Chris Kraus: Seasonal, the protagonist of Hello, World?, is shaken and derailed when their longtime partner H. abandons them after they give up their fairly settled lives in Australia to move to the Netherlands, where he was born. After years of comfortable monogamy, H. decides that he is asexual, leaving Seasonal to figure out how to continue living as a sexual being. But this turns out to be a gift: Almost immediately, Seasonal is drawn to kink and specifically to domination. Seasonal is also an à clef character, and some of the experiences you write about you’ve also lived through. At what point did you realize that you’d write the book?

Anna Poletti: “Seasonal” was the pseudonym I used when I first joined dating apps—the name was a way of flagging myself as an Australian in Europe who didn’t know how to keep warm, and who was used to Christmas as a summer holiday. I have spent 20 years researching identity as a practice—something that is constructed socially rather than being an essence we express—and my main intellectual interest is in how different media technologies allow us to make different parts of ourselves tangible, to ourselves and others.

When I went on dating apps for the first time, I knew from my research that I was going to discover things about myself by doing new things like uploading pictures, writing a profile, and learning how to tell little stories about myself to strangers. I was meeting people in an environment that prioritized our identities as sexual beings seeking connection, and I had never done that before, having met my lovers and partners the old-fashioned way, in contexts where there was some other reason to talk and other things to talk about. It became clear to me very quickly that because dating apps center sexuality and romance, they are where a lot of people go to express the wishes of their sexual or romantic selves. I found myself amongst all these people dreaming and projecting and fantasizing in public. I was immediately intrigued by that. But it was clear to me that academic writing was not the best way to engage with what I was discovering. So I had to turn myself into a novelist to try and do justice to what I was finding out, and what I thought was interesting about it.

CK: Seasonal uses “they/them” pronouns, and I notice in your academic bio that you do as well. At what point did you adopt them, and what do they mean or change for you?

AP: The plot of the book is driven by Seasonal’s attempt to prise themself out of ways of being and living that they feel no longer help them. On the one hand, they are trying to change their relationship to a femininity that prides itself on facilitating people’s needs and experiences. On the other hand, they want a relationship to their sexuality that is not organized around rape culture. Seasonal wants a sexual life, and to them, the “they/them” pronoun is an important marker of that ambition. They want to be more open to the part of themself that wants men, and how it wants them. Seasonal hopes that being “they” will let them leave behind the elements of femininity that condemned them to a life of facilitating and fearing men. They are surprised to discover that some of the men they engage with have their own version of this struggle: how to contend with their desires for women, and how to contend with whatever they have been told masculinity is.

My use of “they/them” pronouns in my academic life was a strategic decision as much as it is a reflection of my androgyny. I heard casual queer-phobic talk from university staff about “young people” and their “gender stuff,” and it really bothered me. As a feminist and queer scholar, I felt it was important that the students who needed to could find me in the conservative world of Dutch academia. Changing my pronouns at work was a way to come out in that space and to make the point that the evolution of language in relation to gender was something I had stakes in: as a researcher, a teacher, and a person. As a writer, I am excited by how language evolves, and the “they/them” pronoun is particularly interesting to me for how it opens up an element of how we talk about personhood that was previously so easily locked down. Learning to write “they/them” was a really exciting part of writing the novel for me.

CK: There’s a lot of literature on domination and the emotional experience of submission, but I can’t remember reading anything about the psychological process of accepting and inhabiting the dominant role. Seasonal’s process of accepting their desire for dominance and understanding it is the through line of the book. Were there any books you looked at while you worked on this?

AP: I reread the French classics on sexuality: de Sade, Sacher-Masoch, Réage, Genet, as well as Paul B. Preciado. At the same time, I was having great conversations with feminist students of literature who were interested in the profoundly conservative gender relations expressed in the popular fiction they were reading, such as the Fifty Shades trilogy and young adult fiction. I reread J.G. Ballard’s Crash and William Gibson’s Neuromancer to try to learn how to write a body being erotically transformed by technology. I also reread Australian classics of queer literature like Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded and the poetry of Quinn Eades. Kurt Vonnegut helped me remember how to write from compassion and a love of human weirdness. The most important reading for informing the ideas about the psychology of dominance in the novel were from psychoanalysis—which takes the position that there is no denying the existence of aggression in the human psyche—and Foucault, who made a model of the social that asks us to accept that power will always be in play, and it will always be on the move.

CK: Gender is inevitably a big part of this—the stakes for someone born and raised as female stepping into the dominant role are very different than for someone who identifies as male.

AP: Yes. Being gendered (or raced or classed, or raised with the expectation that you’re heterosexual) creates internal structures: the little voice in our head that tells us what a man or a woman is and wants. Seasonal is learning how accustomed they are to assuming their comfort is not a priority, and an important realization about this comes when they try to teach their male submissive, Lázsló, to say “yes.” He tells Seasonal he struggles with this simple statement, because to agree to something means that there is no room for his opinion or preferences. For Seasonal, this unlocks something very important: Lázsló was raised with the expectation that the world will adapt to his needs, while Seasonal has been raised to adapt to the world as it is. Seasonal finds the power exchange liberating because it is a circumscribed space in which they can learn to be demanding, something they feel their adherence to femininity has precluded. Seasonal and Lázsló agree to an exchange of roles: To be the dominant in the game is to learn to assert your preferences; to be the submissive is to face your fear of being outranked in every interaction. But ultimately, the story is really interested in what kinds of conditions could make it possible for people raised as male or female to really listen to each other’s desires, and be in sympathy with the other’s desire for freedom and self-respect.

CK: There aren’t a lot of literary models for writing the experience of domination; submission has been so much more exhaustively described. That’s one of the things I find most exciting about your book—that, and how quickly it all escalates. You write about how Seasonal wants to “annihilate László’s will and subjectivity and install themself in him.” It’s a terrifying, radical aspiration, and it’s exhilarating too. Did the force of it take you by surprise?

AP: I think this is the surprising and interesting invitation that people issue to each other when they enter the world of dominance and submission: Things can get very intense very quickly, because everything is bounded by specific roles and rules. What really surprised me was how getting on the apps and discovering people speaking as submissives unleashed a creative force in me: I was shocked by how urgently I felt the need to write a novel, how it created this intense desire to write something that a reader might find fun and compelling.

CK: At the same time, the entire project remains collaborative and consensual. I’m curious about how it ends beyond the ending of the book. Not everyone who becomes involved with BDSM remains there; often, people move through it and on to something else. In my experience, people often gravitate to BDSM in times of overwhelming grief. Anne Desclos described writing Story of O as Pauline Réage in a delirium that lifted like a fever when the books were done. I’m wondering what happens to the experience: Does it remain isolated and quarantined because of its intensity? Or are there ways that it filters through and informs more mundane experiences?

AP: I think you’re right about BDSM and grief—it is a practice where pain can be explored and tested, and this can be very useful for people who are trying to process emotional pain. In the book, Seasonal and Lázsló are on parallel tracks, trying to process the pain of being immigrants whose anchoring partnerships have taken unexpected turns.

Seasonal believes they can understand something about the rise of fascism through BDSM: that it might help them grasp why anger produces a search for scapegoats, and how feeling entitled and wronged produces intoxicating exhilaration. Lázsló has walked away from Orbán’s Hungary, and both he and Seasonal are sensitive to political domination without really knowing how it relates to what they’re doing with their bodies. Ultimately, the power exchange is a short-term space for them both to hide and to heal, but it does offer them something that they can use in more mundane encounters. For Seasonal, it offers a way of being sensitive to parts of themself they were previously troubled by. In a larger sense, they feel they have learned something about how aggression can be channelled into creativity and connection, rather than being something that damages it. For Lázsló, it is the relief of having been seen at his most vulnerable, of having faced down a very private fear, and he believes this has helped him learn compassion.

CK: At one point in the novel, a character observes that BDSM looks like therapy. Is there a logical connection between the two for you?

AP: Well, I imagine that, for many people who don’t want to go to therapy, one of the reasons they avoid it is because they worry they’ll be forced to do things they are afraid of. Both practices involve fixed roles and are spaces where one person’s vulnerability is explored. Therapy and BDSM are defined by asymmetrical relationships, and I find those constraints interesting. In my experience of therapy, I find the way my therapist creates a situation of impersonal intimacy—where I am not expected to care about her at all—surprising and generative. BDSM can be very creative and intimate, and not transactional, but the novel is about a power exchange in which the submissive is in an open marriage, and it explores what kind of relationships people in open marriages think they’re having. Many of the people I met through dating apps were exploring open marriages or polyamory and were looking for impersonal intimacy: They wanted to bring their sexuality and fantasies to someone, but not necessarily reciprocate by being interested in the sexuality of the other person. We see this depicted in All Fours by Miranda July, for example, where the secondary characters are food the protagonist gorges on after being starved in her unsatisfying marriage. My book explores the other perspective: a single sexual person seeking connection and finding lots of people who have taken sex out of their partnerships. For me, relationships with people in open marriages were ultimately not very interesting because of this lack of integration. But I learned from BDSM and therapy that consensual asymmetrical relationships can provide spaces for creativity and foster freedom which surprised me.