Description

Fast Feminism
Shannon Bell
FAST FEMINISM is a new-old feminism grounded in politics,
performance and philosophy. It is in close proximity to
postfeminisms of the poststructuralist variety—third-wave
feminism, queer feminism, cyberfeminism and feminism 3.0.
While FAST FEMINISM operates in proximity to other
feminisms, its ‘natural’ home is in queer theory. Queer gets its
meaning and its politics from its oppositional relationship to
hegemonic norms. To queer something is to disrupt it, to put
it under scrutiny and to attempt to change it. FAST FEMINISM
takes the hypermasculine speed of Paul Virilio and makes it
feminist. FAST FEMINISM is the bastard offspring and the happy
accident of speed theory.

FAST FEMINISM is a philo-porno-political practice—a
pragmatic philosophy and politics—enacted by the pornographic
sage who moves through the text as “FF.” Fast feminist event
sites include female ejaculation, drag-kinging, an infamous
child-pornography trial, Bataillean fucking at a women’s
bathhouse, posthuman-humachine seduction and sex organ
tissue-engineering.

FF is a post-gender provocateur, not so much a gender terrorist
as a gender risk-taker going the distance with her body. FF’s
philosophy is lived. Actions count. One resists with one’s body.

About the Author

Dr. Shannon Bell is a performance philosopher who lives and writes
philosophy-in-action. Her books include: Reading, Writing and Rewriting
the Prostitute Body (Indiana University Press, 1994); Whore Carnival
(Autonomedia, 1995); Bad Attitude/s on Trial, Brenda Cossman,
Shannon Bell, Lise Gotell and Becki Ross (University of Toronto Press,
1997); New Socialisms, eds. Robert Albritton, Shannon Bell, John R. Bell
and Richard Westra (Routledge, 2004); and Fast Feminism.
Bell is an associate professor in Political Science at York University,
Toronto, Canada. She teaches modern and postcontemporary theory,
cyberpolitics, postidentity politics, aesthetics and politics, violent
philosophy and fast feminism.