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“!
About the Author
Persephone van der Waard is the author of the multi-volume, non-profit book series, Sex Positivity—its art director, sole invigilator, illustrator and primary editor (the other co-writer/co-editor being Bay Ryan). Persephone has her independent PhD in Gothic poetics and ludo-Gothic BDSM (focusing on partially on Metroidvania), and is a MtF trans woman, anti-fascist, atheist/Satanist, poly/pan kinkster, erotic artist/pornographer and anarcho-Communist with two partners. Including multiple playmates/friends and collaborators, Persephone and her many muses work/play together on Sex Positivity and on her artwork at large as a sex-positive force. That being said, she still occasionally writes reviews, Gothic analyses, and interviews for fun on her old blog (and makes YouTube videos talking about politics). Any money Persephone earns through commissions or donations goes towards helping sex workers through the Sex Positivity project; i.e., by paying costs and funding shoots, therefore raising awareness. She takes payment on PayPal, Patreon, and CashApp, etc; all links are available on her Linktr.ee. Every bit helps!
Footnotes
[1] 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”).
