Jay Szpilka, "BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland: Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms, and the Problem with Desire" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

That's such a big question.

Uh, well, uh, I've basically have been trying to do research on BDSM in a wide variety of ways, though not as wide as it could have been, uh, throughout my entire academic care- uh, throughout my academic ac- entire academic career.

Uh, and I ended up landing on the project which, mm, us- ended up being this book, uh, when I was trying to figure out what to do for my master's.

Uh, and, uh, I was-- I had this, I had this idea that I want to write about, um, um, about, like, specific erotic practices among Polish BDSM practitioners, uh, and that I would like to do, like, the sort of, quote unquote, "classic, uh, ethnography of the community." Uh, I was, uh, greatly inspired by works of Stasi Neumayer and Margot Weiss, who at the time when I was, uh, doing the, um, uh, when I was starting to do, uh, starting to consider this research were somewhat recent, uh, were somewhat, um, uh, were somewhat new and as such that they kind of, like, gave me this idea that you can do this, that you can do this, this sort of very, I don't wanna say very traditional, but in some ways very, uh, m- very by the book, uh, uh, study, ethnographic study, participant observation, all those things you hear about, uh, in, uh, cultural anthropology, uh, seminars, or ethnography as we still in many ways, uh, prefer to call it, uh, in Poland when it comes to how departments are named.

[chuckles]

Yeah.

Yeah, for sure.

Um, I think maybe we should state for listeners who don't know that BDSM is the acronym for bondage, domination, submission, sadism, and masochism, and practices that-- and a lot of practices that un- under this umbrella.

Um, and I guess before we, before we move to talk about the actual book, I'm, I'm interested in, in w- what made you interested in, you know, pursuing research about BDSM specifically?

Uh, well, it's a very-- as I write in the introduction to my book, it's a very conventional story of, uh, like, trying to do research on something that you are personally invested in.

And I've been-- Like, my sexuality, my sexual desires, my sexual interests have always been very heavily informed, uh, by BDSM.

And since I was also pretty much always an insufferable, uh, academic, academic, like, where I always wanted to go to academia, like terrible fate really, uh, I figured out that the best thing I could do was, uh, like, research it, read about it, write about it, uh, do some, do some field work.

So it was s- this was in many ways an attempt to, like, think through a number of my personal concerns, ideas, desires.

Much, much, much later into my research, I managed to, like, come across works of, uh, Esther Newton, uh, who was very, very absent from my extremely spotty education, and, like, and find out that what I'm doing is in fact following a very well-established trend in queer, uh, in queer anthropology, that I'm basically doing a thing that most well-known, of which I'm not, queer anthropologists have been doing since this discipline basically emerged as a subfield, I suppose so.

It's a, it's a very s- it's a very classic story in many ways.

ways.Yeah, I love that you say classic when, you know, it's-- I guess it's our kind of classic, right? You know, talking about, uh, uh, queer anthropologists.

Yes.

Um, so, um, so moving to the actual book, how did you, how did you come about to do the research, uh, for the book? Was it part-- Was, was that your dissertation?

Uh, yes.

The-- So the book is a result of-- Again, it started as a master's thesis, uh, which I then developed into a project for my, uh, PhD, which then, like, took several more years and, like, a year longer than expected.

Uh, the field-- So I, I think the big, uh, processual, I guess, or methodological shift that occurred part-partway through writing it is that, uh, when I started, when I started writing it, when I started, like, again, I was doing my master's, and I was very much unaware of most theoretical developments around queer theory as a discipline and trans studies as a discipline, which ended up being significant, uh, inspirations for what the book is.

And this is once again, uh, a consequence of the fact that both of those fields are very, very poorly represented within Polish academia, and as such, they just-- they have just completely missed me and my education.

I had to come by them by myself and mostly stumbling very blind.

Uh, so it, it's, uh...

So, uh, so the result is that what I set out at the start was this, again, very by the book, go to parties, make interview, uh, take interviews, uh, talk to people, have whole, uh, small life crisises about interview coding called, you know, the usual, the usual, uh, th- um, the usual of qualitative, uh, qualitative research.