Anti-racist principles and practices in femslash fandom

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Title:	Anti-racist principles and practices in femslash fandom
Creator:	eshusplayground
Date(s):	July 26, 2014
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	Femslash, Race and Fandom
External Links:	Anti-racist principles and practices in femslash fandom
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Anti-racist principles and practices in femslash fandom is a Tumblr post by eshusplayground on making anti-racist femslash fanworks. It has 109 notes.

Post

The more I talk with fellow rainbow women about race and femslash, the clearer it becomes that it’s no longer enough for femslash to merely be tolerant, diverse, or inclusive in order to be a safe place for us. Without being actively anti-racist, femslash can replicate the same white supremacy, anti-blackness, orientalism, and fetishization that exist in mainstream media.

So I’m reaching out to my fellow rainbow women to start a conversation about making anti-racist femslash.

A. How would anti-racism impact your ability to participate in or enjoy femslash?

B. What do you think are some core ideas for making femslash fanfic and fandom anti-racist?

C. What are some things that would be on your Do list? On your Do Not list?

(Note: if you don’t understand the need for talking about this or don’t see the point, please refrain from adding any commentary. Expand the conversation or leave it alone; don’t try to shut it down.)

Responses

[elfyourmother]
this might not be the most coherent response since I just woke up but I have some feelings about this and I don’t want to lose them

the older I get and the more I deal with fandoms I would say that anti-racism doesn’t just positively impact my enjoyment of femslash but is actually required for me to enjoy it, and it’s one of the reasons why I read very little fanfic period unless it’s something specifically rec’d to me by someone I trust. i’m drowning in what i call the unbearable whiteness of fandom and I actually find it more hurtful with femslash because these are the folk who write long passionate essays about inclusion and the importance of valuing women, etc–these are the ppl who pretend to be Progressive and striking some kind of blow for women so to see them mimicking the exact same shitty nonsense found in the dudeslash they constantly decry is…disconcerting to put it mildly

i could talk about a lot of little things that I need from anti-racist fic, but all of them really stem from one basic idea. for me the bottom line in making femslash anti-racist is about decentering whiteness/the white gaze. by decentering whiteness and removing the white gaze, as a bare minimum, I mean simply writing about women of color at all as a start–but that’s not enough, it’s not enough to just stop there. I need folk to consider how and why they are writing women of color in femslash. I need femslash that doesn’t just feature women of color but puts them front and center, centers their voices and their experiences. i need femslash that doesn’t ignore or downplay the impact of ethnicity on the relationship, even if it’s just subtle things like mentioning hair texture. I don’t need any more “colorblind” femslash. I need women of color to be permitted vulnerability without being subject to white women’s white savior complexes or Eliza Doolittle “build a bitch” shit. I need femslash that values and centers women of color’s needs and treats them with compassion and complexity.

I really really need femslash where the characters in the ship are women of color. I am really tired of “interracial” only meaning “white lady and brown lady”, as opposed to woc from different cultures or ethnic groups. I need femslash where women of color love and care for one another away from the white gaze and white fetishization of their brownness and whiteness Othering them. I ship a lot of WW/WoC pairings and write fics with them and there is nothing inherently wrong with that but when that is literally all i see for certain characters it gets very depressing, because 99% of the time WW/WoC pairings are where femslash racism is at its strongest and most insidious.

I started to talk about Dragon Age femslash and how racially repulsive and even psychologically violent I find 99% of it as a black bisexual woman, with the specific example of one canonically bisexual WoC (Isabela) but it got rly long and tbh needs its own post so I cut it. it’ll suffice to say that the above points are my main needs, and a lot of that stems from frustration over how this one character is frequently portrayed in femslash.

[juliecoopers]
#basically 90% of alll major femslash ships with a lady of color #will have one white woman #in fact #if you want to do a woc/woc #your choice is to ignore canon dynamic completely #for instance i ship dana x kalinda from the good wife but they have half a season #of dynamic over alicia kalinda’s four seasons #if you want to ship lena adams with anyone other than steph foster #how far will you realistically get? and this is different because it’s canon queer #but there are still the same problems of lena not interacting with ladies of color who are not her family #and the two women she does interact with- one is fired and the other is now almost exclusively stephs dynamic #what about regina mills then? because her choices are tamara and marian mebbe #and she has had one scene maybe two scenes of interaction with each #and both of them hostile and violent #hey lets look at nikita and see how many wocs or even pocs did she interact with #i can name prominent woc who could be in femslash ships all day #but canon just doesn’t allow them to interact with non white woman #its why people resort to shipping almost pure aus aka maiden queen #or with original character of color #but what are our choice? what are options #racism #femslash #queer ladies lovin #i am not even bringing the exoticization of kalinda in both canon and fanon #or regina for that matter