Femslash and Fandom

Meta
Title:	Femslash and Fandom
Creator:	porluciernagas, Lady Geek Girl
Date(s):	Jan 18, 2014
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	Fanfiction, Femslash
External Links:	Sexualized Saturdays: Femslash and Fandom, Archived version
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Femslash and Fandom is post by porluciernagas on the Lady Geek Girl blog.

Topics Discussed

• Why Isn't There More Femslash on AO3
• destinationtoast's post on Which fandoms have the most femslash on AO3?
• centrumlumina's AO3 Census

Excerpts

We mention femslash a lot on this blog, namely that there isn’t enough of it in fanfic. Well, since we’ve previously discussed why there’s so much slash in fandom, I thought it only proper to discuss why there isn’t that much femslash in fandom.

According to the same graph we looked at last time, femslash makes up just about 3.5% of all works on AO3, as opposed to slash’s 42.5%. There are plenty of theories as to why this is, even though we can’t conclusively pick one reason or the other based on the data, if only because none of the surveys outright asked AO3 users “So why don’t you guys write or consume femslash?” (It’d be a good topic for a future survey, if the survey creators are reading this!)

I think the most compelling theory I’ve seen floating around is the one that says that fanfic authors, especially the 80% of them which are female-identifying, are societally conditioned to regard female sexuality or female pleasure as unimportant or undeserving of attention. Think about some of the non-canonically supported ships that you know. Mycroft and Lestrade have been in one scene together in all nine episodes of Sherlock, but Mystrade is a huge ship. In Teen Wolf, Stiles and Derek are constantly shipped together, despite sharing very few canon scenes. Meanwhile, Allison and Lydia, who are getting a lot of screentime together this season, have barely five hundred fics on AO3. (Sterek has about twenty thousand.) I don’t mean to disparage one ship or the other—what I’m curious about is why fandom seems to have latched onto the male ship over the female one.

And yet fanfiction is an inherently transformative work which, by its very nature, strives to address or change some flaw that exists in canon, even if that flaw is “why isn’t there more of this thing?!” Fanfiction has addressed the lack of gay men by making straight characters gay; it’s addressed countless cultural misappropriations with wildly varying AUs; it’s addressed canon plot holes and timeline issues with fix-it fics and crossovers. Fanfic is the show your show could be like, if only you dared to dream.

But for all its transformative nature, fanfiction and fandom still suffer from a real dearth of femslash. Beyond the simple fact that very few girls exist in canon materials, the societal emphasis on the male gaze seems to have affected fanficcers’ creativity to such an extent that even in our own fantasies, we cannot give women a fair shake. Just as the answer to “Why is there so much slash?” cannot be boiled down to “Well, straight girls are horny”, the answer to “Why isn’t there any femslash?” cannot be boiled down to “Well, straight girls don’t care.” The bias against female characters and female pleasure is an ingrained, institutionalized problem which won’t go away on its own.

Comments

[mithrandirolorin]: Using just one FanFic archiving website to make the stats is certainly flawed. I’ve had nose enough in the lesbian community via visiting AfterEllen and similar sites, that I find the notion of Soccer inspiring more Femmslash then PLL to be simply not believable.

I guess I”m very unlike most people, this entire notion that the lead characters are the eons most FanFic is based does’t connection to my mind at all. I almost always find the main lead of a show (regardless of their Gender) the most uninteresting. For me FanFic is about exploring the characters to minor for Canon to explore.

[sherleigh]: as an author whose works can be found on ao3 (though sadly i did not participate in the survey), i can say i fall into the non-heterosexual female majority.

i’ve written about 8 fics so far, and the only femslash i’ve written is a genderbent version of a ship that is canonically male/male.

the reason, for me, comes down to plain and simple jealousy. i’m gay and single and everytime i read femslash, i can’t enjoy it because i just get so depressed with my own life. that, and the fact pointed out above that there simply isn’t an abundance of female characters to write (or an audience to write for – i love artemisia and i want to write something about her, but who the fuck wants to read that?)

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A quote from the post was also shared on tumblr, gaining 3,449 notes. Most of the commets on the piece were written in the tags.

[lasgatitas]: #take out the part about straight girls being horny #fandom seems to be mostly queer girls to my knowledge #the part about misogyny blocking the expression of femslash and female pleasure rings true #fandom

[lyrangalia]: #this is what i mean when i say m/m slash perpetuates internalized misogyny #that it perpetuates the idea that men are the only ones whose stories are worth telling #yes i acknowledge that I write a lot of het and that's hella heteronormative #but I also write character studies of female characters because they are SO INTERESTING and so rich for exploration #and that's part of this too the need to allow ourselves to rediscover the female characters as characters #the need to allow ourselves to tell female characters' stories AT ALL

[mummyholmesisupset]: #like probably 80% of the slash I read is written by queer women #so I don't really know what to make of this #it rings true in some ways but relies on the standpoint that it's straight girls writing slash? #and that's just not so #not even half of the time

[vvvv5555-blog]: #i've always fucking hated the whole 'straight girls don't care becuz they're too busy being lusty over men durrhurr' explanation that a lot #it's dismissive as fuck and it ignores the fact there's something a lot more harmful at work that's been going on for years in our media #and with female representation