Femslash

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The symbolic slash, used to separate the two names in a romantic pairing, from which slash fiction takes its name.

Femslash (also known as saffic, femmeslash, girlslash, slash, yuri, or shoujo-ai) is a variation on the traditional definition of slash fiction — homosexual/homoerotic fanfiction. In femslash, female fictional characters are paired in a romantic or sexual relationship in a fan-written story. The term comes from the abbreviation of "female."

Many fandoms are femslash-positive, including Hex, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, ER, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, That's So Raven, Firefly, and, the first primarily femslash fandom, Xena: Warrior Princess. Older, more well-known fandoms also have growing femslash contingents, such as Star Trek, The X-Files, and comic books such as Purgatori, Catwoman and Harley & Ivy.^{[citation needed]}

Femslash is a wide and varied genre, ranging from epic romances, to hardcore pornography, to lighthearted romps, to darkest horror.

[edit] History

There are many strong femslash communities with members who read and write femslash material. Many professional authors have emerged from this community. Femslash has its own fan fiction communities, behavior codes, traditions, definitions and terminology. The community, unlike other parts of the greater fan fiction community, lacks a strong fanzine backing, and as of February 2006, there has been no multi-fandom femslash convention.

The first female/female slash story probably emerged in the mid-to-late 1970s. At that time, the material did not have a name -- the term slash did not arrive for another ten years or so. One of the first known instances of femslash in the modern fan fiction context was the story "Kismet," by Dani Morin. This story was published in 1977’s Star Trek Obsc’Zine. Femslash emerged again with Blake’s 7 in the mid-1980s. Members of this small Blake’s 7 femslash community included Jane Carnell, Barbara Tennison, M.J. Dolan, and [Bryn Lantry]. As fan terminology began to take shape, and assume a clear meaning to those within the community, these female/female stories began to generally be referred to as f/f slash.

According to members of the community at that time, slash was generally scorned and feared because of homophobic attitudes and a desire for censorship. Slash writing was seen as a social taboo, with its authors facing ostracism for their work, often within the greater fanfiction community.^{[citation needed]} For the femslash community, the taboo was worse: the material was deemed unacceptable in places where male/male slash fiction was permitted.^{[citation needed]}

During the mid to late 1980s, some fandoms began to move online. This was corellated to the growth of university networks Usenet and mailing lists. There were also some members of the fanfiction community, specifically in the Anime and Star Trek fandoms, who supported the push into this new medium as an opportunity for wider discourse.

The femslash community was a relatively late bloomer compared to gen- (non-pairing-based) and het- (heterosexual-pairing-based) fan fiction. The m/m slash fans followed close behind in establishing their communities. They posted on Usenet and created their own mailing lists. The comic book fandom had their mailing lists as early as 1984, with the Superguy mailing list. Star Trek fen were on Usenet. By the early 1990s, Blake’s 7, Doctor Who, Highlander, Quantum Leap communities all had mailing lists. However, there were no references to f/f slash in these. Evidence suggests that the earliest references to f/f on the Internet happened in the Blake's 7 fandom, on their mailing in 1994. The references to this material referred to it as f/f slash. The references were related to a question of does this material exist, if so where and if not, why not? The discussion said there was some on the Blake’s 7 fandom but it was rare and it was generally not on-line. The lack of material was attributed to the absence of men in the fandom.

The femslash communities that were developing at this period were generally separate from eastern fandoms. Anime fen were in their own separate space, with their own terminology and fannish practices. What was happening in Japanese based during this period of the 1980s and early to mid1990s is relatively unknown. By 1995, the f/f contingent was defined enough that Yuri was the term of choice for the femslash equivalent in that culture. This term would continue to stay in use for the next seven to eight years before the usage would begin to fade as eastern and western fandoms began to merge.

By 1996, a number of factors seemed to have come together and femslash became more visible to fandom as a whole. The material was beginning to show up at conventions such as Media West, which helped expose it to a larger audience. America On-line made accessibility more readily available. CompuServe and Prodigy were offering access to the World Wide Web. In this year, the first X-Files femslash, still called f/f slash or female-female slash at the time, was published on the Internet. Other communities publishing early femslash that year on-line included Star Trek, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager, Doctor Who and Xena: The Warrior Princess. The latter would start to change the nature and shape of femslash this year, when they introduced a word for their femslash writings. Instead of calling it f/f slash or female-female slash, they called the material Alternative. This term would be the defining one for the material in several fandoms for the next three to four years.

Other fandoms began to join in, developing small femslash contingents. They were helped by a variety of factors. In the case of ER, in 1997, the canon relationship between Kerry Weaver and Kim Legaspi helped to develop that community. The Xena: Warrior Princess community was helped by the large lesbian audience for the show, being a show that focused almost solely on the relationship between two women and the large influx of people from other older, more established fandoms. By 1997, this community had begin archiving their material on websites. Some of these archives contained only femslash material. The Xena: Warrior Princess community would also coin the term Uber this year by Kym Taborn of Whoosh.org. She noted on Whoosh that the sudden emergence of Ubers started in 1997, after the Xena episode "The Xena Scrolls" aired. This episode was set in 1942 and featured the characters portraying respective characters' descendants. This tradition would eventually lead to some authors in the fan fiction community turning professional and helping to push published lesbian fiction as a major component of several femslash communities.

As Xena: The Warrior Princess took off, Sailor Moon's femslash period rose as the other large community of the day. This fandom attracted many American fen, ones who were not steeped in eastern, Japanese fannish cultural practices. It helped to create other femslash audience for other Anime shows which would become big in the United States, shows such as Card Captor Sakura and Revolutionary Girl Utena. These audiences would begin crossing over with western fandoms, helping to change both cultures.

By 1998 and 1999, the femslash community became bigger as more fandoms started joining in. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5, Roswell, X-Files had small communities with participants actively plugging their material and relationships. The community also faced a terminology shift as women like Kate Bolin started using terms like femslash, females and saffic. These communities were aided by the ability to quickly, easily and cheaply create mailing lists. A number of them were started in 1999. A lot of them related to Star Trek and Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. In moving their material to mailing lists, they were one of the many factors pushing the centralization of both fandoms away from Usenet and in to new mediums.

These fandoms attracted bigger audiences, and in some regards, defined those fandoms. Xena and Buffy were the femslash fandoms. Yes, the fandoms did other things, had other pairings but they were the place for femslash and they were the communities to find lesbians writing lesbian fic. This increased visibility and defining of those communities as havens of femslash would eventually lead to media attention, the first for f/f material, in 2000 in Wired Magazine. As attention grew, more shows started and it became acceptable to write femslash material. Writers from the older fandoms were migrating to new fandoms, fandoms which had well defined female characters, fandoms which had more than one attractive and interesting female characters. Smallville, Battlestar Galatica, Harry Potter, Queen of the Swords, The L Word, That's So Raven, Firefly quickly found themselves with their own communities.

Fandom migration was starting to become a bigger issue as new technologies, lower archiving costs, an increase in programmers, more available scripts, new services began to be offered. Fandom went from majordomo using e-mail command mailing lists to web based mailing list management to free mailing list services like YahooGroups. Fandom went from archiving stories by hand to cgi scripts to embracing archives like FanFiction.Net to going to smaller more personalized script based archives. Fandom went from personal web pages to blogs to LiveJournals. They went from image manipulation to animated gifs to audio clips to making music videos. Femslash communities went along for the ride, developing practices similar to their counterparts in other parts of the fan fiction community. They were not fully embracing zine and conventions of some parts of fandom but they were technology well in hand.

By 2004, the femslash community seemed to have found its equilibrium with the technology changes. This allowed for the continued development of individual fandoms. Authors had gone professional. In some cases, like that of Radclyffe, femslash authors went into publishing professional novels and becoming more entrenched, not in fannish culture, but GLBT culture.

Other factors outside of the femslash community began to effect the community. Real Person Fic, generally taboo, had become less taboo. While Lord of the Rings Real Person Fic had blown open the door on the material, the femslash community was less eager to embrace the material. Some of this can be attributed to the presence of the old guard in these communities. They actively discouraged this material. Their voices began to be drowned out as more and more people accepted this material. Female Real Person Slash communities began to exist. Some of it started in the Star Trek: Voyager community. Some of it was aided by women’s professional athletics like the WNBA and the professional women’s soccer league. By 2006, very few in the femslash community would speak out against this material.