Apocalypse Doula

exploring the borderlands between creator and creation

Apocalypse Doula is a creative experiment hosted on Instagram that plays with form, genre, and selfie culture, reclaiming social media as a space for artistic and intellectual inquiry. By centering the idiosyncratic, subjective experience of the artist-scholar in the creation of their work, Petra Salazar pushes back against the lingering influence of New Criticism—the academic impulse to sterilize textual analysis, stripping it of the messiness, biases, and contradictions of the creator’s life. This refusal of complexity fosters a puritanical romantic ideal, one that often becomes weaponized in the name of moral and aesthetic purity.

This project subverts social media’s role as a curated archive of thought and image, instead using the platform to provoke engagement with self-reflection, trauma, inheritance, authenticity, identity performance, guerrilla publishing, the undercommons, and alternative learning communities. Apocalypse Doula embraces contradiction, treating the digital landscape as both a seedy and sacred confessional and a wholesome community space for theatrical busking

and hustling wares.—an open-ended, ever-evolving autohistoria-teoría.

Neither product nor brand, Apocalypse Doula is a zine, a corrido, a romcom. It is a coyote pedagogy that delights in process over perfection, rupture over resolution—an invitation to disrupt, to witness, to create, to play.