Femslash, Canon, and Fannish Strength

Meta
Title:	Femslash, Canon, and Fannish Strength
Creator:	The Fandomentals
Date(s):	February 14, 2018
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	Femslash, Fandom
External Links:	Femslash, Canon, and Fannish Strength, Archived version
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Femslash, Canon, and Fannish Strength is an article by kai, written for The Fandomentals.

Excerpts

If I haven’t already outed myself as a “fandom old” with the title, I’m about to right now: There was a point within the last 10 years when femslash was such a minority and so frequently dismissed by het and boyslash fans alike that ship wars within F/F fandom were actually rare. Likewise, femslash’s demographic was unique. It was mostly populated by queer women, whereas both M/M and M/F were populated by predominantly straight women.

As a result of the dynamics mentioned above, you had a lot of overlap between femslash ships, even within fandoms for a single show. People got along, and often multishipped, because 1) OMG more than two girls?? 2) social media hadn’t become the haven for trollish behavior that it is today, and 3) there was minimal investment in seeing their readings of the text reflected onscreen.

“It’ll never be canon” was a way of saying that femslash shippers were delusional. In saying this, primarily-straight fans flaunted the fact that straight relationships and normative readings of a text are privileged, male characters are more valued by creators and fans alike, and that F/F shippers (usually queer women) were completely alone in seeing what they saw—what they saw being their own experiences. All super classy things for straight people to say to queer people.

And how did femslash fandom deal with that?

They dealt with it by shrugging and going, “So what?”

So what? I know my experiences.

So what? It was never about “becoming canon” anyways. “Becoming canon” was an invention of M/F and M/M shippers looking to invalidate and humiliate people who had a different reading of a text than they did. All things considered, that was rather ironic.

Representation matters. To normalizing the idea that gay people exist to queer teens and adults who have often had to read themselves into a story between the lines. However, it is dangerous—as fans—to move into a mentality where we are solely dependent on professional, mass media creators to find stories about ourselves. To so completely invest in the message we want to send to others that we forget the fact that we have power, in our fandom spaces, and it is not dependent on our ability to make the stories we want to see happen onscreen. We have the ability, even in the face of real resistance from exploitative networks, hostile political and cultural dynamics, and even legal action from homophobic creators, to affirm our own stories and experiences.

Fandom’s power has not historically been swaying the opinions of creators to have their ideas “legitimized” and recognized. Fandom has spent most of the past half-century facing “cease and desist” orders, lawsuits, DMCA takedowns (as of the turn of the millennium), and accusations of defamation for daring to imagine a character might be gay. However, ship lobbying on Twitter did not convince media creators that they’d profit more by listening to their fans. Tireless legal work by affected fans, organizations like the Organization for Transformative Works—and very importantly, other parties negatively impacted by legislation like the DMCA—created a space for this shift to occur.

Comments

[letzan]: I’m not so pessimistic about what happens if we forget our past - fandom has reinvented its past several times already and can keep doing so - but I thought this article did a nice job of articulating what is basically how I feel about femslash, which is that giving us the characters is everything, and if the ship is there or isn’t there in canon… that doesn’t have to be the most important thing. This isn’t exactly an original thought, but: it’s telling that the really really big M/M ships are always non-canonical. Partly it’s because of the marginalization of queer stories, but if you put aside how we got to this point: observably people are very very inspired to write stories about characters who don’t have a canonical romantic relationship, and they’re doing it on the strength of the characters (and possibly of the characters’ canonical non-romantic interactions). If we had more representation of women in canon doing more active things, if that were just normal, a lot of this stuff would take care of itself.

[Jo]: I think it's worth noting that even before Buffy, Xena was breaking boundaries in terms of portraying F/F relationships with Xena and Gabrielle. X & G took baths together, slept together, kissed each other, flirted with each other, fought with each other, lived for each other, died for each other, killed for each other and were even buried together. They got married not once but twice on the show (the Mendhi lines are part of the Hindu marriage ceremony, and the show flatly stated in an S6 episode set in the present that X & G got married as soon as both their souls were free again). But what really blew me away was when they actually hired Missy Good, a fanfic writer known for her femslash X/G stories, to write three episodes of the tv show. That was just unheard of.