Picking the Collective Femslash Brain: Femslash as a Fandom

[dagas_isa]

If there is in fact, a collective brain, I'd like to ask it a few questions. I've recently been wondering about Femslash fandom as a whole and thinking about whether it exists and how it manifests.

• Does femslash fandom (as a larger entity) exist?
  
• If it does, what, other than the obvious (having at least one f/f ship), are the central features of femslash fandom?
  
• How is femslash fandom culture different from (or the same as?) het fandom/guyslash fandom?
  
• What are the main fannish interactions in femslash fandom?
  
• Are there any femslash fans who are exclusively into femslash?
  
• What are the canons that you think most femslash fans would (or should) know through osmosis (that is, they might never have experienced them, but would know through discussion/meta)?
  
• What are your personal experiences being a femslasher in a (small/large/eastern/western/etc) fandom?
  

Tell me, what are your thoughts on femslash?

(I have thoughts, but it's easier to ask questions than give a hazy reply based on a limited sample and my experiences in small fandoms.)

Comments

[cleo]

Great questions. It's definitely interesting that these are the big questions that keep coming up in the little bit of femslash meta there is. That said, I do think femslash fandom as a larger entity thinks it exists, but there's definitely a an insularity overall and an insularity within. When it comes to the large fandoms or the new fandoms that create a lot of buzz, there's some community and a lot of visibility in the general femslash comms. But there are only a few large fandoms, and by comparison to slash or het heavy fandoms, they aren't really very large at all. It seems to me that femslash fandom as a whole is made up of a lot of small fandoms, incredibly fragmented and closed off to what else might be going on in other femslash fandoms/fandom as a whole.

It's hard to generalize about anything. With femslash fandom overall there seems to be something of an uneven split between people who are exclusively into femslash in one or two fandoms and people who are into a little bit of everything. I'm not saying one camp is better than the other, and those lines are definitely not so definite. But sometimes it really seems that a lot of femslash fandom isn't in touch with trends within fandom as a whole, that if there's a guy lurking in the story or a het relationship or slash relationship on the side, it's not readable or whatever. And it seems that there tends to be a reluctance to explore and branch out or to keep up with other things that might be going on...that's one reason twtd and I started the femslash Kink Meme...but I won't go into that. There's not a profusion of meta, which I think is why the meta that does get written goes to the big questions you're asking--and omg they're great questions.

Your questions about canons that femslash fans would/should know by osmosis...hmm, it really strikes me. I think give or six years ago Xena, Voyager, and SVU would have been the definite answers. Now, I'm not so sure. Again...not a ton of discussion and meta (which maybe is changing...) to absorb a lot of that from.

And naturally, twtd got here before I did and said pretty much the same things I've said. Lol...can you tell we live together and maaaaaybe have discussed these things? ;)