Hello, World?

"Abandoned by their Dutch partner after giving up their home and their job to follow him to the Netherlands, humanities scholar Seasonal finds themself single in a strange place for the first time in a decade. Dipping into the rabbit hole of digital eroticism, Seasonal soon meets Lâaszlâo, a male sub who volleys back their cerebral sexts and is seeking a dominant guide. His dating-app profile--a photo of Foucault and the ingenuous greeting "Hello, World?"--thinly veils his desire to be annihilated. It's a desire that Seasonal senses they can fulfill. But to do this means crossing the frightening gap between their desires and capacities. Seasonal and Lâaszlâo embark on an experiment in remaking intimacy outside the Republic of Gender. But as it continues, the two realize they are staging separate confrontations with domination: Seasonal finds they must confront their own relation to the violence and anger that marked their upbringing in working-class, small-town Australia, while Lâaszlâo stages his own confrontation with his decision to leave Viktor Orbâan's Hungary. As they attempt to improvise a theater of domination that opens up possibilities of reciprocity, the energies of their sexuality stalk this collaboration, threatening to give them exactly what they bargained or begged for. A feminist paean to perversity in the tradition of Pauline Râeage's Story of O and Anaèis Nin's Delta of Venus, Anna Poletti's hello, world? dares to fully inhabit female power, and to fully face the violence, beauty, and uncharted territories of human sexuality"--Back cover.