Fast Feminism

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.