Wow! Fascinating! Here from metafandom. Thank you for posting this.
Some thoughts: You say: Femslash is generally "quite quickly dismissed as not that interesting (or is theoretically interesting but the author knows nothing about it and isn't going to research), and the assumption is that the only people who read it are (a)Lesbian or bisexual women or (b) Straight men."
If this is true, it makes me very sad. I've only been in online fandom for five years, but there are great stories to be told in all our genres, and anyone who would dismiss an entire genre out of hand? DO NOT WANT. I'm primarily writing slash fanfic, but my gosh. Of course femslash is interesting and important.
I want to respond to this also: You opine that "m/m slashers don't imagine their characters as actual gay men but as two male bodies to be attracted to (and imagine themselves as)." I, as I said, am primarily a slash writer and reader, and I have to say that not all readers and writers of slash would say that your summary matches their experience. There's a lot of variation in the reasons people read slash and how they would describe their characters in terms of "are they gay" or what. In other words, mileage varies.
And also the idea of women writing about gay men, something they don't know firsthand: You observe that doing this "is ok since everyone knows it's not about real gay men, and the power dynamic is balanced out by the gendered power men have over women in society at large." Well, again, mileage varies among slashers. Like any time we write things we don't know firsthand, research is important. But also, the slash fic is so self-referential and so focused on its audience. There are slash conventions and slash expectations that differ markedly from commercially published gay romance, but it's my opinion that there's more overlap than you'd think.
Also you observe: "I like reading romances between equals, and it's hard to really achieve that in a straight relationship (real or fictional :/) But since I prefer stories about women, and in particular am usually more annoyed about the way canon treats its women, while I can enjoy that aspect of m/m slash I prefer seeing it in femslash." This makes perfect sense to me and I think you can extrapolate fairly well vis a vis the realism about lesbianism or bisexual women or polyamorous women in real life and how that would map onto your enjoyment of femslash fanfiction, and that same relationship would hold for women looking at m/m slash. Except of course nearly all our SF canons do a damn poor job with the women characters. This is changing but not nearly fast enough for me.
I look forward to thinking about this more in the future. Thanks again for posting.
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Some thoughts: You say: Femslash is generally "quite quickly dismissed as not that interesting (or is theoretically interesting but the author knows nothing about it and isn't going to research), and the assumption is that the only people who read it are (a)Lesbian or bisexual women or (b) Straight men."
If this is true, it makes me very sad. I've only been in online fandom for five years, but there are great stories to be told in all our genres, and anyone who would dismiss an entire genre out of hand? DO NOT WANT. I'm primarily writing slash fanfic, but my gosh. Of course femslash is interesting and important.
I want to respond to this also: You opine that "m/m slashers don't imagine their characters as actual gay men but as two male bodies to be attracted to (and imagine themselves as)." I, as I said, am primarily a slash writer and reader, and I have to say that not all readers and writers of slash would say that your summary matches their experience. There's a lot of variation in the reasons people read slash and how they would describe their characters in terms of "are they gay" or what. In other words, mileage varies.
And also the idea of women writing about gay men, something they don't know firsthand: You observe that doing this "is ok since everyone knows it's not about real gay men, and the power dynamic is balanced out by the gendered power men have over women in society at large." Well, again, mileage varies among slashers. Like any time we write things we don't know firsthand, research is important. But also, the slash fic is so self-referential and so focused on its audience. There are slash conventions and slash expectations that differ markedly from commercially published gay romance, but it's my opinion that there's more overlap than you'd think.
Also you observe: "I like reading romances between equals, and it's hard to really achieve that in a straight relationship (real or fictional :/) But since I prefer stories about women, and in particular am usually more annoyed about the way canon treats its women, while I can enjoy that aspect of m/m slash I prefer seeing it in femslash." This makes perfect sense to me and I think you can extrapolate fairly well vis a vis the realism about lesbianism or bisexual women or polyamorous women in real life and how that would map onto your enjoyment of femslash fanfiction, and that same relationship would hold for women looking at m/m slash. Except of course nearly all our SF canons do a damn poor job with the women characters. This is changing but not nearly fast enough for me.
I look forward to thinking about this more in the future. Thanks again for posting.