I've been trying to formulate a response to this post since cleo linked me to it, which was pretty much the day you posted it. Femslash fandom is totally where I started to feel comfortable with my queerness, and in a way that I hadn't been even when I was in relationships with women. We should blame my Catholic education for that. Even with my determined commitment to being accepting, there was a certain underlying homophobia in my Catholic education that I had to overcome. Which is what happens when you go to a combination of either Sunday school or daily religious ed for thirteen years. (And by "you," I mean "I," because certainly my experience of religion and Catholicism is potentially different than anyone else's.)
So anyway. To make a long story short (too late), femslash fandom is where I grew to feel comfortable with being queer, because there were other queer people who had interests in line with my interests - stories about women.
I don't know that I could have felt at home in m/m fandom. While I know there are queer women who are m/m slashers, the majority of my early exposure to m/m writers and readers were straight women, so I got the sense (incorrectly, as it turns out) that m/m was all about a sort of prurient voyeurism. Also, stories about men aren't what I'm primarily interested in reading or writing. So, let's face it, m/m fandom isn't for me as a primary fannish home anyway.
There are very few times I haven't felt welcome among femslashers. The times that really stick in my craw are the occasional posts that have become vanishingly rare over the years: The "You're not a real lesbian/femslasher if you're in a relationship with a dude" posts. Also called, at least by me, the "bisexuals suck" posts. I've seen these from people I don't care for, and occasionally from people I once respected, but whom I still like, even if I discount their opinions. I'm not eliding myself from the ranks of queer women by being married to a man. Still queer!
I've proceeded to ignore most of those posts, and most of those opinions, because the thing I've really learned about femslashers is that most of them? Most of them do not care if you're not enough of a lesbian, nor femme enough, nor even female enough to be a femslasher.
Do you want to tell stories about queer women? Or read about them? Or draw them? Or create or consume some kind of creative fanwork about queer women? Are you a yuri-centric shipper who doesn't understand why Western femslashers don't dive into the possibilities of Eastern f/f pairings? Doesn't even matter what fandom you're in. You could write (for example!) Babysitter's Club kink, and even though I haven't read a BSC novel since grade school, femslash is a rare enough commodity and our general interests are convergent enough that we can overcome the different fandom conundrum. If you fit any of those bills, or even if you don't and you're hanging out on the margins? Then you're still a femslasher.
Or a femmmeslasher. Or a ladyslasher. Or yuri fan. (Is there another name for that which I'm not aware of?) Or an f/f shipper. Or whatever you want to define yourself as. That's how and why girlgay got its name; I wanted a tongue-in-cheek, non-100%-Western-centric (I tried, anyway) resolution to the unsolvable problem of what we call ourselves, without trying to posit One True Name for everyone.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Please forgive me if this gets a bit scattered; I have a migraine and am commenting anyway.
So anyway. To make a long story short (too late), femslash fandom is where I grew to feel comfortable with being queer, because there were other queer people who had interests in line with my interests - stories about women.
I don't know that I could have felt at home in m/m fandom. While I know there are queer women who are m/m slashers, the majority of my early exposure to m/m writers and readers were straight women, so I got the sense (incorrectly, as it turns out) that m/m was all about a sort of prurient voyeurism. Also, stories about men aren't what I'm primarily interested in reading or writing. So, let's face it, m/m fandom isn't for me as a primary fannish home anyway.
There are very few times I haven't felt welcome among femslashers. The times that really stick in my craw are the occasional posts that have become vanishingly rare over the years: The "You're not a real lesbian/femslasher if you're in a relationship with a dude" posts. Also called, at least by me, the "bisexuals suck" posts. I've seen these from people I don't care for, and occasionally from people I once respected, but whom I still like, even if I discount their opinions. I'm not eliding myself from the ranks of queer women by being married to a man. Still queer!
I've proceeded to ignore most of those posts, and most of those opinions, because the thing I've really learned about femslashers is that most of them? Most of them do not care if you're not enough of a lesbian, nor femme enough, nor even female enough to be a femslasher.
Do you want to tell stories about queer women? Or read about them? Or draw them? Or create or consume some kind of creative fanwork about queer women? Are you a yuri-centric shipper who doesn't understand why Western femslashers don't dive into the possibilities of Eastern f/f pairings? Doesn't even matter what fandom you're in. You could write (for example!) Babysitter's Club kink, and even though I haven't read a BSC novel since grade school, femslash is a rare enough commodity and our general interests are convergent enough that we can overcome the different fandom conundrum. If you fit any of those bills, or even if you don't and you're hanging out on the margins? Then you're still a femslasher.
Or a femmmeslasher. Or a ladyslasher. Or yuri fan. (Is there another name for that which I'm not aware of?) Or an f/f shipper. Or whatever you want to define yourself as. That's how and why