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

[littlebutfierce]

Oooh, I am excited by your questions! I don't have a lot to say myself, but I am going to check back for comments.

I will say my experiences as a femslasher in a really boyslash-heavy fandom (& one in which people seem reluctant to read het as well: ew, girls *eyeroll*) have been kinda meh. I've been psyched to get the odd really positive comment on fic from people who do want to see the pairing, but it's been a lot of cricket chirping. Which... fair enough, there are lots of reasons that might happen in response to fic. But I get the distinct impression it's b/c people don't care about the female characters in a lot of cases, nevermind imagining them in pairings. That's partly b/c they are fairly minor in canon but also, yeah, I think girl cooties too.

[h4hahn]

Excellent question(s). I've often pondered this as a find myself joining various femslash communities and then never paying attention to them.

I like the idea of femslash fandom. But for me, I guess I've decided that I like femslash within fandom. I have my little shows I follow and I follow their fannish activities. I gravitate to the femslash stories and fanart and vids, et al.but not exclusively. Maybe femslashers are just more well rounded and we like it all, where nonfemslash fans just want the het or just want the slash. We're no one trick pony. :)

[havocthecat]

I think each of these bullet points sound like a meta/discussion post topic all on its own!

[ranrata]

Interesting questions! There's definitely a larger femslash fandom/culture. I can't help but notice it, as someone who likes quite a few femslash pairings, but finds larger femslash fandom...inaccessible? I just kind of flit around the edges, occasionally finding something I like, occasionally contributing.

I've been trying to determine what causes certain ships/shows to become popular in femslash fandom. I can usually predict this for het and slash fandoms, even if I don't like said ship/pairing, but I'm continually baffled by what takes off (or doesn't) in femslash fandom. I've also noticed crossover pairings seem to be a lot more common.

I don't know if I've sampled a large enough selection, but there does seem to be a certain style to the fic that's quite distinct. I'm not sure how to describe it. I tend to prefer femslash that isn't written in this style, though.

This is regarding media fandom based on LJ/DW. I was heavily into Sailor Moon fandom for years, and the experience was completely different!

[pseudo_tsuga]

I dunno, I feel like my experience is really atypical in some ways. I read a lot of fic about anime/manga/video games and they all have way more femslash support if they aren't one of those canons where the majority of the cast are boys (like Oofuri). One on my main fandoms, Phoenix Wright, has a f/f couple as the second most popular pairing. It also seems like people are way more ready and willing to put girls together, especially as protest to big fandoms where they're both treated badly. In Naruto and Bleach, Orihimie/Rukia as well as Sakura/Ino or Sakura/Hinata have a sizable following from what I can tell. Of course the m/m and het pairings are more popular but there doesn't seem to be this drought that exists in Western media fandoms. Maybe I just know the wrong people for that though?

[soukup]

Being pretty new to fandom, I am totally unqualified to make any kind of sweeping statement about What Femslash Fandom Is or anything like that. But I can share my own limited experiences, for whatever they're worth!

Are there any femslash fans who are exclusively into femslash?

I think "exclusively" is kind of a strong word, but I'm pretty thoroughly a lesbian IRL, and that certainly carries over into my porn preferences. That's to say, I'll sometimes read porn with guys in it, if it comes highly recommended for other reasons, but it usually doesn't do too much for me sexually.

What are the canons that you think most femslash fans would (or should) know through osmosis

I've never been into either Buffy fandom (which I'm told has a good-sized crew of Faith/Buffy shippers) or Xena, but I've absorbed at least the names of the most commonly-femmeslashed characters and some basic information about the shows, just by reading metafandom off and on for a year or so.

Good questions! I'm excited to see where they go. And I'd be very interested in your "hazy reply," if you feel like taking the time to post it.

[fred_mouse]

I'm in the odd headspace where I would like to read more femslash, because I don't find het or boyslash to be quite what I'm looking for, and yet, I haven't found an in yet. These is something about the way that the stories I've read have been presented that they manage to be whole in and of themselves, and don't inspire me to go looking for more of that pairing.

This may have something to do with the way that I end up in fandoms generally - I follow other people who do a lot of reading, and rec (and write) stuff that then gets me dragged in. And as yet, I haven't found that gateway person for femslash.

It also has to do with my tendency to grab hold of particular fandom, and not let go (I'm still stuck in Harry Potter fandom, for example, and have no desire to get out of it. I just haven't worked out who the perfect partner for Hermione is, for me), because I don't have the background in very many fandoms for the stories to grab me. Which I guess means that I'm not a 'femslash' fan specifically, but I am within the fandoms that I'm in (does that make any sense at all?)

[twtd]

Answering the ones that I can:

Does femslash fandom (as a larger entity) exist?

I think that there is definitely a part of femslash fandom that wants to believe that it's all one entity, generally centralized around passion_perfect and the femslash_today newsletter, and there are efforts to inspire more pan-fandom community interaction though the online femslash con and things like that. So in that sense, there is a femslash fandom, though it isn't all encompassing.

In reality, everything is far too fragmented for that, and there are large swathes of fandom specific femslash communities that exist without any knowledge of a "wider" fandom being out there.

Are there any femslash fans who are exclusively into femslash?

This question actually strikes me as really funny, because I feel like femslash fandom, moreso than any other 'genre' can be incredibly insular. People read and write femslash without ever interacting with fandom outside of that, barely knowing it's out there. There's a reason that you don't see a lot of meta about femslash, why femslash is so profoundly under represented on the AO3, and it's because the community isn't as plugged into fandom at large as much as slash/het/gen fandom seems to be.

There was a discussion a couple of days ago (I forget whose journal it was on) about how people feel uncomfortable linking stories on f_t that involve het or slash relationships because they feel like the audience there isn't interested in anything that isn't exclusively femslash.

So, yeah, there are totally people out there who read femslash exclusively.

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)?

I think Xean and Buffy are both big enough and pervasive enough that people get them through osmosis. And Xena did so much to establish the habits of femslash fandom. Maybe Star Trek: Voyager, as I think all of fandom gets Star Trek through osmosis and Voyager was the real outpost for femslash within the franchise.

[saekhwa]

I'd like to think that femslash fandom exists as a larger entity because I believe in that collective fandom awesomeness that we come together to talk (maybe not always squee) about common interests. But then again, I seriously can't find it. Maybe I'm missing the pulse of it because while I enjoyed Xena and Buffy, I wasn't really into the fandom side of things while it exploded. I was very much in the animanga and comics camp and mostly squeeing with my friends about the ladies of Sailor Moon or the id-tastic greatness of Tank Girl.

Having said all that, I can't really answer the follow up questions because I guess I don't feel that plugged into femslash fandom. I participate, but I always sort of feel like I'm on the outskirts, someone who enjoys it but isn't really included.

Me, personally? I'm into fantastic stories so I'll read anything: femslash, het, slash, gen. Not to say that I don't have my favorite pairings, but I don't have strict, hard boundaries either, so if a story has been recced or well-received or features a character that I love or seems like my bag of goodies, I'm there.

As to the last question, I often feel like I'm the only person who ships my teeny-tiny pairings. I watch some of the most obscure movies (e.g. Bitch Slap) and even for the not-so-obscure (e.g. Death Proof and maybe St Trinian's), I often feel like I'm playing in my own sandbox all by my little lonesome. I still write the stories I want to write, regardless, but I definitely feel like I'm missing something. Maybe the femslash fandom norms or culture? It's hard to pinpoint from where I'm standing.

[sqbr]

This is an interesting post but I'm too sleepy to answer your questions very well.

I think femslash fandom exists in a nebulous form: there are communities like this for example, but not the same coherent culture you get with a lot of fandoms around particular sources.

I would say there is a definitely a difference in the type of fic produced overall, all the same types of fic as in het/boyslash etc exist but in different ratios. More unrequited bittersweet endings and understated realism, I'd say, and less long plotty fics. From what I can see from DeviantArt with fanart there's a not insignificant proportion of male fans.

Xena is definitely one you can't really miss, also Devil Wears Prada.

The two fandoms I'm really in are Avatar the Last Airbender and Dragon Age Origins and they both seem pretty femslash friendly. Alas I don't like the main popular pairing for Avatar (Azula/Ty Lee) so don't actually read much femslash in the fandom but Dragon Age has a couple of canon f/f ships and my non-canon f/f has been quite popular, both with people who like f/f and those who just like those two characters.

It's been funny with my one Amy/River story: that's the only Dr Who story I've written, and I'm not really in the fandom (not even on the Amy/River community, since most people's approach to the pairing rubs me the wrong way) so the comments to it are my main connection to the fandom. When I encounter posts and links to mainstream Dr Who fandom I am reminded how HUGE and scary and weird (and aggressively obsessed with the het ships) it is compared to the nice friendly small backwater my fic sits in :)

[summerstorm]

I do feel like femslash fandom as a larger entity exists, but I don't consider myself a part of it, not even close, so everything I say here is based on vague perceptions and not any kind of legitimate knowledge or experience.

Okay, while guyslash fandom, which I don't see as a larger entity the way I do femslash fandom, usually latches onto fandoms where there are strong male friendships/rivalries, I find femslash fandom seems to shift a lot towards fandoms where there are canonical f/f pairings. For instance, Grey's Anatomy had all these variations of Meredith/Cristina/Izzie/Addison possibilities from the start, but the femslashy side of the fandom didn't truly take off until Callie started dating Erica. Which I find funny because Erica is pretty widely disliked - except in femslash fandom, where people seem to love her, or at least write her a lot in many different pairings. She's not even on the show anymore, and now Callie's dating Arizona, who I absolutely love (though I'm half a season behind), but people are still all about the Erica/Callie and occasionally those two shipped with Addison. So even when it comes to canonical f/f couples, I don't understand how fandom picks and chooses.

Another example of ships/fandoms whose massive femslash presence I don't get: Devil Wears Prada. Huge fandom presence based on a one-shot movie from 200...5? which didn't even get that much hype in the first place (the way, say, Inception has). And the main ship is Andi/Miranda, i.e. Adorable Young Assistant/Fifty-Year-Old Boss. Which... is super random, because, okay, I like age differences (I have a ridiculous teacher/student kink), but it's so unusual for that kind of pairing to be the main one in a fandom, and even more so when you could also be shipping Andi/Emily, i.e. Adorable Young Assistant/Cold, Distant, Jealous Previous Assistant. They interact a lot. They're both gorgeous. I'm pretty sure if this were a slash fandom, Andi/Emily would be the most popular ship. But I digress.

Surprisingly for me, though, last year Glee fandom took off firstly with a f/f rivalry pairing, Rachel/Quinn, and then this summer Rizzoli & Isles seems to have gotten a lot of femslash presence, and I understand that's a cop show and Rizzoli and Isles are work partners/friends, so maybe (hopefully) those tendencies are changing.

Femslash fans who are exclusively into femslash: from what I see on femslash_today? There seem to be a lot. It's like that early slash hivemind where, when people moved fandoms, they moved to the next one with the big slashable m/m friendship (or Queer as Folk, but QaF always seemed to be kind of insular to me, in its own way, with a lot of fans who were, coincidentally, exclusively into QaF). That's what seems to be happening to femslash fandom as a collective entity.

This is actually one of the reasons I can't get into femslash fandom as such: I get into fandoms, and within those fandoms, I happen to like femslash pairings, as well as het pairings and m/m slash pairings and the occasional threesome. The thing is, I have a fair amount of people on my LJ flist who write femslash almost exclusively, sometimes in fandoms with canonical f/f pairings, but it never feels like they're part of that femslash fandom entity we're talking about. Maybe because I know them better and don't see them as part of a group, or because they have other interests that they talk about where I can see it.

I guess my point here is that I don't like that femslash fandom entity, because it doesn't make sense to me as a fannish collective. I'm not going to like a pairing just because it's femslash and that's somewhat rare. I'm not going to be interested in a fandom just because it has a strong femslash presence, or a canonical f/f ship. It can be a selling point, but not the only selling point. I liked the general idea of Emily/Naomi in season 3 of Skins, but I was so burned out by the show by that point that I had zero willingness to watch it. I'm glad there's a lesbian in Pretty Little Liars, but it's not even close to my favorite part of the show. I actually ship femslash pairings in it that "femslash fandom" seems to ignore solely because they're not Emily/one of her canonical love interests.

As to my experience shipping femslash (I wouldn't call myself a femslasher) in larger Western media fandoms: I feel alone. Not in a woe is me way, but in a "I'm going to write this pairing and out of the ten people, tops, who read it, four will read it because they're my friends, four out of curiosity/multishippiness/open-mindedness, and two because they're actually interested in the pairing." I don't feel alone in those fandoms, but I always feel a little bit like I'm the only one who cares and even thinks about my pairings. I had a great experience with Glee (before I lost interest in the show), but every other fandom where I ship femslash is taken over by het or slash or combinations of both. I recently got into The Vampire Diaries and there are so many female characters who regularly interact with each other, but almost no femslash fic. Bones fandom is OTP-ish to a fault, which means out of three women, two are basically taken, including the canonically bisexual one. (That said, I'm bound to be alone in my Bones ships, because I don't ship one of those OTPs—Angela/Hodgins—, and the character femslash fandom focuses on for Bones—Brennan—is a character who hits my embarrassment squick too painfully to read fic about her.)

This is such a long, disjointed comment. Sorry about that. And, again, disclaimer: this is all based on perceptions. I've been a lurker in many fandoms for a long time, but I could easily be way off about everything.

[unsettledink]

I really don't have enough experience to actually answer these questions well, but I thought I'd share a few femslash thoughts anyway.

I'm possibly a bit odd in that het really ucks me out, while I find both boyslash and femslash hot (and interesting in the non-smut variety). Which makes no sense.

I'm probably not really looking hard enough, but I tend not to find much femslash at all. It may also have to do that I'm not involved in some of the larger fandoms that seem to have a higher amount of femslash. But it tends to be the occasional rare finding for me. (although there are many tiny fandoms that could use some femslash for their awesome female characters.

...and then I started thinking on why *I* don't write the femslash I'm interested in seeing, and it comes down to 'it feels harder to write'. Which seems - odd, seeing as I'd think it would be easier writing about something I've more personal experience with. I think there's an element (for me) of feeling like I have to do it justice, i have to get it right, because I'll actually know the flaws. Whereas in boyslash I can mentally brush off a lot of those things with the terrible justification of "fantasy/how am I/readers supposed to know any way?" Which isn't good.

Something I've found that bugs me in a few of the femslash pairings I do read is pairing the girls up *because* their men have been paired up. I've seen this occasionally in the Ritchieverse Holmes fandom, where Mary and Irene are sort of thrown together just because Holmes and Watson *have* to be with each other. And that doesn't feel like it's being done for the women/femslash, but instead out of a feeling of guilt, and never reads well. (That's not to say I haven't seen Mary/Irene done very well.)

*snort* I also had a moment of 'wth?' when I realized I wanted to write a genderswap of two characters just so I could write femslash for them. There's something awfully askew about that...

[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? ;)

Here by metafandom

[fennel]

Interesting questions.

I sure think a femslash fandom exists - I'm in it for sure, after all! Well, it mostly is for japanimation/manga, not for western media, because anime usually is easier for femmeslash. Female characters actually interact, for one. Sure, manga characters often face sexist tropes, but so do characters in western media, equally so, if not worse. I generally find that female anime characters have it slightly better, as long as you don't go for big shonen fandoms.

The central feature is a kind of wish to have canon ships and focus on them. The femslash/yuri fandom I am a part of really likes canonical(ish) ships and latches to canons where it can get that. Like the Nanoha fandom, for example, where two women end up with a career in the military, raising a kid together, and sharing a bed, and being called a family unit by everyone else. Fandom obviously takes that as canon enough ^^

I am not sure how much it differs from het fandom/guyslash fandom, because I am mostly an exclusive femslash fan. I generally cannot stand het (because I get bombarded with heteronormativity IRL, thus I avoid het ships in stories, and even make a conscious choice to avoid media that mostly is het).

The main interactions I have seem to be forum based.

The canons most femslash fans I know are familiar with are Mariasama ga miteiru, Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha, Kannazuki no Miko. Less so Strawberry Panic, Utena, Aoi Hana, and Sasameki Koto. All those do have canonical lesbian characters, or at least VERY deep subtext.


My personal experiences as a femslasher? Avoid big fandom communities like the plague.
Only recently have people stopped bashing femslash on principle. A couple years ago, people at, say, animesuki.com would routinely deny that even canonical lesbian characters could be lesbian. A decade ago, people would make up fake interviews to "prove" that a lesbian character was, somehow, actually a guy and thus didn't count ("Prince Uranus", a campaign to purge those scary lesbians from Sailor Moon).
Since I started to be in fandom back then, my experience with non-femslash fandom has been very negative, and I generally shy back from it. I greatly prefer the smaller, femslash oriented places.

Those are my thoughts, anyway. ^^; Hope they aren't too boring or useless.

via Metafandom

[miss_prince]

I'm always up for a femslash conversation! Although it's one in the morning so I'm probably pretty incoherent.

I'd say sort of yes, there's an overarching femslash fandom. As others have said, there's femslash_today and Passion & Perfection, but they're pretty narrow-focused imo and are really all about Western media fandom. Being a femslasher doesn't necessarily mean you're part of that overarching entity, though.

You know, it's weird, I've seen a lot more examination of femslash fandom(s) in a Western media context even though I'm really not in any Western media fandoms.

Some trends I've noticed in femslash in general... agreed on the sad, realistic ending thing. It's not like it's super common, but it's kind of hard for me to imagine the old "this is but a fleeting moment, now back to our lives apart" plot happening much in m/m. M/m always seemed more prone to tragic death if they were going to break a couple up. Anyway, I think this trope happens more for rarer ships where the fic is sticking closer to canon. There's also a tendency toward shorter fic, yes, and the porn is likely to be more impressionistic and less detailed, possibly due to not wanting to deal with naming parts. And yes, femslash fandoms spring up more readily around media with canon f/f, so you'll find obscure little movies like DEBS getting a decent trickle of fic, at least for a while.

None of these are hard and fast rules, obviously, and they apply mostly to LJ fandom. When I look for fic in other places, I'm more likely to find happy endings and longer plots and graphic porn, although I'm less likely to find decent writing.

Canons femslash fans would know... depends on the corner, I guess. East/west is a big divide there. For west, idk, probably Xena and Buffy. For animanga, Utena definitely, Sailor Moon, possibly Maria-sama ga Miteru, though that one doesn't get a lot of fic.

I would consider myself exclusively into femslash as much as possible without being a totally inflexible dolt. I've written gen and m/m for exchanges and a couple spur-of-the-moment crack!fics, I have one m/m/f threesome I occasionally enjoy, and the rest of my output and intake is femslash. I'm mostly in Ace Attorney fandom, which has a nice wide selection of women and some lesbian fanon floating around (it is pretty much impossible for me to imagine Adrian Andrews as straight now). I dabble in the Persona 3 and 4 fandoms, both of which have female characters interacting in their canons. 4 especially has a hefty f/f subset thanks to Chie and Yukiko's whole prince thing and general BFF-ness. And I circle around the edges of FFXIII fandom, which is completely made for femslash, but sadly not all that many people have played it. Most of my fandom activity is on kink memes, and I think prompt-based areas like that really encourage more rare pairs to be written, including femslash.

I should really go to bed now urrrrrk

[koredaze]

# 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?

Better late than never. To me femslash is practically anti fandom. It's usually about what's not there in canon. For the most part it's inherently AU by fandom definition but not by femslash definition. In femslash AU tends to mean Uber and is often published with the characters clearly recognizable, but with different names in a different setting.

Femslash writers take characters and say hey, would they work? They're both strong awesome women, let me create this. Though the more it draws on something in canon usually the better it is received. And I do think femslash readers will read any pairing that sparks whether it is because of the characters or the actors. I've read fic from shows I never watched, or only tuned into because of the femslash fic it generated.

I only have one story written so I don't have a lot of experience, but I posted it first in a fandom fic community as opposed to femslash specific. The story plays off against canon and is the first of a series where women in femslash relationships take center stage. Wat killed me was getting feed back from a beta, that all the people in his writing group objected to a character that had a canon lesbian relationship being portrayed a lesbian, and were of course horrified that I put 'straight' characters in a relationship together. At least two had turned canon queers straight in their stories.

The fandom is also chalk full of M/M. And yeah, most is written by women. They have communities dedicated to the women in the series, seem to want non-femslash fics. What I got when I posted to the big bang is what I'd been warned of, pitifully few readers. On fanfic . net I got more and a few reviews from people reading because of the show and not the femslash. So that experience has been better.

I haven't posted to the femslash sites yet for fear of disappointment. It is not a pairing from a popular femslashed show, or even a pairing that's been done before. (except by the person who gave me the idea for it). Which brings me to another question. Am I shocked by what takes off and what doesn't. Yes. TDWPrada boggles my mind. The pairing possibilities that get overlooked stagger me. I wish I was some prolific writer that could fill in the gaps.

I find myself saying, well if it's a het or M/M writer I know is excellent I'll give it a read, if it's a character I'm trying to get a hold of for my writing I look. But I think I'm going to go back to cruising primarily femslash and let the rest go. There is too much femslash across the net in archives and what not I haven't read. As for the continuation of my story, I'm thinking of femslashing more characters than I originally intended. It'll make me happy.

[geekgrrllurking]

Hi there, I've stumbled upon this discussion, I'm not exactly sure how and felt compelled to add my two cents to the discussion.

Does femslash fandom (as a larger entity) exist?
I actually find this a little shocking that you've asked this. Probably because these are the only fandoms that I interact with online. I have no interest in all in m/m or het and maybe I am in a minority...

If it does, what, other than the obvious (having at least one f/f ship), are the central features of femslash fandom?
I think one of the main features of a femslash fandom is that there is a romance and not always just sexsexsex. A story needs to be well told and feelings explored in many various ways. I've always just assumed this was universal to all fandom type writing, but as I noted above I'm not well versed in other types out there. Strong female characters are important as well I think.

How is femslash fandom culture different from (or the same as?) het fandom/guyslash fandom?
I think femslash fandom culture really don't want men in the picture much at all. In fact strong female characters solving their own problems or telling our own stories is an attractive feature to femslash.

What are the main fannish interactions in femslash fandom?
I would say the femslash archive site Passion and Perfection found at www.ralst.com is how a lot of femslash readers find each other. That will eventually lead to the passion_perfect lj community. Also International Femslash Day had it's second annual appearance this summer. This was also the first year that an online femslash convention occurred at the same time, with panel discussions and many authors interacting with femslash fans. It was a ton of fun. There are also several boards out there dedicated to various specific fandoms where there can be a sense of community.

Are there any femslash fans who are exclusively into femslash?
*raises hand* and I somehow doubt I'm the only one. While I have dabbled on the straight side I thankfully realized it was just a phase I was going through in college that I grew out out *grin* As many, if not most, femslash readers seem to be lesbians they tend to only want to read f/f pairings only. I personally have no interest in het or m/m fic at all, generally speaking, although I do have a soft spot for SG1 fic with Jack and Daniel as a couple.

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)?
There are several huge ones that come to mind, with Xena being the mother of them all. From Xena sprung online femslash like you wouldn't believe. Buffy, Law and Order SVU, Star Trek Voyager, and most recently Guiding Light's Olivia and Natalia aka Otalia was gigantic in the femslash world (also one of my personal favourites to both read and write)

What are your personal experiences being a femslasher in a (small/large/eastern/western/etc) fandom?
As a fan I love reading it and that tends to inspire me to write it too. I've devoured the archive sites at Passion Perfection, the Pink Rabbit Consortium www.altfic.com, the Bard's Corner over on www.ausxip.com, the fanfic site for Otalia at www.incandescentfire.com.
As a writer, I have many fandoms that I enjoy exploring, from the extrememly popular Otalia to the obscure like Bionic Woman (2007). I think the femslash culture is smaller, more intimate almost (or I suppose insular is an accurate description) and y'know what, I kind of like it like that.

If you haven't explored a lot of the femslash out there, I encourage you all to check out some of those archive sites to get you started!