I’m quitting Femslash Fandom

Meta
Title:	I’m quitting Femslash Fandom
Creator:	hijadepavlov
Date(s):	December 11, 2016
Medium:	online
Fandom:
Topic:	Femslash, Race and Fandom
External Links:	To what extent does femslash perpetuate the white gaze?, Archived version
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I’m quitting Femslash Fandom was a post by hijadepavlov on racism in femslash fandom. It discussed the disparity in attitudes from fans towards shows (mentioning examples such as The 100 and Supergirl) with shippable white female characters versus their attitudes towards characters of colour on those shows. It also covered the lack of fannish engagement with shows that feature queer female leads and couples of colour or interracial couples, such as Rosewood and No Tomorrow.

The post is no longer live on Tumblr, but was archived on the Wayback Machine. As of July 2020 it had 2,918 notes.

Excerpts

When the first rumors of Alex coming out in season 2 of Supergirl started circulating, again, a myriad of fans rushed to marathon season one so they could catch up in time for the return of the show, and were quick to start stanning Alex, Kara and Maggie, though most paid no attention to James Olsen. Funnily enough, when Kara got with Mon-El, the criticism from these fans wasn’t that James/Kara had better build-up and that writing decision was blatantly anti-black; but that Kara had better chemistry with Lena, a white woman who should have been played by a disabled actress and instead had her disability completely erased.

A common argument by white sapphics who refuse to watch racially diverse shows is that there are no sapphics in them (for example, The Get Down), or that they are treated badly (for example, Jane The Virgin). It is impossible to have a conversation about how important the racial representation in these shows is without a white sapphic jumping in to derail the conversation, so one would expect that the combination of racial diversity and sapphic representation would be a winning match for Femslash Fandom™. And yet…

The first season of No Tomorrow is close to an end and, save for the tweets from my friend @tryingtosprinklealittlefairydust, I had not seen it mentioned it at all. It’s particularly strange, since it’s been almost a month since episode s01e06 aired, and one would assume that a badass, hilarious, hot pansexual Indian woman kissing a beautiful, sweet, charismatic Latina would have Femslash Fandom™ running to catch up with it before the next episode. Now, with Kareema and Sofia happily engaged, I can’t help but wonder why there is only one gifset of them together in the entire #notomorrowedit tag, and a grand total of maybe fifty gifsets for the show at all.

Following femslash blogs is an endless parade of racist white ships that exist only at the cost of black and brown men being sidelined in canon, abusive ships and content from awfully racist shows that are hailed as progressive because white sapphics get to feel good about themselves at the cost of everyone else and, the fact is, I’m often everyone else.

Responses

[univcrse:] this is so so real. white feminism and Femslash Fandom are inextricably linked at this point and it alienates so many wlwoc

all of this + the fosters. it has loads of main characters of color and an interracial lesbian couple as one of the main ships, yet no one watches it?? even though the storyline of lesbians coming to terms with their sexuality after being married to men/having kids is so underrepresented??? and if u compare no tomorrow to wynonna earp where everyone FLOCKED and was hailing it as amazing and talking about how beautiful the wlw were from the earliest stages, way before they even kissed….it has everything to do with whiteness. Femslash Fandom cares about white women only.

[clarkes-safehaven]: This is put together so nicely. This is really true to huge chunk of the fandom.

Another recent example I noticed was Wynonna Earp. Weeks before even first kiss happened there were dozens of gifsets of the girls simply looking at the each other, there were dozens of posts of how GOOD AND GAY THEY ARE. Weeks before becoming canon. Yet, here we had Queen Sugar, and there was barely anything here at all.

Emily Andras is already hailed as the queen of diversity, and no one, not a single person is addressing the absolute lack of racial diversity on the shows that she created (she was running Lost Girl for few seasons). I could bet my money that she will not be questioned about it either on the con (that is supposed to address it, that’s the whole purpose of it) with distastefully named panel.

And i’m not saying it because WE is bad show, it’s fun in a lot of ways, it’s got women, but it has white women. It represents white women and it’s hailed as the root of progressiveness on tv by white women. (Yes, Mo Ryan even by you)

It’s just becomes exhausting at some point. It really feels like talking to a wall, when you keep on repeating: “you can enjoy something, while being critical of it”, but somehow lack of racial diversity is never the valid and deserved criticism in white fandom, even if it’s femlash one. Heck, it’s not even the valid criticism for white critics, whose literal job is to talk critically about the media.

More than that, any criticism touching upon race is labelled as lesbophobia in white femlash fandoms. It’s just….exhausting, that’s it.

[enafics]: I agree with 99% of what you’re saying but can we also agree that some of the people in your notes aren’t much better than those same fanfic writing white ladies. You can’t belittle someone in the comments and then expect them to change their ways for the better. Your post makes some very real, very important points and it’s done in a thoughtful way. Calling people pieces of shit is probably not going to move people to do better and there is certainly a lot of room to do better.