If I haven’t already outed myself as a “fandom old” with the title, I’m about to right now: There was a point within the last 10 years when femslash was such a minority and so frequently dismissed by het and boyslash fans alike that ship wars within F/F fandom were actually rare. Likewise, femslash’s demographic was unique. It was mostly populated by queer women, whereas both M/M and M/F were populated by predominantly straight women.
As a result of the dynamics mentioned above, you had a lot of overlap between femslash ships, even within fandoms for a single show. People got along, and often multishipped, because 1) OMG more than two girls?? 2) social media hadn’t become the haven for trollish behavior that it is today, and 3) there was minimal investment in seeing their readings of the text reflected onscreen.
… fandom as the indefinite mass of people who gather around a piece of
media to share their enjoyment of it? Tell stories about it? Spin legends out of it?
That fandom’s real strength has always been its ability to not care
about whether or not the establishment thinks it’s legitimate; to give
the middle finger to canonicity.
I have created this masterpost for my femslash history.
A
series of blog posts and short essays about my history in femslash fandom and
fanfiction, but also more recent impressions. About things I found interesting
or remarkable – things I found worth remembering.
a year ago
I did a femslash-fans survey for my bachelor thesis. So many of you helped me
and filled out the questionnaire. Again: THANK YOU!
Today I
wanted to share the results with you. There aren’t a lot of studies out there that
research femslash-topics but I do think it’s an important topic. I focused my
study on cyberbullying of femslash-fans and its emotional consequences. I asked
people if they witnessed bullying of other femslash-fans or experienced it on
their own.
Just to be
clear: I only asked about cyberbullying from outside the femslash-community.
This does not mean that everything is “rainbows and unicorn stickers” inside
the community. And I’m also aware that not all femslash-fans are saints, some
cyberbullying goes the other way around too.
And yeah of
course I knew that there is a lot of cyberbullying going on but I was still
shocked to see the results.
Why this is
so problematic: Femslash-fans see their community as their safe-space. A lot of
LGBT+ people need safe-spaces because life outside the internet is sometimes
cruel. So some find a safe-space (like a femslash-community), were they can
speak freely and openly. BUT even in this place they are not always safe.
If you have
further questions, don’t hesitate to ask me 🙂 My bachelor thesis is in German or
else I would publish it for you guys.
Question of Smoke 