumbfounded property (the “think of the women and children” subterfuge) that, themselves, “break down” whorishly once a month:

(exhibit 41k: Artist: Nolwen Cifuentes, of whom Salty World writes, “Period sex happens every single day, all over the planet, but the subject still remains taboo. Sure, there are private conversations between us, we share our tips and experiences, but we never SEE other people having period sex, and certainly not queer couples—not in porn, not in women’s media—never” [source: “Taboo Smashing Period Sex Portraits,” 2023]. In canonical narratives, the period symbolizes the escaping of the wandering womb as a kind of exsanguinating female madness; i.e., hysteria, except increasingly queer iterations are abjected into forbidden, murderous, womb-like spaces occupied by dark, phallic women; e.g., the xenomorph as a surreal, Gothically liminal egregore, but also a vampire par excellence!

A point of contention among iconoclasts is that period sex is palliative re: in that it can ease the pain of periods cramps. If one’s cramps are so severe that they cannot function, then that is not healthy! And yet, popular myths to the contrary normalize this. Women are expected to suffer in silence and not complain [which intersects with other forms of abuse that they also shoulder in domestic life]. Simply put, God wills it, which translates to Vampire Capitalism, easily enough.)

 

As such, the messiness of a particular feeding agent and vector denotes various intersections presented as “past.” With female vampires, the phase “bloody mess” can symbolize menstruation, but also intensely pleasurable sex during menstruation (or any of the above topics) as dualistically xenophilic. Such activities often collide with rape, hysteria, nymphomania, and kinky BDSM rituals afforded a transient past traded on a global level; e.g., Anne Rice’s nomadic vampires, uprooted from their “ancient” homelands and delivering forbidden pleasures to queer audiences, of course, but also a predatory white, cis-het female audience that cares little for us fags (with queer people being the ideal and arguably intended readers, by Rice).

So, while it’s true that blood can be incredibly subversive under the right conditions, playing with blood is something that profanes from the sacred, canonical perspective that many women are subjected to. Blood—but especially female blood—becomes a sticking point regarding “civilized,” xenophobic attitudes about the barbaric past: something to exchange through violent, corrupt sexualities that have gradually replaced “healthy” reproduction; i.e., the hoarding of virgin human blood like a king his pile of gold. They love and hate it as a matter of forbidden, wicked consumption they can then police to serve profit; i.e., in prison-like hauntologies brought into the new old out from the old.

This concludes the old-world approach to vampirism under capital, as well as world vampirism leading to a new-world approach. I now want to consider this per Alice in Borderland as new-world Vampire Capitalism; i.e., while looking at The Matrix and the role of prisons/police violence in such concentric illusory systems!

Except, this also brings us to something stated at the start of “They Hunger”: our original manuscript’s examination of undead egregores and their feeding habits. This originally involved three main exhibits (two in this chapter and the third in the following chapter about composite bodies, inside the Demon Module); re:

• ideal hermeneutic case study (feat. vampires): the Gothic, Marxism, queer studies and ludology (now “The World Is a Vampire”)
• cryptomimesis; i.e., liminal riffing and ghostly lineages (feat. ghosts)
• composite bodies/collages (feat. the Bride of Frankenstein)

My goal in preparing them as I did, back then, was to help workers reunite with their labor as undead, encouraging them to think differently about the assorted egregores already present in Gothic art; i.e., as a creative, fluid, sex-positive mode of genderqueer thought and existence that offers itself up in vivid, accessible ways. To be holistic and well-rounded (to best combat capital as a worldwide and multimedia threat), I want to perverse this model when looking at new-world examples of Vampire Capitalism after having examined old-world examples.

We’ll start within the ideal case study for liminal expression under Gothic Communism; i.e., one that covers the entire Gothic Communistic Hermeneutic Quadfecta (re: gender and Gothic studies, ludology and Marxism): Alice in Borderland, for vampires (and The Matrix, too). Its vampirism pointedly describes the modern world (specifically Japan) in crisis through harmful games controlled by the elite. Make no mistake, though, Borderland remains a show with a queen and a castle. The Queen of Hearts is a charming adversary and dressed to kill. She also prides herself as above everything while the bloodsport rages on; while society decays into a techno-medieval hellscape, she gets her daily dose of blood!

Except, the bourgeoisie’s own charm is very much brute force, enabled by their position as seductive in a one-note sense; i.e., a doll-eyed shark rigging the game to get their daily dose of that drug-like blood (the only time they feel alive): addicts of misery (which is what their content, their brand, is). Raw sodomy arguments are swapped out for basic, blunt-force game rules; everything is uncannily cute or ordinary in appearance, the state a vampire of the New World, corporatized without the tell-tale cartoon fangs and Gothic pastiche seen in The Darkest Dungeon. Instead, coercive BDSM is present as a matter of infernal slave contracts, prisons and cops, infernal concentric patterns, games-inside-games, the owners forcing people to rape and kill each other for their sadistic, heartless amusement; i.e., Smashing Pumpkin’s “super destroyers, sent to drain” and leaving those they abuse feeling trapped in their maze-like illusions. Similar to Top Dollar, it’s the only time when those like the Queen are happy—to shout, “Off with their heads!” and relish in the crucifixion-style bedlam it causes. “When in Rome…”

Note: As we proceed, “blood” is an abstraction for predation/theft; i.e., anything that capital (dead labor) steals from workers (living labor) to enrich the elite at our expense, and which we dualistically take back by any and all anisotropic means (reversing polarity and therefore abjection according to blood flow). Prisons, then, take and take, raping prison populations in spaces built for profit; i.e., exploitation in ways patently meant to cause harm in order to achieve profit.

Keeping with our definition, “rape”—”‘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” (source: “A Note about Rape,” 2024)—is synonymous with “theft,” is synonymous with “blood” according to the usual flow of power and resources towards the state through prison-like structures/metas during Vampire Capitalism. The state only ever takes, and never gives back; i.e., always up, never down, on a one-way track to the elite. By comparison, Gothic Communism’s ludo-Gothic BDSM and proletarian vampirism give and receive per exchange—often during uneven-but-negotiated arrangements that (and here’s a small sex worker secret) take power by giving up a bit of something for something. Sex or unequal power (among other things) are traded by both parties, achieving mutual catharsis during a pedagogy of the oppressed.

I’ve done my best to explain what follows in a linear fashion; but also readily admit and accept that non-linearity and post hoc assembly is the nature of good, intelligent play during holistic analysis. Like a bad puzzle, capital trains people to work within prison-like confinement; i.e., rats in a maze, Pavlov’s dogs taught to bite/see everything as a threat, cats eating mice, etc. Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communists deconstruct and reconstruct these massive, obfuscating environments as messily as needed—doing so out of old parts to redistribute power horizontally among all workers; but until then, they occupy the same maze capital’s canonical vampires and their us-versus-them, cops-and-victims, cat-and-mouse rhetoric do. The warfare is inherently asymmetrical and, as you’ve probably noted, completely unfair! That’s nation-states for you! It’s an uphill battle with the sun in your eyes!

As I will try to explain in this section, then, any attempt by workers to subvert Vampire Capitalism and its negative, one-sided effects happens with the same vampiric language and aesthetics used by state forces; i.e., inside the same shadow space/prison areas during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: where the playfulness known to videogames commonly allows players to camp canon in and out of videogames as a form of negotiated power exchange established in playful, game-like forms (theatre and rules). —Perse

New World, Old Game: Vampire Capitalism in Bloodsport Gameshows Weaponizing Plato’s Cave (from The Matrix to Alice in Borderland and Squid Game)

Per the bloodsport, then, these modern-day monarchs’ greatest weapon is, much like the Caesars of old, bread-and-circus-style games and the prison-like illusion of power relaid through said games; re: Plato’s allegory of the cave (c. 380 BC) actually predating the Roman empire; i.e., his own works, Republic, coinciding with the Roman Republic, which eventually decayed into an imperial version of its former self (27 BC). To summarize Plato, he warned against “the cave” as a prison of the mind; i.e., wherein higher forms of reality existed outside the cave in a place called the Realm of the Forms, but for which ordinary people (not controlling the illusions) would never be able to access (chained, as they were, to stare at the cave wall’s shadow plays unfolding in front of them). Such machinations, despite their age (and Plato’s literal, metaphysical treatment of them), neatly summarize bourgeois power abuses like those seen in Borderland, executed by the Queen of Hearts. Power flows in one direction, and it is up.

Furthermore, such bloodsports have increasingly become a parasocial exchange between different parasites, the master coding her servants to play along through capital (moving blood money through nature). The disco is less “in disguise,” then, and more a dogwhistle that canonizes postpunk forms:

I never said I wasn’t gonna tell nobody
No, baby
But this good lovin’ I can’t keep it to myself
Oh, no
When we’re together it’s like hot coals in a fire
Hot, baby
My body’s burnin’ so come on heed my desire
Come on, come on

Two of hearts
Two hearts that beat as one
Two of hearts
I need you, I need you (Stacey Q’s “Two of Hearts,” 1987).

It’s FOMO from Hell—a “buy now!” con that swells into its own mania/mad drip (also, absolutely no disrespect to Stacey Q—Zeuhl loved her music and passed the infectious beat along to little ol’ me—just that, the elite cultivate such false sensations to starve people of their own power and then put them alongside it. Masters of propaganda, the elite skillfully deprive and bombard us; i.e., with false connections we must take back when using the same language: stealing our hearts back, thus our labor and the land, vampirism and groovy music from manipulative dickwads; re: Zeuhl abusing said music, themselves, to get what they wanted from me before tossing me aside).

Except, the games the bourgeoisie offer have been updated and unfold accordingly under capital, which very much didn’t exist during the Roman empire! In turn, these gamemasters give us the “choice” to play their game as a system; i.e., capital feeding on players through Faustian contracts that always play out through bad BDSM and harmful vampirism. Yes, their games have rules and seemingly can be lost or won. But despite how games in general can be positive-sum (source: Britannica), zero-sum and negative-sum (win/win, win/lose, lose/lose), capital only allows for zero-sum games benefitting themselves. Profit makes them cum, greedily drinking our blood and giving nothing back; our best revenge is to survive and deny them such lopsided domination now and in the future—by putting the gay in game, the play in Plato to fight profit with every fiber of our being! “McScuse me, bitch? I throat-punched that bitch!” (Libbie Higgins’ “McScuse Me Woman Rages Over Extra McRib,” 2016).

As described, Alice in Borderland is very much of a New World approach, concerning games and life as one-in-the-same, and whose embedded, concentric vampirism resembles older forms in function. The story is the game and the game is a prison narrative presented as—you guessed it—a bloodsport in a shadowy open world. Meant to control players, the shadows present as games-inside-games, illusions-in-illusions, per the cryptonymy process. In short, it’s an apocalypse whose revelation lies in a dream space where the citizens of a place—already on the verge of collapse—come repeatedly to grips with exposure; i.e., in ways that illustrate Vampire Capitalism nakedly among the house of cards. In queer terms, it’s the closet—a prison of the mind, the bars of the cell a shadow likeness resembling our own world! They show us our own deaths and rapes in ways we can stand.

(artist: Zoe Volf)

To be clear, there are no overt, supernatural examples of vampires or sodomy in Borderland—nothing that compares aesthetically to those we’ve previously examined here or elsewhere. But there are plenty of games that fulfill the same undead, essence-concerned role; i.e., a prison-like world that forces its local population to fight to the death for the entertainment of an invisible, all-powerful audience; re: the bloodsport. In doing so, here, Borderland depicts Japan’s Tokyo as never being a place to live, but a liminal space to die (for profit) disguised as a residence!

Prisons are powerful institutions, Foucault illustrated; just as we took and removed his ideas from a problematic man to understand queerness under capital, we can take Plato’s old-world quackery and update it to speak to our liberation (and won’t be the first to have done so, the Wachowski sisters’ Matrix being mentioned here, as well as Squid Game coming afterwards); i.e., not something to pimp out and drain us of our brain’s blood (sex being a common distraction, but also shamed as a ruse), but ludo-Gothic BDSM that plays through sex to smuggle rebellion back into the games we play! If those in power treat us like idiots to exploit each other for profit with, then we have to trust that people can be retaught; i.e., learning better ways to flow power and resources through vampirism and games back towards us (there’s room to blame players and games, but ultimately the prime antagonist making people stupid is Capitalism).

First, capital is concentric and built through smaller systems on top of, but inside, larger ones; i.e., a “gobstopper” effect, insofar as the enormity of the overall system is felt through miniatures that, per Capitalism in small, speak to its largest aspects scrambling our brains. Big prisons, little prisons, Vampire Capitalism houses and blinds its prey to feed on them; i.e., profit = theft of labor and wages. Expressed poetically as “blood,” everything is rooted in the land (and exploitation of its people) through police violence regulating sex and force, but also violence, terror and morphological expression per the usual monopolies, trifectas and heteronormative, Cartesian, and settler-colonial, binarized qualities of capital.

In turn, this hall of mirrors is monitored by police agents chosen from the prison population to alienate and sexualize all workers inside; i.e., cops, selected by the warden and his officers to police something so large that it requires them to appoint less powerful token officials all the way down the American-Liberalism pecking order (re: Howard Zinn and Americanized concessions with the middle class). The panopticon always watches workers with workers, but its gaze multiplies/amplifies like an insect’s kaleidoscopic vision: to reward those who play along and punish those who do and don’t!

Keep the above explanations at the back of your mind. To overcome the prison-like nature of Vampire Capitalism and its harmful myopia, we’ll be juggling and combining a lot of different variables (what gamers refer to as “mental stack,” which capital uses to distract, busy and overwhelm us, while turning us into cops that eat each other for them; i.e., little vampires giving to big vampires).

All of this being said, onto the shows themselves!

At first glance, Borderland and Plato’s cave might not seem related, nor either of them to The Matrix. To summarize Borderland, the show is very much a story about survival and emancipation inside the prison, as such; i.e., a rag-tag group of unlikely heroes surviving bourgeois forces, hence Vampire Capitalism. Much of the story/game orbits around the fish-out-of-water, Alice (a boy this time, surrounded by women more physically capable than him). He and his friends aren’t conquerors, but misfits faced with their homeland eating them alive. In it, the usual fantasy—what if playing videogames could teach me how to survive an apocalypse?—comes to bear. And fair enough! Games are both fun to think about and to play with in this respect, but also vital to our survival when empire decays; i.e., when the bare blood of dead people, painting the town red, exposes state predation superimposed over sites of daily life. Except, the fantasy speaks to the possibility of systemic transformation starting with the Platonic realization: that power in the cave is not only fake, but harmful. That’s not too far off from what The Matrix arrived at!

Luckily—and as I’ve hopefully established by now—power is an illusion we can interrogate (thus develop) away from state doubles! Regardless, ludo-Gothic BDSM is still dangerous (state admins/power gamers [cops and vigilantes] will police us to monitor and enforce intended rules, thus predation and rape as a matter of power abuse conducive to profit). As usual, these “gamer abstractions” speak not just to hidden powers, but operations unfolding right in front of us, requiring we read between the lines; i.e., through Gothic abstraction: compare this to that as a toy to play with. Holistic analysis accounts for returning to games to play them differently for liberatory purposes!

Gothic Communism is a holistic discipline for a reason, then; i.e., prison-wise, Capitalism is a multistage and multipronged attack, therefore requiring multiple means, methods and materials of study through the Gothic mode to decloak its abuse. Vampires are a common example (revered for their supernatural powers, including superhuman speed, sexual prowess, hypnosis, and transformation abilities), but so are card sharks (the irony in Borderland is that the King of Clubs is naked by choice, and playing against the hero in good faith):

To it, liberation and enslavement exist within the same half-real stages, boundaries and intended/emergent rules of play. Like a chessboard, the two go hand-in-hand. As we talk about Alice’s own canceled future, then, think of concentric illusions, insofar as we’ve discussed them and hauntological sites before in this series. Liberation occurs inside a prison for which there is no outside (of the text). It must be subverted and transformed inside of itself—as a game (of death) to play! You can only opt out for so long (with marginalized people never given that choice).

Per Gloggin, the idea—that reality is an illusion—again dates back to Plato’s allegory of the cave, but endures in newer forms that simultaneously expose and conceal capital’s titanic operations:

Mimesis or imitation therefore, as one form of play, is an essential element of poiesis, or the “making” of art, which in turn is instrumental in creating what some now refer to as possible or imaginary worlds, that is, fiction.

This traditional understanding of mimesis as an essential element of poiesis places mimetic play at a more distant remove from reality than even the shadows in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave from book VII of The Republic. Related in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon, book VII allegorizes the human perception of reality, likening our reality to shadows projected on a cave wall. These shadows are perceived by human subjects, shackled around the ankles and neck and unable to turn their heads to see the puppeteers who cast shadows on the cave wall before them, which they mistake for reality. In other words, what mortals see and know is merely shadow, and this is what mimesis mimics — not reality.

Importantly, this version of mimesis and reality has long informed the marginalization or trivialization of mimetic arts as “mere play,” “just games,” or insignificant ludic imitations of reality. Likewise, the marginalization of play and its rejection as a serious object of study are motivated by the suspicion that play and ludic cultural forms are treacherous and capable of rendering us the dupe (source: “Play and Games in Fiction and Theory,” 2020).

In short, the suggestion—that we are enslaved and being fed upon by all-powerful (and frighteningly ugly) beings alienated from life—is both frighteningly real and easy to dismiss; i.e., things outside the cave, from beyond human perception (again, what Plato called the Realm of the Forms, which Lovecraft associated with outer space). To some degree, we must imagine class war among these shadows.

(source: Arthur Lazarus’ “Allegory Is a Powerful Tool in Medicine,” 2022)

Here, with Borderland, the gaslight feels half-real, taking someone’s suspicions and pitting them against the skeptic in ways they can play with and rationalize, but also subvert and challenge through games as sacred to canonizer and iconoclast alike: a ghost town to play such things out.

This is the prison that Plato’s cave represents under capital and Vampire Capitalism, hence Borderland, The Matrix and other such stories; it is the thing escaped through the games not simply played, but understood and operated in ways that break the elite’s almighty spell. It’s basically what the kids mean when they say, “touch grass,” except there’s a catch: capital—as Baudrillard argues—has become hyperreal; i.e., a map of empire composing the Real as something to experience, the thing it covers up a desert of reality that empire has destroyed. There’s nowhere outside the maze to go outside to, no outside of the text to escape! Instead, the pattern is infernal and concentric, only showing the audience a canceled future—one pointing to the worrisome cracks of empire and the desert beyond, during Capitalist Realism.

“We live in a simulation,” Abigail Lister writes; re: in “The Matrix | Explaining Jean Baudrillard and the Desert of the Real” (2023). As I argue in response, that is where we must make our stand! Whatever freedom workers can expect to cultivate and achieve (through the Superstructure) occurs during liberation as caged; i.e., as part of the ongoing textual operations therein; re: liberation and enslavement occur in the same spaces’ poetic thresholds and on their shadowy surfaces: during liminal expression/remediated praxis’ ludo-Gothic BDSM!

Simply put, liberation occurs through play during liminal expression as half-real, on and offstage; i.e., trapped between illusion and reality less as separate and more two sides of the same struggle. Neo, in The Matrix for example, wakes up inside a dream that—when emancipated from the shackles forcing him to stare at the cave wall shadows—joyously allows him to soar through the sky like a god. He becomes a king of dreams, free to use the awesome power of shadows to challenge state forces and their harmful distributions of power and criminality! After all, prisons are police stations that have populations; i.e., to house, feed, punish and watch themselves, that they may leech resources for the elite from their sleepwalking selves. Nation-states are prisons, as are just about anything else; but some are given more privileges (through preferential mistreatment) to incentivize them to brutalize their own, affording ignorance to live longer than other inmates!

Like a vampire, then, Neo can anisotropically reverse the flow of power away from the elite and towards workers; i.e., the bullet with butterfly wings repelling state armaments used by state defenders, taking their desire to shoot him at all and scrapping it; re: “Despite all my rage, I’m still just a rat in a cage!” This starts with freeing Neo’s mind from the source of deceptions—games, albeit inside of themselves: Sisyphus smiling at the gods, knowing their tricks don’t work on him anymore. From there, whatever work to be done in aid of nature and workers starts with freeing our minds from the state as straight; i.e., The Matrix—an incredibly gay movie smuggled in as standard cyberpunk monomyth[10] fare—being a wonderfully an-Com, empowering genderqueer approach to Plato’s allegory that speaks to the awesome, queer-Marxist potential to games (and cyberpunk philosophies with a revived punk mentality): as they presently exist. To that, canonical videogames (or things comparable to videogames) repeatedly build atop age-old thought experiments about mind prisons that—like the power they house and abuse—rely on shadowy illusions of power to work as the elite desire!

Though ostensibly not a videogame, the same revolutionary idea speaks to Alice in Borderland and its ludo-Gothic BDSM. First, escape the prison by navigating its games in emergent ways; then help yourselves and others develop something better! Video or not, games are cool because they can set us free (to fags, classically closeted, thus abused under such conditions as fags are, but applying this desire for liberation to all oppressed peoples); i.e., rebellion is cool because universal liberation, intersectional solidarity and agency are cool! Giving towards that is cool because it gives back in return! We’re already in the prison, so the true punk, rebel, and faggot, what-have-you, must take such things to foster widespread opposition—to play as such that the state cannot predict, police, or otherwise control us! That’s all a prison is: predictability of outcome, a rigged game that ends in a blood harvest for profit (“With humans, the machines[11] had found all the energy they would ever need!”). The canonical dice roll is simply a pacifying illusion of control—the suggestion that someone else will be chosen to die!

Expect resistance, of course. There is no clear dividing line in moments like these, and even once you extricate yourself, further challenges await; i.e., there’s always another closet, Capitalism being the ultimate space to change through our revolutionary efforts: hiding and showing to get at things that resist apocalypse (re: “standing on the ashes of something not quite present,” illusions of illusions inside illusions). The emancipatory idea is to not take things at face value, but to play with and ask questions concerning them as shadow games. The more imaginative you are, the better, because knowledge is limited, imagination and play are not!

Furthermore, escape doesn’t happen outside of capital, but during liminal expression as a cryptonymic dream that—when it does start to break—can easily overwhelm the mind and test loyalties. Some regress; others question their sanity and the veracity of either side of the fence—the dreamworld and the reality beyond it less as separate and more a story-in-a-story but also a womb-inside-a-womb. To face that is to die, be born again, and be conscious the second time around!

The idea is so godawful that most don’t dare to conceptualize it, let alone recontextualize it for rebellious purposes. This comes with its own set of challenges: defenders of the cave who will attack outsiders, especially gay ones; indeed, people underestimate the power of faith in that respect—and refusing to attack systems that, for most, make up their core worldview/way of experiencing everything around them. They put their faith in something that will destroy them without a second thought; i.e., an illusion that—fake and covering a destroyed, desert-of-the-real territory (the world and nature)—feels more real to subjugated workers than anything while they’re actually awake. Simplicity trumps complexity inside prisons of the mind, the feeding happening not just “at night,” but at all hours one is asleep during class war (the lights are always on, during solitary confinement).

We are born raped, pushed into second wombs full of teeth. I don’t think there’s a better way to explain Vampire Capitalism and Capitalist Realism than that.

Likewise, “You have all the power you need, if you dare to look for it!” Rebels, then, are detectives that reject reality as supplied to them by elite forces; instead, they interrogate power through performance and play to engender new realities by rearranging how power is storied and played. Keeping with The Matrix and Borderland, then, the hero escaping the illusion is a dupe who searches, wakes up, and survives realizing they were bolted into a machine made to jam images into their brain and harvest them for their various resources (“bio-power” according to Foucault; labor, according to Marx; Gothic potential, according to me). Abjection happens by rejecting this reality as “mere fantasy and play.” At the same time, its reversal during ludo-Gothic BDSM involves facing and sending it back to those eating us (who generally must turn us into something they can stomach); i.e., by heroes increasingly skeptical of reality’s “face value,” who feel a subsequent possible world whispering to them in the current uncertain one; e.g., Neo called by Trinity to “follow the white rabbit,” and Alice following his own, in Borderland, towards the Queen of Hearts. Either leads to the uncomfortable reality that humans under capital are batteries; i.e., whose draining of their power is viewed as the ultimate success by elite forces (and who treat suppression through illusion as gangbusters).

Those who famously take the red pill (the actual waking one, not liberal centrism or conservative thought’s disastrous recuperations) do it because reality around them feels false, and they want to escape not to illusions, but from them! They’re dissatisfied with state heteronormativity and other lies, adopting new GNC propagandas and following the lord of darkness/king of dreams (which is what Morpheus, in The Matrix, is) into fresh spaces of dream-like possibility: of games to play and worlds to build better (and more honest and intimate) than the ones we’re in and suffering to endure, right now!

“I’ve never seen anyone like you—not while I was awake, anyway!” Persephone’s plight isn’t that she’s stuck in Hell; it’s that, once she finds Hell, she can never go back to the world of Light (which ironically is a cave filled with shadows). That world never existed—was built on a lie she must escape with people who not only won’t cause her harm; they’ll set her free: Hell is always a place on Earth, and one that we devils thereof make for ourselves—by turning the prison’s rape scenarios into a playground of “rape” in quotes challenging profit, hence Vampire Capitalism! That’s ludo-Gothic BDSM! To let things go both ways; i.e., the sub’s paradox being to give their blood, but to feel pleasure under a good dom’s care (taking their cum)! The state, by comparison, is a bad dom—the worst, in fact.

Performance and play are canonically impotent forms of escapism. By returning to these worlds to find/make disturbing comparisons to our own, we can begin to play differently and subvert capital’s usual vampirism. We can think critically and synthesize/unearth allegory inside elaborate hyperreal distractions, finding our own power once again as one might an old relic inside a powerful ruin. But such thought experiments demand active, intelligent and perceptive play, which only comes with practice, but also trial and error, hard work and ultimately, mistakes and loss (re: trolley problems; e.g., the prisoner’s dilemma). Charmed life, charmed play! Gothic Communism is not a spectator’s sport—marrying play itself to different schools of theory while synthesizing new development in a liberating direction!

As such, games are an effective way to communicate systems that are normally designed to conceal themselves. Japan, in Borderland, becomes a prison/dungeon for bad BDSM to unfold in gameshow-esque ways—a game-inside-a-game, but also different classes of games (acts of punishment and love, BDSM power exchange, packaged-and-sold commodities, lotteries, etc), an empty wonderland bordering on the usual realities that Alice ignored, holed up in his room; i.e., life as a game that has him, in Borderland, making the kinds of sacrifices he was already doing before entering the game outside his computer screen (the cruelty of the mechanism designed to make him reflect: on this past as shown in the do-or-die, kill-or-be-killed present mirroring said past, making those who survive more delicious: to the Queen of Hearts, but also others watching from places the players cannot see). As we shall see, so were all of the people he comes across and befriends. Capital has made them all, in some shape or form, vampires!

Concerning capital’s vampire BDSM, there’s no choice involved, the ludic contract a slave form and Faustian bargain/Promethean Quest all rolled into one! Play or don’t play, you die (the game allowing players to commit suicide) and are subsequently fed on to glut the elite, as usual (who grow richer as they cage you and watch you steal from yourselves, gameshow-style). As for the hero role, itself, Alice shows us how this needn’t always be bourgeois theft. However, cruel games are endemic to Capitalism, which treats privatization like a game: the manufactured scarcity of jobs and labor value as the stolen essence of workers in a very material sense (versus a phenomenological sense, exhibit 43d depicting ghosts we can camp in friendlier echoes of their former terrifying selves); i.e., the creation of corporate vampirism as a giant, figurative vampire structure tied to a ludic-scheme that exploits workers divorced from our aforementioned old-world supernatural themes (the themes in Borderland and The Matrix do invoke Clarke’s Law, however—technological so advanced as to be considered “magical,” but also Pavlovian, menticidal and dogmatic).

Committed by the bourgeoisie, the theft of worker blood remains permanent and irreversible (meaning the literal killing of workers, not their brainwashed minds)—a one-sided fakery existing in ways that double workers and invite for troubling comparison; i.e., as a dollish matter of play and roles inside the game as connected to real life and its own disparate socio-material conditions: the fatal transfer of power under prison-like environs meant to oppress labor and pit it vampirically against itself (note the red prison suits, but also the videogame button symbols on the masks/the vampiric gaze of the killer doll from Squid Game, below). Such games and their bad BDSM double themselves; i.e., gameshows that mirror bloodsports/death lotteries and concentration camps: rigged, with the developers/owners holding all the cards—literal people—in their bloodless-yet-bloodied hands! Victory is pernicious, hollow and winner-take-all. Something truly heartless and wicked is pulling the strings!

Squid Game is one “death lottery” later made unironically into real life examples that parrot the rigged, prison-like structure of the show-inside-a-show (with us watching the player watching the games begin and play out), but not its ironic critique of capital so common in science fiction/Gothic dystopias; i.e., black mirrors warning against Capitalist Realism parroting blind pastiche (e.g., shlock-shock rockers, GWAR—an unholy and insensitive cross between Anthrax, KISS and Spinal Tap—seeming to miss the point by a mile, with their death games pastiche, “Slaughterama” [1990] just sort of targeting everyone… except the line “Because when you’re life is shit, you ain’t got much to lose!” applies equally to the hippie, Nazi, and… “art fag” [come on, Orderus] equally).

You might have noticed, The Matrix conceals its game as not-game, keeping its cards close to its chest while imprisoning people’s minds. The battle concerns the hero freeing his mind while still inside the game, which he learns to play in ways its owners don’t want. This is done to make someone able to think again (or for the first time), versus simply reacting through fear unto rehabilitation (code for “behavioral conditioning”); i.e., to change whole systems by utilizing and responding to them differently than intended. Imagination sets us free.

Tracking with canceled futures, though, the rules in Squid Game and Borderland are not only explained, but openly shown as unfair games; i.e., precisely to illustrate how capital (and its vampirism) function by design: through creepy dystopian advertisements shocking people out of blind consumption and into critical modes of analysis that have them rediscover emergent forms of play as a mode of criticism and existence (re: the red pill, but inverting the Wachowskis’ usage of it). “Isn’t this fun?!” the game asks, leering at those who suffer inside it. They lack the ability to conceptualize that they’re not having fun. Furthermore, vampirism is still happening from moment to moment. Between the glutted bourgeoisie and battered proletariat, what’s good for the goose definitely isn’t good for the gander (the elite alienated from workers; e.g., Squid Game‘s aging and ghoulish proprietor playing the same horrible game to feel alive, only to die of cancer while describing themselves as “just a player” to that show’s yearly winner)!

Furthermore, this mimetic tension in Borderland doesn’t just remediate across one game type like Western Cards (specifically the French suit system exported to Japan, next page), but whose sense of compelled risk reverberates across local hunger games like the titular “Squid[12] Game” being a parallel, synchronistic text. Regardless of which, either Squid Game or Borderland serves as Alex Blechman’s 2021 conceptualization of the “Torment Nexus”; i.e., as something for the elite to make unironically based off a formerly critical source (source tweet: November 9th). To it, the carceral myopia of Capitalism Realism recruits workers to further the game as half-real, outside itself while playing inside itself; re: Zimmerman’s magic circle and Juul’s half-real “between the fiction and the rules” making workers unironically replicate games comparable to Squid Game and Borderland, but also The Matrix and others, in real life! Cultivating their own Superstructure assisted by class-traitor sticklers, the elite deliberately bury Blechman’s cautionary palimpsest to better prey on labor! Everything becomes more and more one-sided, always flowing up to the elite, never down (save to tokenize workers, and always with a drop from the bucket).

(exhibit 41h1: Artist: Sveta Shubina. The outcome or reward of many games is the girl; i.e., as someone to acquire through great struggle and adversity but also cheating [“All’s fair in love and war…”]. Often, in games of love, they are one’s opponent or adversary as much as the object of pursuit. While the elite use cards to “close doors” and present the impossible as a game to exploit workers, any workers in on the scam can open doors by reversing the process during ludo-Gothic BDSM—”Closing doors. This is a magic and sleight of hand term; it means canceling out possible methods in the audience’s mind” by showing them “proof” of an object’s solid or real nature, then incorporating that reality into the unreality of the magic trick as a disappearing act [Vanity Fair’s “Magician Reviews Sleight of Hand and Visual Tricks In Movies & TV,” 2022″; timestamp: 19:32]. The “cards”—in this case, the beautiful, monstrous women and other archetypes—have not disappeared; they have been hidden in plain sight by capital’s card dealers/pimps, keeping the labor value and potential of these persons and their bodies for themselves, then trickling it down at paying customers. It’s a scam, a card game where the girls are the cards and the players are the sharks. The point of the con is to make the player feel like a winner while robbing them blind, all their blood going to their head [and not the one with a brain inside it].)

 

Likewise, “bad” games in the social-sexual sense are the historical-material consequence of the Superstructure teaching workers to become unintelligent; i.e., playing stupid, trolley-problem games that exploit themselves and other people; e.g., sex is a game and you gotta play it to win (chercher la femme). Alice in Borderland is a dream-like, bloodsport, “game-within-a-game,” but the one episode or “game” we’ll examine from the show is set inside a creepy asylum (another kind of prison). First, we’ll talk about the episode, and then—as much as we can—apply its meta lesson to our own lives!

Head Games: Reflecting on Borderland’s Prison World in and out of Our Own Lives

The episode in question puts Cheshire inside an asylum, itself a series of trolley problems expressed in predatory social exchanges where direct violence is impossible, but death affected nonetheless through said exchanges: tell the truth to others about an RNG-card symbol on the back of their bomb collar. If you tell them the truth, they answer what the symbol is and stay alive; if you lie to them, they answer wrong and the collar explodes, instantly killing them. While it might seem ethical to always tell the truth, someone in the prison population is the Jack of Hearts, a serial killer who will lie to protect themselves. Trying not to be found, their motivation for playing the game directly contradicts everyone else, who cannot leave until the Jack is found; and the Jack is not found until they are killed. It’s the prison dilemma merged with smear the queer, yielding trolly-problems-within-trolley-problems!

Initially the episode denotes a fearful, uncanny presence of inherited power that our hero must try and survive: canon treats “winning” as not dying in a world that’s actively trying to kill you (again, a metaphor for Vampire Capitalism). Iconoclastically, this extends to the breaking of Capitalist Realism, exposing the larger game—Borderland—as something that can be changed inside of itself, via the asylum as a moral to build on; i.e., during emergent forms of play that become meta in service to workers forced by capital to be harmful vampires: when they take, nothing is given back. Like The Matrix‘ own illusory metaphors relayed in game-like choices and theatre, development regarding Borderland happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM breaking Capitalist Realism inside of itself—its ludic dualities either emergent or intended when serving or sabotaging state predation!

A more empowered variant of the twink than Dennis Cooper’s uber-liminal, twink-murder performance art, Cheshire (a catboy pun if ever there were) must use his emotional intelligence, BDSM know-how (from his cutthroat hospital days) and canny game sense to be smarter than his vampire-like peers inside the same quarantine environment; i.e., smarter than the people around him “eating” and “draining” each other through intended gameplay as forced upon them: find the Jack of Hearts and kill them. To survive the asylum, Cheshire must “play the part” in Trojan, emergent ways. Luckily for him, he’s already been made into something of a vampire himself, transformed through a neoliberal Japanese medical system emulating the West’s own prison-like models. Yet, Cheshire has figuratively sworn off the blood—is a pacifist, in ludic terms. He’s disillusioned, having played the bloodsport game before but lacking the thirst now needed to thrive in Borderland’s nightmare opera world.

Inside and outside of the asylum, something sinister looms behind the seemingly innocuous idea of a simple “game” and its illusion of player choice. Instead of players participating fairly through a benign ludic contract, Borderland comments on the gameplay as compelled entirely for the benefit of the elite: kill yourselves for us. The resulting chaos harms workers, but also humiliates them by design; i.e., intentionally affecting their gameplay choices, the larger game being a series of trolley problems, per level. Everything is neat and game-like on paper, but the rules—while cleanly defined—require a stunning amount of dialogic craft and guile (as they do in real life) meant to entertain the elite: watching Cheshire in the asylum watching those he used to prey on (and them watching back). He has remorse, and largely holds back—chewing the scenery as the others cannibalize.

Furthermore, those in positions of power will manipulate victims conditioned to fear violence from authority figures, thus defend said figures from rebuke. And this is precisely how the asylum episode plays out, Cheshire watching the other players fall victim to a hidden manipulator defended by the system: a spider-like puppet master granted a handicap by someone higher up in a vertical arrangement of power. Borderland’s asylum episode is effectively an instructional miniature for Sex Positivity‘s own arguments, taking them to figurative and literal extremes while critiquing Capitalism’s vampire nature inside a more subtle Gothic backdrop.

There, survival happens actively and on one’s toes, inside a game designed turn people against one another with confusing rules, a lack of clarity but concrete materials that promote severe, horrifying punishment in terrifyingly vague ways (decapitations are reminded by the slave-like bomb-collars, but explode behind closed doors). It’s a metaphor for repressed rebellion tied to literal/figurative incarceration while commenting on various gendered barbarities in Japan. There’s a lot being said but it’s happening in real time, all at once, while under threats of power abuse, sexual abuse, murder, mob mentality and so on.

Moreover, the bourgeois metaphor of the asylum game lie in its patently cruel design: a 25% chance to survive every hour, but a 0% chance to survive if someone lies to you. In other words, the elite stack the odds against players from the state, trapping them inside a rigged game; they encourage players to lie to escape the asylum, where they will remain until they find and kill the Jack of Hearts (the game’s formulaic villain, but also tied to the show’s invisible Queen). The game ends when the Jack dies, but physical, lethal violence is forbidden. The Jack must lie and deceive his fellow people, while the mob “hunts” the Jack in an entirely socio-ludic way—lie to the person you think is the Jack, thus dooming them to die; but also, lie to people who might lie to you to try and kill you, which is exactly what the Jack does, but also people trying to narrow down the number of suspects.

Keeping with the prison design, the game forces people to kill each other through social deceptions guided out of material self-interest; i.e., inside a smaller system inside a bigger system that takes away player agency by forcing them to play with someone who has all the advantage and is probably a serial killer (the warden’s rat). Only someone with experience would survive—in terms of games and ambiguous language, but also lying and understanding that pure altruism will not only have you being repeatedly used and lied to; it will also get you killed.

Under these appalling conditions, people are literally worked to death, forced to compete under manufactured scarcity with deliberately severed social ties making them compete under duress. The crumbling backdrop, twink-in-peril Holocaust (and the murder-happy royals looking in) are dated and cliché, but that’s Gothic displacement/dissociation in action; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit: “Isn’t this fun?” Obviously not and that’s the point—to reflect on the nature of games in the real world, on our own labor as a kind of game whose resistance to playing is normally pacified by Gothic illusions that turn people into unironic vampires (which we guilty watch for fun). Capitalism is bad for everyone! Cheshire ultimately escapes the smaller game to reflect on the bigger one: as something that never stops. “You can’t stop this game,” the artist, Tokio, sung in 1986. The only thing to do, then, is play emergently in ways that help you and others subvert the way that games are played, going forwards! It’s very danger disco/Sisyphean (except Cheshire has trouble smiling at the gods; our resident Galatea, he was still made by an environment he has to navigate and help others change through his example).

Overhead, the biggest vampires lord over everything while growing hungry and stupid behind a hyperreal façade: playing golf with people’s skulls, swimming in pools of their blood, impersonating them during Faustian death lotteries (the old man from Squid Game) and placing absurd, arbitrary bets on their lives while forcing them, inside prisons, to kill each other with (and for) their own stolen labor and wages. For the elite, there’s a second game that only they can play and rules they get to write at the cost of everyone else: Capitalism, whose hidden rules are designed to exploit everyone else through predatory BDSM. In it, they are not cheaters, but “winning” according to how much exploitation they can accrue; this is a ludic double standard, with labor being considered cheaters/spoilsports if they try to overcome the odds through labor action and riots—a game within a game, a prison inside a prison.

The critical power in Borderland relies on a worker-friendly trick: a friendly ghost (our catboy-in-white, suitably ghostlike in his appearance) that teaches workers to reflect on their exploited labor through a cautionary tale, specifically a proletarian ghost story (which giant companies like Netflix try and pass off as recuperation; i.e., just a bad dream). Cheshire isn’t strictly-speaking incorporeal, but exists uneasily in a nightmarish wonderland pointedly modeled after real-world Japan. Simply put, his presence and feelings while playing inside the game-as-rehabilitation punishing the wicked feel uncanny from a dramatic standpoint because his own gameplay pointedly compares two unlike things that are only seemingly unrelated: feudal tyrants and all-powerful capitalists. Cheshire knows them all too well because they describe the place he used to work at: the hospital, killing clients in pursuit of profit, with Cheshire instructed to do so by a “vampire” higher up than himself (the Master/apprentice dynamic in a hospital setting).

For example, the existence of urban myths like the bloodthirsty “Impaler” (vampires) in relation to capitalists denotes a presence of public confusion that is caused by manufactured ignorance of a capitalist checklist: the mysterious role of psychopaths inside Capitalism by tending to aggressively promote inside a system that favors and isolates them (re: the Jack of Hearts being both invisible and among us). The kind of murder psychopaths do is closer to desk work, hinted at by the killing process in the asylum episode (not its literal execution) being completely non-physically violent, banal. Instead, it’s socially[13] violent. Under such a system, psychopaths never stop furthering violence against workers for the bourgeoisie because they have no material incentive to do so (which is the only thing that would arguably motivate a psychopath).

Amid the ostensible dissimilarities that suggest a worrying outline towards the historical-material world, Borderland offers lots of shiny markers, counterfeits and drama to convey things in commonplace ways—to get your attention, hold it, and not say the quiet too forcefully out loud. That’s how ghosts work. All the same, looks are deceiving in such worlds. Cheshire is disarmingly boyish, but actually an older administrator—Shakespeare’s poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. To him, the others feels like walking shadows: past mistakes, but possible points of redemption. The moral, in the episode, isn’t so much that one mode of play is optimal, but more humane; i.e., through the meta as instructional towards humane play wrestling with forced survival against other workers!

To that, the meta in Borderland uses ghosts, vampires and BDSM to show how Capitalism “toys” with people; i.e., making Cheshire, Alice and Caterpillar[14] (below) try to win “fake-system” games whose Faustian ludic contracts turn players into mindless “vampires” obsessed with “winning” instead of forming meaningful social bonds with other workers (thus new modes of playing the game that can change it for the better). They love each other in ways that haunt them, for which they refuse to sacrifice or ignore others as they might have done in the past (a present party doubling for someone they harmed in the past). Nothing else matters and everything is alienated, sacrificed and destroyed, making the victory hollow, a deceitful gambit pushed on the isolated, divided brain; i.e., menticide, but also the entire manufacture trifecta: competition, conflict and scarcity.

The paradox, as usual, to is do this in stories that don’t actually kill us, but simulate death omens; i.e., as calculated-risk approximations—through avatars that are, themselves, living in simulations they can hopefully return from to bring back a vital means of, if not preventing Vampire Capitalism at home, then subverting it (re: Trace and Axiom Verge). Victory lies in using the integral enrichment potential of games to liberate our bodies, minds and actions from state dogma. We become, borrowing from Chris Pratt, spoilsports. Enrichment, like Sarkeesian’s adage (used during Gamergate, no less), becomes a survival aid against fascist people and systems: pawns on a chessboard, on a chessboard, on a chessboard, etc. If people are stupid, and might makes right, it’s because capital has made them stupid in ways conductive to Vampire Capitalism.

To it, the cure in Borderland, is to be kind in ways that break Capitalist Realism inside itself; i.e., to build and protect for ourselves with and for our imaginations, emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural (and race) awareness: as things to cultivate for us—not for the elite alienating and exploiting us for our labor by keeping us obedient, pacified, cruel and stupid! This good education and investment is group-oriented in order to instruct as we create, transforming the material world’s canonical media in sex-positive ways: collective worker action against coerced violence and forced play that translates to any worker environment, any backdrop. Be it in a factory, a jungle, or a zoo, they’re less like literal reality and more like a thought experiment with metaphors and material similarities; the paradox here, is that it takes on a shadowy likeness/simulacrum—albeit an imprecise one—of the material copies from other thought experiments: the copy of a fabrication, itself a half-real proposition.

I think stories like Borderland and The Matrix collectively build around prisons because they’re both highly unnatural, and something for which to escape by virtue of what they are: grounds for exploitation, a panopticon of always watching and suspecting others as dangerous, diseased, doomed to die. Under such hopeless circumstances, who wouldn’t be tempted to cheat in order to survive (thus win)? It’s dog-eat-dog, the brutality of the system holding sway over all parties. Hunger strikes are technically optional, but amount to suicide by prison, by cop, by ourselves. To give up or in is to give the state everything. It’s entirely one way!

Some people play along because they’re forced to; others like it. Faced with the system as false, the spell breaks down for some; others fight harder than ever to deny the collapse of, what for them, is structure first and foremost. For all their abuse, prisons grant positions designed to disempower but also incentivize people to betray each other in service to profit. They need it, all the more treacherous, desperate and prone to tokenize when the game is afoot: it’s convenient, especially for neurotypical individuals less prone to question reality as false. For them, ignorance is bliss, and they love their role inside the bourgeois pecking order (the asylum episode playing out like cows in a slaughter house, one being killed randomly[15] at set intervals)!

Such players won’t question the prison around them; they’ll question the person playing at Socrates (questioning authority and everything around him), making him drink hemlock. They do this because they’ve been conditioned to: a pill for a rat in a box if it eats its fellow rats. Winning = class betrayal, per discipline and punish; the prison becomes the rat’s home, which it will die to defend by blaming anything but the system housing it!

Per the dialectic of shelter and the alien, Borderland’s asylum inhabitants become afraid of ghosts like Cheshire, but also his former bosses; i.e., made superstitious and afraid by prisons that conflate abuse with home and stupidity/dormancy/apathy with intelligence. Inside such conversion camps/reeducation centers, Pavlov’s dogs become watch/guard dogs, wholly rabid and hyperviligent. In turn, the first step to combating a prison is acknowledging its existence, which requires cognitive dissonance. Cops don’t experience that by design; it’s literally trained out of them, turning them into robots that rape others for profit (“Computers are dumb,” Seth Brundle puts it; “they only know what you tell them.”). They’ll begrudge and scapegoat state enemies exposing the truth to them. It’s a prison economy paid for in blood.

Such menticide isn’t unique to Borderland, though. As a matter of capital, prisons manufacture such misunderstandings, only to play them out in weaponized forms that watch you, or make you feel under constant hostile surveillance inside infernal concentric spaces; e.g., the agents, from The Matrix likewise “not ready to be unplugged, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to defend it.” They are incredibly unnatural—built on hard division and rigged, predatory competition inside vertical hierarchies of power that, in any kind of state arrangement scheme you could think of—from fraternities, concentration camps and electoral politics, to companies to prisons to games—yield the usual systemic abuses organized in the usual tiered stages and subsequent, prison-like banalities: owners/middle management/workers, rulers/officers/soldiers, bosses/minibosses/minions. These tiered, ludic understandings of power operate through torture as something that must happen, Omelas-style. Thus, players harden their hearts, praying at temples of unironic violence.

The sad truth is, no prison or territory can function without cops taken from labor and made to betray their own (e.g., the face cards, but also Cipher from The Matrix). The “meta game” under Capitalism, then, is merely another kind of alienation—from freeing forms of play as a kind of labor, but forcing people, thus labor, to tokenize in ways that exploit and kill them according to how they view games to start with: as zero-sum, win/lose. There can only be one winner and that winner is profit and the elite (the player killing his friends to become a capitalist). Everyone else is a casualty—a price for the one thing the elite care about, which they not only pay for but set up for repeated abuse! Supply and demand as things to manipulate, help the elite tip the scales. Fairness isn’t the point, exploitation is. Context is sacrificed (usually on purpose) in service to state authorities, not worker experts on a given topic or dispute. Ignorance is worn like a shield.

Except, while all workers are forced to play under coercive conditions, the poor have the least advantages out of anyone. Conversely, “face cards” in Borderland denote “optional” players with extra benefits by virtue of the privileged, and powerful positions they held in real life: musicians, gangsters, lawyers, soldiers, etc. The Marxist lesson isn’t the parroting of a convenient narrative miniature in ludic form—e.g., Nabokov’s estimation of Austen’s card game, Speculation, from Mansfield Park—but a coerced game that, through its vampiric, bad-BDSM execution, highlights how everyone is forced to fight for efficient profit, hence the elite: an army of undead workers both enslaved by the intended rules and freed by emergent play as part of a larger ludic scheme.

In other words, the game’s meta isn’t fully owned by the elite—can be used for revolutionary purposes by deprivatizing its iconic imagery through iconoclastic maneuvers; there’s always an element of risk, thus luck, but the scales needn’t stay tipped against players. Breaking Capitalist Realism, thus escaping Plato’s cave, happens inside Plato’s cave—with its shadows on the wall reclaimed emergently by us with ludo-Gothic BDSM! You must play to win, but you don’t have to do what the elite want you to; you can break their images to expose them on the other side, but also a possible better world in the same general sphere of influence and play!

To this, challenging the extratextual problems intimated inside such smaller structures (while observing them from the outside, no less) means extending those critiques to our own lives in an intertextual sense; i.e., of game theory that lets workers be inventive in ways resistant to state illusions; re (from Volume One):

Power is a performance that upholds through the perception of impossible things like total control, endless enemies, ultimate strength or absolute victory through kayfabe reversals. The same goes for containment, whose paradox of total imprisonment our thesis discussed in relation to videogames as breakable; i.e., how speedrunning and spoilsport gaming attitudes normally contain tremendous invention that canonically restrict the development and execution of emergent puzzle-solving to single texts in gaming culture[16], versus applying that mentality to reconfigure larger extratextual structures; e.g., Coincident’s “Doom Strategy Guide – Okuplok’s Mancubus Cliff” (2023, below) treating player invention more as a hobby on par with a Rubik’s cube—or hell, a human beating Tetris (1985) for the first time in its 38-year existence (aGameScout’s “After 34 Years, Someone Finally Beat Tetris,” 2024)—versus escaping Capitalist Realism by playing videogames (and other such experiments) in ways that resist the profit motive within the neoliberal era (with organized speedrunning arguably having started in 1990[17], just before the fall of the Soviet Union). The puzzle is ostensibly impressive, but the much-touted “progress” of solving it becomes an empty gesture insofar as liberating worker minds is concerned. Doing so has no effect on the external world unless the attitude for solving complicated puzzles through emergent gameplay is deliberately taken outside of the text. Otherwise, the hauntology (and its canceled future) are entirely self-contained:

In truth, the degree of conscious unity against grander historical-material problems can be applied to capital through rebellious worker action and ludo- Gothic-BDSM poetics across all mediums and labor forms; e.g., speedrunning, which can work (from my thesis volume) “as a communal effect for solving complex puzzles and telling Gothic ludonarratives in highly inventive ways. As we’ll see moving forward, this strategy isn’t just limited to videogames, but applies to any poetic endeavor during oppositional praxis”; i.e., intersectional, multilayered strategies of resistance and misdirection that strive to demonstrate there is no outside of the text, applying the imagination and effort needed to transform the world around us by any and all means necessary. To that, I think the grassroots culture and non-profit approach to speedrunning allows larger groups of people to solve immensely difficult problems collectively outside of established business practices: thwarting Capitalism Realism by weaponizing the collective ingenuity and incredible puzzle-solving power of speedrunning against the elite.

If popular videogames franchised under neoliberal Capitalism, and organized speedrunning began to form right before the end of the Cold War in 1990, then its proletarian utility (and other such revolutionary strategies overlapping within nerd culture) must do so after the end of history’s cultural myopia began to thicken. Doing so requires inventiveness in the face of tremendous confusion (worker menticide) and state-sponsored adversity (many speedrunners just want to run their games and ignore the problems of the real word; e.g., Caleb Hart, who we shall examine in Volume Three, Chapter Four). The bourgeoisie might seem to hold all the cards, here, but they cannot kill all workers who resist, nor do they possess the means to completely monopolize violence and terror against rebellious forces; likewise, they cannot hope to alienate us from our own labor as a weapon to levy against them unless we surrender its power and poetics exclusively to them. Subjugation means total surrender as something of a choice when presented with the facts: submitting to Capitalist Realism in those respects, staying inside Plato’s cave. This book’s praxial focus, then, is to enrich propaganda and sex workers by making them (and the world around them) progressively more and more proletarian through Gothic poetics as something to fearlessly apply anywhere, regardless of who complains or fights back (source).

Keeping this in mind, capital, aka private property as Marx explains it, “has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us” (source: “Private Property and Communism,” 1844). If people are stupid, capital has made them stupid, and not just towards privatization, but the things between as privatized under capital; i.e., in our daily lives that we treat like games conducive to bourgeois aims—in short, the games that we play being concerned with our lives in small, in cages!

These, in turn, become puzzles to reassemble out of old pieces; i.e., that come from a graveyard of fragments expressed intratextually and intertextually across a variety of stories: ergodic narratives, which unfold through non-trivial effort, thus labor and motion, challenging capital’s dead, vampiric forms. From a revolutionary standpoint, that’s what puzzle-solving is (and by extension, ludo-Gothic BDSM)—not just a single puzzle in a single box, but a relationship between many puzzles that some illustrate diegetically better than others.

In Borderland, Cheshire shows us, the moment you limit yourself to one disconnected, pulverized frame of thinking is the moment they box you in. But you don’t avoid that purely by thinking “outside the box”; you consider how different systems interface and relate in ways that get you where you need to go, putting puzzles together and then—per Borges’ “Garden of the Forking Paths” or Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (below)—put things together while navigating them:

The way forwards isn’t trolley problems inside a prison system, but we have to be able to think past a bloodsport by thinking ergodically and constructively with it as normally spoon-fed to us, playing with store bought things (and their policed, intended, prison-like rules, made to reinforce profit and Vampire Capitalism on all registers) to consider and illustrate their relationship in a para, inter/intra and metatextual sense; i.e., about how things relate back and forth, including our place within that. To it, we need to look at the two as half-real, seeing such things expressed in stories like Borderland that we can turn back around and connect their fragmented meta/moral lesson to our own lives. Let’s do that, now!

Inside our own lives, Borderland’s asylum metaphor lends itself to a lot of doublings; i.e., that speak to queerness as imprisoning under a heteronormative order that isn’t a matter of legend, but something to live with on a daily basis. Being queer-coded, Cheshire is able to navigate the hospital-in-small as a gay man would; i.e., a social-psychosexual regression to a neo-medieval time under a corporate panopticon, the queer being—similar to the nun or closeted priest—being forced into roles where the skilled survive: those with a good poker face, who female and/or queer, must survive patriarchal, heteronormative systems of control.

The liminal quality—of feeling like one is trapped between the past and the present, dreams and consciousness, queerness and straightness; but also that one’s exchanges routinely frame one as quarantined/veiled and simultaneously wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve in Foucauldian forms of cryptonymy—make everything feel game-like; i.e., as a matter of life or death. It’s historically a very monstrous-feminine experience—one that sadly translates quite well to stories like Cheshire’s, the guilty faggot locked up with the other inmates, all of them searching for the Jack of Hearts (Cheshire’s evil twin), but also vampirism as camping life under Capitalism: far easier to reconcile our own existence as arrested and prison-like (re: compared to fatal diseases and mad science) provided we vamp the vector in reclaimed vampire dialogs.

These are, themselves, not always attractive or cleanly seen, felt, or otherwise experienced. With his own checkered past, Cheshire shows how beauty is often skin-deep, but in their case likewise bears a cross-like weight/desire to repent for past sins; he doesn’t blame the system as much as he does himself while under its control—a control he no longer wants to give them. He is disillusioned.

While Borderland intimates such things in the loosest of ways, the old-world spectre is never far behind. A bio-mechanical womb, heteronormativity and its bad BDSM becomes a prison to grow into and eventually escape through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., camping some truly horrible things behind bourgeois shadows, prisons being highly unnatural—the 1970s zeitgeist speaking to older freak shows, forced medicalization and classification of our “species” as virulent: a specimen in a glass jar, a devil’s backbone to trot out in the sick bay like a geek show for the straight and curious. The black-and-red of the breeding vats parallels Borderland’s playing cards and the Countess’ mosquito brood: fascist or Communist, depending on which way power flows (and which way it encourages power to flow)!

(exhibit 41h2: No one wants to identify as a disease, but such double standards become things to reconcile all the same. As such, queerness is—classically and into the present—a form of cloistered dialog between people closer to older forms of medicine and prison-style social-sexual organization that, under later days, manifested as villages for queerness as sick; i.e., gay villages under the AIDS crisis as disease centers that saw AFAB queers looking after their AMAB brethren, during the societal sickness of capital’s heteronormative panic and persecution mania towards sexual lepers. Like Neo in his sorry Bathory-style bathtub filled with Kool-Aid, capital atrophies us, and feeds us our own dead selves, that it might live forever!

But even when a pandemic is not going on, we fags are still treated like a disease to catch, but also an imposter in straight clothes; i.e., disease spreading whores and vengeful sodomites with various double standards; e.g., women as spreading venereal diseases and seeking hysterical succubus-style revenge on holy men in their sleep, versus homosexual men practicing sodomy as leading to various “queer diseases” that threaten other parties with, in much the same manner!

[artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

Queerness, then, is like a blood transfusion; i.e., whereupon we spend our entire lives being told to fear ourselves, thinking we carry diseases in the passing of sanguine and vitality through common social-sexual metaphors thereof. Overcoming these occurs by mingling with others and playing with them through ludo-Gothic BDSM; e.g., Cuwu sucking my dick in my sleep [above] as a succubus might a priest’s cock; i.e., “exploiting” me and taking my essence from me in ways that the priest would not desire, if only for the fear of slighting God. It’s really no harm, no foul, though; as in, such incidents involve the ability to juggle social practices and symbols with acts of good/bad faith, play and acting during ludo-Gothic BDSM: as endemic to queer and female/monstrous-feminine existence. Something is always coming and going—is being taken and replaced with this or that, sucked through a straw back down our throats!

Furthermore, provided we grant ourselves a chance to refill and give back—i.e., a give and take that doesn’t treat each encounter like a zero-sum game—then our behavior can become increasingly aware of games we can play outside of those offered by the state. Meta-wise, there’s objectively no “correct” way to play the game; but versions of the game can exist that we can enjoy individually more while having collective stability for all peoples; e.g., you could have sex with someone who has the societally advertised “perfect dick,” but it won’t change the fact that some people are size queens, while others just want that Goldilocks six-inch or even—perish the thought—a micro peen.

All creatures, great and small [and during sex and/or social exchanges], there’s literally something for everyone, so why maximize suffering and scarcity purely because it’s the only way that someone as stupid and heartless like the Queen of Hearts can feel anything at all? To do so is to willingly build prisons and give the warden’s keys to the usual psychopaths; these, in turn, become a way of seeing the world for which anything else becomes impossible. Make it impossible and the chance for healthy and fun relationships to happen with other workers and nature likewise fly out the window. Everything is simply canonized, then alienated and fetishized through the usual predatory mechanisms.

In turn, form follows function. Forget about oral sex, anal or BDSM; it’s simply PIV missionary until the end of time [which, to be honest, I love (see: next page), but it’s still nice to be able to experiment]. Anything else is illegal, policed and paywalled. Privileged parties can still do these things, but most are locked up and killed for it, raped by the state and state forces, in a scapegoating circle: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss…” What a stupid, outmoded way to treat the world! But so many fall into those traps, afraid of what the world could be without the elite around to prey on us; so, the middle class surrender their necks [or those of others] to enjoy a place on the preferential mistreatment ladder that isn’t the clear-and-obvious bottom. They become bad doms, taking everything.

[artist: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard]

To it, it’s not like vampirism and baddies won’t exist under Gothic Communism! Apart from oral, Cuwu and I had sex in ways that felt like me being a drug they took by fucking me; i.e., I felt like ambrosia eaten by a god, their mouth hanging open and staring up at me like Pennywise as I fucked them—their hungry cunt, but also their dollish mouth and doe-eyed stare clocking me vampirically as they disassociated [with one hand on the wheel, to be clear[18]]. In moments like those, the thirst took over and they took me for all I was worth. And had they not abused me—using me like a drug they could resort to whenever they were flying off the handle [after I went back home]—it all would have been something I was okay with! Indeed, they were possessed by an intense hunger they couldn’t always control, their pupils dilated like Greek coins leading me to Hell, ravenous mouths ready to swallow me whole like Scylla and Charybdis!

Nevertheless, to be queer is to be closeted, thus under constant surveillance; and Cuwu—well-adapted to the gaze of all eyes in the room being on them—was someone very vain who had turned that tendency into a survival mechanism they were showing me as a lesson: how to survive, but also how to live by controlling the room per one’s witnesses and potential abusers/prey by captivating them with hypnotic movements [often inside the bedroom as a site of vulnerability and sex, but also regression and safety—per negotiated disassociation]. They could do it with their eyes closed, somehow always watching and loving having an audience they could lure, control and toy with: a doll that played back with its handler! Regardless, sex-positive agency preaches having fun, provided no harm is caused on either side of the exchange! When we played in person, Cuwu did not harm me, but they did watch me and work through mirrors and personas to play with/feed on me through mutually consensual rape fantasies [re: sleep sex]!

[artist: Cuwu]

A veteran of the psychic wars, Cuwu was a little spy conducting proletarian recon/espionage; i.e., always watching back [a bit like Nietzsche’s abyss, but far more fun]—had eyes on the back of their head or on their booty or with their various mouths. Eye contact, for them, was a matter of vampiric, dollish body language; i.e., that reversed the imagery of the surface [re: Segewick] into an oculus. Always ready to put on a show at a moment’s notice, they could spring into action in ways that can only be described as “in trance.” Queerness generally amounts to a confused haze [re: Sam Reiner’s “‘Young, Dumb, and Full of Cum’: Point Break’s Homoerotic Haze,” 2009] that speaks to our caged existence [and complicated feeding/prey mechanisms]. Liminal, our agency achieves through the veracity/verisimilitude of such flawed, feverish perception; i.e., always caged and out in the open—per the cryptonymy process, exposed and couched within a campy story or powerful illusion, where we hunt hungrily for those like us.

To become the illusion, then, is to simultaneously gain the upper hand over potential threats, but also relate to other people in game-like forms we follow as code; re: the proverbial white rabbit being a fair bit of drugs, or drug-like experiences that feel delicious and unreal. Showing me their Aegis, Cuwu clapped back, dummy thicc—doing so to teach me how to have fun, thus learn, by giving and receiving in the same exchanges; i.e., in ways that always require some mode of defense, doubling as a dialog and a game we related to back and forth with—sex, among other things. They played me like a fiddle—not to abuse ne, but to show ne what is possible with what we’ve naturally got! “Jazz” flute is for little fairy boys, and Cuwu—Mozart’s Queen of the Night, and my little cutie next door—played my “magic flute” like a pro! And they gave me books, clothes and food, rescuing me from Jadis; my cummy comrade, I have nothing but respect for them!

Like a good joke, nonsense on the surface is often a deeper context of subversion. Freedom through play, then, establishes through strange bedfellows that, through the miracle of chance tailored by good dating habits, must still learn to make each other better than the system allows—not just Ron Burgundy but myself as taught by Cuwu and vice versa as polyamorous players [it’s still possible for poly people to cheat on others, just harder]. Got game? Learn from the best! Keeping with paradox, then, we become true and false at the same time!

Such is prison life for the queer of any gender or sex: the closet a brothel, a sanitarium, a quarantine, a holding cell. We are both diseased and cured, trauma living in and out of the body as libido and leprosy in ways we can reclaim and camp: through vampirism as a theatrical agent, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Gothic maturity doesn’t reject this liminality at all; it embraces the person “dying” of plague in ways that reverse its abjection on all registers and outcomes. To it, and whether from fangs or mouths, we take, give and receive—be that sex, pain, fluid, labor and/or knowledge—to reverse the usual upward flows of power! For survivors of abuse, catharsis is “rape” in quotes, calculated risk marrying trauma to sex and control to survival theatre;  i.e., performing the loss of control to regain it through BDSM theatre [with rules]. Having survived past abuse, we bare it all, and collapse, flushed and spent, delighted and full—intoxicated. Everyone’s happy.)

Bear in mind, the friendliness or unfriendliness of copies adheres to the hierarchical nature of Capitalism. Just as compelled gameplay forces workers into tiered player types—re: soldiers, officers and generals (working stiffs, middle management and executives)—these apply to our lives swept up in games that mirror such unequal/disproportionate arrangements of power that, in turn, execute to achieve Vampire Capitalism. As such, class war is messy and Capitalism makes war through proxy labor as something to replicate in canonically vampiric forms. In turn, the ghosts of vampire-like workers represent a particular “meta” or gimmicky way of videogame thinking: “mobs” are little vampire zombies, the sexy “champions” drop better “loot,” and the lavish “bosses” concentrically lead towards the end game. This can be challenged simply by going against the profit motive; i.e., we make messes that challenge profit as a matter of knowledge exchange wrapped up, often enough, in fluid exchange; e.g., me fucking Zeuhl’s pussy before pulling out and squirting cum across their crotch, belly and tits, to which they replied, “Goodness me! You made a mess!” Zeuhl and their hole took only for themselves; when giving fluid, I took back, too. I learned it from the best!

From a dialectical-material standpoint, then, zombies, vampires and ghosts can be bourgeois or proletarian, and each monster type offers a particular societal critique. However, while zombies tend to be a populist critique and vampires tend to critique aristocrats, their roles can be creatively reversed and applied to things of atypical scope—not just “Zombie Capitalism,” or Smashing Pumpkin‘s famous opening line to “Bullet and Butterfly Wings,” “The world is a vam-pire…”; vampire hordes, zombie kings, etc—Vampire-Zombie Capitalism!

Moreover, game theory’s material qualities and meta learning system is more modern in terms of the educational vehicle—the mode of play as intra and intertextual. People interact with labor disguised as symbols of war through the literal playing of videogames as a neoliberal illusion of false power they carry over into praxis at large. A ludic contract becomes a meta, ghostly likeness for labor contracts the elite exploit through players; i.e., the delivery system for the Pumpkins’ “bullet with butterfly wings.” This can be a revolutionary cryptonym describing a complicit one (vis-à-vis Borderland or Pumpkins); or the dichotomy can reverse, the apocalypse of false revolution being depicted through endless counterfeits we’ve also explored—e.g., the zombie narrative or dead retro-future (which, with Matteson, had vampires that extend to Borderland and The Matrix).

Regardless of which, thinking about canon or iconoclasm in relation to the material world functions as vision in composite fashion; i.e., with older forms of play interacting with modernized technology as Corgan and company did back in the ’90s (when videogames were in their childhood years—reflected by the bodies, minds and cultural values of their target “war orphan” consumers being acclimated towards war in service of Capitalism): exposing the man behind the curtain as a vampiric clown, a humbug toymaker responsible for your material suffering, your infinite sadness. As a game, Capitalism absolutely sucks, eating everything and everyone; i.e., cops and victims alike, no matter how many the former kill of the latter for their bosses; re: “They’re eating her! And then they’re going to eat me!” (a Greek chorus refrain). State extermination rhetoric is cringe.

In this sense, Alice in Borderland is also linguistic—the abstract, ludic usage of monstrous shorthand to communicate theoretical, ludo-Gothic BDSM ideas about labor within the visual likenesses of games whose exact dialectical-material function remains unclear. A larger meta conversation the show touches upon, then, is that corporations are like vampires—”super destroyers” who don’t just monetize games, but micro-monetize them (then gaslight workers; re: despite all their rage, they’re still just rats in a cage, a prison made to drain them)—micro-monetize the actions of the players playing the games, treating every step they make inside the game as labor theft and wage theft for the absentee owner class. Extratextually, this theft model can be consumer-focused—i.e., through consumers spending money on games—or it can be job creation, through gameplay as a form of labor/content creation that streaming platforms steal, or open license contracts try to steal actively or retroactively (e.g., Wizards of the Coast; source: penguinz0’s “Most Delusional Company Ever,” 2016). A player’s time, money and energy bleed into the process, which drains as many people as it can! In turn, state monopolies yield corporate vampires owning the world in, out and between; i.e., when the meta is profit and state predation all anyone cares about, rape becomes endemic!

To that, canonical prisons and their metas are “for profit”; profit through prisons and bloodsports discourage emergent play as being workers doing what people as a social species do and have done for millions of years: play games to learn, cooperate, communicate and survive (with having fun being a part of all of these things). The canonical meta, then, is compelled in ways that go against how we evolved under natural conditions, trading those for something highly unnatural that rapes and kills everything (all its exchanges being one-way). Small wonder that games have the dubious reputation they currently do—i.e., to play games is “dishonest” or “a waste of time”—but in truth, good games are the key to survival against bad. This act of giving to receive in ways that anisotropically empower workers must become second-nature; i.e., between a network of users synthesizing praxis through a proletarian meta that discourages rape; re: harm through power abuse endemic to prison structures!

Cryptonymy remains part of any meta. Whether sex-positive or sex-coercive, Gothic media displaces prison abuse, presenting it inside an educational nightmare scenario where an imaginary villain drains its victims. A potent effect of the vampire as a likeness of the worker persona is how they blend in, hypnotizing their would-be victims by personifying them. Yet, the impersonation occurs according to positions within a structure of power that allows for the abuse to not only arrange in vertical fashion, but generate illusions according to these arrangements: state-corporate propaganda with familiar faces inside and outside of the text.

Inside Borderland, workers are diegetically menticided, forgetting what playing games is all about, until their struggle to live teaches them the value of teamwork against their oppression (collective action). However, displacement of the abuse to a fantastical other world is cryptonymic, a kind of “bad apple” that suggests widespread corruption, but which companies will try to pin on isolated cases, or by socializing blame in the real world. Either is a divide-and-conquer strategy by those with an unfair material advantage: the elite. Controlling the means of production and mainstream media, they use games to divide and alienate workers to keep exploiting them in a vampiric, ghost-like way. Their ability to hypnotize workers extends to would-be muckrakers; e.g., infecting game journalism, insofar as game journalists cannot spit Marxist facts collectively and quickly at their audience. Instead of highlighting the root problem in Gothic-Marxist language that whips up organized collective-worker action, journalists opt to observe disconnected anxieties like “corporations seem to keep doing this/are greedy vampires.”

If journalists outside of the text comment on their own mistreatment, those inside Borderland do the same; i.e., visionaries like Hatter madly demonstrating how corporate vampirism is something that can extend to members of the working class. Class traitors who defend the intended, prescribed system “out of the box,” players are effectively prison guards that rub people out during games inside games; i.e., a meta pattern that—assembled and viewed all at once, mid-collage—forms an ergodic, terrifying cross-media pattern across Borderland into other prisons, of prisons, of prisons; re, Korzybski:

A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly […] If we reflect upon our languages, we find that at best they must considered only as maps (source: Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 1933).

The ergodic sum is a hit list reducing not just single persons, but whole teams-against-teams as numbers and abstract shapes that are, themselves, simply crossed off! The show shelters various types of class traitors inside a game designed to starve its own players, who survive by becoming players that, rather than run linearly through game worlds that turn them into cops, can work within fragments not necessarily given to them in any logical order or shape (the slightly scrambled nature of my writing in this section reflecting that historical trend).

Conversely, a prison is logical enough—i.e., weaning workers off their sustenance, then gorging them on the blood of their own kind playing out through such gambling-style “meta” bloodsports. Suggesting that reality isn’t just a vault to spill the blood into, the prison is entirely fake, hyperreal—a Torment Nexus build on an illusion of the present world (again, a bit like The Matrix, and similar canceled-future stories where police violence serves elite bodies; e.g., Ghost in the Shell, exhibit 42e). Classically metas serve profit and profit is rape; the meta, then, is rape—taking all for the elite, and this is what must change in between our lives and media relating back and forth! Like magic—like Neo, the king of dreams—we pluck things from the ether and build new worlds to reify during emergent play!

Even before the bloodletting occurs, a pre-apocalypse feels oddly familiar and alien—a survival tactic employed by corporations to keep you from looking behind the curtain at all; uncanniness is merely the ghostly (and bloodstained) bedsheets used as window-dressing. As part of its own conflict, Borderland offers up middle-management “destroyers sent to drain”; i.e., who treat parasocial situations as parasitic inside a vertically-tiered structure of privileged management, these positions jockeying for top spot: the jacks, kings and queens granted special prizes by the executive while killing said executive’s political enemies—each other as poor, thus less than the executive (a bit like the Wizard of Oz and his own gift-giving to Dorothy [whose name means “gift of God”] and her friends, following the defeat of the Wicked Witch of the West).

(exhibit 42a: The ghost and the vampire have a lot in common—as ontological models, but also their myriad replicas. Japan’s modern-looking cityscape is overshadowed by a relatively dated card game buoyed skyward and ferried about by blimps. Past the initial shock, the collapse of the state is actually crystalized inside a highly developed game tailored towards mass predation: the exploitation of workers. The sadistic nature of the bourgeoisie is included for entertainment purposes, giving the audience a vice character to disparage. Nevertheless, the King of Spades seeking the blood spill from a salvo of machinegun fire echoes Japan’s warlike past and current occupation; i.e., by neoliberal bodies that haunt the narrative space through enigmatic violence. The game is obviously bloody, but workers must face the dialectical-material reality of that blood, mid-conflict. They reflect on it.)

Closing Arguments: Understanding and Challenging Vampire Capitalism

Let’s conclude with some broader points about understanding and challenging Vampire Capitalism (seven pages), then wrap things up before moving onto ghosts!

Beyond Borderland, the same basic power hierarchy survives across various adaptations that double the same underlying issue: exploitation and its positions of relative advantage mid-scarcity by virtue of capital making people stupid; re: Marx’ “Something is ours only when it is used by us” to my argument—wherein stupidity regarding sexuality and gender all extend from Vampire Capitalism teaching us to feed stupidly as vampires: by drinking everything dry for the elite. Again, if people are stupid, it’s because bourgeois games and illusions (the Superstructure) have made them stupid; i.e., as prisons and prison-like illusions/metas do by design, incentivizing rape.

It’s not a coincidence, then, how the central villain of The Matrix is basically the Monopoly Guy saying “ergo” and “inexorably” a lot; all roads lead to Rome and Monopoly—ironic once upon a time—became an unironic endorsement of Capitalism the Wachowskis had to critique as best they could: all canonical illusions serve profit as categorically straight, including its divide-and-conquer restrictions, Cartesian rules and canonically essentialist rhetoric; i.e., the state as straight; e.g., the nuclear family model, settler argument, and dialectic of shelter/the alien, Divine Right, etc! It can only take/go up, and by force; anything else is unimaginable to them—is a crime against nature as they order it. As such, Neo, the prince of shadows, meets his father, the Shadow King, only to learn he’s a massive, entitled dick! “What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets!”

Rome wasn’t burned in a day. On the outside looking in, the elite are the ultimate vampires of Capitalism until then, callously “turning” tiered workers into smaller “copies” of themselves (thinking they have the same degree of power when they do not); i.e., that help spread the disease of Vampire Capitalism through progressively inferior (and populous) clones. In canonical iterations, the entire undead cycle illustrates a predatory grooming mechanism—with management “marking” vulnerable targets for observation, and whose neighbors the canonical vampire has already “turned” vis-à-vis a perverse in-group. The presence of the vampire denotes reactive abuse as a form of compelled recruitment, exploiting their own servants as well as their opposing victims’ labor inside the game as repackaged by the elite in seemingly different, but ultimately familiar forms.

In the real world as something to mirror back at workers, the elite watch from a distance while their canon and its associate structures turn those with positions of power into subordinate vampires. Inside the ghost of the counterfeit (which is always a liminal position), management watch their victims become increasingly hypnotized by the local vampire’s charm. A time to resist is allotted, but eventually the vampire comes to call. If the victim does not let him “in” by giving him what he wants (usually sex or submission), the canonical vampire will use their top-down arrangement of power to concentrically gaslight, gatekeep, and collectively punish the victim and their friends (the girl boss being the TERF agent; i.e., a “bride of Dracula”).

This is what I mean when I say “stupidity.” State workers are so stupid they see people, animals and nature as blood to drain for profit and profit alone—meaning they have internalized not just bigotry in one form or another, but the very modes of play through intended systems designed to bring these bigotries about when used uncritically! The cat-and-mouse approach is one where the prison is internalized by the rat in the cage; i.e., acting the cat in ways that only ever let them eat themselves. Intelligence comes from not having advantages (the courts, police, etc). We instead, rely on our wits, our proverbial “rodent’s revenge” to weaponize cryptonymy/cryptomimesis in service to workers—in essence defeating capital at its own game by rewriting the rules with the same devices, disarming their unironic, prison-like function! Foucault’s panopticon becomes Medusa’s Aegis, redistributing power between workers to spread it among them during self-imposed ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., by playing with the things that people like to play with—sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll, but also videogames (Cuphead, above)—to invent new Satanic life among capital’s vampire graveyard! Guerrillas in the mist, we spot the patterns of prisons we can exploit during asymmetrical warfare, rewire them, then shut the hood. “Good as new!” becomes an act of playful infiltration, of “cat scratch fever”; i.e., confusing the cat and by extension the cat-like mouse to ergodically avoid state halitosis (the stink of dead workers—masticated to death and belched like exhaust back out into a prison world—a vapor trail to interrogate/negotiate with)! Think about things to get you to think inside-outside the box!

Carceral management, then, is a process of active menticide inside a larger structure that becomes not just a veiled threat, but an ultimatum on par with the Creature from Frankenstein, delivered by the elite and their proponents; re: “If you will comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you refuse, I will glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of your remaining friends” (source). It’s not simply negotiation, but keeping with the Frankenstein theme, bourgeois parentage and social-sexual reeducation that leads to recursive feelings of intense sexual revenge towards the alleged “cockblocker” (who only is exercising their right to consent). The reactive abuse is packaged as “product” of course; i.e., bourgeois monster “junk food,” but also bourgeois monster sex—monster-fucking that compels genuine rape, not emancipatory rape fantasies inside/outside these power structures! Capitalism breeds and defends stupidity and rape with stupidity and rape.

Animal cruelty and worker abuse by police forces go hand-in-hand; re: the state is straight and incarcerates queerness to rape nature-as-monstrous-feminine. In turn, the blood spilled during the game becomes synonymous with fulfillment as achieved unto deprivation and exploitation; i.e., as something to disguise and disseminate. While any propaganda begets monsters, bourgeois monsters uphold systemic abuse as something to spread—raping workers at the social-sexual level through workers-policing-workers becoming a trademarked brand of abuse that prolongs exploitation for as long as possible: draining the worker to not only weaken them, but trap them under the vampire’s spell, in-house. “Blood,” “essence,” “life force,” and “vitality” are all prison code not simply for “product,” but the relationship between workers and capital that cements product as canon, including its legendary systemic abuse! That’s Vampire Capitalism, and like The Matrix or Plato’s cave, Borderline is touching on something in Japan that is actually happening the world over! Labor polices itself for the prison in any shape or size the elite wish to feature it. No one is safe, an entire country built to exploit itself!

Furthermore, beyond one system is another and another—escape becoming nomadic and creative; i.e., to build places to go, doing so out of prison bricks where—liberation being the productive ability to do so—happens in ways that hide or otherwise safeguard workers from state abuse, and all while paving the way for Gothic-Communist development: a world without prisons, established through ludo-Gothic BDSM as an going poetic device borrowing old medieval things for new purpose; re: selective absorption, magical assembly, a confusion of the senses, and our Song of Infinity! As ergodic puzzle-solvers and detectives, we reconcile the past by interactively rebuilding it; i.e., in ways that phase out our bourgeois bloodsports and prisons. It takes on its own life, giving and receiving!

These are complicated ideas with a lot of praxial considerations. We’ll delve into the worker-policing process itself more deeply in Volume Three, Chapter Two. For now, try to keep several things in mind. First, different kinds of undead tend to overlap. Whereas zombies denote a presence of rot and ghosts a hidden trauma, vampires denote a presence of sanguine feeding. These are not mutually exclusive concepts. Unlike zombies, which are generated by the state of exception, smaller vampires are predatory feeders made by a concentric chain of bigger and bigger predators. The biggest is Capitalism, itself, whose top-down pyramid structure instructs workers to become canonical vampires; i.e., sex pests, then sex fiends part-in-parcel to forms of worker division and exploitation that preserve the structure already in place. This includes the kings and their generals, but also down the line to lieutenants, officers and grunts of their little army belong to a bigger army of parasitic undead. They become dead to suck the living dry!

However, as Capitalism divides people into alienating classes of cops/victims, its centrist model also frames them as more visibly undead “bad guys” (fascists) versus less visibly undead, or waiting-to-inevitably-become-undead “good guys” (centrists); and both hate Commies, but especially queer an-Coms!

We’ll explore this broader war pastiche in Chapter Four of Volume Three. For now, just remember that proponents of zombie-vampire canon will socially-sexually dominate their own chosen victims in the meta prison any text speaks to; i.e., about people, capital always making the same argument through workers resisting liberation (those “in the cave” killing those escaping the cave’s canonical illusions): Join us or die. The outcome is replacement, assimilation and abuse—traditionally sexualizing women and killing men along gendered lines indicative of Capitalist models. Capital is and is not parasitoidism, which kills the host; its parasitism drains workers of their life force and the vampire of their humanity for as long as possible (the latter who can only subsist off exploited labor, including sex, which reflects in their reactive abuse). Banality of evil leads to generational trauma, labor regrown and repeatedly killed inside the same prison-like conditions. Except, state shift will make all of this redundant, Medusa having her revenge; i.e., by killing the elite, and trapping workers in the prisons they’ve grown to accept!

Likewise, it reflects Capitalism’s tendency to promote psychopaths—who will be more likely to exploit others—and coexists with the zombie model: the draining of one’s life force becoming a draining of the brain that affects everyone in sight. Not all vampires are smart; some are notoriously stupid because that’s exactly what the system needs them to be (no one likes middle management):

(exhibit 42b: Left: Our vampire king with his zombified corpse bride, source. Despite being powerful, George Junior isn’t just a figurehead who is nevertheless [famously] braindead himself; he’s rehabilitated years later as a sweet old man who, along with his braindead, bloodthirsty cronies, “didn’t do anything wrong“ [Some More News’ “On the Rehabilitation of Monsters,” 2021].

Right: 2019’s Parasite. The class character of vampirism under neoliberal Capitalism exposes the real vampires through Gothic clichés all throughout that film: the false servant, the tyrannical master, the secret dungeons under the ancient castle sold to a modern family, etc. Beneath the façade, then, the elite present as terminally afraid of the poor, who themselves become treacherous and inventive to survive—what Akira Kurosawa refers to as “wicked, foxy beasts!” The father kills his rival in the wealthy household, and “wins” a trip to prison—inside the house’s bunker-like basement! As a bad form of BDSM and games, Capitalism’s vampirism is well-and-truly bad for everyone!

Even so, the most cruel and cold individuals are the upper classes. Posturing as gods, they become easily duped, but also heartless, seeing disease, death and madness within the poor through material conditions they themselves help enforce [the film’s use of tuberculosis and blood scaring up commentary on pandemic-scale diseases relegated to the vast, starving and unvaccinated poor who cannot afford the medications the elite a) take for granted, but also b) deprive others of while gorging on the poor relegated to the city sewers].)

This coercive “zombie vampirism,” unlike Matteson’s famously Communist iterations, becomes an abusively undead social-sexual lesson unto itself; re: Vampire Capitalism strings you out; i.e., the vampiric dialog frequently speaking in instructional ways: the con man giving dating advice to his victims, exploiting them for their bodies and their labor to do his bidding as sex slaves (aggressors for him, or people he sexually wants because the only way he can feel human again is to return to a former time that the system has deprived him of, while forcing him to prey on others for its benefit). Like any prison, this takes time to implement—land conquered and installed with prisons (and power centers of different kinds), then gestating over years inside people who are predisposed to criminalized, sex-coercive ways of thinking (re: the Shadow of Pygmalion, Cycle of Kings, Man Box, etc). Slowly the institution spreads inside its prisoners’ brains, who fall asleep and whose class dormancy and “apolitical” betrayal leads to more canonical vampires, thus bad education and police abuse hidden as part-in-parcel to the product and the game(s) that produce it. All police anything challenging the flow as it normally goes: up and only up. “The spice must flow” becomes a cardinal rule.

Such predation mentalities aren’t something that someone simply “gets over”; the amount of time gone by isn’t indicative of a cure, only the conscious, visible effort to fight it. When confronted for what they actually are, then, bourgeois vampires remain allergic to emotional/Gothic intelligence outing them as unfriendly ghosts. These ghoulish parallels denote workers emulating Capitalism’ unnatural divisions present within their own social structures. The prison keeps people stupid and cruel, but also unaware they are in a prison because they are always high; i.e., willful ignorance, resisting the truth—that we have to fight for our right to be free from the state; e.g., the agents in The Matrix as suits with special powers and big guns (tech bros), the face cards in Borderland are, likewise, inmates granted special privileges. Per Marx, material conditions shape how we think, and how we think shapes these conditions; per me, the cycle changes when we begin to subvert the arrangement in Gothic (gay-anarcho) Communist ways. During ludo-Gothic BDSM, we camp these ghosts to go beyond what they were capable of, in life!

In this respect, Alice and Borderland is oddly complete, but also oddly displaced from the usual monsters in terms of how it portrays my theories, doing a lot of the legwork for you without leaning too hard on the Gothic language: a ghost town devoid of the usual suspects, all the players vampires but not all of them hungry for blood (the Louis problem) inside Capitalist Realism’ grand illusion. Certain episodes—especially the asylum game—tease at the historical-material framework lurking underneath the veneer of a homely space. But it still chooses to primarily focus on the game itself—namely the outmoded, incongruous nature of a bad replica for the French suit system. While popular media in general tends to vary considerably in how monstrous it appears, it is also nothing if not consistent. If the structure didn’t exist, Gothic media wouldn’t exist to elucidate its cruelties.

The trick with Gothic Communism, then, is to be playful and inventive when examining media that isn’t invested in giving the game away. This includes canon of any kind, which tends to replicate the same old clichés, often as products being sold to people (a street corner drug deal). Being cookie-cutter and mass-produced just means they’re automated, thus semi-predictable in ways the elite cannot fully prevent. All workers need to do is interrogate the text by thinking critically in creative ways—through art as something to produce, but also thinking about art as already made whenever and wherever you come across it; i.e., former poiesis. The counterfeit’s ghost is cryptonymic, sought out behind ludic veneers: the card game.

Borderland is plenty bloody without the spillage literally plunging down the killers’ thirsty throats, the heroes living on through a sorry, undead façade while completely covered in the blood of their dead friends. Unlike gladiators, who are generally paid and trained, there’s no belt, no glory for Alice. The same goes for workers at large; i.e., even if you win (survive), the bloodsport (and subsequent witch hunt/police state’s sodomy arguments, feeding on workers through bad BDSM and us-versus-them death lotteries) has already happened many times over!

(exhibit 42c: Despite lacking overtly ghost icons, Alice in Borderland is full of ghosts and vampiric entities: Alice, forced to survive while he sacrifices his friends; the ghost town of Tokyo itself; and Hatter, who haunts his killer long after being shot to death. It’s not a dazzling nightlife, but a graveyard: a giant eye watching you and telling you where to go and where to die.)

Liberation isn’t when the game “stops,” but changes to yield ludo-Gothic BDSM that isn’t Vampire Capitalism; i.e., Gothic Communism having—like any advanced ruleset—developed out of older rulesets. “Winning” (for the proletariat) occurs by breaking the elite’s illusory rules of power under Capitalism Realism: rewriting them through emergent gameplay inside concentric stories speaking to larger systems feeing on smaller systems (nations), and even smaller, embedded forms (domestic police) likewise feeding to defend property and sap living labor through dead labor, on and on; i.e., ludic dualities pointing to current predation and ultimately, a desire for that dated, harmful vampirism to stop because it not only isn’t fair, but needlessly and pointlessly cruel: profit isn’t needed to help people!

Adversity in gaming needn’t translate to a neoliberal trifecta. While stress will remain under Communism, workers address stress with “stress” to help each other heal; i.e., doing so instead of the elite dividing us up into factions they control and prey upon. In turn, ludo-Gothic BDSM is endemic to Communism—shall be as cool, fun and cathartic as ever during harmless bloodsports. Those shall remain, too—just won’t be compelled, harmful and pandemic, and shall apply to all oppressed groups equally (not just we fags). Artifacts of power—their assigned values and statuses for heroes and villains, cops and victims—arbitrate according to how they are viewed but also used in correspondence to those views: defending the prison or tearing it down. Our victory is denying our jailors any and all of our precious blood, while redistributing power to make workers more intelligent/aware! We stick it to capital (who will grow thirstier and eventually weaker).

That’s what good play ultimately is, but also, as we shall see with ghosts, something whose arbitrations remain haunted by spectres of Caesar and Marx under Capitalism as it presently exists. Something is always taken and given, occupying the venue as a liminal space filled with old history on shared avatars and positions, surfaces, etc. Communism is the installation of choice, the latter’s camping of canon informed by older ghosts as beings to learn from: how to cheat and, at times, hang loose and find forgiveness (e.g., Hatter, above). Capital makes us do things we don’t want to do, but can learn from those haunting us to break the habit during class, culture and race warfare as asymmetrical; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a liberatory matter of pattern, persuasion and yes, play!

So often, interpretation is built on shaky premises that—during oppositional praxis—happen in good and bad faith, play and acting in services to workers, power or even what they think is one or the other but corrupt through bad, brute-force interpretations of someone like Foucault, Plato, Butler or Marx. Popular ideas touch upon hard truths, thus lead to common and pervasive misunderstandings and ignorance that, just as often, are willfully pulverized. By comparison, Gothic Communism combines different ideas to disempower the concentric, ludic, and ultimately illusory nature of prisons!

Unto this, the possible world is often haunted by ghosts of itself leading the way out of the maze inside the maze, closet, game, endless night, what-have-you; i.e., escape happening inside capital as something to transform through hearts (spades, clubs, diamonds) and minds—how the game is played, but also inhabited and observed as a prison promoting might-makes-right. It feels like a dream, but speaks to something people better than us believed in; re, Laura Branigan:

I, I live among the creatures of the night
I haven’t got the will to try and fight
Against a new tomorrow, so I guess I’ll just believe it
That tomorrow never comes (“Self Control“).

Our praxial goal is to spread power and knowledge in ways the state can’t simply hoover up—i.e., out of one or two leaders that, once dead, their revolution dies with them; e.g., Lenin—but instead, distributes in ways that, like the hydra, can’t simply be decapitated, turned upside-down and bled dry under Capitalist Realism’s hellish myopia. The best prisons hide in plain sight; the spirit of Gothic Communism is allegory inside of prisons that we subvert through holistic, ergodic, concentric, dialectical-material analysis—to throw the doors of perception wide. We shine a light on Vampire Capitalism, shriveling it!

To it, lie, cheat, steal, ask questions; connect the dots, fuck what must be fucked—do whatever you can to avoid Vampire Capitalism! Deny the elite that one and only thing they enjoy—our suffering. Make them hydrophobic; i.e., something they cannot swallow, choking on thirst. Grow bird spots on your wings/eyes on the back of your head; remind people that videogames (or anything else) aren’t for spending money to abject reality and its abuses under Vampire Capitalism, but reverse that in ways that set us free, thus empower us to be able to make a better world than capitalists ever could (their idea of perfection being a genocidal blood bank concealed by shadowy illusions; i.e., presented as canceled-future false power inside prison-for-profit by-another name, the trolley problem being the logical and perennial choice). Labor has infinite value; use it! Define what you are born with/into, not vice versa!

(artist: Karen B.)

The elite might be our jailors, then, but they’re not the only vampires on the block. We are legion, and own the blood they want to own, but we must intersect or they’ll divide and conquer us all over again; our intersectional solidarity and ludo-Gothic BDSM can arrange power-as-vampiric/should reflect that when challenging state doubles by thinking critically about, thus emergently with, what they want us to play with as intended: to rape ourselves for their daily fix. We’re the cards they strive to play against ourselves, meaning to reclaim ourselves is to take said cards out of their hands. “All’s fair in love and class war!” and they only have what power we give them—from our bodies to their mouths, we can cut off the oxygen to their brains. The Holocaust for us is them loading us into trains and camps for orderly disposal and reabsorption into the state; for them, it’s us reversing polarity to deny them any ability to cage and torture us, shooting down the old track marks of history. The memory of states begins and ends with them “shooting up,” drinking our blood each and every grim harvest. Let’s go for the jugular (no low-hanging fruit), cutting off their supply!

To break Capitalism Realism, then, is to envision new ways of playing ourselves out that don’t lead to systemic exploitation and harm; i.e., by collectively and all-at-once refusing to obey our self-styled masters (and their cops/enforcers) any longer! No more surrendering our neck, thus no more tokenizing to bite into others by internalizing gamer mentalities that condition us to win at all costs: our souls, our bodies, our agency! We have become fenced in, doomed and stared at by those who come after and rape us (to tokenize and be put down, when we go rabid; i.e., the euthanasia effect; e.g., Samus Aran absorbing X parasites, raping the womb of nature until she corrupts with Medusa’s revenge). Networking new circulation, we play with dogma to diffuse it (often spatially and socially—re: Metroidvania). Thus we monstrous-feminine have our deadly revenge—however campy and silly this new proletarian meta may be—topping from bellow (rebellions start and act from the bottom up)! Let them think what they want; it pays to be underestimated[19] (said the victim to the cop, the outlaw guerrilla to the state servant; e.g., Henry Johns to Brett Ridgeman, in Dragged Across Concrete, 2018)!

Under Vampire Capitalism, then, the land is a farm/strip mine of never-ending hate and misery that, when the state decays, eats all workers without care. The land shall be given back, the prisons holistically examined and dismantled, their us-versus-them mentalities erased from existence. Let’s give it back! Knowing what you know, doing so—reassembling Gothic Communism, however fragmented or ghostly it might seem—should be a piece of cake (revolutionary cryptonymy’s show-and-hide often being monster sex)! Sex or not, anything we do is violent, ipso facto; the cake is a lie that, in our capable hands, leads to tastier things! Delicious liberation! Development is liminal, then, insofar as the fabled chicken crosses the road to get to the other side; but for us, the crossing isn’t to conduct genocide! Communism is already treated as next-to-impossible during Capitalist Realism, so there’s no harm in trying in order to spite our captors! Sloganize fresh campy ghosts through rememory! Make Marx gay! Sex workers of the world, unite! We have only to lose our chains! Mutual consent and reciprocity for the win! Go for the gold! Backshot Nike (“Just do it!” haha)! Etc.

(artist: Shexyo)

Now that we’ve explored development through vampires, sodomy and bloodsports—and included the ideal hermeneutic case study vis-à-vis the Gothic, Marxism, queer studies and ludology through Vampire Capitalism and prisons vs ludo-Gothic BDSM in The Matrix and Alice in Borderland (and old-world-themed bloodsports with Red Hook’s Darkest Dungeon and the Countess)—we shall reconsider another vital aspect to Gothic-Communist development: cryptomimesis; i.e., liminal riffing and ghostly lineages. We’ll look at these through ghosts and various mechanisms associated with them, next!

Onto “Seeing Dead People; or Undead Feeding Vectors, part two: Ghosts“!

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Footnotes

[1] Such muscles historically couldn’t be achieved by humans, due to natural limitations. Per the heteronormative order prioritizing science to artificially enhance drug users in the paradigm, capital has pushed steroids long after Eugene Sandow died in order to raise medals and weights in his honor. It’s not just a grift, but a neo-Olympus preying disease-like on its own population: the steroids are as bad for the users as those around them. Like any epidemic, steroids are generally enacted by wealthy addicts. Most often these are middle-class men, but really anyone inside the Man Box; re:

The use of androgens, frequently referred to as anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS), has grown into a worldwide substance abuse problem over the last several decades. Testosterone was isolated in the 1930s, and numerous synthetic androgens were quickly developed thereafter. Athletes soon discovered the dramatic anabolic effects of these hormones, and AAS spread rapidly through elite athletics and bodybuilding from the 1950s through the 1970s. However it was not until the 1980s that widespread AAS use emerged from the elite athletic world and into the general population. Today, the great majority of AAS users are not competitive athletes, but instead are typically young to middle-aged men who use these drugs primarily for personal appearance (source: Gen Kanayama and Harrison G. Pope Jr’s “History and Epidemiology of Anabolic Androgens in Athletes and Non-athletes,” 2017).

In turn, the strong push their prey to the side, the latter living in the shadow of meatheads killing themselves for the same predatory system! Said meatheads become slaves to their own bodies, the muscles needing an unusual amount of blood (thus nutrients) to exist, which users abuse/supplement with chemicals paid for in all the usual sell-your-soul approaches: theft of one’s property and rights, but also other peoples’ as well. All fall victim to the athlete/cop’s drug-seeking behavior (e.g., Ronnie Coleman was a cop). Power is the drug through class, status and predation, which vampirically manifest and supply through theft during class, culture and/or race betrayal!

[2] From Volume Two, part one:

The boy-gets-girl formula is as old as the monomyth, but translates from D&D into videogames via the usual imperial language of sex and force—from Donkey Kong (where the hero, Jump Man, is actually the villain) to Jump King (2019), where it (and content [not criticism] about it; e.g., Karl Jobst’s “Jump King‘s Biggest Barrier Was Finally Broken!” 2024) is suitably less ironic or critical of the media circuit it contributes towards. Instead, the developers (and speedrunning symbiosis) bank on the sexist headspace of Earthworm Jim (1994) or Dragon’s Lair (1983) to valorize male action; i.e., to conquer Hell as a place to enter then oust false dark kings or monstrous-feminine beings to restore balance to the “natural order” of things: by alienating and fetishizing nature as something to conquer by virtue of traditional male action (force) under Cartesian thought. It’s unironically something that wins the princess as a prize (who apparently is just lying in wait, dressed up like a bimbo waiting to be taken back to the hero’s bed to be “lanced”) [source].

To this, the player in Crimson Court gets the girl: raping the whore, monomyth-style; i.e., as a female version of Radcliffe’s demon lover, emerging victorious from her womb space!

[3] Jadis, for example, once asked me to slap them in the face. They had taught me to lightly touch the cheek, then release to give them time to anticipate, but not how to deliver the strike itself. So I slapped them in the face as I had been taught by martial artists—not with a light tapping motion to stimulate the nerves, but with full follow-through! The blow rocked them solid, but being solid themselves their head did not move. Thoroughly rattled but unharmed, their eyes opened wide and they looked up at me anxiously. “Honey…” they said, “that’s not a slap! I felt my brain move!” To their credit, they patiently explained to me the proper technique. Even so, the initial presumption of knowledge from them, during the accident, led to an ignominious (and frankly hilarious) experience. No harm, no foul!

[4] The ritual’s mutual consent, per the ludic contract, further being established by the fact that you first have to buy, download and install the DLC. Countess is a good mommy dom, teaching players to camp her death through ludo-Gothic BDSM (which sadly must occupy her unironic death, as well, inside the same thirsty gameworld)!

[5] I.e., xenophilic BDSM: the strict mommy dom, the xenomorph as deadly even in cutesy forms; re: Art Legionary’s horny and hilarious take on the famous creature.

[6] An anti-Semitic dogwhistle that survives in modern-day Jewish Conspiracy stories. Incidentally, Rice did not like Stoker and called his novel “the incoherent ramblings of an insane Irishman.”

[7] The release of hormones before, during and after a period starts and ends can affect not just the haver’s dreams, but their waking from them in terror and/or lust; re: canonically speaking, the having of naughty dreams visited upon someone by an incubus or succubus. Also sometimes, periods can make people hornier (and again, orgasms can sometimes help with period cramps, though these vary drastically per individual and are also poorly studied. Such ignorance owes to itself to capital, it being far easier for elite forces to dogmatize female biology than to understand it; i.e., humanizing “vampires” so goes against the profit motive).

[8] A common female defense mechanism is “vaginismus”; i.e., where the vagina—rather than swell from blood due to an erogenous response—will suddenly and violently contract on its own. Generally due to lived trauma and/or tokophobia, said mechanism forces the people involved to not only improvise but—keeping with the insect breeding metaphor—canonically enact a practice known as “traumatic penetration”; re: the knife dick, but also fangs and other stabby bits engaging in abject sexual reproduction and BDSM: paternal sodomy and brood-style mothering simply punching through the skin into the bloodstream and/or body cavity (re: the xenomorph, above)!

[9] With vampires classically able to transform into either animal, but also clouds of mist—all anti-Semitic symbols linking vampires to rodents, lupine creatures and other such fearsome-to-victim creatures of the night, but also witches and goblins (who, again, serve a different bigoted form if identical purpose). In BDSM terms, though, vampires can change shape in ways conducive to size difference—the bat quite small, and wolves (especially werewolves) known for their immense size and ability to overpower their prey! Stigmas inform and assist in predation per the profit motive; i.e., as carceral and fake, but no less effective on the faithful Straights policing us in blind faith pursuant to assimilate, thus socio-material elevation!

[10] The film—made by the Wachowski sisters when they were still in the closet—was built on Ghost in the Shell’s Pygmalion-meets-Frankenstein cyberpunk yarn. The former was already a story about a tokenized female robocop in a neoliberal Orientalist wonderland; i.e., made to appeal to the Western Male Gaze while simultaneously assassinating Japanese salary men in a hypercomputerized world on the edge of cyberspace (Aarseth would write Cybertext, two years later): pinned between Baudrillard’s 1970s concept of hyperreality (made on the verge of neoliberalism and based on older thinkers, from Borges to Plato) and 1980s cyberpunk fantasies critiquing neoliberal Capitalism et al. They effectively did so through standard-issue power trips, whose own Neuromancer-grade hauntologies (and tabletop games) would inform Fisher’s concept of Capitalist Realism, per the canceled future and into my own work (starting in 2022, five years after Fisher’s suicide).

In Neo’s case, he was moonlighting as a hacker who, during the daytime, works a dead-end corporate job—magically catching the attention of Morpheus, the King of Dreams, who’s convinced he’s the One (a cause to believe in). And extratextually the entire film speaks to queer dissatisfaction with life under capital, appreciating philosophy/videogames in ways that bring these gentrified theories and media to bear for a revolutionary purpose. The sisters would eventually come out, and their updated, on-the-cusp metaphor for Plato’s cave would resonate with many queer people after the revolution caught fire; i.e., in the Internet Age; e.g., me, feeling validating in my interest with those things as a weird iconoclastic nerd—having watched Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix and The Animatrix (2003) in middle school and high school. As a rising queer academic stepping out of the shadows, I suddenly was finding my queer side twenty years later and viewing these older stories in a new light: queerness as a shadow/ghost of itself haunting the usual action stories; i.e., Neo played by Keanu Reeves—a man with an extensive history of playing queer-coded characters (e.g., Point Break, My Own Private Idaho) and standing in for queer revolution.

“Me!” I would say to the screen, excitedly. “They’re talking about me!” Except I didn’t, at the time. To be queer, then, is to be closeted in ways that sleepwalk through much of our lives. Hindsight is 20/20, we queers having to become a “new” order of existence; i.e., stepping out from older exclusionary shadows to make the Wisdom of the Ancients more wise, hence more inclusive in a 21st-century world. State dualities would rise to meet that challenge, but they could no longer monopolize it as they had in the past! Neo was free, Project 2501 was free, we were free.

Following suit, stories like The Matrix would be recuperated by white cis-het conservative men using DARVO and obscurantism to “create jobs” (the whole idea with prison labor being not just enslavement, but recursive police violence) and steal the magic pills back for the state. And such rebellious stand-ins pulling at queer yolks have the usual de facto white male/female representatives talking for oppressed groups; but so did Marx, I recall, arguing for factory workers (and a great many other thinkers; e.g., Lenin, having a rhetorical focus that started white and argued outwards). The wonderful idea about The Matrix (and later stories, like Sense8, 2015) is there was suddenly a multimedia, ludic allegory that included queer people; i.e., in ways that could occupy traditionally straight roles and make them genderqueer, non-white, sex-positive and Pagan, etc; i.e., many heroes in these stories being GNC sex workers, not just surviving but co-existing under a cyberpunk venue. The grounds for our mutual liberation felt more common, less alienated by Hollywood bullshit.

To it, the shadows on Plato’s cave wall—already dualistic and something of a closet—became thoroughly and consciously gay in ways that challenged state doubles: in the same shadow zone as something to fight over for different causes with said shadows. We could acknowledge ourselves first in shadowy projections, then exist independent of them!

[11] As discussed with Cameron’s Terminator films, in Volume One:

The technological singularity is often misunderstood as something that will eventually happen, all while scapegoating machines; i.e., by presenting them as the end of the world, rebelling against the status quo by replacing Humanity with pure non-humans (often via a transhuman buffer like the xenomorph or Frankenstein’s Creature). But the truth is less romantic: Thanks to efficient profit (and the bourgeois trifectas at large), Capitalism is generally not incentivized to build things like Skynet in a literal sense. Rather, human beings are dehumanized to behave in robotic ways, insofar as delivering or receiving state violence is concerned. This isn’t technology of an incredibly advanced sort, nor does the state require it; it’s a reflection of the human condition projected onto various dated anxieties about the rise of the police state smashed together with state-fueled phobias and stigmas in a retro-future hauntology that leads to Capitalist Realism. It’s a paradox—a liminal expression of unequal power and its abuse, insofar as technology becomes a device of state terror that contains within it all the usual means of humanizing the dehumanized through counterterror (source).

Robata—or slaves/raw technology—is commonly used during Red Scare narratives to scapegoat labor and machines instead of the elite; i.e., the technological singularity argument absolves human systems of any wrongdoing: “It was the machines, Sarah!” The dualities at work likewise present workers as machines inside a prison, which its owners—depleted of their humanity and treating us like blood bags to suck on—unscrupulously abuse during Vampire Capitalism. The way to escape is through a posthuman revolution; i.e., the kind where workers seek revenge against their Cartesian overlords by becoming the thing they fear most: counterterrorists overthrowing bondage. Both arguments use the same aesthetics, one treating it as a doomsday and the other a jailbreak.

[12] While I’m not sure about squids, the octopus is a classic symbol of monopolies under Capitalism and its multiple gilded ages, but also fascism and blood libel per Jewish Conspiracy.

[13] The asylum is also a metaphor of medieval abuse that, for queer people, is a concentration site to keep watch over them; re; Foucault’s panopticon and History of Sexuality speaking to the homosexual man as someone to watch; i.e., by virtue of the queer disease—unlike syphilis—largely being associated with gay men and anal sex. The disease profile became something to camp our status with as disease spreaders differently than women; i.e., they for their hysteria and various STDs, we for our sodomy and AIDS in particular. No one wants to be known as sick or aberrant. To that, the poetry of vampirism becomes a campy, performative way to recontextualize our treatment as walking plagues; i.e., dressing it up in the operatic language of forbidden desire, taboo sex, and various social stigmas. It’s rock ‘n roll/calculated risk—our rebellion put to music and dress codes that even the Straights can get on board with (to colonize, of course).

Applying this directly to Borderland, there’s no music (at least no diegetic music), but plenty of drama. Cheshire isn’t just the twink-in-peril, but one trapped inside Foucault’s panopticon (with “neko” being Japanese gay slang for “bottom”); i.e., the show’s blood disease/transfer is capital-in-small, the prison being operated like a gameshow while its temporary inhabitants murder each other according to the game’s punitive ruleset: in a prison restored to administer that punishment, doing so through discipline as established and acted out according to the game ludicrous ruleset. Stupid game, stupid prize, but the players are literally collared to explosives—they’re hostages pushed into gang behaviors, eating themselves alive (and every death a snuff film shot for the elite’s pleasure)!

[14] From left to right. Caterpillar is trans, escaping her abusive father’s past by kicking ass (using the karate her father taught her to survive); Cheshire is a hospital ghoul seeking redemption for his sins; and Alice is a shut-in gamer alienated from his family and forced to kill his brother and best friend early in the show (survivor’s guilt commonly manifesting in zombie apocalypses/post-apocalypses).

[15] Per the arbitration of the inmates, turning the whole exercise into a guess-who-dies-next game for the elite looking in. They pride themselves as gods—immortal, above it all, exempt from death and human failings while, in the same breath, slaves to blood more than anyone else. They’re like a transplant victim hooked to stolen organs, said organs still inside a comatose body!

[16] I.e., “gamer culture,” which, as we’ve established in our thesis volume, is predominantly white, cis-het, and male. Moreover, many “metas” exist within manufactured competition to serve the profit motive; e.g., fighting games and professional teams of the FGC as a globalized operation across multiple countries. If you don’t complete, you don’t exist.

[17] As Eric Koziel writes in Speedrun Science: A Long Guide to Short Playthroughs (2019):

In March of 1990, Nintendo of America staged an event in Dallas, Texas […] called the “Nintendo World Championships.” While this was mainly a marketing event to capture and further motivate the explosive success of the NES, it grew into a full-on circuit. While the event itself was built around total score, the Nintendo World Championships have a place in history as one of the earliest instances of organized speedrunning (source).

[18] The consent-non-consent, in this case, being their consenting beforehand to us fucking in sessions where they wouldn’t always be able to consent in the moment; i.e., requiring me to gauge for them if things were still good even when they couldn’t signal a safe word for me (they smiled in their sleep as I fucked them). Awake or asleep, sober or stoned, we had a contract and stuck to it!

[19] From my grandfather fighting Nazis in the Dutch resistance to me, doing the same: “I’m just a dumb Dutch girl. I don’t know nothing!” Playing dumb is just another trick up our sleeves, the guerrilla fighting in the shadows with shadows against monopolies on shadows (to escape Plato’s cave).