Towards A Darker Femslash by holyfant
This post is part of Femslash Revolutionās I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.
Hello everyone! I hope your Femslash February is going great so far. I was stoked to be asked to write a little something for I Am Femslash, particularly because while Iāve written bits and pieces about my experience as a young, queer, multishipping and writing young woman in fandom, Iāve never really tried to put any of my thoughts together in a truly coherent way. So, here I go, attempting to write about a topic that is dear to me. Feel free to engage me on any of the points I make in this little essay!
So, hi. Iām holyfant, a 26-year-old ESL fanfic and (aspiring) original fiction writer. Iāve been active in fandom for nearly fifteen years, and have written fic for a lot of that time, picking up English and fannishness along the way. Writing fic gave me a way to connect with other people who had to same interests I did ā and only later did I realise it also paved the way to more self-knowledge. At some point during my teens, the question of my own sexual and romantic identity became pressing; maybe paradoxically this first drew me to male slash, and only later to femslash ā perhaps because the former was and is more visibly present in fandom than the latter, and perhaps also because reading and writing femslash was still too direct a way to engage with my own identity at that point. I still donāt fully understand this; I remember that when I was first playing with the idea that I might not be straight, it felt safer to read about men in love than women in love. Maybe seeing male characters discover their non-straightness was close enough to my own experience to stir up emotion and feeling, but far enough removed from it that it didnāt stir up panic. Who knows?
Either way, when I was more comfortable with who I was, I returned to f/f and found it infinitely rewarding. I read a metric ton of femslash fic and wrote lots myself ā for a fairly long stretch of time I enjoyed deep obscurity in the Harry Potter and Greek mythology fandoms as a niche femslash writer with two or three loyal readers, and it was truly a lovely time. I engaged with femslash in a curious, non-discriminatory way ā I shipped everyone. Iād take two minor female characters who perhaps had never even interacted in canon and found a way to put them together. I took prompts for characters that were only featured in throw-away lines, and wrote a lot of fic for the now sadly defunct LJ community hp_rarestpairest, which encouraged the nichest of pairings. Basically I was honing my writing skills, while also representing my questions, hopes and fears about my own sexuality at the same time. In my fics I dealt with women falling in love, being rejected, having sex with each other, coming out to their families and friends, dealing with heartbreak ā all of these were things that I was thinking about, was experiencing or wanted to experience, or was scared of. I think it will surprise few queer femslash writers to hear that reading and writing femslash taught me a lot about my own identity and sexuality and gave me a community of queer women that I would otherwise never have found.
Despite the fact that I was mostly a femslash writer in my early times in fandom and the fact that I write f/f in my current fandoms today, it remains a curious truth that my growth as a writer from someone who wrote 1,000-word oneshots in one go to someone who wrote novel-length fanfic over several months coincided with going into a different fandom where my main focus was a m/m ship (BBC Sherlock, where I was sucked into the black hole that was Sherlock/John). I said I āshipped everyoneā earlier ā it would be just as correct to say I shipped no one, because I had no deep emotional investment in the ships I wrote about, and often wrote only one fic per ship. (Perhaps the only exception was Lavender/Parvati, which I wrote often and regularly gave me the warm fuzzies to think about.) It wasnāt until Sherlock happened that I started to understand what people meant when they said a ship was their OTP, or how people could get so intense about their reading of a relationship. As a result of this increased feeling of investment I read and wrote so much fic that I became a much better writer for it, by pushing myself to write more and more complex stories. This was all fine in itself, but even as it happened I was aware that it was curious that this sudden spur of feeling and craft was because of a juggernaut white dude ship, something that had never held much interest for me before. I felt ā even at that heady time when youāre in a new fandom and itās like being in love ā like I wanted to continue to write smaller pairings and explore female characters, too. And I did, but the point remains that when I look at my story stats now, itās clear that my f/f stories are shorter in word count and are less varied in their plot and execution than my m/m stories.
All this to show that I am 100% part of what I am about to describe: not a problem, per se, but an observation that I think is useful to be aware of and think about. The fact is that femslash, across fandoms, remains a niche category, and that while there are great amounts of people who read and write almost exclusively m/m this is barely ever the case for f/f. A lot of the f/f writers I know have talked at some point about the realisation that f/f in general seems to lack novel-length stories and stories that have the diversity of plotting and thematic exploration that we easily find for m/m ships. Most f/f stories are shorter stories or oneshots that focus on meet-cutes, sex and domestic bliss. Longer fics are rare. Darker themes, such as character death and grief, trauma, relationship issues, adultery, abuse and so on are also rare. I am not the first to notice this and not the first to theorise on it, but I would still like to identify why I think f/f fandom has developed in this direction, and to formulate some ideas as how to diversify our creative experiences a little.
I think there are a lot of possible reasons that f/f writers are in general less motivated to write long stories that explore complex themes, and these will surely differ for everyone. For me, Iāve identified three causes, in increasing order of importance: 1. a small audience, and therefore a smaller possibility of extensive feedback, 2. a lack of variation and complexity in female characters and their relationships in a lot of canon materials, and 3. the awareness that f/f is often rooted in a deeply lived experience for many of its readers and writers, and that itās therefore necessary to be wary of representing ābadā female characters or negative tropes about lesbian and bisexual relationships. The most complex of these is certainly no. 3, which is why thatās the one I will be writing about a bit more.
Statistically f/f is most likely to be written and read by cis queer women, which of course influences our relationship with the characters we portray, because they refer to our own lived existence. This makes f/f different from m/m ā m/m is also mostly written by cis women (straight and otherwise), which creates a certain leeway for ātrueā realism. Anecdotally I can share what happened when my housemate and my best friend, both cis gay men, delved into the world of m/m fanfic on some of my recommendations. While they enjoyed a lot of the stories I told them Iād liked, they also talked about many of the things they felt were inaccurate about gay sex and romance ā for instance, they could name several often-described sexual acts that they said didnāt quite āwork that wayā, and they were generally uncomfortable with the fannish (certainly often problematic) tendency to label characters as strictly tops or bottoms, especially if this was based on stereotypical characteristics outside of the bedroom. If gay men were to write these stories (which they do, of course, only in much smaller numbers), they might look different ā they might be less fictionalised, less genre-specific; the language developed to talk about men in love might be different, there might be different focuses. Itās hard to definitively say what it would be like. Either way, it would seem logical that it follows, from the fact that lesbian and bisexual women overwhelmingly write the fannish stories that we have about lesbian and bisexual women, that we should find it easy to access their spaces and write about many different aspects of their lives. In reality this doesnāt necessarily seem to be so. Perhaps the scrutiny, both internal and external, is larger ā perhaps because we are writing about ourselves we put more pressure on ourselves to āget it rightā, and perhaps our audience, who is looking to see itself represented, does the same at times. Or maybe we simply perceive our audience as being more critical than it truly is.
What is a ābadā female character? Most people will agree that women often get the short stick of characterisation in most media ā to such an extent that there are tropey names for them, like the Girl Next Door, the Femme Fatale, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and so on. Women are still often used as crutches for men; their stories are supporting stories, their pain is used to further a male characterās pain. Writing about women in fanfic is often already a rebellious act in itself, one that reverses harsh or flippant treatment by canon writers. While this is fine in se, and sometimes even lends a pleasant sheen of fannish disobedience to writing female-centric fic, I do believe it has the unintended and unsavoury result of effectively also policing the sort of woman that can be written about. This may seem like a paradox, but in reacting to the one-dimensional representations of women in fiction it can become important to āfixā those wrongs, and this makes it hard to write about women who donāt overtly challenge assumptions about womanhood: unsympathetic women, women who are perhaps weak-willed, petty, bigoted, jealous, aggressive, criminal, highly sexual, or abusive. Considering that, at least in a Western vision on literature, stories derive meaning at their base from conflict, removing the option to write ābadā women removes a lot of possibility for thematic conflict. This might be part of the reason why there are significantly less plot-driven f/f stories than there plot-driven m/m stories; plot usually requires conflict, and conflict often requires flawed characters and flawed relationships.
I know that when I write about women Iām conscious of the fact that I have internalised societal ideas about what it āshouldā mean to be a woman, but Iām also aware that in trying to combat those ideas itās easy to get mired in different ones. I know that I sometimes interrogate myself about what it is that Iām saying about women when I write about this particular woman cheating on her partner or being generally secretive and untruthful ā doesnāt that reproduce a societal prejudice that women are untrustworthy? Itās very hard to separate a single performance of fictional womanhood from the general performance of womanhood ā this is not usually a problem with (white) men, who are allowed to represent only themselves, and not their entire gender.
The above paragraphs talk about āwomenā ā clearly the problem of treatment that I write about becomes many times more pressing when dealing with women who are on other intersections of oppression. Women who love women are more vulnerable to prejudice and abuse than straight women, and wlw of colour are again many times more vulnerable than their white sisters. And when these wlw or woc are not cisgender, again their situation becomes many times more dire. These societal realities are often reproduced in media ā 2016 was the year in which no lesbian or bisexual woman on tv seemed to be safe, and their pain and deaths hurt all the more because we are confronted with this pain in real life, too. I remember my tumblr dash around the time that The 100ās Lexa died; the pain there for many queer women who watched the show was very real, because ā I think ā it echoed a feeling of being unsafe, of being cruelly treated in society. I remember fans writing about how hurtful it was to see a brave female character who loved another woman killed off like this; in their pain many people stated that it was unacceptable that lesbian or bisexual female characters should be killed in fiction at all. Of course, this was understandable considering how hurt fans were, and how often they had been disappointed ā still, the typical fannish tendency towards lack of nuance frustrated me. In capable writersā hands, tragedy can be performed very meaningfully. I wrote a little about this on my blog at the time, because I was starting to feel insecure about my own tendency to prefer darker thematic material ā was I complicit in my own oppression, and was I hurting other queer women by writing what I enjoyed? Clearly my own privilege was also part of this question: I am a wlw, but Iām white and cisgender, and I hail from a country where legal equality has been realised for the entirety of my adult life. Obviously homophobia is still a problem, but my close environment has been nothing but supportive and accepting from the moment I first came out as lesbian at 16, and again as bisexual at 24. So I havenāt experienced much of the tension and fear that other wlw might have experienced. Does this make me a part of the oppressive machine that performs queer womenās pain for shock value? I seriously thought about this question before tentatively concluding that I had to have faith that I was a thoughtful enough writer to avoid these pitfalls.
It might seem from this essay that I find writing femslash to be an exhausting trial of constantly having to think about what prejudices Iām reproducing ā this is not the case. I love writing femslash and I love my femslash-writing friends. Iāve learned heaps about myself and others by reading some of the stellar f/f stories out there, and with every f/f story I write I become more aware of how much I love to write about queer women ā and I remind myself that I should certainly do it more often, and more ambitiously. As I stated above, this is something that Iāve noticed in my own writing practice, so itās not an accusation leveled at anyone else. Itās simply something that I find worthwhile to examine. Judging by some of the conversation that periodically does the rounds in my f/f-loving circles, Iām definitely not alone in that.
Now how to deal with this in our f/f-writing community? Thereās no singular answer to that, and whatever we can do is both blindingly obvious and hard to actually do. One of the possible answers is, as it is with so many complex questions that have complex roots, to simply push through and do it anyway, to try to ignore some of the fear and uncomfortable associations we might feel in writing unsympathetic f/f narratives and write them anyway. Diversifying the stories we write will automatically diversify the stories we feel weāre allowed to write. Audience response is probably important too; I think that there must be plenty of people who feel, like me, that itās a shame that so much of femslash is short and that a lot of it focuses on narrative happiness rather than also exploring narrative unhappiness and conflict, which (in my opinion, at least) yields more fertile literature. And if we feel that way, then we have to try to reward people who write the things we like to read, through our attention, our comments, our kudos, our podcasts, our recs, et cetera.
I write this mere days before the beginning of Femslash February, and Iām certainly planning to walk the walk that Iāve talked in this talk; Iām absolutely sure that the strong core of people who love to read about women loving women will continue to keep this community vibrant and alive and that there are plenty of new directions our stories can go in. Iām looking forward to seeing what the other voices who are participating in I Am Femslash have to say, and Iām looking forward to all of the new content that will be produced. Iām grateful that as a young teen I stumbled upon fandom and that I found my way towards femslash a few years later; Iām pretty sure my own journey of discovery and creativity would have been very different, and probably more difficult, if I hadnāt found this community. So, to all of us: We Are Femslash! <3
holyfant is a 26-year-old bisexual woman from Belgium, whoās been writing about women and their relationships since she was a budding young wlw. She loves to think about literature and how it relates to the core of our human experiences: the only thing she really wants to be, in the end, is a storyteller.
Tumblr: http://holyant.tumblr.com
AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant
