#femslash fandom

This week's Featured Article is Sapphic September!

Sapphic September is an annual autumnal challenge focused on creating fanworks for wlw ships.  It began as a simple tag on Tumblr that morphed into a recurring challenge that has had different moderators taking up the mantle over the years.  In its current form, a month's worth of prompts is provided to inspire fans.

To find out more about the history of this challenge, visit the Fanlore page!

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In the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 - an unofficial demographics survey of 16,131 AO3 users - the "Mature" rating was ranked most enjoyed by consumers, while those posting works most frequently posted "Teen and Up". Only 16% of those who had posted works to AO3 said they had never posted M/M, while 69% of consumers "Strongly Enjoyed" M/M works.

Thank you for your patience! I would appreciate if people shared this btw!! Thank you!!

Are you looking for a femslash(+) centric space on the web? If so, would you support me in making this space? Read on...

Hi!! My name is Agnes the Alien, and I run Sunset Archive, an archive running on AO3's code dedicated to F/F, F/NB and NB/NB (femslash+) fanworks.

I've been passionate about femslash my entire fandom life, even before I understood my lesbianism. At 12 I ran a semi-popular Buffy femslash blog on Tumblr, and when I realized I was a lesbian at 18, it started becoming clearer and clearer to me that F/F fans were consistently either belittled and mistreated or ignored entirely by fandom at large. Most of the focus is on male characters, M/M, and M/F—which, you like what you like, you know? But for those of us with different preferences, there are, at present, very few places dedicated solely to femslash(+).

As I got deeper into femslash fandom around 2023-2024, I also got into self-hosting software (inspired by my friend Kat, who is amazing!), and I finally realized that someone had to do something to rectify this. So I started Sunset—wow, almost a year ago now. It was rather chaotic at first, as the site went semi-viral before I could fully envision what I wanted the site to be, but it has been such a rewarding experience since it found its footing.

However, whenever I work on Sunset or coding additions to it and complete a project, I always get this uneasy feeling—"Now what?"

I always want to do more.

TL;DR:

Did your ship make the top 10?

Are you a fan, especially a femslash fan, who's interested in reading a funky little (~30 pp.) piece of 19th C. mass-popular literature serialized over several weeks? If so, I've got the project for you! Join us for a casual, opt-in reading group of a short 19th C. dime novel, beginning January 15, 2024!

You can sign up here if you're interested!

More on the Project:

I'm a PhD Candidate in English and Women's and Gender Studies working on a dissertation on nineteenth-century American working-class women, queer pleasure and possibility, and mass-popular literature. As part of my project, I've spent a lot of time in archives reading 19th C. story papers and dime novels, genres of degraded literature that were incredibly popular among factory and mill workers but that have received very little scholarly attention. What's fascinating is how similar this mass-popular literature is to fan fiction--not just in its sensational plots and queer elements (sometimes there really is just one bed in the cabin), but especially in how it was consumed (often in serial format, shared amongst exuberant, fannish communities who even had their own shipping wars in the letters to the editor columns!) and in how it was critiqued (before Anthony Comstock came for pornography, he led a whole campaign against this kind of literature as "perverting" and tending to promote "evil reading"). Although I'm a fan myself, I know that one person's readings can never fully capture the wide variety of responses and interpretations that a whole group of fans and consumers can have, which is where you all come in! For the final chapter of my dissertation, I'll be serially disseminating chapters of a short dime novel for a group of participants to discuss in a private Discord to explore the creative possibilities of fan reading practices.

You're welcome to be as involved as you would like - maybe you just end up reading along and reacting to the comments of others, or perhaps you find yourself writing fan meta or even making memes and other creative responses! If you have any questions, feel free to DM me here!