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 Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

Trial by Fire: Demon Muscle Mommies (feat. Lady Hellbender and Hela, The Shape of Water)

Some people say my love cannot be true
Please believe me, my love, and I’ll show you
I will give you those things you thought unreal
The sun, the moon, the stars—all bear my seal

—Ozzy Osbourne; “NIB,” from Black Sabbath (1970)

Picking up where “‘I’ll See You in Hell’: opening and part one (dark faeries)” left off…

Whereas “Darkness Visible” concerned dark faeries and their subversive ability to get what they want through the aesthetic/collaboration of psychosexual force, their reenactments sometimes had a gentle femme dom character to them. By comparison, “Trial by Fire” considers the fiery “swole'” aspects of the monstrous-feminine that lean towards a stricter side of things: the demon muscle mommy’s staunch command over nature, and notable intimidation factor during deals; i.e, as whorish, illegitimate traders in lethal force that threaten others in Amazonian ways, and whose revenge (against profit) burns with sulfurous hellfire. It’s more blunt and less ambitious, brute force a bit easier to define than darkness visible/the controversial voice of the royal damned; i.e., such matchmaking is short and to the point, these hellish, brutish herbos burlier and more direct, action-packed contenders than their glamorous, brawl-averse faerie cousins. With their taut, muscular bodies, these sexy warlords barrel headlong into danger as something to reenact and wrestle with—a compelling argument of psychosexual force they catalyze/visit on others during the dialectic of the alien’s faux-medieval monster-mom battle sex!

(artist: Ellie Maplefox)

Before we dive into the exhibit, a short explanation on demon mommies themselves, followed by their relationship to the imaginary medieval, ending on several distinctions between them and dark faeries (about eight pages):

Demons muscle mommies (which we’ll shorten to “demon mommies,” from here on out) speak to candidly smutty subject matter (and a classically female readership) that denotes a male/GNC female submissive fantasizing about a monstrous-feminine dominant. Such are Amazons, and by extension, demon mommies as an arguably more criminal, hellish variant (our emphasis again being the royal variety—the bandit queens); it’s a performance to do for themselves, but still have a broader audience that evolves and changes over time. They are demon whores and lovers courting prey-like mates through classic kayfabe shock and awe, but also sex and force relaid as a kind of sacrificial “tease”; re: of rape and revenge (often murder) suggested through paradoxically Faustian trades that, as usual, threaten rape as a bread-and-circus matter of capture (unequal power and harm); i.e., as something to normally distance ourselves from, the bargain tearing the recipient limb-from-limb (deals with the Devil are seldom healthy or fair): a childless monarch unchained from reproductive sex, yet one who obviously knows her way around prurient courtship and its horny terror language endemic to underworld locales. To say there isn’t some kind of theatrical tension because of that is to have seriously tuned out during the original story!

Faust aside, “Trial by Fire” specifically operates through a postcolonial urge of forbidden love: to have our whore’s revenge, doing so through Lady Hellbender (and similar militarized, conspicuously muscular beings—Karlach and Hela, but also male demon lovers, to be holistic; e.g., the merman from Del Toro’s 2017 The Shape of Water). Our emphasis explores gladiatorial violence among such locales; i.e., not so much in the act of poetic creation, itself (through darkness), but the iron-grip wielding of unequal power during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Dominants, bondage and collars—the sub wears the dom’s yoke during calculated risk/a palliative Numinous to paradoxically perform unequal power and relieve stress from past abuse as poetically inherited from total history’s real and imaginary factors; e.g., demon-mommy muscles threatening castration and forced sex, emasculation well-at-home in a Neo-Gothic faux-medieval whose retro-future menace acts as a wraith-like infiltrator of the present space and time: the cushy-yet-recent Western idea of safety and privacy!

To relax, the middle class—who, fearing the deprivation of recently-granted rights by a decaying state apparatus (sticking its assassin’s head into seemingly safe spaces like the bedroom, actually still haunted by rape, of course)—began, back then and now, to dread the ghost of the barbaric past (and its shakier foundation’s unheimlich notions of ownership, illegitimate force, violent sex and brutal revenge). Whenever and wherever they perform these things, their privileged fantasies seek to sever danger from harm by faking it; i.e., in ways that can bring informed workers closer to nature as something they subsequently fetishize with the hauntological aesthetic of medieval acquisition and consummation: the princess dominated in bed extending to the entire castle, except per the demon mommy archetype has classically swapped genders!

Furthermore, the “castle” during the liminal hauntology of war is a normal home (or person indicative of the home; e.g., a housewife or housemate) adopting medieval intimations. “Home,” in the medieval, was a place where sex didn’t happen in the bedroom alone (re: Foucault), and whose taboo, aristocratic violence reliably attached to powerful structures (and their infamously cruel rulers) passed down onto more ordinary-looking people and places. Surviving bourgeois hegemony that decays back into older violence caged by capital, these same people—having received the chronotope’s oversaturation of displaced, fearsome legends (about raw material and sexual exchange)—may speak to one another during the cryptonymy process about such abuse happening around them; i.e., by showing others that we live in Gothic times: the Destroyer on the surface of smirking whores! So can our playtime put “rape” in quotes and a cap on actual harm; i.e., any caused by the bourgeoisie.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

The Gothic plays with rape made alien by capital, flirting with chivalry-as-dead brought back to life; i.e., as Walpole once did with glee. Beyond castles, then, its bastard, danger-disco husbandry includes brutal trades during ludo-Gothic BDSM that speak to the ravishing character of older times, minus the harm. They involve the whispered reprisals of banditti henchmen, but also those who typically paid them; i.e., the unscrupulous ladies and lords, but also their classic sites of pretend, questionable, yet ultimately enormous power (re, from Volume Zero: power is something to perform). This means their long-lost castles, deep dungeons and stolen rituals, but also fabulous riches, treasure, and loot overshadowed by blood-money conquest and a disturbing knack for skullduggery (often through gratuitous shows of force; e.g., defenestration).

All encompass power through the law as literally tied to their dubious bodies and bloodlines—crowns and scepters, to be sure, but also the Amazonian idea of warrior culture and strength of a conspicuously athletic sort: the wrong side of the law something to administer in our favor that, all the same, rules/fuels through violence, lust and fear (medieval sovereignty backed up through force)! Experienced diplomats in might-makes-right, demon mommies are bandit queens and black hell knights who let their fists (and thighs) speak for them, doing so that others might defer to their legendary expertise—as judge, jury and executioner!

In short, “the medieval” is a place to fear returning to the present (the return of the assassin, phantom, rogue, tyrant, etc), but also where a great deal of control might be found by reversing state terror weapons in ways that Walpole himself famously did, through counterfeit and camp; re (from Volume One):

While Baldrick also argues how the likes of Walpole use this dichotomy to both erode the presumed “superiority” of classical culture and to fear the medieval world as a dark and brutal place amid this ghost of the counterfeit, I posit that Baldrick is astoundingly incorrect in assuming that

Unlike “Romantic,” then, “Gothic” in its literary usage never becomes a positive term of cultural revaluation, but carries with it […] an identification of the medieval with the barbaric. A Gothic novel or tale will almost certainly offend classical tastes and rational principles, but it will not do so by urging any positive view of the Middle Ages (ibid.).

Yet, this incorrectness stems from the invented, imaginary past as “medieval” in ways that potentially rewrite the conventional wisdoms regarding said past… which Baldrick conveniently ignores. Indeed, the kinds of stories Baldrick is writing about were predominantly written by white, cis-het men and women centuries ago, when queer discourse was in its infancy and racial bias was phased out of the conversation through regressions to a pre-fascist 15th century that was more interested in enjoying one’s privilege and playing silly pranks.

This brings us to Horace Walpole, the writer of the first Gothic novel and an ostensibly homosexual (or ace) man who devoted most of his relatively long life to making Gothic not just a label to describe the medieval period, but literally a specific style of campy fakery used to embellish the present space and time through intentionally a historical reinvention: the castle where such oddities could be found and observed (source).

This same silly-serious idea extends to the people of castles, which demon mommies easily qualify as: queens of Hell if Hell were a neo-medieval wasteland.

To it, ludo-Gothic BDSM is supposed to be thrilling and fun, but also adequate in ways polite discourse seldom is; i.e., by recreating a crude return to the tyrannical home suddenly doubling one’s own through larger dialectical-material forces, but closer to a frank medieval voice that, akin to Chaucer’s “Miller’s Tale,” is completely vulgar and bananas[1] but invested in the closeness between sex and death, food, and a variety of other poetic devices. When playing with violence and sex as people from the Gothic or Neo-Gothic periods actually did, a reunion with things capital has tried to alienate workers from/with can be a struggle but also a game to delight in; e.g., like Monty Python in the 1960s, but also more recent media getting into the same Walpolean spirit—smiting a dragon (the Capitalocene) about the bollocks!

(artist: Tony Sart)

The Gothic, though historically reviled, critically panned and treated like crude garbage by prude snobs, was and is absurdly popular—not because it was counterfeit or counterculture alone, but inventive, hilarious and badass in equal measure; i.e., graveyard sex through fetishes and clichés, miracles and mad science (staged battles through popular binary arguments’ threatening contrast: good vs evil, reason vs madness, big vs small, tight vs loose, nature vs civilization, men vs women, virtue vs sin, us vs them, black vs white, cops vs victims, etc), but also bluffs, gambits, fakeries and bastard shams delivering clarity through confusion as something of power/power-adjacent to perform and perceive; e.g., fake funerals, marriages, bloodlines, duels, scandals, servants and sidekicks, etc, but also demon castles summoned/sought out for their naughty reputations (of vaguely “dark” monster sex), then traveled to in order to temporarily lose control/radically transform into or in relation to demon mommies!

The adventuresome thrill of the castle’s opera/danger disco—steeped in bogus superstition, demented emotions, and a hellish charge (adjacent to generational abuse, but also a Gothic potential to shift away from Capitalism)—is both larger-than-life and largely the life and point of Gothic argument (to have power over others and vice versa), but also its vector! “A girl can dream,” as the saying goes, and there’s nowhere we’d rather be (a home away from home to let off steam with, but also consume canonically forbidden ideas, letting our hair down); demon mommies denote a statuesque presence of strength that reflects classic forms of violence back towards the usual givers of it by the usual receivers; e.g., from women to men! If the dark faerie is the queen of terrors through darkness personified, the demon mommy (as we’re expressed it, here) is the champ when it comes to brute force, complete daring and physical, heated persuasion (unequal power and dark desire expressed through a sexualized form of combat theatre; re: kayfabe and Amazonomachia).

Several more distinctions, then, before we dive in (three pages). There’s an undeniable element of fabrication with demon mommies, but one attached to real people (versus something completely artificial, which doesn’t have rights). A byproduct of the tawdry and salacious gossip of enterprising-yet-bored housewives (which Radcliffe most certainly was), they’re queens of firepower versus darkness. Even so, both demon mommies and dark faeries embody a kind of abject alter ego that plays out the alien, repressed feelings of oppressed groups, onstage and off: generational anger and revenge, desires to assimilate—even murder and rape! As such, they (and their organs of violent perception) remain prime candidates; re: for forbidden love as a postcolonial device told playfully through Amazonian terror language coming from Hell, especially wrestler’s kayfabe. Except, whereas a dark faerie might barely lift a finger to get what she needs, the demon mommy—while certainly no dummy in her own right—will happily do all the heavy lifting (a total thigh queen, below) while hunting for heads, herself[2]!

(artist: Ickpot)

Whereas the dark fairy is commonly femme and enchantingly mysterious (marking her prey with ropes, teeth, glamour and darkness), the demon mommy is shrewd, spicy, masculine and firm; both can capture their prey but she takes hers by force—i.e., direct and without guile, opting to smash and grab through underworld might versus stealth and overtly/exclusively feminine sex appeal (said femininity always occupied by an alien masculine [monstrous-feminine] element). She’s competent and battle-tested, a firebrand freak of nature (from a traditional, heteronormative standpoint) whose hauntological, faux-medieval qualities patently evoke “strict” versus gentle domination; i.e., psychosexual, vaso vagal, and predator/prey[3] confusions of danger and protection the Gothic (and its imaginary warrior-queen cavaliers) are known for, and which genuine abusers—e.g., Jadis or Zeuhl (the former who raped me, the latter who abandoned me but expected loyalty afterwards)—don’t have a monopoly on!

To it, the demon mommy comes from a house where peace is a stranger and war a welcome friend—a survivor of assassins, vendor of malice and purveyor of strict therapy through lucid nightmares lending the Amazonomachy‘s already medieval, military and hostile gravitas an extra hellish bent. She’s a vice character of sorts—bare and naked, an imposing “tank girl” distraction that roars loudly in ways unbefitting the Western maiden/state modesty argument, but presents precisely for those reasons in canonical circles: the femme fatale/sexual weapon/monster to love, but also routinely defeat and cage because she’s on-fire with hellish energies; i.e., too hot to handle, thus assimilate! Medusa, in this case, is always an antagonist to some degree, because the state requires one to exist and project their own police abuse onto. For them, Galatea is always Pygmalion’s bitch, the warrior whore trapped in his endless shadow and blamed for state shift; re: the Medusa bogeywoman.

Of course, everyone loves the whore; canon does so because her summoning becomes a euthanasia refrain to maintain the status quo with during times of crisis. The Nazi leader and Communist queer inhabit the same kayfabe space and bodies; e.g., Zod and Faora (the latter a Nazi werewolf woman, warrior whore and knightly wet dream for Zack Snyder’s neo-conservative superhero vehicle) appear menacingly in Man of Steel (2013); re: during the liminal hauntology of war… only to be bested and defeated after chewing the scenery and kicking absurd amounts of ass; i.e., during the usual copaganda displacements of controlled opposition/false rebellion. Every Radcliffean scapegoat needs a cop to bury them—a rugged, phallic jester dancing in the king’s court, these usurpers brandish a black mirror to suggest state fallibility (only to have a dashing hero sweep these feelings aside, breaking the mirror [and the oracle] in the process). Through fascinating fascism, the enemy is both weak and strong!

Sex and force, then, can produce/cater to remarkable tension and/or release, but the demon mommy is often relaxed, in this respect; i.e., she’s done this before, at home with the language of masters and slaves, aristocrats and serfs, which she combines through herself. Certifiably queenly but still putting in work, she’s not above dirty jobs—an expert jouster happy to take the reins and get down; a strong-thighed Queen Bee at Castle Sodom, her reputation for extreme behavior proceeds her (and whose poetic maneuvers excite similar emotions through vulgar puns[4] and, in case it wasn’t already obvious, heroic-villainous body language)!

She’s also hungry and ambitious, possessing a ravenous royal appetite formerly known to kings that—among a female/partially feminine body—is unequivocally monstrous-feminine. Demonstrating that appetite, she runs the risk of passing traditionally manly qualities onto helpless maidens exposed to someone other than their promised husbands! In short, she’s temptation incarnate, but works through a kind of gender swap importing the Amazon style onto more recent medieval hauntologies; e.g., castles, servants and unequal, nigh-scandalous breeding scenarios; i.e., a window into an older and scarier but also fascinating and partially imaginary world! Of knights and damsels, but also ladies bearing less virtue and more lust, such spaces turn regular life under capital inside-out; i.e., a Rabelaisian carnival where the exploration of what is normally denied becomes, itself, boldly normal: ringing the Devil’s doorbell!

(artist: Bold Vid Studio)

It might sound odd to white, straight, middle-class women in the Imperial Core nowadays, but women hardly more than a century ago were considered property by the state, of which having extramarital sex (or fantasizing about it in monstrous language) was a common mode of recourse/revenge for these kept persons: to “violate” ourselves, but also the state-assigned boundaries caging us that older authors projected onto a foreign exotic or dated imaginary. What, for older generations, was a push towards liberation for some (fascist feminism), we want to push towards universal liberation. This happens through the Gothic mode, including the consciously ironic language of alienation, scarcity and discord that subversive demon mommies represent; i.e., working towards regular shelter and comfort (often sex), their paradoxical protection realized through such tantalizing “Beauty and the Beast” what-ifs (the marriage of the Ancient Romance and ordinary novel to escape past barbarities, once summoned; re: Walpole’s vague castled forgeries).

To it, the Gothic and its imaginary medieval is the quintessential site of rape play waged by the middle class (and other workers, upper and lower) for different reasons (often at odds); mutual consent during rape play/deep passion is good praxis, provided the “rape” is actually in quotes. The concept is to tantalize with excitingly “dangerous” roleplay scenarios, the use of a threatening “lance” inviting the size queen’s warrior boast during rough, suitably passionate sex, “That all you got, motherfucker? C’mon, fuck me like you mean it!” Hair down, pussies out, girls (who’s fucking who—the power of knowing the courtly exchanges per network—something to arbitrate through girl talk’s anger/gossip, monsters and camp)!

(artist: Sasha Khmel)

So again, this makes the usual blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft accusations something to level against demon mommies! Like the earthbound Amazon or dark faerie, they are beings to canonically fear and tokenize, embodied by subversive agents in much the same manner that we’d camp in more earthly forms. Keeping the anal Amazon thesis in mind—that agents of terror are subverted through reclaimed terror language, including psychosexual acts of domination tied to areas of dominion (e.g., duels for property and honor, enacted by spontaneous brutal violence and fireworks, at or around castles)—let’s get to the exhibit, itself. Reflecting on demon mommies’ grim extortion of others to prosecute their own wars, it concerns the whore’s paradox as equally a paradox of rape reversing such terror devices to achieve a postcolonial effect/reversal of abjection with demon mommies; i.e., how we usually get your attention: through playful, fatal-nostalgic threats of “rape” during ludo-Gothic BDSM’s regular theatrical distortions of state “truths”! When performing unequal power to rebel against state arrangements—i.e., by using guilty pleasure relayed through unlawful carnal knowledge and sinful desire—the best defense is a good “offense” (such indomitable master/slave language often played for effect through exquisite “torture,” left).

(artist: In Case)

That’s what forbidden love ultimately is, in this case; i.e., the audience falling for scrappy harlots, slutty Valkyries, and avenging angels—our resident queens having fallen from Heaven, themselves, only to punch up from dark, foreboding places during the dialectic of the alien; i.e., by playing at war and sex’ intoxicating spells of “rape” to humanize ourselves (and nature-as-monstrous-feminine; re: Medusa) with postcolonial arguments: red-hot rape fantasies, burning with forbidden desires that demon mommies in particular specialize at during calculated risk! “Hell,” for Gothic Communism, is a theatrical place to go to and settle our differences, bravely speaking out in ritualized “violence”; i.e., with a corporal punishment rhetoric endemic to medieval, ecclesiastical institutions; e.g., naughty nuns (above), the complicated genderqueer disguise of churchly crossdress—re: Matthew Lewis’ Rosario/Matilda/the Devil—carried forwards from the ancient and medieval world into a stereotypically outmoded (operatic), predatory/prey caricature of the Amazonian underworld’s traditionally female[5] warrior!

Note: While our focus remains largely on demon mommies like Lady Helldriver and Hela, their function as postcolonial demon lovers remains part of a Gothic-Communist operation. To be holistic (as Gothic Communism generally demands), we’ll divert some energies towards other demon lovers, too—e.g., Del Toro’s aforementioned merman—and consider the complicated ways that privilege and oppression manifest and overlap; i.e., during an intersectional, solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed. —Perse

(exhibit 44a1a1b2: Artist: Persephone van der Waard. Lady Hellbender from Guardians of the Galaxy and Kalach from Baldur’s Gate 3 [2023] exemplify the demon muscle mommy archetype; i.e., they evoke the Amazonian threat of “capture, rape and death” put into optional hellish quotes—of DARVO Amazonomachia speaking to evil, demon slavers from nature, whose dire revenge canonically must be challenged through battle [when Hell comes to Earth or vice versa] but also fetishized [re: death by Snu-Snu] in ways we monster-fuckers humanize: during ludo-Gothic BDSM, camping the monomyth using postcolonial gender[queer] identity and performance!

To it, Gothic camp loves the muscled, bodybuilder guerrilla-as-demon, treated by the state like statuesque criminal hysterics and token, cop-like whores under settler colonialism’s black/white binary married to virgin/whore! They’re warriors and whores from Hell, the monstrous-feminine straddling the fence insofar as spine-tingling terror [and other body parts] require a bit of visual ambiguity, brute strength and token menace! Hell and its militias aren’t for wimps, save to torture them with irony or without!

Like kayfabe in general, demon mommies are physically very demanding and involved, but also govern liminal shows of force that translate to godly levels of inequality and doubles; re: faces and heels, heroes and villains, but also kings and queens, castles and forced marriages franchised by capital. In that sense, it’s no different than the Wild Hunt, Apollo’s chariot, or the death coach [vehicles of death and war]—flying gods speaking to latter-day UFO abduction and rapturous, Radcliffean capture tied to the ghost of the counterfeit [“back from outer space“]: moving castles and their dark-disco, giant, castle-like bodies [re: the liminal hauntology of war] taking us away and making an operatic show of it, then having their way with us in the safety of upside-down homes mocking Western variants! Such are vice characters, demon mommies a kind of Amazon “from Hell” that takes their prey [of any gender they want] back to Hell as an infernal, postcolonial territory!

[artist: Jessica Nigri]

Capital divides by design, always through predator/prey in service to profit. From a Cartesian standpoint, then, the state wrongs nature, gendering it as female/monstrous-feminine in “ancient,” canonically essential ways it can pimp once antagonized; nature responds by revenge-stealing state brides [often by gender-swapping them, turning men into brides] during reactive abuse. In short, subversive Amazons anisotropically camp the monstrous-feminine as terror language normally used to sodomize nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., when empire decays per capital’s usual boom-and-bust cycle, turning nature into terrorist the state counterterrorist [often a token Amazon] can incarcerate, rape or otherwise execute the state’s will against; re: geography as destiny along moral territories and iconography that must routinely be cleansed of evil/natural “corruption” through state arbitration and heroic precedent debriding said decay while gentrifying war all over again [re: Tolkien and Cameron’s cartographic refrains during the monomyth: punch, stab or shoot nature-as-whore, above].

Whatever the form, state binaries are false, harmful, and unnatural as a matter of function pimping nature as criminal, incorrect, and abhorrent; i.e., per Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and/or settler colonialism. Christianized us-versus-them violence stems from Beowulf vs Grendel; from Columbus onto the Cartesian Revolution and beyond, nature is something to pimp, anything not him and his men being “extended beings” for “thinking beings” to pimp, enslave and destroy by cheaply moving money through them. This great theft [which money is] translates neoliberally into Tolkien and Cameron’s refrain, a dubious arrangement of false power per light/darkness that calls for genocide in God’s name [more on Tolkien in a bit]: “For in its presence, all darkness must flee.” A blanket of the mind, such Capitalist Realism always dresses up as divide-and-conquer territory disputes happening between man/the state-as-straight and nature-as-monstrous-feminine; re [from Volume One]:  

The state’s various religious/secular ingroups associate entirely with exclusive ownership and universal coercion under state territories over state-assigned out-groups: to belong/to have belongings versus to be owned or used by someone or marked for systemic mistreatment, even death if you fail to be useful to them (the paradox being your death is useful to profit). Here, the state of exception provides the most basic function of capital: exploitation and genocide in service of the profit motive; i.e., the state eating its population according to heroic arrangements of theatrical power tied to bodily expression as dimorphically gendered [source]. 

These, in turn, codify with older monomythic language borrowed from the means to inspire royal fear and awe, but also lust of a hauntological sort; e.g., scarred and tattooed barbarian women passing for “Vikings” or “Picts” who spit, fart, swear in four-letter words, get mad and “smash”; i.e., doubling as sexual rewards in a time when the state emasculates its own men to sexually frustrate them, then sell them cartoon copies of their biggest wet dreams.

While women, as a whole, remain “lesser” in the pecking order’s Great Chain, standouts serve to enforce classical ideas of male dominance; i.e., in a female body that bullies lesser entitled men [sissification]: per a “prison sex” mentality conforming and adhering to patriarchal force inside the Man Box’ weird nerd culture. Keeping with Athenian Amazon propaganda, they canonically inspire compliance, not rebellion, as muscled; re: subjugated Hippolytas! Per the euthanasia effect, tokens [not just women, but any traitors] are tolerated so long as they uphold the current order through sex and force: calls to yield/submit and ultimately disperse!

While stating the obvious is an option, a common path for poetic recourse is fighting fire with fire, myth with myth. Speaking of the aforementioned charioteers themselves, such formidable demon lovers—strong enough to defy the “natural order” by crossing over into the civilized world but weak enough for the state to cage them [re: Eco]—are Galatea built-to-thrill when consumed, but also teach through experience alongside; e.g., size difference; i.e., calculated risk during ludo-Gothic BDSM. They’re killer dolls that consist of darkness—as flavored through particular accents that code and qualify the Amazonian proceedings of either text: muscle and fire [versus Amazonian earthliness or faerie darkness]. There’s nothing objectively “wrong” with demon mommies; they’re simply ways to rarefy and transfer power in-the-flesh: “Your chariot awaits.”

Amazons, like other warriors and cops/criminals, have a white and a black side, which demon mommies act out in “hellish” ways. They tend to manifest less as binarized, dimorphic halves and more as moods, good and bad; i.e., inside a monomorphic entity whose base function doesn’t change; re: Lady Dimitrescu being a constant “phallic” whore who becomes outwardly furious when threatened, but also turned on: wanting to fuck her attackers to death. In demon-BDSM terms, these categories are not only not discrete, they are excessive and hyperbolic; i.e., nymphomania being an out-of-control “hysterical” libido informed by systemic, externalized trauma that confuses predator/prey mechanisms during calculated risk.

To it, Lady Hellbender is made of shadows and flame, as such—the staged power of unequal strength, of dragons and rarefied cruelty [similar to Count Dracula] that has the desire for company but not the manners; i.e., she tends “flare up” when excited, singing her guests [who, it must be said, sometimes prefer that]. In the demon-lover tradition, then, she demonstrates how forbidden desire is given in ways that distribute power unevenly. According to Hellbender’s damned construction, she burns, she dominates; her victims burn, dominated by her as Big Strict Whore[6] [re: “She tall, she tall”]! She is the curious byproduct of an environment both “stuck” and seeking to change. Said change, in turn, occurs inside-outside itself, through poetic cliché; i.e., said conventions being “how people talk,” but for her amounts to an oscillating fluency thereof: both through tackiness and lack of tact, a holistic-and-liminal ontological statement encompassing the entire masked ball [the original site of forbidden romance and home of the demon lover invading civil spaces of exchange becoming alien again]!

As such, “burning with desire” is a common febrile metaphor describing blood flow and body heat, but also adrenaline when desire climbs and predator/prey confuse in disco-like ways; i.e., the female side of the operatic experience, but turned into a demon-lover version of itself whose confused location jumps between bodies, all operating inside the hauntology/chronotope’s shared fever dream; e.g., The Tryanglz’ “Burning in the Third Degree” [1984]:

Hypnotize, see the flicker gleaming in your eyes
It catches me
Oh, I take it and you’ll never let me go
I’m your prisoner
I feel the heat of your desire
I just can’t face the fire [source: Genius]. 

The phenomenology of the danger disco is paradoxical; i.e., two [or more] things true at once, camping and canonizing the notion of female hysteria and desire. Either make survivors “break down” when triggered, but which they—often involuntarily and without guidance—seek out in ways that accurately describe the disorder of their lived experienced/menticided state informed by external factors; re: gargoyles.

In turn, everything moves in hypnotic slow-motion to speak to complicated feelings; re: the perils of dated courtship threatening the current space and time, a given survivor feeling hunted and desired simultaneously because—for them and their trauma—the difference is never clear-cut. All merge on the same surfaces and within the same thresholds, onstage and off. So, too, does the demon mommy [of a more humanized sort] embody the cowering maiden, demon lover and knightly savior all at once: “chercher la femme” a common female experience that has become, to some degree, hauntologized and myopic [focused prominently from a white, middle-class cis-het female gaze for centuries, left: “I’m being hunted!”] but also a chance to occupy an experience that, for many people, is totally alien to them: to step into someone else’s shoes!

In Gothic, these heavy-metal fan favorites survive outside their respective texts to enable praxial synthesis/generate fresh momentum. As things to rebuild like Frankenstein’s monster [minus the Cartesian dogma] through fantasy/sci-fi trash, they reify in culturally appreciative, sexually descriptive forms and high/low feelings; e.g., a golem’s desire to be loved, or a desire to be protected by someone “forbidden” you nonetheless desire; i.e., through desperation and convenience, unfolding under capital’s oppressive conditions! They unfold regardless, and whose mythical lovers take many forms beyond what is normally allowed; re: the demon mommy’s Amazonian, incendiary and tank-like body something to canonize for a heteronormative freakshow’s Male Gaze, but just as often can exist independent of that: a psychosexual gargoyle/Galatea trapped on the same shared stages while camping canonical superhero beauty standards and heteronormative shows of force—with captivating non-standard showmanship likewise trapped inside various degrees of repetitious convention interrogating myth with myth!

[artist: Marco Turini]

To it, monopolies are illusions, which the state can still argue through its carousel monstrous appeals/menticidal sex symbols, and which we target using the same dream-like aesthetics, left and next page]! By carrying the Gothic’s theatrically flippant, monstrous-feminine traditions into the present, such tours des force aren’t always costumes, but speak to/for/with our bodies and naturally assigned/state reassigned characters as, to some degree, xenomorphic, thus customizable like costumes.

Butch women want to appear strong and desirable, for example, but do so as much for themselves as they do a paycheck from male [or token] bosses—allegorically inside texts that may appear to support deviations from the nuclear model, but in truth often ultimately endorse the same-old status quo [re: Pygmalions like James Cameron shoving Amazons into chaste “armor” versus openly whore-like uniforms, pimping them all the same]. “Hell” is always a brothel—a restless place of cryptonymy to subvert/play with such things without fear of immediate punishment. To it, sex/women’s work extends from art, to porn, to art-as-porn or vice versa; i.e., threatening the center of man’s universe through castration fantasy as something to rock out to, onstage; e.g., Jane Tricka gliding her adventuresome mitt up Wayne Brady’s leg and past his vulnerable junk [note his surprised facial expression, below]: the queen of the stage “threatening” the male damsel-in-distress [there being an unscripted, improvised element to the gag as it unfolds, in real time[7]]!

[source: Whose Line Is It, Anyway? Season 5, episode 21; timestamp: 1:40] 

Tin women and dragon ladies, capital alienates those who are different and molds them into forgeries of themselves trapped in metal and other demonic materiel. In turn, these freakshow strongladies seek to reunite themselves with the audience regardless of profit and its associate dogma; i.e., specific members of the audience, while all eyes are upon them, the opera-in-question seeing them as alien main attractions. To grow is to less to escape arrest, then, and more to establish control, mid-stasis. Like the phantom of the opera, both sides of the creative/performative equation search for companionship, these articulations inverted and rife with various double standards and exceptions. Gender-bending and swapping are just other forms of play—ones that humanize those accused of rape, and those wanting “rape” [classically white women] in ways that meet the needs of each without turning either into cops. They skillfully reverse and/or blur the roles of power in ways that include not just dom and sub, but also the gender identity/performance of that, and the legitimacy and terrorist/counterterrorist status of each, etc.

Mommy or not, demons are like music, then; they’re chosen for contrast by whoever’s arbitrating them. Jazz, blues, funk, bebop, operatic tritones—in music, devilish elements are used for flavor [e.g., flat 5s, 7s and other dominants, diminished chords, Major 7s, etc]. The same goes for Gothic poetics personified, their overtones speaking pointedly to rising class, cultural and racial tensions existing between formerly ecclesiastical institutions bearing out a Protestant ethic; i.e., the eternal war between God and the Devil one that can be used to recruit both entities against workers for capital, or to reclaim either in service to them while walking away from Omelas [and selective bigotry/emancipation].

Such is the case with demon mommies like Lady Hellbender and Karlach’s own sodomy/problematic love. As warrior whores threatening medieval dominion—with “medieval” mil spec attire, vaso vagal sexuality and all-around size difference classically associated with masculine strength—they speak through anger and lust to hyphenate reaping and revenge in multiple directions, but always “from Hell”; i.e., for different groups, for different reasons, using courtly love.

Furthermore, this demonic, monstrous-feminine vector can tokenize for the state, policing the whore with the whore; or it can abject in reverse, workers reveling in these infernal feelings during psychosexual martyrdom: as harmless to all except the bourgeoisie and their strangleholds on moral panic; i.e., what for many is the Man Box [token women unironically acting like men, as TERFs do] and punching down, mid-witch-hunt, but which can also become the endearing [and sincere] appreciation of stacked, capable bodies playing at Hell and its go-to tortures, mid-kayfabe. In a world that increasingly recruits demonic muscle for state, hence colonial, purposes—i.e., tokenizing for fear of total alienation/exile—we want to accept demon mommy candidates/make them feel at home: to have our would-be abusers abandon the triangulation of unironic “prison sex” mentality/Satanic panic [and actual us-versus-them sticks-and-stones genocide] to instead make love through “war” as ironic hurly-burly hanky-panky!

[artist: Word2]

Thick-and-juicy cuts of dark [thigh] meat, they’re less beefcakes topping from below or bottoming from the top and more promising hellish sodomy and total dominance [a Faustian flavor of “torture,” except subs live for such strict service]. But, because it is a performance, there’s always room to camp rape and add a nurturing and self-fulfilling element to Hell; i.e., our strong lady from Hell protects us and smashes our enemies, but she’s got a smile that melts your heart, and brains to play games, sing songs, and clap cheeks that goes with all that molten, luscious brawn!

In other words, she’s the Green Manalishi with the two-pronged crown; i.e., the indulgent, dualistic succubus-incubus of an anisotropic class character—one whose “almost holy” melding of disparate cultural and racialized elements pointedly upset heteronormative [thus setter-colonial, Cartesian] sex and gender norms; re: to have the whore’s revenge against profit and the elite/their cops as straight. All happen vis-à-vis dialectical-material arrangements of demonic sex and force, of the libido—of our aforementioned “Pound Town” being staged, like always, as a gay dark place of dreams hovering near the surface [with Judas Priest’s own queerness being obsessed with such things]:

Now when the day goes to sleep
And the full moon looks
And the night is so black that the darkness cooks
Then you come creeping around
Making me do things I don’t want to do [Judas Priest’s “Green Manalishi,” 1979]. 

The classic Gothic demon is reconciliation with one’s home, thus legacy as fallen, rotting and doomed. Keeping with older writings of mine, “demon” refers to something you often fight to overcome/defeat, mid-exodus; i.e., as unconstrained by human limitations and all at once consolidating them. The word often refers to psychomachy as tied to a location, specifically a chronotope; e.g., Jason Lee’s demon from Dragon [1995] forcing him to look upon his grave to reflect on a cursed, concentrically trapped bloodline [above]. Capitalism reflects onto him, maintaining its Realism during mirror syndrome: courting the demon lover by making love as warriors do—through battle!

By extension, demon mommies aren’t mere fun and games of a light-hearted sort; they’re death omens—forcing us to look ignominiously upon flaws and hubris in our own lives, but also to reenact in playfully psychosexual, abstract ways. Haunted by genuine systemic, thus generational trauma, we play with endless demonic forms; i.e., any that can better alleviate/counteract the myriad harm said systems perfidiously cause: to rise up from the street in Hell’s gutter ballets/castle narratives popularized by Neo-Gothic trash and their painful cryptonymies. Monsters in mazes, demon mommies love to tease; i.e., by beckoning you with demonic pull into the infernal concentric pattern for where liberation must occur [re: Plato’s cave]! There is no outside of the text, loves; there is only change inside a system of differences pushing towards one where these differences aren’t punished [re: me, vis-à-vis Derrida]! Silence is genocide, so make some fucking noise!

Breaking the historical-material cycle, then, happens through mentalities and intuitions that aren’t second-nature, but become that way through good play overwriting bad in Gothic “safe spaces” built to explore demonic things; re: during calculated risk. “I’ll storm your castle!” she jeers, threatening psychosexual violence. To which I would happily respond: “Yes, storm it, mommy! Storm it! Depredate my bussy!” But always, a part of me still burns in Hell, sitting at the canonical Dark Lord’s throne—not my playtime fantasies and submission-by-choice under a competent femme dom, but the shadow of actual abuse I survived and which haunts the venue long afterwards [re: Jadis]!

The fact very much remains: you can’t hug the alien, thus familiarize yourself with Medusa/the unfamiliar [to normies] without seeing all sides of existence under state, thus police violence; i.e., its serialized/episodic historical materialism through demonic pastiche: retelling the demon mommy as a kind of superhuman folk hero! Reifying human qualities and structures in small, but feeling larger-than-life, they emblematize war personified in ways that we, when camping the canon, need to avoid neoliberal false hope upholding Capitalist Realism; i.e., not to recapture the financial success of state [super]models and mythical, never-actually-existed Golden Ages, but to camp them and break their Superstructure to bits using superhero shorthand; re: with alter egos and abject doubles, but also Hollywood glamour and regressive power fantasies unable to monopolize on terror weapons, hence props, makeup, costumes and roleplay!

Demon mommies are whores and the whore is always a threat—one to canonically revive, post-boom, and blame for capital’s inevitable bust period. In canonical terms, the line between superhero and villain, then, is notably razor-thin, the language frequently comic book in its centrist temptation arguments; e.g., Superman and his extraterrestrial superpowers, Batman and his endless gadgets, or Thor and his magic hammer—all conveniently threatened by a dark and/or queer-coded monstrous-feminine, if not equivalent to the hero, then a “close second” Venus twin emasculating hero and home alike: a Promethean scapegoat inkblot for their weakness/flagging reserves, and per the creation of sexual difference, a monomyth dragon they slay once more to prove their doubtful manhoods; e.g., Hela—the god of death, below—quite literally withering Thor’s manhood [erectile dysfunction] while having one hand behind her back, deftly emasculating him/throwing his power into question to bring Hell home to roost[8]. She doesn’t just measure up, during a dick-measuring contest; she puts the boys to shame:

Despite the state-imposed death sentence and bad rap, the demon mommy almost always enjoys her job: one, because she reliably “kills it,” confidently slaying her enemies’ will to fight while kicking self-righteous ass, mid-sermon; and two, the men appear as scared puny weaklings. Suitably overreacting against a sexy-and-stylish dominatrix, the former bemoan the latter’s strict sense/aesthetic of power and death rhapsodizing state shift. In Hela’s case, she isn’t strictly muscular in her physical appearance, but she nonetheless performs strength as something that is muscular/masculine in how she wears it; i.e., owning it while gleefully saying to her would-be owners, “Imagine a world where you weren’t cops, but kneeling before me!” She’s a butt pirate, a Radcliffean sex bandit to conjure at the story’s start, then banish again by its end.

Despite state authors framing Hela as the Nazi-Communist tyrant[9] whose “farming” they can repeatedly sanction through her prescribed, essential illegitimacy—meaning as a feminist bugbear for cops to attack, much like any unruly whore—Hela lives on, post-execution; i.e., as the phantom, terrorist, monstrous-feminine avenger/ghost of the counterfeit that peoples of different socio-political persuasions can happily get behind [or vice versa, to have Hela thoroughly peg them out[10]]! She’s a Radcliffean strawman/fairy godmother to raise and burn, her victim’s invasion fears snuffed out by her bastard’s coming into [and going from] the Imperial Core’s forgery of paradise: a colossal homewrecker/monumental-if-gorgeous fake who does so with pleasure and flaring hysteria, calling the heroes to the void lurking at the center of their bogus castle! Bury her alive, if you want; this Bleeding Nun/faggot witch always rises from the grave, her own cryptonymy speaking vengefully through blindfolds and gags to Medusa’s usual silencing!

Keeping with Orientalism and other persecutory schemes, it’s possible to modulate such intimations without defaming and segregating other cultures. Even so, our demon-mommy wish fulfillment needs to occur in ways that overlap with daily life: the enormity of forces that grow to seemingly endless size, and overshadow not just our own lives, but those who came before and after us; re: death translated into anxieties of inheriting one’s place in empire. Such demons adopt a hungry desire to destroy not just the individual, but the entire bloodline because capital demands it and liberation requires it; re: Hawthorne’s American families always rising and falling in America [the expendability of the middle class, gatekeeping assimilation/safeguarding the elite]. We must challenge this, and do so through the pulpy inkblot language of the imaginary past speaking to buried atrocities, per the ghost of the counterfeit hiding in plain sight: the bad parent cryptomimetically haunting all replication/the panopticon.

While vital to growth, pain is an acquired taste that can motivate power to flow towards workers instead of the state. Doing so happens per ludo-Gothic BDSM playing with passivity and aggression, masculine and feminine, etc, to foster not simply gender trouble, but parody! Self-styled terms like “butch” or “mommy dom” aren’t simply applicable to Lady Hellbender or Hela as demon mommies; they speak to agency over our bodies and avataristic extensions of our bodies, sexualities, gender identities and performances, which the state will try to tokenize and prescribe back as controlled opposition—i.e., the common parlance of those who traffic in sex and courtly love, playing the victim and blaming us as victim, again per DARVO and obscurantism! We protest in duality during oppositional praxis, gender-swapping such stories but still threatening to take our admirers with us through paradoxical theft; i.e., not for profit, but back to Hell where we belong! Free from state bondage, forbidden love might yield a postcolonial effect [female or not, left]:

Such demonic courtship is often cute and slow, but guided by forbidden feelings that threaten to explode and expose the maiden as whore-like; e.g., the fairy princess [or some such submissive] experiencing a sudden desire for raw, extramarital sex; i.e., anything outside state-sanctioned models, thus treated as “from Hell,” animalistic, etc.

These, in turn, commence with the coded expressions of interest/maid-and-butler dialogs that—as the night follows the day—routinely guide the audience away from any novel-of-manners approach and towards naughty sex slumming it with monster lovers; i.e., in spite of the dangers and societal judgements stigmatizing both differently during the dialectic of shelter and the alien: the princess opting for the monster—not to damn or exploit them, but humanize them, mid-risk, while disavowing any state-approved, nuclear forms of “coupling” in the process [re: Radcliffe’s male heroes/good guys, which the heroine “gets” after surviving the demon lover]! She abjures state propaganda to wed the outlaw!

In turn, all can mean different things during the abjection process, and generally all at once. Monster love stories like Persephone and Hades, Beauty and the Beast or The Creature from the Black Lagoon [and similar stories rehashing the same basic concept, above] commonly portray the princess as never from Hell, but per the Gothic, yields a second trickier explanation; i.e., a reunion with one’s lost home: the secret princess and her buried feelings tied to Hell’s imaginary ancestry! Hell is a choice, and a useful one.

Of course, not everyone enjoys such “gimmicks”; e.g., Pallavi Dandamudi, who writes in “Here’s Why the Ending of The Shape of Water Doesn’t Work [2019]: 

If Eliza had been similar to the amphibian man all along, then her love is no longer a statement on the human capacity for compassion. The depth of Eliza’s character lies in her ability to love something that most humans would be scared of or repelled by. The plot portrays her as a simple yet courageous, silent yet powerful human being. This ending just takes away from that, it makes her like any other biological species who is attracted to another member of her species [source]. 

But these loaded, messy and combative representations of human and inhuman still poetically address eugenic/ethnocentric ideas of superior/inferior caused by capital and felt during a captive fantasy about forbidden love/dark desire; i.e., one that struggles to escape its own haunted history while forging new healthier myths/power fantasies using the same stuff.

Whatever the form, these liminal engagements mix danger with protection to yield our postcolonial effect; re: mid-terror-language, demon mommies [and similar sexual outlaws] protect those who feel small and/or vulnerable regarding the other ends of a given love triangle; i.e., as a prolonged and uphill battle, one where class, culture and race war wage for workers by workers, not traitors [cops] upholding the status quo! If such in-groups and tokens use monster love to abject the usual out-groups with, we upset the state’s dogmatic orderings of nature through these self-same stories having two worlds collide!

Except, whether going into Hell or bringing Hell back to Earth, we must do so without permanently regressing towards the very systemic modes of animal survival [e.g., Alien and the cat] whose unironic “jungle fever” capital endlessly relies upon! Instead, we must inspire post-scarcity while attaching its emphasis upon those we help liberate, mid-fetishization: to set free, not banish or limit to a wordless role that prioritizes one group over another [and which The Shape of Water admittedly does; i.e., outlawing the girl for loving the monster she speaks to through sign language, but for whom itself seldom gets a word in. It is always alien in ways Del Toro doesn’t let the creature speak to power with[11]]!

In short, there’s always a foreign element of fascination and fear to such curiously fatal attraction [re: the ghost of the counterfeit]. And yet, monster love stories opine on a scarcity of connection [sexual or otherwise] under capital, and the complicated realities that love triangles afford; i.e., where the privilege and oppression remain unequal for everyone involved, and speak in popular-but-dated forms of murky translation involving lopsided arbitration; e.g., the princess having material and social power over the monster [who she can report to the authorities, should she choose] while the monster often has physical power over her with its raw animal strength! Demon mommies, by comparison, classically keep the strength and reputation known to all demon lovers, but also retain some medieval degree of affluence and lordship over their chosen prey [regardless of gender though often male, insofar as Amazons classically target men; re: to feminize them].

Regardless, the collective road to salvation [and emancipation] requires finding common ground; i.e., in stories that frequently gentrify one side and treat the other as sexually exploitable through mixed metaphors, and whose tricky mixtures of power imbalance we must camp inside themselves; re: in Hell as it can be found on Earth, any demon couple intimated by an earthly double and vice versa; e.g., The Shape of Water evoking the unironic moral panic seen in Birth of a Nation or survived during the Wilmington massacre, but per Del Toro’s Mexican roots, pits a non-princess ethnic minority [and her token friends—a closeted gay painter and a woman-of-color co-worker] against someone even more alienated by the same white straight state! The balancing act is avoiding predation by one side against another while collectively punching up through the wordless power of forbidden love!

Such stories’ longing and nagging emphasis on love language [and language gaps] orbit conspicuously around a shared-if-uneven desire: sex and companionship of different kinds. You wanna really get laid/make friends? Make the unsafe feel safe again, acting as you do in good faith. Show us restraint, control, and understanding with those big capable mitts of yours; or, if you have the means to persecute us and our demonic elements, don’t! “Be gentle!” we ask, then tremble as you “ravish” us [or spare us]. Parry and thrust in ways that—while they can inflict pain—do so in ways that ultimately feel good and are encouraged/adored for their sense of similarity amid difference, healing from rape during a given pedagogy of the oppressed: 

I don’t want to tame your animal style
You won’t be caged
In the call of the wild [Scandal’s “The Warrior,” 1984].

The Gothic specializes in crossovers, committing the everyday offense of daring to see the demonized not just as human, but desirable in a postcolonial world. Yet, such presentation is still liminal, everything doubling and mirrored on the same surfaces, inside the same thresholds. While love-as-theatre commonly marries sex to force in martial forms, empires use it to pointedly instill fear and pacification using demon mommies; i.e., through shadows of police abuse and slave revolt, the former genuine and the latter greatly exaggerated by conflating land-back arguments with actual police brutality dressed up as rape epidemics, drug wars, and crime waves, etc.

Beyond demon mommies singing to release tension, it bears repeating that such DARVO-grade, vae victis [“woe to vanquished”] overtures classically manifest as demonic awakenings that prescribe genocide. Faced the popularity of setter-colonial “musicals,” postcolonial rebels of different kinds camp what has become blank parody/”camp” in quotes [re: Jameson]—doing so to pointedly and perceptively humanize all state victims; e.g., of white pioneer women towards Indigenous Peoples, normally tokenizing against them through rape fears that blame state targets instead of state structures; i.e., in half-real spaces of play and politics, the idea of monster love something to navigate and survive with an animal dance partner we’re drawn towards, but don’t wish to prey upon as the state desires [with white women expected to quickly use, then discard, non-white slaves as disposable sex objects]!

While inequality and preferential mistreatment generally see one side punished far more than the other is, rape ranking isn’t productive or really the point. As a matter of the pedagogy of the oppressed, privilege should assist in undermining such structures to achieve intersectional solidarity against the state; i.e., in holistic ways that people actually relate and respond to. Hence the monster and love story anisotropically addressing a shared-if-uneven human condition under state mechanisms: calumny and stigma, retaliation and remorse. Women fear rape and those branded as rapists fear accusation, the two playing these out on either side of a given exchange that allows for demon lovers of all kinds [not just mommies; re: Del Toro’s demon daddy topped from below by the movie’s spunky-if-unassuming heroine, their roles changing back and forth as things escalate/progress].

In turn, to even think of the other as “equal” becomes treason, sedition, a thought crime in canonical doctrine. So it must be disguised in ways that point to the trauma being discussed during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Anything the state can poetically combine to divide along the usual persecution networks, we mix-and-match; i.e., during the cryptonymy process, using it [and demon lovers] to cross boundaries and tear such cordons down; e.g., with demon mommies, but also mermen from the black lagoon. The boundaries that banish either to Hell are the apex of conspiracy abused by those with privilege; i.e., to enrich themselves on an individual level as much as systemic ones, working as much with ordinary things as not; e.g., Rebecca Watson’s “How Dave Grohl & Foo Fighters Put Actual Lives at Risk” [2024]. As they go hand-in-hand, so must we, but in reverse of what amounts essentially to glorified misinformation. We mustn’t hesitate to check it, and cement our own arguments in the mold.

In turn, these cryptonymic appeals to segregation or intersection sit inside pioneered discussions, they and their alliances couched in dated, hauntological fantasy rhetoric during liminal expression; i.e., as normally dominated by Cartesian orderings of the universe, which our holistic offerings offend on purpose. Paradox is to find one at odds with such paradigms, subverting their language to offer up visually similar but functionally alien alternatives: the golem-esque Amazon queen “man-spreading” her hairy bear snatch on her animal-print power chair while lording over her little, always-was goblin cumslut [captured, taken by force and kept for pleasure, below]. To reverse abjection is to play with its stigmas and taboos, its threats of capture, bondage and torture speaking to Persephone trapped in Hell in more ways than one!

 [artist: Flare Fox]

For better or worse, such things carry weight and instigate consequences we control; i.e., through monstrous dialogs about control. “Rape” enters quotes onstage and off, then—a way of life that yields liberatory sentiment through “torturous” castration aesthetics [re: the Archaic Mother/phallic woman]: xenophilic art of couples profoundly happy with the dominator’s humiliating arrangement as designated by them [an anisotropic reversal of the nuclear order’s polarity of husband and wife, but also girl-on-girl love, interracial[12a] relationships and other such canonical “unspeakables”]! As with demon mommies, it’s seen as embarrassing and guilty to enjoy such things—and indeed, there are pernicious aspects we must critique of the demon mommy rape fantasy while enjoying it—but to swear them [and monster battle and rape] off entirely is foolish.

Postcolonialism needs empathy as found among monsters; i.e., during the dialectic of the alien, the latter’s ubiquity owing to its popularity and age. Allegory, androgyny and monster-mommy kayfabe are as old as demons are—as old as acting is, thus masks, costumes, and muses; sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll; martial arts, stage performers and prize fighters [often mixing onstage and off as half-real spectacles; e.g., with Muhammed Ali loving wrestlers and monster movies, calling his infamous opponent, George Foreman, “the Mummy” on account of his long-guard defensive style[12b]].

To it, personification is equally old, as are comedy and drama in kayfabe, told with shadows and flames as popular high/low forms of discourse about war and rape, but also vulgarity at large; i.e., cartoonishly monstrous like Amazons, their statuesque bodies made-from-clay and infused with that mysterious spark of life; re: the fire of the gods as seen with Victor’s demonic Creature. The stuff of con men, grifters and charlatans, but also communicators, thinkers and actors, all stem from the ancient world’s bread-and-circus combat flowing into medieval varieties, followed by modern nostalgic forms of either [and other] time periods.

All heroes are monsters, meaning demons [mommies or otherwise] can be whatever we need them to be that represents ourselves and our struggles, not the state; i.e., to experiment and figure out what we prefer [with orientation and gender conformity or nonconformity often having a congenital element, similar to phobias and kinks]. All the same, no one is exempt from duality and paradox per nature and language. Exploitation and genuine harm sit adjacent to parody in ways that cross over during reprisals; i.e., us being attacked by reactionaries for speaking out through theatre, blending comfort and discomfort as demon mommies generally afford. Through them, we look “under the hood” to see what we’re made of and how we tick, but also to express ourselves in posthuman ways tied to the imaginary past [and its usual poetic indulgence] walking around:

[artist: Jan Rock]

Individual examples spent, I now want to spend the rest of the exhibit articulating demon mommies and postcolonialism through a more “big picture” lens. To it, kayfabe is liminal. Whatever its form, the fighting happens as much offstage as on; i.e., as much between the state and workers at large as between two performers being viewed. Like demons lovers overall, such things walk the line between reality and make-believe, madness and method, ancient and modern, masculine and feminine, total bullshit and pure truth, and male, intersex and female; in turn, class war weds to culture and race, all while the stage and its lovely inventions, props, stunt people and special effects become ours to use. While magic “isn’t real,” belief and perception are; as a matter of stage magic, then, great power lurks inside illusions and entertainment, the larger-than-life character of stage heroes [and their bodies] bearing out tremendously persuasive and representative, but also smuggling potential. While power is an illusion, we might as well use its splendid lie to assign our values to such startling and potent beings; i.e., rescuing their “Trojan Horse” function from police institutions, to instead become folk-hero role models for those who have no voice in the world [stand-ins until they find their own ways to speak out]!

All the while, it’s possible to subvert canon while raising concerns about popular media’s culturally appropriative/sexually prescriptive elements. Descriptive sexuality can likewise be conscripted through Rainbow Capitalism, which—along with everything else—we camp during ludo-Gothic BDSM using demon mommies. This camp serves multiple purposes, including outing our enemies. As I argue of revolutionary cryptonymy through heroic expression [from Volume One]:

[revolutionary cryptonymy] remains an utterly vital aspect of proletarian praxis—one that challenges state monopolies through the very things they try to control: morphological expression through monstrous and heroic performance, but especially animalized, hauntological examples like the Amazon or knight, as well as the more famously operatic, feudal sites of sexual danger to which they represent and/or navigate—Gothic castles as killing grounds for a state predator’s prey-like designations.

To that, […] revolutionary cryptonymy invokes liminal expression as a cosmetic, conspicuous means of useful disguise within state monopolies of violence, terror and in connection to those dated things, bodily expression. Together on antiquated stages, the deliberate use of dated masks, costumes, props and other performative elements hide activism’s sorties imperfectly within the trauma of canonical Gothic language and its complicated territories of expression; i.e., as a means of rebellious camouflage, useful for blending in and revealing the bad-faith nature of state proponents in shared, thus policed, spaces and dialogs. On said stage, reactionaries and moderates wear masks to hide themselves in common monstrous language; but when they respond to our Athena’s Aegis having doubled their mask, said mask slips from outrage defending state monopolies within nerd culture [source]. 

But apart from striking fear into the hearts of our enemies, the practice is admittedly self-satisfying and -serving. Insofar as power and demons are simply fun to play with, singing and theatre feel good. So does wearing costumes and acting out forbidden desire [sex or otherwise] become fun to watch; i.e., to defy the state as demon lovers, including mommies, happily do during monster love stories [often for the drama, but also the pornographic elements, below]!

Aside from toys, then, a huge appeal to BDSM lies in surrendering power as, oddly enough, its own kind of power [to become like a kid again, while playing with adult materials]. This aesthetic can involve someone big that—herbo or not—acts uncharacteristically gentle with someone they could visibly break, as much as someone small surrendering to a larger dom, or a dom aesthetic lending an element of “taming bears” to it [or a sub as strong as a bear]. It also speaks to asymmetrical warfare; i.e., as something to communicate/relate to and with during ludo-Gothic forms. None are “superior” insofar as challenging the state goes, but do utilize preference during monstrous code; i.e., demon lovers, whereupon demon mommies may assume a variety of dated cryptomimetic positions and embodiments, which echo trauma during the cryptonymy process: to best show and hide things that rebellion needs to destabilize the current world, putting a postcolonial one in its place!

[artist: Jan Rock]

Any way you slice it, great power is something to relate to in ways that historically threaten rape; i.e., someone looks strong enough to cause harm, as demon lovers generally do. Here, though, such rape-fantasy counterterror is not only not harmful, but paradoxically empowering and fun because it occurs within boundaries of faux-medieval play where both sides rewrite and reinforce the rules [thus reestablish mutual consent]. Fear of the alien is inherited by workers born and bred inside colonial bodies, then rewritten in postcolonial terms, onstage and off. When indulged in—and even by ace parties and their public nudism, playing with psychosexual trauma—such forbidden fruit becomes fuel that gives us [and our revolutionary engines] straight fire: to turn the frogs gay!

Whatever the gender[s] being explored, monsters contain a class character among the gendered elements; and while Imperialism perpetually makes the lives of others their business, the fact remains you only need that special someone [excepting polycules] to make you happy! In turn, the myth of the rape epidemic/dark slaver tries to suggest women [or those treated as women] don’t want dark things/actually desire state-assigned mates and nothing else. Yet, per the whore’s paradox, they so often do, and not because the state sells nature-as-alien back to them, mid-genocide! Down to play [and fuck] during ludo-Gothic BDSM, they humanize what the state can only dehumanize; they endeavor reclaim and hold onto the very language of “darkness,” mid-consumption. So does ethicality become a matter of informed consumption [a notion we’ll return to, in Volume Three].

The princesses of revolution don’t care to trap the demon lover inside an abject “slumming” role; and ideally the dom doesn’t want to brutalize us in reality during calculated risk. We want to let off steam and enjoy unequal power together as a shared way of life; i.e., one doubling as a teaching device that can show people how not to act like cops despite the power imbalance and shadow of police rule [with cops raping others through fetishized power imbalance that has a gendered character to it; re: Man Box/”prison sex” mentality and TERFs].

In truth, there’s so much room to play with power through demonic language’s literal and figurative crossfade. Trans or not, some men want to be manhandled by demon mommies; some women want to be “ravished” and taken into captivity [to sit by a dark throne]. The monster lover fantasy is generally a fleeting one—often more fun in one’s head [or in half-real spaces of demon BDSM where some irony is present]—but not because it is objectively wrong and shouldn’t happen; the empheral quality to demonic desire and reunion speaks to repressed, delegitimized arrangements of power the state can only pimp and police, not practice in good faith. “Hell” in reality is generally safer than state ideas of paradise, which its pimps aggressively sell to semi-frightened but equally-interested and curious women pining for “the other side”; and those treated as women [or “black, of Hell/nature,” etc] remain informed by Gothic opera and fairytales—i.e., where the woman falls in love with the monster as being more human than her assigned white knight!

Taken a step further by Pagan/GNC/non-white authors and actors, our additional dimensions and cracking eggs make a Heaven of Hell or vice versa, thus can reverse/swap already-gendered roles; re: by using demon mommies to say things about our oppression/desire in uniquely trans, intersex and non-binary morphological forms that intersectionally solidarize with other struggles: to love and be set free from state abuse/control when allegorically transforming their demonic language, ourselves; i.e., humanizing our allies during the same shared struggle, punching up from Hell! So while Amazons are classically AFAB, AMAB princesses likewise have their own “come hither!” poise, doing to beckon those treated like prey by the state: “Don’t be shy! It’s safe[13] to play with me!”

[artist: Julian Michaels]

Queer or not, everything happens through ludo-Gothic BDSM, reclaiming the neo-Victorian bedroom to turn it [and its Protestant ethic/process of abjection] inside-out. In turn, power is like a force field, phantoms or pantomime; it’s largely imaginary/subjective but shaped by objective forces. Sex and force elide as much as collide in medieval poetics. In a territorial, settler-colonial sense, the state looks to demonize those already “under fire”; i.e., treating native parties as hellish outsiders [suffering lasting damage/generational trauma]! Some will sell out through desperation and convenience; others are more principled, holding onto their values while different movements decay.

Power is all how you frame it, then. So when they’re circling the wagons and playing white Indians and saviors, use your wagons against them! It’s not “ceding ground” to own the demonic role; i.e., in ways that undermine capital and state authority by presenting power in ways that appear cop-like or tokenized, but actually flow power towards workers through demon mommies [often marrying them; re: death by Snu-Snu, below, colliding the medieval language of sex and war into readily consumable forms]: by helping others imagine alternative arrangements to reality and bonding with nature-as-alien. These fugitive unga-bunga refrains become conducive to Gothic-Communist development when such Great Destroyers demonstrably break state monopolies and cut their legs out from under them! “She smash!” Chonk, strong, and ready to bonk! It’s clobbering time, motherfuckers!

 [source]

Power is something that is perceived, thus subject to the usual forces of theatre; e.g., someone can be made to look younger than they actually are, or stronger than is humanly possible. Demon mommies are born of fire, but also made of it [re: Hellbender’s volcanic red hair and Karlach’s burning heart]. Burns hurt like hell; for us demons, love hurts and Hell [and Hell’s heartache] is our paradise, but a plastic one our forced immigrants’ poetic contributions help make and redefine power [and boundaries, trust] in order to shift away from state abuse; i.e., achieving equity under dialectical-material scrutiny and [s]exercise! Hot as hellfire, a monster “ass queen” awaits, as does her Numinous booty’s infernal fitness and demon-dumper glory! We are but priests praying at her temple of almighty fire! Baby got back, a bottom-heavy cathedral whose abyssal end is one to plunge repeatedly into [to fall in love with/make that pull-out game weak]! She even does anal, pegging her “victims” while preaching the benefits [re: using sodomy not as an unironic terror weapon against different marginalized targets, but to cause “terror” as a matter of spicing up sex; i.e., in lands of darkness/disputed ownership challenging state owners]!

[artist: Forest the Rotten] 

Granted, worship is an ancient human function. Except, whereas state religions organize to enslave “the unknown” for profit, ours remain entirely devoted to emancipatory worship; i.e., of a secularized, Satanic politique that actually respects nature. As its monstrous-feminine stewards, our threat displays challenge the state-as-straight pimping nature as monstrous-feminine; e.g., Angela Carter’s white cis-het Female Gaze preying on such things without rehumanizing anything. As such, nature’s revelatory bodies become inspirational temples, rebuilt by us doubling the original’s chonky profane; i.e., during crisis, and within the vein of Gothic fetishes that were already done to death/painfully cliché centuries ago. So does Gothic Communism resurrect long-lost feelings of rebellious frisson that break capital’s counterparts, having the whore’s revenge against them. In the usual language of victory and defeat, they’re the sore losers who remain scared of nature and death!

Nothing is more covetous or afraid than a cop, than imperial defenders, than Pax Americana leery of unruly spoilsports subverting Cartesian gender norms [androgynous, Mother Nature fucks back]. From size difference to size deference, Medusa is straight intergalactic metal, and you can’t kill the metal any more than colonize outer space! A forsaken fane of devilish flagellation, fornication, and flatulence [it happens], she always comes back, reclaiming colonial territories before leaving just as quick: an impure thought, a cosmic whore, mountain mama, female Hercules, bat outta hell! From art to porn, let’s blaze new trails that lead away from Cartesian abuse, taking ourselves home [and to town]! Camp canon; ravish ironically by putting “rape” in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM! Every fortress of doom has its greatest soldier!

Beyond demon mommies, there’s so much language for sex and violence when it comes to postcolonial liberation; i.e., nature treated as queer/alien/female, etc, much of it understandably animalized and medieval per a demonic courtly love’s pornographic style. Whatever the form of the art/performance, capital paywalls nature and pimps it out to rape or otherwise exploit it. Gothic-Communist calculus factors in monetization/privatization of monsters and their liberation under capital; i.e., sex work is paid only if said workers fight for it; re [from Volume One]:

our socio-political positions are vulnerable and often associated directly with our bodies and identities as things to control through monstrous forms during Gothic theatre […] Such forays into pretend worlds amount to an imaginary liberation that challenges Capitalist Realism through avatar-like vehicles; i.e., places to put ourselves and occupy for a time, to better learn how to frame our own experiences (and bodies) in a situation of make-believe. But within that invention lies the ability to think critically about our surroundings, thus interpret the stories already present within our lives that shape how we think, thus act [source].

This goes for us defying the state animalizing us, their idea of “tribal,” “savage” or “primal” challenging workers; i.e., inventing variants to some degree appropriative or appreciative regarding older struggles against empire; e.g., white Indians vs allies to Indigenous groups [with sex being a pacifying or mobilizing force in demonic forms; re: Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks (2014) something of a pun regarding issues of demonic representation[14]]. While [from Volume Zero] 

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: marked for trauma or by trauma [source].

likewise [from Volume One] 

the medieval character of state violence and terror cannot be destroyed during morphological expression, only subverted or contained through linguo-material “traps” we put into motion during revolutionary cryptonomy as an essential means of counterterrorist liberation; i.e., by throwing the setter-colonial character of heteronormativity into dispute through a rebellious medieval, postcolonial imaginary. 

[…] emotional turmoil is very much at home in the Gothic. This includes anxieties about physical bodies and their hauntological uniforms as often having a sexualized, animalistic, psychological element that overlaps with half-exposed, unburied trauma acquired generationally under state domination. This domination occurs within regressive, medievalized positions of crisis and decay that defend and uphold the status quo, but can be reclaimed by proletarian agents within weird-nerd culture; e.g., workers embodying knights to reclaim their killing/raping implements inside the state of exception, while simultaneously dealing with state infiltrators fighting to recapture the same devices back for themselves and their masters; i.e., Amazons and furries, etc, as forms of contested morphological expression that can assist or hamper gyno/androdiversity within Gothic poetics under state monopolies. To that, heroes are monsters, and monsters go hand-in-hand with animals being for or against their own abuse to varying degrees.

The resultant middle ground of this duality grants words like “demon,” “zombie,” or “animal” a double purpose […]: predator and prey. […] Domestication invokes a sense of the wild that is reclaimed by state forces to serve the profit motive, which rebellious agents must challenge and reclaim while being animalized [source]. 

It also extends to demons “of nature” combined with a less earthly plane that points back to nature again; e.g., Hell or extraterrestrial worlds; i.e., places where women rule and men are cucked in the usual Amazonian rape/death-by-Snu-Snu wrestler fantasies that—appearances of domination aside—canonically uphold state power through token/undercover police violence.

Decaying rebellious potential, Red Scare abuses whores in demonic language to better give the Straights “scare boners”; i.e., with “non-white” body types that speak to their mommy issues towards nature during Gothic vaudeville. Compelled dominance servicing straight males sissies per the nuclear/settler-colonial model whoring nature-as-monstrous-feminine, it’s something to “slay” in the usual, unironic monomyth, and which sex-positive workers may camp using what they got: as mommies who cannot die when “slain”!

[artist: Nyx]

Demon or not, it’s no secret that Amazons are farmed by the state to cater to cis-het weird nerds chasing non-natal mommies; i.e., the usual monster peach to cut up and harvest like moist evil cake. But GNC parties humanize the harvest for postcolonial purposes, challenging profit [and its freakshow chattelization] with similar demonic poetry during ludo-Gothic BDSM [re: Nyx, above]. Not ones to overlook a good myth onstage, we use them to our advantage through ourselves; i.e., to teach one another through Gothic theatre and its many, many ways to tell stories about monsters by personifying them. In doing so, we challenge deep-seated beliefs with things rising to the surface; i.e., that we can alter on or around ourselves, all to make larger harmful structures go down in flames. If Communism is a myth, then so is Capitalist Realism, our cryptonymy fighting fire with fire [as demon mommies do]—to best burn Rome to cinders and rise from its fertile ashes!

Revolution, as such, truly is a piece of cake—one that takes as many forms as demonology holistically allows! We are legion, but whose myriad, intersectional solidarity often can be summed up in single images; i.e., any that indicate similar acts of muse-like defiance, expressed in ways openly happy and animalistic, but also educated [thus intimidating to the elite, left]:

[artist: Mercedes the Muse]

We’re not just a pretty face or fat piece of ass, then, but operate through poetic argument, and whose preference with those poetic devices [often metaphors] reclaim by us to better steer our agenda with; re: by using what we got, our Aegis and its forbidden fruit/darkness visible offering up forbidden sight/a deal with the Devil!

As such, demonic rebellion [muscle mommy or otherwise] scuttles or commandeers this vessel or that, jettisons or smuggles any and all cargo, inside; it commonly combines seafaring metaphor with other performative means, often relying on medieval language, but also gut animal skills in animal situations of survival—i.e., where you communicate through scowls, smiles, puppy dog eyes and sounds, but also body language and pet-training BDSM exercises [speaking from experience, here]. It’s definitely a skill, and one that can save you in a pinch. The immediacy of danger and naked exposure demand it, which calculated risk is all about. There is no “true mastery” of such things, only a desire or need to change through practice to escape hostile conditions of false mastery by altering those conditions; happening by any and all means, development [of Communism] happens when those conditions change: using Gothic poetics [and its prolific language of mastery vis-à-vis demon mommies] for the betterment of all!

Whatever our individual preferences and postcolonial inclinations—be it Amazons or cat women from the moon—we queers and other marginalized groups collectively love demons; i.e., because their unequal power/forbidden knowledge/dark desire and transformative potential all speak to our alienation as having a human face we can ringlead: descriptive sexuality and gender as morphological freedom [to express violence and terror] towards liberation—not positive thinking and “peace” [a white man’s word, but also used by cis-het feminists] fetishizing token cops, be they good or bad, white or non-white, skinny or [more often than not] thicc during state monopolies! Waifus are waifus, betrayal is betrayal, cops are cops, but liberators use the same aesthetics [and bodies/colors of stigma] as those who sell out during asymmetrical warfare!

[artist: Angel] 

All workers are demonized to some extent. The postcolonial difference is, rebellious workers operate as universal freedom fighters; i.e., who consciously choose our own roles, despite whatever positions or lot we’re born into. So while profit is moving money through nature as cheaply as possible, our revenge is channeling such things towards ourselves; i.e., by redistributing them but also their capabilities to generate, which we opt of out in favor of a post-scarcity world. This includes demon mommies, but really any form of monstrous theatre you could think of. We’re not just arm candy used “for looks,” then, but sweet the pot through our labor exchanges, including our bodies and what they represent; i.e., at the time, but also over time, reviving such devices as needed to remind people what we and our movement is about; e.g., my friend Angel and their contributions to the book [from an old, commissioned shoot, above] but also Ebonnyy [from a more recent commission, next page].

Something to reclaim inside state monopolies, then, our guerrilla’s strange appetites/diabolical inclinations under capital advertise to whet the curiosity of spectating onlookers! Vulnerable parties, however strong they appear or behave, are framed as demons: to be hunted down and killed like animals. Any appeals to the contrary sit within the same complicated language. Amazons and similar demons are sex warriors—gladiators that promote power as something to witness in all aspects of itself [the home, weapon, body and vehicle, etc]. They play out in highly conventional ways that normally enact cops-and-victims violence to reinforce the status quo; but our imaginary bondage is like Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth: speaking to oppression through “oppression” acted out by subversive agents. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all, but each flower among the larger hellish bouquet remains special, unique, powerful. Helping instead of harming others despite having power over them—that’s our immortality!

[model and artist: Ebonnyy and Persephone van der Waard]

To it, monster-fucking theatre and its abstraction on the Aegis is one of paradoxical struggle—not just of mitigation and reversal during liminal expression, but of upset while turning workers on [eroticized class awakenings, getting down and in touch with our wild sides chattelized by the state]: the vulnerable as normally preyed upon by predatory agents thinking they’re saving the world from evil, the former overcoming the latter emboldened by state forces to harm nature; i.e., by abusing trust, violating boundaries and limiting victims control over their own lives. We fags camp that, merging demon love with adrenaline; i.e., through fight-or-fight operatics that purposefully excite our cathartic energies challenging capital’s usual qualities. If cops are criminals with badges, calling their victims criminals before unironically raping them, postcolonial demon mommies motivate systemic catharsis by camping said rape, time and time again.)

So concludes the symposium and “Idle Hands,” part one. Now that we’ve covered Amazons, dark faeries and demon muscle mommies in the blood libel/witch class vein, I’d like to consider a different aspect to such predators and prey, in “Idle Hands,” part two; i.e., through a sculpted, claymation quality to nature-as-monstrous-feminine and its revenge: hunting and vampires! Amazons often do this, but theirs is territorial in ways that are guarded as “home”; re: for which to bring captured, smaller male mates back to for breeding purposes. But “death by Snu-Snu” has another hunter function that just as often yields kawaii vibes in a modern demonic; i.e., inside an urban setting haunted by monstrous-feminine rage (and patriarchal abuse) vis-à-vis transplanted blood libel tropes—vampires unwelcome in a homely space, yet compelling precisely for the demon-lover violence they promise to visit upon others/suspicion they arouse during courtly love.

For that, we’ll be looking pointedly at Takena’s “Midnight Vampire”! For Takena’s antihero, death is a party—a danger disco to dance savagely inside, Matthew-Lewis-style; i.e., to anisotropically reverse the usual directions of sex and force during criminal-on-criminal violence, the female avenger’s castration fantasy while attracted to predators—happily enacting the whore’s bloody revenge! Gird your loins!

Onto “Idle Hands, part two: Vampires and Claymation“!

---

About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] For further examination of this, consider “Back to Jadis’ Dollhouse, the Birthplace of Ludo-Gothic BDSM” (2024) from the Undead Module.

[2] Doing so evokes Artemis and similar goddesses of war/the hunt, but also Hippolyta and her ilk. In either case, their collective “virginity” occurs by killing men outright (for trespassing on their land, hence home) or by forcing men to marry them and have their children (the shoe on the other foot; re: death by Snu-Snu)! There’s certainly a long history of white-Indian tokenization* to Amazons as “man-eaters” in this respect (the humiliation of men by Amazons part of the latter’s ancient copagandistic function; re: as a patriarchal mythical device treating Athenian women as second-class citizens). Even so, it can easily be reclaimed during the dialectic of the alien, and applies equally to demon mommies essentially being “Amazons from Hell” (often two-world people, one foot in each).

*E.g., Samus Aran; re: “‘In Search of the Secret Spell’: Digging Our Own Graves; or, Playing with Dead Things (the Imaginary Past) as Verboten and Carte- Blanche” (2024)!

[3] For more writing about Amazons and knights apart from here, refer to Volume One’s “‘Predators and Prey’: Predators as Amazons, Knights, and Other Forms of Domesticated, Animalized Monster Violence” (2024).

[4] “Spread ’em, mount ’em, pin ’em” as Jadis’ lepidopterist friends loved to recite.

[5] It’d be easy enough to treat the Amazon as male or intersex through GNC performance (the whole idea already centers around crossdress), but we won’t be doing so, here.

[6] Size difference is a common way to compensate for not leaning into the emotional aspects; i.e., the “Napoleon” persona versus someone who is strong and silent—though frankly there’s no “correct” way to go about this. The best actors combine different elements at their disposal to achieve the desired effect (whatever that is) per case; i.e., regarding those being subjected to their talents and services! To that, Lady Hellbender carries a strict flavor of femme dom (the Amazon), one that plays out through her demonic aesthetic during ludo-Gothic BDSM; but gentle femme doms likewise exist and can use the same/different aesthetics to achieve their own desirable outcomes; e.g., Harmony Corrupted and I.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In other words, erogenous pleasure, non-harmful pain and other euphoric sensations determine by context, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Such performances are generally works-in-progress, tailored to fit the different players working in concert; i.e., I have trauma and want to work through it with Harmony, who doesn’t want to harm me (the mark of a good dom). So we work through it, step-by-step, session-by-session, until we figure out the best way to work such rough play into our psychosexual games and theatre.

But rest assured, while many people have one “speed” with which they normally play things out, switches like myself prefer the ability to adopt different fantasies—thus demonic configurations of “fatal” desire, knowledge and power—when playing with excellent cuties like Harmony Corrupted “on the go/fly.” It’s a place of magical pleasure, a Twilight Zone of our defense, addressing how we feel:

I’m falling down a spiral, destination unknown
Double-crossed messenger all alone
Can’t get no connection, can’t get through, where are you? (Golden Earring’s “Twilight Zone,” 1982).

Such things are a part to play out during cryptonymy and calculated risk, their darkness visible making actual harm impossible and catharsis all but guaranteed; i.e., a party to perform between different players having fun through exquisite “torture” yielding to individual preference.

In turn, we rock ‘n doll in danger discos of our design, divorced from profit and made to help us heal from actual abuse/systems thereof! Genuine exploitation sits adjacent to palliative-Numinous feelings, all existing in the same shadow zone. Those marked by trauma seek “trauma” out in quotes: as made weird in ways that, true enough, seek weird out as something to relate to with; re (from Volume Two, part one):

don’t suffer for your art if you can help it. But also remember that trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. The idea is to combine them in ways that alleviate sickness, stress, tension and harm, but also avoid predation by perfidious elements in our daily lives coming from structural abuse: the Gothic castle as a beacon to attract and house the likeminded while the state tries, as it always does, to dominate us through its own victims (source).

So do we make our bones, our own friendship and marriage counselors, during ludo-Gothic BDSM.

Demon mommies reify not just combative emotions, then, but socio-material conditions as “plastic through play.” In doing so, they give us a powerfully compassionate voice to subvert, thus counteract, state forms with; i.e., during liminal expression doubling our abusers, onstage and off. Any syndrome (mirror, compartment, virgin/whore, white knight, impostor, etc), disorder (eating, personality, body and/or gender), or monopoly we’d want to interrogate, we may do so; i.e., in a half-real sense. State influence sits in between reality and imagination as informing each other according to state designs upheld or turned upside-down in said territories’ total spheres; i.e., desk murder and state atrocities, at large, versus rape play of a campy sort, the latter punching up while arguing for/administering critical thought and dialectical-material analysis as second-nature, over time: through actual Satanic rebellion repeatedly “taking temperature.”

Doing so means parsing fake rebellion/witch cops, en medias res (re: Milton)—with state proponents and labor proponents looking the same, but whose cryptonymy functions differently! Function determines function, and rebellion is always anisotropic; i.e., its reversal of polarity concerning power and knowledge operate through imagination and desire, either requiring such “sea legs” to navigate the inevitable confusions that occur when occupying and navigating a constantly changing world flooded with pre-existing trauma; re: its darkness visible.

[7] Note how Brady, visibly intimidated by Tricka, falls back on various bodybuilder stereotypes once triggered; and how she—suitably emboldened by the stage as a kind of safe space to push the envelope—happily fucks with him a bit; i.e., taking him to Pound Town, if but for one frightening moment written all over his face. The crowd (including the other performers, right) loves it.

[8] The plot of Thor: Ragnarok (2017) being to foist Asgard’s imperial sins onto Odin’s evil daughter (evocations of Virginia Woolfe’s “Judith,” the fictional sister of Shakespeare from her 1929 novel, A Room of One’s Own); i.e., that women “can’t have power” because they’re “hysterical” and always seek revenge against the Patriarchy pimping them; re: gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss.

[9] The character was originally written by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, thus echoes many of those writers problematic attitudes about American heroism on the global stage.

[10] A double pun; i.e., to “peg” as in, fuck with a strap-on, and to “peg out,” meaning to kill. A classic double whammy that Medusa revels in!

[11] I.e., the James Whale problem, a queer director taking away the Creature’s voice: as it was normally expressed—the way Shelley intended—against Cartesian men.

[12a] Such things can be performed with other people, or with poetic extensions of them; e.g., sex toys that—through size, color and shape—represent things outside our normal experience as much as anything ordinary or “realistic”; re: the classic Gothic juxtaposition of the everyday “novel” versus the Ancient Romance extending to roleplay and toys:

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

The gimmick transforms through context; re: by illustrating mutual consent through playing with forbidden elements. To that, such spaces let workers change clothes and colors of different kinds, but also offer various openings in a tantalizing gesture of exposure and invitation, as well as exploration of and for different kinds of people looking in on the fun. White girls are classically “threatened” by BBC in traditional porn, for instance, but through their own pornography can illustrate mutual consent simply through selection; i.e., the ability to put whatever into their holes that they want (a nightmare scenario for straight white men who want to control said women; i.e., in every aspect of their lives, including who they have sex with or who they fantasize about/perform with).

[12b] John J. Raspanti quotes of Ali vs Foreman:

“George Foreman is nothing but a big mummy,” Ali said. “I’ve officially named him, ‘The Mummy.’ See, you all believe that stuff you see in the movies. Here’s a guy running through the jungle, doing the hundred-yard dash, and the mummy is chasing him. Thomp, thomp, thomp. ‘Ooh, help! I can’t get away from the Mummy! Help, help! The Mummy’s catching me. Help! Here comes the Mummy!’ And the mummy always catches him. Well, don’t you all believe that stuff. There ain’t no mummy gonna catch me” (source: John J. Raspanti’s “Forty-Nine Years Ago,” 2023).

The fact remains, people love monsters, and frequently turn up at shows like those to see monsters do battle (often men of color), and because these performers rarefy politics and bloodspots tied to specific places and warring geopolitical forces; e.g., Ali and Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, their event billed “The Rumble in the Jungle.” Indeed, boxing is commonly called “war personified,” the fighters involved representing different countries and peoples whether they want to or not.

To his credit, though, Ali was staunchly anti-war (outside the ring, anyways), going so far as to refuse the draft even if it cost him his license and landed him in jail:

On June 20, 1967, the great Muhammad Ali was convicted in Houston for refusing induction in the U.S. armed forces.

Ali saw the war in Vietnam as an exercise in genocide. He also used his platform as boxing champion to connect the war abroad with the war at home, saying, “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs?”

For these statements, as much as the act itself, Judge Joe Ingraham [through a blatant act of judicial legislation] handed down the maximum sentence to Cassius Clay (as they insisted upon calling him in court): five-years in a federal penitentiary and a $10,000 fine (source: Dave Zirin’s “When Muhammad Ali Took the Weight,” 2011).

In turn, activism and theatre often go hand-in-hand—not just for Ali, but for all performers and consumers of monsters, onstage and off; re: of demon lovers, mommies included!

[13] This goes both ways, with trans women being seen as “traps.” We’ll explore this more in Volume Three.

[14] I.e., “a seemingly more conciliatory set of discourses and institutional practices that emphasize Indigenous recognition and accommodation” (source). Betrayal is betrayal.

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 Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

“I’ll See You in Hell”: Dark Faeries and Demon Mommies

“Your tauntaun will freeze before you reach the first marker!”

—a deck officer to Han Solo, The Empire Strikes Back (1981)

Picking up where “A Paucity of Time“ left off…

Demons are intensely popular poetic devices, which communicate, as people do, through sex and force, but also taboo subjects concerning larger bigotries, phobias and stigmas involving sex and force. In turn, everything speaks to dark wishes, wants and desires achieved through transformation and trade; i.e., few things are used in conjunction more than “fire” and “desire,” but also oxymoron and darkness visible; e.g., “cold fire,” and “Hell freezing over” (the latter being a frozen lake in Dante’s Ninth Circle of Hell, for instance). Milton’s Lucifer was, in that sense, the bringer of light with darkness that broke state illusions. I want to unpack that a little more, here.

Our focus remains monstrous-feminine, as usual. And yet, at its most simple, all roads lead to Rome; i.e., the pandemonium all demons and fairies provide takes you to Hell in order to experience what is forbidden or otherwise denied at home, generally through home’s unequal conditions turned on their heads.

Such things historically and dialectically-materially reduce to sex and force, as a result—are highly controlled by canon as such because, with the proper nudge and mindset, they suddenly offer the unique and productive ability to radically change the world in a half-real sense; i.e., starting onstage but hardly ending there, battering Capitalist Realism with proletarian illusions camping the canon to liberate the whore: through a reclaimed (and deliberately subversive) Superstructure. This cycling wardrobe—one of many masks, mirrors and costumes—endlessly yields dark wishes concerning emancipatory sex and force dressed up as “rape,” and whose dark demonic knowledge and power reliably abstract, adjudicate or otherwise convey through whorish revenge as a devilish, Gothic-Communist, impossible-to-control creative act: something to pass down in cryptonymic, anachronistic and extracurricular modes of poetic discourse forever at play (and war) in history’s endless jumble.

“I’ll See You in Hell,” then, divides in two basic parts to consider said jumble with: a continuation of monstrous-feminine revenge “of nature” against profit—a rebellious witch (and not a witch cop) being someone who, pimped by state force, not only refuses to play ball (witches pimping witches, mid-moral-panic), but bends the rules of play through ludo-Gothic BDSM (and its usual historical ironies) in pursuit of universal liberation: the obfuscation of friend and foe through the usual prosecution markers; re: to confuse state threat responses, reclaiming them while humanizing ourselves during the cryptonymy process!

Amazons, already monstrous-feminine, are a kind of witch whose uneven, historically selective qualities of persecution—through blood libel, sodomy and witch hunter rhetoric—we’ll pointedly explore (this time) through a symposium on demon mommies and dark faeries; i.e., as poetic extensions of the Amazon type of witch: the warrior and monstrous-feminine (often female) dominant/monarch. In turn, we’ll consider both as a common, beloved way of working out our state-imposed, us-versus-them differences through the usual language/theatre of difference: the Gothic’s rape/police roleplay scenarios pointedly breaking boundaries but also resetting them through the playful-yet-shock-therapy fantasies of abject reversal (often with a half-real element of pure invention, dead cultures, and real-life doubles; e.g., Skyrim‘s barbarians and cat people, left, practicing cross-species “pollination” to confront and ultimately revert Cartesian, settler-colonial and heteronormative systems of violence, terror and morphological expression: fucking the alien)!

(artist: Gekko)

Remember that I’m merely scratching the surface of a very old problem (re: nature as gyn/ecological, vis-à-vis Patel and Moore); our doing so, here, shall explore the dark, repressed, out-of-sight qualities to daily life felt but cloaked under capital—generally in places too hot, cold, dark, or otherwise inhospitable to regular folk, yet for the queer-and-mighty is exactly how they prefer (and where they take us to better acclimate/expand our horizons):

• “Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries (feat. Annabel Morningstar, Harmony Corrupted, Romantic Rose, The Witch, and more)”: A collaboration between whores. Considers the labor proponents of Gothic-Communist revolution—working together and with Gothic materials, in a staged, meta sense—to demonically give rise (thus shape/voice) to dark places and people; i.e., as dark faerie rulers/regal fairylands where one can explore off-limit feelings and desires conducive to post-scarcity development; e.g., Satan from Robert Eggers’ The Witch, Lavos from Chrono Trigger, and more!
• “Trial by Fire: Demon Muscle Mommies (feat. Lady Hellbender and Hela, The Shape of Water)“: A symposium. Considers the fiery, militant aspect to demon muscle mommy doms, specifically through the postcolonial urge of forbidden love.

Each considers the whore’s paradox, and how it extends to transition as a source of pride, mid-capture and “duress”; i.e., when you go to Hell as Persephone, only to find out it’s not so bad: a paradox of “rape” that, in quotes, can challenge profit.

In doing so, a hostage suddenly gains the ability to speak to their abuse with ludo-Gothic BDSM/calculated risk, while simultaneously reclaiming they and their friends’ humanity with the fun stuff—with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also those monstrous-feminine beings that famously embody them through courtly love’s demonic castle sex and dark (spontaneous, forbidden) desire; i.e., “I would love [to see/do] this or that.” Demons and faeries do so, and generally with Gothic “spice” haunted by actual abuse/commodification! In other words, they (and their Numinous, exquisitely “torturous” homes) are commonly gratuitous, seeming right out of a succubean nightmare, porno mag and/or Gothic novel: mail-order and made just for those dark monstrous-feminine desires (male, female, or intersex) that workers, per the Protestant ethic, aren’t “supposed” to have!

(artist: Slightly Cunty)

In response, unequal power arranges in a courtly manner with a female/monstrous-feminine, home-court advantage: a warrior whore expressing courtly love towards the princess-as-classic-sex-object (sometimes with a gender swap, but not always; e.g., female brats/pillow princesses, above).

Let’s unpack this conceptually for a moment (five pages), then precede the exhibits themselves with a short list of additional boundaries.

To unpack the above ideas from a theatrical standpoint, think of them as regressive therapy told through Gothic adventure stories. Rather than every second of every day guided by alarm clocks, sugar and caffeine flowing money up, the same fictions can reallocate such forces onto new tracks of distribution. To it, the monomyth is the classic adventure story told from a male warrior perspective, the Gothic heroine forced to survive the villainous castle while waiting to be rescued there; it is a Promethean space when reversed as such, the anisotropic variant harboring a fugitive ruler marrying through kidnap by taking Persephone back to Hell: where she belongs because existing there paradoxically sets her free!

People love demons (and dark worlds) for this reason—relish the gateways, but also “battle parties” and warring theatrical tensions (e.g., psychomachy and Amazonomachia), which they so easily represent when traveled to and visited for the length of a dream (versus coming to empire during the liminal hauntology of war); re: as conflicting poetic stances and arguments to access and adopt in praxial opposition, pimping nature or speaking from nature-whored-out in its defense (regardless of sex, species, race, gender and/or religion, etc). “Hell,” then, is classically the site of such raucous, oscillating exchange, raunchy exploitation and taboo exploration; i.e., during the dialectic of the alien. Such push-pull, gruesome revenge and demonic invention aren’t automatically “bad,” but something to dualistically evoke and pursue by two basic sides (workers or the state) meeting in the middle of a shared shadow zone, their parody and pastiche (remediated praxis) playing with such devices at cross purposes!

(artist: yxxzoid)

To it, Gothic Communism turns the world upside-down to voluntarily transform it outside Hell’s caged evocation, camping the canon (and its rape) using our cake and infernal holes (e.g., assholes, left) as dungeons of deep dark desire; the state, to keep it the same, thus prolong genocide raping nature as usual!

At a glance, things might seem discrete; in practice, people and place evoke one another through mise-en-abyme during liminal expression’s Gothic, concentrically morphological expression (re: Walpole’s walking castles [the Capitalocene] expressed as literal fortresses [and giant suits of armor inside said fortresses] but also corporally vis-à-vis my arguments; re: “Castles in the Flesh,” 2024): where dreams, but especially dark, unequal, forbidden dreams (things conspicuously absent from daily life yet advertised everywhere as such) come gloriously alive/true during ergodic, non-trivial playtime (with “truth” being the potential for them to realize outside the Platonic dream space); re: darkness visible; e.g., universal liberation, ironic/unironic murder and rape fantasies, or land back, vis-à-vis liminal spaces (and occupiers of said spaces) that embody such things in praxial opposition on and within the cryptomimetically echoing surfaces and thresholds (often as drug-like; i.e., acid Communism—a concept we’ll explore at length in “Call of the Wild”).

Simply put, demons articulate through chaos as a kind of wicked, horny presence (of death and decay but also change, regeneration and appetite); campy demons—whether people and/or place, be they mommies and faeries of a rebellious monstrous-feminine—use the medieval morphology of the infernal concentric pattern and Promethean space to upset any sense of order (moral, emotional, ontological, etc; re: Aguirre) that capital installs; i.e., by morphologically (and with puns) evoking violence and terror onstage to threaten radical change offstage: to evoke and instill possible worlds that capital doesn’t want to happen. This means worlds without profit, or—paradoxically—masters (despite the mistress argument campily conveyed by dark faeries and demon mommies). In turn, canon offsets camp with canceled futures/retro-future hauntologies (re: controlled opposition), the vultures of the bourgeoisie instilling praxial inertia to continue scavenging labor’s zombie corpse; re: Capitalist Realism holding workers hostage through DARVO argumentation and police obstruction/arbitration of sex and force per the trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital levied in bad faith: “They [a liberated proletariat] will be a dark master worse than us! Trust in the elite!”

I’d call bullshit, but we are what the elite design workers to fear as “beyond” Capitalism. In short, Communism is gay and from outer space, generally as sodomy arguments known for gender trouble and delight; i.e., we’re a thing to paradoxically chase (more on chasing femboys/catboys and twinks-in-peril, in Volume Three), said chase unfolding on either side of the praxial equation: to plant ideas in our heads that bury the fag or disinter its oddly sexy corpse!

(artist: Jaybaesun)

Despite demons classically being the life of the party, state dogma cannot tolerate anything that functionally threatens bourgeois hegemony. So it treats the function (of genuine rebellion) as party pooping while, in the same breath, robbing our aesthetic of any critical power through bad-faith replication (re: obscurantism).

State alienation, fetishization and control of Gothic poetics (about sex and force) are endless, as are the many ways to challenge them in dualistic forms promoting fearful possibilities the state wants to repress with tokenized variants. As our exhibits will demonstrate, this includes Amazons and Medusa, but also demon mommies of a more overtly demonic and hellish, dark fiery mistress, and/or faerie[1] design; i.e., serving as operatic changeling vice characters giving voice to such things—those creatures seemingly “of another world,” one whose unheimlich, liminal hauntology of war they can take you to as well, making your dreams come true in fantastical modes of expression: to another planet, an underground lake, a fortress, a dark forest, etc, to undergo sodomy as demonic courtship worthy of witch hunts and blood libel in state eyes framing such pleasure as “guilty.”

Under such scrutiny and censorship, these trials by fire are felt through darkness visible; i.e., between resident and residence, seeking less redemption in state eyes and more to rectify state pogroms: a black gate to take you to Hell and back, once opened—not once, but recursively during holistic study of the Medusa’s Numinous peach! If our goal is to humanize the harvest (exposing the state as inhumane), then Hell’s diet grants us the demonic ability to radically change size, shape and composition (as well as perspective regarding such things) to throw the doors of perception wider than Harmony’s painted, glorious ass (and to allow for the interrogation of ghosts, beating them up a fair bit; i.e., during theatrical violence concerned with harm that lacks the capacity to inflict lasting damage[2])!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Such is the stuff of forbidden love, for Gothic authors and actors; i.e., making tongue-in-cheek love (courtship) to demon lovers and their castled haunts during an evocatively carceral (dungeon-style) reversal of the classic abjection process: a verboten, outrageous, Numinous space (chronotope) of the gods—one whose dump(er) site we invoke with swears concerning taboo subjects, be those forbidden objects, personas or divinities (e.g., “shit,” “fuck,” “What the hell?” “Holy Saint Francis!” or “What in God’s name?” etc). It’s an intense, regressive place that bears out similar energies between God and the Devil, the two mentioned both in the same breath and when alluding to other inhuman(e) dynasties with a Frankensteinian stamp using the ghost of the counterfeit: a world that—under capital’s constant alienation and fetishization of nature—has become alien, but also descriptively and prescriptively vengeful towards the perceived order by the perceived disorder!

In the Faustian tradition, it also becomes like a carnival ride, one made with unequal, forbidden exchange and radical transformation using basic materials (re: clay or something comparable, like dead flesh); i.e., in pursuit of fatal knowledge versus power (two sides of the same dark coin). Promethean or Faustian, it’s gratuitous, egregious, formerly accepted and currently beyond the pale owing to the abjection process—to go to an old, dislocated sphere to see the truth at home with forbidden sight; i.e., by making, summoning or otherwise digging up said truths through derelict archaeologies (the Gothic retro-future/found-yet-forged document) and likenesses: a jilted bride of Hell/the dungeon, a horny queen taking us prisoner for funsies in her anti-home!

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

Such sight, in the Gothic tradition, is always dualistic, liminal, concentric, ergodic, and anisotropic (re: castle-narrative), but also morphological and ouroborotic, intimating fearsome-but-desirable things beyond ourselves using ourselves; i.e., felt during a recursive mise-en-abyme, the castle-like whore or whore-like castle (the Medusa) seen pareidolically from the front or the back in ways that—when made, summoned, or found; clothed or naked, kawaii or kowai, alive or slain, unvanquished or ravished, and viewed from all angles like a gleeful parody of Picasso’s arrogant cubism, above—begin to suggest the angry whole of a furious Mother Earth (the wandering womb a traveling castle that, hyperobject, moves in stillness): to conjure up the chronotope’s half-real, hauntological feelings of abjected, monstrous-feminine things, during the cryptonymy process! Policed, the whore paradoxically has her revenge by acting out her rape to revenge (as normally delivered by police violence) from state targets. There’s always more to see, but also a state position to occupy and subvert in dualistic terms!

Blood libel, in that respect, speaks canonically through the monomyth language of persecution, rape and revenge (the whore’s or the pimp’s) afforded to undead, demonic and/or animalistic monstrous-feminine qualities that—in canonical stories—reliably frame, instigate and perform witch hunts inside/outside themselves; e.g., Beowulf, Frankenstein, or Dracula as things to hunt down by heroic forces; i.e., as a recruitment device meant to defend capital from invented enemies “of nature,” the former seeking and destroying the latter onstage and off.

In turn, said execution unfurls in abject territories while abusing unironic forms of DARVO-style terror language, all before ultimately seceding dark ownership of “stolen” colonial gains, thereby restoring a fallen state to its “rightful” sovereignty’s heteronormative reproductive order/the nuclear model: as rescued from the witch tempting the whore’s revenge by exposing her Numinous figure (re: anal sex, but also Amazonian muscle, below). You gotta start somewhere when healing from rape, and we Gothic Communists explore such things to subvert them—to “gang alang” with the devil in some shape or form; i.e., ourselves, often seen wearing animal masks and costumes, but also sporting powerful, semi-to-fully-naked bodies, above and left—walking castles whose war-like fortresses promote “harm” as paradoxically pleasurable: to wage war as sex-positive-yet-fierce, at times being rather literal in its campy morphological puns and playful gallows humor cheekily lampooning abjection as a whole. The bigger the “castle,” the bigger the harvest; the bigger the “threat,” the greater the punchline/payoff.

(artist: Dzenrei Art)

Reverse abjection, then, is still a form of courtship with harvested things—of forbidden monster love (and sex) expressing as unequal, forbidden exchange to explore in people and place as taboo, vulgar and, at times, crude (re: Walpole and Lewis). The iconoclastic idea is the paradoxical threat of “danger” where no danger can occur but which the feeling of danger is abundant, famously evoked through traps, monsters and atmosphere, but also animated miniatures and colossal fakeries suggesting the potential occupation of a ruinous legendary home. Such things can subvert this and reverse that during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to illustrate power in the hands of the dom or the sub. The classic irony of the dom is they serve the sub under “perilous” boundaries of mutual consent; but power defines through exchange, wherein one is meaningless without the other! Desire goes both ways during oppositional praxis—the Gothic infamously dualistic, hence visually and at times praxially ambiguous!

Concluding our food for thought, I wish to supply several (seven) boundary-setting points before we proceed onto the main exhibits themselves.

First, for the sake of simplicity and time, “See You in Hell” is focusing on faeries and demon mommies (of, again, the “witch” blood libel class); i.e., as functionally dominant during a collaborative exercise/postcolonial debate, but it’s not difficult to turn the tables; e.g., by a sub who tops from below, a dom who bottoms from the top (the “power bottom”), or switches doing either role, etc—they reify not by appearance but through the function of unequal exchange, first and foremost. Said Titania to her faerie train about Nick Bottom, “Tie up my lover’s tongue. Bring him silently” (source). As such, we “enslaved” are quick to agree, surrendering control to please those we love. Demon BDSM has universal application and adaptability in this respect, but again—our focus is on dominant aesthetics through faeries and demons.

(artist: Bottru)

Second, “See You in Hell” was originally just “Trial by Fire,” the former written concerning the postcolonial subversion—and cryptonymic revelation/concealment of—captive (thus rape/death) fantasies through swole’ demon mommies. I’ve since expanded this to faerie queens in a second exhibit, placed first, called “Darkness Visible.” Faerie or demon, we’re essentially talking about femme doms of a gentle/strict variety (often hyphenated to allow for softer visual elements merged with vaso vagal ones), which effectively promote a more overtly hellish, otherworldly and Promethean (“of the gods”) version of Amazons, and employ similar aesthetic devices of terror. This includes their mighty monstrous-feminine bodies, but also the sodomy those bodies promise to inflict during ludo-Gothic BDSM (and its own threats of controlled, operatic, palliative-Numinous regression); i.e., made to camp canon, thus anisotropically reverse capital’s usual terrorist/counterterrorist polarities (re: its trifectas, monopolies and qualities). We’re left, then, with witch-like beings of dark power from powerful places beyond normal perception; re: faerie queens/monarchs the likes of which we’ve written about before, revisiting them again here (exhibit 44a1a1b1), before the original demon mommies exhibit on courtly love, 44a1a1b2.

(artist: Iulaandrea)

To that, while the original exhibit (44a1a1b2) concerns fiery muscular examples to deal in dark desire, I wanted to preface that with some additional non-muscular examples of faerie queens (exhibit 44a1a1b1): kidnapper beings of darkness visible; re: “changelings,” but also goblins, vampires and witches fulfilling a similar doppelganger abduction (alien imposter), blood libel role; i.e., who take their prey—often women and children, but also weaker men—to underwater places (watery graves/sunken palaces) under demon-lover torture scenarios; e.g., presumed cannibalism, bloodletting and rape/revenge play. These happen with Amazons, faeries, Medusa and similar monstrous-feminine as “hysterical” (re: phallic women/Archaic Mothers) that secure some sense of nature’s revenge for workers to paradoxically enjoy when the vulnerable, thus exposed or otherwise adjacent to power as something to embrace, do just that; i.e., when hugging the alien (re: Medusa, but also her avatars like Giger’s xenomorph, above)—namely through proximity with power and death in classically demonic ways (re: exchange, transformation, revenge, creativity [magic/mad science] and desire, etc). Per the vengeful, monstrous-feminine whore, nature’s revenge is the reversal of abjection; i.e., one that occurs generally through the theatrically indecent exposure of rebellious nudity and the feverish, murky embrace of the blood libel, sodomy and witch hunt[3] charges: those that, camped by us, show the state/capital (and its monopolies, trifectas and qualities’ bid for legitimacy/warped notions of justice through us-versus-them argumentation) to be entirely false!

Divorced from state authorship, such faerie monarchs are still categorically violent in light of police violence against nature as monstrous-feminine (or otherwise concern the performance of categorical violence); their campy usage still concerns universal liberation using half-real Gothic poetics about kidnapping and courtly love through impostor dialogs and dark desire interrogating creative bids for legitimacy. Even so, “Darkness Visible” before “Trial by Fire” is less focused around forbidden love through overtly postcolonial rhetoric, and more on ludo-Gothic BDSM (the language of capture healing from rape) that could be applied to such arguments. This faerie encore’s momentum include participants like Annabel Morningstar (who will feature in this exhibit a lot, below) and some of my other friends, who I’ve included to be holistic (and because I frankly love mommy doms and want to expand the umbrella[4] a bit, through their help).

Indeed, I could raise as many cathedrals/castles-in-the-flesh as I—but also my friends and their body parts—want; i.e., my directing of what they ultimately want to articulate during ludo-Gothic BDSM: as powerful, independent, and sex-positive monsters, achieving paradoxical liberation through reclaimed, ironic bondage (and other BDSM devices), but also unironically caged by state forces struggling to contain us (re: exploitation and liberation not simply existing on the same stages, but whose punitive language is used by both sides [workers and the state] to entrap or emancipate nature as monstrous-feminine with nature as monstrous-feminine).

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

Beyond our doing so in “Darkness Visible,” I wholly expect you to be able to do what I do/raise your own golems, gargoyles and Galatea in the same Medusa refrain (always in Pygmalion’s Shadow); i.e., once critical thought, as a process, is intuitively understood, the ability to observe and/or perform it, yourselves, becomes infinite in form, using the same aesthetics (of power and death, darkness and revenge) to liberate what the state uses to enslave. During oppositional praxis, function determines function as a matter of flow regarding power moving towards or away from workers; re: through our hands developing Gothic Communism, we can throw the doors of perception wide to reveal hidden truths beyond Capitalist Realism—by using darkness visible differently than the state. The trick is dialectical-material scrutiny achieving intelligence and awareness (consciousness) as second-nature, said status acquired through praxial synthesis; re: on a daily level, our variable exchanges cultivating good social-sexual habits through what we create and encourage as extensions of our demonic, rebellious, genderqueer and emancipated selves: the hellish, awesome power of creation setting nature free, the magic outlaw/dark faerie/cyborg freak/rival power running wild by our making of monsters—for workers, not profit!

Gothic Communism, as the ensuing non-fiery examples shall hopefully demonstrate, is a group operation, one that works as much through tactile, wet, vitalistic intuition (concerning deities of dark vengeful nature) as by dry thesis and reinforcement through clinical detachment. But there’s always room to work thesis materials in; i.e., by the reader long after this module is published!

Third, I wrote “Trial by Fire” before writing “Reclaiming Amazons,” but the framed thesis in that portion—about anal sex/general sodomy as a terror weapon couched within the whore’s counterterrorist revenge through the classic poetic function of demons—is still at work in this older writing’s liminal expression; i.e., in between the frame and framer’s Wonderland, shifting incessantly back and forth across space and time.

Everyone loves the whore and her wanton, naughty and at-times-bloody revenge. In turn, rituals thrive on repetition, Gothic Communism developing through frequencies that synapse along active-if-cloaked circuits of data; demons, as the classic granters of forbidden wishes, generally tie to power expressed in places, people and roleplay scenarios that speak to radically altering ourselves, including how power is framed and performed. As we’ll see, this includes Annabel’s dark faerie queen (or my other friends) envisioned by me during a mutual, informed labor exchange and exhibit; i.e., generally through dark, unequal, forbidden exchange (of power and knowledge) that—when used actively and intelligently in counterterrorist forms—thwarts profit through Amazons and anal, whose dark animal tortures dark faeries and demon mommies certainly embody (taking their prey back to their lairs).

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

In short, they capture their “victims” and take them to dark realms of desire attached to pre-capitalist modes of thought, which Gothic Communism uses to recultivate a cultural understanding of the imaginary past through a rising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, cultural and racial awareness; re: an intersectional, solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed, illustrating mutual consent (through informed labor exchange and sex-positive art) achieving praxial synthesis on the daily during opposition praxis: using iconoclastic art to achieve universal liberation for all work sexualized under capital, and to become stewards of the natural world we protect from the state as enemy to all life on planet Earth.

Revolution (and its dark cargo and romance) is an exercise in totality. Arbitrated through play and art, its liminal refrain—whose patented break from routine during holistic study and Gothic, monstrous-feminine dualism—seeks to gradually and collectively expose a system of harm designed to conceal itself through sex and force pimping nature in duality. Every monster they make or cage is legitimate through the giving and receiving of state force, ours always illegitimate (re: Weber). Both sides require the language—by them to hunt us and by us to acknowledge we are being hunted, which we can reclaim during genocide and its moral panics/witch-hunt dialogs of persecution, caution and revenge; i.e., through poetic likenesses that hide our function among shared, oppositional subterfuge: the oppression of witches, which faeries and demon mommies essentially are!

We camp canon because we must; we play with the imaginary past through vice characters like demon mommies and dark faeries—i.e., in order to expose what is happening to people currently inside the state of exception, at home and abroad. They lend a voice to canonical fears blowing things out of proportion, worker counterterror exposing state terror through the same dialogs thereof: the witch treated as terrorist by the state looking to control nature with—all of which we subvert using what we got!

For us, such creatures stick out during the cryptonymy process, seemingly to blend in through Gothic as commonplace, vulgar and summoned vis-à-vis Radcliffe’s evil castles/rape anxieties (fears of the ancient/medieval world including incest and pedophilia linked to straight people scapegoating homosexual men for practices that undoubtedly occurred in the historical past, but were committed far more commonly by straight-practicing patriarchs). Under Pax Americana, “Hell is a place that always appears on Earth (or an Earth-like double)”; rape is predominantly a white, straight male/tokenized crime committed against innocent female parties, children, the elderly and people of color/queer people, etc. In turn, rape victims aren’t only not believed but often attacked because they threaten property by being witness to their property-owning fathers’, husbands’ and boyfriend’s (or normalized token) crimes and deceptions protected by state devices: courts, cops, and copaganda. The justice system exists to predominantly engender rape, not prevent it (and movements created by marginalized groups are co-opted and abused by white victims; e.g., #MeToo)! All become things to reconcile; i.e., by relating back and forth through intersectional solidarity’s pedagogy of the oppressed healing from rape in the shadow of all police violence!

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

Fourth, I won’t have time to reinsert many of these positions into “Darkness Visible” or “Trial by Fire” (and their symposium approach’s conversational style). But you may apply them yourselves as you go; e.g., “Trial by Fire” is about postcolonial monster sex adjacent to Amazonian power fantasies evoked through the threat of campy sodomy and exquisite “torture.” Ergo, it should be easy enough to apply my anal Amazon thesis to demon mommies as a kind of dark monster mother well at home in ludo-Gothic BDSM; re:

The state only tolerates the problematic love of Amazons and anal when their challenge (to the ancient canonical laws) is nominal; i.e., provided they serve profit in canonical terror language. 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 savage 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, canonically binarize 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.

[…] 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 […]  to take anal back is to take the land (and labor) back from these performative elements and their associate structures and enforcers by camping them […]: subversive Amazons and anal rerouting the usual flow/ordering of power on the Aegis.

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

Fifth, the flavor of “I’ll See You in Hell” is closer to my Poetry Module, and will reference a lot of its ideas using a similar style of discourse.

Sixth, I’ve decided to preserve the original parenthetical-italic formatting of each exhibit.

Seventh, the subject of rape play comes up extensively in this exhibit, but especially the dark faerie portion. The performative, didactic idea, as always, is to heal from rape by camping it as the Gothic (and its fakeries) historically do—by helping survivors heal from trauma with “trauma”; re: through ludo-Gothic BDSM putting “rape” in quotes, effectively playing with rape during calculated risk (monsters) to help the traumatized relax, but also fight back by surviving and thriving despite our abusers harming us!

So anytime I mention “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” I’m referring to healing from rape through play (with monsters like dark faeries, who represent rape in some shape or form); and vice versa, “healing from rape” or general faerie/demon poetics and roleplay (often with big toys and a royal-size “dark” aesthetic, below) likewise denote “ludo-Gothic BDSM” as a penetrative death analog (re: ahegao). Tied to Great Change, it’s the whore out in the open—similar to a bean sidhe or Medusa’s snakes except her pussy’s doin’ the talking! Little death, big implications!

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

In short, each expresses the other and the imaginary willpower of state forces raping nature for profit, whereupon our healing from rape to stymie profit (when illustrating mutual consent behind cryptonymic safety buffers) is the whore’s ultimate revenge; i.e., while paradoxically exposed through vulnerable nudity and dark, semi-naked threats, camping state terror weapons during the cryptonymy process (with Amazonian nudity being invulnerable, to some extent, and “darkness” being clothed and naked at the same time, etc). Through it, roleplayers synonymize playtime and “rape” haunted by actual abuse/token betrayal, wherein our poetic devices help achieve some sense of autonomy. In doing so, they likewise help us acclimate to markers of trauma and abuse, inside/outside ourselves; i.e., as an ongoing lived reality to regain power through theatrical disempowerment, whereupon we “threaten” ourselves with campy psychosexual versions of state abuse; re (from “A Rape Reprise”): “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” (source).

Theory aside (e.g., reversing abjection), the whole point of said “exquisite ‘torture'” is to help past, present and future rape[5] victims heal from the lasting physical, mental and emotional, etc, effects (e.g., the prey mechanisms of rape: fight, flight, fawn, freeze and flop) caused by capital doing what capital does. This means not just by rape’s actual penetrative violence, but by the ongoing threats of imaginary penetration and other kinds of violence besides overtly sexual (e.g., carceral, corporal or verbal abuse), and which the state normally supplies to menticide its victims (extending from single people to entire cultures and places); i.e., before, during and after a given event, constituting an ongoing pimping of nature/policing it as alien whore: to keep raping nature-as-monstrous-feminine, while simultaneously pacifying and antagonizing it through threats of rape causing generational abuse! Rape is torture and terror to keep nature under the state’s boot; emancipation, to rise up from Hell to speak apocalyptically with such things.

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

The reality of rape victims is that everyone can be a victim under capital, but seldom to the same degree (many simply live under conditions where rape is more possible for them, but not foregone). Furthermore, such things are alien to many and experienced differently per side (re: Volume One’s “Healing from Rape“); i.e., rape is a weapon of terror whose fresh evocation frightens anew, but also carries with it a great deal of shame, self-hatred, fear and secrecy projected onto other victims (many cops, de facto or actual, were once victims, themselves). By extension, rape survivors trigger at threats that are, to some degree, imaginary and lived; being able to control the time and place of these half-real interactions, but also depth, size, speed and relative nudity involved (above and left) can be intensely therapeutic and educational for ourselves and others—can help everyone gain some sense of voice, thus expert testimony through ourselves and our shared labor exchanges, playfully illustrating mutual consent during rape play!

That’s the paradox of rape, thus the whore; to heal from rape, you must evoke it during calculated risk. Normally alienated by capital, but sold back to us in purely exploitative forms, our subversive remanufacture of such things can help us systemically combat internal-externalized fears and stigmas, thus avoid self-destruction while rebuilding trust through tailor-made boundaries (re: Cuwu and dialectical behavior therapy incorporated into Gothic Communism); i.e., while learning to be at peace with our strange appetites acquired by life under capital, using said dialogs of mastery to become self-sufficient. To change our socio-material conditions overtime (thus raise emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness) requires active, consciously informed consent through teamwork changing the rules of acceptable behavior and discourse; e.g., Annabel and I negotiating everything that went into this exhibit; i.e., reclaiming our collective time and space, but also means of production to think with, poetry to play with, and bodies to control ourselves (thereby reducing the odds of rape, which is all profit really is). That’s what good praxis is all about!

Got all that? Enough foreplay, then! First up is our dark faerie collab—one enacted between myself and different models. Embodying different monstrous-feminine qualities embedded in Gothic, it has been funded by me to endorse our rights (as sex workers) in times of state decay and witch hunts. Consider our work representative; i.e., of wild, unruly nature performing its dark revenge: bringing fairyland home to the conqueror through the campy language of sex and force, our healing from rape (as a state terror weapon) relaid in darkness visible!

Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries (feat. Annabel Morningstar, Harmony Corrupted, Romantic Rose, The Witch, and more)

“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”

—Black Phillip, The Witch (2015)

 

Before we start our exhibit on dark faeries, a small tangent on Puritanism and Satan, followed by a few aesthetic notes on dark faeries (about eleven pages)…

As I’ve already expressed, “Darkness Visible” is a collaboration of common whores—one seeking to penetrate, thus escape, Capitalist Realism through transformative theatrical exchange; i.e., as dark faeries do, meaning unequally through sudden capture and rapid transportation, magically ferrying their prey beyond normal spheres and into forbidden netherworlds mirroring the faerie’s diurnal counterparts: a nightly place of dreams (often a cave, lake or forest) housing dark desires that are either entirely naked (as faeries often are) or veiled by an oppressive society that normally forbids them to ordinary folk, but hangs in front of to endlessly taunt said folk with (and hypocritically perjure/scapegoat themselves); i.e., with darkness visible, meaning a paradoxically charged, opaque surface that—per Segewick’s imagery of the surface, but also Radcliffe’s infamous Black Veil (and the forest and castle that house veil and veiled alike)—threatens exposure to hostile alien forces similar to more a diaphanous material. Like a pair of magic panties, our investment pulls this veil aside to show you the goods; i.e., to root out harmful prudes by appreciating what we, as people, have become alienated from by capital and must refamiliarize ourselves with through demonic trade; re: exquisite “torture”; e.g., the faerie’s fat, functionally non-white ass: large, immodest, and succulent—a demon lover’s darkness visible helping us live deliciously!

(artist: Nyx)

In doing so, our interest pointedly lies in faerie rulers, meaning those capable of royal enforcement and divine internment, but also medieval pomp-and-circumstance of a similar grandiose scale; re: courtly love. To it, faerie transformation concerns more than bodily changes[6], but that of otherworldly scenery reminiscent of one’s home made alien by a regal Numinous presence. Transpiring through forced relocation as a matter of unequal exchange that faeries are known for in popular stories, such creatures lead a double life. As you will see, so do we (sex workers often moonlight; survival sex workers toil in broad daylight, forced to suffer judgment by society at large policing whores).

Trotted out in pulp media, the process of abjection likewise reinvents Satan as someone who, once bastardized from Pagan culture[7], must be kept “in check” in Christianized spheres by strip-teasing him; i.e., by abusing the same poetics through pornographic dogma, wherein state Gothic canonically lands the Devil in hot water. “The Devil,” not the state, tempts maidens to prostitute themselves—to disrobe, forsake God and destroy the nuclear family vis-à-vis a Puritan reimagining of Hammer of Witches (1478) and blood libel. Commonly devised to accuse disobedient women of “witchcraft,” such pogroms extend state slander and DARVO into circular myth; i.e., urban legends tarring proto-feminism, queerness and Pagan religions with the same cruel, half-real brush, forsaking these groups into latter-day persecution networks, confessional refrains, and idiotic-but-effective canards; e.g., the drinking of infant blood and eating of their flesh perverting Catholic mass, all while using the leftover fat in flying ointments the witch can lubricate her “broom” with, then levitate through unholy orgasm (and phallic-woman histrionics).

According to the settlers, all this happens in service to Satan; i.e., as something to (de/an)nounce and defame through outrageous innuendo and ghost stories—their counterfeits’ haunting aggrandizing God and Manifest Destiny while beset by the Wild as something to colonize all over again: nature “gone wild,” thus savage, impure, and fallen out of a canonically essential pastoral imposed by moral arbiters “grown lax” and paranoid (thus punished by God through Satanic caricature, isolation, and ultimately Malthusian outcomes: starvation, disease, war and death). Satan is the Puritans’ imaginary friend (there are no Indians, in The Witch, the Puritans talking only to themselves while they slowly go mad/starve to death).

A chaste maiden symbolize state dominance; her liberation, through uncontrolled prostitution, is cataclysmic—i.e., the Devil “wins” the moment the state’s baby factories refuse a prescribed burden of care (and when men abjure the same rapacious gender binary, but I digress). Instead, they’re saddled with outrageous entitlement, yet faced with such vituperative and bogus claptrap since birth. So it should come as little surprise when state daughters frequently go mad from threats of exile, rape and execution—that they spontaneously strip naked and run to the hills, almost eager to sin! Debutantes delighting in sodomy and other witchy things, their criminal’s whispered and limitless debauchery cloaks in the dead of night; i.e., as things partially imaginary to repeatedly assault the righteous with, the latter’s menticided brains visualizing profligates who won’t put out for them (the abjection process, during the dialectic of shelter and the alien, fears nature as hungry for superstitious Puritans, all while allegedly “transing their kids” to hug Medusa: through hauntological gender trouble that ruffles police feathers, centuries later).

For the state and its self-policing populace, faeries amount to a fearmongering of wasted wombs, a binarization thereof that puts the colonizers at the top; i.e., during military urbanism and optimism crusading against invented, us-versus-them evils draining state essence—predominantly the right to control female bodies, but also anything that isn’t a white, cis-het, Christian male in order to maintain patriarchal sway over state territories and populations; re: anything monstrous-feminized by the state pimping nature-as-alien for fear of nature’s revenge in kind. But for workers seeking emancipation, faeries—but especially dark, royal faeries—communicate the desire to not only visibly resent our dominators (and their self-righteous bullshit), but slice them to ribbons; i.e., during the cryptonymy process, bristling with fury the elite cannot hope to contain through the same dark devices’ double operation, showing and concealing a plethora of apocalypses.

“If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” wrote the Bard, but nudity is the whore’s weapon; i.e., as a mode of endless moral panic, “hysteria” compelled through state force—a thing to dismiss and preach in equal measure. Policing it doesn’t historically work, the whore’s glee being a maiden set free while dancing on her captors’ graves: “Get fucked, Mom! Way to go, Dad!” Through the usual Promethean anisotropic (re: Hawthorne), the Puritans were the victims worthy of punishment (the witches hunting the witch hunters)!

In this sense, The Witch is hardly unique in its morbid fascination with a Gothic puritanical, including its fatal-when-viewed nostalgia and sinister two-way applications. Plenty of stories give the guilty a place to go and commit venal sins for or against the state; i.e., through Gothic “thought crimes” walking the tightrope between outright vandal and fascist vigilante; e.g., the tank-like T-800 from The Terminator compelling a similar act of revenge to Egger’s titular witch that, instead of policing the usual groups with state force, animates like Walpole’s armor to blast an entire police station to bits[8]:

Per my arguments, such thoughts are fertilized by revolutionary cryptonymy inside the Gothic mode’s unruly aspects; i.e., as something to witness and foment fresh rebellious sentiment with while reversing abjection (versus posture as such; re: Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic, who we’ll talk about more towards the end of the module)!

Regardless, whatever devious wish fulfillment transpires with faerie transplants (to have nature’s monstrous-feminine revenge by killing your whole annoying family and oppressive belief system; re: Eggers), these always happen in darkness. Specifically they unfold in darkness visible relaid through the perceived fairy palaces’ royal decree; i.e., faeries are quite often monsters of a patrician standing and prestige summoned by mere mortals during the restless cryptonymy process, but like the more plebian brethren they walk amongst are generally made to express proletarian longing—meaning through things that are closed off to begin with, and desired for that reason by different parties involved: the forbidden sight that darkness visible classically offers generally tied to a time and place known colloquially as “Hell.”

In short, every monarchy has a ruler for which their voice is given more heed (through the dynastic orderings of power) than plain country folk. Such power is often—in the ancient tradition—borne through nudity as a kind of weapon that offends modern sensibilities (with Egger’s witch often being nude, and Cameron’s terminator and rebel soldier both arriving naked, too); i.e., a courting of power as something to take back by getting into the nudist spirit of things. To it, “Darkness Visible” considers ludo-Gothic BDSM and dark faeries through mutual action in pursuit of Hell’s demonic powers; i.e., which my friends and I—Annabel, Nyx, Harmony and Rose (among others not shown here)—pointedly synthesize, wedding performance and labor exchange to the stimulating act of forbidden creation tied to public nudism; re: castles-in-the-flesh, each with its own qualities that I’ll stress when exhibiting them (e.g., Nyx’ ties to nature; Annabel, to cottagecore; Harmony and Rose, to BDSM and healing from rape; and Crow, to genderqueerness)!

(artists [clockwise, starting top-left]: Nyx, Romantic Rose, Harmony Corrupted, Annabel Morningstar, and Crow)

Except our exhibit, like Carroll’s white rabbit, becomes something to follow deeper inside Wonderland acting as Plato’s cave (a displaced, shadowy replica of the real world and its abuses lying in state). Reversing abjection, we strike conservative parties who view us “dead” merely by strutting our stuff with confidence, and all occur within/upon our naked bodies’ “Aegis”: from an oppressed, fateful voice, rising up from the dark corners of the West to resist, thus subvert, its cultural understanding of the imaginary past—all in favor of something more sex-positive taking said Wisdom’s place; re: as a proletarian Superstructure.

Furthermore, our bare-and-exposed contingency demonstrates a collaborative push for a universal meta awareness—one raised through the dark faerie (ruler) aesthetic as its own “bad religion”; i.e., of larger historical-material trends we want to change through ourselves as monstrous-feminine in small, thus monopolized by virtue of sex, itself, being so heavily policed and censored at large. Canonized in ways that crowd the chronotope with a special kind of darkness visible, the nude sex and force of Gothic castles darken with the pitch blackness known to puritanical censor bars (and modest clothing’s obscurantism). In turn, we highlight the absence of said bars on our bodies’ exposure, but also that of state weaponry and bondage surrounding us, which the state generally won’t censor!

The Gothic’s concentric duality is notably crowded. By pushing it in a post-scarcity direction, we make a mockery of our colonizers’ values, thus their upholding of said values through a dogmatic, platitudinal Gothic. This includes its fairytale wish fulfillment’s dubious, disingenuous framing of the world; e.g., “Suffer not a witch to live” something to apprehend by us and—like the Rolling Stones’ immortal song—happily “paint it black” through bean-sidhe dress-up and crossdress shenanigans camping the lot of ’em: “Look at the Straights, scared of a little pussy!” (with Cameron showing his own Amazonian, white-savior conservatism, having Skynet reportedly terrified of Sarah Connor’s unborn son).

In doing so, we not only embody the sheer heights and plunging depths of fairytales through ourselves, but demonstrate the universal applicability of “darkness” during class war told through Gothic overture. Reclaiming its revolutionary power by punching up during the cryptonymy process (and its own infamous reliance on such things), we reify the dualistic language of sin, demon lovers and all-around vice characters through faeries. Playing them as suitably witch-like, thus invented, our collective aim is to exit the bottle[9] dressed as forgeries but also paradoxically naked disguises (with Hell being a Promethean place[10] to escape persecution and upend profit). In turn, this can be done by others, onstage and off, learning by our example; i.e., to give shape to dark places and persons where anyone can explore off-limit feelings and desires (so-called “yums” that many will “yuck”). Commonly expressed as monstrous-feminine, we are queenly and seeking revenge against the state fleecing us; re: wicked stepmothers and monarchs, but also truthsayers speaking in darkness visible: to our profound abuse and survival while naked, thus exposed to rape we must camp.

So concludes the preface on Puritanism, witches and Satanism (six pages, to haunt the remainder with a spectre of persecution). A couple more aesthetic notes, before we proceed; e.g., the intensity and size difference that faeries commonly evoke when performed; i.e., naked or not, their power feels naked in ways that generate a similar Numinous effect (to be bare and exposed before godly forces)!

Reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Tamora, Queen of the Goths, but also Titania the Faerie Queen and Queen Maeb, Milton’s Satan, Galatea of the Pygmalion legend, Hecate, Medusa, etc—which our performances evoke in spirit if not actually their armies of goblins, wild animals, and Jewish-/queer-coded vampires, devils, succubae, etc—my friends and I humanize the harvest as faeries do: as beings of nature antagonized by state arguments into a kind of false tyrant threatening state rule. Often by speaking to repressed desires for liberation, these include counterterrorist action caged in vice-character stigma, bigotry and phobia! She’s not just a whore, but a jinn—a wishmaster trading tit for tat (often with a sinister, evil-and-loving-it flavor); i.e., while carrying a castle-sized aura. Make something “too big” and it becomes titanically estranged, fully inhuman; our resident baddie is big to be sure but still relatively human-sized: a walking castle to parlay with, a dragon lady to slay during monomyth pastiche. She’s a queen of terrors[11] to treat with—up close and personal, during the witching hour/grim harvest’s liminal hauntology of war! Like a massive blaze, but one that doesn’t visibly burn (which darkness visible does not), her presence notably sucks the room of oxygen: a dark faerie with batwings (and probably having a witch’s familiar or two; i.e., stigma animals; e.g., a frowning toad, raven or black cat) emblematizing the whore in a position of power normally reversed for women having men’s babies!

In regards to dark faeries, then, I often find it useful to think of them in parental terms (the Gothic chronotope being concerned with dynastic primacy and hereditary rites; re: Bakhtin). The wicked stepmother trope, for example, is both diegetically and non-diegetically stuck in the past; i.e., as a corporal-architectural means of dispelling present illusions and weaving fresh spells with, mise-en-abyme. It’s a party/disco-like mood in structure’s time and place (the opera) that queer people commonly relate to/with, one that capital claims to be beyond or otherwise above using themselves; i.e., their proponents serve profit, crafting ancient landowner-yet-undomesticated beings of capricious splendor who make war and turn our worlds upside-down, only to be laid low for their monstrous-feminine hubris. An egregore (concentration) versus an origin, the body-like castle (or castle-like body) appears seemingly ex nihilo, threatens, and then as all spectres of Marx do, it vanishes (or disintegrates).

(artist: Evul)

The Gothic is writ in disintegration. Our faerie-like potential (and flesh) works within the same poetic spheres’ palliative Numinous, conveying some degree of enormity and psychosexual power (often height and heels; i.e., size difference and power imbalance beyond our sex organs; e.g., Gwendoline Christie’s curiously chaste-but-imposing Lucifer from the 2022 Sandman adaptation, below—begging Key and Peele’s “She tall, she tall” line from their 2012 “Karim and Jahar” skit). Instead of compelling state order through tragic-hero narratives, we make Miltonic Satanism conscious of the Devil’s party to liberate nature-as-monstrous-feminine with; re: to ravish ironically by putting “rape” in the quotes of a Gothic fake laid bare!

In feudalistic terms, “sovereignty” was something to randomly assign to bodies that were, unto themselves, haunted by impostor syndrome overshadowed by tyrannical revenge, ruthless torture, dishonorable deeds (re: courtly love) and total conquest, but also boastful claims, grand adventure, nude fakery and murderous fantasy (fake princesses, cursed bloodlines, evil castles, pretend inheritance, uncertain ancestors, bastard children, long-lost siblings, and invented family trees, etc). As such, the Gothic historically litigates through fakery to forge sympathy for the Devil in any shape or size, but also configuration. The Gothic castle, then, is a site of alien invasion and pure illusion, one whose vanishing point leads into and (out from) “a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present.” There, ambush and succor are friends, the “ancient” fake a thing to apotropaically ward off evil spirits less through genuine superstition and more through calculated risk acting curses out: the parent something to fabricate and fear in equal measure.

Except the Devil, contrary to popular belief, has no advocate, and is something of an inkblot to qualify in different ways. Like Lucifer from Paradise Lost, dark faeries never fully assimilate/are always rivals challenging state forms regardless if they tokenize (re: “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”); i.e., occupying the same shadow space as Nazis and using the same tumultuous aesthetic of power and death. Our destiny, then, becomes the ability to craft, thus choose, our fate as something to nakedly diverge away from state copies along the same medieval tracks of invented ancestry (re: Madoff).

As such, the faerie ruler is a Nazi-Communist whore (the world’s oldest profession and enemy—the Medusa), but a powerful one—an indulgent, phallic walking fetish/perpetual thorn in the state’s side vengefully taking what she wants when she wants (the virgin and the whore, the cult of the virgin queen[12]), and someone whose anathematic ability to even want anything (female characters in Gothic fiction being historically passive and denied the right to open sexual appetites while surrounding by rape) the bourgeoisie will desperately try to reclaim by gentrifying the idea of desire/carrying it away from slaves (with women historically being slaves, and Christie’s Satan being penned by Neil Gaiman, a sex pest masquerading as a queer ally): a fetish for the sissy to suckle, the female or GNC dom of nature chained to a straight male.

Envisioned by my friends and I, this exhibit tries to break from stage bondage while evoking unironic harm in campy genderqueer body language; i.e., by illustrating the dark faerie as monstrous-feminine liberator through darkness visible beyond its limited, capricious norms. By ransoming those persons holding our rights hostage, we supply a Trojan-Horse feller of empires, splendidly mendacious via the Gothic’s giddy delight at reversing abjection (from Walpole and Lewis, onwards), and where power and trauma exist, hand-in-hand. While forged sanctuary notably contradicts the safe passage of (and through) a military home afraid of outsiders, we take the faerie ruler and flirt with disaster arranged—as it always is—by state instruments: sex as the most policed device in the world, second only to the Gothic and monsters; i.e., as poetic arguments that not only speak to our alienation, but with it to rehumanize ourselves!

Sex is power—doubly so concerning faerie queens as things to express through reclaimed exploitation; re: our labor value, but also our symbolic value through our genders and sexuality qualified through appearance; e.g., skin color and size—with Crow having undeniably pale skin, but also an impeccable shapeliness to them that is anything but modest (next page). Together we trade in nudity and craft, my invigilation of Crow’s assets (and willingness to disrobe for a good cause, below) speaking to subversive faerie monarchs well enough: go big or go home when satirizing our survived trauma! Context matters, as does the ability to explain it when illustrating mutual consent through public nudism.

(artist: Crow)

Except, while dark power’s “denuding” classically threatens modesty in the state’s hierarchy of values, it’s a bit of a silly myth that you actually have to be modest when speaking truth to power! The simple fact is (and one that Gothic stories illustrate, time and time again), you can speak to power with power-as-abstract in recognizable forms of darkness visible disrobed. Chief among those is the human body resembling a castle and vice versa; i.e., the familiar-foreign, psychosexual signature of a stacked faerie residence as much being the stamp of power and home touched by alien elements, versus the actual humanoid shape emblematic to vanity projects. Rippling through the performance of sex, playing house can become deliberately mendacious and truthful, but also mixed in terms of its literal, pun-heavy metaphors; i.e., faerie castles being as much who embodies them with a brick-house, “mighty mighty” physique.

As disco-in-disguise through danger disco, period, the artificial wilderness is one whose paradoxical reinvention of royal faerie nudity happens during ludo-Gothic BDSM between different workers! It’s a bad camouflage that blends into a space where everyone is wearing the same basic disguise: surviving as tricksters treating ourselves (turning tricks), making mischief while embodying it as a matter of paradox, artifice, guile, teasing and relief!

Bodies or buildings, the Gothic classically emerged out of a delicate, exciting time and perfect storm of variables: an expanding middle-class luxury affording Neo-Gothic authors (and later pretty much everyone, as soon as access to such things expanded beyond the probably-gay sons of British prime ministers and MPs); i.e., a sudden, special sense of play and control that, up until that point, hadn’t really existed beyond aristocratic privilege, and simultaneously was diving back into the medieval semi-imaginary past as something to play with. As camouflage to speak to state power/disorder rising to global prominence using the same stuff to hide itself with, such subterfuge became something not to exclusively admonish, but admire: scaring ourselves, but also the state, by reclaiming such devices to help from rape in theatrical doubles thereof.

For the state, it’s a way of sexing up the banality of evil through weird-nerd culture; for workers, a rising intuition acclimated to the spread of power and lies, thus camping the canon through the usual Gothic disclaimers: everything’s fake, but hides rebellious potential somewhere in all those conventions, fetishes and psychosexual clichés; i.e., Faustian transactions transmitting magical devilry through grave danger and serpentine, bandit-style, black penitent treachery as a hauntological, displaced critique of capital growing into itself; e.g., Radcliffe’s Count Montoni or Father Schedoni part of a larger cultural imaginary relegating British atrocities (and aging national identity) to a cultural imaginary always at war with fictional “Italian” doubles and their evil castles: a forever war haunted by a “just business” mentality of gangsters, liars and thieves, but also poison, bad reputations, stolen brides, concealed weapons and private, mercenary warfare.

To this, the Gothic celebrates chaos and confusion during calculated risk acknowledging state decay (and medieval regression) through artifice. A at times nebulous and completely bonkers, Icarian (crash-and-burn) threat to profit/the nuclear family dressed up as “alien invasion” (which faeries represent), it’s one the state will take seriously while, at the same time, giving workers something to enjoy or otherwise empathize with, through disposable and discredited pleasures; i.e., in faerie-like ways that not only exceed, but purposefully violate state tolerances, mid-cryptonymy! A wish to crystalize by first invoking it, to think of the Devil that she may appear helps workers conjure an imposing luminary that, through our aforementioned nudism, outshines its classical demonizing usage! Rape is historically cheap. Our bodies and identity-through-performance, take on fresh life that overwrites state doubles policing the whore! Police this, dickwads!

(artist: Lera)

Often, this awakening (and its active class character) incurs through infidelity regarding extramarital affairs—the Faustian dealings of the state and monarchs behind closed doors. Despite the crown, the dark faerie queen is an anti-monarch in the traditional sense, but works through entertainment as, itself, a kind of paradoxical threat: the act of being sinful, to some extent, unfaithful because blind faith is historically-materially harmful; i.e., unfaithful to the harmful idea that work is holy, per the Protestant ethic, and pushing back against the idea that wish fulfillment is somehow “cheating” (versus working a low-paying job one’s whole life, subject to wage and labor theft, but also sexual theft through compelled marriage). From a proletarian angle, the Devil opens doors the state wants closed—disaster a thing to court through abjected things; re: demon lovers simply whores, versus medieval slayers, the two overlapping or haunted by their own inverted flavors of sex and force through the same Numinous, abjected scheme.

Concluding our pre-exhibit tangent on Satan, Puritanism, and our aesthetic notes, everyone loves whores, if only as faerie weapons to attack with or stand against; re: sex and force as things to respect and understand above else! There’s a method to our madness, a devil in the details. If the state invents whatever enemy it needs to dialectically-materially enforce its will and rape nature (commonly a woman, it must be said; re: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”), we turn that on its head, fostering a dark mistress/fairy godmother it can never fully pimp, having her whore’s revenge in Promethean worlds (of power older than man, thus profit)! This collab is me and my friends’ fun, conversational attempt to illustrate that, speaking louder together than we ever could alone, our naked fairytale bodies making all manner of wishes come true. Why ask for a pretty dress or the taste of butter when the sky’s the limit? So pay attention, loves; service to Satan is its own reward, and this is what living deliciously (and anti-predation/rape) is all about!

(exhibit 44a1a1b1: Artist: Annabel Morningstar. Annabel is into “cottagecore,” a cottage-industry type of aesthetic that features faeries, and who inspired the idea for this exhibit [though we won’t cover the idea itself until “Call of the Wild”]. Many of the images featured here come from the shoot I commissioned her to produce. 

While demons are whores per the virgin/whore dichotomy, and they communicate as much through pain adjacent to harm during paradoxical revenge dialogs, doing so is a method of social-sexual enrichment in “ace” forms of public nudism; i.e., interrogating trauma and power through Gothic poetics and liminal expression: the booty normally controlled by the state suddenly set free by the natural, God-given owner of said booty—workers! “If you want to critique power, you must go where it is”; demons do that, but equip the interlocutor/participant[s] with the ability to likewise communicate as demons do—through pleasure and non-harmful pain that speak to systemic abuse being an ongoing problem under Capitalist Realism: to bring Hell to Earth, throwing the doors of perception wide on the Aegis [above and below]. Think of it as anal jazz—something to improvise “darkness” with/upon to change/upend state hegemonies; i.e., to profane the sacred in “almost holy” language, where people watch us simultaneously fail and succeed per attempt: on the highway to Hell, loaded with dark power evocative of pre-Christian religions, fertility rites and bacchanal pleasures deemed alien and sinful by the Church, but also pimped by its secularized extensions during the Protestant ethic abjecting the faerie whore’s ghost of the counterfeit [and special weapons, below]!

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Of course, Medusa is the basic notion of such monstrous-feminine/demon lover theatrics upsetting state balance; but dark faeries constitute the same idea as the snake-headed original, as do witches, Amazons, or any other classic female example [that extends easily enough to GNC forms]. They double their canonical variants, while still having that evil, Venus-twin look to them; but again, flow [of power] determines function, not appearance. Appraising and addressing that dilemma through demons like Annabel’s dark sidhe design [and peachy backside, below] helps us not only reclaim monstrous-feminine from state tokenism/obscurantism, but distinguish ourselves and blend in during revolutionary cryptonymy when humanizing the harvest with ludo-Gothic BDSM and bare, exposed forces of darkness! Antagonize nature and put it to work for us.

Furthermore, such poetry is robust, holistic—a complete package fine-tuned to reverse abjection on the Aegis; i.e., during the same-old mythological games’ ghost of the counterfeit assisting rebellion, recultivating the imaginary past in all the same language to camp it; re: Marx’s dead generations, but also the man himself, to yield more perceptive retro-futures looking forwards by going backwards to uncover sex-positive hauntologies within fatal, undead nostalgia [and restless dogma/rebellion during the cryptonymy process].

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Often, this reveals itself through flesh as castle-like, hyphenating the lavish, sensual language of revenge vis-à-vis sex and war with food and death, shelter and combat, pleasure and pain, religion and release placed in optional quotes [e.g., “impalement” or “sheathing[13]“] to achieve live burial in architectural, morphological degrees; i.e., the queen bound to the castle as a funerary chronotope housing a fugitive derelict’s engines of war regardless of ornamentation; e.g., the faerie queen’s fortress backside acting as opening to the netherworld’s opera space/mise-en-abyme as “belly of the beast,” but also butthole of the beast [or other such orifices and cavities, though Annabel’s asshole is a sight to behold, above]: the house as the monster, liar and abuser but also the monster as “brick house” [re: The Commodores] telling paradoxical truths with taboo, thus attractive elements that feed anisotropically in both directions. So often, women [or those treated like women] are, per the whore’s paradox, forbidden from taking abject BBC/manifesting as such, but expected per the profit motive’s colossal, patriarchal double standards to do just that.

Point in fact, Alraune and similar vampiric heinies—e.g., the Moth Fairy from Bloodstained 2: Curse of the Moon, next page—literally stem from nature seeking its monstrous-feminine revenge against profit, hence rape; i.e., acting as bait while fucking back to hell from rape—lying in wait at the traditional place of abuse, thus revenge; re: the bedroom haunted by the vengeful whore’s phallic ovipositor or vagina dentata, double/two-faced presentation, and Medusa-style severed head eating her rapist through Gothic pareidolia and pseudolimb, mid-liminal expression: oscillating[14] inside a murderous womb’s Numinous, danger-zone/nexus-of-crisis hyphenating of sex and force, human and insect, mouth and fang—the palliative-Numinous, Gothic-Communist mommy to quest for and have her dom you through forbidden sight/darkness visible! Something to see that defies belief, the revenge isn’t petty in defense of private property through monopolized terror devices, but substantial and thrilling in defense of nature and labor! The Gothic—as a storehouse of old recycled tropes, dated fakeries and grimly humorous camp—is a fantastic resource for such premeditated discourse/crass danger-disco maneuvers playfully badass dangers.

[model and artist: Annabel Morningstar and Persephone van der Waard]

Except, the same ideas of the vampire’s undead reversal [of the usual feeding direction] likewise apply to the demon’s revenge being functionally the same; i.e., regardless of aesthetic, the dark faerie operating through unequal trade and transformation has Promethean and Faustian outcomes: the destruction of the usual predators by anti-predation devices [and false bodies/animalized Gothic fakeries working in tandem, part of the same vengeful force, above] luring aspiring rapists [which monomyth heroes are] to their doom! Beheading the Medusa is classic abjection, her castration of patriarchal agents while playing “dead” classic reverse abjection; i.e., “helpless” while tied up. It’s a kind of data, but also code-through-power-fantasy speaking to anxiety and anger in methods where the actors and articles involved can reckon with dark forces that raise intelligence/awareness during the cryptonymy process to reverse abjection and foster Gothic Communism; re: moving power anisotropically towards workers through dialectical-material scrutiny during praxial synthesis, not Freudian psychoanalysis [and mainstays, like Creed, Segewick, Carter and Kristeva, etc]. It might seem like the whore always loses; per the whore’s paradox, she reverses abjection through BDSM played out in Gothic stories: showing the military optimist their own cruelty in desiring to rape nature-as-alien-whore, hoping to defeat Capitalism’s hidden sins through combat.

To it, the Gothic is notoriously indiscrete/prone to push-pull while crossing very fine lines; its chaotic violation of boundaries neatly describes the half-real ways that power and its uneven distributions and boundaries exist and unfold in faerie fun and [sex] games. Whether a castle, occupant, or some castle-in-the-flesh combination, awesome [Numinous] power and obscurity are always close at hand. Weighed down by [and reached for with] ambivalent hands and clouded vision, its cryptonymy affords the wielder tangents with narrow cutting power and broad latitude; i.e., amid solvent [dissoluble] feelings of constant confusion and overwhelming danger. The air permeates with thick dread, but also paradoxical excitement; i.e., insofar as liberation and exploitation [cops and victims, Nazis and Communists] all occupy the same kayfabe umbral zone that faeries do: where the atrocities of present social structures, displaced onto faux-medieval language, return as “past” to fall once more under its powerful spell [re: Punter and the ghost of the counterfeit]—all to further or reverse abjection, time and time again!

The Gothic is obsessed with the return of rape as a matter of nostalgia paradox—to a young state of mind with an adult perspective, confronting generational trauma to not only survive, but defeat it at the “source”; i.e., regressing to progress by going to Hell not elsewhere, but at home displaced to a nightmare, castled state—one common to medieval torture scenarios and state crisis and decay expanding said torture deeper into regular in-groups seemingly under state protection. But such places, as haunted homes, are also semi-imaginary playgrounds of “rape” out in the open, exposed dramatically for those who have survived systemic abuse [and its concealment] and seek to unbury such secrets, once and for all.

These cloaked testimonies and Black-Veil affects confess or otherwise point to unspeakable, widespread and atrocious harm on the homefront, themselves announced by great entropy [disorder and collapse] as something that suddenly arrives or erupts into massive, extreme violence: the unstoppable revenge of the barbaric past unto a possible future, holocaust and revenge housed and confronted in the same zone of play’s exquisite “torture.” Commonly denoted by [and abstracted as] Gothic castles and conquerors whereupon time is a circle, imperial abuse and state consumption under capital abject onto a retro-future space-time loop, the “better future” of a once-upon-a-time endlessly devoured by the imaginary past from Elsewhere traveling through space and time [usually outer space, the ocean, the barbaric past, or simply a space of darkness; e.g., Lavos from Chrono Trigger or Skynet from The Terminator—Toriyama’s concentric purple people eater and Cameron’s technological singularity/police state demonic personifications of manmade extinction abjected onto “unknown” spheres during the liminal hauntology of war]: to catch a predator by responding to pain and anxiety as, at times, thoroughly unreliable data.

In Gothic, pain is a problem [re: C.S. Lewis] insofar as uncanny elements promise death inside the home; i.e., as occupied by something older than us, alien even, but nevertheless part of the place we call home. Trauma attacks memory but also rememory as a process, less making it forgetful and more foggy and fractured. In turn, some things are so awful we want to forget and never speak of them again, but silence is death, pain a data to analyze “on the hunt,” gathering evidence; i.e., intel that resists concrete discovery or dismissal as a kind of always-ringing alarm system gone haywire; re: inside the belly of the beast.

Yet, interpretation and deciphering these cryptic omens is required both to survive and live with peace of mind that we aren’t being pimped by tyrannical forces passed off as fakes: the men behind the curtain’s concentric veneer/gobstopper mask, machinations of state, and inkblot scapegoats. There’s always another castle and tyrant inside, because that’s what capital is: endless installations of figureheads, per the ghost of the counterfeit furthering the abjection process. Vague or crystalized, the story is worth nothing without these creatures and their Numinous, at-times-incorporeal halos; i.e., the threat of awesome change, wrought through generational abuse and cryptonymic release: a wild walking castle appears!

In Chrono Trigger’s case, the canceled future [which a hauntology is; re: Fisher] is declared after a failure to stop Lavos, dooming the entire planet: “But… the future refused to change.” Such is Capitalist Realism—deliberately trading genuine activism for personal responsibility scapegoating nature, the latter dressed up as technological singularity or cosmic-nihilist space reaper! Such territories are well-trod, done to death but deathless because of a need to quell Capitalism’s inheritance anxieties among the middle class quaking before the ghost of the counterfeit: the prodigal son, his chickens come home to roost per the Imperial Boomerang’s grim harvest, its dirty little secret cloned and laid bare as “fantasy”!

State proponents, being incompatible with life and consent, lie by design/about everything[15]. They do so to defend what the elite privatize—a fake, which they perform to maintain profit; i.e., through cryptonymic lies-upon-lies and force as something to enact against the counterfeit’s ghost: furthering abjection for the state during Capitalist Realism, the system having an extraordinary tolerance for menticide. So when the state is strong, its cops and their perfidious illusions feel strong. But when the state is weak, these same enchantments wane; i.e., in ways that demand aggressively conspiratorial and preemptive shows of force from the middle class already conjuring up such Radcliffean bugbears: often against “weak and strong” scapegoats [re: Eco] that trap a besieged Earth inside a fluctuating spell of endless lunacy and death [re: Majora’s threat of the falling moon]!

The instigator is typically absurd, Lavos effectively a castle-like “gun porcupine” whose non-diegetic pipe organs herald a sudden invasion-from-within piloted by a central menace [re: the backstabbing Jew]. For the elite, however, a Numinous scapegoat is still a scapegoat; they go so far as to grant the beast its own alien life cycle, expecting us to kneel before it when it erupts from the ground like a cicada or African rain frog[16], then punch down at ourselves during mirror syndrome—in effect, bypassing the elite [and their well-deserved blame] entirely!

For Gothic Communism, though, the whole point is to subvert these black onions’ escalations of civil war—meaning to recreate such cataclysmic disempowerment in ways that empower workers through awesome doom; i.e., in defense of nature from capital during calculated risk: a near-death experience whose obscured, layered threat rears its ugly head when the “old gods” return to have their revenge; re: Medusa and state shift during the Capitalocene. Per the paradox of rape, their evocation feels good during calculated risk; i.e., a confusing reality the elite [the men behind the curtain] will exploit, full-bore: “Worship the state’s gods of death pushed into neoliberal [videogame] spheres; have revenge on who we dress up as the end of the world—Communism and its spectres of Marx!”

[source]

Like the xenomorph’s messy intimations of Ovid, Lavos is a Satanic gay death fairy from outer space/Radcliffean nightmare about the end the world. Aping Hell, the tyrannical butterfly’s cuckoo metamorphosis turns Earth into a ravenous primordial maw eating Utopia cocooning it [re: the caterpillar and the wasp]. As usual, capital will use such degenerate [queer-coded, Archaic-Mother] cryptonymy [and its faerie-like, phantom-class egregores] to charm the middle class, thus further abjection and destabilize the world pursuant to profit raping nature by chattelizing it: the ghost of genocide personified and displaced through DARVO and obscurantism, tokenized by neoliberal copaganda haunting the sham of Utopia [re: “Rome” as retro-future].

“Progress,” then, is classically the word of Cartesian white men raping nature, who frame Omelas as imperiled on the Aegis to justify policing the whore, post-apocalypse; i.e., capital routinely scapegoats its own inevitable “bust” in astronoetic language, the scapegoat a devious ur-thing to push as far away from capital [with Lavos landing on Earth millions of years in the primordial past, similar to Giygas from the Mother franchise, exhibit 60e2] yet push its child soldiers endlessly towards so they can peel back the layers and pimp the whore all over again: the murderous womb, which stories like Alien[17] made so famous, Creed fantasized about from Freud’s arguments, and I reclaimed in my own work, but which Bacon and the Cartesian Revolution’s mainstays have been “running a train on” for centuries! They’re Lavos pulling a bait-and-switch handing out death warrants; i.e., during us-versus-them, gaslight-gatekeep-girlboss stranger danger punching state-compelled unknown during Capitalist Realism! Divorced from the world, it’s still their oyster to pry open and gut; re: through the usual simulative refrains escalating hyperbolic war against the potential for Great Change: idiots trying to conquer death, therefore nature’s great revenge!

The elite push DARVO onto a capitalist analogy dressed up in Nazi-Communist obscurantism! Mighty spectres of death trapped in time as endlessly traveled, fascism and Communism become things to abort and dread, but always to discourage Communism, mid-kayfabe; i.e., neoliberal monomyth refrains promoting death omens of various kinds by the elite unto all workers: home as Hell to return to, or Hell returning home as Juggernaut, Leviathan or some-such Great Destroyer! Faintly detected by stubbornly imperceptive investigators gentrifying extermination war as “cutesy” in service to the state, the heroes of Chrono Trigger and similar fictions [often women and children; re: Radcliffe’s Scooby Doo palimpsest] hunt these endemic alien monsters down, arriving at a final spectral boss looming menacingly inside the web-like trail’s garden of the forking paths: an evil onion/cocoon, hence duty to discharge or execution to carry out—reversing predator and prey in a layered singularity when others failed and the nightmare of the undying vampire never quite ends [so-called “true peace,” itself, an elusive and brittle lie, under Capitalism]!

Per Radcliffe, demons are classic beings to summon and, pursuant to their final forms, “lovers” to defeat through some kind of challenge offered [often survival or temptation]. While Dracula more commonly fits this role, or something else erotic, plenty of Numinous forms have false bodies [re: Lavos] or no bodies at all [re: Skynet, though it cyberpunk pyramid is preceded by an army of cyborg skeletons]. But such qualities skirt the same lines and territories as faerie rulers and their dark chrysalids—asleep, waiting like Cthulhu at R’lyeh to wake up [no one afraid of Capitalism’s fall more than fascists like Lovecraft, but also those strip-mining cosmic nihilism’s Cycle of Kings, post-Giger]: inside a nightmare that, once awake, cannot be escaped [the realization of our being trapped in Plato’s cave]!

[source]

Whatever the form, the function is unanimous. Such beings are vice characters of some kind or another to scapegoat inside a monomyth center/closed space; e.g., vampires as faeries, often of a genderqueer quality bearing anti-Semitic flavors that—under a more modern Radcliffean—become queer-coded witch hunts during sodomy and blood libel arguments exterminating the moth by burning it with state candles; i.e., “bug hunt” being the dark desire to canonically unfold during the heroic quest: to penetrate home as sick with a foreign insectoid plot, excising the insect to whitewash capital and its castles through incendiary fetes and kayfabe. The lynch mob, as such, is a rite of passage purging the usual suspects, their purification by fire happening at night while the interlopers, the middle class, happily beat the faerie to death to achieve regicide, infanticide and genocide [and to get the girl at the end of the story]. Such is copaganda in totality—the monomyth, cops-and-victims power fantasy turning state defenders’ brains off while acting like they’ve somehow “grown up”; i.e., once ridding Paradise of the seemingly invincible barbarian/Grendel stand-in by doing the state’s dirty work. For capital, all roads lead to Rome; all minions lead to a mastermind who, at the end of the monomyth, can be martyred.

A fight over a woman is classically a fight over a chain of property [dowry] and custodial rights, only one side can’t defend itself. Yet, everyone loves the whore [or has virgin/whore syndrome] and its blackhole sun’s black sunshine taunting oblivion vis-à-vis state-induced death anxiety and similar emergencies. In this respect, the Gothic and its demon-mommy poetry’s recursively psychosexual and emotional [ergodic, concentric, anisotropic, etc] turmoil speaks to curiosity’s magnetic charm making anyone feel more at home in alien places; i.e., writ in disintegration[18] with poison as the cure, at home with duality and paradox, contradiction and conflict, society and sickness, and empowerment through “disempowerment” with and without quotes regarding things normally closed-off and simultaneously commonplace; re: sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, but also the stories encompassing such materiel, talent, and merchandise.

Such meltdowns are what the dark faerie ultimately embodies, thus represents through an antihero’s journey—person and place—to bring such things to light for workers or the state: to see you in Hell. “Hell” isn’t “bad,” in this sense. It’s just, like a fairy’s cocoon, a place of radical change, black light and dark desire, thus rape and revenge as something to address, mid-duality and -stasis; i.e., from multiple angles and holistic tangents developing Gothic Communism through wise, perceptive “torture” buried alive—an ass of the gods woken up to deliver a Wisdom of the Ancients caught somewhere in time, but also on the bodies of those we love; e.g., my friend Nyx; i.e., who, on her formidable physique and persona, traps the viewer between pre-capitalist ideas and a post-scarcity future where the state has been permanently dismantled and billionaires no longer exist! A fortress for friends to enter and “die” inside, Nyx slays capital using capital’s ultimate weapon against them: faerie butts speaking for themselves as taking up arms! Like Lavos, Nyx’s planetary “fairy castle” is armed with “ballistics” [missiles or otherwise]!

[artist: Nyx]

Nothing is policed more. Per the Gothic mode, faeries personify dark spaces of chaos; i.e., the faerie queen’s labyrinth[19] of conjecture to penetrate and enjoy what is forbidden outside, but permitted inside itself and its libidinous, brothel-like casino’s concentric morphological architecture; re: mise-en-abyme the reader surrenders unto. Said surrender happens during an eager virgin [or experienced whore’s] imperiled, overwhelmed mind: the slit-like murder holes[20] of prolonged sieges, ramming the barricades of a hungry and curious-yet-fragile brain that, deprived of experience or having too much of it, conflates sex and harm. Fed on warlike fictions exploring that which everyday life teases and denies, the Gothic was the original trashy escape for bored English housewives to slum with!

Speaking to experience and inexperience in equal, stoked barbarity—that being the desire to fuck, but fearing rape as something that women [or those treated as women] are born into—we non-housewives “surrender it all” for something better felt but for a moment in paradoxically “rapacious” tones: “I’d give it all to spend a night with you”; i.e., gentle mommies to nurture and ward off broad, elusive terrors with their teddy-bear softness and nurturing affection, but also “strict,” dark and or Amazonian/faerie femme doms. Working on a switching BDSM mechanism, they instill a sense of masculine strength [with a feminine veneer] during courtly love: comfort food nourishing through multigender mixtures of sex and force during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., developing Gothic Communism on the Aegis, the dated past and possible future constantly haunted by great pain and pleasure in the same fairy-like bodies closer to nature than many under Capitalism currently are!

[artist: Nyx] 

Again, Nyx is one such body—a fairy godmother “goldmine” whose butterfly tattoos denote a high tolerance for pain, but also poetically evoke the ancient goddess Psyche [exhibit 56a1a2]: as a transformative deity linked to the mind set free through pleasure, including pleasurable pain linked to dead metaphors. Capitalism is a cycle of misery bleeding the land dry for a manmade disaster—one of total privatization pimping nature-as-monstrous-feminine by the state, and where such hoarded resources will do no good during state shift; men cannot eat gold and Medusa always wins, so we might as well listen to her avatars ahead of time!

In turn, the only way to exact our whore’s revenge—thus challenge the state and its brittle illusions, infinite exploitation, gross inequality/Protestant ethic/billionaires, automatic violence, and incompatibility with life having their finger on the pulse of capital—is by tapping into our labor’s infinite value and where it’s stored as, to some degree, alien and fetishized during these endless harvests; i.e., our rights versus theirs, we’re the anti-family to capital’s fucked-up sense of nuclear [erectile] dysfunction, division and devastation; re: to humanize the harvest, exposing the state as inhumane. The closer you get to the heart of things, vis-à-vis the infernal concentric pattern, the more Numinous things become; i.e., a reminder that simple things like fruit [and other cash crops in banana republics] lie historically at the core of exploitation: ass farms, but also an outpouring of dark volcanic sentiment[21] turning regular consumption inside-out, the state [and its colonies] having incurred our baddie’s chonky wrath! Fucking to metal, we smash state minds [those of cops policing us] against our whore’s naughty clapping cheeks! “Stare and tremble” as our “pumpkins” turn into chariots of class war playing out the murder of class traitors! The climax is great, the catastrophe one of sweet, sweet revenge!

 [artist: Nyx]

This crop-like cryptonymy includes Nyx’ portentous faerie ass serving as a restless labyrinth to explore, but also her ties to the land and me, her big heart, and aching love for fantasy artwork and rock n roll; i.e., West Virginia, where she comes from, being a place not simply to preserve, but give back with gusto: to the dispossessed. Often ourselves, but also those around us the state destroys—this means labor towns, the miner’s widows, the ruined land and now-native populations all owned in ways we take back through what we own, away from the boomtown factories, mines and fenced-off processing facilities attached to a naturalized boom-or-bust/circular colony. We camp economics and rebellion, making them sexier than usual; and when primed for it, only take a spark to set us off. Strange fruit sending us down special roads, so does the Gothic, through another of Medusa’s avatars—a Mountain Mama, in this case—send us home!

 [artist: Nyx] 

Simply put, we’re hard to believe, yet, like faeries, here we are; forbidden sight, for us, amounts to believing in better worlds through what others see in and upon us as harbingers thereof. While the state frames us as destroyers from Elsewhere to make said worlds “impossible,” we load Capitalist Realism with a black magnetism that reels our audience back in. We’re a demonic sight for sore eyes, then—trading unequally through forbidden things [violence, terror and sex] to anisotropically achieve radical transformation, and seek to be viewed as increasingly legitimate on all registers; i.e., during liminal expression reversing terror/counterterror! The revolutionary idea, here, is to avoid easy solutions in favor of difficult ones, our faerie glamour targeting systems instead of scapegoats by directing violence away from ourselves, mid-rodeo!

So while challenging profit and Capitalist Realism might sound incredibly boring on its face, in truth this takes many different, faerie-like forms that are anything but insipid! Great power lies in them, thus are precisely what the state aims to own, control and harvest by raping nature on loop during the abjection process; i.e., by building monuments to its own displaced abuse, and worshipped at by the middle class to further abject through cryptonymy [and the other Four Gs] all over again; re: Lavos, and those framed as Lavos, are the ones being harvested by state proponents in bad faith. So does capital demand inequality and total control for the state, framing nature as “illegitimate whore” and terrorist to seek its endless and bloody vengeance against.

In that respect, Capitalist Realism could be summarized simply as a battle for legitimacy amid state monopolies, decay and poetic dysfunction. Those of nature, like Nyx, become forces of nature that smash said monopolies with their kindness and shapeliness: a warrior mommy invoking acceptance and love, but also a willingness to transmute state terror with a harvest its cops can never reap, a dark faerie they can never dethrone! “Your ass is fat n your aura is threatening[22]!” Verily.

To that, the Gothic plays with Numinous things and games to instill a paradoxical sense of control; i.e., through rules and devices that can be handled, thus played with, for different means to achieve monumental leverage, post-abstraction; re: a palliative Numinous through ludo-Gothic BDSM developing Gothic Communism to challenge Capitalist Realism [and state ludologies coercing nature through mercenary force]. Doing so happens through things that are historically-materially very hard to regulate; re: sex and force, but also the Gothic/games on either side of class, culture and race war during oppositional praxis. Like Medusa’s fat pussy or asshole, such “castled discotheques” become something to stab, but cannot die—indeed, loves to “die” during calculated risk thrusting to the hilt!

 

[artist: Nyx] 

In times of crisis, then, sex and war are comfort foods, but also a covert means of negotiating themselves within themselves: the whore speaking cryptonymically and cryptomimetically to harm through things that are normally policed, monopolized and colonized in ways we subvert during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: by using what we got, thus arbitrate liberation as our revenge—a desire to see the state blown to bits, but in reality being a process of smaller battles infused with activism automatically equated as “violent” by the state [and cops]: the whore, out in the open, flashing the powerful with her mighty weapons. Physically violent or not, we cannot co-exist with the state, and our struggle against the owner class is always legitimate; e.g., the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson sloganized through “deny, defend, depose” on the shell casings [source: Andrea Cavallier et al‘s “Manhunt Continues,” 2024] versus the same liberatory sentiments enticed through our weaponized bodies demonstrating state fallibility just as well: the elite are not all-powerful; they humbugs!

The fertility of such Gothic maturity is the adventuresome ability to discuss intense harm and healing in sex-positive ways that conceal violence in “violence”; i.e., that push towards universal liberation and away from a shuttered, bigoted existence—fucking to metal not simply to breed or sate the middle class, but disabuse them of genocidal blind eyes! The ghost of the counterfeit becomes profoundly medicinal and multipurpose in good faith, as well as holistic interpretations that liberate workers through speculative richness, but highly abused by state forces in bad faith, theoretic imperialism, and singular interpretations expanding the state of exception on the same inkblot; re: warrior women, witches, faeries, and Medusa [and Medusa’s fat ass, above and below] granting protection when facing the unknown during the dialectic of shelter and the alien—and faced, for some, as if for the first time and others, through déjà vu: to meet again, for the first time, an old enemy and friend both at once that, in doing so, makes our wildest dreams come true. As always, this unfolds while reversing abjection to abstain from Judas silver crucifying the rebel; i.e., the bullet with butterfly wings that riles up the rabble, Medusa’s avatar having more cushion for the pushin’! With darkness visible, she takes us to the gates of Heaven or Hell, a place to come to [or on] and stay awhile!

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Beyond Nyx, consider Annabel’s toxic faerie queen once more. Tits or ass, thighs or stomach, shoulders or throat—all sides to her speak of a scarcely-contained power viewed from different vantage points, her forbidden sight also speaking to a greater world: the plenty of paradise merged with cryptonymy of rape and revenge, voicing joy during calculated risk, but also genuine pain on the dark side of the moon highlighting curious truths and contradictions; i.e., eustress and confusing the senses; e.g., Andrew Friesen’s “My Cat Likes to Be Hit” [2008]: “If she didn’t like it, wouldn’t she run away?” Quite the opposite, “We eat the night, drink the time, and make our dreams come true!” [The Scorpions’ “The Zoo,” 1980].

Another way to phrase it is that humans are animals, and bound by the same principles of confusion and delight[23]: to reunite with things we are alienated from, primarily our faerie-like bodies and their unknown pleasures. This includes pain, but also their psychosexual theatre speaking to rape through “rape” that—all the same—makes our eyes roll back into our dumb skulls: dummy-thicc vitality and salubrious little deaths preceded or overshadowed by Numinous big death/the torpor of Great Destruction; e.g., the rape of a friend or the death of a loved one, the fall of a country or destruction of one’s home. Exacted through inescapable punishment or debt of some kind, our faerie-ness refers to something we ultimately must confront that—despite Capitalist Realism [and its neoliberal copaganda’s dogmatic, ceaseless military optimism]—cannot actually be defeated; it can only be embraced regarding all sides of itself during the dialectic of the alien: us, and by extension nature, exploited by the state as the ultimate destroyer projecting its harm onto the usual Radcliffean, cops-and-victims scapegoats.

Death and rape are classically things to avenge, canonically being yet-another-way for capital to divide nature and conquer her through dualistic terror language. Our revenge is two-fold—acting revenge out while evoking adjacent harm through play during ludo-Gothic BDSM: comedy and drama through demons [faeries, in this case] as an ancient theatrical device, alongside prostitution as literally the world’s oldest profession. Through them, we tell stories to aid in our survival, thus ability to play and learn, but also recontextualize harm through monstrous theatre’s poetic arguments: accessing a part or side of ourselves that is normally closed off; e.g., anal sex as one form of sodomy that faerie magic and darkness visible radiate. Our demons—thus operatic desires, emotional enormity and bedlam, and hauntological calamities—sit on the same shadowy stage as the state’s own vice characters and apocalypses [the revelation generally shrouded in darkness during the cryptonymy process; re, Lavos: “The black wind begins to blow…” Fate farts in the edgelord’s general direction].

To it, we’re the caterpillar and the wasp, the impostor inside a tasty treat that, when consumed, eats you alive from the inside out! We’re the death of patriarchal thought [and tokenism] that abjures profit in succulent, sweet-and-savory ways; i.e., there is no way to change the status quo without some degree of disguise and pain, but also play through transformative [metamorphic] language that is, sure enough, painfully delicious and obvious. Change hurts, especially when it’s up in our guts, poetry’s forbidden fruit rewiring our brains through “trepanation” in quotes—delobotomy killing our darlings, but likewise fucking us just the way we like: with a raw urgency eagerly tearing off our clothes and getting down to business [often through the dialog of sleep; e.g., Shakespeare’s slutty faeries’ from A Midsummer Night’s Dream having a curious and steady penchant for “somno” sex; i.e., using “love-in-idleness” to make people fantasize about extramarital sex].

In the face of unstoppable death and other symbols of capital, risk becomes something to camp—calculated by us through the whore’s paradox of rape! We point to our own harm, but do so to live with it in manageable forms; i.e., the whore’s revenge, mid-paradox, being a tell-tale smile or set of faerie wings: a safe space to wrestle our demons, but also fuck them/guide them inside us by the hand! Through nearness with “death” as a theatrical, paradoxical concept, we faeries raise the stakes, the dead, a lover’s dick, what-have-you. Consent is sexy—especially in times where it is scarce, inserting it needily into our hungry holes. Gimme!

[model and artist: Annabel Morningstar and Persephone van der Waard]

Everyone likes the whore, the tramp, the vice character as someone to root for/spice things up with Gothic panache; i.e., they’re a secret to seek—a dead thing to play with, a puzzle to assemble, a castle [un]made brick-by-brick, to mount and pin to the bed while setting the tempo. The picture, then, is both crystal clear and sharp as knives, but also vague and fleeting as mist, mid-speculation; i.e., walking thunder that, like the Gothic castle, moves while in place and ties to grander and grander intimations blurring Heaven and Hell: a Communist Numinous relaid in castles and warships, but also bodies framed as such, the likeness [and contrast] of kaiju sovereignty that workers embody on the Aegis; i.e., as avatars of Medusa threatening cataclysm in state eyes drunk on Capitalist Realism [mistrusting anything beyond state vision, but also imaginary history beyond fascist reinvention misinterpreting said past]!

Such playful rapture/exquisite “torture” inserts itself into one’s sleeping and waking moments alike, faerie succubae and incubae invading and incubating inside daily life; i.e., with indelible feelings of chaos to embrace as one does Medusa [during the dialectic of the alien]: an alien abductor “taking us away” but not really going anywhere[24], impossible motion cruising for sex perching on the cusp of disaster [warding off evil while presenting as such, brimming with pathos and desire]! So do we live in Gothic times; i.e., inside dwellings of doom unable to contain their own demonic power on any register or in/across any medium. The dark faerie doesn’t merely sit on its laurels, then, but beckons with darkness visible: “Eat me… if you dare! Conquer my dark temple!” As Wordsworth put it, “Let nature be your teacher!”

[artist: Annabel Morningstar]

Abyssal though it seems, the data isn’t corrupted; the corruption is the data, but it must be deciphered. It shakes things up, but cannot be shook; its dated conventions [and their massive, Walpolean personifications—the Capitalocene] continuously fall apart and reform, the Gothic writ with power and decay to best speak to things beyond Capitalism and its ever-decaying illusions while inside them; i.e., inside various persecution networks [and their concentric labyrinths] while using the language of persecution to camp canon with. In other words, the appearance informs the exchange, but the context is ultimately what defines it from a dialectical-material standpoint. Something to sink into, then, those who do can likewise accept how perception can warp under gravity’s dark attraction; i.e., that such a twisting can happen [at cross purposes] while also realizing how the dialectical-material observation itself is fairly constant.

Activism, then, is predominantly leveraged through said observation as something to perform: an identity [faerie or otherwise] attached to legendary victimhood, then overcome and lived with under what power we do have to control, change and recontextualize; i.e., our own survival as beings of nature harvested by state forces through fiction as a staging point. With a little fairy dust, we might begin to arbitrate/scrutinize sex and force in Gothically mature forms that—classically inundated with suspicion, sadomasochism, bondage, and supernatural-to-earthly menace—grant us special, faerie-like ways to speak, means to hunt, and room to breathe as stewards of nature; i.e., as required by us to best survive state counterfeits playing the victim in bad faith, the cop selling out!

Radcliffe’s exclusively white, cis-het rape scenarios, for example, depict the paranoid havers abjecting other groups, punching up and down. Victimhood [and its emotions, like shame, hatred and guilt] do not define us, but do orbit around us/repurpose them through trauma normally buried[25] in what we inherit between fiction and non-fiction, imagination and objective reality interlocked; i.e., as something to perform and play with during ludo-Gothic BDSM, rediscovering “ancient derelicts” like Radcliffe’s spectral castles to learn from them despite their immaturity [we’ll unpack this during “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons”]:

[artist: Carl Gustav Carus]

My dislike—of Radcliffe’s dry modesty but also the army of academic fans licking her mysterious asscrack—is no secret. Then again, she was an intellectual and creative whose writings aren’t completely without merit [refer to my PhD for further discussions about this problem]. So while Radcliffe is a darling to kill, these windows into the past still offer dated ways of thinking we can gleam current-day truths from; i.e., while moving around inside them during ergodic motion to excite faerie-like feelings, which Gothic castles very much were [and are] designed for! This means they’re valuable despite their flaws[26], insofar as they’re littered with playful ways of framing arguments about survival… which again, Gothic castles concern themselves with—to “survive” as relics, but for us go beyond those who harmed us without irony to begin with; i.e., to survive those who, as Gloria Gaynor put it, “hurt us with goodbye.” Forget eternal damnation, ours is endless delight through exquisite torture camping the canon, fawning to feign deference towards those who do not deserve our genuine love or uncritical gaze!

While the Gothic is classically about facing our fears [especially of uncertain, imposturous parentage] by anchoring us in infernal, concentric darkness to survive, it commonly forces people to face things that—like Radcliffe’s unmappable castles[27]—are never entirely imaginary and, worse still, make us doubt reality and imagination. Questioning our sanity and lineage/sense of self in the process, we must acclimate to a state of asking questions useful to our survival under monomythic duress, violence, captivity and alarm, held hostage as prisoners of dark love hunting us; i.e., in a state of probing survival [the rememory process] whose hypervigilance/reliance on intuition goes beyond any single worker or sanctioned action, and instead encompasses what all of us can offer as, to some extent, like faeries and their castles’ forbidden and exotic but also policed elements; e.g., Disney’s “princess” variety promoting assimilation through whitewashed, gentrified castles that put “Gothic” in the hands of a smaller paying clientele seeking a colonized wish fulfillment; re: Radcliffe’s secret princess trope, granting a common girl the bounties of conquest simply by surviving a night in the dastardly place. Whatever camping of the monomyth we do will often be through our bodies as “faerie,” castle-like and genderqueer.

[artist: Mugiwara] 

Mugi, for example, is a survival sex worker/plural trans man; trans men, per the whore’s paradox, are commonly exploited by heteronormative society treating them as unnatural—doubly so for plural persons. Any attempt to humanize ourselves happens through our exchanges subverting such norms by reclaiming said language for liberatory purposes; i.e., our bodies and labor are valid, as are the faerie-like identities attached to them normally invalidated through state doubles and their monomythic violence: likenesses of Medusa, but also each other regardless of gender or sex, shape or size, color or character! Anyone can be oppressed, and anyone can camp the monomyth, hence liberate themselves through the Gothic’s Promethean fairytale; e.g., Mugi, Crow and Victoria’s ample and shared cause through the same pedagogic exhibitionism as Nyx and Annabel, but for expressly GNC reasons:

[artist: Crow] 

With the above and below collages, Mugi and Crow played with me for my 38th  birthday because I liked playing with them [and Crow is one of my partners]. But they’re also two of my muses—and Victoria [next page] is a close friend. More to the point, we’re all trans, and I want to give GNC people a voice beyond just myself while illustrating mutual consent through a shared exhibit’s collective labor exchange. We’re all faeries of a GNC sort, making a case for ourselves using what we got!

Trans people have always been people, and despite blood libel framing us as evil faeries, we’re actually quite good around children. We certainly don’t eat them, and can even have them [e.g., Mugi has a daughter who’s as cute as a bug’s ear]! Simply put, we have families and friends and lookout for each other under state pogroms incited by weird canonical nerds. Our life and labor have value, whereupon mutual aid is not only fine, but just another form of exchange that includes our bodies and labor cast, during demonic/faerie poetics, in a sex-positive light [versus limiting certain groups to caste-style positions; e.g., Jews and usury or untouchables and begging during public outcry/moral panic]. Through ourselves cast as faeries onstage and off, we overcome harmful expectations while allowing for public nudity as a holistic, all-inclusive form of activism; i.e., expressing itself through us, punching up towards universal liberation! “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light!”

Furthermore, biology is hardly essential when it comes to gender identity and performance, but informs whatever liberty emerges in either case [re: sex and gender as separate from each other and unanchored from biology, yet still relating back and forth on a magical fairy spectrum].

To it, Crow and Mugi are both trans and AFAB; I am trans and AMAB; and my friend Victoria is intersex. All of us are faeries promoting darkness visible, each one a special snowflake [as the chuds so often like to put it]:

[artist: Victoria] 

Each of us represents a genderqueer aspect to existence that abjures heteronormative, thus settler-colonial and Cartesian standards; i.e., to exist despite capital exterminating us, our survival a poetic and revolutionary act of defiance made in defense of nature-as-monstrous feminine raped by state forces.

To it, our whore’s fairytale revenge is to exist in ways of make-believe that—far from being totally fictitious or imaginary—defy total banishment to “pure fiction” by shifting deliberately into half-real territories; i.e., as art that speaks to our lived, GNC realities onstage and off, and that when exposed by us through revolutionary cryptonymy purposefully challenges profit as a structure: in defense of ourselves and our friends emerging from the abject land of faeries [often dark forests, said forest alluding to Dante’s Inferno, but also Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ovid’s Metamorphoses] to speak to apocalypse. By reversing abjection as dark faeries so often do, we camp the canon; re: punching up at state hauntologies, abjection, and cryptonymy [commonly relaid in monomyth language; e.g., Metroidvania] to break Capitalist Realism to bits! We’re Lavos, but instead of a Greater Destroyer capable of what the state accuses, you have those who walk away from Omelas!

In turn, our wishes are “dark” because they deal in unequal, forbidden trade and radical transformation/desire that upend the current order in pursuit of a post-scarcity world that, while it doesn’t harm others, remains tied to the harmful past as partially imaginary and nebulous; i.e., its plastic, signature poetry sits adjacent to the barbaric historical-material trends of older dead generations [re: Marx, but also the many Gothic castles embodying nature’s dark vitality and demonic desire, power and knowledge]. We faeries camp our own rape, putting “rape” in quotes during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., while highlighting our own queerness surviving campy doubles, said doubles still reflecting unironic copycats felt upon the same Aegis. We are haunted by genocide’s shadows of shadows/castled echo, but camp our profound survival [of these castles] to communicate through Numinous, psychosexual sensation—another sapient trademark the dark faerie subtype excels at! Where faeries are found, castles—usually abandoned—aren’t usually far behind!

This GNC idea of universal solidarity and value through alienation goes beyond Mugi, Crow, Victoria and I; it also includes “non-white” bodies, be those with a different skin color [e.g., vitiligo, in Mugi’s case] but also body type: thicc. We’ve considered this spectrum earlier with Nyx and Annabel—and just now with Mugi, Crow and Victoria—but have yet to explore its monstrous-feminine margins.

[artist: Sinead]

My friend, Sinead, for example, is fat and genderqueer [not a woman, but fae[28]]—much of faer praxial focus centers around fat liberation merged with faerie-style makeup and genderqueer artistic statements altering traditional beauty standards [or shifting to older standards thereof; e.g., the Rubenesque]. Similar to Mugi and I, fae are policed for what makes faer simultaneously forbidden and attractive under state venues: a forbidden fruit that refuses to take the grim harvest lying down! It becomes, for each of us, a “secret self” to de-closet, then camp canon with—having power the state wants to control as “dark,” unholy and “demonic,” during witch hunts stomping faeries.

[artist and model: Sinead and Persephone van der Waard]

Some faeries stomp back. In the poetic language of the Medusa, I’ve drawn Sinead as a fat underwater queen, her tomb a monstrous-feminine place to plunder in the Cartesian tradition: to, in Francis Bacon’s words, “penetrate the womb of nature and torture her secrets out of her.” This translates monomythically to the moving of money through nature in the usual acts, but also sites of conquest: fat and ready for slaughter but also, per Capitalist Realism, presented as abject, Numinous, “asking for it”; i.e., a scapegoat to butcher within endlessly recolonized zones, where men plunge into and prove their manhoods—by raping and reaping nature, which fae and faers Promethean space prevent by fucking back through Numinous anti-predation challenging profit!

As Sinead demonstrates, Medusa isn’t a woman; fae are the dark mother/fat-and-sassy whore whose watery grave [and its riches symbolizing nature’s endless labor value and exploitation] is where stupid, enterprising men go to die the Roman fool [the Gothic operates dualistically through doubles and decay to defeat enemies of nature; i.e., with their own colonizing devices reclaimed for liberatory purposes]! Wrecking ships on theatrical safe “danger” spaces where true death and rape are impossible, the “kraken” takes faer stolen booty back from horny-yet-superstitious plundering idiots—a Great Destroyer striking them ignominiously dead with faer Numinous booty and whore’s revenge! In doing so, fae give rise to a collective mistrust of, and to desire to change, capital’s mistreatment of planet Earth: a Leveler to entreat before it makes good on its name.

To it, fae target the current mechanisms of state as having evolved over centuries out of the ancient world [and Greece and Rome] to exploit nature through the advancement of state trifectas, monopolies and qualities, thus belief systems. Medusa challenges this advancement through artistic statements that evoke the ghost of the counterfeit [through the poetic language of the half-real ancient past] to reverse abjection, thus profit and genocide as things to prevent: showing the state it’s doomed on faer Aegis, and faer own superiority/unfriendliness to profit in the process! So do we become stewards to perform the symbolic death of the state raping us in bad faith, translating through praxial synthesis into activism [thus universal liberation of all work under Capitalism] through iconoclastic art: to make men fear what, for sailors, they are generally at the mercy of. The sea, then, is a cruel mistress who cannot die, but one who properly respected will yield great rewards: not being unironically trapped and isolated by shapeshifting darkness, then buried alive! In other words, quit while you’re ahead!

To it, praxial synthesis is a matter of involvement that leads to development through daily habits cultivating systemic catharsis; re [from Volume One]:

Systemic catharsis requires praxis as conveyed through our extracurricular instruction’s cultivation of good social-sexual habits; i.e., de facto educators relaying a pedagogy of the oppressed through trauma writing and artwork that speak to living with rape under warlike conditions, raising the collective, solidarized awareness and intelligence required towards preventing future abuse (ultimately dismantling the state) [source]. 

However we get involved, universal empathy and resistance to state overtures should be our top priority when triggering the responses we want. In short, we lead by example, advancing awareness and intelligence [thus rape prevention]through our bodies, labor and social-sexual, artistic-pornographic exchanges.

Last but not least, this isn’t always about raw, vaso vagal violence and mutilative revenge [e.g., murder or castration] committed against our abusers; it also includes the whore’s revenge challenging profit [thus rape] by receiving pain in defense of nature-as-monstrous-feminine—i.e., by establishing intersectional solidarity among pain-loving friends, who put “rape” in quotes by receiving pain through what we deliver unto ourselves: as something to delight in because it’s not a terror weapon meant to pacify us, but heal from rape as our revenge by playing with pain in classical ways.

Our shared human struggle, then, includes exposing our pain in ways we paradoxically reclaim in ironically palliative forms; re: through the whore’s paradox, but especially the cryptonymy process: through cheeky “punishment” arguments that show us in control during calculated risk; i.e., through the appearance of impotence, yet deftly wielding things that, exposed as we desire to expose them during ludo-Gothic BDSM, incur the wrath of people who cannot immediately attack us, yet desperately want to in bad faith. Enraging them with our Aegis, our hellish Communist powers occur by outing them, denormalizing their predatory actions [and subterfuge concealing said actions] from safe vantage points; e.g., the buffer of the phone or computer screen, or otherwise physical distance; re: “flashing with power” to those who have it “in spades”; e.g., my friend Rose’s substantial “battlements”:

[artist: Romantic Rose]

To it, faeries are demons, which—while they constitute unequal, forbidden exchange and startling transformation—also morphologically synonymize with habitats whose dark, radical desires upend state control over terror and pain as darkness visible; i.e., in pursuit of post-scarcity with pre-capitalist hauntologies about giving non-harmful pain; re: that of flesh concerned with power and knowledge, linked to buildings; e.g., faerie-castle torture dungeons, appearing to revenge past wrongs but also existing merely to spite genuine abusers! “We can ‘torture’ ourselves, thanks!”

The dark faerie then, becomes someone to perform and savor in the bargain; i.e., “What dost thou want?” as something to act out through cryptonymic activism masquerading as “mere playtime” and guilty pleasure/controlled opposition, yet feels paradoxically genuine in its playful espionage—as naughty but educational in ways that, while they seem wholly doomed/self-destructive, actually prevent rape [cops, by comparison, enforce rape]. Gothic castles are traditionally places of fear and fascination; so when people see a body-like castle or castle-like body on the horizon, they will often be drawn towards it—i.e., as the faerie refrain’s promise of a hell of a good time, including a delivery site to deposit some dark offering or another [and overshadowed by systemic abuse, all the while]!

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

Beyond cum tributes illustrating mutual consent, the prevention of rape happens by one, raising intelligence and awareness to mobilize activism during praxial catharsis; and two, recultivating the Superstructure while simultaneously exposing our attackers in ways they cannot immediately kettle; re: anisotropically reversing the terrorist/counterterrorist argument of monstrous-feminine language during the pedagogy of the oppressed while giving pain during crucial lessons: not all pain is bad, pain is vital towards growth, and pain during sex can enhance the experience[29] and change how we view sex in socialized [ace] forms; i.e., while humanizing those routinely harvested by state forces abusing said language [re: DARVO and obscurantism].

The Gothic, in turn, interrogates trauma and pain through public nudism uncovering dark things/things coded as “dark.” In doing so, it reminds our attackers where such power is normally stored—through workers and their art, but also their bodies and pain as part of the same infernal trade, bouncing back and forth to heal from rape; i.e., by communicating, as people do, in the half-real, castled and demon-fairy codes: of pleasurable pain elucidating repressed, “unspeakable” desires! Whatever investigations of trauma the state impedes, we facilitate through said infernal trading of pain, bondage [the Gothic in love with desensitization and immobilization; e.g., the constriction of one under attack, below] as something they can’t really control: to use at our own risk in ways that lower the odds of actual harm taking place!

[artist: Kingocrsh]

 To it, how would the state begin to abolishing BDSM when it carries such a famous double standard? Furthermore, evocations of rape and harm sit in quotes, thus on the cusp of something Numinous and healing insofar as rape can be healed; i.e., beckoning all who watch, “Come and see!” To the hungry, “Let them eat cake, pudding and pie!” To the combative, “Let them go twelve rounds with the champ!”

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

Romantic Rose, beyond the pre-existing images already shown, deliberately posed for this exhibit—doing so as a dark faerie queen I might play with and illustrate on my canvas to make a larger point about ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., with her massive tits, cute tum, big booty and fat thighs, but also her huge heart and soft words telling me I’m a good girl as we play together! Our joys [and toys] intermingle through the mystery of monstrous-feminine work reclaimed from state alienation and greed in castled forms of courtly love, thereby transforming into something we then show the world as alien to reunite with; i.e., through the demonic creative process purposefully given a magic-faerie stamp about healing from pain by involving it in ways we can control and camp: “her tits were there,” living deliciously in spite of the Protestant ethic [no need for a hasty exit when we’re protected behind a phone screen]! Sometimes, big things are to be used; sometimes, they’re for show—a way to make you wet and/or hard a glance, imagining as you do what is more fun in one’s head than in practice: the anxiety of receiving pain from things that might be a little too big! Faeries of a royal variety tend to be tall; their junk is less reported on historically [ol’ Shakespeare omitted Oberon’s cock size, if memory serves] but often imagined as matching said height in relative length: the carrot-y girth of a hellish botanical’s mondo faerie dong [with many improvised dildos being produce]!

[artist: Romantic Rose]

Keeping with Hell and darkness visible, this generally waits on the cusp of dark, intoxicating discoveries first given shape through games played by a great many users; i.e., through ourselves as controlled pieces of meat, but also our meta performances/playgrounds consciously imbued with dark poetic energies that faeries revel in. We are the witches of our time, the mistress of our own fate—of the universe freed from police abuse, hence beyond what capital orders and exploits for profit—and again, some witches hammer back.

Of course, how they chose to is ultimately up to them, but it usually happens through devices of darkness, power and knowledge recognized by the larger world, under capital—force, yes, but sex through demon BDSM and faerie-like games; e.g., size queens like Rose, above, taking giant artificial cocks for fun—not to please sexist men, but to emasculate abusive parties insecure about them own members and lack of regular sex. In doing so, these behaviors expand beyond what tortures the state permits, our simulacra exposing theirs as dangerous [e.g., death before dishonor] while putting ourselves in performances of “danger” the state will do its best to stamp out. For them, we’re an unweeded garden grown to seed, the state seeking once more to control what it rapes routinely for profit [which is all the nuclear model systemically is]. By stamping the tramp, monstrous-feminine fairy rulers become conspiracies of unironic rape; re: to scapegoat and tokenize through DARVO and obscurantism by state predators, nothing more.

Touched by trauma, survivors of rape always feel somewhat uneasy/off-balance by any setting evoking exploitation and liberation; i.e., on the same dark surfaces and in the same ambiguous thresholds where faeries call home/rule from. To speak to atrocity and feel good as we do is to play under such positions of perceived disadvantage, restless and agitated by otherworldly enchantment and vaso vagal excitement; i.e., unable to fully relax otherwise, even when said disadvantage isn’t obvious and the warning signs are seemingly absent [the violence of the past happening without warning—sudden and extreme at any moment, exigent and warrantless to monopolize such things].

That being said, there is a vestigial and ongoing torturous element, one I’ll keep investigating to conclude the exhibit with; i.e., with Rose a bit more, but also Harmony Corrupted playing the greatest faerie of all—the Medusa!

Trauma is something to live with; for those with a history with or of violence, weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma[30] to change the survivor for good. Until the day we die, we feel, like the dark faerie, attuned to self-destruction seeking escape by camping harm; i.e., by cramping their style at the proverbial crossroads, out-fiddling the fiddler with our own faerie glamour as, like all deities according to Blake, residing in our breast! The power to disrupt and offend capital lives within us—not as atomized workers, but a plastic collective whose murky  wisdom reaches backwards and forwards in all directions!

To shake such imbalance, then, and retain our defense mechanisms/”spider sense” regarding hidden dangers, we often “martyr” ourselves together during calculated risk [which public nudism essentially is]—to twitch and moan like convulsionnaires, opening ourselves wide to persecution but also the liberation and acceptance of us as psychosexual beings growing accustomed to a hunted, predated existence we can pierce the fog of war with; re: the faerie’s special sight being the strange, at-times-atrocious appetite for pain acquired under capital raping us for profit, which historically-materially encourage tokenization under criminogenic conditions [re: desperation and convenience]. In our hands, the ritualized administering of pain can happen in ways that are only not harmful, but easy enough to pleasurably control when we otherwise feel out of control; e.g., candle wax poured gently on soft, vulnerable parts of the body like the breasts:

[artist: Romantic Rose] 

If you’re wondering what on Earth might possess someone to try such things, the short answer is “capital.” As such, the female body is classically haunted by pain as something to control under capital’s endless pimping [wax being a medieval sculptor’s analog to human flesh]. To it, Rose takes power as something to subvert and transform into her revenge through things that, generally weighed by virtue of size, become more powerful than her enemies can hope to harvest, contain, enslave or match: obstacles and theatre curtains for them, not Rose [total privacy, safety and consent something of a myth under Gothic’s ongoing surveillance, which provides an odd kind of cloaked honesty in how survival victims often feel: under attack and lied to by home as untrustworthy but without exit[31]]! Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, to heal from rape is to play with rape, and that includes pain and its operatic symbols/decaying rituals honed over centuries; e.g., comfortable discomfort, bold caution, weak strength, honest dishonesty, safe danger and similar oxymorons well-known to people living with trauma not weaponizing it against others.

The perditious, ecclesiastic background remains a common sticking point for Gothic satire; re: Lewis; e.g., the camping of religious rapture and torture-as-canon through psychosexual martyrdom as profoundly tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless loaded with textual markers [as the Gothic very much is] that allude to actual harm. This extends to those Rose wants to see such things unfold witnessing her emancipation from the weight of survived trauma; e.g., me having Rose pose multiple times in compromising positions [and tortured, penitent outfits of contrition] that, in the wrong hands, might disadvantage Rose, but through us working as a team, weaponize exclusively to our benefit: the faerie queen set free to work her magic on the living world! “C’mon, scrub! Don’t be courteous; slay that pussy! Mommy has needs! Pound me like I owe you money!”

[artist: Romantic Rose]

Shown for my pleasure—but also to make a combined, social-sexual political statement by inspiring me to paint her as a dark monarch afterwards—Rose uses her body to stress our shared agency over such things; i.e., that we, as sex workers, are capable of working together to speak out against genocide for all peoples under capital. We do so by using our bodies and labor through universal liberation; i.e., as active and informed by ourselves contributing to something greater and in development: Gothic Communism. Evoked selectively through monsters—this time choosing faeries that, under a Gothic lens, function as demons do—their hypnotic glamour[32] administers through flesh and the power it holds having an admittedly demonic signature. Ours is the conscious reclamation of demonic poetics during rape play—carefully shaped and positioned to convey the basic human right to exhibit such things however we want; i.e., to negotiate and advertise [sex is power as something to trade through artwork, and porn is artwork that can achieve such activism to a high degree].

This includes rape play as something to champion as faerie-like and demonic; i.e., as a Promethean being to humanize and hug during the dialectic of the alien avenging nature against profit, of which Harmony also volunteered: my Medusa, and someone I engage in consent-non-consent with on a regular basis [next page]. She straight up slaps, but during live burial offers a much-needed boost to keep at it; i.e., when the chips are down and our libidos/anxiety are up inside these hauntological spaces of doom parking atop our usual safe-space residences [the Gothic famously combining cautionary-to-unbridled lust and looming death/rape fears]!

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

Gothic Communism, then, is something that Nyx, Rose, Annabel, Sinead, Mugi, Crow, Harmony and I do together as friends showing each other off in whatever ways we want to be seen; i.e., as sexy avengers illustrating mutual consent and collective worker action through demonic-yet-sex-positive art exhibits. Rose and Harmony, in particular, grace the cover of several modules for a reason; they are each incredibly kind, honorable and sweet, but also fuckable and fluent in Gothic—i.e., able to work its dated-yet-deathless fetishes and clichés to our collective advantage. When I play with them and my other friends, I feel like I’ve made a deal with the Devil—one whose faerie-like powers set me free, delighting in unknown pleasures couched in prison logic turned on its head. A composite danger disco, they compile a concentric fortress to lose myself in, but also to feel safe from self-righteous, militarily optimistic and tokenized pretenders who hunt us down in bad faith during the liminal hauntology of war/ghost of the counterfeit/Imperial Boomerang’s canceled future [often a vehicle and/or building evocative of an “ancient” tyrant returning to beat us to submission/demand we kneel before them[33]]—someone to believe in when surrounded by so much complicit cryptonymy and neoliberal hogwash.

Keeping with faeries, the idea is informed bliss under Gothic-Communist development; i.e., no gods or masters, just friends who love and protect each other in the struggle to be free from state abuse using the same demon-BDSM language and aesthetic of power and death: what they can’t monopolize, despite stiff competition compelling them to do so! The enemy is unironic oppression and betrayal, thus police actors upholding the state in some shape or form. There is no way to achieve rebellion, thus prevent rape, without resisting and protesting to a meaningful, demonstrable degree; i.e., rebelling against those who uphold these structures, symbolism translating to socio-material change: of criminogenic conditions [and language] towards post-scarcity conditions through medieval poetics reclaimed by workers for those ends. Power aggregates for them, but also for us backfiring their schemes.

Like the Amazon’s fur bikini or nun’s habit, then, there is no way to do this without exposing ourselves to some degree of exposure, thus risk. This vulnerable phrasing includes tracing the anxious spiral of death and decay that breaks how we see the world, whereupon the Aegis becomes something we can use only after the illusions forced onto us since birth are shivered by our demonic theatre, our ludo-Gothic BDSM, magic power and mad science something to behold during the same spaces and personas whose darkness actualizes proletarian needs, not bourgeois ones. Again, such darkness is simply where forbidden dreams [of unequal power and knowledge] come true; re: as a dualistic, dialectical-material matter of revenge through the Gothic’s demonic creative expression, betwixt residence and resident. The idea is to throw aside “no good can come of it” when playing with these notions, and use them to our creative; i.e., to reify what capital denies us: our creative freedom breaking Capitalist Realism paradoxically with darkness; re: something that can be used for liberation or exploitation through discourse about such things, including famous monsters and their lairs: as things to embody struggle with during the abjection process!

Like Egger’s witch, we dark faeries are not waifu. If anything, the power imbalance, stormy disposition, and class character makes that impossible. Instead, through the pedagogy of the oppressed as modular and intersectional, we steer the conversation away from those used to being the center of attention [and always make everything about them; i.e., white cis-het men, or those emulating them, inside the Man Box]. By daring to speak up for ourselves and those less privileged than ourselves in weird-nerd culture, we show strength and vulnerability in equal measure! Revolution is messy but the fact remains, some people are chattelized more than others; those with less privilege will be expected to betray more to elevate, meaning solidarity for and among oppressed groups is incredibly important lest we cannibalize ourselves.

We’re all monarchs under Communism, loves—not defined by skin color or national boundaries but by the bounds we form and make to help one another! Anyone who excludes others to be a king for a day is a traitor and a fool; capital—an unapologetic system of theft—relies on cheap loyalty and quick betrayal to keep the elite in power. No honor among thieves? That’s all capital does, and to not help those in need would be to commit a grave, insurmountable error! We give back to each other by refusing to sell ourselves to the lowest bidders imaginable; we whore ourselves for Gothic [gay-anarcho] Communism: by spitting on Medusa’s trapdoor pussy before we pin her to the wall, lubricating revolution however we can—during explosive combative sex!

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

Medusa isn’t something that exists in a vacuum, then, nor is it merely a device of police hegemony against criminalized elements who aren’t allowed to resist the state’s sudden and merciless terror attacks; we can take her as a poetic device and embody furious, horny and rebellious aspects of ourselves and our own frustration, yearning and longing the state will only try to rape and repress labor with. Medusa unseals such documentation, herself an “ancient,” found document of the Gothic style.

A new Satanic cathedral, a new master of the universe—us, haunting the counterfeit and abjection process! “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Our fortresses, our operas, our titanic passion something that cannot be contained, silenced or ignored taking us to paradise upside-down [salvation being a metaphor for orgasm that we enact in this life, and pervert in the bargain]! It’s a Gothic castle to give voice to rape by playing with it in “unspeakable” forms/darkness visible we can unpack room by room, at whatever pace we require to heal: to express vulnerability yet gain confidence, self-respect and growth recovering from self-hatred, internalized bigotry and impostor/mirror syndrome, etc, on the same road to Hell; re: the postpunk world-in-decay where rebirth is joyously found, the doomed inside gravitating towards the convulsionnaire’s psychosexual martyrdom and sweet theatrical release promoting better things, mid-infernal-concentric-pattern, mise-en-abyme and Cycle of Kings, etc; e.g., the haunted house, Gothic castle, or circular ruin [see my work on Metroidvania for more examples]: the monstrous-feminine villain of the classic monomyth, reversed through Gothic homecomings to break Capitalist Realism with, inside the same endless loop of dying space-time!

Royalty are fluent in the language of service and bondage; Gothic theatre is a safe, campy space to play with powerful things that people like, including dark faeries that mirror the Gorgon as—above all else—a strict taskmaster and ironically “cruel” mistress [rawr]. Nothing is more powerful or loved/feared than Medusa, a liberated whore reversing abjection on her Aegis; boundless and bare, the dark faerie—suddenly naked—is exposed as mighty-mighty and upon the black mirror’s sleek surface: paradoxically ripe for the taking as she haunts the nuclear model with rape and whose “rape,” during ludo-Gothic BDSM, is haunted by nuclear abuse hunting witches! As Matthew Lewis showed us, we can play and speak to genocide by flaunting pain as an aesthetic linked to sex, but stay able to detach from and camp it with royal aplomb!

To better the instruction and regain control during her revenge against profit, Medusa knows your darkest desires. She’s seen and done it all, only asking that when it’s her turn, you ravish her wrecking-ball ass just the way she likes [with Harmony being agender and fluid in her expression—an avatar of the monstrous-feminine, hence Gothic Communism beyond herself, the war she makes towards liberation seen chaotically on her surfaces and in her dark, wet thresholds]! “There you go! Good boy! Fuck mommy just like that! Mount, now heave to! Ride the lightning all full speed!”

[artist: Harmony Corrupted]

The medieval, faux or not, enjoys marrying popular culture to the language of strength, faulty bloodlines, questionable destiny and weakness [to be weak for someone/show vulnerability around them] that it might adequately speak to larger forces at play/get to the bottom of things [the Gothic loves puns]. Revolution, then, is very much something to get into the mood of through these pernicious elements’ flexible camp and persistently rigid “sticking-to” of our arguments. So push her face down into the bed; stab her demon pussy to humanize the harvest! Fantasies of subjugation/dark mastery go both ways; Gothic Communism brings them [and the dark faerie/whore of nature] out of the bedroom [re: Foucault] and into daily life once more! PRAXIS SYNTHESIZED; Medusa can’t die/always hungers for more cum from gentlemen callers!

More to the point, invoking Medusa’s famous aptitude for punishment [and threshold for pain] becomes an opportunity to let down one’s guard and take homerun-style “power shots” of a controlled and playful variety—to spar more aggressively than you might elsewhere when camping rape with some degree of seriousness! To turn up the heat, mid-kayfabe, Medusa [and her veteran initiative] can give as good as she gets, the exposure of nudity something that bounces pain back less like turtles and more like mating porcupines charging their batteries!

[model and artist: Harmony Corrupted and Persephone van der Waard] 

Something is always given and received per exchange. As Harmony shows us, Medusa is something to perform towards universal liberation by Gothic means and motivations; i.e., by paralyzing capital through rude, alien suggestions of rape putting “rape” in quotes, but haunted by its darker side on the Aegis. So don’t fear the reaper—court her and see what she has to say! Witness, mid-capture, Medusa’s dark castle of unholy butt sex, looming deliciously to devour your misguided sense of piety! To squish your junk and your brain, crushing your stupid, costly preconceptions handed down by bourgeois idiots! To invite you to investigate her tremendous, moon-sized urges and wicked, Kegel-esque palpitations, she’ll have you realize [sooner or later] that all workers are gods waiting to wake up and take back what’s theirs from state pretenders!

Revolution is a duel, and it pays to be awake; a champion galvanizer, Medusa gets your attention and keeps it. So wake up, take hold, and reclaim through faerie apocalypse [revelation]: we can have what we want/need not be careful what we wish for! This realizes during state degrowth, the latter occurring by vacillating chemotherapy—a dark-pulse tone poem pushing forbidden things along while disguising our faerie selves behind earthly “beards”; i.e., as controlled opposition, shrinking the bourgeoisie like a tumor! Animal magnetism sets in among commercialized doubles; we camp canon by doubling it—achieving actual, genuine rebellion that mirrors false, recuperated forms, inside the same Gothic mode. Actual martyrdom haunts nature as our domain, our psychosexual “martyrdom” flaunting our power [e.g., our plunging necklines or short skirts] to fuck with those who can’t rape us short of crossing the lines that we install [re: rape is impossible within boundaries of mutual consent, whose cementing undermines Capitalist Realism and its “boundaries for me, not for thee” nonsense]! Nazis [and liberals/moderates] normalize rape in ways our healing from rape—through the regaining of agency and boundaries, during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a public advertisement—helps prevent!

[artist: Akii Desu] 

Such treatment, and its umbral radiation healing emotional damage with “damage,” requires concentration in multiple turnings of that word; i.e., as a matter of potency and focus, delivered through concentrated forms; e.g. Blake’s corroding fires—to handle with care, but dispense with glee, convincing through the molding of a hellish statuesque by virtue of intense, profound reactions [chemical, physical or otherwise] greasing the wheels. Though merited [and fun] in its execution, the sacking of “Rome” isn’t drama for its own sake, but a performative, collaborative vein of counterterrorist activism; i.e., brothel espionage engaged with and expressed through vintage Gothic theatrics’ opaque transparencies; e.g., bodies, costumes, masks, roleplay scenarios, locations, idioms, medieval nostalgia, bad puns, dirty jokes, hardcore sex and penetration, lewd commentaries, genre conventions and clichés; physiological responses like sexual tension and release, throbbing orgasms, medicinal pain, belly laughter and all-around letting off steam; the assorted emotional thrills, consent-non-consent, torn panties and exposed genitals of courtly love; the Gothic’s obsession with paranormal antics, drama, comedy and all-around mood—all playing with power-as-monstrous-feminine and sex as warlike, stunning and gorgeous. It’s what we’ve been doing for this entire faerie exhibit and indeed, the whole book series: playing with those things that societies the world over value, and which we subvert inside of themselves to help from rape with!

Much of this healing concerns the theft of theatrical devices, onstage and off. Workers steal, cops steal; workers and cops commit violence. Weapons of terror aren’t moral or immoral, then; how they’re used—during oppositional praxis, hence class, culture and race war—is. Less a single exchange [during regular examinations and emergency consultations] and more an ongoing relationship, it’s one that happens as much with mechanism as mechanic on all registers across all groups of workers; i.e., of animals and beings of nature like faeries versus the state and its proponents/doubles tampering with or otherwise intimidating witnesses [through blackmail, extortion, even murder]. One side discourages criminality and rape through doomy language thereof; the other encourages it while reeking like a corpse: a black moon rising but also a string of dark planets seemingly vacant but haunted by Numinous, monstrous-feminine potential!

In turn, faeries are canonically things to be caught, except our beauteous orbs are too big to capture; our praxis, but also our pussies, are wetter and looser than Radcliffe’s probably[34] was, those and other social-sexual implements pulling you under our faerie lakes [drenching spheres] and keeping you there—i.e., during live burial as, per Segewick, a commentary on libido tied to various forces/medieval poetics at work, and which we concern with dialectical-material, not psychological models [again, darkness visible and not the murky and far-less-precise models used by those schools of thought that proceeded Marx, deliberately choosing to ignore the historical-material elements he applied to monsters decades before Freud and company abandoned them]! Pillars of monsters, magic and myth, these dark faeries deliver pleasure and pain to prevent trauma, thus command respect and demand discipline from their bottoms: teamwork makes the dream work, healing from “rape” by playing with it, in quotes. As far as survivors go, we’re preaching to the choir!

[artists (clockwise, starting top-left): Romantic Rose, Sinead, Harmony Corrupted, Nyx, Victoria, Annabel Morningstar, Mugiwara, Crow, and Angel Witch]

 

“PUSSY VANQUISHED” or “PUSSY SLAYER VANQUISHED,” we’ve done this before, but rebellion is repeatedly and collectively seditious; re: a collage-like drum to beat, time and time again, among a polity of co-conspirators [above] breeding rebellion through sex on the brain—as something to chase down/get to the bottom of by restoring the mobility of activism [and critical thought] from its turgid, praxially-inert stasis and shell. We’re not sugar-coating the bitter pill to conceal anything scandalous, but operate through sugar and scandal in faux-medieval to speak to toxic, sinister or otherwise controversial devices that—unobserved and undigested by the picky eaters—can go completely unnoticed. Revolutionary cryptonymy points a big combative sign at genocide to prevent its continuation [often through kayfabe, sex and force duking things out, on and offstage]: a garden of shattered innocence, promoting psychosexual healing through “martyrdom,” cultured intuition, and unbridled passion tethered—if not on actual leads—then through bodies, rulesets, and systems of exchange that ground and facilitate the excitement of such grandiose, out-of-control sensations! So do we go beyond our comfort zones; i.e., seeking satisfaction, we adjust to colder comforts warming our plump godly backsides:

(artist: TMFD)

To it, the Gothic—but especially Gothic Communism—is all about application, practice and informed interactions, not rote transaction; i.e., playing with taboo things that we enjoy camping in non-harmful forms, lowering the odds of systemic harm taking place when dashing Capitalist Realism: through fakery and rituals coded to prevent harm, addressing unspeakable things in ways that give them a language, hence voice to speak out with [which capital tries to alienate us from]. In other words, you are what you eat; we’re a diet of pain prescribed by us, not the state’s harmful, policing varieties! I, for example love sluts and playing with them; i.e., as mommy-like and virally potent, which faeries are, but also, to some degree, make-believe. The cryptonymic, holistic idea is to resonate using controlled substances that, faerie-like and in control, speak to abuse beyond our control that, performed in fake ways, touch on socio-material change through buffers; re: speaking out while protecting ourselves; e.g., we can camp Christianity through faerie-like doubles that—when push comes to shove—let us say to the offended bad-faith parties rattling sabers, they’re “just” faeries; re: the “just play” defense, treating our threats as emptier than they seem, “style over substance.”

While silence is genocide and segregation is no protection from rape—and a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all, requiring universal emancipation—there isn’t a monopoly on dishonesty and the enjoyment of guilty pleasure/demonic speaking through pain, panic and death [dark faeries are death faeries, more or less]. We can lie to protect ourselves, but also be more honest than state proponents with the same lateral, unorthodox devices, enjoying them to endorsing liberation through said machinations [re: Sarkeesian]. In turn, we can be smarter than them when setting up our revelations’ cryptonymic hall of mirrors; re: liberation and exploitation share the same spaces, surfaces and thresholds, but also confused, engorged organs of sight/tools of overall perception and disguise. Forget pocket sand, vivid concealment is the dark faerie’s primary weapon! Borrowed from medieval thought [of torture; e.g., stigmata, below] and inserted into half-real medieval hauntologies and their dark Aegises, we reverse abjection through the cryptonymy process sundering Capitalism Realism with apocalyptic language: to show and behold just that, in the faerie flesh! A Great Destroyer mending through the transmutation of darkness and pain, marrying strict to gentle but carrying the usual otherworldly elements of royal command that dark faeries are known for to escape unironic, non-consensual mastery!

[artists: Romantic Rose]

Milton had the right idea; re: “The mind its own place,” a thing to swell with darkness visible, allowing for expanded consciousness, mid-activism. Faeries, then, make anything possible, insofar as “death” can happen onstage, but also radical wish fulfilment through repressed desires that, sure enough, carry offstage during our aforementioned dark trades; i.e., of darkness visible, which happen through demonic exchange and transformation as an oft-hyperbolic poetic act; e.g., their alter-ego, superhero/supervillain’s too-tall bodies, and too-big boobies [mammoth milkers] and butts’ enormous, immodest implications promising profound, improper revelation while cryptonymically winking sardonic charm/radiating faerie ahegao from the bruised-and-bleeding flesh: about half-real potentialities to tilt towards that, unto themselves, “tilt” [enrage] those of the audience still in Plato’s cave [“If we spirits have offended, think but this and all is mended…”]. The paradox of rape and it’s revenge-made-visible, then—but also the monstrous-feminine as a nurturing-scaring warrior maternal—lies in the immediate visual ambiguity of such reenactments but also the presumed futility in defeating them. Death cannot be conquered, and murder (and rape) always will out. That’s what darkness visible is, and by extension, swole’ demon mommies, which we’ll look at next.

[artist: BS Art]

In this respect, dark faeries [and their infernal castles promoting enormously obscure power] function like Medusa does; i.e., speaking to how rape destroys us [and classically is survived by turning into different objects; e.g., a tree] but, through a radical desire to heal from rape by systemically preventing it in paradoxical ways, becomes the very darkness we’ve been performing this entire exhibit: a world without rape, the power to prevent it in our hands subverting hyperbolic beauty standards by Gothically upending purity arguments! For the capitalist, they cannot foresee such a place; to show such profound and whorish/profane recipients of abuse—out in the open, playing with rape as an exhibit—is to threaten capitalist with a post-rape planet. God forbid, right? The thought turns them to stone.

Like Satan, faerie royals are gods/superhumans. They tower to provide dramatic effect, but also invite troubling comparison; i.e., for recess and relapse, absurdity and surrealism, they double our desires, but also conventional mechanisms of power used at cross purposes during oppositional praxis: curating a reality—one within that classic Gothic half-reality caught between complete fakery and total reality—to engage with through age-old power fantasies, including royalty and their power to change peoples’ lives on a whim [often through ransom and arranged marriages, but also medieval, virgin-queen[35] sex games and all-around Faustian elevation[36]]. And, as anyone skilled in the war of war will tell you, warfare isn’t just on the obvious fields with clear-cut uniforms; it’s a theatre that bleeds into daily life through darkness visible, including sex [especially monstrous sex; re: Amazonomachia more broadly] as something to play out, perform and interrogate while negotiating our rights. That’s ultimately what dark faeries are: a theatre of war through psychosexual weaponry that, true enough, is measured by size and aesthetic, but ratified through sex and force performed among or regarding those devices as demonic, dark-yet-visible; re: Faust and Prometheus.

We’ll examine those devices more, deeper in the module. For now, recall that demons of any kind [not just faeries] seldom stay in churches, and that states [through a Protestant ethic] aren’t overtly ecclesiastical. Nevertheless, there remains a cryptonymic, hidden-visible element of sedition to faeries and their own sense of otherworldly glory making us come [to paradise]—a potential to camp that must be embraced, then crystalized in what we create, playfully developing Gothic Communism using what we got. However we do it—be that armored when nude or nude when armored during the whore’s paradox, through kayfabe as psychomachy or Amazonomachia—we are life and the state is death; the state is ultimately incompatible with us, and we camp its inherently unequal canon from exchange to cryptonymic exchange using our shield-like Aegis to have the whore’s revenge against profit: “No pasarán!” There is always another princess in another castle, the bare and level sands stretching far away as we quest for the Gothic-Communist Numinous, cryptomimetically liberating Medusa during cryptonymy’s praxial synthesis; re: in collaborative exhibits like this one!

So is abjection dialectically-materially reversed through the faerie’s demonic trades, its anisotropic vengeance parsed in cryptomimetic and hauntological arbitration. In turn, such litigation frequently occupies chronotopic spheres [re: mise-en-abyme and castles-in-the-flesh] that freeze our attackers in place with darkness visible. Such oscillating duality and liminality is something to occupy across/upon/within people and place—not to rank rape or justify some variant, but prevent all harm while walking away from Omelas as a group of friends [and friends of friends, of friends of friends, and so on].

Doing show should antagonize and provoke not one, but all: through a similarity amid difference! Found again/for the first time through Gothic paradox and reinvention, we faeries and witches dive into Styx. We do so above water and ground; i.e., out from the forests shrunk by capital and into urban territories made, like Radcliffe’s Black Veil, afraid of such things. Their city streets and night skies clouded with smoke, we make ourselves at home; i.e., when bringing Hell home to ferry you there, too—not as punishment, but invitations one and all calling you back to where you belong! “Hell’s bells, Satan’s callin’ for you!”

So kneel if you want! Just have the courage to step on through…)

“What dost thou want?” Again, the devil is in the details—cloudy from aesthetic but clear as day from a dialectical-material standpoint: challenging profit through the performance of power during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: specifically that of dark faeries, breaking Capitalist Realism through Satanic (or otherwise abject) wish fulfillment! Their darkness visible promotes a world without end, hitting us where it hurts and pleases to heal from rape. In broaching post-scarcity with medieval pre-capitalist language to have the whore’s revenge, the language of unhappiness can lead to happier spheres, blazing a curious trail in the bargain (not all roads lead to Rome):

(artist: Nico)

So concludes the dark faerie (ruler) collaboration! Next, we’ll examine a no less strict, but openly warrior class of monstrous-feminine (and its fiery and militant examples of the Amazon taken beyond earthly realms)—swole’ demon mommies in a postcolonial close-read about forbidden love!

Onto “‘Trial by Fire’: Swole’ Demon Mommies (feat. Lady Hellbender and Karlach)“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] Also spelled “fairy,” and referred to as bean sidhe, which translates to “fairy woman/woman of the burial mounds”; i.e., often to a royal degree; e.g., a faerie queen or princess—classically of the otherworld, netherworld, Numinous beyond, Hell, etc. I’ll be sticking to “faerie” for the most part, just to keep things consistent (and because “fairy” often sounds daintier than “faerie”; e.g., fairy princess).

[2] Including verbal abuse; e.g., the speedrunner Bubzia cursing out the boos from Mario 64 during a blindfolded run: “You… stupid, piece-of-shit ghost!” (“I DESTROYED This Blindfolded SM64 Speedrun,” 2024; timestamp: 19:55)

[3] Blood libel, sodomy and witchcraft are all classically criminal charges against non-Christian bodies of the medieval world, which would segue into queerphobia in the 1700s and beyond, under capital (re: “Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love,” 2024). So while witch hunts classically targeted Pagan cis women, blood libel targeted Jews, and sodomy targeted homosexual men, these have been reconfigured under neoliberal, late-stage Capitalism; i.e., to select rebellious monstrous-feminine groups in bad-faith, pitting those against good-faith groups using the same aesthetic one is colonizing and the other decolonizing.

[4] Limited by human imagination and desire (for sex, revenge, and other policed areas), which is to say, completely unlimited save how capital shapes our ability to imagine and how we, as workers, challenge that.

[5] Refer to “A Rape Reprise” for my definitions of rape, themselves lifted from the Poetry Module’s “A Note About Rape/Rape Play” and “Psychosexual Martyrdom“).

[6] This being said, Black Phillip is known as a goat who turns into a man; i.e., as the ominous black curtain Eggers torments the audience with and eventually pulls aside, stripping everyone naked. We’ll explore anthropomorphism and “skin-changing” much more in “Call of the Wild.”

[7] The Gothic, as usual, is obsessed with old, vengeful sites/rites of return; i.e., by nature and those “of it” reclaiming the land and the colonial home from current imposters. The reappearance of faerie royals speaks to a postcolonial, hauntological apocalypse where old kings and queens closer to nature, but also their dark gods, come home to roost; i.e., by reminding Christians they never left—that they were never exterminated, thus seek dislocated, aged and alien-faerie revenge from across the sea and into the New World (witches behaving similar to Dracula, but also goblins in this respect, the Puritans having been chased out of England to punch down against older colonial victims: not the Irish and the Catholics or Jewish people, but the witches of Celtic myth borrowed from Samhain and other druidic harvest rituals).

Satan is one such faerie—a dark wishmaster tempting Puritan girls with liberation, till they whither from old age/exposure and become his wicked hags. The harvest is poor for the girl’s family because they’re all on the menu and she, possessed by the bean sidhe* spirit of heretics (the ancient victim/rival of English fanaticism) is killing them, one by one; re: the grim harvest, the revenge of the Corn Lady on those normally holding the sickle!

*Myth commonly occupies a xenophobic track. Bean sidhe—according to English myth demonizing the pre-Teutonic and pre-Norman Celts into the Irish Catholics and secular Irish—were considered a death omen; their shrill, unruly cries, similar to the Medusa’s gaze, were thought to be able to strike the listener dead, once heard! In short, the rage of such ghosts is a black mirror to strike the guilty dead for having stayed silent about rape while alive! It’s a tool of monstrous-feminine revenge, which the colonizer uses against their usual victims; i.e., by turning them into DARVO-style bogeywomen for not killing home rule with kindness! It’s tone-policing tampering with the witness, calling their testimony “poison” to alienate them [divide and conquer].

The purpose of the witch, then, is to carry the Puritan’s guilt of imperial inheritance, which balloons through their own self-righteousness and overdependence; i.e., on invented enemies to aggrandize themselves and rape the land they abject onto their new area of divine providence (whose perceived criminality watches them through the witch’s uncanny animal familiars, framing the American Indigenous in a New England light). The daughter is possessed not by xenoglossia, then, but by anarchist wish fulfillment; i.e., to destroy her family, who she resents as the real criminals; e.g., her teenage brother lusting after her, but also her demented mother slut-shaming her.

In turn, the witch embodies the Sphinx’ Riddle turned on its head, the witch of youthful whore and aged crone hidden inside the mind of an increasingly vengeful maiden evoking the witch at her annoying twin siblings: “But I am that very witch!” She’s a dog soldier guerilla, warring from the shadows; i.e., by changing shape and size, but also age to embody and invoke mass hysteria—the Puritan’s weapon of choice—against them. Lurking in twilight between day and night, familial suspicion convinces her own flesh and blood that she commands nature and dark wishes to turn the Puritans against each other and, in the process, use terror weapons to ultimately undo the bloodline of nature’s enemies; she’s an imposter for what the Puritans call “enemy” (re: Milton’s “arch-fiend”) having chased them out of house and home (the characters—pariahs themselves, banished by a colony of heretics—are often homesick) and denying it to them, here, in a hauntologized, pre-colonial America: the destruction of the nuclear home by its “anti” double changeling.

Per black/white us versus them and the dialectic of shelter and the alien, nature is criminal invading the Puritans’ sense of unsteady home. Satan, in that respect, might seem like Charles Manson and the witch as one of his Manson girls; i.e., bog-standard Gothic, but haunted by genocide as the ghost of the counterfeit. Closer to the mark, he’s a terrorist fighting for land back, dressed up as a gangster/pimp the Puritans can recognize dancing on their graves! Classic centrist projection (of moral teams), and yet the Gothic works through allegory to secret critical thought into viewers’ brains. Eggers stays comfortably inside the Puritan fear space, but despite this semblance of white moderacy devotes the entirety of its runtime to crucify them; i.e., as a black parody of their values, speaking in the language of morality to hoist them on their own petards. It’s a witch hunt, one where the witch hunts the witch hunters. It’s intensely critical of the Puritans, lambasting them in a classic, New-England, Hawthornean polemic obsessed with Salem’s awful reputation and desire for revenge! There are no good witches in Eggers’ film; just black witches having their revenge.

In turn, Eggers’ film is directed at current-day Puritans-by-another-name: Christian nationalists. The victims of the film think themselves righteous, undeserving of violence, but from our perspective they’re the most radical and delusional of them all. They do it to themselves, while those most often forced into monstrous-feminine, scapegoat positions retreat from family life; i.e., as having been designed, from the start, to harm insubordinate, tokenized women, and for which they seek the whore’s black, monstrous-feminine revenge against; e.g., the opening “baby-mashing” scene being phallic and vaginal, the witch’s pestle-like broom and mortar-like bowl an Archaic Mother’s vagina dentata wielded by a phallic woman making chunky baby batter (above) with her enemies’ spawn (terror weapons include horror—to invoke disgust and dehumanize one’s victims); re: Lady Macbeth: “Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murth’ring ministers, / Wherever in your sightless substances / You wait on Nature’s mischief!” It’s an identity and taboo (unthinkable*) act of defiance told through monstrous argument—the land defending itself from Divine Right and Manifest Destiny by reversing abjection at the source: wolfing down the next-in-line! “Stare and tremble!” Matthew Lewis is alive and well (whose novel, The Monk, also features a famous scene with a dead rotting baby crawling with worms)!

*With infanticide DARVO being a classic weapon of settler colonists, who use their women and children as human shields. The witch reduces the baby (whose pregnancy historically embodies a threat of death and enslavement to married and unmarried women, alike) as something to render down and empower her disgusting revenge (death from the skies)! Furthermore, the wet slapping sound of the witch’s broom during the infanticide scene plays later in the film; i.e., when the then-widowed mother “turns,” seeking revenge against the surviving daughter—by accusing her of seducing father and son! Incest and infanticide, Horace Walpole’s Mysterious Mother once again leaps to mind!

So if you find yourself chilled and quaking in the witch’s indeterminate presence and feeling sorry for the Puritans (who are made by Eggers to be as incompetent and unlikeable as possible), it’s merely a reminder of your own privileged position wreathed in ghostly counterfeit, but also the call of the void towards more humane orders of existence couched in barbarity. That’s what dark faeries classically portend, however unsightly they come to us in our dreams (re: like Satan, disguised as a toad to tempt Eve in her sleep): to pour sweet poison in our ears, and cloud our eyes with crystal darkness!

[8] Cameron doing so in the style of the noir and Western, but also zombie film turning the police into a victim of their own abuses come back to haunt them; i.e., from the tech-noir retro-future! Doing so carries a rebellious signature (if not downright conviction, in Cameron’s case) because the slasher’s normal, canonical usage is to scare teenagers into not having extramarital sex; i.e., while being a guilty pleasure that, among couples married or not, is used to excite particular fears and, sure enough, raise libido in times of perceived danger/elevated panic (with the heroes of the movie fucking while on the run from their tireless assassin). Per Hogel, the middle class eats that shit up (re: through various fandoms and refrains, above), driving the process of abjection to feed the profit motive.

[9] E.g., Link, the Hero of Time from Zelda, capturing smaller faeries in bottles, but gaining boons at faerie fountains housing Great Faeries he cannot bottle (re: size difference)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

[10] One of dark, vengeful, monstrous-feminine gods; re: Creed and Freud, vis-à-vis Medusa.

[11] Darkness and chaos being classically female; re: Jung’s female chaos dragon.

[12] Re: Titania being a stand-in for Queen Elizabeth, a woman who never married or bore children, which Shakespeare, a gay man, envisioned as our aforementioned fairy queen from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

[13] The Gothic loves violent sexual metaphors, which speak adequately to queer hyphenations of criminal sex and force that, just as well, speak to demons and their psychosexuality at large: the faerie ornamentation of violence, but also the its rude slumming (re: gentrification and decay).

[14] A classic Gothic signature, alongside live burial tropes and the decay of state mastery through various fetishes and clichés, and dated, revived conventions stressed for their simultaneous age, barbarity and profound regeneration. These sit in between boundaries concerned with sex as a weakness, but also a death warrant that executes when consumed; re: sex equals death when one’s virtue is “weak.” The Gothic, cloaked in the spectre of organized religion and the Protestant ethic, camps such nonsense inside of itself.

[15] Re: ACAB and ASAB. The state and its traitors (cops) exploit and rape everything for profit, thus control—the two historically-materially going hand-in-hand; i.e. through state illusions and force, thus neoliberal reinvention (mis)using such methods on a regular basis. These include corruption, lobbying and bribes, but also police brutality and various other activities (espionage, assassinations, etc) occurring onstage and off. Less a corrupting of the system and more lubricating it through boom-and-bust with the trifectas, monopolies and qualities of capital, these are things working very much by design. Profit, above all else, facilitates the half-real mechanisms at work, including genocide (war and rape) as a simple consequence of state and corporate operations. They only exist to exploit nature and workers as monstrous-feminine (re: through the usual ethnocentric, canonically essentialist revenge arguments), but that’s all the state is made to perform: divide and conquer for profit, that’s it.

Furthermore, said motive might be haunted by older forms of empire (the ghost of the counterfeit), but within the present state of affairs, profit supersedes these ghosts, which it pimps out in some shape or form; it charters them in the same mapped-out spheres, like everything else. So while everyone likes the whore, the state needs her as something to attack/surrender territory to before clawing it all back: holding a gun to nature’s head, forcing sex in a rush that, turning her into carrot and stick, takes away all choice. Everything is taxable, written up as “the cost of doing business.” Unequal, myopic, panoptic—the state works for one purpose, regardless of scope and scale: to privatize thus exploit and reduce everything to profit; i.e., free enterprise (which neoliberalism is) and negative freedom for the owner class, hence billionaires.

[16] While both animals are known for their cute battle cries, rain frogs are further referred to as “potato fairies.”

[17] I.e., Scott’s film emblematic of Shelley’s Frankenstein novel, both haunted by Red Scare vis-à-vis Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956 onwards, the latter inspired by Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” or At of the Mountains of Madness from the 1930s, H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds from 1898, and older xenophobia/Orientalism from Conrad, Poe, and Radcliffe, etc, reaching back into Antiquity’s fear of the legendary guerilla and barbarian general, Hannibal (who Scipio Africanus defeated in battle, only doing so after Hannibal’s famed crossing of the Alps).

[18] Re, Chris Baldrick’s introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales (2009): “For the Gothic effect to be attained, a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (source). This, for us whores, becomes something to thrive inside, regenerating like a zombie might, but also a demon; i.e., the faerie, in its chrysalis, changing shape to better suit itself in a hostile environment.

[19] Labyrinths, like any dungeon, aren’t cheap. The Labyrinth of Crete, for example, was designed for King Minos by Daedalus and his son, Icarus. By comparison, Gothic fiction miraculously takes what is normally expensive and lets anyone design any cathedral they wish (often with as little as their naked bodies)!

[20] The slots in castle walls from which arrows, bolts and other missiles were fired from relative safety.

[21] A violent outburst of a given crop preventing holocaust (re: “Disgustipated” and “the cry of the carrots”) by turning the harvest back on itself—with ass being a much-needed spice to revolution! Anyone can be a faerie/use faerie devices as weapons of terror to shock and dismantle the state and state bigotry (as racist, sexist and homophobic, etc). Like the human body as something to advertise, such weapons take infinite forms (and beckon “sodomy” as anything extramarital/non-PIV that stalls state engines with; e.g., oral or anal, but also even more repulsive [to the state] forms of kink I don’t tend to advertise); i.e., Crawford’s invention of terrorism and Asprey’s paradox of terror become, per my arguments, Amazonian devices of terror (re: anal sex and similar sodomy devices) that apply neatly to our work: turning the state—normally hunting and pimping nature through its own monopolies—into something workers and nature hunt in response by showing them our ass humanized under demonizing conditions; re: “darkness” being anything that upends state order by iconoclastic means! To cover up is to segregate and silence, thus sentence ourselves to our fate.

[22] The text featured on Nyx’s Twitter banner image; emphasis, me.

(source)

[23] Including the battering of housewives and similar victims’ confusion of predatory/prey, pleasure/pain, fight/flight and vaso vagal, which other animals can’t experience or perform (for sex-positive or sex-coercive reasons) like humans (and their Gothic parentage) can.

[24] For a good example of this from the Undead Module, consider “Away with the Faeries; or, Double Trouble in Axiom Verge” (2024).

[25] What Horace Walpole called “secret sin; [an] untold tale, that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse” from The Mysterious Mother (1768); re (from Volume One):

The Western world is generally a place that testifies to its own traumas by fabricating them; i.e., as markers of sovereignty that remain historically unkind to specific groups that nevertheless survive within them as ghosts of unspeakable events linked to systemic abuse. Trauma, in turn, survives through stories corrupted by the presence of said abuse. There is a home resembling a castle, where a ghost—often of a woman—lurks inside having been met with a sorry fate (source: Healing from Rape,” 2023).

That story was about double incest; any reclamation we enact (about rape and general harm) is generally couched within poetry and mythmaking to some extent—if not because what we say is false then because it will be treated as false, mythical, or otherwise make-believe (as faeries are). Paradoxically, the Gothic castle works as a way to process things that will otherwise be denied outright. The effect is less a strict, positive-sounding euphemism, and more a sex symbol that expresses through violence to conceal sexual abuse (and pleasure) behind; re: the cryptonymy process pointing to all manner of things inside the inky charnel house—where such things get up and move around in uncanny (animate-inanimate) miniature and gigantic forms (often suits of armor)!

[26] For the power of speculation as highly developed; i.e., owing to capital being less developed than it currently is; e.g., Radcliffe’s painterly view of the world in a, at times, very literal sense:

One of the unique aspects of Ann Radcliffe’s novels is her emphasis on landscape. […]

Similarly, theories of landscape are tied to particular settings in the novel. The three main settings for the novel are the different “homes” that Emily inhabits: La Valée, the castle of Udolpho, and Château-le-Blanc. La Valée “is a sheltered and highly sentimental world, a version of a Rousseauian ideal community,” (Kilgour, 114) where Emily “receives a moral and sentimental education from her father,” (Murray, 115) St. Aubert. Emily will take with her the moral lessons of her idyllic home to a more hostile landscape, as is captured by the Castle of Udolpho. Thus, La Valée and Udolpho represent the beautiful and the sublime: “[p]leasurable sentiments characterize the first world; sensations of terror characterize the second. Obscurity replaces light, mystery replaces openness” (Murray, 115). Situated on a towering mountain in the Apennines, the castle of Udolpho is “[s]ilent, lonely and sublime[. It] seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all, who dared to invade its solitary reign” (Radcliffe, 227).  The Château-le-Blanc, in contrast, contains elements of both the beautiful and the sublime; it is a more ambiguous space (an ancestral castle that is modernized by its owner), in which Emily has to negotiate between appearance and reality (Murray, 128).

Like the characters’ relation to nature indicates their moral character, so the setting’s relation to the surrounding landscape reveals the character of its owner (Kilgour, 119). For example, La Vallée is in harmony with its surroundings, reflecting the moderation and virtue of St. Aubert, while Udolpho reflects Montoni’s tyranny by dominating the landscape (Kilgour, 119). In this sense, setting takes on aspects of character, like the Castle in Walpole’s Otranto [source: WordPress, “Landscape, Setting, and Character,” 2011].

These castles embody a particular point of worldview we can embody for the duration of the novel, but take it outside itself to shape our own works; e.g., my books informed, love it or hate, by Radcliffe!

[27] Aka “geometries of terror”/the infernal concentric pattern (re: Aguirre); i.e., with false walls and floors, but also memories about concealed dreaded evils (re: Radcliffe)!

[28] Faers pronouns include: fae/it (any neos/they/he).

[29] Especially when a former victim’s survival mechanism has been damaged, the line between pleasure and pain blurred, but also predator and prey! Simply put, the bigger the trauma, the more usual psychosexual spaces (and their palliative-Numinous evocations) are.

[30] A saying I’ve evoked in the past when writing about trauma as something to revisit:

There clearly isn’t a monopoly on empathy as expressed through monsters, magic and metaphors—including big ones (castles), but also schools of these things playing with the ghost of the counterfeit; e.g., Radcliffe and Lewis’ Schools of Terror and Horror, but also intimations of general-purpose “necromancy” or goth culture as a psychosexual, monomythic (adventuresome) performance with kayfabe elements: “Zombie Marx or Zombie Twain? Choose your fighter!”

Nevertheless, our juggling and balance in whatever contributions we can supply is important. Again, don’t suffer for your art if you can help it. But also remember that trauma attracts trauma, weird attracts weird. The idea is to combine them in ways that alleviate sickness, stress, tension and harm, but also avoid predation by perfidious elements in our daily lives coming from structural abuse: the Gothic castle as a beacon to attract and house the like-minded while the state tries, as it always does, to dominate us through its own victims.

Yet despite having previously discussed martyrs as a powerful form of reverse abjection, it’s not something that should be shot for each and every time. It’s done out of pure necessity and frustration, which we want to move away from. A classic (thus sacrificial) state of grace is no substitute for systemic change. We need to be more constructive and inventive when the options are available; i.e., to offer up enriching poetic gestures that lead to socio-material change without us dying routinely and en masse as a result (as the rats who follow the Pied Piper do). “Magic, myths and monsters” means taking what we need and putting things that seem like they won’t fit together together and passing through barriers that, for the Gothic, is a piece of cake (see, below) [source: “A Song Written in Decay,” 2024].

(artist: Cuwu)

The idea is to learn from our collective but also individual past mistakes; re: “to dominate us through its own victims”; e.g., Jadis dominating me and me revisiting the grave of our relationship to ruminate on our abuse as something exchanged between us, them to me:

Weird attracts weird, trauma attracts trauma. I don’t wish to hide the fact that I loved and made allowances for my abuser because I most certainly did (and still am always reminded of that, through these rememories of them). Nor do I wish to change them, after the fact. That only happens when they decide to (and until then, they simply take and take, having no reason to change). To my most antagonistic abuser (the most Hurtful Abuser Award actually goes to Zeuhl, oddly enough), I merely wish to leave some parting words as we begin our segue into the sorts of monomythical forms you were doubtless inspired by when brutalizing me (source: “Escaping Jadis; or, Running Up that Hill,” 2024).

Only by interacting holistically and repeatedly with the past as “past” can we build devices to play with and prevent the same old mistakes on a systemic level

[31] Escape of the maze, in Gothic, happens inside itself.

[32] The radiative aura that faeries classically exude, used to paralyze the recipient(s) witnessing it. In regal terms, it could be called “majesty” but often likens to a vain, drug-like torpor not unlike vampires and their own seductive charm.

[33] Per the master/slave dynamic, which in Gothic, is often code for more prurient activities demanded by rulers of their slaves; e.g., “kneel” = “suck my cock.” They’ve come to be the rulers of you all!

[34] Though given her secretive nature—and tendency to write what, for all intents and purposes, is torture porn—I’d hazard to guess that ol’ Radcliffe probably experienced more than her fair share of wet nethers!

[35] Extending to royals not expected to produce a male heir to the throne; i.e., aristocratic privilege, romanced in Gothic fiction since Walpole and through the chronotope as saturated with such promises: of sex and force from a dynastic hereditary standpoint (re: Bakhtin). In short, power is measured in space and time through marriage as traceable through motion as much bloodline, the two hardly separate in Gothic stories throwing them into dis(re)pute!

[36] Generally through sacrifice during quid pro quo.

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 Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

A Paucity of Time: Addressing the Rest of the Demon Module’s Relative Brevity

“I want more life, fucker!”

—Roy Batty, Blade Runner (1982)

Picking up where “Reclaiming Amazons, part two: Reclaiming Anal“ left off…

My original plans for the Demon Module have oscillated constantly between longer and more complicated versus relatively short, verging on inadequate. I say “oscillating” because I acknowledged earlier how there would always be a survey element to various aspects of it; re: “As such, the infinite poetic variety and limitless creative potential of demons and nature requires me to adopt a more survey-style approach for the entire module” (source: “Of Darkness and the Forbidden”); i.e., demons have infinite forms; e.g., those of nature being something we can only gloss over in the module’s remaining pages. Gothic Communism is holistic, and happens among different people taking a shared corpus of ideas and applying them differently towards a common goal: universal understanding and liberation. There’s always a different way to say the same basic things—a different time and place, space and persona, term and theory to occupy and adopt. In turn, these things frame and compound, building on themselves (often through size difference, left) to challenge state scapegoat mechanisms with: to summon and abstract as we require!

(artists: Ray Sugarbutt, Shiri Allwood, and JazzzBerrry12)

To it, all sections from here on out, unless explicitly stated, will adopt a symposium approach, thus conversational style. This means I won’t have time to reiterate arguments and reinforce these pages by steelmanning them; i.e., I cannot take everything I’ve said already about monsters (not just demons) and say them again; re (from Volume Zero): “to include or string everything into a grand necklace/dichotomy that I then trot out each and every time a given topic comes up” (source). Instead, I can only abbreviate big things and repeat small things, trusting my readers to take and reassemble my ideas henceforth, making new creative successes pursuant to revolution during oppositional praxis; re (also from Volume Zero):

This book is full of stars, so make your own shapes in the sky using the tools and keywords I supply. As long as the journey and outcome are sex-positive within a broad ergodic sphere, the exact routes you take to get there don’t really matter. So chart your own sequences. To that, revolution needs to be more than holistic; it needs to be internalized in its practitioners by exposing them to radical ideas and praxis as soon as possible, thus at as young an age as can be allowed (rest assured that fascists and centrists are doing the same thing) [ibid.].

I.e., using the Gothic to synthesize sex positivity (thus liberation) with; re (from Volume One):

Above all else, the cultivating of emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness remains paramount—to help workers and society liberate itself (and nature) from Capitalism, thus assist in the renewed development of Gothic Communism through sex-positive (art)work. As things to cultivate, emotional and Gothic intelligence are synonymous with social-sexual activism begot from our own diving into the imaginary past. So please, swim around and play—with language, yourselves, and figurative and literal BDSM games that renegotiate labor and unequal power exchange in sex-positive ways. Mix, match, and blend; inject or insert (so to speak). Whatever it takes to do the job in some shape or form; i.e., to recultivate the Wisdom of the Ancients, thus achieve a Gothic-Communist outcome (source).

(artist: Kitty Bit Games)

Trust me when I say that I’ve wrestled at length, back and forth, with deciding to write less about demonic sex and force than I want. There’s always more to say and revolution is less a single statement plugging up knowledge gaps (in the academic style) and more like the beating of drums, over and over, through slogans and solidarity overall. But up to this point, I’ve already written a variety of thesis arguments about demons, whores, and Amazons that concern the widespread raping of nature by the state. Those will have to do. Perhaps it’s best to avoid cramming a single book too full of different thesis statements (even concentric ones), but I feel these arguments are productive (and modular) enough concerning the whole of demonology that I should be able to say more with less. I will have to; the results of the recent election necessitate my releasing of this module (and the Praxis Volume) ahead of schedule—i.e., while I still can, even if they’re somewhat abridged or otherwise incomplete (a quality that, already felt here, will become even more apparent in “Call of the Wild’s” abbreviated writings on nature at large).

In other words, there may be a time in the near future when my kind (trans people) are considered completely illegal. I plan to release the entirety of Sex Positivity before that happens, showing my own demonic passion for Gothic Communism for others to carry into the future: that we have the power to change things through our actions, not voting (the latter mostly a middle-class game of follow the leader that endorses bourgeois decisions meant to pacify workers with).

Actions take many forms, and go beyond “pure” demonic expression at large. For instance, when I wrote the Undead Module, said module concerned socio-political action through our trauma, and means of feeding in relation to trauma, as undead; i.e., through strange appetites acquired under capital as constantly raping nature, which we subvert through reclamatory Gothic poetics synthesizing good praxis—to cultivate good social-psychosexual habits that prevent profit, thus rape by camping it through its usual poetic markers. Made with our bodies, labor and relationships, our power becomes something to “flash” on the Aegis—ourselves, persecuted like the undead so often are: by other undead forces but showing the world what power remains in spite of those trying to closet us. We expose our abuse but also that which survives abuse to thrive in light of it; i.e., functioning as undead in ways that often appear vivacious and fully alive, without obvious trauma or visible scars:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

With demons (and by extension the entire Demon Module), we exist in ways that, like the whore, are paradoxically forbidden-yet-ubiquitous onstage and off—entirely policed, but something the state cannot police in its entirety save through bad-faith revenge arguments monopolizing such things: portraying us as unironic monstrous-feminine demons; i.e., “of nature,” which the state must first antagonize, then destroy to keep existing as the state does: unequally as a matter of revenge against nature, extirpating it like vermin.

Our revenge, as demonic whores of nature, is to exist in spite of that, liberating ourselves with the same devices under persecution, but also outright extermination mania. That occurs through the various relationships we establish together to break Capitalist Realism with; re: by humanizing the harvest and liberating nature from state bondage, suspicion and persecution by showing the world we’re human despite our reprobate, monstrous-feminine status; i.e., as demons do—through a powerful, campy desire for revenge selecting the language of demonization for total liberation (through iconoclastic art) instead of state punishment-as-usual: “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?” (source).

The rest of this section (fifteen pages) shall unpack a few broader concepts the Demon Module shall tackle through holistic study and informed mutual action, despite said paucity of time.

(models and artist: Maybel and Jackie, and Persephone van der Waard)

For one, the best revenge is success, which for revolutionaries amounts to survival, solidarity and speaking out to achieve universal liberation with; i.e., in ways that denude our killers and give us our dignity amid tremendous adversity during the cryptonymy process: the cryptomimetic echo of trauma, but also darkness, knowledge and power in reimagined “past” places replete with theatrical devices as old as demons; e.g., animal masks, ancient burial rites, and the repressed anger of slaves leaking from a given “tomb’s” seditious fakeries (e.g., Ancient Egypt, above).

So often, demons speak with the voices of the dead—those long-dead, but also those treated as “dead” within the state of exception outlawing their existence; i.e., by fetishizing it as demonic to fulfill state wishes with—impossible, save under Promethean circumstance and Faustian duress, chopping off Medusa’s head. The best way to prevent that is to show our killers the head is human yet threatened by devices that, unto themselves, can be reclaimed during the dialectic; i.e., reversing abjection (us versus them) through an expanded circle of empathy weaponizing demonic language for workers, animals and the environment—with our bodies, faces, sexual acts and all-around public nudism; re: “art is love made public,” negotiated by different groups within shared exhibits illustrating mutual consent as demons so often do—while openly queer and naked:

(artists: Maybel and Jackie)

A perceived land of the gods (who classically enjoy forbidden things to consume or perform, be that ambrosia or reindeer games), our artful forgeries’ ghosts (and their aesthetic of power and death) point vengefully to a palliative-Numinous outcome; i.e., a revenge less of the pharaohs, and more of their servants haunting the same chronotopic venues to threaten the whore’s dark revenge—a subversive, genderqueer desire to change the world through demonic transaction, vis-à-vis the Wisdom of the Ancients weaponized for worker counterterror (and benefit) through Gothic counterfeit; re: camping the canon to recultivate the Superstructure.

Laden with reclaimed instruments of bigotry and alienation, we become armored when nude (and vice versa; re: Sedgewick), a mask and mirror that—in our capable, inventive hands—grants forbidden sight through historically-materially ironic, seemingly impossible vision; re: Nick Bottom’s dream from another of Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1600):

Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was (source).

Rather than strictly frighten or overwhelm, this medieval confusion of the senses shows others our happiness, organs, trades, bonds, and yes, struggles through a combined, intersectionally solidarized pedagogy of the oppressed—one healing from rape with “rape” by finding similarity amid difference; i.e., a disparate polity darkened as much by police shadows as by our own intersectional necromancy’s ludo-Gothic BDSM, and one we pointedly resurrect through Gothic poetics and active, informed labor exchange. We become human while demonized—something to show off in all its rugged splendor when reclaiming poetry-as-labor from state actors:

(artists: Maybel and Jackie)

“Hurt, not harm.” Apart from their glaring eyes and naked, succubean bodies, demons communicate with pleasure and non-harmful pain performed adjacent to actual trauma haunting the same stages; i.e., reminding viewers that liberation (and calculated risk) share the same half-real space with unironic exploitation during liminal expression—death theatre having a fair amount of sex and guilt, but also delight. Said joy happens while breaking through canonical boundaries and out of the closet into the open—our jouissance expressed using memento mori symbolism to speak to death as haunted by rape, but also by healing from rape in graveyard language; e.g., ahegao both “death face,” “rape face” and something in between either that camps what is often, otherwise, impossible to talk about.

In turn, these become pleasurable for several reasons: one, doing so both physically, emotionally and/or spiritually feels good, unto itself; and two, because suddenly having a voice where no voice previously existed—to discuss what feels bad with paradoxically “bad” language—also feels good. By pointing to bad things with “bad” copies during calculated risk, workers afford themselves counterfeits whose larger “ghost,” vis-à-vis Hogel, highlights an intensely pleasurable reaction not simply unique to such Numinous juxtaposition, but renowned for it! Non-harmful pain, like non-painful pleasure, becomes a data mechanism to speak to difficult generational injury with, granting much-needed relief about things that are often repressed through state force and disguise; i.e., longstanding harm that, owing to its state-sponsored qualities, otherwise might hide in plain sight. The Gothic, then, becomes a warning device in rebellious hands; i.e., to supply the public with different paradoxical combinations that draw attention to themselves and, per the cryptonymy process, cloak their rebellious operations as needed: as monstrous code, specifically ludo-Gothic BDSM presenting violent action and thought (however actual or justified those claims actually are) as “mere play.”

These aren’t forbidden at all, then, but which state forces allow during popular media’s Gothic dialogs; i.e., by the simple fact that they require some kind of Medusa (monstrous-feminine scapegoat) to impugn, thus execute through monopolized sex and force, but also violence, terror and morphological expression inside a given territory. For us, it’s a Trojan Horse already inside Troy (or Rome)—a splendid lie whose grey area cannot easily be censored; i.e., it gives bigots room to misinterpret what, for us, contains a deeper message to spoil the elite’s propaganda with revolutionary cryptonymy during the whore’s paradox; re (from earlier): “Often by rape survivors, such people classically find power/agency through theatrical reenactments of unequal, unfair or otherwise rapacious treatment and conditions […] 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” (source: “A Rape Reprise”).

As something to transform, history is incredibly imaginary and plastic, the myth of Gothic ancestry useful for many competing groups (re: Madoff) but especially rebels needing to lick their wounds; i.e., with calculated risk, itself serving as a kind of “hair of the dog”/sheep’s clothing in equal measure. Per the whore’s paradox, dialogs of abuse become healing and playful during Gothic theatre’s “found document” pastiche and ludo-Gothic BDSM, but also vengeful for those very same reasons; i.e., “rape,” in quotes, is no longer strictly a weapon of terror employed by the state to incapacitate us with amid joy divisions, but joy and exquisite “torture” something to reunite with to castrate state terror campaigns with palliative doubles; e.g., by counteracting a great many superstitions about public nudism, queerness and sex (re: that God will smite you for having anal sex), while likewise exposing a great many holier-than-thou people who enjoy guilty pleasures while attacking others for embodying those concepts outside the nuclear model: dissecting the ancient canonical laws while reversing abjection as something to, itself, exhibit by having fun. “Fun,” for us, becomes any act that, by reversing abjection, helps dismantle state structures with. The more we exist and subvert things, the less stable their worldview becomes. Capitalist Realism begins to fracture, the elite trying to re-ingest it to regenerate itself. But decay is also a time when state power is weak, thus prone to revolution through controlled variables like demonic sex.

(artists: Maybel and Jackie)

Keeping with demons, sex often appears (and sounds) violent, even murderous, and loads itself with medieval puns; e.g., “batter my ‘fortress’ with your giant ‘ram’!” or Mortal Kombat‘s infamous “FINISH HER!” and “FATALITY!” but also Dark Souls‘ immortal victory font: “BUSSY DESTROYED!” Except, what might seem ambiguous in theory becomes rather obvious in practice; e.g., Maybel and Jackie aren’t harming each other at all (above), but point in fact, are having a great deal of fun, subverting harm—all while letting the world see its entrance and entering of forbidden things (assholes) with forbidden things (trans genitals) that, under capital, are very much for sale but which our exhibit shows a different usage for porn than pure, pro-state exploitation; i.e., by using the ace side of sex work to—through the ace elements of Gothic poetics (exploring psychosexual trauma, onstage)—skillfully interrogate police abuse onstage and off: by putting it in quotes, but also by showcasing the ace function of sexuality expressed as pornographic art, seeking to decriminalize itself in demonic forms attaching “Hell” to this or that. That’s how subversion in Gothic fundamentally works.

(artist: Angel Witch)

For example, when I showed photos of Angel Witch (a model I’ve worked with/drawn before) to my cover model, Harmony Corrupted, the other responded: “I love that dildo on them, it’s so cute! They look absolutely dreamy and fantastic!” In turn, sexual objects often haunted by sexual violence (of a medieval sort; e.g., knights, castles and torture going in and out of itself, on and on, during mise-en-abyme) gain the curious ability to look cute; and if dildos and assholes can look cute, “murder” and “rape” can look cute, but retain their usual taboo power on the Aegis and its carnival refrain: “‘Come and see the amazing ball-whacker guy!’ Can you survive their ‘castles’ of doom?” Hell ass, dark castle of ass, etc, as a Gothic space of camp, not genuine hate, we provide/are left with a monstrous-feminine site of fantasy that, often enough under capital, starts and ends with female bodies (queer bodies or not, Crow being non-binary but female, Angel Witch being cis-het): something to summon and rock out to/get down with during rhythmic ceremonial rituals (sites and bodies) well suited for such activities. Hell rocks!

(artist: Crow)

In other words, it’s a party concealing itself from state litigation as a matter of disco-in-disguise, but also devilry to normally burn at the stake; i.e., speaking to police abuse during a hellish party atmosphere. It’s very postpunk, but goes beyond the posturing of those older Mancunians like New Order under Thatcher’s reign. Regardless of function or intent, some posturing and fakery is always required during oppositional praxis; behind the mask lurks the revolutionary’s desire to change the world—one all too clear to see on the naked surface of their playful bodies: “It’s ‘just’ porn/Gothic!” Bodies of Hell, then, are often conspicuous—branded with “Hell” as a symbol, but easily dismissed as dumb entertainment that wasn’t trying to actually turn the status quo upside-down (trouble in Paradise).

To it, those in good and bad faith appear visually identical, as do their monstrous symbols, metaphors (mixed or not) and costumes/poetic dress up during liminal expression. Except those more skilled in cryptonymy—i.e., as a consequence of simply needing to survive—rely on a level of skill regarding dialectical-material scrutiny the enemy doesn’t have: to camouflage themselves with police and scapegoat symbols, but also to engage in rebellion with using said symbols during oppositional synthesis, onstage and off. It’s a complicated idea, but after four books I kind of expect you to get it. For more examples, though, consider “An Uphill Battle” (from Volume One) and “Into the Toy Chest, part two”; re (from the Poetry Module, describing cryptonymy my own life):

none of my exes used their trauma to think with in sex-positive ways, but glide from point A to point B on autopilot: toying with their food as something to abuse, mid-play. Sex is one of those things that works well on instinct, but it’s better when it’s actively engaged with because trust is incumbent on good communication, not blind cruising. They were all sex experts, insofar as Zeuhl had sexual health training (and an extensive GNC education, especially with twinks), Jadis was an active masochist with years of acquired know-how (and a sadistic mean streak), and Cuwu likewise knew the ins and outs of such things as relayed between a younger generation’s acclimation to internet culture, but also the machinery of the state as something to impersonate, like chameleons.

Within that culture’s mise-en-abyme/framed narrative, the Amazon (and similar monstrous-feminine) survive as tools used by different people pinned between the state and its usual disparate, harmful conditions. They become something that, like all toys, you can recognize in people, and play with; i.e., mid-historical-materialism, while capital constantly corrupts, rewrites, and transforms over time—in short when it decays and regenerates. This travels from Ancient Athens, to Marston’s Wonder Woman putting “Athens” in quotes, to whatever it becomes when we manifest these articles ourselves; i.e., working to find social-sexual freedom amid oscillating threatres of opposition, deception, games-in-games rendering us or others the dupe, but also having the power to liberate us amid low-to-high stakes.

Within those stakes, monstrous-feminine players are more skilled by virtue of necessity—overcoming systemic adversity through treachery and cunning but also nuance and grace; i.e., a system of exchange on par with giving rings, in The Merchant of Venice, which extends to other kinds of games that serve a similar purpose; e.g., Luc Besson’s 2019 excellent rehash of La Femme Nikita, the svelte sexpot beating the boys at their own game in ways they aren’t accustomed to playing themselves, by virtue of them being men: blunt instruments to her scalpel’s acting and play as a means of surviving men, first and foremost (source).

In short, it behooves us to be skillful, “skill” something that, through sex work (or work sexualized under capital, which is everything but especially any kind of work performed by/assigned to women or people treated as women by the state; i.e., according to their biology and/or identity as monstrous-feminine) merging porn and art as activism-in-disguise:

(artist: Angel Witch and Blxxd Bunny)

Such vivid-yet-underestimated markers of alienation and us-versus-them violence are incredibly useful to workers for several reasons. For one, nothing is more controlled than sex and the desires and poetry surrounding it, which the state requires to prolong itself and rape nature with using police violence (and tokenized rebellion). Except the state can’t make sex entirely illegal, nor language, sarcasm, and thought crimes, and point in fact, desperately needs monsters acting rebellious; i.e., to justify its own sexual violence against nature as monstrous-feminine: through the performance of sin, which it can then control as a language and vector of its own tyranny punching down.

Furthermore, Gothic prohibition (and police/military violence at large; e.g., bombs) historically don’t work. Such things, divorced from their immediate sexual prescription and dogma, afford theatrical commentaries that become performative with a rebellious function, during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., granting a layer of cryptonymic detachment and engagement that lets us play with such things without the immediacy that sexual connection often entails (many of the models I work with are asexual to some extent; e.g., Blxxd Bunny—who enjoys pain and sexual expression more than overtly sexual sensations—is a bit of an ace “size queen,” above). In disguise, we can reverse the terrorist/counterterrorist role, banking on the historical fact that fascism and Imperialism (thus Capitalism) have short lifespans and cannot monopolize weapons of violence and terror like rape through demon BDSM. We can use the same exact things to weaken their stronghold! And there’s nothing they can do about it; colonizers always need someone to fight.

We camp canon because we must. Queer people (and other minorities) live under unstable, harmful conditions, the state criminalizing nature in bad faith to police and maintain private property (re: ACAB, ASAB). So while fascism colonizes media to infiltrate the usual voices of the oppressed, and which the latter must be decolonized by us in the same spaces (subverting the Protestant ethic), we’re not trying to assimilate thus become cops that relegate such subjects purely to realms of privatization/controlled opposition; we want to express private matters in public ways that make the world safe from capital and police violence: by highlighting the chaos of our daily lives through the demonic, sexual language of survival during crisis. It’s a kind of saber-rattling—a threat display that says, “welcome to our world,” but also, “fuck around, find out.”

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Police monopolize, thus abuse, “boundaries for me, not for thee.” Except empires, while formidable, are not all-powerful; they need workers (and copaganda laden with fireworks) to defend them from labor at large as something to steal from. Fascism is capital in decay defending itself and state rights from worker, animal and environmental rights. This means that nothing scares empire and fascism more than a vulnerable party fighting back in ways they can’t control; i.e., by demanding boundaries while acclimated to status-quo bullshit, and calling out state obscurantism and DARVO (which the Gothic, and its lack of concrete boundaries, excels at): exposing the universal fear and hypocrisy that state actors enjoy while using its mechanisms to punch down (whose ridicule only takes a good scandal, per the black penitent trope[1], to hoist our enemies on their own stupid, fragile petards; e.g., pointing out that Destiny—a full-blown Zionist and pedophile who loves calling his political enemies “terrorist” to discredit and attack them—apparently blew Nick Fuentes [a bonafide Nazi who hates women and chases catboys] and then filmed it, only to have the tape leak).

Gender trouble is a large part of it, of course (which the monstrous-feminine is, even in cis-het examples like straight Amazons; e.g., Ayla, from Chrono Trigger, above, and a million other examples of the virgin/whore herbo and harlot), but so is “trouble,” period; e.g., women with guns and confidence in their animalistic, feral bodies while not kissing up and punching down (a witch hunt needs token witches to work, gentrifying and decaying activism): warriors who undermine the status quo and shrink the state of exception for universal liberation!

(artist: Peach Jars)

Viewed onstage, darkness visible is anything that promises universal liberation through Gothic maturity. It becomes something to concentrate and channel, taken offstage during liminal expression to then spread around: rape as something to play with. This includes titillating (and historically ironic) mixtures; i.e., of things normally raped weaponizing tools of rape to their advantage; re: women and guns (above), but also blowing off steam (a sexual outlet, when individual worker needs and desires clash) while simultaneously passing vital ludic codeswitching (and Gothic, BDSM familiarity with such mysterious devices) onto the next generation of workers; e.g., panties—often connected to violence as symbols of sexual vulnerability and conquest (during courtly love, below)—let us play with rape, thus act it out; i.e., by raping the whore as an embodiment of nature that fucks back by acting out her rape, but also monstrous-feminine sex to demonically have the whore’s revenge: as mutually consensual, but whose mixed metaphors (of which the Gothic predominantly is) remain utterly haunted by those who wish her genuine, irreversible harm!

“Safety” is paradoxically expressed as danger and desire, but also “blind,” in Gothic; re: darkness visible. The panties are up, then down; suddenly Medusa is curiously letting you inside, speaking through the performative language of psychosexual violence—to whisper through gouged-out eyes and severed necks’ denoting forbidden sight[2] through a confusion of the senses, but also the paradoxical excitement of lowered panties and foreign objects shoved deep inside her most “delicate” of regions; i.e., during magical assembly and selective absorption‘s Song of Infinity speaking to our profound surviving of rape, and coming to an important realization: that rape, under mutual consent, is impossible, but threats of “it” during calculated risk are not just possible, they’re demanded! “Rape” is so often how Medusa asks for hugs (with Harmony loving the image of the blood shooting from her eye sockets; her response when seeing it: “LMAO that’s amazing!”). Hurt, not harm; no harm, no foul!

 (artist: Harmony Corrupted)

It’s not that consent is terribly difficult to communicate, then, but that its visual ambiguity and subsequent parsing requires intuition that is not commonly taught by canonical norms (afraid of troubling comparison, which doubles are, and which the state uses to shift the blame onto scapegoats other than themselves). To see us uncloaked and doubling our demise (and bad-faith counterfeits of said demise) during liminal expression, then, is to look upon a post-scarcity world shrouded in the plastic, inky language of the imaginary past loaded with rape as something to camp (usually through bad sex puns). Its hellish, anisotropic dualism begs, “Look at us, living our best life in spite of those hunting us; i.e., our stubborn thriving and, indeed, our flexible ability to speak to their betrayals under state control—our humanity something to seize by virtue of the sorry fact that those in (or with) power seek constantly to harm us for profit’s sake”:

(artists: Bay Ryan and Beat)

Cumming is a passionate, “torturous” matter of arrival towards profound feelings that, couched in violence, bigotry and phobia, feel amazing and bypass state barriers (thus unironic usage) during psychosexual martyrdom as a form of art, not literal suicide.

To be clear, the two are often adjacent; re (from “Psychosexual Martyrdom”):

Capitalism is heteronormative, exploiting workers in sexually dimorphic ways that lead to state decay through Capitalist Realism: the world as parasitized behind the illusion, killing host and parasitoid alike. All the while, said nerds project their terrorism onto others, calling their actions “counterterror” to disguise settler colonialism (and its stochastic terrorism) while chasing their victims down. It’s a monopoly whose process must be humanized by learning from the monstrous past as psychosexually martyred, stalling Capitalism and helping it develop into Gothic Communism; i.e., by subverting its heteronormative, kill-on-sight illusions with genderqueer ludo-Gothic BDSM iterations that thwart Capitalist Realism and achieve active intersectional solidary from various marginalized groups working in concert (source).

In turn, “Capitalism has no use for people who see each other as human; it wants us dehumanizing ourselves so capital can function as normal, moving money through nature at the cost of human life” (Persephone van der Waard’s “Remember the Fallen: An Ode to Nex Benedict,” 2024).

Except, what for the elite is merely an unironic tool of domination and humiliation (often used in bad faith), we reclaim the Gothic orgasmically to camp canon with through the greatest of ironies; i.e., to do things that constitute as swears, but also employ forbidden things in operatic spaces playing with rape, death and sin, but also divinity as a campy device hauntologically unrestricted by historical time and place; e.g., curses like “holy fuck/shit” and “Oh my god!” (which Bay cried as Beat fucked him, below) but also half-real arguments that employ demonic poetry as social-psychosexual action (often by merging sexuality with the language of death, war, and food, etc): beating our meat in depraved, “almost holy” acts of Gothic reinvention, revolution’s rock ‘n roll taking land back, but also language and labor in connection to it (re: Amazons and anal sex). Instead of the fascist nadir of genuine dignity and standards, we reclaim our humanity through campy terror language as the poetic passage of space and time, scandal and sentiment. Like Hell, the Gothic is something to reify and move through as we do; i.e., as de facto, extracurricular teaching devices camping state doubles.

(artists: Bay Ryan and Beat)

In other words, our doing so profanes currently sacred, but ultimately harmful systems using a devil-in-disguise that’s about as subtle as a Trojan Horse, tramp stamp (e.g., Hawthorne’s infamous Scarlet Letter) or Gothic novel (originally cited as terrorist literature; re: Crawford, Groom), but historically remains just as effective; i.e., with “harmful energies” that cultivate the Superstructure through the Wisdom of the Ancients as, itself, quite plastic.

It bears repeating that the devil is something to conjure and summon by self-appointed “holy” groups to maintain state control. Summoning sin personifies punishment; i.e., from a position of naturalized weakness to then exploit the whore’s involvement in, even if their role is involuntary, beyond or otherwise outside their control: the fetish and scapegoat to see through and surveil during the cryptonymy process. The maiden/sex demon are things to canonically embrace and abject; i.e., per the same whore’s paradox and revenge, itself something to reclaim from state mechanisms tokenizing and sacrificing the usual suspects. By framing/concentrating them as sex objects, but also sex weapons through the arbitration (assignment) of criminal sex and force, religion already pornographizes such things as guilty pleasure. Using doubles during liminal expression (under an unequal, hierarchical ordering of existence that monopolies things like pity and blame to serve the usual benefactors), the Gothic merely highlights this double standard; e.g., naughty nuns encompassing hauntologically medieval arguments of appetite and abstinence (signified by black and red, the colors of Schism; re: Protestantism vs Catholicism), one where formerly extended (sex) objects—subsisting under a rising Cartesian discourse pimping nature—have always, but more gradually in an iconoclastic sense, constituted a great many things under a latter-day perspective men cannot fully dictate or perceive: camping the canon.

(artist: Paul Laurenzi)

Women, as nuns, are classically saved and fallen, for example; their bodies are charged, in this respect, as a matter of automatic persecution and ownership by men fearful of educated women (e.g., source tweet, Dr Ally Louks: December 10th, 2024), but also anisotropic reversal by those same women (or those treated as women). Threatened with systemic power shift, men (or those inside the Man Box) view loss of power as “rape,” which they respond to by inflicting on their usual victims, mid-DARVO[3a]. In turn, agency and disempowerment inhabit the same canvas and monstrous-feminine bodies tempting men a priori, thus giving the status quo an excuse to resist with prejudice: to blame and rape nature all over again, reforming her as a matter of futile conversion; i.e., while treating it as impossible, but also hopelessly reprobate, degenerate and profane in sacred divisions of man vs nature. Her rape becomes foregone, then, as does her retaliation—one organized religion will try to reimburse and triangulate against more marginalized subjects under state rule. Nuns, in classic Neo-Gothic, are cops and victims. So does capital tank peoples’ vitals—their intelligence and awareness, mid-struggle—to a nadir of praxial inertia.

The fact remains, we Commie-fag sex workers are already creatures of violence, terror and sin; said language can be used to cryptonymically expose state hypocrisy without too much trouble—i.e., by living in/as sin, we achieve multiple desires, expressing ourselves as “of nature,” but also “from Hell” as a coded brand: reversing abjection to show ourselves as human and happy despite state dogma alienating and fetishizing us for being (as they see it) alien, horny and reprobate. Our doing so makes state proponents crap (or jizz) in their pants, thus out themselves as bad-faith behind concentric veneers (re: Matthew Lewis and his crossdressing Matilda tempting Ambrosio)—bad actors testifying to their abusing of us before we’re in reach. So do we, like Lucifer bounding into Paradise, break into Heaven (sold to workers as “Hell” during the Protestant ethic). It’s not like these devices (or their subjugated/subversive functions) have gone anywhere; profaning the sacred breaks Capitalism Realism by outing those menticided to uphold it—through singular (thus violent) interpretations of canonical norms, which our holistic application overwhelms and exposes easily enough!

In short, using the same language cops do, we can expose them more easily during the cryptonymy process, yet mark and identify ourselves as friends to the Cause when all sides are in disguise to some extent: friendly people to gravitate towards, in good-faith, while warding off genuine abuse camping the same destructive language’s markers of prison violence; i.e., during an apocalypse/witch hunt/moral panic assigning them without irony to administer hate crimes dressed up as “law and order” inside a prison full of witches (the state, incompatible with consent, needs rape to function, but also disguise); e.g., Radcliffe’s nunnery from The Italian full of uniforms that advertise state power but disguises to use by those against the institution trying to escape its concentric, prison-like halls with (for more examples of this idea, refer to “The World Is a Vampire” from the Undead Module). Inside such rooms, state actors feign oppression—acting legitimate while doubting our credibility (thus humanity) as something to root out, inside the prison-like disco; we, under scrutiny in the same masked ball, can playfully insist, “It’s a ‘fake,’ my dude!” And if that excuse doesn’t work—if such gay taunts are attacked in earnest regardless of the venue or circumstance—then it’s time to lock arms and, standing side by side, storm the wire of the camps!

Silence is genocide; the existence of GNC people (and other minorities outside of normalized, token spheres) equates to a kind of speaking out the state can only conceptualize as a threat: to profit, thus its own existence, which it will defend by aping us. The state is only a prison (inside a prison, inside a prison), and police are only the enemies of workers (and rebels, monsters) who they dress up as in bad faith; i.e., posturing as false friends. They know it’s a prison, but think themselves exempt; we know better, using the Gothic notion of home-as-prison (an ambivalent, ambiguous, oscillating crisis of faith, in the theatrical sense) to free our minds, then our bodies with: imagination first, then material conditions, the two ultimately working hand-in-hand to develop Gothic Communism and dismantle the state while paradoxically inside it. Liberation happens within, the wasp eating the caterpillar to emerge something different.

In Plato’s cave, this happens primarily with shadows; on the Aegis, with mirrors. Cryptonymy lets us survive, solidarize and speak out through buffers of pretend/not-pretend crime and punishment during liminal expression—a half-real mirror game whose dualistic markers of monstrous violence (to give and receive) infiltrate different sectors’ overlapping persecution networks: through buffers and reasonable doubt, accrued during costume games amid moral panic as an ongoing operation under capital. Our return to home as fallen is soothing through the ability to address crisis during calculated risk, psychosexual poetry and palliative-Numinous affect. Porn is some of the most potent art, in this respect; i.e., as it speaks to (and with) what the state will try to control more than anything else: sex with force, the latter dressed up as protection.

All monsters are, to some degree, imaginary thus fake, but likewise hinting at buried realities through their fakeness; the Gothic, as a dualistic means of calculated risk, is rooted in fakery to further or reverse abjection through the cryptonymy process—i.e., a fake made of clay or an authentic article made of clay are still, both of them, made of clay (re: the Gothic through camp, puts everything in quotes). As such, function trumps form as a hauntological matter of assigned legitimacy versus actual activism regardless of appearance.

Gothic Communism takes said clay, then, and uses it to liberate workers from state golems and gargoyles, the owners of a church increasingly menticided by/alienated from its own counterfeit sense of “past”; re: the ghost of the counterfeit ours to weaponize against our jailors, mid-chronotope. The more they lie, the more room we have to work with, terrifying what they and their forgeries try to abject using the same borderline-to-outright pornographic poetic devices: the sacrifice and executioner housed in the same special place, the maiden/whore to conjure up achingly during Gothic’s liminal rape play and murder fantasy! “Oh, heavens! Just what have I gotten myself into!” Hot goss, indeed, girls talk—about that big Gothic “castle[3b]” to go to for a good time!

(artist: Owusyr)

Except whereas the middle class since Radcliffe might conjure up a castle or demon lover to assuage their bigoted fears (cold feet or shoulders, often with an alter ego—the secret identity man-of-mystery or Amazonian menace to warm things up/cool things down charming the panties off the [classically white, straight, female] audience during calculated risk), we do so to announce and combat systemic oppression: killing our darlings on the Aegis, but also calling them out for their entitlement, hence grab a tantrum-throwing slaver by the balls (re: cops—those whose profession is to torture and extort people more vulnerable than themselves in defense of private property).

So do we anisotropically defend ourselves from state fabrications; i.e., by making our own and fashioning an alternate, at-times-frank/streetwise but also exciting/swashbuckling voice to history through demons (e.g., Borges). We make room for reasonable doubt/craft an alibi tied to our identity and performance going hand-in-hand. The Gothic becomes a place to conveniently be naughty and put our ideas to practice that, in turn, aren’t fully removed from our habitat, thus bailiwick. So with sugar and spice, but also piss, vinegar and worse things (shit, blood, etc), we can win some degree of arbitration regarding sex and force, but also our basic human rights swept up in these things. There’s power in fiction, but especially when it’s mixed up with sex and force through demonic expression as pulpy and clay-like. Yet another thing to speak to power with, onstage and off, we don’t just bypass boundaries; we blur them, too, by relating to (and learning from) the half-real past as ever in flux: through iconoclastic art liberating sex work!

Cryptonymy goes both ways, of course, but in making gender trouble (and again, trouble full stop), we’re freer than state proponents; aping our dragons, witches, zombies and demons, the latter is always trapped in crisis, closeted while reporting us to the authorities. The fact remains that some amount of violence is always required to liberate, even in theatrical forms the state cannot tolerate beyond its own perfidious misuse (of stigma, bigotry and phobia). The elite cannot own, thus monopolize sex and force, hence demons. Ergo, we camp harmful sex and force with ironic, non-harmful variants that worship ourselves, and give suitable gooey offerings (e.g., Beat giving Bay a nice big load, below) to frighten the elite with: wasted seed/non-reproductive sex (despite the creampie, Bay doesn’t have a uterus)! Our devilish pandemonium, these bodies and banners’ dark wishes push collectively using ludo-Gothic BDSM towards a world where profit (thus rape, capital, cops and billionaires) are well-and-truly a thing of the past!

(artists: Bay Ryan and Beat)

Deifying ourselves, we become something to aspire to, an example to lead by when developing Gothic Communism as fairly novel (re: to put the pussy on the chainwax): transformed into as demons do, trading in shadows to achieve reparation and release from police brutality with humor and consensual control (e.g., cock cages). With darkness, desires and dreams, we unleash upon a world that—per Capitalism—has become increasingly afraid of our presence: that trans people have always existed, and always will despite those chasing us. We transform not merely to hide from our attackers, but reveal that which they seek to conquer and destroy inside/outside themselves: us.

As such, we solidarize to reverse what they abject and divide, showing them their own straightness and whiteness (of the state’s settler argument, including tokenized variants); i.e., as the real sickness punching spectres of Marx across space and time, but also in between the past and the present in hauntological dialogs: revolution happens inside capital, the state using language it can abuse but never fully prevent those it harms from anisotropically reversing.

This concludes the broader points of holistic study and informed action the remainder of the Demon Module shall try to impart. In my usual approach, then, I’ll be cross-examining demons with the undead/animals, but will—for the rest of the module—be unpacking different aspects of demonic history and its poetic application we’ve yet to examine. First, we’ll establish the rest of the blood libel class (monsters of persecution and revenge); i.e., among demons mommies and faeries, in “I’ll See You in Hell,” followed by the rest of “Idle Hands” considering the desire/revenge portion of demons as monstrous-feminine whores (such desires often being sex liberated from state force, but still haunted by it). After that, we’ll summarize making and summoning demons vis-à-vis unequal, forbidden exchange to end “Forbidden Sight” with. The next chapter, “Call of the Wild,” shall focus entirely on radical transformation—especially concerning anthropomorphic demons of nature like chimeras, furries and lycanthropes, but also their holistic temples, masks, and props, their lips that grip (and other formidable extensions, below) all begging to be touched and played with: a sensual void calling you home, a mirror on which your own lovely monsters (and their bountiful harvests, also below) await! Ravish ironically!

(artist: Annabel Morningstar)

This possible better world—one where all peoples, animals and environments are free from state oppression and illusions—will always coexist with our dreams and bodies speaking together about such a special day. Its forbidden sight, Numinous quest, and special prescription express in and upon those struggling to survive, using what they got to humanize themselves and theirs normally being exploited through the same monstrous-feminine aesthetic; i.e., stewards of nature reclaiming sex and force from the state (and its historical-material language of profit raping us); e.g., as Bay does while being disabled and through survival sex work, an avatar of liberation and kindness the likes of which channels a sweet feral goodness.

Blood libel conveys a classic problem of horror movies: the monster lives at the end; when in Rome, we speak to those who fear us through the ghost of the counterfeit as something to hug. Survival is victory and silence is death, Bay the little puppy god that lives in my heart, a force to be reckoned with that makes our enemies think twice. One that all revolutionaries should aspire to, his spectacular levers and buttons—once joyously thrown and pushed (next page)—move the Earth on its axis away from capital harvesting us simply for being different than the ruling class. May a day yet come when people like myself, Maybel, Jackie, Beat, and Bay (and Annabel, Sinead, Romantic Rose, and others, next section) are, all of us sex demons, gradually freed from state rule, police violence, and token betrayals! Infinite labor, infinite value; demons, infinite form to explore and express our revenge: they only have what power we give them! Able to play with power ourselves, it becomes what we hold onto and administer as stewards of nature from nature, learning from the imaginary past to create a better world—a Hell on Earth!

Hell, expressed as such, isn’t so bad, is it? But it seems safe, harmless, non-threatening? Bay’s a sweetie’s sweetie, but they can absolutely fight back: “Thou called’est me a dog before thou had a cause / But since I am a dog, beware my fangs[3c]!” In place of pity burns a heart than can never be conquered (outside of ironic playtime), will never surrender to state pigs!

Onto faeries and demon mommies! “Drink deep, or taste not, the plasma spring. Y’see what I’m sayin’?”

(artist: Bay Ryan)

Onto “‘I’ll See You in Hell’: Dark Faeries and Demon Mommies,” opening and part one (dark faeries)“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1] Outing those classically sheltered by state structures, said structures normally letting them retreat elsewhere to harm others; e.g., Father Schedoni from Radcliffe’s The Italian. Exposed for his sins, Schedoni literally dies of shame. Nazis act holier-than-thou, but in truth are the most guilty of all.

[2] That of blind and/or decapitated prophets and demonic xenoglossia: speaking through corpses.

[3a] Re, Louk’s tweet (the original attacker’s response to her PhD’s publication):

You are the dumbest fucking bitch I have ever seen on the internet and the perfect example of literally everything wrong with modern society. Imagine thinking you deserve taxpayer money for writing that useless piece of shit thesis nobody will ever read. Vegan, feminist and queer, your dues to society are many and me and the boys will RAPE them out of you (ibid.).

Educated women, regardless if they’re for universal liberation or not, are witches to burn at the stake by good little soldiers—a threat that historically makes many women (already victims of rape) tokenize; e.g., TERFs; i.e., during fascism scapegoating modernity to attack modernity’s usual victims (and token agents). It’s a recruitment tactic—one to divide-and-conquer labor/gentrify and decay feminism by marginalizing educators into “prison sex” modes of thought, and all while getting others within these same, semi-privileged circles to kiss up and punch down, mid-witch-hunt.

Some things never change because the elite (and their moderate-to-reactionary defenders) endorse such pogroms, dogwhistling and virtue-signaling to varying degrees. And the reality of straight white people is, sadly enough, selective; i.e., such alienation is something that happens to different people under different degrees of preferential mistreatment—with Louks certainly antagonized for her work in academia, but less aggressively than, say, a black trans woman of color (re: “Hot Allostatic Load“). The point isn’t to rape rank, here, but acknowledge relative privilege during oppositional praxis. Such abuse is alien until it is not, but for some it’s less alien and closer to home to varying degrees of open hostility and micro-aggression, from moment to living moment; i.e., witch hunts, like any prison, persecute unevenly to keep workers divided, and America was and has always been a settler colony/police state.

Louks, for instance, pointedly “drew the line” after she was attacked as awfully as she was, but we must do so before attacks happen; i.e., while actively and aggressively fighting for universal liberation (which PhD authors don’t always have time to do; i.e., research is time-consuming, emotionally demanding and expensive). And I get it—rape accusations are dangerous for those inhabiting environments that are historically unkind to those they victimize; i.e., academia and women, the former abusing and tokenizing the latter to carry such abuse forwards; e.g., Simone Beauvoir raping her students (re: Martin)—but being “woke” is all about being ready for abuse and preventing it for all peoples on a systemic level by developing Communism (which academia historically doesn’t do; re: it paywalls its research): while living in Gothic times. Furthermore, you can’t just report rape to the police (which Louks suggests) because police/the courts don’t prevent crime; they uphold the patriarchal bigoted systems (and divisions of thought) that make rape possible to begin with (and cops commit more domestic abuse than anyone else). The state is white, straight and rapacious; so we must treat it as such whether the mask is on or off.

(source tweet, Dr Ally Louks: December 10th, 2024)

To be absolutely clear, I’m not saying Louks is tokenized; but it’s not unreasonable to suggest that others in light of her treatment could be motivated to tokenize in an environment that encourages abuse by turning a blind eye (re: academia has become an increasingly neoliberal institution over time). In Louk’s case, she was bullied so quickly (on a platform bought by the world’s richest man to platform Nazis) and so fiercely that she left Twitter for greener pastures. In short, an educated woman simply announced her intellectual work, and capital’s fascist lapdogs fetishized her for it; re: as they would a nun being—beyond someone classically with access to written material—a sex object for men to use and abuse with impunity. Fascism is the normalizing of rape in public, regressing to an anti-intellectual state of paranoia and persecution mania, mid-moral-panic.

[3b] Known in architectural legal jargon as a “malicious erection” (a structure erected maliciously—usually as an eyesore, or to vindictively block a neighboring party’s vision) but what I call “the liminal hauntology of war”; re: the arrival of a harmful condition/crisis of state, which the hauntology (usually a castle) symbolically announces: genocide, thus police brutality and ultimately rape as symptoms of capital’s endemic boom-or-bust cycle. The castle symbolizes the raping of workers by the state devouring them, its appearance simply a matter of routine; i.e., when Capitalism Realism wanes and apocalypse suddenly rears its ugly head (the Gothic metaphor between state violence and state bodies generally being a morphological one). The Gothic tells its stories with buildings and people relating back and forth across space and time (commonly framed as haunted houses/castles; re: chronotopes).

[3c] From The Merchant of Venice (c. 1598).

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 Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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.

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

power, darkness and knowledge—often as conspicuous, ritualized acts of creation/poetry and (re)invention through magic/mad science—go hand-in-hand during unequal, forbidden exchange, radical transformation and dark desire/wish fulfillment; i.e., someone will trade what they have for what they don’t in order to transform or otherwise fulfill a given wish: with a demon that has the requisite item(s), build and/or abilities (e.g., sensations; re: Medusa’s Aegis/forbidden sight). / 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 (and having their cake and eating it, too, as their alt account demonstrates).

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 “A Paucity of Time“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[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 Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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“!

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[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 Demon Module) is out (2/14/2025)! 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 persecution/alienation, namely blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts 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, through the dualistic language of persecution. Said state historically uses blood libel to demonize, prostitute and police nature-as-alien with nature-as-alien; i.e., the tokenized poetic language of punishment and revenge (witch hunts) within overlapping persecution networks, said devices chattelizing marginalized groups as dark, animal, and inhuman, but also terrorist, criminal and vermin aliens on the homefront (the enemy within). All serve to pointedly divide-and-conquer a population with a population: demons policing demons, whores policing whores.

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

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

To be holistic and flexible, then, I’m devoting even more playtime with demons from said launchpad. Except, whereas part zero focused on the revenge of nature accounting for its own demonized criminal 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[1a]” demons—which this section will then explore through vampires in Takena’s weaponized claymation skit, followed by demons at large (featuring my older work on Tolkien; re: goblins).

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

• part zero: “Cheat Sheet” (included in this post): My original notes for “Idle Hands,” left for your convenience. Lays out the very basics of the blood libel argument, its connection to sodomy and witches in terms of their shared dualistic usage when furthering or reversing abjection (thus persecution and alien), and some germane points, exhibits and quotes to keep in mind as we go.

• part one: “Amazons and Demon Mommies” (included partially in this post): Considers the demonic aspects of blood libel per the Amazon/Medusa as witch-like prostitute, extending to demon mommies such as Lady Hellbender (above) as Amazonian in their own right.
• part two: “Vampires and Claymation“: Lays out the basic idea of demonic, whorish revenge with vampires, whose blood libel it explores in Takena’s “Midnight Vampire” (and reconsiders some ideas of tokenization per some of our thesis arguments that apply to all demon types).
• part three: “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking“: Examines the vengeful, monstrous-feminine qualities of blood libel per goblins; i.e., their being “of nature” in ways that can be policed or avenged by theatrical agents waxing demonic poetic while playing with darkness visible. Explores these dualities first in Tolkien canonizing evil labor policed by good (orcs and goblins [vengeful-Jewish-coded slaves and whores] vs humans), followed by our own work and others camping him: through such “monster-fucking” play as highly chaotic/acid-Communist (e.g., Ween and SpongeBob), 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, persecutory 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 freakshows 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!

Idle Hands, part zero: A Cheat Sheet; or, Some Larger Thesis Arguments/How We’ll Apply Them to Blood Libel and Demons at Large

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 […] 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 (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, “Seeing Dead People” (2024).

As some you probably know by now, I write backwards. Either I go to the top, get to the bottom, and go back to the top again with what I just wrote, or I write something first and then write around it/preface it with a great deal of extra material.

This time around, I started “Idle Hands” by writing “Vampires and Claymation,” first (which was very short—only four pages). I then chased it with “Trial by Fire” and “Goblins and Anti-Semitism,” followed by “Amazons and Demon Mommies” (the latter which took forever because I love Amazons and Medusa, dedicating large swathes of page space to each, only to sub-divide again and write about dark faeries/commission a bunch of models to go with that addition) before eventually arriving back at “Vampires” and “Goblins,” again! This writing is something of a “cheat sheet,” then, which I wrote partway through the process; i.e., where I decided, en medias res, that I wanted a multi-section element dedicated to blood libel, witches and sodomy demons at large!

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

As my readers also know, I don’t like to waste stuff, and very much believe in holistic study by revisiting and playing with old things (e.g., Cuwu and I, above). To it, I very much like people to have context regarding my creative/directing approach. This includes backstories, but also writer’s notes, which part zero essentially is. However vestigial, tangential, or otherwise unnecessary and spectral/diaphanous it might ultimately be, I’ve decided to include my notes here, anyways, for your convenience. Use or discard them as thou wilt!

(artist: Nyx)

First and foremost, blood libel goes hand-in-hand with sodomy and witch hunts; i.e., witches, vampires and goblins occupy the same demonic, monstrous-feminine umbrella (of persecution and alienation); re: under capital, which rapes nature for profit by antagonizing it before putting it cheaply to work. Also, if I mention “blood libel,” I’m generally referring to the other terms unless specified, and vice versa!

While vampires in particular function as undead beings traumatized by theft, the other two historically exude alien/Pagan/anti-Semitic qualities tied to nature vs empire. To liberate sex work by camping canon (thus reversing abjection through the terrorist/counterterrorist argument during oppositional praxis), we’ll be treating all as sex demons, in this module; i.e., in terms of critical analysis through their poetic lenses, coded idiomatic language and subsequent, cryptonymic potential; re: a spectre of Communism—specifically Medusa’s fat ass (through an avatar, above)—is haunting capital (not just Europe, Marx[1b]). We haunt capital to have the whore’s revenge (thwarting profit through the whore’s paradox/paradox of rape during calculated risk): a Communist Numinous rising up from Hell while in Hell, a given train preceded by smaller concentric hauntologies with their own cryptomimetic sense of power and size, mise-en-abyme—haunting and echoing onstage and off, blighting the nuclear home, mid-chronotope (re: me, vis-à-vis Derrida, Castricano and Bakhtin)!

That’s the gist. The rest of the sheet is largely how I wrote it, originally. It’s short—nine pages (three of which are a block quote from Volume Zero)—a small basket of different curios I’ve gathered for you, should the need arise:

Before we dive into the blood libel section of demonic expression, let’s refresh ourselves. First, let’s trot out some thesis arguments, which will undoubtedly come up a lot; re: Capitalism sexualizes and fetishizes everything pursuant to profit and the usual bourgeois trifectas, monopolies and resultant qualities of capital; e.g., police violence as something to resist through play that lets us copy ourselves; i.e., into posthuman homunculi that can be taken apart. Also, “to critique power, you must go where it is”; “humanize the harvest, and the state becomes inhumane”; just as trauma cultivates strange appetites—anything in service to profit gentrifying and decaying the potential for rebellion through recuperated means—so does “trauma” make its own appetites in service to workers! And so on.

We’ll play out these arguments going forwards, including anything made with others’ help; i.e., as “violent,” in quotes; re: the paradox of appearing torturous, but functioning as playful, cathartic and revolutionary during ludo-Gothic BDSM:

(exhibit 43e2c0: Model and artist, top left: Mikki Storm and Persephone van der Waard. The title of the drawing is “The Palliative Numinous,” drawn to Mikki’s specifications. Despite the appearance of rape and gagging “bondage with tentacles,” the Numinous asphyxia [and demonic whore] on display is an ironic, cryptonymy rape fantasy that doesn’t advocate for genuine harm. For one, it’s how Mikki wanted to be depicted as during our negotiation, saying that “beasty” demons and tentacles are her kink. Hugging the alien is what she’s into, showing and hiding things that, apart from concealing anything at all, also show a fair bit of themselves on themselves. Power’s paradox lies in its duality, mid-feeling, expressing dialectical-material pushback against canonical norms. So do workers like Mikki and I touch on abuse, then instruct others how not to harm through “abuse” in quotes.

Furthermore, the shoving of tentacles down one’s throat is no different, in practice, than a cock down the same pipe, or hands clasping “tightly” around one’s throat [the appearance of tightness is for the viewer while a gentle-enough grip in reality is important for the recipient]. Even portrayals of “actual” bodily harm could be allowed, so long as their execution puts “harm” in quotes; i.e., is symbolic and cathartic as a kind of nightmare expression of trauma that helps the subject—notably a sex worker, in this case—process their own complex abuse. Tush, rack or box, “Medusa” employs cryptomimetic demonic exchange and transformation to show what she wants to show and to express her power through mutual consent: the conveying of normally hidden things expressed between pieces of Gothic language in openly monstrous forms; i.e., monsters are “suits” for people to wear and perform in for various reasons, for or against the state; re [from Volume Zero]:

Yet the monstrous-feminine also lends itself well to camp, supplying performers with the means to generate a cutesy-creepy uncanny in ways that make it far less torturous/stigmatic and far more fun, even strangely sexy [the proverbial “weirdest boner”]:

 

[artist: top-left, bottom-left, top-right and bottom-right: Jessica Nigri; top-middle: Johannes Sadeler; bottom-middle: Salem Hysteria] 

Camp can yield gender trouble and gender parody in equal measure—camp, in the case of the guy watching Pyramid Head ride four-eyes like an ass [mimicking the “power of women” topos vis-à-vis Phyllis and Aristotle] and parody for her and her performer friend making trouble/having fun; e.g., camping the canonical-if-at-times-tangential “Nazi” of the occult, psychosexual BDSM aesthetic [with bonafide Nazi camp being its own musical/comedy hit[1c] that never seems to age]. Likewise, Pyramid Head echoes the hauntological medieval as darkly torturous in a cryptomimetic, “Catholic miracle” sense, which can rescue pain from a variety of falsehoods: the false dichotomy of “pleasure and pain,” the false equivalency of “pain as sexual” but also non-pleasurable, the false stigma that pain is automatically harmful, thus has no cathartic potential. Trauma begets trauma and the chase of the Numinous can be medicinal in relation to lived trauma. Even so, it can just as easily be a burlesque show as kawaii vs kowai [cute vs scary] for genuine play and delight in an asexual sense with psychosexual overtones [the color swap] instead of internalized ones. Simply put, these aren’t pointless novelties or exclusive “hard kink medicine” for legit mental scarring, but also deeply fun [and subversive] exercises in the genderqueer creative spirit. Given the destructive nature of capital, all overlap through the same symbols and theatre as something to reclaim from the bourgeois monopoly on these things [source]. 

As always, the context behind the drawing’s negotiation and expression of power exchange remain an important part of the entire exhibit. The water, smoke, and volcano exemplify the same chaotic, seemingly Numinous power being embodied by the dark, giant monster whore “ravishing” Mikki, and Mikki [dressed in white, like the maiden] consents to a consent-non-consent ritual that cannot harm her by virtue of these things serving her complex needs; they can excite her and help her heal from trauma through a ludo-Gothic BDSM arrangement that addresses police trauma as something to live with, thus interrogate through the performance of power in paradoxical ways: calculated risk.

The Numinous, in this sense, becomes palliative/counterterrorist through its psychosexual nature challenging the inherent police design of state monopolies; i.e., the language of the performer being for or against something dualistic, liminal and anisotropic; e.g., terrorist/counterterrorist, good/evil, virgin/whore, protest/counterprotest, etc. Like in chess, the elite or workers can assign their position as “black” or “white,” albeit in duality and at cross purposes; e.g., “the state calls us ‘terrorist,’ but actually we are counterterrorist”; i.e., challenging the dichotomy of abjection and its usual blood-libel flow of power and knowledge, but also morphological forms: the virgin and the whore hyphenated, versus divided.)

Optics matter during playtime, of course—with rebels outwitting cops through counterterrorism’s dialectical-material context; i.e., the sort aiding and abetting guerrillas since ancient times; re: during the dialectic of the alien, the state dehumanizing the monster only for it, the “terrorist” barbarian/scapegoat, to reverse roles (and abjection) on the Aegis! Iconoclasm is a two-way war of mirrors.

Tied to capital, such things are historically-materially ubiquitous and eternal; i.e., so long as Capitalism remains and continues to rape nature as its alien, monstrous-feminine whore. From vampires to demons, then, you’ll never be rid of the Gothic aesthetic (which is so engrained within the West to be synonymous with it), but you can subvert how it is viewed and applied, mid-liminal-expression; i.e., insofar as the application of sex and force during state vs worker dialogs are perceived, swinging back and forth: cops and victims, felt amid common poetic extremes (which metal, videogames, comics, and porn, etc, are known for).

Canonical Gothic is notably “immature,” harmful. Gothic maturity is when workers can engage in/with such discourse to prevent harm; i.e., when labor becomes emotionally/Gothically intelligent enough—and class, culturally and racially conscious enough—to a) develop, not hinder Communism, and b) break Capitalist Realism through these means on a cultural level; re: during sex-positive sex work, generating iconoclastic art to recultivate the Wisdom of the Ancients into a proletarian Superstructure. Liberated from harm, “rape” becomes intuitive; playful but practiced, martial but artist, it shines a black light on dried blood (and other fluids). Such is the palliative Numinous.

This goes for arguments that apply equally to monsters of all kinds; be they undead, demonic, and/or animalistic, we can take those from one module, turn them inside-out and apply them intersectionally to other poetic devices (which we are, here, with demons vis-à-vis blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts). Furthermore, we can literally dress up or disrobe such things and go from there. Be it a uniform (above) or a single article of clothing (a hat or a cloak, below), any and all function as fashion statements and socio-political stances regardless of how they’re worn/dressed; i.e., they are linguo-material, in nature, hence subject to the same cryptonymic dualities and dialectical-material arbitration all human language is:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Our emphasis, here, is demonic expression, thus creation; i.e., as demons are normally created through themselves (and their uniforms). For example, my original character—Ileana Sanda, the Queen of the Night (from my unfinished fantasy series, The Cat in the Adage)—is a “golem” of sorts; i.e., a sex doll and embodiment of power as I see it through the witch aesthetic. She accordingly turns witch hunts on their head through said aesthetic; i.e., by using it to defend women and children from state tyrants, dwindling the latter’s reserves while largely in the buff as an Amazon might be: an action figure whose seditious-yet-protective spirit of utility is ludo-Gothic BDSM. Through Ileana, I marry such playfulness to dark spells and public nudism, to prostitution and parlor magic thumping the pimp without a male hero taking all the credit!

In Amazonian fashion, Ileana’s armor is her body, bare and exposed; i.e., in ways patriarchal forces cannot dominate, mid-exposure, but rather who dominates them in a pastel-goth, witchy aesthetic. She’s badass, but not furiously angry and mute, like so many female ghosts are. Instead, she’s a stage magician, slut and mommy protector acting as the queen of Hell, of her kind; i.e., within pandemonium as granting all occupants of Hell equal rights. She’s not just a sex toy for me to fuck, then, but what I want to be (the two are not mutually exclusive):

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

In turn, witches—along with vampires and goblins—embody the most immediate aspects of persecution and alienation; i.e., their subversion but also their similarities amid difference. They look radically different from each other and to themselves, but redouble and announce the same function across a shared pedagogy of the oppressed: to be hunted by the state, or to survive the state while speaking out through the same terror language camouflaging them as “mere play”; re: healing from rape in the shadow of police violence. Silence is genocide; exposure is strength, provided we use our heads during the cryptonymy process!

The fact remains, we’re all queens under Communism, babes—are all things to humanize and celebrate for our monstrous power (and birthdays, below)! But transformation is complicated, non-linear and ergodic; it takes work, but also repeated forays into the Gay Zone of Doom. It’s a devil’s workshop, one for idle hands to make toy-like monsters (clay or not) that challenge capital, hence profit; re: spectres of Marx evoking devilish tropes—e.g., Mary Shelley’s shadowy cabal of “ancient” black magic, whose coded anti-Semitism haunts Victor Frankenstein’s natural philosophy to slap him in the face—that, through ironic usage, can turn capital (and Cartesian thought) on its head!

(model and artist: Miss Nia Sax and Persephone van der Waard)

As a matter of violence, terror and morphological expression, imagination has the power to set us free as such, or cloister us all over again during the whore’s paradox; e.g., sodomy being something to punish us for/with, but also which opens the door to lovely monstrous factors alienated from workers by capital; i.e., owning collectively what the state only tries to privatize by stealing from and killing us in the bargain: the monstrous means of production, of darkness visible and its forbidden sight. Creation is a mode of thought, as such, for which the Gothic and demons grant our deepest, darkest desires to break Capitalist Realism with by developing Communism; i.e., whatever our hearts desire versus the state trying to rule us by dictating how we present. We decide such things, not them! The profit motive is rape! ASAB! ACAB!

I’ll demonstrate; i.e., by quoting from my thesis volume (next page), but doing so in favor of demonic poetics, this time around; re: while inspecting goblins, vampires, and witches—as similar tropes of persecution and alienation through blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts—that, suitably enough, are made from clay (darkness visible) to either endorse or tear down the status quo with!

From music to dance—to theatre to body language, to ludo-Gothic BDSM’s age, rape or murder play (and various other predator/prey mechanisms)—it’s entirely possible to summon, make or play with demons without harming anyone, while also recultivating the Superstructure in a proletarian direction (which the state targets with police violence; i.e., to label us “enemy” during blood libel to receive their violence[1d]): to fuck a dark mommy dom to metal and realize that—like Milton’s Paradise Lost—the real villain is God and any canonical notion of Heaven and Hell, good and evil, cop and victim is deeply untrustworthy.

Instead, we fags, women and other policed groups learn to trust our idiosyncratic feelings of abandonment acquired since birth; i.e., by using them to unify against the elite during liminal expression, we subvert subjugation rather than tokenize to serve the state as never providing for us: “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” This goes for all of us walking away from Omelas at once, solarized intersectionally towards that aim; i.e., a badge is not a shield from harm, it’s just clemency during witch hunts, and a bigotry for one is a bigotry for all.

In “Camping the Canon” (2021), Colin Broadmoor argues how camping canon, since Milton and Matthew Lewis, exposes ongoing police (thus straight/token) abuse against queer people; i.e., through art, even when the language hasn’t caught up or is otherwise suppressed through state force/tokenization. In response, I argue how workers camp canon because we must—for all workers! This accounts for our oppressed pedagogy’s similarities, which occur amid difference. Like it or not, difference is where similarity occurs. Even so, revolutions cannot survive tokenization unanswered, which only makes them gentrify and decay in ways the state can closet, thus control through difference. So while insurrection is checkered, it still unfolds on a shared board to move different pieces across; i.e., while preventing state triangulation using the same devices! For the state, we’re Satan[1e] as someone to exploit; i.e., made from clay and beaten with hammers, suffering harm until we tokenize into gargoyles. For actual rebellion, though, workers combat various crippling feelings (e.g., gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia, commonly through impostor syndrome/gender trouble) while pushing towards our true selves during abjection, whether the state likes it or not; re (from Volume Zero):

(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; i.e., corrupting the minds of the youth (women and children) by calling out seductively to them, offering forbidden knowledge/fruit[1f] as a chance to go wild/go native by coming out of the closet in opposition to state forces (who will chase us, only to be turned away at the door—”no fascists allowed!”): the truth of things in its totality and not just a white person’s perspective as an outsider to genuine atrocities; e.g., a Lovecraft novella, an overplayed Iron Maiden or Slayer song or the problematic castle of a Radcliffean novel (though these can all be enjoyed mid-rebellion). As Robert Asprey notes, terror and native wit/creativity are the historical tools of the counterterrorist, often being all they immediately have at their disposal; under Capitalism in the Internet Age, labor becomes a huge bargaining chip that Gothic Communism marries to terror during class war as a theatrical, operatic proposition (solidarity and labor action expressed as much through improvised Gothic poetics [improv] as improvised weapons): a means of bringing the oppressed and alienated closer to together in an informed, Satanic act of outer-space empathy and love in the face of state forces. The spotlight isn’t something to hog or monopolize strictly by white nerds but expand and share in a drive towards post-scarcity (through a horizontally-arranged system that isn’t rigged in favor of those who control it because no one person or select group will be in control, in that sense; that’s what anarchism ultimately is).

Doing so becomes second-nature, a way of existing that doesn’t require drugs or sex (though they can certainly be involved if one wants them to); it requires community and love in opposition to capital’s usual bad-faith actors, fear and dogma: persons who blend in for fear of the state, overperforming its doctrines no matter how ridiculous it makes them look. I can understand why they do it (they’re stupid and callow), but short of implied threats of force I can’t begin to fathom why would anyone ever want to listen to people like them; i.e., persons who not only never experiment or try new things regarding gender and sex, but also probably never have had sex outside of abusive and/or vanilla scenarios. They’re exactly the kind of people who act holy but hide behind their privilege as the most deviant ones of all[1g]; i.e., prone to abuse their power and harm those under their care. In essence, they treat the Holy Gospel (in one form or another) as a means to abuse others from a position of willful ignorance: by refusing to eat from the Tree of Knowledge because some asshole saying they’re God said so. The point isn’t whether they’re true-believers or that God is real or that God lied about the apples being poison, but what they do with their power and sense of alienation inside the status quo (source: “Interrogating Power”).

In short, all workers are whores under capital because capital sexualizes everything. By being ourselves in ways that consciously resist state power (and weird canonical nerds), we whores resist police violence and profit normally raping nature as monstrous-feminine; i.e., we break Capitalist Realism and—by extension, the Capitalocene’s usual menticide and hopelessly afraid Man Box—by “running the asylum.” Exploitation and liberation share that asylum. So might we, as the usual suspects/monstrous-feminine inmates, start to subvert canon’s usual copaganda feeding on us! Capital robs us, mid-thirst; we slake said thirst while raising Cain, the whore avenging the pimp’s harm, mid-harvest!

In turn, we transmute fear and dogma in all its forms. Through demons, blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts become things to level against our colonizers; i.e., by scaring them stupid through the cryptonymy process reversing abjection on the Aegis. So while weird attracts weird, its steady manufacture in our hands can shock our enemies senseless. From sex to gender to gender performance (and the trouble it causes), these things become weapons we turn into body art/graffiti codified as much by demonic symbols that have countercultural heft dating back centuries, but link to ongoing struggles; e.g., my art sharing the Palestinian cause.

Gothic Communism, at its core, recodes bias through holistic study. It does so during ludo-Gothic BDSM, disarming persecution with alien theatre; i.e., with our bodies, labor and language, whose playing at persecution during liminal expression regains control over ourselves as demonic. As demons, we’re still alien/deserving of state violence according to them, but learn to master things that normally rape us during the dialectic; i.e., by illustrating mutual content in society at large: where “rape” can still and should happen, in quotes (solo and with others, below)!

(artist: Mercedes the Muse)

So ends our cheat sheet. Keep its arguments in mind as we investigate the demonic qualities present in blood libel, sodomy and witch hunts; re: the witch-like Amazons and Medusa, as well as dark faeries and demon muscle mommies; Takena’s killer sex doll, in “Midnight Vampire”; and Tolkien’s anti-Semitic rape fantasies—not his vampires, this time, but his goblins! We’ll camp them all, one at a time!

Onto Amazons!

Idle Hands, part one: Amazons and Demon Mommies

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

—Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman (1979)

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Aria Rain)

Prefacing Medusa: to Bay

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

(artist: Bay Ryan)

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

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

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

(artist: The_1Medusa)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: In Case)

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

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

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

The Basics/Aesthetics

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

(artist: Winton Kidd)

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

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

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

(artist: Pinala Flame)

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

(artist: mustblove)

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

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

(artist: Queen Medusa)

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

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

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

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

(artist: Quinn)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Magic Moonarts)

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

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

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

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

(artist: Magic Moonarts)

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

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

(artist: Victoria Paris)

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

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

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

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

Poetic History

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

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

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

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Sam Milnes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Mizugi Buns)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: SLBtweety)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tokenization

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

(artist: Dreamy Skullz)

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

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

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

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

(artist: akiraeviI)

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

(artist: Sinead)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Digital Play Toy)

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Hellavender)

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

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

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

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

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

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

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

dialectical-material tension (mirror syndrome reprise)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Greg Rucka)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(source: Inked Artistry)

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Aylin Saier)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Mighty Han)

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

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

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

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

(artist: Autumn Ivy)

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

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

Medusa, My Thoughts Personally

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

(artist: Sienna Milano)

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

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

(artist: SGTMADNESS)

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

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

(artist: SGTMADNESS)

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

(artist: mustblove)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[artist: Brittny Blaine] 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Auguste Clésinger)

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

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

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

(artist: Leeza)

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

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

Second Breakfast: Forms of the Medusa

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: Martian Zombie)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facing Death: the Aegis Opens!

(artist: Abigail Larson)

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

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

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

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

(artist: Bokuman)

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

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

(artist: Tassy Is Here)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(artist: pixmilk)

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

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

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

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

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About the Author

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

Footnotes

[1a] Marx wasn’t above using the Gothic to speak to capital’s rising abuses. Neither must we, but in doing so, must—as usual—camp Marx’s ghost with all the rest!

[1b] Which can be used for the state; re: Virginia Allison’s examination of Evita (1979) and Nazi theatrics in “White Evil: Peronist Argentina in US Popular Imagination Since 1955” (2004). We examined this in Volume Two’s Undead Module; re: “‘That Which Is Not Dead’; or, Capitalism as a Great Zombie(-Vampire),” (2024).

[1c] Which we must anisotropically reverse while considering the optics of violence; e.g., Anansi’s Library’s “Nonviolence Is Good, Actually” (2024); i.e., we will always be “violent” because the state needs a weak/strong enemy to rape and reap through police force; re: nature-as-monstrous-feminine.

[1d] This isn’t to say we’re above critique (e.g., Ty Turner’s “How Ava Tyson Became The Most Hated Trans Woman On YouTube – A Deep Dive,” 2024) but that we’re automatically “Satanic” within the state of exception, thus marked for police abuse by state proponents and their Gothic dogma.

[1e] This experimentation comes with a steep tradeoff, of course. During Socialism, we a) come out of the closet/hiding to slowly regain control of our own bodies, labor, food and identities, but also b) shed the veil of ignorance to reunite with death as something to embrace and dance with, as well as stare down as oracles of the unbelieved, Cassandra sort that are also declared as devils, heretics, whistleblowers, castrators, bubble-bursters and iconoclasts by the faithful: the horrors of Capitalism as endless fields of exploitation, but also the subtler unheimlich where one gets an awful feeling—that one’s home and inherited identity is unironically monstrous and harmful (as are one’s usual means of escape: copaganda, unironic rape play and military optimism). The food will taste better and the sex will hit harder… but you have to be prepared to let go of childish things, including ignorant escapism into spaces of total, unironic enjoyment (repeat Sarkeesian’s adage if it helps). Instead you will have to experience both sides of something so honest (unlike Capitalism): getting spit-roasted by heaven and hell. Shakespeare called the cause “slings and arrows,” Coleridge called the condition “sad and wiser,” and Mae Martin called its solution “sap.” Of all three, I call it “the Wisdom of the Ancients.”

[1f] E.g., Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown,” but also Matthew Lewis’ The Monk. The latter serves as a biting (and hilarious) illustration of the (not so) Silent Majority’s abuse of privilege to indulge in guilty pleasure and wish fulfillment inside the closet (which is an awful, violent place), but also the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection. It’s “boundaries for me, not for thee” for those who—alienated from everything around them except fear and dogma—act precisely the way that Capitalism needs them to: as hypocritical bullies. As I write in Volume Three:

manufactured scarcity deprives sexist performers of safe, nurturing sex (not just condoms or birth control, but consensual sex, too). They become sex-starved and information-deprived—killer virgins embroiled within a prolonged state of fearful ignorance beset by “evil” as instructed by formal institutions of power. On par with Ambrosio from The Monk (1796), such persons revel in bad play through violent fantasies geared towards achieving sexual control through coercive dominance. Indeed, Matthew Lewis cemented these within Ambrosio himself, a religious man obsessed with raping Antonia, a woman he barely knew (and his penis frequently being compared to a dagger or vice versa). Hidden virtuously behind a veil, her impeccable modesty bore no protection against the perfidious cleric (assisted on his horny quest by a crossdressing, devil-worshiping woman named Matilda). For Lewis, these opposites—Ambrosio’s nefarious aspirations and Antonia’s besieged virtue—were less imagined hypotheticals and more Lewis satirizing England’s social-sexual climate within displaced and outrageous, but also queer language (re: Broadmoor). Moreover, its patently Gothic nature gave him the means to speak on taboo themes: rape as a material byproduct of violent cultural  attitudes, not isolated nut jobs misled by the metaphysical devil. Ambrosio even blames Antonia for tempting him and Matilda for setting it all up, fulfilling the binary of temptress and rapist working in tandem while dumping his own blame fully onto women, not himself. This works as a pre-cursor to the whole “no fap” thing that many sexist religious men today endorse: blaming women for taking away the “essence” of their strength: their semen, but also their control; cumming is a sign of spiritual, physical and mental weakness.

[1g] 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.