A man with his hands bound together with rope, circa 1948.
(FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)Possibility, Force, and BDSM: A Conversation With Chris Kraus and Anna Poletti
The two writers discuss the challenges of writing about sex, loneliness, and the new ways novels can tackle BDSM.
Anna Poletti’s debut novel Hello, World?boldly and intelligently explores a heterosexual BDSM relationship from a female dom’s point of view. While the literary catalog of BDSM erotica—from Venus in Furs to Story of O—often revolves around the emotional technologies of submission, Poletti is concerned with how anger, force, and power can be channeled and understood. The effect is stunning, and the cellular dynamics of the couple at the center of the novel encapsulate their entire worlds. Poletti is also a scholar of 21st-century literature and autobiographical writing. Their first book, Intimate Ephemera, is an exhaustive history of Australian zine culture in the 1990s and 2000s. I’ve long admired Poletti’s work, and for several days this August, we e-mailed back and forth between Australia and Baja California to talk about literature, loneliness, possibilities, and limits. This interview has been edited and condensed.
—Chris Kraus