None of these movies are related, apart from that. What’s curious is that each ends up feeling like a horror film, to me—in spite of it being inadvisable: the act of classifying them as “horror” in a purist sense. All the same, while watching them, I couldn’t shake the feeling of watching very different movies than whatever I had initially expected.

Teshigahara’s movie, Woman in the Dunes, is about an entomologist—tricked by some rather unscrupulous villagers into being lowered down a hole, out in the desert. The hole is surrounded by sand dunes that must be shoveled on a daily basis, lest they grow unstable and threaten the village resting on top of them. Meanwhile, the hole contains a hut, which will be destroyed first, unless the dunes are dealt with. A woman lives in this hut and she shovels sand. Like Sisyphus, she is resigned to her dull, inescapable task.

What a strange system, I thought. Why not use more practical methods? The answer is simple: Slaves are a readily-available, cheap alternative (one theory as to why the Romans never developed past a certain technological state is because they didn’t need to: they had all the slaves they could ever require; the same warped logic is applied by the villagers). In any case, the man falls in love with the woman, who becomes pregnant and is evacuated, while he remains. When, at last, he has a chance to escape, he chooses not to. He has acclimated to his new prison.

At the end, I was left feeling as though I’d just watched a lengthy Twilight Zone (1959-64) episode. This was not my feeling going in. The best horror often leads off this way. It establishes a false sense of security and then disillusions it; said reveal can be sudden, or gradual. Dunes was a bit of both—the shock at the start, and the gradual acceptance of one’s inescapable doom.

In Funeral Parade of Roses, we are presented with something altogether different: a “queen,” or man who dresses and acts a woman, including sleeping with men—in 1960s Japan. This seemed largely to involve performances—makeup, body language, upspeak—rather than surgical procedures. Needless to say these persons aren’t always accepted: they skirmish with surly women, whilst their own male lovers uselessly fawn over them from a distance.

Wanting to be different, the protagonist, Peter, walks around, troubled, not simply because he is a queen, but how he became one. Towards the end of the movie, his past is shown, with his mother scolding him fiercely for wearing makeup like a girl. The son explodes, killing his mother—along with an unfamiliar man whilst the two adults are about to have sex. It’s a very violent ordeal, brought to life with terrific blood effects. Peter’s tendency to explode builds, eventually leading him to gouge out his own eyes, like Sophocles’ Oedipus. The gore, here, is equally fabulous, using makeup and prosthetics to rival the sort of digital visual effects showcased in much newer movies.

Being shot in black-and-white, Roses reminded me of a much bloodier version of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). In that movie, Hitchcock used chocolate syrup for its famous kill. I’m pretty sure Matsumoto didn’t, with his actors. Blood is hard to get right (while far from the greatest movie ever filmed, Brian O’Malley’s Let Us Prey [2014] at least manages to). In particular, fake blood in older movies generally looks pretty shoddy. For example, in William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971) it looked way too thick, like ketchup; then again, in newer movies, like Tarantino’s latter-day output Django Unchained (2013) or The Hateful Eight (2015) the blood looks oddly like paint (this is a stylistic choice, not a technical limitation, however). Whatever the reason or method, Matsumoto’s blood looks fabulous; his characters wear white, and their pure clothes are coated in black blood that stains, runs and ruins.

Maybe blood, like cigarette smoke, simply looks more striking in black-and-white. Then again, maybe not: many horror movies look excellent in color. I certainly can’t imagine Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956) in black-and-white: when purple, those blaster shots simply leap off the screen at you. At the same time, they were displayed as black-and-white in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978): in that movie, a little girl stares at Forbidden Planet, featured curiously on her family’s old, black-and-white television set. Such sets were common, in the 1950s, when the movie was new (seeing it in color would have been a privilege exclusive to the theater). I’m not sure if they were, in the late 1970s, but I remember my brother owning one as a collector’s item, in the 1990s. Apart from colorful visual effects seen in Forbidden Planet, the Technicolor showcase The Wizard of Oz (1939) initially bombed. It didn’t pick up steam—not until broadcast on family TV sets, in the 1950s (the irony being that many of these sets would have been black-and-white).

The fact remains, Dunes and Roses both felt perfect to me, as black-and-white movies. So does the third movie, Love Song. Shot by Kazuo Hara, its premise is explained from the offset: Hara, unable to cope with the loss of the girlfriend who left him, shoots her (with a camera). He does this with her permission, while she and her partner(s) are in the room. To quote Tom Hanks, from Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs (1989): “I’ve never seen that; I’ve never seen someone drag their garbage down to the middle of the street and then bang the hell out of it with a stick.” Despite having seen hundreds of films, across genres, I’ve never seen what Hara does with Miyuki.

That being said, I’ll be the first to admit that the premise of unwanted separation can be used to great comedic effect. Just watch Nicholas Stoller’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) or David Wain’s Role Models (2008): the guy who can’t let go is either a hilarious or a sympathetic wreck. And yet, while I’ve heard an ex stalking a former girlfriend, including by filming them, I’ve never in all my days heard of someone seriously being allowed to do so by their old partner—to act as a silent observer in midst of all her future shenanigans. Who’d want to film that?

I figured, Hara must be a glutton for punishment—that or the whole affair had to be royally trashy. Instead, I found it fascinating and insightful. This is because whole the invasive process required Hara to have been in the same room with Miyuki and her lovers (an immediacy assisted by the analogue approach); we’re privy to it all, seeing how his unwelcome presence exhibits a toll on everyone, including him. It’s a unique perspective, to say the very least.

Miyuki’s also a piece of work. She boldly “experiments,” trying relationships with other women, and black men with “big black cocks” (which she writes, in pamphlets she wrote and printed herself, before trying to administer them amongst angry men, in Okinawa). She hotly encourages women to simply take a man’s money and run. I don’t think the 1970s would have allowed for anything other than radicalism, given how stringent expectations on female behavior were, in Japan or abroad (the Okinawans tore up Miyuki’s pamphlets and attacked Hara).

If I’m being honest, my gut reaction was that everyone in the movie was ridiculous. However, then I paused and wondered to myself, what’s so outrageous about birth or parenthood? These are very ordinary things. Miyuki simply didn’t want to be a stay-at-home mom, didn’t want to have to be stuck with a man she didn’t love (simply due to him being Japanese). Sure, it sucks to be him; then again, given the way Miyuki was acting would he have been happy with her as she was? Or should he have put her in her place?

The movie, to its merit, raises awareness towards a lot issues like these—ones that would otherwise simply go unaddressed, even nowadays. I shall explore Love Song in further detail, in part two.

Part Two

Horror excels at exploring taboos—those things which disgust us. Here, the movies Woman in the Dunes, Funeral Parade of Roses and Extreme Private Eros: Love Song do just that. In particular, Love Song has Hara follow his ex, Miyuki, around, filming her as she jumps from partner to partner. From an emotional standpoint, this, right here, would make for a good horror premise, wouldn’t it?

The movie does us one better, however. It has Hara film Miyuki giving birth to Yu, her second child (not his). And when I say he films it, I don’t mean shots of her groaning stentoriously followed by an immediate cut to her magically holding the swaddled tot. Instead, I mean the actual birth, unsterilized (eat your heart out, Ridley Scott).

It’s goes beyond mere medical exhibition, though. We’re not just seeing the kid being pushed out, here, but a scandal in the making: a birth that is anything but the result of a purebred Japanese nuclear family (a native husband and wife who bears only his children). Instead, the baby is Miyuki’s second: from another man—and not just any man, but a black man! Perhaps in today’s day and age this isn’t so odd; in 1970s Japan, it would have been unimaginable.

Thus, leading up to the birth and during it, we have actually have three nightmare scenarios: male impotency, racial supplantment; and the delivery, itself. First, the abandoned lover is made redundant by another man. Second, that competitor is black. Third, the fruit of their deplorable union is exposed for all to see (when shooting it, Hara was so nervous that he failed to notice the shot wasn’t always in focus). The movie doesn’t imply these themes; it candidly narrates them.

Miyuki continues to surprise, as well. During the birth, we watch her calmly speak about how exhilarating it is as a process. There is nothing fake about any of this—especially her conviction. She squats and prods her belly before laying out the plastic sheets, the buckets of water. She knows the whole process like the back of her hand; and thus, might as well be cutting the lawn, for all the shock it poses on her system.

Indeed, she smiles and laughs all the way through, chirping happily into a microphone being held by another woman, who smiles politely and listens to everything Miyuki says as she gives a blow-by-blow commentary on and during her own pregnancy. I was hooked, all the more so because this isn’t a visual effect, but a real, undeniable event. As Kambei Shimada in Seven Samurai (1954) said, of the speared woman carrying her baby to safety from the burning mill: “What willpower!” Concerning my reaction towards Miyuki, the incredulity was no less inspired.

All the while, the baby is forced out, dangling by its umbilical cord as Mom prates nonchalantly about placentas. If that isn’t horror I don’t know what it is. Yet, Miyuki isn’t rambling. She’s lucid, putting her money where her mouth is. The movie paints a genuine picture of earnest, enthusiastic motherhood detached from men altogether. To this, the movie raises a lot of interesting points. For example, in watching Miyuki give birth, I have to wonder why men consider any resultant child to be solely theirs, the so-called “fruit” of their labor versus the mother’s. Given the choice, what man would swap places? You tell me.

Personally I think this kind of rhetoric—of men owning their children and their money—is aimed to keep women around more than convince them of anything that is actually true.

One, my own father spent as much on other women than he did Mom; instead of providing for us kids, he wooed other men’s wives (men who were his friends, who trusted him). Was it his right, simply because he worked, as a man? The only reason Mom couldn’t work was because she was pregnant, thanks to him. Yet, after the divorce, she worked and went to grad school, doing her own thing. Likewise, Miyuki decided to raise Rei and Yu on her own. In my opinion, she succeeds. Yes, she lives with men, but also women, and eventually on her own. All the while, Rei’s father misses them; Yu’s couldn’t care less. Regardless, Miyuki simply doesn’t need their money to be a mother because, like them, she’s capable of making ends meet.

Two, is men’s money actually theirs? They certainly like to say it is. To me, the whole idea of owning money seems odd (for the majority of us who don’t own banks). It’s not like most men own the place they work at, either. I mean, does the paycheck they get actually constitute as theirs when it’s signed by someone else? I wonder.

Furthermore, should they be allowed to do whatever they wish, including let their own children suffer from neglect? Whatever happened to parent responsibility? This includes managing funds and not devoting the majority of those to drugs or booty calls whilst one already has a pregnant wife and three small kids sitting at home. If one can’t handle that, then don’t have kids. Or, is that and having sex every man’s right—essentially to do whatever one pleases?

I can’t condone such heedless, flippant hedonism. So while I may be a result of my father’s errant trysts, it doesn’t mean I approve of what he did, following that. Nor do I approve of telling “lazy” women or kids to fend for themselves, while the “hard-working man” assumes total ownership over them, but doesn’t actually provide. Such a blatant double standard is having one’s cake and eating it, too; it’s convenient nonsense. There’s no reason to allow for it beyond enabling those in total control to bask in the luxurious perks.

None of this means I like Miyuki—point in fact, as a mate, I don’t; I find the idea of being with her not only unappealing but impossible (she wouldn’t allow it, for starters). At the same time, whilst giving birth to Yu, Miyuki seemed pleased, more so than she was at any other point in the movie (with the men, on-screen). And why shouldn’t she be allowed that chance, the same as everyone else?

At the same time, the men are free to complain, here. If they felt wronged, certainly they could’ve taken it up in court. None do. Let’s not forget, these men choose not to be in the picture; many simply disappear long before the woman knows she is pregnant (especially in those days, when pregnancy tests and contraceptives were far less reliable than they are now). Should Miyuki pay for it by being labeled a slut? If so, then why is the man given a pass, here? Is what happened to Miyuki just another case of the old adage, “boys will be boys; girls will be mothers”? Or, should both sides be held accountable?

What I liked about Love Song is that it gets one thinking about these questions, even if we don’t agree with the answers. For example, I initially thought Miyuki was mental; in the end, I felt her methods extreme, but not devoid of merit. At the very least, she shows us society isn’t fixed, but can change. I didn’t see this as a bad thing but that’s just me. Certainly it can always be argued that some people are happy with the way things are. However, what about the ones who aren’t? Shouldn’t they also be allowed to do as they wish? In fact, doesn’t the whole idea of individualism revolve around such entitlement? If people want to be themselves and try to change the world, in the process, more power to them. That’s what free speech is all about.

Part Three

My partner and I love to show each other movies. Our mutual aim is to show the other something different, and to explore new things together. Neither of us had seen these three movies. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. However, lacking a better way of putting it, none of the movies—based on their premise, cover or pedigree—screamed “horror!” They sounded like dramas, more interested in social commentary. What I didn’t realize is there was plenty of room for both.

All the same, I was interested by them, having been deeply fascinated with Japanese movies ever since I was little. One of the first Japanese movies I saw was Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954). Having repeatedly heard it to be one of the greatest movies of all time, I decided to watch it; I loved it, and showed it to my friends and family (and their friends). To this day it’s one of my all-time favorites.

From Kurosawa’s own canon, I also saw Ran (1985), Throne of Blood (1957) and Stray Dog (1949). By the time Kurosawa did Ran, he was no longer working with Toshiro Mifune. However, from 1945-68, the pair had done 16 films together. Needless to say I was exposed constantly to Mifune on-screen; he always had a starring role, always hit it out of the park. I was engrossed with his talent, and Kurosawa’s. However, whilst Mifune remained as prolific as, say, someone like Clint Eastwood, I daresay he managed it without the burden of only being portrayed as a man of few words (whereas Eastwood made a career out as just that).

Watching Mifune, I realized how varied he could be: In Throne of Blood and Seven Samurai, he was over-the-top, demanding your attention. And yet, in movies like Kihachi Okamoto’s Sword of Doom (1966) or Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy (1954-1956), he displays much more reserved warrior—in the form of Toranosuke Shimada or Musashi Miyamoto, respectively. That variety certainly didn’t hurt his career or the notoriety that came with it; he continued to acting for another three decades, but (for better or worse) would always be the man who played Kikuchiyo, Tajômaru and Miyamoto.

To this, one can note a cross-cultural heritage throughout worldwide cinema: In seeing Inagaki’s aforementioned trilogy, it was for me hard not to compare it to Leone’s Dollars trilogy (1964-66) that followed, ten years later—just as I struggled not to compare John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960) to Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

This is because movies mirror each other. It just happens. Likewise, so do actors: I see Mifune’s varied career and find myself thinking of Robert Redford and Paul Newman, working together as reversible, polarized opposites in the George Roy Hill movies Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and The Sting (1973). Good actors should play against type—if not, should own it (see: Eastwood). The best do both (see: Mifune).

The point here is that movies are flexible, as are their actors. Mifune wasn’t restricted by what made him famous, early on. Instead, he evolved, demonstrating himself capable of being more than anything suggested by his outer layer (that, and he had expensive appetites—bills that weren’t going to pay themselves). Thus, as of now I can’t simply look at him and assume anything concrete when watching a new (to me) movie, from his extensive canon—anymore than I could of Robin Williams, Max Von Sydow, or Peter O’Toole.

Williams has made more garbage than I so easily list, here; he’s also starred in excellent movies like (according to me) Seize the Day (1986) and (according to most people) Good Will Hunting (1997). Max Von Sydow starred as Antonius Block in the seminal The Seventh Seal (1957) and Ming the Merciless in the guilty pleasure that is Flash Gordon (1980). O’Toole immortalized himself as Lawrence, in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) then co-starred in the frankly-awful Supergirl (1984).

Perhaps they needed paychecks. Mifune certainly did. Then again, it didn’t stop Frank Langella from delivering a wonderful performance as Skeletor, in Masters of the Universe (1987). His thespian heft doesn’t change the fact that the movie is mostly sub-par, but at least Langella is having fun; if not for that, the movie wouldn’t be any at all, for us. It just goes to show that, when dealing with movies and their actors, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover—or, as James “J.Y.” Young from Styx once said, “sometimes the cover makes the book.”

The same is true with Woman in the Dunes, Funeral Parade of Roses and Extreme Private Eros: Love Song. Each is a black-and-white Japanese movie from the mid-20th century. As I watched each, it seemed straightforward enough: drama, and society commentaries on controversial topics. However, as things progressed, I realized I was dealing with a trio of films that worked just as well as horror as anything else. I went into them with my own subdued expectations—least of all, the sort of classic horror provided by Carpenter, Cronenberg or Scott. At the same time, I also wasn’t surprised to have these predictions obliterated, given the sheer potential contained within Japanese cinema, as demonstrated by Kurosawa, Okamoto or Inagaki. Instead, as each movie proved itself capable of being more than whatever I simply predicted, I was delighted to be proven wrong.

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

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.

Demons: From Composites and the Occult to Totems and the Natural World

“Who needs chicks when you got demons?” [They’re not mutually exclusive, my dudes.]

—John and Moe, The Gate II: Trespassers (1992)

(source: Austin Vashaw’s “Forgotten Sequel GATE II,” 2018)

Note: I wanted to release this opening/symposium on Friday the 13th, but had to rush it a little. As it extends to the entire Demon Module and discusses everything inside, I’ve not only proofread it more, but expanded on it considerably. —Perse

This module focuses on forbidden, unequal exchange (often power, darkness and knowledge, which for us are synonymous with each other) and radical transformation (commonly shifting shape) through demons, but especially creation using such things and their dark materials’ desire/fulfillment of wishes (commonly around advancement and revenge using black magic/mad science); i.e., going beyond what capital normally allows for most people. The gods, for example, classically use clay to create whatever they want (re: all heroes are monsters). Demons, then, commonly constitute unequal exchange through power, darkness and knowledge as a forbidden creative act; i.e., they make for an incredibly broad category of monster that—famously shown during Satanic Panic, in the 1980s—exhibits beings (thus power, darkness and knowledge) as literally fashioned from clay (an analog of human flesh)! Doing so constitutes highly regulated acts of vengeful creation; i.e., showcasing forbidden ability (again, as power, darkness or knowledge) through limitless poetry that we’ll explore in the pages ahead; e.g., from Pygmalion and Galatea, Milton’s Satan, and Shelley’s Frankenstein, to echoes of those we won’t: Ray Harryhausen, Larry Roemer’s Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), and Frosty the Snowman.

(artist: Oxcoxa)

Self-fashioning linguo-materially also ties to incredibly old forms of demonic poetics, which the elite package and sell under capital in a variety of media forms, but also dichotomies; e.g., virgin/whore and videogames (with prostitution and whore-as-sex-demon being something we’ll explore at length, in “Forbidden Sight”). So while demonic “claymation” has occult origins dating back to the Golem of Prague (and far older examples), these have since been reinvoked; e.g., with John Carmack’s own Martian variety in Doom (1993); i.e., as also being fashioned from clay before being digitized (a common ’90s technique, Blizzard originally intending their 1996 flagship game, Diablo 1, to also be digitized claymation).

Apart from clay, however, demons are embodied and invoked by various materials and methods reanimating dead things; e.g., ink (above) but also what William Blake called “corroding fires” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790); i.e., being made of dark hellish materials, summoned from dark hellish zones, or sensed through the imbibing of dark hellish substances:

• posthuman mad science, composite demons and Cartesian thought leading to modern-day fascism and xenophobia (the Promethean Quest)
• the liminal expression of occult language, anti-Semitic black-magic symbols, and BDSM rituals (the Faustian bargain)
• and drug-fueled ecstasies/xenophilic knowledge tied closely to nature, sexuality and gender expression; i.e., as alienated from the modern world and fetishized/pimped out by capital

We’ll go over these ideas one chapter/subchapter at a time:

• “Of Darkness and the Forbidden” (opening, included in this post) is a symposium that discusses various poetic ideas and paradoxes (contradictions) known to darkness and demons, which will come up throughout the entire module.
• “Forbidden Sight, Faust and the Promethean Quest” (chapter) parts zero, one, two and three consider forbidden power as something to see; i.e., forbidden sight, per the Faustian Bargain and Promethean Quest. They do so through the history of making/summoning demons—initially according to Gothic, Renaissance approaches and prostitution (whores) as a Faustian bargain, but then unto the Promethean Quest; i.e., Cartesian dualism meant to punish demons, or otherwise summon/pimp them through the ghost of the counterfeit to further the abjection process in service to capital raping nature-as-vengeful (and whose inheritance anxiety occurs inside the Imperial Core, continuing Capitalist Realism as a fear of the outside, of the dark, of the Earth, creativity and nature[1]).
• “Exploring the Derelict Past“ (subchapter) considers the dialectical-material tensions between a demonic trifecta of damsels, detectives and demons; i.e., as something to enjoy on either side of oppositional praxis, while endorsing pro-state or pro-worker functions (their appropriative dogma or appreciative ironies): according to those expressing and investigating demons and their shape-shifting trauma/catharsis.
• “Call of the Wild“ (chapter) considers the natural world as a hellish, demonic site of animals-as-monstrous; i.e., demonic and/or undead to varying degrees, which the state will exploit per the Cartesian model and its heteronormative, settler-colonial profit motive. Parts one and two consider the revolutionary potential of monster-fucking and the sex-positive educational device offered by the monstrous-feminine as animalized; i.e., how both liberate nature and workers from state-fueled furry panic using acid Communism (the merger of inter- and extra-community measures).

As we proceed, please remember Weber’s maxim concerning the state’s monopoly of violence (and in connection to it, Asprey’s paradox of terror and Crawford’s invention of terrorism vis-à-vis the Neo-Gothic mode); these apply to any demon, be the iconoclast of mad science, occult magic and/or nature, or to some degree chimeric/undead (e.g., the xenomorph). Made to prey on nature as monstrous-feminine, the state has an intrinsically heteronormative, Cartesian and settler-colonial police character that will double and weaponize Gothic poetics against pro-worker forms of counterterror seeking liberation; i.e., through demonic expression.

(artist: Mizugi Buns)

To it, demons embody poetic exchange—as unequal/forbidden, and with transformative linguo-material devices (re: power, darkness, knowledge; if I mention a particular noun in this module, it’s because I’m stressing it). As such, they are classically made, summoned or found, and argue dualistically (through doubles) along these circuits of poetic discourse; i.e., by creating something out of clay or summoning it into a clay-like substance (or dead flesh, possessed victim, graveyard soil, etc): to deal/treat with power in all its forms, including of nature and death as old, haunted, anathema and ubiquitous. Knowledge is power and vice versa during such exchanges; i.e., as dark, anisotropic.

Couched in “darkness visible” as a poetic, xenoglossic device, we can make not just voices, but also bodies that speak cryptonymically to taboo, illusory and paradoxical things, injecting them with fresh poetic life (trans people are poets of identity and the flesh, above); i.e., a half-real, checkered combination of violent, terrifying and hellish morphological freedom of expression, existing in andro/gynodiverse defiance of state monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital, hence Vitruvian medicalization and genocidal apathies (re: the Shadow of Pygmalion as white/xenophobic, fearing things not of the West [“not of this Earth!”] and bastardizing them as abject, alien evil, forgotten; i.e., reimagined with asymmetrical/guerilla powers exploited by the state but not monopolized by them)!

(source: Testament’s Dark Roots of the Earth, 2012; artist: Eliran Kantor)

Per Hogle, the ghost of the counterfeit furthers abjection through the middle class upholding status-quo arrangements of power and knowledge through Gothic fakeries; i.e., viewing colonized land as dark and alien, vis-à-vis Cartesian thought and heteronormative language demonizing older forms of culture connected to nature, life and death, having become alien in ways that uphold capital (and its black/white colonial binary argument). 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 (we’ll get to her).

Rebel power/knowledge, then, becomes ontological in highly dark, Satanic, and “archaically” poetic ways; i.e., through iconoclastic abstraction and impression, but also hefty substance, sensitivity and savory deliciousness regarding the natural world as funerary and wild (as forbidden fruit generally is): “death” as an extant state of constant radical change, made by those “of nature” the forces of light deem ethnocentrically “lesser” or “accursed” while conveniently abusing the same language of the imaginary past’s priestly and funerary necrobiome, themselves (always in service to profit/a Cartesian paradigm raping nature as whore, Pagan, black, the latter closer to life and death through reimagined death gods, post-genocide—above). And yet, all monsters are linguo-material devices, hence exist in anisotropic duality during oppositional praxis; i.e., in dialectical-material struggle, moving power towards workers or the state. This further complicates by a give-and-take approach to what is being exchanged. Whereas the undead take essence when they feed in relation to trauma, demons give knowledge to transform themselves and others into demons when they teach.

From Ovid to Milton to Giger to Vandermeer’s Shimmer (the Rainbow from Hell, per Lovecraft’s “Colour out of Space” [1927] worshipping cosmic nihilism), we Gothic Communists are not “sick”; we change both ourselves and others through love, pleasure, pain, and annihilation, turning into our true forms less as set and more constantly growing: amid a parallel state of existence whose Wisdom of the Ancients challenges Capitalist Realism and its blind, braindead myopia! Not to cheat death, but face and become it, we knock ’em dead—are the guardians of the universe, not its conquerors: the stewards of nature’s mighty-mighty darkness. Darkness is power as potential, waiting not just to happen but intersectionally collect, consolidate and explode in a rising pandemonium of anarchistic intelligence and consciousness; i.e., shifting the giving of unequal, forbidden knowledge towards worker struggles fighting for universal equal rights, dismantling the state as we do.

(artist: Mizugi Buns)

This occurs through playing with power-as-knowledge-exchange insofar as demons represent it through darkness as an aesthetic; i.e., expressed through ludo-Gothic BDSM. Something of an Unholy Trinity that turns capital on its head (usually expressed as upside-down; e.g., the crucifix), 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 (my demon thesis, the overarching argument for this entire module). The demon symposium shall explore this lofty and productive concept for the remainder of its pages, using these words somewhat interchangeably. In doing so, we’ll conversationally unpack an assemblage of complexities and contradictions/paradoxes inherent to demonic expression as “dark,” thus useful insofar as worker liberation under Gothic Communism goes; and we’ll impose limitations on demonic variation/our study’s focus, just to keep things—while holistic—somewhat grounded!

Of Darkness and the Forbidden: A Demon Symposium

Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see
Absolute horror
I cannot live
I cannot die
Trapped in myself
Body my holding cell

—James Hetfield; “One,” on Metallica’s …And Justice for All (1989)

This symposium is like that great library from The Shadow of the Wind (2001)—many books on the shelves and far too many to read in one lifetime or several. With selective reading, we shall pull this or that down from the dark, dusty stores, doing so to assemble and articulate a variety of poetic ideas/thesis statements useful to rebellious demonic expression, as well as arbitrating the focus of the Demon Module at large: forbidden knowledge and “darkness” to transform ourselves through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the demonic subversion of state harm by playing with copies of these things just as state proponents do, but in reverse; e.g., incarceration, torture, rape/power abuse, and the all-around policing of ironic demonic sex and force with unironic demonic sex and force: deus ex machina, Deus Vult!

Ludo-Gothic BDSM, then, is to play with unequal power as “dark” knowledge; i.e., plastic and anisotropic, to better make art in any linguo-material form that allows for transformation as such. Often, this speaks to someone’s perspective, but it also ties to violence, terror and morphological expression—a communion with dark earthly forces communicated by their bodies and minds as somehow “demonic”; i.e., in monomorphic ways antithetical to state configurations. Power is a paradox, then, something “dark” to (re)invent and (re)enforce along the control of poetry and knowledge by the state. As a structure, it invents conditions and ideas—generally through the assignment of guilt and innocence—that flow power up by criminalizing nature and policing it in us-versus-them demonic forms; Gothic Communism reverses all of this by inverting the same terrorist/counterterrorist devices and arrangements: to illustrate how those assigning guilt—or otherwise benefiting from capital as a heteronormative, Cartesian, setter-colonial arrangement—are generally the most guilty of all.

For your convenience, I’ve divided this symposium into six larger chunks and a conclusion (all concern demons and darkness, and the titles should give you an idea of what to expect):

• Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend
• Playing with Power
• Limiting Our Focus
• Expanding Our Demon Thesis
• Further Food for Thought
• Broad Strokes; Some Larger Arguments about Demons
• Conclusion: New Eyes, Forbidden Sight (and “Religious” Concerns)

Before we proceed into the symposium at length, then, a couple of pages about “darkness,” why it’s vague, and what I mean by it in relation to demons!

Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend

“Darkness,” whatever its form, is aggregate, massive, dwarfing the light—man vs nature, virgin/whore, state/chaos, etc—and its poetics and paradoxical ideas of dark knowledge exist within liminal in-between positions of incomplete knowledge. To be “in the dark” is to be at a disadvantage. These states of ignorance and lies actually stem from older pre-Christian religions (re: Judaism and golems), doing so in ways that hauntologically endure well into the present; i.e., “darkness” and “knowledge” attaching to “power” as, per Foucault, being equally broad. Demons are a very old kind of monster—far older than modern vampires or zombies, and still evoking that ancient tenebrous quality to them: a proximity to power merged with a foreboding but also welcoming sense of the unknown. “Dark” = “demon” as evoked by merely hearing or seeing the phrase; i.e., “a being of darkness, thus power as ‘dark’ or from/of nature as alien, vengeful,” simply as something to feel, thus imagine. Darkness is, in one sense, highly subjective—a feeling or a mood associated with demons. Per Plato, though, it operates through shadowy suggestion, having the capacity to liberate dupes or enslave them again through allegory (which is just as old as golems are).

(artist: ArturSG)

Per ludo-Gothic BDSM, “power” is often psychosexual and conveyed in terms of size or classically gendered, phallic/vaginal symbols of sex and force, like caves or swords under Cartesian reimplementation; e.g., Lion-O’s Sword of Omens from Thundercats (first image, 1985) vs Mumm-Ra’s pyramid of power (and his latter-day Egyptology’s skeleton king in two parts: Old Man Saturn and revived youthful tyrant, above) speaking to neoliberal (false) power fantasies made from dolls/pulp and playing with them. Simply put, power is something you articulate through perception, poetry and play as, often enough, “dark,” subjective, unstable, and Gothically vague. Shadows stand in, doing so as simulacra and synecdoche; they abstract to reify whatever our dialectical-material positions are, and whatever is policed by the state and which workers reclaim (usually sex and force, through nature-as-alien, left). Centuries of dogma change how the world is perceived in ways that must be subverted.

(artist: Kinky Birb)

Cartesian arguments classically divide nature into “thinking” and “extended” beings, essentially boiling down to white, entitled European men colonizing anything else per settler colonialism dressed up as “progress”; i.e., taming nature as wild, whorish, savage. For the state, there must always be an enemy expressed as “dark” in terms of a victim for cops to stomp—less a Snidely Whiplash to make Dudley Do Right appear good by virtue of the team he’s on, and more something that either can unite against. There are no moral actions, only moral teams under centrist paradigms, and the portrayal and perception of strength upholding capital, Pax Americana and the state standing against “true darkness (nature)” is the only “good team” under Capitalism: the state was made from clay as genocide during the Cartesian Revolution, the latter seeking revenge against God’s will through the former as something to possess in alien-like, demonic ways. The pastoral yields a shadow the state scapegoats and pimps mercilessly through DARVO and obscurantism: Lilith, Medusa, zombies, etc, threatening daintier forms with “corruption” (rape epidemics, sodomy and blood libel, etc; e.g., Beauty and the Beast, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Persephone and Hades, and similar stories abjecting or reverse-abjecting our mates; i.e., who we want to marry/fuck versus who we’re forced to). We can defend and protect whoever we want for different reasons.

(artist: waifumelsz)

So while “darkness” is initially a subjective inkblot that serves cosmetically for state forces and victim aesthetics alike, in reality it accounts for the holistic, cosmic, total, objective flow of power through language and nature as phenomenologically ambiguous, dualistic and historically-materially divided in two: team bourgeoisie and team proletariat, workers and nature vs the state, man vs nature (often expressed as women), black/white ethnocentrism vs settler-colonial territory ordered for conquest, ownership and rule (e.g., Tolkien’s Christianized Great Chain of Being and Divine Right[2]), and sex positivity vs sex coercion, etc.

As such, “darkness” handily accounts for the sheer poetic variety recorded, witnessed and experienced under these two constants; i.e., combining the five normal senses, but also swapping their roles to speak to new demonic ones; e.g., seeing in “darkness” but also with it, as with power in all its poetic forms (refer to our medieval poetic devices from the Poetry Module to get a better idea of what I mean: a confusion of the senses, selective absorption, magical assembly and our Song of Infinity). Demons classically mislead. Under state illusions, us-versus-them theatre yields not just cops and victims, but supercops and supervillains. Clarity comes from confusion, then, as something workers control and command to upset state logic/cultural attitudes about nature and workers at large; i.e., to use shadows, seduction and demonic instability to escape bourgeois illusions to pursue Gothic Communism and sex worker liberation through iconoclastic art, instead: our own shapes to occupy. Gothic maturity comes by using “darkness” to achieve sex-positive things, our mirror-imaged twins debating with state forgeries in and out of ourselves (myself being an identical twin, a trans woman versus my cis-het double).

(source: Lina Hoshino’s “‘Ghostly Shadows’ on Petaluma Streets,” 2022; artist: Larry Harper)

Arbitration is just that—arbitrary. “Darkness” isn’t automatically evil; it simply is what it is. For one, shadows are often conceived as “lesser” or “diminished” offshoots of someone formerly “bright”—i.e., to be a shadow of one’s former self—or a vague concentration of some kind of occupation, calamity or hard-to-define force attached to something else (a double or Venus twin). However, this doesn’t make them “less,” and often they have great mass and substance; they’re just a dark side to a person, place or event, or—like a black ghost or spirit—express a presence or entity unto itself that is dark, painful, mysterious, different, intimidating and/or left-behind, etc (a trace; e.g., the shadows of the victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, above).

Cartesian thought generally conceives what makes a shadow feel “alien” to begin with; i.e., as needing to be explored, destroyed, and purged, etc (re: the abjection process creating a state opposite to police, a stain generally of nature as monstrous-feminine). But it can just as easily be a pulpy expression of power in romantic language—a potential waiting to happen. To it, the shadowy butterfly Psyche, or ancient goddess of the mind, is a classical symbol of transformation through said potential since Ovid, to Shakespeare, to Keats, to Marvel’s somewhat looser adaption of the same basic idea:

Elizabeth Braddock, Betsy to her friends, grew up in the U.K. with her older brother Jamie and her twin Brian, better known as Captain Britain. Betsy worked for S.T.R.I.K.E.’s psi division after her mutant telepathy manifested, lost her eyes in the line of duty, then was kidnapped by the extra-dimensional media mogul Mojo, who gave her new cybernetic eyes but forced her to star in his wild TV shows. She joined the X-Men, swapped bodies with a ninja name Kwannon, trapped the Shadow King within her own mind, died, and was later resurrected. In fact, there’s not much Psylocke hasn’t done in her life (source: “Marvel Vs. Capcom Origins: Psylocke,” 2012).

Power as “darkness” is something to harness, channel and express for different reasons; it drinks the light trying to purify and extinguish it.

Furthermore, and from a pure applicatory standpoint during oppositional praxis, anyone can betray/stab someone in the back under the guise of luminary holiness and blind faith steered by bad, all in service to American Liberalism, white knight syndrome and capital; anyone can use the abstraction and aesthetic of demons and “darkness” to punch up. Cops and victims, pimps and whores, music and visuals—the state, under neoliberal Capitalism, creates whatever it needs in order to maintain its position; we respond in kind, existing in ways that use the same demonic language for our purposes, passing forbidden knowledge along: “We’re here and we’re queer!”

These ideas generally elide, and it’s actually quite difficult to stress just how similar state and liberatory forms of power outwardly appear. They mirror each other on the same Aegis per the abjection process going forwards or in reverse; i.e., during liminal expression, through state monopolies and trifectas; e.g., “Gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss.”

Cops, then, can look like victims (undercover), and whores can look like cops working for or against the state (re: brothel espionage—with “darkness” ontologically vague in ways the elite can use to expand the state of exception, and for us to hide and communicate inside it during the cryptonymy process). “Darkness” is dualistic, is everything at once, is both the state justifying attacks on workers/nature and the rebel defending themselves/subverting state power through devilish cryptonymy showing you things that normally vanish the closer you get; i.e, are abjected, policed or recuperated by state proponents abusing them: scorn, sedition, lust and other riled-up, simmering emotions/repressed socio-political sentiments, biases, stigmas, phobias, etc (and the linguo-material things attached to either side of them). For political purposes, the disambiguating factor is function/flow, which parses through dialectical-material scrutiny! Cops flow power up towards the elite; rebels redistribute power and knowledge downwards, each addictive, intense, ready to devour and be devoured.

(artist: Durane-S)

Flexibility/vagueness of expression and interpretation is a strength, not a weakness because it constitutes an uncanny ability to play with powerful things and use them to tease people with titillating possibility as “dark,” but also impressive. Whatever their forms, power and “darkness” remain thankfully diffuse and nebulous; i.e., linked to nature-as-monstrous-feminine per the cryptonymy and abjection processes; e.g., shadow warriors or similar beings of darkness, like pirates, barbarians, xenomorphs, Gothic castles, werewolves, and garden-variety Amazonian redheads—all giving weird nerds wet dreams (I want to fuck what I want to be): as badass, of-nature, partially inaccessible things to get close to and play with, “darkening” ourselves in ways that heal the world through subversion and camp as a kind of devious, wicked, energizing pulse to tap into.

Except, our “darkness” and demonic chaos works opposite state “darkness”; i.e., within the same devices at odds through duality. State chaos is a prison, one meant to contain and pacify workers in order to feed on them; emancipatory forms disable all of this, but still work through illusions of power meant to dominate through pain as much as erogenous pleasure. The idea is to unlock the unknown secrets of the body and mind through reunion with alienated fetishized things “of nature,” but especially sex and force injected with irony as inventive; i.e., by pulling us towards truth as, to some degree, encased in powerful, “torturous” shadows that can meet many different communication goals; e.g., Satan’s shapeshifting in Paradise Lost, but also Cú Chulainn’s demonic ríastrad as “a visual reflection of disorder” (re: Enri’s “Inside Out… and Upside Down,” 2013). This can be a threat display to ward off predators, or paradoxically to attract them during calculated risk: “Ravish me, mommy war goddess! Take me into your bush, your sylvan scene! Green light!”

Playing with Power

Darkness is vague, a found document written in Greek; demons communicate through power expressed nerdishly as pleasure and pain, sex and force (Faust was a giant nerd, as was Victor Frankenstein, and so many others pursuing forbidden things to fill in their knowledge gaps). This symposium shall address all of these linguo-materials vagaries and try to articulate the nigh-endless ways you can think about power as such, while still applying it yourselves; i.e., in more productive and less harmful ways than state monopolies do; e.g., Thundercats‘ playing with dolls and symbols of power tied to medieval, European structures of power and their dialectical-material concerns/dualities parallel to various hauntological kinship rituals, rememory and rites of passage. State force doesn’t solve anything and only leads to profit for the elite, thus rape and megadeath for us; to counteract those historical-material effects, workers must familiarize themselves with alienation and exile to poetically speak through the interlocutory (dialectic), cryptomimetic barter of demonic sex and force for workers; re: to give knowledge back to workers, transforming them into outsiders while still inside Plato’s cave and inviting them to do the same with others—through shadows.

We’ll get to that. As demons embody the at-times pulverized exchange of forbidden, thus policed transformative knowledge as a creative act, I’d further like to consider the vague, thus inherently broad umbrella category “darkness” and demonic poetics. We shall do so through an extended exhibit/apologia—one loosely containing various ideas to keep in mind; i.e., insofar as this creative process is a) normally monopolized to serve state forces, and b) reclaimed in the same exploitative boundaries by us to achieve liberation, developing Gothic Communism through ludo-Gothic BDSM: to play with demons, thus hug the alien as a shadowy figure/lie telling truth in virtually endless forms: “Life’s fantasy—to be locked away and still to think you’re free!” (Black Sabbath’s “Die Young,” 1980):

(exhibit 43e2a: Model and artist: Mugiwara Art and Persephone van der Waard. My drawing of Mugi as a dark visitor trapped between their devastated homeworld and ours; i.e., built on the fatal, Orientalist nostalgia of the 1980s Egyptian counterfeit: the return of the demon, demanding submission of the [canonically white] slave, the white Indian: “Frozen eyes stare deep in your eyes as you die!” From Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” [1818] to Slayer’s “Seasons in the Abyss” [1990], you’ll have seen and heard such abjection everywhere, and multiple times in this book, already [re: Castlevania‘s Countess, Jojo‘s Pillar Men, Samus Aran and Skeletor, etc]. Here, it serves a vital theatrical role: “antiquity” in decay delivering calculated risk with a Numinous, beyond-the-realms-of-death traveling flavor we can reclaim from the elite; i.e., as neurodivergent personas challenging their bad demon BDSM—reversing abjection! To that, Mugi and I are both neurodivergent, but Mugi is also plural [and unless stated up front is seamless within a system]. Younger plurals tend to be more open about their condition as a matter of Gothic poetics.

For example, my older friend Mavis likes to be underestimated, operating more like a chameleon, a ninja. They are plural like Mugi is and can agree and disagree with me seamlessly within a position of survival. Once taught, they can’t turn it off, and like all demons, they are made by capital exerting its will upon them. Similar to the nightmare scenario of the skeleton lord coming home to roost, plurality is often a consequence of trauma; i.e., demons are made, but as the entire following module will expose, they and their “darkness visible” can be used for different aims, to represent different things; e.g., plural people, queer persons, and/or Communists to varying degrees: medical conditions, social practices, class attitudes, often as things to summon and offer as paradoxes of forbidden knowledge and unequal power exchange. We become false and true at the same time, our way of seeing the world permanently altered: the inferno inverts, as does our sight—revealing that which is hidden by darkness with darkness.

Except the state doesn’t need to be the only ones making demons and using them to advertise, “other cultures are savage, not us!”; workers can place “rape” in quotes using the same faux-Egyptian counterfeit, albeit for sex-positive reasons that don’t unironically seek revenge against nature-as-alien, profiting as the state does on such inherited anxieties [re: “white people disease”]: a funeral procession making the planet dead as an Orientalist metaphor for fascism and moral panic, a cradle of conquerors and the devastation “they” routinely offer [a pro-state DARVO/obscurantist argument].

 

[artist: Zdzisław Beksiński]

Gothic Communism camps what is easily canonical, in this respect. The eclipse, here, equals the rising of the black, “ancient,” faraway castle in either case; i.e., as a projection of all the usual bourgeois abuses onto fear-and-dogma playgrounds: the liminal hauntology of war [a flying castle, Walpole’s Capitalocene] on the rise. Canon-wise, it merely becomes a middle-class opportunity to cash in on abjection, as so many did during the 1980s; i.e., move money through nature while dressing everything neoliberally up as “alien, past” [the Stargate Egyptology trick: ancient aliens tied to Biblical reinventions, specifically Exodus] and speaking to that Cartesian division through metal, cartoons, comics, videogames and so on—to sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll as essentially dark demonic pulp, thus where power truly lies. For canon, the black pyramid is simply the West diminished, apologizing for “Ra” [and the sun-like Imperium] as merely decayed, unstable like a volcano during the dialectic of the alien and needing a Walpolean facelift. It’s abject pacification, mid-consumerism—the worship of power-in-decay displaced to an other time, a liminal space, a Gothic-castle Sodom and Gomorrah to play with all manner of demons inside a castled morphology: floodgates to Hell, promising oblivion once thrown wide!

[source]

 

When I was living this lie, fear was my game
People would worship and fall
Drop to their knees
So bring me the blood and red wine
For the one to succeed me
For he is a man and a god
And he will die too

 

[…] Now I am cold but a ghost lives in my veins
Silent the terror that reigned
Marbled in stone
A shell of a man God preserved
For a thousand ages
But open the gates of my hell
I’ll strike from the grave

 

Tell me why I had to be a Powerslave
I don’t wanna die, I’m a god
Why can’t I live on?
When the Life Giver dies
All around is laid waste
And in my last hour
I’m a slave to the Power of Death [source: Genius].

 

To this, one of the monopolies I articulate is morphological expression; re: Hell and darkness. This power is neoliberal Capitalism in decay as something to camp; i.e., to monologue as Langella does, the sassy lich becoming a god waxing poetic about the power of “death,” for a fleeting moment: “I feel the power of the cosmos; the universe flows through me! […] The universe’s power! Pure, unstoppable power! And I am that force! I am that power! Kneel before your master!”; re: “I am become death, destroyer of worlds!” He’s a filthy whore, deluding himself as much as being a Darth Vader pimp from Space Egypt.

Such delusion mainly the point, the performative megalomaniacal idea is to own the stage as whore-like; i.e., during a given, profoundly intense and campy instance of the grim harvest/Grim Reaper as exotic, magical, straight-up stylish and cool. We faggish whores do it to draw attention to state predation and puff ourselves up, as proletarian counterterrorist guerrillas historically do; by comparison, the state monopolizes the night’s black boner/sodomy champion/gay butt wizard [the ass is dark and full of terrors] or resident catgirl[3] Medusa death god, summoning and raping them unironically through police violence before banishing them again—rinse and repeat. As always, liberation and exploitation share the same stage/shadow zone’s power-and-death, sex-and-force aesthetics.

In the classic neoliberal refrain, Capitalist Realism strengthens by virtue of a presence of corruption and decay darkening the city scape as coming—per the “black Egyptian” classic displacement—out of the imaginary past to threaten the present world with a ghost of the counterfeit: the pimp-like Great Destroyer traveling from older decayed empires into the Imperial Core as weakened and using garden variety obfuscation and DARVO; i.e., deflecting criticism and projecting state violence onto the same-old victims. Through English operas, rock ‘n roll and Gothic, then, power and darkness express less in funeral poems and more in funerary incantations—Christianized per the Resurrection as abject, Gothic in the NWOBHM style [re: as Iron Maiden did, above, with death anxiety and inheritance fears; e.g., “Hallowed Be Thy Name,” 1982].

To this, a Nazi-Communist skeleton king or Medusa [a dark Cleopatra, “O rare Egyptian!”] conveniently shows up, displacing current systemic harm back onto the same imperiled world; i.e., the Imperial Boomerang and military urbanism returning per a fatal homecoming [as the Gothic generally does]. In response, a white knight is canonically summoned to whitewash the Imperial Core through a false promise of restoration; i.e., one that conveniently banishes the angry foreigner/Wandering Jew [and his global conspiracy/cabal—the titular “Masters of the Universe”] whence they came [from the glossary]:

The Ghost of the Counterfeit

Coined by Jerrold Hogle, this abject reality or hidden barbarity is a hauntological process of abjection that, according to David Punter in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980), “displaces the hidden violence of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under their spell” (source). I would add that it is a privileged, liminal position that endears a sheltered consumer to the barbaric past as reinvented as consumable.

In other words, it’s the usual scapegoater summoning the Radcliffean castle during the liminal hauntology of war to enact Red Scare, except we can reclaim such devices to forge our own destinies with the self-same demonic language of the imaginary past. The state doesn’t monopolize that shit, and Langella’s performance [and Silvestri’s sweeping score] become things to camp the ghost of “Caesar” and Marx with in equal measure: “A battle fought in the stars…now comes to Earth.”

[artist: Drew Struzan] 

For the state, it’s Star Wars‘ billionaire Marxism, but Gothic like Alien was while cycling profit through an endless series of centrist, neoliberal wars, battles, heroes and villains: an Americanized temple of “ancient” war traveling to and fro along with its conspicuously swole deities/avatars thereof [carried into shooter-style videogames, especially Doom‘s unironically hypermasculine Doomguy as a profoundly stupid and violent himbo protagonist]. It’s gibberish, made-up demonic hieroglyphic nonsense settled through force; i.e, disrespectful towards the actual past as something to learn from in imaginary forms, administering dogmatically through faux “archaeology” and sold over and over to maintain Capitalist Realism: by glorifying police violence as “timeless,” eternal, pimping nature as dark and dead graveyard whore.

Canon-wise, it’s an old war-film tactic, and one that translates to pretty much anything violent; e.g., gangster films and Westerns like Heat’s [1995] infamous bank robbery scene and the ending shoot-out to The Wild Bunch [1969]: cops and robbers, but also dragon slayers; i.e., one-man armies whose hauntological worship under capital ignores the regular victims of those exchanges—nature and workers, obscured by evil necromancers. We can camp all of this, but remain entirely beholden to the same astral poetics. Simply put, knowledge is power but limited in ways that Gothic poetics supplement. Like printing money as much as comic books, the state wants to monopolize violence, terror and hellish bodily expression using their us-versus-them arrangement of demons; i.e., a canonical flow of power and knowledge to serve the state by pacifying workers with moral panics and their demonic codes under heteronormative, settler-colonial rule: more targets of state violence, established by playing with demonic stand-ins. All occupy the same shadow zone and use the same dark forces to say this or that.

Canon-wise, banishing a demon back to Hell is functionally no different than slaying a dragon, punching a Jewish-coded wizard, or shooting a zombie, insofar as the endless bullets, beams, missiles, muscles, blades and bombs [re: “stab, shoot, punch”] all equal profit in the eyes of capitalists selling police violence; i.e., by having soldiers, mercenaries and cops [usually himbos and token herbos] use them on the requisite victims, the latter dressed up as monsters: to be destroyed by other monsters during canonically escapist “empowerment” fantasies.

Videogames—being the classic neoliberal refrain—become monomythic war simulators built atop older media forms already designed from an early age to condition people into cops [of media, childhoods]: us-versus-them against nature-as-monstrous-feminine [whore-like] married to anti-Semitic, Orientalist and otherwise xenophobic stories framing nature as abject, as “ancient,” dark, and unruly! Antagonize nature, then tokenize it and put it to work in ways that cloud its vision and judgement; e.g., Amazons like Ellen Ripley and Samus Aran, Hippolyta pimping Medusa. Betrayal is betrayal and cops are cops according to how they attack and drain nature-as-alien: summoned by state necromancers to induce a police, us-versus-them function. Canonically speaking, monsters are made to uphold and disseminate this device; i.e., to learn its ins and outs by playing with it through state-sanctioned toys [classically made from wood, clay and metal, soil and shadows, etc—with L.A. Beast even attempting to make a sword out of Casein plastic: spoiled milk[4]]. Canon makes worlds it populates with Pax-Americana cops and victims, the state Aegis asking workers, “Would you kindly break that sweet puppy’s neck?” while making it look large and frightening. Nature is a whore; rape it [often with whores policing whores, left].

[artist: Xavier Garcia]

While a proletarian Aegis [often, a booty humanizing the whore] can dualistically and dialectically-materially reverse all of this—i.e., in order to make workers reflect on dark unpleasant realities as they evolve—in the eyes of the state, each is already dead and blind; re [from Marx]: dead labor sucks on living labor to enrich the state with cheaply stolen life, itself further rendered [vis-à-vis my arguments] into addictive junk food marshalling the entire process not once, but on loop, mid-Amazonomachia. In turn, the state cannibalizes its “muscle” [cops] per the euthanasia effect [re: tokens first, then black knights/crooked male cops]: “Bitches be crazy!” They must eventually be married off, generally as burly whores stuffed into bridal gowns [or chainmail bikinis enslaving them to the recruitment process, below]: war is eternal, its pimping forever collared during boom or bust [which again, we can camp, but always inside the same poetic spaces and on their dark angry surfaces; “enjoy but do not endorse,” as Sarkeesian sagely puts it].

[artist: Reiq]

Until retirement, cops are bully vampires that enjoy an army of demonic victims, the latter waiting politely to be destroyed by said enforcers in doubled states of purgatorial exception; i.e., fetishizing the alien to disguise how banal and unsexy the state and economics are [e.g., Red Sonya is basically a sexy alien queen/demon warrior dangled in front of nerdy boys, done canonically to pacify them with “Red Scare,” left]. Playing with smaller toys during a Sale of Indulgence as war-like, such canonical war games acclimate children [starting with white cis-het men] to the complicit cryptonymy of darkness-as-genocide; i.e., standard-to-marginalized traitors playing war for the state; e.g., women playing token subjugate Amazons [re: the monstrous-feminine] like Ripley or Samus, Cheetara or Red Sonya, and status-quo knights like Doomguy or Conan, He-Man or Lion-O, Rambo, etc, doing much the same with men. Power is comparable to itself as something to enforce through shadowy likeness.

For the elite, the goal is simple: “Make monster hero predators and monster victim prey[5] and comfort middle-class children, from standard to token as needed; threaten them with pulpy harm, then furnish them with clay-like surrogate parents, avatars and war-bride wheyfus for them to grow into: demonic sex and power fantasies, thus rewards.” Triangulating against state victims by playing victims themselves, cops manifest as supermen/superwomen impossibly threatened by darkness visible [re: “the enemy is both weak and strong”] and motivated by damsels-in-distress [the usual TERF gimmick] tokenizing feminism-in-decay [and other rotting recuperations that eventually rescind state concessions] set within a Gothic liminal space; i.e., the Man Box—one that isolates the hero monomythically inside Hell as a place to endlessly slay between childhood and adulthood, imagination and real life: a cop to call or a vigilante to triangulate against the unruly mob not just as undead, but demonic! Weird canonical nerds don’t just see red, but all the colors of “the Covenant of the Rainbow”:

And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on every living creature on the earth, every bird of the air, every creature that crawls on the ground, and all the fish of the sea. They are delivered into your hand. Everything that lives and moves will be food for you; just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you all things [source: Genesis 9].

Through not classically what “Rainbow Capitalism” refers to, the regressive likeness is tempting enough. Called to heel, corporations abuse a Protestant ethic after God’s death [re: Nietzsche] to have state boys and girls rape nature for them in the usual hauntological Crusades: the “apolitical” stance of seeing planet Earth as a game to act power out in ways that historically oscillate/transfer onstage and off. Oddly colorful and toy-like, said paradoxical vision reflects in the hero’s, theirs literally making for a heads-up display[6] [above] but also curiously set to equally hauntological music stolen from a rebellious past.

Visuals and audio, everything becomes like fruity slop—an infernal breakfast cereal stuffed with sugar, bad ideas and even worse intent; i.e., communicating the same fatal nostalgia to gamer culture while trapped inside the Man Box, coded to defend the state by devoting themselves to colonizing said fantasies [any and all of them, across all media forms]. For videogames, this generally locks inside half-real kill rooms mirroring real life in ways the state wants; re: Gothic liminal spaces whose heroically police-violent movement and action inside is written in spilled demon blood—everything set conspicuously to rock ‘n roll and similar “rebellious” music, its plastic reality’s fatal nostalgia turned into controlled opposition: holocaust by sprite and MIDI-tune versions of older devil’s music bled of its wicked irony/potential [from opera, rock, rockabilly [fast cars, faster women], metal, punk, swing and rap, etc]!

Hardly a trade secret, capital needs such things to function according to the profit motive guiding such poetics. As I write in Volume Zero 

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

I then go on to expand in Volume One

The grander counterterrorist moral isn’t simply that traumatic penetration is psychosexual violence, which fetishes corporally represent; it’s that such devices can be reclaimed through iconoclastic praxis during liminal expression, wherein one chooses to fetishize oneself in controlled, informed psychosexual terms. Despite the ambivalent, conflicted nature of Gothic language, the awesome power to set ourselves free lives within us and our bodies as transcendent gateways to better worlds of infinite possibility framed as “impossible” by Capitalist Realism. Except, Hell—if it is to be a home for all of nature criminalized by Cartesian thought—must be a place on Earth. We must become of two worlds, then, “half-bred” to wreak havoc and sow discord towards a better kind of place than Cartesian order does when enforced by moderate cunning and reactionary brutes’ usual dogma. Their knife dicks rape and kill; ours “rape” and “kill” to drain our would-be-murders’ potency when aiming their weapons against us. They freeze under our power insofar as we humanize ourselves in their eyes and expose them as the brutalizers.

To this, Gothic-Communist instruction occurs through praxial synthesis telling a different story than canon does, the latter’s norms preying on nature and bodies tied to nature as something to harvest (“fat” being the classic state of something “ready-for-harvest”). By humanizing the harvest, the butt needn’t be a symbol of chattel, nor its owner’s smiling face a forced Doki-Doki-Literature-Club-style mask. The smile of the soon-to-be-fucked can be genuine; when the owner raises their butt, they can illustrate mutual consent, indicating how they actively want it from being hard-up: begging for some dick a particular way from a particular type of person while reclaiming the activity with their body and all too happy to do so—i.e., “We are not animals, nor are we guilty or afraid. Now gimme.” It becomes vitalistic in a vampiric way that celebrates the transmission of essence and vitality through all the usual vectors, minus the stigmas; i.e., a revival of older pre-Cartesian ways for seeing the world, updated for the kinds of dialogs-under-capital that have carefully evolved to bring these monsters (and their complicated humanity under state oppression) out into the open: a vampire standing in daylight, making them sparkle.

Trauma is always adjacent to sexuality and performance, but needn’t determine the outcome. Insofar as harm can be reduced to calculated risk in forms of iconoclastic playfulness, the imaginary past remains plastic, thus can be recoded by empowering monstrous aesthetics with a critical-instructional edge, but also jouissance; e.g., the vampire as a play on rape theatre, traumatic penetration (stakes and fangs) and vitalistic power exchange through medieval language as reclaimed by ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., from Cartesian thought’s bad instruction under capital: a harvesting of sanguine that enriches both parties through informed consent that profanes the church and returns to nature [source]. 

which I now tie to demons, here; i.e., this transfer doesn’t have to be seen exclusively as vampiric through a taking of essence, but instead a giving of forbidden knowledge as demons do on their surfaces and inside their thresholds. Such fatal portraits yield a flexible monomorphic poetic lens, one to think of monstrous things in demonic terms as much as vampiric ones: the foreclosure of dreams, but also the brokering of new ones [false or not].

Capital bullies and rapes nature as monstrous-feminine, except the monstrous-feminine is holistic, employing a variety of modules all at once; e.g., Lady Dimitrescu from Resident Evil: Village [below, 2021] being a vampire on her face, but also a giant, shapeshifting demon: the Medusa as a golem-gargoyle Galatea. While she turns to stone when she dies, she’s already statuesque and colossal. And while she has an outwardly humanoid form, she’s also no maiden. Furious or calm, she’s always a whore, and yields strict-flavored energies in a Gothically “phallic” type: a foxy gangster moll with no immediate boss running her side of things—Bonnie without Clyde, the Archaic Mother with a curiously recent, noir-flavored timestamp!

[artist: Felicia Vox]

“Power corrupts” is generally referring to state power. Yes, Medusa’s Aegis can poetically amount to state abuse weaponizing the “strong” against the meek to inherit the Earth for the elite; but it can also be those whores “of nature” taking the planet back—by subverting the dialectic of the alien, making darkness something to get close to and become “dark” in turn! During such reversals, the whore becomes a demonic muse that corrupts canonical data and transmits subversive, concentric replicas inside the Trojan Horse’s formidable “wagon”; i.e., as doubled, bouncing back onto the glass of the screen—not war for the state, but workers raising class, culture and race war through Neo-Gothic, cryptomimetic means: “Medusa lives; now fight back!” Her harvest humanized, Medusa’s letting it all hang out! Merely doing so challenges state monopolies on their face; i.e., states are pimps that rely on whores being policed/punched down against and brutalized into order to exist as states do. Silence is genocide, but genocide is never fully silent. Frontier romances always come home.

[artist: Sinead]

In response, iconoclasts can loudly revisit and reshape the state’s harmful ideas of “past” in Gothic; i.e., through “tone poem” art as highly personal-yet-cathartic—not just the shape, but the perception of shapes that don’t always change that much in appearance; e.g., a drawing I did of Lady Dimitrescu, originally made by me when I was with Jadis, only to have me return to it three years later for this exhibit. My new version, below, and the original share a love for big strong women, and infuse into their surfaces a strict dominatrix/whorish character for the audience to enjoy and shudder at. Even so, the new picture also seeks, despite those likenesses, to make the alien past friendlier to workers; i.e., per an oppressed pedagogy’s Wisdom of the Ancients recultivating the bourgeois Superstructure: as conceptualized since I wrote my PhD and three other books [up to this point].

The two drawings are quite similar in their design and message, then; I’m just continuing to synthesize them more and more to my liking after surviving Jadis—e.g., akin to Georgia O’Keefe painting flowers after leaving Alfred Stieglitz, but in my case, occurring through active daily habits I’ve kept up after leaving someone who was openly a TERF and a SWERF [thus highly abusive towards me as a trans-woman artist and sex worker]!

[artist: Persephone van der Waard] 

Sex and force, pleasure and pain; BDSM, fetishes and cliché rape, death and general power fantasies—all work well enough with demons as undead, in this respect: out of joint, doing their own thang to not just to shapeshift, but turn into objects d’art coded with power. They amount to sex and force expressed as verboten “darkness” but, like the Tree of Knowledge, just hang there begging to be plucked and bitten into. It’s a vanity—a diaphanous robe hanging open and showing the viewer the whore’s goods beckoning into sites of power to play with forbidden knowledge! Per the cryptonymy process, things can be framed to show and hide what you want shown or hidden, but power is always there, always restless and unstable per the vanishing point: “Watch and learn!” but also “Indulge, you sick fucks!” Weird attracts weird, in this respect; trauma attracts trauma, X marking the spot, playing with superhuman symbols of power that range from kayfabe[7] to kawaii: crimefighters and archvillains moonlighting as genuine rebels in our capable hands, a secret identity/alter ago with a secret identity/alter ego! Doubles can double [and double and double…] and whores are an aesthetic and political stance with various sides to them!

[artist: Beefy Kunoichi]

Gothic Communism plays with these accordingly in order to threaten capital and tease development in ways that reward us; i.e., with actual empowerment [socio-material change] while giving the lesson away as forbidden cargo disguised as dumb entertainment/traditional ideas of strength, beauty and vice/virtue: stories classically made during genocide as a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. We take that idea and use it to lead to bitter pills we supplement with our own “sugar” to spice things up! That’s generally how allegory works, and our doing so is yet another black eye we, together as one, align to give state poetics!

“The villagers feared the plague and ran away. All it took was one dead horse to scare them.” Fascism is like a tinderbox. Whores, then, are a crime of reputation that only can redeem itself by doing, as the state defines it, more crimes. When the state sees you as alien, that’s precisely what existence is, but in doing so becomes stronger than the foundations of the Earth, as terrible as the dawn, as deep and unknowable as the depths of the sea. Like the moon, Medusa becomes something to invoke and consequently summon as an appeal; i.e., to the humanity of those demonized. Seen as forces of nature pushing against the Capitalocene, they strive to safeguard nature before state shift becomes permanent. So much damage has already been done, much of it irreversible. But as the saying goes, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings, and she’s just warming up [so to speak].

Life is an experiment, as is rebellion through Gothic art. My experiment with Dimitrescu is just one of many. So many artists play around in much the same sphere of Gothic poetics. The power of revolutionary cryptonymy is something formidable to robe and disrobe as needed; i.e., mixing and matching all manner of powerful and transformative devices, from bodies to swords to castles, to sword-like and castled bodies, etc, as political but appearing as things commonly disputed as “apolitical”; e.g., wish fulfillment and power fantasies told in common language: worker bodies manifesting a desire to never be hurt again but remain desirable—to be stacked in ways that make up for the odds being stacked against them. We are the night, and it can never fully be purged. “What is light without darkness?” The state cannot exist without us to police, but we very much can exist without the state! We want equal rights, not pimps, so tip your sex workers and refuse to ratify genocide in all its forms!

[artist: Vasilia] 

Again, that’s where we come in. Whores are both treated as homewreckers and instructors of forbidden knowledge that turn the nuclear model upside-down; e.g., polyamory vs amatonormativity. In turn, people learn through Gothic sex as sexual, but also as asexual insofar as its BDSM can yield artistic and political commentaries about different social-sexual issues and struggles. As sex symbols of demonic beauty and strength, whores remain powerful while disrobed, reversing abjection as such by refusing to cheerlead profit as a genocidal, heteronormative, settler-colonial affair. Instead, we cheer for our right to fuck/get railed by whomever and own our bodies and their labor value expressed in monstrous, GNC language!

With a body like Eva’s [above] from the same videogame franchise, Lady Dimitrescu cooks with gas, popping cherries. Beyond her and her children, nature is simply “Medusa.” Anyone the state could police and pimp, then, Medusa will double to challenge them through a polyamorous, unruly proletariat’s doubles of state counterfeits. She’s truly seen and done it all, having survived worse: the state often beating and raping workers to submission, but not what they represent in duality! Medusa’s body is sex, and sex is a demonic weapon for which no monopoly is possible! There is only argument for or against the state, generally through theatrical combat where the state tries to portray itself as the underdog and its victims’ the “real” abusers; in turn, truth becomes a matter of position concerning which aspect of theatre you want to support—the Gothic concerned largely with paradox about multiple things being true at once. Such is dialectical-materialism, a series of paradoxes through monsters in duality! Heroes are about overcoming adversity. Unlike the state’s, ours is actually genuine, but theirs is likewise an impossible task. Demons don’t die.

[artist: Vasilia]

So play with “Medusa” from any angle, size, shape, sex or gender your rebellious hearts desire; observe what collocates, then insinuate [with sinew] as your “clay” to work with, making gender trouble for fun. Make demons not to pleasure Pygmalion, but liberate Galatea so she might stomp on the Patriarchy’s balls! “Chonk, stronk, and ready to bonk!” as Jadis would say! BALLS DESTROYED [or sliced with a sickle cropped out of the image, above; re: Barbara Creed, the Medusa, and castration fears from the Archaic Mother and her phallic spawn].

Keeping with darkness visible and paradox, then—and darkly mirroring older morality plays from centuries previous [mainly concerned with warring emotions and desire surrounding sex and force]—virtue and vice become things to demonically double, reify and dualistically play with medieval gags as demons do. Except Gothic Communism abjures the state’s policing character in exchange for actual rebellion; i.e., flashing with power during revolutionary cryptonymy in pursuit of a sex-positive, post-scarcity world! The whore, like Pandora, cannot be put back into her box; her “box” is out there, a mighty-mighty fortress speaking cryptomimetically out against pimps while demanding equal pay and other basic human rights! All such play goes where power is to investigate it, we underdogs existing in the same imperiled sphere as our enemies, camping their canonical, completely unethical [and unfair] refrains!

All this being said, power is often not just visual, but audio-visual; i.e., a peep show generally comes with music of some kind or another! So keeping all that bread-and-circus music and violence we’ve already mentioned in mind, and the vampire-demon exhibit above, canon’s inclusive pandemonium has a commercialized, pandering feel to it; i.e., using older examples of demons sold to men [or those acting like men] who never grow up, but LARP to “defend the realm” from evil: projected onto whatever state enemies they demonize, then conceal/dogwhistle with the usual suspects by proxy. The whore is something to attack in-game and out [which we camp in an equally half-real sense].

Yet, while sight has an aural, heard component to accent its visuals, this can decay and age just as fast when abused by profit. For example, as I write in, “Spectating FPS Speedruns: Potential Pitfalls Exemplified by Doom Eternal” [2021]:

Classic Doom is a curious mix, and takes its visual cues from actual gargoyles, toy guns, and clay demons; its music is MIDI metal, but also post-punk, ’70s prog and ’90s grunge. Doom 3 features elegant, nefarious concept art and dark, industrial levels, but minimal music (the opening track is pretty great, but rips off Tool’s “Lateralus“; it also features Chris Vrenna, a former NIN drummer). Doom 2016 had a giant corporation being re-colonialized by the demonic oppressed, underpinned by some desaturated visuals (inspired by late dystopian surrealist Zdzisław Beksiński) and excellent level music (re: “Rip and Tear,” “BFG Division”). This music was composed by Nu-Industrial auteur Mick Gordon.  

As observed in my original review, Doom Eternal‘s music isn’t bad. Parts of it come alive, though especially when making obscure nods to older games (Diablo) and movies (Predator). Nonetheless, it’s fairly journeyman and rote; or, as [one of my exes] once said, Doom Eternal‘s OST feels like “industrial lite”—music written for people who have never listened to industrial before. For my partner, the music builds, but never climaxes. It hints at NIN, Rabbit Junk or Front Line Assembly but doesn’t go anywhere with it. You’d be better off listening to those bands instead (see, also: Reznor’s soundtrack for The Vietnam War).

For me, Doom Eternal’s checkered music production history leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Originally the story (from id Software Studio Director Marty Stratton) involved an open letter on Reddit in 2020, detailing how Mick’s unprofessional music for the second game was delivered late, forcing Chad Mossholder, id’s lead audio engineer, to have to piece everything together himself; later, Chad and id really got a lot of hate from fans, and Mick seemingly stayed quiet about it. Except after two years, Mick came forward with a ton of receipts, saying 

Marty lied about the circumstances surrounding the DOOM Eternal Soundtrack and used disinformation and innuendo to blame me entirely for its failure. Afterwards, he offered me a six-figure settlement to never speak about it. As far as I’m concerned, the truth is more important (source).

As Greg Kennelty writes in “Mick Gordon Publishes Massive Statement over Allegations Surrounding Doom Eternal Soundtrack” (2022):

All told, Gordon‘s post runs about an hour in length and is long enough to warrant a table of contents. In the Summary of Facts section, Gordon alleges the following against Stratton [emphasis, theirs]:

• • • He was not paid for over half of the DOOM Eternal soundtrack
    • He received a contract for the soundtrack 48 hours prior to the release of the game, and was not told the entire truth about the scope of his work
    • He was cut out of the process at the end of the soundtrack
    • Stratton never reached out to him about the controversy, and instead published the open letter
    • He received torrents of abuse and harassment from fans afterward
    • His reputation has been damaged because of this situation

Read the full letter here.

I don’t care if the guy is an artist that “everybody” loves; compared to famous FPS OSTs from artists like Bobby Prince, Trent Reznor or Sonic Mayhem—hell, even Mick himself—the OST for Doom Eternal just isn’t that great. It doesn’t break any new ground, and it feels like a double CD release that could’ve been trimmed down to just the “combat” tracks. You know, the ones with an actual pulse [source].

 

Furthermore, old monsters can start to feel adrift as time goes on, like soldiers without countries or wars to fight. Sometimes there’s a punk element, as Richard Ray remarks in “Doom, Coronavirus, the Mancubus and Me” [2020]:

id Software’s Doom was made by a band of dropouts and misfits led by gaming pioneers John Romero and John Carmack. It is widely considered the grandfather of the First Person Shooter genre. It’s also been aptly described as gaming’s “punk moment.” It was loud, fast, violent and didn’t give a shit about your feelings. It glorified the sound effect of pumping a shotgun and blasting away at fire-spewing Imps, vile Cacodemons, unholy Hell Knights and zombified employees of the Union Aerospace Corporation [source]. 

Except, of course, this gamer-style history of “rebellion”—from Tolkien to Cameron to Romero and Carmack, to speedrunners and content creators at large as weird canonical nerds [seriously, just look at these two dweebs, left]—is all at once incredibly dumb, self-serving and largely false, from a revolutionary standpoint; i.e., aimed squarely at gamer culture performing strength: as something largely white, cis-het and male[8]. Made to “rebel” against a cartoon idea of evil corporations, they do so by soldiering against “evil,” occupying positions of settler-colonial violence to administer as cops do. “Demon,” then, is really canonical code for all the usual things white boys [and token recruits] shoot in the name of state/corporate preservation as beaten into them; i.e., to achieve, for all intents and purposes, an unironic, middle-class clubbism/gang-style revenge of the/for the nerds; re [from Volume Two, part one]: 

In turn, the American middle class (so called “gamer culture”) would gatekeep and safeguard the elite through videogames being an acclimating device to neo-feudal territories to defend in reality (outside of the game world[s] themselves) as capital starts to decay like usual [source]. 

Back then, white boys “rebelled” as a matter of having the means to do so on ’90s computers [and other home entertainment systems] evolving into a business they got a jumpstart on for themselves as extensions of capital; i.e., what they created, as such. Their creations—our aforementioned heroes, if they were punk in a proletarian sense—quickly became witch hunters once recuperated amid fairly stupid debates had between fighting gangs circle-jerking it[9]; they invent enemies to feel useful while seeking payment as capital decays like always. It’s vital, then, to court such persons through counterterrorist demonic expression, using ludo-Gothic BDSM to offer them a better path than the state does [refer to Volume One for some good examples of this; i.e., the subchapter “An Uphill Battle, part one: ‘Predators and Prey,’ or Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror”].)

Limiting Our Focus

Despite barely scratching the surface, the above exhibit should hopefully demonstrate the virtually endless ways to manifest and play with power by proxy and in proximity to; i.e., letting darkness inside (or out) versus staving it off through a self-imposed vigilance (thus ignorance of its utility in worker hands). Likewise, neither are poetics, imagination, and creativity divorced from history and politics as a living document; instead, they compose, define and inherit them, hence dictate whatever direction that power flows, or the dark forms it can take through weird nerd culture, en route! Marx argued that history repeats in tragedy and then farce; from ghosts to demons, we faggy whores camp it all, including him!

Arguments are fights, then, for which demonic stand-ins are well-suited. Hell is their home—something to not only show off for those foreign to it, but stare back at them with. This isn’t to so much defeat those being stared at, but demolish their abusive positions towards nature; i.e., as much for the demons to ingratiate themselves through the giving of—you guessed it—knowledge that is fatal to an older perspective that withers in the presence of new forms. On the Aegis, new demons are raised, the exchange helping workers by reversing the flow of power so that state harm against them is lessened and eventually under perfect circumstances, impossible. Nature-as-demonic is effectively a revolutionary’s food for thought—something to love, respect and identify with, post-apocalypse: to camp not holocaust, but our survival of genocide in ways that don’t tokenize into gentrified/decayed spoofs, long after an epicenter of genocide has become a thing of the past (e.g., Afrocentrism unto Afronormativity, post-diaspora).

(artist: Gammel Gaedda)

Keeping both points in mind, we’ll want to introduce some limits to our focus; i.e., when playing with power as demonic argument.

First, classification. As already stated, egregores take two basic, modular forms: undead and demonic (with animal qualities to each, often overlapping in chimeric fashion; e.g., the xenomorph). Both are figuratively manmade in the poetic sense, and undead can act demonic or vice versa; i.e., a demon can feed and embody trauma and the undead can give forbidden knowledge and transform. It’s just not either’s poetic emphasis, historically. While zombie, vampiric or ghostly undeath are qualities that can be supplied to nature, the morphological breadth and liberty of demons invoke elements of actual construction that make them incredibly broad, taxon-wise: literally manmade, summoned/supernatural, and/or linked to nature, the instances of each we shall explore in order—both during the “Forbidden Sight” chapter and in the “Call of the Wild” chapter after it.

Second, morphology. Demons are literally fetishes; i.e., objects (often kinky ones) of fabricated power and darkness, thus status and socio-psychosexual knowledge. 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 (future editions can always include more close-reads).

In both cases, I’m adopting such pedagogic limitations to be more playful, thus keep true to demons’ shifting physiology and complicated psychosexual torture games; i.e., as poetic license and lens putting “rape” in quotes per neo-medieval expression. So expect a bit of eclectic messiness and campy oscillation to the rest of the symposium and the module at large: something to slurp/chow down on! “Eat me alive, you animal! Oh, no! I’m being ‘devoured’! Heaven help me/the devil take me!”

(artist: Gammel Gaedda)

Demons or not, all monsters provide preferential code talking about sex and force as policed subjects; i.e., haunted by abuse concerning these topics for which assorted euphemisms give way to genuine pleasure: a cryptonymic exhibit of at least one, but often two (or more) people playing and having harmless fun behind calculated-risk suggestions of “harm.” Harm haunts “harm.” That’s what the reclamation of monstrous poetics through ludo-Gothic BDSM is all about! Psychosexual catharsis thriving despite state abuse, Hell spills over and cannot be policed!

The rest of the symposium shall remain fairly conversational and holistic. We’ll proceed as follows—first, to summarize demonic expression through a demon thesis, then examine various food for thought about demons and the complicated darkness they represent (each emboldened to signpost them as we go): demonic cosmetics; the paradox of power and its performance, play and exchange; how demons lie as a means of instruction that commonly expresses through genderqueer existence, pleasure-and-pain BDSM rituals, and hurt-not-harm roleplay scenes/unequal power scenarios; intersectional solidarity, our strange appetites/modular thesis, dark desires/courtly love, demon lovers and the anisotropic/pact-like nature of demons.

Expanding Our Demon Thesis

To summarize demonic expression, demons transform and exchange/give unequal, forbidden things (re: power, darkness and knowledge) back and forth; e.g., unequal power as forbidden knowledge (not ordinary knowledge, then, but dark knowledge that supplies the power to change things in radical new directions). . This only sets the stage; i.e., for our aforementioned infinite variety that occurs in terms of what these things actually are in practice. Demons don’t take like the undead do when the undead feed, but rather give forbidden knowledge back as lessons to embody and witness that—once received—turns the recipient into a demon, which can happen over and over again! “She turned me into a newt” can be followed by any other shape/power configuration the demon desires, often from underground (re: golems, clay and animation; e.g., Steve Universe[10] making its golems not just from clay but gemstones mined from the Earth and uniforms made topside). Hell is a place of forbidden knowledge about the underworld, populated by all manner of demons who—knowing things—can magically transform because of said knowledge above ground. The more they know, the more they might transform into this or that—are beings of voluntary contrast, levied against those whose shapes (and knowledge) remain stuck/mired in harmful dogma.

In other words (indented for emphasis, an expanded demonic thesis for the rest of the module):

Something of an Unholy Trinity, 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, and/or revenge (which transformation facilitates, on either side of an exchange). During a Faustian bargain, power is exchanged for knowledge; during a Promethean Quest, knowledge is exchanged for power, either being two sides of the same basic coin (of darkness)—i.e., knowledge is power and power is knowledge about sex and force, often as darkly shows thereof. Both hail from older forms of barter that return to either challenge/uphold capital; they concern unequal/unfair trades, leading to self-destruction by the human party trading with the demon party—death being the presumed outcome. And while permanent, this event (often of status shift) marks radical, sudden change in ways that are seldom literal; e.g., Persephone, Faust, Medusa’s victims or Lot’s wife standing in as before/after metaphors; i.e., that seal the dealing parties away from the human world, whence they presumably cannot return (as the monomyth generally allows for/encourages). Faustian bargains predominantly involve a deal with the devil in spoken/written discourse; Promethean Quests concern power as found/left-behind by godly forces, which Shelley describes as denying their power to Cartesian agents: to punish them for using mad science to police nature with (versus reclaiming and safeguarding it from the state, as functional Communists do).

Yet, in the demonic tradition, punishment and reward go hand-in-hand as much as power and knowledge do, this being as much an abject, cryptonymic, esoteric commentary on state reprisals as it is for worker liberation through those (and other) Gothic theories. For all demons, power and/or knowledge is unequal both in how it trades and presents, but speaks to the forbidden, oft-anthropomorphic aspects of nature that state forces close off; e.g., as demonic, whorish, vengeful, off-limits, corrupt, degenerate, etc. Demons stress exchange as such in ways that oscillate; i.e., they go back and forth with such data, empowering people by showing them what the elite have stolen from them, and alluding what workers have to gain by defying the status quo; i.e., during ludo-Gothic BDSM, doing so to experience things that are, from the whore’s perspective, natural, but also under their control despite state assertions to the contrary. For Gothic Communists, mutual consent is power because its illustration demonstrates our ability to exchange what the state can only treat as unironic rape, mid- harvest (of Medusa’s peach). Power is sexy for us because it isn’t sexy as the elite envision it; re: to dominate and harvest nature pursuant to profit, because the state is incompatible with life, with human rights, with liberation.

The word “power” appears a lot in the Demon Module. I synonymize it with “unequal,” and each with “knowledge,” “exchange,” “play” and “virgin/whore” (experience and ignorance) as equally interrelated, thus treated to the same rule of thumb during liminal expression; e.g., “power = unequal knowledge exchange/play about sex and force with whores as sex demons.” —Perse

(source: Reddit)

Form follows function insofar as power flows either direction. Speaking to form, then, whereas zombies are more one-note (despite being a hybrid monster, in modern settings; re: Romero) and vampires—despite their own historical prolificity and ontological complexities—tend to look fairly similar across the board, demons and nature are entirely defined by their morphological, sex-to-gender variety and ludic complexity challenging state monopolies. “Demons” are cartoonishly transformative, thus can be whatever you want them to be; their bodies, terror and violence communicate through sex and force as generally uneven, torturous, and raw (charged on black aphrodisiacal surfaces, above). For instance, the Medusa (arguably the most ubiquitous and famous demon to come out of the West) classically and thus regularly plays out this way through BDSM pastiche (above). Raped by the state, she disrobes any such timidity to expose her succubean whore’s furious and febrile darkness; it becomes her revenge to expose  (more on this, later).

To know is to (ex)change; to (ex)change is to adopt a state of mind as a performance one can play out through paradox. To it, the more power given through knowledge, pain or anything else exchanged, the greater the transformation generally is; e.g., Skeletor from Masters of the Universe declaring “And now, I, Skeletor, am master of the universe!” when he receives the fire of the gods, becoming a god in ways that are perceived as “fatal.” His body and his mind—already twisted in pursuit of such things (“It is my destiny!”)—explode in delusions of rapturous grandeur: “playing god.”

A Faustian bargain canonically finger wags, saying “be careful what you wish for” to curious minds/desperate parties; but it also reminds us that knowledge can grant the ability to change our stars in ways that will see us excommunicated from state realms. This isn’t a fate worse than death, but a mercy exiting Plato’s cave: “Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven.” The same idea applies with the Promethean Quest’s Numinous refrains—the searching for excessive power that leads to us being punished by false Faustian gods telling us we can’t be gods, too.

“Death” becomes a state of change, then, one pursuant to our own building of better worlds using the Gothic aesthetic/poetics of power and death, sex and force (all the fun things). Poetry is cool; power and death are cool; and anyone who discounts the Gothic’s ability to create genuine rebellion through them is terminally lame/a cop defending private property (thus poetics) for the state; e.g., Mark Hamill [the voice for Skeletor, below] being a dyed-in-the-wool Zionist! Gothic is a smoke screen—a regressive/progressive mode of expression whose “new flesh” (as Priest calls it) allows for all manner of politics under its enchanting darkness (no monopolies, remember)! As much as we whores wear the same aesthetics on our sleeves—i.e., to smuggle in good, sex-positive knowledge, mid-allegory—the state can pimp this out, giving bad knowledge to nurse death anxiety with sin: a clownish juggernaut, leviathan, behemoth, and Great Destroyer getting what he wants (revenge) before ejaculating delight and promoting a world beyond our own that we cannot possibly imagine!

Or perhaps we can. Hauntology is nostalgia unanchored from a specific space and time, but haunted by a specific space and time oscillating as the Gothic does, shaking things up like a snow globe. Building anything that challenges God is considered revenge against God, thus forbidden by God (which extends to capital under a Protestant ethic and neoliberal dogma), thus framed as destructive and deceptive vis-à-vis Capitalist Realism. Darkness bad; darkness crossdressing and murderous, turning order upside down. “Come and see!”

In a dualistic, dialectical-material sense, though, Skeletor becomes a great shadow/castle in the flesh for both sides of oppositional praxis—a wrestler’s heel crossing the point of no return per a kayfabe momentum shift; i.e., his appetite for destruction basically makes him not just Caesar but Prometheus and Faust: a whorish/demonic being seeking his revenge, and for the state (and its police) to deny. His impudence must be punished—for making a deal with the devil/stealing the fire of the gods (and transforming like Loki would, from Norse myth) to become less and less human, or conversely posthuman in gigantic ways: that return him to lost states of existence, which state proponents view/treat as “dead”; re: Capitalist Realism. As such, he’s also Satan/Frankenstein’s monster challenging God—either in ways whose rebellion is false, thus in defense of the state, or illegitimate in ways that—as vice characters so often do—promote the joys of basic human rights demonized as non-Christian, foreign, and alien: swollen hubris and bodies of nature, death, and the monstrous-feminine as equally tumescent.

Any way you slice it/want to think about it, knowledge and power are forbidden, but witnessed paradoxically as vengefully out in the open; re: as darkness visible. Looked at/viewed with, this force classically alienates in ways that canonically distance the state from workers and workers from each other and the state. By comparison, liberated workers may exit normal states of existence to become increasingly demonic, thus drawn to other demons who know things, too! Knowledge is power because it gives us the ability to (ex)change not just ourselves, but the ordering of the universe as canonically ordained by bourgeois forces. Iconoclasts upset this ordainment by existing merely as ourselves, thus have our sweet revenge; i.e., if state proponents ultimately deride Melmothian wanderers (or monopolize them in strictly fascist interpretations; re: Hamill’s moderacy/white knight syndrome decaying into fash arguments), then we fags ultimately celebrate them through camp: to mold ourselves and our trauma like clay into demons, thus gain some sense of agency and control over power-as-poetic during rape play and other unequal, made-from-clay power fantasies haunted by state abuse!

As such, unequal power—as something to play with, negotiate and exchange during ludo-Gothic BDSM—is likewise notoriously diffuse, illusory and nebulously subjective; i.e., formally presented as a deal, bargain or negotiation (often of fatal knowledge, through Faust—see footnote), “power” can be whatever you want, can flow in either direction[11] to morphologically arrange however you want (e.g., demon monarchs or servants/imps; circles of Hell, wombs of nature, darkness visible/pandemonium, and other tiered/concentric torture dungeons; “white devils” and other foreigner classifications like “barbarian” or “savage”; kayfabe heels/babyfaces; etc) as an aesthetic or metric (re: Foucault, bio-power)—can be guided by impulse, mood, urgency/detachment and individual preference. Milton aside, one person’s Heaven is another’s Hell, and vice versa. The orgasm (skin or otherwise) is all in the mind!

Furthermore, apart from elemental demons—or demons of nature that yield an elemental quality to their appearance (earth, wind, water and fire; e.g., a fire jinn or water nymph)—nearly all (and their knowledge) are sexual (whores); or they concern sexuality discussed in asexual, meaning in socialized ways that express through BDSM-style rituals of pain, fetishes and kink. These extend to general power imbalance, paradox, public nudism, as well as survived and inherited/generational trauma voyeuristically exhibited. But natural demons, as we shall see in the “Call of the Wild” chapter, often concern sexuality linked to nature-as-abject; i.e., massive and dark, hunted or otherwise pursued and caged/dominated by Cartesian forces.

Divorced from genocide, these conditions become—pardon the expression—breeding grounds (next page) for intense psychosexual expression with asexual elements: to play with that which no one is supposed to see outside the bedroom, but pimped out on street corners and inside bazaars thereof. Reclaimed by workers making the imaginary past wiser, Medusa is a fat, sassy whore (or gigolo) looking to instruct through demonic sex. All are power expressed in dark delicious totality—as, per ludo-Gothic BDSM, something to understand through play! So smack that demon ass, bitches! The more we play god, the more those pre-existing deities of capital seem false and hollow!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Simply put, for demons there’s a million-and-one ways to combine, give and instruct with sex and force through pain (non-harmful or not), but also to marry it educationally with erogenous pleasure, medieval aesthetics, mil spec, time periods, (a)sexual fetishes and clichés, masks, costumes, alter egos, herbos and himbos, Biblical allusions, castle parentage/disputes, fatal homecomings and bread-and-circus trials by combat (e.g., Ornstein and Smough, the black-knight-style demons from Dark Souls, or Marcellus and similar oni-style Yokai from Onimusha and similar Asia-themed survival horror and Metroidvania), kink and BDSM rituals/torture implements (whips, chains, leather and so on), muscle and fat, clay and golems, doms and subs, gender and body euphoria/alteration, and various taboos, stigmas—and biases, anxieties, phobias, what-have-you—while likewise arranging and exchanging power imbalance during ironic/unironic demon BDSM. Existence becomes a point of reference, then, one to wrap our heads around by playing with power as such. In turn, all things expressed and played with as demonic conveniently become food for thought, insofar as playing with power-an-unequal goes.

Further Food for Thought

Let’s pursue that. With vampires, for example, the poetic emphasis leans more on fluid exchange/giving and taking essence as fluid. Though “essence” translates easily enough to power and knowledge through BDSM rituals, “demons” make for an incredibly broad umbrella category amounting to food for thought—can enjoy or express power and forbidden knowledge (about power, essence, or anything else) in any shape or size, vestige or portrayal; and they and their poetic lessons don’t need to be red and/or black (often, green or purple works, too, but really any color scheme[12]). Indeed, they could drink blood as a liquid, breathe spirit as gaseous, or eat a solid shiny red apple;

(artist: Judith Meets Salome)

similar to “darkness,” the apple can represent pretty much anything (cum, power, cum as power, etc) and Eve can be phallic/serpentine through Biblical symbolism, or through illusory-to-allusory stand-ins for stand-ins, dead metaphors out-of-joint with canon, classic-to-Freudian-to-postmodern interpretations/umbilicals, and so on. The potential to change is threatened by implied action and temptation: “Eat me.”

Demon cosmetics remain simultaneously prolific and cryptonymically vague, as such; re: “dark”; e.g., a fat, menacing “castle” something of a vanishing point, mise-en-abyme—an event horizon/Satanic asshole that sucks you in (which assholes tend to do, save when shitting something out). The presentational idea, then, leaps to visual immediacy and in language most people understand/relate to in some shape or form; re: sex and force. Exceptions aside, Western whores tend to classically (within the Gothic mode) dress/appear in black and maidens in white; collars, gloves, corsets, stilettos, stockings and lingerie are popular (next page), as are whips, feather dusters and maid outfits, and various dichotomies like leather/lace, angel/devil, black/white, dom/sub and virgin/whore. They communicate, thus grant knowledge through sex and power as things to recursively reify and exchange; e.g., in a dark forest of desire (again, next page); i.e., in any of the ways outlined above: “Eat me. ‘Die.’ Learn. Change. Grow. Become what is needed.”

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

All of these can hybridize, mid-aesthetic (all women are virgins and whores), but whores are canonically property first, people second; both something to call and relegate afterwards, they paywall in visually obvious ways—marked in society for being a particular kind of criminalized servant/forbidden merchandise that cops, as pimps, “protect” (versus the legalized variant of women’s work: the bride/wife, relegated to broodmare status, party to “legitimate” bloodlines [and their households] thanks to virgin/whore syndrome; i.e., the husband getting his jollies with his mistress/paying for her abortions to avoid bastard, illegitimate bloodlines).

We really don’t have time to unpack the universal wardrobe for whores worldwide. Just know the sky’s truly the limit regarding what’s “on tap” and how you want to respond to it (darlings can be killed and authors die): to draw your own conclusions/make your own connections beyond what dogma and the Imperialism of Theory (re: Norton) afford! Dogma forces singular interpretation, hence police violence; for us and Gothic Communism, speculation and critical potentiation/prolific interpretation is the name of the game! “Eat the fucking apple! They’re going blame you anyway!” Rock those fishnets, girl!

Hermeneutics aside, demons essentially and creatively have carte blanche, affording users limitless, infinite potential and creativity in how they themselves perform, present/perceive and play power out through demonic avatars and their doubled, darkness-visible paradoxes; i.e., like money and material goods, power is an illusion, but specifically a transient, dualistic, liminal one to play between different states that hyphenate (fake-not fake, authentic-inauthentic); e.g., knowledge is power and power is terror, violence, and morphological expression, under dialectical-material dispute during oppositional praxis. They’re something to exchange for as long as possible; i.e., as a means of communicating state abuse (and our place under its shadowy tentpole): as something to subvert, thus escape under hollow existence and empty threats backed up with police force.

Original Sin makes for a classic, recursive, and dogmatic example. Satan tempts Eve with the apple, which is knowledge, but also power performed between different players casting blame and owning up to/casting off responsibility in the face of state structures (and punishment): it’s a lie but true through state force as something to administer (often through the soul and purity arguments tied to glory and eternal salvation translating, under capital, to a Protestant ethic). Faced with total power, workers will happily point fingers to escape damnation/excommunication; i.e., desperation marries with convenience to encourage paranoid betrayal (which, in turn, amounts to more power for the state)! A witch hunt is a blame game, then, one where the state and the state alone can “win.” Except, it’s a lie, both everywhere and nowhere. Sex is everywhere in ways that, through these excuses to coerce workers, cannot be avoided.

(artist: Domenichino)

Dogma weaponizes sex as something to control in unequal ways. Paradise, per law and order under state rule, is generally threatened by shapeshifting devilry (queerness) and nature as monstrous-feminine (classically female parties, but really anything that isn’t white cis-het European Christian men); i.e., Eve, per Original Sin, corrupts under Satanic influence (which God allows), opening the door for degeneracy and decay of the state, hence moral panics/states of exception, hence profit during police abuse/tokenization when Imperialism comes home to empire (and when the state preys on the Global South until that point): antagonize nature-as-monstrous-feminine (alien) and put it to work under capital/settler colonialism as informed by older power structures like Imperialism, organized religion and feudalism. It’s women’s fault, and the Gays, the fall of Eden comparable to the fall of Rome insofar as white male fragility is “threatened” by the collusion of dark forces against that biggest of “victims”: cis-het men and their DARVO schemes (which lead to betrayal/triangulation during Man Box/”prison sex” mentalities, and really assimilation of all kinds [e.g., black skin, white masks] embedded inside persecution networks/rungs of preferential mistreatment).

So what is power? Per Milton, power is paradox and darkness visible played with; i.e., both infinite and finite, tremendously figurative and objective, cryptonymically dualistic and doubled; e.g., “heaven in a wildflower” vis-à-vis labor value (which has infinite value, the state wishing to steal our power [whatever the shape] through Faustian bargains). Since “darkness” denotes heretical/abject power and “power” can literally take any form (and often manifests as such through theatre, acting and disguise, all happening subjectively in good faith or bad versus objective forms, like material conditions), the simplest way to conceptualize it is, “power is exchange” as a matter of context concealed/showed during the cryptonymy process’ double operation; i.e., regarding forbidden knowledge in terms of gender, sex and anything else; re (from “Notes on Power” in Volume Zero):

Banquo got it wrong: Lies and the language of darkness aren’t inherently bad, meaning harmful or deserving of capital punishment; while he exclaims, “Can the devil speak true?” to himself and Macbeth, the devilish workers of Communism can speak true—i.e., in order to help each other survive the real dangers of a structure evolved to deceive us through harmful forgery (the irony being Banquo was killed by his own friend, not the witches—all for the same status inside the same power structure they lived inside together and which Shakespeare relayed through a stage play whose name people [specifically thespians] don’t like to say).

Language, like the devil, is plastic and can change shape (only following the Cartesian Revolution and Capitalism’s rise of mapping and dominating the world through doubles inside and outside of “pure” fiction [exhibit 1a1a1h2a1] did language solidify and binarize in service of the profit motive). Paradox is an essential component of human language in its natural and material forms; i.e., the immensely popular idea of theatre and duels told through heroes and their monstrous contradictions to ascribe meaning through staged conflict. Within this broader dialogic, the Gothic is mired in mimetic paradox through the communication of “deathly” appetites” (indented for clarity):

Death is the ultimate feeling of a lack of control, to be out of control. To face it as codified according to stigmas and biases, theatre is a tremendous, psychosexual device for calculated risk/informed consent (which operates to give agency through performance as a negotiated, heavily controlled affair). For Gothic Communists, these praxial contraptions are built around the profit motive as something to face and challenge through its praxial doubles: Gothic Communism’s monsters and their poetic, liminal extensions versus Capitalism’s, communicating in shared struggle and language as paradoxical on various registers simultaneously.

calculated risk/risk reduction exercise

A calculated risk minimizes harm but mimics the feeling of being out of control; e.g., consent-non-consent/informed consent.

consent-non-consent

Negotiated social-sexual scenarios through informed consent, consent-non-consent where one party surrenders total control over to the other party trusting that party to not betray said agreement or trust; aka “RACK” (Risk-Aware Consensual Kink) in relation to risky BDSM; i.e., bodily harm; e.g., public beatings, rape scenarios, whippings, knife play and blood-letting (source).

In essence, power is paradox during liminal expression through doubles (two or more things existing at once). From Paradise Lost onwards, then, power and its exchange (again, often through/with forbidden knowledge) becomes something to disguise, then tempt ignorant parties with as a gift; i.e., Original Sin (though, in defense of or from the state, this performative notion [and the epistemological freight it offers each side] goes both ways): canon vs iconoclasm using the same aesthetics in duality. Lies are simply another form of language, begging the question, “Which lies anisotropically serve workers?” As I argue about camp, we want to be of the devil’s party and, unlike Milton (re: Blake), actually know it!

At their most basic, then, devils are splendide mendax sullying Paradise with beautiful lies; i.e., as something to darken law and order (with shadows), to dirty or corrupt the state through forbidden exchange by Satanic forces. “Canon” being the strict, rigid control of information (thus power flow) by state paradigms, a devil is a whore, a tramp, a broker iconoclast of so many different things that earn them backhanded compliments by police agents (applicable to men/queer parties at large, but classically to white cis-het women in a heteronormative scheme): a dirty, naughty and/or bad girl, etc. Whores aren’t just demons, then, but criminals who gatekeep knowledge inside-outside themselves. While iconoclasm takes and delights in that fact, Gothic Communism and ludo-Gothic BDSM are more selective/enterprising than simply offering sex to the uninitiated! It uses any expression of power imaginable to foster sex positivity as antithetical to state aims (namely that of profit, raping nature during us versus them)!

A “devil,” then, becomes someone—usually a charming or brute-force tempter of this or that—to deal with in some imposturous degree of disguise and bald face (the paradox of shifting shape through affect versus literal appearance). But such cryptonymy’s dark, ludic/ontological flexibility further owes to demons being performative/poetic in a highly staged way that goes on and off said stage; e.g., serial killers, vigilantes and again, doms, subs, and switches, classically extending to horny college professors taking advantage of their students through a structural power imbalance (above), etc; i.e., BDSM isn’t just for the bedroom (re: Foucault) and it isn’t purely sexual, combining asexual interrogations of sex and force through demonic power displays and public nudism, amongst other things!

To it, demons teach, and generally by example, mid-poetics. These examples historically date back to the ancient world revived hauntologically in ours; i.e., schools function—from Plato’s Academy to modern universities—as special sites of forbidden knowledge, whose poiesis and exchange are ruled classically by patriarchal agents. Except, anywhere can be a classroom/extracurricular dealing space to exchange with devilish things. Demon sex (commonly framed as “whorish”) becomes an ancient weapon evoking nostalgia and poetics to rewrite the Wisdom of the Ancients; i.e., to levy in devilish arts against the state, which again, their patriarchs cannot monopolize! So long as power can express in parallel courts, it can consolidate there, too!

(artist: Jan Rock)

Revolution or critical analysis, then—but especially labor action and mutual consent established through gender and sex, parody and pastiche—can suitably manifest anywhere; i.e., through artistic/theatrical articulations of forbidden knowledge, demonic morphology and power exchange (above): deals with the devil as a cruiser’s costume—a mask to put on or remove as needed (often in a dungeon, ball, closet or false/inverted “church” of some kind; i.e., a danger disco; e.g., a bathroom stall, below, where forbidden “exchange” and “worship” [often extramarital sex and/or drug use] might take place without interruption or interference: prayer and predation, internment and instruction, education and reeducation, etc)! Pre-capitalist, GNC ideas like demonic androgyny (above) move into a post-scarcity world beyond Capitalism, predicating on the reshaping of those things that, canonized and kept under lock and key/close watch, keep us hopelessly locked in place ourselves: a crucible that heats us up and changes our shape to suit us, not the elite! It hurts, but anything worthwhile does!

To it, demons speak to a heretical desire to change, feel strong and look cool—to fit in, sometimes, but also stand out in ways we pass off as normal, safe; i.e., a death of the old turning into the new as waiting to unfold (as queerness in the closet always is). “The dose doth make the poison,” and we Commie fags—while perhaps setting a trap or two (“The play’s the thing!”)—aren’t exactly Zofloya handing Victoria a poison chalice; we’re giving you, yes you, the chance to learn and grow away from dogma, even if we’re a little slick/two-faced/tongue-in-cheek about it. Nothing lasts forever, and pomp and circumstance eclipse themselves. Things lost stay lost, but can be reborn in new terrifying (and awesome) forms using ludo-Gothic BDSM! As such, demons riot, and “a riot,” explained MLK, “is the language of the unheard.” Mid-argument (thus battle), demons are pragmatic in the linguistic sense, making themselves heard; i.e., through sarcasm, innuendo, play and mood (which Gothic encompasses).

To that, a good BDSM actor/sex worker can take any language on Earth—regardless of where it is written (e.g., in a Bible verse, or as graffiti on a bathroom stall door) or performed (e.g., rock ‘n roll, next page)—and make it powerful through suggestion/subversion, generally through conscious anticipation of various responses, mid-tension-and-release: “I’ll eat your ‘apple’!” Nothing is sacred (except basic human, animal and environmental rights) and anything goes. We whores fuck to metal, then, screw on the first date—in short, we just love to fuck, period—all to spite naysayers and prudes; i.e., they’re hypocrites/desperately starved of good connection, missing out on what makes life worth living! Learning is fun, is sex, is wicked, cunning and bad! “I don’t always cum when I learn, but when I cum, I’m always learning!” Yeah, baby! Everyone loves whores, demons and sluts; the idea is to learn not to hate them, too (e.g., Kim Petras, certified transsexual and slut pop star extraordinaire, below)!

In genderqueer terms, then, it’s less about hating on ourselves (though self-hatred/internalized bigotry are an ongoing problem for those in the closet or threatened with it) and more how we gay devil sluts incessantly delight in fucking with normies’ perceived, pre-determined ideas of sin and salvation; re: green eggs and ham that, once tasted, turn canon’s sad little world upside-down: the sinner being that person in the closet, acting holier-than-thou and for whom “sin” is both a guilty pleasure to watch and death sentence once administered!

Though queerphobia isn’t a joke (token or not), most jokes play with phobias to some extent; i.e., riling workers up not to do what the state wants, but to make some noise/rage against the machine while celebrating ourselves building better worlds while inside: as “unholy” in ways they can’t control, mobilizing us to challenge, hence change the status quo through sex work and art as more or less the same, as far as that goes; e.g.,

These boots are made for walkin’
And that’s just what they’ll do
One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you (Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” 1966).

It’s free-love sass, a threat with a wink to the pimp, but wrapped into Vietnam war songs by Hollywood directors recuperating sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll for Pax Americana. Two parties, different goals, same language: dark, fertilizing, of the night as alienated by capital and reunited with workers by workers out of the closet, kissing and telling[13]. It’s fun, natural, energizing and magnetic—the dark, earthly stuff of Medusa/Gaia unchained that rebellion and recuperation build on; i.e., oppositional praxis pimping demons out or liberating them in equal, warring measure!

To it, we sluts live for any theatrical tensions that arise, doing so to create in ways we can control; i.e., watching weird canonical nerds clutch their pearls, fearing our dark suggestions of damnation and delight making them sweat bullets. Trouble in paradise? That’s just our game! We live for it, but also camp canon to survive; re: watching them crap their pants something of a special treat, but likewise entirely necessary during revolutionary cryptonymy: when reading the room to sus out who’s good and bad faith using our Aegis!

Furthermore, torturously disabusing them of such harmful notions—i.e., by radicalizing them through ludo-Gothic BDSM (often sex)—is, unto itself, tremendously validating. Sex and force, pleasure and pain, metal and pulp media at large—modular and united, each works like a charm, the whore using her bag of tricks (“Wind! Fire! All that kind of thing!”) to heat their client up and strike while the metal’s hot. Pent up, we release tension, fight stress, and have fun on top of catharsis. This house is clean, babes!

To that, while certainly drug-like, we don’t owe chudwads (who certainly feel owed sex) an enabler’s taste, nor personal instruction/a benefit of the doubt, be that roleplay or sex. But people are seldom black-and-white. The state, being straight, enforces straightness in its own image, meaning we can corrupt that. Any work-in-progress, then, can promote its own potential to improve, and if we see that potential on someone’s surface and choose to act on it—to mold it like clay into something better than before—well, that’s our choice, isn’t it? “I like them. Let’s put in the work; but regardless of what happens, I’ll have fun!”

So while demons constantly transform, pushing towards a “final form,” they generally shift forever under surveillance, and always towards new growth and understanding. Amounting to perpetual evolution occularized, and furnished by competing natural and socio-material forces, revolution is a journey and a cycle, not a destination (the state will always resist development). To it, relationships don’t exist in vacuums; workers must adapt and, as REO Speedwagon puts it, “Keep pushing!” To learn, then, is to keep learning regarding labor and sex, gender and activism as demonic. Like a birthday party with friends, one happens followed by another amid fresh growth and maturity! Applying that to Gothic, so many breakthroughs, demon “cakes” (muffins, pies, etc) and splashes of wet rapture await (so much yummy frosting to eat and paint ourselves with)!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Furthermore, any teacher who passes sex-positive knowledge to a former entitled dumbass is going to love seeing their work bear fruit; i.e., making the world better according to what we put into it—through what we give back to workers and the world (versus taking endlessly from workers as the state does, watching us). The gift is both an item and a lesson, fighting alienation with demonization: to promote reunion with the never-was to engender what could be.

This goes for sex, but also social practices tied to power exchange through sex work and gender expression; i.e., applying to “devils” among sex workers, lovers, and drag queens, all trying like Sisyphus to get people to abandon harmful ideas by having them watch and learn from us—gazing upon our Aegis’ surfaces and thresholds. Few things are as uphill as rewiring dogma to regain meaningful connection through alien, fetishized things (re: Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything pursuant to profit, thus rape and genocide). So when it actually happens, that frankly feels amazing! “You’re doing it, babe! We’re doing it!”

(artist: In Case)

Sex is forbidden/anathema under capital, but also sold in conspicuous, highly-watched ways we can recreate, abjuring privatization and breaking Capitalist Realism; i.e., through praise, scorn, or anything else we want to roleplay and give back, on and offstage. It’s not something to fear above all else, but overcome fear about and welcome accordingly back into our lives: letting “Satan” and “darkness” into us as holistic unto suffering-as-comorbid, but also healing through commodity! That’s good praxis, and ideally it should mobilize workers into loving the exchange of/doing away with bad knowledge and lies for good knowledge and lies, thus restoring confidence by synthesizing it. In true demonic fashion, then, these translate to any form of power/knowledge exchange you could dream up; i.e., any relationship or fantasy thereof that can be had between two or more workers; e.g., me meeting Zeuhl and them delighting at the power we shared, and which they often dictated the terms of (often at my expense, though I learned a lot, and savored their fat, hairy “deli-cut” pussy—similar to the one in the illustration, above): something to see power play out as, through sex in common, socialized, artistic forms.

Sex is power and power takes work to, well, work; you have to juggle this with that and while it is generally a lot of fun, it doesn’t always last. And it, as power always does, takes many different forms from cycle to cycle. In turn, complex ideas should be able to be communicated as simply as possible through playtime exhibited! The optics consist of fun, but also profound, demonic change had in life-altering ways—giving and receiving through poetics lenses, liberty and license; i.e., whose licentious ardor can shape how we profligates wield power and see through it as something to operate and articulate unto others: through play reclaiming humanity as “torture.” Churches, after all, are classically prisons of faith people escape inside themselves.

In BDSM, this is called “a scene” or “a negotiation,” and combines imagination with playfulness to marry fun with Gothic conventions/reinvention; i.e., to make us not just horny/cum, but able to navigate/negotiate and give/receive power out in the real world: as half-real, trapped between the fiction and rules, the fantasy and the reality as forever in flux! While physical abuse is something you can disassociate from, emotional abuse is ongoing and participatory in ways that cannot be ignored so easily. Seeing how such games involve people who don’t want to play but are concentrated into tight, cramped spaces that not only surveille them, but force them to participate, the only way to escape segregation is by subverting the flow of power while being subjected to it!

For workers or the state, the aesthetic (and chiastic dualism) of dealings with the devil remain largely unchanged: in punitive systems that would seem to both discourage and encourage said behaviors! To litigate better boundaries, you must break down old ones and learn what works and what doesn’t, using whatever “clay” you decide as you do. Short of total genocide (with ethnic cleansing designed to wipe capital, thus the state, clean[14]), this eventually becomes second-nature on a community level: to work with thiccer and juicer variants of the same-old “clay” formulating new tasty (and backdoor, Hannibal-the-general-style) propositions! Churches classically construct through front-facing façades flanked with not just with divine sunlight, but shadowy confessionals, choir screens, and straight-up torture dungeons speaking to repressed desire under a cloistered existence that expects people to court and breed, but in modest, highly controlled forms (e.g., Mormon “soaking” rituals allowing for PIV penetration, but not thrusting in and out of the vagina—requiring a third party under the bed to assist in the motions by kicking upwards into the mattress): a recipe for worker blue balls, but also resenting those controlling sex for the state.

(artist: In Case)

In Case, for example, specializes in demonic art, of which they express in earthly-to-hellish forms using a variety of costumes (e.g., nuns, left); i.e., tied to different institutions of power and knowledge exchange whose barriers demon(strate) and transform, sure enough, in disguise: tit for tat, changing shape and dress to liberate ourselves through fantasies of transgression that, however gross in excess and provocative they seem, cannot actually harm anyone!

This is not a new idea (though it is a “novel” one, haha). Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796)—a story written by a twenty-year-old gay man in a time when queerness was expressed entirely in Gothic fakery instead of medical documents—gleefully has Matilda imitate/profane the Madonna to excite Ambrosio, the story’s star dupe. From Rosio revealing himself to be Matilda and later Matilda as a crossdressing servant of the devil styling herself as a painting of the Madonna that becomes simply the devil, period, “he” becomes “she” becomes something without shape—all according to a hidden devilish urge that Ambrosio both loves and fears, and which Matilda brings out in him to critique and expose the church: as mendacious and rapey through him! As such, Ambrosio becomes a slave to faith; i.e., a house of God that houses jailors who are, themselves, jailed. They preach austerity but do not practice it, are ignominiously ripped apart instead by gay devils in God’s absence!

In Case’s art speaks to indulgence overshadowed by God as someone to defile with relish. In turn, doing so teases a campy, bad-echo, crossdressing power game well at home in Gothic fiction before, during and after Lewis’ work; i.e., nuns dressing in black and white, misbehaving under God’s roof (above): “Heaven holds a place for those who ‘pray'” (Simon and Garfunkel’s “Here’s to You, Mrs. Robinson,” 1968). All constitute ludo-Gothic BDSM, thus precious opportunities to subvert and transgress against canonical, thus policed, pernicious forms of demonic power exchange felt within churchly spheres; i.e., through heretical, “almost holy” games, we gay demons play with things we shouldn’t. Speaking to a profound and ceaseless delight, iconoclastic liberation from inquisition affords fresh, vital perspective, mid-instruction; e.g., “Suck on him like this! Learn what he likes and respond to each other in kind!”

In doing so, you learn how to relate as people do, but in sex-positive versions thereof: through psychosexual rituals of sex and force, thus power exchange on a two-way street. Making people “come” to earth-shattering revelations—e.g., about sex and gender uprooted from biology but able to play with it anyways—is one of a sex worker’s biggest joys: to “see the light” by playing with “darkness.” Attached to morphological and cosmetic freedom, good sex and BDSM can radically change your perception of canon’s unironic aesthetics of torture; i.e., power is control during feelings of no control, paradoxically acted out during calculated risk regaining said control (for us, not the state).

Per my arguments, then, such tutelage and the demonic power it affords remain entirely rooted in performance and play “dressed up”; i.e., in the abject language of power and death, putting “harm” in exquisitely “torturous” quotes; re: ludo-Gothic BDSM! We’re all toys to play with, lessons to learn! Power is plastic, so assume whatever form/combination of forms aid in passing good instruction/demonic flexibility along while collaborating inside inescapable shadows/shows of state rule (necessity is the mother of invention, worker counterterror challenging the state’s throttling of creativity vis-à-vis state monopolies, trifectas, and qualities of capital during class-culture and race war). In doing so, watch your horizons, minds (and other things) expand!

To that, there’s certainly multiple iconic standbys—e.g., the red devil with a pitchfork, pointy tail and horns, or the phallic-woman dominatrix succubus whipping naughty boys inside her retro-future dungeon, infringing liminally on holier grounds. As things to pilot and perform, such dominatrixes take endless forms per the Gothic aesthetic and its “sweet spot” between pleasure and pain (often confusing them on purpose); e.g., Chun Li hyphenating Amazons, slutty mil spec/cop uniforms (the character is a cop, thus crimefighter dressed up, often enough, as a weightlifting whore), all-purpose (and endless) Halloween costumes, toys for boys and honeypots: muscle inside scantily-clad outfits, where the avatar’s thunder thighs, stockings and tell-tale spike bracelets let players police the slum during kayfabe-style Amazonomachia! Sex is literally a weapon, dogma dressed up as fun and games!

(source)

True to form, friendly-looking demons have darker doubles, then; e.g., the cackling, histrionic and leather-clad dark mistresses from the Dungeon Keeper franchise (next page)… which really aren’t all that different functionally from xenomorphs, cenobites, or Lewis’ Matilda dominating through frog-like amplexus; i.e., torturously phallic, faux-medieval poetics hyphenating sex with vaso vagal penetrative violence, queerness with needles and medieval-to-modern medicine/malpractice, etc.  Enemies of the state enjoy one “luxury” afforded to them, in this respect: alienation as humanization (re: Said’s pleasures of exile).

To exist in this sphere is grounds not just for dismissal or arrest, then, but termination of a more exterminatory sort. Until then, it’s constant containment, surveillance, and torture; i.e., the Radcliffe-style[15] rescinding and deprivation of rights, dressed up as justice per the Spanish Inquisition reimagined. It’s moralized, an argument unto itself that leads to generational remorse, regret, and for our purposes, roleplay reversing such axioms through the same basic aesthetics and their associate actions: selling ourselves for workers versus taking state pay to punch down! Prurience cannot be stopped, so the state surveilles it in brothels as prison-like and paradoxically enough, highly publicized and “ecclesiastical.”

In turn, all require us whores, suiting up, to blend in/stand out onstage and off, and whose poetically sexualized weaponization comes with various broad strokes to paint with and larger arguments about demons to keep in mind. We’ll cite some of these next (as block quotes), then close the symposium out with some thoughts about religion (which demons play with)!

(source)

Broad Strokes; Some Larger Arguments about Demons

Concerning the Demon Module as a whole, the holistic demands of Gothic Communism (and sheer poetic multiplicity and potential of demons) all but require me to paint in broad strokes, going forwards: if something is a “demon,” it emphasizes power/forbidden knowledge exchange and transformation (which basically makes the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers quintessential demons, per a neoliberal power trip; re: “teenagers with attitude!”). We’ll cover all our bases, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, but there won’t be as many close-reads as the Undead Module (at least, not for the first edition, v1.0)!

As usual, our aim is intersectional solidarity during a pedagogy of the oppressed—one meant to raise the degree of public knowledge and power when spectated about; re: expressed liminally as emotional/Gothic intelligence and class, culture and race awareness during praxial synthesis (class war is race war, race war is culture war, etc): to locate the expression of worker traumas (queer or otherwise) and subvert their canonical, punitive forms. In doing so, we want to reverse abjection along the ghost of the counterfeit felt through our daily lives—the rules and games we install and play out versus those of the state (church or not).

By examining zombies, vampires and ghosts during the Undead Module, we’ve already looked at the many different ways that monstrous persecution and creation go hand-in-hand with conditional monsters; i.e., monsters that imply a status or affliction assigned to them by Cartesian powers (we’ve also examined the “feeding” vector of each monster type relative to this condition). Except, it also applies to demons through forbidden knowledge (thus power) exchange often being sexual: “flow” something to go with and induce/indulge in; re: undead take back when they feed on trauma, demons give back when they teach forbidden knowledge to transform.

(exhibit 43e2b: Artist: Mugiwara Art. “I want you to cum all over me!” Cum = data, darkness, and seeds, but also where to “sow” them. As things to give, commands are powerful, insofar they consider power through sex as, from the French Revolution onwards, relegated to the bedroom [re: Foucault]; i.e., as a side of power exchanges/knowledge checks and gaps both forbidden outside of such areas and canonically advertised everywhere as “terrorism,” vis-à-vis Crawford. Amateur porn showcases that in ways that stress how worker can transform through knowledge exchange as “guerrilla”; e.g., angel in the streets, demon in the sheets. It becomes power for workers through knowledge as something verboten to share: through globs and globs on one’s fuzzy mound and squishy body as delicious—not just forbidden sodomy-style knowledge, but tasty fruit as darkly Satanic per revolutionary practices enacted and witnessed during the summoning of “rape”; i.e., establishing boundaries independent of state dogma.)

To that, specifically keep our modular thesis argument in mind, as I won’t have time to set it up and stress it neatly per monster type as demonic:

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.

As such, demonic transformation and knowledge/power exchange are anisotropic;

(artist: In Case)

trauma makes us decay/corrupt as monstrous-feminine or fascist (token or not), albeit in ways that cause us to develop demonic habits that are to some degree sex-positive or sex-coercive inside and outside the bedroom as canonically abjecting such things. Said flow of power is seldom clean, too, lurking in the odd, spicy and grey liminal area of the theatre stage, the monster costumes viewed there hardly exclusive to neoliberal Capitalism; re: with past poets closer to death, rape and raw sexuality in ways we’re currently alienated from (save in fetishized forms that serve profit inside the state of exception). Persephone, once in Hell, can stay there if it please her (dualities in full effect, of course); she can “crown” fresh abortions—to witness and play with the mighty and grotesque, but also Numinous afterbirth.

Fortunately, hauntology lets workers brush against the past; i.e., as nostalgic in ways that never quite existed, yet push towards Communism anyways: as canonically aborted by capital/the process of abjection (and other Gothic theories). Exploitation and liberation sit in the same shadow spaces, as do pro-state and pro-worker apocalypse arguments that fend off or expand the state of exception (and state forces using DARVO and obscurantism to muddy the waters): the state is incompatible with life, consent and workers, and we are with it! We must hug Medusa, not fear her, but there can still be Gothic thrills/doubles; e.g., the xenomorph is basically a sex demon threatening alien rape[16] against token Amazonian maidens, but whose immortal design ditches the red for all waspy[17] black: pure death that sometimes covers itself in human blood and gore!

This speaks to an honorary third quality of demons (though it relates to unequal power): sin, but especially desire (commonly expressing in religious forms as “burning passion”). From Radcliffe’s menacing demon lovers and Black Veil (re: Wolff’s “Radcliffean Gothic Model,” which came out the same year as Alien, 1979), we can see the pursuit of a vulnerable party (classically framed as white, cis-het and female, in Neo-Gothic literature) by a dark, arrested/Oedipal, wholly murderous slasher to, if not outright overcome, then at least survive: a killer’s reputation that permeates the dark out-of-doors and castled, churchly and/or graveyard environments to equal measure! Nigh elemental, these are deeply ingrained, well-established-if-partly-founded/unfounded fears with tell-tale classic embodiments (usually big men with dick-like knives; e.g., Jason Voorhees’ machete from Friday the 13th, above) predicated on concealment and revelation occupying the same infernal, golem-esque bodies: “darkness” as a trigger to throw and experience calculated-risk sensations.

Historically within Gothic, a dialectic of the alien and of shelter orbit around a privileged liminal group, white women; i.e., going from property to proprietor amid a state of transition, speaking to the only idea of “affection” they’re ever known—pursuit and abuse from someone for whom restraint is a myth, rape is automatic, and for which sex and harm overlap (rape being an act of total domination): a transient, regressive/reductive violator-inflictor of harmful, psychosexual pain. Doing so per transaction, the class character is one of white, middle-class women demonizing poor people/immigrants/slaves through liminal expression since Radcliffe’s Italian (or Lewis’ Monk, minus that story’s camp)—as abject, hulking maulers, invaders, trespassers in alien likenesses to their homes instead of their husbands and actual houses: getting their knickers in a twist over supernatural-tinged highwaymen (or castle knights) ravishing them.

Though it’s a toy-like, evocative simulation of mutilative, life-or-death exchanges—and Freudian analysis isn’t something Gothic Communism endorses (favoring dialectical-material scrutiny)—the fact remains that genuine feelings of fight, flight, fawn, freeze and flop regularly leap to mind when facing slashers (and the Halloween-grade, mad-science-meets-black-magic, holiday superstitions associated with them and their haunted lands). That’s arguably the point, but these human, or at least humanoid, bugbears sit alongside fearful sightings of state enemies; 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. But undeath is something that can be felt through echoes of ourselves that aren’t diegetically spectral; they feel spectral through an uncanny resemblance, like standing over our own graves. This becomes something to play with, akin to an (at-times) humorous, even trashy gallows theatre rife with dark, forbidden language: sin, vice, violent sex, all-around death, and other taboo subjects (source).

In short, these orations of rape/demonic poetics and play are cathartic and criminogenic, educating and agitating to pacify as much as to rebel (re: controlled opposition). They’re chilling and dogmatic, praxially inert in canonical forms that see white women fetishizing those they commodify and police (re: Jameson’s “boring and exhausted paradigm“): the “help” as outsider but also strong-thighed bargeman, lycanthrope, sperm donor for lady what’s-her-name to fantasize with.

As far as demons more broadly go, mortal combat is a huge part of medieval theatre (the duel, Beowulf-style). Obviously this carries over into the adrenaline and ambrosia of modern-day BDSM/vice theatre; i.e., playing for laughs, thrills and cryptomimetic, legitimate-to-illegitimate boundary-breaking and setting exercises; e.g., Mortal Kombat‘s dark ’90s rock ‘n roll, sold-on-CD aesthetic—its arcade-style forces of darkness, outworld shenanigans, and the passing of order into chaos, videogames into celluloid. It’s a place to play and preach in equal measure, for the state or against it using the same demonic, hitman’s stabby-stabby language; re: courtly love, the way of the warrior as lovable scoundrel (e.g., Trevor Goddard hamming up Sonya Blade’s evil foil, Kano below, as part-meathead, part-phantom-of-the-opera). Better to have the language to play with than not; i.e., to play is to think about power through Gothic poetics (and their live-bur-al conventions) for cathartic purposes, making us strong enough to push back—often by killing our rapist in pure trashy schlock with a dark, genuine and swift undercurrent.

At their most basic, then, demons of all kinds operate sex-dungeon clubs/toy-like novelties replete with music, action and gory theatrics laden with an important asexual element: investigating all of the things listed above, granting them an artistic, social, campy/gallows-humor component that concerns healing from trauma versus simply getting off to this or that; i.e., interrogating our confused predator/prey responses, seeking death/the void in ways that speak to our rapturous survival: establishing control during feelings of us lacking control, generally on the cusp of almost-certain temptation, doom, delight and ecstasy! Part of that denial and indulgence (a mentality that embodies the West), the dominatrix is all-at-once inaccessible and forbidden, and very front-and-center! “You want this ‘rape,’ don’t you, slut?”

Do we? It’s complicated, but excluding battered housewives and other comorbidities during ongoing abuse, survivors of abuse like to put “harm” in quotes; e.g., to be spit-roasted by masked men provided there’s an element of control merged with the self-destructive theatrics (and provided no harm takes place)! Humans are messy and trauma only makes us messier (for which there’s the paradox of Gothic oxymorons, too; e.g., Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition threatening people with comfy chairs to make them confess)!

This forbidden sight extends to world politics, on and offstage. From Israel to America’s Vietnam or any other settler colony project, the problem of demons remains one of police violence; i.e., the deliberate and systemic abuse of demonic language to serve state aims; re: raping nature as monstrous-feminine to harvest it through settler-colonial means. But, to reiterate, they have to essentialize these monopolies of demonic sight to hold onto those territories, which is impossible.

Indeed, as Asprey writes, “Not only can terror be employed as a weapon, but any weapon can become a weapon of terror: terror is a weapon, a weapon is terror, and no one agency monopolizes it” (source). State monopolies seek to decay rebellious forces (and their perceptive vision) and present them, vis-à-vis Parenti, as false versions of themselves: as open fascists, but also moderate, disguised forms of the same police agents (often playing as “guerillas,” themselves). We are devils in disguises versus the state’s devils in disguise. There’s no avoiding that duality. The sooner we accept that and modify our cryptonymy’s weaponized sex accordingly during the dialectic of the alien, the better!

(artist: Homare Works)

Keep that in mind throughout this module, as I won’t overly stress it (we’ll rehash it, but won’t discuss police abuse to nearly the same extent as the Undead Module did; e.g., the “Bad Dreams” chapter). But also keep in mind that, like all monsters, the paradox of class, culture and race war through demonic poetics owes to how all demons use the same base aesthetics of power and knowledge, but also transformation hovering nakedly on the cusp of Great Destruction (the maiden/sub threading the labyrinthine castle while avoiding/seeking the demon lover); i.e., to anisotropically reverse the usual flow that power and knowledge travel in, often through transformation/the presentation of something standing transformatively in for something else, a “blinding” that sees forbidden things with; e.g., xenomorphs for Communists; re (from Volume One):

I’ve repeatedly said that function determines function. Another way to conceptualize this is flow determines function. That is, during oppositional praxis’ dialectical-material struggles, terror and counterterror become anisotropic; i.e., determined by direction of flow insofar as power is concerned. Settler colonialism, then, flows power towards the state to benefit the elite and harm workers; it weaponizes Gothic poetics to maintain the historical-material standard—to keep the elite “on top” by dehumanizing the colonized, alienating and delegitimizing their own violence, terror and monstrous bodily expression as criminal within Cartesian copaganda: […] subjugated phallic women castrating a female master rebel, once she visibly tries—through a dissident question of mastery—to reverse the status-quo binary (and flow) of terrorism and counterterrorism by showing her trauma, anger and willingness to fight back against a presumed overlord (source).

Demons—in all their shapes, sizes and colors—obey the same rudimentary principles for or against the state as straight, putting nature-as-monstrous-feminine to work. Those who shift power towards the state will be viewed as “counterterrorists” (cops or deputized forces); those who don’t will be seen as “terrorists” (re: Crawford’s “Invention of Gothic Terrorism“) or criminals for cops to punish and victimize per the Cartesian, heteronormative and settler-colonial process, mid-abjection.

The same is true for us in reverse, then, our doubles and their paradoxes’ food for thought illustrating duality mid-opposition and inviting troubling comparisons that, for us, break Capitalist Realism and reclaim our lost humanity in the eyes of state forces; e.g., David in Alien: Covenant being a terrorist in the eyes of the company but also occupying that giant shadowy space between Nazi and Communist. Pastiche can be perceptively “blind,” or just blind unto enslavement through the same darkness.

Conclusion: New Eyes, Forbidden Sight (and “Religious” Concerns)

So ends the symposium. There’s plenty in here we could only touch upon, and much of what we introduced here we’ll return to/unpack later throughout the entire module. This starts with how demons alter our perception using the forbidden knowledge they give; i.e., operating as a kind of forbidden sight—a poetic gateway or keyhole to darker realms of repressed knowledge, thus exchange:

As such, we shall further consider demons’ anisotropic flow of power and knowledge moving forwards, but also their whore-like shapeshifting abilities. Demons can change shape, often through illicit, occult forms of sex like Matilda’s clothing but also her skin; i.e., as a psychosexual, oft-violent summoning ritual invading sites of godly surveillance projected onto secular doubles: to summon, show/conceal and disseminate forbidden knowledge about violence and sex under state influence (thus abuse). This remains our poetic focus, not the eating of trauma as such. Yet demons-as-modular intersect with the undead to comment on nature-as-alien/monstrous-feminine; i.e., in oft-composite ways that feel hellish and undead (re: Skeletor), but also quasi-religious; e.g., Giger’s Gothic surrealism one of many dark churches, mise-en-abyme.

The Gothic and its psychosexual theatre thrives in the counterfeiting of religious things (re: Walpole’s Otranto) to speak in code, and I would be absolutely remiss to not mention that. For the rest of this conclusion (seven pages), I want to consider something popular about demons that we haven’t touched upon, yet, but will come up in the module ahead: the “religious” elements!

Churches were schools of the medieval world, and continue to spread dogma through shells of their former canonical greatness (re: Hogle). Per Cartesian dualism, capital divides in service to profit through emotional manipulation, gentrifying and decaying anything it requires to do so. This hauntology/canceled retro-future includes Christianity’s endless dominion/schisms and denominations ordering nature as such: to mask genocide as “charity” using the order of power-as-pecking-order instructing us-versus-them violence, mid-crisis-and-decay (the state rots, tolling its Pavlovian alarm/funeral bells; the menticided holy regress like gargoyle cops—to defend said order’s laws under attack by Satanic criminals).

Apart from canon, though, demons offer up a wild cradle for release and resentment alike, allowing for new apostatic regrowth in Gothic spheres camping the canon; i.e., to safeguard nature from state forgeries, the Madonna winking at whores in the audience waging class warfare liberating all workers through intersectional solidarity as, to some degree, out of joint. Tailored through “almost holy” prostitution, their second-coming resurrections (and gooey rapture, below) surround the nun or the Madonna as anything but immaculate; i.e., normally ransomed by capital holding everything hostage, releasing vital fluid and “fatal” knowledge about nature-as-pimped-out under state control: through the kinds of storied, performative, and panting ahegao, all-too-hungry lessons (about lust and the other deadly sins) that demons in particular are known for (e.g., naughty nuns—again, below)! Sinning gloriously to release ourselves from state influence, we flirt with “danger” to release police-like holds on our fear-addled brains! God is blind to our nightly trespasses, the evil eye a myth but the church panopticon watching us like lepers! So we demon sluts bloom like fungus inside their blind spots, making our own poetic arguments that refute theirs—through Neo-Gothic paradox, our seditious “organs” working in concert!

(artist: Bec Santus)

Simply put, demons are born-again whores; i.e., threatened with rape by state forces and relieving stress by burning their churches down, then and raising pandemonium from the euphemistic ashes’ calculated risk. Thirsty for knowledge-as-forbidden, these euphoric, promiscuous instructors grant comparably prurient lessons meant to trouble blind faith coded into workers by state copaganda; i.e., by playing with the virgin/whore binary through the world’s oldest profession as normally policed in demonic psychosexual language. By joyously scorning dogma, sluts secure special sight surrounding spoiled subjects, their policing of which Satanic atheists/Gothic Communists lampoon by example: to unspool us before installing new demonic threads in the place of older tapestries, seeing the light our Paganized darkness emanates! It’s code, the corruption a data unto itself upsetting state boundaries-for-me-not-thee! We’re not doing it to enjoy special privileges—e.g., nuns playing as ninja vigilantes (exhibit 48b)—but fight for equal rights granted unto all peoples; i.e., as brothel espionage, our impersonation a revolutionary cryptonymy for those who know! Canon is like a light switch, one we can flip on and off framed as “fake,” giving another dimension to our coded pornographic missives: hiding in plain sight, smuggling Satanic rebellion inside faux reliquaries! Espionage is a Gothic utility through the femme fatale playing as naughty nun (someone paradoxically able to infiltrate a patriarchal space because she’s a slut).

Missionary brides are victims of prescription, segregating themselves to submit to state enforcers. Classically expected to turn into demons—to spread their legs and dutifully have babies, then become the things that holy men ward off in pubic, but indulge in private (from doggystyle to sodomy of all kinds)—such women are kept, thus trapped. To be a good little Communist whore, then, is to be a good teacher/code-switcher pointing state (and token) hypocrisies out! Revolution is to get off the fence—to get ourselves off, period, motivating good praxis during oscillating positions of master and apprentice, sinner and saint, giver and receiver using Gothic language! We give and accept fresh knowledge in all its neo-medieval forms, such “data” including hot cum; i.e., using our abject open mouths (and other body parts/tissues) to poke fun of organized religion/capital’s Protestant ethic. Often through ritualized cannibalism, blood libel and other sodomy double standards normally enjoyed by the state, we turn them into a crown of thorns—a thorn in the elite’s side whose agony delights us to no end!

From hustle to gratuitous heist, any despoiling by us of virgins (and other such modesty/virtue arguments) is to emancipate them from holier-than-thou state forces; i.e., the latter raping women, children and minorities on a daily basis, instilling fear-and-dogma ignorance over the former to preserve the nuclear model’s “purity” through impunity! From Rome into “Rome” under capital, the state is morally bankrupt. Steeped in controversy and scandal, such hypocrisy becomes endless crises of faith to leverage against them; any bastions to the contrary are merely a giant lie we can turn on its head. The iconoclastic idea, then, is camping harmful norms, breaking from their police traditions to install liberatory devotion through demonic porn/sex work at large; i.e., unto sex positivity as earnest, genuine and educational towards those revelations breaking Capitalist Realism (and canon’s sex-coercive myopia) like a stained-glass window—into pieces!

Per Weber, capital is Christian “in spirit”; i.e., of a Protestant work ethic, which reliably runs aground by operating merely as it does. So whereas Christianity evokes power in language both historically grand, vivid, and vague, the state has since hollowed out churchly house and occupant alike: profit trumps true belief, blind faith becoming bad faith cashing in on demonic doubles. It’s an easy system to retailor along state deceptions; i.e., built on the past as copied into Gothic doubles (re: the ghost of the counterfeit).

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

In response, demons of all forms generally constitute a half-real pact or offering—one that, in our hands, demolishes dogma through the reclamation of state poetries inside “found documents” (from Walpole onwards): as “castles” (above) antithetical to status-quo bodies waiting to be exposed! Concerned with churchly “donations,” and felt onstage and off, our showing of the ass (a mea culpa) promise/promote a Gothic-Communist “beyond.” Perceived according to linguo-material exchanges that cryptonymically achieve step-by-step development in the present space and time, these Holy Grails suggest a better world through corporal data, even psychosexual violence dressed up as “death” incarnate. Extracted through calculated risk (re: convulsionnaires, demon lovers and exquisite “torture,” etc), whores communicate with pain, as often as not. In turn, the state penalizes its martyrs, driving them into psychosexual rapture. Making them writhe, the elite cannot fully monopolize such agonies. Harmed, we hypnotize others by placing our “harm” in quotes! We make it gay but also demonic and undead! It becomes a pornographic, visually weaponized/vaso vagal and politically charged, inflammatory spectacle no elite can fully control.

I’m not religious (and ironically am not the biggest fan of nuns, in Gothic), but find much to subvert in religious language/canon. Furthermore, I remain entirely serious when saying that such a palliative Numinous can change us—i.e., how we see the world—by demonically playing with codified trauma; i.e, that which the state tells workers to either completely ignore, or to play with only in particular ways: “flesh and the power it holds.” The price is canonically envisioned as “steep,” exorbitant, and fatal. In truth, it’s simply transformative, vis-à-vis the shadows of a Hell reclaimed by workers seeking revenge through demonic escape; i.e., from Plato’s cave by using a massive cryptonymic ass, tight pussy or asshole, what-have-you, as priceless: there being no price the state can put on them to sell ourselves (and our fellow workers) out!

Instead—and per liminal expression’s surfaces and thresholds (of forbidden exchange)—revolutionary whores unchain themselves “on the cross.” Gaining paradoxical access to capital’s usual voyeurs spectating sacrifice (always unto others), we point out various double standards that apply uncomfortably to them; i.e., those that—once exposed by us, smiling through the happy pain (and rough, worker-dictated sex)—strip the state bare and lay them naked on the altar! Guilty pleasure becomes liberatory unto realizations the state wants to vault: that their usual fixtures of power are not so holy or fixed! Faced with that, one grows defenseless against temptation and seditious reeducation!

Indeed, the heretical, naughty sense of conjuring mischief expresses through the whorish Mephistophelean; i.e., the so-called “nun” as bent, being up to no good during ludo-Gothic BDSM—that one is breaking state rules/canonical laws to free one’s mind from bourgeois dogma and illusions, thus interrogate state trauma. This happens through similarity amid difference, strung vicariously together by willing allies playing games of a restorative, debriding sort: the pedagogy of the oppressed as a shared, oft-naked activity—gettin’ down with the devil in us as abjected by state forces! We reverse this ghastly procedure on our Aegis, gorging and gouging this with that. “Stare and tremble!” becomes an invitation: to play with power yourselves, following the white rabbit as demonic whore.

Regardless of whom, subverting state conventions—reclaiming and humanizing their fetishes and clichés—should feel “dangerous,” hence intimate, intimidating and fun; i.e., hooking up free of judgement, mid-disco, delivering the goods for two (or more) people indulging in deep, bottomless appetites; i.e., of all shapes and sizes to share with those looking in (often ourselves, watching the footage in private)! To see how the other side lives, “destruction” means giving ourselves to each other entirely—to hold heaven in a wildflower!

(artist: Mugiwara Art)

Through poetic license, we Gothic Communists aggregate and solidarize, exchanging holistic tit for tat through ludo-Gothic BDSM as churchly pun, live burial; e.g., burying the bishop (the church and its dimorphic expressions of power are full of sex puns)! Like demons, Hell and true rebellion are what you make of them: through biomechanical trigger responses; e.g., piercings, tattoos, sex toys, knife play and so on as body-horror “new flesh”; i.e., relating to people as animate-inanimate objects, recipients of closeted rage whose diaphanous permanence expresses across bodies the only way it can, short of just filming it “as is.” Demons express autonomy amid damage and healing sharing the same spaces. These become a confusion of this with that; i.e., as language exists naturally and soupily in the brain and across history’s space-time: to tightrope lightning and be full of it as PTSD, which can trigger in martyred, dualistic, accessibly gargoyle shorthand ways we can dialectically-materially channel to thwart capital’s dire historical materialism.

So often, the palliative Numinous communicates through ludo-Gothic BDSM, in this respect; i.e., mixing erogenous pleasure and non-harmful pain haunted by harm living inside-outside us: dogma on churchly walls. It, in turn, expresses during various relationships to sex and force through others; i.e., clawing power back any way we can, taking control of out-of-control situations per the human condition as such: to feel social again through anti-social/alienating tendencies we can socio-materially rewire through safely chaotic outlets (the collocating of power that translates so readily and accessibly in religious forgeries; re: “Gothic”). The code-switcher’s idea/preference is to appreciate and understand psychosexual dysfunction as a spectrum; e.g., the Tin Man versus Ryan Gosling in Drive (2010); i.e., doing so in coded spectral ways that divorce from actual psychosexual harm, but manifest through demonic echoes during liminal expression! Love is a package deal, but not a ball and chain; i.e., that, once triggered, our trauma lets us transform our past (and the “past” of churchly spheres essentially the present as “stuck”), learning from and facing it without shame to lead to new exciting destinies (rewriting the church and our place in its theatrical in-betweens)!

So keep everything we’ve discussed in mind, up to this point; i.e., staying vigilant and perceptive as we forge ahead into the Demon Module’s object lessons: weighing our linguo-material extensions that we embody in turn, during ludo-Gothic BDSM. Exchange all the essence that you can, use all the toys you can; i.e., the larger ones giving you an element of control that often has an enormous size/alien element to its design, for calculated-risk purposes; e.g., less “murder dick” (what my ex and I would call period sex) and more freaky toys for cuties of all walks seeking to regain agency through infernal, demonic play! Both loose and tight, erogenous and painful, closeness to power can be incredibly medicinal, but also revolutionary! “Oh god, it’s growing bigger!” Our sleeves hunger for God’s rod and Satan’s shaft (“I can be your angel or your devil!”)!

(artist: Ashley Yelhsa)

Ludo-Gothic BDSM has a reclamatory function, in this respect; e.g., words like “invalid” or “alien” have as much a legal, medicalized usage that dehumanizes sex workers (with Ashley reclaiming her disabled status to fight back against people unironically using those terms to pity or prey on her). Through ourselves writhing restlessly and rapturously during ludo-Gothic BDSM, they become a kind of forbidden sight we can weaponize to mobilize and activate pastiche as paradoxically perceptive: to see with darkness (eyes and ears on the walls) as only demons can echo it! Switching code, we whores reclaim the church; i.e., as a conspicuous site of forbidden knowledge that, far from being empty of whores (and other demons) is positively full of them. All to speak to the faithful’s fragility (thus tendency to turn coat) in eye-catching sites of powerful orders! Power is perception, something for the desperate and eager-to-believe do so out of convenience (the promise of sex) that we can expose, thus manipulate inside its own panics. If you kill us, you will have to face the reality that we are human; i.e., as you try to pimp, police and persecute us (denial being the final stage of genocide).

In a world that canonically watches for sin and suppresses it—whose criteria for care is unrealistic—we become ready the moment we gain a voice, a valve, and ultimately a value that can discuss things by reifying them as demonic sight: a reversing of virtue and vice similar to terrorist and counterterrorist, legitimate and illegitimate or possible and impossible (or any other binary you possibly could imagine). This linguo-material reversal takes effort to synthesize, but it remains, as we shall see, playful, vital and fun. To it, building such churches of “rape” should be fun; i.e., to offend those institutions that unironically rape us. To spite any who isolate and harm us in dualistic blindness, nothing can be more holy than intimating world’s without them; i.e., where we are free of their malign influence!

Of such “secret sin,” Walpole’s Mysterious Mother (1768) described an untold tale “that art cannot extract, nor penance cleanse.” For us psycho sluts from outer spaces, it’s time to sin in public; i.e., through art in ways that expand on Walpole’s genderqueer echoing of “religious” (from Lewis’ Matilda into present-day varieties of the same spoofs, above)! A popular façade to forge anew, we aren’t slaves to quasi-medieval/religious symbols and erotic puns if we don’t fancy them (they are a bit done-to-death), but they nevertheless remain popular and productive; i.e., in overt forms to include among our holistic, Evil Cupid’s imposturous GNC quiver (we’ll consider “subtler” seemingly secular varieties when we look at Giger’s xenomorphic disguises)! Whatever the whore’s outwardly form, the state will call her exposure and witness testimony “violent,” then automatically compel/advocate for heteronormative violence against anyone humanizing the whore-as-harvest; so we, existing already as violence incarnate, must refuse to be quiet about what the state does to us every waking moment!

“Hogle argues that modern Gothic is grounded in fakery” and fake works (re: Dave West). From Walpole onwards, the Gothic predicates on encryption in ways we whores can hijack, mid-oscillation; i.e., the camping of Catholic orthodoxy through twilight “historical” documents: a paradoxically faithful ornamental approach/churchly embellishments to celebrate modern life by sarcastically aping the past. The joy of the Neo-Gothic author is being entombed in holy places to defile them, badly imitating them to deliberately rewrite history as-living-document (re: the historical Gothic tradition). Such reinvention speaks to organized religion historically organizing itself around lies, which our black mirrors can utilize to upend state monopolies/dogma; indeed, there’s never been more of it, thus a need for workers to get creative in this respect! An equal and opposite reaction, we push back; i.e., making cops recoil and scamper away from the thing the state has alienated them from, making them fetishize/fear the most: nature and sex!

When normies make, they fit in; we stand out, enacting and embodying activism through iconoclasm reinventing language where power is stored and controlled (doing so while appearing as cool things, ourselves—like spies, assassins and whores/demons hiding in plain sight: as “maidens”). Indeed, it’s our God-given right to double and camp the canon through this ghost of the counterfeit, our “secret” found documents’ gloomth-y archaeology of the future sarcastically defending Medusa from the state by reversing abjection amid public excoriation; i.e., as whorish guerillas, ironic masters of disguise covertly concealing camp as “canon” to liberate sex work (thus all workers and nature) while relieving stress. We can change the past, thus the future (commonly expressed in hauntological media as retro-future); i.e., by using our bodies as church-like mise-en-abyme (the graveyard sex of demon whores, hauntologically embellishing in medieval miracles). This is our land, something to infiltrate and reclaim from unironic missionaries passing themselves off as “locals.” When cracks start to show, we push it to the limit, using darkness visible holy hell (sex and force; violence, terror and morphological expression) to blow the lid off state power as hollow!

In doing so, our reclaimed Wisdom of the Ancients/proletarian Superstructure happens through iconoclastic art to paradoxically build trust in/with: as concentrically cryptonymic/framed, code-in-code, pornographic camouflage, and trashy (thus cheap), toe-curling mise-en-abyme (no spies, here, just whores pretending to be nuns)! Furthermore, doing so becomes something to organize and fund between workers illustrating mutual consent through rebellion as silly-serious, like Zorro; i.e., a Communist Numinous both difficult to prove but easy to spot: hiding a sword in her bosom/up her “sheath,” or her bosom as “sword-like” on its dark surface carrying its own demonic power (up the bungus)! Espionage is the romantic language of the past brought forwards to serve us, here and now! If the church is a brothel, our best revenge is fitting in to transform the church while spying inside it. Profaning Madonna to take Medusa back, we use every toy at our disposal (natural or manmade): to pass off and pervert in equal measure!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

Medusa’s not without fans. Everyone loves sluts, especially monster mommies with knock-out assets; we want to free them (thus workers and nature) from state bondage/Original Sin (and other persecution networks, such as Orientalism). To double dogma as bad-on-purpose is to invite troubling comparison, our doing so to change power as workers utilize and perceive it, hence how it linguo—materially emerges on all registers and in all poetic forms; i.e., to alter the course of history through ourselves as things to ironically watch and learn with/thick differently about than ever before: having control over our bodies, labor, sexualities and gender identities/performances despite state insistence to the contrary! What is rigid, “pure” and dogmatic can darken, becoming loose enough to change not just shape but polarity—demonstrating those at the top as not being exempt from such poetic realities. As above, so below! In any hole! Sell your soul (and your bodies)! Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll! It’s forever a game of constant underestimation and embellishment, hiding our power on artifacts thereof: as known for both their (un)reliability and cloak-and-dagger potential, but also coded, uncanny ability to have fun with it all! Rebellion is life-or-death, playing on dogma as undead, demonic and animalistic.

The line they walk is, at times, razor-thin. Just as nuns haunt churches, whores haunt castles and the nuclear model’s imperial shadow at large—doing so in hilarious, horny showboating ways that work to our advantage, mid-prison-break; i.e., sex and force, per Gothic invention/imagination, as limitless energies that can drive any rebellion through hauntology and cryptonymy (such euphemisms combining the language of sex, danger and war, food and death, etc): churches are brothels ordained by a false fallible god, reaping paradise and caging its almighty power for greedy men (and token sell-outs loyal to profit, thus policing and raping nature-as-demonic). Keeping with venal paradox, Gothic maturity is mature when rebellion encourages universal sex positivity on a cultural level through such processes swapping state fakeries out with ours. But this, as Walpole and Lewis gleefully showed us, is often immature/campy on its face!

Power isn’t absolute; it’s an illusion that maintains its legitimacy through performative appeals, not objective reality (re: canonical essentialism). The state polices power as a language it wants to monopolize and arrange as it sees fit; i.e., of power diegetically policing itself through Capitalism Realism finger-wagging iconoclasm as “childish” and “vain,” criminal and illegitimate; e.g., American exceptionalism. So do we whores have hearts of gold (what the Ancient Egyptians called “the breath of god”); i.e., worn deliciously on our “orthodox” (unorthodox) sleeves, echoing across the centuries: to help you have a last-ditch change of heart, yourselves! Not to smite us as enemies, but embrace (and “smite”) us as human, like you! In doing so, demon power is notoriously unequal. Perhaps you’ve gotten perhaps more than you bargained for, then but will have still received a far better deal than the state would ever give you (they don’t negotiate with terrorists, which is precisely what Satan is). Such games, then, belong to our natural unalienable right to defend ourselves from the state; i.e., with it (and the bourgeoisie) as incompatible with life, with mutual consent as defined by us. There is no god; we are legion!

So no rest for the wicked! Dynamite coochie, let’s weaponize demon sex, “raw dogging” its liminalities for workers! Reclaim Catholic excess and Protestant reformation (“Methinks the lady doth protest too much!”). Raid the church for ammunition, then give ’em hell (and other puns)! Misbehave! “Rape” ironically and jizz on dogma, danger disco—doing so to take the edge off and inject the holy prim-and-proper with the wilderness of the not-so-holy! Camp the canon, then watch state anuses implode (sending their own bad-faith doubles to mingle and imitate ours)!

(artist: Mimsy)

This concludes the “religious” portion, and by extension, the demon symposium. We’ll continue unpacking this idea of “forbidden sight” more vis-à-vis the Promethean Quest (the quest for the Numinous; re: transformative, ostensibly self-destructive power), unraveling each in the next chapter!

Onto “Forbidden Sight and the Promethean Quest: Knowledge and Power Exchange (opening and part zero: a Rape Reprise)“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] Nature is demonized by Cartesian forces; i.e., becoming something to fear to the point of ridicule. This includes the ultimate weapon of counterterror against occupying armies: their own fear of nature, which the elite expect them to police out of fear. They see nature as wild, hence must be raped to serve profit. Think of a twig snapping in a Vietnam jungle, one that sends the “brave” occupiers into a shooting spree with their surroundings. They think themselves invincible, but also spook easy. This also happens at home, during military urbanism; e.g., acorns, as this Florida deputy discovered (The Guardian’s “US Officer Fired at Handcuffed Man in SUV After Mistaking Acorn for Gunshot,” 2024).

Demons generally aren’t tied to the land, undead are. Except demons are tied to a Cartesian othering which demonizes nature and conjures it up; i.e., as a curse of “the past” to attack the inhabitants of a settler colony from within; e.g., animals, Pagans, and ritual sacrifice being of “somewhere else”: as within an unheimlich according to a forged division of sovereignty whose “historical” counterfeits remain haunted by the ghosts of actual atrocities (re: Hogle’s ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection). Viewed as “past,” state forces abject systemic abuse, then and now, to an imaginary place dug back up: demonic dead.

To that, Sam Raimi’s titular Evil Dead (1981, onwards) possess self-styled “civilized” persons on home turf with a spirit of childlike black revenge; i.e., one that mortifies the flesh (a melding of torture and rot) according to a demon of nature-as-undead, of Cartesian enemies ferried into the present through Gothic reinvention. It’s Capitalist Realism suspended through Gothic animations—of various stolen myths, language, and monsters. The pact is the colonizer’s; i.e., with a world they are born into as inherited according to a system that distracts, overwhelms and confuses them. Like Evil Dead, it’s paradoxical: silly and serious, inside-outside, secular and superstitious, fearful and fascinating (re: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness [1899] and racist fascination with the abomination).

Moreover, such power cannot be killed, only used for specific aims; re: “Bushnell’s Requiem“; e.g., Victor Frankenstein, the Cartesian man of science, is hunted by the ghosts of the dead he stitches together from clay/things he disinterred from the dark earth of Germany and calls “demon” (something to fear and enslave). Except, he made what he feared to maintain his own sense of power according to the land around him. We can reverse all of that to serve our own aims; i.e., dismantling the state versus it conjuring us up, Radcliffe-style, before ripping us apart to serve profit.

[2] Gentrifying war in D&D cartographic refrains, but also demons and evil nature canonized by him: orcs, Balrogs, Dark Lords, previous Rings of Power (the pure Three standing in for the Holy Trinity versus the others as less as less pure, good, and correct) and giving of gifts. We’ll revisit Tolkien some more, moving forwards. To those interested, though, my PhD explores his refrains at length, and Volume One his BDSM expressed pointedly through vampire and the giving of rings.

[3] I.e., graveyard sex in “ancient” mighty ways; e.g., Capcom’s Menat, below, as a catgirl and mummy (with cats being holy guardians of the Ancient Egyptian underworld, and mummies generally being important figures wealthy enough to have tombs, thus leave their legacy behind, preserved into the afterlife). Such antiquated abjections’ imaginary forms work similar to European progressions; i.e., merging sex, rapture, sacrifice and death into comparable spaces/bodies “from elsewhere”: as, to some extent, dating back to Biblical times and Ancient Egypt, but generally reimagined to a hauntological degree. In short, it’s a gimmick, and a lucrative one; i.e., calculated risk to uphold the status quo during Capitalism in decay, middle-class predation and tokenism! Our liberation reverses these pimp-like devices, giving “ancient” power back to whores! No gods, no masters! Just sluts of darkness owning the means of shadowy production. Dark Pharaoh mommy pussy a kind of “mil spec,” power and darkness assume many forms!

(artist Reiq)

[4] L.A. Beast’s “Best of The Worst (Failed Video Ideas),” (2024); timestamp: 11:48.

[5] For more work on predator and prey per Amazons and knights, refer to my chapter from Volume One, “An Uphill Battle, part one: ‘Predators and Prey,’ or Introducing Revolutionary Cryptonymy and the State’s Medieval Monopolies on Violence and Terror through Animalized Morphological Expression.”

[6] An effect shared with other videogames we’ve examined, like Metroid and Castlevania as giving the hero, per Cartesian thought, quantifiable means of mapping and destroying a built world; i.e., with a numbered, arcade-style element per what can be taken from the world and absorbed into the hero, or thrust by the hero into the world—a health bar and ammo counter as they kill the state’s demonic enemies in vampiric fashion.

[7] There’s a mix-and-match, conglomerate quality to Gothic that’s nearly as old as monsters, kayfabe, theatre, dolls, and combat itself (we won’t have time to do more that flirt with the idea, but my PhD discusses it at length; for a fun, shorter example, consider Napoleon Blownapart’s “A Brief History of Freakshow Fighting,” 2023).

[8] I.e., Bill Gates syndrome, such privilege having fascist components when the punk elements, if ever they even existed, decay into pro-state forms playing the rebel/victim; e.g., Tool’s Maynard James Keenan (from Volume Two, part one):

capitalizing on being a cynic, as Maynard from Tool does in “Ænema” (1996) should be wholly discouraged:

Some say the end is near

Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon

I certainly hope we will

I sure could use a vacation from this (source: Genius)

This is fascist rhetoric delivered by white priviliged men, seeing the “end times” as a “vacation” that is anything but a natural disaster (though Capitalism profits off manmade interference assisting in so-called “natural disasters”); it’s an apocalypse to shoot “zombies” with until things “go back to normal.” Except they won’t during state shift, and the fascists and moderates will eat each other (unable to farm or tend the land around them, much like the original American colonists/so-called “Pioneers” were unable to). The only imbeciles who would say this is a self-centered cunt who paradoxically thinks it doesn’t apply to them; i.e., a white boy’s charmed life posturing as doomsayer and preacher cashing in on their own Kool-Aid to sell to the kiddies (source).

It’s white people disease, specifically that of violent, disingenuous white boys who never quite grow up, save to kill state enemies in their own victimized hero complexes. It’s not just dumb for its own sake (re: “Army of Darkness: Valorizing the Idiot Hero,” 2020), but complicit in the face of genocide; i.e., as something to turn your back on and blind eyes towards while raking in money through the usual mechanisms geared towards weird canonical nerds to begin with (a concept we’ll unpack in Volume Three when we critique said nerds). There is no win condition, just necrometrics and lies committed by whitey playing the victim time and time again. Until then, it’s business-as-usual, shutting anyone out who doesn’t conform/toe the line.

I’m speaking from experience here; i.e., I used to work with white cis-het male streamers in my different interview series about Doom and FPS in general; e.g., the “Hell-Blazers” series (2020) with Byte Me, Under the Mayo, Your Mate Devo and others. However, the moment I began to research the games these men played in ways that critiqued them in a genderqueer/postcolonial manner (as I slowly left the closet and challenged Capitalism in the process), they ghosted me. It was as though a cone of silence, an omerta, had been enacted upon me when I said the quiet part out loud (from a now-defunct 2020 piece, “Postcolonialism in Doom,” featured on Marilyn Roxie’s also-defunct blog, Video Hookups):

Like Ripley, the Slayer unwillingly serves a powerful, corporate employer—in his case the slippery Dr. Hayden, head of the UAC corporation. Faced with an energy crisis “the world had no answer for,” Hayden has colonized Hell to harvest its energy. Who inhabits this unlucky 4th world? Demons, of course—monsters, whose only purpose is to be slain. Of course, it’s entirely possible to see the demons of 2016/2020 as an extension of their 1993 forebears: heavy metal piñatas. Smash them; have fun. However, it’s hardly the sole interpretation, even if the makers intended otherwise. It’s even possible for the player to see his enemies in-game as piñatas, but for this to reflect a parallel viewpoint held by him outside of the game.

In this video at AGDQ for example, the livestreamer Byte Me pauses Doom 2016 to thank United States military members for their service. When I heard this, I found myself unable to view his words as neutral praise; an army has orders, after all. This remains true despite AGDQ being a charity fund-raiser where Doom is just another game being played to generate cash. Soldiers, or people who support them, still play Doom to revel in its slaughter and jingoistic camaraderie. It might pale against the reality of military service, but it still reflects said service through a videogame made for a larger audience. Not all members of this audience are soldiers, but those who are can revel in the game for their own reasons.

Perhaps it’s better for those who benefit from Doom Eternal’s gregarious qualities to avoid having it stamped as a military recruiting tool, a la America’s Army: Proving Grounds (2015). Even if Doom Eternal wasn’t built strictly as a recruiting tool, its imagery can, at the very least, be adopted laterally for this purpose. People with similar views can arguably flock to the same banner and say it belongs to them, not unlike a national flag. Already there’s a sense of division, wherein someone like myself who enjoys Doom feels divided from its more warlike customers. I’m against war, so politically we’re already of two opposing camps going in. Doom is still being marketed to a larger, heterogenous group: the old-school shooter crowd. Not all shooters shoot things in real life, but when gamers openly support the military “slaying demons” around the globe, the door for postcolonialism gets thrown wider than the gates of hell.

This cold shoulder extended to anyone in the industry—from John Romero to Nick Newhard (the former whose wife answered my emails but never followed up, the latter who acted interested until I mentioned my left-leaning political lens).

A similar thing happened with British Brat, who expressed an interest in being interviewed… until I mentioned my genderqueer politics. Like Byte Me, Brat is a military man and acted friendly to my face (as white moderates generally will do), but ceased all contact the moment he released I was who I was: queer and against war in videogames—in short, an encapsulation of Gamergate attacking anyone who isn’t “neutral/apolitical” by icing them out; i.e., segregating dissidents to enforce said neutrality in service to profit. It becomes all about them—their music, their toys, their guns, their land—taking it all for granted as Man Box thinking enslaves them to the same-old cruel grind; i.e., violence always being the solution, graduating from kiddie violence to grown-up forms per soldier, per generation.

[9] E.g., Clerks 2 (2006): “There’s only one “Return” and it’s not of the King, it’s of the Jedi!” A cop’s a cop, Kevin Smith (also, you’re a giant homophobe and Mark Hamill’s a Zionist cunt, regardless of how he plays out in your stupid He-man reboot).

[10] The show is highly regimented/militarized—so much so that it’s hardly a surprise to see the ways its “gargoyle mil spec” plays out; i.e., through bodies that can assume any material, color and shape, but also the power-as-performance that comes with them. Always to some degree, essentialized, this happens in ways that can be played with, thus entertained and/or challenged in-text and out (so-called “head canon”): through different roles/positions of power and status borrowed from older forms; i.e., from play without shifting shape, or shifting shape merged with said play as a half-real game that juggles power and positions of power between multiple parties and stages, or even across several cartoons in and out of real life; re (from the Undead Module’s “Playing with Dolls to Express One’s Feeling Undead,” 2024):

(exhibit 38c1b: Artist: Boner Bob [amazing]. Heteronormativity frames anything beyond PIV sex as alien, thus worthy of attack. Meanwhile, the idea of the hero’s reward after emerging from the Abyss during the monomyth is both conversion therapy and compelled love that promises them PIV sex after killing the monstrous-feminine [e.g., Jung’s female chaos dragon] as part of a normalized cycle of queer, thus Gothic-Communist repression.

In truth, the descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation of gender-nonconforming relationships presents the group as a negotiated affair that isn’t divorced from sexual desire as doll-like; it merely conducts it ironically in relation to the status quo’s harmful standards. In other words, the monomyth—as we have discussed a fair bit already—is a highly prescriptive and harmful device and needs to be challenged; i.e., by going into the abyss of gender-non-conforming lovemaking and modes of relation that allow for all parties to exist through reclaimed implements of shame, hatred and domination; e.g., Scott Pilgrim [above] as “made queer” through camp: in ways that highlight its queer potential, which also applies to Steven Universe [next page] as more overtly doll-like, thanks to a steady reliance on the golem myth.

Beyond children’s stories or cartoons, though, the same basic idea applies to more overtly “goth” poetics; e.g., like Rob Halford’s “Isle of Domination” or some similar genderqueer zone; i.e., occupied not by “the Ripper” as a queer-coded gay man in xenophobic canon but a sex-positive example of the gay party animal/favor as a twink-style sex doll: the usual object of total annihilation that isn’t taken literally as a matter of psychosexual performance. Such irony reclaims the harmful imagery of the death fetish and its associate, doll-like tortures and sodomy—doing so for the better of society at large by progressing away from their historically unironic usage. Often, this sits on the cusp of actual exploitation, the harm it presents as always adjacent to a given performance as made to heal from feelings of inadequacy that seek out domination as a matter of interpersonal bonding through BDSM:

[artist: Doxy Doo. Their 2015 “Gem Dom” comic of Steven Universe elides the “futanari” hentai genre (the feminine body with a penis) within the broader Amazonomachia of the militarized BDSM scenario. The liminality of the scene evokes the “prison sex” culture of dominance and Spartan-esque culture of war (which has a pedophilic history to it) as overshadowing a means of doll-like catharsis: the golem. Its legitimacy of violence, terror and sexuality is of the state versus workers seeking sex-positive subversions of the former operating through various BDSM/theatrical tropes: the phallic woman (of color, in this case; i.e., the Medusa) and the non-white goblin taming our white “shrew” (note the long nose) through stereotypical discipline-and-punish exercises: overpowering through brawn, verbal commands, degradation, hyperbolic/painful sex and/or double-penetration, bukkake, collars and bondage, open mouths eagerly and obediently awaiting their reward.

Within a military culture and centrist framework, the idea isn’t far removed from its historical counterpart as unironically abusive, being a forbidden sexual outlet/guilty pleasure whose predatory interplay between superior officers and subordinates would have been a historical reality (and one whose inversion within tokenized, girl boss bureaucracies would emulate their male counterparts under Capitalism).]

Catharsis, post-rape, always walks a borderline [the victim is always afraid of future abuse, thus relies on calculated risk to release tension by emulating rape up to a point]. There’s clearly room to perform this irony further than the centrist, post-fascist overtures in Steven Universe. But doing so requires actively using ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to make an earnest interrogation of the dialectical-material role—the context—of everyone beyond mere wish fulfillment/the novelty of golems ambiguously bullying one another for the Maze Gaze [which under centrist circles extends to tokenized queer people “acting like men”]. The danger of the sadist is always the advertised lack of compunction making them a frankly good dom, but also someone who can just as easily take advantage in ways that reduce the individual they control to putty in their hands [source].

Capital and its systemic abuses create strange appetites, requiring workers wanting to field said appetites to work within power as a language; i.e., to critique its harmful generational effects on us by playing with it ourselves. To critique power-as-demonic, you must go where it is, generally by making fetishes of it that you can play with; i.e., doubles standing in for us as demons do, expressed as dolls but also through doll-like games played with people as dollish, thus demonic.

First, even without changing anyone’s bodies, the likes of Scott Pilgrim have near-endless ludic potential; i.e., in terms of who is on top/the bottom, the dom/sub, and the activities and duties portrayed that everyone arbitrates/agrees to. Second, the corporal uniforms of demons like Pearl or Garnet take on a variety of physical shapes, sizes and sex organs, but also BDSM roleplay tied to said morphologies and associate ludo-Gothic freedoms. This arbitrates according to preference, allowing for endless morphological/poetic expression tied to ludic expression in classic demonic forms: actual or figurative golems doing BDSM for the purposes of expressing and playing with power to heal from power abuse; i.e., “What we get to do within the rules and roles we reify outside of state forms!” Demons are clay and can be as strong or shapely as you like:

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

The only limits that exist are those our imaginations already have, which can be imposed on us through Capitalist Realism (and its notions of false power), or rejected and challenged by iconoclastic forms playing with toys/toy-like things for liberatory and ironically cathartic means.

[11] Faustian bargains are one-way and express in game theory as “zero-sum.” Implements of trickery aside, they harm one person to benefit another as receiving all of that person’s power. Faust, by the end of the bargain, is completely disempowered and—in Marlowe’s version, at least—pulled limb from limb (a gruesome fate that would play out through Clive Barker tearing the villain from Hellraiser to pieces with hooks and chains).

[12] E.g., Uriah Heep’s “Rainbow Demon” (1972).

[13] “This gal suggested… maybe I should have some attentions paid to my butt’s hole!” (Letterkenny’s “It’s Impolite to Kiss and Tell,” 2016).

So often, cis-het men are afraid of non-normative sex, but want it anyways; re: virgin/whore syndrome; i.e., getting it from those who are more used to being treated as sex objects/advertisement props: women (or those forced to identify as/act like women). Framed as “closer” to nature all its forms, and routinely sold under capital as such, women both a) live on the fetishized and cliché, “wild side” of things, and b) appear as chaste maidens or ordinary people (the “angel in the streets, freak in the sheets” paradox). Cryptonymy is something to enact all of these things with; i.e., it becomes a game of show-and-conceal, repressed agents speaking to what they normally mark as swallowed by Gothic’s usual vanishing points: castles, whores and other such event horizons. “On the ashes of something not quite present,” we demon sluts become ghosts in spectral castles that come and go like dreams, the latter dictated by socio-material turbulence!

For example, I once worked with someone from Norway who was making a graphic novel: about a redhead named Madikken (reillustrated by me, below). The story concerned the original author’s closeted sex fantasies, which they wanted to celebrate and bury in the same breath. As such, the “vanishing point” was in full effect, here; i.e., the closer the author got to the sex scene, the less detailed it became! The color all but vanished from the pages’ pastoral scenes, and the quality of the art disappeared as well. I could see their shame unfold in this respect; i.e., clearly embarrassed by their own desires, the author closeted them mid-novel on account that they were basically MAGA in that part of the world (they loved Trump and Gamergate was in vogue)!

Out-of-text, this had a censoring effect on the actual book, as well. We originally published the novel in 2016, only to have them scrap it/the main character entirely. Except, entropy needn’t be a censoring force. Picking up the pieces, I took Madikken and won her in a legal dispute, putting her squarely out of the closet! For me, Madikken’s strong and out there—having an ass and body that don’t quit. She puts in work and is proud of it!

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

[14] Such erasure is impossible. For one, language is always haunted by echoes of trauma; re: palimpsests and cryptomimesis. Furthermore, the state cannot afford to completely erase monsters, because profit requires them to move money through nature. God needs Satan to justify his empire.

[15] As Nick Groom writes (from the Oxford World’s Classics of The Italian, 2017):

Ann Radcliffe may have not been a revolutionary, but her work is far from being conservative—she repeatedly tested the boundaries of orthodoxy at a time of revolutionary foment. This may explain why everything is under scrutiny in The Italian. It is a novel suffused with secrets and mysteries, and pervaded by scrutiny, examination, and interrogation. […] It looks forward to a society in which order is enforced by institutions keeping individuals under perpetual surveillance. As such, The Italian [is] very much a novel for the twenty-first century.

So often, play is couched within abuse (or vice versa), concealing itself as “just games.” We’ll return to Radcliffe and Groom deeper in the module; suffice to say, she wrote her stories in the wake of the French Revolution and before women could legally own property. In doing so, she helped provide unique perspective through Gothic fiction, speaking to state abuse and control felt then and now in and out of such stories.

[16] We’ve already discussed the chimeric, “ancient” qualities of the xenomorph in the Undead Module (e.g., the tokophobic, queerphobic, and racist elements to the monster); but will return to examine it even more moving forwards (especially tokenism/witch cops attacking nature, in “Derelicts, Medusa and Giger’s Xenomorph“).

[17] Arguably a Protestant ethic pun as much as insectoid life-cycle metaphor.

“Deal with the Devil” is a blog-style book 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. This specific promo post includes the Demon Module’s table of contents (and hyperlinks to each post), followed by the book disclaimer.

Further Reading: As of 3/13/2025, I’ve decided to give every book volume/(sub)module its own promotion series, including Volume Zero and Volume One. Access all of them, here.

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 found either at the bottom of this page or on its own webpage.

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.

(artist: Romantic Rose)

Contents (for Volume Two, part two) 

Volume Two, part two divides into two Monster Modules, which will release as separate sub-volumes (due to length issues). Both halves contain the opening thesis statement, “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” (which discusses the overlap between trauma/feeding and transformation/power and knowledge exchange); the first half, “Searching for Secrets,” holds the Undead Module, whereas the second half, “Deal with the Devil,” contains the Demon Module and volume conclusion.

All in all, these individual posts are the primary sections/chapters of each module for Volume Two, part two. Modules are sections that concern multiple chapters, subchapters, and so on. While the Poetry Module focused on Gothic poetics as a historical-material process whose history we contribute towards, the Monster Modules shall focus on the history of Gothic poetics as something to learn from when poetically articulating our own pedagogy of the oppressed.

Playing with Dead Things (opening and thesis chapter)

Opening Summary

The opening to Volume Two, part two, as well as the thesis chapter for the Monster Modules. Each module will have its own promo series, and each promo series will only contain its respective module/sub-volume.

Update, 8/7/2024: Originally “Playing with Dead Things” contained two additional chapters: “In Search of the Secret Spell” and “Back to the Necropolis.” However, to keep Volume Two, part two from getting too big, I’ve decided to transplant those into Volume Two, part one (as of v1.2 onwards, which you can access on my book’s 1-page promo). I’ve updated this content page and the content page for “Brace for Impact” to reflect those changes. —Perse

Posts

• 0. “Searching for Secrets” series opening:  “Volume Two, part two: Opening and Outline“: Explains how Volume Two, part two is focused on the history of Gothic poetics as something that evolved into itself. Also provides a broad outlined to Volume Two, part two (chapter/module summaries and summation). Length: ~2 pages.
• 1. “‘A Cruel Angel’s (Modular) Thesis’; or, the Broad-Strokes Nature of Holistic Instruction: Camping ‘Rape’ as Food for Thought Regarding the Monster Modules“: Outlines the symposium-style approach to the Monster Modules, which were written before my PhD, manifesto and Poetry Module, but contain the same holistic approach to Gothic poetics we’re returning to, years later! Gives a modular thesis statement to consider as we proceed. Length: ~15 pages.

Demons: From Composites and the Occult to Totems and the Natural World (module)

Cover model: Romantic Rose

Module Summary

This module explores the poetic history of demons (made/summoned/of nature); i.e., as actively cunning-yet-alien shapeshifters. Canonized as treacherous within transactional dialogs of forbidden, unequal exchange (of power, knowledge and darkness) and permanent transformation, demons frequently yield a repressed desire for radical change haunted by systemic abuse; i.e., of rape and revenge as things to canonize or camp through the Gothic mode: as untrustworthy beings made deceitful and torturous through the ghost of the counterfeit’s process of abjection’s Promethean Quest or Faustian bargain. As such, we’ll consider the subversive, cryptonymic potential of demons; i.e., to reverse abjection through revolutionary cryptonymy’s double operation (to conceal and reveal taboo subjects), all while dealing with state doubles (re: DARVO and obscurantism, including tokenized variants). Be those people, places or something in between (the chronotope and its castle narrative/mise-en-abyme), we’ll do so through their classical function—as seductive, mendacious granters of dark wishes, including fulfilling the whore’s revenge: of nature policed, thus pimped, as monstrous-feminine by the state for profit, which the demon (as a vengeful, monstrous-feminine whore) challenges said motive (and its raping of nature) in favor of something better.

To it, we’ll explore the dark, hauntological creativity and endless morphological variety of demons, but especially how they manifest and behave; i.e., as a vengeful, nebulous, psychosexual matter of exchange, transformation and desire, onstage and off, during ludo-Gothic BDSM and liminal, half-real expression: composite bodies like cyborgs, golems and robots that are built with mad science (the Promethean Quest), occult beings that are summoned and dealt with (the Faustian Bargain), or overtly natural totems that are hunted down within nature-as-alien.

approximate length (“): ~534,396 words/~1,245 pages and ~1,169 unique images

Posts

• 2. “Demons: From Composites and the Occult to Totems and the Natural World” (module opening): Outlines the historical, poetic, praxial focus on the Demons Modules, and outlines its chapters on transformation and knowledge/power exchange. Opening Length: ~5 pages.
  • “Of Darkness and the Forbidden” (module “demon symposium,” included with opening): Discusses various poetic ideas and paradoxes (contradictions) known to darkness and demons, which will come up throughout the entire module. Length: ~69 pages (nice).
• 3. “Forbidden Sight, Faust and the Promethean Quest: Knowledge and Power Exchange” (chapter opening): Considers forbidden power as something to see; i.e., forbidden sight. As such, it does so through the history of making/summoning demons—initially according to Gothic, Renaissance approaches and prostitution (whores) as a Faustian bargain, but then unto the Promethean Quest; i.e., Cartesian dualism meant to punish demons, or otherwise summon/pimp them through the ghost of the counterfeit to further the abjection process in service to capital raping nature-as-vengeful (and whose inheritance anxiety occurs inside the Imperial Core, continuing Capitalist Realism as a fear of the outside, of the dark, of the Earth, creativity and nature). Opening Length: ~3 pages.
  • 3a. ” part zero: “A Rape Reprise; or, the Whore’s Paradox Having Its Revenge During Ludo-Gothic BDSM” (feat. Nyx; included with chapter opening): Considers how the state rapes nature for profit, a process of abjection that can be subverted during the whore’s paradox and its revenge vis-à-vis ludo-Gothic BDSM. Length: ~44 pages.
  • 3a. ” part one: “Idle Hands Are the Devil’s Workshop; or, Weapons in Clay and Even More Playtime: the Monster Prostitution of Blood Libel and Its Violent, Demonic Revenge” (subchapter opening): “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!” Explores the morphology of whores inside the violent, vengeful domain of blood libel, persecution/revenge and sex demons’ dark desires; i.e., psychosexual camp with traumatic baggage, examining Amazons/Medusa (demon mommies), followed by Takena’s short-but-gnarly claymation skit, “Midnight Vampire” (2024), then goblins as demon lovers exchanging poetic violence of all different kinds! Opening Length: ~3 pages.
    • 3a0. Idle Hands, part zero: “Cheat Sheet; or, Some Larger Thesis Arguments/How We’ll Apply Them to Blood Libel and Demons at Large” (included with subchapter opening): 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. Length: ~11 pages.
    • 3a1. Idle Hands, part one: “Amazons and Demon Mommies” (sub-subchapter opening—included with subchapter opening): Considers the demonic aspects of blood libel per the Amazon as witch-like prostitute, extending to demon mommies such as Lady Hellbender as Amazonian in their own right. Opening Length: ~1 page.
      • 3a1a. “On Amazons, Good and Bad” (sub-sub-subchapter—included with subchapter opening): Parts one and two explores Amazons and Medusa—their history of tokenization and resistance, and how they manifest currently under state influence; i.e., as something to offer different unequal power fantasies, during the cryptonymy process; e.g., Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and James Cameron’s Aliens.
        • 3a1a0. “Prefacing Medusa: to Bay” (included with subchapter opening): Prefaces my Medusa section with a thank you to Bay, my partner and co-writer, who helped with the final proofread. Length: ~1 page.
        • 3a1a1. “On Amazons, Good and Bad, part one: Always a Victim (feat. Medusa, Aliens—included with subchapter opening)“: Explores Medusa and her mistreatment by Amazons abusing her as monstrous-feminine during the abjection and cryptonymy processes. Length: ~69 pages (nice).
        • 3a1a1. “On Amazons, Good and Bad, part two: Reclaiming Amazons; or, Cops and Victims” (sub-sub-sub-subchapter opening): Explores how we can reclaim Amazons (e.g., postcolonial anal sex) from their historically misogynistic usage, but also their tokenization by TERFs to commit various abuses for capital. Opening Length: ~3 pages.
          • 3a1a1a. “Cops and Victims, part one: the Riddle of Steel; or, Confronting Past Wrongs (feat. Amanda Nicole—included with sub-sub-sub-subchapter opening)” : Examines the past of the Amazon myth having become increasingly hostile to state enemies; i.e., through tokenized feminism vis-à-vis subjugated Amazons acting traditionally like men. Length: ~38 pages.
          • 3a1a1b. ” part two: “Our Sweet Revenge; or, Being Ourselves While Reclaiming Anal Rape, mid-Amazonomachia (feat. Nyx and Amy Ginger Hart)“: Considers the whore’s revenge as ultimately the subversion of Amazon’s prior subjugation, doing so through the language of warriors and rape during the whore’s paradox: to camp rape while suffering from its historical effects. Length: ~48 pages.

(artist: Nyx)

• • • • 3a1b. “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) the rest of the module will continue focusing on. Length: ~19 pages.
      • 3a1c. “‘I’ll See You in Hell’: Dark Faeries and Demon Mommies” (sub-sub-subchapter opening): Goes beyond the earthly realms of classic Amazons, giving these warrior-whore sex demons more of an openly hellish character (that still yields the same ludo-Gothic BDSM devices): dark faeries and demon (muscle) mommies. Opening Length: ~16 pages.
        • 3a1c1. “Darkness Visible: Dark Faeries (feat. Annabel Morningstar, Harmony Corrupted, Romantic Rose, The Witch, and more—included with sub-sub-subchapter opening)”: A collaboration between whores. Considers the labor proponents of Gothic-Communist revolution—working together and with Gothic materials, in a staged, meta sense—to demonically give rise (thus shape/voice) to dark places and people; i.e., as dark faerie rulers/regal fairylands where one can explore off-limit feelings and desires conducive to post-scarcity development; e.g., Satan from Robert Eggers’ The Witch, Lavos from Chrono Trigger, and more! Length: ~53 pages.
        • 3a1c2. “Trial by Fire: Swole’ Demon Mommies (feat. Lady Hellbender and Karlach, The Shape of Water)“: A symposium. Considers the fiery, militant aspect to demon muscle mommies, specifically through the postcolonial urge of forbidden love. Length: ~37 pages.
    • 3a2. ” part two: “Vampires and Claymation (feat. ‘Midnight Vampire’)“: Lays out the basic idea of demonic, whorish revenge with vampires, whose blood libel it explores in Takena’s “Midnight Vampire” (and reconsiders some ideas of tokenization per some of our thesis arguments that apply to all demon types). Length: ~21 pages.
    • 3a3. “Prefacing Tolkien: to Harmony/Concerning Big Black Dicks and ‘Anti-Semitism’ vs ‘antisemitism’” (preface to “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking”—included with “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking,” below): Dedicates “Idle Hands,” part three to Harmony and discusses “black” a little more as a poetic device; i.e., why Tolkien loves big black dick in his racist, sexist, and otherwise bigoted blood libel stories: murdering orcs and goblins, en masse, while disguising 19th-century ethnocentrism as post-WWII British High Fantasy escapism. We’ll also discuss the difference between “anti-Semitism” and “antisemitism,” and why I favor the former over the latter in my own work. Length: ~20 pages.

(artist: Harmony Corrupted)

• • • 3a4. ” part three: “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking (feat. Tolkien’s orcs and goblins, acid Communism, and SpongeBob SquarePants)“: 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). Length: ~69 pages (nice).
      • 3a4. “From New to Old: Concerning the Rest of the Module” (preface to “Making Demons”—Included with “Goblins, Anti-Semitism and Monster-Fucking,” above): Explains the history of the “Demons” manuscript, before and after September 2024; i.e., the first half of the manuscript—the module and chapter opening, as well as all of “Idle Hands”—being written during and after September, and everything else (“Forbidden Sight,” parts two and three; “Exploring the Derelict Past,” “Call of the Wild,” “The Future Is a Dead Mall,” and the conclusion) being written before September. Length: ~2 pages.
  • 3b. ” part two: “Making Demons (re: Prometheus, subchapter opening)“: Our Prometheus section, which explores the act of making golems/composite manmade demons from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel onwards!  Opening Length: ~1 page.
    • 3b2. “Foreword: To Mary Shelley” (included with subchapter opening): A short preface to Mary Shelley and her inspiration on me. Length: ~7 pages.
    • 3b3. “‘Fire of Unknown Origin’: Composite Bodies, Golems and Mad Science; or the Roots of Enlightenment Persecution (feat. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and Ridley Scott—included with subchapter opening)”: Lays out Mary Shelley’s life, but also her lasting impact on science fiction; i.e., as the genre she single-handedly birthed, combining Gothic fantasies and early modern ideas of the scientific method to critique capital with, which others imitated (and not always in good faith); e.g., through Ridley Scott as a director whose body of work we’ve previously examined, and whose problematic elements we shall dissect here, with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant (no Metroidvania, this time). Length: ~69 pages (nice).
    • 3b4. “Afterword: A Further Note on Angry Gods (and Playing with Them; feat. Cuwu—included with subchapter opening)”: Wraps up my thoughts on Mary Shelley and her importance, but also the value in making and playing with monstrous gods (demons or otherwise) before segueing into “Summoning Demons.” Length ~21 pages.
  • 3c. ” part three: “Summoning Demons (re: Faust and Radcliffe, subchapter opening)“: Our Faust section, which divides in two basic parts, both of which feature Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, as well as Evil Dead, H.R. Giger and others (note: this is where the Demons Module really starts to abbreviate; i.e., “Summoning Demons” is less about close-reads, and more about introducing ludo-Gothic concepts you can apply through demon BDSM, yourselves—strict or gentle). Opening Length. ~1 page.
    • 3c1. “Raw Deals, Imposters, the Occult and Death Curses; the Demonic BDSM of Canonical Torture vs Exquisite ‘Torture'” (sub-subchapter opening—included with subchapter opening): Per Faustus, Smile, Evil Dead and other Gothic stories, lays out the idea of summoning occult demons, including acts of interrogating them through Radcliffe’s refrain/the classic Neo-Gothic model: the demonic (damsels, detectives and demons) trifecta vis-à-vis canonical torture vs Radcliffe’s exquisite “torture.” Length ~5 pages.
      • 3c1a. “Whores and Faust: Summoning the Whore/Black Penitent” (included with subchapter opening): Introduces Faust and the idea of summoning whores (and by extension sex demons of a Lewis or Radcliffe style); i.e., in strictly magical, Faustian language. Introduces Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, but discusses them vis-à-vis Faust through modern versions of each; e.g., not just Marlowe’s early modern Doctor Faustus (1590), but Greg Beeman’s Mom and Dad Save the World (1992), Alan Rickman in Die Hard (1988), John Landis’ Animal House (1978), Roger Ebert’s weird white moderate voyeurism, and Kevin Smith’s Dogma (1999). Length ~57 pages.
      • 3c1b. “The Road to Hell; or, Summoning the Whore through Newer Black Magic Based on Older Examples (and Other Considerations of the Faustian Bargain vis-à-vis the Participants)” (sub-sub-subchapter opening): Considers poetically summoning demons/the whore (through magic), doing so while “pulling a Faust”; i.e., according to a brief history of demons and their torturous summoning rituals and effects dating back to Marlowe’s science wizard. We’ll start by demasking a “strict” double of old harmful forms—Jadis, in my case, being someone to clone and demask, as Radcliffe’s future stand-in Velma Dinkley would, but expanding the interrogation to benefit all oppressed groups—then explore how to do so while engaging with the Gothic past as it continuously evolved out of itself. This includes onstage and off; i.e., from the chaos of the Middle Ages and various famous works (from Hammer of Witches to Doctor Faustus) into the Enlightenment and beyond towards 20th and 21st century variants; e.g., Smile and Evil Dead, but also my ex Jadis’ abuse of me: as collectively built on top of an earlier history whose demonic tradition endlessly haunts us, and which we must respond to by camping it, ourselves! Opening Length ~2 pages.
        • 3c1b1. “Going Mask Off: Showing Jadis’ Face while Doubling Them” (included with sub-sub-subchapter opening): Gives food for thought about demons as much being real people as fictional ones, during Gothic poetics. The example I give—and doing so in the Radcliffean spirit of demasking bad guys—is my ex and former abuser, Jadis. We discuss my act of doing so not to marshal violence against them, but to learn from the abuse they caused to camp and subvert, hence prevent future harm, on a systemic level; i.e., while making our own media as haunted by said abuse, doing so as a demonic act of thinking critically (through art and performance) about other people that speaks to abuse affecting oppressed groups unevenly (to summon demons is to make them; to make them is to think critically when the resulting parody and pastiche become perceptive). Length ~10 pages.

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

• • • • • 3c1b2. “Dark Shadows: The Origins of Demonic Persecution and Camp; or, Applying My Education (from School and Jadis) to Smile, Evil Dead and More“: Considers demonology’s early roots, subsequent Neo-Gothic period, and 20th/21st century revivals, while also going over the praxial concerns of canonical torture vs exquisite “torture”; i.e., by how we can take things further than Radcliffe did while still being aware of the risks she ultimately took herself. Length ~69 pages (nice).

• • • 3c2. “Exploring the Derelict Past: The Demonic Trifecta of Detectives, Damsels and Sex Demons; or Enjoying Yesterday’s Exquisite Torture on the Edge of the Civilized World” (sub-subchapter chapter opening): Considers the left-behind, derelict flavor of demons, and unpacks various poetic qualities to damsels, detectives and demons separately and together! Opening Length: ~2 pages.
      • 3d1. “Radcliffe’s Refrain” (reprise—included with sub-subchapter opening): A quick rehash of the demonic trifecta vis-à-vis Ann Radcliffe’s pioneering of it. Also talks about her history as “mother to the Gothic novel” and problematic legacy following her disappearance. Length: ~14 pages.
      • 3d1. “Damsels, Detectives and Sex Demons, part zero: Derelicts, Medusa and H.R. Giger’s Xenomorph; i.e., the Puzzle of ‘Antiquity’“: Outlines the idea of “derelicts”—be they damsels, detectives or sex demons—through Medusa/Giger’s xenomorph as involving all three. Length: ~69 pages (nice).
      • 3d2. ” part one: “Non-Magical Damsels and Detectives” (feat. Out of Sight, Nina Hartley, Velma, and Zeuhl): Further explores damsels and detectives as classic Neo-Gothic devices, the oppositional praxis of which has survived well into the present; i.e., in pornographic language, like Nina Hartley, but also tamer/non-magical murder mysteries and echoes of Radcliffe (who conflated extramarital sex with rape and death) through Velma from Scooby Doo. We’ll examine the original character as a cis detective, but also my ex, Zeuhl; i.e., as someone I’m exposing: a good trans Velma demasking an evil one after surviving their abuse for years! Length: ~44 pages.
      • 3d3. ” part two: “Demons and Dealing with Them; or Abandonment, Dark Worship and Vengeful Sacrifice When Dissecting Radcliffe” (feat. Ridley Scott’s The Terror and Alien: Covenant, Ninja Scroll, The Dark Crystal, and Harmony Corrupted): Further explores demons in a similar fashion, but touches on additional ways these complicated beings needn’t be feared (through the process of abjection) but celebrated as Satanic liberators freeing our minds from Cartesian thought, heteronormativity and the settle-colonial status quo. Among his other work (namely The Terror), discusses Ridley Scott’s vengeful dissection of Radcliffe’s “spectre” in Alien: Covenant; i.e., as a dark matter of postcolonial revenge against James Cameron’s Aliens, then camps Scott by dissecting him and resurrecting Radcliffe as a dark whore of her former self (through several close-reads; e.g., with Harmony Corrupted, and about Ninja Scroll and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance)! Length: ~69 pages (nice).
      • 3d4. “In Measured Praise of the Great Enchantress” (feat. Ann Radcliffe, Sailor Moon, The Ronin Warriors, and Harmony Corrupted): “Egon, you’ve earned it.” An afterword that gives Ann Radcliffe some long-awaited praise, and talks about the important of camping demonic sex work vis-à-vis her worthwhile contributions; i.e., with Japanese anime, cosplay, fan art, and more (e.g., Sailor Moon) during sex work as a revolutionary hermeneutic and applied synthesis. Length: ~24 pages.

(model and artist: Mikki Storm and Persephone van der Waard)

• 4. “Call of the Wild; or Sex Education: Trans-forming the World through the Trans, Intersex and Non-binary Mode of Being” (chapter opening): Examines the transformative side of GNC demons, predominantly from the natural world as preyed upon by the state. Opening Length: ~6 pages.
  • 4a. “Call of the Wild, part one: Hunter and Hunted; or, Nature vs the State” (included with chapter opening): Outlines the different animal types (separate from undead and demonic) and revisits their broader settler-colonial relationship to the state as something to challenge; provides some examples of medieval sexualized expression/poetic devices (from the Poetry Module) and labor that, while fun, we won’t have time to explore beyond briefly exhibiting them (nature is simply too diverse*). Length: ~35 pages.
  • 4b. ” part two: “Dark Xenophilia; or, ‘Far Out, Dude!’ Monster-fucking and Magic Girls Helping Foster Dark Radical (Communist) Empathy During Healthy Sex Education (for Children and Young Adults into Adulthood)“: A subchapter that divides in two, each half roughly weighing the undead side of the animal monster equation (furries and furry panic) and the demonic side (drugs and acid Communism, but also children’s sex education going from young adults into adulthood; e.g., Sailor Moon, The Last Unicorn and Giger’s xenomorph); i.e., when raising dark empathy tied to the natural world as alien under capital, and reunited through Communism’s good sex education tied to dark xenophilic monsters and drug use: as a poetic, awareness- and intelligence-raising device versus fascism and capital’s polar opposite of that (re: the state is incompatible with life, thus empathy and consent, pimping nature as monstrous-feminine). Opening Length: ~22 pages.
    • 4b1. “Dark Xenophilia,” part one: “Monster-Fucking and Furry Panic, from Ace to Ass” (feat. Lycans, Chimeras, and Sentient Animals; e.g., Cuwu, “Pelts,” Erika Eleniak, Sonic the Hedgehog and Pippi Longstocking): Delves further into undead qualities of natural monsters, expressing “monster-fucking” and dark xenophilia as a potentially ace-yet-pornographic form of sex-positive education through public nudism: featuring lycans, chimeras, and sentient animals to cope with trauma that is often something to live with; e.g., furry panic; e.g., Dario Argento’s “Pelts” (2006), Erika Eleniak from Under Siege (1989), Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) and Pippi Longstocking. Length: ~66 pages.
    • 4b2. ” part two: “‘Follow the White-to-Black Rabbit’; or Magic, Drugs and Acid Communism” (feat. the Monstrous-Feminine of Magic Girls, Unicorns and Xenomorphs): Applies the same dark xenophilic logic to explore sex(-positive) education (from children to adults) through demons and acid Communism; i.e., spells and drugs, featuring the transformative monstrous-feminine of magic girls, unicorns and xenomorphs; e.g., Sailor Moon, The Last Unicorn, Nimona and Alien (among others). A witch is a witch, but which witch will you be? We’ll consider this question, too, vis-à-vis GNC ideologies from an ideological and morphological standpoint; re: “the trans, intersex and non-binary mode of being” as tied to older dead cultures and andro/gynodiversity in Gothic art, before closing things out with an exploration of radical drug use and revolution per Mark Fisher’s acid Communism inside capitalist hauntologies (which then segues into the rebirth of the Communist mind in dead capitalist retro-future spaces, figuratively the shopping mall of the zombie apocalypse). Length: ~69 pages (nice).
  • 4c. “Saying Goodbye: Onto Better Times Ahead (and Harder Ones)” (included with “The Future Is a Dead Mall,” below): A small antechamber/liminal space between “Call of the Wild” and the closing section of the module; i.e., where we say goodbye to the black rabbit and prepare to face what’s ahead without them: heading into the known-unknown cryptonymy of dead capital (malls or otherwise)! Length: ~6 pages.

*I.e., diversity is strength, beating singular perceptions of strength that, through Cartesian domination, try to hold on to power to everyone’s detriment. 

In Closing (final chapters and conclusion)

Conclusion Summary

The closing chapter and conclusion to Volume Two, part two. Segues into Volume Three, so there’s a bit of transitional material, as well as reflecting on the entirety of Volume Two’s three modules.

Posts

(artist: Krispy Tofuuu)

• 5. “The Future Is a Dead Mall; or Reviving the Zombie Future with Proletarian “Archaeologies”: Revolutionary Cryptonyms that Defy Snobbish Critics of the Gothic to Break Capitalist Realism” (chapter): Monsters are classically devalued outside of canonical forms utilized by state forces, which leads to Capitalist Realism under the current order of things. To critique Capitalism, then, we must critique people’s devaluing of the Gothic or otherwise misusing/scapegoating it for Capitalism’s woes: Radcliffe, but also Coleridge and Jameson’s own complicit cryptonymy. Through a cultivated Wisdom of the Ancients (a cultural understanding of the imaginary past), we can confront Capitalist Realism through the monsters normally pitted against us instead of speaking for us and nature as exploited by the elite. It becomes something to synthesize through our creative successes’ revolutionary cryptonymy—a concept we’ll explore entirely in Volume Three while reflecting on Volume Two’s monstrous histories (and theories from Volume One and Zero). Length: ~31 pages.
• 6. “The Caterpillar and the Wasp; or, What’s to Come” (module and volume conclusion; included with “The Future Is a Dead Mall”): Concludes Volume Two based on its contents, but highlights through medieval expression and a coda (the caterpillar and the wasp) to encapsulate everything the volume has discussed moving into Volume Three. Length: ~15 pages.

(artist: Romantic Rose)

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Disclaimer

(disclaimer exhibit: Artist: Harmony Corrupted, who provided me with various materials from her Fansly account to use [with her permission] in my book, including cum photos. For those of legal age who enjoy Harmony’s work and want to see more than this website provides, consider subscribing to her Fansly account and then ordering a custom/tipping through her Ko-Fi. You won’t be disappointed!)

“If it was not good, it was true; if it was not artistic, it was sincere; if it was in bad taste, it was on the side of life.”

—Henry Miller, on criticism and the Supreme-Court-level lawsuit he received for writing The Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Regarding This Book’s Artistic/Pornographic Nudity and Sexual Content: Sex Positivity thoroughly discusses sexuality in popular media, including fetishes, kinks, BDSM, Gothic material, and general sex work; the illustrations it contains have been carefully curated and designed to demonstrate my arguments. It also considers pornography to be art, examining the ways that sex-positive art makes iconoclastic statements against the state. As such, Sex Positivity contains visual examples of sex-positive/sex-coercive artistic nudity borrowed from publicly available sources to make its educational/critical arguments. Said nudity has been left entirely uncensored for those purposes. While explicitly criminal sexual acts, taboos and obscenities are discussed herein, no explicit illustrations thereof are shown, nor anything criminal; i.e., no snuff porn, child porn or revenge porn. It does examine things generally thought of as porn that are unironically violent. Examples of uncensored, erotic artwork and sex work are present, albeit inside exhibits that critique the obscene potential (from a legal standpoint) of their sexual content: “ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse” (source: Justice.gov). For instance, there is an illustrated example of uncensored semen—a “breeding kink” exhibit with zombie unicorns and werewolves (exhibit 87a)—that I’ve included to illustrate a particular point, but its purposes are ultimately educational in nature.

The point of this book isn’t to be obscene for its own sake, but to educate the broader public (including teenagers*) about sex-positive artwork and labor historically treated as obscene by the state. For the material herein to be legally considered obscene it would have to simultaneously qualify in three distinct ways (aka the “Miller” test):

• appeal to prurient interests (i.e., an erotic, lascivious, abnormal, unhealthy, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion)
• attempt to depict or describe sexual conduct in a patently offensive way (i.e., ultimate sexual acts, normal or perverted, actual or simulated, masturbation, excretory functions, lewd exhibition of the genitals, or sado-masochistic sexual abuse)
• lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

Taken as a whole, this book discusses debatably prurient material in an academic manner, depicting and describing sexual conduct in a non-offensive way for the express purpose of education vis-à-vis literary-artistic-political enrichment.

*While this book was written for adults—provided to them through my age-gated website—I don’t think it should be denied from curious teenagers through a supervising adult. The primary reason I say this (apart from the trauma-writing sections, which are suitably intense and grave) is that the academic material can only be simplified so far and teenagers probably won’t understand it entirely (which is fine; plenty of books are like that—take years to understand more completely). As for sexually-developing readers younger than 16 (ages 10-15), I honestly think there are far more accessible books that tackle the same basic subject matter more quickly at their reading level. All in all, this book examines erotic art and sex positivity as an alternative to the sex education currently taught (or deliberately not taught) in curricular/extracurricular spheres. It does so in the hopes of improving upon canonical tutelage through artistic, dialectical-material analysis. 

Fair Use: This book is non-profit, and its artwork is meant for education, transformation and critique. For those reasons, the borrowed materials contained herein fall under Fair Use. All sources come from popular media: movies, fantasy artist portfolios, cosplayer shoots, candid photographs, and sex worker catalogs intended for public viewing. Private material has only been used with a collaborating artist’s permission (for this book—e.g., Blxxd Bunny‘s OF material or custom shoots; or as featured in a review of their sex work on my website with their consent already given from having done past work together—e.g., Miss Misery).

Concerning the Exhibit Numbers and Parenthetical Dates: I originally wrote this book as one text, not four volumes. Normally I provide a publication year per primary text once per text—e.g., “Alien (1979)”—but this would mean having to redate various texts in Volumes One, Two and Three after Volume Zero. I have opted out of doing this. Likewise, the exhibit numbers are sequential for the entire book, not per volume; references to a given exhibit code [exhibit 11b2 or 87a] will often refer to exhibits not present in the current volume. I have not addressed this in the first edition of my book, but might assemble a future annotated list in a second edition down the road.

Concerning Hyperlinks: Those that make the source obvious or are preceded by the source author/title will simply be supplied “as is.” This includes artist or book names being links to themselves, but also mere statements of fact, basic events, or word definitions where the hyperlink is the word being defined. Links to sources where the title is not supplied in advance or whose content is otherwise not spelled out will be supplied next to the link in parentheses (excluding Wikipedia, save when directly quoting from the site). One, this will be especially common with YouTube essayists I cite to credit them for their work (though sometimes I will supply just the author’s name; or their name, the title of the essay and its creation year). Two, concerning YouTube links and the odds of videos being taken down, these are ultimately provided for supplementary purposes and do not actually need to be viewed to understand my basic arguments; I generally summarize their own content into a single sentence, but recommend you give any of the videos themselves a watch if you’re curious about the creators’ unique styles and perspectives about a given topic.

Concerning (the PDF) Exhibit Image Quality: This book contains over 1,000 different images, which—combined with the fact that Microsoft Word appears to compress images twice (first, in-document images and second, when converting to PDFs) along with the additional hassle that is WordPress’ limitations on accepting uploaded PDFs (which requires me to compress the PDF again—has resulted in sub-par image quality for the exhibit images themselves. To compensate, all of the hyperlinks link to the original sources where the source images can be found. Sometimes, it links to the individual images, other times to the entire collage, and I try to offer current working links; however, the ephemeral, aliased nature of sex work means that branded images do not always stay online, so some links (especially those to Twitter/X accounts) won’t always lead to a source if the original post is removed.

Concerning Aliases: Sex workers survive through the use of online aliases and the discussion of their trauma requires a degree of anonymity to protect victims from their actual/potential abusers. This book also contains trauma/sexual anecdotes from my own life; it discusses my friends, including sex workers and the alter egos/secret identities they adopt to survive “in the wild.” Keeping with that, all of the names in this book are code names (except for mine, my late Uncle Dave’s and his ex-wife Erica’s—who are only mentioned briefly by their first names). Models/artists desiring a further degree of anonymity (having since quit the business, for example) have been given a codename other than their former branded identity sans hyperlinks (e.g., Jericho).

Extended, Book-Wide Trigger Warning: This entire book thoroughly discusses xenophobia, harmful xenophilia (necrophilia, pedophilia, zoophilia, etc), homophobia, transphobia, enbyphobia, sexism, racism, race-/LGBTQ-related hate crimes/murder and domestic abuse; child abuse, spousal abuse, animal abuse, misogyny and sexual abuse towards all of these groups; power abuse, rape (date, marital, prison, etc), discrimination, war crimes, genocide, religious/secular indoctrination and persecution, conversion therapy, manmade ecological disasters, and fascism.

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

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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

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

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

“Meeting Jadis,” part two: One Foot out the Door; or, Playing with Dolls to Express One’s Feeling Undead (feat. Alien, The Night House, Steven Universe and more)

To be crystal clear, the pornstar/”doll” look isn’t automatically a bad thing. Indeed, enjoying the look or subverting its harmful history through ironic BDSM is perfectly serviceable among iconoclasts: deliberately performing like a doll, puppet or sleeping/unthinking “victim” in figurative or literal ways; puppy play as doll-like; creating consent-non-consent in our own art; or otherwise emulating the “swooning” function of vampirism in ways that aren’t immediately harmful; or exhibiting the Goth doll look, mood or vibe through thematic rape play performed by couples wearing masks and outfits of a particular look that evoke death and rape as things to subvert […] However, if it doesn’t express mutual consent in a visually obvious manner, then it’s ontologically “ambiguous” in that respect (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume Zero (2023)

(artist: Jim32)

Picking up from where “Meeting Jadis (opening and part one)” left off…

Now that we’ve explored several of the ontological, modular aspects to dolls, part two will now consider

• the Gothic (monstrous) relationship between dolls, space-time and foreign-to-familiar evocations of either regarding undead sentiment as a coercive or liberatory device (feat. Alien and The Night House)
• the balancing of a paradox of cuteness that can be used to help or hinder workers depending on who’s using them and how
• the means to subvert a canonical absence of irony, mid-play (taking the opportunity to look at various cartoons with doll-like themes in them; e.g., Steven Universe and Scott Pilgrim)

By extension, it will consider the undead, raped way I existed under Jadis’ abuse relative to these things; i.e., which I had to reclaim before I could escape Jadis and their bad-faith variants, then write this book as it presently exists concerning ludo-Gothic BDSM, dolls, and rape play at large: coming out as queer by transforming my zombie self through a playful rememory process. I write better when having others around to talk to/work with, meaning it was an interpersonal exchange between our trauma attracting each other as both a matter of common survival and interest, but also one between dolls of various kinds/media about dolls, rape, and BDSM as doll-like (sex dolls with a rapey flavor). So keep part one’s definitions from earlier handy!

(artist: Brad Art)

As a matter of combining ludology, Gothic poetics and BDSM, we’ll be talking about dolls a lot, which overlap with monsters. To become one is to reduce, configure or otherwise stress oneself as an object of play, which the Gothic does to emphasize monstrous qualities of power exchange and its abuse; i.e., as something to endorse or recover from. As such, monsters and dolls denote a lingering and reoccurring presence of unequal historical-material factors by which to camp the survival of rape; re: “Despite their poetic nature, performance and play are an absolutely potent means of expressing thus negotiating power through the Gothic mode (its castles, monsters and rape scenarios).”

Both are functionally the same in this respect, but monsters more broadly provide a poetic means of study and performance upon examination. Dolls, by comparison, stress an active, participatory element of play within a staged poetic lens; i.e., for dialectical-material purposes during oppositional praxis’ liminal expression as primarily hands-on (expect numerous doubles as we proceed, generally in theatrical but also ontological conflict; re: Amazonomachia, like Hippolyta vs Medusa, but also—to use a random-but-fun example—Mr. Bean camping the Nativity Story with t-rexes and dalecks, next page): to neatly put things into perspective[1] as a framed, object-lesson matter of performance and play camping power as normally monopolized/dogmatized by capital, but also arranged in some-such diorama (me, inside a room, inside a house with an abuser as reoccurring, trend-wise, from childhood to adulthood; i.e., as I went from one abuser to the next). Dolls—like games and play as a larger multimedia tradition—become a scripted-to-improvisational means of thinking that easily demonstrates itself to the audience.

(source: “Merry Christmas, Mr. Bean,” 1992)

Let’s summarize part one of “Meeting Jadis,” then segue into Alien and The Night House. As part one explained, dolls can reify pieces (exhibit 38a) or full bodies of undead (38b1), demonic (38b2) and/or animalistic things, as well as actual objects (38b3) or people acting like these to make a larger point. Our emphasis, here, will be personal trauma through power exchange inside stories of different kinds.

To that, undeath is a feeling I have felt since childhood—of having regular access to toys that could voice my concerns when played with, which Jadis later abused in a doll-like fashion (they had zero empathy and treated everything like dolls in order to completely own and control them); i.e., according to the ways we each played with toys, but also ourselves as doll-like vessels for undead sentiment coming into conflict when trying to heal from trauma as something to meet in good or bad faith: humans being like dolls insofar as they can be controlled, but also able to find agency under such power as arranged and performed; i.e., as a final product; e.g., my doing so here (through various collabs, below) constituting an inventive way of finding agency through my school of thought as something to cultivate and exhibit inside these books: as regularly denied to me both by actual universities[2] and people like Jadis who regularly deferred to the bourgeois arrangement of such places deeming my queerness (and its denuding) anathema:

(artist: Jim32)

In short, the ways in which Jadis and I engaged with the Gothic—as a doll-like means of returning to, and playing with past trauma—began to clash, making me feel less-than-human; i.e., because they refused to sanction my self-expression in doll-like monstrous language. Yet, as I played with things they couldn’t monopolize, doing so drove us apart due to our differing styles when engaging with said aesthetics. Whereas I wanted to use playing with Jadis and dolls to collectively heal and address trauma to improve both our lives, Jadis argued through doll-like approaches to prey on me; i.e., raping me as a predatory means of feeling in control from having survived their own abuse, hence using dolls as capital does: raping others by making them feel undead/doll-like through trauma as confronted, commodified and enacted using canonical demon BDSM (closer to Radcliffe’s mutilative demon lovers than anything I have since tried to represent). They began to belittle and antagonize my expertise, treating it simply as wrong by virtue of them as always being right.

Think of the canonical mechanism as an avatar—something to control, or control others with, in highly manipulative ways that serve profit; e.g., to shape like clay as one might a doll, pull its strings, hold in one’s hand, etc. Again, “whatever the media, rape is profit under Capitalism, which relies not just on predation, but community silence to continue itself in bad copies, falsehoods, and double standards.” This includes dolls under neoliberal schemes, which Jadis performed as a matter of argument; i.e., controlling me as the avatar feeling detached from myself, thus under their power when responding in ways they could provoke, thus predict through my undead elements: my trauma, but also my trauma responses (with undead dolls being arguably more immobile at a glance, only to animate in ways that, in a demonic sense, transform them by virtue of animating dead issue or materials: through reanimation as a kind of forbidden “spell” to cast, thus summon the mobility of undeath onto a dead object or the immobility of death onto a living subject [which translate to domestic abuses but also rape play that can be weaponized during domestic abuse]. Nothing is more “doll-like” than paralysis; i.e., as a Gothic commentary on manipulation through forces that have either effect, then can be played with to whatever degree and flavor the controller desires: to fly or freeze, fight or fawn).

Jadis’ predictions were likewise informed by common interests between us; i.e., media we both consumed as Gothic, hence concerned with trauma as doll-like. To that, my conceptualization of feeling undead vis-à-vis dolls and roleplay remains informed by stories such as Alien, but also like that movie in terms of the same dolls-and-dollhouse theatrics: as undead when dealing with Jadis after the fact; i.e., speaking to personal trauma as part of a larger historical-material equation felt across all parties and texts.

Alien is a good example of the doll and dollhouse per a neoliberal critique, which Jadis challenged ipso facto. In short, they did so through a neoliberal privatization of medieval poetics threatened by my illegitimate expertise (according to them); i.e., their playing the TERF (minority cop) through Gothic argument, instruction, and instrument to correct me as simply “wrong” in their eyes: their dogma vs my liberation using the same devices to play with, the same dolls.

To that, let’s quickly outline how with Alien before moving onto a more recent, domestic-tinged example that speaks nicely to my experiences with Jadis as feeling more and more undead, themselves: The Night House.

(exhibit 38b4a: When I was a little girl, I loved dolls but often broke them. Scott’s Alien showcased a fearsome dollhouse whose rapacious occupants couldn’t break, but felt broken in ways I oddly loved [especially Metroidvania as founded on such castles].

To that, the animated miniature is not always a zombie or demon so much as an animate-inanimate coming alive and behaving in ways it shouldn’t; i.e., a painting or a statue tied to the imaginary past as having historical elements to it that aren’t wholly imagined. The concept of restless cryptonymy is a classic Gothic staple, evoking Walpole’s animated portraits, but also the uncanny feelings of Scott’s Nostromo as a modern-day chronotope; i.e., the sinking sensation felt by the occupants as having inherited a dangerous mimicry regarding the home as perfidious: the Gothic castle, whose mise-en-abyme contains impostors who double and threaten rape unto the current residents to varying degrees.

To this, Ripley is doubled by the monstrous-feminine xenomorph as a furiously undead-demonic animal monster [the Medusa] that, like the gargoyle, springs terrifyingly to life; but also the effeminate [eunuchized] and deceptively strong Ash as someone who was designed as a lesser copy of the xenomorph the company ultimately desires. The fear for the heroine is not simply to die, but to be made as either simulacra is inside the imperiled dollhouse: a sexualized-on-its-surface/veil object, a non-human, ex-human or never-human suggested through the space as conflicted by virtue of such dolls walking around at all; i.e., not fully a medieval metaphor for their mind and self, but some presence of mind haunted by the objects that compose them as simultaneously making up other alien, trans, non-binary or intersex entities as surface-level and ontologically torn.)

(artist: Ashleigh Izienicki)

Whatever they appear as, monsters are poetic lenses that expose trauma as a matter of code to express what is voided (through abjection); i.e., something to fill out again within the usual theatrical cavities. Often, they manifest as art, but especially dolls as things to own and play with, but also command, punish, reward, what-have you. Like a child’s drawing of a ruined home, then, dolls denote rape as something ubiquitous, but partially hidden to play with inside the “home” as haunted with old trauma both real and imagined. This speaks to what happened with Jadis and I as something to revisit again; i.e., just as Scott did with when reviving Otranto two centuries after Walpole. Apart from the dolls, there’s also the dollhouse, hence a cartographic refrain to such devices; i.e., that Alien plays with in abject ways invading a seemingly domestic workspace as castled, but also stories like it that change the balance; e.g., The Night House as previously alluded to, working through altogether different distributions of familiar and foreign.

Even so, the same spatio-temporal relationship exhibits between players and dolls for which all such stories exemplify per the usual chronotopes’ occupants to wander around inside. The Gothic castle, then, serves as a kind of dollhouse unto itself—a playful means of aesthetically expressing the organic and circuitous relationship between all of these things. It does so in a relatable, easy-to-comprehend form; i.e., that children might communicate when talking about their own lived abuse: the undead home as alien, barbaric, and prison-like, but also demonic in doll-like forms that express/rarefy torture and unequal, harmful power exchange: Lovecraft’s “horror in clay” from “Call of Cthulhu.”

To that, the monster in The Night House is proceeded by a doll-like abstraction to the husband’s crimes hidden inside-outside himself as abjecting BDSM[3]. It isn’t overtly undead, then, but still has an undead function when played with: a ludo-Gothic, BDSM-style negotiation of the heroine’s personal trauma as made into things that are essentially dolls. These would interact with my own dolls in a meta sense—but also my abuser abusing me with dolls—that informed my scholarship about dolls as forever a work-in-progress vis-à-vis historical materialism; i.e., as a dialectical-material process, one predicated on rape as a matter of profit expressed through dolls for or against the state on different registers. I want to explore that for the rest of the Night House close-reading.

With any and all BDSM, there’s the fantasy and the reality. Sex workers work between them as half-real, which is where the Gothic comes in; re: the rememory of personal trauma through dolls during ludo-Gothic BDSM as undead. There will be demons and power abuse, of course, but our focus is still trauma when looking at The Night House. To that, the problem with any contract is you ultimately have to rely on the dominant holding themselves accountable when things aren’t materially equal or socially transparent. No contract is perfect. As Jadis shows us, people lie, exploiting their positions to police others to feel in control at someone else’s expense, forcing them to be the doll by exploiting their desire to play with the idea of rememory at all. The same goes for the characters in The Night House; i.e., as things to relate to and learn from when dealing with abusers seeking to dominate a given rape play by bullying its execution in search of total permanent control.

Of course, hindsight isn’t foresight, but it can change history as something we make ourselves when confronting trauma in socio-material ways. Trauma lives in the body but also around it—in the chronotope, the family space—as divided, disintegrating and regenerating through rememory and decay as part of the same imbricating loop. In turn, the Gothic is written in liminality and grey area, oscillating between the world of the living and the land of the dead, the big and the small, the genuine and the fake, good faith and bad, etc; i.e., the past and the present as one in the same, which The Night House demonstrates quietly but exceptionally well through its spatio-temporal elements: the castle as—like with Alien—remains told between the space of one doubled by the other as a dark twin.

In either case, the general operation exists in ontological uncertainty amid tension on the surface of its imagery but also its thresholds (whose troubling comparisons are what doubles, the Gothic and dolls are all about). For The Night House, its title should be a clue, in that respect; but said house isn’t simply the faraway secret house, the normal daily residence, or the lake between them; it’s all of them inside a monstrous time-space filled with different kinds of dolls—the torturous effigy (above) but also the fake wives, the husband as fake, and the wife stuck figuring all of that out: feeling undead, thus potentially fake herself.

All monsters are doubles, but dolls highlight that quality best, because they can adopt any modular element and still be a double with or without a given kind, mid-interaction, as a matter of continuous chaos: incessant entropy thriving in place of eventual resolution. The movie is full of these things, and despite its coherence in presenting them, you’re never quite sure what you’re dealing with (depression, serial killers, demons, or some combination); i.e., upsetting the perceived ordering of things as a confused, quantum kind of ground state (re: Aguirre).

Such a playful recounting of abuse takes on circuitous, mirror-like qualities; i.e., that make exploring the dream-like space not just confusing but hazardous as a matter of recursive motion—of concentric designs denoting plans-within-plans, of deceptions-within-deceptions, of anisotropic exchanges of power and information that upend a previous ordering/understanding of things. All holistically suggest the house being the toy as something to play with, but not perhaps for the reasons you think. It becomes a means of camouflage, too—of things hiding in plain sight that, when confronted, act from positions of continuous invisibility out from the mise-en- abyme as a portal that goes in both directions: an empty suit of armor that threatens, like the black knight or xenomorph coming out of the walls (an echo of guerrilla warfare), to attack!

 

Rape is generally invisible in society but also notably ubiquitous and commented on using Gothic poetics serving the usual kinds of double operation. Like Alien before it, The Night House delights in gradually showing the viewer what really is a very common but hushed-up experience: domestic abuse. To summarize, a woman named Beth loses her outwardly cheerful husband to a sudden and unexpected suicide (Owen, who shoots himself with a gun she didn’t know they had, the body found in a small boat listing offshore, on the small lake next to their house). She starts looking into his life and things get suitably weird. The film is very much a slow-burn, Beth (and by extension, the viewer) being made to feel like they’re slowly going crazy while confronting smaller pieces to a larger problem they hope to reconcile—first the doll, above, but then a husband who lives a double life, within a double house where he kills women doubling his wife (who he positions like the doll as a matter of instruction), and very well might have never been the man she knew because that guy was possessed by nihilism as a literal entity beyond the living world!

Except, the demon really isn’t the point; instead, the focus remains power as a matter of play through dolls, be they alive, dead, or in between.

What I mean by that is, anything seemingly alien in these stories (re: nihilistic sex demons passing themselves off as “Owen”) are generally abjected on account of repressed harmful socio-material factors (re: Lovecraft or Herbert’s queer scapegoating of capital’s usual instabilities). Per the ghost of the counterfeit, the elite use such doll-like vessels to gaslight the middle class with; i.e., bringing things to light by telling a wild story that abstracts them as a means of illusion; e.g., Plato’s allegory of the cave being shadow puppets, probably made with dolls (or humanoid-shapes of some kind or another) to highlight an untrustworthy nature to reality as normally advertised to us by state forces. Except, these elaborate strategies of misdirection cannot be monopolized by the state, meaning proletarian proponents can reclaim them to break through Capitalist Realism with instead of skirting its edges; i.e., challenging the usual bourgeois gaslighters telling us that everything is “fine,” when it clearly isn’t (re: dolls pointing to rape by virtue of themselves, much like a corpse does a murder)! Simply put, there’s a method to the madness of playing with dolls to get at rape without commodifying it as so many authors do: to become advocates for our rights that kill the darlings of yore by exposing as humbugs, one and all! Fuck ’em.

The point, here, isn’t whether the sex demon from Night House is “real” or not, but that such stories exist at all as a matter of abjection. Point in fact, they exist relative to power centers whose sole purpose is to lie to people and rape them through centuries-old strategies of control and abuse (which are required if profit is to occur). For the good of workers, then, such things should be investigated, but also played with through these investigations. This generally happens, to some degree, inside of themselves; i.e., as vehicles that, post-consumption, are then critiqued relative to the broad meta world they belong to. A doll is simply an object that can be used for different purposes, highlighting the things around it that shape the entity and its performance later being critiqued:

Returning to Beth and her little demon problem, the revelation—that her husband is a demon-possessed serial killer—is of course a very “Oh, shit!” moment when it happens. Partly this feels unsettling because it denotes an abusive quality to the home and those inside it, but also serves the audience with a “pinch me” moment weaponized against them; i.e., it generally means to confuse the viewer into thinking they’re nuts—that they’re seeing things that aren’t there (re: pareidolia through Hitchcock-style silhouettes, above, having a doll-like, framed uncanniness to the home as unheimlich). Because monopolies (of violence, terror and sex, etc) are impossible, such duping isn’t for strictly nefarious purposes, but rather showcase how such devices work on people to begin with; i.e., that people can be fooled, and by some of the oldest tricks in the book; e.g., Radcliffe’s pirates, pretending to be ghosts to rob the locals blind. This generally involves likeness of people, reducing to people-like shapes that manipulate the perception of the viewer in responding with hostility towards the sensation; i.e., of a mannequin that might be a person or vice versa.

To that, such theatrical occurrences yield commentaries on rape per an element of camouflage common to narcissists and their own theatre; i.e., as geared towards harming others with: masks and mirrors, dolls and dollhouses. Stories like The Night House, when thought about as part of the world to which they belong (“there is no outside of text”), beg to consider the way in which those work; i.e., when thrown together as part of a larger lie telling a forbidden truth: the elite are the pirates, but they’re generally felt through the predicaments of persons like Beth (a doll-esque likeness of the viewer) faced with abjections haunting the ghost of the counterfeit: the lie of Western sovereignty pushed onto some kind of unspeakable demon or zombie to abject all over again.

Narcissists, as we shall see, communicate through masks and mirrors to disorient and confuse their prey while looking at them: a mirror dance/doll’s game that plays out as the stoat hypnotizes a rabbit before biting its neck. Seeing isn’t believing insofar as you very quickly begin to doubt what you’re looking at as both concrete and insubstantial. By extension, the mirror hall/dollhouse is one that abused parties generally find themselves in, offering up empheral clues to how fucked they are; i.e., after it’s too late. To that, predator and prey alike use camouflage, but predators also build traps to fool and confuse their prey with, which the latter must try to escape during asymmetrical warfare (more on this per my trauma, in part two of this subchapter). The only way out is through the maze.

Per our usual medieval devices, though, the senses reliably start to confuse, boundaries elide, and disturbing information trespass in ways that absorb into the unwilling host as part of a larger echo that won’t shut up (“the love that dare not speak its name!”). It’s simply how the brain operates when housed under such conditions. In turn, the home becomes an occupation of survived abuse that tries to map itself as the mind does; i.e., manifesting as hysteria founded on real events that, no longer repressed, catch reality and cause it to fracture and sweep up on itself. Only then can they be navigated, doing so as a matter of transference all over again (the film limits this to one life, but per generational trauma/stolen generations actually travels across multiple places, peoples and cultures).

What follows in The Night House is a complicated mirror game, one whose various instances/registers have Beth wrestling as much with her shadowy self in a disembodied, physical way, but also during a kind of abyssal staring contest (above and below) as merged with her various surroundings. To be sure, she looks alone, but feels watched by someone/something else that reminds her of a past good lover she’s trying to find by following the memories of that lover any way she can. Her quest for Owen is something of a holy grail, then; it becomes confused in ways that reflect the usual qualities of abuse being dogmatic, Pavlovian, and game-like. These become a lingering influence, both during and after the fact: “See the world through my eyes.”

In turn, reality as something to perceive starts to become highly questionable and unsafe, under such circumstances, but also rapturous; i.e., becoming the doll, the plaything of an angry god, which is really capital singularizing the doll as something to abject its usual rapes onto—a scapegoat destroyer presented as Numinous, celestial, queer and alien (monstrous-feminine): like zombies, the sole function of dolls under capital is rape, domination, and genocide as a matter of profit; i.e., by preserving the nuclear family unit as in-crisis during Capitalism’s built-in instabilities—its monopolies, trifectas and qualities of capital (Cartesian, settler-colonial, heteronormative). The usual elite command is “freeze and obey when we let things run wild,” who then claw them back again as a matter of moving money through nature. On some level, this requires a submissive cop’s wife (a war bride), without which the state will not last.

It’s never stated what Owen does, though he may as well be a cop, a preacher or a celebrity of some kind (re: Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”). This predicament obviously isn’t exclusive to Beth; i.e., the Gothic-as-venue exhibits forbidden knowledge as something to exchange and play with in demonic forms that—per trauma as an undead thing—pass from one traumatized person to the next through likenesses (few things are as doll-like as the classic Gothic heroine): someone I know is an impostor coming from inside the community while pointing the finger outside (the mendacious hypocrisy of a so-called “foreign plot”). As such, the movie’s caged, inwards-folding positions of torment pointedly offer the usual gaslighting technique as projected onto a Gothic kind of shadow space and shadow person; i.e., one common to white women as sheltered from the usual zombies (the victims of state genocide) by their possessive husbands’ so-called “protection”: wool to pull over their eyes.

As a matter of games predicated on deception, these shadows stand in for reality perceived through the mind as raped; i.e., not once, but per the nature of emotional abuse, as taking place over a long period of time—indeed, even after the abuser is dead and buried! As such, the usual markers of abuse take on a historical quality in The Night House that suitably rises from the grave; e.g., the continuous markers of ascension and martyrdom (above) threatening a Numinous presence whose repeating positions of crucifixion are, themselves, staging harmful bondage as a matter of dogmatic, fearful instruction; i.e., looping inside a bind-torture-kill scenario trapping Beth, the widow, with the late husband as torn in two, caught between good lover and demon lover as likewise caught between two houses divided by the lake-as-Styx; re: conflict on surfaces and inside thresholds, per liminal expression as something to move through the architecture of.

You may have noticed how there’s certainly an element of rape apologia to the proceedings; i.e., “the devil made him do it” (sure). Once recovered as an artefact to view in hindsight, though, everything becomes phenomenologically out-of-joint, alien, trapped between echoes (upon echoes). It’s very Radcliffean, passing along (and for) heroines as classically white and straight. But there’s also a Borges flavor to things—encapsulating the mind of your average (white, middle-class) woman as trapped in the sorts of circular-ruin living spaces that intimate the impostor as already lurking in plain sight: on the glass of mirrors, but also—as Night House does—inside negative space (exhibit 38b4c, second image) and various social exchanges that, unto themselves, involve a fair amount of a) self-deception, and b) deception by one’s friends having kept up appearances for far too long (exhibit 38b4b).

All the same, there’s a tremendous amount of emotional urgency to Beth hugging the ghost. She’s so busy groping air that she doesn’t stop to consider what she’s holding onto: “Owen?” “I’m not Owen!”

The film clearly enjoys playing with C.S. Lewis’ idea of the ghost, itself made in response to Rudolph Otto’s Idea of the Holy (1917), his own arguments in The Problem of Pain (1940) about big feelings vis-à-vis big spirits:

In all developed religion we find three strands or elements, and in Christianity one more. The first of these is what Professor Otto calls the experience of the Numinous. Those who have not met this term may be introduced to it by the following device.

Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told “There is a ghost in the next room,” and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is “uncanny” rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Numinous.

Now suppose that you were told simply “There is a mighty spirit in the room,” and believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound. You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking—a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it—an emotion which might be expressed in Shakespeare’s words “Under it my genius is rebuked.” This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous (source).

Now imagine this basic roleplay scenario (which is effectively what it is) except you’re holding the ghost of your perceived, long-lost husband!

That is, you’re actually holding a doll of them that pushes you towards murder (the Hamlet problem) as something to investigate and confront. On some level, Beth denies the reality of what she’s dealing with by wanting to fabricate a replica that, when “held” invisibly in her arms, can still be used to manipulate her by the thing she’s rationalizing (during abuse, play is a matter of outcome—of results that speak to intent as something to infer): abusers so often pull away and continue to exert their influence (“hovering”). This includes after they are literally dead, the subject trying to play with the doll as taken from them by the abuser, but also an indicator of the abuser’s control over them: to have the person grasping at spirits in search of said dominator as continuing to gaslight them; i.e., by virtue of the doll/ghost’s ontological sense of unreality tied to real memories that start to disintegrate the more you hold on, hence deny the truth of things.

However silly this might sound, it’s not so hard to relate to if you’ve ever lost someone who had a profound impact on your life (a theme the movie is utterly obsessed with), or if you’ve ever been threatened with loss by an abusive agent.

Furthermore, I think such medieval notions of miracles in Christian dogma (the reanimation of a dead body that walks again, akin to a doll piloted by a mighty divine force) are—however empirically false—still denoting an experience that is felt with the human senses as easily mislead. The Gothic generally does this for fun, achieving Radcliffe’s infamously “exquisite tortures” as a jouissance unto itself—one known to her School of Terror opposite Matthew Lewis’ School of Horror as very much in competition relative to larger socio-material forces (namely the French Revolution as felt in Great Britain, itself a conservative nation losing its own monarchic influence):

Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them […] and where lies the great difference between horror and terror but in the uncertainty and obscurity, that accompany the first, respecting the dreaded evil? (source).

These are ideas “of their times,” then, which come suitably enough with opinions we don’t have time to fully unpack, here. But I will leave you with a taste of such things; i.e., to ruminate over regarding such competitions.

To that, Daniel Pietersen writes about the above quote in “Soul-Expanding Terror” (2019):

Ann Radcliffe wrote these words in her essay On The Supernatural In Poetry, published posthumously in 1826. She then goes on to clarify:

Obscurity leaves something for the imagination to exaggerate; confusion, by blurring one image into another, leaves only a chaos in which the mind can find nothing to be magnificent, nothing to nourish its fears or doubts, or to act upon in any way [ibid.].

For Radcliffe, this blurring of horror means that it can never teach or improve the recipient of that horror, only “freeze and nearly annihilate them.” Horror becomes for her a denial of and turning away from the sublime. Terror, on the other hand, is the effect of staring clearly into the glare of the sublime, of suffering through an experience that “expands” us and fundamentally changes how we live (source).

In other words, there was a dogmatic, basically religious element to Radcliffe (the Sublime constituting a poetic, secular grasp at so-called “religious experiences” popularized at the time) that stemmed less from a concrete understanding of Capitalism[4] and more through the popular aesthetic concepts she used to uphold the status quo in her intricately moody novels; re: kiss up, punch down, and get paid doing it (which Radcliffe did until her last breath)!

(artist: Don Hertzfeld)

And while it might seem like I’m beating a dead horse (or housewife) by examining this as intensely as I am, that’s literally the name of the game when it comes to domestic abuse. Abusers want you to feel off-balance so they can take advantage inside the usual, doll-like realms of play. Whatever the truth of their intentions, a victim of their behaviors can only proceed by examining them; i.e., inside the mind as caught between the body and space-time: under the abuser’s seemingly almighty control, but in truth only something of a forced monopoly that can be challenged through different socio-material appeals married to medieval forms (e.g., ghosts, above, as rapturous).

To that, Gothic poetics encapsulate this control as a kind of madness that can be played with; i.e., like dolls, to exert our will onto the same linguo-material devices having a socio-political function, with which we can pit against our attackers (the elite and their proponents) if only to stop them from killing us; i.e., exposing things in ways that don’t strictly feed into the usual moral panics, thus avoid a dogmatic function while still, neatly enough, speaking to the human condition for different representees.

The Night House illustrates that nicely with Beth, I think. So many heroines under neoliberalism are souless girl bosses; i.e., tokenize as manly and violent against workers and nature (re: the subjugated Hippolyta). The simple reality is that “the feminine” in Gothic fiction is classically presented as naked, frozen and delicate (though not always for good reasons). Virgin or whore, though, the exact resurrection of the monstrous-feminine boils down to preference, which isn’t the point I’m making. Instead, I want you to consider how a heroine who presents as more delicate can uniquely provide a gentler side to the same modular elements; i.e., which go towards voicing systemic issues generally left unsaid in American society in any form: one, depression (and stillness) is a defense mechanism[5]; and two, survival predicated on suicide ideation is often a discordant, often lateral and anguished call for help leveled at those who generally can’t see what’s going on (with, again, rape being to some degree invisible, even to the direct victims by virtue of denial or disassociation, intimidation, etc)!

 

(exhibit 38b4b: Faced with the demon lover on the little rowboat, the two sit across from on another on a makeshift Charon’s canoe. Most of Beth’s conversation is silent, expressed mutely with the face. It also shows us how a victim is generally alone adrift over the River Styx, insofar as the violence they survive will partially alienate them from their allies. As such, the other characters in The Night House are all somewhat complacent and/or complicit in the husband’s apocalyptic abuse; e.g., the local servant turned a blind eye, the cheery bestie grew distant, etc. In that ultimate moment of confrontation, they emerge in the nick of time to call out to Beth—to draw her away from the edge as she, for all intents and purposes, debates with ghosts: to be or not to be.

Suicide ideation becomes an argument that is very much by the victim with themselves, but also with their abuser threatening them with some kind of great devastation: “I’ll kill myself if you go” or “Kill yourself and stay with me,” and so on. Whatever the argument, people outside of its influence underestimate the power it has on someone who has been abused—how an abuser will home in on such vulnerabilities, using these devices to blunt-force manipulate a victim into “staying” with them; i.e., by having said victim fetishize themselves into a death trophy for the abuser to gloat over afterwards.

Even if the abuser is dead and gone, their likeness still haunts the survivor like a voice, a shape, a shadow they must continue to wrestle with. While friends very much remain vital in helping victims survive trauma after the fact, it remains to some degree a lonely path precisely because it exists inside the mind; i.e., in ways that external factors will trigger fresh episodes, and which those not coded for those kinds of reactions cannot see themselves save through the person they love as tragically under the abuser’s power as a ghost of itself. This power is never total, but it does linger long after the main events have come and gone.

The paradox of the demon is that it isn’t any really one thing. Nor are the dreams and waking moments wholly separate or singular for Beth, confronting personal trauma as something of a corpse dug back up. Instead, the sum blends together as a holistic means of expressing the totality of existence under duress: something that swallows survivors up, becoming a kind of god they kneel towards, seeking absolution. Such isolation is the mightiest force in the universe, especially on minds prone to crossing boundaries and imagining all manner of things before, during and after the passage. Rather, like Persephone—my namesake—there is always an element of us trapped in Hell, with the destroyer handing us the keys to our own destruction but also our salvation!

As we’ll see when looking at Max and Vecna from Stranger Things, in part two, such veins are an effective route to track and pass through time and time again, yielding argumentative likenesses that speak through psychomachia as a popular theatrical device across media; i.e., regarding the same kinds of pain and manipulation historically unfolding during demon BDSM as abused by harmful agents and reclaimed by survivors: “Kill yourself and stay with me, in Hell” as something to camp. Dualities aside, reclamation is taking that—like a knife or a gun—away from them, and by extension, ourselves.

The difference between the two stories—The Night House and Stranger Things—is the shape and flavor of the demon lover sold to the audience, but also the objective of the author[s]. Beth’s husband in Night House is far more ordinary looking than Vecna [the latter basically turned inside-out] but the torments they exact upon their victims have much the same unhealthy leverage: making someone into a doll, an object of control, of rape through bad play. The biggest variation lies in one’s bombastic nostalgia versus the other as largely quiet, nonverbal—told with the eyes versus the Duffer brothers’ penchant for neoliberal dogma, using ’80s-grade montages and dialog that turn Stranger Things into a much more dogmatic and Americanized attack: child indoctrination through Red-Scare moral panic aiming to uphold Capitalist Realism by abjecting Communism into the same kayfabe-grade shadow zone as Nazis. This isn’t to discount its value independent of that—indeed, Max’ struggle to escape Vecna is a potent metaphor that works well on a theatrical level [which I related to when escaping Jadis haunting me]—but the reality of its political origins should never be obscured when studying them.)

There’s something of a bizarre, very-human, accidental quality to such survival mechanisms—something past writers have touched upon; e.g., Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” (1928): “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents” (source). The Night House certainly does, albeit in ways that externalize the qualities of the mind as a relationship between the internal and external across persons but also generations told through dolls. Becoming part of the Gothic castle, Beth begins to see fragmented sides to herself and her husband scattered this way and that; i.e., positioned around the home as swimming in the pieces, of which become impossible doorways: something to step through and into a fearsome world commenting on its more visible elements!

By making them visible as a means of playful transformation, we relate to each other during survival as a dialog to join in on; i.e., a pedagogy of the oppressed (finding similarity amid difference) regarding the dialectic of the alien: as something to dance with, embracing Medusa to understand and heal from police abuse exploiting the usual dolls and aesthetics to serve profit with.

Please note, the following sequence from The Night House is quite pareidolic and tends to seamlessly flow into and out of itself. While admittedly in some visually medieval, artistically interesting and clever ways, it’s still hard to capture, here; i.e., to do such a phantasmagoria justice: as occurring onscreen merely by using collages in my usual approach. This being said, I will do my best! —Perse

 

(exhibit 38b4c: Visited by the ghost of the abuser come back around, Beth sees a likeness of herself in a fogged-up mirror that looks back in equal surprise; her “husband” emerges in the door of the reflection to break the other side of the mirror using the doubles’ head; the wife runs, but is pulled into the mirror and beaten in kind against it; she emerges on the other side, only to be forced to see her husband killing different women who look like her while the home bounces this information all around her.

What follows is a nightmare sequence that, in the usual Gothic style, feels trapped between a waking and sleeping state, but also of the home as occupied by a stranger in the body of a loved one who, all of a sudden, feels alien and dangerous. Among such a presence, the floor becomes like eggshells, Beth walking through walls and jigsaw-puzzle doors shaped like people:

The entire sequence might seem like pure nonsense at first glance. As someone who’s lived through such experiences, I think it’s a lovely likeness to disassociation and derealization as an “event horizon” of sorts; i.e., less an overt hallucination and more something akin to one happening inside a hostile environment that, generally through an abuser inside it, is trying to convince you that none of it is real, or that there must be some logical, benevolent motive to everything.

Certainly the idea of evil sex demons—insidiously coming into a normal sphere from beyond existence, then manipulating someone from behind such veils—might come across as profoundly and obviously stupid; but there’s a sturdy pit covered in such pulp: the existence of rape as unspeakable, felt through the usual symbols of the family home as imbued with a destroyer’s aura. Beth is facing a side of their own life as incredibly painful, but also unthinkable—investigating their husband’s sudden suicide [which is already bad enough] only to discover that he might be a murderer who is clearly shit nuts; i.e., everything about him as given a darker side upon the ensuing avalanche of self-doubt and investigation into someone you begin to realize you only ever saw one side of.

As the saying goes, “Nobody’s perfect.” The reality with any relationship is that most people have more sides than one. Jadis, for example, had many sides, and they used all of them to manipulate me for various reasons. In Night House‘s case, it’s not about the story being a perfect replica of existence—i.e., when our brains aren’t being bombarded by fight-or-fight triggers, or mislead by skilled puppeteers working these elements—but working as a Gothic metaphor that accents and realizes those effects in a doll-like space with a doll-like heroine and doll-like surroundings [e.g., effigies, oil paintings and suits of armor]. Like Otranto, then, things get up and move around, evoking the restless labyrinth’s usual cryptonymies and mobile, unstable bric-a-brac.

Simply put, “this is your brain on drugs” becomes “this is your brain being gaslit” insofar as perception becomes an unreliable-yet-also-trustworthy kind of entropy that betrays the destroyer as normally invisible; i.e., hoping you’ll view them as “otherworldly” [thus granting them more power over you] in ways that are commonly abjected to far-off, hellish spaces: sites of relegation normally reserved for the damned. It’s a case of when worlds collide, the colonial mindset a fragile one by virtue of it confronting distant abuses brought home, and home being revealed as a place for abuses that are normally seen as “distant.” In terms of raw survival, though, such devices don’t need to make perfect sense, because humans are not strictly rational.

To that, Jadis abusing me worked by virtue of their attacks having a way with words—not as purely logical, at all, but something they could weigh against me: “It’s all in your head.” By extension, gaslighting applies to the sorts of things normally abjected as “other” under capital; i.e., presented in progressively alien, fantastical forms: “This isn’t domestic abuse; it’s Commie-Nazi sex demons from outer space!” Capitalist Realism generally presents genocide, exploitation and all-around rape under capital as taboo and impossible, yet clearly manifests them as whorish, monstrous-feminine scapegoats that are very tangible and—per the double operation of cryptonymy—very much both what they appear as and not at the same time. It’s half-real, liminal, threatening to vanish like smoke yet clutching a battered housewife in its seemingly iron grip.

Except, anyone who thinks The Night House is strictly about a sex demon from outer space [anymore than Alien is] is not only missing the point, they’re buying into the usual state deceptions as a matter of abjection. To that, the state routinely abuses Gothic poetics [and dolls] through peoples’ brains; i.e., as engines with which to pour in fuel useful to state aims: the flow of power towards the elite by brainwashing its citizens with stupid-sounding dogma that, as sad as that is, works wonders. Made material, such monsters—however absurd or impossible they might appear at first glance—remain constantly informed by interpersonal trauma as reifying under dialectical-material circumstances. It’s a loop that echoes a given lie for or against the state using the same markers thereof.

In other words, illusions only “work” insofar as they appear to have power the audience believes in, one way or another [re: C.S. Lewis]. Faced with such a hall of mirrors, Beth is a stand-in for mental battles told in physical space that aren’t, either of them, wholly separate in relation to themselves or us, across space and time, but also different stories playing with the same doll-like things.

Beth, herself, doesn’t have that level of agency at her disposal—can only retreat into the reflection, tumbling down the stairs ass-over-tea-kettle to suddenly find herself facing the presumed “bad copy” as potentially the reality of things. They commence as abuse normally does—through words. As they talk, “Owen” literally holds her in its lap while she both talks to it out-of-body and awakens on the couch to find herself seemingly alone; i.e., in the same space that, only a moment before, felt occupied—a dream-like feeling where you feel the need to pinch yourself, but also want to run as a means of confirming you’re safe:

Except, when Beth promptly comes to her senses, the invisible entity is suddenly back in full force. It wants her to run so it can chase and catch her. When it does, it’s still invisible because the truth of it is painful to face. All the same, it literally bends her to its will using—for all intents and purposes—bad BDSM. Whether it’s “real” or not isn’t the point, here; she is isolated and made to see the world through its eyes: “This will hurt a little, but it’s something you’ll get used to.”

Speaking from experience, such liminalities are far more accurate when describing the lived situation of a battered woman than any neat, clean view of reality. It’s poetic as a means of expressing the very things that have become woefully common under Capitalism since Radcliffe’s day. Per the process of abjection, the West has become obsessed with “ancient,” hauntological devices manipulated to whisper about present abuses at home; i.e., the voodoo doll in the movie as a nod to the Louvre Doll: “A Roman 3rd-4th Cent CE ‘doll’ found in Egypt. It was bound and pierced with thirteen pins and was contained in a terracotta vase with a lead tablet bearing a binding love spell” [source: Reddit]. If that’s not a clue to the dubious nature of Beth and Owen’s relationship before his death, I’ll eat my hat!

In other words, rape is a consequence of capital, and one that The Night House explores having come from a time and place in which Marx has become relegated to the underworld, but which his spectres still continue to haunt such fictions and their seemingly impossible events. Again, it’s not a testimony to literal ghosts, but a dialectical-material undercurrent speaking to rape through the metaphor of undead things we can keep playing with to say what the elite will keep trying to repress in service to profit [thus rape].

We’ll explore demons more in that particular module, but all the same, the above qualities manifest superbly in The Night House in the usual Gothic fashion; i.e., the castle as first denoted by its mirror-like appearance to the heroine’s ostensibly perfect past, then yielding disturbing imperfections upon discovery, exploration and reflection as hyphenating inside itself and the double home; i.e., Venus twins; e.g., the house, but also Beth, the heroine, as doubled through doll-ish likenesses of herself for whom the husband is killing to appease a monstrous deceiver from his wife’s suicidal past: himself as piloted by something alien/unthinkable as much to him as his wife, making him do bad things to women who look like her as the victim of all his lies, after he dies.

To be sure, the argument can be made that the thing causing all of this is a cosmic space demon, but that’s simply abjection in action. The actionable, socio-material reality [using Occam’s Razor] is the entity-in-question arguably symbolizes something that isn’t from outer space at all; i.e., rape, murder and exploitation as part of a larger structure such that a husband and wife belong to: something that capital makes ubiquitous to camouflage itself with, because rape is synonymous with profit. To that, the husband’s demon doubles the man’s darker urges. Presenting as a weak defense to the man, himself, the madness of the argument is felt through his wacky floorplans to a secret house filled with “dolls”:

[Our heroine, poring over tombs of forgotten lore, Poe-style. Keeping with the personal trauma theme, the death of someone else leaves behind reminders of them we can pore over, afterwards. For example, after Jadis’ father died, I was the one who went over his personal belongings: thirty years’ worth of old bank statements, bills, and other documents, interspersed with various odds and ends that couldn’t be organized as easily. It can feel incredibly odd looking at the belongings of someone who has died that you actually knew, because each will serve as a reminder that—while they once lived—they now have since died.] 

Keeping with the Gothic chronotope, it’s not about the truth being “over there,” but in between here and there as oscillating through the heroine as the seismograph needle, mid-phantasmagoria. Beth finds her husband’s plans, post mortem, and begins to explore them, going in circles between her safe space as haunted—by the idea of what she thought was her husband, but also the demons he was dealing with in secret as taking over the likeness that still lives in her head. By extension, the cryptonymy process’ Gothic castles and dolls provide ceaselessly esoteric but palpable commentaries on the elusive nature of “truth” as left-behind and played-with; i.e., using the only thing remaining as time goes on: the narrative of the crypt. Everything bounces back and forth, the experience becoming—like a disorienting hall of mirrors—a paradoxical means to seek the truth through experience as distorted, echoed, and repeated through copies of copies. However obfuscated, this happens inside of itself, like a Russian doll.

The idea really isn’t any different than Metroidvania and astronoetic variants ranging from At the Mountains of Madness to Alien. We’ll put a pin in that for now. But the overlap made me want to mention it here, when talking about dolls, rememory, and the undead.)

This concludes the close-reading. It’s a lot to unpack, and seemingly worlds apart insofar as Alien concerns the far reaches of outer space (a “faraway” metaphor for settler colonialism) and The Night House is seemingly rooted firmly on solid ground (a localization of settler colonialism haunted by its ghosts from “afar”). And yet, either becomes something to revisit; i.e., as a doll-like means of seeing victims become unanchored from terra firma that can be performed in different ways; re: feeling undead as a communion with trauma through play. Per the ghost of the counterfeit and process of abjection, both speak to the same kinds of disempowerment as felt by someone born into the colonizer group—me, in this case—who is then called back by the colonized dead through the myopia of Capitalist Realism; i.e., as bonding to or attacking them through notions of what “undead” even feels like through both stories.

I’m not a specialist of single monster types, but rather specialize in holistic interactions between texts, across space and time, on and offstage. So, naturally I knew how the monster from Alien was a kind of “zombie doll” (no matter what Ash [the company’s “killer doll”] says, exhibit 51b): undeniably undead, “straddling the fence” from an ontological standpoint, but also chimeric (composite) and modular as threatening to make the heroine a doll once more (with Ripley emerging from doll-like sleep to dance around inside the Gothic castle). The same goes for poor Beth and her demons; i.e., to confront in a castle-like dollhouse that’s visually closer to home.

In this regard, any monster’s entirety is often identified by the most recognizable pieces—not just the face, but the eroticized components associated with sexual trauma: monstrous toys with expressly libidinous functions (exhibit 38a). Jadis and their toys certainly worked like this, but also their leathers, their blade-like heels and whips; they were intensely erotic, as were the kinds of media they and I both consumed at cross purposes.

However, as a matter of feeling undead, I also started to fear these things because Jadis used them to attack me for trying to heal from my own abuse by using them as medicinal dolls; i.e., by thinking about such things in ways that didn’t just default to predation by virtue of flowing power towards Jadis as the exclusive victim[6] preying on me. It seemed wrong but no matter how hard I tried, I could not stop it—that feeling that I was the doll, but also that Jadis was feeding on me as a giver of state abuse through doll-ish aesthetics. This includes The Night House as something we both watched together after having moved into our new home, back in 2021.

All of these things we’ve discussed about dolls started to feel toxic to me, at that point; i.e., undead by virtue of the abuse Jadis was performing through them bearing some likenesses to the events onscreen. It wasn’t really something I suddenly realized, but the lifting of my denial—of repeatedly trying to explain to myself that Jadis was redeemable—felt very sudden when it sunk in: Jadis treated me like a doll they could rape without irony because that’s precisely the kind of person they were (also, they had some pretty deep-seated beliefs in futurism, transhumanism and neoliberalism per men like Ray Kurzweil as leading humanity towards a “better” posthuman existence through Capitalism; i.e., like our first conversation [exhibit 37c1a] reenacted in ways which they wanted through stories they liked; e.g., Ghost in the Shell, below, as haunted by the Cartesian slavery of nature-as-robata, meaning “slaves” dressed up in futurist cyberpunk language: a canceled future)!

A narcissist exists by virtue of function, and here there was no “ghost in the shell” that would help it all “make sense”; i.e., in a way that would fit the kinds of arguments they were having me make for them against myself[7]. Inside and outside the bedroom, I was policing myself through the kind of dolls Jadis romanticized[8]: the cyborg memento mori.

In short, I wasn’t a stupid person, but Jadis had weaponized my expertise and trauma against me; i.e., a Gothic scholar and monster lover they turned against herself (me) to feed Jadis’ own bad habits: as a matter of faith, acting and play combined through BDSM as a shared activity between us that was often at cross purposes—on the same page with the same words, but functionally at odds. “We’re living in Gothic times,” Angela Carter famously put it, but failed to highlight the kinds of decaying feminism that sprung from her work; i.e., decaying to serve profit, which Jadis certainly did.

For instance, despite Jadis’ enjoyment when playing with dolls (often through science fiction stories, above, having cyborgs survive rape while inside indestructible bodies [since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein] that suffer compounding levels of emotional abuse), their escapism was built on harming me through doll-like conversation: as their enemy to always best through arguments about and with dolls; i.e., between a weird canonical nerd targeting me as a threat to the status quo, thus to Jadis as the elite’s de facto cop.

Yes, Jadis liked horror and videogames—could straight up fuck like a sex demon—but the novelty completely wore off (similar to Zeuhl[9] ignoring me fucking them while they played videogames) when they started harming me through shared media they colonized for the state (ever dutiful to them when raping me, as cops generally do); i.e., which we consumed as reflecting Jadis’ abuse inside the onscreen thematic material: police violence towards sex, terror and force, but also morphological expression as—you guessed it—doll-like. It happened with stories like Alien and The Night House as showing the abuser Jadis had projected onto me, just as those films projected rape onto the xenomorph or the entity inside Beth’s husband.

The moment I realized The Night House was aping my own personal trauma by turning me into Jadis’ obedient sex doll, I realized that it was time to go; the spell broke enough for me to challenge it. I stopped trying to rationalize Jadis’ abuse (and all the excuses they made to abuse me through bad games disguises as common interests) and set about reclaiming my own power from their monopoly on playing with dolls (which included me as something they sought to own); i.e., an understanding of a doll’s various monstrous functions, the remainder of which I’ll go over now before we get to “Leaving Jadis.” As we do, we’ll stick to the undead elements, including those tied to an abusive home as doubled to give voice to repressed things.

Before we do, there’s a few points to bear in mind (three paragraphs): One, instead of dropping these devices by virtue of Jadis abusing them, I used them to my advantage by camping Jadis’ rape of me. Eventually, I called this subversion “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” but there and then, it was simply being hammered out, mid-escape. In doing so, I followed in the footsteps of older queer authors playing with rape as the Gothic does; i.e., a doubling of the home to speak to its undead qualities being centuries old, as a matter of tradition (re: Matthew Lewis camping canon to express queer pogroms executed by state forces[10]). Since Otranto, the animated miniature survives less in isolation and more inside a liminal gallery of portraits the likes of which I’ve touched upon here.

As such, the xenomorph from Alien and torture statue from The Night House are zombie-like in that both dolls embody the endless cache of monster-to-monster-fuckers whose subversive liminality not only codifies trauma, but whose canonical or iconoclastic functions trigger depending on how or why they’re made or used and by whom (exhibit 38b1)—in short how the genesis and tutelage of a given monster doll (or its various sexualized parts) convey the treatment of sex workers through ritualized psychosexual behaviors. Because Capitalism recycles historical-material trauma as a pacifying warning sign, these trademark, undead pieces codify stigmatized abuse as something to revisit and play with for different outcomes.

Keeping with that, Jadis’ tutelage was directed at me in order to present them as in control (re: cops and victims stemming from state abuse), albeit in ways we hadn’t negotiated. Over time, this only led me to view their sex toys as recognizable implements of iconic abuse: the skull or devil’s horns as symbols that yoked me and brought me to heel, but really any cosmetic element you could readily list. In our case, Jadis’ ultimatums were barks that threatened to bite, using their hold on the material side of things to do what their mother before them also did: control others through money. But this generally manifested in a more colorful kind of “pastel goth”; i.e., friendly-looking famous monster parts, minus their critical bite (which, from a theoretical standpoint, conceals the abuse taking place by defanging its outermost markers).

This raises an interesting point: dolls aren’t always creepy or abject in their appearance (even if their function is). To that, let’s conclude “Meeting Jadis” by interrogating the paradoxical cuteness of monstrous dolls; i.e., how they can be used to help or hinder workers depending on who’s using them and how.

Unlike me, Jadis tokenized as monstrous-feminine under capital generally do: something to pour into a profitable mold made to exploit others with. Yet, liberation occupies the same spaces when engaged with critically. In short, we each played with the same toys, but did so very differently in relation to each other. I tried to avoid harm; Jadis sought to dominate and control me because it was the only way they felt safe. They saw adhering to the paradigm as flowing power towards the state, worshipping the likes of Joe Biden and Hilary Clinton (and getting quite angry when I proposed legislation that would make executives like them far less central; e.g., constitutional amendments, not vetoes or SCOTUS rulings).

It’s worth nothing that praxial catharsis requires a finding of escape through psychosexual arguments adjacent to unironic harm; i.e., that sit within frank exploitation as something to subvert using the same erotic nudism as a yummy artistic statement overlapping with rape/disempowerment fantasies. Camping these baneful elements helps the sex object regain her agency mid-penetration and vaudeville, but it remains—as always—a tightrope, a vice (so to speak): to give and receive within boundaries that threaten to exploit you/fly out of control!

(artist: Ottomarr)

Jadis loved these kinds of toys because said toys concealed Jadis’ own naked, abusive nature as literally naked at times, thus paradoxically honest (re: the liar’s paradox) through exposure as such; it made Jadis seem cool and delicious, like designer candy but also frank in their open hostility as somehow absolving them of whatever harm it caused. Whether straight-up knife-like or bubblegum, once conveyed through bourgeois teaching methods tied to a coercive Gothic mode, bourgeois poiesis can colonize future examples like a virus. The end result is “bad play” as a form of reactively abusive wish fulfillment (which we’ll explore more of in Volume Three, Chapter Two): Jadis didn’t want to heal from their own trauma at all; they wanted someone to control, often by lying to them through bad instruction: “This is normal, so embrace it.” For abusers, such doll-like instruction is less something to fairly reason with and more something to argue through force of different kinds, which—as usual—can be interrogated by combining dolls with a given, discotheque venue: “How does it feel /To treat me like you do?” (New Order’s “Blue Monday,” 1983).

The paradox of the zombie is they are generally bound and gagged by a human oppressor treating them like the monstrous-feminine whore; e.g., Romero’s Day of the Dead, with its underground military bunker full of zombie prisoners watched by living soldiers for… reasons. But the Cartesian, mad-scientist torture of the human body as “not alive” (thus free to incarcerate, rape and mutilate) carries over from Romero’s zombie tale (and famously messy revenge) into necro-erotic stories like Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) showcasing the virgin transformed into the whore; i.e., as generally in between the two—a soft, fleshy image of the cliché pale female/feminine body (the damsel-in-distress) wrapped up in bondage gear by men: the cute slut, the sex slave.

Thanks to Capitalism’s historical-material forces at work, the quest for dignity in death—but also agency and negotiation during ritualized power exchange as “deathly”—is forever in flux. We become weak and strong in opposition to fascist articulations of such BDSM refrains lying to us about how things should go; i.e., as Jadis did to me and which I had to reclaim: decaying and regenerating power as something to flow towards workers by humanizing them as “enslaved.” The quotes only appear depending on the ludo-Gothic context of the BDSM theatre and its performers: human dolls showing agency amid exploitation while still, for all purposes, being doll-like as a matter of rape play. The destroyer aesthetic—of power and death during “rape” as a theatrical proposition—becomes something to wear as a fetish that reclaims the death doll from the usual Pygmalions (token elements) commercializing abjection.

Even so, fascist and proletarian zombies share the same surfaces inside the same thresholds. As something to interrogate, then resist mid-enjoyment or endorse, the coercive function of the zombie in overt BDSM/porn is no different than non-erotic zombie stories (though the two generally overlap and have since Matthew Lewis). In Gothic-Communist terms, I would argue that playing with boundaries and symbols of control is entirely the point—especially since no matter how concretely “total” a government seems, they do not have total power, only illusions that cheat the appearance of total power.

As Andrei Plesu notes in “Intellectual Life Under Dictatorship” (1995): “Evil is imperfect, which means it always leaves a ‘space for play,’ a chance for maneuvering, to those under its influence” (source). While I can’t help but feel that Plesu conflates “evil” with Communism (apologizing for Capitalism and American exceptionalism, in the process), I think his basic point still stands: if the state was all-powerful, iconoclastic art and xenophilia would not exist. Keeping with that, if American or American-adjacent workers are to subvert the systemic abuses of an American dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, it starts with language (of which dolls are) as something to play with in sexualized ways. This time let’s do Communism right, but also BDSM as a facet of that through doll-like executions of Gothic poetics; i.e., performing rememory as a pedagogy of the oppressed to heal from police abuse, the latter furthering Capitalism Realism by making all of us feel undead: in ways useful to the state.

As a Gothic Communist, I see liberation in as playing through sexualized language in its historical-material forms: in relation to one’s own trauma as informed by the larger world through play as already colonized by police agents. This includes BDSM, as a practice, being previously loaded with tremendous amounts of sex-coercive canon; i.e., ludo-Gothic BDSM as reclaiming these devices in a sex-positive way by virtue of rewriting the rules in a half-real sense.

For example, Jadis knew the rules of pussy exchange as a matter of theatre (“Come play with this pussy!” they’d beckon when flashing me, but also explaining the effect as a means of play between them and their BDSM buddies, but also people at large they could fuck with if they chose to). Even so, they decided to weaponize said exchanges for the state by telling me how to play in ways that benefitted them as an extension of the state they served by raping me; i.e., in a way that moved power towards the state (on an individual level, between them and their partners: telling me how to play with such things, thus think about the world and my place in it as an undead person).

We must also know the rules, then, but use them to move power towards workers on all registers. That’s what good play is; i.e., reducing the risk/chance of abuse (rape and other kinds of social-sexual harm) regarding dolls and the transformation of our zombie selves with them, which in turn manifest through the rememory of personal trauma as an interpersonal and transgenerational, multimedia exchange! It’s still a game of odds, but one we can change by challenging state monopolies, trifectas and proponents who abuse Gothic poetics through dolls and BDSM against us.

We’ll explore tokenism, Man Box and bad play much more in Volume Three. For now, just remember that canon’s pacifying legacy through cute abjection can be subversively reclaimed by monster sex toys that allow workers to decolonize the abject, forbidden, and taboo, thus help workers individually and collectively heal from profit (and rape) as a state operation; i.e., something to police and enforce. Subverting these atrocities requires irony to work, which we shall now unpack as the last component of dolls and ludo-Gothic BDSM before we move onto escaping Jadis, in “The Rememory of Personal Trauma,” part two.

“Game” users, for instance, can decolonize the knife dick by making something that looks intimidating but remains physically safe to use—not just a disarming play on the “knife dick’s” visually painful-looking threat of rape, but a “two-hander” at that (or zweihänder if you want to get anachronistic). Such an alien, “legendary” horse cock becomes rather clever—shaming insecure, sexist white men with chattel “animals” the users choose to fuck (a bestial pun of John Webster’s “strong-thighed bargeman,” where the incestuous and lycanthropic Ferdinand from The Duchess of Malfi shames his sister for sleeping with the common servants instead of him).

In sex-positive scenarios, taboo sex—even when taken to hyperbolic extremes like consent-not-consent or even just super-rough sex (remember your safe words)—is completely harmless provided it doesn’t endorse actual harm, bestiality and rape, or societal/emotional damage by promoting racist tropes and other harmful stereotypes. To that, rape fantasies also extend to people of color reclaiming terms of abuse in sex-positive exploitation rituals; these still require a willing and comfortable partner, though, which must be negotiated ahead of time and upfront, without ultimatums.

That’s proletarian praxis, which again, is another topic for Volume Three. For now, we’re primarily examining the socio-material history this praxis leaps from as conducive to irony as a synthetic device. To this, iconoclasm brings us closer to nature without abusing workers or animals (animals can’t consent, exhibit 38c) while also providing sex-positive lessons that future generations can improve upon, through their own fantasies. This is important, as older generations of workers have had to abjure canonical praxis by taking “the plunge”—into the gulf of one’s own trauma or into one’s actual, physical “gulf” with an object associated with war and violence in whatever ways it manifests in our own lives. Escaping fear and dogma as a historical-material evocation of abuse means playing therapeutically with its symbols and toys; e.g., pegging and feminization as doll-like (next page).

I’ve tried this, before, and am generally fine with it as long as I trust and love the person doing it; i.e., can seek it out should I choose as a psychosexual means of poetic expression that serves to extend and deliver interpersonal artistic statements that often have a social, asexual element as well as an overtly sexual one: being the exhibit, the model, the whore!

(exhibit 38c1a: Artist: Alice Redfox. As a forbidden site of sexual pleasure, the AMAB asshole, like Satan, can go by many different names: asshole, of course, but also “bussy” and “boy pussy” or “brown eye” depending on one’s orientation/comfort levels with particular gendered forms of language. Also, humor is not uncommon, albeit idiosyncratic; e.g., “fart locker,” “love zone” or “the devil’s doorbell,” etc. The irony with religious-sounding examples is they are often used by cis-het Christians exploiting God’s various “loopholes”; e.g., “God’s Loophole” [2010] by Garfunkel and Oates’ pleading “Fuck me in the ass if you love Jesus!” to subvert the usual means of saving marriages; i.e., a mythology reserved for the status quo in canonical dialogs that simultaneously demonize/chase queer people. Reclaiming our assholes, then, becomes paramount, which involves the whore as a theatrical experience that often verges on sex object. Exploitation and liberation occur using these same devices.)

While performative technique obviously matters, so does a proper mental state and emotional connection with parts of ourselves normally used to shame, degrade and dominate us. Regarding anal, for instance, you have to be somewhat comfortable with, and accepting of, abject confrontations during the event itself; e.g., shit, farting and various other physical realities that seldom-but-sometimes come up when fucking someone in the ass; i.e., as a site of abject bodily functions we have to reclaim by facing what it is as a matter of humane connection. This isn’t just “for the bottom,” mind you. The person topping is still involved in the same equation; i.e., as something to invert, from time to time. There’s often a subversive language gap when this happens, for which the act of play unto itself picks up the linguistic slack.

For example, when getting pegged, the only language I had to initially describe the event as an AMAB person was “taking a shit”; however, the moment Cuwu hit my “sweet spot,” I suddenly had no language to describe how that felt! Being able to discuss this openly and without shame is important, meaning we need to be able recognize abuse beyond a given example.

Apart from Jadis, who was obviously abusive, Zeuhl also shamed me through similar gaslighting measures that felt less openly antagonistic in a way I could recognize. At the ends of things, they blamed me for “not knowing who they were” but also said they weren’t the same person I knew at MMU (which may or may not have been true—hard to say with them). They went from being that person who could joke about shocking their health class in college when giving a surprise seminar about pegging to someone who balked at any discussions about sex whatsoever. Simply put, their newfound piety (and stick up their ass) became an effective and brutal, albeit differently predatory means of controlling me through the fear of disappointing them. Even so, Zeuhl’s treatment of me was just as coercive, infantilizing and unhealthy as Jadis’ was. To use a phrase Zeuhl themselves liked to use, “It was just different.”

Such antics are a recipe for disaster in any long-term friendship; i.e., they’re unstable and mean that sooner or later, something’s gotta give (when that is depends as much on the victim as the abuser). Even so, the larger interactive framework includes anything within the purview of such an exchange, which iconoclastic art can subvert by showing the reader healthy versions thereof; e.g., pegging during a thruple where the man isn’t the dom/Destroyer persona or otherwise “in charge,” but submissive to a pair of Sapphics or other monstrous-feminine subtypes; i.e., bottoming from the top/topping from the bottom (two imbalances I’ve discovered I very much prefer during ludo-Gothic BDSM; re: Harmony and Cuwu).

Let’s quickly look at some examples of that sort of ironic application (often, as a matter of subverting canon’s lack of irony in cartoons—already abstract—as having a playful, doll-like element to them, mid-consumption), then segue into my escaping of Jadis’ infernal toy chest:

(exhibit 38c1b: Artist: Boner Bob [amazing]. Heteronormativity frames anything beyond PIV sex as alien, thus worthy of attack. Meanwhile, the idea of the hero’s reward after emerging from the Abyss during the monomyth is both conversion therapy and compelled love that promises them PIV sex after killing the monstrous-feminine [e.g., Jung’s female chaos dragon] as part of a normalized cycle of queer, thus Gothic-Communist repression.

In truth, the descriptive sexuality and cultural appreciation of gender-non-conforming relationships presents the group as a negotiated affair that isn’t divorced from sexual desire as doll-like; it merely conducts it ironically in relation to the status quo’s harmful standards. In other words, the monomyth—as we have discussed a fair bit already—is a highly prescriptive and harmful device and needs to be challenged; i.e., by going into the abyss of gender-non-conforming lovemaking and modes of relation that allow for all parties to exist through reclaimed implements of shame, hatred and domination; e.g., Scott Pilgrim [above] as “made queer” through camp: in ways that highlight its queer potential, which also applies to Steven Universe [next page] as more overtly doll-like, thanks to a steady reliance on the golem myth.

Beyond children’s stories or cartoons, though, the same basic idea applies to more overtly “goth” poetics; e.g., like Rob Halford’s “Isle of Domination” or some similar genderqueer zone; i.e., occupied not by “the Ripper” as a queer-coded gay man in xenophobic canon[11] but a sex-positive example of the gay party animal/favor as a twink-style sex doll: the usual object of total annihilation that isn’t taken literally as a matter of psychosexual performance. Such irony reclaims the harmful imagery of the death fetish and its associate, doll-like tortures and sodomy—doing so for the better of society at large by progressing away from their historically unironic usage. Often, this sits on the cusp of actual exploitation, the harm it presents as always adjacent to a given performance as made to heal from feelings of inadequacy that seek out domination as a matter of interpersonal bonding through BDSM:

[artist: Doxy Doo. Their 2015 “Gem Dom” comic of Steven Universe elides the “futanari” hentai genre (the feminine body with a penis) within the broader Amazonomachia of the militarized BDSM scenario. The liminality of the scene evokes the “prison sex” culture of dominance and Spartan-esque culture of war [which has a pedophilic history to it] as overshadowing a means of doll-like catharsis: the golem. Its legitimacy of violence, terror and sexuality is of the state versus workers seeking sex-positive subversions of the former operating through various BDSM/theatrical tropes: the phallic woman (of color, in this case; i.e., the Medusa) and the non-white goblin taming our white “shrew” (note the long nose) through stereotypical discipline-and-punish exercises: overpowering through brawn, verbal commands, degradation, hyperbolic/painful sex and/or double-penetration, bukkake, collars and bondage, open mouths eagerly and obediently awaiting their reward.

Within a military culture and centrist framework, the idea isn’t far removed from its historical counterpart as unironically abusive, being a forbidden sexual outlet/guilty pleasure whose predatory interplay between superior officers and subordinates would have been a historical reality (and one whose inversion within tokenized, girl boss bureaucracies would emulate their male counterparts under Capitalism).]

Catharsis, post-rape, always walks a borderline [the victim is always afraid of future abuse, thus relies on calculated risk to release tension by emulating rape up to a point]. There’s clearly room to perform this irony further than the centrist, post-fascist overtures in Steven Universe. But doing so requires actively using ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., to make an earnest interrogation of the dialectical-material role—the context—of everyone beyond mere wish fulfillment/the novelty of golems ambiguously bullying one another for the Maze Gaze [which under centrist circles extends to tokenized queer people “acting like men”]. The danger of the sadist is always the advertised lack of compunction making them a frankly good dom, but also someone who can just as easily take advantage in ways that reduce the individual they control to putty in their hands.

[artist: Cuwu] 

For example, a hard masochist friend and their equally hard sadist husband, who I’ll call Guildenstern and Rosencrantz, reduced Cuwu to a little brainless submissive, chasing raw hedonism through the equally raw suggestibility of “sub-drop-in-action.” I can’t say that it tore our friendship apart by itself—and I want to recognize that Cuwu was perfectly capable of making bad decisions without their help—but all the same, it’s hard not to feel like the people involved exploited Cuwu’s mental illness for their own ends, then dressed it up as them “spreading their wings.” Bad play is bad play.

This distinction includes when play negatively effects the people not directly involved. In this case, I was the voyeur G&R were feeding images to—of them passing Cuwu around and fucking them to their hungry heart’s desire: the doll-like party favor literally at Beltane [Guildenstern was a priestess]. I would’ve been fine with it if I wasn’t expected to care for them afterwards; i.e., when Cuwu hit rock bottom and came crawling back to me to ask for the things they had specifically said they wouldn’t do when we originally negotiated our boundaries. The pattern isn’t any different than Zeuhl or Jadis, then, insofar as the issues generally came when a boundary was violated and the violator [dom or sub] refused to acknowledge wrongdoing and renegotiate afterwards. This always led to a hard boundary being drawn by me, which resulted in an extinction burst by the abuser party.

People sometimes forget that trust is an ongoing negotiation, one where “swooning” is fine for a moment, but shouldn’t be stretched throughout the entirety of the arrangement. To this, I seriously contend that the functional 24/7 master-slave contract ultimately needs the checks-and-balances of a third party or nominal treatment [“in name only”] because otherwise it’s too unequal and too constant a power imbalance to employ short- or long-term. With Cuwu, it spun out of control; but also, as we shall see with Jadis in just a moment, people can lie to antagonize, or—just as likely—can get greedy or complacent in ways that lead to the escalating abuse of control by one party against the other.

Clearly the poetics [and politics] of dolls are imperfect and sit in opposition to state forces and their praxis, often leading to compromise. Steven Universe is a sadly apt example, its finale populated with fascist winged monkeys that turn heel after the leader is dead [infantilizing workers by implying they can never think for themselves, which centrists will abuse]. Yet, the show has echoes of wasted promise.

For instance, there’s more realism in the messiness of Rose and Pearl than the entire season finale; “Rebecca Sugars,” according to Bay, “shouldn’t discuss healing from trauma and fascism in the same sentence because they lack the nuance for it,” default to might makes right. All the same, they admit Sugar’s queer characters are fabulous; i.e., queer golems [commonly inanimate bodies of clay or rock with a spell or incantation inserted into the forehead—with Sugar’s using gemstones as a classic site of holistic medicine/alchemy]. The idea of reanimation—of the egregore, tulpa or Yokai—as contained within a shell or statue is very common with giving voice to ghosts of the past that comment on the systemic atrocities of the present: endorsements of these [through fascists/centrist ghosts] and resistance to them and state power [through Gothic-Communist ghosts].

Such compromises engender old stereotypes tied to capital as heteronormative. For instance, 2019’s Hazbin Hotel quasi-reclaims the pejorative “drunk/killer fag” stereotype with Angel Dust [above] to further the negative aspects of said stereotype; i.e., the homeless drug addict/spider lady of the night who punches up but also lashes out at and outright uses everyone in sight, on par with Tim Curry’s Doctor Frankenfurter from Rocky Horror: someone to relegate to the graveyard, thus eventually bury there [as is tradition].

Like older forms of queer exploitation, Hazbin emulates bad twink caricature made by an actual queer person [the show’s creator, Vivian Medrano, is bisexual] then dressed up in laissez-faire loudmouth behavior that, again, treats hell as “struck” in a perpetually reprobate state of existence doomed to fail. While the sentiment is valid, it’s also prescriptive and tied to capital—literally. The unequal nature of the show’s princess proliferates unironically to help those who, seemingly by their own volition, “cannot be saved”; they’re creatures of the night/forever-criminals pathologically tied to vice. It’s dogma pushed about by a nepo baby [which deprives Hell of any critical power of the Miltonian sort].

In Angel Dust’s case, his list of hobbies and motivations on the Wikipedia read as follows:

• Having sex.
• Doing to drugs.
• Flirting with others.
• Pulling pranks.
• Pissing off Vaggie.
• Starting fights (source: Fandom).

His goal is literally to “Reform and ascend to Heaven (although his erotic and at times violent nature, combined with his fear of looking vulnerable, make this a difficult goal),” ibid.]. In other words, Medrano’s whole premise with Hazbin Hotel is to assimilate, treating the rescue of queer criminality as a Disney-fed, real-life baroness debutante’s pipedream that mocks the vapid, unironically dumb musical but adopting its essentialist features at the same time.

[artist, left: Persephone van der Waard; right, top: Vivienne “VivziePop” Medrano]

The same mentality applies to the action-oriented monomyth the show constantly fetishizes/falls back on, channeling the likes of Samus Aran shooting pirates or Wonder Woman punching Nazis as lacking much of any class character outside of whacking the most rote of clichés. The spectacle of centrist embodiment overtakes any hope of perceptive pastiche, requiring a re-genesis through the ovum-like egg Samus herself uses to shapeshift into an impossible ball wiggling through the fallopian-esque tube circuitry stretched everywhere throughout Zebes. The Amazon can totally be a waifu sexpot [a trend I accidently lighted upon when I made her look like fellow Metroidvania star, Shantae] but should allow for BDSM opportunities other than unironic harm, torture, and inevitable self-destruction; i.e., that avoid pandering incessantly to comic-book-level, equal-opportunity mercenary work that targets everyone for the highest bidder [the plot not just for Metroid but also Hazbin Hotel‘s offshoot series, Helluva Boss, 2019]. However fun this may be, its praxis is frankly dumb and regressive, but also cash-happy in ways that stink of an R-rated Disney pinkwashing itself. Instead, the purpose of the castle and the roles inside its chronotope should be subverted, repurposed ironically at every register.)

(artist: Brad Art)

Let’s wrap up. We’ve covered how dolls store trauma, but also relay it using various modular elements that, at times, appear cute as an ironic means (and target) of subversive critique. The paradox is an upending of cultural double standards that linger on the uptake; e.g., for girls to be “too old” to play with dolls, but expected to use sex toys/exist as dolls to please men while said men play with dolls themselves: raping the whore (too scared to do anything but commodify them for these purposes; e.g., Brad Art being staunchly pro-smut and “apolitical”). By turning the monstrous-feminine into something they can dominate, these men/token elements convey the usual transfer and assignment of power as something to give and receive through unironic sex and force; i.e., delivered towards the monstrous-feminine by state agents. But we can camp this by reclaiming the whore as something we summon to serve ourselves.

Those with power will be there, of course. At the core of all of this abuse, rape is power and power is profit through rape; i.e., defending itself as a matter of profit, of which Jadis was queen. It might sound impressive, even, except that Jadis operated from a position of total advantage; i.e., gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss being a means to make one’s victim feel powerless in a very tokenized way (re: capital policing workers through its own victims).

Speaking from experience, abusive power has a way of making you feel invisible, naked and exposed at the same time; i.e., like a doll undressed by a cruel owner. Pierced with this stare, a frantic desire to escape can suddenly emerge inside oneself—fleeing potential trauma using liminal expressions of trauma in highly subversive ways, including fetishized rituals of power and war like the zombie cosplay (exhibit 38b1) or parts of the undead egregore (38a). The exchange isn’t always sex-positive, though it can seem that way at first glance.

For example, Jadis collected a variety of “alien/monster dildos” and wanted to make their own line of sex toys. At the time, I thought it was cute. Now I firmly see these toys as an expression of abject power and dominance; i.e., tied to the trauma Jadis had survived in their own home growing up as something to reenact without irony. It became the opposite of ludo-Gothic BDSM, in practice.

Before I coined the term “ludo-Gothic BDSM,” though, the paragraph below highlighted the basic idea (from the original draft of “Leaving Jadis”):

The whole point of good BDSM, I would argue, is to ritualize material-ludic expressions of unequal power exchange and social-sexual knowledge; i.e., whose genesis is begot from militarized, post-fascist replicas that can always regress unless the centrist function is seriously interrogated, disarmed and repurposed by subversive agents.

Yet this basic concept—combined with my willingness to learn (and to please) as a means of crystalizing it—made me horribly susceptible to Jadis as someone who used the appeal of sexualized rituals to bend me to their will. They could not read my mind, but like past abusers could easily control me through veiled threats that I visibly responded to: my imagination was written all over my face.

One such threat was, “I don’t lie; if you think otherwise, we’re going to have a problem.” It was totalitarian and vague, implying incredibly that they couldn’t do so much as fib or tell a lie of omission; in other words, I was the impostor and always would be.

Escape didn’t occur to me at first, but I warmed up to the idea. As time went on, Jadis would threaten, pull away and “hover” as I stewed in my own fears, only to eventually return to and offer me “the cure” (rape in disguise). Until then, they’d hide from me, lurking in different parts of the house[12] while announcing their anger as something I could not escape while under their roof. Waiting and watching me like a spider feeding off me in the dark, they played with me like a doll. I always could hear them, their high heels clicking like knives as they strutted back and forth. It terrified me in ways my father’s booming footsteps never could; the physical violence lasted moments, but the emotional violence never stopped (the human shapes hovering all around me, like in The Night House). And if I ever questioned them, they’d throw a bit of legitimate know-how at me to remind me they were an expert:

(exhibit 38c2: The Harkness Test. Such tests are sex-positive and meant to educate “good play” through iconoclastic praxis. As something to remediate over space and time, emotionally/Gothically intelligent sex workers oppose canon with their own artwork, Gothic maturity and awakened labor—their stories, fantasies and toys that feature/represent monstrous sex.)

 

While Jadis was my BDSM idol, over time, I could sense something was wrong. However, I didn’t want to face it because I loved them (and admitting I was being raped felt unthinkable). After all, we had negotiated a relationship where I was to be their dutiful servant in exchange for protection. They knew so much about BDSM and the rules, I simply couldn’t imagine them betraying me and becoming the real monster—the impostor, the perfidious lover, the rapist treating me like a doll they could break while lying to my face—but it was the only thing that started to made sense. They were literally acting like they could be never wrong (Hilter’s führerprinzip: “The Leader is always right.”), meaning I was always wrong for trying to communicate how I felt thus actually improve on our relationship in a healthy way (“boundaries for me, not for thee”). I felt profoundly mislead—less by a forceful hand pulling on the reins and more that the outcome of doing so was leading me to submit to things that felt abusive towards me by my handler.

Eventually I decided that if I couldn’t do that—that if my partner’s fragility and inability to handle criticism constructively was sacrificing my well-being—then I would remove myself from their toxic influence and use the power they gave me (calculated risk) to prevent rape in the future. Over time, this became ludo-Gothic BDSM—a means of playing with rape as camping my own survival; i.e., seeing the world through a vision that Jadis partly contributed towards.

From Frankenstein to Ghost in the Shell, monsters are made as a matter of “post” potential—postcolonial, post-scarcity and posthuman, etc. A gift is what you make of it, then, and the reclamation of my power from my much-touted “maker” has been taking what could be a curse and making good of it: “You have no power over me!” The first step would be escape, working with the rudiments of all the things “Meeting Jadis” has surveyed.

In the interim, I slowly hatched a plan: I dreamed of escape. Eventually I wrote about it, drew it, or planned to with friends. And, like King Diamond’s protagonist from Them (1988), “my mind and body became one again,” the abuser’s spell broken enough for me to free myself from its paralytic, doll-like qualities (the doll aping paralysis as a matter of possession by abusive parties; i.e., the body as a kind of prison, but also a means of derealization, disassociation, to give the owner room to rest, work, and survive). But I was still inside a prison I had walked into of my own volition. Walking out again seemed easy in concept, but still threatened my view of existence as supplied through Jadis’ wealth and arguments: a room of one’s home.

(artist: Ash Thorpe)

I would have to give that up to escape them, turning home into a battlefield; i.e., the likes of which I’d read about since I was a little girl; e.g., knights and dragons (the abjected cruelty of so-called “black knights”), swords and sorceresses. I did my best to play with the idea, to make it palatable/fun. Even so, Jadis would continue to haunt me well after the fact—a commander on home turf as suddenly the enemy to wage war against using revolutionary cryptonymy (showing and hiding what I wanted them to see/not see).

The Gothic, then, is the language of return to an “ancient,” hauntological space of rape, reclaiming it as a matter of survival expressed through play in all the usual medieval hyphenations of sex, force, war and rape, sewage and bodily waste, food, funerals, death, etc. Simply put, it’s the perfect means to heal from the past by reclaiming it, thus transforming our zombie selves—our internal-external anxieties, shames, biases, stigmas, fears, guilt—with ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., through the rememory process camping capital’s usual commodifying of rape: through dolls that denote and execute “rape” as against profit, of police-style, us-versus-them division, of genocide. This isn’t a single event or game to “speedrun,” but goes on forever as part of a cycle to either heal from or contribute towards by playing with our rape, but also reifying it for others to see and learn from.

We’ll consider how next: through my escaping of Jadis! Gird your loins, my little soldiers! We’re not out of the woods yet! Onto “Escaping Jadis“!

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] This can get quite concentric/meta; e.g., puppets playing puppets in The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.

Hanh Nguyen writes in “The Puppet Wizardry Behind the Most Hilarious Parts of Age of Resistance,” (2019):

And so, the audience must watch as the hero puppets sit there and watch the Skeksis and Mystic puppets put on a puppet show. It’s weird and yet brilliant, poking at the entire process of creating the Age of Resistance puppet show but also utilizing different styles of puppets to reveal the history of Thra, the secret of the Skeksis, and how to defeat them.

Beccy Henderson, the puppeteer for Deet, had a front row seat of sorts to the action. “We got the seats to the best show ever,” she said. “My life is so weird! It’s so bonkers, and then they put on this little puppet show for us, and it was wild. It was really wild. But that set in particular the mood was so playful.

“It’s just this refreshing idea because you’ve been watching puppets for however many episodes at this point,” she added. “It gives us these other forms, like shadow puppetry and then this other completely unique kind of puppetry that Barnaby Dixon kind of invented, this hand puppetry that looks kind of like stop motion. Beautiful little sequence like nothing else and a nice break from the normal puppetry that you’ve seen up until that point.”

“That scene may be the greatest accomplishment of my entire career. I credit Jeff and Will for a lot of the final shape and also that wonderful introduction where he says ‘puppetry’ and everybody rolls their eyes,” said Grillo-Marxuach. “The quest has worked, they’ve gotten to where they need it to be, and now they have to have everything explained to them. That could have [been] the most tedious thing ever.

“The world of Thra is so complicated, and some might even say convoluted, and then the mythology has been added to by all of these different people over several years,” he continued. “It literally just began as a solution to a problem of, ‘How do we make three minutes of exposition interesting?’ That scene is one of the things in the show that we spent a lot of time looking at each other going, Can you believe they’re letting us do this?'”

Addiss added, “And [senior costume and creature supervisor] Toby Froud actually directed lot of the pieces of that scene in that puppet show, along with [the show’s director] Louis Leterrier. But that was very much a collaborative scene, because it had a lot of information, a lot of story, a lot of specific visuals, a lot of very detailed puppets. And so it was cool. And Barnaby Dixon came in. But there’s a lot of different people’s vision in there starting with Javi.”

“This is how difficult it is to do exposition in genre,” said Grillo-Marxuach. “It literally took a team of about 150 people to make three minutes of exposition palatable” (source).

Regardless of the exact form or arrangement, dolls become a potent means of perspective extend outside ourselves that contributes towards history as a large of a traditional of poetic expression; i.e., that showcases our development and growth as individuals tied to a larger cultural discussion that is also in flux.

For example, I currently operate/identify as a GNC Gothic ludologist (who specializes in BDSM) and have since at least 2021 (e.g., “I, Satanist“; “Sex, Metal and Videogames“; and “My Body of Work,” all 2021). Originally, though, I was just a nine-year-old girl playing Mega Man V (1995) on her Gameboy. At first the game took me countless days to beat, then nine hours in one sitting, and then much quicker than that (1-2 hours). It went from a time where I couldn’t remember playing games to suddenly being able to remember the process to—over more and more time—be able to contribute to the notion of games and play through my scholarship responding to the tradition of games that exists under capital/neoliberalism; e.g., speedrunning and Metroidvania.

[2] A bit like Chris Farley’s minifridge in Tommy Boy (1995): “You can put beer… or… candy bars inside it…” / “You can put whatever you want inside it, son.”

[3] Bigotries that admittedly extend to Lovecraft as frankly being in a long line of homophobes abusing the Gothic for these purposes, and communicating about it through personal correspondence: “As a matter of fact—although of course I always knew that paederasty was a disgusting custom of many ancient nations—I never heard of homosexuality as an actual instinct till I was over thirty” (source: Lovecraft.com).

However, as “Making Marx Gay” discusses, this rising heteronormative trend also existed among Marx and people like him, and writers celebrated for their ostensible progressiveness like Frank Herbert

last year, when the Los Angeles Review of Books published Jordan S. Carroll’s “Race Consciousness: Fascism and Frank Herbert’s Dune,” an article detailing how the alt-right is trying to co-opt the book series, the paper’s readers went on a rant. Bob Arctor wrote in: “Herbert was a dick about his son being gay.”

Someone writing in as “Nicol” added: “Why do you Dune cultists always minimize this man’s horrific relationship to his son due to his son’s gayness, something he hated so much he would be having his characters rant about homosexuality being linked to sadistic violence in his books? Oh wait it’s because you like reading the homophobic rants isn’t it. . . . As if [Frank] Herbert wouldn’t have thrown his whole weight behind Trump for the sake to teach these wimpy lib commies and the ‘gay agenda’ a lesson” (sic). Bravo, Nicol! (source: Brandon Judell’s “Bland Dune – Also, Frank Herbert’s Dug-up Homophobia,” 2021).

industry giants like Tolkien project the rape fantasy (the perfidious ring gift) onto shadowy agents in faraway places, and so on. Queer abjection is as old as the men camping it (re: Matthew Lewis).

[4] Marx wouldn’t release The Communist Manifesto—thus illustrate capital as something to critique per his approach to historical materialism—for another two decades, in 1848.

[5] For a nice summary of the concept, consider Rebecca Watson’s “James Somerton and the Science of Self-Harm as Abuse” (2024).

[6] Apathy through games is a neoliberal virtue; Jadis prided themselves on it, policing the play of medieval dolls through me: the medievalist they sought to gag for their own delight. In doing so, they became capital’s champion—its token cop brutalizing me by virtue of personal responsibility kissing up and punching down, TERF-style. They saw it as their duty and took pleasure in it.

[7] Of course, I’m a Gothicist, ludologist and BDSM expert, so tend to deal in romanticized language (which I dialectically-materially scrutinize through various disciplinary approaches). For a good example of such devices explained in clinical language by a practicing therapist, consider Theramin Trees’ “My Cluster B Parent Died and I Felt…. Nothing Much (2/2)” (2024). They’ve helped conceptualize a lot of these personality disorders in easy-to-understand language and visual aids; e.g., through mirrors and masks, which I relied on when originally writing “Leaving Jadis” back in 2023, but also “Setting the Record Straight,” in February 2022.

The paradox of the human condition is that I was a human being who was being abused by someone who shaped my view of the world through ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., the functional opposite of their own approach to BDSM, whereupon they were also a human being, albeit one who was acting inhumane by virtue of their personality disorder(s): legitimizing themselves through BDSM jargon to delegitimate, thus dehumanize me with. They were the preacher and I, their flock to cull as needed.

[8] Again, the cyberpunk’s decaying futurism and punk culture to police me, TERF-style, through BDSM engaged with these aesthetics—often literally as games and nostalgia to argue about; e.g., 1993’s Mage: the Ascension as something Jadis loved to endlessly talk about while showing me the monster art/rule books, similar to D&D and Vampire: the Masquerade. Jadis knew I was a ludologist, and I wrote many pieces while living with them; e.g., “Borrowed Robes,” which they critiqued and gave feedback for.

[9] Zeuhl used me for money and sex; i.e., as temporary arm candy. Jadis wanted to own me.

[10] From Colin Broadmoor’s “Camping the Canon” (2021): ” Victims of the law were ritually humiliated and then murdered in an extravagant and merciless display of state power. Around the middle of the 18th century, the British state initiated a long-running pogrom aimed specifically against gay men that exploded during the decades of The Monk’s original release. As Louis Compton records in Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th-Century England: ‘By 1806 the number of executions had risen to an average of two a year and remained there for three decades, though executions for every other capital offense decreased dramatically.’ In the 1790s, when Lewis was writing The Monk, judicial anti-homosexual persecution was at its height in England. Gangs of undercover police officers from anti-homosexual task forces infiltrated queer spaces, sending scores of gay men to the gallows or pillory and creating a palpable sense of paranoia throughout England’s underground LGBT communities” (source).

[11] Either having internalized society’s bigotry against them as queer but more than likely having internalized misogyny as a straight man who can’t get laid, who then masquerades as monstrous-feminine to rape other people with their knife dick, which then results in internalized homophobia manifesting outwards against all parties.

[12] Per stories like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, the house is generally haunted or occupied by trauma in an undead form; i.e., a familiar face that is zombie-like, doll-ish. This can feel paradoxically joyous, but in hindsight best maintains a positive feeling through rememory as a bad copy of the harmful original. For example, when I told Bay about Jadis, they recommended Gerard Way’s “Baby, You’re a Haunted House” (2019) as a likeness of that person’s actions towards me:

And the nights, they last forever
And days are always making you blue
In the dark we laugh together
‘Cause the misery’s funny to you

Oh, Baby, you’re a haunted house
Better find another superstition
We’re gonna stay in love somehow
‘Cause, baby, you’re a haunted house now

I’ll be the only one who likes the things you do
I’ll be the ghost inside your head when we are through (source: Genius).

Jadis, then, became something to revive and befriend after their abuse of me, but the zombie I brought to life very much wasn’t the dangerous original; it became something new, something safe that felt dangerous to hold—a doll-sized calculated risk in human form (exhibit 43d), but also a haunted dollhouse where the person’s likeness is rumored to haunt (also, if Capitalist Realism rots our brains, then sometimes we need little earworms like the above song to “till the soil”).

Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this blog post now belongs to a promotion called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The Poetry Module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted.

Click here to see “Brace for Impact’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Further Reading: Volume Two actually divides into three modules/sub-volumes, each with its own promotion and release. “Brace for Impact” is the first (re: Volume Two, part one), but there are also promotions for Volume Two, part two’s twin Monster Modules, The Undead and Demons: “Searching for Secrets” and “Deal with the Devil“!

Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections these 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 ally 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.

“Welcome to the Fun Palace!” part two—”Red Scare”; or, Out in the World

As its most basic level, rape is a violation of basic human, animal and environmental rights enacted through Cartesian power abuse; this postscript concerns the complicated process that healing from rape entails— i.e., its corrupting presence through codified trauma, wherein the surviving of police abuse becomes something to relate to others through Gothic stories that constitute radical empathy as a thing forever out-of-joint: the attempt to empathize with alien experiences to gain new perspective. Such empathy needn’t concern both parties equally and its Gothic dialogs concern intense, poetic liminalities still bearing an intense potential for disguise that is haunted by the shadow of police forces. Even so, the postscript aims to showcase such a dialog and its phenomenological complexities; i.e., one held between two or more people relating through their interpretation of various texts they are either intimately familiar with or at the very least recognize the tell-tale arrangements of power and performance through traumatic markers (source).

—Persephone van der Waard’s “Healing from Rape,” from Sex Positivity: Volume One (2024) 

Picking up up from where “Medieval Expression, part one” left off…

Part one of “Medieval Expression” considered the Gothic as a bad game of telephone/copycat; i.e., the echo of a rape joke stuck in the imaginary past to speak to queer oppression by straight forces: a funerary affect for which our liberation is one begot through selective absorption, magical assembly and a confusion of the senses married to an ongoing Song of Infinity to which we are but one move in a never-ending game. Its play writes in disintegration and bad taste—not to rejoice in harm, but expose it in ways that paradoxically help us feel good through self-reference as felt among other lost souls trapped in odd prisons. Part one considered this in largely academic terms, with Hannah-Freya Blake and I in relation to Lewis. Now, I want to apply the same basic ideas to people I’ve worked with since starting this book; i.e., sex workers of various kinds, and the media that speaks to our complex, bloody and decaying struggle, seeking hugs despite how society and capital treat us.

(source)

We’ll start with the relationship between people and Gothic media, here in part two. Its theme is Red Scare as something to dance with, in a half-real sense, consider old friends: past lovers and photographs, followed by classic stories that generally hide Communism in plain sight. We’ll go from Star Wars (1977) to Old Bill (2011) and Payback (1997) to James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) to Chernobyl (2019). After that, part three will consider my relation more directly with other sex workers castrating capital together (“You do it, I’ll hold ’em down!”).

Distribution through stealth is a common Communist schtick (the Russian spy trope); for us, it’s is a horizontal trajectory whose red-tinged paradigm shift spreads power across people repeating the Song of Infinity as “immolative” not of the literal self (despite the funerary self-decaying elements), but a “flame on” act of self-defense for (often non-middle-class) workers and their rights from the state and its (often-middle-class) proponents. And like a flame, it becomes something to encourage among the kindling primed to explode: a “hideous raging inferno” groomed, dog-like, by our handlers (our friends) telling us, “get ’em,” and we—like a dog with a bone—giving capital a black eye (more like a straight-up cunt punt, but I digress: “Light up the eyes, boys!” We don’t want to kill our foes, but make fighting with us so unpleasant [through our Aegis] to make them lose the will to continue; i.e., with bluffs as much as brute force: “Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand!”).

Per the Gothic’s ever-unfurling rap-battle scroll—as something to mature towards a class-conscious attitude—the middle class is historically both the gatekeeper position for the elite and the spawning ground for ongoing rebellion; i.e., the latter spreading Communism through GNC Gothic poetics whose morbid pull (fatal attraction) and proletarian apostacy (of a bourgeois Protestant ethic and all that entails) challenge the heteronormative (thus settler-colonial, Cartesian) linguo-material order through liberated sex work. In keeping with paradox, rebellion is what sets us free, as much as the eventual escape: our minds, then our material conditions (the Superstructure, then the Base; we can’t wait to have a big-ass factory to make propaganda with. Point-in-fact, we don’t need one. We already have the Internet and similar widespread ways of spreading information through art. And those without it have the oldest tool of rebellion: word-of-mouth).

(artist: Waifu Tactical)

One follows the other, supporting and maintaining a proletarian offensive into the imaginary future once-canceled but no longer. Medusa lives, and it’s time for her nightly meal of fresh souls, of capitalist profit, of practicing what she preaches by not doing what she’s told by the elite; i.e., eating the forbidden fruit; e.g., Wayne’s World 2‘s red licorice, fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, or those leftover weed cookies Cuwu baked one time that had me (and their equally green [and epileptic] roomie) greening out (“How many of these have you eaten?” Cuwu—playing the weed mother looking after their weed babies—asked me, me not realizing you’re not supposed to eat them like ordinary food[1]). But she’s also a hugger and wants you to join in (lest the ripened fruit wither on the vine)!

(exhibit 34a1b2b1a: Model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard. I’ve always had permission to share Cuwu’s eyes, but felt shy about showing them unless there was a point to make in doing so. In the interest of relating to the photograph to the fullest possible extent, I’ve decided to not censor their eyes from here on out. Look on them and see a little Commie who was still growing and developing as a person—to the degree that shortly after these photos were taken, our working friendship ended.

All language is arbitrary but arbitration occurs through sex and force as historically-materially dictated by state mandates scapegoating Patriarchal abuse/shortcomings; i.e., Original Sin. The red of the fatal apple might seem random, insofar as a green apple could do just as well. However, the color red—while its meaning is determined by stochastic factors—are, per the presence of Imperialism as a historical-material force, funneled through a Gothic lens with a historical past that revives imperfectly in present materials: the crimson red of sanguine, of the cardinal scarlet of the Catholic elite and their dogma, of the Roman imperators and their Superman-style red cloaks, etc, has having a sexist bent; i.e., the red of hysteria, of the furies, harpies, viragos, Fates, etc; e.g., Original Sin being the police rhetoric as much for sexist women-of-privilege as men, punching down at “scarlet women” for being “homewreckers” [“pretty privilege” being a threat].

Point-in-fact, the worst adulterers are classically men with virgin/whore syndrome, but also married women unhappy with their own marriages/jobs trying to have their cake and eat it, too: by abjecting open sex work as somehow “different” than the woman’s work normally done by women for their male bosses owning them. Cornered and caught red-handed, such viragos will simply concede “Let them eat cake” with a not-so-innocent shrug… which doesn’t historically pan out so well for them [e.g., the Romanovs, but also Marie Antoinette]. Payback’s a bitch and capital pits women [and all workers] against each other to glut the maws of the elite as shielded in ways the Romanovs and Marie Antoinette were not.

In turn, the traditional, heteronormative divisions of sex and force—i.e., first through Imperialism without and then with a racialized character vis-à-vis settler colonialism—have merged with the profit motive under neoliberal Capitalism’s Cold War spectres: Red Scare. Liberators must reclaim red as a Communist force—as red as the streets of Stalingrad, of Medusa’s bleeding pussy or Lewis’ Bleeding Nun, of my mother’s own red dress standing with the Red Army after the Fall in 1991.

[“Another world, another time—in an Age of Wonder!” Mom, with the Red Army boys, 1991.]

Echoes of Oedipus Rex aside, the shadow of incest is a Gothic classic [re: Walpole] that projects cryptomimetically across the monstrous-feminine to face Red Scare head on; i.e., as an imagery of the surface that invites future exchanges that, indeed, are quite martial in a poetic sense: “in the blood” as fueled by blood-pumping exchanges—of monsters, of mysterious mothers, of troubling but also exciting likenesses to past things that protected us [or our forebears] from harm: a maternal and benevolent Medusa to hug and shield us from the capitalist pigdogs’ alien doubles. What more could a girl ask for?

Well, a six-demon bag, mayhaps! Armed with her own, superstitiously-charged bag of tricks, then, what’s a girl to do but seek out similarities in extra-familial relations? The enemy is out there. Well, so are we, waiting to strike; i.e., the endless return of the living dead[2] through cryptomimesis as something we leave behind on the surface of ourselves: as part of a grander mise-en-abyme‘s addictive [and fun] Song of Infinity! Watch us revive through sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, and begin to dance [“Dance, magic!” as David Bowie[3] put it, in Labyrinth, 1986]! Our hearts will not break, but swell with bittersweet joy in seeing old friends revived through likeness. Like “Scars of Time” [1999], the pattern is one whose historical materialism must be upended by dialectical-material awareness—to “Shake it, baby!” and break the Capitalist-Realist spell through what people normally consume treated in a non-harmful, sex-positive sense: ourselves in delicious, deathly echo! It helps us “tell time” by—often enough—keeping time during sex as an asexual artistic act as much as fucking [the two are not mutually exclusive, though]. Think of it as a metronome to a rhythmic ceremonial ritual—a synthesis of oral [tee-hee] and written traditions! Through ludo-Gothic BDSM’s paradoxical organs of perception, let’s throw those “doors” of perception wide, babes! So, so wide!

[Model and photographer: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard] 

“Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the Earth!” again spoke Archimedes[4]. For every vampy fae, there is a castle to go with faer captivating castle-like body [“While I love you, I can never be free,” my mother wrote, in a poem to a secret love of hers]: a Gaia to shift in our favor through honest charm; i.e., a brave New World Order beyond the capitalist one and its “end of history” as predicated on people like Cuwu using what they got—their natural, counterterrorist potential and labor power corporally expressed, but also cosmetically in succulent reds [and other colors, to be fair]—to turn me [the invigilator] red[5].

True to form, this becomes a fun game of cat-and-mouse—of watching to see your audience [under your power] respond to your double operation showing to hide or vice versa, the flashing burlesque fostering a revolutionary cryptonymy in the most vivid and tempting of ways [with sex being so much more intense of a desire regarding what you can—like Macbeth’s fatal vision—see, but not grasp: “Look, not touch” an imperative enforced by space and time]. Like strange arrows in an endless quiver, it something to revisit and write about again and again; re [from Volume Zero]:

(exhibit 1a1a1i1: There was nothing strictly “new” about the mise-en-abyme of the 1980s mimesis of a commodified desire sold as “terrorist literature.” Its own controlled opposition was packaged and presented through age-old art techniques that creators then-and-now use for the profit motive, but also to make art that is profoundly anti-capitalist/sex-positive but still “of its time and place.” Indeed, “artistic statements,” “medieval expression,” and “capitalist action” are far from mutually exclusive—a delightful fact illustrated wonderfully by Andrew Blake’s superbly dreamlike Night Trips [1989]. “Vaporwave before Vaporwave existed,” Blake’s marriage of the medieval image was “joined at the hip” [so to speak] with the neoliberal variation of the “Sale of Indulgences” expertly presenting the woman as trapped inside and outside of herself. We see her bare body clinging to electrodes that monitor her vitals, with persons standing next to her looking in, as she looks down at herself, looking in at other people fucking her and each other while she fucks them. Its concentric phantasm is profoundly decayed and euphoric, but also unquestionably ’80s. You’ll know it when you see it.

Regardless of its chief aim, Blake’s film won a silver medal at the 1989 WorldFest- Houston International Film Festival, specifically in the “Non-Theatrical Release” category. This makes it the first porn movie to win a medal at a major international film festival [source: Violet Blue’s “The Helmut Newton of Porn,” 2008]. It was porn and art-as-porn that made a statement that was clearly predicated on material conditions, but also love for the raw materials themselves as “dark,” forbidden fruit tied to music, drugs and disintegration.

The Scorpion’s “Rhythm of Love” [1988] relays a similar savage amusement through the commodification of said fruit, first and foremost. It relays the woman and eponymous scorpion as fused like a chimera. Onscreen, its main product is music, but that music is relayed through Gothic retro-future pastiche. Amid the canceled future, our Teutonic knights fly in from outer space on their spaceship, hauling special “cargo”: the Star Trek starlet in a leather catsuit! They appear like shadowy ghosts, taking to the stage while ghostly women dance and writhe all around them—behind the screen, “inside” the drumkit, upon and within the mirror.

Like a Gothic castle, these sexy gargoyles squirm like animated stone. Of course, the band’s bill of sale conflates sex with music as a silly-yet-serious promise: rock ‘n roll as “sex music” deliberately fused inside a drug-like medieval portrait. Its recursion has been recuperated to serve the profit motive within a campy pastiche that undoubtedly moved monomythic merchandise in a great many forms—e.g., guitars, porn, videogames, movies, Scorpions paraphernalia. It’s all connected, but debatably far more concerned with selling out by “rocking us” with counterfeit cargo [containing ghostly stowaways] than making any kind of statement directly and openly themselves. And yet that’s the beauty of media; we can take what they did for a profit and weaponize it for class war while also having fun!

The whole meta-conversation occurs between not just the Scorpions and Blake from their respective doubled “castles”; it occurs between us on the shared wavelength, deciding what kind of art [thus monsters] we want to make while vibing within the same nostalgic, Gothic headspace and aesthetics [think Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp” (1796) but less lame]. To camp or not to camp? That is the question; but also: to what degree? Allegory or apocalypse? Missionary or doggy? Vaginal or anal? Maybe a bit of both while we listen to Emerald Web’s The Stargate Tapes [6][1978-1982]? Maybe just a bit of teasing while we sit around eating questionably-shaped food objects? The sky’s the limit, really.) 

Despite all their demonstrable flaws, I love the Scorpions because their nostalgia lends itself well to camp as living in the same shadow space as a particular kind of Gothic: the love zone. I wanna rock, baby, and fuck demon mommies to metal in my castle (effectively campy recreations of Castle Anthrax [below] and its train of “wicked, bad naughty things,” all hailed by naughty nuns and false grail beacons; like, it’s made up, but I didn’t make that up). In their music video for “The Rhythm of Love” (1988), the Scorpions offer Cold-War comfort food (which would culminate with “Wind of Change,” in 1990) adjacent to, thus crossing over (if by accident) into the art-camp erotica of Andrew Blake’s porn world they were clearly peddling themselves [source].

[artist: Persephone van der Waard]

Through ironic evocations of the Medusa-trapped in glass, we reach through the veil to transcend space and time—the chronotope haunted by our alien, decaying-yet-vitalistic beauty as alive in spite of so many open wounds and scars: “Can’t touch this!” The idea isn’t to trace its entire, chaotic lineage [though that can be fun] but instead join in on the endless mummer’s farce/whirling dervish dancing a pedagogy of the oppressed: echoing it imperfectly to find similarity amid difference using Gothic poetics in oft-operatic, thus musical[7] ways.)

Encouraging rebellion among a bunch of free-thinking atheists, Satanists, Pagans, et al, might seem like herding cats, but it’s not so difficult provided you make empathy and sex positivity second-nature at a cultural level (not to mention, people love monsters and sex; we just have to humanize these things through themselves: a system of thought that triggers memories of rebellion that first take root and then catch fire). Through that Wisdom of the Ancients’ labor and propaganda, everything else will fall into place; i.e., from the biggest factories to the lowliest street artist singing from the gutter to unite in a cause less rosy and naïve than Lennon’s “Imagine” (1970, from Volume One):

[S]ometimes, the desire to voice one’s oppression is told through common stories; i.e., by reclaiming the language of the oppressor class […]. However, that subversion still needs to involve a process consciously driven by a desire to alter socio-material conditions: to push away from the status quo and its exploitation of workers behind the usual groups benefitting inside these stories and in real life. Queer allies, especially well-to-do ones, need to be mindful of this in regards to peace and tolerance in the face of deplorable socio-material conditions; e.g., Tom Taylor’s 2023 writeup, “Steely Dan vs John Lennon,” reporting how John Lennon’s “Imagine” [1971] came across as more than a little naïve according to Steely Dan’s “Only A Fool Would Say That”:

Their 1972 track, “Only a Fool Would Say That” was written in response to Lennon’s parade of peace. It looks at idealism through the practical eyes of folks on the street. “You do his nine to five,” they sing, “drag yourself home half alive, and there on the screen, a man with a dream.” And with that, you get a sense of how grating and vacuous they thought that Lennon’s “Imagine” campaign had become [source].

In other words, it can’t be vague or mixed in its messaging. For resistance-in-solidarity to work, it needs to be direct, informed and conscious [of class, gender, religion and race as intersecting forces] (source).

Rebellions live and die by their ability to stay the course—to survive (which the likes of Jimmy Hendrix and John Lennon famously did not) and not sell-out to power (which will only recuperate them into forms of toothless controlled opposition); i.e., not just to “follow the white rabbit,” but fuck it through an illustration of mutual consent: to bond through humanistic interactions speaking to shared trauma. This at-times lurid exhibitionism expresses in dialectical-material terms, with capital selling us-versus-them Cartesian (alien, fetish) violence against nature in unironic, profit-driven monster forms (e.g., Frankenstein vs the Wolfman, Santa Claus vs the Martians, Ripley vs the Alien Queen, Orcs vs Humans, Plants vs Zombies, etc) that we, through careful application, turn into workers-vs-the-elite amid the shared aesthetic/stage’s ludo-Gothic BDSM! It’s a very honest, human form of rebellion because it works through what makes us human to begin: our struggles, our laughter, our sexualities and gender, ace nudism, poetry and art as a mimetic, highly biting and critical group effort suffused—per Lewis and his ilk—with graveyard “trauma” placed in quotes to dance with the ghost of the counterfeit. You might not always be sure of where it will take you in the interim (me, as I write a new transition for this subchapter’s unplanned subdivision); but rest assured, it will never be boring!

The dialectic, as Jung would put it, is synchronistic. As we proceed out into the world, then, beware those who would tone-police you as you echo people of the past amongst your contemporaries as for-or-against you to varying degrees—the latter telling you to put on your clothes (in a private gallery open to the public) or to be quiet, get back, go back whence you came/to the shadow, etc. Silence is genocide and those who take part in gagging us are complicit in some shape or form. In turn, our genius is, like Umberto Eco’s interpretive walks (from Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, 1994), manifesting through something I pioneered in 2018 (with my master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania“): ergodic motion through castle-narrative; i.e., through a Gothic chronotope of our own design in space-time as anisotropic, concentric, and non-linear to traverse and express through non-trivial effort: to assemble and communicate larger arguments through a second-nature habit(at) that lets us make connections with all manner of things while we work on it—in short, while we combat Red Scare as, in the absence of the actual color, takes on the struggles of the working poor nonetheless as alien, criminal.

To that, ludo-Gothic BDMS as I envision it is something scrappy from the old stomping ground—a pugilist old fighter’s attempt at peace (me, getting into fights when I was younger) that I compare now to assorted fictions collectively speaking to criminogenic conditions, mid-class-and-culture-war (above: Old Bill, 2011). I always had a soft spot for the underdog criminal, the outlaw trying to get by (through street duels and brothel espionage) and be more than state power wants him to be: the mad dog biting his own kind to serve capital (“the Railroad”) in all its forms. We need to be able to trounce class traitors when needed, but antifascism is as much doing so with holistic dialogs that meld spoken words with likenesses of saloon brawls (the so-called “danger disco[69]” being the usual place of girl talk, monsters and camp the state tries so hard to demonize [“a den of scum and villainy”] and cash in on; e.g., Star Wars).

Except, the Western’s rebellious allegory isn’t dead (re: Andor, 2022), and as Fury Road (2014) shows us, can be transformed into a queer-adjacent lens (that story is largely cis-feminist). As such, I’m trans and have transplanted the “old bum from the neighborhood” schtick not to posture as something I’m not (“slumming”), nor push for rags-to-riches solutions (Rocky goin’ the distance with Creed, the token immigrant slugging it out against the African American golden boy—a popular boxing refrain that maintains the status quo through marginalized in-fighting). Rather, I’m taking “Medusa? I never knew ye!” and rephrasing it to “You’re looking at her!” To that, Communism arbitrates as much through stealth as the color red, favoring black and red as an (admittedly awesome) color scheme during ludo-Gothic BDSM, but not chained to it.

(source: Reddit)

This, we shall see for the rest of part two, is true even when the color red is absent or the argumentation otherwise devoid of an obvious Nazi or Communist. As Star Wars shows us, for example, sometimes they’re dressed up in ways that have been medievalized. Sometimes, though, you can’t tell what you’re looking at until that “dog dick” of a red lightsaber pops out. Even then, what if there’s a Communist allegory behind the American Liberal and cartoon Nazi crossing swords (there is)?

The problem that part two has largely been getting at, then, is how liberation requires metatextual analysis to uproot and embody between and about texts: in a stage-like performance using shared aesthetics with a displaced locale and dormant class character that is simmering just beneath the surface; i.e., not something fascist fans of the franchise are known for recognizing and to which Lucas relied on to make his fortune (which Cameron, as we shall see, imitated rather faithfully). As Gothic Communists, we need to actively camp what has become canon: blue and red police colors that keep the Communist dialog trapped wordlessly in a never-ending lightsaber duel to move merchandise along (notice how Andor has no swordfights in it, at all? So refreshing!). This goes well beyond the scope of Star Wars and into many kinds of media as essentially talking about the same stuff: sex and force through class war as pushed to the side, but impossible to ignore regardless.

The devil’s in the details; so’s the Commie as a covert (incognito) battler for sexual elements in a capitalist hegemony. We’ve already looked at personal past examples from my life (academic: Hannah-Freya Blake; non-academic: Cuwu). I now want to outline some keys in not-so-obvious, then consider Cameron as a billionaire Marxist Lucas clone we can also critique and learn from:

(source: Paul Joannides’ 1999 Guide to Getting It On)

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a ho in possession of a great tush, rack and/or box must be in want of a husband.” Subversion of Austen’s infamous ironies aside, expressing inequality through sex-positive human wants and needs is the rebellious noir or Western’s call to action: as something to right through psychosexual “violence” as a spectrum of exchanges that are historically unkind to women/monstrous-feminine under capital; i.e., during sex work as a matter of class and culture war relayed endlessly through half-real stories on and offstage: Communist sex workers punished for being sex workers and Commies by virtue of asking for their basic human rights (an intersectional problem shared by black civil rights activists and other movements throughout American history the world over).

To that, we’re not leading anyone on to harm them, but a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and we have our would-be assailants (those with power over us) “by the balls.” Such people come in handy when the unironic sadist kicks down our door and we have to—in our last moments—speak truth to power: “You’re an ugly pimp who beats up women on account that he’s too afraid of his own goddamn shadow!” When and if that happens, it really doesn’t hurt to have a himbo (or herbo) in our corner willing to crack some skulls, thus save our pretty ass from yet-another-beating and rape (while Mel, despite being a royal cunt in real life, absolutely kills it in a suit, Maria Bello’s more relatable [for me] as the tough-as-nails-working-girl who-has him-wrapped-around-her-little-finger—Payback, 1997, below):

The exhibit here is twofold, but classically male-centric: one, the streetwise, hard-boiled driver (a classic noir trope all on its own) who cares more about the principle of the thing than making money-upon-money on the backs of working girls; and two, the girl he used to “drive” (in two senses of that phrase). Indeed, Payback literally calls the mob “the Syndicate” (sorry, “the Outfit“) to brand/whitewash their activities as plaguing the timeless replica of any American city’s criminogenic slums: a brothel romance, but also a slum romance—the lady (who’s not a “lady” in the middle-class sense) and the tramp, both having “pull” as a means of mutual survival through mutual action (“I have blankets” taken to its logical extreme); i.e., to do their hunting not just where the money is, but the empathy! Such exchanges might seem of the street—relegated to imaginary concrete jungles—but that’s where love (and rebellion) take place! Mmm, makes my pussy wet and my tail wag just thinking about it (the Gothic, through ludo-Gothic BDSM, often speaks in anthropomorphic GNC code: regarding sex and “violence,” below, as so called “puppy play” that’s theatrically no different[8] than Mel Gibson and Maria Bello)!

To be sure, Medusa is a dirty, red-headed slut who lives on Whore Island; by extension, systemic catharsis through subversive Amazonomachia invokes red has having assorted cultural values that overlap: the demon whore and labor activist something to canonically fetishize and reduce, Star-Wars-style, to yet-another-duel; i.e., choose your fighter!”; e.g., Jadis loved Shermie, above, from King of Fighters. To “choose your destiny” insofar as Ed Boon might ask, Communists involve a chattier cat; i.e., a slutty, loquacious ordeal challenging Red Scare—one made by this bitch (me, not Shermie) as refusing to shut up (despite Zeuhl and Jadis in particular trying to gag me): a cum-guzzling puppy acting in good faith as the world’s biggest slut for human, animal and environmental rights. I might just be trying these thoughts together after a walk ’round the old block (I took a stroll earlier, to clear my head and reflect), but they still served as fertilizer from a rich heritage I put into back the figurative soil: the enrichment of my relationship to the world through ludo-Gothic BDSM as a Gothic-Communist system of thought that challenges Red Scare with; i.e., the town whore amid a train of whores achieving intersectional solidarity through all the things that people like: sex and violence, but also the Gothic (the 1977 Star Wars being a bonafide Space Western with a retro-future medieval aesthetic).

If you build it, they will cum—the sexy slutty dead walking the Earth to speak truth to power as a counterterrorist device (a real “pinch me, I’m dreaming” moment, when you start to realize just how hot and goth your friends actually are. It’s good to be me). Generally this happens through sex and force as osmotic—through selective absorption, magical assembly and a confusion of the senses that, unto itself, has serious pull. We camp canon because we must; we attract people to help us with that not just by putting our money where our mouths are (so-called “voting with your wallets”) but embodying that as an ongoing performative statement of worker struggle towards Gothic-Communist liberation using ludo-Gothic BDSM. It’s my brainchild, but like Shelley’s Modern Prometheus, steals fire from the gods to give it to the workers of the world (to spite Cartesian chudwads like Victor Frankenstein).

So, I might just be the “neighborhood bicycle,” then, but everyone likes the neighborhood bicycle (for canon: capitalist individuation “slaying” the female-coded, monstrous-feminine “chaos dragon” as a rite of passage during Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference[9]); that’s why they’re the neighborhood bicycle, the town whore, the muse, the medium, the Medusa (inspiration is infectious, including sex but also struggle as an “often-cute, often-gross” human expression against rape; i.e., foisted onto us by overbearing structures of oppression)! We are not gods, but we can echo the gods in our own breasts, where they originate from; i.e., in a half-real relationship with the material world cementing them as gargoyles sitting on cathedrals of various kinds. Our own social-sexual instrumentalities pull them back out again and send them into the world (flying castles)—with someone like James Cameron’s cutting-edge special effects, if we have them, minus his Pygmalion tendencies ultimately serving Hollywood through bad-faith activism: “speaking out both sides of his mouth” to capitalize on struggle as white cis-het business men always seem to do (for them, alliances with workers are “optional,” insofar as lucrative “success” goes—again, thirty pieces of silver but translating into so-called “billionaire/Hollywood Marxism” as its own special class of delusion).

To that, antiwar messages often convey in the language of war, and from ironic sources: Howard Zinn, Bob Ross, Edward Snowden, and Kurt Vonnegut—but also James Cameron as oscillating between anti-police-state (with The Terminator, 1984) and neocon/neoliberal revenge (with Aliens, 1986) ushering in the same-old Red Scare theatrics. The Abyss is another swing in the left direction, showcasing the warring forces both on a grand scale (at the “end” of the Cold War) whose red flags are literal Armageddon, and in-person during a underwater duel where the color red (and any Russians) are completely absent; i.e., a swashbuckling exchange that’s darker, meaner and scarier than The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) with Errol Flynn by a fucking mile (also, it’s kind of sexy [in my best valley girl upspeak]—a guy-on-guy version of the wet t-shirt contest):

(exhibit 34a1b2b1b: Say what you will about Cameron, but the man knows how to film a scene. The fight forces us to watch [from Elizabeth Mastrantonio’s perspective] through a camera [a la Scott’s Alien camera eye] at our hero and villain, switching between that perspective and Virgil’s [Ed Harris] while trying to sneak up on Coffey [Michael Biehn, in fabulous form as the villain, this time]. Virgil lacks combat training and makes a mistake: not wanting to kill Coffey but reason with/disarm him by going for the gun; Coffey—jumpy and paranoid—does the usual cop response and pulls his weapon, the two men largely conversing with their eyes and faces [nonverbally, like animals] before Virgil verbally appeals to the other man to not fire: “Coffey, wait…”

Coffey’s eyes are full of fear, blind to reason; seeing Virgil as the alien he must kill, he tries to fire—but the gun doesn’t respond [the look of shock and outrage on Harris’ face says it all, really: “This motherfucker really just tried to shoot me? Oh, hell no!”]. It’s the Cold War in small—the fate of the world resting on Virgil’s shoulders while he and his nemesis do battle: “We have found the enemy and he is us[10].” Threatened and backed into a corner, Coffey—like a frightened dog—is unpredictably violent for the state. He pulls his blade. This isn’t just saber-rattling but a full-on duel-to-the-death; the music kicks in [tropical-themed, belying Cameron’s Orientalism] and the two men cross swords.

Gives me chills, just thinking about it. I feel the Numinous weight of every strike, reminded of the scary men in my life tied to capital, to the nuclear family model, harming me instead of doing the decent thing by providing and protecting [the bare-fucking-minimum]. The little girl and grown-ass woman in me root for Virgil to stick it to the son of a bitch: “Get ‘im!” The only thing between Virgil’s body and Coffey’s thrusting knife-dick [“fuck the enemy, spill its blood!”] is a swinging fluorescent bulb and a club-like metal pipe. In true duelist fashion, the two are uneven—Virgil outclassed by Coffey but Coffey off-balance from his alienated state of mind. Our hero-in-white fends off our man-in-black’s roguish fencing for a time, the two tangling to embrace and fall into the water like “lover” [violence in duels is homosocial, even homoerotic[11]]. Virgil, fighting for his life, bites Coffey’s hand to disarm him, only to be beaten and thrown down again for his trouble [again, he’s trying to survive; Coffey’s trying to kill him]. Then—when the Destroyer persona in small appears to have our hero on the hip, when all seems lost… a surprise entrant turns the tide: our loveable himbo, Cat [who even has the good manners to get Coffey’s attention before decking him[12]]!

Faced with overwhelming odds, the coward turns tail, irrationally determined to carry the state’s wishes to their logical conclusion: extermination. In his usual coherent-but-inconsistent style, then, Cameron’s Gothic action vehicles speak to larger warring forces inspired by older sci-fi stories debating nuclear war on both sides of the political isle: Harlan Ellison’s Outer Limits and Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. In true white-boy fashion, Cameron demonstrates the ability to play both sides just like Lucas does: using anti-war allegory in hauntological stories whose seminal disasters allude to Capitalism’s routine crisis and collapse; the Gothic elements are the decay felt amid a neo-medieval aesthetic, which The Abyss cleverly disguises with an ordinary [novel, quotidian] milieu: an oil rig. But a solder and worker are easily distinguished all the same, the blue-collar everyman swinging for the fences to upend the American hawk.

It’s good stuff… expect Cameron would continue vacillating—using nuclear war to lionize European white men [T2, 1991] and demonize people of color [True Lies, 1994] to serve profit [a trend he would continue, regarding Indigenous rights as something to commercialize with his Avatar series]. And in case you missed it, he also did it in The Abyss: Virgil’s hellish swimming up through the pool to—like Benjamin Willard from Apocalypse Now [1979]—rise metatextually up through a ghost of Joseph Conrad’s original, very racist novella, Heart of Darkness [1899]: to speak to racism/colonial hysteria and decay from within an entirely privileged position; i.e., the white-man-wearing-blackface as always being, on some level, inside the Imperial Core looking out into the darkness [what Jameson calls the dialectic of privilege, which we address through the dialectic of the alien]. You see any Russians or people of color in this movie? Red Scare is Red Scare, even if the Reds are ostensibly truant [the displaced, underwater critique, this time, refreshingly falling on the American side of the fence, at least].

Cameron is a cunt, as was Coppola and Conrad: the three Cs—the Three Cunts, ACAB. I jest, sort of. All the same, these weird canonical nerds don’t own the monopoly on such things—not on the “action/adventure” cinematic genre that, through Cameron’s cartographic refrain, would clumsily evolve into FPS, Metroidvania and survival horror videogames [re: “Mazes and Labyrinths“]. Indeed, through our own Galatean media as fostered out in the world, we can use our own splendide mendax to tip the scales in favor of workers and nature; i.e., by not scapegoating the state using the usual suspect: a pasty fall guy who was “shit nuts.” To that, Coffey was merely a pawn on a larger chessboard, except regicide won’t work, either, because capital is a hyperobject that needs to be understood through the totality of its mechanisms as we can actually observe and utilize them [capital in the abstract]. So revelations of a dark parent or monarch are just different chess pieces to take off the same board [the white planet threatened by a dark one on the same battlefield]: some king to topple, with Cameron choosing a black queen for the white queen to tip in favor of capital, in Aliens. Instead, we want to dance with the ghost of the counterfeit to reverse the process of abjection and change how the game is played, in effect changing its rules to suit worker needs [often combining them—”topping” the so-called “king,” checkers-style]. This paradoxically requires exposing the state while enjoying things in a pernicious, problematic system; e.g., like chess. Bitches love chess.

Seriously, it’s not rocket science, but we learn from those we love! I.e., I once dated a rock ‘n roll poet, a non-binary gender studies expert, a metal-loving entomologist, and a stoner Marxist-Leninist fuck puppy—all followed by my current partners, an Indigenous ecologist therian and good-boy art nerd/fur-crazy roleplayer who both taught me to surrender power without harming me: to rollover like a puppy for them and see things from a humane non-human perspective—on my back, my belly and genitals exposed[13]! Picking all sorts of stuff from them [“Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas”], I absolutely love the antiwar message in The Abyss. Even so, I can still just as easily critique Cameron and the film industry to engender Gothic Communism. There’s a joy in my hellish flow state, the same way there is in having sex or baking a tasty cake. Give it a shot! Kill your darlings to make them into something that retains aspects of their former selves reclaimed dualistically by proletarian forces!)

So-called “genius” takes talent, but still needs cultivating (nature and nurture); i.e., given room to grow and develop; e.g., being neurodivergent, I always marched to the beat of my own drum and had a big-ol’ heart of gold. But all the same, nobody’s perfect. We’re all going to have good days and bad. The tie-breaker is always dialectical-material scrutiny and context, mid-genesis. The shadow of Capital’s collapse, then, is like Cameron’s mirror challenging his own refrain: “Coffee hears NTIs and thinks Russians, nukes. You gotta look with better eyes than that!” It projects internalized bigotries—of fearing the alien as informed by socio-material conditions during Pax Americana as never having stopped. There is always a Cold War relative to the state as something to challenge; i.e., we must always be building[14] something mirror-like/alien in response—to sing, dance or otherwise double spectres of Caesar (the Shadow of Pygmalion) to challenge the unironic Cycle of Kings, infernal concentric pattern and narrative of the crypt with: as an Aegis-like mirror shield threatening state shift unless action is taken to right the ship. We gotta put the pussy on the chainwax—to start a thing as counterterrorists do during asymmetrical/guerrilla warfare, and to bring big friendly herbos and himbos (“muscle”) to our side; i.e., just in case the fash-adjacent nutjobs project their Cold-War-grade xenophobia onto our Commie asses. As Cameron showed us, size absolutely matters in a real fight (less so in bed[15], but I digress) without the element of surprise or mechanical advantage (force multipliers).

And if it sounds like I’m always repeating myself—”pussy on the chainwax” this, “pussy on the chainwax” that—well, that’s what refrains are! Make them your own flow states to vibe to, vibrating in service to workers and nature through the dialectic of the alien yielding sex-positive outcomes, not cataclysm (which often, as I shall now hint, targets our “balls”; i.e., of any gendered and/or biological makeup or persuasion).

To be sure, class and culture war is a Mexican standoff, one that requires force. Power responds to demands backed up by force; i.e., labor action and propaganda. The point isn’t scorched earth, for Gothic Communism, but transition through appreciative irony’s Gothic counterculture (and the other creative successes, which we’ll unpack in Volume Three) during praxial synthesis. Sure, we’re in a pickle—a Lt. Archie Wilcox looking for someone less loquacious at times and more someone to bear and grit it with a “Say auf wiedersehen to your Nazi balls!” when push comes to shove. But until then, we need to recruit peoples more “on the fence,” and afford ourselves the nuance required; i.e., to tell them apart when courting potential friends who might be potential enemies. Better to learn from those who already found out (me); i.e., that the two—while not the same—often look exactly alike. Punching a single Nazi is cathartic, but pointless if it doesn’t yield systemic concessions; we got bigger balls to snip. Capital’s. To that, we gotta take black-and red back, including Red Scare as something that can appear anywhere in popular media (this is a neoliberal planet we live on).

This, however, is a group effort—one that requires friends the likes of Harmony Corrupted and Blxxd Bunny, who we’ll exhibit in the next subdivision of “the Fun Palace!” Before we blast off to that otherworldly sphere (classically it would be the moon), I would like to wrap up a few points about our interactions with popular media; i.e., regarding Red Scare with Chernobyl as an ongoing issue when raising our own castles (and their dangerous confusions).

(source: Jeremy Parish’s “The Anatomy of Games,” 2013).

Of course, I can’t say what exactly will become of the Gothic (and its medieval toys) when Communism eventually happens, save that we already know what Capitalism does (and has done) for centuries. Capitalist Realism acts like it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But the sick joke is, it’s working just fine for the people it’s meant to benefit. By enriching monsters, et al, through the natural tendency of human language to deceive for survival purposes, we can expand the web of quality to drape down on all peoples, giving back to nature what Capitalism does nothing but take for the charitably sparse and empathetically bankrupt (whose gluttony will never be sated, their throats always parched for blood, brains, sanguine, sex, whatever). They privatizing busking as a means of draining wealth as the lifeforce not just of the planet, but the very nation-states they run into the ground (running off with golden parachutes). They take and take and take. Without a change in direction, it will destroy all peoples, including those with more to lose. Frankly, we deserve better than what those old vultures will toss back our way (chunks of our own dead flesh, no less). So does nature, so do monsters and the Gothic. But we must eat empathy as something to reproduce and give back, not abject and throw up; e.g., Capitalism and rainbows (save that one special month where they pretend to care). In turn, the elite are a tumor whose unchecked vampirism and cannibalism (and other such necromantic feeding habits) must be curtailed. Like with all undead who feed and demons to grant fatal bargains, the elite’s variant merit and receive only what we give them.

(artist: Queenie)

As warrior poets, we must gird our loins, flux our capacitors, fluff our pillows and give chase. The more community and education certainly helps (and some degree of neurodivergence), but apart from some basic ideas to keep in mind—e.g., humans have basic unalienable rights—isn’t required in a given, exact form. Gothic Communism is about holistic inclusion combating false hope (a neoliberal staple, per Capitalist Realism’s monopolies, refrains and trifectas) to face the music: you can’t save the world through American copaganda hero fantasies/personal responsibility theatre (those acting in bad faith, commonly referred to as “full of shit”)—can’t just buy something or kill a monster to solve capital’s problems, because they’re built into capital, which isn’t broken, just inhumane; you have to play by a different set of rules while inside capital, which predominantly involve humanizing monsters and abjuring the profit motive to help workers, animals and the environment in direct opposition to the state; i.e., there is no compromise, scapegoat or smoking gun that will work; e.g., no Commie to hang at the gallows to redeem Capitalism from itself.

In Gothic circles, this is generally likened to a “presence” that vaguely or tremendously occupies a given area by haunting it; i.e., the truant space aliens’ detritus in Roadside Picnic (1972), or the radioactive mutants from Metro or the Shadow of Chernobyl series. But the lack of either in reality doesn’t discount the reality of actual trauma expressed in half-real terms (as all Gothic castles do). In more “realistic” forms, these reduce to a cartoon Stalin—less the man himself as a “final boss[16]” and more someone else to blame who’s part of the area formerly known as the U.S.S.R.; e.g., Anatoly Dyatlov from Chernobyl (2019).

Whereas Cameron’s The Abyss held Russia at arm’s length, “Russia” in quotes remains a common stomping ground from neoliberal hauntologies, so let’s quickly explore that with Dyatlov, but also the effigy of the Soviet State that HBO tries to hang. Everything has the air of accuracy amid antiquation, but is surprisingly accurate as a hit propaganda piece America might produce for its age-old enemies (down to the exact date and time, shown on an old-fashioned clock). If fact, that’s exactly what it is, so keep it in mind for a second.

I mention this example not simply because Chernobyl is what’s currently right in front of me, but also because medieval canon and regression involve hauntologies that are far more recent-looking than the so-called Middle Ages. “What is the cost of lies?” the protagonist asks. “It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth; the real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. […] What else is left but to abandon the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stores, it doesn’t matter who the heroes are; all we want to know is, who is to blame?”

Except, this isn’t some insolvable solution; the answer is right in front of us. To see it, you have to think beyond moral panics like Red Scare (Cameron, HBO, or otherwise, speaking abject utterances in Gothic displacement[17]) to understand that the Soviets, while far from perfect, were light years better than any capitalist who has ever lived; Capitalists are unethical by design, because they require profit (an inherently unequal proposition) to move money through nature through Cartesian rhetoric (an inherently genocidal, thus brutal system of thought). Charity and inequality are not just antithetical to their thinking but anathema, insofar the mythical Good Soviet is concerned. How quickly people forget that the Nazis didn’t stop with going East; they went West, too, and will again when the chickens come home to roost (from Volume Zero):

So-called “Jewish revenge” is the Red Scare sentiment of anti-Bolshevism shared by the American elite as enacted with impunity until it “crosses a line”—in this case a national boundary into the West by the Nazis:

For four years, numerous Americans, in high positions and obscure, sullenly harbored the conviction that World War II was “the wrong war against the wrong enemies.” Communism, they knew, was the only genuine adversary on America’s historical agenda. Was that not why Hitler had been ignored/tolerated/appeased/aided? So that the Nazi war machine would turn East and wipe Bolshevism off the face of the earth once and for all? It was just unfortunate that Adolf turned out to be such a megalomaniac and turned West as well (source: William Blum’s Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, 1995).

The same idea plays out in displaced, fantastical forms through undead and demonic language. As such, the assorted “ink blot” stigmas elide within the same poetic shadow zone, whereupon the hungry mouths of dead labor’s zombies bear their fangs and collectively shriek and howl. Simply put, they riot, but do alongside state agents opposing them using the same aesthetics of power and death: the fascist, but also the centrist combating both fascism and labor until asking the black “dog” knight to tag team the Dark Queen and her counterterrorist zombie forces. Mid-riot, various pro-state Beowulfs are generated and sent in to quell the slaves as dissident aggressors, called “terrorist” and certainly treated as such (source).

Chernobyl works much better as an anti-capitalist allegory dressed[18] up in Soviet, Red-Scare clothes—an anti-nuclear parable that treats nuclear energy as the great terror of our age, on part with Big Oil attacking it to regress towards an older system not unlike the Catholics and the Protestants, except it’s being told now, in the Internet Age on HBO. The science in Chernobyl is absolute garbage, but the Gothic elements (fear and dogma) are suitably effective; i.e., state critiques delivered by Western actors follow polemics of an end-stage Cold War that regurgitate neoliberal talking points by treating radiation as the mysterium tremendum:

History matters not, here. What matters is how seriously the cast and crew present their threat, and boy do they ever. When the doctors say the radioactive victims are not safe to be around, they really mean it. This fact is woefully undermined by the workers themselves never getting sick. But it still doesn’t matter because everyone is so grim. When you see an unhappy plant worker falling apart in their hands, it plays out like a zombie film. […]

This is a show that deals in absolutes—of impending, ceaseless doom. The victims rot, their symptoms accelerated and overblown; graphite is radioactive enough to burn the skin off a man’s hand through his protective glove (without damaging the glove). Any exposure to such a volatile source would probably be enough to kill someone outright. For me it doesn’t matter, though; it’s the thought—of immediate danger relative to an awesome power—that counts. That’s what the Gothic is all about.

[…] the exposure of the irradiated is treated like a contagion, a disease to catch. None of the victims are allowed to be touched, becoming objects of fear in and of themselves. While radiation doesn’t spread from victim to victim, the show embodies superstitions about radiation. These remain to this day even if, in the show, they are from a scientific standpoint highly anachronistic. “Tell the truth,” Legasov is told. Yet, the “truth” in Chernobyl is bedridden with boogeymen, nightmares and total ignorance.

The whole ordeal feels less like reality and more like a nuclear physicist’s worst nightmare. Nightmares generally take bits of reality and merge them with chaos. In this respect, Chernobyl is a real place and some of the events actually occurred; likewise, HBO’s verisimilitude lends an element of realism to what would otherwise be a retro-future straight out of Alien (the control room mirrors the walls of the M.U.T.H.U.R. chamber from that movie). But the likes of Stalker (1979) were filmed in the ruins of de-Stalinized Russia. They simply had to point a camera and shoot (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Chernobyl (2019) review,” 2019).

My understanding of anti-Soviet, Red Scare propaganda has clearly grown in the five years I first saw Chernobyl (and six years since I wrote the 2018 symposium, “All that We’re Told: In the Eternal Shadow (within Shadows) of the Hypernormal, Worldwide[19]“). When all’s said and done, we want to recognize patterns useful to speculative thinking while learning from others, including our former selves as something to learn from and critique (“Not great, not terrible.”).

Beyond just a single text like Chernobyl, The Abyss or past friends come and gone, take Sarkeesian’s adage merged with Gothic Communism and apply it to all aspects of your life: right now, as something to foster with your current friends responding creatively and collectively to the same media to reify your core values within the “Russian doll” code (a concentric code pushing Trojan Communist messages through all the usual counterfeits abjecting Red things in favor of American Liberalism’s red, white and blue).

Think critically (such as a medievalist would do) about everything around you regarding intertextual patterns and ideas. Mix, match, fuse and blend whatever’s on hand, using whatever “sutures” you prefer that “do the trick.” Just know that whatever you consume, keeping with the seminal/childbirth metaphors, flavors the jizz/shapes the fetus. It can be anything regarding media, mentalities, styles or people. For us, this means recruiting people from all walks sharing common cause and ground if not casual interests: total liberation, post-scarcity. That includes a goth/gay identical twin like me living in what I previously described as “Merlin’s[20] tower,” but also thanks to the Internet can expand class and culture warriors to anyone who wants in and is able, in some shape or form, to speak as one against Capitalism and the state (a “grass roots” Gothic that uproots its middle-class origins). That’s literally what intersectional solidarity is: an untraditional foundation, barbarism and hereditary poetic lineage of workers (and nature) versus the state’s traditional (nuclear and heteronormative) familial relations/deep-rooted, addictive need to conquer everything inside (and its class traitors of all walks, from token doms and cold-blooded bounty hunters to unscrupulous shysters).

In a conservative sense, we are biting the hand that feeds; but in a progressive mindset, requires we set terms and conditions—demands—to those who wrong us: the state holding us hostage while stealing from us. Structures aren’t people, but they do pertain to them, as well as their chronic, cramping tensions—their hubris and humility—providing grounding emotional elements to intersect and perform, should we have to. The Gothic, as such, specializes in extreme, high-intensity emotional turmoil/dysfunction in theatrical forms that speak to socio-material conditions: the castle walls breached, the body walls opened, the draconian agent or benefactor manning or passing through these portals, atriums, valves (the Gothic castle a crude, “belly of the beast” morphological statement, in that respect)—all constitute performative roles and tableaux commenting on reality between onstage and off. The collective aim is to confront trauma as a mythologized source and cause; i.e., synthesize emotional and Gothic intelligence (meaning growth) and class cultural awareness through an unconventional approach to convention (which is primarily what the Gothic is made from; re: fetishes and clichés): likeness that are just a little off, even if that’s through context (which requires an invigilator).

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

Capital needs life to exploit, generally through sex work as fetishized to serve profit; i.e., as Volume Zero describes, “an absence of material conditions amounting to praxial invisibility” insofar as “the survival of neoliberalism hinges on the neoliberal’s ability to remain invisible” (source). To that, people don’t wear obvious uniforms during civil wars, but do wear loud uniforms during the allegory of class and culture war swept up in capital:

Canonical media is historically-materially vindictive towards, and exploitative of, sex workers who don’t have control over their own bodies (which obviously has shifted somewhat in the Internet Age—a fact we will interrogate much more in Volume Three). During canonical instruction (we’ll consider iconoclastic sex work too, of course), the expected victims are targeted, marked and yoked ahead of time—like a lamb to the slaughter but treated as a kind of opiate for the masses. A “tasty cake” from head to toe and bound with invisible bonds (dogma and material conditions), the sex worker is fetishized against their will to cater to market forces dehumanizing them, or the worker as sexualized for similar dimorphic reasons that suit the state’s profit motive. As we shall see, any attempt to change the structure must occur within it (an absence of material conditions amounting to praxial invisibility). Beyond normalized sex work through basic, off-canvas prostitution, monsters fulfill a canonical role as sexualized “punching bags” (ibid.).

the signs are there if you know where to look. False flags are a classic problem. Meaning our flag is hiding in plain sight. Sometimes, it’s an Amazonian dragoon’s red dress (or thong, above); others, it’s flag from the queer rainbow waved to pick up stowaways and vagrants eager to wage war however we can, when we can. To this, there isn’t a clock on trauma, but the clock for state shift is ticking. As such we must let nothing come between us and the things we enjoy as an outlet and avenue for healthy societal change.

As I’ve hopefully conveyed, this requires a maturity of expression amid a mode of expression where the war is both fought, policed and drained of subject; i.e., the apple something to eat, but also wear and fuck, perform and flaunt. Regardless of how this happens, we still have to hunt our goals down, Red-October-style, through tired, endless war stories taken from a thorough rolodex/playlist of sick[21] beats. As I’ve explained, this can be from the academic or non-academic graveyard of our pasts lives—people like Hannah-Freya, Cuwu or Autumn Ivy as gradients to a fractal-recursive splintering of Communism in Gothic media, but also said media itself as we’ve consumed it: together as something to write about, have sex to, or otherwise relate to each other as imperfect comrades fighting the true evil empire. “The pearly castles are the worst,” meaning the ones that looks good and champions Red Scare, but stink of genocide, corruption, arrested development[22] and hypocrisy that would make Stalin blush. Rebellion is about sacrifice—not of our actual lives (not if we can help it, anyways) but our illusions of safety and total power as we use Gothic poetics to give others more disadvantage a chance to speak, mid-“torture.”

But our torturing of the quarry is, itself, a paradox; i.e., we have to flush them out by frightening the state, showing the latter what it views and treats as alien: ourselves as human, using our labor to endorse a world that values said labor in ways that people regularly consume and learn from. Marx is already a household name; we simply have to camp his ghost to expand the bailiwick. Doing so is less about holding the state accountable by challenging its bigotries and more about dismantling it, because we’re taking our power back; i.e., something the state a) has no valid or logical claim to, and b) is terminally invested in causing harm through our labor as something to abuse—our false stewards, our compelled employers, our gods and masters, our overlords. Their fear and alarm regarding us is far better for us than their satisfaction, because—while the latter gradually leads to total collapse and decay of a larger organism succumbing to slow death—genocide, mass exploitation and sudden death for workers is no accident; it’s systemic, happening all the time. So while the state can’t live without us, we can very much live without it.

(source: Stephen Coles’ “‘U.S.A. Surpasses All The Genocide Records!’ Poster and Fact Sheet,” 2016)

In the absence of obvious reds—in the presence of old black-and-white photographs telling us to make friends and seize the day ourselves—these proverbial dead poets, however imperfect, out-of-touch or unable to sing a note (I’m looking at you, Yoko![23])—are pointing us to the future friendships we could have ourselves. As such, we’ll paint the town red, next—with our friends-in-struggle! Onto part three (which I had to divide in two, so: “‘With a Little Help from My Friends’; or, Out of this World: Opening and part one, ‘What Are Rebellion, Rebels, and Why (feat. Amazons and Witches)?'”).

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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). To learn more about Persephone’s academic/activist work and larger portfolio, go to her About the Author page. To purchase illustrated or written material from Persephone (thus support the work she does), please refer to her commissions page for more information. Any money Persephone earns through commissions goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. Likewise, Persephone accepts donations for the project, which you can send directly to her PayPal,  Ko-Fi, Patreon or CashApp. Every bit helps!

Footnotes

[1] When I shyly replied, “…Two?” Cuwu’s silent gasp of alarm (and slight nervous excitement) said it all. Turns out, weed can make you question your own existence by experiencing unreality as a medical symptom! That was a fun night! Luckily I had my Ariadne to guide me out of the labyrinth…and fuck me outside, on the island of Naxos—all without killing any poor minotaur (such monsters are generally metaphors for challenges that capital and Imperialism treat unironically as threats to serve profit; i.e., monstrous-feminine foils trapped inside violent, copaganda puzzles, but more on that in a bit).

[69] Per Capitalist Realism, Terminator‘s in-house music (“Photoplay” and “Burning in the Third Degree,” 1984)—in true hauntological/mise-en-abyme fashion—has a female voice (the Gothic heroine formulaic) singing about being trapped: in a photograph story where they’re overwhelmed with conflicting emotions of survival (fight or fight, freeze or fawn, protection and provision, etc) while being hunted; it’s very postpunk (“disco in disguise”) and Gothic—i.e., trapped in the dance hall with Dracula the impostor/infiltrator (“hey, that guy didn’t pay!”): what Volume One calls “police-light pareidolia,” merging disco lights with police lights and nuclear sirens; i.e., American as nuclear cops bringing rise to a new fascist world order before the bombs drop (“The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind has raged for decades, but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present. Tonight.”). Such a haze might seem bizarre, but—per the Gothic’s big emotions—is doing a trick similar to T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1921): describing modern life (city life) as a rising new existence out of war with new technologies: that of women’s perspective in the city when threatened by bad-faith men standing impatiently on ceremony (“the gentleman carbuncular”).

Except The Terminator is, in equal hauntological fashion, evolving—regressing under neoliberal Capitalism’s shadow of nuclear war romanced through technophobic cyberpunk superimposed, shadow-like, over a quotidian L.A. nightlife/city space; i.e., as haunted by vague imitations of life and death coming from internal/external sources and conflicts. As such, the heroine (Sarah and the audience to varying degrees) holds out for a hero but feels creeped out by everything and everyone—fight or fight, in short (a criminal hauntology that we’ll explore more in Volume Three). All occur on a shared stage where women go and put on similar clothes (adopt similar hairstyles) while watched by panoptic/myopic state eyes on the hunter’s map: calculated risk as, in a pre-Internet age, coming with pre-Internet concerns for sex workers (women)—”imitation” (assassination) by physical contact, once visually acquired as the target.

In turn, the affect is puts “terror” and horror” in quotes, but also inside a Russian doll: the dark copy of L.A. disassociates per a mental exercise common to female Gothic readership; i.e., regressing into a Gothic chronotope where the medieval-grade class of power abuse (“dynastic primacy and hereditary rites”) is accurately expressed through abstraction that points to the ghost of the counterfeit as updated but oscillating between different legends and true crimes morphing horribly through a shared shadow zone. Per Gothic experience as something to view outside itself (“phenomenology”), Sarah is the stand-in woman (“the double,” in theatre terms) for the audience wanting to be the good girl but haunted by the trauma of other dead (thus past) women* tied to settler-colonial issues linked to profit (the casualties of the privileged relative to that system, pointing to dead white indentured servants; re: Howard Zinn). All raise a curious paradox: impostor syndrome and internalized bigotry, aka mirror syndrome. Sarah is our Catherine Moorland, essentially finding herself in a liminal space indicative of her own wide consumption habits: the Western, horror movies, spy dramas/romances, and a 24-hour news cycle (that she doesn’t want or like to watch: “You’re dead, honey!”).

*The imaginary/fictional nature of fiction doesn’t matter if it points to non-fiction (doesn’t require “ray guns” for proof, Dr. Silbermann). In turn, biography threatens auto-biography regarding genocide as normally experienced by “the other side”; i.e., the Global South being the North’s vision of Hell-on-Earth brought to them during the Imperial Boomerang’s return home—an apocalypse/revelation’s fatal vision: a death-omen skeleton both trapped inside us, wanting to scream, and pulled out of us, rubber-hose-style, to belt out an orgasmic “death” wail. It might seem odd, except it speaks to our universal alienation, fetishizing and sexualization under capital, which all but require the monstrous-feminine to protect themselves from rape by dressing it up as deathly jouissance; i.e., “Help, help, I’m being ‘raped’ and I’m ‘dead’ at the same time!” It constitutes a kind of perverse rape prevention theatre which others will be fearful of and fascinated towards (re: C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain and investigating tigers and spirits in the other room, which—per the Gothic—is using the bloodcurdling screams of “dying” women). Such a palliative Numinous maximizes investigation unto self-interest regarding psychosexual theatre (and just sex in general, if we’re all honest) as highly entertaining (thus persuasive) education; i.e., the testament of the Bleeding Nun, which Sarah’s bones sing to and from in turn (our bad game of telephone): “The little bombs we drop all lead back to the Big One [the spectre of Caesar stabbed to death] when the fat lady sings!” It’s less Red Scare (see any Russians here?) and more (admittedly white-savior) anti-nuke propaganda targeting the middle-class as most able to impact things; i.e., as the usual gatekeepers of capital being selfishly incentivized through rape fantasy to avoid ignominious death. Well played, Cameron. “Not great, not terrible.” But good job, home slice. 

This begs an important question: If you’re trying to change but still figuring things out on a half-real (thus half-false) stage filled with potential bad actors, are you being honest with yourself? The liar’s paradox states that the sentence isn’t true while being true; so Cameron’s disco is equally true while being false, fabricated. So is the Gothic, hence castle-narrative, hence ludo-Gothic BDSM. Sarah is torn between different sides of a divided self that may or may not describe her—but also faced with possible futures (what happens if she takes one guy home versus another) indicative of past atrocities at home and abroad relative to American police abuse across space and time: the terminator is our animal man both stinking and primal (“made with real panther parts”), foreign (a disguised version of the “Russian spy” Cold War trope, the German spy), and made metal like a posthuman robocop armed to the teeth; i.e., the walking castle-in-a-castle, wolf-in-“wolf’s”-clothing threatening foreign rape (the foreign plot) at home, scapegoating systemic police issues in a current police state projected onto the screen as much by the audience as the other way around!

All of it regresses to a false, bad childhood that speaks truth through paradox, one where the kids—appearing to have grown up—are seemingly up to no good/not behaving as they should; i.e., playing with dead things (and guns) during moral panic/witch hunts. The reality, here, is these feelings are exactly how capital wants people to feel/behave; i.e., off-balance, trapped in a canceled future, “high” with a menticidal fear from waves of terror conditioning them to become Amazons and damsels for the state: of displaced, disguised police forces they pay to deal with during canonical calculated risk. In turn, it’s addictive because we feel out of control in a world operated by cruel puppet masters (the bourgeoisie) using us for their own greedy ends, all but requiring us to liberate ourselves (and our monstrous threatres) from their spurious (false) monopoly of terror by seizing control of the nightmare while inside it; i.e., a lucid dream while awake that changes the external socio-material conditions that lead to its tell-tale feelings on all fronts: ludo-Gothic BDSM developing Gothic Communism as a similarly ergodic form of motion inside the chronotope (no outside of the text): liminal, concentric, anisotropic, mise-en-abyme, et al—all through magical assembly, confusion of the senses, selective absorption during a Song of Infinity!

Such rebellious dreaming’s reclamation of the Amazon (I mean, just look at Sarah’s queenly lion mane, contemplating armed resistance before taking a shower, only to make up her mind after fucking cute-boy Reese to humanize him and toughen her [mind and pussy] up), as The Terminator shows us, becomes something to endlessly revisit (fan videos, sequels, remakes, adaptations, etc) through dreams that speak to the cyclical nature of history as historical-material, influencing our literal dreams (“Their defense grid was smashed! We’d won! Taking out Connor then would make no difference! Skynet had to wipe out* his entire existence!”) that play with the taboo social (feelings: kill cops being a guilty but valid desire; i.e., kill our jailors presenting as false protectors actually serving the state as robots-in-the-flesh) and material factors that children are classically taught to do—with dolls (tea time for the girls and action figures for the boys, and GNC variants of emergent gameplay for the fags)—except we’re the dolls on a half-real, chessboard-esque stage (avatars, in videoludic parlance, the magic circle a half-real one). Per the pedagogy of the oppressed, similarity occurs amid difference, straight people experiencing fatal nostalgia, too; they just feel it differently than queer people as alien and fetish, hunted themselves (with cis-het women classically being monstrous-feminine [“woman is other”] enemies to the state; i.e., like Sarah is to Skynet).

*Killing rebellion by killing the mother of his enemy; i.e., killing Medusa as antithetical to state continuation/daily operations. The idea had to die, except killing Medusa is impossible (the state needs a scapegoat to exist and workers/natures to exploit), demanding a forever retro-future war inside the minds of the public that cannot be stopped, only able to cancel Communist futures by keeping potential actors lying in state, fighting forever during an admittedly white-savior plot. Again, just like Lucas, Cameron does this—and Radcliffe did this—while illustrating the problem (Capitalism) as a playground (a Gothic castle) to pacify curious and fearful workers with. We gotta take the war to the streets of imagination in ways they couldn’t: by threatening profit through iconoclasm to alter the Superstructure (thus the Base) in a proletarian direction; i.e., praxial synthesis as protective of workers, nature and the environment and liberatory towards sex work relative to the dialectic of the alien. Targeting the minds of the future youth through Gothic play is the simplest solution to an incredibly complex, hypermassive (normal, real, etc) problem. Targeting the minds of the future youth through Gothic play is the simplest solution to an incredibly complex, hypermassive (normal, real, etc) problem: by teaching future players (usually boys) to play nice in emergent, de facto (extracurricular) forms of good praxis synthesized (creative success); i.e., don’t rape and kill everything you see, you stupid little fucks (teaching children, I’ve discovered, is fun precisely because it’s wicked)!

[2] Re, Castricano:

Although some critics continue to disavow the Gothic as being subliterary and appealing only to the puerile imagination—Fredric Jameson refers to the Gothic as “that boring and exhausted paradigm” [what a dork]—others, such as Anne Williams, claim that the genre not only remains very much alive but is especially vital in its evocation of the “undead,” an ontologically ambiguous figure which has been the focus of so much critical attention that another critic, Slavoj Zizek, felt compelled to call the return of the living dead “the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture”‘ (source).

Granted, Zizek was a wuss who played the “most dangerous intellectual,” but ultimately sided with state power regarding Israel (thus America) vs Palestine (from Volume One):

When Zizek writes, “We can and should unconditionally support Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorist attacks” (source: “The Real Dividing Line in Israel-Palestine,” 2023), he’s essentially apologizing for the state model and its time-tested monopolies on terror and violence; specifically by endorsing Israel, he’s defending a fundamentally settler-colonial project, akin to supporting the Nazi regime’s right to exist while invading Poland but updated through modern-day proxy-war maneuvers (though the WW2-era US certainly expected Nazi Germany to abolish the elite’s enemies in Russia) [source].

We must be braver than that when baring it all ourselves. We can say it with camp (e.g., Bad Lip Reading’s “A Bad Lip Reading of Game of Thrones” [2014]: “I, sir, am the evil studmuffin!”), or as facts; but it must be said in some shape or form that doesn’t preclude irony as a proletarian function.

[3] Rehashing the gypsy’s dance from Lewis’ The Monk, it must be said.

[4] Allegedly. Re: “As attributed to Pappus (4th century AD) and Plutarch (c. 46-120 AD) in Sherman K. Stein’s Archimedes: What Did He Do Besides Cry Eureka? (1999)” (source: Today in Science). Note how size (for all you insecure “lever”-havers, out there) doesn’t matter. Fulcrum does! Labor is a tremendous fulcrum, especially sexual labor (capital sexualizes everything) as a means of engaging with those who will historically-materially seek it out as an opiate. Potential convents, easy pickings.

[5] Few things are so instinctively persuasive as sex is: an educational device (many of the Commies I know were persuaded in that direction by sex—myself* included; even in ace forms, nudism allows people to express and relate to “trauma” as something to put in quotes (thus interrogate and negotiation for a pedagogy of the oppressed inside the self-same shadow zone); i.e., our Aegis a mirror-like booty we take back to freeze our enemies (and playfully tease/seduce our friends) with!

*Zeuhl showed me the little rebellious queer inside myself by first feeling safe enough to sleep with me, only to wake up something more rebellious than they were (despite hilariously calling themselves “the Red Bun,” they didn’t have the gumption to take part in something more visibly rebellious. Their loss, and good riddance); i.e., by lending me not just Foucault’s A History of Sexuality or Butler’s Gender Trouble but Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1968].

[6] Something Zeuhl and I tried once; frankly fucking to metal/videogame music (e.g., Metaltool’s “Mega Man X3 – Opening Stage,” 2012) is a lot more effective: it at least carries the necessary energy and beat, even if it often sounds rather goofy in its own right (Zeuhl and I both smiled like total dumbasses while we fucked to Turrican II’s “Traps,” 1991. But much to my delight, they especially loved Amiga chiptunes regardless of what we were up to, and for good or ill, I cannot listen to that music now without their beautiful, silly ghost haunting me and the music).

[7] Camp doubles canon to empower workers, not the state; i.e., riffing on old musical principles to speak less to a “universal language” (as Major/minor scales and chords are a Western invention) but through a universal struggle: liberation. Achieving it requires employing Zizek’s notion of universal application to reclaim monstrous language in humanizing ways; i.e., that seize the means of monstrous production and reunite us with all alienated things as the Gothic does: through the feelings (and expression) of alienation-made-fetish. The way out of Hell is through Hell as something to transform into our pandemonium using our Satanic poetics/darkness visible. Accuracy isn’t really the point, but provocation (“Was it over when the German’s bombed Pearl Harbor?” / “Germans?” “Forget it, he’s rolling!”)

Also, the way to the brain is—suitably enough—medievally evoked through the ear as the portal to insert poison, honey (or poisoned honey, etc) as sound-like: the siren song a sexual earworm that can—unlike Claudius pouring poison into Hamlet’s father’s ear (“a murder most foul”)—foment the seeds to rebellion that, like a ghost of King Duncan made hella gay, declare: “I have begun to plant thee and will labor / To make thee full of growing” (source).

So camp away, my lovelies! Make Capitalism your bitch by playing with the ghost of the counterfeit (the failure to do so being at your own peril; e.g., The Babadook [2014]: “Do you wanna die?”). Capitalism thrives on selling what it can’t hide, whose reifying is dualistic, thus able to thwart monopolies that bully the usual oracles (often women and children, but also GNC people and other minorities) into silence; i.e., punching down at Cassandra, singing orgasmically because she’s in pain, but also rapture. We don’t want to unironically martyr ourselves, but will “pay the price,” partaking in a little Gothic masochism (fucking the pussy sore) to bend your ear and catch you eye: “Who is that weirdo over there and why are they… screaming? Moaning? Waving a funny red book as they do. Let’s go check it out!” It worked for Lenin, it can work for us.

To prevent us harming those tied to us that we care about, we have to face the monster inside ourselves as informed by historical-materialism—specifically socio-material conditions that lead us to become possessed (in the mother’s case) with a fearsome, unironic variant of the alien inside the house (announced by Red Scare as literally an evil book to burn); i.e., the foreign plot relayed by useful idiots: fascists. The mom in The Babadook is a Nazi mom who burns children’s literature, then eats her own kid! All kidding aside, you can’t get away from the spectres of Marx and Caesar anymore than you can the Babadook; instead you gotta—and I say this with all the irony* I can—make them gay!

*Netflix esoterically choosing to list The Babadook under LGBTQ fiction, a left-field gaffe said community happily memed to death, but also embraced. Is the Babadook gay? He is now, mate (echoing Ridley Scott when being told there’s no atmosphere in space while making Alien—using the “stellar wind” to emulate the vital affect of a Gothic castle surrounded by stormy weather)!

[8] But, in our day-to-day lives, is used between people who feel just as alienated and fetishized, regardless of their station—their puppy-like pedigree. The idea is to regain some semblance of agency through ludo-Gothic BDSM: the ability to play and think as married in animalistic forms—the handler/groomer and the good girl or boy both looking for some lovin’ under state duress! This can be sex or something that stands in for sex as a reward for being good; e.g., Lenore in Castlevania collaring Hector and taking him for walkies (Persephone van der Waard’s “Sex in Castlevania, season 3,” 2020). Take it from me, Capitalism alienates and sexualizes everything. In turn, people are thoroughly embarrassed to come to sex workers as the classic arbiters of unlawful carnal knowledge, let alone ask them for sex, let alone sex that isn’t standard (thinking anal is somehow risqué when it’s really just the tip of the iceberg, cuties). The same idea applies to kink, fetish and BDSM at large. We all have appetites, but also boundaries. As such, it’s useful/vital to have shorthand language that a) people like, and b) communicates things in ways that represent us and our weird, oft-horny desires. This includes safe words and release words (“red light, green light”), but also jokes/memes: “Bonk, go to horny jail!” as relaid through the monstrous-feminine as an oft-domesticated “call of the wild.”

(artist: Danomil)

Such things marry the human (or humanoid/anthropomorphic) face as both endlessly expressive and completely frozen in codified forms (there’s also the uncanny valley and doll-like facemask, which extend to “somno” sex, living latex and other dehumanization fetish/sensory control therapies, but also “resting bitch face, below”), wherein media and mediator go hand-in-hand; i.e., as indiscrete. In the Gothic, this doesn’t preclude discussion with/of abject signifieds, given a place of recognition that becomes its own stage to make in small: the bathroom and toilet activities things to exhibit and watch for at cross purposes—for profit vs for workers. Under capital, abjecting the ghost of the counterfeit inside “women’s spaces” (the house, but especially the bathroom) works like a bad smell (use your imagination, there) that doesn’t stay inside the assigned compartment but travels elsewhere to notify people of a problem but also a release (again, use your imagination, you sickos). The bedroom and bathroom overlap during psychosexual liminal expression; i.e., a call of the wild, but also of nature (sex and shit).

[Jadis was a shitty person with a phenomenal resting bitch face, which I loved and painted. Before sex, they’d say to me in their deep orc voice (their lower incisors jutting from a medical condition they referred to as “orc teeth”): “So, we doing this?” In the absence of harm, a Destroyer persona can be incredibly fascinating (re: Sontag) and endearing (which is why I’ve immortalized Jadis’ semi-friendly likeness in my work). While Jadis in the flesh wasn’t up to the task, they couldn’t spoil resting bitch face or Amazons for me; indeed, I love the good ones even more!]

Through language and its materials, such things speak war-like to social-sexual kinks, fetishes and/or BDSM as essentially social as certain activities are biological—food and its result (shit—there I said it!) as something to confront in monstrous-feminine forms yielding multiple truths all at once: beings forced to identify as women/monstrous-feminine are fetishized in ways that make them feel less-than-human (“like shit”) precisely because they shit as something to, per the process of abjection, feel fear and fascination towards; i.e., as an alien sex object that says different things with and regarding such biological processes during ludo-Gothic BDSM as a social-sexual process. This requires things normally black-and-white to mix to forbidden degrees anathema to capital save as canonical porn. Yet another thing to camp in our own work!

(artist: Blxxd Bunny)

While literal shit remains a “yuck” for me, one I won’t exhibit in this book, I also acknowledge that its inclusion in the broader spectrum of performance art/sex work is vital. The same idea also applies to any biological function as having a sex-positive artistic potential to comment on social-sexual issues that overlap with our biological side as collectively policed by capital; i.e., things that go into and out of our bodies; e.g., urine, semen, and pretty much anything else you can think of that normally comes out of a healthy asshole or genitals (outgoing tissue and waste*) versus sex objects (sometimes the same elements—cum, to use one example I can exhibit without feeling grossed out); i.e., like body parts or likenesses thereof, including martial ones that retain a fatal, Destroyer cosmetic but not unironic (thus capitalistic) function.

*Literally canonized through camp with Monthy Python’s admittedly transgressive “Every Sperm Is Sacred” (1983); i.e., Catholic satire yielding, through a Protestant ethic, the potential to unironically stereotype the very group of people historically used by the British to develop settler colonialism (re: Livia Gershon’s “Britain’s Blueprint for Colonialism: Made in Ireland,” 2022). Reclaiming Ireland is, like any colonized group, a messy ordeal (re: Clare, from The Nightingale [2018]: “I’m not English, I’m Ireland! [switching to Gaelic] To the devil’s house with all English people, every mother’s son of them! May the pox disfigure them! May the plague consume them! Long live Ireland!” source). To say to our oppressors, “I’m still here, white man!” In both, it becomes a song (an oral tradition) written down (onscreen, in media). Unironic merchants of death must be met with ironic imports/exports walking a tightrope; e.g., Abijah Fowler from Blue Eye Samurai [2023] being the usual jester vice character prompting Irish revenge by “bettering the instruction” in ways, onstage, that speak to state power’s habitual abuses. We’re not rooting for the bad guy but the pedagogy of the oppressed as forced, at times, into self-predation.

In turn, our basic needs extend to communication about our basic needs: to needing to go to the bathroom, kitchen or den/game room as something to say (which, if you’ve ever “had to go,” mid-sex, remains a useful skill to communicate* to your partner). Surrendering power is generally discouraged by state dogma, often to the enforcer’s detriment (if you don’t say you need to shit, you’ll shit your pants). This switches from going to a place to meet a biological need to going to a place to meet a social need regarding a biological need; i.e., needing to go onstage and play with things; i.e., to work through and understand bias as something to overcome; e.g., the black cock as zombie-like, thus rotting and fecal-esque in settler-colonial rhetoric, which can be subverted neatly and swiftly by a) simply holding it in your hands, smelling it, and tasting it; and b) invigilating that (above)—all to validate and humanize the toy as an extension of the person it’s attached to or associated with as abjectly “toy-like” under capital (concepts we’ll unpack far more in Volume Two, part two). Per Gothic Communism, it becomes creatively superpowered—an alter ego whose black mask is worn with pride!

*Often as a crude joke (“I gotta take a dump/a shit!”) versus more cutesy forms (“I have to poop!”) as something to play with unto itself; e.g., the pillow princess talking like a sailor and vice versa (with Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt [2010] utterly roasting anime tropes and weird canonical nerds fanboying unironically over moe-style characters like Sailor Moon‘s Usagi Tsukino). And yes, this likewise yields caretaker functions; i.e., having an animalized language with (at times) euphorically humiliating elements: “Aw, good girl! Did you make a mess! So naughty! Do you feel better! Yes you do!” Everything goes both ways.

[Source, collage: Articwolf0418. Liberation is a liminal affair, meaning its expression generally conveys mid-exploitation through psychosexual allegory—re [from Volume One]: Doki Doki Literature Club [2014] as furious with the player and tormenting them with an uncanny dating sim normally aimed at teenage boys who grow into misogynistic young-to-old men. The same warped-nostalgia schtick works to Panty and Stocking’s mutual advantage, camping the classic [and pedophile-adjacent] transformation anime scene by turning it into a transgressive pole dance/strip tease weaponized with action-movie tropes: “dualies” and a katana (more jabs at gamer culture). Like Lewis, Romero or Jennifer Kent’s iconoclasm, etc—it’s meant to make us uncomfortable to get us to think.]

This might all seem backwards and foolish, but rest assured, it will change your life for the better! Capital’s problems are legion, teaching people to solve them with violence—i.e., to treat each other as problems to solve—with a hammer surrounded by nails. The whole situation is completely abject, requiring the flexibility of ludo-Gothic BDSM’s “violence” to procure any solution to any question that comes up in good faith: “Do girls pee from their butts?” No, little man, they do not—but they do shit! In similar fashion, submission to such dogma can be met with complete and utter sarcasm. Point-in-fact, we drool and jump, dog-like, at the opportunity! E.g., like Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan (2006) wanting to be chained to the radiator to better her captor’s instruction (in a meta sense, of course)! Such realities aren’t so simple as comedy or drama, though. As the film communicates, Ricci’s character is guided by trauma as something to survive and express during calculated risk as—for those still figuring it out—sometimes involving others against their will: a “black comedy” if you will that often has literal, overt BDSM characteristics engaging between white women and people of color (a smaller spectrum of psychosexual violent exchange) as diametrically monstrous-feminine under Pax Americana (a larger spectrum of psychosexual violent exchange). It must be camped, which is never a small, easy (or clean) feat!

[9] (from the glossary):

the creation of sexual difference

In other words, while women are not considered full subjects, society itself could not function without their contributions. Irigaray ultimately states that Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through her.

Based on this analysis, Irigaray says that sexual difference does not exist. True sexual difference would require that men and women are equally able to achieve subjectivity. As is, Irigaray believes that men are subjects (e.g., self-conscious, self-same entities) and women are “the other” of these subjects (e.g., the non-subjective, supporting matter). Only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male (source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

This applies not just to female parties or cis women, though (Beauvoir’s dated and exclusionary “woman is other”), but all of nature as monstrous-feminine harvested by Cartesian forces to different degrees/extremes (fostering tokenism, classically by white middle-class cis women—from Radcliffe to Beauvoir to Carter). Challenging capital requires intersectional solidarity against TERFs, SWERFs, afrocentrism, homonormativity and other such class betrayals routinely encouraged by capital’s assimilation fantasies yielding “Judas exchanges”: selling out one’s comrades for “thirty pieces of silver.” There’s a special rung in Hell for people who do that—reminding them such fantasies were administered by the elite in bad faith, making them Faustian bargains.

[10] “This is a twist on Oliver Hazard Perry’s words after a naval battle: ‘We have met the enemy, and they are ours.’ The updated version was first used in the comic strip ‘Pogo,’ by Walt Kelly, in the 1960s and referred to the turmoil caused by the Vietnam War (source: Dictionary.com).

[11] As Sam Reiner writes in “‘Young, Dumb, and Full of Cum’: Point Break’s Homoerotic Haze in Five Acts” (2009):

Discussions of homoeroticism in action cinema, especially of the 1980s and 1990s, frequently assume a troubled tone. The pronounced homoeroticism of these texts—from their display of male bodies to the dynamism of the camera—have led to reductive assertions that erotic percolations are indicators of latent queer orientations or activities. Rather than probing the ambiguity of these text, approaches often default to pop-analysis, aligning closely with Quentin Tarantino’s Sid in Sleep with Me (Rory Kelly, 1994), who claims “What is Top Gun? You think it’s a story about a bunch of fighter pilots…It is a story about a man’s struggle with his own homosexuality.”

This isn’t to say that these verdicts are misplaced or unsubstantiated; both Patrick Schuckmann (1998) and Yvonne Tasker (1993) emphasize the consistent centrality of homoeroticism in the history of the action genre. However, Tania Modleski, in direct response to Tarantino’s accusative interpretation, discourages the conflation of homoerotic and homosexual (2007), advocating a return to the ambiguous potential that homoeroticism elicits. It is within this frame that I revisit Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break and reconsider the boundaries and bonds of Johnny Utah’s (Keanu Reeves) homoerotic desire (source).

Similar to my earlier arguments about the monstrous-feminine (re: Black Snake Moan), such performative ambiguity isn’t to leave all groups dazed and confused, but a cryptonymic disguise mechanism and uncanny (deft) ability to express the complicated realities of queerness (which would be completely alien to a cis-het, rape-apologist, foot fetishist like Tarantino) which those “in the know” will “get” and those who don’t throwing their hands up in the air (outing themselves as bigots for us to navigate around inside the same shared space). Forget Point Break, then—it’s the Gothic in a nutshell!

Also, small side-note about Keanu Reeves (who Zeuhl, ever the twink enthusiast, was absolutely boy-crazy about): The guy might have transitioned to action-man Hollywood (he’s an excellent action star, but also martial arts movie director, to be fair); his genderqueer past—expressed most nakedly in My Own Private Idaho (1991) as speaking to the complicated, masque-ball reality that queer people have always lived in, on and offstage: one, as alienated from each other and watched by the Straights like hawks; and two, forced to copulate (in any sense of the word) through code that is likewise scrutinized by bad-faith allies who look like good-faith allies. If they’re confused, we’re in control! We have to be or we won’t survive (no hard feelings).

[12] Coffey’s war haze representing a drug addict fueled by war fervor akin to Willard’s own smoke-on-the-water psychosis (next page): the enemy is the drug he endlessly seeks, killing himself in the process; i.e., the Roman fool falling on his sword as borrowed from echoes of Caesar ad infinitum. Like Macbeth, Coffey’s very much out of control, “high on his own supply” stemming from older forms of Imperialism (empire and the Divine Right of Kings) surviving into neoliberal Capitalism. Hint: This is a metaphor for Capitalism killing itself on a planetary scale.

[13] Sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally, sometimes both.

[14] I’m always active. For example, I was working on this manuscript all week, when Bay left to go see a friend; when I looked up, suddenly a week had gone by and Bay was back! Talking about it with them, I likened the whole experience as a Renaissance girl would: through a story. As such, I recounted an imaginary analog to what actually transpired: Bay greets me, painting my own Sistine Chapel, close to the ceiling while they go off to have an adventure somewhere; they come back, a week later—dressed in vacation clothes, wearing sunglasses, and carrying bags of goodies under each arm—to find me still at all it. I look down at my towering scaffold to greet them, tail wagging: “Still painting, love?” they ask. “Yeah!” I call down. Then I descend and we fuck on the floor. The end!

[15] There’s no vertical hierarchy in polyamory but material advantage still makes unequal power something to negotiate between two or more parties (which so often happens under Capitalism, generally favoring the historically privileged group as having the money to work with, versus the historically disadvantaged group having the sex/wherewithal to navigate such alliances with greater nuance; i.e., marriage dramas).

[16] There is no final boss except the state; i.e., Capitalism is the final boss, the devil convincing the world he doesn’t exist.

[17] With Cameron’s submerged castle the usual sort authored by a formerly middle-class guy with “fuck you” money making himself the center of the universe; or as Raškauskienė again writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings, re: “Critics have often remarked on the choice of the exotic, the foreign, the barbaric as the background for and source of Gothic thrills. In other words, the Gothic castle is the world of the Numinous” (source). You go to dark places to say dark things, but per Milton, they aren’t insubstantial at all; they are very much grounded in dialectical materialism.

[18] In effect inverting Cameron’s Abyss disrobing trick.

[19] The original abstract: “In response to Adam Curtis’ HyperNormalization (2016), this symposium discusses hypernormality in the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic (1971) and Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation (2014). It aims to examine how Gothic can be detached from the dated past, its subsequent effect on a particular space coming from elsewhere—from indeterminate or unorthodox origins, like the future or the cold vacuum of space” (source). The paper’s focus was on spaces to be explored:

In Gothic stories, residences are built around trauma as hidden, rendering them ambiguous by virtue of what affect is projected outward, from within. In Roadside Picnic and Annihilation, everything is built around alien zones. These spread outward, affecting a residence habitually described as healthy, stable, or heroic, even when it is not. Whatever truth to be had is found by trespassing into these forbidden territories. This is not done without a fair amount of dread (ibid.)

[20] I.e., free to pursue whatever I wish, but a daunting task and a lonely one for someone bred on medieval Romances; re: the Lady of Shallot as born and bred to chase “Camelot,” come hell or high water—which, in my case, led me straight into Jadis’ big burly arms after Zeuhl left me for (in their words) “an old flame in England.”

[21] Note the duality of language, here; i.e., generally through jargon and slang but also Gothic poetics, the cramming of a synonym and antonym into the same word. Similar to puns and idioms, it reflects a common, ordinary function to parlance that, in the Gothic, can get very funny and very weird very quickly.

[22] Re: Star Wars‘ harmful, capitalist fixation on monomyth refrains that hold Communist out of sight, out of mind; i.e., teasing the ghost of the counterfeit to make as much money as possible for the usual Pygmalions unwilling to break the bank to donate intelligently or equally to the cause.

[23] From DJ Gerry from Starlight Music’s “John Lennon & Chuck Berry’s Duet Was Destroyed by Yoko Ono’s Screaming” (2022). All kidding aside, inside of whining about someone screaming ‘ruining’ a performance (in my opinion, her weird-ass undulating [and Chuck Berry’s shocked expression] is the best part of the video), maybe we should ask why she’s screaming? I.e., by actually listening to Medusa instead of scapegoating her to idolize a man who frankly had his heart in the right place but his head up his own ass. Just a thought.

I’m current in the midst of writing a book and might post chapters of it on my website. If I do, I will do so through posts like these.