Happy International Day of Femslash!

By faith on Saturday, July 18, 2009 - 17:02

When I was just discovering I might be gay, I turned to the world around me to discover myself. I turned on the TV, hoping to catch a glimpse of what all of this meant for me and my future. I remember having so many questions, questions I needed answered in order to realize what had changed for me.

I live in the Netherlands and when I was first coming out there were only two things to watch to find some clue about lesbian life. Onderweg naar Morgen (loosely translated as ‘The road to tomorrow’), a Dutch soap opera which, at the time, featured Bettina Berger as Dr. Renee Couwenberg, a woman who fell for a woman (and another and another and another, it’s a soap opera after all) after having been in relationships with men. The second was, starting from Season 4, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

A Buffy the Vampire Slayer graphic of Willow and Tara by BabyDykeCate

From Onderweg naar Morgen I learned that it’s hard to be in a lesbian relationship. From Buffy I mostly learned about Wicca and, eventually, not to hog the covers. What I learned from the search as a whole was that I was barely represented. Oh, I found out that, late at night, I was plenty represented. The few scenes I caught by accident and watched because my curiosity got the better of me made me shiver. If sleeping with a woman was like that, I didn’t want to be a lesbian.

Long story short, I discovered Xena and Babylon 5 on television and begun to realize Xena and Gabrielle, as well as Susan and Talia, were very much together. They cared for each other, looked out for each other and were both emotionally and physically close. I just didn’t see them address it and I went online to discover if they really were together. If so, I wanted a love like theirs. It turned out they weren’t together (or so subtle it was barely there), but there were a lot of people who saw, what I came to know as sexual subtext, between them as well.

These people, the ones who saw subtext in pretty much anything, were mostly women and some of them, I learned, were awesome writers. They wrote stories about famous subtext couples like Xena/Gabrielle, Janeway/Seven (of Star Trek: Voyager fame) and Alex/Olivia (of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit fame). They called it Femslash and for a long time it was my Holy Grail.

One of the official banners for the IFD ’09, courtesy of Femslashday.com

On this day we celebrate, for the second time, the beauty that is fan-fiction and femslash in particular. Fan-fiction, according to Dictionary.com is ”a fictional account written by a fan of a show, movie, book, or video game to explore themes and ideas that will not or cannot be explored via the originating medium.” That’s basically a difficult way of saying ‘the fans know it better’.

‘Femslash’ has a slightly different meaning. Femslash is a subgenre of slash fan-fiction, which focuses on romantic and/or sexual relationships between female fictional characters. And for the record, ‘slash fan-fiction’ is a subgenre of fan-fiction that focuses on the depiction of romantic or sexual relationships between characters of the same sex.

A Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles graphic of Cameron and Sarah by GrumpyBear

First there was fan-fiction. Although I can’t imagine a time without it, fan-fiction really hasn’t been around for that long. The 1960’s brought the first popularized fan-fiction to us via magazines. The stories were in the Star Trek fandom and although they started out heterosexual, a new subgenre emerged quiet rapidly pairing James Kirk with Spock. These stories, marked with a ‘/’ became known as ‘Slash fan-fiction’ and were predominantly written by straight, middle-aged, white women.

Slash fan-fiction used to be a male/male thing for a long time but, eventually, with the coming of Xena: Warrior Princess and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, it became a unified umbrella term for any fiction featuring a romantic pairing of two people of the same sex. Of course, we lesBians like to be special and coined another phrase, ‘femslash’. 

A Xena: Warrior Princess graphic of Xena and Gabrielle by TaladarkieJJ

Why do people write fan-fiction? There are very few studies into the phenomenon, but the few people who did look into it all came to the same conclusion. Fan-fiction is being written to be subversive, to stick it to the Powers That Be. I used to write fan-fiction myself and a lot of people I know still do. Not a single fan-fiction writer I know writes because they want to be subversive.

A Law and Order graphic of Alex and Olivia by GrumpyBear

I decided to ask friend, fellow (and awesome) fan-fiction writer and Otalia nut, DAx why she got into writing fan-fiction. This was her powerful answer.

“The exclusion of lesbian and gay story lines has been a long running tradition in both television and movies. In the early to mid nineties TV shows wised up and decided they could bump their ratings by teasing us as an audience in order to get us to watch, while never having to actually provide the pay off. This included shows that even seemed to be catered to our tastes and desires. 

Take Xena for example. If there was ever a show tailor made for lesbians, that was it. The relationship between Xena and Gabrielle was complex and intense, often sliding into sensual if not flat out sexual, and yet in the end, the Xena and Gabrielle that we actually got to see together were played by Renee O' Connor and...Ted Raimi? Repeat after me: WTF? Sure, they flat out admitted that they were the reincarnations of our much beloved duo, but we still didn't get the actual couple! 

In subsequent years we were treated to innuendo and 'subtext' in all shapes and sizes (i.e., Janeway/Seven, Alex/Olivia, Casey/Olivia, Warner/Olivia...Wow Olivia gets around!), but still no pay off! THAT is why I started writing fan-fiction. I wanted these characters that I loved and valued to actually play out the story arcs that I wanted to see. And I knew if I waited I would be old and gray before it really happened, so I decided to take matters into my own hands. 

My first story was a very small piece called Choices (It's bad, really! Don't read it!) that centered on Kira and Dax from the DS9 series.  I wrote one more DS9 story, a much longer and more involved piece about Dax, before moving on to Xena. That is when I really got involved in the femslash community for the first time.  And THERE you will find my reason for doing this for over 15 years.

The people I have met and the friends I have made are amazing! There is a HUGE social network stretched around the globe made up of people who all want the same thing. For our girls, whomever they might be, to finally have a happy ending. Dammit!”

(I asked her a couple of other things as well in a small interview, which you can read here, and I highly recommend it!)

A Guiding Light graphic of Olivia and Natalia by GrumpyBear

While most fan-fiction is written about American shows (they’re the ones shown all over the globe so they have the greatest fan following), there are certainly European shows which bring in a lot of femslash. Good examples include Britain’s Bad Girls, Hex and Murder in Suburbia and Spain’s Hospital Central. It is interesting to note that European fan-fiction often only gets written when there is already lesBian content on the show or in the movie the fan-fiction is about.

Also interesting to note is that we lesBians are a dedicated bunch. Even long after shows with lesBian characters have ended, we continue writing about them. The same goes for shows that haven’t been picked up but which did have lesBian characters. Examples include Bad Girls and Nikki & Nora. Hell, we even write a lot about shows which don’t have lesBian characters at all! Just look at the fan-following for Women’s Murder Club.

This dedication to a fandom is a trait many fan-fiction writers share. In order to write good stories, they emerge themselves in the show, movie or book and find out how to become that character while writing. It’s this process which separates the good writers from the bad.

A Bad Girls graphic of Helen by GrumpyBear

Reading and writing fan-fiction and femslash is often an initiation into the LGBT community. It was for me. Finding out how the dynamics are in a lesbian relationship, reading about people you identify with, trying to figure out how two women make love, all are good angles to explore by taking on some fan-fiction. And really, the basics of fan-fiction writing are easy. I’ll give you the recipe.

Take two fleshed out women from a book, movie, game, television show or make up some of your own. Make sure not to use real life people because that’s actually against the law. Think up a story about how the women get together romantically. Write it down and publish it somewhere like FanFiction.net or Passion & Perfection. Voilá, you are done.

Unfortunately, creating good fan-fiction is a lot harder. Bad Fanfic! No Biscuit! is a hilarious site filled with fan-fiction written specifically to draw attention to the obvious mistakes made by (newbie) fan-fiction writers. Spend some time on there, even if you’re not a fan-fiction fan. The comments added to the stories will make you laugh out loud, I swear.

A Los Hombres de Paco graphic, courtesy of Passion and Perfection

Sadly, the stories written on BFNB aren’t even amongst the worst I’ve read in my long history of fan-fiction reading. Spending an hour on Fanfiction.net can rally up a lot worse. There are, however, some very, very good and long fics out there. They just take some finding.

Throughout this article I have linked to stories in various fandoms. I strongly suggest you pick your poison and enjoy the ride. I shall leave you with the fan-fiction I keep coming back to, She Who Hesitates Is Lost by Lisa Countryman, and I hope that this article will motivate you to read and support work from all the amazing authors out there (Especially those awesome authors that get published!).

A Women’s Murder Club graphic of Lindsay and Jill by GrumpyBear

If you feel the need to write some fiction yourself or post links to fan-fics you have written or read in the comments, feel free! I think everyone should be able to join the joy that is the celebration of female and everlasting love. Fan-fiction helped me to grow confident about my sexual orientation. It played an import part in my coming out and my growing confidence. It gave me friends, a community and my start in writing. I hope it can add to your life as well. 

Happy International Day of Femslash people! Enjoy and spread the word!