The 3rd Annual Femslash Mini Meta Fest!

[amaresu]

This is a prompt post! Please only leave prompts here. If you see something you want to respond to make a new post to the community.

For those who don't know: Mini meta is like regular meta, only mini. The aim isn't to end up with thousands of words of meta, but somewhere around 300 words. (Although if you get inspired and write thousands of words no one will complain and similarly if you only have 100 words in you for the topic that is fine as well.) This, hopefully, creates much less pressure and allows more people to post what is on their minds without worrying about it being the most perfect thing ever.

Rules will be the same as last year.

1. Submit topics you want to see meta about. These can be anything so long as it relates to femslash. They will be listed at the bottom of this post for everyone to see.
   
   Sample prompts from last year:
   
   
   • OT3s: Are there any awesome OT3s out there? Are any of them all from the same canon? Can you still call is femslash if one of the three is a man?
     
   • Femmeslash and asexuality - tell me about how you see this. What would femmeslash with one or more asexual partner look like? How would you write it?
     
   • No pithy prompt, but I'd love to see a discussion of sexuality-how we conceptualize it for characters, write it in, leave it out...fluid or fixed. Is it too often assumed in femslash that the characters are lesbians, closet lesbians and not bi, poly, etc.?
     
   
   
   
2. Write meta about the topics. Don't worry if someone else has already written about a topic you wanted to write about, multiple posts about the same topic are encouraged. You can even write mini meta in response to someone else's meta.
   
   You can post directly to fem_thoughts or you can post to your journal and link us.
   
   
3. Discuss the meta!
   
   
4. Show off your meta and get other people to come discuss it! Or possibly do this step first and tell people about the fest. Whichever works really.
   

Submit your prompts to this post and I'll add them to the list. Feel free to re-use from previous years. There's no limit on the number of prompts you can submit.

I lost track of time and I'm posting this a bit late so go ahead and start posting whenever you find something you want to write about. Let's call the end date of the fest May 31st so you've got a bit over a month.

PROMPT POST ONLY! IF YOU SEE SOMETHING YOU WANT TO RESPOND TO PLEASE MAKE A NEW POST TO THE COMMUNITY!

Prompt List

• Butch identified/fan-assigned butch identity - what does it mean for characters, a story?
  
• I'd love to see asexual lesbians in fandom revisited. Most fandom asexuals I can think of are male.
  
• What about genderqueer lesbians? Do any fandoms even have this?
  
• Genderswapping AUs, etc. Genderswapping has a reputation of being a way to "avoid the gay" in male-dominated fandoms, by switching one character's gender to allow for a romance. Is there good lesbian genderswap out there?
  
• Lovers in a dangerous time: What's your approach to writing femslash in times and places that are notoriously unfriendly for f/f relationships, especially historical settings?
  
• How popular (or influential) is RPFS, anyway? And particularly, amongst female artists (in the male slash example I used, the case would be amongst authors, or even editors, publishers, etc.) Also, I'm more interested and curious about the RPFS of female public figures pre-20th century. But really, any time period will do.
  
• femslash and intersectionality - race, class, ethnicity, disability etc.
  
• femslash and kink
  
• femslash involving older characters
  
• I'd love to read about experiences with femslash podfic as a reader and/or a listener.
  
• I would love to hear your thoughts on the revisited topic of actively bisexual female characters or F/F/M threesomes in erotic fiction. I guess mostly from a reader's point of view. The story has femslash but it also has het... does it work for you? Or for the sake of reading comfortably as femslash and thus being called femslash some walls should be maintained?
  
• Have you ever chosen a fandom for it's femslash potential? Which fandoms / pairings?
  

Comments

[aphrodite_mine]

Butch identified/fan-assigned butch identity - what does it mean for characters, a story?


Possibly coming back with more.

[havocthecat]

Please feel free to post about this on girlgay!

[amaresu]

That was the plan, but I had to go to work. I shall do so now.

[levitsa]

I'd love to see asexual lesbians in fandom revisited. Most fandom asexuals I can think of are male.
What about genderqueer lesbians? Do any fandoms even have this?
Genderswapping AUs, etc. Genderswapping has a reputation of being a way to "avoid the gay" in male-dominated fandoms, by switching one character's gender to allow for a romance. Is there good lesbian genderswap out there?

Genderswapping and Bodyswap AUs

[ein_myria]

Genderswaps
"Genderswapping has a reputation of being a way to "avoid the gay" in male-dominated fandoms, by switching one character's gender to allow for a romance."

I think that for the f/f that I've seen, it's often been reverse, particularly since there aren't that many female characters for the genres that they are set in. I've seen a few notable ones in the Iron Man and Sherlock genre, sometimes with a feminist slant, which are as follows:

IRON MAN
Red, Red, Gold by pprfaith (various, genderswap)
"Her name is Tasha Stark, and you won't break her."

Thirty Two Flavors (and then some) by gyzym (Antonia/Pepper, genderswap)
"Tony wears her lips red, red, red, rich and full, painted on like armor, because she likes to. Because it looks good. Because no one expects it of her. Because it’s the right call."

SHERLOCK
Categories by parachute_silks (Holmes/Watson genderswap AU)
"Sherlock is a beautiful liar, but even she can’t keep it up forever."

In Arduis Fidelis by Mad_Maudlin (Sherlock/Watson, genderswap)
"Jane Watson likes to think of herself, deep down inside, as a good girl. She is not a drunken mess like Harry. She did not get fat like Mike. Unlike 327 British soldiers and contractors, she is not dead. She got top marks and she served her country and she has not got a selfish bone in her body. That may actually be part of her problem."

You Can Tell From The Scars On My Arms That I'm Not The Carefullest Of Girls, what if this storm ends by postcardmystery (Sherlock/John genderswap)
"Joss Watson isn't quite sure how to describe Shoshana Holmes, except to say that she's brilliant, mad, and the best person she's ever known."

Bonus: Bodyswaps!

For bodyswaps (which I find, when done well, often addresses similar issues to genderswaps), try the following fic for size. Although it's currently on hiatus I would say that the various issues it touches on elevates the concept of the bodyswap.

GLEE
Assured of Certain Certainties by thememoriesfire (Finn/Rachel, Quinn/Rachel, etc.)
"A freak accident in the chemistry lab has Finn and Quinn switching bodies, and has them stuck living each other's lives for the time being."

Re: Genderswapping and Bodyswap AUs

[levitsa]

Ooh, now I have fics to read. Thanks for linking!

[alexseanchai]

What about genderqueer lesbians? Do any fandoms even have this?

SAILORMOON. The Japanese original, not the recut-for-six-year-olds USA version. Haruka tends to present male, but is emphatically female. I may be confusing 'genderqueer' and 'butch', though, it's been a while since I saw any of the series and I didn't have this vocabulary last time.

[levitsa]

So awesome, thank you! I had no idea about Sailor Moon.

[erinptah]

Haruka dresses in men's clothes a lot, and enjoys the confusion when other girls mistake her for a hot older guy and get crushes on her, but there's no indication that she's not female-identified. (See: when Haruka to find the Inners all eager to meet this hot guy Usagi and Minako told them about...with her jacket off, she's done nothing to make her curves less prominent under the shirt, and her response is an oh-so-innocent "I never said I was a man.") So, canonically butch, but not so much genderqueer.

There are definitely trans* characters in the series, though. Fish Eye in the anime seems clearly female-identified (into men, though), and while the Starlights are women temporarily taking male bodies for disguise purposes, Seiya is arguably more into it than the others (possibly FtM, although that interpretation has a bad rep from Seiya/Usagi no-homo shippers, and I feel like she comes off more genderqueer anyway).

[ciaan]

Parker in Leverage is sometimes written as asexual. Though actually I think I've only seen this in the F/M or F/M/M fics with her, not the F/F. Hmmmm.

[ar]

Lovers in a dangerous time: What's your approach to writing femslash in times and places that are notoriously unfriendly for f/f relationships, especially historical settings?

[levitsa]

Oh, I've done some of this, though none of it is online. When I write femslash in historical settings I try to emphasize the fraught aspects and explore the ways in which secrecy and silence must then define the relationship's public expressions. For myself, I find it important not to white-wash the difficulty and danger that women who love women have experienced by sanitizing or gentling a historical period -- and not to let a historical setting prevent me from writing girlslash if that's what fits the characters. We know that women have loved women all throughout history. Some of them did so quite happily, if circumstances permitted, while others suffered for it. But I'm a historian and put a lot of thought and research into depicting homosexual character historically -- especially if they exist in a time period before our modern concepts of orientation. On the whole in the western world though, f/f relationships have usually been seen as less dangerous than m/m ones and have often escaped the notice or prosecution of authorities, unless they are combined with other subversive behavior like wearing men's clothes, which makes me feel like they ought to be written more because many of the historical obstacles around m/m stories are easier to put aside in a f/f story.

[elleth]

I agree about the fraught aspects. Only tangentially related insofar that I am writing Tolkien fanfiction, but the canon universe seems rather prohibitive toward same-sex (or any "deviant") relationships all the same, so while fictional, the situation is not necessarily too different. Secrecy as a theme and the characters struggling to understand and define that identity on somewhat acceptable terms to themselves has become a central focus in those fics rather without my trying.

[amaresu]

I hate to do this, but this is a prompt post. Could you take your discussion to an actual post?

Popularity and Nature of Real Person Femslash

[shyturtle]

After delving more in to the RPS of Melville and Hawthorne, I started to wonder about the nature of RPFS (real person femme slash). I'm not a big fan of RPS, mind you (and I'm very new to this), but I noticed that it's predominately popular in male associations.

How popular (or influential) is RPFS, anyway? And particularly, amongst female artists (in the male slash example I used, the case would be amongst authors, or even editors, publishers, etc.)

Also, I'm more interested and curious about the RPFS of female public figures pre-20th century. But really, any time period will do.

*(this is my first prompt, so I'm sorry if there was anything that was confusing to understand)

[alias_sqbr]

So, can we post them now? Because I just wrote something :)

[amaresu]

Please do.

[woldy]

I'd love to see something about:
- femslash and intersectionality - race, class, ethnicity, disability etc.
- femslash and kink
- femslash involving older characters

[shyturtle]

I have a question, if that's alright. Would it be okay to simply give examples of the topic, rather than a general analysis?

(wanted to address two of woldy's prompts, but wasn't sure if specific cases and examples would suffice)

[woldy]

Not sure if you expected me to reply, but in case you did...

I know of examples of all those in HP fandom, several in Merlin fandom, and have written all those categories myself. I guess it could be interesting to hear about other fandoms, but I contributed the prompts in the hope of someone writing meta. Unless you meant examples of meta posts on those themes? In which case, yes please!

[amaresu]

That's perfectly fine. I'm sure there are lots of people who'd like examples.

[tamsin]

I'd love to read about experiences with femslash podfic as a reader and/or a listener.

[crys_loch]

Hi. I'm new. I would love to hear your thoughts on the revisited topic of actively bisexual female characters or F/F/M threesomes in erotic fiction. I guess mostly from a reader's point of view. The story has femslash but it also has het... does it work for you? Or for the sake of reading comfortably as femslash and thus being called femslash some walls should be maintained?

(frozen)

[woldy]

Have you ever chosen a fandom for it's femslash potential? Which fandoms / pairings?

(frozen)

[amaresu]

Please make this a new post to the community. This is for prompts only.

[ein_myria]

As femslashers do you get a lot of hate for the fanwork that you do? What does one do in that circumstance?

[background: A BNF in Glee femslash and previously, in Skins, (thememoriesfire) supposedly quit writing recently due to the flames. She has had to delete her tumblr a few times due to the amount of aggressive comments she's gotten, and she deleted her works in progress.]