snowynight | Where 're the femslash little black dress

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Where 're the femslash little black dress

Some anecdotes

I love Sherlock Holmes, so I can't resist the lure of the 2009 Sherlock Holmes film. It has Mary and Irene in a greater role than in the book, but the movie's never about them, never told in their POV. They pretty much respond to the action. I return from the cinema with a vague thought that I would like a gun-swinging Mary partnered with Irene in a steampunk Victorian London, but I don't really get the characters enough. Because the movie doesn't give me this.

When I watch the earlier season of Stargate: Atlantis, there are only two female favourite characters. They are shown as friends, and the fandom pretty much pair them as the spare. Later in the season there were more female characters introduced and filmed interaction between Teyla and them. While the amount of fic produced is not much as far as I know, Teyla launched several ships, Teyla/Kate, Teyla/Keller, Teyla/Sam. While the canon is not good enough, it at least gives a starting point to write and passes the Bechdel's test in some episodes.

My hypothesis about the lack of femslash little black dress is thus:
There're just not enough female characters. Even nowadays a show can be without one female major character. Supernatural, for example is a big offender.

When there are finally some, the writers often screw up on the female characters. The stories are often not about them, the story not told in their POV, they often go without agency or sacrificed for some dramatic effect. These combined don't encourage fans of female characters. When the show finally pass Bechdel's Test, there are usually no multiple female relationships, not to mention multiple female friendships.

And when there are such examples, people don't know about it.

In conclusion, with the current trend, we're less likely to see femslash little black dress.

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Yes, definitely. Even when there are more than 1 or 2 female characters that I like and want to write about, they usually don't have the sort/amount of interactions that would launch ships.

Kind of off-topic of the 'little black dress' but another thing with the fewer numbers of main female characters is that one has less choice of pairing types that might hit one's buttons (e.g. villain/hero, or the best buddies).

For me, it's really only in writing minor characters (with lots of headcanon) and original fiction that I feel like I get to work with the kind of yuri pairings that interest me most.

I think you're onto something with the idea of female characters not being written with agency. People often say "but the female characters are written badly!" and this may be true, but badly written male characters still get plenty of fic. The difference, though, is that a badly written male character still usually has agency - he will have a goal, a personality and a reason for existing in the plot. So many female characters, though, are there to be reacted to by men (viewers or characters). And yes, definitely the lower numbers of women in most canons are an issue. While male slash fandoms spring up around anything with two or more male characters who spend time together, some of the liveliest femslash fandoms seem to have either *just* two major female characters who have a strong onscreen relationship of some kind (e.g. Legend of the Seeker, The Devil Wears Prada) or an enormous cast gathered over many years (Harry Potter, DCU and Marvel comics, soap operas). An exception to this rule might be The Good Wife - while most of the fic fits the first category (Alicia/Kalinda have a strong onscreen relationship) there's a lot of other female characters around, mostly written with agency.

Last night I was watching a crappy movie (I won't say what it is as not to spoil people) and this post made me think of the femslash options. For male slash, there's four attractive, fit men who spend a lot of time together. For femslash, there's one attractive, fit woman...and two female ghosts. One has no agency and the other is a child. While it does pass the Bechdel test (the living woman and the girl ghost talk about various things) there isn't a femslash opportunity; the opposite is true for the men.

Even when there are female characters, a lot of the time their interactions revolve around men, or are handwaved. I'm thinking specifically of the two kinds of relationships that get slashed most often, rivals and best friends. Even if there are two female best friends in a mixed gender group, their relationship will have little more characterization than "we are girls and we're best friends", which just isn't enough for me to work with. As for rivals, it's rare that female rivalry is portrayed with any depth.

When I watch the earlier season of Stargate: Atlantis, there are only two female favourite characters. They are shown as friends, and the fandom pretty much pair them as the spare.

Some of us actually paired them because we liked the pairing, not because there were no other choices. I'd have just written crossovers for SGA if I hadn't liked to pair them.

I came across this right after reading your comment on my post about Schrodinger's Heroes. Given the prevalence of female characters there, and how the cast was designed both for adventure and for exploring sexual identity ... I think they'd laugh:

Alex and Ash talk about quantum mechanics.
Kay and Morgan talk about aliens.
Pat is sent to get coffee.
This was a test?
This is an ordinary day at the Teferact.

So, yeah, that's a whole new reason why people might be interested in fanfic from this series.

I kind of think the agency thing is an excuse. People don't write femslash because they don't want to. There may be reasons for that, but I don't think it's a lack of female characters.

Remember Lorne/Parrish and Stackhouse/Markham in SGA? They both got more fic than Teyla/Anyone. Yes, it would be better to have more well developed female characters, but we currently have lots of good ones, and we all know fandom will build a ship out of bugger all if the boys are pretty and it hits a trope they like (example: Arthur/Eames in Inception fandom).

My current fandoms are A-Team (which I'd have to bring a woman in from the TV show to slash with Charissa), Highlander (which has a couple of potential women to slash and one solid pairing, see icon), Hawaii Five-0 (which has one or two potential pairings), and Marvel Comics (which has three or four practically canon pairings). In the first three cases, femslash would take a bit of wrangling, but is totally doable, I've seen fans latch on to less plausible ships, in the last it's begging to be written for Misty/Colleen, Jess D/Carol, Natalia/Bobbi and Carol/Wanda (to name three off the top of my head).

So the question of why I don't write femslash in more then comment fic comes down to my own reasons for not doing so, not to a lack of opportunity or a variety of available pairings.

I find that, personally and I'm not speaking for anyone else, I don't write femslash because it's too close to home. I'm a queer woman. All the women I've dated have been in fandom. Do we have a lot in common with Misty and Colleen? Not really, no. However, it would feel to me like putting something of myself, perhaps something that I wouldn't want to share, and possible something about one of my partners that they don't want to share. Writing about male characters is safe, distanced, because my heart is horrible gender essentialist, and I can never feel like one of the boys is really me.

That is probably also an excuse for internalised misogyny.

It's interesting how you only mention TV shows or movies. I've noticed a lot of femslash in those two areas compared to video games.

Sometimes it feels like you have to be into TV/movie fandom to find femslash. For someone like me, whose fandoms are all video games, there really doesn't seem to be much opportunity to find femslash.

I'm not sure if I'm coherent, just wanted to point out that the different types of fandoms can have a large influence on what femslash is around. Since I don't really watch TV or movies and I don't read comics, femslash pretty much doesn't exist for me.

I'm a little confused by this post.

1) Are we talking about an absolute lack or a relative lack?
2) Are we talking about within a particular fandom or multifannishly?

Within BtVS femslash fandom it was perfectly normal for us to refer to Faith as our Little Black Dress.

I've seen a lot more of that "little black dress" thing in RPF femmeslash fandoms. In the fandom for Morning Musume (a Japanese girl group), there were a few LBDs (but not a lot of fanfiction. As in most Japanese fandoms, fanart and fanvideos are more popular, and there are tons of them). I've read some Girls Aloud (a British girl group) fan fiction, and that fandom was very happy to pair up the girls in any combination, but generally centered on Cheryl Cole.

I wonder if the LBD's in RPF fandoms has to do with how with these pairings, one does not have to rely on males creating females, but with females taking charge of themselves. They are real people, so they are bound to have their own qoals and quirks come out. Granted, with most pop music acts there is a little bit of acting that might be thought out by a male manager or producers, but for the most part, these women are their own person. There is generally more material to work from too.

There're just not enough female characters. Even nowadays a show can be without one female major character.

True. And even if there are, there often isn't a female character that I can actually identify with. When I read pairing fic, I prefer reading a pairing where I identify with one character and am interested in another. I can count on one hand the female characters I identify with in various fandoms and still have fingers to spare.

On the other hand, there's usually at least one geeky/odd male character per fandom.

Since you mentioned Supernatural: SPN has female characters I can identify with/find interesting. It's just that most of them don't last very long.

Someone on LJ wrote a very good explanation of why there's so little femslash, can't remember where, but her rationale was that women are not comfortable with their bodies to intimately describe and name their pleasure or their genitals etc.

I think slash is a special kind of othering of our own sexuality that has a way of making us think we're more ok with queerness than we actually are. I get kinda irked when I see someone say "ick, het. I don't normally read it!" (I'm assuming it's a woman who's saying this...I could be wrong, but most likely not), the self-erasure is kinda disheartening if you completely cut out the other half of the human race when you read fanfiction.

It could also be a case of the genre of the fandom. Soaps, sitcoms and more domestic tv shows/books/games etc probably have a higher number of female characters, but the most popular fandoms I see is mostly sci-fi/adventure/fantasy which are nortoriously male-dominated. Maybe it's a matter of finding fandoms that largely revolve around female characters like Buffy or the novels of Diana Wynne Jones. I dunno.

It's kinda disheartening, because although it may sound like an excuse, I do think there are few female characters that are given agency and a life besides being a romantic interest and it can't be brushed off lightly. And the ones we do get are a bit cardboard-like, conventionally pretty and have just enough spunk/toughness to fulfil the "strong woman" quota that is some kind of fictional/narrative equvalent of affirmative action.

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Here from Metafandom

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