Fast femme-inism and the femme phallus: femme erotic artforms as gender and sexuality theory

Engaging with the intellectual legacy of Shannon Bell presents an opportunity to re-insert sexuality into femme scholarship and make explicit femme’s contribution to sexuality studies. In this article, we offer a femme analysis of Bell’s work and use femme scholarship to extend and rework two of her key concepts: the female phallus and fast feminism. We bring femme scholarship into dialogue with Bell to offer a ‘fast femme-inist’ theory of femme erotic artforms – including postpornographic practices – as sites of knowledge and cultural production that contribute vital femme-inist perspectives to sexuality studies. We analyse femme life-writing, femme erotica, and pornography to demonstrate that femme cultural producers ‘do violence to the original context’ of normative femininity; re-articulate ‘receptive’ sexuality as agentic and erotic through enactment of the femme phallus; and position femme-inist sexual appetites as voracious and lesbian femme-inist sex as hardcore through an eroticization of vulnerability.