Putting the "F" Back in Fanfiction: K-pop Femslash
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| Title: | Putting the "F" Back in Fanfiction: K-pop Femslash |
| Creator: | Seoulbeats |
| Date(s): | March 28, 2014 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | |
| Topic: | K-pop, Femslash |
| External Links: | Putting the "F" Back in Fanfiction: K-pop Femslash, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Putting the "F" Back in Fanfiction: K-pop Femslash is an article on Seoulbeats.
Excerpts
Yulsic. Chaemin. Sulber. Jiafei. Narin. Do these popular pairing names of members from SNSD, 2NE1, f(x), Miss A, and Brown Eyed Girls sound familiar or are they totally new to you? For the record, these ship names refer to different femslash pairings in K-pop. Femslash, also called femmeslash or yuri, is a fan practice where fans explore the relationship between two females, sometimes through a homosexual or lesbian lens. It’s often portrayed as male slash’s less popular and less discussed counterpart. In K-pop, femslash intersects with real person fanfiction (RPF) and real person shipping, since idols portray a certain version of themselves to the public.
This leads to one of two important points: femslash is a predominately female space. K-pop femslash is primarily females writing about female-female friendships and female-female relationships, which can be about but are not limited to romantic or sexual relationships. Fans might write about Bomzy (2NE1’s Park Bom and Minzy) because they find their friendship adorable, intriguing, hot, inspiring, or something else entirely. Female fans create thousands of words of fiction, hours and hours worth of fanvideo and picture edits, and let’s not forget the myriad world of gifs. This is a lot of work! It’s worth noting there are also non-females who participate, but we must realize that the femslash fanspace, particularly when looking at fanfiction, is produced by a female majority and for a female majority. These hours of work come from and lead back to a place where female voices speak and are listened to in return, which I find extremely heartening.
This is why the common dismissal or demonization of slash fanfiction is unacceptable: sometimes femslash is not even acknowledged as a huge ongoing phenomenon of its own. In addition, just as female idols are judged much more harshly than male idols, female fans are usually judged more harshly than male fans. When slash fans are called delusional or dangerous without nuancing their participation and labor, it feels like another devaluation of females in general. We have to start talking about the context that femslash develops in and the reasons why it is important to so many female and queer female fans. K-pop femslash fanfiction may begin in a version of highly mediated reality, but the space that it creates should be treated as so much more than a simple fantasy.
Comments
[Alolika_SB]: I was up almost the entire night for this article to get published -_-But I have no regrets whatsoever! Considering how there has been immense research on m/m slash and yaoi mangas, I was wondering how one would deal with femslash since I am not a consumer of one.
And my god, I loved that point where you said that the K-pop culture,at least within the group,encourages sisterhood which makes the popularity of femslash possible in the first place. It never hit me that women don't have a parallel to the "Bros before hoes" mantra (or do they?) which puts solidarity as a positive outcome of these fics.
[ Ereshkigal ]: [...]What I find disturbing from this article is this.Kirk/Spock (the origin of "slash" in the first place) 'zines and yaoi paradi doujin appeared at the same time on separate continents, but in an arguably shared female space.
Such material has always been derided, as have the fans. (Until yaoi started to make big bucks.) That the majority of said fans should be female and so dismissive of an alternate take on same sex pairings, seems to me ludicrous at best and homophobic at worst. By "homophobic" I do not mean scared of the other, as to them the true other is the gay male; no true threat. In attacking f/f fanfic it seems they are reifying their heteronormative selfperception. Oddly, in talking to yaoi fangirls I have been treated as a pervert, being a male yuri fan.
If young girls (already subaltern) are entering the realm of the fantastic and reordering the gender preferences (or sex) of canon characters, or of "real" people, one would think that they would be more open to the viewpoints of others, or those even of "the other".