Femmeslash

[dangermousie]

I am looking for some.

It seems to be an almost nonexistent genre and I am curious. So, rec away.

Only three conditions:

1. It has to be good. I don't care to read it if it's "Ooooh, hermione so hot sayd ginny and kised her lolz."

2. Not violently anti-canon. By that I mean if someone writes Roslin (about whose sexuality nothing is known) and Starbuck (who could concievably be bi) that's OK. But if someone writes Farscape's post S2 Aeryn getting it on with a woman, there better be a damn good explanation for it, as she is in love with Crichton and will look on no one else (and yes, J/A and Arwen/Aragorn are the one exception. Unless it's prior to their hook-up, I refuse to read a fic which pairs them with anyone else).

3. No RPS. I object to Real People stuff on principle.

I don't care which fandom it's in, as long as it's well-written. I don't have to be familiar with it.

So, any recs? People?

Comments

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Not sure how good it is, as it was written for a male audience and that's a different aesthetic.
Eye of Dawn Leia/Winter mostly, with some Leia/Han.

Power Surge by Irene Heron is much better.

Cute when you babble is Faith/Willow, and not too bad.

[dangermousie.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll check them out.

I wonder why there is a lot more slash than femmeslash.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

Speaking strictly for myself:
1) My fandom has exactly 1 canon female character who lives (Aunt Beru dies early) and I don't find female scenery interesting (the dancing girls, Mon Mothma). If I'm going to have to create a character out of whole-cloth, I might as well write an OFC.

2) As I've gotten older, my lesbian side has become more publically visible, but I am less comfortable writing it. Mainly because I feel it is a very personal part of myself, and when I put real lesbian sex out, everyone (male mostly) sneers and says it's not hot enough because it's not like porn. Quite frankly, who are men to tell me I'm having sex wrongly?

2a) I'm never sure where my physical responses leave off and the character's begin. With men, I'm pretty sure I'm NOT writing myself in with erections. With women, the line is much less clear, and I feel terribly exposed.


That said, I will write lesbian erotica for a lesbian readership. But I no longer have any desire to put my sexuality out for clueless hetboys to mock, because I'm not doing it like the pornobabes.

[dangermousie.livejournal.com]

But I no longer have any desire to put my sexuality out for clueless hetboys to mock, because I'm not doing it like the pornobabes.

It reminds me of an SNL sketch where the fratboys wish to see two real lesbians and get two middle-aged women just talking.

Thank you for the explanation. It was really informative.

It's interesting about personal responses ending up being woven into the fic. I would think that's a danger whenever one writes a female character, whether the story is explicit or not.

[rabidfangurl.livejournal.com]

My theory is that despite slash and fandom's bias toward female readers and writers, we're less interested in the female side of fiction (yes, that goes for the queer female fans too, and I'm one of them). Some of this is the lack of strong, complex female leads in most fiction (if your fandom has the term 'Babe of the Week', you know what I mean), some of it is the 'oooh, pretty' factor of two boys together (see previous comment on queer gals), and some of it the difficulty of writing good erotic femmeslash. I think valarltd is right when she says that some of the difficulty lies in the highly personal nature of the writing, but I also think it's because women as a whole are unused to depictions of female sexuality from the female perspective that actually decribes what it's like. Sure, every cheap romance on the market talks about wild, multiorgasmic sex, but how many of those books talk about what plain ol' vanilla sex is like?

Really, the best female perspective on sex is found in lesbian literature, but even in fandom, lesbians and those who read lesbian erotic are a minority. So the possible pool of those who can even *think* in the ways needed to write good femmeslash is limited. Then we get back to the problem of finding two female characters one *wants* to slash, which shrinks the pool of possible fic/author combinations even more, and by the time you're through, the femmeslash is scarce on the ground.

This isn't to say that there aren't great femmeslash writers out there who *don't* read lesbian erotica, but simply have a gift of thinking about their bodies and those of others in compelling erotic ways, and use it. It's just theorizing why there is so little femmeslash.

Also? I find it really intriguing that so many of us lesbians wouldn't touch a cock with a ten foot pole, but have no problems reading about *two* cocks together and enjoying it. Something about different power differentials between the sexes? (Yes, I've seen that as theory of why femmeslash is rare.)

[katranna.livejournal.com]

Honestly, most of the time, I just don't find lesbian erotica (and femmeslash goes into that) sexy.

Either it's too "real" for me in the sense that I feel it's just vulgar... and I don't mean simply the description of sexual acts. But I want pretty-pretty romance in my fiction, and I get really put off by some of the stuff I see printed.

Or... it's too male het fantasy.

I should also say that I'm not a lesbian, and another part of *my* problem is that I don't identify with lesbians... which I find odd, but anyway. This is my own thing, not a lez erotica thing, though. I feel specifically alienated by a lot of lesbian fiction because I feel I ought to identify, but I don't.

Anyway, what it all boils down to is that ideologically, I WANT there to be more femmeslash, and I feel I ought to like it... but generally I find it boring. I also find that most femmeslash as it's written isn't subversive enough (or if it is, again, it's subversive in a way I can't relate to). Part of the fun of slash is women writers writing men in these passionate romantic relationships that used to be kind of taboo (both in how they're portrayed and in who they're directed at). But no-one ever cared what women do by themselves.

So the only kind of femmeslah I would enjoy, I think, is the kind that takes place entirely out of the bedroom. And focuses more on character development and what the women do, rather than their sexual lives--because that, I think, is what's subversive.

[plazmah.livejournal.com]

I have femmeslash issues similar to yours yo.

[kimbari.livejournal.com]

Here (http://www.livejournal.com/community/sf_with_bite/47106.html?) is a rec from a sci-fi comm I'm a member of.

Or did you want only fanfic? :) (BTW, the author is a female.)