Community, Identity, and Femslash
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| Title: | Community, Identity, and Femslash |
| Creator: | viciouswishes |
| Date(s): | August 1st, 2006 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | Fanfiction, Femslash |
| External Links: | Community, Identity, and Femslash, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Community, Identity, and Femslash is an essay by viciouswishes on identity within the femslash community.
It has 106 responses.
Follow-Up Essay
visiouswishes posted a follow-up essay on August 5, 2006. It has 65 responses.
Follow Up on the Femslash - viciouswishes; archive link
Essay
During some recent wank, lornelover turned to me and said, "Does anyone identify as a femslasher?" I racked my brain and couldn't find a yes. I know many authors who write femslash, but none that I could think of who identified themselves as femslashers and solely write femslash. All my favorites also write gen, het, and/or m/m.I also fall into this pigeonhole. I can't make up my mind what I'm doing today and I get bored of the same thing, whether it's something I've been writing a lot or if it's something that fandom's been overrun with.
When I joined Buffy fandom, I started out reading/writing m/m slash. The slash community is a very solid entity. I know many, many fans that solely identify as slashers (m/m implied) and only write m/m fic. They are the Yellow Dog Slashers who cause wank with their genre superiority. Same goes with those who write OTP het pairings – Spike/Buffy, Veronica/Logan, etc. – and character fen. And once in a while, we even hear from those gen writers. Obviously, individuals may vary, but overall, what all these communities have in common is that they have a loud voice and an identity to cling to. Wank happens when an aspect of this identity is challenged, whether it's something in canon, meta, or other fandom happenings.
What does this mean for femslash?
Because being a femslasher is not an identity – you might be able to argue that it is in sports fandoms – there is no group or mob voice. This means that I read lots of meta that completely forgets the existence of femslash when talking about which genres one writes in. This means I read meta about how in SGA 3x01 that Weir and Teyla calling each other by their first names equals OOC, instead of femslash, which is what I saw.
It also means that femslash rarely causes wank as it isn't a blip on the map. milkshake_b can write – at my nefarious urgings – about how f/f is superior to every genre and have it ignored by everyone (as I predicted).
The thing that I struggle with the most is the idea of creating a community. The women at femslash_today have done a wonderful job; however, I do think it's only worked because they are multi-fandom and incredibly far reaching. (I'm not ever seeing the equivalent newsletter for m/m, het, or gen.) I do think that they are "preaching to the choir" instead of gathering people the way I've seen other communities of people in fandom.
I really want to make sg_femslash into a community hub for Stargate femslash, and perhaps I just don't know how to do that. Lornelover gives me a hard time in that when I see Stargate femslash other places, I make comments about how they should be posting in sg_femslash. She tells me that maybe they don't know; however, I don't know if my reading their fic, leaving feedback, and politely pointing to the comm is helping. Maybe I'm just too much of a hands-off moderator.
I do think that femslash suffers from not having a community identity. There's not a voice, not a dialog, and it's often overlooked as a legitimate writing genre. However, I still don't think that I'll be identifying as femslasher, because who knows what I'll be writing tomorrow. Just like I won't say that I'm a Slasher or a Het Writer or a Gen writer, despite writing all those genres too.