FAST FEMINISM + today's thoughts...

There's a cinematic term ~ 'sutured into the text', which basically means that the film-maker uses a number of devices to draw the viewer into the narrative. Indeed, we become sutured ~ sewn into the text by identifying with different subject positions. Sometimes there is a delay on the part of the spectator and this may cause anxiety. Over the past few days I've been reading Shannon Bell's Fast Feminism and I must admit I felt like I was reading it from the outside, from the position of the 'other'; for unlike FF I could boast no obvious risk taking, drag-kinging, no swiftness of sexuality, amazing body contortions or bodily public displays. However, something strange occurred after reading page 133, the beginning of the fourth chapter: The Will to Laughter ~ A Fast-Feminist Bataillean Narration; I became totally sutured into the text. Was it because I was more familiar with George Bataille's writings than with the thoughts of John Robin Sharpe? Did I resist reading about a paedophile activist or the justifications that Bell and other's provided about Sharpe's transgressional texts or was it that I just couldn't identify with FF ~ this small, incredibly fit looking academic who goes to great lengths to describe female ejaculation. I must have needed some light relief and laughed out loud when I read her ironic remarks whilst visiting the Pussy Palace: ...she was doing femme and the only position for a femme is to be 'invaded, penetrated, split, occupied'. FF had read her MacKinnon and Dworkin (p.138). As Nietzsche said: Pain is also a joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun...! (Zarathustra). So far Bell's book is, like Nietzsche's quote, life affirming, energetic, it pulls no punches. I continue to read with the hope that I remain woven into the text.