Doing it for femme daddy, Fast Feminism, persistent desire, and the unbounded pleasures of critical educational praxis

Desire framed my graduate school experience. My longing to earn a doctoral degree was intertwined by deeper yearnings to undergo gender transition, and to escape suffocating heteronormative scripts. Such trans-queer desires were animated by my love for, and unabashed chasing after, my supervisor Shannon Bell. My place as a trans studies scholar loomed on the horizon as a continuous becoming, and one could not ask for a better sojourner than the whore-philosopher-cum-Fast Feminist herself. This autotheoretical piece tells stories of our first conversation, some of the gifts she gave me, negotiating having her as supervisor, her continual refusal to sleep with me, and the only time she got angry with me. These stories are told in tandem with critical educational scholarship addressing a ‘pedagogy of desire’. I demonstrate that Bell as whore-philosopher and Fast Feminist embodies an ethical commitment to mobilize desire that opens spaces for trans becomings.